Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, DVD, TCM, YouTube.]

Company Business (dir. Nicholas Meyer, 1991). When a spy swap goes wrong, a retired CIA agent (Gene Hackman) and a KGB agent (Mikhail Baryshnikov) find themselves on the run from both agencies. Great location filming in Berlin and Paris, but the plot complications are just tiresome. Elaine once rode in a Juilliard elevator with Baryshnikov; as she recalls, every woman in the car stood without saying a word, and other men, if there were any, were rendered invisible. I think that ride must have been a zillion times more memorable than this movie, even if this one includes an elevator to the top of the Eiffel Tower. ★★ (DVD)

*

From the Criterion Channel’s Eurothrillers feature

Mr. Klein (dir. Joseph Losey, 1976). We like Losey, having seen Accident, The Big Night, Blind Date (aka Chance Meeting), The Intimate Stranger, M, The Prowler, and The Servant, but none of those films prepared us for what we found here. It’s Paris, 1942, and Robert Klein (Alain Delon) is a art dealer, buying on the cheap from Parisian Jews desperate to sell before leaving the country. A chance mistake places Klein under suspicion: is he himself Jewish, or is he being confused with someone else? This Kafkaesque story is brilliant and compelling, imbuing scenes of beauty and splendor with utter dread. ★★★★

*

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (dir. Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014). Filmed in stylish, murky black-and-white with minimal dialogue (in Farsi), and set in the (fictional) industrial wasteland of Bad City, Iran (actually Taft, California), it’s the story of The Girl (Sheila Vand), a vampire who roams the streets looking for victims. In her nightly travels she makes the acquaintance of a drug dealer, a prostitute, and Arash (Arash Marandi, sometimes described as an Iranian James Dean), a lonely young man with a heroin-addicted father. Can Arash and The Girl make a life together? Strong overtones of David Lynch in this movie, where atmosphere is everything. ★★★★ (DVD)

*

From the Criterion Channel’s Hip-Hop feature

Wild Style (dir. Charlie Ahearn, 1982). I’m not sure how it’s possible: it was forty years ago that I saw this movie, at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, Massachusetts, on its first run outside New York. Fab 5 Freddy, Lady Heart, Lady Pink, and Tracy 168 came to town and created a mural on the side of the theater, which was painted over after the city threatened fines. As a narrative, with abysmal non-acting and plot threads that vanish, the movie doesn’t hold up; as a document of early hip-hop culture — DJs, MCs, b-boys, graffiti artists — it’s invaluable. So throw your hands in the air, and wave ’em like you just don’t care. As a narrative: ★★ / As a document: ★★★★ (CC).

Style Wars (dir. Tony Silver, 1983). An hour-long PBS documentary with graffiti artists talking and making art, b-boys breakdancing, and various figures of authority (Ed Koch, among others) talking about how terrible graffiti is (and really, if you ever were in an NYC subway car in the 1970s or ‘80s, you know they have a point). What this documentary makes clear is the artists’ seriousness of purpose: sketchbooks, discussions of letter forms, a writers’ bench at the Grand Concourse subway station, the dream to go “all-city” and have one’s work on trains in every borough. One surprise: the presence of white prep-school kids among the writers. My favorite scenes: Skeme talking about his art as his mother berates it, asking what the trains ever did to him. ★★★★

[Skeme still makes — and sells — art.]

*

Street Scene (dir. King Vidor, 1931). Life before air-conditioning, with the residents of a Lower East Side inferno talking to one another on the stoop or from their windows. Gossip, infidelity, poverty and eviction, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, sexual exploitation of worker by boss, and calls for a socialist revolution: it’s a pre-Code world of astonishing frankness. Sylvia Sidney and William Collier are the nominal stars, but it’s an ensemble movie, with Beulah Bondi and John Qualen, among others, reprising their roles from Elmer Rice’s 1929 play. With unusual camera angles from Gregg Toland, and the Gershwinesque theme “Street Scene” from Alfred Newman, soon to be a staple of movie music. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Two of a Kind (dir. Henry Levin, 1951). The elaborate, preposterous scheme in this movie reminded me of the elaborate, preposterous scheme in The Man with My Face, also from 1951, in which a man accuses a woman’s husband of impersonating him. In this movie a cocky gambler (Edmond O’Brien) agrees to the loss of his left-pinkie tip so that Lizabeth Scott and Alexander Knox can pass him off as the long-lost son of a wealthy capitalist, a wealthy capitalust whom they’re going to kill in a boating “accident.” There’ll be plenty of money for all. The movie begins as noir, turns into light comedy, and ends up just bizarre. ★★ (YT)

*

Portland Exposé (dir. Harold Schuster, 1957). “Honey, I’m mad!” The rackets move into Portland, Oregon, with pinball (and concomitant betting), slot machines, B-girls, and “illegal surgeries.” Edward Binns is the tavern owner who gets wired up to get the goods on the bad guys; Virginia Gregg (a regular in the Dragnet world) is his wife; Russ Conway (a retired police officer in Lassie !) is a crime boss; Lawrence Dobkin and Frank Gorshin are among the sadistic underlings. A solid B-movie with opening and closing travelogues and surprisingly brutal and lurid interludes. ★★★ (YT)

[Here’s an article from Life (March 21, 1949) that characterizes Portland as “wide open and fairly happy about it.”]

*

Miami Exposé (dir. Fred F. Sears, 1956). Fred F. Sears was a busy man: he directed nine movies in 1956 (Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Don’t Knock the Rock, Teen-Age Crime Wave among them), along with several episodes of television shows. Which might explain the poverty of plot and characterization in his movie, with Lee J. Cobb pretty unconvincing as a grizzled detective with a much younger girlfriend, whom he brings, along with her young son, to a cabin where a witness the mob wants dead is being kept in hiding). The best moments have Alan Napier and Edward Arnold (in his last role) scheming the introduction of legalized gambling in Florida. “I hope you realize this is a mistake on your part”: that line from the film sums up my feelings about having chosen this one. ★★ (YT)

*

Till We Meet Again (dir. Frank Borzage, 1944). Ray Milland is John, a downed American pilot in occupied France; Barbara Britton is Sister Clothilde, the novice who sets aside her rejection of the world beyond the convent to help him escape the Nazis. The story is notable for three female characters of authority and courage: Clothilde, the Mother Superior (Lucile Watson), and Resistance organizer Mme. Sarroux (Marguerite d’Alvarez). A story of great pathos and unspoken but unmistakable eroticism, with a shocking ending. Theodor Sparkuhl’s camerawork has moments that are Caravaggesque. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Desperately Seeking Susan (dir. Susan Seidelman, 1985). I remembered only three things about this movie, which I last saw thirty-eight years ago: Rosanna Arquette plays a New Jersey housewife; Madonna dries her armpits with a bathroom hand dryer; and “Into the Groove” plays over the closing credits. What I didn’t understand in 1985 is that Desperately Seeking Susan is a screwball comedy in bohemian drag, with amnesia, mistaken identities, and film canisters and liquor bottles for conking people over the head. And cross my heart, I thought screwball comedy before reading that Robert Ebert thought so too. Great fun in a gone world. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Eva (dir. Joseph Losey, 1962). Humiliation and self-abasement in Venice and Rome. Stanley Baker is Tyvian Jones, a writer from a Welsh coal-mining background, basking in the success of his first novel and a movie adaptation. He meets and marries the director’s assistant Francesca (Virna Lisi) but is drawn again and again to the courtesan Eva (Jeanne Moureau), who humiliates him at every opportunity. Super-stylish, with startling camera angles and plenty of diegetic and non-diegetic music: Billie Holiday records and a Michel Legrand score.★★★★ (CC)

Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)