[And no spoilers.]
Brooklyn (dir. John Crowley, 2015). In the early 1950s, a young Irishwoman (Saoirse Ronan) leaves home for a new life in Brooklyn. She meets a nice Italian boy (Emory Cohen). Complications follow. There are moments of human interest: learning to twirl spaghetti, buying a bathing suit — which the characters, inexplicably, call a “bathing costume.” That odd bit of diction is a symptom of what’s wrong with this film, which is too pretty, too quaint, too staid. It is set in The Past, a world of slow-motion effects, swelling music, and tricks with color filters. There is never a sense of being in mid-century New York — New York, for Chrissake! Compare the noisy, sexy city of On the Town (1949, dir. Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen). Ireland, with different color filters, looks like a Lands’ End catalogue. I had high hopes for Brooklyn , but I ended up hating it. (Elaine did, too.)
[Like a Lands’ End catalogue. Click for a larger view.]
*
Homicide (dir. David Mamet, 1991). Joe Mantegna as a detective investigating the murder of a candy-store owner. Our household’s second Mamet film. (The first was House of Cards .) Here, as there, nothing is what it appears to be. An amazingly clever plot whose details never invite disbelief.
There is also a pocket notebook.
*
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (dir. F. W. Murnau, 1927). A silent fable of country and city, love and hate, treachery and fidelity, as The Man (George O’Brien) and The Woman (Janet Gaynor) rediscover their marriage. The story is told almost entirely in gestures and expressions, with almost no intertitles for dialogue. Such faces! Whatever else I miss out on in life, I am grateful to have seen Sunrise .
[The Man, calling out in the dark. Click for a larger view.]
*
All Things Must Pass (dir. Colin Hanks, 2015). The rise and fall of Tower Records. The personalities on display are not especially interesting, and their relations to music are never present. What do these people listen to? What do they buy? They are, in the end, retailers who sought to move a lot of product. I found it curious that we never see anyone’s record collection, nor do we ever see anyone handling records. (The few dozen LPs on one interviewee’s shelf appear to be leaning against a turntable, which makes me wonder if they are merely a prop.) Especially odd: the film makes no mention of independent record stores (some of which, like Newbury Comics, have outlasted Tower) or the resurgence of vinyl.
*
Deux jours, une nuit [Two Days, One Night ] (dir. Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne, 2014). A boss has realized that it’s possible to do the work of his solar-panel factory with sixteen employees instead of seventeen. He gives the employees at a choice: they can have a bonus, but only if they agree to one of their number losing her job. That would be Sandra Bya (Marion Cotillard), who has recently returned to work after suffering from depression. In the course of a weekend, Sandra visits (or attempts to visit) each of her co-workers to plead her case. So much of life in this story: marriage, parenthood, friendship, national identity (at least one worker is an immigrant), and, always, the conflict between self-interest and solidarity. In lesser hands, this story might have served as propaganda about the evils of capitalism. Instead, it’s a story about the complexities of human relationships and motives.
*
Song Without End (dir. Charles Vidor and George Cukor, 1960). A lavish biopic, with Dirk Bogarde as Franz Liszt. Great music, plausible approximations of piano-playing, and famous people passing through. Chopin, it’s you!
*
The Act of Killing (dir. Joshua Oppenheimer and Anonymous, 2012). in 1965, the Indonesian government was overthrown in a military coup. A wave of killing followed — half a million to a million or more enemies, alleged communists and ethnic Chinese. This film is a documentary in which several of the men involved in the killing talk about and reenact their deeds. They are in love with movies, having begun their criminal careers scalping tickets as “movie-theater gangsters.” So now they become directors and performers, making their own movies of torture and murder within Oppenheimer’s movie, complete with costumes, makeup, and special effects. My first time through, I lasted fifteen or twenty minutes. But I decided that I had to watch. The lesson: barbarism won. Says Adi Zukaldry: “We were allowed to do it. And the proof is, we murdered people and were never punished.” Dozens of people who worked on the film are identified in the closing credits as “Anonymous” — a reminder of the great danger involved in making this film.
[A most remarkable moment: Anwar Congo (said to have killed a thousand people) watches a scene in which he plays a victim of torture and execution. Click for a larger view.]
*
Der letzte Mann [The Last Laugh , or The Last Man ] (dir. F. W. Murnau, 1924). Emil Jannings as a hotel doorman who is demoted to lavatory attendant, losing his uniform and dignity. This silent film has no dialogue and virtually no intertitles. As in Sunrise , the story is told through gestures and expressions: the massive, heavy-coated figure of the opening scene turns into a stooped, shrunken man who leans against walls as he walks (like Dickens’s Phil Squod). The ending is entirely improbable and entirely welcome.
There is also a pocket notebook.
*
City Girl (dir. F. W. Murnau, 1930). In Sunrise The Woman from the City is trouble. Here, a girl from the city, Kate (Mary Duncan), is an unwitting catalyst for intergenerational trouble when her husband Lem (Charles Farrell) brings her back to the family farm. As William Carlos Williams wrote, “the country will bring us no peace.” Well, it might, eventually. In our house, Murnau is batting a thousand.
There is also a pocket notebook.
*
The Letter (dir. William Wyler, 1940). Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall, adultery, and murder in British Malay. With a strong streak of Orientalism. From a play by W. Somerset Maugham.
*
Odd Man Out (dir. Carol Reed, 1947). I’ve now seen four Carol Reed films, each terrific, but Odd Man Out is the best — which means better than The Third Man (1949). Like The Third Man, it’s a story of a man pursued, just one day and night in the life of Johnny McQueen (James Mason), a revolutionary in Northern Ireland, wounded in a botched robbery and now on the run. His efforts to get back to his people put him in one extraordinary episode after another. In an extended encounter with a painter and an ex-medical student, reality itself is stranger than McQueen’s hallucinations.
*
The Wedding Night (dir. King Vidor, 1935). Gary Cooper as Tony Barrett, a hard-drinking writer whose most recent novel is declared unworthy of publication. Tony and his wife Dora (Helen Vinson) retreat to the country (Connecticut), where he meets the girl next door, Manya Novak (Anna Sten), the daughter of a Polish tobacco-farming patriarch (Ralph Bellamy). Dora goes back to the city, and a delicate friendship develops between Tony and Manya. But the patriarchy has its own ideas about how she must spend her life. And I suspect that the Hays Office had its ideas about how Manya and Tony should conduct themselves. I would like to have seen a pre-Code version of this film.
This film made me realize that Charles Vidor and King Vidor were not the same person.
[Anna Sten was supposed to be the next Greta Garbo. She now looks like a prefiguration of Madonna. Click for a larger view. See also this image from Nana (dir. Dorothy Arzner and George Fitzmaurice, 1934).]
Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)
Fourteen more : Thirteen more : Twelve more : Another thirteen more : Another dozen
[Google Ngram Viewer shows a nearly 19:1 ratio for bathing suit and bathing costume in 1952. Bathing suit began to overtake bathing costume in 1860.]
