Directors:

Asghar Farhadi, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Federico Fellini, Abel Ferrara, David Fincher, Robert Flaherty, Victor Fleming, John Ford, Milos Forman, Bob Fosse, John Frankenheimer, Stephen Frears, William Friedkin, Sam Fuller

Fadel, Alejandro

THE SAVAGES (Los Salvages)

Argentina (119 mi) 2012

Cannes 2012: Tim Roth – the Brit in the hot seat Demetrios Matheau at Cannes from The Arts Desk, May 18, 2012

Directed by Alejandro Fadel, it observes a group of teenage miscreants as they break out of a juvenile detention centre and escape into the surrounding wilderness. They seem to have a plan, to trek across the mountains to their ringleader’s godfather’s home, and sanctuary. But soon their various ill natures tear the group apart and it becomes a question of what will kill them first – nature, or each other.

There is barely any dialogue, while motivations and plot developments are often vague. Yet the images are sumptuous, and the brooding, malevolent tone absorbing. It would take a brave distributor to bring a film like this to Britain, but here’s hoping.

Faenza, Roberto

PEREIRA DECLARES (Sostiene Pereira) A- 94

aka: According to Pereira

Portugal Italy France (100 mi) 1995

A beautiful and compelling film set in picturesque Lisbon, Portugal in 1938, Marcello Mastroianni plays a variation on his ALLONSANFAN (1973) role, an aging, overweight journalist with a passion for lemon ice, who has a comfortable position writing the culture section for a 2^nd rate newspaper. He is content talking to the photograph of his deceased wife, but he is haunted by visions of death and dreams up obituaries, plans obituaries for writers not yet dead, and hires an Italian assistant who turns out to be a Communist sympathizer, who writes unpublishable obituaries, always with a subversive leftist political slant, which remind him of the energetic spirit from his youth. Outside, the Fascists gain momentum and armed soldiers can be seen on the street everywhere, even the janitor in his building is constantly spying on him, but he tries to remain neutral to it all. He travels to a health spa, where he develops a spiritual kinship with Daniel Auteuil, who plays a Freudian doctor with a vague, left-wing philosophy about allowing the newly developing ego to take the place of the old one, where newly developing influences in your life require new strategies, doing something which is counter to the comfort and life of intellectual ease he has come to know. When the Fascists murder his assistant in his apartment, he writes his friend’s obituary, revealing to the world where at least one murdered body is lying, very clever, funny, fresh, interesting, all underscored by some very haunting and rhythmically driving music by Ennio Morricone.

Fahlén, Karin

STOCKHOLM STORIES (Gondolen) B- 82

Sweden (97 mi) 2013 Website

This is another one of those interconnecting stories of disconnected or lost souls whose lives mysteriously intersect, almost like an act of fate, where an improbable impact suddenly adds the missing ingredient in what are initially conceived as socially challenged, over-analyzed characters. Woody Allen may be the premiere director at superimposing his real life nebbish personality into comedies of anxiety, where he often makes fun of his various neuroses, as do many of his film characters, none better than Diane Keaton and Mia Farrow. Swedish director Karin Fahlén’s first feature film is a comedy where the common thread is over-analysis, where characters spend way too much time thinking about themselves, often with disastrous results. While the Swedes have always had an unhealthy rivalry with neighboring countries, especially the Danes, perhaps these characters have been overly affected by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkagaard, as they all feel overwhelmed by a deep case of existential despair. The film originated from the 2007 collected short stories The Second Goal (Det andra målet) by writer/actor Jonas Karlsson, where a recurring theme is isolated or lonely individuals, most of whom are trying to hide the fact that they are alone. Adapted by the director, she connects six of these characters together, creating a series of interwoven stories that take place in and around Stockholm. The director’s parents both worked in Swedish films of the 60’s, her mother with Olle Hellbom and Tage Danielsson, and her father with Ingmar Bergman, Bo Widerberg, and Roy Andersson, while Karin initially studied to become a make up artist at Stockholm’s Dramatiska Institutet, also wrote screenplays and worked as a director’s assistant prior to making her first feature film.

Much of this comedy relies upon absurd humor, with dark underlying elements, where Stockholm is often seen as a dark, foreboding place, often shot in overcast grays, though overall a lighter tone prevails, making this ensemble comedy very audience friendly. Perhaps the center of it all is Johan (Martin Wallström), a delusional and manically obsessed would-be writer trying to find his way out of his father’s footsteps, as his father was a revered writer, but Johan tries to worm his way into the public’s eye through nefarious means. His big theory relies upon the removal of light, being plunged into darkness, thinking only then can people really discover one another. Anna (Julia Ragnarsson), Johan’s sister, is seen being indiscreetly thrown out of a hotel by Thomas (Jonas Karlsson), an uptight, overly reserved guy who is more of a bootlicker that lives to please his boss, Lena (Marie Richardson), the Minister of Finance, usually eliminating problems through underhanded and cruelly devised means. Meanwhile Douglas (Filip Berg), is the stuttering trust fund child still living at home with his sanity challenged parents, and secretly has a crush on Anna, who we discover is the lesbian lover of Lena. Then last, but not least, is Jessica (Cecilia Frode), a kind of Swedish Diane Wiest, with floppy blond hair looking a bit like the Rolling Stones Brian Jones. We see her heartbroken after being denied the right to adopt, as they questioned her entirely absent network of friends. She works at an advertising agency, working best when left alone.

Overhearing one of her coworkers talk about a gag they pulled years ago, Jessica points her finger to a name at random in the phone book, and then mails that person an anonymous letter, which turns out to be Thomas, who becomes rabidly obsessed with receiving a letter from someone he doesn’t even know. Following her, literally stalking her, cornering her at her apartment doorway, she refuses to acknowledge she sent the letter, where briefly they are divided only by a pane of glass. Anna has been thrown out into the street and is none too happy about it, but her pride coerces Lena to come clean about her sexual preference with her husband, or she’ll tell him. Douglas, meanwhile, is his demented father’s whipping boy, taking refuge with Anna, following her wherever she goes, as neither one of them seems to have a friend in the entire world. Meanwhile, Johan is still on the loose, a madman using a writer’s persona, who unravels feverishly with his eyes set on the Stockholm electrical power plant, threatening to blow it up with a bomb unless they shut down all the lights in Stockholm. Being Swedish, the maintenance engineers couldn’t be more polite, directing him to the appropriate department where they’re all too happy to oblige, sending Stockholm into the dark. Afterwards, the world looks a little differently to our motley crew, finding fewer obstacles standing in their way, discovering perhaps a glimpse of light in the continually overcast Stockholm skies.

Chicago International Film Festival closes first weekend with some ... Brandon Gaylor from The Examiner

Last night, Festival attendees went gaga for this ensemble comedy. In structure, it resembles Garry Marshall's latest efforts "Valentine's Day" and "New Year's Eve", following five leads as their lives intersect in Sweden's capital city. Working from a book of short stories, first time director Karin Fahlen manages to juggle an ambitious narrative. At times, the screenplay almost has too much to do, jumping between characters almost frantically. And this is the kind of film where happy endings for all are nearly a surety. But that is exactly what the more casual moviegoer wants to see. Those looking for the 'safer' side of Festival films should consider taking a peek at "Stockholm Stories."

Swedish Film Magazine - Swedish Film Institute also seen here: Swedish Film 2013 #2 (pdf)

As the daughter of two film professionals, Karin Fahlén literally grew up on various Swedish film sets of the 60’s. Now she’s directing her own first feature, Stockholm Stories, a romantic relationship drama which aims to highlight the unusual in everyday life.

Karin Fahlén arrives at the fashionable hotel in Stockholm’s Östermalm on her bicycle. With its white tablecloths, well-polished glasses and stylishly minimalist design, it’s just the sort of place you might expect to encounter one of the characters from her feature film Stockholm Stories (Gondolen, 2013). Based on a collection of short stories by actor/writer Jonas Karlsson, it’s a series of parallel, low-key stories which highlight the unusual in everyday life. Outwardly uneventful stories set in the grey Swedish capital, they become woven together when the characters’ paths unexpectedly cross.

Those characters include Jessica (Cecilia Frode), a single woman refused the right to adopt a child because of her lack of friends. Then there’s the reserved Thomas (Jonas Karlsson), who lives for his job in the civil service, and Johan (Martin Wallström), a man with manic tendencies and a peculiar theory of light and dark and how they govern the way we meet, our ability to slow down, to really see each other and to listen.

“In my view there’s been something wrong with Swedish storylines for a long time now. It might sound arrogant, but I can’t face seeing another policeman lying in a ditch. It’s easy to make people cry by running over a kitten on screen. But what’s really difficult is to create a drama from small, everyday things, from the reality that most of us live in. All the characters in my film are united in their feelings of inadequacy, a sort of existential loneliness that becomes more discernible in a city,” says Karin Fahlén.

A true veteran of Swedish film, Stockholm Stories is nonetheless her first feature. With both her parents working behind the camera, she literally grew up on film sets. Her mother worked with the likes of Olle Hellbom and Tage Danielsson, her father with Ingmar Bergman, Bo Widerberg and Roy Andersson. In the 70’s she moved to the UK and went to art school. After that she trained as a make up artist at Stockholm’s Dramatiska institutet. 

“When I was little I was a stunt girl on the popular children’s television series based on Astrid Lindgren’s Emilin Lönneberga. I could ride, but the boy who played the lead couldn’t, so I just pulled a cap over my head and jumped in the saddle. I also seem to remember rolling around in stinging nettles, that kind of thing,” Fahlén recalls. “The reason I went into make up work was that I felt at home in the dressing room. On film sets I was often in the way, but there I could play more freely. And I loved painting, so being able to paint on people suited me just fine.”

After a while she felt a growing desire to tell stories of her own. In 2001 she wrote and directed her first short film Brudlopp, and this whetted her appetite for more. She wrote screenplays, worked as a director’s assistant, made commercials and generally bided her time.

When She read the Jonas Karlsson collection of short stories The Second Goal (Det andra målet), in 2007, she realised that making a feature was her ultimate goal.

“I’ve worked in the film industry all my life. And I grew up in a generation where directors tended to be colourful, demonic men like Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola and Ingmar Bergman. Directing seemed out of reach, as if directors had some special insights that the rest of us lack. But filmmakers born in the 70’s and 80’s don’t have the same sense of awe, and this lack of respect has produced some wonderful Swedish films like Play (2011), She Monkeys (Apflickorna, 2011) and Avalon (2011). The Bergman tradition is more like “who are you to talk?” Gradually I’ve come to realise that you don’t need demons to make a feature film, it’s not that mysterious. It’s more a question of the right balance, of preparation and intuition. And to be open to things as they unfold, to work together with others. No man is an island.”

Falardeau, Philippe

CONGORAMA

Canada Belgiuim France (105 mi) 2006

Congorama Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

While watching this exceptionally deft but highly self-conscious comedy, I was reminded of Mike and Theo's Cannes comments regarding Belvaux's The Right of the Weakest, a film I hope to actually see one of these days. Congorama trades in coincidences, familial inheritance, and multiple perspectives of the same key events. As I watched it, most everything it did felt utterly familiar ("one of those movies") but Falardeau signals each and every move so deliberately as to make the path of the journey completely obvious to all but the most obtuse observer. At the same time, he doesn't make it feel like irony or genre-oriented scarequotes. Rather, Congorama is both precisely what it appears to be (a sweet-natured comedy) and a sort of X-ray of its own mechanics. Thematically, it's about how invention takes place, built on earlier breakthroughs and sometimes outright stolen, or "reverse engineered" from something else. Every single moment of Congorama feels -- how can I put this? -- like a repetition that you're experiencing for the first time. Also, Olivier Gourmet brings the funny. Who knew?

MONSIEUR LAZHAR B+ 91

Canada (94 mi) 2011 ‘Scope Official site

This is the Canadian version of Laurent Cantet’s deeply insightful, Palme D’Or winning film THE CLASS (2008), as both feature uninhibited and thoroughly engaging performances by children, where these 11 and 12-year olds are likely in 6^th grade, much younger than the more outspoken 13 and 14-year old Junior High School kids in Cantet’s film, which was also written and performed onscreen by the teacher who wrote about his own classroom experience, all featured in his more autobiographical and near documentary classroom study in France. Rather than a searingly realistic, highly provocative societal analysis of race and social class, this is a more poetically impressionistic yet completely unsentimentalized view of a troubled classroom in snowy Montreal, where at the outset one of the students finds their teacher hung themself in their classroom just before school begins. All of the other kids are quickly escorted back outside except one who is haunted by what she sees, where much of the drama of the film takes place between these two kids, Simon (Émilien Néron), who discovered the body, and Alice (Sophie Nélisse) who is traumatized, best of friends before the incident, but both barely speak to one another afterwards. While the school brings in a grief counselor, there are many more kids affected than can be remedied by the actions of a lone counselor, not to mention a classroom without a teacher. When Bachir Lazhar (Mohamad Fellag), an Algerian immigrant claiming to be a Canadian national with twenty years of teaching experience in Algeria, submits his resumé, suggesting his experience can help calm the storm, this feels pretty inviting to the desperately underequipped principal (Danielle Proulx) who is in the all hands on deck mode. While this fictional film was adapted by the director from Évelyne de la Chenelière’s play (who also plays Alice’s mother), the autobiographical element is Fellag, who fled Algeria after receiving death threats from his politically charged stage performances.

While tragedy sets the tone, Lazhar’s empathy for the children is beautifully understated throughout, where his enunciation of French is near perfect, yet he’s seen by others in the school as exhibiting a kind of naiveté, as if he’s culturally out of place, taking a racist stab at his heritage, as in the highly nationalistic French-speaking Quebec province, he’s not French born. But Lazhar handles this with a profound calm, reflected by the beauty of the uncredited musical score, which is the opening of Mozart's Piano Sonata in A Major, K. 331 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Piano Sonata In A Major YouTube (8:25), which has a near Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) like grace to it. Another emotional scorcher is Alice’s handling of her class essay on school violence, seen here: Monsieur Lazhar - 'Alice's Presentation' YouTube (1:08), where she reminds everyone just exactly what happened in their classroom. When Lazhar wants to share her essay with other teachers and with parents, feeling it is stunningly mature, the principal shuts him down, claiming it contains too much violence. Lazhar has a satiric way of communicating with the grief counselor, especially when she suggests all the children are healed, where he provocatively asks if those affected by death are ever healed? There are multiple layers going on here, as the children in the classroom take on an intense familiarity, where Lazhar is cordial and polite, but always challenges them with material above their reading level, introducing Balzac for dictation, for instance. The school also has a no touch policy, where teachers are forbidden from touching children, for any reason, which includes gym class, applying sunscreen, or even welcome hugs. This leaves Lazhar feeling like he’s in a straightjacket, as it’s obvious after such a devastating event many of these kids need adult affection, which they’re likely not getting at home, yet the parents then pass judgment and berate him, urging him to butt out of their affairs and stick to “his place,” namely classroom teaching instead of parenting.

Yet another strand of the narrative is Lazhar’s own life story, which comes out in bits and pieces, where we see him getting grilled by an immigration judge handling his request for political asylum in Canada, who is also quick to make judgments without ascertaining all the facts, which are horribly tragic in nature, yet Lazhar stands a chance of immediate deportation, where the kids may be forced to endure yet another quick and graceless teacher exit. While the audience slowly learns of Lazhar’s personal ordeals, the classroom never does, as he keeps his personal life separate, yet his own experience allows him to understand these kids in ways no other teacher is capable of, again underscored by hauntingly beautiful music, like Scarlatti's Sonata in F Minor, K. 466 Horowitz - Scarlatti, Sonata in f minor, K466 YouTube (3:39). There’s another gorgeous interior sequence that begins when the school is having an after school party, where the bass driven music can be heard as Lazhar is alone in his room, where he begins to dance, the first time he expresses any such liberated spirit, eventually seen by another teacher, Claire (Brigitte Poupart), who expresses a personal interest in seeing him. While she’s been an extensive traveler in her life, with happy photographs taken in unorthodox places, she’s appalled that Lazhar would never introduce his personal travel experiences into the classroom. His response is heartbreaking, that for all too many, travel is associated with the often impossible need to produce an endless stream of government mandated documents. Despite a potentially budding relationship, their perspective couldn’t be more radically different, as it is likely to be with the audience viewing this film. Lazhar’s profound maturity and insight into the hearts and minds of others would seem to make him the ideal teacher, yet when parents snoop into his personal affairs and find out about his supposedly confidential immigrant status, they start calling him a terrorist. This would be Canada welcoming him into the country with open arms—or is it a door slamming in his face? The subtle hints of inhumanity surrounding Lazhar’s experience are the heart of this highly affecting film, where the children embrace their teacher’s humanity, but adults are still quick to reject anyone who is culturally different from them.

Monsieur Lazhar : The New Yorker David Denby

This quiet drama of exile and isolation is intelligent and sensitively made but becalmed, almost inert. Bachir Lazhar (the Algerian writer-actor Fellag) is a fiftyish refugee with a long, sad face, a dark goatee, and a sudden smile that gets overtaken by wintry drafts of melancholy. In Montreal, he talks his way into a job in a middle school and takes over the class of a beloved teacher, a depressed young woman who has recently hanged herself. He makes mistakes with his grief-stricken and bewildered kids—he’s not really a teacher—but he wins them over with his love of the French language, which is his true home. As the movie is conceived, Monsieur Lazhar is too mild to fight for himself or to share his sorrows with the women at the school who find him appealing. The writer-director, Philippe Falardeau, who adapted a play by Évelyne de la Chenelière, floods the school with light. Much of the movie is pleasing, but it never comes close to a simmer, much less to a boil. In French.

Monsieur Lazhar Cath Clarke from Time Out London

In the opening scene of this quietly devastating French-Canadian drama, an 11-year-old boy on milk-monitor duty peers through a classroom door and sees his teacher has hanged herself from a pipe. As he tears off blindly, we hear the clatter of his classmates piling into the building after lunch. Will the boy make it back in time with help? Or will they see what he’s seen? It’s tremendously gripping. Afterwards the kids seem okay, but like banged knees, the bruises take a while to show.

A week or so later, amid the fallout, Monsieur Lazhar (Mohamed Fellag) shows up at the stressed headteacher’s office and is appointed as the class’s substitute teacher. He’s Algerian and claims to have 20 years’ teaching experience. That’s not quite true: he was a civil servant in Algeria before fleeing persecution. None of which prevents Lazhar, a man of huge dignity and compassion, from being a fantastic teacher – after some teething problems. The kids call him a ‘dinosaur’ for making them take Balzac dictation. ‘Personal adjectives don’t exist any more,’ shrills one kid. But he understands more than anyone the trauma they’re going through.

‘Monsieur Lazhar’ was nominated for Best Foreign Film at this year’s Oscars, and Philippe Falardeau, who adapted the story from a one-man play, does a wonderful job with his child actors. The classroom scenes transported me right back to primary school, capturing perfectly the texture of  school life: the intimacy of kids who have known each other practically all their lives.You could almost describe ‘Monsieur Lazhar’ as a morality tale, but it’s more thought-provoking than debate-provoking. Its strength is the realness of the emotions and authenticity of the detail, although there is a gentle insistence here that integration is a two-way street.

New York Magazine [David Edelstein]

In the Montreal-set film Monsieur Lazhar, a young boy, Simon, trudges into his middle school ahead of other students and opens the door to his classroom. Inside, his teacher, Martine, is hanging from a pipe, dead by her own hand. He stares at her body for a moment and calls for help, but the sound of children racing up the stairs as the school doors open drowns him out. Simon manages to find an adult to waylay the other kids just in front of the classroom, but one girl, Alice, peeks in. The next week, after the fuss has died down and no permanent replacement for Martine has been found (no one wants the job), a man shows up in the principal’s office and talks his way in. He’s an Algerian immigrant named Bachir Lazhar.

This could be the setup for a social-realist Mary Poppins: Lazhar (Mohamed Fellag, going in the credits by just Fellag) has floated in out of nowhere to help the kids through. But it’s soon apparent that he has little idea how to do it. The curriculum confuses him. Administrators and parents reprimand him for getting too personal. The distance between him and his pupils is vast. Teachers are not allowed to touch their students—not to hit them, of course, but also not to pat them affectionately or shake hands or, God forbid, hug them. No one but Lazhar wants to talk about Martine. But Lazhar too is holding something back: the tragedy that impelled him to seek asylum in Canada. He doesn’t share.

Writer-director Philippe Falardeau keeps most of the turmoil under the surface, but what’s on top is tense, pregnant, and ineffably sad, with a noninvasive and beautiful score by the singer-songwriter Martin Léon. Ineffably sad—yet there’s almost no loitering. The film is crisp, evenly paced, its colors bright, as sharp as the winter cold. Lazhar has a job to do and not, perhaps, much time to do it. Unbeknownst to his employers, he’s facing deportation if he can’t prove that returning to Algeria would endanger his life.

Fellag is a magnetic Monsieur Lazhar: willfully self-contained, anger vanquished, channeling his emotions into his teaching, into finding an equilibrium in the classroom—which is an obstacle course. He insists on his students’ speaking only French because, it turns out, he knows almost no English. They don’t know his secrets; he doesn’t know theirs. Two remarkable young actors, Sophie Nélisse and Émilien Néron, play Alice and Simon. At first they’re drawn together, then repelled for reasons we don’t understand until later. Simon is quietly ravaged, eaten alive with guilt. Alice wants to talk.

Beneath it all is Lazhar’s difficult-to-articulate but fierce conviction that the world is full of anguish and senseless horror but the classroom is where that all goes away, where civilization rules and children feel safe—where you don’t, if you’ll pardon my French, let your own shit interfere with young lives. If that sounds naïve, in the context of the cruelly unsentimental Monsieur Lazhar, it is something to cling to, to fight for.

Monsieur Lazhar, reviewed. - Slate Magazine Dana Stevens

Monsieur Lazhar (Music Box Films), the French-Canadian film that was a nominee for this year’s foreign-language Oscar, belongs to an uncommon tradition of movies about students and teachers. It’s not an uplifting ode to the transformative power of pedagogy, in the mode of Stand and Deliver; rather, like 2008’s The Class, it’s a quiet, sometimes achingly painful meditation on both the possibilities and the limits of the teacher-student relationship. The title character, an Algerian immigrant who steps in to teach a class of Montreal sixth-graders after their teacher commits suicide, is no inspirational firebrand but a courtly, soft-spoken man who has trouble adjusting his traditional values to the needs and expectations of 21^st-century kids. Bachir Lazhar (Mohamed Fellag, identified in the credits as simply Fellag) wants his students to transcribe from a Balzac novel, when Jack London is more their speed; when a student acts disrespectful, he casually cuffs him on the side of the head.

In short order, the school’s devoted but worn-down principal (Danielle Proulx) brings Bachir up to speed on the customs of 21^st-century education: There will be no touching the children under any circumstances, not even to give an encouraging hug. And all mention of Martine, the dead teacher, must be avoided, except during periodic visits from the officiously soothing school psychologist.

Of course, the children’s grief and confusion can’t be managed as neatly as all that, and Bachir’s class remains haunted by the memory of Martine, who, in a chilling opening scene, is found hanging in the classroom one morning by an already-troubled boy named. Simon and another student, Alice, who also caught a glimpse of the body on that day, can’t stop bringing up Martine’s death in class. Alice’s oral presentation about school pride drifts into a lament for her beloved teacher, and Simon secretly carries a photo of Martine around with him. In the second half of the film, it’s revealed that Mr. Lazhar is mourning his own losses, in a less public but no less painful way.

Though its story may sound formulaic on paper, please take my word for it: Monsieur Lazhar, written and directed by Philippe Falardeau, is a sharply intelligent, deeply sad, and not remotely sappy film about both teaching and collective grief. Its surface may be still and quiet, with cool colors, wintry landscapes, and a delicate piano score, but the emotions beneath run tumultuous and deep. Fellag, an Algerian comedian and humor writer, anchors the film as the ineffable Bachir, a man who’s so private that even the third-act revelation of his back story doesn’t fully explain his motivations to us (nor would we want it to). The children who play Alice and Simon, Sophie Nélisse and Émilien Néron, are exceptional in their scenes with him, and even better when they’re alone together. With almost no words exchanged, we understand how these two are bound by the shared sight of their teacher’s suspended corpse that awful morning. Monsieur Lazhar—the character as well as the movie—offers no simple answers to the hard questions Martine’s death poses: Why did this beloved young teacher kill herself where she knew her students would find her? Will Simon and Alice be permanently traumatized by what they saw? What can their teacher, or anyone, do to help them move on?

Though it’s no Dead Poets Society by a long shot, Monsieur Lazhar does ultimately affirm, in its oblique, understated way, the sacredness of the teacher-student relationship. For an old-fashioned, at times rigid teacher like Bachir, the classroom is a place where order and formality must rule, not for their own sake but as a bulwark against the often incomprehensible chaos and violence of the world outside.  

The Film Sufi MKP

JamesBowman.net | Monsieur Lazhar also seen here: The American Spectator : Monsieur Lazhar

The QNetwork [James Kendrick]

'Cabin' Stocked With Scares, Style and Smarts - The Wall Street ... Joe Morgenstern

EFilmCritic [Jay Seaver]

Monsieur Lazhar | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club John Smenley

Slant Magazine [Jesse Cataldo]

Nightlife Magazine [Michael-Oliver Harding]

Richard Schickel: 'Monsieur Lazhar': Tragedy and ... - Truthdig

Critics At Large: A Delicate Gem: Monsieur Lazhar Shlomo Schwartzberg

Greg Klymkiw [Canadian Film Corner]

'Monsieur Lazhar' is Oscar-worthy - Brian D. Johnson ... - Maclean's

Monsieur Lazhar – Movie Review - Monsters and Critics Ron Wilkinson

the m0vie blog [Darren Mooney]

Erik Lundegaard

Monsieur Lazhar - Page 1 - Movies - New York - Village Voice Michelle Orange

Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]

Monsieur Lazhar! Donna Shor from Hollywood On the Potomac

Howard Schumann - Cinescene also seen here: Critical Movie Critics [Howard Schumann]

Sound On Sight Gregory Ashman

FILM REVIEW: Monsieur Lazhar - Things That Go Pop! - CBC.ca Eli Glasner

Coming Attractions Peter Hammond from Box Office Magazine

Monsieur Lazhar Movie Review | Shockya.com Brent Simon

exclaim! [Robert Bell]

Georgia Straight [Ken Eisner]

Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]

Bonjour Tristesse (English) photos

Variety [Boyd van Hoeij]

Monsieur Lazhar – review Philip French from The Observer

Monsieur Lazhar – review | Film | The Guardian Xan Brooks

Monsieur Lazhar: An unforgettable tale, artfully ... - The Globe and Mail Jennie Punter

Review: Monsieur Lazhar - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Gerald Peary

Worthy lesson in 'Lazhar' - BostonHerald.com James Verniere

Philadelphia Weekly [Matt Prigge]

Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]

Movie review: 'Monsieur Lazhar' Walter Addiego from The SF Chronicle

Los Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]

'Monsieur Lazhar': Trauma, tenderness in a Canadian school Michael Phillips from The Chicago Tribune

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]

Monsieur Lazhar - Movies - The New York Times Stephen Holden

Falk, Feliks

THE COLLECTOR (Komornik) B 84

Poland (93 mi) 2005

A film that opens with the frenetic pace of MTV videos, with a jittery hand held camera following hilarious chase sequences of Lucek (Andrzej Chyra), the local repo man (debt collector) with the highest average for successful collections, a man with a nose for uncovering hidden assets, usually risking life and limb in the process, to the pumping sounds of loud rock music. Brazenly soulless, a cocky Mephistopheles wunderkind who takes great pleasure in the misfortunes of others, his arrogance and ruthless disregard for his victims are second to none, calling them morons and cretins, hated by all who know him, which only makes him relish his insidious nature all the more, smirking as he repeats his company mantra, “I’m only doing my job.” He’s the picture postcard for capitalist opportunist, yet you can’t argue with success in an otherwise economically depressed region.

At the peak of his success, as another guy’s sultry wife is voluntarily exposing her own assets, he has an epiphany of sorts, suddenly developing a soul when he realizes he just screwed an invalid kid by his first love out of one of the few pleasures she’ll ever have, and for what? One by one, he starts returning objects of his collection, like a small statue of the Virgin Mary, which he claims has instructed him to give everything back. When an elderly couple see him back at their home, they sneer insults and venom in his direction. Others follow suit and initiate bodily harm, smashing his car to bits, leaving him scorned and a bloody mess. It was starting to resemble a Polish parable on the PASSION OF THE CHRIST. When he started to return money to people who needed it, people threw it back in his face, but he retaliated, yelling back: “You can’t forbid me from doing good!”

The pace slows to a crawl as he becomes Christ-like and morally righteous, but there’s a beautiful scene of a local church funeral, where the orchestra, whose repossessed instruments have been returned, establish a tone of solemn devoutness. But he begins to believe that he and everyone around him have developed a foul odor from their inherent evil, and in a Macbethian image, no matter how hard he washes his hands, he can’t wipe away the stench. I heard the person sitting next to me utter to her friend, “He was a much more interesting bad guy than he is good.” And that comment pretty much explains it all. As a slick, zany bad guy, he’s in a class by himself, showing no remorse, sneering at the rest of the world while he has it all. But when he starts to question what he has in moral terms, he’s much less convincing.

Famuyiwa, Rick

DOPE B 87

USA (103 mi) 2015 ‘Scope Official site

This is a film that seems to have gone out of its way to hit all the touchstones of youth culture, a place where television, pop music, the Internet, drugs, race, and sex all come together in the teenage world, where hip-hop is the anthem that blares in the background while kids try to make their way through the minefield that is high school, complete with an entire set of distinctly black social obstacles placed in the way. While ostensibly a coming-of-age comedy, the film delves into a myriad of stigmas and stereotypes about blacks growing up in gang-infested neighborhoods, where the stomping grounds are a return to the mean streets of Inglewood, California made famous by John Singleton’s legendary BOYZ N THE HOOD (1991). But instead of accentuating the contemptuous distrust between the LA police department and the South Central LA neighborhoods, coming on the heels of the Rodney King Incident that took place in March 1991, RODNEY KING BEATING VIDEO Full length footage ... YouTube (8:08), this film seems to have evolved from the Shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2012, where the life of an unarmed 17-year old black teenager wearing a hoodie was unnecessarily wiped out in an instant, an all-too-familiar headline-grabbing story where guns in the hands of trigger-happy whites are the growing answer to racial fears. While LA has been nicknamed the gang capital of America, home to more than 1350 gangs and 120,000 gang members nearly a decade ago, Inglewood still has a huge gang problem, with close to 50 different gangs residing within the city, where this film seems motivated to change the stereotype by creating friendlier, less threatening characters. “Malcolm is a geek.” These are the first words we hear from the narrator (Forrest Whitaker, one of the film’s producers) about Malcolm (Shameik Moore), a high school senior looking surprisingly like he’s fresh off a 90’s black TV sitcom like In Living Color (1990 – 94), where he might have been one of Theo’s friends from The Cosby Show (1984 – 92), or a featured character in an early Spike Lee film. Despite growing up with a bus driving single mom (Kimberly Elise) in a low-income neighborhood known as “The Bottoms,” Malcolm, a straight A student with a love for 90’s hip-hop and “white shit,” namely getting good grades and going to college, hangs out with two other equally bright and geeky friends, Diggy (Kiersey Clemons), a likeable, light-skinned lesbian that dresses as a man, whose parents have tried unsuccessfully to “pray the gay away,” and Jib, Tony Revolori, the lobby boy in Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), a multiracial oddball who maintains a bit of his impish personality. Together they play in a garage band known as Awreoh (whose songs are actually Pharrell compositions), while cruising the neighborhoods of the streets of LA on their bikes, often extremely careful about what streets to enter and which ones to avoid, where the prevalence of guns can make these life altering decisions. On more than one occasion we see the results of random street violence, including an unfortunate burger joint customer that is killed while simply standing in line, literally seconds away from reaching a supposedly unattainable level on his Game Boy.

At least initially, the idea of presenting material in a new light feels intriguing, where the intelligence of the characters suggests a film at least attempting to cut through the stereotypes, where three definitions of the entitled word “Dope” are provided: an illegal drug, a stupid person, and something overly cool, each of which at some point or another becomes the focal point of the film. Perhaps most interesting is the notion of a black geek being into the same things white people are into, like good grades, anime comic books, being in a grunge band, skateboarding, riding bikes, and getting into college, where Malcolm has his sights set on Harvard, and has already written an essay proposal (A Research Thesis to Discover Ice Cube’s Good Day) that examines exactly what day Ice Cube was talking about in his gangsta rap classic Ice Cube - It Was A Good Day (Explicit) - YouTube (5:12), arguing “If Neil deGrasse Tyson was writing about Ice Cube, this is what it would look like.” His guidance counselor steers him away from that idea, suggesting he needs to distinguish himself from the rest by revealing personal details about his own life, much of which Malcolm feels is a tired, worn out cliché, another story about a poor black kid from a single-parent family in Inglewood. In the process of discovering himself, however, the film rather circuitously touches on what it means to be black, which has become something of a paradox in the era of Obama, Trayvon Martin, and the Ferguson police Shooting of Michael Brown, where Obama’s 2008 election was accompanied by a multi-ethnic surge of hope, a promise of a better tomorrow, ushering in a supposedly post-racial order, but has instead unleashed a continuing series of violent, racially-tinged incidents that once more remind us as a nation just how far we have yet to go. In the post 9/11 world, terrorism and Islamic extremists raise the public’s ire while twice as many deaths on U.S. soil have been attributed to white supremacists and right-wing, anti-government fanatics, creating large-scale public misconceptions of what “terrorism” looks like in the United States. Like derogatory racial epithets, the word “terrorist” has been spewed as a piece of propaganda meant to dehumanize dark-skinned Muslim people while the white killers among us are allowed complex psychological profiles. Much like that premature elation, this film promises more than it can deliver, where racial identity is so much more complicated than how it’s portrayed here, but the director appears to be drawing from the Trey Ellis 1989 essay The New Black Aesthetic, where “a black individual possesses the ability to thrive and successfully exist in a white society while simultaneously maintaining all facets of his or her complex cultural identity.” While that goal is evident at the outset, the film is eventually bogged down in familiar Hollywood cliché’s, resembling a black version of RISKY BUSINESS (1983). When Malcolm accidentally gets pulled into a serious discussion about 90’s hip-hop with a reputable drug dealer on the street, Dom (A$AP Rocky), what starts out as a humorous aside becomes an unexpected side trip into nostalgia, where hip-hop groups like Biggie, Public Enemy, Ice Cube, Tupac, and Dr. Dre are being named with the historical importance of former presidents, where these are the cultural icons of contemporary black history, yet these are also the same rap lyrics that started calling women bitches and ho’s while revitalizing the use of the N-word, becoming an expression of endearment among brothers, but a controversial word when used so conventionally in a breezy and nonchalant fashion. When Dom involves him in a message game with a sultry girl down the street, Nakia (Zoë Kravitz), inviting him to his birthday celebration, she quickly becomes the girl of his dreams, helping her get out of the party safely after a police raid with guns blazing. While indicating “Those other niggas” stepped right over her to get out of there, Malcolm replies, “Guess I’m not one of ‘those niggas.’”

Only afterwards does Malcolm realize his backpack has been stuffed with drugs and a gun, where in no time he’s dealing with the criminal element he’d been avoiding all his life, becoming part of his daily routine alongside taking SAT exams and interviewing with the visiting Harvard college representative. While he’s a total novice in dealing with drug lords, he suddenly finds himself on the speed dials of rival gang leaders, or perhaps an impersonating FDA agent, receiving mixed instructions that he somehow needs to sort out. While Dom insists that he deliver the merchandise to the upscale home of a business associate, but when he’s not there, he’s instead lured into a bizarre labyrinth of wrong turns, led by two dysfunctional children, a wannabe rap producer Jaleel (Quincy Brown) and his half-naked, stoned-out-of-her-mind little sister Lily, high fashion model Chanel Iman in her film debut, the object of every teenage boy’s sexual fantasies, who makes quite a lurid impression before doing the utterly unthinkable, captured, of course, on YouTube video that streams on all the local news broadcasts. Perilously close to missing his college interview, Malcolm is even more amazed to discover the Harvard man he’s being interviewed by is the same man he was supposed to deliver the package to, turning the interview into a skewed discussion spoken entirely in code on the merits of Ivy League meritocracy versus the crass, often contemptible conduct of unfettered capitalism, where exploring his options afterwards is not easy. Drawing upon the knowledge of a former friend he met at band camp named Will (Blake Anderson), a white, all-purpose stoner with an affinity for drug dealing and calling people “niggas,” a social miscue that is eventually discussed at some length, they explore the best way to move the merchandise without being detected, using cyber thriller techniques seen in espionage movies. While this is all in good fun, it’s also borderline ridiculous, drawing inferences from an early flashback that reveals the only gift he ever received from his long absent father, a VHS copy of SUPER FLY (1972), identified as his Dad’s favorite movie, leads the viewer into a myriad of Blaxploitation references. Stripped to its barest essential, however, this is actually the story of a boy who likes a girl, where visions of Nakia are everpresent in his all too vivid imagination, where he agrees to help her with her schoolwork, hoping it will lead to more. Both Shameik Moore (in his first lead appearance) and Zoë Kravitz are excellent, where their flirtatious dynamic has a sweetly underplayed naturalness about it, like it’s only just beginning, where both are seen as evolving figures, vulnerable and compelling, mutually exploring the hazards of the territory needed to cross to get to that next destination in life, whatever it may be. Part of what works best is the brashness of the young trio of friends, never underestimating themselves or their futures, where the film has a different kind of trajectory in exploring the black experience, vibrantly energetic with a cranked-up musical soundtrack (iTunes - Music - Dope (Music from the Motion Picture) by ...), even if it does have a somewhat preachy and by-the-numbers Hollywood ending.

Cinemixtape [J. Olson]

Writer-director Rick Famuyiwa (“The Wood”) has crafted quite a conundrum in “Dope,” a shooting star of a film that comes dangerously close to succumbing its own scatterbrained screenplay. Is it a teen comedy? A drug movie? A sociopolitical think piece? It’s all of those things and none of them, never finding a reliable through line and both favorably and unfavorably evoking Spike Lee’s race relations classic “Do The Right Thing.”

But it’s got personality to spare, largely thanks to a killer performance from relative newcomer Shameik Moore.

Malcolm (Moore) is a brainy black teen and self-professed geek, living out the early 90s on the streets of Inglewood, California – in 2015. “Do The Right Thing” comparisons are not for nothing, as Malcolm gleefully carries the banner for early 90s pop culture with a hi-top fade and a healthy love for old-school hip-hop.

With his two best friends in tow – Diggy (Kiersey Clemons, Amazon’s “Transparent”) and Jib (Tony Revolori, “The Grand Budapest Hotel”) – Malcolm juggles the trio’s fledgling punk band with writing college applications. He wants to go to Harvard.

As clumsily and inconsistently told to us by an unseen narrator (Forest Whitaker), our lead is a young man out of place and time, too cool to be branded a loser but too weird to fit in.

When a small-time drug-dealer (played by rapper A$AP Rocky) invites Malcolm to a party, lives are changed in ways neither characters nor viewers could have seen coming. The film’s general unpredictability might have worked in its favor if its detours didn’t feel so arbitrary.

As Malcolm is unwittingly thrown into a world of drug dealing, the previously bouncy script turns leaden, with handfuls of uninteresting supporting characters and a token romantic subplot featuring Zoe Kravitz (“Divergent”) often killing its momentum.

The 103-minute “Dope” ends up playing like its own extended cut, crying out for some tightening up. Thankfully, Moore and his most reliable co-star – the pic’s soundtrack – are never less than captivating.

Apart from the bizarre use of a regrettable late 90s nu-metal track, the music is grand. From Naughty By Nature to Public Enemy to a few solid original tracks by Pharrell Williams, the soundtrack is the perfect accouterment to Famuyiwa’s often whipsmart dialogue about the history and current state of hip-hop.

If only the story were as succinct.

The film’s best scene – a veritable music video centered on Malcolm’s Harvard admissions essay – is vibrant and energetic and gets to the point that the rest of the movie seems to be skirting around. It’s the scene should end “Dope” on a dizzying high note, but it doesn’t. The film goes on for another 10 minutes, working against itself, as always.

INFLUX Magazine [Steve Pulaski]

Rick Famuyiwa's "Dope" opens by providing its titular term with three distinct definitions - to paraphrase, the word can mean an illegal drug, a stupid person, or an affirmation of something's greatness. For the next one-hundred and ten minutes, the film works to illustrate all of those features in some way or another through a lens that's unique, refreshing, and respectful to its characters and their cultures.

Our main character is Malcolm (Shameik Moore), a black teenager carefully surviving in his crime/drug-ridden neighborhood of Inglewood, California, Despite being influenced by modern forces like the internet and Bitcoin, he loves nineties hip-hop and the culture of yesteryear, and so do his two closest friends, Jib ("The Grand Budapest Hotel"'s Tony Revolori) and Diggy (Kiersey Clemons), who play in his punk band. Malcolm is going for what seems to be the impossible, which is applying for Harvard and forging a successful career path post-high school. However, in the mix of taking his SAT and writing his college entrance essay, Malcolm gets caught up in the underworld of illegal drugs and crime in the most unconventional way possible. After being invited to a party thrown by a drug dealer (rapper A$AP Rocky), Malcolm works to craft a name for himself by getting invested in the online drug-drealing world, using the help of a local hacker and Bitcoin to create a huge influx of revenue for him and his friends.

Famuyiwa attempts to do the same thing to African-Americans that John Hughes did with the middle class high school population in the 1980's, which is cut through the stereotypes, the incredulous romances, and what adults perceive teenagers to be like to really get to the heart of them as people. People with choices and decisions to make that are often times as big or as impacting as the ones adults make. The difference is, however, adults come equipped with life experiences where teenagers generally come equipped with their own instincts and peer pressure in their decision-making.

"Dope" shows the constant struggles of being a moral teenager engulfed in a society driven by illegal behavior and surrounded by peers who are nudging you onto a more dangerous pathway than on which you'd like to travel. The fact that it pays homage to the music and the urban movies of the 1990's is interesting because "Dope" doesn't focus on an anti-hero in a gritty neighborhood, much like the films of that era did. Instead, adhering to the principles of Hughes, it turns to the geek and, in turn, humanizes and paints him as a character trying to find himself in the mix of all this madness.

Famuyiwa and cinematographer Rachel Morrison crossbreed the early 1990's hip-hop culture with the contemporary technology of the mid-2010's, causing a culture shock of epic proportions in "Dope"'s aesthetic variety. "Dope" has the cinematic look of acid-washed jeans, the feel of a sun-soaked day at the beach, and the smells of everything from acne cream, sunscreen, and marijuana ostensibly infused into every scene. It's the kind of aesthetic that's so detail-centric it almost channels the likes of Wes Anderson, minus the meticulous symmetry in every scene.

Shameik Moore must be given considerable praise for his role here, which can only be described as a breakout performance. His human characteristics, carefully painted by Famuyiwa, his conflicted personalities, and his subtle arrogance, all traits that, in the end, make him very likable, echo the sentiments of Cuba Gooding, Jr. in "Boyz 'N The Hood," another conflicted soul caught in between being moral in a morally bankrupt area or taking the easy way out. Alongside Revolori and Clemons, two supporting roles that, again, go far and beyond the call of supporting roles, Moore is a talented who you find yourself being unable to take your eyes off of throughout the entire film.

Above all the aesthetic and character charm, "Dope" is a surprisingly optimistic film. It doesn't get bogged down by environmental cynicism, even when Malcolm has to turn into the kind of people he never wanted to associate himself with. Famuyiwa takes a brave step in the opposite direction of his peers, capturing acts like drug-dealing and backhanded deals in a light that accentuates joy and positivity, but it's all this that make "Dope" an even more fascinating character study, coming of age story, and a subversive tale about life in an urban area.

How Dope Turns the Concept of the Black Geek on Its Head Aisha Harris from Slate

“Malcolm is a geek.”

That’s the first thing we hear from the narrator about Malcolm (Shameik Moore), the hero of Rick Famuyiwa’s Dope, the coming-of-age indie that premiered at Sundance this year and opens in theaters Friday. The line underscores a scene in which Malcolm eagerly explains the concept of bitcoin to his mom, but that’s just the tip of the nerdberg. He and his best friends Diggy (Kiersey Clemons) and Jib (Tony Revolori) are, in present day, obsessed with ’90s hip-hop music and styles (Malcolm wears his hair in a hi-top fade) and have their own band in which they sing about getting good grades. He has his sights set on Harvard, and his application essay sees him geeking out on pinning down the exact date of Ice Cube’s “good day.” We soon learn how much Malcolm and his friends stick out from their neighbors in the predominantly black and Latino Inglewood, California, in what’s known as “the Bottoms,” a notoriously bleak and violent neighborhood, and at their underfunded school. Thanks in part to his geekhood, Malcolm finds himself entangled in a drug deal between a local kingpin and a crooked business owner.

Ah, the black geek. (Or “nerd”—whichever you prefer.) Like pretty much any cultural mode associated with blackness, it’s complicated. In the 1980s, the black geek could fall under the broader umbrella of what Trey Ellis, in a celebrated 1989 essay, termed the “New Black Aesthetic,” or NBA for short—a demographic of young black intellectuals who walked the line between traditionally white and traditionally black worlds; wearing “little, round glasses, and short, neat dreads” while in bookstores, liking “both Jim and Toni Morrison.” The NBA as he described it was a “post-bourgeois movement; driven by a second-generation of middle class”—i.e., Spike Lee, the fictional Cosby family, Chuck D. (In this regard Malcolm doesn’t fit in, considering his geekhood flowers in a poor, dangerous neighborhood.) In more recent years the black geek has become a little bit cool, symbolized, intentionally or not, by the likes of Barack Obama, Donald Glover, and Issa Rae.

Glover, who openly celebrates his identity as a black nerd, has defined such an existence as being into “strange, specific stuff.” The term itself is a bit awkward, succumbing to the notion that geek- or nerdhood is, by default, representative of whiteness. This naturally lends itself to the notion that to be a black geek is to be into things that white people are into, which in turn unfurls an entirely loaded, incredibly tricky conversation about what it means to be black. At best that discussion yields the conclusion that black geeks of all types are a tangible, very invested demographic whose attention is worth courting and whose stories are worth telling. At worst the black geek gets identified as a modern-day “exceptional negro,” a smarter, more “unique” type, set apart from your average black stereotype who only listens to rap, thinks school is whack, and dreams of becoming (or marrying) a professional basketball player.

Through a genre-hopping premise (the film is John Hughes meets the Coen brothers meets Boyz N the Hood, with a dash of Porky’s thrown in), Dope dives headfirst into these complexities, and it certainly seems at first as though its attempts to define its protagonist will stick him in an old, familiar box. Straight out of the gate, the narrator—the voice is Forest Whitaker’s—breaks down what exactly makes the trio “black geeks,” complete with a visual checklist of unsurprising affinities that include skateboarding, manga, Glover, and TV on the Radio—plus engaging in typical “white people activities” like getting good grades and applying to college.

It’s not just our narrator who emphasizes Malcolm’s differences; Malcolm himself repeatedly positions himself against all of the other black people around him. After presenting his Ice Cube–themed college essay to his guidance counselor, he’s told that he needs to write something personal about himself, because his excellent GPA isn’t going to matter to admissions counselors who’ll only see his failing school system. Malcolm is resistant—he has no desire to write about being raised by a single mother, never having known his father, and living in the hood. “It’s cliché,” he protests. And following a party that gets broken up by gunfire, Nakia (Zoë Kravitz), the cool girl of his dreams, thanks him for helping her get out safely. “Those other niggas” were just running over her to get out of the way, she says, flirtatiously. That’s what makes him different, he tells her. “Guess I’m just used to hearing, ‘Niggas don’t listen to this,’ ‘Niggas don’t go to college unless they play ball,’ ” he adds sheepishly. “Guess I’m just not one of ‘those niggas.’ ”

To be clear, Malcolm doesn’t intend for such statements to sound off-putting. (It’s to the credit of the young actor who plays him, Moore, that the character always comes off as charming, even when Famuyiwa writes him as kind of a jerk.) But Malcolm does seem to have internalized the mythology that black geeks like him privilege education and advancement far more than nongeek blacks—a notion that has been proven to be grossly overemphasized. It’s a familiar trope that’s been played out in recent years especially, as the rise of the black nerd has come to dominate discussions about black culture in general. Sometimes it’s subtle: A Vulture piece from earlier this year explored the increasing number of black comedians who take a more “ruminative” and “oddball” approach to humor in contrast to the bawdy humor of Eddie Murphy and Def Comedy Jam. In it, comic Jermaine Fowler told reporter E. Alex Jung, “I was the black kid in school who’d skate and wrestle, who was really into outer space and botany and kung fu and hip-hop. I was into everything.” At other times it’s completely devoid of nuance, as with a 2012 CNN article that defined black nerdhood as “a way to describe African-American intellectuals in a time when it’s finally cool to be something other than an athlete or rapper.”

We’ve seen the trope in pop culture, of course. One of the most persistent and widespread purveyors of the “niggas don’t listen to this” mantra was The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. In that sitcom, the sweater-wearing, Tom Jones–loving Carlton Banks was repeatedly subjected to the blackness litmus test by Will Smith over the course of six seasons, starting with the very first episode:

Carlton: That’s a really neat tux, isn’t it, Will?

Will: Oh yes, it’s definitely the cat’s meow.

Carlton: Wait till we come downstairs in those tuxes. People may not think we’re twins, but I bet they’ll think we’re brothers.

Will: You know what? I don’t think you have to worry about anyone mistaking you for a brother.

Refreshingly, Dope doesn’t actually wind up promoting toxic ideas about a lack of diversity and nuance within black culture; ultimately the movie slyly undermines Malcolm’s internalized notions about blackness. We hear Malcolm’s ideas about what a special snowflake this black geek is, but we, the audience, never witness them in action. He and his friends are picked on by some particularly rough kids at school but only because Malcolm’s shoe size matches that of the ringleader bully, who tries to steal his Jordans. The school’s gruff security officer wishes him luck on his SATs. And charismatic drug dealer Dom (ASAP Rocky) takes a liking to Malcolm, using his inoffensive geek persona as an asset for his own personal gain on more than one occasion. (Dom, despite his hood persona, is also an intellectual of sorts himself, as we see in a conversation he has with a fellow dealer about the U.S.’s drone program.) In Dope, not only can’t the black nerd be pigeonholed—neither can his neighbors, no matter how gang-ridden and poverty-stricken the neighborhood may be.

This doesn’t mean that in the world of Dope, a character like Malcolm would never be accused of “acting white,” but it does mean that his perception of how people view him is vastly different from the reality. I can relate: I too was a black geek. (In many ways, I still am.) During the late ’90s and early ’00s, I was usually the only black kid (or one of very few) in my honors classes, and my “strange, specific stuff” included Turner Classic Movies and channeling my inner Weird Al by writing minimusicals with made-up lyrics to the tunes of popular Disney songs. I too fought hard to prove to people that I wasn’t like those other black kids. I was unique.

I eventually wised up and saw the harm in internalizing such ideals, and by the end of the film, Malcolm does too: In a powerful montage, he reads aloud his newly rewritten college essay, in which he presents the many facets of his life—getting straight As, playing in a band, encountering powerful drug pushers—as the work of two hypothetical students, one from the suburbs, one from the hood. “So why do I want to attend Harvard?” he writes at essay’s end. “If I was white, would you even have to ask me that question?”

It’s a bittersweet but ultimately empowering moment. On the one hand Malcolm knows that much of society may look at him and where he’s from and still make stereotypical assumptions no matter how successful he becomes. Yet the tone is far from defeatist; Malcolm ends the film a wiser, more confident young man than he was at the beginning, having proven to himself that he can play the many tricky, unfair aspects of life—namely, assumptions about race and class—to his advantage. It echoes the voices heard in Trey Ellis’ “New Black Aesthetic” essay, in which Ellis quotes the filmmaker Robert Townsend (Hollywood Shuffle): “I wasn’t listening when everybody told me about the obstacles.” Ellis adds, in a passage that feels very appropriate to this complex coming-of-age indie comedy: “So he took the dominant culture’s credit cards and clobbered it with a film.” 

How Dope's Director Made a Teen Flick for the Internet Age Jordan Crucchiola from Wired, June 19, 2015

Movie Review: Rick Famuyiwa's 'Dope' Raises the Stakes ... Spencer Kornhaber from The Atlantic

Sundance Diary, Days 1-4: Exploitation Blues « - Grantland Wesley Morris

No Compromises - The New Yorker Hua Hsu from The New Yorker, March 31, 2015

Movie Review: Dope Is Actually Pretty Dope Danielle C. Belton from The Root, June 18, 2015

A Sly Comedy About Coming of Age as a Young Black Man in A Dana Stevens from Slate

Slant Magazine [Ed Gonzalez]

Film Racket [Bill Gibron]

Dope / The Dissolve Keith Phipps

Sundance breakout Dope is messy but energetic - The AV ... Ignatiy Vishnevetsky from The Onion A.V. Club

Badass Digest [Devin Faraci]

Screen Rant [Kofi Outlaw]

Writing: Movies [Chris Knipp]

TwitchFilm [Peter Martin]

Dope | Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

Review: Entertaining 'Dope' asks if you're a geek or ... - HitFix Gregory Ellwood

World Socialist Web Site [Joanne Laurier]

Blu-ray.com [Brian Orndorf]

The Film Stage [Jordan Raup]

ReelTalk [Frank Wilkins]

FilmFracture [James Jay Edwards]

Film Pulse [Adam Patterson]

Day 4: Discomfort comedy / The Dissolve Mike D’Angelo

Film-Forward.com [Michael Lee]

The New Black Aesthetic Trey Ellis, 1989

'Dope' Director Rick Famuyiwa Explains How Film Busts Stereotypes ... Jake Coyle interview from The Huffington Post, June 17, 2015

Rick Famuyiwa mixes it up with Dope: 'We knew if we were left alone… this could be something meaningful' Bob Thompson interview from The National Post, June 22, 2015

'Dope': Film Review - The Hollywood Reporter Boyd van Hoeij

'Dope' Review: Rick Famuyiwa's Buoyant Teenage ... - Variety Dennis Harvey

Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]

Kansas City Star [Jon Niccum]

Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]

Not as 'Dope' as hyped, but it has its moments - LA Times Robert Abele

The comedy-drama 'Dope' defies 'black film' expectations Lorraine Ali from The LA Times

'Dope': A clever but convoluted teen comedy, reviews say Oliver Gettell from The LA Times

L.A. Biz [Annlee Ellingson]

Dope Movie Review & Film Summary (2015) | Roger Ebert Odie Henderson

Review: 'Dope,' a Teenage Comedy, Plays With Stereotypes ... A.O. Scott from The New York Times

Farber, Manny – film critic

Farber, Manny Art and Culture

Manny Farber, though still much-revered as a film critic, currently eschews film in favor of painting. Farber began writing film reviews for The New Republic in 1942. He continued his film career through the 1970s, writing most notably for publications such as Film Comment. As his book "Negative Space" (1970) reveals, his dense, surprising prose is extraordinarily rich in ideas; he possesses a keen ability to articulate otherwise impressionistic observations about film. His criticism clearly comes from the point of view of an artist who respects filmmaking as a potential art, not as a commercial product. The notoriously "cantankerous," "cranky," and "curmudgeon-like" tone of his critic's voice seems to derive from his personal frustration with the state of contemporary filmmaking. He often feels that film is being abused or prevented from realizing its artistic possibilities. Not surprisingly, by the 1970s his work as a painter began to overshadow his writing; gradually, painting replaced film criticism altogether. He currently paints and teaches art at the University of California, San Diego.

San Diego Reader | Debt Duncan Shepherd from the San Diego Reader, May 25, 2006, also here: Duncan Shepherd

Manny Farber was a friend of mine before we ever met. I recall exactly how I was introduced. I had read Pauline Kael's jeremiad on Andrew Sarris and the auteur theory, "Circles and Squares," in her first (and at the time, only) collection of film criticism, I Lost It at the Movies, or perhaps I had read it upon its initial appearance in Film Quarterly magazine in 1963. Whichever, it was an attack that aroused nothing so much as sympathy for its victim and curiosity to read for myself the essay that had incited it. I got hold of the pertinent issue of Film Culture, America's Independent Motion Picture Magazine, No. 27, Winter 1962/63, either directly from the magazine's offices or, more likely, from that lifeline to the outside movie world for a suburban Minneapolis high-schooler, the Larry Edmunds Bookshop in Hollywood. The lead article, "Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962" by Andrew Sarris, told me what I had shelled out a dollar-fifty plus postage for, but it got completely upstaged by the article immediately following it, "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art" by Manny Farber, a piece that left my head feeling like a punching bag after a Cassius Clay workout, and that seemed to embody to the nth degree the kind of art the author was touting: "A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity."

One thing leads to another. Kael to Sarris to Farber. I may have recognized the third name from a handful of references in the collection of James Agee's criticism, Agee on Film. I may not. But here, clearly, was a new acquaintance to cultivate. He would confide to me later that when the magazine hit the stands he had an urge to go into hiding, and that Pauline Kael, who had a piece on Shoot the Piano Player immediately following Farber's in the magazine, tracked him down to tell him she could not make out what he was talking about. Yet the terminology of his title has -- shall we say? -- gnawed, burrowed, wormed its way into the critical vocabulary and has been much appropriated and misappropriated by others. Only a couple of years ago when I was in Madrid I picked up a flier for an art exhibit entitled "Arte Termita contra Elefante Blanco." But I get ahead of myself.

The next step would have been similar. (One thing leads to another.) I was reading a book-length survey of the contemporary cinema called The Contemporary Cinema -- this was one of the means whereby a Minnesota rube could find out about the blanks he had to fill in in his film education -- by Penelope Houston, an editor and critic of the British film magazine, Sight and Sound, to which I had a subscription. In the book, there was a chapter incongruously headed "Production Values," if I remember right, wherein she summarized an earlier article by the same Manny Farber, "Underground Films," from a 1957 issue of the political journal, Commentary. By then the term had been snapped up by the editor of Film Culture, Jonas Mekas, and applied to the experimental films of Brakhage, Breer, Baillie, and company, something very different from Farber's application of it to the work of unsung Hollywood action directors, lean, lithe, unpretentious, who toiled in the shadows of "the water buffaloes of film art," Kazan, Zinnemann, Stevens, and company. And he had, to go by the date of publication, been exploring this terrain all by his lonesome, without the aid of an auteurist map, William Wellman, William Keighley, and John Farrow right in there with the anointed Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh, Anthony Mann. Well, I had to get my hands on that, too, and did so by way of a call slip at the Minneapolis Public Library, dredging up from the vaults a bound year's worth of the periodical, to be read and re-read on the premises.

The next step is less distinct. How I learned that Farber at that time -- smack in the middle of the Sixties -- was writing a monthly column for Cavalier, a girlie magazine with Playboy-ish intellectual aspirations, I can't say. I confess I already knew the magazine, and had a copy of it from circa 1962, which I wish I still had today, with a peekaboo pictorial of Jane Fonda in it. In any event, it now became a monthly must, and luckily there was a newsagent at Seventh and Hennepin, bless him, who was willing to sell me unlawfully anything I had the coin to pay for. This period in Farber's criticism was, I see in retrospect, unsurpassed in freewheelingness and wordplayfulness, and my head got sharply turned. I had a new star to hitch my wagon to. His influence on my own scribblings, although unnamed, did not go unnoticed by my twelfth-grade English Composition teacher. It was not until after I had made his acquaintance in the flesh that I was compelled to find other writers to mimic. You can't very well look a man in the eye on a daily or weekly basis when you're stealing from him. Besides which, you may easily enough tap another's language, syntax, even to an extent taste and enthusiasms, but you cannot take over his vision. And no other film critic has been so deeply involved with literal, actual, active vision -- with looking, with watching, with seeing, experiencing, reacting. But again I get ahead of myself.

The eventual meeting would occur in the last half of my senior year at Columbia University, a school chosen solely for the number of proximate movie theaters in New York City, my primary yardstick for Quality of Life. By this time Farber -- I was still on last-name terms with him -- had moved his column to Artforum, readily available in the college library, and in some ways his most hospitable venue ever, where his observations on movies could share space with views of Frank Stella, Robert Motherwell, and Andy Warhol instead of views of naked women. Through a dorm-mate on the fifth floor of John Jay Hall, a card-carrying auteurist and not precisely someone I would call a friend, I got wind of a writing workshop run by Farber at the School of Visual Arts, ninety-some blocks southward in Manhattan. The dorm-mate had blazed this trail in the Fall semester, reporting back erroneously that Farber was "really old, maybe eighty," and I would follow along on that trail come Spring. (One thing leads to another.) And then there he was, sitting six feet away from me, his prominent brow and forehead suggesting superhuman braininess, starting off fearlessly reading aloud from a recent piece he had penned on Luis Buñuel: "His glee in life is a movie of raped virgins and fallen saints...."

I was fortunate in my timing. This was early 1970, when the injured Willis Reed would hobble onto the basketball court at the start of Game Seven in the NBA Finals, and Manny -- I was now on first-name terms -- was a red-blooded American sports fan as happy to talk, in after-class adjournments to the coffee shop, about the Knicks as about the new Hitchcock or new Bresson. Too, he was preparing a show of his recent paintings in SoHo or thereabouts, a side to him I had known nothing about. Film buffs as a breed have a dangerous tendency to put on blinders to anything outside a movie screen, and the broadening of my horizons to the world of art studios, galleries, openings, and the bohemian digs he shared with his fellow painter and future wife, Patricia Patterson, was a healthy thing. Most fortunate of all, he was then putting together his own collection of film criticism, and I was flabbergasted and flattered to be called upon to help sift through the file box of clippings that dated back to the Forties, The New Republic, The Nation, The New Leader. (I'm sure my main function was to plump unreasonably for the stuff from Cavalier.) Fortunately, also, Columbia was in the throes of its annual Spring shutdown due to student revolt, a new tradition, and I was freed to spend my time as I pleased, else I might not have graduated. I'd have opted to sift with Manny rather than study for finals.

A year later, after he had decamped to UCSD to start up a program of film studies in the Visual Arts Department, he was back in New York for the launch of his book, Negative Space, at a reception in the New Yorker Bookstore over the New Yorker Theater, where he recruited me as a teaching assistant. I had since landed a reviewing job at a movie trade paper edited by the father of one of my fellow students in Manny's writing workshop (one thing leads to another), but seeing that I had more money going out than coming in, and was sleeping on a jerry-built shelf three feet from the ceiling in a tiny cell intended as the maid's quarters in a three-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side, I jumped at the chance. And the course of my life was set. Minneapolis to New York to San Diego. One thing leads to another.

Manny's film classes -- I can speak first-hand of only three years of them, though they would continue for another thirteen until his retirement in 1987 to devote himself full-time to painting -- were the stuff of legend, and it seems feeble and formulaic to call him a brilliant, an illuminating, a stimulating, an inspiring teacher. It wasn't necessarily what he had to say (he was prone to shrug off his most searching analysis as "gobbledegook") so much as it was the whole way he went about things, famously showing films in pieces, switching back and forth from one film to another, ranging from Griffith to Godard, Bugs Bunny to Yasujiro Ozu, talking over them with or without sound, running them backwards through the projector, mixing in slides of paintings, sketching out compositions on the blackboard, the better to assist students in seeing what was in front of their faces, to wean them from Plot, Story, What Happens Next, and to disabuse them of the absurd notion that a film is all of a piece, all on a level, quantifiable, rankable, fileable. He could seldom be bothered with movie trivia, inside information, behind-the-scenes piffle, technical shoptalk, was often offhand about the basic facts of names and dates, was unconcerned with Classics, Masterpieces, Seminal Works, Historical Landmarks. It was always about looking and seeing.

He would endlessly preview the week's movies on the wall of his studio on campus or his rented house in Del Mar, lugging an anvil-weight 16mm projector to and fro, together with three or four valise-sized boxes of celluloid, and yet throughout these endless hours he felt no necessity to watch every reel of every movie. If you wanted simply to know How It Ends, he might not have the answer. One week he had previewed Kurosawa's wide-screen High and Low without benefit of an anamorphic lens, so that the image was squeezed like an accordion, and all of his prepared comments on narrow spaces and vertical lines, perfectly true to what he was seeing, had to be modified on the fly when the film was shown in class, stretched out horizontally with the proper lens. He was constitutionally unable to make things easy on himself. It never would have occurred to him to follow the conventional pattern (see Robert Osborne on TCM) of introductory remarks, uninterrupted movie from beginning to end, concluding remarks, and call it a day. It was unthinkable ever to repeat the same movie and the same lecture at a later date. People were forever taken aback to find out that something he had written fifteen or twenty years earlier no longer represented his views on the matter. Everything had to be re-examined afresh, looked at from a different angle, turned on its head. Nothing was nailed down, fixed, finalized. Like the metaphorical termite of that 1962 essay, he was always moving forward, less inclined in 1972 to talk about Preston Sturges or Val Lewton than about Werner Herzog or Rainer Werner Fassbinder. While he was very much the sort of teacher to attract followers, hungering for his wisdom and wit, thirsting for his approval, he was not the sort to have actual disciples. He had all the requisite charisma, just not the dogma. He was, succinctly put, too individual, too inimitable. No one could keep up with him.

My privileges have been many. I was privileged, right off the bat in California, to be a sounding board as his essay on Raoul Walsh, "He Used to Be a Big Shot," took shape before my eyes on the typewriter and sometimes with scissors and adhesive, a fascinating process that nonetheless did not cure me of my own neurotic secrecy about the act of writing. All of his film criticism from that point on, until the last published piece in 1977, was co-signed by his wife Patricia, who brought a matching eye for visual detail and added a Memorex memory for dialogue. (It is sobering to realize that the length of time from his first film reviews in The New Republic to that last one in Film Comment is very close to the same length of time I've been writing in these pages, starting from my second year at UCSD.) I was privileged, too, to be at Manny's and Patricia's wedding, and to have them at mine, very small affairs. Privileged to watch the Super Bowl with him when his 49ers squeaked out their first championship. Privileged to have access to his thoughts on movies in the decades since he stopped publishing them. From afar, it might be tempting to read his silence on the post-Star Wars cinema as one of those eloquent silences, a silence that speaks volumes, yet anyone who knows him will know that his engagement in movies has hardly flagged.

To pull back to the widest angle on the subject: Not everyone who goes into his chosen field gets to have as a teacher and a friend the figure who, in the fledgling's eyes, stands above all others in the field. The downside of that is the impossibility of measuring up and the difficulty, for different reasons than that cited earlier, of looking him in the eye on a daily or weekly basis, or, as time slips by, more like a yearly basis. Manny himself has always been kind, considerate, generous, and gentle, to go along with wry, droll, sardonic, contrary, combative, defensive, touchy, testy, cranky, cantankerous, difficult, dissatisfied, complicated, or whatever descriptive adjective anyone might have attached to him. He didn't need to scold me. For that, I needed only his example.

This is the season once again, coming around as seasons will, whether he likes it or not, to pay homage to Manny Farber. A show of his latest paintings and drawings is on exhibit through June 3 at the Quint Gallery in La Jolla. In conjunction with that, a marathon tribute to him, "Manny Farber and All That Jazz," was staged May 13 at UCSD by his long-time faculty colleague, Jean-Pierre Gorin. A new book of his previously uncollected criticism, tentatively titled Roads and Tracks, is in the offing. And the man himself is going on ninety. He once told me he knew exactly when he would die. I don't remember exactly. Seventy-five, seventy-six, seventy-something. When he said it, it was a number that seemed a laughably long way off. It now seems a number a long way in the other direction. Only not so laughably.

Critical Condition - Film Comment Kent Jones, March/April 2014

Just about 10 years ago, Manny Farber and I were taking one last walk through a retrospective show of his paintings. He stopped to scrutinize a large board called Ingenious Zeus—vegetables, branches, and open art books splayed across a field of deep blue in an unsettled composition suggesting the eye of a hurricane. “I try to get myself out of it as much as possible so that the object takes on a kind of religious awe,” he remarked. I remember thinking that Farber could just as well have been thumbing through a collection of his writings, and reflecting on the force field that binds the work of art to the one driven to describe it. Or, as Andrew Sarris explained it, the one compelled to enter into its enchanted aura: “What it really is, is first you see something, and you like it, and then it’s a mystery, and you go into the mystery.” To strive for a strictly objective account, as André Bazin warned, is to turn down a blind alley: the artwork cordoned off from the probing sensual intelligence of its entranced audience is as uninteresting as an output of zeroes and ones. To pursue a purely impressionistic direction is to let the work slip away by other means: the reader is left with nothing but a blurred, smudged and roughly approximate copy, a Xerox of a tintype of an etching after a painting. Approaching the artwork with humility, as Farber and Sarris suggested (as opposed to arrogance or unctuous subservience), being precise about one’s place in relation to it (as opposed to drifting from rapt respondent to rival creator to impartial observer to public advocate, and then back again), and understanding oneself as a transmitter rather than a final arbiter or an entertainer, is to move toward fulfilling the task of criticism as defined by Bazin: “To prolong as much as possible in the intelligence and sensibility of those who read it the original shock of the work of art.” It seems to me that this is only possible if one preserves and builds upon the memory of the very first shock, recalled by Whitman: “There was a child went forth every day/And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became…”

Over the years, I’ve returned often to the writings of these critics, and Farber is the one who gives people the most trouble. In one sense, he is generally admired and acknowledged. Negative Space is canonical, there is now a Library of America collection of his film criticism, and he is constantly cited in essays and blogs, most recently in a new collection by James Naremore and a series of posts by David Bordwell. But many find Farber’s prose to be forbiddingly dense with bygone slang, lousy puns, layer upon layer of metaphor, and abrupt turns and reversals, and I think they’re even more put off by his reflexive contrarianism. Farber’s impulse is to reduce everyone to lifesize proportions with such casual deflations as “Ozu’s long career . . . never outgrows the Hal Roach idea of a movie image being naïve and making you feel good.” That the action of going against the grain is Farber’s roundabout path to coming ever closer to the film and illuminating all of its properties, intended and unintended, is lost on readers with a fixation on value judgments. Farber’s idiosyncratic prose is as spiritually and intellectually sound as Bazin’s, but when you skim his writing the flashes of impudence can be easily mistaken for flippancy. Thus the obit-ready Farber, the man who took down the “sacred cows” of cinema; and the single-minded responses to the LOA collection that boil down to half a tweet: “Why didn’t Manny have any love for Orson Welles?”

I think that Farber’s passionate involvement in the actual practice of criticism precluded any genuine investment in partisanship or polemics, and that’s doubly true of Bazin. Paradoxically, this means that the cinema’s two greatest critics are outliers in what we now call film culture, a by-product of the Politique des Auteurs, streamlined for American use into the Auteur Theory, and finally trodden down and flattened over the decades into plain old auteurism. Their names are constantly mentioned and their most famous pieces are frequently cited and invoked, but rarely in terms of their relevance to contemporary affairs, least of all the lucid objections they raised to the auteurist idea at its inception.

The point is not to claim that film criticism took a wrong turn in the Fifties and Sixties. The auteurist idea at its most basic (that movies are primarily the creation of one governing author behind the camera who thinks in images and sounds rather than words and sentences) is now the default setting in most considerations of moviemaking, and for that we should all be thankful. We’d be nowhere without auteurism, which boasts a proud history: the lovers of cinema didn’t just argue for its inclusion among the fine arts, but actually stood up, waved its flag, and proclaimed its glory without shame. In that sense, it stands as a truly remarkable occurrence in the history of art. The consciousness of cinema has indeed been raised on a general level, and people are now far less comfortable dismissing it than they once were. That may sound paltry to those of us who won’t rest until Douglas Sirk replaces Lincoln on the five-dollar bill, but in terms of art historical time it’s astonishing.

Bazin understood very clearly that the force of history had no time for subtleties or distinctions, that it was on the side of his young friends and protégés at Cahiers du cinéma, and that the politique held and defended “an essential critical truth that the cinema needs more than the other arts, precisely because an act of true artistic creation is more uncertain and vulnerable in the cinema than elsewhere.” In a sense, his objections were addressed to a future in which artistic creation would be just a little less vulnerable than it was in the mid-Fifties. I think that this has come to pass: it may now be more difficult to make artistic gestures on a grand scale in the cinema than it was even a decade ago, but the ones that are made are met with far less condescension or outright hostility than they once were, thanks in no small way to auteurism. But did Bazin imagine that the extremism of its originators, who were not practicing a critical method but making a collective affirmation, would become habitual? His tone was ineffably respectful, but his rhetoric was as sharp as tempered steel. “There can be no definitive criticism of genius or talent which does not first take into consideration the social determinism, the historical combination of circumstances, and the technical background which to a large extent determine it,” he reminded his readers and fellow critics. This was a prelude to a very simple question with an obvious answer. Did Hitchcock, Rossellini, and Nick Ray make their films with the freedom that Matisse and Singier enjoyed when they painted canvases? Of course not, because cinema was “both popular and industrial.” The question became even more complicated in regard to American cinema. Bazin posited an “American cinematic genius” that had shown “American society just as it wanted to see itself; but not at all passively, as a simple act of satisfaction and escape, but dynamically, i.e., by participating in the means at its disposal in the building of this society. What is so admirable in the American cinema is that it cannot help being spontaneous.” (Bazin’s brilliant formulation now has a poignant ring: America no longer seems interested in seeing itself dynamically, and our industrial cinema has become anything but spontaneous.)

It seems to me that these points are more or less irrefutable, and that far from bursting the balloon they suggest the possibility of an amended and potentially richer variation on auteurism. Why didn’t it happen? Such a possibility was without interest to the younger critics, already on their way to leaving criticism behind even as they were writing it, and criticism has remained equally irrelevant to their followers. “What is the point of saying that the meeting between Richard Burton and Ruth Roman while Curt Jurgens watches is edited with fantastic brio?” wrote Godard so memorably. “Maybe this was a scene during which we had closed our eyes. For Bitter Victory, like the sun, makes you close your eyes. Truth is blinding.” Godard’s exalted writings on the cinema, particularly his pieces on the films of Ray, The Wrong Man, and Man of the West, are among the real glories of film culture. But as a writer, Godard is uninterested in prolonging the shock of the work for the reader. He is consumed with proclaiming the passion that the film in question has ignited within him, and the possibilities of creating dialogue scenes of “fantastic brio” or dynamizing the screen with acid-green dresses and blue and pink carpets. For Godard, Truffaut, Rivette and, to a slightly lesser extent, Rohmer, criticism was a uniformly single-minded activity, and their rhetorical gestures were those of artists-in-waiting. Whenever I re-read Rivette’s famous condemnation of the camera movement in Kapo, for example, I do not have the impression of a carefully considered moral judgment but of a bold, slashing artistic gesture. Taken together, the white-hot writings of the Cahiers critics were not so much a peak in the history of criticism as a blazing, spontaneously generated collective artistic mission statement, as stirring as the Surrealist Manifesto or Whitman’s Democratic Vistas.

When Andrew Sarris Americanized the politique, he made a crucial adjustment by turning a declaration of artistic liberty into both a system of evaluation (the auteur “theory”) and a crusade to change the way that cinema was thought of and discussed. An auteur was no longer an artist who spoke “in the first person,” as Rivette put it, and who had actually crafted a formidable body of work, but any director who had produced evidence of authorship, i.e., an ability to think in visual terms. The transcendent moment, isolated from the surrounding  movie, became proof of the power of the auteur: scenes, passages, grace notes, epiphanies, directorial “use” of this or that actor or actress were precisely where the evidence lay. Placing so much stress on the part at the expense of the whole enhanced the idea of the studio-contracted director secretly injecting contraband strains of “personality” into the scripts to which he was assigned; it also promoted an extremely romantic idea of the director as an on-the-spot inventor, taking whatever material was handed to him and transforming it into gold. The very idea of the “whole” itself became suspect, implying an adherence to forms that were associated with literature and theater.

Somewhere along the line, the polemical devices of Sarris’s The American Cinema were internalized as method. All demurrals were filed under “hostile” and dismissed. To take Bazin’s objections seriously would be to admit that Hitchcock and Rossellini and Ray operated under constraints and conditions unknown to Matisse and Singier, and thus admit defeat. To pay attention to Farber’s commonsensical observations that “any image . . . can be read for any type of decisive, encapsulating judgment,” that a single “scene, actor or technician” is likely to inject “a flash-bomb vitality” across the grain of the film at any given moment, that dissolving “the studio influence from any discussion of [Walsh’s] films leaves him a fantasy figure,” would be to break the spell and stop the flow of revelation. To sympathize with Farber’s mid-Sixties lament for the demise in prestige of “the 40s critic, who was a prospector always repanning and sifting for buried American truth and subconscious life,” would be to submit to the tyranny of the relevant. To acknowledge narrative structure, the particulars of screen acting, the off-hand peculiarities of the image, or any aspect of production with more than a passing glance would be a distraction and a violation of the essential truth of the auteur. To be an auteurist was not to practice a critical discipline, but to believe. For that reason, the effect of auteurism on film criticism has been odd in the extreme.

I recently took a fresh look at the aforementioned scene from Bitter Victory, prompted by a re-reading of Robin Wood’s contribution to a long-forgotten early Seventies anthology called Favorite Movies. Wood’s essay, “The Seaweed-Gatherer,” is one of the finest in the book, and his point of view is soundly and refreshingly anti-essentialist: “The valid question is not ‘Is this theatrical?’ but ‘Does it work?’ and a cogent answer would involve some analysis of the whole film, and the relationship within it of style and meaning.” Wood evokes six examples from different films by way of illustration, one of which is the scene in question. This short paragraph strikes me as an emblematic auteurist gesture. “Richard Burton and Ruth Roman, former lovers, meet unexpectedly after an interval of some years under the suspicious eyes of the man she has married (Curt Jurgens) . . . The intensity of the Ray—it must be among the most electrifying dialogue sequences ever filmed—arises partly from the cutting. The situation is quite commonplace, the dialogue is unremarkable, the actors scarcely my favorites; though they offer notable demonstrations of the general truth that Ray can get fine performances from the most unexpected people, the fascination of the sequence does not lie merely in the acting. Ray has conceived the whole scene in terms of exchanged or intercepted looks; the significance, instead of being extracted from the text, is conferred upon it by the way the characters look at each other. The cutting stresses (but not crudely) the significance of the glances, Ray using editing rather as a poet uses accent to obtain the most precise inflections.”

As Wood shifts from a wide panoramic view to a close-up, he also shifts, imperceptibly and maybe even unconsciously, from a truly magnificent holism to a peculiarly auteurist form of essentialism. He begins his summary of the Burton-Roman-Jurgens exchange by simplifying the situation and eliding a few key pieces of information. Before the scene takes place, we learn that Burton and Jurgens are British soldiers stationed in Tripoli during World War II; that Jurgens is an insecure, buttoned- down army lifer who has been informed by his superiors that he is being considered for a dangerous commando mission that will leave the next morning; that Burton is a brasher and more defiant figure who is also being considered; that Jurgens’ boyishly elated reaction to the news that his wife is coming for a visit indicates a certain imbalance in their relationship. An aura of fatalism linked to inadequacy and resentment has already been established, by visual, verbal, and behavioral means, as we go into the scene.

In contrast to the brisk exchanges in the C.O.’s office, the dialogue in the scene in question is less unremarkable than it is unpalatable, and the action is unclear—indeed, the preceding scenes do a more efficient job of setting up the drama of bravery and cowardice to come than this now-celebrated exchange. The ostensible goals of the scene are to establish Jurgens’s suspicion that there’s something between Roman and Burton, and Roman’s understanding that one and perhaps both men might be sent out on the suicide mission, and these aims might have been handily realized by sticking to Hitchcock’s principle of innocuous dialogue in dynamic counterpoint to the emotional energies and conflicts that actually drive a scene. According to Bernard Eisenschitz in his Ray biography, the making of Bitter Victory was pure chaos. And the scene as written feels like a collection of drafts, stray notes, and ideas mashed together on the morning of the shoot. The dialogue is gummed up with people speaking when they most likely wouldn’t, revealing what they would be likely to hide, and failing to notice what they would be unlikely to miss. There are odd discrepancies. Jurgens is surprised all over again that Burton is being considered for the mission, and he takes pride in introducing Roman to Burton even though it has already been established that the two men are not friendly. The conversation itself follows a meandering non-logic in which the war, people’s short memories, careless talk, love, and survival are spot-welded into a rickety edifice atop an uncertain foundation. It’s not that Ray hasn’t worked from the text, but that the text is so convoluted (compared to the crispness of relatively similar scenes in The Lusty Men) that it all but dissolves on contact, thus placing the hypnotic shuffling of faces (42 variations of three setups in two minutes) at the center of the viewer’s attention. As a presumed consequence of the lack of clarity in the text, Burton and Roman float ethereally through the scene, and their emotional states are very murky: it’s unclear who is having what effect on whom. Jurgens is the only one who evolves emotionally, from elation to bonhomie to quiet astonishment to alarm to hurt. There are indeed many glances but very few of them are intercepted, and those only by Jurgens. The scene now seems less electrifying than tamped down, unified by what Farber once identified as Ray’s “keynote strangeness”—in this case, a pervasive sense of characters moving like sleepwalkers through the action. The strangeness is only deepened by the depressing tone of the production itself: a somber black-and-white CinemaScope image (not so far from Man of a Thousand Faces or The Joker Is Wild) reminiscent of funeral parlors and hospital chapels; three actors with a mild case of CinemaScope mumps; Hollywood decorum in the absence of Hollywood; and a desultory Forties-style nightclub ambience drained of any vitality by a deadened room tone and looped dialogue.

One must grant that Wood’s essay was written in the pre-home-video era and that his examples were not meant to be comprehensive. Nonetheless, it offers, in crystalline form, a perfect embodiment of the auteurist approach: the assumption of a cinematic essence beneath an outer shell of mere appearances (such as dialogue, décor, acting, sound), and—a stickier point—the subtle transformation of the actual scene into an ideal one made in the state of artistic freedom enjoyed by Matisse and Singier. I don’t want to imply that the vast range of criticism written under the auteurist banner is as heavily singularized as this little paragraph—Joseph McBride, Bertrand Tavernier and Jean-Pierre Coursoudon, Raymond Durgnat, Geoffrey O’Brien, and Sarris himself (Sarris the epigrammatically inclined critic, as opposed to Sarris the polemical campaigner) each created flexible and fruitful variations. Rather, the two complementary actions embodied in Wood’s approach—discarding surface detail in order to look to the inner core, and restoring the film and/or the filmmaker to a state of phantom wholeness—have become habitual over the years, and resulted in a dramatic gulf between how, why, and for whom films are actually made, and the way they are commonly written about by critics. I don’t believe that the gulf between artistic practice and criticism is as wide in any other art form. If I’ve singled out Wood, it certainly isn’t in order to prove him wrong or deflate him: we have all operated according to this model, to varying degrees. Durgnat once wrote in these pages that Howard Hawks as envisioned by Wood was both “a magnificent humanist hypothesis without which film culture would be infinitely poorer” and a confabulation. The same might be said of auteurism itself, which throughout the decades has developed a troublingly persistent tic of ignoring vast swaths of the movie experience in order to fixate on a supposedly essential reality. Meanwhile, amid all the discovering, elevating, furious moralizing, ranking, categorizing, proclaiming, denouncing, diagnosing, and theorizing, the work of actual description has hardly even begun.

Manny Farber - Revolvy

Manny Farber Biography – Manny Farber on artnet

White Elephant Art and Termite Art (1962) Farber essay from Cold Bacon, 1962, also seen here at Jambop: White Elephant Art Vs. Termite Art

Farber's article Carbonated Dyspepsia in its entirety. Farber essay from Cold Bacon, 1968

available here Cinephiles, an archival document of Manny Farber’s writings compiled by Donald Phelps for his magazine For Now during the 1960’s

They Drive by Night: The Criticism of Manny Farber | Jonathan ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, June 24, 1993

A Painter, But Still a Critic David Edelstein from NY magazine, October 17, 1994

on Google Books Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies, by Manny Farber, (398 pages) 1998, viewable online

Reel crank Richard Flood from ArtForum, September 1998

The Qualities I Like - Rouge Adrian Martin at Rouge, August 2008, originally published from Framework, April 1999

Manny Farber at Quint Contemporary Art - Brief Article Leah Ollman from Art in America, October 1999

American Beauty [on Chris Petit's NEGATIVE SPACE] | Jonathan ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, May 12, 2000

notes on Negative Space Benjamin Halligan reviews Farber’s 1998 book Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies, from Senses of Cinema, January 2001

Painter of pictures: The Farber equation is never simple - Manny Farber Robert Polito in a panel discussion with Kent Jones, Greil Marcus, Jonathan Crary and Stephanie Zacharek, from ArtForum, April 2002, also seen here: On the same in Artforum.

Doug Cummings Manny Farber from Film Journey, September 30, 2003

Synoptique Article - Silence is Golden : The Ferguson - Farber Affair Colin Burnett from Synoptique, April 26, 2004

GreenCine post from 2004. Manny Farber, David Hudson from GreenCine, July 1, 2004

Marjorie Baumgarten The Termite King, from The Austin Chronicle, July 2, 2004

eric gelber on manny farber at ps1 museum a piece on Farber’s painting (December 2004)

Manny Farber: About Face - artcritical artcritical Eric Gelber, December 1, 2004

Franklin Bruno on Manny Farber (The Believer) In Praise of Termites, by Franklin Bruno from The Believer, December 2004/January 2005, also seen here: The Believer - In Praise of Termites

Barbara Schock A Hard, Wonderful Look at the Movies in Manny Farber’s Film Class, from Filmmaker magazine, Summer 2005

How to Write About Film Clive James book review of Philip Lopate’s American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now, from The New York Times, June 4, 2006

Great post by Jim Emerson at Scanners How Not to Write About Film, a response to Clive James NY Times book review of Philip Lopate’s American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now, by Jim Emerson June 4, 2006

Girish Termite Art vs. White Elephant Art, from Girish, June 5, 2006

Evan Kindley Tribute to Farber in his review of Nicholas Ray’s THEY LIVE BY NIGHT from Not Coming to a Theatre Near You, August 17, 2008

They Drive by Night: The Criticism of Manny Farber Jonathan Rosenbaum, August 18, 2008, from a personal essay written in 1993, Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism, with a follow up letter from Patricia Patterson to John Powers, August 28, 2008 here: Jonathan Rosenbaum

Manny Farber 1917-2008 J. Hoberman from The Village Voice, August 18, 2008, also seen here: Hoberman, J.Manny Farber 1917-2008. Village Voice

SF360: Manny Farber (1917-2008): "The Geography of Gesture" Robert Polito from SF360, August 18, 2008, reprinted from the 2003 SFIFF catalogue

GreenCine Daily David Hudson from GreenCine, August 18, 2008

Glenn Kenny The Greatest, by Glenn Kenny from Some Came Running, August 18, 2008

Phil Nugent Manny Farber 1917 – 2008, The Screengrab, August 18, 2009

Zach Campbell Elusive Lucidity, August 18, 2008

David Phelps quoted passages from Farber’s works, posted at Videoarcadia, August 18, 2008

Ken Tucker Remembering Manny Farber, from Entertainment Weekly, August 18, 2008

Stephen Whitty The End, from New Jersey Entertainment, August 18, 2008

James Wolcott Farewell to Manny Farber, from James Wolcott’s blog at Vanity Fair, August 2008

James Wolcott Farewell to Manny Farber II, from James Wolcott’s blog at Vanity Fair, August 2008

The New York Times obituary Manny Farber, Iconoclastic Film Critic and Artist, Dies at 91, by William Grimes from The New York Times, August 19, 2008, also seen here: Manny Farber, Iconoclastic Film Critic and Artist, Dies at 91. New York Times

Doug Cummings Negative Space (1999) from Film Journey, August 19, 2008

NEWCITYCHICAGO.COM: Street Smart Chicago Still at the Movies, a Death in the Family, Ray Pride from New City, August 19, 2008

Wesley Morris Manny Being Manny, from The Boston Globe Movie Nation blog, August 19, 2008

here Manny Farber 1917 – 2008, by Carrie Rickey (who studied with him) from The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 20, 2008

David Edelstein Reflections on Manny Farber, a Critic and an Artist, from The Projectionist, August 20, 2008

Max Goldberg Hard-Sell Film Criticism, August 20, 2008

girish: Manny Farber, In Memoriam August 25, 2008

David Thomson Manny Farber obituary from The Guardian, August 25, 2008

Michael Sragow Manny Farber, a prescient, pungent artist-critic, from The Baltimore Sun, August 25, 2008

Manny Farber: Termite of Genius Richard Corliss from Time magazine, August 26, 2008

Manny Farber, 1917-2008 | L.A. Weekly Manny Farber 1917 – 2008, Scott Foundas from The LA Weekly, August 27, 2008, also seen here: Scott Foundas

Kent Jones and Robert Walsh Tributes to Manny Farber, compiled by Scott Foundas from The LA Weekly, August 27, 2008

Duncan Shepherd An End, from The San Diego Reader, August 27, 2008

Spencer Parsons Night, Termite, from The Austin Chronicle, August 29, 2008

Manny Farber: Revered critic who analysed films as 'moving collages ... Jonathan Romney from The Independent, September 24, 2008

A Conversation About Manny Farber with Kent Jones ... - Reverse Shot Eric Hynes interviews Kent Jones about Farber, December 17, 2008

Farber Figure David Fear from Time Out New York (2008)

"Remembering artist and teacher Manny Farber 1917–2008" Carrie Rickey, January 2009

The Farber Mystery Jonathan Rosenbaum from Moving Image Source, September 22, 2009

Farber on Film: Introduction, Part 1 (Other Roads, Other Tracks) - Mubi Robert Polito, November 16, 2009

Farber on Film: Introduction, Part 2 (Farber and Negative Space) - Mubi Robert Polito, November 16, 2009

Farber on Film: Introduction, Part 3 (Farber Before Negative ... - Mubi Robert Polito, November 18, 2009

Farber on Film: Introduction, Part 4 (After Negative Space) - Mubi Robert Polito, November 18, 2009

A dozen of Manny Farber's classic pieces from 1940s to 1960s Ehsan Khoshbakht from Notes on Cinematograph, June 22, 2010

Observations on film art : Manny Farber 1: Color commentary David Bordwell (click on open printable version), March 17, 2014

Observations on film art : Manny Farber 2: Space man - David Bordwell March 23, 2014

Saul Bellow, Film Critic - The New Yorker Richard Brody, May 11, 2015

10 Of The Greatest Film Critics Every Movie Buff Should Know « Taste ... Luis Acevedo from Taste of Cinema, July 15, 2015

Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson Interviewed by Richard Thompson, 1977 1977 interview, Screening the Past

Edward Crouse Negative Space Man, interview by Edward Crouse from Metro Active, October 11, 1999

Robert Walsh Concerning Manny Farber: An Interview with Robert Walsh, (who write the Preface to Farber’s book), by Noel King from Senses of Cinema, December 2001

Leah Ollman Farber on Farber, feature and Farber interview from Art in America, October 2004

Manny Farber: In memory | Interviews | Roger Ebert August 19, 2008

Manny Farber (1917-2008) A Conversation with Paul Schrader on Farber by David Schwartz from Moving Image Source, August 19, 2008

Kent Jones on Manny Farber (Eric Hynes, Reverse Shot) Pt I, from Reverse Shot, October 2008

Click here to read Part Two of Eric Hynes's interview with Kent Jones. Pt II, from Reverse Shot, October 2008

Robert Polito: The one-of-a-kind “film investigations” of Manny Farber ... Rich Kelley interview with Robert Polito, editor of the complete writings of Manny Farber, for Library of America, October 2009

Leonard Lopate Lopate talks to two of Farber’s colleagues, film critics kent Jones and Phillip Lopate from WNYC radio (audio – 17 minutes) Download MP3 | Embed HTML

Untitled: New Blue Paul Schrader short film on a Manny Farber painting from Schrader’s own collection

San Diego PBS segment Local Painter Manny Farber and Hugh Davies of Museum of Contemporary Art, on YouTube (25:46)

Farhadi, Asghar

Film Director Asghar Farhadi | Filmlinc.com | Film Society of Lincoln ... Film Comment

Asghar Farhadi is an Iranian filmmaker who graduated from the University of Tehran in 1998. After working in student plays, national radio, and television hits, his first feature film was 2003’s Dancing in the Dust. He went on to direct the award-winning films The Beautiful City in 2004 and Fireworks Wednesday in 2006, and won major international recognition with About Elly (2009), about a group of Iranians who take a trip to the Caspian Sea that turns tragic.

Farhadi said the concept of A Separation just came to him: “The idea for the film came to when I was sitting in the kitchen of my friend’s flat in Berlin nearly one year ago. I was here preparing another film, but I decided to do this one instead. I was smoking a cigarette in the kitchen, listening to some Iranian music and then I decided to make it. The film is influenced by my personal experiences and the situation in Iran and also some abstract pictures I had in my mind. It was like a puzzle. The story was in my mind for some time but when I decided to make it it happened quickly.”

Asghar Farhadi Official website ::

Berliner Künstlerprogramm | Biography: Farhadi, Asghar Berlin Festival biography

Asghar Farhadi Mubi

• View topic - A Separation (Asghar Farhadi, 2011) Criterion forum, a film discussion group, December 7, 2011

Asghar Farhadi Interview with the director by Artifical Eye (2011)

The Financial Times [Nigel Andrews] Nigel Andrews interviews the director, June 24, 2011

Reluctantly, an Iranian director becomes a symbol - latimes.com Steven Zeitchik interviews the dirctor from The LA Times, October 3, 2011

Read our Q&A with writer-director Asghar Farhadi David Fear interview with the director from Time Out New York, December 19, 2011

ASGHAR FARHADI, “A SEPARATION” | The Filmmaker Magazine ... Damon Smith interview with the director, December 28, 2011

'A Separation' probes Iranians' conflicted love for their country, says director Roshanak Taghavi interview with the director from The Christian Science Monitor, January 20, 2012

Images for Asghar Farhadi

Asghar Farhadi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

DANCING IN THE DUST (Raghs dar ghobar)

Iran (95 mi) 2003

Variety Reviews - Dancing in the Dust - Film Reviews - - Review by ... Deborah Young

Two outcasts, a silent old man and a loudmouthed Azerbaijan youth, set out to catch poisonous snakes in the desert in this eye-catching first film by Asghar Farhadi. His theme, surprisingly, is love and the sacrifices it demands, beautifully illustrated in the story's final, satisfying twist. Mustering enough festival and critical support, pic could find favor with Western auds in search of exotica with a heart.

Though Nazar (Yousef Khodaparast) is madly in love with his young bride Reyhaneh (Baran Kosari), his family and friends make him divorce her when they hear rumors her mother is a prostitute. The boy, who's a little crazy, agrees to the divorce but becomes obsessed with paying the girl's marriage portion, which he can't afford. He earns barely a pittance in a strange pharmaceutical institute, where serums are made from the antibodies in horses injected with snake venom.

On the run from a creditor, he hides in a delivery van and finds himself transported to the middle of the desert. Ignoring his demands to be taken back to the city, the stony-faced old driver (Faramarz Gharibian) makes him sleep outside in the cold and wait the next day while he goes to hunt snakes. Nazar foolishly tries to hunt, too, hoping to make money for Reyhaneh, and gets bitten in the process. To save his life the snake hunter cuts off his wounded finger, keeping it in a jar so it can later be reattached. But Nazar, still reeling with love for his ex, has other ideas.

Dispensing with heavyhanded symbolism, Farhadi tells the tale engrossingly and with a lot of physicality through the two main actors. As the young swain, Khodaparast creates an original, often irritating character redeemed by his great love. Gharibian's haunted face needs no words to express his inner devastation, and in fact he barely speaks in the film.

The snakes are genuinely scary, almost as much as the protags' unpredictable emotions.

Dancing in the Dust - Movie info: cast, reviews, trailer on mubi.com

BEAUTIFUL CITY (Shah-re ziba)

Iran (101 mi) 2004

The Village Voice [Joshua Land]

Basically a conventional story-driven drama, writer-director Asghar Farhadi's Beautiful City is a different kind of Iranian film—for New York audiences, at least. With best friend Akbar still in prison, facing the death penalty for killing his girlfriend at age 16, recently released Ala (Babak Ansari) recruits the condemned boy's sister (Taraneh Alidoosti, recently seen in I'm Taraneh, 15) to lobby the victim's father (Faramarz Gharibian) for clemency. At times resembling an Iranian Dead Man Walking, Beautiful City goes out of its way to give each character a fair shake—a few patriarchal rages notwithstanding, even the vengeful father is treated sympathetically. But the script, overly laden with red herrings, forces its characters into some improbable dilemmas—the bereaved father has to choose between paying the blood money required for the execution (Iranian law stipulates the value of a woman's life as half that of a man's) and getting an operation for his wife's adult daughter—and the ambiguous ending feels inconsistent with the too tidy setup. But as a director, Farhadi demonstrates a lighter touch—the paint peeling from the door frames tells us all we need to know about his characters' financial straits.

Slant Magazine [Ed Gonzalez]

Nearly every film that comes to us from Iran seems to recognize its culture and people as living in a perpetual state of flux, an angle that seems unconsciously built into the DNA of these films. For Bahman Ghobadi, the relentlessness of life in Iran is a horrifying matter of fact—for others, like Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Abbas Kiarostami, it's sometimes an area of subversive critique. Persistence is everything in Asghar Farhadi's visually undistinguished but affecting Beautiful City, a simple film about the power of forgiveness. Neither unremitting nor detached, it represents something of an anomaly for the Iranian film we're typically used to seeing; its casual manner and openness may or may not win it many fans, but it's this very relaxed vision and delivery that works to legitimize it. The film opens in a juvenile detention facility where a young boy, Akbar (Hossein Farzi-Zadeh), awaits execution for murdering his girlfriend when he was 16. In the outside world, Ala (Babak Ansari), a petty thief let out of prison for good behavior, helps Akbar's sister, Firoozeh (Taraneh Alidoosti), to secure the clemency Akbar needs from the father of the girl he killed. Context is uprooted during the natural flow of conversation; information such as Akbar's former days as a prostitute and her ex-husband's drug use is treated with minimal hysteria; and insight into the punitive nature of the Islamic judicial system and how readily people hold the fates of others in their hands is effortlessly entwined with the storyline of Ala and Firoozeh's bourgeoning romance. Every decision in the film hinges on a form of sacrifice—a struggle to do what is right without necessarily compromising one's values. The film's hopefulness is matched only by its goodness, and its message is one we could all stand to learn.

Film-Forward.com Parisa Vaziri

An engrossing anomaly in Iranian cinema, the steady-paced Beautiful City is never confined to one subject. Although the film does not completely ignore the quintessential issue of life under an oppressive regime, it still manages to extract more universal meaning from the injustices of the law, questioning whether the root of these wrongs are really so simple or whether there is an underlying complexity and contradiction in even the most seemingly obvious of injustices – in this case, capital punishment.

Akbar has just turned 18. After having spent two years in a rehabilitation center for committing murder, he is now old enough for execution. His only hope for exoneration is to receive a pardon from the father of the deceased – an impossibly dogged man set on retaliation for his daughter’s death. But there’s a chance he’ll relent. According to Islamic law, the value of a woman’s death is half of that for a man. In other words, the father must pay more blood money in the difference between the worth of his daughter and her murderer, which he can’t afford.

An unlikely romantic relationship comes to fruit after Akbar’s former cellmate, A’la (the beguiling Babak Ansari), unites with Akbar’s sister to obtain the consent. As Firoozeh, Taraneh Alidoosti (from I Am Taraneh, 15) is remarkably convincing as the strong-minded but vulnerable older sister, who wears a wedding ring and works full-time to support her infant son.

Beautiful City thrives on the nuances that are the hallmark of Iranian cinema. But what distinguishes it from other Iranian tragedies is its refreshing comedic element, which comes through subtly and at just the right moments – for example, over a kebab dinner through which A’la and Firoozeh, developing an illicit romance, converse “through” Firoozeh’s toddler, flirting like adolescents.

Director Asghar Farhadi manages to cover the tragic material of his film quite concisely and unpredictably. His point becomes most clearly vocalized when A’la speaks to an elder about the justice or injustice of Akbar’s sentence. It becomes clear that neither is completely convinced about his opinion, because, perhaps, there is no right answer.

Thankfully, this is anything but a cloying message film. The characters, not the issues, are in the foreground. Among the most accessible of recent Iranian films, this dramatic labyrinth is as skillfully made, if not more so, than any of this year’s best foreign language film nominees.

Beautiful City Review - Read Variety's Analysis Of The Movie ... Ronnie Scheib

New York Times (registration req'd)

FIREWORKS WEDNESDAY (Chaharshanbe-soori) B+ 91

Iran (104 mi) 2006

Something of a revelation, a surprising example of absurdist comedy from Iran, subversively poking fun at the institution of marriage. The setting is Tehran on the eve of the Persian (Iranian) New Year, where the crack of firecrackers peppers the background throughout the entire film. The premise finds Rouhi (Taraneh Alidoosti), a happy young girl who’s about to be married, flush with the beautiful smiles of young love, as she picks out her wedding dress and happily chats about her special day with friends and neighbors. But on her first day on the job as a cleaning lady in the city, she is introduced to a couple that is going through a marriage that resembles a nightmare from Hell, a non-stop rollercoaster ride of one disaster to the next, where their squabbles are so filled with suspicion, that the slightest hint of cover up or foul play sets them off for another round of insults and accusations. Hamid Farokhnezad is the chain-smoking workaholic husband who put his fist through a glass window pane in the middle of last night, leaving the scattered remains all over the floor. Hedye Tehrani is the neurotic wife who is being driven crazy by an all-consuming fear that her husband is deceiving her by having an affair with the woman next door (Pantea Bahram), and can be seen eavesdropping through the ventilation ducts, checking the cell phone numbers called, all but concluding that her marriage is over.

Rouhi is an innocent bystander witnessing this whirlwind of alleged marital deceit and infidelity, where neighbors point to that “crazy woman” as being high strung and hysterical. Believing that herself, as the lady of the house fires her on the spot the moment she sees her, claiming it was her husband that hired her and her services are no longer required. But as she’s about the leave, she’s asked to perform first one simple task, which amounts to spying on her neighbor, and then another. Next thing you know the husband has a few requests of his own, so Rouhi’s head is spinning in disbelief at what she’s got herself into. When the wife has had it and is about to take their child and leave, the couple finds a momentary reconciliation when Rouhi backs a plausible explanation given by the husband, which typifies the societal willingness to believe the man, probably the viewers as well, even when shown evidence that indicates otherwise.

The husband promises to drive Rouhi home, but only after a spectacular fireworks show in town that his son is dying to see, asking her to come along, which stretches on for hours into the night, giving Rouhi the feeling that she’s been taken hostage, as there’s no escape. There’s a beautiful resolution from a drive home in the night where the skies are filled with the explosions of fireworks, incendiary images seen through various angles out the car window, where bonfires are set in the streets every hundred yards or so, where the car weaves in and out of the burning flames, a metaphor for the heated passions of marriage, the threat of future battles to come, a cleansing spirit of the New Year, but also reminiscent of the spectacular fireworks imagery from Leos Carax 1991 film THE LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE (LES AMANTS DU PONT-NEUF). Winner of the Gold Hugo at the 2006 Chicago Film Fest.

Fireworks Wednesday Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out ... Geoff Andrew

The titular fireworks are literal – the story takes place as Iranians celebrate New Year  by spring-cleaning and lighting firecrackers – and metaphorical : when Rouhi, a young bride-to-be working for a cleaning agency,  turns up at the apartment of a couple about to go on holiday, she’s drawn into an explosive domestic conflict. What distinguishes the film is the way Farhadi keeps us guessing from as to what exactly is happening and why; repeatedly shifting our point of view, he forces us to question our assumptions about characters and their reliability. This compelling, corrosive account of male-female relationships in today’s Tehran is tempered by genuine compassion for the individuals concerned; wisely, Farhadi never serves judgement on them in their troubled pursuit of truth, love and happiness. Intelligent, illuminating and directed with unflashy expertise.  

Bright Lights Film Journal [Robert Keser]

The world is a complicated place in Asghar Farhadi's sophisticated and arrestingly played Fireworks Wednesday (Chahar Shanbe Souri), which could justifiably be called the find of the festival (this Iranian entry won the Gold Hugo for Best Film). Its heroine, a naïve young freelance housemaid, is plagued with chador trouble: first the black robe tangles inside the wheel of her fiancé's motorbike, sending them both merrily tumbling to the pavement. Then, when she wants to try on her ultra-frilly wedding gown, she pulls the virginal-white dress over her midnight-black chador, but soon loses the garment in the tumult of a day's work at an apartment block. Though rock certain that "my fiancé is totally in love with me," she has to steer her way through a network of relationship meltdowns and salutary examples of marital deceptions and betrayals, as the vivid flowing action turns increasingly complex what with spying and eavesdropping throughout an epic argument between a harried husband and his paranoid spouse. The pungent dialogue also involves an understanding divorcée, a little boy with nightmares about hell, and assorted big-city neighbors and relatives. Set during the frenzied New Year holiday, all the marital fireworks fittingly take place to the constant crack and pop of gunfire and firecrackers and explosions and flames and sizzling sparklers.

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

One of the things I love about Iranian cinema is that it seems to inspire itself. Even a decade after the first Iranian "New Wave" films began appearing in the United States in 1997, Iranian filmmakers have refused to "go Western" and use Hollywood methods in their films. Rather, Iranian filmmakers have continued to work with the original ideas and methods that made their cinema exciting in the first place. Here's a film directed by a relative newcomer, Asghar Farhadi, that feels just as fresh as films by his predecessors, yet it also turns slightly inward, getting a little closer to the more turbulent human emotions, and it comes out the other side with a vivid, three-dimensional portrait of three characters over the course of one day.

Taraneh Alidoosti stars as Rouhi, a young woman on the verge of marriage with a man she truly loves. She takes a day job as a maid, working for a couple all the way across town. A window has been broken, and the husband Morteza (Hamid Farokhnezhad) and wife Mojdeh (Hedye Tehrani) prepare to go away for the New Year's holiday. Rouhi slowly realizes that Mojdeh suspects her husband of having an affair. Throughout the day, Rouhi goes from being dismissed to sitting in on the family's arguments. At one point, her employer sends her to a beauty parlor, where she hears more gossip. She does her best to help with a few well-placed white lies, but the film has a few more twists.

Director Asghar Farhadi takes his time, allowing information to creep in at its own pace rather than trying to force it all upon us in the first ten minutes. But the most vivid element is his well-rounded characters: men and women truly relating to one another in both positive and negative lights. (Previous Iranian films have tended to be more about poetic concepts than concrete characters.) He also uses veteran actors, rather the preferred method of using amateurs. Hedye Tehrani, with the longest list of credits, is particularly striking; she's quite beautiful and runs the gamut from angry to heartbroken. In one scene, she sinks to an ultimate low: she steals Rouhi's chador as a disguise to spy on her husband, but her husband sinks even lower by hitting her. Farhadi expertly uses the space of the apartment building, as well as the passing time of the long day. When it gets dark, the "Fireworks Wednesday" celebration begins (basically New Year's Eve), which verges on a violent outburst. Morteza drives Rouhi home through what looks like a battlefield of fires, explosions and unruly crowds. When Rouhi returns to her husband, her fresh, unalloyed love may have been tainted by a bit of reality, or it may be stronger than ever.

The Film Sufi MKP

The House Next Door [Sheila O'Malley] also seen here: …and Wednesday too: Asghar Farhadi's Fireworks Wednesday

Filmjourney Doug Cummings

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

Variety Reviews - Fireworks Wednesday - Film Reviews - Fajr ... Deborah Young

Fireworks Wednesday Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out ... Ben Kenigsberg from Time Out Chicago

Chicago Tribune [Sid Smith]

ABOUT ELLY (Darbareye Elly) A- 94

Iran France (119 mi) 2009 About Elly Official Site

Asghar Farhadi is one of the few major Iranian directors that still makes films in Iran, a nation where literally dozens of filmmakers have been arrested and released under the Ahmadinejad regime, as Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof, along with filmmaker and actress Mahnaz Mohammadi, remain imprisoned for political differences, their passports revoked, banned from making future movies, while legendary Iranian New Wave directors Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf work in exile. It’s a significant paradox that Farhadi has been free to serve on juries for major international film festivals, and even win major prizes himself, including his highly acclaimed A Separation (Jodaeiye Nader az Simin) (2011), which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film (also nominated for Best Original Screenplay), becoming the highest grossing Iranian film ever made (listed as #40 foreign language movie of all-time, Foreign Language Movies at the Box Office - Box Office Mojo) and the first Iranian to win an Academy Award in any competitive category, while his compatriots languish in prison. We are reminded that in September 2010 during the making of A Separation (Jodaeiye Nader az Simin), which due to past film successes was made without any governmental support, Farhadi was banned from making the film by the Iranian Ministry of Culture, as during earlier acceptance speeches at award ceremonies, he expressed support for Mohsen Makhmalbaf, an exiled Iranian filmmaker living at the time in Afghanistan, and imprisoned political filmmaker Jafar Panahi, both of whom are linked to the Iranian Green Movement that questioned the validity of the 2009 Iranian Presidential election, demanding the removal of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from office. The ban was lifted a month later after Farhadi apologized for his remarks and claimed to be inaccurately perceived. While certainly considered one of the most important directors of the 90’s, the Iranian government has long refused to permit the screening of any Kiarostami film for well over a decade, causing him to remark, “The government has decided not to show any of my films for the past 10 years... I think they don’t understand my films and so prevent them being shown just in case there is a message they don’t want to get out. They tend to support films that are stylistically very different from mine – melodramas” ("Abbas Kiarostami – Not A Martyr", Stuart Jeffries from The Guardian, April 26, 2005), which begs the question, why is Farhadi still visibly working in Iran while others have disappeared or been silenced? The Past (Le Passé) (2013) was even partially financed by Iran. Perhaps it’s a matter of economics, as his films continue to make money, seemingly at odds with arthouse filmmakers who have other priorities. That being said, ABOUT ELLY is only belatedly having an international release six years after it premiered to considerable acclaim at the Berlin Festival in 2009 where Farhadi won a Silver Bear for Best Director, winning dozens of other awards as well, but it was mysteriously shelved afterwards, as an earlier distributor that acquired the film apparently went out of business. It’s curious that this film’s public introduction comes “after” his two earlier films drew such heavy international praise, where one of them surprisingly became the most successful film in Iranian film history.

When seen in this context, how ironic that the film with the least amount of accompanying accolades is arguably this director’s best film. This may be the closest Farhadi has come to emulating Jafar Panahi, where Western elements creep into an Iranian film, whose CRIMSON GOLD (2003) mixes the stylization of Iranian social realism with a European art film, actually paying tribute to Fellini’s NIGHTS OF CABIRIA (1957). In similar fashion, ABOUT ELLY borrows liberally from Antonioni’s L’AVVENTURA (1960), a film where Italian neo-realism comes face to face with contemporary modern society, a brooding interior film that expresses extreme emotional alienation through slow pacing, narrative ambiguity, and extraordinary visual stylization. In each, a large degree of the film’s success can be attributed to the brilliance of the character development, where multiple figures literally come to life onscreen, becoming familiar to us all by the end of the picture. While Antonioni creates spaces between characters through silences or long wordless sequences, Farhadi takes a more collective approach, creating a group dynamic that is reflective of a casual self-interest mindset when one member of a group of friends goes mysteriously missing during a weekend trip to the Caspian Sea. Intent on examining the fractured and hypocritical culture of the middle-class, Farhadi conceals their underlying motives throughout most of the film before allowing them to erupt in emotional fireworks during an explosive finale. An essay-like comment on contemporary times, ABOUT ELLY also accentuates the extreme degree of alienation from rapidly changing cultural norms, exposing utter indifference to the social injustice of women, whose powerlessness leaves them even further isolated from the mainstream, their lives dominated and completely controlled by the arrogance and paternalistic whims of selfishly deluded men, revealing just how completely out of touch they are with their wives and female counterparts who are all but invisible to them. The stark divide is a breathtaking surprise, a social critique beautifully revealed through unraveling layers of seemingly innocuous conversations that become dramatically intensified, ultimately a distinctively evolving passion play that reaches heights of hysteria, dramatically expressed with a great deal of clarity, though this only becomes evident by the end. Farhadi’s true strength is his writing, and while there are nearly a dozen featured characters, the naturalism of their performances really serves the overall outcome. Much like a stage play, though expressed with utter simplicity, the speed and rhythm of the conversational interplay between characters must reflect the overall mood changes of a very complicated social dynamic, where it’s essential they be viewed as believable and authentic. The success of this film is that all the movable parts contribute to the whole, where what’s lurking under the surface, seemingly benign and of little consequence, has a powerful impact that in the end provides a stunning societal exposé.

The film begins innocently enough, as a group of middle-class friends, old classmates from the university, set out for a relaxing weekend on the shores of the Caspian Sea, three married couples and their young children, including Sepideh, Golshifteh Farahani from My Sweet Pepper Land (2013), who organized the trip, who brings along Elly (Taraneh Alidoosti), her daughter’s kindergarten teacher, while also inviting a male friend Ahmad (Shahab Hosseini), who recently separated from his wife and is visiting from Germany. While the boisterous mood remains upbeat, with plenty of music and chatter, the overriding feeling is one of exuberance, expressing the joy of being young and happy, shot in a cinéma vérité style, where the audience is exposed to wave after wave of overlapping conversations. Not to be deterred, despite being full for the holidays, the group is offered a seaside villa with broken windows and no beds that hasn’t been fixed up yet, but the charm of the nearby sea is inviting. Playing charades, singing songs, or spontaneously breaking out into dance, it’s a celebratory atmosphere with plenty of food brought in for the occasion. While Elly is admittedly shy and reluctantly hesitant, there’s a bit of matchmaking going on behind the scenes, which is all in good fun, where they’re playfully introduced as young newlyweds to the rental owners to avoid any hint of scandal. Nonetheless, with things seemingly going well, Elly is admittedly uncomfortable and seeks to leave early, spoiling the fun for Sepideh who encourages her to stay. While the women are out buying food and the men are having a strenuous volleyball match on the beach, Elly is watching the kids, seen in a state of ecstasy while flying a kite, but then Sepideh’s daughter frantically cries out for help as one of the other children has gone out too far and is being carried out to sea, creating an panic-stricken moment of hysteria where all the adults run and jump into the water without a clue where he is. Fortunately, after a delirious search, the child is safely rescued, but then they notice Elly has disappeared, where no one knows what happened to her. Unsure whether she drowned or returned home on her own, suddenly the film takes on a more sinister mood, where they have to get their stories straight before calling the police, as they don’t wish to be implicated. Self-preservation overrides any sense of honor in the face of tragedy, as each begins looking out for themselves, pointing their fingers at others, trying any way they can to escape blame. It’s a sad and pathetic situation when they literally turn on one another, like sharks with blood in the water, with husbands blaming wives, claiming they should have been watching the kids, not some stranger whose last name they don’t even know, fearing how this might ruin their reputations and good social standing. A carefree vacation of best friends turns into a desperate moment of panic, fear, and outright suspicion. In no time it grows even more complicated, like a house of cards imploding on itself, where a protracted series of lies meant to spare someone emotional grief only escalates, reaching a level of emotional hysteria previously unseen in Iranian films. Relying heavily on suspense, Farhadi unspools this extraordinary drama in sophisticated fashion, first creating the unsettled, murky waters of suspicion and distrust, then critiquing the morality of patronizing, overzealous social conventions while also exploring the male/female dynamic in modern Iran. It’s a masterful effort that moves from the sunny comforts of Èric Rohmer territory to the dark psychological realms of Hitchcockian suspense.

Observations on film art : A masterpiece, and others not to ... David Bordwell

Less heralded Filmart screenings were much more satisfying. The best, and my favorite film I’ve seen so far this year, was About Elly. It is directed by Asghar Fahradi, and it won the Silver Bear at Berlin. I can’t say much about it without giving a lot away; like many Iranian films, it relies heavily on suspense. That suspense is at once situational (what has happened to this character?) and psychological (what are characters withholding from each other?). Starting somewhat in the key of Eric Rohmer, it moves toward something more anguished, even a little sinister in a Patricia Highsmith vein.

Gripping as sheer storytelling, the plot smoothly raises some unusual moral questions. It touches on masculine honor, on the way a thoughtless laugh can wound someone’s feelings, on the extent to which we try to take charge of others’ fates. I can’t recall another film that so deeply examines the risks of telling lies to spare someone grief. But no more talk: The less you know in advance, the better. About Elly deserves worldwide distribution pronto.

Jigsaw Lounge : Cluj film-festival report Neil Young

The first 20 minutes or so of this film are pure heaven. Sheer delight in existence laps from the screen into the audience as a group of old friends from university and their young children take a weekend break in an old house by the sea. They have brought with them a new acquaintance, Elly. She's been invited along by the lively Sepideh, who wants to introduce her to Ahmad, their friend back visiting from Germany, newly divorced. They pull out all the stops to be nice to Elly and encourage the two to get together, but she is strangely reluctant.  

Screaming out loud for fun in a road tunnel, flying a kite on the beach, and just the exhilaration of being fit and young and happy with one's life and one's friends – it's heady stuff and wonderfully shot in verité style. It feels like reality we are watching, while also looking like a perfectly choreographed dance. So when a disaster happens, things begin to unravel, and a secret about Elly known only to Sepideh begins to surface, it hits the audience that much harder.   

The latter part of the film in which Elly's secret is gradually brought to the surface is maybe a little too long in development, as trust between friends is betrayed. Elly's secret was, in the end, not such a big thing (though clearly something more profound in Iranian culture than it would be in European). The trouble resulting from it is brought about only by misunderstandings and misjudgement, but this in a subtle way makes the tragedy – of Elly of the relationships – more pitiful.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kyle Cubr

Western media typically presents Iran in reductive images of fundamentalist Islam, arid deserts, and threatening militarism. ABOUT ELLY quickly dispels these notions. A group of middle-class friends decide to spend a weekend with their families at a dilapidated seaside villa, and we see that their lives are not much different from our own. When the kindergarten teacher who is also invited along disappears suddenly, the film transitions from drama to psychological mystery. ABOUT ELLY raises many interesting questions both moral and sociological. How far will a person go with lies in order to protect the honor of another? What obligations do both men and women have to one another when the unthinkable occurs? The ramifications to these questions are devastating and life changing in the film. The interpersonal relationships presented are paramount to the film's emotional appeal and narrative. As the relationships degrade and the web of lies grows, the house lends itself as an apt metaphor for the characters themselves—dirty, broken, and hollow. Farhadi's use of muted, earthen colors only furthers the importance of everyone's baser urges and reactions. His mise en scene showcases short focal lengths to portray a sense of dishonesty when a character is out of focus or a sense of claustrophobia when true intentions are revealed. Water plays an important role in this film as well: the ever-crashing waves on the shores contribute to the relentless, foreboding feeling of dread that is omnipresent. Combined with the innocence of the children present, the bleak duality of man is fully realized. Dishonesty's ominous shadow casts largely as ulterior motives are actualized. ABOUT ELLY is one of the crown jewels of contemporary Iranian cinema. Its messages resonate powerfully long after the end credits roll.

“Ex Machina” and “About Elly” Reviews - The New Yorker Anthony Lane

Happiness, in the first half hour of “About Elly,” is passed around like the flu. A bunch of college friends get together for a weekend away, most of them with spouses and small children. The friends are no longer young, yet their spirits seem buoyantly high, and the movie is keen to join in—glancing at face after face, and eavesdropping on the overlapping chat. Characters dance without warning, answer a question with a line of song, and play charades. They have to shift from one rental villa to another, but the move doesn’t faze them, even though the new place has broken windows and no beds. Besides, it’s right on the beach. You can hear the crash of the surf.

At what point we realize that disaster awaits, and that these contented lives, like all lives, can be caught in a riptide, is hard to specify. Suffice to say that something happens, and that husbands, wives, and old pals who felt inseparable descend into a roiling recrimination. It’s difficult and upsetting to behold, but we shouldn’t be surprised; the director is Asghar Farhadi, who mapped out the pangs of divorce in “A Separation” (2011). “About Elly” was made two years before that, but only now is it being released, and, perhaps because the action is confined to Farhadi’s native Iran, it’s a better movie than “The Past” (2013), which was set, more tentatively, in Paris. Here, by the treacherous sea, Farhadi is at home, and, as is his custom, it is women who emerge from the crowd of characters and come, heavy-laden, to the fore.

One of them is Elly (Taraneh Alidoosti), the only single woman in the group, described as “warm and calm.” She is also inscrutable, and, when she recedes from the action, whereabouts unknown, the mystery darkens. She was invited by Sepideh (Golshifteh Farahani), who, despite barely knowing her, was hoping to marry her off to one of the guys. As the plot proceeds, we get an unnerving sense that the whole film, whose early stages bore such a modern and liberated ease, is gradually re-rooting itself in old, tenacious beliefs—in a world where honor and shame run deeper than the mere matter of whether a person is alive or dead. “About Elly” both clutches us tight and shuts us out, adding wave upon wave of secrets and lies. Charades were just the beginning.

About Elly - Roger Ebert Godfrey Cheshire

At the end of act one in Asghar Farhadi’s gripping “About Elly,” the title character disappears. Elly (Taraneh Alidousti), a young school teacher, has gone on a weekend vacation with a group of thirtysomething professional couples from Tehran. She’s supposed to be looking after three little kids who’re playing on a beach, and suddenly she’s not there. That this vanishing sets up a mystery that propels the rest of the film has led to understandable critical comparisons to Antonioni’s “L’Avventura.”

Yet the scene that immediately follows our last glimpse of Elly reminded me of quite a different movie: Spielberg’s “Jaws.” Most of the vacationing adults are playing volleyball behind the villa where they’re staying when two of the aforementioned kids appear from the beach and start screaming about the third. It takes the grownups several beats to catch on, but when they do, they rush around the house, realize that the third kid, a little boy, is nowhere to be seen, and frantically begin plunging into the Caspian Sea’s crashing waves.

I won’t reveal how the scene ends, just that I can’t help but think Spielberg would admire Farhadi’s electrifying direction of it. As the Iranian men dash into the ocean, and their alarmed wives emerge from the house, everything is in motion: the characters, the water, the camera. We seem to be looking in every direction at once, desperately: up and down the beach, back toward the villa, even under the sea as it pounds forward violently. Farhadi’s orchestration of all these elements is complex and viscerally kinetic; few viewers will experience it without holding their breath at some point.

So what do we make of an Iranian film whose conceptual parameters are broad enough to span “L’Avventura” and “Jaws”? Perhaps we should begin by venturing that Asghar Farhadi is a new and conspicuously audacious kind of Iranian auteur. When Iranian directors such as Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf began catching the world’s eye in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, it was for films that had obvious parallels to Euro-style cinematic modernism. Even when newer directors including Jafar Panahi and Majid Majidi gave a more commercial spin to this basic model from the late 90s onward, their work still spoke the language of the international art film.

Farhadi’s “A Separation” (2011) took a different tack, becoming the most successful Iranian film in history, as well as the first to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, thanks in part to innovations on two fronts. First, Farhadi’s Iranian cinematic models were not any of the aforementioned filmmakers but two cinematic masters who are less well known outside Iran: Dariush Mehrjiu (“Leila”), whose films often deal with Iran’s middle and upper classes; and Bahram Beyzaie (“The Travelers”), whose creative roots are in theater (as are Farhadi’s). Second, Farhadi admitted American influences including the likes of Elia Kazan and films such as “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

“About Elly” represents all the tendencies of Farhadi’s mature style as brilliantly as “A Separation,” yet it is not a successor to the latter film. It was made just before it and won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2009, but, due to complicated rights issues, was not released in the U.S. until now. Its belated appearance should be welcomed by cinephiles, as it offers solid proof of this writer-director’s distinctive gifts.

One of those is a way of dramatic structuring that’s like peeling an onion: the first layers we see seem familiar and self-evident, but the more layers we reach, the more complex the whole becomes. Here, the starting point is what seems like an entirely happy and carefree outing where three couples – many of whom have been friends since law school – motor out to the Caspian Sea for a holiday weekend. One wife has invited along pretty Elly, her daughter’s elementary school teacher, in obvious hopes of matching her with the excursion’s other singleton: Ahmad, a handsome friend who’s just returned from Germany after getting divorced.

For Americans who’ve seen few Iranian films, or only ones centered on the poor or dispossessed, the characters here will be striking. With their BMWs, faded t-shirts and constant joking around, they’re like cosmopolitan urbanites anywhere. Sure, we’re reminded of their Iranian-ness in their particular styles of music and dance and in the fact that the women all wear head-scarves throughout (something required by law of Iranian films) but even they are casual and stylish.

As in “A Separation,” there’s evidence of tension between this class of privileged professionals and the strata of poorer, more pious Iranians beneath them, but this is more peripheral than in the later film: e.g., the Tehranis pretend Elly and Ahmad are newlyweds in order not to offend the religious sensibilities of the rural folks who rent them the villa.

From that little white lie to other similar ones and the uncovering of various personal agendas: the peeling away of the onion skins reveals a continuing succession of hidden realities, and the ones that come after Elly’s disappearance are darker and cut deeper than those early on. But when I read that a writer in Sight & Sound has said all this constitutes “a critique of the lies and evasions that permeate Iranian society,” I can practically hear the groans coming from Farhadi, who has said in interviews that he doesn’t want to be one of those filmmakers who is expected “to explain Iran to the West.”

The filmmaker has, instead, clearly indicated that his goals in “About Elly” are far less sociopolitical than cinematic, stating that, “[D]irectors can no longer be content with force-feeding [audiences] a set of preconceived ideas. Rather than asserting a world vision, a film must open a space in which the public can involve themselves in a personal reflection, and evolve from consumers to independent thinkers.”

“Opening spaces” is precisely what Farhadi’s films do, both literally and figuratively. Indeed, the various ways great Iranian directors articulate visual space comprise one of the most fascinating and significant dimensions of Iranian cinema, from the contemplative and symbolic uses in some films to the poetic and documentary-like in others.

Farhadi’s way with space is more dynamic and consciously multi-layered, as well as technically virtuosic, enough so to recall “Jaws” or indeed “A Streetcar Named Desire.” To anyone going to see “About Elly,” I would say this: Notice the early scene where the four couples and three kids arrive at the villa with the boy whose family is renting it to them. See the way ace cinematographer Hossein Jafarian’s gliding hand-held camera takes in the disheveled rooms, glimpses the seascape through the windows and doors, and sets up an enormously complex and involving set of relationships between the characters by continually reframing them.

There are some great little moments here. Two quick shots of the host boy, for instance: in one, he glances out the front door at two kids on the beach, prefiguring the lost-child scene described above; in another, he gives a brief caustic look in reaction to one Tehran man’s silly dance – a statement of class differences as eloquent as any dissertation.

Farhadi is a masterful director of actors, and here he gets a range of precise, vivid performances from a cast that also includes Golshifteh Farahani, Peyman Moadi (“A Seperation”), Mani Haghighi and Shahab Hosseini. It might be argued that Farhadi doesn’t have any grand message, or “world vision” as he puts it. But to me, his way of revivifying cinema, and connecting its spaces to those of human hearts and minds, is vision aplenty.

The Film Sufi

The Sheila Variations [Sheila O'Malley]

Sight & Sound [Philip Kemp] April 24, 2014

“About Elly”: A masterful thriller - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir

kamera.co.uk - film review - About Elly (2012) - Chris Fennell

With About Elly, an Iranian Master Crafts Humane Suspense ... Alan Scherstuhl from The Village Voice

Slant Magazine [Chuck Bowen]

NathanVass.com [Nathan Vass]

Writing: Movies [Chris Knipp]

Movies that make you think [Jugu Abraham]

Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Spectrum Culture [Seth Katz]

Film Review of 'About Elly' (2009) | Cine International

Flavorwire » Tribeca Review: About Elly Brings the Iranian Middle ... Adam Eisenberg

Me On The Movie [Akbar Saputra]

[Review] About Elly - The Film Stage Will McCord

Day 1 - Fipresci Home Blame Game, by Marcos Kurtinaitis

Film School Rejects [Rob Hunter]

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Amber Wilkinson]

About Elly (Darbareye Elly) | Review | Screen Lee Marshall

Screener [Conall Cash]

Blu-ray.com [Brian Orndorf]

Independent Ethos [Hans Morgenstern]

YAM Magazine [Amy Wong]

Monsters and Critics [Ron Wilkinson]

Little White Lies [Phil Concannon]

INFLUX Magazine [Martin Hafer]

About Elly | Movie Trailer, News, Cast, Interviews | SBS Movies Craig Mathieson

Georgia Straight [Ken Eisner]

Observations on film art : A masterpiece, and others not to be ... Kristin Thompson

Asghar Farhadi's “About Elly” – Movie Review Christopher Bourne from Meniscus magazine

What About Elly? | Iranian.com Msabaye

Film-Forward.com [Nora Lee Mandel]

About Elly | White City Cinema Michael Glover Smith

Asghar Farhadi's 2009 'About Elly' Finally Nabs US Releas ...

About Elly - Movie info: cast, reviews, trailer on mubi.com Mubi

Variety Reviews - About Elly - Film Reviews - Berlin - Review by ... Alissa Simon

About Elly Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Dave Calhoun

About Elly – review | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw

About Elly' | The Japan Times Online Kaori Shoji

L.A. Biz [Annlee Ellingson]

Review: In 'About Elly,' a Middle Class Enjoying Itself Is ... Stephen Holden from The New York Times

DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Per-Olaf Strandberg]

A SEPARATION (Jodaeiye Nader az Simin) B+ 91

aka: Nader and Simin, A Separation

Iran (123 mi) 2011 Official site

My finding is that your problem is a small problem. —Judge (Mohammad Ebrahimian)

A thoughtful, slowly developing film that is largely sustained by scenes set in small, inhabited rooms where people actually talk to one another, where in this film what they choose to openly acknowledge makes all the difference in the world, as tiny omissions are the secret ingredient that add essential drama to this often subdued story. Not sure why all the unanimous praise for this film, as his earlier efforts are equally superb, but it’s a small, completely unpretentious film, largely one giant squabble that opens the film and continues unabated until the supposed justice is rendered in the lingering final shot, told in an extremely realistic style, mostly through piercingly honest, nonstop dialog written by the director, where there are few traces of stylistic flourish, simply an exposé of everyday life, easily comparable to KRAMER VS. KRAMER (1979), though without the histrionic element, as this doesn’t highlight post divorce aftereffects, it deals with all the pre-divorce ramifications. In fact, had people paid attention, as there are opportunities for reconciliation all throughout this story, the results would largely be different. What makes this film so essential is the degree to which choices matter, and not in larger-than-life, long drawn out fights to the finish which are obviously contentious, but in the kind of ordinary talk that takes place every day in people’s lives. In this film, it’s the small moments that matter. Never passing judgment, which is key, the director allows people and their various points of view to interact, where the accumulation of small details eventually escalates into something larger and potentially life threatening, where all reason seems to explode into thin air and self-preservation takes over. While there are small, honorable moments throughout, they are matched by equally despicable moments of lies and deceit where human behavior can become an endurance test for the last one standing. What’s especially unusual is the high quality of acting by all represented parties, where no one really plays the lead, as everyone becomes equally significant, also the relaxed and informal view of Iranian justice at work, as there are no lawyers used and each side is free to speak directly to the judge or one another, but will be removed by a guard if they threaten violence.

Opening in an unpretentious room where a judge calmly listens to an otherwise well-educated and loving mother and father offer their disagreements about their family’s future, where the wife Simin (Leila Hatami) wants to take their teenage daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi, yes, daughter of the director) out of the country in pursuit of a better life, while the husband Nader (Peyman Moadi, who wrote the screenplay to Saman Moghadam’s excellent 2006 film CAFÉ SETAREH), agrees to let her go, if she insists, but their daughter stays with him, as he must stay to look after his own father who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. Since there is no unanimity of decision, the judge orders them to go home and work it out between themselves. What’s clear from the outset is that is something neither one of them intends to do, as Simin anxiously packs while Nader tries to find a housekeeper to look after his father during the day while he’s at work, both avoiding one another while their daughter sits in the corner and trembles. Perhaps the initial sympathy lies with the husband, as he can’t simply abandon his father, and the daughter has chosen to live with him, so the mother is the odd one out when she leaves, though never ventures far and remains involved. The beleaguered Razieh (Sareh Bayat) is the housekeeper, obviously over-challenged on the first day, as she can’t keep up with full-time demands of an incapacitated elderly patient and look after her own small daughter at the same time, where she’s stymied by the idea of having to clean up after he soils himself, wondering if it’s a sin, a violation of Islamic law which forbids the touching of any man except your husband. Her harrowing experience is made all the more difficult due to her own pregnancy, where lifting this guy around all day is just not possible, agreeing to stay on for a few days until they can find somebody else.

After the initial introduction of the principal characters, the rest of the film is a continual shift of truth and perception, where events occur that require lawful intervention, where the courts attempt to determine the truth, but the testimony offered may not be the full truth, where there’s an interesting difference in class division pitting a modern, more affluent family against a more oppressed, fundamentally religious, and economically challenged family, where friendships may sway a neighbor’s or family member’s testimony, where the injured parties feel slighted and dismayed at some of the counter accusations, where both sides continually place blame on others, rarely taking responsibility themselves, where escalating charges may be brought and people imprisoned. In this nightmarish scenario of quickly shifting events, the audience’s sympathies are challenged due to each individual’s circumstances, where the idea of blood money is raised, an ancient idea of reaching an honorable accord between families through the payment of money, which supposedly wipes the slate clean, but individuals have reservations, often hiding something from loved ones. The court has interests in pursuing the truth, investigating and interrogating various parties, each family has their own needs and interests, and there’s a moral or spiritual truth that each individual must answer to. All of these interests collide in a stunning web of moral complexity where no one wants to admit they’re wrong, or see someone wrongfully charged, but people take desperate measures, where children are used as battering rams in the pursuit of justice, where all they want is for their parents to stay together, no matter the cost. It’s an intricate design how all these pieces of the puzzle, when moved in a different manner, will result in a differing outcome. But how can anyone predict the future or know what’s best? And even once justice is rendered, is this any kind of acceptable outcome? A microcosm of society at large, this flawed and deeply humane view of how people’s lives and interests intersect becomes a highly personalized view of the pursuit of justice.

Film Blather [Eugene Novikov]

Don’t have any grand thesis about this one, except to say that it’s an exquisitely acted, ambiguous, believable portrait of a society where everything — religion, tradition, justice, gender politics, medicine, absolutely everything — is royally and perhaps irreversibly fucked up. Which can get tiresome, but Farhadi doesn’t push the theme, instead letting it emerge from tremendous drama both macro (the story has a relentless logic that seems to close in from all sides; it reminded me somewhat of a more tragic version of Mamet’s The Winslow Boy) and micro (every scene has an intense, painful energy). I can’t really overpraise the acting; Shahab Hosseini (Farhadi’s About Elly, which I now urgently need to see), in particular, blows the roof off the place as an unemployed, profoundly demoralized husband who has nothing left to lose except his sense of honor and justice. What seems like should be a tough sit for over two hours instead jets by.

Bright Lights Film Journal [Robert Keser]

Sweeping this year's Berlin Film Festival awards for Best Film, Best Actor (the entire male cast) and Best Actress (the entire female cast), A Separation finally positions writer-director-editor Asghar Farhadi at the forefront of international cinema. This gripping and consummately acted drama follows a pending divorce that sets a well-off family against a poor one, with competing versions of truth and responsibility in modern society. Instead of ironing out any ambiguities, Farhadi keeps revealing further hidden ones, while finding ways to orchestrate routine problems so that they realistically tell us about ourselves, without undue dramatic exaggerations. As the audience is thrown from one ostensibly harmless evasion to another, matters build in wrackingly truthful encounters to unexpected court charges. One secret is that the characters are real individuals rather than a collection of assumptions, aided by the splendid performances, especially by first-time actor Peyman Moaadi as the decent family man and by the director's own daughter Sarina Farhadi. The ghost of Jean Renoir hovers over all five of Asghar Farhadi's films, with approval and understanding of the unvarnished truths of human behavior, all those moments when the inner soul can no longer be concealed. As in his previous films Fireworks Wednesday and About Elly, Farhadi excels at keeping multiple perspectives spinning in the air believably, right down to the exquisitely judged ending, while the inherent tension and live energy of the camera freed from its tripod imparts an exciting immediacy. Farhadi picked up the jury prize in Abu Dhabi, while also collecting Variety's award as the Middle East Filmmaker of the Year. Not bad for a production made for $300,000 and crammed into realistic small spaces where people actually live. But once the drama takes off, nothing else matters.

Mike D’Angelo, Pt. I seen here

[Overwhelming in part, I think, because there really is no cinematic equivalent of Ibsen and Chekhov and O'Neill, and yet Farhadi has somehow conjured up a film worthy of such lofty comparisons without betraying the medium in the slightest. Those expecting to see a searing drama about the travails of a married couple will be as stunned as I was when the titular separation (which occurs in scene one) sets off a chain of apparently trivial events that gradually accumulate power, significance and complexity until they encompass nearly every aspect of not just Iranian society specifically but -- hate to drag out this hackneyed phrase, but it can't be helped -- the human condition in general. Just listing those aspects would require more time and energy than I've got at present, so let me highlight the one that had me furtively weeping throughout: I know of no other film so insightful about the ways that parents unwittingly manipulate and even emotionally terrorize their kids, always with the best of intentions and no recognition of the possible consequences. (To say that the final scene wrecked me would be an understatement.) And the Berlin jury did right in bestowing both of their acting prizes on the entire ensemble, which is pitch-perfect down to the smallest roles -- crucial, since it's in the nature of Farhadi's moral reckoning that there's no such thing as a minor character. (Nonetheless, I'd single out the casually astonishing Peyman Moaadi as best in show.) Really, the only possible knock on A Separation I can even fathom is that it's unmistakably a writer's movie, relying on an understated, purely functional visual scheme -- clearly by design, as About Elly was considerably more striking in that regard. Why distract from the sublime?]

A Separation Mike D’Angelo, Pt. II

Previously addressed here, though I now repudiate my assessment of its visual scheme as "purely functional" -- Farhadi has an elegant, fluid sense of how to organize chaotic human behavior for maximum expressiveness, one that extends well beyond his rather obvious (but still effective) strategy of placing physical barriers (usually glass) between characters in nearly every shot. (I think it seemed less impressive to me than About Elly the first time simply because this one takes place in the city, mostly indoors; it's hard to beat the seaside for ready-made grandeur.) Second viewing turned it into a slow-motion disaster movie, as I was even more cruelly aware of various points at which the entire mess could have been happily or at least tentatively resolved, if only various people were capable of looking past the blinders of their wounded pride or crippling fear. "I find that your problem is a small one," rules the judge in the opening scene, unwittingly opening the floodgates for an escalating series of ostensibly larger problems to muddy and distract; only Termeh, the teenage daughter, seems capable of cutting through all the self-involved bullshit and seeing what's really at stake, though even she winds up compromised when forced to join the adult world prematurely. Simply one of the most heartbreaking movies I've ever seen.

Christian Science Monitor [Peter Rainer]

In these days of machine-tooled movies with machine-tooled characters it can’t be stated often enough that, when it comes to matters of the heart, simplest is often best. It's a lesson Hollywood has lost, but it crops up occasionally in movies from abroad and never more triumphantly than in “A Separation.” I think this Iranian movie by the writer-director Asghar Farhadi is the best film of the year.

The storyline is a prime example of how an artist can widen a small-scale domestic situation into an entire microcosm of society. Simin (Leila Hatami) wants to leave her husband Nader (Peyman Maadi), a middle-class bank employee, because he won’t go along with her desire to emigrate in search of better opportunities for their 11-year-old daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi, the director’s daughter). Nader feels obligated to stay with his aged father (Ali-Asghar-Shahbazi), who lives with them and has dementia, but we sense that there is also more to it. Even though he is comparatively secular and bourgeois by Iranian standards, he still partakes of the prevailing patriarchy. Prideful, he wants to call the shots.

With Simin living with her mother while Termeh stays behind with Nader, he hires Razieh (Sareh Bayat), a devout, chador-clad Muslim woman with a 4-year-old daughter, to look after his father. Razieh has not dared tell her hothead, out-of-work husband Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini) about her job; she also has not told Nader – or did she? – that she is pregnant. When Nader and Razieh scuffle, she accuses him of causing her subsequent miscarriage. The lawsuit that ensues, in which Nader is charged with murder and both sides grow increasingly vehement, plays out as a tragedy in which religion and the class system is as much on trial as the protagonists.

Farhadi keeps the story open-ended, so that we, as much as the characters, are unclear about what actually happened. We don’t see the details of the scuffle, nor are we privy to everything that was said between Nader and Razieh. Farhadi isn’t playing games with us. He wants us to recognize that, in the end, no one in this story is culpable; everyone is caught up in a situation spun dangerously out of control.

Razieh is perhaps the movie’s most conflicted character. When she is asked to bathe the naked, soiled old man, she fears the religious consequences and calls an Islamic hotline to seek permission. Razieh is devout and yet she may not be telling the truth about her confrontation with Nader in her testimony before the magistrate. She also holds back from her husband, who is so incensed at Nader that he begins harassing both him and Termeh.

Scared and bewildered, the girl, with her watchful, wary eyes, is pulled into the escalating warfare. Her bewilderment is as much about her father as it is about his accusers. He attempts to use her to his advantage in his defense, and her equivocations lead to consequences that can have no easy resolution – because life is like that.

Farhadi has said in an interview in the Los Angeles Times: “I have watched the film together with many audiences in different parts of the world and there have been a few people who see it as having a political point of view, others who see it as having a moral perspective, others who see it with a social aim, others who see it as reflecting ordinary day-to-day life. It can be any of these things.”

Or, more to the point, all of these things. “A Separation” describes the totality of this society. This is a world in which inevitably, inextricably, the religious and the secular, the social and the political are all one.

The irony here is that Farhadi has made a supremely evenhanded movie in a country notorious for clamping down on its filmmakers. The film is even the official Iranian entry for the foreign film Oscar.

Perhaps the Iranian authorities are cynically offering up “A Separation” as a propagandistic example of how liberal-minded they can be. And perhaps Farhadi, with all his talk about how the film can mean whatever you want it to mean, is playing his own diversionary game.

In the end, it's the film alone that matters. “A Separation” is not the work of a constrained artist. It’s a great movie in which the full range of human interaction seems to play itself out before our eyes. Grade: A (Rated PG-13 for mature thematic material.)

A Separation can't be divorced from Iranian politics Masoud Golsorhki from The Guardian, July 5, 2011

It does art a disservice to say it must work as a metaphor. Yet much Iranian cinema functions as such, for it has had to negotiate with censorship throughout its existence and develop a rich culture that relies on symbolism. Saying one thing and meaning another is an old tradition in the Persian arts. So when the deservedly celebrated Iranian film A Separation is reviewed by predominently western critics, the symbolism at work in this drama will barely be glimpsed.

In Asghar Farhadi's film a middle-class family is being thrown into tumult. Nadar and Simin are evidently still in love, but they argue bitterly about the state of their country and are torn between their loyalty to their daughter, Termah, and Nadar's ageing father, who is suffering from Alzheimer's and must stay in Iran. Simin is prepared to divorce Nadar. Anything to get Termah away from her home country.

The personal has never been so politicised as in contemporary Iran. State interference in the daily lives of Iranians is noted and commented on by many artists, but Farhadi's commentary is particularly authentic and incisive. Simin and Nadar represent the maternal feeling of flight and the paternal need to stay and fight for the cause: the Yin and Yang of the movement for reform. It's the same dilemma that has besieged and disabled generations of Iranians since the constitutional revolution almost 100 years ago: stay and suffocate or leave and be irrelevant.

The couple are young, professional and ambitious. What measure of meritocracy remains in Iran's version of crony capitalism favours them. They have the sophistication and the hustle you need to survive the rigours of Iranian society today. And their fictional struggle echoes the political struggle that we see in Iran today. Nadar's demand that Termah stand up for herself when she is short-changed by a garage worker, echoes the Green movement's question after the disputed presidential election: "Where is my change (vote)?"

On the other side of the class divide are Razieh (a woman Nadar hires to help care for his father) and her husband. They are the Iranian "wretched of the Earth" – the bottom of the heap. They provided the targets for the Shah's army and the cannon fodder that put a halt to Saddam's invasion. It's them that support Khamenei, and they are part of the bloc who voted for Ahmadinejad. Their life choices are limited to say the least. Their opportunity for flight is nil. In their world, democracy is a suspect, unaffordable luxury item.

For them the investment in the revolution is an investment against the worst excesses of unbridled capitalism. This is the couple that "has little to lose and [is] therefore able to gamble all", as the husband cries out in one scene. They are the couple whose agency for change is and will always be the critical weight in Iranian politics, whether in the ballot box or in the fight on the streets.

In the real world the Green movement is stalling because it brought too many from Farhadi's couple A and not enough from couple B on to its side. Not simply because there are way more Bs than As, but because couple A have stuff to fall back on (potential for emigration, material wealth to cash in moment of crisis) and couple B have only faith and an apparently endless ability for suffering.

Khamenei and Ahmadinejad both overestimate the reliability of this power base. This couple and this class are also capable of unravelling under pressure. The husband's propensity for violence is self-defeating. The religious devotion of the wife is a knife that will cut both ways. Each couple is made of two tendencies within each archetype and political tendency: fight or flee and religious devotion v class antagonism. But in the end fruits of ill-gotten gain are inedible for the devout.

The milestone around everyone's neck is Iran. That beloved country ennobled and imprisoned by history, exactly like Nadar's suffering father. The state power, represented by the judicial examiner who oversees Nadar and Simin's divorce case, presides over an opera of lies. He's unconcerned about the truth of the matter, but is hypersensitive when his credentials are called into question. The state apparatus is the fig leaf of efficiency, rationality and even, modernity in a system that is an ideological construct of the most absurd kind.

Farhadi is a great world film-maker and a giant of Iranian cinema. The age of esoteric films like those of Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf (whose beautiful, enigmatic films win festival prizes abroad but remain unwatched at home) is ending. The time of dialectic Iranian cinema is beginning. Farhadi talks to arthouse critics abroad and large audiences at home. This work's role in contributing to the wider public dialogue that is determining the future of Iran should not be underestimated.

Senses of Cinema [Joseph Burke] December 19, 2011

Cinema | 'A Separation': At Sea in the City of Ten Million Tears ... Dan Geist from PBS, October 5, 2011

Chicago Reader [J.R. Jones]

Wall Street Journal [Joe Morgenstern]

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Michael Nordine]

Movieline [Stephanie Zacharek]

Digital Fix [Anthony Nield]

The House Next Door [Elise Nakhnikian]

The A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

Critics At Large: A Separation: Marriage and Divorce – Iranian Style Shlomo Schwartzberg from Critics at Large

Film Freak Central Review [Angelo Muredda]

Filmcritic.com Chris Barsanti

A Separation Review | Pride Goeth Before The Fall - Pajiba Brian Prisco

Movies that make you think [Jugu Abraham]

Slant Magazine [Nick Schager]

Phil on Film [Philip Concannon]

How an Iranian film unites us all John Anderson from CNN, February 20, 2012

David Edelstein on 'A Separation' -- New York Magazine Movie ... David Edelstein

DVD Talk [Jason Bailey] also seen here: Fourth Row Center [Jason Bailey]

The House Next Door [Glenn Heath Jr.]

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

exclaim! [Robert Bell]

indieWIRE [Eric Kohn]

World Socialist Web Site [Richard Phillips]

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Berlinale dispatch

A Separation: When Worlds, and Actors, Collide Bilge Ebiri from They Live By Night

Film-Forward.com [Nora Lee Mandel]

A Separation: Make it your New Year's resolution ... - Slate Magazine Dana Stevens

It All Falls Apart Noy Thrupkaew from The American Prospect

Separation, A - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

Screen Daily [Lee Marshall]

Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

DCist [Ian Buckwalter]

Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]

Popdose [Robert Cashill]

Monsters and Critics [Ron Wilkinson]

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Jennie Kermode]

NPR [Bob Mondello]

Foreign Objects: A Separation (Iran) | Film School Rejects Rob Hunter

NYFF 2011: A Separation Mark Asch from The L magazine

The L Magazine [Henry Stewart]

A Separation — Inside Movies Since 1920 - BOXOFFICE Magazine Wade Major

FILM REVIEW: A Separation - Things That Go Pop! - CBC.ca Eli Glasner

The Film Pilgrim [Nicola Lampard]

Shot Through A Window [Jamie R]

Georgia Straight [Ken Eisner]

Little White Lies [Julian White]

SBS Film [Lynden Barber]

The Reel Bits [Richard Gray and Sarah Ward]

Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]

Technorati.com [Cirina Catania] reporting from The Berlin Festival

Paste Magazine :: Feature :: World Cinema: Iran :: A Rich Tim Porter from Paste magazine, October 1, 2004

Asghar Farhadi Interview with the director by Artifical Eye (2011)

The Financial Times [Nigel Andrews] Nigel Andrews interviews the director, June 24, 2011

Reluctantly, an Iranian director becomes a symbol - latimes.com Steven Zeitchik interviews the dirctor from The LA Times, October 3, 2011

Read our Q&A with writer-director Asghar Farhadi David Fear interview with the director from Time Out New York, December 19, 2011

ASGHAR FARHADI, “A SEPARATION” | The Filmmaker Magazine ... Damon Smith interview with the director, December 28, 2011

'A Separation' probes Iranians' conflicted love for their country, says director Roshanak Taghavi interview with the director from The Christian Science Monitor, January 20, 2012

The Hollywood Reporter [Deborah Young]

Variety.com [Alissa Simon]

Time Out London [Dave Calhoun]

Time Out New York [Joshua Rothkopf]

Iranian drama wins top prize at Berlin film festival Ben Child from The Guardian, February 21, 2011

The Guardian [Peter Bradshaw] June 30, 2011

A Separation – review Jason Solomons from The Observer, July 2, 2011

The Independent [Jonathan Romney]

The Independent [Anthony Quinn]

The Telegraph [Sukhdev Sandhu]

The Irish Times [Donald Clarke]

A Separation: A criminal investigation in which ... - Globe and Mail Rick Groen

Wesley Morris - Boston Globe Movie Reviews and Movie News ...

Islam, family overlap in 'Separation' - BostonHerald.com James Verniere

Review: A Separation - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

Camden New Journal [Dan Carrier]

A Separation (Jodaeiye Nader az Simin) - Washington Post Ann Hornaday

Iran's political struggle hits the box office - The Washington Post Thomas Erdbrink, The Washington Post, June 24, 2011

'A Separation' review: Till tragedy us do part Amy Biancolli from The SF Chronicle

Los Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]

Iran's 'A Separation' bringing people together - Los Angeles Times Mark Olsen, December 11, 2011

A Separation - Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Times

The Best Films of 2011 - Blogs - Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

The New York Times [A. O. Scott]

DVDBeaver - Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]

THE PAST (Le Passé) B 88

France Italy (113 mi) 2013

Premiering at Cannes, where Argentinean actress Bérénice Bejo, who also starred in the Academy Award winning The Artist (2011), was awarded the Best Actress of the festival, the film is notable in that it was shot in France, and in French, by an Iranian director who was forced to use translators throughout, which is somewhat ironic considering the writer/director’s strongest asset is his use of language. This film was one of the strongest contenders at Cannes, and comes off his highly acclaimed A Separation (Jodaeiye Nader az Simin) (2011), which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film (also nominated for Best Original Screenplay), becoming the highest grossing Iranian film ever made (Foreign Language Movies at the Box Office - Box Office Mojo), and the first Iranian to have won an Academy Award in any competitive category. Due to the universal acclaim for A Separation (Jodaeiye Nader az Simin), it also caused a backlash among some viewers who felt it was being overrated, touted as one of the greatest ever Iranian films, supplanting the works of Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf, when in fact it is a very good film, but hardly in the category of one of the best ever, where the highest rated Iranian film in the recent Sight & Sound 2012 Polls | BFI | BFI was Kiarostami’s CLOSE-UP (1989), the only film under the Top Hundred, listed at #37 on the Director’s Poll and #43 on the Critic Poll. The next closest interestingly enough is Farhadi’s A Separation (Jodaeiye Nader az Simin), which is listed at #132 on the Director’s Poll. Having seen his new film, one begins to see Farhadi as the maker of writer’s movies, where he uses narrative devices to withhold certain secrets until just the right dramatic moment, where there is almost a previously conceived mathematical style instead of a natural unraveling of events. In this manner, one can say his films feel a bit too perfect, as there’s a surgically precise, logical explanation provided throughout, but not the organic feel of life as it happens. The result is a somewhat idealized version of family life that contrasts heavily with social realism, for instance, as characters behave in a projected manner suitable for each required scene, and not really in a natural response to one another. Perhaps it’s a subtle difference, but because the film is infused with such an unpretentious style of realism, how it deals with issues of honesty and personal secrets are elevated, and this film is extremely manipulative in this manner.

One thing for sure is the eye popping beauty of Bérénice Bejo as Marie, a fiercely independent woman who runs circles around everyone else in the film with her intelligence, quick temper, and fiery personality, all traits that are nearly non-existent in Iranian films, where combative women may behave that way around children or other women, but remain firmly under the patriarchal boot of male oppression. But this is France, after all, where the flag stands for liberty, equality, and brotherhood, where anything’s possible. But one should recall that in September 2010 during the making of A Separation (Jodaeiye Nader az Simin), which due to past film successes was made without any governmental support, Farhadi was banned from making the film by the Iranian Ministry of Culture, as during earlier acceptance speeches at award ceremonies, he expressed support for Mohsen Makhmalbaf, an exiled Iranian filmmaker living in Afghanistan, and imprisoned political filmmaker Jafar Panahi, both of whom are linked to the Iranian Green Movement that questioned the validity of the 2009 Iranian Presidential election, demanding the removal of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from office. The ban was lifted a month later after Farhadi apologized for his remarks and claimed to be inaccurately perceived, where the film production received an additional $25,000 from the International Motion Picture Association. Like his earlier film, this one also preoccupies itself with divorce and family discord, where the story unfolds through intense personal dialogue and the parceling out of new revelations, where everyone withholds dark secrets that collectively casts aspersions on relevant moral issues that come to dominate the landscape. Both are filmed almost entirely in tiny, claustrophobic rooms that become restricting to the point of being suffocating, where polite characters who try to be civil with one another store their secrets like hidden minefields that will eventually explode, with accusations used like weapons hurled at one another where they can do the most damage. There’s always more going on under the surface, creating a volatile emotional atmosphere waiting for the next volcanic eruption to occur.

As the title indicates, the past has a way of wreaking havoc on the present if you’re not careful, and this film is literally a spiritual barrage of haunting moments from the past that have a way of continually altering the landscape, where one never arrives at the desired future, as they’re too busy putting out the fires still burning from the past. Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) is returning to France after a four-year absence living in Iran, where the reasons are not entirely clear at first, but Marie (Bejo) wants to finalize a divorce as she’s living with another man, Samir (Tahar Rahim), who runs a dry cleaning business. Marie has two children, a self-absorbed teenager Lucie (Pauline Burlet) and young Léa (Jeanne Jestin), while Samir has a brooding young son Fouad (Elyes Aguis) who is about Léa’s age, offering her a playmate. Rather than stay at a hotel, Ahmad arrives in the thick of an unraveling domestic drama where Lucie’s overt hostility towards Samir means she’s refusing to speak to her mother for choosing him, claiming she can’t live under the same roof, as the father figures in her life have never been very reliable. And while Marie is dead set on marrying Samir, convinced that he is finally the right guy in her life, she invites Ahmad directly into this continuing family melodrama, suddenly finding himself trapped in a whirlwind of conflict and regret, where in fairness all he can do is show sympathy to all sides. While Marie is continually flustered by the daily upheaval of relentless struggle, where she is associated with problems of her own making, Ahmad is seen as the noble peacemaker, even though he has abandoned his family, which set the stage for exactly what’s happening, as there are repercussions. Nonetheless, as staged by Farhadi, Ahmad never loses his temper, is always seen as evenhanded, where he plays a soft-spoken man of wisdom offering his insight, as if he’s the long lost man of reason. Like the struggles with Iranian paternalism, the tables are turned against Marie even in France, as Farhadi idealizes the husband she wants to divorce.

Unlike Arbor in Clio Barnard’s The Selfish Giant (2013), the violently hyperactive child from a dysfunctional family that can’t communicate with anyone in authority, trusting no one, where Barnard builds a realist structure around his inability to communicate, Farhadi’s disobedient children throwing temper tantrums open up instantly to the calm and measured approach from Ahmad, where they’re perfectly able to articulate the nature of their problems and concerns, so long as someone is willing to listen to them, and so long as that someone is Ahmad and not Marie. Don’t you think there’d be some build up of resentment and mistrust after their father has abandoned them for four years, yet here in Farhadi’s world they continually answer honestly and openly, showing no difficulty whatsoever with his long absence. If only divorce and parenting were that easy. But here Farhadi gives Ahmad a free and open road, as he’s free to leave at any time, no questions asked, where he’s the noble hero, while Marie is forced to stew in her own misery and endure all the insults and obstacles that Farhadi places in her way, as he’s the writer of the story. This feels blatantly unfair and slanted throughout, as Ahmad is extend

ed the benefit of sympathy, while Marie’s turbulence is having the world turn against her, in ways she could never anticipate, yet this is the world she initially chose with her own free will as the one she was convinced would make her happiest. She’s the one that has to face the cluster bombs of resentment and she’s the one without even a hint of help or support, as she’s forced to fight all her own battles alone. While it has the feeling of theatrical authenticity, filled with struggling characters that face moments of intense reality, Farhadi really stacks the deck against Marie and pulls the strings on this one. It’s a stinging rebuke of social realism, creating something of a downbeat world where all around her everything is sinking into an empty moral crevasse, where her world is perhaps best expressed by the horrified stares of trembling children peeking around the corners as the adults they feel safest with angrily self destruct before their eyes, bringing with them the uncontrollable, heavy-laden trauma of the past.

In Review Online [Kenji Fujishima]

For those who found Asghar Farhadi’s last film, A Separation, more of a screenwriter’s movie than a director’s movie, his new one, the Paris-set, French-language The Past, may well prove to be even more frustrating in that regard. In A Separation, there was that one cutaway from a grandfather crossing a busy street to an unrelated event that some found indicative of an overly schematic quality to Farhadi’s writing, with that glaring elision paying off in a big twist late in the film. If anything, The Past is even more predicated on deliberate omissions and payoffs, giving off a feeling of an overt tidiness of construction battling with its sense of realism.

And yet, for the most part, I’m inclined to give Farhadi more of a pass than I might be with other filmmakers of this sort, mostly because of the unsentimental yet soulful humanist vision his films express, one that, more often than not, transcends such relatively technical matters. “The terrible thing is, everybody has their reasons,” Jean Renoir famously uttered in his 1939 classic The Rules of the Game, and aside from its excellence as a piece of storytelling, the brilliance of A Separation lay in Farhadi’s sympathetically clear portrayal of the various characters’ motives, offering all sides and thus making the human drama that much more compelling and, in the end, heartbreaking.

Those virtues are very much in abundance in The Past, which functions as a kind of spiritual sequel to A Separation in its clear-eyed depiction of the fallout of a divorce in all its agonizing emotional complexities, in this case manifesting themselves in the form of inward and outward resentments; shifting loyalties; and buried secrets, both literal and psychological, that are dragged, kicking and screaming, out into the open. All of these are the elements of a classic domestic melodrama, and essentially that is what The Past is. Thanks to Farhadi’s sensitive attention to character nuances, however—helped in no small measure by the intensely committed performances from its cast—the film, more often than not, transcends its soapy trappings and becomes terrifically involving, at times even devastating.

Which is why the overtly schematic moments that don’t entirely come off in The Past stick out like sore thumbs; its last 20 minutes, especially, with the sudden reemergence of a seemingly minor character and her own skeletons, seem more contrived than anything in A Separation. Farhadi’s thematic reach may exceed his grasp this time around, but once again he finds a beautifully inconclusive note on which to end his film. These characters may not be able to completely forget their pasts, but what make us more human than the memories we hold onto, however painful?

Exclaim! [Robert Bell]

As was the case with his Oscar-winning domestic drama, A Separation, Asghar Farhadi's The Past preoccupies itself with divorce and familial discord, unfolding as an astutely realized dialogue piece with the revelation of secrets and subsequent moral ambiguity making a minor mystery out of it all. The setting has changed — Farhadi has thrust an Iranian protagonist into a French landscape — but the traditionalist social critique has not, reiterating the director's auteur trajectory of reactionary thinking as a political and artistic message.

This time, the story starts with Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) returning to France after several years, having abandoned wife Marie (Bérénice Bejo) and her two daughters, Léa (Jeanne Jestin) and Lucie (Pauline Burlet), for the familiarity of the Iranian social climate. Farhadi, setting up his template of exploring reactions before providing their reasons, doesn't reveal his purpose or their relationship for some time, gradually letting it slip that Marie is desperate for a divorce now that she has Samir (Tahar Rahim), a married man whose wife is in a coma, in her life.

Why his wife is in a coma and why Marie is so eager for a divorce are left on the periphery initially, just as Lucie's overt hostility and the irreverent aggression of Samir's son, Fouad (Elyes Aguis), remain a mystery, propelling the human drama while hinting at the promise of something bigger from the titular past looming beneath the surface.

In this capacity, The Past doesn't disappoint, having an endless series of revelations that ultimately lead to bigger questions and additional digging. Our entry point comes from the perspective of Ahmad — the outsider — as he tries to fit together the many pieces keeping this fragmented, makeshift family at odds.

At first, this structure has some appeal, being formulaic in its cyclic nature, but rewarding the audience with added tidbits of information every time a squabble is resolved by the divulgence of a secret. However, seeing as the film runs for over two hours and, like A Separation, has little action or music to break up the endless talking, the repetition becomes tedious, taking itself far too seriously to have the intended effect.

Essentially, as the many pieces start to fit together and the relationship foundations between Marie and Samir are discussed openly, everything starts to feel very much like the sort of melodrama Almodovar is known for, only without the sense of humour or flashy aesthetic appeal. Played straight, the intensity of the acting is clear, as are the political implications — Farhadi firmly believes that people should remain married, even if it makes them and everyone around them miserable — but there's a void where integrity should be.

The story, while not ludicrous unto itself, unfolds as such, milking emotional reactions from the perpetually crying and screaming cast without any breaks for levity. That everyone would conveniently spill their guts about their guilt and inner moral conflicts so specifically, sharing a bit of information and then waiting for a blow out before revealing another perspective changing point, isn't likely. Since Farhadi plays it all so straight, not allowing the sense of reality to shift enough for the audience to suspend belief or indulge in the versatility of the medium, it eventually becomes ludicrous and frustrating.

Still, as an intricately designed tale that allows its characters to reveal motivations through emotional range and reaction, The Past is exceptional, observing the details — what people wear, how they stand and what they're allergic to — with a keen, consistent eye. In particular, the handling of child actors in relation to their damaged, emotionally unavailable parental figures has an eerie realness that's particularly evident during scenes bordering on abuse.

In trying to depart from the subtlety of A Separation, making a slightly more sensationalized and universal story, Farhadi has sacrificed his strengths, sticking with the style he knows despite diving into a genre that requires more flexibility with the concept of reality versus storytelling.

While flawed, The Past is an interesting and occasionally compelling misstep that foreshadows greater things to come from a very talented, albeit terrifyingly solipsistic filmmaker.

Film Comment [Emma Myers] November/December 2013

Like his previous film, A Separation, Asghar Farhadi’s The Past begins with a deceptively straightforward divorce. Returning to Paris from Tehran to legally terminate his marriage after a four-year absence, Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) learns that his wife, Marie (Bérénice Bejo), has been living with another man, Samir (Tahar Rahim). Papers may be signed with minimal fuss but the past cannot be so easily buried, and once again the Iranian director creates an opportunity to showcase his striking ability to use multiple perspectives to tell an infinitely complex story.

Making little use of the suburban Parisian backdrop, Farhadi opts instead for a chamber drama that is as tightly packed as Marie’s rickety old house. In addition to two children from a previous relationship—petite Léa (Jeanne Jestin) and teenage Lucie (Pauline Burlet)—Samir’s young son Fouad (Elyes Aguis) also lives there, reluctantly. For better and worse, the presence of the even-tempered Ahmad sets the already precarious household off balance as he simultaneously mediates and instigates familial problems large and small.

Despite the obvious conflict of interest, Ahmad is able to assuage the furrow-browed Fouad when he throws his violent tantrums and to coax information from an increasingly moody Lucie. Vehemently disapproving of her mother’s latest relationship, Lucie explains that Samir’s wife is in a coma due to an attempted suicide—a suicide she believes to have been catalyzed by her mother’s affair with Samir. But as far as Marie is concerned, this tragic turn of events was merely the grim culmination of the woman’s long battle with depression, and she can furnish a witness to prove it: the illegal immigrant (Sabrina Ouazani), whom Samir employs at his dry cleaning business.

Much like A Separation, the story spirals, whodunit style, around the blame of the suicide—and around and around—propelled forward and nudged backward as details of past events are revealed and contradicted. As each character attempts to offload their sense of guilt onto someone else, Farhadi further elucidates the elusive nature of truth itself. Forcing his characters into moral gray zones, the director weakens the notion of objectivity, allowing the viewer’s allegiances to shift freely among the household’s denizens—even if as individuals, none of them is particularly sympathetic.

Dispensing with A Separation’s primarily handheld aesthetic, The Past demonstrates a thoroughgoing commitment to stillness. While its visual style mirrors the characters’ sometimes frustrating inability to move forward, the careful framing of bodies and faces—whether crammed into doorways or dim hallways—emphasizes private moments of interiority and noncommunication.  

Despite a number of melodramatic ingredients—comas, hidden pregnancies, torrential downpours, and secret missives, among others—the film remains subtly understated, thanks in large part to the impeccable cast. Shaking off the plucky flapper she played in The Artist, Bejo is particularly impressive as the hot-tempered Marie and is well paired here with the soft-spoken Mosaffa, who exudes a paternal calm. Rahim, as always, brings a quiet but subtly dangerous power to the screen as Samir, while Burlet demonstrates maturity beyond her young years as the emotionally fraught Lucie.

Though The Past may lack its predecessor’s gripping sense of urgency (the 130-minute running time does not go unnoticed), it is precisely its circuitous structure that imbues the film with a sense of unadorned reality. Never leaning on flashbacks or expository dialogue, Farhadi doesn’t pit the past against the present so much as he presents the two as inextricably—and rather bleakly—linked. If the past can only become clear in the present, what hope does that leave for the future?

Angeliki Coconi's Unsung Films [Morad Moazami]

Tough acts to follow: The Past and Stranger by the Lake - BFI Geoff Andrew at Cannes from Sight and Sound, May 18, 2013

Ferdy on Films [Roderick Heath]

In Review Online [Peter Labuza]

The Past / The Dissolve Scott Tobias

Filmleaf [Chris Knipp]

ErikLundegaard.com [Erik Lundegaard]

Seongyong's Private Place [Seongyong Cho]

The Past from Iran’s Asghar Farhadi: Something of a disappointment David Walsh from The World Socialist Web Site

Slant Magazine [Chuck Bowen]

The House Next Door [Jordan Cronk] also seen here: Cannes Film Festival 2013: The Past Review

David Jenkins a Cannes from Little White Lies

Eric Kohn at Cannes from indieWIRE

Indiewire [Kevin Jugernauth] The Playlist

First look: An Iranian director takes on Western morality Andrew O’Hehir at Cannes from Salon, May 18, 2013

Cannes Review: The Past an intimate but exacting ... - HitFix Guy Lodge

Paste [Tim Grierson]

theartsdesk.com [Demetrios Matheou]

Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]

IONCINEMA [Nicholas Bell]

The Past Lee Marshall at Cannes from Screendaily

The Past | Film Review | Spectrum Culture Jesse Cataldo

Movies [Tom von Logue Newth]

Movie Review - 'The Past' - From An Oscar Winner, A ... - NPR Bob Mondello from NPR

Film Racket [Chris Barsanti]

Review: Asghar Farhadi's THE PAST, An Intense ... - Twitch Brian Clark

EFilmCritic [Jay Seaver]

DVDTalk.com - theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]

DVDizzy.com - Blu-ray & DVD [Luke Bonanno]

Blu-rayDefinition.com [Brandon A. DuHamel]

Movie Metropolis [Douglas Norton] Blu-Ray

The Past (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Justin Remer

DVD Verdict (Blu-ray) [Michael Nazarewycz]

Blu-ray.com [Brian Orndorf]

Blu-ray.com [Martin Liebman]

Film Intuition: Blu-ray [Jen Johans]

Cannes 2013, Day Two: Iranian director Asghar Farhadi chases A Separation with another stunning drama Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club

Fabien Lemercier at Cannes from Cineuropa

Richard Corliss at Cannes from Time magazine

Jordan Hoffman at Cannes from Film.com

The Film Stage [Raffi Asdourian]

Film-Forward.com [Mahnaz Dar]

theartsdesk.com [Emma Simmonds]

SBS Film [Fiona Williams]

Film Pulse [Kevin Rakestraw]

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Graffiti With Punctuation [Andy Buckle]

PlumeNoire.com [Moland Fengkov]

Dork Shelf [Andrew Parker]

Cinemablographer [Pat Mullen]

Georgia Straight [Ken Eisner]

Movie Shark Deblore [Debbie Lynn Elias]

Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Richard Mowe]

Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner] Cannes winners

The Atlantic [Jon Frosch] 10 films from Cannes 2013

Daily | Cannes 2013 | Asghar Farhadi’s THE PAST David Hudson from Fandor, May 17, 2013

Owen Gleiberman at Cannes from Entertainment Weekly

The Past: Cannes Review Deborah Young at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, also seen here: The Hollywood Reporter [Deborah Young]

Justin Chang at Cannes from Variety

Nick Vivarelli from Variety

The Past Dave Calhoun at Cannes from Time Out London

A Touch of Sin, The Past, Stranger by the Lake Keith Uhlich at Cannes from Time Out New York, also seen here: Time Out New York [Keith Uhlich]

Cannes 2013: The Past – review | Film | guardian.co.uk Peter Bradshaw at Cannes from The Guardian, May 17, 2013, also seen here: The Guardian [Peter Bradshaw]

The Guardian [Mark Kermode]

The Guardian [Kara Abdolmaleki]

London Evening Standard [David Sexton]

Robbie Collin at Cannes from The Telegraph

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Examiner.com [Travis Hopson]

The Cleveland Movie Blog [Pamela Zoslov]

Austin Chronicle [Kimberley Jones]

Alibi.com [Devin D. O'Leary]

Los Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]

Los Angeles Daily News [Bob Strauss]

The Past Movie Review & Film Summary (2013) | Roger Ebert Godfrey Cheshire

Only Connect: Cannes Report, May 17 | Cannes | Roger Ebert Barbara Scharres at Cannes from The Ebert Blog

'The Past,' With Bérénice Bejo, Directed by Asghar Farhadi ... Manohla Dargis from The New York Times

DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]

THE SALESMAN (Forushande) C+ 78

Iran France (125) 2016 Official site [UK]

I don’t say he’s a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.

—Linda Loman from Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller, 1949

The failed American Dream — Iranian style, with writer/director Farhadi appropriating the Arthur Miller play Death of a Salesman into Iranian society, becoming a chronicle of the Iranian middle class, with negligible results. While there are those that continually overpraise Farhadi’s expertise at either writing, directing, or both, but don’t expect that here, as this is easily the least interesting and most blatantly obvious of his films, where the mere act of combining American and Iranian cultural attributes into a single work seems to win him plenty of acclaim, given kudos for trying, but films are not peace negotiations to be viewed at the United Nations, they are instead expressions of the human soul, where this effort is lackluster and often infuriating, reminiscent of Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve’s failed attempt to make a Hollywood film in Prisoners (2013), as both descend into a dark place of male dominance and overreaction. Winner of two awards at Cannes, the Best Screenplay for Farhadi and Best Actor prize for Shahab Hosseini, the film continues his legacy for making socially relevant films, FIREWORKS WEDNESDAY (2006), A Separation (Jodaeiye Nader az Simin) (2011), The Past (Le Passé) 2013), and 2015 Top Ten List #10 About Elly (Darbareye Elly), a film that was actually completed in 2009 but not released until six years later, all made within a context of other Iranian directors facing police arrest, the likes of which include Jafar Panahi, who remains under a 6-year house arrest, as well as a 20-year ban on making or directing any movies, writing screenplays, giving any form of interview with Iranian or foreign media, as well as leaving the country except for Hajj holy pilgrimages to Mecca, Mohammad Rasoulof, currently out on bail awaiting a one-year sentence, Mohsen Makhmalbaf and recently deceased Abbas Kiarostami on self-imposed exiles from Iran due to the repressive nature of the government, while artist-activist Atena Farghadani was sentenced to a 12-year prison sentence for posting a cartoon on her Facebook page, with legislators depicted with animal heads, in protest of legislation to restrict birth-control and make divorce more difficult in her country, and the nation’s most renowned artist, sculptor Parviz Tanavoli, had his passport revoked recently the day before he was scheduled to speak to a British Museum — all of which suggests Farhadi walks a fine line.

While many felt The Past (Le Passé) was a misstep, or among his weakest efforts, yet that is a film challenged by the brilliance of Bérénice Bejo, who is arguably his most fiercely independent character in any of his films, exhibiting a combative nature that is nearly non-existent in Iranian films, as they remain firmly under the patriarchal boot of male oppression. Unfortunately, Farhadi writes a one-sided, male-friendly script that undermines her character throughout, limiting the options available to her. To a large extent, that same problem reoccurs here in another male-dominated film featuring more submissive female characters. This is beginning to be a glaring omission in Farhadi’s works, where there is little evidence to suggest this is even a concern to him. By appropriating a Pulitzer Prize-winning American play that is considered a milestone in American theater, largely due to the profound depths of the tragedy, Farhadi is suggesting a failed patriarchal system is a common attribute of both American and Iranian societies, yet our histories and the way each nation treats women today is substantially different, as the 1949 play was written to represent a postwar society that was coming to terms with the promise of new ideals, where financial success was viewed as the measure of a successful life, at the expense of all other interests, like love, family, knowledge, community, and personal fulfillment, something many overlooked in the 1950’s, which was considered an era of prosperity in America, yet not necessarily one of happiness, as evidenced by Richard Yates’ excruciatingly personal 1961 novel Revolutionary Road (made into a 2008 film by Sam Mendes) depicting a shattered portrait of the idealized 50’s male-centric marriage, one that disintegrated into marital dysfunction as it denied aspirations for women. The 60’s ushered in new hopes and dreams, such as equal opportunities for women, calls for an end to racial discrimination, poverty, and the war in Vietnam, while advocating greater social justice in an attempt to create a more equal society. All this is part of the legacy of the play, as it represents a last gasp of the American Dream that continually needs to be resuscitated and fought for with each successive generation. The central question to be asked is whether Farhadi is the man to carry this humanist torch in Iran, which is an Islamic society, or other places around the world under their reach. The sad truth happens to be no, at least so far, based on the evidence provided, as the women in Farhadi’s films continue to be portrayed as if we’re still living in the 1950’s.

Like Roman Polanski’s most recent film Venus in Fur (La Vénus à la fourrure) (2013), this one also begins and ends on an empty stage, coming to life with a theatrical performance of Miller’s play, quickly blending real life into the lives of the fictional characters seen onstage, a device that frames the story, where we enter the stormy marriage of the two leads in the play, Willy Loman and his wife Linda, played by Emad (Shahab Hosseini) and Rana, Taraneh Alidoosti, who played Elly in 2015 Top Ten List #10 About Elly (Darbareye Elly). Opening in a state of flux, with dizzying handheld camera shots, we are introduced to the couple as people in their building are being warned the building is about to fall, where all residents must immediately evacuate, as it is believed to be an earthquake, though the damage is actually caused by a building construction bulldozer that is destabilizing the foundation. Nonetheless, it sets an ominous tone that the comfort of one’s home may be disrupted at any time by external events. Emad is a high school literature teacher who promises to bring his class to a performance of the play, which they’ve never heard of, but we see the cast and crew rehearse in the evenings, where already government censors are demanding cuts in the play. When one of the cast members discovers the lead couple are homeless and in need of an apartment, Babak (Babak Karimi) offers them an empty apartment in a building he owns in Tehran, allowing them to move in immediately. Strangely, the previous tenant has left behind personal belongings in a locked room, which initially irritates Rana, as they need the space, while Emad takes a calmer approach, allowing events to naturally unfold. A catastrophic event triggers the story, as Rana opens the door from the buzz of an intercom, believing it is her husband, while returning to the bathroom to shower, but is instead viciously attacked, happening entirely offscreen, where we see traces of bloody footprints, shattered glass in the bathroom, while Rana has been taken to the hospital, apparently helped by neighbors. The details of this event remain obscure, as Rana is herself confused by what happened and doesn’t want to talk about it, obviously emotionally shattered and traumatized by the experience, where she’s afraid to use the shower or be left alone in the building. Emad, on the other hand, is more outraged by his own increasing suspicions, not to mention the dishonor and family embarrassment, where he’s more concerned about exacting revenge than the fragile state of his wife, who attempts to return to the stage, but freezes in a scene where the character of Willy Loman is particularly brutal to her, one of the more affecting scenes in the film.

Strangely, Rana disappears from view, much as she did in 2015 Top Ten List #10 About Elly (Darbareye Elly), as she is removed from the cast, unfortunately spending most of her time all alone, where Emad seems to lose patience with having to deal with her continual fears and anxieties, perhaps viewing her as “damaged goods.” The entire thrust of the film shifts into Emad’s shadowy state of mind, as we observe the unraveling of a man, far from the sympathetic, fairly level-headed guy seen in the beginning, as he ventures into vigilante territory, losing sight of his own teachings and beliefs, where he drifts into a darkened interior state. Becoming obsessed with following clues of her attacker, never reporting any of this to the authorities, as Rana doesn’t wish to relive this experience over and over again, Emad goes on a personal one-man crusade, as he scours the neighborhoods in search of the culprit, knowing little about their personal identity, but they did leave traces behind. Mirroring this is an event that takes place in his classroom, where he falls asleep while screening a movie about a man who strangely turns into a cow, Dariush Mehrjui’s THE COW (1969), arguably the first film of the Iranian New Wave, where his students show no interest whatsoever in the film, but are fascinated by their sleeping teacher, taking pictures on their smartphones in a festive party atmosphere. When he awakes, somewhat embarrassed and humiliated, he angrily attempts to shift the blame to one of the students, appropriating his phone, inspecting the contents, offering a stern moral rebuke about his behavior that needs to be shared with his father, only to learn his father died years earlier. This wild goose chase of an impromptu classroom investigation turns disastrous, showing a mean streak in Emad, one who has lost faith in his own principles and is instead crudely striking out blindly at others in the dark. In much the same manner, he tracks down the home invader, becoming obsessed with exacting justice, even as his wife objects, claiming this is more than she can handle, as she no longer recognizes her husband anymore. While previous works also felt implausible and overly contrived, but unlike others, this film lacks an emotional connection to the blind irrationality of the husband, who goes off the deep end in his intent to punish the perpetrator. It’s a sad exhibition of an overdetermined finale, where Emad himself grows more morally repugnant, forgetting his connection to his wife, or anyone else, where his own personal humiliation is the key to revenge, as the man who caused it must suffer even more, driving the point into the ground, becoming a mad dog, where he literally becomes the “damaged goods.” While the final events are disturbing, they are all too predictable, like a robot on auto pilot, exerting no reflection, where the sins of the self-righteous allow their own pride to blind them to the consequences. Unlike Willy Loman, who made a living genuinely convincing people to buy things they didn’t really need, Emad assumes the role of a salesman, but by the end has nothing left to sell.

Film Comment: Jonathan Rosenbaum August 22, 2016

And Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman adeptly showcases his commercial skill in extracting moral nuances from his carefully calibrated storytelling, once again privileging a woman’s viewpoint without ever quite sharing it or exploring it.

Cinema Scope: Mark Peranson June 27, 2016

But the world didn’t end, as at least Dolan didn’t win. Debatably, Juste la fin du monde was actually the jury’s third favourite, as for some reason they opted to give two prizes to The Salesman, for Best Actor (should have stopped right there) and Screenplay—because of course nothing says Best Screenplay like a typically overwritten, dramatically implausible, and often infuriating Asghar Farhadi film.

Cinema Scope: Richard Porton September 02, 2016

“Attention must be paid”—the most famous line from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman might well sum up the narrative trajectory of Asghar Farhadi’s latest. The protagonists of The Salesman are both performers in an amateur production of Miller’s play that functions as a de facto framing story, and the late American playwright’s liberal humanism meshes well with Farhadi’s agenda. Both Farhadi and Miller are fond of schematic narratives and cannily deployed didacticism; the strengths and weaknesses of this sort of social realism are crucial to assessing the muddled aesthetic achievement of a film that doesn’t replicate the impact of A Separation (2011), the director’s finest achievement, but avoids the embarrassing histrionics of his previous (and weakest) film, The Past (2013).

A masterful chronicle of the Iranian middle class, The Salesman depicts a crisis in the stormy marriage of Emad (Shahab Hosseini) and Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti). After quickly escaping a collapsing building that is an omen of more turbulence to come, the misleadingly serene couple move into a new apartment that serves as the focal point for one of Farhadi’s trademark marital squabbles. When a mysterious intruder assaults Emad’s wife, this seemingly mild-mannered schoolteacher becomes something of a vigilante. As he finally confronts his wife’s attacker, his sadistic streak comes to the fore. It soon becomes clear that Emad, who is as contemptuous towards his victimized wife as he is towards her victimizer, is suffering from a bad case of male hubris. Even though this realization is driven home rather ploddingly, the expert performances of the two leads make the film worth seeing.

CIFF Review: Asghar Farhadi's 'The Salesman' – Vague Visages Michael Snydel

Iranian master Asghar Farhadi’s latest film, The Salesman, begins with the closest thing to an action set piece in the director’s entire filmography. Opening in a rumbling apartment, Emad (Shabab Hosseini) and Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti) scramble to pick up anything they can carry before leaving their home. Giant cracks are appearing in the walls, and it seems like they’re in the middle of national disaster. The camera frantically follows as other tenants are rushing out of their own homes, and Emad is called by a neighbor to help her young son, who’s still groggy in bed. As it turns out, the problem is far more organic — a bulldozer in the adjacent lot has damaged the integrity of the building — but the stage has been set for a Farhadi film that’s more rooted in the physical than the metaphysical.

Akin to much of the director’s work ranging from Fireworks Wednesday to A Separation, The Salesman falls into Farhadi’s concerns of the overlap between the personal and political and the private and intimate. His past films have shown how a single choice could precede a narrative of misconceptions, but while The Salesman is again built on a foundational misunderstanding, its plot machinations are determined by explicit action at every turn. At their most fluid, the narratives of past Farhadi films move like a series of falling dominoes, but The Salesman feels notable in that it’s motivated by direct actions — decisions that are both righteous and self-centered.

After abandoning their home at the beginning of the film, Emad and Rana begin looking for a new place to live, but they have no luck until a mutual friend, Babak (Babak Karimi), tells them that his renter was evicted, and that they are welcome to move in until they find a more permanent place. It’s not an ideal situation. Nearly all of the rooms of the house still have leftover belongings from the previous renter, including a child’s room, which is eerily filled with discarded toys. But Emad and Rana need somewhere to live. By day, Emad is teaching, and at night, Emad and Rana are both starring in a rendition of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.”

All of this is just set-up for the main ethical inquiry of The Salesman. The nature of the event is best left vague as it’s deeply wrapped up in Iranian cultural mores, wounded interpersonal relationships and twists of fate, but it’s enough to say that it involves Rana being traumatized while Emad is out. But unlike most Farhadi films, the subsequent narrative is less about sussing out the effects of that event on their relationship than specifically how Emad reacts to the crime and attempts to compensate for his failure to be there.

That’s not to say there aren’t immediate repercussions as well as Rana grows more anxious with each passing day. She doesn’t get enough time on screen, but Alidoosti’s performance is painfully believable in her subtle mounting fear towards her own apartment and the realization of her own fragility. A scene where she refuses to use the bathroom (where the event happened) feels deeply moving exactly because it doesn’t require a theatrical monologue about her grief.

There’s an unspoken tension as well between the film’s intention and its form here as well. Farhadi’s films have sometimes been tricky for me as a Western viewer, as it’s difficult to know what’s considered conventional social perception and what’s considered political commentary. But there’s an uneasiness in The Salesman being about the dangers of co-opting someone’s emotional distress while also placing its central perspective with Emad. That may in fact be the purpose, but there’s still a question about whether Rana’s perspective should be more prominent in the film, even as Emad’s perspective involves far more incident.

Instead, Rana’s rehabilitation period is kept to a short part of the running time while the camera focuses on Emad as he plays detective, and follows the clues around the event like a phone that was left in the apartment and a mysterious truck that’s parked nearby. For a long time, these scenes are just extensions of Farhadi’s patent skills of observation, but they’re worth discussing for their different visual language.

There’s still a uniform rigor to Farhadi and cinematographer Hossein Jafarian’s (About Elly, Fireworks Wednesday) compositions, but there’s also a more unsettled movement to the angles and shot choices. It never reaches the point of handheld camera work, but there’s a number of scenes where the camera moves in streaks, foreshadowing the thriller leanings of the last act. And when Farhadi folds together the internal narrative of the film and the on-stage conflict of Death of A Salesman, there’s a dreaminess and acknowledgement of artificiality that feels distinctly more visually playful.

This all adds up to a film that’s inordinately crowded for a director who prefers streamlined narratives — and that’s not even decoding any of the larger views of purity or patriarchal responsibility that come into play. But while the film suffers from its attempt to manage so many elements, it also feels profoundly different than the rest of the director’s work in the ways it feels so active rather than emergent. Similarly, the aspect of the play brings a different feel to the film.

Sometimes it’s as obvious as Emad and Rana playing out their domestic distress too realistically on stage. But by the end, the play and context of the film intertwine completely to show that even closure is something that’s always in our control.

The Film Sufi

Iran: A Private Agony Christopher de Bellaigue from The New York Review of Books, January 25, 2017

theplaylist.net [Jessica Kiang]

HeyUGuys [Jo-Ann Titmarsh]

Little White Lies: David Jenkins May 22, 2016

Filmmaker: Vadim Rizov September 07, 2016

Cannes 2016: 'The Salesman' + 'Elle' | PopMatters Elena Razlagova

Screen International [Allan Hunter]

The Film Stage [Giovanni Marchini Camia]

Revenge and Shame Dustin Chang from Floating World

Previewing the 52nd Chicago International Film Festival – Week One Daniel Nava from Chicago Cinema Circuit

The Salesman (2016) MIFF Movie Review: Farhadi, You've Done It ... Chloe Sesta Jacobs from Grafitti Without Punctuation

TIFF 2016: The Salesman Review | Dork Shelf Michael McNeely

The Village Voice: Bilge Ebiri May 23, 2016

The A.V. Club: Mike D'Angelo Cannes predictions, May 21, 2016

Cineuropa.org [Fabien Lemercier]

Observations on Film Art: Kristin Thompson October 15, 2016

The Upcoming [Jasmin Valjas]

Flickreel [Craig Skinner]

firstshowing.net [Alex Billington]

CineVue [John Bleasdale]

Flavorwire [Jason Bailey]

Daily | Cannes 2016 | Asghar Farhadi's THE SALESMAN | Keyframe ... David Hudson from Fandor

Interview: Asghar Farhadi on His New Film, The Salesman Dustin Chang interview from Floating World, January 25, 2017

Hollywood Reporter [Deborah Young]

Variety [Owen Gleiberman]

The Salesman, directed by Asghar Farhadi | Film review - Time Out Dave Calhoun

The Guardian [Peter Bradshaw]

Telegraph.co.uk [Tim Robey]

Cannes 2016: The Salesman, film review – Compelling reflections on ... David Sexton from The London Evening Standard

irishtimes.com [Donald Clarke]

Asghar Farhadi's new film goes deep into shame and vengeance in Iran Los Angeles Times

Review: In 'The Salesman,' Scenes From a Marriage in Tehran A.O. Scott from The New York Times

Farmanara, Bahman

THE SMELL OF CAMPHOR, THE SCENT OF JASMINE (Booye kafoor, atre yas) A 95

Iran (93 mi) 2000

Made by a director who hasn’t made a film for 25 years, who produced F FOR FAKE, and various other unfinished Orson Welles projects, but here he plays the lead in his own film about a lonely, aging film director who is down on his luck. He is forced to make Japanese TV documentaries on various Iranian death rituals, so he is in a morbid frame of mind leading to an inner title segment: a Bad Day. He visits the gravesite of his wife, but along the way, he picks up a strange female hitchhiker, who has just given birth to a dead child, leaving the child behind in his car. Later, he discovers the cemetery has buried someone else in his own, pre-paid plot next to his wife’s, which initiates fantasies of his own death and funeral, actually stepping into his own imagined funeral as an unseen ghost, petrified that no one is doing what they are supposed to do, or what they promised him they would do. Everything is spinning out of control, as he can’t even properly direct his own funeral proceedings. A gorgeous, personal, deeply moving meditation of death that extends beyond A TASTE OF CHERRY with this outrageous dark humor that expands the boundaries of life itself. The director gives us a terrific Akim Tamiroff-style, understated performance.

SMELL OF CAMPHOR, FRAGRANCE OF JASMINE Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion

Farnsworth, Matt

IOWA B- 81

USA (104 mi) 2005

They don’t just grow corn in Iowa anymore. Showing some of the menace of BADLANDS, much of which took place in the neighboring state of Nebraska, this is a completely watchable film that perhaps draws on too many film sources, and gets lost in a myriad of its own undoing at the end, but it opens quite promisingly, very much in the BLUE VELVET mode, as a thin veneer of courteousness and prayer covers up the true nature of a few isolated individuals, and before long, everything is exploding out of control. What works initially is that the film opens itself up to several directions, showing a variety of possibilities, but it’s shot on a digital camera, then blown up to ‘Scope, which stretches the look of the screen, which seems to dwell on facial close ups, cutting off the top and bottom of the frame, creating a distorted look. This works perfectly in the exaggerated sequences where all hell breaks loose, but not for most of the film where it just appears to be shot wrong.

Real life couple Matt Farnsworth and Diane Foster star as a young couple, Esper and Donna, and instead of a life getting up at 5 in the morning to work in a plastics factory making garbage bags, they develop an indulgence for snorting locally manufactured crystal meth, which is highly addictive and hallucinogenic, leaving one in a dangerous state of manic paranoia after awhile. But initially, they ride the wave of their secret thrill, having lots of sex and feeling euphorically in love. He is something of a roughneck with a weatherbeaten Rosanna Arquette as his depraved mother while she’s the spitting image of a perfectly coiffed blond Barbie doll, where the smile rarely leaves her face, the only child of John Savage, who dotes on her with a mix of delusion and obsession, still thinking of her as his little girl that he doesn’t want to lose. They hook up with another eccentric couple with a interest in staying high all the time, with the lure of manufacturing and selling their own product. The film gets interesting when Michael T. Weiss as a crooked parole officer decides to take matters into his own hands and devises his own evil plans, first arresting Esper for possession, then raping his girl after luring her to the station and chaining her to a wall. While this guy isn’t Dennis Hopper in BLUE VELVET, he provides a gripping performance as a cheap Elvis imitation with a sadistic streak.

But instead of developing these somewhat lurid relationships, Amanda Tepe as the dominatrix doper, calling herself a stripper from Des Moines, takes an interest in the Barbie girl, expressed through a bit of nudity shown through different color schemes, it veers into safer and more familiar territory. In a drug movie there must be ramifications, shown as a REQUIEM FOR A DREAM descent into their own private hell where they become victims of their own morbid hallucinogenic fantasies grown more violent by their ever increasing paranoia, and victims of their own selfish greed, which takes them into a criminal underworld that can only lead to disastrous results. While never dull, the ending sequences are filled with unnecessary graphic excess, where this first time director wants to throw everything at the viewer, leaving nothing to the imagination, but the violence becomes numbingly grim after awhile, typically overdone without a hint of subtlety. The original songs by Elia Cmiral have an initial sobering affect, but become lost in the haze after awhile.

Farrelly, Bobby and Peter

SHALLOW HAL

USA Germany (105 mi) 2001

Time Out review

The Farrelly brothers put a more sentimental spin on their trademark gross-out/arrested adolescent schtick, wresting the issue of fatness from the feminists and kicking it into the comedy arena with mixed results. The film is not as funny as their best, but fascinates in the discomforting way it foregrounds the brothers' normally buried, facile moral dialectic. Black brings a bravely unattractive self-satisfaction to the leading character, Hal, an uncool, semi-orphaned jerk, unaware of how his relationships with women have been distorted by the shocking deathbed testament of his clergyman father. Disappointing his equally sad sidekick Mauricio (Alexander), a sexual perfectionist, he is converted into the very paradigm of PC following an encounter with a TV guru (Robbins) who hypnotises him. Now seeing people only for their 'inner beauty', he falls for incredulous 300lb millionaire's daughter Rosemary - Paltrow alternately svelte (and breast-enhanced) and wading around in a body suit. Most of the gags cater magnificently to the lowest common denominator - the Farrellys impress with their sheer audacity, if nothing else. Few mainstream film-makers scratch so violently at the scabs on the modern psyche. The optimism they display in poking fun at the hypocrisy of modern social behaviour is both moving and funny.

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

The only misstep in the Farrelly Brothers' carefully calculated Shallow Hal is that it naively explains its titular chauvinist's superficiality as product of saucy father love—a young Hal watches Dad croak but not before the dirty Reverend advises the portly tyke to never settle for routine putang. With his abrasive bud Mauricio (Jason Alexander) in tow, an older Hal (Jack Black) does the Roxbury shtick at the local nightclub. For trolls, their standards are entirely too high, which makes the Farrelly Brothers' experiment all the more palpable. Self-help guru Tony Robbins hypnotizes Hal into seeing women for their inner beauty; the end result isn't so much a blind taste test for the male pig than it is a subversive jab at the fragile male ego.

Hal's view of women makes a 180-pound turn. He falls in love with Rosemary (Gwyneth Paltrow), an overweight humanitarian that splits her time between a hospital's pediatric unit and a local Peace Corps outpost. The Farrellys cleverly position the pair's courting ritual as an awkward game between a sweetening lothario and a seemingly anorexic beauty. Hal sees rail-thin, everyone else sees behemoth—chairs and benches hysterically crumble beneath Rosemary's weight yet Hal is none the wiser. The Farrellys fascinatingly complicate Hal's vision by situating Rosemary as the daughter of his company's owner. Mauricio thinks he's crazy and everyone else thinks he's an opportunistic creep trying to worm his way up the corporate ladder.

More so than There's Something About Mary, Shallow Hal is incredibly sweet and humbled by an overwhelming sadness. While everyone's "you're being shallow" jargon may be simpleminded to a fault, the Farrellys transcend their "equal-opportunity offenders" status by bravely indicting unusual suspects as instigators of female shame. More important than Rosemary's low self-esteem is her father's notion that she is incapable of being loved. As a result, family unwittingly perpetuates the rituals of self-doubt usually blamed on shows like Baywatch and rags like Cosmo. The Farrellys tackle issues of female beauty with incredible humanity without ever being ham-fisted.

The film's smooth comic pacing is complimented by Russell Carpenter's spare cinematography, which evokes silent film idiom. The grotesque female grins and cackles are as funny as the jokes that speak for themselves (Hal is wowed by Tony Robbins' size 17 shoes). Most interesting, though, is how the Farrelly Brothers cunningly challenge the spectator's gaze just as Hal's view-askew is nixed by the busybody Mauricio. Hal's hypo-induced vision is cautiously revealed as an all-encompassing one. The film, in effect, becomes as suspenseful as it is deftly funny—indeed, Shallow merits multiple viewings in order to tease out its sweet ambiguities. If characters in prior Farrelly films were grotesque for grotesque's sake, Shallow Hal's oddballs are odd with due cause. As oblivious participants in the Farrelly Brothers' straight-faced beauty game, Hal and the spectator discover that nothing can ever be taken at face value.

Senses of Cinema (Meghan Sutherland) review September 2004

Images (Gary Johnson) review

Slate [David Edelstein]

Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review

CultureCartel.com (David Abrams) review [4/5]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Joel Cunningham) dvd review

eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [4/5]

Vern's review

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

Reel.com [Tor Thorsen]

James Berardinelli's ReelViews

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

Movie Vault [Vadim Rizov]

Philadelphia City Paper (Cindy Fuchs) review

The Boston Phoenix review Jeffrey Gantz

Washington Post [Desson Howe]

Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]

The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review

STUCK ON YOU

USA (103 mi) 2003 ‘Scope

Time Out review

Oh brother! Those goofy Farrelly boys have made a comedy about conjoined twins. Joined at the hip, Walt (Kinnear) and Bob (Damon) are cooks at Quickee Burger in Martha's Vineyard - but Walt, a local am-dram star, has a yen to try his luck in Hollywood. Shy, nervous Bob reluctantly agrees to come along for the ride. In such films as There's Something About Mary and Shallow Hal the Farrellys have boldly plumbed taboos (bodily fluids, IQ scores, lard) to sometimes liberating comic effect, but underneath the gross-out gags you'll always find a heart of purest mush. Lately, that heart's been getting out of hand. This film may be the upbeat, humanist conjoined-twin movie we've all been waiting for, but it could sure use more laughs. To be fair, the film has its moments, but these remain isolated, any comic momentum immediately squandered by the Farrellys' standard cackhanded direction, their politically corrected designs on our sympathy, and by a script pulling in at least two directions at once. Kudos to Cher, totally convincing as a shameless egomaniac going by the name of 'Cher'. It's also moderately amusing (if utterly irrelevant) to see Meryl Streep whooping it up in a climactic musical production of Bonnie and Clyde.

Slant Magazine review Jeremiah Kipp

Bobby and Peter Farrelly's latest is a parable about conjoined twins, and though it lacks the laugh-a-minute comic mastery of their magnificent Kingpin or Shallow Hal's cutting insights about body image, Stuck On You is still a big-hearted charmer. They're joined at the hip and they share a liver, but they've led a relatively normal life nonetheless in Martha's Vineyards. But brother Walt (Greg Kinnear) aspires for stardom in Hollywood, and has the acting chops to do it—so how can shy brother Bob (Matt Damon) possibly hold him back? Stuck On You milks the inseparable twins gag for all it's worth with scenes involving one brother taking a shower, or having an intimate conversation, or acting in a one-man-show, or chasing booty while the other has to hang out on the "sidelines." Some of these gags misfire, but once the twins reach Hollywood the Farrellys find plenty of things to say about the movie biz and its obsession with perfect bodies. Playing herself, Cher is Walt n' Bob's diabolical co-star who frets over her career trajectory and the size of her bony ass, and Eva Mendes sends up her manufactured body and breast implants as a sweet natured dumb chippie who befriends the twins. But, truth be told, the central gag wears thin and the Farrelly Brothers' sweet sentimentality gets in the way of their storytelling. They deserve a humanitarian award for repeatedly casting actors as characters with developmental disabilities, but this time his actors aren't given a strong enough situation to play in—here they feel like well-intentioned window dressing. Still, the Farrellys convey sincerity and sympathy for their so-called "freaks of nature" and manage to get across a handful of wildly original sequences (the climactic musical number is a bona fide showstopper!). Even in a movie as lax and lightweight as Stuck On You, the Farrelly Brothers prove once again how good they are with actors: Meryl Streep, better here than she was in the ludicrous The Hours, proves once again that she's not only one of our great American actresses but one of our greatest comedians (now, if only casting directors would get the hint); Damon's performance is more emotionally honest than his over-emoting Mr. Ripley; and compare the depth and pain of Kinnear's turn to his surfacy performance in Auto Focus. Unfortunately, the Oscars don't give nods to virtuoso comic performances any more than they do David Cronenberg's body-horrored protagonists. It took years for Cronenberg to be taken seriously by the film community; the Farrellys are fast on his heels, even with a lesser work like Stuck On You.

24fps | Archive Gabe Klinger from 24fps, Winter 2004

Stuck On You Henry Sheenan

Stuck On You (the Farrelly Brothers, 2003) Eric Henderson from When Canses Were Classeled

Slate [David Edelstein]

Nitrate Online (Dan Lybarger) review

PopMatters (Bill Gibron) review

CultureCartel.com (Lee Chase IV) review [3/5]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Kevin Clemons) dvd review

eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [4/5]

The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

Reel.com DVD review [Pam Grady]

Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [1.5/4]

Guardian/Observer review

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [3.5/5]

San Francisco Examiner (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]

The New York Times (Elvis Mitchell) review

FEVER PITCH

USA Germany (103 mi) 2005 ‘Scope

Brilliant Observations on 1776 Films [Clayton Trapp]

It doesn't take long for major events to make it to the big screen; you know, wars, assassinations, the Red Sox actually winning! I'm not a big Sox fan, but as Mets fan I have a certain affinity with the loonies from shamrock city, as they at least know enough to despise the Yankees! I liked the Pedro/Manny Sox of '03, and I usually pick 'em in the AL East, but you can't really be a fan of more than one team if you're doing it right. But I digress. The film works in precious little baseball, early, but does establish its credentials by touching the obvious bases. Then it goes all baseball, all the while fairly successfully floating a kind of sappy romance between a happy and helpful (I believe that this is supposed to make him lovable, too) schoolteacher and a budding corporate exec. Fairytale? Well, at least don't say "who cares?" if you're gonna watch it because then there wouldn't be much point. The baseball/romance counterpoint is the key and heart of thing. If you don't like baseball, or hate the Sox, there's not much point. If sappy romances just aren't it for you…I think all Sox fans must enjoy such things, but others who don't should stay away. It's all a cute thing, as much in the concept as in the execution. Drew Barrymore is good but has certainly done better, and Jimmy Fallon is never quite enough for me to hope she gets stuck with him much. I guess his character has room to grow. I mean, yeah, the other guys in her life would obviously be worse, but such are not the elements of true love make. It's all very amiable though, nothing to rave about for or against. Not like Soxmania.

Time Out London review

The punning title may try to disguise it, but this is actually the American version of Nick Hornby’s ‘Fever Pitch’, with the football-mad central character now a devotee of the Boston Red Sox baseball team. They had to wait 86 years for their 2004 World Series victory, which would surely make even Arsenal fans wince. Charged with transferring Hornby’s deft North London specifics to New England, A-list Hollywood screenwriting team Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel (‘Splash’, ‘City Slickers’) have kept Sox maniac Jimmy Fallon as a high-school teacher, but changed his love interest to Drew Barrymore’s high-powered, workaholic business exec, who meets him during the team’s winter downtime, thinks he’s adorable, and is thus unprepared to be displaced in his affections by his summer season ticket for Fenway Park.  While the original explored the notion of sporting obsession as a refuge from life (for good and ill), here it’s as much a plot point as a passion, since his ‘n’ hers opposing values are played largely for conventional romantic comedy. It’s slickly done, pleasantly watchable, but despite Barrymore’s ever-charming earnestness, not quite a home run. Although there’s a characteristic note of class tension, and we get to see the funny side of food poisoning and concussion, the Farrellys seem on their best behaviour, as if slightly hamstrung by the challenge of working in the classic Hollywood mould. Then again, perhaps they really needed John Cusack, since ‘Saturday Night Live’ alumnus Fallon is far too lightweight a lead; moderately amusing as a man-child fan-boy dressed from the Red Sox gift-shop, but an unpersuasive potential partner for go-getting Drew.

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

The more elegant Bobby and Peter Farrelly's films have become, the less money they've managed to rake in at the box office. That's probably because the Farrellys are growing up faster than the audiences that tended to their first few features. "From the directors of There's Something About Mary" simply doesn't promise the same thing anymore: Audiences know this (see Stuck on You's poor box office performance for proof), and so does Fox, which is why the Farrelly name is so hard to find on advertisements for Fever Pitch. The studio is undoubtedly trying to protect its bottom line, but we should be thankful that the brothers are still being allowed to make films at all. Based on Nick Hornby's autobiographical book of the same name, Fever Pitch is somewhat mundane, at least by the Farrellys' typically high-concept (and high-strung) standards, but that's not to say the material is innocuous. The film doesn't actualize some cartoon world or scenario but a real one with real people with real problems—that everyone talks and cracks jokes just like you and me is not just the icing on the cake but part of the film's contemporary mantra. Fever Pitch tells the story of a Boston schoolteacher (Jimmy Fallon) who falls for a business consultant (Drew Barrymore) who's unaware that he lives, eats, and sleeps the Red Sox. What's most charming about the film is not the way Ben and Lindsey work to accommodate each other but the way their romance is shaped by their specific cultural moment. I have no vested interest in baseball, or any sport for that matter, but I must admit that I've never before seen a film that so succinctly conveys the allure of sports as a shared emotional experience for a community of people. For Ben's friends, baseball is part of their identities—they go to Red Sox games in much the same way families come together for Thanksgiving dinner (when Ben brings Lindsay to the games, the clan looks at her like a clueless date their brother has brought home for the holidays). The push-pull chaos of Ben and Lindsey's love affair is finely drawn, as is the disconnect between the film's rich and working class characters. If Ben's friends are so hard on Lindsey it's only because they fear she might patronize their sport from a position of privilege. In the end, Fever Pitch is not just some comedy about two people meeting each other halfway, but something much greater: a statement about the wheeling and dealing of a cultural tradition. It's interesting, then, that in making a film about people giving up too soon on love and selling-out their identities, the Farrellys have inadvertently called attention to the way audiences have given up on them. Fever Pitch may not be a homerun but it's as reliable as Monday Night Football.

Pajiba (Dustin Rowles) review

Village Voice (J. Hoberman) review

Slate [David Edelstein]

Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review

CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) review [4/5]

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review

Movie-Vault.com (Mel Valentin) review

The Onion A.V. Club review Scott Tobias

filmcritic.com (Norm Schrager) review [3.5/5]

DVD Times Daniel Stephens

Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]

eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [2/5]

Flipside Movie Emporium (Sean O'Connell) review [B+]

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

Washington Post (Desson Thomson) review

Washington Post (Ann Hornaday) review

The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough

Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [1/5]

San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]

Los Angeles Times (Carina Chocano) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]

The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review

MOVIE 43 C+ 77

USA (90 mi) 2013 Official site co-directors: Elizabeth Banks, Steven Brill, Steve Carr, Rusty Cundieff, James Duffy, Griffin Dunne, Patrik Forsberg, James Gunn, Bob Odenkirk, Brett Ratner, Jonathan van Tullekin

America has always had a love affair with stupid comedy, from an assortment of cartoons to The Three Stooges or Laurel & Hardy, slapstick and physical comedy that emerged out of turn of the century burlesque and vaudeville comedy acts, to the hapless shtick of the elaborately choreographed Jerry Lewis movies of the 50’s and 60’s, the star-studded vehicle of IT’S A MAD MAD MAD MAD WORLD (1963) where audiences could watch celebrities behave like idiots, to the more fast-paced, visual and sight gag oriented satirical comedy of AIRPLANE! (1980), to the moronic buddy movie of DUMB AND DUMBER (1994) written and directed by the Farrelly brothers, who have never been afraid to use toilet humor. The Farrelly brothers have their hand all over this project, which began a decade and a half ago with their producer Charlie Wessler, who came up with the idea of several short films using three pairs of directors, South Park’s Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Airplane’s David and Jerry Zucker, and Peter and Bob Farrelly. The studios, however, wouldn’t back the idea of R-rated movies targeted to teenagers, where Wessler pitched his idea to various studios, but no one understood what he was trying to do until four years ago when Peter Farrelly and producer John Penotti took their idea, along with the script for about 60 short skits to Relativity Films, which gave them the green light. Certainly one of the most amazing feats of the film is collecting so many big name actors, from Kate Winslet and Hugh Jackman to Halle Berry, Chloë Grace Moretz, Gerard Butler, Greg Kinnear, Johnny Knoxville, Seann William Scott, Liev Schreiber, Uma Thurman, Elizabeth Banks, Kristen Bell, Anna Farris, Chris Pratt, Richard Gere, Terrence Howard, Justin Long, Dennis Quaid, Common, Jason Sudeikis, Kieran Culkin, Emma Stone, Kate Bosworth, Josh Duhamel, and Naomi Watts. This year’s Academy Award host Seth MacFarlane plays a small part, while both Jackman and Watts are up for Academy Award nominations this year in other films. As Peter Farrelly appropriately notes about Jackman, “You're not gonna see him at our premiere, he's got things to do.” Most were attracted to the idea of working outside their comfort zone, also the idea they were only in small sketches, requiring short shooting schedules, also the idea they would not have to promote the film afterwards, something most actors hate to do.

So working for scale, actors mostly donated their time for this film, knowing only their own scenes, not any of the other scaled down 16 vignettes that comprise the film. In order to accommodate all the actors, some of whom were having second thoughts, like the South Park team, Colin Farrell, and George Clooney, who reportedly told them to “Fuck Off,” 'Movie 43': Peter Farrelly on His All-Star Cast, and Why Clooney Told Them to 'F**k Off', shooting took place only when actors were available, waiting an entire year for Richard Gere, offering the convenience of moving the entire production team closer to the actor, so the filming of the whole movie took several years. While this film has tanked at the box office in only the first week, receiving some of the worst reviews of the year, where Richard Roeper in The Chicago Sun-Times wrote There's awful and THEN there's 'Movie 43', while Peter Howell from The Toronto Star is calling it Movie 43 review: The worst film ever gets zero stars. David Edelstein from New York magazine asks, “Was someone holding Kate Winslet's children hostage?” Edelstein on Movie 43: Were These Actors Blackmailed to Appear in This Raunchy Fiasco?, while finally Peter Farrelly took to Twitter to defend his gross-out comedy dubbed the ‘Citizen Kane of awful’ Movie 43 director tells press to 'lighten up' after his film is savaged ..., suggesting “To the critics: Movie 43 is not the end of the world. It’s just a $6-million movie where we tried to do something different. Now back off,” adding: “To the critics: You always complain that Hollywood never gives you new stuff, and then when you get it, you flip out. Lighten up.” Hyperbole aside, the jokes range from stupid sight gags to crudely infantile and from extremely risqué to borderline offensive gross-out humor. Perhaps in its original conception, the movie was prefaced with the idea that several teenagers are fooling a younger kid into believing there’s a banned, black market movie out there somewhere on the Web called Movie 43, so their search to track it down leads to these randomly discovered skits, none having any relation to any others, most shot by different directors, though the Farrelly’s may have shot 3 or 4 sequences. The opening segment with Jackman and Winslet is a classic and sets the tone for lowbar comedy, as the bar doesn’t get much lower than this—still, it’s hilarious throughout and is easily one of the better sketches, as both are superb in handling the misdirection and perfect timing. According to Time Out Chicago critic Ben Kenigsberg, Movie 43 | Movie review - Film - Time Out Chicago, “Hugh Jackman garners far more sympathy than he does as Jean Valjean.”

Most of the rest are uneven and hit or miss, with some stronger than others, but many of these ideas are *out there,* pushing the boundaries of bad taste to the point of being off-the-charts unacceptable. Certainly there is foul humor, profane language, and there is crude violence, but there are also some excellent special effects, especially with Halle Berry and Stephen Merchant in a blind date that veers into the surreal. With this film along with Cloud Atlas (2012), Berry has become somewhat of a standout star in what are otherwise abysmal movie failures. One of the few actors willing to comment on the horrible trauma of making this movie, Merchant commented, “I had to spend two days looking at Halle Berry. It was a living hell.” Most of the sketches are framed with the idea of a desperately insane Dennis Quaid refusing to accept rejection while pitching his zany stories to a studio hack Greg Kinnear at gunpoint, apparently the only way to get his attention, a rather apt metaphor for the picture itself. While the film is deserving of its R-rating, at its absolute worst, it is fixated on infantile fart jokes and toilet humor, an overly gross genre that in itself has always captured a certain niche in American society, but it likely turns off many, many more. Gabe Toro of the Playlist The Playlist [Gabe Toro] has interestingly observed “characters begin to react in increasingly inexplicable ways as the narrative falls away, walking in and out of the short without rhyme or reason, until a fourth-wall breakdown in the narrative, a tactic that feels less like a comedy skit, and more like a distant, dopey relative of Dennis Hopper’s THE LAST MOVIE (1971).” Still, it’s impressive to see so many familiar faces, even if what they’re up to is foolishly inane, where the haphazard style never feels connected to an overall whole, but thankfully, each skit is short enough that even if it doesn’t work, new faces are sure to show up in the next segment offering a completely different direction. The film is not timid, nor does it hide its lowbrow intent, where it basically provides exactly what it sets out to accomplish, feeling somewhat experimental without a cohesive narrative, where it instead comes across like a live stand up comedy act, where often, the more outrageous you delve into the world of the bizarre, the better. The bold tone of experimentation and outrageousness of the film does work, such as the drop dead hilarious use of a sickly perverted, X-rated, animated cat, but overall, it’s so brazenly offensive that it’s often more stupid than funny, still, nowhere near the worst ever, and actually inspired in parts.

Blu-ray.com [Brian Orndorf] (excerpt)

I have no idea what the title “Movie 43” means, but I do know what the picture is about. A series of sketches and commercials barely tied together with a flimsy wraparound story, the collection is intended to show off the zanier side of normally sedate talent, pushing Oscar-winners and more dramatically inclined thespians into taboo-smashing blasts of comedy, also making room for a few actors specifically known for their crudeness a chance to join the party. Stacked high with famous faces while the material is primarily bottom-of-the-barrel muck unfit for feature-length investigation, “Movie 43” looks to enchant with a proud parade of shock value, asking ticket buyers to delight in ugliness in the name of good fun. If this is “Movie 43,” I’d hate to see the previous 42 attempts at pronounced stupidity the production didn’t want to release.

Movie 43 | Movie review - Film - Time Out Chicago Ben Kenigsberg

Neither the Kentucky-fried turkey its unceremonious release suggests nor the kind of daring film maudit that seems destined to be reassessed decades hence, Movie 43 is mostly just a whiff. Fourteen absurdly star-studded sketches are all too over- or underplayed to get the laughs they need. Cameos routinely substitute for gags; only the self-satisfaction is a constant. The movie sets the bar low with its framing story, in which a crazy man (Dennis Quaid) delivers his movie pitch to a feckless studio operative (Greg Kinnear). Most of the subsequent segments consist of scenes from his opus, although—with episodes jammed together as awkwardly as shattered Russian dolls—conceptual coherence is not Movie 43’s strongest suit. Ditto quality: For every chapter that elicits a smile (playing a man with scrotum hanging from his neck, Hugh Jackman garners far more sympathy than he does as Jean Valjean), there’s another that’s only theoretically funny (the Brett Ratner–directed bit in which Johnny Knoxville and Seann William Scott taunt Gerard Butler’s kidnapped leprechaun).

The actors are mostly troupers: Liev Schreiber and Naomi Watts seem to enjoy playing the world’s worst homeschooling parents, whose curriculum for their son includes incestuous makeouts. Anna Faris gamely insists that boyfriend Chris Pratt take the next step in their relationship—into coprophila. But the film throws cold water on its proceedings, with sketches that go on too long (“Superhero Speed Dating,” with Jason Sudeikis as a bro-ish Batman taunting Justin Long’s timid Robin) or that wimp out by moralizing (as when Chloë Grace Moretz has a menstrual accident in a house full of dudes). The main instance of inspired outrageousness, in one of the vignettes helmed by producer Peter Farrelly, comes near the end, as Halle Berry’s blind-date round of truth-or-dare with Stephen Merchant escalates into a nasty competition. The results might not please Buñuel, but they add up to one of the few installments worthy of the designation movie.

cinemixtape.com [J. Olson]

"Movie 43" Even Less Inspired Than Its Name

Cancel next year’s Razzies. The race is over. Just three weeks into 2013, “Movie 43” already has a vice-like death grip on any and all “worst of” lists or awards for this calendar year, let alone the decade. Much of its high profile cast is justifiably embarrassed by the project, as few have acknowledged the film in the press. And while that silence (and the January release date) speaks volumes, silence isn’t enough. I suspect we’ll eventually hear mea culpas from the likes of Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Richard Gere, Greg Kinnear, and others – the project, a loose assemblage of short films, was filmed haphazardly over the course of four years – but each apology will be far too late. If you’re going to go out of your way to be this offensive, you better damn well be funny. “Movie 43” almost never is, and at times it displays an almost alarming level of contempt for its audience. If there’s any justice in this world, some of its participants will lose work over their contributions here.

It’s impossible to write about “Movie 43” as a singular entity, so please allow me to break the film down, short by short, so you can skip the 90% of the film that’s entirely unredeemable. “The Pitch” loosely ties each short film together. Dennis Quaid plays a failed screenwriter pitching a bizarre, nonsensical film to a studio exec, Greg Kinnear, eventually forcing him, at gunpoint, to listen to the remainder of his proposal. It’s such an apt metaphor for the picture itself that I have to believe it was an unknowing one. As we weave in and out of different scenes, rapper Common and Seth McFarlane make humorless cameos as Quaid’s character is pushed to his breaking point.

The first of these scenes, “The Catch,” features Kate Winslet on a first date with Hugh Jackman, the latter playing a dreamy magazine cover model who’s fawned over by everyone but his date. You see, he removes his scarf and it’s revealed that – wait for it – he has testicles growing out of his neck. That’s the joke. For ten painful minutes. Of course, it’s taken to gross extremes – Jackman is a sloppy eater, har har – but the most offensive part about the sequence is that it’s been done at least twice before, both in “Men In Black II” and “South Park.”

“Homeschooled,” starring real-life couple Live Schreiber and Naomi Watts, is the funniest portion of the film. They play parents who are homeschooling their teenage son, but instead of sheltering him, they long to give him “the full high school experience.” Of course, this means they bully, humiliate, and abuse him, and their cruel hazing is amusing until it’s taken way too far. Still, this bit could have been a modest viral hit, and compared to the rest of “Movie 43,” it’s an absolute gem.

“The Proposition,” starring Anna Faris and Chris Pratt, is one overlong, patience-testing excrement joke. Don’t worry, there are plenty of burrito and laxative references! “Veronica,” with Kieran Culkin and Emma Stone, makes no impact at all. The two spend their five minutes of screen time sharing bizarre sexual secrets over the loudspeaker of a grocery store. “iBabe” stars Richard Gere as an executive who doesn’t understand why his company’s mp3 player – shaped like a lifesize naked woman – is crippling young men with its poor fan placement. Insert facepalm here. “Super Hero Speed Dating” features Justin Long, Jason Sudeikis, Kristen Bell, Uma Thurman and others in a “Saturday Night Live” reject sketch about superheroes – or weirdos in low-rent Halloween costumes – saying idiotic things to each other while, you guessed it, speed dating. It’s dead on arrival.

The picture’s most inspired bit, “Machine Kids,” is a faux-PSA about how we should be nicer to printers and vending machines and other frustrating contraptions because there are child laborers living inside them. Wait a few months and catch it in all its peculiar glory on YouTube. “Middleschool Date,” helmed by Elizabeth Banks, is an insipid, laugh-free short about how guys don’t know what to do when girls get their periods. “Happy Birthday,” directed by the critically-adored Brett Ratner and featuring Johnny Knoxville and Seann William Scott in a “Dukes Of Hazzard” reunion – no, we haven’t hit bottom yet – features Gerard Butler as a Leprechaun who confronts the duo over God knows what. Eventually, after multiple Lucky Charms jokes, Knoxville shoots the Leprechauns dead and we move on to the next short.

“Truth Or Dare,” starring Halle Berry and Stephen Merchant, is almost palatable. As two blind-daters, they get themselves into a game of truth or dare that escalates to absurd levels. It’s over-the-top, but it feels like a scene out of a much better film. Terrence Howard leads “Victory’s Glory,” a short about a 60s-era basketball team that doesn’t grasp their coach’s pre-game motivational speech – “They’re white. You’re black!” Rinse and repeat for ten minutes. The final short, written and directed by James Gunn, stars Josh Duhamel, Elizabeth Banks, and an animated cat. Duhamel’s character has a decidedly intimate relationship with his aggressively perverted pet cat, much to the chagrin of Banks. It’s gross and violent and patently unfunny, and it’s unfathomable to me that Marvel has given Gunn the reigns to one of their franchises, “Guardians Of The Galaxy.” His pre-“Movie 43” resume wasn’t particularly deserving of the job, but this short film is absolutely wince-inducing.

The Farrelly Brothers, who oversaw the entire project, will come out of “Movie 43” relatively unscathed. They’ve developed plenty of goodwill through “Dumb And Dumber” and “There’s Something About Mary.” This won’t end their careers. But for some of the cast and crew with more unsteady roles in Hollywood? This is the kind of project that won’t soon be erased from memory. It’s so strikingly, soul-crushingly awful that it could cost Hugh Jackman as Oscar (we’ve seen it happen to Eddie Murphy with “Norbit”) and gifted actors like Winslet and Gere might not be allowed near anything remotely comedic ever again. I want to be embarrassed for everyone involved in this one, but it’s so aggressively dreadful that no one deserves a pass. If there’s one silver lining here? Maybe, just maybe, this will put Brett Ratner out of work for good.

'Movie 43': Peter Farrelly on His All-Star Cast, and Why Clooney Told Them to 'F**k Off' Aly Semigran from Hollywood.com, January 25, 2013

Academy Award winner Kate Winslet. Academy Award winner Halle Berry. Academy Award nominee Hugh Jackman. Academy Award nominee Greg Kinnear. Academy Award nominee Naomi Watts. Academy Award host Seth MacFarlane. Definitely Nowhere Near The Academy Awards Johnny Knoxville and Snooki. All together on the big screen, at long last. Well, kind of.

The only thing more baffling than trying to make sense of what exactly Movie 43 is about (we'll get to that), is figuring out how in the hell they assembled half of Hollywood to be in a no-holds-barred raunch fest that was made for just around $6 million. Peter Farrelly (the other half of the Farrelly brothers behind comedy classics such as Kingpin, There's Something About Mary, and their masterpiece Dumb and Dumber, as well as its in-the-works sequel) is a producer and one of the dozen directors to contribute to the comedy, which opens in theaters today. Farrelly a simple explanation for all of this: fellow producer Charles Wessler, who has worked with the Brothers Farrelly on all their films.

"It's the brainchild of Charlie Wessler. He'd been talking about this for years, basically what he wanted to do was a Kentucky Fried Movie thing," Farrelly says. After receiving hundreds of submissions and scripts, Wessler settled on roughly forty and then set his sights on some of the biggest names in the business to star.

As Farrelly put it, "The world doesn't know Charlie Wessler, but Charlie Wessler knows everybody. He was a P.A. on Star Wars, he was the assistant to the director on Empire of the Sun. He's done a million things. So he would call actors like Richard Gere and say, 'Hey Richard, you wanna do this short film?' We have no money. You're working for one day for scale, but there's gonna be a lot of laughs."

If that didn't sell the sizzle enough to the all-star cast (which also includes the likes of hot commodities Emma Stone, Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks, and Jason Sudeikis, to name just a few), the various directors whole filmed segments of Movie 43 over the span of two years (with different writers and crews, as well), catering to when and where the actors could film. Production even waited a full year for Gere, whose conflicts kept him unavailable for this extended period of time.

While it seemed like a pretty convenient deal for the busy stars participating, there was one A-lister who wasn't swayed by the lure of working on the mysterious Movie 43. "[George] Clooney told us to f**k off," Farrelly admits.

As such, everyone but Clooney (and Colin Farrell, and South Park's Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who each reportedly dropped out of the project along the way) was on board. So what exactly did the stars who stayed put get themselves in to?

Movie 43, a series of short films connected by a wrap-around featuring "Dennis Quaid as a down-and-out producer" pitching crazy ideas, is a very different breed of the big ensemble movie. "My fear with that is people will think it's like a Valentine's Day-type movie," Farrelly says.

Anything but. Movie 43 features a series of gross-out jaw-dropper shorts, including the Farrelly-directed sequence about a woman on a blind date (Winslet) whose suitor (Jackman, pictured above) has it all: good looks, charm, money, and…a pair of testicles that hang from his chin that no one else but her seems to notice. While Farrelly doesn't expect the Oscar-nominated Les Mis star to be out stumping for Movie 43 ("You're not gonna see him at our premiere, he's got things to do"), he and Winslet were all-in for their shoot.

"Hugh and Kate were just sensational because it's such a ballsy little piece." (Get it?!) "They embraced it so much and they were so committed and so into it. There was no hesitation. In fact, it was the other way. Both of them were going off the page doing insane things. They got into the swing of it," Farrelly says of his time with the stars, calling the shoot "two hilariously fun days."

Even with A-listers going, ahem, balls-out, this is a moviegoing generation living in the age of Funny or Die. Nowadays, celebrities taking part in outrageous, image-shattering shorts is not only the norm, but free of charge. "Funny or Die is sensational, I wish I'd started it," Farrelly says, "but they do have restrictions to what you can say and do. We wanted to do something that you can't do on Funny or Die. We wanted to push it past the Funny or Die ceiling."

Farrelly, along with the various directors and producers, also realized that coming up with a Kentucky Fried Movie (which came out in 1977) or Groove Tube (from 1974, which Farrelly cites as another influence as an ensemble sketch comedy movie) for a new era provided another challenge with today's breed of moviegoers. "Things have changed since Kentucky Fried Movie in that attention spans have shortened. You can't just have one short after another. Because then you just have people looking at their watches, like 'All right, I don't know if I want to start another short,'" he says.

Alongside Wessler, fellow producer John Pennotti, and Relativity, Farrelly and co. narrowed down which of the shorts would make it into Movie 43. "There were a couple that didn't make the final cut, we knew that would happen. The reasons they didn't make it is they were either redundant, in that there had been a short that was similar, or it just felt like overkill or trying too hard in trying to shock people. We really tried to find the right rhythm so people wouldn't feel manipulated," Farrelly explains, adding, "It gives us stuff for the DVD."

Edelstein on Movie 43: Were These Actors Blackmailed to Appear in This Raunchy Fiasco? David Edelstein

'Movie 43': On the End of a Non-Era | PopMatters Jesse Hassenger

The Playlist [Gabe Toro]

ScreenDaily [Tim Grierson]

"Movie 43" Movie Review - Springfield Romantic Comedy ... Kris Duplisea, the only A grade one could find, from The Examiner

The A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]

Aisle Seat [Mike McGranaghan]

Cinema Blend [Mack Rawden]

DustinPutman.com [Dustin Putman]

Movie 43 | Film Review | Slant Magazine Tina Hassannia

Screen Rant [Kofi Outlaw]

Movie 43 :: Movies :: Reviews :: Paste Tyler Chase

Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]

Georgia Straight [Ken Eisner]

What's Brett Watching [Brett Blumenkopf]

The top 10 stupid comedies for smart people - Salon.com Matt Zoller Seitz from Salon, July 31, 2010

Entertainment Weekly [Clark Collis]

Movie 43: Film Review Frank Scheck from The Hollywood Reporter

STORY: How 'Movie 43' Producers Got So Many A-List Stars for the Raunchy Comedy Rebecca Ford from The Hollywood Reporter

Why 'Movie 43's' A-List Actors Are Staying Far Away - The ... Pamela McClintock from The Hollywood Reporter

TV Guide [Jason Buchanan]

Variety [Joe Leydon]

Movie 43 | review, synopsis, book tickets, showtimes ... - Time Out Tom Huddleston

Why did so many stars sign up? Catherine Shoard from The Guardian

Movie 43: a gross-out workout Charlie Lyne from The Guardian

Movie 43 director tells critics to 'lighten up' after film bombs at box ... Ben Child from The Guardian

Movie 43 – review Peter Bradshaw from the Guardian

'Movie 43': Shock and aw, geez - Movies - The Boston Globe Ty Burr

Review: Movie 43 - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Brett Michel

Movie 43: Movie Showtimes and Reviews on washingtonpost.com Michael O’Sullivan

St. Louis Post-Dispatch [Roger Moore]

Movie 43 - Film Calendar - The Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Movie 43' - The Monitor: Entertainment Brooke Corso

Review: 'Movie 43's' comedy shorts are short on comedy - latimes.com Sheri Linden

Movie 43 :: rogerebert.com - Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Times "Movie 43" is the "Citizen Kane" of awful

New York Times [Stephen Holden]

Movie 43 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fassbinder, Rainer Werner

Fassbinder had a unique relationship to his nation's history. He saw his oeuvre as a history of 20th-century Germany, culminating with BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ, with its exploration of the 1920’s Berlin underclass in such personal detail (in 15 and one-half hours), a film that succeeds with its authenticity, allowing us to understand what it was like to have been a German in an era leading to the rise of Hitler. One of the better writers in cinema who was not afraid to explore the ugly, seamier side of human nature, dramatically exploring dark ulterior motives in the personal search for love, usually with enormously tragic consequences, but without all the graphic violence that explodes off the screen today.  As fellow viewer Fred Tsao was known to utter after each performance: “The punishment continues.” Paraphrasing and even stealing some written material, much of the information gathered here is gleaned from the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) booklet that accompanied the showing of 37 films entitled Rainer Werner Fassbinder, published in 1977, edited by Laurence Kardish, in collaboration with Juliane Lorenz, Fassbinder’s film editor. [Curator’s essay: MoMA.org | Film & Media Exhibitions | 1997 | Fassbinder | essay]

I've always been fond of personal anecdotes from filmmaker's lives.  Before Fassbinder made his first film at the age of 20 in the spring of 1966, he failed the entrance exam to the German Film and Television Academy which opened in September 1966, where the initial class was comprised of 32 male and 3 female students.  Of interest to many, the actual test results were made public afterwards when Fassbinder's talent and fame surpassed anyone in that class.  An incredulous public had grown curious how he had been overlooked.  It is published in a book called "Rainer Werner Fassbinder," edited by Laurence Kardish as part of the MOMA film retrospective exhibition of most of his films in 1997.  

825 requested application forms, out of which 245 submitted timely applications.  There was an age requirement of 23 to 28, but exceptions were taken into consideration with accompanying recommendations, proof of employment, samples of their work, etc.  Fassbinder sent neither recommendations nor proof of employment.  Instead he wrote:  "I am an actor but I only just had the opportunity of taking final exams at the Theater Association.  The date is April 18, 1966.  As of now, I have not been employed in the theater."  As a sample of his artistic work, he submitted "Parallels: Notes and Text for a Film."

Fassbinder was one of 74 applicants invited to take the entrance exams in Berlin, from May 23rd to the 26th in 1966, which included both a written exam and an exercise with an 8mm camera, where they were given film with instructions to make a work of less than 8 minutes which would be comprehensible without sound.  Unfortunately, Fassbinder's submittal film has not survived, but his test questions and answers have.  The first part consisted of 26 questions, while the next part was an analysis of a sequence in a feature film.  The applicants were presented with a sequence from Bresson's A MAN ESCAPED (1956).  The title was not revealed.  The test required careful observation of detail, recognition of style, description of how it was achieved, and an overall evaluation.

Fassbinder's Analysis

The filmed sequence shows a prisoner's unsuccessful escape from a prison van, from the first attempt to the last consequence. The sequence consists of about forty setups, each one clear and simple, with no regard for superficial beauty.

Each setup makes sense only in connection with the preceding one and the one that succeeds it.

The necessary prerogatives for the escape - the fugitive, his hand, the door handle inside the car, a vehicle and a streetcar which force, or almost force, the prison van to stop - are clearly shown in their interrelationships. In relatively quick succession, we see first the fugitive, who stares ahead; then the road, where in a moment a vehicle may force the prison van to stop; then the fugitive's hand reaching for the door handle.

Up to the moment of the escape, the setups change fairly rapidly; later they markedly slow down, as the main character is forced from activity into passivity. He has had little time for his flight, the police have ample time for his punishment.

The immense power of the police and the actual importance of the escape is less evident in the last setups with the battered fugitive than during the flight, where the other two prisoners don't even turn their heads when the shots ring out behind them.

With great sensitivity, the director refrains from showing the brutality visited on the escapee, who is carried, covered up on a stretcher. It is left to the viewer to use his imagination to picture the beaten-up man, so that later, when he sees the distorted, bloody face, he is not totally overcome by horror but is able to reflect on his attitude to such treatment. 

The sequence has been thought through down to the smallest detail. It has been stripped of everything superfluous. The director sticks to the essentials. 

Fassbinder Bibliography (via UC Berkeley) "The Long Take: Still unnerving after all these years: Andy Medhurst on Fassbinder, films and sexuality." Sight and Sound (Feb, 1996)

"The writer reappraises the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. He discusses, from a 1990s perspective, the productive contentiousness of Fassbinder's sexual politics and also considers the formal strategies of Fassbinder's films. He maintains that both these elements share a bullish refusal to simplify for the sake of avoiding controversy. He asserts that Fassbinder took it for granted that to make films was to contribute politically, whether to the politics of the nation or the politics of sexuality. He argues that this assumption, which he finds typical of Fassbinder's generation, should shame the filmmakers of the 1990s. For them, he contends, stylishness has become an end in itself, whereas for Fassbinder style was the conveyor of ideological complexity."

Fassbinder, Rainer Werner World Cinema

By far the best known director of the New German Cinema, Fassbinder has also been called the most important filmmaker of the post-WWII generation. Exceptionally versatile and prolific, he directed over 40 films between 1969 and 1982; in addition, he wrote most of his scripts, produced and edited many of his films and wrote plays and songs, as well as acting on stage, in his own films and in the films of others. Although he worked in a variety of genres—the gangster film, comedy, science fiction, literary adaptations—most of his stories employed elements of Hollywood melodrama from the 1950s overlayed with social criticism and avant-garde techniques. Fassbinder's expressed desire was to make films that were both popular and critical successes, but assessment of the results has been decidedly mixed: his critics contend that he became so infatuated with the Hollywood forms he tried to appropriate that the political impact of his films is indistinguishable from conventional melodrama, while his admirers argue that he was a postmodernist filmmaker whose films satisfy audience expectations while simultaneously subverting them.

Feature: Beware of Rainer Werner Fassbinder Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine

Born on May 31, 1946 in the Bavarian town of Bad Wörishofen, the iconic Rainer Werner Fassbinder spent his short lifetime rejecting the bourgeois lifestyle he was born into. After boldly declaring his homosexuality at the age of 15, he devoted his life to a career in cinema. Fassbinder attended Rudolf Steiner Schools in Augsburg and Munich (the controversial teaching establishments Dario Argento would use as the setting for his famous cult shocker Suspiria), before dropping out in order to cultivate a singular radical aesthetic in the theater. After studying at the Fridl-Leonhard Studio in Munich, Fassbinder joined the Action Theater in 1967, where he met many of his closest friends and fiercest collaborators. Inspired by Brecht's innovative theories on distancing and alienation, Fassbinder (like his great muse Douglas Sirk) wanted to encourage his audience to transform its theatrical catharsis into social action outside the theater. Howard Hawks, John Huston, Jean-Luc Godard, and Raoul Walsh's influence is evident in his earlier works, while his post-Merchant of Four Seasons output bears the unmistakable humanism of Sirk's famous melodramas. The bad-boy of the German New Wave cast himself in various roles both behind and in front of the camera and the quantity of films he made in 14 years was unbelievable (well over 40, counting shorts and TV productions). That he was so consistently on top of his game is a testament to his position as one of cinema's greatest visionaries. Fassbinder was always running, and on June 10, 1982 his life was cut short when, at the age of 37, he died after taking an overdose of cocaine and sleeping pills.

Fassbinder, Rainer Werner Art and Culture

A motorcycle-jacketed, leather-bar Lothario by night, a critically lauded, freakishly prolific cinematic wunderkind by day, Rainer Werner Fassbinder lived in the eye of the hurricane and died of "an overdose on life." His fame rests on his expository manipulations, his classical narrative, and his use of long takes to capture the pace and surging emotions of ordinary life. Fassbinder’s conscious debt to American culture, reflected in his homages to Douglas Sirk and John Ford, was molded during his adolescence, when he would see upwards of 15 Hollywood films a week in defiance of austere, postwar German aesthetics.

Unapologetically homosexual, Fassbinder fled to Munich’s gay underworld as a 15-year-old, haunting bars and clubs as a male prostitute and shocking his family. Drawing on a vast catalogue of artistic influences, from Thomas Mann to Antonin Artaud’s anti-theater, he began to mold his own distinct worldview whose core is one of societal despair. In allegories that savagely indict bourgeois social conditions, Fassbinder employed Brechtian alienation effects to achieve his films’ impacts. His frenetic energy led him to produce 40 feature films in a meteoric 12-year career.

Manic and overworked, Fassbinder conducted a personal life that became the stuff of tabloid legend. A fixture in the New York leather scene, he had a string of suicidal lovers and was accused of violence by both his partners and his actors. Fassbinder fought his personal demons both onscreen and off, eventually succumbing to his own self-destructive tendencies. His films detail the acute longing for love and freedom in a world where society, and the individual, often defeat it. His main characters tend to be unsophisticated people who embody a romantic worldview and who come to be disabused, sometimes fatally, of their idealistic notions.

Fassbinder was not simply a opponent of the status quo, but, as an equal-opportunity critic of the right and the left, he held up a mirror to class expectations, revealing an ugly picture that caused him to be maligned as misogynist, traitorous, and even homophobic. His visually stylized canvases portrayed three distinct social universes: a drab, sleazy middle class; the hard, lacquered polish of the rich and famous; and the remote elegance of the past. All are connected by a sense of unrelenting coldness, an absence of all comfort and human charm. Homes become uninhabitable mausoleums, bitter dwellings for Fassbinder’s romantic pessimism. Glass abounds as a symbolic and Brechtian device that both bars and allows communication, its qualities of transparency and solidity suggesting Fassbinder’s claustrophobic sense of reality.

Despite his assembly-line productivity and his obsession with classic-cinema kitsch, Fassbinder created a body of work that remains uniquely personal and distinctive throughout. Always wildly controversial, Fassbinder could be called "perhaps the most gifted film director Germany has ever produced," and at the same time be reviled as "an example of the second-rate imitating the third-rate." A fixture in art houses, Fassbinder alchemized the best elements of his sources -- the theatrical techniques of Brecht and Artaud, the Hollywood studio look, classically controlled narrative, and a gay sensibility that transcended the ghetto -- into a staggering body of work that continues to illuminate and agitate audiences.

Germany in Autumn Gregory Avery from Nitrate Online (excerpt)

Between 1969 and the end of 1979, Fassbinder made thirty-four feature films. Robert Katz wrote that this averaged to about one film every 100 days. And these were no slapdash efforts, either, in which the director jumped from one project to the next, collecting his pay cheque. (For one thing, the projects were mostly state-financed, and not awash with money.) Fassbinder's film output included literary adaptations, period pieces, a foray into science-fiction, political dramas, personal stories depicting the dynamics of heterosexual and homosexual relationships, cinéma-vérité, documentaries, and hommages to gangster and the "women's picture" genres. Fassbinder also produced Kurt Raab's screenplay "Tenderness of the Wolves," based on the Düsseldorf child murders, which Raab also starred in and which gave Ulli Lommel, an actor for Fassbinder, his first chance to direct a film. While setting up production on his film,Chinese Roulette, Fassbinder arranged to share studio space and some of his cast for the film, plus cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, so that Lommel could make Adolf and Marlene, a purple fantasy in which Hitler entices the famous film star into coming back to Berlin. (When they are alone together, the Fuhrer says he'll do anything for her. "Okay," replies Dietrich, "bite the carpet.")

"Well, there are two factors here," Fassbinder explained in interview, after he had completed his fortieth film. "First, I don't work more than other people, more than someone stamping out cans in a factory, or the like. I just work all year long; I don't take as many vacations as the others in the [film] industry. That's one side of it. The other side is that I really have a drive that's hard to explain -- it makes me have to do things, and I'm actually only happy when I'm doing things...."

At such a pace, Fassbinder's personal and professional life inexorably overlapped. After the departure of Christoph Rosen, Fassbinder became smitten with Günther Kaufmann, whom he cast in the lead of Whity, a real oddball of a film which was made in Spain and can best be described as a sort-of weltschmerz spaghetti Western, with touches of Douglas Sirk's films. Kaufmann, whom Fassbinder affectionately referred to as "my Bavarian Negro," was the product of a liaison between a German woman and an African-American G.I. stationed overseas after World War II. Günther was born and raised entirely in Germany, and Fassbinder cast him as a G.I. in all three of his "postwar trilogy" films. He also gave Günther three Lamborghinis, all of which Günther crashed.

Irm Hermann, who was an actress in many of Fassbinder's films (most notably in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant), became smitten with Fassbinder and set her sights on marrying him, but she was beaten to the punch on that account -- by singer Ingrid Caven, who became Frau Fassbinder in 1970, after which she, Rainer, and Günther all went on the honeymoon trip together. The marriage, though, did not last; Fassbinder would later refer to the state of matrimony as "a sadomasochistic relationship." Irm would end up marrying someone else.

El Hedi ben Salem was a strong, silent, taciturn Berber whom Fassbinder discovered and cast in a role that would make him famous, as the foreign-born worker whose tender romance with an older German woman (played, superbly, by Brigitte Mira) would become pulled apart by outside forces in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Like Günther Kaufmann, Salem already had a wife and children when Fassbinder met him, though they were in Algeria. He would end up going completely out of his head and running amuck in Munich, wielding a long knife and swearing to track down Fassbinder. He was secreted out of the country after he successfully stabbed (not fatally) two people, but Salem came to a bad end, taking his own life in a jail cell. The news was withheld from Fassbinder for years, and when he found out, he dedicated Querelle to Salem.

The sturdy, supportive Armin Meier, who was born and raised in the country, would seem to be as fine a person as anyone would want to have in a serious relationship. But Armin wound up totally out of his depth with Fassbinder's friends and, sometimes, with Fassbinder himself. He refused, for instance, to let Armin attend the premiere of Germany in Autumn. At the Reichenbachstrasse apartment, Armin sat in the big chair in the kitchen, where Fassbinder would sit and receive visitors on the weekends, and consumed the contents of four bottles of sleeping tablets. Juliane Lorenz was the only one who maintained that Armin's death was in some way accidental.

Is He Fassbinder? Gregory Avery from Nitrate Online (excerpt)

Querelle was portentously advertised as being "Fassbinder's final statement." It was not, nor was it ever intended to be. Filming was all set to start in June on I Am the Happiness of This World: Harry Baer had found a club that could serve as the film's main location not far from Peer Raben's flat in Munich. Fassbinder was thinking of putting Rosel Zech into a remake of the Joan Crawford movie "Possessed." There were several literary adaptations, including one of Georges Bataille's 1957 novel, Le Bleu du Ciel (The Blue of Noon: Sample passage from the novel: "She was aroused by me, she aroused me, but all we managed to do was nauseate one another." If anybody could make a movie out of this material, it would be Fassbinder.) He had also been making notes for several years on doing a film either based on the life of, or on one of the works by, Unica Zürn, the ill-fated, early twentieth-century Swiss poet and Surrealist. And there was also still the possibility of filming the Pitigrilli novel.

Further installments in the "BRD" series of films about the German Federal Republic were planned. There was certainly material to be found there: the espionage scandal during Helmut Kohl's chancellorship, the comparative European and American responses to the outbreak of H.I.V., the demolition of the Berlin Wall and the high emotion over the reunification of Germany, the rise of the Russian Mafya, the resurrection of the Ufa studio complex, the Holocaust-denial movement and the openly neo-Nazi music of Rammstein, and the construction of a new Reichstag building which, designed by a British architect, would have a domed glass roof that would make it "open" to the public view.

Fassbinder was giving filmed interviews to Wolf Griem for a documentary Griem was making, The Wizard of Babylon, and had played the lead in Griem's cockeyed detective film, Kamikaze '89. (Fassbinder liked the leopard-spotted clothes that he wore in the film so much that he was allowed to keep them, and wore them the day Andy Warhol visited the set of Querelle. Warhol designed the poster for the premiere of "Querelle.")

Fassbinder had also been talking with Jane Fonda about her appearing in a film about Rosa Luxemburg, who formed the Spartacus League and attempted to start a worker's revolution in Germany during the early years of the twentieth century. The film star had answered one of Fassbinder's telephone calls to her by saying, "This is Jane Fonda herself." Thereafter, Fassbinder answered one of Dieter Schidor's calls to him by saying, in English, "This is Fassbinder himself."

Early on the morning on June 10, 1982, Juliane Lorenz let herself into the penthouse apartment Fassbinder was living, on Clemmenstrasse, carrying freshly-made rolls from an all-night bakery. She went into Fassbinder's room to wake him. The room had a mattress on the floor, a telephone with a private unlisted number separate from the residential line, and a T.V. and V.C.R. loaded with a tape of the movie 20,000 Years in Sing-Sing. Currency bills were scattered about the floor, not an uncommon sight in Fassbinder's residences. Juliane turned off the T.V., which was still on, and opened the curtains. Fassbinder was lying on the mattress, apparently asleep, until Juliane noticed that he was sleeping soundlessly. Fassbinder was an inveterate snorer.

After checking Fassbinder, she phoned for an ambulance and woke up Wolf Griem, who was sleeping in another part of the apartment. When the ambulance arrived, a paramedic walked into the apartment, into Fassbinder's room, and knelt by the mattress. After examining the filmmaker, he stated, "This man is dead." Adding, "Is he Fassbinder?"

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation run by Juliane Lorenz

Links | Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation Thomas Elsaesser writes an essay for the Fassbinder Foundation, listed under His Life

more Wolfram Schütte writes an essay for the Fassbinder Foundation listed under His Art

Film Reference profile by John O’Kane

Rainer Werner Fassbinder • Senses of Cinema Joe Ruffell from Senses of Cinema, May 20, 2002

Biography/Filmography from Books and Writers

All-Movie Guide bio from Lucia Bozzola

New German Cinema brief bio with interesting German and English links

glbtq >> arts >> Fassbinder, Rainer Werner biography from an encyclopedia of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer culture

filmportal.de another bio with links

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Journal an open site for Fassbinder related news

The History of Cinema. Rainer Werner Fassbinder : biography ... Piero Scaruffi with reviews in Italian, with some in English

Feature: Beware of Rainer Werner Fassbinder reviews of a dozen or so Fassbinder films from Slant magazine

Mondo Digital reviews of a dozen or so Fassbinder films

Rainer Werner Fassbinder - Strictly Film School an analysis of readings and films by Fassbinder from Acquarello

Fassbinder on TCM Shop a quick capsule review of a dozen Fassbinder films out on DVD

Jim's Reviews - The Films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder Introduction to Fassbinder, film and theater credits, analysis and resources from Jim’s Reviews

A Date With Fassbinder and Despair 3 part series on Fassbinder by Philip Lopate from Cultural Report (undated)

Features | German Dreams: Some Thoughts on Fassbinder's Berlin ... Andrew Tracy from Cinema Scope (Undated)

UC users only (it is available) Fassbinder: The Poetry of the Inarticulate, by Paul Thomas from Film Quarterly (Winter, 1976-1977)

Fassbinder Death Tied To Pills and Drug Use The New York Times, June 19, 1982

Movie Review - - FILM VIEW; HANNA SCHYGULLA ACHIEVES GREATNESS ... The New York Times, October 7, 1984

FILM: 'A MAN LIKE EVA' Vincent Canby film review of Eva Matte in the title role as Fassbinder, from The New York Times, June 26, 1985

TV VIEW; FASSBINDER'S MASTERWORK John J. O.Connor on upcoming cable TV broadcasts of Berlin Alexanderplatz, from The New York Times, September 8, 1985

Holy Whore: Remembering Rainer Werner Fassbinder website and essay by Jim Tushinski, August 21, 1987

Fassbinder's Brechtian aesthetics H-B. Moeller essay from Jump Cut, April 1990

Movie Review - Schatten Der Engel - Review/Film; Fassbinder And ... Janet Maslin’s review of Shadow of Angels, the 1976 film version of a “suicidally grim” Fassbinder play, from The New York Times, March 6, 1992

- The Spy and the Cabaret Singer Bodil Marie Thompsen, an essay comparing Fassbinder’s Lili Marlene to Sternberg’s Blue Angel, from P.O. V, 1996, also seen here: Functions of the Film Title - 1

MoMA | press | Releases | 1996 | First Complete Retrospective in ... MOMA Fassbinder retrospective Press release

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Cover Page for online 1997 exhibit from MOMA

MoMA.org | Film & Media Exhibitions | 1997 | Fassbinder | essay Curator’s essay by Laurence Kardish

Honoring Fassbinder The Director, Not the Man Vincent Canby on a Fassbinder Retrospective, from The New York Times, January 19, 1997

The Parasites of Fame Peter W. Jansen from Der Tagesspiegel, January 23, 1997, from the Fassbinder Foundation website

3 Who Worked With Fassbinder Recall a Demon And a Magician Mel Gussow from The New York Times, January 27, 1997

Slate [Luc Sante] A Holy Whore, which includes brief film clips, February 19, 1997

Fassbinder films capture a frantic life's desperation | Roger Ebert's ... April 27, 1997

Survey Of A Sadist [Films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder] | Jonathan ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, May 2, 1997

Fassbinder: Dark Angel Gary Morris from Bright Lights Film Journal, May 1998

Survey Of A Sadist | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum, May 1, 1997

Film Fast, Die Young Jerry Johnson from the Austin Chronicle, September 1998

The bitter tears of Fassbinder's women | Film | The Guardian Rosalind Hodgkiss from the Guardian, January 8, 1999

FILM REVIEW; Leopold & Franz & Anna & Vera in Berlin A.O. Scott’s review of Fassbinder’s unproduced play, Water Drops on Burning Rocks, from The New York Times, July 12, 2000

Nitrate Online (Gregory Avery) The Sad Days Are Over, a 4 part essay examining Fassbinder’s career, November 17, 2000

Fassbinder, and Fassbinder/Peer Raben - Screening the Past Roger Hillman from Screening the Past, March 1, 2001

The Conscious Collusion of the Stare: The Viewer ... - Senses of Cinema Julian Savage, September 18, 2001

FAST TIMES Is America Finally Ready for Fassbinder? by David Denby from The New Yorker, February 10, 2003

FASSBINDER 6-week Retrospective Film Series at Film Forum in New York City February 14 – March 26, 2003

The Merchant of Four Seasons • Senses of Cinema Girish Shambu, July 25, 2003

The Boston Phoenix [Peter Keough] 9-film Fassbinder Retrospective, October 3 – 9, 2003

UC users only (it is available) “Straight from the Heart: Re-Viewing the Films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder,” Cineaste (Fall 2004) by Tony Pipolo (pdf)

notcoming.com | Rainer Werner Fassbinder Matt Bailey from Not Coming to a Theater Near You, July 17, 2004

Fassbinder: The Life and Work of a Provocative Genius – Offscreen Louis Goyette from Offscreen, August 31, 2004, also seen here: Fassbinder: The Life and Work of a Provocative Genuis - Hors Champ

Martha, Interrupted: Fassbinder's 1974 Masterpiece on DVD - Bright ... Ian Johnston from Bright Lights Film Journal, August 31, 2004

Speaking For Others: Manifest and Latent Content in In a Year with ... Justin Vicari, October 20, 2005

Rainer Werner Fassbinder | TIME Europe Magazine | 60 Years of Heroes Richard Corliss from Time magazine, 2006

Effi Briest: Beyond Adultery • Senses of Cinema Christa Lang Fuller, November 5, 2006

The Film Journal Article (2006) Justin Vicari from the Film Journal, Winter 2006

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wunderkind Leo A. Lensing from The Times Literary Supplement, April 18, 2007, posted on the Fassbinder Foundation

Battle over RWF's legacy. GreenCine reports allegations that the remastered film has been “markedly brightened” for public palatability, May 31, 2007

No morals without style Ingrid Caven challenges the historical misrepresentations by Juliane Lorenz, the founder of the Fassbinder Foundation site as she speaks to Katja Nicodemus from Die Zeit, recently translated into English at Sign and Sight (May 31, 2007)

GreenCine Article (2007) June 10, 2007

Rediscovering ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL | Jonathan Rosenbaum June 26, 2007

Fassbinder from Film Comment, which posted a statement from 25 of Fassbinder’s colleagues demanding that Juliane Lorenz forfeit control of the Fassbinder Foundation. They cite her image contrast changes on the Berlin Alexanderplatz DVD as "an act of insurmountable presumption and borders on philistinism." (September/October 2007)

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center: Exhibitions: Fassbinder: Berlin ... Fassbinder: Berlin Alexanderplatz, October 21, 2007 – January 21, 2008

The New German Cinema Dennis Toth from Film Notes from the CMA, August 14, 2008

Fassbinder: Life on the Edge Dennis Toth from Film Notes from the CMA, August 18, 2008

*European Film Star Postcards*: Barbara Valentin April 16, 2009

WORLD ON A WIRE: NEW MASTER - Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation August 4, 2009

When Herr R[ainer] Ran Amok - Parallax View David Coursen essay from Parallax View, August 23, 2009

The Fassbinder Page Tom von Logue Newth from FilmFracture, September 28, 2009

MoMA to Show Fassbinder's Visionary Science-Fiction Thriller | Art ... March 19, 2010

Film - A Bold Vision, Still Ahead of Its Time Dennis Lim from The New York Times, April 1, 2010

Fassbinder's Visionary Science-Fiction Thriller to Have a Weeklong ... Art Daily, April 5, 2010

CINEMA IS WHERE LIFE IS Fassbinder and Herzog video clips from Wim Wenders’ 1982 documentary on the future of cinema, Chambre 666, less than a month before Fassbinder’s death, two of sixteen different directors who were filmed in Room 666 of the Hotel Martinez answering the principal question: “Is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?” from Filmmaker magazine, April 10, 2010 (4:42 mi)

R.W. Fassbinder, Twisted Genius John Farr from The Huffington Post, June 13, 2010

Petra's Place • Senses of Cinema Marsha McCreadie, July 11, 2010

Fassbinder's Budgets Ignatiy Vishnevetsky from Sounds, Images, November 1, 2010

The Third Generation • Senses of Cinema Darragh O’Donoghue, June 5, 2011

Fox and His Friends • Senses of Cinema Colin Browne, June 5, 2011

Hollywood, Germany: The Longing of Rainer ... - Senses of Cinema Adam Bingham, June 5, 2011

Searching for the Self in Fassbinder's In a Year ... - Senses of Cinema Rebecca Harkins-Cross, June 5, 2011

The Films Of Rainer Werner Fassbinder: A Retrospective | IndieWire Retrospective reviews from The Playlist, July 29, 2011

Wunderkind - Los Angeles Review of Books Juliane Maria Lorenz, August 18, 2011

JACK FERVER PRESENTS FASSBINDER’S “BITTER TEARS…” Jay Ferver, dancer and choreographer, from Filmmaker magazine, August 22, 2011

"Fassbinder: Prodigal Son, Not Reconciled Thomas Elsaesser essay, 2012 (pdf)

JAY SCHEIB ON FASSBINDER’S “WORLD OF WIRES” Jay Scheib, professor of music and theater arts at MIT, from Filmmaker magazine, January 7, 2012

Fassbinder 16-Film Rainer Werner Fassbinder Retrospective at The American Cinematheque, Los Angeles, by Tom von Logue Newth from FilmFracture, May 28, 2012

An L.A. love letter to Rainer Werner Fassbinder Susan King from The LA Times, May 30, 2012

Fassbinder A Stupendous Weekend of Fassbinder at The American Cinematheque - More To Come, by Tom von Logue Newth from FilmFracture, June 4, 2012

Fassbinder Rainer Fassbinder Retrospective (Nearly) Over at The American Cinematheque, by Tom von Logue Newth from FilmFracture, June 11, 2012

EURO BEAT: Dueling R.W. Fassbinder Biopics, Accusations of ... EURO BEAT: Dueling R.W. Fassbinder Biopics, Accusations of Cannes Corruption, by Brian Clark from Screen Anarchy, June 12, 2012

The Single Antidote to Thoughts of Suicide by J. Hoberman - Moving ... J. Hoberman from Moving Image Source, June 28, 2012

R.W. Fassbinder's Films With Gunther Kaufmann Victor Enyutin from Acting Out Politics, July 1, 2012

Retroactive Prescience: Fassbinder's The Third Generation and the Year 1979 Thomas Elsaesser essay, 2013 (pdf)

Mirroring History: Fassbinder’s The BRD Trilogy Najmeh Khalili Mhani from Offscreen, February 2013

Fassbinder Fans Rejoice: The Film Society of Lincoln Center ... April 21, 2014

Fassbinder: Romantic Anarchist (Part 1) | Film Society of Lincoln Center May 16, 2014 to June 1, 2014

Daily | "Fassbinder: Romantic Anarchist (Part 1)" - Fandor David Hudson, May 16, 2014

Fassbinder and his Friends: Everett Lewis Everett Lewis from Filmmaker magazine, May 30, 2014

Fassbinder and His Friends: Ira Sachs | Filmmaker Magazine Ira Sachs, May 31, 2014

Fassbinder and his Friends: Lynne Stopkewich Lynne Stopkewich from Filmmaker magazine, May 31, 2014

“Despair/Journey Into Light” (1978) by Rainer-Werner Fassbinder by ... Victor Enyutin from Acting Out Politics, June 4, 2014

Daily | "Fassbinder: Romantic Anarchist (Part 2)" - Fandor David Hudson, November 8, 2014

Michael Ballhaus on Framing and Arguing with Fassbinder on The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant video interview from Filmmaker magazine, January 18, 2015 (2:22 mi)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “Merchant of Four Seasons” (1971) – When A Child Is Too Severely (Ontologically Negatively) Judged By Mother, And Later By The Society Victyor Enyutin from Acting Out Politics, February 21, 2015

Bitter Harvest - From the Current - The Criterion Collection Chuck Stephens Criterion essay, June 4, 2015

Cinematography legend Michael Ballhaus turns 80 | Film | DW.COM ... Margit Eberlein from Deutsche Welle, August 4, 2015

The Betrayals of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's ... - Senses of Cinema Claire Henry, March 18, 2016

Tony Pipolo on Fassbinder: To Love Without Demands - artforum.com ... Tony Pipola from Artforum, April 26, 2016

Rainer Werner Fassbinder: 10 essential films | BFI Alex Davidson from BFI Sight and Sound, May 31, 2016

Veronika Voss Archives – The Paris Review | The Paris Review Herr Fassbinder’s Trip to Heaven, by Charlie Fox, February 23, 2017

The muse and the monster: Fassbinder's favourite star on surviving his ... Ryan Gilbey from The Guardian, March 27, 2017

Michael Ballhaus obituary | Film | The Guardian Ryan Gilbey from The Guardian, April 13, 2017

Legendary cinematographer Michael Ballhaus has died Nadine Wojcik from Deutsche Welle, April 13, 2017

Fassbinder, R.W. They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Fassbinder's Germany a book review by Tim Hilchey from the New York Times, October 26, 1997

Fassbinder's Germany: History, Identity, Subject by Thomas ... online excerpts from the book by Thomas Elsaesser

Hand on Elsaesser Post-reunification Fassbinder: Reception and Creation, by Richard J. Hand, an essay on Elsaesser’s book from Film-Philosphy, December 2001

Interview with Hanna Schygulla about Fassbinder by Susan Sontag from the Village Voice, February 26 – March 4, 2003

Dreams of Fassbinder: An Interview with Juliane ... - Senses of Cinema Dreams of Fassbinder, interview with Juliane Lorenz, longtime Fassbinder editor, by Maximilian Le Cain and Chris Neill, December 2, 2003

Fassbinder: The Life and Work of a Provocative Genuis Louis Goyette reviews Christian Braad Thomsen’s latest book, from Offscreen August 31, 2004

from Ingrid Caven: A Novel Jean-Jacques Schuhl from Rouge

10 favorite films Criterion Collection posted a list of Fassbinder’s Ten favorite films, compiled in the last year of his life

Rainer Fassbinder's Gravesite

Rainer Werner Fassbinder - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Short film clip with Fassbinder's editor Julianne Lorenz (45 seconds) on YouTube

THIS NIGHT

July 1966 8 mm

No copy of this short film is known to exist

CITY TRAMP (Der Stadtstreicher) B 86

Munich (10 mi) November 1966 16mm

Suicidal idealizations along with the power of a pistol, terrific music and scenes in a park

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Fassbinder's second short film (the first is lost), an existential silent comedy about a tramp who finds a gun and then tries, unsuccessfully, to dispose of it.

1982 Gregory Avery from Nitrate Online (excerpt)

With the help of Christoph Rosen, the young man who became his first companion, Fassbinder made three short films during 1966-67, two of which still exist. The City Tramp is about a vagrant who finds a revolver but can't get rid of it, and its story was inspired by Eric Rohmer's 1959 film, La Signe du Lion (The Sign of Leo).

"The City Tramp" Jim’s Reviews

THE LITTLE CHAOS (Das kleine Chaos) C+ 77

Munich (9 mi) February 1967 35 mm

Rainer has fun swindling unsuspecting women so he can get money to go to the movies, very tongue in cheek, the first film to feature his mother, Lilo Pempeit, who continues to appear interspersed throughout his entire film career, with 1980’s LILI MARLEEN as her last film appearance.

1982 Gregory Avery from Nitrate Online (excerpt)

A Little Chaos concerns three friends, one of whom is played by Fassbinder, who sell door-to-door subscriptions as a way of gaining access to people's homes to burglarize them. It was made as a homage to Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre sa Vie (My Life to Live), which Fassbinder claimed to have seen twenty-one times. At the conclusion of A Little Chaos, the three main characters talk about what they're going to do with the money they now have, and Fassbinder's character exultantly says, "I'm going to the cinema!"

User comments from imdb Author: ackatsis from Australia

My first film from Rainer Werner Fassbinder is a nine-minute short, one of the director's earliest efforts. The film follows three youths, caught up in the rebellious counter-culture of the 1960s, who decide to supplement their meagre incomes (selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door) by orchestrating a home robbery. The three aspiring criminals – played Christoph Roser, Marite Greiselis and Fassbinder himself – bust into the home of a frightened woman (Greta Rehfeld), and demand her money. The characters, particularly Fassbinder's Franz, do plenty of over-the-top posturing, no doubt in homage to the James Cagney-style of acting that dominated gangster movies of the 1930s and 1940s (the film even references this sub-genre of Hollywood film-making, musing that "I'd like to see a gangster movie that ends well, for once"). The scene of a home invasion surprisingly called to mind 'A Clockwork Orange (1971),' though I don't know how likely it is that Stanley Kubrick received inspiration from the amateur work of an emerging German director.

Though 'The Little Chaos (1966)' was undoubtedly shot on a limited budget, and the cinematography certainly betrays these limitations, Fassbinder does know how to position his camera, alternating between close-up static shots and more dynamic hand-held pans. The film opens with a long zoom across a road, as an enigmatic jazz tune overwhelms the soundtrack, suggesting the brand of classy crime capers that became popular in the 1960s. The acting is adequate enough, though certainly not authentic. Fassbinder mugs determinedly to the camera, a faux tough-guy who perpetually seems to have a foul odour beneath his nostrils. Roser's character is much more tender and introverted, a likable enough guy who's obviously been roped into something in which he desires no part. The film ends with "I Can't Control Myself" by The Troggs on the soundtrack, followed by the wail of police sirens. The three petty criminals will probably get away with it this time, but one gets the feeling that they won't be so fortunate on their next venture.

"The Little Chaos" Jim’s Reviews

LOVE IS COLDER THAN DEATH (Liebe ist kälter als der Tod) B+ 92

Munich (88 mi) April 1969

An unusual first film, over-stylized to the point of anti-realism where the characters have an almost hypnotic appeal, where you can’t take your eyes off them, where the director seems to relish the idea of having so much fun placing himself front and center in a humorously bleak film noir, adding a ménage a trois twist, examining the threatening world of personal relationships, using minimal action, avoiding even the suspicion of emotion, which would be seen in this world as weakness, a poetic melancholy echo, starring Ulli Lommel, Hanna Schygulla, and Fassbinder himself, dedicated to Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, Jean-Marie Straub, and Linio and Cuncho, the last two are characters in the 1966 Damiano Damiano Italian film QUIOS SABE?

The film interestingly is closer to film blanc than film noir, similar to his later work VERONIKA VOSS, as over-accentuated, overly bright whites dominate the look of the film, which seems to overshadow and swallow up everything black, even the humans, as by the end of the film, it simply fades to white. There are also unusual music choices throughout the film, chosen by Fassbinder music master Peer Raben, much of it abstract, modern electronic, or improbable choices one would not expect with the images seen. One of the more unusual shots is a long tracking shot that seems to go on forever. In the middle of it, this outrageous music starts to play. By the time the shot is finished, the very next shot resembles a still photograph which slowly comes to life. Much of this film is humorous, such as the scene where all 3 are simultaneously purchasing sunglasses from a confused store clerk (Irm Hermann), eventually all wearing a new pair by the next scene, also a later scene wandering through a white-accentuated supermarket, where Schygulla shoplifts pretty much anything that interests here. By the end of the sequence, there is only 1 item in her shopping cart. Again, completely unusual music plays, adding dramatic effect as well as humor. As a first film, this seems completely original, as despite its density, there’s plenty of humor, so despite the over-stylization and a love for the human face, there’s an unusual warmth of humanity that somehow breaks out of the emotional void, set in a world where it’s easier to kill somebody than love someone.

The energy peters out a bit near the end, when the finale is given away ahead of time, so despite a few variations on the end theme, we pretty much know ahead of time what to expect, so when we see it, much of it has already been played out. There’s a reliance on Godard imagery of guys slapping girls around and a predominance of guns, also moving car shots as the car drives through city streets. Schygulla is, as expected, exquisitely remote, completely independent, and never bashful or shy, with a few very natural nude scenes. The characters in this film haven’t a clue how to talk to one another, much less express how they feel, so much of it is wordless, which has a pronounced elongating effect, as does the stylishly theatrical pace to the film, which sometimes barely moves at all. They spent next to nothing on sets, which is bare minimal, but Fassbinder finds a way to keep his players moving in the barest of circumstances, walking aimlessly down the street without saying a word to one another, where playing in their heads is this ever-evolving cat and mouse game, Fassbinder eye’s Lommel, idealized by the camera holding a long close up shot of his face, also by his quick defense of Lommel after Schygulla starts making fun of him, Schygulla has desires for Fassbinder, but needs to eliminate Lommel, her competition, who likewise needs to eliminate Schygulla. In the end, Schygulla has her man, but she’s lost him already to Lommel, as a lone car seems to be heading nowhere, which signals the fade to white.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder:

“Here are people who can’t get started, who have been put down, and for whom nothing is possible.”

Time Out

A restless and sombre foray into the b/w world of the Hollywood gangster film as interpreted by B-movie mavericks such as Sam Fuller, and ex-Cahiers iconoclasts such as Godard, here stripped bare by Fassbinder to reveal the cold underlying mechanism of love, death, loneliness, friendship, hate, betrayal and manipulation. Shot on a pfennig budget, this - his first feature - is both an assured 'revolutionary' critique of genre, and at the same time a constantly searching experiment in style and treatment. The plot? For what it is worth, the worn-leather-jacket-and-boots, chain-smoking ex-con and pimp (Fassbinder) refuses the brutal 'persuasions' of the Syndicate, befriends a felt hat and raincoat (Lommel), only to be betrayed by a jealous prostitute lover (Schygulla) in an attempted bank robbery. In this bleak world of bare sets, static camera shots, and stylised acting, was awkwardly born one of the greatest 'lives in film' the cinema has seen.

Richard Brody from The New Yorker (link lost)

In Rainer Werner Fassbinder's first feature film, from 1969, Franz, a freelance gangster (the grungy Fassbinder himself, then twenty-three), brings Bruno, a pretty-boy gunman (Ulli Lommel, an Alain Delon look-alike) into his ambiguous ménage with the prostitute Johanna (a young and overripe Hanna Schygulla). They track down and rub out a thug who has falsely accused Franz of murder and discover that they like it. Scene after scene and shot after shot recall the French New Wave masterworks that inspired Fassbinder, but the grim humor and the deadpan Brechtian stylings (the film was produced by the director's own so-called "antitheatre" in Munich) are entirely his own. In Fassbinder's blasted post-'68 landscape of lost ideals, the New Wave's philosophical flights of fancy give way to a mannered, proto-punk despair: the stark, cynical view of power relations of sex, money, and violence and the sadomasochistically romantic delight in the resulting cruelties would mark the director's entire meteoric career. In German.

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Love is Colder Than Death was Rainer Werner Fassbinder's first feature-length film (he had directed two shorts three years earlier: The Little Tramp and The Little Chaos), the story of a small-time pimp, Franz (Fassbinder), and his complicated relationship with his prostitute girlfriend, Joanna (Hanna Schygulla), and a criminal associate, Bruno (Ulli Lommel), who mysteriously and erotically enters their lives. Had the film been made at a later point in Fassbinder's all-too brief but remarkably illustrious and prolific career, the film's static aesthetic could have been read as a deliberate attempt on the director's part to show his critics that his camera need not move on inch to convey the same rapturous feeling of his greater films. Except Love is Colder Than Death is not a great Fassbinder film. Narratively and experimentally, it's neither exciting nor groundbreaking; since Fassbinder was still obviously trying to hone his signature Brechtian aesthetic, it may come as a surprise that the film echoes the French New Wave (namely Jean-Luc Godard's lyrical, postmodern masterpiece Band of Outsiders) than it does the cinema of Douglas Sirk. Essentially a glorified Calvin Klein advert, the rigorously symmetrical Love is Colder Than Death is drunk on vacuous posturing though you may be taken aback by the beautiful, unexpected shifts in register throughout (there's a half dozen scenes in which Fassbinder allows his camera to move sideways or forward in tandem with the filmic action, and every single one of these movements feels like a rapturous release from the film's otherwise stringent aesthetic). The film's blanched look evokes a heavenly realm where Franz and Joanna's love is constantly compromised by Bruno's threatening third wheel. When Lommel isn't rising alluringly into frame between Fassbinder and Schygulla, he points his gun at the empty space before him. There's no physical target per se, but Fassbinder's chic cuts-on-action repeatedly suggest that Schygulla's Joanna is the object of the man's secret scorn. These disquieting moments evoke a strange and complex sexual relationship between the film's characters—one that is bound to end in typically ravishing, Fassbinderian betrayals.

Love is Colder Than Death Jim’s Reviews

Senses of Cinema [Jason Mark Scott]

Liebe ist kälter als der Tod (Love Is Colder Than Death) Tom von Logue Newth from FilmFracture, June 15, 2011

John Smyth retrospective [3/6]

Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]

Only The Cinema [Ed Howard]

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Rosado)

VideoVista review Gary McMahon

Eye for Film ("Moominkat") review [3/5]

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [2.5/5]

Turner Classic Movies dvd review a compilation of capsule reviews

DVD Times Noel Megahey, reviews the 9-disc Region 2 DVD release, The Rainer Werner Fassbinder Commemorative Collection Volume 1

Channel 4 Film capsule review

KATZELMACHER A- 94

Munich (88 mi) August 1969

Bavarian slang for “cat screwer,” an adaptation of his 1968 play, another exploration of personal relationships, this time set in a bleak Munich apartment complex, where he arranges a group of disaffected and bored young people a little differently each time in a line facing the camera, returning to this same image frequently, as there are dramatic changes in their behavior with the arrival of a Greek immigrant, using highly stylized and distinctively different dialogue. Rainer plays the Greek immigrant, aka Katzelmacher, referring to the supposed sexual habits of foreigners, who is the object of racist hatred and scorn, and who ultimately gets beat up for going out with a German woman. This feels a bit like you’re in the middle of a Jim Jarmusch film, with Hanna Schygulla, Lilith Ungerer, and Elga Sorbas.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1969):

“In my films, there shouldn’t be feelings that people have already digested or absorbed; the film should create new ones instead.”

Time Out

Fear and loathing in the mean streets of suburban Munich, where all behaviour obeys the basest and most basic of drives, and fleeting allegiances form and re-form in almost mathematically abstract permutations until disrupted by the advent of an immigrant Greek worker (played by Fassbinder himself; the title is a Bavarian slang term for a gastarbeiter, implying tomcatting sexual proclivities) who becomes the target for xenophobic violence. Fassbinder's sub-Godardian gangster film début, Love is Colder than Death, was dismissed as derivative and dilettanté-ish; this second feature, based on his own anti-teater play, won immediate acclaim. It still seems remarkable, mainly for Fassbinder's distinctive, highly stylised dialogue and minimalist mise-en-scène that transfigures a cinema of poverty into bleakly triumphant rites of despair.

User comments from imdb Author: johnkibbles (johnkibbles@yahoo.com) from Los Angeles

Katzelmacher changed many people's lives when it came out. One has to wonder how exponential the effects were, but the waves that films like this make are usually much greater than most viewers can fathom. (For example, although very few people are familiar with John Cassavetes' Shadows, that film affected Martin Scorsese profoundly.)

In the interesting documentary, I Don't Just Want You To Love Me, Fassbinder claims that he didn't move the camera much during this time for aesthetic reasons. His cinematographer (Dietrich Lohmann), however, says that aesthetics had little to do with it; they simply couldn't easily move the bulky camera and dolly, and they had no budget to rent better equipment.

This film is part of an experimental avalanche, and it is amazing. The particular art house feel is a result of the times, and as Fassbinder moves on it is fascinating to contemplate how he gets his message across, using different styles. He was truly fearless, and all of his stuff is worth serious consideration.

Katzelmacher becomes even more interesting after viewing his later work.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

A batch of Munich deadbeats spend the days bitching, smoking, drinking beer and fucking each other (mostly for money), until the arrival of a young Greek immigrant gives their petty cruelty a new focus -- ranging from rape to communism, gossip ferments until it makes the fellas take a break from leaning against the building railing to tap dance on the outsider's face. Very much a spawn of his Anti-Theatre sensibility, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's follow-up to his debut Love is Colder Than Death is all blank walls, blunt alienation and deadpan puckishness. Adapting his on his own play, Fassbinder (who plays the Greek lunk) sheathes a generation's post-war prejudice and despair in rootless posing and unbudging camera setups -- the group's social-spiritual deadness, recorded in static long takes, is razzed in mock-ethereal reverse tracking shots across the courtyard, accompanied by some unseen Schubertian tickling. The theme is dislocated ennui, but the director keeps things harshly droll, steering his bored-insouciant-witty troupe (including such future staples as Hanna Schygulla, Irm Hermann and Harry Baer) in and out of their microdramas and, Godard-style, making something out of nothing (a couple stripping in a tiny bare room with only a mattress on the floor and a drawing on the wall, an argument pitched over a meal, Elga Sorbas doing a little song around an imaginary spotlight). Cinematography by Dietrich Lohmann. With Lilith Ungerer, Doris Mattes, Rudolf Waldemar Brem, Hans Hirschmüller, Peter Moland, and Hannes Gromball. In black and white.

Notes on Older Films Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Okay, this is a cheat, since I have not yet made a list for 1969, but I wanted to jot a few thoughts down before I forgot them.  Contrary to its middling reputation, Katzelmacher is a pivotal work in RFW's oeuvre.  It's pretty much the exact moment when his major influences come together.  There is a stark visual and temporal economy that harks back to his tutelage with Straub and Huillet.  There are the crisp black-and-white images, frontal blocking, and slimy, slutty underworld ambiance of Andy Warhol.  But now, thrown into the mix for what I think is the very first time is Fassbinder's Sirk jones.  In Katzelmacher, we see a host of pathetic back-biting bums and sluts (or both), essentially the sort of folks who we used to call "white trash" back home in Texas, before that became a classist epithet.  They turn tricks, nurse pipe-dreams about movie stardom, talk shit about each other behind their backs, but mostly sit on the wall until they get thirsty and go to the pub.  The only thing that can bring (most of) them together is an outsider, in this case Fassbinder himself playing a Greek Gastarbeiter with a shaky command of German.  It's here that Fassbinder the writer-director first lays down his major moves, pushing social commentary right to the brink of believability.  The "villains" speak in slogans and received ideas, all the better to get the point across.  But unlike some desiccated leftist exercise, Katzelmacher lends a sad pathos to the hatred, as if (as in actual works by Brecht and Sirk) the racists are saying and doing what they have to do, paying lip- and fist-service to ideologies they themselves can't even fully commit to.  After being a bit frustrated with some of the early films (Love is Colder Than Death, Gods of the Plague), Katzelmacher was an astonishing kick in the teeth.  Fassbinder the Master Filmmaker starts here.

Katzelmacher Jim’s Reviews

not coming to a theater near you (Matt Bailey)

VideoVista review Paul Higson

Eye for Film (Jeff Robson) review [3/5]

Strictly Film School Acquarello

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Lopez)

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4/5]

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

Turner Classic Movies dvd review a compilation of capsule reviews

DVD Times Noel Megahey, reviews the 9-disc Region 2 DVD release, The Rainer Werner Fassbinder Commemorative Collection Volume 1

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

DVDBeaver.com [[Donald Brown]]

GODS OF THE PLAGUE (Götter der Pest) B 89

Munich (91 mi) October – November 1969

A film noir gangster ménage a trois examining the emotional violence in the relationship between two men and the woman, and between the two men, where something is bound to go wrong and does, derived from Alfred Doblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, filmed partially in his mother’s apartment where he convinced her to play the role of the mother of two gangster brothers, who rejects her youngest son in favor of her older son, creating tensions on the set, starring Harry Baer, Hanna Schygulla, Margarethe von Trotta, Günther Kaufmann, his mother Lilo Pempeit, and Fassbinder as a porno salesman. The film features an expensive helicopter shot which Fassbinder reportedly created to impress Günther Kaufmann, his lover at the time.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1978):

“ GODS OF THE PLAGUE is a rather precise film about the feeling of a certain period of time, the way things really were in that peculiar postrevolutionary era of 1970.”

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Remade (in more impressive form) as The American Soldier later the same year, Fassbinder's early gangster movie is slow, absurd, and quite mesmerising. Baer's the pretty criminal 'hero' who gradually sinks back into his underworld ways by hanging around with the wrong types: card-playing crooks and layabouts with trenchcoats and ever-present cigarettes, fickle molls hanging languorously on the sidelines. Any social comment is implicit rather than explicit, the world depicted is related more closely to classic American noir than any contemporary reality, and there is very little plot indeed. But it's a witty, stylish meditation on the genre, filtered through the decidedly dark and morbid sensibility of its director.

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Gods of the Plague picks up where Love Is Colder Than Death left off (in between both projects he helmed the successful Katzelmacher), this time with a lot less preening and not a whole lot of gumption. Franz (now played by Harry Baer) is released from prison and makes plans to rob a local supermarket with the help of "Gorilla" (Fassbinder's longtime lover Günther Kaufman in his first screen appearance), a Bavarian criminal who killed his brother. After a quick visit with Joanna (still played by the one and only Hanna Schygulla), Franz shacks up with the gorgeous Margarethe (Margarethe Von Trotta), who ultimately gangs up with Joanna in order to betray him. Gods of the Plague suffers from a curious identity crisis. If the film isn't quite successful as a noir exercise (had Fassbinder tilted his camera a few degrees to the side, we could have been watching any number of Welles classics), it's probably because there's a conflict of styles here. The film is tightly composed for much of its running time, but this rigorous framing doesn't so much evoke the claustrophobic allure of some of the best noir classics as much as it points to Fassbinder's bare-bones art direction budget. If not as accomplished as Love Is Colder Than Death, Gods of the Plague is dignified by an irresistible and emotional softness. The narrative is random and disposable, which means you'll have to settle for the allure of the film's many women. Fassbinder can summon the nurturing love of a mother for a son with as little as a delicate overhead shot and he can fabulously suggest the power of a woman over a man by simply lingering on her unavoidable and imposing gaze (see the picture-cum-advertisement in Margarethe's apartment that threatens Franz and Gorilla with its curious invitation: "Have a Cool Blonde Harp"). And in Schygulla's conflicted chanteuse, Fassbinder channels for the first time the spirit of the infamous blond Venus Marlene Dietrich summoned so many times for Josef von Sternberg. The film's women live so we can have our Lola and Veronika Voss. Never trust a blonde…or something like that.

Gods of the Plague Jim’s Reviews

Only The Cinema [Ed Howard]

VideoVista review Gary McMahon

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger)

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [2/5]

Swimming to Casablanca - sprint reviews

Turner Classic Movies dvd review a compilation of capsule reviews

DVD Times Noel Megahey, reviews the 9-disc Region 2 DVD release, The Rainer Werner Fassbinder Commemorative Collection Volume 1

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

WHY DOES HERR R. RUN AMOK? (Warum läuft Herr R. Amok)            B 87   

December 1969 Munich (88 mi)  co-director: Michael Fengler

Fassbinder's first color film, based on an idea at age 17, using a spare dramatic style, improvised dialogue and action, a clinically detailed, satirical examination of the supposedly perfect, suburban middle class as represented by the bored, bland, complacent life of Kurt Raab, who is anything but boring in Fassbinder’s hands as the prevailing order is crying out for a little chaos, leading to the ultimate alienation, which is observed with utter calm, sort of a case study for MERCHANT OF FOUR SEASONS with minimal action, a follow up to LOVE IS COLDER THAN DEATH, as emotions express weakness in this world.

Using anti-theatre regulars Peer Raben, Hanna Schygulla, Irm Hermann, and his wife, Ingrid Caven, as well as the bored, bland, overweight, and supposedly happily married Kurt Raab as Herr R, who can't stand to listen to his wife, Lilith Ungerer, and her friends, particularly Irm Hermann, always cast in the most negative light by Fassbinder, who finds a way to utilize candleholders to extract her punishment. Herr R, a likeable office worker with a family, calmly picks up an ornate lamp one evening and bludgeons his wife, child and neighbor, then just as calmly, shows up for work the next morning. A variation of this same theme is used by Chantal Akerman in JEANNE DIELMAN (1975), though meticulously perfected into a complete work of art by Akerman, this appears largely experimental in Fassbinder's hands, as much of what we see seems as if we may still be in the rehearsal stage.  As Fred Tsao says, "The punishment continues..."

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1970):

“In KATZELMACHER we wanted to offer an alternative viewpoint through the style, and in AMOK through the use of color as well; the audience should understand the content and see that it relates to them, while at the same time, through the form by which it is communicated, they gain some distance so they can reflect on what they’re seeing.”

Chicago Reader [J.R. Jones] (capsule review)

Made for about $10,000, this 1970 provocation by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Michael Fengler stars Kurt Raab (The Stationmaster's Wife) as a character with the same name--a moody, misfit draftsman at a German architectural firm who grows increasingly alienated from his workplace, his neighbors, his parents, and his bourgeois wife (Lilith Ungerer). As did Sinclair Lewis in Babbitt, Fassbinder navigates carefully between mockery and empathy, heightening the interior drama with his superior staging: in almost every key scene, the chattering characters become white noise as we focus on the silent sufferer in the room. With Franz Maron and Hanna Schygulla. 88 min.

User comments from imdb Author: Shane James Bordas from United Kingdom

Co-directed by the young Fassbinder (then only 25 years old) with his friend and producer Michael Fengler, 'Herr R.' shows Fassbinder's tendency to get up the nose of the middle class.

Here, in opposition to his more characteristically considered style, a shaky hand-held camera eavesdrops on the eponymous Herr R.(played to perfection by the great Kurt Raab) who is tediously seen at his work, with his wife, during a visit from his parents and the like, while slowly unwinding inside.

Long takes predominate and we are also let into the life of Herr R.'s pretty but equally vapid wife for whom he, in a most affecting scene, buys a record without knowing the singer or song title - much to the shameless merriment of the shop-girls who serve him. Fassbinder keeps the tension tightly wound throughout and it is this knowing sense of what to show and when to withhold that gives the greatest indication that this is the work of a man who was to become one of Europe's greatest film-makers since Ingmar Bergman.

No doubt, many will find the extreme sense of realism and boredom too oppressive but 'Herr R.' has proved to be highly influential on a much later generation of film-makers and still retains the power to provoke and unsettle.

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

The first scene in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's mysterious, mesmerizing Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (1970) has four co-workers telling silly, rather stupid jokes. The first four jokes pass by with nary a raised eyebrow, but the fifth one is a joke about a man strangling his wife.

That's a clue as to how the rest of the movie is going to go. It's a series of unstructured, almost innocuous scenes that could almost be arranged in any order.

In another early scene, our hero Herr R. (Kurt Raab) and his wife (Lilith Ungerer) are having a drink with a friend. The friend is played by the beautiful, playfully determined Hanna Schygulla, a familiar face in Fassbinder's work (she would go on to play the title role in his most celebrated film, the 1979 The Marriage of Maria Braun).

Schygulla's character talks about being free and single, being able to go where she wants and to do what she wants. In another Fassbinder film, the camera might follow her off to some adventure. But in this one, we never see her again.

Instead, we're plunked right down into the middle of Herr R.'s facile existence and his numbing daily problems. His son is having problems at school. He invites a boring friend over for drinks. He tries to find a record in a music shop while the teenage shopgirls quietly make fun of him.

These scenes occur mainly in long, unbroken takes; I doubt that this 88-minute movie has more than 20 individual shots. Within each, Fassbinder points his camera wherever his mood carries him.

Finally, Herr R. runs amok. It's a scene of almost shocking nonchalance, punctuated by ennui and annoyance rather than rage or violence.

Which brings us back to the title. Fassbinder continually shows us moments that Herr R. does not see; we understand that he is not particularly well liked or admired, but he may not see this. So what triggers him?

Perhaps the answer is not really in the film, which is why Fassbinder asks the audience with the title. Heaven help you if you know the answer.

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford

Man kills entire family and himself". How often have we read a newspaper headline like that and wondered what triggered that final act of madness? When there are no survivors to question, we can only speculate based on the press coverage but, in the end, we can never really know why. German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder doesn't provide any easy answers either in Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (1970), the tale of a seemingly successful, middle-class family man who suddenly snaps one day, killing his wife, a visiting neighbor and his son, before taking his own life. But long before we witness that climactic act of violence, there are telltale signs along the way that trouble is brewing at home and at work.

Shot in a mere thirteen days in Munich during December, Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (now on DVD from Fantoma Films) was Fassbinder's fourth film and quite different in stylistic terms from his later work though he would return to many of the same themes in such films as The Merchant of Four Seasons (1972) and Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven (1975). Certainly his interest in exposing social hypocrisy and petty bourgeois values is on display here, but his main intent is to show man's inability to cope with modern life rendered as a case study; all of it reflected in the monotonous daily grind experienced by Kurt, the Herr R. of the title. At first, Kurt seems to possess the hopes and ambitions of other middle-class working men and appears to have a comfortable home with a devoted wife and child. But as we follow his daily routine, a sense of despair sets in. Workplace disappointments (a much-desired promotion hasn't happened), minor slights (a strained visit with condescending neighbors) and the typical problems that affect most married couples (meddling in-laws, finances, problematic children) take a cumulative toll on Kurt. We can see it as his body language becomes more constricted and withdrawn, particularly in the scene where he and his wife meet with his son's teacher and are made to feel responsible for their child's learning disabilities. Yet, despite the bleak world view Fassbinder offers us in Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?, there are unexpected moments of lightness and humor; the scene where Kurt enters a record store and queries two giggling shopgirls about a song he heard on the radio - he attempts to hum it - has a genuine sweetness and good-natured mockery about it.

Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? was said to have strongly influenced Danish director Lars Von Trier who owes a debt to this film, which in many ways prefigures some of the tenets of his Dogme 95 film movement - hand-held cinematography, shooting in real locations with available light, natural sound with no added musical score or effects, and an avoidance of genre clichés. Unlike the stylized theatricality of Fassbinder's earlier Katzelmacher (1969) which was adapted from a play, Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? has a cinema-verite quality and most of the dialogue was improvised. All of the actors also address each other by their real first names. According to writer Ronald Hayman in his book Fassbinder: Filmmaker the director "probably knew he was more likely to get the performance he wanted from Kurt Raab if he cast Lilith Ungerer as his wife. She was an antitheater actress Raab had always disliked...These provocations may seem petty, but they must have reinforced the concentration of petty provocations in the plot." The cast also includes Fassbinder regulars Harry Baer and Lilo Pempeit (Fassbinder's mother) as fellow employees and, in a small bit, Hanna Schygulla as an acquaintance from school.

The theatrical release of Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? came at a time when Fassbinder was just starting to receive international recognition as one of the leaders in the New German Cinema along with Volker Schlondorff, Werner Herzog, Margarethe von Trotta, Hans-Jurgen Syberberg and Wim Wenders. His work, however, was a reaction against the commercial cinema of his time as he himself stated: "The established culture business needs outsiders like me." Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? could be interpreted as Fassbinder's attack on the complacency of his fellow man but film scholar Jim Clark in the liner notes that accompany the DVD makes this observation: "While this is perhaps Fassbinder's most hyper-real picture, it's also among his most richly ambiguous works, mysterious to the bone. The allegorical title suggests that he has symbolic intentions, but he never forces a narrow this-means-that interpretation." Fassbinder's comments on his film, in typical fashion, were much more obtuse: "In Katzelmacher we wanted to offer the possibility of a kind of alternative attitude through the style of the film, and in Amok we are also using color to this end: the audience should understand the contents of the film and see that this has something to do with them, while, at the same time, finding a distance to it through the form in which the action is presented, so that they can reflect upon what they see." In a later comment, Fassbinder stated that Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? was "the most disgusting film I ever made."

The Fantoma DVD of Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? showcases a new digital transfer of the film in its original 1.33:1 aspect ration. The only extra is an interview with cinematographer Dietrich Lohmann, who collaborated with Fassbinder on many of his early films and offers a revealing look at the director's working methods.

User comments from imdb Author: Graham Greene from United Kingdom

Though the title asks an important question, the film itself offers no such resolutions, with Fassbinder simply supplying us with a series of potential ideas and scenarios that might lead an audience to draw their own conclusions as to why the film ends the way that it does. Although this was quite obviously an early work for Fassbinder, produced at a relatively young age and on a limited budget, the themes and ideas behind it are in keeping with the far greater and more assured films that he would eventually produce during the following years of his life. These ideas of dissatisfaction, fulfilment, alienation and dislocation would all be explored in varied films, such as The Merchant of Four Seasons (1972), Fox and his Friends (1975), Mother Kusters' Trip to Heaven (1975) and In a Year of 13 Moons (1978) respectively, with the director expressing these feelings often through jarring stylisation and alienation techniques to help convey the emotional intensity of the characters in a way that made it easier to comprehend from the perspective of the audience.

As some commentators have previously noted, the film-making technique employed throughout Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (1970) draws heavily on cinéma-vérité conventions of heightened realism and bare formality, as the director - here co-credited alongside Michael Fengler - uses minimal production design, naturalistic lighting, long-takes and jarring jump cuts to establish a sense of drab, everyday normality and ironic, faux-documentary-like realism. This presentation of the film, when combined with the episodic narrative - in which nothing 'seems' to happen - make the eventual resolution all the more shocking and provocative. What Fassbinder is suggesting through the scenario presented here is never fully clarified, with the film beginning and ending with the title covering the screen and all potential notions that might have resulted in the breakdown of communication and the urge for destruction often being dismissed by the director(s) almost as soon as it has been established. Nonetheless, we can draw our own conclusion with the evidence that is implied here; whilst the benefit of repeated viewings and close attention paid to the character of "R." as he progresses through the film hints at a human being finally crushed by the humdrum grind of day-to-day subsistence.

There are a number of factors that seem to lead to the final act of the film; with the character belittled by his attractive wife, who stays at home while her husband works and continually chips away at his self-esteem by mentioning his failure to receive a promotion, his lack of social skills and his subsequent weight gain. He also has a son that is under-performing at school, as well as becoming alienated from his classmates as a result of an unfortunate speech impediment. "R." dutifully spends his time after work with the boy, reading to him and trying to coach him through certain words while his wife entertains their snooty and slyly condescending neighbours. This seems to suggest a tenderness and compassion to the character; qualities that are also obvious in the scene in which "R" and his wife recline on the couch in bathrobes drinking wine, listening to music and reminiscing fondly on how they first met. Nothing is black and white in Fassbinder's films, with the shades of grey presented in the character making the eventual shift in tone even more enigmatic and perplexing; with the cold and rigid examination of Fassbinder and Fengler also making any clearly defined interpretation more difficult as a result of the persistent lack of moralising or melodrama.

Some viewers have noted the similarities here to the later work of Lars von Trier, in particular a film like The Idiots (1998) with its roots in the Dogme 95 manifesto, as well as films like Breaking the Waves (1996) and Dancer in the Dark (2000). Like von Trier, Fassbinder is cold and clinical in his approach to the film, casting a cynical eye on the mechanisms of contemporary society and hinting at the very nature of bourgeois, 20th century living as a possible reason for this seemingly unprovoked cycle of violence. In one of the films key scenes, "R." visits his family physician for an annual check-up. Here, he complains of headaches, and the doctor opines that he's most probably over-worked and over-stressed. Instead of prescribing any kind of help, the doctor tells him to give up smoking, which will bring his blood pressure down and "help with the headaches". The flippant, unsympathetic tone of the doctor and his assessment of "R." seems a deliberate move on Fassbinder's part, with the clear hint that the characters problems stem from his heavy work load and need to provide for his family. Instead of addressing this issue, the doctor instead tells him to give up smoking; one of the few small pleasures that he seems to gleam from social interaction.

There are other hints layered throughout the film, which opens with "R's" work colleagues telling bad taste jokes that come to delicately set up a number the actions that the character will subsequently take. Fassbinder would later return to the themes of Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? in his subsequent masterpiece, Mother Kusters' Trip to Heaven, which could almost be seen as something of a thematic sequel to the film in question. For me, the later film is infinitely better; one of the director's most pointed, affecting and intelligent works, and one of the very best examples of New German Cinema produced during that particular period. However, the way that the themes of that film are paralleled here gives yet another shade of interpretation to Herr. R's enigmatic approach to cinematic examination. Though it is (perhaps) a little rough around the edges, Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? is an interesting film from Fassbinder; one that benefits from the cold cynicism of its director, and a truly mesmerising performance from the subtly affecting Kurt Raab.

Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? Jim’s Reviews, which include the DVD essay

Reverse Shot [Nick Pinkerton]

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Only The Cinema [Ed Howard]

Old School Reviews [John Nesbit]

Mondo Digital

Cinematic Reflections (Derek Smith)

DVD Talk (Ian Jane)

Passport Cinema [Chris Luedtke]

DVD Times Noel Megahey, reviews the 4-disc Region 2 DVD release, Rainer Werner Fassbinder Volume 1

TV Guide review

Channel 4 Film [capsule review]

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

RIO DAS MORTES – made for TV C 75

Munich (84 mi) January 1970

From an idea by Volker Schlöndorff, this is a forgettable, non-action study of German obsession with remote places, in this case, Peru, where two young friends, Michael König and Günther Kaufmann, fresh from military duty, decide to leave Germany in search of a hidden treasure, which they think is buried in the Rio das Mortes region of Peru. However, one friend’s fiancé, Hanna Schygulla, opposes the plan and threatens to shoot them both if they proceed, totally lifeless and emotionless, as if all are stoned, except for a brilliant jukebox dance by Hanna Schygulla to Elvis’s “Jailhouse Rock,” with no one but the audience paying attention, featuring Fassbinder as a disco customer.

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [2/5]

Pretty straightforward for a Fassbinder movie, Rio das Mortes, despite the Spanish title, never gets out of Germany.

The film involves two friends (Michael König and Günther Kaufmann) who decide they want to sail a Peruvian river in search of a fabled treasure. The journey will take a lot of money, so they proceed to do everything in their power to raise it. They borrow. They work overtime. They try to find investors for a hypothetical cotton plantation. They even sell the car -- a nondescript sequence that consumes 10 of the film's 84 minutes. Eventually, a girlfriend (Fassbinder regular Hanna Schygulla) gets wind of the plan and tries to stop it.

Despite its short running time, the film is padded with protracted scenes like the aforementioned car sale, dancing in a bar, talking on the phone, and reading aloud about, of all things, the life of Lana Turner. They jabber endlessly about her past -- even Schygulla is unable to hide her obvious boredom when one speech drags on for five minutes or more. There are few moments of real drama in Rio das Mortes, but it's such a trifle you can forgive some of its flaws. There's not a lot of depth, and there's just not much to care about. In the end, how can you criticize a movie that really isn't about anything? Less forgiveable is the new release's DVD transfer, which looks like a fourth-generation videotape copy.

Overall, it's safe to skip this minor entry in the Fassbinder litany.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

The mundane oppression of German life, which drove the stumplike protagonists of Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? and The Merchant of Four Seasons into suicide, is fended off by the two proletarian heroes (Michael König and Günther Kaufmann) here through absurd fantasy -- they dream of escaping into the Peruvian jungles to seek out some unlikely buried treasure, and spend most of the running time half-assedly trying to drum up funds, muddling from doomed scheme to doomed scheme. The occasional Antitheatre set piece notwithstanding (five gals smoking and walking in a circle in front of a huge blackboard, where a looming dick is chalked in, tagged "USSA"), this mostly forgotten entry of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's early futzing-around period feels unaccountably close to an American road-trip comedy, though, as befits the director's stark inquiry into the stunted alienation of a generation, the characters remain for the most part locked in political stasis. In between scrambling for money, there's pub jitterbugging to "Jailhouse Rock," reading aloud from an entry on Lana Turner, and some authentic bohemian décor circa 1970, wicker chairs, Buster Keaton posters and all. It is illustrative of the characters' apathy that their expected amorous triangle with König's bored bride (Hanna Schygulla) never solidifies, though she does display a far more lucid grasp on life than the two, who, to quote from Kaufmann's monologue about his days in the Navy, "take the line of least resistance." And yet, in the end it is Schygulla who's left behind, lost in her own lipsticky melodrama while the fellas take off together for literally greener pastures -- even this early, Fassbinder understood just how much more elusive escape is for a woman. With Katrin Schaake, Harry Baer, and Ulli Lommel.

User comments from imdb Author: fuzon from London, England

After the heavy-handed Brechtian devices of a number of his early films, Fassbinder really begins to get going in this made-for-TV piece about a couple of working class men who share a boyhood dream to search for treasure in Rio das Mortes in Peru. The dream they share is a typical storytelling "call to adventure" and the film delineates their deadbeat and usually hopeless attempts to raise the money for the venture - their economic situation is too hopeless for them to save, selling their possessions and cashing in their inheritances doesn't add up to much and attempts to finance the trip as a business venture and a research expedition fail due to their hopeless inabilities. But luck arrives in the form of a widow with more money than sense, who stumps up the finance and so off they go. What we've seen of them doesn't inspire much hope for their adventure...

All the while, their male story is ironically counterpointed with the hopes, dreams and aspirations of the live-in girlfriend of one of the men, played by the extraordinary Hanna Schygulla. She goes to college and takes part in a feminist theatre-piece (the conclusion of which is "women's own behaviour is the best evidence of their oppression") but learns little, as she dreams of placating her nagging mother by marrying and having lots of kids. All of that is made nonsense of by the dream-journey of the men, which she almost kiboshes by nearly shooting them at the end, a quirk of fate saving them.

Fassbinder, to my mind for the first time successfully, moulds his early obsession with the homo-social exclusion of the female in male friendships into a contemporary melodrama of some verve and wit. His story, a classic "quest myth", is ironically set in a society seething with casual misogyny, violence, class contempt, economic want and ignorance. Gritty realism is used to undermine the high-falutin dreams of the men, but the film suggests that lucky twists of fate might save a dream - all Fassbinder leaves men with is faith in turns of a friendly card; all he leaves women with is incompatible hopes of settling down with their menfolk, who shaped the patriarchal world in which they're subservient to ideals to which men's inmost dreams are opposed.

Rio das Mortes Jim’s Reviews

Rio das Mortes Tom von Logue Newth from FilmFracture, September 28, 2009

VideoVista review J.C. Hartley

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nate Goss

Turner Classic Movies dvd review a compilation of capsule reviews

DVD Times Noel Megahey, reviews the 9-disc Region 2 DVD release, The Rainer Werner Fassbinder Commemorative Collection Volume 1

THE COFFEEHOUSE (Das Kaffeehaus)

Cologne (105 mi) February – 1970

Das Kaffeehaus Fassbinder Foundation

People meet and chat at Ridolfo’s Coffeehouse. The conversations are mostly about money. But they are of course also about feelings, ideals, friendship, love, fidelity, and respectability. But all this has its price. The TV adaptation of the play – still very popular today – is based on the Venetian comedy writer Carlo Goldoni (1707–1793) and the stage productions of Fassbinder and Peer Raben in Bremen and Munich (with the antiteater group).

WHITY C 70

Almeria, Spain (95 mi) April 1970

Michael Ballhaus first camera work, using exaggerated, lush colors contrasted against what I found to be a totally forgettable, obnoxious, humorless 3^rd rate failure that may precede SATAN’S BREW for theater of the absurd, overplayed and cruel, but it just didn’t work for me, feeling like they were all on drugs playing out some bad LSD trip. Starring Günther Kaufmann, Hanna Schygulla Ulli Lommel, and Fassbinder as a man in the saloon, the story follows the hideous life of an illegitimate, mulatto son of a wealthy white aristocrat, who becomes a slave and whipping boy in this dysfunctional family, until the situation becomes unbearable. Only the beautiful dance sequence at the end held any interest for me.

Actually, Fassbinder’s ensemble was going through a particularly turbulent time, where many violent stories of monumental rages and suicidal whims accompanied this production, which would later be incorporated into the film BEWARE OF A HOLY WHORE. Fassbinder allegedly started each day demanding ten glasses of rum and coke, drinking nine, usually saving the last to throw at cameraman Michael Ballhaus.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1971):

Screenplay

There is a black mother. Her son says, I don’t want you to sing those songs. What songs? Black songs! The son is of mixed blood. Whity! An old man has remarried. His young wife is a hyena. People can be given injections to put them to sleep. Forever.

Two brothers, one is completely nuts, about the other you can’t always tell. The old man is quick with the whip.

A girl sings in a Western saloon. The girl is beautiful. Whity loves the girl. What’s the nigger doing here, someone says, and as he lies beaten up in the mud, he clutches the rose the girl has given him. He wears a light suit.

A woman cheats on her husband. Mexicans are stupid. “I love you,” she says, and “Hit me.” Like most people around here, she has the capacity to enjoy pain.

Kill my father, a brother says. Whity nods. The blacks should be given more rights, makes them less inclined to get stupid ideas.

The other brother loves Whity. Whity beats him. Whity kisses him. There is a tenderness somewhere that doesn’t exist in the heads of those people.

Davie must die.

The singer has a plan. Whity, go east! Whity says: Never. He loves his family.

They are right to beat you. Because you like it when they beat you.

A father whips his son. The son is a mute. His mouth is wide open, screaming. No sound. He lets himself be beaten for Davie. Madness!

One man shoots another man. A girl watches. It was an intrigue. This is not important, unless you need an intrigue.

And pain makes a woman say: Murderer. She says it in Spanish.

Ben is going to die. Kill Frank. Then the property will be ours. Property is always part of the reason.

I have a black son, maybe they know.

The strong torture the weak. Anyone need an intrigue, there are many. And flowers, and hatred. Why did you kill my father? Why didn’t you kill Frank when I begged you?

I’m going to die soon. The will is signed: Ben Nathaniel Richard Nicholson.

You know why your father shot the Mexican? Booze and cards. And beautiful songs.

Whity kills four people. The father. The young woman. The two brothers. Where violence rules, only violence helps.

Whity and the girl will disappear.

“ Yet in actual fact, the entire film is pitted against the black man, because he always hesitates and fails to defend himself against injustice. In the end he does shoot the people who oppressed him, but then he goes off into the desert and dies, having come to realize certain things without being able to act. He goes into the desert because he doesn’t dare face the inevitable consequences. I find it OK that he kills his oppressors, but it is not OK that he then goes into the desert. For by doing that he accepts the superiority of the others. Had he truly believed in his action, he would have allied himself with other suppressed individuals, and they would have acted together. The single-handed act at the end of the movie is not a solution. Thus in the last instance the film turns even against blacks.”

ThreeMovieBuffs [Patrick Nash]

Whity is a strange but beautiful movie. It is a German language western set in 1878. The only time any English is used is during the songs sung by the saloon whore who performs like she's in a cabaret in Berlin in the early 1930's. It was shot in Spain on the sets of Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns starring Clint Eastwood.

The bizarre story (believe me this is unlike any western you have ever seen) centers on the title character - real name Samuel King - the bastard son and slave to the wealthy Nicholson family. The father is a sadistic son of a bitch whose favorite form of punishment for his grown-up sons is a buggy whip. In one scene Whity willingly steps in for one of his brothers and takes the beating for him.

The other members of the family keep begging Whity to kill their father (or husband whichever the case may be). Otherwise they pass the time by regularly humiliating Whity. All except for the youngest brother. He's a bit special. He and Whity have a much more physically intimate relationship. Whity's mother is also a family slave. She's the cook.

Every so often Whity steals some time for himself and pays a visit to his gal at the local saloon. She's the singing hooker with the heart of gold and she wants Whity to go East with her.

I won't give away the ending to this one but believe me it's suitably strange. But not in a makes-no-logical-sense-David-Lynch sort of way. It has a cohesive plot. One thing you can say about this movie - love it or hate it - is that it succeeds at being what it was trying to be.

Normally I'm not a big fan of the art for art's sake school of moviemaking. But Fassbinder's Whity is one example that I love. It works because the story is so far out-there, especially for a western, that it allows you to focus on the cinematic pictures while still making enough sense to hold your attention. Also it helps that Whity is such a unique hero and that Günther Kaufmann gives a great performance.

As art every shot is sublimely thought-out and executed. The camera work is fluid and dreamy with many long takes. Fassbinder's eye for color rivals Vincente Minnelli's. He shoots his star like he's Cary Grant. Clearly this was a director in love with his leading man. And no wonder. Günther was hot, not to mention a truly magnetic presence in front of the camera.

Truly weird, but beautiful.

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Whity was the sickest film of Rainer Wener Fassbinder's career. This fascinating Weltschmerz spaghetti western from 1970 concerns itself with the liberation of a black slave (Günther Kaufmann) from the home of his master and white father, Benjamin Nicholson (Ron Randell). Though the genre-blasting Whity sees Fassbinder toying with classic western conventions and trying to address and subvert distinctly American forms of racism, the moral catastrophes he exposes are nonetheless played for a world-weary pathos and universality. Whity may passively accept his place in society, but does the we-shall-overcome anthem his kitchen-stranded mother, Marpessa (Elaine Baker), sing get her much further in life? In the char-darkened face of Whity's mother and zombified mugs of the masochistic Nicholson clan, Fassbinder ghoulishly and fascinatingly evokes the respective decay and retardation of the human spirit. For Fassbinder, the complex pathology of the film's racists and passive aggressors (as always, the director takes to task those who actively participate in their own victimization) is deliriously likened to various sexual perversions. The Nicholsons are sadomasochists who derive pleasure from Whity's pain, just as the Hanna Schygulla's seemingly liberated showgirl enslaves Kaufmann's Mandingo in her own deceptive way (in one scene, she kisses him knowing that a gang of bar rats will no doubt beat him up). Whity is a triumphant work of political resistance, a force mirrored in the film's aesthetic: Fassbinder's ever-gliding camera startlingly parallels the lives of characters who don't quite understand their function within the filmic space, and therefore their place in society. Because Whity is so technically triumphant (Fassbinder's sensuous camera repeatedly calls attention to the many prisons the characters occupy; the actors often had to exit the film's frame in order to put on their white-faces and re-enter a scene, sometimes in one continuous shot), it's easy to see why this rigorousness provoked many an emotional windfall between the director and his crew. Whity was shot in the Spanish town of Alméria in early 1970 and the many melodramas experienced on the set of the film would set the stage for much of Fassbinder's Beware of a Holy Whore, the director's cautionary ode to his very emotional filmmaking process.

Cinepassion.org Frenando F. Croce

Whatever else it may be -- Anti-Theatre roadshow, cheekily ghoulish roundelay, the Western spoof Mel Brooks was afraid to make -- this stylized genre-bender should be remembered first and foremost as the film in which Rainer Werner Fassbinder discovered the beauty and power of the image. Working for the first time with wizardly cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, he delineates a mise en scène almost parodical in its lushness, the gliding camera movements and engulfing décor seemingly a far cry from the purposeful bareness of Katzelmacher or Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? Rather than decreasing the earlier intensity, however, the movie's drunk-on-surfaces stylistics push the stark aesthetics to their limits by encasing their terseness within a pungent cinematic skin. Society/family is again on trial: set in a 19th-century America somewhere between hothouse antebellum and Sergio Leone's Spain-shot evocations of the Old West, the story strands the titular mulatto servant (Günther Kaufmann) between the charred defiance of his kitchen-wench mother and the pasty decadence of the Nicholson clan whose whims he serves. When not getting whipped or pawed by the Nicholsons (stolid patriarch Ron Randell, head nympho Katrin Schaake, fag-hag son Ulli Lommel and brain-damaged junior Harry Bär, all caked with nauseating white-green makeup), Whity prefers the company of saloon chanteuse Hanna Schygulla, herself not above inciting a mass beating by deliberately kissing him in front of a bunch of unmellowed cowboys. This being a Fassbinder film, the character's passive servility is a masochistic impulse eventually shattered by an act of insurrection that's no less political for being consciously suicidal -- having offed his oppressors, his emancipation will lead him to certain death in the arid spaces of the desert. Easily the most outrageous of the director's early efforts, though apparently the plot pales next to the drama behind the camera (the behind-the-scenes travails formed the basis of Beware of a Holy Whore). Peer Raben did the mock-Morricone score.

User comments from imdb Author: Mark Frey (markfrey2@yahoo.com) from New York, NY, USA

Rarely screened, forgotten by even the most devoted admirers of Fassbinder, _Whity_ is nonetheless a crucial film in Fassbinder's own development as a film-artist. For one, the style of the film marks Fassbinder's turn away from his earlier, Neo-realistic efforts (notably _Katzelmacher_ and _Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?_) and turn towards the flamboyant, melodramatic form favored by him until his untimely death in 1982. Melodrama turns out to be the best possible style for the film's story, which chronicles the fall of the seigniorial Nicholson family in the Mexican 19th century. Indeed, this film should be seen for no other reason than the inescapable weirdness one feels in watching German actors play Mexicans in the Old West. It's like seeing Peter Lorre playing John Wayne: ridiculous, if only it weren't so creepy. "Decadent" and "dysfunctional" are words redefined by the Nicholson family: the patriarch, Ben Nicholson, is remote and cruel, the wife a nymphomaniac, the older son a flaming homosexual, and his brother a severely retarded adolescent. Then there's Whity, the ironically named mulatto slave of the Nicholson family, an inadvertent focus point of each family member's perverse obsessions. It is this mutual obsession with Whity (an obsession shared by the viewer by film's end) which allows Fassbinder to explore the themes which were to comprise his greatest contribution to film's development as a medium, including: dominance and submission, the role of the Other, sexuality, the doppelganger, the economy of familial relationships, and the obstacles fate puts in the way of consumating love. These issues gain complexity when one considers that the slave Whity is played by Fassbinder's then-lover, Gunther Kaufmann. Given this, what is the viewer to make of such stylistic scenes as when Whity is disciplined by his master, while the other family members garrulously look on--knowing that Fassbinder himself is also watching from his director/dictator's chair? (The complex inter-relationships of Fassbinder and the actors during the filming of _Whity_ were later chronicled by Fassbinder in his film _Beware of a Holy Whore_, which is based on the real-life melodrama that occurred _off_ the set of _Whity_.) If nothing else, _Whity_ deserves to be included in with the other Fassbinder films, such as _Despair_, which are so justly celebrated for their psychological depth and complexity. Beyond this, two aspects of Fassbinder's technique in making _Whity_ deserve special mention. The first is that in _Whity_, one of the first of his films to employ a half-way reputable color process, Fassbinder shows himself to be a great colorist in the tradition of Delacroix, bathing the eyes with the lushest oranges, browns, and reds to be seen this side of a sunset. The palette is one that seems to have existed in film only in the late 60s and early 70s, finding similarly gorgeous expression in Truffaut's _Fahrenheit 451_, Boorman's _Point Blank_, Godard's _La Chinoise_, and Nicolas Roeg's early efforts (_A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to The Forum_ , _Performance_, _Walkabout_, _Don't Look Now_, _The Man Who Fell to Earth_). The second aspect of noteworthy technique is a camera movement that truly has no precedent in film history--a fact which makes the obscurity of _Whity_ among film scholars all the more remarkable. The best example of the technique occurs in a scene in which Ben Nicholson reads his last will and testament to the silent family members surrounding him. During an unbroken ten-minute take, the actors remain virtually motionless, as if posed in some Rembrantian tableaux (and in this way recalling Dreyer's _Day of Wrath_). Against this stasis, the camera pans slowly from one family member to another, following their own sight-lines, as if the camera were recording the trace of their attention. For ten minutes the camera repeats this zig-zag path with methodical precision, while psychedelic, trance-inducing music drones in the background. The greatest merit of the technique (seen also in an equally static scene between Whity and the retarded son in the horse barn) is that it allows the viewer time enough to meditate on the relationships among the characters involved in the tableaux--in this case most profoundly on the relationships of power among family members. It's as if Fassbinder, using film technique, took a snapshot of the family, and then spent ten minutes tracing out with his finger exactly who is dominated by whom, who resents the domination, who is perceiving whom and how, and so on. The technique, which to my knowledge Fassbinder never used again to such great effect, can only be seen as the great innovation that it is, and as such, a powerful tool for the revelation of psychological truth. However, let none of these deeper concerns eclipse the enjoyment to be had watching this bizarre, Teutonic _Dallas_ unfold. Like the best moments in a Warhol film, the high camp of _Whity_ is very, very funny to watch--certainly because it is absurd, which is not to say it is without profound meaning.

Whity from Jim’s Reviews

DVD review of Whity Dan Schneider from Unlikely 2.0, also seen here: User comments from imdb Author: Cosmoeticadotcom (cosmoetica@gmail.com) from United States

Reel.com DVD review [Tod Booth]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer)

Mondo Digital

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

THE NIKLASHAUSEN JOURNEY (Die Niklashauser Fart) – made for TV B- 80

Munich, Starnberg, Feldkirchen (86 mi) May 1970 co-director: Michael Fengler

An adaptation of an actual historical event in 1476 when a shepherd claims he was visited by the Virgin Mary and declares he is the Messiah, causing him to be arrested and burned at the stake, which Fassbinder updates to a shoot-out, Black Panther style, in a Tower of Babel junk car lot, which is supposed to show how and why a revolution fails, similar to the last half of Godard’s WEEKEND, but falls flat, more actors on drugs, starring Michael König, Hanna Schygulla, Margit Carstensen, Kurt Raab, and Fassbinder himself as the Black Monk.

Cinematheque Ontario:

“As Godard’s WEEKEND captured the anarchic spirit of France in the sixties, this rarely seen Fassbinder film reflected sexual and political upheaval in Germany...Fassbinder gleefully jumbles the worlds of medieval Europe, the (then) Third World, postwar Germany and the Roccoco period.”

Chicago Reader (Lisa Alspector)

This 1970 allegory about allegory veers from intellectual exercise into emotional exhortation and blurs the line between theater and film. Nesting complex visual strategies within simpler ones, writer-directors Rainer Werner Fassbinder (who plays a monk in a motorcycle jacket) and Michael Fengler present a series of scenes that demonstrate the martyrdom of a shepherd, who's also a performance artist and revolutionary, after his followers persuade him to abandon his sheep and take up residence in the home of a bourgeois chick who's got a big crush on him. The story alternates between this troupe--allegorical characters within the fiction of the movie as well as the street-theater pieces they perform--and a clan of ecclesiastical and royal types who seem to spend most of their time choreographing decadent scenarios in elaborate interiors. Amazingly simple editing and sound design--most scenes are complete in one shot and use only one or two sound effects or just music in addition to the dialogue--create a minimally realist and hypertheatrical vision of class conflict and potential doom.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Who needs the revolution?" asks Rainer Werner Fassbinder, his black-jacketed back to the camera, in a stark Antiteater tableaux against a red brick wall. The people do, of course, and in this early call-for-arms curio, co-directed for German TV with Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? pal Michael Fengler, Fassbinder mines a feudal past for present-tense guerilla fare -- for him, as for Godard and Glauber Rocha around the same period, the possibility of revolution still throbbed. Ostensibly set in the 15th-century, the story follows a hippiefied shepherd (Michael König) who claims visions of the Madonna, rallies up the masses (or at least a bunch of Fassbinder axioms, including Hanna Schygulla, Günther Kaufmann, Margit Cartensen) against an epicenely oppressive ruler, and gets crucified and burned for his trouble. Bourgeois lucidity is the first casualty of the movie's recklessly anachronistic agit-prop, so that the rehearsal of a Virgin Mary soliloquy gets interrupted by news of the killing of Black Panthers founder Fred Hampton, the shaggy Messiah caps an al fresco sermon with a fervid "Long live Lenin, smash fascism!" and the conceptual audacity of the director's camera movements far outweighs the resources of cinematographer Dietrich Lohmann. In his most explicitly politicized (though far from best) film, Fassbinder suggests a temporal continuum of thwarted upheaval that can only be addressed (and, thus, confronted) by way of frontal artistic attack -- or, as one of the languid sleepwalkers in the opening sequence puts it, "agitation through instruction and militant example." With Kurt Raab.

User comments from imdb Author: adam3000 from Seattle, Washington

One of Fassbinder's first films, 'The Niklashausen Journey' might be the most explicitly political the filmmaker would ever get. Once again - as with all his earlier work that I've seen - Godard's influence is palpable, particularly the messy mythologizing he applied to revolutionaries in 'Weekend' (although from what I've read about Straub-Huillet and other first generation of filmmakers from the New German Cinema, the influences extend much farther beyond that). 'Niklashausen' is a scathing critique of both political radicals and the society that produces them. Unlike Godard, Fassbinder makes this a very specific society, a very German society. The movie draws very clear parallels between religion and revolution, questions both the means and ends of revolutionary violence, suggests similarities between this uprising and the one led by Hitler several decades earlier - and it completely dismisses the ruling class as worthless, absurd fools quick to devastation when their enemies are involved. It works on the viewer in unexpected ways, building on our empathy with the revolutionary cause, while nearly condemning the whole movement, to make us truly care about enacting change - it is not as depressingly claustrophobic as the summary would have you believe. Without the usual melodrama to carry the film along, it does feel like an emotionally distant version of Fassbinder's later films like 'In A Year of 13 Moons' or 'Querelle.' It is difficult to deny that the film is formally and structurally brilliant, however, and of immediate interest to anyone who wants to see yet another side of a genius manifesting itself for the first time, in one of his more fascinating experiments.

User comments from imdb Author: fuzon from London, England

The Niklashausen Journey is very much a product of its time, being halfways between a Goddardian (by way of Brecht) "distanced" telling of a historical tale, full of anachronisms and on-screen commentary, and a hip parable, not unlike an ultra-leftist Godspell with polemic replacing the songs.

The film is based on the life of one Hans Boehm, a shepherd from Niklashausen who, in the early 15th century, had visions of the Virgin Mary, gathered a large popular following amongst the peasantry, increasingly stirred up ill-feeling towards the clergy and nobility and was burned as a as a heretic and enchanter in 1476. In Fassbinder and Fengler's television film (shot on 16mm), a motley group of contemporary types re-enact the shepherd's story as well as talk endlessly about the methods, implications, pitfalls and necessities of political revolution. Along the way, the film suggests not just the mystic revolutionaries of the reformation period but also the German and Russian communists of the early 20th century and the hippies & black panthers contemporaneous to the film's release. The story would seem to suggest that the revolution - although justified by the corruption and guile of the ruling classes - is always doomed; the shepherd himself is a gorgeous blonde youth with little personality whose followers seem to be in the grip of some spell or hysteria, suggesting that he's nothing more than a Pied Piper, Hitler or Charles Manson.

Fassbinder himself plays one of the shepherd's cohorts, walking & talking alongside the group wearing his trademark blue jeans and black leather jacket. At one point one of the female followers chastises him for thinking that happiness can ever be achieved on earth - life on this plane of existence is merely ours to illustrate that there can be no happiness outside of heaven; Fassbinder says nothing either way about this...

The film is rather uncompromisingly lacking in narrative pull, although its amalgam of tableaux, slow zooms and intricately choreographed tracked dialogues does make it filmicly exciting. Basically, it's another of Fassbinder's long, slow steps out of avant-guarde cornerism towards becoming a master of 1970s cinema. Worth catching once, appreciable but difficult to really warm to. Not that it is meant to be taken warmly...

The Niklashausen Journey Jim’s Reviews

VideoVista review Jim Steel

Eye for Film ("Marnie") review [3/5]

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null)

Das Nicklashauser Fart (The Nicklashauser Journey) Tom von Logue Newth from FilmFracture, September 28, 2009

Turner Classic Movies dvd review a compilation of capsule reviews

DVD Times Noel Megahey, reviews the 9-disc Region 2 DVD release, The Rainer Werner Fassbinder Commemorative Collection Volume 1

THE AMERICAN SOLDIER (Der amerikanische Soldat) B 89

Munich (80 mi) August 1970

Fassbinder’s homage to Hollywood gangster films is updated to the 70’s, murder is still for sale, but crime is organized by the State, not the mob, in a film noir world of corrupt police using ruthless killers who live in a perpetual state of utter calm until they are called upon to do a job. Ricky (Karl Scheydt), in his white double-breasted suit and fedora, who learned to kill in Vietnam, is now called upon to kill soldiers, other strangers, and even his girl friend, so overly stylized that it’s filled with humor and an absolutely unforgettable, Sam Peckinpah, slow motion ending with hugely Freudian and gay symbolism, so disgusting it makes you smile. The homage continues with secondary characters named Walsh and Fuller, starring Fassbinder himself as Franz Walsh, also Margarethe von Trotta and Kurt Raab.

Interesting that this film introduced the storyline for Fassbinder’s later film, ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL, in a scene where barmaid Margarethe von Trotta, in a long sequence where she sits on a bed, recounts the story of Emmi and her husband Ali, a 60-something German cleaning lady and a 20-years her junior Moroccan guest worker. According to Fassbinder, “They marry and one day she is murdered. Nobody knows who the killer is – whether it was her husband or one of his Turkish pals. But I didn’t want to tell the story the way it actually happened. I wanted to give the young Turk and the old woman a chance to live together.”

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1971):

“ THE AMERICAN SOLDIER ...is a synthesis of LOVE IS COLDER THAN DEATH and GODS OF THE PLAGUE, and the narrative method is very concrete and professional. The earlier two films were actually accurate reconstructions of the people and atmosphere in Munich, while THE AMERICAN SOLDIER was more a real film and had a real story, and besides, it was larded with quotes from Hollywood films as well as French gangster films, and above all from the films of Raoul Walsh and John Huston.”

Time Out Tony Rayns

Far from Vietnam, indeed. Fassbinder's American soldier is actually a German, who comes home to roost as a hired killer in the Munich underworld. The miasma into which he sinks involves an ageing rent-boy whose time is up, a roving porn-shark-cum-supergrass called Magdalena Fuller, a mother with a pinball machine in her living-room, and a two-timing moll called Rosa von Praunheim. There is no attempt at plausibility, just a relentless insistence on mood (manic depressive) and behaviour patterns (ex-film noir). The gangsters in Fassbinder's earlier movies were sad, pale shadows of their American prototypes; by this time, they've become full-fledged Neuroses. In other words, this film marks a decisive step towards 'real' Fassbinder: the absurdity of its world of second-hand experience invests every cliché with a meaning it never had before.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

1970's The American Soldier shows Fassbinder getting drunk on Godard's experiments in noir. The main character, a gunman hired by the local police to take out criminals they can't dispose of legally, spells out another character's name thusly: "W as in war, A as in Alamo, L as in Lenin, S as in science fiction, C as in crime, H as in hell." For Fassbinder, unlike Godard, film was more a means to an end than an end in itself, so his genre deconstructions don't carry the same weight. Soldier's ending, though, is pure Fassbinder: After eliminating his hero with a deliberately arbitrary twist, Fassbinder stages a scene of grotesque emotionalism that seems to go on for days, with the dead man's brother grabbing onto his lifeless body and flopping around like a dying fish.

Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce

The strongest of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's early noir riffs, trailing the white-suited, white-fedoraed eponymous thug (Karl Scheydt), just back from Vietnam, as he makes the underworld rounds of a chiaroscuro Munich. Although crammed with buffish winks -- hoods playing poker with porno cards under harsh Langian lighting, characters tagged Murnau and Fuller (and, more esoterically, Rosa Von Praunheim), some cutrate Dietrich lip-synching at a dive dubbed "The Lola Montes" -- Fassbinder goes beyond Nouvelle Vague pastiche. Comparisons with Alphaville are de righteur (Scheydt's ice-water hit man is cut out of the same attitudinizing mold as Lemmy Caution, Godard's own trenchcoated signifier of Yank imperialism), though Fassbinder's concerns are postwar German to the core: as in Love is Colder Than Death or Gods of the Plague, film noir tropes are dusted off to connect the characters' sense of spiritual malaise to a nation's cultural displacement. (It's only fitting that, quoting from a vintage Hollywood genre, the filmmaker points back to such legitimate, if transplanted, Germanic presences as Lang, Siodmak and Wilder.) A huge advance on the stylistic wobbliness of Gods of the Plague, the movie keeps druggy, almost Jarmuschian mood and tone compact even when coming up with the most lyrical of interruptions. (My favorite -- forlorn maid Marguarette von Trotta leaning against the railing of a motel bed, plaintively outlining a couple of future Fassbinder projects while Scheydt and some undercover slag fuck on the mattress behind her.) Peter Raben did the narcotizing theme song ("So much tenderness is in my head/So much emptiness is in my bed"), poured unforgettably over the finale's boldly unending, undercranked spoof of Bonnie and Clyde's tommy gun-dance climax. Cinematography by Dietrich Lohmann. With Elga Sorbas, Hark Bohm, Ulli Lommel, Katrin Schaake, Ingrid Craven, Kurt Raab, and Irm Hermann. In black and white.

User comments from imdb Author: hasosch from United States

The München police cannot cope anymore with some of their underworld elements, so they hire Ricky Murphy alias Richard von Rezzori, a German who served for the US in Vietnam, to kill first a gypsy, then a porno-merchant (and by the way also her lover), and last the girlfriend of one of the police detectives. It happens to be exactly this girl who is sent to Ricky when he stays in a hotel and orders a girl. In the scene in the hotel we hear also the story of the house-keeper Emmy who married a much younger man from Northern Africa who killed her. This story has been filmed by Fassbinder with a different end a few years later under the title "Ali: Fear eats the soul". Just at the time of his arrival, Ricky meets his old buddy Franz, and they visit places where they had been together. Ricky also meets his mother and brother, and in this scene we have on the one side a coldness between Ricky and his mother that cannot be increased and a latent homosexual love between Ricky a his slightly retarded brother on the other side.

However, after Ricky has done his duty for the detectives that engaged him, they must get rid of him because otherwise they would have to admit their incapability to solve their problems on their own in front of their boss, an ancient police-chief who seems to be in the hand of his officers. The end scene, in which Ricky and his buddy Franz lose their lives because of a simple "accident", I do not want to spoil here, because the end of "The American Soldier" is an end of such a magnitude of splendor that you will hardly find in any other movie. However, what I want to add is that the message of this movie goes way beyond that of Fassbinder's inclination towards American gangster movies from the 40ies: People who know Fassbinder's work also know that he gave his movies strong political and sociological messages on their ways. "I want my movies to go on in the heads of the audience after they have left the cinema", Fassbinder once said. In this movie, Germans engage an American-German with Vietnam-experience to do the dirty work in Europe, and after he succeeds, instead of paying him the promised sum, they kill him. It seems that Fassbinder just used the decor of Film noir to characterize the years after World II in Germany, since, for a man like Fassbinder, the liberation of Germany by the Allies was not an act of terrorism against the Nazi regime, but a deed for which the American soldiers who cleaned the mess up in Germany have never been adequately rewarded.

User comments from imdb Author: jcappy from ny-vt

Yup, this is full of allusions to brilliant German directors, and French and American cinema, but "The American Soldier" is much more than a clever exercise-- and cuts deeper than film noir. For this, I think, is as much about the Vietnam War, misogyny, and German/American superiority as it is about an underworld hit man. In fact, the genre seems no more than a departure point.

Ricky's inner power is in no way individuated---he's a type, a type produced by powerful entities. He's not a man born, but a male made. He's one of a multiplicity of monsters let loose on the world by the naked display of power--whether it be located in DC or Berlin. His immediate authority resides in his soldier past, and in his male identity--and more specifically, in his heterosexual male identity. He kills men as easily as he commands submission from women.

But he's not a typical hit man. He's cool all right, and does cut the figure. But he seems cumbersome, as if new to his form, his movements contained as if by a low ceiling, his body by an uncomfortable suit. He's "the man" but he seems programmed--and is, simply following orders from his own "the man" who also happens to have state authority. He's detached, indiscriminate, naked in his actions, and impersonal--his mind almost narcoleptic. There seems to be some flaw in his design, as if the suit made to cover the soldier, and the soldier made to cover the killer, are not totally effective---not for him, not for those who control him. His murders have all the raw arbitrary-ness of the automated martial male, created in an era of war treachery that has no end.

Ricky's females, a spectrum of femme fatales, have a malaise about them, as if narcotized by drugs, drink, sex, or more obviously, by a submissiveness to power. Ricky orders them in the same precise way he orders his Ballantine--and with the same certainty of availability. He takes them, literally dumps them, mocks them, uses them and, if they get too close, murders them. He has to drink whiskey before every sexual encounter to negate any emotion or doubt. Gay men suffer a similar scorn from the brute, his contempt for the powerless underwritten by the world of organized violence that created and controls him. "So much tenderness in my head, so much emptiness in my bed" is heard over and over during Ricky and his brother's final sex/death scene. Which might be interpreted that in a perverse world poisoned by super masculinity and violence, sex with the dead is more possible--or preferable than sex with the living.

The American Soldier Jim’s Reviews

The House Next Door (Immediate Impressions #4) [Todd VanDerWerff] Keith Uhlich

Only The Cinema [Ed Howard]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger)

Fulvue Drive-in Nate Goss

Eye for Film (Keith Hennessey Brown) review [2.5/5]

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3/5]

VideoVista review Gary McMahon

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

Turner Classic Movies dvd review a compilation of capsule reviews

DVD Times Noel Megahey, reviews the 9-disc Region 2 DVD release, The Rainer Werner Fassbinder Commemorative Collection Volume 1

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

BEWARE OF A HOLY WHORE (Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte) B 88

Sorrento, Italy (103 mi) September 1970

A movie about the making of a movie, shot in an upscale Spanish seaside hotel during the filming of WHITY, the “holy whore” is cinema, who both inspires and degrades her devotees, with reflections on Godard’s CONTEMPT, Fassbinder-style. The film is about a doomed production unit where both the cast and crew are besieged by every possible thing that can go wrong, where nerves are on edge as they wait for the director to show up, the producer scrambles to pull the strings to hold onto the ever-dwindling funding, and it turns into a very difficult and troubling, self-destructive experience, starring Eddie Constantine as himself, Hanna Schygulla, Fassbinder (as Sascha), and the usual suspects.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1971):

“With this film, we finally buried our first hope, namely the antitheater. I had no idea how things would go forward after that, but I knew that things couldn’t continue as they were...Much of the films up to BEWARE OF A HOLY WHORE satisfied me quite simply because the films expressed my situation at that time very concretely...If you see them together, it becomes clear that they were made by someone who put them in his sensibility, his aggressiveness, and his fear. Nonetheless, I don’t quite count these first 9 movies; for they are too elitist and too private, and they actually were made only for us and for our friends.”

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

By 1971, Fassbinder was up to his 10th feature, and if the Godard influence on Beware of a Holy Whore is just as strong, Fassbinder expertly reworks Contempt to serve his own needs. Though it's ostensibly about filmmaking, more than half the film goes by before you see a camera (compare to Contempt, which features a camera in the first shot); what Fassbinder's really interested in are the dynamics of a group of brittle temperaments confined to an enclosed space (in this case, a Spanish hotel) for weeks at a time. The results, as you'd imagine, aren't pretty, with couples uncoupling and re-coupling without provocation (most notably, Hanna Schygulla makes nice with Alphaville's Eddie Constantine), broken glasses, bloodied egos and more temper tantrums than you can shake a Xanax at. And yet, Fassbinder almost dares you to be bored, keeping the camera distant and letting the pauses linger. By the time it's done, you may feel like climbing the walls, but you'll be fascinated all the same.

User comments from imbd Author FilmBoy999

I saw the restored print today at the film forum it was stunning and lush and beautifully photographed. If you can't understand that Fassbinder's early films came out of his experiences in the theater in Germany, and the plays he wrote very often featured a group of people standing around talking, then you'll never understand this film or Fassbinder. This film is about Fassbinder, and like all his films it crosses genres widely mixing the obvious Warhol influence with films about films like Contempt, Day For Night, 81/2. It does feature a large cast of people and like the Chelsea Girls sitting around talking about nothing for four hours, Beware Of a Holy Whore features a large group of people doing whatever they want and catches them in various states of anger, sadness, drunkenness, etc. The dialogue is often amusing, but the monotony of the experience is what's important - again the link to Warhol. Moreover the director character in the film seems to me to be exactly a representation of Fassbinder and by the final half hour you really come to feel his frustration at everyone and life itself. This was Fassbinder when he directed, screaming , shouting at everyone. His reputation was widespread. In this film Fassbinder realizes his ridiculousness and decides to do it up - and that's where the self-parody comes in. If you want to see this movie for a comedy experience, next. The film is impressive, interesting, beautifully shot - one exceptional moment was the sunset shot where Jeff gets punched in the stomach. And the editing of the film half really worked well, cutting between scenes the way they did. Quite Effective. Really.

Beware of a Holy Whore Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine

Comparisons between Beware of a Holy Whore and Godard's Contempt and Truffaut's Day for Night are unavoidable, but even if the film is not quite as successful as those two films it's infinitely funnier. At once Fassbinder's most accessible and self-indulgent film, Beware of a Holy Whore catalogs the emotional baggage of actors holed up inside a Spanish seaside hotel during a tedious and under-financed movie shoot. The film is, at first glance, about making movies. Upon closer look, though, it's really about Rainer Werner Fassbinder making movies. The many events depicted here are more or less variations of similar melodramas his actors suffered on the set of the remarkable Whity, which was filmed in Andalusia the year before. The film-within-the-film's vicious director, Jeff (Lou Castel, wearing Fassbinder's signature leather jacket throughout), sleeps with both men and woman and tortures everyone around him with unrepentant passion. There are entirely too many characters in the film to keep any of their many emotional and physical entanglements straight (the women are all drama queens, the men latent queens), which is of course the point of this offbeat self-caricature. Beware of a Holy Whore is essentially Contempt by way of Andy Warhol's Factory. Similar to what Warhol was doing in the '60s and early '70s, Fassbinder spent his all-too-brief career in Germany cultivating a radical free-form aesthetic with a select group of actors. The characters in Beware of a Holy Whore are all prone to random emotional fits and schizophrenic outbursts, and as such it's almost impossible to truly appreciate the film without some knowledge of the camp classics Paul Morrissey directed for Warhol (from 1966's Chelsea Girls to 1970's Trash). The film begins with one actor telling an elaborate child-like joke about a poor little girl coming to terms with the fact that she's really a three-foot tall male criminal and ends with a famous quote by Thomas Mann ("And I say to you that I am weary to death of depicting humanity without partaking of humanity") that points to Fassbinder's distancing approach. Even when they were at their most comical, Fassbinder's films were always about the same thing: human brutality. With Beware of a Holy Whore, Fassbinder seemed to acknowledge that his portraitures of human suffering on film meant nothing if he was subjecting his actors to the same melodrama he thrust upon his characters. This is cinema as apology.

Beware of a Holy Whore Jim’s Reviews

Nick's Flick Picks (Full Review)

Only The Cinema [Ed Howard]

eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz)

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

DVD Times Noel Megahey, reviews the 9-disc Region 2 DVD release, The Rainer Werner Fassbinder Commemorative Collection Volume 1

TV Guide review

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

RECRUITS IN INGOLSTADT – made for TV B 84

aka: Pioneers in Ingolstadt (Pioniere in Ingolstadt)

Landsberg am Lech, Munich (84 mi) November 1970

The recruits or pioneers are actually workers in a government-backed construction project, similar to the WPA workers hired during the American depression of the 1930’s, hired here to build a bridge in the middle of town, and reminded at every turn by the local townsfolk that their social strata casts them among the lowest rung on the ladder. Adapted from Marieluise Fleisseur’s 1929 play, which Brecht admired, but set in the present where disaffected workers drink, have sex, brutalize the mayor’s effeminate son, and drown their field officer, boredom broken only by danger and mischief, with Hanna Schygulla, Harry Baer, and Irm Hermann, made for German television, the 1^st Fassbinder film to be invited to the Cannes Film Festival.

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)

Like his hero Douglas Sirk, Rainer Werner Fassbinder explored the dark side of human sexuality in Pioneers in Ingolstadt, the story of a group of soldiers building a bridge in a small town during peacetime. The town's women, including a loose tart (Irm Hermann) and a naïve maid (Hanna Schygulla) begin to flirt with the soldiers, one to have sex, the other to fall in love. The soldiers play with the power of their uniforms and ranks, often making decisions based not on what they themselves want, but on what they don't want others to have. It's a powerful film, shot quickly and economically with incredible cinematic poetry.

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Whity seriously kick-started Rainer Werner Fassbinder's career, but before the German bad boy left for Spain to shoot the film in early 1970, he directed the quickie Pioneers in Ingolstadt for German television. Though not exactly insignificant, the film is still a minor work for a director best known for thought-provoking observations of social exclusion like Fox and His Friends and tear-jerkers like Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Pioneers in Ingolstadt was one of only a handful of productions whose source material wasn't written by Fassbinder himself, though it bears mentioning that Marieluise Fleisser (whose 1929 play the director adapts here for the screen) was a favorite of Bertolt Brecht's. The film catalogs the sexual exploits of army recruits sent to the film's titular town in order to build a bridge. The film is difficult to place on an actual timeline, though it appears as if its soldiers are members of the Nazi party. Fassbinder doesn't do much with this small and ultimately insignificant detail, though he seems to recognize a certain irony in having a black man as a member of the film's pioneer ranks. Fassbinder regulars Irm Hermann and Hanna Schygulla star as two housemaids-cum-whores whose lives are shattered when the men love them and subsequently leave them. It's in the hopes and emotional disappointments of the film's women that Fassbinder evokes not a war between nations but an equally destructive battle between the sexes. Appropriately, these little wars between the film's men and women are sometimes unfounded and end in bitter regret, but a careless Fassbinder only seems half-interested in the emotional devastations he charts. This is not the quintessential aesthetic detachment vital to other Fassbinder masterworks (and crucial to the theater of Brecht and the cinema of Douglas Sirk). Fassbinder is clearly bored…and it shows.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

A troop of German soldiers arrives at tiny Ingolstadt with orders to build a wooden bridge, though, besides a couple of shots of the guys hammering the same beams over and over, their interests are more attuned to brawling, boozing, and whoring -- the last amply supplied by the bored female populace, embodied by forlorn Hanna Schygulla and her looser pal Irm Hermann. Both housemaids ditching their aprons for microskirts, the two take to the streets for uniformed horndogs, with Hermann diving into trick-turning with a vengeance (earning the hatred of the other gals) while the still-romantic Schygulla, already with the boss' son (Rudolf Waldemar Brem) hounding her ass, has to fall for the most narcissistically dislocated of the grunts (Harry Baer). In this Rainer Werner Fassbinder TV quickie, Schygulla's love for the soldier (which inevitably brings about her misery) is not so much an emotion as an incantation of an emotion -- no campy put-on, but the realization of a character who wants to believe in love, in the possibility of regeneration from a society's spiritually coagulated stasis. Somnambulistically terse, the movie reaches for Brecht (it's no surprise that the source material, Marieluise Fleisser's 1929 play, was a favorite of Herr Bertold's) but ultimately settles for disinterested sadomasochism. If little of the military setting matches the pungency of Claire Denis' Beau Travail, bits of Fassbinderia still twirl in between the Antiteater tableaux -- an interminable circling pan around a tavern of dancing gropers may be more mobility than cameraman Dietrich Lohmann can deal with, though a brief interlude between a loudmouth sergeant and a tiny Lana Turner wannabe shows how a mere dance for the director can be a battleground of emotional brutality. With Walter Sedlmayr and Günther Kaufmann.

User comments from imdb Author Itchload from MA

If there's one thing that really bothers me about Fassbinder's history is how boggled his film chronology is. For someone who improved at such a consistent rate, it's really annoying in the case of his first 11 "anti-theater" films, that no one seems to know what order they came in.

According to the information on the recent DVD issue of this movie, "Pioneers" is the last of those first 11. Now, I could have sworn that "Beware of a Holy Whore" was Fassbinder's 11th film (which would make more sense, given that movie's self-reflexive 'biting the hand that feeds you' nature). Alas, maybe this one is number 11.

On a technical level, this is very much "early Fassbinder", which is best evidenced by Dietrich Lohmann's early cinematography. When working with Michael Ballhaus, Fassbinder was able to have his camera swoop around his characters. Even if they still weren't doing anything, it at least gave some external feel to the movie. Dietrich Lohmann is the polar opposite. He just points the camera, and occasionally pans it, as in one seen that pans back and forth between two characters talking for about 5 minutes. Fassbinder always loved long takes, and always liked giving a theatrical look to his movies, especially the early ones. Michael Ballhaus was able to nail this, but Lohmann's camera work always seemed a bit amateur. It worked great in "Effi Briest", and certain scenes of "Merchant of Four Seasons" and "American Soldier", but I can see why Michael Ballhaus slowly became Fassbinder's preferred camera man going into the mid-'70s.

That said, this movie is also indicative of Fassbinder's early career in that is stars seedy low lives. Before, he usually used gangsters, here he uses whores and bored, drunken soldiers (or 'pioneers'). They sit and drink and do typical Fassbinder stuff (occasionally have sex, occasionally beat someone up). There's some plot here and there. It definitely gives you what you're looking for when renting a Fassbinder movie, but certain scenes had a Fassbinder-by-numbers quality. In one of the final scenes, Hanna Schylla starts chasing after the morally bankrupt guy she's fallen in love with. I said under my breath "she's going to trip and fall and start to cry". I was right. Maybe I've seen too many Fassbinder movies, or maybe Fassbinder was treading a bit too much water with this one.

Like I said, this movie does the trick if you're looking for a Fassbinder fix, and in that, I have to commend it. It's just a movie best reserved for the devoted fans.

Pioneers in Ingolstadt Jim’s Reviews

not coming to a theater near you (Matt Bailey)

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer)

Mondo Digital

THE MERCHANT OF FOUR SEASONS (Händler der vier Jahreszeiten) B+ 92

Munich (89 mi) August 1971

A highly rated melodrama, Douglas Sirk style, supposedly based on Fassbinder’s uncle who was treated like an outcast for taking up the working class occupation of selling vegetables from a pushcart, only to be welcomed back into the fold when he made a bundle doing it. The film is a character study of a fruit peddler (Hans Hirschmüller) who eventually drinks himself to death in front of his friends, a premonition of Fassbinder’s own fate, a stark look at unexceptional, everyday, ordinary life, constantly frustrated by social convention, showing a surprising degree of sympathy for the characters, despite their brutality and betrayal. This is a well-balanced narrative, featuring some terrific ensemble acting including Irm Hermann and Hanna Schygulla, the 1^st Fassbinder film to expand the emotional edges using a very precise, beautiful style, also a song entitled “Little Love” allegedly written by Fassbinder for the film according to Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation, disputed by Ingrid Caven (No morals without style) who claims Fassbinder never wrote a note, that the real composer is Peer Raben, winner of the Gold Filmband in German Film Prize Competition.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1973):

“THE MERCHANT comes from a period in which I had gotten intensely involved with the melodramas of Douglas Sirk and had learned a couple of things from them; I had figured out that the public likes them, and is interested in them, to put it simply. For example, the story with Karl Scheydt (who plays Anzell in the film), where he spends the night with the wife of the fruit seller and then later comes in again as an employee. Previously I would not actually have done that, because to me that would have been like something in a dream. And suddenly I began trusting myself.”

Chicago Reader (Don Druker)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder has a genius for detailing the pain of suppressed emotional states, and even at its most achingly deliberate, his style in dealing with the petit bourgeois mentality is a source of endless fascination. This 1971 feature, originally shot for German television, chronicles the struggles of a fruit peddler to build a semblance of a life for himself and his wife--with whom he maintains only the barest contact--in postwar Germany. With Hans Hirschmuller, Irm Hermann, and Hanna Schygulla. In German with subtitles. 89 min.

Time Out

Made before Fear Eats the Soul, which it resembles in many respects, this deceptively muted melodrama chronicles the 'rubbing out' of a character found oddly irrelevant by those around him: a man who dreamed of being an engineer, but had to settle for a fruit and vegetable stall, his aspirations constantly frustrated by his social circumstances. The film builds with remarkable power towards a concluding scene in which the process of Hans' destruction is revealed to be blindly self-perpetuating. Fassbinder's regular ensemble perform with enormous precision, and there's a remarkable dinner party scene in which, in a kind of mesmeric shorthand, the mechanics of destruction are revealed, working like clockwork.

User comments from imdb Author: Itchload from Massachusetts

In Fassbinder's earlier films, his ideas sometimes surpased his ability to execute them. He was always a great writer, but it took him some time to get his style of camera work and storytelling down pat.

The Merchant of Four Seasons is one of Fassbinder's first movie to make great use of color, from the bright green pears in the merchant's cart to the bright red roses at the funeral (a funeral in a Fassbinder movie? who'd have thought).

His camera work was getting there too, but it was still fairly minimalist. The occasional zooms seem a bit uncomfortable at times and unnatural, but then again, Fassbinder was still coming out of his purely avant garde phase. This might be because Michael Ballhaus isn't behind the camera, but instead the slightly inferior Dietrich Lohmann.

Still, this is Fassbinder, and you get your fix here. Broken dreams shown so vividly and unflinchingly as to alienate audience and drive them into a depressed stupor. Just what the doctor ordered. An early classic that shows remarkable progression when compared to his first films released only 2 years prior.

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

The Merchant of Four Seasons is a pivotal work in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's career because it was the first film he made after meeting and befriending his muse Douglas Sirk in 1971. The film is more or less a variant of Fox and His Friends, except Hans Hirschmüller stars as the film's born-loser whose human spirit is crushed by a cruel society, and the great Hanna Schygulla appears as the proverbial voice of wisdom common to so many Fassbinder films. Via an elliptical narrative structure consisting of various flashback sequences, Fassbinder evokes Hans' many disappointments, beginning with Hans returning from the war after several years away and being berated by his mother ("The good die young, and people like you come back," she says after hearing about the death of the young friend Hans had taken into the army with him). Though he innocently believes that a gift of flowers will win him a marriage proposal, Hans is rejected by the great love of his life (Ingrid Caven) for being a fruit seller. Frustration quickly sets in and Hans turns to liquor and violence, beating his wife, Irmgard (Irm Hermann), and driving her away from the home of his judgmental family. Sirk's influence is most evident in Fassbinder's subversions of Irmgard's domestic bliss. When she flees from Hans and is propositioned by a man in a car, Fassbinder frames her in front of a department store window containing mannequins dressed in bridal attire. That a nearby display is that of a sleek living room unit reinforces just how little they have. Hans and Irmgard's daughter, Renate (Andrea Schober), repeatedly bears witness to her parents' embarrassments: she catches her mom having sex with a future employee of her father's and later watches as another employee takes on the role of surrogate father when Hans is too detached from the world to help her with her homework. "I told you, he'll live if he wants to," says Schygulla's Anna to the little girl, pointing to Hans' inability to fend off the collective weight of the emotional disasters that have beset him his entire life. If not quite as solid as Fox and His Friends, The Merchant of Four Seasons is every bit as critical of its lecherous, hypocritical German society as it is with the victims who seemingly perpetuate their own damnation.

User comments from imdb Author: The_Void from Beverley Hills, England

The Merchant of Four Seasons is a film about a lack of love. The film starts off with the main character; Hans Epp, returning from a spell in the foreign legion. He returns to his mother, not to be told how much she loves him, or how much she's missed him; but to be told that he is worthless and, even worse, that she would have preferred the man he went with to have come back instead. It is the character's relation to women that makes this film so hateful; the fact that his wife is taller than him is symbolic of his relation to the other gender; he is consistently humiliated by them, and it is through his relations with them that his life isn't as great as it could have been. This is also shown clearly by the way he treats his wife after a drink. He lost his job as a policeman through lust for a woman, and even his wife; a woman that is supposed to love him, never really shows any affection for him. Even at the end, his wife is more bothered about what her and her daughter will do than the state of her husband.

The Merchant of Four Seasons is a thoroughly unpleasant film. There isn't a scene in the movie where someone is happy, and not only that; but the movie seems deliriously blissful to wallow in the misery of it's central characters. The movie is certainly not recommended to anyone who is currently having a hard time, that's for sure. Despite all the misery, the film never steps out the bounds of reality; every event in this movie can - and most probably has - happened, and that only serves in making the movie more shocking. The film is, of course, helmed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder; the cult German director that committed suicide in 1982. This is only my second taste of the man's work, but through just two films, it is easy to get an idea of the type of art that he creates. Both films are downtrodden and gritty - yet realistic pieces of art. His characterization in this movie is subtle; we only ever get to know the characters through their plight's and not through their character. This is a very clever way of showing the audience that it is their surroundings that define the people in the film, not the people themselves - and as nearly everyone that sees the film knows what living in an urban society is like, it wont difficult for the majority of people to relate to.

The Merchant of Four Seasons is not a film that is easily forgettable; the movie is high on substance and low on style, and that makes for a very memorable picture, and one that everyone who considers themselves to be a fan of cinema should experience. It is with that in my mind that I give this film my highest recommendations; it's not sweet and it's not pleasant, but you will not see a more realistic portrayal of depression, and this is most certainly a movie that will stay with you.

User comments from imdb Author: Graham Greene from United Kingdom

The Merchant of Four Seasons established a number of trademarks, both visual and thematic, that would become further refined and much more expressive in the Fassbinder films to follow. Here, for example, we see the action unfold through the eyes of a tortured anti-hero and his literally abused wife, as they strive to put aside petty differences, the ghosts of the past and the animosity of friends, family and neighbours, in an attempt to overcome the monotonous misery of everyday life. However, as with most Fassbinder films, the daily grind often ends up being too severe - and generally things never go to plan - leaving most of the characters feeling damaged, depressed, worthless or worse. With that in mind, it would be easy to dismiss Fassbinder's work as nothing more than misanthropic self-pity, yet to do so would require us to disregard the three-dimensional characters, the meaningful dialog and the heart that seems to beat at the centre of all of his films.

Unlike many other director's who have mined the social-realist path, Fassbinder never looks down on his characters to gloat or heap scorn, and instead, seems to have a genuine warmth and love for then. That said, he respects the fact that such real-life archetypes can often fall foul of the system, ending up as nothing more than damaged shells forced to enter into a downward spiral that takes time, faith and self-belief to truly escape from. The central notion of The Merchant of Four Seasons then, involves a character that has fallen into one such spiral that has crushed his very will to escape. So, like the characters in later works like Fox and his Friends, Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven and In A Year With 13 Moons, Hans Epp becomes a character that has, through circumstance and upbringing, been led towards an ultimate downfall that he both accepts and embraces. As you can imagine from such a bare-bones description, The Merchant of Four Seasons is bleak stuff, offering an honest and at times rather ugly depiction of failure, despair, contempt and alienation.

Fassbinder attempts a purposely fractured narrative with The Merchant of Four Seasons, beginning the film with a scene in which Hans returns from a stint in the Foreign Legion. He expects a heroes welcome, but instead, is chastised by his mother for waking her up at such an ungodly hour, before lamenting the fact that the young man dragged along by Hans to fight by his side has been killed, whilst her errant son has returned ("the good die young, and people like you come back" she says, before closing the door in his face). The scene establishes the relationship between Hans and his mother perfectly, and will go some lengths towards explaining Hans's often quite violent relationship with his own wife Irmgard. Later scenes, presented in similarly fragmented flashbacks, inform us of Hans's past as a promising scholar before he dropped out to join the Legion, his dismissal from the police force after accepting sexual favours from a prostitute, the humiliation in the eyes of his family and friends of having to become a common fruit vendor, and his inability to woo the great love of his life.

Like many of Fassbinder's key characters, Hans remains a tragic anti-hero. On the one hand we feel pity (and to some extent empathy) for this short, overweight character, so unfortunate in life that he's even ended up married to a tall slender woman who's very appearance can only exaggerate his physical shortcomings, but at the same time he comes across as quite vile and detestable. The scene in which the drunken Hans viciously beats his wife - whilst his young daughter tries desperately to protect her mother - is captured in a static medium shot that goes on for so long that the actions run from the heartbreaking, to the comedic, to the tragic and beyond!! Even when Hans seems to be getting his life back together, finally winning the respect of his family and even establishing a successful working relationship with his old Legion pal Harry, there's still something missing. Fassbinder's point seems to be that the failures of our early life can only dictate the direction of our adult life, whilst one scene in particular, in which Hans's daughter Renate asks her aunt Anna if her father is going to die, seems to sum up the soul of the film perfectly, with Anna replying "he will live as long as he wants to live".

Ultimately, The Merchant of Four Seasons is a film about a character resigned to a life from which there is no escape... a life in which his very presence is enough to poison the lives of those around him!! Hans Hirschmüller's performance as the tragic Hans is exceptional stuff, managing to elicit a degree of sympathy for this dark and complicated character. As great as Hirschmüller is, he is far eclipsed by Fassbinder regular Irm Hermann, who offers a touching and sympathetic performance as Hans's loveless and equally complex wife. Further support is offered by Hanna Schygulla, Klaus Löwitsch, Ingrid Caven and Kurt Raab... though the film belongs to Fassbinder, who here begins to develop the style that would later lead to masterworks like The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Fear Eats the Soul, Fox and His Friends, The Marriage of Maria Braun and In A Year With 13 Moons. Though perhaps too morose and continually bleak for some viewers, The Merchant of Four Seasons remains an intelligent, honest and subtly affecting look at failure, alienation and despair.

The Merchant of Four Seasons Jim’s Reviews, which includes material for the Commemorative Collection Volume 1 DVD essay

The Merchant of Four Seasons • Senses of Cinema Girish Shambu, July 25, 2003

Bitter Harvest - From the Current - The Criterion Collection Chuck Stephens Criterion essay, June 4, 2015

The Merchant of Four Seasons - Jump Cut Structures of Alienation, by Barbara Leaming from Jump Cut, 1976, also seen here: The Merchant of Four Seasons

The Merchant of Four Seasons • Senses of Cinema Girish Shambu, July 25, 2003

The Lumière Reader Steve Garden

“The Merchant of Four Seasons” (1971) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder Victor Enyutin from Acting Out Politics

Reel.com DVD review [Pam Grady] Special Edition

Eye for Film ("Marnie") review [4/5]

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4]

VideoVista review James A. Stewart

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3.5/5]

Strictly Film School Acquarello

FilmExposed Magazine Chris Power

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

Turner Classic Movies dvd review a compilation of capsule reviews

DVD Times Noel Megahey, reviews the 9-disc Region 2 DVD release, The Rainer Werner Fassbinder Commemorative Collection Volume 1

TV Guide review

The New York Times (Nora Sayre)

THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT (Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant) A 97

Worpswede (124 mi) January 1972

Cramped, but wonderful look at the personal interplay between three lesbians and their struggle for dominance – no men, except for a renaissance phallus on the wall overseeing all, as Fassbinder explores the motivating and destructive forces of love, the mechanics of sexual captivation and its emotional upheaval, featuring a brilliant style and drama, with extraordinary character development, especially interesting to see Irm Hermann as the silent slave who is always on the outer fringes of the frame, as if she’s not allowed to protrude any further, creating a hermetically sealed environment accompanied by the music of Verdi and The Platters, very subtle directing from one of his own plays, this is one of Fassbinder’s greatest works.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1973):

“Marlene leaves because she had accepted her role as the oppressed and exploited one and because in reality she is frightened by the freedom offered to her. Freedom means, specifically, having to think about her life, and she isn’t used to that. She had always acted like a commando and never made her own decisions. So freedom scared her, and when she finally abandons Petra, she doesn’t go towards freedom, in my opinion, but in search of another position as a slave.”

Adrian Martin, from 1001 FILMS YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

For many prominent gay artists, George Kukor’s THE WOMEN (1939) has proved an irresistible model for cinematic storytelling in a queer mode: a group of women stuck together in a house, their destinies nominally defined and dominated by of-screen males, but lived through the melodramatic intensity of same-sex exchanges.

THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT – cheekily subtitled “a case history” – is Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s lesbian variation on this model. Preserving and indeed exaggerating the claustrophobic theatricality of his play, Fassbinder offers a parade of chic women who visit Petra (Margit Carstensen), a fashion designer, her mute and ever-obedient servant Marlene (Irm Hermann) [and a sultry, cruel model (Hanna Schygulla) who ends up making the master her slave, also starring Eva Mattes.] Psychological domination and expert game playing are Petra’s forte (she gives good phone) and, in her lair, transactions are a dance in and around her bed – while the seethingly jealous Marlene types and sketches forever in the background.

The possibilities that arise for camp humor are many, such as the ironically contrapuntal use of old pop hits, but Fassbinder keeps it cool. His film builds to a simple but valuable life lesson for those embroiled in emotionally sadomasochistic relations, which for Fassbinder means everyone: “The weaker” in any situation has one ultimate, devastating weapon – the power to walk away.

Interesting thoughts from Edward Greenfield from American Record Guide, a critical review of classical music recordings:

The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant is the first opera in history shorter than the drama on which it was based, even though word for word it uses the same text. The leading Irish composer, Gerald Barry, has drawn his inspiration from the 1972 film by the controversial German director, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Set in five brief acts, it tells the story of Petra, a fashionable dress designer, who, after her failed marriage, falls obsessively in love with Karin, a gauche young airhead. Brisk and direct where the film spreads languorously with long periods of silence, this unexpected major success with a strong all-female cast was given its world premiere in September 2005, as it opened the English National Opera’s current season at the Coliseum.

By severely compressing the drama and using an approachable but generally abrasive idiom (thank goodness for surtitles), Barry intensifies the story of Petra’s obsession with a selfish, disturbed girl who in self-pity reports the childhood trauma of the murder of her mother by her father. Gawky in the first two acts when Petra first meets her, Karin becomes a beautiful and successful fashion model, thanks to her mentor, but quickly proves so lazy, drunken, and self-obsessed that even Petra’s indulgence is undermined. Karin, not seen in the last two acts, remains an ominous presence, threatening more tragedy.

What makes this sordid story vivid is not just the vitality and speed of Barry’s music with its jangling brass, but the teasing mixture of dark tragedy, hysterical emotions, and unexpected comedy. The audience never knows whether to laugh or cry. This is brilliantly backed in Richard Jones’s production with evocative sets and costumes by the designer, Ultz. Spread right across the broad Coliseum stage, the sets on different levels picture all the rooms in Petra’s apartment in trendy 1960’s style. In addition to Petra’s mother, daughter, and close friend Sidonie, the key figure is Marlene, the much put-on secretary and slavish factotum. At the final curtain, there is just a hint that Petra, in finally showing concern for Marlene, has overcome her obsession with Katrin.

Barry’s brilliant coup is to make Marlene a non-singing character even though she is at the center of every scene. Deservedly, Linda Kitchen, magnetic as Marlene, regularly got the biggest cheer of all at the end. The role of Petra, touchingly portrayed by Stephanie Friede, singing strongly, was set against the deeply unsympathetic Karin, well sung and acted by Rebecca von Lipinski. The conductor, Andre de Ridder, drew out fully the power of Barry’s striking but unlyrical score.

Time Out

If Fear Eats the Soul used Emmi and Ali's improbable relationship as a key to deep-set patterns of social prejudice and fear, then the slightly earlier Bitter Tears sketches the currents of dominance and submission that lie beneath the surface of any human relationship. This time, the focus is gay rather than straight: fashion designer Petra (once widowed, once divorced) develops a fiercely possessive crush on her model Karin, and, as soon as the one-sided affair reaches its necessary end, starts wallowing in theatrical self-pity. Coldly described, the set and costume design and the hothouse atmosphere represent so much high-camp gloss; but once again this careful stylisation enables Fassbinder to balance between parody of an emotional stance and intense commitment to it. He films in long, elegant takes, completely at the service of his all-female cast, who are uniformly sensational.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

The Fassbinder retrospective goes out on a high note with the final screening of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972). Adapted from Fassbinder's own play, the film hardly hides its theatrical origins, turning them instead to its advantage. Rather than camouflage the proscenium, Petra makes it a prison, a gilded cage of suffocating aestheticism. The symbolism is hopelessly over-determined: Petra (Margit Carstensen) is a fashion designer who lives in a loft cluttered with mannequins and the just-as-talkative Marlene (Irm Hermann, Fassbinder's stock punching-bag), her silently suffering maid. Cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (who went on, of course, to a long career collaborating with Martin Scorsese) composes every frame within an inch of its life, trapping the figures with their own beauty. The exception is Karin (Hanna Schygulla), the comely young model who floats into Petra's life and becomes the subject of Petra's instant obsession. In a rare instance of a Fassbinder character actually deserving her fate, Petra becomes the victim of the same emotional cruelty she's shown Marlene, who is quite obviously in love with her mistress: Karin exploits Petra's amour fou but never returns her affection, setting her up for a cataclysmic fall. An incredible confluence of human insight and artistic expression, Petra is Fassbinder at his most over-the-top, but also his most exacting.

Edinburgh U Film Society [Spiros Gangas]

This is at first glance oblique but ultimately deeply penetrating study of the way relationships are constructed and the essential feature of them which according to Fassbinder is no other than power. Here power alternates in actual or oflen in purely symbolic terms between several women in a room, in what may be regarded as one of the most successful attempts to present a theatrical play onto the screen.

Petra Von Kant is a fashion designer and lives with her assistant. She soon though employs a new model and a lesbian relationship between them unfolds almost immediately. This relationship remains brief as Petra is abandoned by her "newly-acquired' lover...

Fassbinder provides here a transparent examination of the dynamics of dominance and submission aiming to transcend the strict limits of the homosexual nature of the relationship, and to reach a more general level. In this goal he is entirely successful. The way abuse of power inhibits true communication and the way it enhances estrangement is presented through various confrontations: husband and wife, employer and employee, mother and daughter. The result, as one would expect, is detrimental to both parties. Fassbinder throws in simultaneously, all sorts of issues which are not directly linked to the main theme but they somehow cohere perfectly with it. He juxtaposes kitsch with art, and he compensates for the coldness of his characters with some incredibly moving moments of personal confrontation.

User comments from imdb Author Galina from Virginia, USA

"The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant" (1972) - was the first Fassbinder's film I saw many years ago in Moscow and it had started my fascination and interest in the work of the enormously talented man who was a writer/director/producer/editor/ actor for almost all his movies. "The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant" is a screen adaptation of the earlier Fassbinder's play and it never leaves the apartment of Petra Von Kant an arrogant, sarcastic, and successful fashion designer who constantly mistreats and humiliates her always silent and obedient assistant Marianne (Irm Hermann, with whom Fassbinder made 24 movies). As a background for Petra's apartment, Fassbinder uses the blowup of Poussin's painting "Midas and Bacchus." The use of the mural is ironic on more than one level. Nude Bacchus stands in the center of the mural and is the only male presence in a film populated entirely with women. Petra, not unlike legendary Midas wished for herself a golden girl, young and beautiful Karin with golden hair (Hanna Schygulla, another Fassbinder's muse with whom he made over 20 films). As with Midas from legend, it turned to be a huge mistake for Petra who learned herself what abuse, indifference, and humiliation meant. With just a few characters locked in the claustrophobic and suffocating atmosphere of the apartment, the film is never slow or boring thanks to the young director/writer story-telling ability and to magic camera work by Michael Ballhaus ("Goodfellas", "The Last Temptation of Christ", and "After Hours" among others). It is hard to believe that such a gorgeous looking movie was shot for ten days only. I've read that Fassbinder was able to make so many movies in such a short period of time because they were cheaply produced - no special effects, no big action scenes, no exotic locations. This is true but his movies are most certainly not cheap - highly intelligent, thought provoking, always excellently acted and beautiful or perhaps I've been lucky and have not seen the ones that don't fit the description. 9.5/10

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Not exactly the most comfortable film of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's career, the Sapphic haute couture bitchfest The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (a major influence on Francois Ozon's 8 femmes) is also his most oft-quoted. And it's easy to see why, what with rhythmic rants like: "He stank like a man. The way men stink. What had once had its charms now turned my stomach and brought tears to my eyes." Margit Carstensen stars as the film's eponymous fashion designer, a divorced whiner who falls hopelessly and obsessively in love with one of her models, Karin (Hanna Schygulla). Fassbinder uses the claustrophobic geometry of the film (for two hours, his grueling camera never leaves Petra's hermetic quarters) to strangle the film's women and to distance them physically and emotionally from each other, cataloging the various force du jours their individual hysterias provoke. Having divorced some time ago the husband she no longer loved, Carsensen's bored fashionista now grapples with the implications of her love for women. She's drawn to Karin not only for her beauty but for the subservience the up-and-coming ingénue seems to promise her. But in Karin's emotional turnaround in the film's nihilistic last act, Fassbinder envisions a proletarian uprising against an oppressive bourgeois. Irm Hermann stars as Petra's perpetually silent servant girl, who spends much of the film typing in a corner for her master and observing her eventual downfall. And in Petra's relationship with her daughter, a naïve little baby dyke fresh out of boarding school, Fassbinder allows Petra to declare and define her notions of maternal power and female control. The film is a fascinating but strange document of the trickle-down effects of power and an even stranger observation of the way women treat and sometimes enslave each other, but Fassbinber's galvanizing aesthetic approach to the material, however fitting, is so unbearably oppressive that it borders on the pathological. For his audience, the only points of departure are the high-camp exchanges between the film's actresses.

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant Jim’s reviews, which includes material for the Commemorative Collection Volume 1 DVD essay

Slate [Luc Sante] A Holy Whore, which includes brief film clips, February 19, 1997

Petra's Place • Senses of Cinema Marsha McCreadie, July 11, 2010

Mise en Scène as Power Struggle: THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT Jonathan Rosenbaum, June 4, 2009

Epinions [metalluk]

Epinions.com [Steven Flores]

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) Roderick Heath from Ferdy on Films

Long Pauses Darren Hughes

VideoVista review Jonathan McCalmont

The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant Karina Longworth from SpoutBlog, February 8, 2008

"Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant” (1972) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder Victor Enyutin from Acting Out Politics

User comments from imdb Author: rosscinema (rosscinema@juno.com) from Oceanside,Ca.

User comments from Author: Shane James Bordas from United Kingdom

FilmExposed Magazine Chris Power

Cinematic Reflections (Derek Smith)

Dfordoom [LiveJournal]

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [1.5/5]

Eye for Film ("Moominkat") review [1/5]

Turner Classic Movies dvd review a compilation of capsule reviews

DVD Times Noel Megahey, reviews the 9-disc Region 2 DVD release, The Rainer Werner Fassbinder Commemorative Collection Volume 1

Books on German film New German Film: The Displaced Image by Timothy Corrigan (213 pages) and West German Film in the Course of Time by Eric Rentschler (260 pages), reviewed by Jan Mouton from Jump Cut, February 1988

TV Guide review

The New York Times (Nora Sayre)

DVDBeaver - Review [Brook Kennon]

JAIL BAIT – made for TV

aka: Wildwechsel

Straubing and vicinity (102 mi) March 1972

“Sexually precocious and spoiled, 14-year old Hanni (Eva Mattes), the only child of a pious couple, allows herself to be seduced by 19-year old Franz (Harry Baer). When their affair becomes known, he is imprisoned on morals charges. They resume the relationship upon his release, and she becomes pregnant. To avoid getting her father’s permission for an abortion, she suggests that Franz murder him at a game pass (“Wildwechsel”), a tower in the woods where wild game may be watched.” – from the Fassbinder Foundation

Press: “The charge is made against you from time to time that your films are a denunciation of humanity.”

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1978):

“I would defend myself against a charge of denigrating people in anything I’ve made. On the contrary, I think that I really put people down less than just about anyone and a lot of time approach people too positively, to the point where it almost can’t be justified. Like in JAIL BAIT, when the father tells about his war experiences, when his opinions are particularly horrible, we always deal with them very sensitively, in order to be clear that what’s horrible is what they’re saying and...not what they are.”

Time Out Tony Rayns

Fassbinder made this (for TV) right after The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, in the year that Godard made Tout va Bien. Like Godard's film, Fassbinder's is about a male-female relationship in a 'political' context, but here the boy is 19 and the girl only l4, so that their mutual love outrages more than one lower middle class taboo. Despite a final flourish of misogyny (the girl betrays the boy after he's laid his life on the line for her), Fassbinder's stance is very sympathetically unsentimental; and his mixture of caricature (her parents), materialism (the depiction of a factory production line), carefully stylised realism (the central relationship), and a bold physical frankness, is more than usually adroit. The movie created a censorship furore in Germany, not least because the author of the original play (Franz Kroetz) denounced Fassbinder's 'obscene' depiction of his characters.

User comments from imdb Author: Hankoegal from Germany

Wildwechsel is one of the very good Fassbinder films. It's a family-story with all the restrictions in a typical Bavarian Fassbinder-family. Eva Matthes is the daughter in her puberty who wants to explore sexuality. Harry Baer is the young Romeo. But as always with Fassbinder the people surrounding the two - parents - are enemies of the relationship. I don't know, why this Fassbinder-film is never been shown on TV again and why it never got released on VHS or DVD - lucky people who have the film on celluloid ;-) Maybe it has to do with the author Franz Xaver Kroetz, that this very good Fassbinder-film from the center of his oeuvre is not available.

User comments from imdb Author: rsbklyn from United States

Tonight I saw the infamous Wildwechsel, or Jail Bait, at the Museum of Modern Art. This movie lives up to it's reputation as one of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's darkest and most perverse movies. And that's really saying something.

Eva Mattes, age 18, plays Hanni, age 14. Hanni willingly has a sexual relationship with Franz, age 19 (played by Harry Baer). Hanni looks older than her age--say, 4 years older--as we cannot help but notice, since Hanni is nude or hornily pulling her clothes off in scene after scene. Franz gets busted for sleeping with a minor, but Hanni still wants him, and it all goes downhill from there.

This is an extraordinary level of cinematic manipulation by Fassbinder. He makes the audience feel guilty for watching a 14 year old girl (even though we know she is fictional), naked on the screen, in sexual situations. The only people who don't realize that Hanni is a sexual being are her conservative (Nazi daddy) parents, who blame Hanni for ruining their lives. Death threats, suicide threats, and tragedy upon tragedy ensue.

The emotional "vicious circles", (Elsaesser, 1976) are especially vicious in Jail Bait: the parent/child relationships go from bleak to bleaker to bleakest. None of the four main characters are sympathetic, and Hanni, the ostensible victim, has the blackest soul of them all.

MOMA's print was vintage '72 and kind of a dirty faded unrestored mess, especially at the very beginning. But that is a minor complaint. Jailbait contains early use of key Fassbinder imagery which return in film after film: the slaughterhouse, a child's dolls, and the ever present mirrors. The performances from Harry Baer and Eva Mattes as star crossed, twisted young lovers are heart wrenching.

Seeing Jail Bait, there is no wonder why it has never been released on VHS or DVD--this film truly pushes and challenges the limits of decency, in many ways. That's what makes it classic, essential Fassbinder.

Wildwechsel Fassbinder Foundation

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

EIGHT HOURS DON’T MAKE A DAY (Acht Stunden sind kein Tag) – TV episodes

Cologne 5 TV episodes (Episode 1: 101 mi, Episode 2: 100 mi, Episode 3: 92 mi, Episodes 4 and 5: 89 mi) April – August 1972

User comments from imdb Author: pallimero from Sweden

Me and my brother used to watch this series when it was shown in Sweden back in the 70s. Especially we were very fond of lead actor Gottfried John, who's laid back, easy going style really made an impression to us as a role model. The series is about the family situations and the situation at work. How does an ordinary day of life go by in Germany? It starts of when Jochen (played by Gottfried) makes an improvement to the the machine he is working on at the factory which helps to speed up the production process. The drawback, however, is that now fewer employees are needed to run the machines. He starts off as a rather unpopular workmate.

Also there was Hanna Schygulla who is a top actress who starred in many of Fassbinders films. I would really like to get my hands on the series on DVD because it's not only charming but also a great landmark of contemporary television because of its documentary drama style.

Acht Stunden sind kein Tag Fassbinder Foundation

BREMEN FREEDOM (Bremer Freiheit: Frau Geesche Gottfried - Ein bürgerliches Trauerspiel) – made for TV B 86

Saarbrücken studio (87 mi) September 1972

From Fassbinder’s own stage play, this is a rather odd, grim, surrealist, ultra-dramatic conception based on a true story of a female mass murderer (Margit Carstensen) beheaded in Bremen in the early 19^th century, has a Masterworks Theater feel to it, with deliberate, slow pacing, very oppressive, but unlike EFFI BRIEST, here is a woman strong enough to assert herself and get revenge against the males trying to limit and control her, also starring Ulli Lommel, Wolfgang Schenk, and Fassbinder as Rumpf.

Chicago Reader (Lisa Alspector)

This 1972 cinema-and-theater hybrid made for television confines its action to a stagelike platform that appears in front of a projected background. On the platform, which is furnished like a parlor, Geesche (Margit Carstensen) entertains her parents, a sibling, and a parade of husbands and lovers in a series of confrontations that demonstrates her increasing aggressiveness in taking over her family's business, something she achieves not quite mysteriously by serving coffee. Carstensen is a perfect portrait of hysteria and vengefulness and the perfect vehicle for the feminism of director Rainer Werner Fassbinder (who adapted his stage play with Dietrich Lohmann); the more perversely his female characters behave, the more consistently his narratives blame the culture that gives them no better options.

User comments from imdb Author sleepsev (bearania@yahoo.com) from Bangkok, Thailand

This is my most favourite Fassbinder's film to date (I might change my mind in the future as I have seen only 15 films of his.) The movie is represented in the form of a stage play,and this style works very effectively for me. I was stunned when I saw it. It is so raw, yet so moving. It is so minimal, yet so intense. The thing that impressed me the most is the song that Geesche sang repeatedly. For the first time she sang it, I just thought her voice expressed a strong emotion very well. But for the latter times she sang it, it becomes heart-rending. It breaks my heart and makes me want to cry. Her grief was not only expressed, but also instilled into my heart. No matter how brutal or cruel she was, I feel it's hard to hate her. One can understand her reason for killing very well.The opening shot that focuses on her moving feet impressed me a lot. And it never gets dull after that. The tension is maintained very well throughout the movie. The backdrop of the stage enhances my feelings and emotions to the utmost degree. Sometimes the backdrop is a view of the landscape, sometimes it is an enlarged image of her face. But it strikes me every time. It elevates this movie to the highest position. The acting is, of course, top-notch. Margit Carstensen does not only make her character come alive, but she also brings the heart of Geesche inside out. The props on the stage is very sparse, but very appropriately placed. A lot of scenes in this movie were shot from a meaningful angle--the angle that add an important meaning to its own scene. I can see that many shots were very carefully constructed. No big budget is required to make this kind of excellent movies. I feel this movie really stands out from other films of Fassbinder. Not only that its style is different, but its power, its intensity, and its haunting quality also make this movie transcend all. I think if I have another chance to hear that song again, I might not be able to control my tears any more.

Bremer Freiheit Fassbinder Foundation

WORLD ON A WIRE (Welt am Draht) – made for TV A 96

Cologne, Munich, Paris (Pt I 99 mi, Pt II 106 mi) January – March 1973

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1973):

“I directed a series of two one-and-a-half-hour segments based on a novel by Daniel F. Galouyé. It’s a very beautiful story called WORLD ON A WIRE that depicts a world where one is able to make projections of people with a computer. And of course that leads to the uncertainty of whether someone is himself a projection, since in this virtual world the projections resemble reality. Perhaps another larger world made us as a virtual one? In this sense it deals with an old philosophical model, which here takes on a certain horror.”

One of the most unique works over the course of Fassbinder’s entire career, his only venture into science fiction, where this may be the very first Virtual Reality movie, though it was readily explored on sci-fi TV shows like Star Trek (1966 – 1969) or Doctor Who (1963 – 1989). This was also made for German TV, which is mindblowing in itself, as there is simply nothing else out there like this on TV, either before or since. Some may find this excessively slow, as there’s no action to speak of for the first two hours, really only showing up in the finale sequence, yet this continually holds the viewer’s attention by the sheer boldness of the subject matter and the mind-altering production values used by Fassbinder, filtering nearly every shot through doorways, long hallways, frosted windows, glass fishbowls, peeking through a hole in the wall or around some object, where there are multiple reflections throughout caused by the incessant or one might say obsessive use of mirrors. Only CHINESE ROULETTE (1976) comes close to using this kind of dazzling, shooting-through-the-Looking Glass stylization, both movies shot by cinematographer Michael Ballhaus. In terms of look, this film most closely resembles the mannequin acting style of THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT (1972), where naked or fashionably dressed characters have a tendency to stare off into empty space, which in this film works excessively well, especially because it is projecting an artificially designed virtual world that contains no signs of human life, as it’s all a computerized reproduction.

Adaptated by Fassbinder and Fritz Müller-Scherz from a 1964 Daniel F. Galouyé novel Simulacron 3, where computers can create projections of people, leading one to wonder if they, themselves, are just a projection? This is a paranoid, ALPHAVILLE (1965)-style, corporate-controlled world of super computers where the company director mysteriously commits suicide, but not before muttering one of the prevalent themes of the film, “You are nothing more than the image others have made of you,” referring to the co-opting of his brilliant creation by an all-controlling inside elite, where programmed individuals are indistinguishable from actual humans. The powerful interests of the U.S. Steel corporation intervenes and wants to use the successor, Klaus Löwitsch as Fred Stiller, to manipulate the international markets, as the artificial computer design so exactly replicates our own world that the computer has the ability to accurately predict future trends before they happen. He meets Eva Vollmer, Mascha Rabben, the daughter of the deceased former director, and the two begin to realize that they may be artificial, controlled by a higher intelligence, their knowledge of which could cause a threat to those actually in control, so it is a world where love is threatened by the repressed police state. Can humans prevail? Initially shot on 16 mm, now blown up to 35 mm, this is riveting from start to finish, adding improbable flourishes of dark humor, simply a stunning, highly original and unusual film, with Fassbinder regulars Adrian Hoven, Ivan Desny, Günter Lamprecht, Margit Carstensen, Ingrid Caven, Ulli Lommel, Kurt Raab, and even a brief appearance by Gottfried John.

Certainly one prevalent theme is the Third Reich dream of world domination, only using a behind the scenes business model to accomplish what the German Army couldn’t achieve militarily. Whoever controls the computers controls the world, including a Virtual World of people who are all prisoners in this alternate world, like the most brilliantly designed gulag imaginable, as all of the artificial creations are programmed to work solely to benefit and improve the lives of those living at the highest level, the real humans, creating a Virtual Reality society that remains a METROPOLIS (1927) designed underground world, where captive artificial slaves can never escape to the higher ground. Fassbinder beautifully enhances this Nazi design as only he can, through a staged musical production in a beer hall, actually the Alcazar in Paris, where Solange Pradel performs her smoky Marlene Dietrich renditions of “See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have” and “Lili Marleen,” sung to the shadowed images of marching boots. Actually much of the futuristic design of the film was shot inside shopping malls, upscale hotels, and in the streets of Paris and Munich, adding that 70’s impersonalized, avant garde, corporate glass-windowed skyscraper look that defined Alan J. Pakula’s modernist THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974) a year later, also using an oblique and radically abstract electronic score by Gottfried Hüngsberg that reflects psychic distress, but also a clever use of Wagner’s Liebestod, synthesized Bach, Strauss, and Peter Green’s strangely hypnotic “Albatross.” Much of the first half introduces the viewer to the concept of a simulated world, while the second half shows Stiller growing ever more suspicious and paranoid, feeling continuously threatened, like a rat in a maze, as if he’s being hunted down by the controllers at the highest levels.

Much of the narrative centers around people who simply disappear from reality, people that Stiller remembers, but everyone else has been programmed to forget, wiping that memory off the face of the earth, even in police and newspaper reports, except it still exists in Stiller’s memory, making him think after awhile that he’s the one going crazy since no one else recollects his version of events. This is also a brilliant depiction of the vulnerability (and need) of outsiderism, showing how the State can easily program reality to reflect the propagandized views of the masses, where anyone who doesn’t conform to those views feels particularly powerless and isolated, subject to police arrest for becoming a threat to the stability of society, which almost perfectly resembles the real life fate of currently imprisoned Mikhail Khodorkovsky, former head of the Russian oligarchy and the wealthiest man in the country before Russian President Vladimir Putin returned the nation to its police state origins, not to mention former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko who was assassinated by radioactive poisoning in 2006 allegedly by a Russian secret agent while Litvinenko was living in political asylum. As outlandish as that sounds, that’s effectively the story here, as Stiller literally falls from grace in the corporate hierarchy and begins to see how he’s being used and manipulated by higher powers, how he’s taking the fall for their crimes, where his name is being posted on television news reports as a murderer to explain the strange disappearance of people. Barbara Valentin is exquisite as the voluptuous corporate secretary who appears to be a virtual projection of the manager’s dreams and desires, also there are extraordinary set designs for party sequences, indoor swimming pools, and beer halls, where ironically the music of Elvis Presley blares out to a programmed virtual world of utter conformity, where society is in such lockstep they actually resemble the horrified depiction of zombies in horror movies. From this State controlled world domination, can humans survive? This is a beautifully staged theatrical rendition on the question of free will, where the entire planet appears to be an artificially designed mirror reflection of the real world.

Time Out New York Joshua Rothkopf

Never mind how inconceivable it is that busy Rainer Werner Fassbinder took time between his two crowning provocations, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), to make a three-and-a-half-hour sci-fi sizzler for German TV. (He also wrote several episodes of a blue-collar labor drama and directed an Ibsen play.) Let’s just be thankful he did. World on a Wire is the discovery of the season, rarely screened in America but very much a key chapter in Fassbinder’s story—a step toward bigger budgets and slicker production values, yet clarifying of his core artistic legacy.

Fashionable nerds will compare the knotty tale—essentially about a supercomputer that creates a virtual reality—to Avatar, but the vibe here is closer to those cryptic, blue-ish mysteries that David Cronenberg used to make in Canada with people running around in lab coats. (Yes, that equals awesome.) A scientist (Löwitsch) hopes to get to the bottom of it, tugging dangerously at the fraying edge of what he thinks is reality. Fassbinder, adapting freely from Daniel F. Galouye’s deeply influential 1964 novel Simulacron-3, finds his usual themes in the genre material, notably social and sexual exploitation. But a chase or two certainly don’t hurt.

exclaim! [Will Sloan]

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's World on a Wire always seems to be taking place in some bleak reception area, the kind where there's always a faint echo and classical music dins in the background, and the white, faux-leather chairs feel just a little too cold. Like Jean-Luc Godard with Alphaville, Fassbinder evokes his dystopian future, where an ominous super-corporation has perfected an all-encompassing reality simulator called "the Simulacron," by simply filming in the most ultra-modern and blandly functional sections of a city ― in this case, Munich, 1973. The passage of time has, if anything, enhanced the creepy, otherworldly ambience: all these square phones, orange chairs and appalling fur rugs really do suggest some kind of homogenized corporate hell.

Originally aired in two parts on German television, World on a Wire is one of the least known and most rarely screened of Fassbinder's 40-plus film and TV projects. A new 35-mm print, which premiered last year at the Museum of Modern Art, has been making the rounds at rep cinemas and seen today, it feels like one of those movies that's somehow both tied to its moment and ahead of its time.

Its navigation of reality and virtual reality obviously anticipates our Facebook/World of Warcraft era, the corporation could be any of our major media conglomerates and the reality-shifting technophobia anticipates and influences The Matrix, eXistenZ, Avatar, Blade Runner and just about any other grown-up sci-fi film.

But the world of World on a Wire is a pretty unpleasant place to spend 205 minutes, and those minutes don't exactly fly by. Fassbinder directs the convoluted "sci-fi thriller"― in which the newly installed Simulacron project director (Klaus Lowitsch) experiences glitches in his world, with the higher-ups conspiring against reality ― in a way that perversely strips it of thrills. Many of Fassbinder's stable of actors appear as bureaucrats and sexpots, all seemingly instructed to act with as little charisma and chemistry as possible. When characters flirt or attend parties, the acts feel rote, and the film's lone sexual encounter is immediately followed by a betrayal.

This, of course, doesn't mean that World on a Wire isn't worth your time. In its cold, sterile way, Fassbinder's universe has much of the same power as Alphaville and little of the escapism. And surely this is the only movie you'll see this year with a platonic conversation about whether a cup of coffee is really just the idea of a cup of coffee.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List Ben Sachs

Perhaps the key stylistic flourish in the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder is an exquisite, Old Hollywood-style tracking shot around actors who are in stasis or else performing simple actions with mechanical precision. This strategy, which became central to Fassbinder's cinematic language early in his career and would persist until the end, conveys one of the director's most enduring themes: that modern life suppresses individual emotion through a punishing, economic-based concept of social utility. Yet these moments also reveal Fassbinder's underlying romanticism, his belief in the freedom that could exist in art where it could not in real life. These are among the cinema's most crystallized expressions of cinephilia, as well as the most impassioned: Only someone who loved movies as much as Fassbinder would feel so brutally betrayed by the systems that made their beauty impossible in life. WORLD ON A WIRE, the two-part film Fassbinder made for German television in 1973 and which is now circulating in a new restored print, is rife with shots like these; the cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus, was surely the most ingenious of Fassbinder's cameramen when it came to realizing grandiose ideas on very small budgets. (He would go on to shoot several of Martin Scorsese's most visually impressive features, including AFTER HOURS and GOODFELLAS.) It's one of Fassbinder's most allusive works, incorporating science fiction, a detective story, melodramatic romance, and even a few musical numbers. The story, appropriately, concerns fantasies within fantasies, as a government employee working on a secret virtual reality project discovers that his world is itself a projection. Once aware of his life's artificiality, he attempts a doomed mission to disseminate this knowledge, only to become a pariah hounded by the authorities. Broadly speaking, the film follows a narrative arc identical to that of the more realistic ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL, which Fassbinder would make later that year. WORLD ON A WIRE can be read as epic allegory, though much of it plays as straight-ahead genre storytelling. (As Christian Braad Thomsen notes in his critical biography Fassbinder: The Life and Work of a Provocative Genius, Fassbinder approached TV as a means of connecting with a larger audience than he did through his plays and theatrical films.) The final hour consists largely of chase scenes and conspiratorial revelations that wouldn't be out of place in, say, an Alan J. Pakula movie. But even here, Fassbinder makes the material entirely his own, developing an odd, languid pace that emphasizes the film's eerie unreality. Some have criticized the film's conclusion—incidentally, one of the few happy endings in Fassbinder's oeuvre—as failing to resolve the numerous themes introduced in the densely packed first half. That's a fair criticism to level at a work by a 28-year-old filmmaker directing at least half-a-dozen scripts a year, as Fassbinder, extraordinarily, was doing at this time. Still, there's no denying this remarkable work ethic also produced a feeling of urgency (as well as a tense paranoia) that's still palpable four decades after WORLD ON A WIRE was made. No less than any other film of his career, it illustrates the radical will behind Fassbinder's art. As he would describe it, "[My films] developed out of the position that the revolution should take place not on the screen, but in life itself, and when I show things going wrong, I do it to make people aware that this is what happens unless they change their lives... I never try to reproduce reality, my aim is to make mechanisms transparent, to make it obvious to people that they must change reality." (1973, 205 min, 35mm)

Vancouver Voice [D. K. Holm]

Viewers thinking that they have stumbled into a very rough draft of The Matrix while watching Rainer Werner Fassbinder's TV knock-off World on a Wire (Welt am Draht) can be excused. This lengthy 205-minute mini-series is science fiction in sound effects only, though, and really serves Fassbinder the chance to play with imagery he liked from American melodramas.

This despite the fact that the film is clearly influenced by Godard's 1965 faux sci-fi excursion Alphaville, even to the extent of casting that film's star, Eddie Constantine, in its second half. Yet the influences are really melodramatist Douglas Sirk and Andy Warhol, with a little Antonioni thrown in and with hommages made to Warhol's supposedly favorite movie, the excruciatingly boring yet still significant Creation of the Humanoids. Warhol liked that film because it was boring. If you are familiar with this incredibly talky movie, you will know where World on a Wire is going with its premise.

Aired originally on West German television in 1973, and based on a novel called Simulacron 3 by Daniel F. Galouye, Wire leisurely tells the tale of one Fred Stiller (Klaus Lowitsch). He comes to the aid of a corporation with a government contract after his mentor, inventor Vollmer, dies suddenly and mysteriously, of "headaches." Vollmer's invention is a simulated world in a computer designed to guide futurologists about the shape of things to come. Stiller is followed, questioned, flirted with, intimidated by the corp.'s CEO, and even makes a trip of two into the simulated world, all while ostensibly trying to meet the boss's deadline and secretly trying to solve the mystery of … well, of something.

Aside from Fassbinder's film anticipating such successors as The Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor, it's not really for sci-fi fans. Rather, it is for worshippers of the director and students of existential genre variations on the order of westerns such as McCabe and Mrs. Miller or crime melodramas like The Long Goodbye (both by Altman, in these examples). Wire was made at the height of that time in the 1970s when directors young and old were questioning if not undermining the genre materials handed to them. Wire came in the middle of Fassbinder's 80-film, 13-year career, after The Merchant of Four Seasons, which brought him attention in New York City as part of the German New Wave, and before The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and Effi Briest – that is, Fassbinder's foray into the structures of melodrama and the passions of female performers, of which Wire is in some small part a precursor.

Like Godard, Fassbinder utilizes existing places and settings to create his "futuristic" world. It's a world in which glass buildings and Mannix-like computer mainframes are made strange by recontextualization and weird outer space music and effects. Wire is a world of fragmented paintings on walls, glass surfaces through which Fassbinder continually shoots his subjects (a habit Todd Haynes picked up), and long takes that follow people talking. The plot is easy to grasp; Fassbinder simply wanted it to be a bore, maybe because he resented having to make the thing, or because that's how he viewed the future. The essential normality of what is said and done is undermined by Warhol-esque, Antonioni-staged parties where people don't circulate but pose, staring off at nothing. It's a world where people exist to be looked at. It may be that the only aspect of the film that really interested Fassbinder was the tension between the questing Stiller and his boss, Herbert Siskins (Karl-Heinz Vosgereau), a smooth domineering industrialist, always in control. Fassbinder was fascinated by such power relationships and it is not always to his credit that he often "took the side" of the figure with the upper hand.

World on a Wire has been difficult to see since its initial airing, but the R. W. Fassbinder Foundation has prepared the film for release this year, and it will be released by the Criterion Collection.

Only the Cinema [Ed Howard]

World on a Wire is Rainer Werner Fassbinder's mind-bending sci-fi epic, a two-part, over three-hour examination of the nature of reality, thought and perception. Based on Daniel Galouye's sci-fi novel Simulacron 3, the film is concerned with the creation of simulated computer worlds, populated with synthetic, programmed beings unaware that they're living in a virtual reality rather than a tangible flesh-and-blood world. Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch) is appointed to become the technical director for this "simulacron" computer system after the project's previous administrator seemingly has a mental breakdown before dying in an accident. Almost immediately, however, Stiller is subjected to tremendous pressures and odd incidents relating to the computer and the company he's working for. There's some kind of industrial intrigue going on — the company's director, Siskins (Karl Heinz Vosgerau) wants to use the computer to benefit his corporate friends — and bizarre events make Stiller doubt his own sanity. A man (Ivan Desny) tries to tell Stiller about the strange circumstances of his predecessor's death, only to disappear into thin air — and soon enough, no one even remembers that this man ever existed. Stiller experiences other strange visions, and is beset by crippling headaches almost constantly, quickly developing a paranoid outlook that encompasses nearly every moment of his day and everyone he meets.

It's obvious enough where all of this is heading, even before Fassbinder explicitly states the twist in the final scene of the first part. Yet the film's careful study of the layers of reality remains engrossing, because Fassbinder's visual mastery is at its highest level here. There is little in the plot to justify the film's length, and the characters are, for the most part, doll-like ciphers prone to staring emptily into space, posing within Fassbinder's meticulously arranged compositions, caught in frames of mirrors, remaining static as the camera turns circles around them. Fassbinder underlines the film's central theme of perception by continually distorting and reflecting his images, emphasizing how what we see is dependent on the angle from which we're looking. In the film's opening scenes, Stiller's predecessor Vollmer (Adrian Hoven) accosts two government representatives, asking them to look at themselves in a handheld mirror and describe what they see. They are not really themselves, he says, they are just images, images imagined by other people. Even beyond the film's sci-fi premise, this idea resonates: each person is the culmination of images created and maintained in the minds of others, and what we see when we look in the mirror is not necessarily what others see when they look at us.

To this end, Fassbinder inventively packs his film with mirrors and distortions. In his melodramas, such devices are stylized routes into character, picked up from Sirk, a way of positioning characters in abstracted relationships to one another, capturing two reactions in the same frame. Here, the perpetual mirroring emphasizes how fragile vision is, how easily it is subjected to distortions. When Stiller goes to see Siskins one afternoon in the latter's office, Siskins has a tremendous glass funnel perched on top of his desk. The curved glass distorts Siskins' face, rendering him at times multi-eyed and blurry, almost insectile, his smirk stretched out so that it seems to stretch across his entire face. It's a subjective image of Stiller's boss, a collection of attributes rather than a coherent image of a face. In the reverse shot, when Fassbinder turns the camera onto Stiller instead, his face is reflected in the shiny surface of the desk, but chopped in half, only his eyes looking out hauntingly as though trapped within this reflective prison, his mouth and the lower half of his face cut off by the desk's edge. The boss is distorted and magnified, his all-seeing eyes multiplied, while the employee is made voiceless and trapped; the mirrors don't lie.

Unless, sometimes, they do. Later Siskins visits the computer lab — with its funhouse mirror walls and clusters of TV screens — to watch a computer doppelganger of himself perform a song-and-dance routine as programmed by Stiller. Fassbinder frames the image so that we see the the TV monitor, and Siskins' warped reflection next to it, and layered on top of this, Siskins' back as he watches the screen. It's a man and, essentially, two false doppelgangers of himself, one computer-created and one a blurred reflection of himself stretched out across the wavy surface of the wall. Still another form of mirroring exists in the scene where Stiller goes to visit his sick secretary Maya (Margrit Carstensen). She is lying down, looking at herself in a mirror to put on lipstick, but because the mirror is two-sided, the side facing the camera actually reflects the offscreen Stiller. One side of the mirror then presumably shows her, while he appears in the other, so that the mirror becomes a link between them, their reflections joined like the image of Janus, two sides of the same head. The mirror divides and distorts, it reveals the truth, it connects people and shatters the illusion of a smooth, tangible reality. When Vollmer dies at the beginning of the film, he is seen through a sheet of cracked glass, as though reality itself has been broken by his departure from it.

Fassbinder makes these examinations of sensation and perception the film's true focal point. The ostensible thriller plot is inert, and the corporate intrigue simply seems irrelevant, to the point that when Stiller finds out the answers to questions relating to the corporate politics, rather than the more metaphysical mysteries he's really interested in, he simply laughs. There is an analogue here for those religious and philosophical ideas that insist that the world is essentially an illusion, or at best a warm-up for the afterlife. If the world is not real, or is only a secondary stage of reality, if the "true" life is on a higher plane of reality, it renders the physicality and events of the world somewhat moot. Once Stiller begins to believe that his world is only an illusion that's secondary to another world, he ceases to care about any of the things had previously occupied his attention: job, friends, love, even life and death itself. Does the world become irrelevant in comparison to the idea of Heaven? This would explain Stiller's "ascent" at the finale of the film.

So Fassbinder makes the whole film one big visual metaphor, his camera moves mapping out Stiller's quest for truth. During a meeting with Siskins and a government official, Stiller wanders around the large space of the office, swinging around on a chair in the foreground, then flinging open a pair of unusual double doors, the kind usually seen between neighboring suites in hotels. Finally, he appears again at the rear of the space, visible only from a distance in a mirror. It's like he's constantly searching, always peeking behind the doors, into closed-off rooms. He does a lot of spinning around in chairs too, like a bored and restless kid, eager to discover something new, or simply a man who wants to see the fullest possible 360-degree view of his surroundings. In one of the film's most playful scenes, Siskins and Stiller conduct an entire conversation while they're both spinning around in their chairs, rendering office politics goofy and funny.

These oddball touches, like a dance club populated with muscular Arab models and topless dancers, give the film its distinctively surreal Fassbinderian aura. It's a weird and disjointed film, perhaps a little repetitive, padded out with multiple scenes of Stiller trying to explain his theories to skeptical listeners. But the characters, flat as they are, make an impact, because Fassbinder has developed such a versatile troupe of actors that even when most of them are just making token cameo appearances (Eddie Constantine as a dapper but sinister businessman; Kurt Raab as Stiller's bald, oafish office rival; El Hedi ben Salem as a quiet, sensitive bodyguard) they are vivid and memorable. This is a fascinating experiment from Fassbinder, transplanting his usual cast and his Sirkian aesthetic strategies into the unfamiliar genre of the sci-fi thriller, with very compelling results.

Fassbinder’s prophetic 1973 sci-fi work ‘World on a Wire’ finally sees theatrical release Independent Ethos, July 24, 2011

World on a Wire Chuck Stephens from Film Comment, May/June 2010

411mania.com [Chad Webb]

theartsdesk.com [Sheila Johnston]

Filmjourney.org [Doug Cummings]

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]

Cinema de Merde [Scott Telek]

Horrorview.com [Black Gloves]

PopcornReel.com [Omar P.L. Moore]

Total Sci-Fi [Matt McAllister]

Slant Magazine [Simon Abrams]

Shock Cinema (Steven Puchalski) review

Film Monthly.com – World on a Wire (1973) Daniel Engelke

eFilmCritic [Jay Seaver]

World on a Wire J. Hoberman from The Village Voice, July 20, 2011

Fassbinder's Sci-Fi "World on a Wire" at MOMA J. Hoberman from The Village Voice, April 13, 2010

World On a Wire | Fassbinder Rediscovered « The Fade Out David D. Robbins Jr. which includes Fassbinder’s 10 favorite films

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

Toronto Film Scene [Sarah Gopaul]

The Phantom Tollbooth [Derek Walker]

World on a Wire - Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation also seen here: Welt am Draht

*European Film Star Postcards*: Barbara Valentin April 16, 2009

WORLD ON A WIRE: NEW MASTER - Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation August 4, 2009

MoMA to Show Fassbinder's Visionary Science-Fiction Thriller | Art ... March 19, 2010

The House Next Door [Fernando F. Croce]

Chicago Reader (Lisa Alspector)

MIFF 2010 Diary: Part 9 « Cinema Autopsy Thomas Caldwell

User comments from imdb Author: Absinth from California

User comments from imdb Author: ro. from Berlin, Germany

Review: World On a Wire - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

World on a Wire - Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Times

New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott, April 13, 2010

Film - A Bold Vision, Still Ahead of Its Time Dennis Lim from The New York Times, April 1, 2010

Fassbinder's Visionary Science-Fiction Thriller to Have a Weeklong ... The New York Times Art Daily, April 5, 2010

DVDBeaver.com [Gary Tooze]

NORA HELMER (A Doll’s House) – made for TV B 86

Saarbrücken studio (101 mi) May 1973

Margit Carstensen gives a blistering performance in a play about domestic cruelty and psychological domination, an adaptation of Ibsen’s Doll House, where in order to help her critically ill husband, Nora, without his knowledge, forges her father’s signature in order to obtain a needed bank loan, with disastrous social consequences, with Joachim Hansen, Barbara Valentin, Ulli Lommel, Klaus Löwitsch, Lilo Pempeit, and Irm Hermann.

“Have you altered anything in the play?” Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1973):

“We haven’t changed anything, just cut quite a bit. In our version, for example, Nora doesn’t go away at the end. she stays, since in ten thousand families there’s the same blow-out between Nora and Helmer, and usually the woman doesn’t leave, even when she probably should. In fact she has no other options, and so people always find some way to accommodate themselves, which in the end is even more horrible...I’ve never read anything by Ibsen to the effect that Nora was supposed to be a pioneer of women’s liberation.”

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's shortened 1973 version of Ibsen's A Doll's House--shortened to the extent that the heroine (Margit Carstensen) no longer leaves home at the end, a change Fassbinder defended as more realistic. As in Martha (also 1973), Carstensen seems to elicit a baroque mise en scene from Fassbinder; despite a bleached-out look from having been shot on video, it's still an eyeful.

Channel 4 Film

Fassbinder adapted and directed this version of Ibsen's A Dolls House for television. Radical and yet intensely faithful to the text, Fassbinder gives Nora (Castensen), Ibsen's heroine, self-awareness and confidence right from the word go, which in turn gives the whole production a fierce energy. Spare and brutally harsh, the use of video camera is utterly brilliant, wringing every last nuance from the actors' words. Stunning.

Time Out

Fassbinder's version of Ibsen's A Doll's House for television develops a radical yet scrupulous reading of the play. Stripped of sentimentality and giving Nora (Carstensen) self-assurance from the start, this studio production delivers its critique of bourgeois marriage with a force rarely matched even in the theatre. The brutal prose, harshly delivered, is complemented by the unique visual spectacle which Fassbinder manages to wring from a videotape studio. Achieving effects of lighting and framing which British TV directors have never dreamed of, he makes the oppressiveness of Nora's home as concrete as a tank-trap. Almost every scene is shot through latticework, net curtains, cut glass, ornate mirrors, so that the characters are perhaps visually obscured but always intellectually focused. All the BBC's producers of tele-classics should be chained to chairs and forced to watch it.

User comments from imdb Author michelsouris from On the Move

I've now seen four film versions of Ibsen's "A Doll's House", and this has to be the best. The first thing that grabs your attention is the art direction/camera-work,which shows us everything through glass, through netting, or reflected through multiple mirrors. This really drives home the unreal hothouse atmosphere, the "Doll's House", in which Nora lives. (As is well known, the story revolves around her comfortable but barren relationship with her proud but possessive husband Torvald).

The acting is wooden, but it needs to be. Naturalistic acting would look out of place in such a deliberately-artificial setting, whereas the long static poses bring out the gilded-cage ambiance of the story.

The look of this film is typical of Fassbinder's classical period, which I consider his best; it produced such films as Petra von Kant, Chinese Roulette, and Effi Briest. Nora Helmer is at least as good as the others, it's a pity it's so little known. I had to go to a lot of trouble to get my copy, which doesn't even have English subtitles. (Fortunately, the story is so familiar that most viewers will be able to follow it; otherwise, watch an English language version first - the Jane Fonda or Claire Bloom versions are easily available).

I am pleased to say that the picture quality is good, considering that the movie was made for the tiny Saarland-TV and then distributed by the equally tiny All-video. Picture quality is essential in a production which depends so much upon artistic visuals.

Great stuff, one of the master's best; I hope it will get a proper release on DVD someday. Wouldn't it be nice to have a multi-set combining this with the Julie Harris, Jane Fonda and Claire Bloom versions?

ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL (Angst essen Seele auf) A 97

Munich (94 mi) September 1973

An extraordinary look at race and age discrimination, told with Fassbinder’s typical stark emotional despair along with a burning intensity, exploring the deeply felt humanism in a doomed love affair, textured with the details of working-class life. Rainer plays the racist son (Eugen) of an aging charwoman, Brigitte Mira, a 60-ish former member of the Nazi party who marries a 20-years her junior Moroccan guest worker, El Hedi Ben Salem, a relationship that disturbs everyone, including the viewer, also starring a voluptuous Barbara Valentin as the barmaid. This is one of Fassbinder’s gutsiest, most emotionally brutal and thought provoking films, combining poignant melodrama with somewhat exaggerated social satire, lingering on motionless faces staring out of a neighbor’s doorway, soon to retreat behind closed doors, providing a backdrop of near-universal mockery and hostility from neighbors, such as the caricatured racist grocer and gossiping woman, an homage to F.W. Murnau’s 1924 silent film, THE LAST LAUGH, while her grown children show her complete indifference, winner of the International Critics Prize at the Cannes Film Fest.

This is the first-time collaboration with Fassbinder cameraman Jürgen Jürges, who continues thirty years later to make films with Michael Haneke. Also, on a lurid note, El Hedi Ben Salem, who plays Ali, was one of Fassbinder's former lovers and he committed suicide in a French jail, reportedly after Fassbinder spurned him, the first of two lovers who committed suicide, including, later, Fassbinder himself.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1973):

“I had already used the story in a film once, it was actually in THE AMERICAN SOLDIER, where it was told by a barmaid, in a long sequence where the girl sits on a bed. It’s about an old German woman who is around 60 and a young Turkish guest worker. They marry and one day she is murdered. Nobody knows who the killer is – whether it was her husband or one of his Turkish pals. But I didn’t want to tell the story the way it actually happened. I wanted to give the young Turk and the old woman a chance to live together.”

Time Out

A deceptively simple tale of the doomed love affair between an ageing cleaner (Mira) and a young Moroccan gastarbeiter (immigrant worker) which exposes the racial prejudice and moral hypocrisy at the heart of modern West German society. Drawing upon the conventions of Hollywood melodrama (the film has many similarities to Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows), Fassbinder uses dramatic and visual excess to push everyday events to extremes, achieving a degree of political and psychological truth not accessible through mere social realism. Watch for Fassbinder himself as the reptilian son-in-law, and relish the scene in which Mira's son kicks in the television to demonstrate his disgust at the idea of her marrying an Arab.

The Village Voice [Dennis Lim]

Vital link between Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows and Todd Haynes's recent homage Far From Heaven, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's achingly tender, brutally wise 1974 masterpiece retained Sirk's scenario of a scandalizing romance and rendered it extra verboten. Widening the age gap and igniting a racial fuse (which Far From Heaven would later co-opt), the German wunderkind also turned the lovers against each other as soon as they'd made headway in their battle with social prejudice. This double-disc set—gorgeous and abundant even by Criterion standards—features an impeccable transfer, spiffed-up subtitles, and filler-free extras: interviews with star Brigitte Mira (vivacious, motormouthed, and apparently a cabaret performer—at 93!) and editor Thea Eymèsz (who looks ready to relive her Fassbinder-provoked breakdown as she recounts the insanely compressed production schedule); a 2002 autobiographical short starring Mira and edited by Eymèsz, about director Shahbaz Noshir's encounter with neo-Nazis while starring in a stage production of Ali; and a 20-minute intro by Haynes, triangulating Sirk's film and its two descendants with pinpoint eloquence and infectious fan ardor.

Edinburgh U Film Society [Iain Lang]

Superficially a story about a friendship and marriage between Emmi (Brigtte Mira), a lonely, widowed charlady, and Ali (Ben Salem), a Morrocan mechanic half her age, this film is much deeper. Their relationship is viewed with angry disapproval and even hostility by the pair's friends, and through this Fassbinder explores racism and prejudice in modem-day Germany.

The film is a remake of Douglas Sirk's 1955 Hollywood melodrama All That Heaven Allows. Fassbinder pushes the point further than that film did by powerful visuals and a narrative drive which takes the plot to extremes. By doing so he is able to engage his subject in a way which conventional social realism would not permit.

Over a thirteen year period, Fassbinder averaged a film every 100 days, which prodigious and surely draining output makes this film all the more amazing. A more straightforward narrative tale than some of his work, Fear Eats The Soul nevertheless demonstrates Fassbinder's great social, political and psychological awareness, and the way in which he was able to articulate. It is also more approachable than certain of his other films, which makes it all the more worthy of viewing by those who might otherwise be disinclined to attend one of his films; at least in this case they would be missing out.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Fear Eats the Soul, screening Wednesday and Thursday, is in many respects the pivotal film in Fassbinder's long filmography, marking the transition from Brechtian principles to Sirkian ones. The contrast to Fassbinder's early films could hardly be more stark; fear traffics in bold colors and melodramatic situations, a far cry from the rough-hewn aesthetics and angst-filled pauses of a movie like Beware of a Holy Whore. After helping organize a retrospective of German expatriate Douglas Sirk's Hollywood melodramas, Fassbinder determined to find a less aggressive -- or at least more subversively confrontational -- way of getting under an audience's skin. The outlines of Fear Eats the Soul's plot could come out of a Stanley Kramer movie from the 1950s; widow falls for young immigrant man, and their love is challenged by a society too blind to see past the color of their skins. That Emmi, Brigitte Mira's bourgeois ex-housewife, is several decades older than Ali, El Hedi ben Salem's Moroccan laborer, is just Fassbinder's way of upping the ante. The film serves as a withering indictment of German racism and middle-class hypocrisy; the way the hausfraus in Emmi's building none-too-subtly turn against her when she takes Ali as a lover, complaining that she'll have to clean the stairwell because there's too much "dirt," shows Fassbinder's devastating understanding of the way social decorum can mask the ugliest of sentiments. The shot of Emmi eating lunch alone in the stairwell, abandoned by her former friends, is pure heartbreak, composed with a Sirkian eye for color and frame. Fassbinder consistently uses frames within the frame -- windows, doorways, etc. -- to underline the artificiality of melodrama; bright swaths of primary color only heighten the effect. As in the best of Sirk's films, such self-consciousness draws the audience in rather than repulsing them -- you sign a contract to play by the movie's rules, and bind yourself to it. The film sums itself up with an epigraph that encompasses Fassbinder's views on love: "Happiness is not always funny."

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young]

With time on his hands in between major projects, the ever-industrious Fassbinder churned out a ‘quickie’ remake of a film by one of his favourite directors, Douglas Sirk. All That Heaven Allows (1956), scripted by Peg Fenwick, is a classic evocation of Eisenhower-era social repression in middle-class America: respectable middle-aged widow Jane Wyman (then 41) scandalises her family, friends and neighbours when she falls in love with her free-spirited gardener, Rock Hudson (then 30). The third cinematic version of the story is Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven, which nods to Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1958, itself a remake of John M Stahl’s 1934 original) by making the gardener black – Haynes eliminates the age-gap factor by casting Julianne Moore (then 41) and Dennis Haysbert (then 47) in the key roles.

Fassbinder diverges from Sirk and Haynes by setting his tale in ‘the present’ – mid-seventies Munich, in the aftermath of that city’s blood-spattered Olympics. Prefiguring Haynes, he introduces a racial element – Emmi (Brigitte Mira) is white, her lover (later husband) Ali (El Hedi Ben Salem) is one of the gastarbeiters (‘guest workers’) invited to Germany to solve the post-war shortage of manual labour. As in the other versions, the central coupling horrifies onlookers – widow Emmi is snubbed by her neighbouts, ostracised by her family and colleagues, and is refused service at her local store. But she’s a stubborn sort, and has a history of experiencing (mild) prejudice after marrying a Pole. Perhaps keen to expiate the guilt of her Nazi-party membership, Emmi refuses to be broken down – her determination is a key factor in the film’s major divergence from All That Heaven Allows: an ambiguous denouement which, by Fassbinder standards, can be described as a happy ending. Then again, the film does open (even before the titles) with a stern motto which reads : ‘Happiness isn’t always fun.’

Fassbinder plays down the class aspects emphasised by Sirk and Haynes: Emmi is, like Ali, a manual worker – a cleaner. Instead, he dramatically widens the age-gap: it’s hard to tell Ali’s age, but he’s probably in his mid-30s. Emmi is in her sixties – and it’s this, rather than the racial ‘barrier’, which emerges as the biggest threat to their relationship. Emmi does her best to satisfy Ali’s carnal needs, but he doesn’t seem entirely satisfied and seeks further ‘entertainment’ with the younger (but spectacularly hard-faced) barmaid (Barbara Valentin) at his local pub - though from what we’re shown their lovemaking is stilted to the point of inactivity.

That’s rather more than we see of Emmi and Ali, however – there’s a brief scene early on with a cut that strongly implies sex, but nothing at all after the pair get married (they emerge from the register office to a bleak scene of rain and slagheaps). We see even less of Mira naked than we do of ‘octogenarian’ Ruth Gordon in Harold and Maude, which was severely bowdlerised by the nervously prudish Paramount. This feels like a rare mis-step by Fassbinder – it’s as if he’s as averse to the physical aspects of Emmi and Ali’s relationship as the character he plays, Ali’s bigoted son-in-law Eugen.

It’s also hard to know exactly how to take the Bavarian boorishness Eugen represents, and which is shared by the vast majority of the characters on view – is this an accurate mirror of 1974 Munich reality, or a deliberately caricatured exaggeration? Sad to say, much of Fear Eats the Soul remains all too topical today – the Olympic terrorism incident seems to have altered the atmosphere in the city towards immigrants: “They’re all Arabs, you know – with bombs and all that” confides a neighbour to the (long-haired) policeman she’s summoned to break up a party in Emmi’s flat, a line that quite jarringly prefigures the paranoid aftermath of September 11^th.

The few people we see who tolerate Emmi and Ali’s marriage seem to be motivated primarily by financial imperatives – her son only starts talking to her when he realises he can’t afford a babysitter. Those hostile to Emmi’s choice of partner are presented as stiff, cardboard figures, shockingly close-minded in their prejudices. As usual, Fassbinder’s approach is deliberately stylised, melodramatic and mannered, with several instances of characters stiffly intoning their lines as they sit in fixed tableaux, often surrounded by spectacularly ugly instances of mid-seventies clothing and furniture – vile décor for vile thoughts, indeed.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul: All That Fassbinder Allows Criterion essay by Michael Töteberg, June 23, 2003

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul: One Love, Two Oppressions Criterion essay by Chris Fujiwara October 02, 2014

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) - The Criterion Collection

Jim's Reviews - Fassbinder's Ali Fear Eats the Soul

The Conscious Collusion of the Stare: The Viewer ... - Senses of Cinema Julian Savage, September 18, 2001

ANGST ESSEN SEELE AUF Ed Lowry from Film Reference

Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats The Soul) Tom von Logue Newth from FilmFracture, September 28, 2009

Rediscovering ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL | Jonathan Rosenbaum June 26, 2007

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Reverse Shot (Chris Wisniewski) Lie to Me, Late Summer 2006

CultureCartel.com (Keith Uhlich) review [5/5]

not coming to a theater near you (Matt Bailey)

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Lang Thompson

Kinocite review Beth Gilligan

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

Bright Lights Film Journal Adam Bingham, November 2003

Images Movie Journal David Ng, 2003

Critic After Dark Noel Vera

VideoVista review Gary McMahon

Still Life: Fassbinder in '74 on Notebook | MUBI Ethan Vestby, November 3, 2016

“Ali: Fear Eats the Soul” (1973) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder Victor Enyutin from Acting Out Politics

My Year of Fassbinder: Heaven & Fear | SpoutBlog Karina Longworth from SpoutBlog, March 21, 2008

Nina Simone Meets Fassbinder. Clip of the Day. | SpoutBlog Karina Longworth from SpoutBlog, March 31, 2008

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digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer) dvd review Criterion Collection

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [4/5] Criterion Collection

DVD Talk (John Wallis) dvd review [5/5] [Criterion Collection]

DVD Verdict (Rob Lineberger) dvd review [Criterion Collection]

Talking Pictures (UK) review Howard Schumann

FilmExposed Magazine Chris Power

Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Damian Cannon

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4.5/5]

Turner Classic Movies dvd review a compilation of capsule reviews

DVD Times Noel Megahey, reviews the 8-disc Region 2 DVD release, The Rainer Werner Fassbinder Commemorative Collection Volume 2

Log › Angst essen Seele auf (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974) Clint offers a photo sequence on the film from Log, February 28, 2009

TV Guide Review

Variety review

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 1974

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies] in 1997

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

DVDBeaver.com - Review [Gary W. Tooze]

DVDBeaver.com - Review [Gary W. Tooze] a comparison

Brigitte Mira Obituary by Hugh Rorrison from The Guardian, March 25, 2005

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul The Auteurs

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

MARTHA – made for TV B+ 91

Konstanz, Ottobeuren, Kreuzlingen, Rome, and S. Felice Zirceo (112 mi) July-September 1973

Based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich, Margit Carstensen plays an anorexic, virginal woman living under the thumb of her emotionally cold father until he drops dead while visiting Rome, whereupon she starts living under the thumb of an even crueler husband, played sadistically by Karl-Heinz Böhm, who despises her body and ridicules her mind. A game of escalating degradation ensues which Martha willingly gives in to. There is an eerie, unsettling edge to this darkly comical, straightforward theater of the absurd style, also starring Barbara Valentin. The entire film was shot with one lens, no zoom, giving it a realist look.

Michael Ballhaus (1974):

“Of the films I’ve made with Fassbinder up to now, I like MARTHA the best. For MARTHA we had, by Fassbinder’s standards, a lot of time; twenty-six shooting days. Fassbinder wanted me to photograph the entire film with one lens, without zoom. We maintained this principle with a few exceptions, and this was after we had just exploited the full range of technical possibilities doing WORLD ON A WIRE. This restriction led to new ways of thinking about things and fresh experiments, and I noticed that because it was photographed this way, the film attained a strength and consistency that we wouldn’t have been able to achieve otherwise.”

Fassbinder Bibliography (via UC Berkeley) Cahiers du Cinema (Jan 1996), by Frederic Strauss

"A review of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film Martha, which was made for German television in 1973 and has been recently rereleased. The story of a violent encounter of love, hate, scorn, and possession between a man and a woman, the film is initially not one that is easy to enjoy. Yet despite its seriousness, Martha includes moments of humor and lightness and remains a work for which Fassbinder deserves much admiration."

Martha | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Reader, also here: Martha

My favourite Fassbinder feature (1973; not shown in the U.S. for years because of problems involving the rights to the Cornell Woolrich source novel) is a horrific black comedy—a devastating view of bourgeois marriage rendered in a delirious baroque style. Vacationing in Rome, a virgin librarian in her 30s (Margit Carstensen) meets a macho architect (Peeping Tom's Karlheinz Böhm) and winds up marrying him. It's a match made in heaven between a masochist and a sadist, with the husband's contempt and absurdly escalating demands received by the fragile heroine as her proper due. Suspenseful and scary, excruciating and indigestible, this is provocation with genuine bite—though the manner often suggests a parody of a 50s Douglas Sirk melodrama.

Time Out

The everyday fascism Fassbinder dissects often rests on the simple observation that there are elements of sado-masochism even in such respectable bourgeois relationships as true romance and happy-ever-after marriage. Here, his script an adaptation of a story by Cornell Woolrich, he takes the staples of the Sirk melodrama (love at first sight, a big-dipper courtship, a honeymoon drive) and stands them on their heads, combining '40s costumes and movie references with recognisably real locations and high colour photography. He forces to their logical extremes the attitudes implicit in the woman's weepie and the little woman's traditional craving for a strong and competent man, pushing a sentimental romance into a high camp study of SM, full of images of vampirism, claustrophobia and haunted house genre movies. With no explicit references to a world beyond the screen, with indulgently aesthetic settings and outlandishly theatrical performances (notably from Carstensen as the perennially hapless victim), he creates a dazzling baroque abstraction with unsettling relevance to even the most mundane domestic partnerships.

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

This made-for-TV movie boasts some glorious, opulent cinematography by Michael Ballhaus, highlighting the fact that it was one of director Rainer Werner Fassbinder's rare excursions into the upper class. But the ornate sets and colorful camerawork only belie the disturbed nature of this truly sick film. Margit Carstensen (The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant) stars as the title character, a skinny, skeletal woman who is vacationing in Rome with her father when he suddenly dies of a heart attack. Not long after she marries a sadistic engineer Helmut (Karlheinz Bohm, from Peeping Tom) who continuously strips her of her rights and her free will. He makes her ride roller coasters with him, makes her quit her job, makes her read a boring book on engineering, and eventually rips out the phones and makes her stay home all the time. Arguably the worst scene comes after Helmut has allowed his new bride to fall asleep in the sun. She lies on the bed, burned to a bright pink and he throws himself on top of her, savagely making love to her. It's an insidious story, and inside it somewhere is a woman who probably wants to be stripped down to a point where she no longer has the burden of deciding anything -- or even living -- for herself. This is pretty rough going, but fortunately the DVD, from the great Fantoma Films, includes an excellent 60-minute documentary about Fassbinder and his tenuous connections to Hollywood. Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum tries to defend the film in the liner notes.

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Possibly the most twisted film of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's career, Martha (a favorite of his frequent cinematographer Michael Ballhaus) catalogs the tyrannical hold a bourgeois husband has over his wife. The similarities between this absurd tragicomedy and Luis Buñuel's Él (itself a precursor of sorts to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo) are unavoidable, and as such Fassbinder's film plays out as a loose remake of Buñuel's Mexico-era masterpiece. (Even the film's elaborate dinner sequence brings to mind Buñuel's warped renditions of the Last Supper for both Viridiana and The Exterminating Angel.) Margit Carstensen stars as Martha, a librarian who marries a rich businessman, Helmuth (Karlheinz Böhm), and finds herself slowly stripped of her freedom: he forces her to read a book on construction and listen to his favorite music and quits her job at the library without telling her.

The film opens with a black man entering Martha's hotel room while she vacations in Spain with her father. Not long after throwing the man out, Martha discovers that the hustler was sent to her room because the hotel clerk thought he had seen her winking at the man. This scene foreshadows the film's many domestic disturbances and the way the film's men insist on doing the thinking for their women. Martha's father dies of a heart attack during their joint Spanish vacation. She reacts indifferently to his death (seemingly more concerned with her stolen purse), no doubt irritated by his controlling nature. "You always dispute when you're in the wrong," he says before asking her to call a taxi. And as he clutches his chest dying on the film's Spanish steps, he mutters, "Let go of me, please, Martha." When she reaches for a cigarette not long after his death, it's obvious that she is happy to be free of his hold.

In Martha's pill-popping mother (a hysterical Gisela Fackeldey), Fassbinder sees the future of the film's younger domestic prisoners. "She has a right to death," says Helmuth as he watches the old woman overdose in front his daughter. The great irony here is obvious: although he believes everyone is entitled to death, he refuses to grant his own wife a right to life. Fassbinder unearths the man's patriarchal excuse for his wife's abuse during the couple's honeymoon. While reading The Disinherited Mind by Ellrich Heller (who observed the sterilized sobriety of Kafka's modern humanism), Helmuth insults his wife's intelligence and suggests that if a man can support his wife, it's embarrassing for her to work. When she half-sleepily defends female independence, he punishes her by letting her burn beneath the Italian sun. And though she now suffers from a severe sunburn, Helmuth passes his fingers threateningly over her skin and then mauls her sexually.

The reason Martha so easily suffers Helmuth's wrath then is because Helmuth's attacks are always preceded with reassurance. (She has no problem smoking on the veranda of their new home because he asks her nicely.) Trapped alone in their lonely castle, she brings a black cat into the house in order to surround herself with a living creature. He feigns sympathy, allows her to keep the cat, but kills the animal and ravages Martha right next to the carcass. However disturbing all of this may sound, Fassbinder plays the film's horrors and many social blunders for laughs. When Martha pretends not to have met Helmuth before at a dinner party, she defends her actions by saying, "What will mother think? She has such a smutty mind. She regards 'know' in the Biblical sense." Indeed, what with Martha being constantly surrounded by ominous jungle-like flowers and plants, Fassbinder sees Martha's struggle with Helmuth no different than the one between Adam and Eve.

Martha from Jim’s Reviews

Critic After Dark Noel Vera

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford

Martha, Interrupted: Fassbinder's 1974 Masterpiece on DVD - Bright ... Ian Johnston from Bright Lights Film Journal, August 31, 2004

MARTHA: Fassbinder's Uneasy Testament | Jonathan Rosenbaum Jonathan Rosenbaum, August 31, 2007

Rainer Werner Fassbinder: A Baby Caligula | The Chicago Blog Kristi McGuire, May 31, 2012

Still Life: Fassbinder in '74 on Notebook | MUBI Ethan Vestby, November 3, 2016

Epinions [metalluk]

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review

digitallyObsessed [Matt Peterson]

Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]

User comments from imdb Author: hasosch from United States

User comments from imdb Author: Knut Behrends (knb@gfz-potsdam.de) from Potsdam, Germany

Mondo Digital

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Ron Von Burg

RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER Subterranean Cinema

Time Magazine [Richard Corliss] December 16, 2003

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias] also reviews IN A YEAR OF 13 MOONS

DVD Times Noel Megahey, reviews the 4-disc Region 2 DVD release, Rainer Werner Fassbinder Volume 1

Channel 4 Film [capsule review]

FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW; Fassbinder on the Painfully Tight Bonds of Marriage Stephen Holden from The New York Times, September 24, 1994

EFFI BRIEST A- 94

aka: Fontane Effi Briest

Munich, Vienna, Aeroskobing (Denmark), Scleswig-Holstein, and the Black Forest (141 mi) Sept – October 1972 and October – November 1973

Gorgeously photographed in black and white by Jürgen Jürges and Dietrich Lohmann, based on the 1894 Theodor Fontane novel, this is an intelligent, slow-paced, literary adaptation of a system of repression, as seen through the eyes of a woman, in a luminous and subtle performance by Hanna Schygulla, who is trapped in 19^th century social convention. There is scrupulous attention to period detail, elegant framing in every shot which fades to a white out, as if pages are being turned, page by page, narrated eloquently by Rainer, subtitled: “Effi Briest, or Many who have an idea of their possibilities and needs nevertheless accept the prevailing order in the way they act, and thereby strengthen and confirm it absolutely.”

Of note, Hanna Schygulla didn’t work for Fassbinder again for 5 years, allegedly offending him by asking him for a raise, with Wolfgang Schenck, Karl-Heinz Böhm, and Ulli Lommel.

Time Out review Tony Rayns

Late 19th century Germany. A wholly inexperienced teenage girl is pushed into a marriage with a minor aristocrat many years her senior. She bears him a child, but her first knowledge of emotional warmth is gained when a neighbour makes moves to seduce her. Fassbinder's Effi Briest is quite literally a film of Theodor Fontane's novel: everything about the way it's conceived and structured draws attention back to the literary source. As a result, Effi is not just another Fassbinder victim-figure, but (true to Fontane) an index of her society's morality; she is exploited in various ways by everyone around her, but she suffers only because she hasn't the strength to challenge the social codes that bind her. Schygulla plays her with absolute conviction. Filmed in black and white, with extraordinary delicacy and reserve, this is one of Fassbinder's best films.

User comments from imdb Author: gsims from Melbourne, Australia

This film has everything one could ask for: astonishing visual intelligence and imagination, wonderfully evocative, impeccably composed images that draw on silent cinema and painting, all perfectly adapted to the very moving story being told, and the period/milieu in which it unfolds: Effie Briest is presented as enclosed in the many different spaces (most of them - especially the interiors - saturated with stifling formality, social rectitude and conformity) through which she moves and in which she lives, or tries to live (the bird in the cage being a transparent symbol of all this). Quite simply, Fassbinder knows - knew - what "mise en scene" really means. The passage of time is brilliantly handled (through, for example, the use of the fade to white, intertitles and a moving voice-over narration), and the cast is flawless, as well as being flawlessly directed. A film of immense dignity and power, yet it somehow remains understated...

User comments from imdb Author from United States

Fassbinder's Effie Briest is a tremendous film. It is not an 'adaptation' of the book. It is much more complicated than that. The title as it appears in the film is:

Fontane // Effie Briest // oder

then followed by a long quotation in the next frame. The word 'oder' (or) works as a hinge holding the first title onto its meaning (erklarung). The whole of Fontane's book is framed within the title. And the film is a meditation on the limits of enframement. Mirrors are everywhere, doubling and re-doubling the images and framings. To anyone that thinks the camera-work is sub par was obviously not paying attention. The execution of some of these scenes is unsurpassed by anyone.

The film consists of several different layers. There are inter titles, narration (direct quotations from Fontane), and then dialog. This would be the three orders of representation. Then there are the layers of sense. As an example take the figure of Effie Briest. She is never a unified subject that we can refer to as an individual. She is the contested site of a number of different forces in a number of fields of discourse. The most obvious evidence of this is the contestation of the name: Effie. Effie Briest? Effie Von Instetten? The film is about this change and the possibilities of refusal. What would it be to have ones own name and not the name of an other? She cannot. Or as her father (who is always called by the signifier 'Briest') continually says 'Das ist ein zu weites Feld'. He pronounces the limits of thought in its foreclosure. It is always a command and always ends the dialog: there is nothing left to say on this subject because we CANNOT think THAT (the repressed idea, which reveals itself as thinkable through the fathers disavowal of its thinkability).

Fassbinder: Life on the Edge Dennis Toth from Film Notes from the CMA (excerpt)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder became during his brief life one of the most dynamic and controversial figures in the modern cinema. Before his death in 1982, he completed over 40 film and television productions and created numerous works for the stage and radio. He performed as an actor in over a dozen other films and was one of the central artists in the New German cinema movement of the 1970s. Despite the fact that his career lasted for less than two decades, he was a torrential force whose self-destructive behavior was capable of producing an energetic degree of inventiveness and creativity. He continually led his life on the edge of a great abyss and became the poet laureate of angst, perversity, and a powerfully genuine emotionalism.

Fassbinder was born in 1945, though he would later change his birth date to 1946. His parents divorced when he was six and Fassbinder spent his childhood being moved back and forth between his aloof father and his seemingly disinterested mother. While his mother spent time in a sanatorium for tuberculosis, his father lived in Munich and was a doctor whose patients mostly were prostitutes and their clients. Except for the sporadic company of his father's patients and a few friendly relatives, Fassbinder grew up primarily alone and once boasted, "I'm my own father." If he was his own father, then the movies were his mother as he spent hours each week in darkened theaters watching American films. He was especially intrigued by gangster pictures and the melodramas of Douglas Sirk. By his late teens, after displaying an indifference to school and leading a brief career as a street hustler, Fassbinder became convinced that he had to make films.

He attended drama school intermittently in Munich and, by 1967, was acting with a small group called the Action Theater. Fassbinder systematically took control of the group through the combined forces of hard work, an overmastering ego, and sexual liaisons with theater members. By the time the police had closed the theater during the May 1968 uprisings, Fassbinder had already formed the core of the Anti-Teater which he would use on stage and in film.

Improvisations and guerrilla theater tactics formed the basis for the Anti-Teater and, in 1969, Fassbinder directed the group in his first four feature films. Each film was made within a matter of a few weeks and represented a mix of experimental stylization, psycho-drama, and autobiographical details. These earliest films ranged wildly from the extremely studied and classical design of Effi Briest (West Germany 1974) to the excessive Gotterdammerung mentality of The American Soldier (West Germany 1970); yet the common ground among all the films was a focus on redefining the structure of narrative film making. Each film also exposed, directly and indirectly, glimpses into Fassbinder’s psychology.

Effi Briest is a close adaptation of Theodor Fontaine's 19th century novel which was, in turn, a variation on Madame Bovary. When developing some of his previous adaptations of novels to film, Fassbinder simply neglected to read the novel. In producing Effi Briest, he deviated from this practice, actually reading the book, and quoting directly from it throughout the film. The narrative of Effi Briest attracted him as it provided a compelling delineation of Fassbinder's own overwhelming need for love, his inability to achieve it, and the underlying sadomasochistic pursuit of power that can so easily dominate the emotions.

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

A tragic, lethal tale of societal limits confronting youthful naivety, Effi Briest excludes emotional harmonics as it exposes the central cruelty. Effi Briest (Hanna Schygulla), a young girl of seventeen, still lives with her parents and behaves like a tomboy. As she prefers climbing trees to acting the lady, the earnest marriage proposal of Baron Geert Von Instetten (Wolfgang Schenck) comes as a surprise. A much older Prussian diplomat, the oddity is that Instetten had previously vied for the hand of Luise Briest (Lilo Pempeit), Effi's mother. Since then his status has much improved, making his new advance acceptable to Herr Briest (Herbert Steinmetz).

Effi is socially ambitious so she accepts, despite the considerable age difference. In short order she finds herself stranded in a remote Baltic town with a man she barely knows, not that this dents Effi's enthusiasm. She believes her husband to be a decent fellow of firm principle (relative to her moral code, in any case). Yet the Instetten household gives Effi the cold-shoulder, with the housekeeper Johanna (Irm Hermann) taking particular umbrage. Even when Effi falls pregnant her situation remains poor, since the town elite have long since decided that she doesn't fit in. A lapsed Catholic nanny, Roswitha (Ursula Strätz), helps but still Effi comes to innocently spend her time with the inveterate womaniser Major Crampas (Ulli Lommel).

As Effi Briest plays, there is one quality that comes to dominate: the flatness of its emotional landscape. In scene after scene the characters talk past one another, mouthpieces for an interior monologue. Instead of showing us the events that drive this story, Rainer Werner Fassbinder describes them; at times his narration quotes almost verbatim from Theodor Fontane's text. What we have, at least initially, is the unbearable sight of a film suffocating by its own rigidity. Yet curiously this seems to be exactly the mood that Fassbinder is striving for, hoping to remark upon the stifling repression of 19th Century Germany. If so then Fassbinder hits this nail square on; the problem is that this doesn't make for a delightful viewing experience. When emotion must be hidden at all costs, this leaves nothing for the audience to get a hold of.

In line with Fassbinder's wishes, the majority of the cast put no inflection into their speech, avoiding any semblance of an emotional response. Effi Briest feels almost like a rehearsal, where the cast are simply running through their lines without shading in the intricacies. The only character who makes any sort of impression is Roswitha, principally through the hooks that we are given into her past. Strätz induces a response because she's tangible, because she directly interacts with other people. There are moments, near the end, where Schygulla breaks free of Fassbinder's straitjacket but this just enhances our sense of frustration. Effi Briest is tough and impenetrable, its strands thickly packed together; if only there were a way to taste the film's lifeblood.

As usual Fassbinder demonstrates absolute technical control, using Jürgen Jürges and Dietrich Lohmann to photograph his vision. Throughout, Fassbinder's strict stylisation guides the lighting and spatial dynamics of each scene, reinforcing Effi Briest's aura of alienation. Characters are pinned in place by formality, unnatural in the mode of a butterfly museum. To open up the frame, Fassbinder repeatedly employs a clever device; mirrors, placed everywhere, reflect back on the camera. Thus he allows an interpretative flexibility while simultaneously increasing the character's emotional distance; we don't see the "real" protagonists during some key moments, merely their ghosts.

In retrospect it becomes clear that Effi Briest is hardly a film at all, in the traditional sense. Fassbinder is in love with Fontane's words, to the extent that his monochrome creation is pushed into the background by the film's literary source. Unlike the vast majority of movies, which attempt to engage on a visceral level, this is a purely intellectual journey. The oppressive cruelty of Effi's chosen society is stripped repulsively naked, a bloated force that turns the characters into puppets. This environment is the tale's key figure; it means nothing in human terms, yet its influence is all around. The inevitable conclusion is that Effi Briest will appeal to a select group, those able to appreciate its complex, cerebral overtones, arid nature and slippery angst.

That said, there is a caveat: as Fassbinder remarks, "Well, it's a film that really only works in the German language." This is quite correct, although the poorly translated subtitles do little to express the inherent subtlety of Fontane's novel. If you're not fluent in the German language then be prepared to miss out on an important, perhaps critical, aspect.

Effi Briest: Beyond Adultery • Senses of Cinema Christa Lang Fuller, November 5, 2006

Effi Briest Jim’s Reviews

not coming to a theater near you (Matt Bailey) review

Epinions [metalluk]

The Marquise of O... and Effi Briest Women oppressed, by Renny Harrigan from Jump Cut

Film and Feminism in Germany From the Outside Moving In Marc Silberman from Jump Cut

German Women's Movement and Ours Renny Harrigan from Jump Cut

Women's Cinema in Germany Claudia Lennsen from Jump Cut

Feminism and Film Helke Sander from Jump Cut

VideoVista review J.C. Hartley

Still Life: Fassbinder in '74 on Notebook | MUBI Ethan Vestby, November 3, 2016

ReelTalk (Donald Levit)

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

Eye for Film (Keith Dudhnath) review [4/5]

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [2/5]

Turner Classic Movies dvd review a compilation of capsule reviews

DVD Times Noel Megahey, reviews the 8-disc Region 2 DVD release, The Rainer Werner Fassbinder Commemorative Collection Volume 2

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4.5/5]

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

FOX AND HIS FRIENDS (Faustrecht der Freiheit) A 95

Marrakech and Munich (123 mi) April and July 1974

A semi-autobiographical story in THE BLUE ANGEL tradition, this is a very intelligent, brutally bleak portrait of class exploitation under the sadistic guise of love. Rainer, in his most affecting role as Fox, a carnival worker professionally known as Fox the Talking Head, a low-life used to hustling older men in public toilets, wins the lottery and consumes all his winnings furnishing the unfinished business of other people’s more sophisticated middle class lives, leaving nothing for himself, believing this will lead to love, but is devastated when they have no more use for him once the money runs out, then continues to be assaulted and brutalized even after he is dead, lying alone in a subway station stripped of all his money, and with it, any shred of dignity, dedicated to: “Armin, and the others.”

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1974):

“I think it’s incidental and beside the point that the story has to do with gays. It could just as well take place among other people. I even think that people pay more attention to details for this reason, because if it were merely a ‘normal love story,’ the melodramatic aspect would be a lot stronger.”

Michael Tapper from 1001 FILMS YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

This Rainer Werner Fassbinder classic has often been portrayed as the bisexual director-writer-actor’s study in homophobic, self-hatred. However, the plot of FOX AND HIS FRIENDS – about gay, low-life crook Franz “Fox” Biberkopf’s (Fassbinder) self-delusion of being elevated to the land of the rich and beautiful after he wins 500,000 marks in a lottery and suddenly becomes the love interest of handsome bourgeois Eugen Theiss (Peter Chatel) – is less about sexuality than it is about class. At first Fox, with his impulsive energy, insatiable libido, and cunning street smarts, seems to have the upper hand in the relationship, putting him in stark contrast to Eugen and his circle of friends’ lifeless world of etiquette. Gradually, however, his brute force is worn down by Eugen’s condescending treatment, transference of guilt, and manipulation. Fox might be a successful predator in the world of hoodlums and whores on the street, but in the salon world of capitalists (even small-time ones) he is no match for cold-hearted vampires like Eugen.

Fassbinder makes Fox’s fateful journey all the more painful by inviting us to witness the telling signs of doom early on, the first and most fateful one being his infatuation with and reverence for Eugen’s lifestyle. The film poignantly dramatizes the ways in which the mass media has marketed desire for social status and wealth to the postwar working class through commercials, glossy magazines, and soap operas. The unforgettable final shot of Fox deprived by Eugen of all his money as well as his human dignity, collapsing or maybe dying of a broken heart in the subway only to be robbed of his last belongings by some boys, has been criticized as a melodramatic gimmick. But Fox’s fate bears a connection to other men named Franz – mainly played by Fassbinder – for instance in his LOVE IS COLDER THAN DEATH (1969). However the most significant reference is, of course, to the tragic death of another Franz Biberkopf, the protagonist of the Alfred Döblin novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (adapted five years later for TV by the director) – one of the most powerful descriptions of death in a society where human value has a price tag.

Time Out Geoff Andrew

One of Fassbinder's excellent melodramas focusing on the manipulation and destruction of a working-class victim-figure, in this case a surly fairground worker who is taken up by effete bourgeois gays when he wins a small fortune on a lottery. It's the usual vision of exploitation and complicity hidden under the deceiving mantle of love, but Fassbinder's precision, assured sense of milieu, and cool but human compassion for his characters, make it a work of brilliant intelligence. And the director himself is superb as the none-too-intelligent hero.

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder practically sweated films.

Coming from the German New Wave of the 60s and 70s (which also included Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders), Fassbinder (1945-82) poured out something like 40 films in his brief 37 years of life before he committed suicide in 1982 with a drug overdose.

Fassbinder was also the heir apparent to Douglas Sirk, concentrating mostly on gut-wrenching melodramas, doomed romances and other volatile relationships. Because he worked so fast, his films all have a sense of urgency and potency, as if no other film matters in that moment.

To save time, he also worked with the same cast and crew again and again, including the great cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, who went on to photograph many of Martin Scorsese's films, including Gangs of New York.

Now, both Wellspring Media and Fantoma Films have finally begun releasing many of Fassbinder's films on DVD.

One of Fassbinder's own personal favorites, the powerful Fox and His Friends (1975, Wellspring Media, $24.98) may also be the greatest gay film ever made (alongside Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together). Fassbinder delivers a powerfully intuitive performance as Fox, a former circus worker forced to go straight when his boss is arrested. He wins the lottery and falls into the company of some sleazy, well-to-do types, who eventually cause him to spend his entire fortune. Carl Boehm (a.k.a. Karlheinz Böhm), best known as the clean-cut killer in Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960) co-stars.

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [8/10]

Franz Biberkopf (Fassbinder), a.k.a. Fox, loses his job as a Munich fairground ‘talking head’ attraction when his MC and lover Klaus (Harry Baer) is sent to prison. He picks up suave antique-dealer Max (Karl-Heinz Boehm) in a public toilet and, after winning a small fortune on the national lottery, is adopted by Max’s circle of well-heeled gay friends. These include the snooty Eugen (Peter Chatel), whose initial disgust towards the ill-mannered Fox instantly fades when he spots a chance to save his family’s ailing bookbinding business. The pair become lovers, Eugen leeching more and more of Fox’s winnings into the family firm – with tragic consequences for the hapless ‘lottery queen’…

Fox is a characteristically bitter and caustic slice of socio-economic melodrama from Fassbinder, but isn’t the ideal starting-point for newcomers to his insanely prolific output. Though never as turgid as, say, Merchant of Four Seasons, it’s still one of his longer films, feeling closer to three hours than two. This is one of his blunt but persistent and effective attacks on the stratified, deadening society of West Germany in the mid-70s – a well-off but somewhat scuzzy and seedy environment of vile fashions and gaudy décor.

As with most (but not all) of his films, Fassbinder is a writer first and a director second – he’s more interested in character and dialogue than in exploring the possibilities of the cinematic medium. But he includes one dazzling show-off scene near the end, when Fox finally starts to realise the mess he’s in and breaks up with Eugen. With this sequence, Fassbinder lets us know he as capable of visual flair as anyone – he’s just too busy and angry to bother.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - Cine-File.info Kyle A. Westphal

Not to be confused with the Fox News Channel's liberty-lovin' early morning coffee klatch Fox and Friends, itself a formidable showcase of sadomasochistic aggression and queenly preening, Fassbinder's 1975 film FOX AND HIS FRIENDS is one of his finest—a fatalistic cautionary tale about an innocent schnook deflowered by the logic of industrial capitalism. (Appropriately, one plausible translation of the original German title is "Freedom Will Fist-Fuck You.") Though Fassbinder lifts the name of his central character from Alfred Doblin's 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, the decisive Weimar shadow is that of F.W. Murnau’s 1924 film DER LETZTE MANN; FOX AND HIS FRIENDS plays like an inversion of Murnau and screenwriter Carl Mayer's classic of working classic humiliation, which famously proposed "a most improbable epilogue" that delivered salvation-through-unexpected-inheritance to Emil Jannings' downwardly-mobile washroom attendant and depicted his new-found magnanimity in comically out-sized terms. In Fassbinder's version, prissy prole Franz "Fox" Biberkopf assays a providential lottery jackpot in the first reel (a camp-crass "triumph of the will" played with Keystone staccato) and spends the rest of the movie paying the price for his good fortune. Instantly drawn into a gay demimonde of mud baths, antique furniture dealers, chintzy nouveau riche flats with absurd chandeliers, and admittedly impeccable exemplars of male fashion, Fox is an arriviste outsider, an avatar of working class boorishness. Proudly adorned with his SCORPIO RISING-style stud jacket, freely professing his love of pilsner and total ignorance of sugar spoons, Fox cannot his recognize new friends' predations as anything but acts of love that he's too dim to fully appreciation or comprehend. That presumption of ignorance, the automatic self-deprecation and inferiority complex, is Fox's tragic flaw—and an exploitative opening for his high-bred defilers, who are immune to such doubts and instinctively know how to weaponize shame. Defending FOX AND HIS FRIENDS against charges of self-loathing leveled decades ago by Andrew Britton in Gay Left, the critic Alex Davidson smartly quipped, "[W]ould that the avaricious men in Fox and His Friends had enough self-awareness to hate themselves." So, is this hilariously precise dissection of West Germany's gay scene a covert act of homophobia? Let us say only that Fassbinder knew the milieu a hell of a lot better than many of the actors with whom he populated this acid postcard from paisley purgatory. Karl-Heinz Böhm, who played the camera-killer of PEEPING TOM and appears here as Fox's high society tour guide Max, incredibly maintained that the profoundly queer Fassbinder was only "pretending to be a homosexual or bisexual," "very good at acting as a gay person, and behaving like a gay person," all as "a kind of protest against his father, but also to express his opposition to a society where homosexuals were not being accepted." That Fassbinder could craft such a warm, empathetic, and ruthless movie with collaborators who misunderstood and denied his deepest desires is but one demonstration of this artist's unearthly powers.

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

One of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's towering masterworks, Fox and His Friends is the devastating story of a poor circus worker who wins the lottery and finds himself fleeced out of his fortune by lecherous upper-class monsters. The film begins with Franz Bieberkopf, alias Fox (Fassbinder), firmly planted at the bottom of the culture's social ladder, but even then he is still only an abstraction of a real living, breathing human being. When his boyfriend Klaus (Karl Scheydt) is arrested for tax fraud, "Fox, the Talking Head" must turn tricks in order to buy the lottery ticket he's convinced will bring him his fortune. After meeting a gay sophisticate, he's introduced to a group of queens who shun him for his proletariat stench. The hypocritical Eugen (Peter Chatel) disregards his gorgeous boyfriend, Philip (Harry Baer), and pounces on the working-class dope, enticed by the boy's rough but endearing disposition, feelings that intensify after he learns Fox is worth 500,000 German marks.

Make no mistake, this is the real Queer as Folk, but for all of Fassbinder's gripes with an elite gay culture's many sexual hang-ups, Fox and His Friends is first and foremost a riveting evocation of social Darwinism in action (Fox is called "stupid and primitive" and the tagline that follows the film's title on the Wellspring DVD of the film aptly proclaims: "Survival of the Fittest"). A mere child at heart, Fox is unconsciously rude to his elders and pounds his hands at the dinner table. His sweetly innocent behavior nonetheless brings shame to Eugen, who has no problems borrowing 100,000 German marks from Fox to prevent his father's printing business from going under. And after Eugen and his elite family (they prefer Mozart to loud modernist composers and are easily mortified when Fox drops chunks of bread into his soup) successfully bilk Fox out of his entire fortune (embarrassing him by forcing him to work at their factory and then suggesting that his slave labor is his interest due), Fox returns to the earth, so to speak, after dying of a broken heart.

Curiously, Fox and His Friends has been deemed homophobic by some and overly pessimistic by others. The film's homosexuals are, not surprisingly, any different than the film's equally lecherous heterosexuals. And the film's pessimism is far outweighed by Fassbinder's humane indictment of Fox as an active participant in his own victimization, a familiar critique found in many of the director's films. Is there such a thing as natural intelligence? So asks one of the film's characters at one point. More importantly, how does one truly measure human decency? When Fox's perpetually drunk sister, Hedwig (Christiane Maybach), causes a scene and is subsequently reprimanded at a party hosted by Eugene at the apartment he bought with Fox's money, she wails, "It stinks of high heaven, and God, dressed as Marlene Dietrich, holds his nose." In Fox and His Friends, Fassinder likens the abuse his character suffers at the hands of his "friends" to that of a poor animal ravaged by carnivorous predators, and the smell of human hate is certainly far more crippling than the smell of urine that hangs from his clothes.

Fox and His Friends • Senses of Cinema Colin Browne, June 5, 2011

Fox and His Friends Jim’s Reviews

Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis) review [A]

outrate.net (Mark Adnum)

Fassbinder's Fox And His Friends An exchange of views, by Bob Cant, reply by Andrew Britton from Jump Cut

Eye for Film (Jeff Robson) review [4/5]

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4]

Thirtyframesasecond [Kevin Wilson]

User comments from imdb Author: desperateliving from Canada

User comments from imdb Author: gradyharp from United States

User comments from imdb Author: Itchload from Massachusetts

User comments from imdb Author: Galina from Virginia, USA

User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: jzappa from United States

User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: Graham Greene from United Kingdom

VideoVista review Jim Steel

ReelTalk (Donald Levit)

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3/5]

PopcornQ review Lawrence Chua

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review

Passport Cinema [Chris Luedtke]

Turner Classic Movies dvd review a compilation of capsule reviews

DVD Times Noel Megahey, reviews the 8-disc Region 2 DVD release, The Rainer Werner Fassbinder Commemorative Collection Volume 2

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 1975

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 1979

The New York Times (Richard Eder)

LIKE A BIRD ON A WIRE (Wie ein Vogel auf dem Draht) – TV show

Cologne (44 mi) July 1974

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1975):

“LIKE A BIRD ON A WIRE is an attempt to do a show about the Adenauer era. For us it certainly wasn’t entirely successful. But the film does reveal the utter repulsiveness and sentimentality of that time.”

User reviews from imdb Author: Hankoegal from Germany

This is a curiosity within the Fassbinder-oeuvre. It is a personality-TV-show for German actress Brigitte Mira - the main actress in ALI - FEAR EATS SOUL. In different TV-studio-settings Brigitte Mira sings some popular songs starting with Leonard Cohens BIRD ON A WIRE in German language WIE EIN VOGEL AUF DEM DRAHT - the title of this show. Others I remember are KINDER HEUT' ABEND, DAS SUCH' ICH MIR WAS AUS, a song originally sung by Marlene Dietrich, as far as I remember from the BLUE ANGEL-period. Then Brigitte Mira sings EGON, known by Evelyn Künneke. During this song she is in her living room, drinking alcohol and getting more and more drunk. Between the songs she tells the story of her life briefly. A small bitch fighting scene is showing her with Evelyn Künneke on a train ride. Next scene she is walking the catwalk during a fashion show. One scene shows here singing to a bunch of leather guys in a gay bar. Fassbinder's scene. Another scene she is a in a gym with lots of muscular men working out in their tight pants - very camp and gay. During the last song a b/w-photography of Fassbinder himself is cut in for some seconds. The whole show is very 70ies, somehow cute and a homage for the great actress. A must-see for Fassbinder-fans.

MOTHER KÜSTERS GOES TO HEAVEN (Mutter Küsters' Fahrt zum Himmel) B 89

Frankfurt (120 mi) February – March 1975

A loose remake of the 1929 Piel Jutzi film, MOTHER KÜSTRA’S TRIP TO HAPPINESS with one difference, M. Küsters (Brigitte Mira, from ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL) does not find salvation with the political left, but only finds another pack of self-interested sharks in the water eager to exploit her. A chilling look at a woman whose husband goes berserk killing his boss’s son, kills himself, and the film begins as an honest and good person (Mira) falls prey to a system of currupt media and politics, searching for help through the tabloid media, whose muckraking journalist (Gottfried John) begins living with her daughter (Ingrid Craven in one of her best roles) whose only concern is to further her own career as a would-be chanteuse. Through meetings with the various wings of the communist and anarchist parties (Karl-Heinz Böhm), they promise to clear her husband’s good name, but soon the dead man’s life is distorted throughout pages of a cheap tabloid, a world where both John and Böhm represent the ultimate evil in both this and other Fassbinder films, where only small kindnesses carry relief from overwhelming suffering. Told in an absurdist, theatrical style with 2 endings, the happy US ending, as originally written by Fassbinder, and the radical German ending, as originally shot by Fassbinder. Both are hilarious, changed allegedly due to the insistence and the complaints of friends. It’s hard to believe this was banned by the Berlin Film Festival for fear of political reprisals due to its supposed pro-communist leanings, all part of the absurdity and charm of the Fassbinder legend.

User comments from imdb Author: Spuzzlightyear from Vancouver

Mother Kunters is just so drolly funny. The story is about a woman coping with her husband's death. Her husband died after he fell into some machinery at work. Oh, and there's something else. Her husband killed 2 people on the job before doing himself in. Actually, if you listen closely during the first 15 minutes of the movie, the "There's something else" line is repeated 3 times, which is very oddly funny. Mrs. Kunsters is of course, devastated by the news, and when her children get together, they all don't really get along, and deal with the death in different ways, her daughter is especially malicious, using the death to promote her laughable music career. Mrs Kusters, not finding solace anywhere, finally finds a couple willing to listen and feel compassion. Problem is of course, they're COMMUNISTS! Ha ha. Pretty soon they're convincing poor Mrs Kusters that her husband's death is directly related to The Plight of The Common Worker! I mean, that's priceless. Pretty soon, she's getting caught up with the hardline commies and soon violently protesting against newspapers that published negative stories about her husband. I mean, clearly we're dealing with manipulation, (both personal and political) and Fassbinder does it brilliantly here. As you could tell by the title of my review, I'm not the biggest Fassbinder fan, but I personally loved this one. Although the ending (the American one even more so) leaves a little bit to be desired, I, all in all, enjoyed this tremendously.

User comments from imdb Author: ksie_15241 (ksie_15241@yahoo.com) from Virginia, USA

Another of Fassbinder's 'man's cruelty to man' films, Mother Kusters features the wonderful Bridgit Mira in the title role. She is superb, delivering a wonderfully restrained and poignant performance. Other Fassbinder regulars also appear including Karl Heinz-Bohm (in one of his trademarked icy-sophisticate roles), Margit Carstensen (excellent also as another of Fassbinder's self-absorbed characters) and Ingird Caven (oozing all over the screen brilliantly as a Dietrich-esque singer). All of the Fassbinder films I have seen contain strong female roles, and this movie is certainly no exception. The relationship here between Mira and Caven, as mother and daughter, is particularly interesting, yet not really explored sufficiently.

The early part of this story deals with the death of Frau Kusters' husband, and the initial repercussions. At first it seems that the movie is to be an indictment of the press. Reporters and photographers immediately swoop-down onto the Kusters family, invading their privacy and mourning, in search of a fantastic story about a homicidal maniac. They sensationalize everything the family tells them about Hermann Kusters, and do indeed print an inaccurate, exaggerated portrait of this simple family man.

But the exploitation of Mother Kusters goes even farther. First, it is her family. They are basically indifferent to their father's passing, and seem to have little concern about their mother's grief. The singer daughter (Caven) even goes so far as to use the sensationalism of the incident to further her career. It is here that a prior conflict between Corrina and her parents is hinted. The singer seems to have some empathy with her mother, and perhaps some deep-rooted issue with her father. But this is never quite explained or explored. Nevertheless, Mother Kusters seems to be alone in showing any respect for her dear departed.

The film then takes a subtle but surprising direction. Whereas the story to this point has dealt with emotional exploitation, Fassbinder introduces a political bend. A seemingly caring couple turn out to be members of the Communist Party. Their interest in the widow is as a symbolic example of the exploitation of the worker. The political angle of the story works surprisingly well, and is taken further with the introduction of anarchists, who of course also wish to use Frau Kusters for their own means.

The DVD version I have contains two endings. The first was apparently never filmed, and is instead shown in a summarized script format. The second was obviously tacked-on at a later date (everyone looks different), for American audiences. This is curious. Although upbeat ('happy'), the second ending is inferior and really rings untrue to the rest of the story. Did Fassbinder really feel this made the movie more saleable, or was this a corporate dictate? The endings' confusion aside, this is an excellent film.

Fassbinder once again explores deeply his usual (apparently personal) themes of emotional exploitation, cruelty, and the the political drama of post WWII Germany. Highly recommended!

Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven Jim’s reviews

Only The Cinema [Ed Howard]

World Socialist Web Site Joanne Laurier and David Walsh

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

User comments from imdb Author: planktonrules from Bradenton, Florida

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

DVD Times Noel Megahey, reviews the 8-disc Region 2 DVD release, The Rainer Werner Fassbinder Commemorative Collection Volume 2

FEAR OF FEAR (Angst vor der Angst) – made for TV A- 93

Cologne and Bonn (88 mi) April – May 1975

A woman terrorized by her own anxieties that defy explanation, and are unnoticeable to everyone else, is a tour de force for Margit Carstensen, whose seemingly perfect suburban life turns into a nightmare, complete with swelling music, blurred images, trembling camera, and a rather flamboyant narrative. The story was initially suggested from an idea by Asta Scheib, Fassbinder’s preoccupation with loneliness is conveyed here using the mental illness theme that anticipates unforeseen hostile elements affecting West German society, and has a Buñuel-like humor to it.

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Rainer Werner Fassbinder directed Fear of Fear for German television some two years after the similarly themed but superior nightmare comedy Martha. Both films feature housewives being driven to insanity by their largely oppressive environments though Fear or Fear counts as the more humanist exercise. If not entirely successful, the film still puts the preening melodrama of The Hours to shame. Margot (Margit Carstensen) finds herself succumbing to a seemingly inexplicable hysteria just weeks before she's about to give birth to her second child. Easily agitated by her husband Kurt's dismissals and her daughter Bibi's whims, Margot loses herself to a crippling fear of fear, which Fassbinder repeatedly and tiresomely suggests by wavering the woman's sightline. Margot begins to sleep with a local doctor in exchange for bottles of Valium, all the while dodging the bloodshot eyes of a snickering drug addict that she may or may not have shared a past with. Margot's mother and sister are monsters, seeing fault in her need to cuddle and kiss her children. If Fassbinder fails to provide a proper context for Margot's bourgeoning insanity during the film's first half, he later evokes a lecherous society's desire to squeeze the life out of the woman during her moment of weakness. Whenever Margot steps out of her apartment, Fassbinder repeatedly shoots Carstensen in such a way that brings to mind an irreparably damaged and writhing organism patronized beneath the lens of a microscope. Margot's decision to drown herself in liquor, drugs, and music (notice the metaphoric use of Leonard Cohen's "Lover Lover Lover") is her seductive way out of a banal and carnivorous modern world.

User comments from imdb Author zetes from Saint Paul, MN

Really, the plot is nothing different than your average movie on the Lifetime cable network: a woman suffers from post-partem depression while no one around her seems to care much; eventually, she becomes addicted to Valium and alcohol. But what a difference a genius can make, and Fassbinder is clearly a genius. And his lead actress, Margit Carstensen, gives an absolutely brilliant performance. It's a small and subtle picture (made for television, actually), and I wonder if anyone else would be as impressed as I was. But I really felt that Fassbinder and Carstensen captured something remarkable here. The other actors are fine, as well. Ulrich Faulhaber plays her odd husband. He cares for his wife, but probably not in the way she needs. I noticed early in the film that he never touches his wife, and later in the film his mother complains that it is abnormal the way the mother hugs and kisses her children. The nosy mother-in-law is played by Brigitte Mira, looking really ugly after making me cry in Fear Eats the Soul, made the previous year. I would say that that character is a cliché if I didn't know so many people exactly like her! Irm Herrmann plays the sister-in-law, and Adrian Hoven plays a pharmacist with whom Carstensen begins an affair after her prescription for Valium runs out. These two characters have the kind of hidden depth that make the film so good. The same can be said about Kurt Raab and Ingrid Caven, both playing other people with psychological problems, the former appearing once in a while in the streets and staring knowingly at Carstensen, the latter Carstensen's roommate at an asylum in which she undergoes some treatment; when Carstensen is undergoing sleep therapy, Caven desperately wants to converse with her, but when she is awake the woman becomes catatonic. Peer Raben's music is excellent, as always, and Fassbinder uses the music of Leonard Cohen wonderfully (as he also did in his more famous 1975 film, Fox and His Friends). 9/10.

Turner Classic Movies Lang Thompson

One welcome development over the past couple of years has been the DVD appearance of numerous Rainer Werner Fassbinder films. Once considered a leading light in world cinema, Fassbinder's reputation has slipped for a variety of reasons, not the least being the difficulty of grasping his body of work. In the 16 years before his 1982 death, Fassbinder directed 39 feature films and two TV serials (one of the latter, Berlin Alexanderplatz, runs 15 hours). Needless to say, the films are uneven and there's not much thematic variety but viewing many in their new DVD incarnations leaves no doubt that Fassbinder was a major director.

One example is 1975's Fear of Fear (the English title a somewhat pale translation of the original German title Angst vor der Angst). In broad outline, it's not far removed from many Hollywood melodramas and certainly within Fassbinder's world of alienated prey and uncaring predators. The film follows a housewife through increasing depression as she copes with a distant husband and his nagging mother and prying sister. She tries to distract herself with her grade-school daughter, seeks refuge in pills and alcohol, toys with the idea of an affair and generally floats through life.

This is fairly sparse material and in lesser hands could easily have been quite tedious. But Fassbinder was above all a true filmmaker, not just a maker of polemics. Without being blatant or agressively "arty" he deploys a variety of music and ambient sound, smart framing (one memorable shot shows the housewife practically obscured by the furnishings), image distortions, and even iconic devices like the numerous mirrors inspired by Fassbinder's idol Douglas Sirk. This allows him to communicate or at least hint at the housewife's mental state without overusing dialogue or cliched situations. The film is a fairly unsettling portrait, all the more effective for a strain of ambiguity that runs through it.

Fassbinder developed a stock company of actors which certainly helped the speed of his work. The housewife is played by Margit Carstensen, a veteran by this time of nine Fassbinder films (not to mention Ulli Lommel's cult classic Tenderness of the Wolves). Her performance is restrained and subtle, completely appropriate for a film in which she's onscreen almost the entire running time. Much of the other cast had logged time with Fassbinder: Kurt Raab, Brigitte Mira (unforgettable in Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven), Irm Hermann and even Ingrid Caven, at that time Fassbinder's ex-wife.

All told, Fear of Fear is one of Fassbinder's minor films. Despite its virtues, the entire effect is a bit too schematic and narrowly focused. The rushed production is a constant in Fassbinder's films but here it also leaves a few too many rough spots like incompletely sketched motivations and some clumsy camera movements. Still, the DVD by Wellspring Home Video is a clean, sharp presentation and this will definitely interest viewers already familiar with Fassbinder's work.

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger)

Here comes her nineteenth nervous breakdown. This 1975 film, originally produced for West German television, is director Rainer Werner Fassbinder working in top form—it's a self-conscious homage to many Hollywood films of the 1940s and 1950s, particularly those of Douglas Sirk and Alfred Hitchcock. The genre has been derided—this is what the trades would call a "women's picture"—but it's so fraught with angst and tension that it makes for a compelling hour and a half.

Things look just perfect in the Staudte household—too perfect. Husband Kurt is finishing his advanced degree in mathematics, and he and his wife Margot have a sweet little girl, Bibi, who is 4, and another one on the way; so how come Margot seems just one little nudge away from her breaking point? That's the principal question here—she's got everything that society tells her a perfect housewife should want, but she's obviously deeply discontent. The film locks us in early to her point of view—as she looks at her world, things go from perfect clarity to a blurry mess, and right back again. It's a clever bit of camera work, and helps us to empathize with a protagonist who isn't always the most articulate about her own dilemma. ("So this is me. Me. Me? What is that, me?")

Her new baby, a bouncy little boy named Jan, doesn't comfort Margot, and she goes in search of a crutch—first Valium, then alcohol, then attempted suicide. Anything to dull the pain. Her sense of claustrophobia is only reinforced by her husband's family, who live in the same apartment building and aren't bashful about voicing their disapproval. And her husband is willfully oblivious—he wants his sleep and his television, and thinks only that Margot is making fun of him. (Her cutting rejoinder: "Why would I laugh at you? Where would I get the strength?")

Unsurprisingly Margot seeks comfort in the arms of another: the pharmacist offers kind words and ready access to his medicine cabinet. But she can't even find refuge running for the shelter of that mother's little helper; her demons will out. (The professionals tell her that she will be fine, "as long as you keep taking the pills.") As with the recent Far From Heaven, this film evokes Douglas Sirk's high period, in films like Written On The Wind and All That Heaven Allows; in some respect, there are even more affinities between this movie and another Julianne Moore film, her sequences in The Hours, a suburban mother of two so fraught with anxiety that she's contemplating downing a bottle of sleeping pills. Rear Window seems to have been on Fassbinder's mind as well, or maybe even Peeping Tom—we watch lots of scenes of people watching, and many of the shots are framed through windows and doors.

Margit Carstensen is especially good in the lead role, communicating the inner torment of this woman who isn't especially articulate about her own emotions; she's well supported by the rest of the cast, and you're likely to react with a visceral disgust to her judgmental in-laws, blithely using their own key to crash in on her, and boasting about their potato pancakes and cabbage. If you had family like this, you might resort to the cognac bottle at lunch time, too.

Fear of Fear Jim’s Reviews

Bright Lights Film Journal Justin Vicari, August 2006

Angst vor der Angst (Fear Of Fear) Tom von Logue Newth from FilmFracture, September 28, 2009

Only The Cinema [Ed Howard]

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3/4]

“Fear of Fear” (1975) by R.W. Fassbinder Victor Enyutin from Acting Out Politics

Eye for Film ("Marnie") review [4/5]

Needcoffee.com - DVD Review Dindrane

User comments from imdb Author: hasosch from United States

User comments from imdb Author: Filmjack3 from United States

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

Fulvue Drive-in Nate Goss

VideoVista review James A. Stewart

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3/5]

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

Turner Classic Movies dvd review a compilation of capsule reviews

DVD Times Noel Megahey, reviews the 8-disc Region 2 DVD release, The Rainer Werner Fassbinder Commemorative Collection Volume 2

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

I ONLY WANT YOU TO LOVE ME (Ich will doch nur, daß ihr mich liebt) – Made for TV B 89

Munich (104 mi) November – December 1975

The story is based from an interview in the book Lebenslänglich (Life Sentence) by Klaus Antes and Christiane Erhardt, a true story about a man who was driven to murder a man he didn’t know because he looked like his father, told as a flashback from the man’s discussions with his prison psychiatrist. An autobiographical title suggesting a film about Fassbinder’s own need to be loved turns into a scathing look at family values during one of Germany’s most prosperous times, using a yes-man protagonist (Vitus Zeplichal) who learns from his parents that feelings are for sale. With a troubling and unfulfilling home life, a wife (the wonderful Elke Aberle) and parents who are indifferent to him and his pain, sounds like Herr R, set amid an almost manic atmosphere of urban economic development in Munich, where the good life is promised by all the prosperity, but underneath, there are layers of loneliness and emotional isolation. He is trapped by the idea that the good life buys everything, even love, as he falls deeper and deeper in debt trying to buy things to please his wife, a loveless story filled with despair.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1976):

“As it happens, the adolescence of our Peter actually coincides with a very important development in this society, the so-called Economic Miracle. It isn’t dealt with explicitly in the film...but when I think of the kind of childhood Peter has endured, it plays an important role. At the time the grown-ups were busy with what they called ‘construction,’ and one could already imagine that their children became an afterthought and that not very much time was left over to ‘construct’ them as well. Anyway, I know an awful lot of people who were raised at that time, or around then, and they are what we call today ‘difficult,’ and sometimes they’re just nuts.”

User comments from imdb Author matthew wilder (cosmovitelli@mediaone.net) from los angeles

Made in a hurry for German TV, this demonstration of the adage that You Can't Buy Love is shot in a quasi-documentary style that evokes the British lumpenprole aesthetic of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. But Fassbinder is no social-worker/muckraker; this tale of a guy who just wants a little tenderness has the lockstep tragedic structure of Racine or Aeschylus. As in most of Fassbinder's best work, like FOX AND HIS FRIENDS, the impulse toward melodrama is naked and unashamed. The score, by Peer Raben, exceeds his most brilliant efforts. And the last line, and the hero's reaction, caught in nightmarish freeze-frame, stands as one of Fassbinder's greatest masterstrokes.

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder based this interesting if somewhat didactic TV film on a published interview with a convicted murderer; the film follows a young man who moves to Munich with his new wife, determined to succeed but unable to escape the shadow of his unloving parents. Exploited at his bricklayer's job and hoping to buy love from his wife by showering her with gifts, he's a grim figure in the fatalist Fassbinder mode, prefigured for disaster, and though some of the implicit theorizing about what makes him doomed is provocative, it doesn't entirely convince. Incidentally, many Fassbinder films of this period recall Douglas Sirk; in this film the hero insists on buying his wife a dress they can't afford, a scene that recalls Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life. With Vitus Zeplichal and Elke Aberle.

Fassbinder Bibliography (via UC Berkeley) "Processes of subjectification in Fassbinder's I only want you to love me," by Therese Grisham from Screen

“Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1976 made-for-television family melodrama and docudrama Ich will doch nur, dass Ihr mich liebt/I Only Want You to Love Me is discussed. The plot's main action concerns Peter Trepper and his adult life--his marriage, work, hyperconsumerism, and his murder of an innkeeper, for which he is serving a prison sentence. The film can be read as a close examination of an individual's narcissistic disorder and its origins and development in his family, with hints at such things as the narcissistic disturbances in other families. However, Fassbinder works out these relations visually by using material objects as metaphors for narcissism, and Peter's disturbed personality is so intimately linked to West German consumerism and the demand for material achievement, the legacy of the Economic Miracle of the 1950s, that it is hard to definitively state that the film portrays purely familial, individualistic psychological causation. It offers the experience of complex and acutely framed complicities between familial, social, literary, economic, political, and filmic orders.”

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

The title is supplicated by Vitus Zeplichal, on his knees midway through the picture and midway through his spiritual deterioration. When first seen, he's building a home for his parents, who love him for two weeks before things get back to normal; as a boy, he steals flowers for his cold mother (Erni Mangold), who bends him over a chair for the coat hanger beating, recorded in pitiless long shot -- both the flowers and the pain will haunt him. The character framed in anxious close-up with a stuffed bird looming in the background shows Rainer Werner Fassbinder has seen a previous tale about a boy and his mother, and the intensity here all but matches Psycho's, emotional brutality erupting into physical chaos. Zeplichal meets his beloved, Elke Aberle, who lovingly tells him "You look like the first dog I had... a schnauzer" as they amble through industrial dunes; a forward-track-zoom-out through a window, recalled in Goodfellas via cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, lands the bricklayer a job and points to Munich, where he and his bride are headed. Able to translate feeling solely into property, Zeplichal's dolorous void becomes his inability to keep up with the materialism all around him; champagne is ordered as their bills stack up, Aberle is haplessly fitted into a dress while trying to tell her husband of her pregnancy. Fassbinder here is on a TV schedule, yet his every image slices like a shiv, streamlined brutally into a compressed temporal frame -- awkward wooing segues into the tense wedding party, a flashback later cuts from the couple's first fuck, with both facing the camera vulnerably naked, to the birth of their baby boy. Visiting a headachy Mangold, their reflection on a wall mirror freezes into tableau; floral bouquets turn as deadly as wreaths, a title card nails the Freudian coffin ("The money arrived the next day. Without any greeting. Almost like an insult."). "A child needs his mother," Fassbinder laments through Zeplichal, who accumulates the miseries of Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? and Merchant of Four Seasons until it detonates onto a paternal doppelganger, clearing the screen to leave its despairing culmination, arms thrown aloft in freeze-frame. With Alexander Allerson, and Johanna Hofer.

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review

DVD Times Noel Megahey, reviews the 4-disc Region 2 DVD release, Rainer Werner Fassbinder Volume 1

Channel 4 Film capsule review

The New York Times (Stephen Holden)

SATAN’S BREW (Satansbraten) B+ 90

Munich (113 mi) January – February 1976

Theater of the absurd at its best, crudely overplayed, a very cruel black comedy starring Kurt Raab as the deranged, would-be poet “during the revolution of 1968” with writer’s block, whose imagination overreaches his talents, but becomes a minor celebrity. Forced into betrayal, he hurts those around him and ultimately starts to believe that he is the reincarnation of the 19^th century German romantic poet Stefan George, curing his writer’s block only after reaching orgasm and murdering his mistress and demented brother, Volker Spengler, whose obsession with torturing and killing flies is mind-boggling, with Margit Carstensen as a bookish librarian who admires the celebrity writer and Helen Vita as his haranguing wife. This is the only Fassbinder film “not” to be shown on German television due to its obsessive dedication to extremely bad taste, reputedly based on autobiographical “facts” about the cult of an individual artist. This is a turning point in Fassbinder’s career, as he leaves his staple of actors behind and ventures into new territory, bigger budgeted films that are extremely tasteful, beautifully crafted, exquisite works of art.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1976):

“This is an experiment that has to do with a lot of totally personal things that I’ve been involved with, that has something to do with my attitude when I read the newspaper, how I react to certain things, or when I’m talking to people who go on as if it were still 1968, and that happened to me then, the kinds of aggression that I vented then...and that are still coming out of me and how I am still trying to overcome that, because I tell myself, that is still the right way. Out of this complete muddle of feelings and thoughts I try to tell a clear story.”

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr)

A 1976 comedy by the well-known German humorist, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. It has something to do with an avant-garde poet (whose best-known work is "No Ceremony for the Fuhrer's Dead Dog"), his lesbian wife, an Oriental prostitute, and the poet's mentally disadvantaged brother, who has a strange fantasy involving his fly collection.

Time Out Tony Rayns

The scurrilous movie that marked a turnaround in Fassbinder's film-making practice, following the disbandment of his 'stock company' of actors as a theatre troupe. The familiar faces are still around, this time distorted by pebble glasses, pustules or gross make-up, but there's a new sense of liberation from theatrical stylisation gusting through the proceedings. The plot is a benignly black celebration of the art of literary theft: Kurt Raab plays a clapped-out writer who regains his stride when he begins 'accidentally' reproducing the complete works of Stefan George. He is surrounded by freaks, perverts and grotesques, and so hardly anyone notices. It's no accident that this frolicsome tale reverses Fassbinder's standard 'victim' formula: it transpires that the tyrannical Raab is secretly a masochist, and one who actively enjoys being victimised. Bouncy.

DVDBeaver.com [Adam Lemke]

Fassbinder and Artaud seem like a match made in heaven (or is it hell?), and this absurdist comedy, which has Fassbinder paying homage to Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, turns out to be a vital part of the Fassbinder canon. The story goes something like this: A blocked writer (who may or may not be a gay poet as well) lives in an apartment building of misfits, and struggles to make ends meet as he tries to find inspiration. His wife is on his case because he hasn’t slept with her in 17 days, his halfwit brother has an obsession with ‘fucking flies,’ and various prostitutes and masochistic women drift in and out of the story. There is also a murder, a missing gun, and a detective who is searching under every bit of furniture to crack the case. Even if this off the wall story is not your cup of tea, Fassbinder fans will have a hell of a time just seeing his usual cast of players show off their acting chops, as they all appear to be having the time of their life in some of their wildest screen appearances. It’s a puzzling work, but one that may have more to say about Fassbinder’s warped view of society than initially meets the eye.

not coming to a theater near you (Matt Bailey)

Walter Kranz, a self-proclaimed “revolutionary poet,” hasn’t written a line in ages and his publisher refuses to give him another advance. Running out of money and at the end of his rope, he murders his mistress after she orgasmically writes him a check. Returning home to his harridan of a wife and his mentally retarded brother, Kranz begins to write again. After he has come up with what he believes to be his greatest poem, his wife reveals to him that he has merely plagiarized Stefan George, a fin-de-siècle poet who was considered the German Oscar Wilde, and not just for his poetry. Convinced of the greatness of Stefan George, Kranz slowly begins to believe he is George. His first course of action is to have a tailor fashion a suit like George’s for him, despite the tailor’s protests that Kranz is too fat for a suit like that. No sooner is the suit finished that Kranz begins recruiting young male acolytes to hear him recite George’s poetry as he wears a wig and stage makeup to appear more like George. Meanwhile, his wife must deal with dwindling finances, Kranz’s eccentric prostitute, his fly-obsessed brother, his utterly insane masochistic groupie who has now come to live with them, and her own painful gastrointestinal ailment. Kranz only begins to come to his senses when he enjoys being beaten on the street for stealing money from his prostitute. His groupie, appalled that she has been submitting herself to just another masochist, moves in with one of his mistresses’ husband. That mistress, now at a loose end, moves in with Kranz. Several other revelations and reversals occur until the level of mania returns to normal. Normal for Kranz, that is.

To those who only know Fassbinder as the director of coolly distanced melodramas, Satan’s Brew will come as quite a shock. It is a flat-out screwball comedy, but one that is pitch black in tone. Informed by but not dedicated to the idea of the Theater of Cruelty developed by Antonin Artaud, the film begins over the top in its depiction of Kranz as an absolute nutcase and only goes up from there. Sadomasochistic sex is treated as matter-of-factly as a handshake by all and torrents of verbal cruelty spew from the mouth of every character. The performances by all, particularly Kurt Raab as Kranz, Helen Vita as his wife, and Margit Carstensen as Andrée (a complete about-face from her Petra von Kant), are exquisite in their sustained hysteria. The film is so odd but so funny, it’s almost like Buñuel on crystal meth. My only complaint is that at 105 minutes, it’s about 15 minutes too much. The joke goes on for just a little too long, and by the time the twist ending is revealed, you’ve stopped laughing.

Despite being a comedy, Fassbinder’s film does broach some serious subjects between laughs. Chief among those is the question of how much abuse we are willing to put up with from someone, and when does that abuse of power and cult of personality cross the line into fascism. It’s a subject that forms the basis of many of Fassbinder’s other films, particularly the scathing The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, but here it is played for laughs.

I made the mistake about ten years ago of choosing this film blindly as the first Fassbinder I ever saw. I was wholly unprepared for it and was taken completely by surprise. I hated it. Luckily, I gave Fassbinder another chance and saw some of his other films. Coming back to it now, I realize what a beautiful rare object it is in Fassbinder’s career. For a director whose films are largely without a single laugh, he must have been saving them all for this one.

Satan's Brew Jim’s Review

Fassbinder: Life on the Edge Dennis Toth from Film Notes from the CMA, August 18, 2008

User comments from imdb Author: phobophob from Austria

User comments from imdb Author: Filmjack3 from United States

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review

VideoVista review Jim Steel

Passport Cinema [Chris Luedtke]

DVD Times Noel Megahey, reviews the 8-disc Region 2 DVD release, The Rainer Werner Fassbinder Commemorative Collection Volume 2

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) featuring her infamous tagline, “a kind of ‘Father Knows Best’ on acid”

CHINESE ROULETTE (Chinesisches Roulette)            A 95       

Stöckach and Munich (86 mi) April – June 1976

I have tried to make a film that pushes artificiality, an artificial form, to extremes in order to be able to totally call it into question. I’m pretty certain that in film history there is no single film that contains so many camera movements, traveling shots, and counter-movements of the actors. The film I’ve made, which appears to speak out for marriage as an institution, is in reality about how infamous, mendacious, and destructive marriages are, and perhaps, precisely because of this equivocation, it becomes stronger than other films that explicitly speak out against marriage.

—Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1977)

Taking us into a minefield of marital discord, creating characters the audience loves to hate, including one of the most poisonous mother/daughter relationships this side of Mommie Dearest, which hadn’t even been written yet, this deliciously fascinating Gothic chamber drama is a psychological examination of the indiscreet charm of the bourgeoisie, where infidelity and deep-rooted family contempt prevail at this country estate, filled with aristocratic austerity and detachment, hostility, distrust, and malicious intent. Fassbinder disbands his customary stock theatre troupe, utilizes two of Godard's actresses, the always lovely and enchanting Anna Karina as the husband’s mistress, and Macha Méril, who is simply brilliant here in a mute role as the governess to a spoiled and overly pampered, polio-stricken child, the equally brilliant Andrea Schober, who turns the tables on her unsuspecting parents, inviting both to show up at the estate with their respective lovers on the same weekend, feeling they are blaming her for their own unhappiness, so she challenges them to a truth or dare game that has deadly consequences.  These roles of Méril and Schober, similar to PERSONA (1966), are among the most inventive in the Fassbinder repertoire, and the Sirkian style here is reminiscent of THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VAN KANT (1972), with fabulous choreography, a kaleidoscope of statuesque faces that are constantly in motion, constantly reflected back in bizarre glass and mirror images, like abstract double reflections, very slow and cold, gracefully refined, elegantly beautiful, featuring extraordinary camera work by Michael Ballhaus, also starring Margit Carstensen (brilliant, as always) and Alexander Allerson as the parents, with Ulli Lommel as the wife’s lover. Blink and you’ll miss a brief scene of a blind beggar knocking on a mansion door, only to be seen moments later throwing away his crutches into the back seat of his Mercedes and driving away, an indicator of how appearances are deceptive and the entire world is living under some kind of illusion. This film is a little tribute to the failings of marriage, and how each act of infidelity is akin to an emotional murder, always hidden and secretive, covered up in lies, like a secret assassin, with devastating results. The final scene of this giant castle in the darkness has the feel of a vampire film, as if the inhabitants are largely bloodsuckers.

Chaos as Usual: Conversations about Rainer Werner Fassbinder Interview with cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, edited by Juliane Lorenz, Marion Schmid, Herbert Gehr, pages 105-106:

He never allowed anything to just take its course. He was far too interested in the process. But by and by, a strong mutual understanding developed between us—which doesn’t mean that we always agreed. It’s just that our relationship graduated to another level. We no longer had these constant confrontations. We knew what we could accomplish together. Three movies evolved in that period, which are interesting with regard to our collaboration. One was Chinese Roulette, a movie which I find impossible to watch today but which had a special meaning for us then. There the camera turned into a person, an actor, so to speak. We developed a very precise and interesting visual language. I learned an incredible amount while we shot it, and our work was surprisingly harmonious. By the way, only three months elapsed between the idea and the finished product—the fastest work of my entire career.

Rainer had been given a grant. So he said, “Let’s make a movie. What shall we make?” We first chose the actors and decided on a locations. I told him, “We own this house in Franconia. We might do it there. It’s quite a beautiful location.” Rainer went to Paris for a couple of weekends and returned with the script. We decided to shoot the movie in our house, and I realized that this was bound to end in disaster. Rainer, who goes out every night, who constantly needs to be surrounded by people, in a place where there’s no entertainment for miles. The nearest bar was in Schweinfurt, and it was very boring. I thought it was going to be awful but it turned out to be the exact opposite. We were all together in that house, we lived together, ate together, spent every evening together playing Chinese roulette. Of course, we also tore each other to pieces. But Rainer felt he had a family, and in the end he didn’t want to leave. A lot of crazy things happened, but he felt at home and never even left the house. It was a strange experience.

Ballhaus, who went on to work in the 80’s with Martin Scorsese in America, shot a total of sixteen films with Fassbinder, the last being THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN (1979), arguably the director’s most commercially accessible work, a film that played at international film festivals and placed him on the international map. Many of his earlier films were only discovered afterwards, where this tense psychodrama is among his most visually stylized works, reminiscent of Bergman’s PERSONA (1966), making it a point to shoot a choreography of faces in close-up merging in and out of one another, like cells symbiotically reshaping themselves, constantly reflected in mirrors or sculpted glass, creating a kind of Picasso disfiguration, as the camera incessantly moves around the room, peering around corners, including a glass liquor cabinet in the center of the living room, dazzled by the refracted images seen while staring through the glass. Actors are often shot at odd angles, or hold their poses like fashion models carved in stone, dramatizing the tense interpersonal relationships that develop, each one growing more suspicious of the other, where Fassbinder’s drama literally has them on display, like animals pacing in a cage, with the camera continually encircling them, Escena (dolly circular) de Chinese Roulette (Fassbinder) YouTube (1:19), as if capturing them offguard, naked and exposed. It’s a uniquely opulent technique, some might even think garish or overdone, yet it visualizes the unseen psychological breakdowns occuring throughout the film, enhanced by a conceptualized vision that accentuates the fragile vulnerability of what’s happening underneath the surface where a series of emotional explosions are taking place, leaving the characters onscreen in tattered pieces afterwards. The film opens with an emotional shock to the system, Chinese Roulette (Opening Scene) - YouTube (2:15), as Arianne (Margit Carstensen) and her 12-year old daughter Angela (Andrea Schober), who walks with metal crutches for both legs that can be heard clanking throughout the film, are sitting in separate rooms listening to the operatic sounds of an LP record playing the lush finale to Mahler’s ecstatic 8^th Symphony for voices and orchestra, one of the largest-scale choral works in the classical repertoire, a work that looks to the heavens, bathed in the lyrics of Goethe’s Faust, arguably the most famous narrative of man making a pact with the devil, yet so powerfully celestial that it’s often called “Symphony of a Thousand.” Through the windows, trees are seen rustling in the breeze, a contrast to the inert and wordless characters onscreen, as both women appear stuck in time. The scene is exceptionally dense, using exalted music that spiritually transcends the limitations and smallness of humankind. As if on cue, the father, Gerhard Christ (Alexander Allerson), opens the front door and the music instantaneously stops.

All that is transitory

Is but an image;

The inadequacy of earth

Here finds fulfillment;

The ineffable

Here is accomplished;

The eternal feminine

leads us upwards.

Using Biblical names for several characters, the innocence of this Edenesque opening scene abruptly unravels into multiple derivations of original sin, as a wealthy Munich couple are heading their separate ways this weekend, leaving Angela and her collection of dolls in the hands of her mute governess, Traunitz (Macha Méril). Gerhard is heading to the airport, supposedly a business conference in Oslo, while Arianne is dashing off to Milan, yet within minutes the viewers realize the deception, as Gerhard is at the airport meeting his longtime mistress Irene Cartis (Anna Karina), a French hairdresser, with plans to spend an idyllic weekend together at his family’s countryside home. Part of the intrigue is the exquisite interior of the estate itself, which is identified late in the film as Castle Traunitz, suggesting the governess may be the natural heir to this family estate, yet through sinister legal subterfuge and some carefully kept family secrets, indicated by a devious housekepper Kast (Brigitte Mira) who confides to Gerhard that Ali ben Basset was murdered in Paris, suggesting criminality is involved, yet this is only implied, as more is never revealed. However there is a clearly defined aristocratic class system in place, where Kast and her embittered, sexually ambiguous son Gabriel (Volker Spengler) are the live-in servants and caretakers of the home, who begrudgingly follow every order and command, no questions asked, just as if it was a precise military operation. This hierarchy is conspicuously in place the moment Gerhard arrives, barking out instructions while he and his mistress head out for a little walk in the woods, where they sexually commune with nature. Afterwards, as they return inside the house, they walk in on Arianne having sex on the floor with Gerhard’s business assistant Kolbe (Ulli Lommel). Astounded, shocked, hurt, and bitterly disappointed, both couples laugh at the absurdity of the timing, yet continue to pair off as they had originally planned. After an awkward dinner, perhaps most unexpected is the later arrival of Angela, bringing along her hideous collection of broken or disfigured dolls, accompanied by Traunitz carrying each and every one out of the trunk, where only Kast seems to have had some inclination about this all along. Arianne goes ballistics and is ready to strike her daughter (Gerhard holds her back), actually pointing a gun at her at another point, as she diabolically planned this entire weekend event just to get back at her parents, tired of all the lies and deceit that had been going on for years. This bizarre group of eight comprises the household, much like François Ozon did with his zany musical tribute 8 WOMEN (2002), as the weekend unravels in a series of embarrassing unpleasantries, offering continuously changing mood shifts from jealousy, mistrust, rage, hatred, and sadism.

Angela starts the next morning by opening the doors of each parent, finding them naked in bed with their “new” partners, having a laugh at their expense as the adults go about their business as if nothing has happened, liars and cheaters one and all, where the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie is scathingly depicted, always remaining overly polite, as is customary for the aristocratic class, wrapping themselves around custom and established routines, where the women especially compliment one another, even show signs of affection, though the men, seen later playing chess, are much more wary. Actually the female characters assert themselves more and literally stand out in this film, typical of Fassbinder’s inclinations later in his career, always overshadowing the presence of men, providing most of the real internal intrigue, where they become the dominant players in the room. Gerhard’s authority rests on the fact that he is indisputably the wealthiest person in the family, but he is no match for the vicious psychological warfare taking place before him. One of the most startling scenes is a look inside one of the many closed doors that line the narrow halls of the estate, where loud music is playing, kraftwerk - Radioactivity (Original Version) - YouTube (3:34), representing a stark new German modernization, juxtaposing the new world against the old. Inside, Traunitz is dancing furiously to the music while using Angela’s crutches, spinning around and kicking her feet, Rainer Werner Fassbinder - Chinese Roulette (excerpt) - YouTube (54 seconds), offering an explosive look at her underlying feelings of unbridled liberation, showing how neither woman will allow themselves to be victimized by their physical disabilities. What follows is Angela’s turn, initiating an incendiary parlor game of “Russian roulette,” where one side tries to get what another team is thinking by asking a stream of questions, with Angela choosing the teams ahead of time, where Irene and Kolbe, the two adulterous lovers, the always suspicious Kast, and her despised mother comprise one team, revealing a chilling calculation on her part. While the game itself may seem silly and harmless enough from afar, but in the room amongst the players, the dramatic intensity that Fassbinder provides with each successive question, along with the shocked reaction on the faces, reaches an extraordinary level of sheer Sirkian melodrama, with the director milking it for all it’s worth. While this vicious game is meant to be intentionally cruel and sadistic, there’s a kind of camp, wicked fun to be had by asking such provocative questions like, “Who would this person have been in the Third Reich?” Traunitz, exceedingly clever throughout, comes up with the most ingenious answers, yet they all indulge Angela and play along, where the results are perhaps not surprising at all, as ultimately it allows Angela to not only insult, but express her unbridled hatred and contempt towards her mother. What’s perhaps most surprising is the number of ideas planted in every scene, where the framing of the film, the artificiality of the color, the mirrors, the décor, and the extravagant look of the characters really tell the story, as this is another extraordinary Fassbinder social critique that mocks existing social norms by highlighting failed relationships and extreme emotional manipulation, where the ending is so operatically over the top that it’s hard not to take a certain amount of pleasure in this family’s demise.

Chinese Roulette, directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder ... - Time Out Tony Rayns

Made after Fassbinder disbanded his 'stock company' of actors, Chinese Roulette is quite different from his earlier bourgeois satires. The script is boldly non-naturalistic: a crippled girl connives to get herself, both her parents and their respective lovers to a country house all at the same time, for a weekend of intense embarrassments. And the style, all double reflections and shifting points of view, suspends the cast like flies in an amber of deceptions, neuroses and panics. The humour fits the cruelty as a boot fits a groin.

Chinese Roulette | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr

Rainer Werner Fassbinder directed this 1976 film as a bedroom farce pushed into sadism and despair (which isn't too hard a push). A crippled teenage girl arranges a meeting between her estranged parents at their family estate; each arrives with lover in tow, and the games begin. The camera seems much more interested in exploring the glass and chrome furnishings than in examining the characters, and by the time the film is finished, so is the audience—the untrammeled alienation effects alienate you right out of the theater. Satan's Brew, equally obscure, is a much more successful film from this troubling period in Fassbinder's career, a transitory phase between the early melodramas and the later black comedies. With Anna Karina, Volker Spengler, and Margit Carstensen. In German with subtitles.

Chinese Roulette | Film Society of Lincoln Center

Forever experimenting with form and tone, Fassbinder ventures into Edward-Albee-meets-Gothic-thriller territory with this account of the Christs (Alexander Allerson and Margit Carstensen), an affluent Munich couple whose polio-stricken daughter, Angela (Andrea Schober), brings them together at a country house with their respective lovers. The climactic set piece is the title game, a nasty pretext for forced truth-telling and hateful revelations (Angela suggests her mother would’ve been Commandant at Bergen Belsen), which Fassbinder himself liked to play at parties. Brilliantly shot by Michael Ballhaus with a constantly roving camera, the film keeps shifting the POV to establish the subjectivity of experience. Featuring Anna Karina as Herr Christ’s mistress and Brigitte Mira as the housekeeper.

Chinese Roulette | The Cinematheque

"Fassbinder's most enigmatic film" (Anna Kuhn), Chinese Roulette offers a kinky, cruel, and coolly formalist variation on Renoir's Rules of the Game. The plot has a philandering married couple and their respective lovers who are unwittingly brought together for a weekend in a country chateau. The embarrassing situation has been engineered by the couple's disabled daughter, who then proceeds to initiate a truth game — “Chinese Roulette” in which participants must answer awkward questions about each other: “If this person were a wild animal, what would he be?” or, “What would this person have done in the Third Reich?” Brilliantly shot by the great cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, who now often works with Martin Scorsese, Chinese Roulette features Fassbinder's typical thematic and stylistic artificiality revved up to “an hysterical intensity and formal extravagance not far removed from the horror movie” (Richard Combs, Sight and Sound). “Fassbinder is exploring new methods of cinema narrative that are more original and daring than anything I’ve yet to see by filmmakers who call themselves avant-garde” (Vincent Canby, New York Times.)

Northwest Chicago Film Society: News Kyle Westphal, also seen here: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Chinese Roulette: Karina, Kraftwerk, and More in 35mm

A woman, her husband, their respective lovers, and a cadre of domestic workers all find themselves inconveniently in the couple’s country home for the weekend. It is quickly revealed that all have been brought there via the machinations of the couple’s disabled teenage daughter Angela, initiating a game with unknown and potentially deadly consequences. Perhaps the strangest, most misunderstood and bleakly hilarious film in a career packed with cinematic feints, Chinese Roulette found Rainer Werner Fassbinder at the height of his powers as a stylist and an observer of human beings struggling to maintain control in the face of their own powerlessness. Working with the internationally renowned actresses Anna Karina and Macha Meril (both well known for their work with Jean-Luc Godard) and his highest budget to date, Fassbinder makes every second of this tense and wildly eccentric chamber thriller count, sending master cinematographer Michael Ballhaus’s unmoored camera careening across rooms, carving up screen space with doorways and reflections, pinning characters under panes of glass, moving in and out of close-ups to find the best vantage point to watch them squirm, finding time for snatches of political intrigue, a creepy doll collection, and a dance on crutches to Kraftwerk’s Radioactivity.

Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago John Dickson

As far as chamber drama goes, R.W. Fassbinder’s CHINESE ROULETTE proves to be kammerspiel in high fashion. The plot concerns a group of bourgeois, Fassbinderian characters, a husband and wife primarily, as they both plan to stay at their weekend mansion/home with their separate lovers. Their daughter, a crippled eleven-year-old with a passion for dolls, decides to mangle the lines of communication, causing each of her parent’s to show up with their discreet sexual partners; what follows is a game of truth conducted by the mischievous young girl, who proves to be no less sadistic than “her” foolish guests for the weekend, as the daughter bides time with her beautiful, mute servant, calling to mind Fassbinder’s former lover in THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT. Despite shooting the majority of the film in a large mansion, most of the film’s events take place in one room, adorned with glass counter-tops and cabinets, which serve as panes of reflection, distorting the character’s faces into one another or into collage-like shards of images. However you want to slice it, it’s hard to think of another film with so much exciting camerawork covering the dimensions of a dining room; this is a film built solely around the idea of precise mise-en-scene, planned and executed to achieve high emotional gain. This film also comes from a period in Fassbinder’s work that was meant to pay homage to master filmmaker Douglas Sirk. One would be hard-pressed to see where the actual influence may be: is it in its setup (THUNDER ON THE HILL) or is it in its plotting (THERE’S ALWAYS TOMORROW)? Whichever it may be, both filmmakers seem to mistrust children. CHINESE ROULETTE does seem to separate itself from the director’s earlier films, while also reuniting them, making the case for Fassbinder as one of cinema’s great pitch-black satirists, whose work essentially sets the stage for modern masters like Paul Verhoeven. This being a Fassbinder film, the primary concern is a thirst for power, this time sought by the couple’s young daughter. As she enacts her game of “truth-telling” with the guests gathered at the mansion, the game being played is one of the very fruits of cinema: truths being told through fictitious exaggerations, without the actual truth being revealed.

notcoming.com | Chinese Roulette Matt Bailey

Chinese roulette is a party game for two groups in which the first group thinks of a person in the second group and the second group asks a series of questions to determine about whom they are thinking. It’s like twenty questions. Like many party games, it can be lighthearted fun or it can be cruel. Guess which approach Fassbinder takes.

A man and his wife are taking separate business trips over the weekend. Unbeknownst to his wife, the man has actually arranged to take his mistress to the couple’s country home. Unbeknownst to her husband, the woman has actually arranged to take her lover (and her husband’s assistant) to the couple’s country home. The couple’s hateful crippled daughter, who knows all of their secrets, has arranged for them a very interesting weekend.

The couple and their respective paramours arrive at the manor, overseen by a forbidding housekeeper and her peculiar son, surprised and not a little ashamed of themselves. The couple deals with the situation like the bored bourgeois sophisticates that they are — they laugh it off and agree to enjoy the weekend à quatre. These good intentions are derailed when their daughter arrives with her mute governess in tow and announces that she’d like to play a little game of Chinese roulette.

Fassbinder’s film, in a nod to the structure of some of his earliest films, takes a group of people, puts them in a volatile situation, and then invites the viewer to sit back and watch the fireworks. What is different in this film from those of a decade before, apart from the fact that the nastiness is orchestrated by a teenaged girl, is the level of narrative and stylistic sophistication at which Fassbinder works.

Whereas the earlier films, mostly shot by Dietrich Lohmann, often framed the groups or members of the group in static tableaux in order to highlight their solidarity and opposition to a lone outsider, this film (Fassbinder’s ultimate collaboration with Michael Ballhaus) uses an almost constantly moving camera and a remarkable succession of framing and fracturing devices within the camera frame to underscore the shifting alliances, individual isolation, and internal struggles of the characters.

The main set of the film, the dining room of the manor, is packed with doorways, mirrors, and strange Plexiglas racks that hold liquor and audio equipment. Fassbinder and Ballhaus use the doorways to bisect faces and bodies, the mirrors to double them, and the Plexiglas racks to both fragment and reflect them. For Fassbinder, who began making films with something close to a visual anti-aesthetic, it’s a thrilling revelation to see him work in such a highly symbolic, almost Bergmanesque, visual style. He made this film just as he was beginning to be recognized as a master director on a global scale and it almost seems as if he was meeting the challenge of those who thought he had run out of ideas and those who questioned his ability to narrate in images.

With this film, Fassbinder got the opportunity to work not only with members of his regular informal repertory company including Ulli Lommel, Volker Spengler, and Brigitte Mira, but also with one of his idols of the French New Wave, Anna Karina. Fassbinder being Fassbinder, he perversely upends her persona from Godard’s films and sucks all the vibrancy and vivacity out of her character, turning her into a somewhat sad woman who has contended herself to be the other woman. Margit Carstensen, another of Fassbinder’s usual gang (and the unsung female acting genius in his films who is consistently overlooked in favor of Hanna Schygulla), turns in another astonishing performance as the victim and cause of her daughter’s fury. Andrea Schober, as the villainous little Angela, is the best girl-you-love-to-hate since Patty McCormack.

Fassbinder intended the film to be an indictment of marriage and the cruelty inflicted on children when a marriage goes bad, but it’s also effective as an testimonial for the advantages of birth control. Chinese Roulette is one of those films where you hate every single one of the characters yet can’t tear yourself away from them until you find out how they end up.

Jim's Reviews - Fassbinder's Chinese Roulette - JClarkMedia.com Jim’s Review

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's “Chinese Roulette” (1976) – Parental ... Acting Out Politics, December 5, 2011, also here: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “Chinese Roulette” (1976) – Parental Perfectionist Expectations (Placed on Their Children) As a Target of Child’s Rebellion

“Chinese Roulette” (1976) by R.W. Fassbinder by Acting-Out Politics Victor Enyutin, January 6, 2015

The New German Cinema - UC Press E-Books Collection, 1982-2004

Rainer Werner Fassbinder • Senses of Cinema Joe Ruffell, May 2002

Scribblings of a Cinema-obsessed Mind: Chinese Roulette (1976) Aditya Gokhale

Criterion Collection Review of the Week | E Street Film Society Mike Dub

R. W. Fassbinder's Chinese Roulette - Being Boring Bradford Nordeen

Chinesisches Roulette (West Germany/France 1976) | The Case for ... Roy Stafford from The Case for Global Film, November 29, 2010

Digitally Obsessed review Jeff Ullmer

Chinese Roulette | Film Review | Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

my new plaid pants: Orgy, Interrupted

Traunitz, essay by Caitlin Berrigan (.pdf) - Jonathan VanDyke

Cinema Somnambulist: 1976: Chinese Roulette

Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]

Chinese Roulette Review (1976) - The Spinning Image Graeme Clark

chinese roulette - review at videovista James A. Stewart

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3/5]

EURO BEAT: Dueling R.W. Fassbinder Biopics, Accusations of ... EURO BEAT: Dueling R.W. Fassbinder Biopics, Accusations of Cannes Corruption, by Brian Clark from Screen Anarchy, June 12, 2012

Turner Classic Movies dvd review a compilation of capsule reviews

Film @ The Digital Fix - Rainer Werner Fassbinder Commemorative ... Noel Megahey, reviews the 8-disc Region 2 DVD release, The Rainer Werner Fassbinder Commemorative Collection Volume 2

User comments from imdb Author: zetes from Saint Paul, MN

User comments from imdb Author: Prof_Lostiswitz from Cyberia

TV Guide Review

Tim Robey recommends... Chinese Roulette (1976) - Telegraph Tim Robey

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) also seen here: Movie Review - - Screen: Laughing With Fassbinder - NYTimes.com

Chinese Roulette - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Chaos as Usual: Conversations about Rainer Werner Fassbinder Page 106 (pdf)

A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder Page 147 (pdf)

Understanding Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Film as Private and Public Art Page 167 (pdf)

The New German Cinema: Music, History, and the Matter of Style Page 59 (pdf)

BOLWIESER (THE STATIONMASTER’S WIFE) – made for TV and theatrical version A 95

Maxgrün, Förmitzsee, Bayreuth, Hof, and Munich October – December 1976

(1977 German Television version Pt I 104 mi, Pt II 96 mi; re-edited in 1983 into one American theatrical release – 112 mi)

Adapted from the novel by Oskar Maria Graf, an excruciating portrait of marriage and repulsion, the longer version centers on the small town stationmaster, Kurt Raab in his last Fassbinder performance, and his infantile, almost primitive need for his beautiful wife, while the re-edited version centers on his wife, in a marvelous performance by Elisabeth Trissenaar, who dominates and cheats on him with impunity as he can’t satisfy her sexually. He is incorrigibly infantile, and she is bored with his obsessive attention, so he is left to helplessly follow her every move, believe her every lie, dramatized through a Sirkian deployment of bold, ironic colors, brisk melodrama, and tight framing. In one scene, he steams a windowpane with his breath only to draw a crude female figure, while in another, he slips his thumb in his mouth, and is left in complete, abject dependence, also featuring Bernhard Helfrich as the butcher. Set in the late 1920’s, sexual slavery and power dominance in relationships become Fassbinder metaphors for German society at large, epitomizing a fake bourgeois morality and also the historical rise of fascism – with an absolute, spellbinding ending.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1976):

“I take women more seriously than directors usually do. To my mind, women don’t exist to turn men on. They don’t have this function of merely being objects. In fact, that is one aspect of the cinema I really despise. And I want to show that women, more than men, are obliged to resort to underhanded methods to avoid being mere objects.”

Bolwieser, directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Film ... - Time Out Tom Milne

Marvellous performance from Trissenaar - justifiably compared to Garbo and Dietrich - as the enigmatically errant wife of a provincial stationmaster, doting but hardly of the stallion breed. In mood, something of a cross between Fear of Fear and Chinese Roulette as Fassbinder continues his Sirkian task of exploring the cheerless grey world of petit bourgeois morality (the time is just after the First World War), highlighting a series of melodramatic sexual betrayals in order to dissect (with surprising compassion) the tissue of lies and deceptions that makes them inevitable while simultaneously keeping society going (towards the fascism that clearly lies just ahead). A feature drawn from the original two-part, 200-minute TV film.

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr)

A condensed version of a Rainer Werner Fassbinder TV film from 1977. Perhaps the pacing was superior in the three-hour original, but the lack of narrative rhythm in the film's present form makes it a grueling experience even for those sympathetic to Fassbinder's enervated view of the world. With a plot that recalls Madame Bovary, the film recounts the romantic disappointments of a minor official's wife in a small German town. In the late Fassbinder style, the mise-en-scene is heavily clogged with intervening objects, generating his classic theme of the impossibility of love in a materialist society. Yet the characterization of the wife (Elisabeth Trissenaar) has an acrid shrewishness that pushes the film toward blunt misogyny. With Kurt Raab as the pathetically loving husband.

Slant Magazine [Fernando F. Croce]

The Stationmaster's Wife's first image sets up the template for Rainer Werner Fassbinder's magnificently excruciating study of romantic degradation—frozen in embrace over the opening credits, newlyweds Xaver (Kurt Raab) and Hanni Bolwieser (Elisabeth Trissenaar) kiss and grope ardently, until she abruptly pushes him away ("We don't want a baby for the moment, all right?"). Watched from outside the bedroom window, the couple is framed in pitiless flat space, Fassbinder's camera movements terse and entrapping, distilling the director's maxim of love as "the best, most insidious, most effective instrument of social repression." The love is Xaver's, the titular stationmaster and arguably the greatest of Raab's stump-like petit bourgeois jobs for the director; infatuated with his new wife, he's unable (or, given Fassbinder's preference for characters implicit in their own misery, unwilling) to believe the sensation-hungry Hanni is enjoying affairs with various men in their provincial burg in late-1920s Bavaria. Actually, "enjoying" is a misleading word: Hanni's promiscuity, rather than liberating her, plunges depths of self-loathing, as when, fresh from some afternoon delight with handsome butcher Merkl (Bernhard Helfrich), she gazes at her new Garbo locks in the mirror and spits at her reflection. Venomous gossip promptly spreads throughout the town, derisive cackling ringing in Xaver's ears as he leaves the pub and marches home to confront his wife, only to be inevitably shouted back into hen-pecked submission.

The pattern's repetition evokes a ritualized circle of mutual torment, which, set to the filmmaker's heightened choreography, can be compared to a delirious waltz. Fassbinder nudges the point at an early costume party, as Xaver watches Hanni twirl with Merkl and is told by a guest "it's a shame you don't dance," although the sequence's most important detail lies in the same man's eye-patch costume, further sign of the husband's obscured vision. "Blind in both eyes" is the blunt verdict of a cleaning lady (played, naturally, by Fassbinder's mother) for the man who refuses to believe his wife is fucking other men, yet the remark could just as easily apply to Xaver's unquestioning acceptance of society norms in exchange for an uniform and a handful of workers to order around, or, for that matter, Weimar Germany's myopic playing into the hands of the Nazi regime ominously waiting in the wings. Fassbinder obfuscates the characters' visions with a panoply of curtains and grids, but to call the film misogynistic would be no less short-sighted: Merkl and Hanni are locked in a continuous cycle in which the wife's so-called shrewish nature is given just as much emotional fullness as the husband's regressive masochism, and, indeed, Hanni is arguably the strongest, most assertive female character of Fassbinder's late-career period pieces (tellingly, Hanni is the narrative's focal point in the original 200-plus minute version made for German TV).

Adapted from Oskar Maria Graf's novel, the film is often compared to Madame Bovary, but the overall effect is closer to that of Von Sternberg's The Devil is a Woman, where a couple not only remains obsessively stuck in infatuation-degradation gear, but the visual beauty of the images is rigorously questioned by purposeful dissonance, surface lyricism ruthlessly undercut by a caustic inquiry into the nerves underneath. (Fassbinder's acid-bath is aural as much as visual—see the shrieking pet bird subtly placed in the domestic skirmishes.) Raab's lumpy cuckold is eventually dragged to prison while Trissenaar's hausfrau takes off with her greasy hairdresser (Udo Kier), yet even when the loop is finally broken, the characters are still unable to sort hate from love—Hanni sobbingly rushes to get one final kiss from Xaver then later files for divorce, while Xaver's prison rants against Hanni invariably shift from growling threats to yearning endearments. The naked, transcendental catharsis of In a Year of 13 Moons is still one year away for the director; the characters in The Stationmaster's Wife are to remain incarcerated in the artist's cruel-tender gaze, denied freedom yet exalted into a cosmic luminosity, puppets yet irretrievable projections of Fassbinder himself.

The Stationmaster's Wife Jim’s Review

Turner Classic Movies James Steffen

not coming to a theater near you (Ian Johnston)

DVD Talk (Svet Atanasov) dvd review [2/5]

User comments from imdb Author: tom-darwin from United States

User comments from imdb Author: hasosch from United States

DVD Town [Christopher Long]

DVD Verdict [Rob Lineberger]

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2/4] a befuddled Roger Ebert

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

WOMEN IN NEW YORK (Frauen in New York) – made for TV

Hamburg (111 mi) March 1977

User Reviews from imdb Author carlwest2 from United States

I recently managed to get a VHS copy of this rarity. It unfortunately has no subtitles, but I am very familiar with the play ("The Women," 1936), so it was a real pleasure to watch.

Unlike Fassbinder's other made-for-television films like FEAR OF FEAR or I ONLY WANT YOU TO LOVE ME, both of which could have been released theatrically as feature films, FRAUEN IN NEW YORK only really works as a television product. It is "filmed theater" in the extreme – the sets are very stagey, and slightly unreal in some cases. Each scene is filmed in single takes, with the camera zooming and panning to emphasize the different characters (very good camera work, mind you, from Michael Ballhaus). The scene in the Reno hotel is remarkable in that the entire scene was shot through a huge piece of glass with evenly spaced streams of water trickling down it (this is evidently meant to be one of the windows of the elegant hotel lobby). This strikingly visual scene places this film comfortably in Fassbinder's Chinese ROULETTE period.

FRAUEN IN NEW YORK features one of Peer Raben's stranger scores (very similar to his music for QUERELLE, actually). The primary elements are choral singers, mixed with some synthesizers – ethereal to say the least, but thankfully subtle. In the scene where Mary is at the manicurist, there is this persistent synthesizer noodling in the background, giving the film a real 70s avant-garde feel.

Margit Carstensen shines the brightest as the cosmopolitan Sylvia – who else in Fassbinder's troupe could have been so perfect for that role? And Fassbinder is very much at home in telling a story about catty women. I would say that this is certainly deserving of a DVD release, as it is, if nothing else, a nice television piece.

Frauen in New York Fassbinder Foundation

DESPAIR (Eine Reise ins Licht) C+ 78

aka: Journey Into Light

Munich, Interlaken, Berlin, Lübeck, Braunschweig, Hamburg, and Mölln (119 mi) 1977

Tom Stoppard wrote the screenplay, an English-speaking adaptation of Vladimir Nabakov’s novel, a cross between Lolita and Repulsion, an international, intellectual exercise in futility, too somber and heavy for its own good, with a so-called comic performance by Dirk Bogarde, who is so controlled in his lunacy as to be hilarious. He is in such self-denial that he thinks of himself as literally outside himself and uses a double, who looks nothing like him, who he implicates in a fake suicide in order to collect his own life insurance. His descent into madness reflects the growing insanity of the world outside as the Nazis come to power, dedicated to “Antonin Artaud, Vincent van Gogh, Unica Zürn,” also starring Andrea Ferréol and Volker Spengler.

Channel 4 Film capsule review

The first screenplay for a Fassbinder film not written by himself, was an adaptation by Stoppard of a Vladimir Nabokov novella. On the eve of the Third Reich, a chocolate manufacturer (played by Bogarde in an overwrought manner) becomes convinced a tramp is his double, whom he kills, and assumes his identity. In Nabokov's book, it is revealed in the end that the two men bore no resemblance to one another. This is not too clear in a film that was apparently ruined by Fassbinder's final cut. As it stands, it suffers from obfuscation and from the fact that it is in English.

Time Out

This generally ill-received assault (in both senses) on the art house market, filmed in English, toys perversely with its signifiers of 'class' (Nabokov novel, Stoppard script, Bogarde performance) to both plainly outrageous and oddly hermetic effect. The novel's surprises are merrily given away half way through (when distressed chocolate manufacturer Hermann Hermann decides to opt out of proto-Nazi Germany by murdering a 'double' who in fact looks nothing like him), and Fassbinder increasingly aligns the material with his more personal studies in schizophrenia like Satan's Brew or World on a Wire, while matching his own concerns with illusionism to Nabokov's with delusion. Bold, garish and obsessive, but more than a little irritating.

Talking Pictures (UK) review Howard Schumann

"Despair comes from the awareness that in everyone's life there comes a point where not only the mind but the body, too, understands that it's over"

—Fassbinder

Shot in English on a budget that nearly equaled the cost of his first fifteen films, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Despair has wit and style yet its attempt to recreate the dark, comedic genius of Vladimir Nobokov left me unmoved and uninvolved. Based on Nabokov's novel Despair (apparently intended as a parody of Dostoevsky), and adapted for the screen by Tom Stoppard, the film describes the descent into madness of wealthy chocolate entrepreneur Hermann Herman (Dirk Bogarde). Set in Germany on the eve of the Third Reich, scenes of the Nazis assaulting Jewish-owned businesses are sprinkled throughout the film but to no apparent purpose. Herman has left his Russian home to live in Berlin and constantly fantasizes about the beauty of the Russian winters and whispers “Russia, which we have lost forever...” to his wife, Lydia (Andrea Ferreol). He is a thoroughly unsympathetic character: cold, calculating, and cynical and Mr. Bogarde's exaggerated mannerisms do not make him any easier to appreciate. 

Much of the film takes place inside Herman's stately bourgeois home. Shots of the characters through glass partitions keep the viewer at a distance and the elegant interiors look like an abandoned mausoleum. Lydia's and Herman's relationship is unconvincing and Fassbinder's repeated descriptions of Lydia as an unintelligent sex object border on misogyny. "The flowers of your sensuality would wilt with intelligence," Herman tells his wife whom he always addresses with condescension. In addition to Lydia, we gradually meet other vivid supporting characters: Lydia's cousin, Ardalion; and Dr. Orlovious, an insurance salesman whom Herman mistakenly thinks is a psychiatrist and opens up to. 

Herman is convinced that Felix Weber (Klaus Lowitch), a labourer, resembles him as closely as "two drops of blood." though the resemblance is tentative at best (a joke Nabokov wisely saved for his readers until the end of his novella). He has an odd compulsion to observe himself as a stranger and devises a plan to commit the perfect crime, exchanging identities with the worker as a means of escaping his existence. Felix, on the other hand, decides to humour the eccentric Herman with the thought of getting a job. In Despair, Fassbinder constructs a world in the process of falling apart where people march inexorably toward self-destruction and where the journey into light proves to be an illusion. In a world approaching madness, however, Hermann seems to fit perfectly - no more, no less crazy than the insanity occurring around him.

Senses of Cinema (Carloss James Chamberlin) review Emigrating to Madness: Despair (Eine Reise ins Licht), July 2003

Reverse Shot review Michael Joshua Rowin, Autumn 2004

“Despair/Journey Into Light” (1978) by Rainer-Werner Fassbinder by ... Victor Enyutin from Acting Out Politics, June 4, 2014

User comments from imdb Author: Mo Mo from New Paltz, NY

User comments from imdb Author: Krystine-3 from Russian Federation, Moscow

User comments from imdb Author: hasosch from United States

The Film Jock Israel Vonseeger

TV Guide review

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

Salon Books | The gay Nabokov Lev Grossman from Salon, May 17, 2000

FASSBINDER B 85

Germany (30 mi) 1977 d: Florian Hopf and Maximiliane Mainka

A documentary interview of Fassbinder by German film critic Florian Hopf, walking around the sets, offering a few clips of Rainer

User comments from imdb Author erahatch from Baltimore, Maryland

While coy at times, this is some of the more interesting and sustained Fassbinder interview footage I have seen. Fassbinder reflects on the various stages of his career, discusses how his motives behind filmmaking evolved up to this point, and discusses a potential new phase in his career, as represented by his then-current project, _Despair._ This doc also features clips from a few Fassbinder films, especially _Beware of a Holy Whore_, and gives us some behind-the-scenes glimpses at the shooting of _Despair_. Overall, essential viewing for fans, with a lot of insight into what Fassbinder accomplished, and what could have been had he lived on.

For those who are interested in seeing this doc, you should know that it is available as a bonus feature on the _Bitter Tears..._ DVD.

GERMANY IN AUTUMN (Deutschland im Herbst) – one episode B+ 91

Munich (138 mi – Fassbinder episode only – 26 mi) October 1977 Omnibus work with 13 writers and 11 different directors

Personally, one of my favorites, as it gives so much human insight into Fassbinder himself, staged as it is, shown here arguing with his lover Armin Meier and his mother in his own totally dark and depressing apartment while dictating shots for Franz in BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ and snorting cocaine.

13 German writers and directors conceived this collective work in response to the deaths, in the fall of 1977, of Hans-Martin Schleyer, an executive kidnapped and killed by political terrorists, and the subsequent mysterious “suicides” in prison of the last three members of the notorious Baader-Meinhof revolutionary group. The film is basically a protest against Fascist tendencies in West Germany, ranging from an elegiac sequence of the burial of the prisoners to newsreel clips of Rommel’s cortege and a fictitious argument among TV executives about a controversial production of Antigone.

In the amazing Fassbinder sequence, it concerns how he, a radical filmmaker, finds German complacency too much to bear. He badgers his mother into taking a stand on terrorism, revealing at first that she endorses the need for order in a dictatorship, and argues with his lover, a foreign worker, who supports the state position on terrorism, revealing how a real life political crisis affects personal relationships as well as the general malaise of German complacency.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1978):

“The problem is really just that we don’t have a censor. If we had one, we would know what we can and what we can’t do, and then we would also know under what circumstances we could fight. There is nothing that one could accurately call a censor – I would describe it more as a climate in which from time to time something...now, it isn’t forbidden, but we say: that won’t be possible.”

Time Out Tony Rayns

A genuinely collaborative movie, aiming to deal with the state of the West German nation in the months between the Schleyer kidnapping and the Baader-Meinhof deaths in Stammheim Prison. The result centres on paranoia rather than on terrorism as such. Fassbinder brings the issues squarely back home, showing himself arguing with his mother and taking out his aggressions on his late boyfriend Armin. At its best, the film argues that it's impossible to have a 'coherent' left wing position on terrorism.

Chicago Reader [Dave Kehr] (capsule review)

Made in response to the terrorist kidnapping of German industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer in 1977, this compilation film marks attitudes ranging from concern to irony to despair among its eight directors. It is, of course, wildly uneven (and sometimes insufferable), but there is an urgency and engagement in each of the episodes. Rainer Werner Fassbinder's section is perhaps the best, in part because it's the most personal--an extended discussion-cum-rant between Fassbinder and his oblivious lover. Among the other contributors are Alexander Kluge, Alf Brustellin, Bernhard Sinkel, and Volker Schlondorff. Kluge, the main organizer behind the feature, later used his segment, "The Patriot," as the basis for one of his features.

Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce] Fernando F. Croce

The German New Wave gathers to dissect the nation's mood of breakdown following tensions between the government and the left-wing terrorist group Red Army Faction, which culminated in late 1977 with the death of a magnate, the kidnapping of a jet and the alleged suicides of three of the movement's leaders. The resulting work is less digested commentary than free-floating meditation, veering from documentary to fiction and from blackly comic to baldly despairing. Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz, Katja Rupé, Volker Schlöndorff and Peter Schubert are among the contributing directors, writers and actors, though the film's message, layered through many different artists, remains remarkably consistent -- the supposedly liberal contemporary German authorities, in light of their actions in the terrorist crisis, have more in common with Third Reich fascism than they care to admit. The most forceful segment is Rainer Werner Fassbinder's opening sketch, "playing" himself reacting to the news -- fucking up his relationship with his lover, doing blow, getting paranoid and throwing up in toilets. This remarkable segment crystallizes the notion that revealing one's political opinions is no less confessional than revealing one's own naked body, and Fassbinder is fearless about letting a national crisis bleed in and out of the personal (including exposing his own authoritarian streak, as he bullies his mom into yearning for old authoritarian rulers). Other highlights: jailed RAF co-founder Horst Mahler linking terrorists and revolutionaries within the common ground of moral indignation; a spoof of the elusiveness of the political film in a student group's ardent mock-Eisenstein manifesto; a committee of suits tearing apart a production of Antigone for subversive context. Bookending the arguments are the constrasting funerals, the industrialist's (solemnly televised, reverently attended) and the three prisoners' (dumped into the ground, surrounded by fist-raised-in-solidarity youngsters). The power of the material seesaws, though the impulse to open up discussion and raise consciousness is valiant, infusing the bleakness of its final images -- violent police interventions, a woman and a little girl walking down the road -- with a hint of battered hope. Can you imagine an American equivalent following 9/11?

Germany in Autumn Gregory Avery from Nitrate Online (excerpt)

West Germany, and much of Europe, went through a highly turbulent time in the Seventies. There were hijackings, bombings, and kidnappings-for-ransom; the murder of several Israeli athletes by terrorists at the 1972 Olympics; and the abduction and murder of Italian prime minister Aldo Moro. In West Germany, Hanns-Martin Schleyer, head of the Citroen-Benz motorworks, was kidnapped by a terrorist group, held for ransom, and then murdered. The four leaders of the Baader-Meinhof gang were arrested and incarcerated at Stammheim, a special facility which was created to house both the trial proceedings and the inmates. The prisoners were each confined to an individual cell. After they were jailed in 1972, the trial would not get underway until 1975, and two more years would pass before final sentencing. Afterwards, despite ultra-maximum security measures which included hourly cell inspections, three of the convicted gang members all committed suicide on the same night. (The fourth member was hospitalized and survived.)

In the meantime, the government passed laws which prevented prisoners from consulting with their attorneys, and for trials to be held without the accused being present. The jail cells at Stammheim were bugged for surveillance, and means were taken to prevent inmates from communicating between cells. The country's telephone system was also monitored for possible subversive communications. "Second" and "third generation" revolutionary and terrorist organizations and groups sprung up after previous groups had either fled, been arrested, or killed. Posters went up proclaiming "Our youth are turning against us!," while the term "fascistoid" came into parlance.

In 1977-78, nine German filmmakers, including Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz, Volker Schlöndorff, and Bernhard Sinkel, collectively made a film to express their feelings and concern over the present conditions in the West German state, "Germany in Autumn." The film included coverage of the huge memorial service held for the tragic Schleyer, as well as the funeral for the three deceased Baader-Meinhof gang members in Stuttgard, which almost did not take place until the town's mayor, Manfred Rommel (son of Field Marshall Erwin Rommel), intervened. ("I will not accept that there should be first and second-class cemeteries. All enmity should cease after death.") Nonetheless, "Germany in Autumn" captures footage that shows that police managed to find some way to arrest several of the mourners as they left the funeral.

Fassbinder's contribution, a jagged, disconcerting piece of filmmaking which opens the film after the main title, is extraordinary.

We see Fassbinder and Armin Meier, his companion at the time, in the apartment where they lived, on Reichenbachstrasse in Munich, where the walls have all been painted a sort of black color with some olive mixed in; the effect is to mute light and turn the place into a dark cocoon. Fassbinder telephones for information on an airline hostage situation in Mogidishu (where terrorists demanded the release of the prisoners at Stammheim, in exchange for the passengers' lives), or to confirm with a friend the news of the Baader-Meinhof members' suicide. Armin voices the opinion that, "If they don't obey the law, then the state shouldn't, either." This causes Fassbinder to kick him out of the apartment, then to call for him to come back in. After the announcement of a nationwide "search" -- with phone numbers where people can give the police anonymous tips -- Fassbinder hears sirens outside the building and promptly flushes some freshly-obtained drugs down the toilet. Armin asks if he's crazy; Fassbinder replies, what if the police came in to the place and started shooting, confusing in his head an interview he gave earlier to a journalist (where his statements against marriage could be construed as anti-Establishment) with when security forces stormed the hijacked airliner at Mogidishu (all the terrorists were killed, but the passengers all emerged unharmed), concluding with an unkind remark towards Armin. "Okay. If I'm a little s**t, I'm getting plastered!" Armin says, and walks out the door. Fassbinder, realizing he's acted rashly, slumps in regret.

The lithe, swaggering figure who appeared in Fox and His Friends four years earlier has transformed into someone who is by turns contrary, argumentative, sodden, paranoid, anguished. He picks things up, whether it be a lighter or a telephone receiver, and then sets them down heavily. He seems to take great exertion even to think, at times. In others, his hands rub across his face as if to reassure himself that he is still there.

Intercut with the scenes at the apartment is a filmed discussion between Fassbinder and Liselotte about the recent events. Liselotte shows no remorse for the terrorists, saying that a prisoner in Stammheim should be shot, publicly, for every hostage that the terrorists in Mogidishu threatened to shoot if their demands weren't met. (The pilot of the hijacked Lufthansa plane was killed, and his body was thrown out onto the runway; special police forces then stormed the plane, killing three of the four terrorists. None of the passengers were harmed.) Murderers should be put in jail and kept their so that they will not commit any more killings. But what, Rainer responds exasperatedly, if they aren't just simple murderers but people who are acting for a perfectly good cause? Many Germans were polarized over the treatment of the imprisoned Baader-Meinhof gang members: while nobody wanted to condone setting off bombs, the imprisoned terrorists, prior to their incarceration at Stammheim, were held in various locations and under conditions that were so horrid that Amnesty International lodged a formal complaint.

Liselotte tells Rainer that she isn't even sure people should talk about the incidents that have just occurred -- -who knows what could be said and then either taken out of context or used in the wrong way? She was particularly hurt by how a friend responded to her when she brought up the writer Heinrich Böll, spoke out about the way the imprisoned terrorists were being treated by authorities. Although she doesn't act distressed, she was clearly wounded by her friend's harsh response, and regretted ever saying anything. How, then, Rainer argues, can one have a democracy when people can't fully express their opinions? True, but the incidents they're talking about involve issues concerning due justice and fairness, not whether to take-down a democracy or not (a democracy provides a structure in which to resolve these issues). But there seems to be a want to quickly jump to the conclusion that Germans have once again made a hash out of having a free government, again. Fassbinder ends the sequence by showing Liselotte saying that who she would like to see leading the West German government, at that time, is someone who is an "authoritarian" who would be "good, and kind, and orderly." Someone who would inspire confidence and assurance, although, the way Fassbinder presents it -- unkindly, I'd say -- Liselotte appears to be thinking of another leader altogether. (Helmut Schmidt would be voted out of office in 1983, replaced by Helmut Kohl.)

The sequence at the Reichenbachstrasse apartment ends on a different note altogether. Fassbinder hears Armin come back in, late at night, and finds that he brought a young kid back with him, simply because the kid has nowhere to go and needs a place to sleep for the night. Fassbinder tells him to throw the kid out. Armin does so, then turns to Fassbinder and quietly asks, "Why did you have to go do that?" Fassbinder sits down and starts weeping, uncontrollably, and Armin kneels beside him and holds him, patting Fassbinder on the back with his large, workman's hands.

Cinemonkey [Carl Bennett]

“Germany in autumn” By Rainer Werner Fassbinder Victor Enyutin from Acting Out Politics

DVD Times Noel Megahey, reviews the 4-disc Region 2 DVD release, Rainer Werner Fassbinder Volume 2

DVD Times [Anthony Nield] Alexander Kluge: Films for Cinema

Books on German film New German Film: The Displaced Image by Timothy Corrigan (213 pages) and West German Film in the Course of Time by Eric Rentschler (260 pages), reviewed by Jan Mouton from Jump Cut, February 1988

TV Guide

New York Times (registration req'd) Vincent Canby

THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN (Die Ehe der Maria Braun) A 96

Coburg and Berlin (120 mi) January – March 1978

In a brilliant weaving of soap opera, comedy, history, politics, and social satire, Fassbinder creates his strongest female character for Hanna Schygulla, who won the best actress award at the Berlin Film Festival, in a radiant performance playing Maria Braun, a sex kitten, wife, whore, and entrepreneur in a man’s world, all with a spine of steel, forged by the danger and deprivation of war, qualities needed for Germany’s post-war Economic Miracle.

The film opens as Maria marries Hermann Braun (Klaus Löwisch), with a baby’s cry heard above the sirens and bombs, with Beethoven playing underneath it all, which may very well represent Fassbinder’s 1945 birth, and then goes on to reveal what it takes for that baby to survive. Hermann is called to the German front the very next day, and soon, he’s among the missing in action, believed to be dead. During a period of stark rationing, Maria starts working her way up through the bedrooms of the social elite. When her husband suddenly returns from a Russian prisoner-of-war camp at an inopportune moment, while Maria is pregnant and having an affair with a black American GI named Bill (Greg Eagles), she clobbers Bill to death. At the American war trial, Hermann accepts full blame for the murder and is sent to prison. Meanwhile, while Maria waits earnestly for Hermann, visiting him in prison and telling him, “These are bad times for feelings,” she participates wholeheartedly in the German Economic Miracle, rising to the top working exclusively for the corporate executive Karl Oswald (Ivan Desny), who she seduces quite by chance on a train. Maria works desperately to achieve redemption and to prepare a safe life for the days to come when Hermann is released.

A decade of restless efforts turns her into a strong-willed, successful, cool-as-ice, career business woman, so even once liberated, Hermann feels uncomfortable in her presence and decides to leave for South America to seek his fortune, perhaps induced by a behind the scenes deal made with Oswald while still in prison, who provided monetary security for their future so long as Oswald could spend his remaining years (he was suffering from ill health) with Maria. But near the end of the film, Hermann comes back for a night of reconciliation, only to end with an apocalyptic ending full of ambiguity, exacerbated by the delirious, somewhat surrealistic ravings of the play by play announcer calling the end of the soccer match where Germany wins the World Cup in 1954, certainly a contrast to the internalized emotional gloom that has marked this couple, equating Germany’s soccer triumph with the Mephistopheles-like post-war Economic Miracle, where a human price, a pound of flesh, must be paid in full. The film is dedicated to Peter Zadek. Fassbinder appears as a black marketeer, also Elisabeth Trissenaar, Gottfried John, and Günter Lamprecht, while Michael Ballhaus appears as a lawyer. In the original script ending, Maria drives a car, with Hermann in it, over a precipice.

Dana Duma from 1001 FILMS YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

The melodramatic premises in no way diminish the force of this remarkable film, which analyzes, through a particular case, the “German miracle.” Paid for with huge sacrifices, Germany’s reconstruction rested mostly on the fragile shoulders of its women. Not unanimously accepted, Fassbinder’s idea about the post-war boom was that, “if the walls were reconstructed, the hearts remained broken.” THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN speaks about the loss of the soul in a society exalting prosperity. Brightly performed by Schygulla, Maria is forced to suffer for seeking self-respect and dignity by inhuman means. Fascinated by money, she loses her feminine charm.

Convinced by Douglas Sirk that melodrama always works, Fassbinder managed to avoid sentimentalism by being rigorous and efficient. The famous “cold look” is still in place here, as a mark of his unmistakable seal. With THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN, Fassbinder once again, proves to be a master of the feminine portrait.

Barbara Baum (Costume Designer on the film – in 1990):

“On MARIA BRAUN RWF said to me ‘The costumes are more important than the sets for me because the sets don’t change as quickly. I want to convey through the costumes what phase of the war and postwar periods we are in, and I would like to make clear through the costumes how the Economic Miracle unfolds, in general and in particular, through the career of Maria Braun.’ He didn’t have to say any more; with that the direction was clearly defined.”

Time Out Tony Rayns

Knowing in advance that Fassbinder considers the institution of marriage to be the most insidious trap that mankind has yet devised for itself doesn't prepare you for The Marriage of Maria Braun. It opens in 1943 as an air raid hits Maria and Hermann Braun's wedding ceremony, and closes with another explosion, highly ambiguous in effect and implication. In between, Hermann goes missing on the Russian front, serves years in jail, and emigrates to the States, while Maria sails through unruffled, acquiring wealth and position pending his return. It is at once Fassbinder's most conventional and elusive film: that final explosion keeps ricocheting long after it's over.

The Marriage of Maria Braun Dave Kehr from the Reader

In 1978, Rainer Werner Fassbinder retreated from the failures of Chinese Roulette and Despair with what, for him, was an extremely naturalistic and accessible work. The sublime Hanna Schygulla stars as a plucky frau perennially separated from her husband, first by war, then by prison, and finally by pervasive capitalist malaise. She channels her frustrated romantic energy into the construction of an industrial empire--a plot that mixes love and money in the manner of Mildred Pierce. Though Fassbinder takes a more open attitude toward his characters, letting them exist as fully developed psychological specimens, his deadly irony continues to operate on the level of mise-en-scene, drawing his actors into an unstable world of seductive surfaces and shifting meanings. Fassbinder argues that happiness delayed is happiness denied, tempering the film's emotion with precise analysis. In German with subtitles. 120 min.

User comments from imdb Author: batzi8m1 from Watsonville, California

Alright already, get over it, was Handke's comment to the 1968 meeting of the Gruppe 48 -- those writers who wanted to "heal" from the war. Well Fassbinder doesn't want to heal, he wants to indict. And this movie, probably his most accessible, takes a woman as the symbol for the nation-- a theme common to prehistoric oral literature, particularly among the Irish, made famous by Grimmelshausen's Mother Courage and updated by Brecht's play. But in this version, instead of the tragic Mother trying to save her children and mourning them, Maria Braun sells out for comfort from collaboration with the Nazi's through the economic wonder "Wirtschaftswunder" of the cold war. This was Fassbinder's big hit, because he toned down his politics both sexual and marxist, to focus on the loss of soul that Germany experienced. It was also Hanna Schygulla's Oscar worthy performance, probably one of her best of many great ones. Like little Oskar from the Tin Drum, Maria Braun was stunted by the experience, only on the inside.

FilmExposed Magazine Chris Power

Just as the autuers of the French New Wave aspired towards incorporating American influences into their native cinema, so Fassbinder and the other directors of the New German Cinema sought to make ‘German Hollywood movies’. In that respect, and judging things by Hollywood standards, The Marriage of Maria Braun can be considered Fassbinder’s most successful work, given that it was by far his most financially successful.

One should also bear in mind, however, that Fassbinder’s opinion of Hollywood was a mixture of love and disgust, and it is ironic that a film so bound up with critiquing the transactional nature of life should have raked in the most money. Another irony is that Fassbinder was able to reach his commercial peak when his consumption of cocaine and alcohol, which would kill him within four years, had reached such monumental levels.

Maria (Schygulla) marries Hermann (Löwitsch) the day before he leaves for the Russian Front. Thinking he has been killed, immediately after the war she becomes involved with a black GI. When her husband returns, she kills the soldier but Hermann chivalrously takes the blame.

Unbowed, Maria piggybacks on West Germany’s post-war economic recovery, making as much money as she can for when Hermann is released. She becomes an advisor and then mistress to Karl (Desny), a French textile magnate. Schygulla gives a tremendous performance as Maria, who for much of the film seems a paragon of individuality and self-determination. She does what’s necessary to succeed, and she does it for love.

But Maria is trapped in a system she cannot beat, a system that sours purity. Fassbinder subtly adumbrates the sickness at the heart of the post-war boom with radio speeches concerning rearmament made by Chancellor Adenauer, and meetings between trade unionists and bosses at which the mood is one of relentless cynicism. This cynicism turns Maria’s chutzpah into cold-heartedness. “It’s not a good time for feelings,” she tells her husband. “But that suits me. That way, nothing really affects me.” And later, when tipping a removals man, she snaps, “So, now I don’t have to say thanks. I’d rather pay than say thanks.”

But while a less complex film might have been satisfied with drawing a line between material wealth and spiritual atrophy, Fassbinder goes deeper than that. The film is littered with false premisses: Maria believes Hermann to be alive when everyone else thinks him dead; when she finally accepts his death, he returns; when Hermann is released from prison, he leaves the country, claiming that he can only return to Maria when he feels whole again. In fact Karl, who has only a short time left to live, has paid him off so that he can have Maria to himself until he dies.

It is this last misconception that spells Maria’s doom. When Hermann returns her excitement is hysterical and lacking real happiness. That things come to a bad end is, by this stage, no surprise, and Fassbinder adds a sick-making irony to the agony of the final scene by including an invasively loud commentary of the 1954 World Cup final, in which West Germany triumphed. This national success stands in mordant contrast to the domestic tragedy we have witnessed, a tragedy that, it is strikingly suggested, we will very possibly not learn from at all.

1982 Gregory Avery from Nitrate Online (excerpt)

At the beginning of The Marriage of Maria Braun, Maria (Hanna Schygulla) and Hermann Braun (Klaus Löwitsch) are seen running out of the door to the registrar's office onto a street where everything is gradually being blown to bits. Even after they've been knocked to the ground, Maria insists on the notarization of their marriage certificate, right there, on the spot, before everyone has scattered. It's done. Then, it's off to the war for Hermann. Maria will not see him again for several years, and when she does, he takes a murder rap and is packed off to prison. Maria justifies her actions thereafter by saying that she is doing everything for the sake of "mein Mann."

This was the sixteenth film that Hanna Schygulla had acted in for Fassbinder. She appeared in his very first feature, Love is Colder Than Death, in 1969. You can see her, looking very young and very stunning, in another Fassbinder film made that year, Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?, in which Kurt Raab played a character named Kurt Raab who is so humiliated by everyone around him that he ends up killing his wife and children and then taking his own life. If I recall correctly, Hanna is one of the only people in the film who does not have anything scathing to say about "Herr R.."

But sometimes an actor and a role come together and they click, and that's what happened with Maria Braun. Revisionists have attempted to put forward a fresh assessment of the film, saying, for one, that Schygulla was really not as talented an actress as everyone made her out to be at the time. And that she had no vast international success to equal that of Maria Braun afterwards only goes further towards proving the point. (In fact, Schygulla has worked steadily in European film over the last two decades. She gave a spectacular performance in Kenneth Branagh's 1992 film, Dead Again; and, this year, appeared in The Werckmeister Variations, the new film by celebrated Hungarian director Bela Tarr. Also, as George Clooney put it in a recent interview, sometimes it's a matter of whether or not an actor works for the sake of working, or works on films that are worth working on.)

Schygulla projects both a smoldering quality and a glamorous on-camera presence, but she also doesn't come across as phony, which is remarkable considering that she is playing a character who is continually adapting herself to the shifts and opportunities that arise, reinventing herself. Whether it is with an African-American G.I., Bill (George Byrd), whose courtliness reminds one character of the German film star Willi Fritsch, and who fortuitously gives Maria a chance to learn English; or with Oswald (Ivan Desny), the French-born textiles manufacturer with whom Maria gets a job after displaying her command of English under unusual circumstances. She begins working with Oswald at the same moment in time when Germany is going through a "currency reform" and Konrad Adenauer, who will lead Germany through the years of its "economic miracle" in the 1950s, has been elected to the Chancellorship.

When Betti (Elisabeth Trissenaar) tells Maria that love -- such as the love Maria feels for Hermann -- is nothing more than a feeling, Maria responds by saying that may be so, but it's "a great feeling, and a great love can be very real and very true." She works in various modes and guises, so that her relationship with Oswald never gets mixed up with her feelings for Hermann. Even when she loses a child she was going to have, Maria takes a pause and then quickly moves on to the next thing, starts making her next step in the world, goes to meet whatever opportunity ahead that she's supposed to seize. This is why her coy description of herself as "the Mata Hari of the Economic Miracle" continues to amuse no matter how many times one has seen the film.

Life changes, but things between Maria and Hermann don't stay perfectly preserved, frozen until the moment where they were so that they can resume where they left off. Maria develops a particularly nasty snarl at the office, which she tries out on Frau Ehmke, the woman who becomes Maria's secretary after working for Oswald. And then there's when Hermann shows up for the first time at the house that Maria has bought for when she and Hermann are together again. Maria is all ready to start married life and finally be the dutiful wife for him, even if Hermann seems more interested in listening to the World Cup Soccer match on the radio. "Most happy people look indecent when you're unhappy," Maria tells Betti earlier, when the family has a party and Maria discovers that her widowed mother (Gisela Uhlen) has a boyfriend (Günther Lamprecht) who's about the same age as Maria. (Maria's mother also begins to look younger and younger, after this turn of events.) "Those who knew a great love can appreciate a great love in others," another character says.

Hanna Schygulla's beauty always seems to look just slightly out-of-focus, like Carole Lombard in Howard Hawks' Twentieth Century, and it's the nebulous, not-entirely-defined quality that helps make her performance -- Schygulla's looks and mannerisms and Maria's actions and connivery go together perfectly. She looks dreamy, exudes presence, but does not seem to have fully materialized. We see her up-close during the early part of the film, but then she moves away, under the makeup and hair style that (Maria says) make her look like a "poodle" for the servicemen's club, then into numerous and more up-to-date outfits; an office desk that always seems to be on the other side of the divider from Frau Ehmke's workspace, or lit by a single lamp that casts her in shadow; then, finally, the wide hats with veils (provided by the ace costumer Barbara Baum), which she wears even while dining alone. When Hermann arrives home, he's wearing a hat, too (said to be a homage to Michel Piccoli's character in Godard's Contempt, who wore a dark fedora indoors), which partially hides his face. (Later, in Lili Marlene, one of the last shots of Hanna Schygulla shows her, in close up, motionless and with her head partially encased in a silver turban, like Greta Garbo in a photo portrait taken of her for the film Mata Hari. In Lili Marlene, the effect seems to expose Schygulla rather than lend her mystique.)

That Maria's mother takes up with another man who appears to be the same age as Maria must not have been any mistake on Fassbinder's part. Additionally, the role of Frau Ehmke, who must work under Maria, is played by Fassbinder's mother Liselotte, under the name Lilo Pempeit ("Pempeit" being her maiden name). Liselotte's first appearance in one of her son's films was in Gods of the Plague, in 1969: in it, she sat on a sofa in the apartment where she lived with her second husband (which he grudgingly lent to Fassbinder for the shoot), and asked her (off-camera) son if he needed money. Only later did she learn that the camera was operating while she was speaking. According to accounts, Fassbinder was sometimes not entirely respectful in his treatment of her on the set, but Liselotte would make appearances in twenty-six of Fassbinder's films, ranging from one scene bits, such as in Fox and His Friends, to substantial supporting roles in Maria Braun and Berlin Alexanderplatz.

Fassbinder himself turns up in a small but important part, as the black marketeer who sells Maria the dress she needs for her first day working at the servicemen's club. He also offers to sell her a copy of the collected works of Heinrich von Kleist; she declines -- books don't burn as long or as well as firewood -- and takes a bottle of liquor home for her mother, instead.

"A good director can sometimes contrive a happy ending that leaves you dissatisfied," Fassbinder said. "You know that something is wrong -- it just can't end that way." The Marriage of Maria Braun was to have ended in a way that was very, very similar to what happened to Robert Mitchum and Jean Simmons at the end of the 1953 drama, Angel Face. Hanna Schygulla, however, intervened. "If she has gone so far and taken so many steps, she can take one more. She can just start from scratch," Schygulla argued. "That happens to everyone." Thus, the more ambiguous ending, in which Maria, subconsciously, sabotages everything she's worked for at a moment when she is about to relinquish the dedicated, free, but independent life that she had heretofore been living. A telltale clue as to how things turn out in the film as it presently stands is that the radio broadcast that Hermann had been listening to, announcing that Germany has won the decisive match in that year's World Cup Soccer Championship -- a first for Germany since the outcome of World War Two -- continues to be heard all the way through the climatic scenes.

From this sound motif comes the other, controversial aspect to the ending of Maria Braun. The first shot in the film is of a photo portrait of Adolf Hitler. The film's concluding shot is a dissolve between four portraits of the chancellors that governed West Germany through the postwar era. The first three, including Adenauer, are shown in negative; the last, Helmut Schmidt, is shown first in negative, then in positive print. Many people in the audience picked up the disturbing connotation of this: what did Fassbinder mean by putting Hitler in the first shot of the film and then putting Schmidt in the last? Was he hinting that there was some sort of similarity between the two men, or was Fassbinder, as he was sometimes wont to do, just being provocative?

The Marriage of Maria Braun Jim’s Reviews, an analysis of the BRD Trilogy

DIE EHE DER MARIA BRAUN Gretchen Elsner-Sommer from Film Reference

Fassbinder's use of Brechtian aesthetics by H-B. Moeller - Jump Cut H-B. Moeller essay from Jump Cut, April 1990

Epinions [metalluk]

Rainer Werner Fassbinder: The Marriage of Maria Braun Derek Malcolm from the Guardian

DVD Verdict: Fassbinder's BRD Trilogy: Criterion Collection Brian Burke

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] reviewing the BRD Trilogy

Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [4/4]

User comments from imdb Author: Galina from Virginia, USA

User comments from imdb Author: rosscinema (rosscinema@juno.com) from Oceanside,Ca.

User comments from imdb Author: Graham Greene from United Kingdom

User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: louiebotha from South Africa

User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: ALauff

Eye for Film (Ben Sillis) review [4/5]

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [7/10]

VideoVista review J.C. Hartley

Mondo Digital

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [A+]

ReelTalk (Donald Levit) review

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4.5/5]

Thoughts on Stuff Patrick

Marriage of Maria Braun, The German Cinema Film Archives

The Marriage of Maria Braun quotes - Rainer Werner Fassbinder ... Mooviees.com

Doogan's Views - The BRD Trilogy & The Cathedral Todd Doogan on the BRD Trilogy from the Digital Bits

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's BRD Trilogy :: Film & TV Reviews ... Tim Sheridan on the BRD Trilogy from Paste magazine

Cinema of Attractions: The BRD Trilogy January 11, 2008

RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER’S BRD TRILOGY | Films In Review Roy Frumkes on the BRD Trilogy

allmovie ((( Fassbinder: The BRD Trilogy - The Marriage of Maria ... Mark Deming on the BRD Trilogy

New York Movies - To Have and To Hold On To - page 1 - Village Voice Michael Atkinson on the BRD Trilogy

The Weaving Mill Film Workshop - R.W. FASSBINDER FILM NIGHTS BRD Film Retrospective

Turner Classic Movies dvd review a compilation of capsule reviews

DVD Times Noel Megahey, reviews the 8-disc Region 2 DVD release, The Rainer Werner Fassbinder Commemorative Collection Volume 2

TV Guide review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4] in 1979

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies] in 2005

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

DVDBeaver.com - Review [Donald Brown]

The Marriage of Maria Braun The Auteurs

The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978) - The Criterion Collection

The BRD Trilogy - The Criterion Collection

BRD Trilogy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

IN A YEAR OF 13 MOONS (In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden) A 98

Frankfurt, Germany (124 mi) July – August 1978

The film IN A YEAR OF 13 MOONS is told through the encounters of a man during the last five days of his life and it tries, on the basis of these encounters, to figure out whether this man’s decision, that on the final day, the fifth, he will allow no further days to follow, that he will refuse, is somehow understandable, or perhaps even acceptable.

—Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1978)

Every seventh year is a lunar year. Those people whose lives are essentially dominated by their emotions suffer particularly strongly from depressions in these lunar years. The same is also true of years with 13 new moons, albeit not quite so strongly. And if a lunar year also happens to be a year with 13 new moons, the result is often a personal catastrophe.

In an unfortunately short career, from 1969 until his drug-induced death in 1982, Fassbinder directed 40 feature-length films. One similarity in all of Fassbinder’s films are characters, straight or gay, male or female, who are unable to connect with people in the world around them, whose frustration with their own lives provides the meaning to his films. A raw, searing, emotional powerhouse, with Fassbinder as the writer, director, cameraman, art director, and editor (with Juliane Lorenz), an extremely provocative and unimaginably compelling response to the guilt the director felt from his partner Armin Meier’s suicide, probably on Fassbinder’s birthday May 31st 1978 in Fassbinder’s apartment while he was receiving accolades at the Cannes Film Festival for DESPAIR (1978), allegedly due to their impending split, the 2nd such suicide in Fassbinder’s personal life, making relationships appear hopelessly dangerous and impossible. Shot just a month after the death, the subject of the film, which follows the last five days of transsexual Elvira, born Erwin, unwanted and raised by nuns, played powerfully and tragically by Volker Spengler, who rarely speaks above a poetic whisper, where Erwin falls in love with Anton Saetz (Gottfried John), a rich Jewish Holocaust survivor from Bergen-Belsen who now owns real estate in Frankfurt, a city portrayed as a soulless expression of the sadistic effects of capitalism. Saetz watches a scene with his bodyguards from the Jerry Lewis movie YOU’RE NEVER TOO YOUNG (1955) Jerry Lewis - You're Never Too Young - YouTube (4:18), featuring Jerry masquerading as a member of a female teenage marching band in what has to be one of Fassbinder’s most unforgettable uses of irony, and remarks to Erwin, offhandedly, “too bad you’re not a girl,” which was enough to cause Erwin to have his sex changed, the ultimate act of love, demasculation, and a willingness to die for his love, only to be rejected and laughed at by Saetz, later beaten by men on the street, causing Elvira to revisit the stations of her life.

Often characters will speak long passages of dialogue while seemingly unconnected images are seen onscreen. In the company of her friend, a sweet-natured whore, Zora (Ingrid Craven), Elvira sets out to tour the slaughterhouse where she as a he used to work as a butcher, the visuals are similar to Godard’s WEEKEND (1967), but Elvira’s underlying narrative describing her own story is excruciatingly painful, an assaultive, agonizing, yet ecstatic scene, using historical trauma to communicate a sense of the personal, perhaps Fassbinder’s reference to the slaughter of the Holocaust: “It’s not against life at all. It is life itself. The way the blood streams, and death, that’s what gives an animal’s life meaning in the first place. And the smell when they die and they know death is coming and that it’s beautiful and they wait for it...Come with me, I’ll show you. It’ll smell, and we’ll see them die and hear their cries, cries for deliverance.” While the meats are butchered, stripped, and flayed, the intensity of the images mixed with the near hysterical pitch of Volker Spengler’s voice leave a lasting impression that sticks with the viewer through every moment of the film. Elvira can be heard telling her friend Zora about her life with her last lover, mimicking his distraught, intoxicating lines as an actor, words competing with barely audible images, how she made a “man” out of him quoting a famous final passage from Goethe’s Torquato Tasso, which directly alludes to the relation of pain to expression, of containment and silence: “And when our gaze lights on a monstrous deed, the soul stands still the while…And if as a man, I am silenced in my agony, a god taught me to speak of how I suffer.”

Elvira identifies with humans falling silent in their pain and expresses anxiety over castration, the act of demasculation, a reference to the impossible sacrifice it would take to rid the German male identity of the Nazi, which leads to a dream of a cemetery in which are buried not the dead, but the brief times “a person was truly happy.” Next she visits the convent of her youth, and speaks with the Sister (Lilo Pempeit, Fassbinder’s mother), who describes the intense longing Erwin felt as a young boy waiting for the next visits from his step-parents to be with such detail that Elvira responds by fainting, remembering the stark emptiness she once felt when she realized the visits would eventually end. Challenging or punctuating our notion of history and forgetfulness, Fassbinder creates a peculiar party sequence underscored by a shrieking soundtrack of recorded screams with one man talking incessantly while another quietly pumps iron, or Elvira witnesses a black man hang himself in one of Anton Saetz’s empty rooms but not before he helps open her bottle of wine, while in another Zora watches television while Elvira is asleep, as a news broadcast details the horrors of Pinochet's regime in Chile, where Fassbinder places himself on the television right after the newsreel footage, literally implicating himself in Armin Meier’s tragic death. The unforgettable tape recorded narration heard throughout the film (particularly during the final scene) was not scripted, but was recorded with Fassbinder asking questions of Volker Spengler answering in character, where by the end, Fassbinder’s voice was cut out, as Elvira in the end quietly decides to end her life. The film utilizes harsh color, asymmetric sets, a dissonant sound track, and alternating narrative techniques to evoke the depths of Evira’s pain, a film of suffering, muteness, and repression, stretching the boundaries of conventional storytelling, also starring Elisabeth Trissenaar and Eva Mattes, dedicated to Armin Meier - - easily Fassbinder’s most personal film.

In a Year with 13 Moons | review, synopsis, book tickets ... - Time Out Tony Rayns

Elvira (Spengler) was Erwin until s/he went to Casablanca for a discreet operation. She now lives in Frankfurt, abandoned by her lover, befriended by a hooker who's not much better off than herself, and ripped to shreds by cruelties and social inequalities. In a Year with 13 Moons is not only Fassbinder's last word on victimised innocence, it's also a subjective response to the suicide of his own lover Armin Meier, and a sincere admission that life is messier than his earlier films acknowledged. A movie riven with contradictions and fuelled by vehemence and passion.

In a Year of 13 Moons Jeffrey M. Anderson from Combustible Celluloid

In a Year with 13 Moons is one bizarre film, even for Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Made just after Fassbinder's lover committed suicide in real life, In a Year with 13 Moons manages to cohere its pain into intellectual and emotional compartments. Elvira (Volker Spengler) is a former man who flew to Casablanca and returned as a woman -- all because a former boyfriend, Anton Saitz (Gottfried John), joked, "too bad you're not a girl." The film tells Elvira's entire sad life story, but in disjointed chunks. In several sequences, characters speak long passages of dialogue while unconnected visuals pass by. (One such scene takes place in a slaughterhouse as Elvira tells her story to a prostitute friend). Other sequences are more elusive, such as one in which Elvira witnesses a man hanging himself, but not before the man helps open her bottle of wine. A peculiar party scene comes underscored with a shrieking soundtrack of recorded screams while one man talks incessantly and another quietly pumps iron. Strangely enough, Fassbinder manages to make all this stuff gel. He decries fascism in the form of Anton's character and pays tribute to his fallen lover at the same time, with proper emphasis on both emotional need and intellectual respect. Fassbinder literally made most of the film himself, controlling the writing, directing, art design, editing and camerawork.

All Movie Portal review Ed Gonzalez (link lost)

In one of cinema's more memorable moments, In a Year of 13 Moons's transgender Elvira (Volker Spengler) walks through a slaughterhouse with her prostitute friend Zora (Ingrid Caven) as she delivers a monologue on castration anxiety. Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Martha) lends hypnotic attention to a nun's melodramatic take on Elvira's troubled youth in one of the film's more fluid scenes. As with the rest of the film's characters, the nun is in constant physical flux: her movements within the convent's garden create a distancing emotional effect between herself and Elvira. Indeed, 13 Moons is very much a film about humanity's isolation in the face of muted sexual desire. Elvira naively believed that becoming a woman would win her the graces of a childhood crush, Anton (Gottfried John). (He is described as having offhandedly remarked: "Too bad you're not a girl.") Years later, Elvira is a victim of homophobia and domestic abuse, seeking salvation from suicide through validation from an older Anton. Elvira's journey to Anton (now a capitalist drone who spends his time dancing to Jerry Lewis songs along with his fellow businessmen) is deeply metaphorical; the year of 13 moons (Jews call it Ve-Adar) is the year where the super-emotional become exceptionally prone to catastrophe. Although spiraling toward nothingness, Elvira still manages to enlighten those around her: an icy trip through Anton's industrial tower finds Elvira bestowing hope, however inconsequential, to a man about to hang himself (in Christ-like fashion, she gives the man bread and wine). Quite possibly Rainer Werner Fassbinder's finest film, 13 Moons is the ultimate paean to transsexual shame.

In a Year of 13 Moons | Film Review | Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

The year 1974 saw the release of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's brilliant Fox and His Friends, a bitter indictment of an upper-class gay society that toys with and subsequently destroys a working-class male hustler (played in the film by Fassbinder himself). Many of the director's best works took their cue from explosive melodramas that transpired in his own life. Fox and His Friends was motivated in part by Fassbinder's romantic relationship with Armin Meier, who starred in seven of the director's films (most notably Fear of Fear, Chinese Roulette, and Despair) before killing himself in 1978 shortly after their break-up. Just as the torturous behind-the-scenes fiascos on the set of Whity would lay down the foundation for his acclaimed Beware of a Holy Whore, the guilt Fassbinder suffered in the wake of Meier's death would inform much of his brilliant In a Year of 13 Moons.

Like Josef von Sternberg and his hero Douglas Sirk, Fassbinder understood and loved women in ways few directors have. Because so much suffering came to his women, Fassbinder had to dodge erroneous sexist accusations for much of his unfortunately short career in cinema. (From 1969 until his drug-induced suicide in 1982, he directed some 40 feature-length works.) But regardless of their sex or sexual proclivities, Fassbinder's characters (the emasculated straight man from The Merchant of Four Seasons, the divas of Lola and Veronika Voss, the hoity-toity lesbians of The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, the oppressed straight women of Martha and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and the gay men of Fox and His Friends and Querelle) all suffered from the same inability to fully connect and engage with the people around them, a frustration the director likened to cosmic, world-weary ennui in In a Year of 13 Moons, the story of a transsexual forced to come to grips with the meaning of "her" existence shortly after a humiliating break-up.

"Every seventh year is a lunar year. Those people whose lives are essentially dominated by their emotions suffer particularly strongly from depressions in these lunar years. The same is also true of years with 13 new moons, albeit not quite so strongly. And if a lunar year also happens to be a year with 13 new moons, the result is often a personal catastrophe." So warns Fassbinder during the film's opening scene, which begins in Frankfurt during a year of 13 moons: 1978, also the year of his ex-lover Meier's suicide. Fassbinder's ability to evoke allegory through rigorous framing techniques is unmatched. These distancing effects can be suffocating at times (Chinese Roulette's constantly roving camera brings to mind a pistol randomly aiming at and threatening to shoot the film's "victims"), but In a Year of 13 Moons they blissfully and ravishingly equate broken lives to solar planets dislodged from the orbital flow of the sun.

"He says he's not a man, but a woman," says the man who beats Elvira Weishaupt (Volker Spengler) at a Frankfurt cruising spot for gays when he discovers she doesn't have a penis between her legs. If the man and his posse of Wakefield Poole queens are largely archetypical, Elvira represents something more prototypical: a she-male who suffers so that all others who find themselves caught "in-between" can flourish. Save for his monumental miniseries Berlin Alexanderplatz, In a Year of 13 Moons may be Fassbinder's greatest achievement, because the film's kitchen-sink melodrama collectively addresses the domestic, cultural, psychological, spiritual, and existential hang-ups of the human condition his others films addressed individually. In Elvira's relationship to her lover Christoph (Karl Scheydt), Fassbinder acknowledges the brutal way men treat their woman, but in Elvira's relationship to the world around her, the director posits a journey of self-discovery that ends with a tragic yet hopeful emotional uplift.

You can see Fassbinder sorting through the guilt and grief he suffered after Meier's death throughout the film, which makes Elvira's humiliations and bizarre rituals of atonement that much more difficult to watch. Fassbinder wasn't a religious man, but In a Year of 13 Moons feels not unlike a series of biblical encounters between the Christ-like Elvira and the film's other cripples as she spirals knowingly to her inevitable doom. Humiliated by her lover, Elvira befriends a prostitute named Zora (Ingrid Caven) and together they go to a slaughterhouse where Elvira (then Erwin) used to work as a butcher. There, Elvira discusses her crippling loss of self, but rather than linger on Spengler's face, Fassbinder shockingly and cynically subverts her castration anxiety by showing a group of cows being cut open, decapitated, and subsequently skinned. Throughout this notorious sequence, Fassbinder means for us to think of the medical procedure that turned Erwin into Elvira but, more importantly, the degrees of free will human victims have over their own brutal slaughters.

Like Sirk, Fassbinder was big on mirrors and reflective surfaces. Early in the film, Christoph refers to Elvira as a soulless "piece of meat" before forcing her to look at herself in a mirror. She has a difficult time opening her eyes. Later she walks into a casino and is embarrassed by a potential suitor who calls her "grandma" before threatening to cut her throat—again, another reference to Elvira intimidated with human butchery. Both times, Elvira has a difficult time opening her eyes and looking at herself. Only once is she confident enough to gaze at her ambi-sexual exterior: inside a mod bathroom where the mirror is so fractured that she can never see herself in full. There are always numerous visual allegories at play during any given frame of the film. Here, the fractured glass calls attention to Elvira's displaced self, but by lingering on her confident gaze and then noting her abrupt sadness, Fassbinder points out his character's inability to ever truly escape the identity she's created for herself.

Looking to bring Elvira some peace of mind (and to understand for herself why he decided to become a woman), Zora takes her to the orphanage where a young Erwin was raised by a group of nuns. There, the peaceful Sister Gudrun (Lilo Pempeit, Fassbinder's mother) sheds a little light on the order of the universe. "No one ruins his life of his own accord, the order human beings have made ruins them," the old woman says before detailing the particulars of a young Erwin's abandonment. In what has to be one of the most incredible sequences ever directed for the screen, the goddess Gudrun begins to methodically walk around the exterior of the orphanage's garden center. Like the red and golden spherical objects that hang from the ceilings of so many rooms in the film (not to mention the home garden where Elvira's ex-wife and daughter sit peacefully, the daughter reading from Franz Kafka's The Castle), the garden's center is meant to represent the sun and Sister Gudrun the planet that moves around it in perfect alignment.

This revelatory moment is very much In a Year of 13 Moon's centerpiece, around which the first and second halves of the film revolve. Fassbinder's films have a geometry all their own but the overall emotional and theoretical configuration Fassbinder conveys with In a Year of 13 Moons is very specifically that of a human solar system out of whack. While Sister Gudrun is making her circular journey around the orphanage, Elvira collapses offscreen on the concrete floor. (The poor girl is such a mess that she can't even go down a spiral staircase without tripping over herself.) Like so many other characters in Fassbinder's films, Elvira has yet to conquer—let alone define—her emotional center. And so she continues to fall into the empty void of the film's emotional universe (in classic Fassbinder-style suspended animation), always on the brink of sacred fulfillment but constantly frustrated by that rigorous moral order enacted by the human beings around her.

Though Elvira continues to spiral uncontrollably into nothingness, she still manages the strength to pay a trip to the man supposedly responsible for her sex change operation, thinking that he's angry at her for having spilled dirty secrets about him to a newspaper reporter. Anton Saitz (Gottfried John), a corporate pig who levels and rebuilds the world around him for profit, sheds fascinating light on Elvira's body consciousness. After Elvira, Anton, and his bodyguard/goons engage in a curious choreographed dance timed to a musical number from a Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis film that plays on the television, Anton throws a tennis ball at Elvira. When Erwin declared his love for Anton years earlier in Casablanca, Anton replied: "That's nice, too bad you're not a girl." And so that's what it took for Erwin to become Elvira, proving Zora's theory that "she didn't even have a real reason" to make the change. ("It all started with cheese, since meat made Anton nauseous," Elvira humorously hints earlier in the film as to the reasons for her current emotional predicament.)

Fassbinder strains for a world-weary political contextulization at one point in the film: Zora watches television while Elvira is asleep and a news program details the horrors of Pinochet's regime in Chile. More interesting (and you'll have to look carefully for this), Fassbinder places himself on the television right after newsreel footage of Pinochet, implicating himself in the world of hurt he no doubt believes to have wrought on Armin Meier. Before meeting Anton at the top of his corporate tower, Elvira gives a man bread and wine in Christ-like fashion before he hangs himself in front of her. The man justifies his "self-murder" by telling Elvira, "I don't want things to exist because I perceive them." What's to blame then for the tragedy of Elvira Weishaupt: her own free will or the collective pressure of the people around her? It's a question Fassbinder doesn't pretend to know the answer to, or maybe he's saying it's a little bit of both. Elvira and Meier made the decision to commit suicide, but there's still that "order human beings have made" to ruin them.

In a Year of 13 Moons comes down to a series of operatic, sometimes campy examinations of questions pertaining to free will, chance, cause and effect, moral responsibility, self-sacrifice, and spiritual atonement. When Zora and Elvira visit the bitchy Soul Frieda (Walter Bockmayer), the spiritual queen describes a strange cemetery seemingly inhabited by the corpses of young children. But he explains that the dates etched on their tombstones refers not to their lifespan but to "the time during his life he had a friend." In a Year of 13 Moons begins at/on FRANKFURT AM MAIN/AM 24, JULY 1978 and ends at/on FRANKFURT AM MAIN/AM 28, AUGUST 1978, the length of time during Elvira's life Fassbinder allows both Zora (and his audience) to enter her universe. When Elvira dies, there's plenty of blame to go around. But that everyone in her world is there to hover gently and in perfect sync around her body suggests that her death has restored a more genteel order to this personal solar system.

In a Year With 13 Moons Jim’s Reviews, also seen here: Jim's Reviews - Fassbinder's In a Year With 13 Moon

Gender Variance in the Arts: In Einem Jahr mit 13 Monden Zagria

Searching for the Self in Fassbinder's In a Year ... - Senses of Cinema Rebecca Harkins-Cross, June 5, 2011

Speaking For Others: Manifest and Latent Content in In a Year with ... Justin Vicari, October 20, 2005

Not Just Movies: In a Year of 13 Moons (Rainer Werner Fassbinder ... Jake Cole from Not Just Movies

Wellington Film Society - IN A YEAR OF THIRTEEN MOONS Martyn Auty from Sight and Sound, Autumn 1980

In a Year of 13 Moons Read TCM's Home Video Review on this film Pablo Kjolseth

Only the Cinema: Films I Love #20: In a Year With 13 Moons (Rainer ... including a series of movie stills, also seen here: Only The Cinema [Ed Howard]

The Anatomy of Anguish: Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982 ... Violet Lucca from Film Comment, June 28, 2012

Sunday Editor's Pick: In A Year of 13 Moons (1978) - Alt Screen

The Art of Cruelty The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, by Maggie Nelson (304 pages), July 11, 2011 (pdf format)

The Films Of Rainer Werner Fassbinder: A Retrospective | The Playlis The Playlist, July 29, 2011

Krell Laboratories: Ungendered*: Fassbinder's A Year of 13 Moons ... Christianne Benedict from Krell Laboratories

“In a Year of 13 Moons” (1978) By R.W. Fassbinder Victor Enyutin from Acting Out Politics

Robert Edwards - digitallyOBSESSED!

User comments from imdb Author: Alice Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) from dublin, Ireland

User comments from imdb Author: Galina from Virginia, USA

User comments from imdb Author: Graham Greene from United Kingdom

User comments from imdb Author: hasosch from United States

Mondo Digital

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Fassbinder: Life on the Edge Dennis Toth from the CMA, also seen here: Film Notes From the CMA

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

In A Year With 13 Moons (Fantoma) - Fulvue Drive-In.com Ron Von Burg

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias] also reviewing MARTHA

DVD Times Noel Megahey, reviews the 4-disc Region 2 DVD release, Rainer Werner Fassbinder Volume 2

Dave Kehr Chicago Reader (capsule review)

In a Year with 13 Moons - Movie info: cast, reviews, trailer on mubi.com Mubi

In a Year of 13 Moons | BFI | British Film Institute

TV Guide review

Scanlines - The Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review also seen here: Vincent Canby

DVDBeaver.com [Stan Czarnecki]

In a Year of 13 Moons - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE THIRD GENERATION (Die dritte Generation) B+ 90

aka: A comedy in 6 parts about parlor games full of suspense, excitement and logic, cruelty and madness, like the fairytales told to children to help them bear their lives unto sleep

Berlin (110 mi) December 1978 – January 1979

A comic romp featuring some of the regulars who are terrific being tense and concerned, featuring the first nude appearance of my favorite Fassbinder actress Y Sa Lo, the junkie in this film, and a sex starved Bulle Ogier, in an absurd depiction of urban radical chic terrorists in 1978 Berlin who haven’t a clue what they’re doing, yet they steadfastly and meticulously maintain secret meetings and organize terrorist plots. In this case, they kidnap the owner of a computer company, P. J. Lurz (Eddie Constantine), without knowing he set up his own kidnapping in order to increase sales to West German security forces who will need to use his products to combat rampant terrorism. He hires August (Volker Spengler), who recruits a “third generation” of terrorists, middle class people without real ideology for whom terrorism has become a lifestyle.

Fassbinder wields the camera in this film, which is dedicated in error to: “Someone who is a true lover, and that is probably no one,” which was misread by film editor Juliane Lorenz, as Fassbinder actually wrote: “Someone who is a true liberal...” Fassbinder saw the error, but he never mentioned it to Lorenz.

When asked to define the "third generation" of his film's title, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1978):

“It refers to the three generations of terrorism, a theme that unfortunately is very fashionable. The first generation was that of ’68. Idealists who wanted to change the world and told themselves they could do it with words and demonstrations. The second, the Baader-Meinhof group, went from legality to armed struggle and to total criminality. The third is that of today, which simply acts without thinking, which has neither ideology nor politics, and which, without knowing it, lets itself be controlled by others like a bunch of marionettes.”

Time Out Tony Rayns

Just what we always wanted: the every-day angsts of a terrorist cell as Life with the Lyons. Fassbinder's basic proposition is simple: the West German state is already so repressive that it might well have invented its terrorists as scapegoats for its own growing totalitarianism. Hence this 'comedy in six acts, just like the fairy stories we tell our children, to make their short lives more bearable'. It's a return to the grotesquely overplayed melodrama of Satan's Brew, acted by the entire RWF stock company, plus Bulle Ogier and Eddie Constantine, with a gaggle of haute couture 'subversives' going through the film noir motions of paranoia and anti-capitalist rhetoric. And it's formulated as an affront to all conceivable audiences: if the concept doesn't make you ill, then the interpolations of lavatory graffiti and the constant barrage of background noise from TV and radio will certainly give you headaches. Essential viewing.

Reel.com DVD review [Tim Knight]

Twenty-seven years after outraged supporters of the Seventies-era West German terrorist groups threw acid at the film in a Frankfurt theater, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Third Generation (1979) remains one of the late cinematic provocateur's most incendiary films. This baroque and scathingly witty indictment of the "third generation" of terrorists who effectively held Germany hostage in late 1977 portrays them as clueless members of the bourgeois class paying lip service to revolutionary ideals. Although it's a bit airless at times—most of the action unfolds within the confines of a Berlin flat and other indoor settings—The Third Generation is a densely layered and acutely observed blend of social commentary and perverse humor that's vintage Fassbinder.

Filmed on the fly in six weeks flat, The Third Generation introduces us to the decidedly middle class members of an unnamed West Berlin terrorist "cell" who take German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer's "the world as will and idea" as their credo. That they only have the vaguest understanding of what Schopenhauer meant—or what they ultimately want to achieve—doesn't deter them from plotting to kidnap Lurz (Eddie Constantine), the head of a multinational company. And since Lurz's trusted secretary, Susanne (Fassbinder's great muse, Hanna Schygulla), is a member of the cell, along with her ineffectual husband, Edgar (Udo Kier), it appears the terrorists can get to Lurz, who's under police protection, due to the wave of kidnappings. But for all their planning and incessant blathering about their revolutionary ideals, the cell members are "armchair radicals," prone to naval gazing and easily distracted, whose stupid mistakes eventually catch up with them. As the police, led by Edgar's father (and Susanne's cruel lover), Inspector Gast (Hark Bohm), start to close in on them, the cell members begin to suspect there may be a turncoat in their midst.

Superbly acted by an ensemble cast that also includes such Fassbinder regulars such as Margit Carstensen (The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant), Gunther Kaufmann (In a Year of 13 Moons), and Volker Spengler (Veronika Voss), The Third Generation spares neither the terrorists nor the multinational conglomerates they hold responsible for society's ills. As Lurz laughingly confides to Inspector Gast, "Capitalism invented terrorism to force the state to protect it better." In fact, Fassbinder cheekily goes so far as to suggest an unholy collusion of sorts between big business and terrorism. It's no wonder he was unable to obtain government funding for The Third Generation, which also takes prescient aim at the media for perpetuating "terrorist hysteria" via its 24/7 television coverage.

Although it's never received the critical attention of such Fassbinder classics as The Marriage of Maria Braun and his masterpiece, Berlin Alexanderplatz, The Third Generation is a bracing jolt of a film from the director aptly known as the "infant terrible of German cinema."

Aside from the theatrical trailer, the DVD's sole special feature is an interview with Julianne Lorenz, Fassbinder's filmmaking partner at the time, who sheds much light on both the film's rushed production and the late Fassbinder, a self-described "anarchist" who never shied away from controversy.

Retroactive Prescience: Fassbinder's The Third Generation and the Year 1979 Thomas Elsaesser essay, 2013 (pdf)

The Third Generation • Senses of Cinema Darragh O’Donoghue, June 5, 2011

Jim's Reviews - Fassbinder's The Third Generation

Critical analysis of "The Third Generation" by Critical-Film.com reviewer Scott Wood

User comments from imdb Author: fuzon from London, England

User comments from imdb Author: artihcus022 (artihcus022@gmail.com) from India

User comments from imdb Author: hasosch from United States

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review

Channel 4 Film capsule review

DVD Times Noel Megahey, reviews the 4-disc Region 2 DVD release, Rainer Werner Fassbinder Volume 2

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ – made for TV A 99

Berlin and Munich (921 mi – 15 hours and 21 minutes) June 1979 – April 1980

(Part 1: 81 minutes; Parts 2 – 5: 59 minutes; Parts 6 – 9: 58 minutes; Parts 10 – 13: 59 minutes; Epilogue: 111 minutes)

“We know what we know, the price we paid was not low.”

An extremely detailed, sometimes brilliantly conceptualized look at the Berlin underclass in the 1920’s, a seamy, decadent society portrayed in dark, cluttered, claustrophobic settings which make exceptional demands on the concentration of the viewer with some of the most exhaustive, punishing viewing on screen. This is a violent, epic masterwork, probably Fassbinder’s greatest work, featuring some of the most brilliant imagery and acting on record, underscored by a wonderful, original score by Peer Raben. Part XII, “The Serpent in the Soul of the Serpent,” which is actually the murder in the woods of Mieze by Reinhold, may be the most beautiful 60 minutes of film I’ve ever seen, a rapturous, perfectly choreographed dance of death which is simply sublime.

The film is an adaptation (a previous adaptation was in 1931 by Piel Jutzi) of Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel, which was read by Fassbinder at age 14, again 5 years later. “On second reading, from page to page, it became clearer to me that a huge part of myself, my behavior, my reactions, in other words, much that I had considered to be my own, was in fact nothing other than that which Döblin had described in Berlin Alexanderplatz,” causing Fassbinder to hear an inner voice which for the rest of his life he would try to decipher, encouraging him “to work on something which finally and relatively completely was to become what one calls identity...Gay people are especially receptive to cultural images presented by books and films because, in the years when they are settling their sense of their own identity, they are uniquely on their own...As a result, there is a uniquely cultural transaction in which the concept of homosexuality becomes a literary construct.”

In Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht), Fassbinder found an image of himself, an alter-ego, and rarely has he revealed so much tenderness as he did in Franz Biberkopf’s epic journey from spending four years in prison at Tegel for murdering his mistress who he pimped to 1927 Berlin, determined to live a decent life, “but something unaccountable crashes against him..with fraud and foul play. Three times Biberkopf is able to stand up again, but finally this thing torpedoes him with ferocious savagery,” – from Döblin’s introduction, and he decides to end his life. But before he can, an unusual thing happens, and he is led to understand that his awful life had meaning and he is given, so to speak, a radical cure. Biberkopf reappears in Berlin on Alexanderplatz, bruised but a new man, an everyday, ordinary Fascist. On his journey, he has a little help on the way from a devil incarnate, in the character of Reinhold (Gottfried John), with his paranoid masculinity and his sadistic stutters, who inflicts the punishment in a constant vacillation between violence inflicted and violence received, using brute force, especially when directed against women, phallic power placed outside all possible viewer comprehension, seen as the everpresent original trauma from which Franz fails to recover. Also starring Hanna Schygulla, Barbara Sukowa, Franz Buchrieser, Claus Holm, Roger Fritz, Brigitte Mira, Irm Hermann, Margit Carstensen, Elisabeth Trissenaar, and Barbara Valentin.

In the epilogue, “My Dream of Biberkopf’s Dream,” Fassbinder deletes the narrative and working from his own imagination, provides only violent, grotesque, phantasmagoric images like Franz nailed to the cross, but then taken down again, in the end leaving the viewer an eternity without transcendence, sounds and images all on top of one another, simultaneously. Precisely because Franz is ordinary, the ordinary German, a figure through which Fassbinder can love not only Germany but himself, he becomes someone through whom the viewer may also begin to understand what it means to have been a German, and maybe what it means, once more, to become German.

“BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ lingers in the mind, indeed haunts the viewer as a markedly corporeal experience...It is nothing less than an encyclopedia of bodies responding to modernity: street violence and domestic beatings, individuals in crowded spaces shrieking, moaning, rejoicing, an arm run over and a hand burned, people in transit, meeting and coupling in public places, having serious conversations while urinating or engaging in sexual intercourse in a toilet stall. One escapes the city into small cubby holes, smoke-filled bars or rented rooms cluttered by a printing press and reddened by incessantly blinking neon lights, fateful walks in the woods, the inescapable procession through the slaughter house.” —Eric Rentschler, New German Critique (Winter 1985)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1980):

“For Franz Biberkopf, it is not that he dies, but that what is anarchic in him dies. Of course, he isn’t a complete anarchist, since anarchy, insofar as I understand it, always has something to do with awareness. The anarchic in him is instead something childlike, unconscious, and it dies. And after that he is born again, and in a sense it’s a rebirth, as a normal, middle-of-the-road guy who has little in common with the earlier Franz Biberkopf, who has in fact experienced extreme contradictions, for example just before he brawls with the communists, where he takes his first steps toward law and order, though he is a man who completely rejects law and order. But in place of that fellow there is now the epitome of the narrow-minder German bourgeois. And by that I also mean that in my opinion he ends up a Nazi.”

Time Out Tony Rayns

This shattering adaptation of Alfred Döblin's masterpiece - made for TV in 13 episodes with a two-hour epilogue - offers a level-headed account of protagonist Biberkopf's key weakness: his quasi-sexual infatuation with the psychotic pimp Reinhold. Aided by great design, cinematography, and, not least, performances, Fassbinder tells the story surprisingly naturalistically. Then in the epilogue, he offers a disturbing meditation on his own fantasies about Biberkopf. This phantasmagoria is Fassbinder's most daring act of self-exposure: a movie time-bomb that forces you to rethink the series as a whole. The work of a genuine master with nothing left to lose or hide.

Chicago Reader [Dave Kehr] (capsule review)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 151/2-hour adaptation of Alfred Doblin's novel is perhaps the capstone of his career (1981), a work of unprecedented narrative density that revolves around a single character. Franz Biberkopf (Gunter Lamprecht) is a pudgy, affable ex-con, determined to achieve some kind of decency in a world--the Berlin of the Weimar Republic--that will not tolerate it. Fassbinder discards the mannerism of his late films in favor of a noble simplicity, concentrating on a single point of view as it operates across a wide range of experiences and environments. All of the usual distancing effects drop out, leaving the wrenching spectacle of one man grappling with his life in perfect candor.

more Susan Sontag on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ

Fassbinder has succeeded where [others were] thwarted – he has filmed virtually all of a novel. More: he has made a great film of, and one faithful to, a great novel. (…)

Fassbinder’s cinema is full of Biberkopf’s – victims of false consciousness. And the material of BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ is prefigured throughout his films, whose recurrent subject is damaged lives and marginal existences – petty criminals, prostitutes, transvestites, immigrant workers, depressed housewives, and overweight workers at the end of their tether. More specifically, the harrowing slaughterhouse scenes in BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ are anticipated by the slaughterhouse sequences in JAIL BAIT and IN A YEAR WITH 13 MOONS. But BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ is more than a resumé of his main themes. It was the fulfillment – and the origin. (…)

Though made possible by television – it is a coproduccion of German and Italian TV – BERLIN ALEXANPLATZ is not a TV series. A TV series is constructed in “episodes,” which are <<designed>> to be seen at an interval – one week being the convention, like the old movie serials (FANTÔMAS, THE PERILS OF PAULINE, FLASH GORDON) which were shown every Saturday afternoon. The parts of BERLIN ALEXANPLATZ are not really episodes, strictly speaking, since the film is diminished when seen in this way, spaced out over fourteen weeks (as I saw it for the first time, this winter, on Italian TV). The New York presentation in a movie theater – five segments of approximately three hours each, over five consecutive weeks – is certainly a better way to see it. Seeing it in, say, three or four consecutive days would be far better. The more one can watch ovcr the shortest time works best. . .exactly as one reads a long novel with maximum pleasure and intensity. In BERLIN ALEXANPLATZ, cinema, that hybrid art, has at last achieved some of the dilatory, open form and accumulative power of the novel by being as long as it is – and by being theatrical.

Berlin Alexanderplatz (VHS format) Amazon.com Reviewer Bruce Rhodes "brucefromcanada" (Toronto, Canada)

In the 1970s I traveled through East Berlin, the location of Alexanderplatz. I came across many vestiges of the city's troubled past: stark, menacing buildings from the Nazi era, as well as ruins of older structures, such as the Oranienburg Synagogue, built before the Second World War. By the 1970s, however, the original Alexanderplatz, destroyed in WWII, was converted into a huge, bleak concrete plaza by the DDR government eager to close the door on the past. Fassbinder's "Berlin Alexanderplatz" resurrects the enigmatic Alexanderplatz by painting a brilliant yet distressing picture of life in Berlin during the turbulent period between the two world wars.

Fassbinder was at his best when he created this epic about the lives of misfits and malcontents in 1930s Berlin. I first viewed this series over a weekend at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa; it was a marathon at two four-hour sessions on each of two days. Since then, I have viewed the VHS version several times, thankfully at a more leisurely pace. Each time I view it, I see new and different things, and appreciate the richness of the work. The acting by all players is superb, and the music and audio effects, such as the use of chimes, are hauntingly effective, creating a grim mood which envelopes the characters nearly to the point of suffocation.

Franz Biberkopf is the central character. He is released from prison at the start of the film, only to flit from menial job to job, as the Nazis turn the status quo on its head, and relentlessly and ruthlessly wrest control of Berlin and Germany. Franz, who gives every indication of being mentally ill, is both victim and perpetrator: a victim of a soulless society intent on committing both genocide and self-destruction, and the perpetrator of acts of cruelty and violence against women.

Most of the scenes are filmed indoors, in dim, dreary places (a Fassbinder trademark that lends a pervasive sense of claustrophobia). The few outdoor scenes are mostly in gray, bleak wooded areas whose atmosphere is not unlike that of a cemetery. All kidding aside, anyone who is depressed really ought not to watch this film.

Fassbinder exposes all the nuances of his characters; we get very close to these people, often uncomfortably close. Fassbinder's characters are hyper-intense, usually quite raw, and seldom happy. Notwithstanding these hard to digest aspects of the film, it holds a remarkable allure. In a way, Berlin Alexanderplatz is a horror film, in which the horror lies in the depravity of the characters, and in the dark, brooding society in which they find themselves.

Of the hundreds of films that I have seen, Berlin Alexanderplatz could well be my favourite. It takes both a lot of time (obviously) and much emotional energy to take in this work. I also recommend Fassbinder's other films, such as Kamikazee 1989 and Querelle.

Slant Magazine [Keith Uhlich]

For its first 13 episodes, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's adaptation of Alfred Döblin's 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz is most decidedly a masterpiece—this despite numerous nerve-trying flaws and longueurs that could only tickle the fancy of extended-running-time masochists like Susan Sontag. From my limited experience, Fassbinder seems a fitfully brilliant filmmaker, his moments of insight so potent, so profound, that they effectively veil his much more frequent idiocies and obviousness. It is beyond any critic's ability to proclaim true genius (I doubt we'd know this elusive beast of burden if it was staring us head on), but one thing we're good at is forgiveness, especially of those artists with whom we fall head over heels in love. We are no one but ourselves, so I don't consider such effusive joie de cinema inherently problematic—it is its own form of criticism, striking all manner of self-indulgent notes, subject as much to brilliance as to mediocrity, a labyrinthine jumble of interior feeling made flesh. Yet such feeling can be rendered with disinterest, hence dishonesty, and it is exactly in this respect that Fassbinder's magnum opus is undone.

Until its self-described two-hour epilogue, Berlin Alexanderplatz is an engrossing psychological portrait of Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht), a Weimar-era worker bee whose slow corrosion of self both parallels and paves the way for the impending rise of Nazism. He's a vividly realized allegorical golem, at moments passive and acquiescent, at others viciously in control. Emerging from a four-year prison stint at film's start, he plugs his ears and contorts his mouth in silent scream (the on-screen title: "The Torment Begins"), though he is no mere victim of the pogrom's progress slowly infecting the German id. In retrospect, I'd say that Biberkopf is more of an accumulative symbol—he wears his ideologies (Nazi newspaper seller, drunk, underground criminal, pimp) like the latest fashions, discarding them when they violently fester or cease to be useful. The residue of his experiences (multifaceted, oft-contradictory) nonetheless remains, so the impression in the moment is one of revelation: with each narrative step forward Biberkopf seemingly gains in clarity (the length of the work is a benefit, allowing for a novelistic density and, at times, a mesmeric depth of character), though Fassbinder is, in fact, merely setting up his metaphor-slathered patsy for an empty-headed last-act kill.

To his credit, Fassbinder's highly problematic directorial intentions don't emerge from the literal nowhere. The Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac is crucially invoked, played in voiceover counterpoint to a scene of a younger Biberkopf strangling his lover Ida (Barbara Valentin). This is the only glimpse we get of Biberkopf's past (the only extra-narrative detail), and Fassbinder returns to it again and again over the course of Berlin Alexanderplatz, the same matter-of-fact shot-sequence replayed (each time with a different aural accompaniment) so that it burns irremovably into the psyche. This is the wellspring, the moment in time that births the character of Biberkopf and sends him flailing forth on a sacrificial ascension up the Teutonic mount. Yet it is finally lazy psychology, in toto suggesting that all of Biberkopf's travails (and, implicitly, Germany's) can be traced back to a singular point.

I don't think Fassbinder entirely believes in this bill of goods he's selling us, but he seems incapable of resolving the complex undercurrents of Berlin Alexanderplatz, preferring to indulge his (not incorrect) instincts toward self-destruction. In conception, the film's two-hour epilogue is ingenious, a descent into absolute hysteria and madness wherein Biberkopf wanders through a politically and spiritually charged psychosexual dreamscape, complete with anachronistic musical cues from the likes of Janis Joplin, Lou Reed, and Kraftwerk. Yet the experience of watching this intentionally incongruous coda is excruciating, and to no defensible effect beyond a shrug of the shoulders and an acknowledgement that literalizing the metaphysical is not Fassbinder's forte. This is the sequence that helped me to understand Phillip Lopate's otherwise erroneous dismissal of the film ("flat and indifferently realized, a TV mini-series directed by the yard," he writes) in the closing paragraphs of his essay "A Date With Fassbinder and Despair." I would personally urge Lopate to go back and re-view certain parts of Berlin Alexanderplatz, some of which rank with the finest work in cinema, though in light of where it all finally goes (a haphazard succession of sub-Anger sexual imagery, half-hearted slaughterhouse/Christ motifs, and the kind of head-slappingly pretentious apocalyptic imagery brilliantly skewered by The Critic) I'd understand his hesitation to do so.

For me, the best scenes of Berlin Alexanderplatz revolve around more interpersonal matters, specifically in Biberkopf's relationship with the treacherous Reinhold (Gottfried John), the man who indoctrinates him into the criminal underworld and who eventually kills Biberkopf's prostitute lover Mieze (Barbara Sukowa). When the duo first meets in the fifth episode, they agree to share several revolving-door lovers (when Reinhold tires of his latest conquest, he passes her onto Biberkopf). It's a brilliantly sustained roundelay on Fassbinder's part, aided and abetted by an incessant Windham-Hill-from-Hell underscore and by the metronomic rhythms of an endlessly flashing neon sign. In ultimate effect, it is second only to the film's best scene (captured in a distanced, yet empathetic single take) in which Reinhold murders Mieze. Fassbinder recognizes this as the high point of Berlin Alexanderplatz—Reinhold and Mieze move as if on a woodland proscenium, helplessly trying to avoid a violent, practically preordained confrontation. When it comes it is awkward, messy, yet possessed of a cosmic significance, an act at once unintentional and inevitable. Even the mist in the fog-shrouded forest descends as if on heavenly cue. It is telling that Biberkopf is nowhere to be found (he spends the majority of this episode off-screen) and even more revealing that Fassbinder appends the tail-end of this sequence to the final moments of his ill-advised epilogue, as if trying—desperately, regretfully, impossibly—to recapture and reclaim a long-lost moment of clarity.

Features | German Dreams: Some Thoughts on Fassbinder's Berlin ... Andrew Tracy from Cinema Scope

The monumental film so easily inspires prostration rather than investigation, though surely that is at least partly the intention of its maker. Issuing from within a matrix of production geared towards certain regulations of duration, content, and legitimate claims on audience attention, the monumental film explodes that packaging to present itself in its own mode of consumption and reception: that of its monumentality itself, its very exploding of boundaries establishing the contours from within which we are to view the work. It demands new spaces for itself, asserts itself into the world, makes its weight felt even in its absence—for the fact that the work is so frequently exiled from conventional frameworks of viewing itself attests to the fact of its monumental existence.

Such is the “heroic violation” as celebrated by Susan Sontag, those works which subvert “the norms and practices which now govern moviemaking everywhere in the capitalist and would-be capitalist world—which is to say, everywhere.” Surely the attendant irony that the medium that has done more than any other to institutionalize those norms and practices gave issue to two of the greatest violations of the last quarter-century was not lost on her. “To see a great film only on television isn’t to have really seen that film,” says Sontag, and yet Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Our Hitler: A Film from Germany (1977), began their lives from within that most compromised and bastardized space of consumption, and now, courtesy of Criterion and Facets respectively, have become incarnated in the even more consumable medium of DVD—though their drastic length naturally precludes their being contained on a single disc.

The sacred space worthy of the monumental continually shrinks beneath our feet, yet this is only appropriate. The televisual origins of Fassbinder and Syberberg’s epic projects were an economic necessity rather than aesthetic determinant—both were conceived as works of cinema rather than mere TV miniseries. But surely the logic must work in reverse as well. If the aesthetic necessity of the work is not hampered by the economic determinants of the space of consumption, then surely that space is, aesthetically, a neutral one, one whose domination and fragmentation by capitalism is a contingent outcome rather than an inevitable one. Even Serge Daney’s enlightened speculations on cinema and television were predicated on an inevitable dissolution in the journey from large to small screen. “There must be enough faith in images (and in the audiences to come) to believe that where once there has been beauty, there cannot be nothing at all overnight,” said Daney; turning his formulation on its head, the Alexanderplatz DVD release has occasioned a controversy over whether the restoration’s brightening up of the reputedly impenetrable darkness of Fassbinder’s 16mm television original interferes with his intentions.

This is by no means intended as another hymn in praise of TV, the New Cinema. Rather, as Fassbinder and Syberberg gave early testimony to, the closer the two mediums move together, the more distinct they become as modes of practice and forms of art. Television—good, bad, great(?)—is sequential in both the narrative and franchising sense. Its aim is continuation and reproduction, until it is no longer economically (or, more rarely, aesthetically) feasible; its demands on our attention are an entreaty to survive. It is a (co-)dependent relationship, and thus one pursued with the weapons of dependence: persuasion, cajolery, seduction. The monumental work, by contrast, determines its own limits, assumes authority over its own boundaries; it is self-terminating, a dead fact rather than a grasping, going concern, and it speaks to us with the authority of the dead. In its progressive reincarnations from smaller screens to large and back again, by its inability to be consumed within any one medium, the work itself is the sacred space within which it enacts itself. It is both theatre and drama, a movable Bayreuth. Fassbinder and Syberberg declare their intention to make the psychic territory of their films ours for the still delimited, but still conventionally unimaginable, time of their extreme duration, to allow their monumental works free play away from our expectations of progression, culmination and resolution, to make their dreams enveloping, overwhelming, indisputable. Like the ocean liner in Amarcord (1974), our admiration is at least partly based upon the sheer awe of witnessing the behemoth move by before returning to its self-imposed darkness.

The debuts of Alexanderplatz and Our Hitler in the at once consecratory and demystifying form of DVD thus present some interesting questions to their aesthetic being. Rendered accessible to as many repeat viewings as the now-sovereign spectator desires, the two epics retain their imperial claim to our psychic territory precisely because they are both self-consciously premised on repetition—not only in their aesthetic design, but also in their awareness of their place within the cycle of consumption. The monumental’s desire for exalted singularity is self-contradictory within the medium of film, which is based from the very beginning on the repetition of a performance already past, already dead; “Dialogues of the dead, conversations in the land of the dead,” as Syberberg’s narrator intones. It is only through repetition that the film can convey its messages, only through passive spectatorship that it can be received, only through the inevitably capitalistic mediation from maker to audience that the film exists in the first place. The immersive world which Fassbinder and Syberberg aim to make of their cinema is not a metaphysical ideal, but a tangible reality corrupted from the beginning, a hope already bound up with its own negation. “What else is this world but, first of all, us who make, present, and watch this film?” asks the narrator—a remark as portentous as it is romantic.

This formulation of collective creation, of participation in the building of the monumental work, was implicit in Alfred Döblin’s monumental novel, the source for Fassbinder’s labour of love. Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz comprises not merely the rise and fall of Franz Biberkopf, but numerous overlapping, other-authored texts: interpolated newspaper reports, snatches of contemporary song, equations calmly illustrating the physical laws operative in Franz’s fatal beating of his girlfriend Ida. The totality of the world evoked is one of accumulated fragments, the effect kaleidoscopic. It is the city itself in all its ceaseless and senseless activity, the endless talk that fills it, the colliding social forces and masses of people teeming within it, that is the living protagonist of his work, and the human focal points chosen “randomly” from this multitude live at the whim of its relentless velocity. Phil Jutzi’s Döblin-scripted 1931 film version of Alexanderplatz (a thoughtful addition to the Criterion edition) adapts this effect in a conventionally “cinematic” way: as Heinrich George’s Franz is released from Tegel prison at the beginning, he hops a streetcar and is bombarded by the sights and sounds around him, a city symphony writ as torture.

To say that Fassbinder does more than adapt Döblin, that he forgoes such relatively easy cinematic shorthand, is not only to say that he performs the necessary task of imaginatively transmuting the work for another medium. Rather, he continues the process of repetition and multiplication inherent in his source. Stanley Kauffmann has speculated that Emil Jannings was a possible inspiration for Döblin’s Biberkopf, that “a film figure may have helped to crystallize what Döblin was trying to ‘assemble’ from observed life—especially since that figure was a popular vicar for most of that life.” One nexus of contemporary fantasies thus served as the model for another, which provided Fassbinder with a locus for further multiplications in his own time: many of his lead characters were named Franz, and he himself played “Franz Biberkopf” in Fox and His Friends (1975). Günter Lamprecht’s unforgettable Franz is not simply a particularly apt representation of Döblin’s hero, but both an addition to and sum of these previous fantasies, as fluid and unfixed as Syberberg’s parade of Hitlers.

Fassbinder moves in both the opposite direction and tempo from Döblin. Döblin’s protean city becomes Fassbinder’s amorphous protagonist; the exploration of an inexhaustible exterior becomes that of an inexhaustible interior; the method shifts from speed and traversal to distension and prolongation. Reinhold, the anti-Franz, slithers into the book almost unnoticed, simply a passing strange creature in a corner of Franz’s local watering hole who only gradually assumes his stature as this universe’s angel of death. In the film, Franz and Reinhold’s (Gottfried John) barroom encounter takes place in an atmosphere of portentous infatuation, a fateful coupling enacted with all due solemnity. Where Franz’s successive adopting of Reinhold’s cast-off mistresses is handled curtly in the novel, the speed heightening the sardonic humour of the situation, in Fassbinder the anecdote is spread out over two of the 12 episodes, with the stages of seduction, cohabitation, and dumping acted out at length. Not only narrative sequences, but mere incidents in the narrative chain receive the same distended treatment: the savage street beating of Franz’s fellow burglar Bruno (Volker Spengler) by a rival thug seems to go on for an eternity, as does the scene of Franz’s childlike play with his beloved Mieze (Barbara Sukowa), the two of them rolling around on the floor and spitting alcohol into each other’s mouths.

These are not merely the necessities of dramatization, nor of the kind of pedestrian sensibility that would view Döblin’s novel simply as a story to be told (as Döblin evidently saw it in his own film adaptation). The astute characterizations and sharply defined features of Fassbinder’s wonderfully cast actors—fittingly etched in blocky, thick-lined caricatures in the Criterion artwork—belie the amorphous, inexplicable, chaotic forces which course through them. Representation continually gives way to incarnation: Fassbinder does not seek to explore character in the psychological sense, but states of being; he is after essences, something eternal coursing through the present. The recurrence of certain blocks of text, in voiceover and inserted title cards, creates an air of incantation, of ritual. Where Döblin employed repeated phrases as indicators of the chugging, cyclical progression of the city and the biologies tethered to it, Fassbinder moves toward the mythic, to some inscrutable breed of eternal return. Reinhold’s murder of Mieze, in long shot and long take, not only heightens the crushing emotion of the scene but its feeling of chronicling a death foretold: Franz’s murder of the unfaithful Ida enacted this time upon the devoted Mieze by his opposite and doppelganger. Everything is connected, everything is arbitrary; patterns coalesce and diverge, original sins are entered into the catalogue alongside common ones. Repetition does not divulge meaning, it is meaning itself—a grand, ironic joke, if the human toll it took were not so great.

Morality, its gradations and its absolutes, is the fulcrum of both Alexanderplatz and Our Hitler, not as canned drama but as questions of universal significance, questions given form by the ultimately unknowable Everymen at their respective centres: the anonymous Franz and the infamous Adolf, the former immortalized by Alfred Döblin, Fassbinder, and Günter Lamprecht, the latter mortalized into banality, mocked, scoffed at, ridiculed, his constant abasement only sanctifying him further—the Devil as Hero of the 20th century, just as Döblin’s pimp, murderer, and thief becomes the embodiment of the Good Man. Neither of these are simple instances of moral transposition, nor are the moral dramas they enact fixed within a stable order of meaning. Despite its stylistic homogeneity, its Sternbergian “beauty,” Fassbinder’s deceptive narrative ultimately has no more internal solidity than Syberberg’s fantasia. The sudden and vulgar dissolution of Fassbinder and cinematographer Xaver Schwarzenberger’s carefully cultivated visual style in Alexanderplatz’s wild dream epilogue, venturing boldly and garishly into grotesquely banal symbolism and cheap flamboyance—piles of bodies in a human slaughterhouse, crosses and crowns of thorns, atom bombs and Dean Martin singing “Silent Night”—cannot be regarded simply as an unfortunate blot upon the film’s otherwise refined surface. Its radical atonality is a signal that the author cannot encompass the jumbled meanings he has assembled within the bounds of the work, that the work (and the world) itself cannot contain them.

Neither Fassbinder nor Syberberg believe in the truth of the image. Where truth is to be found is rather in the ubiquity of images, their ability to crystallize realities even as they banalize them. Franz as crucified Christ, as battered prizefighter, as pig to the slaughter; Hitler as Chaplin, as Napoleon, as Nero, as M’s Hans Beckert—all are pertinent, none can fully explain the cosmic drama being played out; none is the sole, generative source of meaning. The “original” is gone, has always been gone. Only its assorted copies remain, and only their juxtaposition can yield some slim chance of meaning.

In Syberberg’s underpopulated hall of echoes, Richard Wagner, John Ford, Caligari, Nosferatu, Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, Gone With the Wind (1939), Nietzsche, Syberberg’s own Ludwig—Requiem for a Virgin King (1972) and Karl May (1974) all circulate around the central absence, the criminal who escaped by making himself ubiquitous, disseminating himself into serious scholarship, opportunistic biopics, posters, parodies, pornography—that is, business as usual. He’s Not There even in his omnipresence, reflected in everything he touches even as everything is reflected in him.

Syberberg, however, is not simply playing a hat-changing semiotic game. While Todd Haynes’ schematic ode to his chosen 20th Century Man is content to swim around in recycled myths, to eagerly participate in and contribute to the obfuscating culture it pretends to analyze, Syberberg’s metatext is not a self-flattering mirror but an injunction to self-judgment. “We’ll make it a commercial film, for after all, film has always been a commercial business,” Heinz Schubert’s sardonic circus barker remarks. Syberberg’s critique is an immanent one, knowingly mired in the Dantean muck of commercialism that has made Nazism a sellable brand name even as it scorns it. His boundless rage is directed as much against the contemporary consumer society of the West as against the historical atrocity of Hitlerism.

While Syberberg’s rhetoric indulges in the same rather simplistic linking of fascism to consumerism then common on both sides of the Iron Curtain—as witness Mikhail Romm’s Ordinary Fascism (1966), another moral treatise in documentary guise—this relates to his major theme: that Hitler simply activated currents already circulating through the realms of society, thought, and belief that with the assent of the world he made himself a compendium of the endless clichés of hate. For Syberberg, the pornographic consumer society of the “good old democracy” that emerged in the wake of Nazism, that now peddles the wares of that which it “defeated,” is consigned to the same Hell as Hitler—the Hell of ceaseless repetition envisioned by Walter Benjamin, where “precisely what is newest doesn’t change, where the ‘newest’ in all its pieces keeps remaining the same.”

Sontag, in her marvelous essay on Our Hitler, one of those rare pieces of criticism that has established itself as the authoritative (even if eternally disputed) starting point for its subject’s interpretation—think Sartre on Genet, Kael on Last Tango in Paris (1973), Lester Bangs on the Stooges’ Fun House—quite sensibly points out that the Führer cannot be held accountable for the plastic consumer society that followed him, for it was well on its way to realization even as he railed against it. Syberberg, however, does not posit a direct causal relationship, but an even more damnable one of choice. In the wake of fascism’s dreadful legacy, to continue disseminating its myths in the name of profit is a moral renunciation, the same willing surrender to power—this time to that of the dollar—which allowed Hitler to rise to power in the first place. For Syberberg, the commodity society is the inverted mirror of fascism: where the latter sought to compress diversity into uniformity, the former markets uniformity in the guise of diversity.

This is not simply a polemical point, but an aesthetic quandary. How can an artwork be pure, how can art itself be possible when everything can be tagged for its niche market, when even the critical methods of modernism, as Sontag notes, can be assimilated into consumer society’s “huge variety of satisfactions—the unlimited proliferation, and devaluation, of satisfaction itself?” How to make a Great Work when the Great Work itself has become a saleable and readily available commodity; when, 30 years later, every new, shallow provocation is branded a masterpiece by someone, somewhere? With the temperament of a Romantic and the sardonic irony of a Brechtian, Syberberg tries to break through the conundrum by having it both ways. Like Godard’s own television-spawned monument Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1988-98), Our Hitler is a messianic work unmoored from any faith in the sacred, a purifying work littered with cultural detritus, a noble work steeped in vulgarity. It valourizes and romanticizes the unifying and totalizing power of cinema, that “new child of the century,” even as it derides that very power as the enabler of banalization, repetition, and commercialization. It is a work forever conscious of the hopeless contradiction, the impossibility of its chosen task, even as that very impossibility heightens the urgency of what it is compelled to say, over and over again.

It’s appropriately ironic, then, that the digitalization of Our Hitler and Berlin Alexanderplatz does not dispel their monumental aura, but only increases it. Their accumulated cultural capital has received official validation by their transmutation into graspable, ownable object, their newly commodified incarnations gilded with the sanctifying language of holiness and canonicity. Heroically violating the norms of production, they have been welcomed back into the fold that has accommodated them, in one form or another, all along. The monumental work has only ever been able to affirm its stature by contrast to that which surrounds it, without operating within the same system of compromising relations. Film has always been a commercial business, after all, but contrary to whatever claims the latest critically touted ephemera are having made for them, masterpieces have always been in short supply.

Berlin Alexanderplatz from Jim’s Reviews

Berlin Alexanderplatz: He Who Lives in a Human Skin Criterion essay by Tom Tykwer, also seen at the Fassbinder Foundation, February 8, 2007, here: HE WHO INHABITS A HUMAN SKIN

Designing Berlin Alexanderplatz Criterion essay by Eric Skillman, which originated at his personal website: Silkscreening 1 (October 11, 2007), and also here: Cozy Lummox: Berlin Alexanderplatz, Part II (January 10, 2008)

Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) - The Criterion Collection

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Sean Axmaker on the Criterion release

The Genius of Berlin - The New York Review of Books Ian Buruma essay on the Criterion release and art exhibition, January 17, 2008

Only The Cinema - Parts I-II [Ed Howard]

Only The Cinema - Parts III-IV [Ed Howard]

Only The Cinema - Parts V-VIII [Ed Howard]

Only The Cinema - Parts IX-XI [Ed Howard]

Only The Cinema - Parts XII-XIII [Ed Howard]

Only The Cinema - Epilogue [Ed Howard]

DVD Times Noel Megahey on Region 2 Second Sight release

kamera.co.uk - film review - Berlin Alexanderplatz - Edmund Hardy Edmund Hardy on the Region 2 DVD release

Cineaste Jarod Rapfogel on the Criterion release, 2008, also seen here: Berlin Alexanderplatz. - Free Online Library

The Criterion Collection #411: Berlin Alexanderpla... Robert Humanick from The House Next Door, September 7, 2007, also seen here: The Criterion Collection Database [Robert Humanick]

Imagine a Man in a Box: Berlin Alexanderplatz on DVD C. Jerry Kutner on a Region 2 DVD release from Bright Lights Film Journal, November 2007

Bright Lights Film Journal review Gordon Thomas looks at both the original 1931 release and the recent Criterion version, May 2008

Berlin Alexanderplatz < Pop Past | PopMatters Michael Barret looks at the novel, the first film, and Fassbinder, December 3, 2007

Berlin Alexanderplatz - Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Culturazzi ... Srikanth Srinivasan essay from Culturazzi Cognoscente Club, November 19, 2008

RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER Wilhelm Roth essay from Subterranean Cinema (undated)

Film Walrus Reviews: Review of Berlin Alexanderplatz July 9, 2008

“Berlin Alexanderplatz” (1980) By Rainer Werner Fassbinder Victor Enyutin from Acting Out Politics

DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) dvd review [4/5] [Criterion Collection] also seen here: Criterion Confessions

DVD Verdict (Bill Gibron) dvd review [Criterion Collection]

DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd review Criterion Collection

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Wilson) dvd review Criterion Collection

User comments from imdb Author: randallhurlbut from United States

User comments from imdb Author: Dr Jacques COULARDEAU from Olliergues, France

User comments from imdb Author: Galina from Virginia, USA

User comments from imdb Author: hasosch from United States

User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: bernardrmartin from United Kingdom

Mount-Everest-of-modern-cinema SF MOMA month-long blog by a Berlin Alexanderplatz film discussion group that watched the film from June 1, 2008 through July 3rd

I Survived BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ Peter Debruge from Collider

The Auteurs Andrew Tracy from The Auteur’s Notebook, December 13, 2008

American Cinematographer: DVD Playback: Jon D. Witmer from American Cinematographer, July 2008

Cinematheque Ontario - Film Details - BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ

Strictly Film School Acquarello

FilmFanatic.org

The Onion A.V. Club dvd review Noel Murray

Eye for Film (Keith Hennessey Brown) review [4.5/5]

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review

Swimming to Casablanca - sprint reviews

TV Guide review

The Phoenix > Reviews > Hell boy Michael Atkinson from The Boston Phoenix, March 18, 2008

Berlin Alexanderplatz Spencer Parsons from The Austin Chronicle

FILM; Wandering In Weimar Purgatory A.O. Scott from The New York Times, April 8, 2007, also: More Photos » also posted at the Fassbinder Foundation here: Wandering in Weimar Purgatory

TV VIEW; FASSBINDER'S MASTERWORK John J. O.Connor on upcoming cable TV broadcasts of Berlin Alexanderplatz, from The New York Times, September 8, 1985

DVDBeaver [Gary Tooze]

Berlin Alexanderplatz - Killer of Sheep - Shrek the Third - Oceans ... Dave Kehr on the Criterion DVD release from The New York Times, November 13, 2007

Berlin Alexanderplatz: Remastered Bavaria Film International website

Berlin Alexanderplatz Fassbinder Foundation website

Berlin Alexanderplatz: Remastered Fassbinder Foundation, June 3, 2005

Battle over RWF's legacy. GreenCine reports allegations that the remastered film has been “markedly brightened” for public palatability, May 31, 2007

No morals without style Ingrid Caven challenges the historical misrepresentations by Juliane Lorenz, the founder of the Fassbinder Foundation site as she speaks to Katja Nicodemus from Die Zeit, recently translated into English at Sign and Sight (May 31, 2007)

GreenCine Article (2007) June 10, 2007

Cinematic Blow-up The landmark restoration of R. W. Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, by D. W. Leitner from the Fassbinder Foundation, July 1, 2007

Fassbinder from Film Comment, which posted a statement from 25 of Fassbinder’s colleagues demanding that Juliane Lorenz forfeit control of the Fassbinder Foundation. They cite her image contrast changes on the Berlin Alexanderplatz DVD as "an act of insurmountable presumption and borders on philistinism." (September/October 2007)

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center: Exhibitions: Fassbinder: Berlin ... Fassbinder: Berlin Alexanderplatz, October 21, 2007 – January 21, 2008

Reality at 25/24 Frames per Second - From the Current Peter Becker from the Criterion discussion group

Berlin Alexanderplatz (television) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Berlin Alexanderplatz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia the novel

Berlin Alexanderplatz Book Review Alexandre Meirelles from Shvoong

H-Net Reviews Julia E. Sneeringer reviews Peter Jelavich’s book, Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture.

C. Partsch: Review of Jelavich, *Berlin Alexanderplatz* Cornelius Partsch reviews Peter Jelavich’s book from Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, Fall 2007

The top 100 books of all time as released by the Norwegian Book Clubs, from The Guardian, May 8, 2002

The Critic - Apocalypse WOW The Artist is Dead, by Jay Prescott Sherman on YouTube (59 seconds)

LILI MARLEEN A- 93

Berlin and Munich (120 mi) July – September 1980

Fassbinder uses the power of a Douglas Sirk melodrama, the energy of a Hollywood musical, and the masochistic take on love that was uniquely his own to make a period piece from 1938 Nazi Germany about a frustrated love affair between a third rate cabaret singer (Hanna Schygulla) and the son (Giancarlo Giannini) of a wealthy Jewish family whose business it is helping Jews escape Nazi Germany, whose father, masterfully played by Mel Ferrer, is a Swiss-Jew sitting at the top of the world of finance, culture, politics, religion, and morality. The father conspires to keep the two separated and the poor son hasn’t got a chance against “The Father” and Fassbinder’s own silent mother, Lilo Pempeit.

War breaks out and the song “Lili Marleen,” also known as “The Sentry’s Song,” having to do with wartime separation of lovers, becomes a big hit with the troops as both sides stop fighting when it’s played over the radio. Goebbels, however, hates it and bans it for decadence and morbidity when it is clear that the sentiment behind it – pure longing – breaks down Nazi order, but the Führer loves it and lavishes all luxuries on the singer in style, insulating her from the truths about the Third Reich, until her lover returns and they attempt clandestine love affairs amidst the bomb blasts and the relentless pursuit of the SS. Fassbinder plays a Resistance sympathizer. Ultimately there is a pact between the Fatherland and the Father that is no accident, one that dooms the free spirited and disobedient. The film is filled with extravaganza musical spectacle which was obviously used by the Nazi’s to keep everybody happy. It works wonders here as they are all bathed in glorious technocolor, highlighted by fabulous, spectacular set pieces, like the SS officer wearing the boa around his neck in a beer hall. These sequences make the movie, but this reminds the viewer how much the Third Reich depended on public spectacle as a means to keep the public in tow and the suffering soldiers committed to the war effort.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1980):

“In LILI MARLEEN I have a main character who is driven more by emotion than by thought. With that in mind I have tried to base the direction of the film on emotions. And for that I also need music. With music you can make a lot of people crazy because it’s so suggestive. In general, when something happens in the story, there’s music. It was not without good reason that Hitler suppressed such shows, sentimental ones, like in the Sports Palace. Music is also a way to keep people in line.”

Time Out

Fassbinder's determinedly 'tasteless' brew of sentiment and swastikas annexes the original two-way forces' favourite to a totally apocryphal cloak-and-dagger romance, camped up into a one-song musical comedy. Its basic joke is that Schygulla, required to sing 'Lili Marlene' umpteen times, can't sing; but when a variation on that has her Jewish lover (Giannini) tortured with the song by his German gaolers, one's incredulous guffaws just keep rolling. Elaborate proof that the devil really does have all the best tunes.

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr)

This 1981 big-budget, international coproduction, shot in English, was supposed to be a mass-market hit for Rainer Werner Fassbinder. It didn't work out that way--does it ever?--but dubbed hastily in German, it makes a mildly interesting entry in the Fassbinder canon. Hanna Schygulla is a cabaret singer whose recording of a World War I song, "Lili Marleen," becomes a hit in Nazi Germany. She becomes a propaganda star of the new regime, which first embarrasses and then benefits her Swiss lover (Giancarlo Giannini) and his millionaire father (Mel Ferrer), the head of a Jewish anti-Nazi group. The meanings are banal and the pace is heavy, but Fassbinder's use of color--as throughout his late period--is superb.

Time Magazine Bund Wagon, Richard Corliss from Time magazine, July 13, 1981

When she started, in Switzerland in the mid-1930s, she was Just a Gigolette, one of Seven Beauties singing in a Cabaret. Then Lale Andersen stumbled onto a discarded piece of Great War schmaltz, a soldier's love song called Lili Marleen. As German soldiers swarmed over the globe in 1939, they carried this song with them. Lale became a star—for a time, the darling of the Third Reich —and Lili Marleen the song of her life.

This is the movie version, and it cleaves as tenaciously to the facts as any star biopic from Hollywood's heady days. Fassbinder built his reputation with films (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, The Marriage of Maria Braun) that played high-voltage melodrama as deadpan farce; here he has turned Lale's tale into what Hanna Schygulla, who impersonates her in the film, calls "a Nazi fairy tale." As the new star gorges on her celebrity, making love to her mirror image in a palatial white bedroom, her countrymen starve to win the war and her country's enemies are paraded to death. Told that her song reaches 6 million German soldiers every night, she muses: "Six million? I don't believe it. No, not 6 million."

Fassbinder means to contrast death on the Russian front and in the refugee camps (shot in the harsh, primary colors of the Fauves) with life on cloud nine of the Nazi fantasy (shown in the pastel soft-focus of the later Doris Day films). Indeed, one can find hints of the director's auto biography: a contrast between his pinchpenny past and his recent, glossier work. He appears here in the role of a "secret Resistance fighter"—against the Nazis on-screen and the moneymen of the new German cinema. But he puts up too little resistance to the lures of an international cast (including Giancarlo Giannini as a Swiss Jew, and Mel Ferrer as his father!), a multilingual film (the principals appear to be speaking English, which has been dubbed into German and subtitled back into English) and a $5 million budget. Once, churning out more than 30 films before his 30th birthday, Fassbinder was called the movies' Wunderkind. At 35, he is Kind no longer. And, on the evidence of Lili Marleen's empty excesses, it's no wonder.

Subterranean Cinema Hans Günther Pflaum

The German public's reaction to this film by Fassbinder was astonishment. In the first place, the director worked with Luggi Waldleitner, a producer who was seen as the embodiment of the "old style", long proclaimed dead by young film-makers.  Even more baffling was Fassbinder's cooperation with co-author Manfred Purzer, as the two had fought out a heated political argument a few years before. Finally the material did not seem exactly typical for Fassbinder. The result is nevertheless an unmistakably personal film.

On the one hand Fassbinder was interested in the "great love story between two people, a love which is all the greater because it is unfulfilled, and cannot be fulfilled, because the two are separated. One is a  Swiss Jew and works for Hagana, the other sings in Nazi Germany. This love only works because it is unfulfilled, and that alone is something that interested me. The second thing is to admit to someone, even inside the Nazi regime or any such regime anywhere, that you want to survive in a way that is not just a matter of being a supporter. Wilkie does want to survive, very definitely. The third thing is that anyone who thinks they are an artist also has ambitions even in a regime like that. These are all things with which I am familiar enough from my previous stories, so you cannot say that this is something very new and strange, - in other words, things with which I am sufficiently familiar to say: yes, I'll do that."

This statement also reveals the point of view from which LILI MARLEEN should be seen. Fassbinder wanted least of all to make a historical film, and Fassbinder's production, in very controversial discussions, has been heatedly accused of imprecision in historical details. It is not history, it is myth - the myth of a song which silenced the weapons for moments during the war, the myth of a woman who became a star by chance, and the myth of an innocent career in a guilty country. Fassbinder himself has repeatedly emphasized in public that he himself did not want to and could not identify himself with the political development of Germany, and despite this, he became established in the country as a person and as a producer, and to a certain extent also integrated. The conflict of the singer Wilkie who in her performances serves a system she rejects, may not suffer comparison with people, history and systems, but it is also a very personal conflict of Fassbinder. The historical Lale Andersen and her autobiography were only a starting point for him. It is characteristic that the director did not himself produce the scenes outside of the personal story, especially the war scenes; these are bought from Sam Peckinpah's German film STEINER - DAS EISERNE KREUZ.

Fassbinder consciously uses stylistic devices from Nazi film production,  at the same time keeping his political awareness and using today's knowledge of events. "He always also produces the function of the slush film: ... to be war propaganda"  (Wilhelm Roth). Most of all this is shown by the most impressive sequence of the film,  when in the middle of Wilkie's song, pictures of the terror of the downfall burst in and tip the kitsch into horror.

- The Spy and the Cabaret Singer Bodil Marie Thompsen, an essay comparing Fassbinder’s Lili Marlene to Sternberg’s Blue Angel, from P.O. V, 1996, also seen here: Functions of the Film Title - 1

User comments from imdb Author: hasosch from United States

Lili Marleen 1981: Movie and film review from Answers.com

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review

TV Guide review

Channel 4 Film capsule review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]

FILM: SWEETHEART OF THE THIRD REICH Vincent Canby from The New York Times, July 10, 1981

Norbert Schultze Dies at 91; His 'Lili Marleen' Was a Hit Richard Goldstein from The New York Times, October 22, 2002

LOLA A 96

Munich (113 mi) April – May 1981

The film opens with a photograph of Konrad Adenauer, Chanceller of the Federal Republic of West Germany since 1949,

the film is then set in 1957 in the midst of the Economic Miracle in a small town in Bavaria, an off-beat remake of Murnau’s THE BLUE ANGEL, shot in garish primary colors featuring Barbara Sukowa as Lola, a cabaret singer in the town brothel, a working girl in every sense but determined to achieve respectability. All the town’s politicians and businessmen gather here to sell their wares as well, as everything is for sale until a business reformer comes to town, Armin Mueller-Stahl, who is excellent as the naive, thoroughly honest, only virtuous man in town, who begins having an affair with Lola, not knowing she is already the purchased real estate of the most corrupt politician of all, Schuckert, played wonderfully by Mario Adorf, one of the city’s principal developers, and mother of his child. A truly disheartening and cynical view of corruption and love, founded on the belief that the Economic Miracle led to a collusion between businessmen and public officials, legitimizing the cynical exploitation of love, the price one pays for success, you sell your soul to the devil.

LOLA is a love story about sex and power where all the players display a particular intelligence which lies under the surface in explaining their actions, in explaining Germany’s recovery. OK, the ruling class is corrupt and immoral, but then why was this society so successful in becoming such a leading capitalist power? And democracy, given the provincialism, hypocrisy, self pity, and lack of public spirit or will in confronting the past, makes the issue of corruption really quite complicated, and the logic of LOLA suggests it becomes a matter of political intelligence, the foresight to see the forest through the trees, and know how to find your way out. The film is dedicated to Alexander Kluge.

“If LOLA has a single subject, it isn’t the corrupting power of capitalism or the state of the German soul, but the simple act of going on – of finding compromises necessary to survive, the means to continue. Lola doesn’t conclude with the crashing chords of ironically overstated tragedy Fassbinder was so fond of, but with a soft note of genuine pathos, a tone I have never heard in his work before.” —Dave Kehr, The Chicago Reader

Rainer Werner Fassbinder:

“MARIA BRAUN and LOLA are stories that are only possible in the time when the story takes place. And they are, as I hope, parts of a comprehensive portrait of the Federal Republic of Germany that makes it easier for this peculiar democratic structure to be understood – also the threats and dangers. To that extent these are very political films. That I made LILI MARLEEN is more of an accident. It is my first film about the Third Reich. And I would certainly make more films about the Third Reich, but it is a separate theme, just as the Weimar Republic is a separate theme. I also want to pursue these thematic cycles. Perhaps there will be in the end a comprehensive picture of the German bourgeoisie since 1848. That would be my hope if I get far enough to make that many films. I find that everything has its logic. I also find that the Third Reich was not such an accident, it was not like history got injured on the job, the way it’s often portrayed.”

Time Out

A wonderfully upfront narrative rendered in garish primary colours, this discursive update of The Blue Angel poses Lola (Sukowa) and the blue-eyed trembling-pillar-of-rectitude building commissioner who helplessly falls for her (Mueller- Stahl) as barometers of the moral bankruptcy at the heart of Germany's post-war 'economic miracle'. Lola (owned, like most of the city, by Mario Adorf's bluffly sleazy building profiteer) threads sinuously through the civic corruption of reconstruction, accruing sufficient manipulative credit to buy a slice of the status quo, seductively scuttling several shades of idealism with the oldest of come-on currencies. Business as usual. The prostitution metaphors come undiluted from early Godard, the poster-art visuals from the magnificent melodramas of Sirk and Minnelli; the provocations are all Fassbinder's own.

User comments from imdb Author: Alice Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) from dublin, ireland

Fassbinder's glorious penultimate film is a giddy fusion of all his influences: Jean Genet and Jean-Luc Godard (the use of a brothel as a metaphor for capitalist society, exchange and demand; role-play); Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill (the very 1920s political analysis; the sardonic comedy, where all ends happily for the characters, dismally for humanity and society; the horrified, bitter humour; the charismatic villains and compromised 'heroes' (Von Bohm's, and Germany's, residual Nazism is very telling)); Josef Von Sternberg ('Lola' is an update of 'The Blue Angel', another story about a Lola degrading a respectable citizen - here we cut off at the marriage; there is no need for public humiliation in an amoral society); Douglas Sirk (the use of the reviled form, melodrama, packing it with meaningful compositions, febrile camerawork, and dazzling, yummy colour - all with the intent of mocking the film's (and society's) 'reality', showing how it is constructed.

This is a wonderfully entertaining, accessible, funny film, and if Lola sometimes gets lost in the rather misogynistic mix, than such is the nature of boygenius.

User comments from imdb Author: Galina from Virginia, USA

"Lola" (1981), the second chapter of Fassbinder's BRD Trilogy is an update and a remake (in a way) of "The Blue Angel"(1930) directed by Josef von Sternberg with magnificent Marlene Dietrich as a singer Lola Lola but Fassbinder's film is marvelous by itself. Like "Marriage of Maria Braun" (1979) and "Veronica Voss" (1982) "Lola" tells the story of a strong and beautiful woman and her survival and search for love, success and happiness in postwar Germany. It's superb and dazzling and I kept smiling all time while I was watching it. It's an old story (and what is new in this world? Carmen had been dead and Lola Lola is old) but the style, the approach, the times, the place, his use of colors that seem to sing, to smile, to scream and to touch you gently are unique. Did he sell his soul to the Devil for these colors? The dresses, the songs, Barbara's voice, her legs that grow from the ears, her hair, oh my God, her and Hanna's (in "Marriage of Maria Braun that I will finish watching tonight) golden hair, these witching Loreleis, the walking sensuality - Fassbinder understood and admired women and I admire him for this.

"Lola" is a combination of many genres- satire, drama, comedy, and musical. It mixes glamor with very serious themes. Striking Barbara Sukowa is a singer-whore Lola who sets up to seduce the incorruptible local building commissioner, unbelievably blue-eyed Armin Mueller-Stahl. Lola went through many losses, humiliations, and disappointments during the war and right after it and she wants to be an independent business woman for which she decided to win over the man everyone kept telling was not for her.

As Barbara Sukowa recalls, Fassbinder told the critical stories but he did not make them dry or theoretical. He did not use the intellectual or academic approach to his stories. He hated gray "kitchen" naturalism and he was mixing Hollywood glamor with specific German realities creating his own style that was sexy and appealing. While many German film makers of his generation were influenced by the American directors like Martin Scorsese and John Cassavetes, Fassbinder was very impressed by Douglas Sirk and his style.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder died at the age of 37 just as he was completing his last movie, "Querell". He had made over 30 films during 12 years. He began directing in 1969 revealing in his work New Germany, often heartless and materialistic. Fassbinder's talent and the quantity and quality of his output are incredible. It is like he knew he would die young and he was obsessed by finishing as many films as it was physically possible, majority of which (including "Lola") were way ahead of their time.

Germany in Autumn Gregory Avery from Nitrate Online (excerpt)

If "Maria Braun" was about a woman who did all that she did for the sake of "mein Mann," "Lola" was about a woman who, by her own admission, works from her mind rather than from her heart. When she's told that poems are often sad because "the soul knows more [about life ]than the mind," Lola replies, "With me, the mind knows more than the soul."

Lola -- or, as we learn, Marieluise -- is a little more hard-nosed, more determined, which is why Barbara Sukowa is more suited to the role than Hanna Schygulla might have been. Lola is a little more realistic, although, like Maria, she has had to "adapt," too, in the rapidly transforming German Federal Republic that is busily buying and trading goods and services. But Lola isn't after something as ultimately illusory as Maria's missing years with her husband. And Sukowa expresses a yearning that is just as affecting as Schygulla's Maria.

It shows first when the two men in her life -- the building contractor Schuckert (Mario Adorf, who had just played Oskar's unlucky uncle Alfred in The Tin Drum), and Esslin (Matthias Fuchs), an anti-rearmament activist -- tell Lola that the town's new building commissioner, von Bohm (Armin Mueller-Stahl), is not the kind of guy for her. (She is told this twice to her face, in fact.) Deeply wounded at first, Lola takes this up as a challenge -- she even bets that she can walk right up to von Bohm and have him kiss her hand, just like he would with any proper woman he meets. Lola also feels excluded: the social order of the town, no matter how many people sneak out their back doors to be with her at the town's bordello (which, reflecting West Germany's booming prosperity, looks like a cross between a nightclub, a high-class brothel in the Storyville section of New Orleans, and a 'Fifties bowling alley), won't let her "play along," and she wants to be a part of them. Nobody cares what people do in their off-hours, as long as it doesn't affect appearances (this being the 'Fifties, not the 'Nineties).

The most neatly-turned, elegant touch in the film is how it shuffles things around so that von Bohm doesn't realize that the girl whom he begins seeing seriously is the one whom everyone around him already knows a whole lot about. When von Bohm finds out, after he gets over his disillusionment, he finds he can't treat her the way everybody else has, even out of spite. Rather than respond angrily at von Bohm, Lola treats him the exact opposite, realizing what this reaction of his really means. She knows what she wants, and she knows how to go about getting it (for one thing, she has a mother, Maria, and a young daughter, also named Maria, to be mindful about), but she won't destroy von Bohm's basic decency and moral uprightness.

Lola's moral center is the main difference between this and The Blue Angel. In Fassbinder's film, Esslin, a follower of Bakunin, says that he is not a "revolutionary" but a "humanist," and that seems to be the viewpoint from which Fassbinder and his co-screenwriters, Peter Märthesheimer and Pea Frölich, see the story and its characters. (Märthesheimer and Frölich co-wrote all three of the "postwar trilogy" films with Fassbinder.) Compared to his previous films, Lola takes place amid a riot of colour, in such a way that, in some scenes, the bright hues hit you and make you feel like you've been beaned. This was the second feature film where Fassbinder worked with Xaver Schwarzenberger, who took over as the director's cinematographer after the departure of Michael Ballhaus following Maria Braun. (Fassbinder and Schwarzenberger's first film, Lili Marlene, looks notably drab. Schwarzenberger also handled the cinematography on Berlin Alexanderplatz.) The production design, by Rolf Zehetbauer, and costumes, again by Barbara Baum, enable the film unfold in a rich, surreal, newly-minted "populux" landscape, replete with the silver mobile that rotates above von Bohm's office desk. (Which, if I recall directly, was believed at the time to be an aid in stimulating creativity or, at least, mental processes.) Everyone seems to be waking up from a long dream into something new and invigorating. Lola's mother, Maria (Karin Baal), works as von Bohm's housekeeper during the day and finds that her employer does not mind a bit that she brings young Maria, Lola's daughter, along. (A bit of a relief: when von Bohm, who served in the German army during the war and lived to tell of it, asks after Maria's husband, she stands still and says simply, "Stalingrad." Von Bohm reacts accordingly and respectfully.) When von Bohm tells the young girl a story, Maria replies, "That's silly." She's unimpressed.

One of the best scenes in the film occurs when the new television that von Bohm orders arrives. Maria doesn't know quite what to make of it, from its boxy, imposingly shape to the decorously twisted antennae that rests atop it, to the test pattern that appears when it's switched on. So far, they get only one program, on one channel, and it's on at eight in the evening. Günther Kaufmann, playing the American G.I. who becomes friendly with von Bohm (Kaufmann is always seen coming and going in the film with a different girl), tells him that back home, in Philadelphia, they have twelve channels that run programs 'round the clock. Von Bohm is quietly impressed. He's fascinated by the newness of it. (One wonders if Fassbinder saw Samuel Goldwyn's 1950 production, Our Very Own, which has the indelible scene where young Natalie Wood's face is reflected in the rounded glass of the picture tube in the brand new TV Farley Grainger delivers to her family's house.) There's no reason why Germany can't have its own twelve channels of broadcasting in time.

Lola is basically a story about transactions, with some of the romantic and yearning elements that Maria Braun had (although Lola has romantic and yearning elements of its own, just different ones). People may also have been expecting to find some of Hanna Schygulla's Maria Braun in Barbara Sukowa's Lola, but that is not what the role needed, and Sukowa, a talented actress, does not try to play it the way Schygulla would have.

And she can sing, too! Sukowa delivers an opening song, "Am Tag als der Regen Kam," with the precision and power of a laser beam, and she later sings and dances to an uninhibited rendition of "The Fishermen of Capri" that is, if not better than, comes pretty darn close to the bang-up number Rita Hayworth did near the end of Affair in Trinidad.

At the end of the picture, Lola, the outsider, is integrated into the community, Schuckert is able to go ahead with his building project, Lola ends up with some security for herself and for her daughter, and everyone ends up happy. The only thing that's sacrificed is von Bohm's integrity. But the filmmakers leave it up to us, as at the end of Maria Braun, to determine how things even out, here. As Lola attends to some last minute business, Esslin asks von Bohm, "Is everything in order?" After he says yes, little Maria asks him if he's happy. She has climbed up into a hayloft that figured earlier in the film. "Yes, yes, Marie," von Bohm answers, "I'm happy."

Lola Jim’s Reviews, an analysis of the BRD Trilogy

Lola Ronald Bowers from Film Reference

Only The Cinema [Ed Howard]

Fassbinder's use of Brechtian aesthetics by H-B. Moeller The Marriage of Maria Brau, Veronika Voss, Lola: Fassbinder's use of Brechtian aesthetics, from Jump Cut, April 1990

Forum: The University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture ... Screaming through the century: The female voice as cathartic/transformative force, from Berg's Lulu to Tykwer's Run Lola Run, by Maree MacMillan from RMIT University/The University of Melbourne (section on Fassbinder’s Lola is about 2/3 into the essay and part of a doctoral thesis targeted for 2007)

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

Dragan Antulov review [7/10]

“Lola” by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1981) Victor Enyutin from Acting Out Politics

User comments from imdb Author: aliasanythingyouwant from United States

User comments from imdb Author: Graham Greene from United Kingdom

Mondo Digital

RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER Subterranean Cinema

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review

Bright Lights After Dark: Does David Cronenberg Love Fassbinder's ... C. Jerry Kutner, September 11, 2007

DVD Verdict: Fassbinder's BRD Trilogy: Criterion Collection Brian Burke

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] reviewing the BRD Trilogy

Doogan's Views - The BRD Trilogy & The Cathedral Todd Doogan on the BRD Trilogy from the Digital Bits

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's BRD Trilogy :: Film & TV Reviews ... Tim Sheridan on the BRD Trilogy from Paste magazine

Cinema of Attractions: The BRD Trilogy January 11, 2008

RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER’S BRD TRILOGY | Films In Review Roy Frumkes on the BRD Trilogy

allmovie ((( Fassbinder: The BRD Trilogy - The Marriage of Maria ... Mark Deming on the BRD Trilogy

New York Movies - To Have and To Hold On To - page 1 - Village Voice Michael Atkinson on the BRD Trilogy

The Weaving Mill Film Workshop - R.W. FASSBINDER FILM NIGHTS BRD Film Retrospective

DVD Times Noel Megahey, reviews the 4-disc Region 2 DVD release, Rainer Werner Fassbinder Volume 1

TV Guide review

Lola Movie Overview (1981) from Channel 4 Film

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) August 4, 1982

Movie Review - Kamikaze '89 - FASSBINDER STARS IN GREMM'S ... Vincent Canby from The New York Times, February 27, 1983

Lola storms the cinema Introduction for a personal appearance by Barbara Sukowa to the IFC Center

Lola (1981) The Auteurs

Lola (1981) - The Criterion Collection

The BRD Trilogy - The Criterion Collection

BRD Trilogy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

YouTube - Lola (1981) (3:27)

THEATER IN TRANCE

Cologne (91 mi) June – 1981

Theater in Trance Fassbinder Foundation

A documentary film in fourteen chapters about the festival “Theater der Welt 1981” in Cologne. The program encompassed more than 30 groups from 15 countries and more than 100 performances. For two weeks, Rainer Werner Fassbinder observed the participants in the festival and filmed their acts. The raw material was turned into a film whose 14 parts reflect the observer’s impressions while – at the same time – the essentials are filtered out of the overabundant offering. The text Fassbinder narrates in his film was written decades before the Cologne festival. The author, one of the most important theoreticians of modern theater, is Antonin Artaud. In his collection of writings entitled The Theater and Its Double, the source for the passages cited, Artaud describes a radical shock therapy for a theater that he believes is ossified in its conventions. He draws up a model whose relevance is demonstrated through the scenes presented in this film.

VERONIKA VOSS (Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss) A 97

Munich (105 mi) November – December 1981

Everything I have belongs to you — all I have left to give you is my death. —Veronika Voss (Rosel Zech)

Early German cinema masterpieces such as THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1920), NOSFERATU (1922), METROPOLIS (1927), and M (1931), with their themes of ruthless totalitarianism, sadistic violence, and extreme fanatacism, foretold the rise of fascism and the horrors of the Third Reich. Half a century later Germany was still reeling from the ramifications of World War II, where the mixture of guilt, anger, and confusion, not surprisingly, led to denial. No one was more sensitive to this subject and its effect on the national consciousness than young German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who in the late 70’s noted, “They can’t have forgotten [the Holocaust]; they must have had it in their minds when they were creating their new state. If a thing of so much significance could be forgotten or repressed, then something must be pretty wrong with this democracy and this ‘German model.’” Selective memory becomes the central theme of his BRD (Bundesrepublik Deutschland) Trilogy, offering humanist dramas that uniquely and effectively tell his and his nation’s story. Winner of the Golden Bear (1st Prize) at the 1982 Berlin Film Festival, the only one of his films to ever do so, Rosel Zech as Veronika Voss followed Hanna Schygulla in THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN (1979) and Barbara Sukowa in LOLA (1981) in the third of Fassbinder’s BRD Trilogy, one of the most imaginative critiques of the German economic model in any medium, a flamboyant, metaphorical, and satiric response to Germany’s “economic miracle” of reconstruction in the 1950’s, suggesting rampant greed and capitalism survive by wiping away the historical past, where selective amnesia is a mandatory condition that allows the rest of German society to move forward. Veronika’s connection to the country’s Nazi past is dismissed to the shadows of memory, coming to symbolize a relic of an unwanted past that must be swept aside to make way for the future.

In a lurid melodrama and memory play about the past and its haunting effects on the present, VERONIKA VOSS is one of the better Fassbinder films, a perfectly conceived visual masterpiece in black and white, gorgeously photographed by Xaver Schwarzenberger, released 6 months after Fassbinder’s death, a grim reminder foreshadowing his own death.  Notes discovered after his death reveal this film set in 1955 was intended to be the 2nd of his German post-war trilogy films, chronologically taking place after MARIA BRAUN (40’s), and before LOLA (late 50’s).  The film is modeled after Billy Wilder’s SUNSET BLVD. (1950), both featuring a gloomy old house, a fading film star, a relationship with a younger man, and a comeback attempt, not to mention a movie within a movie, where the pathologically self-deluding character of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) mirrors the long downfall of Veronika Voss (Rosel Zech), an aging Third Reich actress living in the obscurity of postwar Munich, where the film was shot, rumored to be the mistress of Goebbels, based on the real life of actress Sybille Schmitz (VAMPYR, DOES NOT ANSWER — both 1932), later blacklisted by Goebbels, and she committed suicide in 1955.  Fassbinder was reportedly looking for Schmitz to play the mother in PETRA VON KANT (1972), apparently unaware of her fate, and when discovered, decided to make her story into this film.  The film actually begins with Voss watching alone in a theater witnessing one of her old, lurid screen performances in an UFA wartime film entitled Insidious Poison (Schleichendes Gift), where her character is injected with drugs, signing over all her earthly belongings in a scene that foreshadows both her final days in the film and Fassbinder’s fate, as he is also in the same theater sitting behind her watching the film.  In real life, her own doctor, a diabolical, sado-masochistic lesbian Dr. Katz (Annemarie Düringer), mercilessly exploits her by feeding her morphine habit, forcing her to sign over what’s left of her life’s fortune as payment.  A prominent theme and certainly of interest is the use of the song, “Sixteen Tons,” sung by Fassbinder regular Günther Kaufmann (one of Fassbinder’s former lovers, appearing in all three trilogy films) which features the lyrics:  “I owe my soul to the company store,” eventually leading to Voss’s tragic suicide.  

In a chance encounter, Voss runs into Robert Krohn (Hilmar Thate) on the street, offering her his umbrella in a downpour of rain, a kind gesture that she appreciates, describing him as her shelter in a storm. What immediately surprises her is that he does not know who she is, as she’s a former UFA star still living in the delirious illusions of stardom, where she’s used to being catered to night and day while being treated like royalty, forever expecting a return to her former glory. Robert is essentially an everyman, the personification of the postwar German, a man who drinks his beer, pursues his work and his private relations, yet in his life nothing dramatic or exciting ever happens, working a routine job for a newspaper as a sports reporter, but gets caught up in the whirlwind of her own delusions, finding her fascinating, allowing him to rub elbows with the upper class, company he rarely keeps, where he finds it hard to keep his eyes off of her. Viewed largely through his supposedly impartial eyes, as he was unaware of her former fame, Robert already has a girlfriend, Henriette (Cornelia Froboess), a level-headed and attractive girl who finds his newfound romantic interest amusing, especially when Voss arrives at their door one evening ready for him to drive her to her lavish country estate and spend the night, a preposterous gesture that is sealed with a kiss on Henriette’s cheek as she brazenly steals her man, but doing so in such an openly alluring and irresistible manner. Voss’s immense home is like a mausoleum, a lavish corpse with dead plants and white sheets covering all the furniture to keep the dust from accumulating, very much like its aging superstar, a relic from a forgotten era, where she murmurs to him, “I like to seduce ... helpless men.” Unlike Zarah Leander and Marika Rökk, celebrated UFA stars who continued to be popular in Germany for many decades after World War II, Voss has no connection to the new Germany, but lives only in her memory, longing for a bygone past, separated from her ex-husband, the screenwriter Max Rehbein (Armin Mueller-Stahl), who left her because he could no longer bear her addiction and its consequences. Only in these moments of memory and imagination is Veronika Voss allowed to show feelings or affection towards others. After sleeping with Krohn, she wakes up horrified, ruled by a neverending emptiness and pain, once more requiring the services of Dr. Katz.

But Voss is hiding even more personal secrets, as she doesn’t live at her given address, an old Jewish couple named Treibel live there instead, Johanna Hofer and Rudolf Platte, who both survived Treblinka, but are also patients of Dr. Katz, dependent on morphine to obliterate their memories, literally ghosts of the past whose age belies their wisdom, as they seem to be dark angels of death, both consumed by their own morbidity, with tattooed arms from the war, a haunting reminder of the death camps and all who lost their lives. Voss is actually living in the home of Dr. Katz, though it feels more like an imprisonment, bearing a strange resemblance to the German Expressionism of THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1920), expressed through a surreal dreamlike home that is oversaturated in white, creating a ghastly, unworldly presence, ironically playing American country music on the radio, like Johnny Horton’s Johnny Horton: The Battle of New Orleans - YouTube (2:33), and Sanford Clark’s SANFORD CLARK Run Boy Run - YouTube (2:14), representative, perhaps, of her warped state of mind, but it may also be a comment on the pervasive use of the radio during the Nazi era as a form of social control, with the wildly exaggerated artificiality of the home resembling a sterile medical lab where Katz plays ruthless psychological mind games with Voss, suggesting she, and by implication the nation, have never been able to overcome their Nazi past, as her wicked brand of authoritarianism closely resembles the brutal precision of the Nazi past, keeping her patient addicted to morphine while blatantly abusing her power to arbitrarily authorize needed treatment only as a means to bleed the actress of her wealth. Robert and Henriette visit Dr. Edel (Erik Schumann), who heads the Health Department, but he is very noncommittal when it comes to questions about the distribution of narcotics, suggesting they are properly regulated, echoing the sentiments of the Third Reich, “The system of control is perfect. It’s the people that aren’t perfect.” Partnering together with Dr. Edel, Dr. Katz and her associates icily connive to become the big winners of the “economic miracle,” the unscrupulous beneficiaries of the postwar reconstruction, succeeding beyond their wildest dreams, while nobodies like Krohn and Voss haven’t got a chance against them. Krohn wants to save Veronika, free her from the manipulative hold by Dr. Katz, but realizes this is impossible, ultimately paying a large price, losing his girlfriend in the process, who poses as a rich widow in need of Dr. Katz’s services in order to help expose her criminal behavior, becoming yet another victim in the process, murdered by Katz for coming too close and knowing too much, with Krohn remaining a fool throughout. His efforts are pointless, as Veronika refuses to be saved, and actually protects her oppressor by cooperating with the sinister Dr. Katz, becoming slavishly submissive, a more than willing foil, performing one final scene in front of the authorities, lying to help prevent Dr. Katz’s exposure to the police. Impotent to expose such deep-rooted and institutionalized corruption, Krohn returns to the banal life of a sports reporter.

Blending Brechtian austerity with Sirkian melodrama, Fassbinder produced forty features in a thirteen year career, where in addition, he was largely responsible for screenplay, equipment, and editing, displaying fluid camerawork and astute color schemes while accentuating the social isolation of his fallen protagonists. Despite tortured emotions and disintegrating psyches on display, Fassbinder not only identifies with outsiders and misfits, but exhibits compassion and even tenderness in their portrayals onscreen. Shining a light on the marginalized, Fassbinder identifies with working class heroes, examining the root of their disenfranchisement, awakening us from our own self-induced complacency, providing intellectually stimulating and emotionally volatile works that demand empathy and personal investment. A humanist at the core, Fassbinder’s films have a rare potency, achieved through extraordinary performances and superb craftsmanship, as the man simply knew how to make films, becoming one of cinema’s boldest enfant terrible. Displaying a degree of sophistication in the latter stages of his career, among the most memorable recollections about this film are Fassbinder’s magnificent use of white coupled with Veronika Voss’s seductive and positively enchanting performance of the song “Memories Are Made of This,” Veronika Voss Memories are made of this - YouTube (2:32), a Marlene Dietrich-like spectacle that is among the director’s most technically accomplished sequences. In two and a half minutes Fassbinder masterly interweaves many the director’s primary concerns, a blurring of reality, fiction and fantasy, a predominance of artifice, including candlelight, visual composition, spectator vs. spectacle, both physical and psychological imprisonment, celebrity, along with an intertwinement of desire and destiny in a multi-layered kaleidoscope of light and shadow. The sequence perfectly casts the central figure ensnared in a spider’s web, surrounded by the leeches that would eventually devour her. Broken dreams and shattered illusions are seen through a prism of rain-soaked, or tear-stained, windows. This brilliant display of artistry expands and embellishes the joyless mood of helplessness and utter despair.

While the subject of drug abuse may mirror Fassbinder’s own personal descent into a fatal overdose in 1982, just 112 days after winning the Berlin award, suffering a stroke after two days of binging on cocaine and sleeping pills, but Voss’s addiction represents an indictment of German history, where drugs serve as an agent of commerce and a spiraling out of control capitalism, yet without accompanying safeguards and an understanding of its misuse and harmful effects, drug addiction can inevitably lead to ruin, becoming a symbol for the failings of modern society. As Veronika, Zech portrays a drug-addicted screen idol in the twilight of her career, subsisting on memories of past grandeur, as if through a fog of hazy recollection, which would include the brief triumphs and ultimate defeat of Nazi Germany, its impact on the nation now laid to rest, where death and forgetfulness become synonymous with forgetting one’s past as a nation forges a new path towards the future. When investigated, the real-life Schmitz had been living in her doctor’s house at the time of her suicide.  She seemed to be assisted by another doctor, an official working in the Munich Health Department, who issued the prescriptions, notably 723 instances of prescribed narcotics in less than three years.  The two supplied hard drugs in exchange for cash and property rights, specializing in celebrities from the Nazi period, covering for each other when their patients committed suicide, supposedly when they could no longer pay. In the end, no one was guarding the guardians of the new age. It has been suggested that rather than film noir, this is film blanc, not black and white, but black or white. The white in this film has never been so menacing, so evil, as it is in the apartment of Dr. Katz and in the room that eventually becomes both prison and grave to Veronika.  Here the unnatural white decor reflects the clinical presence of death, turning the home into its worst perversion, a test laboratory for unspeakably cruel human experiments.  The white eventually drives out the black, and with it, pushes into oblivion the person that was once Veronika Voss.  White is, in this context, the drugs she was addicted to, the whiteness of forgetting, another metaphor for Germany, the soft sleep of forgetting.

Take one fresh and tender kiss
Add one stolen night of bliss
One girl, one boy
Some grief, some joy
Memories are made of this

Don’t forget a small moonbeam
Fold in lightly with a dream
Your lips and mine
Two sips of wine
Memories are made of this

Then add the wedding bells
One house where lovers dwell
Three little kids for the flavor
Stir carefully through the days
See how the flavor stays
These are the dreams you’ll savor

With His blessings from above
Serve it generously with love
One man, one wife
One love through life
Memories are made of this
Memories are made of this

Veronika Voss, directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Film review Time Out

Intended as just another chapter in the continuing indictment of the post-war German economic recovery, but Fassbinder's death means that this will have to take its place as a loose third panel of the Maria Braun/Lola triptych. Unlike those heroines, however, Veronika (Zech) doesn't even pretend to any kind of upward social mobility. When 'discovered' by a crusading journalist (Thate), she is already on the skids, a washed-up Third Reich film star. His infatuation and subsequent investigation reveals her dependency on a snow white clinic, and her sado-masochistic relationship with the female doctor who feeds her morphine habit; and that's just the beginning of the downward slide. If Sirk's colourful melodramas were once Fassbinder's models, this is closer to Wilder's monochrome Sunset Boulevard, not just in theme, but in the reductive cynicism that views all human motivation as grounded on folly and greed; a world in which love is just a power struggle, dirty 'habits' are murderous, and happiness is simply the art of being well deceived.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Penultimate Film: Veronika Voss – 35mm ... Cameron Worden from Chicago Film Society

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s most unambiguously beautiful film was also the last one he lived to see released. Months after Veronika Voss premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, where it would win the Golden Bear, Fassbinder would be dead of a drug overdose and his penultimate film would take on autobiographical echoes. Veronika Voss draws from the life and mysterious death of German actress Sybille Schmitz, best known abroad for her work in Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr but notorious in her home country for remaining active in the German film industry throughout the Third Reich. Fassbinder tracks the final days of his titular character (played with otherworldly abandon by the phenomenal German TV actress Rosel Zech), a has-been movie star with a paralyzing morphine addiction, as she is besieged by parasitic medical professionals, carries on an affair with a local sports reporter, and attempts to mount a comeback in the German film industry of the 1950s. Recalling the heyday of American film noir, as well as the horror-tinged melodramas Sunset Boulevard and The Seventh Victim, with the addition of more than a smidge of pitch-black humor and a quietly droning soundtrack of country music hits, Veronika Voss is an icy, monochrome masterpiece, in love with classic cinema and at odds with the industry behind it.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - Cine-File.info Ben Sachs

VERONIKA VOSS was the last film that Rainer Werner Fassbinder completed during his lifetime and the penultimate film that he directed. It shouldn’t be described as a valedictory work, however. Fassbinder was constantly evolving, finding new subjects at which to direct his anger and sympathy and discovering new means to express those feelings; had he lived past 1982, he surely would have covered much more thematic and stylistic ground. Nevertheless VOSS finds the filmmaker at a level of mastery he had been working towards his entire career. It is “a druglike immersion experience disguised as a CITIZEN KANE-like investigative inquiry, tonally very close to Fassbinder’s earlier IN A YEAR OF 13 MOONS,” wrote Kent Jones for the Criterion Collection in 2003. “The narrative of Robert’s investigation [into Veronika Voss’s past] never gains much momentum, as the sense of skin-crawling anxiety stretches out to infinity in scene after scene. Every image hurts in this hyper-tactile, overstuffed world, shot in bric-a-brac stuffed interiors in the most piercing black and white, closer to an X-ray than to high Hollywood.” Comparing the film to an X-ray feels appropriate in more ways than one, as it seeks (like the other films in Fassbinder’s BRD trilogy, THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN and LOLA) to expose the legacy of facism hiding beneath Germany’s postwar economic “miracle.” The title character, based on the real-life actress Sybille Schmitz, a movie star during the Hitler era who has lapsed in seclusion and drug addiction in the post-facist 1950s; Robert’s discovery of her degradation serves as a metaphor for the recovery of German historical memory. The film works brilliantly as melodrama too. Fassbinder had tremendous sympathy for victims of emotional abuse and those cast out by society at large, and Veronika is both. Her disintegration is tragic to behold, though Fassbinder’s incisive style finds the bitterness and dark humor in her story as well.

Veronika Voss Gregory Avery from Nitrate Online (excerpt)

Sometime in the mid-Seventies, Fassbinder began his hard drug usage. Cocaine enabled him to lock himself away and work for long periods of time at a stretch, after which he would sleep, then start working again for long periods at a stretch. For his insomnia, he used a pharmaceutical called Mandrax, which, when taken with cocaine in the system, is supposed to produce sleep without the interim period of drowsiness.

When West Germany banned the dispensing of Mandrax, Fassbinder understandably panicked. He tried other sleepaids -- nothing worked. Eventually, Juliane Lorenz, his film editor since 1976, contacted a physician who provided a sleep aid under strict instruction that Fassbinder should only take a dosage of a half-tablet at a time. It worked, but then Lorenz discovered shortly thereafter that Fassbinder had been taking three whole tablets of the drug at a time.

"If there is an atomic war," Fassbinder said, "people should stick with me, because if a bomb drops, it won't destroy me. I've got more energy than any bomb."

Fassbinder wanted to make a film of the 1921 novel, Cocaine, written by Pitigrilli, the pen name for Italian journalist Dino Segrè. In it, Tito, an Italian playboy, tumbles in and out of various adventures, gets a job at a newspaper that pays him for not writing, and carries on simultaneous affairs with two women, a young dancer whom Tito knows from his youth, and a stately Armenian widow. He also is introduced to the title recreational drug, although Tito's downfall at the end comes about only partially as a result of it.

The novel is surprisingly funny, even lighthearted in parts, and there are some indelible scenes, such as when butterflies imported from South America are set free during a high society party in Paris where the guests are drinking cocktails made from ether, and, as the party progresses, the butterflies slowly succumb from the ether fumes, one by one.

Fassbinder had come up with a film treatment that would have depicted the effects of cocaine on the protagonist by gradually showing the settings being covered with a hoarfrost, silvery and sparkling, and the characters' breath becomes visible in the air at all times and in all places, even during the hot times of the year and in warmer locales. You can get some idea of what this visual scheme would have looked like while watching Veronika Voss.

There is one sequence in Veronika Voss that particularly sticks in the memory, especially if you've ever worked in film production. Veronika (Rosel Zech), working for the first time in years, has to deliver a single line reading in one scene, where she receives a telegram and, after reading the message, sheds a tear while she tells something to the delivery boy. As she makes the attempt, gazing straight into the camera (and at us), her face grows rigid, tense, mesmerized. Her hair style and costuming make it look as if she were encased to appear before the camera. The moment comes. She has to deliver the line. She delivers the line alright, but she doesn't produce the tears needed for the scene. Take Twelve, and we see what she sees while she's attempting to work: down a narrow path, there approaches the camera, the dolly, the cameraman, many technicians, and, sitting to one side of the camera, the director, his overcoat and porkpie hat draped in a stylishly "louche" fashion, with a calm yet anticipatory, predatory expression on his face. Veronika loses her concentration and breaks character. Take Thirteen: the tears are alright, but the line is wrong. The set is finally cleared. Silence in the corridor outside the soundstage, until, finally, with the stealth of a Panzer tank, we hear Veronika's agonized screech as she breaks down altogether.

Veronika Voss has been compared to Sunset Boulevard, in that it shares some basic similarities: a gloomy old house, a fading film star, a relationship with a younger man, and a comeback attempt. But of the three women in the "trilogy," Veronika has more in common with Blanche DuBois than Norma Desmond. (Fassbinder was said to have been interested in staging a production of A Streetcar Named Desire.) During one of the opening scenes, Veronika and her future "savior," Robert (Hilmar Thate), take a streetcar from Geiselgaste to Thierschplatz. The two streetcars that figure in Tennessee Williams' play, and which travel, in opposite directions, on the same route, are named "Desire" and "Cemetery." "Geiselgaste," where Veronika and Robert meet after she has left a screening room, translates as "hostage guest," while Thierschplatz turns out to be the same street where the office of Veronika's "doctor" is located. In fact, the story takes the usual dynamic of most stories about a woman who gives her all to a man, and turns it into a story about a woman who gives her all...to another woman.

"Have pity. I'll give you everything I own." "All right. All of it." "Now you own me and everything that's mine." After delivering these lines in a film, Veronika is complimented, on the soundstage set, for her performance. "It's my profession to be 'moving'," Veronika responds confidently.

Years later, Veronika is chastised by her physician, the "neurologist" Dr. Katz (Annemarie Düringer), who catches her taking an overdose of sleeping pills, like a naughty child with his or her hand in the cookie jar. "Am I not your best girlfriend," Dr. Katz says, not as a question but as a statement of fact. She speaks to Veronika in the placating but fully commanding "best friend" tones of a true abuser. "You...you don't want to die yet, do you? You can't die until I allow it." Veronika laughs at this, ruefully. The laugh is her only defense. Dr. Katz laughs. Everyone else in the room laughs. There are times when you laugh or go mad. There is a lot of rueful laughter in this movie.

At a party held at Veronika's house -- where Rosel Zech sings a wickedly outstanding rendition of "Memories Are Made of This" -- Veronika tells a reporter that she has been considering offers from Hollywood studios -- United Artists (."..it means, 'union of artists'..."), as well as M.G.M., and 20th Century-Fox. What will she be paid? someone asks. "You know what they're called over there," Veronika responds, using the German term "Traumfabriken." "A factory that makes dreams, not money. Making dreams. Just making them." Joseph Goebbles used the term "traumfabrik" in 1933 when, as Germany's new Minister of Propaganda, he met with the German studio heads and producers and called for German film production to both rival and outpace Hollywood pictures in terms of quality and standard. When, in 1981, Fassbinder was asked what his aspirations were twenty years earlier, in 1961, when he was still an aspiring filmmaker, Fassbinder replied, "To make many, many films, so that my life would become a film."

In 1955, when Veronika Voss is set, the "traumfabriken" are all located in the U.S. Some people still remember Veronika as a star, but not a lot. She lures Robert back to her house, telling him "I like seducing defenseless men...," but when she wakes up, she doesn't know who he is and what he's doing there. She is having pain from the lack of morphine in her system -- the pain is also what causes her to break-down on the film set -- so Robert must bundle her off to Dr. Katz, who gives Veronika the "spritzen" she needs, but in exchange for the morphine Veronika must turn more and more of her assets over to Dr. Katz to pay for the drug, which she does when the pain returns, and she must go again to see Dr. Katz....

Veronika can be seen as either a victim or as someone who chooses her destiny (she must "finish" what she has "started"); as a relic of an era being swept into the past (we do not even find out that she was a star at Ufa, the biggest of Germany's studio complexes, until almost the end of the picture) so that Germany can now move into its future, or as someone who is simply being gotten rid of. The final scenes of Veronika Voss are played out, in confinement, between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, and one could even surmise that Veronika moves on to another, higher plane, a star who passes up into the sky where the stars shine bright.

Fassbinder realized Veronika Voss in the style of the grand Ufa studio-made melodramas of the 'Thirties and 'Forties, from the stylized opening credits to the use of all sorts of cross-wipes and "tear-throughs" for scene transitions. And he and Xaver Schwarzenberger worked out, with great specificity, an intricately-designed use of black-and-white photography and lighting for the film. Scenes at Dr. Katz's clinic seem to approach, but just hold off from, being blindingly bright, while the visuals give the features of Rosel Zech's Veronika a slightly hazy look, as if their definition had been affected after being exposed under the heat of too many studio lights for too long.

The initial idea for the film came from the real-life death of Sybille Schmitz, a German film star who died from a combination of morphine and sleeping pills. There were unresolved suspicions, though, as to whether she took her life entirely by her own hand or not. The opening credits of Veronika Voss identify it as "BRD 2/1955" ("BRD" standing for "Bundesrepublik Deutchland"), 1955 being the year of Schmitz's death, and which chronologically sets it between Marriage of Maria Braun and Lola (which was set around 1958, and was identified as "BDR 3" in its opening credits). The scenes at Dr. Katz's clinic, from which Günther Kaufmann's G.I. can be seen coming and going, have Armed Forces Radio playing in the background, and one can hear Johnny Horton's recording of "The Battle of New Orleans." ("Oh, they ran through the briars and they ran through the brambles/ And they ran through the bushes where a rabbit wouldn't go....")

Fassbinder had always wanted to work with Romy Schneider, but he did get to work with an actress in Veronika Voss who has the same luminous, wounded beauty as another postwar actress, Hildegard Knef: Cornelia Froboess, who plays Robert's girlfriend, Henriette, a photographer. The two of them try to expose Dr. Katz's racket in snaring people onto morphine solely for financial gain. At one point, Henriette even poses as a lackadaisical rich woman who has a pain, an emotional pain that only Dr. Katz can treat with her unmentioned narcotic. (Katz pulls a fast one, though, switching the morphine prescription she gives her with one for "Radix Valerianae," an herbal medicinal described by one source as "the Valium of the nineteenth century.") When Robert and Henriette go to see a state official in the Health Department, he tells them that all he can do is make sure that pharmaceutical narcotics are being regulated. "The system of control is perfect. It's the people that aren't perfect."

Sweet Death: Veronika Voss Production History Criterion essay by Michael Töteberg, September 29, 2003

Heartbreak House: Fassbinder's BRD Trilogy Criterion essay by Kent Jones, September 29, 2003

The BRD Trilogy - The Criterion Collection

Veronika Voss (1982) - The Criterion Collection

Hollywood, Germany: The Longing of Rainer ... - Senses of Cinema Adam Bingham, June 5, 2011

Mirroring History: Fassbinder’s The BRD Trilogy Najmeh Khalili Mhani from Offscreen, February 2013

Jim's Reviews - Fassbinder's BRD Trilogy -The Marriage of Maria ... Jim’s Reviews, an analysis of the BRD Trilogy, also seen here: Veronika Voss

Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss Douglas Messerli from International Cinema Review

Friedrich Strasse: Fassbinder-Veronika Voss(1982)

Wunderkind - Los Angeles Review of Books Juliane Maria Lorenz, August 18, 2011

Veronika Voss - Senses of Cinema Adam Bingham, June 5, 2011

Fassbinders BRD-Trilogie Johannes von Kösegi from Kino Film

film is love.: Veronika Voss (Fassbinder, 1982) RM, May 27, 2008

Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss - Film 1982 - FILMSTARTS.de Uhlich Behrens

Film: Ein deutscher Nostalgie-Frühling - DER SPIEGEL 8/1982 Hellmuth Karasek

Germans on Drugs: The Complications of Modernization in Hamburg Germans on Drugs: The Complications of Modernization in Hamburg, by Robert P. Stephens, 2007 (pdf)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Distant Voices

Fassbinder's use of Brechtian aesthetics by H-B. Moeller - Jump Cut H-B. Moeller essay from Jump Cut, April 1990

Veronika Voss | Neil Young's Film Lounge - Jigsaw Lounge

FilmFanatic.org » Veronika Voss (1982)

'Veronika Voss' review by Edgar Cochran • Letterboxd

DVD Reviews | 'Le Plaisir' - Metroactive Michael S. Gant

DVD Verdict: Fassbinder's BRD Trilogy: Criterion Collection Brian Burke

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] reviewing the BRD Trilogy

Doogan's Views - The BRD Trilogy & The Cathedral Todd Doogan on the BRD Trilogy from the Digital Bits

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's BRD Trilogy :: Movies :: Reviews :: Paste Tim Sheridan on the BRD Trilogy from Paste magazine

Cinema of Attractions: The BRD Trilogy January 11, 2008

RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER’S BRD TRILOGY | Films In Review Roy Frumkes on the BRD Trilogy

allmovie ((( Fassbinder: The BRD Trilogy - The Marriage of Maria ... Mark Deming on the BRD Trilogy

New York Movies - To Have and To Hold On To - page 1 - Village Voice Michael Atkinson on the BRD Trilogy

The Weaving Mill Film Workshop - R.W. FASSBINDER FILM NIGHTS BRD Film Retrospective

Film @ The Digital Fix - Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Volume 1 Noel Megahey, reviews the 4-disc Region 2 DVD release, Rainer Werner Fassbinder Volume 1

Film @ The Digital Fix - Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Volume 2 Noel Megahey, reviews the 4-disc Region 2 DVD release, Rainer Werner Fassbinder Volume 2

User comments from imdb Author: sol- from Perth, Australia

User comments from imdb Author: rosscinema (rosscinema@juno.com) from Oceanside,Ca.

User comments from imdb Author: Graham Greene from United Kingdom

Mondo Digital

'Veronika Voss' (1982): Review | Express Elevator to Hell The Celtic Predator

Veronika Voss | The Soul of the Plot Hunter

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review

Veronika Voss (1982) - MUBI

Films in Films | Veronika Voss

Channel 4 Capsule Review Richard Luck

TV Guide review

Veronika Voss Movie Review & Film Summary (1982) | Roger Ebert January 1, 1982

Veronika Voss Movie Review & Film Summary (1982) | Roger Ebert December 4, 2012

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) also seen here: Movie Review - - FASSBINDER'S 'VERONIKA VOSS' - NYTimes.com

Veronika Voss - Wikipedia

BRD Trilogy - Wikipedia

Rosel Zech obituary | Film | The Guardian Ronald Bergan, September 4, 2011

QUERELLE B 89

Berlin (106 mi) March 1982

Extraordinary surreal lighting by Ekkehard Heinrich accentuates artificiality over substance, with frost colored windows and mirrors everywhere, Art Direction by Rolf Zehetbauer, using a kind of over-formalized acting with just the barest hint of emotion. Made just three months before his death, this film reveals some of the best and worst aspects of Fassbinder’s work, originally shot in English, but the copy seen was in German, while Jeanne Moreau sings rather deadpan in her saloon: “Each man kills the one he loves, La La La, La La La La,” (lyrics by Oscar Wilde) based on Jean Genet’s novel of sexual submission and humiliation, Querelle de Brest, a story of tangled and nightmarish erotic passions set in a fabled French seaport of Brest.

The film charts the degradation and salvation of a beautiful young sailor, Querelle, the Angel of Death (Brad Davis), who discovers his homosexuality through a rape, murders the mate, then allows himself to be sodomized as “execution” for the crime. Nono (Günther Kaufmann), then engages in a game of dice to bed his wife, Madame Lysiane (Jeanne Moreau), the mistress of the brothel where sailors mingle with the underworld of Brest. Losing, he must endure the attentions of Nono, an encounter which opens up a new world of previously forbidden attractions and increasing brutal pleasures, all ruled by the arbitrary laws of the strange establishment in which Querelle finds himself. Querelle also beds Madame Lysiane, who is also sleeping with Querelle’s brother. Querelle and Gil, a fugitive murderer, become fast friends and intimate lovers until Querelle turns him over to Mario, the sadistic police inspector (looking like something out of The Village People). Querelle returns to his ship, commanded by Lieutenant Sablon (Franco Nero), who, longing for Querelle, keeps his distance in order to tell the sailor’s story. This is a disturbing and depressing portrait of terminally unhappy people doomed to destroy themselves, one another, or both, dedicated “to my friendship with El Heidi ben Salem m’Barek Mohammed Mustafa – Rainer Werner Fassbinder.”

PopcornQ Review

Producer Dieter Schidor originally took the task of filming Genet's sadist-and-sailors dockside drama to Bernardo Bertolucci (who could only, according to Schidor, "present it as cock poetry"), then Werner Schroeter (who would turn it into "faggot poetry"), and finally Fassbinder ("I thought he might make it gay kitchen trash"). Hardly trash, the result is instead one of the most overdetermined gay films of all time: starring salty Jeanne Moreau, blank-face Brad Davis, and a surreal Barbarella-style seaport.

Time Out remarkably blunt homophobic language from JG at Time Out London

More a dream about than a dramatisation of Genet's novel, this is glorious and infuriating in equal parts. The port of Brest is built and lit more like one of Burroughs' Cities of the Red Night, murderous deity Querelle's ambisexual encounters are suffused with a sweaty, tangible eroticism, and Fassbinder's 'version' stays faithful to Genet's nightmare poetry. But its narrative detachment, weighty monologues, Resnais-like anachronisms, and (most irritating of all) listless rationale turn it into a lurid hymn to teenybop nihilism. All in all, perhaps an entirely appropriate parting shot from a drug-crazed German faggot. –JG

Fassbinder Bibliography (via UC Berkeley) "Man to man," Sight and Sound, May 1994, p. 69, by James Roy Macbean

"The writer comments on the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, singling him out as the most original, talented, and productive director/writer in German cinema after the Second World War. The writer focuses on Querelle, which is based on Jean Genet's Querelle de Brest, probably Fassbinder's most outspoken homosexual film. In this film, she contends, maleness can be studied by watching the protagonists act like members of an unknown--and at the same time familiar--tribe. For the writer, Querelle reveals as through a magnifying glass a claustrophobic, frozen environment of male paranoia."

Is He Fassbinder? Gregory Avery from Nitrate Online (excerpt)

Dieter Schidor, who had previously worked as an actor, wanted to produce a film version of Querelle de Brest, a novel by French writer Jean Genet. Genet, who had spent years in the criminal underworld, was in prison when some of his writing came to the attention of Jean-Paul Sartre. Along with Jean Cocteau, Sartre petitioned to have Genet released so that he could continue his work as a writer. Genet chronicled his years as a criminal, and his homosexual encounters with men in the underworld, in The Thief's Journal. He also worked as a novelist, a playwright, and a journalist (in 1968, he wrote about the general strike that brought France to a halt in May, then covered the Democratic National Convention in Chicago with Terry Southern). He also wrote an original screenplay, Mademoiselle, which Tony Richardson directed in 1966. Jeanne Moreau played a provincial schoolteacher whose love for a local woodcutter causes her to destroy the entire town where she lived. Moreau's appearance in the film may have had something to do with her being cast as Madame Lysiane in Schidor's production of Querelle.

"The thought of murder often evokes thoughts of the sea, and of sailors. What naturally follows thoughts of the sea and murder is the thought of love or sexuality...." There is a consummate image of Brad Davis in Querelle when Roger (Laurent Malet) hears Davis' character, the sailor Querelle, say, "Come here," turns, and sees him, standing on a dock (possibly a dock, since it appears to be made out of metal plating and rivets) that looks coppery from the corpulent setting sun behind it. Davis wears a long black peat coat, a black-and-white stripped cotton shirt, and crisp pressed white sailor's bellbottom trousers. His lean features make his head look like it's cocked, insouciantly, with chin up, eyes almost closed, head tilted back until you almost cannot make out his white French naval sailor's hat. His body seems to curve languidly from the neck down, into an inverted "j." This is the man whom Genet described as "[a] young boy, whose soul is visible in his eyes, metamorphosed into an alligator...." and which Fassbinder put more simply as, "He was a boy whose soul had changed into an alligator."

Well, not quite. Fassbinder's Querelle drops the process Genet described by which the main character had already started his transformation before the main story begins. "In my opinion, it's not a film about murder and homosexuality. It's a film about someone trying, with all the means that are possible in this society, to find his identity...."

Brad Davis, sinewy and charismatic, and still fresh from his appearance as Billy Hayes in "Midnight Express," plays the sailor whose brother, Robert, is the lover of Lysiane (played by Moreau), co-proprietor of the Feria Bar in the French port town of Brest. Querelle obtains and sells narcotics, cheats, steals, murders, betrays, and allows himself to be deflowered by Lysiane's husband, Nono (Günther Kaufmann), after losing a bet with him. Yet Querelle is thrown into a quandary when he experiences love, instead of plain sexual attraction, for Giles, who is hiding from the police after being accused of a murder Querelle committed. Querelle arranges for an escape and a disguise for Giles -- the disguise makes Giles, down to the fake mustache, look like Querelle's brother Robert. And, even though the narration tells us of the "striking resemblance between the two brothers" Querelle and Robert, Fassbinder cast actor Hanno Pöschl, who doesn't look at all like Brad Davis, to play both Robert and Giles.

Fassbinder was probably the only director at the time -- maybe the only director, period -- who had the artistry, the sense, the clout, the reputation, and the brazenness to get this film made. With production designer Rolf Zehetbauer, Querelle was filmed in a fanatically artificial style, with the quays and waterfront sections of the town of Brest created and filmed entirely on a soundstage. It is also unapologetically homosexual: phalluses jut impudently from the architecture or appear frosted on window panes, the languid staging makes everyone look like they're cruising everyone else, and the scenes and actors are bathed in shades of tangerine orange and burnished gold, giving almost everything the appearance of a tumescent California coastal sunset. (When Jean-Jacques Beineix's equally stylized The Moon in the Gutter, with Gerard Depardieu and Nastassja Kinski, came out in the U.S. a few months after Querelle, David Denby described it as "a heterosexual Querelle.") Fassbinder took the film further than any film had previously in both depicting and expressing gay sexuality without the trappings of morality, self-loathing, condescension, or reservation. This picture came out years before the emergence of ACT-UP, Queer Nation, and "We're here, we're queer, get used to it." One of the characters in the film (played by Burkhard Driest, who wrote the first draft of the film's screenplay), a local police detective, spends his off hours wearing a leather visor cap and vest, like one of the bikers in a Tom of Finland sketch, while the French sailor hats, and the close-ups of Laurent Malet's delicate, slender features, evoke the crisp, perfect, scrupulously composed conceptual photographs made by Pierre et Gilles. (Fassbinder's mother, Liselotte, can be spotted, dressed as a nun, in a scene where Moreau sings in the Feria bar; Kurt Raab turns up as well, first dressed as a Roman Catholic cardinal, then, near the end, in drag wearing a geisha wig and holding a folding fan. Fassbinder did a silent cameo in one of the police station scenes, but this does not appear to have made it into the final cut of film, although a photo of his appearance was reprinted in the magnificently-produced Querelle Filmbuch that was published to accompany the film's release.)

Brad Davis, who distinguished himself as a stage actor during the first half of the 1980s, playing Gregor Samsa in an adaptation of Kafka's Metamorphosis and Capt. Queeg in The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, could have probably captured the difficult shadings of Querelle's character, but Fassbinder's approach works against the actors, distancing us through studied staging and movement and the interspersal of title cards which, in Brechtian style, interrupts any involvement we may have been having with the drama and forces us to be objective and detached. Scenes fade in and out of white, a device that Fassbinder said he used so that the audience would remain "awake" during the film. The ending of the film even suggests that there may have been no Querelle at all, that what we had been watching may have been either an individual or group fantasy all along.

Which brings us to another aspect of Fassbinder's work in this film: his contribution to Germany in Autumn, and the "postwar trilogy": the notion of forgetting. During the years that Adenauer served as West Germany's chancellor, the country rose from a physical and spiritual annihilation to a state with a flourishing economy, a respectable place as one of Europe's, and the world's, leading countries, and one where most citizens were living in comfort and could afford luxuries that would have been unthinkable prior to the "economic miracle." (On the other hand, there was the Berlin Wall, and the "Christiane F." series of reports in Der Spiegel that indicated that not all was well among the nation's youth.) Maria Braun tries to span the years that keep her apart from Hermann by embarking upon a career which starts when she negotiates a deal whereby Oswald's new textile plants will be able to produce nylon stockings for Germany's women. Lola keeps her relationship with von Bohm separate from her "secret" life as a kept woman. Veronika Voss is on the verge of being forgotten as both a movie star and as a person, with Dr. Katz's morphine injections helping all the way. Querelle appears in the town of Brest, affects everyone he comes in contact with, experiences "moments of sorrow as being those moments in which [he] himself felt the light wrinkles of forgetfulness on his terrible body...," and then disappears like a shadow when exposed to direct light. When Giles says ."..I'll never forget you," Querelle replies, "You say that now. Life happens fast. You're already forgetting me." And, at the start of the film, Lysiane, sitting at a table with Robert, casts the tarot and tells Robert that his brother is in "great danger.... He's in danger of finding himself."

Yet when Querelle's path brings him face to face with his superior officer on-board the ship Vengeur, Lt. Seblon (Franco Nero, in a brave, magisterial performance) -- who has been hopelessly yearning for Querelle from afar during the entire story -- Querelle becomes transfixed, as if by a manifestation, as if he can suddenly see that, by submitting to him, Seblon will lead him, "subdued, completely subdued," to where he will find his place and purpose in the world -- through stasis, oblivion, forgetfulness. (Querelle tells Seblon, "It must be done so that, afterwards, I can lie across your thighs like a pietá...." During a pre-production meeting, Fassbinder told Dieter Schidor, "Querelle must be a film about the Passion of our Lord.")

Querelle also ends with a coda that was not in the original script: "His birth certificate states: Born on the nineteenth of December, 1918, at ten o'clock in the morning. Mother: Gabrielle Genet. Father: unknown. Apart from his books, we know nothing about him, not even the date of his death, which to him seems near." The reference is to Jean Genet, who never knew who his real father was, and who rose from obscurity to become a famous and celebrated author.

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) reviewing THE WIZARD OF BABYLON (Bauer von Babylon – Rainer Werner Fassbinder), an 82-minute 1983 documentary by QUERELLE’S producer Dieter Schidor on the making of QUERELLE, which includes a controversial interview that Mr. Schidor had with Fassbinder approximately 10 hours before the director's death

''THE WIZARD OF BABYLON,'' which opens today at the Film Forum, is another footnote to the career of the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder, which means that it's something not to be missed by anyone interested in the career of that rare, disturbing film maker. It's an 82-minute documentary on the making of Fassbinder's last film, ''Querelle,'' scheduled to open here in the near future. The documentary was produced by Dieter Schidor, the producer of ''Querelle'' and one of its principal actors.

Though ''The Wizard of Babylon'' is not an independent achievement to equal Les Blank's ''Burden of Dreams,'' about the making of Werner Herzog's ''Fitzcarraldo,'' it is an effectively insinuating trailer for ''Querelle'' and should become one of the sources for all future students of Fassbinder's work.

Central to the film is an extended interview that Mr. Schidor had with Fassbinder approximately 10 hours before the director's death last June. It's this interview that Fassbinder's mother sought unsuccessfully to have removed from the film by court order.

Because the English subtitles that translate the German dialogue are not consistently clear, one can't always be sure whether it's the subtitlist or Fassbinder who's being obscure. However, enough recognizable Fassbinder comes through the fog of words to make the session riveting.

Fassbinder, wearing jeans, a pink shirt, a gray fedora and dark glasses, lounges on a leather couch. He smokes constantly and looks like a skeptical, beached walrus as he responds to Mr. Schidor's questions. Some of these he clearly finds silly though others prompt serious, carefully considered answers that certainly aren't those of someone strung out on booze or drugs, at the end of his rope.

He is especially brisk when Mr. Schidor characterizes ''The Marriage of Maria Braun'' and ''Veronika Voss'' as ''feminist films.'' ''I don't make feminist films,'' he says, ''but films about human society.''

He's also very articulate when it comes to differentiating between the reality of a film and that of the literary work on which it is based. ''Querelle'' has been described by him elsewhere as not being an adaptation of the Jean Genet novel but a film ''about'' the novel.

Much more conventional are the interviews with the stars of ''Querelle,'' including Jeanne Moreau, Franco Nero and Brad Davis. Mr. Nero and Mr. Davis express absolutely no reservations about ''Querelle'' and their work in the film, though both actors are reported to have had problems coming to terms with some of the brutally explicit, homosexual business that Fassbinder required of them. Miss Moreau, whom the narrator describes as having been in films longer than Fassbinder has been on earth, is funny and candid in discussing what was once a rather dangerous friendship with Mr. Genet years ago.

The bits and pieces of ''Querelle'' that we see being shot make it look as if it will be one of Fassbinder's most highly stylized films, its locale appearing to be a surreal unit set that becomes a ship, a barrroom, a bordello and a dockside. Drenching the soundtrack from time to time is an impressionistic commentary, spoken by the actor Klaus Lowitsch, composed, we are told, of stories, thoughts and reminiscences supplied the film makers by Fassbinder himself.

The Betrayals of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's ... - Senses of Cinema Claire Henry, March 18, 2016

Querelle Jim’s Reviews

Bright Lights Film Journal Frank Episale. also seen here: outrate.net (Frank Episale)

Jean Genet On Film Nathan Lee from the Village Voice, May 1, 2007

Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis) review [B+]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Daniel Hirshleifer)

DVD Verdict (Mike Pinsky)

Eye for Film ("Chris") review [4/5]

Surfin' Dead Deeky Wentworth

User comments from imdb Author: (starpath) from Santa Clara, New Mexico

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Cinematic Sojourns: Querelle (1982) - Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review

DVD Talk (Gil Jawetz) dvd review [1/5] not feeling it at all

Variety review

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

Faure, Christian

DANCING FOREVER (Fais danser la poussière) – made for TV

France (90 mi) 2010

The 9th Annual CHICAGO AFRICAN DIASPORA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL Facets Multi Media

Based on Marie Do's autobiographical novel, this absorbing film balances the two dominant factors in its heroine's destiny: her mixed-race heritage and her passion for dance in a consistently upbeat tone that matches its heroine's indomitable spirit.

Variety Ronnie Scheib

French helmer Christian Faure's absorbing made-for-TV movie, based on Marie Do's autobiographical novel, neatly balances the two dominant factors in its heroine's destiny: her mixed-race heritage and her passion for dance. Unlike Darren Aronofsky's schizophrenic approach to ballet in the current "Black Swan," "Dancing Forever's" consistently upbeat tone matches its heroine's indomitable spirit. Featuring fully fleshed-out, juicily ambivalent characters coping with complexities of racism in 1960s France, and a wealth of colorful, well-executed terpsichorean material performed by a talented, real-life ballerina lead, pic satisfies on a number of levels. Cable arts channels and ethnic-themed fests should take note.

Following Do's fictional counterpart, Maya, through childhood and adolescence, the film's first half centers on the evolving relationship between Maya (played at different ages by Ambre N'Doumbe, Nastasia Caruge and Tatiana Seguin) and her mother, Rose (Marie Denarnaud), a fascinatingly conflicted character. Though madly doting on her daughter as they snuggle together in bed, clowning around like sisters, Rose has trouble dealing with society's vision of her as the unmarried mother of a half-black illegitimate child, and she expresses her shame through impatience with Maya's kinky hair and coffee-colored skin (Rose insists that Maya wear a hat outdoors because she is "brown enough as it is").

Maya is further marginalized when Rose marries upper-class businessman Francois-Xavier (Xavier de Guillebon). Yet every time the situation threatens to veer toward melodrama with clear-cut villains and victims (evicted from Francois-Xavier's snobbish clan's holiday celebration, Maya spends Christmas Eve outside in the snow), characters evolve to accommodate each other in a shifting family dynamic.

Unlike Rose, Maya stubbornly refuses to be shamed or cowed, absorbing Rose's affection and ignoring her ambivalence. Encouraged by her accordion-playing communist uncle (Michel Jonasz), Maya increasingly finds her autonomy through dance, which gradually overtakes the film. Up-and-coming modern dancer Seguin, in her screen debut, infuses Maya with delight in dazzling movement and concentrated grace. Never needing a cutaway to cover up an actress' shaky ballet moves, helmer Faure gives free rein to the improvisatory give-and-take of rehearsal scenes and the dynamic flow of Do's choreography (Do also collaborated on the screenplay with Bruno Tardon).

Though dance rules the day in the pic's second half, racial issues still crop up. In New York, with the Alvin Ailey troupe, Maya confronts the either-or absolutism of black/white identity in America, and in true biopic meller fashion, disaster strikes just as Maya is on the brink of stardom. Yet in Do's telling, sheer force of will always trumps mere happenstance.

Thesping is excellent throughout, and Denarnaud is particularly impressive in making her sensual, in-the-moment Rose immensely sympathetic, despite the character's immaturity. Tech credits are sturdy, believably capturing period detail.

Camera (color), Jean-Pierre Herve; editor, Jean-Daniel Fernandez-Qundez; music, Charles Court; production designer, Sebastian Birchler; costume designer, Christine Jacquin; sound, Jean-Pierre Fenie; supervising sound editor, Jean-Marc Lentretien; choreography, Do; casting, Stephane Finot. Reviewed on DVD, New York, Dec. 20, 2010. (In African Diaspora Film Festival.) Running time: 97 MIN.

Favreau, Jon

ELF B+ 90

USA (95 mi) 2003

Sure it’s cornball, but the terrific cast, well designed Christmas sequences, some truly inspired musical choices, and out and out laughter makes this a terrific holiday pick, the kind of movie that’s sure to pick up some of those lagging spirits. Will Ferrell plays the role of his lifetime as a human that mistakenly ends up at the North Pole raised by Santa (Ed Asner) and the Elves, specifically Papa Elf, who is none other than Bob Newhart. As an elf named Buddy who is incapable of being anything but nice, Ferrell is a misfit, as despite having the Christmas spirit, the primary goal of all elves, he towers in size over them in their tiny workshops and doesn’t possess their flair for making toys. When he overhears the other elves talking about him, as he can never make his Christmas quota, he realizes, at last, that he’s human, and goes to New York City in search of his dad, passing through a winter wonderland that resembles movies from Christmas past like RUDOLPH THE RED-NOSED REINDEER.

Immediately the film turns on a dime. To the upbeat, jazzy sounds of Louis Prima singing “Pennies from Heaven,” we see Buddy’s incomprehensible innocence, his honest charm of age 30 going on 10 mix with the cut throat cynicism of New Yorkers, expressed by the choice of his real dad, James Caan as Walter, always the hard ass ever since his role as Sonny Corleone, a guy who’s so wrapped up in his job, he hardly ever looks at his wife (Mary Steenburgen) or son Michael (Daniel Tay). Buddy, dressed as usual in his bright green elf suit, wanders up to Walter’s office suite at a publishing firm in the Empire State Building and the entire staff gathers around thinking he’s a Chistmas sing-a-gram, cheerfully waiting for a funny message. When Buddy tells him he’s his father, Walter yanks him out of there pronto believing he’s a nut case, but Buddy screams out the name of his mother, which registers distant memories. When the security guards suggest as a joke that he join the elves at Gimbels across the street, they never dreamed that they saved Buddy’s life, as the department store manager, seeing him dressed as a green elf, immediately assumes he belongs in the North Pole display where Buddy spots the positively delightful Zooey Deschanel as Jovie decorating a tree. After she tells him to back off when he approaches, she’s amused when Buddy flips out when he hears Santa Claus is coming the next morning at 10 am, and promptly spends the entire night decorating for Santa’s visit.

Buddy awakes in Gimbels to the sounds of Jovie singing “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” in the employee shower, blissfully joining in after awhile which scares the pants off of both of them, Buddy fleeing immediately when he realizes she’s naked. But they become fast friends when she realizes Buddy possesses a strange honesty, getting kicked out of Gimbels after exposing a department store Santa Claus as being a fraud, telling him “You sit on a throne of lies!” Meanwhile, even after a paternity test, Walter can’t believe this “deranged elf man” can possibly be his son, but when they realize he has nowhere else to go, he stays with them, rearranging their decor into holiday cheer. Michael is embarrassed by him as well until he rescues him with a dazzling display in a snowball fight, taking renewed interest on the spot, actually encouraging Buddy to ask Jovie out on a date, which is priceless moment in the film, as he exposes her to his infectious charm of silly fun, beautifully sequenced together to the voice of Frank Sinatra singing “You Make Me Feel So Young.”

By this time, despite the breezy, lightweight quality of the film, the audience gets swept away into Buddy’s world, which Farrell renders as totally harmless, beautifully expressed in a hilarious fight scene with a real midget, Peter Dinklage, who takes serious offense to Buddy’s repeated references calling him an elf. There’s a lot to like in this film, which despite being completely family oriented for kids of all ages, has the tiniest bit of edge to it for adults, such as Santa’s snide reference to the horse mounted New York City Police Rangers, who, after their offensive display at the Simon and Garfunkel concert in the park in 1985, forced him to put them on his naughty list. It’s a feel good film that actually has a delightful sweep about it, remaining intelligent throughout, briskly paced, closing with a festive note, not the least of which is Ray Charles voice singing “Winter Wonderland” over the end credits.

eFilmCritic.com (Kelly Palma) review [5/5]

This film truly captures the Christmas Spirit. Jon Favreau does a phenomenal job of capturing the essence of the old television Christmas specials. The color, sound and look of this film will ensure that it will be around for many many holiday seasons to come. From the delightful soundtrack, to the stop animation figures and Leon Redbone's voice-overs every aspect of this film is enjoyable. But the icing on the cake or I guess the star on the tree in this case is Zooey Deschanel's singing voice; one word - FABULOUS!

ELF is the story of Buddy [Will Ferrell] who is a human adopted by elves and raised by Papa Elf [Bob Newhart] who at the age of approx 30 finally figures out that he is not like other elves. So Buddy sets off in search of his real dad [James Caan] in New York City. What ensues is a hilarious tale of Buddy's adventures in the city. From meeting his new step mom and brother [Mary Steenburgen & Daniel Tay], to attempting to gain his dad's acceptance and love and then finally Buddy's attempt at romance with Jovie [Zooey Deschanel]. In the process Buddy helps those around him realize what is really important and that the best way to spread Christmas cheer is singing loud for all to hear. This is the best family friendly film I've seen in a long time. Buddy is 30 going on 10. Will Ferrell does such a good job with the innocence of Buddy you almost forget he's a grown man wearing bright yellow tights. The entire cast is simply lovely. Buddy is a fish out of water in NYC, but eventually he has everyone wanting to climb into the fishbowl with him.

ELF is a journey for adults and kids alike, you won't be sorry you jumped aboard - it's truly a magical experience. For more fun, check out the dvd extras. If you can't pass all the extras, just think of Christmas day and then you can get on the elevator.

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3.5/5]

Elf is a movie that’s so profoundly ridiculous that it has to be admired, if for no other reason other than its sheer willingness to run with its premise and take it to the end of the line. In his first leading role in which the whole movie depends on his performance, former SNLer Ferrell demonstrates that he’s the one to call when there’s an impossible comic job to be done. As many have noted about Ferrell, he is fearless – which is no small feat when the eyes of millions will greet your every move. Ferrell has what it takes to play Buddy the elf and dress for an entire movie in yellow tights, green elf suit with fur collar, and matching hat and elf shoes, and play the naïf from the North Pole in Manhattan to find his biological father (Caan). The effect is something like those on-the-street segments that Letterman does on his show in which he sends out someone dressed in a bear suit to hail a cab or piles dozens of people in goofy costumes into a neighborhood boîte. It’s dumbfoundingly silly, and somehow we all emerge the better from the experience, psychologically cleansed and more willing to embrace the absurd. Well, Elf embraces the absurd with arms outstretched, not unlike the comic way Buddy’s surrogate father Papa Elf (Newhart) stretches out his arms for a hug with his many-times-larger son and gets more than he bargained for at first impulse. In addition to Ferrell’s comic pulse at the heart of the film, Elf surrounds its leading man with a choice group of actors (among them Bob Newhart, Zooey Deschanel, Mary Steenburgen, and James Caan), who are all individual masters of irony. Then for further laughs, the movie throws in the gruff Lou Grant (Asner) as Santa Claus and a sequence featuring Peter Dinklange (The Station Agent) that has to be one of the most politically incorrect – and the funniest – scenes in a movie this season. Plus, we discover that in addition to her talents that we’ve already discovered, Deschanel possesses a lovely singing voice. The other thing that Elf has in its favor – especially during a week when it opens against The Matrix Revolutions – is its low-tech look. Actor-director Jon Favreau makes it appear as if he has just graduated from Blue Screen 101 – and I mean this as a compliment. All the process shots and forced perspectives of a grown man among all the elves have something of a DIY aesthetic, a look that’s completely refreshing amid all the technological razzmatazz we’ve come to expect from movies these days. The aesthetic also comes closer to fitting in with the whole Christmas spirit in reminding us that the season is all about believing. Ferrell and company make us believe in this "deranged elf man," and in doing so offer the greatest gift of all.

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Kevin Clemons) dvd review

Every Thanksgiving I watch a sappy, winsome holiday movie that somehow brings with it the holiday spirit. It's a personal tradition that may seem silly, but it means a lot to me. The only bad thing is, for the past several years I have been relegated to the same films over and over, and that, unsurprisingly, grows tiresome. So it is with a certain amount of trepidation that I greet each Christmas with the hope that something new and terrific will come along, and it has, this year, in the lovely little package of Elf.

Told with an unabashed love of the holiday season and an absolutely fantastic performance by Will Ferrell, Elf is one of those Christmas films that not only packs a lot of heart but a lot of comedy also. The plot is ludicrous, which should always be the case in a film like this, and the performances and the witty script are enough to make you forget about those sorts of things anyway.

Buddy the Elf (Ferrell) is the biggest and best known elf at the North Pole, and while that may at first seem like a compliment, it really isn't. The reason he towers above all of the other elves is because he is in fact a human, brought to the North Pole after he stowed away in Santa's gift bag. Raised by Papa Elf (Newhart), Buddy doesn't quite fit in, and slowly he is beginning to realize it. This leads him on a trip to New York where he seeks out his biological father Walter (Caan), a children's book editor who is in desperate need of a hit.

As Buddy begins to interact with Walter he also meets an eclectic group of friends including a cute shopgirl named Jovie (Deschanel), his stepmother Emily (Steenburgen), and his new stepbrother Michael (Tay). But there are also the requisite moment where Buddy has to save the day and rescue Santa and Christmas and some other carved in stone scenes. There is little doubt as to what will happen but that really isn't the point.

From the outside Elf looks like a film that would be likely to fail, with the aforementioned premise and some truly strange casting—James Caan in a broad family comedy, or better yet, Bob Newhart as Papa Elf—yet director Jon Favreau and writer David Berenbaum have crafted a sort of near masterpiece. So much of the pleasure they obviously derided from the film is evident in every step along the way, and Ferrell's performance has enough joyous energy to melt the coldest of hearts.

By overloading the film with humor and emotion Favreau wisely eschews any obvious gags and instead lets the story build with several outstanding scenes that place Buddy in strange situations. In essence this is Big with an elf, but Favreau never really drills the fish out of water aspect home too hard, and thanks to Ferrell's performance we kind of start to believe Buddy as a child experiencing things for the first time. The interaction between Ferrell and his co-stars is another treat, as he and Caan play off of each other wonderfully and Caan shows off some outstanding comic abilities. One needs to look no further to the first family dinner with Buddy, Walter, Emily, and Michael that is both touching and hilarious.

Sure the film is sappy, and the ”lets all believe in Christmas again” thing has been done time and time again, but here is it done with such carefree abandon that it ultimately wins you over. This is a terrific film that deserves to become a modern holiday classic.

Slate (Michael Agger) review

Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review

filmcritic.com (Sean O'Connell) review [4.5/5]

Nitrate Online (Gregory Avery) review

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2.5/4]

New York Magazine (Peter Rainer) review

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias] A Grinch review from Scott Tobias at the Onion

Flipside Movie Emporium (Rob Vaux) review [C-]

Reel.com DVD review [Pam Grady]

Film Freak Central review (Walter Chaw]

Movie-Vault.com (Joseph Kastner) review

Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [3/5]

Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review

BeyondHollywood.com Nix

Christian Science Monitor (David Sterritt) review [4/4]

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [6/10]

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [1.5/5]

Brilliant Observations on 1776 Films [Clayton Trapp]

The Village Voice [Ed Park]

Time Out review

Washington Post (Desson Howe) review

Washington Post (Stephen Hunter) review

Boston Globe review [3/4] Wesley Morris

The Boston Phoenix review Mark Bazer

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]

San Francisco Examiner (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]

The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review

Faxon, Nat and Jim Rash

THE WAY, WAY BACK C+ 77

USA (103 mi) 2013

It’s like spring break for adults. —Susanna (AnnaSophia Robb)

Beware of false advertising when it comes to summer movies, where one of the first out of the block, released over the 4^th of July weekend, is THE WAY, WAY BACK, where a plethora of reviews are calling this similar in tone to LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE (2006), but don’t for a second believe it. While the two films share the same studio, Fox Searchlight, which is trumpeting the dubious connection in their ad campaign, and has two members of the same cast in Steve Carell and Toni Collette, both are a huge disappointment. This is the same studio, by the way, that sued director Kenneth Lonergan and considered his film 2011 Top Ten Films of the Year #2 Margaret unreleasable, so it sat unseen on the studio shelves for 6 years before releasing the film for a single week, making sure as few people as possible saw the film. And for those looking for laughs and a feelgood comedy…oops, we’re sorry, but this is a film about the devastating consequences of divorce and adult bullying, where the lives of kids are secondary and get tossed around like leaves in the wind. What’s missing in this film is any hint of character development, which was the strong suit of MISS SUNSHINE, filled with memorable, and even lovable, characters. Not so here, as Steve Carell plays the most obnoxious person in the universe, rivaling Ben Stiller in GREENBERG (2010), a loathsome character the audience will simply hate, while Allison Janney plays the second most obnoxious person in the universe, the crazy neighbor next door who constantly has a drink in her hand and whose high-pitched, hysterical laugh can be heard throughout, that insincere kind of laugh that only gets louder as the jokes get less funny. What these two have in common is their tunnel vision ability to ignore and alienate kids through the absolute worst parenting techniques, where the example they serve is little more than pathetic. What’s worse, the film uses their infantile behavior for comic laughs, reversing the roles, where it’s the adults who act recklessly and irresponsibly, while most of the children are all much more mature.

Written by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, the duo who co-wrote (along with the director) Alexander Payne’s The Descendants (2011), though this was written before that film, where there appear to be two separate stories, the first of which involves the dysfunctional world of adults, where without any back story, a divorced mother Pam (Toni Collette, another troubled woman) and her painfully shy 14-year old son Duncan (Liam James), tag along with her new overbearing boyfriend Trent (Steve Carell), and his typically superficial daughter Steph (Zoe Levin) and head to Trent’s summer house on the beach in Massachusetts. The title references the position in the car where the anti-social Duncan chooses to sit, in the way, way back of the stationwagon facing in the opposite direction of the other occupants. When they arrive, Betty (Allison Janney) enthusiastically announces she’s off the wagon and greets them as an alcoholic disaster waiting to happen, while making excuses for the blasé behavior of her own two kids, Susanna (AnnaSophia Robb), a moody teenager a few years older than Duncan, and Peter (River Alexander), the youngest and most ignored kid in the movie, who has a problem with one traveling eye, so his mother continually wants him to wear a patch out of sheer embarrassment. By the end of the film, however, the kid is adorable. Another couple joins them, Kip (Rob Corddry), the neighbor with a boat, and his promiscuous wife Joan (Amanda Peet) that Trent continually leers at. While these adults have backyard barbeque and drinking parties that go on into all hours of the night and morning, occasionally indulging in a little weed as well, buying from one of the neighbor kids, they make Duncan’s life a living hell, especially Trent, who steamrolls him every chance he gets, literally squashing any sense of self-esteem, continually making him feel worthless. The only worse movie parent that comes to mind is the Reverend Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) in The Night of the Hunter (1955), and he’s a psychopathic knife-wielding murderer.

If you’re not bored to tears by the first half, where the generic sounding indie music is equally bland, showing no originality whatsoever, usually the staple for these kinds of films, as they’re usually about rebellious individuality, thankfully the film has a second half, where Duncan finds a water park on the other end of town, which may as well be another movie. While never reaching the sarcastic humor and observational honesty of Adventureland (2009), similarly set in an amusement park, this one includes still more infantile adults, like those working at the park, which includes both writers in amusing roles, and it also includes the co-manager Owen, Sam Rockwell, who is staggeringly hilarious in his role. Besides being a natural born clown that thrives on doing comedy bits and being the center of attention at an amusement park, causing grief to his more responsible wife Caitlin, Maya Rudolph, the other co-manager who actually has to run things, Owen turns out to be the friend that Duncan has been looking for, offering him a job there for the summer. Owen literally turns the kid’s life around, placing him in situations where he has to find his way, and then trusting that he’ll succeed, actually giving him a life that he never felt like he had. Trent only gets worse, twisting the screws of bad taste, while Duncan actually develops a friendship with the pretty girl next door, Susanna, while concealing the job, the developing relationships, and everything else from his family, who were ignoring him anyway except to berate him and boss him around. While Duncan is the star, he’s only mildly effective in the role, perhaps overly passive, and not all that interesting, while Sam Rockwell steals every scene he’s in, literally altering the focus of the film, becoming the only character worth paying attention to, delivering one of the best performances of his career. Because Rockwell is so funny, one might overlook the complexity of his growing friendship with Duncan, the way he nurtures the kid and treats him like an adult, even as he has his own personal growing up issues that need to be worked out. It’s a killer of a performance, one that deserves to be in a better film, which may be why the studio is hyping this film to be more than it is. In truth, the film raises some unpleasant social issues and then leaves them hanging at the end of the picture, never addressing the reality of what actually matters.

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Amber Wilkinson]

Nat Faxton and Jim Rash's directorial debut may not be breaking any new ground but this is a warm and funny tale, helped enormously by good performances and a snappy script.

Similar in tone to Little Miss Sunshine, the echo is reinforced by the presence of Toni Collette and Steve Carrell and the fact that Fox Searchlight rushed to snatch it up at Sundance. And if the dysfunctional family territory is familiar, the humour is consistenty fresh in what turns out to be a not so much a coming-of-age story as a coming-of-confidence.

Collette's Pam is a case in point. Making tentative steps back into the world of romance following her divorce, she may seem chirpy on the outside and full of excitement for a summer vacation with new boyfriend Trent (Steve Carrell) but nervousness and a desire to please hang around her like a cloud. Then there's her son Duncan (Liam James). Introspective from the outset, he's not helped in the slightest by Trent's bullish disregard for anyone's feelings but his own, typified by his would-be stepfather's declaration, with not the slightest hint of a joke, that on a ratings scale from 1-10, Duncan is a three.

Arriving at a ready-made community of once-a-year friends, described by one as "spring break for adults", the child/adult reversal is everywhere - from a disregard for fidelity to an overindulgence in booze and drugs - leading Duncan to seek escape, through both a hestitant friendship with the nextdoor neighbour's daughter Susanna (AnnaSophia Robb) and the discovery of local water park Water Wizz.

Wizz is from a bygone age, and the manager Owen (Sam Rockwell, putting in his best comic performance for a long time) could make a slacker look industrious. Drifting around the park on a wave of one-liners, he nevertheless recognises Duncan as a good kid who just needs a hand up and soon gets him involved in the running of the place while peppering him with a barrage of gags that mostly flow over his head - "You don't get sarcasm, do you?" he points out. As the summer progresses, Duncan starts to find a spark of self-worth and it seems his mum may be on the verge of a similar epiphany.

James, who has been a jobbing TV actor for several years, sells Duncan completely, making his journey seem natural and gradual. Collette, as always, proves the queen of emotional transition and Carrell, although shackled with the least believable and most two-dimensional of the main characters, nevertheless throws himself into it with comic gusto. There is also terrific support from the likes of Allison Janney, whose neighbour Betty takes outrageous to Oscar Wilde proportions, and Maya Rudolph, as Caitlyn, the water park second-in-command who is hoping Owen will do some growing up of his own.

Faxton and Rash - who previously teamed up on The Descendants - let their script do the talking and create a good sense of atmosphere, neatly contrasting the juvenile sense of uncertainty of Duncan to the overblown bravado of the adults. The production values may rough and ready and the direction never more than workmanlike but this is a sunny crowd-pleaser that keeps you rooting for the kid.

Slant Magazine [Chris Cabin]

Another white, insular teen is having yet another initially shitty summer at the beginning of The Way, Way Back, the disappointing directorial debut of Jim Rash and Nat Faxon, Alexander Payne's Oscar-winning writing partners on The Descendants. This particular smart yet tragically awkward teen happens to be named Duncan (Liam James), who's being dragged on summer vacation in Massachusetts by his mother, Pam (Toni Collette), and her sternly dickish boyfriend, Trent (Steve Carell). At first content at just averting his elders and Trent's obnoxious daughter, Steph (Zoe Levin), Duncan begins frequenting and eventually is employed by Water Wizz, a family water park where he comes under the tutelage of Owen (Sam Rockwell), a charmingly sarcastic slacker who has the run of the place.

The film has admirable intentions, as it attempts to depict the hardships of a young man trying to come out of his shell at the very same time his mother is attempting to do the same following a bitter divorce. Pam is excited about Trent, enough so that she forgives his alpha-male posturing, even when he openly rates her child a three out of a possible 10 as an overall person. In a handful of scenes, there's a sense that Pam is still gaining her footing with romantic freedom, and that Trent, who's still carrying on with Joan (Amanda Peet), the wife of his friend, Kip (Rob Corddry), is her first uncertain step forward. This side of the story, however, goes largely unexplored in the script, which was written before The Descendants, and the film instead explores Duncan's distinctly bland coming-of-age summer, which predictably delivers unto the teen a curious dream-girl, Susanna (AnnaSophia Robb), and a nostalgic soundtrack unto audiences. "Can't Fight This Feeling" is a pretty solid tune. We really get it!

The Way, Way Back feels like the mundane midsection of two more fascinating stories. The first, concerning how Trent met Duncan's mother, is told by Pam, but sadly never seen; we don't get what was so inviting and attracting about this boorish asshole at the beginning of their relationship. The other is what happens after, when Duncan has grown courage and Trent, in hot water with Pam after his affair comes to light, has to actually work at his relationship if he wants it to succeed. The filmmakers only pay lip service to these painful, fascinating emotional undercurrents, and if there's a few laughs to be had from Rockwell and the other Water Wizz employees played by Faxon, Rash, and Maya Rudolph, there's paltry excitement or danger to make Duncan's climactic revelation of his confidence and unbound personality convincing. It's par for the course in a subgenre that too often praises the electric carelessness of teenage angst while depicting it as if it were ultimately no more exciting, though no less pleasant, than an hour in the wave pool.

An Adult Education, But Who's Doing The Teaching Here? Ella Taylor

So here's the latest cinematic scoop on the New American Family: The kids are all right — or would be if the grownups stopped acting like stoked toddlers and got with the program.

That may or may not be true in real life. From where I sit, helicopter parents pose a more potent threat to child development than footloose adults. But the proposition will strike joy into the hearts of teenagers, who are the primary target audience for the brisk new movie The Way, Way Back. Adults are welcome too, but they should know they're in for a drubbing.

Like others of its kind, this cheerfully profane dramedy shoehorns a coming-of-age parable into a domestic drama. Its big joke, edged with a hint of potential disaster, is a July 4 barbecue that plays out, in at least one unwilling participant's eyes, as "spring break for adults."

Fourteen-year-old Duncan, astutely underplayed by Canadian actor Liam James, carries his unhappiness in his rounded shoulders and shambling gait. You get the sense that Duncan has been holding a lot of stuff in. For a while.

And no wonder: His divorced, devoted but unevenly overprotective mother Pam (the always terrific Toni Collette) has dragged Duncan away from the father he adores to a seaside vacation with her new partner, Trent (Steve Carell).

Within minutes of their arrival Pam is drinking, dancing, doing a little furtive weed and trying not to notice that her betrothed comes on awfully pally with a comely neighbor. (And by the way, will someone please give the talented Amanda Peet a role as something other than a man-eating minx?)

Carell's transition to serious actor has mostly had him playing lovable goofballs. But he has the watchful, furious eyes of an ax-murderer, or at least a soul-crusher, and directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (who co-wrote The Descendants with Alexander Payne) have deftly cast him in The Way, Way Back as the latter. No surprise, he's pretty good as Trent, whose idea of responsible stepfathering is to maneuver Duncan into a psychological corner, then ask him what he's doing there.

Pam sees this, but she doesn't want to know it, so poor Duncan slinks off to sulk, act awkward around the promising blonde next door (Annasophia Robb), and ride a girlie bike around town — in the course of which excursion, he happens on a decaying water park. At the Water Wizz, it will not surprise you to learn, he finds a surrogate family among a motley assemblage of screwups and stalled strivers who offer him both and unconditional acceptance.

The Way, Way Back isn't exactly memorable, and strictly speaking it would do just fine on a small screen. But unlike the glib The Descendants, which is also about, it's smart, funny and moving about human weakness. And it doesn't divide the world into good and bad adults — not counting that one bona-fide creep and his clueless squeeze.

Faxon and Rash keep faith with what it feels like to be an adolescent wading through a world of adults who routinely fail to practice what they preach. But they also attend to the abject bewilderment that comes with trying to conduct oneself like an adult in a world that encourages childlike behavior.

Parental solidity comes in surprising packages in The Way, Way Back. Some will find Allison Janney's manic neighbor offensive or implausible, and I'll admit the character as written is a tad overdrawn. But this skilled actress gradually teases out of an understanding woman who you'd want covering your back, and who treats her own children — and Duncan — as anything but incompetent infants.

The same goes for Sam Rockwell's hilarious Owen, a foul-mouthed slacker at the Water Wizz and an influence no helicopter parent would allow within a mile of their child. Undisciplined and, Owen understands what it means to be marginalized, misunderstood and ignored.

He's also willing to do what every good-enough parent does: show up, observe, listen and support. To his own astonishment, he turns out to be the movie's most unlikely role-model — and its most appealing.

The Way, Way Back Offers a Sugar High, but Not ... - Village Voice

'The Way Way Back' Sets the Coming of Age Tale in a Water Park Jesse Hassenger from Pop Matters

The Way, Way Back: A Summer Treat Mary Pols from Time magazine

Twitch [Chase Whale]

Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]

DustinPutman.com [Dustin Putman]

'The Way, Way Back' and the Joy of the Kinder, Gentler Summer ... Esther Zuckerman from The Atlantic Wire

Sundance Review: 'The Way, Way Back' A Familiar But Crowd ... Cory Everett from The Playlist

Review: Sam Rockwell steals Nat Faxon and Jim Rash's rocky - HitFix Gregory Ellwood

The Way, Way Back Review - Sundance 2013 - Film School Rejects Rob Hunter

ScreenDaily [David D'Arcy]

Film.com [William Goss]

Film Threat - The Way, Way Back Brian Tallerico from Film Threat

The Film Stage [Dan Mecca]

Review: 'The Way, Way Back' is doubly good (Includes first-hand ... Sarah Gopaul from The Digital Journal

The Way, Way Back | Variety Peter DeBruge from Variety

Sundance film festival 2013: The Way, Way Back – first look review ... Damon Wise from The Guardian

'The Way, Way Back' is a shore thing - The Boston Globe Ty Burr, July 4, 2013

Movie review: 'The Way, Way Back' has a sweet side and a sting Betsy Sharkey from The LA Times, July 4, 2013

'Way, Way Back's' Liam James finds a way to keep life normal Dana Ferguson from The LA Times, July 5, 2013

Movie Reviews, Showtimes and Trailers - Movies - New York Times ... A.O. Scott

'The Way, Way Back' Chronicles a Boy's Difficult Summer Dave Itzkoff from The New York Times

Fei Mu

A brief biography of Fei Mu Chinese Cinema

b. 1906, Shanghai d. 1951 Director. Acclaimed as one of the most accomplished of all Chinese directors, Fei Mu spent his childhood in Beijing. After graduating from a French school, Fei worked as an accountant for a mining company in Hebei province. Besides his knowledge of French, Fei was self-taught in English, German, Russian and Italian. Before being hired as chief editor for the information department of North China Film Company in 1930, Fei contributed film reviews to numerous newspapers and journals in Beijing. He also co-published, with Zhu Shilin, a film magazine entitled Hollywood (Haolaiwu). Fei moved to Shanghai in 1932 where Lianhua Film Company offered him a position as director. His critically acclaimed debut, City Night (1933), concerns class tensions between workers and capitalists and exhibits an unmistakable sympathy for the working poor. Following this success, Fei directed Life and A Nun's Love (both 1934). His *Song of China (aka Filial Piety, co-dir. *Luo Mingyou, 1935) glorified traditional family values and was intended to help promote the ideology of the New Life Movement. The film was taken to the USA and re-edited for a limited release. Fei proceeded to Wolf Hunting (1936), a film that deals implicitly with the signs of increasing Japanese aggression against China. Fei's last film, Spring in a Small Town (1948), presents its triangular love story with great conceptual and technical maturity. Many critics consider this film to be one of the best art films produced before 1949, a Chinese equivalent to Citizen Kane (dir. Orson Welles, 1941). Fei suffered from chronicle health problems and had very poor eyesight. He died in 1952, three years after moving to Hong Kong and co-founding Longma Film Company with Zhu Shilin and Fei Luyi. Further Reading: A. Zhang (1987), on Fei Mu's film art.

NationMaster - Encyclopedia: Fei Mu bio and filmography

"Then and Now: Two Versions of Springtime in a Small Town" Artifical Eye essay

media and literature, spring 2005 photographic portrait of Fei Mu

Fei Mu - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

SPRING IN A SMALL TOWN (Xiao cheng zhi chun)

China (93 mi) 1948

Time Out review Tony Rayns

The crowning achievement of one of China's finest directors, this unique film both reflects and dissects the mood of helpless impotence which afflicted many Chinese in the years after the war. After a 10-year absence, a doctor visits a married couple living in a bomb-scarred country town. The husband is a broken man, close to suicide; the wife was once his lover and they start to drift back into an affair under the nose of her husband. The sense of frustration and enervation is palpable, underlined by Fei's brilliant idea to use dissolves within scenes, but the counter-current of renascent desire (sparked by Wei Wei's phenomenal performance as the wife) makes this also a very sensual movie.

The aesthetics and moral politics of Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town ‘The Courage to Live’: Woman, Morality, and Humanism in Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town, Susan Daruvala article synopsis, entire article on (pdf) here: Edinburgh paper outline

This article attempts to analyse Fei Mu's 1948 masterpiece, Spring in a Small Town, and to provide a reading based on a contextual investigation of its aesthetics. Fei Mu's modernist cinematography both privileges the main female protagonist's subjectivity and underwrites the lyricism of the film, which links it in turn to a Confucian moral message. A central concern is with passion (qing) as a route to understanding. The film can be seen on some levels as responding to the Chinese war epics that came out in 1947. Parallels are drawn with David Lean's Brief Encounter (1945), a British depiction of passion and restraint, to suggest the universality of some of the underlying moral questions confronting different societies with different class and political structures in the post-war world.

Sycorax Pine: "Spring in a Small Town" dir. Fei Mu

In a town so small it seems to be made up of only one tiny family, the bored Yuwen walks the deserted, ancient walls as long and as often as possible, trying to forget her marriage to the sickly Liyan, whom she has never loved. Liyan spends his days moping about the garden of his crumbling house, in despair that his family’s fortune and power have declined so far under his feeble stewardship, snapping at his sprightly schoolgirl sister and trying in vain to have heart-to-hearts with his increasingly cold wife.

A thaw spreads through the household with the visit of Liyan’s childhood friend Zhichen, now a doctor, who, we soon find, has an equally affectionate history with every member of the household, although the affection takes different forms of amorousness. While Liyan fondly plans to marry his friend off to his young sister, after a suitable number of years, it gradually becomes clear to him (and, much more rapidly, to us) that Zhichen has considerably more interest in Yuwen, who was the doctor’s neighbor growing up, and whom he should have married. A complex dance between desire and honor ensues, complicated by a profound affection (read “sexual tension”) between Zhichen and Liyan, as well as between both men and Yuwen.

Although I have only jumped back about ten years in my progress through the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list in order to see this film (having just discovered its availability on Netflix), the historical gap seems much longer, as if this really should be a silent movie, with all that era’s symbolic expansiveness of gesture. When I called the plot a “complex dance between desire and honor,” I meant it literally as well as metaphorically: much of the movie occurs in silence, and gesture acquires an almost balletic importance.

The orientation of the actors’ bodies to one another and to the camera are often fascinatingly unconventional. In one scene, Yuwen circles around the front of Liyan (who holds her by the hand) in a wide arc, eclipsing him as she passes between him and the camera with her back turned to us. I can’t think of another film off the top of my head that did this with the planes of space between us/the camera and the characters’ faces. In another scene, Zhichen stands on a low wall, towering above Liyan, who holds his hand affectionately and begs him not to leave the house (the doctor’s morals have been making him skittish). The hushed, gestural (rather than vocal or verbal) quality of the film emphasizes the furtive nature of the plot, in which anxious caresses are exchanged behind locked doors with glass panels and great care is taken not to disturb the calm of Liyan’s sickroom. So too does the wonderful voiceover by Wei Wei, who plays Yuwen, in which she seems to be whispering breathless poetry to us behind the backs of all the characters, including her own.

Perhaps the strangest and most disconcerting of Spring’s filmic techniques is Fei Mu’s habit of changing “scenes” without moving the camera. In other words, a shot will come to an end in the middle of a dramatic scene (a single dialogue between two characters, for instance, taking place in a single stretch of dramatic time), and when the new shot begins the camera will have remained stationary, the stage setting will still be the same, but the actors will have moved during the cut from shot to shot. My poor education in cinematic art leaves me unaware of any term there might be for this technique – so if you know, I would love to hear about it.

Spring in a Small Town was released in 1948, and Fei Mu died only a few years later in 1951. The film was banned for many years in China, perhaps for its frankness about adultery, perhaps for its implicit individualism. In 2002, however, after a long enforced hiatus from filmmaking following The Blue Kite, Chinese director Tian Zhuangzhuang remade Spring in what is apparently an impressive film in its own right. I look forward to seeing it. Despite a certain wooden theatricality (by no means a bad word in my lexicon) that accompanied my sense that Fei Mu’s film belonged to an earlier era, this emerged as a delicate, lovely film and an affectionate narrative of gestures.

Xiao Cheng Zhi Chun Stephen Teo from Film Reference

China Now Magazine Shelly Kraicer compares Zhuangzhuang’s 2002 remake to the original, February 13, 2009

The House Next Door (Andrew Chan) Spring (and Springtime) in a Small Town

"Then and Now: Two Versions of Springtime in a Small Town" Artifical Eye essay

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman] offering brief comparisons

Asia Pacific Arts: Classics of Epoch Proportions, now on DVD Brian Hu looks at now DVD available Chinese classics

Film Notes - Spring in a Small Town Kevin Jack Hagopian from New York State Writer’s Institute

Xiao chen zhi chun (Spring in a small town, Fei Mu, 1948)   Noel Vera from Critic After Dark

DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) dvd review [2/5] also reviewing: Springtime in a Small Town

PopMatters (Michael Barrett) review offering brief comparisons

Spring In A Small Town Noel Megahey from DVD Times, also reviewing: Springtime In A Small Town

3continents - Chinese Cinema Chinese Cinema, a Unique National History, essay by Chen Shan, Beijing Film Academy history teacher

Talking Pictures (UK) review Alan Pavelin and Howard Schumann, who also reviews the remake

DVD Verdict (Joel Pearce) dvd review

Xiaocheng Zhichun (Spring in a Small Town) (1948) DVDRip (SiRiUs ... Torrent site that offers a film essay

supernaut ... i whore for art … 小城之春 - The best Chinese ... Voted Hong Kong Film Award winner as best Chinese language film of all time, Top 20 listed, March 2005

Spring Water Study guide site, including director bio, questions to ponder, and song translations

The Storyboard Guo Shao-hua

SPRING IN A SMALL TOWN (Fei Mu, 1948) « Dennis Grunes

not coming to a theater near you (Leo Goldsmith) capsule review

CHINA & INNER ASIA SESSIONS reference in first paragraph

Urban Cinefile SPRINGTIME IN A SMALL TOWN Andrew L. Urban and Richard Kuipers (in his final paragraph) reference the original film

Channel 4 Film capsule review

Hong Kong Film Awards' List of The Best 100 Chinese Motion ... Monkey Peaches

Yingxi (shadow play): the initial Chinese conception about film Jubin Hu essay from Screening the Past, November 1, 2000

Tian Zhuangzhuang Springs Back an interview on why he did a 2002 remake by Robin Gatto, August 29 – September 8, 2002, including his review here: Springtime In A Small Town

BFI | Sight & Sound | Springtime in a Small Town (2002) Philip Kemp reviews the 2002 remake, July 2003

'Springtime' again for Tian - Los Angeles Times Hugh Hart, May 28, 2004

Chicago Reader Movie Review Jonathan Rosenbaum looks at 2004 releases and offers brief comments about both films, January 5, 2005, also another Cinema Scope article here (reference last 4th and 5th paragraphs): Global Discoveries on DVD: By Jonathan Rosenbaum

Spring in a Small Town Transcribed version of the screenplay, translated by Andrew F. Jones

Spring in a small town (Xiǎochéng zhī chūn) - Fei Mu (1948) The entire film may be seen here on YouTube (93:15), also here: Cinemafilms: 小城之春 / Spring in a small town - Fei Mu (1948) or here: Internet Archive: Details: Spring in a Small Town (小城之春)

Fejos, Paul, aka: Pál Fejös

Fejos, Paul Art and Culture

A World War I flying ace, a piano-factory worker who earned a degree in medicine, a published anthropologist, a scenarist with Hungarian silents, and most notably, a Hollywood filmmaker for Universal Studios, Paul Féjos appears in film histories as a short footnote. He's remembered, and occasionally celebrated, for a couple of things: his capacity to make the camera tell the story in its movement and for naturalism in an era when pantomimic histrionics were the order of the day.

The Féjos flick most likely to appear in silent-era film festivals is "The Last Moment." The 1927 movie uses the quick-clipping montage techniques of illustrious Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein to suggest the urgency and epiphany of a drowning man's final visions. The filmmaker also achieves immediacy by foregoing intertitles and positioning the camera above the action -- precisely the bird's-eye view we would have if we were hapless witnesses to an actual drowning.

"Lonesome" (1928) also defied contemporary practice. A young man and woman fall in love on Coney Island on a Saturday afternoon; they then quickly lose each other in a weekend crowd of thousands. To tell the archetypal story of new lovebirds' tragic separation, Féjos used the inherent drama of a crowd capable of swallowing people up like so much flotsam. He avoided the typical close-up of desperate lovers casting eyes heavenward for aid and solace.

Féjos' stay in Hollywood -- and in filmmaking -- was short-lived. He had one more major Hollywood project, an early musical called "Broadway" (1929). Injecting the night club setting with sultry, unspoken expectation, "Broadway" is more German Expressionist than Hollywood glam. After returning to Europe, Féjos jumped restlessly between production companies in France, Denmark, and Austria. In France, he directed the adrenaline-inducing "Fantômas" (1932), which turned the popular French series into something of a James Bond romp.

But he soon decided that the symbolism of real life was more fascinating than that of make-believe. After a stint in Madagascar, where he shot more than 100,000 feet of film, he turned his eye to anthropology. Over the rest of his career, he wrote several scholarly books on the subject.

Paul Fejos Anthony Slide from Film Reference

Few directors have had such a curious and diverse career as that of Paul Fejös, who was equally at home behind a camera directing entertainment features and documentaries or on anthropological expeditions to South America and the Far East.

After an early career in his native Hungary that embraced medicine, painting, and play production, Paul Fejös became a film director in the late teens. A trip to Paris persuaded him that he wanted to direct in the West, specifically the United States. In 1921 he arrived in America and started to work at the Rockefeller Institute. Eventually, Fejös journeyed to Hollywood—despite his penniless situation—and made his first American film, The Last Moment, for $5,000, borrowed from Edward Spitz. An experimental drama in which a drowning man (Otto Matiesen) relives his life, The Last Moment was hailed by the Hollywood intelligentsia and enabled Fejös to land a contract at Universal. The film also indicated that Fejös was to be no ordinary Hollywood-style producer. He was going to use every technical trick the cinema offered in the creation of his films, whether the works were melodramas about magicians (The Last Performance) or screen adaptations of popular Broadway productions (Broadway).

Paul Fejös's one genuine screen masterpiece (and the only one of his films which is readily available for appraisal today) is Lonesome, which uses cinéma vérité to provide a study of two lonely New Yorkers who spend a Saturday afternoon and evening at Coney Island. Not only are the visuals in Lonesome stunningly exciting, but the director manages to obtain realistic performances from his two stars, Barbara Kent and Glenn Tryon, neither of whom had previously shown much indication that they were capable of such performances.

The director's Hollywood career ended as suddenly as it had begun. There were arguments over the direction of All Quiet on the Western Front, a project which he cherished but which was assigned to Lewis Milestone. Fejös returned to Hungary, where he directed Marie, generally considered the best pre-war production from that country. He also directed films in Austria and Denmark before embarking on a documentary filmmaking trip to the Far East, China, and Japan, where he made Black Horizons and A Handful of Rice, among others. In 1941 he joined the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York. He spent the rest of his life directing anthropological research.

LONESOME

aka: Solitude

USA (69 mi) 1928

Girish

A masterpiece of silent cinema that I caught at George Eastman House; I had never even heard of it. It follows one day in the lives of a man and a woman in New York City. Both of them are single and lonely. The formal invention in this film is to be seen to be believed. Rhythmic parallel editing, lightning dissolves, multiple superimpositions, fluidly mobile camera—they were performing all this intricate magic in….1928? Interestingly, the film was released right after the coming of sound, and at the last minute three dialogue sequences were shot and shoehorned into the film. They are stiff and static, and the dialogue is risibly banal. But I loved that these scenes made it into the film because it showed by contrast how stunning the silent sequences were in their freedom and imaginativeness. This movie is crying out for wider discovery on DVD.

User comments from imdb Author: Levana Taylor from Chicago

If only this remarkable movie hadn't had the misfortune to be released just when the enthusiasm for sound was sweeping all before it, it would probably have been more appreciated at the time and remembered today as one of the all-time classics. As an expression of the isolation of city life, it builds up an atmosphere of desperation, in spite of its romance with a happy ending. The scene where the boy searches frantically for the girl throughout crowded Coney Island, buffeted this way and that by the uncaring throngs, turned away by the indifferent faces of the amusement park workers, has few equals for anguish. Also unforgettable is the montage that cuts from one to the other of the lovers (who have not yet met) while they are at work, the one at a factory, the other at a telephone switchboard; the motions of the hands and the machines build to a frantic, overwhelming pace.

Unfortunately, before the movie was released it was sadly mangled by the insertion of several sound sequences, which stop the continuity dead with their absolute stasis, and feature dialogue so thunderously inane you have to suspect it was written by the sound technician. Nonetheless, "Lonesome" remains one of the most sophisticated examples of the silent movie, an art form that was killed by sound almost as soon as it had reached maturity.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - Cine-File.info Kyle A. Westphal

The first time I saw LONESOME was on the late Miriam Hansen's DVD-R copy, itself ripped from a VHS tape dubbed from a camcorder attached to the Steenbeck at the George Eastman House. If there was another generation or five tucked away somewhere in there, I wouldn't have doubted it. And yet, despite LONESOME's complex and virtuosic visual style, this degradation tarnished the experience hardly at all. Don't get me wrong: the restored 35mm print that will be screening on Sunday as part of the Kodak- and Alamo Drafthouse-initiated Reel Film Day is an object of great beauty and I envy those who will see the film for the first time under such blessed circumstances. But the mongrelized bootleg of LONESOME tapped into something elemental and true about this very special film, which would be impure and compromised in any version. Predicated on the cacophonous collision of competing aesthetics, LONESOME is a Janus-faced artifact, looking back on silent cinema's artisanal past while casting a gaze towards the talking horizon. By 1928, most American feature films eschewed tinting and toning, the techniques that a newly respectable industry regarded as classless regression to the emotional crudity of an earlier era. The hand-colored aesthetic was more retrograde still, suggestive of French imports from a quarter-century before—but those delicate efforts are front-and-center in LONESOME, and utilized to tremendous effect. (As all modern copies of LONESOME descend from a single nitrate French distribution print, the authenticity of the color effects is all-but-impossible to verify.) The color is especially strange when glimpsed alongside three brief dialogue sequences. For many years, fanciers of LONESOME tended to write these sequences off, attributing them to a janitor or perhaps a Laemmle relative who happened to be on set that day. With their pedestrian photography and risible dialogue, the talking sequences would appear to confirm, in almost diagrammatic fashion, the priors of the silent film chauvinists who insist that Hollywood lost the poetic core of its craft in the transition to sound. Of course, those who truly love LONESOME also love the dialogue sequences for their novelty and guilelessness. These scenes were shot before Hollywood executives became convinced that the talking cinema required the literate patter of Broadway-bred screenwriters, and their casual, unremarkable ease suggests more about the way regular people actually talked in 1928 than any other movie ever could. More important than any of the dialogue, though, is LONESOME's canny use of Irving Berlin's "Always," which is ultimately held up as an earnest apologia for popular culture, that protean vehicle of everyday salvation. It would be both a stretch and a bum rap to call LONESOME self-reflexive, but I know of no other work of art so sanguine about its place in the world. Hyperbole also goes against everything this innately modest movie stands for, but to hell with it: LONESOME is a plausible candidate for the greatest film ever made, and someday we may even be worthy of it.

Read the New York Times Review » Mordaunt Hall

Dr. Paul Fejos, producer of that unusual film "The Last Moment," is responsible for "Lonesome," the production with which Universal has re-opened the Colony Theatre. This current attraction suggests an O Henry story without that author's keen insight into human nature. It is agreeable and interesting, a relief in many respects from the cut and dried picture formula so frequently set forth as a narrative. But there are a number of episodes where Dr. Fejos's imagination seems stunted. Sometimes it looks as though he did not know what to do with his characters; he also sounds the same note too often.

The rigid direction has its effect upon the acting, particularly on the performance of Barbara Kent, who, charming as she looks when smiling, is hardly expected to appear as cheerful as she does in most of the scenes.

The prolonging of some sequences, the culmination of which is by no means surprising, does not add to the strength of this effort and hoped-for ideas fail to flame forth It is a story that could have been pictured with more fervency, truth and originality. Dr. Fejos's fancy of taking his characters to Coney Island does not help his narrative, for with all his knowledge of camera tricks the scenes of that popular resort are not very different from those beheld in countless other pictures.

Dr. Fejos opens with a queer shot of skysciapers and then gives one a view of the clouded heavens. It is the hour for rising and soon he shows the hall bedroom of Mary (Miss Kent), calling attention to the alarm clock and the girl's wish for more sleep. Then Dr. Fejos knocks on Jim's door and discloses that young gentleman hastening over his dressing and subsequently swallowing a doughnut and a cup of coffee.

Jim (Glenn Tryon) is perceived at work, running a press stamping machine Mary is a telephone operator. It is Saturday, and after hearing the murmur of voices and the clackety-clack-clack of machinery the time comes for the dismissal of the workers. One can't help wondering why a pretty girl like Mary should be lonesome. Jim appears to be a congenial soul, hardly the type who would be alone on Saturday afternoon.

Dr Fejos has paid more attention to his interesting dissolves and double exposures than he has to the characterization of his story. The camera stunts in those scenes of Mary at a telephone switchboard are cleverly conceived, but there are others that really don't matter and which have a tendency to interrupt the flow of the narrative.

The inevitable sound effects have been introduced into the scenes of this production and most of the conceptions are quite well done, although once or twice they are a bit off key. There are a couple of episodes where voices are heard. The voices are fairly good after one is accustomed to the talking, but the lines are something like those in a very ordinary musical comedy. It is a mistake to give speech suddenly to a character and then take it away. These articulated periods are valueless to the film. They are merely airing the novelty of giving speech to the shadows.

The denouement of the tale may not come as a complete surprise, but it is brought about in an agreeable fashion.

Ben Bernie and his orchestra hold forth as the main stage offering.

All Movie Guide [Tom Vick]

TV Guide

BROADWAY

USA (104 mi) 1929

User comments from imdb Author: FerdinandVonGalitzien (FerdinandVonGalitzien@gmail.com) from Galiza

After 75 years considered lost, "Broadway" directed by Herr Paul Fejos was found in Hungary, in a very well preserved copy with Hungarian titles but that European language is not a problem for this German Count because he remembers very well those Austro-Hungarian old times. This remarkable discovery gives silent fans the chance to watch the virtuosity of camera work of a director not very well known. His obscurity is a complete disgrace because Herr Fejos'surviving silents are absolutely fascinating.

"Broadway" tells the story of underworld criminals who run the "Paradise Club". In between musical numbers we have crimes and intrigues involving showgirls and special investigators. Passion, strange business and love affairs are all part of the mix too."Broadway" shows characters caught up in dual roles and the turmoil in which feelings come out into the open, the sort of conflicts that Herr Fejos was so fond of.

The most remarkable aspect of this film is the extraordinary camera work, especially Herr Fejos' use of an enormous and amazing camera crane which he himself designed and which scrutinizes every corner of the "Paradise Club", giving a frenzied rhythm to the film with those incredible camera movements. It also highlights with many details and angles, the beautiful and astounding sets that are the backgrounds for the fuss, happy and dangerous night life in the Broadway streets. The second notable aspect of this modern silent film is that it was made before the superb "Lonesome" (1929) and, like that film, it is part of the transition period between silent films and talkies. "Broadway" was an early musical available in both formats, silent and talkie and what's more, the silent version found in Hungary is a complete copy that includes at the end of the film "Technicolor" footage ( faded after so many years ) of the final musical scene number and this so startled this German Count that his monocle popped out from his aristocratic eyes more than once.

The New York Times (Mordaunt Hall) review

FANTÔMAS

France (91 mi) 1932

User comments from imdb Author MARIO GAUCI (marrod@onvol.net) from Naxxar, Malta

I learned of this film's existence while browsing the Internet after watching Louis Feuillade's Silent serial of 1913-14 and coming upon a website dedicated to this arch criminal! Given director Fejos' involvement, I was obviously intrigued by this version; unfortunately, it turned up on Italian TV while I was in Hollywood late last year - but, thankfully, it didn't take me long to catch up with it after that (hopefully, two other very interesting films I missed out on during that period - Abel Gance's THE END OF THE WORLD [1930] and G. W. Pabst's DON QUIXOTE [1933] - will likewise be re-run shortly)!

Anyway, while essentially dated, the film is great fun throughout. Still, even if the 'old dark house'-style first half is said to be quite faithtful to Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre's very first "Fantomas" novel, the film is not really typical of the criminal mastermind's exploits - especially since he only appears on a couple of occasions in his trademark skin-tight black outfit, and we're left guessing as to his true identity until practically the very end! That first part (with a thunderstorm for backdrop, secret passageways galore and even a robbery/strangling) is nicely shot, however, and plays like a French variant on THE BAT WHISPERS (1930); the remainder involves an automobile race, a murder in an operating theater, a particularly animated fistfight (with the opponents using all the ultra-volatile props and furniture they can get their hands on!) and is capped by a car explosion which allows the titular character to escape (apparently, this was intended as a continuing series but, alas, it never materialized - perhaps it was Marcel Allain's disapproval of the film which put paid to the idea!).

Unfortunately, Jean Galland is nothing like the Fantomas of the Feuillade serial (hiding under multiple disguises throughout) or Andre' Hunebelle's 1960s triptych, featuring Jean Marais sporting a silver mask: his dapper true identity is a disappointment and, even though his regular nemesis Inspector Juve is on hand for most of the proceedings, they only share one scene together! The supporting cast includes Gaston Modot as a suspicious-looking butler and an impossibly young Georges Rigaud (this was the ageing Euro-Cult favorite's film debut) as a cad who eventually turns heroic.

The Fantômas Web Site

Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings (Dave Sindelar) capsule review

Fellini, Federico

from DVDBeaver Director’s Chair: http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/direct-chair/fellini.htm

Federico Fellini's name is recognized as one of the icons of world cinema. He had no formal film training and appropriately his cinema is steeped in personal expression and often imbued with carnivalesque fantasy as one of his more colorful signatures. He repeatedly explored the roles and relationships between unattached lovers, parents / children and separating spouses. His admitted influences included preferences for Chaplin, Keaton, and other comedians of that era as well as Luis Buñuel (admiring his biting satirist films) preferring them to those currently recognized with him as canons of the world cinema stage (Bergman, Dreyer, Kurosawa etc.). He was known to have a volatile temper during the film shooting process - one which he never disguised to outsiders on the set. He seemed to utilize this fervent passion as part of his creative process. Constantly capturing public interest, his recognized 'muse', and wife of over 40 years (till his death), Giulietta Masina was occasionally cast as his leading lady.

Fellini, Federico Art and Culture

"Felliniesque" -- even if you have never watched a scrap of his film, this adjective summons up a world of oddity, magnificence, and pathos that testifies to Federico Fellini's creative genius. Initially part of the Italian Neorealist wave, he soon veered towards an idiosyncratic style all his own. Fellini used film to reflect his personal passions, drawing on his childhood experiences in Rimini, a small resort town on the Adriatic, to generate a veritable circus of delightful and frightening images. (Seasonal visits by travelling circuses led to a recurring clown motif in many of his films.) Fellini became a film icon by recreating the theatrics of his own imagination, complete with a cast of whimsical freaks and caricatures, and monumental sets (often constructed on huge stages at Cinecitta, the famous Rome studio).

Fellini would cite his wife, the actress Giulietta Masina, as his muse and greatest influence; Marcello Mastroianni was his cinematic alter ego. "La Strada" (1954), the film that first brought Fellini recognition outside Italy, starred Masina in a parable of love and suffering set among circus performers and intercut with dreamlike images. "La Dolce Vita" (1960) explores the melting point between fantasy and reality in a three-hour, surreal satire where Mastroianni, playing a journalist, bears witness to the oversaturated self-indulgence of celebrities and aristocrats in Rome after the war. Mastroianni was to appear again at the center of Fellini's masterpiece, "8 1/2," the story of a conflicted filmmaker searching for a new idea. Fellini recorded a buoyantly capricious world that was intensely personal: "If I were to make a film about the life of a soul, it would end up being about me." Yet his powers of storytelling, which never left him even in his more experimental projects, were intensely affecting, making him beloved at home and abroad.

Film Reference Stephen L. Hanson, updated by Rob Edelman

Federico Fellini is one of the most controversial figures in the recent history of Italian cinema. Though his successes have been spectacular, as in the cases of La strada, La dolce vita, and Otto e mezzo, his failures have been equally flamboyant. This has caused considerable doubt in some quarters as to the validity of his ranking as a major force in contemporary cinema, and made it somewhat difficult for him to achieve sufficient financial backing to support his highly personalized film efforts in his last years. Certainly, few directors in any country could equal Fellini's interest in the history of the cinema or share his certainty regarding the appropriate place for the body of his work within the larger film canon. Consequently, he has molded each of his film projects in such a way that any discussion of their individual merits is inseparable from the autobiographical details of his personal legend.

Fellini's early film La sceicco bianco gave a clear indication of the autobiographical nature of the works to follow, for it drew upon his experience as a journalist and merged it with many of the conceits he had developed in his early motion picture career as a gag writer and script writer. However, he was also an instrumental part of the development of the neorealistic film in the 1940s, writing parts of the screenplays of Roberto Rossellini's Roma città aperta and Paisà, and his reshaping of that tradition toward an autobiographical mode of expression in La sceicco bianco troubled a number of his former collaborators. But on his part, Fellini was seemingly just as critical of the brand of neorealism practiced by Rossellini, with its penchant for overt melodrama.

In a succeeding film, La strada, Fellini took his autobiographical parallels a step farther, casting his wife, Giulietta Masina, in the major female role. This highly symbolic work was variously interpreted as a manifesto on human rights, or at least a treatise on women's liberation. In these contexts, however, it roused the ire of strict neorealists who regarded it as containing too much justification for political oppression. Yet as a highly metaphorical personal parable about the relationship between a man and a woman it was a critical success and a confirmation of the validity of Fellini's autobiographical instincts. This gave him the confidence to indulge in a subtle criticism of the neorealistic style in his next film, Il bidone. The film served, in effect, a tongue-in-cheek criticism of the form's sentimental aspects.

In the films of Fellini's middle period, beginning in 1959 with La dolce vita, Fellini became increasingly preoccupied with his role as an international "auteur." As a result, the autobiographical manifestations in his films became more introspective and extended to less tangible areas of his psyche than anything that he had previously brought to the screen. La dolce vita is a relatively straightforward psychological extension of what might have become of Moraldo, the director's earlier biographical persona (I vitelloni), after forsaking his village for the decadence of Rome. But its successors increasingly explored the areas of its creator's fears, nightmares, and fantasies. After establishing actor Marcello Mastroianni as his alter ego in La dolce vita, Fellini again employed him in his masterpiece, Otto e mezzo (8 1/2), as a vehicle for his analysis of the complex nature of artistic inspiration. Then, in a sequel of sorts, he examined the other side of the coin. In Giulietta degli spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits), he casts his wife as the intaglio of the Guido figure in 8 1/2. Both films, therefore, explored the same problems from different sexual perspectives while, on the deeper, ever-present autobiographical plane, the two characters became corresponding sides of Fellini's mythic ego.

Subsequent films continued the rich, flamboyant imagery that became a Fellini trademark, but with the exception of the imaginative fantasy Fellini Satyricon, they have, for the most part, returned to the vantage point of direct experience that characterized his earlier works. Finally, in 1980's La città delle donne, which again featured Mastroianni, he returned to the larger–than–life examination of his psyche. In fact, a number of critics regarded the film as the ultimate statement in an ideological trilogy (begun with 8 1/2 and continued in Juliet of the Spirits) in which he finally attempts a rapprochement with his inner sexual and creative conflicts. Unfortunately, City of Women is too highly derivative of the earlier work. Consequently, it does not resolve the issues raised in the earlier two films.

Several of Fellini's films are masterpieces by anyone's standards. Yet in no other director's body of films does each work identifiably relate a specific image of the creator that he wishes to present to the world and to posterity. Whether any of the films are truly autobiographical in any traditional sense is open to debate. They definitely do not interlock to provide a history of a man, and yet each is a deliberately crafted building block in the construction of a larger–than–life Fellini legend which may eventually come to be regarded as the "journey of a psyche." While the final credits on Fellini's filmography are far from his best works, they nonetheless are fitting conclusions to what is one of the legendary careers in the history of world cinema.

And the Ship Sails On is the wildly preposterous but uniquely Felliniesque tale of the miscellaneous luminaries who come together for an ocean cruise in which they will bid farewell to a just-deceased opera performer. Ginger and Fred is a sweetly nostalgic film because of its union of two of Fellini's then-aging but still vibrant stars of the past, Giulietta Masina and Marcello Mastroianni. The Voice of the Moon, Fellini's last feature—which did not earn a U.S. distributor—works as a summation of the cinematic subjects which had concerned the film maker for the previous quarter century. The most outstanding and revealing late-career Fellini is Intervista, an illuminating film (and characteristic Fellini union of reality and fantasy) about the production by a Japanese television crew of a documentary about the director. Fellini himself appears on screen, where he is shown to be shooting an adaptation of Kafka's Amerika, a film that appears to be a typically Felliniesque extravaganza-in-the-making, complete with eccentric extras, surreal images, and autobiographical touches. We watch the filmmaker as he casts Amerika. We meet his various associates and underlings, from producers to actors, from casting director to assistant director. We see how Fellini directs his performers and the steps he takes to inspire feelings and attitudes within them. And we are privy to the various crises, big and small, which are standard fare during the filmmaking process. Finally, Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg, who over thirty years before had co-starred in La dolce vita, appear as themselves. Mastroianni's entrance is especially magical; the sequence in which he and Ekberg (whom, he remarks, he has not seen since making La dolce vita) observe their younger selves in some famous clips from the film is wonderful nostalgia.

However, Intervista is primarily an homage to Cinecitta, the studio where Fellini shot his films. Revealingly, the filmmaker describes the studio as "a fortress, or perhaps an alibi." Fellini first came to Cinecitta in 1940, when he was a young journalist. His assignment was to interview an actress for a magazine profile. This event is dramatized in Intervista; at various points in the film, the narrative drifts from images of the real Fellini, an artist in the twilight of a much-honored career, to a recreation of young Federico (played by Sergio Rubini) and his initiation into the world of Cinecitta.To fully appreciate this very personal movie about the movie-making process, you must be familiar with—and an admirer of—Fellini and his work.

Federico Fellini.com what feels like an official website, but isn’t

Felliniana celebrating all things Fellini

All-Movie Guide bio from Jason Ankeny

Federico Fellini a brief biographic overview

Fellini Biography from Baseline’s Encyclopedia of Films

Federico Fellini biography from Turner Classic Movies

Classic Movies links to articles and essays

Internet Fan Club

Federico Fellini Antonia Shanahan from Senses of Cinema

Why Fellini? Philip Kemp from Sight and Sound, August 2004

BFI | Sight & Sound | Late Fellini: A clown with wrinkles Guido Bonsaver reviews late Fellini from Sight and Sound, August 2004

Federico Fellini: Images and Archetypes Gerry Manacsa from Out of Balance, a 4-part personal essay

Terry Gilliam's Guilty Pleasures Originally published in Film Comment, this article describes his love of Fellini's "8 1/2."

Ringmaster and Clown Federico Fellini, 1920-1993 | TIME an obituary from Richard Corliss, November 8, 1993

FELLINI GO HOME! America loses its love affair with foreign films, by Richard Corliss from Time magazine, October 20, 2005

Memories of Rome :: An Essay on La Dolce Vita Sly from The Open End, January 10, 2009

Fellini, Federico They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Journalist/poet Toni Maraini interviews Fellini for Bright Lights Film Journal, November 1999

CRITIQUE :: Federico Fellini: Author of Cinema feature and interview by Gaither Stewart for Critique, November 2001

EuroScreenwriters - Interviews with European Film Directors ... excerpts from Fellini: A Life, by Hollis Alpert, or here: Excerpt

Frank Burke, Fellini's Films: From Postwar to Postmodern Frank Burke provides very brief excerpts from his book

GreenCine | Federico Fellini an entranceway to film information on GreenCine

FEDERICO FELLINI an overview, from 1-World Festival

The 9th Most Influential Director of All Time (2002 MovieMaker Poll)

Robin Buss' Top 10 Directors

Irene Bignardi's 5 Best Directors

Kenneth Turan's 5 Best Directors

Federico Fellini@Everything2.com

Federico Fellini: Photo Gallery

One of Fellini's artworks

Nino Rota Collection Hommage to Nino Rota

Fondazione Federico Fellini (official website, Italian language only), also here: Fellini Foundation

Federico Fellini Fellini related quotes on Wikipedia

BIOGRAPHY ON WIKIPEDIA

VARIETY LIGHTS (Luci del varietà)

Italy (93 mi) 1950 co-director: Alberto Lattuada

Nitrate Online (capsule) Eddie Cockrell

Federico Fellini’s feature debut, Variety Lights bears established Neorealist filmmaker Alberto Lattuada’s name as co-director, but there’s little doubt into which man’s filmography this work belongs (Fellini professed to not remembering "which scenes were directed by Lattuada and which by me," but he inevitably hastened to add "I regard the film as one of mine."). No argument from the scholars, who see in the story of a tawdry touring theatrical troupe the germ of ideas that would populate Fellini’s entire oeuvre. In truth the film is a family affair, as Lattuada (with whom Fellini had previously collaborated on a handful of scripts) was married to leading lady Carla Del Poggia, and the young female co-star Giulietta Masina, soon to be known to the world for her roles in La Strada (1954), Nights of Cabiria (1957) and Juliet of the Spirits (1957), was even then married to Fellini. Three years later, Fellini embarked on his bonafide solo career with the satirical romantic comedy The White Sheik (Lo sceicco bianco), and the rest, as they say, is film history. Criterion’s DVD edition of Variety Lights has little in the way of extras, but Andrew Sarris’ brief essay in the accompanying fold-out brochure is illuminating, and the transfer itself is generally spotless, restoring some black and white luster to a film that heretofore existed in notoriously poor prints. Special kudos to Michael W. Wiese for the fine audio restoration.

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

Co-directed with established neo-realist Alberto Lattuada, 1950's Variety Lights marked the directorial debut of Federico Fellini. And, while it's unfair to underestimate the contributions of the venerable Lattuada, there's little mistaking this bittersweet story of life among low-rent Italian vaudevillians as the product of anyone but its better-known director. Playing a show-business vet who has fallen short of success for decades, the wonderfully expressive Peppino De Felippo stars as the director of a close-knit but struggling traveling revue whose routines include bits featuring a man and his goose and a parade of energetic if none-too-voluptuous women in bikinis. Carefully handled by Felippo's girlfriend (Giulietta Masina, Fellini's then-wife and the future star of La Strada and Nights Of Cabiria), they scrape by, even when occasionally forced to walk from gig to gig. When Felippo encounters an ambitious, if not especially talented, local beauty queen (Carla Del Poggio, Lattuada's wife), he's seized with desire, both for her and for his own advancement. The directors' deep affection for their characters, even the self-involved but essentially good-natured Del Poggio, comes through in every moment of this charming film, which places one foot in Italian filmmaking's neo-realist recent past and one foot toward Fellini's future, neatly anticipating the fruitful years before he became his own favorite subject. With a light touch and an unmistakable sadness, he and Lattuada use a group of not-so-beautiful losers as an illustration of human resiliency and a demonstration of how even perpetual disappointment has its comic side. That turns Variety Lights into a moving, funny, formative work that should be of interest to more than just Fellini aficionados.

Apollo Movie Guide [Scott Renshaw]

Yes, Variety Lights marked Federico Fellini’s first outing as a director (in conjunction with Alberto Lattuada). Please mark the footnote in your film history textbook, and return your eyes to the front of the class. Some films are destined to be remembered less for their own merits than for their place in the career of a filmmaker or an actor, and many of them deserve little other recognition. Variety Lights deserves better. While many viewers may watch it primarily to look for clues as to the filmmaker Fellini would become, there’s actually a perfectly satisfying narrative at its core.

Admittedly, it’s a somewhat familiar narrative, particularly since it was released the same year as All About Eve. Like Eve, Variety Lights focuses on the relationship between a professional entertainer and a seemingly innocent protégée. In this case, the “professional,” Checco Dal Monte (Peppino De Filippo), is the director of a run-down travelling vaudeville company. He is involved in a relationship with leading lady Melina Amour (Giulietta Masina) when lovely Liliana (Carla Del Poggio) shows up looking for a break. Though the company is already strapped for funds, Checco is smitten enough that he takes Liliana in. Unfortunately for Signore Checco, Liliana appears more interested in the contacts he can provide than in Checco or his company.

Since Variety Lights is a co-directed effort, it’s not easy to point to the emerging Fellini trademarks. There is indeed an attention to (and affection for) marginalized characters, and a dollop of grotesquery (a troupe member whose act includes chewing up and swallowing light bulbs). There are hints of Fellini’s fascination with unusual faces, but in general Variety Lights is stylistically unremarkable.

It is, however, a surprisingly effective tale of the theatrical life as both a passionately pursued vocation and a source for wild flights of ego. Though the real-life wives of its co-directors play the two female leads, the narrative is actually a showcase for De Filippo’s middle-aged would-be Lothario and impresario. It’s a wonderful little portrait of a man so convinced of his own charms as a performer and a businessman that he is incapable of recognizing Liliana’s manipulations. Checco is convinced that success (romantic and professional) is always just around the corner, even when he’s forced to put together a company from a group of homeless street performers to provide a showcase for Liliana.

The special little edge in Variety Lights is that every performer—even those homeless street performers—is shown with a streak of diva in him or her. Lattuada and Fellini have fun with the troupe’s expectation of first-class treatment, even when they’re playing to half-empty houses of sleeping patrons. Individual supporting characters don’t always emerge fully formed, but there’s still a poignancy to the entire story, right down to the here-we-go-again denouement. Yes, it was Fellini’s first time in the director’s chair. And there’s more to it than the answer to a trivia question.

Variety Lights Criterion essay by Andrew Sarris

Variety Lights (1950) - The Criterion Collection

Bright Lights Film Journal Gary Morris

Reel.com DVD review [Rod Armstrong]

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick)

Time Out

The New York Times (A.H. Weiler)

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

THE WHITE SHEIK (Lo sceicco bianco)

Italy (83 mi) 1952

Time Out

Fellini's first solo feature, a delightful satirical comedy about a young honeymoon couple (Bovo and Trieste) who arrive in Rome with the wife yearning after her romantic ideal, The White Sheik, star of one of the fumetti (the photographic comic strips so popular in Italy). While she dashes off for a glimpse of her hero (Sordi), incarnated by a bedraggled hack actor who vainly tries to preen himself to meet her expectations, the disconsolate husband spends a lonely night wandering the streets until he meets a friendly prostitute. Agreeably abrasive in its attitude to illusions and the self-delusions that fuel them, vitriolically funny in evoking the world of the fumetti, Fellini lapses only briefly into his later mystico-sentimentality in the character of the prostitute (played, of course, by Masina). (From a story by Fellini, Tullio Pinelli and Michelangelo Antonioni.

filmcritic.com Matt

The White Sheik is one of Federico Fellini’s most overlooked films. When it came out in 1951, The White Sheik was a direct contrast to the Italian Neorealist films that were made at the same time. Where most Neorealist films dealt with the genuine struggles of lower class Italians, The White Sheik was a light comedy about a well-to-do couple involved in a somewhat trivial episode in their lives.

A recently married couple Ivan (Leopoldo Trieste) and Wendy (Brunella Bovo) come to Rome from a small village to take place in a ceremony with the Pope to legitimize their marriage vows. Ivan, a comically serious businessman, has a strict itinerary that they are supposed to follow over the next couple of days, but Wendy, an impulsive, wide-eyed small town woman, has other plans.

While Ivan takes a quick nap, Wendy runs off to see if she can have a chance encounter with her idol: an actor in adult photo comic strips (called fumetti) named Fernando Rivoli aka "The White Sheik," who works in a theatre not far from the hotel. She finds herself on the actor’s set but before she knows it she is whisked away to a beach 12 miles outside of Rome with the crew. There she meets the White Sheik (played with a clown-like handsomeness by Alberto Sordi) and before she knows it she has been swept away and dressed for a part in the fumetti photo shoot.

Meanwhile her husband frantically tries to cover her absence with his relatives who are eager to meet her. He takes them around Rome with the hope that she will return to the hotel. In the course of a day they both go through personal struggles that will either make or break their marriage.

Cloaked under the laughs are bigger themes of familial and cultural obligations and infidelity. Wendy learns that her naïve, star-struck notions are mere whimsy, while Ivan doesn’t learn much except that his life will be ruined if he is unable to get his wife back.

The film is hardly groundbreaking. As far as Fellini’s career is concerned, The White Sheik has neither the wild, surreal beauty nor the self-reflexive flourishes that marked his later, more popular, work. Nonetheless, it is a delightful comedy that demonstrates Fellini’s talent of directing exaggerated actors in madcap scenarios: It also has a brief scene with Giulietta Masina and features a Nino Rota score.

The Criterion Collection DVD presents the film in its original 1.33:1 aspect ratio in beautiful, grainy, black and white. There is also a first-rate 30 minute video short featuring insightful interviews with the two main actors and one of Fellini’s biographers. On the inside jacket cover is a fine essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum and a brief excerpt from a Fellini biography titled I, Fellini.

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford

In The White Sheik (1952), Federico Fellini's first directorial effort (he co-directed Variety Lights with Alberto Lattuada the previous year) he drew upon his experiences as a journalist and script writer to tell a bittersweet story about a provincial newlywed couple vacationing in Rome for their honeymoon. Wanda, the young bride, is a naive romantic, prone to impulsive behavior and passionate fantasies. She is also an avid fan of fotoromanzi (a comic book with photo captions instead of cartoon drawings) and is secretly infatuated with "The White Sheik," the hero of her favorite series. Her husband Ivan is her complete opposite: conservative, unspontaneous and overly concerned about social respectability. Shortly after their arrival in Rome, the couple is soon parted, with the bride heading off to the publishing office of Blue Romance to meet her idol while her husband frantically scours the city for her.

Like many of his subsequent films, The White Sheik explores a subject which would become a recurring motif in Fellini's movies - the clash between illusion and reality. In the course of their misadventures in Rome, both the husband and his new bride see their hopes and dreams dashed: Ivan is forced to face his own unrealistic expectations of marriage while Wanda finally sees her "White Sheik" exposed for what he really is - a petty and unglamorous third-rate actor. By the film's end, the couple is reconciled with a more realistic view of their martial responsibilities yet Fellini's final scene is ironic, suggesting that both characters are still clinging to their foolish illusions.

Producer Carlo Ponti initially proposed The White Sheik as a project for Michelangelo Antonioni who had previously made an acclaimed documentary about the fotoromanzi entitled L'amorosa menzogna (The Loving Lie, 1949). Fellini and Tullio Pinelli were hired to write the screenplay but their initial script didn't please Antonioni and eventually the project was passed on to another producer, Luigi Rovere, who encouraged Fellini to direct it himself.

The first obstacles Fellini had to overcome were his casting choices. Alberto Sordi was not popular with Italian moviegoers at the time yet the director insisted that he was perfect for "The White Sheik." Although Peppino De Filippo, his original choice for the part of Ivan, was rejected, Fellini's second choice, Leopoldo Trieste, was approved. Trieste was a well-known writer, not a professional actor, but the director decided to cast him after they met at a screening room at Cinecitta Studios. Brunella Bovo, who was a young and relatively unknown actress, won the role of Wanda and Fellini cast his wife, Giulietta Masina, in a small part, playing a prostitute called Cabiria. The director would later build an entire film around this character - Nights of Cabiria - which won his wife international acclaim and garnered the film an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film of 1957.

Even though Fellini had co-directed a feature the previous year, he was extremely nervous on his first day of shooting The White Sheik. According to Peter Bondanella in The Films of Federico Fellini: "A flat tire delayed his arrival on the set but gave the young man the opportunity to pray for guidance at a roadside church. Unfortunately, in the church Fellini saw a catafalque he understandably interpreted as a bad omen. He spent the entire first day on his set walking around on the beach in the sun, pretending to his crew and producer that he was deep in thought, while actually trying to imagine how the directors for whom he had written scripts would have resolved the scene's technical complexities: "Rossellini, the inimitable, the unpredictable, came to mind almost exclusively. How would Roberto have done it."

Luckily, Fellini took control of the situation on the second day, improvising a scene in which Wanda is taken out to sea by "The White Sheik" on his "pirate boat." From that point on, his judgment never faltered and he began to develop some of the techniques which would become the hallmarks of his style: the use of music (by Nino Rota) to establish the emotional state of his characters, ironic juxtapositions of images, and satiric humor (when Wanda attempts to drown herself by jumping into the Tiber River, she only succeeds in getting stuck in the ankle-deep mud).

When The White Sheik finally premiered at the Venice Film Festival, the audience responded favorably but the Italian critics dismissed it as a failure since it didn't cater to their political agendas (for one thing, the movie didn't comply with previous neorealism standards set by Rossellini's films). In Fellini: A Life by Hollis Alpert, the director was quoted as saying, "Perhaps it was ahead of its time. It's an ironic story, and Italians don't like irony - sarcasm and buffoonery, but not irony." Even more unfortunate, The White Sheik was poorly distributed by a small company that went bankrupt, preventing American audiences from seeing the film for many years. Now it is seen by some critics like John Simon as "an early masterpiece" from the director but more importantly this film marked the beginning of Fellini's creative collaborations with a core group of talented people - the cinematographer Otello Martelli, composer Nino Rota, the writers Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano, and his actress wife, Giulietta Masina. In 1977, actor Gene Wilder directed and starred in a loose remake of The White Sheik entitled The World's Greatest Lover but it was only a pale imitation of the original.

The White Sheik Criterion essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum

The White Sheik (1952) - The Criterion Collection

Images Movie Journal Joe Pettit Jr.

DVD Journal Clarence Beaks

not coming to a theater near you (Rumsey Taylor)

ToxicUniverse.com (John Nesbit)

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson)

Apollo Movie Guide [Scott Weinberg]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger)

KQEK DVD Review [Mark R. Hasan]

About World Film Marcy Dermansky

DVDBeaver.com - Graphic Review [Gary W. Tooze]

I VITELLONI

aka: The Young and the Passionate

aka: The Little Calves

Italy France (104 mi) 1953

Time Out

The best of Fellini went into this bleakly funny study of five young men adrift in the wasteland of their provincial home town. Middle class layabouts living by cadging off their families, aimlessly spending their days in pursuit of amusement and girls while nursing vague ambitions never likely to be more than pipe-dreams, they are trapped as much by their own moral bankruptcy as by the futureless society in which they have never quite grown up. Beautifully shot and performed, and governed by an inextricable mixture of affectionate sympathy and acid satire, it clearly (and beneficially) trails the neo-realist roots which Fellini later shook off.

VideoVista Gary Couzens

The title is Italian for "the little calves," although the subtitles translate it not especially appropriately as Spivs. (It's also known as The Young And The Passionate in the US.) Fellini's second feature is semi-autobiographical. (Fellini's own brother Riccardo plays one of the lead characters.) It follows five young men in their late twenties, living in a small out-of-the-way seaport, as they dream about getting away, of writing the great novel, play practical jokes, chase girls. One of them, Fausto (Franco Fabrizi), is pressurised into marriage. Fellini looks at these characters with a mixture of affection and criticism: we warm to them, though we know that they will never amount to very much, nor will they leave the town. If they're in a rut, it's a comfortable one. In fact, one of them does leave - Moraldo (Franco Interlenghi), a clear surrogate for the writer/director, departs for the city. (For his adventures there, see La Dolce Vita, where the author-figure is called Marcello and is played by Marcello Mastroianni.)

In style I Vitelloni is naturalistic, but there are hints of the non-realist direction Fellini would later take: a sequence where the carnival comes to town, for example. This video transfer is in good condition, apart from some splices and distorting sound at the beginning. As is usual with Fellini's work, it was shot silent with the sound added later, with some less than precise lip-synch in places.

I Vitelloni Sight and Sound

I Vitelloni literally means overgrown calves, a typical Fellini coinage to describe a group of petit bourgeois, stay-at-home young men in a provincial seaside town, kidding themselves they've grown out of adolescence. They think they're something, and the film manages to be both pitiless and sympathetic in showing that they're not. Leopoldo thinks he's a writer but spends his time eyeing the girl next door and believing a famous old actor is interested in him for his mind. Alberto struts about (and drags up), unable to see that he's utterly dependent on his mother and sister. Franco has to get married but just can't stop womanising, even when he's working in a shop selling rosaries and plaster saints.

I Vitelloni is like the neo-realism that Fellini first worked in, observational and episodic as well as poignant and down-to-earth. But it is also distinctly his, able to be inward with characters and situations and yet also ironic, even critical. Above all, there is everything that makes Fellini Fellini: the strains of Nino Rota's insinuating, melancholy music, the haunting sound of wind, subtly flowing camera movement, seedy imagery of small-town life, a perfectly chosen cast and a disconcerting sense of point of view. It wraps you up blissfully in a world at once enchanting and second-rate, heart-warming, comic, recognisable and, just occasionally, fiercely sentimental.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Camden G. Bauchner

According to history Federico Fellini's second feature, I VITELLONI, should never have existed. After the commercial failure of THE WHITE SHEIK Fellini and co-writer Tullio Pinelli approached producer Luigi Rovere with an early draft of LA STRADA. Intimidated by the liminal nature of its genre, Rovere quickly handed it off to fellow professor/producer Lorenzo Pegoraro. Also bothered by its lack of commercial appeal Pegoraro encouraged the young screenwriters to pen a comedy. And thus Fellini, Pinelli, and longtime collaborator Ennio Flaiano pooled their childhood experiences and birthed I VITELLONI. Met with immediate acclaim, the film follows a group of idle youths in provincial Italy through a series loosely stitched together episodes and adventures. These vitellonis (a cross between the Italian for beef and veal meaning roughly an immature loafer) spend their days plotting hijacks and chasing skirts. Shenanigans include an extravagant masquerade ball, an interrupted beauty pageant, and actor Albert Sordi's drag tango. No doubt influenced by its neorealist predecessors (who found interest in seemingly innocuous small events), I VITELLONI's profound originality lies in its negation of the norms of storytelling, an attribute often derided as immature and naive. But these disparate stories reveal the characters not through dramatic evolution but gestures and attitude—a wry joke, particular gait, or hairstyle. What's crafted is an image behind traditional "psychological cinema"; what Andre Bazin has aptly called a "mode of being". For a film that never should have been I VITELLONI is astonishing in its daring and a must-see for any Fellini fan. As André Bazin has noted, "everything was already contained in I VITELLONI and set out there with magisterial genius."

I Vitelloni Mike D’Angelo from Time Out New York

According to Robert McKee—or at least the affectionate parody of him featured in last year's Adaptation—the movies haven't seen a new genre since Fellini invented the mockumentary. Give the maestro credit for two innovations, then, since I Vitelloni, his second solo feature, created the template for the arrested-adolescents-just-hanging-around-doing-nothing picture, represented in American cinema by such classics as American Graffiti, Mean Streets and Diner. The title translates literally as The Calves (as in livestock, not anatomy), but that's an idiomatic expression with no equivalent in English. The Wastrels provides a better sense of the enervation that rules the film's characters: five young men without ambition or prospects, whiling away the hours in a languid seaside village.

Loosely based on Fellini's memories of his childhood in Rimini, I Vitelloni largely avoids the mawkish nostalgia that permeates Amarcord, his later reminiscence. Nor, thankfully, is the director's appetite for grotesquerie yet in evidence. Interlenghi, cast as authorial stand-in Moraldo, had previously starred in Vittorio De Sica's Shoeshine, and this is as close as Fellini would ever come to neorealism; much of the film plays out on the actor's impassive, watchful face, which stands in sharp contrast to the buffoonery of his more rambunctious pals. Still, Fellini was never one to eschew mediation, and I Vitelloni's energy derives largely from its compositional vigor, which often involves placing the characters in symmetrical proximity—one memorable shot finds each seated at a separate café table, with half of them facing in one direction and half in the other. Indolence has rarely looked like such hard work,

Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce

Federico Fellini's I Vitelloni (1953), re-released in a new print for its 50th anniversary, makes the crop of prestige fall films seem even punier by comparison. More than that, it is a reminder. Forget for a moment that right now the most it can give us is translucent taffy like Cinema Paradiso and Malena -- there was a time when Italian film was synonymous with challenging, sensuously intellectual moviegoing splendor. So much breathtaking talent: the abstracting ennui of Antonioni, the implicating analysis of Rossellini, the decaying lushness of Visconti, the politicized sensuality of Bertolucci. And check it out -- I haven't even touched on Pier Paolo Pasolini, Francesco Rosi, Ermanno Olmi, Marco Bellochio or the Taviani brothers yet. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, only Ingmar Bergman in Sweden and the Nouvelle Vague guys over in France could rival them in setting ablaze the imaginations of movie buffs.

Of the Mediterranean auteurs, Fellini (1920-1993) was possibly the most popular and accessible with audiences. The world he created and celebrated in his films was recognized as "Fellinesque" way before it was hip to come up with such cute terms -- emotional, noisy, mercurial, cheerfully grotesque and chaotic, always swirling around the three- ring circus of life. No matter what the subjects ostensibly were, the pictures inevitably were about Fellini himself, the jostling of his coarse naiveté and his joyous megalomania. It's no secret why so many other directors adore La Dolce Vita or 8 1/2 -- like Bergman, Fellini used the camera in the first-person. The confessional aspect of the director runs through his entire career, but it first came fully to the fore in I Vitelloni, his third feature. The title (which translates to something like "the overgrown calves") refers to the four characters, twentysomething layabouts muddling through life in an uneventful Italian village.

There's the ladies' man (Franco Fabrizi), who, afraid that his marriage will jeopardize his lothario status with the rest of the gang, keeps on chasing skirts; the aspiring playwright (Leopoldo Trieste) who dreams of making it big; the joker (Alberto Sordi) whose hulking body is matched by his blubbering emotionalism; and the filmmaker's stand-in (Franco Interlenghi), quietly observant, sensitive and increasingly restless. There really is no "plot" -- Fabrizi's dutiful young wife, fed up with his philandering, runs off at one point, but I Vitelloni rather takes as its shape the unrushed observation of the characters' lives. Nostalgia is the dominant mood, yet with far more complexities than that usually facile term implies: like the frequently misunderstood It's a Wonderful Life, the movie sees the nurturing warmth as well as the stifling complacency of family and small-town life.

The "calves," far from indulgent memories, are sharp studies in the degradation of dreams by immaturity, milieu, machismo, and laziness. (Claude Chabrol would achieve a similar, much more acidic portrayal a few years later, switching genders, in Les Bonnes Femmes.) And yet, while exposing and satirizing his characters' limitations, Fellini's eye is free of meanness or cynicism -- he's as attuned to the emotional subtleties of a bunch of guys standing around playing pool as to a young man's painful need to sever his roots and expand his horizons. The picture is early Fellini, much closer to the fond satire of Variety Lights and The White Sheik than to the raucous glitter of La Dolce Vita and Juliet of the Spirits. Despite its share of set pieces (including a carnival sequence marvelously attuned to Nino Rota's shimmering score), it is quieter and simpler than what people normally associate with the maestro. Faced with his increasingly challenging late work, many critics would gaze back nostalgically at the supposedly lost innocence of the I Vitelloni period -- a myopic notion that obscures the fact that the film is more of a beginning than an end.

Martin Scorsese has gone on record citing the film as one of the main influences on his 1973 breakthrough Mean Streets, though its impression can be spotted just as clearly in American Graffiti, Next Stop, Greenwich Village, Diner and Swingers. Seeing it in late 2003 is to be reminded that, five decades later and an ocean apart, things aren't that different among wolf packs. The foolishness, the braggadocio, the touching male pride are still ample -- what's in short supply today is a fond sensitivity like Fellini's to prod them, delicately but cuttingly.

I Vitelloni: A Trip to the Station Criterion essay by Tom Piazza

I vitelloni (1953) - The Criterion Collection

Bright Lights Film Journal [Megan Ratner]

DVD Times Noel Megahey

Turner Classic Movies Felicia Feaster

moviediva

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

not coming to a theater near you (Rumsey Taylor)

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Reel.com DVD review [Pam Grady]

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Guardian/Observer

Chicago Tribune [Michael Wilmington]

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LOVE IN THE CITY (L'amore in città)

Fellini segment: Un Agenzia Matrimoniale

Italy (105 mi) 1953 omnibus film, 6 segment film with 7 different Italian directors

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

An early example of the Italian omnibus film, a subgenre of irresistible conceptual appeal and inevitable built-in unevenness (RoGoPaG, Le Streghe, Boccaccio '70). The brainchild of neorealism doyen Cesare Zavattini, it huddles a batch of shorts from various directors hinging on amore thematics, whether built around strands of melancholy flirting (Dino Risi's surveilling of a provincial jitterbugging hall) or forlorn lechery (Alberto Lattuada's flipbook of males double-taking over strolling lookers). Not surprisingly, Zavattini's own contribution, following a poor unwed mother through the daily grind of Roman boarding houses and crowded welfare offices, is the one most obviously cuffed to neorealist ideas (the heroism of the wretched) and tropes (an unbroken diaper-changing shot apes the real-time integrity of the maid's morning routine in Umberto D.). By contrast, the more interesting segments by Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini push the aesthetics toward bladelike abstraction (alienated women reenacting botched suicide attempts for Antonioni's cooling lenses) and fantasy-tinged satire (Fellini's account of a pure, struggling country girl rung through a matrimonial agency). Note: The version I saw, already pricked with a lecturing English narration, was missing Carlo Lizzani's segment on prostitution. In black and white.

User reviews from imdb Author: zetes from Saint Paul, MN

Omnibus film in the Neorealist vein

That was the intent, anyway. Cesare Zavattini produced the film and brought together five directors to make short films about love. The results are all good, but none of them great. They all have problems. To add to this problem, the version that I saw had English narration in the prologue and in the inter-segments, and sometimes in the short films themselves. I don't know if anything was edited out.

Part 1 (d. Dino Risi): This segment is a charming little film about the people in a dance hall. It has no real story. Instead, we see couples connect, people alone, and couples break up. It's very nice.

Part 2 (d. Michelangelo Antonioni): Of course, I saw the film for the Antonioni and Fellini segments. They're two of my very favorite filmmakers. Antonioni's is quite interesting. It is the most documentary-like segment. I don't know if it's true, but the narration claims that they gathered together a group of people who had attempted suicide over failed relationships. Two women tell their stories in an interview format. It's quite good.

Part 3 (d. Federico Fellini): At first, this looks like it will be the best of the film. The opening sequence, with the main character wandering through the narrow hallways of a Roman apartment building looking for a matrimonial service (the equivalent of a dating service). A young child tells him that he will lead him to that room, and as they proceed, other children show up and follow them. That's a very mystical scene, but what follows is very disappointing. The man claims that he's looking for a wife for his friend, who happens to be a werewolf. This segment is the one that hints that there might have been some editing in the version that I watched. This man is introduced to the girl, they have a conversation in a field, and then the man, I guess, tells her that she is too good to do so. The result is nonsensical. There is absolutely no payoff. Actually, the weak ending reminds me a lot of the segment Fellini wrote for Roberto Rosselini's Paisa.

Part 4 (d. Mesallini Zavattini): I assume Zavattini is related to Cesare, probably his brother or son. Anyhow, this segment is most in-line with the neorealistic movement, which was dying by the time this film was made. A Sicilian woman went to Rome to find maid work. Her first employer impregnates her and then fires her. Now she's stuck with a young boy but no money whatsoever. She tries to scam a nanny into taking care of the kid, but he is eventually given back to her. There is a beautiful scene where the mother changes her sons diaper on the edge of a fountain. This scene's real-time realism is reminiscent of the maid's morning duties in Vittorio de Sica's Umberto D., made shortly after this film and written by Cesare Zavattini. The climactic scene is truly heartbreaking, but the end is horribly anticlimactic. This film really shouldn't have had a happy ending. Neorealism and happy endings really don't mix.

Part 5 (d. Alberto Lattuada): Lattuada is most famous for co-directing with Fellini on his first film, Variety Lights. His segment in Love in the City is perhaps the best of the film. It has no story at all. Instead, it is a non-narrative compilation of the reactions of men when they see beautiful woman. The editing reminded me of Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia. It's quite musical. In fact, the music of this segment is really good. The film ends on a very poetic moment.

All in all, you should see the film if you're a fan of Italian cinema, or just of Antonioni or Fellini. 7/10.

LA STRADA A 98

aka: The Road

Italy (115 mi) 1954

Federico Fellini has here achieved one of those very rare films, of which we forget that they are movies and accept them simply as a masterpiece.

—Andre Bazin, 1956

La Strada Dave Kehr lowering the bar for negative film criticism from the Reader

Early mush (1956) from the master, Federico Fellini. The story--about a circus strong man (Anthony Quinn) and the doe-eyed waif who loves him--is an allegory, so you can leave as soon as you figure it out. It won't take very long. Costarring Giulietta Masina and Richard Basehart. In Italian with subtitles. 115 min.

Time Out

For all its sentimentality, this overshadows virtually everything Fellini has made since La Dolce Vita. As ever for il maestro, life is both cyclic odyssey and circus, a teeming, tragicomic arena of pain, cruelty and solitude. Masina plays Gelsomina, a naïve waif whose simpleton innocence provides a direct line to life's eternal mysteries; when she is sold into virtual slavery to play clown to itinerant strongman Zampano (Quinn), the boorish brute simply exploits his new assistant's desire for affection at every opportunity. It's basically a road movie: she vainly tries to escape, they join a circus, and her friendship with the tightrope-walking Fool (Basehart) brings its own problems. Despite the pessimism of much of the story, memorably embodied in the grey, desolate towns the pair visit, Fellini has already moved far from his roots in neo-realism; symbols, metaphors, and larger-than-life performances hold sway, and moments of bizarre if inconsequential charm abound.

L'Age d'Or to The Landlord Pauline Kael

The theme of Federico Fellini's spiritual fable is that everyone has a purpose in the universe. It is acted out by three symbolic characters. Giulietta Masina is the waif Gelsomina (soul, innocence, spirit, dreams); Anthony Quinn is the strong man Zampanò (brute physical strength, man as animal); Richard Basehart is an artist-fool (mind). Though the background of the film is neo-realist poverty, it is transformed by the romanticism of the conception. Giulietta Masina's performance has been compared variously to Chaplin, Harry Langdon, Stan Laurel, Barrault, and Marceau, and the comparisons are just-maybe too just. Basehart's performance as the fool, which is not like the work of other performers, is possibly more exciting. Even if one rejects the concepts of this movie, its mood and the details of scenes stay with one; a year or two later, a gesture or a situation suddenly brings it all back. Winner of at least 50 prizes, including the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. In Italian.

Edinburgh U Film Society [Spiros Gangas]

One of the great classics of Italian cinema, La Strada is undoubtedly Fellini's most popular film and one of his best. In historical terms it includes Anthony Quinn in his greatest role, it introduces Fellini's wife Gulietta Masina in a stunning performance and it is supported by a beautiful soundtrack by Nino Rota.

The film deals with Gelsomina - played by Masina - as a simpleton girl who is sold to Zampano (Quinn) a travelling strongman, brute and coarse, who exploits Gelsomina's naivety at every chance. After an unsuccessful attempt to escape she joins (with him) a circus and she develops a friendship with "The Fool" (Richard Basehart), a weird tightwire walker...

Despite the comical elements in it, usually generated by Masina's lovely mannerisms strongly reminiscent of Chaplin, La Strada is ultimately a bitter film which addresses more issues than one is originally inclined to think. The adumbration of a character like Gelsomina (in one scene placed against a wall poster of the Madonna) points remarkably to a Christian interpretation of the soul's salvation through suffering. Not a typical Fellini orientation but one which functions perfectly well through basically an unmatched performance by Masina. It's really hard to think of any other actress who would have fitted this particular character and who would have made such a contrast to the barbarous Zampano.

The neorealist heritage can be easily felt but Fellini has already passed that stage especially through the innovations in the film's narrative. There are plenty of moments which establish Fellini as one of the great magicians of world cinema and which make La Strada such a lyrical piece of filmmaking with the monochrome photography capturing splendidly the underdeveloped rural Italy. In the climatic final sequence - Zampano's desperate wandering - the emotional build up explodes, and one's sense of desolation becomes complete.

Washington Post [Rita Kempley]

A deceptively simple and poetic parable, Federico Fellini's "La Strada" was the focus of a critical debate when it premiered in 1954 simply because it marked Fellini's break with neorealism -- the hard-knocks school that had dominated Italy's postwar cinema.

"{Neorealism should embrace} not just social reality, but spiritual reality, metaphysical reality, all that there is within man," said Fellini to his detractors, mostly Marxists who labeled him a traitor to the genre and therefore to their cause.

While the neorealists defined their characters according to social circumstances, the characters of "La Strada" -- which is being re-released in Washington today -- exist outside these confines in an ambiguous time and place. The neorealists saw the wasted land, the ragged people, but Fellini looked up and saw that there were stars. Not that he ignored the poverty of the period: "La Strada," which means "the road," takes place in a hovel on wheels. The Oscar-winning film is quite literally a road movie, with its picaresque plot and its cast of traveling performers: Zampano, a brutish strongman (Anthony Quinn); Gelsomina (Giuletta Masina), his simple-minded assistant; and Il Matto (Richard Basehart), a bitter tightrope walker.

Zampano comes to a seaside village to purchase a second assistant from the impoverished woman who had already sold him her eldest daughter, Rosa, who died in his care.

Though it breaks her heart, the woman takes 10,000 lire for Gelsomina, a wide-eyed naif who sets off with Zampano in his motorcycle-trailer. He dresses her as a clown and teaches her to beat a drum and pass the hat before and during his pathetic act of breaking a chain with his chest.

Though he abuses her both physically and sexually, Gelsomina is hurt most by Zampano's indifference to the wonders of the road, from the tomato seeds she plants, to the music of Il Matto's violin. Zampano, who often warms up the crowd by warning that the act can cause blindness, is blind to anything but his physical needs -- food, drink, sex and sleep.

After another futile attempt at communicating with the oaf, Gelsomina runs away and encounters Il Matto (The Fool), who is performing his tightrope act in a neighboring village. Wearing wings and bumblebee tights, he is obviously Zampano's ethereal opposite. When the three characters come together at a traveling circus, the two men feud and Zampano is jailed.

The circus folk invite Gelsomina to join them, then Il Matto asks her to leave with him, but she stays behind to wait for Zampano. It's a decision that Il Matto unwittingly influences in a bit of dialogue that Millicent Marcus, author of "Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism," calls the thematic center of the film.

"Everything in this world is good for something. Take ... this stone, for example," says Il Matto in hopes of convincing Gelsomina of her life's worth. "What's it good for?" she asks. "I don't know ... but it certainly has its use. If it were useless, then everything would be useless -- even the stars."

Gelsomina takes his parable to mean that her place is with Zampano, a notion that is reinforced when she and Zampano, now on the road again, are taken in by a convent on a bitter night. "You follow your bridegroom, I follow mine," observes one of the nuns, whose selflessness is even stronger than Gelsomina's (less likely than even Cinderella to be embraced by today's enlightened woman).

Martin Scorsese, who is behind the film's re-release, recalls in a recent article for the New York Times, "I was enthralled by the film's resolution, where the power of the spirit overwhelms brute force." It is essentially a story of redemption rooted in the religious aesthetic that predated neorealism. The simplicity of the plot harks back to the medieval morality play and, as Marcus points out, to the tradition of commedia dell'arte, with its stock roles and clownish costumes.

As Gelsomina, Fellini's wife and muse Masina is literally dressed as a clown, in outsize shoes and pants and baggy hat. Her performance inspired comparisons to Chaplin when first reviewed, yet she reminds me more of Harpo Marx, with her haystack hair and her saucer eyes. There's some of Harpo and even more Groucho in Basehart's whistling wiseacre Il Matto too. Quinn, who was fresh from a Broadway production of "A Streetcar Named Desire," brought more than a little Stanley to Zampano.

It's Gelsomina's sad clown face that remains the film's most haunting image, vividly photographed in black-and-white by Otello Martelli. As French critic Andre Bazin pointed out, "The Fellini character does not evolve; he ripens." And so do his movies.

La strada Criterion essay by David Ehrenstein

La Strada (1954) - The Criterion Collection

Turner Classic Movies Mark Frankel

DVD Times Noel Megahey

Epinions [metalluk]

ToxicUniverse.com (John Nesbit)

ToxicUniverse.com (Jeremiah Kipp)

filmcritic.com (Doug Hennessy)

Epinions.com [Steven Flores]

Ted Prigge

DVD Savant review Glenn Erickson

Decent Films - faith on film [Steven D. Greydanus] who reports the film is listed here: Vatican film list

DVD Verdict - Criterion Collection Mark Van Hook

Film Court (Lawrence Russell)

In Review (Adam Suraf)

Reel.com DVD review [Kim Morgan]

Apollo Movie Guide [Dan Jardine]

Strictly Film School review Acquarello

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The New York Times (A.H. Weiler)

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

DVDBeaver.com [Henrik Sylow]

IL BIDONE A- 94

aka: The Swindle or The Swindlers

Italy France (109 mi) 1955

Time Out

A pair of provincial con-men (Crawford and Basehart) pose as priests to swindle ignorant peasant farmers, but what begins as comedy turns sour, cruel, and finally tragic. Characteristically, Fellini stacks the pack with a final victim of great facial beauty, palsied legs and obscurantist belief, after which it is only a matter of time before bad Brod receives his comeuppance on a stony hillside. Most of Fellini's preoccupations are present, but in 1955 had not yet blown the obligation to tell a story off-course.

Wade Major from Boxoffice magazine (link lost):

An overlooked little Fellini gem nestled between "La Strada" and "Nights of Cabiria," 1955's "Il Bidone" is a wonderful and unexpected release on DVD. A compelling piece of early, melodramatic Fellini, "Il Bidone" features the reliable Mrs. Fellini, Giulietta Masina, along with Americans Richard Basehart and Broderick Crawford in the story of petty crooks who face unexpected obstacles while plotting to swindle Rome' unsuspecting poor. It's an unusual film for Fellini in a variety of respects, freely mixing gritty realism and heartfelt melodrama in a manner which should seem awkward and unorthodox, yet which nonetheless manages to make a wide range of profound emotional impressions. Films as diverse as "The Treasure of The Sierra Madre" and "The Sting" will come to mind as Fellini's masterful grasp turns the screws of his powerful and surprising drama. No bonus features are included on the disc, though the caliber of the video and, in particular, the audio are surprisingly good considering the general quality of Italian films from the period. Fellini's early works, in particular, have tended to suffer in previous video releases, making the fine transfer of a lesser title such as "Il Bidone" a praiseworthy accomplishment.

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)

While not a new Italian film, Federico Fellini's 1955 classic The Swindle may as well be new. Most Fellini fans I know of -- including myself -- have never even heard of it, much less ever seen it.

Coming on the heels of Fellini's Oscar-winner La Strada, The Swindle (a.k.a. Il Bidone) was a flop both in Italy and here in the U.S. (though the French embraced it). Broderick Crawford stars (in a role originally intended for the ailing Humphrey Bogart) as Augusto, an aging con man and the leader of a group of four. He dresses as a bishop for a scam that works on remote farmers: a murderer buried a treasure chest next to the body of his victim on the farmer's land. The farmer can keep the (worthless) treasure but must pay for the last rites of the (phony) dead man.

The youngest of the con men Carlo (Richard Basehart) is married to Iris (Giulietta Masina) who constantly wonders how he can make so much money as a salesman. Augusto worries that Iris wields too much influence over Carlo, but he himself runs into his own teenage daughter about to go off to college. He promises her money for her education that he cannot deliver.

The Swindle falls between Fellini's two best films, La Strada and Nights of Cabiria, and deserves to stand at their side. It comes at a time when the master Italian director was still experimenting with neo-realism (before he launched off into pure spectacle) and was attempting to artistically craft his stories around events that could really happen. The images in The Swindle are rife with poetry -- depicting struggle, loneliness and guilt in the loveliest and most poignant way imaginable. It's an unforgettable treasure.

Critical Culture [Pacze Moj]

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Chris Jarmick

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

NIGHTS OF CABIRIA (Le notti di Cabiria) A 99

Italy France (117 mi) 1957

DVDBeaver.com - Full Review by Gary Tooze (excerpt)

This DVD/Film's appearance in both the 100 TOP DVDs listing , my YMdb page and Essential Cinema webpage is really an understated representation of my love of this film. For me, it literally transcends cinema itself, as each time I view it I feel there is nothing more I need to see... ever. It is films like this that have helped make Criterion's reputation what it is. Fellini's absolute best, Masina's finest performance –

A Night at the Opera to The Nutty Professor Pauline Kael

Possibly Federico Fellini's finest film, and a work in which Giulietta Masina earns the praise she received for LA STRADA. The structure is a series of episodes in the life of Cabiria (Masina), a shabby, aging, dreamy little Roman streetwalker--a girl whose hard, knowing air is no protection against her fundamental gullibility, which, we finally see, is her humanity and her saving grace. A famous actor (Amedeo Nazzari) picks her up and takes her to his luxurious villa; she goes to a cheap vaudeville show, and when the magician hypnotizes her, the innocent dreams of her adolescence pour out; a young man in the audience (François Périer) meets her and proposes to her, etc. Though the film seems free and almost unplanned, each apparent irrelevance falls into place. (It was the basis for the Broadway musical--and the movie musical--SWEET CHARITY.) In Italian.

Time Out

In 1957, Fellini was still as indebted to neo-realism as to surrealism, and this melancholy tale of a prostitute working the outskirts of Rome is notable for its straightforward depiction of destitution. It may come as a surprise to those who know only Fellini's later work. It's easy to appreciate how Bob Fosse, Neil Simon and Peter Stone found a musical in it (Sweet Charity): Fellini orchestrates his story in waves of simple, pure emotion, telegraphed with silent screen gusto by Giulietta Masina. With her Noh eyebrows and white bobby socks, Masina is the missing link between Charlie Chaplin and Shirley MacLaine. One of life's eternal optimists, Cabiria one day meets the man of her prayers (Périer), and what follows is scarcely unexpected, but heartbreaking for all that. This new (1999) print features a seven minute sequence not seen since the film's Cannes premiere - Cabiria's encounter with a stranger delivering food parcels to the poor. Censored apparently at the behest of the Catholic Church, it underlines the severity of the social context, deepens Cabiria's character and serves as a poignant harbinger of things to come.

New York Times (registration req'd) Janet Maslin

There is more grace and courage in the famous image of Giulietta Masina smiling through her tears in Federico Fellini's 1957 "Nights of Cabiria," the restored treasure of the summer movie season, than there is in all the fire-breathing blockbusters Hollywood has to offer.

The star's prize-winning, heartbreaking performance, the story's allegorical resonance and Fellini's sweeping, soulful vision of a Roman prostitute's resilient humanity mark "Nights of Cabiria" as a cinematic masterpiece. Not coincidentally, "Nights of Cabiria" has been refurbished and revived by the same team (Bruce Goldstein of Film Forum and Mike Thomas) who brought back Godard's "Contempt" last year, and who display the same acumen in reissuing a film of special prescience. Though it was shot in black and white amid the stark poverty of postwar Italy, neither the style nor the searching of "Cabiria" has grown dated at all.

As an outgrowth of characters played by Miss Masina in her husband's earlier films, "The White Sheik," "Il Bidone" and "La Strada," the unforgettable Cabiria is a tiny, scrappy survivor who drifts almost magically among the film's varied realms. In three astonishing long sequences here, she is taken under the wing of a movie star, disillusioned by a religious pilgrimage with carnival overtones and cruelly tricked by a hypnotist who exposes her once-secret dreams.

The fine new 35-millimeter print, which yellows at a few points but retains a beautiful depth and clarity, also includes an episode that has not been seen in the film since its original showing 41 years ago at the Cannes Film Festival.

In this section of the movie, a character who became known as "the man with the sack" takes Cabiria with him as he distributes food to people so poor that they live in underground caves. Beyond affording Cabiria a premonition of her own possible future, this fluid and mysterious episode drew the censure of Roman Catholic authorities, who saw the good Samaritan as a reproach to organized religion (there are many in the film) and asked that it be excised.

In the course of her eventful travels, Cabiria undergoes the profound spiritual evolution that gives the film its lingering grandeur. Anyone dismayed by the hyperkinetic emptiness of so much current film spectacle will find the antidote -- a deep, wrenching and eloquent filmgoing experience -- right here.

New York Magazine (David Denby)

In one of the most famous sequences in the history of the cinema, Federico Fellini ends his 1957 masterpiece Nights of Cabiria with a benumbed Giulietta Masina walking along a street as a bunch of carefree teenagers serenade her. The boys and girls swirl around the lonely, grief-stricken woman, passing in and out of the frame, singing, riding a motorcycle around her, until, finally, Masina smiles, even grazing the camera with a glance, as if to signal to us her permission to enjoy the moment. One can analyze this movie, which has just been rereleased in a restored, uncut version, in terms of its technique and its cinematic language -- patterns of light and dark, figures in the foreground and background intricately moving together, and so on. But emotion is a language, too -- the language that the cinema forgot -- and when watching Nights of Cabiria, one is amazed by how close Fellini keeps us to the moment-by-moment feelings of Masina's aging, unhappy little prostitute. That final sequence pulls together the seemingly random meanings of everything that has come before; it completes Masina's character and releases us into tears. Nights of Cabiria remains the most perfectly beautiful and touching of Fellini's movies.

At the end of the war, Fellini began his career in film by writing screenplays for Roberto Rossellini, who was creating, with other directors, a new, raw-streets style that came to be known as neorealism. Nights of Cabiria, which marks the end of Fellini's first period as a director, can be seen as a final stopping place for that style. The heavily symbolic La Dolce Vita came next, and then the many Fellini extravaganzas in which the fate of no single human being seemed to matter very much. Cabiria shares the neorealist emphasis on poverty and unhappiness -- the sense of social betrayal, the rapacity of street life -- but the movie at its most expressive is moving away from realism and toward fable and even religious myth.

Masina's Cabiria is no longer young; she's been around, and she talks tough, insisting on her independence, refusing the services of a pimp. She has something -- her own house. But it's the most comfortless of refuges, an isolated cement box surrounded by empty lots and a few blank modern buildings. In the neighborhood where she works, pimps and clients drive up, the other girls strut and shout, and sometimes lewd parties break out on the street. It's a Fellini movie, and there's always a lot of life going on. But the prostitutes and their clients are struggling to cheer themselves up, struggling to keep at bay the loneliness and impersonality of the huge, tawdry city. For all her tough talk, Cabiria is entirely vulnerable; she believes what people tell her. She unwittingly poses a test of their honesty and loyalty.

At the beginning of the movie, a man Cabiria loves throws her in a river and grabs her purse. She is pulled out by a bunch of kids and turned upside down until the water drains out. As soon as she can, she's up and fighting, enraged and hurt but ready for more. Battling for every bit of respect she can get, she responds to everything, little slights and moments of temporary advantage. Masina's performance draws on the circus, and on the Chaplin Tramp figure, but it has a delicacy that goes even beyond Chaplin. Cabiria can't conceal anything; her feelings show up on her face, a clown's mug with saucer eyes and big round lips. At a pretentious nightclub, she starts dancing like a music-hall performer, kicking and grinning -- Cabiria is not stupid, but she's guileless. She lives deep in fantasy and emotion while hardly seeing what's in front of her.

Even after her gruesome experience in the river, Cabiria is looking for love, or at least a little companionship. It was a principle of neorealism that incident mattered more than plot -- that reality not be squeezed into a preset pattern. Nights of Cabiria seems at first rather wandering and random. But Fellini quietly creates a structure that echoes and resonates. If you think of the movie as both a Christian fable and a sorrowing defense of illusion, everything in it makes sense. The movie becomes a panorama of betrayal -- by art, by the church, by men. Only a silent man with a sack, walking about the outskirts of Rome and handing gifts to the broken-down old whores living in caves -- a secular saint -- redeems this wasteland.

Nights of Cabiria, we think, should be a tragedy. But Fellini renounces tragedy; he insists that life without illusion is not possible. He offers a Christian optimism that draws nothing from doctrine or clergy and everything from love. It would be nice to say that Nights of Cabiria could redeem the cinema, too, but some things are not possible. Yet this 41-year-old movie provides an extraordinary contrast to the summer-season monstrosities as they blaze their way into oblivion.

Nights of Cabiria Criterion essay by Fellini

Nights of Cabiria (1957) - The Criterion Collection

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Bright Lights Film Journal Gary Morris

BFI | Sight & Sound | Nights of Cabiria (1957) Geoffrey Macnab from Sight and Sound, October 1999

Salon.com [Stephanie Zacharek]

Nitrate Online Sean Axmaker

ToxicUniverse.com (John Nesbit)

Ted Prigge

Real and Surreal including some great photos

Combustible Celluloid Jeffrey M. Anderson

The Criterion Contraption [Matthew Dessem]

digitallyOBSESSED! DVD Reviews Daniel Hirshleifer

Epinions [metalluk]

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young]

Reel.com DVD review [Robert Payne]

DVD Verdict Sean McGinnis

Strictly Film School Acquarello

filmcritic.com (James Brundage) probably the most dismissively flippant review out there

Mondo Digital also reviewing 8 ½ and AND THE SHIP SAILS ON

Philadelphia City Paper Sol Louis Siegel

Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)

LA DOLCE VITA

aka: The Sweet Life

Italy France (180 mi) 1960 ‘Scope

Time Out

The opening shot shows a helicopter lifting a statue of Christ into the skies and out of Rome. God departs and paves the way for Fellini's extraordinarily prophetic vision of a generation's spiritual and moral decay. The depravity is gauged against the exploits of Marcello (Mastroianni), a playboy hack who seeks out sensationalist stories by bedding socialites and going to parties. Marcello is both repelled by and drawn to the lifestyles he records: he becomes besotted with a fleshy, dimwit starlet (Ekberg), he joins in the media hysteria surrounding a child's alleged sighting of the Virgin Mary, yet he longs for the bohemian life of his intellectual friend Steiner (Cuny). There are perhaps a couple of party scenes too many, and the peripheral characters can be unconvincing, but the stylish cinematography and Fellini's bizarre, extravagant visuals are absolutely riveting.

The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]

Fellini may be the most dated and retrospectively overinflated of the new wave era's headline acts, but La Dolce Vita (1960) is still a potent, expressionistic launch into post-war Euro-emptiness that shares a rarely acknowledged helix with Antonioni's L'Avventura, released later that year. Outlandishly fashionable in its day thanks to the very decadence it critiques, the movie is almost Chayefsky-esque in its desolate portrait of a self-disgusted "society" reporter (Marcello Mastroianni) as he wanders in and out of the Roman celebrity-royalty-publicity swampland. Hardly just bourgeois target practice, Fellini's movie focuses on what had become of pop culture after fascism. The satirical attack lets Vita bloom into a living nightmare whose primary source of horror was the manner in which gossip, stardom, and entertainment media had laid siege to the world consciousness.

Disingenuous, perhaps, given Fellini's soon-to-be-apparent weakness for showbiz sawdust and tinsel. But in one movie, at least, the ethical baseline (heisted, you could argue, from Sweet Smell of Success) gave Fellini's roaming, cluttered mise-en-scène a chilling gravity he could never genuinely locate again. La Dolce Vita's welcome cynicism was powerfully influential, at least here—open season was declared on official cultural industries in so many films (The Manchurian Candidate, Medium Cool, The Long Goodbye, Network, etc.) that it became an American new wave motif.

Edinburgh U Film Society [Rosie Anderson]

From the opening sequence of Christ flying low over a grainy fifties Rome, this is a film about the search for the sublime, which always seems to hover just above all of us. It is fitting that Marcello (Mastroianni, Fellini’s erstwhile alter ego) should be hovering somewhere just behind it in his personal pursuit, crammed into a helicopter with a member of the paparazzi brandishing a telephoto lens. Despite his avowed intent to be a writer, he makes his living rehashing gossip of the rich and fabulous.

Not a film with what you could call strong narrative drive, La Dolce Vita oils its way as self-indulgently through Marcello’s world and his quest for something worthy of worship as he does. In a series of increasingly magnificent and silly episodes he attempts to find the ideal woman, the ideal man, the ideal job, the ideal life. Perhaps inevitably, he always discovers doubt at the heart of the object of his adorations. Poor Marcello and his decentred self wind up dancing to bongo music and throwing feathers about in a white suit at a beach hut.

Though at times deeply dated, this is existentialist angst as the fifties lived it. And, darling, it looks simply gorgeous. Marcello himself is a thing of eerie beauty, crisply suited and astride a throbbing moped, dashing from echoing mansions to achingly sharp apartments through pools of glare and shadow. Fellini, in his characteristically composed way, manages to capture the stress of trying to rebuild a country after the war in the bombed-out fading grandeur of Rome and its dissipated denizens. True, the film ennervatingly posits meaning only to blow it away. But Marcello’s predicament is both of its time and strikingly close to home. What do you worship in a world where film stars are treated like religious idols?

ToxicUniverse.com (Jeremiah Kipp) also seen here: filmcritic.com (Jeremiah Kipp)

The streets are buzzing with all the beautiful people, each of them clinging for attention as they sign, dance, laugh, and busy themselves with the pursuit of wine and sex. Such is the exciting, intoxicating universe of Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (The Sweet Life), one of the Italian master's more accessible films. It also marks his first collaboration with his onscreen persona, the charismatic Marcello Mastroianni.

La Dolce Vita and Michelangelo Antonioni's L'avventura were the dawn of the Italian New Wave in 1960, movies about the decadence, glamour, and emptiness of middle class life. Placed side by side, they paint a well-rounded portrait of life after the economic boom after World War II, which led to a new distribution of leisure time for the privileged.

Antonioni's world is stark, cold, confounding, and filled with dead-end corners. Fellini's world is more along the lines of a lavish circus—and while his characters are no less doomed than those of Antonioni, coming face to face with a great emptiness underneath the glamour, they'll drown with pasted smiles on their faces, dancing the conga.

Ah, Marcello. He knew how to wear a suit and look classy. Nobody knows how to smoke a cigarette or charm a woman like he does, nor does anyone convey the vulnerability of playboy life so accurately. It's all in that easy smile, the confidence of his walk, the sheer charisma of Marcello Mastroianni, even while playing a sneaky gossip columnist.

He's sexy and cool, but he's also something of a philanderer. At least he's having fun being chased by (and in hot pursuit of) women, dodging commitment to his adoring fiancée and searching for some small meaning and purpose in the universe while driving around in his hot rod. The photographers swarm around him, there are always huge processions and crowds, and he's in the middle, every single time. What a life!

There's not very much plot. Marcello wanders around the city of Rome flirting with all sorts of girls, ranging from back-alley whores to glamorous movie stars, like the lovely Sylvia (Anita Ekberg). So what if his current lady friend is home moping about? Marcello is wading around in the cool water of the fountain with this lady of his dreams. That's probably worth a punch in the nose from her jealous lover.

Too bad it all means nothing. Federico Fellini's layered world is a joy to behold, vivid and filled to the brim with vitality, but also deceptively banal. Nothing much happens in the film, even with all that activity. That's why La Dolce Vita can be read like an open book time and time again, either as a terrifying trap which will swallow up the unwary or a carnival ride which is worth riding around for a while.

The beautiful, subtle, poetic conclusion with Marcello on a beach offering an elaborate mimed shrug is a wonderful moment, exemplary of the film. Is he happy or sad, or a little bit of both? Whatever he is, I could not help but be touched by the gesture and enjoyed hanging around with this guy for almost three hours.

It's all fun and games until you have nothing. There's a sober undercurrent in the film which reveals the depression and hopelessness that counters the mirth. Marcello's girlfriend, Emma (Yvonne Furneaux) attempts suicide early in the film, but then is "fine" for a while. Marcello's literate, world-weary best friend, Steiner (Alain Cuny) seems to propose an all-too-similar solution later in the film; this from the man who has a wife, two lovely children, and a home which signifies success and happiness. Life is "fine" until the layers get peeled away.

There's a long, drawn out, nearly comical argument between Marcello and Emma where they scream and shout about never wanting to see each other again (over and over, to the point of becoming ridiculous). The words are meaningless. It remains to be seen whether this spat is a breakthrough beyond everything being "fine." It's significant in that at least they're shouting at each other, which implies some small feeling in a world of silliness and disguise.

Then we return to that momentous scene on the beach with Marcello falling on his knees. Decked out in a dapper white suit and black shirt, he looks great. His hair's a little tousled. He's had a rough night and maybe too much to drink. Much has happened to him by the end of the movie, and we wonder if it has changed him at all. In his small exchange with the girl across the way (where we only hear the sound of the waves), Fellini gives us all the information we need.

As thought provoking as it is playful, as tragic as it is hilarious, La Dolce Vita is prime Fellini. An endlessly watchable, beautiful, ridiculous film from a man whose passion for life, love, anger and laughter shines through every vivid, celebratory image. Life has never been so sweet, and the zing brings tears to my eyes every time.

DVD Times Noel Megahey

Ted Prigge

Film Court (Lawrence Russell)

not coming to a theater near you (Rumsey Taylor)

Turner Classic Movies Paul Tatara

Memories of Rome :: An Essay on La Dolce Vita Sly from The Open End, January 10, 2009

DVD Town [James Plath]

Erasing Clouds [Dan Heaton]

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson)

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

Epinions.com [Steven Flores]

The City Review [Carter B. Horsley]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger)

Reel.com DVD review [Ken Dubois]

Edwin Jahiel

culturevulture.net Arthur Lazere

DVD Verdict Rob Lineberger

DVD Talk (Svet Atanasov)

Milk Plus: A Discussion of Film Stennie

Movie Vault [Timotei Centea]

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Movie Gazette DVD review [Anton Bitel]

The worst best films ever made Tim Lott from The Guardian, July 24, 2009

Guardian/Observer

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

Chicago Tribune [Michael Wilmington]

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)

DVDBeaver.com - Graphic Review [Ole Kofoed]

BOCCACCIO ‘70

Fellini segment: The Temptation of Dr. Antonio (Le tentazioni del dottor Antonio)

Italy France (208 mi) 1962 omnibus film with 4 directors

Time Out

Probably the best remembered of that exasperating sub-genre, the portmanteau film, largely because the directors concerned (the undisputed heavyweights of their time) let rip in their most vulgar styles in an attempt to recapture the spirit of Boccaccio. The filmettes also reveal a startling fear of women in general. Fellini's episode concerns an outsize Ekberg who steps out of a billboard poster to torment an ineffectual puritan; while Visconti delivered a vicious tale of a beautiful young wife (a stunning performance by Schneider) who takes revenge on her husband by making him pay for her body. De Sica and Monicelli went for broader, more traditional comedic effect - less pretentious, but perhaps inevitably in this company, less memorable.

Being There Magazine [Nathan Williams]

In 1962, Italy was the envy of the cinematic world. The Nouvelle Vague may have been in full swing, Kurosawa and Ozu may have been at the peak of their powers, and the U.S. continued to churn out some quality product under tough circumstances. But, really, nobody was touching Italia in the early '60s. Fellini, Visconti, Antonioni, Rosellini, Pasolini, Olmi, De Sica; the list of heavy-hitters is jaw-dropping.

Inter-continental super-producers Cesare Zavattini, Carlo Ponti, and Joe Levine dreamed up the idea of matching four top directors with four bombshells, all in the style of the Renaissance poet, Boccaccio. They wrangled Fellini, Visconti, De Sica, and b-level talent, Mario Monicelli, as well as a substantial budget for their four-part (and nearly four-hour) tribute to gorgeous women. The results are mixed, but the total film is better and more thematically coherent than any other of the genre (if, at 208 minutes, a bit of a cinematic endurance test).

Monicelli's segment, "Renzo and Luciana" is a touching depiction of the difficulties of marriage in the modern industrial Rome. It resembles a sweeter, more optimistic Olmi, and while it doesn't quite match his better work, it is a sweet, touching film nonetheless. Newcomer Marina Solinas is excellent as the working girl wife.

Fellini's segment, "The Temptation of Dr. Antonio," produced between La Dolce Vita and 8½ is disappointing. The good doctor is a moralist who becomes obsessed with an Anita Ekberg poster, 50-foot Anita comes to life to torment him, and a victory is won for sexual freedom. Despite some impressive flourishes of style, the whole thing is relatively uninspired, and silly to the point of inducing boredom. Fans of a certain early Scorsese short, however, should note this as a source of inspiration.

Visconti's segment, "The Job," is easily the best of the quartet. Contrasting strongly with the large-budget, on-location competition, Visconti's film takes place entirely in a handful of small rooms. Romy Schneider, as a countess who wants to earn her own living, is tremendous under Visconti's direction. Also fascinating are small hints of the film he would shoot next, The Leopard: (the relationship, the large dog, the novel itself on the couch).

De Sica bats clean-up with, "The Raffle," a depiction of a carnival worker (Sophia Loren) who sells her sexual services via lottery. De Sica gets success with the dangerous combination of the savvy Loren and his usual assortment of non-actors. The dropped jaws at Loren's beauty isn't acting, it's regular Italian men genuinely excited to be sharing space with her. Indeed, without this charm, the film would be nothing more than an above average sitcom episode.

The transfer is unexceptional, but not distracting in any way. The extras are minimal (a mildly diverting interview with De Sica as the highlight) and the sound is fine. Not an especially good introduction to any of these directors, and not among their best work, but far from their worst. For fans of Italian cinema, required viewing.

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson)

At the height of the craze for European art films when Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni were in peak form, super-producer Carlo Ponti dreamed up this omnibus opus, four lengthy short subjects each directed by a major talent. Clocking in at a whopping three hours and eighteen minutes, American importer Joseph E. Levine immediately lopped off Mario Monicelli opening episode, leaving a more easily distributed film by the three directors with bigger reputations among New York critics: Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica.

Most American viewers have only seen Boccaccio '70 in this tryptich form, and usually pan-scanned in faded Television prints. The new DVD outfit NoShame Films (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow) gives us this interesting landmark production at its full length, uncut, and in a brightly-colored transfer.

Renzo e Luciana: The marriage between low-income factory workers Luciana and Renzo (Marisa Solinas and Germano Gilioli) is kept a secret because of company rules. Their home life is frustrated by the lack of privacy, or funds to buy any - that and the unwanted attentions of Luciana's pushy boss, who assumes that she's available to be his girlfriend. Le tentazioni del dottor Antonio: Self-appointed censor and protector of public decency Dr. Antonio (Pippino De Filippo) is scandalized by an enormous poster of "Anita" (Anita Ekberg) promoting milk. He tries everything to get it torn down, but even Vatican officials are mostly unconcerned. While trying to demolish the billboard at night, Dr. Antonio is horrified to discover that the poster image has come magically to life. He's confronted by a 50-foot Anita with an equally outsized sexual appetite to quench. Il lavoro: The tabloids catch the indolent Conte Ottavio (Thomas Milian) in the company of a score of expensive call-girls, a scandal that his lawyers try to neutralize to insure that the money keeps flowing from his rich father-in-law. Ottavio's wife of one year Pupe (Romy Schneider) at first doesn't seem overly concerned about his philandering. But she has secretly contacted the women he's been with, and has a personal plan to determine the truth of her marriage. La riffa: Carnival tout Zoe (Sophia Loren) accepts desperate measures to pay back taxes and keep her traveling shooting gallery from bankruptcy. A confederate is selling raffle tickets to hundreds of love-starved livestock cowboys - and Zoe is the prize.

The American trailer for Boccaccio '70 tries to explain that the title refers to what Boccaccio would come up with if he were to make a film in 1970; in other words, it's meaningless. What we get are four rather good mini-movies by top Italian filmmakers. There was some talk of Mario Monicelli's episode not fitting in with the others, but the obvious reason it was dropped from international distribution was to cut down the length of the film. If Monicelli's show seems different, it's because the other three each have a more exploitable sex element. The producer's natural favorite Sophia Loren does yet another of her big-tease-but-no-payoff farces, Romy Schneider provides some discreet but intoxicating near-nudity, and Anita Ekberg sends up her bosomy bombshell image from La Dolce Vita by appearing as a literal mountain of flesh, a Colossus of Sex.

Each episode presents a different facet of Italian art filmmaking of the time. Mario Monicelli's tale of frustrated newlyweds is a Neorealist exercise, sketching the day-to-day reality of love oppressed by economic concerns. Renzo and Luciana have to sneak across town to marry on a work break. As they can't afford a place of their own, the pair spend a miserable honeymoon surrounded by curious children and insensitive adults. If they want a drink when they dance, they should probably walk home. And all the while they must put up with the unwanted advances of Luciana's loutish office supervisor.

Monicelli's episode is handsomely produced and needs make no excuses, but viewers will probably be anxious to get on to the big names and sexy actresses of the later chapters. The chopping of this section by Joe Levine invites comparison with the Japanese horror omnibus Kwaidan. It was shorn of an entire chapter for American art houses as well. That spirit lived on in the Miramax company's routine editing of their foreign imports of the last fifteen years - Like Water for Chocolate, Italian for Beginners, etc.

The most famous episode is Federico Fellini's The Temptation of Dr. Antonio, the "¹/₂" in 8 & ¹/₂. Here's the first time we see Fellini's "crazy circus" filming style in all its glory, as Nino Rota's bouncy, maddening jingle Bevete più latte ("Drink more milk") provides the music for the mad parade of boy scouts, schoolgirls, nuns, firemen, jazz musicians and ordinary citizens that rallies around the giant billboard of "Anita" holding a glass of milk in a seductive pose. Fellini is taking time out from 'meaningful' epics to have a bit of fun and doesn't mind pulling in references from Frank Tashlin (remember Ekberg's mammary competition Jayne Mansfield holding the milk bottles in the suggestive cartoon The Girl Can't Help It?) and of course American science fiction films with Allison Hayes and Dorothy Provine as fifty-foot females on the prowl. Ekberg becomes the monstrous incarnation of the prudish Dr. Antonio's repressed desires - his 'enemy' is at one point revealed to be a lost mommy figure. Antonio is indulged and tolerated by even his conservative friends and Church officials also consider him a pest; he's as alone as the figure of St. George slaying the dragon that hangs on his wall. The episode is unique, highly enjoyable, and shows Fellini at his fun-loving best.

The most profound episode is Luchino Visconti's Il lavoro, a deft and thoughtful one-act that's modest in production value. The devastatingly beautiful Romy Schneider is the center of the show, before her dilution in comedies like What's New Pussycat? She totally eclipses Thomas (Tomas) Milian, who would later become a fixture in political Spaghetti westerns. This chapter makes a Boccaccio-esque comparison between a wife and a whore, as Schneider's pampered frau discovers her real place in her fairy-tale of a marriage. The husband whines and pleads for his straying to be ignored and his allowance untouched, which prompts Schneider to put him to the test. It's all conveyed through costume changes and elaborate 'business' in their palatial home, with servants serving food, starting baths and rounding up Schneider's collection of kittens. She acts nonchalant and teases her insolent hubby with her body, while revealing several layers of inner disillusion and disappointment. Visconti pulls off an almost perfect character analysis, without the grandiose trappings of his other masterpieces (Senso, The Leopard, The Damned) . Schneider's wife never says explicitly what she has in mind but her crushed, rueful look when Milian thoughtlessly falls into her trap expresses much more. It's a masterful sequence that sums up A Doll's House in just a few telling moments.

The final chapter is a light comedy in Vittorio De Sica's 'down in the streets' mode. If I were Italian I might wonder just how condescending is the director's typing of common folk as mostly sweet but crude buffoons. Sophia Loren's unlikely gutter princess is just another side of beef in a stockyard fair, the grand prize in a blind raffle. Prospective lechers of all shapes and sizes show up to "see the goods" as if they were inspecting a prize heifer. In an inspired bit of sex-play, the writers contrive to make Loren remove her red blouse so as not to arouse a mad bull. The bull calms down but the assembled Italian cowpokes are aroused en masse by the sight of the star's (obviously custom-fit) underwear. As in a number of other sex farces with Ms. Loren the episode has to be all tease. Events conspire to make sure that the meek churchgoer with the winning ticket doesn't collect his prize, and that the naughty girl's profits are returned, etc. The fun here will depend greatly on one's attraction to Italy's sex symbol; there are some cute Rock 'n Roll and cha-cha riffs on the soundtrack. Loren sings a song called "Money Money Money" to round out the package.

Showing up in various bits throughout the show are name actors Suso Cecchi d'Amico, Paolo Stoppa (practically a cameo) and Romolo Valli; the amusing gallery of sad sacks in La Riffa are said to be non-professionals.

Turner Classic Movies Paul Sherman

DVD Talk Bill Gibron

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Wilson)

Monsters At Play Gregory S. Burkart

DVD Verdict [Dan Mancini]

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice Daulton Dickey

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)

DVD Beaver Gary W. Tooze

8 ½ A 100

Italy France (114 mi) 1963

“Often imitated, never equaled,” dark and surreal fantastical, a tormented confession of a movie director’s secrets, a psychic kaleidoscope in which the protagonist’s virtues and peccadilloes, fears and hopes, are quite literally paraded before our eyes. This is the performance of a lifetime by Marcello Mastroianni, imperious and tortured, so dangerously complex in his character that his image forever became the emblematic image of Fellini himself.

Time Out

The passage of time has not been kind to what many view as Fellini's masterpiece. Certainly Di Venanzo's high-key images and the director's flash-card approach place 81⁄2 firmly in its early '60s context. As a self-referential work it lacks the layering and the profundity of, for example, Tristram Shandy, and the central character, the stalled director (Mastroianni), seems less in torment than doodling. And yet... The bathing of Guido sequence is a study extract for film- makers, and La Saraghina's rumba for the seminary is a gift to pop video. Amiably spiking all criticism through a gloomy scriptwriter mouthpiece, Fellini pulls a multitude of rabbits out of the showman's hat.

8½ Jonathan Rosenbaum

If what you know about this exuberant, self-regarding movie comes from its countless inferior imitations (from Paul Mazursky's Alex in Wonderland and The Pickle to Woody Allen's Stardust Memories to Bob Fosse's All That Jazz), you owe it to yourself to see Federico Fellini's exhilarating, stocktaking original—an expressionist, circuslike comedy about the complex mental and social life of a big-time filmmaker (Marcello Mastroianni) stuck for a subject and the busy world surrounding him. It's Fellini's last black-and-white picture and conceivably the most gorgeous and inventive thing he's ever done—certainly more fun than anything he made after it. (The only other Fellini movie that's about as pleasurable is The White Sheik.)

8½ Sight and Sound

"8½ coalesces for me in many ways the essence of cinema" —Terry Gilliam

8½ was voted number three in the 2002 Sight & Sound Directors' Poll of the Top Ten Best Films of all time, where it was described as "the definitive film about filmmaking". Federico Fellini was voted at number two in the Sight & Sound Directors' Top Ten Directors poll.

A film director who looks like Fellini tries to make a film but can't, except that here is the result, Fellini's roughly eighth-and-a-half film. He is mentally assailed by... what? Dreams? Memories? Fantasies? No, silly, by films. Convoluted and self-reflexive, 8½ comes on as the ultimate art-movie, but is above all an extraordinary evocation of unbearable restlessness finally giving way to the joy of going with the flow.

Village Voice (J. Hoberman)

Reopening this week as well, Federico Fellini's 1962 8 1/2 marked the high point of the director's personal legend. This self-reflexive essay on the vicissitudes of a successful, middle-aged movie director (given an undeserved grace by Marcello Mastroianni's performance) was once so revered it's worth noting that it always had detractors. Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris both panned 8 1/2 and continued to flog it for years as the sort of bogus masterpiece beloved by over-earnest English professors (Kael) or callow film students (Sarris).

However the ensuing decades have brought forth a deluge of bogus masterpieces, and Fellini's, by comparison, holds up rather well. 8 1/2 may be lightweight, but its facility is inspired. The filmmaker was never smoother than he was here, guiding the audience through a series of superb set pieces: the opening traffic-jam nightmare, the harem fantasy, the cocktail partypress conference on the movie lot, the haunting and inimitable circus-ring ending. Fellini's intercutting of reverie, dream, and reality is seamless and standard-setting. And as 8 1/2 was made before his style inflated to DeMille dimensions, his pet tricks— killing all the sound except the howl of the wind, or dollying the camera through a throng of ciao-hissing gargoyles— had yet to harden into mannerist tics.

More than any other foreign "classic" of the early 1960s, 8 1/2 was slick and entertaining enough to make a splash in the mainstream. The movie's major flaw remains its romantic, self-serving portrait of the artist as a big-time moviemaker. This, of course, has been its fatal appeal for certain self-conscious Hollywood auteurs. Now that movies like Woody Allen's Stardust Memories and Bob Fosse's All That Jazz have slid down the memory hole, it should be easier to enjoy the maestro's more adroit hokum.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Ben Sachs

For many, the greatest film about filmmaking and Federico Fellini's finest hour. 8 1/2 is a work of such grandeur that it demands to be seen on a big screen—if nothing else but for the Chagall-esque final images, a celebration of the "carnival of life" as dreamt by a passionate artist on a massive oceanside set for a film that will never be made. It's also a film that demands to be heard in a theater, as the music of Nino Rota (Fellini's frequent collaborator) is rarely less than ravishing. "Fellini's camera is endlessly delighting. His actors often seem to be dancing rather than simply walking... [and Rota's] music brought a lift and subtle rhythm to their movements," wrote Roger Ebert in his "Great Movies" review, a deft formal analysis of a director often accused of groundless style. But if there's a movie defensible for groundless style, it's 8 1/2, a portrait of a film director's vibrant inner life as a mosaic of memories, dreams, sex fantasies, and ever-surprising images. Marcello Mastroianni, at the height of his star power, managed to make an iconic performance by standing in for Fellini, but the whole cast is ultimately dwarfed by the scope of Fellini's imagination. To again quote Ebert's review: "Few directors make better use of space. One of his favorite techniques is to focus on a moving group in the background and track with them past foreground faces that slide in and out of frame. He also likes to establish a scene with a master shot, which then becomes a close-up when a character stands up into frame to greet us. Another technique is to follow his characters as they walk, photographing them in three-quarter profile, as they turn back toward the camera. And he likes to begin dance sequences with one partner smiling invitingly toward the camera before the other partner joins in the dance. All of these moves are brought together in his characteristic parades. Inspired by a childhood love of the circus, Fellini used parades in all his films—not structured parades but informal ones, people moving together toward a common goal or to the same music, some in the foreground, some farther away... I have seen 8 1/2 over and over again, and my appreciation only deepens. It does what is almost impossible: Fellini is a magician who discusses, reveals, explains and deconstructs his tricks, while still fooling us with them."

Federico Fellini: 8 1/2 | Features | Guardian Unlimited Film Derek Malcolm from the Guardian

At least half of all film-makers asked about the directors they most admire include Federico Fellini in their top three. And he seems to have a particular fascination for purely commercial directors - perhaps because his was the cinema of visually expressed emotions rather than intellectual rigour. He was indeed a great director. But there's a kind of critical resistance to his work that once caused him to write to me (I was then deputy film critic for the Guardian) to ask if there was anything I could do about the carping notices that invariably flowed from the pen of Richard Roud, my predecessor.

There was not. But I have to confess that the longer he worked, the more I doubted Fellini. In fact, my favourite of his films has always been his first - Variety Lights, which he co-directed with Alberto Lattuada way back in 1950. It's a marvellously sympathetic study of a travelling theatre group, which, perhaps because I was once an actor, seemed to me the best film about the theatre I'd ever seen.

There's no doubt, though, that 8 1/2, made 12 years later, is his real masterpiece; La Dolce Vita and Fellini's Satyricon his most spectacular epics, while Amarcord is the self-referential film that turns his most faithful supporters weak at the knees.

8 1/2 is probably the most potent movie about film-making, within which fantasy and reality are mixed without obfuscation, and there's a tough argument that belies Fellini's usual felicitous flaccidity.

Its title refers to the fact that, up to then, Fellini had made seven features and two episodes in composite films that added up to about a half. Its central character is Guido (Marcello Mastroianni), a film-maker based partly on Fellini. He's a successful director, with everything in place to make another hit but with no actual story to tell - perhaps as Fellini felt after the success of La Dolce Vita.

Guido procrastinates, retreats into his messy private life with wife and mistress, goes to a nightclub clairvoyant who makes him recall his childhood and he fantasises about keeping a harem of women at bay with a whip, or about being hounded to death by desperate producers and a hostile press. Guido never makes his film, whereas Fellini did.

When it came out, the film seemed incomprehensible to many who had hitherto loved his work. In one Italian town, the audience attacked the projectionists. As far as Fellini was concerned, however, 8 1/2 was 'sincere to the point of being indecent' and not at all difficult to understand.

Later, critics referred to Jung, Kierkegaard, Proust, Gide, Pirandello, Bergman and Resnais in burrowing for his influences, and Alberto Moravia insisted Guido was an Italian version of Joyce's Leopold Bloom. Fellini strenuously denied all this, though it is true that many others were making subjective films around the same time, notably Bergman (The Silence) and Kazan (The Anatolian Smile). 'Certain issues are in the air,' was all Fellini would say.

He won his third Oscar with 8 1/2, so it can hardly be as complicated a film as some have made out. But it does remind one of Bergman, with whom Fellini was going to collaborate on a film, together with Kurosawa. Nothing came of it, but Fellini recalls meeting Bergman at Cine citta, the great Roman studio where Fellini made so many of his films. During their talk, Bergman 'pointed with his very long finger to a corner of the swimming-pool. Beneath the rain-rippled surface of the water an infinity of little organisms, like a Sumerian alphabet, were whirling around at bacterial velocity. Bergman squatted down on his heels and began talking to the tadpoles with a happy smile on his face.'

Both directors regard humans as if they were tadpoles, to some extent, but whereas Bergman divorced himself from the equation, Fellini, at least in 8 1/2, did not. Which is why it is a better film even than The Silence.

Washington Post [Hal Hinson]

In 1964, when Dwight MacDonald reviewed Federico Fellini's "8½" for Esquire, he called it the Italian maestro's "obvious masterpiece." Today, as the film approaches its 30th anniversary with a spanky new 35mm print, that evaluation still sounds about right -- perhaps even more so than when "8½" was first released.

Of course, MacDonald intended for "obvious" to serve a double meaning. And he used the term "masterpiece" as if it set his ornery teeth on edge. "Fellini has made a movie," he wrote, "that I can't see any way not to recognize as a masterpiece."

Not appreciate. Recognize, as if he had to squint and put on his glasses.

And yet MacDonald's grudging faint praise isn't merely a case of critical distemper. He'd hit on something fundamental, not just about "8½" but about all of Fellini -- that he is that rare sort of artist who can be loved, revered and just barely tolerated, all at the same time.

What we just barely tolerate in this chronologically numbered, blatantly autobiographical opus is the shamelessly overluscious "Italian-ness" of it -- the priests and the nuns, all that symbolism and emotionalism and chicly weary self-absorption -- a trait that through the lead character of Guido, his alter ego and filmmaker without a clue, Fellini parodies with one brush stroke and indulges with the next.

Also on this list of negatives is his sentimentality, and his tendency to substitute his trademark mannerisms -- his auteur's stamp -- for true substance, and cover his deficiencies with his astounding sense of visual lyricism and romance.

Yet, still, what beautiful mannerisms, what lyricism and romance.

Never again was Fellini as successful as he was here in his use of film as a theater for soul-searching. Loaded with self-referential detail, "8 1/2" is the director's self-mocking chronicle of his inability to come up with a worthy subject for his next film. Guido is dried up as an artist, and spent as a man. And so lacking a true subject or thematic direction, he turns inward, focusing on his emptiness (which out of vanity he mistakes for depth) and his suffering, most of which is self-inflicted.

With gray streaking his hair, a black hat, black suit and black-rimmed glasses, Marcello Mastroianni plays Guido (and for once the verb fits perfectly) as Fellini, down to the last detail, and from the outset it's clear that he is an irresistible weakling, a pampered mama's boy and a lout -- self-proclaimed! Which is supposed to make him all the more adorable.

Has there ever been a filmmaker who got more pleasure out of hating his weaknesses than Fellini? Or displayed them with greater pride and verve? Fellini hates Guido (and Guido hates himself) for the lies he tells his wife (Anouk Aimee), his mistress (Sandra Milo) and the rest of his harem of women (including Claudia Cardinale) who clutter up his life and make it impossible for him to create his greatest, most personal, most definitive work.

The irony of course is that Fellini is in the process of creating the very sort of sweeping, ground-clearing work that is beyond the talents of his own feeble stand-in. Structurally, the film has been much imitated -- by Woody Allen in "Stardust Memories," for example, which stole its basic premise -- but no other filmmaker (with the possible exception of Cocteau) has been able to move as easily back and forth in time, to range from childhood to the present, or shuttle as seamlessly between dreams, fantasies and reality as Fellini does here.

Guido is an artist in extremis. Feeling the need to purge himself and escape into his art, Guido goes to a fashionable spa for their mineral water cure. Once he's arrived, though, he's clawed at everywhere he goes by producers, hangers-on, starlets, friends and foes alike, all of whom want to know when he's going to tell them something about the breakthrough film they're supposed to be making.

They wait throughout the entire picture while Guido squirms and equivocates, until out of desperation he grasps at the closest, easiest solution. Fellini's final stab at resolution at the movie's end comes dangerously close to trashing the flashes of genuine brilliance and insight that had come before. It was then -- and still is now -- a facile, unsupported ending. Instead of forcing this phony family-of-man finale on us, he might have left us alone with Guido and all he has left, himself and his charming, ludicrous suffering, the clown and his circus of pain.

8 1/2: A Film with Itself as Its Subject Criterion essay by Alexander Sesonske

8 1/2 (1963) - The Criterion Collection

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford

filmcritic.com [Christopher Null]

DVD Journal Gregory P. Dorr

not coming to a theater near you (Rumsey Taylor)

DVD Verdict - Criterion Collection Mike Pinsky

Film Court (Lawrence Russell)

Epinions [metalluk]

Epinions.com [Steven Flores]

moviediva

MovieFreak [Howard Schumann]

ToxicUniverse.com (John Nesbit)

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dale Dobson)

eFilmCritic.com (Charles Tatum)

Decent Films - faith on film [Steven D. Greydanus] who reports the film is listed here: Vatican film list

Psychologically Significant Movies [Aleksandar Novakovic]

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick)

CINE-FILE: Cine-List Ben Sachs from Cine-File

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Not Another Boring Neophyte - Vadim Rizov also can be seen here: Movie Vault [Vadim Rizov]

ToxicUniverse.com (Chris Sweet)

Reel.com DVD review [Doug Jones]

Critical Culture [Pacze Moj]

Movie Habit (Breck Patty) or can be seen here: Breck Patty

Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]

Ruthless Reviews Matt Cale

VideoVista Peter Schilling

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] calls it shameless self-indulgence

Federico Fellini.8 1/2 (Otto e mezzo). 1963 from MOMA exhibition

Mondo Digital also reviewing NIGHTS OF CABIRIA and AND THE SHIP SAILS ON

Washington Post [Desson Howe]

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] Roger Ebert in May 7, 1993

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] Roger Ebert in May 28, 2000

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

JULIET OF THE SPIRITS (Giulietta degli spiriti)

Italy France Germany (137 mi) 1965

The Joker to Juvenile Court Pauline Kael

Federico Fellini looks at a mousy wife's fantasy life; her unconscious seems to be stuffed with leftover decor from MGM musicals. A peculiarly ungallant film. With Giulietta Masina, and Sandra Milo, Valeska Gert, Lou Gilbert, José-Luis de Villalonga, Sylva Koscina, Valentina Cortese, and Friedrich Ledebur. Cinematography by Gianni Di Venanzo; music by Nino Rota. Written by Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, and Brunello Rondi. In Italian.

Juliet of the Spirits (1965) Stephen Holden from the New York Times (capsule)

Made in 1965, around the time the term psychedelia was coined to describe a luminous Day-Glo vision of the world, Federico Fellini's phantasmagoric "Juliet of the Spirits" was the Italian master's first color film. Fellini went deliriously and brilliantly bananas with the color to create a rollicking through-the-looking-glass series of tableaus evoking a woman's troubled psyche. These sequences are a zany, surreal jumble of Freudian, Jungian and pagan symbolism segued into a 145-minute head trip. Although the head being explored is a woman's and the movie has been described as the female counterpart of Fellini's "8 1/2," the fantasies being enacted are still Fellini's sexual obsessions but embellished with feminine frills.

Apollo Movie Guide [Patrick Byrne]

From the mind of legendary director Federico Fellini and his amazing group of artists, writers, actors, camera crew, designers and production team involved with Juliet of the Spirits, Fellini's first colour feature film. It’s one woman's tale of a marriage full of indiscretion and infidelity – a story that’s nothing short of a lavish Technicolor transformation through the hypnotically hallucinatory swinging 1960s. The colours in her mind... her dreams, her fantasies, her confusion... become mirrored on the screen for all to see in its lushly grandiose presentation.

The story of Juliet (Giulietta Masina, Fellini's real wife) and her neglectful, unfaithful husband Giorgio is based to a certain extent on Fellini's relationship with his wife, his psychic friends, and his sexual relations both with men (his most famous being director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was later famous for his landmark 1975 film Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom – a merging of the Marquis De Sade's novel and Fascist Italy) and women, although Fellini claimed this film was a brainchild born of his LSD drug usage. While these elements combined may seem utterly seething with hedonism and selfishness, Juliet of the Spirits is actually a compassionate and loving testament to all that Fellini loved in this world.

The use of plastics and artificial substances throughout the film suggest a message of false reality in the main character's world, which feels very much like the real world can be at times. The film’s subtly over-accentuated prism of colour and light – amidst a constantly mutating connection between the dream world and the real world – provides an ambiguous psychedelic experience like no other director could have accomplished. Trademark Fellini – as his future films would show – full of colourfully strange characters, noise, and passion, Juliet of the Spirits is Fellini's very essence, in every sense of the word. Not only did it bankrupt him because of its box office and critical failure when it was released, ruining his life for about five years until his next film (Fellini's Satyricon, which shows how Juliet of the Spirits helped Fellini embrace his homosexuality), but it also changed entire philosophy on filmmaking.

You might remember Juliet of the Spirits from Woody Allen's reference to it in the movie theatre scene in Annie Hall, when Allen encounters a loud-mouthed know-it-all intellectual trying to impress his girlfriend with his knowledge of Fellini. Or you may know about it simply because it is arguably Fellini's most personal masterpiece, but those who may have stumbled upon it and don't know much about Fellini's films most certainly couldn't choose a better one to start with. It is a film that gave him life, as most of his films and work in cinema did. As Fellini once said, "There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life."

City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul Peter Ritter

If the critics are to be believed, Juliet of the Spirits, released in 1965 and rereleased this year in a restored and re-subtitled print, marked the beginning of Federico Fellini's long, sad slide into self-parody. Writing in Esquire, Dwight Macdonald compared Fellini to an orator who shouts to cover gaping holes in his argument. Pauline Kael--who otherwise disagreed with just about everything Macdonald ever wrote--seconded the motion: "Few seem to have noticed that by the time of Juliet of the Spirits [Fellini] had turned into a professional party-giver." The consensus view was that, with this "big trashy phantasmagoria" (Kael's biting summation), Fellini had let his imagination elope with his senses--a harbinger of later rococo orgies like Fellini Satyricon. Juliet was all dressed up, with nowhere to go except camp.

Fortunately, the critics are not to be believed. It isn't that Juliet has aged especially well: With its psychedelic gilding and mucky Age of Aquarius spirituality, the film seems a bit overripe for contemporary taste. Nor is it a particularly sophisticated film: The story tells of a cuckolded wife (played by Fellini's wife, Giulietta Masina) who suffers a benign haunting after she discovers that her husband, a professional party thrower (Fellini, in other words), is carrying on an affair. What stands up after all these years is the film's visual brio--in their first departure from black-and-white, Fellini and his longtime cinematographer Gianni De Venanzo get reelingly drunk on color--and its deeply felt sense of the absurd. The latter seems especially central to Fellini's purpose: Like that other Roman satirist, Horace, Fellini was determined to speak the truth while laughing. Reviewers primed to pigeonhole him as a maker of modern morality plays--"the official greeter of the apocalypse," in Kael's memorable phrase--might have missed some of the maestro's wink-and-nod humor. Of course the modern world is going to hell, he seems to say. But isn't the trip grand?

Juliet, though smaller in scale than Fellini's La Dolce Vita or 8-1/2, also wickedly satirizes the lifestyles of the rich and semi-famous. Here, the director plants Masina in a tidy seaside home that looks like an enlarged dollhouse. Her life, too, is an exaggerated version of bourgeois placidity: Surrounded by bustling servants at the film's opening, Masina's Juliet prepares for a lavish anniversary party. Her husband forgets, of course, arriving instead with a coterie of hangers-on, including a darkly handsome toreador who quotes Garcia Lorca; a desiccated sculptor and her oily boy toy; and an effeminate mystic who insists on performing a séance. Fellini stages the ensuing party as a swirl of sound and shadow; his camera, accompanied by Nina Rota's unsettlingly chirpy jazz score, flits around these slightly ghoulish figures, alighting only momentarily on their painted faces. It's as though the crowd of grotesques from La Dolce Vita has invaded Juliet's head and begun to multiply.

In this respect, at least, Kael was spot on: Fellini knows how to throw a party. He packs so much baroque weirdness into these early scenes that the screen sometimes resembles a Hieronymus Bosch canvas. In one virtuoso sequence, Juliet pays a visit to her neighbor, Suzy, a vampish sexpot played by Sandra Milo (who, in an impossible-to-miss parallel, played the mistress of Fellini's alter ego in 8-1/2). Suzy's sprawling mansion is like the harem dream in La Dolce Vita, stocked with beautiful, wild-eyed women dressed like art-nouveau peacocks who stage an elaborate bordello pageant. And Suzy herself is like Juliet's uninhibited alter ego: She maintains her own harem of chiseled men; a chute from her bedroom to a swimming pool below, for quick postcoital access; and a liquor-stocked tree house for trysting. Recall that in 8-1/2, Marcello Mastroianni's Guido tried to convince his mistress to play a prostitute in the bedroom; Milo's Carla, voluptuous and dumb, kept interrupting the fantasy by talking about her digestion. Here Fellini has finally got Milo where he wants her, and he makes her into the kind of woman who could commit seven deadly sins before breakfast. (Like Guido in 8-1/2, Fellini somehow manages to keep both his slutty fantasy girl and his chaste wife.) He's clearly more interested in this eroticized kabuki than he is in Juliet's situation; for a few minutes, the diminutive Masina is almost lost in the flutter.

In fact, given that Juliet is considered by some to be the feminist counterpoint to 8-1/2 (inaccurately, I think), it's remarkable how little interest Fellini shows in Juliet/Masina's problems. One could argue, of course, that Fellini never treated his wife particularly well: In La Strada he let Anthony Quinn toss her around like a rag doll; in the first reel of Nights of Cabiria, he had her thrown into a sewage ditch, dumped by her lover, and prostituted to a famous actor. Fellini didn't use Masina as Antonioni did Monica Vitta--as a pretty face to foreground the filmmaker's immaculate compositions. Masina was both Fellini's muse and his mule. Especially in Juliet, though, the director's treatment of his wife borders on spousal abuse: Fellini, who designed Masina's couture for the film, dresses her like a nun, managing to render her unattractive and uninteresting. In the midst of all this decadent abandon (everyone around her is decorated like a Christmas tree), Masina ends up seeming like Julie Andrews plopped onto the planet of the apes.  

In his own account of the production, Fellini gives Masina a peculiarly backhanded compliment: "Giulietta's resistance to the makeup, clothing, hairdo, earrings, her firm stand that other times seemed to me crimes against the character, intolerable interventions of femininity--this time they were functional." According to stories, Fellini intended Juliet as a gift to Masina during a particularly tumultuous period in their marriage. But he couldn't give it without leaving the strings attached; Masina was his marionette. Watching the film now, you can see the tension created by Fellini's demands on his wife's dignity. Masina plays Juliet as a sort of holy fool, wearing the same inert expression--a beatific little crinkle of a smile, as though she was laughing at a cosmic joke--throughout. Masina certainly wasn't a bad actress: Playing wistful romantics in La Strada and Nights of Cabiria, she gave Fellini's cinema of cruelty a warm human center. By the time Juliet of the Spirits rolled along, though, it seems that Mrs. Fellini simply didn't want to play her husband's head games anymore. The style of her performance might best be described as passive resistance.

What Fellini was interested in was, of course, himself. In a telling dream sequence, Masina is tasked with dragging a chain out of the ocean. Fellini, a devotee of Jung, often used the sea to symbolize his mind. (Recall the monstrous fish that washes ashore at the end of La Dolce Vita, a symbol of Mastroianni/Fellini's awakening.) In Juliet, Masina is literally enlisted in the dredging of her husband's subconscious. Andrew Sarris compared the film's undertones to those of Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt, which also uses a filmmaker's wife to mirror an artist's insecurity (a rare case of Contempt breeding familiarity). But only Fellini would have the audacity to put his real-life wife on the psychoanalyst's couch, then talk about his own problems for two hours. Fellini called Juliet his least autobiographical film, and, indeed, he's not an overt presence in it. If, in 8-1/2, Fellini was like Prospero, directing the tempest on the enchanted island of a movie set, here he's more like Puck from A Midsummer Night's Dream, causing mischief behind the scenes and then clucking, "Lord, what fools these mortals be." But he's pulling the strings in either case, and you can feel his influence upon every frame. If one were to attempt a working definition of "Felliniesque," Juliet of the Spirits would be Exhibit A.

Fellini was always a surer fabulist than he was a moralist, and that might be Juliet's saving grace. Unlike the hellfire and brimstone of Bergman, Fellini's conception of sin was never more sophisticated than a weird-looking guy sticking his tongue out at the camera. Indeed, Fellini often seems to have adopted a Catholic schoolboy's imagination without any of the usual hang-ups. In Juliet, for instance, he sends Masina to see a frail, creepily androgynous swami who chants obscure passages from the Kama Sutra. The scene is meant to be demonic, foreboding; instead, it's funny as hell. Later, in the film's hallucinatory climax, we flash back to the root of Juliet's neurosis, a church pageant in which the poor girl, playing a martyred saint, is lashed to a cage and burned in effigy by a chorus of faceless, cowled nuns. (Fellini's rather unchivalrous message to his wife being, apparently, Come down off your cross.) For all its portent, Fellini can't resist piling on the ecclesiastical camp: The angelic young Juliet, nearly lost in a writhing sea of red paper flames, floats above the hushed crowd like the statue of Christ hovering over Rome at the beginning of La Dolce Vita. Even when he's throwing a black mass, Fellini turns it into a masque. It's worth noting that, as a child, Fellini ran off to join the carnival, not the priesthood. Eventually, even the church became another ring in his circus.

In the 1974 book Fellini on Fellini--the title of which rather neatly describes his entire filmmaking career--the director explained his fondness for excess thus: "I feel that decadence is indispensable to rebirth. I have already said that I love shipwrecks. So I am happy to be living at a time when everything is capsizing." Juliet of the Spirits, Fellini's own lavish shipwreck, demonstrates where his true sympathies lay: For all his apocalyptic rumbling about moral degeneracy, Fellini was happier among pagans than among saints. And that hedonism enlivens Juliet's camp decadence; watching it now, you can sense the wicked fun he's having piloting this ship of fools onto the rocks. William Blake once wrote of Milton: "He was a true poet, and of the devil's party without knowing it." Fellini, too, was of the devil's party. But he knew it; indeed, he wanted to be the host.

Juliet of the Spirits Criterion essay by John Baxter

Juliet of the Spirits (1965) - The Criterion Collection

DVDTimes review Noel Megahey in 2002

DVD Times (UK DVD) Noel Megahey in 2005

DVD Verdict - Criterion Collection Mike Pinsky

Film Commentary by CGK

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The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

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filmcritic.com [Christopher Null]

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

DVDBeaver.com - Graphic Review [Gary W. Tooze]

SPIRITS OF THE DEAD (Histoires extraordinaires)

aka: Tales of Mystery and Imagination

Fellini segment: Toby Dammit

Italy France (121 mi) 1968 omnibus film in 3 segments featuring 3 different directors, including Louis Malle and Roger Vadim

Time Out

A compendium of three Poe stories. Vadim's (Metzengerstein) carries with it an aura of perversity, due not so much to the fetishistic clothes and decor as to the casting of Jane Fonda and brother Peter as the lovers. With his death, she resorts to a totem black stallion as a substitute, and the film itself falls apart. Malle's piece (William Wilson), a not particularly riveting variation on the Doppelgänger theme, has Alain Delon 1 (looking slightly bewildered) being chased by Alain Delon 2 (looking even more bewildered). Bardot puts in an appearance, looking odd in a black wig. Meticulously done, but not much to do with Poe; only Fellini (Toby Dammit) really manages to make much of his source. Stamp comes to Rome as the actor chosen to play Christ in the first Catholic Western (a cross between Dreyer and Pasolini, with a touch of Ford). He plays a man at the end of his tether, and as his obsessions take over, so do Fellini's. In many ways the sequence foreshadows Roma. It's overdone and strained, but worthwhile for Stamp's curious performance.

Apollo Movie Guide [Scott Weinberg]

To say that motion pictures have not been kind to the legacy of Edgar Allan Poe is quite an understatement. More than 100 movies have been based on (or more often than not, “inspired by”) the tortured writer’s tale of crime and the macabre, but very few of these adaptations are even worthy of searching out. Roger Corman managed to produce a few entertaining variations on Poe’s more popular stories, but it’s pretty alarming that this legendary author’s finest ‘modernization’ came courtesy of The Simpson’s superlative version of “The Raven”.

While Spirits of the Dead doesn’t do much justice to Poe’s source material, fans of bizarre French cinema should have a pretty good time. This anthology contains segments directed by three well-known European filmmakers (Roger Vadim, Louis Malle and Federico Fellini) and, as is often the case with anthology movies, the result is a mixed bag.

Vadim’s ‘Metzengerstein’ is loosely based on Poe’s tale of the same name, and it features a young Jane Fonda (Vadim’s then-wife who would also appear in his Barbarella) as a decadent and cruel aristocrat who delights in the suffering and discomfort of her various contemporaries and servants. The beautiful countess oversees some surprisingly downcast orgies and behaves like an insufferable bitch before surprisingly falling in love with her cousin. When he dismisses her advances, the countess exacts a cruel revenge that contains some decidedly ironic results.

Louis Malle (Atlantic City) is behind episode two, which is called ‘William Wilson.’ Wilson is a cruel soldier who has an affinity for gambling at the card tables. A lifetime of petty cruelty and outright awful behaviour earns him a mysterious hooded visitor – one who bears more than a striking resemblance to himself. Wilson learns the hard way that defeating your own alter ego comes with some nasty repercussions.

The last feature, ‘Toby Dammit,’ is based on Poe’s ‘Never Bet the Devil Your Head’ and it focuses on a drunken and insufferable lout who also happens to be a world-famous actor. Since Fellini brings this tale to us, you can of course expect something truly bizarre. Suffice to say that as Toby appears on an arcane talk show and begins an inner descent into madness, all sorts of wild visual stuff goes on and things end badly.

Unfortunately, Spirits of the Dead is a muddled and altogether bizarre movie. Fans of Poe adaptations and late-sixties French cinema will undoubtedly find more to enjoy than others, but as a whole this one veers between truly odd and painfully dull. The appearance of a few recognizable faces (Fonda, Terence Stamp, Peter Fonda, Brigitte Bardot) offers something of interest, but on the whole, Spirits of the Dead is simply more “weird” than it is “entertaining.”

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null)

A rare '60s oddity, Spirits of the Dead takes a weird premise and makes it even weirder. How weird? Try classic Edgar Allen Poe stories given a 1960s spin -- one that lambasts the whole free love/no morals movement the way that only the Frenchies could do. And stars some of the biggest stars of the era -- Fonda! Bardot! Delon! -- and is told in three short pieces, courtesy of three big-time directors -- Fellini! Malle! Vadim!

Roger Vadim takes his Barbarella star Jane Fonda through a very loose interpretation of "Metzengerstein," with Fonda as an aristocrat bored of the constant orgies and swift executions of her enemies. She ends up falling for her cousin, but when he rejects her, she burns down his stable, taking him along with it. Strangely, the cousin ends up possessing the spirit of a horse, which the countess ends up fascinated with anew. It's the weakest of the three shorts, but it's worth seeing if for no other reason than to see Barbarella trot out her French. (To be honest, that might be the only reason -- the story just doesn't make much of an impact.)

Louis Malle heads the second segment, a version of "William Wilson," wherein a barbaric Alain Delon finds himself chased by an alternate version of himself throughout his life, his own conscience casting judgment upon him. And for good reason -- Delon's Wilson is incorrigible, tormenting classmates with live rats as a youth, nearly performing an autopsy on a live and buxom patient, and cheating at cards so he can get revenge on a beautiful card sharp (Brigitte Bardot). The story works well as a parable about how the evil that men do always catches up with them in the end, and Malle tells it with flair -- low-budget '60s flair, but flair nonetheless.

The final act of the triptych is pure Fellini as only Fellini can be. A revision of "Never Bet the Devil Your Head," his Toby Dammit (Terence Stamp) is a famous modern-day actor, as well as a drunk and a soulless libertine. Everything about Fellini's mini-universe is sketchy, from a bizarre awards show ("The Golden She-Wolf Awards") to the little redhead he sees in his frequent visions... whom he sees as Satan, naturally. Reminiscent of 8 1/2 and La Dolce Vita, Fellini's segment is both beautiful and surreal, with Dammit's self-destruction leading us inexorably toward a foregone conclusion.

Spirits of the Dead is something of a historical anomaly. In a year when films like The Graduate told us that, hey, anything goes, Spirits of the Dead says that it doesn't. I'm not sure I would have expected this from the directors of Barbarella, 8 1/2, and Pretty Baby -- none of which is exactly known for moral restraint -- but hey, we are defined by our contradictions, no?

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The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

FELLINI: A DIRECTOR’S NOTEBOOK – made for TV

Italy (54 mi) 1969

User Reviews from imdb Author: Filmjack3 from United States

The Director's Notebook, a very off-the-cuff, stream-of-consciousness documentary by Federico Fellini, reminds me of what Terry Gilliam said in his introduction on the 8 1/2 DVD, of which this is so generously included. He said that once he went and shot a film in Italy and more specifically in Rome, he guessed that perhaps Fellini was perhaps more of a documentarian of what he saw in Rome than he was making up incredibly outrageous and fantastical visions. This time we as the audience get about as close as that can be (though Amarcord, and to an extent La Dolce Vita, come close too in their own ways) to the Rome that Fellini sees as real. We may not, of course, but it is of course all part of subjectivity when going into many documentaries. This time, we get a view inside Fellini's film-making style, his actors, some memories and locations and shots and "lost" sets and footage, and the un-reality of it all just pours more truth to the gobbledy-gook that sometimes makes up the film.

As with even the lesser Fellini moments, he doesn't leave fans totally without some fulfillment. It's something that is very much what Fellini would do, given what he wants to show the audience as his techniques and approaches. Right away we know this will and wont be your usual auto-bio into a director, as he gets some comments off some 'hippies' who happen to be traipsing around the ruins of a film he planned to shoot (or not, as case may be, I don't know). Then he and the American narrator go on between seeing things being shot- and the sets of which shot by Fellini himself with the usual peering and following and moving camera- on Satyricon. But it's not just that, to be sure, as it is basically a look through notes, ideas, and much of what might be considered almost conventional in the Fellini-esquire sense. But it's still entertaining through it all, and I loved seeing a partial re-creation and look at Fellini's inspiration from the "Old Rome" he knew through silent films as a kid. Or the moments with Mastroianni. A nice diddy, which is now no longer a lost scene but now restored, is the sack-man scene from Nights of Cabiria hosted by Masina herself.

And all the while, in tricky English, Fellini leads us along in his very bigger-than-life though somehow modest way of talking to us as his audience, through Roman ruins, coliseums, actors in screen tests, scenes being shot, seeing some strange things (one of which, maybe not as strange, is his own office), and other fragments that are very reminiscent of Fellini's comedies and tragedies. Nothing too revelatory, but just enough to keep Fellini fans salivating.

FELLINI – SATYRICON

aka: The Degenerates

Italy France (138 mi) 1969 ‘Scope

The Fatal Glass of Beer to Fist in His Pocket Pauline Kael (listed under Fellini’s Satyricon)

Fellini's big pagan ball, with the debauchery of the pre-Christian Roman world at the time of Nero as an analogue of the modern post-Christian period. In LA DOLCE VITA, he used the orgies of modern Rome as a parallel to ancient Rome, and now he reverses the analogy to make the same point-that man without a belief in God is a lecherous beast. The film is full of cautionary images of depravity that seem to come out of the imagination of a Catholic schoolboy: an unconscionable number of performers stick out their evil tongues at us, and there are leering cripples, fat freaks with hideous grins, and so on. Fellini draws upon his master-entertainer's feelings for the daydreams of the audience, and many people find this film eerie, spellbinding, and even profound. Essentially, though, it's just a hip version of De Mille's THE SIGN OF THE CROSS (also a photogenic demonstration of the highly dubious proposition that godlessness is lawlessness), and it's less entertaining than De Mille's kitsch-maybe because no one is given a role to play; Fellini is the only star. He uses Petronius and other classic sources as the basis for a movie that is one long orgy of eating, drinking, cruelty, and copulation. We seem to be at a stoned circus, where the performers go on and on whether we care or not, and, for a work that is visual if it is anything, the film leaves disappointingly few visual impressions. The fresco effect becomes monotonous; we anticipate the end a dozen times. There's a charming episode with a beautiful slave girl (Hylette Adolphe) in a deserted house, and some of Danilo Donati's set designs (a ship like a sea serpent, a building with many floors and no front wall) have a hypnotic quality. With Max Born as Gitone, Martin Potter as Encolpius, and Hiram Keller as Ascyltus; Mario Romagnoli as Trimalchio, Magali Noel, Alain Cuny, Capucine, Lucia Bose. Written by Fellini and Bernardino Zapponi. In Italian. For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book Deeper into Movies.

Fellini Satyricon Mike D’Angelo from Time Out New York

Of all Fellini's films, Satyricon is perhaps the most ostentatiously Fellini-esque, at least insofar as that adjective tends to be applied to the work of others. The lyrical neorealism that pervades La Strada and Nights of Cabiria, for example, is indisputably Fellini, but it ain't remotely Fellini-esque. Consult a search engine, as I just did, and you'll turn up citations in reviews of such aggressively overstuffed pictures as Black Cat, White Cat and Babe: Pig in the City; the word invariably conjures up an image of grotesque carnival excess—an image that Satyricon, for better and (more often) worse, delivers in spades. Frequently marvelous to look at, the film is nevertheless something of a trial to endure; it feels dispiritingly like the work of a guy who was reading way too much of his own press.

Freely adapted from Petronius's phantasmagorical epic, Satyricon loosely follows the alternately bloody and randy adventures of young poet Encolpius (Potter), whose desperate infatuation with an androgynous boy (Born) gets him in all kinds of trouble. If that synopsis sounds a little vague, there's a good reason: No more than 25 percent of Petronius's text, written during the reign of Nero, has survived, and hence the tale features gaps wide enough to accommodate a fleet of Mack trucks driving in adjacent lanes. (It's as if The Godfather began with the wedding, then abruptly jumped forward to Sonny at the tollbooth.) Fellini, working with screenwriter Bernardino Zapponi, opted to leave the holes intact, apparently energized by the idea of incompletion; unfortunately, he fails to explore that idea in any meaningful way, and so the film comes across as merely incoherent, lurching randomly from one episode to the next.

Even within each vignette, Satyricon has little to offer beyond its admittedly stupendous production design and Fellini's assortment of unusual faces and figures. His decision to hire mediocre English and American actors and dub them (badly) in Italian more or less precludes any emotional involvement, and what remains is empty spectacle—a catalog of striking images in search of a compelling context. Come to think of it, most Hollywood product these days qualifies as Fellini-esque....

Movie Vault [Vadim Rizov]

Fellini Satyricon: a movie so strange, it really deserves a tagline. Something like "A story about cannibalism, impotence and food." But since it's a Fellini film, the only advertising the film needed back in 1969 was his name, and nothing has changed since then. Fellini remains a rare foreign superstar director, a name recognizable even to those who haven't seen his films, as long as you were alive in the 60s. The film itself is neither as insightful or focused as his greatest works (despite being about himself, 8 1/2 is actually a very cohesive and well-thought out film). Part of the problem may be that the film has nothing to do with Fellini himself, as some of his best films did. Instead, as Fellini stated, he set out to make a film as he might make a film documenting the habits and lives of Martians.

Essentially plotless, the film follows a pair of young men and various, changing companions through a journey all over the Roman
Empire. There's no reason to recount their travails; it seems that everyone thinks of this film in terms of their favorite parts anyway.
Who am I to buck a sensible trend? Fellini opens the film with the puzzling image of a man in shadow against a wall of graffiti. Is he a Roman or a modern day man examining ancient day murals? The difference, Fellini suggests, may not be that great. Eventually, the man starts on a furious monologue about how his new boyfriend has been stolen and sold a slave. (Incidentally, the dubbing of various non-Italian actors can be atrocious). Eventually, he ends up at the film's first famous set piece: a humongous dinner. The new cook has roasted a whole pig, but forgotten to gut it. Master promises to be benevolent as long as it's gutted RIGHT NOW. Out comes the knife and the sausages and intestines. This is a key touchstone, evidently, for Terry Gilliam, who reworks the moment in his terrific Time Bandits; when the knife went in, out came colorful fruits.

Later on, we have the film's emotional highlight: a simple and deeply touching portrayal of a couple who, after sending their kids away, commit suicide. Before that is what appears to be Fellini's answer to Ben-Hur, a crammed galley ship sequence full of no buff shirtless Anglo-Saxons. Still later comes the terrific and ingenious ending. Based on fragments of the ancient Roman book of the same title, the film's plotlessness and lack of cohesion is the logical result, yet the ending is perfect. In the middle of a voice-over narration, the pictures dissolves to a mosaic depicting our characters, preserved in time 2000 years later. It's a beautiful touch.

Because there is no cohesive plot, Fellini is allowed to riff on Satyricon (by Petronius), which he assumes everyone in the audience has read and therefore can keep up with what he's thinking. Well, I hadn't. My Latin teacher assures me that the film makes perfect sense if you've read the book (well, almost), in the manner that Sokurov's Mournful Indifference tackled Bernard Shaw's "Heartbreak House" and, using the play as a reference point, created its own vision. That vision is realized in Giuseppe Rotunno's gorgeous and brilliant cinematography, some of the best I've seen in a long long time. That, ultimately, is the reason, along with Fellini, why this film remains relevent: marvelous cinematography plus an undeniably important auteur equals an interesting if lumpy and dated movie which, for all its indulgences, has things you just can't get anywhere else.

MovieJustice (Dan DeVore)

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a fascinating Satyricon tribute site requires registration, features not only Fellini’s screenplay and Petronius’ original text, but over 1,600 consecutive screencaps. In effect, you can watch the complete movie in stills!

Houston Chronicle [Louis B. Parks]

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert in 1970

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert in 2001

New York Times (registration req'd) Vincent Canby

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

THE CLOWNS (I Clowns) – made for TV

Italy France Germany (92 mi) 1971

Time Out

Fellini's documentary celebration of the dying art of the clown is his best film in years. As overtly personal as his autobiographical Roma, it has little of the self-indulgence of that film, mainly because of Fellini's relentless pursuit of his elusive subject. Made for the RAI TV company, it includes much interview material with once-famous clowns now long forgotten; reconstructions of scenes from Fellini's own childhood, attempting to explain his obsessive fascination with the circus; and a final tribute to the clowns themselves, a slapstick funeral staged in a circus ring. The final image in this funeral sequence, with pathetic trumpet music across an empty ring, is memorably touching.

Raging Bull [Mike Lorefice]

Federico Fellini's style is to make his scenes visually engaging and technically intricate, causing some of his serious films such as La Dolce Vita to suffer from his directing choices not only making appealing but seeming to glorify that which his mind clearly seeks to condemn. In his made for TV film The Clowns, his style and his head are on the same page. He finds the circus performers hilarious, and captures their act in ways that add to performances which have no problem standing alone. The fact that the clowns act is silent and tells isolated little stories fits perfectly into Fellini's wandering dream world. Clowns are windows to Fellini's history, and thus his mind, as they lead him to his latest series of reminiscences of characters from his past. After peaking with 8 ½, Fellini's "minor" films tended to be far more worthwhile than his "major" ones. He began using a parody of the documentary form to take stabs at the subjectivity of films. Though interacting with famous clowns of his youth, the subject of the "documentary" is, like most Fellini works, Federico himself. Staged in good fun with the aim of making Fellini and his "inept" film crew low key clowns, as his perspective is the world could regain the humor it has lost by through people making fools of themselves as the clowns do. Fellini provides little insight into the world of clowning, but the circus acts are far more interesting than the vaudeville dancers he focused on in his even shallower directorial debut Variety Lights. Fellini's playful but slightly melancholy work shows a way in the world has changed; clowns are still around, but they are overshadowed to the point we might not even realize it. Fellini longs for the aging clowns to be replaced by glorious new ones so future generations can have wondrous experiences similar to the ones he recreates, but if nothing else he's done the world the best service he could, preserving for all eternity some of the masters who keep us from becoming too serious.

Cleveland Press (Tony Mastroianni)

“The Clowns” is an extraordinary movie in the most literal sense of the word. It is very much out of the ordinary, an exceptional film that defies classification.

That it is a documentary about clowns is only partly true and only a small measure of its vast merit. It is also a key to the films of Federico Fellini, a mirror of the Fellini world, another dip into autobiography, a funny movie, a sad movie.

It is a picture to enjoy at all levels, at any age; by those who have been intrigued by this Italian director’s movies over the years and by those who have never seen them.

Fellini starts with his boyhood memory of circuses and clowns and how, while they were funny, they also were real and sometimes frightening.

They reminded him of the people of his hometown — the village idiot, the pompous station master, the poolroom crowd. Over and over again there are the faces, those wonderful faces that have been characteristic of Fellini’s films.

“The clowns of my childhood, where are they today?” Fellini asks as he serves as narrator. He then shows us himself and his crew searching Rome and Paris for the great clowns of the past and for those who have memories of them.

The famous acts are recalled and then re-created for the camera. As a gentle spoof of the entire enterprise Fellini’s crew are also low-key clowns — the dumb-blonde script girl reading passages in a flat delivery, the odd-looking wardrobe mistress, the face-making cameraman, Fellini himself.

As a documentary “The Clowns” is an examination of the European traditions, a formal classification of the white clown and the more familiar clown, the “Auguste.”

The importance of clowns and circuses has been apparent in most of the Fellini movies. These have ranged from “La Strada” with its out-and-out circus setting to “8-1/2” with its conclusion in which all the characters come out and parade around circus rings. It has been copied so often by other directors that it is known as a Fellini ending. And in between there was the clown in a nightclub sequence in “La Dolce Vita.”

“The Clowns” brings to the surface the underlying thread in so many of his movies and dramatizes and glorifies it in its own right. He works in clean, brilliant colors. The picture is vividly visual and there is no language barrier in it.

Nino Rota’s evocative musical background (especially the use of a plaintive trumpet) reinforces the film superbly.

Fellini’s research indicates that the time of great clowns is dead. The clowns are still around but somehow we fail to recognize them. More important, we fail to recognize the clowns all around us, the clowns in ourselves.

“The Clowns” is very funny and just a little sad, sad in that it reminds us that a simpler, happier world is dying — or perhaps is already dead.

FilmFanatic.org

Channel 4 Film

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

ROMA

Italy France (128 mi) 1972

All Movie Guide [Lucia Bozzola]

Fellini's Roma is precisely the kind of cinematic valentine to the Eternal City that only Federico Fellini could create. Fellini's personal journey through the city of his 1930s youth and the freak show, traffic-clogged 1970s present, Roma fondly lingers over the Felliniesque carnival of characters populating family dinners, theater audiences, brothels, and street parties. Fellini himself appears on film orchestrating the contemporary crew. Accurately summed up on camera by Gore Vidal as "the city of illusions," Fellini turns Rome's Catholic ritualism into an opulent ecclesiastical fashion show, while the subway construction sequence and the final, nocturnal tour of the ruins via motorcycle find surreal beauty in the potentially destructive juxtaposition of ancient and modern Rome. Reportedly disdained by Romans, Roma was nevertheless greeted by critics as a welcome return to the nostalgia and astute commentary of such early masterworks as I Vitelloni and La Dolce Vita. Fellini would merge nostalgia and surrealist fantasy even more fruitfully in Amarcord. Anna Magnani's cameo as herself, urging Fellini to go home and go to sleep, was her final screen appearance. Cameos by Marcello Mastroianni and Alberto Sordi were cut from the English language version.

The Fatal Glass of Beer to Fist in His Pocket Pauline Kael (listed under Fellini’s Roma)

It's an imperial gesture at documentary: a sketchbook about the city of Fellini's imagination, that love-hate dream-nightmare city which is more familiar to us by now than Rome itself. This autobiographical fantasy includes extras painted up as voracious citizens, a high-camp ecclesiastical fashion show, and a mock excavation in a subway which uncovers a Roman villa. Designed by Danilo Donati, who is a magician, and shot by the great Giuseppe Rotunno, the film is like a funeral ode to an imaginary city under purplish, poisoned skies. Some of the images are magisterial and marvellous, like a series of stormy Turners, but whenever there's dialogue or thought, the movie is fatuous. Fellini is at the center of the film, played as a young man fresh from the provinces by a toothsome, lusciously handsome actor (dimply Peter Gonzales, from Texas), and then by himself, speaking in English-most of it dubbed-in this version. He interacts with no one; he is the star, our guide, and like many another guide he often miscalculates our reactions, especially to his arch, mirthless anticlerical jokes. The ambiance is least oppressive when he stages a 40s vaudeville show-a return to the world of his early movies. The picture reaches its nadir when he goes celebrity-chasing and interviews Gore Vidal, who informs us that Rome is as good a place as any to wait for the end of the world. Fellini appears to see himself as official greeter for the apocalypse. In English and Italian. For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book Reeling.

digitallyOBSESSED! [Dan Lopez]

Frederico Fellini's Roma is probably one of the most unique films that any director has ever made about himself. Filmmakers often pay tribute to their origins and histories by creating autobiographical pieces, but Roma is something very different. Here, Fellini pays homage to his childhood home in a way that only he could manage: by not making much sense at all. This is not a criticism, but an accurate representation of an ambitious project that, although pretty bizarre, plainly represents Fellini's love for his home and the land that embraced him as an acclaimed filmmaker.

Roma is a plotless series of vignettes, attempting to recollect Fellini's memories of growing up. At some points, the director himself narrates, adding a bit of meaning to what is being seen; but in general, the entire film is a mixture of realistic portrayals and strange metaphors of his world. It begins with the early years in his life; we see segments about his childhood just outside the city and his first time visiting Rome itself, where he encounters the manic and strange family he will be living with. His first day there ends with an evening at an outdoor restaurant where we are introduced to Fellini's interpretations of the various folks living in the neighborhood—most of them very gaudy and brash. As the film moves on, it gets more non-linear and moves between modern day and the past. We see Fellini and his film crew driving down a busy highway, observing the activity, or spying on tourists. There are other exaggerated flashbacks to the fascist days of Italy's government, his recollections of seeing his first film, and memories of a local brothel.

The end result of this approach is a strange epic, filled with amazing visuals from the realistic to the wildly fictional. It really doesn't make much sense because it isn't explained in detail, but that's definitely the charm. He wants to immerse you in the culture, have you witness it with a child's eyes, much like he did while growing up. There are arguments that the bizarre and outlandish things that go on in some of these skits are insulting to Italians, because it makes them all seem immoral or mentally deranged. I'd have to disagree, though, because an undercurrent of humor is present, as well as the obvious element that this is one man's memories. This is not the actual world of Italy, but rather Fellini's Roma as the title suggests. It is the Italy of his mind, and not just some romantic video tour guide. Perhaps the most infamous segment of the film is the Catholic fashion show in which groups of Cardinals and Bishops engage in a weird pageant that only Fellini could envision. Again, with the wrong eyes, this may seem blasphemous, but I doubt this was the intention. Rather, it shows how the exotic ceremony and pomp of the Roman Catholic church might appear to someone growing up in its midsts.

The visual style and presentation are top-notch, and truly fit the enormous scope of the film. Frederico Fellini commands this movie in a very distinct and powerful way. The wonderful set pieces, such as the neighborhood of his youth, are a stylized combination of stage set and film set. Perhaps that's the best way to interpret the film; like a burlesque show of all things Roman put on by one of Rome's best showmen. Originally, before I saw the film many years ago, I had heard that it was for "hardcore Fellini fans only." Although I've never been a big fan of Fellini's entire body of work, my two favorites are Roma and Satyricon, mostly because of their surreal atmosphere. Anyone who enjoys creative and unusual filmmaking should also find a lot to enjoy here.

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Time Out

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

New York Times (registration req'd) Vincent Canby

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AMARCORD

Italy France (123 mi) 1973

Time Out

Fellini at his ripest and loudest recreates a fantasy-vision of his home town during the fascist period. With generous helpings of soap opera and burlesque, he generally gets his better effects by orchestrating his colourful cast of characters around the town square, on a boat outing, or at a festive wedding. When he narrows his focus down to individual groups, he usually limits himself to corny bathroom and bedroom jokes, which produce the desired titters but little else. But despite the ups and downs, it's still Fellini, which has become an identifiable substance like salami or pepperoni that can be sliced into at any point, yielding pretty much the same general consistency and flavour.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Ben Sachs

The film directly responsible for Woody Allen's RADIO DAYS (1987) and a good many moments in the work of Emir Kusturica, Federico Fellini's AMARCORD is a two-hour celebration of life, love, and community so clearly personal to its maker that every shot seems to require some sort of artistic signature. The title means "I remember" in the dialect of the small town Fellini grew up in, and many of the tall tales that comprise its drunken-reunion structure were inspired by his 1930s youth. "It's like a long dance number, interrupted by dialogue, public events and meals," Roger Ebert wrote in his "Great Movies" review of 2004. "It is constructed like a guided tour through a year in the life of the town, from one spring to the next... The film is saturated with Fellini's affection for these people, whose hopes are so transparent they can see through their own into another's. All of Fellini's visual trademarks are here, including the half-finished scaffold that mediates between heaven and earth, the grotesque faces of the extras, the parades and processions, and always the Nino Rota music..." Somewhere amidst all the nostalgic excess are memories of the rise of Italian Fascism and some more bittersweet episodes about death. But even in these moments, Fellini recognizes the spectacular human comedy present in all communal affairs.

Amarcord BFI Sight and Sound

Winner of the Best Foreign Film Oscar and nominated for Best Director in 1974.

A year in the life of a small provincial seaside town in the 1930s: loopy teachers, weird foreigners, eccentric uncles, curvaceous women, a skinny nympho and a crazed solitary motorcyclist, Hollywood movies, dance-band tunes, bonfires, big parades, hilarious family rows, a wedding, a funeral... Yet Amarcord's view of the period is disquieting. The Fascist regime appears first as ridiculous then as vicious, yet mostly people are shown to get along with it very well, sometimes thrilling to it, only very occasionally rebelling. And then there's the title, 'I remember' in dialect. But who remembers? Start to pick at that and the film is revealed to be as complex, as modernist or postmodern, as Last Year in Marienbad, Memento or, of course, 8½.

Amarcord also plays fast and loose with the norms of cinema: tunes on the soundtrack suddenly start being played by the characters themselves; people in this 30s setting address us directly via the camera; the great set piece of the townspeople going out to see a vast illuminated ocean liner obviously takes place in the studio on a sea of undulating blue plastic sheets. Yet all this probing at history and memory, this playing with convention, never stops it being an utter treat.

All Movie Guide [Dan Jardine]

"Amarcord" is the phonetic translation of the Italian words "Mi Ricordo" (I remember) as pronounced in the dialect of Emilia-Romagna, the birthplace of director Federico Fellini and the setting of this wonderful film. Little surprise, then, that it is a poignant and bawdy semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale, with an ethereal, dreamlike quality that combines sharply drawn memories with vividly engaging fantasy. Like William Wordsworth, Fellini implies that the child is father to the man, and Amarcord is a both a lament for and an homage to his hometown. Employing a picaresque style, Fellini expertly weaves the tales of a wild menagerie of characters in pre-WW II Italy. No mere sentimentalist, he also tackles the prickly issue of the emergence of Fascism. The film takes careful aim at fanatics, while conserving its empathy for the lost, questing, confused, and lonely individuals in its midst. The family at the center of it all, loosely based on Fellini's own, is a well-drawn melange of coarse, pathetic, colorful, clever, and cranky characters. While Fellini does not choose nostalgic sepia tones, he does shoot much of the film in muted colors that seem slightly out-of-focus, as if he were attempting to transport us into a dreamlike state. Blending scenes of pathos and humor, vulgar carnal desire and transcendent magical illumination (the peacock's standing in the newly fallen snow, spreading its magnificent plumage is this film's signature image), Amarcord won the lion's share of 1974's Best Foreign Film awards, including the New York Film Critics Circle, the National Board of Review, the Golden Globe, and the Academy Award, and it remains a triumph of personal filmmaking.

MovieJustice (Dan DeVore)

A lot of times trying to watch foreign films can be painful. Not because they are bad, boring or even subtitled, but because as Americans we are used to a style more dependent upon narrative and story. Something more concrete, where we need to be in control and aware of what is happening. One could argue that Federico Fellini’s films are especially difficult to sit through, when many times he rules his movies with free reign and lets the pieces fall where they may. Like paint being splashed onto a canvas with no lines to color within. Amarcord is different. The paint is still splashed mind you, but we can see that there are indeed lines and that is what holds this movie together. There are strong characters and a grounded plot, both very easy to follow. The film is also extremely enjoyable. You won’t even know that time has passed because Amarcord is such an entertaining, witty, and downright fun movie experience. The kind of movie you see when you want to lose yourself for a couple of hours and forget your troubles.

Amarcord is simple. It is about Fellini remembering growing up in his home town of Rimini in the 1930s played out to the backdrop of fascism spreading across Europe. But the political revolution doesn’t dictate the story, instead it just makes its presence known so we can take things within context and know where we stand. For example, when Titta’s father (Armando Brancia) is taken in for questioning by fascist officials, because of a comment he made regarding the possible future under such a government. In a world as care free and happy go lucky as Amarcord, pain still exists and sometimes you just can’t run away from it. But even so at one point towards the end of the film, the townspeople become so blindly faithful in fascism that they row out through the fog at night to see a fleet of ships go by. Just as the fog obscures their viewpoints it does so of the future as well, rendering most unable to predict the troubles ahead. Nevertheless for Titta (Bruno Zanin), the character Fellini uses to represent himself, life is mostly untroubled. He finds ways to get away from the bitter arguments between his parents, the uncertainty of the future, and the hesitation of growing up to be a man.

Another satisfying thing about Amarcord is its open sexuality. It doesn’t shy away from situations that most films would, or if they didn’t would simply make crude jokes of, ala American Pie. It takes sex seriously but does so in stride with relative ease and open mindedness. For a movie that focuses on an adolescent, this facet of plot would be hard to simply ignore. Titta and his friends are faced with tempting situations every day. There is the woman’s bicycle team, who in the eyes of the boys, when seeing them sit down on the seats, has dual meanings. This scene alone nearly saw me lose my lunch, it was so hilarious.

Then we have the town prostitute who was actually somewhat attractive and never shied away from using her God given attributes to make any member, of any age, of the opposite sex squirm. Now with all of this sexual frustration going around we are bound to run into that one taboo word. You know, one of the mortal sins according to the Catholic church. Masturbation. Amarcord tackles this topic with relative ease and straightforwardness, like it was nothing more than taking a walk in the park. It does so by showing the boys in confession, who can barely contain themselves from laughing out loud at the minister. Combine this with flash editing to some of the more memorable scene’s in film history involving a car and once again the audience is knocked off their feet with laughter.

Nina Rota composed the music for Amarcord and did an excellent job with the upbeat carnivalesque tune to completely match the mood of the film. Even though Amarcord is one of his more grounded films, it is still full of Felliniesque outbursts. A dwarf nun, Uncle Teo yelling from high up in a tree “I want a woman”, dancing prostitutes, a hefty and busty shop clerk, and a fascist wedding. The movie is full of tiny little odds and ends like those trickled here and there.

From start to finish Amarcord takes us on a journey through Fellini’s scrap book of memories that lived in his mind and heart, translated onto film with his interpretations. It’s not his best work, but along with Roma it just might be his most personal and heart felt. I’m sure parts were improvised and he took liberties and exaggerated some, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that each character with their own little quirks was based on someone Fellini actually knew growing up.

Amarcord is both a comedy, a drama, and a commemoration. It won the academy award for best foreign picture in 1974, and was nominated for best director, as well as a golden globe for best picture. This is probably Fellini's most accessible work and would be a good place to start watching his movies. There aren't any big motives or force driving the plot onward, instead it is a snap shot that takes us down memory lane. Fellini's own, that is.

Amarcord: Federico of the Spirits Criterion essay by Sam Rohdie

Amarcord Criterion essay by Peter Bondanella

Amarcord (1974) - The Criterion Collection

DVD Times [Noel Megahey]

Dragan Antulov

filmcritic.com visits Amarcord Chris Cabin

ToxicUniverse.com [John Nesbit]

DVD Verdict - Criterion Collection [Bill Gibron]

DVD Talk [Phil Bacharach]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer)

The Criterion Contraption [Matthew Dessem]

Epinions [metalluk]

Apollo Movie Guide [Derek Smith]

10kbullets.com [John White]

Reel.com DVD review [Ken Dubois]

The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick]

Epinions.com [Macresarf1]

Movie House Commentary Tuna

Guardian/Observer

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert in 1974

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert in 2004

New York Times (registration req'd) Vincent Canby

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

CASANOVA

Italy USA (166 mi) 1976

The Fatal Glass of Beer to Fist in His Pocket Pauline Kael (listed under Fellini’s Casanova)

Fellini has done something no one else in screen history ever has: he has made an epic about his own alienation. And perhaps this can't be done successfully-not with all this pageantry, anyway. When an artist moves inward yet deals with his own spiritual crises on a spectacular and lavish scale, there is a conflict in form. Something goes rotten. With Donald Sutherland, who is used as a deliberately unfunny caricature of Casanova.

Time Out

Imbued with an air of funereal solemnity and elegance, this forsakes realism in favour of a stylised romantic pessimism which confronts impotence, failure, sexuality and exploitation as fully as Pasolini's Salò. Although teetering at times dangerously close to Ken Russell, the visual daring and pure imagination of every image leave it as an elegiac farewell to an era of Italian cinema; and Sutherland's performance is the most astonishing piece of screen acting since Brando's in Last Tango in Paris.

Chicago Reader [Jonathan Rosenbaum] (capsule review)

What the world wanted from Fellini's epic account of the famous 18th-century lover (Donald Sutherland) was hardly the dark, disturbingly jaundiced, alienated view of eroticism offered here (1976). But as one of the late flowerings of the director's claustrophobic studio style at its most deliberately artificial, this is a memorable work, helped along by Nino Rota's music and Danilo Donati's Oscar-winning costumes. With Tina Aumont, Cicely Browne, John Karlsen, Carmen Scarpitta, and Clara Algranti.

VideoVista [Jonathan McCalmont]

Federico Fellini was perhaps the ultimate cinematic auteur. He would work without scripts, and would alternate between dictating his actors' intonations and refusing to tell them what to do for fear that they would play his description of his idea rather than the idea itself. Critically panned at its release, his Casanova departs from the typical romantic glorification of the notorious libertine to criticising him and presenting him as a tragic figure.

The film itself has no real plot. Casanova is a Viennese gentleman who begins by bedding a nun and, when imprisoned for heresy and black magic, is forced to escape and live the rest of his days travelling around Europe bedding more and more bizarre sexual partners until he dies, poignantly declaring his love for a mechanical woman while dancing on ice (and yes... it is as odd as it sounds) thereby revealing himself to be a pointless and empty shell of a man. Unable to have a real relationship with a real woman, unable to live up to his vainglorious boasts of being a philosopher and economist, he dies utterly alone. His life wasted.

According to Donald Sutherland (who gives a very candid and articulate interview included as an extra but arguably worth the price of the DVD on its own), Fellini didn't care about the real Casanova. He found his biographies dull and he threw all of Sutherland's books on the man out the window of a moving car. Fellini's motivation was to criticise the culture of empty-headed sexuality and solipsism that pervaded Rome in the 1960s and 1970s. The sex scenes are beautifully produced; the actors and actresses cavort on huge sets with dozens of extras in beautifully ornate and exotic costumes that are more reminiscent of operas than your average film's romantic 'climax'. However, despite the lavish production, these scenes are also completely devoid of any sensuality or romance, scored with circus music they verge on the comical or disturbing. Each time a scene concludes, Casanova moves on in time and space and finds himself falling in love again and again until he finds himself an old man with nothing but a mechanical woman incapable of thought or love but strangely no different to him. Whereas at the beginning of the film you think that a mechanical bird symbolises Casanova's sexuality, by the end you realise that because Casanova is his sexuality, he is no more real a person and no more capable of love than the mechanical woman in his arms.

This film is weird and challenging to the point of being opaque. The production values dazzle the eye and mislead the mind. It was only after I'd taken a few minutes to think about the final scene that the point of the film fell into place. Less accessible than many of his other films, this isn't an easy watch. However, it is worthwhile. Sutherland's interview nicely brings out the themes of the film and gives wonderful details on how difficult it was working under Fellini. As an intellectual argument, the film is challenging (when was the last time you saw anyone other than a reactionary do anything than champion sex?) and as a piece of art it is astonishingly bold and unique. However, as strong as these two elements of the film are, Fellini's decision to focus on them has resulted in the plot and dialogue being atrophied. The dialogue was dubbed in post-production and there is no plot to speak of, making it clear where Fellini's priorities lay. Other reviewers have argued that this results in a hollow viewing experience as the emotions are rarely appealed to, but I would argue that this is to miss the point of the film.

The film comes with a lengthy interview with Donald Sutherland and a featurette on the life of Fellini and both are utterly excellent. If you are thinking of taking an interest in his work, I can think of no better introduction to his methods and artistic viewpoint. Combined with the intriguing and challenging film, this is a DVD that's well worth a look. Sadly though, this version is not the original version, it lacks nearly 20 minutes. Research reveals that the original version of the film featured a homosexual scene and it's possible that this was left on the cutting room floor and that it accounts for the lost 20 minutes but, even if this isn't the case, there's still 20 minutes missing from this version. It's still well worth a look for anyone who is even remotely serious about the filmmaker's art.

DVD Times [Noel Megahey]

DVD Times [Anthony Nield]

Time Magazine Leo Janos

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Eye For Film [Angus Wolfe Murray]

Channel 4 Film

Guardian/Observer

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

ORCHESTRA REHEARSAL (Prova d'orchestra)

Italy France Germany (70 mi) 1978

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

Orchestra Rehearsal, a long-unavailable 1979 short feature by Federico Fellini, is finally seeing domestic release, and while that's a good thing, it's not hard to see why there was no rush to release it outside Europe. Not that it's not a fine film; it is. Subtitled The Decline Of The West In C# Major, it's also a fairly heavy-handed political allegory about post-war Europe. Orchestra Rehearsal is told from the point of view of a television documentary crew covering a rehearsal in a medieval auditorium that also serves as the burial place for several popes. Over the course of the rehearsal, amid much discussion of what drew them to their instruments in the first place, the musicians come into conflict with each other and, more frequently, the conductor. After a short break in the rehearsal, Orchestra Rehearsal then quietly slips off the shackles of realism as wholescale revolt takes hold. A relatively minor film by Fellini standards, it's still smart, compelling viewing, and its conclusion—an ambiguous tribute to the unifying power of the arts—is as provocative as most of the director's films.

VideoVista J.C. Hartley

Infinity Arthouse with their masterpieces of the cinema releases show what a DVD package should be. This is the only time a cardboard sleeve should be acceptable: a slipcase, a nice box, a liner insert and a fabulous extras presentation.

Federico Fellini isn't to everyone's taste, and despite the fulsome praise for Orchestra Rehearsal (aka: Prova d'orchestra) reprinted on the box, this is a slight work, but a slight work by Fellini is a wittily written, beautifully crafted and convincingly acted chamber piece that is never less than amusing and wholly absorbing throughout.

An orchestra gather for a rehearsal in a former oratory, cameras are present to record the event, and unseen interviewers invite the musicians to talk about their instruments and their feelings for music. Some of the musicians are egotistical, stressing their own importance within the orchestra, some are depressed, tied to an instrument they have ceased to care for; for some their calling is just a job, like attending at a factory. The director of the orchestra arrives and rehearsals begin under the watchful eyes of the musicians' union representatives, occasional tremors shake the building. Rehearsals break down, and during a 20-minute break the director confesses to his cynicism about the whole procedure, while the orchestra members reveal their theories about how the process of making music should be conducted. A power cut is the catalyst for a revolt by members of the orchestra until a threat from outside and a tragic death sees harmony restored.

An allegory then, and perhaps a heavy-handed one, but of what; the breakdown of modern society with too much freedom and representation, or a parable about the film-making process itself? The underlying theme of the need for a strong leader may seem a little fascistic but it may just be an assertion of the auteur theory of filmmaking.

The five little documentary films that comprise the second disc's extras, take the director from his time as a youth growing up in Rimini, his departure to Rome and his early film-writing career, the defining success of La Dolce Vita, and the critics reaction to his later films including the autobiographical 8 ½, and these are worth the price of admission alone.

An analysis of Orchestra Rehearsal [Cadrage.net] Alexandre Tylski

Bright Lights Film Journal [Robert Castle]

Orchestra Rehearsal Norl Megahey

ToxicUniverse.com (John Nesbit)

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

CITY OF WOMEN (La città delle donne)

Italy France (140 mi) 1980

Time Out

Will Fellini ever learn to count beyond eight and a half? As Snaporaz (a discreetly ageing Mastroianni, still the alter egoist and flattering mirror image of his director) dozes off in a train to be whisked through a nightmare of ultra-militant feminism, here we are again on that familiar gaudy treadmill of Barnum and ballet, circus and comic strip. Yet if much of it verges on self-parody, a few of the set pieces are superb (the Women's Lib congress, every word of which, swears Fellini, was taken verbatim from feminist literature; the homage to the communal masturbatorium the cinema used to be). In his martyrdom, Snaporaz becomes hardly less poignant a creation than Ophüls' Lola Montès; and only a pinchpenny soul could denigrate the generosity, the sheer fertility of the Maestro's invention in this curate's egg by Fabergé.

Channel 4 Film

Very few directors could turn an entire dream sequence into a movie, but Fellini manages to pull it off. The dreamer in question is Mastroianni's train-traveller, who nods off on a cross-country journey and has a bunch of quirky encounters with the opposite sex while in slumberland. Among other experiences he joins a feminist gathering, while his own sexually permissive past comes back to haunt him. It all strolls along at a leisurely pace, with Fellini relying heavily on symbolism and surrealism; the result, while occasionally tedious and incomprehensible, is also beautifully filmed and curiously touching.

The Cinematic Threads

Fellini stand-in Marcello Mastroianni dreams he's in a world of progressive-minded females who have it in for men of all ages and, in particular, hapless Marcello, who is close to middle age but still randy as ever. Though Dave Kehr is correct that Fellini, for his later films, thoroughly ignored the basic rules of standard narrative filmmaking (and all that nastiness about character development and plotting) there's something in this that sticks - it can certainly be viewed as a companion piece to the female-fantasy Juliet of the Spirits, but there's something more personal and melancholy about this (it's also a meditation on aging and memory). I think the overall impression, about women being unknowable, complicated and threatening, hits with me as a male viewer - it's so fitting that Marcello's 'dream-girl' is a balloon that takes him to the sky ... only to be shot down by machine gun fire (dream girls essentially being pure fantasy). For non-Fellini acolytes, lower the rating for this a few points, but sometimes you just gotta humor an old guy with a subconscious this insane - they don't make every filmmaker's name an adjective for the fantastic.

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

If there is one central image in the work of Federico Fellini, it's of Fellini's autobiographical hero being smothered by women. They come in all shapes and ages, from old crones to young innocents, from heavy-breasted mother figures to seductive nymphs. One of Fellini's favorite strategies is to gather all the women into one fantasy and place his hero at the center of it. That's what he did in the celebrated harem sequence in 8 1/2, and that's what he does throughout CITY OF WOMEN.

There is, however, an additional twist this time. Since the basic Fellini universe was created in LA STRADA, LA DOLCE VITA, 8 1/2, and JULIET OF THE SPIRITS (1965), beliefs about the role of women have undergone a revolution, even in Italy. It is no longer enough that Fellini deal with the ways women tantalize, dominate, and possess his male heroes. Now he must also deal with the women themselves. For Fellini, this is probably not nearly so much fun. His idea of a liberated woman is fairly clear from the wife-character in 8 1/2 (1963). She is severe, wears tailored suits and horn-rim glasses, and wants to spoil all the fun. Fellini's hero, in that film and in CITY OF WOMEN, is named Guido, is played by Marcello Mastroianni, and wants to escape from the horn-rim types and lose himself in the capacious bosom of a thoroughly undemanding sex object.

At the beginning of CITY OF WOMEN, however, Guido finds himself riding on a train across from a severe-looking woman in a tailored suit. He tries to seduce her. She sentences him to an imaginary odyssey through a series of sexual fantasies, most of them devoted to the unpleasant fates of men who do not have the correct attitude about women. Most of these fantasies, and indeed many of the specific images, are familiar to anyone who has seen several Fellini films. There is a long circus chute for Mastroianni to tumble down (JULIET), and a group of circus scenes (from half his other films), and a wall covered with portraits (remember FELLINI'S ROMA?), and an insatiable satyr, and, of course, the full-lipped, full-bosomed, smiling, and inexhaustible temptress who turns up, in one manifestation or another, throughout Fellini.

CITY OF WOMEN does nothing original or very challenging with this material. Although it pretends to be Fellini's film about feminism, it reveals no great understanding of the subject; Fellini basically sees feminists as shrill harems of whip-wielding harridans, forever dangling the carrot of sex just out of reach of his suffering hero. Fellini has rarely been able to discover human beings hidden inside his female characters, and it's a little late for him to start blaming that on the women's liberation movement.
Is CITY OF WOMEN worth seeing? Yes, probably, even though it is not a successful movie and certainly not up to Fellini's best work. It's worth seeing because it's a bedazzling collection of images, because at times it's a graceful and fluid celebration of pure filmmaking skill, and because Fellini can certainly make a bad film but cannot quite make a boring one.

Old School Reviews [John Nesbit]

Spirituality & Practice [Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat]

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

AND THE SHIP SAILS ON (E la nave va)

Italy France (128 mi) 1983

Time Out

Here we go again: the Italian buffo happily constructing his own world of elaborate grotesquerie in a studio far away from the problems of the real world. This time it is a marvellous ship, full of opera stars who set sail on the eve of WWI to bury one of their number. And as usual there are the anecdotes of droll inconsequence and pleasure - a symphony played on wine glasses, the divas serenading the stokers. When the boat picks up some refugees from the first flickerings of the war, a re-found social conscience seems about to edge in, only to be handled with the man's monumental off-handedness. But while Fellini may simply observe the chattering of his clowns and have absolutely nothing to say himself, it still (as usual) adds up to marginal doodlings which are unique, curious, ingratiatingly charming, and quietly nostalgic for the last great and peaceful age in Europe.

VideoVista J.C. Hartley

Between the gross-out spectacle of Satyricon (1969) and the indulgent Fellini's Casanova (1976), where the director seems to be attempting some kind of assault on an American market, lie the masterpieces Roma (1972) and Amarcord (1973); Fellini then made the much reviled City Of Women (1980) before embarking on a lower key of sensitive storytelling of which And The Ship Sails On (aka: E la nave va) forms part.

A disparate bunch of divas, tenors, opera lovers, aristocrats, journalists and former lovers of the great Tetua (Janet Suzman, appearing in a 'home movie' reel), partake of a cruise to commit the late diva's ashes to the sea winds of the Italian Mediterranean. With English actors prominent among the cast, the great Freddie Jones shows that given their chance dogged professionals, associated with comedy and cameos, can rise to the occasion. Jones has said that Fellini suggested the part of the journalist Orlando should be played as a cross between Charlie Chaplin and Groucho Marx, and nowhere is this reading more apparent than, when swinging on the handrail on deck, Jones coquettishly asks the young lady he has taken a foolish fancy to "How old do you think I am?" Later, when Tetua's ashes are allowed to blow from a chalice on deck, while a phonograph plays one of her greatest arias, the camera intrudes upon Jones and he waves it away, overcome.

There are set pieces that show why classic European filmmaking is such a joy to those of us who love it, the singing competition in the engine room, and the impromptu 'concert' in the galley, where the performers 'play' using wine glasses and cutlery. When Serbian refugees are taken on board, dissidents among them make an assassination attempt on the political figures among the passengers, and the story swings towards an allegory for the decline of the old order of Europe with the outbreak of the First World War. The story ends with catastrophe and Freddie Jones sharing a lifeboat with an incontinent rhinoceros.

Rather an old-fashioned film, and a long way from the sensual battering-ram that the director usually employs, but perhaps one for completists, Fellini lovers and those wanting a gentle introduction to his work.

And the Ship Sails On Criterion essay by Federico Fellini

And the Ship Sails On (1984) - The Criterion Collection

DVD Times Noel Megahey

The Criterion Contraption [Matthew Dessem]

Apollo Movie Guide [Dan Jardine]

EyeForFilm.co.uk Steve Harwood

Spirituality & Practice [Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat]

Don Ignacio's Movie Reviews (Michael Lawrence)

Mondo Digital also reviewing NIGHTS OF CABIRIA and 8 ½

Channel 4 Film

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

GINGER AND FRED (Ginger e Fred) C 75

Italy France Germany (125 mi) 1986

Time Out

The absence of Fellini's name before the title seems a just indication of a return to something warmer, quieter and more intimate than his grandiose freak shows. Confirming this is his reunion with his wife Masina after a gap of some 23 years, and with Mastroianni, so often his alter ego in the past. They play a couple of old hoofers, who used to tour the boards doing a respectful homage to Astaire and Rogers; they are being brought together after all these years by a TV show in Rome. A long first half, chronicling Ginger's return to the city, shows the place to be in the grip of much general urban decay, and allows Fellini his usual wallowing in all the quirky sideshows (a dead pig, lit up with fairy lights, dangles from the railway station roof). But once the couple finally get together, a warmth which Fellini has not displayed for years gradually seeps all over the screen. She is still trim, a courageous old fighter; he is seedy, but with an ironic detachment. Not even Fellini's deadly sarcasm about TV's horrible degradation of all human values can quite dim the magic that they restore with their little dance. As usual, Fellini doesn't have a lot to say; but it amounts to considerably more than his usual marginal doodlings, and it is irresistibly charming.

Georgy Girl to The Goddess Pauline Kael

The title of this Fellini movie is alluring, but the picture isn't about those two tapping, twirling icons. It's about two mediocre dancers (played by Giulietta Masina and Marcello Mastroianni)-small-timers, curiosities-who, in the 1940s, entertained Italian vaudeville audiences by imitating the Astaire-Rogers numbers. Now they are being reunited, in Rome, for an appearance on a Christmas TV special. This situation (which is reminiscent of Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys) serves as a pretext for Fellini to vent his disgust at TV. He "flashes" his spoofs of TV programs and commercials as if they were obscene images, and he means them to be obscene. They're images of piggy abundance-oral and infantile. But Fellini has no zest to energize these skits, or the rest of the material, either. This is a cranky, wobbling movie. Fellini appears to be condemning TV for being a green slime that's absorbing everything, and denouncing it, too, for passing him by. The film treats Masina's character with an element of condescension, and Mastroianni is playing Fellini's view of himself as an aging, crumbling tower of a man-a drunken bum. With Franco Fabrizi as host for the special and Frederick von Ledenberg as the old admiral. The score, by Nicola Piovani, has a lovely finesse; the script is by Fellini, Tonino Guerra, and Tullio Pinelli. In Italian. An Italian-French-West German film, produced by Alberto Grimaldi. For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book Hooked.

VideoVista J.C. Hartley

Highly rated because I'm a big fan of Fellini, and I admire good filmmaking for the attention to detail and great performances even in little stories.

Amelia (Giulietta Masina) and Pippo (Marcello Mastroianni) danced in the 1940s as their idols Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers before splitting up. They are brought together for a TV variety show that, like celebrity-driven glossy gossip magazines in the UK, combines true-life confessions, look-alikes, heart-warming stories of compassion and endurance and a parade of freaks.

The film represents an attack on Italian TV, generally regarded as the worst in the world, and a particular bete noir for Fellini through his campaign to prevent commercial breaks during the showing of movies. Amelia arrives in a Rome where heaps of uncollected refuse are piled up at the sides of the road, the characters move through a desolate hinterland interrupted by the hotel where they spend the evening, and the even more vulgar television centre. Amelia and Pippo are reunited and Amelia discovers that after the break up of their act Pippo's life has gone downhill with problems of excessive drinking and a mental breakdown.

The film is really a showcase for the crass awfulness of television, through which Ginger and Fred's act shines as a little bit of magic from a forgotten age. A slight story but one raised by the assured and charming playing of the leads, and one in which sentimentality never intrudes to provide an unfeasibly happy ending.

Ginger And Fred Movie Review (1986) from Channel 4 Film

It is hard not to be won over by Giulietta Masina at her best. This tiny, expressive actress had an air of Chaplin's tramp about her, and the requisite ability to simultaneously break and lift hearts. Federico Fellini cast Masina, his wife and his muse, in a number of roles where her innocent clowning was used to great effect, La Strada being the most obvious and most beloved of her pictures. In Ginger And Fred, Fellini pairs her with another great icon of Italian cinema, Marcello Mastroianni.

Masina and Mastroianni play Amelia and Pippo, an old-time dance double act. Accomplished imitators of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, they wowed provincial Italian audiences with their polished song-and-dance shtick throughout the 1930s. Long since parted to lead ordinary family lives, they are reunited for a Christmas edition of a popular Italian variety TV show. The duo are reacquainted as they wait in the wings with their fellow guests, a hoard of freaks, deviants and oddballs.

Nothing much happens. We slip in an out of encounters with members of this bizarre company, Fellini constantly distracted by the opportunity for a grotesque curlicue of characterisation here and there, but never enough to make something meaningful of it. The world of television is presented as a magnet for the daft, dumb and amoral - insightful, maybe, but not exactly a groundbreaking satirical comment. Similarly, his portrait of Rome as a fetid, chaotic hell-hole is hair-raising, but never more than a picturesque diversion.

What keeps you watching, through the on-screen clutter of stock Fellini bit part-actors - dwarves, transvestites, ex-priests, Mafiosi - is the charming spectacle of the Masina/Mastroianni relationship. This tender union, woken after many years, will build, one hopes, to a final dance of reconciliation and provide that moment of Fred and Ginger magic needed to save us all from the banality of TV hell. Masina's Amelia is determined to maintain her dignity in a cheap contemporary landscape but her partner's louche cynicism is at odds with her upbeat attitude. Despite their differences, there is real feeling between them, and it is this which is ultimately the saving grace of what is often in danger of becoming just another sprawling Fellini freak show.

Film Freak Central Review [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]

The idea of Fellini criticizing television for its vulgarity--as he does in Ginger and Fred--is indeed a bit rich: Federico Fellini complaining of vulgarity is rather like Roberto Rossellini complaining of neo-realism. But beneath the surface of this admittedly shallow lament lies the real theme of the movie, which is the displacement of artists once their chosen form is rendered obsolete. It's not too hard to see Fellini himself, high-modernist art director that he was, in his music-hall dancer protagonists, who by 1985 have been completely snowed under by seismic shifts in technology and, by extension, entertainment. Slight as the film may be, you can't help feeling a twinge of regret for not only its leads, but also the increasingly-forgotten filmmaker who pulls their strings.

Those leads are Amelia (Giuletta Masina) and Pippo (Marcello Mastroianni), who in the 1930s had a Fred and Ginger knockoff act. They haven't spoken since breaking up in 1940--but by some strange serendipity, an immensely lowbrow variety program called "We Are Proud to Present" has tapped them to dance on its Christmas show. Unfortunately, the pair's appeals to elegance and taste are largely crowded out by the rest of the day's guests: a transvestite who grants prisoners connubial visits; a group of dancing dwarves; a convicted Mafioso; and, worst of all, a parade of celebrity look-alikes who cheapen the image of the originals. Thus our heroes become ever more lonely and fragile as they stand alone amidst TV crassness and their own inability to fight off being relegated to novelty status.

I suppose this is where the film's biggest weakness comes in: Fellini's demonization of the very reason people go to his movies. Like the ancient Rome of Satyricon and the modern Rome of Roma, Ginger and Fred's vision of TV culture is set up as acid condemnation when in fact it's what we paid to see. And the manifesto against television pretty much stops at everyone's vague sense that they ought to be doing something else even as they're glued to an episode of "Hart to Hart". One is less impressed with the juicy "Felliniesque" imagery than by the winding, uninterrupted journey of the show's guests first from train station to hotel, then from the hotel to the enormous, grossly modern studio. As Amelia and Pippo are caught in a flood of freaks, one feels their pain of being trapped in a world they never made.

Although we more enjoy than decry the grinning, sequin-jacketed host of "We Are Proud to Present" (Franco Fabrizi), there's no denying that the heroes' sense of the parade going by is piquant and bittersweet. The interplay of the smart, practical Amelia and the somewhat fading sensibility of Pippo (masterfully achieved by Masina and Mastroianni) is the picture's main event--and as these two fret over rehearsal time and wonder what exactly they're doing there, one infers that this is Fellini speaking of his own itinerant position in the cinema of the 1980s. That this would be his last big international export before his death in the early-'90s makes the film prophetic: it's about having the limelight torn away from you and grappling with your inevitably insulting place in the new world order. Whatever the film's faults, Ginger and Fred is actually a lot more cogent (if a lot less immediately gratifying) than the average Fellini.

Warner brings Ginger and Fred to DVD in a 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer just vivid enough to capture the bursting eighties colours, but also sharp enough to render the teeming humanity and crowded mise-en-scène. The video presentation is crisp and clean and does the tactile surfaces justice, while the Dolby 1.0 mono sound is equally fine, great for the big juicy sound of the dubbed voices as they cackle and gurgle forth from your centre speaker. The only extra: the film's theatrical trailer.-

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INTERVISTA

Italy (105 mi) 1987

Time Out

The wait is over! Here is yet another episode from Fellini's relentlessly colourful past: a free-form reminiscence of his first arrival in the Cinecittà studios, prompted by questions from a Japanese TV crew. The searching period reconstruction includes some dark notes (peasants sing Fascist anthems in the fields), but this is mostly a starry eyed celebration of the time when Movies were still Magic, complete with a bitter-sweet pastiche Nino Rota score. As expected, Mastroianni pops up, and Fellini sweeps everyone off to Anita Ekberg's villa, where a clip from La Dolce Vita is screened and quiet tears are shed for the Good Old Days. Groundbreaking stuff.

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) also seen here: Turner Classic Movies

Federico Fellini's late-career Intervista is a filmic valentine to the Cinecittá movie studio, to filmmaking, and to himself. Twenty-five years after Otto e mezzo the director pointss a camera into a mirror and fashions an autobiographical guided tour to movieland. It's too affectionate to be self-indulgent.

A Japanese film crew interviews Federico Fellini at the start of a shoot, and the balance of the film becomes a fantasy restaging of the director's cinematic memories. His most trusted associates play themselves doing the usual work of finding suitable locations and rounding up the director's expected cast of unusual faces. An actor (Sergio Rubini) is the young Fellini coming to Cinecittá for the first time to interview a libidinous movie star (Paola Liguori). He is enchanted by every woman he sees the star, a young hopeful (Antonella Ponziani), a studio staffer (Nadia Ottaviani) collecting chicory on the studio's open fields. A crazy director clashes with a tight-pursed producer over cardboard elephants on the set of a costume epic. Fellini interrupts his preparations to take actor Marcello Mastroianni (himself) to visit his old co-star Anita Ekberg (herself); they watch scenes from La dolce vita together. Finally, rain interrupts the nighttime shooting of an attack of wild Indians ... carrying weapons that look like old Television aerials.

Intervista is Federico Fellini's idealistic look back at his life as a filmmaker, as it is two hours of amusing characters, pretty women and cinematic glitz. It is certainly not an exposé nor an exercise in self-criticism. It's all about that part of the Fellini mind that loved making movies.

Earlier Fellini 'pageant pictures' like The Clowns and Roma were huge productions requiring many elaborate sets and hundreds of specially designed costumes. Intervista has only a handful of major set designs, mainly the Majarajah film-within-a film with its giant throne room, pools and enormous reclining elephant. Fellini takes great amusement in showing the artifice behind the beautiful cinematography. Workmen eat and play cards within the body of the elephant, out of sight of the camera.

Everything else would seem to have been cobbled out of found locations and items on the Cinecittá grounds. Giant cranes and lights extend high into the air, and stages are mostly empty. The biggest expense was probably making the (by 1987) mostly disused lot look new and attractive, the same way that MGM pretended that it was a bustling studio long after its back lot was a crumbling ruin. Fellini's crew transforms an old station in the heart of Rome to make the trolley that brings the young director, then a reporter, to the studio.

What makes the film come alive are the dozens of interesting characters, bit-players that crowd into the proceedings. Fellini's production people collect a group of overweight women and then have to deal with their personalities when some are chosen and others not. Strange retainers and sycophants orbit the stars while the director's crack team of technicians creates order out of chaos. Designer Danilo Donati is merely glimpsed but cameraman Tonino Delli Colli becomes an amused member of the cast. In one of the best moments, two bored scenery men pass the time by trading obscene insults as they paint a giant backing inside an empty stage.

Delli Colli's camerawork makes a huge contribution by keeping visual interest high in this near-shapeless film. If Fellini has mastered anything in these 'crazy parade' pictures, it is the illusion of spontaneity. The random-looking activity in front of the camera is actually all planned out there are no editorial montage effects to create scenes out from disorganized footage.

The most gratuitous scene is the reunion of Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg. Fellini and his entourage of thirty supposedly just 'drop in' for bread and wine at the Ekberg villa. We compare the two aging stars to their earlier ultra-sexy selves romping in the fountain of Trevi, allowing Fellini to make a point about the value of film to create beauty that doesn't grow old. Mastroianni may be overplaying his role as a puffy-faced old star, but viewers will be more than a bit surprised by Ekberg, who isn't exactly obese but certainly seems enormous. Their emotionally subdued meeting is curiously less believable than other more fantastic scenes. The movie works better when Fellini has his whole circus to play with.

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THE VOICE OF THE MOON (La voce della luna)

Italy France (120 mi) 1990

Time Out

A noisome, sprawling slab of pretentious nonsense, charting the odyssey of a dreamy simpleton-cum-poet (Benigni) through an Emilian landscape populated by the usual Fellini collection of grotesque eccentrics, and clearly intended to evoke the various ills of the modern world. Profoundly reactionary, almost without narrative structure, and embarrassingly self-indulgent, it is virtually unwatchable.

Channel 4 Film

In Voice of the Moon Benigni is the simple-minded poet who drifts through this unstructured, messy slice of whimsy from Fellini. Based on Poems of a Lunatic by Cavazzoni, the film is a hopeless jumble of events and diversions that match the hapless Benigni with a whole host of loonies. There's Prefect (Villaggio), an old grumpster who drifts in and out of the action functioning as a kind of one-man Greek chorus, a mob of reporters and some Japanese tourists, as well as the usual Fellini suspects. It's funny in parts but, sadly, overcooked and ultimately ridiculous.

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

Federico Fellini's last feature (1990)--uncharacteristically adapted from a novel, Ermanno Cavazzoni's Il poema dei lunatici--is diffuse as narrative, like all of his later pictures, but often touching as poetry. Fellini built a set of a village square, then improvised the script day to day using two well-known Italian comics, Paolo Villaggio and Roberto Benigni (Life Is Beautiful), to play his main characters. Fellini's feeling for his small-town roots pays off intermittently, though this is decidedly a cut below Amarcord. If you care a lot about the director's work you should definitely check this out.

San Francisco Chronicle [Edward Guthmann]

In his last, unsuccessful film, ``Voices of the Moon'' (1990), the late Federico Fellini offered a disjointed tour of his mind and imagination -- a wacky omnibus of fantasy, folly, tender yearnings and delirious lust.

It's a rambling, frustrating mess of a film, with occasional moments of beauty and wisdom, and it's notable primarily in the context of Fellini's 50-year career as a screenwriter and director of extraordinary vision. For fans of the maestro especially, who will see themes and idioms from earlier works repeated in this adventure, ``Voices'' may be worth a listen.

Today, in the ``Tutto Fellini'' film series, which was organized by Cinecitta International in Rome and presented here by the San Francisco Film Society, the Pacific Film Archive and the Italian Cultural Institute, ``Voices of the Moon'' will play at 7 p.m. only, followed by Fellini's ``City of Women'' at 9:20. It's a beautiful print and will be shown with the Softitler system, which places subtitles below the screen.

Based on ``Poems of a Lunatic,'' a novel by Ermanno Cavazzoni, ``Voices of the Moon'' opens and closes with Roberto Benigni, the wonderful Italian actor who appeared in Jim Jarmusch's ``Down by Law,'' looking down into a well. ``Do you hear them?'' he asks. ``They're calling me.''

In between is a kaleidoscope of situations and diversions, haphazardly connected, that match Benigni with a host of lunatics. We meet Prefect (Paolo Villaggio), an old grump who drifts in and out and functions as a one-man Greek chorus; an oboe player (Sim) who imagines ``ghosts'' traveling through certain musical notes; and the usual Boschian stew -- Japanese tourists, TV reporters, big- breasted women and hawk-nosed politicians -- that Fellini adored.

Throughout ``Voices,'' the moon is addressed, meditated on, serenaded and extolled. Someone thinks it's a persecution; someone else says it's a divining rod, a source of mystery and sustenance. For others, it's ``femininity at its most,'' an incitement to passion.

In the film's funniest passage, a short, furry dweeb named Nestore (Angelo Orlando) meets and weds a man-hungry manicurist who turns out to be a sexual volcano. In a sequence that recalls (but actually predates) ``Like Water for Chocolate,'' the insatiable bride sets furniture on fire with her crazed heat and rocks her groom until he thinks he's on a speeding locomotive.

In the first scenes, ``Voices'' takes place in a village that resembles the setting for Fellini's classic ``Amarcord'' (1973). Later, the action moves to a small, cluttered city -- although the sets, created by ace production designer Dante Ferretti (``The Adventures of Baron Munchausen''), look only marginally like any world we know.

Benigni, who also played Inspector Clouseau in a misbegotten ``Pink Panther'' movie, is the soul of ``Voices'' and delivers a performance -- largely improvised -- that's quieter, slower, less clownish than his usual screen persona.

At a cemetery crypt, Benigni goes soft with emotion and muses in a way that makes you think the words came directly from the aging Fellini's heart. ``Sometimes I think there must be a place in the world, a hole that communicates with the other side,'' he says, and then adds, ``How I love remembering, sometimes even more than living.''

Later, Benigni dreams of being ``free, truly free. I know it's out there, (but) it's still so dark and far away. There are no certainties.''

It's tempting to interpret those lines as the sweet, nostalgic yearning of a man in twilight -- lyrics from a swan song. In fact, Fellini never intended ``Voices of the Moon'' as his final effort, but found that the film's poor reception scared off potential investors from backing subsequent films. Like so many great artists' works, Fellini's last films, which also included ``Ginger and Fred'' and ``Intervista,'' are among his weakest. What he intended with ``Voices,'' I think, was a cockeyed lament on a world gone haywire, where traditions are dismissed and sensitive souls -- what's left of them -- look to the moon for magic and nourishment.

Instead, ``Voices'' dribbles and rambles and plays as if Fellini had ignored the imperatives of structure and cohesion and sacrificed himself to the power of his whims.

Fenchenko, Anna

MISSING MAN (Propavshiy bez vesti) C- 69

Russia (96 mi) 2010

This Russian drama is an exaggeration of Kafkaesque absurdity, which to people who speak Russian may be hilarious, as it does show elements of dark comedy, but the subtitling is so poor, where the words projected onscreen seem so amateurishly typed onto the print that the audience has a hard time telling who even spoke the words, as they may be shown several seconds before or after they’re actually spoken, rarely in synch with the dialogue. Also, this film probably loses plenty in the translation, as the Russians in the audience were howling with laughter, while the rest are shocked at the unending monotony of this extended road movie that delves further and further into a horrible nightmare. This example of the unyielding Russian bureaucracy was beautifully examined in Kieslowski’s short Polish films, where reality was the furthest thing from the minds of those in positions of authority, as power was all they cared about, ordering people about, requiring that ordinary, in some cases senile or illiterate citizens, comply with every bureaucratic detail right down to the fine print, even if this causes a dozen trips before they get it right, and this may be the procedure month after month, which requires endless waiting and endless trips to the windows of the same petty bureaucrats. That is the spirit of what this new young filmmaker is looking for, and it’s doubtful that she succeeds in the English language, as this tedious work becomes all too pointless after awhile.

Andrei Filippak is the no-named hero, a handsome and mature Russian man, the kind of guy that women give their phone numbers to, as he appears to have been around the block a time or two, so he’s no young innocent. But his day begins when he is awoken by a tapping on his window at his St. Petersburg apartment complex where he lives, as someone needs his signature on petitions, as people are being sent to some strange destination. He’s visited again by police who are interested how it was he came to see someone who was reported as a missing person, as the previous evening he ran into a young man he knew at the bus depot who gave him a photo to deliver to his mother, as she lives in the same apartment complex. The police find it odd that he would know someone who is listed as a missing person, and ask for a drink. As he has nothing to offer, he runs upstairs to his sister’s apaprtment for some vodka, only to return to a police order that he is not to leave town until this matter is resolved. The mother then visits and apologizes profusely, claiming she thought her son had run away from home and reported him missing, but strangely, her belongings are being thrown into the street, as are the belongings of the man’s sister. Mayhem seems to be happening right outside his door, where eventually he has no home to return to, as the demolition crew has begun tearing down the building, indicating his belongings were already shipped to a relocation address in the suburbs. But when he finds the address, the complex hasn’t even been built yet, so he returns to the police who promptly arrest him, thanking him for turning himself in, as he traveled outside the city limits of St. Petersberg, making him a wanted man.

With his passport in police possession, he decides to make a break for it, and the rest of the film is the ever more absurd road trip into the desolation of the backwoods of Russia, traveling with a Kaurismäki deadpan style group of outlaws, none of whom have any redeeming value, yet his life apparently has been placed in their moronic hands, as they sing Russian folk songs in the getaway car. There are a few scenes in the woods that have a scenic appeal, as the Russian forests always photograph well, but it soon becomes clear there is no portal of entry back into his real life, that he’s been excommunicated from reality as he knows he’s without a clue how to straighten things out. This is simply a Russian version of Kafka’s K, a man who is arrested for a crime he never commits, yet he spends the rest of his life as a condemned man, pronounced guilty without a trial by the authorites. However this doesn’t have the weight of other Kafka films, and simply plays the same note throughout without ever expanding on any additional themes. It’s a story that’s been told many times, usually better by others, where perhaps the best version outside of Orson Welles’s 1962 version of THE TRIAL is Hungarian filmmaker Péter Gothár’s THE OUTPOST (1995), a legendary glimpse of Communist repression as expressed through a scathingly dark and humorous exposé.

Missing Man (2010) Mubi

A loner tries to help a stranger, turning his life into a litany of disasters in this offbeat drama from director Anna Fenchenko. A free-lance web designer (Andrei Filippak) lives alone in his St. Petersburg apartment, where he works in solitude and is visited only occasionally by a handful of friends. While seeing off a pal at a nearby bus station, the designer is approached by a teenager, whose mother lives in his building. The youngster asks the designer to give a letter to his mom; the designer agrees, but when he does, he discovers the teenager was running away from home, and when his disappearance is reported to the police, the designer is now suspected of wrongdoing. The designer has to visit the police to be interviewed and sign a statement pledging he won’t leave town while the runaway’s case is under investigation; when he returns home, he’s surprised to find his building has been torn down. The designer is told his belongings were moved to a new flat before demolition began, but he heads out to the suburbs to check out his new home only to discover it hasn’t been built yet. The designer complains to the police about this turn of events, only to learn he traveled outside the St. Petersberg city limits and is now wanted by the law. Propavshyi Bez Vesty (aka Missing Man) was the first theatrical feature from director Fenchenko, who previously worked in television. —allmovie guide

Proskurina gets top award at Kinotavr Vladimir Kozlov from The Hollywood Reporter

MOSCOW -- Veteran director Svetlana Proskurina collected the Grand Prix at Kinotavr, Russia's main national film festival, whose 21st edition came to a close in the Black Sea resort of Sochi on Sunday, for her existential drama "Peremiriye" (Truce).

At several previous festivals, the main prizes often went to first-time directors, and the dominance of debuts in this year's official selection made observers think that the trend would continue, but the only feature debut to be awarded a major prize was Sergei Loznitsa's "Schastye Moye" (My Joy).

The movie, which was premiered at Cannes last month, brought Loznitsa Kinotavr's best director's award. The best screenplay prize was awarded to Andrei Stempkovsky, the writer/director of "Obratnoye Dvizheniye" "Backwards Movement).

The best cinematography prize went to Roman Vasyanov for his work on "Yavleniye Prirody" (Nature Phenomemon) by Alexander Lungin and Sergei Osepyan. Anna Fenchenko collected the best debut award for "Propavshi Bez Vesti" (Missing Person).

The best actor prize was awarded to "Truce's" lead actor Ivan Dobronravov, whom international audiences may know for a role in Andrei Zvyagintsev's "Vozvrashchenie" (The Return) which he played when he was a teenager.

Maria Zvonaryova, who starred in Dmitry Meskhiyev's "Chelovek U Okna" (Man by the Window), picked up the best actress award.

Feng Xiaogang

Metacinema for the Masses: Three Films by Feng Xiaogang Jason McGrath, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 17, 2 (Fall 2005): 90-132

Beginning in the late 1990s, film director Feng Xiaogang established himself as the most commercially successful mainland Chinese filmmaker ever through a series of popular hesuipian or "New Year's celebration films." The hesuipian phenomenon results from the new market conditions facing the Chinese film industry since the mid 1990s. The expectation that government owned studios turn a profit, combined with the sudden domination of the domestic box office by newly permitted Hollywood imports, meant that domestic filmmakers would have to emphasize turning out an entertaining product as never before in the People's Republic. The entertainment cinema of Feng Xiaogang thus represents a new model of a Chinese national cinema that positions itself vis-à-vis Hollywood.

Close readings of three of Feng Xiaogang's hesuipian--Jiafang yifang (Party A, Party B, 1997), Bujian busan (Be there or be square, 1998), and Dawan (Big shot's funeral, 2001)--reveal that this new genre of entertainment cinema had a strong metacinematic tendency and an aesthetic of irony that mitigated the overall lighthearted and often sentimental tone of the films. Reflexivity often appears in cinema during times of industrial crisis, and Feng Xiaogang's metacinema can be read as the self-reflection of the film industry during a time of transition from socialist conditions to competition within a globalized cultural market. At the same time, the entertainment value of Feng's metacinema comes from the skilled exploitation of a certain reflexive, self-deconstructing element that is intrinsic to the enjoyment of entertainment cinema in general.

A WORLD WITHOUT THIEVES (Tian xia wu zei)

China (100 mi) 2004 ‘Scope

A World Without Thieves Tuna from Asian Cinema Drifter (link lost)

Feng Xiaogang once said, "A film is like a cup of wine, I'm trying to ensure that the audience gets the most fun and inspiration from the screen. But I would never make a movie to win an award.” While this blatant commercial aim should appear to lower one’s view of him before even stepping into a film of his, one should take note that he’s a step above most other directors with these same intentions. Xiaogang created A World Without Thieves as another of his New Year planned films, except he sheds comedy and dark humor to focus on a drama that we’ve all seen in many forms before. Still, the style, the writing and the performances of the film, can hold audiences in their chairs like his films before, as another example to why he’s one of China’s strongest directors.

Wang Bo and Wang Li, a crafty duo of thieves (not to mention romantically involved couple) have a little argument as Wang Li requires a religious moment and decides to quit the lifestyle. Wang Bo, appalled at Wang Li’s hopeless attempt to change her ways gives up, and she is left stranded in the countryside until she happens upon a group of local villagers on horseback. Root, a young man on his way to the city with his life savings and a plan to find a wife and a house, gives Wang Li a ride to the village. All three characters wind up meeting again at the train station, as Root, wildly screams and announces the cash he is holding to prove to his friends his naïve idea that there are no thieves. Meanwhile, a strict professional group of thieves also boarding the same train take note of the situation and plan to steal the money, while Wang Li and Wang Bo must decide where they stand on the issue.

While the premise appears rather standard, the true strength of the film lies in the script and the fine plot it provides. Xiaogang’s dialogue is engaging but hardly stand-out. The thing to appreciate is how he makes it free of awkward or cringe-worthy moments that attempt cheap laughs. It’s just clean interesting dialogue that does what it should for each character, from Wang Bo’s suave dialogue to Root’s outstandingly ignorant but lovable lines. The dialogue does not hold the film over as much as the plot events that Xiaogang manages to squeeze all into this one constricted train ride. The film seems like a reversal on Yesterday Once More with a focus on thievery and the background romance between Wang Bo and Wang Li. This fills the film with a number of interesting schemes and even hand-to-hand fights as thieves clash on the train, pick pocketing and trying to outwit each other. The pacing works very fine to keep the viewer attentive with each rising issue, with funny script ideas such as how a brute force robbery duo becomes the laughing stock of the train when they match wits with Wang Bo. The story moves very well, and the only apparent problem seems to lie in the ending, which feels just a little too Hong Kongian and common for my tastes.

All this keen writing is expressed well with Xiaogang’s directorial style and his strong visual sense in such a constrained environment. It works especially well when he shoots tiny lightning quick pick pocketing fights between thieves and it’s a nice bit of fun that’s similar to Andy and Sammi’s sneaky thievery in Yesterday Once More. Xiaogang just uses these neat little bits of fun when Wang Bo throws an ice cube straight up at the camera in slow motion, or we take a little detour outside to the windy top of the train. Just the tight atmosphere and the lightly intense mood separates the film from most other commercial productions made in Hong Kong nowadays. Nothing about the feel of the film seems contrived as every bit fits together neatly to compliment each other.

To also add that extra edge, the actors’ performances are superb all the way around. They show the bits of emotion they need without going overboard, and they all fill out their respective characters perfectly. Andy Lau shows a major improvement as he is given a much better chance to shine here than in House of Flying Daggers. Rene Liu works fine with him as well, and they have decent chemistry that gives the freedom to switch their relationship from a feud to passion when needed (and is only held back by the fact we saw Andy with Sammi a few months ago.) You Ge, listed as a “special guest appearance” is the third co-star and plays a great role as the stern professional antagonist to the heroes. He moves from comedy as well, to create an interesting and intimidating character. Finally, as Root, Wang Baoqiang (emerging from Blind Shaft) creates a rather believable character in spite of his unbelievable naivety and heart of gold. All the characters together just have a strong level of interaction and charisma to make the dialogues even better.

A World Without Thieves, in the end, is just another film focused on the themes of good and evil, and making change. All the elements surrounding this “life altering” lesson appear rather contrived, but they still work in some respects, to give this film a side of dramatic substance. Personally, the film was best taken lightly as a fun ride on a train with enticing characters and situations, free of any life changing messages to “qualify” this film for an award.

Fergus, Mark

FIRST SNOW B 85

Germany USA (101 mi) 2006

“God don’t ever change.” —Blind Willie Johnson

A film that operates under the premise that the universe is a finite entity and everyone’s place in it is fixed. Everyone’s fate is known, but can only be seen or understood by those with a special clairvoyant gift to perceive it. J.K. Simmons is that someone, a two bit fortune teller operating out of a trailer in the middle of a parking lot of a gas station miles away from anywhere in the middle of a New Mexico desert. He plays a relatively minor role, but his influence permeates everything that happens in the picture. Guy Pearce plays Jimmy, a fast talking con artist/salesman who spends much of his day on his cell phone, a guy who dreams of making it rich selling vintage Wurlitzer juke boxes, each with the original 45’s, an item he believes will lure people to want to fill it up with money, feeling they won’t be able to help themselves. And therein lies a key to understanding his nature – people can’t help themselves. Biding his time after pulling into a gas station out in the middle of a vast, empty desert landscape, waiting for his broken down car to be fixed, he finds Simmons, the fortune teller, who has a near breakdown himself when he feels Jimmy’s future, then regrets to inform him that he has only a short time to live, that all roads soon come to an end. “One thing is certain. You’re safe until the first snow.”

Jimmy laughs it off as a silly prank, but within days, other things he predicted ring true, making him have second thoughts about the wisdom of the “old man,” returning to him several times in the film, each time with the same cryptic message. “No matter what road you choose, you can’t escape your fate.” These thoughts start circling around in his head like vultures circling over a near dead animal in the desert, leaving him more and more anxious about what to do, while at the same time trying to keep his cool, his suave polished salesman pitch look, usually hiding behind a suit and shades. The mood grows more eerie when Jimmy’s boyhood best friend Vince, a guy who’s been in prison, may have his mind on a little payback, believing Jimmy might have sold him out. Jimmy’s first reaction is to secretly check him out, but Vince is on to him and he starts sending Jimmy a shitload of ominous cell phone messages. His girl friend Deirdre, Piper Perabo, is suspicious, especially after he gets a gun. The widescreen cinematography by Eric Alan Edwards is haunting, especially some of the night images of a car going down an empty highway, barreling full speed towards what feels like a mixture of the future meeting his past, also the low key music by Cliff Martinez perfectly fits the feeling of dread and anguish that drives the interior mood of the film, that moves into high gear after the first snowfall, where everything seems destined to backtrack into the murky world of his past for a showdown with Vince. Accelerated by a series of quick flashbacks, the inevitable Sergio Leone-like scene draws to an anticipated set up with a kind of David Gordon Green back alley, broken down atmosphere, but it all feels too staged and anticlimactic. Vince’s voice was far more threatening over the phone than in real life. The tense atmosphere leading to the first snow was much more vivid and beautifully realized. By the end, despite the well-made quality of the film, we feel a bit cheated when everything fits so neatly into a fixed package, which is the premise of the story, but that in itself feels all too unthreatening for a psychological thriller. By the end, the thrill is gone, but there’s a nice Blind Willie Johnson song that plays over the end credits.

Reel.com [Jim Hemphill]

One often hears actors praised for their chameleon-like ability to disappear into their parts, but few thespians really warrant the description like Guy Pearce does. In First Snow, he completely inhabits his role, playing a character as different from his previous roles as his troubled antihero in Memento is from his drag queen in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. What's remarkable about Pearce's performance here is that he vanishes not through any major overhaul of his physical appearance, but through subtle alterations in gesture and intonation that make us forget, five minutes into the movie, that we're watching the actor from L.A. Confidential, Ravenous, and so many other films.

Pearce plays Jimmy, a slick flooring salesman with a dark past whose confidence is totally shaken by a chance meeting with a fortune teller. When a couple of the psychic's predictions come true, Jimmy begins to worry—especially after the psychic tells him that he only has a short time to live. This information, coupled with the news that an old friend with a grudge has just gotten out of prison, sends Jimmy down a winding road of fear and paranoia, and Pearce's complex performance drags the audience right along for the harrowing ride. To describe the plot in any further detail would be a disservice to the moviegoer, since a great deal of First Snow's appeal lies in its surprises. Yet ultimately this is less a movie about story than it is about mood and behavior, and on this level it's extremely compelling. Though the whole thing hinges on Pearce's portrayal, he's given solid support from a supporting cast that includes Piper Perabo as Jimmy's good-hearted but clueless girlfriend, and William Fichtner as a colleague who gets tired of covering for Jimmy at work. The dialogue in each scene is smart and stylized, yet completely naturalistic in its own way—the movie is reminiscent of 1947's film noir Out of the Past, both in its sharp adult badinage and in its sense of fatalistic dread.

The film was directed by Mark Fergus, who, along with co-writer Hawk Ostby, was also one of the scribes responsible for the brilliant Children of Men screenplay. In his directorial debut, Fergus displays the same kind of technical skill and resourcefulness one finds in a low-budget thriller like Blood Simple or Mute Witness. The whole movie oozes atmosphere, thanks partly to some evocative New Mexico locations, but mostly to Fergus' ability to do a lot with a little. He may not have a big budget to work with, but he's extremely adept at milking his modest situations, as in a scene in which he generates sheer terror simply in the way he edits and frames a conversation between two guys on a telephone. His sense of timing is nearly perfect; he consistently ratchets up the tension without forcing it, and reveals information to the audience at precisely those moments when it means the most. Fergus and Ostby only falter in the film's final act, which they drag out slightly longer than necessary—they slow down the action just when they should speed it up, which keeps First Snow from being the minor classic that it could have been. Yet Pearce's mesmerizing work holds the viewer's interest even in that slow patch, and the filmmakers more than compensate for the miscalculation with a powerful finale that brings all the movie's themes together in a haunting final image. With its quiet, unassuming style and brooding intelligence, First Snow isn't the kind of movie that announces itself, but it's well worth seeking out, especially for moviegoers who complain that "they" don't make movies for grown-ups anymore.

Creative Loafing [Curt Holman]

Usually the sins and crimes of film noir are committed in cities by night. The colossal shadows of tenements and office buildings conceal humans behaving badly, while blinking neon signs and lone figures in streetlights only serve as beacons to even worse actions.

But just because film noir translates as "dark film," that doesn't mean bright lights and wide-open spaces can dispel evil deeds. Two of the Coen Brothers' great modern-noir films, Blood Simple and Fargo, take place in rural flatlands with empty expanses of baking prairie and chilling snow, respectively. Against such featureless landscapes, tough noir anti-heroes find a physical isolation to match their status as alienated loners.

First Snow is a draggy but cunning low-budget indie noir that takes place in a setting where you can see fate coming a mile away, but can find no place to hide. Guy Pearce of Memento is cast with such talented character actors as J.K. Simmons and William Fichtner, but his true co-star is the array of endless Southwestern locations. As Jimmy Starks, Pearce portrays a fast-talking salesman whose nonstop pitching seems particularly hollow with the timeless hills and deserts as the background.

A cocky young guy on the make, Jimmy could fit in anywhere hustling anything, but happens to be a flooring salesman based in New Mexico. He keeps talking up his dream of unloading a "fleet" of vintage Wurlitzer jukeboxes with original 45s, and his appreciation of their nostalgia value may be the closest thing he has to depth.

When a car accident strands him in the middle of nowhere, he visits a local fortune teller for a lark. J.K. Simmons, best-known as bombastic J. Jonah Jameson in the Spider-Man movies, does a superb, 180-degree turn as Vacaro, a humble, plainspoken shaman who eschews mystical mumbo-jumbo. The soothsayer makes a few predictions, then gets spooked and refuses to finish. Only after Jimmy badgers him does Vacaro admit that Jimmy will meet a dire fate of unknown origin, coinciding with the season's first snow, which could fall in weeks if not days.

At first, Jimmy shrugs off the prophecy of doom and maintains the upbeat, unreflective front with his girlfriend (Piper Perabo) and best friend (William Fichtner). But he grows increasingly obsessed that his days are numbered, and while sitting at a sidewalk cafe proves hypersensitive to potential dangers and sinister words on a newspaper. He becomes increasingly paranoid when he receives mysterious threats and phone calls, possibly from his old friend Vincent (Shea Whigham), recently sprung from prison.

From his coarse drag queen in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert to his icy, ambitious police lieutenant in L.A. Confidential, Pearce never seems to give the same performance twice. As a salesman, Jimmy proves slick but untrustworthy, while in casual moments he's almost opaque, as if intimacy is foreign to him. Pearce effectively captures Jimmy's obsession and takes him through a variation on the stages of dying (anger, denial, bargaining, depression, acceptance). Jimmy's personality gets deeper even as his lifeline gets shorter.

Debut filmmaker Mark Fergus co-wrote the film with Hawk Ostby, and though both are credited scripters for Children of Men, First Snow tends to drift. Vincent remains a menacing offscreen voice for most of the movie, which fires Jimmy's paranoia, but the slow-burning plot gets little chance to build momentum. Perabo and Fichtner get too little to do besides show concern for Jimmy's uncharacteristic behavior, while Jimmy seems to make too many return visits to the psychic, despite Simmons' excellence in the role.

As a director, Fergus shows keen abilities at creating mood, and Jimmy's nervy search of Vincent's squalid apartment could fit in a traditionally shadowy noir film. Some sequences stray from convention, such as the way the first snow finally falls and seems at once purifyingly white and ominously blank, depending on whether you think death should be embraced or feared. First Snow affirms that in film-noir stories, heroes can be surrounded by darkness even in the unblinking light of the sun.

Slant Magazine [Eric Henderson]

Film Journal International (Doris Toumarkine)

The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]

James Berardinelli's ReelViews

New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden

Ferguson, Charles

NO END IN SIGHT B 89

USA (102 mi) 2007

An intelligent, easy to understand documentary that critiques the Bush administration’s handling of the post war occupation of Iraq, that from the beginning never had a plan that even remotely resembles the size and scale of the operation needed, always underplanning, underfunding, believing it will all be over in a couple of months, and then basically hides from the public when things don’t go as planned. The film’s real point is that this was basically a secret government operation, that the President was included in the plans to militarily invade Iraq from the beginning, but once they reached Baghdad, he turned over all responsibilities to secure the peace to Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who ran a secret, behind-the-scenes operation from a tightly closed group that answered then and answers now to no one but themselves, not even the President, like a secret cabal that basically botched every phase of the operations by disregarding CIA reports, which in Bush’s case he wouldn’t even read, and by refusing to listen to the concerns of those that were already in Iraq or who had experience in the area, including their own military personnel, and instead created their overseas plans while holed up in the Pentagon in the United States. The film really does a brilliant job documenting the initial phases, where there was a degree of support from the Iraqi people to overthrow Saddam Hussein and form their own government, believing that in the meantime the US could help improve the basic services needed throughout the country. What happened instead was rampant looting in the country that only escalated when they realized the US military wasn’t going to do anything about it, as soldiers were ordered not to leave their tanks or vehicles, so they just sat there while every major institution was broken into and looted except the Oil Ministry which was mysteriously protected by the Marines. By looting, we’re not talking about food from neighborhood grocery stores, but the use of large scale construction equipment to make off with huge hauls in an unprecedented degree. When ordinary Iraqi’s witnessed this open invitation to lawlessness, which included daily televised broadcasts of open criminal activity, theft, and the large scale destruction of urban enterprises, with the looting of basic goods as well as cultural artifacts, then turf warfare developed between various religious and ethnic factions who resorted daily to open warfare on the streets, and the Americans let them do it, they began to suspect the Americans weren’t really there to help them.

50 days before the war started, a group of experienced and well-intentioned experts were brought together to work out the planning details of an interim government, under the control of General Warner. But by the time they actually got to Baghdad, buildings were demolished, tables and chairs and furniture had all been stolen, so there was literally nothing to start with. This led to a fortified military zone completely protected from all outsiders which led to a bunker mentality, as they lived in an idealized environment sealed off from Iraqi people. Worse, General Warner was replaced by Paul Bremer, who rather than work with Iraqi’s decided to seal himself off from the minions and rule as an Iraqi Czar, initiating the firing of all former Baathists, Saddam Hussein’s party, which included technicians, school teachers, librarians, doctors, and nurses – all suddenly out of a job, and also the Iraqi military was disbanded in its entirety. So Bremer’s initial order immediately makes half the country unemployed, which leads to demonstrations and social unrest, as people’s lives are thrown into turmoil, as well as the extended families that were dependent on that income. Without money, without food, the US government was basically forcing people to resort to criminal means to survive. This also drove huge numbers into the hands of the fundamental religious leaders who specialize in fomenting violence when poverty and hopelessness prevail. When Bremer refuses to budge on this issue, the tension only mounts, leading to the formation of grass roots organizations to oppose the US occupation, which was a mix of ordinary citizens thrown out of their jobs and former soldiers and military commanders, who just happened to know the whereabouts of stockpiled ammunition depots, which were also left unprotected. So one of the first boneheaded moves was to simply allow the former military personnel to steal literally tons of weapons which would then be used to turn against the Americans, as this gave rise to what is now known as the insurgency, fueled by vengeance and the wrath of the fundamentalists.

Ferguson is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and he does a good job of getting into the mindset of several members of the Bush team that refused to cooperate with the filmmaker, providing excellent accompanying footage of this initial bungling. He also claims the military was so obsessed with breaking into people’s homes, arresting nearly any male of military age and sending them to Abu Ghraib prison, raids that were usually forewarned by the circling of helicopters in the middle of the night, all in the mad search to find Saddam Hussein and his regime, that the accumulating daily violence and unrest on the streets was given a free reign to develop and escalate. The Bush administration’s denial that there even was an insurgency certainly led to further delusions about how to counter their effectiveness. Instead they bicker with the press over their use of terminology, claiming the press is to blame, never once taking responsibility in the matter or understanding the seriousness of their situation. Ferguson attempts to maintain his case up until the present, but it loses its potency and becomes more muddled after the reelection of Bush and the subsequent firing of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. Ferguson’s arguments carry less weight as he never really delves into what the problem is on the ground in Iraq from the Iraqi point of view, the influence of the fundamentalists, the effect of a civil war, the chaos of the weakened governmental structure, as we never hear from those who have a vested interest in a positive outcome. Instead he sticks with his claim that this is a war that has been mismanaged from the beginning. There is a poetic sweep to the brief recap finale, but unfortunately the thrust of the film derails into what feels like a televised Frontline episode. This is all information that is common knowledge in the rest of the world, but which has been altogether missing from American news coverage. Children around the world are aware of America’s debacle in Iraq, as criticism is common in international news. Unfortunately children in America aren’t – unless they have informed parents who have instructed them.

For instance, it is my view that the reckless behavior of the Americans and their total disregard of the Iraqi people and culture have made them completely irrelevant as a credible influence in determining any Iraqi future. Their role has deteriorated to such a degree that now they are largely sitting ducks for terrorists and the next generation of potential terrorists, as the arrogance of Americans and their trillion dollar misadventure in a land where they don’t belong leads to an easy almost comical characterization, dehumanized by those that have the ear of the Iraqi people, the fundamentalists who continually call America the great Satan. One of the interesting ironies of the film as the military was conducting security patrols up and down the Iraqi streets was the presence of giant writings on the walls that highlight anti-American slogans, like “Execute Bush,” or “Kill the Americans.” These have the effect of giant billboard advertisements, like something out of early Godard films, yet the military blindly goes about their operations completely oblivious to the effect of their presence, as they can’t read Arabic.

INSIDE JOB B+ 92

USA (109 mi) 2010

You have three more minutes. Give it your best shot! —Glenn Hubbard, Columbia University Business School Dean and Bush Chief Economic Advisor

Inside Job is otherwise known as: Who’s left holding the bag for the economic meltdown of 2008? Ferguson is a bright investigative photo journalist who does his research, a guy with a Ph.D. in political science from M.I.T. who made a fortune designing computer technology, including the invention of the FrontPage which he sold to Microsoft for $133 million dollars over a decade ago. Since then, he made perhaps the most comprehensive documentary film analysis of the Bush administration’s mishandling of the post war occupation of Iraq in NO END IN SIGHT (2007). Ferguson is a former senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, one of the more influential and independent-minded non-for-profit think tanks in America. Here he sets his sights on helping the audience understand just what caused the economic crisis which ran amok in a sweeping euphoria of bank deregulation, an industry that offers surprisingly little oversight or caution in the name of quick profits and handsome corporate bonuses, where Ferguson identifies the names and influential positions of the people who implemented the decisions that led to the crisis, an interesting mix of those who would and wouldn’t speak before the cameras.

Occasionally there were advanced signs of potential distress, such as a research paper entitled “Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?” warning of a “catastrophic meltdown” from the accumulation of too much debt, which was presented at a celebration honoring retiring Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan in 2005 by Raghuram Rajan, chief economist at the International Monetary Fund who presented his analysis of a potential systematic breakdown in front of an international group of G-7 economic elite, but was summarily mocked and dismissed by Larry Summers, the President of Harvard, the Chief economist at the World Bank, and the Secretary of the Treasury, calling him “misguided” and a “Luddite.” Despite the meticulous care to make this subject understandable to the common man, much of this economic analysis will clearly sail over the heads of most, making this difficult, at best, to have the impact it should, which is likely what the persons named as most responsible for this crisis must hope for, as Ferguson points them out, one by one, like that deck of cards that listed all of Saddam Hussein’s most influential men in Iraq. Most all of these men retain their prestigious positions of authority within the walls of government, hand-chosen by the current Presidents, be it Clinton, Bush, or Obama, Republican or Democrat, to hand guide them through each administration’s economic vision for the future.

What’s unique about this particular group of economists and Ivy League academics is the degree of their insularity, protected from any accountability to the outside world as if they live in a protected refuge of an ivory tower sanctuary. It’s clear most of these individuals have never mixed with anyone other than their own exclusive, ultra-rich economic strata, continually designing economic laws that favor protection and exclusivity for the rich to such a degree that only the top 1% of the nation’s wealthiest actually benefit with multi-million dollar rewards while the rest of the population ends up paying for it, as their jobs are sent overseas, their pension funds dry up from neglect or mismanagement, where too many people have lost their homes and anything resembling a secure way of life. Investment firms like Goldman Sachs were actually consolidating bad debt loans into securities that received smooth sailing Triple A credit ratings by firms paid by the banks to list them as safe investments for their customers, but then bet against them, presenting a house of cards designed to fall, then making a handsome profit on their own customer’s misfortunes. The chief financial officers from these huge investment houses that subsequently went bankrupt from their dizzyingly amoral short-sightedness ended up sitting in Cabinet positions in the White House, advising the President on all economic policies. As part of the conditions set to bail out Wall Street investment firms, strings were attached where no one would be prosecuted for criminal malfeasance, even in instances where the executives of these companies were hiring strippers, prostitutes, and rampant cocaine use, then writing them off as business expenses, all supposedly part of the culture of executive privilege.

As the viewer becomes more familiar with the problems, some of the major players are seen being grilled before Congress, which includes Richard Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers, who received a $484 million dollar bonus for leading his company into bankruptcy, a man who refused to even share an elevator with the public, or Daniel Sparks, head of the Goldman Sachs mortgages department, who was forced to explain why investments his own traders describe as “shitty” were aggressively being sold to their own unsuspecting customers. Ferguson himself from behind the camera begins to interrupt or ask more pointed questions, many of which are never answered, as the person sitting in the hot seat in front of the camera begins to stammer unintelligently or grows more angrily indignant, as these men are not used to someone questioning their judgment or business acumen. By the end, however, when it’s clear the same men who implemented the crisis remain firmly entrenched within the current government, there is something of a hollow plea for the audience to do something about it, which is a clear case of feebly throwing one’s hands-in-the-air with disgust. Surely the filmmaker hopes to load the audience with knowledge and information, thinking this must lead to a better solution, perhaps hoping democracy will take its course, but like Supreme Court justices who retain their position for life, these targeted individuals enjoy such a life of privilege that no one ever votes for them, so you can’t vote them out of office, as they are selected at the discretion of the President and are considered “the chosen people.” These individuals with their millions tucked away in their pockets remain untouchable. One thing this film makes perfectly clear is how widespread and systemic the problem is regardless of which party controls the White House or the Congress, and how serious the need is to revise the current practices in the financial world. Until then, whoever is in the White House will be considered a Wall Street President.

Inside Job Lee Marshall at Cannes from Screendaily

Mixing interviews, archive footage and lush HD aerial shots of its main locations, Charles Ferguson’s second full-length documentary, Inside Job, gives the global financial crisis a cold hard stare where Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story threw it a great big Michigan sucker punch.

Slickly shot and produced, it lends a voice - Matt Damon’s - to the current mood of indignation against fat-cat bankers, but does a lot more to explain, in quietly passionate tones and with a more waspish sense of irony than Moore’s, what went wrong and why it is still going wrong.

The non-fiction bestsellers lists prove that there’s currently a real appetite for laymen’s guides to the crisis that go beyond the bankers’ usual defence (presented here more than once by Ferguson’s hapless interviewee-victims) that the world of modern finance is extremely complex and we couldn’t possibly understand.

Inside Job performs the task admirably in audiovisual form so that even financial dummies - like this reviewer - come out feeling enlightened and suitably angry. But despite its glossy production values and SPC’s distribution muscle, it will be up against the theatrical hurdle that all non-Moore documentaries face. Cleverly targeted pitching in urban markets will help, and auxiliary prospects look rosy.

If we could sum up the film’s argument in one phrase it would be: “the crisis was caused by deregulation”. While voiceover duties are handed over to Damon, whose laconic delivery strikes just the right tone, we assume its Ferguson’s voice we hear asking the sort of spiky, well-informed questions that allow his subjects little room to fudge (the only downside here is that the director sometimes cuts after his own clever riposte).

The film’s 37 interviewees include such luminaries as financier George Soros, French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde and Singaporean prime minster Lee Hsien Loong. Notable by their absence are those who refused to be interviewed, who are named and shamed as the film’s story of state-sanctioned greed, blatant conflict of interest and astonishing economic shortsightedness unfolds.

And whereas Moore’s film on the meltdown took a wait-and-see attitude to the Obama administration’s handling of the crisis, Inside Job is not so charitable one year on.

The final section, Where We Are Now, exposes the continued hand-in-glove relationship between Wall Street and the US government, and the government’s lack of action on bank bonuses or effective financial regulation. As the Bachman Turner Overdrive song goes - one of four ironic pop tracks accompanying cityscape montages that allow us to catch our breath between the talking head chapters - they’re just “takin’ care of business”.

Cannes '10 Day 4: Mad (at) Money Wesley Morris at Cannes from The Boston Globe, May 15, 2010

A few days ago, a friend expressed a fear that she was seeing fewer American journalists come back to the festival. Her guess was that the economy and the general state of woe for the news business in the United States. He concern didn't fully hit me until this afternoon at a screening for Charles Ferguson's documentary "Inside Job." As it was, the film was being shown in a (relatively small house, la salle Bunuel) and it was still not fun -- compared to the Leigh and Allen films which played in a giant auditorium not big enough for scores of people praying to get in. Ferguson's movie, about the current financial collapse, seemed somewhat relevant to its mediocre attendance. It seems unlikely that the premiere of a new Gregg Araki movie, which was showing at the same time, had siphoned everyone off. But I put very little past Araki.)

In any case, "Inside Job" is a masterpiece of investigative non-fiction moviemaking -- a scathing, outrageous depressing, comical, horrifying walk through what brought on the crisis. In much the same way he did in his previous film, "No End in Sight," about the run up to Iraq war, Ferguson finds many of the key players of the crisis and many people -- economists, lobbyists, journalists, Eliot Spitzer -- who have special knowledge about how it happened. The use of footage from last month's instantly legendary Senate cross-examination of Goldman Sachs (hello, C-SPAN Classics?) gives the movie a hot-off-the-hardrive feel.

For the number of times we read or are told (Matt Damon works hard as our narrator) that so-and-so declined to be interviewed for this film, the movie has a deep bench of expert, quite a few of whom seem unlikely to regain their integrity or the respect of their upon the film's release. It's unclear how a man like Frederic Mishkin, who abruptly left his governor's post with the board of the Federal Reserve at the height of the meltdown in order to "edit a text book," will ever be able  to show his face again. 

It's a damning work of deliberate but unsparingly meted incrimination. You rarely see professionals exposed not simply as corrupt and mendacious but wretched. At best, many of the people who landed the world in this crisis are duplicitous and foolish. At worst, they're evil. Did you know John Campbell, the dean of Harvard's econ department, sees no conflict of interest in having members of his faculty making big bucks from the financial industry and known obstacles to financial regulation ? His being rendered speechless before Ferguson's camera runs a not-so-distant second to Mishkin in the self-immolation department. (Yes, it's seems even the teaching of economics has been tainted.) 

"Inside Job" is scarier than anything Wes Craven and John Carpenter have ever made. Ferguson even corners the seemingly mild-mannered Glenn Hubbard, George W. Bush's chief economic advisor and current dean of Columbia's business school, into a chilling axe-murder moment. The film treats the enormity of its subject with the gravity it deserves. Ferguson asserts himself to ask, "Are you kidding me?" or to say, "That just isn't true. But he does not get in his own way the way Michael Moore did throughout "Capitalism: A Love Story." Oliver Stone's "Wall Street" sequel will have a tough time topping Ferguson. This is a reasoned, even-tempered, nonpartisan film. Its anger is always simmering, but it's not all consuming. 

The movie insists on revolution, as many such documentaries do. But this is one of the very few with the goods to send you out rioting in the streets. 

Daily Film Dose (Alan Bacchus) review

Though I work in the film industry and write this film blog, I actually have a degree in economics. From my very first econ course back in school we were aware of the concept of ‘deadweight loss’. This is a calculation of profit loss due to market inefficiency, which in real world terms means price controls and any other regulated markets in the economy. This was ingrained in our minds from high school all the way up to university.

This is also the heart of the problem with the collapse of the US (and thus, global) financial markets, which Charles Ferguson makes so clear in his incendiary, comprehensive and really, the last word, on this monumental financial disaster of recent years.

There’s a palpable sense of anger from Ferguson, a filmmaker, who must have poured though reams and reams of unintelligible figures, pages of dry research papers and really heavy university textbooks in order to understand what happened. As he questions and confronts some of the smartest and craftiest men in the world, we can hear Ferguson in the background admirably go toe to toe. And now his work is our benefit, and worth much much more than the $13.00 or less it will cost to see this movie.

I’ve seen many films and journalism news segments which attempted to explain the incredibly complex chain of events which caused the collapse, from 60 Minutes to Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story nobody seemed to get it straight. And no one’s really told the whole story. Remarkably Ferguson does this in spades.

His approach reminds me of Spike Lee’s comprehensive and final word on the Katrina disaster When the Levees Broke. Inside Job has the same desperate need and desire to find the truth and expose one of the world’s worst acts of conspiracy and criminality.

Ferguson applies a distinct cinematic approach to the film. It’s evident in the opening scenes. First a prologue telling the story of Iceland’s financial collapse, which occurred remotely on its own before the US collapse, a kind of warning sign not unlike the Easter Island parable to today’s current environmental crisis. Then there’s a lengthy credit sequence featuring freeze frames and soundbites of the numerous executives, government wonks, professors etc who will appear in the film.

This background and tonal build up is key to making sense of what’s to come.

As narrated by Matt Damon, Ferguson systematically breaks down all the details of exactly what the fuck happened. All the way back to the 1930’s through the prosperity in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s to the series of collapses in the 80’s and 90’s which led to that fateful week of Sept 2008 when everything went bankrupt.

Despite Ferguson’s careful use of graphics and charts to help make clear, what the hell credit default swaps, or CDOs etc. There’s just so much information we have to process, it’s difficult to keep up even for an economics grad. But I was also reminded of Oliver Stone’s JFK, where the overkill of information actually helped prove his point of the complexity of government, business and wealth which helped effect the assassination of JFK.

We’re not meant to understand every detail in Inside Job, and it’s all there for those attentive and smart enough to understand it on the first go. But he never loses sight of the big picture, which isn‘t lost on the less-economically inclined. The recurring theme is simply - greed - the need for the individuals on Wall Street and Washington to grab that piece of deadweight loss and put it into their own pockets.

Many of the key players refuse to give interviews, all of which are noted as text in the film. Their silence speaks volumes though, which is how they managed to get away with it all. The villains he does manage to interview are typically smarmy and evasive, which furthers the frustration of the entire affair. These guys are so smart there’s actually little criminal activity going during this period. Which is the most frightening aspect, is that the collapse was all legal, which make the title of this film absolutely perfect Inside Job. This is fantastic film.

Slant Magazine (Aaron Cutler) review

Many know about how the 2008 financial crash happened: Widespread deregulation of investment banks and savings and loan companies, new homeowners with bad credit, and an expanding gap between America's rich and poor as a result. The striking insight the new documentary Inside Job offers is that experts predicted the crash over a decade before it happened, and that, rather than listen, financial heads gave themselves bonuses. Charles Ferguson's film, more than anything, proves a vital piece of journalism.

But it takes a while for the documentary to become one. A goofy prologue discusses the recession in Iceland, then a parade of global market officials offer split-second soundbites about the bad shape America's in. Matt Damon's voice narrates archive clips of people signing bills; meanwhile, the soundtrack offers songs like "Big Time" and "Taking Care of Business," making one think the filmmakers threw their radios out after 1988.

One didn't get the same sense of rehashing from Ferguson's previous film, 2005's No End in Sight, a comprehensive walk through the botched Iraq War campaign. Some critics derided No End in Sight as a feature-length PowerPoint presentation, but, in fact, it was a logical, even systematic linear argument that used relevant footage and statistics to make its points.

Yet the most compelling sight in No End in Sight was of former Bush administration officials admitting their mistakes on camera (Colonel Paul Hughes summing it up with, "There are nights when I don't sleep very well"). They gave the movie both authority and catharsis. For viewers like me who responded positively, the feeling walking out was that we had finally heard the truth.

The financial crash, by contrast, doesn't have a clear narrative with name-recognition heroes and villains. One of the greatest engines behind it was how even the government lost track of who had money when, and where it was going. Finding characters and events amid economic jargon isn't as easy as pointing a finger at Donald Rumsfeld, and so, as Inside Job's first half hour progresses, you fear that Ferguson's new film will stay general and diffuse.

It's then that Inside Job becomes an essential movie. While No End in Sight's subjects speak truth to power, Inside Job demonstrates how the people in power are still lying. Unlike No End's interviewees, the financial officers here frequently squirm, duck, and avoid Ferguson's questions. The director finally snaps at Frederic Mishkin, a former member of the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors who resigned a month before the crash, he says, so that he could revise a textbook. "I'm sorry, I'm sure that your textbook is important and widely read," Ferguson interrupts, "But didn't you think that more important things were going on in the world?"

He questions his subjects with increasing aggression, and unlike what many other documentarians in Michael Moore's wake would do, he keeps himself off camera so that the focus stays on them. They respond by not responding, like the government official who has no comment save that he doesn't regret being on AIG's board, or the one that demands that Ferguson turn the camera off. Bush's Chief Economic Advisor, Glenn Hubbard, barks, "You have three more minutes. Give it your best shot!"

You might not believe what you're seeing and hearing, until you learn about the relationships between business and government; for example, Henry Paulson, the former Treasury Secretary, headed Goldman Sachs before he took the job, was allowed to sell $485 million worth of stock tax-free, and later afforded his old company $14 billion during the bailout that was ostensibly for AIG. "It's a Wall Street government," an expert says during the film, speaking in the present tense; Obama pitched himself as a reformer while running for president, but then appointed economic advisors like Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner who had authored policies that helped cause the crash to begin with. (Coincidence or no, both Summers and Geithner declined Ferguson's interview requests).

In this week's New York Review of Books, Paul Krugman and Robin Wells lament how books about the recession have failed to offer a viable solution. That may be because many people that caused the problem are still in power, and still helping themselves; consider that the Obama Administration hasn't launched a single criminal investigation related to the crash. Meanwhile, the severance package Merrill Lynch's former CEO received could pay the average yearly salaries of more than 5,000 Mississippi workers. If No End in Sight took on the tone of a tragedy, then Inside Job becomes dark, despairing comedy. And, as with much strong satire, watching it pisses you off.

Washington Post (Ann Hornaday) review

If Oliver Stone's recent "Wall Street" sequel exploited the 2008 financial meltdown for all its theatrical excess, Charles Ferguson's documentary "Inside Job" mines the crisis for its most shocking nonfictional drama. If you think you've absorbed all you could about subprime mortgages, credit default swaps and the arcana of elaborate derivatives, think again. "Inside Job" traces the history of the crisis and its implications with exceptional lucidity, rigor and righteous indignation.

What's more, Ferguson actually breaks news, uncovering the shady world of academic economists who, as paid consultants for the very banks they write seemingly objective research papers about, are part of the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington.

Filmgoers might remember Ferguson for his 2007 documentary "No End in Sight," about the American occupation of Iraq. That astonishing debut was deservedly nominated for an Oscar, but some skeptics thought maybe the tech millionaire - he founded Vermeer Technologies, which Microsoft bought for a bundle - simply had beginner's luck. Wonder no longer: Ferguson is the real thing, as evidenced by "Inside Job's" taut, laser-focused narrative, which manages to infuse real tension into a story most viewers know all too well. Shot by Svetlana Cvetko with crisp, bold digital imagery and set to Peter Gabriel's "Big Time" and other trenchant pop numbers, "Inside Job" isn't a tutorial as much as a trip: swift, scary and at times as mind-bending as Alice's sojourn behind the looking glass.

After a brief prologue in economically ravaged Iceland, Ferguson takes viewers back to post-Depression times, when tight financial regulation coincided with a period of uninterrupted growth. When Ronald Reagan came to power in the 1980s, a spate of deregulation began that only metastasized under Bill Clinton. If the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s was a harbinger of things to come, it was all but ignored by such financial kingpins as Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan and others for whom regulation was ideological anathema.

As meticulously laid out by Ferguson, the implosion two years ago was inevitable, and claims that no one saw it coming are patently false, as economists Raghuram Rajan and Nouriel Roubini are happy to tell you. Ferguson himself can frequently be heard confronting the officials who deign to talk with him, often countering their blithe denials of culpability with "You can't be serious" or its rhetorical equivalent. Tellingly, several of those who were recently or are still in power in Washington - Larry Summers, Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, Henry Paulson - declined to be interviewed.

Summers is revealed as a particularly galling character in "Inside Job," and not only because as deputy Treasury secretary he bullied Commodity Futures Trading Commission chief Brooksley Born out of regulating derivatives back in 1998. As the former president of Harvard and chief economic adviser to President Obama, he embodies the egregious conflicts of interest among academia, the financial services industry and government "regulators" that Ferguson so skillfully exposes. (Although we're denied the pleasure of seeing Summers on the hot seat, Ferguson's grilling of Columbia University Business School Dean Glenn Hubbard, which ends with Hubbard sputtering in high dudgeon when his potential conflicts are revealed, represents the art of muckraking at its finest.)

Still, as brilliant as "Inside Job" is, it leaves the viewer with a pronounced feeling of helplessness. None of the principals in the financial meltdown was arrested, indicted or even forced to admit wrongdoing; indeed, many of them weren't even fired but were allowed to resign with hefty platinum parachutes. "Inside Job" joins such recent documentaries as "The Tillman Story" and "Casino Jack and the United States of Money" as an infuriating chronicle of the abuse of power with little or no push-back from the criminal justice system or Congress. Sure, they're all terrific films. But they're no substitute for genuine accountability.

Pajiba (Dustin Rowles) review

The Slump Goes On: Why? by Paul Krugman and Robin Wells | The New ... The New York Review of Books, September 30, 2010

Correcting Krugman - NYTimes.com Raghuram Rajan response to the Paul Krugman and Robin Wells analysis of his book in the article The Slump Goes On: Why? in The New York review of Books, from The New York Times, September 16, 2010

The Way Out of the Slump by Paul Krugman and Robin Wells | The New ... The New York Review of Books, October 14, 2010

Cinematical (Christopher Campbell) review

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin

The New Yorker (David Denby) review

CineScene.com (Chris Knipp) review

Mark Reviews Movies (Mark Dujsik) review [3/4]

IFC.com [Stephen Saito]

Movieline (Michelle Orange) review [8.5/10]

New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review

The Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review

The House Next Door [Kenji Fujishima]

SBS Film [Lisa Nesselson]

The Onion A.V. Club review [B+] Nathan Rabin

<em>Inside Job</em> :: Hollywood Elsewhere Jeffrey Wells at Cannes, May 15, 2010

exclaim! [Robert Bell]

Boxoffice Magazine (Richard Mowe) review [3/5]

Logan Hill at Cannes from The Vulture, May 16, 2010

Cannes 2010. Charles Ferguson's "Inside Job" + Jean-Stéphane Bron's "Cleveland Vs Wall Street" David Hudson at Cannes from The Auteurs, May 16, 2010

Rational Irrationality: Interview with Raghuram Rajan : The New Yorker John Cassidy’s interview with Raghuram Rajan, former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund, from The New Yorker, January 15, 2010

Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir] which includes an interview with the director at Cannes, May 2010

Anthony Kaufman Interview with the director at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 13, 2010

Duane Byrge at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 15, 2010, also a Gregg Kilday interview with the director May 16, 2010, here: THR

DealBook: The Filmmaker Who Does a 'Job' on Wall Street Interview with the director from The New York Times, October 1, 2010

Owen Gleiberman at Cannes from Entertainment Weekly, May 16, 2010

Variety (Rob Nelson) review

Time Out New York review [3/5] Keith Uhlrich

The Globe and Mail capsule review [4/4] Gayle MacDonald

Boston Globe (Wesley Morris) review [4/4] October 15, 2010

The Boston Phoenix (Chris Faraone) review

St. Paul Pioneer Press review [3/4] Chris Hewitt

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle, Chronicle Movie Critic) review [4/4]

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review

Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]

At Cannes, the Economy Is On-Screen Manohla Dargis at Cannes from The New York Times, May 16, 2010

The New York Times review Who Maimed the Economy, and How, by A.O. Scott, October 7, 2010

At Cannes, Naming the Perpetrators of an ‘Inside Job’ Dennis Lim, including audio interviews from The New York Times, May 18, 2010

Charles H. Ferguson - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fernández Almendras, Alejandro

HUACHO

Chile France Germany (89 mi) 2009

Huacho Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily

The word ‘huacho’ literally means ‘bastard’ but is also used in this particular region of Southern Chile to mean ‘abandoned’, like the rural family whose everyday challenges form the film’s subject matter. Former critic Almendras, himself from this region of the South, offers a fiction with a strong documentary feel, sketching out a single day in the life of a peasant family, beginning with a power cut and ending with the four characters – son, mother and grandparents – reunited at the table. Individual sections follow each character through the daily rounds, each episode offering new insights into the changing nature of peasant life and the harsh economic realities that threaten it.

Huacho is bookended by two sections that most directly echo the tradition of rural documentary. In the opening episode, grandmother Clemira (Aguayo) tends to her chickens and makes the cheese that she sells by the roadside. The price of milk has gone up, forcing Clemira to charge more in turn, but city folks driving through baulk at her prices.

Clemira’s daughter Alejandra (Yáñez), who works as a cook in a local tourist spot, fails to get an advance from her employer, then heads into town to get a refund on a newly bought dress so as to pay the electricity bill. Next, young Manuel (Hernández) goes to school in the city, and fails to get his turn on  a Playstation game, a privilege he has apparently paid for. Shunned by his schoolmates, who come from well-heeled families and mock him as a peasant, Manuel – whose future, we can’t help thinking, will be in the city rather than the fields - ends the day alone in a games arcade.

The film ends in more familiar rural territory as grandfather Cornelio (Villagrán), a garrulous raconteur to whoever is around to listen, erects a fence, then has a snooze al fresco. The matter-of-fact nature of this section, simply showing Cornelio’s day without comment, recalls the rigorously detached approach of fellow Latin American director Lisandro Alonso (La Libertad), but in a much less consciously art-cinema manner.

In this undemonstrative but engaging film, little ostensibly happens, rhetorical commentary is at an absolute minimum, and yet we learn much about a certain way of life and the rural-urban divide in this region. While the theme of endangered rural populations is timeless, Huacho clearly has particular relevance to the current state of the global economy. Almendras’s non-professional cast – whether they are acting or effectively being themselves or versions thereof – are certainly very comfortable in front of the camera. By the time the film reaches a quietly hopeful ending, Huacho’s objective, sentiment-free approach has paid off in imparting an enormous respect and tenderness towards its characters

Ferrara, Abel

All-Movie Guide Sandra Brennan

Independent New York filmmaker Abel Ferrara became best-known for his low-budget, shockingly violent films that explore the roughest parts of the Big Apple and the darkest reaches of the human soul, with films such as China Girl (1987) — his unique version of Romeo and Juliet — generating a devoted following. Ferrara was born in the Bronx, but spent most of his childhood in Peekskill, NY, where he met the two young men who would eventually become his primary screenwriter (Nicholas St. John) and occasional consultant (John McIntyre). As boys, they would play around with 8 mm cameras. In the mid-'70s, the three reunited and founded Navaron Films, where they produced an adult film. In 1979, they released their most notorious film, Driller Killer, for which Ferrara starred, edited, and wrote the songs under the pseudonym Jimmie Laine. In this movie, a young man goes berserk and begins killing vagrants with a portable power drill. Ferrara continued making low-budget shockers until the late '80s. In addition to such brutally violent fare, the "Me Decade" also found Ferrara also helming such television shows as Miami Vice and Crime Story. Switching to more mainstream (although hardly more subtle) films, including The King of New York (1990), Bad Lieutenant (1992), and Body Snatchers (1994) in the 1990s, the director successfully retained his stylistic edge while gaining a somewhat wider audience. Not surprisingly, this trio of films proved Ferrara's most successful run to date and the director became something of a hot property among indie stars. In 1995, his metaphorical exploration of vampirism, The Addiction, won an award at the Berlin Film Festival. Always controversial, Ferrara's 1996 crime drama The Funeral seemingly split his longtime fanbase down the middle with half heralding the film as a gritty masterpiece and others dismissing it as a pale attemot to recapture the success of King of New York. Despite a somewhat impressive cast which included Beatrice Dalle, Matthew Modine and Dennis Hopper, the director's 1996 effort The Blackout did little to win over detractors of The Funeral. In 1998 Ferrara made the unusual choice of adapting a novel by cyberpunk legend William Gibson for the screen, and though the results were mixed few would argue that it was any worse than previous attempts to bring his writings to the screen (see 1995's Johnny Mnemonic). WhenFerrara's muddled 2001 effort 'R X Mas failed to live up to the hype as his big comeback film, audience were widely left to wonder whether courting the mainstream had forever tainted Ferrara's formerly potent vision.

Abel Ferrara Internet Library

Film Reference Julian Petley, updated by John McCarty

Article by Kent Jones The Man: Who Cares, by Kent Jones

Darren Hughes examines Ferrara’s cynicism at Long Pauses, Ferrar-a-thon, March 27, 2006

Filmbrain at Like Anna Karina’s Sweater looks at Ferrara short films, March 27, 2006

Aaron Graham at More Than Meets The Mogwai, looks at a Ferrara Miami Vice TV episode, March 28, 2006

"Letter to Abel Ferrara on His 59th Birthday" Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

Ferrara, Abel They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Richard Gibson: March 2006 Abel Ferrara: Not Guilty, a take on the Rafi Pitts 2003 documentary

Nicole Brenez/Ten Levels Girish, on Nicole Brenez's new book on Ferrara

Village Voice Interview (2007) by Rob Nelson, May 29, 2007

THE DRILLER KILLER

USA (96 mi) 1979

Time Out

Reno, a painter, is driven to distraction by financial troubles, the punk band rehearsing next door, and the city squalor he sees all around him. Picking up a power tool, he vents his fury on the homeless, bit by bit. Ferrara's first film coincided with John Sayles' Return of the Secaucus Seven at the onset of the American indie scene - though, like nearly all Ferrara's work, this feels more at home on the exploitation fringe than the art-house circuit. (There's even a gratuitous lesbian shower scene.) Notorious in Britain as one of the much-cited, little-seen 'video nasties' that ushered in the censorious Video Recordings Act of 1984, this reappeared in 1999 in a version six minutes longer than previously (though still shorn of its goriest moments), basking in the retrospective glow of such hard-won auteurist credibility as Ferrara has mustered. The very first image sees Laine (aka Ferrara) approaching an altar, for all the world like Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant. We even get glimpses of Ferrara's own paintings on the walls. Take out the killings, and you're left with an anguished (even somewhat boring) stab at urban ennui, heavily influenced by Repulsion and Taxi Driver.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Abel Ferrara's 1979 art-grindhouse hybrid The Driller Killer opens with the instruction, "This film should be played LOUD," but it doesn't need volume to make an impact. The story of a painter (a pseudonymous Ferrara) whose personal and private frustrations, not to mention the incessant clamor of the punk band practicing next door, drive him to savage acts of murder. Like Martin Scorsese's '70s films, The Driller Killer thrums with simultaneous attraction-repulsion to New York's darker side; Ferrara's camera glides into Max's Kansas City like an old friend, but his character huddles in a corner and complains about the noise. Though the movie takes a few stylistic cues from exploitation cinema, the title is largely a ruse — on his disjointed audio commentary, Ferrara imagines audiences storming the projection booth, yelling, "Where's the drilling? Where's the killing?" At least, that's true until the movie's ending, when it wholeheartedly gives in to genre cliches: doors that close themselves, people who enter empty rooms and say, "Hello?" Given that part of what drives Ferrara's character mad is his inability to finish a painting, it's fitting, and perhaps intentional, that the movie doesn't seem to know how to end.

The Driller Killer is packaged with a handful of early shorts, which show Ferrara already working his central themes of class conflict and misdirected guilt. Unfortunately Not Guilty: For Keith Richards, starring Ferrara as the battle-scarred Rolling Stone, seems to be lost for good, but Could This Be Love? is a bitter, sharp comedy of manners in which two upper-class women bring a Manhattan prostitute to their suburban soiree. A lack of funds makes the locations less clear than they should be, but Ferrera's social observations are already razor-keen.

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]

Director Abel Ferrara spent the '80s sneaking style and grit into straight-to-video fodder like Fear City and China Girl, then graduated in the '90s to high-art exploitation like King Of New York and Bad Lieutenant. Since then, he's alternately frustrated and perversely thrilled his fans with ponderous, unpleasant genre-benders like The Addiction and The Funeral. For the last five years or so, he's been the subject of rumors and legends, while emerging occasionally with more odd, arrhythmic movies that get unceremoniously dumped by his latest distributor. He's sort of a mystery, the kind people are afraid to solve.

Earlier this year, Artisan's special-edition DVD of King Of New York went a long way toward explaining Ferrara, courtesy of a hysterically grumpy director's commentary and a roundtable interview with his crew survivors. But Ferrara-ology doesn't get much more basic than the Driller Killer DVD. The director provides commentary for the main feature—an eccentric 1979 take on the slasher genre—as well as for two of the three film-school shorts on the second disc, which also includes an explicit trailer for Ferrara's 1976 porn effort Nine Lives Of A Wet Pussy. It's a crash course in where he's coming from.

The shorts don't amount to much: a little urban melancholy, peppered with violence and studied ennui, amateurishly acted and shot with only a modicum of control. The Driller Killer, though, is darkly fascinating, as much a document of the late-'70s New York punk and pop-art scenes as it is a grindhouse plugger. Ferrara himself stars as a misanthropic painter who lets his frustration with insensitive art dealers and obnoxious neighbors push him over the edge, into homicide by power drill. Ferrara based his character on a bum-hating friend of his, and shot the film over the course of two years, partly as a joke and partly as an attempt to cash in on gore-mania. But his fascination with New York subcultures overtook the project, leading him to spend half the picture hanging out with fringe-dwellers before finally getting around to offing them. It's not an auspicious debut, but The Driller Killer is clearly the work of a one-of-a-kind maverick.

Ferrara's commentary is even more entertaining. The semi-articulate skeptic who poked holes in King Of New York has been replaced by a near-incoherent mumbler who lays down a long rap full of dropped sentences, pop-culture word association, bursts of giddiness whenever a clever edit catches him by surprise, and the all-purpose topic-changer, "Okay, here we go." He mocks his own work mercilessly, perking up only when he spots a painting he likes or a half-dressed actress. The impression the DVD leaves is of a director making movies out of a bizarre compulsion, addicted to the power inherent in crafting compositions out of naked flesh and stage blood.

The Horror Review [Egregious Gurnow]

Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer is an interesting affair in that its popularity and reputation lies largely within its being one of the first “Video Nasties” banned in Europe.  However, the irony stands in that The Driller Killer fails to hold even the vaguest light to the gratuitous gore that many of the film’s peers on said blacklist exhibit and, equally fascinating, it posits a thought-provoking premise whose execution is nothing short of genius as it serves as a signpost for an obviously gifted filmmaker who is beginning to hone his skills.  

A struggling New York artist, Reno Miller (Abel Ferrara), is living off of his girlfriend, Carol (Carolyn Marz), while attempting to finish his next commissioned painting in order to silence his nagging agent, Dalton Briggs (Harry Schultz).  Tortured by the thought of ever present bills; his girlfriend’s live-in lover, Pamela (Baybi Day); and a punk band called The Roosters that perpetually rehearses regardless of the time of day, he finally completes his next piece, one which he believes to be his masterpiece.  However, when Briggs refuses to accept the work, Miller snaps as he takes out his aggression by way of an electric drill upon the derelicts roaming the street.  

The first aspect of the work which I found most intriguing is that Ferrara, much like his contemporaries Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese, paints his cinematic canvas with wide, unabashed brushstrokes of the New York experience.  As much as Allen encompasses the an upper- to middle-class New Yorker mentality, Ferrara shares a stronger kinship with the latter in that he unapologetically issues the underbelly of the Big Apple.  In this regard, the work--as does most of the director’s canon--serves as a social critique in that most of what we are given is unpleasant to even look at, nonetheless ponder upon the plights of those whom we are greeted by.    

Many have criticized the work as being a throwaway piece of mere exploitation filmed, much like many now renowned directors, for the sake of--albeit it negative--recognition.  This often implemented tactic is enacted in order, via the work’s notoriety, to expose those within the business to the filmmaker’s name, thus getting one’s foot in the door as a risqué, but nevertheless sellable, product.  Yet, with The Driller Killer, whose name undoubtedly accounts for many of the preconceptions of the film, only houses one instance of explicit onscreen gore.  All of the other acts of violence occur with the camera turned away from the victim as we focus upon the filmmaker’s agenda:  the character of Reno Miller.  

As such, The Driller Killer stands as one of the greatest character studies of insanity within the genre.  However, amid the poor photography, violence, and unbalanced compositions, many get lost along the way but, unlike many of the Video Nasties, such is not created due to the filmmaker’s lethargy.  For example, The Driller Killer not only posits an impetus for the killer’s homicidal rage, but does so ever-so-subtlety, i.e. the confusing opening sequence, which is never explicitly explained, in which an old man (James O’Hara) offends Miller by touching his hand.  However, once Miller begins his rampage, his victims being the homeless bums of the City, we come to realize that the pressures bearing upon the artist are visual, seemingly constant, confirmations upon his fears of becoming a vagabond.  Only intuitively do we come to understand that the old man, a derelict himself, is Miller’s father.  

What results as a consequence of this defense mechanism made manifest is a succinct explanation of how a passionate person (Miller does not agree with Briggs’s assessment of his work, which the viewer complies with after having watched Miller labor over the piece) who, in the midst of an impassionate world, goes insane at the thought of being unable to aptly express himself artistically, compounded by his inability to subside at the most minimal level, nonetheless rise above his rapidly declining state of squalor.   

Laden with pathos, Ferrera convolutes his narrative in that Miller is unable to connect with anyone throughout the film, primarily due to his preoccupation with mere survival.  In Francis Bacon’s terms, “Morality is a luxury” at this venue in Miller’s life.  We watch as Miller makes out with Carol in the back of a cab before becoming instantaneously ponderous once she opens the cab door, his mind obviously reverting back to his immediate affairs regarding how to make ends meet.  The often-referenced ambiguous ending infers that Miller finally makes a connection, however momentary and fleeting it may be, amid the chaos and depravity of his environment and life.  

Interestingly, using the character of Briggs as an intertexual mouthpiece as he complains that Miller’s work has become too technical and, as a consequence, is devoid of any reminisce of passion, the cinematography and editing of The Driller Killer turns away many a would-be interested viewer.  However, as form follows function, to polish and refine the technical components of a film involving the underbelly of society would, aesthetically, defeat its own purposes as Ferrara permits the mode to compliment the contents contained therein.  This is not to say the work is not controlled, but not in the areas in which it needn’t be.  For example, an eye motif runs throughout the duration of the feature by way of human eyes filling the camera lens, the dominating stare of a bison contained within Miller’s newest painting, and the blank gaze of a skinned rabbit, whom Miller reluctantly accepts as a gift from his superintendent (Alan Wynroth) just to have another meal.  Furthermore, Ferrera pauses to insert ironical humor, thus reminding us that such will inadvertently surface even during the most inappropriate times as Miller is forced to pause from his work in order to drill a hole in a door facing at Pamela’s incessant request (to say nothing of foreshadowing).  Also rather fascinating is the punk band, which serves as a Greek chorus outlining the main themes of Miller’s life by way of their lyrics.    

Unlike most of the Video Nasties it was placed beside, Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer is a substantial piece of cinema that not only signals the presence of a very critical acumen at work, but that reflects the time and locale in which it was filmed as we are greeted with one of the most masterful depictions and explorations of human insanity set to celluloid.

Turner Classic Movies Pablo Kjolseth

David Lowery at Drifting, The Beatific Vision Of Abel Ferrara

DVD Town [John J. Puccio]

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

MovieFreak.com (Dylan Grant)

Rich Juzwiak at Four Four

Final Girl Stacie Ponder

Exploitation Retrospect Dan Taylor

Monsters At Play Scott Weinberg

Driller Killer, The (Limited Edition) Michael Den Boer from 10k bullets

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

KQEK DVD Review [Mark R. Hasan]

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson)

Classic-Horror.com Misfit

Mondo Digital

MS .45

USA (80 mi) 1981

Time Out

Abel Ferrara opined that this made his previous film, Driller Killer, look like 'scratchings on the cave wall'. Who are we to disagree. Still working the gutter no-budget beat - a correlative to New York's no-wave punk music of the period - he brings a patina of slick visual sophistication to this rape/revenge thriller; more importantly, he allows a coherent, if extreme, feminist position to emerge. Nineteen-year-old Nastassja Kinski-lookalike Zoë Tamerlis plays Thana, a shy deaf-mute who works in New York's garment district. Raped twice within hours, she kills her second assailant and chops him up in the bathtub (an episode that finds its way into Alan Warner's novel Morvern Callar). Gaining confidence, she arms herself and woe to the chauvinist who crosses her path. It's a provocative, disreputable movie, well worth seeing. Regrettably, Tamerlis never really came through on her promise, though she co-wrote and appears in Bad Lieutenant as Zoe Lund. She died in 1999 of 'heart failure'.

All Movie Guide [Brian J. Dillard]

This terse revenge fantasy makes no apologies for its astronomical body count and queasy gore. Instead, it focuses on creepy details to drive home its not-so-subtle point about the aggression women face at every turn in the urban jungle. From the mundane horror of a rapist's cellophane mask to the casual leer on a boss' face at work, director Abel Ferrara's camera impassively takes in the myriad predators, actual and potential, who clutter cleverly named heroine Thana's path like so many panhandlers. For her part, star Zoe Tamerlis invests her speechless character with a quiet dignity that slowly evolves into stylish sexual agency; it's as if the only way Thana can become conventionally "hot" is to kill all potential sexual partners. Whether you read the protagonist's transformation from demure worker bee to avenging vixen as S&M window-dressing or feminist irony, it certainly makes for some arresting images. For every expertly choreographed assassination scene, though, Ferrara also adds a handful of throwaway detail shots: spare bullets, bloody irons, broken windows, and streetwalker accessories. The well-cast supporting characters likewise lend nuance to the story -- especially the meddlesome landlady, the imperious fashion plate, and the wise-cracking, tough-talking coworkers who present the film's alternate visions of femininity. Ultimately, despite its small budget and no-frills feel, Ms. 45 presents a self-contained meditation on sex roles that stands up to repeated viewing in a way few pure action films can.

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

Contradictions abound in Ms. 45, the most prominent of which is director Abel Ferrara’s ambiguous stance toward his pistol-packing female avenger. A mute seamstress working in NYC’s garment district, Thana (the incomparable Zoë Lund), after being raped twice in one afternoon, goes on a murderous rampage against the city’s entire male population. That the first, masked attacker is played by Ferrara himself speaks to the director’s own complicated role in Thana’s transformation into an angel of death – does his presence indicate his vindictive feelings toward his anti-heroine? Or does it reveal his guilt over contributing, as a heterosexual man, to her feminine fury? And further confusing Ferrara’s ostensibly empowering “woman scorned” story is that Thana’s killings are frequently unwarranted (especially with a sidewalk catcaller and the climactic scene’s disguised partygoers), thereby exposing her to be less interested in justified vengeance than sadistic carnage. His taut mise-en-scène light years beyond that of The Driller Killer, Ferrara casts his Manhattan locale as a grungy coliseum in which aggressive chauvinists and bitchy broads engage in full-scale gender warfare (scored to the punctuating blares of nerve-jangling horns). Given the filmmaker’s intense Catholicism, it’s no surprise that Thana eventually finds herself going bloody bonkers in a nun’s costume. But it’s the myriad compositions layered with undercurrents of divisive male-female relations – such as the close-up sight of Thana’s icy cold countenance set against a men’s room door – that eventually give Ms. 45 its sexy, squalid dynamism.

Theo’s Century of Movies Review

After being raped twice in succession, a timid, mute young woman turns avenging angel, going out on the streets nightly to kill men who abuse women.

"Beautiful name," says someone when our heroine - Thana - is introduced ; "It's all Greek to you," teases her escort. It is indeed - from Thanatos, meaning Death, making her an Angel of Death, preying without reason or compunction on the male sex. Set-ups are brutally brief, tension never really an issue - Death is Death, and of course invulnerable, impossible to kill, at least for those (i.e. men) on whom it battens ; Jesus-like, only those she serves can destroy her ("Sister!" she gasps with her last breath, breaking her silence in what might equally be shock - "Sister, how could you?" - or pure Christian love). The straight feminist reading makes sense, of course - she starts as a seamstress, the ultimate oppressed-woman job, becomes empowered through the killings, becomes more of a woman (even becomes more 'feminine', wearing lipstick and makeup for the first time) - but what's most interesting is perhaps how it co-exists with a more subversive take, pointing out how easily feminism can degenerate into man-hating and sexual panic : the film begins in perfect moral sync with its heroine then gradually moves away, observing more than empathising, frustrating her for the first time when she tries to kill without moral justification, based only on gender (the Oriental boy, who does nothing more than kiss his girlfriend goodnight), adding complexity to her victims - a complexity she herself can't see - with, e.g., the guy who kills himself. Some cite REPULSION but this is slightly different, not so much inviting us to identify with a disturbed person as testing the limits of identification - though mention of Polanski also illustrates how crude the film-making here is by comparison, nothing like the slow accumulation of tension. Fair amount of flash, though, plus that irresistible low-budget gritty feel from before indies became indies ; why does tinny 80s synth music always sound so creepy, anyway?...

DVD Times [Michael Brooke]

As coincidence would have it, no sooner had I finished my review of The Exterminator when a long-delayed copy of Ms.45 popped through my letterbox. I hadn't meant to compare the two films, but under the circumstances it's hard not to - both were made the same year on a very low budget, both are set in New York, and both revolve around a very similar plot, at least if broken down to "vigilante kills lots of sleazy creeps who deserve to die" basics.

But Ms.45 (released in Britain as Angel of Vengeance) is a far better film, for all sorts of reasons. Whereas The Exterminator was a pure exploitation item that existed solely as a showcase for a few effectively-staged set-pieces, the film fizzling out as soon as it became apparent that its director had nothing else to offer (the last 10-15 minutes are particularly weak), Ms.45 abundantly confirms the talent that could just about be discerned through the low-budget murk that was Driller Killer, Abel Ferrara's first feature, made the previous year. Ms.45 was equally cheap, but its confidence, verve and sheer visual flair are miles ahead - even twenty years on, it still ranks as one of his most striking films.

The plot is back-of-a-matchbook simple - painfully shy, mute seamstress Thana (Zoë Tamerlis, who would also co-write Bad Lieutenant) is raped twice in the same day, though she does at least manage to kill her second assailant with a paperweight. Cutting his body up into small pieces and storing them in the refrigerator before depositing them in various Manhattan waste bins, she resolves to embark on a crusade as a feminist vigilante, blowing away sleazy male scumbags with the .45 that she 'inherited' from her first victim.

And there are no shortage of potential victims - pimps, muggers, self-styled 'fashion photographers', Arab businessmen - but as the film progresses, the more it becomes clear that notions of 'guilt' and 'innocence' have gone flying out of the window: all men deserve to die, a concept expressed most clearly during the climactic Halloween party massacre scene, where Thana (dressed as a nun) lays waste to as many male guests as possible.

If I've made it sound like a non-stop orgy of sex and violence, nothing could be further from the truth - Ferrara's approach throughout is admirably restrained. There's nothing remotely titillating about either of the rape scenes (unlike most slasher movies of the period, they're staged entirely from the victim's point of view), and he constantly pulls the rug out from under audience expectations - just when Thana is about to disrobe to take a shower, she suddenly sees the first rapist (played by Ferrara, incidentally) standing behind her in the mirror (it's a nightmare flashback, but it's a great shock effect nonetheless). Similarly, the violence, though gory enough when it comes, is generally reined in and much of it happens offscreen. Even more than Driller Killer, this is an violent exploitation film that at least tries to make its audience think through its constant subverting of traditional genre clichés.

That said, it's disappointing that its sexual politics turn out to be so relentlessly one-note for the most part, the sole exception being a scene where Thana encounters a suicidal cuckold whose wife has abandoned him for another woman. It might have made for a rather more complex and intriguing film if the men hadn't all been irredeemably beyond the pale - for instance, the not dissimilar Thelma & Louise did at least have one sympathetic (if ultimately useless) male character in Harvey Keitel's cop.

The decision to make Thana an all too literally mute witness to the male-dominated horror around her works well up to a point, especially visually, but it does mean that the film is ultimately a little too simplistic for its own good, since we never really understand what makes her tick beyond an increasingly pathological hatred of men - in this respect, it noticeably falls down in comparison with Roman Polanski's far more subtle Repulsion, an obvious influence on both this and Driller Killer (the skinned rabbit in the latter is a bit of a giveaway!). But as trashy exploitation films go, Ms.45 is a great deal more stylish, intelligent and thought-provoking than many.

1000 Misspent Hours [Scott Ashlin]

ToxicUniverse.com (Mike Bracken)

eFilmCritic.com (Charles Tatum)

FilmFanatic.org

Flickhead. from Ferrara-Blog-a-Thon

SWM Panic In The Crosshairs Of Ms. 45 (Abel Ferrara, 1981) Eric Henderson from When Canses Were Classeled

Edinburgh U Film Society [Keith H. Brown]

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Horror View Bill P.

Evil Dread

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

Chris Jarmick

FEAR CITY

USA (95 mi) 1984

Channel 4 Film

Another sleazy trawl through the rotting underside of life courtesy of Ferrara; this time the setting is Manhattan and the story focuses on a serial killer who picks off hookers and exotic dancers and records his murderous deeds in a diary. Berenger and Murray, who run rival agencies for the latter, each suspect the other of the crimes but soon realize they actually have to work together to protect their clients; also caught up in the maelstrom is Griffith as Berenger's bisexual, drug-addicted ex-girlfriend. With characters this unappealing, however, it's hard to care what happens to any of them.

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

“Nobody’s clean,” says detective Al Wheeler (Billy Dee Williams, laying on the malt liquor charm) in Fear City, and as if to hammer home this central point about New Yorkers’ (and, by extension, mankind’s) scuzziness, director Abel Ferrara then has a teenage passerby say something to his friend about a woman and “two on one.” Ah, to be in pre-Giuliani Times Square, home to bums, hookers, drug pushers, and a nunchaku-wielding, manifesto-writing serial killer who prays upon exotic dancers. Kicking things off by raggedly cutting between shots of flashing neon signs and a stage-bound Melanie Griffith (in a role that only superficially recalls her turn in Body Double) flashing her tits to a crowd of unseemly club patrons, Ferrara’s third feature is a structurally messy noir, wasting too much time on repetitive symbolic subplots – namely, flashbacks to the death of a boxer at the hands of Tom Berenger’s Matt Rossie, a former pugilist and current mob-funded stripper agency owner – and only skimming the salacious surface of the lesbian love affair between Griffith’s smack-addicted Loretta and Rae Dawn Chong’s Leila. Still, the film, shot almost completely at night and in almost nothing but dilapidated locales, is so thoroughly drenched in putrid squalor that one can almost smell the stench of garbage littering Manhattan’s cracked sidewalks. And though it never quite congeals into something proficient or profound, Fear City – conveying a sense of inescapable, hopeless physical and moral decay – has a bitterness and cynicism that’s grimily, perversely romantic.

The New York Times (Janet Maslin)

The low-down, dirty ambiance of ''Fear City'' should effectively keep it from being seen by anyone outside the hard-core action crowd. However, Abel Ferrara, who directed this and an earlier exploitation thriller called ''Ms. 45,'' has a strongly individual style that almost transcends the genre. For all the violence, sexism and racial slurs that are de rigueur in films of this sort, ''Fear City'' is better than most, and it has elements of originality and visual distinction. It opened yesterday at Loew's State and other theaters.

The story, which takes place largely in strip clubs rendered as seamy as Mr. Ferrara can make them, concerns two men who run a so- called talent agency supplying women to work in the clubs. A killer with a command of ferocious martial- arts tactics begins attacking the women, in sequences Mr. Ferrara films with overabundant gusto. However, the killer, who is identified briefly as a ''Taxi Driver'' type conducting his own war against smut, is a relatively small part of the film's crowded Times Square tableau.

The cast includes Billy Dee Williams (as a homicide policeman), Melanie Griffith, Rossano Brazzi (as a Mafia kingpin) and Rae Dawn Chong. It's an interesting lineup, although Tom Berenger, as an ex-boxer who now runs the strippers' agency, makes a dullish hero.

In addition to being watchable for its casting eccentricities, ''Fear City'' also showcases Mr. Ferrara's skill with action scenes and with nonverbal narration. For instance, some of the flashbacks to the boxer's youth are imaginatively done. Mr. Ferrara's visual talent for the unexpected is not matched by an equivalent gift for character development, but ''Fear City'' doesn't attempt to make personality its strong suit. Its biggest selling points, quick pacing and a bright, hard-edged look, are as much as the genre requires.

Aaron Hillis at Cinephiliac

Bearded Freak's Reviews

DVD Talk (G. Noel Gross)

DVD Verdict Norman Short

CHINA GIRL

USA (89 mi) 1987

Time Out

This superior exploitation picture is a tough, stylish but often painfully misjudged reworking of Romeo and Juliet, with rival teenage gangs battling it out, sparked by the inter racial love affair between an Italian (Panebianco) and a Chinese girl (Chang). Ferrara makes excellent use of the Chinatown and Little Italy locations, and delivers the choreographed violence with his usual muscular panache, but his handling of the younger, inexperienced actors is distinctly dodgy. The major strength of the script is its accommodation of three generations: the elders and their aspiring sons are seen to conspire against the warring youngsters, putting money before family. But the bitter taste of this radical undercurrent is ultimately drowned out by saccharine sentiment and histrionic overkill.

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

The fact that lower Manhattan's Chinatown and Little Italy are adjacent to one another provides the basis for this 1987 exploitation bloodbath directed by Abel Ferrara (Bad Lieutenant), which has racial gang fights and old-boy networks to spare. Bojan Bazelli's location photography is luminous and exciting, and the battle lines charted in Nicholas St. John's script are fairly complex, but the characterizations in this Romeo and Juliet tale of an Italian-American (Richard Panebianco) and a Chinese-American (Sari Chang) caught in the cross fire are so minimal that it's hard to get very involved in the proceedings. (The fact that St. John occasionally filches dialogue from West Side Story doesn't help much either.) James Russo, David Caruso, Russell Wong, Joey Chin, and the Living Theatre's Judith Malina also figure in the cast.

The New York Times (Janet Maslin)

SLEAZE has few champions, but Abel Ferrara is one of them, having made some of the liveliest exploitation films (among them ''Ms. 45'' and ''Fear City'') in recent years. Mr. Ferrara has since gone on to direct some episodes of ''Miami Vice,'' where his brand of lurid, high-style glamour fits in perfectly. His films are outlandish by their very nature, and what could be more so than ''China Girl,'' a blatant mix of ''Romeo and Juliet,'' ''Mean Streets'' and ''West Side Story'' played out among very young, barely verbal Chinese and Italian street gangs? It would be gratifying to report that Mr. Ferrara had made a coup of this, but the odds against it are daunting. Instead, ''China Girl'' amounts to a cult item and a nice try.

Mr. Ferrara's touch is unmistakable - who else would film a dying man crawling into the arms of his mother and concentrate on the torn, bloody leg being dragged up a flight of stairs rather than the emotions of either party? And who else would hew so relentlessly to the rain-soaked-street, neon-in-the-puddles look? Or bring this romance to its predictably unhappy ending with the image of corpses lying hand in hand? There's a lot to like about this kind of bravado, but still not enough to catapult Mr. Ferrara into the mainstream. Then again, ''China Girl'' makes no stab at broad acceptance anyhow, which is another of its better qualities.

''China Girl,'' which opens today at the National and other theaters, hardly exists on the verbal level; Mr. Ferrara still doesn't have much idea of what to do with actors other than to let them fight with one another. It tells of Tony (Richard Panebianco) and Tyan (Sari Chang), who meet at a dance - where else? - and quickly strike up the kind of pure, beautiful romance that outrages everyone they know. The love scenes are of much less interest than the brawls, and indeed the latter occur more frequently. The screenplay by Nicholas St. John seems concerned only with action and ethnic slurs, though it does stop to let one of Tony's cohorts address him as Gandhi for refusing to engage in one more rumble.

''China Girl'' has intermittent flashes of virtuosity, though not enough of them to offset the film's slow, ordinary stretches or its essential silliness. Still, Mr. Ferrara remains a man to watch.

Bearded Freak's Reviews

CAT CHASER

USA (90 mi) 1989

Time Out

Co-scripted by Elmore Leonard from his own novel, starting out with black-and-white footage of war-torn Santo Domingo before jumping to the palmless tat of a Florida motel, this is a typical Leonard brew: extreme passion and violence interspersed with mature characterisations, wit, and a non-judgemental attitude. Weller leads a splendid cast as George Moran, a laid-back motelier who dreams about his paratrooper past and about the wife (McGillis) of a particularly sadistic Dominican ex-police chief (Milian)who has a thing about testicles and garden shears. On the way, from quirky opening to woozily abrupt climax, we pick up low-life and hustler, big-wig and flunky, as George finds himself tangling not only with the powerful hubby but with the wonderfully decrepit, ruthless figure of Jiggs Scully, played by Charles Durning as if Blood Simple had collided with The Killers. Jiggs isn't after the lady (perish the thought) but the generalissimo's loot. Both Durning and Forrest, as a boozy drifter, excel in a gripping thriller marred only by some precious and unrevealing voice-overs presumably meant to remind us that Leonard is nearer to Hammett and Chandler than Miami Vice.

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

Abel Ferrara’s original three-hour cut of Cat Chaser apparently featured a naked Kelly McGillis having a gun stuck between her spread-eagled legs, merely one of many borderline-pornographic touches that caused the film’s producers to take the film away from Ferrara and cut it down to its current 90-minute DVD form. The result of such post-production interference is a butchered mess of a movie that only superficially resembles the Elmore Leonard novel on which it’s based (the author’s assistance on the script was largely ignored by Ferrara) and exhibits few of the skuzzy filmmaker’s signature touches. That said, it’s nonetheless hard to imagine Ferrara making this sunshiny noir work even if he’d been granted final cut, since the director seems totally out of his element in his story’s Miami setting and completely uninterested in any plot element that doesn’t involve full frontal male or female nudity. As former military man and current motel owner George Moran, Peter Weller brings some devil-may-care charm to the muddled goings-on, and even with her clothes on, McGillis (who still flashes her assets during a shadow-drenched spousal abuse scene) acquits herself nicely as the unhappily kept woman of a vicious Dominican Republic general. But more often than not, Cat Chaser – from its thinly sketched characters and general sluggishness to the tacked-on literary narration that attempts to tie together its disjointed narrative – simply comes off like a misbegotten attempt at intricate noir that’s been neutered by its hacking-and-slashing financiers.

Channel 4 Film

Abel Ferrara meets Elmore Leonard head on, resulting in a sassy, at times sordid thriller that is all the better for its Dominican Republic setting and a delightfully sleazy turn from Charles Durning.

From an incredibly troubled production (numerous script re-writes, studio re-cuts and actor hissy fits) Cat Chaser deserves credit for emerging as an enjoyable, if somewhat flawed thriller. It's an adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel, so you can expect plenty of sharp dialogue, quirky characters and complex crime plotting, and is directed by Abel Ferrara, so you can expect, well, lots of sex and violence.

It all centres around paratrooper-turned-hotelier George Moran (Weller), who gets mixed up in a plan to relieve a one-time general of the Dominican Republic from his money, principally because he's got a bit of thing for the ex-soldier's wife (McGillis). There are all manner of other shady characters mixed up in scheme, most notably a scabby, ruthless former cop, played with tangible relish by Charles Durning.

The sleazy hotels and bars of the Dominican Republic, the sexual rapport between Weller and McGillis and a laid-back jazz score courtesy of Chick Corea make Cat Chaser a potent concoction - it smoulders in much the same way as the later Leonard adaptation Out Of Sight. It is disjointed at times and the voiceovers grate, but there's more than enough going on to warrant an hour and a half of your time.

Abel Ferrara's foray into the world of Elmore Leonard is worthwhile if only for the exotic blend of characters and witty dialogue. A surprisingly uninhibited Kelly McGillis helps too.

Peter Nellhaus at Coffee Coffee And More Coffee

Movie House Commentary Johnny Webb and Tuna

DVD Verdict Bill Treadway

Bearded Freak's Reviews

KING OF NEW YORK

USA Italy Great Britain (103 mi) 1990

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

1990's King of New York, released just before Ferrara's career-high Bad Lieutenant, is a gangster drama whose glossy style is often at odds with its cautionary-tale side. On his commentary, far more lucid than The Driller Killer's, Ferrara denounces the movie as "fucking fascist filmmaking," and says he wouldn't make another movie like it if you put a gun to his head. Given the inconsistent quality of Ferrara's recent films — many of which have gone without theatrical distribution — a little repetition might not be such a bad thing, especially considering the lively, wall-crawling performances Ferrara gets out of Christopher Walken and Laurence Fishburne.

Time Out

Quite easily the most violent, foul-mouthed and truly nasty of current gangster movies. It might be charitable to say that Ferrara, who made the reasonably decent Cat Chaser, is doing a Scarface by pointing up the designer nature of modern urban crime, its brutality and ethnic mixture, and its attempts to infiltrate the mainstream. Certainly, in the person of Walken, spare, elegant, slightly spaced and lording it over a black/hispanic gang, the film has an impressively charismatic central character: the kind of powerbroker who does favours for the poor and makes love on subway trains, but still manages the right burst of psychosis when dealing with racist rivals, Chinese nasties, or treacherous black brothers. Sadly, his performance is wasted on a film which, despite splendid location work, lurches sloppily and messily from kill to kill, orgy to orgy, coke to crack, cliché to cliché.

Washington Post [Hal Hinson]

Abel Ferrara's "King of New York" is all soft-core lighting and music video stylings -- it's an urban crime story with a Euro-disco flavor. In Ferrara's films -- he directed "Ms. 45," "China Girl" and "Fear City" -- style is everything. His specialty is a kind of hallucinatory tawdriness, and here, he's made a hepped-up film about drugs that plays as if the filmmakers themselves kept a healthy supply of the stuff at hand.

Ferrara has directed a number of episodes of "Miami Vice," and that's what "King of New York" most resembles -- "Miami Vice" but without Crockett and Tubbs. The film does manage to throw a new wrinkle into its genre. Its protagonist is Frank White (Christopher Walken), a ruthless drug lord who, after a lengthy stay in prison, moves back into circulation with a vengeance. Nothing new there. But White is a man with a vision. He feels bad about the way he lived his life. "If I can just have a year," he tells his girlfriend, "I can do something good."

What he'd like most is to be able to spin off some of his profits from the drug trade to finance a hospital for underprivileged kids in the South Bronx. (Maybe he'll empty a few bedpans too.) Why should all the hospitals be in the rich neighborhoods, he asks. White has a messianic streak in him, and Walken is the perfect actor to bring it out. The other New York crime bosses -- the Italians, the Colombians, the Chinese -- are scum. Plus they can't dance like he can and don't have the perfectly hollowed cheekbones of a Schiele portrait. An equal-opportunity thug, White surrounds himself with blacks from the slums; in one scene he even offers jobs to the brothers who interrupt a tryst with his lovely attorney on the subway. "Come see me at the Plaza Hotel," he tells them, tossing over a fist-size wad of cash. "I've got work for you."

The wackiest thing about "King of New York" is that Ferrara seems to take White's role as a social reformer seriously but, quite naturally, not seriously enough to have him succeed. Unable to get the leaders of rival gangs to participate in his plan, he kills them, usually with a maximum of blood and savage flamboyance. It's in these scenes that the director is at his empty best. Ferrara lavishes all of his skill on these overwrought set pieces, and he can muster a cheap sort of excitement with them.

Unfortunately, there's nothing left over for the rest of the film. The scenes between the cops who are trying to stop White are creaky and hysterical. And while these flatfoots guzzle beer and complain about their paychecks, White's maniacal army stages wild orgies, dancing, carousing and snorting powder off whatever surface avails itself, including each other.

This partying is so outrageously decadent and so hyperbolically shot that you can't help but fall on the floor laughing. These guys are so stoked that you wouldn't be surprised if one of them tried to snort a lamp. Appropriately, the actors pull out all the stops. Walken plays White in his Man-Who-Fell-to-Earth mode. There's not a moment in the entire film when he shows anything close to a recognizable human emotion. But Walken's charisma is potent. He gives White a freaky stillness that's chilling.

It's Larry Fishburne, though, as White's designated killer, Jimmy Jump, who takes the prize for stratosphere dancing. Fishburne gives a performance right out of the Clarence Williams III school of manic histrionics. He holds nothing back here; he just straps on his rocket pack and soars. If the rest of the film had been on his level it still would have crashed, but my, the flames would have been dazzling.

Welcome To The Circle. Bang Bang. Iain Sinclair from Sight and Sound

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

ToxicUniverse.com (Mike Bracken)

Oggs' Movie Thoughts

DVD Confidential Scott Standish

Peter Sobczynski

Movie Vault [Morgan]

DVD Verdict - Special Edition George Hatch

Reel.com DVD review [Jerry Renshaw]

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The New York Times (Janet Maslin)

BAD LIEUTENANT

USA (96 mi) 1992

All Movie Guide [Brendon Hanley]

Bad Lieutenant is like a diseased Nineties version of Mean Streets: same lead (Harvey Keitel), same city in turmoil (New York), same striking visual energy, same Catholic guilt. Of course, Abel Ferrara's movies have never had the same sense of humanity as Martin Scorsese's, and Bad Lieutenant is the ultimate extension of that comparison. The "bad" lieutenant is so lost in excess of every kind that he has become basically an anti-human. Ferrara has made a strange career of examining such bottom-feeders: his filmography includes such classic exploitation titles as Driller Killer, Ms. 45, and King of New York. What elevates Bad Lieutenant above the others is Keitel and his shockingly open, courageous, some would say foolhardy performance. In 1992, Keitel was making quite a diverse career statement, starring in this movie, Reservoir Dogs, and. . .Sister Act. Ferrara's ability to build the tension surrounding the lieutenant is impressive, but none of it makes for pleasant viewing. It's a lurid, over-the-top cult film masquerading as an art-house movie, and it's hard to imagine a motion picture that could polarize reactions more. At times, that reaction seems to be exactly Ferrara's idea. Bad Lieutenant has been issued in two versions - one rated NC-17, and one rated R. Both are available on video.

Washington Post [Hal Hinson]

"Bad Lieutenant," the dark, acid urban drama starring Harvey Keitel, isn't just another story about a cop gone wrong. Those are a dime a dozen. This punishing film from director Abel Ferrara is something else altogether -- an illuminating, excoriating descent into the cesspool of sin, self-loathing and defilement. This is not an easy film to watch.

Why would we sign up for such an unpleasant journey? And what compels us to watch a figure so seemingly without redeeming value? Because somehow, though this film's lead character is repulsive and his actions dastardly, it is possible to learn from this grim parable something about our own cruelties and weaknesses.

The Keitel character is given no name except The Lieutenant, and that's entirely appropriate. He doesn't deserve a name. The Lieutenant is pure appetite, pure libido, with only vestigial traces of his humanity intact.

To say that substance abuse plays a part in this journey into debauchery is a grotesque understatement. During the course of the film, The Lieutenant abuses substances that I didn't know could be abused. (And in some cases, I couldn't even identify the substances.) Like a modern-day Caligula, his excesses are epic: Sex, booze, crack, coke, heroin are indulged in such gargantuan proportions that it's a miracle he remains upright. When a gambling habit that eventually leaves him in hock to the tune of 120 grand is added to the mix, full systemic meltdown becomes a question of when, not if.

This suicidal betting, which centers on a seven-game playoff series between the Mets and the Dodgers, drives the film's narrative. With each day's losses, The Lieutenant plummets deeper into debt, raising the stakes for himself -- and for the audience -- until we feel trapped with him in a torture chamber with the walls slowly closing in.

In his past films (most notably "Ms. 45" and "King of New York"), Ferrara has straddled the fine line separating art and exploitation, usually landing on the side of the latter. And for about the first half of "Bad Lieutenant" -- which is, not surprisingly, rated NC-17 -- we're not sure where this one will come to rest either.

When The Lieutenant pulls over a pair of young teenage girls who've taken out Daddy's car without permission and negotiates a sleazy exchange of sexual favors for his silence, we may want to dismiss the picture entirely as a disgusting exercise in sewer diving. Certainly, we might think, this is not entertainment.

But The Lieutenant's atrocities -- committed against both himself and others -- accumulate a critical mass that reaches far beyond the laws of man to become sins against God. And, ultimately, it's God's attention he's trying to get. This religious dimension is introduced when The Lieutenant begins an investigation into the rape of a nun in a Spanish Harlem church by two crackheads who, after brutalizing the woman, desecrate her church.

Ferrara is clearly drawing an equation between the criminals' actions and The Lieutenant's, and as trite (and potentially shameless) as this may sound, it actually works. The Lieutenant, who calls himself a Catholic and then, several scenes later, snorts coke off a picture of his child at communion, is raging against God and, at the same time, administering to himself a cruel punishment for his own transgressions. In this sense, The Lieutenant is like a rogue, self-flagellating saint drawing himself closer to God through willful defiance -- a tormented, bedeviled man engaged in unholy communion.

This bizarre ecclesiastical dimension is what makes "Bad Lieutenant" more than a shallow wallow in the muck. Ferrara does make his moral points, and though one feels dirtied in the process, there is an accompanying feeling of purification as well. Ferrara and Keitel -- who by virtue of his work in "Mean Streets," "Fingers," "Taxi Driver," "Bugsy" and, most recently, "Reservoir Dogs" may be the only actor in America to have earned the right to play this lost soul -- take The Lieutenant to the absolute limits of self-inflicted human pain. They blot out every trace of decency and goodness, yet the possibility of redemption is not entirely foreclosed. In the shadow of this suffocating darkness, this slender hope provides the only ray of sunlight.

"Bad Lieutenant" is rated NC-17 for, well, you name it.

Jeeem's Cinepad [Jim Emerson]

As the otherwise nameless title character in Abel Ferrara's NC-17-rated Bad Lieutenant, Harvey Keitel plays an NYPD detective who compulsively places outlandish bets he can't cover, sticks needles in his arm and shoots up, snorts coke seconds after dropping his kids off at school, cavorts nakedly and drunkenly with prostitutes and masturbates in front of teenage girls. Meanwhile, he's investigating the brutal rape of a nun.

The ads for Bad Lieutenant play up the movie's sordid, sensationalistic side (though why a strategically obscured full-frontal photo of a naked Harvey Keitel would be expected to help sell tickets, I really don't know). And if you're familiar with Ferrara's movies (Ms. 45, King of New York), you know that sleaze is certainly a major part of his sensibility. In its early scenes, Bad Lieutenant wallows in nightmare gutter scum along with its eponymous protagonist. The movie's portrayal of the Lieutenant's desperation and degradation is often horrifyingly (even sadistically) funny, as in a scene in which he attempts to lift a bag of cocaine from a crime scene; or another in which he is driving through midtown Manhattan, so fucked up and outraged over developments in a Mets-Dodger game on which he's placed a staggering bet that he takes out his piece and blasts away at his dashboard radio.

But Bad Lieutenant is more than just another look at that hackneyed "seamy underbelly" of urban American life. This is, in some ways, a devoutly Catholic movie about sin and redemption (well, aren't all Catholic movies about sin and redemption?). Keitel puts himself so far out there (and I'm not just talking about the full-frontal scene, which is probably the main reason for the NC-17 rating) that we actually start to feel there's something at stake (for humanity, perhaps) in what happens to this exceptionally awful guy. The title (there's no "The") is a straightforward description of the Lieutenant: He's a bad man, he does bad things, he has no redeeming qualities of compassion or sensitivity. He's just a bad lieutenant in every way. He's even a lousy cop -- and not just because he's a corrupt, whoring junkie.

But what finally pushes him over the edge is not drugs or sex or gambling or any of the other forms of corruption which have rotted the Lieutenant's soul. What drives him mad, and toward redemption, is the nun who was raped on the altar of her church by two young hoodlums: She has already forgiven her assailants and has no desire for "justice" or "retribution" or any of the concepts that drive, and give meaning to, the Lieutenant's personal and professional life.

Bad Lieutenant is bookended by howls of anguish from its title charater. The first comes when he's staggering around an apartment naked, bombed out of his mind, with the prostitutes. The Lieutenant is not a party guy: He gets no pleasure from his transgressions but seems driven by demons to abase himself as much as is humanly possible. The final cry of agony comes when he has to plumb the dark depths of his own soul to decide what to do about the punks who raped the nun. He can take the law (man's and God's) into his own hands by either blowing these sinners away, or by taking it upon himself to absolve them (thereby assuming the role of priest and confessor). It tears him apart to consider these options once he's tracked them down, but in his own twisted, confused and rather pathetic way he also sees them as possible paths out of the personal hell in which he's become mired. Bad Lieutenant ventures so deeply into its protagonist's head that we actually begin to understand the Lieutenant's desperate, convoluted spiritual logic as he assumes the lead role in his own hellish Passion Play.

The movie drags you down right along with the Lieutenant. I mean, you honestly can't help but get off a little on the movie's portrayal of this guy's no-holes-barred appetite for self-destruction. Watching him stick a needle in his arm may make you wince, but there's an illicit thrill to it, too. It isn't glamorous, or even pleasurable, but you can't turn away. The Lieutenant's life is like a car accident happening in slow motion: It's fascinating and ghastly.

With this and Reservoir Dogs under his belt, the long-underappreciated Harvey Keitel (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, The Duellists, The Last Temptation of Christ, Thelma & Louise) should finally get some of the recognition he deserves. So few actors would expose this kind of raw, emotional and physical nakedness. This is a harrowing performance that works on several levels at once: funny, appalling, moving. Bad Lieutenant is one of the best movies of the year, but it isn't easy. Neither, however, is the twisted road to redemption.

Bright Lights Film Journal [Brian Grady]

Matt Zoller Seitz The House Next Door

Brian Darr Hell On Frisco Bay

Film Court [Lawrence Russell]

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)

Oggs' Movie Thoughts

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick)

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Movie Vault [Aaron Graham]

Dragan Antulov

Exploitation Retrospect Dan Taylor

CineScene.com [Chris Dashiell]

James Berardinelli's ReelViews

Movie House Commentary Johnny Webb

Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]

Washington Post [Desson Howe]

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The New York Times (Janet Maslin)

BODY SNATCHERS

USA (87 mi) 1993 ‘Scope

Time Out

This remake of the classic '50s paranoia movie, Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, is evidence that the end of the Cold War hasn't dispelled fears of creeping authoritarianism and loss of individuality. The story is relocated to a southern military base - a more credible breeding ground for insurgency than the San Francisco of Phil Kaufman's chilling 1978 version - with disaffected teenager Anwar at the centre of the drama. At first this seems like a sop to Hollywood fashion, but in fact it's a switch which lends an intriguing perspective as the nuclear family approaches meltdown. Tilly (and her body double) are excellent as the teenager's stepmom; and there's a good tight script from Stuart Gordon, Dennis Paoli and long-time Ferrara collaborator Nicholas St John. This slick, polished film is a change of pace for Ferrara, but fans of his more abrasively challenging work are unlikely to feel short-changed - 'I always loved Martian movies,' Ferrara has said. 'I used to dress up as a Martian when I was a kid and go out and terrify the neighbours...'

Apollo Movie Guide [Bryant Frazer]

Don Siegel filmed novelist Jack Finney's rural science fiction yarn The Body Snatchers in 1956, crafting a creepy, anti-conformist alien-invasion parable – christened Invasion of the Body Snatchers for sensation's sake – that became a genre classic. Philip Kaufman updated it in 1978, tweaking northern California sensibilities and adding elaborate special effects work and unforgettable sound design.

While it's no surprise to see a third version, it's interesting that grungy New York director Abel Ferrara took the helm. Ferrara, whose credits include downtown classics like Ms. 45 and King of New York, has always exhibited a fierce independence, and it's disorienting to see him in cahoots with Warner Brothers on a studio feature. The studio apparently agreed – the film was shelved for years pending a perfunctory 1994 theatrical release en route to video.

Traditional narrative has never been Ferrara's strong suit – Body Snatchers will make the most sense if you're already familiar with the story. In a nutshell: alien invaders are plant-like creatures, or pods, that grow into an exact copy of a sleeping person – sucking the life out of the victim in the process. Because the transformed aliens look just like humans, it's impossible to tell whom to trust. In all three versions, the ‘pod people’ philosophize weirdly about how great it will be when everyone on the planet thinks and feels exactly the same way. (Shiver.)

Ferrara sets the story on a military base (talk about conformity!) where an EPA investigator (Terry Kinney) has moved in to investigate the storage of toxic materials. Daughter Marti (Gabrielle Anwar) is the most alienated character, and young son Andy (Reilly Murphy) the most vulnerable. Mom (Meg Tilly) is the first to succumb, and thus gets the creepiest scenes. Throughout, we see in Murphy's baleful stare the face of a little boy who realizes he's in deep trouble.

Five writers are credited with story and screenplay, including It's Alive impresario Larry Cohen, the Re-Animator team of Stuart Gordon and Dennis Paoli, and regular Ferrara collaborator Nicholas St. John. Unfortunately, what they came up with is stock characters, a feeble teen-angst melodrama, and a token romantic subplot. The story's disquieting power stems from the original concept, not any modern retooling.

Body Snatchers is marred by some unconvincing scenes and performances, and was probably inadequately budgeted. Like all of Ferrara's features, it's paced very deliberately. But when he's firing on all cylinders, boy, is it something to see. The film's midsection melds gooey effects, careful direction, and top-notch film editing to satisfying, genuinely scary effect. Elsewhere, some isolated sequences effectively raise the gooseflesh. Bojan Bazelli's widescreen cinematography is stunning throughout, referencing the Dutch tilts and virtuoso photography that characterized the original and relentlessly backlighting the base personnel to sinister effect.

Body Snatchers is a moody genre piece with a strong sense of menace, crafted in fiercely unconventional fashion. Like much of Ferrara's work, it's deeply flawed but utterly gripping, shot through with urgency and conviction that makes the threat of dehumanization feel real.

Body Snatchers; Nicole Brenez from Rouge

Silver Screen Reviews

The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J Wright]

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

And You Call Yourself a Scientist! (Liz Kingsley)

Scott Renshaw

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Movie Vault [Mel Valentin]

The Sci-Fi Movie Page James O’Ehley

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

Elusive Lucidity: Body Snatchers Zach Campbell

Martin Degrell at Detoured

Austin Chronicle [Stuart Wade] compares the 3 versions of the film made so far

Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]

Washington Post [Richard Harrington]

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The New York Times (Caryn James)

DANGEROUS GAME

aka: Snake Eyes

USA (108 mi) 1993

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

Flippantly derided upon its initial release as an indulgent failure, Abel Ferrara’s Dangerous Game (aka Snake Eyes) is the director’s most overtly Godard-ian effort, an examination of filmmaking and family – and their intrinsic relationship – that self-consciously revels in ambiguity, contradiction and artifice. It’s also, one might add, one of his most rewardingly challenging works. Eddie Israel (Harvey Keitel) leaves his comfortable (but latently tense) NYC domestic confines for L.A., where he’s directing Mother of Mirrors, a movie starring TV actress Sarah Jennings (Madonna) and method thespian Francis Burns (James Russo) about a woman who, after finding God, rejects the hedonistic lifestyle she created with her husband. The contentious on-screen action and difficult behind-the-scenes rapport shared by the two actors parallels the disintegration of Israel’s marriage. Ferrara, however, disallows any tidy 1+1=2 equations from developing, his film an irreconcilably tangled web of reality and make-believe in which any given moment could be part of a fictional Dangerous Game scene, a non-fiction portrait of the making of Dangerous Game, or a scene from Mother of Mirrors. If inferior to Keitel’s magnetic portrait of artistic honesty-run-amok, Madonna’s uneven performance is nonetheless more tolerable than Russo’s “actorly” turn. Unsurprisingly, though, the film’s true star is Ferrara himself, who mines emotional landmine-laden terrain through both intimately scuzzy violence and canny manipulations of perspective.

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)

Abel Ferrara's meditation on life imitating art (and vice versa) is one of his weaker efforts, but it didn't deserve the scorn it got.

Harvey Keitel is Eddie Israel, a filmmaker very similar to Ferrara. (His wife is played by Nancy Ferrara, real-life wife of guess who.) Eddie is directing a psychodrama starring two actors who hate each other (James Russo and Madonna) playing a couple falling apart. Meanwhile, Eddie sleeps with Madonna (wonder if Abel did, too?) and wrecks his own marriage (wonder if Abel ... ah, never mind).

It takes an extremely ballsy filmmaker to direct a scene in which his onscreen surrogate confesses to his wife's onscreen surrogate (played by his wife) that he's had lots of on-set affairs. Is any of it interesting? Sure. It gives us insight into how directors get performances out of actors, and more specifically how Ferrara gets them. There's some wit in the casting of Keitel as the Ferrara character — he gets to show us what Ferrara probably put him through on Bad Lieutenant.

Among the movie's triumphs is that Madonna actually wakes up and gives a solid, believable performance, both as Claire the religious convert in Eddie's film and as Sarah the traumatized actress in Ferrara's film. Some would say she's just playing herself either way — which I think is part of what Ferrara is getting at: Great acting requires you to play yourself, to dig out the part of yourself you're least proud of and lay it bare.

Dangerous Game (originally titled Snake Eyes) is a good film-buff movie, but it's too smitten with its own fancy intricacy, and eventually even the most confrontational scenes (Eddie insulting Sarah off-camera to provoke her into reading her lines with the appropriate venom; James Russo getting carried away and doing everything in the script for real) seem like movie-magazine clichés.

I kept expecting Ferrara to step into the frame and coach Keitel on how to play him.

DVD Times Gary Couzens

Eddie Israel (Harvey Keitel) is a film director. He is making Mother of Mirrors, with leading actors Sarah Jennings (Madonna) and Frank Burns (James Russo). Sarah's character, Claire, rejects a hedonistic sex-and-drugs lifestyle for religion. Her husband Russell (Frank's character) rejects Claire's conversion as a lie as to him the substance abuse and multiple sexual partners are a truth. As the filming progress, the line between reality and fiction become blurred.

In between work for hire (such as the same year's interesting Body Snatchers), Abel Ferrara made several small-budget independent films, often reusing actors and crewmembers. His work outside the mainstream is characterised by an unflinching look at the dark side of human existence, grappling with themes of sin and redemption and occasionally undone by an undue emphasis on the sin part. The best of his work is perhaps Bad Lieutenant, in which Harvey Keitel gave one of the great performances of the 1990s. Dangerous Game (which was filmed as, and initially shown as, Snake Eyes – no relation to the Brian DePalma film of 1998) is not up to that level, and has had a mixed reception. Depending on who you listen to, it's anywhere from a bomb to a masterpiece. To this reviewer's mind, it's an interesting but ultimately confused film, sometimes powerful but ultimately unclear about what it all adds up to.

The tone of Ferrara's work, not to mention his prolific output, suggests a man struggling with personal demons and aiming at catharsis. This impression is strengthened by Dangerous Game. Although the central character is called Eddie Israel, Ferrara seems to be going out of his way to be identified with him, to the extent of casting his own wife as the character's wife. (At one point you can see a clapperboard with Ferrara's name on it.) However, Keitel's performance is oddly distanced and low-key. The best performance comes from Madonna, impressive work by any standard.

Dangerous Game certainly won't be for everyone. Many people will find the characters repellent and the incessant psychological violence (not to mention virtually non-stop strong language) very hard to take. One of the most disturbing scenes is one where, in the film within the film, Russell rapes Claire – but has Frank raped Sarah for real?

One shortfall of Dangerous Game is Ken Kelsch's drab camerawork, which alternates between 35mm and video for the "documentary" scenes. Unfortunately, Universal UK's DVD does the film few favours. It's a full-frame transfer, but at least it's open-matte rather than pan-and-scan even if the film should be shown at 1.85:1. The colours are dull and the transfer soft, with some noticeable artefacting and a lack of shadow detail. I'd say it wasn't much better than VHS quality if the video I compared it with (a Polygram ex-rental tape) wasn't actually worse. The soundtrack is basic 2.0 Stereo, but for most of the way might as well be in mono, so dialogue-heavy is this film. There are eighteen chapter stops. The only extra is the trailer (running 1:17), which tries to sell the film on Ferrara's controversial reputation. The sound on the trailer is much louder than on the feature, for some reason.

It should be noted that this version of Dangerous Game is a complete one. Several of Ferrara's films have suffered at the hands of the BBFC, but this has never been one of them. About three minutes went in the USA to achieve a R rating, though an uncut, unrated version has been available there. Dangerous Game was banned outright in the Irish Republic. Certainly, Ferrara's admirers will be in the market for this DVD, but it's a shame that it's yet another indifferent-to-poor Universal disc.

Zach Campbell from Elusive Lucidity

Dragan Antulov

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]

The New York Times (Janet Maslin)

THE ADDICTION

USA (82 mi) 1995

Time Out

Chronologically, this precedes The Funeral by about a year. Both were scripted by Nicolas St John after the death of his son. Both were shot quickly, on limited budgets, by much the same crew, and feature Walken and Sciorra, and a Catholic priest, Father Robert Castle. Finally, both are philosophical/religious ruminations, in genre form, on the nature of sin and redemption. The Funeral, though, is the far more accessible, even conventional drama. By contrast, this is one wild, weird, wired movie, the kind that really shouldn't be seen before midnight. Taylor is commanding as New York philosophy student Kathleen Conklin. Dragged into a back alley, she's vamped by Sciorra's voluptuous Casanova. Soon she starts obsessing on images of My Lai and the Holocaust, name-dropping Nietzsche, Sartre and Heidegger, and taking a syringe to a vagrant's artery for a late-night snack. Shot in b/w, with an effectively murky jungle/funk/rap score, this is the vampire movie we've been waiting for: a reactionary urban-horror flick that truly has the ailing pulse of the time. AIDS and drug addiction are points of reference, but they're symptoms, not the cause. Ferrara's chiaroscuro imagery is as striking as anything in Coppola's Dracula, while the voice-over narration often recalls Apocalypse Now. Scary, funny, magnificently risible, this could be the most pretentious B-movie ever - and I mean that as a compliment.

Washington Post [Hal Hinson]

You certainly can't fault New York filmmaker Abel Ferrara for not blazing his own path. In movies such as "Bad Lieutenant," "Dangerous Game" and "King of New York," Ferrara has proved that he is one of the most individualistic and least compromising figures working in film. And with "The Addiction," he delivers the same dark, unflinching vision of contemporary modern life that he presented in his past work. Unfortunately, it's so dark—and impenetrable— that it shuts us out.

Set in downtown Manhattan, the movie is yet another variation on ancient vampire legends. However, unlike in "Nadja" and "Vampire in Brooklyn," these myths aren't employed for their pop resonances. Instead, Ferrara uses vampirism as a metaphor for AIDS, drug addiction and all sorts of worldly evils.

His heroine here is Kathleen (Lili Taylor), an NYU student in the process of completing her doctoral dissertation in philosophy. Every day, Kathleen is in the library, plumbing the depths of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre. Then one night Kathleen meets Casanova (Annabella Sciorra), a slinky creature who gives her a little bite on the neck, and suddenly she is describing the library as a slaughterhouse, reeking with the putrid odor of rotting ideas.

Clearly something has changed. Fascinated by evil, Kathleen pursues a more direct exploration of the subject, leading her to conclude that all mankind is baptized in sin. After she begins behaving like a vampire, Kathleen concludes that she is merely acting according to her true nature. "We are not evil because we do evil," she says. "We do evil because we are evil." She uses this as a rationalization for her heroin use too. Addiction, it seems, builds character.

For Ferrara, these aren't casual observations. His critique is serious and passionate; his conviction, too, is unquestionable. However, when he flashes images of historic atrocities of both the distant and recent past—Nazi death camps, the war dead in Bosnia—his ideas come across as shallow and banal. Also, inserting scenes of real-life horror into what is essentially a glorified genre exercise may strike some as the essence of bad taste.

Regardless of the material, Ferrara is usually able to entice uninhibited performances from his actors. Taylor, however, seems less distinctive here than she has been in past roles. (Perhaps it's that she's playing a junkie.) On the other hand, Christopher Walken supplies all the acting eccentricity an audience can absorb in his brief cameo as Peina, a truly disturbing figure who can only be described as a kind of Super-Dracula. When he's on screen, the movie's theoretical pretensions fade into the background and, for a moment, it becomes truly frightening.

Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]

The movies of Abel Ferrara (Ms. 45, King of New York, Bad Lieutenant) are not meant to go down easily, and The Addiction is surely his most uncompromising effort yet. Shot for a small budget in stunning black-and-white on the downtown streets of New York City, The Addiction is clearly a movie that Ferrara urgently wanted to make. The movie tackles the topic of evil, presenting evil as an immutable force that is very much alive and ever-recruiting in our time. At the outset, the movie's opening images show us horrific pictures of the massacres at My Lai and the Nazi death camps as viewed by Kathleen Conklin (Taylor), a doctoral candidate in philosophy at NYU. Yet, The Addiction's brilliance and originality are due to its ability to bring the evil back home, back across the ocean and into the sorry hull of each individual human being. Evil persists because we allow it to… because we desire its offerings… because we allow it into our hearts every time we do not refuse its approach… because goodness cannot exist without evil. Ferrara's universe argues for a kind of lapsed-Catholic existentialism in which the act of being human absolutely requires a personal relationship with evil (we are all addicted), but the act of being human also means that our power to reject evil must overcome our impulse to submit. Mere silence or acquiescence is collaboration with evil and in this sense it becomes impossible to cite one individual's guilt for the My Lai massacre without also holding responsible an entire nation's addiction to its war machinery and combat mentality. The Addiction frames its unpopular philosophical premises within the guise of a generic vampire story. Here, the vampire's nightly need for blood is the addiction. In the larger sense, addictions are whatever gets us through the night: drugs, work, obsessions, The 700 Club, or whatever. Yet what really gets us through the night are our rationalizations; whatever props we use are merely the gauzy curtain that keeps the evil at bay and allows us to believe that we are doing “good.” Each time in The Addiction before a vampire goes for the jugular, the victim is offered an opportunity to “say no like you mean it.” The perpetual lack of resistance “causes” the bloody, vampiric holocaust of the film's climax. Ferrara's visual style is gritty, visceral, and energized by his rap-fueled soundtrack - a marked contrast to all the philosophical interjections of the characters. For these are characters who can quote extensively from Nietzsche and Heidegger or ask, during the middle of a tirade, if someone's read Naked Lunch. Philosophy is what these characters do, but never has it sounded more vital and relevant than when coming from the likes of actors such as Lili Taylor or Christopher Walken. At center stage throughout, Taylor's embodiment of Kathleen's increasing mental and physical decay rivet our attention like a stake through the heart. In all honesty, parts of The Addiction could stand some trimming while others might have benefited from a reshoot, but I find such distractions to be minor in face of the movie's monumental daring. Though ostensibly an urban vampire tale (in many ways, not unlike this year's other vampire original, Nadja), The Addiction is less a blood-sucking story than a fable about modern enervation. Not everyone will get off on The Addiction, but much like the aforementioned Naked Lunch, The Addiction renders with perfect clarity all that which we swallow.

Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer)

Raging Bull [Mike Lorefice]

The Horror Review [Egregious Gurnow]

Nick's Flick Picks (Full Review) Nick Davis

Vampire as metaphor: revisiting Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction Justin Vicari from Jump Cut, Spring 2007

Jerry Saravia

Looking Closer (Ron Reed)

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Daniel Fienberg -- Epinions

San Francisco Examiner [Walter Addiego]

Washington Post [Desson Howe]

The New York Times (Caryn James)

THE FUNERAL

USA (99 mi) 1996

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

With The Funeral, Abel Ferrara revisits many of his trademark obsessions – madness, honor, duty, loyalty, sexual dysfunction, and Catholic guilt and repentance – via the flashback-heavy story of the funeral of communist gangster Johnny Tempio (Vincent Gallo) at the house of his mob boss brother Ray (Christopher Walken). It’s a psychologically strung-out tale stuffed full of ideas and inspired moments, the best of which is a torturously powerful scene in which Ray, at the moment of truth, struggles mightily with the justness of avenging Johnny’s murderer. Yet despite its trio of superb lead performances – the finest of which is Chris Penn’s explosively coiled turn as semi-insane third bro Chez – the film (written by long-time Ferrara collaborator Nicholas St. John) often finds itself too preoccupied for its own good, choosing to ruminatively free-flow from one theme to another rather than taking the time to incisively explore some of its more intriguing topics (such as the brothers’ interactions with Benicio Del Toro’s union-busting crime bigwig Gaspare). And Ferrara largely short-shrifts his actresses, giving them little to do but either deliver inelegant moral-imparting speeches (Annabella Sciorra and Isabella Rossellini) or sit around in the background and look blankly attractive (Gretchen Mol).

Philadelphia City Paper (Cindy Fuchs)

I can't think of another filmmaker who can match Abel Ferrara in spewing fucked-upness on screen. This version of his sin-without-hope-of-salvation plot features three mightily pained brothers — played by Christopher Walken, Chris Penn and Vincent Gallo — each with his own terrible cross to bear. Gallo may have it the worst (though not for long), as the corpse whose upcoming funeral lends the film its title. He's resurrected through flashbacks leading to his more or less senseless murder (for a time it seems that he might have been offed by neighborhood prima donna swaggerer Benicio del Toro, but soon it becomes clear that the killer's identity is quite beside the point): he's a budding communist, concerned that his family's business tends to abuse laborers, and he mouths off to union-buster del Toro once too often. Walken's flashbacks are more banal — he remembers his initiation into gangsterism at age 13, when his father had him shoot a traitor. Penn is the wild card, and he plays the part beautifully, crazy and scared of himself (not unlike his turn in Altman's Short Cuts), always on the verge of detonation, barely soothed by long-suffering wife Isabella Rossellini. Annabella Sciorra is differently wonderful, smoldering as Walken's less forgiving wife, pissed past forgiveness at the men's macho posturing and cruelty: she has a stunning speech in the kitchen (sort of directed at Gallo's mourning fiancee), which indicts all the prideful assholes in all Ferrara's films. It's an obvious device — well, maybe not so obvious as Harvey Keitel meeting the cleaning-woman "christ" in Bad Lieutenant — but she handles it gracefully.

Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]

Nobody spins a good morality yarn like Abel Ferrara. With The Funeral, the notorious director delivers his most straight-ahead movie, having reined in some of his more extreme narrative impulses while continuing his intrepid thematic exploration of worlds bereft of moral compasses. The Funeral is a period piece and a family saga set against the backdrop of a 1930s gangster milieu. Yet any relationship with the Corleones stops right there, for The Funeral is quintessential Ferrara. Beginning with the gloomy title, the movie makes little attempt to woo an audience with soothing terms of endearment or emotional comfort. This time out, however, Ferrara's moral excoriation is tempered by the movie's solid and realistic story line and its stunning assemblage of performances. Absent is the ultra-violence that plagued The King of New York and The Addiction (although The Funeral's gangsters are hardly strangers to violence and gunplay); gone, too, is the abject self-abasement of Bad Lieutenant (although, once again, The Funeral's characters find themselves spiritually groping amidst the secular and profane. The Tempio brothers -- eldest Ray (Walken), middle brother Chez (Penn), and youngest Johnny (Gallo) -- learned from their father, in a vividly recounted scene, their lifelong dogmas about manhood, loyalty, and trust. It was a lesson reiterated by popular culture: A Bogart passage from The Petrified Forest constitutes the opening scene of The Funeral. The family priest condemns their “practical atheism” but Ray's wife Jean (Sciorra) asks him to pray for them anyway. She is the only one who can see how the family is spinning its moral wheels. She explains to her sister-in-law Clara (Rossellini), Chez's wife: “They pass themselves off as rugged individualists. But they never rose above their heartless, illiterate upbringing. We think it's romantic, but it's not.” Only Johnny, the youngest, seems capable of turning his back on the past, but then too it's Johnny who is laid out in a casket in the film's opening moments. Told almost entirely in flashback, the movie relates the events leading up to Johnny's death. The brothers have been involved in labor union racketeering, but Johnny begins finding himself swayed by all the communist theory he absorbs at the meetings. “We should be taking over the Ford Motor Company instead of shooting each other,” he comments at one lucid point. The performances in The Funeral are all electrifying. Ferrara also aligns himself with many of his longtime associates in the creation of The Funeral, most notably screenwriter Nicholas St. John, music composer Joe Delia, and cinematographer Ken Kelsch. Their contributions are intrinsic to what we think of as a “Ferrara” film. In The Funeral, so many of the team's recurring elements coalesce to create a piece that may serve as the perfect portal into the “Ferrara” universe.

Tucson Weekly [Stacey Richter]

ABEL FERRARA IS an independent director with a small but loyal following, and The Funeral, his twelfth film, has all the hallmarks of a classic Ferrara endeavor: low budget, gunplay, crude sex, debates of Catholic theology spiked with a little undergrad philosophy, and a starring role for Christopher Walken. Ferrara's movies are so bad they're entrancing. Watching The Funeral is like witnessing a traffic accident: You don't want to gawk at the violence and misfortune, but then, you kind of do want to gawk.

The story concerns several days in the life of an Italian family during the 1930s. The Italians are, of course, gangsters, because if there's one thing we've learned from the movies it's that all Italians are gangsters. Ferrara's films are written by a guy named Nicholas St. John, and if bad art were a crime, St. John would be in a high-security facility.

St. John rotates through the obvious film genres in his writing for Ferrara, bringing his own special brand of Catholic guilt to a series of familiar story lines, including Bad Lieutenant, a gritty police drama (including a stylish, sexy rape of a nun, an all-time high in bad taste); Dangerous Games, a movie about filmmaking; The Addiction, a vampire movie; and now, with The Funeral, he turns his formulaic imagination to the gangster flick.

What makes these films different from mainstream vampire, filmmaking, gangster and cop movies is St. John's truly bizarre artistic sensibility. It seems like he might have read a lot of Dostoyevsky a long time ago, and his scripts are peppered with debates over free will, fate and the role of God. His characters tend to stop what they're doing to muse, out loud, about issues of morality. Then they shoot the guts out of each other.

The resulting scenes are laughable but also sort of fascinating because they're so strange. Walken, with his intense, highly affected acting style, only heightens the sense that the film was made by space aliens. In The Funeral, Walken plays Ray, the eldest brother of an Italian clan, which has gathered together to mourn the passing of Johnny (Vincent Gallo), the youngest brother. Walken comes off like an angry robot, putting little spaces between all of his words when he speaks and fixing the other Italians with his reptilian stare. He was traumatized as a child, apparently, when his mentally ill father forced him to kill a thief. Or did he force him? Ah, these are the conundrums that fuel the murky philosophical engine of The Funeral.

The film consists of the funeral itself, as well as copious flashbacks to let us know just how the little brother came to be whacked. It turns out that he was a man of ideas, a Communist fighting for the working man. The dead brother was also a gangster, a killer, and a party boy, as were all of the brothers.

The Funeral is punctuated with weird party scenes featuring gratuitous, disturbing sexual encounters. One scene features Johnny and his brothers hanging out with a bunch of half-dressed women, watching the 1930s' version of a stag film. With no explanation, Johnny starts to make out with a woman old enough to be his grandmother.

Meanwhile, the brothers' wives are at home bemoaning their fates. Annabella Sciorra manages to be calm and dignified as Walken's wife; Isabella Rossellini is fine in her small role of Clara, wife of brother Chez, played by Christopher Penn, who seems no more psychotic than his siblings, even though all the characters turn to each other as soon as he leaves the room and exclaim, "He's crazy!"

The women, though, are mostly given the very hazardous duty of sitting around and providing exposition. Annabella Sciorra turns to Johnny's young fiancée and says something like, "These brothers have us all fooled! We think they're so interesting--individualists, mavericks--but they're not interesting. They're just criminals." I was inclined to agree.

I wasn't really in the mood for a movie the day I saw The Funeral, and it was so bad I kept gathering my things together so I could walk out. But every time I was about to leave, some disturbing sex would start to happen on the screen and I would find myself hanging back. It was the car crash again. I didn't want to watch it, but I didn't want to miss it, either. I stayed to the bitter end.

Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer)

Movie Vault [Mel Valentin]

James Berardinelli's ReelViews

Movie Magazine International [Mary Weems]

Dragan Antulov

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)

Mike D'Angelo

The Onion A.V. Club [John Gustafson]

Time Out

Variety.com [Emanuel Levy]

The Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

Washington Post [Desson Howe]

Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas)

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The New York Times (Janet Maslin)

THE BLACKOUT

USA France (98 mi) 1997

Film Scouts (David Sterritt)

There are more wild cinematics in "The Blackout," by the predictably unpredictable Abel Ferrara, who here unfolds the reflexive tale of a filmmaker (Dennis Hopper) coping with an actor (Matthew Modine) whose drug-and-booze habit has gotten the better of him. The story is trite, and Hopper falls amusing apart during his *big scene* near the end; but Ferrara works almost as well with cinematographer Ken Kelsch as with the great Bojan Bazelli, and if Christopher Walken had snagged the lead instead of the capable but unexciting Modine, this engagingly eccentric filmmaker might have had a worthy successor to his great "King of New York" at last.

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

Released theatrically abroad and direct-to-video here in the States, Abel Ferrara’s The Blackout shares some of Dangerous Game’s ideas about art, commerce, and the tangled relationship between filmmaking and real life but never manages to control its turgid chaos. A movie star with a cocaine vacuum for a nose (Matthew Modine’s Matty) is traumatized by the discovery that girlfriend Annie (Béatrice Dalle) has aborted their child, having forgotten (due to drug excesses) that he’d previously ordered her – in the most callous way imaginable – to get rid of the unborn fetus. After visiting an experimental video filmmaker (Dennis Hopper) who’s in the midst of remaking Emile Zola’s Nana as a lesbian smut show, Matty has the titular memory lapse and, a sober year later, tries to relocate the missing Annie whose disappearance has left him a psychological wreck (despite the fact that he’s now shacked up with Claudia Schiffer). Character doubling, disorienting transitions, Modine’s overcooked histrionics, and issues of guilt, sin and salvation all characterize the haphazard film, which progresses with such bumpy, awkward momentum that it feels as if Ferrara didn’t decide upon a narrative structure until he reached the editing room. “I don’t even know the difference between life and acting anymore,” explains Matty for those scant few incapable of picking up on The Blackout’s evident themes, but it’s Ferrara who, with this muddled misfire, proves incapable of making distinctions between his inspired and indulgent impulses.

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

Though famous for their indelicacy in portraying sex, violence, and chemical intake, Abel Ferrara's films only work because of their surprising subtlety. The writer-director's best works, such as Bad Lieutenant and The Funeral, match excess with meaning, creating lurid melodramas that also work as morality plays. When Ferrara is in top form, only Martin Scorsese can match his effectiveness in expressing the relationship between old-fashioned Catholic guilt and contemporary moral malaise. But the last few years have not found Ferrara in top form, with some of his less memorable films meeting undignified, direct-to-video fates years after their intended release dates. Released elsewhere in 1997, The Blackout at least improves upon Ferrara's borderline incomprehensible William Gibson adaptation New Rose Hotel, placing the director in more familiar sin-and-redemption territory. His sinner this time out is a hard-living, well-known film star (Matthew Modine) who, while vacationing in Miami, asks his girlfriend (Béatrice Dalle) to marry him, then flies into a paroxysm of rage when she informs him that she carried through with the abortion he none-too-subtly suggested and subsequently forgot. Meanwhile, Modine begins hanging out with Dennis Hopper, a high-tech sex-club/film-studio owner who claims to be filming an adaptation of Emile Zola's Nana. (Apparently, his interpretation restores all the lesbian sex and lace thongs that Jean Renoir's version omitted.) After a few hard-partying days, the foggy-headed Modine blacks out, bottoms out, cleans up, and sets up house with Claudia Schiffer. Violent dreams continue to haunt him, however, as does the small matter of Dalle's unexplained disappearance. "I don't even know the difference between life and acting anymore. It's all started to blur," Modine mumbles at one point. The line typifies The Blackout's willingness to explain itself, which it does, over and over, as it drags to its conclusion. Modine gives a memorable performance, there's an interesting if muddled bit of commentary about mixed media, and the film has its isolated powerful moments, as every Ferrara movie does. But here, they remain far too isolated.

filmcritic.com (Jeremiah Kipp)

One of these days, I'll make good on my promise never to rent another Abel Ferrara movie. King of New York and Body Snatchers notwithstanding (and Bad Lieutenant is only fit for a single, emotive viewing), his exploitation flicks have fallen into a rut of hoary art-house trappings. It's a perfume-drenched, coke-addled visit to the seedy pornography shop, where beautiful models (no, hookers -- no, courtesans) usher you through the silk curtains.

Ferrara's only consistently smart move has been casting Christopher Walken over and over again, since Walken can make a good movie great and a loathsome movie durable whenever he's onscreen. His 8-minute scene in The Addiction is the saving grace of that otherwise abysmal, unwatchable, and pretentious failure. When he starts talking about his vampiric bowel movements, or questions whether Lili Taylor has ever read Naked Lunch, there's a much-needed dose of humor in an otherwise terminally unfunny affair. You know those Gothic club kids who are too cool to smile and let you know they're actually having fun? The Addiction is that movie.

Walken, sadly, does not appear in The Blackout. The central role of Matty, a junkie film star whose lightning paced Hollywood life among the beautiful people is inevitably leading to his destruction, is played by Matthew Modine (who takes what he can get after Cutthroat Island). Much like the protagonists of Michelangelo Antonioni's terminally bored cultural elite, Matty is involved in a bitter pill "relationship" with high fashioned model Annie (at least I think she's a model.) Matty's lady is played by French actress Béatrice Dalle, arrested twice for cocaine possession during filming of The Blackout -- not that you needed to know that, but it lends credence to the idea that Ferrara's entire oeuvre has been filmed in a blackout. No kidding. Requiem For a Dream has nothing on the junkie presentations seen in Ferrara's movies and his controversial urban lifestyle.

Matty and Annie struggle over her decision to have an abortion without consulting him. No doubt, he was off chasing the dragon. In his despair, Matty indulges in a chemical induced weekend of debauchery, tooling around the streets of Miami with video filmmaker Mickey Wayne (Dennis Hopper, in full "dirty ol' man" mold smacking models on the ass and telling them to spread their legs. Wider!) Toward the end of the night, they pick up a teenage waitress also named Annie (Sarah Lassez), start shooting a hastily improvised sexual scene, then Matty thankfully blacks out. Something happened that night which haunts him throughout the rest of the movie, and it's exactly what you think it was. Suffice to say, there's some confusion over whether he killed Annie One or Annie Two, or anyone at all.

The Blackout is typical Ferrara: no plot to speak of, plenty of raunch, and horribly vogue images of Matthew Modine downing a bottle of Jack Daniels and a beer while wrapping himself in a see-through curtain in his hotel room by the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea. Cinematographer Ken Kelsch finds inconsistent glory in alternating gorgeous painterly sunsets with docu-style sleaze (and we're back to Dennis Hopper leering at girls in bathing suits. "Yeah!!! YEAH!!! ARRRGHHH!" says Mr. Hopper. Dirty old sod.)

It's compulsive viewing in a tacky sort of way, leading to a ridiculous climax where Modine seizes control of his destiny. How's that for cryptic? Never fear -- Ferrara finds time for some female full frontal nudity to remind us what he's all about. I can picture it now. "Take off yer clothes, kid -- it's essential to depict the inner maelstrom of my central protagonist, and you're his visual id. You're the soul, the heart, the bloodstream of the picture. Take it off! TAKE IT ALL OFF!!! HA HA HA!" Friggin' vampire. Yeah, you, Ferrara.

A final word about Matthew Modine: He's actually a fine actor when properly cast, but there's something too squeaky-clean in his demeanor. He's ideally suited for sarcastic men in tightly controlled situations, such as his Private Joker in Full Metal Jacket or the time-bomb nebbish in Short Cuts (who is every bit as superb as Julianne Moore in that famous scene, though no one seems to notice him). [He was in that scene? -Ed.] Here, he's asked to let it all hang out, sporting a three-day stubble and oily bangs. He throws around furniture like Stanley Kowalski, but it's somehow lacking. Modine lacks the feral intensity of Brando, entirely miscast in Ferrara's flesh fair. Better luck next time, Matt. Someday, you'll be forgiven for Cutthroat Island, which wasn't really your fault in the first place. Maybe Atom Egoyan will find a place for you somewhere, and all will once again be well in your world.

Plume Noire Sebastian Sipat

Girish Shambu from the Ferrara-Blog-a-Thon

Mubarak Ali from Supposed Aura, a comparison of NEW ROSE HOTEL and THE BLACKOUT

Bearded Freak's Reviews

Apollo Movie Guide [Cheryl DeWolfe]

Nitrate Online (Capsule) Eddie Cockrell

Film Scouts (Lisa Nesselson)

Variety.com [Emanuel Levy]

Time Out

The New York Times (Dave Kehr)

NEW ROSE HOTEL

USA (93 mi) 1998

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null)

Frustrated to the point where most people will give up, Abel Ferrara's New Rose Hotel is one of the worst-realized psychodramas ever made, despite its stellar one-two punch of Walken and Dafoe. Ostensibly a story about two con men who take $100 million to get a bigshot scientist to defect to a rival firm, it eventually turns into a story of obsession and subjectivity when Dafoe's character realizes he's been had. The end result is that the last half the movie is a flashback to the first half of the movie, and mostly in slow motion. Interminable and dull, with plenty of mood lighting and little in the way of mood.

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

Christopher Walken’s idiosyncratic mannerisms and strangely articulated turns of phrase are in full bloom throughout Abel Ferrara’s New Rose Hotel, though the uneven film’s real center of gravity is Asia Argento, whose sensual presence haunts this William Gibson-based tale of futuristic corporate espionage and romantic delusion. One of the most fully realized female characters in Ferrara’s oeuvre (along with Zoë Lund’s avenging Ms. 45 and Drea de Matteo’s ‘R Xmas mommy), Argento’s prostitute Sandii is the sultry vehicle via which wheeler-dealers Fox (Walken) and X (Willem Dafoe) plan to make millions, the voluptuous hooker functioning as the lure in their plan to steal a Japanese geneticist away from one conglomerate and deliver him to a rival outfit. With the trio’s imbalanced dynamic as electrified as a buzzing neon sign, Ferrara surprisingly – at least in light of his occasionally less-than-flattering portraits of womanhood – bestows Sandii with the preponderance of power, her initial functionary, passive role in Fox’s scheme reversed by her magnetic, sexually empowered domination of the foolhardy X. Ferrara’s editing has a ruminative rhythm that nicely clashes with Walken’s scene-stealing overacting (if not Dafoe’s somewhat lifeless supporting turn). But it’s the prolonged finale that truly defines the inconsistent New Rose Hotel, with X’s devastatingly revealing flashbacks proving to be masterfully constructed and yet eventually rather wearisome.

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)

Like his fellow New Yorker Jim Jarmusch, Abel Ferrara's films often feel more European than American. As a result, they tend to be released in Europe long before they see American multiplexes, and the Europeans like them more, too. In the case of Ferrara's 1998 New Rose Hotel, the film never made it to America at all.

Following the Roxie's successful Ferrara tribute two weeks ago, New Rose Hotel finally has a proper San Francisco theatrical run, and only four years late. I shudder to think how long it will be before we can see Ferrara's newest film, R-Xmas, currently enjoying a critically acclaimed and popular run in France.

Quintessential New York actors Christopher Walken and Willem Dafoe occupy the lead roles as non-descript illegitimate businessmen in New Rose Hotel. Their job is to seduce a big-shot Japanese scientist away from his family and his company, though for what purpose I wasn't able to tell.

It doesn't matter, though. The heart of the movie comes when Walken and Dafoe hire sexy singer and prostitute Sandii (Asia Argento, daughter of Suspiria director Dario Argento) to do the dirty work. Unfortunately, Dafoe falls head over heels for Sandii and screws up the whole plan.

Based on a story by William Gibson (author of the cyberpunk book Neuromancer and film Johnny Mnemonic), New Rose Hotel takes place in some vaguely futuristic world full of darkness, neon, mirrors and glass. Our heroes occupy various bars and hotel rooms that could be located anyplace from New York to Portugal to Japan.

But the movie works thanks to Walken's and Dafoe's hardcore performances. Clearly, Ferrara lets these two giants improvise a good deal of their dialogue together (just try to picture a couple of Hollywood creampuffs in these roles). Walken wears a wrinkled white suit, carries a cane and walks with a huge, swinging limp; it's all part of his enthusiastic scenery chewing. Dafoe matches him, but just barely -- he occasionally looks like he's about to crack up at some of Walken's wild inventions.

The film can be trying at times. It wraps up its storyline about 75 minutes in but spends another 15 minutes watching Dafoe laying around in a Japanese sleeper unit and flashing back, going over the movie's incidents again. This epilogue repeats some sequences twice but surprises us with new scenes as well. Best of all is Walken's line, convincing Sandii to go through with the plan (you can just hear his hesitating, sinister coo), "This is your ticket outta the boneyard. You're dead, in case you didn't know it. You just don't have the sense to lie down."

I'm sure Ferrara thought he had a sure thing on his hands: along with Walken, Dafoe and Argento, he managed to land Annabella Sciorra, John Lurie, Gretchen Mol and Victor Argo, all playing small roles. (Mol doesn't even have any dialogue, if I recall correctly.)

But New Rose Hotel is a clear-cut case of style over substance. Ferrara makes it work by not making anything easy, and not delivering anything homogenized or dumbed-down. He has the guts to invite us in to this world, to stay if we like it and to get the hell out if we don't.

Elusive Lucidity | Capitalism, Genre and Humanity at the New Rose ... Zach Campbell from Elusive Lucidity

Matt Clayfield from the Esoteric Rabbit

Notes On Cinema.

Mubarak Ali from Supposed Aura, a comparison of NEW ROSE HOTEL and THE BLACKOUT Aura.

Nitrate Online (Sean Axmaker)

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

Sci-Fi Weekly Matthew McGowan

eFilmCritic.com (Charles Tatum)

Apollo Movie Guide [Ryan Cracknell]

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Film Journal International (Maitland McDonagh)

DVD Verdict Mike Jackson

Jerry Saravia

Daniel Fienberg -- Epinions

Movie House Commentary [scoopy.com] Johnny Web and Tuna

Elusive Lucidity The midriff of the esteemed Asia Argento in New Rose Hotel, posted by Zach Campbell

Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas)

The New York Times (Janet Maslin)

MARY

France Italy USA (83 mi) 2005

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

Indeed, I raced from Tideland to Abel Ferrara's MARY, where, before the screening, a distraught Gilliam fan held forth on his hero's "cinematic suicide." Hey, as the movie director in Mary tells his God- besotten star (Juliette Binoche) when she refuses to leave the movie location, "Fucking go to Jerusalem." Though a mere 83 minutes, Mary is its own double bill—a response to The Passion of the Christ in which the director (and star!) of a Jesus film (Matthew Modine) called This Is My Blood is a fantastic amalgam of Mel Gibson and Ferrara himself. Everyone in this jagged construction—which incorporates all manner of newsreel footage—is perched on the edge of hysteria. Speaking for confused filmmakers everywhere, Ferrara's alter ego winds up barricaded in a projection booth, unclear whether his movie is a terrorist threat to society or vice versa. That's some premiere, the ultimate festival fantasy.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Coherence isn't Abel Ferrara's stock in trade; Mary, the conflicted Catholic filmmaker's double-barreled response to The Passion of the Christ, polarized critics with its beguiling blend of talking-head interviews, alarm-bell psychodrama and Biblical reenactment. But if it's hard to say what Ferrara's getting at, it's clear he's getting at something, possibly a lot of somethings. Most intriguing among them is the Gnostic notion that Mary Magdalene was a disciple, not merely a follower, of Jesus, and the erasure of her role has unbalanced every subsequent interpretation of his teachings. (Ferrara's Christ has the humility that Mel Gibson's notably lacked.) Playing a director who casts Juliette Binoche as Mary and himself as Jesus (because "I'm the best actor I know"), Matthew Modine explicitly channels Ferrara's high-octane mannerisms, while Binoche is so impassioned in the film-within-a-film segments you wish Modine's movie really existed. Mary is hardly perfect, but even if it's a failure, it's better than most people's successes.

Mary Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

[MILD SPOILERS] With moments of brilliance adrift within a sea of half-baked ideas and occasional outright idiocy (see Modine' s shoddy, showboating Walken impression), Mary feels unfinished. Most of the film is gorgeous, with Ferrara employing deep blacks and the tentative golds of candlelight, played off his usual NYC-at-night electricity. One of the main themes seems to be the redemption of Forest Whitaker's agnostic theologian, learning to experience God rather than ponder Him as an abstraction. And the film's finest moments -- the car attack, the sex scene, and the bombing -- formally emphasize the idea that states of psychic extremity bring us closer to holy revelation than everyday religiosity can. But paradoxically, the dry academic theologians Whitaker's talk show host interviews provide some of the most fascinating material in the film. In the midst of this, Ferrara can't help throwing in some of the crassest cross-cutting since Griffith, and whatever beef he has with Gibson is well-nigh incomprehensible. A fascinating botch, and I'd expect any other director to re-cut it. Ferrara? Full speed ahead and fuck 'em all, naturally.

On Film Criticism Girish

“Abel Ferrara’s Mary (like also Gus Van Sant’s Elephant) happens to be a remarkable essay about telephones in modern life – mobile phones, in particular. All the actions, the character interrelations, the montage dynamics, the junctions and disjunctions of image and sound, are caught and dramatised in the multiple phone calls that occur in the movie, bridging different countries, different experiences, different media. Ferrara deliberately restricts his frame of reference: none of his characters use computers or send emails, for instance. Maybe that will be the subject or substance of his next film! But by ‘unrealistically’ isolating this one element of modern experience in Mary, he really makes us see, experience and understand it. And he connects it to very large issues: faith, love, revolt. This working from the particular detail to the general theme is part of what the influential critic Manny Farber meant by his concept of ‘termite art’. Films are involved in making termite art in this way – and so are film critics.”

filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin)

Out of the thousands of problems one could have with Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, there is one thing that sticks out above all: its sureness and certainty. There was no questioning going on in the film and no humbleness in the great face of possibility. It was an act of utter belief, which could be seen as a great gesture or a great detriment. This obviously got the attention of indie rebel Abel Ferrara, the firebrand behind Bad Lieutenant and King of New York. Where Gibson is steadfast in his Christianity, Ferrara has the foresight to fill the film with his own humility and confusion over what’s going on up there.

Jesus Christ walks into a cave (this would be directly after the resurrection) to find Mary Magdalene and attempts to comfort her. Then, Jesus yells “Cut!” It turns out that he is actor/director Tony Childress (Matthew Modine), and Mary is Marie Palesi (Juliette Binoche). Tony is just wrapping his retelling of the life of Jesus, This is My Blood, and is high on his own self-righteousness. So much so that he blows up at Marie when she announces she is going to Jerusalem. See, Marie has become obsessed with the character of Mary Magdalene and has made it her new mission to try to unlock her secrets.

Back in New York, hard-nosed discussion show host Ted Younger (Forest Whitaker) is prepping a week long discussion on Jesus and the Bible. He has a pregnant wife (Heather Graham) that he ignores and a pressing need to get Childress on his show. Childress agrees but Younger hits a water hazard when his wife gives birth prematurely and the life of his son is not certain. Things get really messy, but Younger gives it up to god and Childress stages a coup when a bomb threat threatens to cancel the opening screening of his film.

Childress isn’t just a representation of Gibson-like pomposity; he is also a representation of Ferrara’s feebleness/audacity with this subject matter as well. Ferrara’s search is sincere and unbelievably open, but it really is a return to the ideas that he was tangling with in Bad Lieutenant: uncomplicated redemption. Bad Lieutenant’s physical world of pain and corruption eventually led to that shocking scene where the Lieutenant offers to kill the rapist and the nun asks him not to, ostensibly forgiving the kids who raped her. The redemption sought after in Mary has much more breadth and a mercurial vastness. Every character is looking for their way to rediscover god, to be brought back into his graces. Childress tries to find it by emulating it, Younger does it by finally giving into his humility and Marie wants to find it through finding Mary Magdalene’s true purpose. At moments, it can be overwhelming.

Ferrara returns to his city of choice with an uncanny gothic style, dark and frankly frightening. Those long shots of Younger’s limo rides home evoke a deep sense of dread in the current state of cynicism and fear (often, Younger is watching news of terrorism during his rides home). For the first time since 1996’s The Funeral, Ferrara has found a sustainable tone and a story that allows him room to talk about a reverent subject. Somehow, he turns confusion into a concise study on what it means to believe in god in this day and age. Consider it an act of faith. Amen, brother.

Michael Guillen at The Evening Class.

Harry Tuttle at Screenville

Film Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers]

The Lumière Reader Mubarak Ali

The Age Philippa Hawker

MovieMartyr.com [Jeremy Heilman]

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

DVDBeaver.com [Eric Cotenas]

GO GO TALES

Italy USA (96 mi) 2007

Boxoffice Magazine (Richard Mowe) (link lost)

Renegade director Abel Ferrara (The Bad Lieutenant) lightens up with this musical froth set amid the topless clubs that flourished around the director’s New York neighborhood at Union Square. Ray (Willem Dafoe) and Jay (Roy Dotrice) run a “go go” cabaret in downtown Manhattan which represents “a factory of dreams” for young dancers trying to make their way in the showbiz. In the course of one night, Ray and Jay are facing imminent foreclosure by the landlady (Sylvia Miles) when Ray’s younger brother Johnny (Matthew Modine) reveals he is no longer willing to lend him the money to keep the club open. Things have gotten so bad that even the dancers, among them Asia Argento as the deliciously sexy Monroe, are threatening to "strip-strike," and, to make matters worse, Ray has lost their winning lottery ticket. Wacky and good-humored, Go Go has a seductive visual appeal that Ferrara exploits to the fullest.

Screen International Jonathan Romney

Abel Ferrara , king of New York low-life drama, slips into more benign mode than usual with Go Go Tales, a good-natured but somewhat half-baked evocation of life backstage at a lap dancing club.

The ensemble comedy, with its decided stylistic debt to Robert Altman, might best be characterised as A Prairie Home Companion with G-strings, but a slapdash narrative and attempts at touches of screwball comedy will mean the film is equally unlikely to satisfy hardcore Ferraraphiles and to attract mainstream audiences.

While theatrical uptake should be moderate, festival slots will rely on the director's flagging auteur cachet; however, the film's cheerfully risque appeal and ample flesh quotient should help boost DVD afterlife.

Ferrara's comedy is set almost entirely within the walls of Ray Ruby's Paradise, a lap-dancing club run by host and MC Ray (Dafoe) and his Irish accountant partner Jay (Dotrice, pouring on the blarney) with front-of-house business taken care of by gruff majordomo Baron (Hoskins, sounding as if he's impersonating Jimmy Durante). Business is bad, the strippers aren't getting paid, and everything depends on the success of one of the countless lottery tickets invested in by inveterate gambler Ray.

Meanwhile, Ray's brother and main financier, beauty-salon owner Johnnie (Modine) is threatening to pull his support, and eccentric landlady Lilian (veteran Miles, doing her patented foghorn routine) is making one of her regular disruptive visits. But the show must go on, and the clothes must come off.

Go Go Tales is low on narrative, high on admiring footage of bump-and-grind routines by performers including Asia Argento, whose dancer Monroe, described as "the sexiest, scariest girl in the world", might startle even hardened Ferrara viewers by tongue-kissing a rottweiler.

The overall mood, with its wandering camerawork, seeming improvisation and overlapping dialogue, comes across as an outright tribute to Altman's ensemble comedies, but the film also tips its hat to the seedy background of John Cassavetes' The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie – with perhaps a dash of Atom Egoyan's Exotica.

The main problem is that Ferrara gives an almost exclusively male view of this milieu, with its female characters depicted as decorative, ditzy or neurotic - a brash Argento predictably being the one exception.

The in-house milieu is evoked vividly, although it's not long before you start gasping for a few exteriors, or just some sunlight through a window. Acting that's largely in the broad register exacerbates the overall feeling of claustrophobia, but character players such as Sylvia Miles, plus Pras Michel as a chef obsessed with his organic hot dogs, liven up the mix.

Dafoe looks uncomfortable, especially when singing an onstage ballad, but maintains a certain scuzzy dignity - although his concluding "That's showbiz" speech takes some swallowing. An intriguing, boisterous soundtrack keeps the atmosphere from flagging too much.

Harsh Realities in a World of Fantasy Manohla Dargis from the New York Times

Sleaze rarely looks as lovely and plays with such sentiment as it does in Abel Ferrara’s “Go Go Tales,” a down-and-dirty story about a nightclub owner and the beauties and beasts who work for him. The film, which unfortunately, if unsurprisingly, is screening out of competition, is easily Mr. Ferrara’s best since “The Funeral” (1996) and welcome news for his hard-core, patient admirers. (Its commitment to female pulchritude comes unadorned by self-consciously belabored art and ideas.) An obvious homage to John Cassavetes’s underbelly classic “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie” (1976), “Go Go Tales” also works rather poignantly as a metaphor for the down-and-dirty independence that Mr. Ferrara has pursued his entire filmmaking career.

A terrific Willem Dafoe, his Joker-like smile stretched across his face, plays the titular owner of Ray Ruby’s Paradise, a strip club pulsing with music and an atmosphere of desperation. Times are tough at Ray Ruby’s: the coffers are empty, the strippers haven’t been paid and the landlady (Sylvia Miles), parked on a bar stool like a toad on a lily pad, is screeching for the rent. Ms. Miles, whose voice scratches against your eardrums like fingernails on a chalkboard, seemingly a mere decibel away from puncture, provides just one of the many squawks and shouts that create the cacophony that fills Ray Ruby’s Paradise to the rafters, flooding it with noise and the vibrant thrum of humanity. Few other performers can upstage a roomful of naked women as effortlessly.

There’s something of a plot, though it’s almost incidental to all the moods and glorious moments in time in this film, to the poetry of a red neon puddle of light and the way a woman’s face shimmers with glitter and Mr. Ferrara’s adoration. As the strippers writhe onstage and occasionally take a languid spin around the center pole, the camera moves ceaselessly about the club, upstairs and down, checking out the women waiting in the wings and the older, adoring men (Bob Hoskins among them) who function as surrogate uncles to the hopeless romantic they work for. Like Ben Gazzara in “Chinese Bookie,” Ray Ruby is the club’s proprietor and its master of ceremonies, as well as its resident dreamer and schemer.

The other great attraction in “Go Go Tales,” though she’s not on screen nearly enough, is the actress and sometime director Asia Argento, who enters wearing her pretty scowl and tethered to a Rottweiler. She certainly gives it her all (well, she keeps on her stockings, leather panties and pasties) as one of the strippers, instantly earning her character’s introduction as “the scariest, sexiest girl in the world.” Ms. Argento, who delivers a fantastic star turn in another out-of-competition film here, Olivier Assayas’s underappreciated “Boarding Gate,” has the kind of intense screen presence that could bring out the fire department. Actors are paid to emote and recite lines, but Ms. Argento bares body and soul, throwing herself into both Mr. Ferrara’s and Mr. Assayas’s films as if her life depended on it. Maybe it does.

CHELSEA ON THE ROCKS

USA (88 mi) 2008

Chelsea On The Rocks Allan Hunter at Cannes from Screendaily

The Chelsea hotel in New York has a global reputation as the place where artists go to enhance their notoriety. Dylan Thomas slid into alcoholic oblivion from a room at the Chelsea. Sid Vicious's girlfriend Nany Spungen died there and its portals have welcomed everyone from Arthur Miller to Andy Warhol, Charles Bukowski and Vladimir Nabokov. Director Abel Ferrara has also been a resident at the Chelsea and his modest, loosely-assembled documentary on its heyday as a bohemian refuge is more effective in its conventional talking heads material than some ill-advised dramatic recreations of key events in the establishment's illustrious past.

The film's uneven, rambling nature would seem to herald few theatrical reservations for Chelsea On The Rocks but there is a much stronger likelihood of buoyant television sales and interest from documentary festivals.

Ferrara's attempt to capture the essence of the Chelsea has been prompted by the sale of the hotel to a company more interested in its commercial future than its gaudy past. Manager Stanley Bard, who took over the running of the hotel from his father in 1955, has been squeezed out of the picture for reasons that remain something of a mystery. The days when individuals could take up permanent residency and not worry about the rent are clearly numbered. An end-of-an-era nostalgia hangs over the film as we meet some of the current residents who recall the wild days and drug-fuelled excesses of the Chelsea's finest hours.

But the film is infuriating in its refusal to identify any of the individuals being interviewed. We have no idea who these people are or what weight they carry in the bigger picture of the hotel's hundred year history which is never explained or sketched out. Why the hotel become a magnet for the great and good of 20th century American artistic life is one of the questions the film never addresses.

The question of identification is not a problem in the case of an Ethan Hawke, who stayed at the Chelsea after the collapse of his marriage to Uma Thurman, or Milos Forman, who lived there in the early 1970s. Forman provides some memorable anecdotes including the time an old woman appeared to have set her room on fire and the fire department drowned her in their attempts to save her, or so he claims.

This all seems remarkably conventional for an Abel Ferrara film but the director can't help but add his own special touches to the project in dramatised scenes of the last hours of Sid Vicious (Jamie Burke) and Nancy Spungen (Bijou Phillips) that are badly written and performed with such an awkward, amateur air that they are embarrassing. The same could be said of scenes apparently depicting Janis Joplin (Shanyn Leigh) which also feature Grace Jones.

The film would lose nothing if the dramatic re-enactments were cut and it would still retain the Ferrara signature in its rather shambling manner and the way the director imposes himself on the narrative by his appearances on camera and casual interviewing technique. The fact that Chelsea On The Rocks isn't a straightforward historical portrait of the hotel is part of its charm but also something of a drawback to its general accessibility.

Dennis Lim at Cannes from the LA Times

CANNES, France -- Abel Ferrara's new film, "Chelsea on the Rocks," represents a kind of homecoming for the Bronx-born director and longtime chronicler of the New York City underbelly. Ferrara, best known for urban tales of damnation such as "Bad Lieutenant" and "King of New York," moved to Italy several years ago, fleeing a city transformed by the Rudolph W. Giuliani regime and the Sept. 11 attacks, not to mention a cultural and economic climate that had grown more hostile to maverick filmmakers.

His last two movies, "Mary" (2005) and "Go Go Tales" (2007), were European productions. "Mary," the story of a Jesus-themed film project and a pointed riposte to Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ," was shot mostly in Rome. "Go Go Tales," a good-natured screwball comedy as well as a personal manifesto of artistic tenacity, is set within a Manhattan strip club, built from scratch on soundstages at Rome's Cinecittà Studios.

"Chelsea on the Rocks," which had its premiere as a special presentation at the Cannes Film Festival on Friday night, is a documentary about the 125-year-old Chelsea Hotel, the spiritual home of Manhattan bohemia, where Jack Kerouac wrote "On the Road," Andy Warhol filmed "Chelsea Girls" and the Sex Pistols' Sid Vicious stabbed his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, to death. It's Ferrara's first proper New York movie since 2001's " 'R Xmas."

"It's a tough town, but it's home," he said by phone from New York on Thursday. He had been due to arrive in Cannes earlier in the week but at that point had already missed two flights. (He eventually arrived on Friday, in time for his news conference.) Ferrara said he was busy in the States trying to get a new fiction feature, which he described as "a Catholic western," off the ground. "It could be my version of 'The Searchers,' " he said.

The "Chelsea" project was initiated by producer Jen Gatien, who was hoping to make a movie to commemorate a turning point in the history of the Chelsea -- last June, the hotel's manager (and patron of its artist-residents), Stanley Bard, was forced out by new management. Gatien approached Ferrara as an interview subject; he offered to go further and serve as director. "I watched how these guys were shooting it," he recalled, "and I said, 'Listen, this is something you gotta do right,' so I brought my crew in."

Ferrara said he never intended to make a conventional documentary: "We're not conventional people." Amid the expected interviews with current and former tenants, including Milos Forman, Dennis Hopper and Ethan Hawke (who directed his own film about the place, 2001's "Chelsea Walls"), "Chelsea on the Rocks" mixes in archival footage (featuring Janis Joplin and William S. Burroughs) and re-enactments (Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, played by Jamie Burke and Bijou Phillips).

"I could only get so far using interviews," Ferrara said. "I'm comfortable with getting at the truth through fiction."

Ferrara has known the Chelsea well all his adult life, but he decided to move in for a few months while making the film. "There's a difference between just visiting and actually living there," he said. "A lot goes on in the place after lights out."

"Chelsea on the Rocks" is still without a stateside distributor, an increasingly common state of affairs for Ferrara. He's considered a major auteur in Europe, but his films since "The Addiction" (1996) have not opened theatrically in the U.S. or only received the smallest of releases. "The distribution business is a punk business," he said. "But I can't get hung up on it."

"Chelsea" is something of a companion piece to "Go Go Tales," an allegory about the price of independence that also addressed the toll exerted on would-be iconoclasts in a changing New York (Ferrara's alter-ego, played by Willem Dafoe, is a strip-club owner suffering a major cash flow problem). But "Go Go Tales," in its heroic insistence that the show must go on, is not melancholy so much as defiant.

Ferrara was likewise keen to avoid nostalgia or mournfulness in "Chelsea," despite the hotel's uncertain future (the management company that removed Bard from his position was itself recently ousted). "The Chelsea Hotel's an alive, vital place," he said. "It's not a historical monument. There's no use sitting around and crying about change. There's no sympathy in New York. You either change with the times or you get out of town."

Ferrara's name came up earlier in the festival when the trade publications confirmed reports that "Bad Lieutenant" (1992) would be remade with Werner Herzog directing, Ed Pressman producing and Nicolas Cage in the title role (originated by Harvey Keitel).

Mere mention of the project set him off on an extended -- and only partially printable -- rant. "These people should die in hell, all three of them," he said. "It's so disrespectful." He added, referring to his delayed arrival in Cannes. "And it's a good thing I'm not there. If I see them I'll strangle every one of them."

Chelsea on the Rocks (Abel Ferrara, 2008) Ignatiy Vishnevetsky from Mubi, November 9, 2009

Ferraro, Gayle

ANONYMOUSLY YOURS D 55

Myanmar Thailand USA (88 mi) 2003

Dreary and dreadful look at the sex traffic trade in Myanmar and the bordering regions, interviewing four girls who were sold by their parents at an early age, and despite some good attempts, have not been able to break the cycle of financial dependency, as, despite its obvious exploitive nature, there is little else that can provide the same financial opportunity.  The directing style is horrid, as if made by missionaries, whose sole purpose is to provide a picture of abject misery, never once wavering from that single point of view, worse than regular television programming.  

Ferraz, Vicente

I AM CUBA: THE SIBERIAN MAMMOTH (Soy Cuba, O Mamute Siberiano) A- 93

Brazil (90 mi) 2004

A fascinating exploration of the making of Mikhail Kalatozov’s highly controversial film, I AM CUBA, filmed in the early 1960’s during the early stages of the Cuban revolution, a joint Soviet-Cuban film project which was intentionally positive and favorable in support of the Cuban revolution. The film begins with footage of one of the most miraculous crane shots in the history of cinema, which is covering the funeral of a student in I AM CUBA, where the streets are a mass of people, where from just above street level the camera sweeps up several stories high into the air where onlookers are throwing flowers into the streets, then continuing across a hallway into another area where people are rolling cigars, then moving forward where they roll out a Cuban flag out the window, continuing out the window, actually following the parade of people from the air, continuing to move forward all the time. This documentary film actually reunites many of the Cuban people who were part of the film, now 40 years later, showing how they have been influenced by this unique and legendary film experience.

Ferraz was allowed access into the Cuban film archives, showing footage of the joy and near delirium at the success of the revolution, where initially there was such a feeling of hope and optimism, which led to the making of this film. Kalatozov was a prize winning film director, winning the Palme D’Or top prize and Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1958 with his film THE CRANES ARE FLYING, which opened up the Soviet Union to the west after the fall of Stalin. With his decidedly organized and detached style of directing, he brought along his legendary cinematographer, Sergei Urusevsky, who refused to film unless there were clouds in the sky, who was a competent painter as well, who from time to time would do portraits on the set, and was co-authored by the brilliant Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Cuban novelist Enrique Pineda Barnet, capturing a poetic, romanticized view of Cuba that was decidedly more uniquely Russian than the Cubans themselves would ever conceive, though many would call this intentionally one-sided view a propaganda film or “commie crap.” Due to the political stalemate caused by the Cold War and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the view of both nations became much more politically suspect of each other’s nations, so when the film was finally released in 1964, both countries quietly called the work a failure and shelved the film after only one week. Oddly, it was the interest of the West, specifically filmmakers Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, who unearthed this film from the Russian archives, who then redistributed it in 1995 to huge critical acclaim, many regarding it as an artistic masterpiece. Unfortunately, both Kalatozov and Urusevsky died before any success could ever be attributed to their project. Of interest, all the Cuban people who worked on the film, from the carpenter, the musician, an assistant director, to several actors, were all given new copies of the film with the critical praise attached to the back of the copy, as it was distributed in the West on video, and each couldn’t believe it was the same film, as they had been led to believe it was a disaster. This film, unlike the Russian depiction of Cuba, was filmed by a Latin American filmmaker and the feel of the film is warm and enthusiastic, complete with terrific Cuban music and wonderful street scenes. This film is simply a joy to watch and is utterly successful at encouraging viewers to rediscover the original film for themselves.

Ferreira, Jairo – film critic

Cinema: Music of Light Jairo Ferreira article published in 1986, introduced by Filipe Furtado, from Rouge

Shohei Imamura: The Insect's Game Jairo Ferreira published in 1967, from Rouge

Feste, Shana

THE GREATEST D 63

USA (99 mi) 2009 ‘Scope

A film that’s been sitting on the shelf for the past year, shown at Sundance more than a year ago, actually shot during 2008, where it probably wouldn’t have had a commercial release at all except that Carey Mulligan was nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award nomination for another film (AN EDUCATION), making the producers think there was a brief commercial window of opportunity. Without knowing anything about the director, it’s easy to tell this is their first movie, as there’s very little actual direction exhibited here in what is a fairly standard, overwrought movie about grief when an older teenage son dies in a car crash, a story that becomes insufferable after awhile as the actors, especially the parents Pierce Brosnan and Susan Sarandon, are the exact opposite of subtle, as their performances border on the uncomfortable due to their full blown hysteria. This might play well onstage or in a dense melodrama, but this is being presented like an indie movie of small moments with wispy guitar music continually playing in the background. Other than grief for a life lost, with flashbacks blended in to show bits and pieces of what was a budding love affair, this movie shamelessly hovers in its own wretched misery for the duration. What I can’t figure out is how the director obtained the services of such top flight actors, or how they were led to believe this was a good script, because whatever idea was pitched to get this film made never materialized onscreen. The most obvious film that comes to mind in this genre of parents grieving over their killed child is Nanny Moretti’s THE SON’S ROOM (2001), which created quite a controversy when it won the Palme D’Or at Cannes, as despite its more subtle art film approach, many to this day assert it’s a maudlin, self-indulgent and trivial tale that is little more than a glorified movie-of-the week. I wonder what those same critics would have to say about this film? The gold standard in my book remains Atom Egoyan’s THE SWEET HEREAFTER (1997), which reaches even more transcendent heights than the brilliant Russell Bank’s novel on which it was based.

While foolishly stopped in the middle of an empty road in the middle of the night, just as a boy announces his love for a girl (Carey Mulligan), they are struck by a car, killing the boy, which leaves everyone devastated afterwards, as he was voted the boy most likely to succeed in high school. While his parents play their tears for all they’re worth, blaming the other for not grieving enough or not fully respecting their unhappiness, this movie gets mired down in its own miserablism until Mulligan arrives on the scene and announces she’s pregnant, actually moving into the home of the bereaved, which turns into a full-throttled exposé of family dysfunction. While Mulligan is always a breath of fresh air, offering a glimpse of rare adolescent maturity within that tiny teenage frame, easily the most mature character in the movie, one wonders how someone that bright didn’t take precautions while having sex. There are enough contrivances just in the opening half hour to send someone’s head spinning, but this movie asks the audience to play along as if this all makes sense. Sorry, but after a few too many writhing moments of delirious agony, one where Sarandon actually gets arrested while shopping at the local grocery story when she sees a young boy on the floor that reminds her of her lost son, this is so bad it’s ridiculous. There are a few sequences that actually have a rare depth, one immediately after the funeral where the camera simply holds the frame of the unspoken silence, another where Sarandan simply goes too far in her utter disregard for the girl, and finally one when their younger son lashes out against his dead older brother in a grief support group as even dead, he’s still hogging all the attention that this kid never got. Three scenes are hardly enough to recommend this movie, which would be hard to stomach even if caught on the movie-of-the-week. Carey Mulligan, however, is adorable and so far in her young career, she’s always a stand-out.

The Boston Phoenix (Gerald Peary) review

Carey Mulligan’s Oscar-nominated performance in An Education must have prompted the belated release of this mawkish, clumsy family drama that screened at Sundance 2009. All dimply and Katie Holmes cute, Mulligan’s Rose is a pregnant collegian who moves in with boyfriend Bennett’s grieved parents after he’s killed in a freak auto accident.

Allen Brewer (Pierce Brosnan) welcomes her, but he’s too shattered to talk about his son’s death. Grace Brewer (Susan Sarandon) obsesses over her boy and can’t accept Rose’s pregnancy — a grandchild on the way — as any kind of compensation. Overwritten and indifferently directed by first-timer Shana Feste, this bloated TV-movie-of-the-week is more grate than great.

Time Out New York review [2/5] David Fear

There are films that examine the healing process following a loved one’s death with poignancy, profundity and insight about the human condition. And then there’s straight-up grief-porn like Shana Feste’s shameless sucker-punch of a drama, which romps all over the emotional messiness of mourning like a frenetic feline on a catnip-covered floor. After the film’s martyr—Aaron Johnson’s jockish, jocular Bennett—perishes in a car accident before the opening credits, the movie lays out how each of the teen’s family members process their loss. Mom (Sarandon) breaks down into a hyperactive, hysterical bundle of nerves; Dad (Brosnan) shuts down entirely; and the younger brother (Simmons), a former substance abuser, simply stares numbly off into space.

That all of this is communicated in a single, static, five-minute shot suggests we’re in for a story told with restraint and grace. And then the screaming—and crying, and oh-the-humanity Oscar baiting—starts in earnest. Once Bennett’s girlfriend (An Education’s Mulligan) shows up announcing she’s pregnant, all sense of decorum is lost and everybody goes into full-blown posttraumatic pantomime acts. Given that Sarandon played this same role so sublimely before in Moonlight Mile, her devolution into theatrical rending of garments and gnashing of teeth is particularly disappointing, but no one—not Brosnan’s shell-shocked–by-numbers patriarch nor Mulligan’s wide-eyed waif—comes out of this steroidal pity party unscathed.

The Onion A.V. Club review [C] Scott Tobias

A young man dies in a car accident at the beginning of The Greatest, and for the rest of the movie, his loved ones grieve for him. There’s a candor to writer-director Shana Feste’s melodrama that’s alternately bracing and awkward, a willingness to plumb directly into matters of loss and reconciliation where other indies might enter through the side door. Because it’s so straightforward, how much The Greatest works relies entirely on the verity of Feste’s observations and the cast’s ability to carry these volcanic emotions across. In the smallest of moments, it can be profoundly affecting, like an early scene where the mother, waking up after a nap, begins sobbing uncontrollably as she slips back into consciousness. It’s when the small moments become large ones that Feste overreaches and the shaky performances don’t bail her out. 

Fresh off her Oscar-nominated turn in An Education, Carey Mulligan acquits herself nicely as the deceased student’s girlfriend, an impish loner who turns up at his parents’ doorstep, pregnant with their son’s child. She finds each member of his family grieving in different ways: The mother, played by Susan Sarandon, is a basket case, pausing from her crying jags only to obsess over the driver of the other car (Michael Shannon) and what he might have witnessed in the last moments of her son’s life. By contrast, the father, played by Pierce Brosnan, seems more together, at least on the outside, and he’s much more willing to engage with Mulligan as part of the family. Meanwhile, their youngest son (Johnny Simmons), a recovering drug addict, attempts to work through his feelings in a grief counseling group.

A tearjerker of the Ordinary People kind, The Greatest seems more mysterious and acutely observed at the beginning than it turns out to be once the characters and relationships come into clearer focus. Feste shoots for the raw and cathartic, but her script is disappointingly schematic: Brosnan and Sarandon, both at their worst when called upon for histrionics, are too neatly divided into “the strong one” (who internalizes pain) and “the weak one” (who lets it all out), and the various subplots converge into an ending that’s Hollywood pat. It’s a film about the grieving process that winds up with processed grief.

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2/4]

What a waste of a talented cast! There are times when it can be depressing to see so much acting potential wasted on a script unable to elicit the best from its stars, and this is one such occasion. Although The Greatest can boast a few excellent isolated scenes, the movie as a whole is a melodramatic mess - a mawkish and unconvincing tear-jerker that wants to say something profound about the impact of an unexpected death on a family, but falls so far short that comparisons to the likes of In the Bedroom and Ordinary People feel almost sacrilegious.

The premise of The Greatest promises something more interesting than the soap opera level at which the majority of the story is pitched. One summer day, 18-year old Rose (Carey Mulligan), who is broke and has nowhere to stay, arrives at the front door to the upper middle-class house occupied by the Brewer family. It seems she is three months pregnant by the oldest of the two Brewer sons, Bennett (Aaron Johnson), who died in a car accident on the night the baby was conceived. Rose has decided not to abort the child and, with her mother unable to provide emotional support, she has elected to seek out Bennett's family. Although Allen (Pierce Brosnan) welcomes her with restrained enthusiasm, Grace (Susan Sarandon) is openly hostile. Bennett's younger brother, Ryan (Johnny Simmons), is curious about Rose - he was the only Brewer who knew about her existence before her surprise arrival. It quickly becomes apparent that none of the Brewers are coping well with Bennett's death. Allen is bottling everything up, Grace is obsessing over her son's final 17 minutes, and Ryan is living in denial. It doesn't take long for Rose to realize she has stumbled into a hornet's nest of repressed grief and unresolved anger.

As a portrait of the implications of a tragedy, The Greatest is too over-the-top to be accepted on its own terms. Emotions feel forced and the ending is not earned. There's a pervasive sense that writer/director Shana Feste will do anything to wring tears from her audience and this leads to scenes and performances (most notably the one in which one of the character's defenses crumble) that are borderline cringe-inducing. The impact of grief on an unstable family can be difficult to effectively dramatize, but successful endeavors like the aforementioned In the Bedroom recognize that reticence is a crucial ingredient. There's nothing understated or restrained about the way in which Feste approaches her characters or their circumstances. She's as subtle as the proverbial jackhammer and trades in clichés and obviously scripted moments of artificial catharsis.

That's not to say there's nothing worthwhile in The Greatest. Feste has crafted a number of small, quiet scenes that play effectively on their own, divorced from the overall melodrama. One of the best is the moment in which Rose confesses to Allen how she first met Bennett. There's honesty in the dialogue and both actors are convincing. Most of the flashbacks that build the relationship between Rose and Bennett are also credible. In fact, the love story, which is mostly presented after the fact, is touching - how these two passed each other every day of high school without saying a word and fell for each other through glances, then spent one glorious afternoon and night in each other's company before everything changed. Sadly, Feste's hit-and-miss deftness of touch is more "miss" than "hit," and this makes The Greatest a source of disappointment and frustration.

The high-profile cast is anchored by Susan Sarandon and Pierce Brosnan, but they are easily the weakest links. Sarandon simply isn't very good and Brosnan, who has been busy lately (also appearing in Ghost Writer and Remember Me), is uneven. For the most part, he's believable but his biggest scene is the one in which he stumbles the most obviously. Johnny Simmons has some nice moments although, like Brosnan, he is at his weakest when displaying strong emotions. Carey Mulligan, with her flashing eyes and pixie haircut, doesn't standout as obviously as she did in An Education, but she's the best thing about The Greatest. Notable supporting turns are provided by the likes of Zoe Kravatz (as Ryan's girlfriend), Jennifer Ehle (as Allen's mistress), and Michael Shannon (as a coma patient Grace with whom Grace becomes obsessed).

While it's true that everyone reacts differently to loss, movies often overplay the power of grief in order to elicit a reaction from the audience. Feste's manipulation is awkward and unsophisticated and, as a result, her movie exists upon a foundation of artifice. Even those who succumb to the director's clumsy ministrations and shed a few tears are unlikely to leave The Greatest with the feeling of 90 minutes well spent. Viewer satisfaction, even when it's of a bittersweet variety, demands a connection to the characters and their circumstances. Such a thing requires an emotional honesty that is too often missing from this production.

Slant Magazine [Andrew Schenker]

RopeofSilicon (Brad Brevet) review [C-]

DVD Talk (Jason Bailey) review [3/5]

The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [D+]

FilmJerk.com (Brian Orndorf) review [B] also seen here: DVD Talk and here: Briandom [Brian Orndorf]

CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review

The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review

KYW Newsradio (Bill Wine) review

The Village Voice [Chuck Wilson]

Big Picture Big Sound (David Kempler) review [1.5/4]

New York Daily News (Joe Neumaier) review [2/5]

Steve Rhodes review

Screen International [Tim Grierson] registration required

Entertainment Weekly review Lisa Schwarzbaum

Variety (Todd McCarthy) review

Philadelphia Daily News (Gary Thompson) review [C]

St. Paul Pioneer Press (Chris Hewitt) review [1/4]

San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2/4]

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review

COUNTRY STRONG D+ 66

USA (117 mi) 2010

I can't believe I fell for this shit twice! —J.J.(Jeremy Childs)

Well if you ever want to shoot yourself, this is the movie to watch, as you just might find a reason to do it. This is one down, down, downer of a film, and one that is patheticically short in having anything substantial to offer. Instead it’s a continual stream of country music cliché’s that typifies a made-for-TV movie, feeling more like a Gossip Girl episode, a film that hasn’t an ounce of emotional authenticity to it, yet it’s filled with close ups on faces with perfect hair and make up that have precious little to express. The director has once again written and directed a film that dwells on wretched misery, apparently an obsessional subject that keeps her occupied, but she’s simply the wrong messenger, as that’s not a subject to treat lightly, and what’s missing is the needed depth to make any of this matter. Instead, without a moment’s worth of silence or reflection, it sounds like someone left the radio running with a wall to wall country music soundtrack, feeling more like a Disney movie that’s meant to commercialize the songs and sell movie merchandise. Gwyneth Paltrow is the down and out country music star who is pulled too early from drug and alcohol rehab to quickly resurrect her fledgling career and is filmed and costumed like a perfume commercial, where it could just as easily be Jennifer Lopez or Tyra Banks, each modeling whatever merchandise they have to sell. What this film may unintentionally be expressing is how superficial and shallow the music business really is, and how stupid fans really are to continue to sink their hard earned cash dollars into a business that operates through such callous manipulation, all the while pretending to be down home and real. The singers are marketed as being unpretentious and honest, as if the sincerity comes from the heart, yet they’re doled out to the public like the latest line of automobiles, where sleeping with the right person apparently gets your name on the bill, filled with all the superlative hype and product credibility. Still this seems like an unintended side effect of sitting through a pitifully bad movie, perhaps reading something into it that was never there.

Instead the script is told in dual layers, showing the light going out on a faded country music star while another one rises for the next generation’s up and coming crop of wannabe’s. It’s also told in terms of relationships, as Paltrow has the hots for one of the young rehab attendants (Garrett Hedlund, filmed so often in close up it’s as if he was portraying Zac Efron) who also writes and sings country music on the side, while her old guard husband (Tim McGraw) is overzealously trying to prematurely push her back into the limelight, managing her career while showing little concern for her well being. Also at the same time, a Texas beauty queen turned country singer (Leighton Meester, actually from Gossip Girl, filmed as Vanessa Hudgens) is attempting to get her foot in the door, wanting in the worst way to become a star. Somehow they’re all drawn together in a macabre musical chairs of bedding the wrong sex partners, where if they keep changing, maybe eventually they’ll get it right. Paltrow herself is seen as a pampered diva, a woman of privilege, an incredibally narcissistic individual who hasn’t had a clear head in ages, where drugs have changed her perception of herself. Gone are the days when she was fearless and headstrong and couldn’t wait to get onstage, whereas now she’s plagued by fears and self doubts and has very little connection to anyone anymore, which includes her audience, as she’s been avoiding anything resembling the truth about herself for as long as she can remember. In the same manner, her husband speaks as her over controlling manager but never as her husband anymore, as both are avoiding the obvious. So without any real truth at the center of the picture, the overall message is surprisingly empty, where all that’s left are side effects and leftovers. The film takes an offensive turn with Gywneth’s character, one that really sends a wrong message not only to viewers, but one that diminishes any credibility in the overall story. In what is most likely a dishonest and failed attempt at getting real, the film sends a horrible and irresponsible message that won’t soon be forgotten. This is such a stinker that it’s likely to leave a stain on Paltrow’s career, as this is a tainted role, not only anti-heroic, but one that too easily throws under a bus any sense of humanity.

The Village Voice [Karina Longworth]

Kelly Canter is the Courtney Love of country stars. Spectacular meltdowns onstage have forced Kelly (an inconsistently twanging Gwyneth Paltrow) into rehab. There, her decolletage decked out in black lace and a bling cross, she jams in more than one sense with singer-songwriter-janitor Beau (Tron fox, Garrett Hedlund), until her husband, James (actual country star Tim McGraw, who inexplicably doesn’t sing until the closing credits), drags her on a three-date comeback tour. A sexless Svengali (his reaction to Kelly’s revelation that she’s just had “one of them Brazilian bikini waxes” is the film’s best punchline), James has already found an opening act in Chiles Stanton (Leighton Meester), the Katy Perry of would-be country stars, whose fierce determination is equal parts honey and acid. When Chiles chokes onstage and Beau saves her, James invites his wife’s boyfriend to “get out of these honky tonks and step into the big leagues” by joining the tour. Soon, the aging diva’s bad behavior becomes a bit too much for both hubby and young lover, creating an opening onstage and in bed for the ingenue. Country Strong is sillier—and more tone-deaf—than Paltrow’s advice website GOOP. The intersection of Chiles and Beau’s rise with Kelly’s epic downward spiral (embodied in the image of her crying on a massive JumboTron as floor-to-ceiling American flags are unfurled on either side) is pure A Star Is Born stuff. Except there’s no knowingness here, making Country Strong a rare specimen in our post-ironic age: legitimately unintentional camp.

Chicago Tribune [Michael Phillips]

"Country Strong" writer-director Shana Feste has said that country music has "nothing small or subtle" in its bones. So, right off I question her opinion and suggest that she revisit "Crazy Heart" some time, or "Tender Mercies."

She's true to her word, though. The first five minutes of "Country Strong" go for nothing small or subtle. (Neither does "Black Swan," a far juicier backstage melodrama, which may as well carry the title "Urban Crazy.") Six-time Grammy Award-winning country superstar Kelly Canter, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, has checked into rehab for alcohol and pill problems after a disastrous flame-out in Dallas that caused her miscarriage. Her hard-driving husband and manager (singer and actor Tim McGraw, lately of "The Blind Side") walks in on what looks like a rehab-love-nest situation between his wife and rehab staffer Beau, played by Garrett Hedlund in full, entertaining Kris Kristofferson growl.

Beau's an aspiring singer-songwriter himself, as well as Kelly's Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor and a little something more. The triangle bluntly established, "Country Strong" proceeds to take Kelly back on the road for a comeback tour, with opening acts and romantic complications provided by Beau and by a beauty pageant warbler with stage fright and a few secrets, played by Leighton Meester.

This is Paltrow's first leading role in several years, and it offers the Oscar-winning actress a lot: heartache, discreet trysts with good men and bad, drunken misbehavior and heart-of-gold moments where we see the human being beneath all the tabloid noise. To address your questions: Yes, Paltrow can sing. And yes, she's more than able to pull off a portrayal of an unstable Nashville icon at war with her demons.

But my God is this script predictable. Each relapse and betrayal shows up announced, and then announced again, a little louder, by the dialogue equivalent of an aggravating doorman. When, for example, Kelly arrives at the recording studio only to find that the interloping up-and-comer played by Meester has stolen her song, the scene carries almost no impact. I realize what Feste is suggesting about the notion of subtlety in this universe. But plenty of terrific songwriters have found ways to invest real subtlety, real human feeling — the telling, off-handed detail tucked inside the heart-on-sleeve sentiment — in their work to see familiar country-and-western mythologies reduced to corn syrup this way. The movie's well-acted. Almost everything else about "Country Strong" is weak. "You belong on stage, singing in front of thousands of people," McGraw tells Paltrow early on. We hear it, but despite Paltrow's sincere and often touching efforts, we never fully buy what happens offstage, before and after the singing.

The Hollywood Reporter [Kirk Honeycutt]

The best country songs never take themselves too seriously. Hell, if you really believed every emotion in certain ones, you'd want to kill yourself. But there is usually something good-natured in even a low-down tale of woe.

Writer-director Shana Feste's Country Strong, a melodrama set among country music performers, takes itself far too seriously. Themes and cliches plucked from countless country lyrics fuel a thoroughly unconvincing show business story about a larger-than-life, crash-and-burn star and her unruly entourage of self-serving personalities.

The odd-couple pairing of Oscar winner Gwyneth Paltrow and country superstar Tim McGraw -- who never sings a lick in the entire movie! -- might pull in fans during the opening frames. But this Country doesn't seem strong enough to last more than a few weeks in theaters. Its only real pluses are fine vocal performances from Paltrow -- she's sung in movies such as Duets and Infamous, so this is no surprise -- and by the relative newcomers Garrett Hedlund (Tron: Legacy) and Leighton Meester (Gossip Girl).

Paltrow also looks sensational along with displaying great pipes. Meanwhile, McGraw is asked to go against his own likable personality to play a character who is anal-retentive, self-pitying and continually out of sorts. Who thought that was a good idea?

But then there are few good ideas here since the movie wallows in about every country chestnut imaginable. If it's country, there's got to be a drunken performer struggling to get back in the game, right? If it's country, it's got to have betrayals, broken hearts, a sick kid, a couple of punches to the face and pickup trucks. Yep, got 'em all.

Paltrow plays a country superstar in rehab whose manager-husband (McGraw) pulls her out of the facility far too early to begin a comeback. Somehow while in rehab she contrives -- or rather Feste does it for her -- to have an affair with an up-and-coming singer (Hedlund) who just happens to work in the facility. Next thing you know, her husband has signed him up as her opening act along with his new protege, a beauty queen-turned-singer (Meester). A romantic triangle swiftly turns into a quadrangle.

Oh, and let's not forget a baby bird the superstar has rescued from an abandoned nest, which she carries around as a poor symbolic substitute for the fetus she lost when a drunken fall onstage caused a miscarriage.

It's hard to synopsize this movie because it sounds even worse than it actually is. What relieves the utter crassness of the story are quite a few songs performed well by the two youngsters. You wish that Paltrow's character wasn't forever collapsing onstage so she can sing her heart out too. Near the climax, she finally gets to strut her stuff musically. But why does the movie hold this back?

The dynamics between Hedlund and Meester are equally puzzling. He initially is contemptuous of her and her talent, yet this doesn't prevent him from coming to her rescue when she freezes onstage or staring at her with bedroom eyes despite his supposed romantic loyalty to his married lover.

This is not his only contradictory behavior. On this ill-fated tour, he becomes an overnight sensation but inexplicably wants to shun stardom to play in clubs and honky-tonks.

Country Strong feels like a script that needed a Page One rewrite. Ideas and character relationships are poorly thought out. Motivations are hard to pin down as characters seemingly abandon their own best interests.

Feste, who has one previous effort as a writer-director, last year's The Greatest, fails here to do the most basic thing -- give an audience a rooting interest, or any interest at all, in these four troubled people. Showbiz glamour and soap opera only get you so far.

The Gwyneth Paltrow Problem - TIME Mary Pols

Country Strong Review | In the Third Full Paragraph, I'm Going to ... Dustin Rowles from Pajiba

Movie Shark Deblore [Debbie Lynn Elias]

IC Places [Chris Knipp]

Country Strong Review :: Movies :: Reviews :: Paste Tim Pasham from Paste magazine

Country Strong: movie review - CSMonitor.com Peter Rainer

Country Strong | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Keith Phipps

Slant Magazine [Glenn Heath Jr.]

REVIEW: Gwyneth Paltrow Weighs the Price of Fame in Jumbled But ... Michelle Orange from Movieline

Country Strong Review - Gwyneth Paltrow, Tim McGraw in Country ... Rebecca Murray from About.com

PopMatters [Cynthia Fuchs]

Country Strong - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

HitFix.com [Alonso Duralde]

EricDSnider.com [Eric D. Snider]

Movie Review: Country Strong (2010) – RopeofSilicon.com Movie News ... Brad Brevet

DVD Talk [Brian Orndorf] also seen here: eFilmCritic Reviews and here: Briandom [Brian Orndorf]

A hackneyed backstage soap opera... - ShowReview Frank Swietek from One Guy’s Opinion

Review: Country Strong Is Completely Bonkers - Film.com Laremy Legel from Film.com

Cinematical [William Goss]

Moviefreak.com [Sara Michelle Fetters]

Season of the Witch, Country Strong | The Plight of Jafar Panahi ... Joe Morgenstern from The Wall Street Journal

filmsoundoff [Alex Roberts]

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

exclaim! [Joseph Belanger] also seen here: Black Sheep Reviews [Joseph Belanger]

Country Strong — Inside Movies Since 1920 Amy Nicholson from Box Office magazine

ReelTalk [Betty Jo Tucker]

CBC News - Film - Review: Country Strong Lee Ferguson

Gwyneth Paltrow's "Country Strong" is Maybe Kind Of Good Joe Coscarelli from The Village Voice

Variety.com [Justin Chang]

Country Strong: Like its inspiration, it's not very deep - The ... Kate Taylor from The Globe and the Mail

Movie Review: Country Strong all wrong - thestar.com Peter Howell from The Toronto Star

'Country Strong' review: Paltrow's too-serious musical just misses ... Stephen Whitty from The Star-Ledger

'Country Strong' comes up on the weak side | Philadelphia Daily ... Gary Thompson

Paltrow, McGraw in country foursome - Philly.com Carrie Rickey from The Philadelphia Inquirer

Review: 'Country Strong' is not at all as good as its ads pretend ... Chris Hewitt from St. Paul Pioneer Press

Austin Chronicle [Kimberley Jones]

Tulsa TV Memories [Gary Chew]

Country Strong (D) | Dallas-Fort Worth Entertainment News and ... Tom Maurstad

San Francisco Chronicle [Amy Biancolli]

Los Angeles Times [Betsy Sharkey]

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]

New York Times (registration req'd) Manohla Dargis

Gwyneth Paltrow Offends Working Moms Lisa Johnson Mandel from AOL Jobs, January 18, 2011

Feuerzeig, Jeff

THE DEVIL AND DANIEL JOHNSTON

USA (110 mi) 2005

The Devil and Daniel Johnston Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Brian Belovarac was right, that (thank god or the devil or whoever) finally we've got a contemporary music doc that actually concerns itself with visual aesthetics. Feuerzeig seems to be a close student of the films of Errol Morris, not in the sense of how he constructs arguments or subtly guides his interviewees, but more in the way he uses themes and motifs (the rolling cassette tapes, the comic book images, and Daniel's parents' lower-middle-class Southern Christian decor) to bring Johnston and his world into focus. Feuerzeig demonstrates that, far from being an "outsider" artist, Johnston in many ways completely representative of the rather repressive environment that helped form him. He's the Bizarro face of conservative Christianity -- chaste, pining, doe-eyed, longing to break free but too fearful of the consequences. It was interesting seeing this film and The Notorious Bettie Page on the same day, since both films observe a respectful distance toward their subjects. Yes, Feuerzeig "psychologizes" Johnston, foregrounding his struggles with mental illness, particularly the toll this has taken on his loyal, exhausted elderly parents. But at the same time The Devil and Daniel Johnston never tells the audience what we're supposed to think about Johnston's creative talents. We hear from numerous friends and fans who adore Johnston's plaintive, Casio-plinking songs, and we see snippets of concert footage. But there's very little analysis or explication of the Johnston phenomenon. (Compare this with something like the They Might Be Giants doc, where articulate expert-witnesses tell you why the band are geniuses, and you're just supposed to nod in assent.) It's just presented as a thing that is, and if you're sympathetic to Johnston's raw, guileless, zero-degree-of-humanity expressivity, the film's portrait of the artist will make perfect sense to you. And if, like Mike D'Angelo, you think Johnston is sincere but tragically talentless, a damaged dupe being turned by on-the-make hipsters into a cool primitivist freak show, well, The Devil and Daniel Johnston will confirm that opinion, too. In short, Feuerzeig pulls off quite the high-wire act, forging a document that is penetrating and yet still (like Johnston and his art) functions as a kind of Rorschach test. In short, some artists make windows, others hold up mirrors, and still others smash all available glass on the concrete, leaving you to pick up the pieces.

Feuillade, Louis

All-Movie Guide Sandra Brennan

Louis Feuillade was an important and extremely prolific director of early silent films. Born in Lunel, France, Feuillade attended a Catholic seminary as a boy and then served four years in the cavalry before moving to Paris in 1898. By 1902, he had become a writer for the Right Wing royalist press and four years later began working in French film as a screenwriter. A short time after that, he began directing films. In 1907, Feuillade was appointed chief of production in charge of supervising all of Gaumont films, a job he did in addition to directing. During his less-than 20-year career, the hard-working Feuillade directed over 800 films of different lengths and a wide variety of genres; he also wrote at least 100 film scripts for other directors. In 1915, he served in the French army but was seriously wounded and discharged. Feuillade is best remembered for directing the Fantomas and the Vampire series of fantasies and for being the first to utilize the camera techniques that would later effect the Nouvelle Vague directors of the late '50s. Feuillade's films were also instrumental in shaping the conventions of suspense films and thrillers and in inspiring the German expressionist filmmakers of the 1920s.

Feuillade, Louis World Cinema

One of the great pioneers of French cinema, Feuillade started out as a wine merchant, wrote poetry and journalism on topics ranging from a defence of Catholicism to bull-fights and created a short-lived satirical magazine, La Tomate. He was hired by Alice Guy at Gaumont in 1905 and became artistic director in 1907 when Guy left France. He wrote and directed hundreds of comic films, melodramas, biblical scenes, trick films, etc. His stupendous activity encompassed the long-running children's series Bébé and Boutde-Zan; the ambitious art series "Le Film esthétique," based on original subjects and with sophisticated decors; and the realist series "La Vie telle qu'elle est" ("Life as it is"), meant to give "an impression of truth never seen before." This "impression of truth," based on location shooting, informs Feuillade's most famous films, the extraordinary Fantômas (five feature-length films, 1913-14), a baroque crime series set in Paris which mixes the everyday with the delirious, based on phenomenally successful novels by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre. Fantômas combines anarchist and bourgeois sensibilities, a duality which also informs Les Vampires (1915-16), starring Musidora. Both series were immensely popular, an object of fascination for artists, and the target of Establishment disapproval. Feuillade responded with Judex (1917), another series in which the hero was, nominally, on the side of the law. He also made Vendémiaire (1919), Tih-Minh (1919) and Barrabas (1920). His filmography includes almost 400 titles.

— Ginette Vincendeau, Encyclopedia of European Cinema

Film Reference Roy Armes

Louis Feuillade was one of the most solid and dependable talents in French cinema during the early twentieth century. He succeeded Alice Guy as head of production at Gaumont in 1906 and worked virtually without a break—aside from a period of war service—until his death in 1925. He produced some eight hundred films of every conceivable kind: comedies and contemporary melodramas, biblical epics and historical dramas, sketches and series with numerous episodes adding up to many hours of running time. Alhough most of these films were made from his own scripts, Feuillade was not an innovator. The years of his apprenticeship in the craft of filmmaking were those in which French producers reigned supreme, and he worked uncomplainingly in a context in which commercial criteria were paramount. For Feuillade—as for so many of his successors in the heyday of Hollywood—aesthetic strategies not rooted in sound commercial practices were inconceivable, and a filmmaker's only viable ambition was to reach the widest possible audience.

Most of Feuillade's output forms part of a series of some kind and he clearly saw films in generic terms rather than as individually sculpted works. Though not an originator in terms of the forms or styles he adopted, he made films which are among the finest examples of the various popular genres he successively explored. Before 1914 his work is enormously diverse. It included thirty comic films in the series of La Vie drôle, a group of seriously intended dramas in which a concern with the quality of the pictorial image is apparent (marketed under the banner of the Film esthétique), and a number of contemporary dramas, La Vie telle qu'elle est, with somewhat ambiguous claims to realism. In addition, he made some seventy-six films with a four-year-old child star, Bébé, and another fifty or so with the urchin Bout-de-Zan.

But the richest vein of Feuillade's work is the series of crime melodramas that extended from Fantômas in 1913–14 to Barrabas in 1920. Starting with his celebration of Fantômas, master criminal and master of disguise, who triumphs effortlessly over the dogged ordinariness of his opponent Inspector Juve, Feuillade went on to make his wildest success with Les Vampires. Made to rival the imported American serials, this series reflects the chaotic wartime state of French production. It is marked by improvised stories refusing all logic, bewildering changes of casting (necessary as actors were summoned to the war effort), economical use of real locations, and dazzling moments of total incongruity.

Les Vampires reached a level that Feuillade was never able to duplicate. Subsequent works like Judex and especially La Nouvelle Mission de Judex are marked by a new tone of moralising, with the emphasis placed on the caped avenger rather than the feckless criminals. If the later serials, Tih Minh and Barrabas, contain sequences able to rank with the director's best, Feuillade's subsequent work in the 1920s lacks the earlier forcefulness.

It was the films' supreme lack of logic, the disregard for hallowed bourgeois values—so appropriate at a time when the old social order of Europe was crumbling under the impact of World War I—which led the surrealists such as André Breton and Louis Aragon to hail Fantômas and Les Vampires, and most of Feuillade's subsequent advocates have similarly celebrated the films' anarchistic poetry. But this should not lead us to see Feuillade as any sort of frustrated artist or poet of cinema, suffocating in a world dominated by business decisions. On the contrary, the director was an archetypal middle class family man who prided himself on the commercial success of his work and conducted his personal life in accord with strictly ordered bourgeois principles.

Classic Film and Television Home Page Michael E. Grost

The Innovators 1910-1920: Detailing The Impossible Vicki Callahan from Sight and Sound, April 1999

When Louis Feuillade first began to make crime serials he was vilified. But 'Fantômas' and 'Les Vampires' began a rich tradition of questioning narrative certainty

LES VAMPIRES

10 episodes: 1: The Cut Head (31 minutes); 2: The Ring that Kills (13 minutes); 3: The Red Book (39 minutes); 4: The Specter (30 minutes); 5: The Escape of the Dead Man (35 minutes); 6: Hypnotic eyes (53 minutes); 7: Satanus (42 minutes); 8: The Master of the Thunder (50 minutes); 9: The Poisoner (48 minutes); 10: The Terrible Marriage (57 minutes)

France (399 mi) 1915

Les Vampires Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine

Louis Feuillade joined Gaumont studios in 1905 as a scriptwriter, hired by none other than Alice Guy, who Feuillade would replace as the company's chief studio director two years later. Feuillade would go on to direct approximately 700 films over the course of his 20-year career, none more popular than his silent ten-part serial Les Vampires. Feuillade's achievements are often ignored in light of the technical innovations being pioneered at the time by the likes of D.W. Griffith and Georges Méliès, but the director's magical mystery tour through a deadly Parisian landscape is, like A Trip to the Moon, a towering and radical work of narrative fiction that, like Broken Blossoms, is remarkably attuned to the morality of the time.

Critic Armond White has defended Stephen Spielberg over the years against a critical establishment seemingly opposed to the director's cinema of fun. The novelistic Les Vampires is in many ways no different than, say, Spielberg's Jurassic Park. According to Feuillade, a ferocious anti-intellectual, "A film is not a sermon nor a conference, even less a rebus, but a means to entertain the eyes and the spirit." And while Les Vampires is every bit as adventuresome as Jurassic Park and even Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, its Machiavellian reflection of a complacent bourgeois order on the brink of collapse makes this realist masterwork a precursor to the surrealist cinema of Luis Buñuel, who, incidentally, was a great fan of Feuillade's film.

The allure of Les Vampires is a simple one. During the early-to-mid-1800s, Charles Dickens milked the Victorian serial publication to great success, a model that continues to entice housewives in today's television soap operas and one that Stephen King successfully exploited with the release of his six-part Green Mile series. The public's voracious fascination with the serial is certainly not unlike a drug addiction. Feuillade, like Dickens and King, gives the spectator his fix, and in telling a story over the course of months (maybe even years), the author ensures the spectator will come back for more. More simply, Feuillade no doubt recognized that some great stories, like life itself, shouldn't be consumed in one sitting. Now, the challenge was to tell the story without betraying the lives of the characters, and in turn the lives of those who bought into them.

There are no vampires in Les Vampires, at least not the blood-sucking kind. There is, though, a group of petty thieves who revolt against the banality of their time by feeding on the anxiety of the Parisian upper class. Nouvelle Vague auteur Jacques Rivette, also a fan and champion of the film, doesn't immediately come to mind when one thinks of Feuillade's criminal aesthetic. But Feuillade's influence on Rivette is obvious, primarily in the way characters slither in and out of rooms through doorways and walk atop rooftops; these motions are anxious, primordial, even pre-sexual. Though the alluring pictorialism of Les Vampires is difficult to ignore, it's ultimately the serpentine and claustrophobic interiors of the film that truly inspire awe and there's a mesmerizing truth beneath the film's realism.

Observe Feuillade's Paris as a body interconnected by a dizzying network of veins. Characters, good and bad, enter rooms via chimneys, water wells, and paintings, slowly invading their environment and seducing themselves with the act of penetration. The vampire threat even takes the film's human vermin by surprise. In the film's fourth episode ("The Spectre"), Musidora's Irma Vep readies herself to filch a room safe only to discover that the sucker in the next room is one of her own. The shape-shifting Le Grand Vampire (Jean Ayamé) is equally titillated and threatened by the mystique they've actively and dangerous propagated. (That a Supreme Court judge is also a member of their group suggests members of the bourgeois were easily "hooked" on this violent mystique.) The Vampires repeatedly tease the public with their presence: their silly dance troupe openly advertises Irma Vep on the marquee. A careful bystander (or is he just paranoid?) concludes that her name must be an anagram for vampire!

In his essay "The Public Is My Master: Louis Feuillade and Les Vampires," Fabrice Zagury stresses, "A long time after Griffith reshaped American cinema, Feuillade kept rejecting the new editing methods, choosing instead to reserve cuts on action and close-ups as moments of unusual punctuation." Not surprisingly, it's these very moments in Les Vampires that are often more daring than Feuillade's long shots. In episode three ("The Red Codebook"), Philippe Guérande (Edouard Mathé), a reporter for the The Chronicle investigating the Vampire crimes, pretends to fall asleep in an attempt to trap Irma Vep, here "disguised" as a maid. He observes through a small hand mirror as she poisons his drink; when Feuillade cuts to a shot of Irma reflected in the mirror, it feels as if this is the first punctuation in the film besides a cut to an intertitle. In episode six ("Hypnotic Eyes"), Feuillade cuts to the first and possibly only close-up of Juan-José Moréno (Fernand Herrmann) in an attempt to emphasize the power of the man's gaze.

It's clear that Feuillade championed action over montage, and Les Vampires is a seductive collection of double-crossings, a major point of focus in Irma Vep, Olivier Assayas' homage to Feuillade's film. Even the film's more plot-fueled segments are ridiculously entertaining. In "Dead Man's Escape," Guérande escapes (again!) from the grasp of the Vampires, partner and ex-criminal Oscar Mazamette (the hammy Marcel Lévesque) saves the day, and the Vampires' rival gang leader Moréno rises fabulously from the dead. As Guérande and Mazamette escape from Moréno's secret hideout, the Vampires have already gassed a roomful of Parisian aristocrats in order to steal their fortunes. That Les Vampires opens with news of a severed and missing head makes it all the more disappointing that these gassed aristocrats aren't really dead.

Zagury believes that, stylistically, Les Vampires may have had an impact on both German expressionism and film noir. The key word here is "may" because, since the film remained unseen in Britain until the '40s and in America until the '60s, it's influence is easier to trace much later: in works as diverse as Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel to Francis Ford Coppola's "epic"sodic The Godfather. As episode five comes to a close, Feuillade not only anticipates the birth of the crime drama as we now know it, but also the demise of his Vampires. After a series of double-crossings, Moréno gets the upper hand over Guérande. The reporter-cum-detective—who gets his daily fix by reading the newspaper (Feuillade himself was a columnist for the Revue Mondiale)—is immediately drawn to one headline: "In all things one must take the end into account."

In episode seven ("Satanas"), Moréno joins forces with the film's motley crew of thieves. After duping an American couple who fled to Paris with money belonging to millionaire George Baldwin, Moréno and the vampires bilk the millionaire himself after he sails to Europe. The thieves love the idea of screwing the same person twice and their plan is as richly detailed as it is drunk with irony. In order to forge the millionaire's signature, a vampire poses as a journalist from Modern Woman magazine. Of course Baldwin decides to sit with the woman. The only French the millionaire knows is: "Parisian women are the most charming I've ever seen." Feuillade, like the sexy, defiant and androgynous Irma Vep, seems to openly flaunt his control over the spectator. It's also easy for them to extol this power because they have an uncanny ability to recognize weakness in both the victim and the spectator. And the chaos they create has a delirious rollover effect.

To keep us interested, Feuillade continued to introduce new characters right up until the 10th episode ("The Terrible Wedding"). It isn't too far-fetched to liken the Vampires to a disease that invades Paris's human body. If they're contagious they're also seemingly incurable. Because the film's Vampires are so resistant to authority, it comes as no surprise they prove so self-devouring by serial's end. The irony here is that the Vampires hone in on bourgeois complacency for personal gain and it's their own self-absorption that repeatedly and finally does them in. Feuillade saw the Vampire power struggles as business as usual. It's a shame then that Irma Vep plays second fiddle to no less than three male Le Grand Vampires throughout the course of the film (Louis Leubas' Satanus and Frederik Moriss' Vénénos followed Jean Ayamé's original).

Irma Vep is nonetheless a ferocious woman warrior. Though she outlasts her fellow Vampires, she is killed unceremoniously by Guérande's fianceé, the very delicate "modern woman" her clan actively and repeatedly revolts against. Perhaps there's a final message here: that the romantic power of the Vampires can repel foreign threats (the American characters in the film are all thwarted) but is no match for France itself. If Zagury is correct that Les Vampires portrays a France rooted in the 19th century, the film's finale seemingly anticipates the birth of the 20th century. Several times during the course of the film, characters make clawing motions with their hands as if grabbing invisible objects before them. Perhaps these are allusions to Feuillade's hold over his audience. Les Vampires grips you for nearly 400 minutes. The high is exhilarating but the comedown is devastating.

Les Vampires Notes Midway Through a Louis Feuillade Serial, by J. Greenberg from Kabinet magazine

JUDEX

France (300 mi, 12 episodes, 25 mi each) 1916

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

In this breezy, dreamlike 1917 French serial, an enormous pack of hounds runs with the car of the dorky title hero (Rene Creste) as he drives around the Paris suburbs in his flowing black cape, righting wrongs and generally taking care of business; one of these dogs even rings the gate bell for him at one of his stops. These glorious, goofy mutts are emblematic of what makes Louis Feuillade a greater director of popular cinema than Spielberg or Lucas; his serials from the teens may be the greatest of all adventure films, representing the essence and peak of fantasy filmed on real locations. Less sublime or mysterious than Les vampires or Tih Minh (which is even better), Judex proved to be a bigger hit than either, and even spawned an inferior sequel. The surveillance camera/TV/mirror inside Judex's secret cave, relentlessly tracking the banker villain in his cell, presaged Lang's Mabuse, Orwell's Big Brother, and all the versions of Batman, and marks the genteel Feuillade, a spiritual contemporary of Lewis Carroll, as one of the inventors of 20th-century paranoia. It all runs more than six hours, but there's not a better movie in town. With the great Musidora, Yvette Andreyor, Marcel Levesque, and Bout de Zan, all Feuillade regulars.

Village Voice (J. Hoberman)

The great French director Louis Feuillade (1873–1925) is the founding father of pulp cinema, as well as the original cult filmmaker. Feuillade's wildly popular, epic serials Fantômas (1913–14) and Les Vampires (1915–16) were predicated on mad geniuses, criminal gangs, and vast conspiracies. Shot mainly on the streets of Paris, they were beloved by the surrealists for demonstrating that, as the poet Paul Eluard would write, "there is another world, but it is in this one."

Released just before and during World War I, Fantômas and Les Vampires were also accused of anti-patriotism, demoralizing French audiences, or worse. Hence, so the story goes, Feuillade obligingly sought to produce a more positive, censor-friendly serial: Judex (1916), named for its detective hero, a legal vigilante and the movies' original cloaked crime-fighter. While the first two Feuillade epics are largely urban, Judex is mainly bucolic. The earlier serials feasted on nightlife; much of this one verges on domestic melodrama. Children are prominent (and so is kidnapping). Almost every major character has a mother—not least the caped crusader himself, who has promised his mom that he will avenge his late father, who was ruined by an unscrupulous banker.

Feuillade called Judex "a family show, exalting the finest sentiments." Yet, however lyrical, the movie remains unsettling. As envisioned by Feuillade, the French countryside can be nearly as sinister as an empty boulevard. Musidora, the actress who memorably played the star vamp of the Vampire gang, Irma Vep, is here slimmed down and somewhat less ferocious as the film's major villainess. Still, she's not without her erotic wiles or theatrics. Indeed, it's arguable that Judex, which has a relatively low body count for Feuillade, is even more voyeuristic than its precursors.

The second of Feuillade's serials to be released on DVD (Les Vampires is available from Waterbearer), Judex has 12 episodes and runs over five hours. The tinted print is excellent and the new score, composed by Robert Israel, is appropriately spare and moody.

Turner Classic Movies James Steffen

Flickhead review

not coming to a theater near you (Leo Goldsmith)

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson)

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer)

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

Feyder, Jacques

Jacques Feyder Liam O'Leary from Film Reference

Jacques Feyder Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television

CARNIVAL IN FLANDERS (La Kermesse héroïque)

France (117 mi) 1935

Introduction Sight and Sound

Jacques Feyder's joyfully immoral satire, La Kermesse héroïque (Carnival In Flanders) was greeted with acclaim and controversy on its original release - acclaim at international film festivals where it scooped top prizes, and controversy in Belgium where it caused small riots: some protested about the mocking portrait of Flemish notables whilst others saw in it allusions to the Flemish collaborators during the Germans' occupation of the area during World War I. Some even called it "Nazi-inspired". Feyder and his wife Françoise Rosay (who stars) almost simultaneously made a German version called Die klugen Frauen (The Clever Women) and this version won the Best Director Award at the Venice Film Festival 1936.

The German title hints at one of the remarkable elements of La Kermesse héroïque which is that this is certainly an early feminist screen comedy. The tongue-in-cheek farce is set in a Flemish town in the early 1600s which is facing invasion by the Spanish army. The men of the town are spineless and the mayor pretends to be dead, but his rather more courageous and sophisticated wife takes control of the situation and by recognizing and appealing to the enemy's base needs, she and the town's women avert certain catastrophe.

Also remarkable is the look of the film, which recreates the world of Flemish painters. Feyder aimed to bring to life Flemish painting, which he achieves with great success through the detailed costumes, exemplary photography by Harry Stradling and through the minutely detailed studio sets. These recreated the Flemish town of Boom which still exists in Belgium, the houses being built on a smaller scale to elevate the importance of the characters and to ease framing

Fidell, Hannah

A TEACHER B- 82

USA (77 mi) 2013 Official site

An unusual choice for a first feature, as the subject matter itself is simply never that compelling, and for that reason, the first half of the film drags terribly, as there’s little to hold the audience’s interest. Why should we care about a smart and attractive high school English teacher sleeping with one of her students, where the idea just seems foreign to most viewers, as this is an area we’re not particularly interested in exploring. Making matters worse, they’re something of a bore together, as Eric (Will Brittain) has very little personality, yet obviously thinks very highly of himself, if for no other reason than he’s sleeping with one of his teachers. Due to his maturity level, who knows what he’s saying behind her back? What is interesting is how little information is provided by the writer/director Hannah Fiddell, where the affair is in full bloom by the time the film begins, with no reference to any begin point. It’s a bit icky to watch her in front of a classroom knowing full well what she’s doing afterwards. They communicate via text messages, have sex in cars, or places where no one is at home, always eager to see one another again, setting up their next date, where they both behave like teenagers. There’s never any clue why this is going on, but the story is told completely through the eyes of the teacher, Diana (Lindsay Burdge), who is on screen for the entire duration, where the audience reserves the right to withhold sympathy for a teen predator who may already be a rapist.

The film that comes to mind might surprise some, but it’s Peter Bogdanovich’s superb THE LAST PICTURE SHOW (1971), where Timothy Bottoms as Sonny is a high school football player who has an affair with the coach’s wife, Cloris Leachman as Ruth Popper, largely taking pity on her as he feels she’s so lonesome, but he also gets what he’s after in the bargain. This is an affair that has context, as the film is about the passing of an era, how Texas oil towns like this one are drying up, eventually turning into ghost towns, leaving the jobs elsewhere. The effect this has on the population is profoundly sad, as people’s lives are as desolate as the empty Texas landscape. Set in the early 50’s, never once in that film did anyone ever think of rape or pedophilia. But in A TEACHER, that’s all one thinks about, leaving a bitter aftertaste, where just watching one sexual escapade after another is difficult to watch, where much like Michael Haneke’s THE PIANO TEACHER (2001), making the audience squirm in their seats is the desired effect. But there is a moment that turns this film around, where the unconscionable suddenly develops a conscious. When they are almost discovered at Eric’s father’s ranch, Diana freaks out, suddenly aware of the consequences she’s been avoiding thinking about all along. From that point on, it’s a slow walk into the descent of her own tragic doom, becoming a tense psychological drama where her life starts to unravel before our eyes.

Thoughtless sex was so easy for this couple, but when she thinks about losing Eric and what might happen if she loses her job, it’s not so easy, and she yearns for simpler times when it came automatically. Her own emotional dysfunction turns young Eric off, as he’s not getting his way, as she’s becoming a hassle to deal with, all things that complicate the life of an overly pampered and uncomplicated teenager. The use of percussive drum sounds amassing in her head is quite effective, as she’s emotionally off kilter, unable to stop the madness that’s enveloping her. She becomes more and more obsessed with having Eric as her own personal plaything, where the tables have turned, and she becomes the pleading child that begs to spend time together, while his indifference only feeds her mental instability. This section shows some inspired filmmaking, as Burdge’s performance is stunning, where we’re at times sympathetic, fascinated, and repulsed by what we see, as Diana becomes overly obsessed to the point where she becomes a stalker, and still can’t stop herself. What’s most effective here is how completely naturalistic she makes it feel, as the audience is locked into her mindset, where she makes a beeline into mental confusion and personal despair. We never learn the source of her return to teenage adolescence, though she’s not close with her family. She spends all her time on her cellphone, continually checking out photos of Eric on his Facebook page, avoiding all other social contact, isolating herself until he’s the only thing in her life that matters, where what might have been a schoolgirl crush turns into statutory rape territory. What’s perhaps most startling is the director’s choice to use such quiet restraint as we simply observe Diana when she finally realizes all is lost. It’s a brief venture into forbidden territory, and by the time it’s all over, none of it seems to matter anymore.

NewCity Chicago  Ray Pride

The essentialism of Hannah Fidell’s first feature, “A Teacher”—remaining close on the rash behavior of one character to the exclusion of other narrative niceties—sounds like a dangerous choice, until you see the performance by Lindsay Burdge. Minimalist, meet maximalist. In a wealthy Texas suburb, Diana becomes obsessed with one of her students after starting an ill-starred, illegal affair. Burdge’s tense, taut, tactile presence is not reduced by psychology or amplified by melodrama: she wants, she needs, she seethes, she bleeds. Burdge amazes. 75m

Film Blather [E. Novikov]

A Teacher is a study of a profoundly asymmetric relationship between a high school teacher and a student — like the anti-Oleanna. Diana Watts (Lindsay Burdge) is a young, pretty English teacher who’s desperately trying to keep secret her passionate affair with Eric (Will Brittain), a tall and confident senior in her class. Almost immediately it becomes clear that Eric holds all the cards. There’s the obvious matter of the consequences of being found out: the ignominous end of her career, versus probably some high-fives from his friends. But — contrary to the the conventional wisdom about these kinds of couplings — the emotional stakes are all hers, too. They’re both trying to simulate a real adult relationship, but while Eric is doing it aspirationally, Diana has invested her entire being in this clearly hopeless endeavor.

It never becomes totally clear why that is, though the film hints at a troubled family history; the words aren’t spoken aloud, but abuse seems like a possibility. To her credit, director Hannah Fidell doesn’t dwell on the root cause of Diana’s issues. The pleasure of A Teacher (and I use “pleasure” a bit loosely) is watching Fidell and her actors flip the power dynamic we would usually associate with this sort of story — and watching that dynamic play out without either Diana’s awareness or Eric’s active participation. He’s not out to hurt her, and the degree to which he even knows he can is not obvious. (A scene in which he regards her for a few moments and then orders her to take off her clothes suggests that he’s not totally blind to his position, while the ending strongly hints that he didn’t quite sign up for the full extent of her dependency.) But to watch him blithely wolf down breakfast on a morning when they were nearly found out while she sits across the table, her hands literally trembling, is to see the most wrenching romantic mismatch since The Deep Blue Sea.

Fidell has a tremendous ear for authentic, unforced dialogue, from the realistic classroom banter to the fraught collision between Diana’s earnest neediness and Eric’s proto-frat-boy, “Shit, chill out!,” nonchalance. And Burdge and Brittain limn the contours of their characters’ malformed relationship with perfect clarity. This is a tough, essential film.

A Teacher daringly asks us to understand the plight of a predator ... Timothy E. Raw from Vérité

Inappropriate teacher-student relationships increasingly clog our headlines. Sex scandals splashed across the front-page paint a predatory picture of authority figures crossing professional boundaries, and seize upon our collective feelings of outrage whenever a societal sense of right and wrong is violated. Increasingly reported in national news, this phenomenon has unsurprisingly provided the basis for much salacious entertainment on screen. The real life case of high school media teacher Pam Smart has twice been dramatized with Helen Hunt and Nicole Kidman in the staring roles of Murder in New Hampshire and Gun Van Sant’s To Die For respectively. David Strathairn found himself dangerously involved with a damaged student in Sundance fave Blue Car and this year, a township pitchfork parade came knocking at Julianne Moore’s door in The English Teacher. A quick Google search pulls up “The 50 Most Infamous Female Teacher Sex Scandals”, a list of shattered lives and mug shots shamefully awaiting their own big screen adaptation or TV movie of the week.

Hannah Fidell’s A Teacher boldly bypasses the familiar ordeal of a woman trying to salvage her reputation. The film ends before anything goes public and begins a good while after the “see me after class” flirting and that first extracurricular tryst. Accusations aren’t hurled and suspicions never turn to slander. The only person judging anybody is the perpetrator.

We first meet Diana (Lindsay Burdge) on her morning run, seen shortly thereafter driving to school. Fairly mundane were it not for the agitated strings of Brian McOmber’s score. The affair she’s recently begun having with one of her students (Will Brittain) weighs heavy on her mind and the music immediately puts us in the thick of the emotional maelstrom. Caring little for context or scene setting, Fidell gets right to examining one woman’s torn and tortured nature. Diana’s unlawful actions spring from confused urges and undetermined desires about which she hasn’t the slightest idea. Trapped in a tempest of powerful passions, the patheticness of Diana’s home life is a picture slowly pieced together by the viewer that she cannot see.

Not unduly troubled by adult responsibilities, the only thing remotely grown up about this teacher is her job. A terminally sick father is forgotten and lumped on her brother, and she’s equally dismissive of her colleagues at work. Living with a roommate like a pair of perpetual students, Diana attends house parties blaring rap music, talking to men still sipping solo cups and wearing backwards baseball hats. As juvenile as the jailbait she’s jumping, the smaller age barrier makes it almost impossible to distinguish Diana’s twenty something suitors from the students in her care. Lovemaking has its own responsibilities, and if her sex with Eric lacks illicit charge, it’s because Diana’s own immaturity doesn’t seem to warrant it. The camera maintains a suitable emotional distance, fading out whenever things get too hot and heavy.

For lack of any real men, Diana goes looking elsewhere, though her own behaviour is aggressively adolescent. Hanging on the phone for a late night booty call like the gossipy girls whose phones she’d be confiscating in class, she willingly sends naked selfies to her horny teenage lover without a moment’s hesitation. Only after they’ve done the deed, do Eric’s hormones turns cold; Diana’s immodest confession of hardly being able to wait till the next time, a painful post-coital reminder of the squalid relationship he’s entered into. Diana’s tragic dismissal of the gulf between her own adoration and a young buck’s complete indifference is crushingly conveyed by Lindsay Burdge, whose unsentimental portrayal somehow manages to find a very human vulnerability in such erratic and deeply questionable behaviour.

Finally able to resist Eric, her willpower comes too late. When he forces himself on her, Diana’s resistance is hesitant, a terrible realization of how the maw of her crime has swallowed her whole. Scared to shout at Eric for fear of setting off a teenage tantrum that could blow their cover, Diana is as much a self-saboteur as she is sexual predator, so it hardly matters past the point of no return.  A shot of her morning jog in slow motion is an artful suggestion that however it plays out, there’s no outrunning what she’s done. Figuratively and literally she’s made her bed. Now she must lie in it.

In Review Online [Carson Lund]

Flavorwire Michelle Dean

The New Female Predators of Page and Screen - Film School Rejects Kate Erbland, a comparative essay about the film and Alissa Nutting’s book, Tampa

Qwipster.net [Vince Leo]

"A Teacher" Review: But Then My Homework Was Never ... - Pajiba Seth Freilich

Review: Hannah Fidell's 'A Teacher' Is A Flawed But Striking Drama ... Gabe Toro from The Playlist

The Steve Pulaski Message Board [Steve Pulaski]

The House Next Door [Zeba Blay]

Paste Magazine Tim Grierson

Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]

Slant Magazine [Chris Cabin]

Sound On Sight Scott Colquitt

A Teacher / The Dissolve Mike D’Angelo

Movie Mezzanine [Dan Schindel]

A Teacher 2013 Movie Review - Film School Rejects Kate Erbland

Onion AV Club Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

[Review] A Teacher - The Film Stage Jared Mobarak

A Teacher Movie Review : Shockya.com Brent Simon

Film-Forward.com Ben Bliumis

NPR.org » A Teacher Astray, But Who's Leading Whom? Tomas Hachard

Film.com [William Goss]

Sundance Next Weekend 2013 Review: A TEACHER ... - Twitch Ben Umstead

A TEACHER Facets Multi Media

Exclusive: Hannah Fidell, Lindsay Burdge and Will ... - Shockya.com Brent Simon interviews the director and two lead actors from Shockya, September 9, 2013

Hannah Fidell - Filmmaker Magazine | The Magazine of ... Nick Dawson director profile from Filmmaker magazine, 2013

A Woman Under the Influence: Hannah Fidell on A Teacher Brandon Harris interview from Filmmaker magazine, September 5, 2013

Hollywood Reporter  David Rooney

Review: Hannah Fidell's 'A Teacher' doesn't make the grade ... Sheri Linden from The LA Times

LA Weekly [Andrew Schenker]

A Teacher Movie Review & Film Summary (2013) | Roger Ebert Marsha McCreadie

A Teacher (Movie);Teacher, A - Movies - The New York Times Manohla Dargis

Tampa by Alissa Nutting – review | Books | The Guardian Sarah Churchwell book review

Bookslut | Tampa by Alissa Nutting Josh Zaidman book review

Alissa Nutting's Tampa - The Brooklyn Rail Weston Cutter book review

Alissa Nutting's 'Tampa,' and More - NYTimes.com

Field, Connie

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ROSIE THE RIVETER

USA (65 mi) 1980

Chicago Reader [Dave Kehr] (capsule review)

Connie Field's intelligent, quietly passionate 1980 documentary on the women's workforce of World War II. Its subject isn't so much the ability of women to do a "man's job" in factories and construction as it is the power and abuse of propaganda, the ease with which ideologies can be altered to suit the economic needs of the moment. Field documents the ways in which the image of the working woman was changed from a negative to a positive one, and then shifted back again when postwar society demanded wives and mothers. The presentation is honest, direct, and disturbing. 60 min.

Time Out

'Do the job HE left behind' the wartime posters urged American women. Connie Field's documentary explores and exposes the sexual hierarchy of labour operated during (and after) World War II as women quit their homes for the factories while the menfolk did their bit for 'Democracy'. Despite guarantees of continued work for women, the end of the war saw men resume their traditional position in the economy, and women encouraged 'Back to the stove and the marital bed'. Combining propaganda film and newsreel footage - often to hilarious effect - Field contrasts it with recollections from some of the women today in interviews that reveal the extent of sexual and racial discrimination they encountered. Consummately skilful in articulating vital political issues through a strong sense of humour.

FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg Bagley]

Countless documentaries have been made about World War II — especially since the debut of the History Channel on cable — but Connie Field’s The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter remains unique. Filmed at a time when many former “Rosies” were still alive and able to remember their experiences during the war, Riveter showcases first-hand interviews with women who experienced both a unique opportunity to learn “men’s work”, and a devastating loss of empowerment soon thereafter. Field is especially adept at showing how the American propaganda machine churned out rhetoric meant to make women feel guilty during the war if they didn’t contribute to the workforce, and guilty afterwards if they hoped to keep the jobs they’d grown to enjoy.

User comments from imdb Author: Zen Bones from USA

This is by far, the best documentary on the American home front during the Second World War. It's also an excellent and extremely entertaining look at the spark that ignited the women's liberation movement nearly thirty years before it 'officially' planted its roots. With thousands of men leaving the factories to fight in the war, and with the urgent, escalating need for America to arm itself, women were strongly encouraged to join the factory workforce. They came from all over the country and discovered skills they never knew they had, both as laborers, and as independent women. They were self-sufficient and strong (many of them endured double-shifts on a fairly regular basis), and they eventually discovered new freedoms by earning their own incomes and making their own choices on how to spend that money. Connie Field has created an extremely entertaining documentary that's choked full of interviews with women from all walks of life. She intersperses lots of the newsreel footage and the popular songs that had been created in order to encourage and inspire the female workforce. And she illustrates the myriad of ways in which women were discouraged from working after the war had ended, and how strong a role the media played in encouraging women to raise families and stay in the kitchen. This film is rare glimpse of the Second World War from the female perspective, and a vital document of American history.

All Movie Guide [Mark Deming]

Jump Cut [Sue Davenport]

Alternative Cinema in the 80s Chuck Kleinhans from Jump Cut

Field, Todd

IN THE BEDROOM B 87

USA (130 mi) 2001 ‘Scope

Time Out review

A supremely confident, controlled US indie, this debut from actor Field isn't the sex romp its title might suggest, but a well-tempered study of communion and claustrophobia, trespass and transgression. In the first place it's an immaculate family portrait of a middle-aged New England couple (Spacek and Wilkinson) on the brink of losing their grown son (Stahl) to college, hoping his fling with an older single-mum (Tomei) won't outlast the summer. The film conveys these relationships, their intimacies and tensions, with enveloping ease and lucidity, before taking first one and then another abrupt turn into unpredictable terrain. All this is acted with immense delicacy and authority so that when peace erupts, the emotional violence is visceral. At the film's core is a portrait of grief and the healing process, evoked with remarkable containment by Spacek and Wilkinson, she burrowing deep into repressed reproachfulness, he correspondingly lost in a daze of uncertainty. And if the final stage alone nudges up against genre bounds, it none the less raises some pertinent questions. Meanings here are fluid, but ultimately it's a film about the implacable face of bourgeois composure: the surface is ruffled, something stirs in the deep, but finally tranquillity reasserts itself.

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

A story about an exceedingly normal upper-middle class family in a small fishing village in Maine. The father is a doctor who has repressed his emotions all of his life, and the mother is a caring responsible citizen and teacher. Their son is attracted to, and dating, an older woman with two children. She is attempting to maintain distance from her violent ex-husband. A simple story with honest overtones.

Filmed almost exclusively with no panning shots and a static camera, director Todd Field has been able to crawl inside our psyche, under our thickest layer of compassion, and burrow his story deeply in our sense of justice and vengeance. This film creeps up on you with such stealth, you almost feel detached from your life and part of the onscreen characters activities. You find yourself constantly questioning behavior in their circumstances. Many characters are slightly flawed only helping to adhere to the truthful atmosphere of the film. The acting is magnificent on all fronts and the story even better. Even though this film won countless awards and accolades it only adds to my disbelief on how more people are not aware of it. This is as close to a masterpiece as I have seen in few years.

Slate (David Edelstein) review

Shortly after Sept. 11, Slate's Robert Wright posed vital questions about the human desire for retaliation. Is it natural? Is it inherent? More important: Is it adaptive? Does it perpetuate the species or hasten its destruction? I've been troubled by such questions since I became a movie critic and found myself reckoning with a ceaseless stream of vigilante pictures, most of which exploit modern anxieties in ways that only reinforce them—along with a conviction that the right of vengeance is key to Americans' manifest destiny. Among the reasons to be grateful for In the Bedroom (Miramax Films) is that it reimagines a familiar scenario in a subtly different context. The movie is anchored in a persistent dread: of what might happen to our loved ones if we're too vigilant, and of what might happen to them if we're not vigilant enough. It's about living in a society in which our survival instincts have been muted even as the laws of nature continue, inexorably, to operate. The tension is unresolvable, which is why this is a genuine modern tragedy.

It's also the best movie of the last several years: the most evocative, the most mysterious, the most inconsolably devastating. It marks the return of a major American actress (Sissy Spacek, in her greatest performance—yes, even better than in Carrie [1976] and Coal Miner's Daughter [1980]) and the arrival of a major American screenwriter, Robert Festinger, and director, Todd Field. Known best as an actor (he was the ill-fated pianist in Eyes Wide Shut [1999]), Field works without flash, but his images have a mythic power. The first few shots establish both the mood and the central theme: A beautiful, bare-legged young woman (Marisa Tomei) runs through waving tall grass; a beautiful boy (Nick Stahl) kisses her passionately on the ground; across town, the boy's father (Tom Wilkinson) watches that same breeze rustle the leaves outside his window, and he smiles

Wilkinson is Matt Fowler, a small-town Maine doctor with an easygoing faith in civilization that runs counter to his knowledge of the natural world. As a part-time lobsterman (it was his dad's boat), he knows what happens when, say, two males are caught in a trap with a female; but that same knowledge isn't fully engaged when the estranged husband of his son's girlfriend begins to lurk in the vicinity. He tells his wife, Ruth (Sissy Spacek), that he'll think about phoning the police—he'll sleep on it.

In part, Fowler is trying to function as a counterweight. Ruth can't stand the way her only son, Frank (Stahl), is letting this older woman—uneducated, reportedly promiscuous, with two children—interfere with his education: Her boy, a talented architect, should be in Boston, she maintains, in school. But Ruth's cold, seething attempts to break up the relationship—to interfere with something as natural as the wind—only drive Frank away from her. Fowler agrees with his wife that their son should be in Boston—but he doesn't mind the woman, either; he can see that she's a dish; and he never had anything like her in his youth. And the estranged husband—well, that will blow over, we're all grown-ups here. His middle ground seems to him the most stable spot.

It might seem that way to us, too, if we didn't sense from the start what was coming; and if we didn't see the predatory instincts in the eyes of Richard Strout (William Mapother) as he watches his wife and children with another man. I've never seen Mapother—but I recognize his Strout from my unconscious. He has a soft, babyish face with a cleft chin and hooked nose; his visage signals both his childish sense of entitlement and his capacity for violence. He plays with his boys like a gorilla, poking them, attempting to awaken the fight in them. He's so primal that you almost pity him, later, when he tries to explain his actions to Fowler—"He was making it with my wife"—as if reaching out to a fellow dominant male instead of a father.

The script of In the Bedroom, by Festinger and Field, is based on "Killings," a short story by the late Andre Dubus (senior). It's no slur on Dubus' work (which is masterful) to say that the movie is deeper and richer—that it does full justice to Dubus' themes and adds a philosophical tug of war of its own. Festinger and Field have made the Fowlers slightly higher-class than their Maine co-workers and friends. Matt is physically at home in this world but too gentle and inhibited to enter into it fully; and Wilkinson's tentativeness and slight effeminacy are marvelously expressive. Ruth is a former professor who doesn't want her son to be trapped in this cultural backwater the way she is—and who fears that, with his talent, intellect, and sensitivity, he's not equipped to survive in it. She conducts a local singing group in Eastern European choral music, and those hymns give the film a primordial current, as well capturing her own, otherworldly mixture of longing and rage.

Spacek conducts that chorus with a face that's like something out of Greek tragedy—an archetypal mask that can absorb and reflect all the anger and sorrow in the world. Her face is broader now and less reptilian, but there's nothing soft about her presence; her Ruth maintains such an inner simmer that telekinesis would seem a healthy way of letting off steam. Spacek's most electrifying moment has a telekinetic charge: It comes when Tomei's Natalie pays her a tremulous visit as she crouches over a table, listening on headphones to her Eastern European requiems. It's wordless, and no words of mine can do justice to its power (or to Tomei, who is reborn in this movie too—simple again, elemental, without that neurotic fussiness).

The entire middle section of In the Bedroom has little in the way of meaningful talk—and that's the point. Words could temper nothing, relieve nothing. The language is in the images, in the progression of shots during a funeral, in the breeze (an echo of the earliest motif) that makes a lace curtain billow, in the aura of futility that surrounds household chores, in the chatter of a television in the abyss. During the last hour, I could barely breathe; I swore at the screen; I called for blood; I cried for vigilantism to restore the natural order; and I sat in shock when the natural order was and wasn't restored. That's the thing about a masterpiece like In the Bedroom. It isn't over when you leave the theater. It isn't over when you brood on it for days. It's just always going to be there, in the air, in the bedroom.

The Film Journal (Rick Curnutte) review

World Socialist Web Site David Walsh

Images (David Ng) review

AboutFilm.com (Carlo Cavagna) review [A]

Flipside Movie Emporium (Jeremiah Kipp) review [A-]

Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

Bright Lights Film Journal review Alan Vanneman, April 2002

The Nation (Stuart Klawans) review

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

Nitrate Online (Gianni Truzzi) review

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [5/10]

Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis) review [C+]

The Filmsnobs (James Owen) review

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [4/4]

Salon (Andrew O'Hehir) review

PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

New City [Ray Pride]

Movieline Magazine review Stephen Farber

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere

CultureCartel.com (Lee Chase IV) review [5/5]

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review

Film Monthly (Parama Chaudhury) review

Talking Pictures (UK) review Jen Johnston

The Providence Journal review Michael Janusonis

The UK Critic (Ian Waldron-Mantgani) review [4/4]

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [4/5]

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [3.5/4]

filmcritic.com (Frank Ochieng) review [4/5]

DVD Verdict (Mike Pinsky) dvd review

Reel.com review [3.5/4] Rod Armstrong

hybridmagazine.com review Roxanna Bogucka

James Bowman review

Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [4/5]

Cinepinion [Henry Stewart]

DVD Times Richard Booth

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review

VideoVista review Robin Landry

Movie-Vault.com (Angelo Aquino) review

Variety (Todd McCarthy) review

Guardian/Observer review

The Globe and Mail review [3/4] Liam Lacey

Philadelphia City Paper (Sam Adams) review

Austin Chronicle (Kimberley Jones) review [4/5]

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold

San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review

LITTLE CHILDREN A 95

USA (130 mi) 2006 ‘Scope

A small understated gem of a film whose bold discomforting detachment and occasional mock tone belies its aim to cut through the superficiality that strangely touches on our Puritan interests as a society, where we all have to huddle together in mass and feel like we’re cut from the same cloth, where everyone obviously must agree with us, as there’s simply no other point of view. This image of pointing inwards toward ourselves, this small town portrait of a democratized America which has all but forgotten the meaning of the word freedom, this slumbering giant of a nation which is portrayed with a sobering vision that at times resembles the unpleasant acrid sarcasm of von Trier’s DOGVILLE (2003), complete with a narrator that sounds oddly detached and outside the realm of the characters he’s commenting upon, which certainly catches us by surprise when a man’s voice starts voicing the innermost thoughts of a female character, this is an oddly oriented film that reaches the depths of our emotions with the “wrong” characters. What’s going on here, asking what exactly is meant by Homeland Security? This is a superbly written story capturing the hilarious yet nauseatingly mundane rhythms of daily routine that pointedly challenges our growing complacency, that literally scolds our preconceived notions as being without foresight or merit, that makes us go back to the drawing board and ask ourselves what kind of a world do we wish to live in, and what part are we going to play in it? Using a novelistic structure that references Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, a metaphor for the suffocation of our now over-privileged souls, OUR TOWN (1940) returns as a similarly repressed, but now straight-jacketed nation whose values are under siege.

Wow, this film really takes it all on, but it does so without political overkill and with a degree of subtlety that is fascinating throughout, utilizing superb, open-ended storytelling and the development of believable, well-crafted characters, none of whom are particularly likeable. Kate Winslet once again finds herself immersed in a powerful role as Sarah, the Madame Bovary of the neighborhood who dares to consider adultery liberating, refusing to accept the suffocation of a loveless marriage that has all but sapped her inner spirit and left her clearly a stranger to herself, who practices the same rituals as all the other middle class housewives, who is a stay at home mom spending “quality time” with her daughter every day, but who barely recognizes herself anymore. In the children’s park, she discovers another intriguing character, Patrick Wilson is Brad, the All American guy who is labeled the Prom King by the other stay at home moms in the park hovering over their children, like mother hawks, who practice protection through elicit yet thoroughly judgmental and stiflingly intolerant views, who are seen as a Greek chorus suspicious of anything different or out of the ordinary, a cauldron of Salem witch trial rumors and guilt by association. In Brad and Sarah, we find the non-breadwinners of their marriages, each struggling with feelings of failure, who defer to the dominant but thoroughly flawed characteristics of their more economically ambitious partners, the ones “society” would label as the most responsible. In this hole or spiritual pit that they have allowed themselves to fall into, there is an extraordinary urge to try something else, to take a risk, to give themselves another opportunity to rediscover who they are and what they believe in. This film gives them that chance through romantic afternoon interludes which may be more an open act of rebellion than love, but it appears to provide them a catalyst for growth.

Within this community conflict, this variation on Desperate Housewives, where the protection of children is a moral rule that is thrown around in the most hostile and despicable manner, where anything different, or not perfect, is considered a threat, throw into this mix a pedophile, Ronnie, simply an amazing performance by Jackie Earle Haley, a convicted sex offender who was recently released from serving his prison term, now living at home with his mother, the still loving and supportive Phyllis Sommerville. There’s a scene on a hot summer day where Ronnie decides to go swimming in the public pool that is nothing less than hair-raising, yet it perfectly expresses the essence of the CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS (2003) hysteria that is still at play in our society, which bears a strange resemblance to the post 9/11 terrorist alert hysteria. Making matters worse, a former cop, Larry (Noah Emmerich), goes on a one man rampage to alert the neighborhood of this danger in their midst, posting photos of the man that dominate the urban landscape, continually hounding him at his home, never giving it a rest, treating this man like vermin that needs to be eradicated.

While it’s conceivable that the final outcome may feel a bit contrived, this doesn’t in any way diminish the unusual character development or detract from the originality of the material. Needless to say, this is a complicated work highlighting the flawed and damaged among us, from the pillars of our society, the ones who would admit no wrong, the zealously righteous who become a walking contagious disease that contaminates the very core of our lives with a reeking hypocrisy, to our own weak-kneed response to the abhorrent, swirling out of control moral order that is imposed upon us, where it’s easier to do nothing, say nothing, feel nothing, and allow this feeling of benign resignation to blight our withered souls, to become transformed into something meaningless and unrecognizable. This dramatically effective work purges the obvious from the artificial surface and allows us to feel something lurking underneath that may be completely foreign to us. Taking a page out of the innocent children’s playground in Kurosawa’s IKIRU (1952), we’re rediscovering within ourselves the almost completely forgotten human attribute of empathy.

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]

It's not necessary to look at the color of the leaves to determine the season of the year when movies of this power come along. Little Children, the second feature from director Todd Field (In the Bedroom), is the rarest of movies - a literary multi-character drama. From the erudition of the voiceover narrative to the three dimensionality of the characters, Field's film is the closest it's possible to get to a book without reading one. The story is presented in an unhurried fashion with all the characters and situations being allowed to develop and expand in a natural fashion.

Although this is an ensemble piece, there are two anchoring characters. They are Brad Adamson (Patrick Wilson) and Sarah Pierce (Kate Winslet), neglected spouses who find happiness in each other's company as they chaperone their children's playdays. It takes a while but they eventually give in to the inevitable and become lovers. They dream of being with one another, but that seems more like a fantasy than a hope grounded in reality. Other characters orbiting like satellites around the main pair include Kathy (Jennifer Connelly), Brad's controlling wife; Richard (Gregg Edelman), Sarah's porn-obsessed husband; Ronnie McGorvey (Jackie Earle Haley), a convicted pedophile; and Larry Hedges (Noah Emmerich), an ex-cop turned vigilante.

There's enough material here to fuel a series of lurid melodramas, but Field (who co-wrote the screenplay with Tom Perrotta, upon whose book it is based) keeps things low-key and under control. The scope of the project never gets away from him. The voiceover (unlike most voiceovers) is helpful, since it emphasizes the story's literary roots. Delivered in a smooth baritone (that of Will Lyman, who can be heard on PBS' Frontline), it offers observations and editorials on the action, occasionally with more than a hint of sardonic wit.

The performances, especially those by Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson (the tortured pedophile in Hard Candy), Noah Emmerich, and Jackie Earle Haley, are tremendous. Winslet and Wilson face the challenge of portraying regular, intelligent people who are trapped by the normalcy of their lives. Emmerich and Haley, on the other hand, must play individuals with monstrous personality defects, and they do so without making their characters seem either unduly sympathetic or reprehensible. This is especially difficult for Haley, considering the nature of Ronnie's crime (he exposed himself to an underage girl), but the actor succeeds.

It might seem to some that Little Children meanders too much or could have been better focused. While I agree that any of the characters would have made an excellent choice for a feature film, Field's goal here is to present a slice of the community - the soccer moms, the bored housewives, the disempowered husbands. The main story deals with Sarah and Brad, but the other characters are given existences of their own, which is rare in motion pictures, and Little Children is richer for it. With In the Bedroom, Field demonstrated his mastery of difficult dramatic material and his ability to direct actors. His sophomore feature, which avoids the dreaded "slump," reinforces those characteristics and gives us reason to believe Field is a director whose next project should be met with anticipation.

Little Children Michael Sicinski disapproves from the Academic Hack

Grow up, America. On some level I feel torn, as though I should give Little Children a 3 since it does feature two solid (but unremarkable) performances. As Sarah, Kate Winslet accurately portrays a tremulous, agile mind thwarted by decisions that seem more and more irrevocable by the day. And although Jackie Earle Haley's work is hardly deserving of the Oscar-buzz it's generating, the actor does manage to invest Ronnie the sex offender with a rare combination of damaged humanity and a spooky, inaccessible otherworldliness. But neither actor is capable of gaining much traction, since Field and Tom Perrotta have effectively trapped them and everyone else involved in a smug ideological showcase. It's not for nothing that after the commuter train establishing shot ("we are in the non-space of suburban hell"), we cut to a montage of gaudy Hummels and insipid porcelain gnomes. The characters of Little Children aren't people. Their frailties and stymied desires might be recognizable from actual life, but Field warps them into exhibits in his moralistic condemnation of anyone who doesn't do right by those suffering little children. The vapid, overly regimented playground moms are unappealing in every way. But unlike Sarah, who treats her daughter like a pesky annoyance, or Brad the Prom King (Patrick Wilson), who by all available evidence is a good father but lacks ambition and therefore isn't a real adult man according to the film's harsh, normative logic, those emotionless suburban bitches have it right. They are parents, and it is therefore their moral obligation to subsume their own lives into meeting the socially approved demands of childrearing. No one wants to live their lives, Little Children allows, but look what happens if you don't. At least The Ice Storm had the decency to represent the slide into proper domestic normalcy as a kind of necessary tragedy, hinting that there ought to be a better way for families to exist without complete self-sacrifice. But Field and Perrotta promote a James Dobson agenda, depicting the sad, quixotic quest for fulfillment as the ultimate parental abdication -- Sarah running away from home, Brad trying to skate with the local kids, both acting like pathetic little children and being appropriately jolted into going home, meeting their responsibilites. I could get into the film's ludicrous formal ineptitude -- the faux-anthropological PBS voiceover, making sure we're never allowed to draw our own conclusions; the surface affectations of observational realism, an attempt at disguising a moral vision as deterministic as anything Lars von Trier or Michael Haneke has produced but at a fraction of the creativity and intelligence; the incoherence of asking us to condemn neighborhood-watch panic around the sex offender, but filming him in the pool with a menace that lacked only the theme from Jaws -- but I could be here all day if I really set out to take this odious turd apart piece by piece. Suffice to say, Little Children is so inexplicably pleased with itself, and so out of control of its formal procedures while evincing total confidence, that I frequently wondered if I'd stumbled onto some sort of comedy. At least Todd Solondz gets off a good line every now and then. But this? Yet another sub-Griffith alarmist melodrama for reactionary times. Cue garment-rending, gnashing of teeth. Who'll speak for the children? Think of the children! Suffer little children! Ah, naptime! Ah, humanity!

The New Yorker (David Denby) review

Sarah Pierce (Kate Winslet), the thirtyish heroine of Todd Field’s extraordinary new movie, “Little Children,” dropped out of graduate school to marry an older man—a business consultant—and moved into a neo-Colonial house near Boston that he inherited from his mother. Some years have gone by, and the marriage is not in the best shape: Sarah’s husband communes on the Internet with a friendly person known as Slutty Kay, and Sarah, unwilling to hire any help, feels imprisoned by their three-year-old daughter, whom she (rather negligently) looks after by herself. Sarah is the latest version of the baffled Americans that Betty Friedan wrote about forty years ago in “The Feminine Mystique”—the women supposedly living the American dream. What’s particularly embittering in this case is that Sarah knew all about the trap and still stepped into it. Her face pale with disgust, she sits in a tiny suburban playground with three other young mothers who ruthlessly put down anyone who’s even slightly different from themselves. These three witches—the only element of caricature in the movie—live on a rigidly controlled schedule. But there’s an unaccountable element in their lives: Brad (Patrick Wilson), the good-looking, strongly built young man who makes them all flutter when he shows up at the playground with his little boy. Brad is married to a beautiful filmmaker (Jennifer Connelly) who works for PBS, leaving him at home to take care of the baby and to study for the state bar exam, which he has failed twice. A former golden-boy college jock stranded in adulthood, Brad is decent, not too bright, irresistibly attractive—a man designed for adultery. As the children take their daily nap, Sarah and Brad run to an empty corner of her house. If they leave town together, where will the kids fit in?

There’s an element of garden-variety suspense in “Little Children,” but sex and possible home-wrecking are only part of what the movie is about. “Little Children” is based on a best-selling 2004 novel by Tom Perrotta, who worked on the adaptation with Todd Field. Together, the men have preserved Perrotta’s tone, which fluctuates between slightly satirical, even mischievous, irony and the most generous sympathy. Perrotta and Field make you see how their characters are weak or screwed up without allowing you to despise them. Moral realists, they know the world does not yield easily to desire. “Little Children” is a sharply intelligent and affecting view of suburban blues—a much bigger canvas than Field’s previous movie, “In the Bedroom” (2001), which was about a placid middle-aged couple thrown into turmoil when their son takes up with an older woman separated from a violent man. Field has grown in ambition, but he still works on an intimate scale. He surrounds his characters with an intense stillness, and then slowly introduces the ungovernable into their lives.

Handsome Brad, it turns out, is not the only disturber of the peace. A convicted sex offender, Ronnie (Jackie Earle Haley), a polite, childlike fellow, has been released from prison and is living in the neighborhood with his mother. For parents who have moved to the suburbs to protect their children, Ronnie’s presence is an unbearable outrage. Everyone is obsessed with him, especially a troubled ex-cop (Noah Emmerich), who runs around putting up pictures of Ronnie and forming committees to guard against him. After a while, one realizes that Perrotta and Field may be creating a metaphor of life under terrorism. It’s not that Ronnie isn’t a genuine threat, but he causes people to lose all sense. At the least, the filmmakers are hinting that both men and women are projecting their sexual frustrations and fears onto a pervert. What fuses Ronnie’s story and the rest of the movie is the charged suggestion that outright perversion and ordinary unhappiness (sexual indifference, adultery, porn obsession, semi-psychotic rage) belong on the same spectrum of recognizable behavior. Almost everyone in town has a secret, or at least an itch.

Field works with such fluid grace and perception that the movie goes right to the top of the suburban-anguish genre. The picture is not as aggressively designed or as witty as “American Beauty”; nor is it as malicious as Todd Solondz’s “Happiness.” It’s smarter, tougher, closer to the common life. Field captures, for instance, the way the daily routines of child care—getting a kid into a car seat or a hat, putting him down for a nap—have to be accommodated within the furious passions of adultery. The picture moves swiftly and surely; the separate shots that evoke the town are fitted together with uncanny precision, and Field neatly pulls off a big set piece that another director might have ruined with overemphasis. When Ronnie jumps into the town pool on a very hot day, the parents scream for their children and haul them out of the water, leaving Ronnie, in a mask, alone under the surface. As the police expel the invader, the children riotously jump back in, and the mass hysteria, followed by mass relief, is both sinister and funny—an interruption of summer pleasure that intentionally leaves our sympathy split between the alarmed parents and the sad outcast.

The sexual awakening of a disappointed wife may seem like an old movie turn, but when has it been done with such candor? At the beginning of the movie, Kate Winslet’s hair looks dead, and she hides her body in denim overalls. Her Sarah is a slightly clumsy woman who has lost her confidence. When she falls in love with Brad, the transformation comes slowly and painfully: at first, a nervous gesture, a smile that turns anxious, and then a golden aureole of beauty, a body in movement. The sex scenes are brief, naked, heated, startling. But Winslet never quite loses the awkwardness and uncertainty that will always be Sarah’s signature. Brad is not a type, either. Patrick Wilson, a stage actor who appeared in the movie version of “Phantom of the Opera,” has a slightly puzzled air: his Brad is pleased by the attention of women, but he doesn’t think much of himself, and Wilson, as a performer, seems quite without vanity. Looking at teen-age boys flying through the air on skateboards, Brad falls into a rapt silence; his longing for lost youth is so defenseless that it’s impossible to dislike him, however irresolute he is as an adult. At first, Sarah and Brad seem prematurely defeated. Yet the filmmakers hold out the possibility of new life stirring under the domestic halter and the intellectual sloth. Adults may not be happier than overgrown children, but at least they have a chance of finding out who they are.

Pajiba (Daniel Carlson) review

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Ruthless Reviews review Matt Cale

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eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [5/5]

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Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [2.5/5]

eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [4/5]

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All the Children Are Above Average - New York Times Will Blythe writes a book review of the novel, March 14, 2004

THE HIGH HAT | MARGINALIA: Little Children John James writes a book review of the novel from High Hat

Little Children (novel) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Little Children (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fiennes, Sophie

Sophie Fiennes: 'Film-goers are bored with being talked down to' Elizabeth Day from The Observer, September 21, 2013

OVER YOUR CITIES GRASS WILL GROW B 89

Great Britain Holland France (105 mi) 2010 ‘Scope

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. —Genesis 3:19

Sometimes you wonder how certain artists get their funding, as there is certainly an unequal distribution of the wealth, especially considering the massive size of some of their works, something that would require a substantial piece of Fort Knox. Others create art from next to nothing, from discarded trash, odd pieces of junk, or everyday ordinary objects. This film is about a large scale conceptual artist, German Anselm Kiefer, who studied under controversial artist Joseph Beuys in Düsseldorf, a member of the Nazi youth that participated in book burnings, who joined the German Luftwaffe during the war. Kiefer purchased just under 100 acres of land near Barjac in the south of France ten years ago, a former industrial and manufacturing district, the site of a deteriorating silk factory. Using bulldozers and construction material, he has spent the last decade building an immense installation known as a Gesamtkunstwerk, an industrial landscape based on his conception of the end of the world, where only the demolished ruins of a former civilization remain standing, much of which resembles the destroyed rubble from an earthquake, broken glass lying all around, concrete cinder blocks uprooted with the wires sticking out, crumbled to the earth surrounded by rocks and gravel and dust, but all around it wild grass grows, leaving the effect of “over your cities grass will grow.”

The film is divided into three sections, where the first and last are completely wordless, where the director uses slow moving pans in and around the artist’s work, which also includes the dug out excavation of the world below the buildings, much of which resembles a cave. In fact, viewers of Herzog’s CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS (2010) will be reminded of this slowly moving exploratory style, one which brilliantly contrasts darkness and light, but rather than focus on actual prehistoric cave art that is some 35,000 years old, this film projects some futuristic apocalyptic design where man’s imprint has been left behind, still standing like a piece of petrified wood, where the hauntingly quiet emptiness of the partially demolished structures resemble the grown over remains of a WW II German concentration camp, where the gently swaying grasses in the wind betray the violent, tortuous atrocities that took place on these grounds. Accompanied by the surreal and otherworldly music of Jewish composer György Ligeti, familiar for his use in Kubrick’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), notably the composer used during the Monolith sequences, this film takes us on another journey, one also distinguished by the arduous length and endurance of Homer’s Odyssey, a mythical journey that reflects upon mankind’s heroic strength and bravery, where he had to use great wisdom and cunning to survive.

In the middle section, we see Kiefer at work with several helpers in a giant indoor industrial art studio, where thematically he makes great use of fire, preferring to use the burnt remains of various sized books, many of which are gigantic, hovering above or beside wall-sized paintings that resemble decay and destruction, like portraits of trees standing in dark forests that have been covered in ashes before blowing the ashes away like dried leaves, leaving behind a composition that reflects permanent decay and decomposition, a work that will continue to decompose over time. Kiefer is interviewed by German journalist Klaus Dermutz in a local library, discussing the origins of his work and his sources of inspiration. He describes childhood as a period in one’s life filled with moments of boredom, describing a philosophical principle from Heidegger that suggests only when humans have idle time filled with boredom do they begin to reflect upon their lives and their existence in the universe. As if on cue, after about a 20-minute in depth interview of utter seriousness without an ounce of humor, what appears to be his son tip-toes behind him, as if he’s been severely reprimanded in the past not to disturb his father. But, of course, as he’s still a kid, he causes a noticeable disruption that hilariously makes his father lose his concentration.

When assembling the various large scale objects that require the use of a crane, Kiefer tyrannically barks out instructions to his team to try this or do that, where he is incessantly ordering other people around while he visually observes the creative process, trying to duplicate in reality what he’s only seen in his imagination. His method of producing massive sized artworks that reflect a world in chaos has a precise order to it during the construction stage. While the entire area becomes part of his canvas, including the trees and the natural grounds between the constructed art objects, one never sees any viewers walking the grounds, as it’s all in the construction stage. A few viewers in the audience afterwards were impressed enough by the film that they suggested a desire to go to visit the site of Barjac, but the intention of the film, like Herzog’s cave footage, is to immerse the audience in the entirety of the work, to give them the hypnotic feeling of being there, where the people onscreen go away and leave the viewers alone as the camera slowly inspects each artwork with a perceptual eye, akin to Tarkovsky’s shift of focus to a close examination of a painting at the end of ANDREI RUBLEV (1966). This ponderous, quietly reflective cinematic method adds a layer of depth and introspection that wouldn’t otherwise be there. Kiefer claims The Bible is filled with multiple references about the destruction of the world, suggesting his reproduced apocalyptic landscape is meant to reflect both the origins and the end of the world, where all that’s left is viewed in the haunting and solemn silence of the end of the human race. The film adds a respectful and funereal tone, mournful and elegiac, where all thoughts about what constitutes the essence of the human soul are notable by their absence.

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow Dave Calhoun from Time Out London

It’s rare to have the chance to watch an artist at work at length, and that’s what Sophie Fiennes offers with her immersive documentary about German artist Anselm Kiefer. As the titles tell us, 65-year-old Kiefer moved to an old silk factory near Barjac in France in 1993 and in 2000 started transforming the buildings and the surrounding 35 hectares into an evolving exhibit of industrially created artworks. He builds caves by pouring concrete into earth to form columns and erects wobbly-looking towers as a response to the Bible. He works with glass, dust, metals, paints, canvas and crockery, and, at first glance, you could mistake his workshop for a living, breathing factory.

After ‘The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema’, her films about Slavoj Zizek, this is another unusual, collaborative film from Fiennes about the creative mind. The difference is this is almost silent. We hear Kiefer talking to his assistants (‘Now, glass, please,’ he says as they smash huge sheets while building a sculpture. ‘Mmm, nice, nice’) and there’s a mid-film interview with a journalist which reminded me of the chatty scene in ‘Hunger’. But the rest is slow and observational as Fiennes lends her voice to Kiefer’s haunting works with stately camera movements and a minimal score by Jörg Widmann and György Ligeti. The boldness of Fiennes’s film lies in how, like Kiefer’s wonderland, it’s removed from the world and indulges only Kiefer and his work. It’s like watching beautiful rushes of a less imaginative doc. Not for everyone, but if you’re willing to give yourself over to its pace, there’s much to enjoy.

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow | Review | Screen Mark Adams at Cannes from Screendaily

Sophie Fiennes’ mesmeric and absorbing documentary about German artist Anselm Kiefer and the installations and paintings he worked on and displays at La Ribaute, a derelict silk factory near Bajac in France, is a fascinating look at the creative process.

Shot in cinemascope, the Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow was filmed in Kiefer’s last days at La Ribaute before his move to Paris, where he now lives and works. The film weaves through his set piece landscape which combine a network of underground tunnels; pavilions built to house specific art works, and a series of concrete towers.

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow is likely to see life on the festival circuit and will attract attention from arts TV channels, though it is also easy to see how it might feature as a screening installation at art galleries.

The film opens and closes with slow and beautifully structured shots of the sprawling series of installations, making impressive use of stirring music from Jorg Widmann, and Gyorgy Ligeti.

These sequences book-end unobtrusive observation of Kiefer at work as he - and his team - smelt lead; smash glass; throw ash and excavate soil to create his work and use electric hoists to move his often gigantic art pieces into place. He is a bold and charismatic artist - fiercely intellectual in terms of how he describes his inspirations, but also practical when it comes to the physical process of making his art.

Scenes of him painting and then scattering ash onto a large canvas of a treeline are absorbing and are counterbalanced with him smelting lead and pouring it onto a pile of earth to create a sculpture.

Sophie Fiennes, who has carved out an impressive niche in the arts documentary field (she has films on dance and linked with radical thinker Slavoj Zizek for 2006’s The Pervert’s Guide To Cinema), directs with a good deal of style, and is aided by beautiful widescreen cinematography from Remko Schnorr.

User reviews from imdb Author: allenrogerj from United Kingdom

The film begins with a long exploration like "The Zone" from Tarkovsky's Stalker: bushes glimpsed derelict tunnels, shelves of books made of lead with rocks on them, more leaden books with fragments of glass in and around them, light from overhead windows shines on rubble and dust- filled corridors. Music by Ligoti accompanies it. After some time- more than ten minutes at a guess- the first human appears, charring sets of- paper- books in a furnace. He is one of Anselm Kiefer's assistants at this strange studio or workshop- a derelict silk factory, where Kiefer adds deliberate ruins to the accidental ones. We see Kiefer's working methods- both aleatoric and industrial in their own way- enormous paintings- of tree trunks on glass, of a man or corpse on his back- a strange self-portrait, perhaps- the only painting we see not exclusively involving black, white and grey- and watch his working methods- glue and then a powder- dust or paint- is scattered on a painting on the ground and a crane slowly hoists the painting up to display it while much of the powder falls off; a strange sculpture of a deformed ship is stuck to a seascape, hiding the artist's palette which was there before.

Next there is an interview with Kiefer in the library. We never see what any of the books in the library are and Kiefer does not refer to any other artists, only to the bible and the Kabbalist Solomon Luria and the Rosicrucian Robert Fludd. Nor do we learn more of Kiefer- are the children who appear in the library his children, his grandchildren or someone else's? We never learn how his extraordinary work is paid for either. At one point the interviewer says that nothing is written on the blank pages of the lead books- no, says Kiefer, everything is written there. At no time is there a discussion of the quality of Kiefer's art or the history and influences behind it. Its value is taken as a given.

In the second half we see how the sculptures are made and someone excavates an underground amphitheatre, for an unknown end. Kiefer and his assistants pour molten lead down a mound of earth, help the lead form a cascade and melt a leaden book at the bottom- it seems important that the book be melted, rather than raw lead be used. They pay no attention to health or safety regulations, never wearing protective masks or clothing, no matter how potentially lethal the material they work with. Finally, they put up artificial ruins, already fragmentary walls of concrete that rest on the leaden books and make brittle piles in the sky, haunts for Lilith the she-demon, Kiefer says. He announces, casually, that he is going to a new studio in Paris; over a hundred lorries have already moved things, and this studio will be abandoned, a painting or sculpture left in each building to decay with the building. The film ends with another survey accompanied by Ligoti's music, this time of the ruins in air waiting to decay and fall as if Ozymandias had designed his statue as a ruin.

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow Peter Bradshaw at Cannes from The Guardian, May 16, 2010, also here: Cannes film festival review – Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow

With infinite patience and care, and a sense of how the movie camera can both record and also participate in the process of making art, Sophie Fiennes has directed an intriguing documentary about the work of 65-year-old artist Anselm Kiefer, who in the early 1990s left his native Germany for Barjac in the south of France where he devised an extraordinary artistic living-space: an atelier, an installation complex, an entire created landscape.

Building almost from the ground up in a derelict silk factory, Kiefer devised an artistic project extending over acres: miles of corridors, huge studio spaces with ambitious landscape paintings and sculptures that correspond to monumental constructions in the surrounding woodland, and serpentine excavated labyrinths with great earthy columns that resemble stalagmites or termite mounds. Nowhere is it clear where the finished product definitively stands; perhaps it is all work in progress, a monumental concept-art organism.

Fiennes's movie is almost entirely wordless. Her camera roams around Kiefer's creations, allowing the audience to focus on light, shape, colour and texture, to music by Jörg Widmann and György Ligeti; this score was arguably a little too exclamatory and overt, but it was a bold expository device.

Kiefer's art is ferociously physical and tactile: he creates as if in some industrial forge – burning, smelting, winching up machinery, painting, smearing and often smashing. It looks fantastically dangerous a lot of the time, and there is no nonsense with helmets or goggles. This is not an artist seated at his laptop, tweaking concepts with funky software; it is hands on, sweat-of-the-brow stuff. All of it looks like work which the modern age has made obsolete – and yet it is saturated with modernity.

The artist is not interviewed by the director about his work, but Fiennes – perhaps conceding that some explicit commentary does need to be built in – films an interview that Kiefer gives to a German journalist. Kiefer is engaged by the idea that the materials in his work are living things whose changes may be obvious or infinitesimally, geologically slow. His intention is not to create finished, gleaming, varnished objects, but great stumps or fragments or semi-formed embryological expressions: essays in the incomplete which allude to the impermanence of everything in the physical world.

He muses on a Heidegger essay on boredom: "It is only when one is bored, that one's consciousness settles, reluctantly or even fearfully, on oneself and the nature of one's own existence."

Nothing could be less boring that what Kiefer is doing, but something of this restless transcendence is achieved by Kiefer's work – and Fiennes's film.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film review: Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow ... Lisa Mullen from Sight and Sound, November 2010

Barjac, southern France. The film follows artist Anselm Kiefer as he works in the installation complex he has created around his studio in the countryside. Opening with a slow, meditative tour around labyrinthine corridors, tunnels and concrete structures, it takes the viewer through a mysterious space resembling an archaeological dig, filled with what appear to be the fragmented relics of a lost civilisation. As the camera moves through various parts of this ongoing art project, we see sculptural concrete forms, pools of smashed glass and stacks of large ‘books’ made from thick layers of lead sheeting, all of which appear ancient, weathered and broken. The central part of the film, which shows Kiefer making the work and directing his assistants, reveals that this ageing process is a key part of his practice, involving much digging, breaking and melting of materials.

Kiefer is filmed in conversation with a German journalist, describing how he hopes the ageing process will continue as the work is exposed to time and the elements. Finally, the camera takes another tour of the installations, this time pulling back to reveal the effect of the work at the level of landscape, with large structures framed against an evening sky.

Review

Is this a film about art, or about film as art? That’s the question asked by Sophie Fiennes’ ravishing, hypnotic record of the work of Anselm Kiefer.

Kiefer’s practice depends on a large-scale perspective that isn’t easily placed within the neat rectangle of a cinematic frame. He has created a huge complex of installations spreading across the landscape around his atelier in Barjac, southern France, and the structures he creates, which rise out of the ground like the ruins of a lost city, invite a long view of time as well as space, since they are intended to weather and collapse as the years pass. Fiennes’ film, on the other hand, begins with sepulchral intimacy and timelessness, with the camera roaming down long, mysterious corridors like Theseus on the trail of the Minotaur, in a subterranean world where pot shards rest in the dust like archaeological relics and the claw marks left by machine-digging resemble the traces of a terrifying feral encounter. When we finally stumble into the light and discover a human being, he is tending a furnace, one of the most primal technologies known to man, though he is in fact a harbinger of modernity: his ancient activity will introduce the film’s middle section, in which Kiefer’s practice is brought down to its dusty, noisy, industrial brass tacks, and it’s the human artist, not some mythical monster, who is gouging and tearing the earth.

Kiefer’s work repeatedly references images specific to the Holocaust (gold teeth, shower heads) as well as more general war detritus (including the twisted remnants of reinforced concrete which suggest the World Trade Center without categorically insisting on a connection). But he isn’t engaged in a simple act of memorialisation, or not only that. By building ‘new’ ruins, and burying freshly made relics in freshly dug caves, he is thinking through the artificiality of history, of memory, which remakes as it retells, and leaves its own traces even as it reads the traces of what has gone before. In an interview with a German interviewer, Kiefer references Heidegger, but it’s Walter Benjamin’s thought that underlies much of his practice: Kiefer’s work is an exposé of the intimate connections between the modern cityscape and the topography of ruins that coexists beneath its surface, and it’s also an attempt to map the constellations by which these historical portals can be navigated.

As so often with conceptual art, the relationship between work and practice is where meaning resides. As an immersive installation, Kiefer’s wonderland is an eerie place filled with spectral forms and numinous intimations of death; only by showing the industrial process by which it has been built – the roar of the diggers, the smashing of glass, the thumping and spilling and dropping and dirtying by which the appearance of history has been manufactured – can it be revealed in all its self-critiquing complexity.

Fiennes does this, beautifully, and she does something more; she places the artist in a new frame, one of her own devising. Twitching away the curtain of artistic illusion, she reveals Kiefer and his assistants choked, coated and physically subsumed by the materials they work with as they turn art into a kind of theatre. The interdependence of the aesthetic and the artisanal will always be of interest to film-makers, whose work depends on technique and technology as much as inspiration and concept; in highlighting Kiefer’s ambivalent status – is he a curator, a producer, a forger, a conductor? – Fiennes is also thinking about film’s artificial authenticity and its inability to tell ‘the truth’. Finally, slyly, she appropriates Barjac itself for her own ends, concluding the film with a lingering shot of Kiefer’s strange, tottering towers framed against a yellow sky – a surrealist film set, waiting expectantly for the actors to walk into shot.

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow (2010) – The ... - Ruthless Culture Jonathan McCalmont from Ruthless Criticism, October 22, 2010

Anselm Kiefer on Film Sanford Schwartz from The New York Review of Books, August 19, 2011

Toronto 2010 | OVER YOUR CITIES GRASS WILL GROW > THE BACK ROW ... indieWIRE Blog, The Back Row Manifesto, September 10, 2010

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow Film Review - Over ... - View London Matthew Turner

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow review (2010) | film ... Jonathan Crocker from Little White Lies

CINE-FILE: Cine-List Michael Castelle

CINEMA | ARCHITECTURE: Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, The ...

Empire Magazine [David Parkinson]

Anselm Kiefer: 'The Independent wants to know if I am a Nazi ... Charles Darwent interview of Kiefer from The Independent, October 11, 2009

Inside the world of a modern master Alistair Sooke interview from The Daily Telegraph, October 13, 2010

Variety Reviews - Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow - Film Reviews ... Alissa Simon at Variety

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow – review Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, October 13, 2010

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow – review | Film | The Observer Phillip French from The Observer, October 17, 2010

Independent.co.uk [Anthony Quinn]

Anselm Kiefer's desolate landscapes address the most crucial ... Simon Schama from The Guardian, January 20, 2007

Twin towers of the apocalypse Serena Davies from The Daily Telegraph, February 6, 2007

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, review - Telegraph Tim Robey, October 14, 2010

Anselm Kiefer's Spectacle at Gagosian Gallery - Review - NYTimes.com Roberta Smith from The New York Times, November 18, 2010

ARTmostfierce: Anselm Kiefer @ Larry Gagosian Gallery Art Most Fierce, November 19, 2010

Anselm Kiefer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Anselm Kiefer: Biography from Answers.com biography

Anselm Kiefer Biography biography from Lenin Imports

Anselm Kiefer :: MECA MFA – Impetus to Analysis: Practitioners Impetus to Analysis

ANSELM KIEFER Previous exhibitions

Flavorwire » Daily Dose Pick: Anselm Kiefer Paul Laster from Flavorwire, July 15, 2009

Joseph Beuys - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Gesamtkunstwerk - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Figgis, Mike

All-Movie Guide Hal Erickson

Born in England and raised in Nairobi, Kenya, director Mike Figgis studied music in London, where he helped form a rhythm and blues group called the Gas Board that included amongst its members a young Bryan Ferry. Figgis' roots as a musician would later be made readily apparent in his screen work, as he has scored several of his films. Following his tenure with the Gas Board, he went on to work with an experimental British comedy/variety group known as The People Show. After being turned down by the National Film School, Figgis bankrolled his own 60-minute TV movie, The House (1976), gaining an entree into mainstream filmmaking.

In 1988, Figgis made his feature directorial and screenwriting debut with Stormy Monday. A moody character study set against the backdrop of the jazz and crime worlds, it received a moderately strong reception. Earning probably his greatest recognition for his successful direction of Richard Gere in Internal Affairs (1990) and the near-surrealistic Mr. Jones (1993), Figgis attracted strong notices for his 1994 remake of The Browning Version. However, it was with his highly acclaimed Leaving Las Vegas (1995) that the director really hit the big time. A somber, resolutely unsentimental portrait of the last days of a writer determined to drink himself to death, the film earned Figgis Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Director Academy Award nominations, and provided Nicolas Cage with an Oscar for Best Actor. Figgis followed up this success two years later with One Night Stand; an ensemble drama centering on the repercussions of adultery, it received only a lukewarm critical reception. Figgis rebounded in 1999, releasing two films that year. The first, The Loss of Sexual Innocence, was a story revolving around a young man's sexual evolution, while the second, Miss Julie, was an adaptation of August Strindberg's play about an illicit love affair between a titled young woman (Saffron Burrows) and her servant (Peter Mullan).

Filmbug Biography

Guardian Article (2006) This is seat-of-your-pants stuff, by Will Hodgkinson, October 26, 2006

Red-Mullet Commercial, Mike Figgis Showreel

Figgis, Mike They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

BBC Interview September 1, 2000

In View Interview a video interview

LEAVING LAS VEGAS

USA France Great Britain (111 mi) 1995

Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz)

A film that could be "none more black" that leaves you with a spark of hope and an experience of true love you won't soon forget. If you're one of those moviegoers who needs their flicks to end happy with everything tied in a neat little bow, you will really hate this movie about a down and out screenwriter trying to commit suicide by drinking himself to death. Not exactly the quickest way to go, but probably one of the more enjoyable, if you don't mind the hangovers and vomiting. Cage plays our "hero" who just happens to meet the love of his life, Sera, a hooker played by Shue, on his way out of this world. Their story, of two very broken people who manage to find just a touch of love and acceptance in their lives, will leave you breathless. Nothing about their existence is fun and it's certainly not easy to watch, but it is incredibly honest and real. Never have I seen a love story where the characters have such great chemistry and yet are still so completely alone. Both Shue and Cage give the performances of their careers. While they are onscreen this film is mesmerizing. When they're not, it kind of drags and falls into disappointing plot conventions that are not worthy of their talent or the story. This is Figgis' most complete film, bringing two very complex characters to bitter, heartbreaking life.

Leaving Las Vegas (1995) Bryant Frazer from Deep Focus

In Leaving Las Vegas, Nicolas Cage plays Benjamin, an alcoholic who's lost his family and his job and moves to Las Vegas to quite deliberately drink himself to death over the course of four weeks' time. While he's there, he meets a hooker named Sera, played by Elisabeth Shue, who's cast adrift, so to speak, when her boyfriend and pimp (Julian Sands) is finally murdered by the thugs he owes money to. Since these two are just about the neediest people on the planet, they immediately fall into a codependent relationship. Ben agrees to vacate his room at the $29-a-night Whole Year Inn (in an unusual moment of lucidity, Ben reads the sign as "the hole you're in") and move in with Sera on one condition -- she can never ask him to stop drinking.

I'll say it one more time: Leaving Las Vegas is about a man who moves to Vegas and drinks himself to death. It's not a comedy, and it's very depressing. Still interested? The good news is that the movie is exceedingly well acted, skillfully crafted, and even, at times, a joy. That Benjamin's character can be so damn charming in the middle of this deadly predicament is due to Cage's staggering and ever-expanding talent for playing the loser beautifully. Shue is remarkable as well, even though her beauty, charisma, and demeanor totally belie her supposed lot in life as a Vegas street hooker. Regardless, if critics are talking Nicole Kidman up as an Oscar nominee for the color-by-numbers To Die For, Shue ought to clinch the Nobel Prize for what she goes through bringing this to the screen.

Thank God director Mike Figgis knows his medium, because this material would verge on maudlin without sure guidance. John O'Brien's novel is deliberately harrowing, and it won't make you feel any better to know that the writer committed suicide just a couple of weeks after his book was optioned as a film. He would have profited, no doubt, from the movie's release, but you sense that he and his characters were living in the same lonely place, and sought release.

Their sorry lots in life don't bar Ben and Sera from some semblance of a romantic relationship, and Leaving Las Vegas is indeed a love story. As far as eroticism goes, the movie's mostly sleazy without being sexy, and I get the feeling that's an adequate representation of the city itself. There's certainly nothing romantic about the way Ben drinks (indeed, he's more or less impotent), though the opening scene is a jaunty shot of him quite literally dancing down the aisles of a liquor store, pushing a cart filled with bottles of all shapes and sizes. When he goes into withdrawal, he trembles and stutters until he unstops another bottle or drains another glass, and he becomes remarkably witty and self-assured, if not entirely pleasant. Cage digs deep to find Benjamin's humanity, and it's brave for the film to allow this level of dignity to such a blasted out, hopeless character while acknowledging the fundamental disaster of his life.

And it's no mean feat for the movie to maintain credibility. Leaving Las Vegas is about a desperate relationship that somehow transcends traditional needs, and short circuits the sex drive (Sera is, after all, going out and turning tricks even after Ben moves in). One scene, which defines completely the seductive appeal of an alcoholic haze, has Ben and Sera getting hot and bothered as Sera peels off her swimsuit and pours liquor down the front of her body in an act that takes the sublimated sexuality of TV beer commercials to its erotic extreme. And of course, there's an abrupt comedown from the sexual high that neatly negates the fetish.

That's just one great scene in a movie that's full of them, and with hardly a misstep. Figgis takes an unconventional, bravura approach to the film, and it pays off by making the experience something more than a straightforward sad story (as movie-of-the-week material, this tale would be deadly). The pre-credit sequence stretches out for what seems like 10 minutes, until an obstinate, jazzy score (also composed by director Figgis) wells up over the credits. It plays in hip, sidling counterpoint to Benjamin's bleak motives for the rest of the film. (My own pet peeve is the gaggle of Sting songs that punctuate the soundtrack, with his vocals so high in the mix that you wind up thinking about Sting's slightly daffy lyrics instead of the matters onscreen.) If anything, Figgis' jumpy style is a little too much for his material, but this is, after all, a story of excess.

As a treatise on the savagery of alcohol addiction, Leaving Las Vegas is a winner, but I'm not sure what else Hollywood had in mind when the story was optioned. To be sure, this is a movie that brutalizes its characters from start to finish -- and poor Sera comes out the big loser, since Ben is the one who fulfills the mission of the movie's title. Curiously, we get no sense of the direction her character is heading at the end of the film, even though we've witnessed her desperate devotion to Ben and her abject humiliation at the hands of lovers and strangers. Maybe a brilliant movie about alcoholism must by definition be unsatisfying, but this one's a tough sell. For all its sincerity and virtue, Leaving Las Vegas is a movie that empties you out, and doesn't give much back.

Nitrate Online Carrie Gorringe

Tucson Weekly [Stacey Richter]

EyeForFilm.co.uk Scott Macdonald

eFilmCritic.com ("Dr. Isaksson")

Linda Lopez McAlister (c/o inforM Women's Studies)

James Berardinelli's ReelViews

Philadelphia City Paper (Cindy Fuchs)

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick)

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

filmcritic.com says viva, Las Vegas! Christopher Null

Edward Copeland on Film

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)

Edwin Jahiel

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten)

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan)

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 1995

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 2004

The New York Times (Janet Maslin)

MISS JULIE

Great Britain USA (103 mi) 1999

BFI | Sight & Sound | Miss Julie (1999) Peter Matthews from Sight and Sound, October 2000

The north of Sweden, midsummers night, 1894. In the kitchen of a country estate, the cook Christine upbraids her fiancé Jean, the footman, for dancing with the Count's daughter Miss Julie. Julie commands Jean to dance with her again. On his return, he and Christine fondle each other. Julie interrupts them and orders Jean to put on clothes befitting a gentleman. When Christine falls asleep, Julie asks Jean to drink beer with her. Then she insists he kiss her shoe. In the garden, Julie flirts with Jean, but slaps him when he kisses her. Back in the kitchen, Jean describes his impoverished childhood and confesses his desire to rise. When revellers erupt into the kitchen, Jean hides Julie in his room and there seduces her. Afterwards, he confesses his dream of owning a hotel and proposes that they run away.

Jean suggests Julie rob her father to finance the scheme. Drunk, Julie leaves to search the Count's desk. Christine appears and surmises what has occurred. She demands that Jean accompany her to church, and tells him to shave. Julie returns with the stolen money and a suitcase. When she tries to take a pet bird along on the journey, Jean kills it. After a confrontation with the pair, Christine goes to church alone. Julie asks Jean to give her the razor. The Count rings from upstairs, and Jean hastens to attend him. Julie slashes her wrists.

Review

Though August Strindberg's 1888 play Miss Julie is one of the great war horses of western theatre, few film-makers have been drawn to the material, and it's easy to see why. Strindberg himself worried that audiences used to the pomp and circumstance of 19th-century stagecraft would not accept a brooding chamber piece where just three characters (Miss Julie, the well-heeled daughter of a Count, and servants Jean and Christine) are confined to a single set. Striving for a heightened realism, the Swedish dramatist arranged the action in an unbroken flow and (shocking at the time) instructed the players to turn their backs on the spectators now and then.

In this regard, Miss Julie anticipated the sustained voyeuristic illusion that is cinema; still, screen adapters have largely steered clear of a work that puts so many obstacles in the way of conventional opening out. Once an unassailable classic, Alf Sjöberg's 1951 version seems to have fallen off the map of late, despite the stunning virtuosity of its flashbacks, through which the tortured heroine's past was made to occupy the same physical space as her present.

The one indulgence director Mike Figgis permits himself in his bargain-basement version (the film was shot chronologically over a relatively short period of time) is a brief split-screen sequence showing the erotic grappling of Julie and her footman lover Jean from fractionally varied angles. Other than this redundant bit of punctuation (which anticipates his extended split-screen experiment Timecode), Figgis has burned off the slightly disreputable swank that characterised such earlier pictures as Internal Affairs. Far from opening out the theatrical frame, he closes it down, not only keeping to Strindberg's kitchen set, but pinioning the actors with a mock-vérité style that emphasises every blemish and fleck of lip spittle. The movie was shot on Super 16mm using two handheld cameras, which judder and lurch as though whipped up by the stormy passions; the editing could have been done on a butcher's block, so prodigal are the mismatched eyelines and jarring reverses in screen direction. While Figgis isn't quite as root-and-branch in his asceticism, it would appear that Dogme 95 has spawned another fellow traveller. By sacrificing the frills of mainstream film-making, he presumably hopes to free the play's primal anger. In this, he follows Strindberg, whose jagged psychodramas were an assault on the stuffy conventions of bourgeois theatre.

High-born Julie is possessed by a fantasy of wallowing in the mud, while the rising young Jean entertains few illusions about his motives in seducing the Count's daughter. Their liaison carries a kinky sadomasochistic charge, and that's perhaps what caught Figgis' interest - it's hard to miss the parallels with the destructive symbiosis of the couple in Leaving Las Vegas. Screenwriter Helen Cooper faithfully preserves the play's vituperative atmosphere, and indeed amplifies it by a coarsening of the language (when Jean narrates a childhood recollection, his monologue builds into a scatological aria). Since it was only censorship that inhibited Strindberg from spelling out the earthier implications of his naturalism, this is one case where vulgarisation makes sense. Indeed, the film shows thought and care in practically every detail; so it's a real cause for regret that it never catches fire. Saffron Burrows gives a technically accomplished performance as Miss Julie, but is perhaps working too hard to arouse much pity and fear. Or perhaps the wobblyscope technique is at fundamental odds with Strindberg's tightly deterministic structure, and ends up cooling things down when it should heat them up. Simplicity, you're left thinking, may be the toughest goal to achieve in movies.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Wilful Amateur Geoffrey Macnab from Sight and Sound, May 1999

TIME CODE

USA (97 mi) 2000

Timecode Mike D’Angelo from Time Out New York

Call Mike Figgis just about anything you like—and those poor souls who endured last year's The Loss of Sexual Innocence are likely to have at least a couple of choice epithets handy—but don't even think about using the word complacent. Like Lars von Trier and Peter Greenaway, Figgis is committed to pushing the cinematic envelope, and Time Code is one of the year's most remarkable films—a complete failure, yes, but an important and worthwhile failure, if only because it illustrates the direction in which digital-age filmmaking should decidedly not go.

Right about here is where I'd usually launch into a plot summary of some kind, but one of the most telling aspects of Time Code is that it's much easier to explain what the film is than what the film is about, largely because it's about little more than its own unusual technique. Loath as I am to discourage innovative modes of storytelling, there's no getting around the fact that Figgis has made several fundamental errors of judgment, to wit:

FOUR IMAGES ARE NOT BETTER THAN ONE.

The most immediately jarring feature of Time Code is ultimately the least irritating: The screen is divided into quadrants, and four separate (but interrelated) images appear simultaneously. Figgis manipulates the sound mix in a way that's meant to guide theviewer's attention, but your gaze is ultimately free to wander as it will. Very democratic and all, but traditional crosscutting accomplishes the same goal without inducing eyestrain; rarely does any genuine synchronicity occur.

SCRIPTS MATTER.

John Cassavetes and Mike Leigh are often mistakenly thought to be masters of filmed improvisation, but both directors have actually used improvised rehearsals as a means of creating finely tuned, disarmingly naturalistic screenplays. Figgis, by contrast, merely devised a vague scenario involving various showbiz infidelities, then filmed his actors continuously for more than an hour and a half as they flailed about. The difference is readily apparent, even with 75 percent of the dialogue inaudible at any given moment.

CUT TO THE CHASE. PLEASE.

"In some ways, editing is a corruption, a lie that feigns continuity," states Figgis in the press notes for Time Code. His film, meanwhile, confirms via omission that the juxtaposition of one image with another—as controlled by the filmmaker, not by each individual audience member's randomly roaming eyeballs—is the medium's single most powerful tool. Each of Figgis's four cameras shot continuously for the film's entire duration, sans cuts, and the effect, highlighting a quartet of the most artless compositions ever to pass through a projector, is thuddingly monotonous. Didn't Figgis ever see Hitchcock's Rope, in which the Master of Suspense attempted a similar experiment, with very similar results? Is anybody eager to see the crop-dusting sequence from North by Northwest reshot with a Steadicam in a single take?

Ah, well. Figgis may have fallen on his face this time—continuing a losing streak that includes all four of his films since Leaving Las Vegas—but a willingness to fail is one of the distinguishing qualities of a true artist. I was relieved when Time Code finally ended; by the same token, I can't wait to see what he'll come up with next.

Review: Time Code - Film Comment Gregory Solman from Film Comment, May/June 2000

In the vernacular of multi-camera television events such as live sports programs and live-to-tape daytime dramas, the motion picture Time Code resembles what is known as a “quad split”: a live-television director chooses the feeds from four simultaneous camera sources, selecting on the fly the best action to air. It’s a vastly under-appreciated art that bristles with the excitement of possibilities continually lost and found, of editing a story in the moment, behind the scenes. In Time Code, Mike Figgis has painstakingly—and often strikingly—coordinated the action of four uninterrupted and interrelated feature-length narratives, then presented the illusion of a live quad split on a single movie screen rather than four TV monitors. Time Code renders the effect of watching four movies in a single gestalt from a broadcast control room or production truck—or, perhaps closer to the director’s intent, from the vaguely voyeuristic catbird’s seat of a security guard’s throne. The movie itself is sort of a lighthearted Altman-movie manqué meets Hollywood Squares (wherein the imaginary contestant might say to the host, “I’ll take Stellan Skarsgård to block yet another unmistakable reference to Short Cuts‘ earthquake-as-metaphor”).

Having witnessed or participated in hundreds of hours of such TV production, here’s a subjective and hopefully relevant observation: despite what is so often presupposed by proponents of multiple-angle TV broadcasts and interactive narratives, one is struck by just how often in a live event there’s only a single best shot for telling the story. Or, rather, the setup and selection of that shot and its conversion from randomly arbitrary to seemingly necessary defines directorial sensibility—in a word, vision.

Telling a story is inescapably undemocratic; what Figgis has done in Time Code seems equally undemocratic, but divided or multiplied by four. Almost incidentally, it’s been shot on digital video. The structuring of story, not the medium, is the message here. Figgis foregrounds the process of editing without a single cut.

During the title sequence, Figgis fills his quadrant frames with examples of experimental minimalism—video editing timecode numbers and VU-meter patterns that, bereft of scale, could be pulsing runway lights or an Ernie Gehr effect. Those object-oriented shots, with no “story” content, frame the action slickly when juxtaposed with narrative frames, but fade as the movie(s) start(s) in earnest.

Actress Lauren (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and aspiring actress Rose (Salma Hayek) are lesbian lovers descending from the Hollywood Hills by limo, Rose to an audition, and Lauren, under the pretense of running errands, to keep tabs on her girlfriend, whom she suspects is having an affair. Across town, Emma (Saffron Burrows) unloads in therapy. Meanwhile, at the Sunset Boulevard offices of Red Mullet Pictures, production executives and their assistants, played by Xander Berkeley, Holly Hunter, Danny Huston, Golden Brooks, and a hotshot director played by Richard Edson, among others, await the arrival of Alex Green (Skarsgård), a mogul powerful and egocentric enough to put his sycophants through exasperating paces. Green is conducting an affair with Rose, all the while distraught at his estrangement from his wife, Emma. He and Emma are having coordinated nervous breakdowns. If the movie does have an imaginary, schizophrenic P.O.V., it’s either his or hers.

The story, by Figgis, is effervescent, enterprising and Altmanesque. It’s fun, for a Figgis film, combining elements of The Player and Short Cuts. Figgis’ direction imparts an overarching tone of improvisational, light (soap) opera. It’s an object-lesson in television “Q” ratings: when the screen’s full of stars, they compete for the eye less through emphasized action than with charisma. Figgis orchestrates the action as fascinating choreography (e.g., complementary shot-reverse shots of Alex leaving one room and entering another) and awkward silliness (groups of actors huddle close together, like a covey of anxious quails, when moving as a group).

But the implicit claims of breakthrough experimentalism fall short of exciting. Figgis himself seems cognizant of this when Red Mullet entertains the pretentious pitch of an avant-garde French director who references everything from Gropius’ Bauhaus functionality to Leibniz’ monadology to support her theory of the digital filmmaking revolution (“Art/technology, a new unity!”), sending Alex hilariously over the edge. But to avoid a confusing cacophony of four audio sources at once, Figgis usually emphasizes only one source per scene, so he’s directing your attention toward a single story anyway. And he drains as many as three screen quadrants of any compelling narrative content at a time. If there’s a story-meeting discussion in one corner with sound, but the other three silent quads contain Hayek putting on her makeup, a closeup of Tripplehorn’s lovely cocoa-brown eyes, and an empty office lobby, one might as well be seeing only one movie, edited in a parallel montage. In that sense, Time Code is not as advanced or beautiful or exhilarating as Abel Gance’s Napoleon triptych of 1927; it’s far less complex and innovative than the trippy pop experiment of Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls or Brian De Palma’s modern, artful split screens in such conventionally watchable movies as Sisters; and it’s not as boldly breakthrough as the widescreen, multiple-character, multi-track conversational overlays of Altman. Because Figgis skillfully mounted four simultaneous 93-minute takes with no cuts, the use of digital video is refreshingly purposeful in contrast to the Dogma95 artists’ self-aggrandizing scams. But, unlike Hitchcock’s attempts to create claustral tension in movies like Rope and Lifeboat, to what narrative purpose has the actual movie-length take been applied? The eye “edits” every conventional shot in the cinema by its focus anyway. Cinema is anti-monad. A shot is irreducible to a word, or even a simple sentence.

The Los Angeles Directors Guild’s top-notch video projection system was employed for Time Code‘s premiere at the Yahoo! Internet Life festival. But since then, Figgis has bumped up the resolution and transferred the video to film for theatrical release. In the process there hasn’t been much discernible gain in image quality. The use of single lenses to capture a range of compositions results in odd angles and unflattering uni-filtered lighting (at least the skin tones could be color-corrected). Frequently tape-to-film transfers lock in the worst characteristics of each media, interframe flicker and feeble image structure. So there’s a case for viewing Time Code in high-definition digital video. It will lose something of its essence—and much of its integrity—otherwise. Video’s psychologically hypnotic properties—as opposed to cinema’s dreamlike quality—reinforces Figgis’ aesthetic of unbroken takes and TV-dramedy tone. It’s honestly video, not film, particularly in the way it evidences its hand-held means of production. Finally, video has an immediacy, which, combined with larger-than-life image size, imparts a strange intimacy to the performances. Perhaps the digital revolution should be televised instead of pretending to be cinematic evolution.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Timecode (2000) Xan Brooks from Sight and Sound, September 2000

Fila, Ivan

LEA A- 93

Czech Republic Germany France (100 mi) 1996

A remarkable story with a strikingly beautiful composition, featuring some original poetry and some terrific acting

Filipovic, Benjamin

WELL-TEMPERED CORPSES (Dobro ustimani mrtvaci) D+ 64

Bosnia-Herzegovina Slovenia France Italy (92 mi) 2005

This feels like an attempt to be a postwar Sarajevo madcap comedy along the lines of Serbian director Emir Kusterica in films like UNDERGROUND or BLACK CAT, WHITE CAT, without the inspired relevancy or the crazy non-stop Gypsy violin music, however it’s a lame substitute, attempting social satire, such as the gorgeous Transportation Minister who masturbates while watching videos of herself making speeches before the city council. However, none of the characters connect to us, there’s little noticeable direction, instead it feels like a connection of disjointed scenes, some that go on way too long, such as the preamble to flying sequence, the humor doesn’t really work, so there’s plenty of repeated gags that weren’t funny the first time. Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” music plays almost inaudibly through an extended scene at the morgue, where bodies in the morgue are initially pronounced dead, but then inexplicably have to be pronounced alive again when the doctors blew the first call. I found very little to like here and could easily have walked out, but it was my first film of the day and nothing else was playing.

Fillières, Sophie

GOOD GIRL (GENTILLE) B 86

France (102 mi) 2005

An Emmanuelle Devos showpiece, seen in recent films like KINGS AND QUEEN, or THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED, but also earlier Noémie Lvovsky works like the 1994 film FORGET ME, which Fillières co-wrote, or her even more brilliant 1999 film, LIFE DOESN’T SCARE ME. While FORGET ME featured a younger, angrier, more sexually provocative women in her early 20’s (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi), this film examines a more mature, independent minded professional, but unmarried, woman in her late 30’s. In both films, the women are the focus of every shot of the film, portrayed here as a character named Fontaine Leglou, an anxious, alluring, overly affectionate, somewhat puzzled yet easy to engage woman prone to making outspoken confessions, who seems to develop unexpected relations wherever she goes.

The film opens as she confronts a man walking down the same street, telling him she’s in no mood to be followed. He apologizes for not following her, if that’s what she’d prefer, but he was really just walking down the same street. Embarrassed, she inexplicably proposes they meet for coffee. And so it goes. The film is a choreographed series of awkward moments, wrong turns, embarrassing gaffes, that focuses nearly entirely on one person, so she’s a performance artist, a drama queen, used to being the center of attention whether she wants to be or not, reflected in a wonderful scene where a street fire-eater grabs her out of a crowd to be his completely unwilling volunteer. In another instance, she returns home where she lives with her fiancé Michel (Bruno Todeschini), but notices a little girl running around the apartment. Despite his perfectly rational explanation for why she was there, she first starts toying with the girl’s name, then conjures up infinite possibilities for why things are not as they appear, suggesting there’s something strange going on, until eventually concluding that the little girl was totally weird. Michel just stares at her starry-eyed and concludes that he loves her. The film moves with this kind of inner reflection leading to romantic thoughts.

The film’s strength is the natural flavor of the always intriguing dialogue, captured in a wonderful conversation as Fontaine and Michel are lying naked in bed, where he actually proposes marriage, which catches her completely off guard, especially as it veers towards unmentionable sexual practices that they might be open to exploring. Shot from the waist up, moving back and forth between characters, turning at first towards one another, affectionately lying in each other’s arms, and then retreating backwards away from one another, moving back and forth like this until eventually, despite the romantic occasion, they’re backs are turned completely away from one another on opposite sides of the bed. This defines their tentative relationship. Throughout the rest of the film, despite their little love kisses and romantic gestures, she makes herself available to any guy that moves, not on purpose, of course, it just happens. She works at a hospital where another doctor there, Philippe played by Lambert Wilson, takes a personal interest, finding clever ways to be near her that resembles stalking, and at times the two feel more compatible than her own fiancé, best expressed in a scene when Fontaine and Michel visit his parents, where she keeps calling him Philippe, which certainly amuses the father, Michael Lonsdale, last seen in a brilliant turn in MUNICH, wondering where this Philippe guy is. The funniest scene in the film is when Philippe sits down at a table in a room full of mental patients at the hospital, where Fontaine had just passed by offering her affectionate hello’s to an apparent staff employee, who proceeds to tell Philippe how she’s had nearly every guy in the hospital, entering into a marathon soliloquy that keeps gathering momentum providing still greater graphic detail, making one suspect he may be a patient with serious delusion issues, as after all, as the title suggests, she’s not that kind of girl.

Eventually, it all comes down to what to do about our apparent lovers, and the story makes it contingent upon the engagement ring, which goes through a series of mysterious transformations, as does this couple. The film is always amusing, a little quirky and off-beat, that feels like we’re witnessing the nervous persona of a great comedic actress, who’s also never afraid to show a little skin, wonderfully expressed in a shower scene where she tries on her engagement ring to various poses in front of the mirror, a woman who delights in her female charms and can’t help talking to people. While this is not a perfect script, as it introduces sequences, like trying on the swimming suit, or characters, like the coffee guy in the opening scene, or Hugues or Cléia who seem to appear in the picture only for the humorous pronunciation of their names, that just disappear and are never heard from again, it does feature one of the best French actresses at the top of her game, who effortlessly slinks around a bit like Sophia Loren, always aware of her feminine presence, yet she maintains a fascinating curiosity about the world around her that makes us want to spend more time with her.

Good Girl (Gentille) Richard Brody from the New Yorker

In this intellectual comedy, written and directed by Sophie Fillières, Emmanuelle Devos plays Fontaine Leglou (the name sounds as funny in French), an anesthesiologist at a mental hospital. Fontaine lives with a professorial boyfriend whose name, Michel Strogoff, happens to be that of a Jules Verne novel (her colleague tells him, "I've heard of you"), but she falls in love with one of her patients, Philippe. The twisting plot is built on ingeniously programmed coincidences, embarrassing accidents, weird slips of the tongue, and surprising confessions. The writing is skewed and brilliant (scientific expositions and shopping sprees stand in for declarations of love). And the images are as restrained and as precise as the highly ordered behavior of the characters, who wear their mask of dignity tightly bound in order not to burst out laughing or screaming. Fillières's hysterically repressed world is a Jacques Tati landscape in which the technological obstacles have been reduced to verbal tics by too many years of psychoanalysis and a feminine sensibility that Fillières avows with an unabashed romantic sincerity.

Reel Film Reviews (David Nusair) capsule review

Gentille gets off to a fantastic start, opening with a hilariously absurd sequence in which Fontaine (Emmanuelle Devos) accuses a man on the street of following her and then - after discovering that he was, in fact, not following her - asking the guy out to coffee. This is followed by further evidence that there's something seriously off about Fontaine (ie she climbs a fence to get to work, despite the fact that there's a normal entrance), and though the film's nonsensical nature is initially charming, it's not long before all this insanity becomes overwhelmingly irritating. Up to a certain point, though, Gentille is basically entertaining (provided the viewer is willing to overlook the fact that most of this makes absolutely no sense); Fontaine is a fairly intriguing character, and Devos does a nice job of portraying her rampant wackiness. The problem emerges when it becomes clear that writer/director Sophie Fillières isn't going to answer the majority of the film's questions, including the most obvious: is Fontaine crazy or not? As a result, the ludicrous vibe quickly goes from charming to annoying, and it eventually reaches a point where the only way any of this could possibly make sense is if the film turned out to be a French variation on The Truman Show (with Fontaine the unwitting participant in a bizarre reality program). But since that never happens, all we're left with is an experimental, self-serving exercise in abject pointlessness.

Strictly Film School review Acquarello

The whimsical and offbeat opening sequence of subverted expectation and role reversal provides a tongue-in-cheek glimpse into the eccentric humor and understatedly irony of screenwriter turned filmmaker Sophie Fillières latest film, Gentille, as an anxious Fontaine Leglou (Emmanuelle Devos), an anesthesiologist working the evening shift at a private psychiatric hospital, accosts an unwitting man on the street with a vehement rejection of any potential attempt at romantic pursuit in the mistaken belief that he had deliberately followed her from the train in order to chat her up. Chagrined by her impulsive act of presumptive aggression, Fontaine then invites the stranger for a drink to atone for her unprovoked brusqueness. Fontaine's reaction to the awkward, if amusingly disarming, encounter provides an insightful glimpse into her character that will inevitably set the tone for a delightful comedy of manners when her behavioral pattern of exceeding politeness, discretion, and opacity collides with her emotional ambivalence over a patient and fellow colleague, Philippe's (Lambert Wilson) not-too-subtle romantic overtures and a marriage proposal from her long-time, live-in lover Michel (Bruno Todeschini) towards an attenuated (and occasionally surreal) self-induced crisis of evasive indecision. Inviting favorable comparison to Noémie Lvovsky's deceptively lyrical, breezy, and idiosyncratic, yet sophisticated, incisive, and poignant comedies on the travails of romantic relationships (in films such as Les Sentiments), Gentille similarly captures the eccentricities of human behavior and the imaginative humor and sensual mystery that can be found in the quotidian. Chronicling Fontaine's humorous attempts at maintaining a semblance of normalcy despite surfacing - and increasingly distracting - romantic entanglements, Fillières insightfully navigates through the ever-complicated terrain of evolving relationships and the enigma of the human heart.

IF YOU DON’T, I WILL (Arrête ou je continue) B- 81

France (102 mi) 2014

Sophie Fillières is better known as a screenwriter than a director, co-writing an earlier Noémie Lvovsky film FORGET ME (Oublie-Moi) (1994) showing a keen ear for the kind of small talk superficiality that hides deeper frustrations, where “self knowledge is a dangerous thing.” This romantic film comedy is no exception, with a rhythmic sounding dialogue that resembles David Mamet doing screwball comedy, where this is largely a two-person play as we follow the squabbles and misunderstandings of a married couple whose marriage is on the rocks. While the likeable actors display excellent comic timing throughout, Mathieu Amalric as Pierre and Emmanuelle Devos as Pomme, this film is ultimately a bit too absurd, though beneath the laughter is a tragically sad portrait of marital dysfunction. The film is set amidst a 20^th century existential state of limbo, given a Sartrian No Exit tone that borders on the surreal, where the characters couldn’t be more out of place and out of time, yet they are hanging onto every word the other says with biting, overly sarcastic comebacks, where much of their dialogue has the feel of a string of one-liners. The audience doesn’t know what to make of this, as the two are obviously very clever, have a deep-seeded connection with each other, as if they’re afraid to actually let go, but rather than argue about their feelings or what matters to them, they spend their time resorting to pettiness and trivialities as a means of holding something over on the other person, becoming a long and extended Alice in Wonderland meaningless game of some sort, caught in a rabbit hole of their own making, becoming an absurd power trip that reflects the changing nature of relationships. While there is obvious wit on display, it feels wasted, as neither one appreciates anything the other has to say, where instead they’re actually too busy avoiding one another.

Amalric and Devos have appeared together as a couple in French movies no less than six times now, going back 18-years to an early talkative Arnaud Desplechin comedy, MY SEX LIFE…OR HOW I GOT INTO AN ARGUMENT (1996), so their history together gives the material added weight, as we’ve been through various battles with them before, making them not only familiar and recognizable, but we’re also comfortable with them onscreen. What’s perhaps most surprising, given the levity of the material, is that nothing is working, that their relationship is in shambles and they’re content to leave it that way. After their college-age son Romain (Nelson Delapalme) moves out of the home, the distance between them only grows wider, where Pomme is apparently recovering from a potentially serious but benign brain tumor, giving her pause and a chance to reflect about the state of their affairs, asking for a definitive commitment from Pierre, but instead he provides painstaking existential answers that simply avoid the question, refusing to provide an ounce of reassurance, as if this kind of verbal sparring is how they spend their lives, turning romance into an ongoing mind game resembling a jousting match, continually hoping to pierce under the armor of the other. Treated in this manner, love is a faded memory, like lost youth, which can only reincarnate in another form, often expressing itself in protracted bitterness. While they attend art galleries together and have a personal trainer who sadistically keeps them in shape, she notices he refuses to dance with her at parties, and their attempts to chill half a bottle of champagne in the fridge on “superfrost” results in a disaster, as the bottle explodes, where they end up sipping chunks of frozen champagne ice mixed with pieces of broken glass. Despite the passive aggressive streak, with hints of meanness, the two still show a certain degree of laughter and affection while remaining at arms length from one another, while the music from singer-songwriter Christophe adds a mainstream dimension of pop romanticism to this otherwise quirky tale.

The two decide to take a walk and go camping in a nature preserve, but their bickering continues, where at the end of a long walk Pomme refuses to return home with Pierre, as she’s simply had it with the guy, who incredulously leaves her behind and returns back to the apartment. She doesn’t know this, however, and can’t reach him as her cell phone battery is dead, but initially spends a good deal of time looking for him, thinking he may be lurking just around the corner waiting for her to come to her senses. But no, he leaves her flat to fend for herself in the forest, which completely alters the tone of the film as instantly there’s no fighting, no talking, suddenly silence, as both have been sent to their neutral corners, and wordless images take over as Pomme finds various creatures to interact with in the woods, turning this into a whimsical Disney experience where she talks to rabbits and goats, even saves a deer that falls into a hole, while sleeping on the ground eating provisions she brought along with her. Quite the outdoors woman, rather than staying in one place waiting to be rescued, she takes a different strategy and starts hiking out of there, finding a small hotel nearby serving food to a group of chamber musicians, joining in, pretending to be one of the players, feasting on the dinner festivities before returning back to the forest. Meanwhile Pierre is visited by Romain, who’s a bit perplexed by his father simply leaving his mother out in the woods without calling the police, as it’s already been several days. Whatever rift existed between them before has only grown deeper, as Pierre is no help whatsoever. Pomme’s absence in the woods recalls Hans Christian Schmid’s German film Home for the Weekend (Was bleibt) (2012) where a mother with a history of mental problems wanders off alone into the woods, with the family organizing a police search and rescue operation in a futile attempt to find her, similarly expressing wholesale family dysfunction before the character disappears, exploring the bored and meaningless lives of the rich and wealthy, discovering what they’ve really been searching for all along is the emptiness within, becoming a counterpart to Antonioni’s L’AVVENTURA (1960). This witty, well acted, dialogue-driven film uses absurd humor to chip away at the idea of a healthy bourgeois marriage, where an otherwise intelligent and attractive middle-aged couple loses their bearings during a midlife crisis, becoming an eccentric and moderately appealing satire on modern marriage.

Fabien Lemercier Cineuropa

Emmanuelle Devos makes an astonishing trip back to nature when faced by her worn-out relationship with Mathieu Amalric. An unusual film directed by Sophie Fillières

"We never talk about anything any more"; "We never dance any more"; "We're getting old": life as a couple is definitely a far cry from a life of bliss for Pomme and Pierre, the two protagonists in If You Don't, I Will [+]  by Sophie Fillières, unveiled in the Panorama at the 64^th Berlinale. Played by the excellent Emmanuelle Devos and Mathieu Amalric, our pair of 40-year-olds unreel an everyday life of feelings that have run dry, accompanied by veiled aggressiveness, mini settlings of scores, eloquent silences at breakfast, routine walks in the forest, "social" commitments that stir no enthusiasm, and slightly fanatical obsessions. It is an observation of a present on the decline and an uncertain future, hardly spiced up by little hints of jealousy ("You don't like it when people like me"). On the basis of this portrait of a couple, which is very well conveyed and not lacking in humour, but all in all rather banal at first glance, Sophie Fillières nevertheless succeeds in carrying off a rather bold and very unusual film by telling how Pomme strangely takes off, escaping to the solitude of the forest in search of a new meaning to give to her life.

Just recently, there have been lots of female characters dissatisfied with their lives and trying to find a way out or a new breath of life in French cinematographic production (one can cite among others On my Way [+], Lulu in the Nude [+], Domestic Life [+], Bright Days Ahead [+]), though Pomme (Devos) sets off into new territories, abandoning her companion on a woodland path and spending almost two weeks, alone and in survival mode, in the midst of nature. A flight on an impulse which leaves Pierre irritated, then dumbfounded, before he decides to set about finding her several days later (in vain, in an area of 11,150 acres criss-crossed by 444 kilometres of paths). Pomme, however, (who will later introduce herself, when hitch-hiking, by the name of Gena Rowlands; a very telling reference...) must above all take a good look at herself and discover quite simply whether she still has a kind of desire to live, now that she knows she is not immortal (she has just been treated for a benign tumour) and that her son is too old for her to keep on over-protecting him.

Borne along by the very real talent of Emmanuelle Devos, If You Don't, I Will avoids the inherent risks in its surprising plot; the sequences in the forest are tinted with the atmosphere of a realistic tale which could easily have descended into something quite incongruous. The well-controlled staging, convincing dialogues and beautiful photography handled by Emmanuelle Collinot all contribute perfectly to a film which is certainly likely to throw spectators fond of rationality, but which expresses very effectively the (feminine ?) emotions ranging between things left unsaid and sudden, almost insane explosions. We see human equilibrium on the fringes of normality, which reinforces the rather off-the-wall style of Sophie Fillières.

If You Don't, I Will/Arrête ou je continue (Sophie Fillières 2014) Chris Knipp from Filmleaf

The prolific Matthieu Amaric, seen also at the Lincoln Center 2014 French film series in the Larrieu brothers' Love Is the Perfect Crime as a strutting professorial Lothario, becomes more of an everyman in Sophie Fillières' quirky study of a disintegrating marriage in Lyon, Arrête ou je continu. (It's been given the English title If You Don't, I Will.). This is the third performance for Fillières by Emmanuelle Devos, who plays Pomme, the disappointed wife of Pierre (Amalric). The others were Aïe/Ouch (2000) and Gentille (2005), the latter clearly a more interesting film, meandering and oddball, like this one, but blessed by the presence of not only Bruno Todeschini but the legendary actors Michel Lonsdale and Bulle Ogier. Here the cast is augmented only by a mountain goat. One feels the lack, and Pomme's long "fugue" in the park, which fills much of the film, is a dreary interlude. As the reviewer of this film for aVoir-aLire.com says, it begins with energy but "gets lost in the forest." Both Amaric and Devos have arguably had a great deal better material in the past. However, one must remember that this is a comedy, and while it may seem like watching paint dry, it does had its droll moments.

Amalric and Devos are no strangers to each other. Arguably the most original French film actors of their generation, they first played a couple 18 years ago in Arnaud Desplechin's distinctive, smart early film, Comment je me suis disputé... (ma vie sexuelle)/My Sex Life... or How I Got Into an Argument. They have appeared together as a couple no less than six times now. They're not young anymore: Amaric is 49 and Deovs 50.

In a key scene at a party Pomme tries to drag Pierre out on the dance floor, but he stands there rigid. The comedy: Pomme complains to a female friend "We don't dance anymore," and the friend says "Nobody does." In a comic moment, the couple try to chill a half bottle of champagne using the fridge's "superfrost" button, and it explodes. They toast each other with chunks of ice. "Watch out for glass," says Pierre.

Since Pierre and Pomme's constant squabbling threatens to grow tiresome Fillières splits them up, though her method is the dubious park episode. The two go on an ill-starred hike in a nature preserve and when they fight as usual, Pomme, who's just recovered from treatment for a benign brain tumor and finds this change of venue a shock, chooses to stay behind in the park and lets Pierre go home in the car by himself. And what does she do? She basically sits around. Her cell phone battery goes dead. At one point she takes a break at a small resort hotel, posing as a chamber musician. Then she goes back to the park. Pierre comes to look for her, but the park is large. When she returns home days later on her own, Pierre, who has been frantic, hopes for a reconciliation. But none takes place. Pomme has saved the young chamois that fell into the stone and ground declivity she was sleeping in. She has not saved their marriage. While Pierre seems to have an affair cooking with Mellie (Josephine de la Baume), he and Pomme are still close, making attempts like the hike in the park and regular joint sessions with a trainer. There's just one thing that's lacking now: amour.

The humor and storyline here are not far from the work of Agnès Jaoui with Pierre Bacri. This is particularly seen in an early sequence at a gallery opening. But Fillières has a more delicate touch. Neither Devos or Amaric has the dryness of that other couple's French humor, nor would Jaoui present a park sequence that was this flat. While the arguments are certainly real-seeming, Fillières doesn't provide any details of Pierre and Pomme's professional lives, and their no longer at home college-age son Romain (Nelson Delapalme), who's brought in a couple of times, is underused. This film seems likely to appeal only to ardent fans of the two actors and the director.

If You Don't, I Will , 102 mins., debuted in the "Panorama" section of the 2013 Berlinale. It opens in Paris cinemas 5 March 2014. Screened for this review as part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center (6-16 March 2014).

Melissa Anderson on Sophie Fillières’s If You Don’t, I Will Artforum magazine

frenchcinemareview.com [Judith Prescott]

Spirituality & Practice [Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat]

ArtsHub [Sarah Ward]

Arrete ou je continue - The Hollywood Reporter Jordan Mintzer

Berlin Film Review: 'If You Don't, I Will' - Variety Guy Lodge

If You Don't, I Will - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fincher, David

Film Reference Philip Kemp

David Fincher is a devotee of darkness. Scene after scene in his films takes place in cramped, sparsely lit rooms where malignancy seems to hang in the air like ineradicable damp. For the shadows that pervade his films are moral and psychological no less than physical. Using darkness as a metaphor for evil and danger is hardly original—it is the entire basis of film noir, for a start—but Fincher brings to the banal equation a degree of emotional intensity that reinvigorates it. The darkness in his films is organic, the element in which his characters swim. When the Narrator in Fight Club quits his bland, Ikea-styled apartment to move into the derelict Victorian mansion where Tyler Durden lives, it's clear that he's coming home. This leaky ruin, squalid and underlit, is where he spiritually belongs.

On the face of it Fincher, with his dark sensibility and nervy, MTV-honed style, should have been the ideal director to take on Alien 3. It was the Alien series, after all, that had brought shadows into space, grafting the conventions of the Old-Dark-House horror movie on to a genre previously typified by brightly lit sets and gleaming, sterile surfaces. But Fincher found himself mired in a hopelessly jinxed project that had already chewed up and spat out two previous directors—not to mention a cinematographer, a small army of writers, and a lot of studio money. "I got hired for a personal vision," he later recounted, "and was railroaded into something else. I had never been devalued or lied to or treated so badly. . . . I thought I'd rather die of colon cancer than do another movie."

The experience evidently left its scars; even with three far more accomplished films to his credit, Fincher claims not to enjoy directing at all, describing it as "kind of a masochistic endeavor." Something of this penchant for willed self-torment transfers itself to his characters, haunted as they are by their demonic alter egos to the point of possession. The actions and character of John Doe (Kevin Spacey), the sadistic serial killer in Se7en, increasingly obsess Brad Pitt's young homicide detective until Doe is able to direct the cop's will, using him as an instrument to complete his own murderous design. In The Game Michael Douglas's rich banker becomes a puppet, jerked this way and that in the devious scheme devised by his scapegrace younger brother. The pattern is even there in embryo (literally) in the flawed Alien 3, with Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) impregnated by the Alien; but it reaches its logical conclusion in Fight Club, where Edward Norton's Narrator and the dangerous, charismatic Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt again), disciple and manipulative guru, turn out to be one and the same person.

This view of people as constantly in thrall to their dark side, ever vulnerable to takeover by their worst submerged instincts, might seem intolerably bleak were it not for the sense of subversive glee that underpins Fincher's work. Gavin Smith, writing of Fight Club (though his comments apply, to a lesser degree, to the earlier films), refers to "a mocking sense of flux and liminality in its attitudes both formally and conceptually . . . insolence towards cinematic codes and conventions concerning authenticity and the narrative representation of space and time." Fincher plays sophisticated mind-games with his audience, taking their cine-literacy for granted and teasing them to follow him as he switches between different levels of subjective and objective reality, just as John Doe cruelly teases the detectives on his trail. At their most achieved, his films contrive to have it both ways, being at once grim metaphysical statements of the human condition and intricate ludic conundrums set in hermetically enclosed worlds. Unsettlingly pleasurable, they at once defy us to take them seriously and challenge us not to.

This kind of conceptual balancing-act requires the highest degree of precisely gauged scripting. When it's lacking, as in John Brancato and Michael Ferris's not-quite-cunning-enough screenplay for The Game, the movie lapses into ingenious spectator sport—diverting, but ultimately uninvolving. But at their most sublimely ambiguous, Fincher's films can set up disquieting tensions in the viewer—as shown by the outraged reactions of certain critics to Se7en and Fight Club. Fincher talks of being "drawn to things that begin to dismantle the architecture, not of movies, but of the pact that a movie that's responsible entertainment makes with an audience." Such disruptive tactics are never likely to make for commercial smash-hits. But if this self-styled "malcontent and miscreant" can resist pressure to tone down the edginess and mordant humour in favour of something less disturbing, his future films—and his influence on mainstream Hollywood cinema—promise to be, at the least, highly stimulating.

Bombast: Gone Finching - Film Comment Nick Pinkerton, October 10, 2014

A big part of the case for David Fincher, at least as I’ve heard it put forward by his more eloquent defenders, is that he’s a throwback—that is to say that, with his unfailing technical luster and easy traverse between genre subjects, he’s a holdover from the days of studio professionalism. Dave Kehr, for example, has compared him to Otto Preminger: “[D]istanced, cool, he’s not making too many judgments for you, he’s amassing data that you can then sift through, very similar camera style, these beautiful long takes.”

The preceding quote comes from 2011, shortly before The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a film which seems almost universally to be regarded as among Fincher’s worst, arrived in theaters. Fincher was then 49 years old. Almost three full years have passed since. Preminger, in the same stretch of his life (1954-57), knocked out River of No Return, The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Saint Joan—not a bad haul, though nothing like his 1960-65 tear. Fincher has since directed the first two episodes of the Netflix original series House of Cards, continues to serve as the show’s executive producer, and fixed in place the overall “distanced, cool” visual template of the program, to which even the demonstrative Joel Schumacher has allowed himself to be tethered. And now we have Gone Girl.

Like Preminger, who established himself as a very successful independent producer-director with 1953’s The Moon is Blue, Fincher at this point in his career presumably has almost total control over his selection of material. Both directors allocate scriptwriting duty elsewhere—neither has a screenwriting credit on any of their feature films. Both have also evinced a partiality for fat tomes with great popular appeal, if only intermittently with egghead cachet. (On the highbrow end, Preminger did Wilde and G.B. Shaw; Fincher, Scott Fitzgerald.) Preminger adapted Book of the Month Club hardcover cinderblocks by Leon Uris, John D. Voelker, and James Bassett. Fincher has now followed Stieg Larsson with an adaptation of a 2012 bestseller written by Gillian Flynn. It’s astonishing that he let The Da Vinci Code slip through his fingers.

Finally, both Preminger and Fincher have a nose for material that will get the chattering classes chattering—or the Twittering classes Tweeting, as it were. The success of The Moon is Blue was attributable, at least in part, to a publicity putsch—it went to theaters without the Motion Picture Production Code’s seal of approval, and this fact promised untold titillation to ticket buyers. Fincher’s greatest box-office successes have come when he has dealt with hot-button issues or the multiplex audience’s idea of the transgressive, with films about serial killers (Seven), anti-consumerist sloganeering (Fight Club), The Way We Live Now (The Social Network), and inside-the-Beltway skullduggery (House of Cards). But where Preminger had the ability to chasten and elevate variously unpromising material, Fincher rarely seems to do the same. For this reason he’s always left me a little uncomfortable, his impeccable, unruffled style putting me in mind of the opening paragraph of Manny Farber’s “Hard-Sell Cinema” essay:

“The figure who is engineering this middle-class blitz has the drive, patience, conceit, and daring to become a successful nonconforming artist without having the talent or idealism for rebellious creation. The brains behind his creativity are those of a high-powered salesman using empty tricks to push an item for which he has no feeling or belief. Avant-gardism has fallen into the hands of the businessman-artist.”

This talk of “rebellious creation” against the “businessman-artist” may seem a little starry-eyed as Jeff Koons holds court at the Whitney, but the above excerpt gets at the absence of conviction that I have always felt in Fincher. Even the Fincher films that I’ve admired seem to have their sticking points: The pathos of Mark Zuckerberg F5ing updates on a Friend Request to an ex-girlfriend at the end of The Social Network (2010) is a piece of laborious symmetry only one-bettered by his latest. For many, Zodiac (2007) was the movie that announced Fincher’s emergence as a mature artist, the one where he put aside those gauche CG-generated traveling shots through wastepaper baskets and Mr. Coffee handles and assumed his present observational style. It is an undeniably audacious movie, a maze without a center—or a proper protagonist, shackled as it is with Jake Gyllenhaal, the performer who my colleague Nicolas Rapold memorably categorized as “wombat-eyed.” Of course, Preminger also had a habit of working more-or-less-successfully around casting—see the green Jean Seberg of Saint Joan (not the quantum leap Seberg of Bonjour Tristesse), or poor, poor Tom Tryon in The Cardinal.

Gone Girl is concerned with a missing woman, but the real structuring absence is Ben Affleck, playing Nick Dunne. With this film and Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder, Affleck may have perfected the role of following—as opposed to leading—man. (Since 2006’s Hollywoodland, his good roles have all played on the ridiculousness of his status as a star actor.) Nick runs a bar in “North Carthage, Missouri” (in fact Cape Girardeau, MO) and teaches English on the side, though it’s difficult to imagine this lug finishing a book, much less aspiring to write one. When we meet Nick, he is sullen, pouty, a little ex-jock paunchy. One afternoon, he returns home slightly day-drunk to find that his wife is missing, and that the glass coffee table in their living room has been shattered in what would appear to have been a struggle. From the moment that the police arrive, Nick fails entirely to respond to the absence of his wife with any of the acceptable indicators of grief, and his insufficiency in the role of distraught spouse is all the more glaring when the media spotlight alights on his case. His wrong-ness is quickly picked up on by the pundits of the 24-hour news cycle, particularly the hostess of Ellen Abbott Live, a blathering blonde modeled on Nancy Grace.

It has been interesting to see a film which, in part at least, is about the process of media feeding-frenzy and reckless speculation, going through the mill itself—as its creators had every hope and confidence that it would—in the week preceding and following its release. (I know, I know, I’m not helping matters.) The touchy subject here, originated with Flynn (who wrote the screenplay) and hand-picked by Fincher, is woman hate—hatred of women, women’s hatred. These are also present to one degree or another in the director’s previous work: The boundlessly execrable Fight Club; Panic Room, previously the record-holder for recurrences of the word “bitch” in a Fincher film; and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, with its turnabout-is-fair-play strap-on rape. Gone Girl does all of the above one better, a Rorschach blot custom-made for this moment when quantifying works of art according to their relative perceived feminism-to-misogyny content is one of America’s favorite pastimes. So chum meets sharks, and Amanda Dobbins at Vulture confirms that yes, Virginia, “Gone Girl Has a Woman Problem,” while for Todd VanDerWerff at Vox it’s “the most feminist mainstream movie in years.” Among our friends in Canada, it has been received as a comedy, either intentional or otherwise. Just today I’ve caught wind of a rumor that the entire movie is taking place in Nick’s head, the new Gorfeins Theory of the too-much-time-on-their-hands set. And I’ve not even started in on the brouhaha surrounding the side-view of Affleck’s Hollywood loaf!

The dong cameo occurs in a shower scene which takes place after Nick’s reunion with his blood-spattered bride, Amy, played by Rosamund Pike, in actual fact no innocent victim but a Lady Macbeth whose conscience presents her no problem in washing herself clean of the taint of blood. Amy is introduced in close-up in the film’s opening shot, in which her husband is heard to fantasize about cracking open her skull in voice-over. Through the first half of the movie, during which we have no reason other than Nick’s limp protestations not to believe that he’s lived out his fantasy, Amy is present through flashbacks narrated by her journal entries, in which she recounts the two years of their courtship and the five years of their slowly unraveling marriage, writing with a girlish script and candy-colored ink entirely inappropriate to a woman over thirty. The visualized scenes from these diary entries play like fairy-tale romance familiar from post-Sex and the City pop, New York City media jobs and skyscraper backdrop and all. It’s saccharine to the point of parody from the moment that Nick takes Amy past an all-night bakery to walk her through a sugar storm, just as the dissolution of their loving foundation plays out as boilerplate domestic melodrama.

There is a reason for this reliance on cliché, as it turns out: what’s being depicted is, in fact, largely the fabrication of a madwoman. (Where the real story of Nick and Amy ends and the fabrications begin is not and will never be explained.) Throughout the media firestorm surrounding her disappearance, Amy has been hunkered up in cabin in the Ozarks, hiding out behind a big-box store dye job and a southern accent. The incriminating journal that we’ve been hearing from was a clue that Amy left behind for the investigating detectives to find, the final piece in an elaborate mousetrap deigned to catch and frame Nick for her murder, as she deems nothing less than the death penalty a just punishment for his affair with a young student.

With this revelation, replete with “This is how it really happened” flashbacks a la The Usual Suspects/Fight Club/Memento, Amy temporarily takes over the narration, explaining how she used the same imagination that she’d once applied to crafting romantic scavenger hunts to trap Nick. Here Fincher is entirely in his element, offering the viewer the vicarious thrill of playing accomplice to a criminal genius—you almost expect Amy to tauntingly direct-address the viewer in the style of Spacey’s Frank Underwood in House of Cards, or his predecessor, Spacey’s John Doe in Seven, and she damn near does. From Doe to Mark Zuckerberg, Fincher’s filmography is littered with blandly brilliant micromanaging geniuses, but here he has one who exudes a bit of gelid glamor. Amy is “methodical, exacting, and worst of all patient,” to use a description applied to Doe, or if you prefer “a manipulative fucking control freak,” as Michael Douglas’s Nicholas Van Orton is described in 1997’s The Game, still by a considerable stretch Fincher’s most completely-realized movie, and the one where his comprehension of movie logic—as opposed to reasonable plausibility—reaches the giddiest heights of preposterousness, up to its final swan dive.

Gone Girl’s single most impressive set piece comes after Amy takes shelter in the security camera-wired lake house of Desi Collings (Neil Patrick Harris), an ex-boyfriend who’s held a torch for Amy since boarding school, who agrees to help her in her hour of need, though his assistance comes with an undercurrent of proprietary menace. This doesn’t sit so well with Amy, especially after Nick sends her a covert message signifying that he knows she’s alive, has decoded her scheme, and seems to want her back. So one morning, biding her time, Amy scrupulously builds a case to prove that Collings had kidnapped her, held her hostage, and repeatedly raped her, putting on a dumb-show for the camera, violating herself with a bottle, shredding her wrists with rope restraints and finally—the piece-de-resistance—slitting her “captor’s” throat with a box-cutter at the moment of his climax, showering herself with a gush of arterial blood with full assurance that she’ll get away clean. “There are parts of the movie where I go, oh yeah, ‘Go Amy,’” Fincher told a Los Angeles crowd at a recent post-screening Q&A, and why wouldn’t he—she knows how to stage a scene for her director.

The victim here, Collings, is a posh spazz who threatens to chain Amy to a future of “octopus and Scrabble” in the wine-dark Mediterranean, and so his passing is not to be grieved. The rich are detestable here, while the middle-class don’t come off a great deal better, represented by the bovine Midwesterners who herd together for a candlelight vigil for Amy—beautifully shot in dusk-light by DP Jeff Cronenweth, as if I needed to mention—and most prominently by a neighbor hausfrau, Noelle (Casey Wilson), covertly befriended by Amy to bolster her case against Nick. (An “idiot” in Amy’s words, but also as presented by Fincher.) As for the poor whom Amy descends among while on the run, they’re treated with the usual repulsed fascination that Fincher reserves for the sight of decay. We have the Morlock-like meth addicts who congregate in the abandoned mall in North Carthage, and the white trash grifters who sidle up to Amy while she’s laying low, Greta (Lola Kirke), a slattern with a cold sore visible from outer space, and Jeff (Boyd Holbrook), a lummox with his arm in a filthy cast. The pair catch sight of Amy’s fanny pack full of rainy day cash and shake her down for it, and as Jeff’s ransacking Amy’s cabin, it’s let slip that the whole thing was Greta’s idea, for the women wield the brains in this movie, against which male brawn is laughably ineffectual. (It’s one of the film’s better gags that when Nick finally puts hands to his wife, as she’d unfairly impugned him for doing before, she scarcely even notices the blow.)

Is Gone Girl misogynist, misandrist, elitist, or sans-culottes? Can I opt for all of the above? And who’s to blame? Once Amy has revealed herself as the film’s stealth narrator, and in the process ceded control, we must presume that the narrative is being overseen by none other than Gillian Flynn and David Fincher. (That is, of course, assuming that it isn’t all in Nick’s head.) It is telling that their storytelling in no significant way deviates from that of their heroine. The “distanced, cool” style tends to deflect claims of caricature, but all things considered, the New York City gay bar in Preminger’s Advise and Consent—made in 1962, mind you!—seems a more pleasant place to spend time than the small-town Missouri of Gone Girl.

If the film has any sympathy or allegiance, it’s a respect for cleverness and ingenuity wherever they exist, most often as embodied in Amy. When she covertly hocks a loogie in Greta’s Mountain Dew, we’re invited to share in Amy’s enjoyment of the payoff. When Greta and Jeff catch her with her back turned, well, she has only herself to blame. It’s a movie that’s on the side of whoever’s conniving enough to get the upper hand, which is why the ostensible tragedy of the conclusion, with hapless Nick pinned in a loveless marriage with a potentially-homicidal monster, feels so wholly unconvincing. Any time someone gets caught out—or, quite literally, with their pants down—you can almost hear Fincher out-of-frame, whispering like John C. McGinley’s gloating SWAT agent to the bedsore-ridden “corpse” in Seven: “You got what you deserved.”

Fincher is a throwback all right, but he doesn’t go much further back than the release of Pretty Hate Machine. For all of Fincher’s marvelous control, I can’t look past the accumulation of Nineties tropes that riddle his filmography, a particular form of PTSD that comes with having gone through adolescence in that era. It’s in his ex-music video director’s fetish for urban/industrial desolation. It’s in his serial killer chic. It’s in his marketable, unreflective conception of female agency—when Amy gives her “Cool Girl” speech, apparently lifted verbatim from Flynn’s book, I swear I heard Jagged Little Pill fading in on the soundtrack. It’s especially in his elevation of cleverness and snark, as epitomized in the zingy patter between Nick and his twin sister, Margo (Carrie Coon in the Janeane Garofalo part—and while we’re on the subject, does anyone buy this sibling relationship for even a second?)

Like Tyler Perry’s Gummi bear-throwing defense lawyer, Margo is there for comic relief, but as a friend noted, “a comic-relief scene isn’t the same as a film being a satire.” (Is John Ford’s entire filmography satire because of the occasional bouts of knockabout comedy?) Sometime around the point that the lead detective investigating Amy’s disappearance (Kim Dickens) complements the name of Nick and Margo’s bar (The Bar) as “very meta,” effectively directing our reception of the film, I decided I’d had just about enough of exemplification-as-exoneration. Gone Girl reconfirms Fincher as a mastermind, but I only see whey-faced John Doe playing with his “sick, ridiculous puppets.”

Interview: David Fincher - Film Comment Amy Taubin interview from Film Comment, January/February 2009

DAVID FINCHER: It took for fucking ever. We were supposed to make it before Zodiac. Sherry Lansing was running the studio and I think it was just too big a bite. It’s funny, you say to people $140 million or $150 million dollars and Hollywood is so screwed up that three years later it sounds like a bargain. I think it was just that the number was too daunting, and also, what is it? Is it an action movie? Is it Forrest Gump? When you say you’re making a movie about life and death for anyone who has had children or anyone who has had parents, Hollywood is not going to beat down your door.

AMY TAUBIN: And they still seem to be having trouble figuring out how to sell it. The poster I saw was, well, a bit vague.

It’s interesting. I made it with the idea in mind that it showed the fallacy in the idea that youth is wasted on the young. But some people come out of it saying, “You made the best case for youth is wasted on the young.”

I don’t see the second at all.

Neither do I. But again, I think people bring so much to it. If you’ve lost a parent, if you’ve sat there on that death watch… it’s a totally different situation for somebody who’s been through that than for somebody who hasn’t. I joked about this, but it really is true that when I tallied the list of things that everybody said I should cut, the movie was an hour and a half, and when I tallied the list of everything that people said you must not cut, the movie was four hours long. So at some point you have to do what feels right to you and call it a day.

I think it’s a terrific movie. I probably shouldn’t start with my only reservation—what I think you should have cut—but since you gave me the opening, I’d like to get it out of the way. I had problems with the framing story, and particularly with starting the film with such a long framing sequence. Because, for me, it does an odd thing: the reality of the movie is Benjamin’s story. I believe so much in that story that when you shift to a different register of realism in the hospital, it seems much less real. I never buy it—it seems to me just an actress lying in bed with a lot of make-up to make her look sick. Whereas everything else in the movie, I believed totally, or rather I had no problem suspending disbelief.

I felt you needed to be reminded of the mundane. I wanted to gut the tragedy. The tragedy is not that we all die, that’s just a given. So, I sort of know what you’re saying, but I felt structurally you needed it. And I think Eric [Roth, the screenwriter] felt strongly about it, and I feel he was right—you needed to get the experience through someone [Daisy and Benjamin’s daughter] who hadn’t experienced it. You couldn’t do it just as Daisy’s POV, It just not third party enough. Everything is like either he’s telling you this is what it’s like for me or she’s telling you. But it [the framing story] is designed to be semi-reliable.

During the Q&A at the DGA screening, Steven Soderbergh asked you how you set the tone of a fable? And you said something like you didn’t think of it as a fable. I don’t think of it as a fable either.

Yeah.

I think, in part, the reason is how movie time has affected us without us being consciously aware of it. It doesn’t seem so strange to me that someone would go backward in time—that his body as a biological entity would be programmed to go from the end to the beginning. The connection between Benjamin’s body clock and movies is specifically made in that sequence where Mr. Gateau, the clockmaker, describes how he wanted time to go backwards so that his son who died in the war could come back to life, and at that point, you see the war footage running backward. So movies have changed our experience of time and it’s just the next step for that experience to infiltrate our DNA. If the shot of the movie going backwards hadn’t been there, I might have found it harder to believe in Benjamin’s experience.

Again, this is what I love about Eric Roth: that all the people who posit these ideas are lunatics. Elias [Koteas] and I talked a lot about Mr. Gateau [Koteas’s character] and his sort of tilting at windmills. But I think it’s kind of like what Spielberg’s great at with visual effects. He posits the idea before he shows it to you and he has you rooting for it. When I read it [the scene of war going backwards] on the page I thought, is this going to work? A military charge running in reverse and seeing these people fly back together again? It’s the cheapest trick in cinema. It’s so simple and yet it’s a bold idea. And it’s played as such a quixotic moment. It has so much pathos. The combination of those elements is such an Eric Roth thing. You have empathy for him [Mr. Gateau] even though you don’t know who the hell he is. But you have empathy for a situation and then he makes crystal clear his hopes and desires in this very simple cinematic conceit.

I’m not a fan of Forrest Gump, to put it mildly. The first time I saw Benjamin Button, I wasn’t aware that Eric Roth wrote both films. But when I put that together, I watched Gump again and loathed it just as much. What’s strange is that the two films pose very different worldviews and yet they share so many narrative tropes and devices. For example the way the first person voiceover threads through both films.

Yeah, and particularly his flashes in time. I used to joke with Eric about “and we see just that.” We’d have the big discussion about the see-and-say. Are we going to see and say… because it’s funny but it’s easy. And when we got down to it, the only see-and-says we kept were the stuff that went right through everyone’s intellectual chain mail.

Would you explain see-and-say?

Whenever we had something that was talked about and we’d see it at the same time, we’d let it slide if we felt it was emotional—it would sort of cut through everything. For instance, [Mr.Gateau says] “Perhaps the boys that we lost in war might stand to come home again.” And then you illustrate it—you literally cut to it [the footage running backward]. And that was one of the moments where we said, well you’re going to have to do that. But for the most part we wanted things to stagger and be dovetailed. He [Benjamin] talks about something but it doesn’t happen just then. Because that kind of irony allows people to put up their emotional chain mail up. Like when he says “I met the person who would change my life forever,” and the first person he sees is his father across the street, and you go “maybe that’s who.” and then, of course, he turns around and there’s Daisy. So wherever possible we were trying to make sure you didn’t feel “well, I don’t need to listen to this because I’m just going to see it at the same time.” There was always a little bit of a trick being played unless it was one of those moments like the war footage running backwards. And you said, this is undeniable. This is going to be a powerful thing to witness at exactly the same time as he’s talking about it.

I think the voiceover is remarkable, in part because of Brad Pitt, who is wonderful in the film.

I love him so much in this movie. His most effortless performance ever and it’s the most difficult stuff to do.

And his accent seems, to my New York ear, pretty flawless.

Tim Monich [the dialogue coach] is good. I was terrified of the idea of accents, but we were down prepping it in New Orleans, and you know, you can’t have a Missouri accent, you can’t have a San Diego accent, you can’t be mid-Atlantic, we’ve got to do this. Tim was very conscious of making sure that a lot of elements of it were African-American because Benjamin was raised in that environment. We chose Virginia for his father’s accent—we wanted it to sound a little tonier, but the New Orleans accent has a nice homily.

I listened to you talking at the DGA about the motion capture, and I think I have a general idea of how you do it, but would it be too boring to ask you to run through the basics?

Intro to Facial Capture 101.

Even before we get to facial capture. What happens on the set, in the scenes where Benjamin looks old. You have small actors playing Benjamin. Where is Brad?

We don’t have Brad on the set. He’s never there [during those scenes].

And one or another of the small actors is doing the lines and walking through the blocking and interacting with the other characters?

That is correct.

But has Brad read the scenes with the other actors who are supposed to playing with him? Do the three small actors know what he’s going to do, or are they very good at capturing his rhythms or what?

Well, we cast them not so much for their acting ability. Peter Badalamenti plays Benjamin from when he’s 5 up until he’s about 9, basically the first four years of the movie—we meet him in a wheel chair and he gets up out of the wheelchair and he’s walking on two crutches, he goes out into the world with Mr. Oti on two crutches. So Peter’s greatest function and the things he had most to be aware of were where he was looking, and did it look like he had never walked before and was trying to walk on crutches, and was he looking at his Mom when his Mom was talking to him or was he looking away. He did the lines but a lot of the time his delivery was faster. But we were married to his head movement on the set, so takes were chosen depending on where he was in physical space, what his body was doing, and where his head was looking. And some times, we re-jiggered some of the text once Brad got in there and he said things a little differently, but we’d be locked into, not the eye-line, but the head position. Then there’s a hand-off to Robert Towers who plays Benjamin from [when he’s about] 10 to 15. We reintroduce Benjamin at the Thanksgiving Day party and he’s walking on one cane. That’s Robert Towers, and he does all the stuff with Benjamin meeting Daisy, and their scene under the table, and going out and getting the job on the tugboat, and going to the whorehouse and meeting his father. Then he comes back home, he throws up, he brings Daisy on the tugboat, he meets Mrs. Maple [piano teacher], she dies, he decides to leave home. At the time you see him packing his bags and walking downstairs and leaving, that’s Tom Everett. So all the stuff of leaving his mother on the porch and then reading the letter from Daisy and meeting all the different crew members, that was Tom. And then Brad takes over, when we come through the snow and the Chelsea [the tugboat] is moving into the port of Murmansk. That’s Brad’s first shot.

Now in terms of how it worked: We had done a test in 2001 or 2002 with Joel Bissonnette, who plays the social worker at the end. He had been in Zodiac and Fight Club. We’d taken him and done the make-up, we’d tried the head replacement thing. We tried lopping off the heads and keeping the collars and then tracking from the movement we would get from multiply placed reference cameras. So when we did it [on the set for the actual film] we had a full bandwidth 4-4-4 production camera that was our main camera—that was the eye of the scene—and then we had to hide in a real house all these other cameras to make sure that we always had hi-def data of where Peter’s head or Robert’s head or Tom’s head was in the scene. And then we’d take that data and track it so we could derive where the head was in space, and then we also got still photos of the backgrounds wherever the character walked so we could erase his head and put this other head in. But what was critical was the reference—we had to know exactly where his temples were in relation to his clavicles because that distance can’t ever change. There’s no squash and stretch in that. So that became the critical thing. We had the full bandwidth production camera and three or four vipers that were in 4-2-2—television mode—and we would run them to a ganged set of recorders. And then, all the media from the shot would have to be collated, and we’d comb through it and say, this is the take we would want to use, and then Digital Domain would pull up all of the media from the other cameras that related to that take, and cancel out all the camera movement, cancel out all the head movement and pull up the stills of the environment and then they would erase the head out of it.

Oh my God.

Yeah. We only started putting the head on after we shot the whole movie. We shot the whole movie and then we cut the whole movie with the background scenes and a black dot that just floated over Benjamin’s head, so you could hear him talk but you didn’t see him. So we could move dialogue around if we wanted to pace the performance differently. We could take different readings of, say, Peter’s and move them around. You were wed to where his head was in space, but you weren’t wed to what his lips were doing at that moment in time. We cut the whole movie that way. And then we showed it to Brad. And he’d say “I like that bit, but I’d like to have a little more time for something here,” and then we’d make those alterations. And then we locked the picture, about May 2007. And then Digital Domain begin the process of erasing all the heads of the actors who were there [playing Benjamin], they eradicated any memory of that, and started building with all their collars and hats and glasses. And then I went off to shoot the wraparounds with Cate [Blanchett, who plays Daisy] and Julia [Ormand, who plays the daughter—the reliable narrator—in the framing story]. Then we built a motion–capture stage in the Valley and we did about five days of performance capture stuff of Brad. He had a 23-inch monitor that showed him the scene as it was cut—the hat of Benjamin and Benjamin’s body but not his face, and he would perform the take. And you know, it was pretty, because we knew we could cut stuff so we could ask him to pick it up again, but it was all pre-cut, and we had everything loaded into Final Cut Pro so we had all of the scenes and handles for each shot so all of that stuff was ready and rolling, so we could just kind of go, okay, play that back, and he would hear it in the ear-wig and he would respond and we would record his voice—it was on a soundstage—and that become the final audio for Brad. And we also took his performance capture, and we could cut those and trim them within the time frame there, and we could see it back—we had a little postage-stamp-sized picture of Brad in the side of the frame, so you could see what he was doing in relation to what the head was doing, and then Digital Domain took all the stuff and made the sculpture of Brad-as-an-85-year-old move. So the sculpture we had of him was scanned into a computer and became like a soft-puppet, and then he basically was the puppeteer of the 3-D data base of himself as an older man.

That’s so amazing. When you watch it, you never think twice about how could this be happening. It’s remarkable in terms of the technical invention, of course, but it’s also remarkable in terms of his performance—just in terms of his eyes and his line-readings.

I’ll tell you, it was almost the beginning and the end of my relationship with Digital Domain. We had done a commercial for Orville Redenbacher to do the proof of concept. Millions of dollars were spent. Marco Maldonado, who did all the tracking, he really figured that shit out. So on that commercial the tracking was perfect, but the skin shaders were horrible and the hair shaders were horrible. What ended up happening, because they are a vendor for commercial visual effects, was that they [Digital Domain] got railroaded into this schedule that precluded them really developing the facial capture side of the pipeline. So there was a lot of key-frame animation. And key-frame animation, as great as it is… Tom Hanks in Toy Story is as great as Tom Hanks has ever been—it’s amazing the distillation of all those moments and the risks the actor can take and with the voice and the things that they can try, and you can just use that line from here and this line from here, and you can create this thing that is perfectly timed because you can comb through it a thousand times and then you bring in really gifted people to figure out the facial contortions that are happening on top of it. But it’s a toy, and you do see Hanks through it sort of, but it’s like frozen concentrated. And the thing that we found on this Orville Redenbacher commercial was that all of the beautiful things that really talented animators bring to their craft ultimately are obfuscation when you’re talking about a performance. You can make a consistent performance of a character, but you can’t make it look like Brad Pitt. So we sat down and we had a come-to-Jesus, and I said, you guys got to figure out a way—I don’t want a Xerox machine, I don’t want you to plug this piece of software into another piece of software that’s off the shelf. I’m not talking about years of software development. You’ve got to find whatever worked on Beowulf and throw away whatever didn’t work, and you have to find whatever worked on Final Fantasy and you got to throw away whatever didn’t work, and you have to come back with something that’s ready to go. I can’t spend ten million dollars priming the pumps on this. You’ve gotta come back with a solution that works the first time.

And they did. They came up with a way. They culled through everything and sort of invented a way of daisy-chaining different technologies that made it possible for it to be Brad. And this is thing: I’d have these, well not fights, but circuitous conversations with Sherry Lansing, who I adore, but who would keep asking, ‘When does Brad come into the movie? And I’d say, will you stop with this fucking question, he’s going to be in the movie from the beginning to the end, and she’d be, “Yeah, but when does he come in?” and I’d say, “you’re just going to have to trust me.” And it was astounding, because he [Brad] would do the weirdest shit, I can imagine, it was like the first day of shooting on Pirates of the Caribbean and here comes Johnny Depp out of his trailer and his teeth are all gold and he has eyeliner on and this is what he’s doing? And you kind of go “Wow, it’s singular.” He [Brad] would do these things, like in the scene where he’s supposed to make a muscle. What Robert did in the scene was kind of sedate, he was just eyeing himself in the mirror like, wow, I am changing. And Brad came in and said, “I think he would just be so jacked, it’s like he’s out of his coffin.” So I said, “well, let’s try it.” He did it and I thought, this is ridiculous—I don’t know if this rig we built can capture anything this extreme, so I said let’s do another one, maybe a little more sedate, and he goes, “no, no let’s do this.” And we took that data and interpolated it with that 85-year-old face, and everyone just fell out of their chairs in dailies. You looked at it and went, oh my God, it’s character, it’s not a technique. It’s like when he learns to walk and he’s falling on his face, he’s toward camera and the look on Peter’s face was that he’s happy, his eyes are sort of wide-open. And then Brad came in and did this Popeye thing, and I thought, yeah your glasses are going to be all cocked and screwed up. And he did this whole thing where like one side of his face was scrunched up he looked like Popeye. And I said, I don’t know about this, and then when we saw it—Benjamin trying to walk—it was perfect.

So when you did the five days of motion capture with Brad alone, how was he framed? Was he acting full out with his whole body?

The cameras were on him like from the top of his chest to the top of his head and he had room on the sides to move around. Remember all of the movement he makes in the facial capture is cancelled out, so the movement doesn’t have to synchronize. We are just going to take the data of what his face is doing. So he was free do to it as he saw fit, and we just edited the sections that we wanted for the different shots and then they could apply the data of that facial contortion through the rig of him as an 80-year-old, and then we put that on the bodies of the actors who were there in New Orleans.

You know people are going to say, this isn’t a performance, it’s just some kind of animation, but I have endless admiration for him for having the technical chops to do that, and also to be able to play with another actor in a scene. Because the first full-out emotional scene in the film is the one with Tilda Swinton who is also remarkable. And that’s the first scene where the whole Brad—body and head together—appear to the screen.

Once everyone gets over the endless bizarre fascination that the tabloids have with him… it’s kind of like Paul Newman—you’re just amazingly handsome, amazingly handsome, amazingly handsome until you have a body of 20 or 30 movies, and then everyone goes, Wow, who knew.

Why couldn’t you use the same method when he’s a young boy as when he’s an old man? Once he’s regressed to 12 years, you begin using child actors to play Benjamin…

Not enough money. We could have, but it would have been a lot more expensive. When he’s 12, it’s Brad’s voice though. The actor who plays him when he’s sitting at the piano, we had to make his ears smaller, because Brad has these small ears. This kid looked a lot like Brad looked at that age but something was off… and then they made his ears smaller, and of course, that looks just like him.

So what proportion of shots were simply through the lens the way you shot them on the set and nothing else.

I would say more than half. All of the tugboat is blue-screened. There are matte paintings in and around the Nolan house, and then there’s the head replacement. Yeah, I’d say more than half. By the time you get to the Fortiess, we have a couple of matte paintings—to set up Paris and to set up New York, but for the most part, all that stuff is pretty straight. Same for the Sixties—and not counting make-up fixes where you have a piece of make-up that has to be blurred or fixed—yeah I’d say more than half. Does that surprise you?

No, I just didn’t have a sense of when it was and when it wasn’t. I mean I knew that wasn’t actually Paris actually in the Fifties, but mostly I forgot about it. Another question: did you choose the century references very carefully? One of the differences between this film and Forrest Gump is that Gump gives you just about every possible era reference, but here they were very sparing.

Yeah, we were staying away from that.

And the ones that are there are surprising: Carousel and the beatnik party, and Lincoln Kirsten and Balanchine…

And the Mercury Redstone. Imagine you are sailing along and you see the first launch of the Mercury Redstone from Cape Canaveral, and you go, “gee that’s pretty.” That’s the way Eric writes “They look over and see the first launch of the Mercury Redstone,” and you go… they don’t know it’s the Mercury Redstone. It’s just giant puffy clouds, so they go, “Look at that.” We tried to stay away… obviously you have to know where you are in time, and you do that with music and with hairstyles, and with colors and cars. But it was never going to be “ And now!!! Welcome to 1941!!!’

Sorry to be obsessive about this, but how many years from the time you actually started production until now?

I was hired to do a test and put together a budget and a schedule, I think in 2003. And then they shut us down for a few years and I went off to do Zodiac. And just before Zodiac, Katrina hit. And we sort of thought, Well, that’s off. And we sent the locations manager to New Orleans about six weeks after Katrina, and he called and said “It’s all still here, everything we want to get at. There’s no public works system and all the trolley shots we’re going to have to fake, but it’s basically still here, and if you want to risk it, come down. I don’t know if I can get you plywood to build sets, but there are hotels that are dying to put people up.” So we sort of rolled the dice at that point, and we went to the studios and we said we think we can do it for this number and they said, “Okay, that number, not a penny more, and we called Brad, we called Cate and said we’re on. October 2006. And we’d been talking about it for five years.

And working on the script at the same time?

We pretty much had the shooting script by 2003-2004. That’s what we turned in with our schedule, and that’s the thing they shut down. So we didn’t work on the script after that until we had actors in make-up chairs and we were gluing rubber to their faces, and then we would have these meetings, really great sort of fun story meetings, and talk about what people thought they could play and what they could bring to it or what he should do. Sort of revamping it as you do and tailoring things to things people want to say with the character. We did that for four or five weeks, and then we went down to New Orleans and started shooting.

It’s a silly question at this point, but did you ever consider making it on film?

There was no way to do it on film. We went all digital because I can do it in my office. We have the art department here, and we have PIX, so the editorial department and the production designer can draw up what a matte painting should look like and we can email that up to Matte World in Marin County and they can comment on it on PIX, and then they can redraw stuff, and we can say that’s it. And this is the locked picture and we can send them the plate and the zip drive FedEx—you don’t have to get into this whole thing of sending someone over to Deluxe and they get it to the negative cutter and then they have to cut it and make sure those are the frames we want, because, God forbid, we have to come back, and then … We just didn’t want to do that, so we thought we’ll just deal with this in the HD world that we already figured out for Zodiac, and only have to go a few steps further for Benjamin Button.

So is Paramount going to be limited to theaters that can show it digitally?

No, we’ll be striking prints the first week of December. And I saw one yesterday and it looks pretty good. It’s a little colorful, but…

But do you prefer showing it digitally?

Yeah.

It is an intensely romantic movie without the romanticism being limited to the romance per se. I think all your movies, except maybe Panic Room, aesthetically have their roots in 19th-century romanticism—the vision of mortality and the beauty of loss and decay. And it’s that wedded with the 21st-century technology makes them very powerful.

Well, the mortality was there in the script. That was the thing that I kept coming back to. You know we were discussing this the other day over at Paramount marketing. You have the two most beautiful people in the world on the poster for Dr. Zhivago, but you also have the Russian Revolution behind them. You know what’s going to get in the way. In this case, you can’t put a clock behind them. You know what I mean? And yet there’s something odd about it. I saw what the movie looked like in my head but it never occurred to me the sadness until we were actually making it. You see someone who’s 65 years old, but you don’t think, uh-oh, you’ve got 15 years. But when you see someone who’s aging backward and they’re 12, you just go, Oh [a sighed Oh]. Because I know what one through 12 is. I’ve seen it in my kid. It is an odd thing. If you saw two people meeting again in their seventies, it doesn’t seem as sad to me as when she’s 70 and he’s 20. I’ve got to tell you this story, I hope you’ll appreciate it. We had a sex scene in it, and Paramount was very… they said “You cannot have a 68-year-old woman have sex with a 20-year-old man.” And we said, well we’re going to. So we came in on the day, and we had these body doubles who were lovely, and we talked about what it was, and Brad talked about what he would do and I was sitting there and listening to all this and we were trying to rehearse this whole thing. And suddenly, I realized we could just fade to black, and then we just see this woman pulling her panty hose on and him watching her from behind. That’s going to speak volumes. Because it’s so vulnerable. She won’t face him, she’s hoping he’s not looking and it’s so human. You look at all the little buckles and rolls of flesh, stuffed into… it was really interesting. We would shoot the scene with Cate and then we’d bring the body double in, and I’d sort of apologize and say, “Okay, you’re pulling your top on here.” And she was wonderful and lovely. And we actually did end up shooting these six or seven shots for this [sex-scene] montage. And it was odd because Claudio [Miranda, the DP] had this beautiful soft light from the bathroom raked across the bed. And you couldn’t really tell. You could tell that he was twenty, but you couldn’t tell that she was 65 or 68. It wasn’t really making the point that I thought it would, so we went with pulling on the panty hose. But when I saw that moment, I thought we’re here to talk about that. It’s so important that he’s 22 and she’s in her sixties.

It’s both abstract and extremely emotional. The whole movie is like that.

I don’t know anymore. You see something a thousand times. I’m completely inert to it.

I’m very curious about what people are going to make of it?

As am I. But this is the part where you just want to hibernate and wake up eight months later. How did it all turn out? Am I persona non grata?

God of Filmmaking bio info and film comments

The Works and Genius of David Fincher a Fincher Fanatic informational blog

All-Movie Guide bio from Rebecca Flint Marx

David Fincher Sean Lindsay from Senses of Cinema

Pop Matters Article (2007) 'Zodiac' filmmaker David Fincher recalls wave of panic, by Rene Rodriguez, March 3, 2007

Fincher, David They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Digital Bits Interview by Todd Doogan, May 11, 2000

Geek Monthly Interview April 3, 2007

Interview: David Fincher - Film Comment Amy Taubin interview, September/October 2014

Brainy Quotes

Wikipedia

Ranked 39th on The Guardian's 2004 List of the World's 40 Best Directors

SE7EN B+ 92

USA (127 mi) 1995 ‘Scope

I just don’t think I can continue to live in a place that embraces and nurtures apathy as if it was virtue.

—Detective William Somerset (Morgan Freeman)

It’s a dark and foreboding world set in some timeless and nonspecific present. What’s worse? It’s wet, where a deluge of rain continuously pummels a hellish dark city drenched in a criminally infested cesspool that starts resembling Sodom and Gomorrah. This is a fatalistically grim and enormously creepy serial killer film, where the production values are coolly impressive, but like most Fincher films, the emotional detachment can be overwhelming at times. Morgan Freeman as Detective William Somerset is one of the highlights of the film as a downbeat, world weary but extremely conscientious detective who is within a few days of his retirement. His sense of order and objective detachment has an old world quality to it, somber and scientific, a man who reflects before he acts, whereas the other cops are more temperamental and hot-headed, prone to knee-jerk reactions where they want to play the hero, as exemplified by a new detective assigned to work with him, Brad Pitt as Detective David Mills. In fact, Somerset immediately sees Mills as a detriment to solving the most recent case, a particularly horrific murder, as Mills confidently jumps headlong into the thick of it like a young hotshot without any serious regard for what he’s dealing with. Mills is quickly assigned to another murder which is equally egregious, where the two are destined to share evidence as if by fate. But it’s Somerset’s dogged persistence working studiously in the library that gets a handle on just what they’re dealing with, as the killer is naming each abominable murder with one of the Seven Deadly Sins, which suggests more are forthcoming. What’s truly bloodcurdling about each murder is the methodical degree of patience exhibited by the killer as he inflicts excruciating and unthinkable amounts of pain before each victim dies, where he may even force them to mutilate themselves during the process. All this precedes the SAW (2004 – 2010) series, notorious for their gruesomely graphic depictions of sadistic torture porn, where this is more suggestive, as the actions have already taken place offscreen before the detectives discover the catastrophic remains.

This is not the tense thriller of MANHUNTER (1986) or THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991), both of which focus on the psychological profile of a monsterish psycho killer, instead this is seen through the differing perspectives of the two investigating cops as they try to piece together the necessary materials to catch the guy, who remains unseen and out of reach for the first two-thirds of the film. Mills has brought along his wife, Gwyneth Paltrow, in his transfer to the city, but it’s clear she’s unhappy there, that the move was more likely based on his personal career ambitions, while that’s the kind of mental clutter Somerset has little use for, as his laid back approach is more low key and unassuming. The biggest problem of the film is the casting of Pitt, who continually whines and overacts and is clearly outclassed by the relaxed intelligence yet judicious manner of Somerset, who is in every way Mills’ superior, but humble enough to allow Mills to run the investigation due to his approaching final days on the force. Mills never rises to the occasion, never elevates his stature, and never shows the cautious professionalism of a good detective. Moreover, he’s not a very sympathetic figure, where his impatience and casual air of reckless nonchalance can easily get others into trouble and allow criminals to walk away free, as he’s seduced by a world of shortcuts and quick fixes. His temperamental cowboy mentality is in stark contrast to the more intellectually refined and cerebral Somerset, a man alone in a world that has passed him by, moving at an altogether slower pace than the world around him, which is portrayed as a nightmarishly corrupt city of neverending crime.

It is this incessant stream of unstoppable crime and the public’s apathy to it that is leading Somerset into retirement, yet he lingers on the case knowing Mills doesn’t have the experience or expertise to apprehend such a coldly calculating, viciously brutal killer. Throughout the entire ordeal, the key to understanding this dark and disturbing noir universe can be found in the sad eyes and defeated voice of Morgan Freeman, whose agonizing sense of despair in the face of such ghastly horrors lends a sense of unexpected clarity. The biggest strength of the film is a dazzling opening credit sequence and the visual invention of cinematographer Darius Khondji that gives the film some magnificent architectural looks resembling the crumbling and decaying world of BLADE RUNNER (1982), moving back and forth between immense open space and cramped, claustrophobic quarters, as the detectives creep through the tight hallways and blood-filled crime scenes investigating the murders, where you can reach out and seemingly touch the wallpaper peeling from the walls. Even worse is the hypnotic sense of awe and disbelief as they enter the lair of a psychopath with his multiple connecting rooms, some with religious significance and some resembling a scientific torture chamber, complete with Medieval devices. Apparently only in Somerset’s retreat into the quiet enormity of the library is there any sense of calm or prevailing order, as otherwise the world outside is continually seen in utter turmoil, almost like a nightmarish apocalyptic vision of a world in ruin. When the elusive killer finally reveals himself, heard first as a voice over the phone (uncredited, but marvelously committed to the role), he’s like an avenging angel of doom carrying out the terrifying wrath of God. Fincher does an excellent job withholding the presence of the killer until the end while continually sustaining a tense and taut atmosphere throughout. The pace of this morbidly compelling film never wavers, while the astonishing finale is abruptly shocking and uncompromising.

Seven Geoff Andrew from Time Out London

Serial killers and mismatched cops overcoming antagonism are seldom fresh, fruitful subjects for movies, but this exceptionally (and impressively) nasty thriller blends genres to grim and gripping effect. Somerset (Freeman) and Mills (Pitt) are the detectives brought together when an obese corpse is discovered in a dismal apartment. Mills, who with his wife (Paltrow) has recently moved to the city from upstate, resents what he perceives as Somerset's patronising attitude; still, the older cop, about to retire and weary of crime and moral apathy, is unusually educated, as becomes clear when they find a second mutilated body and he insists his young partner start reading the likes of Milton, Chaucer and Dante. Somerset's theory? That a messianic murderer is perpetrating crimes to punish the Seven Deadly Sins - in which case there are five more to go. The film's world is so shadowy, decaying and intentionally dated that one often wonders whether anyone involved has heard of electricity; at the same time, however, Somerset and Mills' slow voyage from claustrophobic murk into blinding light makes for a vivid dramatic metaphor. Moreover, Fincher handles the violence with sensitivity, announcing its obscenity in spoken analyses and briefly glimpsed post mortem shots, but never showing the murderous acts themselves.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Who would have guessed that a grisly and upsetting serial-killer police procedural (1995, 127 min.) costarring Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman as detectives, written by a Tower Records cashier (Andrew Kevin Walker), and directed by David Fincher (Alien) would bear a startling resemblance to a serious work of art? One can already tell that this film is on to something special during the opening credits, which formally echo several classic American experimental films and thematically point to the eerie kinship between the serial killer and the police--not to mention the kinship between murder and art making that the movie is equally concerned with. The detectives are trying to solve a series of hideous murders based on the seven deadly sins, and the sheer foulness and decay of the nameless city that surrounds them, which makes those of Taxi Driver and Blade Runner seem almost like children's theme parks, conjures up a metaphysical mood that isn't broken even when the film moves to the countryside for its climax. Admittedly, designer unpleasantness is a hallmark of our era, and this movie may be more concerned with wallowing in it than with illuminating what it means politically. Yet the filmmakers stick to their vision with such dedication and persistence that something indelible comes across--something ethically and artistically superior to The Silence of the Lambs that refuses to exploit suffering for fun or entertainment and leaves you wondering about the world we're living in. With Gwyneth Paltrow, Richard Roundtree, John C. McGinley, R. Lee Ermey, and Kevin Spacey.

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

In 1995, Seven had to distinguish itself as a serial-killer movie in a market flooded with Silence Of The Lambs clones. Five years later, its DVD edition arrives on the heels of nearly as many Seven knockoffs. So it says a lot about the quality of the film that, then and now, it brings nothing to mind so readily as itself. While director David Fincher's urban hellscapes and nihilistic atmospherics have been easy to duplicate, other aspects of the film have proven more elusive. Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman could claim the credit for their pitch-perfect acting, if Kiss The Girls, one of Seven's bigger-budgeted spawn, hadn't demonstrated that even Freeman can't save an uninteresting film. Similarly, Seven's premise is clever, but countless fatally flawed movies have failed to live up to clever premises. Andrew Kevin Walker's script uses the crime genre's familiar devices to engage far larger issues of good and evil, but just about every crime film of note meets the same requirement. Perhaps, despite the quality of just about any given individual factor of Seven, its artistic success is best credited to the fortuitous combination of forces behind it. Seven's features-packed DVD gives that impression by democratically devoting much of its space to the various team players behind the film; the supplements take a detailed look, rare for all but the most obvious special-effects-driven blockbusters, at the behind-the-scenes work. Fincher himself, speaking alongside Freeman and Pitt on one of four commentary tracks, certainly defers much of the credit elsewhere. (Someone had to create all those psychotically copious notebooks, after all.) But while Fincher's modesty never sounds disingenuous, it's also not entirely accurate. Detractors, particularly critics of the divisive Fight Club, have been eager to label him as a filmmaker whose grasp of style exceeds his other abilities. But he directs Seven with an undeniable thoughtfulness, knowing to emphasize the relationship between his two leads and let it develop amid the ominously lit rooms and rain-drenched streets, through long takes and quiet moments. Fincher also, less obviously, deserves credit for knowing which film to make. A highly informative second commentary track, orchestrated by British film professor Richard Dyer and featuring Fincher, Walker, New Line exec Michael De Luca, and editor Richard Francis-Bruce, reveals that the director chose Seven after accidentally receiving a discarded first draft. Seven could simply have been another Lambs knockoff, but instead, it's one of the most distinctive films of the '90s, due to its shared commitment to a single vision whose clarity—as with most films of this caliber—ultimately serves as its most distinguishing feature.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

A superb visual stylist with the moral depth of a sophomore philosophy student, David Fincher may be American cinema’s most pretentious thrill jockey. While Fight Club wallowed in shambiguity, disguising its critique of commercialism in a commercial shroud so elegantly crafted it swallowed whatever message the film might have hoped to convey, Se7en (and yes, that is the film’s unfortunate title) stokes the fires of shallow moralism to disguise a gruesome, misogynist genre tale whose juvenile pessimism is equaled only by its gruesome imagination. That the film has acquired the status of "a modern classic" (as film historian Richard Dyer says on the disc) in the five years since its release is a tribute to filmgoers’ and critics’ willingness to mistake provocation for insight, and nihilism for depth.

That said, this deluxe double-DVD set, complete with four full-length audio commentaries, the complete screenplay (a DVD-ROM feature not accessible on Macs, dammit) and a second disc of deleted scenes, alternate endings and galleries of the photos used in the film — all with audio commentary — makes it clear that Fincher is way ahead of the curve in embracing the format (the two-disc Fight Club came similarly well-appointed), and it provides a slew of behind-the-scenes information, as well as an opportunity to study exactly why Se7en has taken on such widespread cult status. It’s clear from his commentary that Fincher’s chiefly interested in pushing his audience’s buttons, which is more the task of the huckster than the artist, but it’s clear that audiences respond to it, at least up to a point. (The stench of manipulation is probably what kept Fight Club from taking off at the box office.) There’s no question that he’s an ace button-pusher — or that Kevin Spacey’s performance pours ice water straight down your spinal column — but it’s a little depressing that people don’t expect more from movies.

As a fascinating aside, the second disc also contains a demonstration of the way Se7en was remastered for DVD. Rather than just making a new transfer, Fincher went back to his original negative, effectively re-color timing the entire film digitally, in addition to entirely remixing the 5.1 theater sound to take advantage of the smaller, more precise environment of home theater systems. The video demonstration, where entire scenes have their color palates shifted and their shots reframed (mostly in a matter of seconds), offers a stunning glimpse into the future. Imagine what a real director could do with that stuff.

PopMatters [Bill Gibron]

It’s been so glamorized and creatively undermined in the years since first striking cinematic gold that it’s almost impossible to remember a time when the serial killer was actually considered a viable heavy. Not just some smooth talking terror with a tendency toward the classics and fine cannibal cuisine, but a true blue horror movie menace that inspires fear, not a fanbase. All throughout the ‘90s, the FBI profiling potential of such a psycho was exploited and overexposed, creating a vacuum where something vile and reprehensible should be. Few filmmakers understood the underlying power of such a human social disease and even fewer wanted to journey down the dark and disturbed road toward unveiling such a sicko.

That’s why, some 15 years after its initial release, David Fincher’s extraordinary Se7en (now on Blu-ray) remains a grim gloomy masterpiece. It’s a work of remarkable vision played out in a classic cat and mouse with far too few heroes and way too many villains. As envisioned by screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, it’s a bleak world where good is trampled on, evil endures, and the inescapable stench of death is everywhere. Balanced between the gratuitous and the always open Gates of Hell are two dichotomous policeman - the bitter and soon to be retired William Somerset and the emotional and eager to advance David Mills. As they roam the nameless urban decay which passes for a city, they act like two sides of the same coin—resignation mixed with rage, the need to escape vs. the urge to run headstrong into the fray.

It all begins to fall apart when an obese man is discovered dead. He is soon followed by the mutilated corpse of a ‘greedy’ high profile lawyer. When the words “Gluttony” are discovered at the first crime scene, Somerset is convinced: there is a serial killer on the loose and he is using the Seven Deadly Sins from scripture as a means of making his apocalyptic point. While his chief and Mills are skeptical, he continues to research the religious underpinnings.

A clue leads them to another victim (‘Sloth’) and, eventually, to the hide out of one “John Doe”. A baroque apartment filled with the musings of a madman, it offers rare insight into the demented mind they are dealing with. Eventually, after two more killings, Doe turns himself in, offering to provide the final piece of his prophetic puzzle. For Somerset and Mills, however, the solution may be too startling—both personally and professionally—to endure.

It’s safe to say that Se7en is a modern classic, the prototypical thriller from whence an entire category of protean police procedural was born. Simmering slowly and provocatively, giving up its ominous secrets in small snippets of despair, it remains a defining moment in the careers of all involved. For director David Fincher, it was a rebound after the disastrous Alien3 and a calling card for his future as one of the world’s best filmmakers. For Morgan Freeman, it was the second stellar performance in as many years (The Shawshank Redemption of ‘94 securing his continued big screen renaissance). Though Brad Pitt already had some fascinating work under his pretty boy belt, 1995 would be his creative coming out, both as Mills and with an Oscar nominated turn in Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys. Even the minor role work of Gwenyth Paltrow prepared us for her eventual Academy accreditation with Shakespeare in Love.

For many, however, Se7en stands as the moment when Kevin Spacey came into his own as a major movie force. Like Pitt, 1995 would be his year, taking home accolades for his mysterious maniac here and for his equally impressive work as Roger ‘Verbal’ Kint in The Usual Suspects. Though he had previously made a massive impression as the office manager in the film version of Glengarry Glen Ross, Doe would turn the solid stage actor into that most rarified of cinematic icons - the true movie monster. Thanks in part to Fincher’s fierce artistic approach and ability to make clear character associations, we fear this man even before ever laying eyes on him. Once Doe arrives, fingers shredded and clothes covered in blood, the last act conversation and confrontation confirms our worst fears.

Indeed, Doe is a dilemma for Somerset and Mills. Each see him differently in the grand scheme of their career. The older man sees him as an albatross, a continuous killing force and a constant reminder of the rotten world he wants to leave. For the younger, the meaning is all together different. Mills wants the ‘Sins’ case as a calling card, as a way of making his years in the service of a suburban Podunk homicide department finally pay off. Both intentions are as selfish as those of the self-proclaimed message of God they are chasing. In fact, Se7en could be described as three men coming face to face with their individual destinies—and each one failing miserably at such a chance realization.

Fincher follows this by setting the film in its own inexact universe, a place with murder and misery around every corner, where the rain never stops and the surrounding desert houses an oasis of industrial blight. There are no high tech specialties here, no cellphone checks or in-car computers. Though clearly of its era, Fincher also forces an unique dystopian noir on the narrative, giving it the crackle of old school suspense without resorting to many of the mannered, cliches tricks inherent. By getting us involved in the story right up front, by letting us in on the horrific details of these cruel crimes (visualized with award winning skill by make-up master Rob Bottin), we become invested in the outcome, and as such, as shocked and undone by what happens next.

It’s interesting to hear Fincher discuss his work on the film, lamenting lost sequences and struggling to find a rhyme or a reason behind New Line’s “wait and see” production approach. Indeed, one of the more intriguing elements of this film (which make up a majority of the added content on the new release of the title) is the fact that few saw it as a commercially feasible property. Rewrites were asked for and reluctantly given. Much of the more gruesome ideas were excised in favor of suggestion and off screen reactions. Even with Silence of the Lambs critical accomplishments, the studio was convinced Se7en would stumble. Oddly enough, a few successful test screenings secured the monies necessary to complete Fincher’s vision—and what a hard, hideous series of ideas it is. 

Even 15 years later, it’s impossible to forget the force intrinsic to Se7en. It stands as a singular moment in a moviemaking realm which regularly tries to stand-out (or more accurately, sell out). Audience still find it sad and unsatisfying, especially given the way the characters’ lives end up. We don’t like to see a triumph of the wicked over the worthy, but then again, few in this film seem deserving of much more. Ineffectual or overwrought, calculating or just plain crazy, the situation in Se7en suggests we are all doomed. Such a sentiment might not make for an upbeat crowd-pleaser, but it does deliver a pure post modern masterwork.

Love Costs: Rescuing Se7en From Nihilism | The House Next Door Michael K. Crowley initially from 24LiesASecond, April 29, 2004, reprinted at Slant magazine, September 21, 2008

Everyman and no man: white, heterosexual masculinity in contemporary serial killer movies Nicola Rehling from Jump Cut, Spring 2007

Nitrate Online Carrie Gorringe

DVD Journal D.K. Holm

Se7en (1995) Bryant Frazer from Deep Focus, also seen here: Se7en - Deep Focus and here: Bryant Frazer

The House Next Door [Jason Bellamy & Ed Howard]

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]

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Read TCM's article on Se7en Sean Axmaker from Turner Classic Movies, also seen here: Articles

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HorrorDigital.com [HammerFanatic] DVD Review

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THE GAME

USA (128 mi) 1997 ‘Scope

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young)

David Fincher’s least hyped film is also his most inexplicably underrated, and it narrowly shades Fight Club as his finest achievement to date. All four of his features – the first two were Alien3 and Se7en -  are clever pieces of work, audacious, well-crafted and surprising, but The Game is the only one of the quartet which is about more than just that cleverness. It’s probably no coincidence that it’s also, in many ways, the most conventional: on the surface, it’s a twisty psychological thriller about a smug businessman, Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas), whose life is turned upside down when his kid brother (Sean Penn) enrols him in ‘The Game.’ Exactly what this ‘game’ is, we never quite find out, but it involves a series of increasingly elaborate practical jokes which undermine Van Orton’s sang-froid, his bank balance and his sanity. Enjoyable enough, but there’s more to The Game than meets the eye. Many first-time viewers complain that the film is ludicrous because the organisers of The Game wouldn’t know all of Van Orton’s moves and reactions so far in advance – but I think that this is what makes the movie special. The fact that – in a climactic scene – he lands right in the middle of an ‘X’ (I won’t spoil the film by revealing any more) indicates that Van Orton is entirely predictable. Whether he’s a prisoner of capitalism, class, psychology or whatever is a matter of subjective opinion. But Van Orton is imprisoned by his character, and by the fact that he is a character - a pawn in the hands of the screenwriters and director, but under the delusion that he has free will. He’s a character in a film, surrounded by fake sets and actors, controlled by unseen forces. The Game is, of course, cinema, but it’s also life.

Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.)

David Fincher has emerged as one of the most provocative filmmakers of the decade. With Seven, The Game, and Fight Club, he has raised the ire of traditionalists like Roger Ebert with his flamboyant style, drawing accusations of favoring style over substance. However, I think that his style, which at times is substance, speaks to viewers who are fed up with the traditional Hollywood dreck that we are spoon-fed every year.

In The Game, uber-yuppie Nicholas van Orton (Michael Douglas, in a caricature of his Gordon Gecko of Wall Street) lives a life of solitude, punctuated by financial reports. For his birthday, his younger brother Conrad (Sean Penn, working his paranoid style for all it's worth) buys him an appointment with a mysterious company that sets up games to amuse the disgustingly rich. After he stops by for an extensive physical, he is sent home with the explanation that the "game" could start any day. I do not want to spoil any of the delicious plot twists and surprise happenings that fill the last two-thirds of the movie, so I will stop there. It is sufficient to say that, although his game might not be worth the price of admission, it is certainly worth watching.

There is a method to Fincher's madness. Here and in his other films (though not in Alien 3) he offers a dead-on critique of the increasing isolation that new technology offers. When people's lives are so empty that they would rather sit at home and watch other "real" people (like on the rash of "reality" television shows like Survivor or Big Brother), there is no telling how far people will go to escape from the ennui of their own lives. Fincher is the best around at pinpointing that isolation.

The Game (1997) Bryant Frazer from Deep Focus

Filmmaking itself is a bit of a game. Directors, actors, screenwriters, and editors play it with their audiences all the time. You use diversionary tactics, you pluck at heartstrings, you appeal to the emotion, the intellect, and the libido of your audience. When the movie is complete, the studio marketing department plays the game, as well. The object of the game is to get butts in theater seats. On a slightly more high-flown level, the object is to engage, stimulate, and please your audience to the extent that they feel gratified by the experience -- and tell their friends about the little game you're playing so that they can buy tickets, too. And the filmmakers find out whether they've won when the box office receipts start coming in.

David Fincher is hardly the first director to exploit his own uncanny gamesmanship, but he's done it as compellingly as anyone since Hitchcock. Granted, his debut feature, Alien3, took a swan dive at the box office that mirrored the film's almost ritual sacrifice of an SF cinema icon. (Fincher says the film is less than he wanted it to be, and blames studio interference.) But who would have thought that Se7en, an unremittingly pessimistic serial killer film -- in which the serial killer plays a self-righteously depraved game with two big-city detectives and wins -- would score more than $100 million at the domestic box office, with or without Brad Pitt on board?

Well, maybe Fincher knew it. Keep in mind that this man cut his teeth as a director of music videos, including the iconic "Express Yourself" for Madonna. This makes him a salesman of the highest rank, a heavy-rotation participant in perhaps the savviest media blitz ever to impact the pop music business. Salesmanship is a big part of the filmmaking game, and a component of its trickiest gambit -- figuring out a way to make art shake hands with commerce.

As I write, it's hard to tell how solid a commercial hit The Game may or may not be, although the general reaction of the audience on opening night was one of near-euphoria, with laughter, gasps, and even screaming throughout and widespread applause at the ending credits. In fact, I hardly know where to start criticizing it, because the pay-off is so terrific. Even if you guess the film's ultimate resolution -- and I did, although I kept telling myself that even this screenplay couldn't possibly resort to such a wildly implausible device -- the execution and follow-through is dazzling.

Michael Douglas, the quintessential white man in trouble, plays Nicholas Van Orton, a wealthy, steely, and entirely troubled gazillionaire. (You may recognize a little bit of your boss in him.) He perches atop a megacorporation headquartered in San Francisco, and works his employees ragged -- but not, he believes, unfairly or without good reason. He's devoted to the bottom line, and puts a sourly positive spin on his firing of an underperforming executive (Armin Mueller-Stahl) -- more time to go sailing, Van Orton assures him. He regards his ex-wife (Anna Katerina), who clearly remains worried about his soul, coldy. He lives in the long shadow of his father, who committed suicide by jumping from the roof of the family home.

He's visited by his estranged brother, Conrad (Sean Penn), who offers him an unusual birthday present -- a gift certificate for a personalized "game" orchestrated by a high-tech company called Consumer Recreation Services, or CRS for short. "They make your life fun," he promises. Resistant to the idea but intrigued at the same time, Nicholas eventually finds himself at the CRS offices, submitting to a battery of psychological tests and a physical exam that will help the company tailor a game just for him. Soon, Nicholas arrives at home to find a clown dummy splayed across his driveway, just as his father was found. Nicholas finds a key in the clown's mouth, and suddenly starts receiving some very strange television programming.

And so the game is afoot. The movie seems to take some cues from John Frankenheimer's sinister Seconds, but without that film's chilly sensibility. The general mood is closer kin to Martin Scorsese's one-night-in-New-York farce After Hours, with more sinister overtones but with the same general trajectory. Nicholas bonds with Christine (Deborah Kara Unger, seen earlier this year in Crash), a wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time waitress who dumps drinks all over his expensive suit and then helps him escape after he finds himself, mysteriously, trespassing at CRS offices after hours. Lost credit cards, Swiss bank accounts, a crypt in Mexico and a first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird will all figure into the picture as the game plays itself out. Justly paranoid, Van Orton's task is to figure out what the hell is going on, and whether or not he's still just playing.

The screenplay, by the folks who brought you The Net (with an apparent polish by Se7en screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker), is effective but irritatingly simplistic. It relies on cyber-paranoia, the suspicion that anybody with the right technological tools can manipulate your televisioned, cell-phoned world to such an extent that you can't tell what's "real" anymore. What's more interesting is the sobering suggestion, left over from Se7en, that a human life is really a sort of Rube Goldberg device -- that by setting up the right combinations of pulleys and levers, you can manipulate a person into just about anything.

With the exception of a few choice lines that are accented by Douglas's deliciously dry delivery, the dialogue is mostly banal -- which makes it more and more difficult to figure out just what the hell is really happening. Some skillful misdirection by Fincher compounds the confusion, and Unger's smartly reserved performance drives us to second-guess whether or not she's really involved in what looks more and more like a truly sinister scheme. Douglas is fine, exuding that combination of privilege and haplessness for which he's so well known. Penn is only on-screen for a few minutes, but his performance veers effectively from relative serenity to hysteria.

From a technical standpoint, the film is expertly gorgeous. Fincher remains one of the few directors in Hollywood with a visual style that pushes the bounds of what we think of as "the movies." Van Orton's repeated flashbacks to the life and death of his father are presented as Super-8 home movies -- efficiently and beautifully, the flashbacks are signalled not by dissolves or slow pans, but by the abrupt change in the quality, color, and grain of the film itself. Fincher retains an aesthetic fascination with photography, with what it means to take a picture. Cinematographer Harris Savides photographs an incriminating a pile of Polaroids with the same sort of up-close, shallow-field inserts that made up a good portion of the chilling opening credits to Se7en. Jim Haygood's film editing is virtuosic and world class, tapping into the rhythm of the characters and the story instead of relying on MTV-style hypermontage. Compared to what's playing elsewhere in the multiplex, this sort of breathtaking craftsmanship nearly qualifies as avant garde.

For all that, The Game is almost breezily entertaining. You can take that as a compliment, but it's also a problem. For too long -- about the first three-quarters of the film -- Fincher can't manage to escalate this particular game to the level of tension or exhilaration achieved by the best Hollywood movies, say a Breakdown or a Face/Off. Meandering from situation to situation, the script takes pains to remain absolutely ambiguous, since the climax will its depend on being able to jerk our perceptions this way and that. The end result of this is that there's no sense of revelation for the audience, no moment when you feel things click together just right -- just twist after twist. Normally, I'm not a fan of this school of storytelling, which seems sorta lazy to me -- The Usual Suspects fell back on a similar one-twist gimmick in 1995, and Joe Eszterhas has used it repeatedly, to my great irritation (Jagged Edge, Basic Instinct, and Sliver). But The Game is a little more playful in its convolutions than those films.

In a critical scene, Nicholas is left alone in a room, and he starts investigating his surroundings. To his surprise, the whole room is prefab -- the books on the bookshelves are fake, the refrigerator is empty, and the picture frames hold cutouts from magazine pages. It's as though he's just started taking apart the movie set. In another scene, he stands and squints into the shafts of light pouring out from a projection booth, confused and impatient with the film he's being made to watch.

It occurred to me in retrospect -- Michael Douglas and this character are both part of a literal game, one that has been crafted by Fincher and his cronies at considerable expense, and one whose object is to confound you, the moviegoer. It's a slight diversion, but it is certainly entertaining. You can decline his invitation to play this little game of perceptions and authorial duplicity, and it won't be any great loss -- but for a little over two hours, it will make your life fun.

Scott Renshaw

Movie Vault [Arturo Garcia Lasca]

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

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Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

New York Times (registration req'd) Janet Maslin

FIGHT CLUB C+ 79

USA (139 mi) 1999 ‘Scope

I flip through catalogues and wonder: what kind of dining set defines me as a person?

And then, something happened. I let go. Lost in oblivion, dark and silent and complete, I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.

—Edward Norton (Narrator)

Things you own end up owning you.

We’re a generation of men raised by women. I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.

It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.

—Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt)

As divisive a film as you’re going to find, one that certainly establishes its own particular view of existence, starting with the presumption heard through the narrator Edward Norton that following the rules of society has led one to a meaningless existence, a mind numbing void of emptiness from which there is no return. Fincher paints another bleak picture of the world outside, a moral vacuum of rampant consumerism and blind obedience, where citizens have all but given up control of their lives to corporate mega-giants that all have their own secret agendas, which is mostly an uncontrollable lust for more power. The darkly satiric tone of the film couldn’t be more unnatural and mockingly derisive, clearly preaching endlessly about what a sick society we’ve become, where the entire film is a cockly artificial substitute for the supposed impotency of mankind, yet will appeal to many for the snarky, wise-cracking attitude that prevails throughout. The dialogue is endlessly monotonous and grates on one’s nerves, filled with such a contemptuous view of the meaninglessness of the world, which is first and foremost fed by an overriding feeling of a limitless amount of self-loathing. This is not the sort of thing that will appeal to everybody, but is all attitude, using an in-your-face style told with the reckless ambition of a runaway train, of an accident waiting to happen, where the mind-numbing monotony of your existence has grown so wretchedly offensive that you’d make a desperate deal with the devil to try anything to change the road you’re on. This film is for the most part a visualized, nightmarish hallucination of that deal.

Part of the attractiveness of the movie is the offensive public reaction to Brad Pitt (never better than in this film), as overexposed a figure as exists in American consumerist society, painted endlessly on the cover of tabloid magazines, seen as a vile human being for leaving the lovable and supposedly adorable American sweetheart Jennifer Aniston from the popular TV show Friends (1994 – 2004) for the trailer trash aberration that is Angelina Jolie, he’s as detestable a public figure as anyone other than perhaps Scientologist zealot Tom Cruise. With this view in mind, Pitt is given the role of his lifetime in Tyler Durden, a guy Norton meets on a plane (with the same briefcase) who is everything he is not, aggressive, good looking, brazenly confident, a guy who speaks his mind seemingly without a care in the world, literally the alter-ego of Edward Norton’s pathetic complacency. When Norton returns home and the floor of his apartment his been obliterated by a massive explosion, destroying every Ikea possession he’d spent his lifetime collecting, he had nowhere else to turn, and using one of the last public pay phones seen anywhere in American movies (having converted to cellphones), Norton turns to Tyler for help. After guzzling a few pitchers of beer, Tyler challenges him to relieve his pent-up aggressions with a punch, which leads to an exasperatingly thrilling (for them) fight in the parking lot, where they eventually end up at Tyler’s dilapidated home, which may be a building scheduled for demolition that was still standing, but in truly terrible shape. The two of them start up a friendship that only accelerates throughout the picture, where at first they feel like best buddies, both on the same page, but by the end, it’s like they are two complete strangers. The gist of the picture is revealing all the weird things that happen in between.

Perhaps most revolting is the continued theme of guys pulverizing other guys as a means to shock their overly compliant systems into feeling something different and new, a form of male therapy where pain means gain. Despite the black eyes and bloody cuts on their faces, these guys live to fight again, as if this adrenaline is all they live for. A strange human connection develops between the guys that fight in these fight clubs, as it’s all part of an underground movement that’s kept secret, separate and apart from women, like a secret society, making this an exclusive treatment just for men, like a deodorant or cosmetic product. The weirdness just gets started when the male fantasy gets lost in the world of male delusions, where Norton gets disconnected from his own sense of purpose, lost in a kind of Kafkaesque nightmare where he can’t change the track he’s on, as Tyler mysteriously disappears and everything spins out of control. Without Tyler’s brash aggression, Norton returns back to his endlessly questioning self, the one that whines in utter disgust at what’s happening all around him and is paralyzed by his own indecisiveness. Fincher creates a nightmarish vision of helplessness, as if Norton is pushed off to the side as a tourist inside his own dream, confined to a state of ambivalent confusion while others step over him with that same newfound sense of zeal and purpose he once had, as new fight clubs pop up across the nation, and new missions are handed out to energized militia types with shaved heads to carry out subversive missions targeting the symbols of corporate power. It’s like a blitzkrieg of anarchy hitting the streets as the fight club members, suddenly organized and challenging the new world order, have evolved into a lawless netherworld spiraling towards oblivion. The look of the film is darkly nihilistic, where Pitt brilliantly commands the screen with utter contempt for the world, but beyond that, it’s like finding yourself lost in a maze where those around you start to resemble Hitler’s youth, becoming more and more wretchedly uncomfortable to the point of being nearly unwatchable, feeling overlong and repetitive, where most of the time we’re trapped inside Norton’s lost world.

Time Out

This is not an action movie, but a cerebral comedy - which is to say, an ideas movie. Some of those ideas are startling, provocative, transgressive, even subversive. They're also pretty funny. It goes like this: Norton used to be an upwardly mobile urban professional; now, he's pallid, neurotic and unhappy. Then he bumps into Tyler Durden (Pitt), his apartment blows up, and everything changes. Gaudy and amoral, Tyler's an id kind of guy: living on the edge is the only way he knows to feel alive. Pitt's raw physical grace embodies everything his alter ego has lost touch with; they trade body blows for fun, and you can sense the gain in the pain. Their 'club' draws emasculates from across the city; under Tyler's subtle guidance, the group evolves into an anarchist movement. The film wobbles alarmingly at this point, then rallies for the kind of coup de grâce that sends you reeling. Jim Uhls' cold, clever screenplay, from Chuck Palahniuk's novel, is a millennial mantra of seditious agit prop. Shot in a convulsive, stream-of-unconsciousness style, with disruptive subliminals, freeze frames and fantasy cutaways, the film does everything short of rattling your seat to get a reaction. You can call that irresponsible. Or you can call it the only essential Hollywood film of 1999.

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

Fight Club ostensibly celebrates the very things it eventually decries, though that’s in keeping with its fundamental schizophrenia. David Fincher’s 1999 cult classic isn’t a simple A-B construct – its cinematic (and, thus, mass-market) glorification of its characters’ bruised-knuckle anti-materialism may be contradictory, but Jim Uhls’ script (based on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel) is at heart a shrewd, scintillating work rooted in an investigation of varying degrees of masculinity and extremism. Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), the id to our nameless protagonist Narrator’s (Edward Norton) ego, is a sexy beast because his ethos, in its nascent form, is as well; only when truly embraced in practice does his destructive-self-help philosophy reveal its true, ugly primal underbelly. That shift is reflected in director Fincher’s exhilarating treatment of his gonzo tale, in which Tyler and Narrator’s early creation of their fight clubs has a brutal sensuality and appeal, while the later sparring-session bludgeoning of a pretty boy (Jared Leto), and the death of a Tyler acolyte (now working for a new mission dubbed Project Mayhem), are presented as the sadistic lunatic inevitabilities of unchecked machismo and its resultant fanaticism.

The final shot, then, of lovebirds staring at a skyline of terrorism-produced crumbling skyscrapers captures the fundamentally irreconcilable duality of Palahniuk’s caustic satire – interior unity via external devastation – without passing judgment. It’s a pitch-black smirk of a conclusion, a shrug at the insanity of healing thyself (and finding genuine amour) by obliterating the world. That humor courses throughout Fight Club, from its early slams at Ikea consumer culture (by way of a vision of Narrator’s apartment as a catalog layout), to Narrator’s blackmailing self-fisticuffery in his boss’ office, to his final, futile attempts to combat the very underground movement he begat. Both Pitt and Norton, playing off each other’s clashing visions of masculinity with eroticized wit and verve, have never been better. That’s similarly true of Bonham Carter as Narrator’s kindred wayward soul Marla, who seeks genuine emotional engagement by visiting support groups for the dying, and also – as with her screamy bedroom romps with Tyler, which are akin to the fight clubs – through physical pain. Just as Bonham Carter sexily wields a cigarette like few others, so too does Fincher handle his material with unparalleled eroticized agility, his CG-enhanced, Dust Brothers-scored aesthetics (an impossible zoom here, a bit of Shining-style auditory howling there) lending his better-living-through-annihilation film heady, electrified life.

Louis Proyect

"The Fight Club" is ordinarily the kind of film I would stay away from. The only reason I went is that it thematically related to "American Beauty" and would serve as a useful counterpoint in preparing this review. It seemed over-hyped and, even worse, starred the odious Brad Pitt. Although I found the film nearly unwatchable, it certainly did satisfy in terms of documenting the current scene in the United States through the peculiar perspective of the young director David Fincher and the screenplay based on the novel of Chuck Palahniuk.

The central character in this film, who remains nameless and who is played by Edward Norton, is very much like Lester Burnham. He is trapped in the corporate world and finds himself increasingly dissatisfied with the fruits it is supposed to deliver. He works for an automobile company as a risk assessor. His job is to prepare technical reports on accidents involving his company's products. If it cost more money to fix a car rather than pay off successful claimants in suits against the company, the company opts for not making the necessary changes to make the car safe.

Norton's character leads an unfulfilled and aimless life. Rather than masturbating as an outlet, he buys furniture from Ikea. His entire apartment is covered with tables, chairs, lamps and sofas ordered from their catalog, which also appears to be his only reading material. He also suffers from insomnia for which the only cure seems to come in the form of going to self-help groups for terminal diseases like testicular cancer or tuberculosis. The emotional confessions of the participants gives him a vicarious sense of being alive, which then allows him to sleep soundly. While he enjoys good health, he is closer to death than the people he communes with on a nightly basis. They face physical mortality at any moment. He faces spiritual mortality every moment of his waking life.

On an airplane ride to visit an accident site on behalf of his company, he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) who is everything he is not. Brash, self-confident and dressed like a pimp, Durden describes himself as a soap salesman but he gives every indication of leading a darker existence. The Norton character finds himself drawn to Durden.

When he arrives back at his apartment building, he discovers police cars and fire trucks on the scene as flames pour from the windows of his apartment. His precious Ikea furniture and all his belongings have been destroyed in a mysterious explosion, possibly the result of a pilot light having failed on his stove.

Since Durden gave him his business card on the plane, he decides to call him up. In the back of his mind, he considers staying with him until finding a more permanent residence. The two men meet for drinks at a seedy bar and continue the conversation they had on the plane. Basically, Durden puts forth a critique of consumerist society that is absolute to the point of being monomaniacal. There is nothing more evil in this world view than shopping and status-seeking.

After they have had several pitchers of beer, they leave the bar and continue talking in the parking lot. Out of the blue, Durden asks the Norton character to punch him. There is no particular reason for this, but he accommodates him. Whereupon Durden punches him back and the two men trade blows until they fall to the ground bloody and exhausted. Meanwhile, a group of men from the bar stand in a circle around them both entertained and bemused. Why are the two men, who appear to be friends, pounding each other into senselessness? Eventually other men follow in their path and a fight club becomes a regularly scheduled event in the basement of the bar.

While the film does not really take the trouble to explore through dialog the appeal such pointless violence has for these men, it obvious that we are dealing with violence as a form of existential authenticity. Men--and it is men we are talking about--feel trapped in a meaningless existence. To transcend the emptiness of such existence, the only release seems to be the feel of a punch in the nose and the sight of blood pouring from it, either your own or your opponent's. In many ways, this message is simply a recycling of the theme of Camus' "The Stranger", whose existentially unrealized French Algerian character discovers authenticity through the murder of an Arab on the beach, whom he has never met. It also evokes "Clockwork Orange," whose teenaged rebels inflict random violence on peaceful citizens in order to protest the social control of a well-engineered and well-controlled society of the future. "The Fight Club" would seem to be saying that such a world exists today.

Eventually fight clubs spring up around the United States and begin to mutate into nihilistic bands of black clad militia types with shaved heads, who attack symbols of consumer society. In a very telling scene, evocative of recent events in Seattle, they send an immense globular corporate sculpture crashing into a Starbucks coffee bar. The revolution of fight club activists is designed to destroy modern society, not transform it into a positive alternative. This is not far removed from the vision of the Unabomber and the intellectuals like Kirkpatrick Sale and John Zerzan who provide spin-doctoring services for him.

Where "The Fight Club" fails as both cinema and as effective social commentary is in its total lack of engagement with the ideas that might propel these men into such an extreme posture. While one would not expect a film to include the sort of psychological and political analysis of Dostoyevsky's "The Possessed", its total absence leaves the viewer with an inability to understand their motivations. It is simply not sufficient to state that all of a sudden men find themselves willing to be beaten into senselessness as an escape. Anybody who has been beaten up, and I speak from personal experience, does not go through such an experience as a lark. In contrast "Clockwork Orange" is filled with characters explaining why they commit random acts of terror. Their words, drawn from Anthony Burgess's capable prose, are indeed what makes the film successful.

Whatever the flaws of the film, it is a useful snapshot of American society at a peculiar juncture in its unfolding as an empire. In the final years of the second term of the Clinton administration, which by some standards has produced more material success than has been enjoyed in many years, Hollywood is turning out films that curse the system that produced it.

Inside Out: David Fincher - Film Comment Gavin Smith from Film Comment, September/October 1999

It's tempting to describe David Fincher's stunning, mordantly funny, formally dazzling new movie Fight Club as the first film of the next century and leave it at that. It certainly suggests a possible future direction for mass-appeal cinema that could lead it out of the Nineties cul-de-sac of bloated, corrupt mediocrity and bankrupt formulas. Indeed, its vertiginous opening credits shot—a camera move hurtling backwards from the deepest recesses of its main character's brain, out through his mouth and down the barrel of the gun that is inserted into it—could almost be a metaphor for the cinema viewer's predicament.

Based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club is ostensibly an anti-New Age satire on both the dehumanizing effects of corporate/consumer culture and the absurd excesses of the men's movement. Its main character is a twentysomething wage slave (Edward Norton) whose voiceover discloses a sardonic, dissenting, but impotent interior life beneath his subdued exterior conformity. Finding relief from chronic insomnia by attending multiple self-help group meetings under false pretenses, he leads a pallid, vampiric half-life, feeding vicariously on the catharsis and suffering of others. He reluctantly shares his perverse addiction with Marla, a despised fellow misery “tourist” (Helena Bonham-Carter, whose damaged-goods-with-attitude turn is something of a revelation). In the course of his travels as a “recall coordinator” for a major car manufacturer (a job that deeply implicates him in the casual cynicism and corruption of corporate America), this unnamed protagonist encounters and falls in with an elusive, slightly outrageous trickster individualist called Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt).

For all his ironic distance, the nonconformism of Norton's character pales in comparison. Durden, with his outlandish self-presentation and ersatz-Nietzschean pronouncements, is everything our narrator isn't. He answers to nobody, sees through the hypocrisies and agreed deceptions of modern life, is given to casually mentioning, say, the recipe for making nitroglycerin out of soap, and in his part-time job as a movie projectionist amuses himself by splicing single frames of pornography into family movies. In his best work to date, Pitt, who's always good when he takes risks as an actor, relishes every juicy moment.

The two men seal a kind of unspoken pact with a spontaneous fistfight—something that becomes a regular activity. Before long, other men begin to participate, and a club is founded for weekly one-on-one fight sessions. Durden also takes up with Marla, to our narrator's disgust. In sharp contrast to the drab ambiance of the narrator's prosaic daytime world of offices, hotels, and public spaces, Durden inhabits a disorderly realm of eccentric dilapidation that suggests a shadowy subconscious hinterland. As Durden's influence on him grows, the protagonist becomes an accomplice in his escalating program of antisocial pranks and subversive mischief, until they take an abrupt left turn with the formation of a quasimilitary all-male cult with an expressly antisocial, revolutionary agenda—a kind of surreal prole insurrection against bourgeois values.

For all their emphasis on hard surface, vivid texture, and sensational effect, Fincher's previous films staked out suggestively dreamlike psychic/narrative spaces: Ripley's rude awakening from cryogenic suspension in Alien3 (92), Somerset going to sleep to the tick of a metronome in Seven (95), the living nightmare of The Game (97). A tale told by an insomniac who doesn't know when he's asleep, Fight Club takes things one step beyond into new realms of dissociation and movie mindfuck. Suffice to say viewers might wonder just what they can trust: Is Tyler Durden projecting this movie? And just how reliable is this flipped-out narrator anyway?

To be sure, this film is the culmination of a recurrent Fincher scenario: repressed straight white masculinity thrown into crisis by the irruption of an anarchic, implacable force that destabilizes a carefully regulated but precarious psychosocial order. In Alien3, a shaven-headed, celibate, all-male penal colony of killers that anticipates Fight Club's “space monkey” cult of violent, obsolete masculinity is disturbed first by a woman, then by a destructive libidinous organism. In Seven, locked in an endgame with a killer who's equal parts deranged artist and Old Testament avenger, Morgan Freeman's troubled, paternal detective seems to act with the stoic understanding that an older civilization of culture, values, and reason that he defends has been all but submerged in a Bosch-like world of corruption and chaos.

The sterile, controlled universe of Michael Douglas's uptight millionaire tycoon in The Game unravels until he is stripped of everything he relies upon to define himself—though in the end, masculine power and privilege remain intact, indeed reaffirmed, by the ordeal. In Fight Club, sweeping through the main character's tidy, airless life like a tornado, Tyler Durden is a galvanizing, subversive force dedicated to revolt against the inauthenticity and mediocrity of modern life, seeking a nihilistic exaltation of disenfranchised masculinity through self-abasement and destructive transgression.

Fincher's films seemingly repudiate the values he's paid to uphold in his TV commercials. All his features, Fight Club especially, seem to be reactions to or commentaries upon the seductive, fabricated realities, spectacles of consumption, and appeals to narcissism and materialism of commercials. The dreamlike suspension, relative freedom from conventions and formats, and formidable technique that distinguish Fincher's sensibility have been honed or acquired from commercials and music videos, with their routinization of spectacle and “style,” conceit-based construction and permissiveness in terms of breaking down film grammar conventions. (Fincher's 1989 Madonna video “Oh Father” demonstrates the potential aesthetic discipline and integrity of the form at its best.) His features apply these qualities to more complex, rigorous aesthetic strategies: the starkness and fragmentation of Alien3 with its minimization of wideshots and spatial resolution; the gliding, hollow sleekness of The Game; the luxuriating in painstaking abjection and gloomy decay of Fight Club and Seven.

Fight Club belongs to a distinct moment of both dread and rupture in American mainstream cinema, also manifested in The Matrix and traceable at least as far back as Verhoeven's Starship Troopers. The acceleration and dissolution potentially ushered in by digital cinema are only a partial manifestation of this. There's a kind of dissociative hyperrealism operating in Fincher's film, and a mocking sense of flux and liminality in its attitudes and values both formally and conceptually. Its recourse to evident digital imagery has less to do with expanding the boundaries of what can be visualized than with a derangement of or insolence toward cinematic codes and conventions concerning authenticity and the narrative representation of space and time. (In an early, defining scene, Fincher's protagonist, ironically contemplating his consumerist lifestyle, moves through his condo as it transforms around him into a living Ikea catalog with prices floating in space.)

Is Fight Club the end of something in cinema, or the beginning? Zeitgeist movie or cult item? Whether you find the state-of-the-art cinematic values of this current moment liberating or oppressive, radical or specious, of lasting significance or entirely transitory, as the little girl in Poltergeist says: they're here.

Getting Exercised over Fight Club Gary Crowdus from Cineaste

Depending on your sense of humor, your response to Fight Club—the most provocative and controversial release from a major Hollywood studio last year—probably involves taking an extreme position on either side of a love/hate divide. Most viewers, in fact, felt that Fight Club was either wildly funny or morally reprehensible, that it spoke to them in a meaningful way that few movies ever have or that it should be censored and the filmmakers hauled before a congressional committee to answer for what they’d done.

If you’re among those who loved Fight Club, you’ll be delighted with Fox Home Entertainment’s two-disc Special Edition DVD release. One assumes that those who hated the film won’t go near this video, but, as an adherent of the former camp, I have fantasized that at least one of the major critics who trashed the film on its theatrical release will screen the DVD, reconsider their critical stance, and-à la Joseph Morgenstern’s historic 180-degree reversal on Bonnie and Clyde—publicly and remorsefully confess the obtuseness of their initial pronunciamento in a Variety cover story.

Which leaves us with the few, those happy few, who haven’t seen Fight Club and somehow remained oblivious to the critical controversy which raged around the film last fall. First of all, let’s be more precise about the required sense of humor. We don’t mean Adam Sandler or Pauly Shore funny, but a very dark and decidedly offbeat sense of humor. Fight Club is a pitch-black comedy, an over-the-top, consciously outrageous social satire, characterized by excess and absurdity, and therefore guaranteed to delight or disturb sizable portions of any viewing audience.

The film is a fairly faithful adaptation of the critically acclaimed debut novel by Chuck Palahniuk, which was most often characterized by adjectives such as “unsettling,” “caustic,” “twisted,” and “bleakly funny.” Indeed, the darkly satiric writings of this thirty-seven-year-old Portland-based author (he has since completed two additional novels, Survivors and Invisible Monsters) have earned him favorable comparisons to other literary chroniclers of the dark and weird side such as Irvine Welsh, J.G. Ballard, Brett Easton Ellis, and William Burroughs.

Narrated in a first-person, stream-of-consciousness manner, Fight Club chronicles the misadventures of a thirty-year-old corporate nebbish (Edward Norton)—identified only as The Narrator but who eventually refers to himself as ‘Jack’—whose dehumanizing job as a recall coordinator for a major U.S. auto firm, combined with a self-confessed enslavement to lifestyle consumerism, have fueled a six-month-long bout of insomnia and a personal sense of despair so great that he secretly yearns for a plane crash to end his meaningless existence. ‘Jack’ becomes involved with a pair of eccentric social misfits—Marla Taylor (Helena Bonham Carter), with whom he shares an emotional addiction to attending support groups for the terminally ill, and Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a charismatic free spirit with whom Jack organizes a ’Fight Club’ in the basement of a local bar where they and other disaffected young men find temporary physical and emotional release for their pent-up frustrations. The unusual, three-way relationship that develops between Marla, Tyler, and ’Jack’ propels the latter on an increasingly violent quest for personal redemption, which, in a bizarre plot twist late in the film, confronts him with a startling self-discovery.

Many critics praised Fight Club, hailing it as one of the most exciting, original, and thought-provoking films of the year. Most writers focused on how director David Fincher imaginatively translated into fresh new cinematic language the novel’s abrupt, herky-jerky, stream-of-consciousness voice by employing hyperkinetic camera movements, photo montages, subliminal imagery, freeze frames, terse editing rhythms, and some stunning, computer-generated visualizations of the Narrator’s thought processes (including a bravura minute-and-a-half backward tracking shot originating in the protoplasmic fear cells of his brain, an IKEA catalog rendition of his trendy apartment furnishings, and a nightmarish plane crash). He seamlessly connects this disparate array of visual techniques through Edward Norton’s voice-over narration, whose mordant humor and intimate reflections allow us inside the skin of its deeply troubled protagonist.

Fincher’s stylish cinematic skills, honed through his early work in commercials and music videos, are on prominent display here, and the murky visual style and creepy dramatic quality so evident in his previous features—Alien3 (1992), Se7en (1995), and The Game (1997)—have been carefully calibrated here for comic effect. The film’s expressionistic nature has been further heightened by the low-key, largely monochromatic but vivid cinematography of first-time DP Jeff Cronenweth (son of Blade Runner cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth), an evocative and quirky sound design by Ren Klyce, an unusually effective techno-pop score, filled with propulsive rhythms and unusual sonorities, by the Dust Brothers (Michael Simpson and Don King), and the fast-paced but remarkably expressive editorial style of James Hapgood. The level of technical craft and artistry on display in Fight Club is awesome and becomes more impressively evident on repeat viewings.

The performances in Fight Club, from the top-billed stars to the character actors in bit parts, are absolutely first-rate. Norton’s performance, which involves the most extreme emotional trajectory, from white-collar nerd to rebel leader to responsible adult, is the dramatic and thematic core of this modernist bildungsroman. It’s a doubly impressive performance since it’s played on at least two levels, involving the interplay between his on-screen performance, which often involves the character’s direct address to the viewer, and his voice-over commentary, which adds another layer of irony or insight. Before his messianic self-image takes over, Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden is all carefree attitude and raffish charm, a gonzo libertarian with a bizarre sense of humor and a taste for garish fashion. Helena Bonham-Carter, the Merchant/Ivory heroine, is here brilliantly cast against type as a grunge goddess, complete with wildly unkempt hairdo, sloppily applied eyeliner, a thrift-shop wardrobe, and a lit cigarette perpetually dangling from her lips. These are memorable performances sure to show up in future career-highlights reels for all three actors.

What truly distinguishes Fight Club, however, is its pungent satire, whose numerous targets include the soul-deadening consequences of excessive materialism, cynical corporate policies based on an indifference to human life, festering workplace discontent, repressed male rage and gender-role anxiety, class resentment, New Age psychobabble, the emotional legacy for a generation of young men of physically or emotionally absent fathers, and a critique of the personality types who are attracted to political cults. In a further departure from the cookie-cutter mode of most studio releases, Uhls’s screenplay retains much of the novel’s minimalist, modernist style, and refuses to untangle narrative ambiguities or to provide convenient signposts to guide viewer interpretation.
Most notably, the film sustains the novel’s single fixed perspective of the Narrator and, notwithstanding several tiny clues that would be picked up by only the most attentive and perspicacious viewer, thereby delivers the maximum surprise effect of its delayed plot twist. Both as social satire and psychological thriller, Fight Club engages and challenges moviegoers on an intellectual as well as an emotional and visceral level, refusing to spoon-feed them an easily digestible moral or lesson, instead insisting that viewers think through for themselves the many provocative themes and issues it broaches

While Fight Club had numerous critical champions, the film’s critical attackers were far more vocal, a negative chorus which became hysterical about what they felt to be the excessively graphic scenes of fisticuffs, which were variously condemned as “ugly,” “stomach churning,” “morally repulsive,” “dangerous,” and “macho porn.” They felt such scenes served only as a mindless glamorization of brutality, a morally irresponsible portrayal, which they feared might encourage impressionable young male viewers to set up their own real-life Fight Clubs in order to beat each other senseless.

Generating such a strong response was, to some extent, what the filmmakers intended. Glamorization was definitely not what they had in mind, however, since they consciously chose to avoid the conventionally stylized and physically sanitized barroom fist fights, choreographed like raucous dance routines, so familiar from classic Hollywood Westerns or the martial-arts displays in the contemporary films of Jackie Chan, Steven Segal, Jean-Claude Van Damme, or their innumerable brethren. The far more realistic melees in Fight Club are instead characterized by a lot of awkward grappling, wild roundhouse swings, head butting, kneeing, headlocks, low blows, and other amateurish wrestling maneuvers—the way guys who are not used to fighting would fight.

A surprising number of critics, who suggested that the film’s ‘Fight Club’ encounters were little more than a monotonous repetition of scenes of senseless violence, seemed almost willfully oblivious to the fact that the filmmakers provided a comic or dramatic context for every fight, with each bout functioning in terms of character development or to signal a key turning point in the plot. Many of these scenes are purely comic in tone, such as Jack and Tyler’s first tussle in the bar parking lot (after trading their first punches, the exciting adrenaline rush and revitalizing quality of the blows is suggested by their exchanged entreaties-“Hit me again,” “No, you hit me”). This same mood figures in the visual hyperbole of one of the film’s most hilarious montages, depicting Fight Club members on a ‘homework assignment’ to pick a fight in public with a total stranger, and lose (in one of these, a seminary student is assaulted and, having surprised himself by throwing a retaliatory punch, and poised on the knife edge of the fight-or-flight syndrome, can’t seem to decide whether to throw another punch or to apologize and run away).

In this same comic spirit, Fincher goes to great lengths to show the real-life aftereffects of such bare-knuckled violence. Jack, for example, suffers a black eye, bleeding gums, loosened teeth, and assorted cuts and contusions for weeks afterwards. He is easily able to recognize other Fight Club members in public by the bandages or various black-and-blue facial markings they sport. The pièce de résistance of this running gag is a bartender who wears an elaborate, immobilizing head and neck brace.

In a broader satirical context, of course, the film is clearly posing in absurd terms the extent to which Jack and other Fight Club members have become so physically impassive, so emotionally anesthetized, and so spiritually numb, that it takes a broken nose, a split lip, or a few cracked ribs to reawaken their deadened nervous systems and to provide them with a meaningful sense of male identity.

All kidding aside, Fight Club also knows when its scheduled bouts of controlled, consensual violence can go too far. After Jack, for example, becomes concerned that ’Angel Face’ (Jared Leto), a new Fight Club member, threatens to replace him as Tyler’s confidant, he decides to seek vengeance against his rival. During their match, he breaks Fight Club Rule #3 (“When someone says ’stop,’ or goes limp, the fight is over”) by administering a punishment beating. Having thrown him to the floor, Jack kneels astride Angel Face, striking repeated blows to his face in an obvious effort to disfigure him, to “destroy something beautiful,” as Jack confesses. The editing of this scene, with Jack’s assault repeatedly intercut with the shocked reactions of other Fight Club members, is clearly meant to convey the repellent nature, even in this roughhouse environment, of the encounter. Indeed, Tyler himself expresses his disapproval by calling Jack “psycho boy” and instructing others to get the victim to a hospital.

If Fight Club’s critics became morally exercised over the film’s mano-a-mano violence, they were absolutely apoplectic about what they perceived to be its ’fascist’ politics, involving Tyler’s establishment of Project Mayhem, for which he recruits a small army of terrorist guerrillas to carry out bombings and other attacks on corporate targets. The film was denounced as “an apology for fascism,” “frankly and cheerfully fascist,” and “a fascist rhapsody posing as a metaphor of liberation.” These tirades, like the earlier complaints, seem to willfully ignore the film’s inherent criticisms of Tyler’s terrorist actions, which is consistently expressed through Jack’s voice-over narration and the privileging of his increasingly condemnatory point of view.

In addition, the film’s portrayal of Tyler’s army leaves little doubt about its cultlike nature, revealing the Project Mayhem members as nameless, willful automatons who proclaim their unquestioning loyalty to their cult leader (“In Tyler we trusted”) and who mindlessly parrot his slogans. The negative visual connotation of their skinhead coiffure to contemporary neo-Nazi groups is particularly germane. As Tyler proselytizes his troops through a bullhorn, it’s clear that they have become as manipulated and dehumanized by their leader as they ever were by the corporate civilization from which he is trying to rescue them.

The multiple commentary tracks on the Special Edition DVD go a long way toward clarifying the filmmakers’ intentions. The first disc, a gorgeous transfer of the 2.4:1 anamorphic widescreen film with a vibrant, THX-certified, Dolby Digital 5.1 surround soundtrack, features four separate commentary tracks-the first by David Fincher; the second with Fincher, Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, and Helena Bonham-Carter; the third with novelist Chuck Palahniuk and screenwriter Jim Uhls; and the fourth with production designer Alex McDowell, cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, costume designer Michael Kaplan, and visual effects supervisor Kevin Haug.

Not surprisingly, Fincher tends to concentrate on visual style and technical challenges and defers to the novelist and screenwriter on the film’s “sociology.” The most illuminating, entertaining, and funny commentary is that featuring Fincher and his actors, who are articulate not only about acting in general and what they were after in their specific performances, but also about the film’s satirical approach (Pitt describes trying to find that “fine line between empathy and irony”) and its political and philosophical themes (Norton discusses how nihilism seems such an appealing philosophy when you’re young but that, as you mature, you recognize the practical limits as well as the hypocrisies to which nihilism lends itself). Palahniuk and Uhls discuss the film’s edgy satire, the genesis of the novel and its characters, and the changes made from novel to film. While the commentary track featuring the production personnel is informative, it tends to get overly technical at times, with no effort to explain their professional jargon to the average viewer.

After you’ve savored every last anecdote and insight from disc one, the following week you can work your way through disc two, which is loaded with supplemental materials, including behind-the-scenes production clips, with alternate camera angles and commentary tracks, for six key scenes (including the airplane crash, the explosion of Jack’s condo, and the projection booth), deleted and alternate scenes (including Marla’s censored pillow talk), Fincher’s storyboards, visual effects stills, and preproduction paintings. A variety of publicity materials are also included, most notably two hilarious Public Service Announcements (one each by Norton and Pitt, which Fox refused to show in theaters), and the film’s press kit, presented as a Banana-Republic-style mail-order catalog of trendy and expensive clothing items and other fashion accessories featured in the film.

As real-world echoes of Fight Club continue to swirl around us, from the current scandal involving numbers crunchers at Firestone who decided against a recall of their defective, life-threatening tires to the Versace fashion show which unabashedly presented a new Fight Club-inspired men’s collection, this Special Edition DVD offers the ideal opportunity to reappreciate (or reappraise?) what some critics have referred to as “the first movie of the twenty-first century.”

BFI | Sight & Sound | So Good It Hurts Amy Taubin from Sight and Sound, November 1999

Testosterama feature and interview by Michael Sragow from Salon

Fight Club : A Ritual Cure For The Spiritual Fight Club : A Ritual Cure For The Spiritual Ailment Of American Masculinity, by Jethro Rothe-Kushel from The Film Journal, 2002

A beautiful mind(fuck): Hollywood structures of identity Jonathan Eig on movies like The Sixth Sense, The Others, The Usual Suspects, Waking Life, A Beautiful Mind, Fight Club, Memento, Mulholland Drive, and Donnie Darko, from Jump Cut, Summer 2003

Everyman and no man: white, heterosexual masculinity in contemporary serial killer movies Nicola Rehling from Jump Cut, Spring 2007

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PANIC ROOM C+ 77

USA (112 mi) 2002

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

David Fincher's Panic Room begins more or less where his Fight Club left off, with a succession of ominous skyline shots. But a plethora of "impossible" camera maneuvers notwithstanding, Fincher's new thriller is as conventional as Fight Club was provocative—a women-in-danger flick that's as tastefully muted and elegantly minimalist as Hamad Karzai's wardrobe.

A just divorced mom (Jodie Foster) and her androgynous offspring (Kristen Stewart) take up residence in a West Side townhouse nearly the size of the hotel in The Shining. Foster, a scholarly type who is planning to go back to school, is justifiably anxious. On their very first, suitably dark and stormy night rattling around this grotesque surplus of space, the house is invaded by a trio of treasure seekers (sad-faced Forest Whitaker, manic Jared Leto, and sinister Dwight Yoakam) looking for the millions hidden in the impenetrable "panic room" where mother and daughter take refuge.

This situation—women besieged in their own home, desperately telephoning for help—received its definitive expression in 1909 when D.W. Griffith directed The Lonely Villa. (Indeed, Michael Haneke gave the situation a particularly odious twist with his sadistic Funny Games.) Fincher uses the miracle of video surveillance to elaborate on Griffithian cross-cutting while digitally swooping through the house and its innards—generating suspense mainly by cranking up the anxiety music and retarding time in the manner of Brian De Palma.

Like the shelter for which it is named, Panic Room is an efficiently tooled construction (albeit one whose success is overly predicated on its villains' single-minded idiocy). But unlike the eponymous treasure trove, there's nothing inside.

Slant Magazine

Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) moves into the posh home of an eccentric millionaire who hid his fortune inside his safe room which doubles as a makeshift hideaway against domestic invaders. Panic Room feels an awful lot like the movie an exhausted director would make after something like Fight Club. A seemingly disinterested David Fincher allows cinematographer Darius Khondji and a slew of special effects wizards to turn an Upper West Side apartment into a 3-D dollhouse for a recently divorced mother of a diabetic tomboy. Aggravating yet incredibly punchy, Panic Room brings to mind a PoMo Home Alone though Rear Window For Dummies is more like it. A blabbermouth Jared Leto is insufferable as one of the film's trio of intruders though Whitaker wonderfully keeps the lid on the John Coffey heart-of-gold in his good-guy-gone-bad Burnham. While overly mechanical and shamelessly self-obsessed, Panic Room is nonetheless replete with some incredible set pieces. Actually, it's all about the opening credit sequence and Jodie's slow-mo dashes into the panic room. That and those elegant wine glasses. Panic Room may lack depth but it's great eye-candy nonetheless.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Mother Courage Linda Ruth Williams from Sight and Sound, May 2002

Salon.com David Thomson

Nitrate Online [Cynthia Fuchs]

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The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

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Los Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott

ZODIAC B 89

USA (158 mi) 2007

How can people be so heartless?

How can people be so cruel? —“Easy to Be Hard,” by Three Dog Night

Like Haneke’s CACHÉ (2005) a few years back, this is something of a mindfuck of a film, a curious police procedural lost in the cavernous depths of its own obsessions that uses timelines like chapter headings, written by James Vanderbilt based on two books by Robert Graysmith that takes a different turn in the road, becoming more about the effect over time of the constant police frustrations, as they never find the actual Zodiac killer, a serial murderer in the late 60’s in the San Francisco bay area who actually taunted the police and the public, holding a city hostage through repeated media demands sent to the newspapers to either print his letters or more people would be murdered, intentionally leaving behind cryptic clues that could never be solved. Welcome to the information age. In this film, long after the police’s leads have grown cold, a San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist, Jake Gyllenhaal as Graysmith, who was something of a bystander when the original Zodiac letters were sent to the paper, grows obsessed with solving the case, even at the expense of losing his family, eventually writing a best selling book. Unfortunately, this is a confusing film, especially in the initial hour or so where information is sprawled all over a canvas like suburban blight, most of which is incomprehensible not only for the frustrated-at-every-turn police officers involved, but for the audience as well. In an era that predates computers, where police reports and newspaper stories were written on old-fashioned typewriters, the accumulation of sheer data in this case is staggering, where the focus of the film, much like Fritz Lang’s methodical, perfectly synchronized police manhunt for M (1931), another public enemy number one film, becomes the laboriously slow process of accumulating meticulous information, trying to fit the pieces together and catch the monster. The monster in this film, however, remains in our heads.

Opening with a phenomenal zoom shot by Harris Savides from out of the sky, flying into the port of San Francisco, we hear the lilting music of Three Dog Night from a bygone era, “Easy to Be Hard” from the rock musical HAIR. Lest we think we’re still in the Age of Aquarius, this film quickly jolts us to attention. Similar to MONSTER (2003) a few years back, the audience is privy to a series of very graphic and gruesome murders, one following closely behind the next. Each of these films features serial killer music, in MONSTER it was Tommy James and the Shondells “Crimson and Clover,” while in this case it turns out to be Donovan’s psychedelic rendition of “The Hurdy Gurdy Man,” where one can substitute the bogeyman, a common reference from John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN (1978). In an eerie opening moment right out of CHRISTINE (1983), with fireworks going off in the distance on the 4^th of July, a couple parks in the protected darkness of a lover’s lane when a car, headlights off, pulls up behind them blasting the song “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” where it’s Donovan’s daughter (Ione Skye) sitting in the front seat of the car. It sits for a moment before pulling away where we can follow the headlights driving off in the distance, the song nearly fading out, but the car ominously screeches to a halt, turning around and returns, the music growing louder as it approaches, eventually pulling up right behind this car again with the headlights blazing a hole right through them with the music still blasting. A man gets out of the car with a gun. Yikes.

The police detective on the case is a world weary Dave Toschi, Mark Ruffalo, the basis for the Steve McQueen character in BULLITT (1968), also Michael Douglas’s character on the TV show The Streets of San Francisco, whose less flamboyant partner (Anthony Edwards) eventually gets so discouraged that he wants off the case. An unsolved serial killer case is an obsession that takes a crippling toll on the public, the police and city officials, and those individuals whose misfortune it is to get wrapped up in this kind of case, as it drains the life force out of those that are the closest to the investigation. In the initial flood of murders and the accumulation of facts and clues that are so hurriedly strung together, opening with the invigorating music of Santana’s “Soul Sacrifice,” not only is this montage of neverending and never enough evidence fatiguing, but near impossible to keep straight. The film is relentless in pursuing facts and evidence, perhaps overly so as it demonstrates the futility of the chase. When this is a police thriller, too much information depletes the interest, as where’s the thrill? It’s lost as the plot gets bogged down in mind numbing details. Yet years later, beautifully expressed through a dazzling digitalized time-lapsed construction of the Transamerica Building, when it turns into one man hellbent on deciphering the evidence, a lone man’s crusade against the world going against all odds, as the police are no longer cooperating with him and find him something of a curious albatross, an unpleasant reminder of their own failings, there’s something intriguing and almost psychotic in the incredible burst of energy that drives this man, like John Nash in A BEAUTIFUL MIND (2001), challenging the demons that possess his brain. Gyllenhaal portrays a former eagle scout who couldn’t be more clean cut and wholesome, in stark contrast to Robert Downey Jr, a reporter who covers the police beat for the San Francisco Chronicle. Initially Downey Jr is fiercely funny with his snarky witticisms, but drink gets the better of him as he loses his job and slinks off into a subterranean netherworld of a bohemian drunk. Some of the more humorous moments come when the two of them first meet in a bar to discuss the case, where Downey’s curiosity gets the better of him, referring to the blue-laced Aqua Velvet party drink that Gyllenhaal is drinking, “This can no longer be ignored,” taking a sip, which leads to both of them tossing down glasses of the stuff, or later when several of the key players in the film all happen to meet coincidentally in a movie theater that is playing Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood’s patented rip off, changing the serial killer from Zodiac to Scorpio in DIRTY HARRY (1971). Another is when Gyllenhaal, an amateur sleuth at best, is unexpectedly caught offguard in the lair of a strange and potentially deranged man who he thought, at least for that moment, was the actual Zodiac killer. Circumstantial evidence plays tricks on people when many of the clues numerically start to add up.

An interesting concept to the film was the introduction of the Chloë Sevigny character as a blind date for the divorced cartoonist, as both initially exhibit few social skills, and what looks like a date from Hell turns out to be “the best date of my life.” But her character, becoming a mother to his children, adding a stability and social dimension to this obsessed guy, also adds a certain human element that is otherwise missing in the entire film. Some of the film’s best moments have nothing to do with the policework, but are the quiet, yet telling moments between the two of them. He can’t keep his eyes off the television news reports, and like a Rubic cube or mathematical puzzle, he spends his life trying to solve the missing pieces. After years of putting him off, eventually Gyllenhaal and Ruffalo meet and put together a best case scenario, similar to the Deep Throat revelations in JFK (1991), and of course the audience is shaded by these implications. By the end, we’re not sure what he’s solved, or even if he came close, as the lengthy innertitles at the end of the film seem to refute the conclusions reached by the end of the film, conclusions that mirror the speculation by Graysmith in his book, leaving the viewers completely flabbergasted about what to believe, no closer to understanding the truth than when the film started. The film’s real focus then becomes the internalized damage exacted from the people close to this case, how lives were changed in the process, careers altered, marriages destroyed, and how much utter chaos one man could bring to an entire community, who to this day, still remains at large.

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)

A certain kind of journalistic sorcery can make you believe a movie is absolutely real. A density of fact, a camera that whisks us into the action while never calling attention to itself, a lack of the expected Hollywood narrative beats — all of these add up to something deeper than fiction and richer than documentary.

In Zodiac, directed by David Fincher (Seven) from a crackling script by James Vanderbilt, the various characters circle around the Zodiac killings of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s as if drawn towards an existential black hole. The killer taunts them, idly muses about future atrocities he doesn’t bother to carry out. His very existence is an affront to the professionalism of the California police and reporters — and one editorial cartoonist — who track his every move. In a way, the Zodiac becomes their dark god, appearing at intervals with maddening omens.

Zodiac is not an exploration of the killer, who in any event was never caught, though the cartoonist — Robert Graysmith, who wrote two books about the Zodiac case — is pretty sure he knows who did it. It’s a mammoth police procedural, running a leisurely two hours and 38 minutes, yet the editing (by Angus Wall with Kirk Baxter) keeps the scenes clipped, taut, compressed. This is the film equivalent of a big, thick paperback full of crime photos and clippings and digressions that usually don’t mean anything but sometimes do. David Fincher, who in movies like Fight Club and Panic Room had been falling a bit too much in love with his own stylistic perfume, approaches Zodiac humbly, without fuss or excess, and winds up delivering his most electrifying film to date.

Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) hangs around on the margins of the case, working out the Zodiac’s coded messages and making connections no one else makes. But he’s seen as an eager-beaver kid by people a generation removed from him — people like the jaded detective Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and the shambling reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.), neither of whom take Graysmith very seriously until he’s stayed on the case long after everyone else has fallen away in exhaustion. Gyllenhaal anchors the movie in enthusiasm passing over gradually into obsession, but once again Robert Downey Jr., the hippest skull-and-crossbones in the room, mutters his way in and out of scenes and casually steals the movie.

Shot by Harris Savides using the new digital process Viper, Zodiac looks nothing like most of today’s drab, monochromatic films; warm, natural light is used whenever possible, and the movie, right down to its old-school Paramount logo, could be shown alongside a run of Sidney Lumet or Alan Pakula films from the ‘70s and not look out of place. Zodiac has considerable menace (especially its use of Donovan’s shivery “Hurdy Gurdy Man”) but very little violence, though Fincher makes the most of it. One attack takes place on a bright sunny day in an idyllic setting, and it’s filmed as a well-lit grindhouse horror that brings to mind the rougher scenes in Last House on the Left. A late scene, fairly terrifying, finds Graysmith at the home of a film aficionado played by Charles Fleischer with quietly nightmarish creepiness. Graysmith is alone in a basement with a man who could be the Zodiac. Nobody knows Graysmith is there, nobody will come save him, and the man has just turned out the light. We know Graysmith survived to write the books this movie is based on, but for a few moments we forget.

Overall, Zodiac is a stuffed package, a densely woven tapestry of data and entertainment. It ends, by necessity, on a rather flat note. Fincher, a modern master at sending the audience out buzzing, restrains himself this time. Graysmith gets what he wants, after a fashion, and the movie ends on the haunted face of the Zodiac’s first target. The movie’s refusal to fabricate an easy, manipulative finale will frustrate some and gratify others.

Somehow, this thorny, stop-and-start, difficult work made it through the studio system and into thousands of theaters, reminding us what movies can do better than any other medium. 'Zodiac' is the most beautifully shaped and satisfying big Hollywood film in years.

Zodiac Mike D’Angelo from Las Vegas Weekly, more in depth from his Enchanted Mitten blog here: "Zodiac redux, or: Which star sign is the Dead Horse?" also a brief portrait from Esquire magazine here: Robert Downey Jr., Zodiac

Because Zodiac takes as its subject one of the most notorious serial killers in American history, and because its director, David Fincher, remains best known for Se7en, a movie about one of the most diabolical serial killers in film history, most people will naturally assume that what we have here is a picture about a serial killer. This assumption will sell tickets, no doubt, luring the unsuspecting viewer into one of the most radically ambitious and conceptually bizarre projects ever released by a major studio. If you're even slightly familiar with the case, it will dawn on you at the end of Zodiac's first hour that no additional murders are forthcoming—the Zodiac killed only five people that we know about for sure, all of them between December 1968 and October 1969—and that even the taunting letters and ciphers that made him infamous are about to cease without explanation. You also know that the Zodiac was never caught, and that you've signed on for a film that runs closer to three hours than two. Where can they possibly take this story? you will wonder. Only when you realize that the movie's pace is speeding up in inverse proportion to the killer's activity, however, will you understand that you're actually watching the most exhaustive portrait of obsessive-compulsive disorder ever seen onscreen.

Odds are, of course, that you're not already familiar with every detail of the Zodiac case. Never fear—after seeing this movie, you will be. Adapted from two books by editorial cartoonist-turned-amateur sleuth Robert Graysmith, Zodiac features a handful of ostensible characters: Graysmith himself, who worked at the San Francisco Chronicle during the period when the Zodiac was sending letters there, is played by Jake Gyllenhaal, and we also spend significant face time with star Chronicle reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) and legendary SFPD detective Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo). But none of these three men, nor anything that you could credibly call human drama, amounts to much more than a ripple in Zodiac's endless, raging sea of investigative minutiae. Dates, times, locations, statements, interviews, clues, totems, theories—Zodiac is less narrative than avalanche, opening crevasses in characters' and viewers' psyches alike. Even as Avery sinks into alcoholism and Graysmith's obsession with the case destroys his marriage, it's the mental state of the filmmakers that seems troubling. Existentially horrified by the absence of certitude, the movie, like Graysmith's books, drastically overcompensates via maniacal attention to detail, which manifests as a desperate need to embrace What Is Known.

Of course, Fincher is still Fincher, so it's not as if any of this plays as dry or bureaucratic. Scene by scene, Zodiac is the director's most visually restrained work to date, taking its cue from the mostly functional mise-en-scène of the police procedural; at the same time, he can't resist the occasional expressionistic flourish, as when two young lovers en route to violent death drive slowly down a quiet Vallejo street as fireworks explode overhead. (The Zodiac's second attack took place on July 4, 1969.) Nor will you ever again be able to listen to Donovan's loping "Hurdy Gurdy Man" without a chill running down your spine, assuming that you can now. The actors, for their part, do a credible job of creating the necessary illusion that they're playing human beings rather than walking, talking DSM-IV codes: Downey turns Avery, who received several personal communiqués from the killer, into his standard hilarious motormouthed cynic, while Ruffalo, playing the real cop who inspired Steve McQueen's character in Bullitt, expertly mimics Toschi's shaggy, understated demeanor.

Gyllenhaal is the weak link, projecting little more than dogged earnestness—but then, I think the movie erred in selecting Graysmith as its source and nominal protagonist. Zodiac buffs know well that the true obsessive is a fellow named Gareth Penn, whose untenable yet mesmerizing theory maintains that various odd misspellings in Zodiac letters—"phomphit" in lieu of "puff it"; "cid" instead of "kid"—are part of an elaborate mathematical code. It's also unfortunate that Zodiac follows Graysmith in making a determined case against Arthur Leigh Allen (John Carroll Lynch), a convicted child molester who died in 1992. Plenty of circumstantial evidence points to Allen, but it's still a bit odd that the movie—like Graysmith's second book, Zodiac Unmasked—concludes with one of the Zodiac's surviving victims identifying Allen from a photo lineup (over 20 years after the attack), while the fact that Allen was conclusively ruled out by DNA testing a few years ago is relegated to a end-credit footnote. Wasn't this supposed to be a film about uncertainty leading to madness? Caught up, like so many others, in the thrill of the hunt, the movie ultimately falls into its own trap.

Zodiac Brent Simon from Screendaily

In the shadows of this year's Oscar ceremony comes the first legitimate contender for next year's honours in the form of David Fincher's Zodiac, a dense but hypnotic and starkly involving account of the unsolved murders in California that spanned the late 1960s and 1970s. Part brooding investigative ensemble, part journalistic procedural in the vein of All The President's Men, the film is a strikingly well stitched together vivisection of crime and obsession, marked by a painstaking, novelistic richness that showcases the heavy existential toll of the pursuit of punishment.

Fincher's most mature work to date, as well as his least stylistically ambitious, Zodiac will ply discriminating upscale adult audiences for modest returns, both domestically and abroad, but its length and lack of overt cop-versus-killer thrills will dent its chances at Se7en-sized grosses or widescale embrace.

Both solid word-of-mouth amongst habitual filmgoers and Fincher's reputation as a purveyor of distinctive genre fare should help the film outstrip The Black Dahlia and Summer Of Sam, two other large-canvas true crime stories which also used shocking murders to explore, to varying degrees, paranoia and social unease. Each of those movies clocked out under $25m domestically.

The strength of Zodiac's construction and the clarity of its completely-of-a-piece storytelling, meanwhile, make an awards-season re-release seems almost certain, giving mainstream audiences potentially resistant to the movie's considerable running time and somber themes a second chance to see it.

Making inroads with this audience, and selling Zodiac as what it is — a brilliant new classic of its field — is perhaps tough, coming on the heels of as spry a crime picture as The Departed, but is key to its theatrical success. With sustained critical support and proper positioning, awards attention for Fincher, the film and its screenplay, amongst other notices, is not inconceivable, and certainly not undeserved.

Based on the true story of a serial killer who terrified the Northern California area and taunted authorities across the state with cryptic letters to the press, Zodiac is based on the non-fiction book of Robert Graysmith (Gyllenhaal), a shy editorial cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle.

On August 1, 1969, similar letters arrive in the press rooms of three different newspapers claiming responsibility for two previous attacks which left three young people dead and another critically injured. Along with details of the crimes are a series of coded messages, with instructions to publish them. By mid-October, two more assaults leave another two dead and one injured.

While San Francisco homicide detectives Dave Toschi (Ruffalo) and William Armstrong (Edwards) work the case from their side, Graysmith indulges a growing interest in the awful affair with his gifted but cynical colleague, scruffy crime beat reporter Paul Avery (Downey, Jr). Graysmith even unlocks a key reference to the 1932 film The Most Dangerous Game in one of the Zodiac's ciphers; Avery becomes a stated target of the killer, touching off his downward descent into drugs and alcohol.

Inter-jurisdictional nightmares ensue. In decided contrast to the inviolabilities of modern-day forensics often showcased in such genre pieces, the police in Zodiac are shown to be continually frustrated by problems with respect to evidence analysis, tracing and simple coordination. Conflicting modes of exploit and the Zodiac's contradictory staked claims to crimes he likely didn't commit only muddy the waters.

Over the course of many months and years, though, a tangled labyrinth of evidence eventually points to a compelling suspect. When this individual is cleared, Armstrong begs off the case. Graysmith, meanwhile, launches his own dogged investigation, conferring occasionally with a still haunted Toschi.

Many more years pass. As much as the rigorously detailed Zodiac is about specifically its namesake case, it's also a movie about the associated effects of the hunt for a murderer, and the heavy price — materially, socially, psychologically, emotionally — those seekers pay.

That screenwriter James Vanderbilt (Basic, The Rundown) avoids conventional payoffs is somewhat of a given knowing the nature of the material. It's the dark humour and digressive details of his script, though, which help truly moor the story and add to its overall tension. They make the expansive backdrop, its galloping pace — weeks, months and sometimes even years flit by with dispassionate textual cards — and the manner in which characters flow in and out of the story feel even more real.

Zodiac 's actual violence is relatively minimal, but frontloaded and grimly depicted. Fincher captures the sudden and arbitrary nastiness of these acts, and they carry a nasty wallop and enduring influence that hangs menacingly over the rest of the film.

Visually, Fincher applies the same exacting sense of detail and framing to Zodiac as his other films, abetted by Donald Graham Burt's fantastic production design and occasional collaborator Harris Savides' cinematography. Everything from the spot-on costumes, setting and newsroom lighting to David Shire's score and a discerning selection of period rock tunes (Boz Scaggs, Donovan, Marvin Gaye, et al) exudes the time period in question.

Fincher furthermore makes savvy use of a variety of directorial techniques — from a compressed montage of talk radio chatter to a time-lapsed sequence involving the construction of the city's iconic Transamerica Building — to briskly and artfully convey wide swaths of time.

The cast is superbly chosen, and the performances are uniformly engaging in their own ways. Downey, Jr, impresses his own idiosyncratic charm onto the role of Avery, while Fincher bleeds Ruffalo of the undue earnestness that has weighed down some of his recent work, resulting in the actor's most lingeringly memorable performance since You Can Count On Me.

Collateral Damage Scott Foundas from LA Weekly

When the editorial cartoonist turned amateur sleuth Robert Graysmith published Zodiac, his sprawling, meticulously researched account of the eponymous San Francisco serial killer, he wrote that the tale was “the most frightening story I know,” and it was easy to understand why. Graysmith was writing in 1985, some 16 years after the Zodiac’s last confirmed attack and seven since his final, cryptic message — “I am back with you” — arrived at the offices of the San Francisco Chronicle. With Zodiac’s publication, Graysmith had completed his own massive re-investigation of a case that had stymied authorities for nearly two decades, unearthing further compelling (if still circumstantial) evidence against one of the prime suspects as he went. But still Zodiac remained at large — a phantom forever lurking.

Now Zodiac is a movie, directed by David Fincher from a screenplay by James Vanderbilt, and I suspect that those who go to see it expecting a dark, brooding serial-killer chiller on the order of Fincher’s Se7en will emerge disappointed. For what interests Fincher most this time is not the hooded madman with the cross-hairs logo, but rather the cops and reporters who doggedly pursue him, who allow the case to take control of (and in some cases destroy) their lives — the Zodiac’s collateral victims. Fincher’s Zodiac is a study in the passage of time and the accumulation of massive amounts of information — a movie that seems to be unfolding inside of a cramped storage locker. And it is, though it may not sound like it, thrilling to behold.

Like the book, Vanderbilt’s screenplay hopscotches between the Zodiac killings themselves (brutally efficient attacks on mostly young couples parked at or near lovers’ lanes), the ongoing police investigations in the various counties where the murders take place, and the simultaneous inquiries made by disheveled Chronicle reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey, Jr.), who is eventually aided by the comically wholesome rookie cartoonist Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal). In his letters, the Zodiac christens himself with his astrological moniker, threatens attacks against schoolchildren if his words and encrypted ciphers aren’t printed in the pages of the Chronicle, and, in one particularly absurd moment, demands a televised audience with famed litigator Melvin Belli (a gloriously hammy Brian Cox). Yet, as the body count increases and the Bay Area trembles in fear, Fincher and Vanderbilt show us that it wasn’t only the Zodiac who grows large and mythic the ensuing media frenzy. Indeed, Avery, Graysmith and San Francisco detective Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) — one of the models for the Clint Eastwood character in the Zodiac-inspired Dirty Harry — also realize that they’re in the spotlight and that this is their chance to transcend the routine of their everyday lives. Welcome to the cult of the celebrity serial killer.

At nearly three hours, and without a single hobbit in the cast, Zodiac is the sort of vast, richly involving pop epic that Hollywood largely seems incapable of making anymore, so it’s little surprise that Fincher’s influences derive from an earlier era of American film. From the vintage Paramount studio logo that opens the movie through to the first bars of composer David Shire’s musique concrète score, it’s clear that Fincher is transporting us back to the New American Cinema of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and specifically to the pared-down, fact-based procedurals of filmmakers like Alan J. Pakula and Sidney Lumet. He’s used the latest available technology (the same high-definition video cameras that Michael Mann used to shoot Miami Vice) to make a resolutely low-tech movie, and the surprise isn’t that Fincher pulls it off, but rather that the form of the film — a triumph of period lighting, costumes and production design — is exhilaratingly of a piece with its content. In Zodiac, every fluorescent-lit medium close-up, every corduroy jacket and every shade of goldenrod or taupe has the effect of pulling you deeper into the movie’s narrative thicket.

The talents of Fincher, who began his career as a visual-effects artist (with credits on Return of the Jedi and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom among others), have never been in doubt, but Zodiac is the first of his movies since Se7en to seem more interested in people than in the possibilities of style and of storytelling gamesmanship. It may also be his most personal work to date, in that, like the men on the trail of the Zodiac killer, he is said to be a workaholic who will stop at nothing until he has achieved his goal. As the Zodiac saga moves into the ’80s and ’90s with the case still unsolved, the lives of those caught in its web descend into drunken despair, careers are ruined, marriages fall apart. And it is all but impossible to watch the scenes of Gyllenhaal poring over old case files and chasing down possible leads (including one encounter with a serenely creepy movie projectionist, played by Charles Fleischer, that will raise the hairs on the back of your neck) without thinking of Fincher’s own reported propensity for filming up to 70 takes of someone walking through a door. So Zodiac may be the perfect meeting of filmmaker and subject — an obsessive’s portrait of obsession that is, finally, a monument to irresolution.

Salon.com [Stephanie Zacharek]

David Fincher, who grew up in Marin County in the '60s and '70s, has called the Zodiac killer -- who terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area in those years -- "the ultimate bogeyman." "Zodiac," Fincher's obsessively manicured account of the murders and the subsequent investigation -- the case has never been definitively solved -- is clearly the director's attempt at making the ultimate serial-killer movie, a labyrinthine study that pokes into some very dark corners of dread, suspense, madness and frustration.

Instead of picking through the details and dramatizing the most significant ones, Fincher lays them all out for us in a meticulously crosshatched engraving: Bits of the picture are fascinating to look at, but eventually, exhaustion kicks in, to the point where we're not sure what we're looking at, or why. And Fincher can't stop himself from portraying the murders (in one case, in extremely graphic detail), as if addressing them more obliquely might possibly dilute their horror -- as if their horror could be diluted. His approach, and his coldness, may be some kind of point-of-pride demonstration of artistic objectivity. But is there any such thing as an objective artist? And if so, do we want, or need, one?

Fincher opens the picture with a carefully plotted sequence that establishes the picture's disquieting mood: A nice-looking young woman and a guy who comes off as sweetly shy -- we later learn that their names are Darlene Ferrin and Mike Mageau, and they're played by Ciara Hughes and Lee Norris -- drive to a golf course parking lot one evening, ostensibly to sit in the car and talk. Darlene, who's behind the wheel, is visibly nervous, and when Mike asks her why, she deflects the question. But he notices that a dark car, driven, it seems, by someone Darlene knows, has been trailing the couple. The car stops behind them, and a figure steps out, shining a flashlight, cops-in-lover's-lane style, into their faces. They can't see -- and neither can we -- that the flashlight is strapped to a weapon. The bullets riddle the couple's bodies, and Fincher shows the spasms and blood spurts in fetishized detail. The mysterious figure walks away, only to come back when he realizes he hasn't finished the job, unloading more bullets into these already limp bodies.

It's less an opening sequence than an assault and seizure. And I'd be more willing to accept its effectiveness if Fincher didn't try to top it later, with a stabbing sequence in which we see a knife, at close range, being plunged repeatedly into a man's back as his hogtied girlfriend watches in horror next to him, and then her body twitching as she, too, is knifed.

If Fincher were merely going for sensationalism, you could at least chalk his tactics up to honest sleaze. But Fincher wants sensationalism and class, too, seemingly unaware that you can't have both. And through the rest of "Zodiac," Fincher amasses details with so much zeal that he barely bothers to stop to notice their significance, or lack thereof.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Robert Graysmith, the former San Francisco Chronicle political cartoonist who went on to write two books about the Zodiac killer (on which the movie is partially based; the screenwriter is James Vanderbilt). Graysmith, Chronicle reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) and their colleagues at the paper become drawn into the case when the Zodiac sends a letter, along with an encrypted note, to the Chronicle offices demanding that the missives be published, or else he'd launch an even bigger killing spree. (He will later threaten to shoot out the tires of a school bus and then "pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out.") The third and fourth major players in the investigation are police inspectors William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) and David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), the latter of whom, in particular, becomes rattled by the way the Chronicle employees nose their way into the case.

Fincher is telling a complicated story here, one that spans more than 30 years: The Zodiac committed his first murders in 1969 (he publicly claimed 13 victims, although the exact number may never be known) and was never caught, although the movie makes a strong case for the killer's identity, as Graysmith's books do. That dim, flickering light bulb of uncertainty adds an extra layer of creepiness to the Zodiac story. And to Fincher's credit, he does sustain a murky mood of dread, even beyond the movie's two-and-a-half-hour runtime: I left the theater feeling vaguely ill, complicit in the spectacle I'd just witnessed and wondering if, just if, the killer might still be out there.

But "Zodiac" didn't make me feel as if I'd been in the grip of a master -- only in the grip of a brash filmmaker with a sadistic streak. The picture is a mere hopscotch-jump away from Fincher's much-adored 1995 "Se7en": When he talks, in interviews, about how the Zodiac case gripped him as a kid, he's obviously not kidding. Like "Se7en," this is a story in which the hunted destroys the hunter: The Zodiac case unravels the lives of the people who try to crack it, or at least frays them at the seams. But unlike "Se7en" -- and unlike Fincher's other fanboy favorite, the absurd "take back the might" macho-apologist and faux-Marxist "Fight Club" -- "Zodiac" at least resembles a real movie, as opposed to a stunt. The picture, shot by Harris Savides ("Elephant"), is muted and gloomy, in characteristically Fincher fashion, but it doesn't look as if it's been scratched up with a bent paper clip after the fact: It has a somewhat more straightforward, classical feel than Fincher's other pictures do.

But particularly considering how passionate Fincher is about telling this particular story, "Zodiac" should add up to more than it does. Fincher went to a lot of trouble here, including hiring his own expert in forensic linguistics to see if any new light could be shed on the case. But his exceedingly elaborate picture is also sometimes surprisingly careless: Early on, we learn that Graysmith, a divorced single dad, has two young kids, but we see only one. (Later, when he's found a new girlfriend, Melanie -- played by Chloë Sevigny, who adds some much-needed sparks of life to the movie -- we see three kids at the dinner table, one of whom belongs to Graysmith and Melanie. The phantom second kid from the first marriage can, apparently, be conjured at will.) And Fincher shows how one of the Zodiac's intended victims escapes alive -- she's one of the few survivors who have actually seen his face. We see newspaper accounts about her, but we never see her being questioned, a detail that could have at least been wrapped up in a line of dialogue.

Those might seem like minor quibbles. But are they so minor in a movie in which a vintage '70s-era Chronicle newsroom was re-created in loving detail, reportedly right down to the Chronicle-logo pads and pencils nestled in the desk drawers? That sounds a bit like Michael Cimino's bewitched undie fixation during the making of "Heaven's Gate": He insisted the underwear folded in the characters' dresser drawers be authentically period, even though these unmentionables were never seen, nor even mentioned, on-screen.

Directors often say they insist on those kinds of details to help the actors build their characters. But a movie loaded with such bits and bobs is more often just a highly decorated palace in which a director's king-size ego might dwell. Fincher may be stylish, but he's not an actor's director. In his quest for perfection on "Zodiac," Fincher in some cases shot as many as 70 takes, looking to get just the right something from his actors. If a director needs 70 takes, what he's looking for either doesn't exist or won't be visible to anyone but him.

Miraculously, all the performances here achieve at least a base level of proficiency: Downey, playing an exceedingly bright reporter undone by drink and drugs, is a wonderfully casual and relaxed presence in the midst of Fincher's excessive orchestration, and Ruffalo adds layers of interesting shading to the principled, frustrated cop he's playing.

But Gyllenhaal, normally a surefooted actor, at times looks a bit wobbly, as if he's lost his place in the plot. Actors aren't the biggest part of Fincher's plan, and maybe that's not supposed to matter, anyway: The movie isn't really about these characters, struggling to solve a series of bizarre, grisly crimes; nor is it even about the killer himself. "Zodiac" is all about Fincher's personal enthusiasms and obsessions. It takes a mighty big ego to steal the show from a serial killer. Apparently, Fincher's just the guy for the job.

The Village Voice [Nathan Lee]

In the unforgettable Zodiac, three shots stand out. The first comes early, climaxing a brisk introduction to one of the film's primary settings, the offices of the San Francisco Chronicle. Gliding through hallways with the suavity you'd expect from the director, David Fincher, and the cinematographer, Harris Savides, the camera assumes the point of view of an object inside an overflowing mail cart. It is August 1, 1969. The first of many letters and cryptograms by a serial killer calling himself the Zodiac has been delivered to the newspaper.

The second shot, captured by helicopter or perhaps digitally composited, is an aerial view of a taxi motoring through San Francisco. Starting at the intersection of Mason and Geary, the God's-eye-view follows the vehicle to the corner of Washington and Cherry, at which point the passenger, the Zodiac, shoots the driver, Paul Stein. Patterned with a series of space-collapsing dissolves, the sequence is scored to disembodied voices on a talk radio program discussing the man—the media phenomenon—that has gripped the city in fear and fascination.

The third, arriving about halfway through the film, literalizes the theme of the first two, and indeed of Zodiac itself: the relationship of man to media. Several years have passed; the body count has mounted; the letters have piled up. The efforts of Homicide Inspector Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and his partner William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) have failed to turn up a suspect. A tracking shot follows them through the offices of the San Francisco Police Department, the other nexus of the film. The image is layered with a digital scrawl of letters, phrases, and symbols from the Zodiac missives, literally engulfing the heroes in a text that has thus far led nowhere.

Thus far: There is much more to come. With a runtime of over two and a half hours, this relentlessly swift film super-charges every minute with a maximum of minutiae. Dizzyingly dense, intricate in the extreme, Zodiac is the most information-packed procedural since JFK, though far more restrained when it comes to theorizing. The screenplay, meticulously engineered by James Vanderbilt, has been adapted from a pair of books by Robert Graysmith (played here by Jake Gyllenhaal), a cartoonist at the Chronicle who glommed on to the Zodiac case and eventually took it on as his life's work. Everything has been checked against verifiable sources, then staged with the utmost fidelity and precision; note how Fincher resists dramatizing the events in Paul Stein's cab, sticking to a representation of his known route. The result is an orgy of empiricism, a monumental geek fest of fact-checking, speculation, deduction, code breaking, note taking, forensics, graphology, fingerprint analysis, warrant wrangling, witness testimony, phone calls, news reports. "I felt like I was stuck in a filing cabinet for three hours," complained one viewer. Exactly!

A remarkable feat of concentration, Zodiac is a fully mature triumph for reasons that bring us back to that trio of signature shots. Their explicit virtuosity stands out in a surface that forgoes the visual sweep of Seven, Fight Club, or Panic Room. Mechanical as he can be, Fincher tends to the operatic: big emotions, massive denouements, portentousness, flamboyance. Zodiac, by contrast, plays out with the cool calibrations of a 12-tone piano suite, advancing with a detached, mathematical precision capable of great variety and nuance, yet controlled by a strict discipline. It's a film that never raises its voice because it needs to speak clearly and carefully. It's got a hell of a lot to say.

Talk to Fincher and he'll tell you he just wanted to tell a damn good story. Mission accomplished. Yet it's his very lack of pretense, coupled with a determination to get the facts down with maximum economy and objectivity, that gives Zodiac its hard, bright integrity. As a crime saga, newspaper drama, and period piece, it works just fine. As an allegory of life in the information age, it blew my mind.

The medium is the message in Zodiac. That's what those three shots mean, and why they're delivered with extra rhetorical emphasis; the Zodiac is never given an attention-grabbing p.o.v. shot, but his communiqué is. A serial-killer flick that isn't really about a serial killer, a procedural keyed to the psychology of procedure more than the men engaged in it, Zodiac is an information system of bewildering complexity laid out for our contemplation. It's an epic, reflective analysis of how one canny lunatic triggered an all-consuming flood of data that swept up, and drowned, three different entities: the media, the police, and one man's life. Zodiac returns the serial-killer flick to its roots in Fritz Lang's M, a movie likewise preoccupied with technology, symbols, spatial patterns, communication systems.

Anyone expecting a reprise of Seven-style shivers and Grand Guignol psychodrama will be gravely disappointed. Yet common to both films is the notion of their villains as the inevitable manifestation of a troubled zeitgeist. Seven's John Doe seeks to chastise the debased, apathetic modern world through a kind of radical installation/performance art; an appreciative audience, shocked at his subversive daring, is an essential component of his project. His provocation is basically an extremely twisted publicity stunt. "We are talking about people who are mentally ill," protests Brad Pitt's wrathful hothead. "We are talking about people who are fucking crazy." "No, no we are not," replies Morgan Freeman's world-weary detective. "We're talking about everyday life here."

Compared with his colleagues in the serial killer pantheon, the Zodiac was something of an underachiever. His true forte was marketing, complete with a spiffy logo. "The thing that was so stunning about the Zodiac was not what he did but how he hyped it," says Fincher, reached by telephone on the set of his new movie in New Orleans. "The letters themselves are amazing graphic examples of that. They're riveting. They're the reason we're still talking about this guy, not the body count." Like Seven's John Doe, the Zodiac is in it for the publicity; the most intriguing detail of his story isn't what he did to his relatively few verifiable victims, but rather the likelihood that he claimed responsibility for murders he read about in the news. "What's the one thing we know about the Zodiac for sure?" asks a character at the end of the film. "That he reads the Chronicle."

This helps explain why Zodiac is less concerned with delving into the inner lives of its characters than observing their operative role in larger phenomena. Fincher denies the audience a strong, sympathetic hero. He's at least as interested in the yellow-on-gray color scheme of the Chronicle office as he is with the psychological shadings of his protagonists. "Fincher paints with people," Gyllenhaal recently griped to The New York Times. "It's tough to be a color." That doesn't mean that Zodiac is inhuman, only that it applies attention evenly across the whole canvas, the big picture; it's a panorama, not a portrait.

The most ingeniously designed narrative in many moons, Zodiac is structured in three parts without conforming to the conventional trajectory of a three-act narrative. The first section details the effect of the Zodiac on the media, filtered through the experience of Graysmith and Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.), a jaded reporter assigned to the story. Part one climaxes with the rupturing of the media's sense of its own inviolability: The Zodiac sends a letter, and a swatch of blood-soaked fabric, directly to Avery.

The middle part focuses on the police investigation, with a wealth of circumstantial evidence pointing to Arthur Leigh Allen (John Carroll Lynch), a convicted child molester now employed at an oil refinery. Zodiac makes a convincing case for his guilt, though the mechanics of a whodunit are more important here than who, definitively, done it. If part one scrutinized media manipulation, part two delineates the limits of law enforcement, the lunge and parry of a police procedural destined to go unresolved. The section fades out at the 1971 premiere of Dirty Harry, a film incorporating the Zodiac mythos. "You're going to catch him," Graysmith says to Toschi in the lobby. "No," he replies in resignation. "They're already making movies about it."

By the time we get to section three, the sheer volume of information has grown exhausting—which is very much the point. Zodiac ends with the story of Graysmith's continuing mania for the truth. It is only here, nearly two hours into the tale, that a recognizable human story enters the picture. Delaying that contact is one of Zodiac's shrewdest maneuvers; by the time we're dropped into Graysmith's drama, we're almost as overloaded with information as he is.

Toschi remains only nominally involved in the case. Avery has retired to a houseboat and the bottle. Graysmith's persistence is pitched somewhere between the admirable and the unhinged. As ever, the Zodiac takes his toll. Mrs. Graysmith (Chlo Sevigny) leaves Robert to stew in an apartment heaped with "Zodiac crap"; from first date to breakup, the way she's sidelined from the story may seem a cliché of the genre, but it makes perfect, poignant sense in a movie with a deft sense of elision.

In its final stretch, as it zeroes in on the processes of a single consciousness, Zodiac, that endlessly resonant glyph, functions as a movie about its own process. Graysmith's obsession is mirrored in Fincher's; the movie soldiers on, accumulating still more facts, unearthing new connections, pushing deeper into the labyrinth, chasing the ghost. The director's cut is going to be amazing—and intolerable.

Zodiac exhausts more than one genre. Termite art par excellence, it burrows for the sake of burrowing, as fascinated by its own nooks and crannies as Inland Empire. While it mimics the look of 35mm film, it is appropriately, perhaps inevitably, a product of the high-def-video imagination. The movie operates with the back-and-forth insistence of a scanner arm, gathering, filtering, digitizing, and storing an immense catalog of analog enigmas. It might have been titled A Scanner Darkly.

"The ending for me," says Fincher, "was always, At what point can you, personally, call it a day, Robert?" The film ends with the publication of Graysmith's book on the Zodiac, a final twist in the Arthur Leigh Allen theory, and a set of on-screen title cards that twist the theory yet again. As for Graysmith, the Zodiac lives on. Reached by phone from his home in San Francisco, the author mentions Shooting Zodiac, a book he's finishing about the production of Fincher's film.

Zodiac Larry Gross from MovieCity

Zodiac is an important postmodern work. It's an authentically “new” and even experimental thing attempting, to quote from Susan Sontag's essay Against Interpretation, to put content in its place. It's very very much a film constructed on a 21st century conception of information as a non-substantive, purely relational digital phenomenon, and the fact that it was shot on video and exists immaterially as digital information is thus not a merely decorative issue but crucial to its meaning.

In the seventies conceptual artists referred almost apocalyptically, to the dematerialization of the work of art. Zodiac is one of the first mainstream movies (The Matrix would be another, JFK from an entirely different direction, another) moving to embrace some of that aspiration.

Zodiac stands to Se7en very much the way Inland Empire stands to Mulholland Drive. It's auto-critique. It takes an artist's admirable if relatively conventional accomplishment and smashes it deliberately into several oddly shaped but ultimately connected pieces.

The most important disturbing, disconcerting aspect of the film is that, despite competent dialogue, and an excellent cast, it is not character centered, but structure and theme centred…the major theme is representation itself.

How do you represent representation? Fincher does it by telling the story of someone who resists representation, someone who is unknowable, someone about whom there is only a history of not-knowing.

As the two recent major works by Van Sant also photographed by Harris Savides, (A coincidence? I think not.), Last Days and Elephant, demonstrate, when you work with the limits of representation, you seem invariably to be engaged with Death. Death is the real world or thematic term for the problem of representation.

Zodiac is more an elaborate anthology of episodes than a story. In the course of it the problematic of this strange “extraordinary” killer, turns out to be that like Death itself, the more you scrutinize him, the more he merges with the ordinary.

Death is the most extreme thing in life, yet it happens to everybody, everywhere, all the time. In a crucial line of information Downey reminds Gyllenhaal and us that more people die in random traffic accidents than at the hands of mythic devils like Zodiac. But revealing the banality of evil in the Zodiac himself, is far from the main point of the film, only one of its juicy incidental thematic by products.

The great triumphant device strategy is the ordinariness of everything about it, from editing and lighting patterns to down everyone in it, bit players to leads. Gyllenhaal, Downey, Ruffalo and Edwards are directed so that they are just above the water line as “leads”. In fact they are as close to being background characters like Elias Koteas, Philp Baker Hall, Donal Logue and Dermot Mulroney as they can be without disappearing into that background. And if you hadn't noticed that this was the case, Fincher points patiently in the background to the conventional moveistar versions, of those characters who stand out beyond their situations in (classic) movies like Bullitt and Dirty Harry.

At the moment of every dramatic “heightened” moment Fincher subtly and expertly slides by any conclusive revelation of character or defining content. There are four fascinating examples of this; Ruffalo's confrontation with Downey over procedure, the three police detective’s interrogation of their most likely suspect, Gyllenhaal and Ruffalo piecing together a network of data old and new into a convincing narrative, and finally, Gyllenhaal facing the guy he thinks is the killer.

Depriving these 'big” moments of their conventional dramatic explosiveness is risky but central to Fincher's project: Partly he wants in a very clear and simple way to prepare the audience for the dissatisfaction of not literally catching the bad guy but what is also going on here is a careful mimicking of conventional thriller tropes, in a processs that patiently and exhaustively empties them of all there regular power to console or edify,

Thus if the Zodiac unknowable, that is only because he is an emblem of the entirety of the universe. What is masterful about Zodiac is that every aspect of its structure plays back upon its central disturbing theme. “Knowing” the tiniest thing in the world, precisely, is depicted over and over and in each and every fresh instance, and character perspetive until the very end, as fragmentary, incomplete, frustrated, frustrating.

What is fascinating and so perplexingly compelling about the last three or four scenes in the film is that cognitively we are given a solution, but it is now empty of affect, reversing and upending all conventional narrative results. The Graysmith character, a cartoonist, works through with the cop played by Ruffalo, a kind of schematic of all the events we have seen over and over, handled, mishandled, misinterpreted,, knowledge has become pure form, stretched out precariously as an abstract “story” across the abyss of the lives that have been swallowed up in the failure to become its content. The haunting final scene exquisitely utilizing characters we barely know and can identify, “completes” the abstract search for truth. An i.d. is judged eight on a scale of ten, ten being positive. It and the subsequent crawl gives us everything and nothing.

In any event, Zodiac is far more about our present and future than about our past. I agree with a number of people who are already descrbing this as a film of/about the information age we're living in now. It is in no way a meaningful “statement” about the late sixties seventies, except in so far as it reminds us that millions of people went through that period leading utterly humdrum non-revolutionary non-counter cultural lives, not particularly pschedelic lives. The Zodiac is a purely timeless monster, and hence utterly askew to, if not satiric of, the period's self-consciousness about itself as historic. Much in the manner of Kubrick's forays into "period,” it uses the past as a theatre on which to get out our current and future anxieties and fears, into clearer simpler more mythic focus.

Just for the record, I doubt David Fincher personally knows from or much cares about Conceptual Art or avant guard rhetoric about the Dematerialization of the artwork. He has said he was intent on telling a good story as cleanly and simply as he knew how and I see no reason not to take him at his word. There are certain ways in which the film nearly/almost works at that immediate non-reflective level, though its failures there are conspicuous too-and too obvious I would say not to be (artistically) deliberate. Just a good story told directly? And I'm sure Hitchcock was content to be labeled the 'master of suspense.' He WAS that, but he was the critic of all that at the same time.

Even when he's a nice and sincere guy, never trust the teller, trust the tale.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Zodiac (2007) Graham Fuller from Sight and Sound, June 2007

The House Next Door: Darkness visible: David Fincher's <i>Zodiac</i> Matt Zoller Seitz from The House Next Door

Zodiac (2007) Bryant Frazer from Deep Focus, also here: Zodiac VFX, plus The Host

Jake Wark The Case Against Arthur Lee Allen

Zodiac Scott Tobias from the Onion

"Zodiac": Digital and analog Jim Emerson from Scanners, also more here: Opening Shots: Zodiac

BeyondHollywood.com John C. Ford

Slant Magazine [Nick Schager]

Zodiac Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Film Journal International (Maria Garcia)

Reel.com [Jim Hemphill]

ReelViews (James Berardinelli)

Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]

New York Times (registration req'd) Manohla Dargis

"Lights, Bogeyman, Action" David M. Halbfinger from The New York Times

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON C+ 77

USA (159 mi) 2008 ‘Scope

You never know what’s coming for you. —Queenie (Taraji P. Henson)

Some people are artists, some swimmers, some mothers, some people dance... and some get striked by lightning. —Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt)

Somewhat of a cheeky movie, dressed up in a sunny disposition of life affirming optimism, much of this comes off as just plain weird, and not necessarily in a good way. It reminds me of a Lemony Snicket story without the impending threat of death and menace, where instead the twist is a story that is moving in opposite directions at once, where little baby Benjamin is born looking like and medically similar to an old man near the end of his life, and as time moves forward he grows ever younger. It’s an interesting idea, and kudos to the director for instilling verve and imagination, much of which resembles the look of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s AMÉLIE (2001), but it’s overlong, with a narration by Brad Pitt (Benjamin as an adult) that couldn’t be duller, with a melodramatic tone that never wavers from being a tearjerker. Obviously, with Fincher as a director, it’s beautifully put together, but it feels miscast (Wouldn’t you have loved to see Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward at some point?), and because so much is artificially contrived throughout the film, the leads never sustain any level of spark or interest, so what’s missing is any genuine emotional connection that will last beyond the finale of the film. Instead, this is an unconventional made-for-TV movie with a few interesting moments with the side characters, but outside the novelty of the story itself, no complexity that is reflective of an intelligent or unique point of view.

Mostly set in New Orleans, one would think they’d capture the essence of the Crescent City, as ZODIAC (2007) captured the flavor of San Francisco, but it’s immediately clear that this doesn’t interest the director at all, as neither the accents nor the flavor of the city are anywhere near authentic, so it could just as easily have been shot anywhere. While the film is framed around Hurricane Katrina, this has no relevance to the movie whatsoever, so this feels like a cheap device. Instead, as WWI comes to a close, a child of wealth and privilege is born looking decrepidly ugly and deformed, where the mother dies in childbirth, so the distraught father leaves the newborn wrapped in a blanket on the steps of a home for the elderly, where one the the workers known as Queenie (Taraji P. Henson, who we discover cannot have a baby) finds him and raises him as her own, which works, at least initially, as the aged-looking baby fits right into the incoherent and detached states of mind of the elderly, most of whom have a short time to go before passing away. But in time, he leaves home for his own sense of adventure, but not before meeting Daisy (Cate Blanchett as an adult), the girl next door who turns out to be the love of his life. Simultaneous to this storyline, there’s another developing in the present where a dying mother (Daisy, also Blanchett, nearly unrecognizable) lies in a hospital bed taking morphine injections for her pain as she has her own daughter (Julie Ormond) read to her from Benjamin Button’s diary, basically the story of his life, much of which intersects with Daisy’s life, something she has kept secret from her daughter until now. As a hurricane rages outside, Benjamin cris-crosses the globe, but always ends up in the path of Daisy, though they’re only near one another’s ages in their 40’s.

Interesting turns are provided by Jared Harris as Captain Mike, the rough and tumble captain of a tugboat who gives Benjamin his first job, and Tilda Swinton as the repressed but saucy wife of a British secret service attaché who luridly introduces Benjamin to his first affair. But conveniently, no one is ever cruel or makes fun of the innocence or naiveté of Benjamin, who throughout his life is basically a sponge, a listener who is fascinated by the lives and adventures of others, which makes his own story all too whimsical and too incredulous to believe, even as a fairy tale. While the aging of the characters is interesting, it never leads us anywhere we haven’t already been. As a result, outside of the most rudimentary lessons about how nothing lasts forever, and how life as we know it can be gone in a second, and at any age in our lives, this is overly simplistic and hasn’t the transformative feel of a great work.

Time Out New York (David Fear) review [3/6]

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novella is a curious case indeed: Where else can you find Kubrickian distance, bumper-sticker dialogue and a three-foot nonagenarian Brad Pitt, often in the same scene? Welcome to the wonderful, tragic life of Benjamin (Pitt), a man who ages backward and is consigned to a fleeting moment with his true love (Blanchett) before time steals her away. That the movie never devolves into Tuesdays with Benji is miraculous, though this deadpan Hallmark card still wants to jerk your tears. It just prefers remote manipulation over supercheap shots. Therein lies part of the problem.

For a melodrama concerned with emotional pain, this fairy tale favors formal trickery over human connection to a fault. When Fincher harnesses his prodigious chops to complex concepts—Fight Club, Zodiac—the result is first-class filmmaking. Without such intellectual grist, however, his flashy technique feels like hermetic virtuosity; even though Button deals with Big Themes, you’d swear the movie is being directed from deep inside a cryogenic tank. Showstopping sequences and state-of-the-art computerized aging can’t substitute for actually engaging with Button’s epic story of loss. Detachment can hold suffocating sentimentality at bay. It can also be a deathblow.

Slate (Dana Stevens) review Page 2

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Warner Bros.), adapted by David Fincher from an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, is the lengthiest and most ambitious of all the Christmas releases, yet it's the one I have the least to say about. Two hours and 55 minutes is a long time to sustain a mood of puckish whimsy, especially when the frame-story narrator is a dying old woman (Cate Blanchett in age makeup) lying immobilized on a hospital bed. Fincher is a technical magician: He can convincingly (digitally?) create the illusion that Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt) is aging in reverse; that he—and we—are caught in the middle of a World War II naval battle; and that Cate Blanchett, a 39-year-old mother of three, is an airborne teenage ballerina. But Fincher's magic can't transform him from the coldly dispassionate misanthropist of Se7en, Fight Club, and Zodiac into a sentimental humanist, and it can't turn Brad Pitt into the kind of actor who can carry a movie like this.

Don't get me wrong: Pitt's great in character roles, as a comic grotesque or an unrepentant scoundrel. (See Burn After Reading or, for that matter, Fight Club.) But as a passive, introspective leading man like Benjamin, he's just dull. There's not enough going on behind those deep-blue peepers to justify a Forrest Gump-esque jaunt through 80-plus years of American history (though it is amusing to watch that familiar chiseled Pitt face emerge from layers of excellent age makeup). The melancholy final scenes have Blanchett, as Benjamin's true love, Daisy, caring for her once-husband as he gradually regresses to babyhood and she approaches old age. This vision of two lives criss-crossing as they ebb finally achieves a profundity the rest of the movie strains for, but it comes about two hours and 25 minutes too late.

Newsweek (David Ansen) review

Wistful, melancholic, steeped in a sense of impermanence and looming mortality, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is not a movie one could have predicted from the maker of "Se7en," "Fight Club" and "Zodiac." David Fincher's haunting and uneven picaresque fable is a radical reimagining of a fanciful, minor F. Scott Fitzgerald short story. It tells the tall tale of an infant who is born as an old man—tiny but suffering all the infirmities of an 80-year-old—who lives his life in reverse, becoming younger with each passing year until he achieves real infancy at the end of his life.

Benjamin (Brad Pitt) gets his last name from his button-manufacturing father (Jason Flemyng) who, horrified by the sight of his bizarre baby, abandons him on the steps of a New Orleans old-age home, where he is raised by the loving black employee Queenie (Taraji P. Henson). He may only be a toddler, but he feels right at home among the old folks, being a balding child who wears glasses and is confined to a wheelchair. At this stage of the story it's only Pitt's heavily made-up head we're seeing (digitally imposed on other bodies); it will be a while before he begins to resemble the matinee idol we know.

Pitt's Benjamin, with a lazy Southern accent, narrates this two-hour-and-40-minute tale. If his ruminations evoke distant echoes of "Forrest Gump" it's because Eric Roth wrote both screenplays. "Button" is, among other things, a love story, but it's in no hurry to let you know it. Indeed, for more than an hour—from the end of World War I to the outbreak of World War II—Fincher meanders without ever achieving total traction. He keeps returning to the present-day, less-than-inspired framing device in which an old woman, dying in a New Orleans hospital as Hurricane Katrina approaches, listens to her daughter (Julia Ormond) read Benjamin's journals.

And a long and winding tale it is. Along the way one has to put up with some tiresome adventures as the teenage Benjamin (who looks to be in his late 60s) sets sail with a drunken old tugboat captain (a blustery, scenery-chewing Jared Harris). But then, with the arrival of Tilda Swinton as a married, upper-class Englishwoman, the movie snaps to life. She seduces Benjamin in a wintry Russian hotel, and the movie seems to shift from the elegiac past tense to a vivid present. Not coincidentally, it's the first time Pitt is fully recognizable: he gets to act with his whole body. The great love of Benjamin's life, however, is not Swinton's Englishwoman. It's the little girl Alice, whom he meets as a child in New Orleans and who grows up to be a headstrong ballet dancer played by Cate Blanchett. Benjamin, now looking merely middle-aged, re-encounters her in New York, where she is hanging with a bohemian crowd and gushing about Agnes de Mille.

The poignance of this love story lies in its impossibility. She will grow older as he grows younger; their daughter will grow up as he returns to childhood. Only for one magical moment will these lovers share the same age. Yet for all of Fincher's formidable filmmaking—this is one gorgeously shot and designed movie—I was never convinced that the spoiled, sometimes abrasive Alice and the gentle, philosophical Benjamin were a good romantic fit. As compelling as Blanchett and Pitt are—he gives one of the subtlest, most touching performances of his career—their characters don't quite mesh here.

In another movie this would be a fatal flaw, yet the overall impact of "Benjamin Button" is greater than the sum of its parts. The metaphor of a life lived backward is strangely haunting. Benjamin's saga is singular yet universal: anyone who has contemplated his own mortality will find it hard not to be moved by Fincher's evocation of the fickleness of fate. Lyrical, original, misshapen and deeply felt, this is one flawed beauty of a movie.

PopMatters (Bill Gibron) review

David Fincher is a god. Not a lesser deity, mind you, or some manner of false filmmaking prophet. No, this inside outsider may have gotten his start in music videos, and suffered at the hands of a disgruntled studio while making his directorial debut (the oft debated Alien3), but since those uneasy early days, he’s been nothing short of sensational. With a creative output claiming one masterwork (Se7en, The Game) after another (Fight Club, Zodiac), only mainstream commercial acceptance has truly alluded him (unless you count Panic Room). All that might change with his Brad Pitt vehicle The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Loosely based on the short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, this may look like a blatant attempt to grab awards season consideration. Instead, it’s another notable notch in the man’s amazing auteur oeuvre. 

Born into a turn of the century New Orleans, orphaned Benjamin Button is blessed/cursed with an unusual malady. As an infant, he looks nearly 90 years old. As a toddler, he’s in his ‘80s. As he gets older, his body ages in reverse, decades dropping off as the experiences pile up. While living in a nursing home with his caregiver mother Queenie, he meets the granddaughter of another resident. Her name is Daisy, and Benjamin is instantly smitten. As time moves along, he holds onto his flame, even as he joins the merchant marines, aids in World War II, has an affair with a British woman (who wants to swim the English Channel), and returns home to Louisiana where he reconnects with his dying father. Yet all along, all Benjamin can think about is Daisy. Her career as a ballerina cut short and her options limited, she soon finds herself drawn into her new partner’s curious case. It will be a relationship that inspires many wonderful memories, a lot of adventure, a few heartaches, and some significant deathbed secrets.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is not a movie made for a single viewing. At nearly three hours in length, its detail and depth become distant and unclear. There are times when it looks like director Fincher is operating under a delusion of self-indulgence, basic camera tricks and CG deception taking over where narrative drive and clear characterization would suffice. But then the premise kicks in, an idea so novel and yet so simple that it often threatens to spin out of control. But this is where Fincher shines - bringing the outrageous and the outsized back into scale with the rest of his vision. As a result, Benjamin Button stands as the kind of filmmaking achievement that formidable French auteur theory was meant to celebrate. Without Fincher behind the scenes, this would be an occasionally interesting, often irritating trifle. With him, it’s some manner of masterpiece.

It also helps to have amazing actors inhabit this world, and you can’t get much better than Pitt (as the title entity), Cate Blanchett (as lifetime love Daisy), Taraji P. Henson as Benjamin’s adopted momma, and Julia Ormond as bookend offspring Caroline. Interspersed amongst the main threads are remarkable moments from Jared Harris, Tilda Swinton, and Elias Koteas. Each one accents Fincher’s amazing images with their own unique take on humanity and honesty. At its center, Benjamin Button is about the truth - the truth about living, the truth about dying, the truth about who you are, and the truth about who others find us to be. All throughout the film, secrets and stories are revealed, each one clarifying the people who populate them. At the end, the denouements build to a shattering emotional epiphany that ties everything together magnificently.

Certainly, the screenplay by Eric Roth mirrors his Oscar winning adaptation of Forrest Gump, even down to a central symbol for birth/resurrection. But unlike that Robert Zemeckis fable, spun out of Southern comforting and a great deal of Tom Hanks definitive drawl, Fincher finds the darker side to this material. After all, when was the last time you saw a mainstream movie deal with the impending death of an infant. Remember, Benjamin ages backwards, so the very youthful biology the industry tends to senseless celebrate actually becomes the harbinger for the arriving Grim Reaper. This is juxtaposed against Blanchett’s aged façade, holed up in a New Orleans hospital as Katrina is about to hit. The concept of placing the plot within the horrific events of 2005 may be locational happenstance, but it does work to underline the overall theme of life’s fascinating fragility.

In fact, the physical elements of Benjamin Button stand out as the film’s creative finest achievement. The early stages of Pitt’s “elderly” youth have an eerie provocation, while his last act teen façade is achingly Adonis-like in look. Blanchett gets an equally effective make-over, her turn as an adolescent ballerina and ‘50s fashion plate remarkable in their picture perfect, almost porcelain purity. Fincher forces the audience to rethink their previous notions of age and vitality all throughout the film. When Benjamin visits a brothel for the first time, it’s not as some dirty old man. Instead, Pitt plays the moment just right, using raging teen hormones to accent his character’s withered looks. With the movie set inside a nursing home, there’s a lot of jokes made at the expense of the infirmed and enfeebled (one man gets seven silent movie slapstick sequences, illustrating the number of times he’s been hit by lightning). But there is plenty of dignity here as well, times when what we become throughout the decades is discussed and redefined.

Yet in the end, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is really about celebrating your existence. It’s a statement on how life lived - in any order - can be taken for granted and gone in an instant. As they move through the years, trying to connect and complete their unending love, Benjamin and Daisy discover something even more shocking about their interpersonal emotions: they can survive anything. Only time treats the couple like an interchangeable pair of enigmas, each owning their own unusual approach to being and being together. The wistful qualities of the narrative, matched with Fincher’s frighteningly magnificent direction, turns something gimmicky into something grand. When the word ‘epic’ is tossed around, it’s an effort like that of those of all involved in Benjamin Button that supply a perfect illustration. Destined to grow in critical acclaim as the year’s go by, this represents Fincher at his finest - and gods rarely find a way to top themselves.

Village Voice (Scott Foundas) review

Slant Magazine review [3/4] Nick Schager

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]

Chicago Reader (J.R. Jones) review also reviewing THE READER (excerpt)

Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]

Reel.com review [4/4] Sean O’Connell, also seen here: filmcritic.com (Sean O'Connell) review [5/5]

PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review

Screen International review Mike Goodridge

Urban Cinefile (Australia) Louise Keller and Andrew L. Urban

Critic's Notebook [Martin Tsai]

David Fincher Amy Taubin interview from Film Comment, January/February 2009

Entertainment Weekly review Lisa Schwarzbaum

Variety (Todd McCarthy) review

Boston Globe review [2.5/4] Wesley Morris

Austin Chronicle review [2/5] Kimberley Jones

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [1/4]

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review

Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]

The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review

Tales of the Jazz Age Read online the 11 chapter short story written by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1922)

THE SOCIAL NETWORK B+ 92

USA (120 mi) 2010 ‘Scope

So this is what Aaron Sorkin has been up to? The opening 5 minutes of this film is a blast of blistering energy, a hilarious comedy satire of Sorkin-written dialogue, where like a speed chess match it movies quickly with verbal sparring and jabs, where one’s attention is simultaneously on several things at once, responding to comments made two or three moves back. This is assaultive dialogue, where words are spoken with a vehement purpose and hurled with a furious intent to do harm. This short sequence plays out like the language of live theater before the opening credits begin and is the premise for the rest of the film. Jesse Eisenberg, more mature and confident here, never better, is Mark Zuckerberg, a brilliant 19-year old Harvard sophomore in the fall term of 2003 having a conversation in a bar with Erica Albright (Rooney Mara), another bright student who finds his manner obnoxious and offensive, blind to the views of others, making it clear to him that she’s rejecting him not because he’s some geek or a nerd that she doesn’t like, but because he’s an “asshole.” This is the predominate theme for the rest of the film, as it immediately prompts his wounded male pride to go back to the dorm, drink a few beers, and in the course of four hours, with the help of a few dorm roommates, invent a computer template for Facebook, though this initial version was called Facemash. Driven by a seething adolescent resentment, while simultaneously making vicious personal blog entries calling the young woman a bitch and making unflattering references to farm animals, Zuckerberg spent his time hacking into the database of nine Harvard dormitory resident computer files and stole all the female photos, updating the women into a comparative side by side photo contest called “Hot or Not,” where the Harvard students could pick the hottest between two photos, which generated 22,000 hits in just the first four hours online before crashing Harvard’s servers, cementing his legendary status on campus as a geek genius loathed by women who weren’t happy about having their pictures stolen and then placed on exhibition for fratboy male appraisal.

What really works here is the level of free-wheeling viciousness on display right alongside continual outbursts of supreme intelligence, both signs of a Sorkin screenplay, loosely adapted from interviews and Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires. Fincher’s accelerating speed however is especially notable, as the furious pace shows the exuberance of youth like few other films, where these guys are incredibly focused on their creation, like the two geeks in PRIMER (2004) who invent a time machine in their garage, but this invention generates instant recognition around campus, something most geeks never receive. Zuckerberg eventually refines his idea, but only after the prompting from a couple of prospective Olympic athlete rowers, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played by Armie Hammer using the latest in digital technology), identical twins who patronizingly promise to rebuild his damaged reputation through the prestigious hallowed grounds of their all-male Porcellain Club, supposedly the pinnacle of privilege and social success at Harvard, if he would build them a social media website that could connect Harvard men exclusively to other schools around the country. From this dare, per se, Zuckerberg on his own, with the help of his roommate Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) launches Facebook in February, 2004, a site where friends can upload their own comments and pictures to share with other like-minded friends, “taking the entire social experience of college and putting it all online,” an idea that explodes with popularity. The irony, of course, is that these two are socially awkward but extremely bright kids using their knowledge to actually invent something completely foreign to their own personalities, having few friends and even fewer girls, yet these socially dysfunctional people invent the most popular Internet site ever devised driven by a desire to increase their chances with the opposite sex by promoting a computer social networking site for people to share with their friends, a particular social commodity they don’t have. In a sense, they create a virtual world, where the thrill is watching the intense reaction by others while the originators of the idea remain aloof, socially inept, and forever locked behind computer screens, which pretty much defines the detached nature of new age friendships, where one out of every fourteen people in the world has a Facebook account.

What follows, of course, are the inevitable sour grapes lawsuits, where the success of the website is beyond anyone’s wildest comprehension, so people want a piece of it, where both the Winklevoss twins and Zuckerberg’s only friend in the world, his roommate Eduardo, each claim this was partially their idea. Zuckerberg’s response: “If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook.” While we hear depositions being taken with lawyers in private rooms, where Zuckerberg occasionally interjects his candid comments which cut right through the legalese, as he continues to exert his mental superiority even as he’s being sued for hundreds of millions of dollars, we also see the tragic and senseless deterioration of his friendship with Eduardo, who fronted the original money to get Facebook started, enough to hire a few programmers who could connect them to a few other Ivy League schools, also Boston University and Stanford, but the project continued to expand. Zuckerberg eventually meets Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), the founder of Napster, a site that downloaded music for free, who had already gone through the litigation process with the music companies, so he had a track record and awareness, as he was also a computer savvy guy who could help incorporate and expand Facebook into other continents. He interested Zuckerberg immediately, as Parker could introduce them to some investors and he knew they should never settle for nickel and dimes when this idea, which he calls “a once-in-a-generation, holy shit idea,” was worth billions. His influence and Silicon Valley West coast connections eventually replaced Eduardo, who kept insisting early on that they advertise on the site, where Zuckerberg and Parker disagreed, thinking they would lose the “coolness” of what drew kids to the site in the first place, so they were inclined to keep the site free from aggravating and unnecessary pop-ups, receiving hefty investments from PayPal founder Peter Thiel until eventually Microsoft in 2007 purchased the right to place ads on Facebook which placed the value of the company around $15 billion, making Zuckerberg at age 23 the youngest billionaire in history.

The film’s real success is being able to trace the root of such monumental changes in our lives in just the past few years, and doing so with complete coherence. Fincher’s editing throughout is superb, as he seamlessly jumps back and forth between conflicting information being revealed in the lawyer’s offices which is then seen in fuller detail through flashback sequences where it all plays out, where it’s hard to keep track of the timeline involved, so the audience is never sure about the chronological order of events. This method mimics how the Internet is used, freely moving back and forth in time seemingly at random, depending on how it’s being used. One of the more dazzling sequences is watching the Winklevii twins, as Zuckerberg sarcastically calls them, at a boat race regatta which is scored to the frenzied crescendos from Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” Grieg - In the Hall of the Mountain King - YouTube (2:41). What’s especially purposeful is the way the computer storyline connects to an international athletic event, and where the twins are humorously portrayed as notoriously sore losers. The twins, by the way, eventually placed 6^th at the Beijing Olympics for the men’s pair rowing event, but their careers are really structured around winning a $65 million dollar settlement, a nice tidy sum which should help solidify any of their financial concerns. No one comes across unscathed in this film, though Eduardo may be the most sympathetic, if naïve, character, while what remains fascinating in the portrait of Zuckerberg is the way he continually relishes flaunting his condescending air of superiority while he remains flummoxed and dumbfounded by the negative impact this has on others, where his otherwise intensely shy and vulnerable side remains hidden, safely protected behind a firewall of new age gadgetry. For every new door he opens, he slams several others shut behind him through sheer arrogance and a fondness for humiliation. What is clear, however, is the frantic and hilarious pace of the opening eventually slows down when they leave college life for the West coast, where youthful ideals soon become replaced by hardcore business decisions and personal betrayals, where people, especially those closest to you, can get hurt by petty grudges that certain individuals retain seemingly forever. Zuckerberg is no exception. What’s truly remarkable is that this is one of the most extraordinary responses to being rejected by a girl, though who knows, Shakespeare may have been similarly motivated.

Time Out New York review [5/5] Joshua Rothkopf

Facebook isn’t such a great subject for the movies—too much typing. And heroic computer hackers have never, ever inspired cinematic thrills. (Remember Sandra Bullock in The Net? Exactly.) Mainly, though—and let’s see how many film critics admit this—Facebook has quietly left Hollywood in the dust. Not even James Cameron can claim 500 million friends for Avatar, and that’s people returning on a daily basis. We’re the movie now, and it’s a dumb comedy about what sandwich we just ate.

So consider it a wondrous turn of events that The Social Network, a lightning-fast dramatization of the disputatious founding of Facebook, represents not just a revenge of the onscreen nerd, but of those behind the camera, too. It’s a grandly entertaining reminder of everything we used to go to the movies for (and still can’t get online): sparkling dialogue, thorny situations, soulful performances, and an unusually open-ended and relevant engagement with a major social issue of the day: how we (dis)connect. Forget about damage control—if I were billionaire site exec Mark Zuckerberg, I’d be down on my knees in gratitude for an origin story this brainy, suggestive and, yes, flattering. Sort of.

The future CEO himself is portrayed as a furiously snippy Harvard “asshole”—that word becomes something of a theme—by Adventureland’s Jesse Eisenberg, fully breaking the bonds of Cera-dom. Reportedly, the real Zuckerberg lent zero access to screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (who tops even The West Wing for mile-a-minute nowness), but he’s been supplied with a fully believable class complex, chafing at the traditions of the university’s exclusive “final clubs.” Giving us a taste of Hollywood’s future Lisbeth Salander, Rooney Mara cuts down her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend thusly: “What part of Long Island are you from, Wimbledon?”

Drunkenly, the computer whiz demolishes her with a passive-aggressive online stunt, “Facemash,” setting up the whole story (and, subversively, Facebook itself) as an offshoot of dumpee rage. Mark soon finds himself hated campuswide, a Shylock courted by two unlikely Antonios, the crew-rowing goy twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played with delicious entitlement by Armie Hammer). They want to apply Mark’s gifts to their own hookup site and help him rehabilitate his image. “Wow. You would do that for me?” the unkempt programmer asks them in their frat’s bike room, resentment brewing.

Sex, money, Jewish paranoia, algorithms—this is merely the movie’s first half hour. The Social Network zings along like nothing attempted since the heady days of Paddy Chayefsky. (We might be looking at the heir to his darkly dazzling Network.) Splitting into deft complexity, Sorkin’s tale toggles to ominous legal conference rooms, developing a pair of shoulder angels for Mark to hear out: his betrayed cofounder, Eduardo (Garfield, the heart of the film); and larky Napster flirt Sean Parker (Timberlake), inviting him to dream bigger. Never preachy, the film becomes a referendum on pushy ambition, both in business and private matters, that’s the signature of Facebook itself, turning a nation of users into self-promoters. These characters will, one day, be us: alienating our “friends” while linking with the world. Do movies ever attempt to analyze the entire weave of life? Now they do.

To think that we once didn’t know what to do with David Fincher. Was he a Kubrickian fussbudget? A stylish torture master picking the wings off Brad Pitt? The bad-boy director of Fight Club and Seven might still be both of those things. But ever since 2007’s ghostly Zodiac (a veiled indictment of Bush-era fear culture), there can be no doubt of Fincher’s seriousness. He wants to make the big films—the ones about everything. The Social Network affords him opportunities for flash: A boat race scored to a computerized version of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” is as puckish as anything in A Clockwork Orange. Yet here, too, is a Fincher first: his most alluring, full-bodied lead performance, via the beautifully arrogant Eisenberg. It took a bastard to understand Zuckerberg; to turn him into a cryptic Pandora, lonely with his laptop, took a master.

Cinema Blend [Eric Eisenberg]

Some people are born with good looks or with the natural hand-eye coordination necessary to hit a fast ball. Others come from money or are naturally charismatic; they draw people to them in a way that just can’t be learned. Then there’s the rest of us. We’re nothing special. We’ll never be those people. We look at them and say it’s ok, but can’t even convince ourselves. Whether we choose to admit it or not, we want to be them or at least gain their approval. We want those people to see us as their equals.

Known to many as “The Facebook Movie,” David Fincher’s The Social Network is not about the creation of one of the internet’s most successful websites. It’s not about becoming the world’s youngest billionaire. It’s not about greed and it’s not about power. The Social Network is a film about the inescapable need for acceptance inside each one of us.

It’s the fall of 2003 and Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) is sitting in a bar with his girlfriend (Rooney Mara). He explains to her the importance of belonging to one of Harvard University’s eight prestigious all-male social societies called “final clubs”. Why? Because they’re “exclusive,” a word that Mark does battle with throughout the movie. Mark has a serious personality problem. To put it in psychological terms, he’s an asshole. Because of his intelligence, he gives off a stink of superiority and has no tolerance for those whom he thinks are beneath him (Read: everybody). He’s bullish and stubborn, which, of course, makes him unlikeable. His only option is to do something that makes people accept him.

Enter the Winklevoss twins (Armie Hammer). These 6’5” blonde Adonis’s are everything Mark is looking for: members of the Porcellian “final club”, future Olympic rowers, and holders of inherited money. They sit at the head of the cool kids’ table, shining examples of the kinds of people Mark wants attention from. He gets it after creating something called FaceMash.com, a small website so powerful it shuts down Harvard’s servers. The Winklevoss twins bring him in for a meeting with the Porcellian Club stairway and tell Mark their idea: create a social networking site defined by exclusivity, where women can find and meet Harvard men. It seems like everything Mark wants. But he’s not in a “final club,” he’s in a stairway. He’s not friends with the Winklevosses, he’s a business partner. He hasn’t been accepted – he’s been reached out to with a ten foot pole.

Whether because of his attitude or his approach, everything that Mark does to gain acceptance ends in rejection. He tells his girlfriend that being in a final club would allow her better access to the upper class, leading her to dump him. Mark’s first attempt to make a website in the film, a site where pictures of female Harvard students are posted next to each other and the users click on the girl that they think is the hottest, is wildly popular but results in every girl on campus seeing him as a sexist pig and their boyfriends repeatedly threatening him. Facebook is a billion dollar idea that winds up with Mark dealing with two simultaneous lawsuits, one of which comes from his best friend.

You may be tempted at this point to think of Mark Zuckerberg as a sympathetic character, a Willy Loman or Shelley Levene for the 21st century. Don’t be fooled - Mark Zuckerberg is a tyrant, an unstoppable force. Every effort Mark makes to gain acceptance winds up hurting someone; he is a serial bridge burner. Feeling disrespected by the Winklevosses, he morphs their idea and keeps them dangling on a string before cutting them off entirely. When his best friend and Facebook business partner, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), becomes a prospective final club member, gaining the acceptance that Mark craves, he begins to shut more and more doors, rejecting idea after idea, before Eduardo is left behind completely. Mark is attempting the impossible, trying to gain acceptance through rejection.

This isn’t a simple film. It’s not the paint-by-numbers approach that you might see from a director less talented than David Fincher. At no point during the movie is the audience meant to sympathize with Mark. There’s no emotional scene during the climax where he crawls into a corner and bawls uncontrollably because he feels so alone. While the audience may feel the occasional shiver from the cold, Aaron Sorkin’s script never lets the audience feel distanced from the material. Eisenberg, recently stuck playing the nebbish, nervous weakling elsewhere, is stronger and more captivating here than we’ve ever seen him. There’s more than a film here; there’s a comment.

All of us can relate to Mark Zuckerberg. And that’s what will keep you engaged. You and I both want that same acceptance and equality Mark wants. Plenty of movies show that heavy is the head that wears the crown. We have enough movies where money goes to people’s heads and they espouse that greed is good. The Social Network outright rejects the tropes of power and money. Instead, Fincher and Sorkin have given us something that we can all understand and relate to: the costs of the desire for acceptance when it mutates into the blind ambition of social climbing. There are a finite number of slots on a baseball team roster, only so many seats available at the cool kids table, and we all want to be offered that last spot.

Cinema Blend [Katey Rich]

I am the same age as Mark Zuckerberg. This means nothing to me personally, or at least didn't until I saw The Social Network, the movie that both captures and decries our generation as defined by Zuckerberg's invention. Without ever painting in broad strokes or stretching for meaning, director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin-- an ideal pairing if there ever was one-- examine the false promises of these lives lived online through the lens of the boy who made it possible. Mark Zuckerberg's story is wholly unique, and yet from the hazy dorm room beginnings to the empty corporate present, his story stands as a symbol for all of us who pour ourselves into Facebook, rearranging pixels to make ourselves look and feel better but logging off remaining, irrevocably, our same selves.

The film begins like a starter pistol, a rapid-fire conversation between a college-aged boy (Zuckerberg, played by Jesse Eisenberg) and girl (Erica Albright, played by Rooney Mara) in which the socially stunted Mark destroys the nascent relationship with a series of insults delivered at an astonishing speed. The conversation doesn't just drop you seamlessly into Fincher and Sorkin's murky, socially fraught world of Harvard in 2003-- the recent past dripping with surprisingly effective nostalgia-- but gives you Mark Zuckerberg in whole: smart, ruthless, unfiltered, unaware of his power until he wields it with blunt force.

Erica is right to break up with him, and Mark may know it, but instead he lashes out with a vicious blog and then a trickier invention, a site where all Harvard girls can be compared side-by-side, allowing anyone on campus to rank the hotness of their classmates and friends. Because it involves hacking and not a small amount of sexism the site gets Mark into trouble, but it also gets the attention of wealthy twin superhunks Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played by Armie Hammer in a bit of CGI wizardry) and their business partner Divya Narendra (Max Minghella), who are developing a site that sounds a lot like what Facebook would become. Mark meets with the guys but blows them off as he teams up with best pal Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) to develop his own, better idea: The Facebook.

Several years later, in two different glass-walled lawyer's offices so different from wood-paneled Harvard, everyone mentioned in that previous paragraph is suing Mark. The Social Network is the story of how that happened, told in flashbacks and snippets and a climactic rowing race, pieced together from lawyer records and personal accounts from probably everyone but Zuckerberg himself. It's astonishing enough that Fincher and Sorkin have spun a compelling story from these dry technical details, but the movie is such a marvel because it's a heartbreaker too, more than anything a story about how ambition and envy destroyed a friendship almost by accident.

Because though the film serves as a fascinating portrait of Zuckerberg, and though Jesse Eisenberg centers the entire film with his restrained and inscrutable performance, it's the friendship between Mark and Eduardo that provides the movie's soul. The forces that drove apart the Facebook co-founders were pretty typical-- different goals for the site, different plans for where to live, and an extremely persuasive funder (Justin Timberlake's brilliantly suave Sean Parker) with big ideas-- but though these boys are uncommonly smart, they hurt like the rest of us. One of the film's most powerful moments doesn't involve Trent Reznor's glorious and haunting score or Sorkin's nonstop dialogue, but the expression on Garfield's and Eisenberg's faces when Mark asks Eduardo to come back to California after a fight. It's not just that the two actors are wide open yet perfectly measured, balancing the vulnerability and bravado of youth with an eerie ease. It's that their emotions are so real and damned familiar, and that even would-be titans fall victim every time to the same flaws and selfish wishes we pretend aren't there when we edit our Facebook profiles.

There's no disputing that Mark Zuckerberg overstepped the bounds of common courtesy and ethics when building Facebook, but The Social Network is remarkably sympathetic to the character it acknowledges as merely a kid. From that first scene with Erica we sense that Mark isn't quite in control of his mean streak, and though there are flashes of cold ambition in his conversations with Parker, Mark seems more like a programmer thrust awkwardly to the throne than an entrepreneur bent on glory. The famous business cards reading "I'm CEO, bitch" are presented as cruelly ironic, and while his co-workers celebrate Facebook's millionth member, Mark hunkers down by his computer, still looking into the screen for answers. That's the gist of the much-discussed final scene too, the first time we see Mark actually use Facebook, and by then we've learned to read everything into Eisenberg's relentlessly blank face-- and we find, perhaps to our surprise, great sympathy.

It's easy to see why the meticulous, technically gifted Fincher is drawn to Zuckerberg and the challenges of his story, and working from Sorkin's best script yet, Fincher has struck perfectly the balance between calculated and human filmmaking. No single moment of the film stands out as a showstopper, but the cumulative effect of all the skill and talent on display here is devastating by the end, as we're allowed to piece together for ourselves what this small story means for all of us (the film's lack of a big Tie It All Together moment is just one of many master strokes of restraint). Just as Zuckerberg knew immediately at Facebook's inception that it would outlast the Internet's short attention span, The Social Network feels instantly iconic and important-- a portrait of the generational hero no one asked for, the world he changed by accident, and all the things his invention will never change no matter how hard we try.

Cinema Scene [David L. Blaylock]

In the summer of 2004, I was walking through the Village Voice office when I passed by one of the film department interns going through his classmates’ profiles on thefacebook.com. As a student from Duke University, he was among the privileged few who were given access to the site in its early months. I, as a graduate from the University of Tennessee, had not yet been afforded that opportunity. But I knew I wanted to be.

In a nutshell, that’s why Facebook worked. It created the idea of selectivity, the premise that this was the networking site for the in crowd. MySpace and Friendster already existed, but their cache of coolness was limited to band listings and forced network interaction. Facebook promised more: full dossiers on people you’ve met (or want to meet), pictures, messaging, and event planning, and all of it coming from those who mattered, not the shut-ins and the miscreants. It promised to take the actions that feed friendships and social activity into a website interface. And those who created it navigated the landscape of internet opportunity, cheap by the standards of a normal worldwide business venture, in such a way to make these inroads with limited loss.

At least that’s how it looks on the surface, as Facebook has one of the most visited website in the world wide web, second only to Google, built largely on a user base that feels obligated to check the site multiple times throughout the day. But David Fincher’s The Social Network makes clear that there was substantial loss to be had in creating something this successful and transformational. A site that aspires to virtually supplement friendships has destroyed many a real friendship. Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg is one of those people, becoming the world’s youngest billionaire while losing some of those closest to him on his path to success.

Those left in his wake, including multiple business partners who sued him for their cut, all trusted him to be sincere with his intentions—is there a more naïve period in a person’s life than his or her college years?—while losing sight of his larger aspirations. No one will come out of The Social Network thinking that Mark Zuckerberg is a good friend, but he is a very savvy businessman who, for better or worse, seems at times to think only of the interests of the site, not of the interests of himself or the other people involved in it. He’s like a mother hen, attacking anyone else in the roost if it gets too close to her eggs.

Much ink has been (and will be) spilled writing about the impact Facebook has had on American culture, and this space isn’t really the place to try to analyze its societal impacts. But it is important to realize how this film fits into the film trajectory David Fincher has set for himself. Looking back at his early films—Alien³, Se7en, The Game, and Fight Club—one can see a filmmaker coming off a career in short, quick-edit commercials and music videos (his supermodel montage for the "Freedom ’90" video turned a pretty unspectacular George Michael into the ultimate in sex and glamour for the early ‘90s); today, his movies are little slower but denser. The Social Network jumps between events almost as fast as the signature Aaron Sorkin dialogue (stick with the film’s fast-talk opening—Sorkin gets his bearings once he quits trying to be cute), but its scope is actually pretty concentrated along a small temporal plane and the crosscutting serves more to transform the film from simple historical narrative stylings to one of a deposition, collecting and disseminating information with the knowledge of what it all led to. This is, to some extent, a film centered on the legal proceedings of two lawsuits, and in that way, Fincher does for the court drama what he did for the police procedural in Zodiac.

The film also has a generational sweep that cannot be underappreciated. Insofar Fight Club reflected a late ‘90s generation that both defied and embraced venal body images and mass consumerism, giving it a sucker punch in the form of under-lit but peppy violence and a philosophy that is both outrageous and convincing, The Social Network is about what that ‘90s inverting cynicism hath wrought. Those who created The Facebook were the kids who likely looked up to the iconoclastic Tyler Durden and who, armed now with fast internet connections, new-media modes of communication, and their own wits, saw an opportunity to be the cool kids while never giving up their nerdy, wounded side. They could create a community that was limited and make everyone else want in. And they did just that. I wanted in; as did most everyone who heard about The Facebook before it branched out to more schools.

The way the film portrays Zuckerberg, played very well by Jesse Eisenberg, who’s made an art out of wearing his disappointment on his shoulders, is that of a titan of the internet who is also a jerk, a liar, and a cheat. His bona fides as a lover, friend, and partner are consistently shown to be momentary facades meant to get the most out of those he can piggyback on. The film does make a solid case that he is the driving force behind Facebook, but it is also clear that he was forced to commit quite a few hit and runs in the process.

Nowhere is this more the case than with his early business partner, Eduardo Saverin (Garfield, quickly becoming one of the most interesting young British actors today—Boy A and the first episode of Red Riding are particularly worth checking out). Eduardo is a sympathetic character, but it’s impossible for the audience to not realize that he, for all his well meaning, makes assumptions and moves that would have been disastrous for the website. No matter how much one might dislike Napster impresario-turned-internet entrepreneur Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), the cocky prick seems to be giving sound advice. Parker had learned from his mistakes and—while enjoying the fruit of success all over again thanks to his part in Facebook—was making sure that Zuckerberg didn’t follow the same path.

All this drama makes for rich material, and Fincher again shows that he knows how to use strong and interesting visuals without overshadowing the story. Like in Zodiac, he does have some fun with a throwaway scene—using tiltshift on a crew meet—but most of the film is shot using angles and lighting that fit the story without seeming boring and easy. For a Fincher film, there actually aren’t that many special effects (the film’s centerpiece, though, comes in the digital face swapping used to turn one actor into a pair of twins, an effect that is unnoticeable throughout the film—it seems that even when in person, some of Zuckerberg’s “friends” are virtual), and what’s there are integral to telling the story properly rather than to show off Fincher’s grasp of cinematography in the digital age.

Looking at the career trajectory Fincher has taken, this makes sense: his films have not become less stylish over the years; rather the style has become less about style and more about the substance. Like some of the best genre filmmakers of yesterday (Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford) and today (Michael Mann, Martin Scorsese), Fincher has found a way to blend the storytelling archetypes of yesterday with the latest digital effects of today. And much like the site and the zeitgeist it attempts to portray, The Social Network story makes the present effects of The Facebook less important than the past strictures of social networking that made it a success. As far as friendships going to the virtual sphere are concerned, that’s business; but the nature by which The Facebook came about, built on failed romantic stylings and the need to fit in with the cool kids, is older than the trees the parchment on which our old, archaic yearbooks were printed. Like all megalomaniacs before him, The Social Network’s Zuckerberg isn’t driven by money but by recognition. He just happened to have found a new (and very lucrative) way to get it.

Revenge of the Nerd - Film Comment Scott Foundas from Film Comment, September/October, 2010

It was E.M. Forster, of course, who scripted that immortal, oft-abbreviated imperative: “Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.” But had Forster lived to see the advent of something like the Internet, would he have been so quick to admonish the life bestial or monastic? As I write this, I am not nor have I ever been a member of those ubiquitous online communities known as Facebook and Twitter, which have separately and together transformed millions of us into the stars of our own reality shows, complete with “friends” and “followers” tuned into our every banal thought or change of mood, and where human popularity is tabulated in numbers as readily as the weekly box-office returns. In my Luddite way, I harbor a healthy suspicion for any technology whose adopters seem more its slaves than its masters. Above all, I cling foolhardily to the belief that the more time-honored methods of human interaction maintain a slight edge over the electronic ones. Indeed, though we may now live in public, we seem to see rather less of one another.

On the other hand, half a billion people can’t be wrong—or, rather, they can, but good luck convincing them of it. A scant seven years into its existence, Facebook is already an inevitability, a cultural axiom. Among other things, it is said to have played a role in rallying America’s youth for the 2008 election (even if some of those youths were actually the fictitious avatars of middle-aged men and women seeking a little masked-ball escapism, or something more sinister). Nor is its reach limited to these shores: recently, Facebook was banned in Pakistan for supposed trespasses against Islam, which is no small achievement for a website that traces its origins back to an Ivy League social misfit’s drunken act of revenge against a girl who spurned him. Like so many historic achievements in arts, letters, and commerce, Facebook was born of a romantic rejection.

This is very rich material for a movie on such timeless subjects as power and privilege, and such intrinsically 21st-century ones as the migration of society itself from the real to the virtual sphere—and David Fincher’s The Social Network is big and brash and brilliant enough to encompass them all. It is nominally the story of the founding of Facebook, yes, and how something that began among friends quickly descended into acrimony and litigation once billions of dollars were at stake. But just as All the President’s Men—a seminal film for Fincher and a huge influence on his Zodiac—was less interested by the Watergate case than by its zeitgeist-altering ripples, so too is The Social Network devoted to larger patterns of meaning. It is a movie that sees how any social microcosm, if viewed from the proper angle, is no different from another—thus the seemingly hermetic codes of Harvard University become the foundation for a global online community that is itself but a reflection of the all-encompassing high-school cafeteria from which we can never escape. And it owes something to The Great Gatsby, too, in its portrait of a self-made outsider marking his territory in the WASP jungle.

Adapted by The West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin from Ben Mezrich’s nonfiction best-seller The Accidental Billionaires, The Social Network was one of those “buzz” scripts that seemed to be on everyone’s lips in Hollywood for the past couple of years, and it’s easy to understand why. The writing is razor-sharp and rarely makes a wrong step, compressing a time-shifting, multi-character narrative into two lean hours, and, perhaps most impressively, digests its big ideas into the kind of rapid-fire yet plausible dialogue that sounds like what hyper computer geeks might actually say (or at least wish they did): Quentin Tarantino crossed with Bill Gates.

Consider the movie’s opening—a soon-to-be-classic breakup scene in which soon-to-be Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) verbally machine-guns his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara) with a rant about the difficulty of distinguishing oneself “in a crowd of people who all got 1600 on their SATs.” From there it’s on to his conflicted feelings about that peculiar Harvard institution known as “final clubs,” elite secret societies that, sops to diversity notwithstanding, remain decidedly inhospitable to monomaniacal, borderline Asperger’s cases like Zuckerberg. As he holds forth, his face contorted into a tightly focused stare, looking through Erica rather than at her, she tries to keep up. “Dating you is like dating a Stairmaster,” she laments before delivering the delicious coup de grace: “Listen. You’re going to be successful and rich, but you’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a geek. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.”

It was that rejection, or one like it—the details aren’t specified in Mezrich’s book—that led to an infamous late-night (and inebriated) programming session during which Zuckerberg created a crude comparison website allowing Harvard students to rank the relative desirability of the university’s female population based on photos hacked from the student directories (or “facebooks”) of various dorms. Soon, Zuckerberg’s prank went viral across the campus, making him a pariah to his female classmates, earning him academic probation, and bringing him to the attention of a trio of undergraduate entrepreneurs: the Indian-American Divya Narendra (Max Minghella) and the towering, blond and bronzed identical twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss (both played by the disarming Armie Hammer, himself a scion of corporate blue bloods). In between their rigorous course loads and heavy training regimen for the Harvard crew team, the Winklevoss brothers had conceived of a dating website open only to those who possess a Harvard e-mail address (the rationale being, quite simply, “Girls want to go with guys who go to Harvard”) and needed someone to design it for them. And Zuckerberg, as he would surely regret doing later, accepted the assignment.

The rest of The Social Network runs along two parallel narrative tracks—one tracing Zuckerberg’s development of Facebook and the other detailing the lawsuits later filed against him by the Winklevosses and by former Facebook CFO Eduardo Saverin (the superb Andrew Garfield), the latter being the closest thing in the movie to a wholly sympathetic character. From a legal perspective, it’s a thorny case of he-said/he-said, though the movie is less concerned with assigning blame than with considering Zuckerberg’s precise degree of assholedom, or lack thereof. And this is where things really get interesting. It would be easy enough, of course, to vilify Zuckerberg as a greedy twerp who betrayed his friends (what few he had) and partners on his way to the top—we are, after all, talking about a 24-year-old billionaire who once carried business cards reading “I’m CEO . . . bitch.” It would be even easier, perhaps, to exalt him as a nonconformist deity, a Holden Caulfield of the information superhighway. But to the sure nervousness of the studio, and the potential discomfort of some viewers, Fincher and Sorkin chart a more treacherous course straight down the middle of Zuckerberg’s many contradictions, one in which there are no obvious winners or losers, good guys or bad—only a series of highly pressurized social (and genetic) forces.

“I’m six-foot-five, 220, and there’s two of me,” notes one of the Winklevoss brothers upon learning of Zuckerberg’s Facebook subterfuge, contemplating physical retaliation—and indeed, one of the movie’s great visual gags is the recurring image of these two Aryan gods seated across the deposition room from the pale, slight Zuckerberg in his signature hoodie and “fuck-you flip-flops.” Yet at the same time, it’s hard not to see plaintiff and defendants as opposite sides of the same ambitious coin: gifted young men driven to separate themselves from the herd, two by moving to the front of the pack and one by going upstream against the current. Time and again the point is made that Zuckerberg doesn’t lust after riches, having turned down lucrative offers from Microsoft and AOL while he was still in high school (to buy another software program he designed), but status is something else entirely. “They’re suing me because for the first time in their lives, things didn’t work out the way they were supposed to for them,” Zuckerberg notes at one point—oblivious to the fact that he’s making himself sound equally petty. This leads to another of the movie’s most revealing scenes, in which a young legal associate (Rashida Jones) schooled in the fine art of jury selection advises Mark to settle out of court rather than face a jury destined to judge him on such factors as “clothes, hair, speaking style” and, above all, “likeability.” “Myths need a devil,” she reminds, and Zuckerberg fits the bill. Whereas the “Winklevi”—well, they could probably get away with murder.

Lest I seem to suggest otherwise, I hasten to add that The Social Network is splendid entertainment from a master storyteller, packed with energetic incident and surprising performances (not least from Justin Timberlake as Napster founder Sean Parker, who’s like Zuckerberg’s flamboyant, West Coast id). It is a movie of people typing in front of computer screens and talking in rooms that is as suspenseful as any more obvious thriller. But this is also social commentary so perceptive that it may be regarded by future generations the way we now look to Gatsby for its acute distillation of Jazz Age decadence. There is, in all of Fincher’s work, an outsider’s restlessness that chafes at the intractable rules of “polite” society and naturally aligns itself with characters like the journalist refusing to abandon the case in Zodiac and Edward Norton’s modern-day Dr. Jekyll in Fight Club. (It is also, I would argue, what makes the undying-love mawkishness of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button seem particularly insincere.) So The Social Network offers a despairing snapshot of society at the dawn of the 21st century, so advanced, so “connected,” yet so closed and constrained by all the centuries-old prejudices and preconceptions about how our heroes and villains are supposed to look, sound, and act. For Mark Zuckerberg has arrived, and yet still seems unsettled and out of place (as anyone who witnessed his painfully awkward 60 Minutes interview two years back can attest). And now here is a movie made to remind us that nothing in this life can turn a Zuckerberg into a Winklevoss.

The New Yorker (David Denby) review Influencing People, October 4, 2010

Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg opens up The Face of Facebook, feature and Zuckerberg interview by Juan Antonio Vargas from The New Yorker, September 20, 2010

Generation Why? by Zadie Smith | The New York Review of Books Zadie Smith from The New York Review of Books, November 25, 2010

"Inventing Facebook" Mark Harris interviews writer Aaron Sorkin from New York magazine, September 17, 2010

Mark E. Zuckerberg ’06: The whiz behind thefacebook.com Michael M. Grynbaum from The Harvard Crimson, June 10, 2004

"The Billionaire Facebook Founder making a fortune from your secrets (though you probably don't know he's doing it)" Steve Boggan from The Mail Online, May 21, 2010

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, and 'The Social Network' Kay Matthews from The Digital Journal, September 21, 2010

The New Republic (Lawrence Lessig) review

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

The House Next Door [Aaron Cutler]

"The Social Network": A modern horror film Matt Zoller Seitz from Salon

Edward Champion [Edward Champion]

Slant Magazine (Nick Schager) review

IC Places [Chris Knipp]

IFC.com [Alison Willmore]

TIME Magazine review Richard Corliss, with additional Time links:

(See Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher on the making of The Social Network.)

(See TIME's 2010 cover story on Facebook.)

See TIME's NewsFeed for the irony about the Facebook crash alluded to in The Social Network.

See pictures of Facebook's headquarters.

(See the 100 best movies of all time.)

See 10 people caught on Facebook, including the White House gate crashers.

See a Q&A with Ben Mezrich on his Facebook book.

(See a 2000 TIME story on The West Wing.)

(See TIME's review of David Fincher's Zodiac.)

/Film [David Chen]

Movieline (Stephanie Zacharek) review [9.5/10]

The Village Voice [Eric Hynes] The Medium Is the Message in David Fincher's Present-Tense Social Network

Ain't It Cool Movie Reviews (Harry Knowles) review

indieWIRE (Todd McCarthy) review

Pajiba (Dustin Rowles) review

The Daily Notebook [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky] also here: Obsessive / Compulsive: "The Social Network" (David Fincher, USA)

The Parallax Review [Mark Dujsik]

Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]

Cole Smithey [Cole Smithey]

Unexamined Essentials [Jaime N. Christley]

The L Magazine [Henry Stewart]

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]

DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) review [5/5]

DVD Talk (Tyler Foster) review [5/5]

Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin

One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [A-]

The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [A-]

DVD Talk (Brian Orndorf) review [4/5] also seen here: Briandom [Brian Orndorf]

Screen Rant (Kofi Outlaw) review [4/5]

CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review

RopeofSilicon (Brad Brevet) review [B+]

Newsblaze [Prairie Miller]

Boxoffice Magazine (Pete Hammond) review [5/5]

CHUD.com (Devin Faraci) review

TheFilmChair.com [Dan Stasiewski]

The Hollywood Reporter review Kirk Honeycutt

Entertainment Weekly review Owen Gleiberman

Variety (Justin Chang) review

Is the Facebook movie the truth about Mark Zuckerberg? Finlo Rohrer from The BBC News, September 30, 2010

The Guardian (Andrew Pulver) review [4/5] September 24, 2010

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg now richer than Murdoch or Apple's Jobs Andrew Clark from The Guardian, September 23, 2010

The Social Network and docudrama dishonesty Andrew Clark from The Guardian, September 24, 2010

The Social Network: How to make a sensational film about coding Facebook, by Aaron Sorkin Jemima Kiss from The Guardian, September 28, 2010

Hadley Freeman: How evil is Facebook? Hadley Freeman from The Guardian, September 29, 2010

These perfect Facebook nerds did start a revolution – in advertising Zoe Williams from The Guardian, September 30, 2010

Social Network's artistic license John Patterson from The Guardian, October 9, 2010

Peter Bradshaw's review from The Guardian, October 14, 2010

The secret of The Social Network's twins Steve Rose from The Guardian, October 17, 2010

And Zuckerberg created man ... and The Social Network David Cox from The Guardian, October 18, 2010

Mark Zuckerberg rejects his portrayal in The Social Network Ben Child from The Guardian, October 20, 2010

Facebook: Conquering the world through mobile and social Jemima Kiss from The Guardian, November 4, 2010

National Board of Review likes Facebook film The Social Network Catherine Shoard from The Guardian, December 3, 2010

More billionaires pledge to give away half of their wealth The Guardian, December 9, 2010

Critics give The Social Network a leg up the Oscars ladder Ben Child from The Guardian, December 13, 2010

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg named Time magazine's person of the year Josh Halliday and Matthew Weaver from The Guardian, December 15, 2010

Facebook's value swells to $50bn after Goldman Sachs investment Dominic Rushe from The Guardian, January 3, 2011

SEC may force Facebook flotation Jemima Kiss from The Guardian, January 4, 2011

Facebook began as a geek's hobby. Now it's more popular than Google Jemima Kiss from The Guardian, January 4, 2011

Facebook updates its status – but at the wrong price Nils Pratley from The Guardian, January 4, 2011

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has an 'awkberg' Saturday Night Live Hadley Freeman from The Guardian, January 30, 2011

David Fincher: unfriended by Oscar? Catherine Shoard from The Guardian, February 2, 2011

Facebook's intriguing world revealed Elizabeth Day from The Observer, September 12, 2010

So how many friends do you have, Mark? Simon Garfield from The Observer, November 16, 2008

Philip French's review The Observer, October 17, 2010

Facebook is now a 'reality interface' - but The Social Network doesn't get it Caspar Llewellyn Smith from The Observer, November 7, 2010

Watch The Social Network closely or you'll miss the key point John Naughton from The Observer, November 14, 2010

The Daily Telegraph review [4/5] Marc Lee

The Independent (Kaleem Aftab) review [4/5]

The Boston Phoenix (Peter Keough) review

St. Paul Pioneer Press (Chris Hewitt) review [3.5/4]

Austin Chronicle review [4/5] Kimberley Jones

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [4/4]

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review

Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]

The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review

"Facebook Feels Unfriendly Toward Film It Inspired" Michael Cieply and Migeil Helft from The New York Times, August 20, 2010

Lord of the Internet Rings Maureen Dowd column from The New York Times, October 9, 2010

Mark Zuckerberg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Zuckerberg's Facebook Page

Images for Mark Zuckerberg

Cameron Winklevoss - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cameron Winklevoss | Facebook

Tyler Winklevoss - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tyler Winklevoss | Facebook

Winklevoss Twins Lose Case Against Facebook Fox News, April 11, 2011

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO B 88

USA Sweden Great Britain Germany (158 mi) 2011 ‘Scope

Adapted from the Stieg Larsson Millennium Trilogy, a wildly popular series of Swedish crime novels that were published posthumously, the first part of the series was initially directed in 2009 by Swedish director Niels Arden Oplev, featuring a mix of digital video, 16 mm, Super 16 mm, all blown up on Super 35 mm, giving the film a variety of looks which helps set the series in motion. The opening introduction is easily the most intriguing of the Trilogy, as it draws the audience into this smart crime drama where part of the interest is the individuality and unique intelligence in the characters, introducing the punkish computer hacker Lisbeth Salander with a near photographic memory, initially played by Noomi Rapace, and Mikael Blomkvist, originally Michael Nyqkvist, a top notch, award winning investigative journalist working for an issues oriented magazine called Millennium, where he has a longstanding affair with the editor, Lena Endre initially, replaced here by Robin Wright Penn, where a brutal streak of sadism lies underneath the cool veneer of Swedish sophistication, where only on the outside surface does life feel safe, secure, and orderly. Despite the vastly improved production values and superb score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the writing and editing of this American remake are less impressive, losing some of the intensity and focus, including what was so uniquely original about it, namely the intelligence and strange sexual curiosity between the two leads.

David Fincher creates a superb opening credit sequence shot to a cover of Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song, which is a masterful film short in itself seen here: Karen O, Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross: "Immigrant Song ... - YouTube (2:51). The Swedish title Män Som Hatar Kvinnor translates to Men Who Hate Women, quite appropriate to the story, a decade’s long murder mystery filled with particularly grisly unsolved murders directed against women balanced against an intriguing, off color love story. The film opens as acclaimed journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) is being sentenced to 6 months in prison for libel and is immediately whisked away from his family Christmas dinner to meet secretly with a millionaire business tycoon, Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) on a remote island location where Vanger wants him to search for his presumably killed niece, missing for 40 years, insisting upon Blomkvist only after his libel case had been thoroughly investigated by an unusual computer expert, a young punkish Lisbeth (Mora Rooney) who has found no evidence of any wrongdoing, but instead everything suggests a frame. Of interest, the niece always made Vanger a birthday gift of crushed flowers, and those gifts have continued to be sent from various corners of the earth ever since she went missing. Vanger believes his is a hateful family, one of whom is likely the murderer with a sadistic interest in continuing the birthday reminders of her absence. With nothing to lose, Blomkvist resigns from the magazine to begin his investigative work on the island.

Hard to believe Mara Rooney as the rebellious and punkish Lisbeth Salander in this film is the same spirited girl in the opening conversation in a bar with 19-year old Harvard sophomore Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg in THE SOCIAL NETWORK (2010), the girl whose blatant rejection of his crudely obnoxious manner led to his creation of the computer template for Facebook before the night was done. Despite Rooney’s best efforts, however, she’s no match for the harder edged Noomi Rapace who originated the role. The American remake sticks closely to the original version except for a few exceptions, like the omission of a sequence of Lisbeth getting beaten up by a street gang, less time spent with Lisbeth’s underworld friends, including her hacker friend named Plague, and changing the focus somewhat, giving a softer edge to Lisbeth in the relationship, as she’s not nearly as aggressively controlling as Rapace, who adds more fire and inner rage to the character, more damaged and more ferocious, feeling much more uniquely revelatory and internally complex in the original. Rooney is following Rapace’s lead with the character, where Rapace’s physique is less feminine, built more like a man, where in the original story her biographic profile was blended into the theme of treachery against targeted women instead of spoon fed to the audience only after the fact at the end in Fincher’s version, as if to elicit sympathy, something at odds with the Lisbeth character who would never allow herself to feel like a victim.

The secret to the success of this Trilogy is the fierce interior character of Lisbeth herself, an outlandish woman dressed provocatively in full black leather fetish attire, wearing motorcycle boots, facial painting with heavy black eye liner, looking boyish with spikes, multiple tattoos, a Mohawk haircut and piercings, a girl who never smiles or enjoys herself, who uses her brooding silence brilliantly, remaining one of the more compelling characters seen in years. Her appeal lies in her own approach to herself, her reaction to the dark forces surrounding her, operating with utmost conviction, highly disciplined, fiercely independent, protecting herself with the feral quality of an animal surrounded by savage beasts, yet she remains balanced and in complete control of her life. In the original, her startling sociopathic personality wins over audiences through flashback sequences to childhood including courtroom sequences that threaten to take control of her life, exposing a lifetime of fighting against physical and emotional abuse, becoming a righteous feminist vigilante, which makes her a sympathetic figure from the outset, where she initiates the initial encounter with Blomkvist by hacking into his computer and leaving him clues, steering him in the right direction, which leads him to her. Fincher omits these scenes altogether, having them spend much less time together, delaying and prolonging the real tension and interest of the story, the glue that holds it all together, which is this bizarre but fascinating relationship. Her computer and investigative skills at uncovering secret evidence are unmatched, so he convinces her to work with him in exposing a savage killer of women, where she ends up doing most of the lead work and being his guardian angel, actually saving his life from a reclusive family of demented Nazi’s.

The dark and at times horrendous story is told with a brisk pace, advanced by clues, impeccable computer searches and interviews, but especially intriguing are negatives of old photographs which Mikael blows up and scans, becoming a movie within the movie, where they uncover unsolved murders, eventually leading them to various sexually gruesome murder sites across the country where something potentially connects to this case. As they get closer, the inner circle of the Vanger family become more and more suspicious and paranoid, as they all appear to have something to hide. The actual island estate is filled with architecturally stunning homes that are especially foreboding in the winter ice, with a few former Nazi’s living inside, men who have little respect for human life and will go to any extent to protect what they have. There’s plenty of suspense and psychological tension in this taut drama, but something has to give, and when it does, it will carry the force of forty years of lies and cover ups, something dark, twisted, and repulsive, yet undetected throughout the entire period of time. Noomi Rapace, however, is the real discovery of the Trilogy, and nothing in Fincher’s version matches her ferocity, as her hostile yet vulnerable character is shrouded in secrets as well, but she’s actually looking for a way to believe in something better, yet all around her she is held back by deeply disturbed and detestable men who have turned her life into a living hell, isolated, alone, but an aggressive force, even as she sleeps with Blomkvist, a man who senses danger with every move, that only grows more acute as he draws closer. It’s one of these cool sophisticated crime fiction thrillers that’s gorgeous to look at, that relies on intelligence and a multitude of clues, where a heavy streak of brutal sadism lurks underneath the sexual intrigue between the major players.

Time Out New York [Keith Uhlich]

On this week’s episode of Law & Order: Swedish Victims Unit… Pardon the flippancy, Stieg Larsson fans. While you’re sharpening your knives for the disrespecting film critic, know this: If you’re already invested in the adventures of beleaguered journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Craig) and goth vision-o’-vengeance Lisbeth Salander (Mara), then David Fincher’s absorbing adaptation of the first book in the Millennium series will surely satisfy. It moves like a mad dog, looks like a hi-def dream and is deliciously cast from top to bottom (good to see you again, Julian Sands!). Go and bask in the lushly photographed luridness.

But lurid it remains. Blomkvist and Salander’s inquiry into the affairs of the moneyed and malevolent Vanger family plays like a ripped-from-the-headlines mishmash—part Royal Family puffery, part Josef Fritzl what-the-fuck. And though Fincher hits all the right emotional beats (e.g., the Mulder-and-Scully–like pining between the leads) and does all the memorable set pieces (the rod-up-the-ass revenge scenario), his exquisite craft can’t distract from a number of troubling questions at the story’s core. The most glaring: Is the brilliant yet blighted Salander, who takes rapes and beatings as much as she gives them, a victimized phoenix rising from the ashes or a charismatic wet dream for fanboys and -girls to go gaga over? Larsson was surely aware of the narrative’s potentially misunderstood contradictions; the book’s cheekily profound original title, Men Who Hate Women, could have sprung from Sam Fuller’s typewriter. But Fincher’s film tips much more in the indulging direction of crowd Comic-Con—delighting the franchise junkie above all other considerations.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Dave Calhoun from Time Out London

Trespassing on 007’s territory, the opening-credits sequence to David Fincher’s ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ sees wires swirling, melting and reforming as an oily black liquid to create ultra-smooth, cybersexual impressions of the main characters’ faces appearing and disappearing. The message from the director of ‘The Social Network’ and ‘Fight Club’ is clear: this is a more slick, more expensive, better-looking but no less provocative spin on the first novel in Stieg Larsson’s all-things-to-all-readers Millennium Trilogy.

Some may be surprised at how similar Fincher’s version is to the 2009 Swedish film in plot and mood, and even Fincher can’t avoid stretches that feel like souped-up Nordic television drama. But fans of the book and film should rest easy at how this ‘Dragon Tattoo’ is still inherently a Swedish tale – set and partly shot in Sweden – and Fincher doesn’t flinch from the sexual violence at their core.

Daniel Craig gives a relaxed Sunday of a performance, with appropriate knitwear, as Mikael Blomkvist, the disgraced journalist (essentially Julian Assange, if he was likeable) hired to uncover the secrets of an old industrialist family with a Nazi past, while Rooney Mara (who had a small part in ‘The Social Network’) tears it up as Lisbeth Salander. Mara is prettier and more fragile than Noomi Rapace, but she’s also more dead behind the eyes, more haunted. Her Salander gives her body over to Blomkvist in two brisk, forceful sex scenes – but never gives him a hint of a smile. It’s a storming performance that gives the film its soul.

As you’d expect from Fincher, the storytelling is immaculate, and he negotiates a mix of accents, all speaking English, with little distraction. Yet whatever bells and whistles you hang off this tale, there’s no escaping that its murder mystery element is fairly pulpy and unremarkable. Still, Fincher showed in ‘Se7en’ and ‘Zodiac’ that a hunt for a serial killer is a story template that allows him to go far in exploring character and atmosphere, the latter of which is ramped up no end here by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s discomfiting score.

Slant Magazine [Ed Gonzalez]

The difference between Niels Arden Oplev's adaptation of Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and David Fincher's own is not, as some might have hoped, the difference between night and day, but between curdled milk and a warmed-over holiday second. While Fincher's deliberate, rather perceptible "reimaginings, compressions and reductions" of the novel's lurid, soap-operatic plot, which is rife with the familiar intrigue—and then some—of your average mass market paperback (rape, incest, serial murder, Nazis, and a shitload of clue-solving), can't elevate trash to art, they do give one the impression of attending the most handsome funeral procession ever mounted—which is, in the end, better than feeling like you're the corpse lying inside the coffin.

For the unwashed, Larsson's potboiler concerns a disgraced journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, who's hired to investigate the mysterious, age-old disappearance of a young girl from a private island inhabited by the Vanger clan, a bunch of super-white, insanely rich Swedes with more skeletons in their closets than there are tracks on Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's soundtrack for this latest film adaptation. Playing the Watson to Mikael's Sherlock is Lisbeth Salander, a sour twentysomething computer hacker and ward of the state who orchestrates Mikael's background check and uses her new gig as a means of avenging the deaths of rape victims like herself.

Therapy might help to permanently expunge the original film from my mind. Until then I recoil at the memory of its most reprehensible scenes: a vicious subway attack by a group of thugs that leaves Lisbeth with a broken laptop and her rape by a social worker who controls her money. Unlike Arden Oplev, Fincher doesn't gleefully exploit Larsson's material, staging Lisbeth's subway attack not as a hate crime, but as a mere robbery that ends with her fiercely getting the upper hand (her laptop, though, still goes to shit). And as for the depictions of Lisbeth's rape and its retaliation, Fincher fixates less on its violence than he does on the instruments that perpetuate it, from handcuffs to a tattoo liner. (Fincher doesn't even bother flashbacking to Lisbeth's horrible burning of her father, and he films the climax so anti-climactically that it practically becomes anti-matter.) Of course, Fincher's restraint has its costs, and my fears that this Dragon Tattoo would be a feature-length version of Fincher's "Janie's Got a Gun" video were realized during at least one scene so carefully blocked it unfortunately brought to mind one of those randy TV ads where everyone's privates are amusingly sequestered from view.

Fincher is a meticulous, albeit chilly, observer of procedure, and the film derives much of its momentum from Mikael's sleuthing into the lives of the Vangers and Lisbeth's high-tech hacking, which passes the smell test more easily here than it did in Arden Oplev's version, and from the elegance with which their storylines are paralleled. These two fallen figures seem to be on a date with destiny, but they don't challenge each other's strengths and weaknesses, once they begin to work together, like true kindred spirits might. The film's elegant moroseness, like the propulsive, sometimes discordant, volume of Rezor and Ross's experimental score, seems intended to distract us from the fact that these two characters are banal stock types.

The book's original title was Men Who Hate Women, and it's enough to see Lisbeth as a feminist heroine, except her rage is so contrived (she fulfills a fantasy by carving "I am a rapist pig" onto her porcine social worker's body) that it almost precludes such a reading. One could more successfully argue that the original title is a self-diagnosis by Larrson, a self-professed feminist, as every aspect of Lisbeth's behavior, from her almost autistic withdrawal from the world to her libertine sexual appetites, seem sprung from the imagination of a misogynist, or at least someone with a rather rudimentary, Psych-101 understanding of victimhood.

Only a complete reimagining of Larrson's text might have given any of its film adaptations real value. There's ink on Lisbeth's body, and the missing, perhaps dead Harriet used to draw plants, but the empathy that draws these living dead girls toward one another is more richly articulated in the film's poster art. And Daniel Cragi's Mikael is just a limp noodle, a lobotomized 007 whose adultery could have been intriguingly linked to the Vanger clan's legacy of violence—though to be fair, a scene featuring a wasted Embeth Davidtz as Mikael's wife is so abrupt it's tempting to imagine the better version of the film that lies somewhere on a cutting room floor.

Rooney Mara seems to take Lisbeth more seriously than Fincher, who has a good laugh at the character's expense in one scene by shooting the possible David Lynch fan in a shirt that reads "Fuck You You Fucking Fuck." This role necessitates that Mara do much strutting, and she fiercely complies, but she also hints at a vulnerability in Lisbeth that Noomi Rapace never got to convey in the first Dragon Tattoo. If Lisbeth's goth armature feels less like a stunt this time around, it's because Mara understands it as such, a calculated bit of theater Lisbeth is only committed to in the abstract; it's a purposeful exaggeration meant to deliberately alienate the world. Of course, that Lisbeth, in the end, is at her most vulnerable when pining for Mikael may flesh her out as a character, but it also confirms that Dragon Tattoo, in all its incarnations, is really nothing more than the story of girls running to and from their daddies, and no matter how you dress it up, it's inherently retrograde.

Monsters and Critics [Anne Brodie]

Sound on Sight [Corey Atad]

Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]

Review: Fincher's take on 'Dragon Tattoo' is visually striking and dramatically dormant Drew McWeeny from HitFix

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Review - Screen International Tim Grierson

Is Rooney Mara Actually Good in Dragon Tattoo or Does She Just Look Awesome? Dana Stevens from Slate

0-5 Stars Moria - The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]

The New Yorker [David Denby]

New York Observer [Rex Reed]

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Scott Tobias

Annals of the Overrated: David Fincher Hollywood and Fine

FlickFilosopher.com [MaryAnn Johanson]

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

Review: David Fincher's 'Girl With The Dragon Tattoo' Is An Intense ... Todd Gilchrist from The indieWIRE Playlist

Govindini Murty: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Twilight, and the Return of Women's Blockbuster Films Govindini Murty from The Huffington Post

DustinPutman.com [Dustin Putman]

the m0vie blog [Darren Mooney]

Boxoffice Magazine [Sara Maria Vizcarrondo]

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) - Gone With the Twins

Blu-ray.com [Brian Orndorf]

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Declan Burke from Crime Always Pays

ClimbingHigherPictures [Ryan Hamelin]

Matt's Movie Reviews [Matthew Pejkovic]

Film-Forward.com [Nora Lee Mandel]

Paste Magazine [Annlee Ellingson]

Battleship Pretension [Scott Nye]

Corndog Chats [Adam Kuhn]

Digital Spy [Ben Rawson-Jones]

E! on Line [L. Thompson]

TheEstablishingShot [Craig Grobler]

WhatCulture! [Shaun Munro]

Starburst [Katherine McLaughlin]

CompuServe [Harvey Karten]

Sky.com [Francesca Steele]

tonymacklin.net [Tony Macklin]

For the Last Time, Lisbeth Salander Is Not Pippi Longstocking Nathan Hegedus from Slate, December 20, 2011

User reviews from imdb Author: chrismsawin from United States

Entertainment Weekly [Owen Gleiberman]

STORY: 'Girl With the Dragon Tattoo' Producer Bans New Yorker Critic From Future Screenings for Breaking Review Embargo Tim Appelo from The Hollywood Reporter, December 4, 2011

Rooney Mara: Lisbeth Salander Of 'The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo' More Than Just A Role Jordan Zakarin interview of the actress from The Huffington Post, December 19, 2011

The Hollywood Reporter [Todd McCarthy]

Variety [Justin Chang]

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – review | Film | The Guardian Xan Brooks, December 15, 2011

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: feminist, or not? Viv Groskop from The Guardian, March 15, 2010

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo director lashes out at US remake Andrew Pulver from The Guardian, November 9, 2010

Swedish Girl With the Dragon Tattoo director attacks Hollywood remake Ben Child from The Guardian, November 9, 2010

David Fincher's 'Tattoo' leaves lasting impression - BostonHerald.com James Verniere

Critic Review for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo on washingtonpost ... Ann Hornaday

The 'Girl With the Dragon Tattoo' review ... - The Washington Post Jen Chaney

'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" review: Thrilling even when ... Chris Hewitt from St Paul Pioneer Press

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Times

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo - Movies - New York Times

Stieg Larsson - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

GONE GIRL C 75

USA (149 mi) 2014 ‘Scope Official Site

—Cool Girl speech from the novel Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn, 2012

That night at the Brooklyn party, I was playing the girl who was in style, the girl a man like Nick wants: the Cool Girl. Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl…Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version—maybe he’s vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every f***ing thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point f*** someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”

One of the more cynical movies seen in awhile, ugly and calculating, a horrible comment on the vapid emptiness of American society, painting a cruel portrait of a soulless age, yet it’s a dark satiric comedy that actually pokes fun of just how clueless the public remains of the hidden truths taking place in their midst, caught up in the windstorm of the latest political hysteria that leaves them blind by the filtered bullshit that passes for news these days, where they become numbed beyond hope, like walking zombies taking the place of what were once human beings. Fincher’s film is as infuriatingly hopeless as anything Béla Tarr ever concocted, but instead of dreary black and white social realism, it’s a trashy best selling book becoming an equally trashy best selling movie, where the Hollywood production machine is in high gear, pumping out artificiality with great relish. It’s another marriage on the rocks movie that veers out of control into Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000), where Ben Affleck as Nick Dunne, pilloried by the public after being suspected of killing his missing wife Amy (Rosamund Pike), is no Christian Bale, where the exaggerated absurdity of the lynch mob public out for blood never compares to the heightened excess on display from Wall Street’s impeccably stylish Me Generation, jump started by Reaganomics opening the doors for unscrupulous business entrepreneurs in the 1980’s to rake in the money like the actual thieves they were. The difference is the 1991 Bret Easton Ellis novel is actually a hilariously clever critique of the consumer culture of the 80’s, while this unraveling marital thriller exposing the beast that lies within is more like mixing the wildly popular Jacqueline Susann books with a dose of Stephen King, as Gillian Flynn’s airport novel spent more than 71 weeks on the New York Times hardcover best-seller list, and sold more than 6 million copies before it even came out in paperback. The book (and subsequent movie) is a pale comparison to the shattering portrait of the idealized 1950’s marriage depicted in the excruciatingly personal 1961 Richard Yates novel Revolutionary Road, seemingly the perfect couple to all outsiders, played by the idyllic TITANIC (1997) couple Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in the 2008 Sam Mendes film version, living in their wonderful dream house in the suburbs, where clearly the foundation of their success was the male-centric world of America in the 1950’s, a deluded American Dream that quickly disintegrates into marital dysfunction, as it denies the aspirations of women.

In pointed contrast, the superficiality on display in Fincher’s film may turn off many viewers, as it thrives on the artificiality of the surface, literally mocking the shallowness of society while the unhappy lives of the featured couple takes a turn into the dark side, even delving into horror as Fincher’s vision seems designed to make the audience feel as uncomfortable as possible and then leave them in the lurch by providing few answers. The offensiveness of the smug, overly detached tone, however, may hit everyone differently, where it’s reminiscent of the exaggerated sarcasm of von Trier’s DOGVILLE (2003), which couldn’t be more irritating. Using a back and forth dual narrative scheme of he said, she said, where we’re privy to his interior narration and also what she writes in her diary, including flashback sequences that reveal her perspective on a crumbling romance, what’s immediately clear is that both narrators are consummate liars and cannot be trusted to convey the truth about their own stories. Their home is a house of mirrors where they continually pretend to be something they’re not, fuming with displeasure underneath while both playing the part in public of a perfect marriage. Whatever love or attraction may have been there at the outset has been twisted and contorted into a marriage that is a big lie, where the original romance was a con job, and once their guard has been let down what’s exposed are the frayed nerves, where these two have little use for one another except for keeping up appearances. While there’s plenty of glib back and forth conversation when they first meet, each trying to be more clever than the other, they are apparently easily charmed, where Nick proposes as if on cue, and the next thing you know they’re married, moving away from their beloved New York to Missouri to be near Nick’s seriously ill mother who dies of cancer, leaving them alone in a gigantic house that feels unlived in and empty most of the time. While Nick is more comfortable in the Midwest, having grown up there with friends and acquaintances, he runs a non-descript neighborhood bar with his twin sister Margo (Carrie Coon) that gives him an excuse to get away from Amy as much as possible, while she scribbles in her diary (with perfect penmanship) aimless thoughts that barely touch on the extent of her growing resentment.

Amy’s parents “plagiarized” her life, actually improving upon it in a popular series of children’s books called Amazing Amy, leaving her unsure of her real identity, but always struggling to be better than the rest, where she has become an ice princess that continually speaks in a calm, reassuring, overly breathy voice that feels very much like an over-controlled robotic Stepford wife from THE STEPFORD WIVES (1975), where she has to emote perfection with every spoken word. Certainly that would drive any man crazy after awhile, especially when used in a patronizing manner of never-ending superiority, where Nick is contemplating walking out on the marriage. A clue for the audience is the sound of Blue Öyster Cult on the radio singing “(Don't Fear) The Reaper” (Don't Fear) Halloween You Tube (5:11), which figures so prominently in John Carpenter’s slasher horror film HALLOWEEN (1978). On their 5^th wedding anniversary, the date of his planned breakup announcement, he returns home from work in the early afternoon and finds his house broken into, a coffee table smashed, a few blood stains on the wall, and his wife missing. Within days, he’s the chief suspect, where the investigative team of Detective Boney (Kim Dickens) and Officer Gilpin (Patrick Fugit) keep unearthing new evidence, much of which Nick has no knowledge about. His sense of indifference to his wife’s life and subsequent absence is more reflective of his lazy and distant self, but once the cameras are parked outside his door, it opens the floodgates to media speculation, where he is raked over the coals in the tabloids and on a FOX TV style station run by a vicious rumor mill host (Missi Pyle) hellbent on using him to avenge all wronged women, where her continual diatribes run endlessly on the neverending TV news cycle, playing even in the local police precinct. This lynch mob mentality has convicted the guy in public, plastering his face all over the airwaves, destroying his character, calling him a wife killer, reminiscent of the blanket national coverage surrounding Drew Peterson, who was alleged to have killed his third and fourth wives, where the body of the latter has never been found. A 30-year police veteran, Peterson was familiar with forensic evidence, wasn’t bashful with reporters, and seemed to thrive on all the attention he was receiving in the national spotlight.

To a large extent, this is a film about character assassination juxtaposed against a murderous assassination, where the impact of the first is a whole lot more damning than the second (where you actually have a day in court), which is a dangerous comment on a society that overlooks reality in order to exist in a self-induced fantasy, continually blaming the other guys for all of society’s woes, while refusing to look in the mirror and take any responsibility. It has pretensions to Gus van Sant’s To Die For (1995), veering into the crazy psychopathic territory of Tuesday Weld in Pretty Poison (1968), as it plays with this seemingly fixated need for attention, where you’re willing to do anything to get it, which will leave at least some viewers literally refusing to be scammed and manipulated once again by Hollywood’s pretend version of reality. It ends up being an exaggerated murder farce where the act of murder doesn’t remotely match the damage done by outright lies and misinformation produced by the made-up hypotheses of so-called experts in creating a whirlwind of mass hysteria generated by the media, usually in attack mode smearing someone’s character, for which they take no responsibility, hiding behind 1^st amendment rights that it’s only freedom of speech, where people have the right to say anything they please. Nick is caught up in an illusionary maze of deceit, a puzzle-like trap where he’s left trying to figure out why all this is happening to him and how he can escape. Turning to an ace defense attorney Tanner Bolt (Tyler Perry) with an expertise in representing maligned offenders who are perceived as being the most vile and contemptible creatures on the planet, he slowly tries to gather some semblance of his life back as the noose is tightened around his neck by this continuing police investigation fed by malicious rumors. Bolt delivers perhaps the sanest line in the film: “You two are the most fucked up people I've ever met and I deal with fucked up people for a living.” Reminiscent of Rolf de Heer’s ALEXANDRA’S PROJECT (2003), another film that turns the tables on an the idea of male idealization, this $61 million dollar Hollywood fiasco feels more like a B-movie where The Stepford Wives meets The Twilight Zone through a wretchedly overwrought Scarlett O’Hara style melodrama that veers into sci-fi territory where aliens are the species pretending to be human, as people have already lost all semblance of their humanity. While this is obviously the work of a control freak who delights in conniving and manipulating the lives of others, where every film is a variation of PANIC ROOM (2002), Fincher has a reputation as being a perfectionist, where according to producer Ceán Chaffin, Fincher took, on average, as many as 50 takes for each scene, where it should also be pointed out that on the first day on the set, Ben Affleck changed the lens setting on the camera by the slightest degree, betting the crew Fincher wouldn’t notice, only to have Fincher take a look through the lens and exclaim, “Why does the camera look a little dim?”

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.

—Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5, 1606

Georgia Straight [Ken Eisner]

Gone Girl is, in many ways, the crackerjack entertainment many were hoping for. Still, some may wonder how much caramel corn you must consume to get such a small prize.

High-toned David Fincher, who not long ago directed the American franchise of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, here handles a deluxe repackaging of Gillian Flynn’s popular airport novel, with screenplay by the author, who has, shall we say, rather volatile views of class and gender politics. Ben Affleck and England’s Rosamund Pike (going stiffly American) star as Nick and Amy Dunne, New York City writers driven by hard, if sketchily drawn, economic times to return to Nick’s native town of North Carthage, Missouri, where their storybook marriage goes south.

When Nick comes home to find Amy gone amid suspicious surroundings, he calls the cops, and a local detective (Treme’s excellent Kim Dickens) is a neutral sounding board for his possible complicity in her disappearance. Certainly, his shifty behaviour raises red flags. So do Amy’s journal entries, which operate as intentionally too-perfect counterpoint in the he said/she said structure that dominates the film’s fairly breezy 149 minutes, supported by Trent Reznor’s music, which sometimes burbles so intently, it can be hard to hear what either of them is saying. In any case, it becomes obvious early on that this conversation will be a rather lopsided affair.

Amy, it turns out, grew up “plagiarized” by her parents, who improved upon her life in a popular series of children’s books, leaving her resentful and unsure of her own identity. That device was itself seemingly lifted from the childhood of Rachel Griffiths’s Brenda character on Six Feet Under, where it was given several years’ worth of episodes to bear poisoned fruit. Flynn uses this peculiar background less to create complexity than to spread fear; indeed, except for the detective and Nick’s asexually presented sister (strong newcomer Carrie Coon), all the screen females—from ditsy neighbours to lowlife grifters and cable-news Barbies—are most notable for their predatory skills.

Men don’t fare much better, but Tyler Perry, of all people, is at least allowed to have energetic fun as the big-city lawyer who enters the picture as Nick’s situation heats up. This helps, because our interest in the main combatants flags considerably as the hours go by. Fans of the book may delight in Gone Girl’s stylishly hyperbolized view of modern marriage. Sorry, but if both central characters are potentially deranged psychopaths, how does that comment on anything except what sells?

Marriage, American Style - Film Comment Kent Jones, November/December 2014

The darkly funny Gone Girl begins as a procedural illuminating the disintegration of an “ideal” marriage. But this is a David Fincher movie, which means that both dramatic forms happen concurrently and illuminate each other in the process. With the head-spinning drunken-revenge/party montage in The Social Network, Fincher set off in a new direction, braiding cues and micro-events—narrative, gestural, visual, sonic, textural—into an unbreakable cinematic cord. His films now have a diamond-cut sleekness that fits comfortably with the blind momentum of current popular movies, but said sleekness results from an attention that is hair-raisingly precise in its focus.

There are no generalized categories in Fincher’s filmmaking; there are, strictly speaking, no such things as “cross-cutting,” “flashbacks,” “extras,” or “inserts.” He has achieved a new form of superfluid omniscient storytelling, in which a knowing nod of the head from Patrick Fugit’s cop or a single glimpse of a search party on a sweltering afternoon are just as significant as the latest developments in the strange case of Amazing Amy (Rosamund Pike) and her unsympathetic spouse, Nick (Ben Affleck).

There are two pretty big knots in Fincher and writer Gillian Flynn’s cord. The narrative shifts gears twice, and on both occasions Gone Girl more or less redefines its terms and begins again. With the first rupture, our understanding of Amy is undermined, our attention is re-routed to a series of fairly outlandish narrative developments, and we are placed mid-movie in territory that is very close to the trans-global ruination of Wennerström in the penultimate stretch of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The massive popularity of Flynn’s source novel aside, this is a risky undertaking, because it shifts the story’s center of gravity. We might wonder: is Fincher’s cord tightening or is it going slack?

Most filmmakers working in the popular sphere are risk-averse, but not this one. Fincher is confident enough in the tensile strength of his material to lead his characters and his audience through the looking glass of improbabilities, banking on the proposition that they will come out the other side in a new and uniquely disturbing realm. I think his bet pays off. 

There is a specter haunting Gone Girl. In the early scenes it is simply sensed as a mood, realized in a series of caustic exchanges and lazy banter between ambition-free people, either wallowing in their disappointments or getting off on their resentments and moralizations. Once Amy’s disappearance is announced, the mood grows into something coarser, eerier, and more subtly pervasive, and the film becomes a hyper-acute rendering of a world filled with people forever checking and re-checking their own media-ready self-presentations, acting on their every emotional impulse and mortally afraid of being disliked.

One might say that the heart of the film is an exchange that happens in the blink of an eye: a woman at a rally for Amy takes a selfie with Nick; he sheepishly recalls that it might not look too good to be flirting when he’s supposed to be desperate to find his missing wife, and asks her to delete it; she takes umbrage and stalks away. Like The Social Network, Gone Girl has the feel of science fiction set in an instantly recognizable present. And this powerful evocation of what Marilynne Robinson has called an institutionalized “absence of mind,” incarnated in virtually every character and every interaction, is the secret force that drives this movie and makes its final section so rich and strange. Nick and Amy are delivered back into each other’s company, shorn of all pretenses and alibis, and we are confronted with two pure creatures of their poisoned social environment, a new Adam and Eve glowing with the cold light of a craziness they’ve each fully absorbed.

In short, this “trashy,” “misogynist” popcorn movie based on a “supermarket best seller” is one of the gutsiest and most complex cinematic enterprises I’ve encountered in a while.

Slant Magazine [Ed Gonzalez]

Gillian Flynn's impeccably crafted, if garishly written, novel Gone Girl leads readers down a rabbit hole so mind-bogglingly twisty that it almost defies reason. The sea-sawing motions of the book's he-said-she-said structure, which so cunningly involves the audience by toying with their expectations of narrative and male-female relationships, clearly appealed to David Fincher, a filmmaker whose art has always been devoted to the enigma of personality and memory, and so often reflected in his surgical-like fondness for symmetry. His films don't lack for thieves and crooks, scheming and sleuthing, and Gone Girl and all its slippery sleights of hand are very much in his wheelhouse. But it remained to be seen if this postmodern observer of procedure would challenge or obscure, with his propensity toward cool and sobering aesthetic spectacle, the having-it-both-ways moral relativism that Flynn so stridently engenders throughout her book.

The film begins deceptively on the straight and narrow, with a privileged husband and wife, Nick (Ben Affleck) and Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike), in the wake of some money problems, moving from New York City to the heart of Mark Twain country. In the first shot, Nick passes his fingers through the blond locks of Amy's finely shaped head, which suggests, like Fincher's crystalline images, a patina of myth. And even though he wants to break her head open, and even though she's been given so little agency in the choice of their move to the Midwest, his shock is palpable enough when he comes home to find broken glass on the floor to suggest that he has nothing to do with her disappearance. At least not in ways the audience might expect. Fincher is in the business of obfuscation, and Gone Girl thrills in its lack of temporal fluidity and withholding of cause and effect. This is, on the surface, a run-of-the-mill anatomy of a crime that finally becomes an almost surrealistic dive into the mind of a psychopath.

As murder mystery, Gone Girl abounds in minutiae, in speculation, clues, witness testimony, and news reportage. Yet this isn't, as Nathan Lee wrote in praise of Zodiac in the Village Voice, an "orgy of empiricism." Fincher catalogues the events of the novel with an elegant brusqueness that feels wiped clean of potential resonances, like the kitchen floor where Amy lost copious amounts of blood. There's an acknowledgement of the economic despair that's depleted our nation in the postcard-pretty montage of decrepitude that opens the film, but any insight into this desolation and how money woes color Nick and Amy's predicament stalls there. Even a later scene, where the investigation into Amy's disappearance leads to an abandoned mall where she might have bought a gun from a homeless person, is too busy fulfilling Fincher's familiar shtick of having detectives flash lights into chasms of inky-black darkness to ever hauntingly scan as an empathetic imprint of a world having been left behind.

Fincher's detachment is fitting here only insofar as he's dealing with characters who are always on guard. But there's detachment, and then there's disinterest. In flashbacks that punctuate the film, Amy is scrutinized with a transparency that's laughable. If she's into bending men to her will in the present, it's a mania that's easily traced back to her parents, who "plagiarized her childhood" for Amazing Amy, a popular string of children's books wherein her fictional doppelganger achieved everything she couldn't in real life. Woe is Amy, a practically brick-to-the-head example of Freud's concept of the uncanny, and woe is Nick, the prototypical nebbish who's unlucky to have gotten caught in her crosshairs. Or any woman's crosshairs, for that matter, which is consistent with the book's vision of Nick being incessantly victimized by the other sex, women who are depicted only as shrill, lecherous, petty, or conniving. There's a comic streak to the film that suggests Fincher may understand the material as trash, but it's the kind of affectation that only reinforces, rather than dulls, its insults.

As in Flynn's novel, because Nick's point of view doesn't take the form of written letters and isn't understood as an appeal to the audience, his innocence, at least in Amy's killing, is always assumed. No suspense there, and if the shrillness of the cloyingly appeasing Amy on the page was belied by her convincing earnestness (this is Flynn's one masterstroke, which is easily confused for bad writing), there's no leavening agent in the film, as Pike's guileless delivery makes clear that Nick is unmistakably in the right, even if he doesn't always have the upper hand. Just as Fincher views the infinitely frayed layers of Affleck's prized mug, from the furious to the resigned, as the orbit around which the entire film pivots, he more or less delivers Amy as an open book, reducing the revelation of her spectacularly feigned innocence and sense of victimhood to just a matter of time.

Gone Girl is at heart a melodrama about a marriage's collapse and bonkers restoration. The ending many readers wanted from the book is the one where, as mischievously suggested by the film's early teasers, Nick sends Amy to the bottom of the Mississippi. But that's not the one we deserve—and it's not the one we get in this most faithful adaptation. In the pathological way Amy retaliates against Nick, the true Amy is revealed as a stereotypical embodiment of feminism by wanting to strip men, and not just Nick, of their "power." Affleck is so committed to how his character becomes resigned to the anxieties that Amy causes him that his surrender feels more understandable than it does in the novel, where it was even more fabulously and conspiratorially orchestrated. But Fincher and Flynn should have gone further and truly grappled with the real horror that, by giving his relationship with Amy another chance, Nick is indulging in one of the great myths of feminism: that it emasculates men. Rather than undermine that noxiousness, Fincher enshrouds it in funereal brushstrokes that cast his Gone Girl as a fashionable tumbling into an abyss of willful denial.

Pursuits of Happiness: David Fincher’s Gone Girl Adam Nayman from Cinema Scope

Lest anybody doubt that Gone Girl is a comedy, consider that it includes, in no particular order: a scene where America’s favourite bad actor Ben Affleck is coached on his line readings by a character played by a well-known Hollywood film director (Tyler Perry); that his punishment for uninspired delivery is having Gummi Bears whipped at his head; that elsewhere Neil Patrick Harris is cast as a super-wealthy beta-male who lives in the sort of isolated lakeside fortress typically stormed by James Bond (and whose ideal vacation itinerary includes “octopus and Scrabble”); and that at one crucial juncture, a major character who is completely drenched in blood and dressed only in their underwear drives up to the side of the road in broad daylight and exits the car to the appreciative response of a gathered throng.

Skillfully rewritten by Gillian Flynn from her own best-selling novel and elegantly directed by David Fincher—who is now apparently our patron saint of paperbacks—Gone Girl is, for the reasons listed above and a whole host of others, very, very funny. Clearly in a jovial mood, the filmmaker who Manohla Dargis recently designated our Dark Lord even times his own onscreen credit so that it immediately precedes a shot of Affleck’s unemployed magazine writer Nick Dunne carrying a battered board-game box into the bar he owns and operates in the less-than-picaresque-and-in-fact-downright-dilapidated hamlet of New Carthage, Missouri. The name of the game is Mastermind, which is the most amusing auteur vanity card since Sofia Coppola plastered her own name over a bejeweled necklace spelling out “Rich Bitch” at the beginning of The Bling Ring.

Essentially a disembodied director cameo, the shot of the Mastermind box cues us to view the ensuing proceedings through a Hitchcockian lens (and there are other, bloodier allusions to the Master later on). From there, it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to the kind of Kubrickian obsessiveness recently spoofed and vindicated in Room 237.To wit: when Nick puts Mastermind on the shelf, it’s piled on top of Emergency!, Let’s Make a Deal and The Game of Life, three living-room favourites that could have worked nicely as alternate monikers for the film we’re watching.

Gone Girl’s actual title refers to the sudden and suspicious disappearance of Nick’s wife Amy (Rosamund Pike), and any fair critical assessment beyond mere opinionating—OK, it’s the most entertaining American movie of the year so far, there you go—must include a discussion of her whereabouts and ultimate fate. It’s not enough to simply say that Flynn sets up an irresistible Lady Vanishes scenario in which the husband is pegged (by both the local authorities and the reader) as a prime suspect; plenty of thrillers, literary and cinematic alike, feature promising set-ups that go south. Gone Girl, though, is all follow-through, and it’s the precise nature of its revelations that gives it its power and makes it so widely polarizing, an overused word that absolutely applies in this case.

So without further ado, here it is: approximately halfway through the book (and around the same time in the movie), it’s revealed that Amy faked her own abduction to punish Nick for sleeping with one of his community college creative writing students; and perhaps more to the point, she also did it because she’s an absolutely monstrous sociopath. Flynn’s conceit of splitting the story’s action evenly in half between his-and-hers narrators (Nick and Amy), and then in half again between Amy’s forged and designedly self-serving pre-disappearance diary entries (her ace in the hole in implicating her husband in her fictional murder) and her more nakedly conspiratorial account of her life on the lam (“I’m so much happier now that I’m dead”), is as clever as anything ever devised by Ira Levin (and it directly echoes the bifurcated storytelling of A Kiss Before Dying, with a pinch of Patricia Highsmith). It’s been retained here, to a point: the difference is that by staging the Nick material at an omniscient remove, Fincher and Flynn entirely eliminate his interior monologue, which was (perhaps slightly dishonestly) laden with enough ambiguous observations and flat-out lies to suggest that he might be a villain. So even though Affleck convincingly sells the douchey, grown-up frat-pledge aspects of Nick’s character and leads with his “slightly villainous chin” (what a great piece of movie-star casting this is!), we’re given no compelling reason to ever doubt his innocence—a state of affairs that only serves to heighten both the surface and latent misogyny of the narrative.

Leave aside for a moment the fact that Amy (ably played by Pike, whose icy eyes and scarily symmetrical physiognomy are perfectly matched to the part) is a walking contradiction of trust-fund-suckling arrogance and bottomless insecurity, which manifest themselves in a cumulatively repellent and terrifying combination of diffidence, dishonesty and self-preserving amorality (she even spits in another woman’s drink); or that her insane actions are sparked by the discovery that her husband is fooling around with a younger, sleeker rival; or even that she’s not above giving head to get an enemy into a fatally compromising position. Excise its blonde-tressed black-widow antagonist altogether (goodbye, girl) and this is still a movie about a man harried at every turn by needy, grabby, and otherwise unflatteringly depicted women: unscrupulous groupies, media mavens, disdainful mothers-in-law, slatternly baby-baking neighbours, and so on. When Nick’s twin sister (Carrie Coon) discovers his affair, she reacts like a jilted lover, and she doesn’t seem to have a life outside her brother’s embroilment; even the level-headed detective (Kim Dickens) assigned to his case views our hero through a half-wary, half-desirous lens.

And make no mistake: this is all intentional, and it’s satirical, too. It’d be a little too convenient to trace an entirely clean break between the genuinely problematic female characterizations of The Social Network (2010) and the overtly ghoulish gals of Gone Girl, but it’s probably safe to say that Fincher—whose recent interviews in Sight & Sound and Playboy confirm that he’s now approaching his idol Kubrick in the imperious self-awareness department—knows that he’s been seen as a bad gender politician in the past; hell, it could have been what attracted him to this material, which is controversial in a way that buttresses rather than blocks its commercial appeal. It’s amusing that some people (men and women alike) who will watch Gone Girl and inevitably recoil from its brazen political incorrectness—including one jaw-dropping gore scene that goes beyond anything described in the book and feels like some unholy combination of Psycho’s shower scene and the opening credits of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011)—will probably place the blame on Fincher, when he’s simply faithfully translating the action and the attitude of Flynn’s book (aided and abetted by the author’s own screenplay).

So, to hold Flynn accountable (and to give her credit), Gone Girl is indeed awash in misogyny, but played up to such a degree that the insidious ideology is rendered absurd, and cathartically so at that. A colleague offered up Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct (1992), itself a Hitchcockian pastiche, as one possible corollary, and the comparison makes sense: recall that Michael Douglas’ scummy, womanizing San Francisco detective—also named Nick, come to think of it—is both imperilled and vindicated by the arrival of a legitimate man-eater in the form of Sharon Stone’s Catherine Trammell, Amy Dunn’s spiritual progenitor and deep-down soul(less) sister (as well as a clear precedent for Pike’s performance: like Sharon Stone before her, Pike is no spring chicken, and subtly works her relative-veteran status into her performance).

Basic Instinct’s paranoiac sexism and homophobia boomerangs back first on Douglas’ white-collar white male—it’s as if he’s willed his world of demented and dangerous ladies into being—and then onto the viewer, who is forced to interrogate their own enjoyment of such retrograde archetypes. With this in mind, the very best parts of Gone Girl—the last 25 minutes, after Amy has returned of her own volition with blood literally on her hands (she sensually washes it off in another Psycho shower-scene nod), an unlikely story on her lips and reconciliation in her heart—suggest a sequel of sorts to Basic Instinct, if that ice pick had stayed safely stowed away after all. What would it be like to live with somebody who you know is crazy, and who you suspect might be capable (mentally and also skill-set-wise) of killing you at any moment?

Or, in other words: What is it actually like to be married? Gone Girl’s portrait of domestic bliss as a kind of personalized thermonuclear détente is glib and obvious, but it’s also deeply satisfying, albeit in different ways in two different mediums. In the book, we’ve spent enough time with Nick the callow, resentful prick—the one who harbours murderous fantasies even if he doesn’t act on them—to feel like he at least partially deserves his fate walking on eggshells around his magnanimous gorgon of a wife. The fraudulent façade the mutually loathing couple displays to the world from inside their gilded suburban cage has the ring of poetic justice for both parties. In the movie, where our sympathies are finally torqued more in Nick’s direction, Amy’s malevolence plays more as a sick joke; I particularly liked how Nick’s tabby cat, whose well-being he considers even when he’s being arrested for murder one, pointedly sidles up to his returned mommy (probably because that’s how things tend to go in my house, too). And the final shot fully consolidates this latter point of view: it’s a piece of head-on portraiture à la Kubrick, a woman’s face with lowered eyes, simultaneously inviting fear and desire.

Speaking of Kubrick: at this point, praising Fincher’s meticulous craft is old hat—even a movie as bad as The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo qualifies as a proverbial silk purse. And yet the compliment that comes to mind about Gone Girl is that its maker’s mastery is all rather self-effacing. While Jeff Cronenweth’s grey-scale lighting and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ room-tone score are familiar (and welcome) elements, the attention-getting stylistic tics of his previous features are scarcely in evidence here. The great artistic leap forward of Zodiac (2005)—its methodical and metaphysical treatment of time and space—has played out in ways great and small in the years since (i.e., the wonderfully distended opening credits of The Social Network, which show the time it takes to traverse large physical spaces as a way of setting up its mouse-click-quick virtual world), but the upshot is that midway through his career, Fincher is a master both of framing (his controlling, Kubrick side) and of pacing, the latter a virtue he has cultivated apart from his influences. Gone Girl runs exactly two-and-a-half hours, and it moves like a shot from a silenced pistol. As it heads into the home stretch, in fact, its velocity starts to feel positively screwball, which makes perfect sense insofar as Flynn’s story of boy-meets-girl, girl-gets-gone, boy-gets-girl-back is, finally, a comedy of remarriage—one to freeze Stanley Cavell’s blood in his veins.

Interview: David Fincher - Film Comment Amy Taubin interview, September/October 2014

Although he made one movie about mad love—The Curious Case of Benjamin Button—David Fincher never seemed a director deeply concerned with intimate relationships between women and men. His primary subject has been masculinity as a struggle within the male psyche (Fight Club, The Social Network) or against a savage doppelgänger (Se7en, Zodiac). What links these films to his wildly anticipated Gone Girl is his tragicomic sense of the absurd, as it applies to the extreme acts human beings commit in order to protect and project an image of self largely based in what old-fashioned existentialists termed false consciousness.

Adapted for the screen by Gillian Flynn from her 2012 bestseller, Gone Girl has engendered much speculation, especially among the novel’s six-million-plus readers. Indeed, no major film since Hitchcock’s Psycho has been such a minefield of spoilers, and for viewers who haven’t read the novel, that minefield begins less than halfway into the narrative. We have tried not to give any of the film’s surprises away. Gone Girl is about Amy and Nick Dunn, two not particularly distinguished journalists who met and married in New York just before the crash of 2008 cost them their jobs. They move to the small Missouri town where Nick grew up and which Amy, a New Yorker born and bred, finds intolerable. When Amy goes missing, Nick becomes the prime suspect in the investigation of her possible murder.  

How did you go about adapting Gone Girl?

The book is many things. You have to choose which aspect you want to make a movie from. Most interesting to me was the idea of our collective narcissism as it relates to coupling, or who we show to our would-be mates and who they show to us.

The most dire part of the book then?

Well, maybe. It also is the most absurdly honest part, the part that touches us the most. And the newest thing in terms of what it illuminates about marriage and what may or not be going on behind closed doors.

Let’s talk then about the casting. Rosamund Pike is fabulous and she is exactly on the nose in terms of who I think Amy is. But the casting of Ben Affleck is a bit more surprising. Usually you work with actors who have great technical flexibility—the kind of actor who can speak a line 10 different ways and time his or her gestures and moves in relation to the words. It never struck me that Affleck is skilled in that way. But when I read about the casting, I thought that in another way he was right for Nick because he can be a blank slate on whom you can project just about anything.

He’s probably a lot craftier than you give him credit for. He’s wise as an individual, extremely bright, and he’s very attuned to story and where one is in the narrative. I think when any actor is miscast, it’s easy to blame them for trying to stretch. It’s difficult to be in the position where people are giving you a lot of choices. You have to be most thoughtful when everyone wants you. I enjoyed working with him immensely. The baggage he comes with is most useful to this movie. I was interested in him primarily because I needed someone with wit and someone who understood the stakes of the kind of public scrutiny that Nick is subjected to and the absurdity of trying to resist public opinion. Ben knows that, not conceptually, but by experience. Ben has all of that.

When I first met with him, I said this is about a guy who gets his nuts in a vise in reel one and then the movie continues to tighten that vise for the next eight reels. And he was ready to play. He was completely subservient to that notion. It’s an easy thing for someone to say, “Yeah, yeah, I’d love to be a part of that,” and then, of course, on a daily basis, to ask: “Really? Do I have to be that foolish? Do I really have to step in it up to my knees?” Actors don’t like to be made the brunt of the joke. They go into acting to avoid that. Unlike comics, who are used to going face first into the ground. They know what open mic is like. But actors, they want, when someone else is writing the lines, to be made to look good.

But we got the truth out in advance. When I first met with him, we didn’t have the script yet, but he had read the book. And I said, I’m going after something that walks a fine line between satiric and stupid. There was a National Lampoon record in the mid-Seventies called That’s Not Funny, That’s Sick. That’s kind of the tone of the movie. If we play it too earnest and sincere, then it’s tragedy, but if we go with the absurdity of it, I think it can walk a satirical line. The beginning of the movie purports to be the Scott Peterson case. Stripped from the headlines. And you say, I know what this is and I know where I am in the investigations. But then, by the time Desi [Neil Patrick Harris] comes into it, it becomes not about you at all. It takes off into this semi-absurd world. And then by the time we get to the fight in the dressing room, you kind of go, oops, we as an audience are not absolved. We’re complicit.

The movie keeps changing on you as you watch it.

Isn’t that what’s fun about it.

If Hitchcock’s Psycho had come out in the era of social media, Hitchcock could not have organized the publicity the way he did. He couldn’t have kept audiences from tweeting about the shower scene when the movie was only a third over. So this film is going to run into the problem that no one keeps quiet about anything. In a way, the film itself is about that problem. I can’t wait to see what’s going to be said about the movie.

I can’t wait to see what will go on between couples at dinner after they see it. There are so many interesting tectonic shifts in the movie. There’s the moment where Andie [Emily Ratajkowski] comes into it, and you watch the sexual dividing line in the audience. I’ve shown this movie to people and when they come out of it, they are either Team Amy or Team Nick. Team Amy doesn’t have a single quibble about her behavior, and Team Nick doesn’t have any problems with his. Especially the uninitiated. They are the most honest in their response. Then there are people who primarily measure the movie against the book and how they felt about the characters in the book. And the narrative of the movie is vastly denuded from the way it’s allowed to grow and bloom in the novel. It wasn’t a defoliation as much as a deforestation. Once you got it back to the branches and the trunk, it was pretty easy to see that this movie was going to be about who we are versus who we present to those we are endeavoring to seduce. And once we got there, it was easy to see that the absurdity needed to be part of the two-hour-and-half-hour fabric in a much bigger way than in the novel. For me, the 30 percent of the novel that’s about who we present—our narcissistic façades—becomes the entire foundation of the movie. Where the book had room for four endings, we only had room for one. You begin to prune back.

When we started working together, the biggest concern was how we would represent the two voices. And what was interesting was Gillian [Flynn] adapted so quickly to the structure that the “she said” is in flashback and the “he said” is being lived out in front of you. And you question which one is reliable or if either of them are. It wasn’t a question of there are 500 pages and which 300 were we going to lose. But all of a sudden, it was, if we prune back, it’s not so much a question of “he said, she said,” but that the “cool girl” speech becomes central to the exploration of “we’ve been married five years now and I can’t get it up anymore to be that person you were initially attracted to and I’m exhausted by it and I’m resentful that you still expect this. And you throw in a little homicidal rage and it’s a fairly combustible idea. Does that make sense? [Fincher has been laughing all the way through this passage.] I’m so sorry I made this movie: it’s just not marketable.

I’ll loop back: when you tested this movie, were there people who were actually on Amy’s side?  

I think, oddly, that it’s equally balanced. I don’t think Gillian is a misogynist. She’s taking everybody to task in a very subtle way. I think she is really gifted. I think she has a very interesting Midwestern pop sensibility. That is, she understands the salacious interest of “What’s going on in that house at the end of the cul-de-sac? It can’t be all that it appears to be.” She has a sort of Rear Window prurient interest that we all have to a degree. She probably has a higher percentage than most. But she also writes very much from the point of view of an audience member. She’s not above her material. She’s not making fun of these people, even the nosy neighbor. She’s not making fun of even those archetypes. And she’s interesting in that way. I kind of held my breath and waited to read her first draft and I was so emboldened by it. She was not only capable of slaughtering the darling, she took a peculiar pleasure in offing those extensions of her own imagination. And how she got to the things that interested me most: Who Are We? That great moment in The Stepfather, where he says: “Who am I here?”

I think everyone has those moments in relationships, especially extremely intimate relationships where you’ve spent years with someone and you find yourself standing in front of the mirror, and going “What!” Part of it is that I don’t want to let the other person down in their idea of me. When I hear my mate talking about me in the best possible terms, I absolutely want to be that person. Not at any cost, of course. But there are also times when you’d be shocked to hear your mate talk about you in not such glowing terms, and you can’t see yourself in that way. I think she was able to take the kind of headline-news angle—“What Was Going On in This Marriage”—and use that to create real traction with the question of who are any of us in these relationships. And she has a lot of fun with it.

But, look, it’s not healthy to have an idea in your head of who your mate should be. Who your mate is should be revealed to you through interaction, the quality of the person’s character, the behavior they exhibit. But I certainly know that early on in my life, I had ideas that I could fix someone. But then the thing you realize, if you’re remotely sane, is that I can’t fix anything about anybody else, and I need to look at that part of myself that thinks this is who I need to see myself with, and also, what length did I go to, how much did I betray who I really am in order to seduce that person and lead them to believe that I was a suitable mate for them. Forget how much I was lying to you, how much was I lying to me? There are all kinds of narcissism that a modern cultural intersection needs to address, but this book was on a frequency or a channel that I hadn’t seen before.

Are you describing the Hitchcock model? Sean Connery thinks he can save Tippi Hedren in Marnie, but that belief proves that he’s crazier or more damaged than she is. In Vertigo, Scottie thinks he can transform Judy into Madeleine, but he’s so crazy he doesn’t see that they are the same woman.

I don’t remember Marnie very well, but I know Vertigo really well, and I think Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo is so much crazier than any of villains in Hitchcock. I mean the so-called hero of that film is wandering up to women on the street and saying, would you wear a gray suit and change your hair for me? But I think this movie is different. Maybe it travels in those regions, but it didn’t occur to me, maybe because in some weird way Scottie never worries about the impression he makes. “No, that gray suit’s not the right one. Try this.” [Lots of laughter]

This is off the main subject, but did you ever read the piece Chris Marker wrote in which he theorizes that the second half of Vertigo is the fantasy that Scottie tells himself when he’s in the psychiatric hospital because he can’t admit his guilt for having not protected that nice woman, Madeleine, as he was hired to do, but instead allowed her to commit suicide by jumping off the tower. The only way he can handle his guilt is to turn her into an accessory to murder, who duped him, so the whole second half of the movie is a kind of wish-fulfillment dream—see, she’s really guilty, she deserved to die.

I’ve always thought that anyone who directs a movie in which a character sits down in the second half of the movie for half a reel to write a letter explaining what happened in the first half of the movie should turn in his DGA card. That aside, I’ve always felt the more compelling version of Vertigo is her point of view, which is so much weirder and more freakish even than his. And his is really sick. I don’t know how you can make that movie and not expect people to go “Dude, you’re so sick.” But I always felt the movie was inverted and the most interesting version would be following this woman who meets this man [Gavin Elster], falls in love, and then he says to her, “Hey, would you dress up like my wife, wander around a few museums, maybe toss yourself in the bay, let a stranger disrobe you and keep you in his apartment all afternoon, and drive with him down to Santa Cruz or wherever they go, and meet me on the roof.” So she climbs up to this rooftop knowing that the guy she drove down with can’t follow her up the stairs, only to find her lover tossing his dead wife of the roof and saying to her, “Shhh, now you’re in it deep, up to your neck. Keep your mouth shut, and here’s some jewelry.” That seems like a way more compelling movie—you are in it deep.

I’ve always thought that Vertigo is about a police detective who falls in love with a transvestite, not knowing that she is a transvestite.

Especially the way she looks in that gray suit [laughter]. Reminds me of Rigby Reardon [Steve Martin] in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid when he’s imitating Barbara Stanwyck and he goes: “I’m only half the woman you think I am.”

[Author’s note. In fact, as critic Rob Nelson pointed out to me, Flynn makes a strong reference to Vertigo in the novel. I had forgotten it when I interviewed Fincher, and maybe Fincher was being polite in not pointing out what a careless reader I was or maybe he had forgotten it as well.]

You’ve made two films in a row that are adaptations of best-selling novels. Is that the only thing that there is financing for, besides comic books?

Neither Girl with the Dragon Tattoo nor Gone Girl was a struggle to set up. But neither was The Social Network. That was a “go” movie. The Social Network came to me at a point in my life when I said, “Wow, just because it’s a really good piece of material doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make it.” [Laughs] I wasn’t offered any Marvel movies nor expect to be, and I don’t know why anyone thought of me for this, but I’m glad I got a chance to read it, and I’m extremely happy to have had a chance to work with Gillian and come up with something that I thought would make an interesting movie. My criteria isn’t to make something that’s been on the Times best-seller list and has a built-in audience of at least five million. I just thought when I read it that I haven’t seen this movie before. Dragon Tattoo was a story I was interested in, kind of in spite of itself. I was interested in the story of him and her. I liked that relationship. I thought it was spectacularly modern and beyond sexual.

That was great.

I hadn’t seen that. Yes, they partake of each other’s flesh, but that wasn’t the primary reason for them to have met. And it not codependent love, which I really like about it.

Novels are hard. They have incredible expectations around them.

There are not a lot of applicable comparative relationships. There aren’t a lot of people taking a symphony and whittling it down into a pop song. I always want to please the writer, not only the writer of the source material, but of the adaptation. I really wanted Chuck Palahniuk to be proud of the movie of Fight Club. And I felt the same way about Aaron Sorkin on The Social Network and Andy Walker on Se7en. I want the person who dreamed it up to walk away thinking that’s an effective distillation. I’m looking for the most salient storyline. There was a lot of good stuff in Gone Girl that maybe didn’t distract from the narcissistic facet of it but maybe was just too fine a marbling. Film narratives just move so much quicker. And have to be able to be seen, which usually means they have to be a little bit broader.

I’m happy that Gillian thinks it’s a good adaptation of her book. She did most of the heavy lifting. And I feel a responsibility to the audience, but no one feels more of a responsibility to the audience than Gillian. She’s ruthless. There was a moment when we were working on the end of the movie and we had these competing elements and we realized that the last 33 pages of the script didn’t help us. So she went away and came back the next morning and those 33 pages had become 31, but the two versions had maybe six lines in common. The rest of it she just chucked. She has an amazing work ethic. And she is completely at home with slaughtering anything that isn’t progress for our new collective narrative. Because it’s one thing when you ask who is Amy and who is Nick, but then, when Amy is Rosamund and Nick is Ben, you have to tailor everything to those personalities and what they are giving you.

I think when you are working with a novel that sold six million copies there’s a tendency to work backwards from the book, but the best adaptations work forward through the characters. And to have the novelist/screenwriter sit there and make eye contact with everybody and understand that implicitly. On some level she just took to it and realized that there is no point in fighting what these two people give us. You have to go through it with these people and allow them to shape it. We had these bookended shots that were going to launch and close the film, and these bookended sentiments, but the question was what was going to happen in that house with those characters after the shower. And she was just able say, okay, here we go.

So could you outline the process step by step?

I was sent the book. I said it’s interesting. Obviously we have to cut 300 pages but I don’t know yet which ones. They said the novelist is working on a draft of a screenplay but if it doesn’t pan out… I said, no, let’s let her get to the end of what she’s doing. And Gillian’s first draft was, albeit long, incredibly streamlined in terms of what my expectations were of what she would do. So I met with her and said, unabashedly, that I was impressed, “I’m betting on you.” But here’s what I think is extraneous and what I think is improbable. And we rolled up our sleeves and went at it for a month or so. Then we started talking about cast and availabilities, and we got to a draft that we thought could be sent out. In the meantime, I talked to Ben about the idea of it. And I sent him a script. And then we began to look for an Amy. And after those two, the most linchpin character was Desi, because he’s sort of like Clare Quilty, he sort of doesn’t exist in reality. And so we just took a left. We spun the wheel and it wasn’t your father’s Oldsmobile. And once we did that, the tone of the Scott Peterson inquiry, which is what you might think the opening is, was out the window, and we had to run off the end of the pier, and you’re in all the way up to your eyeballs. That’s what Neil Patrick Harris as Desi allowed us to do. And then Tyler Perry [who plays the lawyer, Tanner Bolt] because we wanted a calming influence, not a huckster. And once we had the widest ends of the spectrum in place we started filling in everyone else. And then we got everybody on Skype and had a read-through. It was interesting, all the little squares, but we could see who the actors were and how they felt about each other and where they each were in their careers. And we recorded the whole thing. All those little Hollywood Squares.

Had you ever done that before?

No. But we learned a lot so we were able to make more revisions. And then we rehearsed about three or four weeks and cut about 10 or 15 pages. And toward the end of that, we focused on the third act and what the summation of our thesis was going to look like. And then we went to Missouri and shot for about six weeks and came back to Los Angeles and shot another 10.

So when you talk about the book having four different endings, do you mean the book has four different rationales for the ending?

The book has a more elaborate wind-down, and the movie couldn’t have it. The end of the movie that we have now is the denouement of the novel, but the emotional catharsis is happening four minutes before that as opposed to 12 pages, which it initially was. For everybody, it felt that we were overstaying out welcome. And we needed to say, this is not something abstract. This is not beyond the experience of most of the people in the theater—what people tell themselves to make it all okay.

I read that Trent Reznor [who wrote the score] said this is a really, really dark movie. Do you think it is?

I think there are certain conceits in the kind of story and the storytelling… Well, let’s put it this way, I think he read the book or part of the book and he felt kind of the way you do. This is not me, it’s about Midwesterners or this writer who returns to this small town. And then when it got to the third act, as absurd as some of it is, it began to resonate with him. That was shocking to him because he thought at first that Fincher’s doing a popcorn movie. He hadn’t read the script so he hadn’t realized that once we had pruned back, we didn’t have Desi’s mother and we didn’t have more than an impression of Amy’s parents—they are much more caustic in the movie because they have only two or three scenes. Their suffocating presence in her life becomes more crystalline. And I think he was expecting to see something that was more polite.

Or more National Lampoon?

You don’t get much from Trent when you show him stuff. He’s cagey that way. But when he came out of the screening, he was laughing, almost giddily. And he said: “That’s so sinister in what it’s talking about. It makes me feel bad about myself.” I don’t really want to speak for Trent because he’s wildly articulate.

But I’m not sure yet what you think the tone of this movie has.

I think there were people on the crew who thought we were making Fatal Attraction. One of those Paramount thrillers of the late Eighties or early Nineties.

It’s definitely not that.

But there are these TV spots that all dance the same gig. Have you seen the trailer? Does it seem as if it’s selling the proper aspect of the movie that could possibly hook people without giving anything away? One of the things it took six months to negotiate in my deal was that they couldn’t use anything in the trailers of Amy past reel four. Because if you do, you ruin the movie. People go to the movies to discover things. They want to see actors as they’ve never seen them before and to see them in situations you never imagined them in because hopefully you never imagined seeing yourself in that situation. I need that sense of discovery when I look at movies.

I just want to correct something. I think Ben Affleck is wonderful casting. I would have done something stupid and obvious. I would have cast someone who is obviously ambiguous, like the Jude Law of Side Effects.

Interesting. But there needs to be a frat-boy component to Nick. You needed someone for Nick who could have opened their mouth and inserted both feet. And certainly Jude Law knows what that shit-storm is like. But Nick also has to be someone who has skated by on charm and has that as a deflection mechanism. And that’s what crucifies him. It’s the stuff that he didn’t do that makes him come on their radar. And once he comes on their radar, it’s the stuff he does do that seals his fate. And he needs to have wit; Ben has great wit. I think Jude Law does too. But I can’t see Jude Law getting in that kind of trouble.

Ben seems like the guy who wants to be everybody’s friend.

Yes, and that’s what Nick does too. And that’s what gets him in trouble—that “Hey, can’t we just all get along” attitude. That’s what I love about Carrie Coon [who plays Go, Nick’s sister]. You get the idea that she just loves him even though she’s going to develop calluses on her forehead from slapping him.

She’s great. She’s the reality principle. I love that character.

She’s part of the trification of how we see Nick. There’s Amy’s view of him, there’s Boney’s [Detective Boney, played by Kim Dickens ], and there’s Go’s. And she really, really knows him. So she’s the most necessary of the secondary characters.

I think all the women are very good in the movie. We haven’t talked enough about Rosamund Pike, but it’s hard to do that without giving too much away. I think this will be a much-talked-about movie, and it is also a very serious movie. But I really want to know what you think the tone of the movie is.

I think it is high seriousness in little dishes of candy.

Sight & Sound [Nick James] October 10, 2014

The New Yorker [Richard Brody]

Movie City News [Michael Wilmington]

Is Gone Girl Feminist or Misogynist? Eliana Dockterman from Time magazine

What David Fincher's Gone Girl Takes From Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho Forrest Wickman from Slant

GONE GIRL Review: David Fincher's Latest Is A Trash ... David Ehrlich from Badass Digest

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World Socialist Web Site [Marcelo Arias Souto]

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Gone Girl / The Dissolve Genevieve Koski

Gone Girl Goes Grim Christopher Orr from The Atlantic

Gone Girl the Movie Is More Complex and Richly ... - Slate Dana Stevens

Want to Know What Makes David Fincher Great? Focus on What He Doesn't Do. Courtney Duckworth from Slate

David Fincher's Misdirections: The Movies Inside His Movies « Sean Fennessey and Chris Ryan from Grantland

Review: David Finchers Gone Girl pits Affleck ... - HitFix Drew McWeeny

Gone Girl adaptation more faithful than Ben Affleck ... - HitFix Gone Girl Adaptation More Faithful Than Ben Afleck Interview Suggests, by Drew McWeeny

Gone Girl Is Smartly Crafted, Well-Acted -- and a Bit Too Slick Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice

Gone Girl is a trick only David Fincher could pull off - The AV ... Ignatiy Vishnevetsky from The Onion A.V. Club

The Society For Film [James Marsh]

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Seongyong's Private Place [Seongyong Cho]

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How Faithful Is David Fincher's Gone Girl? - Slate Aisha Harris

Gone Girl 15 Big Differences From The Book And Movie Jessica Rawden from Cinema Blend

'Gone Girl': A Gripping Film That's More Fun Than The Book David Edelstein from NPR

Who's Worth Your Trust In Fincher's Moody, Atmospheric 'Gone Girl'? Bob Mondello from NPR

Cinemixtape [J. Olson]

INFLUX Magazine [Steve Pulaski]

SBS Movies [Michelle Orange]

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EyeForFilm.co.uk [Anne-Katrin Titze]

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Gone Girl - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]

DVD Talk [Jeff Nelson]

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DVDizzy.com [Luke Bonanno]

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Reel Insights [Hannah McHaffie] also seen here: Hannah McHaffie [Hannah McHaffie]

outlawvern.com [Vern]

And So it Begins... [Alex Withrow]

IONCINEMA [Nicholas Bell]

Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]

FilmGrouch [Rick Swift]

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

'Gone Girl' powers up with formidable women taking lead Rebecca Keegan interviews both the author and the director from The LA Times, October 3, 2014

'Gone Girl': Film Review - The Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy

CinemaCon: 5 Things to Know About the First 'Gone Girl ... Rebecca Ford and Pamela McClintock at The Hollywood Reporter

The Hollywood Reporter Russia [Ilya Miller]

Variety Justin Chang

Gone Girl review - The Guardian Mark Kermode

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Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]

Examiner.com [Ben Kenber]

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Examiner.com [Michael Adams]

'Gone Girl,' 'The Good Lie' and other new movies, reviewed ... Ann Hornaday from The Washington Post

Ben Affleck plays a guy with 'a face you want to punch' in ... Emily Yahr from The Washington Post, October 3, 2014

Charleston City Paper [T. Meek]

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Psycho-thriller from director David Fincher David Luhrssen from Express Milwaukee

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'Gone Girl' Movie review by Kenneth Turan - LA Times

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Gone Girl Movie Review & Film Summary (2014) Matt Zoller Seitz from The Ebert Site

Movie Review: Ben Affleck in David Fincher's 'Gone Girl ... Manohla Dargis from The New York Times

Drew Peterson - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Finn, Jim

INTERKOSMOS

USA (71 mi) 2006

Interkosmos Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

An improbable mélange of aesthetic strategies, Jim Finn's Interkosmos defies the current moment's virulent strain of Communist kitsch by inventing its own dashed dreams and taking them seriously. A poetic film-essay held together with ultra-cheap B-movie glue (almost like an MST3K rendition of Sans Soleil shot into outer space), Interkosmos goes all counterfactual in order to discover the deep levels of belief -- a spirituality, really, although one that could hardly announce itself as such -- underpinning the last century's struggle for Marxist utopia. Finn's fabricated documentary details the East German space program and its plan, under Soviet auspice, to build Socialist entertainment colonies on the moons Ganymede and Titan. The project is manned by personnel from various Socialist and non-aligned nations, but the main focus is on the wistful, unresolved romance between East German Cosmonaut Falcon (Finn) and India's Cosmonaut Seagull (Nandini Khaund). Found footage of the rotating earth seen from space, or the edge of a space station pitched against the blackest infinite void -- in short, some of the most conventional images from our collective image bank, and ones you can see nightly on the NASA Channel if you so desire -- are redefined with melancholy juxtapositions. Seagull reads a love letter to the absent Falcon, her offbeat observations and halting emotional sense made all the more askew by her broken German. Falcon tries to explain to ground control that he has had "The Trolley Song" stuck in his head for hours, only to be gently chastised for capitulating to the seductions of a "capitalist love song." With moments such as these, Finn stages the conflicting desires that hard-line Communist attempted to mask, yet unlike so much triumphal (and yes, capitalist) pop culture, he does this without making light of the egalitarian, internationalist striving of Socialist culture. The lo-fi atmosphere of Interkosmos, with its Home Depot DIY sets and faded film stocks and a propulsive neo-Kraut-rock soundtrack, captures not the supposed inferiority of East German television or the rocket science of the Soviet bloc, but their modesty, the dogged will to persevere. (I was reminded of the late Spalding Gray's comments in Swimming to Cambodia about primitive communications technologies in Soviet submarines, how he imagined that you could still here basic human emotions coming through those flimsy tubes.) Make no mistake -- much of Interkosmos is quite droll, especially that bit about "The Trolley Song." But Finn's humor is more like the wry sadness of deeply held convictions washed away by changing times. (It's not insignificant that much of the Interkosmos program was in fact an excuse to build a Socialist library archive on a space station, far from the entropic vicissitudes of History.) Finn's invented facts, then, ultimately take on the character of a new set of dreams, a vision of a not-yet-lost utopia to come. Seem far-fetched? Well, just think about how primitive Can and Faust used to sound. Everything alt is Neu! again.

Currency | Shining Trench - Cinema Scope Jay Kuehner

As a ticket to peer into the culturally cluttered imagination of artist/filmmaker Jim Finn, take his 2000 photograph Snow and Farm, a faux landscape diorama featuring a model farmhouse and its surroundings that’s unremarkably true to its title but clearly a labour of fastidious reconstruction. Undermining the scene’s pastoral gloss—and, more crucially, possibly restoring it—is the use of Prozac pills and powder, reportedly looted from a pharmacutical-toting family member, to fabricate the natural landscape. In Finn’s hands, manipulation is less an act of deliberate subversion than an organic play between personal and political cultural effects. His films are like anamolous inside jokes that deceptively partake of broader worldviews, wherein a pet gerbil, skimpering before a crude scrim of found footage, might become a symbol of New World capitalism (wustenspringmaus, 2002) in its incessant energy. In his typically unclassifiable body of work, which includes a series of very homemade shorts and two feature-length “re-creations” (as well as a traveling roadshow of hand knitted pillows featuring communist heroes), Finn’s wayward vision can at least be described as perfectly pathetic.

Finn’s follow-up to his cult-credible communist cosmonaut romance Interkosmos (2006) finds him in equally insular (and pinko) territory, but decidely more earthbound. La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo (The Shining Trench of Chairman Gonzalo) is an improbable re-enactment of daily life in a Peruvian prison, circa 1989, among women inmates, combatant followers of Abimael Guzman’s Maoist revolutionary-terrorist group Sendero Luminoso (the Shining Path). Grounded in historical record, the film nevertheless reflects the director’s desire for “the bootleg video that I would have wanted to find in a market in Lima.”

Maybe therein lies the film’s originality—who would want to find such a thing, let alone in a market in Peru?—and likewise its shaky aesthetic; La Trinchera resembles an in-house amateur documentary of the prisoners’ dogmatic daily rituals, shot in Hi-8 analog video, with an ensemble cast of nonprofessionals (many cast from an Albuquerque theatre group of artists from marginalized communities). La Trinchera sees Finn’s nearly-patented sense of irony bordering on sincerity for the duration: so firmly has the director’s oft-quoting tongue become embedded in cheek, any traces of a smirk have taken on the appearance of a scowl.

La Trinchera’s plotless “action” is confined to the Canto Grande prison, which Finn scrupulously resurrects using a 4H youth dormitory at the New Mexico State Fairgrounds. Just as Interkosmos relied on a garage aesthetic in the recreation of a fictional space program, with its charmingly tin-foiled space capsule cradling most of the screen time, La Trinchera employs a built-from-scratch milieu that intentionally flirts with credibility: Playtime it isn’t. Reconstruction in Finn’s films seems half the point: there’s a performative, rather than narrative, element to the interplay between actor and set, however droll. And the banality of seemingly strange locales becomes all the more fertile for teasing out incongruities. It’s this fundamental absurdity that is Finn’s stock-in- trade, the basis for such dryly comic contrasts as the Trolley Song mumbled over crackling interplanetary airwaves in Interkosmos, or La Trinchera’s uneventful pick-up soccer match among inmates scored to agitprop ballads about brandishing machetes.

La Trinchera consists mostly of Shining Path inmates espousing ideology, by way of daily rituals of guerilla training, or in parodically earnest interviews that situate inmates before lovingly crafted murals extolling class revolution via bloodshed—all while the bouncing handheld camera seems to bob with curiosity, in spite of the smudged lens. Favoring expository sequences of the inmates in risibly mundane states of work or play— some brushing up on self defense, a little needlepoint—the film is still unavoidably crammed with revolutionary rhetoric that isn’t entirely obsolete in the 21st century. Communist kitsch has become a virtual thrift store for artistic tropes, but beneath La Trinchera’s schema of fake replica, with its color-coded pageantry and proud marching songs, there lies a not so didactic consideration of leftist ideology. Finn’s rather ironic use of genre—the space odyssey, the women’s prison movie—becomes a sly means of broadcasting a litany of found textual footage. Sure, capitalism may be like a lame llama with bloody hooves retreading its path, but there’s no doubt that someone in Peru in the last 27 years has felt that a revolution is a means of giving the people what they need. And that perhaps a dead father is better than a live traitor.

La Trinchera airs many such convictions from historical sources, culling much of its seemingly incidental rhetoric from the pages of Mao, Abimael Guzman, and testimonials from Shining Path prisoners. That many of the prisoners were women isn’t coincidental, as the movement included an unprecedented number of female combatants, which Finn highlights interrogatively as well as a matter of course. Invoking the ethos of Bolshevik feminist Alexandra Kollontai, in which there is no true revolution without gender equality, Finn may be cheekily praising Shining Path for its inclusive membership policies while wondering how it carried out, and still carries out, such extreme violence.  Was this an historically aberrant constituency or, as the director states in his press notes, more in common with 21st-century guerilla tactics? Still, there are no guns to be found in La Trinchera, but there are ladles, notebooks, and violins.

La Trinchera references Shining Path’s foothold among Indian groups by incorporating Navajo (Dine’) into the mostly Spanish-language proceedings, but the in-film revolutionary theatre performance of Macbeth in Navajo, while touching on issues of betrayal, fails to fully register the connection. Whatever dramatic thrust the film musters involves a trial of comrades who’ve strayed from the party line (“Do not call your fellow comrades ‘lazy asses’!”), and are summarily expelled to accusatory chants of ”Deng Xiaoping—traitorous Chinese rat!” The thread of prisoner interviews woven into the film’s reflexive content, conducted by an unnamed and unseen source, provides a cursory review of the group’s dogma, but scarcely acts as a critical consideration of its actions. If, as the filmmaker has proclaimed, La Trinchera creates a ”unique, fictional world based in fact,” it is in the context of imaginative history practiced by Washington Irving, himself name-checked in the prolix script. La Trinchera may be an anomaly—a women’s prison movie without the nudity, guerilla warfare without the guns, and Shakespeare without the drama—but it is also a deliberately framed portrait of Peruvian history without any direct recognition of atrocity. Does it go without saying?

No sooner does the question arise that it becomes subsumed by the absurdity of Finn’s conceit. Clever, but I still want some answers. Cut to a scene in which night has engulfed the compound, and the women take to the courtyard to shake some revolutionary booty, with a retro-electro salsa groove embedding yet another party imperative: “We are sustained in the inexhaustible beat of revolution” chirps the lyric. With his penchant for the pageantry of organized politics and an uncanny ear for its drumming-up of fervour, Finn is likewise induced. The poker-faced director, who has a penchant for appearing in his own films to often naturally comic effect, wisely excludes himself from La Trinchera’s nominally serious proceedings—though it’s worth imagining what kind of recreated archival footage Finn may have dreamed up, with himself in the Gonzalo role. Modestly scaled, La Trinchera scores a minor conceptual coup for occupying politically charged territory with the levity of, well, highly evolved karaoke video. Call it a party favour.

Finney, Albert

CHARLIE BUBBLES

Great Britain (89 mi) 1967

Charlie Bubbles Neil Young from Jigsaw Lounge

Charlie Bubbles so disturbed the all-powerful UK exhibition-distribution machine in 1967 that it was effectively denied any kind of proper release. Since then, Finney’s only similar credit has been as co-director of a mid-80s TV movie about the Steve Biko case. Perhaps if/when he wins his Oscar (for Big Fish?) and/or gets his knighthood, he might be encouraged to have another try – because 36 years on, Charlie Bubbles holds up well enough to suggests that Finney’s forced ‘retirement’ for directing was possibly as big a blow to late-sixties British film as the suicide of Michael (Witchfinder General) Reeves.

Finney plays the title character, a mega-successful author from Manchester now relocated to a luxurious London mews house. Over the course of a longish weekend Bubbles goes out on the piss with an old pal (Colin Blakely), then – accompanied by his young American assistant (a touchingly perky Liza Minnelli in her adult debut) – he drives back ‘up north’ to tour his old haunts, and visit his ex-wife (Billie Whitelaw) and young son (Timothy Garland) at their rural Derbyshire home.

Not a great deal ‘happens’ in Charlie Bubbles: the closest the film comes to the usual definitions of ‘plot’ is when our hero takes his kid to see Manchester United play Chelsea at Old Trafford, and the kid – understandably bored at having to watch the game through glass from an expensive box - absconds to make his own way home. Instead the screenplay - by Morrissey-favourite Shelagh Delaney (who also wrote A Taste of Honey – takes the form of slightly disjointed, sometimes mildly surreal episodes built around the jaded, disconnected central character, a writer enduring what F Scott Fitzgerald called “the crack-up.”

Bubbles is, financially speaking, enormously successful – we never find out exactly what kind of books he writes, but the era, and the fact that many of them have been filmed, suggests he’s perhaps some kind of a Len Deighton figure. But otherwise Bubbles’ life seems to be a disaster-zone – it’s possible to see Bubbles’ northern tour as a kind of deliberate leave-taking before suicide, or some other kind of desperate escape. Indeed, the final moments do see Bubbles quite literally float away from all of his troubles in a sequence that is, depending on your perspective, enigmatic/pretentious/dreamlike/a cop-out.

And of course, given Finney’s own Salford background, his hard-drinking image (Bubbles thinks nothing of driving halfway up the country after a day on the sauce) and his sudden 1960s rise to fame, it’s very tempting to interpret the film as an autobiographical cry of existential anguish – or perhaps an attempt for Finney to interrogate/subvert his own ‘legend’ in the way that several of Warren Beatty’s 1960s movies (directed by others) attempted to do. Finney, however, is very much in charge of his movie, and the focus is just as much on the a Britain awkwardly positioned with one foot in the past and one in the future, where the old class definitions are becoming blurred by money, where the old terraced houses are being torn down while Manchester city-centre (unwisely) dives headlong into a concrete-brutalist future.

Mike Hodges must have seen Charlie Bubbles before making his similarly northern-metropolis-on-the-cusp time-capsule Get Carter (1972) - which also features a colliery jazz-band marching through what once was a vibrant housing estate - while the Derbyshire sequences prefigure both The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (1973) and 24 Hour Party People (2001) in their Manchester/Peak District dichotomy. Finney’s film, however, has a character all of its own – seemingly blunt but essentially enigmatic, much like the man himself. In terms of using cinema as a means of super-confident, enjoyably egotistical, of-its-time-but-ahead-of-its-time self-expression, in fact, the actor-turns-director movie which Charlie Bubbles most strongly recalls nothing less than Citizen Kane.

Fischinger, Oskar

Ten films by Oskar Fischinger

Decades before computer graphics, before music videos, even before Fantasia (the 1940 version), there were the abstract animated films of Oskar Fischinger (1900–1967), master of “absolute” or nonobjective filmmaking. He was cinema’s Kandinsky, an animator who, beginning in the 1920’s in Germany, created exquisite “visual music” using geometric patterns and shapes choreographed tightly to classical music and jazz. (John Canemaker, New York Times)

Oskar Fischinger is one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, embracing the abstraction that became the major art movement of that century, and exploring the new technology of the cinema to open abstract painting into a new Visual Music that performs in liquid time. (Biographer William Moritz)

We now understand Oskar Fischinger not only as a link between the geometric painting of pre-war Europe and post-war California but as a grandfather of the digital arts. (Art Critic Peter Frank)

allmovie ((( Oskar Fischinger > Overview ))) bio from Sandra Brennan

Avant-garde German animator Oskar Fischinger devised a special color process for making animated films. Fischinger started out as an abstract painter and since the age of 19 had been interested in the possibilities of using animation to interpret music and verse. One of his first efforts was an attempt to map out the emotional progressions and changes with in a play by Shakespeare. In 1920, using a self-designed wax-cutting machine, Fischinger began making his first short films. In the mid '20s he came out with a series of studies which he called "absolute film"; following the advent of sound, these studies were played to classical and jazz music to great effect. In the late '20s he worked with feature filmmaker Fritz Lang to create the special effects for The Woman in the Moon. After developing his color process in 1933, Fischinger created Composition in Blue and won a prize at the Venice Festival two years later. He then moved to the U.S. to create another short film and help create the special effects for The Big Broadcast of 1937 (1936). He next tried working for Disney and did a highly abstract "Toccata and Fugue" segment for Fantasia, but because studio heads considered them too experimental, they were radically modified. Fischinger got angry and left the studio. He did remain in the U.S. and continued experimenting and creating animated commercials. In 1949, Fischinger won the Grand Prix Award at the Brussels Exhibition for his evocative visual representation of the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, "Motion Painting No. 1."

Bright Lights Film Journal | animator Oskar Fischinger Gary Morris, September 1998

Film historians have made much, and rightly so, of the enormous influence of 1930s German and Austrian emigres on the American film scene and by extension on American culture in general. Alongside auteurs like Murnau, Wilder, Preminger, Ulmer, et al. were artists toiling in more rareified realms. One of the most important (and lately overlooked) of these was the avant-garde animator and painter Oskar Fischinger. He worked at UFA in the 1920s, designed special effects for Lang's silent sci-fi flick Woman on the Moon, fled the Nazis for making "degenerate" art, created shorts for Paramount and M-G-M, spent a year with Disney on Fantasia, had a stint with Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre, and settled in Hollywood, where he lived, painted, and animated until his death in 1967.

Fischinger was born in Germany in 1900. An engineer and draftsman by trade, he co-owned an animation company in Munich by age 22, producing a variety of experimental films. His early artistic goal was to combine two of his great passions, music and the graphic arts. To this end, he experimented with photographing multiple forms — melting wax, cardboard cutouts, swirling liquids. According to Fischinger historian William Moritz, he devised "a machine that would slice very thin layers from a prepared block of wax, with a camera synchronized to take one frame of the remaining surface of the block. Any kind of image could be built into the wax block — a circle getting smaller would be a simple cone, for example." Later he would create a Technicolor-style camera for Bela Gaspar that he would utilize in his early color films. Fischinger's technical and creative efforts were applied, along with scores from Bach and Beethoven, to a hitherto unseen abstract art form known as "visual music." A long-overdue reassessment of his achievement in this area is now possible, thanks to this thrilling seven-film compilation (the first of a projected series) that samples his work from 1927 through 1947.

Some of Fischinger's shorts took the form of advertisements. In 1934, he made Muratti Grieft Ein (Muratti Gets in the Act) for a popular cigarette company. This is one of Fischinger's most startling works, a clear and in some ways superior precursor to the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" sequence in Fantasia. In this case it's a series of cigarettes marching in mad formation rather than broomsticks, and the overall effect (unlike in the rather disturbing Disney film) is of a vast, pleasurable energy made of sound, shape, and color and barely contained. Think Busby Berkeley with cigarettes rather than half-naked women.

Seelische Konstruktionen (Spiritual Constructions), from 1927, opens with two silhouetted male figures drinking together at a table. Over the course of the next few minutes, they change rapidly into all manner of shapes, objects, and creatures — miscellaneous blobs, snakes, lines, even a house that spits them out. This early take on psychedelia is a wonderfully witty exploration of a vast interior landscape.

Studie Nr. 7 (Study No. 7) was one of a dozen "studies" spanning the 1920s and '30s. This one is a gorgeous visual tone poem with a few small, dynamic white shapes popping decoratively out of a sea of blackness. The mood here is reminiscent of the minimalist work of underground filmmakers like Gregory Markopoulos.

Filmstudie Nr. 8 (Film Study No. 8) takes the trancelike properties of the previous film to greater extremes, with dazzling shapes blinking on and off the screen to the rhythm of Paul Dukas's "The Sorcerer's Apprentice." Critic Christopher Knight has compared this to the Fantasia sequence that uses the same music, with Disney coming up second. He calls Fischinger's film "a giddy, liberating experience of space in four dimensions."

The next film here is in color (Gasparcolor). Kreise again shows Fischinger's surprising modernism, this time using a vertigo-inducing Op art/Pop art canvas that predicts the work of later, lesser talents like Peter Max. It's puzzling indeed that works like this weren't revived for mass consumption during the 1960s.

The 1936 color short Allegretto was originally made as an insert for a Paramount feature, The Big Broadcast of 1937, but the studio wanted to print it in black-and-white to fit the film and Fischinger refused. Eventually he bought back the rights to it. Again it's hard to believe this film — with its dizzying concentric circles moving in and out of each other, its bold, beautiful colors, and wild angles — was made more than six decades ago.

The final entry here is Motion Painting (1947), which matches the Brandenburg Concerto #3 to a series of sensuous abstractions. Ever the seer, during one sequence, Fischinger created a multicolored grid that looks disturbingly like a computer motherboard.

Fischinger's predictions of abstract animation, Op art, psychedelia, light and laser shows, and other modern sensory phenomena weren't his only innovations. Fans of Warhol's Chelsea Girls may be shocked to hear that Fischinger used multiple overlapping projected images at live multimedia concerts in the 1920s. Music video addicts should know that MTV did not pioneer that form. As William Moritz says, "Fischinger made a deal with Electrola Records to synchronize his further Studies with Electrola's phonograph recordings and to include an end title saying 'You have heard Electrola Disk #1337, Vaya Veronika — Get it at your local record store!'"

Fischinger's unique talents were recognized early; by 1935 his films were being shown on cinema screens and at film festivals throughout the world as the last word in modernism. The Nazis' censure of his work as "degenerate" in 1936 was perhaps inevitable; this much visual joy had to be suppressed. At any rate, he got his revenge on the Nazis in films like Muratti; besides being a brilliant work of art, with its goose-stepping cigarettes it's also a devastating satire on the kind of fascist groupthink at which the Nazis excelled.

Fischinger Archive

Fischinger Biography, Long V. long biography

Oskar Fischinger - Films as animator/director:, Other films: extensive profile by Philip Kemp from Film Reference

Oskar Fischinger Biography Jennifer McHale, 2001

Media Art Net | Fischinger, Oskar: Biography brief biography

Oskar Fischinger - Animation Wiki - a Wikia wiki brief bio page

Center for Visual Music Oskar Fischinger pages

Website - Oskar Fischinger Queensland Art Gallery program notes

Short Films by Oskar Fischinger brief essay by Vadim Rizov (undated)

Oskar Fischinger by Mario Cutajar (undated)

Oskar Fischinger by Ray Zone (undated)

My Statements are in My Work Fischinger statement, 1947

The Importance of Being Fischinger Dr. William Moritz, from an Ottawa International Animated Film Festival Program, 1976

Oskar Fischinger Folder Notes on an art restrospective at the Toby C. Moss Art Gallery, September 20 – October 18, 1988

Tobey C. Moss Gallery: Oskar Fischinger Biography which includes images and an Expanded Biographical Essay

Oskar Fischinger: Artist of the Century — iota Dr. William Moritz, exhibition catalogue notes (2000)

Cross-Influence in Abstract German Animation Cross-Influence in Abstract German Animation of the Silent Era, by Jim Middleton, April 2000

Art in Context - Oskar Fischinger: A Centennial Tribute ... Notes on a centennial tribute, July 2000

The Legacy of an Abstract Animator - Los Angeles Times Charles Solomon from The LA Times, July 28, 2000

Chicago Reader Movie Review Music for the Eyes, Films by Oskar Fischinger, Jonathan Rosenbaum, January 2001

MichaelBarrier.com -- Capsules: Oskar Fischinger's Motion Painting ... Motion Painting No. 1, Michael Barrier essay written May 2003, updated January 24, 2004. Click here for MOMA image of the painting: Oskar Fischinger. Motion Painting I. 1947

Goethe-Institut London - Film - 2003 Oskar Fischinger: Music and Motion, December 5 – 9, 2003

Animation World Magazine A Gesture of Serenity, Robin Allan book review of Dr. William Moritz’s book, Optical Poetry: The Life and Work of Oskar Fischinger (256 pages), February 7, 2004

Bill Moritz, 1941-2004 Personal tribute by Harvey Deneroff, April 2, 2004

"Space Light Art" - Early Abstract Cinema and Multimedia, 1900-1959 Cindy Keefer from CVM, 2005, slight revisions in 2008

TATE ETC. - Europe's largest art magazine Where Abstraction and Comics Collide, Esther Leslie from Tate magazine, Summer 2006

“FRIEDE” Moon Rocket & Oskar Fischinger « Balduin Blog Balduin blog, November 9, 2006

Oskar Fischinger - Paintings in Motion « motion design Research weblog by Mark Webster, January 16, 2007

MOCRA - Oskar Fischinger: Movement and Spirit Art exhibition, July 1, 2007

Drawing Connections: Oskar Fischinger: Inspiring Motion Paintings July 24, 2007

Oskar Fischinger Doug Cummings from Filmjourney, October 4, 2007

Oskar Fischinger on artnet Artworks for sale

Oskar Fischinger - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Danse Macabre YouTube video (1:18)

Removable Tongue (1:51)

"Early Abstractions" (1946-57), Pt. 1 (6:00)

"Early Abstractions" (1946-57), Pt. 2 (5:28)

"Early Abstractions" (1946-57), Pt. 3 (5:33)

"Early Abstractions" (1946-57), Pt. 4 (3:34)

Oskar Fischinger, in "Fantasia", Walt Disney -1940 (6:07)

SPIRITUAL CONSTRUCTIONS (Seelische Konstruktionen)

Germany (10 mi) 1927 1970 reconstruction (7 mi)

User comments from imdb Author Squrpleboy from Ontario, Canada

SPIRITUAL CONSTRUCTIONS is a pure delight to watch. Whimsical and yet somewhat deranged silhouettes of anamorphic men twist and transform themselves in a world where nothing moves or acts as one should, would or could expect.

One of Oskar Fischinger's earliest films, Seelische Konstruktionen (as it is known in German), clearly points the way to the masterpieces of musically-blended experimental animation he would conceive in the decades to come. The sense of masterful timing and rhythm, the easy and natural -- though patently Fischinger-esque -- character traits of the subjects, and the smooth precision of both line and movement are all present already. Unique is the black-silhouetted, semi-cartoon characters (not nearly as rigidly self-contained as Lotte Reiniger's cut-out forms) which seem to adhere to no physical limitations whatsoever. Morphing into shapes, structures, objects, patterns, and even one another, as though they were made of pure mercury and set to music. As for the "story", it's rather non-sensical, and certainly silly, but also has a slightly dark and devious tinge to it as well; men becoming monsters, uncontrollable shape-shifting and the constant, almost desperate movement. And all is beautifully married to a piece of frolicking classical music, so trademark Fischinger as well. Much less abstract than most of his later work, but so rewarding to watch for it's differences and playful unfolding.

9/10. Made me smile, both on the inside and out!

STUDY NO. 7 (Studie Nr. 7)

Germany (3 mi) 1931

User comments from imdb Author Daniel Yates from Montreal, Canada

"Study #7", is a remarkable work that is a breath of fresh air after seeing so many mediorcre animation films. Since I don't really want to discuss them here, I won't go in too deep, but I feel that "Symphonie diagonale" (Viking Eggeling, 1921) and "Rythmus 21" (Hans Richter, 1921) are worth mentioning to emphasize why I appreciated Fischinger's film. Both earlier films are interesting, but boring nonetheless. While I appreciate any attempt by an artist to express his ideas in any way he pleases, I have to say that it does not always work. Eggeling's film does not work for me because first, he does not use all the screen space, therefore leaving us with to many empty spaces to distract us, and secondly, repeats the same series of images ad infinitum, which quickly becomes tedious. Richter's film is slightly better for he uses the entire screen space. However, I found use of only squares and rectangles much to mechanical and cold.

"Study #7", by contrast to the first films, is an exiting, involving piece. Fischinger of course believed that art should be a pleasure, and this film is certainly a pleasure to watch. It's amazing to see these etchings move in time to the music. In class, someone mentioned that maybe Symphonie diagonale would have worked better with music. In "Study #7's" case however, even though the Brahms music works beautifully, the film would have worked silent as well. The way the images scurry and leap across the screen create a visual music., much in the way Eggeling tried, but in my mind, failed to do with his film.

There is one specific moment from the film that really moved me. It could be hard to specify the moment, but I'll try the best I can. When I first Saw "Study #7" in my History of Film Animation class at Montreal's Concordia University, we saw some slides with still images from the film before watching the film itself. I thought to myself as I looked at those pictures, how much they looked like sketches of dancers or figure skaters in the midst of movement. When we watched the film and it came to the point where we saw those images animated, it looked even more life like. However, where human dancers are restricted by the confines of their bodies, these drawings break apart and form new shapes in ways only animated etchings can.

STUDY NO. 8 (Studie Nr. 8)

Germany (4 mi) 1931

User comments from imbd Author Bob Kosovsky (bkosovsky@nypl.org) from New York, NY

When most people think of films, they think of photography of recognizable images and form. This film is totally abstract -- it's all the negative images of chalk on paper (i.e. it appears as white lines and shapes among a black background). But it is simply an amazing and breath-taking excursion into a very different world of cinema, one that is totally guided by image, movement and sound (i.e. music). Fischinger's abstract vision is a continuously metamorphasizing into different shapes tightly coordinated to wonderful music. It must be seen to be believed!

User comments from imdb Author (tugboat9212030@yahoo.com) from New York

I don't know how many people will see this comment, but I find this study to be of extra importance. I believe that this study features a particularly familiar piece entitled "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" by Paul Dukas. (It's either this one or study 6, I forget). For those of you who are wondering, it is the same piece that Disney uses in Fantasia and Fantasia 2000 with Mickey Mouse as the apprentice, and it has grown into the piece into which we all know and love. I don't think this is a coincidence: Walt Disney MUST have seen Fischinger's studies and was so intrigued that he used one of the pieces for his Fantasia. So when you are seeing these 70 year old studies, you're seeing the basis for modern animation. In short, if Fischinger and others had not done these early visual pieces, we wouldn't have great masterpieces like Snow White, Pinocchio, Shrek, and Toy Story. It all originates to this.

COMPOSITION IN BLUE (Komposition in Blau)

Germany (4 mi) 1935

User comments from imdb Author Christopher Mulrooney from Los Angeles (link lost)

The physical elements of stop-motion as pure color (cubes, flat shapes, strips, circles) rhythmically accompanying the overture to Nicolai's Die Lustigen Weiber Von Windsor. Columns of color emerge from the ground, dip down from the upper frame to splash pools of color, it's the base of Clokey passing through Arp on its way to Agnes Martin by way of Albers.

User comments from imdb Author Daniel Yates from Montreal, Canada

"Composition in Blue" truly struck me. This was Fischinger's first film in colour, and you can tell. By the way he uses the colour, you would think that they were all going to disappear tomorrow, and the world would be left in black and white, with this film the only remaining evidence of its coloured past. One moment that I particularly remember is from the beginning. A group of red and blue blocks pile on top of each other. I've always liked the bizarre, wavy effect that happens when you combine blue and red. The way Fischinger does that here, with the blocks moving closer to the screen, had a hypnotic effect on me. It was truly beautiful.

User comments from imdb Author: segaltoons from San Francisco bay area

This is a truly amazing film, very early full color work. It is not Fischinger's first in color, Kreise (1933) a.k.a Circles and Muratti Greift Ein (1934) a.k.a Muratti Marches On (a cigarette commercial) were both in color, but the color may not have been as full as in this film. The music is from the overture to The Merry Wives of Windsor by Otto Nicolai. His wife, Elfreide did a short segment in the middle. The film is mostly colored boxes moving in tight synchronization to the music, at the climax there is some striking painted work that foreshadows some of his great work to come, like Allegretto. This film was a sensation in Germany and the attention brought him a contract with Paramount which allowed him to escape Nazi Germany.

Media Art Net | Fischinger, Oskar: Composition in Blue

ALLEGRETTO

USA (3 mi) 1936

User comments from imbd Author: Christopher Mulrooney from Los Angeles (link lost)

First, it's cel animation. The backgrounds are reminiscent of Wachsexperimente. They are two sets of concentric circles, one expanding and one contracting, followed by a single expanding set. The color sequence is from cool to warm.

Cel animation gives Fischinger more flexibility. He doesn't Mickey Mouse the action generally speaking. It's an evocation of mood and timbre and vocalization, created as an independent, you might almost say free-standing abstract composition.

Ralph Rainger shortly thereafter co-wrote "Thanks for the Memory". His music is charming to the point of distraction from the dazzling brilliance of Fischinger's work.

User comments from imdb Author Darragh O' Donoghue (hitch1899_@hotmail.com) from Dublin, Ireland

I'm afraid I know nothing about Fischinger, although his name often crops up as a pioneer of abstract animation, so I can only enjoy this short as a sensual experience, but what a sensual experience. The title is a musical expression (meaning to play a piece quite quickly), and the film visualises a piece of big band jazz by Ralph Rainger. Beginning with ordered concentric circles, ALLEGRETTO follows the music with elaborate firework-like patterns exploding the screen, specifically diamonds, amid a riot of colour. The music, probably conservative enough on its own, begins to sound urgent and hysterical with this visual barrage, which, while highly ordered and geometric, seems violently unstable. I am sure there are deep aesthetic and philosophical reasons for this, but as an exercise in colour and line, it is a thrilling treat.

AN OPTICAL POEM

USA (6 mi) 1937

User comments from imdb Author mgconlan-1 from United States

Just about anyone who's ever made a music video — especially an abstract one — owes a debt of gratitude to Oskar Fischinger. This short film is a charming rendition of Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody set to a dazzling series of colored dots, lines, flashes and vivid visual effects that often look like a Piet Mondrian painting come to life. Paul Marquardt's often cheeky orchestration — far different from the one usually heard — adds a quite inventive series of tonal effects to the film that only underscores the rambunctious appeal of Fischinger's animation. I remember seeing films like this from the 1960's and not realizing anyone had done anything this imaginative with the same format thirty years earlier — and I can't for the life of me imagine what unsuspecting moviegoers who caught this in 1937 on a program headlined by an MGM feature of the period made of it!

MOTION PAINTING NO. 1

USA (11 mi) 1947

User comments from imdb Author Christopher Mulrooney from Los Angeles (link lost)

"The spiral is a spiritualized circle," Nabokov says. "In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, unwound, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free." Fischinger paints spiral formulations on glass, disposed as color harmonies, then built up layer on layer in a stop-motion relative of Clouzot's technique for Le Mystère Picasso, to the accompaniment of Bach's Third Brandenburg Concerto (first movement).

Squares of color build up rapidly, become two abstract figures, then a landscape. A bold vertical spiral appears, then organic forms, then the spiral again, this time circling a vertical shaft. Spirals (blue, red, yellow) painted flat ("A colored spiral in a small ball of glass...") begin to fill the frame. Orange-red brushwork overlays this, and the composition becomes very dense. Large spirals dominate the composition again (blue, red), organic relations are made, vegetable or floral forms are created. The whole thing becomes a network of lines, which are finally overlaid with squares of color that eventually achieve blankness.

A capital survey of painting from Klee (it might suggest his Pedagogical Sketchbook) to Albers, with a bit of Max Ernst. Then it continues in segmented yellow rectangles, small amounts of blue, then red. The frame is filled with angles, setting off a new composition of solid diagonal lines, curves are introduced, the grand culmination is a compendium of Fischinger's œuvre as a painter in constellations and Western abstraction, with a segment of his earlier animation (arcs in motion).

User comments from imdb Author Thomas Pfaff from California

This is perhaps my favorite animation, filmed on at least four panes of glass and layered in an improvisational pattern.

Fischinger's tastes ran to form and color. Some of the color moods of Disney animations during his day reflect this, even though he was not retained [ahem] as an employee of Disney and evidently made no direct contribution to any Disney flicks.

I saw one of his best paintings hanging in a funny little antique store in Glendale, CA. I always wish I would have inquired if it was for sale.

Fischinger was more of a painter than an animator. His animation skills were limited, or should I say that he probably just wasn't interested in what turned into mainstream animation techniques and subjects.

Folks who like Fischinger should also check out Alexander Alexeieff. Alexeieff does not play with color but does play with form. There are some overlaps in their styles. For obvious reasons (lack of color film stock in the 1930s) Fischinger did a lot of black and white (charcoal) animations exploring motion and symbolism. In the black and white material Fischinger and Alexeieff seem to complement each other more.

Carl Jung comes to mind.

Oh I am jumping around aren't I?

I wish Disney would revisit the Fischinger influence in their animations.

See Disney's original Fantasia, Make Mine Music and Melody Time DVDs to see color and style influences by Fischinger. There is some great material there.

Anyway Motion Painting #1 is like nothing else [not like Disney at all] and will probably blow your mind.

MichaelBarrier.com -- Capsules: Oskar Fischinger's Motion Painting ... Motion Painting No. 1, Michael Barrier essay written May 2003, updated January 24, 2004. Click here for MOMA image of the painting: Oskar Fischinger. Motion Painting I. 1947

Fitoussi, Marc

LA VIE D’ARTISTE C- 68

France (107 mi) 2007 ‘Scope La Vie d’Artiste

A film that explores the lives of lovable losers, three sad sacks whose career dreams as artists have long since fallen off the fast track yet they still insist on holding out hope. Unfortunately, this is a kind of commercial film the French specialize in that has become overly formulaic, using self-effacing humor bringing characters to the brink of embarrassment and personal ruin, making fun of them along the way as they sputter and fall before finally allowing them a brief window of optimism. There is an audience that loves to laugh at watching people make complete fools of themselves, but unless there’s more to it than what this film offers, I’m not one of them. I’m sure there’s a whole philosophy surrounding the tragic universality of laughing at a clown, perhaps best expressed by a Charles Mingus Jazz Workshop composition from 1959 called “The Clown” with an improvised narrative from radio personality and Beat writer Jean Shepherd that describes the pain of a clown that that no one likes, so he tries so hard to gain acceptance and please the crowd that he dares ever more dangerous pratfalls until they finally burst into the biggest applause of his life only to discover that he’s dead, where the audience all along thought it was just part of the act. His sadness, obviously, was kept concealed from his audience. This film never takes it to those extremes, but sadness is an integral part of coming to terms with one’s personal limitations. Rather than show it, this film instead interweaves the story of three characters in utter denial about their ordinariness, believing they are somehow better than the rest, that they are artistes.

Cora, Émilie Dequenne, otherwise known as ROSETTA (1999), has regrettably fallen to the life of a karaoke hostess introducing amateur acts, where at times the performances are so horrible that her only recourse is to take the mike and sing the song herself, a rather wretched display of vanity, but aspiring to be a singer herself, she reveres the charm of the old songs and hates to see them mangled. Alice (Sandrine Kiberlain) is an actress that made a career move to provide voice dubs in French for Japanese manga films and grows alarmed when she discovers no one will hire her for anything else, as she still sees herself as a star. Bertrand (Denis Podalydès) teaches high school language arts but becomes stymied by writer’s block when he can’t finish his second novel, becoming obsessed with his futility at the expense of his students who are all but ignored. Of course they all have personal lives that fall into utter turmoil as they spend their waking hours attending to no one but themselves, where social calamities are just waiting to happen, but that doesn’t stop them from pursuing their dreams until they are utterly disgraced or humiliated. The filmmaker pokes fun at them throughout until there is nothing left to make fun of. Somehow, at the end of their rope, like alcoholics who have to reach the absolute bottom, they finally get a good look at themselves in the mirror. While there are plenty of good laughs, and occasional personal truths revealed, much of this was painful to endure, much like “The Clown” where we were just waiting around for the next pratfall. This film also has the distinction of having the worst musical soundtrack of any film seen this year, bearing a resemblance to mindless musical themes heard on game shows.

12th Annual Festival of New French Cinema Facets Multi-Media

Ostensibly a frothily good-natured French social comedy, Marc Fitoussi's La Vie d'artiste bristles with trenchant observations and sometimes cruel verities about the frustrations of creative pursuit. Interlocking narratives follow three characters who pursue their solitary aspirations to artistic excellence. Alice (Sandrine Kiberlain, Seventh Heaven, After You) has found success in the movie dubbing industry, where she supplies the voice for a popular Japanese anime female action figure, but fears that legitimate recognition in the acting world is slipping out of her grasp. Cora (Émilie Dequenne, Fissures, The Housekeeper) is an aspiring vocalist working as a karaoke hostess who reveres the tradition of French chanson but cannot find her place in the 21st-century pop universe. And Bertrand, portrayed in a sublimely painful performance by the priceless Denis Podalydès (It's Easier for a Camel, Liberté-Oléron) is a teacher obsessed with completing that elusive second novel and prepared to compromise himself horribly in the hope of reviving his flagging muse. Disaster, humiliation and bad judgment await all three characters round every corner, but filmmaker Fitoussi guides his trio to eventual self-knowledge with compassion and satisfying mischief. (BFI London Film Festival) Directed by Marc Fitoussi, France, 2007, 35mm, 107 mins. In French with English subtitles.

Plume Noire Review [Fred Thom]

There is a fine line between living from your art and selling out, which is what La Vie d'Artiste explores, following the sinuous paths of an actress, a singer and a writer.

Following Avenue Montagne, La Vie d'Artiste seems to confirm that there is a new subgenre in comedy, which aims at chronicling the lives of artists in Paris, which isn't surprising given that the City of Lights is also known as the world's capital of the arts.

One can imagine what such a subject would have become in the hands of a pretentious filmmaker — I'm thinking a headache-inducing solemn essay — or in the hands of a vulgar director — see Claude Lelouch's And Now Ladies and Gentlemen if you dare. By opting for a light comedy, writer/director Marc Fitoussi manages to smoothly deliver his message without forgetting to bite serious artists and sell-outs in the process.

Sandrine Kimberlain (Alias Betty, For Sale) plays Alice, an actress who makes ends meets by dubbing a manga while dreaming of serious work. Through her character, we're told that even if you have talent, luck is one of the most important factors to make it in this industry. Both Alice and Bertrand (Denis Podalydès — Caché), a self-absorbed college professor trying to write a novel, take themselves seriously, but whatever diverse paths they choose, we see that real art and success aren't assured. Through Cora (Emilie Dequenne — The Housekeeper), a singer who has a taste for "chanson populaire", Mr. Fitoussi delivers the portrait of a more genuine artist who'd rather struggle than sell out — she even turns down a French American Idol audition.

While La Vie d'Artiste isn't a deep, unforgettable oeuvre, it is a pretty accurate depiction of artists from these various fields — evolving in these worlds, I can tell you that I recognized each of the characters. What also makes this film work is that Mr. Fitoussi used a refreshing and charming comedy as a vehicle for his message. Despite its subject, the picture is never patronizing or boring, especially since it's supported by a good cast.

In the end, the film tells us that it's OK to sell out, as long as there is an audience and that you don't compromise yourself. While I don't totally agree with the beginning of that statement, the point where I'm right behind him is that — fake and bad — wannabee artists should assess themselves and drop the ball — and I can tell you that, without a doubt, the world would be a better place without the likes of Thomas Kinkade.

Variety.com [Lisa Nesselson]

COPACABANA B 84

France (105 mi) 2010

Fitoussi is a director of breezy, light-hearted French comedies, known for their fast and furious dialogue that keeps the characters and the audience off guard, which usually play out like movies made for television. Rarely is their any profound context to be seen anywhere, and this film is no exception, a screwball comedy that offers a few heart rendering moments, but all within a mainstream movie context. In America, Steve Martin or Diane Keaton would be starring in these comedies due to their gift for verbal sarcasm as well as physical comedy. But in France, what better actress to choose than Isabelle Huppert, who is the all purpose actress who can do no wrong and can literally play *any* role. In this film, which is a comedy about selling timeshare apartments, a subject that nauseates nearly everyone across the globe, all the director has to do is point the camera at Huppert and she’ll do the rest. That is the formula for success with this movie.

Huppert plays Babou, another free-spirited, eccentric mother whose more conventional daughter Esmeralda, Lolita Chammah, looking a bit like a young Kim Cattrall, and as fate would have it, is Huppert’s real life daughter, announces she wants to get married, but the prospective in-laws are so straight-laced that she’d prefer her mother not attend the wedding. Her daughter is also ashamed that her perennially out of work mother has little she can contribute financially, so she’s already invented a story about how she’s on the other side of the globe and couldn’t possibly attend. Huppert is so distraught by the sentiment that she’s forced to actually look for a job (quelle horreurs!!), which she finds selling timeshares in the seaside resort town of Ostend in Belgium, perhaps the dullest narrative turn possible that is greeted with dread and pangs of horror.

And true enough, my guess is that this storyline was chosen on a wager after putting away considerable bottles of French wine, where the question arose, like Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder in the PRODUCERS (1968), whether Ms. Huppert could take the worst possible material that anyone could think of and turn it into a successful French comedy. It turns out Huppert can do comedy as well as Haneke, the problem being the unextraordinary nature of the movie itself, which offers a few unorthodox moments but is nothing special, but Huppert is positively uplifting in the role, as she is the mother of comic invention, continually finding ways to charm and warm the hearts of everyone concerned, audience and cohorts alike, even in the most conventional of movie formats. She has a way of making everyone around her better, where her ever-appealing curiosity about the world around her even works wonders in feel-good comedies. And this, let’s face it, is a delightful feel-good movie with a touch of romance and melancholy, with subtitles that race across the screen like they’re in a track meet.

The Daily Telegraph review [3/5] David Gritten

She aims to impress her conservative daughter Esmerelda, (played by Huppert’s own daughter Lolita Chammah), who is so embarrassed by her mother that she has not invited her to her wedding. Babou takes a supremely dull job, selling time-share apartments in the sea-side town of Ostend, to raise some money and prove her steadfastness.

Copacabana (the title plays off Babou’s liking for Brazilian music, which pays off at the climax), is gently comic in tone, but writer-director Marc Fitoussi has created a whole cast of well-rounded dramatic characters with light and shade here; he has a feel for the underlying seriousness in this mother-daughter rift.

This low-key delight may well lend itself to an English-language remake. It will certainly be our last chance to see Huppert on screen sporting a flamboyant Rio Carnival headdress.

The Hollywood Reporter review Peter Brunette at Cannes

One can only imagine the evil deeds that Isabelle Huppert must have committed in an earlier life, or possibly some hugely mounting debts, that have led her to accept the principal role in this completely misbegotten film by French director Marc Fitoussi. In it, she plays Babou, one of those obnoxious "free spirits" who fight the power by wearing funny clothes, taking in homeless people, and refusing to hold a steady job.

Her daughter Esmeralda, who can't wait to join the hated bourgeoisie, decides that she won't invite her wayward mother to her wedding, thus precipitating the ultra-high-concept that motivates the film's plot, such as it is.

Alas, the writing is awful -- both long-winded and never funny -- and both the characters and the situations are either completely implausible or completely cliched. Even the scenes are badly constructed, and just when you think a scene is over, it starts up again. Psychological motivations are confusing and/or contradictory.

The many references to pop culture -- both French and international -- fall flat, and everything in the film feels forced. As for the title and the Brazilian theme that fitfully reappears throughout -- better not to ask. Let's just hope that Huppert has something more worthy of her considerable talents land in her lap the next time she goes looking for a film to star in.

User reviews from imdb Author: guy-bellinger (guy.bellinger@wanadoo.fr) from Montigny-lès-Metz, France

Spectators who will go and see 'Copacabana' to have a good time will not be disappointed because writer-director Marc Fitoussi's last film IS a warm-hearted comedy but it is also much more than that. And it is always pleasant to get MORE than what was expected than the contrary, isn't it?

What they will get first is Isabelle Huppert as Babou, the central character, frolicking, laughing,dancing in cafés, wearing flashy dresses and thick make-up. A welcome change from her usual grave, restrained, suffering self in recent movies. And with the support of a bunch of funny actors and actresses (Luis Rego, as Babou's bashful old lover; Noémie Lvovsky, as her disillusioned former friend; Chantal Banlier, irrepressible as her business rival) and well-written witty dialogs, the comedic aspect of the film is undeniably a success.

But 'Copacabana' is not just a straight comedy. Marc Fitoussi's tale of an eccentric mother who tries to win back her daughter is much more complex and much richer than what you could expect. For the film is also philosophical (to what extent can you remain free in society, especially when you have children?), psychological (the conflict between Babou who wants to remain off the beaten track and Esmeralda, her daughter who wishes, as a reaction, a steady middle-class life, is well dissected), satiric (the dubious methods of time-share business are denounced), documentary (Ostend, on the Belgian sea-coast has rarely been filmed in the off-season), ethnological (the Flemish shown in the film are real people) and social (the young homeless couple episode).

And the miracle is that 'Copacabana' is so well written that all these aspects blend together harmoniously. You follow this seamless story from its beginning to its end effortlessly, until the final surprise (which I am afraid will remain a surprise until you see the film).

'Copacabana' is a well made film that doesn't overwhelm you but seeps into your brain and your heart. A feel-good movie that never falls into the trap of over-simplification. A kind of Gallic Capra-esquire comedy that makes love, intelligence and eccentricity meet to everybody's delight.

Variety (Jordan Mintzer) review

Kind-hearted realism and spirited thesping are very much the fashion in "Copacabana," a wryly observed sophomore dramedy from scribe-helmer Marc Fitoussi ("La Vie d'artiste"). Set in the hottest spot north of, um, Ghent, this amusing tale of a Boho mom who enters the time-share biz to win back her daughter's love starts off on shaky ground, but soon finds its footing thanks largely to Isabelle Huppert, appearing here in carefree comic mode rather than her usual ice-queen routine. Backed by a strong Franco-Flemish cast and generally efficient storytelling, pic should cha-cha among arthouse distribs after its Cannes Critics' Week premiere.

Despite its title and a soundtrack that includes songs by Astrud Gilberto and Jorge Ben, "Copacabana" has little to do with Brazil and much to do with Belgium. It's there that, following a disconcerting first-reel setup, the unemployed and single Babou (Huppert) heads to sell beachfront apartments in the northern resort town of Ostend, which looks in the winter like the kind of place where Michael Haneke or Bruno Dumont would gladly spend a weekend.

Babou is what the French call a "baba-cool," a sort of bourgeois hippie who never held down a steady job, and dragged her daughter Esmeralda (Lolita Chammah) from one country to the next in search of the ultimate laid-back lifestyle. But now that Esmeralda is grown up and about to marry clean-cut salesman Justin (Joachim Lombard), Babou needs to prove she has the chops to be the kind of hardworking, old-fashioned mom her daughter now needs.

When she lands the real estate gig, it's here that the narrative really picks up interest and humor, as the story transforms into a cleverly framed study of the highly competitive (and equally dubious) business of vacation time-share sales. Ever the iconoclast, Babou remains her insouciant self, but still finds a way to outperform her fiercest rival, Irene (Chantal Banlier, hilarious), eventually becoming the favorite of cutthroat middle manager Lydie (Aure Atika, on point).

What's most enjoyable about Fitoussi's characters is how few concessions they make -- these folks are what they are, and because they're mostly blue-collar, they have no choice but to work and stick together despite obvious differences. Thus, when Babou meets local dockworker Bart (the generous Jurgen Delnaet, from "Moscow, Belgium") and promptly begins an affair, it's clear to us (though not at first to Bart) that she's simply enjoying herself but will never be in it for the long term.

Huppert is hugely believable as Babou, making her seem less like the flighty New Age type then like someone who approaches life with eager curiosity, only to be ready to move on as soon as things grow dull. Her relationship with Esmeralda is characterized by the latter's rebellion against everything mom stands for, while Babou is forced to somewhat grin and bear her daughter's conservativeness, until eventually stepping in to give a loving and helping hand.

Tech credits are solid, with Helene Louvart ("The Beaches of Agnes") capturing the depressing contempo decors with natural lighting that shows hints of warmth.

Camera (color), Helene Louvart; editor, Martine Giordano; music, Tim Gane, Sean O'Hagan; production designer, Michel Barthelemy; costume designer, Anne Schotte; sound (Dolby Digital/DTS Digital), Olivier Le Vacon, Benjamin Laurent, Emmanuel Croset; assistant director, Laure Prevost; casting, Fitoussi. Reviewed at Club Lincoln, Paris, May 5, 2010. (In Cannes Film Festival -- Critics' Week.) Running time: 105 MIN.

Isabelle Huppert and Her Daughter Meet on Screen at Cannes Joan Dupont from The New York Times, May 18, 2010

Flaherty, Robert J.

Screen Online Biography

Widely regarded as the inventor of documentary cinema, Robert Flaherty approached filmmaking with an ethnographer's eye. Generating ideas 'in the field', he would shoot a vast footage - in his own words, photographing what the camera wanted him to photograph - and distil ideas and material from this. Flaherty is credited with eight films, all distinguished by an instinct for finding lyrical images. He made three of them during his eight-year stay in Britain during the 1930s.

The eldest of seven children, Robert Joseph Flaherty was born in Iron Mountain, Michigan on 16 February 1884. Having received little formal schooling, he briefly attended Upper Canada College, Toronto and the Michigan School of Mines (where he met his wife and collaborator, Frances Hubbard). He spent the years between 1910 and 1920 prospecting for iron ore in north Canada, where he gathered material for his first film, Nanook of the North (1922).

In 1931, Flaherty came to Britain at John Grierson's behest to make a documentary for the Empire Marketing Board: this was to be a study of craftsmanship in Britain's major industries. After some weeks travelling around the country and shooting a great deal of 'test' footage, the EMB's limited film stock and funds ran out and Flaherty was taken off the film, which was completed by EMB personnel. A sound version of Industrial Britain, incorporating some of Flaherty's footage, was released in 1933 for distribution to commercial cinemas.

For his next assignment, Man of Aran (1934), Flaherty and his crew spent over a year on the island of Aran, off Ireland's Galway coast, shooting the film and absorbing Irish life. Again, the production, financed by Gaumont-British, overran and the shoot was closed down: this time, however, Flaherty took part in editing the film which, despite charges of inauthenticity (the islanders re-enacted long-abandoned fishing practices for the camera), was enthusiastically received and garnered many awards, including Best Film of 1934 at the Venice Film Festival.

In 1935, Flaherty was commissioned by Alexander Korda to film Elephant Boy in India. This was a big-budget production by comparison with Flaherty's earlier work, and he was unable to complete it: after two years of shooting, the film was finished at Denham Studios by Korda's brother Zoltan. A "wretched piece of cinema by all standards," was Paul Rotha's verdict, "but it does contain some fine examples of Flaherty's work."

When Flaherty returned to London, no further projects were forthcoming, and in 1939 he and Frances returned to the USA, where he spent the remainder of his life, completing two more films. Robert Flaherty died in Dummerston, Vermont on 23 July 1951, of cerebral thrombosis. His work continues to be commemorated at the annual Flaherty Seminar, inaugurated by his widow in 1954.

Although his best work was done outside Britain, the single-minded, ungovernable Flaherty's sojourn here delivered a stimulating culture shock to the relatively staid men dominating the British film scene. More significantly, the scenes Flaherty shot for his British-made films remain among the most beautiful in the history of documentary cinema.

—Annette Kuhn, Reference Guide to British and Irish Film Directors

All-Movie Guide bio from Hal Erickson

Film Reference profile from William T. Murphy

Robert Flaherty Deane Williams from Senses of Cinema

Flaherty Index web links and resources

Robert Joseph Flaherty Biography by Dennis Doros from CinemaWeb

Thunder Bay Historical Museum Society

The Robert Flaherty Film Seminar

Flaherty, Robert They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Robert J. Flaherty, a Biography by Paul Rotha. Edited by Jay Ruby. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. Made available by the kind permission of Gei Zantzinger, copyright holder. Robert J. Flaherty: A Biography by Paul Rotha, entire book available online

How I Filmed Nanook of the North Robert Flaherty from CinemaWeb, 1922

Picture Making in the South Seas Robert Flaherty from CinemaWeb, 1923

The Handling of Motion Picture Film Under Various Climatic Conditions Robert Flaherty from CinemaWeb, 1926

Frances Hubbard Flaherty, The Odyssey of a Film-Maker, Beta Phi Mu Chapbook, Number Four, 1960, pages 9-18.

MoMA.org | The Collection | Robert Flaherty. Nanook of the North. 1922 The MOMA Collection

Jean-Pierre Melville's 64 Favourite Pre-War American Filmmakers (Cahiers du Cinema, October 1961)

The Documentary Stefan Herrmann, March 15, 2002

NANOOK OF THE NORTH

USA France (79 mi) 1922

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4/5]

Robert Flaherty's classic documentary of Inuit hunter Nanook and his family (including two wives) may look quaint today, and it certainly has a Wild Kingdom feel to it, but this groundbreaking documentary is nonetheless a fascinating and unique look at Eskimo culture, produced at extreme hardship and with even more loving care. Nanook's life, mainly concerning the perpetual quest for food as his family teeters on starvation, doesn't offer a lot of variety, but blisteringly real images like this don't come along any more these days. The igloo-building scene (he puts in a freakin' window!) is monumentally unforgettable.

Time Out review

Flaherty's pioneering ethnographic documentary is structured as a year in the life of an Inuit hunter (Nanook) and his family in the tundra east of the Hudson Bay. In terms of authenticity, much was staged, contrived and traditionalised (Flaherty would point to his subtitle: 'A Story of Life and Love in the Actual Arctic'), but these characters are plainly 'playing' themselves, and scenes such as the igloo-building manifest a sage grace and skill. The simplicity of Flaherty's outlook is reflected in Nanook himself, the film-maker's equal and intimate, while his intrinsic naivety and exoticism for once detract nothing from the truth of his story - the primal struggle for survival in extremis. Nanook himself only made it through another year before dying of starvation on a hapless hunting trek. (The film, which originally ran approximately 70 minutes, was re-issued in 1947 in a 50-minute sound version, produced by Herbert Edwards, with narration written by Ralph Schoolman and spoken by Berry Kröger, and music by Rudolph Schramm.

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

Robert J. Flaherty is sometimes regarded as the father of the documentary thanks to the 1922 silent film Nanook Of The North, which has just been re-released in a restored version. An explorer and self-taught filmmaker, Flaherty followed the family of an Eskimo named Nanook over the course of one year, filming their unbelievably harsh but apparently satisfying existence. The footage he captured is often incredible, even if some of it was clearly tailored for the camera. Nanook and his wife Nyla go about their daily existence, hunting, fishing, trading, and building igloos with remarkable fortitude in the face of brutal surroundings. Part of what makes Nanook such a great film, and sets it apart from the work of too many filmmakers who followed Flaherty, is that it never condescends and never seems motivated by anything less than respect and admiration for the culture it portrays. An added poignance hangs over the film thanks to Flaherty's introduction, which announces that Nanook died of starvation two years after completion of filming. Nanook's worldwide success, as Flaherty's widow and co-editor Frances recounts in a brief television interview which supplements this tape, helped change the possibilities of film by showing that long-form non-fiction works are not only possible, but can be just as gripping as their fictional counterparts. This version restores the full director's cut to its proper running speed and adds a dramatic new score, helping make an already important film that much more enjoyable.

Film as Art [Danél Griffin]

Robert J. Flaherty is the Shakespeare of the movie documentary, and Nanook of the North is his Prince of Denmark. It is a beautifully filmed, simply told account of a few days in the life of Nanook, an Eskimo living east of the Hudson Bay, and his family. Despite its technical limitations, including the obvious difficulty of filming under arctic winds, the film still holds its own today as a cinematic milestone of silent cinema. Flaherty certainly distinguishes himself as a gifted filmmaker, capable of capturing effective shots that are both action-packed and educational (how he managed to get a shot of those walruses before Nanook and the hunters crept up on them, I’ll never know).

Flaherty initially went to Hudson Bay on an expedition and recorded footage of Eskimos and they hunted, traded, etc. He was so impressed by this jovial, secluded group that he hoped to edit the footage into a documentary. Unfortunately, it was all lost in a fire down in the lower forty-eight. Determined to expose the Eskimo people to Western culture, Flaherty then spent the next few years raising enough money to return to Hudson Bay with a professional film crew, and Nanook of the North was the result.

History has revealed that most of the film is staged—even Nanook’s movie family is not his real-life spouse and children. It is therefore difficult to tell how much of this is faked and how much of it is real, but this question mark by no means hurts the film. Flaherty’s interest and appreciation for this culture remains, and even if Nanook and his “family” are acting out routines in their daily life for the camera, we can rest assured that they are accurate portrayals of the life of an Eskimo. In addition, some of the scenes certainly cannot be rigged: A fantastic fight to drag a harpooned walrus out of the water is exciting and realistic, and I’m sure that Flaherty didn’t bring a trained walrus along with him to act out the part.

Nanook himself (whose name means “The Bear”) has a famous legend surrounding him—we learn in the opening narration that a few months after Flaherty shot this film, the poor Eskimo wandered off into the wilderness and starved to death. This fact casts a sad note over the film; Nanook certainly seems like a delightful fellow, smiling pleasantly as he demonstrates his daily activities. He remains seemingly delighted that he is getting a little exposure after living in a barren, icy land for so long that, though as large as Great Britain, is only inhabited by around three hundred people (at least at the time that the film was made).

As we watch Nanook mingle with his peers and hunt/fish/gather, it is important to note that the rest of the world had little exposure to Eskimo life before Nanook was released in 1922. I can only speculate that it is this film that provided most of the stereotypes that we now have about these people, including the igloos, the parkas, ice fishing, and even “Eskimo kisses.” Such stereotypes can be forgiven when we understand that Flaherty’s intentions were only to celebrate Nanook’s culture. He says of the Eskimos, “[They are] the most cheerful people in the world. … Fearless, lovable, [and] happy-go-lucky,” and the entire film is devoted to proving this thesis. If racist stereotypes resulted from Nanook of the North, this was clearly not Flaherty’s intention. He loves and respects these people, and their willingness to go along to make this film reveals that the feeling was probably mutual.

Most of the film consists of Nanook walking about the icy, windy Northern landscapes, which Flaherty captures as almost desert-like in nature. Snow billows like sand in a desert storm, and we get an excellent idea of the barren climate where Nanook makes him home. Nanook was appreciated by his tribe for his superior hunting skills, and this film makes it easy to believe. In some fine action-packed sequences, Flaherty captures Nanook jumping from ice-flow to ice-flow in an attempt to catch fish, fending off ravenous wolves with an ivory knife, and attempting to catch a seal that, despite being harpooned, refuses to surface from the black, icy water. Such moments are exciting and revealing. I also particularly like the long, in-depth sequence that chronicles the difficult process of making an igloo. I’ve always wondered how they did that, and now I know.

We also get softer, gentler moments of Nanook with his family, as they sled down snowy hills, and take medicine for their upset stomachs, and laugh in amazement at the white man’s “canned voice” (a record player). All of this serves Flaherty’s purpose of presenting these people as an intelligent, distinguished culture that makes the best of their nomadic lifestyle. Their environment might be cold, but their hearts are as warm as ours, and this is exactly what Nanook of the North is about.

Nanook of the North Criterion essay by Dean W. Duncan

Nanook of the North (1922) - The Criterion Collection

How I Filmed Nanook of the North Robert Flaherty from CinemaWeb, 1922

Life Among the Eskimos Robert Flaherty from CinemaWeb, 1922

The Best Moving Pictures of 1922-23 Robert E. Sherwood’s 1923 review

Picture Making in the South Seas Robert Flaherty from CinemaWeb, 1923

The Handling of Motion Picture Film Under Various Climatic Conditions Robert Flaherty from CinemaWeb, 1926

The Odyssey of a Film-Maker Frances Hubbard Flaherty from CinemaWeb, 60, also seen here: Frances Hubbard Flaherty, The Odyssey of a Film-Maker, Beta Phi Mu Chapbook, Number Four, 1960, pages 9-18.

OneWorld Magazine: Nanook of the North Alain Silver, 1996

Media Worlds essay by Faye D. Ginsburg Anthropology on New Terrain, from the University of California press, 1998

Silent Film Sources Review Christopher Clotworthy, 1998

The Criterion Contraption [Matthew Dessem]

DVD Outsider Slarek

CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) review [4/5]

Nanook of the North Jared from Evade the Noise

Nanook of the North | Organic/Mechanic

Reel.com dvd review [3.5/4] Rod Armstrong

Jabberwock: <I>Nanook of the North</I>: Flaherty and the human spirit Jai Arjun Singh

Nanook of the North Haiti arts website, offering two views, the beliefs of the man who made it or by taking a look at the film itself

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young]

True Films (Kevin Kelly) capsule recommendation some excellent photos

Variety review

Robert Flaherty: Nanook of the North Derek Malcolm from the Guardian

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies]

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

June 12, 1922 review of Nanook of the North The New York Times, may be viewed on (pdf) format

Nanook of the North - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Swiss Jazz band Q3 composes a new Nanook of the North soundtrack

Nanook of the North, Robert FLAHERTY, 1921 YouTube (8:02)

Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922) Igloo (9:19)

MOANA: A ROMANCE OF THE GOLDEN AGE

USA (85 mi) 1926

The New York Times (Mordaunt Hall) review

Robert J. Flaherty's second production was presented yesterday at the Rialto. This idyll of the South Seas is called "Moana," and not even the unfortunate rasping introduction by hardy banjoists and an energetic dancer woùld rob this picture of any of its beauty, its good nature, its fervent appeal, its wonderful trees and glorious sunshine. In Mr. Flaherty's former effort, "Nanook of the North," there was the drama of stoics in grim weather amid stark surroundings. The people were courageous, true sports who made the most of everything, and those sitting in a picture theatre on Broadway were not apt to envy the existence of Nanook and his friends. In "Moana" Mr. Flaherty has captured the spirit of the Polynesians and reflected their blissful content in their own surroundings. Here we have a poem which is filled with charm, without any makeshift villain to interfere with the effort—which was produced in the small village of Safune on the Island of Savau—and the consequence is that it is a joyful and at the same time a thoroughly artistic contribution to motion pictures.

Even in the tense sequence in which Moana—which incidentally means "The Sea," and also is the name of the leading character in this effort—undergoes the ordeal of being tattooed, the producer proves that this marking on the young hero's flesh is real. Mr. Flaherty's players, all Polynesians, are natural in every expression and gesture, and there are playful incidents, such as the participants might indulge in without a camera before them. Sometimes it seems that Mr. Flaherty does so well that it is hard that a camera was near the characters.

The remarkable clearness of the water is something upon which Mr. Flaherty dilates, and it is pleasing to the viewer. You see the hardy young Polynesians darting after fish, snaring wild boars and catching a huge tortoise. In all these chapters there is a cheerful note, and therefore it all happens as one might expect. One is not surprised that Mr. Flaherty introduces his film with a quotation from Robert Louis Stevenson, in which the author wrote that three great things in life were the first love, the first sunrise and the first sight of a Samoan Island. When one recalls Stevenson's scathing description of Edinburgh one can readily appreciate what he means by his tribute to the South Seas after seeing Mr. Flaherty's picture. Mr. Flaherty looks at his little dot of land in the South Seas through Stevenson's eyes, and in all probability this producer could make a telling production of life in bleak Edinburgh, which would have contended Mr. Stevenson.

To say that this pictorial effort is informing or educational rather than dramatic is quite true, but the life on this island is pictured so captivatingly that one feels like shouting with glee that it is not just another movie.

In this gently running Polynesian etching Mr. Flaherty shows some astounding feats performed by the natives, aided, of course, by the mother of invention. They flatten out the inner layer of the bark of a mulberry tree until it reminds one of gold-leaf. He depicts them getting the cocoanuts, then squeezing the milk from the cores; it is done so naturally, with a smile or a pat from one of the players, that one might think that this island was the land of milk and honey and a spot where the only villain was a storm. They do have wild boars at Savau, but it happens, Mr. Flaherty tells us, that this is the only dangerous beast on this pin-point of a place.

The tattooing chapter deals with the ordeal through which a young male has to go to become a full-fledged man. It is peculiarly interesting. The needle used by the tattooing experts, known as Tufungas, which at first looks like a modern implement, turns out to be made of bone. The Tufunga has a light hammer with which he taps the needle. His work is to tattoo a certain pattern on a man from the waist to the knees, and we are reminded in this picture that the most painful period of this operation is when the Tufungas are decorating the knees.

Not only is Mr. Flaherty to be congratulated on what he has put into this film, but he deserves a great deal of praise for having kept it free from sham.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Variety review

INDUSTRIAL BRITAIN

Great Britain (21 mi) 1933 co-directors: Arthur Elton and Basil Wright

Robert Flaherty Deane Williams from Senses of Cinema, October 2002 (excerpt)

It is useful to begin with the project that became the unfairly maligned Industrial Britain (1931). Although this film obtains the kind of nostalgia that permeated all his works, it has often been subsumed by the understanding that the film was completed by John Grierson, Basil Wright and Arthur Elton.

Industrial Britain is an example of a state-sponsored documentary that emphasised people and work in an uneasy combination of the worldviews of both Grierson and Flaherty. Over the years this film has been understood through the more hagiographic writings about both men. Grierson brought Flaherty over from Berlin where the American was trying to get a film project up. In late1931 Britain's Empire Marketing Board Film Unit had obtained some credibility, a broader terms of reference and, more importantly, an increased budget enabling John Grierson and Stephen Tallents, the Unit's leaders, to employ the highest profile documentary maker of the period. Flaherty brought with him not only a status as the crafter of great works such as Nanook of the North and Moana but also a reputation for loose production methods such as a high ratio of shot footage to useable material.

Grierson wanted to employ Flaherty not only to make Industrial Britain but also to draw attention to Britain's Documentary Film Movement as well as to teach the likes of Basil Wright and John Taylor about filmmaking. Grierson was well aware of Flaherty's methods and managed to obtain a large budget of £2,500 for him to work with. Nevertheless the production quickly ran into trouble when Flaherty had spent his budget and film stock. Caught between Flaherty's comparatively extravagant production methods and the civil service constraints of government filmmaking with which Grierson had become used to dealing, the production was always going to be a difficult one. It seems that the footage was edited by Grierson with Edgar Anstey's assistance. The final film was eventually put together with half a dozen two-reel documentaries to form what became known as 'The Imperial Six' that British Gaumont distributed theatrically. Flaherty had nothing to do with the narration which sounds like Grierson's words.

Nevertheless, Industrial Britain manages to reconcile the aims of, on the one hand, Grierson and Tallents' Film Unit, to produce socially purposive films that were not delimited sponsored, product based films but publicity films with a wider market appeal, and on the other hand Flaherty's pre-modern romanticisation of folk life. The film that Flaherty envisaged strives to posit that the craftsmen of England were the real heroes of the industrial revolution; that it was the people that enabled fine products to be realised rather than the then contemporary emphasis on machinery. At the same time Industrial Britain straddles the strikingly composed images of large-scale industry and the close-ups of men toiling away at their craft. It could be that Flaherty was not responsible for all of the footage that found its way into the finished film and that Basil Wright and Arthur Elton were brought in to shoot extra footage, yet this awkward production history doesn't diminish the film's appeal.

It is the reconciling, the in-between, that marks Industrial Britain as one of the most interesting of the British Documentary Film Movement films. In what seem to be Flaherty's images of rows of chimney stacks and urban residences clouded in smoke and grime there is a classical quality that rhymes with the intense close ups of working men. These images of the faces of workers are not unlike those portrait-like images of the United States Roosevelt government's Farm Security Administration photographers such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. In this insistence of these images, on the personalising of the industrial revolution, alongside the broader industrial landscape images, Industrial Britain employs a "poetic ambiguity" – containing the "metaphoric and associative possibilities of the montage juxtapositions” in a somewhat haphazard organisation of numerous images of workers and their workplaces.

In attempting to reconcile Grierson's socially purposive aesthetics with Flaherty's pre-modern romanticism, the film can be read as an uneasy paean to modernity. The broader images of an industrial landscape in which the British worker performs his noble work create a filmic world which is not only about the craftsmanship that lies behind the facade of chimney-stacks and production lines. It is also about how these workers are a part of a human army of craftsmen who maintain their grace and humanity in the face of the mechanisation of industry, whilst themselves appearing somewhat machine-like. The images of workers in Industrial Britain are not images of the automatons of capitalism but rather they are remnants of a time past, a time when craftsmanship belonged to the kinds of folk culture that Flaherty locates in Nanook of the North, Moana and the later Man of Aran.

While it is difficult to say whether Industrial Britain is a Robert Flaherty film or a John Grierson film it may be that a more interesting proposal is that the film produces resonances with the world views of both men in an uneasy commingling of romantic celebration and the kind of sponsorship imperatives that Grierson was responsible to.

DVD Times (Anthony Nield]

Westminster Wisdom Gracchi

MAN OF ARAN

Great Britain (76 mi) 1934

Time Out review

Flaherty was neither the documentary purist nor the victim of movie commerce that he has so often been called - more a talented exoticist. Here he quite happily places the Aran fishermen in a preconceived mise en scène of spartan struggle in order to arrive at his intended goal: images of stylised heroism. A film which remains - especially in its elemental images of sea and storm - mightily impressive.

not coming to a theater near you (Matt Bailey) review

The Man of Aran lives a difficult life. To raise his potatoes, The Man of Aran and his family must make their own soil by breaking rocks, hauling seaweed from the ocean, and scouring crevices on the windswept island for the last traces of natural soil. To fish, he must weather unpredictable and rocky seas that shatter his boat into tindersticks and shred his nets beyond repair. To light his lamps, he must hunt sharks to boil down their skin and livers for oil. In short, for the Man of Aran, life is difficult.

Robert Flaherty’s film, Man of Aran, follows a similar formula as his Nanook of the North, and probably includes just as much fakery. I doubt very much that shark hunting was a daily occurrence in the 1930s, even on the remote Aran Islands of Western Ireland, but I could be wrong. Fakery aside (because who really cares), what makes this a lesser film than Nanook is that we don’t really get a sense of who these people are. Surely their lives couldn’t be constant drudgery, otherwise what would stop them from flinging themselves off the tall and picturesque cliffs of their island? Where are the scenes of family meals? Of rest after a long day’s work? Of social interaction with other people in the village?

What we are left with is, I think, an attempt to give us a representative day in the Aran Islands, even though it’s a far stretch to think that all of these events could have occurred in a single day. There are no night scenes in the film, and day does not seem to pass from dawn to dusk. There is only hard work under grey skies. Those skies, however, are beautifully shot. Much of the film is composed with very low horizon lines that show the Man of Aran (as well as the Woman of Aran and the Child of Aran) silhouetted against and dwarfed by the threatening skies that fill almost the entire frame. Other stunning shots invert the composition and fill the frame with the rocky cliffs of the island on which the people look out to sea.

The scenes of shark hunting that fill almost half of the film, despite their implausibility, are both more thrilling than you would expect and less thrilling than you would like them to be. The large portion of the thrills come from some very surprising and effective montage-style constructive editing that is rarely seen outside the Soviet silent cinema. This style of editing was made possible because the film was shot without synchronized sound, edited, and then enhanced with a soundtrack featuring orchestrated music, the sounds of crashing waves, and overdubbed voices in an almost incomprehensible dialect and accent. The soundtrack is slightly distracting in that those overdubbed voices often don’t match up with what the figures in the film are actually doing or saying. This minor problem is swept aside by the elegantly composed images.

Man of Aran definitely shows the influence of Soviet cinema and the John Grierson style of British poetic documentary, but the style and subject, fakery and all, is pure Flaherty.

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review

You can count Robert Flaherty's films on one hand, but his landmark work established a high standard and engaged many of the critical issues for all documentarians who followed him. Is a documentary inherently more "true" than a fiction film? Ask the various partisans of Bowling for Columbine, or The Fog of War, or Capturing the Friedmans, or The Thin Blue Line, and you'll find that the answer, more often than not, is no. One of Flaherty's biographers, in the supplementary material on this disc, refers to the director not as a documentarian, but as a poet—and if that's the case, he's certainly taken advantage of poetic license. Still, his work is powerful and memorable, even if it's not necessarily journalism.

The three Aran isles are off the west coast of Ireland, and Flaherty set out to portray the lives of those who inhabit these beautiful places that present so many challenges to their inhabitants. It's clear from the jump that this isn't cinema vérité, as Flaherty's movie begins with a dramatis personae; and quickly it's clear that what he's after is not an exhaustive sociological investigation, but in investigating the struggle between man and nature, a theme that runs through all of his work. (Nanook of the North is probably the first and best example of this.) Of course, when someone starts talking to me about the nobility of labor, I reach protectively for my wallet; and Flaherty is after types and archetypes, not stories that are individual and unique. In doing so, things here can sometimes seem marginally patronizing; but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't respect that hard work and fierce ethic of these people.

In a land without soil, the people on Aran make their own, using seaweed beds and crumbling bits of rock to create something in which potatoes, then the staple of the Irish diet, could grow. These are still the early days of sound pictures, and Flaherty doesn't use sync sound; the film is heavily scored, and layered in with the chatter of the folks on the island going about their business. And while the land is unforgiving, the sea is even more so—much of the documentary is devoted to the men of Aran waging battle with basking sharks, which inhabit the Irish waters, in swarms. This isn't Jaws, though there's obvious danger inherent in the work; it's all workmanlike, another day on the job, though replete with great big dangerous swimming animals and a ferocious sea. The pastoral is emphasized throughout; we see almost as many close-ups of farm animals (sheep, usually, and of course the occasional Irish setter) as we do of people, tending to anthropomorphize the other species, witnessing the work of the noble men of Aran.

Some of it borders on Hemingway territory, men displaying grace under pressure, performing the tasks necessary for survival; happily, unlike Hemingway and many of his heroes, the men of Aran seem to be neither fat nor drunk nor violent. The sea is shot with particular care, in what seems like an effort almost to anthropomorphize it, too—it doesn't quite become another character, but it is something to fear, the aquatic manifestation of the great unknown. It's a visually rich movie, and if it doesn't provide a thorough portrait of its subjects in all their particulars, it will give you a certain respect for the people of these islands, and especially for the intrepid documentarians who set about to capture their world on celluloid.

CultureCartel.com (Dan Callahan) review [4/5]

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review

DVD Talk (Jason Janis) dvd review [3/5]

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [4/5]

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Variety.com [Variety Staff]

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DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

THE LAND

USA (45 mi) 1942

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review

The great documentarist Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North, Moana) created this study of life in the Depression dust bowl for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which promptly repressed it. Flaherty wanders far afield from the social programs that were his assigned subject, concentrating on the suffering of migrant workers and the apparent hopelessness of their position. Moving, even majestic, it remains a remarkable film, if not one of Flaherty's best.

User comments from imdb Author: yeadur

Flaherty made this docu about the dire consequences of 100 years of over-production of cotton just as the USA was entering World War2, & it wasn't shown then, because it might give the enemy a propaganda advantage. It was, however shown on BBC TV a few years ago, & only last week at the wonderful Aldeburgh (Suffolk, UK) cinema on a proper screen, when the composer, Richard Arnell, 83, told us of his meeting as a young man with Flaherty in Washington. In fact the musical score, which fills the entire 45 minutes of the film is as striking as the poetic imagery of the dust bowl, the indigent farmers, the extreme poverty of a family living & reproducing in a shack and the mass migration to California where so few would find work. The upbeat ending, where wonderful threshing machines swiftly harvest the land, has the irony that still more labourers would be out of work. The only pity is that Flaherty, at heart a silent film director, wouldn't let his subjects speak.

LOUISIANA STORY

USA (78 mi) 1948

Time Out review

Flaherty's last work, like his first, Nanook of the North, was the product of one of those fluke occasions when a sponsor (in this case, the Standard Oil Company) offers money with no strings attached. With no disciplining 'purpose', Flaherty's totally intuitive method was tested to its limits - and his editor Helen van Dongen has recorded the extraordinary convolutions of plot and readings that his material underwent en route to its ravishing conclusion. As an account of oil exploration, Flaherty's narrative may seem slightly naive; but his vision of a child's myth-world, and the oilmen's intrusion and acceptance into it, is perhaps his greatest achievement.

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

Known as the "father of the documentary," Robert Flahtery (Nanook of the North) was also not a traditional journalist. He was not above "casting," or directing his actors or staging certain scenes. Even so, the result comes closer to truth than most other filmmakers could ever envision. His last completed feature, Louisiana Story, may be Flaherty's greatest work. Commissioned by Standard Oil, Flaherty tells the story of a new rig going up in the Louisiana swamp, and cross-cuts his story with that of a young boy's adventures there. Stunningly photographed, the film moves with a beautiful, languid pace and even the "happy" ending as the derrick strikes oil does not break the spell. This disc also contains Flaherty's final film, the uncompleted, never-released The Land. The film's score, by Virgil Thompson won a Pulitzer Prize for Best Composition -- the only time a film score has done so.

filmcritic.com (Matt Langdon) review [4/5]

Robert Flaherty was one of the great documentary directors of the 20th century. One of the reasons was the way he artfully interwove down-to-earth subject matter and fiction in entertaining yet respectful ways.

Louisiana Story, Flaherty’s final film, is a simple tale about a significant subject. A big oil company comes to Louisiana to drill for oil and disrupts the life of the plants, the animals, and the people of the bayou.

The world of the film is presented to us from the perspective of a 12-year-old boy (Joseph Boudreaux) – who is given the elongated symbolic name Alexander Napolean Ulysses Latour. He is introduced to us rowing around on his tiny rowboat, hunting small animals and checking out the underbelly of the environs of the swamp. The oil people come to the area and build a huge derrick. The boy inquisitively pokes around and is befriended by the workers who like his innocuous presence.

Louisiana Story could just as easily be titled "A Young Cajun Boy, His Pet Raccoon, and the Oil Company" because it has a rather innocent unpretentious view of the bayou, the oil company and the natives of the Bayou. Yet it is an engrossing film in part because of the Pulitzer Prize winning score by Virgil Thompson, the absolutely shimmering black and white cinematography by Richard Leacock and the fine editing by Flaherty.

Louisiana Story compares and contrasts modernization with that of the people who live off and with the land. While watching the film one can’t help but notice the way Flaherty shows life being disrupted by the huge oil derrick. Yet, ironically, the film was financed by the Standard Oil Company, and because of this Flaherty never digs too deep with the negative impact of modernization.

Flaherty used non-professional actors to create documentary-type situations, and because of this the actors all have a stiff acting style. It’s also apparent that his camera set ups are very strictly diagramed rather than improvised. And his editing is occasionally obvious too – one scene in particular is a suspenseful cross-cut between the boy and an alligator who is pursuing him. Seen in the context of the rest of the movie it’s obvious that the relationship between the alligator and the boy is not unlike the relationship between the land and the oil derrick: Although, no doubt, Standard Oil didn’t see it that way.

The DVD released by Home Vision Entertainment has some excellent extras including a 28 minute vintage interview with Flaherty’s wife, a 30 minute excerpt from a documentary titled The Land (1942) and another 30 minute documentary title Hidden and Seeking, which is about Frances Falherty’s photography. There is also a very good commentary by cinematographer Richard Leacock and Frances about the film’s beautiful opening sequence. The best extra by far is titled "Letter’s Home" and features an actor reading letters that Richard Leacock wrote to his wife during the shooting of the film. The letters are very insightful about the filmmaking process and opinionated about Flaherty’s working methods. This 15-minute section is accompanied by scenes from the film.

In terms of style Louisiana Story is dated but it looks great and is still a rather unique film that should be seen by anyone interested in documentary films. The DVD is a must for Flaherty fans. Note also that Home Vision Entertainment is releasing another Flaherty film titled Man of Aran (1934) at the same time as this one.

not coming to a theater near you (Matt Bailey) review

Louisiana Story tells the tale (and a tall tale it is) of a boy and his raccoon companion who co-exist quite happily and peacefully with a monstrous, steam-driven oil derrick in the bayou swamp that is their front yard. It should come as no surprise that Standard Oil commissioned the film. What does come as a surprise is that the film has some of the most beautiful images I’ve ever seen in a movie yet, at the same time, some of the clunkiest, most awkwardly staged scenes I’ve ever seen outside of my high school’s production of Oklahoma.

As with all Flaherty films, this one too deals with man in conflict with nature. The film (and many of the reviews and criticism written about it) would have you believe that it’s about what happens to a community (and to a young boy who acts as the avatar of that community) when an oil rig is plopped down in a peaceful swamp. Well, what happens is that the boy can’t find his raccoon and catches a really big fish. And it wouldn’t be a Flaherty film unless there was a terrifically lengthy scene of some poor animal being hunted, captured, and skinned — this time an alligator.

Robert Flaherty acted as his own cinematographer on most of his films, but chose Richard Leacock to shoot this particular film. Leacock would eventually go on to be an accomplished documentary filmmaker in his own right, working first with Robert Drew and Drew Associates, the television documentary group that spawned the careers of the Maysles brothers and D.A. Pennebaker and then later forming a production company with Pennebaker where they made several important and influential films in the “direct cinema” mode. Leacock’s cinematography in Flaherty’s film is nothing short of astounding. The images of the young boy paddling his canoe through the placid bayou and coming across the towering derrick gliding slowly through the water as if moving under its own power have an almost religious intensity that no doubt made the executives at Standard Oil ecstatic.

The score for the film was written by Virgil Thomson, the composer of the memorable scores from other documentaries such as Pare Lorentz’s The Plow that Broke the Plains and The River. The music, drawn from folk tunes and traditional melodies, is in the style of other mid-century composers like the quintessential American composer Aaron Copland and the Viennese émigré Erich Wolfgang Korngold — the kind that uses instrumentation so richly varied and orchestration so vast as if to sound as wide as the whole country. The only drawback is that the music has to stop to make room for the dialogue scenes.

It’s obvious from the stilted nature of the dialogue scenes that Flaherty was not comfortable directing his non-professional actors in speaking parts. Every time the music stops and the actors open their mouths, the film comes to a skidding halt. This is a terrible shame because the scenes without dialogue that are accompanied by Thomson’s score are so glorious. Louisiana Story is, strangely enough, Flaherty’s most beautiful work and yet his most awful.

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review

DVD Talk (Jason Janis) dvd review [2/5]

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [2/5]

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Lang Thompson

Images (Derek Hill) review also reviewing MAN OF ARAN

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KQEK (Mark R. Hasan) dvd reviewing also reviewing MAN OF ARAN

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Variety review

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DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

Fleck, Ryan and Anna Boden

The film that changed my life Ryan Fleck from The Observer, April 18, 2010

HALF-NELSON A 95

USA (106 mi) 2006

Reminding me a bit of the anguished journey in MORVERN CALLAR, which takes place nearly entirely inside someone’s head, or like Alice searching through the Looking Glass, this is a muddled odyssey through the present day and age, as seen through the eyes of a sympathetic white 8^th grade teacher in a predominately black inner-city school in Brooklyn, who scores crack on the side and thinks he can handle the situation while also teaching his kids history, asking them to explore the two opposing forces that confront one another in determining change, which he contends is the catalyst or determining factor of history, while also seen through the eyes of a young student in his class who actually catches him smoking crack in the bathroom, but is sympathetic and keeps her mouth shut, as her brother is in prison for selling crack, and the dealer, in a favor to the brother for not turning him in, owes her family. Ryan Gosling is unerringly believable as the teacher, Dan Dunne, who isn’t selling anything in the classroom except the freedom to speak one’s own mind while making their own choices. And while his own choice selection is hazardous, not to mention personally destructive, this issue is not side-stepped in the film, and his deplorable behavior is a force to be reckoned with, including an attempted rape scene, but so is his commitment to stick with these kids, to be honest and not sell them a bill of goods. Thinking that he can write a children’s book about dialectics on the side, instead he spends all his free time getting wasted. Shareeka Epps plays the inquisitive Drey, a 13-year old latch key student caught between moving forces, a dead end school, a tired single mother who works too hard to have any time for her, a brother in prison, a dealer that offers money and protection, and a white teacher who, despite his personal problems, actually makes sense. Her hesitation in exploring each world is the heart and soul of the film, as she’s remarkably appealing, tough and soft at the same time, with an open mind to finding a new way other than the route of her brother or the dealer, but she doesn’t know where to find it.

Anthony Mackie plays Frank the dealer, and in the model of THE GODFATHER, which features likeable men who kill for a living, or HUSTLE AND FLOW, which features a likeable, hard-working man who pimps for a living, Mackie has his own appeal, is soft-spoken and considerate, and doesn’t push Drey too hard while gently attempting to persuade her to take over her brother’s business. When Dan sees the paternal and potentially dangerous influence, he attempts to intervene, and in an especially effective scene, he confronts Frank in front of his own home and tries to steer Frank away from Drey, but realizes he’s hardly the role model to be making this request, as his example is no better. Frank, in a masterful stroke of understated psychological swagger, completely takes the air out of his sails, and there lies the real complexity of the film. If we’re to be honest, how can we blame black dealers for being dealers, considering the economic options and the lure of a lucrative lifestyle? In fact, what drives the demand for dealers in the first place? Who are the biggest drug consumers? In America, it turns out to be the comfortable middle class whites, who may be in denial about the consequences of their actions, like Dan in this film, believing he can handle it, while remaining oblivious to the economic disparity between blacks and whites, and the social injustice contrasted between the races, especially if ever arrested. But this film places the responsibility front and center on the white middle class, on the Baby Boomers, the ones who marched against the war in Vietnam, or for voting rights in the South, the ones who supposedly offered an alternate moral view, as reflected by the black and white newsreel footage that Mr. Dunne shows his kids, such as the assassination of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected representative in the U.S, or Cesar Chavez, whose boycotts helped establish rights and benefits for migrant farm workers, or America’s CIA advocating the overthrow and assassination of a freely elected leader of Chile, Salvador Allende, replacing him with a U.S. puppet, General Augusto Pinochet, now up on war crimes charges, while Henry Kissinger expressed the U.S. view that the issue was too important to leave to the Chilean people, or Mario Savio leading the Berkeley free speech rally, where the students occupied the administration building, suggesting they could help open up a crack in “the Machine.” Mr. Dunne makes the connection that by truthfully analyzing the problems of the past, which all of us are a part of, we might find some clues into how to solve these problems in the future. Like characters in a Jean Eustache film, whatever happened to this moral optimism, this belief that people could work together to fight against social injustice? Everything’s become so comfortably compartmentalized now, so specialized, each looking after only their own interests, which is the modern era status quo, there’s no longer any belief that we are all in this together or that concerted action can make a difference.

Enhanced by the edgy, somewhat vacuous style of the film that at times resembles an amorphous blur, it’s grounded in the raw vulnerability of several brilliant dramatic performances. But identifying with the film isn’t easy, it’s disjointed, sometimes out of focus, or the hand-held camera keeps physically being knocked around a bit, so there’s a rough quality, a mood of ambiguity, with occasional eerie industrial or electronic sounds along with a psychologically probing soundtrack by Broken Social Scene. Despite the film’s unsparingly honest, near documentary style, it occasionally departs from naturalism, such as a noticeable scene when Drey visits her brother in prison, which takes place in perfect quiet, unlike the raucous noise that is typical of overcrowded prisons today, or when the students stare straight into the camera and repeat memorized moments in history, like similar set up scenes in ANNIE HALL, but it also perfectly captures the wretched state of Dan’s wasted mind when a proud parent comes up to him in a nightclub to thank him for his daughter’s success at Georgetown and he can’t even remember her. Still, this accurately points out how badly we need good teachers with challenging, inquisitive minds like Dan in the public school system, despite his obvious damaged goods, as his painful honesty is heartfelt and believable, made all the more compelling because the unconventional person behind the message is so flawed. Kids remember being in his class, and not the automatons pushing standardized testing that school boards would prefer. Born to radical parents on a commune in Berkeley, and growing up in the same area, I suspect co-writer and director Ryan Fleck shares much in common with Dan’s travails, as picking up on the residue of leftover 60’s themes comes with paying a high price for disillusionment. This film begins to explore finding a way out by linking some of our cultural connections to our human imperfections, by literally building a bridge of mutual tolerance.

Film Society of Lincoln Center Film Comment (2006)

Dan’s a committed teacher in an NYC public school, but spends most of his off-duty time in a drug haze. He’s managed to keep his two lives separate until Drey, one of his students, discovers him in a compromising situation. Now the two embark on a turbulent journey through the temptations of their worlds. Director Ryan Fleck has fleshed out the characters from his short film Gowanus, Brooklyn, (ND/NF 2004) and created a full-bodied drama that explores personal demons and the unlikely friendships that can help change us. Ryan Gosling plays Dan with an idealistic intensity, and Shareeka Epps packs an emotional wallop as a teenager struggling to make sense of her predicament.


New York based director Ryan Fleck, directed his first short film struggle as a student at NYU. In 2002 he began collaborating with creative partner Anna Boden on the short Have You Seen This Man?. He and Boden went on to direct Gowanus, Brooklyn the script of which they expanded into Half Nelson. They also co-directed the documentary Young Rebels (ND/NF 2005).

Half Nelson Bryant Frazer from Deep Focus

Ryan Gosling anchors Half Nelson with a sturdy, utterly credible performance as a crack-addicted Brooklyn schoolteacher struggling to keep his life together. Strung out and depressed, he’s befriended by a student, Shareeka Epps, who’s fighting her own private battle in an environment that offers up drug-dealing as an easy way to exploit your neighbors for easy profits.

The material could easily be campy or tedious, culminating in a half-baked life lesson about saying no to drugs. But Gosling, who manages an easy, big-brotherly chemistry with Epps, keeps it serious and affecting -- he plays a gentle soul but a helpless one, in thrall to his own self-destructive behavior. With kind eyes and a big brain on his shoulders but an imperfect heart on his sleeve, he’s the kind of guy you can imagine a 14-year-old girl could actually learn something from.

Filmmakers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (he directed, she produced and edited, and they wrote the screenplay together) make good use of Brooklyn locations to give the film an inner-city immediacy that bolsters the naturalistic tone. It’s a tough movie in the best sense of the word — it never underestimates how difficult it can be to do the right thing.

Dec Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

This one's a tough nut to crack. Rating about as close to 7 as a film can on my scale, while still receiving the stingy 6, Half Nelson is certainly one of the most interesting and, in its own limited way, even innovative films to come out of Sundance in quite some time. Obviously Old Joy is more formally daring, but I actually think Half Nelson attempts something bolder and more difficult. Ostensibly this is the story of Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling), an inner-city high school history teacher with a crack addiction, and his struggle to mentor a remarkably self-possessed student named Drey (the amazing Shareeka Epps) while steering her away from her more available father-figure, local drug dealer Frank (Anthony Mackie, also excellent). But there's a bit more going on here. As the title announces, this is a film about immobility and stalemate. Fleck achieves this, in part, by adopting a very familiar movie template (the inspirational student-teacher relationship) and thwarting it at every turn. There is no redemption, and even those little interstitial moments of grace that pop up through the cracks in the sidewalk seem accidental, likely to be missed by these characters, fixated as they are on mere survival. Fleck underlines this problem of immobility by having Dunn prattle on to his students about the dialectic, the opposition of forces that Hegel claimed was the engine of historical change. But there is no change in Half Nelson, aside from tiny, stillborn glimmers of self-awareness. Fleck avoids overt allegory, but Half Nelson could be seen as a statement on the inability of white liberals to actually make improvements in the lives of poor African-Americans, or the failures of the idealistic Left more generally. Moreover, as Jen pointed out to me, this could be a new, self-critical kind of Sundance movie, one all too cognizant of the meaningless marginality of any liberal message it could provide. (As she put it -- I'm paraphrasing -- "Twenty-five years on, and what has Sundance-style American independent film really accomplished?" No more or less than other kinds of film, of course, but the point stands; left-leaning American artists have set a higher bar for themselves, as exemplified by so many earnest Sundance entries, and it's probably a bar no work of art today could ever actually clear.) Despite being a film with so much on its mind, Half Nelson itself gets stuck in the mire of indecisiveness. Mostly observational in style, it also allows for some moments of bravura acting, and even has a few abstract, driving-at-night sequences that flirt with the pure visual poetry of a Hou Hsiao-hsien. But ultimately, this film is a collection of fragments, and it simply refuses to cohere. This formal approach no doubt mirrors its content (a film about stuckness that unfurled itself with triumphant confidence would be fraudulent to the core), but it nevertheless resulted for me in a viewing experience too similar to outright directorial hesitancy. (This fragmentary style is something I could defend on deconstructionist, up-is-down grounds, but as we know, that's a courtesy I extend only to boring, obscure international art cinema.) All kidding aside, Half Nelson is a sharp film, one that has the sense to get out of its actors' way when necessary, and allows the audience to sink our teeth into big ideas. But Half Nelson is a collection of fits and starts. Fleck is so intent on abandoning the phony structures of cinematic uplift that he never quite replaces that armature with anything else. Also, Gosling is quite good in this, but no better than he was in The Believer, The Slaughter Rule, or even Murder By Numbers. I'm just not seeing the breakthrough performance others are, but if it's simply "Gosling's time" I certainly don't object. He's one of our very finest.

Long Pauses: Half Nelson (2006) Darren Hughes from Long Pauses

It's rare these days when I find myself identifying with a character in the same way that, say, the 7-year-old version of me identified with Charlie Bucket or the 15-year-old version of me identified with Holden Caulfield. But Dan Dunne, the crack-addicted, idealistic History teacher played by Ryan Gosling in Half Nelson, is more like me than any other character I've met in quite some time. I don't share his drug problems, fortunately, but I identify with what they represent in his life -- the hypocrisy and disillusionment and isolation. (We all have our fatal flaws, right?)

What rescues Half Nelson from the trappings of Movie of the Week melodrama -- and what makes it one of my favorite new films of 2006 -- is the care with which Fleck and partner Anna Boden ground Dunne's struggles in a specific historical and political context. He's not some Everyman Teacher fighting a universal battle for the hearts and minds of Today's Youth; he's the child, both literally and philosophically, of the '60s generation that fought bravely and successfully for Civil Rights and Free Speech before watching their idealism shattered by personal excess, in-fighting, the horrors of Vietnam (or their inability to stop it), creeping apathy, and, eventually, the dawning of a new "Morning in America."

In the classroom, Dunne throws out the approved curriculum and, instead, teaches his students dialectics, forcing them to recognize the complexity -- the counter-arguments, the push and pull -- of every issue. As a simple echo of Dunne's own swings between good and bad, light and dark, all the talk of dialectics is, perhaps, too easy a metaphor. But Fleck and Boden, I think, are interested in larger issues as well: the essential nature of debate for the health of a Democracy, for example, and, more specifically, the difficult but necessary intersection between idealism (even naive idealism) and pragmatism that every movement must maneuver in search of a progressive politics.

I continued writing my dissertation long after I'd lost my enthusiasm for academia and the specific texts with which I was working because I was (and still am) personally invested in the central questions of the project: How do I take this "theory" -- specifically, the ideas about democracy that animated the best aspects of the American New Left -- and transfer them into "action"? How do I find "praxis" at the historical moment when capitalism won? How do I fight off the cynicism of my generation and participate, in a practical and meaningful way, in a progressive movement toward goodness and justice? How do I hold onto hope when I see so little cause for it?

There's a moment two-thirds of the way through Half Nelson when Dunne drives across town to confront Frank, a drug dealer who is angling to pull one of Dunne's favorite students out of school and into the business. Dunne is high. He's bought drugs from Frank (and other dealers just like him) many, many times. The right/wrong dialectic here has exploded into a dizzying miasma, and Gosling's performance nails it. "What am I supposed to do? I'm supposed to do something, right?" he finally gasps. I didn't know whether to cry or cheer.

New York Observer (Andrew Sarris) review

Ryan Fleck’s Half Nelson, from a screenplay by Mr. Fleck and Anna Boden, plunges us into an inner-city junior high school in Brooklyn, with all its Marxian-dialectical rhetoric blazing away at the comparatively timid, superintendent-mandated civil-rights curriculum. At least, this is the pedagogical approach of Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling), the school’s parlor-pink, crack-addicted white instructor. This very unusual (for an American film) mix of radical explicitness and despairingly fatalistic drug addiction suggests an uneasy attitude toward the current political situation in the country and the world. (Indeed, at one point Dan is asked by a girlfriend if he’s a Communist—a strange kind of loaded question to ask someone in this post-9/11 period, when the pejorative term of choice is “Islamofascist.”)

Much of the movie is photographed and directed in an expressionistic crack-cocaine-like haze, with many abrupt close-ups and out-of-focus flash shots. The narrative’s major relationship involves Dan and one of his female students, Drey (Shareeka Epps), who discovers him one day smoking a crack pipe in a stall in the girls’ bathroom. It’s not exactly meeting cute, but it’s a fitting enough confirmation of the neighborhood’s depressed passivity toward all forms of lawless behavior.

Yet the major characters are marvelously gentle and subtle in their interactions, particularly Dan and Drey, who provide a steady stream of exquisite expressions, thanks to the enormous talents of Mr. Gosling and Ms. Epps, and the natural-sounding dialogue produced by Mr. Fleck and Ms. Boden, who are live-in partners as well as a writing team. To establish the contrasting social backgrounds of Dan and Drey, we are given brief introductions to their moderately supportive but mostly distracted families—without exaggerating the roles they play in motivating the uncanny rapport between the two.

There are many opportunities for the film to overestimate the power of good intentions—especially given Dan’s determination to protect Drey, a task that would seem to demand more from him in terms of character and discipline than are likely to be found in a confirmed crack addict—but this is a mistake that the filmmakers scrupulously avoid. In fact, there was a misleading scene in the film’s trailer that ostensibly pitted Dan against a drug dealer named Frank (Anthony Mackie), a close friend of Drey’s imprisoned older brother, also a dealer. In the bit used in the trailer, Dan is shown warning Frank to stay away from Drey in no uncertain terms. Indeed, the level of hysteria unleashed by Dan suggests that a violent collision between the two men is virtually inevitable. As it turns out, it’s nothing of the sort: When Frank smoothly offers Dan a drink while they talk over the situation, Dan’s good intentions crumble in his crack-weakened condition, and he accepts Frank’s offer and his own capitulation. This is a wonderfully perceptive scene that could easily have degenerated into Boy Scout heroics.

The stage is set for Dan’s final humiliation when Drey, driven by her mother’s pressing need for extra money, agrees to deliver a crack package for Frank, only to discover that the needy customer is Dan himself. The traumatic explosion that ensues for the two onetime soulmates impels Drey to turn away forever from Frank and his “easy money,” and may perhaps shame Dan at long last to mend his ways in rehab and stop kidding himself that he can “handle” his addiction.

Much of the narrative is interspersed with the students’ classroom presentations as well as archival clips of prominent 60’s radicals, black and white, speaking out for revolutionary change. The longest such insertion is taken from Mario Savio’s 1964 Free Speech Movement manifesto at the University of California, Berkeley, after the students seized an administrative building on campus. A link is thereby suggested between the hopeful dawn of the student-protest movement and its disappointing sunset, with which Dan is now trying to cope.

The key to the direction of all the performances is tactful restraint and nuanced modulation. This applies not only to Mr. Gosling, Ms. Epps and Mr. Mackie, but also to Karen Chilton as Karen, Drey’s hard-working mother, and to Tina Holmes and Monique Gabriela Curnen as two of the women in Dan’s life. Much of the film was reportedly shot in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Half Nelson is an exhilaratingly ennobling experience for viewers of all races, ethnicities and classes, but I am afraid it will reach only a small, select audience that is least in need of its enlightened, progressive, morally sophisticated message.

Cinematical [ Kim Voynar ]

Teaching at an inner city middle school can be stressful, but Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling) handles the kids under his tutelage with ease, engaging them in classroom discussions, bantering about their lives, even coaching the girls' basketball team. He's the kind of teacher you wish all your middle school teachers had been -- interesting, fair, and not condescending to his students just because they're kids. Yes, Dan is the perfect teacher, while he's on the job. It's after work, when he brings out the crack pipe, that his dark side comes out.

Dan, the protangonist of Half Nelson, is living a double life: Responsible schoolteacher by day, crackhead by night. An idealistic young man caught in the throes of a reality he doesn't know how to handle, Dan deals with his stressors by making them go away for awhile. He thinks he's got it all under control, and, like a lot of addicts, maintains the illusion of control on the surface, for awhile -- until the day one of his students, Drey (newcomer Shareeka Epps), walks in on him in the locker room post-game, prone on the floor, crack pipe in hand.

If that happened in my suburban neighborhood, the kid would probably freak out, but Drey is older than her years, and life in her drug-dealer populated neighborhood has made her immune to the shock value that the sight of a teacher with a crack pipe might have for a lot of kids. And thus begins a complex relationship between teacher and student that merges the lines between adult and child, as Drey struggles to make sense of the contradiction of her white, middle-class teacher lying helplessly on the floor like a homeless crackhead.

Epps, who attends an inner city arts school in real life, handles this role with an ease that belies her age and experience. When Drey looks at Dan, her eyes seem to bore through him and see into his very soul. Drey has the world-weariness of a child who's grown too fast and seen too much, and when she finds her favorite teacher on the locker room floor, emotions flit beneath the surface of her guarded expression: Shock, betrayal, sorrow and acceptance. In that moment, Drey and Dan will become allies or enemies -- maybe a little of both -- and the teacher watches his student blearily through his crack haze, trying desperately to pull himself together.

It's an interesting idea for a story, and director Ryan Fleck brings this sumptuously layered screenplay (which he co-wrote with Anna Boden) to delicious life, thanks largely to the performances of the two main actors. I never would have thought of Gosling for a role like this, to be honest, but he does a stellar job of portraying a complex character, walking the ridgepole between idealistic, responsible molder of young minds and blithering drug addict; it's a performance that could very well generate some Oscar buzz.

Why would someone who seemingly has everything easy -- middle class family, college education, a job he loves -- resort to using street drugs -- especially crack? What are the demons Dan is fighting? The script doesn't bang us over the head with obvious or stereotypical reasons for Dan's drug use, other than his disillusionment over his once deeply held belief that he could change the world. Dan looks around and sees that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and he no longer believes in himself and his own ability to do any good, fighting the good fight in the battlefield of an inner city middle school. Life is pain, as a Buddhist might say, and for Dan, the blissful, albeit temporary, oblivion of a crack haze makes it seem better, at least for awhile.

Dan has the duplicitous nature of a lot of drug addicts: At once charming and chameleon-like in his ability to conceal his addiction when he needs to, while beneath the surface simmers the shifty mistrust and deceit of the demon of addiction. Dan has reached that pivotal point where his demon has him firmly in its grip (hence, the title of the film); he's jeopardizing not only his job and the relationships with other adults in his life, but now also with one of the very kids he set out to save when he became a teacher. The realization of the state of his moribund ideals gives him a sense of desperation.

Tight direction by Fleck keeps the tension where it needs to be, and he guides his key actors through the intricacies of the script with an even hand. There's never any suggestion of an inappropriate sexual relationship between Dan and Drey, although there is certainly a crossing of boundaries between teacher and student. The heart of the story, though, is about a young girl trying to help the one adult (outside her overworked mother) who has tried to throw a lifeline into the darkness of her life, and the narrowness of the line between light and dark.

Dan believes in his students, so Drey believes in him, with a child's ability to accept without judging, and she tries to help him in the only way that makes sense for her.You may find yourself exasperated, as I was, by Dunne's inability to get a handle on the addiction that has him in its clutches (especially if you've ever had an addict in your own life), but you're sure to walk away from Half Nelson feeling affected by the story and impressed by the excellent performances and direction.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Half Nelson (2006) Ryan Gilbey from Sight and Sound, April 2007

Chicago Reader: Movie Reviews Jonathan Rosenbaum, also seen here: A Radical Idea

Pajiba (Dustin Rowles) review

The Onion A.V. Club review Scott Tobias

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Les Wright

CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) review [4.5/5] also seen here: Old School Reviews [John Nesbit]

Twitch (Mike Rot) review

Salon (Andrew O'Hehir) review

PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review

Reverse Shot (Travis MacKenzi...) review

Ruthless Reviews review Matt Cale

eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) review [4/5]

World Socialist Web Site review Ramón Valle

Culture Wars [Iona Firouzabadi]

stylusmagazine.com (Jay Millikan) review

New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review

Village Voice (Rob Nelson) review

creative Loafing [Felicia Feaster]

Oggs' Movie Thoughts

not coming to a theater near you (Tom Huddleston) review

Christian Science Monitor (Peter Rainer) review [B+]

Village Voice (Dennis Lim) review

DVD Verdict (Jennifer Malkowski) dvd review

filmcritic.com (Norm Schrager) review [3.5/5]

Slant Magazine review Nick Schager

PopMatters (Shaun Huston) review

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3.5/4]

Between Productions [Robert Cashill]

Reel.com review [3/4] Pam Grady

CineScene.com (Howard Schumann) review

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3.5/5]

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Eye for Film ("Chris") review [3/5]

Slate (Dana Stevens) review

Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [4/5] Don R. Lewis

DVD Talk (Phil Bacharach) dvd review [4/5]

Reel.com dvd review [3.5/4] Tim Knight

eFilmCritic.com (William Goss) review [3/5]

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [2/4]

Mike D'Angelo review

Edward Copeland on Film

CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

Exclaim! review Travis Mackenzie Hoover

The Evening Class-Interview [Michael Guillen] with directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, August 6, 2006

Entertainment Weekly review [A] Lisa Schwarzbaum

Variety.com [Dennis Harvey]

The Guardian (Andrew Pulver) review

The Observer (Philip French) review

Time Out London (Ben Walters) review

Washington Post (Ann Hornaday) review

Boston Globe review [3.5/4] Ty Burr

Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [3.5/5]

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Gianni Truzzi

San Francisco Chronicle [Ruthe Stein]

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review

RogerEbert.com (Jim Emerson) review [4/4]

The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review

SUGAR B 86

USA (120 mi) 2008

Unfortunately, after the unique insight and originality of HALF NELSON (2006), one might have hoped for more. Instead this follows very closely on the heels of a Steve James “Dominican Baseball Players” section from his 7-hour documentary THE NEW AMERICANS (2004), which features the difficulties faced by a series of immigrants from various parts of the world as they attempt to fathom life in America, usually facing a brick wall of resistance and a ton of loneliness and isolation. While this film uses non-professional actors, and in 19-year-old Dominican pitching prospect Miguel "Sugar" Santos (Algenis Perez Soto), the film easily finds its mark of authenticity in nearly every scene, what it lacks is consistent direction, as it wobbles on its tracks and prolongs the inevitable monotony of the journey, oftentimes feeling boring and uneventful as time passes. There are a few outstanding sequences, but there are also too many stagnant moments along the way where the film slows down to a crawl, much of which could easily have been excised, as the length doesn’t really add greater complexity, but this is a case of directors falling in love with all of their footage. Opening in the Dominican Republic, youthful baseball prospects dream of going to America, where Sugar’s curve ball catches the eye of some American scouts while in high school, where he’s been attending a baseball academy since he was 16. The film is a character study, as the cocky pitcher enjoys exalted status among the Dominicans growing up, easily rising to the top of the ranks, where life, at least for him, is fortunate, as he’s spared the economic futility of so many other island residents who end up working back-breaking, low-wage jobs. The film beautifully captures this kid’s protected status both on and off the field, as the players are a happy, gregarious, tight-knit group with plenty of good-natured baseball chatter. When he’s called to spring training in the major leagues, supposedly the stuff of dreams, the jubilation disappears instantly, as suddenly everything’s serious.

Initially, Sugar is completely stymied by his inability to speak English and can only survive by the help of other Latino’s interpreting for him, which includes talks or instructions from coaches as well as eating meals, continually ordering the only meal he can pronounce. The kid simply can’t communicate, so he’s at a disadvantage. Also he notices that friends who get injured are sent back home and immediately replaced by other eager recruits. So it’s a cutthroat business, especially when competing against quality ballplayers, where he soon realizes he’s barely good enough to survive. When he’s sent to a minor league A-ball franchise in Iowa with only one other Latin player who is soon sent packing, he’s also sponsored by a well-meaning Christian family that takes him in and provides room and board. Not ony does he lack the language skills to comprehend, but he may as well be on Mars, as nothing is remotely familiar to him any more. When one of the family members attempts to involve him in her Christian youth activities, where one might think teaching him English would be a good place to start, he immediately gets the wrong message. Instead, the family steadfastly insists on speaking to him as if he was one of the family, chatting away endlessly which only isolates him further, chipping away at his youthful confidence. But nothing dissolves his spirit as much as an injury, where he has to sit around helplessly and watch his replacement revel at his opportunity, reducing his status on the ballclub little by little until eventually he starts getting knocked around pretty hard. Sugar tries pills to help quicken his recovery, which leave him embarrassed and disgusted with himself afterwards, where one gets a sense of his disorientation in a beautiful sequence where he takes a long walk through various video arcades leading to a bowling alley, like a scene out of Lynne Ramsay’s MORVERN CALLAR (2002), all with pulsating lights flashing every which way, none of which he’s remotely able to comprehend.

Without a word of explanation, Sugar suddenly abandons baseball and heads for New York City with a few bucks in his pocket, looking for one of his Dominican friends, but he soon discovers it’s a big city where people within a few small blocks are separated even further. Quite by accident, he runs into a woodshop around the corner and meets the owner Jaime Tirelli, so good in GIRLFIGHT (2000), a truly marvelous character who offers a terrific story about racism and Vic Power. By this time, baseball may as well be a million miles away and Sugar is still struggling to keep his head afloat. There’s a wonderful street sequence set to a Spanish-language version of Leonard Cohen's “Hallelujah” which eloquently describes the depths of anguish along with the sublime moments of happiness, how they become one and the same when seen in this light. SUGAR is a baseball story about the camaraderie of a game that’s meant to be fun, but it’s also a harrowing immigrant’s journey where what seemed like a world of possibilities quickly narrows down to just a few immensely significant choices in one’s life. In the end it’s not Sugar’s curveball, or his competitive drive, but his earnestness, appealing smile and youthful sincerity that wins people over, apparently the right people. Sometimes that makes all the difference. Baseball, as seen by the end of the movie, carries a completely different flavor, as it’s obviously an unforgiving, hard-nosed business, but it’s still a kid’s game at heart, filled with the optimism of wild-eyed dreams about how things will be so much better next year.

Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]

It takes a good film to get me interested in baseball, and Sugar is rather better than good. The titular protagonist (Algenís Perez Soto), so nicknamed for his sweet knuckle curve (or so he says -- fellow players insist it’s for his fondness for desserts), is a 19-year-old rookie coached at a Major League farm visited by American scouts in the Dominican Republic; the hopefuls sing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" phonetically, "the States" across the ocean promise fame and escape. Accepted into a single-A team in Iowa, he’s fêted like a hero in his hometown: "Life gives you many opportunities. Baseball only gives you one," an old trainer reminds him. Transplanted to the Midwest, Sugar boards with an elderly couple, develops a crush on his evangelical foster sister, and gets acquainted with the realities of the American Dream. Many of the situations (the competition from other rookies, the crack-up under stadium lights) are sports-movie staples, but filmmakers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, who have become more assured storytellers since their 2006 Indiewood favorite Half Nelson, examine them in terms of cultural dislocation and the machinery of sports and dreams. And as their humor grows, so do their style (a shoulder-level tracking shot through an arcade-lined hotel lobby evokes the Dardennes, and Scorsese, too) and their humane understanding of people snared by expectations and erecting divides despite their best intentions. Sugar has scarcely a manipulative or fake moment -- there’s no clever virtuoso like Ryan Gosling whooping it up from beneath a fastidiously naturalistic veneer, just the realities and anxieties of a new land merging in Perez Soto’s hopeful, haunted eyes.

The Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review

"Sugar," a quietly surprising drama by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, follows the outward form of a baseball story, and takes its title from the nickname of its hero, Miguel Santos (Algenis Perez Soto). He's a handsome young Dominican with a sweet spirit, a radiant smile and a good shot, or so it would seem, at lifting his family from poverty by pitching his way into the big leagues.

The script is structural in its approach to Sugar's rise, his inevitable fall and the resolution of his plight. First we see him playing his heart out at a baseball academy in the Dominican Republic. Then he goes to rural Iowa, where he joins a minor-league team and lives in a comfortable home with a welcoming family. "It's our job to keep you healthy and focused on baseball," the earnest woman of the house tells him, and he nods politely, even though his English is confined to "thank you," plus such essential phrases as "line drive" and "I've got it."

For a while the filmmakers focus on baseball, too, then slowly reveal their real agenda. "Sugar" is a study of how industrialized baseball develops talent; instead of cannon fodder, young men like Miguel are diamond fodder, a precious few destined for stardom and most doomed to failure. The film is equally an evocation of the immigrant experience; Miguel's job is to fit into a new country that may not have a place for him. Watching him try isn't the most exciting choice you can make at the movies -- the price of the production's integrity is a leisurely pace -- but it's a worthwhile one. Though "Sugar" demands patience, it deserves attention.

Slant Magazine review Bill Weber

An immigrant's saga more than "a baseball movie," Sugar ultimately runs headlong away from the clichés that mar formula sports-related narrative films. In embedding their tale in the consciousness of 19-year-old Dominican pitching prospect Miguel "Sugar" Santos (Algenis Perez Soto), whose attempt to become an American major leaguer meets with daunting complications, writer-directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck trust the accretion of small successes, humiliations and frustrations to supply the drama of a young man who, for all his potentially remunerative gifts, is unfinished. Boden and Fleck's sleeper Half Nelson rode a flashy Ryan Gosling star turn to Oscar attention, but Sugar is largely free of the contrivances and wobbly structure that marred that hip Mr. Chips redemption story. It makes Sugar—Miguelito to the family that dreams for his success and their security—someone who owns his quest, whose identity isn't forged through development on the mound but in the struggle to assimilate and thrive in an alien society.

An assiduous builder and carpenter who makes love to his girlfriend in the unoccupied house he's begun constructing for his hopeful family, Sugar becomes a star at a Kansas City team's "academy" in his hometown (the baseball hotbed San Pedro de Macorís) where the impoverished hopefuls are drilled not only in on-field skills but diamond phrases like "fly ball" and English interview essentials like "I need to work on my mechanics." The phenom's imagined future seems palpably attainable when he's invited to spring training in Arizona, promising family and friends that his talented right arm will make him rich and celebrated before he returns. The everyday banalities of Phoenix are wonders to Sugar and his fellow Latino neophytes; veteran catcher and mentor Jorge (Rayniel Rufino) has to school them to pass up pricey hotel-room mini-bars and TV porn, and all the rookies parrot "french toast" at the breakfast diner because they can't read the menu. Advancing to minor-league ball in the Midwest, Sugar finds more awkward, limited Anglocentric guidance. The Iowa farm family he lodges with sees themselves as the caretakers of his athletic and moral development: "No cervezas in the cazza and no chickas in the bedroom" are the rules they issue in cornpone Spanish.

The plot of Sugar become suffused with anxiety when Miguel loses command of his hurler's repertoire, desperately tries some unidentified "performance-enhancing" pills that are no help, and a steadier young Dominican usurps his place in the pitching rotation. While the American baseball superstructure upon which Latino prospects are dependent for support isn't explicitly condemned, it's seen to lack empathy for the visa-holding youths it has uprooted and placed in a charged, high-pressure bubble. Sugar's drawling, white A-ball manager tries to assuage his charge's jitters by wrong-headedly telling him, "I used to be just where you are." A final-act sea change leads Sugar to the Bronx of the storied Yankees, but in an assertion of independence rather than on a professional journey.

Soto, like many of the young actors a first-time professional, embodies youth in accelerated transition, whether being rebuffed in an Iowa disco by jealous rednecks or saying what baseball lifers want to hear. When Sugar and his peers sing a phonetically memorized version of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" over a bottle on the eve of his departure for the States, it's an incantation to summon a Pan-American dream. This modest bildungsroman, shot mostly in fly-on-the-wall style, frees Miguel/Sugar from a fixed track, rewarding him with newfound community and renewed autonomy.

The Globe and Mail review [3/4] Rick Groen

Sugar combines two genres that are typically laden with clichés - the sports flick plus the coming-to-America tale - and rubs away all the melodramatic varnish, leaving only the natural grain of life's small victories and lingering disappointments. The co-directors, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, did much the same in their previous feature, Half Nelson, reversing the usual polarities of the inspiring-teacher-in-the-ghetto picture. Clearly, the pair have an instinct for honesty if not a flair for style - what their camera lacks in craft their pen makes up in candour.

This immigrant's journey comes in three distinct stages, starting with his home base in the San Pedro de Macoris community of the Dominican Republic. Baseball fans will know the name well: It's a colonial outpost of the major leagues, a source of abundant raw material - live arms, skilled gloves, big bats - awaiting shipment to the new world for further refinement and possible advancement in the marketplace. There, in the D.R. "academy" that serves as a lab for the watchful scouts, we meet Miguel Santos, a teenage pitcher with pretty good velocity and an even better nickname - "Sugar," a tall stalk of cane fresh cut and poised for export.

This opening act has a loose, easy rhythm in keeping with the Caribbean locale. Already a celeb in his home town, the kid (Algenis Perez Soto) is a hard worker on the mound, confident yet not too cocky, as eager as the other hopefuls to cash the fat cheque that will transform his family's fortunes. That hope gets sparked with an invitation to spring training camp in Phoenix. Stepping off the airplane, he walks into a profound culture shock, lost in a language he doesn't speak and thrust into a competitive arena where exalted talent is the rule not the exception. Even at the entry level of professional sport, everyone is a star and every star must face a hard fact - there are a lot fewer jobs than applicants.

Sugar receives his first posting, and an even deeper culture shock, on a Single A team in the boonies of Iowa. He boards in the home of an elderly couple, ardent fans who take in a player each summer, hoping to rub shoulders with a bona fide up-and-comer. Here, in the odyssey's second phase, the film parcels out both the baseball lore and the broader sociology in equally well-observed measures. The newcomer does face some bigotry, but, given his player's status, most folks are kind and genuinely wish him well - the oldsters, their pretty granddaughter, even the team's no-nonsense manager, all have his best interests at heart. As for the crowd in the stands, their narrow yardstick is blind to colour and calibrated to assess only one thing: They cheer mightily when he pitches well, and boo lustily when he doesn't.

So is there a big make-or-break game, the moment when a career soars to great heights or spirals to extinction? Nope, another cliché averted. For elite athletes aspiring to earn a living in their sport, the epiphanies tend to be much smaller and more gradual, a slow yet clear realization of exactly where they stand on the scouts' merciless scale. For most, all those who play the game infinitely better than the rest of us but still not quite well enough, the decision ultimately faced is as tough at it is mundane: whether to ply their trade over a limited time for $1,000 a month in a backwater burgh, or to find a new trade.

This is the dilemma that takes Sugar, and the film, to the final stop in New York, where the immigrant finds comfort in a Spanish-speaking neighbourhood, confined by his changed circumstances yet liberated too, freer now to take his own measure, to calculate the size of the dream he's chasing. An untested rookie himself, and on-screen almost continually, Perez Soto shoulders the performance burden (both athletic and emotional) quite credibly - when he doesn't, at least the floundering is more or less in character.

Mainly, though, the film's strength is reportorial, sensitively exploring a theme that has grown ever more prominent with the globalization of sport. Today's North American leagues are rife with Sugars - with Turks playing basketball, Koreans playing baseball, Byelorussians playing hockey, each one arriving in a strange land to put on a familiar jersey, his name on the back competing for, and struggling with, the logo on the front.

Salon (Andrew O'Hehir) review “Sugar,” a Sundance Standout, January 23, 2008

Salon (Andrew O'Hehir) review “Sugar”: Best Baseball Movie Ever, feature article and interview with the directors, April 3, 2009

Pajiba (Ted Boynton) review

CineScene.com (Howard Schumann) review

Village Voice (Melissa Anderson) review

filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [3.5/5] also seen here: Reel.com review [3/4]

Screen International review Patrick Z. McGavin at Sundance

Reverse Shot [Henry Stewart]

PopMatters [Cynthia Fuchs]

indieWire [Anthony Kaufman]

SpoutBlog [Brandon Harris]

Critic's Notebook [Sarah Manvel]

Paste Magazine [Robert Davis]

Cinematical (Kim Voynar) review at Sundance

CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review

Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw

FilmJerk.com Review [Brian Orndorf] also seen here: DVD Talk

Bina007 Movie Reviews

Film School Rejects [Neil Miller]

Interview: Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck >>> Interview by Adam Keleman from Slant magazine, March 31, 2009

ITVS: Outreach - New Americans - Episode Descriptions

THE NEW AMERICANS . Dominican Story | PBS The Dominican Baseball Players section of the 7-hour Steve James documentary

THE NEW AMERICANS . Learn More . The Stories | PBS links to articles on Dominican baseball

Entertainment Weekly review [B+] Owen Gleiberman

The Hollywood Reporter review James Greenberg at Sundance

Variety.com [Todd McCarthy]

Time Out New York (David Fear) review [5/6]

Boston Globe review [4/4] Ty Burr

San Francisco Chronicle (Jonathan Curiel) review

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review

Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review April 17, 2009

Movie Review: 'Sugar' offers a change-up of the typical baseball ... Christy Lemire from The Chicago Tribune, April 8, 2009

Q&A: 'Sugar' directors have keen eye for new talent ... Lauren Viera interviews the directors from The Chicago Tribune, April 17, 2009

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]

The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review

Fleder, Gary

RUNAWAY JURY B 84

USA (127 mi) 2003

Completely preposterous premise, part of this film fascinates, part of it reeks, but there was enough fun watching all the double-crossing going on.  I felt Rachel Weisz was strong in her central role, the film had some terrific editing to keep the pace of the film moving, it just had a story that was too far fetched to ever take very seriously.

Fleisch, Thorsten

ENERGIE!

Germany (5 mi) 2007

Energie! Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

This is one of those instances in which repeat viewings clarified the fact that I had no idea what the film was trying to do the first time around. Or, if not no idea, at least a limited one, based on certain biases of mine with which Fleisch's film only partly intersects. Upon first watching Energie! online twice, I really couldn't shake the sense that this was a film bathed in the surface trappings of experimental cinema but not really so steeped in its deeper ethos, and in some key ways even opposed to it, although unwittingly. The film consists of high-contrast images of electrical charges and ionic phenomena (the press notes on Fleisch's website indicate he drew the imagery from a manipulated cathode ray tube), pulsating in a general black / white flicker. We first see jagged, lightning-like arcs coming off the bottom of the frame, and eventually a spherical form rises from the offscreen space like a black sunrise. In practical terms, what this means is that a basic Gestalt form, the lightning lines -- a set of pulsions that are largely impermanent and radically singular, but all work to convey a general visual idea -- gives way to a solid, concrete shape, a sphere. Soon, the sphere begins to move, the flicker intensifying.

At first, this movement from one idea to the next gave me the sense that Fleisch, like many contemporary avant-garde filmmakers, had taken the wrong lessons from earlier masters. In struggling to understand the work of Brakhage or Jacobs or Gehr, it became useful for critics like Tom Gunning to remind us of early cinema before Griffith, and its "monstrative" mode. That is, the films are not organized around a narrative principle, but around an impulse to show, to display. Likewise, connections drawn between structural cinema and minimalist art (as in the writings of Paul Arthur, Annette Michelson, and Regina Cornwell, for example) offered another way to understand the construction of certain films -- a modular principle, wherein concatenation of like components, all compositionally equal, could obviate the reliance on traditional non-narrative forms, like the fugue or the sestina. But a lot of films have taken all this as license to find a thing to do, and do it to death, with little in the way of an organizing principle, little care for the intricacies of composing in time. Instead, it's "here's some cool stuff, and here's more cool stuff, and here's some more," et cetera. These works have the appearances of avant-garde film, and are indistinguishable to the untrained eye, but in fact have no bone structure, no commitment to the modernist doctrines of compositional integrity, part / whole relationships, the rigorous shaping of time.

In a way, I was wrong. Energie! is not the best example for this argument, partly because what it is trying to do does entail a strict application of measurement, organization, and control. But as it happens, Fleisch's desired effect occurs in the eyeball rather than within the confines of the film itself. (In this regard it has a concrete connection to minimalism's physical address to the spectator and her / his body.) By minute three, Energie! has become a whirling three-dimensional form, harnessing the flicker and the alternation of complementary shapes in order to generate a molecular light-object that emerges from the screen. Although the basic shape of the object remains consistent, its pocks and dents give it a unique life across time. But then, after this point, Fleisch seems to revert to the sorts of formally negligent ideas that prompted my original thesis. The sphere splits into quadrants, then corners-plus-center as in a "5" on a die. The little cellular zones twirl in opposing directions and shoot weblike tendrils out at each other, resulting in a kind of film noir Fruitopia commercial. (Jens Thiele's industrial-drone soundtrack only adds to the sense that we are adrift across time, that if and when surface phenomena synch up in meaningful ways, it's likely to be only a temporary occurrence.) Minute four through four-and-a-half moves from psychotronic Jordan Belson to a thaumatrope flip maneuver, the dark and light rounded parts of the screen changing places to provide a gentler, less distinct form of motion. Before long, these forms are interrupted with those from earlier parts of the film -- the lightning, the now-brainlike molecular orb -- and the visual metaphors come fast and furious. We see eyes, brains, and the zap-zap-zapping of light and shadow burning their data directly into them. And then, Fleisch practically returns us to a narrative world, or at least a palindromic one, as the thick rootlike forms shove the eye-orb back down out of frame. And so, in the end, Energie! is just that, a set of forces unleashed on the eye, and often that is enough to sustain a five minute visual experience. But although deeper structures are implied and, at times, possibly even achieved, the film neither adapts the older templates not forges its own necessary progression. It's a thing, and a thing, and another somewhat related thing, and the eye and the mind are stuck trying to decide whether to submit or cherrypick. [Energie! may be viewed online here.]

Fleischer, Max – Animator

BFI | Sight & Sound | The Innovators 1930-1940: The Thin Black Line Harvey Deneroff from Sight and Sound, June 1999

Animation's history may now be dominated by Disney but many of its techniques were pioneered by Max Fleischer's rival studio, which invented the characters of Popeye and Betty Boop and was the first to animate Superman.

In the first years of cinema few films lasted more than 15 minutes. By the time sound arrived in the late 20s, however, Hollywood was producing full-length live-action features, and animation had been cast as a medium suited to providing 'short subjects' to begin the evening's entertainment. Several of the major studios (MGM, Warner Bros) set up their own in-house animation divisions to provide supplementary cartoons, which Warner at least saw almost as proto-music videos designed to popularise songs published by its music division. Other studio distributors bought in cartoons made by independent studios and producers, such as Terrytoons, the Van Beuren Studio and Ub Iwerks. But undoubtedly the most important and profitable independent cartoon studio - and Disney's most feared rival - was that owned and run by the Fleischer brothers.

Max Fleischer was an important technical and artistic innovator and the leading proponent of the New York style of animation, in which the artificial, drawn nature of the medium is dominant. His films were ethnically inflected, reflecting the largely Jewish and Italian composition of his staff, and even in the area of narrative, where most historians credit Disney as the great innovator, he broke considerable new ground, paving the way for the Bugs Bunny cartoons and influencing such present-day film-makers as Hayao Miyazaki.

Born in 1883 in Vienna, Fleischer emigrated with his Jewish family to New York City at an early age, studying art at Cooper Union and the Art Students League. He worked as a commercial artist and cartoonist, but an interest in mechanics led him to animation. Specifically, he was driven to find a method to produce animation more efficiently and economically, which resulted in the invention - with his brothers Dave and Joe - of the rotoscope, a device used to trace movement from live-action film. The process was demonstrated in his first film, Experiment No. 1 (1915), in which Dave posed as the clown who became known as KoKo.

From 1916 to 1921 Max worked for John R. Bray, for whom he and Dave made the first Invisible Ink films featuring KoKo; he also produced educational films including some of the first training films for the US army. The Fleischers left Bray to form Out of the Inkwell Films, Inc, later subsumed by the more ambitious Red Seal Pictures (in partnership with Edwin Miles Fadiman and Hugo Riesenfeld), which produced and distributed both animated and live-action shorts for the US rights market. Though Red Seal ended in financial failure, the studio turned out some of the most inventive films of the period and from 1924 to 1926 Fleischer made the first sound cartoons (using the DeForest Phonofilm process) and invented the rotograph, a system for combining live-action and animation.

However, it was Disney's Steamboat Willie (directed by Ub Iwerks, 1928) that was the first sound cartoon to attract the nation's attention, kindling a renewed interest in animation. The following year Max and Dave formed Fleischer Studios to produce cartoons for Paramount Pictures, and it was under Paramount's protective umbrella that Max found the financial backing and distribution muscle he needed to become a major player. The coming of talking pictures led the studio to drop its star KoKo, who despite the brilliance of many of his films had never achieved the fame of Otto Messmer's Felix the Cat. After trying out various permutations of Bimbo the dog, Fleischer hit pay dirt in 1930 with Betty Boop, who made her debut in Dizzy Dishes. Betty was not only the first animated female star, but also the first animated character to deal forthrightly with sex, especially in her pre-Hays Code incarnation. She also proved the perfect vehicle for the development of the zany, surreal style Fleischer had evolved during the silent era. Grim Natwick's initial character design for Betty was based on a picture of singer Helen Kane, who had popularised the phrase "Boop-oop-a-doop", and you can see the mix of naughtiness and childish innocence Betty made famous in Kane's skit in Paramount on Parade (1930). There is also more than a little of Betty in the title character of Fleischer's Carrie of the Chorus, a short-lived live-action series he produced in 1926.

The silent KoKo films were extensions of the first animated films, in which live-action artists would bring drawings to life, as in Bray's 1910 The Artist's Dream. (These in turn grew out of the early French trick films of Emile Cohl and Ferdinand Zecca, and the lightning-sketch artists of vaudeville days.) KoKo existed in a parallel, Roger Rabbit-style universe brought to life by the pen of the live-action Max Fleischer, who at times would leap into the drawing board and assume his own animated identity, as in The Challenge (1922, directed like many of the studio's films by Dave) and The Masquerade (1924). What continues to amaze audiences are the transformational qualities of these films - as in The Hypnotist (1922), in which an accidentally hypnotised KoKo does battle with his shadow, which steals his hat, surrounds him with multiple shadows and eventually changes places with him, making him the shadow's shadow. The Fleischers' silent films have a strong improvisational character, the result in part of the seemingly off-hand manner in which they were made, with a loose gag structure - which Disney eschewed in favour of more careful plotting and acting - that allowed the animators a great deal of freedom. Max experimented with a variety of techniques, including clay animation - in Modelling (1923) and Clay Town (1924) - and photo collage, as in the climactic destruction of New York City at the end of KoKo's Earth Control (1928).

The coming of sound led to considerable changes in the way the Fleischer cartoons were made. The cut-and-slash system of paper animation used for the KoKo films was abandoned in favour of the more expensive cel-animation process, largely avoided during the 20s because of the royalties that had to be paid to the Bray-Hurd Patent Trust. Rather than concentrating on the live-action/animated interactions between Max and KoKo, the new films had more conventional stories, their screens cluttered with characters playing against fully realised settings. Songs also become more integral.

By the time talking pictures came along Fleischer had already had considerable experience with sound from his Song Car-tunes (from 1924), in which audiences were encouraged to sing along following a bouncing ball. The animation here was decorative rather than narrative: Mike Barrier, in his Hollywood Cartoons, quotes Disney's praise for the way "the letters and characters [did] all kinds of funny things in time to the music that got a lot of laughs." This decorative approach, combined with a strong sense of the surreal and the macabre, permeates many of the early Fleischer sound cartoons. Snow White (1933), for instance, with its scene of KoKo being transformed into a phallus-shaped ghost pursuing Betty while 'singing' Cab Calloway's rendition of 'St. James Infirmary Blues', is described by Fleischer biographer Mark Langer as "something that [sexologist] Krafft-Ebing might have produced had he been an animator."

When the Hays Office began to enforce its 1934 Production Code, the Betty Boop films lost something of their joie de vivre. The studio used Betty for its first colour film Poor Cinderella (1934), an elaborate production which introduced the 3-D process (invented by Fleischer and John Burks the year before), which involved photographing the two-dimensional cels against a three-dimensional set mounted on a turntable. (The process inspired Disney to develop the multiplane camera.) A fairly straightforward telling of the story with more than a hint of a Lubitsch musical, Poor Cinderella is far from macabre, though the decorative nature of Fleischer's films comes to the fore in the ornate settings, enhanced by the three-dimensional backgrounds.

Poor Cinderella seemed an effort by Fleischer to compete with Disney at his own game. (After all, Disney encouraged his artists to look at Fleischer films and was clearly influenced by them - The Band Concert, 1935, for instance, owes a lot to Fleischer's Tree Saps, 1931, which first used the device of a tornado being animated to Rossini's William Tell overture.) Had Fleischer gone ahead with feature production at this point, using the kind of resources and talent he employed on Poor Cinderella, the history of US animation might have taken a different turn. But instead the studio lavished its attention on its newest star, Popeye, whose cartoons following Popeye the Sailor (1933) became the most popular short films in the US, eclipsing even Mickey Mouse.

The Popeye cartoons represented a major change for Fleischer, who had previously paid little attention to narrative. While the off-hand nature of the dialogue (including asides in Yiddish provided by Popeye voice Jack Mercer) was very much in the old Fleischer mould, the films had a strict, formulaic structure that introduced a new genre. Every Popeye film showed a contest between the hero and the often villainous Bluto for the hand of Olive Oyl, leading to a variety of escalating and often violent battles which Popeye wins at the last minute after eating a can of spinach. This structure provided the model for the Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry and RoadRunner cartoons, and Popeye's success forced other animation studios to take note: Warner's The Major Lied Till Dawn (1938), for instance, directed by Frank Tashlin (who along with Warner storymen Warren Foster and Michael Maltese had worked with Fleischer), has its title character use a can of spinach to vanquish Tarzan - "Well," he says, "it worked for that sailor man, it will work for me."

The Fleischer studio encountered serious labour problems and had endured a five-month strike in 1937, only to be forced by Paramount Pictures to settle. Then Max decided to move to Florida to build a new studio and break the union. He was able to do both, but it eventually bankrupted him (among other things he was forced to pay premium wages to attract artists to Miami, as well as guarantee their moving expenses back to New York or Los Angeles if they decided to leave).

Fleischer and Paramount prepared to move into feature production with a pair of elaborate two-reel Popeyes: Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor (1936) and Popeye Meets Ali Baba and His 40 Thieves (1937). But their first feature Gulliver's Travels (1939), despite some outstanding sequences including the opening shipwreck done in the manner of Japanese woodblock prints, did little to fulfil the promise of the Fleischer shorts. It performed well in the US (probably as well as Disney's Pinocchio, released a few months later) and broke box-office records in Latin America; however, its high cost and the absence of the European market because of World War II meant it lost money and kick-started a series of circumstances that led to the Fleischers having to relinquish control over their studio and their films. Disappointing too was their second feature Mr. Bug Goes to Town (Hoppity Goes to Town, 1941) - based loosely on Maurice Maeterlinck's The Life of the Bee - despite some neat set-pieces including the opening sequence, played against a three-dimensional New York background and evocative music by Leigh Harline.

In the midst of these efforts, at Paramount's behest, the Fleischers produced a series of elaborate cartoons based on the Superman comic books, beginning with Superman (1941). Made on much the same scale as the studio's features, these films successfully adopted the pulp comic-book style of the original, and have a strikingly modern look: the staging, dramatic camera angles and lighting seem to be more in line with contemporary live-action cinema and early films noirs such as The Maltese Falcon than anything seen in animation. Both Osamu Tezuka (Astro Boy, 1963) and Hayao Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke, 1997) have said they were heavily influenced by these films, and historian Fred Patten points out the similarity between the robots in Shun Miyazaki's Lupin III: Castle Cagliostro television series (1979) and those in the Fleischers' The Mechanical Monsters (1941). In the US the Superman cartoons were shown as inspiration to staff working on Warner Bros' groundbreaking television series Batman: The Animated Series (1992).

After the Fleischer brothers split up in 1942 Dave went off to Hollywood to head Columbia's Screen Gems cartoon unit and worked as a script doctor. Max went to Detroit, where he worked for former Bray colleague Jam Handy, producing industrial films and the first screen version of Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1948). His last job, ironically, was for the Bray Studios in New York, who were by then producing training films for the US navy.

Fleischer, Ruben

ZOMBIELAND C+ 79

USA (80 mi) 2009

After a series of the most violent, brainless and visually uninspiring trailers screening ahead of time, one couldn’t be in a dourer mood. It’s as if they strip your brain of all signs of intelligence before the movie starts. In zombie movies, one looks to the satirical subversive tone of mindless conformism, such as sheep being led to slaughter, or that the human race has lost its grip and the planet is spinning out of control. But in Zombieland, that’s not really the case, as it turns out to be more of a state of mind somewhere in the outer reaches of a disconnected civilization far from the social norm where your inner self gets to do whatever it wants to do, where there are no rules or restrictions, no one to pass judgment, no one to impress, and where the only person you have to please is yourself. That doesn’t sound so hard, so they up the ante by filling the world around you with bloodsucking zombies that can spring out of any dark corner and whose sole desire is to eat you. The world, and the way it is feels saturated with heavy metal music while being explained in voiceover by Jesse Eisenberg, playing yet another neurotic teenager, this time in an Adventureland swarming with zombies—interesting how this plays as the flip side of his earlier summer blockbuster, as he seems chosen for precisely the same role, such a self-protected, intelligent, but overly analytic teen who talks himself into his role as a social outcast with few, if any, friends, where his world exists nearly entirely in his imagination. Based on his natural inclinations to avoid conflict, he has somehow avoided contact altogether from the viral-related zombie infestation that has all but wiped out the world’s population around him, where as the last man standing (so far as he knows), he eventually goes on a road trip to Columbus, Ohio to see if his parents are all right. Along the way he meets what appears to be a zombiemobile, a black SUV with a snowplow out front used to run over zombies. Inside is another living man. The two meet in a Sergio Leone standoff, each eying the other with guns pointed, waiting for a slip of character. But it turns out to be Woody Harrelson as Tallahassee, as that’s where he’s heading, a fully armed, redneck cowboy who’s only claim to fame, apparently, is killing zombies with a relish. The two hook up and head through the remnants of a human wasteland where all we see are endless lines of burnt out cars, crashed airplanes, and the leftover fragments of human remains, some still being eaten. Like a Twilight Zone episode, the rest of the world is already gone.

Add to this gooey zombies dripping with blood, all resembling the image of underworld sinners cast into Hell, a pathetic lot whose fate is to rot in their wretched miserablism, reduced to target practice in this movie for a swaggering gunslinger Woody who knows a thing or two about killing zombies, while Columbus turns into his Tonto sidekick. Soon enough, we discover, the boys are outfoxed by a deceiving sister act (Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin, still not grown up) who scam them out of their weapons and their car, leaving them to rot in hell. But not to worry, as Tallahassee is extremely resourceful and soon finds an even better Hummer vehicle already loaded with weapons. “Whooey!! Thank God for rednecks,” Harrelson screams. Soon enough, they meet the scamming sisters who get the upper hand again, but this time it ends in a stand off, where, after informing Columbus that nothing is left in Columbus, they decide to head for the Pacific Playground amusement park which they hear is a zombie free zone, largely to give the kid one last pleasure ride on earth. But after a distrustful introduction, they actually seem to get along fine, where they learn to love destroying things along the way, releasing their childlike inner freak, but Los Angeles is hardly a zombie free zone, as the place is crawling with the creepy critters. Tallahassee decides the apocalypse offers endless possibilities, and a map of the stars takes them to their dream home in Beverly Hills, where we get a brief cameo from a befuddled movie star who’s been attempting to blend in with the zombies, as they don’t seem to hurt one another. But we soon see that the mystery of the universe is filled with unanticipated obstacles. After a brief romp around the mansion, the two girls make it to the amusement park, which when lit up at night, becomes a calling card to all zombies, luring them like moths to a flame. This extended sequence has its moments, not to mention delirious implausibility, again a counterpart to Adventureland, but all in all this is pretty ridiculous mindless entertainment. I realize this is a light-hearted and fun zombie movie, where spirited dialogue and the excellence of the cast is part of the thrill, where the overreach of Harrelson in particular, who’s in overkill mode most of the time, adds an energetic zaniness to the mood, where his weakness for Twinkies and puppies is truly exploited along with a falling piano and other visual sight gags. But one terrific performance and occasional moments of cleverness does not a good movie make, as despite its obvious intentions to be all fun and games, it’s mostly all surface and superficialities highlighting a special effects zombie demolition derby, like entering an alternate reality video game. When the game was over, however, I didn’t really feel like playing again.

Village Voice (Scott Foundas) review

The zombie movie—that evergreen vessel for all manner of social and political allegory—gets stripped down to its "Holy shit! Zombies! Run!" chassis in this fitfully amusing romp directed with little ambition and even less distinction by first-timer Ruben Fleischer. Set in a not-too-distant future (Roland Emmerich's apocalyptic 2012, set for release in November, is on the marquee at Grauman's Chinese), in which most of mankind has gone flesh-eating crazy from a Mad Cow–style pandemic, Zombieland follows the requisite hardy band of uninfected survivors as they, like the Griswolds before them, make their way to the promised land of a Southern California amusement park. Woody Harrelson leads the charge as a leathery urban roughneck in the Snake Plissken mold, with Jesse Eisenberg (typecast, yet again, as a virginal neurotic), Emma Stone, and Abigail Breslin (the latter two playing a couple of scam-artist sisters) riding shotgun. Ho-hum zombie mayhem lurks around every bend, but the movie's comic tone becomes increasingly strained (as does Eisenberg's logorrheic voiceover), up to and including an indulgent movie-star cameo by a certain deadpan genius usually more discerning in his choice of projects. Who ya gonna call? How about John Carpenter?

The Onion A.V. Club review [B+] Nathan Rabin

Buried deep within the grim worlds of most zombie movies lies an unlikely streak of wish-fulfillment. Granted, a zombie-ruled hellscape offers plenty of disadvantages to the living, but it also includes the giddy promise of a world where the rules have been thrown out the window, and survivors can treat abandoned stores, amusement parks, and homes like their own private treasure chests—assuming, of course, that they don’t get eaten in the process. The winning new road movie/horror-comedy Zombieland runs with this conceit, most gloriously during an extended sequence featuring a mystery guest star indulging in hilarious self-parody.

Jesse Eisenberg stars as a meek young man whose preternatural cautiousness allowed him to survive a zombie apocalypse that wiped out most of humanity. Eisenberg goes it alone until he runs into a gun-toting, Twinkies-obsessed roughneck (Woody Harrelson) whose badass exterior belies a sentimental side. These unlikely zombie hunters join forces with a sister-act pair of small-time grifters (Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin) and head to a southern California amusement park, where hideous ghouls may eat their brains, but at least they won’t have to wait in line for rides. (Anyone who has spent time at Disneyland knows that’s a fair trade-off.)

Zombieland leans heavily on the comedy side of the horror-comedy equation. For a zombie movie, it’s largely devoid of suspense and scares; instead, it focuses on the comic possibilities of four misfits indulging their most cherished fantasies under the bleakest circumstances imaginable. Though Eisenberg’s excessive voiceover narration bogs down the first act, the film quickly evolves into a crackling zombie romp powered by a clever script, goofy physical comedy—the filmmakers get a lot of mileage out of Harrelson’s amusingly over-the-top means of dispatching the undead—and the yin-yang comic chemistry of the eternally adorable Eisenberg and good-ol’-boy Harrelson. The four protagonists aren’t about to let something as minor as the complete breakdown of society get in the way of having a good time, and their fun proves infectious.

Fangoria [Michael Gingold]

Even if you prefer slow zombies to the fast kind and the serious undead to funny ghouls, you’re likely to get a kick out of ZOMBIELAND (screening at Austin, TX’s currently running Fantastic Fest and opening nationwide next Friday). Like many of the better horror/comedies, it doesn’t so much poke fun at the genre as plunk a group of humorous characters down into a dire situation and let ’er rip.

Our guide through an America overtaken by the walking dead is a young man who will come to be called Columbus (more on the nomenclature in a moment), played by Jesse Eisenberg. A former shut-in who was never comfortable around others, he has found himself in an existence not much more devoid of human contact than it was before—aside from the hordes of former living that are now trying to eat him. Having adopted a series of rules allowing him to survive, he’s on the road to Columbus, OH—where he hopes to reunite with his parents—when he encounters a fellow survivor/cowboy type played by Woody Harrelson. Dubbing the kid Columbus after his destination, and similarly calling himself Tallahassee, he’s not as bound by rules but a lot handier with a shotgun, and the two become traveling companions, if not quite friends for a little while.

Columbus’ rules and their graphic presentation (as onscreen type animated in various ways) evoke plenty of laughs, and help get ZOMBIELAND off to a rousing start. They’re funny because they make sense as logical reactions to an outrageous situation, and screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick turn a few of them into sustained running gags. There’s plenty of splatstick, too, with a number of improvised ghoul-killing techniques, plus Tallahassee’s shitkicker attitude toward dispatching the walking dead, delivering many moments that are too lighthearted to be truly called black humor. After an opening-credits montage featuring a zombie stripper and the like, however, director Ruben Fleischer largely keeps the creatures’ own actions and appearances on the serious side, not skimping on the flesheating and providing a credible menace for the heroes and heroines to play off of.

Said heroines are 20something Wichita (Emma Stone) and tween Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), whose goal is to reach a California amusement park they believe will provide a safe haven. After a couple of antagonistic false starts, they join forces with the boys, and bad-ass Wichita softens up enough to provide a potential romantic interest for Columbus. Of course, he’s pretty inexperienced in such things, and the last time (also the first time) he got close to a girl, she tried to consume his flesh the next morning. This encounter is one of several flashbacks to the protagonists’ pasts that serve to flesh out the characters somewhat, though overall, ZOMBIELAND lacks the surprising depth that elevated the similarly inclined SHAUN OF THE DEAD to the very top rung of the shocks-and-yocks ladder.

Mostly, ZOMBIELAND is content to be a jokey good time, and it succeeds, in no small part thanks to the well-cast lead quartet. Eisenberg, last seen facing very different amusement-park troubles in the underrated ADVENTURELAND, is perfect as the withdrawn Columbus, who doesn’t make his inevitable emergence from his shell without a fight (a lot of fights, actually). Harrelson’s role is, for the most part, more thinly written—his big quest is to find a Twinkie amidst the undead apocalypse—but the actor brings just the right attitude to the table, and Stone and Breslin ably balance feistiness and vulnerability. The rapport between the four keeps the film moving down its episodic road, with one notable pit stop that’s inspired if a bit overextended, featuring a lengthy big-star cameo that’s been an ill-kept secret (but just in case, I won’t give it away here).

Although the director and writers hail from TV, there’s nothing small-screen or sanitized about ZOMBIELAND. The humor may not exactly be highbrow but it doesn’t depend on cheap punchlines, and Fleischer teams with cinematographer Michael Bonvillain to give the picture an expansive widescreen look, staging scenes of chaos and its aftermath befitting a seriously intended postapocalyptic picture. Same goes for the many and varied ghoul getups and gore gags created by makeup FX artist Tony Gardner and his team, which are as visceral as any zombie fan could desire, augmented by well-wrought CGI splatter. They help ZOMBIELAND pass the test of any good horror/comedy: Even as it delivers the laughs, it doesn’t forget that it’s basing them on scary subject matter.

CHUD.com (Devin Faraci) review

Zombieland's not much of a horror movie. There are some really good scares in the first act, and it's set in a world that's been devastated by zombies (but not, I think, the undead. These zombies seem to be much more like the Rage-infected types from 28 Days Later and less like the ghouls of George A. Romero's films), but if you're hoping for a really gory, juicy, splattery zombie movie, look elsewhere.

That's the bad news. The good news is that if you're looking for an incredibly funny, sweet, smart and enjoyable movie, Zombieland is right for you. The zombies exist at the backdrop against which Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), a neurotic, Woody Allen-esque survivor and Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), an ass-kicking tough guy survivor, have a relationship. This movie could have been set in the world of Mad Max or after a meteor hit the planet; the important thing isn't that there are zombies, the important thing is that there's no one else.

Well, no one else except two girls. Wichita (an almost unearthly looking Emma Stone) and her little sister Little Rock are making do on their own, scamming and scavenging. These two groups collide and make for a sweet and funny little family. I know that sounds kind of awful, but believe me when I say it's not, and that a huge part of what makes this all not awful is the script by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick. Many of the jokes are dagger sharp, and no joke opportunity is wasted. But Reese and Wernick don't just chase gags - they find the organic, believable ways to have characters say these lines. And Zombieland is full of great lines - this movie feels like a quoter's dream.

Director Ruben Fleischer does some really impressive stuff. This isn't a 100 million dollar movie, but he's able to find the views of American desolation that sell this as being post-apocalyptic. He places the four figures within these big, empty landscapes in ways that emphasize their closeness against the big, scary empty out there. That's really what Zombieland is about - not about the rules for surviving a zombie plague (although that's a very funny and very visual running gag throughout the movie), but about how damaged people can come together to find happiness and love.

If you were to take Zombieland at name value - ie as a zombie movie - it's one of the weirdest I've ever seen. For one thing, it's completely hopeful. Zombie films are, by their nature, almost always bleak. There may be a glimmer of hope at the end, but usually it feels like a band-aid on a gaping chest wound. Every good zombie movie has a sociopolitical layer, and Zombieland is no different, but this sociopolitical layer is about Obama, and about the end of the recession. This is a movie about making it through the bad times and seeing the other side. That's kind of cool, but I have to admit that it left me a touch disoriented at the finale, because I'm just not used to walking out of zombie films feeling... good.

The chemistry between Eisenberg and Harrelson is so good it's almost obscene. This is a tough relationship to pull off - Tallahassee immediately senses that Columbus is a bitch - but they navigate the waters well, without ever becoming too touchy feelie or even chummy. It's a real relationship that maybe wouldn't happen in the normal world, but in the chaos of Zombieland these two opposites together make perfect sense. Breslin and Stone are good, and Stone particularly has a great sort-of bad girl thing down, but they don't come close to matching the wattage of their male co-stars.

There's also a secret cameo in the film - hell, cameo doesn't even do it justice. It's an amazing sequence that works like magic and that, even though it comes towards the end of the second act, really gels the movie together tonally. It's a sequence that defines what Zombieland is and what it's trying to do, and it sums up why I like this film so much. It's a bummer that I can't talk about it.

One thing about Zombieland that I want to call out for specific commendation: this is almost 100% a post-zombie apocalypse movie. With the exception of a flashback or two, this film completely takes place after humanity has been wiped out. It's not about people trying to figure out how to survive or crawling from the wreckage, it's about people who have survived and how they live their day to day life in this world. We haven't seen enough zombie movies like that, and it really sets Zombieland apart from the walking (or in this case running) dead glut we've experienced the last decade.

Zombieland was originally conceived as a TV pilot, and I think you can still see that element in the film's ending. I certainly would love to tune in every week to follow the adventures of Columbus and Tallahassee and Little Rock and Wichita; these are engaging characters set in a vivid world with the benefit of smart, really fucking funny writers putting words in their mouths. What else can you ask for? Well, maybe some more gut-chomping, but not every zombie movie can be Day of the Dead.

Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw

KQEK (Mark R. Hasan) dvd review

filmcritic.com (Bill Gibron) review [4.5/5]

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]

Screenjabber review

Showcase [Todd Brown]

Slate (Josh Levin) review

Beyond Hollywood review Nix

Horror Squad [William Goss]

The Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review

About.com Hollywood Movies (Rebecca Murray) review [A-]

Slant Magazine review [2/4] Nick Schager

The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [B+]

FromTheBalcony [Bill Clark]

The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review

One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [B]

New York Daily News (Joe Neumaier) review [3/5]

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

CineSnob.net (Kiko Martinez) review [B+]

Entertainment Weekly review [B+] Lisa Schwarzbaum

Variety (Dennis Harvey) review

Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [4/5]

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [2/4]

Los Angeles Times (Michael Ordoña) review

Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]

The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review

Fleischner, Sam

STAND CLEAR OF THE CLOSING DOORS B+ 91

USA (102 mi) 2013 Official site

While the title doesn’t lend itself to greatness, or even anything out of the ordinary, but this film is anything but ordinary. Taking a cue from Morris Engel’s groundbreaking film Little Fugitive (1953), which uses a cinéma-vérité documentary style for a fictionalized tale about a 7-year old child who gets lost overnight at Coney Island, seen from the child’s perspective, Fleischner’s naturalistic style accentuates the worldly conditions surrounding a 13-year old Mexican boy Ricky (Jesus Sanchez-Velez, a non-professional actor with Asperger syndrome) on the autism spectrum who gets lost in the city of New York. What’s particularly interesting is we’re not just seeing the world as a child would see it, but as an autistic child, where the sensory conditions are clearly heightened. Inspired by the many stories of kids on the autism spectrum who wandered off from school or their homes, the outcome is often tragic, yet they are an inevitable thread of the world around us, largely unseen where they may as well be perceived as invisible, especially a child of color who is all but ignored. Ricky spends most of his time quietly alone, never uttering a word to anyone, drawing pictures of strange and mysterious creatures, even as he lives with his family near the beach of Far Rockaway, Queens, where his mother Mariana (Andrea Suarez Paz) is a house cleaner, his father Ricardo Sr. (Tenoch Huerta Mejía) is away from the home on construction jobs, while his 15-year old sister Carla (Azul Zorrilla) shows little understanding for her brother’s problems, feeling overburdened, growing easily irritated and impatient with always having to deal with him, and is more concerned with her own teenage life. When she decides to go shopping and “forgets” to pick him up from school one day to walk him home, she believes it’s no big deal, that he’s old enough to get home on his own, but when phone attempts fail, his mother freaks out, knowing he’s all alone out there with nobody to help him. Unfortunately, when Carla doesn’t show up, Ricky curiously follows a man with what he perceives is a magical dragon symbol on the back of his jacket heading into the subway, leading him onto an extended odyssey continuously riding the A-train to Manhattan and back, becoming a treacherous journey of survival.

Because he doesn’t know the name of his subway stop, Ricky remains stuck in a kind of Sisyphean purgatory that takes on a life of its own, endlessly repeating his journey for days on end, where the sounds and sights of this subterranean existence are all too familiar to those that ride the subway, often swarming with people seemingly smashed together on subway platforms, while the screeching noise can be overwhelming at times. As he sits alone connected to ear plugs, we never know what, if anything, he’s listening to while impromptu jazz music echoes through the corridors of the subway station. While a hip-hop dance routine is performed inside a subway car, the overall mood is one of utter indifference, as a train ride is transitory, a means of getting from one place to another, a temporary inconvenience in terms of a loss of time, where people routinely avoid eye contact or speaking to strangers. Lost in thought, the film takes on an abstract mosaic of impressionist images, where seen out the window of the front car, upcoming lights are continually changing shape, becoming energy fields that tap into the subconscious, while above ground buildings and roads whiz by instantaneously. As time goes on, Ricky’s disassociation only grows, becoming positively heartbreaking when we realize he has no means to eat or drink, and each time he attempts to use the subway rest rooms they are chain locked at night, leaving him in a perilous predicament where he’s forced to urinate on himself, one of the few times fellow passengers actually acknowledge his existence, as they further taunt and humiliate him. While you’d think a train employee would notice him, as the smell alone ought to attract attention, but he is surprisingly never rescued by anyone and instead completely ignored. He is able to find an unused, half-empty water bottle, and even some small change enough to purchase a bag of potato chips, but after more than a week his state of mind deteriorates and he grows delusional from hunger and thirst, where he begins hallucinating, seeing fellow passengers turn into monsters, where reality shifts into another dimension with sights and sounds routinely altered. This mental dilemma forces him to fear almost everyone, often seen scurrying away from perceived signs of trouble.

The only distraction from Ricky’s harrowing journey is a strange fascination with odd shapes and designs, where he can be seen staring at mysterious patterns on the subway walls. While Ricky’s dilemma is a purely subjective experience, so is that of his family, as his mother searches endlessly for him in all the nearby locations, gaining help from a shoe store saleswoman, Carmen (Marsha Stephanie Blake), where Ricky likes to spend time in the store staring at the different color designs of the shoes. She helps put up signs with Ricky’s picture on it in the neighborhood and encourages the family to make a police report, despite their undocumented status, but the police are little help, continually finding missing kids that bear no resemblance to Ricky. By the time Ricardo Sr. shows up, Mariana already thinks the worst, that Ricky may never return home alive. Their search through the neighborhood is another impressionistic montage of wordless images, while Mariana also reports that he’s missing to his school, where she receives a lecture about how underfunded the school is to help special needs children, suggesting there are schools with specially trained staff that would be a better fit, which is an infuriorating insult under normal circumstances, but emphasizes the indifference Ricky faces, where even his school has little interest in helping him, and now he’s lost and utterly on his own. Adding to the growing dilemma are reports that Hurricane Sandy is fast approaching, with amazing footage of a ferocious ocean with gigantic waves crashing onto the beach, where an ominous announcement is made over a loudspeaker that no trains will be running after 7 pm due to the anticipated flooding of the subway tunnels. Once more finding himself abandoned and alone, he sees the fleeting image of the man with the dragon symbol on his jacket, following him to the edge of the platform and into the darkness of the tunnel, even as the audience hears disturbing sounds of onrushing water. The next day, naturalistic shots of the storm’s aftermath are devastating, like the remnants of a tornado, leaving a path of washed up destruction in its wake. The actual storm appeared during the final days of shooting, where the dramatic footage adds an apocalyptic edge of doom to the finale, where so much was lost in the destruction, where Ricky’s world comes to resemble the shadowy eye of the storm, a murky existence where real and unreal merge, an oasis of perceived calmness surrounded by indescribable wreckage.

Festivals: Tribeca | Film Comment Amy Taubin

As Engel did 60 years ago, Fleischner uses the latest advances in portable motion-picture technology to capture a real, highly populated heterogeneous location—the NYC subway system—thus seamlessly mixing documentary and fiction. Ricky (Jesus Sanchez-Velez), a high-functioning autistic 13-year-old living in Rockaway Beach with his undocumented family, follows a magical image of a dragon onto the El and gets lost for more than a week in the subways. Almost no one pays him notice, but he sees with the eyes of a poet, and increasingly out of necessity, a pragmatist. Fleischner deftly weaves together two parallel storylines—Ricky’s odyssey and the determined efforts of his mother (Andrea Suarez) to find him. The leading actors, including the Mexican star Tenoch Huerta Mejía, are marvelous, as are the people who ride the subways, some of them caught unaware on camera only for seconds, some performing in short scripted scenes. Hurricane Sandy struck during production and Fleischner allowed this “Act of God” (as it would be referenced in contract law) to carry the movie in slightly unexpected directions. In its depiction of fragility and resilience, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors rings true from beginning to end without a trace of sentimentality.

New York : Stand Clear of the Closing Doors - Village Voice Alan Scherstuhl

What a difference a camera makes. In the context of Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, a narrative feature that plays like an impressionistic record of the New York subway experience circa exactly right now, train-car breakdancers prove a wonder rather than a dangerous annoyance. Framed by the shuddering lights, the silvery roof, and the knees of an audience determined not to notice them, these kids, so cocksure and defiant, loose something effervescent in themselves as they pop and whirl.

The story concerns an autistic teenager's days spent riding the trains in a daze as his family searches for him. Looming over all of this is an approaching storm -- while the great scenes of train-life capture what feels like this week, the film is set in October 2012, with Hurricane Sandy bearing down. For all that, director Sam Fleischner is mostly dedicated to showing us everything millions of people glance at each day but don't actually regard: the brilliant play of light and shadow on subway windows, and the way the headlamps, as you space out, seem to flatten to colored wafers.

"You're both so focused on your screens, you don't even notice there's no light!" the boy's mother carps to her kids in the opening moments. The same goes for the passengers slumped about Ricky (Jesus Sanchez-Velez) on his trek. That it's a thrill to watch humdrum train life through Ricky's eyes underscores one of the ironies of our age: Patient, observational film demands you surrender to it, that you keep your phone in your pocket, which means movie theaters now sometimes offer a more unmediated look at the world than life itself does.

Tunnel Vision Amy Taubin from Artforum

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE to watch Sam Fleischner’s richly textured, fully engaging Stand Clear of the Closing Doors without thinking of the terrible story of Avonte Oquendo, the autistic teenager who ran through an open door in his high school—he was always attracted to light, his mother said—and vanished. His remains were discovered three months later in the waters off College Point, New York. Stand Clear premiered in the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival, almost half a year before the photos of Oquendo with the words MISSING BOY appeared in every New York subway station. At Tribeca, Fleischner said that he had been inspired by many stories of kids on the autism spectrum who wandered off from school or their homes. Some of those stories ended badly, some didn’t. Without giving the ending of the film away, I can say that although I often feared for the life of the protagonist, a thirteen-year-old Mexican boy named Ricky (Jesus Sanchez-Velez), I also believed throughout that he would survive. Wah Do Dem (2009), the brilliant debut feature which Fleischner codirected with Ben Chace, is about a guy who gets lost in Jamaica without a cent or a cell phone and emerges with a recalibrated consciousness from his dangerous Odyssey.

The axiom that Richard Linklater wrote in the diary he kept during the making of Slacker (1991)—that he wanted his films to be “locked in with the time and place of their making”—applies to Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, which is set in the eclectic community of Rockaway, New York, where Fleischner lives, and in the New York City subway system, which, depicted partly through the eyes of an imaginative, differently abled boy, is both ordinary and surreal. Ricky follows a man whose jacket is decorated with what the boy believes is a magical symbol—a water serpent swallowing its tail—up the stairs to the A train, and, because he doesn’t know the name of his stop, gets lost for a week, growing increasingly despondent and even delusional from thirst and hunger. His fellow passengers for the most part seem perfectly nice, but they either fail to notice his plight or don’t want to get involved or, if they are homeless, assume he is too.

Ricky’s journey is crosscut with that of his mother Mariana (Andrea Suarez Paz), who at first searches for him alone. Mariana is afraid to tell the police because the family is undocumented. Her husband, Ricardo Sr. (Tenoch Huerta) is a day laborer, working “upstate”; if he leaves his job, he’ll never get it back. Ricky’s older sister Carla (Azul Zorilla) is so consumed with guilt—she left Ricky alone because she wanted to hang with her friends—that she’s almost useless. The only support Mariana gets is from Carmen (Marsha Stephanie Blake), the manager of the local sneaker store, who helps her make LOST BOY posters and then convinces her to go to the police.

The performances in the lead roles are all so good that I hesitate to single anyone out, but Suarez Paz, an aspiring actor whom Fleischer discovered in the neighborhood, is exceptionally strong and nuanced, and Sanchez-Velez, a thirteen-year-old with Asperger syndrome, uses his own experience to evoke Ricky’s unpredictable emotional changes and the mystery of his inner life. Rose Lichter-Marck and Micah Bloomberg’s script gives the film an excellent spine, strong enough to allow Fleischner to fill it with wonderful cameo performances, some planned in advance, some improvised, and some simply found objects. Large-format cameras were used throughout so that everyone in the subways and on the street knew that they were being filmed. (Fleischner believes it is unethical to use hidden cameras to “steal” shots of people.)

What makes Stand Clear of the Closing Doors an exceptional film was what movie contracts term an “act of God.” During what was meant to be the last week of shooting, Hurricane Sandy struck, flooding the Rockaway neighborhood and destroying Fleischner’s own house. Production was suspended and the movie had to be rejiggered. But in the days leading up to the storm, Fleischner got some amazing footage of the beach and the turbulent surf and menacing sky. There is a chilling moment in the subway when we hear the announcement over the loudspeaker that the MTA is suspending service and everyone must leave the trains by 7 PM. Ricky sits alone on the suddenly emptied platform. In the distance he sees the apparition-like figure of the man with the water serpent symbol on his jacket. The man walks to the end of the platform and disappears into the tunnel. Ricky follows him into the darkness, toward the sound of the rushing water, and toward the light.

PopMatters [Cynthia Fuchs]

He Can't Find Himself

Ricky (Jesus Sanchez-Velez) holds a sneaker. The camera in Stand Clear of the Closing Doors is close on his fingers as he rubs the faux suede, vaguely purple, and the Supra crown logo. He leans in to smell the shoe, his glasses glinting in the dim light. A pop tune plays on the shop’s sound system, a speedy beat that links Ricky’s close-up with a subsequent longer shot, his sister Carla’s (Azul Zorrilla) legs, in textured tights and boots, as she waits for him, restless. “Come on Ricky,” she says, “We gotta get cat food.” Ricky remains focused on the shoe, as Carla walks into his frame, hoping to keep their disagreement between them, invisible to the boy she spots across the room, a boy trying on shoes, briefly looking her way when he hears Ricky’s voice rise.

While Carla’s nervousness, her hope not to make a scene, makes her like most other 15-year-olds, very aware of the world around her, Ricky, 13 and has Asperger’s syndrome, lives another experience, one they can’t share. If their differences seem obvious, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors goes on to consider their similarities, the sensory and emotional fragments that make anyone’s experience a mix of order and chaos.

This comparison is occasioned by a crisis, when Carla, frustrated with Ricky and also the fact that she’s expected to look after him when their undocumented domestic worker mother Mariana (Andrea Suarez Paz) is unavailable, leaves him at school and he wanders off. The movie goes on to follow what might be described as parallel tracks over the next couple of days, as Ricky rides the New York City subway and Carla, Mariana, and eventually the kids’ mostly absent father Ricardo (Tenoch Huerta Mejia), worry in their Rockaway Beach apartment, embarking each day to try to find him.

As the boy alone is surrounded by noise and movement, impressions that are alternately thrilling and frightening, weird and familiar, so too his family sees their environment and each other in new ways, the changes made vivid for you in a whirl of street and beach scenes, as well as a sonic cacophony, from construction and traffic, to the wind and surf of an approaching storm: the film is set in October 2012, when Sandy hits the Rockaways.

If the storm is an obvious bit of metaphor, the film’s other framing devices help to complicate and expand how such signs circulate. Mariana confronts a school system that absolves itself of responsibility (“What he needs is a place where the staff has training specific to autism spectrum disorder,” observes a white guy at a desk, training his budget can’t accommodate) and a police force that can’t act until the boy has been missing for 72 hours. When at last a detective (Santo Fazio) comes to her tiny apartment to ask questions and inspect the drawings of sea monsters Ricky has left behind, he’s out of breath from climbing the stairs, a point underlined when he attaches his portable oxygen tubes to his nose. “Do you want some water?” she offers. He sweats and mutters no, then proceeds to the standard questions: does Ricky have friends, places he likes to go, maybe things he likes to do?

Mariana has already asked herself these questions, and already visited the beach her son likes to walk, several times over the course of the movie. She’s encouraged to search by Carmen (Marsha Stephanie Blake), who works at the shoe store where Ricky finds sneakers he likes. “Right now your son just needs you,” Carmen tells her, “He needs you to not give up, wherever he is, he can’t find himself.”

The film uses this notion as both structure and philosophy, that no one can “find himself,” that such searches make community by definition. Ricky may not know he’s lost, as his sense of time and place can’t match his mother’s. Simultaneously, Mariana and Carla must sort out another sense of loss while also finding themselves. The film ee this not in the end of the search but in the process, on the trains where Ricky rides and the streets and shore where Mariana walks and puts up fliers. The train is rather a perfect “place” to be lost, in constant motion but also still, inside each car. During these scenes, you see what he sees, sometimes in tight frames suggesting his focus, sometimes in mobile frames suggesting his distraction. Along with the news of Sandy, you’re reminded of the US presidential election, which pops up in New York Post headlines (“Romney: The Only Choice”) and the also the annual anarchy allowed by Halloween, as Ricky looks up to see figures in chainsaw killer or dragon or Lion King costumes, their faces masked or painted, riding the subway on the way to somewhere else.

Ricky by this point is exhausted as well as lost. And so his ride on the train is ongoing and allusive as much as it might be actual, an experience that his mother cannot imagine, for which his sister cannot apologize enough, and that draws his father home from the job he’s been working “upstate.” He comes back on Halloween, when Carla’s on her way out the door in a pink Nicki MInaj wig: she stops short and embraces her dad who might, she hopes against hope, make things right. As she makes him dinner, bent over the stove in her costume, the camera watches her from the next room, where Mariana and Ricardo both sit, uncomfortably, uncertain how to speak to each other, how to make sense of the silence between them.

Here and elsewhere, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors connects experiences that look, on their surfaces, to be absolutely different. This isn’t to say that the film disrespects differences, reconciles these experiences or conjures a neat morality. Rather, it renders the many impressions that might make up these experiences, the loud smudgy blurs of trains passing, the sound of the surf crashing outside Ricky’s home, Mariana’s long walks on sidewalks and on the shore, her efforts to put up fliers and her visits to church, where she and Carla find solace in a chorus, a sound you now understand is of a piece with the city’s noise even as it might be different.

Review: Stand Clear Of The Closing Doors resists intima... David Ehrlich from The Onion A.V. Club

Filmleaf [Chris Knipp]

Review: 'Stand Clear Of The Closing Doors' A ... - Indiewire Diana Drumm

Stand Clear Of The Closing Doors / The Dissolve Scott Tobias

Critical Movie Critics [Howard Schumann] also seen here: Cinescene

Film-Forward.com [Cary Meltzer Frostick]

Slant Magazine [Chuck Bowen]

Blu-ray.com [Brian Orndorf]

jdbrecords [Justin Lockwood]

Sound On Sight Mark Young

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Jennie Kermode]

Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]

Stand Clear of the Closing Doors - Facets

Georgia Straight [Ken Eisner]

Underground: Sam Fleischner on Stand Clear of the Closing ... Brandon Harris interview from Filmmaker magazine, May 23, 2014

How Hurricane Sandy Rewrote 'Stand Clear of the Closing ... Chris O’Fait interview from The Hollywood Reporter, May 23, 2014

Stand Clear of the Closing Doors: Tribeca Review - The ... John DeFore from The Hollywood Reporter

Film Review: ‘ Stand Clear of the Closing Doors’ | Varie... Ronnie Scheib from Variety

Vancouver Weekly [Indrapramit Das]

Stand Clear of the Closing Doors Movie Review (2014 ... Matt Zoller Seitz

'Stand Clear of the Closing Doors,' a Subway Odyssey ... Stephen Holden from The New York Times

Fleming, Victor

Film Reference Jeanine Basinger

Victor Fleming was a successful, respected director of some of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's biggest and most celebrated films (Red Dust, Captains Courageous, Test Pilot) as well as two undisputed Hollywood classics by the standards of popular taste, The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind. Ironically, it is probably the enormous continuing popularity of the last two titles that has eclipsed Fleming's personal reputation. Correctly perceived as producer-dominated, studio-influenced cinema, both Oz and Gone with the Wind are talked and written about extensively, but never as Victor Fleming films. They are classic examples of the complicated collaborations that took place under the old studio system. Although Fleming received directorial credit (and 1939's Oscar as Best Director) for Gone with the Wind, others made significant contributions to the final film, among them George Cukor.

Fleming served his film apprenticeship as a cinematographer, working with such pioneers as Allan Dwan at the Flying A company and D.W. Griffith at Triangle. He photographed several Douglas Fairbanks films, among them The Americano, Wild and Woolly, and Down to Earth. He developed a skillful sense of storytelling through the camera, as well as a good eye for lighting and composition during those years. After he became a director, his critical reputation became tied to the studio at which he made the majority of his films, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Known unofficially as a "producer's studio," MGM concentrated on showcasing its well-known stable of stars in suitable vehicles.

At Metro, Fleming was frequently thought of as a counterpart to George Cukor; Cukor was labelled a "woman's director," Fleming a "man's director." Besides being a close personal friend and favorite director of Clark Gable, Fleming was responsible for directing the Oscar-winning performance of Spencer Tracy in Captains Courageous. His flair for getting along with male stars enabled him to create an impressive group of popular films that were loved by audiences, who saw them as "Gable films" or "Tracy films." Both Henry Fonda (whose screen debut was in Fleming's The Farmer Takes a Wife) and Gary Cooper (whose first big screen success was inThe Virginian) owed much of their early recognition to Fleming's talent for directing actors. Fleming had a talent for spotting potential stars and understanding the phenomenon of the star persona. In addition to his work with male actors, he also played a key role in the career development of Jean Harlow. Under Fleming's direction, she was encouraged to mix comedy with her sex appeal.

The Virginian, Fleming's first sound film, is an underrated movie that demonstrates a remarkable ability to overcome the problems of the early sound era, shooting both outdoors and indoors with equal fluidity and success. Fleming's use of naturalistic sound in this film did much to influence other early films. However, Fleming's work is not unified by a particular cinematic style, although it is coherent in thematic terms. His world is one of male camaraderie, joyous action, pride in professionalism, and lusty love for women who are not too ladylike to return the same sort of feelings. In this regard, his work is not unlike that of Howard Hawks, but Fleming lacked Hawks' ability to refine style and content into a unified vision.

Fleming's name is not well known today. Although he received directorial credit for what is possibly the most famous movie ever made in Hollywood (Gone with the Wind), he is not remembered as its director. His work stands as an example of the best done by those directors who worked within the studio system, allowing the film to bear the stamp of the studio rather than any personal vision.

All-Movie Guide

Reel Classics A Forgotten Maker of the Unforgettable, by Michael Sragow from The New York Times, November 15, 1998

Fleming, Victor They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Jean-Pierre Melville's 64 Favourite Pre-War American Filmmakers (Cahiers du Cinema, October 1961)

RED DUST

USA (83 mi) 1932

Time Out

The archetypal steamy melodrama, with Gable as the boorish-but-sexy manager of a rubber plantation in Indo-China who falls for platinum prostitute Harlow, despite a moment of adulterous lust for cool-but-I'm-burning-up-inside Mary Astor. So excessive that some of it turns camp, and rampantly sexist, but you can see why the Depression audiences flocked.

Edinburgh U Film Society [Mark Radice]

The most compelling reason for seeing this film is it's cast - a set of MGM's most prized possessions: including Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Gene Raymond and Mary Astor.  The combined talents of the various legends assembled before the cameras could not fail to make an explosive, entrancing picture.

The original play, by William Collison, collapsed after only eight performances on Broadway, but after its resurrection here in 1932 it was filmed again in '39 as Congo Maisie, and again in '53 as Mogambo. The story is a good yarn set on a rubber plantation in Indochina, where rough-and-ready Gable slaves for money, feigning immunity from all women. His life is much upset by the arrival of cheap floozy Jean Harlow, seeking sanctuary from the jungle, and upper-class Mary Astor, the wife of his partner, Gene Raymond.

Feeling guilty about a brief liason with Astor, Gable spurns her and turns to Harlow on the rebound. The love-triangles - or squares - make the plot, but this is kept from lapsing into mediocrity by the sizzling performances of the cast. In panicular, the scenes where Gable and Harlow interact at odds with each other crackles with masked sexual energy, the dialogue is dated but obscurely potent.

The direction keeps things swift and snappy; the picture is made by subtle omissions which leaves the viewer wondering about how intense the relationships are.  The man responsible for this is Victor Fleming whose credits as director include such classics as Treasure Island, The Wizard of Oz and Gone With The Wind.

Classic Film Guide (capsule)

Before he immortalized the role of Rhett Butler in producer David O. Selznick's Oscar winning blockbuster – the film adaptation of Margaret Mitchell's celebrated novel - Gone With the Wind (1939), Clark Gable played plenty of other womanizing rogues in the movies, like the one he plays in this steamy pre-code drama opposite Jean Harlow, the screen's original “blonde bombshell”, and Mary Astor. Like GWTW, this movie was directed by Victor Fleming; Wilson Collison's story was scripted by John Lee Mahin. This film was added to the National Film Registry in 2006.

Gable plays the owner of a rubber plantation in Indo-China, where he becomes involved in a love triangle with a floozy (Harlow) on the run from the law, and later the wife (Astor) of an engineer he's hired, played by Gene Raymond, whose character is conveniently stricken with malaria. The film includes an infamous nude (in a water barrel) sequence featuring Harlow's character splashing and teasing Gable's; afterwards, their relationship heats up pretty quickly in the jungle setting. But Gable's head is turned when Astor's character, a woman with “real class”, arrives on the scene, causing sparks of a different kind to fly between the prior lovers. Character actor Donald Crisp, who appeared in four of the original Lassie movies including the famous collie's debut in Lassie Come Home (1943), plays one of Gable's employees, and a voice of reason to his employer-friend about the dangerous love triangle.

The story was so well received that the owning studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), later remade it, again with Gable – this time as a big game hunter, set in Africa - as Mogambo (1953) opposite Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly, respectively. But this is one of my favorite Gable-Harlow films (they made half a dozen films together, this was their second), and the superior version ... and not just because Mary Astor looks (uncharacteristically?) sexy in it too. FYI, a scene from this film was used in the story of another Harlow film, Bombshell (1933).

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford

The second of six films Jean Harlow and Clark Gable appeared in together, Red Dust (1932) demonstrated once and for all the potent sexual chemistry these two MGM stars generated when they were teamed on the screen. Gable plays Dennis Carson, a rough-and-tumble rubber plantation overseer in Indochina and Harlow is cast as Vantine, a prostitute on the run who is offered shelter by Gable until the next boat to civilization. At first Carson is indifferent to Vantine's charms but eventually a mutual attraction develops between them which is soon complicated by the arrival of engineer Gary Willis (Gene Raymond) and his attractive wife, Barbara (Mary Astor).

Red Dust was based on a play by Wilson Collison that had originally been purchased as a possible film vehicle for John Gilbert. Although the former matinee idol was still under contract to MGM and in need of a hit, the studio brass decided to cast Gable in the role instead, believing Gable and Harlow a better match than Gilbert and Harlow. At the last minute, they replaced French director Jacques Feyder with Victor Fleming but other than that, production proceeded smoothly until a major scandal threatened to shut down production. Jean Harlow's husband, MGM executive Paul Bern, committed suicide midway through filming (some biographies suggest he was murdered and the studio covered it up) and MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer, fearing a scandal, appealed to Tallulah Bankhead to step into Harlow's role. She refused out of respect for Harlow and the blonde bombshell was soon back on the set, though considerably subdued. During her first day back at work, Fleming reportedly said to Mary Astor, "how are we going to get a sexy performance with that look in her eyes?" But Harlow proved herself the ultimate trooper, turning in a delightful performance. When Time Magazine covered the film, the reviewer wrote: "The best lines go to Harlow. She bathes hilariously in a rain barrel and reads Gable a bedtime story about a chipmunk and a rabbit. ("Say I wonder how this comes out?" her character wisecracks). Her effortless vulgarity, humor, and slovenliness make a noteworthy characterization, as good in the genre as the late Jeanne Eagels' Sadie Thompson."

Surprisingly, Red Dust avoided any censorship problems with the Hays Office, despite the carnal relationship between Carson and Vantine or the passionate kissing scene between Carson and Barbara during a rainstorm. The latter, in fact, was particularly difficult to film because of the intense heat on the set. The hot lights would instantly vaporize the water on the actors' clothes and produce a mist effect that was NOT what the cameramen wanted. To avoid this, prop man Harry Edwards would heat water in a teapot and then pour it on the actors prior to filming.

Co-star Gene Raymond agreed it was a difficult picture to shoot and said, "...the whole thing was done at MGM. Stage 6 was now a jungle with a hut in it, and it stank to high heaven. The rain would seep in and all of a sudden you had mud. Then they put the hot lights on and it steamed up. So it was not a pleasant picture; it was hard for everybody, especially the crew." Regardless of the hardships, Red Dust was a hit and would later inspire a remake - Mogambo (1954) - directed by John Ford and with Gable repeating his original role opposite Ava Gardner (in the Harlow part) and Grace Kelly (in the Astor role).

A final bit of trivia: Jean Harlow would later marry Harold "Hal" Rosson, the cinematographer on Red Dust.

Crazy for Cinema

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The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks

Channel 4 Film

The New York Times M.H.

BOMBSHELL

USA (96 mi) 1933

Channel 4 Film

The perfect vehicle for Harlow's talent has her as a Hollywood star (bet that was a stretch!) less than happy with her lot. Her family are queuing up for handouts, while an unscrupulous studio publicity agent (Tracy) is cooking up lurid stories to keep her in the papers. There is a biting satirical edge here that is hard to ignore - the studios exploitative of talent and the family leeching off it - not exactly million miles from Harlow's real-life experiences. It is hardly surprising she plays the role with such gusto, her quick-fire delivery highlighting a great comic talent.

Classic Film Guide (capsule)

An essential inside Hollywood comedy about a film star (Jean Harlow), her meddling agent (well played by Lee Tracy), and all the other leaches (including her family - Dad played by Frank Morgan) who live off her. Pat O'Brien plays her director, where they are supposedly filming scenes from Red Dust (1932). Recently divorced, he has a love hate relationship with her. But it's Tracy's agent character that really gets on her nerves. He "wants" her too. When she decides she wants to adopt a baby, (fearing for his own loss of income?), he spoils it. Fed up with it all, Harlow escapes to a desert resort where she meets, and falls for, Franchot Tone. But she doesn't live up to his parent's (Dad played by C. Aubrey Smith) expectations. And, there's something else going on here ... (Una Merkel & Louise Beavers also appear). Directed by Victor Fleming, uncredited.

Crazy for Cinema

Harlow is at her sexy, sassy best in this classic comedy, lampooning her own superstar image. She plays Lola Burns, a big name actress trying to lead a normal life in spite of the lies churned out by her studio’s overzealous publicity department and the constant money woes of her shiftless relatives. All she wants is to be loved, respected and allowed to work in peace. What she gets is a constant stream of demands on her time, cash and emotions. Though a mere money machine to her family, it’s the blatant lies and schemes of Space Hanlon, the head of publicity that wreaks the most havoc in her life. He swears he only plants tales of her wanton ways to build her into a superstar, but the love of millions of strangers fails to cure her romantic yearnings. When his meddling ruins her plans to adopt a baby – who better to love her unconditionally – she disappears into the night, forsaking her career for a normal life. If only she could see that he’s dashing her chances at finding romance because he’s madly in love with her himself.

Not about to let her get away, he launches one final ploy to return her to Hollywood and into his arms, using the handsome, but leaden Franchot Tone for bait. This may be a crazy and convoluted look at the troubles that come with fame, but Harlow makes it both hilarious and heartfelt. The part of Lola Burns did, without a doubt, hit fairly close to home for the young actress, but she is clearly on top of her game here, making Lola more than just a selfish, sexy screen siren. She captures her character’s need to be loved for who she really is and not her Hollywood persona with an honesty that catches at your heart. The more of Harlow’s films I see, the more saddened I am at her tragically young demise. God only knows the acting heights she could have climbed to if she had made it into her 30s. BOMBSHELL proves she could carry a picture without a super star leading man like Gable or Powell beside her. For those wondering what all the fuss was about, this film is a definitive Harlow experience not to be missed.

Turner Classic Movies Roger Fristoe

Inside jokes and movie connections abound in the Jean Harlow comedy Bombshell (1933), in which Harlow is cast as Lola Barnes, a sexy, guileless movie star based on Clara Bow. Harlow had played a supporting role in Bow's The Saturday Night Kid (1929), and Bombshell director Victor Fleming had dated Bow, so both had inside information about their subject. The basis of the film was an unproduced play that took a serious look at the tragic situation of a star who is exploited by everyone around her.

In a story conference at MGM, screenwriter John Lee Mahin had the inspiration to turn the tale into a comedy an idea seized by Fleming when he realized Bow's story was ripe for satire. "She used to be my girl," Fleming explained. "You'd go to her house, and there'd be a beautiful Oriental rug with coffee stains...and her father would come in drunk, and her secretary was stealing from her." As Bow was known as the "It Girl," the fictional Lola becomes the "If Girl." Lola works at "Monarch" Studios, as Bow had toiled at Paramount, to support hangers-on including an alcoholic father and dishonest secretary. Lola's household is overrun by oversized sheepdogs, just as Bow's had been by undisciplined Great Danes.

Bombshell also contains parallels to Harlow's own life. Script clerk Morris Abrams would recall that Harlow also worked hard, only to have her own family take her money, "just like the girl in the movie. She would come in at 6 a.m. each morning for makeup and hair and wardrobe and rehearsal, then shoot till dinner or later and in they'd stroll in the middle of the day, dressed to the nines and riding high. They were parasites." Lola has an all-white house similar to Harlow's own, designed to complement her pale skin and platinum hair. Lola's movie career is illustrated with clips from Harlow's own films, and she is shown doing retakes for Red Dust (1932), in which Harlow had starred with Clark Gable under Fleming's direction.

The Fleming-like director in Bombshell is played by Pat O'Brien. Another character in the film, publicity agent "Space" Hanlon (Lee Tracy), is loosely based on MGM publicity chief Howard Strickling. In an off screen development, Harlow married the movie's cameraman, Harold "Hal" Rosson, before Bombshell was released. He also had photographed her in Red-Headed Woman (1932), Red Dust (1932) and Hold Your Man (1933). The marriage lasted only a year. Harlow's performance in Bombshell was a critical success, praised by Richard Watts, Jr. in the New York Herald Tribune as "the first full-length portrait of this amazing young woman's increasingly impressive acting talent."

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

The New York Times (Mordaunt HalL.B.R.c)

TREASURE ISLAND

USA (103 mi) 1934

Fifteen men on a dead man's chest,
Yo ho ho, and a bottle of rum!
Drink and the devil had done for the rest,
Yo ho ho, and a bottle of rum!
—Robert Louis Stevenson

George Chabot's Review of Treasure Island

They just don't get any better than this!

Faithful adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's rousing tale of pirates and buried treasure on the Spanish Main, it is an action and adventure lovers treat and one the whole family can enjoy.

Starring the inimitable Wallace Beery in a great screen performance, as Long John Silver, a one-legged sailor who signs on as ship's cook. The adventurers try to hire a ship (The Hispaniola) and crew to search for buried treasure and newly-hired Beery offers to find the crew for them. What the honest men don't know is that Long John was first mate with the infamous Cap'n Flint, when they buried the treasure long ago on Treasure Island! The crew, waiting at Long John's tavern, is a gang of cutthroats just like the author so vividly described in the novel.

Jackie Cooper is the hero of the story, Jim Hawkins, a boy who finds the map among an old buccaneer's (Barrymore's) effects after he hastily departs this life without paying his bill at the Admiral Benbow, an inn kept by Jim's mother. Cooper was a blonde-haired child actor who made a number of very successful movies in the 30s, however, was little heard of afterwards.

Wallace Beery is stupendous as he wins his way into the adventurers' confidence, meanwhile plotting with the mutinous crew behind the scenes, finally resorting to out-and-out murder without batting an eye.

Supporting cast is comprised of some of the finest character actors from the golden age of Hollywood: Otto Kruger (Dr. Livesey), Lewis Stone (Capt. Smollett), Nigel Bruce (Squire Trelawney), and Lionel Barrymore(Billy Bones).

Needless to say, they find the treasure, but there are more pressing things on the adventurers' minds by the time they arrive at Treasure Island - pirate attack!

Watch Lewis Stone as the immovable Cap'n Smollet, refuse to give Long John a hand up after their parley at the redoubt. Silver has to crawl back to the pirate lines.

The movie has a happy ending, but there are plenty of plot twists and comic relief to keep you delighted. This is a five star adventure and holds up even in the colorized version. Watch it if you haven't seen it, or watch it again if you have!

Silver Screen Reviews

One of the earliest adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel, 1934's Treasure Island follows the original story fairly closely. The mystery and excitement of the book carry over very well into the film version, which was directed by Victor Fleming of The Wizard of Oz fame. He assembled a remarkable cast including the legendary Lionel Barrymore to star as Billy Bones and popular child actor Jackie Cooper (as an adult, Perry White in the Superman movies) to star as Jim Hawkins. With such cinematic greats behind and in front of the camera, Treasure Island was guaranteed quality right from the start.

Even before the main character, Long John Silver, steps onto the screen, we are introduced to a number of major players.  The crusty old pirate Billy Bones shows up at the Admiral Benbow Inn, under the management of the Hawkins family. Jim and his mother aren't the sort to get in and out of trouble, but upon Bones' arrival, trouble finds them easily. Billy seems nervous all the time, and paranoid, as if someone is about to run into the room and drive a sword into him at any moment. He keeps to himself, but when he gets too much rum into him, he causes a scene and offends everyone within earshot.

It turns out that Billy is possessor of a lost map to buried treasure on a far off island. Jim Hawkins obtains the map from a dying Billy, and then takes it to his trusted friend Dr. Livesey (Otto Kruger). Before long, the doctor and Squire Trelawney (Nigel Bruce) gain access to a British naval ship and set sail to find the treasure. Along for the ride is the old one-legged sea cook Long John Silver (Wallace Beery). Billy warned Jim of a one-legged man, but this man in particular is so friendly that Jim forgets about the warning and falls under the spell of Long John's good-natured personality.

Treasure Island is a fun adventure film about buried treasure, angry pirates, noble good guys, an exotic island and a plucky hero. Jim Hawkins is a brave young lad thrust into a world of betrayal and treachery, of underhanded plots and snarling villains. It's the kind of film that young children can get into because its hero is a teenager who gets to do the things they can only dream of. At one point, Jim goes aboard his ship, the Hispaniola, after it was commandeered by Long John's men and cuts it loose from its anchor. He goes by himself, at night, and finds himself face-to-face with the remorseless Israel Hands (Douglas Dumbrille). It's a scary mission, but he succeeds, and in the process he allows every kid watching to experience that same adventure in their imaginations.

Stevenson's novel has experienced incarnations in the form of a Disney version, a musical, a cartoon and a muppet movie. That pigeonholes the story into kiddie territory, but it's a great story full of colorful characters, and adults can certainly find plenty in the film version to appreciate. In particular is Wallace Beery's performance as Long John Silver. He plays the part with a wink from his eye to the viewer, as if he just can't wait to shed the nice-guy image. When we first meet him, he's kind and considerate, but underneath all that is a villain just waiting to get loose.

Treasure Island came out so long ago that it's been supplanted by slicker and glossier versions, but this 1934 release takes many of its strengths – Jim Hawkins' friendship with Long John Silver and the swashbuckling action – from the book, which itself was thrilling entertainment.

Turner Classic Movies Bill Goodman

DVD Town [John J. Puccio]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer)

DVD Verdict [Maurice Cobbs]

The New York Times (Mordaunt Hall)

DVDBeaver Gary W. Tooze

THE WIZARD OF OZ A 100

USA (101 mi) 1939 co-director: King Vidor

One of the first, and one of the greatest Technicolor masterpieces, featuring in my view, the greatest female performance in the history of film, that of Judy Garland, who represents the essence of innocence and youth for all times, it's been 60 years or more and no one has been better, NO ONE can compare to her Dorothy, or the timeless message of this film that you don't have to go on a lifelong journey, Somewhere Over the Rainbow, in search of the human qualities that are already inside each and every one of us, some of the most beautiful music, one of the most heartfelt films I've ever seen, and what's more, there are treacherous flying monkeys!

Truly one of the greatest American films ever made, adapted from the L. Frank Baum book, celebrating a 60^th anniversary release with gorgeously restored Technicolor dye-transfer prints and digital sound, this is simply a sumptuous experience. Of interest, I saw this again after seeing Bergman’s anthem in red CRIES ANDS WHISPERS (1972), Demy’s color extravaganza THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (1964), and this one easily takes the cake for the most extraordinary use of color. The color is simply unbelievable how bright it is, underscored with terrific songs, the superb innocence and beauty of Judy Garland whose passionate singing and bursting-with-emotion onscreen presence just drives the energy in this film. Of greater interest, the best scenes in the film were directed by an uncredited director, King Vidor, who completed the black and white scenes and the Munchkin scenes while Fleming was off directing GONE WITH THE WIND (1939).

My three-year old daughter Eva thought the “house scene,” where the house was hurled up into the air by the tornado, throwing in surreal imagery of Dorothy looking out the window and seeing things flying past, including the transformation of Margaret Hamilton’s evil Mrs. Gulch riding a bicycle into the Wicked Witch flying by on her broomstick, was the best scene in the movie, followed by the Munchkin scene, where the black and white world of Kansas was replaced by the magnificent color of Munchkinland, including singing and dancing dwarfs, a Good Witch arriving in a colorful flying bubble, the green-faced bad witch arriving in a cloud of red smoke, a magical world that makes today’s Telletubbyland pale by comparison. I have to agree with Eva’s observations. Seeing it onscreen after all these years, I was also impressed by the opening black and white landscape, at just how barren and desolate it all was, a giant expanse of emptiness from which the heart-stopping Somewhere Over the Rainbow is sung under the haystacks.

Dorothy’s three friends remain as irrepressible as ever in our memories, Ray Bolger’s Scarecrow searching for his brain, Jack Haley Jr’s Tin Man searching for his heart, and Bert Lahr’s unique and unstoppable Cowardly Lion searching for his courage, all meeting on The Yellow Brick Road where they join up and dance and sing We’re Off the See the Wizard, the Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Once they get to Emerald City, where “a horse of a different color” changes from purple to red to orange, and where the color green is everywhere, especially in the sacred halls leading to the Wizard himself, we discover “the great and powerful Oz,” Frank Morgan’s Kansas humbug with a loudspeaker and a lightning machine hiding behind a curtain, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,” eventually exposed by Toto, Dorothy’s dog. But first the Wicked Witch sends the flying monkeys to kidnap Dorothy, but Toto escapes and leads her three friends to the Witches castle, where the monkeys sing their marching song, Oooh Eeee Ooo. The Witch stupidly sets the Scarecrow on fire leaving a bucket of water lying around for Dorothy to put to good use. Eventually Dorothy clicks her magic red slippers three times and repeats “There’s no place like home,” where we all learn “the heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others.”

There are different takes on this film, Dorothy’s line to the Scarecrow at the end, “I think I’ll miss you most of all,” and her promise when she awakes that she’ll never leave home again, where a marriage to the farmhand Hunk is not out of the question, giving Dorothy an outlet for her heart’s desire. Or there is a more traditional take on the novel’s intent, that the Scarecrow is an allegory to the land, the Tin Man to industrialization, the Lion to nature, that the Munchkins represent the worker state, controlled by the Wicked Witch, the über capitalist Mrs. Gulch, who owns three quarters of the land in the county and terrorizes the entire population, threatening to use the law to enforce her wishes, which are a far cry from the worker’s wishes, who have to dream “Over the Rainbow” to follow their heart’s desires.

All Movie Guide [Lucia Bozzola]

The lavish MGM production of L. Frank Baum's children's book may have lost a million dollars on its initial release, but its songcraft, technical artistry, star-making performance from Judy Garland, and unexpected TV success turned it into a perennial classic. With future ace MGM musical producer Arthur Freed lending producer Mervyn LeRoy an uncredited hand in pre-production, Cedric Gibbons' art direction, Adrian's costumes, and Hal Rosson's sparkling cinematography maximized the creative potential of Technicolor film, as Dorothy goes "over the rainbow" from a sepia-toned black-and-white Kansas to a fantastically rendered Oz of ruby slippers, emerald cities, and yellow brick roads. Lent ample support by vaudeville vets Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr, neophyte Garland delivered a touching performance as Dorothy, proving that she had the acting talent to match her superb singing. As with Gone With the Wind, the film went through several directors and Victor Fleming got the credit; King Vidor directed the Kansas sequences, including Garland's solo "Over the Rainbow." Almost cut for the sake of pacing, "Over the Rainbow" became an Oscar winner for Best Song and a Garland standard. Although the 2.7-million-dollar film wilted at the box office, The Wizard of Oz was nominated for several Oscars, including Best Picture (which it lost to Gone With the Wind), winning for Herbert Stothart's score and Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg's song. It was the first feature sold for prime-time TV telecast, and its 1956 TV debut was a ratings hit, finally turning it into the crowd-pleasing blockbuster that MGM had always meant it to be.

Time Out Trevor Johnston

It’s like a Pavlovian reaction. I know it’s coming but I can do nothing about it. The strings swell for the introduction to ‘Over the Rainbow’ and already I’m wavering. Judy Garland gets a few lines into the song and I’m emotional wreckage. Every single time…

Oh, but this is supposed to be some creaky old kids’ movie, a charming relic of vintage MGM showmanship, full of chirpy songs and midgets and a wee dog. Not to be taken to heart, surely? Well, intellectually that may be so, but this is one instance where the vagaries of cinematic fashion simply don’t apply. Like Chaplin’s ‘The Kid’ or ‘ET The Extra-Terrestrial’, ‘The Wizard of Oz’ simply lays bare primal emotions, exposes our childhood anxieties about abandonment and powerlessness and brings to light the tension between the repressive comforts of home and the liberating terrors of the unknown marking all our adult lives.

After all, who wouldn’t, like Dorothy, want to leave black-and-white Kansas farmland, where the people are lovely but they just don’t understand you, and try your luck in the jolly old land of Oz, where life is lived with the magically fervid intensity of three-strip Technicolor? Yet with the thrill of escape and the cusp of maturity come all sorts of insecurities: what if you can’t ever go home again? What if the adults in whom you put your faith can’t help you because they’re too busy with their own fallibilities? What if, like those you meet, you’re not sufficiently smart, courageous or emotionally astute to deal with this brave new world? And what if it contains cackling, cruel individuals bent on doing you harm? What then? Put it like that, and maybe the film wrings tears from grown-ups because it hot-wires us to the pain of growing up.

Garland’s performance is key here. She was 17 at the time, and although the vestiges of childlike innocence are still there, she conveys an undertow of trepidation, put across with the adolescent’s jangling nerve-ends. The cheesy, insentient bravado of a moppet-ish child actor would have ruined it completely. Yet you can’t imagine Garland, or anyone else in the splendid cast of vaudevillian pros, being self-conscious about the timeless significance of what they were doing. This was just another studio shoot, and although masterly craftsmanship’s evident in every frame and every bar of Harburg and Arlen’s wonderful score, the production lurched from crisis to crisis. A string of directors included King Vidor and George Cukor as well as credited journeyman Victor Fleming, while Toto was out injured for two weeks when somebody stepped on him, Wicked Witch Margaret Hamilton got badly burned when she went up in a puff of smoke and the first Tin Man wound up in hospital with aluminium poisoning.

What they left us with, though, is celluloid alchemy of the highest order. Kids will continue to love this movie, but perhaps only adults really get it. See this luminous restoration and rediscover the power of truly great storytelling to reveal us to ourselves. Just follow the Yellow Brick Road…

Slant Magazine [Eric Henderson]

Some movies defy criticism and, because nothing bugs critics more than their superfluousness towards a film's general perception, inspire reactive critical insanity. Victor Fleming's The Wizard of Oz is surely one of those films. That said, boy, the impish character of "prestige" projects has surely corroded since MGM's heyday. Cultural appropriation still can't quite mask the fact that Wizard of Oz is absolutely barmy. It's a multimillion-dollar super-production based on L. Frank Baum's born-from-poverty series of mundane, Great Plains fantasy books. Its switch from sepia to color cinematography reverses the standard parameters of which hues represent dreams and which represent realism—we've been associating sugar plum color wheels with our attainable aspirations ever since. It outdoes George Cukor's contemporaneous The Women for its depiction of a matriarchal social model in tumult, where bitchliness is next to evenness. It's both the definitive Hollywood narrative for legions of hopeful starlets and female impersonators ("Come one, come all, your screen test awaits you") as well as a coded-but-firm post-Dust Bowl message to the throngs of California Oakies: "There's no place like home, and this place is not within reasonable classification your 'home.'"

Famously unpacked by Salman Rushdie's BFI monograph as a testament to the resilience of the geographically, politically displaced peoples, The Wizard of Oz stresses the schism between home and not home in a series of vaudeville songs and dances, most revolving around the character's shamed awareness of their own inadequacies. Usually cited by most people as one of their inaugural exposures to the concept of terror within cinema (it even appeared on the AFI's list of the top 100 "most thrilling" films, a seemingly valence kids' film alongside the likes of The Shining and Wait Until Dark), the film's dread doesn't merely emerge from burlap tornadoes, flying monkeys, mole-puckered witches, and sassy apple trees. It also reflects children's subconscious separation anxiety, their knowledge of that distant but defined moment when they will be expected to demonstrate their autonomy. (In Motown's funky '70s update The Wiz, that independence had somehow developed into a synonymy with marriage and sexual maturity, which makes Michael Jackson's casting as the Scarecrow a joke for the ages.)

Rushdie's essay astutely noted that Oz is "an authorless text." He was basically referring to the film's production via committee, a true amalgam of creative forces individually pooling their studio-contract talents like a hive of bees (in tribute to a trio of queens…a quartet if you count Cukor). But his inadvertently anti-auteurist appraisal also encapsulates the nuclear family favorite's crucial endorsement of personal sovereignty…and, like in that Seinfeld episode, of surrounding yourself with new friends that are essentially doppelgangers of your old ones.

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

Many younger viewers won't understand the phenomenon of the yearly The Wizard of Oz television broadcast. When I was a kid in the days before video, we had to wait all year to see this film. It mesmerized and enchanted me, and my enjoyment was only enhanced by the fact that it was a fleeting thing. Moreover, I knew that kids all over my town -- probably all over the country -- were watching it at the same time. It was an event.

This is not to take away from Warner Home Video's spectacular new three-disc DVD The Wizard of Oz box set. (It's also available in a slightly cheaper two-disc set.) Their digital restoration ranks among the most utterly spellbinding DVD achievements yet. Skip ahead to the sequence in which Dorothy (Judy Garland) opens the door of her black-and-white house to reveal the full-color Land of Oz, and it's so stunning that it recaptures what it must have felt like for the original 1939 viewers.

As one of the interviewees says on the disc's supplements, The Wizard of Oz is one of the most-protected films in history, and it's also one of the most well-covered. Probably everyone knows by now that it flopped upon its initial release, and that director Victor Fleming received final credit for both it and Gone with the Wind (released the same year), although he was one of many directors on each film. Most people know that Buddy Ebsen was originally cast as the Tin Man, but had an allergic reaction to the metallic makeup (he went on to be known as Jed Clampett on TV's "The Beverly Hillbillies.") Fewer probably know that W.C. Fields was once considered for the role of the Wizard. The raucous behavior of the little people playing the Munchkins and Garland's eventual emotional downfall are the stuff of Hollywood dirt, and legends such as the dead cast member visible onscreen and perfect synching of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon have permeated popular culture. Other movies have incorporated The Wizard of Oz into their fabric, notably Woody Allen's Annie Hall, Martin Scorsese's After Hours and David Lynch's Wild at Heart, not to mention the popular book/Broadway play Wicked, Which tells the story from the Wicked Witch's perspective.

Based on the novel by L. Frank Baum, the plot, it goes without saying, has Dorothy caught up in a Kansas tornado, dropped into Oz, killing the Wicked Witch of the East in the process. With the help of the Scarecrow (Ray Bolger), the Tin Man (Jack Haley), and the Cowardly Lion (Bert Lahr), she makes her way to see the Wizard of Oz (Frank Morgan) in the hopes of returning back home. Scholars love to poke around in the weird layers of this story, focusing on the murders and the various Freudian representations of things, but we'll leave that to them.

No, the key to The Wizard of Oz is its pure, simple theme: Dorothy's desire to get back home, to safety, to comfort, to family and to love. Her subsequent journey is henceforth unsafe and uncomfortable, and so we wring our hands in sympathy, waiting, hoping for her to be okay. That it's all a dream makes it all the more unpredictable and unreliable. The film understandably works better for kids, but since everyone grew up watching it, adults can enjoy with a certain amount of nostalgia, or -- as stated above -- with a twist of the subversive.

Who knows how long it will be before technicians adapt The Wizard of Oz to some other new home video medium, with even better quality and more extras? How much more essential will it actually be? But as long as DVD players and television sets are a reliable source of entertainment, this disc will be a staple.

Despite the fact that the yearly TV viewing is gone and that viewers can watch it again and again whenever they want, the new DVD is an unquestionable, essential item in anyone's DVD library. It comes with enough extras to help any adult re-capture his or her memories of youth. There are two collections of photos and promotional materials (real ones, not just images on the TV screen), and there are as many documentaries as you can shake a broomstick at, including one on Baum. One look at some of the clips in some of these older documentaries provides a brilliant example of just how brilliantly the movie has been restored. The disc includes the various "deleted scenes" that have already been shown on both the VHS and the laserdisc, including the wonderful song "The Jitterbug." One featurette examines the cult phenomenon and interviews John Waters, among other familiar faces. And for an alternate telling, Angela Lansbury reads the storybook. Disc Three features the most fascinating bonuses: five earlier films based on the Oz books, including four silent films -- one directed by Baum himself -- and one cartoon. The overall quality ranges from decent to poor, but it's great to have these as a comparison.

Boston Phoenix [Peter Keough]

Years later, I can now see that the terror instilled in me as a child by repeated viewings of The Wizard of Oz drove me to become a film critic.

Every holiday season the film would be broadcast on television, and with the rest of the family I would be obliged to watch. Was I the only one who had nightmares about twisters languidly, inexorably lolling across the Kansas grayness, the phallic funnels looming over the closed, womblike shelter of the storm cellar? The macabre spectacle of the Wicked Witch of the East's feet, robbed of their Ruby Slippers, shriveling up under Dorothy's house? Or the Winged Monkeys, their formations filling the sky like a cross between Goya's Sleep of Reason and the Luftwaffe, off to their hideous dismemberment of the Scarecrow? Or the appalling realization that one's entire experience, in living color yet, might be no more than a dream? These were things, like sex and death, no one spoke about. Year after year I watched, the terrors unspoken, until the ritual of film reviewing could sublimate them.

Now the Wizard is back, and I am watching it for the first time on the big screen and with an audience consisting mostly of hundreds of prepubescent girls dressed in Dorothy's blue-polka-dot gingham dress. My biggest anxiety is that the film, like the genial shaman of the title, might prove a humbug. It did not, but perhaps I did. Where was the terror, and the delight?

It didn't help that my first ever theatrical experience of this cinematic archetype was foiled: the theater manager apologized that the print he'd received was "not compatible with Sony's lenses," and so we had to be content with a postage-stamp projection on the big Cheri screen. Or that the youthful audience was well-behaved -- no crying, squealing or laughter, a few clap-alongs with the tunes, and only polite applause when the Wicked Witch of the West melts. And so, not even the cyclone got a rise out of me. Instead, I analyzed. How did Dorothy's quest with her three needy, dysfunctional friends relate to current pop-psychological issues of empowerment and passive aggression? Was the film a Freudian, feminist, or Marxist allegory? Was the man behind the curtain a metaphor for the dubious magic of the motion-picture industry itself?

Well, so be it. The key to growing up, as Dorothy realized, is discovering that one's fears and desires are mostly special effects and hokum and resigning oneself to the fact that, except for an inconsequential sojourn for a couple of hours to a gaudy two-dimensional somewhere over the rainbow, there is indeed no place like home, the humdrum monochrome of the familiar, oppressive, and hopeless that one returns to after the flickering illusion is over.

That home is Dorothy's Kansas, ruled over by landowning capitalist Almira Gulch (the oddly sexy Margaret Hamilton, later to sell us Maxwell House coffee), a barren matriarchy (that Auntie Em is a coldblooded taskmaster, despite her crullers) served by bumbling, ineffectual males (I still laugh at Uncle Henry's line, "Oh, she bit her dog, eh?"). When the sole spirit of rebellion, Toto, asserts himself, Gulch sentences him to death. This summons the fertilizing male principle -- that inevitable cyclone, which propels Dorothy, home and all, into a realm of endless possibility, where the conflict between independence and conformity can be resolved through kitschy fantasy and some catchy production numbers.

Oz, though, is merely Kansas transformed by Dorothy's libidinous wish fulfillment (she is, after all, the 16-year-old Judy Garland) and early Technicolor. In this Utopia, she has slain the mother oppressor, the Witch of the East, and usurped that tyrant's power in the form of ruby footwear (with the intervention of dotty Billie Burke's oddly detached Glinda the Good Witch of the North); but she still requires patriarchal assistance to defeat the vengeful Wicked Witch of the West (Hamilton, again, seductive in green).

That assistance includes the three Kansas farmhands metamorphosed into types of their own inadequacy: the Scarecrow with no brains who is the brains of the outfit, the Tin Man whose crying threatens to rust him into immobility, and the Cowardly Lion, terrifying in appearance but terrified within. While these three hide their capabilities behind the guise of debility, the goal of their quest, the Wizard himself (Frank Morgan, in one of five roles -- think of how the film would have played if W.C. Fields had not held out for more money) veils his powerlessness under the veil of omnipotence.

Or is it powerlessness? When he is exposed by the indefatigable Toto, the Wizard reveals that ultimate Hollywood secret, that the reality doesn't matter as much as the image, that illusion is as effective as truth if believed in, if only for 90 minutes of screen time. That's the recognition that Dorothy takes back to Kansas, where all else remains unchanged (whatever happens to Toto?). As for me, there's no place like home video.

The Official THE WIZARD OF OZ Page

The Wizard of Oz (1939) at Reel Classics

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Classic Images, January 1999: The Restored WIZARD OF OZ David Chierichetti

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Reel.com DVD review [James Plath]

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GONE WITH THE WIND

USA (226 mi) 1939 restored version (238 mi) uncredited co-directors: George Cukor and Sam Wood

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kathleen Sachs

Critic Dave Kehr said it best about the classic film that has largely escaped in-depth critical scrutiny while likewise enjoying mass acclaim: "A critic-proof movie if there ever was one: it isn't all that good, but somehow it's great." Kehr perfectly encapsulates the mystery that is the enduring popularity of GONE WITH THE WIND, a success that can only rightly be attributed to the book's author and the film's passionate producer; according to Molly Haskell's book, Frankly My Dear: Gone With the Wind Revisited, the film had five directors, including George Cukor and Sam Wood, and though Victor Fleming was the final, credited director, it would be highly inaccurate to credit the overall result to any one of those people. Instead, it was a combination of Margaret Mitchell's best-selling book and David O. Selznick's dedication to the source material, a trait for which he was known, that elevated the film from far-fetched pipe dream to worldwide phenomenon. The critical success of an epic film is often attributed to its director, but Selznick was not interested in people looking to advance their own vision—instead, he sought to bring the story to the screen as it existed on the pages. As is also noted in Haskell's book, one critic called the film "the supreme custom-built movie," referring to the leveled process used to amalgamate all the parts that would comprise an ardent representation of the novel. Legend surrounding the film's production recalls the desperation for Clark Gable to play Rhett Butler and the serendipity with which Vivien Leigh became Scarlett O'Hara. Such lore seems to suggest an endeavor in which the sum of its parts is equal to the 'whole,' which provides a sharp contrast to several other films of the same year that are known almost solely by who directed them. Standing out amongst the crowd is William Cameron Menzies, whose art direction presents the South during the Civil War aflame with defeat and Technicolor.

Edinburgh U Film Society [Sophie Cruickshank]

Adapted from a book by Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind is one of the most successful films in cinema history. Starring some of Hollywood's greatest actors and winner of nine Academy Awards, this a film you simply must see.

The film follows the life and loves of Scarlet O'Hara, the beautiful daughter of a wealthy Southern family. Set during the American Civil War, she witnesses the downfall of a world of grace and beauty towards starvation and desperation.

The film opens with Scarlet (Vivien Leigh, Street Car Named Desire, Caesar & Cleopatra) a young woman whose greatest desire is finding herself a husband. Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard, Romeo & Juliet, The Scarlet Pimpernel), an honourable and decent gentleman, in particular holds her affections. Her love for him is however, doomed as he is engaged to the sweet natured Melanie (Olivia de Havilland, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Airport 77). Clark Gable plays Rhett Butler, a profiteer who does not believe in the war and the man unfortunate enough to fall in love with Scarlet. Scarlet herself is a scoundrel who lies, cheats and kills to get what she wants though, admittedly her ends are largely honourable. Apart from Ashley and Rhett, the central passion in Scarlet's life is the plantation (Tara) and keeping her family provided for.

This film is about far more than Southern belles and dashing gentlemen though. Gone With The Wind touches on some serious and emotive issues; black/white inequality, the Klu Klux Clan, prostitution and the "honour" of war (watch out for the scene in the military hospital where Scarlet is asked to assist in an amputation with no anaesthetic).

The real beauty of the film lies in the vivid and enjoyable characters crafted by Margaret Mitchell played by a selection of Hollywood's greatest actors. Clark Gable is frequently credited with being the most handsome man in film and Vivien Leigh was praised for her ability to drop her English accent and slip into a fluent Southern drawl. The film also saw a black member of the cast, Hattie MacDaniel (Mammy), win an Oscar (unprecedented at the time). Other Oscars included Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Picture, and Best Actress (Vivien Leigh).

City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul Rob Nelson

It's a cinch to show a huge financial loss, and should be conclusive evidence that it's folly to gamble $2 and $3 million on a single picture.

—NBC radio announcer, 1939

I was the only Negro in the theatre, and when Butterfly McQueen went into her act, I felt like crawling under the rug.

—Malcolm X

To whom do we owe the guilty pleasure of Gone With the Wind's umpteenth rerelease? Should we thank the old Atlantan Ted Turner, whose Turner Entertainment Co. (itself owned by Time Warner) has been the master of this plantation epic since the '80s? Or self-proclaimed "king of the world" James Cameron, whose Titanic reminded fans of historical soap opera that bombast--er, make that size--does matter?

Either way, producer David O. Selznick's mammoth endeavor of 1939 continues to mean business. Strategically timed to exploit Wind's fourth-place showing last week in the American Film Institute's top-100 poll, this latest reissue urges the value of old property in more ways than one. Small wonder that Turner regaled his AFI interviewers by citing the entrepreneurial wisdom of Scarlett O'Hara's grizzled Pa: "Land is the only thing that matters; it's the only thing that lasts."

Perhaps so. But will this well-trod Old South still sell in 1998--what with its Technicolor images of happily enslaved "darkies," its wistful longing for those last days of macho "gallantry," its suggestion of drunken rape as one way to rekindle a marriage? Given this Civil War behemoth's conspicuous lack of combat, most male moviegoers these days would rather witness Armageddon than four long hours of "a Civilization gone with the wind." And it's doubtful that Titanic's core audience of teenage Leo lovers will approve of Scarlett's climactic realization that effete Ashley Wilkes withers beside the rough Rhett Butler. On the other hand, Wind's heroine is nothing if not titanic: Her heart will go on. Through war, poverty, pregnancy, miscarriage, Reconstruction, and Rhett Butler, Scarlett lives to proclaim that "tomorrow is another day."

Speaking of forecasting, media pundits predicted disaster in 1939, but Wind's heavy gust of nostalgia, anxiety, regional pride, and determined optimism was bound to resonate. With the war gathering steam in Europe and the Depression still fresh in people's minds, an 1860s setting hardly abstracted the tale of a woman who'd "lie, cheat, steal, or kill" to keep food on the table and her man close by. So too, Scarlett's desperate escapism would have made immediate sense to prewar moviegoers: The film's first scene establishes Scarlett (Vivien Leigh) as queen bee with her pick of the drones, lamenting all their talk of "war, war, war... it's spoiling all the fun." After petulantly throwing a wine glass out of frustration that her beloved Ashley (Leslie Howard) is planning to wed a "mealymouthed ninny" (Olivia DeHavilland), she meets her match in Rhett Butler (Clark Gable), who hears the breaking glass and exclaims, "Has the war started?" Clearly, this film's main battle will be between the sexes.

If Scarlett is a one-woman army as well as the personification of Hollywood's bid to seduce the spectator, she's also an emblem of Wind's creator. Stubborn, bitchy, inexhaustible, and fiercely protective of the backlot "Tara," David Selznick remains film history's consummate example of the producer as star. Building his epic from the ground up, the man literally dismantled all others, torching old sets from King Kong to re-enact the burning of Atlanta and marshalling all seven Technicolor cameras in existence to capture the blaze from every angle (no matter that his heroine hadn't yet been cast). Over the course of the shoot, Selznick gave orders to four different directors and 11 writers (including an uncredited F. Scott Fitzgerald); he charmed the NAACP, MGM (he'd married Louis B. Mayer's daughter), and the Hays Office (which objected to the use of the word "damn"). Coordinating six filming units at once and presiding over 50-hour editing sessions, he subsisted on a regular diet of thyroid extract, Benzedrine, and B-12 shots.

Thus, Selznick's strenuously overdetermined movie, like Titanic, is too enormous to be anything but a metaphor for itself: Scarlett is Selznick is Hollywood is America; Tara is the studio plantation, and its product is fluffy as cotton; war is shooting half a million feet of film in five months. As for the other characters, the loyal Mammy (Hattie McDaniel) and Prissy (Butterfly McQueen) are granted entry into the master's house but serve mainly to signify the captive audience. (McDaniel won an Oscar, but segregation laws kept her from the Atlanta premiere.) And if sensitive Ashley seems to recall women's picture director George Cukor, who was given his walking papers early in the shoot (reportedly for paying too much attention to the actresses), then who's that mysterious "visitor from Charleston" played by Clark Gable? Well, just as hubby-for-hire Rhett leaves Scarlett pondering all tomorrow's sequels, the nominally credited director Victor Fleming opted to skip Selznick's gala premiere--because by that point, frankly, he didn't give a damn.

Memphis Flyer [Chris Herrington]

Domestic slavery in the Southern States has produced the same results in elevating the character of the master that it did in Greece and Rome. He is lofty and independent in his sentiments, generous, affectionate, brave and eloquent; he is superior to the Northerner in everything but the arts of thrift.” – George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, 1854

“There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered ... A Civilization gone with the wind.” – From the opening title to Gone With the Wind, 1939 Gone With the Wind was something more than the Titanic of its day. Opening in Atlanta on December 15, 1939, the governor declared a state holiday and ticket prices were 40 times the going rate. It was the longest, most expensive film production ever attempted, and the first major color film. Made for $3.9 million at a time when average ticket prices were a mere quarter, producer/Svengali David O. Selznick feared he’d never see a profit. He needn’t have worried. The film grossed 25 times its cost on its initial run. By contrast, Titanic would have to gross $5 billion to be as profitable. And, though Gone With the Wind has long been passed as the highest-grossing film ever, it’s still probably been seen by more Americans than any other film.

It’s about to be seen by more. A newly restored version will be given a national theatrical release starting this week, and The Orpheum has gained exclusive Memphis rights to the film, making it the centerpiece of its Summer Movie Series. Gone With the Wind, the grand old Southern movie, will be booked for seven straight days, June 26th through July 2nd, in the grand old Southern theatre. On opening night, Confederate reenactors will be patrolling the area and a Scarlett O’Hara look-alike will be on-hand to kick off the film’s run.

It’s a coup for The Orpheum, and a special event – but not one without complications. Recently enshrined by the American Film Institute as the fourth-best American feature ever, GWTW seems to be as popular as ever. And though its popularity may have a lot to do with the way it eventually winnows its historical sweep down to the barest essentials of romance and melodrama (much like TItanic), one can’t help but think that its persistent, mangled nostalgia for that thing called the “Old South” may be part of the equation.

However much of a legitimately classic spectacle the film is, and however compulsively watchable, the film is hard for a thoughtful Southerner to view today without being embarrassed. The problem with the film is not merely its “racism.” One can’t reasonably quibble when Ashley Wilkes or Rhett Butler refer to servants as “darkies”; such depictions are merely historically accurate. There is an important, and too-often-misunderstood, difference between what a film shows, and what its attitude toward its content is, and it is the second half of that equation where Gone With the Wind becomes problematic.

The Southern planter class before the war consisted of many men who were the patriarchs and rulers of small kingdoms and who were engaged in mass self-delusion. Drunk on their own power, these men believed that their system of domestic slavery was both the most economically successful and most morally correct way to govern a society. They believed that the slave was content in bondage, happy to be the childlike subject (much like the wife) of a benevolent, paternal master.

George Fitzhugh, one of the Old South’s most prominent pro-slavery intellectuals, was engaged in this self-delusion when he wrote Sociology for the South, and Gone With the Wind’s conception of what the pre-war South was “really like” is a virtual carbon copy of Fitzhugh’s vision. GWTW’s antebellum South isn’t realistic, it’s a dreamstate born out of this self-delusion, a depiction of the South as the film’s aristocratic characters thought it really was. Like Fitzhugh, Gone With the Wind is concerned with the “character of the master.” It sees the South only through the eyes of the wealthy, slave-holding class, who are elegant, honorable creatures living in a “pretty world.” The slaves are docile and happy, and treasure their affectionate bond with their master. The vast majority of whites who don’t run plantations or own slaves are dismissed as “poor white trash” and kept off-screen.

D.W. Griffith’s silent epic, Birth of a Nation, a celebration of the Ku Klux Klan as an instrument for re-establishing the “Old South,” did more than codify the visual language of narrative cinema. It codified a language of racial stereotypes that GWTW softens and perfects. Eschewing the overt, inflammatory propaganda of Birth of a Nation – its blatant, hysterical racism – Gone With the Wind masters the art of suggestion to achieve much the same ends. The threat to “Southern womanhood” is implicit when Scarlett is attacked riding through a poor settlement. But where the damsel in Birth of a Nation is forced to commit suicide rather than succumb to a monstrous free black man, Scarlett is attacked by both a black man and a white one (no doubt a carpetbagger or scalawag), and she is saved by her former field slave, Big Sam, who earlier in the film assures her, “We’ll stop them Yankees.” The subsequent rise of the Klan is there as well, but it happens off-camera, and is not explicit. It is merely “men doing what men have to do.”

At first Rhett Butler (the archetypal conflicted American outlaw hero, a precursor to Ric Blaine and Han Solo, among countless others) is a strain of criticism within the film. When he tells a group of Southern “gentlemen” consumed by “honor” that “all we’ve got is cotton and slaves and arrogance,” he’s telling the truth. But this criticism gets removed. When Rhett leaves to join the Army and speaks of a “lost cause,” he, and the film, mean the salvation of this “pretty world,” whose loss the film mourns.

In Gone With the Wind the (very real) suffering of the master class is the only suffering that matters. The poor masses, black slaves, and “poor white trash” are barely an afterthought. Watching the film today, 60 years after it was made and more than a century after the war itself, as we continue in the struggle to purge our past sins and preserve out past virtues, Gone With the Wind is seductively misguided about what those sins and virtues are. Instead of mourning the death of the Old South of the Wilkes and O’Haras, we should now celebrate the common culture forged by those Gone With the Wind leaves out – the strange fruit born of past sins that gives our region its unique vitality, that gave birth to a body of music that stands as one of America’s cultural achievements, that makes our society, though still hobbling and forged from tragedy, a conflicted nation’s best hope for racial healing.

So when Gone With the Wind, in all its restored grandeur, plays at The Orpheum next week, it should be seen, as entertainment and as cultural history. But perhaps it can be seen not as it was intended, as a monument to our lost glory, but as a Technicolor tombstone to a culture we’ve overcome.

Striking Chords and Touching Nerves: Myth and Gender in Gone With the Wind Vicki L. Eaklor from Images

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Florey, Robert and Joseph Santley

THE COCOANUTS

USA (96 mi) 1929

Time Out review

The Brothers' first feature, for Paramount, adapted from their 1925 Broadway hit written by George S Kaufman, and set in a Florida hotel running wild with jewel thieves, romantic leads, dancing bellhops, a stately matron (Dumont), a conniving manager (Groucho) and assorted riff-raff (Harpo and Chico). It shows its age, what with indistinct sound, fluffed lines, quaint choreography, quainter songs, a stilted supporting cast and positively arthritic direction. But the Brothers' energy and madness is never in question: when the laughs come, they come loud and long.

not coming to a theater near you (Matt Bailey) review

The United States never had a proper Surrealist movement as France did between the two World Wars. If we had, I am sure that the Marx Brothers would have been a primary influence and point of reference, much as the film comedian Max Linder was for the artists, writers, and other cultural gadabouts in France. The daft anarchy of the comedic family is often akin to watching the id personified and unleashed. Harpo, the most primal of the troupe, is nonverbal and perhaps the most seditious. His funniest acts of comedy in The Cocoanuts, the first feature-length Marx Brothers film, are practically revolutionary in their intent and performance. He is on screen for no more than a few minutes until he is, apropos of nothing, tearing up other people’s mail. Not soon after, he begins to eat the telephone.

Chico speaks for Harpo when it is necessary, but language for Chico is not a tool for communication but a weapon of obfuscation. Chico, it seems, willfully mishears and deliberately mispronounces words. When the subject of a viaduct comes up, Chico can only hear and say, “Why a duck?” A question to which there can be no answer. By refusing to play according to the rules of language, Chico blocks all rationality. He cannot be reasoned with.

Groucho operates on a higher plane of thought than his two more childlike brothers do. Groucho subverts rational thought by appearing to use it. Groucho can begin what seems like a normal conversation but will, when given the chance, spin it into a web of puns, invented words, thoughts spoken aloud, self-referential asides, and contradictory statements. In his flirtations with Mrs. Potter, a society matron played by the indefatigable Margaret Dumont, an insult can become a compliment can become a wisecrack can become a string of nonsense. The humor of Groucho often comes from never knowing where a sentence will go once it begins.

Zeppo often seems like the least useful of the Marx Brothers. It is true that he never developed a comedic character like the other, older three, but that does not mean that he does not have a place in the dissident comedy of the family business. Zeppo is the figure who passes as normal, yet is anything but. He does not have the outlandish behavior of Harpo, the impenetrable anti-logic of Chico, or the diabolical brain of Groucho, but if you watch him carefully you will see that every time the brothers are all together and the film has tipped over into mayhem and chaos, Zeppo is there in the midst of it all, frolicking along with the other three.

How could America have reacted to this utter anarchy of comedy as it slid into the Depression? After such a bloody and terrible war from which the world had only begun to recover? Perhaps the only rational response to such events was to resort to the irrational. Perhaps the only recourse was to find humor and a bit of wisdom in the question, “Why a duck?”

User comments from imdb Author: theowinthrop from United States

Unless the legendary "HUMORISK" ever shows up, COCONUTS will have the honor of being the first Marx Brother comedy. It is set in Florida, during the 1920s land boom down there (by the time the show opened in 1928, a hurricane had destroyed the land boom). Groucho runs a seedy hotel, where Mrs. Potter and her daughter Polly (Margaret Dumont and Mary Eaton) are residing. So is Polly's boy friend, the architect Bob Adams (Oscar Shaw), as well as black sheep socialite Harvey Yates (Cyril Ring) and Penelope (Kay Francis). Yates needs money, and is trying to marry Polly. Penelope is willing to assist him, as she wants to steal Mrs. Potter's jewelry. Mrs. Potter is favorable to Yates because he is one of "the Boston Yates", but Polly favors Bob - who is still struggling to get any backers for his architectural ideas. Because he is not making money (or from money) Mrs. Potter dislikes his attentions to Polly.

Groucho's Mr. Hammer (and his assistant Jamison - Zeppo) are hoping to sell various lots of real estate to their hotel guests at an auction. Then two new guests arrive: Chico and Harpo. Groucho notices their luggage is empty. "That's okay," says Chico, "It will be full when we leave." Naturally the arrival of Chico and Harpo excites the suspicions of the local sheriff, Hennesy (Basil Ruysdaal).

It is impossible to sensibly discuss the humor of the Marx Brothers, in this their first sound film and one of their zaniest. Just a few choice moments:

Groucho and Chico (as a plant) at the auction, where Chico knows he has to raise the bids. Unfortunately he does not realize when to stop doing so, so that when Hammer frantically tries to stop him from preventing someone with money from buying a lot, Chico keeps ignoring. "I go higher...higher...I have plenty of numbers left!", he says.

Groucho, Chico, and Harpo playing musical rooms with Dumont and Kay Francis, on the night of the jewel robbery. And Francis discovering that her "come-on" line, "Has anyone ever told you you look like the Prince of Wales?", is being used by everyone else.

Even a slightly sad moment is memorable. When Bob is arrested at one point, a tearful Mary Eaton watches this - Harpo walks over to her and hands her a flower. She embraces the silent brother, who just looks perplexed about what else to do.

It is constantly brought up that Eaton and Shaw are drags on the film. Actually Ms Eaton was quite lively when given a chance, and Shaw is game in one of the routines with Groucho and Harpo. Kay Francis would later show a comic flair in movies too, but here she is relatively subdued as far as comedy is concerned (until her last shot with Cyril Ring). Ring is a non-entity. Ruysdaal has one really glorious moment (when he demands his shirt - he can't be happy without his shirt!). And of course, Margaret Dumont got her first chance to show what an asset she was to the Marx Brothers in seven films.

For a musical comedy the surviving songs, mostly by Irving Berlin (one is by Victor Herbert!) are passable only. "When My Dream Comes True" can linger in the memory, but it is not grade-A Berlin. Sadly, Irving composed "Always" for the show, but George Kaufman showed his contempt for the tune and and angry Berlin took it back. A case of pearls before swine there.

Film as Art [Danél Griffin]

Why The Cocoanuts is ultimately a disappointment has nothing to do with the Brothers themselves. They are right on target throughout the production, and the film contains some of their best routines, including the immortal, tongue-twisting “Viaduct/Why a Duck” discussion between Groucho and Chico, on par with the best tongue-teasers of Abbott and Costello ("Who's on first?") and Danny Kaye ("Vessel with the pestle"). Most of its faults are in its technical failures, which are often so incompetent that it’s downright distracting.

Part of the problem, of course, is that the film was made in 1929, an era in which sound films were still desperately trying to find their technical footing (see Singin’ in the Rain to get a more complete—and humorous—picture of the difficult aspects of the transition from the silent era to the sound stage). Thus, some of the creaking floors, misplaced microphones (making some voices inconsistently quite loud and others barely audible), and ongoing cracking sounds on the film reels were unavoidable. I do know that some attempt was made to avoid this distraction: All books on set were soaked to avoid the sound of their crispy pages turning loudly, but this only took care of a small portion of the problem. In 1929, audience members were still marveling at the idea of talking pictures themselves so that the kinks went by unnoticed; today, they make us wince at their ineptitude. As the Marx Brothers’ comedy depends on their one-liners, puns, and insults, a creaking soundstage cannot help but spoil the charm.          

The Cocoanut’s origins also didn’t much help. This was the Brothers’ first official feature (a silent picture called Humor Risk, shot in 1926, received a limited release and is now considered lost), and it is an adaptation of their Broadway musical of the same name. Because it was based on a Broadway musical, The Cocoanuts seems limited in its ability to allow the Brothers to completely dominate the cinematic screen. The stage is a different medium altogether, requiring exaggerated makeup, acting, and songs to breathe life into the story. On the other hand, film is a smaller, more intimate exercise; its images are confined to a screen of much more limited space than the stage. The filmmakers, seemingly unaware of the difference between the mediums, include plenty of unnecessary songs and dance routines that must have looked great on Broadway but take away from the forceful power of the Brothers’ anarchy on film.          

Another problem probably lies with the Brothers themselves, though it is at no fault of their act. Groucho later recalled of the film’s directors, “One of them didn’t understand English, and the other one didn't understand comedy.” This is an ill-fated combination, especially when dealing with the archaic Marxes. The Brothers, almost completely inexperienced in the art of film, dashed about the set as if it was a Broadway stage, and cameras had to be set up all over the place to make sure that their movement was captured. They too had not yet learned the difference between stage and film, and they are often so frantic in their movement and leaps across the screen that it is easy to understand why the inexperienced directors had such a hard time filming them. By their next film for Paramount, Animal Crackers, the problem had been rectified, so I guess that they weren’t too pleased with their performances here and took notes.          

Despite these flaws, the ferocity of the Brothers’ routine still shines through, and still creates enough memorable moments to make The Cocoanuts thoroughly inspired viewing. The plot—if it could be called that—concerns Groucho’s hotel business in Florida. He runs his summer inn like a Facist dictator, refusing to pay his workers and forcing the bellhops to stand in attention at all times, including Zeppo, who would rather sleep at the desk than run it. In the meantime, Chico and Harpo turn up for no apparent reason, and they remain for no apparent reason except to toss their own form of anarchy into the mix, but that motive is good enough. Eventually, they all get plopped right into the middle of a love story and jewel heist that would have been otherwise unbearably dull without them—which is, of course, the point.          

The Cocoanuts is also responsible for creating formulas and that would immortalize the Brothers’ distinct personalities: Groucho’s nonstop insults and swooning of the patient but irritated Margaret Dumont; Harpo’s woman-chasing demon in the shape of an angelic clown; Chico’s opportunistic nature and partnership with Harpo, not to mention the brilliantly written puns between he and Groucho; Zeppo’s wide-eyed, big-smiled parody of the juvenile role as he headed the unnervingly “happy” employees and extras. Such roles would become their signatures, and would eventually turn the Brothers into Hollywood legends.          

The gags between the four abound almost non-stop, and most of them work despite the film’s technical limitations. Highlights include the “Why a Duck” routine (of course), Groucho’s insults to the inimitable Dumont (“I can see it now—I come home from work and I see you bending over a hot stove. But I can’t see the stove.”), the auction scene (“I’ll wrestle any man here for five dollars!”), and the closing sequence, in which the words to the opera Carmen are rewritten in order to—well, they’re just rewritten. Do the Marx Brothers really need a reason why?         

The Cocoanuts was the first of six films that the Brothers did for Paramount, from 1929-1933 (the others were Animal Crackers, Monkey Business, I’ll Say She Is, Horse Feathers and, arguably their best, Duck Soup). These six remain the best of their many films, due to the fact that instead of being slaves to the films’ plots, the plots were slaves to the Brothers’ archaic slapstick. Say what you will about A Night at the Opera or A Day at the Races: They may be funny, they may be charming, but they were simply lesser films because they were trapped in formulas that the Brothers were mocking in these earlier productions. The Cocoanuts presents the Brothers in good form, and is a good cinematic first step towards the masterpieces that would follow in the next few years. What cannot be avoided, however, is this production’s enslavement to its technical limitations: When the Brothers’ act merits four stars and the film’s technical achievements merit only two, it is fair to place the final rating somewhere in the middle.

Turner Classic Movies review Rob Nixon

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Self-Styled Siren

Reviews by John John Haywood

Review of Cocoanuts The Oracles of Music

Classic Film Guide (capsule)

The DVD Journal | Reviews : The Marx Brothers: Silver Screen ... Mark Bourne from DVD Journal, The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection

Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw] The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection

The Onion A.V. Club dvd review The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection

DVD Talk (John Sinnott) dvd review [4/5] The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection

DVD Verdict (Patrick Naugle) dvd review The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeremy Arnold, The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection

The New York Times (Mordaunt Hall) review

Marx Brothers in Cocoanuts on YouTube (5:34)

Fly, Per

THE INHERITANCE (Arven) B+ 92

Denmark (107 mi) 2003

From start to finish, there is a beautifully somber and understated tone to this film, with a terrific ensemble cast, gorgeously photographed and edited, and just a superb style throughout. I found this wonderfully appealing filmmaking. Ulrich Thomsen and Lisa Werlinder are the exceptionally good looking leads, a happy husband with a stunningly beautiful wife who appear to have everything, love, passion, and happiness, which they easily and affectionately display with one another as she is getting notices playing Shakespeare while he runs a successful Stockholm restaurant. They lack for nothing. But the story slowly veers inwards toward the violently suppressed emotional world of Bergman’s PASSIONS OF ANNA when he is called back to Denmark to run his family’s steel factory after his father’s suicide. There is a simply breathtaking image of legions of men in hardhats filling the entire screen, listening in complete silence on the plant floor as the family makes the announcement. Bit by bit, as his ruthless business acumen increases, he retreats farther and farther into his own private domain, cutting himself off from his wife, his family, his coworkers, everyone except his overly dominating mother, a draconian Lady Mac Beth who controls the family’s shares. Mired in Shakespearean melodrama and revenge, the meltdown becomes predictable, but is inventive and visually stunning nonetheless, as his world resembles the deteriorating fall of Charles Foster Kane, alone in the spacious confines of Xanadu, viewed here in a symbol of corporate wealth and success, but a shattered man crumbling helplessly before our very eyes. This is an elegantly presented, powerfully affecting portrait of how a family’s financial successes lead to their own emotional ruin.

Foley, James

PERFECT STRANGER C 72

USA (109 mi) 2007

Another mediocre Halle Berry vehicle where it always looks like she’s doing a magazine shoot, not filming a movie, as every hair remains in place, her make up perfect, her wardrobe carefully picked out so they always feature her in as attractive a manner as possible, even when it looks unrealistic and overly stylish. Even in her roles as a potential bad girl, Berry passes for a cover girl. And in the one film where she dresses down, due to her poor financial condition (MONSTER’S BALL), she wins an Academy Award for playing ugly. Here she plays a top notch investigative journalist who prints her stories under a fictitious man’s name, whose lead story about the illicit homosexual affairs of a lying Senator is quashed by the editors, who may have previously contributed money into the Senator’s coffers, so she walks away from the job with her head above the cesspool of backroom politics, followed by Giovanni Ribisi, her creepy computer geek who has an amazing capacity to instantly access anything and everything on the computer. There’s no need to investigate, not in this instant information age, just press a few computer buttons, the theory being the audience doesn’t wish to see Ms. Berry get her feet dirty, so Ribisi does all the dirty work while Berry poses for a series of photo ops in different locations.

Bring on Bruce Willis as the bad guy, a two-timing high society ad agency executive who has a history of getting into the pants of his female staff, who immediately becomes the target in the murder of one of Berry’s childhood friends, so Berry, of course, goes undercover and joins the firm, immediately making a favorable impression as she is hit on by the boss - - such easy pickings. There’s this completely implausible storyline about online chat room sex talk between Berry and her boss, as no business executive with computer savvy would leave his Internet fingerprints out in the open like that, or search the web looking for potential targets, so this not only feels fabricated, but unnecessary, as it actually takes interest away from the real story, which is the weirdness of Ribisi, whose fascination with Berry intersecting with his private life gets really creepy, and the eventual unravelling of Berry’s closed and highly secretive world. This is a typical made for TV movie of the week format, as we’re fed misleading clues all the way through in a veritable sleight of hand with the viewers, rearranging it all by the end in hopes that this changing storyline would rev up the interest by playing so hard to get, but it never for a moment builds up any real tension or interest, leaving behind an empty aftertaste that none of this really matters.

Slant Magazine [Keith Uhlich]

The great Stan Brakhage once made a comment legitimizing the existence of empty-headed Hollywood product, likening such films to mind-cleansing palliatives that helped to balance out our tempestuous inner workings. On that level, the ludicrous Halle Berry vehicle Perfect Stranger is a total success: Upon its completion, I genuinely felt I had attained Nirvana, and credit must be given where it's due; as vacuous, white noise entertainments go, this is one of the finest. What else to say about a film that makes its male lead (Bruce Willis) an advertising executive for the seemingly lone purpose of setting an entire sequence at a Victoria's Secret afterparty? Minus any sort of satirical edge, such shit pretty much sells itself (and if any doubt remains, be sure to stick around for the Reebok straight with Heineken chaser). To all the Halle Berry fans out there: sorry, I just don't get it. Girl can't act her way out of a Ziploc bag; she seems more content (and all too self-aware) flaunting what Christopher Walken's The Continental would refer to as her "sumptuous décolletage." A sickeningly ripped Giovanni Ribisi (as the perverted, nasal-voiced confidante to Berry's troubled reporter-of-many-faces) seals the deal: this is a film of diseased surfaces that director James Foley, long late of his Glengarry Glen Ross glory days, treats like a Eurotrash bodice ripper-cum-revenge thriller, equal parts Chabrol and Vadim, inexplicably run through a temporal-dissociative meat grinder. Call the end result nouvelle vagueness, a film best suited to late-night Skinemax where it will no doubt find its proper place beside Raoul Ruiz's Shattered Image and the latest installment of Emmanuelle.

The Onion A.V. Club [Tasha Robinson]

Few things are as compelling as a good twist ending, the kind that invites reconsideration of everything that came before it. Problem is, it's devilishly hard to play fair with an audience on a twist-ending story, because films often make the big secret either too obvious, or so improbable that it seems like a cheat. The thriller Perfect Stranger falls squarely in the latter camp, while also inventing its own special problem: By the time the reveal snaps the loose ends into place, the question "Why is any of this idiocy happening?" has been looming oppressively over the film for so long that no answer could possibly seem satisfying.

As the film opens, unlikely super-journalist Halle Berry and her partner, tech wizard Giovanni Ribisi, are completing an exposé on a Mark Foley-esque page-schtuppin' politician, but their newspaper cancels their story, sending Berry into an unconvincing apoplectic rage. She promptly quits her job, which leaves her with a lot of free time for dealing with the out-of-nowhere demands of her estranged childhood friend Nicki Aycox, who materializes in a subway station and demands help in blackmailing her lover, super-rich ad-man Bruce Willis. Berry doesn't show much interest until Aycox turns up murdered. Then Berry launches a thoroughly standard tech-thriller investigation, infiltrating Willis' ad company under a false ID, sneering over erotic online chats with him, hacking into his computer, and so forth.

Meanwhile, Ribisi has an unhealthy crush on Berry, Berry has an on-again-off-again relationship with a boyfriend who cheated on her with Aycox, Aycox was pregnant and the child could be anyone's, Willis has a statuesque lesbian minder and a gorgeous wife who's stalking him, and something presumably important is going on with Berry's savage nightmares and flashbacks to little girls in the snow. Screenwriter Todd Komarnicki piles on the subplots (and the clumsy recaps and exposition) as if trying to keep viewers too dizzy to think things through, not that anything about the film actually invites much thought. Berry's unpleasant character makes a lousy hook; she spends half the film ordering Ribisi around and ignoring him when she doesn't need his help, and the other half sitting at computers, reading her own text messages and emails out loud. When the left-field ending finally arrives, it explains a lot, including why she's so off-putting and histrionic, but it never really explains why audiences should bother sitting through such a tangled mess.

Salon.com [Stephanie Zacharek]

Theoretically, there should be no such thing as a mediocre thriller: Either it thrills or it doesn't. Yet there's a vast, possibly bottomless pit reserved for thrillers that are neither good nor bad enough to be truly entertaining, and James Foley's "Perfect Stranger" tumbles right into it. Halle Berry plays Rowena, an inquisitive reporter for a New York tabloid who, in print, goes by the name David Shane so no one will know she's a woman. In the movie's first scene, she ambushes a conservative anti-gay rights legislation senator, confronting him with pictures that show him cavorting with one of his young male interns. "I work for David Shane at the New York Courier!" she announces, dropping the bomb. "Jesus Christ!" the miscreant exclaims, like a villain in a "Superman" comic, his balls having been suitably and duly busted.

But Rowena's paper, unwilling to turn tail on a politician it had previously endorsed, kills the story. Understandably disillusioned and embittered, Rowena quits her job in a clatter of spike heels, only to stumble onto a case bigger than anything she has ever encountered: When the body of an old friend shows up in a Gotham morgue, she has reason to believe that a rakish Manhattan advertising magnate named Harrison Hill (Bruce Willis) is the killer. With the help of one of her former co-workers, tech whiz Miles (Giovanni Ribisi), she sets out to trap Hill: By day, she works, undercover, as a temp at his agency -- a kind of Mata Hari of Madison Avenue -- harvesting gossip from her chatty co-workers and monitoring the boss's careless flirtations, which he strives to keep secret from his ultrajealous wife. By night she titillates him via sexy, anonymous online chats, fielding questions along the lines of that whiskery chestnut, "What are you wearing?"

Of course, as in most mediocre thrillers -- and in many good ones -- people are not everything they appear to be. Everyone here has a secret, and some of those secrets are bigger than others. But by the time those secrets are revealed -- most of them in a rushed wrap-up at the very end of the picture -- we've been through so many tortured, screenwriters-workshop-style plot twists that we've almost forgotten how we felt about any of those characters in the first place.

"Perfect Stranger" was directed by James Foley (whose credits include "Glengarry Glen Ross" and "Who's That Girl?"); the writers are Todd Komarnicki and Jon Bokencamp. And it's hardly a complete disaster. For one thing, it doesn't make the mistake of taking itself too seriously. Willis' presence alone leavens the picture: He makes a seductive, witty villain, a guy whose charisma, and not his libido, is his own worst enemy. He's so charming he almost can't stand himself -- the flirty gleam in his eye says, "Stop me, before I seduce again!" He has even hired a hot lesbian secretary (va-va-voom brunette Daniella van Graas) to keep his extramarital love life organized; she struts through the agency's offices on legs as long as circus stilts, taking notes and putting out fires (although she probably doesn't put out nearly as many as she starts).

Ribisi, playing the kind of guy who wears the thing he can most conveniently pick up off floor when he gets up in the morning, helps keep the movie rolling, too. The semi-nerdy Miles has an obvious crush on Rowena, and one evening, hanging out at her apartment as the two are finishing up some work, she emerges from her bedroom in a dress that slithers along her curves like liquid. When she plunks down next to him on the couch, so he can show her some razzmatazz on the laptop, he can't help stealing semi-surreptitious glances down her cleavage. This is obviously the highlight of his day, and his valiant effort to be discreet and gentlemanly is the funniest thing in the movie.

But the movie doesn't know if it wants Miles to be a charmer or a sleazebag, and that shaky uncertainty applies to other characters, too. In the movie's universe, this constitutes "complexity" -- it doesn't matter that the characters' shifting behaviors don't make much sense. Remember (as if you could ever forget): People are not always as they seem! Meanwhile, characters walk around intoning lines like "Actions have consequences" and "All it takes to commit a murder are the right ingredients at the right time." You see a theme coming straight at you here, and it looks like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

Although Berry can be charming -- and there's no doubt she's lovely to look at -- she can't anchor this picture. Berry has given a few very good performances, most notably in the 1999 TV movie "Introducing Dorothy Dandridge." But here, she's only perfunctory: The movie asks little of her, and she gives little back. We get many, many shots of her wearing a cute little newsboy hat, tilted dashingly over one eye. She and the hat are both adorable, but a little of that goes a long way. "Perfect Stranger" is one of those movies that two years, or two months, from now, you won't recall having seen. Ostensibly a movie about big secrets, it comes up with few that are worth keeping, or telling.

eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress)

PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs

James Berardinelli's ReelViews

Los Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]

New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden

Folman, Ari

WALTZ WITH BASHIR B+ 91

Israel Germany France USA (87 mi) 2008 Waltz With Bashir website

A look at history through a recent animated collage of memory fragmented and forgotten, then carefully reconstructed through film, an autobiographical animated docudrama that immediately plunges us into the face of a pack of angry dogs threatening havoc running ruthlessly through city streets, creating an uncontrollable sense of dread and violence that comes to a halt only when a man awakens from a dream. The rest of the film is an attempt by that man, a stand-in for the director and his nation, to come to terms with some of the psychological anxiety associated with events that occured twenty years earlier when he served with the Israeli armed forces on a drive to Beirut where a massacre took place in several Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Turning to a half dozen different characters throughout the film ranging from a film director, a specialist dealing with post traumatic disorders, a war reporter, and many fellow soldiers, he attempts to fill in the missing pieces that he has largely forgotten, perhaps to spare himself from the trauma. While it takes awhile to get in synch with the animated style, as much of the early talk is largely analytical, we follow the soldier in his column of tanks as they enter Lebanon one morning to a pop tune that accentuates how carefree and invincible they were feeling before a hail of incoming bullets and rocket fire immediately plunges them into panic and turmoil. Despite this jolt to our senses, what immediately becomes clear is that Boaz, the dreamer, has a way of dispassionately looking at his life as if from the outside looking in, where in the view of a friend, the singlemost trauma blocking his path to self acceptance and self awareness is his own knowledge of his parent’s Holocaust experience at Auschwitz.

As we flashback to various memories, it’s apparent Boaz remains disengaged or missing from many of them even though he was a participant, also suggesting the news media and the public hide behind history in much the same way, never internalizing it, but distancing themselves from the reality of the events. At some points Boaz resembles a sleepwalker wandering through a battle sequence at an airport, as does a fellow war reporter who wanders unscathed through a battle zone supposedly protected by his camera, or a fellow soldier who performs an out of body experience in synch with the title, while in another Boaz claims it resembles an acid trip because of the surreal nature of seeing dismembered or mangled body parts lying beneath all the rubble left behind. But other points of view are shown as well, such as the viewfinder of another roving tank or a helicopter gunner as they set their sights on a moving target but then repeatedly miss, hitting innocent civilians instead, a fast action pop pop pop sequence that has the look of a video game, except it’s for real. This demonstrates how easy it is in the heat of the moment to inflict collateral damage, but also suggests that by showing it, the filmmaker is at least attempting to take responsibility for this kind of build up of civilian casualties. It is a fact of life. There are other forms of aggressive intolerance, such as a tank intentionally rolling over and demolishing parked cars on the street or ramming into buildings in order to get past, showing an inherant disregard for the people and their culture. The most obvious example is forgetting certain experiences entirely, where he simply hasn’t thought about them in twenty years, as if they never existed. But as he’s shown photographs or hears accounts of what he did, a more complete picture develops.

Piano music of Bach, Chopin, and Schubert (all uncredited) along with highly amped rock songs play over some of these portrayed memories, adding a haunting note of poignancy and clarity to what the viewer observes. By the time we enter the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in 1982, the film is oddly silent on providing any historical context, which leaves each viewer responsible for providing this knowledge. As it turns out, Bashir Gemayel (whose picture is everywhere) was the leader of the Lebanese Christians and a very popular President-elect before he was assassinated, the act which prompted anti-Muslim retaliation by the Lebanese Christian militia, known as the Phalangists led by Elie Hobeika (later himself assassinated before he could testify at a war crimes tribunal), who then massacred as many Palestinians as possible, eventually totalling some 3000 victims over several days, leaving the camps littered with dead bodies. Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, who was later found guilty of ignoring the possibility of a massacre by an official Israeli defense inquiry known as the Kahan Commission of Inquiry which led to his resignation, is seen nonchalantly breakfasting on steak and eggs as he’s informed by a war reporter of a massacre taking place witnessed and made possible by the actions of his own troops who sat and watched it all happen, providing flares throughout the night without intervening until some point later when an Israeli commander orders the shooting stopped, shouting out “This is an order,” suggesting the entire event was orchestrated by the Israeli military. Clearly the larger picture is that atrocities speak for themselves, the horrors of which can’t be undone even after the passage of time, drawing a parallel between the Holocaust and more recent Israeli atrocities. But the director leaves much of this muddled and unclear, because if he’s making a statement of indictment against an Israeli offense, it’s largely lost in the narrative account that strictly follows one soldier’s attempts to rectify his own guilty conscience. Some may draw that parallel to modern atrocities and war crimes that continue to occur in Gaza, Iraq, Darfur, Rwanda, the Congo, and Afghanistan, but many may not. The finale, an unexpected jolt of realism, is beautifully realized and positively shattering.

Facets Features Milos Stehlik at Facets Multi Media from 2008 Festival de Cannes: Part Three

But a very, very exciting film here last night, Waltz with Bashir--directed by Ari Folman. Feature length animation, the film features the filmmaker as a central character, trying to deal with his recurring nightmare in which he is chased by 26 vicious dogs. Gradually, by visiting a psychiatrist friend and other former army buddies, he peels back the layers of repressed memory which deal with his army service in Lebanon twenty years ago, and leads, ultimately, to the massacre of civilians at the Shattila camp. A film which resonates to the true, real experience of every soldier and to the current experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, Waltz with Bashir is brilliant (and fast-paced) because the abstraction of the theme thro ugh animation allows Folman to compress events. The film feels very personal and almost intimate--the first real winner here, in Cannes.

Peter Bradshaw on an Israeli docu-drama about the atrocities of war Return of the Soldier, by Peter Bradshaw at Cannes from The Guardian

Cannes has got off to an intriguing start, with some fascinating but very, very sombre films on the competition menu. Two films, remarkable in different ways, have been about guilt suppressed and guilt denied - and the inevitable return of this guilt. Waltz With Bashir, by the Israeli director and former soldier Ari Folman, was a brilliant docu-fiction, computer-animated in the "rotoscope" style made famous by the art director Bob Sabiston in his work for Richard Linklater. It is a parable of what Folman sees as Israel's willed forgetting of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp massacres during the Lebanese war in 1982, in which Israeli forces were accused of turning a blind eye to, or even effectively enabling, the mass slaughter of Palestinian refugees by the grotesquely labelled "Christian" militia. It is vivid and thrilling film-making, and on its own terms it is the most successful competition film so far.

Cannes: "Blindness," "Waltz With Bashir," "Leonora," "Four Nights With Anna." Glenn Kenny at Cannes from Some Came Running

Israeli director Ari Folman had to grapple with certain of what we pros call "problems of representation" in creating his autobiographical documentary about the 1982 war in Lebanon...details of his participation in which he found himself having trouble remembering a couple of years ago. "You can draw me all you like, but don't film me," said a still-agonized friend he solicited for memories. Taking that cue, and perhaps one from Art Spiegelman as well, Folman made an animated film, featuring recreated scenes from his life, interviews, and depictions of the awful warfare he was part of. Animation, of course, solves the problem of recreating with real bodies scenes that should never be recreated (see Gilbert Adair on Schindler's List in his book Flickers). It also gives Folman imaginative opportunities to ruminate, both sardonically and agonizedly, on a form of Israeli guilt that isn't given much voice anywhere outside of Israel. Its exposure in this festival is almost as groundbreaking as the movie itself.

Jonathan Romney at Cannes from The Independent

Further proof that this year's selection is to be taken as seriously as any recent Cannes, comes with Ari Folman's audacious Israeli competition entry Waltz with Bashir. Poised strangely – possibly uniquely – between confessional animation and documentary investigation, the film explores the director's own experience as an Israeli soldier in Lebanon at the time of the Sabra and Chatila massacres. Realising that he can't actually remember what he saw at the camps, Folman investigates his strange amnesia, and finds it also affects his contemporaries too.

Delving into his own psyche, and his nation's, Folman delivers a trenchant and unsettling reportage on Israel's complicity in the slaughter of Palestinians by Phalangist militia. That Folman chooses to depict his quest in impressionistic, often dream-like animation initially seems like an outrageous poetic liberty – but it makes his film all the more personal and gives it the urgency of a true cri de coeur.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kalvin Henely

WALTZ WITH BASHIR is a movie that doesn't need to be live action because it doesn't set out, like so many others, to impress us with how movies can make war look real and scary, or as in THE THIN RED LINE, beautifully and disorientingly unreal. It's a movie that uses animation to bring us into characters' memories, to bring us back to places that may never have been real to begin with, and that would never have been recreated accurately in live action anyway. It wants us to consider the human element of war rather than the strategies, the numbers, the visceralness, the characters that it can create. Director/writer Ari Folman (writer of HBO's therapy show IN TREATMENT) stars as himself, an Israeli survivor of the Lebanon War in the early 80s trying to remember what he experienced by talking with his friends and fellow survivors. Through this form of therapy he learns of memories he can't remember, but that he can imagine; he learns that memories are living things that change as we change. He is haunted by one memory that no one else seems to remember and we are reminded how everyone copes differently with traumatic experiences. Some suppress it, others replace it, and, most notably, that from a human's perspective, war is never how it objectively looks on camera.

New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review

Speak, memory,” commanded Vladimir Nabokov, and it’s a nice enough thought—but in the Israeli animated masterpiece Waltz With Bashir, memory only stutters, yowls, and babbles in tongues. To translate, a new form is needed, with more fluid boundaries between documentary and fantasy, reality and dreams, life and art. What we get is both a detective story and a head-trip. The movie’s writer, director, and protagonist, Ari Folman, was 19 when he went to war in Lebanon in 1982, and he does not, he tells a friend, have distinct recollections of what he saw and did—especially on the days and nights of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, when Christian Phalangists murdered hundreds of Palestinian men, women, and children. Waltz With Bashir begins with a dream recounted by one of Folman’s friends: Snarling dogs emerge from the night shadows and bound through the streets of Tel Aviv, their eyes a radioactive yellow to match the clouds scudding above them, converging under the dreamer’s window and snapping at his face. That opening, with Max Richter’s pounding drums, puts the vision in our faces, too: It’s Folman shouting, “Cry havoc, and let loose the dogs of remembrance!”

One vision above all haunts Waltz With Bashir: soldiers, principally the young Folman, emerging naked from the sea and pulling their uniforms on their elongated bodies to Richter’s shimmering synthesizers. Folman slings his rifle over his shoulder and heads into Beirut. Women surge past him going—where? The camera can’t see beyond his face. The style of the movie shifts: He and a friend sit in a café, barely transformed, musing on whether films such as his can be therapeutic. Ho-hum, you say, Jews talking about therapy, what else is new? Except this isn’t New York, it’s Israel, which has a culture more repressed than its volubility would lead you to believe. (Monosyllabic Scandinavians don’t have a corner on buried traumas.) As Folman interviews his combat buddies, other soldiers, a reporter, and a psychologically astute friend, the narrative baton is passed. Now the backdrops are photo-realistic, now surreal. The music segues from raucous rock to dainty classical as a soldier dances among posters of the assassinated Lebanese president-elect Bashir Gemayel, his machine gun chattering like an electric guitar. Even the most lambent passages have a feverish urgency.

So many modern war films center not on rousing battles but the horror of civilian casualties, and on soldiers racked by flashbacks over things they can’t fully recall—things they saw, did, or didn’t do. Some filmmakers use images of slaughtered women and children for cheap shocks; others are more scrupulous, but so literal-minded that our defenses fly up. It has taken an animated film to go where live-action dramas and even documentaries haven’t—to tickle our synapses and slip into our bloodstream. The end of Waltz With Bashir rockets us out of the unconscious: The cartoon women surging past the young Folman become newsreel-real, their unholy keening recorded at the scene. The director has used every drop of his artistry to open us up to the sting of death.

Christian Science Monitor review [A] Peter Rainer

Among the most heartening recent developments in movies is the upsurge in deeply personal animated films that break new aesthetic ground. I'm thinking particularly of Richard Linklater's "Waking Life" and "A Scanner Darkly," Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis," and now, and perhaps best of all, "Waltz With Bashir," by the Israeli director, screenwriter, and composer Ari Folman. (It is Israel's entry for the best foreign film Oscar and recently won best picture of the year from the National Society of Film Critics.)

Like "Persepolis," which was about Satrapi's Iranian odyssey, Folman's movie – Israel's first animated feature – is intensely autobiographical. He brings his deepest crazymaking anxieties right up to the surface. Folman was a 17-year-old Israeli soldier during the 1982 invasion of Beirut and the subsequent massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon. Twenty-five years later, he still cannot come to terms with his complicity in the bloodshed. He is in such denial that he cannot even clearly recall his participation. "Waltz With Bashir" is his quest to find out what happened. It follows Folman through a series of interviews with fellow soldiers who also served.

He utilized videotaped discussions as visual guides for the animation, a combination of Flash, hand-drawn and computer-enhanced 3-D modeling. The pastiche of styles points up Folman's disjointed remembrances. He documents the nightmares of his fellow soldiers, like the one from his friend Boaz that opens the film: Twenty-six ravenous dogs racing through the streets of Beirut. Boaz remembers the exact number because, while on military maneuvers, he had to shoot the dogs one by one in order to silence them. Another friend recalls the dream of being clasped by a giant nude woman floating on her back as they are carried off to sea. Images like these have a scary, hallucinatory power that no description can convey.

In some ways, "Waltz With Bashir" reminded me – of all things – of "The Manchurian Candidate," which also centered on a soldier with bad dreams trying to retrieve his memories of a massacre by reconnecting with his old platoon. But Folman's movie is one of a kind. Visually arresting – the sulfurous nightscapes are particularly resonant – it is also a philosophical meditation on the nature of guilt and survival. Because of the current situation in Gaza between the Israelis and Hamas, it may even have special relevance beyond what Folman intended.

He takes no doctrinaire political position regarding Israel's presence in Lebanon at the time of the massacres (which may rankle zealots on both sides of the political spectrum). And yet, that situation, in which Israeli soldiers observed but did not intervene in the killing of thousands of Palestinian civilians by the Christian Phalangist militia, informs everything in this movie. It compounds Folman's trauma. There is nothing self-serving in any of this, no special pleading. Folman's emotional quest is existential; he goes wherever his blocked and burgeoning memories take him.

"Waltz With Bashir" is a supremely courageous act, not only as a piece of filmmaking, but much more so as a moral testament. And because Folman's odyssey is so all-encompassing, we can connect up to it psychologically in ways that transcend the historical particulars of Lebanon in 1982. It's a movie about the wages of suffering, on all sides, in battle. When, at the very end, Folman dispenses with animation and shows newsreel footage of the massacre's aftermath, the full obscenity of war screams out at us.

Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review

An extraordinary achievement, Ari Folman’s “Waltz With Bashir” is a detective story as well as an moral inquiry into the specific horrors of one war, and one man’s buried memories of that war. It is personal filmmaking of the highest order, recognized with an Academy Award nomination for best foreign film.

Israeli writer-director Folman sets himself a near-impossible task: How to make an animated documentary focused largely about yourself without falling into a morass of self-indulgence? At age 19, Folman was a soldier in the Israeli army, dispatched to fight in the 1982 Lebanon War. Structured as a series of interviews, each leading back to another murky piece of Folman’s past, “Waltz With Bashir” begins with Folman’s friend, Boaz, relaying a recurring nightmare to the filmmaker. In the dream, which comes alive in vivid detail, a sickly yellow sky weighs down on a pack of wild dogs racing through city streets. They stop beneath Boaz’s window. They wait, drooling for his hide. The dogs have haunted his dreams for years, he tells his friend. They have something to do with a gruesome incident Boaz experienced during the war.

And what about you? Boaz asks his friend. “No flashbacks from Lebanon?” Folman thinks a moment and says no. But he seems unsettled both by the question and his own answer.

That night Folman dreams for the first time of the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in West Beirut. In his dream, he is a young soldier walking out of the sea, with two comrades bearing rifles, under a night sky lit by flares. In what way does this dream correspond with his role in the ’82 carnage?

Prodded by Boaz, Folman embarks on his research project. He interviews both friends and military personnel who can shed some light on this dark corner of his young adulthood. One colleague, Carmi, has made his fortune in selling falafel; he now lives in Holland, where Folman visits him. Carmi’s memories of the war serve as a fascinating detour in Folman’s quest, yet like each new piece of information, it points toward his own memories. How much has the filmmaker repressed? As another friend, Ori, tells him: “Memory is dynamic. It’s alive. If some details are missing … [sometimes] memory fills the holes with things that never happened.”

The film is a visual feast. Simple two-person conversations take on the quality of a dream, the way the animation styles inform each other. Folman’s artistry makes hash of such recent, comparatively crude animated history stories as “Chicago 10.” Folman and art director David Polonsky treat the screen like the pages of a graphic novel. The movie was first shot on video, with interview subjects (two of the nine portrayed by actors) in a studio. Out of that came the storyboards, which led to some 2,300 illustrations  used as the basis for the finished two- and three-dimensional animation, plus flash animation. The effect is anything but fussy or self-conscious; it’s an organic, textured world we’re thrown into.

At one point Folman, in the back seat of a taxi traveling to the Amsterdam airport, gazes out the window at the countryside. Suddenly the landscape transforms from rural Holland to blasted-out Beirut, a memory emerging from the rubble of the past. The same transition could have been done on video or film, but the animation adds both distance and dreamlike fluidity. You can’t imagine any other visual approach.

“Waltz With Bashir” pins the blame for the three-day massacre of the Palestinian refugees squarely on the Christian Phalangist militia, exacting revenge for the murder of Lebanon’s newly installed president, Bashir Gemayel. The specifics in this conflict matter a great deal, yet the film could be about any armed conflict, any civilian killings committed in the name of security and freedom, any ex-soldier plagued with doubts. The current, uneasy cease-fire between Israel and Hamas reminds us of how urgently we need the likes of Folman today.

At the Cannes Film Festival in May, the film struck me as “a stimulating and provocative meditation on responsibility and morality.” Festival juror Natalie Portman noted at the closing press conference that when “a film as good as ‘Waltz With Bashir’.” doesn’t win a major prize, you know competition was especially formidable. Neither opinion, it seems to me now, went far enough. I doubt anyone could remain unmoved by what this picture says, and I can’t imagine a filmmaker finding more bracing cinematic ways to express it.

The Village Voice [Dina Kraft]

World Socialist Web Site David Walsh at Toronto

eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) review [5/5]

Reverse Shot (Michael Koresky) review

Village Voice (J. Hoberman) review

not coming to a theater near you (Jenny Jediny) review

Reel.com review [4/4] Chris Cabin, also seen here: filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [5/5]

Pajiba (Daniel Carlson) review

TIME Magazine (Mary Corliss) review

Cinematical (Kim Voynar) review at Cannes

CBC.ca Arts review Martin Morrow

PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review

DVD Talk theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]

SpoutBlog [Kevin Buist]

Salon (Andrew O'Hehir) review including an interview with the director

Moving Pictures Magazine [Ron Holloway] at Cannes, including an interview with director Ari Folman: Animation Mayhem: Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir

Newsweek (David Ansen) review

Plume Noire review Moland Fengkov

Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis) review [B]

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young]

The Onion A.V. Club (Tasha Robinson) review

Twitch (Todd Brown) review

Persistence of Memory: Ari Folman animates “Waltz with Bashir” Ray Pride from New City

Daily Plastic [J. Robert Parks]

Critic's Notebook [Robert Levin]

Screen International review Dan Fainaru at Cannes from Screendaily

The Auteurs' Notebook Daniel Kasman at Cannes

J Hoberman at Cannes from The Village Voice

Cannes Dispatch: Day Two: Patrick McGavin from Stop Smiling magazine

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [2.5/4]

Slant Magazine review Nick Schager

The House Next Door [Matt Noller] at Cannes

Wednesday 14 Emmanuel Burdeau at Cannes from Cahiers du Cinéma

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

Movies into Film.com (N.P. Thompson) review

Entertainment Weekly review [A] Lisa Schwarzbaum

Variety (Leslie Felperin) review

The Globe and Mail (Liam Lacey) capsule review [3.5/4]

Time Out London (Dave Calhoun) review [4/6]

Time Out New York (David Fear) review [5/6]

Time Out Chicago (Ben Kenigsberg) review [4/6]

Boston Globe review [3.5/4] Ty Burr

San Francisco Chronicle (Jonathan Curiel) review [4/4]

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]

Shaking Up the Crowd at Cannes Manohla Dargis at Cannes from the New York Times, May 16, 2008

The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review December 26, 2008

Bachir Gemayel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Gemayel of Lebanon Is Killed in Bomb Blast at Party Offices Colin Campbell from The New York Times, September 15, 1982

Elie Hobeika - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Car Bomb Kills Figure in 1982 Lebanese Massacre Neil Macfarquhar from The New York Times, January 25, 2002

"The Assassination of Elie Hobeika" (January 2002) Gary C. Gambill and Bassam Endrawos from Middle East Intelligence Bulletin

Sabra and Shatila massacre - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Report of the Kahan Commission Israeli defense inquiry finding Sharon guilty of ignoring the possibility of a massacre, leading to his resignation

DOC a Lebanese defense of Sharon

Cobra written by Elie Hobeika’s bodyguard, the Lebanese Christian military leader

Witnesses

Eyewitness Lebanon eye witness accounts from over 90 international reporters

Sabra and Shatila Jewish Virtual Library

Lebanese Civil war 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacre Pictures

BBC News archive and video On This Day, September 17, 1982

"Sabra and Chatila Massacres After 19 years, The Truth at Last?" Robert Fisk from The Independent, November 28, 2001

Sabra and Shatila Report Israel News, August 1, 2006

Fonda, Peter

THE HIRED HAND A 95

USA (90 mi) 1971

Jesus said, “If those who lead you say to you, ‘See, the kingdom is in heaven,’ then the birds of the heaven will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is within you, and it is without you.”

The disciples said to Jesus, “Tell us how our end will be.”
Jesus said, “Have you then discovered the beginning that you enquire about the end? Where the beginning is, there shall be the end. Blessed is he who shall stand at the beginning, and he shall know the end and not taste death.”

His disciples said to him, “When will the kingdom come?”
Jesus said, “It will not come by expectation. It will not say ‘see here’ or ‘see there.’ But the kingdom of the father is spread upon the earth, and men do not see it.”

—The Gospel of Thomas, Verses 3, 18, and 113

Immediately after EASY RIDER (1969), when Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper severed their friendship over a longstanding quarrel over sharing scriptwriting credits (Hopper insisted he wrote it alone) and the enormous profits (Hopper wanted 40% not 33%), eventually settled out of court nearly 30 years later in 1997, Fonda ventured into artistic obscurity in his first directing assignment by making a near wordless, highly visual acid western that was a box office flop, with some critics dismissing it as a hippie western. Way ahead of its time and one of the underrated films of the 70’s, made for less than a million dollars and released years before Terrence Malick’s BADLANDS (1973) or DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978), where acting and extreme artistic visualization takes precedence over plot or narrative, Fonda assembles a brilliant cast and crew, where first and foremost is the stunning cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond which simply defines the film, as everything is saturated in the beauty of each shot. His next film shoot was the even more memorable, career defining Robert Altman western McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971). Frank Mazzola’s stylistic editing and montage shots, seen from the opening, often blending two or three shots into a single image, gives the film an innovative style, supposedly modeled after Nicolas Roeg’s editing scheme in PERFORMANCE (1970), continually contrasting sharply defined images with a gorgeously flowing impressionism, shot along the Rio Grande in New Mexico where the film has some of the most incredible landscape sunset shots, accentuated by the stark beauty of Bruce Langhorne’s exquisite soundtrack, a virtuoso who plays as many as 58 different instruments himself. On top of that is Fonda and Warren Oates, fresh off Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), friends working together in their prime as a couple of drifters who ride together through the American Southwest during the 1880’s for seven years before Fonda gets the itch to return home to the wife he left behind. The hauntingly spare script written by Alan Sharp is beautifully delivered throughout, sharing screen time with prolonged silences, allowing the actors plenty of time to mold their characters, where Verna Bloom as Fonda’s abandoned wife perfectly conveys her mixed emotions with enormous sensitivity.

Bloom’s character gives this film a surprising feminist sensibility, especially considering she’s nowhere to be seen in the beginning of the film. But once they make their way back home, she is the heart and soul of the picture, even as Fonda and Oates, together for the first time, dominate the screen time. She lays down the law upon Fonda’s return, allowing him to stay as the hired hand, sleeping in the barn with his friend, where she doesn’t wish to confuse her 7-year old daughter Janey (Megan Denver) who believes her father is dead. The subject matter examines the role of a woman alone on the frontier, afraid to be taken advantage of by men, but also afraid of being left alone, where the daily struggle to survive emotionally is barely mentioned in westerns which usually favors schoolteachers or whores as the best subjects. Bloom exerts authority while opening the door just a crack to the thought of beginning anew, where she sets the terms of the relationship, and in doing so, transforms herself into a completely different person. In wordless sequences, the men work the farm, but their respect for the independence of Fonda’s wife grows, where the lyrically hypnotic music resembles waves of time, creating a feel for time passing without incident, where perhaps these men can succeed in leaving their troubles behind them. But likely not, as violence has been part of their lives, as it’s an everpresent part of the American West. These guys don’t go looking for trouble, but it has a way of finding them, where they continually have to stand up for themselves and make life or death moral decisions, the kind with lifelong implications. Even as Oates decides to venture out on his own, leaving Fonda and Bloom to rediscover what’s left of their marriage, there is an element of foreboding in his farewell.

Peter Fonda channels the moral virtue of his father in this picture, like Henry Fonda’s resolute portrayal as Wyatt Earp in John Ford’s MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (1946), another morality play set in the burgeoning outlaw criminality of the American frontier. Here the years have sapped Fonda’s optimism and stamina, having endured more than a man can swallow, but his weary resignation allows his co-stars to shine, feeding off his quiet stoicism, giving some of the best performances of their careers, often captured in extended wordless sequences where Fonda often films them in close ups. Oates is a marvel of minimalism in this picture, a kind and gentle spirit with a streak of wisdom, where there’s never a false note in his delivery. Bloom describes Oates as the reason Fonda left home seven years before, to find someone like him, where the intrinsic trust between them is an unspoken love, though neither would admit to it, as both are too proud of their own fierce independence, never allowing anyone else to define who they are. But Bloom has rare insight into the hearts of these men, as she’s been hurt and wounded too many times before, and her endurance will be tested once again, a stand-in for the sacrifice of all the women left behind by men seeking a nobler purpose, many of whom will never be seen again. Fonda’s filmmaking is assured throughout, often changing speeds, utilizing elaborate dissolves, lamp lit interiors, silhouettes, natural lighting, slow motion, and overlapping still photography to accentuate the slowness of time, as these men travel great distance, expressed in a poetic montage of wordless movement. The delicate soundtrack is as spare and as quietly affecting as any movie in memory, adding a tinge of melancholic sadness to every frame. There is a different version released for television in 1973, adding twenty minutes of footage Fonda felt was “extraneous,” but Fonda does not include this material in his final cut, ultimately restored in 2001, where according to editor Mazzola who oversaw the restoration along with sound engineer Richard Portman, he estimates 65% of the original negative was damaged, primarily with streaking and discoloration. Despite the huge financial success of Easy Rider (1969), this film has hardly ever been seen, and if it were released today, it would be among the best films of the year.

Time Out

Peter Fonda's follow-up to Easy Rider is a strange hybrid of a movie which starts off as a ghastly Western parody of Dennis Hopper's film, and then develops into something much more interesting: the last half is primarily concerned with the problems of a woman in a male-oriented Western culture, and Bloom captures the part magnificently, adding another dimension to the film by her performance. Oates, too, is as good as ever, and there are a few scenes between them of real subtlety and intelligence before the uninteresting mechanics of the plot reassert themselves.

BBCi - Films Jason Wood

Following their work on the splendid restoration of Donald Cammell's "Wild Side", "The Hired Hand" editor Frank Mazzola and distributor Hamish McAlpine have again teamed up to bring an undervalued classic into the limelight.

After years of roaming, and, being on the heels of bad trouble in the remote desert, Harry Collings (Fonda) decides to return to the wife and child he left behind to pursue his nomadic wanderings. His wife, Hannah (Bloom) at first refuses to accept him and orders him to sleep in the barn alongside his friend and fellow saddle tramp Arch Harris (Oates).

Collings works the slowly prospering farm as a hired hand and as his respect for his wife's independence grows, their romance rekindles. Arch, who has developed romantic feelings of his own, makes a graceful exit. But the peace and renewed intimacy is short-lived. The bad trouble comes full circle when Arch is taken hostage by the thugs they offended and Collings is forced to abandon his wife and child for a second time to ride to Arch's rescue.

Handsomely shot by Vilmos Szigmond, the film begins with one of the most beautiful sequences in film history. Fonda refuses to force the action and captures sensitive, moving turns from the terrific Oates and a performance from Bloom that caused Fonda's sister Jane to declare her brother had made a feminist western.

A work dear to Fonda's heart, he has often spoken of his wish for this film to be his epitaph. It's one that would do any director proud.

Kamera.co.uk [Jason Wood]

One of those rare director's cuts that manages to be shorter than the original, Peter Fonda's often forgotten, highly lyrical Western (the influential Films and Filming magazine rated it ahead of The Last Picture Show, The French Connection and McCabe & Mrs Miller - to which Fonda's film bears more than a passing aesthetic and thematic resemblance - in a 1971 end of year poll) re-emerges into the unblinking light of 2002 (all frenzied MTV style editing according to the director/star) thanks to the sterling work of editor Frank Mazzola and distributor Hamish McAlpine. Eagle-eyed readers may recall that Mazzola's/McAlpine's previous labour of love was returning Donald Cammell's Wild Side to its original glory. With The Hired Hand they have far exceeded their previous achievements.

Fonda directed the film (his first directorial effort and undoubtedly his best), from a script by Alan Sharp, fresh from the critical and commercial success of Easy Rider. When Universal - the studio behind the project - saw the result they were mortified, hastily forcing superfluous battle scenes and unnecessary gratuity in an attempt to hurry along the film's stately pace and character driven narrative. The film was marketed as a guts and gore revenge Western and though finding favour amongst more discerning critics - and McAlpine, who immediately tagged it as one of the most undervalued films of post-war American cinema - never achieved the reputation it deserved. Fonda has always asserted that he would be happy for the film to serve as his epitaph; watching the restored version presented by Mazzola and McAlpine, in close conjunction with Fonda himself - who has excised gratuitous scenes featuring one Larry Hagman - it is easy to see why.

In essence the film is a visual poem, a transcendental mediation on divergent paths, loyalty and, like Peckinpah's restored version of Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid, a eulogy to regret and the passage of time. Further, the film has the distinction of being one of the first in a rare breed of feminist westerns (The Ballad of Little Jo being the most recent), as it concentrates on the ardour endured by Verna Bloom (excellent, as is the perennially under-appreciated snaggle-toothed Warren Oates, here in more laconic mode) as the wife of Fonda's returning nomad. The film's feminist sensibility was a constant surprise to Fonda's sister Jane.

The Hired Hand begins with a beguiling pre-credit sequence which sets the textural tone for the rest of the film; Vilmos Szigmond's (Deliverance) autumnal cinematography capturing the shimmering light of the waters of a mountain river whilst the men frolic innocently in its cleansing, calming luxury. Frank Mazzola's dizzying montage sequences - beautiful recreated in this restored version - in which characters and pastoral vistas blend into one lends the film a truly spiriting sensibility. Bruce Langhorne's haunting score (sadly not available on disc) adds to the film's palpable aesthetic beauty. Directed with the deftest of touches, it's a graceful work of multiple and rewarding pleasures.

Dusted Reviews: Bruce Langhorne - Soundtrack To The Hired Hand Tad Abney from Dusted Reviews

There aren’t many Westerns like Peter Fonda’s The Hired Hand. His first project after the revolutionizing Easy Rider, it might be the strangest one I’ve come across in quite some time (at least since High Plains Drifter). It’s definitely the only Western I’ve seen that’s influenced by experimental filmmaker Bruce Conner, makes ritualistic gestures towards the four elements, has a character read from the ancient Gnostic text, the Gospel According to Thomas, about the kingdom of Heaven being within, and ends with some of the most anticlimactic gunplay I’ve seen, at least until Superfly. Did I mention it also features Warren Oates?

What ties the film together, maintains the dreamlike haze, the hidden parables, the things left unsaid by Fonda, by every character – the destabilizing movie as a whole – is the music by Bruce Langhorne. Known best as a session man for Dylan on Bringing It All Back Home and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (and apparently, he is “Mr. Tambourine Man” according to Dylan), Langhorne decided the best way to score it was not in the projection room, but by shooting the film onto a small black and white camera for later playback, allowing him to accompany the film from the comforts of home. Now fuzzy, black and white, and slightly out of sync, he played along as his girlfriend taped him, going back and layering Farfisa, piano, banjo, harmonica, fiddle, recorder, and Appalachian dulcimer, most run through a tube-based Echoplex over the 1920 Martin guitar. The results?

Maybe if Fahey hadn’t punched Antonioni, and had scored the desert porn scene in Zabriskie Point instead of Garcia, or if Sandy Bull had all of Ry Cooder’s soundtrack gigs, there’d be similar grounds for comparison. I think of Bull on the opening theme, plucking away at a banjo that echoes through the canyons from a Twin Reverb, suddenly meeting up with Henry Flynt’s fiddle for the tiniest of slowed-down hoedowns, a snare surfacing for four beats and then gone. Tracks seven and eight, with their haunting recorder melodies, animal calls, deliberate plucking, and invocation of lost American Indian sound rituals, find kin with the eloquent tribal sections of Jack Nitzsche’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

The urge to push it towards the fore of American cosmic folk (whatever that may mean) is strong, yet at 11 tracks in 23 minutes, a bit rash. Fahey, Bull, Cooder, Flynt, Nitzsche, they’re strong company to associate with Langhorne, considering the entire soundtrack is longer than Bull’s “Blend” by barely two minutes, and most pieces clock in well under a minute, scarcely settling before the dust stirs again. And yet time becomes irrelevant when considering the disc (aside from straight dollar-to-minute ratio). It’s already out of sync from the film, and is sourced from the original sound stripe, the masters (maybe even uncut and more expansive) long lost. A generation lost makes it only more ghostly. And Langhorne’s notes even mention that during the premiere, he was hearing sounds he’d never heard before, fearing them to be deal-breaking accidents. (Though it fit the movie perfectly.)

The ideal way to get at its gold, to have The Hired Hand hypnotize, is to switch the disc to repeat. Before you really realize it, you’re on the third spin, still adrift in that sparkling river that opens the film, immersed in layer upon layer of magic, ancient ritual, and American cosmic music, all these invisible forces at work on you. Like they've always been.

Film Threat [Tim Merrill]

The Hired Hand (1971) - Notes - TCM.com

The Village Voice [Molly Haskell] August 26, 1971 (pdf format)

DVD Savant [Glenn Erickson] Collector’s Edition

DVD Talk [Matt Langdon] Collector’s Edition

Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

VideoVista [Andrew Hook]

Hired Hand, The Review (1971) - The Spinning Image Graeme Clark

Legends of the Silver Screen [Mitch Lovell]

Concise Cinema [Adam Cook]

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

The Onion A.V. Club Noel Murray and Scott Tobias

Filmfour.com

TV Guide

Variety

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]

New York Times (registration req'd) Roger Greenspun, also seen here: The New York Times

The Hired Hand - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fontaine, Anne

ENTRE SES MAINS C+ 78

aka: Between His Hands

France (90 mi) 2005

While not adapted from a novel by Dominique Barbéris, Les Kangourous, the director was inspired by the story, along with other stories where ordinary, average women who lead perfectly normal lives fall for men who exhibit criminal behavior, in this film creating a psychological serial killer thriller. Isabelle Carré is terrific as an attractive, well organized insurance investigator who is assigned to handle a local veterinarian’s claim of flood damage, Benoit Poelvoorde, a Belgian actor who usually plays in French comedies, who turns into a tenacious stalker, a man who shows up unexpectedly at her workplace with plenty of conversation and compliments, which carries over after work as well with a weird happy/sad changing mood that he later has to apologize for, like drinking too much or taking her to his local disco pick up joints. But she’s intrigued by him, despite her better judgment, and her safe, comfortable middle class husband and child. Her mood deteriorates when she suspects he may be the serial killer on the loose, with news reports constantly reminding her that he’s always killing women with a scalpel, but she can’t deny her fascination.

Of interest is the title, which in French, has no his or her, it’s neutral when it comes to whose hands, so it could be the woman who is in his hands, or the man who is in her hands, adding plot possibilities. Only in English do we have to choose a sex. Many found this to be an intelligent, taut suspense thriller, eliciting screams when the atmosphere turns to murder and terror, but I found it formulaic and all too predictable, much preferring Jane Campion’s adaptation of IN THE CUT, where the female character is caught in a murky world of murder, sex, and bad cops, and actually has the balls to do something about it. Fontaine’s film feels like free will has little to do with the outcome, that fate and destiny will prevail, turning Carré’s character into a kind of Joan of Arc, believing she can somehow redeem his murderous soul.

Fonteyne, Frédéric

GILLES’ WIFE

France Belgium Luxembourg Italy Switzerland (103 mi) 2005

Gilles' Wife Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

[MILD SPOILERS] I found myself watching Gilles' Wife with the level of detachment that I experience when visiting and Arts and Crafts museum. I'm fully capable of noting the skill and workmanship involved in this piece of furniture or that woven tapestry, but there's usually no way in for me, no emotional frisson. So I can understand why Fonteyne's film would have its ardent admirers. It is beautifully crafted through and through, borrowing many of the stylistic tropes of early silent cinema to convey the dissolving inner life of Elisa (Emmanuelle Devos), a housewife for whom self-abnegation becomes an absolute existential commitment. Fonteyne has created a hybrid work that draws on usually incompatible elements: Eisenstein's flattening of space and image into hardened, interlocking icons; Murnau's collision of individual interiority and mythic typicality; and Griffith's domestic chamber dramas and fixation on the expressive female face. Devos is wonderful, shifting her features with a precision that hovers between the subtlety of modern acting and the telegraphic signification of the great silent heroines, especially that of Mae Marsh. Fonteyne's silent film syntax is matched, interestingly enough, with an artificial treatment of color, reducing tonalities to the muted matte finish of hind tinting. At times these flat colors, even lighting, and frontal compositions turn Gilles' Wife into a sort of shadow-box, its performers and environments taking on the texture of modeling clay. There are points of comparison for this type of mise-en-scène -- some late Resnais films, portions of Guy Maddin's oeuvre, Veit Helmer's contemporary silent Tuvalu -- but none of these captures the vexing contradiction of Fonteyne's approach, which seems aged in oakwood casks and at the same time obviously digitally enhanced. There aren't other films like it anywhere for miles, and for that reason alone it is worth a recommendation. However, its exquisite surface and Devos' virtuoso performance all struck me as rather fussy and overdetermined, and this sense of estrangement was only heightened by the story and its commitments. Elisa is a sort of anti-heroine Kate Chopin wrote about, a protagonist taking the absurdity of her own choices to the brink and beyond. It's an inward, feminine rendition of the sort of anti-heroes one finds in Camus or Dostoyevsky -- the absolute, unswerving devotion to a decision that, once taken, precludes reconsideration. Apart from being troubled by the perverse-feminist premise of Gilles' Wife (a tale, it's worth noting, created in the 1930s), in which a woman's greatest deed is her own disappearance, I have always had a problem with this variety of existentialism. Tenaciously holding fast to one course of action, it seems to me, precludes learning; I have always preferred Sartre's version of the human event, wherein the choosing subject acts, and then chooses and acts again. So no matter how carefully wrought the film and Devos' character may be, I find myself with a political objection -- why this tale, now? -- and colliding with a personal bête noire I just can't find it within me to sidestep. In sum, Gilles' Wife is undeniably accomplished but to my mind thoroughly wrongheaded, and your mileage, as they say, may vary.

Fonyó, Gergely

MADE IN HUNGÁRIA B 85

Hungary (109 mi) 2009 ‘Scope

The director was present for the screening and prefaced his film by indicating Hungary only makes musicals about once every twenty years, so he felt fortunate the one was his film. Based on a musical stage production seen by the director about 7 years ago, this is a comic portrait of life in the 60’s under Communist leadership using a music and dance format. Interestingly, the film is based on the true story of Miklos Fenyo, who wrote most all the songs used in the movie, all of them hits in Hungary. Having spent some time in America, 18-year-old Miki (Tamás Szabö Kimmel) arrives with his parents at a rundown airport in Hungary in the early 1960’s, with armed guards stationed everywhere. Miki looks a bit like Kieran Culkin in IGBY GOES DOWN (2002), so this is conceivably an Igby Goes to Hungary movie. Miki breaks out his Jerry Lee Lewis imitation on the piano and starts rocking the young crowd which breaks into an uncontrollable dance frenzy. Amusingly, the Communist response is to cordon off the kids from the stage to keep them as far away as possible, and when that doesn’t work, bring in a tank to shoot fire hoses on everyone. A guy in a convertible remarks that it’s the greatest May Day celebration yet. When his parents arrive back to their home, under the Communist system they have to share it with a deadbeat who claims the kitchen and bathroom privileges during set hours.

Behind the scenes, the Communist leadership decides allowing youth a little room to breathe is healthy and wants to sponsor a youth talent contest, all under their banner of course. Having spent time in America, Miki’s father was not exactly welcomed back with open arms, so he had to plead with the Communist officials to find any kind of work at all. In the same fashion, the Communists want Miki to lead a group of carefully chosen East German girls and the official’s son in a blatant attempt to stack the deck in their favor to win the contest. Initially, despite being seen as a sellout, Miki goes along because he has little choice. Their opening rehearsal is perhaps the best dance sequence in the film, as the robotic East German girls whip off their clothes and break into Hullabaloo dance moves, attacking the musicians in sexually compromising positions in what looks like a blast. But Miki is derided by one of the other guys, Röné (Iván Fenyö) who’s also not exactly happy to see Miki back, as his talent is a threat to his own, as up until now, he’s been the rock “n” roll king, courting the most beautiful woman in town, Marina (Titánia Valentin, who in reality is Tamás Szabö Kimmel’s girl friend). But Röné’s problem is that he pilfers women’s jewelry as he seduces them, so in a wild musical number where he’s the King of Rock “n” Roll, the police raid the contest and attempt to arrest him for jewelry theft, but he keeps evading them, jumping up into the balcony where he continues his song.

This is largely a vehicle for large scale dance numbers, with contrived throwaway love stories that barely register, as they’re dwarfed by the sultry music and dance performances. Something of a dream fantasia where rock “n” roll music is the only weapon kids have against the political and military occupation of their country, the music never seems to fail them, as each time the music starts cooking the kids just can’t stop having a good time, something unthinkable under Communist rule. which believes in controlling the outcome of every event. At the end of the film, there is footage of the real Miklos Fenyo upon whose character Miki is based, actually winning that talent contest and becoming an infamous Hungarian rock “n” roll star. While some of the Communist kitsch and musical numbers resemble the Kaurismäki’s Leningrad Cowboys in their raw amateurishness, but it hardly matters at all, as this is a spoof on Communist authority where the idea is for the rebellious teenagers to kick back and let themselves go, which the entire cast does brilliantly in the ensemble dance routines. This is light, breezy, and fun, while a better dramatic film is a look back at the rock “n” roll music scene of the 50’s in Hungary in Peter Gothár’s TIME STANDS STILL (1982).

User comments from imdb Author: horli from Hungary

Well, I have to say that this movie is amazing! (compared to other Hungarian movies ... ) The film is not only a really great comedy, but also gives an insight into the life of the 60's (in Hungary). Furthermore, the music makes it so much better!! We all know that the story is about a musician, Miklós Fenyo, who has lived in America, but his family had to move back to Hungary. I also must mention the actors, mainly Szabó Kimmel Tamás, who played so well. In my opinion, this comedy/musical contains everything what the genre requires; from the house party to the love. All in all, I really enjoyed every single part of the movie. That's why, I recommend it anyone, whatever age you are if you need distraction.

Well done ;)

Variety (Boyd van Hoeij) review

After a prolonged stay in the U.S., a Brylcreemed Hungarian teenybopper teaches his Commie-era peers about rock 'n' roll in "Made in Hungaria," helmer Gergely Fonyo's fluffy but swinging musical romance. Solidly entertaining '60s-set tuner is based on the Hungarian stage musical that was in turn inspired by the early days of Magyar rocker Miklos Fenyo. Early February release at home garnered almost 200,000 admissions, making it the second biggest local title of the year. With its high feel-good quotient, "Made" could jive into fests wanting to counterbalance the recent glut of Central Euro gloom-and-doom pics.

Though a staple of Magyar cinema in the Communist era, musicals haven't been popular in Hungary since the 1989 transition. A notable exception was Peter Timar's 1997 B.O. hit "Csinibaba," which, perhaps not coincidentally, also told the story of a '60s talent contest.

Pic opens with the arrival of 18-year-old Miki (Tamas Szabo Kimmel) and his parents (Tamas Dunai, Eva Vandor) at a rundown airport in 1963 Hungary. "Rock and roll," says Miki, eyeing the flaky control tower lined with armed soldiers.

Languid early scenes offer a gently humorous look at the family trying to settle in again. Helmer Fonyo ("Young, Dumb and Full of Love") then shifts into second gear with the first musical number, in which Miki shows off his Jerry Lee Lewis-inspired piano and singing skills after bumping into his childhood friends in a park.

Miki's buddies join in, except for the group's new leader, Rone (Ivan Fenyo), who took Miki's place after the latter left four years earlier. A rivalry between the two at several talent contests is, of course, inevitable.

Fonyo uses the Communist-era setting for both humor and nostalgia, though his focus always remains on the kids and the music. The antics of Comrade Bigali (Peter Scherer), who is supposed to watch Miki's family but also wants to exploit Miki's musical gifts, get some of the biggest laughs.

After a setback about halfway through, Miki exclaims, "I just want to make music and fall in love," and the pic's aspirations don't go much beyond this. But Kimmel's peppy perf makes the film an enjoyable ride, and he has nice chemistry with Sarah Jessica Parker lookalike Tunde Kiss, who plays his childhood sweetheart. Other thesps are competent ensemble players, with Eva Vandor (the only thesp from the stage musical to reprise her role) giving Miki's mother some warmth in just a few scenes.

The musical numbers work best in natural situations, such as the talent contest and scenes of serenading. Editor Mano Csillag niftily advances smaller stories-within-the-story during the numbers by using parallel editing. Choreography is old-school but effective.

Like other musical love stories set in the early '60s ("Dirty Dancing," "Hairspray"), "Made in Hungaria" is so meticulously designed that any sense of realism is lost in all the picture-perfect period detail. Pre-recorded voices lack verve, but other tech credits are tops.

For the record, "Hungaria" was the name of the band of Miki's real-life counterpart, Miklos Fenyo.

Camera (color), Sandor Csukas; editor, Mano Csillag; music, Miklos Fenyo, Robert Gulya; production designers, Viktoria Horvath, Zsolt Nanassy; costume designer, Janos Breckl; sound (Dolby Digital), Atilla Tozser; choreographer, Akos Tihanyi; assistant director, Judit Biro. Reviewed on DVD, Luxembourg, April 29, 2009. Running time: 109 MIN.

Forbes, Bryan

THE STEPFORD WIVES

USA (115 mi) 1975

'It's really a crock' Pauline Kael excerpted from the Guardian

The plot of The Stepford Wives is Invasion of the Body Snatchers with a women's-lib theme. The idea of an undeclared all-out war of men against their wives had a perverse charm, and satirical possibilities leap to mind. But the dialogue is gummy, the situations dimly functional; the movie gives the impression of a patchwork script and it's blah and becalmed.

Since the women haven't enough personality for us to get scared of them - where's the terror in robots being turned into robots? - Stepford has nothing but its cautionary parable to go on. That is exactly the level on which, I think, it has no validity. As a statement - a text for our times - it's really a crock. If women turn into replicas of the women in the commercials, they do it to themselves. As a guilt-provoker for men, this picture may be peerless. It says to them, "You're a vacuous, inadequate excuse for a man; you've been demeaning a sensitive, intelligent woman, and now that she's trying to lift her head and get her consciousness raised, you'd rather kill her than let her find herself."

It could be an entertaining parable only if we saw the women's dreams and the men's dreams go sour, and masochistic and sadistic fantasies build. Stepford provides nothing but drab masochism. What is the danger represented by robotisation but giving in to commercialism and letting the advertising society set the models for one's own behaviour? Right now, there's a pop subculture peddling this gutted view of women's liberation. I dislike The Stepford Wives for reasons that go beyond its being a cruddy movie: I dislike it for the condescension implicit in its view that educated American women are not responsible for what they become.

Slant Magazine [Ed Gonzalez]

In his tribute to William Levitt in Time (for the magazine's 100 Most Important People of the Century), Richard Lacayo wrote, "So long as you don't count sex and violence, there's no human impulse older than the urge to find a nice, affordable house, something outside of town but not too far." Levitt was responsible for exploiting people's motivations to "get out of town," applying a panoply of assembly-line techniques to housing construction. He was the father of suburbia, a place where rich white people could run to in order to get away from the big-city hustle, the prying eyes of nosy neighbors, and human undesirables. (In 1977, Levitt explained the exclusion of blacks from his Levittown developments as a "business decision.") At the end of The Stepford Wives, Joanna Eberhart (Katharine Ross) confronts the man responsible for the robotization of Stepford Village's women. Desperately clinging to reason, she demands a rationale for his cult of transmogrification. "Because we can," he responds. (Or is it because the women have let them?) It's an awesome summation of the film's theoretical but stinging feminist statement, which is critical of the suburban milieu as a petri dish where regressive sexist fantasies are cultivated. During the film's awesome opening shot, director Bryan Forbes allows an empty New York City apartment to mirror Joanna's struggle against an empty-shell existence. The sight of a man carrying a naked female mannequin through the streets of the city similarly anticipates the power struggle at play in Stepford Village but also sets up the film's brilliant dissection of corrupt suburbia. The transformation of the town's women into housewives and sex slaves is a business plan employed by a group of men no doubt worried by the effects of the feminist movement, symbolized by Joanna and her buddies Bobbie (Paula Prentiss) and Charmaine (Tina Louise). Because the filmmakers look to preserve the mystique of the film's final moments, the male characters barely register (Polanski does a better job scrutinizing John Cassavetes's motivations in Rosemary's Baby while still keeping the nature of his character's master plan a secret to the very end). Joanna's "consciousness-raising" friends seem as exaggeratingly grotesque as the film's Stepford Wives, all but threatening to burn their bras whenever one of the robot women begins to reenact cleaning product commercials, but Joanna's battle to be remembered is a stirring one. Forbes's direction is uncluttered and makes excellent use of the long shot, and though the film threatens to run out of steam at each and every turn, it never runs out of ideas.

Movie Gazette DVD review [Anton Bitel]

Everyone knows that a Stepford wife is a suburban woman who has dedicated her life almost robotically to serving her husband in the kitchen and in the bedroom. This is because 'The Stepford Wives' is one of very few films, along with Federico Fellini's 'La Dolce Vita', whose titles have entered the vernacular as much as the films themselves entered the public consciousness of their times. The best horror has always reflected contemporary anxieties, and 'The Stepford Wives' taps right into the battle between the sexes which was revolutionising the domestic landscape of 1970s America.

The Eberharts are leaving the excitement and confusion of their inner city New York life for the more basic values and old world charm of Stepford, Connecticut. Walter (Peter Masterson), who had instigated the move in the first place, quickly takes to the Stepford community and makes new friends in the local men's association, but his wife Joanna (Katharine Ross), who works for herself rather than for her husband and uses her maiden name professionally, misses the noise of the city and is uncomfortable in her new surroundings - until, that is, she meets Bobbie Markowe (Paula Prentiss), a fellow ex-Gothamite who shares her spirit of rebellion against suburban conformity. Together they try to start up a women's lib group to rival the men's association, only to find that the interests of the chillingly perfect local women do not extend beyond baking, floor polish, and the sexual satisfaction of their husbands. When Bobbie changes seemingly overnight, becoming as blankly subservient as the other Stepford wives, Joanna's indignation turns to hysteria and horror, as she tries to uncover the sinister secrets of the men's association before she too is turned into a Stepford wife.

Seamlessly merging smalltown conservatism and male chauvinism, 'The Stepford Wives' portrays a showroom community - familiar from the advertisements of the 1950s - where women are mere constructs of male fantasy. When it first appeared, the film was criticised for being a mouthpiece for the anti-feminist backlash in the 1970s - but in fact it clearly satirises its male characters as vain, narrow, unimaginative and insecure nerds, who fall far short of the picture-perfect standards that they apply to their wives, and whose self-serving ideals create a Disney-fied world marked only by blandness and sterility. Without ever resorting to special effects or graphic horror, 'The Stepford Wives' suffuses its sexual conflicts with just the sort of tension and paranoia that characterised the real gender politics of the seventies, before resolving itself in a satisfyingly creepy sci-fi conclusion.

Adapted by William Goldman (Hollywood screenwriter extraordinaire and author of the influential 'Adventures in the Screen Trade') from a novel by Ira Levin (who also wrote 'Rosemary's Baby', 'The Boys from Brazil'), 'The Stepford Wives' has a subtlety and dark wit which the recent Nicole Kidman remake can only fantasise about replicating.

TCM.com [MIchael Atkinson]

Movies are both their brute entertainment textures and the secret delivery of ideas, and Bryan Forbes’s The Stepford Wives (1975) is notorious as a Hollywood product that failed disastrously on the first measure but has in time revealed itself to be a veritable gusher of subtextual anxieties and cultural satire. The scenario – taken seriously, not as campy farce as per the execrable 2004 remake – is a ticking bomb placed under the theater seats of a middle-class America already red-eyed and bone-tired from the onslaughts of civil rights, anti-government activism and women’s lib. Imagine an educated, artistic, restless young wife being confronted with moving to the suburbs, where her sense of alienation amid the rampant conformity and provincialism reaches a kind of screaming peak when she realizes that the wives she meets aren’t women at all, but automated simulacra engineered by the husbands, robots who are non-argumentative, undemanding, obedient, obsessive about housekeeping, and always sexually available.

Of course the contemporary remake had to dull that blade with smirky, Paul Rudnick-scripted yocks – the Mars-Venus implications of Ira Levin’s novel and William Goldman’s screenplay are outrageously vicious and all too relevant. Katharine Ross is Joanna, a svelte, wary and rather brittle New York photographer and mother married to jovial lawyer Walter (Peter Masterson); at the outset, they’re moving upstate to the wealthy bedroom community of Stepford, a transplantation performed completely by Walter, who never tires in selling his wife on the glories of country life. But Joanna isn’t sold; she misses the city (it’s a rare film that idealizes the friendliness of Manhattan as it demonizes the chilly soullessness of the suburbs), and Stepford, though spacious and peaceful and affluent, lacks the zest of urban life. We’re cued in right away, as Walter exchanges a conspiratorial word with another husband at their mailboxes – something is going on underground here, like a perverse, postmodern version of an Elks lodge. Sure enough, Stepford has a no-girls-allowed "men’s association," stationed in a local mansion (complete with a Robert Motherwell painting on the president’s office wall), and much to Joanna’s chagrin she’s the only wife in town who seems to think that its very existence is an archaic insult.

Joanna, in short, is not a slavishly obedient, old-fashioned wife, and we slowly realize that this is what drove Walter to move his family to Stepford. Suburbia in general is treated like an alien landscape of zombie women and shadowy men, in which Joanna and, soon, Bobbie, another New York émigré housewife, played with typically grinning zeal by Paula Prentiss, both feel as if they’d woken up in an Orwellian future of some particularly banal sort, or halfway through a body snatcher invasion. That’s the magic of The Stepford Wives – the perception of bourgeois shallowness becomes the movie’s ruling metaphor, because of course the women that surround our heroines aren’t just movie caricatures of narcissistic suburban idiocy, they’re actually constructs within that world as well, programmed devices that reveal their makers’ desires and weaknesses.

It’s no mere flourish to have the main man of Stepford (Patrick O’Neal) an ex-design engineer for Disneyland, where technology serves to not only exaggerate a specific notion of happiness but to eliminate the perception of frustration, boredom and dissatisfaction. As Joanna and Bobbie pass down the rabbit hole, and slowly realize their husbands are part of an incomprehensible plot directed exactly at them, Forbes’s movie becomes more and more Gothic. It doesn’t get any more graceful, though; The Stepford Wives has moments of bracingly dry-eyed ‘70s grit, but mostly it’s hampered by an inappropriate score, lots of stiff direction, and a sense of being pieced together from a hurried shoot. Certainly, Forbes, a busy British writer, director, producer and actor, had little fluency with American suburbia; the wives’ quasi-Southern-gentlewomen’s floor-length dresses and floppy hats were his idea, much to Goldman’s chagrin, who following Levin’s lead thought the Stepford husbands would rebuild their wives as Playboy bunnies. (Forbes’s casting of his wife, Nanette Newman, who was no hot-pants-wearing sexpot, figured in the strategy.) But here Goldman, who took Forbes’s pre-production costume choices to be the film’s death knell, turned out to be wrong, and Forbes was inadvertently right: what trad man would want his wife bazooming out of her scanty clothes at the supermarket? The men of Stepford are embodied nakedly in their artificial wives’ behavior not as just horny bastards, but full-on reactionaries, neo-cons who like their women draped and subservient and old-fashioned, ready for sex at home but otherwise dressed like high-class matrons – the public mother to the private whore. It plays today like a New England version of sharia law, a form of sexual control as well as an expression of possessiveness, nostalgic conservatism and social power.

In fact, Joanna and Bobbie, in short-shorts and halter tops, stand out like freaks at the local hoity-toity backyard soiree, as they would, flaunting their womanly freedom, in a world operated and defined by men. Forbes’s film has subtler resonances, too, that are easy to overlook amid the general clumsiness – in particular, the casting of Ross with her apprehensive, dewy eyes and boyish figure, and of Masterson, playing exactly the kind of friendly, balding go-getter that would manage to earn enough to land such a fetching, sophisticated younger woman and then have to endure her dissatisfaction with the choice. But Prentiss’s Bobbie is the godsend, extroverted, snarky, crowing over Joanna’s housekeeping non-skills ("A messy kitchen! A home away from home!"), settling down for a covert snack of Ring Dings and Scotch. A natural comedienne and vibrant personality, Prentiss was apparently never devoted to success in Hollywood, and her career is sketchy with ellipses and retirements. But even when she worked the Industry rarely seemed to know what to do with her, and even in the ‘70s projects that suited her rangy talents and irrepressible elan were impossible to find. For whatever reason Prentiss was never a star, but she remains one of the most entrancing women to appear in postwar American movies. Having her become, in The Stepford Wives, a brainless, kitchen-scrubbing automaton is the final dismaying irony.

The Stepford Wives The Recreated Woman, by Lilly A. Boruszkowski from Jump Cut

Reel.com DVD review [Jerry Renshaw]

Movie Vault [Friday and Saturday Night Critic]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer) Special Edition

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick)

eFilmCritic.com (Charles Tatum)

The Digital Bits Adam Jahnke

DVD Talk [Stuart Galbraith IV]

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

DVD Verdict - Paramount Edition Patrick Bromley

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

Ford, Chris J.

THE VILLAGE BARBERSHOP

USA (99 mi) 2008 ‘Scope Official site

Time Out Chicago (Hank Sartin) review [3/6]

A grizzled old barber (Ratzenberger) is forced by circumstances to hire a woman (Cole) at his manly-man barbershop. He shows his soft side and opens his heart a little. She finds new love with a local barista (McRae). The new hair-cutting team manages to turn around the failing business, and their unscrupulous landlord gets what’s coming to him. The script is exactly as soft-edged as it sounds. The stakes are low, and you’ll know every turn that’s coming, but criticizing this attractively shot trifle feels like kicking a puppy.

The Village Barbershop Facets Multi Media

Stuck in a rut of haircuts, hot dogs, and horse books, a small time barber Art Leroldi, (John Ratzenberger of Cheers, Toy Story and Ratatouille) lives every day like a disappointment. However, with the unexpected death of his long time partner and last apparent friend, he faces losing the only thing in his life that has any meaning, his barbershop. In order to keep it, he is forced to hire the last person on earth he would ever imagine working there, a spitfire young girl Gloria (Shelly Cole of Gilmore Girls) who suddenly finds herself unable to take no for an answer. This is the bittersweet story of a man who has lost his way in life and of a woman trying to find hers - revealing how two unlikely people can find a second chance in the most unlikely of places. Directed by Chris Ford, U.S.A., 2008, BetaSP, 99 mins.

Moving Pictures Magazine [Elliot V. Kotek]

The Village Barbershop is the debut feature from the mind of a man who owns up to owning 67 pairs of sneakers and is, otherwise, an advertising creative-type at Goodby, Silverstein in San Francisco. Deftly transitioning to long-form storytelling, writer/director Chris Ford's decade-long gestation on a script set in Reno (though filmed predominantly, and somehow effectively, in Napa) has paid dividends, birthing a character-driven comedy with a solid sensitivity appropriate for a film whose main character is an old-school barber with an old-school name (Art).

Art's creator is the gifted and underrated John Ratzenberger, known to many as Cliff Clavin from "Cheers," and who has since appealed to all generations by giving his voice to all of Pixar's flicks, from Toy Story to Ratatouille, and (cough, cough) appearing on "Dancing with the Stars." In Village, Ratzenberger's Art is a no-frills barber who still charges eight bucks for a cut, and who, since the passing of his one true love, spends his routine lunch hours throwing the business' money away on beer and bad betting tips.

The film begins when Art's barber-shop partner, Enzo, dies at a Chinese-restaurant-cum-brothel. Simultaneously, any control that Art had over his business affairs hits the skids. With this challenge to Art's livelihood and identity, he's forced to look outside his world to save himself, and finds an unlikely heroine in a pregnant, trailer-park-dwelling, unapologetic go-getter named Gloria. Gloria has been the answer to many a songster's soul (Van Morrison and Laura Branigan, to name the most prominent), and Shelly Cole's character whips both the shop and its owner into shape with a charm and confidence that, to say the least, had been missing from both their personal lives.

Cindy Pickett, as Art's topless cocktail waitress love-interest, and Laurellee Westaway, as the hilarious, still-smoking, septagenarian neighbor with an oxygen tank, provide perfect support to their leads, and Westaway's audience appeal is through the roof. Unfortunately, the film is let down a little by a couple of inconsistent supporting perfs and some overly-theatrical day players who, together, keep the film from playing with the absolute truth that may have helped the film ascend from a surefire festival favorite to an indie classic.

Still, with outstanding outings from Ratzenberger and Cole, The Village Barbershop lathers up a poignant piece of first-time filmmaking that focuses firmly on the integrity in people, providing proof that no matter how alone someone might seem to be, companionship, camaraderie (and comedy) might just be a short clip away.

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [3.5/5] Chale Nafus

Entertainment Insiders (Jonathan W. Hickman) review

Director interview Cinequesting, March 2008

Variety.com [Dennis Harvey]

Ford, John

A Look at STAGECOACH (1939), SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON (1949), and THE SEARCHERS (1956)

What’s truly memorable in John Ford films, initially seen in STAGECOACH (1939), is his unique screen portrayal of Indians shot down in droves, where the whites not only shoot the Indians, but also their horses out from under them - - all in a single shot.  This is utter lunacy, yet it is the key to understanding John Ford's mythical creation of a continually escalating visceral thrill onscreen, where the camera is placed low to the ground looking up at the Indian on the horse as they both die, falling simultaneously to the ground, all from a single bullet.  This happens repeatedly, as the fast-paced movement actually creates tension and drives the action.  Why few critics have questioned this outrageously racist depiction is beyond me, as whites are always depicted as not only militarily, but morally and intellectually superior, as if this is a known and undisputed fact, continually portraying Indians as savages and never as the culturally developed people that they were, who did not ravage and destroy the earth, understanding they were dependent upon it to survive.  These images degrade the viewer's understanding and appreciation for Indians and their place in American history, as they were more often the victim of genocide and untold atrocities by the U.S. Cavalry and Defense Department that attempted to wipe them off the face of the earth in order to make way for the white settlers.  It is this fictitious and mythical view of supposed white superiority, as projected in the movies, that continues to plague this nation, reflected by the equally hostile and racist attitudes of many misinformed American soldiers when they are sent to foreign lands.    

When looking at John Ford, he is a man whose cinematic visualizations are renowned, but his hatchet job of American history is equally legendary, as he insists on perpetrating the same racist myths about Indians that have been in effect for the past 100 years, which makes his historic vision as a filmmaker no better than the dime store novelist that originated these misconceptions. Ford has always portrayed Indians in the least desirable light, showing them to be less than human, vicious savages, terrible shots, poor military strategists, and little more than pathetic wretches of humanity, so little sympathy is ever shown when a gazillion Indians are killed onscreen, such as in STAGECOACH (1939).  Even when adding psychological depth and complexity to the Western, there is no understanding whatsoever of Indians or Indian culture, yet he continued to project the same racist stereotype of "Indian as savages.” Ford is revered for his supposed authenticity and historic attention to detail in his depiction of the West, but someone needs to point out how racist and degrading his supposed portrait of authenticity really is.  He allowed white characters to be psychologically complex, but never Indians.

Compare that to the elevated sympathy offered to two white women escorted by a cavalry troop through hostile Indian territory in SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON (1949), an overreaching drama that opens in 1876 just as news is spreading about the defeat of General Custer at the hands of the Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapahoe, sending waves of anxiety and fear throughout the West, where a newsreel style narrator misinforms the audience straightaway, probably exactly as the newspapers speculated in that era, believing various Indian tribes were gathering together in great numbers to purge the West of white settlers.  In reality, Indians were gathering in record numbers to defend themselves against the inevitable advance of the whites into their territory.  After the Custer debacle, however, rather than remain a fighting force of multiple tribes united in opposition, as is suggested here, they split back up into smaller tribes, each going their own separate way, as they had always lived, reflective of their nomadic lifestyle of living off the land.  But that’s not the way the movies tell the story, instead projecting a view of the white settlers as victims of random and indiscriminate Indian violence, overlooking the genocide initiated against Indians by the U.S. cavalry throughout the West, ordered to militarily defeat one tribe after another, rounding up all free Indians in a form of ethnic cleansing, eventually forcing them into submission, legally requiring that they live away from their traditional hunting grounds, forcing them to live in isolation on desolate reservations, subject to rampant disease and the rotted food of government rations where more than half died within the first few years.  Ford conveniently leaves out all references to the true story of “American” history and instead recounts the same mythological racist lore that turns Indians into savages while the whites are noble heroes. 

THE SEARCHERS (1956), a candidate for the greatest Western ever made, is a film about a racist and bitterly hateful man, perhaps the most racist film ever made, where Wayne's character is the ultimate Indian hater who rides for years harboring the racist view that whites raised by Indians are better off dead, as his captive niece has been irredeemably "soiled" by the experience, a view he reluctantly revises when he later rescues the daughter of the one woman he loves.  But this view recurs in Barbara Stanwyck's role in yet another Western portrayal, TROOPER HOOK (1957), where she is so scorned by the townsfolk just for having been an Indian's woman, her fall from grace is so severe that she is forced to live outside any society, white or Indian, much like Wayne at the end of THE SEARCHERS.  Wayne would also rather kill buffalo and leave it to rot on the plains than allow Indians to have food to eat, while the director Ford includes a despicable scene, also Aldrich in ULZANA'S RAID (1972), where whites raised by Indians are depicted as having been raped into insanity.  With Wayne typically the hero that audiences always root for, they are NOT apt to question this horrendous depiction of Indians and the generational harm these images cause both in planting the seed of ignorance in the brain and then having to re-learn how to reject such negative stereotypes, not when there is near unanimous praise for the film and the filmmaker. 

There is no question that in any John Ford/John Wayne movie, but in particular STAGECOACH (1939), SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON (1949), and THE SEARCHERS (1956), together they forged a tough guy persona as the good guy, a lone man who harbors private secrets from a life filled with experience, adding a touch of intrigue and mystery, not to mention power to his character, personifying the freedom that is associated with the West.  In each, Wayne is viewed as the hero and will inevitably be the smartest, most experienced, and most skilled practitioner with a gun or rifle, but also in devising strategy whenever he and/or his men get caught in a tight situation, always displaying a rare level of courage and grit under fire. Again, what's racist is the demeaning and racially restricted view that only whites have a capacity for intelligence, as Indians are never depicted as having knowledge and skill, or powers of analysis, or exhibit a sense of humor or a concern for others, or any capability for being human. These qualities are only allowed for whites, just like a white-only neighborhood, or a drinking fountain, or a rest room.   

I'm not suggesting all Westerns need to be revisionist, this was the 50's after all, I will call filmmakers out on their misrepresented portrayal of Indians, as enough is enough, and Westerns are among the worst offenders of a culture plagued by race and culture hatred, so it's about time someone sought to eradicate some of the harm done by these damaging and misconceived historical perceptions which only cloud and distort reality, further leading to an ill-informed populace. 

John Ford • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Richard Franklin from Senses of Cinema, July 2002 (excerpt below)

RECOMMENDED VIEWING:

Rather than be daunted by the full filmography below, I shall presume to list some Ford films readily available in most larger video stores in suggested viewing order. I am pre-supposing the reader has little or no knowledge of Ford's work (you might use two stores rather than depart from this order, at least at first).

Do not begin with The Searchers - it is an acquired taste and without a knowledge of Ford's milieu, it will seem like little more than a pot-boiler (which it was). But viewed with a little knowledge of Ford's work (and the now lost Western genre), it will soon find its place.

The Grapes of Wrath - Probably Ford's most accessible work to a modern audience. Note particularly the contrast of highly stylised chiaroscuro lighting (Greg Toland a year before Kane) to the documentary realism of say the encampment scenes.

They Were Expendable - another realist piece, remarkable in that Ford came out of active duty to re-create what he had just experienced, yet gave this story of the US's greatest defeat in WW 2, a mythological sense of historical perspective. Note the final scene between John Wayne and Donna Reed.

How Green Was My Valley? - a non realist evocation of life in a Welsh mining town a century earlier. This is not shot by Toland, yet note Ford's composition and lighting at the same time as Kane was being shot. Allow yourself to be swept away by the sentiment. A complete contrast to the previous two films and yet so clearly the work of the same director.

Fort Apache - First of the cavalry trilogy. Loosely based on Custer, it is a more accessible introduction to the Western genre, being Ford's first film in a new sub-genre.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon - Third of the cavalry trilogy (but shot second). It won the Academy Award for Technicolor cinematography (note in particular the thunderstorm sequence, extemporised during a real storm "under protest" by the cameraman). And John Wayne's performance as an old man, two years after Fort Apache.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance - do not be put off by its studio bound look, or the age of Wayne and Stewart playing young and old. This does not need Monument Valley, being a morality play of Shakespearian proportions.

The Quiet Man - You are now ready to wallow in Ford sentimentality. But note the almost expressionistic treatment of the boxing flash-back (when he wanted to, Ford could grab an audience by the throat).

The Searchers - Warrants and rewards with repeated viewings. Apart from containing the best suspense sequence ever filmed (the Indian raid), consider the time frame of the story - Ford effortlessly has years pass without in any way diluting the urgency of the drama. To quote John Milius: "...anyone who thinks John Wayne can't act has not seen The Searchers ". Consider the relationship between Ethan (Wayne) and his sister in law early in the story. Then Ethan and Martin (the searchers) as the story progresses. Also the sense of family, community and finally man's plight in a hostile universe. (There are many versions on tape, but the "Technicolor restoration" on VHS is better than the DVD).

All-Movie Guide Bruce Eder

Maine-born John Ford (born Sean Aloysius O'Fearna) originally went to Hollywood in the shadow of his older brother, Francis, an actor/writer/director who had worked on Broadway. Originally a laborer, propman's assistant, and occasional stuntman for his brother, he rose to became an assistant director and supporting actor before turning to directing in 1917. Ford became best known for his Westerns, of which he made dozens through the 1920s, but he didn't achieve status as a major director until the mid-'30s, when his films for RKO (The Lost Patrol [1934], The Informer [1935]), 20th Century Fox (Young Mr. Lincoln [1939], The Grapes of Wrath [1940]), and Walter Wanger (Stagecoach [1939]), won over the public, the critics, and earned various Oscars and Academy nominations. His 1940s films included one military-produced documentary co-directed by Ford and cinematographer Gregg Toland, December 7th (1943), which creaks badly today (especially compared with Frank Capra's Why We Fight series); a major war film (They Were Expendable [1945]); the historically-based drama My Darling Clementine (1946); and the "cavalry trilogy" of Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950), each of which starred John Wayne. My Darling Clementine and the cavalry trilogy contain some of the most powerful images of the American West ever shot, and are considered definitive examples of the Western.

Ford also had a weakness for Irish and Gaelic subject matter, in which a great degree of sentimentality was evident, most notably How Green Was My Valley (1941) and The Quiet Man (1952), which was his most personal film, and one of his most popular. It also earned more Oscars and nominations than any other movie ever produced at Republic Pictures. Poor health dogged Ford's career during the 1950s, but he still managed to create The Sun Shines Bright (1953) — one of his favorite films, dealing with politics and race relations in the 19th century South — Mogambo (1953), and The Searchers (1956), which is considered one of the most powerful Western dramas ever made. The Horse Soldiers (1959) showed some of Ford's flair, but was marred by production problems, and Ford later directed the John Wayne/Harry Morgan section of How the West Was Won (1963). His concern with social justice, which manifested itself in The Sun Shines Bright also became more evident during the early '60s, in films such as Sergeant Rutledge (1960), Donovan's Reef (1963), and Cheyenne Autumn (1964), all of which sought to address problems of racial prejudice.

Ford was the recipient of the first Life Achievement Award bestowed by the American Film Institute, and was the subject of Peter Bogdanovich's documentary, Directed by John Ford (1971). He died in 1973.

DEEP FOCUS: John Ford Bryant Frazer

John Ford was born Sean O'Feeny in Maine in 1894, the youngest child of a large Irish immigrant family. He came to Hollywood in 1913, acting in bit parts in several films including D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation until he was hired in 1917 to direct Westerns starring Harry Carey. By 1921 he made about 30 films, nearly all of which have been lost. Only 12 of his silent films still survive, including perhaps his best silent work, The Iron Horse (1924), which displays a strong influence of Griffith. By the 30's he was an established industry director. He began to direct many notable literary adaptations, including The Informer (1935) and later The Grapes of Wrath (1940) before he made the first Western masterpiece, Stagecoach , in 1939, a film that would set the standard for most classical Western films from thereon. Its the many Westerns he made that established Ford as one of the greatest and most influential film directors in cinematic history. Orson Welles claimed to have screened Stagecoach more than 40 times before making Citizen Kane , and when asked which three directors Welles would consider to be his superior, Welles replied, "John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford." Besides Welles, everyone from Howard Hawks to Akira Kurosawa have acknowledged Ford's great influence on their work. After Stagecoach , Ford continued to develop the Western in such films as My Darling Clementine (1946), The Searchers (1956), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). In his earlier Westerns, Ford used low-key lighting and visual stylization that showed an influence of German Expressionism.

Though he retained some of this earlier style, he acquired a naturalistic style of scope and wonder. Ford seems especially at home filming his Westerns in Monument Valley in Utah, which Ford describes as the most peaceful place on Earth. Ford discovered Monument Valley in Stagecoach , the same film in which he and the world discovered John Wayne, who until then was relegated to cheap B-movies. Using the same stock of actors and locales, Ford built his films into the West, creating a profound mythology that resonates through his oeuvre. His films became reflections on the American West and its conflicts with the American East, and stoic meditations on courage, honor, lawfulness, and community. Ford once said, "I'm John Ford. I make Westerns." However one should not dismiss him as simply a genre director. Ford's work was profound and personal, upholding his beliefs and always examining American life and American history. Ford passed away in his home in California in 1973.

Film Reference John Baxter

John Ford has no peers in the annals of cinema. This is not to place him above criticism, merely above comparison. His faults were unique, as was his art, which he pursued with a single-minded and single-hearted stubbornness for sixty years and 112 films. Ford grew up with the American cinema. That he should have begun his career as an extra in the Ku Klux Klan sequences of The Birth of a Nation and ended it supervising the documentary Vietnam! Vietnam! conveys the remarkable breadth of his contribution to film, and the narrowness of its concerns.

Ford's subject was his life and his times. Immigrant, Catholic, Republican, he spoke for the generations that created the modern United States between the Civil and Great Wars. Like Walt Whitman, Ford chronicled the society of that half century, expansionist by design, mystical and religious by conviction, hierarchical by agreement; an association of equals within a structure of command, with practical, patriotic, and devout qualities. Ford portrayed the society Whitman celebrated as "something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of night and day."

Mythologizing the armed services and the church as paradigms of structural integrity, Ford adapts their rules to his private world. All may speak in Ford's films, but when divine order is invoked, the faithful fall silent, to fight and die as decreed by a general, a president, or some other member of a God-anointed elite.

In Ford's hierarchy, Native and African Americans share the lowest rung, women the next. Businessmen, uniformly corrupt in his world, hover below the honest and unimaginative citizenry of the United States. Above them are Ford's elite, within which members of the armed forces occupy a privileged position. In authority over them is an officer class of career military men and priests, culminating in a few near-saintly figures of which Abraham Lincoln is the most notable, while over all rules a retributory, partial, and jealous God.

The consistency of Ford's work lies in his fidelity to the morality implicit in this structure. Mary of Scotland's Mary Queen of Scots, the retiring Nathan Brittles in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and outgoing mayor Frank Skeffington in The Last Hurrah all face the decline in their powers with a moral strength drawn from a belief in the essential order of their lives. Mary goes triumphantly to the scaffold, affirming Catholicism and the divine right of kings. Duty to his companions of the 7th Cavalry transcending all, Brittles returns to rejoin them in danger. Skeffington prefers to lose rather than succumb to modern vote-getting devices such as television. "I make westerns," Ford announced on one well-publicized occasion. Like most of his generalizations, it was untrue. Only a third of his films are westerns, and of those a number are rural comedies with perfunctory frontier settings: Doctor Bull, Judge Priest, Steamboat round the Bend, The Sun Shines Bright. Many of his family films, like Four Men and a Prayer and Pilgrimage, belong with the stories of military life, of which he made a score. A disciple of the U.S. Navy, from which he retired with the emeritus rank of Rear Admiral, Ford found in its command structure a perfect metaphor for moral order. In They Were Expendable, he chose to falsify every fact of the Pacific War to celebrate the moral superiority of men trained in its rigid disciplines—men who obey, affirm, keep faith.

Acts, not words, convey the truths of men's lives; public affirmations of this dictum dominate Ford's films. Dances and fights signify in their vigor a powerful sense of community; singing and eating and getting drunk together are the great acts of Fordian union. A film like The Searchers, perhaps his masterpiece, makes clear its care for family life and tradition in a series of significant actions that need no words. Ward Bond turns away from the revelation of a woman's love for her brother-in-law, exposed in her reverent handling of his cloak; his turn away is the instinctive act of a natural gentleman. Barred from the family life which his anger and independence make alien to his character, John Wayne clutches his arm in a gesture borrowed from Ford's first star, Harry Carey; in a memorable final image, the door closes on him, a symbol of the rejection of the eternal clan-less wanderer.

Ford spent his filmmaking years in a cloud of critical misunderstanding, with each new film unfavorably compared to earlier works. The Iron Horse established him as an epic westerner in the mold of Raoul Walsh, The Informer as a Langian master of expressionism, the cavalry pictures as Honest John Ford, a New England primitive whose work, in Lindsay Anderson's words, was "unsophisticated and direct." When, in his last decades of work, he returned to reexamine earlier films in a series of revealing remakes, the skeptical saw not a moving reiteration of values but a decline into self-plagiarism. Yet it is The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, in which he deals with the issues raised in Stagecoach, showing his beloved populist west destroyed by law and literacy, that stands today among his most important films.

Belligerent, grandiose, deceitful, and arrogant in real life, Ford seldom let these traits spill over into his films. They express at their best a guarded serenity, a skeptical satisfaction in the beauty of the American landscape, muted always by an understanding of the dangers implicit in the land, and a sense of the responsibility of all men to protect the common heritage. In every Ford film there is a gun behind the door, a conviction behind the joke, a challenge in every toast. Ford belongs in the tradition of American narrative art where telling a story and drawing a moral are twin aspects of public utterance. He saw that we live in history, and that history embodies lessons we must learn. When Fordian man speaks, the audience is meant to listen—and listen all the harder for the restraint and circumspection of the man who speaks. One hears the authentic Fordian voice nowhere more powerfully than in Ward Bond's preamble to the celebrating enlisted men in They Were Expendable as they toast the retirement of a comrade. "I'm not going to make a speech," he states. "I've just got something to say."

John Ford's films unite America's myths, truths - tribunedigital ... Michael Wilmington from the Chicago Tribune, July 2, 2006

Who was John Ford? That's something I've mulled over for more than 35 years, ever since co-writing the critical study "John Ford" (British Film Institute and Da Capo Press) back in the early 1970s. And it's still a knotty question, worth re-examining after the recent release of an excellent Ford/John Wayne boxed DVD set.

To comprehend Ford -- that ornery, hard-drinking, deceptively literate Irish-American who won six Oscars and became a U.S. Navy Reserve rear admiral -- you have to accept something seemingly contradictory. As an artist, Ford was obsessed, above all, with truth and the "moment of truth." But, as a person, he could lie with a straight face that hornswoggled enemies or patsies and amused or exasperated friends.

Truth and fiction, fact and legend are the double sides of Ford and of his movies, something that resonates through the most famous line in any of his movies, when nosy, pompous newspaper editor Maxwell Scott, played by Carleton Young said, in "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

That volatile mixture of truth and blarney in his films, of historical fact laced with legend or hokum, is often attacked as a flaw of Ford's. In fact, along with his unmatched visual sense, it's part of what makes him great -- and what makes masterpieces of movies such as "Stagecoach," "Young Mr. Lincoln," "The Grapes of Wrath," "How Green Was My Valley," "The Quiet Man," "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon," "The Searchers" and "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance."

When John Ford showed Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) arriving at an isolated house in the opening of his great 1956 western "The Searchers" and drifting away at the end of it -- both times framed by the blackness surrounding the house's open doorway -- he created one of the most imperishable images in the whole wide range of the classic Hollywood movie. Just as "The Searchers," over the years, has been increasingly heralded as an American classic and the finest movie western, Wayne's Ethan has come to incarnate the image of the man alone: the noble outlaw who stands apart from society, sometimes appearing to fulfil its deep violent needs and then vanishing afterward, as Ethan will, to "wander forever between the winds."

Tom Joad as left-wing rebel

There's another noble outlaw in the Ford filmography, as powerful a presence as Ethan, who arrives and departs in images just as unforgettable -- but today, less praised and analyzed. That's Henry Fonda as Tom Joad in Ford's 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath."

In "Grapes," also an American film masterpiece, Fonda's Tom, like Ethan, arrives at the film's opening and departs at its end. He first appears as a solitary figure, marching along the dusty roadside, and makes his final exit, walking off in silhouette against the pre-dawn sky, just after his heart-rending farewell speech to his mother (Jane Darwell), "I'll be around in the dark. ... Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. ... "

These days, "The Searchers" usually receives all the critical praise it missed upon its 1956 release, when it was a box-office hit but not a favorite of more intellectual critics. Just a few weeks ago, it was properly celebrated with the DVD set from Warner Bros. of eight Ford-Wayne movies. At the same time, "The Grapes of Wrath," though always accorded classic status, and available itself in a fine DVD edition from Fox, is sometimes criticized as overly solemn and socially conscious, a preachy left-wing drama that doesn't reveal the true Steinbeck or the true Ford. (Steinbeck himself strongly disagreed.)

Yet, "The Grapes of Wrath" is every bit the masterpiece "The Searchers" is. The two movies, which remained personal favorites of Ford's throughout his life, are equally important to understanding him -- and to understanding America as well.

Fonda and Wayne, as the left-wing rebel Tom and the right-wing rebel Ethan, are two sides of the man many regard as the greatest American movie maker of the classic Hollywood era. But as with many complex artists and men, there are a number of John Fords: respectable man and outlaw, warrior and showman, poet and fighter. You cannot truly perceive him or his movies without accepting and understanding all of the Fords.

Some respected critics, such as David Thomson and Richard Schickel, have cogently (and, in Thomson's case, obnoxiously) disputed Ford's rank. But Ford's biggest admirers always included his colleagues. Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Elia Kazan, Orson Welles, Frank Capra and Howard Hawks all called him the "greatest living director" during his lifetime; Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Clint Eastwood are among his admirers today.

And Ford's duality extended to his politics. He is often misperceived as sharing Wayne's hard right conservative views. In fact, he was a self-identified liberal Democrat for much of his career. (He once said of Wayne with a mix of affection and ridicule, "I love that damned Republican.") A decorated WW II veteran -- unlike Wayne, who took a deferment and stayed home -- Ford was a cold war liberal in the mold of two of his three favorite presidents, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy. (The other: Abraham Lincoln.). And though Ford changed over the years, he always remained capable of telling one group that he was a Maine Republican, and another that he was a Democrat and rebel, which is how he described himself in 1966 to French critic/director Bertrand Tavernier.

Westerns his specialty

Another element of his greatness is his popular touch. Ford's 60-year filmography includes at least 113 features and 24 short films. And though he worked in many genres, including historical films, war movies, regional comedies, adventure films, social dramas and literary adaptations, westerns were his bread-and-butter. Indeed his most famous personal quote -- which is variously reported as "My name's John Ford: I make westerns" or, "My name is John Ford; I am a director of westerns" -- insists on that vocation.

Ford was never naive. He knew that it was not for his westerns that he was the most honored American director. "Stagecoach" (1939) and some others might be considered classics, but none of his six Oscars came for a "horse opera." It was the social dramas and literary adaptations such as "The Informer" (from Liam O'Flaherty's novel of an IRA traitor and his dark night of reverie and tragedy), "The Grapes of Wrath" (from Steinbeck's epic of the Depression and the dispossessed Dust Bowl Okies) and "How Green Was My Valley" (from Richard Llewellyn's saga of the Welsh coal mines and a troubled mining family) that gave Ford his cachet.

A mistake

Because of that, some Ford admirers today tend to elevate the Westerner Ford of "The Searchers" far above the Popular Front Ford of "The Grapes of Wrath" or "The Informer" -- a mistake, I feel. Yet another part of what makes Ford great is his ability to admire both the Fondas and the Waynes, the left-wing rebel Joads and the right-wing rebel Edwardses.

"The Grapes of Wrath" was one of the most powerful progressive books of its era: a deeply felt expose of inhuman conditions inspired by Steinbeck's own investigations as a San Francisco News reporter -- and it attracted Ford, he claimed, because he immediately saw parallels with his own Irish forebears' experiences in the Great Famine.

Ford was a great image maker, but he was also an artist obsessed with memory, a filmmaker who liked to recall and quote his own movies. In "Liberty Valance," there are echoes throughout of "Stagecoach" (the characters) "My Darling Clementine" (the plot) and "Young Mr. Lincoln" (the music).

"The Searchers" in turn echoes the images and themes of the earlier westerns. But it also recalls "The Grapes of Wrath," with its themes of disrupted family and a man on a quest. That becomes more obvious if we compare both movies to his 1964 western swan song "Cheyenne Autumn," which is about the 1878-79 trek of 286 reservation Cheyenne Indians over 1,500 miles to their Yellowstone homeland -- starting, like the Okies, in Oklahoma.

So Tom Joad of "Grapes" tries to help hold his family together in their ramshackle truck on Route 66 to California. Ethan Edwards of "Searchers" tries to rescue the last member of his own family. In both cases, these men remain at the end outsiders who serve their communities but cannot rejoin them, which is why the endings of both films are so moving.

Striking a pose

Ford carefully choreographed the end of "The Searchers" -- even giving Wayne a habitual hand-on-arm pose used by Ford's first star and mentor, Harry Carey Sr. in their silent westerns. And he wanted Fonda's dramatic leave-taking, like Wayne's, to be the film's last image, though he was overruled by the film's strong-willed producer, Darryl Zanuck. (It was Zanuck who substituted -- and, at Ford's insistence, took over the direction of -- the movie's eventual closing scene, Ma Joad's stirring but pat sermon on "we're the people.")

Both films resonate in our minds for their striking landscapes, for those heroic (sometimes anti-heroic) wanderers and for what their quests reveal about America: economic exploitation in "Grapes," racism and violence in "The Searchers."

"Print the legend," the arrogant "Liberty Valance" editor said, and it's often mistakenly assumed (by Thomson, for example) that he's a mouthpiece for Ford's views. But Ford, as Peter Bogdanovich point out, "prints" both the legend and the fact. Somehow, he magically brings together both the beauty of America's myths and the harsher truth lying underneath them.

Intolerance - Film Comment Kent Jones, May/June 2013

One of my American Western heroes is not John Ford, obviously. To say the least, I hate him. Forget about faceless Indians he killed like zombies. It really is people like that that kept alive this idea of Anglo-Saxon humanity compared to everybody else’s humanity—and the idea that that’s hogwash is a very new idea in relative terms. And you can see it in the cinema in the Thirties and Forties—it’s still there. And even in the Fifties. But the thing is, one of my Western heroes is a director named William Witney who started doing the serials. He did Zorro’s Fighting Legion, about 22 Roy Rogers movies; he did a whole bunch of Westerns . . . John Ford puts on a Klan uniform [in The Birth of a Nation], rides to black subjugation. William Witney ends a 50-year career directing the Dramatics doing “What You See Is What You Get” [in Darktown Strutters]. I know what side I’m on.

—Quentin Tarantino, in conversation with Henry Louis Gates, in The Root

Let’s start with the obvious and agree that Tarantino was carried away by his disgust with racism and his lofty feelings about William Witney. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that it’s been a while since he took a fresh look at Fort Apache (48) or Cheyenne Autumn (64) or—given the fact that he’s collapsing prejudices against Indians and African-Americans into one—Sergeant Rutledge (60). Let’s assume that such Witney titles as Drums of Fu Manchu and Jungle Girl are as racially enlightened as Tarantino claims Darktown Strutters to be. And let’s assume that, as he was soaring on the wings of his rhetoric, Tarantino forgot that Ford’s own ancestors were not Anglo-Saxon but Celtic, that they were not exactly welcomed with open arms when they started emigrating to this country in great numbers in the 1840s, that the memory of Anglo-Saxon oppression was considerably fresher in Ford’s lifetime than it is now (still pretty fresh back home), and that the Irish experience played no small part in his films.

But let’s take a closer look at the part about Ford killing all those “faceless Indians.” First of all, the Indians in Ford’s films, while never as carefully drawn as the Indians in Delmer Daves’s films, are less “faceless” than they are in many other movies made by directors with only a fraction of Ford’s knowledge of the actual West. Secondly, what about all the other directors who killed so many more faceless Indians? What about Hawks (Red River), Walsh (They Died with Their Boots On, Distant Drums, Saskatchewan), Hathaway (The Thundering Herd, Ten Gentlemen from West Point), Vidor (The Texas Rangers, Northwest Passage), de Toth (Last of the Comanches), Mann (The Last Frontier), Tourneur (Canyon Passage), and Sherman (Comanche, War Arrow, The Battle at Apache Pass)? And what about all the lesser directors, the Lesley Selanders and Louis Kings and R.G. Springsteens and lower and lower down the pole? Does anyone actually believe that they each chose Western stories set during the Indian Wars because they unwittingly shared a burning desire to promote the superiority of Anglo-Saxon humanity? Or that William Witney laid down the law with Republic president Herbert Yates and unequivocally refused to make any films about the slaughter of Indians? While making it clear that the Chinese were another matter and that a Fu Manchu serial was okay? On the other hand, he seems to have made an exception for Santa Fe Passage, about an Indian scout played by John Payne who stands up to a murderous band of Kiowas.

Some of these directors wielded quite a bit of power, Hawks most of all. Some of them, like Witney, wielded none and were in no position to refuse an assignment. The fact that he didn’t wind up making that many movies featuring pitched battles between Anglo-Saxon cowboys or scouts or soldiers and hordes of Apaches or Cheyennes or Sioux, gunned down from behind the safety of rock formations or upended Conestoga wagons or on horseback, obviously has nothing to do with personal predilections and everything to do with the reality of slaving away on budgets that didn’t allow for the cost of feeding, housing, and paying 100 horse-riding extras and a couple of dozen stuntmen. Shadows of Tombstone (53) is more typical Witney fare and more typical of low-budget Westerns in general: a rancher catches a bandit who turns out to work for the corrupt sheriff and then decides to run for office himself with the help of the beautiful local newspaper owner.

In some of the above-mentioned cases, the battle with the Indians is nothing more than an episode in a Western saga, as in Red River. In Hathaway’s Ten Gentlemen from West Point, the raid on Tecumseh’s camp is the final step in the military education of the eponymous 10 cadets. In Vidor’s Northwest Passage, the massacre of an entire Abenaki village builds with a scary momentum that suggests (or suggested, to certain post–My Lai viewers) that the film itself was bursting through its own celebratory spirit of the pioneering ethos to reveal a throbbing inner core of American supremacist bloodlust. In Mann’s The Last Frontier and Walsh’s Saskatchewan, as in Ford’s Fort Apache, a hero with extensive knowledge of Indian ways and a respect for a particular Indian tribe (Sioux in the Mann, Cree in the Walsh, Apache in the Ford) comes into conflict with a commanding officer who lives long enough to see his arrogant attempt to assert the superiority of Anglo-Saxon humanity go down in flames. In certain films, the Indians are played by actual Indian actors, albeit often from the wrong tribe (as was the case in many Ford films). In others, including Daves’s enlightened Broken Arrow and Drum Beat, they are played by white actors like Jeff Chandler and Debra Paget and Charles Bronson. From a distance, it’s very easy to view the Western genre as a great abstract swirl of cowboys and Indians, the proud Cavalry vs. the mute savages, a long triumphal march of Anglo-Saxon humanity led by John Ford and John Wayne brought to a dead halt by The Sixties. Up close, one movie at a time, the picture is quite different. Similarly, the mental image of a film about the South at the turn of the century featuring Stepin Fetchit as the devoted manservant of a small-town judge sounds like the occasion for a satisfying round of righteous indignation, while the actual films Judge Priest (34) and The Sun Shines Bright (53) are something else again.

Why would Quentin Tarantino, of all people, buy into such a frozen, shopworn image of Ford and the pre-Sixties Western genre, an image that is now six decades old and more of an antique than anything Ford ever directed? Of the 12 sound Westerns Ford made between 1939 and 1964 (I don’t think that Tarantino is referring to the silents: we’re not talking about actual film history here, but a political construct from an earlier era built around the Cavalry trilogy), some have no significant action involving Indians at all, including My Darling Clementine (46)—unless you insist on counting its one drunken Indian—3 Godfathers (48), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (62). In Wagon Master (50), Ben Johnson is chased on horseback by a band of Navajo warriors, but when they see that he is traveling with Mormons, all hostilities cease—one oppressed people recognizes another. At the Navajo dance to which they’re invited, an outlaw who is hiding among the Mormons sexually assaults a squaw, and the Mormon elder has the man publicly flogged. Since no Indians, faceless or otherwise, are killed, I presume that this is not one of the films that Tarantino had in mind. In Fort Apache it’s Cochise and Geronimo, hardly faceless, who do most of the killing—yet within the framework of the film they are justified because their people have been corrupted by the local Indian agent and their agreements with the American government have been dishonored. In She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (49), in which tensions break out between the Indian agent and a rebel Arapaho leader, the final Seventh Cavalry raid on the Arapaho camp is bloodless and intended to avoid a massacre. Two Rode Together (61) is about the problems of returning white Comanche captives to their prejudiced families. In Sergeant Rutledge, the Ninth Cavalry tracks down and battles with a band of Mescaleros . . . but the Ninth Cavalry is all-black and the protagonist is its proudest sergeant, falsely accused of the rape and murder of a white girl—surely Tarantino could see his way to cutting this one a little slack. In essence, I think that we’re really talking about three movies: Stagecoach (39), in which the men on the eponymous vehicle defend themselves and the women aboard against a band of Apaches; Rio Grande (50), in which Apaches on a rampage are wiped out by the Cavalry on the Mexican side of the border; and The Searchers (56). More about that one later.

The idea of the American West was always more a matter of solitude and space and the balance between individualism and community than a matter of conquest. Along with the city as theater of life in the Thirties or bourgeois existence as genteel prison in the Fifties, the idea belonged to no director or writer, and the culture breathed it long before the movies began. That the idea was built on the backs of indigenous Americans who were, in Ford’s own words, “cheated and robbed, killed, murdered, massacred and everything else,” was not exactly hidden from view, but relegated to the background of the story that the culture was telling itself through paintings and dime novels and traveling shows and, finally, movies—albeit never quite as comfortably as is now imagined. It’s curious that American culture and history are still so commonly viewed through a New Left prism, by means of which 1964 or thereabouts has become a Year Zero of political enlightenment; as a consequence, the preferred stance remains that of the outsider looking in, or in this case back, at a supposedly gullible and delusional pre-Sixties America. It’s certainly preferable to right-wing orthodoxy, but that’s hardly a compliment. The New Left is now very old but its rhetoric lives on, many times removed from its original context, and that rhetoric seems to have found a welcome home in film criticism.

Can we really afford to keep saying “them” instead of “us?” Is it useful to keep looking back at the past, disowning what we don’t like and attributing it to laughably failed versions of our perfectly enlightened selves? Should we really give ourselves the license to remake film history as we would like it to be by eliding certain details and amplifying others—in this case, selling The Birth of a Nation as the American equivalent of The Eternal Jew, equating a day of extra work with riding for the real Klan, elevating William Witney to King of the Underdogs and sweeping John Ford into the dustbin, and maintaining that the Blaxploitation genre was a model of African-American empowerment? Why do we keep insisting on the de-complication of history if not to justify our own tastes and abolish our discomforts? The Birth of a Nation is indeed a hair-raising experience, and its moments of visual poetry, as stirring as ever, are as close to its many truly repugnant passages as teeth are to lips, to paraphrase Mao. They always will be. Does that oblige us to pretend that the film wasn’t a beacon for every director of Ford’s generation and beyond, for fear that we might appear racist by doing otherwise? Griffith and Thomas Dixon, with assistance from Woodrow Wilson, helped to reinvigorate the real Klan. They did so unwittingly, not with a piece of propaganda but with a powerfully dynamic and romantic rendering of the “old South” of their elders that housed a racist deformation of history at its core—indeed, if they had been mere propagandists like Fritz Hippler or Veit Harlan, their film would never have had the effect that it did. That’s not splitting hairs, but the thorny, unwelcome, complicated truth. The question is, how do we live with it?

And how do we live with John Ford? Just as a great deal of energy once went into the domestication of The Birth of a Nation—for instance, James Agee’s contention that Griffith “went to almost preposterous lengths to be fair to the Negroes as he understood them, and he understood them as a good type of Southerner does”—so an equal amount has gone into smoothing out Ford, fashioning him as either a drunken-racist-militarist-jingoistic lout with a gift for making pretty pictures or a Brechtian political artist. If I have some sympathy for the latter position (and zero for the former), it still seems like a stretch. But as Raymond Durgnat might have put it, and as Jonathan Rosenbaum argued so eloquently in his 2004 appreciation of The Sun Shines Bright for Rouge, Ford wasn’t a great artist in spite of the contradictory imperatives of his films but because of them. His films don’t live apart from the shifts in American culture and the demands of the film industry, but in dialogue with them. Do those films provide the models of racial enlightenment that we expect today? Of course they don’t. On the other hand, they are far more nuanced and sophisticated in this regard than the streamlined commentaries that one reads about them, behaviorally, historically, and cinematically speaking, and the seeds of Ulzana’s Raid and Dead Man are already growing in Fort Apache and The Searchers. Is Ford’s vision “paternalistic?” I suppose it is (and that includes The Sun Shines Bright and Sergeant Rutledge), but the culture was paternalistic, and holding an artist working in a popular form to the standards of an activist or a statesman and condemning him for failing to escape the boundaries of his own moment is a fool’s game. Maybe it’s time to stop searching for moral perfection in artists.

The mistake has always been to look for the paternalistic, find it in Ford’s work, and then make the leap that it is merely so. If there’s another film artist who went deeper into the painful contradictions between solitude and community, or the fragility of human bonds and arrangements, I haven’t found one. To look at Stagecoach or Rio Grande or The Searchers and see absolutely nothing but evidence of the promotion of Anglo-Saxon superiority is to look away from cinema itself, I think. In Stagecoach and Rio Grande, the “Indians” are a Platonic ideal of the enemy—every age has one, one can find the same device employed throughout the history of drama, and in countless other Westerns. As for The Searchers, the film becomes knottier as the years go by. The passage with Jeffrey Hunter’s Comanche wife Look (Beulah Archuletta) is just as uncomfortable as the courtroom banjo hijinks in The Sun Shines Bright, particularly the moment when Hunter kicks her down a sandbank—but the comedy makes the sudden shift to relentless cruelty, and the later discovery of Look’s corpse at the site of a Cavalry massacre of the Comanches, that much more shocking.

Tarantino’s ill-chosen words more or less force a comparison between his recent films and Ford’s. As brilliant as much of Django Unchained and Inglourious Basterds are, they strike me as relatively straight-ahead experiences—there is nothing in either film to de-complicate; by contrast, one might spend a lifetime contemplating The Searchers or Wagon Master or Young Mr. Lincoln (39) and continually find new values, problems, and layers of feeling. And while Tarantino’s films are funny, inventive, and passionately serious about racial prejudice, there is absolutely no mystery in them—what you see really is what you get. Within the context of American cinema, Django is a bracing experience . . . until the moment that Christoph Waltz shoots Leonardo DiCaprio, turns to Jamie Foxx, and exclaims: “I’m sorry—I couldn’t resist.” The line reading is as perfect as the staging of the entire scene, but this is the very instant that the film shifts rhetorical gears and becomes yet another revenge fantasy—that makes five in a row. Is revenge really the motor of life? Or of cinema? Or are they interchangeable? Or whatever, as long as you know what side you’re on?

If Waltz’s admission of the irresistible impulse to take vengeance on the ignorantly powerful is the key line in Django Unchained, the key line in The Searchers, delivered in the first third of the film, is its polar opposite. As Jeffrey Hunter’s Martin and Harry Carey Jr.’s Brad prepare to join John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards on his quest to find his nieces, Mrs. Jorgensen (Olive Carey) takes Ethan aside and pleads with him: “Don’t let the boys waste their lives on vengeance.” Ford’s film is about the toll of vengeance on actual human beings, while Tarantino’s recent work is about the celebration of orgiastic vengeance as a symbolic correction of history. Ford’s film has had a vast and long-lasting effect on American cinema, while the impact of Tarantino’s film has, I suspect, already come and gone. But then, Ford only had the constraints of the studio system to cope with, his own inner conflicts aside, while Tarantino must contend with something far more insidious and difficult to pin down: the hyper-branded and anxiously self-defining world of popular culture, within which he is trying to be artist, grand entertainer, genius, connoisseur, critic, provocateur, and now repairman of history, all at once. It makes your head spin. And one day in the future, I suppose he might find himself wondering just what he had in mind when he so recklessly demeaned one of the greatest artists who ever stood behind a camera.

John Ford's Homepage website

John Ford at Reel Classics

Classic Movies

John Ford • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Richard Franklin from Senses of Cinema, July 2002

American Masters . John Ford/John Wayne | PBS Pappy and the Duke, essay by Ken Bowser

The Films of John Ford Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television

GreenCine | Westerns Craig Phillips

Interview With a Dead Director reflections on John Ford interviews, by Stuart J. Kobak from Films on Disc

John Ford: Biography and Independent Profile excerpt from Hollywood Renegades, by J. A. Aberdeen

A Study of John Ford - the Dartmoor Resource Mark Beeson, 1998

John Wayne's America: Rio Grande by Brianna Keilar Fall 1999

Ford, John essay by Gerald Peary, November 1999, another one here: Ford, John (September 1990)

The Searchers Stefan Herrmann, April 9, 2001

John Ford Made Westerns: Filming the Legend in the Sound Era ... Book Review by David Boyd, from Senses of Cinema, December 29, 2001

Flashing Spikes • Senses of Cinema Quentin Turnour from Senses of Cinema, April 2004

John Ford: Other Directions • Senses of Cinema Quentin Turnour from Senses of Cinema, April 2004

Ford Till '47 • Senses of Cinema Tag Gallagher from Senses of Cinema, April 22, 2004

Rouge Article (2005) Ford's Depth, by Miguel Marías from Rouge

John Ford, or The Eloquence of Gesture Shigehiko Hasumi from Rouge (2005)

Lance Mannion: Ethan Edwards goes searching for Easy Rider Lance Mannion, January 26, 2005

The man who shot - Lance Mannion - Typepad The man who shot "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," February 4, 2005

Premiere Article (2007) Ten Directors Who Changed Cinema: John Ford, from Premiere magazine

American Triptych: Vidor, Hawks and Ford • Senses of Cinema Tag Gallagher, February 13, 2007

Respect in a Box: Giving John Ford the Major American Artist Treatment Dave Kehr looks at the DVD release of 24 Ford films from Fox from The New York Times, December 4, 2007

The Movie of Shark Island zunguzungu, February 12, 2008, 2008

Dismembering and Remembering Mr. Lincoln zunguzungu, March 9, 2008

John Ford Goes to Guantanamo zunguzungu, March 17, 2008

Staging And Depth zunguzungu, March 23, 2008

The Colonialist Western and Putting an End to Realism zunguzungu, March 27, 2008

Sergeant Rutledge zunguzungu, May 8, 2008

CLR James Disrespects John Ford zunguzungu, June 3, 2008

Braudel, Farmer’s Markets zunguzungu, July 1, 2008

The Ways of Love and Politics Chris Fujiwara from Fipresci magazine, 2009

Kentucky Pride (1925) Shigehiko Hasumi from Fipresci magazine, 2009

Judge Priest (1934) Jean-Pierre Coursodon from Fipresci magazine, 2009

3 Godfathers (1948) James Verniere from Fipresci magazine, 2009

When Willie Comes Marching Home (1950) Gregg Rickman from Fipresci, 2009

The Rising of the Moon (1957) Miguel Marías from Fipresci magazine, 2009

Gideon's Day (1958) David Sterritt from Fipresci magazine, 2009

The Last Hurrah (1958) Ronald Bergan from Fipresci magazine, 2009

The Westerns Of John Ford [Part 1/2] « The Seventh Art Just Another Film Buff from The Seventh Art, June 26, 2010

The Westerns Of John Ford [Part 2/2] « The Seventh Art Just Another Film Buff from The Seventh Art, July 3, 2010

Film Studies For Free: On the art (and ideology) of John Ford's films October 10, 2010

John Ford's The Sun Shines Bright and the ... - Senses of Cinema Richard B. Adams, March 18, 2012

The Searcher: John Ford's faith in community | America Magazine Patrick J. McNamara, January 23, 2013

Ford, John They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Gerald Peary - books - The Men Who Would Be Kings John Ford interviews, edited by Gerald Peary

The John Ford Papers - Table of Contents from the Lilly Library

John Ford's Monument Valley Kenneth Turan from the LA Times

TRAVELOGUE: The Duke’s co-star: A movie pilgrimage to Monument Valley Alan Solomon explores Monument Valley from the Chicago Tribune

Monument Valley Watch any John Ford "cavalry" movie and you'll see this view through what's now called the North Window.

Monument Valley This is the dune that fans of THE SEARCHERS will associate with the reunion of Natalie Wood, Jeffrey Hunter and John Wayne.

Monument Valley Photographers jostle for position to shoot this panorama at Artist's Point. Scenes from STAGECOACH (1939) were filmed here.

Monument Valley A full moon adds drama to the Left Mitten, a Monument Valley formation familiar to fans of John Ford-John Wayne westerns.

The 5th Most Influential Director of All Time (2002 MovieMaker Poll)

Survey of Filmmakers: Top 25 Directors (2005 poll by The Film Journal)

New York Film Academy's 20 Great Movie Directors

Jean-Pierre Melville's 64 Favourite Pre-War American Filmmakers (Cahiers du Cinema, October 1961)

Fred Camper's Top 10 Directors

Chris Fujiwara's Top 10 Directors

Kent Jones' Top 10 Directors

David Robinson's 5 Best Directors

Angel Fernández Santos' 5 Best Directors

Kenneth Turan's 5 Best Directors

STRAIGHT SHOOTING

USA (57 mi) 1917 restortion in 1998 (71 mi)

User reviews from imdb Author: bartman_9 from Belgium

Rich cattle baron Flint hires a group of bandits, among which is Cheyenne Harry (Harry Carey), to drive the Sims, a hard-working family of farmers, away from the prairie. When Cheyenne finds out that Flint's men have killed the younger son of the family, he switches sides and comes to the aid of old farmer Sim and his beautiful daughter (Molly Malone).

The famed opening shot of Ford's The Searchers sees the camera tracking from inside the Edwards farm to outside on the prairie where Ethan (John Wayne) emerges. This shot sets up a motif that will run throughout the movie of inside vs. outside, Civilization vs. The Wild. What's fascinating to see about Straight Shooting is that here, in his first surviving silent western, Ford employs the same motif: as in The Searchers, Ford frequently uses open doors as frames-within-the-frame to contrast the domestic life of the farmers with that of drifters like Ethan/Cheyenne. As in The Searchers, our hero must choose which world he belongs to and the similarities between the two endings are striking.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

One of the earliest building blocks in the John Ford pyramid, but first of all a consistently lovely cowpoke yarn. An iris-out introduces Duke Lee, the villain, atop his horse with his cattle empire behind him; the depth of the screen is measured by a bovine herd slowly winding down a hill from background to foreground, like everything else in the film a prophetic act (Tol'able David, Bend of the River, Aguirre: The Wrath of God, et al). A family of struggling ranchers, headed by white-bearded George Berrell, refuses to leave the land despite the fences raised by the cattle lord; to get rid of them, Lee hires rascally gunslinger Harry Carey ("the Prairie Kid"), who springs out of his hideaway inside a tree to laugh at the "Wanted" poster recently nailed to the trunk. Berrell's son (Ted Brooks) crosses the barbed-wire barriers to get to the stream and is shot by a rustler: "Destiny," reads the intertitle, though to Ford fate is never so rigid that it can't encompass the paradoxes of life, so Carey approaches his targets only to be profoundly moved by a family tableau by the side of a grave (the POV shot is made shimmering by the hired killer's surreptitious tear). The zesty pictorial expression embraces mythical composition (horseback riders, low in the frame, against the vertical spaces separating two precipices) and the practical medium-shot that can photograph in its entirety a stunt like jumping from a saloon roof onto a horse and riding off: young Ford at his freest, alert to the genre and the offhand gravity of his star. The tutelage from Griffith is acknowledged via closeups and climactic crosscutting (mainly from Battle at Elderbush Gulch, also recalled in Stagecoach), the path toward The Searchers is laid out -- a wanderer unable to settle in the civilization he has helped build amid the wilderness, Carey indelibly sketches Ethan Edwards to be rounded out by John Wayne with psychotic depth four decades later. With Molly Malone, Hoot Gibson, and Milton Brown. In black and white.

Straight Shooting (1917) Fernando Martín Peña from Fipresci magazine, 2009

The Westerns Of John Ford [Part 1/2] « The Seventh Art Just Another Film Buff from The Seventh Art, June 26, 2010

FilmFanatic.org

BUCKING BROADWAY

USA (53 mi) 1917

The Westerns Of John Ford [Part 1/2] « The Seventh Art Just Another Film Buff from The Seventh Art, June 26, 2010

Bucking Broadway (1917) is really a screwball comedy masquerading as a Western (The film appears to have been written entirely around its climactic action set piece!). Primarily a reworking of the country rat-city rat tale, Bucking Broadway follows a young ranch hand’s journey to the city of New York and his subsequent attempts to win back his girlfriend from a fraudster in the city. This film might be seen as Ford’s petition for a cinema with sound and the film virtually cries out for a voice (Ford actually throws in a scene with a piano in the film). However, most of the humour here is slapstick and some of the indoor sets look straight from a Sennett production. There is no real tension between the characters or within plot points and one always knows where the film is heading (the film itself has its tongue planted firmly in its cheek). But it is probably here that Ford is on his most experimental ground. For one, he dabbles in hypnotic chiaroscuro lighting, which he would only rarely use in the future (not considering the tinge of expressionism that graces his films now and then). Then there are the glorious horizons, that Ford frames off-center (almost always at the top of the frame here, as if pressing the characters down), as he would do very frequently in his Westerns. Finally and most importantly, there is the remarkably judicious use of all the three planes of the film image (The final brawl scene at Columbia Hotel toys with the focus of your eyes and presages the breakfast scene in The Searchers by about four decades).

Only the Cinema [Ed Howard]

Bucking Broadway is a very early Western from John Ford, one of his earliest surviving works; it was once lost before being rediscovered in France in 2002. It's an hour-long Western melodrama about the ranch-hand Cheyenne Harry (Harry Carey), whose romance with the farm owner's daughter Helen (Molly Malone) is interrupted when the wealthy urban businessman Thornton (Vester Pegg) steals her away and takes her to New York. Harry, heartbroken, follows her to the city in order to get her back. It's a potent examination of the opposition between the folksy, noble West and the decadent, sleazy urbanity of the East.

The story is very simple, almost iconic in its application of broad archetypes, but Ford's presentation of this elemental tale is extraordinarily poetic and sensuous. It's a gorgeously shot, moody and melancholy Western; one title card, appearing as Harry moons around the ranch in Helen's absence, economically read, "Loneliness, dreams and memories." Ford uses a lot of closeups here, probing the intense emotions of this story through the actors' faces. The closeups have a raw, shadowy beauty that sears away any trace of melodrama in this story, leaving behind only the very real underlying emotions. When Harry proposes to Helen, in the cabin that he's built for them to live in, the flickering candlelight sculpts her face, alternately serious and delighted, into a sweetly pretty icon of youth and innocence, moved by Harry's proposal and only a little worried about what her stern father (L.M. Wells) will think. This scene, so sweet and sensual, makes it a little puzzling why Helen would then so quickly be swayed away from Harry by the smooth-talking man from the city. The portion of the film dealing with his seduction of her seems more than a little clipped and rushed, and Helen's change of heart is unconvincing, beyond a rather offensive insinuation that all women are weak-willed and susceptible to flashy manners.

Indeed, the closeups of Helen on her trip to New York suggest that she's already realized what a mistake she's made, as Ford captures the haunted expression in her eyes, glaring up at the camera. In one affecting scene, Ford juxtaposes Helen's face, half-shaded with deep black shadow, against an image of a woman (Gertrude Astor) who a title says that Thornton "introduces as" his sister (which of course suggests that she's anything but). Ford shoots this other woman in a way that, oddly enough, seems to anticipate film noir all the way back in 1917: she's sitting by a lampshade, which casts a gauzy, striped shadow across her face as she looks at the new girl. The suggestion is that this is an old lover of Thornton's, used up and imprisoned by her decadent lifestyle, a hint of the future for Helen should she stay with this no-good man.

Ford is making the city a place of corruption and sexual iniquity, all dark interiors in contrast to the hilly fields of Wyoming from the first half of the film, with animals spread out across the plains and cowboys making photogenic silhouettes in the foreground, smoking and squinting out at the horizon from horseback. When Harry arrives in the city, Ford makes much of the fish-out-of-water comedy of the cowboy in the city: he mistakes a steaming water heater, which he's obviously never seen before, for a rattlesnake, and pulls a revolver, frightening the bellboy as he searches for the snake. Later, continuing the parallels between West and East, he finds "a seasoned guide" to the city in a prostitute and her pimp, who attempt to rob him before the city woman is moved by his down-home tale of love and loss.

Ford's feel for comic relief, always a prominent characteristic of his work, is also apparent in the earlier part of the film, when Harry tries to win Helen back from Thornton by buying some fancy clothes, so he can dress like the city slicker. Harry gets behind the counter at the store to try on his new pants, glancing anxiously out towards the front of the store hoping that no one will come in — although the way Ford cleverly stages the shot, it looks as though Harry is glancing at the camera, breaking the fourth wall, as though wondering if the audience will see him undressing like this. (Ford unfortunately follows this scene with a wince-inducing racist gag, when Harry sees a black man wearing the same outfit as him and grows angry with the store owner.)

The film climaxes when Harry and his cowboy pals get into a frenetic brawl with Thornton and his friends at a hotel, after the sequence that gave the film its name, a few blue-tinted shots of the cowboys roaring through the center of New York on horseback, weaving through traffic and waving their hats in the air, Wyoming having truly come to the big city. The brawl itself is frenzied and fast-paced, utterly chaotic, a flurry of half-comic action to cap off the film's conflict between East and West.

This was an early, budget Western for Ford, from a period in his career when he was cranking out economical little Westerns like this in a few days of shooting. With that in mind, it's surprising that the resulting film, despite its clichéd story, is anything but inconsequential. Bucking Broadway is an emotionally compelling, beautifully shot film that proves the director was already a supreme visual talent even this early in his career.

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

BUCKING BROADWAY Mardecortesbaja

JUST PALS

USA (50 mi) 1920

The Westerns Of John Ford [Part 1/2] « The Seventh Art Just Another Film Buff from The Seventh Art, June 26, 2010

Just Pals (1920) was apparently the first film Ford made for Fox Studios and the change is palpable. While the earlier couple of Westerns were transparent about their motives, with their trump cards being grand action set pieces, Just Pals leans more towards the sentimentalism and innocence epitomized by the films of Chaplin. In fact, Just Pals has a striking resemblance to The Kid (1921), where too a happy-go-lucky tramp is deeply transformed after he takes in an orphan – a scenario that would recur in many Ford films. As a result, the film is closer to the works of Capra than of Ford, with a preference for disarming emotionality over awe-inspiring grandeur. Given that the film plays hardly for an hour, it is commendable how much drama is packed into these precious minutes (There are at least three major concurrent conflicts in the film). Also noteworthy is how the film is more in line with the aesthetics of silent cinema than with those that Ford had developed so far. There are probably more close-ups than Ford would have liked. However, what both of them have in common is the strong sense of morality that would become the calling card for both Ford’s cinema and silent cinema at large. The film is fairly liberal and as inclusive as it can be. The love and contempt that Ford respectively has for socially marginal characters and the coterie that shuns it would echo in almost all of Ford’s Westerns that follow, where the conflict is translated to one between conscience and the law.

The Films of John Ford [Michael E. Grost]

JUST PALS Mardecortesbaja

THE IRON HORSE

USA (150 mi) 1924 uncredited director DVD print (133 mi)

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr)

John Ford's 1924 epic about the building of the Union Pacific railroad was granted classic status almost on first release. Actually, it's one of his least personal films, not nearly as Fordian as his earliest surviving feature, Straight Shooting (1917). The panoramas have Ford's depth, but the drama doesn't. Well worth seeing; just don't expect too much. 119 min.

Time Out

The epic silent Western, made as Fox's response to The Covered Wagon and effortlessly surpassing it. A paean to Lincoln and the notion of Manifest Destiny, it recounts the building of the first transcontinental railroad. Gangs start from both coasts, rebuffing Indian attacks, thwarting greedy landowners, initiating a sweeping trail drive and moving whole towns along the line. After battles against the rigours of blizzard and desert, the final spike is driven home as the hero avenges his father's murder and wins back his childhood sweetheart. Visual glories (and stirring piano accompaniment) sweep aside objections to the tedious passages, the psychological ineptitude, and the racist portrayal of Indians, Irish and 'coolies'. As in Stagecoach, each scene and each character looks fresh struck at the mint of myth, while every frame asserts that this is the making of America and of the American cinema.

Images Movie Journal Gary Johnson

After the success of Paramount's The Covered Wagon, Fox studio was eager to meet the challenge with their own epic-scale Western. They turned to director John Ford. At this early point in his career, Ford had already directed dozens of short Westerns, mostly two and three reelers, many starring Harry Carey. He wasn't yet acknowledged as one of the master filmmakers. That wouldn't happen until the '30s.

Many of Ford's early films are now lost. But film historian William K. Everson reported that Ford's Straight Shooting (filmed in 1917, when Ford was just 22 years old) gives evidence of Ford's talent for photographic composition.

Entrusted with the largest budget of his then-young career, Ford responded by creating an epic-scale Western that manages to outdo The Covered Wagon in terms of grandeur. The main story of The Iron Horse (1924) involves the building of a transcontinental railroad and culminates in a reenactment of the famous union of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railways at Promontory Point, Utah in 1869. However, The Iron Horse also involves a cattle drive, an Indian attack, a saloon brawl, and the Pony Express. In addition, Wild Bill Hickcok, Buffalo Bill, and Abe Lincoln make appearances. The basic situation is filled with suspense as the railroad workers hammer spikes into rails and lay down the iron rails, struggling to be the first to complete their stretch of railroad tracks.

George O'Brien plays the hero, Davy Brandon. After his father is killed by a tribe of Indians led by a white man, Brandon strives to realize his father's dream of building a transcontinental railroad. Meanwhile, Davy attempts to woo his childhood sweetheart, Miriam (Madge Bellamy), only to discover that she is already married--and her husband, Peter Jesson (Cyril Chadwick), is the same man who murdered Davy's father. So Davy must reveal Peter Jesson's true nature, win Miriam's heart, and help complete the transcontinental railroad!

The Iron Horse contains many of the themes that Ford would explore in his sound-era Westerns. One of the main themes centers upon the men who sacrificed their lives in order to help bring civilization to the wilderness. Ford would return to this theme throughout his career, as in My Darling Clementine, The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

Ford shot most of the film in Arizona, where a good-sized town was built in order to support the movie's huge cast and crew (over 6,000 people altogether). A train of 56 coaches was required to transport the production to the site. The resulting movie is one of the great silent epics. However, the drama isn't overshadowed by the weight of the movie's historical importance. In The Hollywood Western, William K. Everson wrote, "The Iron Horse is big and sprawling, but unlike so many historical super Westerns … it doesn't allow itself to slow down into stiff sprawling tableaux."

Star George O'Brien was virtually unknown when John Ford cast him in The Iron Horse. O'Brien would become a major star of the silent era, also starring in Ford's Three Bad Men (1926) and F.W. Murnau's Sunrise (1927). However, in the sound era, O'Brien was strictly a Western star. Ford remembered O'Brien when he made his cavalry trilogy and gave O'Brien small roles in both Fort Apache (1948) and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949).

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)

VideoVista Richard Bowden

The Westerns Of John Ford [Part 1/2] « The Seventh Art Just Another Film Buff from The Seventh Art, June 26, 2010

Silents are Golden Vintage Review

THE IRON HORSE Mardecortesbaja

The New York Times

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

3 BAD MEN

USA (92 mi) 1926

The Westerns Of John Ford [Part 1/2] « The Seventh Art Just Another Film Buff from The Seventh Art, June 26, 2010

I’m going to go out on a limb and proclaim that 3 Bad Men (1926) is Ford’s first Western masterpiece. Here’s where Ford the filmmaker truly meets Ford the epic poet and Ford the painter. Set during a gold rush in Dakota, in the lands previously belonging to the Sioux, the film charts the attempts of the three titular bandits to escort the daughter of the decently deceased mayor across the plains and away from the scheming mind of the local Sheriff. Hilarious, eloquent, tragic, grand and moving all at once, 3 Bad Men is a fitting farewell to silent Westerns for Ford (sadly, it bombed at the box office) that embodies both the innocence of silent cinema and the splendour of Ford’s brand of filmmaking. One could almost swear that this film was a talkie, for the dialogue (much deadpan comedy and lots of sarcasm!) and acting here is highly naturalistic and it seems as if the director was all set for the sound revolution. But then, being silent is also the best part of the film because it prevents it from flaunting its biblical overtones and its themes of sin and redemption – a temptation that a few of the director’s talkies give in to. Rife with iconic shots, including one stunning two-way dolly that could sit alongside the legendary tracking shot that Murnau would pull off next year, and backed by a terrific 2007 score by Dana Kaproff, 3 Bad Men is Ford at his mythmaking best.

Wonders in the Dark [Peter Lenihan]

The name of this series is half-borrowed from a very short post of screen captures I did for Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s A Screaming Man a while back that I entitled “Rediscovering John Ford in the Twenty-First Century”. That’s the purpose of this post as well, and I hope you all forgive its somewhat digressive nature.

2010 saw the release of two superb oaters—Kelly Reichardt’s defiantly allegorical Meek’s Cutoff and the Coen brothers’ endearingly eccentric adaptation of the Charles Portis classic True Grit. I’m not interested in elevating one of these movies (or a particular style of filmmaking) at the expense of the other—they’re both great, and although more different than similar (it’s instructive that the two films are set on virtually the opposite sides of the country), they do share an awareness, if not a pre-occupation, with their cinematic forbearers, even as they supposedly distance themselves from a “classical” approach (…which they don’t, but that’s a discussion for another time). True Grit’s most obvious point of reference isn’t Henry Hathaway’s uneven, disappointing 1969 effort as much as The Night of the Hunter (which had been explicitly alluded to in several of the boys’ previous productions), but the palpable, almost omnipresent sense of giddiness has nothing to do with Laughton and everything to do with the fact that they’re working on the same terrain that Mann and Boetticher once did. As such, they’re less interested in referencing specific films (although both Ride Lonesome and The Naked Spur are at least suggested) than doing justice to a certain milieu, and their refusal to go for the easy landscape shot or the obvious “lonesome violin” soundtrack cue is an unusual, old-fashioned choice that should be celebrated.

Reichardt’s film is a bit more complex in this regard—although its scenario shares a lot with those of Wellman’s Westward the Women and Ford’s own Wagon Master, they probably aren’t the best points of reference, and even comparing it to a kinda-feminist western like Richard Pearce’s neglected Heartland paints a less-than-accurate picture. The “existentialist” (can’t believe I’m using that word) finale owes something to Hellman, certainly, and while the modesty of the plot could be compared to that director’s spaghetti China 9, Liberty 37, the bleak, ambiguous framings of an unknown desert stretching out into infinity has far more to do with the amorphous, mysterious landscapes of silent cinema. There’s nothing enigmatic about the Coens’ Arkansas; it’s rough, unpredictable country that has given birth to rough, unpredictable people, but it’s geographically and historically grounded, and the directors’ (or, more accurately, Portis’) emphasis on Greil Marcus’ oldweirdAmericaisms guarantees that for all the moral disorientation (articulated most clearly in Bridges’ magnificent “I bow out” soliloquy), the characters still know the way back to town. Meek’s Cutoff, by contrast, seems to use the word “lost” in every line of its not exactly verbose script, and we’re never completely certain that the characters are in Oregon or, for that matter, on Earth. Generally, dialogue contextualizes and familiarizes and grants a sense of realness that moves beyond the physical; by making a talking silent picture, Reichardt foregrounds the material that makes up this world, and generates an uncanny atmosphere that seems more tied to the films of Victor Sjostrom or Mauritz Stiller than the aforementioned Boettichers and Manns.

Connecting a John Ford film to Stiller or Sjostrom (& implicitly distancing it from Boetticher or Mann) might seem counterintuitive, especially when one considers Reichardt’s unambiguous rejection of macho western iconography—however, 3 Bad Men captures the sense of spectral presences wandering across an unfathomable land better than even The Wind does, and its timelessness and placelessness has more in common with Meek’s Cutoff (or The Turin Horse) than the brands of conventional genre filmmaking it’s often compared to. Reichardt is working towards the landscape Ford reached, and here the great director was able to capture the American landscape as it was even as he turned it into something alien and still unknown.

It’s like this—the three bad men of the title, unrepentant murderers and hustlers and thieves, interrupt a vicious hold-up, killing the bandits they catch and firing away at those that escape across the horizon. The spoil is a batch of thoroughbreds and Bull, the trio’s leader, turns to the only survivor and gets ready to execute him. The he turns out to be a she however, and the bad men instead decide to protect her against the vultures, of which they are proudly or not-so-proudly among. And yes, these are what they call plot mechanics—there’s a lot of them in 3 Bad Men, and they all work. So you get the sister who abandoned her family running into her brother just before she dies, and of course the villainous gangster / sheriff that everyone has every reason to kill is the man who led her to a sinning life to begin with. We know this, and these conventions are so plainly employed it almost seems like the film is begging you to view it as just another twenties oater. Which is frankly impossible.

These are shootouts at the end of the world—the dust never clears and the characters never escape their histories, or each other. I mean, this just doesn’t look like anything else. Ford always talked about watching the eyes and that was never more apparent than here; every actor has the kind of possessed quality one tends to associate with Dovzhenko, and in its most frenzied sections, which in their imagery and editing suggest a bizarre kind of active religiosity, it’s hard not to see the film as an early inspiration for the Soviet director’s Earth (also: that shot of waving grass towards the end). A priest lifts up his arms, a cross on fire burning behind him. Is this what it all comes to? Is this what we have built? There is madness here.

It’s paradoxical (and Ford is nothing if not paradoxical) that a silent made in ’26 remains one of the director’s most modern and accessible works, but so it is; these bad men ain’t his later godfathers, and there’s a searing violence to the images that transcends the (minimal) homespun sentimentalism of the domestic scenes. The film concludes with a series of shoot-outs that you’ve seen even if you haven’t—which is to say that they’ve appeared in several thousand westerns and action pictures since, but there’s still a singularity to them that kicks your ass the second you let down your guard. Ford doesn’t play it elegiac, despite the ghostly epilogue; that three hard, drunk, occasionally noble men have to die isn’t sad yet, and Ford suggests there might be relief in this. Like a great scene a bit earlier—Bull stands over his sister’s grave as thousands of men, horses and caravans move across the frame in the background. He doesn’t want to re-join that rat race, to hunt down Layne Hunter and whatever awaits him in those canyons. He goes, of course. But he’d rather just sleep.

The Films of John Ford [Michael E. Grost]

3 BAD MEN Mardecortesbaja

FOUR SONS

USA (100 mi) 1928

User reviews from imdb Author: Arne Andersen (aandersen@landmarkcollege.org) from Putney, VT

I was first made aware of this gem when a clip was shown on the BBC Hollywood series. I have finally tracked it down and am very impressed indeed. Ford's direction in this very moving film is of Wyler quality. The performances of Margaret Mann (Mother Bernle) and Albert Gran (The Postman) are unforgettable - full of feeling and quite natural.

The story is a moving one and I won't give away any of its surprises. I was most impressed by the cinematography. The camera movement is extensive and the composition is very appealing. Three scenes are standouts - the delivery of the first government letter to Mother Bernle; the haircutting of Andreas as Mother Bernle waits outside the window and the following farewell scene; and the tracking shot and following reunion between Joseph and Andreas. Very moving, full of feeling and artistic truth.

This is one that should be rediscovered and made available on DVD. A gem - a masterpiece deserving of more public exposure.

Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]

Homage to UFA. The setting is a gingerbread burg peopled by Bavarian-clock figurines, a bit like Gogol; the spherical postman (Albert Gran) sports Jannings whiskers and spins with joy until he's got tragic news to deliver, then he becomes a slumped messenger of death with a shadow slanted like Nosferatu's. The elderly matriarch (Margaret Mann) lives idyllically with her brood -- an officer (Ralph Bushman), a blacksmith (Charles Morton), a carriage driver (James Hall), and a herdsman (George Meeker) -- and dinner every night occasions a symmetrical, family-portrait composition. The Great War darkens the operetta scenario: two of the sons go off to the front, another leaves for America and the last is recruited by the monocled rotter (Earle Foxe), the bereft Mutter is reduced to recalling the snapshot at an empty table filled with apparitions. The theme ("Guess those fellows have mothers, too") is voiced by Hall's Yankee buddy in the battleground. John Ford saw Murnau's Sunrise and something cleared in his head, he here pays ample tribute (Hall's introduction to a busy American street, ersatz clouds part and give way to studio sunshine). Despite its constant tracking through misty chiaroscuro, the emotionalism is undiluted Ford, and at once you see Pilgrimage and How Green Was My Valley, among others (a reverse track of a train pulling into the station receives its full expression thirty years later in The Rising of the Moon). The mother is barred at Ellis Island until she can recite her ABCs in English, but it ends with prayers answered -- Ford's eye is still that of an optimistic immigrant, yet one who can't help but notice that, once war is declared, Hall has to change the name of his restaurant from "German-American Delicatessen" to "Liberty Delicatessen." With June Collyer, Frank Reicher, and Jack Pennick. In black and white.

Four Sons • Senses of Cinema David Boxwell from Senses of Cinema, April 22, 2004

The Films of John Ford [Michael E. Grost]

FOUR SONS Mardecortesbaja

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

The New York Times (Mordaunt Hall)

AIRMAIL

USA (84 mi) 1932

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr)

John Ford ponders the problem of heroism versus responsibility in this 1932 flying film. The material really seems to belong to Howard Hawks, but Ford, even at this relatively early stage in his career, is able to give the conflict between reckless Pat O'Brien and staid Ralph Bellamy the cast of his personality. No great masterpiece, mind you, but indispensable for students of Ford's work. With Russell Hopton, Slim Summerville, and Gloria Stuart; scripted by Dale Van Every and Frank "Spig" Wead. 83 min.

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

Released the same year as "Flesh," this is much more "fordian" than the movie starring Wallace Beery. "Airmail” contains the seeds of a lot of things which will be developed by the director afterward: mainly friendship, sense of duty, struggle against the elements, and most of all, the fact that any man can redeem himself. There are such characters in the script: the first one is the pilot who, in the past, left his plane (with passengers) before the crash; the second is Duke (Pat O'Brien) who falls first under a femme fatale's spell, then leaves her and comes to his mate's rescue, at his own risk.

People often say that Ford's cinema is very optimistic. These ones have tunnel vision. There are a lot of deaths in this film: Joe 's and "Dizzy"'s ones are particularly dreadful. The men here are true heroes who give everything: Bellamy's character will face the storm, in spite of his lover's plea.

"Only angels have wings"(Hawks,1939) would certainly be influenced by Ford whose interest in planes would not be dried up when he directed "The wings of eagles" in 1957.

Movie Mirror

The New York Times (Mordaunt Hall)

THE LOST PATROL

USA (73 mi) 1934 re-released in 1949 (66 mi)

Classic Film Guide (capsule)

A great film, familiar because it’s been copied, about a troop of men who are trapped in a desert oasis and must survive snipers, and each other, while waiting for relief that may never come. Directed by John Ford, the cast includes Victor McLaglen as the Sergeant, Boris Karloff as a religious soldier (somewhat of a fanatic), Wallace Ford, Reginald Denny, Alan Hale as one of the soldiers who volunteers to go for help, and J.M. Kerrigan. This marks Max Steiner’s first (out of 24!) Oscar nominated Score, he won three in his career including for Now, Voyager (1942) & Since You Went Away (1944).

Chicago Reader (Don Druker)

A group of British soldiers (including Victor McLaglen, Boris Karloff, Reginald Denny, and Wallace Ford) are lost and under murderous siege in the North African desert during the First World War. Eventually, one soldier (Karloff) goes mad and is picked off by his buddy (Ford) when he tries to run away; and the troop's sergeant (McLaglen) is the only survivor at the end of John Ford's marvelous study of men under the pressure of an unseen enemy. A fine Dudley Nichols script stresses character interaction at the expense of adventure and turns this short, early Ford work (1934) into the classic colonial actioner.

Raging Bull [Mike Lorefice]

A small WW1 British patrol is technically picked off by their Arab enemies, but really succumb to the sweltering heat of the expansive Mesopotamian Desert and their own stupidity. Their officer kept their instructions in his head and was above sharing them with even to the second in command, so when he's the first to be gunned down The Sergeant (Victor McLagen), a lifer who's more tough than smart, is simply lost in the Ottoman Empire. The bumbling white men may actually have had the strategic advantage, but they lack the patience of their "cowardly" counterparts. Their displacement and isolation breeds helplessness and insanity. The film focuses on the soldier's interaction, bonding and clinging to maintain mental balance, but alienating one another and ultimately causing as many problems as they alleviate. Boris Karloff gives his worst performance, 1000 miles over the top as the judgmental religious zealot Sanders who turns to God in his time of need to the point he sends the others to the devil. Stress erodes judgment, sanity, and endurance until waiting to be killed becomes so excruciating the soldiers want to rush to their death. They are embarrassingly non-strategic, not even knowing or noticing they get put down when their head pops up. It's surprisingly unsentimental and non-heroic, probably Ford's tensest and most minimalist work. Harold Wenstrom's standout claustrophobic cinematography shows the soldiers have everywhere and nowhere to escape. Outside of the sturdy McLagen, most of Ford's other collaborators do the film in. In particular, Max Steiner's blaring wall to wall bombast does nothing beyond prove how clueless the Academy Mafia is. The performances are much too stagy, and Dudley Nichols hurried screenplay creates stereotypes who tell us a little about themselves before getting blown away. Lost Patrol seems tired and dated today, but partially because the story of men bunkered up and awaiting death has been remade and reworked so many times.

Turner Classic Movies Paul Tatara

Probably more than any other American filmmaker, John Ford dealt in overtly iconic imagery. For better or worse, his personal rendering of the Old West has come to represent the promise of America in many people's minds; even the most cynical movie fan can be forgiven for occasionally thinking that John Wayne blazed a trail through Monument Valley. It's something of a surprise, then, that Ford always cited The Lost Patrol (1934) as one of his favorite films. Aside from a highly melodramatic performance by Boris Karloff, and an omnipresent score by Max Steiner, The Lost Patrol is a grueling piece of minimalism. It looks and feels like nothing else in Ford's oeuvre.

The film opens with a patrol of British cavalrymen riding through the Mesopotamian Desert. The one officer who is familiar with their mission is shot by a sniper, leaving the men stranded with no orders and no real knowledge of where they are. A hardened sergeant (Victor McLaglen) takes command of the unit, although all he's able to do is lead them to an oasis, where the men are shot down, one after another, by unseen riflemen. Eventually, only the sergeant, a man named Morelli (Wallace Ford), and a religious fanatic named Sanders (Boris Karloff) are left to ponder their fates. The situation finally drives Sanders insane.

Critics have alternately hailed The Lost Patrol as a flawed masterpiece and a failed experiment. In reality, it's probably a little bit of both. Certainly, there's an ethereal quality to the picture that sticks with you long after it's over. And Karloff's transformation into a wild-eyed Christ figure casts a bizarre spell, even though his over-the-top histrionics seems geared for a silent film, not a talkie. But it may be the elusive metaphor of a group of leaderless soldiers being picked off by an enemy they can't even see that breeds the most fascination. Different viewers will read different meanings into the sparse narrative.

Even at such an early point in movie history, this wasn't the first time Philip MacDonald's novel, Patrol, had been adapted for the screen. In fact, a 1929 British version starred Cyril McLaglen, Victor's brother, as the Sergeant! Ford and his screenwriting partner, Dudley Nichols, attempted to add some depth by giving the soldiers an opportunity to sound off about their personal histories before taking their bullets, an approach that works better with some characters than with others.

This was the first collaboration between Ford and Nichols, who would later team up on such legendary films as The Informer (1935), Stagecoach (1939), and The Long Voyage Home (1940). "I was working at Fox again," Nichols later remembered, "when Ford, who had gone to RKO to make a modest film from Philip MacDonald's war novel, Patrol, called me, in some urgency. He was to start shooting in about ten days - and had no script. What had been done, he considered a mess and unshootable." Nichols and Ford sat down and pounded out a new script in eight days, then the picture was filmed in ten days, in the desert around Yuma Arizona.

The heat in the desert was unbearable, sometimes reaching upwards of 120 degrees. This led to one of those stories that Ford loved to tell about foolish producers who didn't know what they were dealing with. This one involved a pampered type who ruined an important shot by landing his plane too close to the location. Ford was livid when the horses scattered and left unwanted hoof-prints all over the dunes. The producer then approached Ford and suggested that the cast and crew should start taking shorter breaks to speed up filming. "But you can't work in the heat," Ford said. "Jack," the producer said, "it's great. I've never felt so good in my life." He then proceeded to enthusiastically stroll around the set, bare-headed and puffing his cigar. About an hour later, Ford, needed to confer with the producer- but he was already in the hospital with sunstroke.

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford

The Unspeakable Pleasure of Killing Arabs zunguzungu, March 8, 2008

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

KQEK.com DVD Review [Mark R. Hasan]

DVD Verdict [Joe Armenio] reviewing a 5-film dvd release

The New York Times (Mordaunt Hall)

DVDBeaver Gary W. Tooze reviews a 5-film dvd release, also THE INFORMER, MARY OF SCOTLAND, SERGEANT RUTLEDGE, and CHEYENNE AUTUMN

THE INFORMER B+ 91

USA (91 mi) 1935

The influence of German filmmaker F.W. Murnau is renowned, who emigrated to Hollywood in 1926, producing SUNRISE (1927), listed at #5 among the greatest films ever made in the recent BFI Sight & Sound poll in 2012 (The Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time | British Film Institute), and certainly American filmmaker John Ford was highly impressed by the German Expressionist movement of the 1920’s, featuring dramatically stylized and symbolic films, perhaps best represented in Ford’s murky adaptation of Eugene O’Neill Sea Plays in The Long Voyage Home (1940), almost completely told through light and shadow, where humans are mere shadows on the wall, evocative of Plato’s allegory of the cave. THE INFORMER has a similar claustrophobic feel of impoverished Dublin streets literally saturated in a constant blanket of fog, where the low budget production uses this technique to cover the cheaply designed sets, creating a gloomy atmosphere of poverty and despair that pervades throughout the entire picture, where the real brilliance of the film shot by cinematographer Joe August is the moody haze of confusion clouding the better judgment of the lead character, Gypo Nolan, played by Ford favorite Victor McLaglen. The film is based on Liam O’Flaherty’s 1925 prize winning novel, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, adapted by Dudley Nichols, who also adapted O’Neil’s Sea Plays. The Irish source material defines both films, O’Neill through the broken dreams continually haunting men at sea, while O’Flaherty examines one man’s guilty conscience and his anguished effort to escape the invasive forces of doom, a reference to the war-torn Irish nation that was continually caught up in a bloody confrontation between the Irish Republican Army and the Black and Tan British forces. Ford had an especially close relationship with his screenwriters, working with Frank Nugent and Dudley Nichols on 24 feature films, personally selecting and training them to develop an instinctive understanding of his style, where Nichols in particular helped elevate the depth of his work that was lacking during the Silent period, heightening the sense of drama. The film was not an instant success, but received glowing critical reviews afterwards, winning Academy Awards for Ford as Best Director, Nichols for Best Screenplay (but he refused the Oscar due to a Screen Writers Guild strike at the time), McLaglen for Best Actor, and Max Steiner for Best Music, bringing Ford a critical reputation that he would sustain throughout his career, becoming one of the iconic leaders of the industry. This film has fallen out of favor from the heavily idealized portrait of the IRA as the common man’s alternative to British oppression, but it’s one of the smaller, more psychologically interior films Ford ever made, using expressive visuals to enhance the drama, eventually discarding his interest in expressionism for his love of location shooting, framing his characters against the backdrop of the rugged Western frontier.

Ford’s personal connection to Ireland was through his parents, both Irish-born, where there’s some reason to believe McLaglen’s robust portrait of a heavy drinker with a volatile temper, but also an affable charm, is based on his own father. Ironically, McLaglen wasn’t even Irish, but was born in England, becoming a prizefighter who actually fought Heavyweight Champion Jack Johnson before becoming an American actor. The only real Irishman in the film is J.M. Kerrigan, a little man who plays the same despicable freeloader role in The Long Voyage Home (1940), a repugnant, slimy hanger-on to anyone with money in their pocket. But the film belongs to McLaglen, who became known for playing lovable drunks, who was apparently bullied by the director into giving a great performance, often told by Ford he was off schedule, where McLaglen was prone to drink in his down time, but would then be called back to the set, forcing him to work in a semi-drunken condition, often filming what the actor thought were rehearsals, appearing overly weary, bewildered and confused, searching for his lines, which is exactly what Ford was looking for. This story may be more of the myth and John Ford lore that seems to accompany his films, but McLaglen’s physically demanding performance dominates the screen, playing the well-intentioned but dim-witted Gypo as a big brute who loves to be the center of attention, a gentle giant with a soft spot for tenderness, whose weakness is he can’t resist flattery. Outraged to find his best girl Katie (Margot Grahame) reduced to prostitution to pay her bills, he’s equally humiliated by getting thrown out of the IRA for refusing to shoot a traitor, especially someone he’s known from the neighborhood. But when he sees a poster offering twenty pounds (equivalent to over a thousand dollars today) for the whereabouts of IRA gunman Frankie McPhillip (Wallace Ford), probably Gypo’s best friend, he gets delusions of grandeur, dreaming of marriage and an ocean voyage, especially when the poster is right next to a travel agency advertisement offering voyages to America for only ten pounds, which is one of Katie’s dreams, as she wants a better life. Making up his mind that he’ll do it for her, Gypo reluctantly turns in his friend, who is killed instantly when the Black and Tans go to pick him up. Conscience-stricken and ashamed, he curls into the corner of a saloon with a whisky bottle quickly drinking himself into a stupor.

Gypo descends into a nightmarish delirium of human degradation, goaded on by the irrepressible cynicism of J.M. Kerrigan, the Iago-like voice that purrs niceties in his ear about what a popular guy you are when you buy everyone a drink, and a meal, and then more drinks, getting more ploughed and his pockets emptied as the night progresses. Nonetheless, for a moment at least, he’s King Gypo, the most generous guy in town, which quickly draws the attention of the IRA, who suspect Frankie was killed by an informer and are counting every penny that Gypo spends. All drink and bluster, the big lout remains sympathetic even as his actions are contemptible, as inside he’s dying of remorse. Like Fritz Lang’s M (1931), where it’s the criminals themselves who track down a detestable child murderer and force him to stand trial before a jury of his peers, Gypo is brought before an IRA tribunal, where his plan to pin it all on some other pitiful chump falls apart and he’s left to explain the unexplainable, where half mad with fear, McLaglen is at his wits end trying to find any words that make sense to the people standing in that crowded basement room, but only ends up incriminating himself. The sickening descent into the Hell of one’s conscience is a road paved with guilt and personal torment, where McLaglen is a pitiful sight, pitied by all who are embarrassed by what he stands for, a coward, a bully, an alcoholic, expressing weakness, mistakes, human frailty, where there’s no place for that when fighting stronger, better financed, and better organized forces of tyranny with only political slogans and a few firearms. Shot in just 17 days, the film was director Sam Fuller’s favorite movie, filled with melodramatic overreach, made during a time when sound cinema had not yet discovered its own identity from the Silent era, as acting was just as exaggerated. Drenching the toxic atmosphere with such a pervasive feeling of doom, characters seen through the haze choking on their own murderous intentions only enhance the tragic nature of the human condition. For its time, the film is unmistakably bleak, but the warmth and childlike innocence of McLaglen’s Gypo, played as an everyman, has a heart rendering quality to it that feels authentic and sincere, especially considering the horrible aftermath of the Irish Civil War in the 1920’s which brought no historical resolution, only ruthlessness and brutality, leaving a desolate looking future in a divided nation without any hope of peace or reconciliation.

Time Out

What do critics dream about? John Ford got the best reviews of his career for this heavy- handed, humourless and patronising art film ('Many consider it the greatest talking picture ever made in America,' wrote Theodore Huff a few years later), roundly, and rightly, debunked by Lindsay Anderson for having the 'painstaking explicitness of a silent film grimly determined to tell its story without the aid of titles'. Liquored up by Ford, McLaglen won an Oscar for his lumbering portrait of a brainless, boozy Dubliner, Gypo Nolan, who betrays his buddy to the Black and Tans for a kingly £20, then suffers sweatily under the torments of conscience. There were further awards for the director, Dudley Nichols' script, and Max Steiner's score - all equally over-emphatic. Today, only Joe August's foggy expressionist camerawork still captures the imagination, but even this becomes enervatingly portentous before long.

Classic Film Preview David English

You wouldn’t normally think of John Ford as directing a low-budget art film, but that’s the best way to think of The Informer (1935). According to Joseph McBride’s excellent book Searching for John Ford, the project was rejected by Columbia, Fox, MGM, Paramount, and Warner Bros. before RKO agreed to let Ford make it on a shoestring budget (the final production costs were $242,756). That meant almost no money for sets and only 18 days for shooting.

Rather than fret about the restrictions, Ford, screenwriter Dudley Nichols, and cinematographer Joseph August crafted a visual story that’s defined primarily through shadows, fog, and backlighting. The style is reminiscent of the great silent German expressionist films, especially those of F. W. Murnau, whose work Ford admired.

In his 1943 essay “The Writer and the Film,” Nichols explained how this approach was an excellent match for the storyline:

I had an able mentor as well as a collaborator in the person of John Ford and I had begun to catch his instinctive feeling about the film. I can see now that I sought and found a series of symbols to make visual the tragic psychology of the informer, in this case a primitive man of powerful hungers. The whole action was to be played out in one foggy night, for the fog was symbolic of the groping primitive mind; it really is a mental fog in which he moves. . . .

Though often shy and reserved in real life, Ford could be a hard taskmaster when directing. He had to fight RKO to cast former boxer Victor McLaglen as Gypo, the central character. As McBride explains in his book:

Ford directed McLaglen with cunning calculation, bullying and tricking him into giving a great performance. Since he wanted McLaglen to grope for his lines to convey Gypo’s slow-witted, half-drunken condition, Ford continually changed the schedule to keep McLaglen unfamiliar with his scenes and surreptitiously filmed what the actor thought were rehearsals. He would send McLaglen off to run his lines with cast member J. M. Kerrigan at the nearby Melrose Grotto bar, and then would abruptly call a tipsy McLaglen back to the set to shoot his scenes.

The result is paradoxically realistic and expressionistic. The Informer was a popular success and widely praised by the critics. Though it came in second to Mutiny on the Bounty for the Oscar for Best Picture, Ford took home the Best Director award. In addition, McLaglen won Best Actor, Nichols won Best Screenplay, and Max Steiner won Best Musical Score. Though some of the symbolism may seem heavy handed, and the ending a bit forced, everything else works terrifically. And it doesn’t appear to be made under severe financial restraints. All the choices seem to be natural extensions of the plot.

The Informer - Turner Classic Movies Scott McGee

Moody, expressionistic, symbolic of paranoia, betrayal, guilt--these are the elements that mark director John Ford's The Informer (1935), his paean to an Ireland--the country of his parents' birth—torn asunder by political and martial war with Britain.

In 1922, in the strife-torn streets of Dublin, Gypo Nolan (Victor McLaglen), a poor, lumbering goliath, sees a wanted poster of his best friend, rebel Frankie McPhillip (Wallace Ford) that promises a hefty reward for information leading to Frankie's arrest. Broke, hungry, and longing for an escape to America, Gypo seeks out the British army and betrays his friend and comrade. After Frankie is killed in front of his mother and sister, Gypo collects his reward money and begins a long journey into a night filled with guilt, remorse, and ultimately, some kind of redemption, all with an Irish flavor. [Martin Scorsese references The Informer in his own statement on Irish guilt and betrayal in The Departed (2006).]

The film is based on Liam O'Flaherty's novel, the rights of which were purchased by RKO for $2,500. Ford had wanted to film O'Flaherty's novel as early as 1930, but RKO thought the subject matter entirely unappealing. The fact the novel had already been adapted as an unsuccessful British film in 1929 did not help Ford in convincing RKO otherwise. The studio brass simply thought the tale was too dark, too grim, too common. But the studio hesitantly agreed, after Ford and screenwriter Dudley Nichols wrote the first and, according to Nichols, only draft of the script, in six days during a cruise on Ford's sailboat, the Araner.

+ Nichols, one of Ford's most important collaborators, found the pre-production process of The Informer to be wholly unique. As Ford scholar Lindsay Anderson recounts, Nichols said, "I had of course been mulling the story for a long time, and was full of it, had been gathering ideas as to how to do it. I had a few talks with Ford beforehand, but nothing specific was discussed. Then we had one fruitful session together with Max Steiner, who was to write the music; Van (Nest) Polglase, who was to do the sets; Joe August, the cameraman; and a couple of technicians. This, to my mind, is the proper way to approach a film production—and it is, alas, the only time in 25 years I have known it to be done: a group discussion before a line of the script is written."

Still, many higher-ups in RKO regarded The Informer as "dramatically pointless and commercial suicide." Fortunately for Ford, he had an ace in the hole within RKO's management—associate producer Cliff Reid. The tenacious Reid championed Ford and more importantly, Ford's ambitions. When RKO would question whether or not the story suffered from dramatic anemia, Reid would argue, "Never mind the story: just keep concentrating on we got the best damn director in Hollywood working for us. F-O-R-D. Ford."

RKO wanted Richard Dix in the role of Gypo Nolan, the title role informer. Ford adamantly resisted. He had Victor McLaglen, his star from The Lost Patrol (1934), in mind for the role all along. According to film scholar John Baxter, McLaglen was "the personification of noisy, violent, drunken but lovable Ireland, and based, Ford acknowledges, on his own father." McLaglen wasn't even Irish (the only authentic Irishman in the cast was J.M. Kerrigan, playing Terry, the hanger-on who helps Gypo squander his blood money). He was English. He was a boy soldier in the Boer War and a prizefighter (who once went six rounds with Jack Johnson) before he became an actor. McLaglen made a total of twelve films for Ford, including The Quiet Man (1952), another film for which Ford won the Oscar® for Best Director. The total number would be thirteen if one counted What Price Glory (1926), a picture that McLaglen starred in, with a few scenes directed by Ford. But McLaglen breaks the heart with his performance as the blustery, bruising simpleton, who can not fully comprehend the consequences of his actions.

For his performance, McLaglen was awarded the Academy Award for Best Actor. It was later suggested that Ford "tricked" McLaglen into getting drunk for several key scenes, specifically the scene where Gypo is being interrogated. The story goes that Ford told McLaglen to should tie one on after shooting wrapped one day, since he wasn't needed for the next day's shooting. So when the morning came, McLaglen was surprised to be ordered to the set, looking haggard and hung-over. It was in this state, supposedly, that McLaglen performed the climactic interrogation scene. However, McLaglen's son, Andrew, strenuously denied that his father would perform any scene while inebriated. And Ford himself, years later, admitted that "there is an axiom in the picture business that nobody under the influence of alcohol can play a drunk. And I believe that…You can't play a drunk while you're under the influence. Victor had to run too many gamuts of emotion, bravado, nervousness, fear sometimes all in one scene, and go back to bravado again and resume the whole thing. He had too much to do to take a drink."

To keep RKO happy, The Informer was kept on a tight budget and a tighter schedule: about $243,000 and just under 20 days. The relatively cheap budget and lightning fast pace give Ford an interesting challenge, one that would be taken up by independent filmmakers in the future: how to make a compelling motion picture with very little money and time. What Ford did make was something RKO never intended: a highly personal art picture, and he did it on time and on budget. The film became RKO's most prestigious production for years. When it was first released, The Informer was not a breakout hit. It took a little time, helped by rapturous reviews, for the film to become a financial success and, more importantly, justification that John Ford was at the top of his game and one of Hollywood's greatest filmmakers. In addition to McLaglen's Oscar®, The Informer also earned Ford his first of six Oscar®s, and Max Steiner won for Best Score. Dudley Nichols received the Oscar® for Best Screenplay, but Nichols refused it, out of loyalty for his fellow writers, who had left the Motion Picture Academy over union issues. The film was also nominated for Best Picture, but lost to The Mutiny on the Bounty (1935).

As Ford biographer Scott Eyman notes in his book Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford, "The Informer gave (Ford) a critical reputation he would never entirely lose and bestowed upon him a leader's role within the industry." The experience also resulted in a long friendship with Liam O'Flaherty. The novelist dedicated Famine, his next novel, to Ford.

The Informer: A Ford Crucible Blake Lucas from Fispresci magazine, 2009

A March Through Film History by Ryan McCormick: The Informer ...

Self-Styled Siren: Redeeming The Informer March 13, 2007

Film Notes -The Informer Kevin Hagopian

Elusive Lucidity: John Ford ... Forever? Zach Campbell from Elusive Lucidity

The Informer (1935) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com David Sterritt

The Informer (1935) - Notes - TCM.com

The Informer - Film (Movie) Plot and Review ... - Film Reference James Limbacher

Armchair Oscars [Jerry Dean Roberts]

Nothing is Written: A Film Blog: The Informer Groggy Dundee from Nothing Is Written

Daily Film Dose Alan Bacchus

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

DVD Savant Review: The John Ford Collection - DVD Talk Glenn Erickson, John Ford Film Collection

Audio Revolution Allan Peach

VideoVista Alasdair Stuart

Monsters and Critics - John Ford Film Collection DVD Review [Jeff Swindoll]

DVD Verdict [Joe Armenio] John Ford Film Collection

Jerry at the Movies [Jerry Saravia] also seen here: Jerry Saravia

Brian Koller, filmsgraded.com

Liam O'Flaherty THE INFORMER REVIEW Ireland Bob Corbett book review, July 2009

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

Sobriety Test Movie Reviews [Zach Davis]

The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 1935 [Erik Beck]

The War Movie Buff: #51 - The Informer

The Noir File: John Ford's 'The Informer' is a great precursor — Film ... Michael Wilmington

TV Guide review

Variety

The New York Times Andre Sennwald

DVDBeaver

The Informer (1935 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND

USA (96 mi) 1936

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr)

John Ford finds some resonance in the story of Dr. Samuel Mudd, who unknowingly treated John Wilkes Booth for a sprained ankle and was sent to an offshore prison compound for his trouble. Ford's artistic personality hadn't quite settled by 1936, and the film remains somewhat unformed, although there are some remarkable expressionist passages set in the prison and an interesting treatment of Lincoln, who would become a key icon in Ford's later work. With Warner Baxter, Gloria Stuart, Harry Carey, and John Carradine, enjoying himself immensely as a sadistic guard. 95 min.

Time Out

One of Ford's least dated films from the '30s, even though its attitude towards the blacks it portrays is (understandably, given the times) undeniably racist. Inspired by historical reality, it begins with the assassination of the director's beloved, almost Godlike Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth, before proceeding to focus on the harsh fate dealt by destiny and an unforgiving America to Dr Samuel A Mudd, imprisoned for treating Booth's wounded leg. If the quasi-liberal message is undermined not only by a nostalgia for the Old (ie slave-owning) South but also by the over-emphatic assertions of Mudd's innocence, the film is nevertheless for the most part tautly scripted (by Dudley Nichols), vividly shot, and blessed with muscular performances. Baxter excels himself as the good doctor whose selfless integrity finally ensures his pardon, while Carradine's sadistic prison guard is terrific.

The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936, John Ford) | The Stop Button Andrew Wickliffe

Warner Baxter is one good actor. I’ve only seen him in one other film, but he’s great in The Prisoner of Shark Island. Baxter’s got a depth to him--he builds on it, adds to it, throughout scenes and throughout the film. Shark Island is about the physician who set John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg--and is an idealized portrait of the physician, which is unimportant--and almost everything in the film happens to Baxter... and when he actually has to do something for himself, it’s a big something.

Shark Island is another pre-World War II John Ford film. This John Ford is the one who made The Informer, not the one who made The Searchers (but it is the same Ford who made Stagecoach). Color didn’t change Ford too much, since the post-WWII calvary trilogy are not the same Ford as this film and at least one of those is black and white. The Shark Island Ford is the one who did exciting things with confined space and people’s place in that space, as opposed to the later Ford, who did things with open space and the place of people in that space. That sentence has two “that” spaces, I hope it makes sense. Since Shark Island is from the 1930s and it’s from Fox, it has a certain feel to it. It’s filmic. Fox films from the 1930s don’t have the crispness of an MGM or Warner picture. Ford perfectly creates a 1860s time period too. It’s lushly rural for the Maryland scenes and then the scenes on the prison island are spacious but confined. With Shark Island, you get the feeling Ford didn’t know what he was doing and he was trying things. Ford is the most confident filmmaker I’ve ever seen, so seeing him exert himself and succeed is interesting.

He does get quite a bit of help from Nunnally Johnson’s screenplay. Johnson went on to write The Grapes of Wrath for Ford, which might be the last of this period of his career. Regardless, Johnson is unsung superstar. The Prisoner of Shark Island has a number of conversations and they’re these beautiful moments--even if they aren’t the defining conversations of the film, which are beautiful too--but these conversations are perfectly paced and rich. They’re rich. They’re full of living character. Ripe with it. Having Gloria Stuart as the wife makes a lot of the film work. Without her, it wouldn’t work as well. Stuart’s wonderful in the film. There’s also a great performance by Ernest Whitman, who was black and got fourteenth billing instead of fourth (which he deserved). Then there’s John Carradine as a sadistic prison guard. He’s so good and Ford knows it. He gives Carradine these awesome creepy angles, something a later Ford wouldn’t have done.

I guess Shark Island never had a VHS release in the United States--but Fox Movie Channel shows it a couple times a year (probably not for President’s Day, though it would be interesting--the film presents Lincoln as a humane, soft-spoken, decent person, which modern Americans certainly don’t find appealing in a president). I watched the Masters of Cinema release from the UK, which (for once) didn’t have any noticeable PAL speedup. It’s a good film to see, for both Baxter and Stuart, but particularly for Ford.

DVD Times [Mike Sutton]

The Movie of Shark Island zunguzungu, February 12, 2008, 2008

The New York Times (Frank S. Nugent)

THE HURRICANE B 87

USA (110 mi) 1937 uncredited co-director (listed as associate director): Stuart Heisler

The South Sea islands, the last hiding place of beauty and adventure. —Girl on ship (Inez Courtney)

No jail can hold Terangi very long — if it has a window in it, he’ll fly away! If it has water around it, he’ll swim away!

— Marama (Dorothy Lamour)

I represent a civilization that cannot afford to show confusion or conflict to the people it governs.

— French Governor Eugene De Laage (Raymond Massey)

How can I be your judge? You’ve sinned, but others have sinned more against you. You weren’t meant for evil, you were made to do evil.

—Father Paul (C. Aubrey Smith)

Other than the most recent Tabu (2012), another filmmaker influenced by F.W. Murnau’s TABU (1931) is none other than American movie icon John Ford who traveled to the South Pacific to make this film, specifically the village of Pago Pago on Tutuila Island in American Samoa, while also constructing an artificial native village on 2 ½ acres on the United Artist back lots where according to Life Magazine, special effects wizard James Basevi was given a budget of $400,000 to create his effects, spending $150,000 to build a native village with a lagoon 200 yards long, and another $250,000 destroying it. Pre-dating the tornado sequence in THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939) and the modern era Weather Channel on TV, no one had ever seen such a vivid recreation of a tropical storm, more correctly called a cyclone in the South Pacific (hurricanes are in the Atlantic), where the real thrill is an incredible 15-minute hurricane sequence that was actually directed by Stuart Heisler, perhaps best known for his film noir remake of The Glass Key (1942) starring Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd, but also the rarely seen early performance from Susan Hayward in Among the Living (1941). Ford usually liked to personally supervise all of the filming on his movies, so Heisler’s ability to simulate a savagely fierce island hurricane is particularly noteworthy, as it’s one of the best uses of special effects in early cinema. Adapted from the Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall novel, the same duo writing The Mutiny on the Bounty, an Academy Award winning film in 1935, the film is a highly picturesque South Seas island melodrama that borrows liberally from TABU, especially the contrasting views of “Paradise” and “Paradise Lost,” as seen through two marriages, young Polynesian newlyweds Terangi (Jon Hall, an American actor who was actually raised in nearby Tahiti) and Marama (Dorothy Lamour, a former Miss New Orleans who became associated with roles in sarongs) and the more “civilized” European couple of French Governor Eugene De Laage, the ever dour Raymond Massey wearing a white suit with matching pith helmet, and his wife Germaine, Mary Astor.

Set during the colonial era in the South Pacific on the French Polynesian island of Manakoora, with the sweeping musical theme of “Moon of Manakoora” Alfred Newman - The Moon Of Manakoora - YouTube (3:08) playing throughout the movie, the lushly visualized island village has a sandy shoreline with swaying palm trees where the glimmering seas never looking so romantic, a picture of innocence and hope. Yet according to Turner Classic Movie’s Robert Osborne, the story resembles Les Misérables “with a relentlessly sadistic villain in constant pursuit of an unfairly hounded victim.” The same could be said about an earlier Ford movie shot the previous year, THE PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND (1936), which features another unjustly accused man attempting to escape from prison, where interestingly John Carradine plays the sadistic warden in each film. Told entirely in flashback, the film is given a near mythical characterization, where the islanders are seen from an outsiders point of view as childishly naïve and overly happy, mostly without a care in the world, yet a cultural divide seems to have been bridged in several examples of perfect harmony, where Terangi is seen as an indispensable first mate on a European vessel traveling back and forth to Tahiti, and in a gorgeously exotic marriage ceremony between Terangi and Marama, where literally hundreds wore gardenia leis around their necks and every woman had flowers in her hair, as they are given the blessing of both the Catholic Church and the tribal chief. However, viewers may cringe when they hear Terangi proudly announce to his new bride, “In Tahiti, when I sit down in a café with this cap on, I’m just the same as a white man.” Overall, the natives are seen as docile and obedient to authority, where they submit to the rule of an intractable and extremely narrow minded Governor who sees the law in absolute terms. It’s unclear why such a small island would even have a French Governor and why people would so easily submit to his authority, especially without any police or militia at his disposal. Early on we see the tribal chief cooperating with the jailing of a native for theft, when the evidence suggests he was using a canoe to romance his girlfriend under the moonlight. One wonders how this is considered a crime, especially since all the canoes are owned by native islanders and none were pressing charges. Most likely the idea of property ownership is strictly a European principle, so a distinction is clearly made between the tyrannical colonizers who make the rules and the submissive natives who must adhere to them, especially when the law is unjustly applied.

Ford builds a strong case for resistance to imperialist tyranny, as the moral divide only grows larger and more untenable when Terangi is arrested in Tahiti for slugging a drunken white man making racial slurs, where the offended party is politically connected in France, leading to a 6-month prison sentence for what might be considered justifiable assault. Assigned to back-breaking labor and treated with all manor of abuse by Carradine, Terangi makes multiple escape attempts, seen diving off cliffs into the ocean, only to have more time added to his sentence each time, eventually totalling 16 years. Ford insisted the violent whippings actor Jon Hall endure be real, wanting no fake acting, but unfortunately the realism was so severe the censors forced the scenes be cut due to their brutality. Despite the disparity of an excessive sentence for the original crime, the Governor refuses to intervene, making no exceptions, going strictly by the book, despite the pleas of his wife and a sympathetic island doctor, Dr. Kersaint, Thomas Mitchell, seen as a philosophizing lush, a world-weary man who’s been away from civilization for too long, something of a preliminary run-through of his Academy Award winning performance for pretty much the exact same character in Ford’s STAGECOACH (1939). When Terangi does manage to cleverly escape, making a heroic journey in only a canoe, he is sheltered by the village priest and the natives, who are seen celebrating his escape, which only enrages the Governor, even more maniacally insistent on tracking him down and bringing him to justice. Nature’s response to man’s feeble attempts at implementing justice is harshly judgmental, showing a force of Biblical proportions, where the entire island comes under siege. The ferocious devastation is brilliantly realized with a massive hurricane sequence that must have been indescribably intense when initially seen in the theaters, as no one had ever seen anything like it. To the sound of crashing waves and gushing winds, Ford used the most powerful propeller-driven wind machines ever designed generating winds up to 150 miles per hour and 150,000 gallons of water to lambaste his actors, where no stunt doubles were used. The force of the wind is astonishing, probably Ford’s best special effects sequence throughout his entire career, where cinema’s promise to create awe and spectacle is actually delivered. The sequence literally overwhelms the rest of the picture, making everything else seem like an afterthought, but the contrast between the idyllic peaceful tranquility on the island and the monstrous roar of the waves remains utterly spectacular.

Time Out Capsule Review

A breezy South Seas melo, with Dorothy Lamour, having no need to apologise for slinking around in a sarong, canoodling with Hall and giving starchy Governor Raymond Massey the sweats. Ford knocks off the hour or so of filler efficiently enough before the special effects team (headed by James Basevi) take over for the biggest blow-job in Hollywood history. Infinitely more enjoyable than the 1979 remake.

THE HURRICANE (John Ford, Stuart Heisler, 1937) « Dennis Grunes

Heavily influenced by F. W. Murnau’s Tabu (1931), The Hurricane is not among John Ford’s artistic successes. However, this South Seas island melodrama is ultimately very moving—overwhelming, really. This is due to a poised, emotionally mature marital reconciliation that allows new appreciation, wisdom and tenderness to thaw the frosty side of the union. It is also due to the reason why Samuel Goldwyn produced the film in the first place: a spectacular climactic hurricane commandeered by James Basevi, the special effects wizard behind the earthquake in San Francisco (W. S. Van Dyke, 1936), the previous year’s biggest hit.* Indeed, it is the storm’s separation of the couple that leads Tahiti’s French colonialist governor, DeLaage (Raymond Massey’s finest performance**), to relax his heartless law-and-order stance and adopt his wife Germaine’s humane perception of things. We infer Nature’s participation in DeLaage’s transformation, and we simultaneously grasp Ford’s condemnation of colonialism as “unnatural.” Ford’s sophisticated understanding of human motivation sheds light as well on the sexual unease and jealousy that inflame DeLaage’s “moral principles.”     

The film contrasts two married couples. With Robert J. Flaherty’s spirit hovering (as it did over Tabu, which he and Murnau had planned to co-direct until Murnau’s vision prevailed), young Polynesian newlyweds Terangi and Marama (Jon Hall and saronged Dorothy Lamour, close to the beginning of their careers) live to the chord of a single heartbeat.*** But Terangi’s unjust imprisonment sets the DeLaages at subtle odds; although she doesn’t press Terangi’s case with the inciting boldness of a Desdemona, Germaine (Mary Astor, magnificent****) persists in trying to set her husband’s heart to the cause of justice. European colonialism, though, limits her role and restricts her influence, while her alignment with outspoken Dr. Kersaint (Thomas Mitchell, endearing—and, for the time, jaw-droppingly sexually ambiguous*****) at the very least irritates DeLaage. Nature seems to have blessed the Polynesian pair but cursed the DeLaages with “civilization.”     

Terangi’s repeated attempts at prison escape, each of which—until the last—earns him a whipping upon recapture and two years’ imprisonment added to his sentence—makes the narrative, for me at least, drearily repetitive. Ford’s achievement falls short of a poetic hymn to freedom. Moreover, Bert Glennon’s diffuse, wishy-washy black-and-white cinematography is no match for Floyd Crosby’s Oscar-winning high-contrast black-and-white cinematography in Tabu.     

Yet each time I revisit this “Ford failure” I am left in joyful tears. The revival of a marriage is a beautiful thing.

* The film’s script was based on the novel by James Norman Hall and Charles Nordhoff, whose Mutiny on the Bounty generated Hollywood’s biggest hit of 1935. Goldwyn doubtless had this also in mind—and the fact that that film won the best picture Oscar.

** Anna Massey, Raymond’s gifted daughter, was Ford’s godchild. Ford directed her (beautifully) in Gideon of Scotland Yard (1958).

*** Ford’s mea culpa would be the more complex vision of South Seas native society he offered in Donovan’s Reef (1963), made the year prior to another mea culpa of his, Cheyenne Autumn (1964).

**** Andrew Sarris has identified Astor’s unforgettable Germaine DeLaage as Ford’s idea of ideal womanhood. Whether one agrees with Sarris, Astor’s loyal Germaine is the artistic equal of her treacherous Brigid O’Shaughnessy in John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941). I am glad that this superb actress won an Oscar for something (The Great Lie, Edmund Goulding, 1941).

***** Mitchell was Oscar-nominated as best supporting actor for his Kersaint. Two years hence, he won the prize for playing more or less the same character, this time called Doc Boone, in Ford’s Stagecoach (1939). The Hurricane’s only Oscar went to Thomas Moulton for his supervision of the film’s sound recording. Another of Moulton’s credits: Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, George Cukor et al., 1939).

The Hurricane (1937) - Classic Film Guide

Produced by Samuel Goldwyn and directed by John Ford, this James Norman Hall/Charles Nordhoff novel was adapted by Oliver H.P. Garrett and features a screenplay by Dudley Nichols that was rewritten by Ben Hecht (though he didn't receive a screen credit). One of the early disaster movies, following San Francisco (1936), it still preceded Oscar's Special Effects category by a couple of years. It did win Thomas Moulton an Academy Award for Best Sound, Recording and its Score earned Alfred Newman his first nomination (though he'd concurrently received a nomination for his The Prisoner of Zenda (1937) Score). The titled event, which occurs more than 75 minutes into the drama and lasts for approximately 15 minutes, is pretty spectacular, giving one a pretty good idea of what it would be like to experience the high winds and storm surge that up until recently, because of 24 hour cable news, was unimaginable.

The melodrama itself is rather average, and even provides a mild indictment against the rule of law. On the other hand, one could think of "the hurricane" as an act of God against the story's sinners. From the beginning, we know that the fictional island of Manukura (or Manakoora, as the song became known), said to be 600 miles from Tahiti, will be devastated - Dr. Kersaint (Thomas Mitchell, who earned his first Academy recognition with a Best Supporting Actor nomination) tells a fellow cruise ship passenger (Inez Courtney) that the strip of sand before them was once a vibrant island. In flashback, we learn the story before the storm.

Raymond Massey plays the island's French Governor Eugene De Laage, a caricature of unyielding principles who believes justice must be meted out at all costs, regardless of the circumstances. As stern as he is paranoid (which conjures up Humphrey Bogart's performance in The Caine Mutiny (1954)), he provides a vivid contrast to the "live and let live" islanders whose native ways are supported by everyone else including his wife (Mary Astor), his drinking doctor (Mitchell), and especially the moral relativist priest Father Paul, played by C. Aubrey Smith. Top billed are relative unknowns, Dorothy Lamour and Jon Hall (born Charles Locher), whose characters’ (Marama & Terangi, respectively) love story forms the basis of the non-disaster part of the plot. John Carradine plays a typically sadistic prison warden and Jerome Cowan plays an ethically challenged boat captain, Nagle. Al Kikume plays the natives’ island Chief, Mehevi.

After a short scene which helps to establish the Governor's, the doctor's, and the Chief's punishment philosophies, the flashback features Nagle’s ship coming into port, guided through the reefs by Terangi, a popular native who represents the island's free (as a bird) spirit. It's his wedding day, and after Father Paul performs a Christian service to marry Terangi & Marama, the two proceed to Mehevi, who performs the native ceremony. The whole island celebrates, but the newlyweds’ time together is short-lived, Captain Nagle must set sail for Tahiti and the boat doesn't go anywhere without its navigator. On Tahiti, Terangi gets in a fight with a white man (William Davidson), whose nose Terangi breaks. Because of this, the Judge (Spencer Charters) sentences him to 6 months. Naturally, Nagle protests that this is unfair, that Terangi had been provoked, but the Judge promises to allow the native to work outside and that the time will pass quickly. Seeing his ship sailing without him, however, prompts Terangi to attempt to escape, to swim to the ship. But Nagle doesn't see him and Carradine’s character, who had whipped him earlier, recaptures him. Attempting to escape adds a year to Terangi’s sentence and further attempts add more time until it totals 16 years.

Of course, everyone on Manukura, save Governor De Laage, feels this is unfair. They urge the Governor to intervene on Terangi’s behalf, have him transferred to their island (anything!), but he refuses. Eventually, Carradine’s character becomes the warden and Terangi fakes suicide to escape yet again. This time he's successful, but he kills a guard (with one punch) by accident in the process, so he's a murderer. Miraculously, Terangi is able to make it 600 miles across the open ocean to Manukura to be reunited with Marama and their (6 year old?, wedding night conceived?) daughter. Actually, Father Paul, who'd been fishing offshore, helped Terangi make it the last ten miles in his canoe. De Laage accurately suspects per the natives’ celebrations that Terangi is back on his island ... right about the time the storm winds start blowing in.

De Laage goes out with Nagle (on his boat) to find Terangi. Dr. Kersaint has to deliver a baby, Marama’s sister's, and actually goes out into the storm on a canoe with her and some others. De Laage’s wife goes to the church with most of the others to be with Father Paul, who's decided to sing (until the end), like on the Titanic. Terangi lashes his wife and child up in the biggest tree he can find, and then goes to the church (with a rope tied to the tree) to get others to join them. De Laage’s wife is the only one that makes it. The storm destroys everything! Afterwards, Dr. Kersaint finds himself washed up on the sandbar that is left. The baby was born successfully. De Laage and Nagle are seen on his battered boat; they rendezvous with the doctor but decide to go out looking for other survivors. Terangi, his wife, child, and De Laage’s wife survived on the tree; they find a canoe and make their way to another sandbar. Terangi sees Nagle’s boat coming and decides to leave with his family in the canoe, but starts a smokescreen so that De Laage can find his wife. When De Laage arrives, he embraces her, and then sees the canoe in the distance, seeing clearly (with his binoculars) what it is (e.g. Terangi escaping with his family), but agrees with his wife's pleading conjecture that it's just a log.

The Hurricane - Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford

Notes Turner Classic Movies

Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

FilmFanatic.org

Prisonmovies.net [Eric Penumbra]

The Hurricane (John Ford, 1937) « Simon's Film-Related Rants and ...

Apocalypse Later: The Hurricane (1937) John Ford Hal C F Astell

Welcome to Emanuel Levy » Hurricane, The (1937)

John Ford- The Hurricane (1937) - JWMB - The Original John Wayne ...

Into the West: John Ford Ranked - Movie List on mubi.com

The Films of John Ford - by Michael E. Grost

The Hurricane photos at Virtual History

Channel 4 Capsule Review

TV Guide review

The New York Times Frank S. Nugent, also seen here: NY Times Original Review

John Ford - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Hurricane (1937 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

STAGECOACH

USA (96 mi) 1939

What’s truly memorable in John Ford films, initially seen in STAGECOACH (1939), is his unique screen portrayal of Indians shot down in droves, where the whites not only shoot the Indians, but also their horses out from under them - - all in a single shot.  This is utter lunacy, yet it is the key to understanding John Ford's mythical creation of a continually escalating visceral thrill onscreen, where the camera is placed low to the ground looking up at the Indian on the horse as they both die, falling simultaneously to the ground, all from a single bullet.  This happens repeatedly, as the fast-paced movement actually creates tension and drives the action.  Why few critics have questioned this outrageously racist depiction is beyond me, as whites are always depicted as not only militarily, but morally and intellectually superior, as if this is a known and undisputed fact, continually portraying Indians as savages and never as the culturally developed people that they were, who did not ravage and destroy the earth, understanding they were dependent upon it to survive.  These images degrade the viewer's understanding and appreciation for Indians and their place in American history, as they were more often the victim of genocide and untold atrocities by the U.S. Cavalry and Defense Department that attempted to wipe them off the face of the earth in order to make way for the white settlers.  It is this fictitious and mythical view of supposed white superiority, as projected in the movies, that continues to plague this nation, reflected by the equally hostile and racist attitudes of many misinformed American soldiers when they are sent off into battle.    

When looking at John Ford, he is a man whose cinematic visualizations are renowned, but his hatchet job of American history is equally legendary, as he insists on perpetrating the same racist myths about Indians that have been in effect for the past 100 years, which makes his historic vision as a filmmaker no better than the dime store novelist that originated these misconceptions. Ford has always portrayed Indians in the least desirable light, showing them to be less than human, vicious savages, terrible shots, poor military strategists, and little more than pathetic wretches of humanity, so little sympathy is ever shown when a gazillion Indians are killed onscreen, such as in STAGECOACH (1939).  Even when adding psychological depth and complexity to the Western, there is no understanding whatsoever of Indians or Indian culture, yet he continued to project the same racist stereotype of “Indians as savages.” Ford is revered for his supposed authenticity and historic attention to detail in his depiction of the West, but someone needs to point out how racist and degrading his supposed portrait of authenticity really is.  He allowed white characters to be psychologically complex, but never Indians.

There is no question that in any John Ford/John Wayne movie, but in particular STAGECOACH (1939), SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON (1949), and THE SEARCHERS (1956), together over several decades they forged a tough guy persona as the good guy, a lone man who harbors private secrets from a life filled with experience, adding a touch of intrigue and mystery, not to mention power to his character, personifying the freedom that is associated with the West.  In each, Wayne is viewed as the hero and will inevitably be the smartest, most experienced, and most skilled practitioner with a gun or rifle, but also in devising strategy whenever he and/or his men get caught in a tight situation, always displaying a rare level of courage and grit under fire. Again, what's racist is the demeaning and racially restricted view that only whites have a capacity for intelligence, as Indians are never depicted as having knowledge and skill, or powers of analysis, or exhibit a sense of humor or a concern for others, or any capability for being human. These qualities are only allowed for whites, just like a white-only neighborhood, or a drinking fountain, or a rest room.   

I'm not suggesting all Westerns need to be revisionist, this was the 50's after all, I will call filmmakers out on their misrepresented portrayal of Indians, as enough is enough, and Westerns are among the worst offenders of a culture plagued by race and culture hatred, so it's about time someone sought to eradicate some of the harm done by these damaging and misconceived historical perceptions which only cloud and distort reality, further leading to an ill-informed populace. 

Download this essay David Bordwell from Film Art

Film theorist André Bazin has written of John Ford’s Stagecoach: “Stagecoach is the ideal example of the maturity of a style brought to classic perfection… Stagecoach is like a wheel, so perfectly made that it remains in equilibrium on its axis in any position.” This effect results from the film’s concentration on the creation of a tight narrative unity, with all of its elements serving that goal.

Time Out

Impossible to overstate the influence of Ford's magnificent film, generally considered to be the first modern Western. Shot in the Monument Valley which Ford was later to make his own, it also initiated Wayne's extraordinarily fertile partnership with the director, and established in embryo much of the mythology explored and developed in Ford's subsequent Westerns. Wayne plays the Ringo Kid, an outlaw seeking revenge for the murder of his father and brother, first seen 'holding up' the stagecoach containing banished prostitute Trevor, dipso doctor Mitchell, cynical gambler Carradine, timid salesman Meek, and a pair of ostensibly respectable characters: pregnant 'lady' Platt, and crooked banker Churchill. The contrast between the innocence of the wilderness and the ambiguous 'blessings of civilisation' are brilliantly stitched into a smoothly developed narrative, which climaxes with the famous Indian attack on the stagecoach.

Images Movie Journal Gary Johnson

1939 was the great watershed year in the history of the Western. By the late '30s, with only a few exceptions, the Western had been turned over to the B-movie studios (Republic, Lone Star, Universal, etc.), where stars such as Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and William Boyd thrived. The "A" Western had become a rarity. In 1939 this pattern suddenly changed when Hollywood showed renewed interest in feature length Westerns by producing Dodge City, Jesse James, Union Pacific, and, arguably the most influential Western of all time, Stagecoach. Many writers have pointed to the importance of Stagecoach in revitalizing Hollywood's attitude toward Westerns, but when Stagecoach was first released, it did only mediocre box-office business. Over the ensuring decades, however, the reputation of Stagecoach has soared--for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the presence of John Wayne in the role that made him a major movie star.

When Stagecoach was being cast, director John Ford lobbied hard for Wayne, but producer Walter Wanger kept saying no. Ford stuck by his guns, though, and eventually Wanger gave in. It's not hard to understand Wanger's uneasiness about Wayne. Throughout the '30s, Wayne had starred in a plethora of relatively undemanding B-Westerns, where Wayne's characters projected a warm, boyish charm, but he often looked inept when scenes demanded real acting ability. Wayne had failed his biggest test to date--a starring role in Raoul Walsh's The Big Trail (1930), a big-budget Western that had fizzled at the box office.

Part of the problem is the B Westerns frequently asked Wayne to project emotions outside of his range. However, John Ford understood Wayne's limitations as an actor and created a role--the Ringo Kid--that could use Wayne's greenhorn talents. In the process, Wayne learned that being a Western star depended as much upon what you don't say as what you do say. Like Clint Eastwood's man-without-a-name character, Wayne often best served his characters through a minimum of words. In Stagecoach, Ford frequently simply focuses the camera on Wayne's face. But whereas a B-Western director might ask Wayne to show surprise or fear or anger, Ford evoked much subtler reactions from Wayne. In one shot, as Ringo and a woman share a brief look, Wayne's face remains passive, while a faint but discernible glimmer warms his eyes: as a result, you respect his strength and sense the Kid's moral character. Whether this is acting or just masterful direction is irrelevant, for on some level Wayne understood what happened in Stagecoach and what it said about his future in "A" Westerns. Never again did he return to the enthusiastic-but-boyish acting of his B-Western career.

But there is much more to Stagecoach than simply John Wayne. John Ford made use of Monument Valley for the first time in Stagecoach. Other directors had used it before, such as George B. Seitz in The Vanishing American (1925), but no one used it as well, or as extensively, as John Ford. The stark buttes and dusty desert plains of Monument Valley would soon become one of the most widely recognizable locations in the world. John Ford liked the scenery so much that the movie's stagecoach trip traverses Monument Valley three times. But you can't blame Ford for the repetition. It's a stunning location that for many movie lovers around the world instantly evokes images of the West and the arid, inhospitable land that pioneers crossed while settling this continent.

Much of Stagecoach's power comes from what critic Andrew Sarris called Ford's "Double Image; alternating between close-ups of emotional intimacy and long shots of epic involvement, thus capturing both the twitches of life and the silhouettes of legend." Whereas movies such as Union Pacific and Dodge City are concerned almost entirely with "the silhouettes of legend," Stagecoach allows us to get close to the main players by using a narrative structure not dissimilar to Grand Hotel. The story introduces us to a stagecoach full of characters, who all bring with them their own problems and motivations. Claire Trevor plays the prostitute, named Dallas, being run out of town by the women's benevolent society; Thomas Mitchell (in an Academy Award-winning performance) plays the alcoholic doctor, Doc Boone, being run out of town by the sheriff; Berton Churchill plays the banker who has embezzled funds; Louise Platt plays the pregnant wife traveling to see her husband (a cavalry officer); John Carradine plays a card shark with a roving eye; Donald Meek is the whiskey drummer who Doc Boone instantly befriends (much to Meek's dismay); George Bancroft is the town sheriff who rides shotgun when word spreads that Geronimo is on the prowl; Andy Devine is the stagecoach driver who'd prefer to be back at home with his Indian wife; and John Wayne is the Ringo Kid, who has recently broken out of jail with the intention of killing the man who killed his father and brother. Ford's camera gives Wayne the type of introduction usually reserved for only the biggest stars: the camera quickly tracks in on the Kid as he twirls his rifle as a signal for the stagecoach to stop and pick him up. From this moment forward, our attention is riveted by Wayne every time he's on the screen.

American audiences have always been attracted to characters with shady pasts who have chosen to reform their ways (usually as a result of romantic love). Stagecoach's story ultimately depends upon a double act of reformation as represented by the budding relationship between Dallas and the Ringo Kid: in the climatic scene, Dallas waits while the Kid and outlaw Luke Plummer face-off in a showdown. Her entire future rests in the balance: if he doesn't return, she will no doubt return to prostitution, and if he does return, Dallas and the Kid will start their lives anew on his small ranch. Director Ford expertly plays with our expectations in this scene: as the Ringo Kid approaches Luke Plummer (Tom Tyler) and his two sidekicks, the Kid lunges forward into the dust, firing his rifle while the camera captures him at ground level--but Ford cuts away. Instead of showing us the action scene through to its conclusion, Ford takes us back to the darkened street, where Dallas waits, half out of her mind in fear of what might be happening to the Kid. It's one of the great bits of misdirection in the history of cinema.

Significantly, if the Kid and Dallas ride off into the sunset, they're headed for the wilderness, where in the words of Doc Boone "they'll be saved from the blessings of civilization." As the movie shows us with Platt's snobbish society lady and Churchill's banker who can't be trusted, society can't be depended upon for help. And commercial interests (as represented by the whiskey drummer) are ineffectual and incapable of protecting themselves. It's outcasts (as represented by Dallas, the Ringo Kid, and Doc Boone) and military force (as represented by the cavalry that rides to the rescue) who save the day and provide flashes of stability and nobility.

Ford would return to these themes, with more optimistic results for civilization in My Darling Clementine (1946); however, with The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ford once again questioned the relationship between civilization and the people who settled the West.

Orson Welles has long been credited with being among the first directors to film scenes with ceilings intact. But when you watch Stagecoach, watch closely the scenes at Dry Forks and Apache Wells: you'll find the interior scenes have ceilings. Ford's camera frequently drops down low so that it must look up at the actors. In the process, the ceilings appear huge, massive, and foreboding. The effect is absolutely claustrophobic when compared to the openness of the wilderness as represented by Monument Valley. Ford leaves little doubt where his allegiances lie.

DVD Times [Mike Sutton]

Turner Classic Movies James Steffen

Turner Classic Movies Behind the Camera on Stagecoach, by Scott McGee and James Steffen

Jim Kitses Horizons West, by Jim Kitses, Criterion essay is a book review by Edward Lamberti from kamera

Robert Moore John Ford's 'Stagecoach' Made the Then-Unknown John Wayne Into an Overnight Star, at Pop Matters

Intolerance - Film Comment Kent Jones, May/June 2013

Monsters and Critics - DVD Review [Jeff Swindoll]

Classic Film Guide

The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks

Film Commentary by CGK

filmsgraded.com (Brian Koller)

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

Staging And Depth zunguzungu, March 23, 2008

DVD Verdict [Joe Armenio] The John Ford Film Collection (8 films)

Theories of Authorship Theories of Authorship: A Reader, ed. John Caughie, 315 pages, a book review by Barry Grant from Jump Cut

The New York Times (Frank S. Nugent)

Turner Classic Movies Paul Sherman reviews the Special Edition DVD

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

John Ford's Monument Valley Kenneth Turan from the LA Times

TRAVELOGUE: The Duke’s co-star: A movie pilgrimage to Monument Valley Alan Solomon explores Monument Valley from the Chicago Tribune

Monument Valley Watch any John Ford "cavalry" movie and you'll see this view through what's now called the North Window.

Monument Valley This is the dune that fans of THE SEARCHERS will associate with the reunion of Natalie Wood, Jeffrey Hunter and John Wayne.

Monument Valley Photographers jostle for position to shoot this panorama at Artist's Point. Scenes from STAGECOACH (1939) were filmed here.

Monument Valley A full moon adds drama to the Left Mitten, a Monument Valley formation familiar to fans of John Ford-John Wayne westerns.

YOUNG MR. LINCOLN

USA (100 mi) 1939

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr)

Abraham Lincoln is one of John Ford's personal icons, recurring in film after film, but this is his only appearance as a central character--a young, idealistic, but shrewd Springfield lawyer played by Henry Fonda (in what may be his finest performance). Ford's mythologizing has seldom seemed stronger or more subtle; the film (1939) stirs feelings about the American past that most of us, I suppose, have missed since childhood. A masterpiece. 100 min.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

At their worst, John Ford and Henry Fonda gave in to sentiment and sanctimony, but this 1939 collaboration neatly skirts both—a miracle, given the subject matter. Fonda, in a story he repeats in several interviews on Criterion's double-disc set, was put off by the prospect of playing Lincoln at first, until John Ford sat him down and told him, "You're not playing the Great Emancipator. You're playing the young jackleg lawyer." (Actually, Ford used more characteristically colorful language, as Fonda admits during the one interview that wasn't intended for public broadcast.) As Fonda plays him, Lincoln is as much a trickster as a leader of men. He settles a dispute between landowners with misdirection and faulty math, providing for his own fee in the bargain, and talks down a mob intent on lynching two brothers accused of murder with a deft blend of conscience and cornpone wit. The murder case, which threatens to pit the brothers against each other, is a subtle prefiguration of the coming Civil War, as is the thunderstorm into which Lincoln walks in the movie's final shot. Shot in dusky tones like a sepia photograph already beginning to blur, Young Mr. Lincoln is mythmaking of a peculiar sort, less interested in foregrounding Lincoln's greatness than establishing his essential Americanness. Criterion's disc is embellished with an excellent documentary spanning Ford's pre-WWII career.

John Ford: Young Mr Lincoln | Film | The Guardian Derek Malcolm

"It's no use asking me to talk about art" - John Ford. "Oh, yes. He was a great bullshitter" - Henry Fonda.

Clearly John Ford would not have been at home doing two days of group interviews about his latest film at Cannes. Nor was he much at home doing interviews of any sort, especially with critics. He once accorded me a session at Venice, bawling out from the lavatory by way of introduction: "Come on in. I can deal with two shits at once". As Lindsay Anderson once wrote: "I more or less reconciled myself that admiration was better from afar". But, whatever he said, artist he was, and a great cinematic poet too, working at a time when his fond investigation of the American past had to connect with both the considerable constraints of Hollywood and the immediate hopes and fears of American society.

It would be completely wrong to think that he was working in isolation from his times. Almost all his films were edited by others, which is why he always tried to shoot a minimum of footage to give his cutter as little opportunity as possible.

A number of his films would easily qualify for inclusion among the 100 best - three from 1939 alone - in Stagecoach, the first film he shot with John Wayne in Monument Valley (which afterwards came to be known as Ford country), The Young Mr Lincoln, his first with Henry Fonda, and Drums Along the Mohawk.

Fonda, like Wayne, was central to Ford's art, but whereas Wayne was the perfect expression of Ford's love of tradition and an often nostalgic and idealised past, Fonda lent his films the idea that there could be an optimistic future too.

Young Mr Lincoln was about the early life of Abraham Lincoln, his love for Ann Rutledge, which ended tragically, his decision to become a lawyer and his first trial, in which he successfully defended two brothers on a murder charge. The film is based upon the fact that everyone who watched it knew who Lincoln was and was designed to show that, even as a young man, there was greatness in him. It was rather literally called Towards His Destiny in France.

A simple plan, perhaps, and not without a measure of sentimental piety. But this is still a deeply moving film, with certain sequences which express all, or at least most, of Ford's essential, and often contradictory, philosophy. One of them is when Lincoln first visits Ann's grave in late winter as the ice breaks up on the river. Talking to her about his future, he decides to hold up a stick and let it drop. If it falls towards him, he will stay where he is in the country. If it falls away from him towards Ann's body, he'll go to town and practise law. It falls towards her but we guess he helped it along anyway.

The scene, gentle and done with great economy, so that it doesn't seem hopelessly simplistic, expresses a lot about Ford: it was his way of saying that to honour the dead properly you have to fulfil the aspiratons they had for you. Time and again the film is organised around such crucial Fordian values. But it very seldom seems self-conscious. The wider resonances are effectively underlined by film-making that never takes its eyes off the story it is telling.

Fonda's performance was once considered the sole reason for the film's success, and it is extraordinarily subtle even as it looks direct and simple. But Young Mr Lincoln's craftsmanship is what looks classic now, as does the potent quality of its myth-making, mixing with flawless skill the comedy of the Pie Judging and Tug of War contests in small-town America with the tension of Lincoln's speech from the prison steps to the Springfield lynch mob.

"I may not know much about the law," says Lincoln at the murder trial, "but I know what is right!" Thus the former store-keeper and hick lawyer becomes a man of destiny, another Fordian concept encapsulating the idea that there is a higher law that civilisation neglects to its peril and that has to do with family and community, and a shared struggle for survival.

Reel.com DVD review [Pam Grady]

Young Mr. Lincoln marked the beginning of a beautiful partnership between director John Ford and Henry Fonda. In Fonda, Ford found one of those totemic actors who could embody the legendary director's particular brand of American heroism. They would go on to make six more film together, and might have continued had they not fallen out during the making of Mr. Roberts, when Ford allegedly settled the growing rancor between them by punching out his leading man. But things were different and much more promising in 1939, when Ford met Fonda and the two created an unforgettable portrait of the Great Emancipator as a young lawyer. The film was long out of circulation on video, but the Criterion Collection has retrieved this classic and given it the spit and polish of a glorious new restoration, and added a second disc of bonus features that no Ford fan will want to be without.

It was 20th Century Fox head Darryl Zanuck who brought both Young Mr. Lincoln and Fonda to Ford. Lamar Trotti's script was tailor-made for a director like Ford, a filmmaker enamored with both history and Americana, and unashamed by sentimentality. But Fonda was the rare actor of that era who was not under contract with the studio, and he didn't want to take the part. To the young actor, Lincoln's shoes were simply too large to fill. Ford was having none of that, particularly as Fonda was not being asked to play the president, simply a man who would eventually rise from humble beginning to that august position. (Fonda relates the story of the encounter three times on several of the DVD's special features, most hilariously in a profane audio interview with the director's grandson Dan Ford.) It's a good thing Ford talked the actor into it, because Fonda's resemblance to Lincoln (with the aid of prosthetics) is so stunning that it's hard to imagine anyone else in the role.

But it's not just the physical appearance that makes Fonda such a brilliant choice for Lincoln; it's the honesty and integrity he so easily projects. Young Lincoln teaches himself law, and has barely started practicing when an Independence Day celebration comes to a close with a deputy's stabbing. Abe first has to stop a lynch mob from killing brothers Matt (Richard Cromwell) and Adam Clay (Eddie Quillan), then defend them in a court of law against seasoned prosecutor John Felder (Donald Meek) and his crafty advisor, Stephen Douglas (Milburn Stone)—the man Lincoln would famously debate for a U.S. Senate seat two decades later.

The story unfolds at a leisurely pace. The Fourth of July celebration that precedes the deputy's murder is lengthy as it sets up the brothers' conflict with the man and his fellow lawman, J. Palmer Cass (Ward Bond), and it serves as the place where Abe first meets his future wife, Mary Todd (Marjorie Weaver). Perhaps even more importantly to Ford, the scene offers a glimpse of what such a holiday might look like in those nascent years of the Union, the 1830s, starting with a parade featuring Revolutionary War veterans and ending with a bonfire of staked barrels. Another languid sequence set at a house party limns the social differences between Abe and Mary, makes subtle note of their growing attraction, and shows the rivalry between Lincoln and Douglas. Even the courtroom scenes unfold in an unhurried way, mirroring Abe's laconic personality.

Young Mr. Lincoln came out in 1939, the same year Ford made John Wayne a star with Stagecoach. That was also the same year Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington came out. That was a very good year for movies, indeed, and Young Mr. Lincoln is not just a fine example of Ford in top form; it's a film on par with the best pictures of 1939. And this is in no small part thanks to Fonda: despite his trepidation, in the end, he was just the man to fill Lincoln's big shoes.

The DVD contains no audio commentary track (perhaps because, as the late director Lindsay Anderson notes elsewhere on the DVD, Ford was always "more great than fashionable"). And maybe, too, there was no Ford scholar available on that count. All the goodies are on the second disc, starting with Anderson's 1992 BBC documentary on the director—or part of it, anyway, as Criterion inexplicably includes only part one. It's great as far as it goes, covering the director's life and career, up to his World War II documentary, The Battle of Midway, and offering wonderful glimpses of him in combat with journalists, but it seems like such a tease to leave the rest of the documentary behind.

Anderson begins the extra features on a high note and the quality continues with the rest. There's a gallery that includes deleted portions of Trotti's screenplay, art, and a fan letter from legendary Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein to Ford. The director's grandson Dan contributes two audio interviews he did in the 1970s with his granddad and Fonda. There's also a half-hour radio production of Young Mr. Lincoln, with Fonda and Bond reprising their roles from the movie.

The highlight of the disc is a 1975 appearance by the then 70-year-old Fonda on Parkinson, an English talk show. In a wide-ranging conversation, the actor talks about the breadth of his career from the time Marlon Brando's mother recruited him for the amateur production, which would change the course of his life, to his collaboration with Ford to his rare starring role as a heavy in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. He also discusses his children, Jane and Peter, and their respective careers, and even talks about the lynching he witnessed as a child that would later inform his liberal politics. It's a rare glimpse at an extraordinary actor, and exactly the type of thing that makes Criterion titles so prized. Young Mr. Lincoln is a wonderful film, and features like this make the DVD that much more spectacular.

Young Mr. Lincoln: Hero in Waiting Criterion essay by Geoffrey O’Brien, February 13, 2006

Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) - The Criterion Collection

Passage: John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln • Senses of Cinema Tod Gallagher from Senses of Cinema, May 5, 2006

Dismembering and Remembering Mr. Lincoln zunguzungu, March 9, 2008

John Ford's movie "Young Mr. Lincoln" - Cliomuse.com

Film Studies For Free: On the art (and ideology) of John Ford's films October 10, 2010

Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) - Articles - TCM.com Scott McGee

Old Hollywood Films: 1001 Classic Movies: Young Mr. Lincoln Amanda Garrett

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Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick)

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Pretentious Musings (Kevin Koehler)

'Young Mr. Lincoln' and ideological analysis, p. 5 - Jump Cut 2013

Reading against the grain revisited Aspasia Kotsopoulos from Jump Cut, Fall 2001

The New York Times (Frank S. Nugent)

DVDBeaver.com [Henrik Sylow]

Young Mr. Lincoln - Wikipedia

DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK C- 68

USA (103 mi) 1939

You’d think this was James Fenimore Cooper territory, and historically and geographically it is something of a lesser substitute, adapted from a popular Walter D. Edmonds historic novel taking place exclusively in the Mohawk Valley of upstate New York. Ford’s first film shot in Technicolor, this is something of a prelude to the eventual victory of the Revolutionary War, a glimpse of what was at that time seen as a hard life on the frontier, hunting and farming mostly, where grizzled, backwoods types fill the landscape along with other hard-nosed Christian families, where the threat of Indians and the unsettled affairs of establishing a new nation add an element of uncertainty into their lives. The film was a commercial success, largely due to the popularity of two big name stars, where a shocking lack of chemistry exists straightaway in newlyweds Lana and Gilbert Martin, the rich and pampered city girl, Claudette Colbert, who overacts in every scene, crying and fainting often, and the morally upright and ever understated Henry Fonda, in a film sandwiched between playing Abraham Lincoln in YOUNG MR. LINCOLN (1939) and Tom Joad in THE GRAPES OF WRATH (1940). This is one of Ford’s weaker Westerns, as the Revolutionary War has never played well in motion pictures, and this is no exception, becoming a grim, costume melodrama shot largely in the outskirts of Utah. The on-location scenery works well, where cinematographers Bert Glennon and Ray Rennahan received Academy Award nominations, but the story itself is suffocatingly restricted, often told from the women’s point of view while the men are away at war, where one grows weary of Lana’s overreaching sense of drama, but more importantly, the demonized and stereotypical depiction of Indians as savages is overdramatized, largely because there’s no British presence to speak of, so the settlers are continually fighting Indians instead of the British, who never fire a single shot.

The film has a heavy handed tone of black and white moral certainty throughout, where the Revolutionary War is seen as a battle between God fearing Christians and heathen Indians, giving it an annoyingly self-righteous tone, where there’s a single British character in the movie, John Carradine wearing an eye patch, a Tory who mobilizes the Indians against the “Americans,” seen early in the film burning their farms and their crops. The one friendly Indian, Chief Big Tree (the model for the Indian head nickel) as the character Blue Back, is a Christian convert who takes on all the “Uncle Tom” characteristics, speaking that barely decipherable Navajo English, and is largely used for ill-advised comic relief, offering a few “Hallelujahs” in inappropriate places, also the gift of a whipping switch for Gilbert to beat his woman to keep her in line. So if you can get past the Bible thumping, fundamentalist Holy War aspect of the film, which is truly a gross distortion of history, much like Victor Fleming’s similarly embellished GONE WITH THE WIND (1939) made that same year melodramatically distorts the Civil War, there are familiar Ford characteristics that play out well. The most important aspect of living in the wilderness is the portrayal of a sense of community, where displaying courage under fire is seen as a distinctly American trait, right alongside helping neighbors by clearing their fields and collectively rebuild, sheltering the injured and the needy, where Fonda’s notable humility is particularly appealing. Often forced to take protection from a nearby military post, the theme of the film is expressed by General Herkimer (Roger Imhof), “This is our land and it’s worth fighting for.” Rounding up all the able bodied men, they march off to fight in General Washington’s army, presumably motivated by duty and faith, leaving their families behind to endure the insufferable consequence of not knowing, having to sit and wait, where we only hear about the war’s development when the wounded men return, where losing 400 out of 600 men is the price to pay for victory.

What differs here from typical Ford films is the camera doesn’t follow the action, where it’s not so much about the war itself or the men, his usual subjects, but is a portrait of the evolving transformation of Lana from a hysterically out-of-place rich girl into a highly capable frontier woman. Granted, Colbert is probably not the right woman for the role, but Ford has a fondness for her near perfect, pin-up style close ups, where he’s likely a firm believer that soldiers carry a picture of the woman they love in their pockets as a reminder of what they’re fighting for. The woman behind Lana’s transformation is a no frills, tough as nails frontier widow played by Edna May Oliver, also nominated for Best Supporting Actress, who is easily the best thing in the movie. Her ornery defiance is both laudatory and comical, especially when she refuses to be removed from her bed when her home is invaded and burned by Indians, forcing them to carry her bed (with her in it) to safety. She leads a cast where many secondary characters exhibit plenty of eccentric personality. While there is an impressive Ford-like assault of the fort, featuring cannon fire and hand-to-hand combat, Gilbert interestingly decides to make a run for it, believing he can outrun any Indian, turning this into a strange endurance run through the forests and empty landscapes of the wilderness followed closely behind by three Mohawk Indians. His perseverance brings needed reinforcements and helps turn the tide not just for this community, but for the birth of a new nation. Just as Lana is initially seen wearing gigantic bonnets and elaborate, fashion inspired dresses, turning afterwards into farmer attire, and later even wears a Revolutionary War army coat with a musket in her hand, the church inspired community is also shown, to the music of “The Star Spangled Banner,” recognizing the significance of the first American flag, and in a highly dramatized, ceremonial final gesture, places it high atop the church, a premonition of Manifest Destiny.

As it turns out, nearly 13,000 Native Indians fought with the British, most coming from the Iroquois tribes, where the Seneca, Onondaga, and Cayuga nations also sided with the British. Because the settlers built a fort directly on the banks of the Mohawk River right in the heart of their territory, the Mohawk tribe also sided with the British. After the American Revolution, most moved northward into Canada, again fighting against the United States in the War of 1812, where they continue to live in settlements in Southeastern Canada and New York State. Among the most notable Mohawk Indians are Hiawatha, the subject of the epic 1855 poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Full text of "The song of Hiawatha", writer Pauline Johnson, artist Shelly Niro, and musician Robbie Robertson from The Band.

Time Out Tom Milne

A typical Ford hymn to the pioneer spirit, his first film in colour and absolutely stunning to look at. Set on the eve of the Revolutionary War, it's a stirring account of the trials of a young couple setting up home in an isolated farming community, particularly memorable for the sequence in which Fonda outdoes Rod Steiger's 'run of the arrow', racing two Mohawks in a fantastic cross-country marathon to bring help to the beleaguered fort. Very funny too, on occasion, as witness the redoubtable Edna May Oliver's confrontation with a band of marauding Indians.

Slant Magazine [Jeremiah Kipp]

Maybe film historians are just being lazy when they lump Drums Along the Mohawk with John Ford's other 1939 classics, Stagecoach and Young Mr. Lincoln. It's also conveniently located on Ford's résumé right before his enduring 1940 masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath. But make no mistake, Drums Along the Mohawk is a lesser effort from Ford, told in a series of stand-alone scenes of frontier life. Newlywed farmer and his bride Gilbert and Lana (mismatched Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert) adjust to life in an isolated cabin in the Mohawk Valley. Lana discovers the pride and joy of harvesting crops and procreating, and Gilbert grows from timid boy into rugged American individualist. Ford clearly enjoys his All-American Myth Building, as farmers and frontiersmen toughen up into a firm militia to do battle against savage Indians and faceless Redcoats. His Yankees show a can-do resilience against all odds and epitomize the pluck and strong work ethic of Americana combined with a love of God and country that borders on obscene zealotry. As always, Ford creates some stirring pictures. Set against the backdrop of mountain sunsets, one gets the impression Ford never met a horizon line he didn't like. But the landscapes aren't varied enough to make up for the underwritten characterizations and ho-hum action scenes. (The best they can muster is a painfully long foot chase through the forest, which modern viewers are sure to compare to Peter Jackson's similarly endless "let's spring to save the Hobbits" montage in The Lord of the Rings…where pretty backdrops can only go so far!) Even though Fonda is uncharacteristically stiff, it's easy to see why he became Ford's leading man of choice: stoic, quiet, handsome, and true blue, he suggests all things one-dimensional and wholesome. But petulant Colbert is woefully miscast, looking entirely out-of-place and befuddled by the prairies. She and Fonda have zero appeal together, which makes sense in the early scenes of newlywed panic but carries on throughout the entire picture, even after they've built up their family and farm. Ford regulars Ward Bond and an eye-patched John Carradine pop up as welcome familiar faces, but Academy Award nominee Edna May Oliver's turn as a straight-talking, crusty old widow is a performance of never-ending crass bluster. When she refuses to move from her bed as the stereotypical grunting Injuns are burning her house down, you're placed in the disconcerting position of wishing homicide upon a supposedly noble frontierswoman, if only to make her shut her yap.

CineScene.com Chris Dashiell, also seen here: Flicks - Cinescene

In 1775 New York, Gilbert Martin (Henry Fonda) marries a well-off young townswoman named Lana (Claudette Colbert), and they set off north to try to make a living as farmers in the wilderness of the Mohawk Valley. It looks like they're going to succeed, but the Revolutionary War, and the menace of British- allied Indians, threatens to ruin everything they've worked for.

For some reason, this era of American history has rarely translated well into film. This picture, however, is one of the happy exceptions. It was the director's first color movie, and the photography (Bert Glennon and Ray Rennahan) couldn't be better. Ford, as usual, shows an uncanny ability to put the camera in the right place at all times--the use of long shots during the battle scenes are especially effective. That the film doesn't attain the first rank in the Ford pantheon is due partly, I think, to the uneven and episodic nature of the source (a popular Walter D. Edmonds historical novel, adapted by Lamar Trotti and Sonya Levien) and to Colbert's somewhat rote performance--her tendency to overplay a line is less hidden in a straight-ahead period drama like this, than in a comedy or drama with a modern feel.

Nevertheless, there's much to appreciate here. The film's first half patiently outlines the struggle of eking out a living from the land, and the portraits of various rustic characters are quite convincing, despite some typical attempts at low humor. Ford is brilliant at depicting the cohesive social life within a small community. A joyful sequence involving a country dance is among his greatest achievements of this kind. Ford integrates the drama of the individual characters into an idyllic vision of the American dream--you can see a myth being constructed before your eyes. Late, there's a scene where Fonda tells Colbert about a horrific battle in which he got wounded. It's a stirring bit of narrative reflecting the misery of war --in fact, it's a bit odd that the decision not to show the battle but tell it through Fonda is more effective than the film's actual battle scenes occurring later.

The picture's second half is, regrettably, less compelling. Edna May Oliver shows up in the Edna May Oliver role. Yeah, she's tough, and she intimidates a couple of Indians that are setting fire to her house, getting them to move her bed to another room. But it's a show-off performance that distracts from the period tone. There's also the usual problem involving the stereotyped depiction of Indians, but this is part of what you have to expect when you watch a John Ford western (or in this case, eastern). In addition, we get the fiery, lovable Irish minister (Arthur Shields), some cloddish humor, and an ending that tries too hard. Still, it's never dull, Fonda is solidly good throughout, and the film has an epic sweep and visual power that makes it special.

Ford had already shot Stagecoach and Young Mr. Lincoln the same year. Not too shabby.

Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Paul Sherman

There are a couple of different kinds of historical value at work in 1939's Drums Along the Mohawk. First, there's its historical entertainment value. It's a frontier tale directed by the movies¿ foremost storyteller of the American frontier, John Ford. Then, there's its historical value as, well, history.

The movie fares better in the first category. Ford's many frontier tales included, most famously, the Wild West era (My Darling Clementine, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Searchers). But he also made one of the definitive movies about 20th-century westward migration (The Grapes of Wrath), and Drums Along the Mohawk is an all-too-rare movie set during the American Revolution. Drums Along the Mohawk is not in the league of any of those other movies, but it certainly gains value when considered as another chapter in Ford's ongoing chronicle of frontier life.

In the cinematic glory year of 1939, Ford made this right after the same year's Stagecoach, which started his fruitful collaboration with John Wayne, and Young Mr. Lincoln, which started his long partnership with Henry Fonda. Drums Along the Mohawk is the second of six Ford movies Fonda would star in between 1939 and 1948. He plays Gil Martin, a young farmer whose 1776 wedding to well-to-do "city girl" Lana (Claudette Colbert) opens the movie. The pair moves to the rugged Mohawk Valley in upstate New York, where they and the area's other settlers struggle to get their farms running, build families and, for much of the movie, fight the Revolutionary War.

There are many recognizable Ford touches in the movie. Familiar Ford supporting players Ward Bond and John Carradine appear, the sense of community among the characters is palpable and corny comic relief, for which Ford often has a weakness, abounds, especially when men's reaction to childbirth or alcohol comes up. Despite the cringes wrought by the cliched humor, these are the good things about Drums Along the Mohawk. Fonda is modest and determined without being overly earnest and the supporting cast is colorful, especially Edna May Oliver - the horse-faced sourpuss so often lampooned in 1930s cartoons - as a crusty widow who befriends the newlyweds. You also feel the mutual sacrifice that ties the valley's characters together, whether through aiding each other on farms, serving side-by-side in battle as the local militia or helping out on the homefront. The movie is also a very scenic, early three-strip Technicolor picture, restored to pristine quality for its otherwise no-frills DVD. When Lana marvels about how beautiful the land is when she sees it for the first time, you feel it, too. (The movie can be too pretty, though. Colbert, who's asked to cry every five or 10 minutes, does not have one of her best roles here and, like Nicole Kidman in Cold Mountain, she may go through hell and back, but she's always perfectly made up.)

The nice touches bump up against one very ugly touch: Why does Drums Along the Mohawk turn the American Revolution into a holy war? Obviously, religion played a large part in the lives of this country's early settlers, but Drums Along the Mohawk portrays the Revolutionary War as, above all, a battle pitting Christian settlers versus "heathen" Indians. And the Christian settlers are sometimes annoyingly self-righteous because of this. Amazingly, there is exactly one British character in the movie, the Tory agent played by Carradine (in cape and eyepatch, no less), and he instigates several raids on the settlers by Indian warriors, who burn down settlers¿ homes and storm the local fort. Although the farmers' militia goes off to unseen battles and we hear dialogue about British troop movements, you never see a single Brit fire a musket in the entire movie, while talk about the political principles behind the war is limited to one very brief moment.

Ford's later Ford Apache famously has one character tout the importance of sometimes "printing the legend" instead of fact, but it's hard to see how that notion does any justice to Drums Along the Mohawk, based on a novel by Walter D. Edmonds. In Ford's westerns set in the late 1800s, there was at least some rationale for demonizing the Indians. They were at least the genuine adversary in those tales - though even Ford eventually made the relationship between whites and Indians more complex in The Searchers and treated Indians with great sympathy in 1964's Cheyenne Autumn. Drums Along the Mohawk doesn't just fudge the facts by downplaying the British role in the war. Sonya Levien and Lamar Trotti's handles the Indian seen very lazily; most are just faceless threats, and the only Indian who's an actual character is an "Uncle Tom"-like convert to Christianity who’s treated as comic relief.

So if you're approaching Drums Along the Mohawk for the first time, expect it to be interesting within the context of John Ford's entire career. Don't expect it to match up to his best movies or be a definitive Revolutionary War movie.

Read TCM's article on Drums Along the Mohawk Rob Nixon, also seen here: Drums Along the Mohawk - Turner Classic Movies

DVD Talk Stuart Galbraith IV, also seen here: DVD Talk [Stuart Galbraith IV]

nativeamerican.co.uk Chris Smallbone

digitallyOBSESSED.com Jon Danziger

The Westerns Of John Ford [Part 1/2] « The Seventh Art Just Another Film Buff from The Seventh Art, June 26, 2010

Ozus' World Movie Reviews Dennis Schwartz

The Stop Button Andrew Wickliffe

filmcritic.com Paul Brenner

filmsgraded.com Brian Koller

The Spinning Image Andrew Pragasam

KQEK Mark R. Hasan

Combustible Celluloid Jeffrey M. Anderson

Variety

The New York Times Frank S. Nugent

DVDBeaver.com [Henrik Sylow]

THE GRAPES OF WRATH B 84

USA (129 mi) 1940

Clarksville and Ozark and Van Buren and Fort Smith on 64, and there’s an end of Arkansas. And all the roads into Oklahoma City, 66 down from Tulsa, 270 up from McAlester. 81 from Wichita Falls south, from Enid north. Edmond, McLoud, Purcell. 66 out of Oklahoma City; El Reno and Clinton, going west on 66. Hydro, Elk City and Texola; and there’s an end to Oklahoma. 66 across the panhandle of Texas. Shamrock and McLean, Conway and Amarillo, the yellow. Wildorado and Vega and Boise, and there’s an end of Texas. Tucumcari and Santa Rosa and into the New Mexico mountains to Albuquerque, where the road comes down from Santa Fe. Then down the gorged Rio Grande to Los Lunas and west again on 66 to Gallup, and there’s the border of New Mexico.

And now the high mountains. Holbrook and Winslow and Flagstaff in the high mountains of Arizona. Then the great plateau rolling like a ground swell. Ashfork and Kingman and stone mountains again, where water must be hauled and sold. Then out of the broken sun-rotted mountains of Arizona to the Colorado, with green reeds on its banks, and that’s the end of Arizona. There’s California just over the river, and a pretty town to start it. Needles, on the river. But the river is a stranger in this place. Up from Needles and over a burned range, and there’s the desert. And 66 goes on over the terrible desert, where the distance shimmers and the black center mountains hang unbearably in the distance. At last there’s Barstow, and more desert until at last the mountains rise up again, the good mountains, and 66 winds through them. Then suddenly a pass, and below the beautiful valley, below orchards and vineyards and little houses, and in the distance a city. And, oh, my God, it’s over.

—John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939

The definitive work of the Great Depression, John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel is one of those rare books that was the best selling book of the year while also winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1940, which along with Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, may well be the most thoroughly discussed and best analyzed books currently being taught in American classrooms. It immediately captured the nation’s attention, becoming a lynchpin of cultural history and also one of the most beloved novels of American literature. Steinbeck was a California writer who grew up in the Salinas Valley, where he wrote a series of seven articles about migrant worker communities for The San Francisco Chronicle, as tens of thousands of Americans were migrating to California during the Dust Bowl era of the mid 30’s, where Steinbeck spent time getting to know families living in the various migrant worker camps. Infuriated by the amount of inhumane suffering he witnessed, he turned his disgust into a novel, which from the outset was controversial, showing unmitigated sympathy for the plight of the poor by exposing the cruel aspects of capitalism, which lead to a backlash against the author close to home, where the Associated Farmers of California denounced the book as a “pack of lies,” and labeled it “communist propaganda.” Actually, the novel is to a large degree an outraged response to a government ideology of fear steeped in the paranoia of red scares, where immigrants and outsiders are deemed unpatriotic, where government propaganda demonizes and marginalizes unions out of greed and indifference. This “realist” aspect of the novel is only hinted at in the movie, which was seen as an Oscar hopeful, so Hollywood could not present a supposedly true story about the government in this light. It’s also interesting to note that at this stage in his career, director John Ford (who won the Academy Award for Best Director) was a leftist, describing himself in 1937 as “a definite Socialist Democrat, always left,” supporting liberal causes of the 30’s, such as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi league, and sent money to the anti-Franco, anti-fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War, while also becoming one of the founding members of the Screen Director’s Guild, a union that was extremely unpopular with studio executives. Ford aimed to reproduce the Depression era style of photographers like Oklahoma-born Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Margaret Bourke-White, and New Deal U.S. Resettlement Administration, government-produced documentaries like THE PLOW THAT BROKE THE PLAINS (1936), becoming one of the first films selected to be in the National Film Registry in 1989.

Twentieth Century Fox producer Daryl Zanuck, who purchased the rights to the book, actually hired a detective agency to investigate the migrant labor camps in California to see if the conditions were as bad as Steinbeck claimed in the book, and to no one’s surprise the agency reported back to Zanuck that the conditions were actually worse than what was portrayed in the novel, where Eleanor Roosevelt took it seriously enough that she called for congressional hearings on migrant labor camp conditions. Zanuck then gave Ford free reign to make the film as brutally realistic as he could. One assumes Ford took this project very seriously by his approach to the visual style, hiring Hollywood’s best cinematographer, Gregg Toland (who wasn’t even nominated for an Academy Award), who the following year filmed Orson Welles’ legendary masterwork CITIZEN KANE (1941), and incredibly the production was completed just 6 months after the book was originally published. Set during the Great Depression, the story follows the Joads, a poor Oklahoma family of sharecroppers in the early 30’s who must move as the bank is kicking all the tenant farmers off their land, claiming dire circumstances brought on by Dust Bowl drought and economic hardship. Along with literally thousands of other Okies who are in the exact same predicament, they migrate West to California, where they hear jobs are plentiful. While Steinbeck alternates chapters describing the land, the people and their hardships, painting a picture touching on all the things the country was going through with the story of the Joad family, focusing upon their epic journey West, where part of the beauty of the book is a fascination with all the places they traveled through and certainly the wonderfully descriptive language:

The concrete highway was edged with a mat of tangled, broken, dry grass, and the grass heads were heavy with oat beards to catch on a dog’s coat, and foxtails to tangle in a horse’s fetlocks, and clover burrs to fasten in sheep’s wool.

The first part of the film version accurately follows the book, with the dialogue almost intact from the page, though instead of joining up with other families, the Joads remain on their own and arrive in California more quickly, while the second half veers into different territory, creating a more uplifting, visionary ending, as the downbeat and miserablist original ending is something that recollection suggests has never been shown on a movie screen. A few striking observations from the outset, for such a realist drama with documentary style elements, one is surprised to see so much of the film take place in the restricted confines of a studio movie set, and minimally showcase the vast endless landscapes of the great outdoors (which surface later in Ford’s Westerns), shots that might reflect the majestic character of America, and the extraordinary beauty of the book’s language. Instead, much of the early shots take place at night, where faces are lit like flittering ghosts when Tom Joad (Henry Fonda), just out of prison on parole after killing a man in a barroom brawl, discovers his family has left their homestead, and instead finds Muley (John Qualan) and former preacher Casy (John Carradine) on the premises, where they’re seen talking by candlelight. Despite the impressive cinematography, what stands out is the artificiality rendered in these early shots, where there’s little hint of realism, while the repeated orchestral refrains of “The Red River Valley” only grow monotonous. Even more surprising is the exaggerated and wildly uneven sense of caricature from all the actors involved with the exception of Fonda as Tom Joad, who is one of the great characters of literature, and one of the great portrayals in American film as well, as this is arguably Fonda’s greatest performance, especially since Tom is a flawed individual with such a checkered past. His Midwest, folksy inflection literally breathes authenticity into these lines of such a plain speaking man, making the iconic character come to life, becoming synonymous with fair play and social justice, as he always defends the principles of small town morality, where rewards are based upon honesty and hard work, where no man is better than any other. “Maybe it’s like Casy says. A fella ain’t got a soul of his own, just a little piece of a big soul. The one big soul that belongs to everybody.”

As they cross the country among the legions of others, this sense of ordinary human decency is on display in a local restaurant when the owner and waitress give Pa Joad a break on the prices for a loaf of bread and a few pieces of candy, where their kindness represents the generous spirit of those who willingly help others in a time of need. By the time they get to California, however, the ultimate conflict of the film is the violation of those simple American principles, where the Joad family symbolizes the casualties of the Depression, where the openhearted kindness of the Joads runs up against heartless authorities of the bank, but also includes the police and their paid deputies who represent the farm interests, where neighborhood trust is replaced by suspicion and blunt force. Our first look at one of the destitute migrant camps still leaves a picture in our heads long afterwards, and it’s one of the best shots in the film, showing hordes of people living in squalor, passing by crowds of people that literally give them cold, haunting stares, vividly expressing the fear of not knowing where your next meal is coming from, and reveals the extent of the cruel labor exploitation, as there is an oversupply of workers who are forced to work for next to nothing, and anyone who tries to organize or warn workers of the potential hazards of quick wage cuts has to answer to rogue deputies with guns and nightsticks. At one point, they’re led in secret, under police escort, into a fenced-in and locked living compound at a peach orchard, where they’re not told the circumstances but immediately ordered to work, forced to buy food supplies at the inflated prices of the company store, where without realizing it, they’re actually strikebreakers filling in at half the wages of the striking workers. Things only go from bad to worse, where Tom’s friend Casy is murdered right before his eyes, where he wants to strike back, but it’s clear California doesn’t want this influx of migrant workers, where law enforcement seems determined to drive these unwanted “outsiders” into slave wages and servitude. Pitted against these brutally deteriorating conditions, Tom Joad becomes a symbol, an identifiable everyman character who must rise up and stand against this enveloping madness, personifying a desperate hope for people who struggle, becoming a clarion call for economic justice, embodying the spirit for social justice that will live on for generations to come, as if that is our patriotic duty. In the film, however, it’s Ma Joad (Jane Darwell, winner of Best Supporting Actress) who has the last word, voicing an uplifting, anthem-like vision of a new day ahead, led by a “We the people” reference to our nation’s founding principles.

Time Out

This classic Ford film eclipses much of the action of John Steinbeck's well-known novel of the Oklahoma farmers' migration from the dustbowl to the California Eden during the Depression years. The Okies were unwelcome in California, of course; they threatened the jobs of the locals. The brutal police hassled and harassed them unmercifully. The migrants formed unions in self-defence and struck for decent fruit-picking wages. This inevitably multiplied the official violence. Ford's film, shot by Gregg Toland with magnificent, lyrical simplicity, captures the stark plainness of the migrants, stripped to a few possessions, left with innumerable relations and little hope.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Inspired by childhood memories of the great potato famine, John Ford's magnificent adaptation of John Steinbeck's book is somehow both sentimental and austere; it reminds you that Ireland is the land of Samuel Beckett as well as Sean O'Casey. Ford and cinematographer Gregg Toland manage the unbelievable task of making Henry Fonda unrecognizable at first: His haggard, sallow face holds no trace of movie-star familiarity. The masterful Toland outdoes himself, surpassing even Steinbeck's rough-hewn poetry. The harsh light and menacing shadows split the world into temporary winners and all-time losers, with community the only way to weather the storm. The moment when Jane Darwell's Ma Joad stops feeding her belongings into the fire long enough to press a pair of cheap but prized earrings to her face is as fine an expression of loss as the movies have ever seen. Fox's DVD features literally dueling commentary from Steinbeck and Ford experts, who let a disagreement over Ford's politics drag on needlessly.

John Ford, The Grapes of Wrath (1940) - CUNY Catherine Lavender

John Steinbeck's quasi-documentary study of Dust Bowl immigrants inspired John Ford's film, The Grapes of Wrath. Like Steinbeck's book, the film follows the Joads, an Okie family trying to get to California in an overloaded jalopy filled with crying children, beaten-down people, and dying grandparents. It is a sympathetic look at the fate of the farmers who fled the Dust Bowl for brighter futures in California, but encountered there instead the same class system and prejudices that had impoverished them back home.

When Ford released The Grapes of Wrath, some people found it depressing and pretentious; why, critics asked, would people struggling through the Great Depression want to go and watch a movie about people like themselves taking it in the teeth? Despite this criticism, The Grapes of Wrath was an extremely popular and critically well-received movie; Ford won the Oscar for Best Director, although Henry Fonda lost out as Best Actor to James Stewart in The Philadelphia Story. And many in the audience found it inspiring, especially the speeches delivered by Fonda and Jane Darwell, as Ma Joad, at the end of the film. Ford, and not Steinbeck, wrote those inspiring speeches; Steinbeck's vision was infinitely darker than Ford's. The Grapes of Wrath made such an indelible impact on the minds of Americans that just a few years later, when Preston Sturges made a funny and moving film which responded to and parodied The Grapes of Wrath, called Sullivan's Travels (1941), everyone recognized the connection.

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Matt Bailey]

If there were such a thing as American Expressionist film John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath would have to be a classic of the genre. With the stark lighting effects of cinematographer Gregg Toland, the ruined landscapes and the decrepit interiors, the haunted melodies of American folk tunes, the spectres of death and loss that loom at every turn of the story, and the heavy air of pure sadness and anger that permeates the film, there is no other film that captures the abject desperation of the 1930s quite like this one. Much like the Dust Bowl experience itself, the film is almost unrelentingly grim from beginning to end. The drought ended after long years of hardship when rains fell in the fall of 1939, most likely just as Ford’s film was beginning production. The film, however, promises no happy ending.

While The Grapes of Wrath has at its heart some very radical, almost revolutionary notions, and at times seems to teeter on the edge of becoming New Deal propaganda, it is not a stridently political film. There seems to be no true, single villain other than the drought itself, even though every person is thrust into direct competition with his neighbor for survival. Even our hero, Tom Joad, is a man who, by the end of the film, has killed two men and might kill more.

Darryl Zanuck, the legendary Fox studio mogul, produced several films that draped politically forward ideas in narratives which even the thickest moviegoer could swallow. Many of those films seem hopelessly naïve now, but The Grapes of Wrath, whether in novel or movie form, remains a shockingly potent work of social criticism to this day.

Reel.com DVD review [Sarah Chauncey] (link lost)

John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath is one of the most classic and controversial pieces of American literature ever written. To this day, it frequently appears on banned-books lists for schools and libraries. With its powerful message of the struggle between the working and ruling classes, it's doubtful any movie could do such a complex, nuanced piece of literature justice. But in 1940, legendary director John Ford spent $750,000—about the same budget as Fox would give Orson Welles for Citizen Kane—to come as close as humanly possible to matching film to book. Although large pieces of the novel had to be truncated, and even deleted, word has it that Steinbeck himself felt the interpretation was an accurate one, albeit with an altered ending. Fox Studio Classics has released The Grapes of Wrath on a double-sided DVD, newly remastered—though it still retains some graininess—and with exceptional, if overly intellectual, commentaries. More on those in a minute.

For those who slept their way through middle school, The Grapes of Wrath begins as the story of Tom Joad (Henry Fonda), an ex-con who returns home to Oklahoma, where he finds his family preparing to head to California—the only place there's hope of work during the Great Depression. The story then becomes that of the Joad family, and later the Wilson family, with whom they team (the metaphor for oppressed people uniting and working together). Despite death, destruction, and severe deprivation, they persevere; California turns out not at all to be the land of dreams, and even more desolation ensues. Even when things begin to look up a bit—that is to say, when things aren't totally bleak—soon complications arise that lead to more tragic consequences. The film version, unlike its literary counterpart, concludes in what would come to be known as a Hollywood ending—upbeat and hopeful, where the novel foreboded nothing but pessimism. If this summary sounds vague, that's because it would take pages upon pages to explain the precise ups and downs—and besides, that would deprive the viewer of experiencing the story onscreen. Let's just say this is the epitome of realism in movies, and The Grapes of Wrath is as much a necessary film to view as it is a novel to read.

Behind this epic film was a well-known Republican (who would later oversee other political films such as Gentleman's Agreement), Fox Studio head Darryl F. Zanuck. One might think he would hesitate to put his clout behind such a leftist story, even a Pulitzer Prize-winning one, but after sending scouts to make sure that Steinbeck hadn't exaggerated the plight of migrant workers in California (as it turns out, the author had understated the horrible conditions), Zanuck committed fully to the project, resulting in a film that the American Film Institute named one of the top 25 of the 20th century (clocking in at number 21). Though the film was nominated for seven Academy Awards, it won only two (Best Director and Best Supporting Actress for Jane Darwell). Though 34-year-old Fonda should have won for his amazing performance as Tom Joad, the award went to Jimmy Stewart for The Philadelphia Story. Surprisingly, John Carradine (as Casy) didn't even garner a nomination. Then, as now, social politics governed the Oscars as much as talent.

Much of the "obscenity" in the novel was cleaned up for the film version—language, clothing, migrant worker conditions—but the basic message of the proletariat banding together remained, leaving both Steinbeck and Ford open to McCarthy-ite investigation for Communist leanings (both were acquitted).

The DVD features enhance the movie beautifully: standouts include an A&E Biography on Daryl F. Zanuck, a prologue written for non-American audiences, Movietone newsreels about the drought of 1934, President Roosevelt's speech praising the film, a restoration comparison, and a full-screen option. The crowning glory, however, are the commentaries (which sound as though they were recorded separately) by film historian and John Ford specialist Joseph McBride, and Steinbeck scholar Susan Shillinglaw. McBride's comments are more accessible than those of Shillinglaw, who frequently quotes directly from academic texts. Nonetheless, together, they provide as perfect an insight into the social, political, and artistic context of both book and film as is possible on DVD.

The Grapes of Wrath (1940) A. S. Hamrah from Fipresci magazine, 2009

The Grapes of Wrath - Turner Classic Movies Rob Nixon, also including more: Read TCM's article on The Grapes of Wrath

The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks

The Grapes of Wrath (1941) John Ford « Twenty Four Frames John Greco

The Grapes of Wrath - Film (Movie) Plot and ... - Film Reference John Baxter

White City Cinema [Michael Smith]

Slant Magazine [Chuck Bowen]

Top 100 Novels #18: The Grapes of Wrath [Erik Beck]

Top 100 Directors: #15 - John Ford [Erik Beck]

The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 1940 [Erik Beck]

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FilmFanatic.org

The Grapes of Wrath | Peter Bogdanovich - Blogs - Indiewire

DVD Savant Review Glenn Erickson

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Film Freak Central review [Bill Chambers]

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The Grapes of Wrath - Shmoop

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Classic Film Guide

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Pasadena Art Beat [Jana J. Monji] also seen here: Examiner.com [Jana J. Monji]

rogerebert.com [Roger Ebert] March 31, 2002

New York Times [Frank S. Nugent]

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The Grapes of Wrath - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia novel

The Grapes of Wrath (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE LONG VOYAGE HOME A- 94

USA (105 mi) 1940

As far as this job’s concerned, you men haven’t gotten any names. You’re just so many hands. —Captain (Wilfrid Lawson)

A grim yet revelatory work, beautifully shot throughout by CITIZEN KANE (1941, his next film) cinematographer Gregg Toland using a powerfully provocative German Expressionist style, almost completely told through light and shadow, where man is seen as little more than a silhouette on the wall. Something near and dear to the director’s heart, Dudley Nichols adapts Eugene O’Neill’s Sea Plays, a combination of four one-act plays all taking place at sea, including port excursions, The Moon of the Caribees, Bound East for Cardiff, In the Zone, and The Long Voyage Home, and all written between 1914 – 1918 during the First World War. Ford, however, sets the action during the lead-in to World War II, weaving them all together into a single voyage, perhaps as a progressive notion to raise awareness for the war effort, because England was taking on Hitler alone at the time, where Andrew Sinclair, author of John Ford: a Biography (1979) points out, “Ford was using Irish-American plays and players to praise English patriotism.”  The film became a personal favorite of both Ford and O’Neill, where this is but one of many Ford films built around a journey, such as THE IRON HORSE (1924), THE LOST PATROL (1934), STAGECOACH (1939), WAGON MASTER (1950), THE SEARCHERS (1956), and CHEYENNE AUTUMN (1964), though often the object of the journey is never attained, like a mythical quest for the Golden Fleece, or immortality. There’s a near surrealist aspect to Ford’s vision, as the weary and rootless sailors of this beat-up freighter ship circle the seas endlessly in a Sisyphus notion, always with the hope that land will offer them renewed life or opportunities, but they’re forever seen dragging their feet back aboard ship again for the next voyage, disappearing into the night like ghosts at sea. Any O’Neill story is filled with a notable bleakness and sense of disillusionment, but these are ordinary men who lead hard lives filled with noble dreams, broken promises, and false hopes, having no one to blame but themselves for continually abandoning any possibility of hope.

Coming between the era of rampant unemployment during the Great Depression in THE GRAPES OF WRATH (1940) and the harsh setting of a small mining town in HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY (1941), these form a powerful trilogy on the exploitation of workers, where ordinary people become victims of circumstances beyond their control, becoming easy prey for more powerful interests to swoop in and continually take advantage of their situation. It’s interesting that these all precede America’s entry into World War II, where our values of passive non-involvement reflect the nation’s lingering paralysis in coming to terms with Hitler and the war, leaving an unsuspecting nation vulnerable and unprotected for attack, which, for lack of a better plan, mirrors the hopeless predicament the men in this film continually find themselves. The film can be linked as well to THE INFORMER (1935), as both have Irish source material, including the lyrical and near musical enunciation of the language itself, but both are also set inside a hermetically sealed, artificially self-contained universe, a supposed safe haven where one can comfortably retreat, but which often becomes a trap of enclosing doom. Instead of a powerful lead performance, however, or even a unifying narrative, this is clearly a more abstract ensemble piece of collective voices, giving this the feel of an experimental work, where the striking expressionist look continually creates a murky atmosphere where figures on deck are silhouettes moving slowly through the mist, resembling the fog and gloom of Béla Tarr’s THE MAN FROM LONDON (2007). The closely constructed quarters onboard the ship resemble the claustrophobic confines of a submarine, where the men are continually stacked on top of one another, never more than a few feet away at any time, with no air to breathe, where privacy is a luxury that exists only in one’s head. Having spent several years at sea, Eugene O’Neill also suffered from alcoholism and depression, common elements that figure prominently in this film.

From the languorous opening in the steamy tropics of the Caribbean West Indies where women for hire are swaying in the breeze under palm trees, where a chorale of voices chant to the rhythmic sounds of pounding drums, a ship at shore sits with idle men leering over the deck smoking cigarettes, a truly exotic sequence which can be seen here: ThLngVygHmA - YouTube (10:01). After a night of alcohol and prostitutes, the ship heads for Baltimore where explosives are packed into the ship before they cross the open sea for England, secretly offering assistance for the war effort. This is a no frills version of another TITANIC (1997) like disaster of epic proportions, a portrait of endless life on a ship at sea, fresh meat for the officers, hash for the men, where the men’s nerves are frayed entering perilous waters in the Atlantic knowing the cargo they carry and how vulnerable they are to submarine attack. Like a scene out of HURRICANE (1937), a huge rainstorm takes them by surprise, with giant waves crashing over the deck loosening the anchor, where one poor sap trying to help gets submerged by thundering waves, puncturing his lung. His chilling death only magnifies their weakness and sets the men on edge, where the mood of camaraderie disintegrates, gradually turning into an eerily extended sequence of growing panic and psychological paranoia, where an overwhelming wave of fear turns them all against one man, creating a lynch mob atmosphere drenched with a malevolent suspicion until shame clears the air with a foul odor. Adrift at sea, in a perpetual state of soulless decay and dreary isolation, each man must face their own inner demons, where Ford’s direction continually accentuates character, blending the absence of adventure of the voyage with the collective interior wasteland of the men, so once they reach their designated port, they pessimistically ply themselves with alcohol, blithely divorcing all rationality from their inebriated brains, allowing themselves to get suckered once again, until all that’s left is a tragic portrait of a pathetic human condition, each one a beaten down shell of a man, lost souls destined to wander the vast and endless seas in a shadow existence.

Time Out Geoff Andrew

Adapted from four one-act plays by O'Neill, Ford's tribute to the plight of plucky seamen aboard a British freighter as WWII begins features his usual mixture of romanticised cameraderie and courage, boisterous braggadocio and brawling, and banal homespun philosophy. Beginning with an erotic skirmish with exotic island maidens, and ending with the death of Mitchell, shanghaied while drunkenly rescuing Wayne (oddly cast as an innocent Swedish farm-lad) from the clutches of another crew, the film is chiefly noted for Gregg Toland's remarkable high-contrast camerawork which even manages to alleviate Ford's most maudlin excesses. None the less, a strong cast of risibly mixed accents copes gamely.

Nate Meyers - digitallyOBSESSED!

John Ford's The Long Voyage Home is a melancholic look at life at sea. Based on four one-act plays by Eugene O'Neill, this is a compelling adaptation of the great playwright's work. Combining German Expressionism with gritty documentary-like visuals, Ford and screenwriter Dudley Nichols look deep into the soul of the crew aboard the merchant ship Glencairn. It isn't an easy film to endure, but the effort is well worth your while.

The crew consists of various men from around the globe, laboring for a meager living that they'll most likely drink away in a single evening. Driscoll (Thomas Mitchell) is the charismatic, hard-drinking mate that loves to sing and dance almost as much as he loves to push and shout. The dejected Smitty (Ian Hunter) looks longingly towards a shoreline well out of sight, carrying an unbearable burden in silence. Yank (Ward Bond) and Cocky (Barry Fitzgerald) work with honor, while Donkeyman (Arthur Shields) reflects about the life of a seaman. Whether slaving to keep the ship afloat during a storm or relaxing in the Atlantic's sun, each man is wary of the current assignment. Seafaring through Europe's wartime waters, each man realizes that death could be lurking under the surface.

Ford's film is a studied look at its characters, choosing to avoid clichéd plot developments in favor of a realistic look at life aboard a merchant ship. The driving force behind the events on screen is Ole Olsen (John Wayne). Ole is largely a solitary figure, speaking only in fragmented English. This is to be his final voyage at sea thanks to the guidance of Axel (John Qualen), who has helped Ole save his money to return home to Sweden and buy a farm. While the crewmembers may be preoccupied with their own desires, each man always rallies around Ole to help him return to a life they will never have. It is the bond, I think, that interests Ford. His movies look closely at the relationships between men, both positive and negative, to unlock their humanity. In The Long Voyage Home, Ford solemnly exams maritime life. His affinity for the sea is clear, as is his own disappointment of never being a sailor. Under Ford's direction, the audience is treated to a highly personal motion picture.

There's much to admire in the film. Gregg Toland's rich black-and-white cinematography is gorgeous. The smog and dark alleys when the men arrive ashore in England are vividly captured, evoking an ominous tone while also treating the viewer to one startling shot after another. The scenes at sea are also well realized; take, for instance, a disturbing moment when the crew suspect one of their own to be a German spy. It results in a trial that is absolutely heartbreaking thanks to the beautifully simple dialogue and eloquent performances. Mitchell is astonishing as Driscoll. He crafts an indelible performance that sums up the movie's whole thematic content about loneliness and integrity. Wayne is also good, delivering an unconventional turn that proves his diversity as an actor. Ian Hunter is heart-rending as Smitty and Arthur Shields amiably serves as the film's sage.

O'Neill declared The Long Voyage Home to be his favorite adaptation of his work. It is easy to see why he would say so, since Ford and Nichols weave his plays into a marvelous reflection not only on nautical life, but mankind's nature. As the Glencairn's crew sails through the Atlantic's dark waters, they represent their shore-bound counterparts. This isn't the most entertaining motion picture in the Wayne/Ford canon, but it is one of the most rewarding.

Articles James Steffen, also seen here: Read TCM's article on The Long Voyage Home

The Glencairn, a British steamer returning home to England from the West Indies, stops in Baltimore to pick up a load of munitions. The crew includes Ole Olsen, a young Swede who wants nothing more than to return home to his wife and is protected by fellow Swede Axel; Smitty, who carries the secret shame of losing his wife to alcoholism; and the brawling but loyal Driscoll. The voyage proves more dangerous than any of them could have imagined - with violent storms, a kidnapping and attacks by Nazi planes, not all of the close-knit crew will make it home alive.

The Long Voyage Home (1940) was adapted by Dudley Nichols, who updated and wove together four early one-act sea-themed plays written by Nobel Prize-winning playwright Eugene O'Neill from 1914 to 1919. Not only was Nichols a friend of O'Neill, he later directed a film version of Mourning Becomes Electra (1947). The result here, while rather free in its treatment of O'Neill's original material, pleased O'Neill so much that he counted it among his favorite films and kept a personal print of it which he viewed regularly. Director John Ford was under contract with Fox at the time but was allowed to make one film a year outside the studio. Together with his buddy Merian Cooper he founded the independent production company Argosy Pictures, named after his fishing boat. Walter Wanger, with whom he had collaborated so successfully on Stagecoach (1939), agreed to finance the film. Subsequent Argosy productions included The Fugitive (1947), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Wagon Master (1950).

One significant factor in the film's artistic success is undoubtedly its strong ensemble acting from John Ford regulars such as Thomas Mitchell, Ward Bond and John Qualen. For John Wayne the role of Olsen, the idealistic young sailor, was a particular challenge since it required him to adopt a Swedish accent and an altogether different persona from his usual cowboy roles. Danish actress Osa Massen worked closely with him to develop a credible accent. Wayne recalls, "The night before I went to work for the first day's shooting on that picture I worked until probably midnight on a picture that we'd made in six days for Republic. I had to play a straight part as my accent couldn't clash with John Qualen's, who was playing a comic Swede. I wanna tell you, that was quite a switch from the night before, knocking people around and jumping on a horse." Although some critics today consider John Wayne miscast in this role, particularly due to the Swedish accent, Wayne himself considered it one of his finest performances. Noted stage actress Mildred Natwick made her screen debut here as the prostitute. Natwick said of the production: "Ford was a wonderful director, and I think he knew how nervous I was. He really told me everything to do; it was marvelous coaching. When I had to make my entrance, I remember he said, 'Why don't you have your sweater down and sort of be pulling it up over your shoulder?' [...] He just made me so comfortable. He took a lot of time and nurtured me along."

Gregg Toland made The Long Voyage Home among the most beautifully photographed black-and-white films of the era, its low-key lighting and deep focus photography contributing to the pessimistic atmosphere of the film and directly foreshadowing his work on Citizen Kane (1941). Variety characterized Toland's work here as "a masterpiece." Wanger, who considered it an "art" film and hoped to appeal to an elite audience, commissioned ten paintings by various contemporary artists depicting scenes from the film and organized a traveling exhibit at cities across the country. Although The Long Voyage Home was praised lavishly by the critics - John Mosher of The New Yorker called it "one of the most magnificent films in film history" - it failed to turn a profit at the box office in comparison with lighter fare released at the same time such as the Betty Grable musical Down Argentine Way (1940). Nonetheless, the film received seven Academy Award nominations: Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Black and White Cinematography, Best editing, Best Score, Best Sound and Best Visual Effects. Ford was so proud of the film that he displayed stills from it on the walls of his home.

FROM STAGE TO SCREEN: THE LONG VOYAGE HOME AND ... FROM STAGE TO SCREEN: THE LONG VOYAGE HOME AND LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, by William L. Sipple from The Eugene O’Neill Newsletter, Spring 1983

The Long Voyage Home (1940) Chris Fujiwara from Fipresci magazine, 2009

Big House Film Roger Westcombe

Goatdog's Movies Michael W. Phillips, Jr.

Audio Revolution Allan Peach

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

Nothing is Written: A Film Blog: The Long Voyage Home Groggy Dundee

Welcome to Emanuel Levy » Long Voyage Home, The: Starring ...

filmsgraded.com Brian Koller

Ozus' World Movie Reviews Dennis Schwartz

The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 1940 [Erik Beck]

Matt vs. the Academy [Matt Foster]

The Stop Button Andrew Wickliffe

Five Big Yearnings Self-Styled Siren

DVD Savant Glenn Erickson, Wayne/Ford 8-DVD collaboration

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TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide

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The New York Times Bosley Crowther, also seen here: The Long Voyage Home - Movies - The New York Times

The Long Voyage Home - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Long Voyage Home online text of the play

TOBACCO ROAD

USA (84 mi) 1941

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

Not John Ford at his best, but still full of interest, this somewhat dry-cleaned version of Jack Kirkland's play adaptation of the famous Erskine Caldwell novel, scripted by Nunnally Johnson, offers a bittersweet view of Georgia hillbillies that doesn't register fully as either comedy or drama (1941). Reportedly the same thing was true of the original play, which became a comedy only after audiences started laughing at it, but Ford benefits from this ambiguity by putting a wry spin on the populist humanism of The Grapes of Wrath, which he'd recently made for the same studio, Fox. With Charley Grapewin (repeating his stage role as Jeeter Lester), Marjorie Rambeau, Gene Tierney, William Tracy, Elizabeth Patterson, Dana Andrews, and Ward Bond.

Time Out

Ford's next film but one after The Grapes of Wrath, obviously intended by Fox as a follow-up in the Oscar-winning social conscience stakes, was generally castigated as a crude, stagy mockery, derived at one or two censorship removes from the play based on Erskine Caldwell's bawdily earthy novel. In retrospect, however, it emerges as a fascinatingly subversive piece, undermining the starry-eyed humanism of the earlier film's 'We are the people' view. Instead of Steinbeck's Joads of Oklahoma, stubbornly maintaining their faith in the American Dream even in the depths of misery, we get the Lesters of Georgia, poor white trash perfectly content to wallow fecklessly in their mire of animal sexuality (when young) or tranquil sloth (when old age takes over). Beautifully realised by Ford, not unlike Kazan's Baby Doll in its blackly comic blend of dark sexuality and overheated melodrama, Tobacco Road is often very funny, sometimes deeply moving, and always provocative in its acknowledgment of an alternative to 'the American way of life'.

User reviews from imdb Author: zetes from Saint Paul, MN

The back side of the same coin whose front is The Grapes of Wrath. It's a Depression piece about a family of Georgia dirt farmers who are about to be driven from their home. Here John Ford stays much in his comedy mode, so most of his detractors will certainly want to stay clear of it. And even I admit that at times it can be obnoxious. Dude Lester, the youngest of the 16 (or 17) children Jeeter and Ada Lester had, and one of only two who still live on the farm, is particularly hard to bear. One wonders whether Jeeter and Ada had the same parents. Dude runs around screeching and imitating his car's horn. He can be funny, but he's certainly the most grating element of the movie. Luckily, he gets his comeuppance, which makes it well worth putting up with him. The other child, a 23 year old girl, Ellie May (Gene Tierney, in a very early appearance and gorgeous as the earthy farmer's daughter – Ford really fetishizes her, to tell you the truth), is in love with her brother-in-law, Lov (Ward Bond, whom I didn't even recognize). He chose Ellie May's younger sister because he wanted a young wife – 23 is too old and he feared he'd be the laughing stock of Tobacco Road. Most of the movie focuses on Jeeter (Charley Grapewin), who is trying to remain on his land. It's quite amazing. These characters are so stereotypical, and they can certainly be construed as highly offensive. The Beverly Hillbillies probably contains less offensive material about hicks. With any other artist at the helm, it would be completely reprehensible. Yet, in Ford's hands, Jeeter Lester exhibits as much humanity as Tom Joad. We laugh at his ridiculousness, but we care for him very much. His wife (played by Marjorie Rambeau) doesn't get a lot of screen time, but when she does, she reminds me much of Jane Darwell's heartbreaking role as Ma Joad. After Dude tears into his parents about being at death's door, the two have a solemn conversation about their numerous, departed children. `I thought at least one of them would write,' Ada sighs. The film also boasts the greatest number of occurrences of Ford's favorite hymn, `Shall We Gather at the River'. It even serves as the base of the film's score. If the wackiness doesn't put the detractors off, that song very well might! I love it myself. As funny as Tobacco Road is, and it is quite funny almost all of the time, it contains dozens of moments of the greatest American poetry. 9/10.

Channel 4 Film

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)

HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY

USA (118 mi) 1941

Time Out

The backlot mining village (impressive as it is) and the babel of accents hardly aid suspension of disbelief in this nostalgic recollection of a Welsh childhood, based on Richard Llewellyn's novel. An elegant and eloquent film, nevertheless, even if the characteristically laconic Fordian poetry seems more contrived here (not least in the uncharacteristic use of an offscreen narration). Its tale of the calamitous break-up of a traditional way of life - with immigration to America offering a despairing hope of salvation - looms larger in the mind if you think of it (as Ford obviously did) as dealing with Ireland rather than Wales.

Apollo Movie Guide [Jamie Gillies]

I have always disliked How Green Is My Valley, not because it’s a weak film, but because it beat out The Maltese Falcon, Sullivan’s Travels, Meet John Doe and the greatest film ever made, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, for best picture and best director Academy Awards in 1941. Nobody will deny John Ford greatness as a director, but he did not deserve the award that year, with four incredible films by Huston, Sturges, Capra and Welles. That said, this touching but depressing drama set in a Welsh coalmining town is beautiful to look at and heartfelt, not unlike De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief. How Green Was My Valley exposes the awful class divide between rich and poor in England. While this was set at the beginning of the 20th century, it is the forbearer to the grand kitchen sink drama tradition. But when compared to the four 1941 classics, it is a tedious working class drama that did not deserve the accolades it received. The years have not treated it well, and it is even despised by film aficionados for stealing Oscar from Welles.

The film’s Morgan family is largely indistinguishable, with three brothers, all miners. The youngest son, Huw, is played by a very young Roddy McDowall and the story is seen through his eyes. It begins with the mine garnishing the workers’ wages and the infighting that results when some of the miners want to form a union (for a much more heartbreaking look at this topic, see Barbara Kopple’s fabulous documentaries Harlan County, U.S.A. and American Dream). When this effort fails, some of the Morgan brothers want to head to America and try to make a go of it there. Huw’s parents, including Donald Crisp in a very good supporting performance that won him an Oscar, want to stay in the town and fight the good fight. Meanwhile, the local preacher (Walter Pidgeon) is falling in love with the sister (Maureen O’Hara).

The movie has a “well, it’s about working class issues and it’s black and white, so that automatically makes it a classic” quality about it. But without the best picture win, it would be indistinguishable from many other working class films. It doesn’t capture the mundane aspects of life or the filth and grime of these towns as well as a Ken Loach film. Instead, there are a number of pastoral scenes with Huw and the preacher. In this sense, it is a little unrealistic. Furthermore, nobody in Wales talks like these actors, who speak slowly with a slight British accent.

The heartbreak comes at well-paced moments. It begins with a death; there is 15-minutes of a ‘small boy growing up in a small town’ plot, then another death. Like Ford’s other two films set in the British Isles, The Quiet Man and The Informer, How Green Was My Valley did not fit into his canon of western classics. But this film in particular seems to be an oddity. Ford, whose Irish roots come through in the aforementioned films, did not have a trace of Welsh miner in him. Like his excellent direction of The Grapes of Wrath, perhaps stories of the working poor appealed to him. This was considered a landmark year in American filmmaking, with the heated competition among studios producing a series of excellent high quality pictures. Perhaps it is the stuff of legend that this film is the one that beat everything else that year. It’s worth a watch, but is not a bona fide classic.

not coming to a theater near you (Matt Bailey)

John Ford’s 1941 film, How Green Was My Valley, is an affectionate coming-of-age story, set within a family drama, and played out in front of the epic struggle of the residents of a Welsh mining town. Roddy MacDowall, in his first film role, plays Huw, the youngest son of the large Morgan family. The film follows Huw through the delicate internal transition from child to man as he watches the mine tear his family apart one member at a time. The film is beautiful in both imagery and story and is full of rich, complex emotion without resorting to cheap, unearned sentiment.

How Green Was My Valley was originally intended to be Fox studio head Darryl F. Zanuck’s answer to Gone with the Wind. It was to be directed by William Wyler and to star Katherine Hepburn as the eldest Morgan daughter and Tyrone Power as little Huw. The film was to be shot on location in Wales and in Technicolor, so the audience could see just how green that valley really was. The start of World War II, to make a gross understatement, changed those plans. John Ford replaced Wyler, several of the parts were recast, and the lush, verdant Welsh village was recreated on an eighty-acre ranch in, incredibly, Malibu. The changes might all have been for the best, though, as the film won not only the Oscar for Best Picture of 1941 (beating, among others, Citizen Kane), but also the Oscars for Best Actor (Donald Crisp), Art Direction, Cinematography, and Director (the third out of four and the second consecutive Ford would receive).

While Ford was not the originally intended director of the film and took over well into pre-production, the film is suffused with his particular obsessions and personal filmmaking touches. Visually, the film is strikingly composed and features strong background light in interior scenes, often streaming in through open doors or windows, in contrast with darker, often shadowy foregrounds. The film features several of Ford’s stock company bit players such as Barry Sullivan, Arthur Shields, Mary Gordon, and Mae Marsh. The heavy drama of the film is lightened by cheerful, often physical comedy that sometimes borders on the eccentric (two words: Dai Bando). Befitting his start as a silent film director, Ford often favors actions over words, pantomime over verbal exposition. Despite the exquisitely written script, one could watch this film with the sound off and understand the story completely, so strong is Ford’s command of visual language.

I’ve repeatedly mentioned the visual beauty of this film, and there is a reason why. The film’s receipt of the Oscar for cinematography is significant because so much critical noise has been made regarding the innovations of Gregg Toland in Citizen Kane. It’s worth remembering, however, that several of Toland’s innovations were inspired by the work of John Ford. The celebrated visible ceilings in Kane that hid overhead microphones are present as well in How Green Was My Valley and were an innovation of Ford for Stagecoach, made way back in 1939. Toland’s famous deep focus is also present in Arthur C. Miller’s work for How Green Was My Valley, only it calls less attention to itself. It’s a common tendency of the film industry to award visual beauty over technical innovation when it comes to cinematography, but the distinction between these two films is a particular curiosity. The Academy’s choice of Miller’s work over Toland’s is considered by some film scholars the triumph of the use of deep focus in visual and narrative context over the use of deep focus as a showy technical device. Indeed, at least one of Kane’s famed deep focus shots had to be faked with optical effects, whereas Ford eschewed any such trickery whenever possible. The man didn’t even want close-ups or camera movements in his films unless they were absolutely necessitated by the action. Of course, all of this is not to say that Ford’s is necessarily a better film than Welles” is, but perhaps the old man should be given his due as a visually innovative director. After all, when asked who most influenced his filmmaking, it was Welles who replied, “The old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.”

How Green Was My Valley (1941) Adrian Martin from Fipresci magazine, 2009

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THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY

USA (18 mi) 1942

eFilmCritic Reviews Brian McKay

It's certainly far from perfect, but it does more justice to the subject matter than the Michael Bay fiasco (sorry, I should clarify, the fiasco he made about Pearl Harbor, not the other ones). At least the love story is kept to a minimum, and most of the plot actually centers around the events of the battle.

Midway is one of those "All-Star Cast" movies - well, all star for 1976. Half of these guys are dead or in a home now. Even the young actors who were up and coming are now has-beens. Sadly, it appears that most of the budget was spent on the cast, as the film uses a lot of recycled footage from other movies (i.e. "Tora, Tora, Tora"), and "authentic" (read: cheap) stock war footage.

Among the cast are Heston, Fonda, Mitchum, Ford, and most of the other big-gun actors of the day. Their Japanese counterparts, including Toshiro Mifune and James Shigeta, are equally competent. None of them were going to win any Oscars, but the acting is sufficient to move the story along, and the story is what's more important. The only tragedy is that they dubbed over Mifune's voice, and it is so painfully obvious every time he opens his mouth. Apparently they felt his English wasn't quite up to snuff. Never mind the fact that he was one of the greatest fucking actors of the century . . . but I digress.

The battle of Midway was one of the most pivotal in World War 2. American forces, based on a combination of sketchy intelligence, intuition, and luck, managed to get the jump on the Japanese fleet and take out four Carriers, losing only one of our own in the process. Many have complained about the choppy and confusing editing, but I found the story enthralling and relatively easy to follow. At least it has the decency to devote the majority of the film to the actual events, and not get bogged down in a fictitious, smarmy love affair.

Not that this film doesn't have a fictitious love affair of it's own. There is a small subplot regarding an american pilot and his Japanese-American fiancee' who has been placed in an internment center with her family. Many people feel that this dragged the movie down, but I think it's impact was minimal. It only took up about 15 minutes of overall screen time, and it was much more interesting and far less melodramatic than it's bloated counterpart in "Pearl Harbor". At least the film made some attempt, no matter how minor, to show the plight of Japanese-Americans who were caught in the middle.

The action scenes are competent, although the constant switching between studio shot film and stock WW2 footage can be a bit jarring. Some of the stock footage is pretty cool to watch, as planes go tumbling into the sea, but gets a bit tiresome after a while.

The film, while fairly balanced, does land a bit heavy on the American perspective overall. However, at least the Japanese have a little personality and are not completely portrayed as automatons. I wouldn't recommend it as a history primer, but it's certainly interesting enough to make you want to read more on the subject matter.

It's not as good as "Tora, Tora, Tora", but it's certainly more watchable than "Pearl Harbor", even without the cool CGI explosions and dogfights. Recommended for anyone interested in WW2 films.

The Battle of Midway Martyn Bamber from Senses of Cinema

John Ford remembers filming Battle of Midway

Adapted from Commander John Ford USNR interview in box 10 of World War II Interviews, Operational Archives Branch, Naval Historical Center

The New York Times (T./VJ./ P.)

THEY WERE EXPENDABLE

USA (135 mi) 1945

Time Out

Ford and Montgomery were both under Navy orders when returning from active service to MGM to make this tribute to World War II hero John Bulkeley (Brickley in the film) and his squadron of motor torpedo boats which had covered the Pacific retreat of US forces in the wake of Pearl Harbor. The tugs of docudrama, emotionalism and sheer timing produced a major work of surprisingly downbeat romanticism. Commitments to cause and career are raised as genuine conflicts as Wayne's second-in-command questions notions of teamwork and sacrifice; and even at the end, when Ford has ennobled his warriors in a succession of classic images, the narrative has to acknowledge that the ranking pair's heroism consists in knowingly leaving their men to a near-certain doom. A curious movie, whose premises Ford would obsessively rework in his subsequent cavalry pictures, with the luxury of historical distance.

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Nate Meyers)

John Wayne easily stands as the iconic movie image of American GIs during World War II. With such work as Sands of Iwo Jima and In Harm's Way among countless others, the Duke appears to have essentially won every battle in the both theaters of the war. Leave it to John Ford, however, to place America's A-number-one hero on the losing side of Bataan.

On the surface, They Were Expendable is the typical 1940s war propaganda movie. Its subtext, on the other hand, is an unflinching portrait of war's tragic loss. Lt. John "Brick" Brickley (Robert Montgomery) and Lt. "Rusty" Ryan (Wayne) are prepping PT-boats in Manila Bay on the eve of Pearl Harbor. Rusty is sick of Brick's patient demeanor and wants to serve on a destroyer. Along with their fellow Navy officers, including "Boats" Mulcahey (Ward Bond), the two men are simply stuck working dead-end jobs until the Japanese attack. Now, under the leadership of General Martin (Jack Holt), each man is stuck between a rock and a hard place—not equipped to deal with the oncoming Japanese attack, but unable to abandon the Philippines just yet for strategic purposes.

The vast majority of Frank Wead's script looks at the bureaucratic machinations of the Navy, as Brickley and Rusty attempt to get their boats out to sea in a sacrificial attempt to stall the Japanese advance. There are many earnest scenes depicting the officers talking to enlisted men, motivating them despite the fear of death. Rusty is held up by an infection, which places him in the care of Nurse Sandy Davyss (Donna Reed), while Brickley leads his men into combat. Ford wisely chooses to show the blooming relationship between Rusty and Sandy, because it helps underscore the film's themes. This is a war film about losing, not glory. Whether it is the loss of shipmates or a chance at a new life, war closes many doors. Yet, this is not an angry diatribe against war. Each man finds a purpose during the film's 135 minutes that has an unquestionably positive impact on his life.

It is fashionable now to attack Wayne's WWII movies, but even the most ardent critic will have a hard time assaulting They Were Expendable. The jingoistic storytelling of his other films is decidedly absent here, replaced by Ford's sharp take on war. The battle scenes aren't rally cries, but an honest attempt to show the horror of armed conflict. As Japanese planes fly over the PT-boats, one gets a real sense of how random and uncontrollable much of battle is. Wayne's typical heroics never emerge here. Instead he delivers a muted performance of a man who enters into battle not as a superhero, but merely a Navy officer. Robert Montgomery brings his real life PT-boat experience to the screen convincingly and, it pains me to say, actually upstaged the Duke. While the supporting cast tends to fall prey to the typical 1940s wartime clichés, the cast still makes it compelling.

They Were Expendable, as the title indicates, isn't the typical 1940s war movie. Ford's film was ahead of its time when released in 1945 and its images ring true in today's contemporary world of war. Neither pro- nor anti-war, the film simply presents the sacrifice of men and women in uniform. And while it realizes some are expendable, the tone laments that fact.

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MY DARLING CLEMENTINE

USA (97 mi) 1946

Time Out

Like many Hollywood directors, Ford's claims for his films are very modest. For him the key thing about My Darling Clementine is its authenticity: 'I knew Wyatt Earp...and he told me about the fight at the OK Corral. So we did it exactly the way it had been.' For viewers, however, the film's greatness (and enjoyability) rests not in the accuracy of the final shootout, but in the orchestrated series of incidents - the drunken Shakespearean actor, Earp's visit to the barber, the dance in the unfinished church - which give meaning to the shootout. Peter Wollen's comment on the significance of Earp's visit to the barber's and its outcome makes clear just how complex the ideas contained in these incidents are: 'This moment marks the turning point of Earp's transition from wandering cowboy, nomadic savage, bent on revenge, unmarried, to married man, settled, civilised, the sheriff who administers the law.'

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Considering that it offers a near-complete version of John Ford's classic Western before Darryl Zanuck recut and reshot it without Ford's input, you'd expect more ballyhoo surrounding Fox's elaborately endowed DVD. But the understated approach is somehow appropriate for Ford's laconic tale. Though it climaxes with the shootout at the OK Corral, Clementine almost treats the famed gunfight as a pretext; Ford is far more interested in the texture of everyday life, the petty brawls and minor allegiances of frontier life. (Peter Fonda recalls how his dad described it as the "art film" Ford smuggled into the studio system.) Henry Fonda's Wyatt Earp is a straight shooter, especially compared to the short-tempered Doc Holliday (Victor Mature, in an undervalued performance), but he's something of a rube as well, fidgeting in the barber's chair, wincing when he's sprayed down with cologne. (In Ford's original ending, Earp merely offers Cathy Downs a fond handshake before leaving town, not the tender kiss on the cheek of the release version.) Though Zanuck's version isn't a mutilation, its amped-up emotions (what today's studio execs would call "raising the stakes") violate Ford's plainspoken tone, though the latter may, now as then, strike some as unnecessarily distant, dustily removed. Happy the DVD owner, who can flip the disc over and choose one or the other.

Images Movie Journal Grant Tracey

Filmed during a post-World War II period of noir despair, Joseph MacDonald’s visuals and John Ford’s compositions remain indelible fixtures in movie lore and make My Darling Clementine (1946) one of the great brooding westerns, loaded with iconic moments of darkness.

After his brother has been killed, Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) bumps into the Clantons in a hotel lobby. As Earp exits the frame, he says his name, "Earp, Wyatt Earp." Old Man Clanton (Walter Brennan), standing at the lobby desk and looking grizzled and nasty, suddenly has a shocked look as his face falls. Ford then cuts to Earp in the hard rain walking down splattered wood planks. With his back to the camera, Earp’s walk is slow, determined, his hat a strong upright icon of justice. An intense mood of alienation and determination resonate.

Later in the film, Earp, his hair slicked back, takes Clementine (Cathy Downs) dancing. She wears a white dress and he leads her across the outdoor floor with a high upright leg kick. His gentleness suggests a possible world outside of violence and revenge, but Clementine, signifies more of an unattainable metaphor than an image of possible domestic bliss. She represents the East, Boston, and what the Byronic Doc Holliday (Victor Mature), her former boyfriend--his life now ruined by indiscriminate sex and drinking--has lost. For Wyatt, she’s a brief moment of innocence in an otherwise darkening noir landscape of personal obsession.

The shoot-out at the OK Corral is a tour-de force. MacDonald’s use of deep focus photography creates stirring moments of beauty. Earp, in low angle and extreme long shot, walks toward the camera. He’s positioned in the middle of the frame. To his right are closed shops, to his left, still wagons, in the distance, a desert butte. This is perhaps one of the most famous images in all of cinema. Fonda’s Wyatt, against that landscape, is strong, an heroic figure, steely and graceful with a gun glinting in his left hand. And Ford’s use of sounds--the vague silence broken by the metallic clink of Earp’s spurs--suggest control, order, and false comfort. Moments later, Earp extends the false quiet, as he emerges from behind a wagon, gun propped up in his right hand, foot up on the hitch. He pushes back his hat. "Let’s talk awhile." He’s calm and unafraid.

And then with sudden meanness the scene’s tempo changes to darkness. Ike (Grant Withers) walks into a swirl of dust, kicked up by a passing stagecoach, aiming to kill Earp, but he can’t see him. He fires indiscriminately, and then a flicker of Earp appears and he kills Ike as the dust dissipates. Seconds later Doc, following another one of his coughing fits, is shot off a fence post, but he manages to kill one Clanton before dying, his white handkerchief clinging to the wood like a forgotten remnant of lost Boston gentility. And alongside Doc’s last shot is Earp, bursting through the coral, blocked by the horizontal lines of a fence. He blazes two six guns and another Clanton drops, his gun limply landing in a trough. After Earp captures the old man, a moment of surprising cruelty happens. He offers to let Clanton go so that he too can suffer like Wyatt’s father suffers, over the pain and guilt of dead sons.

Fonda’s actions here surprise me and illustrate the noir bitterness brimming beneath the calm surface. Yes, Brennan’s Clanton is one of cinema’s true ugly villains. Earlier in the film after Wyatt one-upped his sons, Old Man Clanton whipped them and spat, "When you pull a gun, kill a man!" And before killing Wyatt’s youngest brother James, Brennan’s upper lip had slightly curled back with glee at the prospect, but to not arrest the man, to let him roam free so that he can wander in purgatory, steps beyond enforcing the law. It’s an act of cruelty that an earlier Fonda in The Ox-Bow Incident would never contemplate, but another post-war Fonda of Fort Apache would.

Turner Classic Movies Jeremy Arnold

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THE FUGITIVE

USA Mexico (104 mi) 1947

Time Out

Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory given typically Fordian treatment, in that the moral complexities of the novel have been replaced by simplicity, picturesque poetry, and emotional power. Fonda plays the priest pursued by police and informers in an anti-clerical Latin American country, wandering the countryside in search of sanctuary and someone to understand him. It's generally one of Ford's most turgid efforts, slow, overstated, and with an annoying tendency towards obvious religious symbolism. But one cannot deny the beauty of Gabriel Figueroa's glowing photography.

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr)

John Ford applied his studied, expressionistic, high-art style to this 1947 adaptation of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, and the results are mixed. Henry Fonda is the outlaw priest stumbling through a Latin American revolution; Ford seems unable to connect with the character emotionally, so he drowns him in Christological imagery. Still, it's a better film than Ford's similarly themed The Informer, if only because the open-air setting brings out Ford's landscape sense. With Dolores Del Rio, Pedro Armendariz, and J. Carrol Naish; photographed by Buñuel's man, Gabriel Figueroa. 104 min.

Edwin Jahiel

The fugitive is Henry Fonda, a priest running away from soldiers during Mexico's violent anti-clerical period, helped by beautiful Del Rio and Yankee robber Bond. One should not compare the film and its superb book source, partly because the movie cannot possibly give voice to the inner torments of Greene's whiskey priest, partly because in the novel the priest lived with a woman--something that could not then be shown in a film.

"The Fugitive" was shot by Gabriel Figueroa, whose splendid work -- with its plasticity, contrasts, shadows, camera positions and angles-- is one of the high points of black-and-white cinematography. Exceptionally good editing and music. This film, after "The Informer" and " The Long Voyage Home" confirmed that Ford (who, in-between , has made other movies) was also an "artistic" filmmaker.

Essentially the same mix of realism and expressionism prevails in all three films. "The Informer" was a Judas story, with clear Christ-like echoes. "The Fugitive" also has religious symbolism: a Christ-like figure, Mary Magdalen, and the Good Thief. It had a mixed critical reception and did not prove popular. It is,however,one of the best Catholic-themed movies and was one of Ford's own favorites. The current version may have a short spoken introduction (not in the original) by the unmistakable voice of an uncredited John Huston.

Turner Classic Movies

Based on the novel The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene (originally published in the United States as The Labyrinthine Ways), John Ford's The Fugitive (1947) is a visually striking ode to the resilience of the human spirit within the shadow of violence and oppression.

In an unnamed state of Mexico, in which a ruthless police lieutenant (Pedro Armendariz) wages war upon the clergy, a Priest (Henry Fonda) travels the countryside disguised as a peasant. When his identity is discovered by a group of villagers, the Priest continues to perform religious services in secret, even though it jeopardizes his safety. In one such ceremony, he baptizes the child of a mysterious woman (Dolores del Rio), a child who was fathered by the very policeman who persecutes the Catholic people. The Priest's flight is paralleled with that of an American bank robber (Ward Bond), whose wanted poster hangs alongside that of the fugitive Priest. The Priest eventually succeeds in escaping the police state, but learns that the criminal is mortally wounded and wishes for the last rites to be performed. Thus the Priest faithfully (and fatefully) re-enters the territory to perform a final act of charity, as the lieutenant's soldiers close in upon them.

Commonly considered Greene's single greatest literary work, the novel was inspired by the author's travels through Mexico in 1938, at a time when the country "suffered at the hands of President Calles -- in the name of revolution -- the fiercest persecution of religion anywhere since the reign of Elizabeth."

"I had seen the devotion of peasants praying in the priestless churches," recalled Greene in his travel memoirs, Ways of Escape, "and I had attended Masses in upper rooms where the Sanctus bell could not sound for fear of the police."

In Greene's novel, the central character is a "whiskey priest," and it is he, not the lieutenant, who has fathered an illegitimate child with Maria. As might be expected, much of this moral ambiguity had to be abandoned during the screenwriting process. "You couldn't do the original on film," said Ford. Under the guidelines of the Production Code, such a character could never be rendered on screen, so Ford and screenwriter Dudley Nichols reshaped the central figure, so that the Priest's greatest sacrilege is pride in the ceremonial trappings and elevated status of priesthood. The lieutenant was transformed into a heartless tyrant, no longer a political idealist driven by a misguided desire to help his people. Maria was reduced to a quiet symbol of maternity -- "decorative and mutely impassioned," said Variety -- though she is given a touch of the Magdalene as the barmaid of a rural cantina.

After the end of her brief romance with Orson Welles and tired of being typecast as a Latin spitfire, Del Rio had walked away from Hollywood in 1943 and returned to Mexico, where she was able to play more fully-developed characters. For Del Rio, The Fugitive was a comeback of sorts and was her first American film since her departure; it would remain her only one until returning to appear in Flaming Star with Elvis Presley in 1960.

Ford is best remembered today for his boisterous adventure films, such as The Quiet Man (1952), The Searchers (1956) or She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949); and for his crusty, unpretentious demeanor, often denying the existence of thematic subtext in his work and refusing to discuss his artistic intentions as a director. But The Fugitive belongs to an earlier, lesser known faction of his work, self-consciously "arty" films that demonstrated his interests in German expressionism, English literature and religious ideology. Films such as The Informer (1935), < the and Plough>(1936) or The Long Voyage Home (1940), remind us that beneath Ford's growling machismo were a sophisticated mind and a brilliant visual sense, even though Ford was later to deny both gifts ("I make Westerns," is how he typically summarized his career). The Fugitive is perhaps Ford's last great "art film," a high-minded show of faith, a lovingly crafted paean to his own Catholicism.

Rather than create a vision of Mexico on the backlots of Hollywood for The Fugitive, Ford and company went to Mexico, shooting the film on location in Taxco, Cholula and Cuernavaca, as well as at Churubusco Studios in Mexico City. At Ford's side was popular Mexican director Emilio Fernandez, who served as associate producer of the picture. Fernandez had made several films with Del Rio and Armendariz (most notably Maria Candelaria in 1944), and introduced Ford to a particularly notable member of his production team: now-legendary cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa.

If one were to criticize the photography of The Fugitive one could only say that it was possibly too beautiful. The tableaux are so stunning, at times breathtaking in their powerful balance of light and shadow, that they make it difficult for the viewer to concentrate on the plight of the Priest.

"It had a lot of damn good photography -- with those black and white shadows," said Ford, "We had a good cameraman, Gabriel Figueroa, and we'd wait for the light -- instead of the way it is nowadays, where regardless of the light, you shoot."

This impulsive approach to filmmaking was applied not only to the cinematography but also the narrative itself, causing a rift to form between Ford and screenwriter Dudley Nichols (who had penned all of Ford's most important works since 1930). According to Nichols, "I don't know what happened in Mexico, I didn't go down with him...To me, he seemed to throw away the script. Fonda said the same. There were some brilliant things in the film, but I disliked it intensely -- and, confidentially, I don't think Ford ever forgave me for that."

The Fugitive was the first film Ford made for Argosy Productions, an independent concern established with Merian C. Cooper (one of the creators of the original King Kong (1933). This deeply personal and ideologically weighty film won respectable notices but failed to capture an audience. Realizing that the company could not sustain another financial loss of this scale, Ford set about making films that were sure to reap profits at the box office, the first being Fort Apache (1948). From that time on, Ford channeled his artistic impulses beneath the surface of Westerns, comedies and adventure films -- films that were less obvious in their explorations of the human character, but no less rewarding.

THE FUGITIVE (1947) Mardecortesbaja

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FORT APACHE

USA (125 mi) 1948

Time Out

The first of Ford's cavalry trilogy (to be followed by She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande), and an intriguing development of questions of leadership, responsibility, heroism and legend, first raised in the muted officers' conflict of They Were Expendable. West Point stiffness (the Custer-like Fonda) meets the more organic Western community of an isolated Arizona outpost, and inflexible notions of 'duty' lead inexorably to disaster, historically rewritten as glory. Not for the last time, Ford gives us telling evidence of tragic ambiguity, but none the less decides to 'print the legend'.

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Nate Meyers)

Fort Apache is the first installment in John Ford's unofficial trilogy, commonly dubbed the "Cavalry Trilogy," that continues with She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and concludes with Rio Grande. It serves not only as an impressive re-creation of military life in post-Civil War America, but also as evidence of Ford's maturation. Made after his service in World War II, the film is an examination of military leadership and the high cost of war.

Lt. Col. Owen Thursday (Henry Fonda) arrives at Fort Apache as a man declining in esteem. Accompanied by his comely daughter, Philadelphia (Shirley Temple), Thursday is displeased with his most recent assignment. Stuck in the middle of nowhere to deal with the Apache, who are led by Cochise, Thursday feels slighted by his superiors. Determined to find a way to achieve his previous glory, the fort's commanding officer starts to whip everyone into shape—to the point where he bumps heads with Captain Kirby York (John Wayne). York suggests a more tempered approach to dealing with the Apache, as well as the soldiers, but Thursday will not listen to reason. Things become even more confounded when 2nd Lt. Michael O'Rourke (John Agar), fresh from West Point, begins to court Philadelphia. Determined to assert his authority over his family and soldiers, Thursday's actions put everyone at risk as his poor leadership puts them on a course for war.

The screenplay, by Frank S. Nugent, is somewhat inspired by the exploits of General Custer. Like Custer, Thursday is an atrocious leader who rushes forward to advance his own career. However, thanks to Fonda's performance, there is a buried humanity to the man. Fonda acts against type, playing Thursday as a severely rigid man that seems to be responding to his current predicament. He isn't so much hateful towards the Apache as he is desperate to regain his lost honor, which causes his failings to become more tragic. Wayne offers an excellent counterpoint as York, though his performance is far from the showy cavalry officer one might expect. He seems to be reacting most of the time, offering a moral center to the story instead of serving as a valiant warrior. The two actors work well with one another, creating a compelling conflict within the fort.

In no small part the cast is responsible for bringing these characters to life. Apart from the leading men, Shirley Temple and John Agar deliver pleasant performances that give excellent support to Fonda and Wayne. Furthermore, Fort Apache contains many memorable character moments from Ford's stock company of actors. Victor McLaglen does well as O'Rourke's sergeant uncle Mulcahy, bringing some effective comic relief. Additionally, Irene Rich as Michael's mom is quite touching. The cast works well as an ensemble, allowing each member to help flesh out the film's themes.

The filmmaking is, as usual, topnotch. Ford puts his keen eye for composition to good use, especially during scenes of the cavalry riding off to fight the Apache. There's a timeless quality that makes it surprisingly contemporary. Ford's direction sees these events as common occurrences that take on many forms—he could easily be telling a tale about corporate executives running a company into the ground or politicians implementing disastrous policies. Most importantly, Ford's work here treats the audience with respect. The ending challenges us to look deep within our own history as a means of understanding what we can do to change the future.

Turner Classic Movies Scott McGee

The great film director John Ford needed a hit after the end of World War II. His first effort after the war, The Fugitive (1947), starring Henry Fonda, was met with critical derision and audience indifference. In fact, Ford's production company, Argosy Pictures, had a devil of a time finding a new project that financiers would back and also attract audiences. Ford and Argosy could not afford another noble failure like The Fugitive, a film that even Ford acknowledged at the time was a risky venture.

Ford had met the writer James Warner Bellah in India during the war. The two became acquainted, and Ford took notice of Bellah's series of cavalry stories that were being printed in The Saturday Evening Post. Argosy bought from Bellah a number of his stories, for prices that usually ran around $4,500 apiece. One of these stories, "Massacre," served as the basis for Fort Apache (1948), the film that marked Ford's return to critical and commercial success. Of course, adapting the story was no simple task, as many of Bellah's own personal beliefs ran contrary to Ford's, and naturally some of the author's strong views found their way into "Massacre." One of Bellah's tenets that Ford disagreed with was the depiction of Indians. Bellah's viewpoint, never straying far from a racist doctrine, saw Indians as the "red beast in the night." Nevertheless, Ford went out of his way to grant Indians a dignity and sense of humanity, as he does in Fort Apache, by clearly making the Indians not the villains, but the victims of government-sanctioned rogues.

Despite the dispute over the Indians, Ford and Bellah agreed on one thing: the valor and pride of the military. And to capture this long-gone military tradition of the U.S. Cavalry, Argosy hired a researcher named Katherine Spaatz and sent her to Arizona to interview an old cavalry sergeant's widow. Spaatz also talked to her own grandmother, who began her marriage to a soldier in the famed Seventh Cavalry in Arizona during the 1880s.

As the script was nearing completion, Ford, together with producer and Argosy co-founder Merian C. Cooper, realized they lacked a title for the film that would become the first of an informal trilogy of cavalry pictures, the others being She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950). So the duo held a contest amongst the Argosy employees with a promised prize of $100 going to anyone who came up with a winning title. The story's original title, "Massacre," was considered too graphic. Other briefly considered titles: War Party, Dragoon (which was suggested by special effects artist Ray Harryhausen who was on the RKO lot working on Mighty Joe Young, 1949), Indian Fighter, Glory, Thursday's Folly, Trumpet Call, Boots and Saddles, Indian Country, Rampage, Valley of Death, The Apache Fight at Dawn, Red, White and Untamed, and Failure Then Defeat. Ironically, it was John Ford himself who suggested Fort Apache. There is no record whether or not he claimed the $100 for himself.

Fort Apache (1948) Dan Sallitt from Fipresci magazine, 2009

DVD Times Mike Sutton

Psychological Commentary Kelley L. Ross Ph.D.

Edwin Jahiel

Reel.com DVD review [James Plath]

Turner Classic Movies the idea behind FORT APACHE, by Rob Nixon

epinions.com [George Chabot]

Dragan Antulov

Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz)

All Movie Guide [Lucia Bozzola]

Monsters and Critics - DVD Review [Jeff Swindoll]

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson)

filmcritic.com (David Bezanson)

Turner Classic Movies Behind the Camera on FORT APACHE

Turner Classic Movies Critical Reviews

Turner Classic Movies trivia and famous quotes from the film, by Rob Nixon

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)

SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON B 83

USA (103 mi) 1949

Never apologize, mister, it’s a sign of weakness. —Captain Nathan Brittles (John Wayne)

A movie that typifies director John Ford’s Achilles heel, a man whose cinematic visualizations are renowned, but his hatchet job of American history is equally legendary, as he insists on perpetrating the same racist myths about Indians that have been in effect for the past 100 years, which makes his historic vision as a filmmaker no better than the dime store novelist that originated these misconceptions. Ford has always portrayed Indians in the least desirable light, showing them to be less than human, vicious savages, terrible shots, poor military strategists, and little more than pathetic wretches of humanity, so little sympathy is ever shown when a gazillion Indians are killed onscreen, such as in STAGECOACH (1939). Compare that to the elevated sympathy offered in this overreaching drama when a cavalry troop escorts two white women through hostile Indian country. The film opens in 1876 just as news is spreading about the defeat of General Custer at the hands of the Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapahoe, sending waves of anxiety and fear throughout the West, where a newsreel style narrator misinforms the audience straightaway, probably exactly as the newspapers speculated in that era, believing various Indian tribes were gathering together in great numbers to purge the West of white settlers.

In reality, Indians were gathering in record numbers to defend themselves against the inevitable advance of the whites into their territory. After the Custer debacle, however, rather than remain a fighting force of multiple tribes united in opposition, as is suggested here, they split back up into smaller tribes, each going their own separate way, as they had always lived, reflective of their nomadic lifestyle of living off the land. But that’s not the way the movies tell the story, instead projecting a view of the white settlers as victims of random and indiscriminate Indian violence, overlooking the genocide initiated against Indians by the U.S. cavalry throughout the West, ordered to militarily defeat one tribe after another, rounding up all free Indians in a form of ethnic cleansing, eventually forcing them into submission, legally requiring that they live away from their traditional hunting grounds, forcing them to live in isolation on desolate reservations, subject to rampant disease and the rotted food of government rations where more than half died within the first few years. Ford conveniently leaves out all references to the true story of “American” history and instead recounts the same mythological racist lore that turns Indians into savages while the whites are noble heroes.

In this film, the second of a 3-part cavalry trilogy, between FORT APACHE (1948) and RIO GRANDE (1950), Ford is really paying tribute to the men in uniform, offering a glowing and idealized portrait of romanticized courage under fire. James Warner Bellah wrote the short stories on which the entire trilogy is based, while screenwriter Frank Nugent adapted the first two into movies, a character driven and nearly plotless story offering an intimate glimpse of military life at a remote cavalry post. This is largely a nostalgia piece, complete with a rousing Americana musical score that doesn’t shy away from playing Dixie, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and several variations of the title tune, which is still the official anthem of the United States Cavalry, where despite some strong individual performances, the collective portrait of the Second Cavalry Regiment is really the featured star of this film. Ford and his cinematographer Winton Hoch, who won an Oscar, use vivid Technicolor to continually frame them on the move in single file formation while traveling through the stunning panorama of the natural backdrop of Monument Valley in Southern Utah, which is now part of the Navajo Indian Reservation. These compositional images so completely resemble authentic Western artworks, particularly those of Frederic Remington, that Ford’s Westerns are forever associated with Old West authenticity. The same can’t be said for the subject matter, however, where Ford tends to mythologize the West, once more overlooking the real history of the Second Cavalry, which was responsible for the Marias Massacre in 1870, where despite warnings from scouts that they were attacking the wrong camp filled with Blackfeet Indians friendly to whites, some 200 Indians, mostly women and children were slaughtered in an act of wrongful brutality, while the Piegan tribe and their Chief, the military’s actual target, escaped safely to Canada.

Here, however, the cavalry is depicted as a harmonious place where soldiers from both the North and the South have come together after the Civil War under one flag and one common purpose, to keep the West safe from Indians. The charismatic leader holding them all together is John Wayne in one of his better performances as Captain Nathan Brittles, a savvy veteran of 40-years in service whose long deserved retirement is expected within a few days, though he has mixed feelings about becoming a civilian. This is one of the first Westerns to pay tribute to an aging Western hero, along the lines of Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott in Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country (1962) or Clint Eastwood’s aging gunfighter in UNFORGIVEN (1992). Still served by his orderly Quincannon (Victor McLaglen) from their days together in the Civil War, their morning ritual has a relaxed, comic flair of longtime friends as Quincannon is expected to join him in retirement just two weeks afterwards. Also interesting is Brittles’ respectful relationship with Sgt. Tyree (Ben Johnson, a real cowboy, a champion calf roper discovered by Ford), a man with equal rank while serving the Confederacy, whose opinion he values, but Tyree is reticent to offer, claiming “That’s not my department,” sarcastically claiming the orders come from the Yankee War department. When a fellow Southern soldier dies, Brittles finds it noble and befitting to bury him with a Confederate flag.

When a paymaster stagecoach carrying the troop’s wages is attacked by Indians with the passengers murdered and robbed, Brittles is ordered on one last patrol to quell the vicious outbreaks by a band of renegade Indians who have broken from the reservation. Added into the mix are his orders to escort the commanding officer’s wife and niece, Abby (Mildred Dunnock) and Olivia (Joanne Dru) to the nearest East-bound stagecoach, claiming they could not withstand an “Army” winter, where Olivia has inflamed the hearts of a few soldiers by adhering to a cavalry tradition of wearing a yellow ribbon in her hair, which symbolizes her faithful devotion to one of them. But this doesn’t prevent two young officers, John Agar and Harry Carey Jr., from spending more time fighting one another than they do with her, a sign of their youthful inexperience for leadership, making Brittles even more reticent to give up his command. When a long line of Indians is spotted moving their entire village with them, Brittles thinks it wise to avoid contact, as they’re not in battle mode, preferring to take a longer route, even though the delay has serious consequences, eventually missing the stage which is destroyed in a violent Indian encounter at the stage post, including several lives lost. Flabbergasted at the turn of events, believing he failed every mission he was assigned, this tribute to an old soldier reveals Brittles has a few more tricks up his sleeve, all of which exhibit a flair for intelligence and cunning, displaying the kind of wisdom and experience that endear him to his troops. In the end, Ford depicts them as one and the same in this loving tribute to “the regulars, the fifty-cents a day professionals riding the outposts of a nation.”   

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon Time Out London

The centrepiece of Ford's cavalry trilogy (flanked by Fort Apache and Rio Grande) and a film of both elegiac sentiment and occasionally over-eloquent sentimentality, structured around a series of ritual incidents rather than narrative conflicts. Wayne's captain and McLaglen's sergeant face up to impending retirement from a force whose role and self-awareness is changing in the wake of Custer's defeat; America, however, still has to be willed into existence and unity. Winton Hoch's Technicolor cinematography of Monument Valley (modelled at Ford's insistence on Remington pictorialism) won him an Oscar.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon Dave Kehr from the Reader

Of all John Ford's lyrical films, this 1949 feature is the one that most nearly leaves narrative behind; it is pure theme and variation, centered on the figure of a retiring cavalry officer (John Wayne, playing with strength and conviction a man well beyond his actual age). The screenplay (by Frank Nugent and Laurence Stallings) is entirely episodic, and it ends in a magnificently sustained series of anticlimaxes, suggesting it could spin out forever. In Ford's superbly creative hands, it becomes perhaps the only avant-garde film ever made about the importance of tradition. With Joanne Dru, John Agar, Ben Johnson, Harry Carey Jr., Victor McLaglen, Mildred Natwick, and George O'Brien. 103 min.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon Chris Dashiell from CineScene

U.S. Cavalry Captain Nathan Brittles (John Wayne) is reluctantly facing retirement, while Indian trouble is brewing. The second in Ford's so-called Cavalry Trilogy, this was also only his second color picture, and the cinematography was specially crafted to imitate Remington photos - winning DP Winton Hoch a well-deserved Oscar. Ford's uncanny instinct for camera placement and composition of men and horses in the frame is again in evidence. He was the master of the seamless style - by this time it was all second nature to him - as they say in sports, he was unconscious. Wayne is fine in the role of the aging officer - the whiskers definitely look good on him, he is amazingly mellow and restrained, and he only indulges in his more typical mannerisms a few times here and there. There are the usual formulaic elements - young lovers at odds (Joanne Dru and John Agar - yawn) and Irish drunk humor courtesy of Victor McLaglen (a little better than usual but I'm still not taken with this recurring aspect of Ford's films). In the end, there's nothing very urgent about the plot; it's more of a mild portrait of the old warrior than an adventure yarn, which is fine with me. As for the Indians, though, I must say that my awareness of historical reality always makes enjoyment of these cavalry movies problematic, to put it mildly. Part of the western movie myth (which Ford didn't invent, only inherited and elaborated on) is that the white settlers and soldiers were a beleaguered, peaceable minority harassed by dangerous and unreasonably hostile savages. (The supposed menace is actually belied by the film's rather abrupt resolution to the Indian threat.) Some people choose to ignore this or make allowances for mythology. Others make fun of it. I tend to react with grumpiness and criticism. I admit I'm not a big fan of the westerns, but that doesn't stop me from sampling Ford from time to time and appreciating his artistry.

dOc DVD Review: She Wore a Yellow Ribbon ... - digitallyOBSESSED Mark Zimmer

When John Wayne and John Ford were in their primes, they turned out some of the most entertaining Westerns ever to hit the screen. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, second in their acclaimed "Cavalry Trilogy," is one of the very best of these.

Capt. Nathan Brittles (Wayne) is only six days from retirement from the cavalry when word of the downfall of Custer at Little Big Horn hits. Emboldened, the local Indians begin making plans for war. The commanding officer of the fort orders Brittles to take his wife Abby (Mildred Natwick) and niece Olivia Dandridge (Joanne Dru) out on patrol to the next outpost so that they can take a stagecoach to safety. But disaster follows disaster as the Captain's service draws to a close and he fights to redeem himself.

There's not much more in the way of entertainment one can ask from this picture. There's plenty of action, romance that doesn't feel tacked on as an afterthought, and comedy relief that's actually pretty funny. Despite being primarily a tough-guy picture, there's also a ton of sentiment, and Wayne's farewell to his men will hardly leave a dry eye in the house.

Wayne turns in one of the best performances of his career here, despite being saddled with some exceptionally poor age makeup. He provides a character that's fully rounded with not only heroism but sensitivity and above all, caring about the men under him. The character is well-written too, taking numerous steps to protect the safety of the men under his command, and deeply ashamed at his failures. The various characters, in the supporting cast are usually interesting as well. Among these are the two men competing for Miss Dandridge's affections, Lt. Ross Pennell (Harry Carey Jr.) and Lt. Flint Cohill (John Agar) are entertaining in their conflict and immaturity. Oscar®-winner Victor McLaglen has a comic turn as Quincannon, the hard-drinking Irish sergeant who intends to follow Brittles into retirement. The picture is loaded with juicy character bits for them as well as many others, including Chief John Big Tree as the elderly Pony That Walks, who cannot persuade the fiery young men of his tribe to live peaceably.

As usual, the picture is beautifully shot in Monument Valley. The cinematography by Winston Hoch won an Academy Award®, and it was well-deserved. It's drop dead gorgeous throughout; one just wishes that Cinemascope had been invented five or six years earlier to really capture the vistas here. The score by Richard Hageman is alternately stirring and moving, relying heavily on folk songs but adapting them deftly for the demands of the sequence. It's highly appropriate and effective and adds a great deal to the presentation.

Welcome to Emanuel Levy » She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

John Ford's Western takes place after the massacre of General Custer at the Little Big Horn. A narrator sets the movie's sentimental tone, when he announces: “And wherever the flag rises over some lonely army post there may be one man–one captain–fated to wield the sword of destiny.”

That man is John Wayne's Captain Nathan Brittles, an elderly officer who has spent 40 years in service and is about to retire to civilian life in a few hours.

The Indians begin a war and Brittles wants to trail them, but his Major objects. Instead, he assigns Brittles to escort his wife and daughter to a safer place, and Brittles reluctantly accepts.

At the station, Brittles is devastated by the sight of mutilated bodies, all victims of the Indian raid. “About time I did retire!” he tells himself. However, realizing that he has only four hours of service, he decides on a bold move against the Indians, outwitting them by stampeding their horses; humiliated and helpless, they sue for peace. Having turned a failure into a successful mission–the raid has no casualtiesBrittles is now ready to retire.

The picture's real hero, as in Fort Apache, is not Brittles but the larger collective he stands for, here, the Second Cavalry Regiment. At the end of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, the narrator tells the audience: “So here they are. The dog-faced soldiers, the regulars, the fifty-cents a day professionals riding the outposts of a nation. From Fort Reno to Fort Apache…from Sheridan to Stockton…they were all the same. Men in dirty-shirt blue…and only a cold page in the history books to mark their passing. But wherever they rose and whatever they sought for, that place became the United States.”

The two-generational plot in this Western differs from that in Hawks' Red River, which was released the same year. More nostalgic in his approach, Ford comments int his Western on the passing of heroes like Captain Brittles, an aging cavalry officer who has spent all his life in the army. Whereas Ford mythologizes the Old West, Red River looks ahead to the future and signifies social change.

Brittles doesn't trust the younger generation and is reluctant to hand over the command to Lieutenant Flint Cohill (John Agar) because he lacks experience. Major Allshard (George O'brien) has to remind him that the youths have to learn the hard way, just as he himself had. Allshard protests that, “Every time Cohill gave an order, men would turn around and look at you, they'd wonder if he was doing the right thing.”

But in the end, the younger generation adopts Brittles' way of life. Lieutenant Pennel (Harry Carey Jr.) decides to renounce an easy and comfortable life in the East in favor of military career, just like Brittles.

Some of the movie's most touching sequences describe the ritualistic ceremonies in which tradition is transmitted from the older to the younger generation. On Brittles' last review of his troops, he gets a present, a silver watch. Brings out his glasses, he sniffs back a tear as he reads the inscription, “Lest We Forget!” with a slight choke in his voice.

This is the only personal and informal interaction between Brittles and his men. It takes Brittles long time to soften, show his heart. Hence, only when he hands over the command to Cohill, Brittles calls him, for the first time, by his Christian name.

She Wore A Yellow Ribbon - TCM Turner Classic Movies Rob Nixon

Arguably no one but the artist Frederick Remington did more to imprint an image of the Old West on the American imagination than director John Ford. The vistas of Monument Valley, the heroic posture of John Wayne, the sense of almost mournful nostalgia for a time when civilization had not yet encroached upon the free reign of the rugged individual - these were the essence of Ford's great Western films.

By the time of the release of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), however, Ford was beginning to lose favor with critics. Post-war Hollywood was turning toward stark realism and contemporary themes. The classic popular genres, among them musicals and westerns, were starting to be regarded as old hat and irrelevant to the concerns of the day. But audiences obviously still found something in Ford's work that the critics either missed or dismissed because from the first day of its release, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon was a solid box-office hit, and today it's regarded as one of his finest.

Set in 1876, shortly after Custer's defeat at Little Big Horn, the film tells the story of 43-year cavalry veteran Captain Nathan Brittles (Wayne), who faces an Indian uprising on the eve of his retirement. With this, the second picture in Ford's cavalry trilogy (bookended by 1948's Fort Apache and Rio Grande in 1950), the director further displayed his fascination with the heightened sense of camaraderie among fighting men and the value of tradition and ritual. It also gave Wayne one of his most memorable roles, playing a man a generation older than himself with a more vulnerable side; something the actor had rarely shown before. Years later, Wayne spoke admiringly about the touches Ford added to give dimension to his character, such as the scene where Brittles, accepting a watch from his troops as a retirement gift, comically fumbles with a pair of bifocals to look at the inscription.

But this proved to be a critical disappointment for Wayne, too. Although several reviewers praised his portrayal, the general critical consensus was not in favor of his trying something new and expanding his range. Wayne recalled rather bitterly that he never got the credit he deserved for the picture, so he just went back to "re-acting" for the rest of his career, an assessment that would seem odd to anyone who's ever seen him in Ford's The Searchers (1956).

Reviews aside, audiences were happy to be back in familiar Ford territory, not only in the company of several actors who made up a sort of stock company for the director (including Wayne, Victor McLaglen and Harry Carey Jr.) but in the breathtaking landscape of Monument Valley. By the time he made this movie, Ford considered the location on the Arizona-Utah border his lucky spot and knew every inch of it. To capture it, he hired Winton C. Hoch, one of the pioneers of Technicolor and the foremost color cinematographer in the business. Ford, Hoch and art director Jim Basevi pored over Remington's paintings for the look and feel of the Old West. But although Hoch was meticulous about focus, frame and lighting, he almost didn't get one of the most famous and characteristic shots in the picture, an incident that marked the beginning of his long but tempestuous working relationship with Ford.

At one point, while shooting a line of soldiers on horseback, a desert storm kicked up. Ford thought the angry, dramatic clouds made a good backdrop for the scene, but Hoch insisted there wasn't enough light. Ford demanded the cameras be kept rolling anyway, and Hoch filed a formal complaint with the American Society of Cinematographers saying the shot was unacceptable and that he had been forced to do it. But on Academy Award night the following year, Hoch was the only one of the cast and crew to walk away with an Oscar.

Only The Cinema [Ed Howard]

User reviews from imdb Author: theowinthrop from United States

girish: John Ford in "Undercurrent" May 18, 2009

Propaganda and American Values in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon Laurel Westbrook book review of John Wayne's America, by Garry Wills, Fall 1999

Filmcritic.com Paul Brenner

John Ford For Ever Serge Daney, translation by Laurent Kretzschmar, originally published in Liberation, November 18, 1988

DVD Savant Review: She Wore a Yellow Ribbon Glenn Erickson

DVD Verdict [Joe Armenio] John Wayne and John Ford Film Collection

DVDTown [John J. Puccio]

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] John Wayne and John Ford Film Collection

The Aisle Seat [Andy Dursin] John Wayne and John Ford Film Collection

Review: She Wore a Yellow Ribbon - Tail Slate Marty Leicht

Dennis Schwartz

George Chabot's Review

J & C Christian Movie Reviews

User reviews from imdb Author: Ben Burgraff (cariart) from Las Vegas, Nevada

Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]

Monsters and Critics - DVD Review [Jeff Swindoll]

The Movie Scene [Andy Webb]

Western Classic Movies

Eye for Film : She Wore A Yellow Ribbon Movie Review (1949) Liam Papworth

Richard Beal's Blog » She Wore a Yellow Ribbon – John Wayne March 24, 2011

Movie Mirror [Sanderson Beck]

She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1949) Edward Jahiel

Brian Koller, filmsgraded.com also seen here: Brian Koller

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

Andy's Film Blog [Andy Kaiser]

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) Classic Film Guide

Variety.com [Variety Staff]

BBCi - Films (DVD review) Almar Haflidason

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon - Movies - New York Times Bosley Crowther

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon R1 vs. R2 Celto Slavica from DVDBeaver

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Film locations for She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

James Warner Bellah - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Yellow ribbon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The History of the YELLOW RIBBON End Time Pilgrim

2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment (United States) - Wikipedia, the free ...

7th Cavalry Regiment (United States) - Wikipedia, the free ...

Battle of the Little Bighorn - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Indian massacre - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cultural Policy in US History Don Adams and Arlene Goldbard

Native American Genocide Still Haunts U.S. Leah Trabich from An End to Intolerance, June 1997

American Indian Holocaust - United Native America United Native America

Native American Genocide Eagleman from Wicocomico

The Genocide of the American Indians

List of massacres in the United States

WAGON MASTER

USA (86 mi) 1950

Time Out

Another Fordian epic positing the American community as the sum of its bands of outsiders, with a Mormon wagon train bound for the westward Promised Land in alliance with a pair of rootless horse-traders, a trio of theatricals, and a tribe of nomadic Navajos, tested by the landscape and the threat of their perverse familial mirror image, the villainous Uncle Shiloh Clegg and his boys. A moral fable, but with a refreshing lack of rhetoric to its poetry. Athlete/actor Jim Thorpe, here playing the Navajo leader, was himself portrayed by Burt Lancaster the following year in the biopic Jim Thorpe - All-American.

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr)

The film that John Ford most often cited as his personal favorite among his westerns, Wagon Master (1950) stars Ben Johnson and Harry Carey Jr. as two drifters assigned to lead a Mormon train to the Utah frontier. Ford treats one of his central themes--the birth of a community--through a sweeping visual metaphor of movement. Seldom has the western landscape seemed such a tangible emblem of hope and freedom. A masterpiece beyond question--but a masterpiece that never degenerates into pomposity or self-consciousness. It's American filmmaking at its finest and most eloquent. 86 min.

Raging Bull [Mike Lorefice]

The sweeping poetic vision of the west John Ford creates in Wagon Master has rarely been matched. The wagons alternately glide and shake, their inhabitants coexisting with nature and regularly pausing to celebrate life however they can. The film is theoretically about the Mormons 1849 journey to their "promised land" Utah, but it could best be described as Ford's idea of the west. Tinged with nostalgia, Ford captures the joyful spirit of the pioneers in this communal film. America is a place for all forms of outcasts, with Ford giving us a cross section to show most of them will band together, and his stereotypical bandit family (in My Darling Clementine they were called Clanton, now they are Clegg) to represent those who refuse no matter how hard you try. With the exception of a few scenes such as the bandits arrival - a missed opportunity for a startling turn because Ford opened the film with one of their holdups - where Ford shows a series of head shots to convey the apprehension, fear, and intensity of the situation, the film is so lighthearted and laid back there's almost no tension. This had to be one of the most grueling journeys in American history, but to Ford it's mostly singing and dancing. Some Mormons die, but the film celebrates the life of the ones who live to they are just a bit of collateral damage. Ford actually did some writing here with this son Patrick, taking tremendous creative license including making Mormons liberal pacifists who refuse to bear arms. The characters are well developed at least, and it's nice to see a western about tolerance for once. There are no stars, so Ford doesn't have to focus on one or two individuals and tailor the characters to their iconography. He has the characters he wants and gets performances at least as good from his stock company actors, including impressive turns from Ward Bond & Ben Johnson.

Turner Classic Movies Jeremy Arnold

"Be gentle," repeats Ben Johnson over and over early in Wagon Master (1950). He's talking to his horses, but in a way, he's talking to the audience, too. There's not much action forthcoming (especially for a Western), and there is barely a story. And yet Wagon Master is one of the most poetic narrative films ever made. What little plot exists is secondary to the movie's real concern: celebrating a way of life, that of Mormon pioneers, and placing it in the context of nature. Director John Ford, one of the most visual of directors working near the peak of his career, called Wagon Master not only his favorite Western but described it as, "along with The Fugitive (1947) and The Sun Shines Bright (1953), the closest to being what I had wanted to achieve."

In a rare starring role, Ward Bond plays the leader of a group of Mormons who, shunned by society, struggle to cross the American West to reach their "promised land," where they can settle and form a community. They ask two horse traders (Ben Johnson and Harry Carey, Jr.) who know the territory to lead their wagon train. It takes some convincing, but they finally agree to do it, and the rest of the story follows their journey and the obstacles they must overcome, including Indians, gunmen, and Mother Nature. Yet the story often pauses to revel in the characters dancing, whittling or singing (the soundtrack is packed with old Western songs), and to show pastoral sequences of the wagons simply moving through the landscape or crossing a river. These scenes become the emotional core of the film, and they undoubtedly are what Ford was so satisfied to have achieved.

By all accounts, the production of Wagon Master was as relaxed and enjoyable as the movie itself. Fittingly, it was a family project: John Ford received story credit and directed. His son Patrick shared screenplay credit (with Frank Nugent). His brother Francis was in the cast (as Mr. Peachtree), and his daughter Barbara was assistant editor! With a budget just under $1 million (the highest paid actor was Ward Bond at $20,000), Ford was able to shoot the picture in under a month by filming between 10 and 28 setups a day, often doing just one take. Filming took place mostly near Moab, Utah, then a tiny town. On weekends, with nothing else to do, the movie company took over the town theater and put on Robert Service's "The Shooting of Dan McGrew," staged and narrated by John Ireland, who was in Moab to be with his wife Joanne Dru - the leading lady of Wagon Master.

Ford liked Moab because of its landscape - especially its river crossings - but also because of the look of the local populace. Patrick Ford remembered, "Moab had the greatest faces in the world. [John] wouldn't credit a Hollywood extra if he could do otherwise. He wouldn't use a Hollywood Indian if there was still a real Indian alive." Furthermore, wrote Harry Carey, Jr., in his memoir, Company of Heroes, "To [Ford], there was no such person as an extra, and because of that, they all adored him. He knew most of them by name by the end of that first day. They'd do anything for him."

Ward Bond gave one of his most endearing performances in Wagon Master. At one point he accidentally fell off his horse, luckily not hurting his left leg, which had been damaged some time earlier in a car accident and on which he often wore a brace. With the camera still rolling, Bond remained in character, got up and angrily berated the horse - a bit that remained in the picture.

An even more amusing incident happened on the day that Ford decided to work into the film two local dogs who were constantly getting into fights with each other. Ford wanted to stage a fistfight between Carey and a stuntman with the dogs fighting in the background. Ward Bond was then to enter the frame and separate the two men. Ford methodically explained the logistics to everyone, and the two men started their fight. But when the dogs were let loose, they didn't fight - they froze. Then one ran away while the other attacked Bond, ripping his left pant leg wide open. "I have never in my life seen Jack Ford laugh so hard," remembered Carey. "Ward ran into the scene, torn pants and all, and separated the two of us." This scene remains in the finished film.

Wagon Master (1950) by Richard T. Jameson from Fipresci magazine, 2009

WAGON MASTER: A WORLD OF SPIRIT Mardecortesbaja

The New York Times

RIO GRANDE

USA (105 mi) 1950

Time Out

Wayne's Captain York from Fort Apache has become a Colonel by the time Rio Grande closes the Ford cavalry trilogy, but is still much exercised by troubled notions of authority in both the mirrored families of home life (O'Hara and estranged son Jarman) and command (hamstrung by the inconveniently close Mexican border while keeping down marauding Apaches). A bit wordy, a bit plot-heavy, and with an unfortunate tendency to saccharine musical excess (the Sons of the Pioneers), it's fairly minor but still resonant Ford.

digitallyObsessed! DVD Review [Dan Heaton]

Separated from his lovely wife and estranged from his son, Lieutenant Colonel Kirby York (John Wayne) devotes all his time to commanding the cavalry. Situated amid the lonely confines of Fort Stark near the Rio Grande, he maintains a stern presence while gaining little enjoyment from his duties. Does a compassionate presence still exist within this courageous figure? When his son enlists in the cavalry under his command, York must deal with the demons of the past. Meanwhile, frequent attacks from aggressive Apache tribes create a danger that could quickly sever this new familial bond.

The last of the John Wayne/John Ford cavalry trilogy, Rio Grande focuses on issues of honor and duty and their conflict with family needs. Following Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, this story is generally regarded by critics as the least effective of the three films. However, it remains an often-stirring tale of the personal difficulties of cavalry life. Maureen O'Hara and Wayne star in the first of five screen combinations for the duo, who exude a believable chemistry with only brief glances. O'Hara has a wonderful screen presence and brings impressive depth to a possibly one-note character.

After failing math at West Point, innocent Jeff York (Claude Jarman Jr.) enlists in the cavalry to the extreme dismay of his mother Kathleen (O'Hara). The young man has not seen his father in 15 years, and he remains stoic during their initial meeting. Kirby maintains a stern countenance, which immediately creates a quiet bond between them. Intent on removing her son from a path similar to his father, Kathleen arrives to return him to more civilized avenues. The first meeting between her and Kirby is a classic moment that reveals a surprising subtelty to Wayne's acting. They both gaze longingly at the other, but neither will easily admit their continual attraction. In the hands of lesser actors, their romance would veer into conventional boredom, but it generally remains interesting throughout the film.

Directed by the legendary John Ford, Rio Grande features the usual array of impressive stunts and remarkable scenery. The work with horses is especially well done, including a memorable Roman-riding scene. Ben Johnson, Harry Carey Jr., and Claude Jarman Jr. all perform the stunt of standing above two horses in an incredibly dangerous moment. The Apache battles also showcase notable stunt work as horses and wagons fall in all types of manners. Filmed in Moab, Utah—a smaller version of Monument Valley—this movie features several picturesque landscapes. The Colorado River covers nicely for the title waterway, and it leads to a believable story.

While offering some interesting conflicts, this tale never reaches the very top echelon of the Western genre. It showcases a compassionate romance and decent action, but the complexity level falls short of the best entries. Wayne, O'Hara, and the supporting cast all do a nice job in carrying an only acceptable script. Certain areas move too slowly, including several lengthy songs from the Sons of the Pioneers. These interludes provide a refreshing change-of-pace, but they sometimes distract from the central story. The Native American conflict is also underwritten, as they serve only to further the plights of the Yorks. Even given its minor flaws, Rio Grande remains an entertaining picture. Wayne and O'Hara are engaging, and Ford's lush outdoor direction helps to create an enjoyable atmosphere.

Turner Classic Movies Jerry Renshaw

John Ford never really intended to make a 'cavalry trilogy', but Fort Apache (1948), She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950) have come to be recognized by film historians as a connecting trio of films. And they did bear the common threads of the Monument Valley landscape, plots based on stories by James Warner Bellah and the presence of John Wayne as a cavalry officer.

Rio Grande was the result of a brief alliance between Ford's Argosy Productions and Republic Studios (Wayne made many pictures at Monogram, one of the companies that preceded Republic). Ford's relationship with Republic producer Herbert Yates was a prickly one; by 1950, Ford had his sights set on The Quiet Man, a movie that would become a classic for Ford and Wayne both. Yates, however, insisted on a solid box-office film from Ford before he'd consider investing in The Quiet Man. The result was Rio Grande, an archetypal cavalry Western.

Based on Bellah's "Mission With No Record", Rio Grande finds Wayne reprising his role as Col. Kirby Yorke, assigned to a remote outpost on the Rio Grande with an assignment to train fifteen recruits, one of whom is his son he's not seen in years. His mother shows up to remove him, but the young trooper decides to stay and fight the Apaches. Soon Yorke finds himself locked in a family conflict and a bloody Indian war, facing the possibility of a court-martial for his unorthodox tactics.

Shot on location in Moab, Utah, Rio Grande was treated as an exercise by Ford (Harry Carey, Jr. called it one of the director's "vacation pictures"). The budget was half of the production costs for Fort Apache, and no one, Ford included, seemed to take the project very seriously. The director was especially irritated when producer Yates showed up on location with fellow Republic executive Rudy Ralston. Pointing out the time (it was ten in the morning), Yates asked when Ford intended to start shooting; "Just as soon as you get the hell of my set", Ford supposedly replied. The director later played a practical joke on the two producers at dinnertime. He hired one of his actors, Alberto Morin, to masquerade as a French waiter with poor English skills. During their meal, Morin managed to spill soup on the men, break several plates, and create a general ruckus in the dining room but Yates and Ralston never seemed to catch on to the joke.

In June 1950, while Rio Grande was being filmed in Utah, North Korea was invading South Korea. By late November, when the picture was in theaters, Chinese forces were attacking U.S. positions in North Korea. General Douglas MacArthur suggested using atomic weapons against the Chinese but President Harry Truman opposed the idea. This conflict between diplomatic tact and defense through aggression was certainly a timely theme and the subplot of Rio Grande mirrored a similar situation.

One last bit of trivia: Rio Grande features nine songs, many of which are performed by the Sons of the Pioneers. It was also the first of five films in which John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara starred together, the others being The Quiet Man (1952), The Wings of Eagles (1957), McLintock! (1963), and Big Jake (1971).

John Wayne's America: Rio Grande by Brianna Keilar Fall 1999

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THE QUIET MAN

USA (129 mi) 1952

Time Out

Ford's flamboyantly Oirish romantic comedy hides a few tough ironies deep in its mistily nostalgic recreation of an exile's dream. But the illusion/reality theme underlying immigrant boxer Wayne's return from America to County Galway - there to become involved in a Taming of the Shrew courtship of flame-haired O'Hara, and a marathon donnybrook with her truculent, dowry-withholding brother McLaglen - is soon swamped within a vibrant community of stage-Irish 'types'. Ford once described it gnomically as 'the sexiest picture ever made'.

Ruthless Reviews Matt Cale

John Ford’s The Quiet Man just might be the only film ever made devoted exclusively to John Wayne’s desire to get laid. Over the course of 129 blarney-filled minutes, Wayne huffs and puffs about the Irish countryside, piss-drunk and full of rage over not being able to throw Maureen O’Hara down on the bed and have his swaggering way with her. Wayne is Sean Thornton, an ex-boxer from the United States returning to the land of his birth to escape his guilt over having killed a man in the ring. Within moments of his arrival, he makes an offer for his ancestral home and seconds after that, makes another for O’Hara’s hand. Because he’s in a foreign land and must abide by its ridiculous Catholic customs, he simply can’t take her to the barn and splash his manly seed about. Instead, he has to marry her first, which is a process that involves a dowry, a loutish, overly possessive brother, and what appears to be each and every priest in the Emerald Isle. This is the sort of town where everyone staggers around in a stupor -- including men of the cloth -- and the women exist solely to be widows, virgins, and young wives waiting to be savagely beaten after a drunken Da returns from the pub. Hell, with all the fighting, cussing, drinking, and singing, it could be argued that Ford’s stereotypes do more damage to the cause of the Irish than a hundred potato famines. But this is the homeland Ford holds near and dear to his heart, which makes sense given his reputation as a whiskey-soaked bastard.

While the Technicolor visions of Ireland are a stunning sight to behold, the story is little more than a Ford family holiday; a light break between the sort of films where he single-handedly created Western mythology. Still, The Quiet Man is locked in a fantasy all its own; where we truly can go home again and what’s more, the entire village will show up to see us along. Things aren’t helped by O’Hara (as Mary Kate Danaher), who is so unsympathetic that we can’t help but root for Wayne as he drags her along the ground despite his deplorable misogyny. This is the sort of film where sweaty oafs roar for their supper and get it -- piping hot -- lest the poor girl get a bloodied fist in the kisser. Mary Kate is a red-haired siren to be sure, so we understand why Sean wants to split her Irish rose, but we simply can’t believe that he’d abide by tradition and wait for her brother to hand over $350 in gold coins. His raging blue balls would have eventually gotten the best of him, after all. At one point, Sean grabs Mary Kate, lifts her in his arms, and turns down the bed, but instead of a brutal, much-deserved rape, he simply throws her down, breaking the expensive piece of furniture in the process. The censors of the era must have had a field day with that scene, as it is charged with an unbearable sexual tension, but we’re asked to believe John Feckin' Wayne would simply walk away. Nope, the Duke takes what he needs. He’s too busy skinning redskins to show compassion and restraint.

And so we endure the long build-up to the final scene, where Sean and Mary Kate’s brother Will (played by the reliably ox-like Victor McLaglen) battle on the streets, in the fields, and over the lush hills, to the only possible conclusion: the two men respecting each other, Mary Kate finally giving it up, and the local widow wedding a tamed Will. Before that end, however, Sean and Will engage in a heavyweight clash far longer even than the famed Gentleman Jim Corbett/James L. Sullivan bout of 1892. At least a dozen buckets of water are splashed on the two brutes as they make their way through the town, and by the end, so many townspeople have joined the party that the whole thing could easily be confused for the New York City Draft Riots of 1863. Not like the Irish would know anything about that, of course.

I’m not clear what the usually reliable Ford was up to here, although one suspects that the comedy was quite intentional. Ford clearly loves these rascals, and as usual, he explores community with an eye for the bonds that keep larger concerns at bay. This, after all, is an Ireland unaffected by “the troubles,” or any sort of religious conflict, and what we are left with is an unspoiled Eden where work (or the absence thereof) is never an issue. We’ll make do, just don’t hide the bottle. Still, Wayne seems confused by his status as a romantic lead, and the few brief scenes of awkward courtship (supervised walks and the like) usually defer to slaps, threatened slaps, and discussions of Wayne being forced to spend his evenings in a sleeping bag until he can finally crash his pasty heap upon the snotty lass. Far from a tale whereby civilization (read: women) tames the beast, the female in question grabs the hero by the balls, demands a bloodbath in her honor, and won’t rest until he’s done her bidding. Ford’s Westerns are usually patriarchal affairs, but he recognizes that gunplay eventually gives way to the security of hearth and home. Perhaps the final brawl is at last that regeneration through violence that men like Wayne need before settling into domestic quietude, but as it came with the full endorsement of his wife, the usual Fordian values seem distant, if not entirely absent.

Whenever I am confronted with a so-called classic that I find less than stellar, I first ask why it retains it beloved status through the generations. True, it might be the quintessential Irish tale -- tall, long, and told through the haze of whiskey-soaked half-truths and blarney-inflected malarkey -- but I imagine it’s the utter lack of complexity or depth that has people riveted. It’s such a joyful tale, after all, where the rigid mandates of the Church can be dismissed as playful quirks, and the ungodly consumption of paint thinner leads not to death or cirrhosis, but innocent kisses and bar songs about the homeland. Wayne can wear a bowler and not elicit snickers, a hillside horse race can occupy a good ten minutes without complaint, and we can all dance a jig while laughing our heartaches away. We confront nothing, ask even less, and stare longingly at those endless seas of green.

John Ford's The Quiet Man extended essay from William C. Dowling

The Quiet Man (1952) Sam Adams from Fipresci magazine, 2009

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THE SUN SHINES BRIGHT

USA (92 mi) 1953

Time Out

Usually cited as Ford's personal favourite among his own films, this picks up the story of Judge Priest, his 1934 Will Rogers vehicle, and follows the picaresque experiences of the old judge of Fairfield, Kentucky, some 15 years on, as the twentieth century exerts a pull forward equal to the retrograde magnetism of the Civil War. Winninger's judge casts benevolent paternalism over an American community idealised almost to the extent of the Irish village in The Quiet Man, but still riven with vestiges of racism, religious prudery, and the scars of the North/South divide, and now facing an electoral tussle between the Old and the New. A mosaic of Americana both sentimental and self-consciously critical, with the emphatic past tense its safety valve.

The Sun Shines Bright Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Reader

My favorite John Ford feature (1953) was also the director's, and it's one of his cheapest and coziest, made in black and white at Republic Pictures. Vaguely a remake of his 1934 Judge Priest, set in an idyllic Kentucky town at the turn of the century, it features the same alcoholic hero—this time played by Charles Winninger and even more transparently a stand-in for Ford. The busy plot, confused by insensitive studio cutting, concerns racial strife, prostitution, prudery, and death and involves the entire community; Ford makes the film a ceremonial elegy and testament to everything that he loves and respects. With Stepin Fetchit, John Russell, Arleen Whelan, Francis Ford (in his last screen appearance), and Slim Pickens (in his first).

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz)

Considered John Ford's ("Wagon Master"/"The Fugitive") favorite film among his own works, a continuation of his 1934 Judge Priest which starred Will Rogers. It's a personal film based on humorist Irvin S. Cobb's three short stories "The Sun Shines Bright," "The Lord Provides," and "The Mob From Massac." It follows in an agreeable way the colorful elderly ex-Confederate bugler of Fairfield County, Kentucky, Judge William Pittman Priest (Charles Winninger), who is in the middle of a heated election with the son of a carpetbagger, Horace Maydew (Milburn Stone)--someone who cannot relate to people in the same easy way that Priest can, but stands behind a right-wing agenda to bring back "law and order."

The Judge is a natural politician, a heavy drinker and a lover of the Confederacy, but also alienates many of the upper-class citizens with his homey approach to office. But he's tight with the common people who keep re-electing him and his other Confederate cronies to office. He especially has a friendly but paternalistic relationship with the blacks (non-voters by law) such as his loyal servant Jeff (Stepin Fetchit), Uncle Zack, and Uncle Pleasant Woodford. The stereotyped characterization of the blacks, seemingly dancing for joy in their segregated community, would no longer be P.C. to a modern audience or acceptable to too many African-Americans. John Ford might have meant well, which I believe is so, but it's difficult to give him a free pass except to say he's a product of his times. 

The storyline follows Judge Priest going out of his way to befriend the Union war veterans in order to bring harmony to the community, run a fair court, preserve the southern traditions without being a racist, treating the rejected grand- daughter (Arleen Whelan) of General Fairfield with dignity while others sneer at her behind her back because her mother was a prostitute, singlehandedly stopping the lynching by an angry white mob of an innocent slow-witted black youngster, named U.S. Grant Woodford, accused of raping a white girl (he does this despite the possibility of losing the election, since those was his constituents in the mob), and marching in a funeral procession for a prostitute who came home to be buried while the "better" people in town refuse to treat her as a Christian and would deny her the right of having a preacher at her funeral service.

The Judge acts as a healer and a benovolent paternalist figure, serving office only to make his community a friendlier and better place. He just happens to look the other way at the evil vestiges of the Old South, the religious stuffiness of the community, and the real scars leftover from the Civil War.  

The result is a heavy mix of mushy sentimentality and low-brow comedy, and a melodrama that seems as if it were already outdated on its theater release date in 1953. Ford's idealized view of America seems old-fashioned and incredulously naive but, it's not all bad, as it ends on an upbeat note with members of both races singing together "My Old Kentucky Home."

'The Doddering Relics of a Lost Cause' by Jonathan Rosenbaum, who claims this is his favorite Ford film, calling it “the opposite of Gone with the Wind in almost every way, especially in relation to the power associated with stars and money,” from Rouge

The New York Times

MOGAMBO

USA (115 mi) 1953

Time Out

Gable's performance in Red Dust alongside Jean Harlow had been one of his earliest hits; 21 years later he was still big enough at the box-office to star in this remake, re-scripted by original screenwriter John Lee Mahin, and re-sited from a studio-set Saigon to African locations. The insolent sex talk of the original is here toned down, and the relaxed rumbustiousness of the safari love triangle is wholly in keeping with Ford's holidaying inclinations at the time. Half-hearted, half-baked, and at least half-watchable.

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr)

John Ford's 1953 remake of Red Dust lies far from his field of personal interest--in Africa, in fact--but it is a creditable sex and safari yarn. Ava Gardner more than holds her own against Jean Harlow's original performance, lending her dusky energy to a tritely conceived part: she's the international call girl who falls for the great white hunter (Clark Gable, far more interesting than he was in the first version). As the temptingly pure and fragile Englishwoman, Grace Kelly was closer to Ford's sympathy and understanding, but Gardner walks off with the movie and the man. Oddly, the studio scenes are more atmospheric than the location shots. 115 min.

Modern Times to Moscow on the Hudson Pauline Kael from 5001 Nights at the Movies

Clark Gable as a mighty hunter in Africa, in a remake of RED DUST, which he'd starred in 21 years before; Ava Gardner plays the old Jean Harlow role--the wisecracking, tough broad--and Grace Kelly does her hot-ice bit as a ladylike prig (the old Mary Astor role). Gable certainly doesn't have the animal magnetism he had in the earlier version, but when Gardner and Kelly bitch at each other, doing battle for him, they're vastly entertaining anyway. (Gardner has never seemed happier.) The director, John Ford, got a little carried away with African wildlife (RED DUST was faster and funnier), but this sexual melodrama never takes itself too seriously. John Lee Mahin revamped his earlier script; the color cinematography is by Robert Surtees and Freddie Young. With Donald Sinden, Denis O'Dea, and Laurence Naismith. MGM.

Reel.com DVD review [Ken Dubois]

With the Technicolor extravaganza Mogambo, director John Ford transplanted the no-nonsense machismo of his cowboy Westerns to deepest Africa, and cast Clark Gable as the John Wayne of the Jungle, master of all he surveys and the undisputed king of beasts. Gable comes equipped with a shotgun, but it's his icy stare that causes wild animals to run away, and women to run toward him, abandoning all sense of propriety and reason. He can take them or leave them, and the men, too. He's hardly interested in lesser creatures.

Gable plays safari leader Vic, who makes a living capturing animals for American zoos, and leading photo safaris for his thrill-seeking clients. In his jungle compound, he lords over a crew of assistants and entertains paying guests who arrive by boat from the outside world. Into this scene comes the smart-talking, sharp-dressing New Yorker "Honey Bear" Kelly (Ava Gardner), a globe-trotter who arrives by accident and has to kill time waiting for the next boat to take her away. All she needs is a day or two to fall for the big Mogambo himself, and Vic, who is well-versed in these steamy scenarios, is happy to oblige. He gives her one of those hard movie kisses—their faces mashed together—and the lady swoons.

Enter the fastidious young anthropologist Donald (Donald Sinden) and his prissy wife, Linda (Grace Kelly), two animals who clearly will not do well in this survival-of-the-fittest setting. In his neat pith helmet, Donald prattles on happily about all the animals he's seeing, and the fascinating tribes ("I'm very interested in those chaps," he bubbles), while his mesmerized wife goes native with Vic—more breathy dialogue, more hard kissing, and another notch on the belt for Vic, who seems to be over it before it's even begun. It never occurs to him that these dalliances will get him in trouble, but he's soon to find out that one of these ladies is a wilder animal than he ever imagined.

The movie is overblown, over-dramatic, and terrifically entertaining. The location filming in Kenya and Uganda is stunning, and the footage of real animals—giraffes, gorillas, hippos, leopards, and elephants—in the wild or interacting with the actors is amazing. Ford throws in some sort of action about every ten minutes, so the picture never has a chance to slow down, and when the safari gets going, it's genuinely exciting to watch. The characters are fun to watch too, especially Gable as the leathery lothario, who's only real interest seems to be the fight against animal nature, or giving in to it when women are concerned. Ava Gardner as Honey Bear looks a little silly decked out in pearls and lipstick, but she's quick with the wisecracks and immensely likable because of it (she's doing an awful close impersonation of her husband, Frank Sinatra). And, though Grace Kelly's fake English accent is pretty bad, her acting is decent and her star quality is hard to deny; she glows.

In a series of popular Westerns, including Stagecoach, The Searchers, and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, John Ford and John Wayne together built the persona of the tough-guy as good-guy, a man of mystery who exuded power and the absolute freedom that comes from it. So why did Ford not cast Wayne in Mogambo, in the role so clearly inspired by Wayne's previous films? Perhaps it was the scene near the end of the film, when the tables are turned on Vic and, briefly, he starts to fall apart. Alone in his tent with a bottle, his greasy hair flopped onto his forehead, he whines and wallows in drunken self-pity. Gable can pull it off, but the Duke would never do a thing like that.

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

Hollywood movies set in Africa in the decade or so before independence from European colonialism are remarkable for the lack of African characters. When the African Queen docks the first time, Humphrey Bogart has a "native" assistant who may have a line. There are Africans singing in church and African troops and sailors following orders from German commanders, but no African characters. There are assistants with lines in unidentified African languages in The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Hatari!, and Mogambo, but no credited parts. (The various versions of "King Solomon's Mine" have an African prince, and the exceedingly dull movie John Huston made of Romain Gary's Prix Goncourt-winning novel The Roots of Heaven include leaders of an independence movement. The credits to "Mogambo" list four whole tribes: Bahaya of Tanganyika, M'Beti Tribe of French Equatorial Africa, Samburu Tribe of Kenya Colony, Wagenia of Belgian Congo, though the main filming location was in Uganda.)

Like "Out of Africa" (1985's best picture according to Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences voters), the successful 1950s movie with African backdrops are romances (generally triangular) involving white visitors and white "old African hands." The Hollywood stars went on location (see Katharine Hepburn's memoir of The Making of the African Queen), but "backdrop" is apt, since many of the scenes in the various movies are process shots with the actors delivering their lines with African footage projected behind them. The alpha male gorilla charging the alpha male Hollywood star (Clark Gable) in "Mogambo" is especially obvious. Moreover, the film colors (and presumably film stock used) for showing animals and jungle do not match the colors of the scenes with Grace Kelly and/or Clark Gable supposedly in the jungle.

The pictures of flora and fauna and massed "natives" waving spears are striking and I can shrug off the lack of color continuity. The real problem (as also with "The African Queen" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro") is that the romances are hard to believe. There is a certain amount of chemistry between Ava Gardner and Clark Gable. Gardner plays Eloise Kelly, a "party girl" whose safari host, a playboy maharajah, stands her up. She adapts quickly to playing with Gable, the head of a safari/animal capturing enterprise, and then stands back with some grace to being usurped by a younger married woman (Grace Kelly).

It is the Gable/Kelly romance that is really hard to credit. I guess Gable was still the "King" of Hollywood and that was sufficient reason for every actress cast with him to rush into his arms. In the same role two decades earlier (in "Red Dust"), Mary Astor managed to look credible as the high society tag-along becoming enamored with Gable. Victor Marswell (Gable) does not seem very interested in Linda Nordley (Kelly), but somehow flips a switch that transforms her from dutiful wife of an enthusiastic young husband into being madly in love with the aging Great White Hunter. Although they are obviously incompatible, and one would assume that Marswell has been around the block in romances a few times, he is totally smitten almost as instantly and decides to take the Nordleys into gorilla country.

It is obvious to the audience that if there is a mate for Gable herein, it is Gardner, the wisecracking realist (seemingly on loan from the Howard Hawks universe). Also, the Motion Picture Production Code forbade adultery leading to happiness. Anyone who has seen more than a few Hollywood movies of the 1940s and 50s knows that the marriage is going to be shored up and that the right pairing will prevail in the end.

It takes 115 minutes to reach the end, with lots of animals (ranging from cute to menacing), chanting natives, and relationship jockeying. Clark Gable goes through the motions of being a leading man with some irony (but less charm than back in "Red Dust" ion 1932). Grace Kelly seems false to me in nearly every scene and in hurtling through a wide gamut of emotions, but won a Golden Globe and received an Oscar nomination as best supporting actress.

Although totally unbelievable to me as an anthropologist or a primatologist, Donald Nordley as played by Donald Sinden, is convincing as the husband who is the only person who does not see the romance of his wife and his contract employee, and whom in the end no one can bear to disillusion.

Ava Gardner had the best lines (along with some stupid ones), the best lighting (the nights were very brightly lit!), and some subtle nonverbal communication. (Jean Harlow is even more fun in the part in the precensorship version with the younger Gable.) Gardner and the African extras are the best reason to watch "Mogambo." The visual compositions (including the second-unit work as well as what John Ford shot) are excellent and there is no background musical score. (There is a player piano, several renditions of "Coming Through the Rye," chanting natives, fighting hippos, roaring felines, and no lack of ambient sounds.)

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MISTER ROBERTS

USA (123 mi) 1955

Time Out

Trouble-bound adaptation of Thomas Heggen's Broadway hit about a WWII supply ship, its martinet captain, and the junior officer who finally makes the symbolic gesture required to liberate the pent-up tensions in the crew. Ford became diplomatically ill, LeRoy took over, and an uncredited Joshua Logan (responsible for the original stage show) directed bits as well. The fact that the picture is seamlessly anonymous testifies to the power of star performances rather than to any directorial engagement. The acting is the only reason to watch it: Fonda as the frustrated lieutenant who craves a go at the Japs; Cagney as the tyrannical captain; Powell as the cynical medico; and Lemmon as Ensign Pulver, the joker in the pack.

Mildred Pierce to The Model Shop Pauline Kael online Reviews

The comic and heroic spirit went out of the famous stage success by Thomas Heggen and Joshua Logan when the play was transferred to the screen; it's a miserable piece of moviemaking--poorly paced and tearjerking. Henry Fonda re-creates his stage role as the ideal modest, quietly strong American--a Second World War lieutenant who is frustrated by the petty boredom of life on a rear-line Navy cargo ship and wants to get into action. Those on board include James Cagney as the tyrannical captain, William Powell as the weary-eyed ship's doctor, and Jack Lemmon, who provides a few enlivening moments, as the laundry officer--the jokester on board. Also with Betsy Palmer, Ward Bond, and Nick Adams. Two directors were involved: John Ford and Mervyn LeRoy. Adapted by Frank Nugent and Logan; produced by Leland Hayward, for Warners.

Turner Classic Movies Brian Cady

On June 4, 1942, movie director John Ford had a 16mm camera pointing out the window of a powerhouse shooting one of the most important battles of World War II. It was the Battle of Midway Island and Ford was there at the request of the U.S. Navy. He kept the film rolling even after he was struck in the arm by shrapnel and knocked down by a flying block of concrete. Twelve years later, Ford returned to Midway to shoot a rollicking comedy with old friends. Again a battle raged and this time, Ford lost.

Mister Roberts (1955) started as a novel by Thomas Heggen, but became popular when it hit Broadway as a stage play in 1948, written by Heggen and Joshua Logan. The play starred movie actor Henry Fonda who had left Hollywood after making Fort Apache (1948) with director John Ford. For once, that turned out to be a wise decision, as the play became one of Broadway's most popular hits.

When Logan and the play's producer, Leland Hayward, went to Warner Brothers to make the film version, Fonda felt there was little chance he would be given Roberts. After all, he was then nearly fifty years old and Roberts was written as being a man in his twenties. In fact, Warner Brothers would have preferred Marlon Brando or William Holden in the lead. However, one of the first decisions the producing team made was bringing Ford onboard as director and Ford demanded Fonda. To make Fonda seem younger, most of the rest of the cast was populated with older actors; fifty-five year old James Cagney as the dictatorial Captain Morton and, after Spencer Tracy turned down the role, sixty-two year old William Powell for Doc. For the young Ensign Pulver, Ford chose a little-known actor who had made a screen test for his previous movie The Long Grey Line (1955)- Jack Lemmon.

As the filming began, sailing could not have seemed smoother. Ford used his Navy connections to find one of the old cargo scows to use for the story's setting and boat; cast and crew were all sent to Midway Island for exterior shooting. Why it all went wrong is a matter of controversy. After years playing Roberts on stage, Fonda felt he owned the role and knew how it was to be played. Ford had other ideas, introducing bits of broad physical comedy, inventing new situations and, allegedly, throwing more attention to Lemmon's Pulver than Fonda's Roberts. Fonda kept his mouth shut but Ford could tell he was dissatisfied. One night, Ford confronted Fonda in his quarters while Fonda was having a meeting with Hayward. "I understand you're not happy with my work," Ford muttered and, when Fonda confirmed it, Ford charged him, swinging wildly. Fonda managed to hold him back and Ford later apologized. The damage, however, was done and was irreparable.

Ford continued directing the movie into the next month but could not handle being subservient to an actor. His way of dealing with the humiliation was drinking, keeping an ice chest full of beer nearby and downing up to two cases a day. After exterior shooting was completed, Ford was hospitalized with a gall bladder attack. The day he went into hospital for surgery, he was replaced by Mervyn LeRoy, the director of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) and Quo Vadis? (1951). LeRoy shot all the studio-bound interiors except for two scenes, the laundry scene and Pulver's final message to the Captain, both of which were directed by Joshua Logan.

Those who knew the play well from Broadway were unhappy with the end result but their perspective may have been colored by unrealistic expectations. Movie audiences loved Mister Roberts, making it 1955's third-biggest box office hit, and earning Jack Lemmon his first Academy Award. Ford went on to what many feel was his greatest movie, The Searchers (1956), while Fonda had a long career of acting triumphs. But these two former friends never worked together again.

Three Movie Buffs (Patrick Nash)

DVD Verdict (Nicholas Sylvain)

Audio Revolution Bill Warren

The New York Times (A.H. Weiler)

THE SEARCHERS B 89

USA (119 mi) 1956

One remains dumfounded at the near unanimous praise this film has received, that it is considered a legendary film masterpiece, perhaps the greatest Western ever, yet it is so blatantly racist in its degrading and thoroughly inaccurate depiction of Indians, despite the fact it intentionally depicts an overzealous Indian hater who is so outside the mainstream that he is eventually ostracized from his own society because of it. While it remains a wretchedly racist film about a racist, one must be curious why a film like this gets a free ride into cinema immortality when it is at least possible that this film may do more harm than good.

When looking at John Ford, he is a man whose cinematic visualizations are renowned, but his hatchet job of American history is equally legendary, as he insists on perpetrating the same racist myths about Indians that have been in effect for the past 100 years, which makes his historic vision as a filmmaker no better than the dime store novelist that originated these misconceptions. Ford has always portrayed Indians in the least desirable light, showing them to be less than human, vicious savages, terrible shots, poor military strategists, and little more than pathetic wretches of humanity, so little sympathy is ever shown when a gazillion Indians are killed onscreen, such as in STAGECOACH (1939).  Even when adding psychological depth and complexity to the Western, there is no understanding whatsoever of Indians or Indian culture, yet he continued to project the same racist stereotype of "Indian as savages.” Ford is revered for his supposed authenticity and historic attention to detail in his depiction of the West, but someone needs to point out how racist and degrading his supposed portrait of authenticity really is.  He allowed white characters to be psychologically complex, but never Indians.

There is much to admire in many of his early films, The Informer (1935), The Hurricane (1937), and The Long Voyage Home (1940). In his later work, MISTER ROBERTS (1955) is an absurdist, satirical look at military service, while The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) is unusually astute at debunking western myths, but real problems exist with THE SEARCHERS. Ford attempted to right some wrongs with this film, as his John Wayne character was so filled with hate that he expected filmgoers to reject and detest this flaw, the problem being this is John Wayne, the man he made into a myth. Wayne is the man Ford pumped up with western mythology and turned into a great American hero. Audiences aren't going to reject John Wayne because of a few character flaws that some people have come to expect are just part of being a rugged, individualistic American. And while the film’s Wayne character appears wise in every other respect, his fundamental flaw is his own entrenched hatred of Indians, presumably from experience, which is so completely inbred in his psyche that by the final sequence, a legendary shot in its own right, he’s not even allowed entrance into the same house as the more “acceptable” folks. What’s never really questioned, right alongside all the well-deserved praise, is why there is such a pervasive acceptance of the damaging racist views of the filmmaker himself, who continues to perpetuate degrading, historically inaccurate, and indefensible stereotypical depictions of Indians?

How are we to evaluate films like this?  How can you rate a film all puffed up with monumental critical acclaim?

Facets rates it the best film in 1956, Dave Kehr in The Reader (The Searchers) writes nothing but flattery:

“We may still be waiting for the Great American Novel, but John Ford gave us the Great American Film in 1956. THE SEARCHERS gathers the deepest concerns of American literature, distilling 200 years of tradition in a way only available to popular art, and with a beauty available only to a supreme visual poet like John Ford. Through the central image of the frontier, the meeting point of wilderness and civilization, Ford explores the divisions of our national character, with it's search for order and it's need for violence, it's spirit of community and it's quest for independence...”

Like Leni Riefenstahl and D.W. Griffith, where in an ironic twist of fate a young John Ford actually rode as one of the Klansmen in Griffith’s notorious 1915 film BIRTH OF A NATION, why don’t critics list this man’s racial flaws right alongside his considerable film skills? Why isn’t this listed in each and every film review? Without it, each new generation of film audiences is hearing only large doses of overwhelming film praise. These audiences are NOT apt to question this horrendous depiction of Indians and the generational harm these images cause in both planting the seed of ignorance in the brain and then having to learn how to reject such negative racial stereotypes, not when there is near unanimous praise for the film and the filmmaker.

THE SEARCHERS (1956), a candidate for the greatest Western ever made, is a film about a racist and bitterly hateful man, perhaps the most racist film ever made, where after a Comanche raid (offscreen) kills most of his family, Wayne's character Ethan Edwards is the ultimate Indian hater who out of love and respect for her mother Martha (Dorothy Jordan), who Wayne loved, rides for years hell-bent on saving his abducted niece Debbie (Lana Wood) from the dishonor of just living with Indians with the intent of killing her, because she’s “not white any more, she’s Comanche,” relentlessly tracking her down so that in the end he can “deliver her from evil” and be her white “savior,” harboring the racist view that whites raised by Indians are better off dead, as his captive niece, presumably raped, has been irredeemably "soiled" by the experience, a view he reluctantly revises when he later rescues her. But this view recurs in Barbara Stanwyck's role in yet another Western portrayal, TROOPER HOOK (1957), where she is so scorned by the townsfolk just for having been an Indian's woman, her fall from grace is so severe that she is forced to live outside any society, white or Indian, much like Wayne at the end of THE SEARCHERS. 

Wayne would also rather kill buffalo and leave it to rot on the plains than allow Indians to have food to eat, while the director Ford includes a despicable scene, also Aldrich in ULZANA'S RAID (1972), where whites raised by Indians are depicted as having been raped into insanity.  With Wayne typically the hero that audiences always root for, his character, despicable as it’s meant to be, only reiterates pervasive historical thought that whites are justified in commiting atrocities against non-white people, generated by these stereotypical depictions which are nothing more than white supremist myths that whites are a superior race of people than the inferior "others" represented by savage Indians. They may as well be Vietnamese, or Iraqi's, or all those black men on death row. As far as many in the white community are concerned, they're all better off dead.

There's enough hatred in this film to fill all the holes in Albert Hall.

I'm not suggesting all Westerns need to be revisionist, this was the 50's after all, a time when Americans found Communists lurking under every rock, but Westerns are among the worst offenders of a culture plagued by race and culture hatred, so it's about time someone sought to eradicate some of the harm done by these damaging and misconceived historical perceptions which only cloud and distort reality, further leading to an ill-informed populace. 

There is no question that in any John Ford/John Wayne movie, but in particular STAGECOACH (1939), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and THE SEARCHERS (1956), together they forged a tough guy persona as the good guy, a lone man who harbors private secrets from a life filled with experience, adding a touch of intrigue and mystery, not to mention power to his character, personifying the freedom that is associated with the West.  In each, Wayne is viewed as the hero and will inevitably be the smartest, most experienced, and most skilled practitioner with a gun or rifle, but also in devising strategy whenever he and/or his men get caught in a tight situation, always displaying a rare level of courage and grit under fire. Again, what's racist is the demeaning and racially restricted view that only whites have a capacity for intelligence, as Indians are never depicted as having knowledge and skill, or powers of analysis, or exhibit a sense of humor or a concern for others, or any capability for being human. These qualities are only allowed for whites, just like a white-only neighborhood, or a drinking fountain, or a rest room.   

Post Addendum:

While the film is most certainly about racism and is to be commended for wading into such murky waters, which was pretty much unheard of in the Sirkian mid 50's, one has to acknowledge that this film *has* generated volumes of discussion afterwards, so all of that is well and good. 

On balance, most of these discussions don't delve into racial analysis and simply overpraise the film to the hilt, where many of the Ford biographers, like Tad Gallagher, gush so profusely about Ford that they are nearly in love with the man, claiming he's a film God, rarely offering any true film criticism, though Gallagher does at least acknowledge that “empathy is rare in the world of The Searchers, as is our own.” 

Part of the problem is that when Ford was alive he never took responsibility for his contributions in perpetuating racist stereotypes and historical inaccuracies, something he could easily have done, but instead he backtracked somewhat, went on the defensive, and Cheyenne Autumn (1964) is an equally stereotypical and bad film, so it's a message and understanding he simply never came to terms with.  Most all film criticism refrains from calling Ford a racist, which he obviously was, and instead place him in a historical context of the times, suggesting it wasn't just Ethan, but the entire community that was biased, where the apt rationalization today is to take a position of "ambiguity." But Ethan and Ford went far beyond the prevailing views of the community, and had the galling nerve to do it in the name of western "authenticity." 

There is nothing ambiguous about Wayne's depiction of Ethan, who is the focal point of The Searchers, where his hatred is his obsession and his downfall, as he's a despicable man, thoroughly unredeemable.  But there's nothing mentally unbalanced about Ethan, no enveloping madness, as his deliberately coldblooded and calculating methods over the course of many years are designed to exact revenge, where in a lawless society, he wasn't going to wait for justice to prevail, he would take it in his own hands and act as judge and jury.  That's pretty typical of the John Wayne hero, who had little use for society's well-mannered impotency.  He was a man of action and at the center of every decisive scene in a John Ford Western, where his character is an accumulation of decades of films, so he's ultimately judged differently than the half-breed Martin (who actually kills Ethan’s nemesis and counterpart, Comanche Chief Scar) who shows up only in this single film.  He's John Wayne, so in a Western he commands the screen.  Because of his qualities of heroic individualism, his world weary intelligence, and overall Western mettle, people look up to him as a role model, as the picture of masculinity and strength.  And his hate-based obsession is still reflected in today’s prevailing racial attitudes, where's it's as toxic today as is depicted onscreen, and that's largely because the disease of racism hasn't been rooted out, but continues to be infested by each and every generation.  And at least to some degree, we have John Ford to thank for that.     

Where was Ethan to roam at the finale of The Searchers, likely the same fate as the dead Comanche whose eyes he shot out, where both would "wander forever between the winds."  In real life, the character would likely find God and go through a spiritual transformation where all is forgiven.  Even in Liberty Valance, the Wayne character all but disappears off the face of the earth so that even the townsfolk have a hard time remembering who he is at his burial.  

But John Ford, and his history-challenged westerns, will live on.   

The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson] (excerpt)

To my tastes, the world has rarely harbored enough reservations about John Ford and has always held far too many about John Wayne, but everyone has always been able to agree about this 1956 classic, which is as far from an ordinary mid-century western as King Lear is from a soap opera. The obsessive hunt for a kidnapped frontier girl (eventually, Natalie Wood) is the through-line, lasting for years and growing into a perverted odyssey of xenophobic self-hatred and waste, with Wayne at the center in arguably the most profound portrait of macho montrosity ever delivered by an American movie star.

Time Out

A marvellous Western which turns Monument Valley into an interior landscape as Wayne pursues his five-year odyssey, a grim quest - to kill both the Indian who abducted his niece and the tainted girl herself - which is miraculously purified of its racist furies in a final moment of epiphany. There is perhaps some discrepancy in the play between Wayne's heroic image and the pathological outsider he plays here (forever excluded from home, as the doorway shots at beginning and end suggest), but it hardly matters, given the film's visual splendour and muscular poetry in its celebration of the spirit that vanished with the taming of the American wilderness.

Scarface to A Sense of Loss Pauline Kael from 5001 Nights at the Movies

John Wayne is the taciturn loner, Ethan Edwards, a Confederate veteran who arrives at his married brother's ranch in Texas in 1868. Learning that there are Comanches in the area, Ethan and Martin (Jeffrey Hunter), a part Cherokee young man who lives with the brother's family, go off to look for them. While they're away the Comanches attack the ranch; they return to a scene of horror--the house has been burned down and the family slaughtered, all except Ethan's two nieces, who have been abducted. The ravaged body of the older girl is found and buried; the search for the little one (played by Lana Wood) goes on. It's a peculiarly formal and stilted movie, with Ethan framed in a doorway at the opening and the close. You can read a lot into it, but it isn't very enjoyable. The lines are often awkward and the line readings worse, and the film is often static, despite economic, quick editing. What made this John Ford Western fascinating to the young directors who hailed it in the 70s as a great work and as a key influence on them is the compulsiveness of Ethan's search for his niece (whose mother he loved) and his bitter, vengeful racism. He's surly and foul-tempered toward Martin, who accompanies him during the five years of looking for the girl (who by then has turned into Natalie Wood, in glossy makeup, as if she were going to a 50s prom), and he hates Indians so much that he intends to kill her when he finds her, because she will have become the "squaw" to what he calls a "buck." The film doesn't develop Ethan's macho savagery; it's just there--he kills buffalo, so the Comanches won't have meat, and he shoots out the eyes of a dead Comanche. The sexual undertones of Ethan's character almost seem to belong to a different movie; they don't go with the many crude and corny touches in this one. Ford's attempts at comic relief are a fizzle--especially the male knockabout humor, an episode involving a fat Indian woman called Look (Beulah Archuletta), and the scenes with Hank Worden overacting the role of a crazy man. Throughout, the performances are highly variable. With Vera Miles, Dorothy Jordan, Ward Bond who wears a fine top hat, Henry Brandon as Chief Scar, Ken Curtis as Charlie the singing guitarist, Peter Mamakos as Futterman, Olive Carey, John Qualen, Antonio Moreno, Harry Carey, Jr., Walter Coy, Pippa Scott, Pat Wayne, Nacho Galindo, and in a small part, Mae Marsh. From a novel by Alan LeMay, adapted by Frank S. Nugent; music by Max Steiner; filmed in Colorado and in Monument Valley. (There are allusions to this film in STAR WARS, MEAN STREETS, HARDCORE, and many others.) Warners.

ToxicUniverse.com (John Nesbit)

Ignored by The Academy and lightly regarded by critics upon its 1956 release, The Searchers has since found a large fan base and numerous critics to champion the film as John Ford's masterpiece and one of the best films of all time. The film also showcases John Wayne in his most complex role--the western loner, relentlessly searching for his niece and consumed with hatred for Comanches (although he is well versed in their language and ways). As big as the Duke is, he remains within the larger landscape of Ford’s magnificent storytelling abilities and the incredible scenery of Monument Valley.

Although filmed on Navajo land in northern Arizona, the film begins in 1868 Texas with a magnificent inside framing shot of a cabin door, opening up to high desert red sandstone formations and turquoise sky (a similar shot will bookend the film). A silhouetted pioneer woman moves from the darkness into the brightly lit desertscape to greet Ethan Edwards (Wayne), arriving back home from the Civil War, and never re-uniting with the Union: "I figure a man's only good for one oath at a time. I took mine to the Confederate States of America." Furthering his isolation, Ethan mysteriously has a significant amount of mint gold coins and hints abound that he’s wanted by the law.

The family homestead is now headed up by his brother Aaron (Walter Coy), married to Martha (Dorothy Jordan), who have a son named Ben (Robert Lyden) and two daughters named Lucy (Pippa Scott) and Debbie (Lana Wood/Natalie Wood).

First hint of Ethan's deep hatred for Indians occurs when Aaron’s adopted son Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter) arrives for supper. Although Marty is only one-eighth Cherokee, Ethan looks askance and "teases" him as a half-breed. Demonstrating even more internal conflict is the fact that Ethan was the one who saved Marty from an Indian slaughter years before, but he still resists accepting him as a full relative: "Don't call me Uncle. I ain't your Uncle. Don't need to call me sir either, or Grandpa or Methuselah. I can whup you to a frazzle...name's Ethan."

Drawn away by a cattle raid, Ethan and Marty aren’t around for the family slaughter and kidnapping. Without showing any graphic violence, Ford expertly creates suspense through a nifty montage that includes:

1. An eerie silence to accompany the reddish sunset
2. A covey of quail taking flight from a clump of sagebrush
3. Flashing lights
4. The family dog nervously barking on the porch
5. Aaron nervously maintaining his composure, telling his anxious wife that he’s taking his gun to look for sage hens
6. Martha cautioning against lighting the kerosene lamps
7. Lucy realizing the Indian raid is approaching . . . a classic scream!

Only ten-year old Debbie is away from the cabin, as she hunkers by her grandmother's grave. On the gravestone lies the film's only clue to Ethan's intense hatred of Comanches:

HERE LIES MARY JANE EDWARDS
KILLED BY COMANCHES
MAY 12, 1852
A GOOD WIFE AND MOTHER
IN HER 41st YEAR.

Ethan's racism is blatant and troubling, becoming a crucial plot point--after years of relentless pursuit of Comanche renegade Scar (played by Anglo Henry Brandon) and the kidnapped Debbie, we're not sure if he'll rescue her or kill her. He states that she’d be better off dead after living as a Comanche and later writes her off as a blood relative. Foreshadowing Costner's Dances with Wolves, he uselessly slaughters buffalo, cynically saying, ''At least they won't feed any Comanche this winter.'' Ethan’s intense hatred isn't even confined to living Comanches, going even beyond General Sherman's statement about "the only good Indian being a dead Indian," he shoots the eyes out of a buried Comanche, explaining what "good" it does to the preacher:

By what you preach, none. But what that Comanche believes, ain't got no eyes, he can't enter the spirit-land. Has to wander forever between the winds.

Other characters chime in with parallel racist attitudes that highlight one of the worst aspects of the Old West, or of the cinematic West winding up in the 1950s. Marty's side story love interest, Laurie (Vera Miles), becomes outraged when she discovers that he has inadvertently married another woman, especially emphasizing that she's a "squaw." Even worse is a fort scene where soldiers have brought three white women who had been kidnapped by Indians, and the deranged three are ready for the loony bin. One guard remarks, "It's hard to believe they're white; to which Ethan characteristically deadpans, "They're not now--they're Comanche!"

A few years ago I exchanged a series of emails with Roger Ebert about the difficulties I had using The Searchers with my Navajo and other Native American students (I was teaching in Tuba City, about 90 minutes west of Ford's beloved Monument Valley), and Ebert admitted that the blatant racism was problematic but didn't see other more subtle forms as relevant. He discusses the issue in a recent retrospective review of The Searchers, a film he loves and has rated among his top ten of all time. Despite Ford's craftsmanship and ability to construct a compelling film amidst the beauty of Monument Valley, this film will not play well with Native American audiences (Navajos especially) because it disregards the culture and displays residual racism that Hollywood hadn’t thought of in the 1950s.

One of the reasons that Ford chose Monument Valley was due to the ease of finding Indian extras, but these "Comanches" are all Navajo except for the white chief Scar (painted with brown skin tone), who has a more prominent speaking part. Navajos will laugh at these fake Comanches because they speak Navajo and dress in traditional Navajo garb, and they may fall off their chairs when John Wayne declares that they are singing a Comanche "Death Song"--it's really a social Navajo Squaw Dance Song. More laughter will ensue when "Comanche"-speaking Ethan rides into the camp yelling "Ya-ta-HEY" (a greeting) and "Bela-gana" (white man)--pronouncing both words like a laboring first day tourist to the reservation.

Ford must have liked the face of one old extra because he appears three times as part of different Comanche bands, but as some say "all Indians look alike." Add to the mix the ludicrous "tom tom" background music to signal that Indians are in the area, and you begin to get a sense of why this film plays nearly as badly for Native Americans as Birth of a Nation does for African Americans. Of course, the year is 1956 and Hollywood hadn't thought that cultural accuracy was necessary when it came to Native Americans; one Indian language would suffice for any other, and the Indians are mostly there as background scenery anyway.

Does that mean The Searchers isn't worth watching? Nothing of the sort! John Ford stamps this entertaining western firmly with his style, building suspense visually like the classic line of scouts surrounded on both sides with parallel lines of Comanches. Masterfully incorporating the Monument Valley landscapes without overpowering the characters demonstrates his genius. And no one is better at adding doses of humor to break up the tension--Marty's attempts to rid himself of his Comanche wife, Laurie's little smile when Marty fights for her, or comic character Mose Harper (Hank Worden) sticking out his tongue or just wanting to kick back in a rocking chair.

Just that opening shot through the cabin doorway announces that this is no ordinary film--John Ford's western artistry remains intact, and no one ever photographed Monument Valley as beautifully or crafted a western character more complex than Ethan Edwards. It's a classic that will be studied for years and paints an accurate picture of Hollywood thinking in the 1950s; for that reason it won't play as well with Native American audiences or with people sensitive to its inadvertent racism. But along those lines, there are some less publicized Abraham Lincoln quotes and actions that wouldn't sit well with African Americans.

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert)

John Ford's ''The Searchers'' contains scenes of magnificence, and one of John Wayne's best performances. There are shots that are astonishingly beautiful. A cover story in New York magazine called it the most influential movie in American history. And yet at its center is a difficult question, because the Wayne character is racist without apology--and so, in a less outspoken way, are the other white characters. Is the film intended to endorse their attitudes, or to dramatize and regret them? Today we see it through enlightened eyes, but in 1956 many audiences accepted its harsh view of Indians.

The film is about an obsessive quest. The niece of Ethan Edwards (Wayne) is kidnapped by Comanches who murder her family and burn their ranch house. Ethan spends five years on a lonely quest to hunt down the tribe that holds the girl Debbie (Natalie Wood)--not to rescue her, but to shoot her dead, because she has become ''the leavin's of a Comanche buck.'' Ford knew that his hero's hatred of Indians was wrong, but his glorification of Ethan's search invites admiration for a twisted man. Defenders of the film point to the famous scene where Ethan embraces his niece instead of killing her. Can one shot redeem a film?

Ethan's quest inspired a plot line in George Lucas' ''Star Wars.'' It's at the center of Martin Scorsese's ''Taxi Driver,'' written by Paul Schrader, who used it again in his own ''Hard Core.'' The hero in each of the Schrader screenplays is a loner driven to violence and madness by his mission to rescue a young white woman who has become the sexual prey of those seen as subhuman. Harry Dean Stanton's search for Nastassja Kinski in Wim Wenders’ ''Paris, Texas'' is a reworking of the Ford story. Even Ethan's famous line ''That'll be the day'' inspired a song by Buddy Holly.

''The Searchers'' was made in the dying days of the classic Western, which faltered when Indians ceased to be typecast as savages. Revisionist Westerns, including Ford's own ''Cheyenne Autumn'' in 1964, took a more enlightened view of native Americans, but the Western audience didn't want moral complexity; like the audience for today's violent thrillers and urban warfare pictures, it wanted action with clear-cut bad guys.

The movie was based on a novel by Alan LeMay and a script by Ford's son-in-law Frank Nugent, the onetime film critic who wrote 10 Ford films, including ''She Wore a Yellow Ribbon'' and ''Wagon Master.'' It starred John Wayne, who worked with ''Pappy'' Ford in 14 major films, as a Confederate soldier who boasts that he never surrendered, who in postwar years becomes a wanderer, who arrives at the ranch of his brother Aaron (Walter Coyt) and his wife Martha (Dorothy Jordan) under a cloud: He carries golden coins that may be stolen, and Sheriff Sam Clayton (Ward Bond) says he ''fits a lot of descriptions.''

It is clear from the way Ethan's eyes follow Martha around the room that he secretly loves her. His hatred of Indians flares the moment he meets Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter): ''Hell, I could mistake you for a half-breed.'' Martin says he's ''one-eighth Comanche.'' Ethan rescued young Martin when his family was killed by Indians, and left him with Martha and Aaron to be raised, but it's clear he thinks one-eighth is too much. When Martin insists on joining Ethan's search for the captured Debbie, Ethan says ''I give the orders'' and treats the younger man with contempt. In a saloon, Ethan pours out drinks but snatches away Martin's glass, snarling ''Wait'll you grow up.'' Martin at this point has been a ranch hand, is engaged to be married, has been on the trail with Ethan for years. Does Ethan privately think it's dangerous for a ''half-breed'' to drink? One of the mysteries of ''The Searchers'' involves the relationship between Ethan and Martin on the trail. Living alone with each other for months at a time, sleeping under the stars, what did they talk about? How could they share a mission and not find common cause as men?

Martin's function on the trail is to argue for Debbie's life, since Ethan intends to find her and kill her. The younger man also figures in a romantic subplot awkwardly cobbled on to the main story. He is engaged to marry Laurie (Vera Miles), the daughter of friendly Swedish neighbors. Ford goes for cornball humor in scenes where Martin writes to Laurie only once in five years, and in that letter makes light of having mistakenly purchased a ''squaw bride.'' Martin returns on the very day when Laurie, who never expected to see him again, is scheduled to marry Charlie (Ken Curtis), a hayseed, and the men fight for the women in a sequence that would be more at home in ''Seven Brides for Seven Brothers'' than in an epic Western.

''The Searchers'' indeed seems to be two films. The Ethan Edwards story is stark and lonely, a portrait of obsession, and in it we can see Schrader's inspiration for Travis Bickle of ''Taxi Driver;'' the Comanche chief named Scar (Henry Brandon) is paralleled by Harvey Keitel's pimp named Sport, whose Western hat and long hair cause Travis to call him ''chief.'' Ethan doesn't like Indians, and says so plainly. When he reveals his intention to kill Debbie, Martin says ''She's alive and she's gonna stay alive!'' and Ethan growls: ''Livin' with Comanches ain't being alive.'' He slaughters buffalo in a shooting frenzy, saying, ''At least they won't feed any Comanche this winter.'' The film within this film involves the silly romantic subplot and characters hauled in for comic relief, including the Swedish neighbor Lars Jorgensen (John Qualen), who uses a vaudeville accent, and Mose Harper (Hank Worden), a half-wit treated like a mascot. There are even musical interludes. This second strand is without interest, and those who value ''The Searchers'' filter it out, patiently waiting for a return to the main story line.

Ethan Edwards, fierce, alone, a defeated soldier with no role in peacetime, is one of the most compelling characters Ford and Wayne ever created (they worked together on 14 films). Did they know how vile Ethan's attitudes were? I would argue that they did, because Wayne was in his personal life notably free of racial prejudice, and because Ford made films with more sympathetic views of Indians. This is not the instinctive, oblivious racism of Griffith's ''Birth of a Nation.'' Countless Westerns have had racism as the unspoken premise; this one consciously focuses on it. I think it took a certain amount of courage to cast Wayne as a character whose heroism was tainted. Ethan's redemption is intended to be shown in that dramatic shot of reunion with Debbie, where he takes her in his broad hands, lifts her up to the sky, drops her down into his arms, and says, ''Let's go home, Debbie.'' The shot is famous and beloved, but small counterbalance to his views throughout the film--and indeed, there is no indication be thinks any differently about Indians.

John Ford (1895-1973) was Hollywood's greatest chronicler of American history, and there was a period when his ''The Grapes of Wrath'' (1940) and not ''Citizen Kane'' was cited as the best American film. He worked on his first film in 1914, and was directing by 1917. He had an unrivaled eye for landscape, and famously used Monument Valley as the location for his Westerns, camping out with cast and crew, the company eating from a chuck wagon and sleeping in tents. Wayne told me that making a Ford Western was like living in a Western.

Ford's eye for composition was bold and sure. Consider the funeral early in the film, with a wagon at low right, a cluster of mourners in the middle left, then a diagonal up the hill to the grave, as they all sing Ford's favorite hymn, ''Shall We Gather at the River'' (he used it again in the wedding scene). Consider one of the most famous of all Ford shots, the search party in a valley as Indians ominously ride parallel to them, silhouetted against the sky. And the dramatic first sight of the adult Debbie, running down the side of a sand dune behind Ethan, who doesn't see her. The opening and closing shots, of Ethan arriving and leaving, framed in a doorway. The poignancy with which he stands alone at the door, one hand on the opposite elbow, forgotten for a moment after delivering Debbie home. These shots are among the treasures of the cinema.

In ''The Searchers'' I think Ford was trying, imperfectly, even nervously, to depict racism that justified genocide; the comic relief may be an unconscious attempt to soften the message. Many members of the original audience probably missed his purpose; Ethan's racism was invisible to them, because they bought into his view of Indians. Eight years later, in ''Cheyenne Autumn,'' his last film, Ford was more clear. But in the flawed vision of ''The Searchers'' we can see Ford, Wayne and the Western itself, awkwardly learning that a man who hates Indians can no longer be an uncomplicated hero.

Intolerance - Film Comment Kent Jones, May/June 2013

One of my American Western heroes is not John Ford, obviously. To say the least, I hate him. Forget about faceless Indians he killed like zombies. It really is people like that that kept alive this idea of Anglo-Saxon humanity compared to everybody else’s humanity—and the idea that that’s hogwash is a very new idea in relative terms. And you can see it in the cinema in the Thirties and Forties—it’s still there. And even in the Fifties. But the thing is, one of my Western heroes is a director named William Witney who started doing the serials. He did Zorro’s Fighting Legion, about 22 Roy Rogers movies; he did a whole bunch of Westerns . . . John Ford puts on a Klan uniform [in The Birth of a Nation], rides to black subjugation. William Witney ends a 50-year career directing the Dramatics doing “What You See Is What You Get” [in Darktown Strutters]. I know what side I’m on.

—Quentin Tarantino, in conversation with Henry Louis Gates, in The Root

Let’s start with the obvious and agree that Tarantino was carried away by his disgust with racism and his lofty feelings about William Witney. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that it’s been a while since he took a fresh look at Fort Apache (48) or Cheyenne Autumn (64) or—given the fact that he’s collapsing prejudices against Indians and African-Americans into one—Sergeant Rutledge (60). Let’s assume that such Witney titles as Drums of Fu Manchu and Jungle Girl are as racially enlightened as Tarantino claims Darktown Strutters to be. And let’s assume that, as he was soaring on the wings of his rhetoric, Tarantino forgot that Ford’s own ancestors were not Anglo-Saxon but Celtic, that they were not exactly welcomed with open arms when they started emigrating to this country in great numbers in the 1840s, that the memory of Anglo-Saxon oppression was considerably fresher in Ford’s lifetime than it is now (still pretty fresh back home), and that the Irish experience played no small part in his films.

But let’s take a closer look at the part about Ford killing all those “faceless Indians.” First of all, the Indians in Ford’s films, while never as carefully drawn as the Indians in Delmer Daves’s films, are less “faceless” than they are in many other movies made by directors with only a fraction of Ford’s knowledge of the actual West. Secondly, what about all the other directors who killed so many more faceless Indians? What about Hawks (Red River), Walsh (They Died with Their Boots On, Distant Drums, Saskatchewan), Hathaway (The Thundering Herd, Ten Gentlemen from West Point), Vidor (The Texas Rangers, Northwest Passage), de Toth (Last of the Comanches), Mann (The Last Frontier), Tourneur (Canyon Passage), and Sherman (Comanche, War Arrow, The Battle at Apache Pass)? And what about all the lesser directors, the Lesley Selanders and Louis Kings and R.G. Springsteens and lower and lower down the pole? Does anyone actually believe that they each chose Western stories set during the Indian Wars because they unwittingly shared a burning desire to promote the superiority of Anglo-Saxon humanity? Or that William Witney laid down the law with Republic president Herbert Yates and unequivocally refused to make any films about the slaughter of Indians? While making it clear that the Chinese were another matter and that a Fu Manchu serial was okay? On the other hand, he seems to have made an exception for Santa Fe Passage, about an Indian scout played by John Payne who stands up to a murderous band of Kiowas.

Some of these directors wielded quite a bit of power, Hawks most of all. Some of them, like Witney, wielded none and were in no position to refuse an assignment. The fact that he didn’t wind up making that many movies featuring pitched battles between Anglo-Saxon cowboys or scouts or soldiers and hordes of Apaches or Cheyennes or Sioux, gunned down from behind the safety of rock formations or upended Conestoga wagons or on horseback, obviously has nothing to do with personal predilections and everything to do with the reality of slaving away on budgets that didn’t allow for the cost of feeding, housing, and paying 100 horse-riding extras and a couple of dozen stuntmen. Shadows of Tombstone (53) is more typical Witney fare and more typical of low-budget Westerns in general: a rancher catches a bandit who turns out to work for the corrupt sheriff and then decides to run for office himself with the help of the beautiful local newspaper owner.

In some of the above-mentioned cases, the battle with the Indians is nothing more than an episode in a Western saga, as in Red River. In Hathaway’s Ten Gentlemen from West Point, the raid on Tecumseh’s camp is the final step in the military education of the eponymous 10 cadets. In Vidor’s Northwest Passage, the massacre of an entire Abenaki village builds with a scary momentum that suggests (or suggested, to certain post–My Lai viewers) that the film itself was bursting through its own celebratory spirit of the pioneering ethos to reveal a throbbing inner core of American supremacist bloodlust. In Mann’s The Last Frontier and Walsh’s Saskatchewan, as in Ford’s Fort Apache, a hero with extensive knowledge of Indian ways and a respect for a particular Indian tribe (Sioux in the Mann, Cree in the Walsh, Apache in the Ford) comes into conflict with a commanding officer who lives long enough to see his arrogant attempt to assert the superiority of Anglo-Saxon humanity go down in flames. In certain films, the Indians are played by actual Indian actors, albeit often from the wrong tribe (as was the case in many Ford films). In others, including Daves’s enlightened Broken Arrow and Drum Beat, they are played by white actors like Jeff Chandler and Debra Paget and Charles Bronson. From a distance, it’s very easy to view the Western genre as a great abstract swirl of cowboys and Indians, the proud Cavalry vs. the mute savages, a long triumphal march of Anglo-Saxon humanity led by John Ford and John Wayne brought to a dead halt by The Sixties. Up close, one movie at a time, the picture is quite different. Similarly, the mental image of a film about the South at the turn of the century featuring Stepin Fetchit as the devoted manservant of a small-town judge sounds like the occasion for a satisfying round of righteous indignation, while the actual films Judge Priest (34) and The Sun Shines Bright (53) are something else again.

Why would Quentin Tarantino, of all people, buy into such a frozen, shopworn image of Ford and the pre-Sixties Western genre, an image that is now six decades old and more of an antique than anything Ford ever directed? Of the 12 sound Westerns Ford made between 1939 and 1964 (I don’t think that Tarantino is referring to the silents: we’re not talking about actual film history here, but a political construct from an earlier era built around the Cavalry trilogy), some have no significant action involving Indians at all, including My Darling Clementine (46)—unless you insist on counting its one drunken Indian—3 Godfathers (48), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (62). In Wagon Master (50), Ben Johnson is chased on horseback by a band of Navajo warriors, but when they see that he is traveling with Mormons, all hostilities cease—one oppressed people recognizes another. At the Navajo dance to which they’re invited, an outlaw who is hiding among the Mormons sexually assaults a squaw, and the Mormon elder has the man publicly flogged. Since no Indians, faceless or otherwise, are killed, I presume that this is not one of the films that Tarantino had in mind. In Fort Apache it’s Cochise and Geronimo, hardly faceless, who do most of the killing—yet within the framework of the film they are justified because their people have been corrupted by the local Indian agent and their agreements with the American government have been dishonored. In She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (49), in which tensions break out between the Indian agent and a rebel Arapaho leader, the final Seventh Cavalry raid on the Arapaho camp is bloodless and intended to avoid a massacre. Two Rode Together (61) is about the problems of returning white Comanche captives to their prejudiced families. In Sergeant Rutledge, the Ninth Cavalry tracks down and battles with a band of Mescaleros . . . but the Ninth Cavalry is all-black and the protagonist is its proudest sergeant, falsely accused of the rape and murder of a white girl—surely Tarantino could see his way to cutting this one a little slack. In essence, I think that we’re really talking about three movies: Stagecoach (39), in which the men on the eponymous vehicle defend themselves and the women aboard against a band of Apaches; Rio Grande (50), in which Apaches on a rampage are wiped out by the Cavalry on the Mexican side of the border; and The Searchers (56). More about that one later.

The idea of the American West was always more a matter of solitude and space and the balance between individualism and community than a matter of conquest. Along with the city as theater of life in the Thirties or bourgeois existence as genteel prison in the Fifties, the idea belonged to no director or writer, and the culture breathed it long before the movies began. That the idea was built on the backs of indigenous Americans who were, in Ford’s own words, “cheated and robbed, killed, murdered, massacred and everything else,” was not exactly hidden from view, but relegated to the background of the story that the culture was telling itself through paintings and dime novels and traveling shows and, finally, movies—albeit never quite as comfortably as is now imagined. It’s curious that American culture and history are still so commonly viewed through a New Left prism, by means of which 1964 or thereabouts has become a Year Zero of political enlightenment; as a consequence, the preferred stance remains that of the outsider looking in, or in this case back, at a supposedly gullible and delusional pre-Sixties America. It’s certainly preferable to right-wing orthodoxy, but that’s hardly a compliment. The New Left is now very old but its rhetoric lives on, many times removed from its original context, and that rhetoric seems to have found a welcome home in film criticism.

Can we really afford to keep saying “them” instead of “us?” Is it useful to keep looking back at the past, disowning what we don’t like and attributing it to laughably failed versions of our perfectly enlightened selves? Should we really give ourselves the license to remake film history as we would like it to be by eliding certain details and amplifying others—in this case, selling The Birth of a Nation as the American equivalent of The Eternal Jew, equating a day of extra work with riding for the real Klan, elevating William Witney to King of the Underdogs and sweeping John Ford into the dustbin, and maintaining that the Blaxploitation genre was a model of African-American empowerment? Why do we keep insisting on the de-complication of history if not to justify our own tastes and abolish our discomforts? The Birth of a Nation is indeed a hair-raising experience, and its moments of visual poetry, as stirring as ever, are as close to its many truly repugnant passages as teeth are to lips, to paraphrase Mao. They always will be. Does that oblige us to pretend that the film wasn’t a beacon for every director of Ford’s generation and beyond, for fear that we might appear racist by doing otherwise? Griffith and Thomas Dixon, with assistance from Woodrow Wilson, helped to reinvigorate the real Klan. They did so unwittingly, not with a piece of propaganda but with a powerfully dynamic and romantic rendering of the “old South” of their elders that housed a racist deformation of history at its core—indeed, if they had been mere propagandists like Fritz Hippler or Veit Harlan, their film would never have had the effect that it did. That’s not splitting hairs, but the thorny, unwelcome, complicated truth. The question is, how do we live with it?

And how do we live with John Ford? Just as a great deal of energy once went into the domestication of The Birth of a Nation—for instance, James Agee’s contention that Griffith “went to almost preposterous lengths to be fair to the Negroes as he understood them, and he understood them as a good type of Southerner does”—so an equal amount has gone into smoothing out Ford, fashioning him as either a drunken-racist-militarist-jingoistic lout with a gift for making pretty pictures or a Brechtian political artist. If I have some sympathy for the latter position (and zero for the former), it still seems like a stretch. But as Raymond Durgnat might have put it, and as Jonathan Rosenbaum argued so eloquently in his 2004 appreciation of The Sun Shines Bright for Rouge, Ford wasn’t a great artist in spite of the contradictory imperatives of his films but because of them. His films don’t live apart from the shifts in American culture and the demands of the film industry, but in dialogue with them. Do those films provide the models of racial enlightenment that we expect today? Of course they don’t. On the other hand, they are far more nuanced and sophisticated in this regard than the streamlined commentaries that one reads about them, behaviorally, historically, and cinematically speaking, and the seeds of Ulzana’s Raid and Dead Man are already growing in Fort Apache and The Searchers. Is Ford’s vision “paternalistic?” I suppose it is (and that includes The Sun Shines Bright and Sergeant Rutledge), but the culture was paternalistic, and holding an artist working in a popular form to the standards of an activist or a statesman and condemning him for failing to escape the boundaries of his own moment is a fool’s game. Maybe it’s time to stop searching for moral perfection in artists.

The mistake has always been to look for the paternalistic, find it in Ford’s work, and then make the leap that it is merely so. If there’s another film artist who went deeper into the painful contradictions between solitude and community, or the fragility of human bonds and arrangements, I haven’t found one. To look at Stagecoach or Rio Grande or The Searchers and see absolutely nothing but evidence of the promotion of Anglo-Saxon superiority is to look away from cinema itself, I think. In Stagecoach and Rio Grande, the “Indians” are a Platonic ideal of the enemy—every age has one, one can find the same device employed throughout the history of drama, and in countless other Westerns. As for The Searchers, the film becomes knottier as the years go by. The passage with Jeffrey Hunter’s Comanche wife Look (Beulah Archuletta) is just as uncomfortable as the courtroom banjo hijinks in The Sun Shines Bright, particularly the moment when Hunter kicks her down a sandbank—but the comedy makes the sudden shift to relentless cruelty, and the later discovery of Look’s corpse at the site of a Cavalry massacre of the Comanches, that much more shocking.

Tarantino’s ill-chosen words more or less force a comparison between his recent films and Ford’s. As brilliant as much of Django Unchained and Inglourious Basterds are, they strike me as relatively straight-ahead experiences—there is nothing in either film to de-complicate; by contrast, one might spend a lifetime contemplating The Searchers or Wagon Master or Young Mr. Lincoln (39) and continually find new values, problems, and layers of feeling. And while Tarantino’s films are funny, inventive, and passionately serious about racial prejudice, there is absolutely no mystery in them—what you see really is what you get. Within the context of American cinema, Django is a bracing experience . . . until the moment that Christoph Waltz shoots Leonardo DiCaprio, turns to Jamie Foxx, and exclaims: “I’m sorry—I couldn’t resist.” The line reading is as perfect as the staging of the entire scene, but this is the very instant that the film shifts rhetorical gears and becomes yet another revenge fantasy—that makes five in a row. Is revenge really the motor of life? Or of cinema? Or are they interchangeable? Or whatever, as long as you know what side you’re on?

If Waltz’s admission of the irresistible impulse to take vengeance on the ignorantly powerful is the key line in Django Unchained, the key line in The Searchers, delivered in the first third of the film, is its polar opposite. As Jeffrey Hunter’s Martin and Harry Carey Jr.’s Brad prepare to join John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards on his quest to find his nieces, Mrs. Jorgensen (Olive Carey) takes Ethan aside and pleads with him: “Don’t let the boys waste their lives on vengeance.” Ford’s film is about the toll of vengeance on actual human beings, while Tarantino’s recent work is about the celebration of orgiastic vengeance as a symbolic correction of history. Ford’s film has had a vast and long-lasting effect on American cinema, while the impact of Tarantino’s film has, I suspect, already come and gone. But then, Ford only had the constraints of the studio system to cope with, his own inner conflicts aside, while Tarantino must contend with something far more insidious and difficult to pin down: the hyper-branded and anxiously self-defining world of popular culture, within which he is trying to be artist, grand entertainer, genius, connoisseur, critic, provocateur, and now repairman of history, all at once. It makes your head spin. And one day in the future, I suppose he might find himself wondering just what he had in mind when he so recklessly demeaned one of the greatest artists who ever stood behind a camera.

The Searchers Syd Field

Implacable in Texas - The New York Review of Books Geoffrey O’Brien reviews Glenn Frankel’s The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend (405 pages), July 11, 2013

Race, Racism and the Fear of Miscegenation in The Searchers ... Jason Priestley

The Searchers - Dismantled - Rouge which includes a video display, by Ross Gibson from Rouge, 2005

The Searchers Stefan Herrmann, April 9, 2001

The Searcher: On Ethan Edwards and John Ford's Masterpiece  Gary Morris from Bright Lights Film Journal, November 1, 2007

How Hollywood Whitewashed the Old West Leah Williams from The Atlantic, October 5, 2016

The Searcher: John Ford's faith in community | America Magazine Patrick J. McNamara, January 23, 2013

The Searchers - TCM.com Scott McGee

Film as Art Danél Griffin

DVDJournal [D.K. Holm]

Images Movie Journal Grant Tracey

The Searchers Tim Dirks

"Hero, Text, and Ideology in The Searchers" Katherine Lawrie examines Ford’s “hero” in THE SEARCHERS, also here: Links for Race in US Cinema

The Worst Best Movie Stephen Metcalf from Slate asks why on earth did The Searchers get canonized?

Jonathan Rosenbaum « Rightwing Film Geek Victor Morton agrees with Metcalf

The worst best films ever made Tim Lott from The Guardian, July 24, 2009

The Lumière Reader- DVD review

Ultimate Collector's Edition, DVD Town [John J. Puccio]

filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin)

Dragan Antulov

All Movie Guide [Lucia Bozzola]

digitallyOBSESSED.com [Nate Meyers]

DVD Verdict Norman Short

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

Monsters and Critics - DVD Review [Jeff Swindoll]

DVD Talk (John Sinnott)

Critical Culture [Pacze Moj]

John Ford Goes to Guantanamo zunguzungu, March 17, 2008

stylusmagazine.com (Ron Mashate) a personalized and very poor retort to Stephen Metcalf at Slate

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)

the famous last shot 'The Searchers': How the Western Was Begun, by A.O. Scott from the New York Times, June 11, 2006

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

THE LAST HURRAH

USA (121 mi) 1958

The Last American Hero to Law of Desire Pauline Kael

John Ford turned into a sentimental faker whenever he got near the Blarney stone, and Edwin O'Connor's novel about the final campaign and last days of Frank Skeffington, an old-style Boston mayor (Spencer Tracy), gave him an opportunity he couldn't resist. The subject is richly comic, and the picture has its moments despite the sprightly foolery, but Skeffington is so full of the milk of human kindness that he almost moos. The extraordinary cast includes James Gleason, Pat O'Brien, Ricardo Cortez, Edmund Lowe, John Carradine, Basil Rathbone, Jeffrey Hunter, Donald Crisp, Anna Lee, and Jane Darwell. Columbia.

The Last Hurrah Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Tom Milne

Often shrugged off as a Ford failure, but it improves with acquaintance. Sentimental, certainly, and featuring a perilously protracted death-bed scene, but with Ford superbly at ease on his Irish-American home ground in an elegiac account of the last, doomed campaign of a New England political boss (based by way of Edwin O'Connor's novel on Boston's Mayor Curley), defeated by time and new-fangled media image-making. Sidestep-ping the corruption inseparable from this sort of old-style politicking, Ford prints the legend with a warm, rueful (almost testamentary) sense of recollection. Outstanding camera-work by Charles Lawton, and a rich gallery of performances in which Hollywood veterans and Ford's stock company are well to the fore.

Classic Film Guide

Spencer Tracy plays Mayor Frank Skeffington, an aging incumbent trying to get reelected against the wishes of his party's political machine in the new era of television. It foreshadows (to some degree) this new medium's influence in the process for the real life Presidential contest between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, two years later. It was directed by John Ford, and features a screenplay by Frank S. Nugent (The Quiet Man (1952)) from the Edwin O'Connor novel which was loosely based on real life Boston Mayor M. Curley. Jeffrey Hunter plays a newspaper writer that's also Skeffington’s nephew, Adam Caulfield; he learns by watching the old master (old fashioned political campaigns were dirty too), and comes to admire him despite his editor's (John Carradine) hatred for the man. Pat O'Brien, James Gleason, Edward Brophy, and Carleton Young play the Mayor's colleagues. Basil Rathbone plays a banker who opposes Skeffington’s reelection, Donald Crisp plays Cardinal Martin Burke. The cast also includes Wallace Ford, Frank McHugh, Willis Bouchey, Ricardo Cortez, Frank Albertson, and of course Jane Darwell (among many others).

"The Last Hurrah" (1958) Mark Harris from Patrick Murtha’s Diary, also seen at the Blackboard here: Off Topic: "The Last Hurrah" (1958)

Discussing John Ford at all has to count as off-topic on a noir discussion board, because with the partial exceptions of The Informer and The Fugitive, he never really ventured into noir territory. Unusually among American directors, he is scarcely interested in urban crime as a plot motivator – there is only one straightforward crime film in his long output, Gideon of Scotland Yard in 1958, and reviews of that film, which I have not seen, make it clear that the overall tone is light rather than shadowy.

The John Ford of the 1950s was looking for new subjects. Between Rio Grande (1950) and The Horse Soldiers (1959), he made only one Western, The Searchers, but ten non-Westerns. He was feeling the call of Ireland strongly, making The Quiet Man and The Rising of the Moon on location there, and taking up Irish-American themes in his wonderful political drama The Last Hurrah, based on Edwin O’Connor’s best-selling 1956 roman a clef about Boston Mayor James Michael Curley. The Last Hurrah is a big, rich, yeasty film. It is said that Ford wanted his friend Orson Welles to play the lead, but I think he was better off with the actual casting of Spencer Tracy. To say that the role of Frank Skeffington is in Tracy’s wheelhouse is an understatement: He owns it. I can’t imagine anyone else so well embodying a larger-than-life figure with a common touch, and his sheer pleasure in politicking. Like a Bill Clinton, Skeffington seems to be a scoundrel and a decent relatable guy simultaneously. Since in both these cases, the man’s demonizers focus on the first quality and miss or underrate the second, it’s no wonder they can’t get a real handle on him.

Curley served four non-consecutive terms as Mayor of Boston, plus a few as a U.S. Representative and one as Governor of Massachusetts. Like his real-life counterpart, an aging Skeffington goes for a fifth term as Mayor – his “last hurrah,” a phrase that Edwin O’Connor contributed to the language – but is done in, as Curley was in his 1950 bid, because his old-school style of ward politics is no longer adequate to new postwar realities.

As in All the King’s Men or The Great Gatsby, there is an observer figure whose role is to register the sheer spectacle of personality – in this case Skeffington’s nephew, played by Jeffrey Hunter, whom the Mayor invites to watch the last hurrah unfold (but also to be the son his own frivolous grown boy cannot be). Hunter works well as a fringe figure here because he is so unobtrusively acceptable wherever he goes – the late Fifties model of the handsome, charming, altogether regular young man who is bound to make a success of himself, but will never become the “character” his uncle is.

Ford surrounds Tracy with a wonderful crew of actors – among Skeffington’s supporters, Pat O’Brien (oddly, the only time that O’Brien and Ford worked together), James Gleason, and Ricardo Cortez; among his enemies, John Carradine, Basil Rathbone, and Willis Bouchey; as local clerics, Donald Crisp and Basil Ruysdael. Jane Darwell gets a hoot of a single-scene role at a funeral. The atmosphere of backslapping and back rooms, rallies and election night tallies, is perfectly conveyed, and does indeed capture an older style on its way out.

The most poignant of the minor characters is the man who has lost his name, Skeffington’s somewhat dim-witted but eminently useful operative “Ditto” (Edward Brophy), who tries to copy his boss’s lead in everything down to his choice of hat, and doesn’t even realize that his nickname is a cut. (An obvious although seldom-mentioned source for Rush Limbaugh’s Dittoheads!)

Ford follows O’Connor’s lead in ending the narrative not just with Skeffington’s political defeat, but with his protracted actual death following a heart attack. Some commenters on the film have felt this 20-minute coda to be labored, but although it has a few forced moments, I rather like Ford’s characteristic fearlessness with respect to sentiment (and its displays). The key point of this final sequence, I feel, is that the men who have worked for Skeffington are going to be deader than he is, after he dies – his memory will continue to throb strongly, at least for a while, but they will have no function.

The final shots remind me of the ending of Ford’s great World War II picture They Were Expendable (one of the least sentimental titles ever). The last plane with John Wayne and Robert Montgomery has taken off from the Philippines, and we know that the men left behind are doomed (not just to death, but in all likelihood to the Bataan Death March). We see them walking away from us along a twilit beach, their long shadows falling on the sand – the sort of signature shot that Ford was so brilliant at.

In The Last Hurrah, the team waiting downstairs in Skeffington’s mansion has gotten the word from upstairs that he has passed, and as they trudge up the majestic curved staircase to pay their respects, their shadows fall on the wall to the right. They are goners. Last of all, slower than the rest, is the pitiable Ditto, a shadow casting a shadow. The era is over.

The Last Hurrah - Turner Classic Movies Paul Tatara

The Last Hurrah (1958) - Notes - TCM.com

The Films of John Ford [Michael E. Grost]

Epinions.com [George Chabot]

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

The Stop Button [Andrew Wickliffe]

Jonathan Rosenbaum - Chicago Reader

Dave Kehr - Chicago Reader

Variety

The New York Times Bosley Crowther

SERGEANT RUTLEDGE

USA (111 mi) 1960

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

For once, John Ford gave his black company player Woody Strode a starring title role as a cavalry officer being tried for the rape of a white woman and a double murder. Told mainly in flashbacks, this effective if slightly overlong western thriller (1960) represents one of Ford's late efforts to treat minority members with more respect than westerns usually did (Cheyenne Autumn was another), and Strode takes full advantage of the opportunity. With Jeffrey Hunter, Constance Towers, and Billie Burke. 111 min.

Time Out

Though often pigeonholed as one of Ford's late trio of guiltily amends-making movies (to blacks here; to Indians in Cheyenne Autumn; to women in Seven Women), Sergeant Rutledge is both more complex and infinitely more confused than that simplistic formula would suggest. Possessing in broad outline an integrationist perspective (at a time when the Civil Rights movement was gaining strength), it's riddled with liberal compromises and evasions with its portrait of Strode's dignified black cavalry sergeant on trial for alleged miscegenatory rape. Ford can show us an innocent victim of American racism, and stress in courtroom flashbacks his heroic credentials in white man's uniform, but he can never make the leap to offering us a black who actually rejects the role of honorary white. He can make the cinepolitical connection back to The Birth of a Nation (by the bit-casting of Mae Marsh, the rape victim in Griffith's film) and consider his film compensatory, but he can't confront the cultural fear of miscegenation that mechanises both movies, only its distorted expression.

Turner Classic Movies

I don’t know if John Ford had a change of heart late in life or if he just felt more empowered to break with his own movie conventions then. But, after becoming the foremost chronicler of the white settlers’ experience in the old west, Ford broadened his perspective during his last decade of work. He focused on the Native Americans he’d so often demonized in Cheyenne Autumn and, in 1960’s Sergeant Rutledge, he used a familiar cavalry setting to examine racism.

To the movie’s credit, it’s much more than a message movie, and it holds up better than similar films of its day like, say, The Defiant Ones. But, as can still happen today, it focuses on its “different” character through its “normal” character. The different character is the title character, Sergeant Braxton Rutledge, an ex-slave and the proud “top soldier” of the all-black (save for officers) 9th Cavalry; the audience surrogate is Lt. Tom Cantrell (Jeffrey Hunter of The Searchers), an officer at the 9th’s Arizona outpost. Rutledge is on trial for the murder of the post’s commanding officer and the rape and murder of his C.O.’s teen daughter, and Cantrell is defending him.

One of the things that makes the movie interesting today is that, as probably wouldn’t happen today (when we’re all so enlightened), Ford and writers James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck actually play off of the assumed racism of the audience. As Rutledge’s court-martial begins, we’re not told what the exact charges against Rutledge are, but we see that the one witness Cantrell has brought to the courtroom is blonde Mary Beecher (Constance Towers of Sam Fuller’s Naked Kiss) and we see that a group of ornery townspeople is clamoring to string up Rutledge. Of course, we assume there’s a sex crime involved; it’s not as if Hollywood was making many movies about black heroes. (The movie’s trailer, the DVD’s lone extra, also plays on the assumed threat of a big black man on a white woman like Mary.)

But Rutledge is indeed heroic. Sergeant Rutledge has an inevitably predictable structure, launching into flashbacks with every new witness who takes the stand, but it also tells a very involving tale. Starting with Mary’s testimony, we see how she first encountered Rutledge at a remote train station where, after she found the station man dead and ran outside in horror, it was wounded Rutledge who grabbed her, calmed her and protected her from a small band of raiding Apaches. Further testimony from an officer’s wife (Billie Burke), the post doctor (Charles Seel), another 9th Cavalry sergeant (Juano Hernandez), Cantrell and Rutledge himself fill in more of the story: how Rutledge was friendly with teen Lucy (Toby Michaels), how Rutledge was seen exiting the C.O.’s quarters after shots were heard, how he deserted the post and, later, how Cantrell, leading a party of soldiers tracking Apaches, arrested him at the train station. When the cavalrymen encounter the Apaches, Rutledge helps to save the lives of many of his comrades.

Of course, that battlefield heroism won’t get Rutledge off the hook at his court-martial. The panel of judges (led by the cranky officer well-played by Ford regular Willis Bouchey) doesn’t doubt the ex-slave’s reputation as a warrior, nor the defendant’s powerful speech about how important the 9th is to him, emotionally put across by Strode. It takes a Perry Mason-like unveiling of the real perpetrator to acquit Rutledge, but that feels rushed and overly convenient. No, in the world of John Ford westerns it’s much more significant that Rutledge and his squad get the full-blown Ford treatment: face-offs against Indians, treks through Monument Valley, the camaraderie of men in uniform. There’s no love interest for Rutledge, but other than that, the most effective affirmation of the title characer in Sergeant Rutledge is that, essentially, whatever’s good enough for John Wayne is good enough for Woody Strode, too. Despite the weak resolution, which also involves a reconciliation of would-be paramours Cantrell and Mary, the last shot of Sergeant Rutledge, a choice Ford image of a line of buffalo soldiers on horseback, ascending a ridge, is a genuine tribute.

In a rare lead role, Strode, who regularly played supporting parts in Ford’s 1960s films and had memorable roles in The Professionals, Spartacus and Once Upon a Time in the West after this, really rises to the occasion. Like most good movie actors, his very bearing gets across much of his character, and the proud air ex-football player and wrestler Strode gives Rutledge makes him a strong, dignified character who won’t be cowed by his harsh court-martial surroundings. The movie asks you to accept this defiant character on his own terms, and though the movie’s message of tolerance can feel obvious 46 years later, Ford certainly spoonfeeds its message of tolerance less than many movies after it, Philadelphia included. Among the better of Ford’s non-Wayne westerns, Sergeant Rutledge is, for the time being, available only in the John Ford Film Collection boxed set.

Sergeant Rutledge • Senses of Cinema Andrew Tracy from Senses of Cinema, April 22, 2004

Sergeant Rutledge zunguzungu, May 8, 2008

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

The New York Times

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

THE TWO RODE TOGETHER

USA (109 mi) 1961

Time Out

Dismissed by Ford as a casual favour to Columbia's boss Harry Cohn, this neglected Western repays careful attention. Stewart is the cynical marshal hired to repatriate pioneer children captured by the Comanche, and Widmark the cavalry officer who accompanies him. Gone is the clean frontier as would-be garden of The Searchers and earlier; instead, Ford offers us a nightmare vision, the frontier overrun by hysteria and (Eastern/Yankee) hypocrisy, with even the Indians seen as primitive entrepreneurs.

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

This rather atypical late (1961) John Ford western stars James Stewart as a cynical marshal hired to negotiate with the Comanches for white prisoners and Richard Widmark as a cavalry officer who comes along with him. Not a film with any of the resonance of The Searchers, despite a certain similarity in theme, but interesting nonetheless. With Linda Cristal, Shirley Jones, Andy Devine, John McIntire, Mae Marsh, Henry Brandon, and Anna Lee. 109 min.

Turner Classic Movies Rob Nixon

John Ford, the master mythmaker of the American movie West, and James Stewart, who had redefined the genre and his career in a string of westerns with director Anthony Mann in the 1950s, finally worked together in Two Rode Together (1961), a far cry from the director's typical glorification of the West and the pioneer spirit. Two Rode Together was conceived as a misanthropic and almost farcical story with Stewart as a corrupt sheriff who ends up with an outcast woman primarily because the degradation and disappointment of their lives makes them ideally suited for each other. Stewart is a disreputable lawman hired by a Cavalry lieutenant (Richard Widmark) to help rescue dozens of captives held by the Comanches in 1880s Texas. Among them is a Mexican woman (Linda Cristal) who is shunned by white society because she was the forced squaw of a warrior. In the end, their rescue mission proves to be futile, even disastrous. Cristal is unable to fit in anywhere, and Stewart has lost his job and his share of the profits in the local brothel. With nothing to keep them in Texas, the couple ride off for California together.

Although this first pairing of James Stewart and director John Ford may have been cause for cinematic celebration, it wasn't a happy shoot. This was not a personal project for Ford but something he did only for the money ($225,000 plus 25 percent net profits) and as a favor to Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn, a man Ford said he admired like "a large, brilliant serpent." The director hated the material, believing he had done a far better treatment of the theme in The Searchers (1956). Even after he brought in his most trusted screenwriter, Frank Nugent - the man responsible for The Searchers and nine other Ford classics - to fix the script, the director said it was "still crap." Nevertheless, he took the project on and proceeded to take his frustrations about it out on his cast and crew. Not that this was uncharacteristic. Stewart had been warned about the director's behavior by such longtime Ford stalwarts as John Wayne and Henry Fonda (who Ford once socked in the jaw during the filming of Mister Roberts, 1955). Stewart came to learn Ford liked to keep his actors in the dark about the direction of the picture and suspicious of each other. In Andrew Sinclair's biography, John Ford, Stewart revealed that Ford's "direction took the form of asides. Sometimes he'd put his hand across his mouth so that others couldn't hear what he was saying to you. On Two Rode Together he told me to watch out for Dick Widmark because he was a good actor and that he would start stealing if I didn't watch him. Later, I learned he'd told Dick the same thing about me. He liked things to be tense."

One of the film's most renowned and impressive shots has been credited solely to Ford's mean streak. In the famous five-minute two-shot of Stewart and Widmark bantering on a river bank about money, women, and the Comanche problem, the film's downbeat comedy, misogyny, and careless attitude toward human life are summed up perfectly. Ford justified the take as a simple preference for a wide-screen two-shot over cross-cutting between close-ups of "pock-marked faces." But Stewart and others insisted Ford was so cantankerous during production he forced his crew to wade waist-deep into the icy river and stay there all day until the shot was completed.

Whether the product of a bad attitude or a shift in artistic vision, Two Rode Together is Ford's most irredeemably cynical movie and ends in complete disillusionment. In many of his classics, such as My Darling Clementine (1946), the town, while representative of the encroachment of civilization on the rugged individualism of the West, is nevertheless seen as a place of family, law, and community. In this picture, the town is all about corruption without any of the mythologized virtues Ford brought to his earlier works. In contrast to Henry Fonda's self-sacrificing Wyatt Earp, Stewart's McCabe is little more than a mercenary, up to his ears in graft. Even the director's characteristic town dance sequence is used to different effect. In My Darling Clementine it celebrates the civilizing qualities of community. In Two Rode Together it is used to highlight and attack the townspeople's intolerance and hypocrisy, as Stewart rails against them for treating the Linda Cristal character even worse than her former captors.

Although the movie was not a commercial success and Stewart and Ford did not make the best collaborative team, there must have been something in this bleaker revisionist view of the West that appealed to both men. Stewart would work for the director three more times, two of those in films that took a radically different and even darker view of the western myth - The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and Cheyenne Autumn (1964). They might not have been the best of friends on-and-off the set but they had a grudging respect for each other and the closest Ford ever came to praising Stewart was when he said, "He did a whale of a job manufacturing a character the public went for. He studied acting."

Two Rode Together (1961) Geoffrey O'Brien from Fipresci magazine, 2009

Christian Pyle

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

The New York Times (Eugene Archer)

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE A 96

USA (123 mi) 1962

This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
—Maxwell Scott (Carleton Young), newspaper editor

The last great work by Ford, which interestingly looks back at characters who are themselves reflecting back upon their lives, making this something of a memory play where Ford not only examines his own role in revitalizing the American Western, using some of his own stable of familiar stars to do it, he also questions the truth about our own history, raising some interesting questions about the role of newspapers, government, literature, cinema, and other artforms, showing how truth is often buried in order to form a more perfect and idealized legend, which becomes the substitute for the truth, but instead of an examination of the misperceptions of history, much of this film unfortunately feels like a rationalization for the director’s own actions. Certainly Ford is guilty of elevating heroes to mythical status, like the iconic stature of actor John Wayne, seen as the great American hero, the man who boldly stands above all others as an example of hard grit and that individual frontier spirit, always seen as the toughest guy and the fastest gun in the West. But despite his penchant for so-called accuracy and historical authenticity, Ford also negatively stereotypes the West, creating racial stigmas that have lasted through generations for more than half a century, where his repeating stream of derogatory stereotypical images have contributed mightily to the racist depiction of Indians as savages in order to make way for the coming white settlers, where his own mythology has not only proven inaccurate, but helped perpetuate the myth of white superiority in a historical era of the American West when Indians were subject to attack by the U.S. Cavalry and forced to a life on isolated reservations, or total annihilation if they refused. Surrender often led to starvation, rotten food, or worse, as so many Indians died from infection and contagious diseases. This bleak inevitability coincides with the slaughter of the plains buffalo to near extinction, all but eliminating their food source and the Indian way of life, a nomadic existence that followed the buffalo herds. You won’t find any cultural reference to Indian genocide or extermination in a John Ford movie, with the exception of the apologetic Cheyenne Autumn (1964), which instead focuses on the legendary white heroes who settled the West.

One of Ford’s best films, as it’s likely his most provocative and self-reflective work, THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE is a different kind of western, as it’s not shot in the great outdoors of the Monument Valley and doesn’t include a single Indian, instead it’s a chamber drama that moves indoors as it looks back at the first vestiges of democracy and government in action, as represented by a feisty but thoroughly domesticated James Stewart as Ransom Stoddard, a man hell-bent on bringing what he learned from East coast law school to the savage wilderness of the West, pitted against notorious gunslingers and outlaws like Lee Marvin’s deranged Liberty Valance, a sadistic killer turned monster, hired by the wealthy cattle barons to force their will upon the populace, as they believe in open range as far as the eye can see with absolutely no government intervention. Stuck in the middle of so-called progress is John Wayne as Tom Doniphon, given the reverential treatment here, as it’s his funeral that brings an ominous tone of solemnity to the opening of the film, told nearly entirely in flashback. Doniphon is seen as a man already forgotten, as time has passed him by, yet he’s the heart of the story, as the West would never have survived without men like him. Ford absolutely loves paying tribute to characters like this, unsung heroes that fought the pitch battles in a lawless frontier out in the middle of nowhere to make the world better for those that followed, laying the groundwork for a progress yet to come, eventually becoming a reality through the construction of the railroad, which changed the West, as humans came in droves afterwards. This western is not interested in the Wild West, which Ford has already shown before, where men like Doniphon and Liberty Valance prevailed, but in the taming of the West, showing the first signs of civilization, when men put down their guns and attempted to reason with one another, developing the first laws of the land, where the idea of an endless frontier instead emerges into the first arguments on statehood, becoming a highly entertaining piece of feelgood, patriotic Americana, the kind of thing you can watch on the 4^th of July along with Cagney’s YANKEE DOODLE DANDY (1942).

Something of an auteur project, Ford located the property, developed the script along with long-time associates Willis Goldbeck and James Warner Bellah and raised half of the money needed himself, while choosing an all-star cast, including the first time John Wayne and James Stewart worked together in a movie. The film represents an older and wiser man in the twilight of his career looking back, having already made MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (1946) and THE SEARCHERS (1956), critically acclaimed works that suggest something of an alternative mythology while accentuating the struggles between the individual and society, or chaos and civilization. The decision to shoot the film in Black and White was startling to some, as the western genre in the 60’s tended to glorify the West by emphasizing the beauty of the landscape through panoramic Cinemascope vistas, like THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960) or Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country (1962), but this film was shot in the murky darkness of confined spaces, creating a claustrophobic, character driven world where Stewart, for instance, spends the majority of the time wearing an apron and washing dishes with Vera Miles as Hallie and the other women in the restaurant kitchen. It’s quite a contrast to Wayne’s swaggering outdoor independence, a man who wouldn’t be caught dead doing women’s work. Interesting enough, both men are vying for the same woman (outside of a Mexican cantina, she is the only available woman seen in town), though their lives are on different trajectories, as Doniphon is doomed to live in a world where he cannot adapt, while Stoddard becomes one of the West’s first schoolteachers attempting to eradicate an epidemic of illiteracy. The already outdated western hero loses his girl and fades into obscurity while the lawyer from the East, a veritable Lincoln among the ruins, marries Hallie and rises to political power, becoming a 3-time Governor before ascending to the United States Senate. Meanwhile, in the ultimate showdown between good and evil, order and violence, or truth and legend, the awkward tenderfoot Stoddard stubbornly faces off against the gleefully overconfident Liberty Valance as the rest of the town shirks its responsibilities, hiding in the crevices and cracks in the dark, best expressed by the over-eating, freeloader sheriff Andy Devine as Marshall Link Appleyard, a man who stays alive by continually avoiding confrontation.

One interesting aspect of the film is it never shows the audience definitively who kills Liberty Valance, though most would assuredly think it does, but it’s impossible to tell from the footage provided just who’s gun the bullet came from, nonetheless, a legend is born, as Stoddard most certainly takes all the glory and credit which stays with him throughout his lengthy career, immortalized throughout history as the two men remain inseparable. What Ford pessimistically shows is how fate is more of an accident or even a misunderstanding, while history depends largely upon who’s telling it. By the time this film opens, at the end of Stoddard’s illustrious career, the West has already been settled and the myth of the western hero is remembered only in storybooks and flashbacks. Stoddard may have attempted to bring the civilized values of the East to the town of Shinbone, but he only does it through deception and violence, earning his reputation not through the law, but by killing an evil incarnate. At a nominating convention for statehood, his name is dragged through the mud as a murderer and his reputation sullied by the flowery language of the cattle baron’s mouthpiece, none other than John Carradine as Major Cassius Starbuckle, whose own candidate is nothing more than a grotesque spectacle. But Stoddard has his own image-maker in the form of newspaper publisher and town drunk Dutton Peabody, Edmund O’Brien, whose own overly verbose, chiché-ridden performance nearly ruins the film with such an obnoxious, self-inflated sense of ego, where at one point in a rambling drunken stupor he even resorts to quoting (incorrectly) Shakespeare’s Henry V. Yet it’s Peabody that sings the praises of Stoddard, anointing him to his new career as a mythical western hero, a noisy, frenetically wild sequence of pure mayhem and pandemonium where Ford seems to enjoy mocking the origins of the American political process with the same cynical tone reserved for the equally empty rhetoric of today.

What’s truly groundbreaking about this film is the way Ford reverses the wheels, turns his back on his success, and makes a film that challenges the same assertions that led to his success in the first place. This suggests a man confident enough of his place in history that he can challenge it while he’s still alive. The stark look of the film, taking place entirely in one’s mental recollections, makes it almost an anti-western, where Doniphon’s bold and reckless man of the West has already outlived his time. Usually placed just after THE SEARCHERS among Ford’s greatest works, it’s an interesting critique of his own mythmaking career, one that suggests history is filled with quasi-heroes, men whose public image and persona have been beefed up to hide and obscure the far different private lives behind the image, where suppression of the truth is a natural byproduct of the mythmaking process. In this manner, the nation’s confidence is propped up by political lies and distorted exaggerations, where one assumes this is preferable to hearing the unwholesome truth. But it also suggests “official” explanations may be leaving out what actually happened, case in point The Tillman Story (2010) or The Invisible War (2012). While this rather dark and sinister film is itself closer to the truth, it’s also highly entertaining and often hilarious, such as when young Ransom Stoddard shuts down the bar, by law, while voting is in progress at the territorial convention, calling it one of the “Fundamental laws of democracy, no exception,” and Dutton Peabody is repeatedly reminded by Tom Doniphon that the bar is closed, yet he keeps squirming for just a beer, as “a beer’s not drinking!” Reminded once again that there’s no exceptions, he quivers, “Why that’s carrying democracy much too far!” The film’s maniacal violence from the whip-wielding Liberty Valance, who has to be held back by his own men, actually anticipates even greater, exaggerated choreographed extremes from Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone, and even Clint Eastwood, where ironically Liberty Valance’s two henchmen include Peckinpah’s Strother Martin and Leone’s favorite villain, Lee van Cleef. Nowhere in the film, by the way, does Gene Pitney sing “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” though it is advertised in the film’s posters and movie trailer. Almost overlooked in the structure of the film, due to the central tension focused between Stoddard, Doniphon, and Valance, is the film’s concern with American politics and the birth of civilization in newly formed western towns, showing democracy in action at such fundamental levels by showing the significance of the role of the press, a town meeting, a debate over statehood, and the influence of education—all indoor preoccupations.

Something should be said about Woody Strode, Tom Doniphon’s black sidekick Pompey, who worked in five John Ford movies, from his final film going all the way back to STAGECOACH (1939). Though Doniphon treats him like he owns him, viewed as his loyal and obedient lackey, being John Wayne’s confidante in this film also gives him a certain elevated status with the audience, as they know his loyalty is not in dispute, that he always has Tom’s back, but he’s still not allowed into the saloon in Shinbone, as the bartender won’t serve a black man. This little bit of racial harmony among friends, but disharmony within the larger society, is interesting, as Ford is intentionally bringing attention to this racial disparity, pointing out the injustice, something he failed to notice with his own belittling portrayal of Indians.

Article - A Dozen Eclectic Westerns by Jonathan ... - DVDBeaver.com Jonathan Rosenbaum

John Ford uses John Wayne, James Stewart, Vera Miles, Lee Marvin (the title villain), Edmond O’Brien, John Carradine, John Qualen, Andy Devine, Woody Strode, and Strother Martin, among others, to recollect and rethink his own career as a maker of westerns and what all those legends he was helping to perpetuate meant. What he comes up with is ambivalent, complex, and so clouded with ambiguity about the misperceptions of history and heroism that Andrew Sarris called his essay about this black and white film “Cactus Rosebud”. It’s also a kind of melancholy ghost sonata. If you’re getting a little tired of black and white westerns on this list, be assured that this is the fifth and next to last.

Time Out Nigel Floyd

Ford's purest and most sustained expression of the familiar themes of the passing of the Old West, the conflict between the untamed wilderness and the cultivated garden, and the power of myth. Stewart plays a respected senator who returns on a train (in an opening echoing that of My Darling Clementine) to attend the funeral of his old friend Wayne. In one scene, Stewart wipes the dust off a disused stagecoach, marking in a simple gesture the distance between the Old West inhabited by Wayne and the new West which he himself represents. In the central flashback sequence, it is revealed that it was not Stewart who shot the outlaw Liberty Valance (Marvin) but Wayne, the gun law of the Old West paving the way for the development of a new civilisation. For Ford, the passing of the Old West is also the passing of an age of romantic heroism. The only link between the two worlds is the desert rose, a flowering cactus hardy enough to survive the harshness of the desert and humanise the wilderness.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Like Star Wars, Apocalypse Now and, oh, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, John Ford’s 1962 Western contains one of those lines that has worked its way into the culture, even if not everyone can identify the source. Valance is often referred to as an anti-Western along the lines of Ford’s The Searchers, but when Carleton Young’s cynically realistic newspaper editor proclaims, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend," he’s actually justifying mythmaking, not deconstructing it. True, the film’s story unravels the legend on which the whole career of Jimmy Stewart’s Plains politico is based, but we’re confronted, finally, with the proposition that most people are better off not knowing the truth. (Picture Stewart as an idealistic young screenwriter and Young as a savvy movie producer and you’ve got the dynamic about right.) As the seasoned gunman who tries to show Stewart’s new arrival the tricks of surviving in the near-lawless town of Shinbone, John Wayne is less wooden than usual, but he and Stewart are so consciously used as archetypes — Wayne the borderline-anachronistic man of honor, Stewart the naive, headstrong face of the civilized future — that they’re rarely called upon to act. Though he’s similarly playing to type, Lee Marvin ravishes the part of the villainous Valance, who’d as soon whip a man to death as spit in his eye.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kat C. Keish

John Ford needs no explanation--he is that great American director who is to the craft what Mount Rushmore is to our country's cultural landscape. And in THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE, Ford brings together two of America's most beloved representatives: Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne, those iconic actors whose combined filmography could stand in for most high school history classes. THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE is not only an homage to the genre that Ford himself revolutionized, but also a love letter to its stars, whose performances bring to mind roles from their early careers. In the film, Senator Ransom Stoddard (Stewart) and his wife, Hallie, return to their hometown to attend the funeral of their dear friend Tom Doniphon (Wayne). It's revealed through a flashback that Tom was the toughest man in town, who was keen on Hallie but at odds with Ranse; though their political ideologies aligned, their seeming unequivocal views on gun violence caused each to question their morals and their manhood. After Ranse is held up by the notorious outlaw Liberty Valance, he vows revenge through the law. Doniphon knows only Western justice and his love for Hallie, both of which are threatened by Ranse's arrival. They eventually come to respect one another, but their relationship is never one of romanticized camaraderie. Ranse still ultimately disagrees with Tom's trigger-happy disposition, and Tom resents Ranse's way with the ladies. Such disparities reflect the paradox of Ford's film within the context of his prolific career; the genre that he canonized is challenged by Ranse and Tom's philosophical differences. Where Ford seems to be self-questioning, Stewart and Wayne remain as much themselves as ever. Instead this time, Mr. Smith goes to Shinebone and Ringo Kid doesn't get the girl. Shot in black-and-white and on the Paramount sound stages, Ford contrasts his previously-confident recreations of early Western life with a humble perspective of an often-idealized convention. Both Stewart and Wayne were middle-aged, though their characters are supposed to be young men in their heyday. What appears to be lack of continuity adds a surrealist effect to one of the most streamlined genres. Also showing is a production featurette from the 1968 film WILL PENNY (6 min, 16mm). (1962, 123 min, 35mm)

The New York Times the 1962 review

THE Old West, ravaged by repetition and television, has begun to show signs of age to judge by "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," which arrived at the Capitol Theatre yesterday. The mayhem, murder and downright colorful cussedness inspired by the seemingly indestructible struggle between cattlemen and homesteaders, is handled with consummate professionalism by such top hands as John Ford, director; James Stewart and John Wayne. But time has made their vehicle creaky. Their basically honest, rugged and mature saga has been sapped of a great deal of effect by an obvious, overlong and garrulous anticlimax.

Mr. Ford, who has struck more gold in the West than any other film-maker, also has mined a rich vein here. He is again exposing the explosive forces involving the advent of law, in the shape of Mr. Stewart, on the raw denizens of a lawless frontier town. Our hapless hero is immediately ambushed by Liberty Valance, as brutal a dastard as ever shot up a sound stage, and a murderer in the hire of the cattle barons, who are opposed to statehood. But the majesty of the law sustains our transplanted Eastern lawyer, who is determined to bring justice to the town of Shinbone.

Of course, a viewer wonders why the sadistic Valance had not been liquidated before Mr. Stewart's arrival, especially since John Wayne, the fastest gun in the territory, is there to do the trick. As related in one long flashback — Mr. Stewart, now a famed Governor and Senator of the state, who has returned to Shinbone for Mr. Wayne's funeral—there is "more than meets the eye in "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance." Out of unexplained kindness, Mr. Wayne has given Mr. Stewart his protection even though he knows that Vera Miles, the local waitress and his girl, is losing her heart to Mr. Stewart. At any rate, the mystery of who actually did the shooting of the villain, a deed that eventually catapults Mr. Stewart into national eminence, is explained. But to a moderately alert observer, it is hardly an enigma since it is strongly stressed that Mr. Stewart couldn't hit the floor with his hat.

Once that point has been made—and it is made in vividly tough and picturesque style—Mr. Ford's irony is lost and his drama bogs down. Mr. Stewart's ascent to national fame is neither inventive nor intriguing. But his vignettes of the brawling life of Shinbone on a Saturday night; the ravenous diners on giant, fried steaks; the tinny music and clatter of a saloon; the tinkling sounds of a cantina near the desert, and a raucous local election are the authentic sights and sounds of a pioneer community.

Mr. Stewart makes an effectively fumbling but indomitable lawyer, who values honesty as much as justice. Mr. Wayne again proves, if it is necessary at this late date, that he can sit a horse well, shoot from the hip and throw a haymaker with the best of them. And, fortunately, he is more laconic than most. The same cannot be said for Edmond O'Brien, whose performance as the town drunk and newspaper owner-editor includes more words than The Congressional Record. It is both a broad and fairly chiché-ridden portrayal. "Lee Marvin, in the title role, is a villain, without nuance, to delight the abnormal psychology student. He beats, kicks and kills his victims with the fervor of a maniac.

Miss Miles makes an engagingly rough-hewn heroine and John Carradine, in an oratorical bit; Jeannette Nolan and John Qualen, as the Swedish restaurant owners; Andy Devine, as a timorous marshal, and Woody Strode, as Mr. Wayne's unflinchingly loyay sidekick, add competent support to the principals.

"When legend becomes fact," a newspaper editor tells Mr. Stewart, "print the legend." In "Liberty Valance," there is too much of a good legend.

George Chabot's Review of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

“Think you can make it, Pilgrim?”

Director John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance represents a milestone in the Western genre - an essay on the passing of the Wild West and the rise of law and order.

Gone is the white hat/black hat morality of the classic western. Gone also is the idea that the good guy always wins.

Benefiting from a masterful screenplay by a committee of screenwriters, the story is set in several acts, most of which take place indoors. It begins in a bustling western town around the turn of the 20th century. The railroad has brought prosperity to Shinbone.

Jimmy Stewart stars as the bumbling eastern dude lawyer, Ransom A. Stoddard. Stoddard is a guy who took Horace Greeley's "Go West, and grow up with the country" advice to heart. Trouble is, he is not fitted out to cope with the realities of life on the frontier. He quickly finds out just how vulnerable he is when his stage is held up and the villain, Liberty Valance, gives him a vicious beating with a silver-knobbed whip. Clearly, the ability to quote long passages from his law book is not going to do Stoddard much good when confronted with such men. He is befriended by the honest rancher Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) a man of action and everything that Stoddard is not. Stoddard is just about to give up and go back East, but there is a girl, Hallie (Vera Miles)…

The movie begins with Stoddard returning to the town of Shinbone to attend the funeral of his friend, Tom Doniphon. Stoddard is a US Senator, ever since the territory became a state. The movie is told in flashbacks from Stoddard's memory. Stoddard got his notoriety years before from standing up to Liberty Valance, the meanest man South of the Picket wire. Now, after forty years, with all the principal players dead, Stoddard decides to come clean and tell how the territory was settled and how the gunfight with Liberty Valance went down. At the end of his surprising story, the newspaper editor simply says, "When the legend has become fact, print the legend."

Shot in gritty black and white, in a day when Technicolor was the norm, I believe Ford was trying to show the elemental difference between good and evil, along with the varying shades of gray we humans invariably find in-between; how compromise dulls our edge and makes us settle for less than we could have had. Such is politics and such is the story of civilization.

The characters are typical, but stereotypical behavior was what Ford wanted from his cast, to underscore his moral; and he got it in spades from an ensemble cast.

Liberty Valance, ably played by Lee Marvin, is the town bully - not especially tough, but tough enough to bully that measly town. That is, until he ran afoul of Tom Doniphan -John Wayne, in one of his finest performances - who proved the tougher man, even though the credit devolved on Stewart, who successfully ran for Senator as "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance."

Great supporting cast in Woody Strode, Andy Devine, Edmond O'Brien, Vera Miles, Lee Van Cleef, and Strother Martin. Outstanding dramatic score by Cyril Mockridge as well as compelling expressionist cinematography by William Clothier.

Along with The Searchers, this is John Ford's masterpiece; to miss it is to do a grave disservice to a western fan, as it is one of the very finest westerns ever made.

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The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance - Reverse Shot Near Myth, by Michael Koresky, Autumn 2005

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HOW THE WEST WAS WON

USA (162 mi) 1962 ‘Scope co-directors: Henry Hathaway, George Marshall, and Richard Thorpe (Ford filmed “The Civil War” segment)

Time Out

A vast, sprawling Western, shot in the short-lived three-strip Cinerama process, which chronicles the development of the American West through the adventures of one family over three generations. Hathaway's sequence, 'The Rivers, The Plains, The Outlaws', comes off best, while Ford's section on the Civil War looks as much a survey of his own career as of the war. The main problem remains the impossibility of subjecting a film that is fundamentally about landscape and history to the demands of such a coarse dramatic form.

Classic Film Guide (capsule)

A glorious epic (the title is the story) told in three parts; it won three Oscars (Editing, Sound, & Writing for James Webb, his only Academy recognition) and was nominated for five others: Best Picture, Color Art Direction, Cinematography & Costume Design, and Score. Directed by John Ford, Henry Hathaway (The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935)) and a couple of others, it features a "boatload" of stars including Carroll Baker, Lee J. Cobb, Henry Fonda, Karl Malden, Gregory Peck, George Peppard, Robert Preston, Debbie Reynolds (the only actor to appear in all three sections), James Stewart, Eli Wallach, John Wayne, Richard Widmark, Walter Brennan, Andy Devine, Raymond Massey, Agnes Moorehead, Thelma Ritter, Harry Morgan, Spencer Tracy, and Russ Tamblyn (Harry Dean Stanton & Lee Van Cleef appear uncredited) among others. Added to the National Film Registry in 1997. #25 on AFI's Top 25 Film Scores list.

Doug Pratt's DVD Review

The star-studded Cinerama epic is presented in dual-layer format, and is letterboxed with an aspect ratio of about 2.35:1 and no 16:9 enhancement. The picture appears to be the same as the LD release, with the panel edges of the Cinerama image readily evident much of the time. The color transfer looks very nice, with bright hues and decent fleshtones. The image is sharp and wear is minimal. Perfectionists complain that it isn’t good enough, but until everybody has curved living rooms with wall-sized screens and three projectors, it will have to do. The sound could probably use some sprucing up. The basic stereo surround soundtrack is enjoyable, but the film’s original seven-track stereo separations have not been preserved and there is no Dolby Digital encoding. The 150 minute film can also be presented in French and comes with English, French or Spanish subtitles (“Venez avec moi/Je sais un pays/Où nous bâtirons, notre maison/Dans le prairie”). There is a nice general release trailer, emphasizing the film’s cast, and a terrific 15 minute retrospective featurette, partially about Cinerama and partially showing a behind-the-scenes look at some of the movie’s stunt sequences.

There are people who insist that movies, and DVDs for that matter, are supposed to be Art, and we wonder what these people do for relaxation. How the West Was Won is art all right, folk art. The technology that was used to create it was aiming not for a high ideal, but for a mass entertainment. With as many directors as it has panels and four times as many stars, it is a conglomeration of talent with no individual’s imprint looming larger than another. In telling a generational story that codifies the growth of the American West in a collection of movie action sequences, the film’s limitations are readily apparent. The vignettes are precisely what the filmmakers intended them to be, however, enough of a story to provide a mild commentary on the path of generational growth, while stringing along the thrills. It has one grandstanding moment after another, and when you become attuned to them you can get excited just seeing the shot of the St. Louis street, because looming in the center is a large show palace and you just know the next cut will be to a widescreen dance number. What the movie is really saying is that our forefathers fought to expand and settle America so that we could sit back and enjoy movies like this, and we certainly do not intend to let them down.

Man's Favorite Short: "The Civil War" Miguel Marías from Fipresci magazine

Almost the only John Ford film dealing with the War between the States, together with The Horse Soldiers (1959), this 21-minute segment of the Cinerama epic How The West Was Won (1962) remains, in the midst of an interesting but long and sprawling blockbuster, almost ignored or, when seen, immediately dismissed or forgotten because of its very short duration. It seems an absurdly quantitative criterion which no critic, I think, would acknowledge, but which certainly and surreptitiously works against a fair consideration of shorts, thereby limiting yet more their attractiveness as a feasible narrative format, the best when a story can be briefly told, instead of inflating a paper-thin anecdote into a standard-length screenplay, as happens so often today.

By 1962, John Ford had fully developed a sort of cinematic shorthand which allowed him, on a studio backlot despite the theoretical spectacular Cinerama show to which he had accepted to contribute (the producer was Bernard Smith, who later hired Ford for Cheyenne Autumn and 7 Women), to synthesize the meaning and the taste of the Civil War, perhaps of war in general, surely of most civil wars, in a little more than twenty minutes which I regard among the best, most purely cinematic he ever directed.

It is a very simple, wholly elliptical short, built with the naked evidence of logic. Abraham Lincoln (Raymond Massey) foresees that there will be a war between the States. The former mailman, now Corporal Peterson (Andy Devine) of the Ohio Volunteers militia, brings to the aging Mrs. Eve Rawlings (Carroll Baker) a letter about her son Zeb (George Peppard) from her sister Lilith in California. But the boy doesn't want to go there or to work in the family farm, but rather wishes to follow his father's steps and go to war. Like so many others, including Peterson, Zeb seems to believe that the war is a great adventure, a promise of glory and fun, and that it won't last for long. In another beautiful porch scene, with both sitting on the steps, the tired mother, hurt but helpless, gives in to her son's youthful delusions. As he sets off to war along the dirt road, she prays and talks to her father's tomb. But war is no fun. Rather a nightmarish mess. Captain Rawlings has been killed in the battle of Shiloh. Nearby, unaware of that, a lost and haggard Zeb meets another disappointed and frightened young recruit, a nameless rebel without a cause (Russ Tamblyn), both equally terrified, disgusted, exhausted, and feeling so cheated they are on the verge of desertion. Though chaos is so general that no one would know if they did. In the night, sitting thirsty by the riverside whose bloody water they cannot drink, both overhear the bitter, disheartened talk of two generals, Grant (Harry Morgan) and Sherman (John Wayne). The Texan deserter is tempted by this chance to become famous as the man who killed Grant, so Zeb has to bayonet him to death. Nobody realizes or understands either what's happened or what might have happened otherwise. After some more brief battle shots, Zeb returns home only to find two new tombs in the family plot: both his parents are now dead. He leaves for the West, in search of a more adventurous life than farming.

It's that simple. But it breathes in a serene and beautiful way, unhurried but to the point, with an economy of trait and gesture that brings to mind Griffith and Chaplin, and now (we were not familiar with the Japanese master in 1962) seems curiously close to Ozu. No more need be said. Why, when you can see it? And fully understand it without any stress, with very little, sparse, laconic dialogue. Part of its beauty comes from the hallucinated pictorial quality of day-for-night sets composed for widescreen that recall Goya's firing squad or David's cavalry charges. But most of it comes rather from the dead leaves silent dropping quality of the shots which quietly let things simply happen, at a certain distance, without stressing the horror or the self-evident loss.

Turner Classic Movies Lang Thompson

BFI | Sight & Sound | DVD Review: How the West Was Won (1962) NOZONE: The Wide, Wide West, by Tim Lucas from Sight and Sound, December 2008

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DONOVAN’S REEF

USA (109 mi) 1963

Time Out

Most critics agree that Donovan's Reef is a fun film - 'A couple of Navy men who have retired to a South Sea island now spend most of their time raising hell', runs one brief description of the film - but beneath the fun lies one of Ford's most desperate films. Set on an idyllic island, the film seemingly depicts a 'natural' (semi-feudal) society in which Ford's wandering heroes (Wayne, Marvin and Warden) can at last settle down and find peace. However, the arrival of Warden's Boston-reared daughter (Allen) reveals that, like the town in The Sun Shines Bright, the island of Ailakaowa is a paradise built on ritual and racial division. In short, a very bleak - but very funny - comedy.

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson)

Andrew Sarris in The American Cinema said that Donovan's Reef was like some kind of heaven that Tom Doniphon and Liberty Valance, both fun-loving uncivilized types, had retreated to in the afterlife.   And it's the key to appreciating this broad comedy.

Just appreciating this show on any level will be an accomplishment for younger fans.  There's a lot they may despise here, starting with the faux-Hawaiian song concocted from 'tiny bubbles', a Lawrence Welk favorite. ( actually, lounge music fans may love it)   The use of Polynesians and particularly Asians is stock stereotyping at its most extreme ("plitty lady, show legs, nice picture?"), but is only the most salient aspect of a fantasy constructed almost entirely from stock ideas.   Even the critical champions of Ford had to make excuses for his favorite subplots involving amusing drunks and giant brawls where nobody's seriously hurt; Donovan's Reef is almost completely composed of this kind of material, a lot of which is fall-down funny, especially with Marvin and Wayne clowning around.

But that's the whole point.  John Ford obviously wanted to make a light comedy in the paradise of the South Seas he had reconstructed in The Hurricane 25 years before, and had seen for himself during the War in the Pacific.  Haleakaloa is no real place but instead IS the Valhalla for fallen Ford heroes, especially the misfits who don't belong in society.  'Guns' Donovan, 'Boats' Gilhooley and the Doc are refugees from Ford's more serious films, living in a paradise for Navy veterans.  A tourist's paradise it is, not unlike Shangri-La, a place populated by charming, clean natives who always smile, wear bright clothes and speak English with endearing child-like accents.  The natives of Haleakaloa might as well be sub-human Eloi, easy to convert to Christian spirituality and easy to take to bed, but not on the same level as the whites.  Blacks somehow need not apply; even Woody Strode's servile Pompey of Liberty Valance doesn't earn a place in paradise, it seems.

The brawling goes on non-stop, and is just another ritual for birthdays and Christmas in a film constructed almost entirely of Ford moments: arrivals, departures, memorials, church services, pagaents, parades.  Here's where the appreciation might kick in, for far from being some kind of stiff & square non-comedy by has-beens, Donovan's Reef comes off instead as a surreal, almost abstract progression of kabuki-like rituals from the world of John Ford.

There's the Clementine-like good girl from back East, who Donovan 'humanizes' with a spanking and a kiss.  There's also the local, dark, bad girl played by Dorothy Lamour, who evokes not only the Hope and Crosby comedies in her sarong, but reminds us that she started the fad with The Hurricane. In that movie her native husband Jon Hall travels afar and wants to buy her some special things to bring back as gifts; Lamour's 'Miss LaFleur' is like the ghost of that woman, singing boozily about a man promising to bring her petticoats and dresses.  The entrance of the boat into the harbor with 'heavenly' singing is a cliché practically invented by Ford in The Hurricane, that continues through The Long Voyage Home and even into Mr. Roberts. The feeling imparted is that the weary travelers have arrived at a place far from home free of civilization and its restrictions, where one can be at peace, as if it were a welcome refuge for everyone who's lost the essential Ford idea of Home.  

Ford's heroes arrive at Haleakaloa by literally swimming ashore, but even on the beach there's a formal native gate that frames every arrival (Gilhooley greeted by his fans) and exit (the very surreal assembly at the end, with all marching forward & while staring out to sea).  Ameilia and Michael's first handshake is framed by this gate.  The fact that a 'native' runs through the frame with a handy towel for Ameilia to dry herself is a reflection of the lack of concern for realism.  Mike tear-asses around in his jeep, even with tots aboard, as harmlessly as in the comic barfights where nobody gets killed, despite the lethal blows that are being exchanged.  There are a lot of similarities between Haleakaloa and the Judgement City in Defending Your Life, where there are also no consequences for one's actions.

Mike Doniphon, I mean, Donovan, says that his destroyer was sunk offshore, and they swam to the island to be welcomed by the natives.  Donovan's Reef is so fantastic, it's fun to speculate that the sailors actually all went down with the ship, and that the whole film is the wishful thinking, Ambrose Bierce-style, of life-loving sailors killed prematurely.  After all, the Doc never contacted his family ever again, and Gilhooley and Donovan might as well have dropped off the face of the Earth with him.  It's an idea that goes only so far, but it does help explain why this tropical island is populated by fantasy natives from a Hollywood movie, why the only Asians are harmless comic relief, even why the houses and lawns are manicured to picture-postcard perfection.  This Polynesian paradise is the one of Tourist shows, with lines of smiling young women insultingly presumed to be available to the Howlies.  The reverence accorded the hereditary descendant of Manulani is amazingly sincere, given the bald tourist baloney of the pageantry surrounding her.

So Ford's film is the ultimate Navy fantasy, where grown men get to live in a state of frozen adolesence, playing with toy trains, the dark floozy gets to marry her hunk instead of dying off in the last reel, and the Clementine Carter character stops being such a priss and gets down to basic chemistry with the hero.  If modern teen movies can have every kid hero be a champion kickboxer, and warp historical events (Pearl Harbor) to indulge the selfish fantasies of 21st-century know-nothings, than surely John Ford and his pals - who actually lived through some of these world-changing events - should be permitted the luxury of having their own surreal fantasy, even if the fantasy includes unlimited beer and cigarettes.  In other words, they saved the world, so cut 'em some slack, already.   Much like loving the idea of America, loving John Ford movies is like loving an ideal that you know should not be confused with the Truth.  If my parents' generation had mastered the miracle of honoring the legend, but telling the Truth, well, things could have been a lot different.

16:9 enhanced and beatifully remastered, Paramount's Donovan's Reef is a visual treat almost as good as a vacation on Maui.  William Clothier's lush photography takes full advantage of what must have been inspiring conditions ... it's hard to believe there are bugs on the plants, and you want to rush forward and fix the divot ripped out of the lawn by Wayne's jeep. It's almost offensive when Wayne tosses his cigarette butt into a Hawaiian bay. Anyhoo, the disc is just gorgeous, and the restored proper framing makes Ford's formal intentions more apparent than on flat television prints.  The only extra is a trailer, but this title has a French mono track in addition to its standard English Mono.  The brief package notes are by someone who inanely says that the heroes brawl to 'stave off the sameness of tropical living.'  Sheesh, I'll take my crackpot theories any day.

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CHEYENNE AUTUMN C- 69

USA (154 mi) 1964

Even a dog can go where he likes... but not a Cheyenne. —Dull Knife (Gilbert Roland)

No self-respecting Quaker could fall in love with a soldier. —Deborah Wright (Carroll Baker)

An apologetic film that attempts to right the wrongs of the racist and historically inaccurate portrayal of Indians in the John Ford mythology, one the director is responsible for creating throughout his storied career, where he unapologetically portrays Indians as savages while anointing the white settlers and Cavalry officers to noble American heroes, where the contrast between the two differing characterizations couldn’t be more imposingly different, where in Ford’s filmography, whites are the master race, the one’s with superior intellect and culture, and the only ones to ever display any hint of personality and character, where we never follow the lives or families of Indians, who were never seen in a sympathetic light and never written into the storyline of the films except to be killed, as Indians were utilized only as barbarous objects standing in the way of civilized white progress, where their eradication is always seen as boldly heroic and noble, as if this is how the West was won. Even if nothing could be further from the truth, this is the West as John Ford tells it, building his career on capturing the so-called authenticity of the Old West in his westerns, becoming the most esteemed movie director of the entire western movie genre. Simultaneously fixated on the beads and buckskins of the plains Indians, Ford brought his cameras outdoors to the breathtaking desert topography of the Southwest’s Monument Valley, both of which he described were for “aesthetic reasons,” where generations of moviegoers were led to believe that western Kansas looks just like northern Arizona, where the territories of the Commanches and the Cheyenne are indistinguishable from that of the Apaches. Ford made seven Monument Valley westerns, which is actually located on Navajo Indian Territory, where the untranslated Indian dialogue is in Navajo, not Cheyenne, and he was proud about employing Navajos as movie extras, though he paid them less than what he paid whites, winning Academy Award nominations for two of the pictures, STAGECOACH (1939) and THE SEARCHERS (1956), while the others include MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (1946), FORT APACHE (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), which won Best Cinematography, WAGON MASTER (1950), and CHEYENNE AUTUMN, also nominated for Best Cinematography.

CHEYENNE AUTUMN is what you might call a patronizing view of Indians, where only whites can be trusted to tell the “right” story to the audience, so in the end, despite its obvious sympathies for the plight of the Indian, it is equally misguided with its overly stiff and near cardboard cut-out, Hollywood portrait of Indians, starting with the miscasting of Cheyenne chiefs Dull Knife and Little Wolf with Gilbert Roland and Ricardo Montalban, while Red Shirt is played by Sal Mineo, who never utters a word, while an Indian wife known only as Spanish Woman is played by Dolores del Rio. Making the case that the Hollywood studios just couldn’t find Indians capable of playing themselves on screen “convincingly,” they instead consistently hired whites or Hispanics to impersonate Indians in a more “believable” manner. This practice backfired, as the wooden performances are projections of Indians as stereotypes, where nothing more detailed or complex was ever written for them. This is in stark contrast to the meticulously researched book that inspired the film, written by Mari Sandoz who wrote extensively about pioneer life and the Plains Indians, known for her attention to detail. She was not used as a consultant on the film, though she was available, where Ford’s screenwriter James R. Webb, and the near stolen contribution of Howard Fast’s The Last Frontier (whose left-wing politics Ford despised, so he was not credited or paid for his story), literally combine to include the absurd presence of a pacifist white Quaker teacher (Carroll Baker) driving her buggy with the desperately fleeing Cheyennes during the 1878 Breakout, when a band of less than 300 Cheyenne Indians decide to flee from Oklahoma Indian Territory, a makeshift reservation where they had been sent by the U.S. government, which then failed to provide adequate food and shelter, causing an epidemic of famine and disease where more than 700 of them died, so they escaped to their original Wyoming homeland in the Yellowstone country mostly walking on foot, avoiding the chasing U.S. Cavalry troupe led by the film narrator, Richard Widmark as Captain Thomas Archer, who had orders to return them to the reservation. The inclusion of an attractive white teacher among the Indians softens the genocidal implications of what was actually done to the Cheyennes, inappropriately and inaccurately generating Indian sympathy through her “whiteness.” Even in a film that attempts to portray Indians in a sympathetic light, highlighting the historical implications of grievous mistreatment, John Ford requires the presence of whites to generate the sympathy.

Ironically, it was white activists from the 60’s who were protesting the war, fighting for Civil Rights, or even making movies in Hollywood who were predisposed to think well of American Indians. Following the Kennedy assassination, the nation was charged with emotion, led by youth protests publicly demonstrating against an increasingly unpopular war, where change was the order of the day. It was in this rapidly changing social and political climate, attempting to deliver a film in step with the liberal mood of the country that Ford made CHEYENNE AUTUMN, using the American Indian as a metaphor against oppressed people. Reflecting back on his own legacy, Ford reevaluated his own role when he previously turned a blind eye to the idea of Indians not only as an oppressed people, but mystical and in harmony with their natural environment. This film goes against the grain of everything John Ford stood for, where he fictionalized events to create mythical white heroes, which were extremely popular with the public, while here he bases the film on the Fort Robinson tragedy, an actual historical incident, destroying the legend that he himself created, which may be one of the reasons it was less successful. Contrary to the previous methodology of Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy pitting two conflicting forces against one another, Captain Archer is actually an admirer of the people he is ordered to chase across the American plains, a nearly decimated people, the reservation Indians, whose arduous trek marching across nearly 1500 miles of heat and dirt and snow and ice only reinforces his admiration. The point being, once you remove the blinders of the Hollywood stereotype and the reality of the situation comes into focus, respect and justice can finally occur. The problem lies in the distorted imagery. No clearer example of this exists than the scene where a cowboy shoots down an unarmed Cheyenne begging for food, where the cowboy sentiment is reflected in his view that “I always wanted to kill me an Indian,” because he’s the only one of his friends not to have an Indian scalp. Cold-blooded murder is justified in his eyes based on the racist imagery. Ford follows this with a host of wildly exaggerated newspaper headlines, each one a greater distortion of the truth than the last, until one publisher finally insists, “From now on we’re going to grieve for the noble red man. We’ll sell more papers that way.” This seems to be the sentiment behind this film, which ironically was a box office flop, showing perhaps how out of step Ford was with the times, where both he and his iconic movie star John Wayne, incidentally, were two of the most outspoken supporters in favor of the Vietnam War.

The opening credit sequence of Frederic Remington Indian sculptures suggest shedding a different light, showing, finally, a nobility in being Indian, and while the beautiful panoramic vistas of Monument Valley are used to wondrous effect as visual poetry, this time telling the story from the Indian’s point of view (though narrated by a white Army officer), with a near burlesque Dodge City sequence that goes for over-the-top humor, this sad and melancholy movie is the most expensive in Ford’s entire career, but is never very engaging. From the outset, the Cheyenne Indians are already dying by the hundreds of famine and disease, but Ford makes no reference to a systematic policy of genocide, but blames the circumstances on utter indifference, so when the Indians stand around in the hot sun all day to meet a congressional delegation that never shows, it’s clear that words, especially white man’s words, so essential in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), have been reduced to nothing here, just empty rhetoric with no meaning, where Dull Knife utters “We are asked to remember much. The white man remembers nothing.” Despite Ford’s claims that this was “a true story, authentic, the reality as it was,” the movie is filled with more historical inaccuracies that are quite different from the book, as the Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz never traveled West and was basically uninvolved with the Cheyenne affair, Dull Knife never killed Red Shirt in a tribal ceremony, but Thin Elk at a trading post. Lone Wolf was never a noble warrior, but a drunk, where the runaway girl in question was his daughter, not his wife. Ford, one must remember, is the director who told Peter Bogdonovich in an interview, “I’ve killed more Indians than Custer, Beecher, and Chivington put together,” something he was proud of, as if this was the legacy he was looking for in his lifetime. And without Indian killers, he’s made a movie without heroes, without any clear depiction of purpose, where much of its overlength feels lost to aimless wandering, like Moses wandering in the wilderness searching for direction. Even when Ford darkens the skies with a landscape of dead buffalo bones, all senselessly killed for buffalo hides, we see no evidence of who slaughtered them. Who is to blame? Everyone? And when a similar landscape of dead bodies lay upon the frozen ground just outside the Fort Robinson prison gates when Indians made their suicidal escape, where are the heroes, and who does one sympathize with? While there is a contrived, Fordian feel good ending tacked on at the end, this is mere make believe, as in real life, those escaping Cheyenne were all tracked down and either killed or returned to the fort, hardly a noble victory, captured in a painting entitled After the Final Battle at “The Pit” FortRobinsonPit006.jpg, by Frederic Remington, originally appearing in the August, 1897 issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine.

Time Out Geoff Andrew

Making amends for his less than sensitive treatment of the Indians in his earlier movies, Ford came up with a sprawling epic illustrating the callous disregard with which the US government treated the Cheyenne in the 1880s, uprooting them from the Yellowstone and resettling them in distant Oklahoma without proper provisions for survival. Over-long, often clichéd and uneven (there are comic interludes complete with cameo performances), but still imbued with moments of true poetry, thanks largely to William Clothier's magnificent Panavision landscapes.

DVD Savant Glenn Erickson

Ford's Cheyenne Autumn was his 65mm bid to follow in the footsteps of The Alamo and How the West Was Won. Signs of Ford's souring attitude to the West started with his post-war Fort Apache but his reversal of sympathies to the side of Native Americans didn't really hit until The Searchers. Audiences didn't pick up on this change, so the full-blown liberal outrage of Cheyenne Autumn took them by surprise.

The movie is not good. If Ford and his producer Bernard Smith had a master plan, it got lost along the way. Andrew Sarris pegged the problem when he said that Ford could sympathize with the Indians but wasn't capable of presenting them as anything more than stiff symbols: It's supposed to be their movie but for the most part they pose like ... like wooden Indians. Add an ungainly structure and a story with no surprises, only grim disappointments, and Cheyenne Autumn is a real debacle.

One shocking scene in The Searchers shows mounted cavalry troops marching a line of freezing Indians through deep snowdrifts. Although complacent 1956 audiences don't seem to have been aware of Ford's subversive intentions, that set of visuals (and the troopers splashing through an icy stream) say more than the 156 minutes of Cheyenne Autumn. It's not that we don't like the movie -- it overflows with our favorite actors playing against drop-dead beautiful 65mm visuals of Monument Valley (which again stretches from the Southwest to the Canadian border). But just as we sometimes find ourselves complimenting films that magically get everything right (Casablanca, Singin' in the Rain, The Asphalt Jungle) it's a sad thing to report on a picture that somehow gets everything dead wrong.

Ford's background Indians are the same reliable fellows we've seen since Stagecoach but his leads are all played by ethnic Europeans and Latins ... Sal Mineo, Ricardo Montalban, Victor Jory, Gilbert Roland. Dolores Del Rio is supposed to be a Spanish woman, but everybody else just reminds us that we're in Hollywoodland. Mineo is good in his small part, but Montalban and Roland are lost doing a "who's got the pillow" schtick with the tribe's sacred icon. The worst of it is that we learn so little about the Indians. They're so boring we honestly don't care what happens to them. An old Mad magazine hit this fact without mercy, calling the movie "Cheyenne Awful."

We'd never believe that Ford could be led astray with good intentions ... the screen story is the movie equivalent of a root canal. The Indians suffer in the sun. A narrator tells us about the injustice visited upon them. Carroll Baker (who is fine - no weepy scenes) tells us about the injustice. Liberal trooper Richard Widmark complains about the injustice. Soulful Secretary of the Interior Edward G. Robinson worries about the injustice in Washington. Meanwhile, Ford's stock company is either sidelined or plays villains. Harry Carey Jr. and Ben Johnson do some hot fast riding, but that's all they do. Ken Curtis is a murderous cowboy. Casual western fans in 1964 must have wondered what the heck Ford was thinking.

This DVD release comes complete with a major missing scene (that still looks like it has continuity jumps) that disappeared from most sub-runs of the film. It's a light-comedy episode in Dodge City that just plain doesn't fit. James Stewart is Wyatt Earp, Arthur Kennedy is Doc Holliday and a pack of amusing actors (John Carradine, Elizabeth Allan of Donovan's Reef) play idiotic townspeople panicked by the idea that an Indian horde will soon attack. It's only fitfully funny and is ridiculously wrong for Cheyenne Autumn. James Stewart shoots Ken Curtis' murderous cowpoke in the foot in a dirty-trick faceoff identical to Han Solo's "shooting first" scene in Star Wars (the real Star Wars from 1977).

After the Hallelujah Trail-style chaos in Dodge City, we're given an obvious concentration camp metaphor with Karl Malden's harsh Captain deciding to freeze the Indians into accepting his terms. Everybody gets a chance to thump their chests and say how sorry they are. Then Edward G. Robinson shows up via terrible rear-projection for a quickie peace-pipe scene. One shocking scene with Sal Mineo and the Indians has a powerful outburst of Indian emotion but neglects to show us the reaction of Mineo's lover (spoiler), who presumably should be concerned when he's shot dead in front of the whole tribe. A few discontinuous shots of Baker and Widmark returning an Indian child to the (now happy?) tribe gives us a wholly unsatisfying ending. Has everyone forgotten about returning the Indians to the desert? What's going on?

I particularly wish that Cheyenne Autumn hadn't been a big flop, because it probably contributed to Columbia's decision to slash the budget at the last minute for Sam Peckinpah's Major Dundee. There were a pack of failed cavalry pictures in 1964 -65.

Warners' DVD of Cheyenne Autumn is to be praised, as this is a picture that only John Ford fans will appreciate. A welcome commentary from ace Ford biographer Joseph McBride records the entire story of this noble failure, including the various cuts and editorial choppings done to bring it into showable shape. If you've seen the movie before, I recommend listening to it right off the top. A trailer is also included, along with a lazy vintage featurette that has narrator Jimmy Stewart expressing more concern for the historical plight of the Apache. It has pretty pictures but not much of a commitment to its subject.

Cheyenne Autumn (1964) Toshi Fujiwara from Fipresci magazine, 2009

Cheyenne Autumn - Turner Classic Movies Scott McGee

Cheyenne Autumn Read TCM's Home Video Review on this film Richard Harland Smith

nativeamerican.co.uk Chris Smallbone

• View topic - Cheyenne Autumn (John Ford, 1964) Criterion forum, a film discussion group, July 18, 2006

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CHEYENNE AUTUMN Mardecortesbaja

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

Classic Film Freak

Variety

Cleveland Press [Tony Mastroianni]

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) also seen here: The New York Times

DVDBeaver Gary W. Tooze

7 WOMEN

USA (87 mi) 1966

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

A commercial disaster when it came out in 1966, generally relegated to the lower half of double bills and dismissed by most critics, John Ford's magnificent last feature is surely one of his greatest--not merely for its unsentimental distillation of Fordian themes, but for the telegraphic urgency and passion of its style, which is aided rather then handicapped by the stripped-down studio sets. Set in 1935, the film effectively transposes the gender and settings of many of his classic westerns to the apocalyptic last days of a female missionary outpost in China, which is about to be invaded by Mongolian warriors (including Mike Mazurki and Woody Strode). Anne Bancroft stars as an atheistic but humanist doctor who turns up at the mission, immediately challenging its sense of propriety with her lack of inhibitions and acerbic manner. With Sue Lyon, Margaret Leighton, Flora Robson, Mildred Dunnock, Anna Lee, Betty Field, and Eddie Albert. 87 min.

Slant Magazine [Keith Uhlich]

John Ford's 7 Women unfortunately remains something of an obscurity. Upon its release in 1966, the film played as the second half of a double bill with the Burt Kennedy-directed Elke Sommer vehicle The Money Trap and was roundly ignored or pitied (save by a gallant few that included the always-alert Andrew Sarris and the insightful, passionate Ford historian Tag Gallagher) as the latest failed project of a once-great director. But time reveals truth: 7 Women is, in actuality, a great film whose potboiler plot masks an incisive inquiry into the battle of the sexes—it reflects Ford's artistic and ideological maturation and sums up many of his career-long themes within a narrative that transcends its B-movie, role-reversal kookiness.

In North China, year 1935, an emissary of change threatens the conservative values of a female-run Christian mission: Dr. D.R. Cartwright (Anne Bancroft) is a hardheaded atheist, firm believer in science, and just about the most mannish woman you ever saw. Clad in cowboy garb that gives her more than a passing resemblance to Ford's frequent actor John Wayne, Cartwright drinks, smokes, cusses, and basically wreaks havoc on the traditional ideals of womanhood that the mission upholds. Her main nemesis and polar opposite is Agatha Andrews (Margaret Leighton), an uptight, repressed authoritarian who holds a fairly obvious lesbian attraction to oblivious young protégé Emma Clark (Sue Lyon). Tensions abound between Cartwright and Andrews, with a begrudging respect afforded when the doctor near single-handedly saves Emma and the other mission residents during a cholera epidemic. Yet their truce is short-lived, for the mission is soon invaded by the vicious Mongolian warlord Tunga Khan (Mike Mazurki), as brutish a symbol of unchecked, rampaging masculinity as the cinema has ever offered.

Ford is no stranger to mapping the divide separating men and women, though, in a unique twist for the director, 7 Women explores the gender abyss through primarily female viewpoints. Indeed, the first half of the film focuses entirely on the women, the only man ("the only rooster in the henhouse" as Cartwright none-too-kindly observes) being the cuckolded, weak-willed Charles Pether (Eddie Albert), husband to an exasperating, menopausal, and pregnant wife (Betty Field). Ford understands the power of isolation, that it inevitably creates its own social rituals. Accompanied by Elmer Bernstein's superb score (its timpani-heavy flourishes at once parodic and incisive), Ford's camera captures the women in either two-shot conversation (numerous ideological and emotional dichotomies always playing off of one another) or in group shots that emphasize their ever-changing power placement: watch, especially, how the initially towering Margaret Leighton (who between this film, Alfred Hitchcock's Under Capricorn, and Joseph Losey's The Go-Between, fully paid her dues to the Loathsome Bitch Club for Sexually Repressed Religious Fanatics) appears to shrink and retreat into herself with each successive scene.

Ford treads racist impulse in his portrayal of the Mongolians—both Mazurki and black actor Woody Strode (always a welcome presence) are made up to ridiculous slant-eyed excess—but there's a clear theatrical distance in their presentation that complements the obviously soundstage-bound setting. As positioned in and around Ford's Cinemascope frame, the Mongolians' bestial actions and untranslated dialogue—sounding like the brusque, guttural grunts of mad dogs in heat—finally seems a profoundly intuitive philosophical disquisition on the decidedly masculine impulse towards war and destruction. Certainly Leighton's constant reassurances to her wards that the mission is safe because "we're Americans" provide a clue toward 7 Women's most apparent allegorical reading, while the title of Ford's subsequent documentary (Vietnam, Vietnam) pretty much seals the thematic deal of this, his final fiction feature.

It's a surprisingly astringent turn for a director who more often presented himself as the rah-rah patriot of American filmmaking, a decidedly Western poet-laureate/idealist who could none-too-shamelessly and all-too-seriously play "Glory, Glory Hallelujah!" over the sentimentalized, myth-mongering climax of his otherwise superb Young Mr. Lincoln. 7 Women represents a fully-developed newfound side of Ford that prior features like Steamboat Round the Bend (in which Black pariah Stepin Fetchit fuels a steamboat fire with historical American waxwork figures) only hinted at: a concurrent bitterness and cynicism, though of a wise and elating sort. In particular, the way that Ford films Bancroft suggests simultaneous feelings of attraction and revulsion, as if he is working through a vision of the future slowly taking root before him, a muddying of the lines between heretofore accepted definitions of Male and Female that alternately repel and fascinate him.

It's little surprise, then, that Bancroft's character is clearly not included among the seven women of the title—as the film's androgynous ambassador of change and choice (both, I would posit, being essential tenets of democracy), she stands appropriately apart. As such the ultimate tragedy of 7 Women comes with Cartwright's climactic loss of choice, forced into a life of concubinage in exchange for the titular group's freedom. Yet even at this depressing, despondent point, Ford acknowledges that the strong-willed individualists among us can still retain some measure of control over our fates. Thus does Dr. Cartwright, now hauntingly clothed in Geisha garb, stand before Tunga Khan in 7 Women's final scene, toasting her captor with two poisoned teacups between them and offering the film's—and John Ford's—appropriately morbid, knife-to-the-guts epitaph: "So long ya bastard!"

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford

PopcornQ Review Annette Forster

The New York Times (Howard Thompson)

Ford, Tom

A SINGLE MAN B+ 92

USA (101 mi) 2009 ‘Scope

For many gays, I would guess they might wilt in their seats at the honesty and lack of artificiality in this movie and how much it resembles their own life, despite the director's fashion background, where you would think you'd see magazine cover images, but not so.  This is an extremely smart gay exposé, kind of an idealized vision which is expertly presented and Colin Firth is exquisite.  It's the MILK (2008) gay liberation film of this year, only without the historical implications this has a more personal dramatic reach, is much more complex, and is vividly involving, perhaps relaxed is the word, in ways Sean Penn just isn't.  Not since Tennessee Williams and those "no-necked monsters" has there been a more negative depiction of children and how many gays simply loath them.  Despite occasional downbeat turns, there is drop dead hilarious humor to match, so for the most part there's a nice healthy balance to this thing.  I would think this film might mean more to gays just due to the way it so easily accepts the mindset of being gay.  I'd be hard pressed to find many others that share this comfort zone.  From the outset, however, there are repeated images of drowning, which the viewer can’t tell if they are real or metaphoric. We do become aware that George (Firth) is devastated to hear the news that his lover of 16 years, Jim (Matthew Goode), an architect, died in a car crash while visiting his parents, leaving him alone in an architecturally perfect glass house somewhere in the Los Angeles vicinity where he teaches English literature at a nearby college. Set in the early 1960’s during the Cuban Missile crisis, this is also an era where all gays are closeted and one has to be expert about hiding their own gay identity. George is lecturing his students on Aldous Huxley’s book Time Must Have a Stop, where they are bored to tears, before he veers off into an extemporaneous exposé on conformity and the fear of minorities, how some minorities walk invisibly among us as an unseen presence that only escalates that fear, a revealing expression of his own personal truth.

Adapted by the director and David Scearce from Christopher Isherwood’s infamous 1964 novel, the man also responsible for writing “Berlin Stories,” the source material for Sally Bowles in Bob Fosse’s CABARET (1972), so most of the scenes and written dialogue are extremely well written. Much like the fantasy sequences in the recent musical NINE (2009), George continually has flashbacks, only instead of a slew of women in his life, all of George’s flashbacks recall Jim, so the narrative continually moves between the past and the present with a seamless ease. Colin Firth’s occasional narration and his meticulous attention to detail is impressive, as his unabashed intelligence and exquisitely good taste reflects upon the director’s own personal style as well, which can be seen in nearly every frame of this film, the icy cool surfaces beautifully captured by cinematographer Eduard Grau. Add to this mix the presence of George’s best friend, Charley (Julianne Moore), a boozy broad he once had designs on earlier in his life who has stuck as someone he can be completely honest with, both losing the loves of their lives. Their dinner date together is a cozy evening of 50’s style cocktails, dinner, sophisticated conversation, and some free form 60’s dance steps to the bluesy music of Etta James “Stormy Weather” and Booker T and the MG’s “Green Onions” which beautifully shows them letting their hair down, but George, as always, remains perfectly in control. There are many side routes, detours along the way, each of which leads to something of interest, as George can’t tell what state he’s in, frequently considering suicide as an option, but usually getting sidetracked by something of interest that suddenly comes into view.

The pervasive mood that all takes place throughout a given day is grief driven, caught up in a downward spiral, but even with the dour mood, there is an equal amount of spontaneous interest that simply sprouts up out of nowhere, as it must be said that despite everyone telling him how frightfully bad he looks, George is an awfully interesting man, filled with clever insight and profound thoughts, enough to keep him occupied during particularly tough times. He’s too interested in himself, the world around him, and his own preoccupations to simply let it go. The film offers doorways of insight into the gay experience expressed through a gay aesthetic that just feels so authentically human, where sometimes people need to have an intelligent conversation, mouth off to dull-witted small children, be honest with people, have fantasies about others while someone’s talking to you, or feel an overwhelming desire to be needed or appreciated. All this is shown through a display of wit and charming mannerisms, where mood swings become remarkably significant, such as a scene where George has not one but two cigarettes with a stranger in a parking lot, which were portrayed almost as if they were two different conversations with two different people, but it was just curiosity kicking in. In time, new doors open, and even surrounded by smog one feels like they can almost breathe again. This is a beautifully uplifting experience for most of the film that unfortunately doesn’t have a good ending. It has an ending that works, but it’s not a good ending. Colin Firth is suave and debonair and a true British gentleman, yet except for rare connections, the tragedy is that he lives almost exclusively in his own head, because being gay during this period of time one is effectively shunned and excluded from the world, where distance separates all people.

Time Out Online (Dave Calhoun) review [4/6]

It’s no shock that fashion designer and former Gucci creative head Tom Ford has modelled a beautiful-looking piece of work from Christopher Isherwood’s mournful novel about George, a gay British literature professor (Colin Firth) in 1960s Los Angeles attempting to deal with the sudden death of his younger lover (Matthew Goode). What’s more of a surprise is that Ford’s first feature film offers such strong and credible emotional resonance and displays an impressive handling of visual experimentation. That’s not to say that the film doesn’t drool all over its own surface: no detail of costume or set is left unexamined, from George’s pristine wardrobe to the furnishings at the home of his lonely, drunken friend Charley (Julianne Moore). But this is more than an exercise in style, not least because Firth lends subtle gravitas to proceedings. Expect awards-season attention for Firth.

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review [3/4]

Fashion designer Tom Ford makes his directorial debut with this adaptation of Christopher Isherwood's 1964 novel. It's overdirected and slightly precious, but it does capture a very interesting, insulated, interior world for its lead character, George (Colin Firth). George is a middle-aged English professor who has lost his younger lover, Jim (Matthew Goode) to a car accident. George has a tough time getting up in the morning, but today is different, mainly because he has decided to kill himself. The decision gives George a newfound freedom, however, and he finds himself saying and doing things he wouldn't ordinarily do. His behavior attracts the attention of an adoring student, Kenny (Nicholas Hoult), and after a drunken evening spent with his best friend Charley (Julianne Moore) -- who is also a Londoner relocated to Los Angeles -- George spends a flirtatious evening with Kenny. And of course the evening does not wind up quite as planned. When he's dealing with actual actors, like Firth, Goode and Moore, director Ford gets some wonderfully intimate moments from them, but the rest of the cast behaves more like models, and simply pose -- or pout -- for the camera. There are tons of weird close-ups and camera effects, but these eventually serve to keep George's world as physically closed off as he is emotionally closed off. It's an effective and sometimes powerful work, though even with awards hype for Firth's excellent performance, it's going to be a hard sell.

Time Out New York (Keith Uhlich) review [1/6]

Christopher Isherwood’s seminal queer novel deserves a film adaptation that captures both its sense of place and its activist spirit. Cowriter-director Tom Ford settles for the glossy ephemera of a Vanity Fair cover spread. Both Isherwood and Ford follow Brit-expat college professor George (Firth, dully competent despite the film festival plaudits and Oscar buzz) through a single, sun-baked California day at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. But only in the film is there a hoary motivating factor—a suicidal death wish stemming from George’s mournful pining for his dead lover Jim (Goode)—meant to round off edges that should remain jagged. (The most frayed thing onscreen is, tellingly, an angora sweater.)

Ford’s biggest mistake is making George a martyrdom-ready symbol; too many movies subscribe to the regressive notion that queers are unassailable victims of fate and circumstance. One of the most revealing amendments here involves a flashback in which George is informed of Jim’s death and is refused an invite to the funeral. There’s no such melodramatic manipulation in Isherwood’s tome, where George is invited to the funeral and refuses out of a fascinatingly contradictory mix of pride, prejudice and anguish. It deepens his humanity rather than making him allegorically alien.

Isherwood set out to normalize his gay protagonist’s experience, showing the many different poses he assumed within a seemingly routine day (in that context, masturbation was as mundane yet significant an occurrence as driving on the freeway). Ford privileges sexual preference over all else. It’s the defining trait of his George—a Camille-esque affliction signaled by a portentous cough and overcome in a sacrificial ending that turns Isherwood’s beautifully enigmatic final passages into a poisonous, irony-laced tear-jerk.

The Onion A.V. Club review [A-] Nathan Rabin

A Single Man proves a film can look and feel like a 99-minute perfume commercial and still register as a poignant meditation on grief, memory, and loss. It’s the directorial debut of Tom Ford, a wildly successful fashion designer who luxuriates in impeccably composed images and unapologetic eroticism. It’s a film of stunning beauty and deep underlying sadness, a self-financed labor of love filled with impossibly gorgeous, oft-unclothed men and dazzling eye candy.

In a revelatory performance, Colin Firth plays an English professor in Southern California who has lurched into a suicidal depression following the death of his longtime lover Matthew Goode. The film follows the stylish, impeccably dressed Firth as he goes about his daily routine and lays the groundwork for his impending suicide. Firth wants everything to be in place when he exits the earth; in his mind, death via self-inflicted gunshot need not be sloppy or disorganized. But life has a way of messing up even the best-laid plans. Firth’s determination to kill himself is complicated by the unrelenting sexual advances of a pretty young male student (Nicholas Hoult) and a clumsy drunken pass by Firth’s glamorous, self-destructive best friend (Julianne Moore). Moore and Hoult aren’t the only ones infatuated with Firth; at a liquor store, a gorgeous young Spanish hustler tries to pick him up as well. The aura of ineffable sadness surrounding Firth apparently serves as a potent aphrodisiac.

Firth only has a few scenes, all flashbacks, with Goode, yet Ford—who adapted Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel with co-screenwriter David Scearce—manages to create a central relationship of lived-in tenderness, comfort, and abiding love in spite of Goode’s limited screen time. It’s easy to see why Firth would be inconsolable at losing the wonderful life he built with his soulmate over 16 happy years, and not just because Goode, like everyone and everything else in the film, is so unconscionably attractive. A Single Man is a film of tremendous style wedded to real substance, and rooted in Firth’s affecting lead performance as a man trying to keep it together for one last day after his world has fallen apart. 

The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review

The face of grief that the actor Colin Firth wears in “A Single Man” is crumpled and gray. There is little movement in the face initially: it’s a beautiful and gently furrowed mask, not yet old, despite the small brushstrokes of white at the temples. You might think that gravity alone was tugging at its mouth. But George, the middle-aged professor and single man of the title whom Mr. Firth plays with a magnificent depth of feeling, has had his heart broken, and the pieces are still falling.

The film, directed by Tom Ford, follows the outlines of the landmark 1964 novel of the same title by Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986), the openly gay British-born author whose story “Sally Bowles” was turned first into the play “I Am a Camera” and later the musical and movie “Cabaret.” An intensely, at times uncomfortably, intimate work of fiction, “A Single Man” condenses George’s story — much of his very life — into one emotion- and event-charged day. What makes the day special, and the book too, is George’s existential condition. George is single. And he is a man. But he is also a homosexual, which helps set him and his lusting, fading body apart from almost everyone in his life.

But other things distinguish George, including his profound grief over the death of his longtime lover, Jim (Matthew Goode), seen in intermittent flashback. The film opens with an image of George slowly sinking naked in water, a vision suggestive of rebirth and fatal submersion. This is immediately followed by a starkly different image of him slowly entering, as if in a trance, a disquieting tableau in which Jim and a terrier lie dead in a snowy field next to a wrecked automobile and a large, vivid blot of blood. Carefully, George lowers himself next to his dead lover and tenderly kisses his mouth, a gesture that seems to cause George — who had actually been sleeping and presumably dreaming — to wake in his bed.

Numbness follows, as do routine, work, sorrow and perhaps another kind of awakening. Set in 1962 — news of the Cuban missile crisis crackles through the air — the film tracks George from the brutal loneliness of his morning through his day and transformative night. Along the way, he passes in and out of the Los Angeles area college where he teaches Huxley to bored students who stare at him with curiosity when the subject turns to invisible minorities and fear. He crosses paths and wits with a flirty student, Kenny (Nicholas Hoult), and a charming hustler, Carlos (Jon Kortajarena), while also making time for his close friend, Charley (Julianne Moore), a British expat like George. At one point, he buys some bullets.

It’s axiomatic, at least for Chekhov and a lot of Hollywood directors that if you introduce a gun in the first act, it must go off in the third. Mr. Ford, who shares screenwriting credit with David Scearce, introduces a gun largely because the novel has so little obvious dramatic tension. The gun is a matter of narrative convenience that sometimes works, if sometimes not, with the bits Mr. Ford borrows from Pedro Almodóvar and Wong Kar-wai. Mr. Ford, for instance, partly frames George’s encounter with the hustler in front of a billboard for Hitchcock’s “Psycho” featuring a wild-eyed Janet Leigh, an image that recalls a similar shot in Mr. Almodóvar’s “All About My Mother” and invokes the unsettlingly sexual menace of “Psycho.”

Bringing Hitchcock and Mr. Almodóvar into the picture is risky because it creates a ridiculously lofty level of expectation. O.K., show me, you think. (It also intimates that the director and the audience belong to the same cine club, which can seem like a form of pandering.) But Mr. Ford, one of the most famous names in fashion and in luxury branding — he was the longtime creative director of Gucci — has taken an enormous chance just by taking on “A Single Man,” a foundational text in modern gay literature. The novelist Edmund White, for one, called the book “the first truly liberated gay novel in English.” That kind of legacy would have intimidated a lot of inexperienced directors, but Mr. Ford betrays few signs of intimidation.

Mr. Firth’s delicately shaded performance no doubt helped steady Mr. Ford’s nerves. Certainly, the director knows how to exploit his actor’s reserve to terrific effect, as when he sets the camera in front of Mr. Firth’s face in one critical scene and just lets the machine record the tremors of emotion cracking the facade. It’s hard to know if Mr. Ford’s most flamboyant visual flourish, the use of a changeable palette to show shifts in George’s mood — the character’s normally gray face floods with color in the presence of another life force, like Kenny — was born out of a filmmaking conceit or a lack of confidence. Whatever the case, while the color changes are initially distracting, Mr. Firth’s performance soon makes you forget them.

Mr. Ford has excellent taste in lead actors — Mr. Goode and Ms. Moore are very fine — and in cinematic influences. But he hasn’t fully learned how to work inside the moving image plane, a space in which people and objects must be dynamically engaged rather than prettily arranged, as they occasionally are here. And at times his taste seems too impeccable, art-directed for a maximum sale, as in a black-and-white flashback that brings to mind a perfume advertisement. In a film by Mr. Wong, whose influence is evident in the visuals and on the elegiac score, a luxuriant bloom, a curlicue of smoke and the curve of a lover’s back express what the characters themselves cannot, rather than the filmmaker’s own personal style. The composer Shigeru Umebayashi has written music for several of Mr. Wong’s films and contributed to this one.

That Mr. Ford has placed so much weight on Mr. Firth suggests that he knows how valuable his actor is to his first effort. And while “A Single Man” has its flaws, many of these fade in view of the performance and the power of Isherwood’s story. Part of the radical importance of Isherwood’s novel is its insistence on the absolute ordinariness of George’s life, including with Jim, whose relationship together is pictured only briefly in both the novel and the film, and yet reverberates deeply (then as now). Mr. Ford’s single man might be less common than Isherwood’s, a bit too exquisitely dressed. But with Mr. Firth, Mr. Ford has created a gay man troubled by ordinary grief and haunted by joy, a man apart and yet like any other.

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ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2.5/4]

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San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [3/4]

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Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]

Christopher Isherwood - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Christopher Isherwood Books and Writers

A Single Man (novel) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

glbtq >> literature >> Isherwood, Christopher Claude J. Summers

Literary Encyclopedia: A Single Man

NOCTURNAL ANIMALS B- 82

USA (117 mi) 2016 ‘Scope Official Facebook Page

Do you ever feel like your life has turned into something you never intended?

—Susan Morrow (Amy Adams)

A chillingly cold neo-noir film that is about 90% production values, and the rest relies upon some intriguing acting, but in Tom Ford films, a man whose success came first as a fashion designer, it’s the overall setting that matters, as that tells you what’s important. This is more of a slow descent into the murk from the director of A SINGLE MAN (2009), using cynicism as an excuse to tell a Macbethian ghost story that was clearly inspired by Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997), where by the end, all that’s left is revenge. The overall mood of loveless detachment leaves little to the imagination, filled with white, wealthy, and entitled people who couldn’t be more unhappy, never looking into the mirror at the source of their own sterile emptiness, living in glass houses with extravagant views, leading fatalistic lives that are doomed from the start. Refusing to take a chance on Edward Sheffield (Jake Gyllenhaal), a poor yet aspiring young writer whose sensitivity attracts the attention of Susan Morrow (Amy Adams) as a young woman, marrying him, but eventually leaving him as a lifestyle choice, as she prefers to be married in an economic status that provides her the special comforts of life. Now married to a philandering husband Hutton (Armie Hammer) who looks the part, cutting a dashing figure, but they are little more than eye candy to one another, someone they can be seen in public with and not be embarrassed. This special class privilege has its limitations, as there’s absolutely no spark of electricity between them, yet in the best tradition of a well-polished upbringing, they remain civil and polite, uttering meaningless phrases to one another, where he uses the pressures of work to constantly be away from home, but this is just an excuse to be with other women, as he’s apparently not so good at making money, though he looks the part, instead her lucrative art gallery supports them both, even though she’s lost any interest in any of the artworks she’s purchased, feeling no connection to any of it, calling it junk culture, where she is literally suffocating from the meaninglessness of being surrounded by “all junk,” yet she remains wracked by guilt at the way things ended with her first husband when she simply walked away. So it comes as a surprise when after a twenty year absence a manuscript arrives in the mail with his first book, entitled Nocturnal Animals, where curiously it's dedicated to her. At that point, the film divides in two, one a look at her life, complete with flashbacks mixed into the present, along with a second track that follows the violently sadistic story of the novel that seems to have personal implications. Ford effortlessly interchanges them, with each mirroring the other, yet despite this artistic device, the viewer can always separate truth from fiction.

Opening with one of the strangest opening scenes on record, naked, excessively obese women dancing on display at an art gallery, performance art images that are both provocative and disturbing, much of it in slow motion, surrounded by photographers and customers ogling them, where this is an uncomfortable glimpse into the vapid culture of contemporary modern art, forcing the audience to view the grotesque. This is the prelude for what follows, with Ford adapting Austin Wright’s 1993 novel Tony and Susan, following upon a flashback theme from their early romance where Susan feels she is too cynical to be an artist, while she thinks Edward is overly naïve to be a writer, too insecure and weak, creating a culture gap that he was willing to explore further, thinking love is something you hold onto and don’t let go, but she ran out on him for a wealthier guy, a decision that still haunts her. The trashy pulp novel is shockingly violent, set in a world of pure evil and malice, with Gyllenhaal doubling as Tom, the self-loathing husband and father who is too meek to prevent a roadside hijacking where three men in another car drive him off the road, with psychopathic rednecks from West Texas seizing his wife and daughter for sick fun while leaving him helplessly abandoned in the middle of nowhere, somewhere in the vast emptiness of an unending desert, a superbly filmed sequence, easily the highlight of the film, where the intensity jolts her into a panic mode, as the material is emotionally devastating. The title comes from Susan’s habit of not sleeping, where she roams the empty premises of her luxurious home in the Hollywood Hills overlooking the flickering lights of Los Angeles at night, mostly alone, where she reads the novel over the course of several nights before Edward is due to arrive in LA. Her own husband is off in New York somewhere doing as he pleases, while she is running her gallery somewhat dazed and lost in thought, as this fictionalized world of the novel has a grip on her that is more viscerally real than her own ghostly, waking life existence. As if to embellish this virtual reality theme, where it’s easy to get lost in the concept of an alternate universe, Susan is greeted at work by one of her staffers, Sage Ross (Jena Malone), who is obsessed with watching her newborn baby all day long on her new cellphone app, where like Skype, she can communicate with her baby at any time, gleefully showing this device to Susan, where it’s the latest on modernized and mechanized motherhood, but Susan is caught in a surreal moment of her own, where one of the faces from the lurid novel she’s reading appears instead, causing her to drop and shatter the phone. Not to worry, as the latest iPhone version is coming out in just a day or two. Like a choreographed dance routine of misdirection, interweaving an intersection of technology, fiction, flashback, and reality where an appearance/reality theme prevails throughout the whole film, the director accentuates all the sleek and shiny surfaces, while revealing a ghoulishly ugly underside, themes also expressed in Terrence Malick’s incendiary view of Hollywood culture in Knight of Cups (2015).

Continuing with the novel’s lurid expression of wounded masculinity, Tony makes his way up the highway and finds an isolated farmhouse to call for help, where Detective Bobby Andes, a terrific Michael Shannon who’s hard as nails, arrives to investigate, quickly locating the abandoned naked bodies of his wife and daughter, shot gratuitously in a statuesque pose, each subjected to untold horrors leaving them both raped and murdered, leaving Tony wracked with guilt for failing to prevent it. Tony’s character is clearly a reflection of how she perceived Edward in the past, as she recalls the intimate details of their past romance, where her domineering mother, the almost unrecognizable Laura Linney, warns her that marrying Edward would be a big mistake, that “the things you love about [Edward] now are the things you’ll hate in a few years…” Ignoring her advice, almost as an act of childhood rebellion, she ultimately becomes exactly what she despised in her youth, where a phone call to her husband in New York reveals what she’s suspected all along, that he’s in the company of another woman. As she continues reading, a year goes by before Andes contacts Tony with two suspects, one dead and one alive as a result of a recent robbery gone wrong, with a third man getting away. Unable to identify the dead man, the one in custody was one of the three men on the road, immediately charged as an accomplice to murder. Finally tracking down the third man, Ray (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who Tony also identifies, he is quickly released from custody due to insufficient evidence, setting up the final sequence, where Andes acknowledges he’s dying of lung cancer, maybe has a year left to live, but would like to get this over with before he dies, asking if Tony is willing to go outside the law and improvise. It’s the first opportunity to alter the power dynamic of this cat-and-mouse game, to turn it around, where up until now he’s been sadistically toyed with by these rednecks. Finally he has an opportunity to confront them face-to-face, where he has a chance to exact justice by his own hands, seething with anger and the opportunity to rectify this pervasive feeling of helplessness. Shocked by the dark content and raw emotion of the novel, Tony’s interior wrath reveals the anguish he’s felt since Susan walked out on him, where he’s making it plain to see in vividly graphic terms. Among other things, the film is about regret, having a chance to correct previous mistakes, something looming in the back of Susan’s mind, anticipating the opportunity to see Edward again. The way it plays out, on both ends, in the story and in real life, is unexpected, as things don’t go exactly as planned, where the director turns this into a kind of game or writer’s exercise where he has the last laugh, becoming a kind of parody of life, bordering on the insincere, exerting near imperious power to make sure Susan feels the same kind of dark hole of helplessness as Edward, both ensnared by the vacuous Hollywood allure where a gay artist (Michael Sheen) in a heterosexual marriage is heard to proclaim early in the film, “Our world is a lot less painful than the real world.”

In Review Online: Kenji Fujishima

Tom Ford may have overburdened his first film, the Christopher Isherwood adaptation A Single Man, with quick-cut impressionistic montages and an overly polished look, but at least some of his attention-grabbing effects could be said to express the inner life of his tortured main character. In his follow-up, Nocturnal Animals, Ford has tamed his previously impulsive, jittery editing rhythms, but he’s ramped up the voluptuous production design: Even a West Texas desert sunrise feels as ravishingly upholstered as Amy Adams’s outfits and upper-class decors. Somewhere, however, the troubled souls of its characters get lost amid all that useless beauty. Disenchanted art-gallery owner Susan (Adams) is ostensibly wracked with guilt over the way her relationship with writer ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal) has ended, and Tony Hastings (Gyllenhaal again)—the fictional character Edward has conceived for the novel he dedicates to Susan—is ostensibly wracked with guilt over his failure to protect his wife and daughter from being killed by a trio of white-trash psychos (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Karl Glusman, and Robert Aramayo). Ford, however, is too busy making it all look sleek and pretty for that anguish to register.

Film Comment: Genevieve Yue November 03, 2016

Tom Ford’s airless second feature tackles the deathless question of the relationship between life and art, with results that are predictably inconclusive. Following the slow-motion opening featuring mostly nude, obese women undulating at an exhibition opening, gallery owner Susan (Amy Adams) expresses a displeasure that comes not from the lousy art but a more existential sense of dissatisfaction. She appears to be riding for a fall from her Hollywood Hills mansion; where she lands, however, is equally fanciful.

After receiving Nocturnal Animals, a novel written by her ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), Susan plunges into its pulpy depths, a variation on the Deliverance plot, about a nice bourgeois family menaced by West Texas rednecks. The film offers moments of permeability, linked through synchronized sounds and gestures, between Susan reading the manuscript (in Tom Ford glasses) and the book’s lurid tale of wounded masculinity, its vigilante pursuit aided by Detective Andes (a terrific Michael Shannon). Any insight that might be gained by stacking these narratives, however, collapses under the weight of their many clichés, including mommy issues, disaffected millennials, and the removal of lipstick to suggest something like authenticity.

The film’s enigmatic ending might suggest the Möbius looping of life and art; still, sending your ex an allegorical account of your divorce in the form of a violent revenge thriller seems unnecessarily cruel. At one point, Susan confesses she’s “too cynical” to be an artist; Edward, and by extension Ford, might fit into that category as well.

Film Comment: Michael Sragow November 17, 2016

The second effort by fashion designer turned writer-director Tom Ford (A Single Man) is a roadside horror film wrapped inside a chichi relationship movie. That could have made a good combination for a go-for-broke black comedy, but there are only isolated laughs in this exquisite, alienating picture. It isn’t scary-funny—it’s scary-stultifying. Amy Adams plays a cutting-edge Los Angeles gallery owner who receives a not-yet-published novel in the mail from her struggling-writer first husband (Jake Gyllenhaal), just when she happens to be questioning the passion, commitment, and values of her “handsome, dashing” but also materialistic and empty second husband (Armie Hammer). The movie cuts between her immersive reading of the thriller and her spiritually desolate current life, when it isn’t flashing back to her first marriage. It’s a triple-decker conception that ends up flat as a crepe.

The novel, like this movie, is called Nocturnal Animals. The scenes from this story-within-a-story depict, with brute elegance, the vulnerability of a civilized man (also played by Gyllenhaal) and his attractive wife and teenage daughter (Isla Fisher and Ellie Bamber) as they fall prey to psychotic thugs on a lonely stretch of highway late at night. Before the movie is over, we learn that the novelist used to call his ex-wife a “nocturnal animal” (she cannot sleep); from the get-go we’re cued to see that this L.A. gallerista will respond to the text ultra-personally. With Gyllenhaal in the dual roles, it doesn’t take long to realize that she’s identifying the fictional hero (or is it anti-hero?) with her former spouse. He had dedicated the book to her, and it pivots on the protagonist’s feelings of rage and impotence over the loss of his family.

Even so, our gal reacts too viscerally to every dark turn in the narrative. Her differing methods of slamming the book shut or pushing it away certainly allow Ford to achieve some snappy staccato effects. Still, you can’t help wondering whether this denizen of L.A.’s curdled crème de la crème has ever read another suspense novel. (Aren’t Michael Connelly and Lee Child the height of Angeleno chic?)

The cuts between her and the fictional leading man become laughable. When they’re bathing at the same time, we wonder whether the book is functioning like the Necronomicon in the Evil Dead movies, determining each of her new moves. Perhaps we’re supposed to feel that the novel is so grisly that it would make us want to take a shower, too—a high-tech downpour in a pricey marble stall, since her house is as expensive and over-styled, in its own slab-like way, as the suburban manse in Mon Oncle.

Ford aims to counterpoint the primal intrigue of the story-within-the-story with supposedly fascinating questions about the heroine’s past. Too bad his script spells everything out in flash cards. She wanted to be an artist but decided she was too much a realist, or cynic; the writer’s guileless virtue attracted her, then made her lose faith in him after they were married. In one of Ford’s grievous storytelling mistakes, she tells a colleague that she left the writer for her current husband in a particularly brutal way. After hearing that confession, no breakup would feel extreme enough. Sure enough, when Ford delivers the split in a flashback, it’s dreadful in a familiar, soap-opera way, not frightening.

The movie’s three-pronged structure derives from its little-known source book: Austin Wright’s 1993 novel, Tony and Susan, is just as beautifully honed, and equally tricky, but its present-day story is more open-ended, middle-class and lifelike. Ford’s adaptation sticks closely to Wright’s pungent, shrewdly observed scenes of crime and punishment, whether focusing on the unholy road-hogging trio (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Karl Glusman, Robert Aramayo) or on Michael Shannon’s dry, intense lawman, who rouses the one good guffaw in the movie when he says he’s “OK” after a Brobdingnagian coughing fit. In a couple of genuinely alarming sequences, Ford displays rare gifts for maintaining a mood of simmering violence and for staging action that is all the more haunting for being inexact and hard to figure out. All the actors who play characters at mortal risk are top-notch at embodying gut-wrenching fear. The two murders that take place off-screen and the two that unfold before our eyes are equally disturbing. But overall Nocturnal Animals is one non-thrilling thriller.

Ford has relocated both the present and “fictional” action, from the book’s Chicago and Pennsylvania to Los Angeles and West Texas, respectively. He’s largely re-imagined the framing device to excoriate the contemporary art scene and to repeat the old saw that women end up becoming their own mothers—in this case, a haute-bourgeois harpy (Laura Linney, overacting giddily). Ford, who shot the film a year ago, has one sublime opportunistic riff: the heroine describes her status-conscious, Republican mom in a stream of adjectives that mirror liberals’ disdain for President-elect Trump. You can write the description yourself: “Racist?” Yup. “Xenophobic?” Ditto.

Unfortunately, Ford lampoons the art scene just as obviously, but far less entertainingly. He begins the film with a gallery opening that features morbidly obese women nude except for boots, gloves, and cowboy hats, cavorting like all-American cheerleaders, then slumping down to rest on off-white slabs. Later, Jena Malone carries her off-kilter wit into the role of a museum operative who’s so overdressed, it’s as if Malone had jumped to the Capitol in The Hunger Games. (She has the best topical gags, about her smartphone.) And Michael Sheen conveys an air of drollery as a gay man who’s happy in a heterosexual marriage. They’re the lucky ones. Adams expertly modulates her performance in both past and present tenses, but without any room for spontaneity or organic growth, she’s just a bird in a gilded cage.

The movie piles portents on top of melodrama. When Adams starts to open the package that contains the novel, she gives herself a terrible paper cut. Are we being warned about the bloody Fickle Finger of Fate? Later, a small black bird dashes itself against her window. Ford’s gravest error, though, is thinking that he can enlarge the action of the novel with a satiric evocation of today’s high-cultural cluelessness. Nocturnal Animals is intricate, polished, and stillborn. It’s an immaculate misconception.

Nocturnal Animals settles it: noted weirdo Jake Gyllenhaal is the best actor alive Kaitlyn Tiffany from The Verge, November 25, 2016

Sight & Sound [Adam Nayman] November 3, 2016

Time: Stephanie Zacharek November 18, 2016

The Village Voice: Bilge Ebiri November 16, 2016

Slant Magazine [Jesse Cataldo]

Every Movie Has a Lesson [Don Shanahan]

Screen Daily: Fionnuala Halligan

Nocturnal Animals: The Art Without the Heart Christopher Orr from The Atlantic

Brooklyn Magazine: Benjamin Mercer

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Sight & Sound [Simran Hans] November 4, 2016

Little White Lies: Manuela Lazic

Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford, 2016) Daniel Nava from Chicago Cinema Circuit

The Cinemaholic John H. Foote

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MUBI's Notebook: Fernando F. Croce September 12, 2016

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Tom Ford's 'Nocturnal Animals': Venice Review | Hollywood Reporter David Rooney

Nocturnal Animals review – Tom Ford's seductive cautionary tale | Film ... Mark Kermode from The Guardian

Nocturnal Animals review: Tom Ford's deliciously toxic tale of revenge Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian

Nocturnal Animals caps off Hollywood's year of toxic masculinity Guy Lodge from The Guardian

I'm so glad to spoil this film for you Victoria Coren Mitchell from The Guardian, January 21, 2017

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Review: ‘Nocturnal Animals,’ Brutality Between the Pages and Among the Fabulous Manohla Dargis from The New York Times, November 17, 2016, also seen here: The New York Times: Manohla Dargis

Tom Ford, Ben Mankiewicz and a Fashion-Film Vortex The New York Times, November 19, 2016

Nocturnal Animals (film) - Wikipedia

Forman, Milos

All-Movie Guide Hal Erickson

Czechoslovakian director Milos Forman lost his Jewish father and Protestant mother to Hitler's concentration camps. Raised by family members, Forman studied at the Academy of Music and Dramatic Art in Prague, serving his professional apprenticeship as a writer of the pioneering Laterna Magika mixed-media presentations of the 1950s. Already an award-winning filmmaker thanks to a brace of short subjects, Forman directed his first feature, Black Peter, in 1963.

Loves of a Blonde (1965) and Firemen's Ball (1967), two sweet-tempered films with a distinctively Czech sense of humor, brought Forman to the attention of American critics. With the increasing artistic freedom prevalent in his country, Forman intended to spend the rest of his career in Prague, but when Russian troops marched into Czechoslovakia in 1968, the director shifted his base of operations to France. From there, he went to Hollywood for his first English-language film, Taking Off (1971), a modest comedy about changing family values of the 1970s that featured such stars-to-be as Georgia Engel and Carly Simon. The film proved to be a success, winning a number of awards, including a Special Jury Prize at Cannes.

Following this triumph, Forman directed the decathlon sequences of the multi-national Olympic documentary Visions of Eight (1973), then moved on to what many consider his masterpiece, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975). A celebration of the individual spirit staged in the depressing confines of a mental institution, Cuckoo's Nest became the first American film since It Happened One Night (1934) to win Oscars in all five major categories, including Best Director for Forman. Following that was Hair (1979), the overdue film version of the 1967 Broadway rock musical; it could have been anachronistic in lesser hands, but, under Forman's guidance, became a delectable time capsule of what the '60s seemed to represent to those who lived through it. Forman then directed Ragtime, a generally well-received 1981 adaptation of E.L. Doctorow's novel that provided a compelling look at the various cultural and social forces at work in early 20th century America.

Three years later, Forman returned to Prague for the first time since his 1968 exile, filming location shots for Amadeus, a liberal retelling of the life of Mozart (as seen through the eyes of Antonio Salieri). Amadeus won another Oscar for Forman, not to mention Best Picture. Following the film's great success, Forman served as director of Columbia University's film division; he also acted in other directors' films and directed Valmont (1989), the least-famous variation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. In 1996, Forman returned to directing with his acclaimed biography of Hustler magazine founder Larry Flynt in The People vs. Larry Flynt, scoring both a Best Director Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe win in the same category. Three years later, he tackled the life of another controversial American figure in Man on the Moon, his biopic of legendary comic Andy Kaufman, starred Jim Carrey as the mercurial Kaufman.

Official Website

Film Reference Josef Skvorecký, updated by Rob Edelman and Chris Routledge

American Masters - Milos Forman

Forman, Milos They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

In-Depth Interview from 1997 from Red Spring, January 18, 1997

Interview by Joseph McBride feature and interview from the Director’s Chair

THE LOVES OF A BLONDE (Lásky jedné plavovlásky)

Czechoslovakia (85 mi) 1965

Time Out

Forman's second film is a small gem. The story is almost classical in its simplicity: a pretty little blonde meets a young pianist at a dance hall, and they spend a happy night of love together. But she takes the affair altogether more seriously than he does, and when she pays an unannounced call on his parents, everybody is appalled. He feels he is being trapped, she feels betrayed, and the parents see both sides in turn, until in the end nobody knows what to think because nobody seems to be playing according to any known rules. Much of Forman's humour comes from the fact that his characters peer out at the world like timid nocturnal animals, always prepared to defend themselves against attack, but constantly having the ground cut from under their feet by the discovery that people are never quite what they seem at first glance. Using mostly non-professional actors, letting them improvise, then refining, shaping and perfecting, he achieves something indescribably exact, touching and funny.

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)

The authorities in a small Czech town put on a dance so that the soldiers barracked there can mingle with the local girls. During the event, three middle-aged reservists try to hook up with a trio of young local women for a quick fling. One of the girls, named Andula (Hanu Brejchovou) wanders away from the other two, and ends up in the arms of the dance band's young pianist (Vladimíra Pucholta) who says that she should come to Prague and live with him, never dreaming that she would take him up on his offer.

Forman's style, characteristic in many ways of the Czech New Wave in general, focuses on the little details of everyday life, and in particular the lives of young people, with a gently satiric eye. The long sequence at the dance, with the hesitant and embarrassing behavior of the three men trying to approach the girls, themselves uncertain as to what they want, is a minor masterpiece of observation. After the film narrows its attention to Andula, the blonde of the title, it becomes a bittersweet comment on the differences between youth - searching for something to give meaning to their drab existence - and their more conservative elders. Andula ends up on the doorstep of the pianist's parents, with whom he lives, and their reactions to her arrival are very funny, while reflecting at the same time a certain sadness in the girl's situation.

With its semi-improvised script, crisp black-and-white photography (perennial Forman colleague Miroslav Ondrícek) and use of precise camera angles and close- ups, Loves of a Blonde is one of the most accomplished Czech films of the period - its modest, understated tone subtly augmenting the story's charm. It was quite successful at home and abroad, winning awards and even getting an Oscar nomination, but the government didn't like it, ostensibly because of a mild nude scene, but probably because it was so casually disrespectful of Czech society. After one more film (the more overtly provocative The Firemen's Ball), Forman fled to the U.S., where he gained fame, fortune, and freedom.

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias] also reviewing THE FIREMAN’S BALL

A sly and powerful dissenting voice against the oppressive grip of the Eastern Bloc, the '60s Czech New Wave added a touch of bitter comic irony to a house style that was close to Italian neo-realism, with an emphasis on non-professional actors, natural lighting, real locations, and a vérité directness. The movement was abruptly disbanded in 1968, when the country's Soviet-led invaders halted production on many films, announced the permanent ban of four others, and prompted a few gifted filmmakers to emigrate to the West. The most famous of these was director Milos Forman, a gentle humanist and astute social critic who won Oscars for One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and Amadeus, and paid homage to fellow subversives in The People vs. Larry Flynt and Man On The Moon. His growing discontent with his former life in Czechoslovakia is reflected in 1965's Loves Of A Blonde and 1967's The Firemen's Ball, two wry comedies that evolve from an implicit critique of government policy to an all-out drubbing of its corruption and ineptitude. A tender and beautifully observed story about the impossible odds of young romance, Loves Of A Blonde takes place in Zruc, a gray industrial town where dozens of women have been forced to relocate for work at a shoe factory. In an attempt to redress the gender balance, which stands at 16 women to each man, army officials place a regiment in Zruc, but the women are horrified to discover that the new arrivals are mostly middle-aged reservists with haggard looks and limited social skills. Still, the heroine, a dark-eyed and vulnerable wallflower played by Hana Brejchovoá, finds a healthy prospect in a handsome pianist (Vladimír Pucholt) who fiendishly twists her inexperience to his advantage. Hovering above Forman's sweetly empathetic character study is the implication that Brejchovoá is a casualty of the system, searching haplessly for love on infertile ground. The new DVD axes a superfluous scene found on most VHS copies (and available as a supplement here) that complicates the audience's sympathies while weakening the film's anti-authoritarian overtones. While Loves Of A Blonde is relatively subtle, nothing could be done to cover up the scabrous sentiments of The Firemen's Ball, which was "banned forever" for its paper-thin comic allegory about a social event unhinged by outrageous buffoons in uniform. Like the officials in Dr. Strangelove's War Room (though with nothing serious at stake), volunteer firemen bicker endlessly over the petty details of a commemorative ball for their retiring fire chief. Nothing goes right: The hand-picked contestants of a beauty contest are unattractive and stage-shy, the raffle prizes go missing one by one, and, irony of ironies, a raging inferno breaks out across town in the middle of the party. Forman dutifully insisted that the film had no double meanings—and, true to form, he was incapable of putting the firemen in an entirely negative light—but censors and government officials were outraged, and he was forced to flee the country shortly after the Soviet takeover. Seen today, The Firemen's Ball holds up better as a historical document than it does as a screwball comedy, though its underlying sweetness helps to smooth over the more strident bits of slapstick humor. In a terrific interview on the DVD, Forman talks about the difference between making films in Czechoslovakia and in Hollywood. In the former, the pressures are ideological, and rely on "a few idiots" who determine political correctness; in the latter, the pressures are commercial, and rely on the audience's taste. As his career usually attests, Forman puts his faith in the audience.

Loves of a Blonde Crityerion essay by Dave Kehr, February 11, 2002

A Visit to James Mangold’s Office Curtis Tsui December 13, 2010

Loves of a Blonde (1965) - The Criterion Collection

Images Movie Journal also reviewing THE FIREMAN’S BALL, by David Gurevich

Loves of a Blonde (1965) - #144 | Criterion Reflections David Blakeslee

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DVD Verdict: Criterion Collection Mike Pinsky

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Edwin Jahiel

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MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman

filmcritic.com [Christopher Null]

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

ToxicUniverse.com (Stephen Murray) calling him the most overrated film director in the world

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) also reviewing THE FIREMAN’S BALL

Reel.com DVD review [Mike Gregory] also reviewing THE FIREMAN’S BALL

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

Loves of a Blonde - Wikipedia

THE FIREMAN’S BALL (Horí, má panenko)

Czechoslovakia Italy (73 mi) 1967

Time Out

The scene is the annual firemen's ball in a small Czech town. The action, characteristically tenuous but packed with detail, concerns the committee's efforts to round up girls for a beauty contest, the winner to make the presentation of a golden hatchet to their 86-year-old retiring president. As the ball proceeds, a patchwork of comic incident unfolds: the committee, finding girls too shy and mothers too ferocious, are busily trying to hijack any girl, pretty or not; an anxious official watches as the lottery prizes mysteriously vanish one by one; and the ancient president, desperate to slip away for a pee, is kept forcibly waiting and waiting. Quietly, irresistibly funny in the early Forman manner (this was his first film in colour); but the belated switch to allegorical satire (in the closing sequences, an elderly peasant's house burns down while the firemen revel; a sympathetic whip-round nets the now worthless lottery tickets for him) seems altogether too sour in the context.

filmcritic.com [Christopher Null]

You can almost smell the cabbage in Milos Forman's The Firemen's Ball, a lovely little farce about a party for an 86-year-old fire marshall in a small Czech town. The problems center around a beauty contest, designed to pick the girl who will bestow an award to the elderly gentlemen -- only the girls aren't exactly supermodels, and then, once they've finally been selected, they're too afraid to go on stage. Other problems erupt (someone is stealing the prizes for the lottery), until the party is interrupted by -- of all things -- a fire.

This 73 minute film is practically a trifle, hardly a masterpiece but definitely the work of genius. Forman's social satire makes more sense in the context of 1967 Czechoslovakia, which had a government in crisis much like the firemen on parade in the film, on the eve of the country's invasion by Russia and imminent conversion to communism. The film was reportedly "banned forever" on the spot by the new regime. Apparently those Russkies were on to the movie, too...

Forman fled Czechoslovakia shortly after making this film. His life experience in a country none of us are likely to ever visit (and in fact, no longer really exists) makes our lives all the richer.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Scenes from the Czech New Wave truly swings into action next week, but don't miss the first film in the series, Milos Forman's delightful 1967 satire. Following up his internationally successful Loves of a Blonde, Forman made this wicked little trifle, whose 73 minutes breeze by in a giddy haze. It's so swift, in fact, that you may not realize how deep it's cut. Set at a catastrophic fundraiser run by a provincial firemen's squad, the movie not only slices and dices the idealized communist working man, unflinchingly depicting the greed and corruption that flourished in communist Czechoslovakia, but mercilessly parodies the firemen, the local representatives of law and order whose uniforms look suspiciously like military garb. (By the time the movie was released, Soviet tanks had already rolled through Prague.) In the movie's single most cutting exchange, the firemen quarrel over who's stolen the goods they meant to raffle off at the end of an evening, and one publicly returns an item his wife has stolen. One of his comrades explodes in fury, yelling, "The good name of the fire brigade means more to me than any honesty!" Substitute "the Party" for "the fire brigade," and you can hear how, as Forman reports in an interview on Criterion's DVD, it was that line that set a government official to "climbing the walls," leading to its suppression in Czechoslovakia and Forman's immigration to America, where none of his movies have come close to equaling the manic energy of The Firemen's Ball.

The Firemen’s Ball Criterion essay by J. Hoberman, February 11, 2002

The Firemen's Ball (1967) - The Criterion Collection

Images Movie Journal also reviewing LOVES OF A BLONDE, by David Gurevich

The Fireman's Ball (1967) - #145 | Criterion Reflections David Blakeslee

ToxicUniverse.com (John Nesbit)

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer)

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick)

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

DVD Verdict: Criterion Collection Mike Pinsky

Scott Reviews Miloš Forman's The Firemen's Ball ... - CriterionCast.com Scott Nye, Blu-Ray

MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias] also reviewing LOVES OF A BLONDE

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) also reviewing LOVES OF A BLONDE

Reel.com DVD review [Mike Gregory] also reviewing LOVES OF A BLONDE

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 1969

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 2002

The New York Times (Renata Adler)

The Firemen's Ball - Wikipedia

TAKING OFF

USA (93 mi) 1971

Chicago Reader [Dave Kehr] (capsule review)

Milos Forman's first American film (1971) is still the most graceful and well-proportioned work he's done here, an engaging, episodic, wonderfully fair-minded satire about runaway children and anxious adults. With Lynn Carlin, Buck Henry, and Linnea Heacock. R, 93 min.

Time Out Film Guide

A delightfully touching comedy, Forman's first in America and far better than his later One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or Ragtime, this deals with the attempts of a middle-aged, middle class American couple to trace and lure back their runaway daughter. Scenes of their search are intercut with sequences at a musical audition for disillusioned youth, and Forman's wry but sympathetic humour derives largely from the incongruities he observes in both situations: deserted parents, concerned and conservative, getting stoned in an effort to understand why kids smoke dope; a rosy, virginal young girl singing a quiet folk song in praise of fucking. Never taking sides, but allowing both factions engaged in the generation gap war plenty of space and generosity, its gentle wit has aged far more gracefully than the hectoring sermons of most youth movies churned out in the late '60s and early '70s.

Talking Moviezzz

Channel 4 Film [capsule review]

Cleveland Press [Tony Mastroianni]

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

ONE FLEW OVER THE COOKOO’S NEST

USA (134 mi) 1975

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST Pauline Kael excerpted from littlereview

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) -- Smashingly effective version of Ken Kesey's novel about a rebel outcast, McMurphy (Jack Nicholson), who is locked in a hospital for the insane. The book was a lyric jag, and it became a nonconformists' bible. Published in 1962, it contained the prophetic essence of the whole Vietnam period of revolutionary politics going psychidelic. Milos Forman, who directed the movie version, must have understood how crude the poetic-paranoid vision of the book would look on the screen after the 60s paranoia had lost its nightmarish buoyancy, and he and the scenarists -- Lawrence Hauben, and then Bo Goldman -- did an intelligent job of loosening Kesey's schematism.

Set in 1963, the movie retains most of Kesey's ideas but doesn't diagram them the way the book does. We're not cued at every step, and the end isn't so predictable. (On the shock table, McMurphy doesn't ask, "Do I get a crown of thorns?" -- as he did in the book.) Milos Forman appears to have recognized the strong realistic material within Kesey's conception. We all fear being locked up among the insane, helpless to prove our sanity, perhaps being driven mad; this fear is almost as basic as that of being buried alive. And we can't formulate a clear-cut difference between sane and insane. So Forman replaces the novel's trippy subjectivity with a more realistic view of the patients which leaves their mental condition ambiguous. They seem not much more insane than the nurses, the doctors, the attendants. They're cowards, terrified of Big Nurse (Louise Fletcher), but then the staff is intimidated by her, too.

What has disappeared from the film version is the Combine (to be known a little while after the book came out as the Establishment). Forman could have exploited the Watergate hangover and retained the paranoid simplicities that helped make hits of Easy Rider and Joe, but instead he (with, it appears, the support of his producers, Saul Zaentz, of Fantasy Records, and Michael Douglas) has taken a less romantic, more suggestive approach. McMurphy's sanity isn't so clear-cut, and he doesn't give his buddies the courage to go back out into the world; the ward isn't emptied, as it is in the book. (Now only the Indian walks out.) Cut off from the concept of the Combine, the ward symbolizes the pressures and ambiguities of society as we know it, and the movie comes at a time when we're all prepared to accept a loony bin as the right metaphor for the human condition.

But this leaves a problem that isn't completely solved: Big Nurse. Instead of the giant-breasted terror of the novel, Louise Fletcher's Nurse Ratched resembles Shirley Temple Black. She's the smiling, well-organized institutional type -- the dean of women who was was disappointed in you, the phone-company supervisor who tells you why she has to interrupt your service for non-payment. Nurse Ratched's soft, controlled voice and girlishly antiseptic manner always put you in the wrong; you can't cut through the crap in her -- it goes too deep. And she's too smart for you; she's got all the protocol in the world on her side.

In Thieves Like Us, Louise Fletcher played Mattie, the strong, no-nonsense betrayer. Here, thinner and almost baby-faced, she's a middle-aged woman wearing her hair in a forties wartime style and still seeing herself as an ingenue. Louise Fletcher gives a masterly performance. Changes in her flesh tone tell us what Nurse Ratched feels. We can see the virginal expectancy -- the purity -- that has turned into puffy-eyed self-righteousness. She thinks she's doing good for people, and she's hurt -- she feels abused -- if her authority is questioned; her mouth gives way and the lower part of her face sags. She's not the big white mother that she is in the book; that part of the symbolism has been stripped away. She's the company woman incarnate; the only way to reach her is to go for her throat -- though neither the novel nor the film perceives that women, too, would want to strangle her.

Forman isn't a manhood-and-size obsessive like Kesey, but the film's plot structure derives from Kesey's male-female symbolism, and when that is somewhat demythified, the plot goes a little out of kilter, into melodrama. Those who know the book will probably feel that Nurse Ratched is now more human, but those who haven't read it may be appalled at her inhumanity. The melodramatics are flagrant in the episode involving Billy Bibbit (Brad Dourif), the stuttering, mother-fixated virgin of the ward. McMurphy fixes him up with his own hooker girlfriend Candy (Marya Small), and the next morning Billy is cured of his stutter -- until Nurse Ratched tells him that she is going to inform his mother of what he's done. Then the stutter comes back. Brad Dourif gives the rolea fey spark, but without Kesey's giddy pop view this crybaby-juvenile bit is a bummer -- psychiatric dramaturgy circa Lon McCallister and, before him, Eric Linden.

Will Sampson, a towering full-blooded Creek, is very impressive as Chief Broom, the resurrected catatonic. Forman's tentative, literal-minded direction lacks the excitement of movie art and there's a callousness running through his work; he gets laughs by pretending that mental disturbance is the same thing as ineptitude. But the story and the acting make the film emotionally powerful. And Nicholson, looking punchy, tired, and baffled -- and not on top of his character (as he often is) -- lets you see into him, rather than controlling what he lets you see. With William Redfield, Scatman Crothers, Danny DeVito, Vincent Schiavelli, Sydney Lassick, Louisa Moritz, and Christopher Lloyd; cinematography by Haskell Wexler. Academy Awards: Best Picture, Director, Actor (Nicholson), Actress (Fletcher), Screenplay (Hauben and Goldman), Released by United Artists.

Film Freak Central review [Bill Chambers]

DVD Journal Gregory P. Dorr

Dragan Antulov

James Berardinelli's ReelViews

DVDTalk [Gil Jawetz]

DVDTown [John J. Puccio]

Reel.com DVD review [James Plath]

ToxicUniverse.com (John Nesbit)

Long Che Chan

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest An aerial view of the nest, by William VanWert from Jump Cut

The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks

The Flick Filosopher's take MaryAnn Johanson

Edinburgh U Film Society [Ben Wilkinson]

All Movie Guide [Lucia Bozzola]

Reel.com DVD review [Pam Grady]

Time Out

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 1975

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 2003

DVDBeaver.com [Gregg Ferencz]

RAGTIME

USA (155 mi) 1981 ‘Scope

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

Those of us living in the opening decades of the 21st century should watch our step: Writers and artists will be waiting at the other end, trying to make sense of the entire age from the way we lived. Just as James Cameron attempted to squeeze a hundred years of American class conflict and teen rebellion into Titanic, E.L. Doctorow's 1975 novel Ragtime looked back at a turn-of-the-century American culture of new possibilities and new traps. New media began to create a popular culture that flickered in movie houses and moved to the beat of music created by people who were only a generation or so removed from slavery. Celebrities were destroyed as easily as they were created, and Harry Houdini jostled for newspaper space against Teddy Roosevelt, Emma Goldman, public murders, and the sex scandal of the week.

For years, the novel's kaleidoscopic sprawl resisted attempts to adapt it, including an earnest try from Robert Altman. With his command of expansive casts and historic themes, Altman might have been able to make a masterpiece of it, but his Ragtime belongs beside Richard Linklater's Friday Night Lights in a file for missed opportunities that eventually yielded interesting results anyway. Scaling back Doctorow's ambition from the ludicrous to the merely daunting, Milos Forman (coming off the success of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and the failure of Hair), puts the focus on the novel's central story of an upwardly mobile middle-class family (headed by James Olson and Mary Steenburgen) who take in an unwed black mother (Debbie Allen) and her newborn child. Flush with new success as a pianist, Allen is swiftly courted by the child's father (Howard E. Rollins) and just as swiftly killed when she attempts to aid his quest to find justice for the racially motivated vandalizing of his new Model T. Driven mad by his loss—or is that just righteous fury?—Rollins begins a campaign of terror that eventually stretches to the highest reaches of New York society.

Opting for handsome straightforwardness, Forman loses much of the novel's flavor, but the film still has much to recommend it, especially an immersive period production design and a top-form cast. Lured out of decades of retirement, James Cagney has a memorable turn as a wily police commissioner, but the younger performers—particularly Rollins, Steenburgen, Brad Dourif, Elizabeth McGovern, and Mandy Patinkin—are the ones who tap into the spirit of the piece. With assembly-line efficiency, the new era reveals its ability to convert their idealism into cynicism whether they find success or tragedy. It's a hard lesson, but one worth remembering at the top or tail end of any American century.

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna

DVD Verdict Mitchell Hattaway

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson)

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer)

Elizabeth McGovern Website -- Review of RAGTIME

PopMatters Nikki Tranter

MediaScreen.com Wayne Klein

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

AMADEUS

USA (160 mi) 1984 ‘Scope director’s cut (180 mi)

The Onion A.V. Club [Tasha Robinson]

From 1975's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest to 1999's Man On The Moon, Milos Forman's best-known American films explore creative rebellion and the stubborn outsiders that perpetrate it on their unappreciative (or outright hostile) societies. But his other works don't approach the subject with as much complexity and passion as 1984's Amadeus. The film earned eight Academy Awards with its highly fictionalized account of the life of 18th-century composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Tom Hulce), a celebrated child prodigy whose star fell as he grew older, until he died poor and alienated at 35. Forman's tormented, iconoclastic subjects are often pitted against iconic or impersonal antagonists, but Amadeus' conflict remains rivetingly intimate, in spite of its sumptuous, larger-than-life settings. The film's tremendous drama comes from the prim demeanor and savage, outsized emotions of successful composer Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham), the only person in Vienna who truly understands Mozart's genius. Overwhelmed by his rival's music, Salieri drinks it in at every opportunity. But his own lamentably paltry talents, and Mozart's insufferable vanity and crudity, drive him to protest God's unfairness by destroying the man whose music channels God's voice. The cinematography of longtime Forman partner Miroslav Ondrícek makes Amadeus visually stunning, the cast is spectacular, and Forman deftly shapes and informs the narrative with exquisite use of music, making Mozart's genius enormously accessible. But Peter Shaffer's deft, layered script—adapted from his far more artificial and self-conscious play—is the key to the endeavor. That may explain why the beautifully refurbished director's cut of the movie, which adds some 20 minutes of footage, seems slightly dry and unbalanced. Salieri's newly restored attempt to extort sexual favors from Mozart's wife Constanze (Elizabeth Berridge) does significantly alter both characters, though Berridge's topless scene is both jarring and excessive. But most of the other restored sequences are redundant (Mozart argues with Constanze about money) or unnecessary (Mozart briefly takes on a humiliating tutoring job). The superbly edited original version of Amadeus used overlapping sound cues for a lively flow between scenes, and the new version breaks up some of that flow with lengthy, talky interludes. Still, Ondrícek's breathtaking images and Forman's essential craft are best appreciated on the big screen, and another theatrical run for Amadeus is a welcome gift, no matter how much this edition unnecessarily gilds what's already a near-perfect lily.

Turner Classic Movies Director’s Cut

May 2002, Warner Brothers re-released Amadeus (1984) theatrically in a special "Director's Cut" version but the film only played a few selected cities in the U.S. so very few people had a chance to see it. Luckily, Amadeus: Director's Cut is now available on DVD. Based on Sir Peter Shaffer's London and Broadway stage hit, the film includes 20 additional minutes of drama, music and sound not included in the 1984 release, all of which were added with the approval of Milos Forman, Sir Peter and Saul Zaentz.

The 2-disk DVD of Amadeus: Director's Cut includes a commentary by Milos Forman and writer Peter Shaffer, the theatrical trailer, and a behind-the-scenes documentary entitled The Making of Amadeus. The film is presented in its widescreen anamorphic format with Dolby sound and closed-captioning options.

In 1985 the original theatrical release of Amadeus won 8 Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor for F. Murray Abraham, Best Screenplay Adaptation for Peter Shaffer, Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design, Best Make-up and Best Sound.

Amadeus was directed by Milos Forman and produced by Saul Zaentz, the team that swept the 1976 Academy Awards (winner of the 5 major Oscars) with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975). Amadeus was adapted for the screen by its author Sir Peter Shaffer. In the much coveted leading roles, F. Murray Abraham is featured as Antonio Salieri, the jealousy-ridden 18th Century composer, and Tom Hulce plays the hapless victim of his venom, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the man-child genius whose music is heard throughout the film.

Described by Shaffer as 'a fantasia based on fact,' Amadeus was inspired by persistent rumors in the early 19th Century that Mozart had been poisoned by his rival Salieri, a successful court composer driven mad by the revelation of his own mediocrity when compared to Mozart's God-given genius.

Noted choreographer Twyla Tharp staged the ballets used in Mozart's operas the way they were danced in his day. Filmed almost entirely in Czechoslovakia, director Milos Forman's native country, the segments from Don Giovanni were staged in Prague's famed Tyl Theatre, where Mozart conducted the premiere in 1787.

James Berardinelli's ReelViews

DVD Times Noel Megahey

DVD Journal Dawn Taylor

Reel.com DVD review [James Plath]

DVDTown [John J. Puccio] Director’s Cut

ToxicUniverse.com (John Nesbit) Director’s Cut

DVDTalk.com review - Director's Cut [Holly E. Ordway]

DVD Verdict - Director's Cut Eric Profancik

filmcritic.com (Annette Cardwell) Director’s Cut

Film Freak Central Walter Chaw – Director’s Cut

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

The Flick Filosopher's take MaryAnn Johanson

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web

Chris Jarmick

Edinburgh U Film Society [Iain Jackson]

Looking Closer (Jeffrey Overstreet)

Guardian/Observer

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 1984

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 2002

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

DVDBeaver.com - Review [Gary W. Tooze]

THE PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT

USA Canada (129 mi) 1996 ‘Scope

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

Oliver Stone, who produced The People vs. Larry Flynt, is good at packaging depravity in acceptable forms. Natural Born Killers was nothing but a 60's psychedelic drug movie. (See it and Roger Corman's The Trip back to back and you'll know what I mean.) The Doors was a rock and roll drug movie and JFK was a giant trash propaganda film (like Reefer Madness). The People vs. Larry Flynt is about porn, and it shows us porn, but it's packaged as a movie event, and that makes it okay to see.

I'm not complaining about this phenomenon. I like it. We live in a country where depravity is (more or less) legal, but people get upset over the packaging. That's just what The People vs. Larry Flynt is about. It's about a man who did what was allowed under the First Amendment, and was picked on by people who didn't like how he did it. (The publishers of Playboy never went to court.) The secret is that people do like porn, but they can't admit it. Everyone wants to see porn. Even the bad guys in the movie have collections of Hustler magazine "for reference." The movie is about weak people trying to use the law to cover for their own personal weaknesses.

The People vs. Larry Flynt is not subtle. Even though Oliver Stone did not direct (it was directed instead by Milos Forman, a two time Oscar winner for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Amadeus who is not very good with subtlety either) it reeks of his presence. Unless you are one of those repressed people, it's really hard not to identify with Flynt (played over the top but great by Woody Harrelson). He's a scumbag, but you love him because he stands up to the movie's stuffed shirts (who are all pretty one-dimensional). He loves his wife and his parents and he acts on what he believes in, no matter what the consequences. The filmmakers are counting on critics to call Flynt an "unlikable" character and pat themselves on the back for identifying with him, but, on the contrary, he's very likable. That on top of the fact that the bad guys are not given real personalities to oppose him. (We've got Charles Keating and Jerry Falwell as villains, and they're paper thin.) In Tim Robbins' Dead Man Walking for example, both sides are given equal weight and the finished film is so much more powerful than anything Stone has ever or will ever accomplish.

The movie is a lot of fun for long stretches. There are scenes of dancing girls and moonshine running and photos of naked women (most of the nudity in the movie is in still photos). It's written by the team of Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski who made the wonderful Ed Wood biopic. The drugs in Ed Wood were handled with finesse, but in Larry Flynt, they're pretty exaggerated. Unless you're a big fan of needles, the section of the film where Larry gets shot, then deals with pain pills, then his wife Althea's addiction, then her contraction of AIDS, is long and hard to watch. I personally have a problem with sequences like this because I've seen it all before and we're expected to react to the subject matter itself and not the presentation of it. In Trainspotting, drug abuse became fascinating and even poetic because of the unusual and interesting presentation of it.

On a side note, the movie boasts the unusual casting of Courtney Love as Althea Flynt. Love is the passionate and intelligent lead singer-songwriter for the great band Hole. She has been labeled as "the asshole wife of martyr Kurt Cobain" and even as a Yoko Ono figure. But the music of Hole is nearly as good and honest as Nirvana's was, and Love proves in her performance that she is incapable of fakery in any medium. She is truly dazzling in her part; wild, pathetic, romantic, beautiful and funny (and naked). She makes Whitney Houston (The Preacher's Wife) and Madonna (Evita) look sad in comparison.

Edward Norton (who is also in this year's Everyone Says I Love You and Primal Fear) plays Flynt's attorney. He gives great patriotic speeches that hit home. He sounds like he is making up the speeches as he goes along, and there's no swell of music behind them. He's jittery, geeky and smart. It's also a great performance.

The People vs. Larry Flynt isn't a porno movie, but it makes you feel good about porn and America for two hours. It's sloppy and unpleasant at times, but also a lot of fun.

Austin Chronicle [Steve Davis]

A flag-waver for the free speech set, The People vs. Larry Flynt isn’t what you might expect it to be – it’s more raucous than raunchy. Using the trials and tribulations of the self-proclaimed smut king to teach a civics lesson in the meaning of the First Amendment, this audacious film will undoubtedly be reviled by feminists and fundamentalists alike for its refusal to judge Flynt’s fleshy commerce. (One of the film’s critics has pontificated that director Forman, who allegedly had never seen Hustler magazine before committing to the movie, would have never agreed to direct had he first seen a copy. Given that Forman – a Czech émigré – left his homeland while it was under totalitarian Communist rule, I’d guess he’d probably be more willing to undertake this freedom-of-speech project than one of his American counterparts.) Those disturbed by the film’s glorification (of sorts) of its white-trash Hugh Hefner – there’s nothing airbrushed about Larry Flynt – may rightly be concerned that less discriminating viewers will see it as elevating its subject to martyr status, as a forthright defender of American civil liberties, when in reality the man is nothing but a pornographer for profit. The truth is, however, that The People vs. Larry Flynt depicts its focal character as both hero and antihero. Flynt’s ascent into notoriety smacks of pure 20th-century Horatio Alger. Born to a dirt-poor Appalachian family, he got into the strip-joint business in less-than-hospitable Cincinnati in the 1970s, striking paydirt only when he began publishing a skin magazine that defied all notions of good taste. (A hilarious scene in which copies of Hustler are distributed to concerned – and “respectable” – citizens at a posh dinner, as evidence of the depravity that has entered their community, beautifully exemplifies human beings’ natural curiosity to look at the forbidden, even when it’s repellent and vile to them.) It is only when Flynt’s cash flow is threatened and the prospect of incarceration becomes real that he unwittingly becomes an advocate for constitutional rights. Still, if the First Amendment is to mean anything when it comes to the right of free speech, it must include the right to be selfish – to say what you think, rather than what others believe you should or should not say, regardless of what your motivation may be. Battered by obscenity trials and paralyzed by a sniper’s bullet, Flynt reaches his abyss in the 1980s – addicted to painkillers and mentally unhinged – all the while accompanied for the wild ride by his wife, Althea, the love of his life. Unlike most film biographies in which the love interest angle is an often obtuse one, the romance of Larry and Althea – the Sid and Nancy of porn circles – is a truly genuine one. All the notions of co-dependency aside, the film presents them as two people acutely attuned to each other, eternal soulmates by default because no one else in the world could love them as they loved each other. This unexpected poignancy, blooming amidst an unflinching portrait of the couple’s downward spiral – he was hospitalized in an institution, she died an AIDS junkie – easily makes The People vs. Larry Flynt one of the most adept movies seen in a while, especially when considering its satiric panache as well. Harrelson gives an almost fearless performance as Flynt, clearly relishing the thought of playing this American icon. (About halfway through the film, Harrelson’s timbre decidedly changes; was there any irony in this acting choice, in that he then sounds like a gravel-voiced James Stewart?) Harrelson is more than matched by Love in an open-wound performance. In an acting turn full of physical and emotional contortions, she gives herself wholly to the role of Althea, most likely because she’s actually lived it to some degree. When the perfect arc of Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski’s smart screenplay is completed, you may find yourself tearing up, but not in response to the tragedies that marked Flynt’s life. Rather, the unlikely culprit is the opening language in a United States Supreme Court opinion, in which the nine justices unanimously ruled in Flynt’s favor in an infamous lawsuit brought by the Reverend Jerry Falwell. The People vs. Larry Flynt is proof that you can find patriotism in the most unlikely of places.

THE PEOPLE VS LARRY FLYNT Will the Real Larry Flynt Please Stand Up? by Peter Lehman from Jump Cut, May 1997

Albuquerque Alibi [Devin D. O'Leary]

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James Berardinelli's ReelViews

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digitallyOBSESSED.com (Rich Rosell)

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick

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Apollo Movie Guide [Brian Webster]

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Exploitation Retrospect Dan Taylor

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Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan)

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The New York Times (Janet Maslin)

MAN ON THE MOON

USA Germany Japan Great Britain (119 mi) 1999 ‘Scope

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

How do you make a movie about Andy Kaufman, the enigmatic comedian who hid himself beneath so many layers of characters and pranks that he didn't seem to exist anymore? Attempting to explain Kaufman is a self-defeating task that's contrary to everything for which he stood. It might be better just to describe what he did, pointing out his continual puncturing of the illusion surrounding entertainment (and everything else) as an act of subversive, conceptual comedy in its highest form. Milos Forman's new Kaufman biopic Man On The Moon more or less contents itself in doing just that, re-creating Kaufman's most famous moments in a way that makes it clear just how funny and important he was. In an uncanny performance that announces him as an actor in a way the mediocre Truman Show did not, Jim Carrey perfectly mimics Kaufman's stable of characters: the foreign-man persona that would earn him a slot on Taxi, the obnoxious lounge singer Tony Clifton (who would get fired from the same), and the friendly naif that Kaufman sometimes tried to present as himself and in some ways might have been. Consisting largely of scenes of Carrey in performance, Man On The Moon sometimes plays like a greatest-hits reel, but given the awkwardness of many of the (usually brief) expository scenes, it's just as well. (Though it would have been nice had Forman, seemingly inspired by bad '70s concert films, included fewer shots of audiences reacting to the performances.) Saving most of their subtlety for the touching final act dealing with Kaufman's death from lung cancer in 1984, screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski mostly content themselves with brief scenes introducing major characters (Danny DeVito as manager George Shapiro, Paul Giamatti as collaborator Bob Zmuda, Courtney Love as the notoriously promiscuous Kaufman's late-in-life girlfriend, Lynne Margulies) and dialogue that moves the film from one Kaufman moment to the next. The result isn't much of a biography—Alexander, Karaszewski, and Forman all but canonize Kaufman, just as they did Larry Flynt in The People vs. Larry Flynt—or really much of a film. But it works wonderfully as a funny, moving tribute to Kaufman, which might be the best that could have been hoped for anyway.

Philadelphia City Paper review by Sam Adams

Bright Lights Film Journal [Robert Castle]

Images (Gary Johnson)

Man on the Moon Leslie Felperin from Sight and Sound

World Socialist Web Site David Walsh

Salon.com [Stephanie Zacharek]

James Berardinelli's ReelViews

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City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul

Scott Renshaw

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Edwin Jahiel

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culturevulture.net Gary Mairs

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Forster, Marc

All-Movie Guide Jason Buchanan

It often seems that people find their true callings in the most unexpected manner, and for a young boy growing up in a remote town in Switzerland who didn't see a movie until he was 12 years old, the prospect of growing up to become a movie director may have seemed as unlikely as they come. Upon viewing director Francis Ford Coppola's acclaimed 1979 war drama Apocalypse Now, however, young Marc Forster had an epiphany that would eventually lead him to Hollywood and beyond. Though the German-born youngster's bucolic childhood was virtually celluloid-free, the sheer awe of Coppola's striking vision eventually led the ambitious and imaginative Forster to dive headlong into a career that might otherwise have never occurred to him even in his wildest dreams. In 1990, Forster left his home in Switzerland to enter New York University's acclaimed film program, with the young director's freshman feature hitting the festival circuit a mere five years after his graduation. A suitable cinematic calling card that won Forster the Audience Award for Best Feature at the 1996 Slamdance Festival, Loungers earned the emerging writer/director a solid reputation for his ability to balance story with style. Another five years would follow before Forster once again took to the screen for the haunting psychological drama Everything Put Together, which offered the tale of a mother who struggles to maintain her sanity following the tragic and unexpected death of her infant son. Not only did the film transcend its digital-video origins to weave a heart-wrenching tale of loss and mental decay, but it also earned Forster a nomination for the Grand Jury Prize at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival in addition to taking home the "Someone to Watch" award at the 2001 Independent Spirit Awards.

Forster's success with Everything Put Together proved his ability to capture such a suffocating atmosphere on digital video, and he was next approached as a prospect to direct Monster's Ball. Though the script had been floating around Hollywood for nearly five years by the time it crossed Forster's desk, the high-priced demands of the A-list stars and directors who had shown interest — combined with the studio's insistence that the film be made for less that five million dollars — found the tide slowly turning in the ambitious young director's favor. When Monster's Ball was released in 2001, there was little doubt that Forster had been the right choice to direct the downbeat drama. In addition to earning star Halle Berry an Oscar for her emotionally devastating performance as a widow whose passionate affair with a prison guard proves a last-ditch effort to jump-start her numbed emotions, the film also found Forster's Inbox flooding with tempting offers. When the smoke cleared and the director had found adequate time to carefully consider his future prospects, he eventually announced that he would be directing screen heavies Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet in the fact-based drama Finding Neverland (2004), a film which served to detail author J.M. Barrie's motivation behind the penning of his children's classic Peter Pan. Even before that film hit theaters stateside, Forster was in post-production on Stay, a labyrinthine thriller starring Ewan McGregor that told the dark tale of an Ivy League professor who attempts to alter the tragic fate of one of his students.

Filmbug Biography

Forster, Marc They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

indieWIRE Interview (2001) by Jacque Lynn Schiller from indieWIRE, November 12, 2001

Paste Magazine Interview feature and interview by Annabelle Robertson, December 1, 2004

Film & Video Interview (2006) by Bryant Frazer, November 13, 2006

MONSTER’S BALL A- 93

USA Canada (112 mi) 2001 ‘Scope

Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]

Billy Bob Thornton moves with the slow, careful steps of the walking wounded and speaks with the dead, emotionless calm of a man in a sustained spell of shock.

His character, death row corrections officer Hank Grotowski, is a single dad and blue-collar guy who has had the life whipped out of his soul by his racist father (Peter Boyle, whose hateful redneck practically overdoses on snarling glee) and is now dutifully passing the legacy to his son (Heath Ledger).

Halle Berry is Leticia, a worn-down and frustrated single mom (for all intents and purposes). She pulls double shifts at a local diner and raises a sweet, overweight boy while her incarcerated husband (Sean Combs) counts down his days on death row. Numb from overwork and drained by her prison visits, she collapses into screaming rants directed at her boy, slowly destroying his sense of self-worth.

Almost broken from a series of ordeals that would test Job, Hank and Leticia are tossed together to seek comfort in the sheer physical sensation of sex.

Director Marc Forster's awkward angles and oblique editing remove the viewer from both the spectacle and the emotion, but the spark of contact changes the trajectory of their lives and transforms a story of self-destruction into a tale of possibility.

Raw moments of naked emotion rip through the contrived tragedies of the script (did I mention Hank puts Leticia's husband to death?) and Forster's careful control and choreography. The film struggles mightily between the two poles: the raw and the overcooked. Berry is jagged and ragged, an emotional wreck barely holding it together as she careens from one disaster to another, while Thornton is more studied than felt, a small-town "The Man Who Wasn't There" without the slyness or the sadness.

For all its darkness and tragedy, "Monster's Ball" is a film that wants to be liked and Forster stumbles over his good intentions to win the audience over. He's so determined to expose the evils of racism and ignorance and hate passed from father to son like a virus, and celebrate the healing that comes from breaking the cycle, that he smothers the spontaneity from the picture. Yet it remains an often affecting film with a powerful message.

In the tender quiet of the final act, two scarred souls step up to take control of lives they've let someone else drive into a dead end. It's a lovely moment of hope, well deserved after all the hate we've slogged through, but it's all a little too contrived to fully embrace.

The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]

As headlong wallows in hatred and degradation go, Marc Forster's Monster's Ball self-consciously outgrunges the year in American film, but the upshot is curiously unconvincing. This particular slice of bruised Georgia peach, with its bigoted rancor and Job-like tragedy spree, falls from the Tennessee Williams orchard, but with significantly less blab. Forster (Everything Put Together) is not quite the dilettante-hack you'd expect given the film's faux artiness, but Monster's Ball is a So-Goth footnote, executed just efficiently enough to make you pine for the backwater days of John Huston's Fat City and Wise Blood. What you glimpse here amid the fastidiously pretty focal fuzz and slumming Hollywood royalty is the difference between a filmmaker exploring a workaday truth and a careerist dallying in the foothills of American crackerdom as if earning a Cub Scout badge.

It's a subtle distinction in Monster's Ball, because the movie gets so many things right: spatial details, trash decor, behavioral rhythms. (The way the actors offhandedly show their characters' intense affection for Wild Turkey and oatmeal is lovely.) Certainly, there are the raw ingredients for a Faulknerian harrowing: three lonely generations of racist prison guards (infirm retiree Peter Boyle, execution-team captain Billy Bob Thornton, rookie Heath Ledger), and a boozy waitress (Halle Berry) whose husband (a fine, weary-voiced Sean Combs) is on death row. The trio of shotgun-toting whiteys have it no better: Their women having long vacated the joint, the family unit is so bilious that Ledger's laconic punk, after fucking up on Combs's last mile, pulls a revolver on his dad and then blasts himself in the chest.

When asked if he wants something read at his son's burial, Thornton's dead-eyed dick replies, "All I want is to hear the dirt hittin' that box." Monster's Ball should add up to a poison-pen portrait of cannibalistic Southern masculinity, but it doesn't—after the first act's circumstantial pileup, Thornton quits his post and falls in with Berry's shell-shocked floozy instead, making some nasty and severely irrational interracial whoopie. (This sex sequence might've had some thrust if Forster hadn't shot it from distant rooms and through various pieces of furniture.) What at first blush read like fashionable dolor—the cinematic equivalent of complaint rock—becomes the obvious architecture for a tolerance sermon; the schematically arranged characters are thereafter reduced to thoughtful brooding. In the end, what Forster and his screenwriters manage to achieve by restraining the clichés, they drown in overlighting and cool introversion. Already graced with twin best-acting awards from the ever dubious National Board of Review but far too studied to generate much impact, Monster's Ball wastes a ton of potent material—Combs donning a pre-chair diaper and Thornton extracting his son's spent bullet from the family armchair are moments an artist could've used like a blackjack.

Washington Post [Stephen Hunter]

You never see the monsters in "Monster's Ball," but they are there, and boy, do they party. They cavort through the minds and memories of the Grotkowski clan, three generations of white men so haunted by them as to be hardly human. The monsters are those old, hairy macho beasts who've dogged the race since prehistory: racism, fear, hatred, suspicion of softness, distrust of women, contempt for others. These boys play rough, especially with such a tribe as the simple Grotkowskis, beckoning them on toward madness and death, to that hell that so many men invent for themselves, where there is no woman and there are no children but only beer and bitterness.

The Grotkowskis – patriarch Buck (Peter Boyle), son Hank (Billy Bob Thornton) and grandson Sonny (Heath Ledger) – are prison people. They live in a small house and work at the big one, in some unspecified Southern hinterland. They stand for the law; they incarcerate the guilty and monitor that population's small compass, up to and including the squalid, weary goodbyes as convicts, kids and spouses separate at the end of visiting hours; they also preside at the dark ceremonies by which the violent are sent to another plane. Their commitment is obsessively total, even as it exiles them from community and friendship and ultimately each other.

But as grim as it is, "Monster's Ball" tells a story of uplift: how one Grotkowski acknowledges the fear and pain eating at his soul, and drives the monsters out. It only costs him his son and his father.

Hank is a sergeant. He's a modest man, largely created by his father to believe in two prime virtues: the necessity of order and the worthlessness of African Americans. The sometimes blank face of Billy Bob Thornton, with his too-lush Southern hair, his watching eyes that can tighten to beams of pure-D hate or widen softly to acknowledge pain, is perfectly mated to this part. Thornton specializes in fellows who think they know it all, then learn they don't.

When two black neighbor kids come over to the Grotkowski estate, a rotting old hulk on the outskirts of town, the monstrous old Buck, creaking amid his oxygen tubes and pill bottles as he simmers in anger at the shrinking of his world, sends Hank out to chase them off. Dutifully the son does so, even if he can't muster the energy to achieve the pitch of hellfire in which the old man lives so naturally. It's a brilliant little scene: It demonstrates economically how the racism has been ever so slightly diluted, father to son, and suggests that the son may yet have a shot at redemption.

But it's not to be an easy one. Hank's son, Sonny, is yet more evolved. He sees the people of darker skin as human but, like some rank malignancy out of the rotted wood and the stale air and the oeuvre of the great Faulkner, he is still cursed: He knows the two generations above him in the family hierarchy conceive this apostasy as weakness, girlishness.

Almost as if confirming their doubts about him, Sonny cannot hold together at an electrocution. His failure drives his father mad, for this is the ultimate disgrace: the surrender to emotion in the midst of ceremony. Hank's anger is savage and horrifying (this is not a pretty movie; people explode in bilious rage at each other every few minutes and people die every half-hour or so) and it culminates in a family tragedy that leaves Hank asking the key question, the question his father never let him conceive: Why?

The second element of the story takes place on the other side of the color line. Lawrence Musgrove (played by Sean Combs, aka P. Diddy, who is extremely good, no matter his reputation and history) is the recipient of the state's 2,000 volts of electricity, which Hank and Sonny are charged to administer. He leaves behind a wife, a mountain of bills, an eviction notice and a son. By contrivance, Hank, in the aftermath of his own domestic agony, meets Leticia.

It's not that Halle Berry is so beautiful, for in the film she has deglamorized herself to an amazing degree and taken up a compellingly believable rural accent. She is no goddess: When she catches her son, Tyrell (Coronji Calhoun), eating from a secret candy hoard, she, too, explodes in violence and contempt. He's a fatty; she knows a fat black kid will have no chance, and her anguish channels into violence, until the beaten boy is crying. She is achingly human and believable.

Sometimes the screenplay, by Milo Addica and Will Rokos, stoops to melodramatic contrivance almost too crude. They reverse the old movie trope of fated lovers meeting cute by having Hank and Leticia meet ugly – at another gut-busting tragedy. But the two, each a recovering grief addict, find in each other a 12-step recovery plan. Step 1 is love. Step 2, why, that would be love. Darned if Step 3 isn't love. And Step 4, why goldang, love again. And on to Number 12: love, love, love.

You feel the presence of melodrama lurking everywhere, threatening at every moment to destroy the movie. But the director, a Swiss named Marc Forster, is a classicist.

He tells his story with directness and simplicity and without the high hallmarks of the soaps' gooey emotional lubrication: no pretentious camera angles, no swelling music, no overlush pictorials. When people cry, they get real ugly: snot bubbles out, tears dribble and turn to puddly sheens, hair messes into thatch.

But the movie's stroke of sheer genius is its wondrous ending. Forster has played so cleverly with Big Scenes that you worry that he's building toward a corker, the one where Leticia has to find out that it was Hank who belted her hubby into the chair and nodded to the electrician behind the curtain. But the movie sends you out full of the chocolate ice cream of hope, the belief that if we work hard enough, then maybe yes, we can all just get along.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Changing The Guard Nick Roddick from Sight and Sound, June 2002

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FINDING NEVERLAND C 73

Great Britain USA (101 mi) 2004

Somewhat dark and dour look at J.M. Barrie, the writer of PETER PAN, played innocently enough by a turn of the 20^th century dapper and debonair Johnny Depp, always a gentleman, a playwright who is stuck in a loveless marriage with a beautiful woman of class and means, Radha Mitchell, and instead falls for a lovely widow with few means that he meets while strolling in the park, Kate Winslet, who has 4 charming boys who, without a father, immediately find him amusing. The theatrical pieces are magical, but unfortunately, despite the stellar cast, including Julie Christie as the boys stern grandmother, who perhaps gave Barrie the idea for Captain Hook, the rest of the film is overly bland, predictable, and filled with tug-on-your-heartstrings moments that call for syrupy stringed music. This was a first-class disappointment, probably the only Kate Winslet film I’ve ever seen that I found disappointing, as so many good people are in this film, filmed by the director of MONSTERS BALL, which was immensely better. This film simply lacked any staying power or dramatic intensity of any kind, as it seemed mired in a destiny of doom, in what might be called a Dickensian dreariness, with the hovering power of death satiating throughout.

STRANGER THAN FICTION B- 81

USA (113 mi) 2006

Shot completely in Chicago, this is another formulaic Will Ferrell film that turns up few surprises and instead relies on being another breezy, lightweight feel good comedy. It toys with the idea of being darker, but never commits to that theme, deciding instead on being liked by the audience, turning into a typical commercial Will Ferrell vehicle. However, what’s interesting here is the edgy contribution from Maggie Gyllenhaal and the intelligent intervention of Dustin Hoffman which almost saves this picture. What really confounds the imagination is the totally straight Queen Latifah role, a useless and completely unnecessary appearance, and the by now predictable device of leading the audience into still another CRASH syndrome variation. Emma Thompson is fine in her role as a somewhat out of sorts novelist who specializes in killing off her main characters, but who is having second thoughts about doing it yet another time, as if she is turning gun shy in her middle age.

Granted, the idea of suddenly discovering late in life that you are a character in someone else’s story, where every action is guided by the thoughts of a narrator who understands your innermost thoughts before you do, and who uses a better vocabulary, is an amusing plot device. Add to that the uselessness of modern psychology to rescue you in your hour of distress, suggesting instead that the character would be better served under the tutelage of a literary expert (Hoffman), which is a brilliant stroke, and this strand of the story suddenly elevates the film into more intelligent possibilities, but they die on the vine, guided by what I might call the touching little boy syndrome. Will Ferrell since ELF plays characters that never grow up, who are so uncharacteristically bland and morally upright that they are stripped of all interest or meaning, but are instead pure caricatures whose very innocence is used to play upon the audience’s emotions. Contrast this to Jim Carrey’s emotionally underplayed character in ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, whose existential confusion actually connects with the audience as he was fighting to hold onto the one person in his life who meant something to him. Ferrell never really connects with anyone on a human level and remains lost in a contrived storyland, where he remains a Pinocchio-like fictional character.

Forsyth, William

All-Movie Guide Sandra Brennan

Consistently described as quirky and droll, Scottish filmmaker Bill Forsyth mastered the art of the unexpected with the release of his first film, That Sinking Feeling, the episodic moral tale of an unemployed band of urban Glasgow youths trying to unload a stolen shipment of kitchen basins. As with his subsequent films, the story is a comedy with the underpinnings of a moral tale from which the film's youthful protagonists will learn a lesson or two about life.

Forsyth entered the film industry at age 17 after he was hired as the assistant to a documentary filmmaker. From this director, Forsyth was able to learn about all aspects of film productions. In the late '60s, Forsyth briefly attended the national Film School and then worked as an assistant editor at the BBC before returning to Glasgow to break ties with the documentary director. By that time, Forsyth decided he wanted to make more personal films. His sophomore effort, Gregory's Girl (1980), followed the offbeat romance between a painfully shy local football (soccer) hero and the young woman who joins his team. The director's third film, Local Hero (1983), is his best-known film and exemplifies Forsyth's original style. A gentle comedy rich with melancholy undertones, it is the story of a Texas oil tycoon who endeavors to buy a small Scottish coastal village that sits atop a vast reserve of untapped oil in the North Sea. Forsyth's first American film, Housekeeping, starring Christine Lahti as an eccentric wanderer who profoundly impacts the lives of her two nieces, is similarly laced with humor and pathos. His most ambitious and yet least successful film is Robin Williams' vehicle Being Human, an ambitious but uneven and snail's-paced look at romance through the ages.

A Bill Forsyth Page

Forsyth, Bill (1946-) bio from BFI Screen Online

Britmovie Bio

Film Reference Duncan J. Petrie, updated by Rob Edelman

Bill Forsyth Christopher Meir from Senses of Cinema

Forsyth, Bill They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Gerald Peary - Interviews - Bill Forsyth in 1985

THAT SINKING FEELING

Great Britain (93 mi) 1980

Time Out

The image of the Scots in British films had largely been confined in the past to the wayward eccentrics of Whisky Galore! or to Glaswegian thugs. Refreshingly, in his first feature (independently produced on a risibly small budget), Bill Forsyth successfully captured the subversively ironic optimism of the Glasgow streets and somehow managed to combine it with the good-humoured charm of the best Ealing comedies. It's a street-smart fairytale about a group of unemployed teenagers embarking, enthusiastically but incompetently, on a big heist, and is played with such relish by members of the Glasgow Youth Theatre that it's guaranteed to win any audience over to its side within minutes: the British dispossessed's version of Rockers.

Channel 4 Film

Brilliantly surreal Bill Forsyth comedy about four bored, unemployed Glaswegian teenagers who hatch a plan to rob a warehouse full of sinks (because one of them has noticed that they're worth a lot). Also enjoyable for fans of bad hair

This wonderfully daft debut set the tone for a series of smart offbeat comedies by Scottish director Bill Forsyth, the best known of which are Gregory's Girl and Local Hero.

Set on a housing estate in Glasgow That Sinking Feeling follows the misadventures of four, bored teenagers who gather together each day to eat cornflakes, watch daytime cookery shows on TV and occasionally wander around the local park, with flares flapping in the wind.

Then one day, Ronnie (Robert Buchanan) decides that their future lies in crime, and hits upon the ludicrous idea of robbing a warehouse containing hundreds of sinks. Their master plan is pulled off with the aid of a knock-out potion and by dressing as women.

The slightness of the story shouldn't really be strong enough to carry an entire film, but thanks to a gentle pace, some absurd humour and sweet incidental observations That Sinking Feeling is a treat from start to finish.

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

''THE action of this film,'' a preopening credit announces, ''takes place in a fictitious town called Glasgow. Any resemblance to any real city called Glasgow is purely coincidental.'' The setting does, indeed, look a lot like the real Glasgow, but what happens there on the grubby back streets, in the rubbish-strewn vacant lots, vast warehouses and rain-soaked parks is pure enchantment. Here is a contemporary fairy tale in which just about everybody has a skin problem.

The film, which opens today at the Lincoln Plaza and other theaters, is Bill Forsyth's 1979 ''That Sinking Feeling,'' the first feature to be written and directed by the young Scottish film maker whose second and third features, ''Gregory's Girl'' and ''Local Hero,'' have already established him as a most original, major film humorist.

Though Mr. Forsyth was apparently reluctant to have this early, extremely low-budget, 16-millimeter work released here, he need not worry, at least about those of us who were bewitched by the two later comedies.

''That Sinking Feeling'' doesn't have quite the panache of ''Gregory's Girl'' and ''Local Hero.'' However, it is a lyrically amiable, funny introduction to Mr. Forsyth's talent and his particular world, which is inhabited exclusively by lunatic teen-agers, self-possessed adolescents and solemn tots. Though the backgrounds are real enough, everything that happens in the foreground is touched by magic.

Strictly speaking, I suppose, ''That Sinking Feeling'' might be classified as a caper film, being about the conception, the planning and, finally, the execution of an improbably near-perfect crime: the stealing of 90 stainless-steel sinks by a gang of eager but none-too-bright kids. The leader is a fellow named Ronnie who, early in the film, admits that he has just tried to kill himself by drowning in a bowl of cornflakes and milk. After much introspection, Ronnie decides that there must be more to life than suicide, with which his mates agree.

It's Ronnie who hits on the complicated plan, involving an ever-widening circle of thieving conspirators, to break into the warehouse and make off with the sinks, which, he estimates, will bring in small fortunes for all. Among his associates are Vic and Wal, who are to disguise themselves as women to keep the warehouse's night watchman busy; Bobby, something of a wizard at chemistry, who concocts a sleeping potion that will allow them to ''borrow'' a bakery delivery truck, and a small black boy called the Wee Man, who never says much but plays a key role in the heist.

Among the fringe characters are Vic's girlfriend Mary, who frowns a lot anyway but even more when Vic starts to take an unnatural interest in her clothes as well as her lipstick, and Eddie, the innocent driver of the bakery van who, one doctor predicts at the end, won't wake up until 2068. ''He'll be a billionaire,'' the nurse says with delight, ''Eighty years of sick benefits!''

''That Sinking Feeling'' doesn't move - it ambles from one seemingly found moment to the next, and though it's not as dense with odd detail as the later Forsyth films, it's never bereft of them. Like the somewhat better-manicured landscape of ''Gregory's Girl,'' this grubby Glasgow is full of mysterious characters, including one small figure in a bright red jogging suit who, without explanation, frequently turns up in a scene, jogging purposefully to nowhere.

Robert Buchanan, who plays the second-best friend of the hero of ''Gregory's Girl,'' is a very winning Ronnie, a pint-sized poet with a gift for unlikely crime. John Gordon Sinclair, who was so fine as Gregory in the later film, has a very small role in this one, but he also is a very funny if mostly mute presense. As Vic, John Hughes almost makes off with the film, particularly as we see his personality change from fairly hip teen- ager to rather prissy, prematurely matronly woman, when he gets into drag. Billy Greenlees, who played Gregory's pastry-baking pal in ''Gregory's Girl,'' is hilariously bemused as the other ''girl,'' who nearly drives the night watchman mad with desire.

''That Sinking Feeling'' is a gentle film, but that gentleness cannot obscure the strength of its intelligence and wit. Mr. Forsyth is one of a kind, and ''That Sinking Feeling'' is one long, very broad smile, punctuated here and there with genuine belly laughs.

GREGORY’S GIRL

Great Britain (91 mi) 1981

Britmovie Ian Freer

There is something cosy Gregory's Girl, like having an old friend over for dinner. So choc full of lovely little bits. Bill Forsyth's mega low-budgeter remains acutely irresistible, mixing first love rituals and the offside trap with loopy charm.

Set around the failings of a useless school football team ("heard they got a corner last week and took a lap of honour") what plot there is concerns the attempts of gawky Gregory (Sinclair) to earn the affection of star striker Dorothy (Hepburn), who has taken her place in the first eleven. Yet, although the film works perfectly as a straight down the line romance - Dorothy rebuffs Gregory's puppy dog enthusiasm, passing him onto the quirky Susan (Grogan) - the real heart of the film lies in a myriad of quirky vignettes (the horizontal dancing escapade), winning absurdity (a kid in a penguin suit waddles the school hallways for no apparent reason) and interesting teen characters that are miles away from the stereotypes served up by countless John Hughes movies.

Forsyth peppers the dialogue with quotable gems and funnies, yet never sells short the truthfulness, desperation and small-time pains of adolescence. Indeed, the whole film is engendered with a generous, likeable sensibility that plays delightfully at odds with the concrete comprehensive surroundings. Forsyth also crafts winning performances from the whole of the cast - D'Arcy's misguided football coach is a delight - with Hepburn, by turns driven and winsome, and Grogan delightfully dippy. Yet, this is Sinclair's movie, nailing the painful diffidence and petty embarrassments with such likeability that you are prepared to forgive him the slew of awful sitcoms he has served up since. Daft but deft, realistic yet imbued (in its final third) with a midsummer magic and madness, rites of passage - particularly in a British movie have rarely been idealised with such watchable charm.

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

There was a little item in the paper not long ago that should have been front page news. It was about a survey reporting that physically handsome men were less successful in business, made less money, married younger, and had less "desirable" spouses than men of average or below-average looks. The sociologists who announced these conclusions speculated that the handsome guys tended to get sidetracked in high school, spending more time on social life and less time on studies; they tended to depend on their golden boy charm instead of plowing ahead through college; and they tended, because they were more sexually active at younger ages, to marry sooner and therefore to marry women who were looking for marriage rather than careers. On the average, therefore, the weird kid with acne who's president of Chem Club will do better in the long run than the prom king.

Bill Forsyth's GREGORY'S GIRL is a charming, innocent, very funny little movie about the weird kid. It is set in Scotland, where the teenagers are quieter, more civilized and more naive than, let's say, those in CLASS OF 1984. And it is about Gregory (Gordon John Sinclair), a gangling adolescent who has started to shoot up all of a sudden and finds he is hopelessly uncoordinated on the soccer field. Gregory looks sort of like an immensely likable stork. He loses his place on the soccer team to another student who is a good deal faster and more coordinated. The other student happens to be a girl. Her name is Dorothy (Dee Hepburn), and Gregory instantly falls deeply in love with her. Nothing like this has ever hit him before, and romance becomes for him almost a physical illness. Dorothy is sweet to him, but distant, because she not only suspects Gregory's feelings but is way ahead of him in her analysis of the whole situation.

The movie takes place mostly in a pleasant suburb of Glasgow, where the kids hang about and trade endless speculation on the impossibility of being sixteen and happy at the same time. Gregory turns for romantic advice to his younger sister, who is much more interested in ice cream. His sister, in fact, is oblivious to boys, although one pays her an earnest compliment: "She's only ten, but she has the body of a woman of thirteen." Meanwhile, Gregory consoles his best friend, who is fifteen and a half and has never known love.

This movie is a reminder that we tend to forget a lot of things about adolescence. For example: That it is no use telling a teenager what his faults are, because he is painfully aware of every possible fault in the minutest detail; that boys are absolutely helpless in the throes of teenage romance, whereas girls tend to retain at least some perspective; that it is an unwritten law of the universe that no sixteen-year-old ever falls instantly in love with the right person at the right time.

The movie has a lot of gentle, civilized fun with insights like that. And along the way, Gregory the stork is led on a wild goose chase with a swan at the end. The movie contains so much wisdom about being alive and teenaged and vulnerable that maybe it would even be painful for a teenager to see it; it's not much help, when you're suffering from those feelings of low self-esteem and an absolutely hopeless crush, to realize that not only are you in pain and suffering an emotional turmoil, but you're not even unique. Maybe only grown-ups should see this movie. You know, people who have gotten over the pains of unrequited love (hollow laugh).

Gregory's Girl (1980) Mark Duguid from BFI Screen Online

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Choking on Popcorn Mariken

Movie Gazette review [Gary Panton]

iofilm.co.uk Top Twenty Scottish Films

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LOCAL HERO

Great Britain (111 mi) 1983

Genuine fairy tales are rare. So is filmmaking that is thoroughly original. Local Hero, a disarming, funny movie, is both.

—Janet Maslin of the New York Times

Time Out

For all the ballyhoo about Chariots of Fire, Forsyth's is the more significant film because it rediscovers a genre that was once among the British cinema's proudest achievements. Local Hero, which concerns the frustrations of a Texas oilman's attempts to buy up an idyllic Scottish village, ranks as a lyrical anti-urban comedy in the great tradition of films like I Know Where I'm Going and Whisky Galore!; and its essential triumph is to prove that comedy can still contain a gentle, almost mystical, aspect without necessarily being old-fashioned. The film achieves this best in its superb sense of location and the haunting contrast between Texas and Scotland. Forsyth cannot quite tease out of his characters the kind of strange sublety that Powell and Pressburger delivered, but it is enough that he and producer David Puttnam succeed in making you realise just how badly this kind of film has been missed.

BFI Screen Online Michael Brooke

A Texas oilman goes to a Scottish fishing village with plans to build a refinery there, but becomes enraptured by the locals' low-key way of life and the area's natural beauty.

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In the early 1980s, British cinemas still regularly showed double bills, and an intriguing one that did the rounds in 1982 involved Chariots of Fire (d. Hugh Hudson, 1981) and Gregory's Girl (d. Bill Forsyth, 1980), two films that on the face of it seemed to have nothing in common - apart from the way that their huge success led to them becoming high-profile symbols of different aspects of the new British cinema.

So it came as little surprise that David Puttnam (Chariots' producer) and Bill Forsyth would eventually join forces, and the result was a critical and commercial triumph. Local Hero (1983) was made on a much bigger budget than Forsyth's previous films - even stretching to a bona fide Hollywood star in Burt Lancaster - but it's clearly the work of the same man.

Indeed, one of the film's most satisfying conceits is the way that Lancaster's character (the Texan oilman Happer) turns out to be the biggest dreamer of them all. Despite his success, he's a kindred spirit to Andy in Gregory's Girl, and certainly as detached from the real world, even to the extent of installing a planetarium in his office and brushing aside business-related matters in favour of astronomical ones when making long-distance calls to his man in Scotland, 'Mac' Macintyre (Peter Riegert).

Mac takes centre stage throughout much of the film, partly as an essential plot motor (he's the man responsible for linking up the small village of Furness Bay with the Knox Corporation and potentially turning its inhabitants into millionaires) but also because it's his journey from hard-bitten executive to hopeless romantic that marks him out as a true Forsyth hero.

Equally typically, he doesn't take any of the expected paths, showing little interest in material or romantic success but a great deal of attachment to natural phenomena from the aurora borealis to the rabbit Trudy - whose summary execution by casserole harshly demonstrates that he's rather more sentimental than his new Scottish friends.

In retrospect, Local Hero was the high point of Bill Forsyth's career. None of his subsequent films would achieve the same level of critical and popular acclaim, partly thanks to production difficulties, but also due to an increasingly darker, more pessimistic tone (as seen in such films as the ironically-titled Comfort and Joy (1984) and his US debut Housekeeping (1987)) that belied his (not entirely deserved) image as a specialist in light comedy.

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COMFORT AND JOY

Great Britain (106 mi) 1984

Time Out

When his girl-friend walks out on him, Alan 'Dicky' Bird (Paterson) grits his teeth and plugs away at his sugar-coated job as a DJ on a Glasgow local radio station. Then by a highly unlikely quirk of fate he finds himself mediating in an ice-cream war between Mr McCool and Mr Bunny, both of them branches of the Scotia Nostra. But while Paterson regains his self-esteem through the injection of seriousness into his life, the film is damaged for the same reason: Forsyth stamps too firmly on the comedy which was his forte, while being apparently too nice to believe that the mafia are anything other than high-spirited boys. The result doesn't go far enough in either direction. Other people make comedy thrillers; this is a whimsical mild-surpriser.

Edinburgh U Film Society [Stephen Townsend]

Set during Christmas time in Glasgow, Comfort and Joy stars Bill Paterson as Alan 'Dicky' Bird, a popular local DJ. After his girlfriend Maddy (Eleanor David) decides to leave him, he takes to wandering the streets in hopeless desperation. Obsessed with his loss, he soon finds himself caught up in the middle of a bizarre war between rival Italian Ice Cream sellers.

This is a very endearing movie. It's definitely a much more ambitious work than the director's previous comedy Gregory's Girl. Quietly humourous, it seeks to explore the motivations of a man whose life appears devoid of meaning. For the most part its successful, but it has to be said that at times the story does drift aimlessly. The humour occasionally lacks much needed bite. Even so, there are enough genuinely affecting moments to please any viewer. Bill Paterson is marvellous as Dicky and Ricky Fulton is absolutely hilarious as Hilary, the head of the radio station who begins to doubt his employee's sanity.

BFI Screen Online Michael Brooke

After his girlfriend walks out on him, a Glasgow DJ tries to develop other interests. But his stint at investigative journalism blows the lid on corruption in the local ice-cream business, and he finds himself at the centre of a full-scale war.

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Following the critical and commercial success of Local Hero (1983), Bill Forsyth had little difficulty in getting a new film off the ground - though this would sadly be the last time in his career that there would be such a brief gap between features.

Comfort and Joy (1984) marks a watershed in several respects: despite the title and plenty of Forsyth's trademark quirky observations, it's ultimately a bleak, pessimistic film that was disconcerting at the time - but in retrospect it can now be seen to clearly foreshadow his later work.

Like Gregory in Gregory's Girl (1980) and Mac in Local Hero, Alan 'Dicky' Bird (Bill Paterson) is trying to come to terms with a dramatic change in his life by adopting a fresh outlook, but the crucial difference here is that for all the appearance of success (even securing a financial stake in the new ice-cream fritters venture), at the end he is still left alone in a largely deserted radio station on Christmas Day trying to whip up a party atmosphere - presumably aimed at others in his situation.

Though there's plenty of verbal and visual humour (a running gag sees Alan regularly wiping white substances - bird droppings, snow, ice cream - off his car roof), Alan himself barely seems to notice: he sleepwalks through his radio show and his inane jingles like the professional he clearly is, but his heart is still with the departed Maddy (Eleanor David) - his chasing of Charlotte (C.P. Grogan) is so half-hearted that he may well just be going through the motions as a matter of course.

And much the same is true of his dealings with Messrs Bunny (Alex Norton) and McCool (Roberto Bernardi) - he ultimately solves their little local difficulty not so much through a sense of altruism but because it's become too annoying to ignore, especially when his car is repeatedly damaged as a side-effect. While the ice-cream war that drives the main plot motor initially seems like a typically Forsythian invention, it is in fact based on real-life incidents.

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HOUSEKEEPING

USA (116 mi) 1987

Time Out

Adolescent sisters Ruthie (Walker) and Lucille (Burchill) live by a threatening black lake; their mother lies at its bottom, and Aunt Sylvie (Lahti) flaunts death by rowing on it late at night. Sylvie rocks the boat in other ways too. Arriving out of the blue to care for her nieces, she has habits that challenge the small town's conventions and eventually come between the girls: she collects tins, sleeps on park benches, hoards newspapers, condones the girls' truancy, almost sets the house on fire while cooking. Gentle humour stems from such idiosyncrasies, but Sylvie is irresponsible, dangerously so. When Lucille's schoolgirl desire to be 'normal' forces her out of the house, we sense an ominous flipside to the kookie, childish adventures Sylvie dreams up to entertain Ruthie. Weather, period (the '50s) and place (Idaho) are so emphatically detailed they're oppressive; while Sylvie and the girls come to life with greater depth and wholeness than Forsyth's characters have hitherto enjoyed. Here the director's characteristic other-worldly charm is overshadowed by a dark intensity; with its backdrop of death, isolation and portent, the movie is sombre, very strange, but wonderful.

All Movie Guide [Michael Hastings]

Scottish director Bill Forsythe's first effort for a major Hollywood studio was 1987's Housekeeping, a touching but resolutely unsentimental coming-of-age story boasting one of Christine Lahti's more under-appreciated performances. When Lahti's frizzy-haired, glassy-eyed Aunt Sylvie becomes the surrogate mother to two nieces, Ruth and Lucille, her dreamy philosophies and pack-rat behavior cause a split between the high-minded Lucille and the more pensive Ruth, played with an unforced grace by the young Sarah Walker. Rather than presenting Sylvie as the screen-tested stereotype of the lovable eccentric, Lahti and Forsythe make her increasingly more ambiguous as the film nears its conclusion, and the chasm between the two sisters' lifestyles takes on a bittersweet, almost tragic quality -- shadings which may have turned off audiences expecting more lighthearted fare. Lahti followed Housekeeping with a string of stellar roles in such films as Running on Empty; for Forsythe, the film would be the beginning of many post-production clashes with Hollywood studios. The haunting Pacific Northwest locales were shot by frequent Forsythe collaborator Michael Coulter.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kathleen Sachs

Before Natalie Portman and Zooey Deschanel were halfheartedly manic-pixie-dream-girling it up for the likes of Zach Braff and the Fox network, Christine Lahti was brilliantly being the real deal in Scottish director Bill Forsyth's 1987 film HOUSEKEEPING. Based on the modern classic by Marilynne Robinson, it's about two young girls in the fictional town of Fingerbone, Idaho whose aunt comes to live with them after their grandmother—who'd been taking care of them since their mother committed suicide years earlier—passes away. Lahti's Aunt Sylvie drifts into the sisters' lives just as they begin to drift apart; the younger one yearns for normalcy while the oldest is a dreamer of sorts who doesn't fit in with her peers. Sylvie recognizes a kindred spirit in the latter niece, and Forsyth (and perhaps Robinson—I haven't yet read the novel) uses the parallel between both generations of sisters to consider the world in terms of a binary outlook. The darkness of this implication lingers over an otherwise ethereal film in which Sylvie and her niece's eccentricities are complemented by a variety of gorgeously haunting landscapes that rival Terrence Malick's in their sublimeness. Forsyth's first American production, HOUSEKEEPING advances an aesthetic in his work that was seemingly influenced by the exquisite beauty of his home country. There's also a Jarmuschian lyricism in his depiction of nature; it shares its wisdom with Sylvie and her niece but never relinquishes its supreme power over them. This further emphasizes that they aren't merely quirky but instead genuinely alienated outsiders who experience the world in a different way. It's also a small but noteworthy fact that Sylvie is estranged from her husband, ostensibly at her own discretion. She's beholden to no man—or woman, for that matter, unlike her younger niece who has fallen prey to the opinion of others. Many of Forsyth's films are similarly charismatic, though none that I've seen are as bewitching as this one, likely owing to the originality of the source material. (Forsyth himself has said as much.) To be straightforward, this is a can't-miss screening; after seeing it, you'll surely feel imbued with Sylvie's infectious wonder.

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BREAKING IN

USA (94 mi) 1989

Time Out

Forsyth's second American picture (the first actually shot in the States) is a gentle comedy about a couple of guys who happen to break into the same house at the same time. Mike (Reynolds) is an old-time pro, but Ernie (Siemaszko) is a kid, only in it for thrills. Declaring he'd sooner have a partner than a witness, Mike sets about showing Ernie the ropes. Despite the caper movie framework, John Sayles' screenplay is not as far from That Sinking Feeling as you might think. Forsyth has a rare talent for locating the comic in the real world. His heroes and heroines never quite fit in, and who can blame them? There's something funny going on: a guard dog more inquisitive than aggressive, a Christian hostel with thousands of dollars in its safe, a poetic prostitute who muses, 'What would I do with your balls were they mine?'. Reynolds reminds one of the easy charm he commands when he doesn't force it, and young gun Siemaszko is marvellous as a likeable schmuck who wants only to belong; together they're poignant and very funny. A subtle, masterly film, a series of life lessons which never ducks the moral ironies, no less precious for their simplicity.

eFilmCritic.com (Jack Sommersby)

Low-key, uncommonly observant and original, this is one of those films that may not seem like much while you're watching it but manages to work on you in pleasurably subtle ways. It's imperfect, but so much of it is so damn good, you're more than willing to overlook these shortcomings.

Burt Reynolds gives an outstanding staying-in-character performance as a sixty-one-year-old Portland safecracker who takes overeager young car mechanic Casey Siemaszko under his tutelage in this intoxicating low-key comedy from writer John Sayles and director Bill Forsythe. The film is less reliant on gags and more on amusingly acute observations of human behavior (like lecturing over the wrongness of stealing an apple in the middle of a grocery store robbery) and philosophies (engaging the services of a call girl is no less reputable than going out on a regular date because you're paying for "it" -- i.e. sex -- either way); and the characters come off less like pawns of the plot (with what little plot there is, mind you) and more like integrals of the story. Breaking In may not seem like a big deal, yet it's fairly amazing in its determination never to belabor the obvious nor to offer cut-rate solutions to complex problems; it's one of those slice-of-life films that is appropriately breezy and comfortable in its own skin, so it doesn't feel the need to go needlessly melodramatic or invoke a sense of shame to score points with the kind of audience that likes everything spelled out. In a big way, it's kind of like to filmmaking what Jeff Bridges is to acting: never calling undue attention to itself, and forgoing sensationalism in favor of accumulating finely textured nuances for the good of the overall whole. The entire cast, from starring to supporting roles, is pitch-perfect, with Reynolds the standout in the kind of rich performance he likely would have given six years earlier had he not turned down the role Jack Nicholson won an Oscar for in Terms of Endearment. (He also did outstanding work in '89 as a framed-for-murder ex-cop in Michael Crichton's otherwise-ludicrous Physical Evidence, and the voice of a German shepherd in Don Bluth's engaging animated feature All Dogs Go to Heaven.)

This was the first Reynolds film one could even remotely ascribe the term "art house" to, and though it grossed just under $2 million during its U.S. theatrical run it was widely embraced by critics and earned a nomination at the Deauville Film Festival.

DVD Times Anthony Nield

They may not be the most immediate of double acts, but the 1989 pairing of Scottish director Bill Forsyth - the man responsible, most famously, for Gregory’s Girl and Local Hero - and indie figurehead John Sayles - writer of Piranha and writer-director of Baby, It’s You and City of Hope - proved to be a winning combination and resulted in the gem that is Breaking In. The film may belong to the ranks of those overfull sub-genres the heist movie and the buddy movie, yet this odd transatlantic couple adopt them in a manner that appeals to both. Breaking In is a quiet, unhurried character study focussing on Burt Reynolds’ suave but limping old hand and rough around the edges new kid on the block Casey Siemaszko. The two meet by chance trying to pull the same job - though Siemaszko is more concerned with the fridge than the safe - and soon Reynolds is imparting his knowledge onto the youngster. Indeed, the breaking in of the title plays two ways.

So is this primarily a Bill Forsyth film or a John Sayles one? The focus on the youthful Siemaszko, as opposed to big name Reynolds, gives Breaking In a similar vein to That Sinking Feeling and Gregory's Girl, whilst the entire film could be read as the director’s riposte to Michael Hoffman’s Restless Natives (made four years earlier) which was regularly referred to by critics as a Forsyth-esque crime flick. However, the leanness of the narrative (the film begins and presumably, though ambiguously ends at the same time as the central relationship) is very much a Sayles trait - even his “epics” such as City of Hope and Sunshine State are refreshingly free of any extraneous bullshit - as is the small town Americana. Of course, Forsyth’s films had been gradually moving in this direction, beginning with the invading Texans in Local Hero’s Scotland and continuing with Housekeeping, his first U.S. film proper, though the remote 1950s setting was barely distinguishable from his early work (indeed, it wasn’t actually filmed in the states). Yet Sayles’ presence seems to have afforded him an extra ease and allowed the territory to be not so alien as could be expected.

To separate the pair, however, is to ignore the qualities that they bring out in each other and the sense of unison this entails. One of the most refreshing aspects of Breaking In is the manner in which it doesn’t take pot shots at its chosen genres but merely co-opts them for its makers’ needs. Yet at the same time the pair also never forget the keystones of such works meaning that the film is still reliant on suspense, set pieces and the wonderful chemistry that all great buddy movies have. Indeed, the simplicity of Sayles’ screenplay combined with the unfussy nature of Forsyth’s working methods has resulted in Reynolds’ finest performance of the eighties, one which retains the actor’s natural charms but excises any hint of the arrogance that begun to dominate much of his work during the decade. Likewise, Siemaszko proves so utterly winning that you immediately want out what happened to him following his performance here and in the first Young Guns. What’s even more delightful, however, is the way in which Breaking In never goes for the obvious but instead delves into the more delightful truths meaning that, at the very least, this is a film brimful of happy moments. Admittedly, there are occasional imbalances - the cameos from Maury Chaykin and Stephen Tobolowsky may have worked in Sayles picture but seem a little too quirky for Forsyth’s mannerisms - yet these remain minor flaws to a wonderful little gem ripe for rediscovery.

Sadly no extras - a commentary from the writing-directing team would have been most welcome - though MGM’s disc does have a decent presentation. The original aspect ratio of 1.66:1 (one that seems perfectly suited to Forsyth’s style) is adhered to, though rendered non-anamorphically, and the print is in fine condition. Indeed, there is little damage to speak of, with the image remaining clean throughout. Likewise, the soundtrack, in the original Dolby Surround, is free of any dirt or damage and poses no problems to speak of.

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BEING HUMAN

Great Britain Japan (122 mi) 1993

Spirituality & Practice [Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat]

Being Human is a daring movie written and directed by Bill Forsyth (Local Hero) which will appeal mainly to mystics. Willa Cather once observed: "There are only two or three human stories and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they never happened before." Here five stories from different periods of history are stitched together by the narration of Theresa Russell. Robin Williams plays a cave man who loses his family to a raiding party of strangers, a Roman slave who gets his freedom after his owner commits suicide, a medieval wanderer, a Portuguese shipwreck survivor, and a divorced New York landlord spending an uneasy weekend with his son and daughter. These stories join the past with the present and make a path into the future by celebrating universal human experiences — family ties, the yearning for freedom, love, sorrow, and the search for meaning.

Michael Sragow from The New Yorker (link lost)

Robin Williams is Bill Forsyth's vacillating Everyman in five vignettes depicting humanity's jumble of pusillanimity, selfishness, and love through the ages. The movie starts slowly in prehistory, pratfalls into the Roman Empire, meanders around the Middle Ages, gets shipwrecked (literally and figuratively) in the sixteenth century, and turns lachrymose in the twentieth. The episodes rarely come to a head or a punch line or a satisfying point. There are gorgeous storybook images, but the action is a stupefying combination of existential tomfoolery and squishy, pathetic humanism. The high spot comes early: as a wily Roman slave and a foolish master, Williams and John Turturro pay homage to "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum." Theresa Russell delivers the narration, a failed deconstructionist whimsy about this being "the story of a story."

Time Out

Forsyth's most ambitious film disappeared after its disastrous US opening. Warners sat on it for a year, trying to figure out a recut which would make sense. They eventually gave the film back to the director who added Russell's voice-over narration as a sign of good faith. It's a difficult picture to get a handle on (five stories spanning 6,000 years): in each tale, Williams plays a human being (sic), Hector - a caveman, Roman slave, medieval traveller, 17th century aristocrat, and finally a contemporary New Yorker. The stories are low-key and deliberately anti-climactic, but they coalesce into a tender, contemplative whole that's profound and moving. While Hector may not be reincarnated, exactly, each story feeds on what has gone before, so that after losing his family in the Bronze Age, he's separated from them in every other tale. Other motifs recur: fear and anxiety, superstition and sacrifice; the nature of partnership, how men treat women (and other men) as chattels; the significance of water-crossings; the need and difficulty of filling other men's shoes; the abused integrity of a name. The studio was probably right: there is no general audience for this mid-life crisis of a movie, but it's singular and fascinating all the same.

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Fosse, Bob – director/dancer/choreographer

Film Reference Greg Faller

Rex Reed once said of Bob Fosse (in a review of his performance as The Snake in The Little Prince), "The man can do anything!" Somewhat effusive, Reed's comment nonetheless has more than a kernel of truth: Fosse won eight Tonys, one Oscar, and one Emmy over the course of his career. In fact, he garnered four of the awards (the Oscar for Cabaret, the Emmy for Liza with a Z, and two Tonys for Pippin) in one year.

Fosse started his career as a dancer and choreographer on Broadway and divided his time almost equally between directing for the stage and for films. All of Fosse's films are musicals (with the exception of Lenny) and it is within this genre that he made significant contributions. The directorial choices employed by Fosse stemmed, not surprisingly, from his style of dancing and choreography: a type of eccentric jazz that isolates and exaggerates human motion, breaking it up into small components. It has been noted that there appears to be little difference between the dance material for Fosse's stage and film choreography. But the presentation of the dance is radically different. On the stage, only the performers could create the fragmentation of Fosse's choreography. In film, the use of multiple camera set-ups and editing allowed an amplification of this fragmentation, essentially obliterating the dance material and the mise-en-scène.

This style can be seen as the complete opposite of Astaire's presentation, which strives to preserve spatial and temporal integrity. "I love the camera," Fosse once said, "I love camera movement and camera angles. As a choreographer you see everything with a frame." Camera angle and camera image become more important choreographic components than the dancing. The dance routine itself is non-essential, subordinated to a more complex system of integration and commentary, as Jerome Delameter has noted.

Fosse's notions of integration and commentary drastically altered the structure of the American musical film. Reacting against thirty-odd years of the Arthur Freed musical, Fosse broke new ground in 1972 with Cabaret. No longer were the musical numbers "integrated" into the narrative with people singing to each other. All dance performances were logically grounded, occurring where they might be expected—on a stage, for example (and never leaving that stage, as Berkeley did)—and was distinctly separated from the narrative. The "integration" took place in the sense that each performance was a comment on the narrative action. In an interview with Glenn Loney for After Dark, Fosse shed some light on his approach. "I don't think there is any such thing as a realistic musical. As soon as people start to sing to each other, you've already gone beyond realism in the usual sense. . . . I have generally tried to make the musical more believable." Fosse did not seek to make the events more realistic, just more plausible and logical. Fosse expounded on his concepts of "believability," "integrated commentary," and visual fragmentation of performance via camera angle and editing with All That Jazz, a film in which musical numbers are literal hallucinations, obviously separated from the narrative but still logically grounded within it.

Read Full Review Caroline Palmer looks at the films of Fosse from City Pages

Late Broadway choreographer-turned-filmmaker Bob Fosse once said: "Live like you'll die tomorrow, work like you don't need the money, and dance like nobody's watching." No one was more faithful to these words than Fosse himself, a man who spent the majority of his 60 years either onstage, in the studio, or in the sack (with lots of company, of course). He originated a movement style like none other. Long-legged dancers--their gloved fingertips stroking the rims of ubiquitous bowler hats--strut through Fosse's rigorous jazz routines with sensual detachment and flawless timing.

He directed movies like he made dances, isolating and dissecting bodies, emotions, and events with a voyeur's patient eye. But the workaholic who chain-smoked up to six packs of unfiltered Camels a day and popped amphetamines like Altoids also embraced a death wish. Fosse created nonstop until 1987, when he dropped dead on the sidewalk outside the National Theater in Washington, D.C., just minutes before the curtain opened on his much-anticipated revival of Sweet Charity. Fate delivered a finale fit for the consummate showman.

This week the Walker Art Center presents "A Tribute to Bob Fosse" by screening three of his five films. While Fosse may be best known for Cabaret, which earned him the 1972 best-director Oscar, the Walker series focuses instead on his obsession with the highs and lows of show business. Screening all of Fosse's films (including the underrated 1969 Shirley MacLaine vehicle Sweet Charity) plus his acclaimed 1972 television special for Liza Minnelli, Liza with a Z, would have made for a more complete picture of the artist's cinematic flamboyance. But the Walker does locate a logical theme in Fosse's love of real-life stories, especially as they reflect his own interests.

The 1974 classic Lenny (Thursday, August 29) is a gritty glimpse into First Amendment martyr Lenny Bruce's untamed mind while 1983's Star 80 (Friday, August 30) recounts the lurid details of Playboy Playmate Dorothy Stratten's shocking murder. Between these biographical bookends Fosse turns the camera on himself in 1979's All That Jazz (Wednesday, August 28), an unapologetically indulgent (and eerily prophetic) eulogy overstuffed with outrageous and amazing dance numbers. Taken together, the films represent Fosse at his artistic best and worst, addicted to decadence, in love with excess, afraid of nothing but the bad review.

Aside from directing, Fosse also choreographed for stage and film, conceiving several hits including The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, Sweet Charity, Pippin, Chicago, and Dancin'. His leading ladies, including third wife Gwen Verdon and quintessential Fosse muse (and lover) Ann Reinking, all became stars under his tutelage. Inspired by legendary Hollywood choreographer Jack Cole, Fosse mastered the art of razzle-dazzle and at the same time created a unique style that suited his physical shortcomings (rounded shoulders--perfect for shrugging--and pigeon toes). Even the bowler hats were a reaction to his premature balding. Ever the perfectionist, the eight-time Tony Award winner worked his performers mercilessly. "I can't make you a great dancer; I don't even know if I can make you a good dancer. But if you keep trying, I know I can make you a better dancer," his alter ego tells a discouraged chorus member in All That Jazz

Fosse was offered Cabaret after several other directors passed on the opportunity to render Christopher Isherwood's vision of Weimar-era Berlin on film. The story of a sleazy nightclub culture suited him well: Fosse, the son of a vaudevillian, grew up performing in low-rent burlesque houses. But, most important, Cabaret established Fosse as a director who changed the look of dance on film. Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and others all performed as if they were on a proscenium stage. Their bodies were shown in full and the camera rarely strayed from a frontal perspective. Fosse edited his dance scenes, employing unusual angles, quick cuts, audience reaction shots, and close-ups of body parts. Looking through his lens, one could imagine the mechanics of movement.

Fosse never forgot he was a choreographer, even when the subject matter of his films had nothing to do with dance. The camera still partners the actors, matching motion with emotion. Lenny provides several examples of this propensity while exploring the deviant's role in society through a mock documentary style. Lenny Bruce, who performed during the Fifties and Sixties, commented on racism, politics, religion, and sex--and he swore a lot while doing it. Such audacity earned him public vilification as a pornographer, and he spent the years prior to his fatal overdose in 1966 defending himself in several courts. Fosse weaves together flashbacks, re-created standup routines, and interviews with actors portraying real figures in Bruce's life. As Bruce's career builds, the excitement is palpable: Scenes of sex, parties, booze, and shocked-then-hysterical audiences combine in a whirlwind of action. Then everything slows down so Fosse can evoke Bruce's creeping madness as he attempts to fight a legal system clearly unprepared for his kind.

Fosse was friends with Bruce and found an astonishing interpreter of the man in Dustin Hoffman. The actor navigates Bruce's rise from cheesy borscht-belt comedian to Hollywood icon and, finally, public enemy with an edgy grace. Fosse shot the film in black and white, enhancing the coarseness of Bruce's act and subliminally commenting on the folly of a single-minded society absorbed with a man's foul language while far more egregious acts--racism and the brewing war in Vietnam, for example--went unchecked. Years before the National Endowment of the Arts controversy, Bruce, and Fosse through this film, set the standard for the modern visionary punished for telling the truth. Fosse may not have been honest in much of his personal life, but as an artist he could identify with such a risky commitment to candor.

Fosse also intimately understood the interplay of sex and fame. Each set of auditions provided the opportunity for a fling, but Fosse recognized that his allure largely owed to his rising star. It makes sense, then, that Fosse made Star 80, an exploration of sex as a power commodity, even if it is not remotely his best work. The film explores the true story of Dorothy Stratten (Mariel Hemingway), a naive Canadian girl discovered in a Dairy Queen who became 1980's Playmate of the Year. It's an altogether sordid tale that Fosse mines, fruitlessly, for its glamour potential.

Stratten's guide to the Playboy lifestyle is husband Paul Snider (a genuinely disturbing Eric Roberts), a small-time hustler who idolizes Hugh Hefner. As Stratten succeeds, Snider stumbles. Even Hef thinks he's nothing more than a pimp. Stratten eventually leaves Snider for a film director (in real life, Peter Bogdanovich, who refused to cooperate with Fosse). Snider murders and rapes Stratten, then kills himself, as Fosse replays one of Hollywood's most notorious crimes.

Star 80 is the director's most controversial work. Some will be repulsed by Stratten's perpetual objectification, and the ending is extremely violent. Much of the film was shot in the actual apartment where Stratten died, suggesting a morbid fascination on Fosse's part. Still others have hailed the director for showing all sides of the story, unflinchingly portraying the dynamics of domestic abuse, and laying guilt with the many parties who profited from an impressionable young woman's beauty. As in Lenny, Fosse employs a mock documentary style with actors portraying figures in Stratten's life. Yet Star 80 lacks Lenny's sophistication, and its stilted dialogue combined with its urgent sensationalism play, more often than not, like a Lifetime movie.

Fosse was aware of his personal drawbacks and even celebrated them, comparing his character to a Broadway production. "I'm still working on my life," he stated. "Just like it's out of town, and when I get it fixed, I'll bring it in." With All That Jazz Fosse glamorized his life but also offered a mea culpa for his many mistakes. Set during the mid-1970s, the film re-creates Fosse's experience of suffering a heart attack while preparing for Chicago. Although he recovered, Fosse became obsessed with his demise. Roy Scheider, Fosse's doppelgänger, portrays--surprise!--Joe Gideon, a Broadway choreographer and film director, who is opening a show, editing a movie about a standup comedian, sleeping around, ignoring his daughter, smoking and drinking too much, and having heart troubles.

Several of the big numbers make one wonder how Fosse finagled the budget for such an unabashed, ego-driven spectacle. But, thankfully, he did. Particularly noteworthy are an erotic rehearsal, an impromptu performance by Reinking (playing the girlfriend) in full Fosse form, a Busby Berkeley-style fan dance, a hilarious montage of hospital-room parties, and the spectacular finale with another Fosse vet, Ben Vereen, singing "Bye Bye Love" to a heavenly studio audience. All That Jazz received nine Oscar nominations and won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. It also proved that Fosse, who proclaimed that he didn't fear death, really did want to live, if only so he could keep topping himself. But death, like a Broadway show's closing, is inevitable. And so the film gave Fosse--the ultimate control freak--an unprecedented opportunity: the chance to direct his own funeral.

Fosse.com

Internet Broadway Database

Musical Theater Biography

Bob Fosse bio Dance Help

Who2?: Bob Fosse a Who2 Profile

Being Mrs. Fosse from the Gwen Verdon website: Redhead : A Tribute to Gwen Verdon

All-Movie Guide Lucia Bozzola

Overview for Bob Fosse - Turner Classic Movies

PBS Feature

Fosse: An Introduction 5-part feature by D. Fernando Zaremba from Features

Fosse, Bob They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Wikipedia: Bob Fosse

Bob Fosse bio. - FindAGrave.com

THE FIFTY-FOURTH STREET REVUE – TV show

USA (60 mi) 1949 d: Ralph Levy Fosse - dancer

THE GEORGE BURNS AND GRACIE ALLEN SHOW – TV show

“Harry Morton’s Private Secretary”

USA (30 mi) 1950 d: Rodney Amateau and Frederick De Cordova Fosse – featured dancer 1 episode

THE AFFAIRS OF DOBIE GILLIS

USA (72 mi) 1953 d: Don Weis Fosse – actor and dancer

User reviews from imdb Author: Peter Swanson (pswanson1@mac.com) from United States

I caught this film in the pre-dawn hours of an insomniac night recently, and found it reasonably diverting, although certainly no cinematic treasure. It does, however, contain genuine buried treasure for anyone interested in dance history, especially fans of Bob Fosse. The future Triple Crown of entertainment winner (Tony, Emmy, and Oscar in the same year) has a dance solo in this little movie which is positively searing, absolutely mind-bending in its virtuosity...and that's as seen in 2006. In its original release that sequence must have snapped the jaws of any member of the audience who'd ever taken a dance class. The man was simply fantastic, making Bobby Van, a decent hoofer himself, look like a club-footed spaz. I'd watch the storyless antics of Van's Gillis again just to see that number. By the way, I have read the original Dobie Gillis novel by Max Shulman, and it is very funny, as well as substantially earthier than any film or TV version of the story. If you see it in the library, give it a try.

Classic Film Guide

Directed by Don Weis, this Max Shulman screenplay and story was made into a cute, light early 1950's Musical comedy by pairing Debbie Reynolds with Bobby Van, and Barbara Ruick with Bob Fosse, as college kids on the campus of Grainbelt University (obviously a Midwestern locale). The most memorable musical number is the oft-repeated "All I Do Is Dream of You" (the whole day through), which Reynolds had just performed, jumping out of a cake for Gene Kelly, the previous year in Singin’ in the Rain (1952). Reynolds’s character alternately appears to pronounce Gillis’s name as either Dobie or Dopey, which seems more appropriate. Followed by a TV series with Dwayne Hickman and Bob Denver before he became TV's Gilligan.

Pansy Hammer (Reynolds) enters college with the university's motto "work, work, work, learn, learn, learn" drummed into her head by her protective father (Hanley Stafford). That is until she meets Dobie Gillis (Van), who's come to college to have fun. Not so slowly as surely, he convinces her to adopt his carefree way. Ruick plays another girl, instantly stuck on Dobie, who's pursued and eventually learns to love Gillis’s roommate Charlie Trask (Fosse). Hans Conried plays an amusingly arrogant English professor; Charles Lane plays a chemistry teacher. The young couple gets in real trouble after they start skipping classes to be together and Pansy, for the umpteenth time, blows up the chemistry lab when they're trying to makeup their work.

After this last incident, against the protests of his wife (Lurene Tuttle, actress Ruick’s real mother) and daughter, Pansy's father decides to separate the two lovebirds by sending his daughter to a college in New York, where she'll live with her Aunt (Almira Sessions). Charles Halton appears, uncredited, as the Dean of Grainbelt University. So, Dobie and his two friends try to figure out a way for him to make a trip to see Pansy in New York. After a failed book buying scheme (Percy Helton appears, uncredited, in the campus bookstore), brought about by Gillis’s own plagiarism, Dobie finally ends up convincing the near defunct campus magazine manager (Archer MacDonald) out of $1,000 so that he can go to New York to hire a big-named band for a dance to save it. Since he spends almost half the money wining and dining Pansy in the Big Apple, he can only afford to hire "Happy Stella" Kowalski (Kathleen Freeman) and her German quintet. But this is a musical comedy, with some dancing by Van et al, so naturally everything will work out in the end ... after all, human nature means everyone rushes to see a train wreck (and will pay for the privilege), right?

KISS ME KATE

USA (109 mi) 1953 d: George Sidney Fosse – dancer “Tom, Dick or Harry,” “From This Moment On” and uncredited choreographer

BBCi - Films George Perry

In early 1954 the old Empire, Leicester Square in London, then the West End's biggest and finest cinema, was where "Kiss Me Kate" was shown in 3-D. Subsequent generations have only known it in its flat version, and sadly that big Empire screen vanished many years ago. The BFI provides a welcome opportunity to see George Sidney's film the way it was meant to be seen. Now the reason why Ann Miller in her "Too Darn Hot" dance number flails the camera lens with her pink chiffon scarf becomes clear, and when Kathryn Grayson hurls a pewter goblet at the audience in "I Hate Men" the instinct is to duck.

It's a stagey piece, but so what? It's about the theatre anyway, with Grayson and Howard Keel leading a company staging a musical version of "The Taming of the Shrew". The trouble is that she is jaded and plans to run off with a Texan millionaire while he wants her back as a wife and a leading lady, and has to tame her.

The sparkling score by Cole Porter is one of his best with almost every number a standard, including "So in Love", "Why Can't You Behave", "Always True to You in my Fashion", and "I've Come to Wife it Wealthily in Padua".

The effervescent Ann Miller not only dances superbly but performs splendidly in the Bianca role, while Keenan Wynn and James Whitmore are a delight as they soft-shoe through the cod vaudeville number "Brush Up Your Shakespeare". The most magical moment is when for 45 seconds a very young Bob Fosse dances in "From This Moment On" to his own choreography, bringing to the screen the first glimpse of the slides, hand wiggles, and angular limbs that were to change forever the look of dancing on Broadway. A treat, on no account to be missed.

Turner Classic Movies Felicia Feaster

Dan Navarro

Bright Lights Film Journal [Alan Vanneman]

Macresarf1 - Epinions Review: In 3-D, at Frisco's Castro Theater

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GIVE A GIRL A BREAK

USA (82 mi) 1953 d: Stanley Donen Fosse – actor and dancer “In our United State” and “Nothing Is Impossible”

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

The main claim to fame of this low-budget, mainly mediocre 1953 musical, an early effort by Stanley Donen, is that it was shot on sets built for another picture--a ploy Jacques Rivette consciously emulated in his 1995 Up Down Fragile. Maybe this is why Donen disowns the film, though Dave Kehr has remarked that, in spite of "its saccharine story and saccharine players (Debbie Reynolds, for one) . . . [it] still has its points of interest, including a madly overdone production number involving balloons, confetti, reverse motion, and an impossibly young Bob Fosse, at the start of his career." Marge and Gower Champion are also present, and the latter gets a chance to dance with Fosse. 82 min.

User reviews from imdb Author: RonSinMichigan from United States

This movie was a great and pleasant surprise. Besides being very entertaining, one can see the future styles of these 2 legendary Broadway giants. Champion's numbers are tight, synchronized, and beautifully realized . And strong . Fosse- what can I say- what a delight !! While Fosse often spoke of his limitations as a dancer, the reality is he was a brilliant one , and in his dance numbers here he already is exhibiting a unique and original style that is athletic, jazzy, sexy and charming . He was an American original . The music in this movie is very good , and serves to show off the talents of its stars. Debbie Reynolds is quite good. This movie is for Broadway and dance fans.

User reviews from imdb Author: (t1z2f@yahoo.com) from United States

This is a little gem for those wanting a bit of relaxed entertainment. Unfortunately it came in a period when Kelly/Donen were setting a new standard for big production and very rapid pacing, so it was out of fashion and ignored. Everyone is charming; Marge and Gower Champion are at their peak, Bob Fosse is just hitting his stride (amusing that his screen persona was so charmingly little-boyish, in contrast to the dark angular sexiness of his later stage choreographies), and Debbie Reynolds is pixie-ish as ever. Helen Wood was not a great actress, but she was necessary to provide an additional dance flavor (see below).

To differ from another reviewer, I think that Kurt Kaznar was perfect for the Leo Belney part, at least as it was written. He carries off being totally suggestible, changing opinion instantly, and having an equal conviction in each new attitude.

Though they don't make a big deal about it, the film was mirroring a real conundrum facing Broadway directors at that period: what kind of dance to use? Tap was still around but on its way out; a kind of jazz-ballet blend was becoming mainstream; the avant-garde was a more dramatic and angular "modern" dance. Which would the public go for in the next show?

User reviews from imdb Author: madchinaman

This movie that originally was going to include Fred Astaire, Gene Kelley, Judy Garland and Ann Miller was left with some great dancers such as Gower/Marge Champion and Bob Fosse.

Some people insist that this is a gem - this fanatic of great musicals (flicks that include great dancing, singing and acting), this is just an innocuous adventure of entertainment performed by talented dancers.

The Gower/Marge Champion numbers seemed to be the recipient of more time and money with more well-thought out production values. The Bob Fosse numbers seem surprisingly off-kilter that only suggests the great work that he will be doing in the future.

One could attribute this to Gower's good fortune of dancing with a great dance partner that he can personally bond with. It was fun seeing a dance partnership providing some of the best highlights of the film. The Bob Fosse/Debbie Reynolds seem to suffer because Debbie couldn't fully realize the moves that Fosse was giving her - especially since she was much younger than him. (Note: Interesting seeing a "perky" choreographed dance numbers, especially considering the sharp/edgy/sexily-tinged/jazzy moves that Fosse give to the world).

In addition, Stanley Donen didn't do Fosse any favors with the "backward" footage that looks "out-of-placed" and/or awkward - good ideas that didn't quite produce the desired effects.

Note: Bob Fosse is not a singer - though he tries hard. His best works can be found in much of his latter work and/or in films where he's dancing with Dan Dailey, Gene Kelley and many others.

It's too bad that Bob Fosse and Gower Champion couldn't get along - hence denied the general public of what would be created with these immensely talented dancer/choreographers. A dance showdown between Fred Astaire/Gene Kelley (seen in "The Great Ziegfield") and the team of Fosse/Champion would have been great to experience!! Wouldn't it be fascinating discovering why there were serious fractions that eventually had Bob Fosse/Stanley Donen vs. Gower Champion/Marge Champion/Debbie Reynolds.

fyi: George Chakiris (of "West Side Story" fame) can also be seen in the movie btw: MGM didn't even release this film in New York, that demonstrated their "faith" in this flick. One can only imagine what would have resulted if this $2M film (a big amount for that time) had the originally intended cast of Gene Kelly, Fed Astaire, Judy Garland and Ann Miller - what can only have dream the magic from the Burton Lane/Ira Gershwin songs?!?!

User reviews from imdb Author: F Gwynplaine MacIntyre (Borroloola@earthlink.net) from Minffordd, North Wales

'Give a Girl a Break' deserves to be better known; it's certainly not one of MGM's greatest musicals, but it has many bright spots and some pleasant tunes by Burton Lane with excellent lyrics by Ira Gershwin. Modern viewers will probably be most interested in Bob Fosse's excellent performance, in a supporting role.

Some aspects of this movie are clearly derived from earlier and better musicals. At one point, Gower Champion's character (a Broadway director) is besieged by struggling chorus dancers who want parts in his new musical. To escape them, he climbs up the wall of his theatre. This is apparently meant to show us how virile and athletic Champion is ... but it reminded me of the scene in 'Singin' in the Rain' when Gene Kelly escapes his fans by climbing up the side of a bus. The fact that 'Give a Girl a Break' is directed by Stanley Donen (co-director of 'Singin' in the Rain') only makes the link more obvious.

Gower Champion plays Ted Sturgis, the big-shot director of a new Broadway musical still in rehearsal. Bob Fosse plays Bobby, his assistant and dance captain, although Sturgis usually keeps Bobby busy fetching coffee. (Prophetically, Champion later became a major director of Broadway musicals... as did Fosse.) Kurt Kasznar plays Leo Belney, the show's musical director: a role that should have been played by Oscar Levant. Sturgis's ex-wife (played by Gower Champion's real wife Marge) is Madelyn Corlane, a former star whose popularity has faded, but who is hopeful of a comeback.

When Sturgis's leading lady throws a tantrum and walks out (not likely!), he needs a new leading lady in a hurry. Whoever he chooses for the role is destined to become a star. Will Madelyn get the job? Meanwhile, Bobby has become enamoured of Suzie Doolittle (the excellent Debbie Reynolds), a talented newcomer. The more classically-minded Leo wants the leading role to go to Joanna Moss (Helen Wood), a ballet dancer he secretly hopes to romance.

There's some genuine suspense as we try to guess which of these three women will get the big break. Unfortunately, the three candidates aren't equal: it's extremely obvious that highbrow ballerina Joanna hasn't got a chance against the more conventional chorines Madelyn and Suzie.

The best number in the movie is 'In Our United State' performed by Fosse and Reynolds. On a couple of other occasions ('Kiss Me Kate', 'My Sister Eileen'), Bob Fosse demonstrated his ability to do a backward aerial somersault, with astonishingly good amplitude. Here, he does it while facing the camera, in medium close shot, and it's extremely impressive. Unfortunately, Donen ruins the number with some gimmicky trick photography, speeding up the action and running it in reverse. After Debbie and Bob pop some brightly-coloured balloons, it's very weird to see the balloons unpopping themselves in reverse motion.

Another number, called 'Applause', is pleasant. I also enjoyed 'Nothing Is Impossible', performed by the three men, which features a strange bit in which Gower Champion does a rapid tap dance with one foot while he keeps his other foot balanced on top of Bob Fosse's upright heel. The tubby actor Kurt Kasznar, who can't dance and can barely sing, shows some courage by performing a musical number with the athletic Champion and Fosse.

There's a clever three-way dream sequence, in which each man envisions his own favoured lady's name appearing in lights above the theatre. But there's some clumsy dialogue involving the word 'palaver'. At the end of the movie, Marge Champion does a really ludicrous bit, in which she runs down the theatre gangway with her lips and her bosom thrust forward and her arms and her head thrown back. Corny!

This is a good place to correct a misconception about Gower Champion: after a long career as a director of Broadway musicals, he supposedly died on the opening night of '42nd Street', his biggest hit. This was, of course, an extremely ironic death. ('42nd Street' is about a Broadway director who risks his own health in rehearsals while trying to make his biggest show a hit.) The truth is a bit less neat: Gower Champion actually died several days before his show opened, but producer David Merrick (recognising the publicity value of Champion's death) claimed on opening night that Champion had died earlier that day.

I'll rate 'Give a Girl a Break' 6 out of 10, and I recommend it to you.

Turner Classic Movies Lorraine LoBianco

New York dancer and future superstar choreographer and director Bob Fosse had idolized Fred Astaire but wanted to be the next Gene Kelly. Had he been born twenty years earlier, he might have become a big star, but when he arrived in Hollywood to be in Give a Girl a Break (1953), MGM was at the end of the Golden Age of Hollywood, a time when musicals were losing popularity and the industry as a whole was losing viewers to television. Studios were cutting stars from their roster and downgrading productions in an attempt to save money. Give a Girl a Break is one such example.

Originally intended to be a major MGM film starring Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly and Ann Miller, the unavailability of the stars and the changes occurring at the studio turned it into a much smaller production for MGM's young star Debbie Reynolds, the dancing team of Marge and Gower Champion, and the newly arrived Fosse, who had quit the Broadway production of Pal Joey to come to Hollywood.

As Martin Gottfried wrote in his book, All His Jazz: The Life and Death of Bob Fosse, "There were residual elements of the big project it had once been, a score by Burton Lane and Ira Gershwin [their only collaboration] , for instance, direction by Stanley Donen and musical supervision by Saul Chaplin. The screenwriters, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, were estimable too, although in this instance they had written a slender story involving three unknown actresses competing for a Broadway role that becomes available when the star walks out."

Rehearsals started in September 1952, but, as Gottfried wrote, "The Champions [Marge and Gower] and Debbie Reynolds, having played small parts in previous MGM movies, snobbishly formed a clique and sniffed at the newcomer....Donen and [the film's musical director] Saul Chaplin, and Fosse were left to become a trio of pals. In fact, Stanley and Saul were to be Bob's only close friends during the lonely, infertile, and frustrating year that lay ahead."

Fosse had rented pal Buddy Hackett's Hollywood home and bought a red sports car, but he was still unhappy. He realized that his looks were not those of a leading man, and that he did not want to end up a musical star "wearing a toupee". He also knew, as did everyone else on the picture, that it was not going to be an important film, as Stanley Donen later said, "The idea for the story is so puny that it's not worth spending a year of one's life on it." Still, Fosse put his all into it and as Gottfried wrote, "Donen gave him a good-sized role in Give a Girl a Break, almost as big as Gower Champion's, and the two young dancers had several numbers together. Bob was also to dance with Debbie Reynolds, and Donen found him not only cooperative but 'the hardest worker I've ever known". Like almost everyone who ever worked with Fosse, Donen was awed by his perfectionism, the tireless repetition until he got something right. If there was any problem, it was a back flip that Donen had decided would be the climax of one of Bob's big numbers, and Fosse was scared to try it. The young man had not yet discovered his particular dance style "but when he did," Donen said, "it would be delicate and small with no major physical or athletic moves. He didn't want to do the back flip, but I staged the number doing what I knew, not what he did." A back flip is a backward somersault achieved without touching the ground, "just throwing your feet up in the air," Donen said blithely. It lends the illusion of momentary suspension, the head hovering above the ground, and Donen practiced with Bob for hours, holding an arm behind the small of his back as he flipped. Finally, the director said, "Okay, we're going to do it for the camera, the whole dance right up to and including the flip." And for the one and only time, with nobody behind him for support, Bob did the flip and it was perfect. They had it on film, and that is how it appears in the movie. Donen never did know that Bob flew to New York and spent two days working with Joe Price, an acrobatic teacher, to get the flip right before coming back to do it on camera that one time."

Donen also resorted to tricking Kurt Kasznar to get what he wanted for the Nothing Is Impossible number. Donen wired Kasznar so that he would not fall when he bends over so that he is nearly touching the floor with his nose. Donen also nailed Kasznar's shoes to the floor so that he could not move, and had the stagehands drop a sandbag above his head that would stop right before it hit him. As Donen remembered, "He almost had a heart attack, but it got him to move."

Predictably, the critical response to Give a Girl a Break was lukewarm, but the most devastating criticism seems to have come from Ira Gershwin's wife Leonore, as Stephen Silverman wrote in his book Dancing on the Ceiling, "True, the picture was nowhere near Academy Award nomination, but it wasn't this bad," said Ira Gershwin in regard to MGM's denying the picture a New York opening and national reviews. Others shared the studio's opinion. "On leaving the studio projection room after seeing a rough cut of the film, my wife asked me if I owned any stock in the film company." Gershwin did, one hundred shares, which he had purchased the previous year, and this he reported to his wife, Leonore. Her response: "Sell it."

WHITE CHRISTMAS

USA (120 mi) 1954 d: Michael Curtiz Fosse – uncredited dancer and uncredited choreographer

Classic Film Guide (capsule)

A quasi remake of the Mark Sandrich-Irving Berlin comedy Musical romance drama Holiday Inn (1942), this Michael Curtiz-directed version also stars Bing Crosby but teams him with Danny Kaye (in lieu of Fred Astaire) as well as Rosemary Clooney and leggy dancer Vera-Ellen. Norman Krasna (Princess O'Rourke (1943)) and Norman Panama & Melvin Frank (Road to Utopia (1946)) wrote the screenplay & story. Irving Berlin's Original Song "Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep" received an Oscar nomination; his title song (#5 on AFI's 100 Top Movie Songs of All Time) had already won him his only Academy Award for the earlier film.

Crosby and Kaye are song and dance buddies who'd served in the army together during World War II. They follow the girls, who are sisters, to a Vermont lodge where they're to perform a winter show; the usual romantic pursuits and misunderstandings occur. They learn that the ski lodge, which isn't doing so well (e.g. there's no snow for skiing), is being run by their former commanding officer, played by Dean Jagger; Mary Wickes plays the retired General's reliable (busybody) employee. So, they decide to enlist the support of others, including those who'd formerly served in the General's unit, and turn the show into an extravaganza (with an uncredited Bob Fosse dancing with Vera-Ellen); Crosby croons "What Can You Do With a General?". Naturally, it snows just in time for the title song finale, and the skiers. Glimpse George Chakiris in two of the dance numbers, Percy Helton as a train conductor, Sig Ruman as an angry landlord, Grady Sutton trying to cut in on Crosby & Clooney (one of the pairings) dancing, and a photo of Carl 'Alfalfa' Switzer - all appear uncredited.

Turner Classic Movies Jeremy Arnold

DVDBeaver.com [Nick Zegarac]

MY SISTER EILEEN

USA (108 mi) 1955 d: Richard Quine Robert Fosse – dancer “Competition Dance” [instrumental], “Give Me A Band And My Baby,” “There’s Nothin’ Like Love” and choreographer

Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]

My Sister Eileen is a breezy, lightweight musical featuring some fancy footwork (courtesy of choreographer Bob Fosse) and a funnier-than-expected screenplay (Blake Edwards co-wrote with director Richard Quine). The story revolves around a pair of sisters (played by Betty Garrett and Janet Leigh) who head to the big city with dreams of success, only to find out it's not quite as easy as they might've hoped. Like the majority of movie musicals, some singing-and-dancing sequences in My Sister Eileen are more effective than others - though there's no denying that Bob Fosse's choreography is often very impressive. Jack Lemmon, as a potential suitor for one of the sisters, is just as charming and engaging as ever (and even gets to belt out a show tune of his own). Though the film does eventually wear out its welcome, the actors often elevate the material with their infectiously high-spirited performances.

Turner Classic Movies Deborah Looney

In the late 1930s, The New Yorker magazine published a series of stories about two sisters from Ohio who moved to New York. The author, Ruth McKenney, based the stories on experiences she and her sister Eileen had when they first settled in Greenwich Village. The articles became very popular and served as the basis for the 1940 Broadway comedy My Sister Eileen. In 1942 the play was made into a film starring Rosalind Russell and later became the basis for the 1953 Broadway musical, Wonderful Town. Columbia Pictures owned the screen rights to the original comedy, but in the mid-1950s, the studio decided to film it as a musical. When studio executives couldn't reach an agreement with the producer of Wonderful Town, Columbia decided to create their own musical version of the popular comedy and hired Jule Styne and Leo Robin to write a new score.

As in the other versions, My Sister Eileen (1955) follows two sisters, Ruth and Eileen Sherwood, who move from Ohio to an apartment in the Village where they encounter some "colorful" and eccentric characters. Ruth (Betty Garrett) is a struggling writer who tries to get a job with publisher Bob Baker (Jack Lemmon). Eileen (Janet Leigh) is also having trouble finding employment, but she has no trouble finding suitors. One of the men she meets is Frank Lippencott, played by Bob Fosse, who also choreographed the film. Blake Edwards and Richard Quine wrote the screenplay for this screen version and the latter had the advantage of performing in the Broadway comedy a decade earlier as well as the 1942 film.

Since the new musical version couldn't bear any resemblance to Wonderful Town, a studio attorney stayed on the set to look for similarities between the two. According to Martin Gottfried in All His Jazz: The Life and Death of Bob Fosse, "Since the only musical number in the original play was Ruth doing a conga with a group of Brazilian sailors, it was the only song in the movie that resembled anything in the show. The attorney wouldn't even allow musical numbers to be used in the same spots as in Wonderful Town."

Bob Fosse was already established as a talented actor and dancer when he took on the added role of choreographer in the mid-fifties. He received a Tony Award in 1954 for The Pajama Game, the first Broadway musical he choreographed. My Sister Eileen was the first time Fosse both performed in and choreographed a film. According to Kevin Boyd Grubb in Razzle Dazzle: The Life and Work of Bob Fosse, "Fosse's choreography bolstered even the weaker songs" in My Sister Eileen. Biographer Gottfried stated that Fosse rehearsed Betty Garrett and Janet Leigh "until they were ready to drop, having them endlessly repeat a wriggly, knock-kneed, slithering dance that they did in a gazebo. He kept telling the women, 'You have to do this very tight,' and he said it so frequently that Betty began to call all the thigh-rubbing choreography 'shaving your hairs.'"

My Sister Eileen was Janet Leigh's first musical and since she didn't have any previous experience in the genre, she met with Fosse several weeks before filming began to work on her singing and dancing. Even though they were both married at the time, Leigh admits there was a spark between them: "Both Bobby and I knew, even without talking about it, that an affair would have happened if we let it. There was that much electricity between us." In her autobiography, Leigh summed up her experience working on My Sister Eileen: "We were a young, spirited, talented, ambitious conglomeration of energies. It was a six-month labour of love. No one wanted it to end, and it was a sobbing group who gathered for the farewell party."

DVD Talk [Stuart Galbraith IV]

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digitallyOBSESSED.com (David Krauss)

PopMatters Tim O’Neil

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DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

THE PAJAMA GAME

USA (101 mi) 1957 d: Stanley Donen and George Abbott Bob Fosse – choreographer

Slant Magazine [Eric Henderson]

It's going to prove fairly difficult for those who, like me, are strongly inclined to assign authorship outside of auteur-ship to reckon with The Pajama Game, a spunky, simultaneously neon-dingy musical about a garment factory showdown between the headstrong leader of the workers' Union (Doris Day, sporting a fetching bull-dyke pompadour) and the hunky factory superintendent (John Raitt, sporting in every conceivable way) attempting to bridge the widening gap between the plant's workers and boss over a proposed seven-and-a-half cent raise. The author struggle is heady not so much because of the physical roadblock representative in two directors taking the helm—one of which, Stanley Donen, also split the directorial billing for his most critically acclaimed film (Singin' in the Rain) with a different collaborator, Gene Kelly—but more so because of the centrality of Bob Fosse's choreography, transposed from the hit Broadway production that won the hoofer his first of a mile-long string of dance Tony awards.

Though only one routine stands tall in Fosse’s pantheon ("Steam Heat"), the narrative momentum of Pajama Game is punctuated far more often than most musicals by musical numbers. (By my count, there had already been no less than six songs just past the first half hour.) And most of those musical numbers seem to serve as introductions to extended, vocal-devoid interludes featuring soft shoe, stomp n' clap, and those inimitable Fosse proto-vogue, angular-jointed contortions. In fact, as directors, it could be said that Donen and George Abbott's main contribution to the film's mise-en-scene was to cart over as much of the Broadway troupe as possible. (Abbott was the stage director.) Visually, the artifice of Pajama Game's sets is reminiscent of oil-paint backdrops of vaudeville yore, and the insistent swatches of color that cut through the grime complement Fosse's limber body architecture.

As the two leads' swiftly flowering romance begins to grow further apart with the pressures of the labor war, the strain is conveyed through the mechanized perfectionism of the choreography, which isn't, incidentally, confined by the musical numbers. At one point, when the workers object to their maltreatment, they grind their physical routine to a slow-motion display of protest. The centerpiece "Steam Heat," performed by the quintessentially Fosse-lanky Carol Haney and two Runyon-worthy mugs (the one on the right of the frame seems to be the only one who wears the bowler hat correctly, though), tellingly takes place at a union meeting. The precise, almost masochistic tension-release dynamic of the dancer's movements (bodies lean back at a perfect 45º angle, combinations that involve standing on one's ankles) mirror Day and Raitt's dangerous liaison, and their guarded hope that the alliance will tip the scales of the conflict their way. Fosse's movements hadn't quite calcified into the nightmare of bondage and strain that would thin out the air in his 1972 film version of Cabaret. Here, as with most musicals of the era, the exertions are rewarded with good health, a condition endorsed by the closing spectacle of Day's nude gams and Raitt's bare barrel chest.

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DAMN YANKEES!

USA (111 mi) 1958 d: Stanley Donen and George Abbott Bob Fosse – dancer “Who’s Got the Pain” and choreographer

filmcritic.com Pete Croatto

I like baseball. I love movies, especially musicals. I figured that Damn Yankees! would be my movie version of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. It was more like combining chocolate and a pound of seasoned ground beef.

This 1958 musical, adapted from George Abbott’s Broadway hit, presents a baseball fan’s ultimate dream. What if you could help your favorite team win the pennant? And what if you got to be the star of that team?

Well, that dream comes true for lifelong Washington Senators fan, Joe Boyd (Robert Shafter). After another night of watching the hapless Senators lose, Joe receives a visit from the devil. He goes by the name Mr. Applegate (Ray Walston), he likes the color red, and he can make things happen. He can have Joe -- a one-time baseball standout -- play for the Senators and help them reach the promised land. With an escape clause firmly established, Joe writes a note to his long suffering, but tolerant wife (Shannon Bolin) and becomes a strapping 22-year-old superstar Joe Hardy, played by a wooden and charisma-free Tab Hunter.

There’s more to this deal than just fulfilling a lifelong dream, so Applegate, who acts as Joe’s agent and guide, tries his best to have the man fail. This means recruiting an other-worldly seductress (Gwen Verdon) to get Joe to play ball, but his morals and his love for his abandoned, oblivious wife make him a hard man to seduce, especially as the Senators make a run at the dreaded New York Yankees.

While the Senators make their championship push, Damn Yankees can’t get find a winning touch. Walston and Verdon are outstanding, but Walston gets all the good lines. The rest of the movie is an array of hokey, overdone songs and broad performances, as if directors Stanley Donen (a master director of movie musicals) and Abbott forgot they weren’t in charge of a Broadway play. The alluring Verdon doesn’t appear until almost an hour into the movie, and then she’s hampered by the choreography of paramour Bob Fosse, who only lets her limber limbs loose on occasion. Best example: Verdon’s “Whatever Lola Wants” striptease, in which Fosse has her shuffle around like Ed Grimley in the old Saturday Night Live skits.

Also, the movie hasn’t aged very well. With all of its scandals (drugs, money, Pedro Martinez’s Jheri Curl), baseball is no longer America’s pastime, even after one of the best postseasons in recent memory. People now have to be reminded of why baseball used to matter, and Damn Yankees! doesn’t provide those reasons. I would have liked more scenes in the stands or the sports bars, showing us why millions of people continually root for a team going nowhere. That would have made for a more compelling storyline.

Damn Yankees! is enjoyable fare, if only for the work of the late Verdon and Walston. I can’t put it on a level of Singin’ in the Rain or Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, two of Donen’s other gems. The dance routines, songs, and performances do not pass muster. There’s no “I’ve got to hit the rewind button” scene and maybe one song you can’t wait to hum on the car ride to work.

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HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING

USA (121 mi) 1967 d: David Swift Fosse – choreographer

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Isaac5855 from United States

HOW TO Succeed IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING is the 1967 film version of the Pulitzer Prize winning 1960 Broadway musical that broke Broadway box office records and made a star out of Robert Morse. Morse was thankfully allowed to recreate his Broadway role in this exuberant film version as J. Pierpont Finch, an ambitious young window washer who, through the aid of the title book, cleverly manages to work his way up the corporate ladder at World Wide Wickets, Inc. Morse lights up the screen in the best role of his career. He sadly never really got a role of this caliber again and I've never been able to figure out why. He gives a smart and brassy performance and is well-supported by 20's crooner Rudy Vallee, also reprising his Broadway role as company president JB Biggley and Michele Lee as devoted secretary/girlfriend Rosemary Pilkington. There is also standout work by Anthony Teague as company brown-noser Bud Frump and Maureen Arthur, Biggley's outspoken mistress whose physicals assets clearly outweigh her secretarial skills. David Swift's fast-paced direction is a plus as is Bob Fosse's inventive choreography. Sadly, the original score has been severely tampered with and several great songs from the stage show have been cut, but we still have "How to", "The Company Way", "A Secretary is not a Toy", "It's been a long day", and the show's most famous song, "I Believe in You." A clever and entertaining screen adaptation of a classic Broadway musical.

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: theowinthrop from United States

Based on a very successful Broadway comedy of the 1960s, HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING was a marvelous look at climbing the corporate ladder at the height of American Business Success (from 1945 to 1970). Instead of climbing by means of showing superior executive abilities, the successful climbers make it by back stabbing, ass-licking, and trickery. The hero of the fable is window washer J. Pierpont Finch, who is played by Robert Morse (who played the role on Broadway). Morse purchases a pamphlet entitled "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying". Throughout the musical and movie we see Finch making his plans while reading the pamphlet, hearing a voice over telling us what he's reading. He starts off in the mail room, and quickly becomes a friend of the retiring mail room head, but also meets his arch-nemesis Bud Frump (Anthony Teague). Throughout the film Bud constantly tries to thwart the rise of Finch, but while his schemes seem fool-proof, Finch constantly outwits him.

Complicating the story is the behavior of the President of the firm, Jasper B. Bigley (Rudy Vallee). Vallee too played the eccentric millionaire on stage - and it is wonderful that both these performances are preserved, for Vallee's greatest film performance is as Bigley - the "old Groundhog" supporter of his alma mater "Old Ivy", as well as the man who relieves his tensions by either going out with his mistress Hedy LaRue (Maureen Arthur), or by knitting covers for his golf clubs.

Finch too finds romance with Rosemary (Michel Lee), a secretary at the corporate giant WORLD WIDE WICKETS. But will he be single minded in his determination to rise to the top, or will he take time out to marry the girl he loves? A splendid spoof, which while exaggerated does suggest more of the reasons for promotions in the corporate and real world than we care to acknowledge usually.

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: gftbiloxi (gftbiloxi@yahoo.com) from Biloxi, Mississippi

One of the most often overlooked movie musicals of the 1960s is also one of the most successful: the screen version of the Broadway smash HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING, which delivers a sharp comic rap across the corporate knuckles in its tale of a nobody (Robert Morse) who uses a self-help book to rocket up the corporate ladder--and by the time our hero reaches the heights, romantic complications leads him to wonder what price corporate success.

Although the business world has changed quite a bit since 1967, SUCCEED is so dead-on with its attack that even modern corporate leaders will be bloodied from the fray. The company is just large enough so that no one knows what is actually going on, leadership cries out for creative solutions then promptly fires any one who shows a talent for it, and promotion doesn't hinge so much upon ability as it does upon sucking up, backstabbing, and looking like you know what you're doing. There are jabs at dressing for success, the idea that employees don't engage in sexual hankypanky, hidden nepotism, and the importance of belonging to the "right" clubs. And along the way our hero meets the classic business crowd: the company man, the bombshell secretary, the boss' nephew, and a host of largely incompetent yes-men VPs.

The film is very stylized, making no pretense at naturalism per se, and the cast follows suit, playing in a way that blends beautifully with the self-boosting and jingoistic tone that pervades the piece. Robert Morse gives a truly brilliant performance in the lead--and one wonders why Hollywood so seldom used him in later years; Michele Lee, as the secretary who befriends him, is equally fine, and the supporting cast is wonderful all the way around. The musical numbers (which includes such numbers as "The Company Way," "A Secretary Is Not A Toy," "It's Been A Long Day," and "Brotherhood of Man") are remarkably sly and memorably performed. All in all, HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING is sure to appeal to any one who has had the misfortune to grapple with the idiocies of corporate America--and it will almost certainly outrage every "company man" on your city block. Strongly recommended

Films on Disc (Stuart J. Kobak)

Time Out

SWEET CHARITY

USA (149 mi) 1969 d: Bob Fosse Fosse – director and choreographer

Time Out

Making his debut as a director on this adaptation of the Broadway musical derived from Fellini's Notte di Cabiria, Fosse starts on the wrong foot by showing off with an irritating flurry of zooms, dissolves and jump-cuts. Luckily his own choreography intervenes, settling the film down and offering at least two classic anthology pieces: the superbly weary, sleazy erotica of 'Hey, Big Spender', in which a row of disillusioned taxi-dancers laconically display their wares, and the trio of bizarre fantasies ('The Rich Man's Frug') performed by a vampiric night-club dancer. For the rest, the film belongs to Shirley MacLaine, splendidly funny as the 'extremely open, honest and stupid broad' who earns a dubious living as a taxi-dancer at the Fandango Ballroom, meanwhile overflowing with innocent love for everybody and everything and being left short of the altar by a succession of men. No masterpiece, but a generally underrated musical all the same.

Edinburgh U Film Society [Kathryn Parkerson]

"Love" is the religion of Miss Charity Hope Valentine, and before the opening credits have even finished you just know this musical was made in 1969. Subtle it is not, but Bob Fosse's innovative directing style, including a bizarre use of stills and zooms, is perfectly suited to the psychedelic period in which it was made.

Shirley MacLaine plays the naive dance-hall hostess/prostitute of the title who just wants to be loved, and her zestfull performance - which might be described as Bonnie Langford on acid - matches the enthusiastic direction (Watch out for the "Somebody Loves Me" number, with a manic Shirley dressed in a red marching-band outfit dancing her way round New York!).

The film contains a bucketful of good songs by Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields, including the wonderfully seedy "Big Spender" and the funky "Rhythm of Life" sung by a psychedelic Sammy Davis Jnr and several stoned hippies. The musical numbers are expertly staged choreographed by Fosse, whose talents are used to best effect in the Barbarella-esque nightclub sequence where several groovy dances are performed.

Sweet Charity was actually based on Fellini's Nights of Cabiria, but leave all serious thoughts at home, put on your smiling-Shirley faces, and come and experience a truly outrageous film.

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: ijonesiii from United States

Bob Fosse's first opportunity to direct a movie was the 1969 film version of his own Broadway musical SWEET CHARITY, a musical based on the film NIGHTS OF CABERIA, with a book by Neil Simon and music by Cy Coleman and Doothy Fields. The story is best described by the film's subtitle: "The Adventures of a Girl Who Wants to be Loved". Shirley MacLaine, taking over the title role from Fosse's wife and muse, Gwen Verdon, plays Charity Hope Valentine, a pathetic thing who has worked as a taxi dancer in the Fandango Ballroom for eight years and has basically been a doormat to men all her life. As her friend Nickie (Chita Rivera) explains, "You run you heart like a hotel...you got men checking in and checking out all the time." The story is told in a series of amusing and touching vignettes which lead to Charity meeting the possible man of her dreams, a milquetoast named Oscar Lindquist (John McMartin, reprising his Broadway role). This film died at the box office in 1969 and I'm not sure why except for the fact that this was a period when musicals just weren't being made anymore and that's a shame because the movie is extremely entertaining, thanks to the bravura performance by MacLaine as Charity and the extraordinary choreography by Bob Fosse. I can watch this movie over and over again just to watch the dance numbers. The raw sensuality of "Hey Big Spender"...the angular, disjointed and pointed moves of "Rich Man's Frug"...the Broadway exuberance of "There's Gotte be Something Better Than This", exuberantly danced by MacLaine, Rivera, and Paula Kelly...the brilliant jazzy classic Fosse moves of "Rhythm of Life"..and the pure joy of "I'm a Brass Band." All of Fosse's choreographic signatures are present here...the hats, the gloves, the turned in feet, the disjointed body parts, the expressionless dancer faces, it's all here to be watched and studied and marveled over. For dance purists and Fosse devotees, SWEET CHARITY is a must.

Turner Classic Movies Frank Miller

Shirley MacLaine returned to her roots in musical comedy for Sweet Charity, a lavish 1969 film musical that marked the feature-directing debut of one of the entertainment world's greatest talents -- Bob Fosse. The film's box-office failure (a $4 million domestic gross on a budget of $20 million) helped put an end to big-budget movie musicals for a while, but today it seems ahead of its time with startling cinematic effects that literally make the camera one of the dancers. That position is more than borne out by the success three years later of Fosse's second big-screen musical Cabaret (1972).

Sweet Charity was born when Broadway star Gwen Verdon and husband Fosse decided to create a stage musical based on Federico Fellini's Italian film classic Le Notti di Cabiria (1957) as a vehicle for her. The role of a streetwalker who tries to escape the world's oldest profession through marriage only to face rejection when her new beau decides he can't live with her past seemed perfect for Verdon. Although some critics would accuse them of sanitizing the original, they decided to transform the leading character, the ever-hopeful Charity, from a streetwalker into a dance-hall hostess. Fosse argued that setting the show in New York City made the change necessary; the hookers there were too hard-edged for the story. The musical opened in 1966 with great songs by Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields, including "Hey, Big Spender" and "If My Friends Could See Me Now," and became a big hit.

A few years later, Lew Wasserman, head of Universal Pictures, was looking to produce a film musical to capitalize on the success of such films as My Fair Lady (1964) and The Sound of Music (1965). MacLaine suggested a film version of Sweet Charity and even fought to have Fosse hired to make his film directing debut with the picture (he had choreographed in Hollywood since the '50s on both original musicals and adaptations of his stage hits). In a way, she was paying back past favors. Fosse had cast her first as a member of the chorus and then as understudy to one of the leads in The Pajama Game. MacLaine was on the verge of quitting that hit to understudy Verdon in Can-Can, with hopes that she would get to play the role, when Carol Haney, the actress/dancer she understudied in Pajama Game, sprained her ankle. MacLaine went on in her place the night a talent scout was attending, and the rest is Hollywood history.

Verdon had hoped to play Charity in the screen version, but realized that MacLaine's name was well known to moviegoers and would mean more at the box office. It also seemed a fair exchange, since she had modeled her characterization on MacLaine's image as a kooky gamin. She even signed on as an assistant choreographer, helping teach MacLaine the dances and leading the camera through some of the more intricate routines.

Only one star from the original Broadway production made it into the film. John McMartin, who would go on to appear in such Broadway hits as Follies and Into the Woods, played the young accountant who almost marries MacLaine. Chita Rivera and Paula Kelly, cast as Charity's dance hall friends, had appeared in the show in London (with Rivera in the lead). To this mix they added screen veteran Ricardo Montalban as a movie star who picks up Charity after a spat with his girlfriend, Stubby Kaye as the dance-hall manager and, in a cameo, Sammy Davis, Jr. as the leader of a religious revival. In the dance chorus would be future Broadway stars Ben Vereen and Lee Roy Reams, mime Lorene Yarnell (later of Shields and Yarnell), Laugh-In star Chelsea Brown and Toni Basil, later the singer of the top-20 hit "Mickey."

Fosse wanted the film version to maintain the gritty texture of both the stage musical and the original Italian film. In that area, he quarreled with producer Ross Hunter, who had a long career of creating lavish, glamorous and, most importantly, moneymaking films for Universal. When they failed to come to terms, Wasserman stood behind the new director and replaced Hunter with another of the studio's stalwart producers, Robert Alan Arthur. He also supported Fosse's decision to re-shoot an ending the director thought too corny (Charity reconciles with the man who dumped her at the altar) and replace it with one in which Charity goes off to seek happiness on her own terms.

But for all the good work and solid professionalism that went into Sweet Charity, it was caught in the storm of changing times. The same year she danced in the film's chorus, Toni Basil played a small role in Easy Rider, a film that would change the face of filmmaking with its appeal to a younger, alienated audience. To them, the old-fashioned Hollywood musical was a dinosaur, and Sweet Charity became one of several big-budget musical flops that put the genre to rest -- at least for a while. With the recent success of Chicago (2002), another adaptation of a Bob Fosse-Gwen Verdon stage hit, Sweet Charity deserves a second look as the collaboration of one of the world's greatest choreographers and one of its most energetic and appealing stars.

Peter Thompson Reviews, Showtime Greats Australia

Movierapture [Keith Allen]

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LIZA WITH A “Z” – made for TV

USA (55 mi) 1972

User reviews from imdb Author: moonspinner55 from redlands, ca

Liza Minnelli's Emmy-award winning musical TV special, directed by Bob Fosse, and coming right on the heels of their Oscar-winning "Cabaret". After listening to this record album for years, I was quite excited to find a copy on video (transferred from the 16mm print). I was surprised by two things: 1) that the LP captures most of the show's excitement all on its own, which says a lot for the command of Liza's singing and the quality of the music; and 2) that Fosse is irreplaceable in the business of musical-comedy staging. The dancing on numbers like "I Gotcha!" and "Son Of A Preacher Man" is incredible, with Fosse's sensual style of choreography bringing down the house. Still in all, it's Liza's singing that is the show's centerpiece, and she's in fine, clear voice throughout. Dramatic, comedic, self-effacing, flirtatious, silly, giggling, Liza proves to be a virtuoso performer of great magnitude.

Reverse Shot [Michael Koresky]

For the avid Bob Fosse fan of a younger generation, there’s always been a viewing gap, as far as his brief but peerless directorial career is concerned. For in between his era-defining and rather anomalous musical Cabaret and the stinging, tobacco-stained black-and-white backrooms of Lenny, Fosse threw himself whole-hog, along with John Kander and Fred Ebb, into the elaborate enshrinement of Liza Minnelli as razzle-dazzle stage icon with his spectacular concert film of her steamrolling one-woman show, Liza with a Z. Pre Marty Scorsese love affair, pre Studio 54 binge, pre Arthur 2: On the Rocks, Minnelli was, it should not be forgotten, a simultaneous Tony, Oscar, Emmy, and Grammy winner, none of which sound as impressive individually until piled atop each other like different flavors on a wedding cake. Where Liza earned her purple heart, however, establishing herself as a showtune performer with gale force, was on stage in 1972, enacting Liza with a Z’s delightfully over-the-top succession of standards and oddities. It’s a wondrously cut, gloriously framed, and wholly unpretentious bit of Fosse eye and ear candy, providing a satiating morsel for those who could never get enough of his trademark jazz hands and rhythmic editing. Yet for those who remain agnostic about Minnelli herself, Liza with a Z will prove more than just a Fosse side-note; it’s a reminder of its central diva’s utter command of her craft.

Just as Fosse helped make irregular spinal patterns sexy, with Cabaret and this 55-minute film, which aired on network TV in September of 1972, he firmly established the duck-faced, bulbous-nosed Hollywood offspring as an unlikely sexual presence. With her seemingly super-glued on eyelashes and ever-mulletting black hair, Minnelli certainly didn’t look the part of a dazzling showgirl, especially as her face awkwardly amalgamated perhaps her parents’ worst features, something like a Puppetoon version of Judy and Vincente. Prior to Cabaret, Liza had cut her movie teeth in the late Sixties with starring roles in a pair of smallish dramatic pieces about social outcasts, The Sterile Cuckoo and Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon. So the one-two punch of the 1972 Fosse films really drove home Minnelli’s growing star persona, cementing once and for all her claims to the Judy Garland legacy. Preternaturally poised and charmingly self-effacing, Minnelli tore into her Broadway tunes with an rip-roaring effortless belt that emanated almost preposterously from a half-opened mouth; it’s almost as if she’s throwing her voice—like Ethel Merman reborn as a ventriloquist.

As stunning as it must have been to witness Minnelli emerge from out of the shadows of her legendary parents in 1972, it remains an equally potent sock to the gut to watch Liza with a Z today, in its radiantly restored DVD collector’s edition, out from Showtime. Post alcoholism, drug addiction, and two knee replacements, Minnelli’s become much-Googled fodder for cheap, sturdy laughs in everything from South Park to Arrested Development. Thus, it’s her physical dynamism that most astonishes here, from her nailing of Fosse’s sultry, athletic moves to her high-cut pink single pieces daringly revealing her “generous” gams. Once she really gets revved up, almost every number is itself a climax; these aren’t so much showstoppers as jawdroppers, and with so many songs in succession packed into one tight hour, each with Minnelli’s piercing vibrato and Fosse’s inventive, expansive footwork, Liza feels almost like sensory overload.

Kander and Ebb, those cynical old so-and-sos who expertly balanced vaudeville showmanship and world-weary pathos in songs from Cabaret to Chicago to Kiss of the Spider Woman, are generally considered Minnelli’s tried-and-true footmen. And certainly, many of her most rousing vocals here accompany their tunes, most popularly in the reliably monumental climactic Cabaret medley, and most notably in the original piece “Ring Them Bells,” which borrows Barbra Streisand’s borscht-belt anecdotal asides to tell the tale of a New York lonely lady who must travel all the way to Europe to find the man of her dreams, who just happens to live next door at her Upper West Side apartment. Yet the greatest gambits here are the wholly unexpected, goofily incongruous numbers, each one initially eliciting an inquisitive “Really?” before allowing Liza to smoothly assimilate. A completely unexpected rendition of Southern soulster Joe Tex’s “I Gotcha” opens with a pair of mustachioed, cowboy hat-adorned prowlers in sunglasses and tights slinking across the stage with porn-tastic menace. Soon, in bursts Liza, having quick-changed into that skimpy silken pink number, gyrating and thrusting to Tex’s funked out wails. Then of course, there’s the terrific update of “Bye Bye Blackbird,” featuring the show’s most intricate and telltale Fosse choreography, in which a tight tuxedoed Liza is joined by a too-close-for-comfort gaggle of black-clad dancers center stage. And the “No, she didn’t!” effect hits maximum wow with her unabashedly on-one-knee “My Mammy,” an homage to Mommy’s homage to Al Jolson—in blackface this couldn’t have been any bolder. Fosse, meanwhile, surveys with his eminent cool, even as a million unspoken dramas explode across Minnelli’s every gesture. The disc itself reaches a poignant conclusion when we flash forward thirty-three years to see a frumpy but game Liza climb up onstage at the Toronto Film Festival to see the restored cut. Noticeably stretched and exhuasted, she nevertheless rises out of her chair and strikes a fancy Fosse pose. Despite what life’s dealt her, the gal’s still got it.

Montreal Mirror [Matthew Hays] including a brief interview with Liza Minnelli

DVD Verdict [Jonathan Weiss]

CABARET

USA (124 mi) 1972

BBCi - Films Jamie Russell

The first musical ever to be given an X certificate, Bob Fosse's "Cabaret" launched Liza Minnelli into Hollywood superstardom and reinvented the musical for the Age of Aquarius.

Following in the wake of the radical sexual politics of the 60s, Fosse's adaptation of Christopher Isherwood's autobiographical "Berlin Stories" focuses on singer-dancer Sally Bowles (Minnelli) as she struts her stuff on the stage of the Kit-Kat club - a place where absolutely anything goes.

While the decadent partygoers of 30s Berlin experiment with song, dance, and all manner of sexual couplings, Germany's going to rack and ruin as a bunch of thuggish political heavies known as the Nazis turn the city's streets into a violent arena of hate-crimes and political propaganda. The champagne may still be flowing at the Kit-Kat club, but how long will it be before the brown shirts fulfil the promise of the song "Tomorrow Belongs to Me"?

Contrasting the perverse stage show with the terror engulfing the streets, Fosse turns "Cabaret" into a dark yet gaudy snapshot of an era of the relentless pursuit of pleasure. As the sexy, but none too bright, singer Minnelli (in bowler hat and stockings) dominates the stage, squeezing Michael York's shy gay Englishman out of the frame and only meeting her match in Joel Grey's overblown and completely unforgettable Master of Ceremonies.

The songs all take place on the stage, so as not to disturb the sexual shenanigans between Minnelli, York, and Helmut Griem's bisexual, and include "Money, Money", "Mein Herr" and, of course, "Cabaret". All are guaranteed to leave Sally Bowles' words ringing in your ears as the credits roll: "Divine decadence, darling!"

User reviews from imdb Author: Isaac5855 from United States

1973 was a very good year for legendary director/choreographer Bob Fosse. He won an Emmy for directing and choreographing the television special LIZA WITH A Z, he won a Tony for directing the Broadway musical PIPPIN, and blindsided Francis Ford Copolla by winning an Oscar for Best Director for CABARET, the dazzling 1972 film version, which is Fosse's re-thinking of the 1966 Broadway musical. The stage and screen versions are quite different and as independent works, they stand on their own as outstanding achievements and it is not necessary to have seen the play to appreciate the movie. The main focal point of Fosse's re-thinking of the musical is that he wanted it to be a more "realistic" musical and therefore made sure that all of the musical numbers (with the exception of "Tomorrow Belongs to Me")all took place within the walls of the Kit Kat Club. He cut several numbers from the original score, but if you listen, some of them can be heard as background music in several scenes. He also shifted the focus of the way the story is told...the play tells the story from the leading man's point of view, but Fosse switches the focus to the character of Sally Bowles, the brassy, sassy party girl who believes in "divine decadence' and wears bright green fingernail polish. Fosse also takes two secondary characters from the play, who are older, and makes them young and attractive in order to make their story more youth-friendly, I imagine. Liza Minnelli turns in a dazzling Oscar-winning performance as Sally, a gutsy, self-absorbed party girl who shows signs of vulnerability and a desperate need to be loved. Minnelli makes the most of her musical and non-musical moments in the film...her climactic confrontation with Brian (Michael York)is brilliantly performed. York is charming and sexy as Brian and Joel Grey's Oscar winning turn as the Master of Ceremonies is a delight. The musical numbers are all brilliantly staged and performed, from the opening number "Willkomenn" to the new "Money" song performed by Minnelli and Grey, to "Maybe this Time", the ballad belted out by Minnelli onstage in the empty club. Fosse cleverly counterparts the musical numbers with the realities of what is going on in Nazi Occupied 1931 Berlin with sometimes startling effect. "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" still gives me goosebumps every time I watch the film. This film ruled at the '73 Oscars, winning eight awards in all (it lost Best Picture to THE GODFATHER)and deserved every accolade it received. A sparkling, eye-popping, thought-provoking, haunting film experience that should be savored over and over again.

eFilmCritic Reviews Mrs. Norman Maine

Bob Fosse's 'Cabaret' changed the way the American film going public viewed the musical as a genre and its influence is still felt in the way in which song and dance are integrated into modern films. Although it's now 30 years old, there's nothing dated about this jaundiced view of between the wars Berlin and the ambisexual goings on of its inhabitants.

COME BLOW YOUR HORN

Helmut, our producer, was on the set of Fillies , the stunning new musical version of Equus today. The poor dear must be ninety in the shade, if he's a day, but he had this creature with him who was either his pet harpy, or his demented grandmother - an overly peroxided bimbo with the improbable name of Anna Nicklesmuth. He introduced her as his caretaker but, even with her less than officious help, he kept tripping over the jazzy gold sequined feedbags on the set. Disaster was averted as her cellulite thighs gave him a soft landing space. We finally did a full take of the number, Reins on the Roof , and Helmut was most complimentary of my performance, saying it had to be seen to be believed.

I returned home to find Norman flat on the couch. He had been down at the Beverly Center helping June Allyson open her new incontinence products boutique. Apparently there was quite the mob scene and poor Norman was in the way when a bus load of ladies from the Golden Sunsets retirement community all demanded service at once and started clubbing him with their walkers. Norman had no sooner recovered from this when he was run over by an impatient elderly gentleman on a scooter, determined to beat him to the only free urinal in the men's room. Norman is going to have to have a talk with his agents in the morning and have a new bodily injury clause inserted in his contract.

I calmed my hubby down and left him on the couch with a pitcher of sloe gin fizzes and descended to the home theater in order to put my feet up and relax after such a taxing day. When I’m working, I tend to unwind in the evening with a musical to keep me in the proper mood from day to day, so I popped Cabaret into the VCR. This is the restored 25th anniversary edition that includes not only the film, but also a documentary with behind the scenes footage and interviews with surviving stars and creative team.

Cabaret is a Bob Fosse film of the Kander and Ebb Broadway musical, originally produced and directed by Harold Prince. It was made in 1972, the year that Fosse completed his unequaled directing trifecta - winning, the Oscar for directing this film, the Emmy for directing Liza with a Z , and the Tony for directing Pippin . It is a musical adaptation of several of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories , written in the 1930s about a British man's perspective of the Weimar society and the rise of the Nazis, later adapted for the stage as I am a Camera by John Van Druten.

Cabaret details the unconventional relationship between Brian (the Isherwood figure, played by Michael York) and the nightclub chanteuse, Sally Bowles (Liza Minelli) in 1930s Berlin. Brian arrives in Berlin determined to experience life and is quickly drawn to the seedy nightlife the city has to offer. He becomes friends, and eventually lovers, with Sally and watches (he is the titular camera) as the decadent society she personifies is carried away by the rising tide of fascism while the revelers of the Cabaret world never notice.

The stage production of Cabaret was one of the first concept musicals, using the Cabaret setting and songs as commentary on the rather traditional book musical romance that formed the backbone of the story. An air of authenticity was provided by a subplot detailing the unhappy courtship of Sally's landlady, played by Lotte Lenya, one of the major theater figures of Weimar Berlin, with a Jewish grocer. Harold Prince was interested in moving into new musical territory but held back, thinking the audience of 1966 was not ready for a more radical conceptualization; his reticence (which has been removed in the current New York revival staged by Sam Mendes) was rewarded with a major hit.

Sally Bowles was played on stage by Jill Haworth. Kander and Ebb had written the part specifically for Liza Minelli (who had starred in their earlier show, Flora, the Red Menace ). Prince, however, held a grueling set of auditions, fourteen callbacks in all, and narrowed the field to three. Liza, Jill and yours truly. When it was announced that Jill had gotten the part, Liza and I held each other, wept copious tears, and spent the afternoon at Schrafft's eating ice cream sundaes. When Liza won the movie role, we again went to Schrafft's to celebrate - but this time she picked up the check. I did eventually play Sally in the Dubuque production and got some of the best notices of my illustrious career.

Fosse, when he looked at the material in cinematic terms, took the radical step that Prince dared not take, he completely removed the traditional book elements of the musical, leaving only the diegetic numbers in the Kit Kat Klub cabaret commenting on the story; the music enriches the story rather than propelling it forward by establishing plot or character. With this revamp, the subplot went (and was replaced with another Jewish romance, derived from a different Isherwood story.) The new lovers are now young and played by Marisa Berenson and Fritz Wepper, who are both much more attractive than Lotte Lenya, and new plot threads were introduced, including a more honest look at the sexuality of the Isherwood surrogate. While Isherwood was unapologetically gay, Brian, in the film, is bisexual. In the original stage conception, he’s straight.

This rather daring move changed the way in which movie audiences related to the musical as a genre. Prior to Cabaret , audiences could accept traditional book songs with characters breaking into song and dance in the most unlikely situation. The full realism that Fosse used began the trend that led to the culture rejecting the suspension of disbelief for musical numbers not firmly rooted in the reality of the situation. The movie musical has never been the same. Traditional book musicals, for instance, are now the province of animation. Live action musicals now require a setting where song and dance are part of the story and the characters’ real lives.

So, how does Cabaret hold up after nearly thirty years? Brilliantly. It plays as if it had been produced last week. The musical numbers, featuring Minelli and Joel Grey's leering, unctuous, master of ceremonies are brilliantly choreographed and photographed. The device of the distorted mirror that frames the movie (from the original stage concept) helps draw the modern audience in and gives them a wake up call to see the trends of today’s society that parallel those of the Weimar republic. The musical numbers such as Wilkommen , The Money Song and of course Cabaret , are so good that it almost undermines the concept of Minelli being a second rate entertainer. Both she and Grey deserved their Oscars. Sally, in particular, is an amazing creation; a bundle of neurotic vulnerabilities that are heartbreakingly real.

The one number that does not take place in the Cabaret, Tomorrow Belongs To Me , still carries the concept of reality in song through, being staged in an ultra-realistic manner. Sally and Brian, stopping at a beer garden, witness an angelic youth begin to sing the haunting ballad. The camera pulls back to reveal a Hitler youth uniform and soon, as the other patrons join in, it becomes an anthem to what will be and a brilliant illustration of the perils of groupthink.

This film should be on the must see list of all with an interest in the American movie musical.

File Under: Fur coats. Bisexual encounters. Nazi armbands. Gratuitous gorilla. Female impersonation. Women trombonists. Grotesque theatrical makeup. Mispronunciation of 'phlegm'. Dog murder.

Cabaret • Senses of Cinema Peter H. Kemp, April 4, 2000

DVD Times Maria Walters

“Cabaret” - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir, November 17, 2000

ToxicUniverse.com (John Nesbit)

Turner Classic Movies Frank Miller

DVDTown [John J. Puccio]

Guardian/Observer

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The New York Times (Roger Greenspun)

THE LITTLE PRINCE

Great Britain USA (88 mi) 1974 d: Stanley Donen Fosse – dancer “The Snake” and choreographer

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Antoine De Saint-Exupéry is considered a French national icon. Saint-Exupéry was a pilot during the very infancy of commercial flight in the 1920s, where he flew as an international postal courier and later managed an airfield in the Sahara. He began writing in 1926 and within his lifetime published seven books, all on aviation themes. The most famous of these was the fable Le Petit Prince/The Little Prince (1943), which has gone onto become an international children’s classic. The story is largely seen as allegorical upon Saint-Exupéry’s part – he, like the character, was a pilot in Saharan Africa, while the character of The Rose, who represents love, was a portrait of his wife Consuelo – she later entitled her autobiography The Tale of the Rose (1979). The characters throughout stand in for caricatures of various types in modern society, against whom the Prince contrasts an unalloyed innocence. Saint-Exupéry is a character of some interest. Chief among these is the mystery of his eventual fate – he had joined the Allied resistance against the Nazis as a pilot during the Second World War. In 1944, he flew what was meant to be his last mission, a reconnaissance flight, before leaving the service, but failed to return. Exactly what happened remains a mystery, although it is believed that he was shot down by a German fighter. Largely on the basis of The Little Prince , he has become a celebrated figure in French culture. He appeared on the French 50 franc note and has had an airport (in Lyon) and even an asteroid named after him.

This is a film adaptation of the Saint-Exupéry story. Here though, the story was turned into a brassy, cumbersome musical. It was written directly for the screen by Broadway musical specialists Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, who had classics like Brigadoon (1947), My Fair Lady (1956) and Camelot (1960) to their name. The film was directed by Stanley Donen, a specialist in film musicals with the likes of Royal Wedding (1951), Singin’ in the Rain (1952), Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1957), Funny Face (1957) and Damn Yankees (1958).

Even though the film remains quite faithful to the text of the story, it is all rather ponderous and quite deadening. It is really its being construed as a classical-styled musical that drags the story out. And while many of Donen’s other film musicals have a frothy effervescence, he fails to give the exercise here much in the way of enervation. The film’s only enlivening moment is a wonderfully slithery self-choreographed number from famed dance choreographer/film director Bob ( Cabaret , All That Jazz, Star 80) Fosse as the Snake in the Grass. Another dance sequence with Gene Wilder, giving what must be one of the worst in a whole career of awful performances, is excruciatingly over the top. The scenes between the Pilot and Prince do certainly play with a wry humour and deft matter-of-fact absurdism. But then the score keeps returning to drag proceedings to a standstill.

One of the plus points of the film are its highly unusual sets and effects. The Prince’s asteroid is a sphere only 15 feet in diameter – we see him walk the entire way around the equator, stepping over tiny volcanoes and across The Statesman’s borders and countries that are no bigger than a puddle of water. And there are other memorable images – Clive Revill as the businessmen living in a world filled with towers of books; or the Prince’s flight through space holding onto a flock of animated silver birds. Eight year-old Steven Warner has a plaintive and sweetly endearing presence as the Prince – what ever happened to Warner one wonders?

A far more impressive version of the story was a short film version made by Claymation animator Will Vinton in 1979. There was a further animated adaptation made for German tv in 1990. There have also been two films based on the life of Saint-Exupéry – the British production Saint-Ex (1996), with Bruno Ganz in the title role, and the French tv production Saint-Exupéry: The Last Mission (1996), starring Bernard Giraudeau.

Stanley Donen’s other films of genre interest are:– Damn Yankees (1958), a musical about the diabolic temptation of a baseball team; the Peter Cook-Dudley Moore black comedy, the original Bedazzled (1967), a dark satire on pacts with the Devil; and the killer robot film Saturn 3 (1980).

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson)

DVD Verdict Bill Treadway

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

LENNY

USA (111 mi) 1974 Fosse - director

David Macdonald`s Movie Reviews

Most film biographies depict extraordinary people, presented glowingly. By this, I mean that we have little ambiguity about the belief that the person in the film is a great, inspiring, individual. Of course, this has to happen, because why make a movie about a useless real person that lasts two to three hours?? At the very least, the subjects` flaws are dwarfed by their attributes.

This leads us to Bob Fosse`s bio of comedian Lenny Bruce. Bruce certainly contributed to society, by drawing attention to the freedom of speech issue, which he defended numerous times, even while being arrested for obscenity. Much of his comedy dealt head-on with subjects which, at the time, nobody would talk about. This film does not question these facts, and is certainly worthy of a film bio. But Bob Fosse does something else, which is very risky, and that is to present its subject not as a hero of free-speech, but as a complex, deeply flawed individual. This is all the more risky when you are dealing with an entertainer, as well as someone who apparently did so much to expose the world to the futility of censorship. People want to see the glamour and the success, they want to see someone bold and daring enough to fight for our rights. But they don`t want to feel depressed, or be forced to truly think about this individual, but that is what Lenny forces you to experience.

Lenny Bruce fans have expressed their discontent in such places as the film`s entry in the Internet Movie Database. Dustin Hoffman is miscast as Lenny, the routines aren`t funny, the plot is not detailed enough, and so on. There is no doubt that the film does not show us a lot of comedy.... but this is not a comedy film, but a drama. Dustin Hoffman is a great actor, and he does what he can, and does in fact pull off the task of giving us a glimpse into Bruce`s comedy. And the plot.... well, Fosse does give us a plot, but not the one rabid fans probably expected.

My opinion is that a vast majority of the Lenny Bruce fans were disappointed because they ended up seeing a film rather than a love-in (think of Man on The Moon, the Andy Kaufman bio which dealt with a somewhat related personality, yet felt about as unbiased and blunt as a political pamphlet, sacrificing truth for constant attempts at laughter). Lenny is a dark, grim piece of work, shot in moody black-and-white, and absent of any forced attempts at humour, warmth, or sentimentality. That is just the way Bob Fosse sees this story.

The film details the rise and fall of this famous comedian. At first, he performs lousy comedy and poor imitations at cheap nightclubs. And in his personal life, he meets Honey Harlowe, a stripper played by Valerie Perrine. As the years go by, the two get married, and Bruce the comic becomes famous for pushing the envelope (the movie does not quite get into detail on his change in comedic insight). His personal and professional lives both intertwine and mirror each other. This occurs as a result of the two of them becoming heavily involved in drugs and other hedonistic activities, while at the same time, his career takes numerous hits due to charges of obscenity. The rest of the film depicts a free fall into utter self-destruction.

Dustin Hoffman portrays Lenny as a deeply flawed individual, whose biggest flaw is that he cannot handle the pressure of being both famous and persecuted. Over and over, he is charged for obscenity, which creates a situation where he is even more popular, and the film implies that this has little to do with his talent but rather his notoriety, and the chance that something even more outrageous might happen. At first, he is able to survive the attention with his humour intact. But, soon, his troubles are a curse, a scarlet letter, which ruins him. The single most wrenching scene in this regard is a performance where he wanders out, in a trenchcoat, high as a kite, and delivers a rambling, incoherent rant on entrapment and harassment. This ends when he whispers desperately to the audience that he cannot take it anymore, that he is not funny, and walks out. This entire sequence is done in one unbroken, unmoving long shot. The camera cruelly, dispassionately witnesses his despair as well as the audience`s reaction.

Bob Fosse`s camera also cruelly witnesses Lenny Bruce no longer in fashion with the crowd. This occurs in a running commentary throughout the film, presented as a performance taking place after much of the actual story in the film. Bruce is supremely obsessed with his legal troubles, and the meaning of obscenity, and all this causes is an alienated audience, who slowly drift away from him.

Another important aspect of the film involves his personal life. In the Andy Kaufman bio, for example, we are presented with a loving, eccentric couple. But in Lenny we see manipulation, lies and misery. We know about the drugs. We also know that Lenny has had affairs, and lied about them. We are also witness to a painful result of Lenny`s need to push the boundaries even in his personal relations. Lenny, in one scene, tells Honey that he wants to engage in a threesome with her and another woman. Honey attempts to get out of it, but can`t, because she is unable to respond to Lenny`s claims that if she loves him, she will do this for him. We actually do get to see this threesome, but not in the way we expect. Played against complete silence, helped by the black-and-white cinematography, the fears and curiosity in Honey`s face are juxtaposed with the imposing presence of the act`s orchestrator, and we are soon witness to more emotional pain.

What Bob Fosse does is give us an open-ended view of this person. We are forced to think whether he was a great man done in by society, or whether he did himself in, while society enjoyed the spectacle for a time before they got bored. Either one of these conclusions may work. Personally, I was leaning toward the latter. Throughout the viewing of this film, I had the feeling that Lenny was setting himself up for a fall. He marries someone who is certainly his sexual fantasy, so expects her to follow that fantasy. His comedy shocks the world, and brings issues to light, but has the misfortune of being unable to defend himself without sounding like a bore, or, usually, utterly desperate. The man was not just a martyr for the rights and freedoms of the rest of us, but was a victim of his own hungers and needs.

DVD Times Mike Sutton

Lenny Bruce was probably the single most significant comedian of the 20th century and a potent cultural figure whose battle against the taboos imposed by the state was of immense importance to the development of art in general and American art in particular. That said, I don't see the necessity of turning him into some kind of saint but that, sadly, is exactly what Bob Fosse's Lenny attempts to do. It's not a bad movie - far from it - but it is a fundamentally timid one and timidity is one thing of which Lenny Bruce could never have been accused.

The film uses a pseudo-documentary technique using 'interviews' with actors playing Lenny's wife, mother and agent to tell the story of his rise to popularity and his downfall at the hands of the moral guardians of America.. Interspersed with the interviews are depictions of Bruce's personal life, his clashes with the authorities and excerpts from stage routines from throughout his career. This has the advantage of rendering the depiction of events reasonably clear and of offering a perspective on how Bruce affected those closest to him. It has the enormous disadvantage of breaking up the material and preventing us from seeing at any length the interaction between Bruce and his audience and the broader showbiz milieu from which he emerged.

Dustin Hoffman's performance as Lenny has been widely praised and it's easy to see why. He uses his immense charisma as a performer to his advantage and it's entirely believable that Hoffman could have been a successful stand-up comedian. His rapport with the audience is total and his timing is immaculate. But the one thing he never manages to do is convince us that he is Lenny Bruce. If you watch film of Bruce in action during his heyday, you see a wired, brilliantly funny man who is a bundle of aggression and anger. The real Bruce doesn't sweet talk his audience or offer moral justifications for the material from which he is getting laughs. He's outright obnoxious sometimes and often a little too much for the camera to contain (presumably this wasn't a problem for the live audience). Hoffman is too nice and too eager to be liked and the writer, Julian Barry, conspires with him by giving Bruce little speeches in which he explains why he's using shock words like 'nigger' or discussing the subject of cocksucking. This certainly makes Bruce more appealing but doesn't chime with what we know about the man himself, from the reports of those who knew him and footage of his performances. Hoffman gives a great performance here but he's not Lenny Bruce and he seems to know it. The smiles he drops in, as if to say "Hey I'm just kidding" are the clincher. Bruce was never kidding, he was deadly serious and if people were offended then all the better. The reason I labour this point is that when I first saw this film, aged 18, I thought this was Lenny Bruce and it took me the better part of ten years to discover that it wasn't. It's a sentimental approximation of what people would have liked him to be.

Having expressed this major reservation, it's only fair to say that, on its own terms, Lenny is an extremely good film. Bob Fosse only directed five films for the cinema (and one Liza Minnelli TV special) and he must be unusual, if not unique, in that all of them are fine pieces of work from the explosive energy of Sweet Charity to the underrated power of Star 80. What marks out his work is the care he takes with his actors, his fertile collaboration with the very best cinematographers and the attention to detail in the settings. This pays dividends in Lenny through Bruce Surtees's evocative and atmospheric black and white cinematography. Surtees, who worked with Clint Eastwood on countless occasions and also contributed world class work to Dirty Harry, Big Wednesday and Night Moves, uses stark contrasts in lighting to suggest the martyrdom aspects of Lenny (a theme which I dislike but which is pivotal to the conception of the character) and composes images with breathtaking clarity. The use of harsh front and back lighting is a masterclass in itself. Surtees and Fosse work together to create this almost Christlike view of Lenny Bruce and I have to say that this is ludicrous and oddly offensive to those of us who don't need to turn an antiestablishment rebel into a tragic martyr, but given their conception they certainly see it through to the end. The script is, however, a problem. When it sticks to the routines then it's fine, even though many of the best bits are ruined by Hoffman trying to be a nice guy and the decision to break them up into snippets which means he never gets a performance rhythm going. The difficulty is the dialogue given to the other characters, notably to Valerie Perrine playing his wife, which is prosaic and horribly sentimental. These characters aren't sufficiently fleshed out either - the wife, Honey, first appears doing a steamy striptease which suggests she's an erotic powerhouse but she then turns into a pathetic junky doormat. The temptation seems to have been to suggest that Lenny Bruce was fucked up by his wife, especially since his offstage life, bar promiscuity, appears to have been cleaned up. I don't think we would be too shocked to learn about his drug taking and drinking but the film, desperate to tell us how the wicked state destroyed this truth-telling genius, fumbles anything which might suggest he had more a small streak of self-destructiveness. This only comes through during a courtroom scene at the end when Bruce talks himself into jail and it's only here that the film really convinces. Nor do we get enough sense of the revolutionary aspects of Bruce's emergence in the comedy establishment of the 1950s and early 1960s. There is a good scene of Bruce clashing with an established Jewish comedy star at the Catskils but this isn't followed through and we don't really discover the way in which Bruce was the vital link between, for the sake of argument, Jack Benny and Richard Pryor.

The film is exceptionally well made but it is essentially fraudulent and timid. It never addresses the issues it raises - freedom of speech, obscenity, the way an individual willfully turns himself into an enemy of the establishment - and drifts off into soap opera whenever it threatens to reveal something realistically messy about its central character. The conclusions it comes to are that freedom of speech is a good thing and that Lenny Bruce's downfall was a bad thing but those are things that most of us liberal viewers already knew - it preaches to the converted and tells us what we want to hear, but that's not good enough. Bruce was certainly an advocate of free speech but he was also a dangerous, 'dirty' comedian and a great one at that - pretending that he was a saint who proselytized the things we believe in doesn't get to the truth of the matter. The film, funny and sometimes touching as it is, tells us nothing we don't already know and that, ultimately, is its failure.

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Joel Cunningham)

Film Freak Central Bill Chambers

DVD Verdict Barrie Maxwell

Entertainment Insiders Rusty White

One Movie a Day David Wester

The Projection Booth [Rob Humanick]

The Movie Addict

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

ALL THAT JAZZ A 96

USA (123 mi) 1979

What’s the matter? Don’t you like musical comedy? —Joe Gideon (Bob Fosse) appealing to God

Talk about a movie with a death wish, this is a movie that explains what a heart attack feels like, where you’d think with this level of intimate autobiographical detail about death that the director would have dropped dead on the set somewhere, but he survived another eight years. While the critical consensus claims this autobiographical Bob Fosse piece is a take-off on Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963), not really, as it doesn’t have the plotless, stream-of-conscience, avant-garde modernism that implies being at a creative stand-still and existential impasse. Instead, Fosse continually draws inspiration throughout the entire film, even including his infamous death sequence which he turns into an extended, deliciously irreverent, musical song and dance number. One must give due consideration to Fellini’s JULIET OF THE SPIRITS (1965), which is flush with surreal, extravagantly idealized hallucinogenic set pieces filled with dancing showgirls. Fosse’s continuous stream of womanizing rivals that of the surrealistic Fellini drama as seen from his wife Giuletta Masina’s jealous and increasingly exaggerated point of view, where every woman he goes out with becomes a voluptuous beauty that is so ravagingly attractive that no mere mortal could resist. Both films feature artists that love living in the surreal world, where the world of the living is where all the problems occur, so they both have a great deal of difficulty determining where the dream ends and reality begins. Fosse (Roy Scheider as Joe Gideon) has a repeating shower sequence set to the music of Vivaldi every morning with eyedrops along with a handful of Dexedrine to get him started each day. Rarely is he ever seen without a cigarette dangling from his mouth. The constant use of pills, booze, and cigarettes create a pervasive theme of death that haunts the entire film, even including an everpresent angel of death, Jessica Lange (in only her second film after the 1976 remake of KING KONG), foreseeing the New York City AIDS scare of the early 1980’s, where death ravaged the theater district, leaving a devastating impact.

This is a film where the director continually takes chances and pushes the boundaries, using experimental devices to express the visible disorientation of the Fosse character, who has a continual back and forth, satirically humorous dialogue with a mysterious angel hovering at his side, who quickly loses his concentration from one idea to the next, or one character to the next, changing time spans, continually intermixing thoughts in his head as he’s developing and reworking pieces in his head, often with abrupt visual cuts and simply brilliant editing, where in the reading of the dialogue from a new show the sound actually disappears altogether for an extended duration, as Gideon literally spaces out on the real world. However nothing is more shocking than a brilliant hospital sequence where he films his own death, actually structured upon an interwoven comedy routine by Frankie Man on Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s 5 final stages of death, an extremely imaginative, wickedly clever, musical montage from a near death state of hallucination that turns pleasantly familiar song lyrics into a cruel and sick joke on himself. The aggressively sarcastic and irreverent tone may not be for everyone, but it’s clear the style is highly inventive, which when added to the appeal of his jazzy, meticulously choreographed dance numbers make this one of the more uniquely original films ever made. Fosse got his start as a dancer and quickly earned a reputation as a supremely gifted choreographer for which he won no less than eight Tony Awards, but he surprised everyone when for CABARET (1972), a song and dance musical, Fosse actually won the Academy Award for Best Director over Francis Ford Coppolla in THE GODFATHER (1972), currently listed as the #2 (Top 250 #2) greatest film on the IMDb all-time list. Fosse revived the interest in song and dance movies, as these are arguably the two best musicals made in the past twenty-five years, perhaps since Judy Garland in A STAR IS BORN (1954).

What’s unusual about the success of this film is that the songs themselves, unlike Fosse’s CABARET (1972), are not showstoppers. Instead it’s the staged, theatrical inventiveness of the incomparable dancing routines that take one’s breath away. The exception is the highly appealing opening number set to the music of George Benson’s “On Broadway” Mike Ink - Jazz on YouTube (5:54), which really sets a likeable tone for the film, as the audience quickly identifies with a thriving energy, as Fosse punctuates the seemingly impossible physical and artistic demands of life in the theater, creating a mesmerizing backstage portrait that includes his ex-wife, Leland Palmer as Audrey (based on Fosse’s third wife, Broadway star Gwen Verdon), his adorable daughter Michelle (Erzsebet Foldi) and current girlfriend Kate (Ann Reinking, Fosse’s live-in partner), where all three women are featured in exceptional dance sequences. One of the best and easily the happiest number in the movie is “Everything Old Is New Again,” Mike Ink - Jazz lovingly performed for Gideon by Michelle and Kate (3:53), an affectionate portrait contrasting the young and old that is wildly free and uninhibited, while the centerpiece of the film and perhaps the most extraordinary example of modern dance on celluloid takes this whimsical and bouncy musical ditty Take Off With Us - YouTube (1:42) and turns it into this completely restructured, highly evolved, erotic ballet, Air-otica - YouTube (9:36), a modern era dance masterpiece that is incredibly shot as a rehearsal once-through. Where this all leads is to an inevitable heart attack, where confined to a bed Gideon starts imagining song and dance sequences that have a chilling element of personal truth for him, where a similar idea resurfaces again as a fantasy Raymond Chandler escapist novel in both a British TV mini-series (1986) and Keith Gordon’s remake of THE SINGING DETECTIVE (2003), where ironically Gordon plays a young Joe Gideon in Fosse’s film. The magical finale opens with four elaborately connecting showbiz production numbers, "Hospital Hallucinations" ---- All That Jazz(1979) - YouTube (9:38), leading into the sickest rendition of the Everly Brothers “Bye Bye Love” Everly Brothers - Bye Bye Love [Very Good quality ... (1:29) ever conceived, emcee’d by the incomparable Ben Vereen, seen here Bye Bye Life - "All That Jazz" 1979 - YouTube (10:08) as a phantasmagoric, musical tribute to death and dying.

Note - -

Paula Abdul "Cold Hearted Snake"
http://www.youtube.com/watchv=XNQq2umKZo&feature=RecentlyWatched&page=1&t=t&f=b

All That Jazz "Air Rotica"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSHnK4dvi3w

Compare Beyonce's "Single Ladies" video with Bob Fosse's "Mexican Breakfast" from 1968 (at least I think it's 1968, it's somewhere around then anyway).
This clip intercuts the two dance routines and makes the relationship obvious.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yhlbni8C3XI

Beyonce's videos for "Get Me Bodied" and "Single Ladies" are both Fosse inspired. "Get Me Bodied" is inspired by "Sweet Charity" and "Single Ladies" is inspired by "Mexican Breakfast". I don't know if there are others, but I wouldn't be surprised.

Angela Errigo from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

“It’s showtime, folks!” This fascinating, imaginative, and intimately autobiographical musical that still divides audiences is an American 8 ½, a startlingly candid testament from Bob Fosse, the gifted dancer, brilliant choreographer, multiple Tony award winner, and Oscar-winning director of Cabaret. Fosse’s astonishingly frank dance drama—which he conceived, co-scripted, and made shortly after he had undergone open-heart surgery—has as his alter ego the Oscar-nominated Roy Schneider’s chain-smoking, womanizing, pill-popping, choreographer-director Joe Gideon. Too busy rehearsing his erotically-charged new show, browbeating backers, and chasing leggy showgirls to seriously heed his troubling chest pains, Joe is dying (flirtatious to the end in the operating theater with his attendant angel of death Jessica Lange) while contemplating personal failures, professional triumphs, and great showbiz moments. Brilliant or pretentious, according to taste, All That Jazz is savagely witty on backstage life and thrilling in how well it conveys the obsessive, all-consuming excitement of those passionately committed and driven in their work.

Sensational dancing in the jazzy signature Fosse-style and eye-popping production numbers (the dazzling opener performed to George Benson’s soulful version of “On Broadway,” another featuring all-around entertainer du jour Ben Vereen) punctuate the confessional reminiscences of the arrogant, satirical theatrical eminence. These include flashes from his seedy burlesque roots and his insufficiently remorseful view of the women he has loved, exploited, adored, and discarded in his life (one of them obviously based on Fosse’s third wife, dancer and Broadway star Gwen Verdon, another played by his protégé and latter-day partner Anne Reinking).

Audaciously structured and edited as well, All That Jazz won four deserved Oscars and stands out alongside Cabaret as the best two musical dramas in thirty years. As it turned out, this undeniably self-indulgent celluloid epitaph was made nearly a decade before the fact. Fosse died suddenly if inevitably of a heart attack in 1987, at the moment his revival of his 1960s Broadway hit Sweet Charity (which had also provided his feature directorial debut) was opening. His legacy made itself felt in 2002’s Oscar-winning Chicago, an old Kander-Ebb musical reworked into the dark razzmatazz danse macabre we know by Fosse in the 1970s.

All That Jazz - Deep Focus Bryant Frazer

When I was a kid, I never understood why no one called All That Jazz a classic. This Bob Fosse musical followed Roy Scheider's obsessive dance choreographer through life and love, as viewed in an astonishing set of musical numbers (if you care, Paula Abdul swiped one of the concepts for a music video). The whole film climaxes as Scheider goes into cardiac arrest, with a bunch of dancers in grotesque skin-tight heart outfits singing along with him in a major musical number: "Bye Bye Life." Amazing stuff -- cool, cruel, and brilliant.

All That Jazz Time Out London

Apparently Bob Fosse thought it 'foolish' to call All That Jazz self-indulgent. But he did direct, choreograph and co-write this musical comedy; it's about his life; it's very pleased with itself. As translated onto screen, his story is wretched: the jokes are relentlessly crass and objectionable; the song'n'dance routines have been created in the cutting-room and have lost any sense of fun; Fellini-esque moments add little but pretension; and scenes of a real open-heart operation, alternating with footage of a symbolic Angel of Death in veil and white gloves, fail even in terms of the surreal.

City Pages [Caroline Palmer]

Overstuffed with outrageous and amazing dance numbers, this unapologetically indulgent (and eerily prophetic) eulogy--delivered semi-autobiographically by Broadway choreographer-turned-filmmaker Bob Fosse--re-creates the director's experience of suffering a heart attack while preparing for Chicago. Although he recovered from the event, Fosse became obsessed with his own demise. Roy Scheider, Fosse's doppelgänger, plays Joe Gideon, a Broadway choreographer and film director who's opening a show, editing a movie about a standup comedian, sleeping around, ignoring his daughter, smoking and drinking too much, and having heart troubles. Several of the big numbers make one wonder how Fosse finagled the budget for such an unabashed, ego-driven spectacle. But, thankfully, he did. Particularly noteworthy are an erotic rehearsal, an impromptu performance by Ann Reinking in full Fosse form, a Busby Berkeley-style fan dance, a hilarious montage of hospital-room parties, and the spectacular finale in which Ben Vereen sings "Bye Bye Love" to a heavenly studio audience. The ultimate control freak, Fosse gave himself the opportunity of a lifetime in All That Jazz: the chance to direct his own funeral.

Slant Magazine Eric Henderson

There's something a little perverse about a director who models his own ego trip completely after someone else's movie. Such is the case with Bob Fosse's 8 1/2, more popularly known as All That Jazz. In it, Fosse's alter ego Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider) juggles simultaneous film and stage productions, as well as his broken home life, multiple affairs, and his own failing health (one of Jazz's many parallels to real life is how it eerily predicted Fosse's own death by heart attack). Gideon's newest film, The Comedian (obviously a riff on Fosse's own Lenny) has been in the editing suite for months past its original deadline. Meanwhile, he's helming a vanity project for his ex-wife, to make amends of a sort. Neither project is passing his own ridiculously high standards of excellence and he plunges into a crisis in which he finds himself playing psychological case study with the Angel of Death (Jessica Lange). Fosse might owe a lot to Fellini's plunge into self-obsession, but the pungent texture of showbiz grime and sweaty, thrusting body geometry are completely his own. In powerhouse numbers like "Take Off With Us" and the infamous "Bye-Bye Love" (easily the longest on-screen death rattle of all time), Fosse brings his own unique style of rhythmic, dance-like film editing that he initiated with Cabaret to its apotheosis. Never content to cut on a beat, instead he makes razor-sharp edits at the change of a dancer's direction, or as an extension of his combination moves. In essence, he turns the art of the edit into its own form of choreography. All That Jazz may be Fosse's finest cinematic achievement.

All That Jazz: Special Music Edition - Directed by Bob ... - Exclaim! Matt McMillan

It’s every tough guy’s movie night dilemma: "Oh god, it’s her turn to pick the movie. Oh no, no, not a musical! God, do not let her choose a musical. I’ll volunteer at the food bank first thing tomorrow.” Easy, tiger, All That Jazz is not The Sound of Music. Meet Joe Gideon, he’s a pill popping, booze swilling, chain-smoking, womanising hard ass… choreographer. For him, chorus lines are all you can eat buffets that he blows through almost as insatiably as amphetamines and Alka-Seltzer. He smokes, fucks and works and works and works yet somehow he seems removed from it all. Joe Gideon is Bob Fosse. Yeah, it’s thinly veiled (as thin as O,J,’s alibi) but this is Bob Fosse writing, directing and choreographing his own life, warts and all. Gideon (Roy Scheider channelling Fosse) is in the middle of editing a film (based on Fosse’s Lenny) while launching a Broadway musical (an amalgam of Chicago and Pippin) all while juggling his ex-wife and daughter (Gwen and Nicole in real life), his main lady friend (Anne Reinking basically playing herself, which is kind of weird) and a stream of gals who briefly warm his bed, and it’s taking its toll. Through all of this, in a series of hallucinatory conversations with an angelic Jessica Lange (who was also romantically linked to Fosse), Gideon wrestles with his mortality and looks back over his life and his sometimes selfish, hurtful choices. It’s a surprisingly dark story to be told as a musical but being Fosse’s story, there’s no other way it could be told. The musical numbers aren’t set pieces pasted into the story, they move the plot forward and give us insights into relationships between the characters. Sure, the musical’s made a comeback of late but there isn’t going to be another All That Jazz anytime soon. Ballsy, experimental, dark and exuberant, it’s self-indulgent, ambitious and brilliantly inspired. It’s also probably a career high point for both Fosse and Scheider.

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

Surely one of cinema's most outrageous feats of egotism, Bob Fosse's All That Jazz borrows from (and perhaps seeks to upstage) Federico Fellini's autobiographical classic 8 1/2, which magically transformed self-regard into art and made a conscious claim for its director's genius. By standing on a giant's shoulders, Fosse courts charges of flagrant navel-gazing, while working off the presumption that an audience will want to care about a tortured artist chased by demons of his own making. Like Fellini, Fosse could only justify this project by convincing people of his brilliance. Otherwise, what interest remains in a pill-popping, chain-smoking womanizer who routinely betrays and neglects his loved ones? Yet with a sly wink and a devil's grin, courtesy of uncanny alter ego Roy Scheider, Fosse absorbs and defuses any criticism that could be leveled against him, constantly poking holes in his inflated reputation. He counters every piece of show-stopping craft, such as the dazzling cattle call that opens the 1979 film, with bitter, excoriating truths about his weaknesses and regrets, coming clean about the bad behavior that he correctly predicts will lead him to an early grave. A dense and often exhausting ordeal, All That Jazz tries to function as art and entertainment, preferably at the same time, which makes it either an exceptionally dark musical-comedy or an unusually buoyant death wish. As the Fosse doppelgänger, Scheider scurries from the rehearsals for his latest Broadway opus to the cutting room for his Lenny-like biopic, hounded by panicked producers, wannabe starlets, jilted lovers, and an ex-wife (Leland Palmer) and neglected daughter. Barely propped up by a morning brew of Dexedrine, Alka-Seltzer, eye drops, and Vivaldi, Scheider responds poorly to his pressure-filled schedule, with each day driving him closer to cardiac arrest. Aware of his declining health, Scheider literally flirts with Death, which here takes the angelic form of Jessica Lange, who hangs around his conscience and indulges his numerous confessions. An entertainer first and foremost—every day, Scheider greets his mirror image with a rousing "It's showtime, folks!"—Fosse spins his runaway narcissism into self-effacing humor and filters the darkest themes through electrifying song-and-dance numbers. The musical sequences are a lesson in choreography, not just for Fosse's renowned wit and invention in handling his dancers, but also in the editing, which fuses music and movement in perfectly timed cuts. In addition to a spare but informative commentary track by Scheider, the DVD offers five brief clips of Fosse in action, as he micromanages scores of dancers for the opening audition sequence, assuring that not a step (or intentional misstep) is out of place. A monument to Fosse's obsessive craft, All That Jazz insists that the show must go on, even if it takes the ultimate toll.

filmcritic.com Chris Barsanti

Now that both Chicago and Cabaret have been dusted off and remounted as seemingly eternal fixtures on Broadway, and the film version of Chicago was such a rousing critical and commercial success, it’s a good time to take a look back at one of the stranger entries in the career of choreographer/director Bob Fosse: All That Jazz.

On the surface, the movie is the autobiographical story of Fosse going through a physical/emotional breakdown during the making of the original stage version of Chicago in the mid-1970s. Roy Scheider plays the Fosse stand-in, Joe Gideon, as a pill-popping, compulsively womanizing, perfectionist, son of a bitch who finds happiness only in his work. But Fosse rips apart the standard showbiz puff piece right from the start, by dropping viewers right into the frenzied mess of Gideon’s life, and mixing up the already-fractured storyline with a recurring sequence where Gideon talks over his life with a glowing, radiant Muse figure (Jessica Lange).

In a squirmy bit of verisimilitude, Ann Reinking – a longtime Fosse dancer/worshipper who was not only his mistress for years while he was married to dancer Gwen Verdon, but also won a Tony for her choreography of the Chicago stage remake in 1990 – plays Gideon’s primary girlfriend, who he goes back to when he’s not sleeping with chorus girls or ignoring his ex-wife. Sharp-eyed viewers will spot John Lithgow and Wallace Shawn in small roles.

But even though Fosse could be called one of the last great visionaries of the Broadway stage, he presents Gideon here as an unpretentious sort who worked in Chicago strip clubs as a kid and just wants to do good work. It’s a tough piece of self-examination, in which Gideon does horrible, selfish things to those around him, all for the sake of his work in film and theater, which seems to be the only thing keeping him alive. All That Jazz literally cracks open Gideon’s life, a metaphor brutally realized when he finally collapses under the stress of working on the play and editing his last movie (which looks here like it’s supposed to be his 1974 Lenny Bruce film, Lenny) and we see his open heart surgery – not a pretty sight.

Fosse was never a neat-and-tidy director, and All That Jazz is definitely one of his messier creations. Overflowing with half-conceived ideas, the thing consumes itself even as it unspools. We hear a critic’s review of the film that Gideon was compulsively re-editing for months, which talks about how Gideon has good material and good ideas, but his habits of cutting things off mid-stream and always being too desperate to entertain (cut to Gideon facing himself in the mirror: “It’s showtime!”) ruin the film. It’s a classic Fosse move that illustrates the film’s conundrum of being a stutterstep between wanting to entertain everyone with a blazing showcase of razzle-dazzle and then jumping back to show the seamy underbelly of the showbiz world.

The final musical number is a perfect illustration of this schizophrenia. Gideon and O’Connor Flood (an irritating Ben Vereen) dance about, singing a heart-rending number about accepting death that’s undercut by tacky, flashy staging which seems to have been designed in the seventh circle of disco hell. The conclusion is chillingly matter-of-fact and has eerie resonance with the circumstances surrounding Fosse’s own death in 1987.

As an examination of an artist at war with himself and unable to ever quite finish a piece of work, Fosse outdoes Fellini here: it’s 8 1/2 with a pounding heartbeat. Narcissistic and self-indulgent to a fault, it’s also like nothing you’ve ever seen before and probably never will again. Not only do they not make them like Fosse anymore, today's audiences and the industry also don’t tend to reward this kind of experimentation: All That Jazz was nominated for nine Academy Awards in 1980 (including best actor, director, and picture) and won four.

The Fox DVD features a bright, sharp picture transfer, interview and commentary with Roy Scheider, and some interesting clips of a balding, nervous Fosse directing "On Broadway," the big number that opens the film.

All That Jazz (1979) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com David Sterritt, also seen here: All That Jazz: Special Music Edition Read TCM's Home Video Review on this film

All That Jazz Rachel Gordon from Culture Cartel

All That Jazz Laurie Edwards from Culture Cartel

Surrender to the Void-[Steven Flores]

DVD Playback All That Jazz - American Society of Cinematographers Jim Hemphill

Dreams Are What Le Cinema Is For [Ken Anderson]

American Cinematographer: DVD Playback April 2003 Jon Silberg

All That Jazz Beckylooo Who from Pajiba

KQEK DVD Review [Mark R. Hasan]

MoonStar Film Reviews [Youssef Kdiry]

Ryan Kohler

SBCCFilmReviews [William Conlin]

FilmJerk.com [Carrie Specht]

DVD Verdict - Special Musical Edition [Bill Gibron]

Home Theater Info DVD review

DVD Verdict Mike Pinsky

All That Jazz : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Matt Langdon

The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 1979 [Erik Beck]

Top 100 Directors: #53 - Bob Fosse (All That Jazz review)

All That Jazz Richard Scheib from The Science Fiction, Horror, and Fantasy Film Review

Nick's Flick Picks (Full Review)

Thoughts on Stuff Patrick

eFilmCritic Godfather

The DVD Archives [Estefan Ellison]

The Essentials Project [Michael Nusair]

User reviews from imdb Author: dean237

User reviews from imdb Author: brocksilvey from United States

User reviews from imdb Author: zetes from Saint Paul, MN

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Ed Uyeshima from San Francisco, CA, USA

Overview for Bob Fosse - Turner Classic Movies

Overview for Ann Reinking - Turner Classic Movies

New York Times (registration req'd) Vincent Canby

All That Fosse: All Those Echoes of ‘All That Jazz’ Matt Zoller Seitz from The New York Times, December 23, 2009

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

Bob Fosse - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

All That Jazz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

PIPPIN: HIS LIFE AND TIMES – made for TV

USA Canada (112 mi) 1981 d: David Sheehan Fosse – choreographer, stage director and uncredited writer

Apollo Movie Guide [Ed Gonzalez]

Pippin was the eldest son of Charlemagne. Good old Charley, the King of the Franks, had a mighty fine empire full of much drama but Stephen Schwartz and Roger O. Hirson apparently felt the man to be a bit of a bore. Why one would think that the obscure life of one of Charlemagne’s sons would make a great musical is beyond me, but I suppose we should accept the destiny Schwartz, Hirson and Bob Fosse (the show’s original Broadway director) bestowed upon us.

Let’s give Pippin’s original creators the benefit of the doubt. Let’s assume that Fosse gave the production enough of a jazzy, sexy-cool feel to make the otherwise uninteresting plot a treat. This filmed version of Fosse’s stage play lets you decide for yourself.

Pippin ( William Katt) is out of school and looking for the meaning of life. He tells Charlemagne (Benjamin Rayson) that he wants to go to war and dad eventually obliges. War brings him success but not happiness and his grandmother (Martha Raye) tells him to live life to the fullest. Pippin’s stepmother (Chita Rivera) wants Pippin’s brother to be king, while Pippin plots and kills his dad to bring peace to his new empire. He then feels guilty and has the leading player (Ben Vereen) bring dad back from the dead. Pippin meets a girl named Catherine, falls for her and then leaves her. Still wanting meaningful order in his life, Pippin faces further trials before the story wraps up.

This could be thrilling stuff if it had high romantic and historical urgency – a little Shakespearean touch. But we are dealing with a less compelling story, so the film’s success rests on the production design and direction. It starts off nicely enough as the leading player dances before people whose hands are all we can see. Unfortuantely, this sort of dynamic staging is never enough to lift the musical above mediocrity.

The leading player, played with amazing charm by Vereen, is nothing more than the Master of Ceremonies in Cabaret. The musical is heavy on dialogue and one would think this would provide some semblance of narrative order, but it’s really just a gratuitous display of sexually coy dialogue.

This is not Hair and one is left to wonder when Charlemagne’s backyard became the centre of sexually risqué behaviour. One can only assume that there is a demand out there for lines like “Sometimes I think men raise flags when they can’t get anything else up” to be uttered by grand dames like Martha Raye, but is this really necessary? Historically inspired musicals like Evita, no matter how insipidly written and staged, still tend to have strength and historical significance. Pippin is reminiscent of a writer sifting through a history book and lacing the otherwise insignificant life of a feudal French prince with sexually charged dialogue and musical numbers that wouldn’t shock an 80-year-old grandmother.

DVD Verdict Michael Stailey

STAR 80

USA (100 mi) 1983 Fosse – writer and director

Time Out

The all singin'n'dancin' Fosse turns his hand to straight tragedy with the true story of Dorothy Stratten's pathetically short career as Playboy pin-up and film starlet (her only starring role was in Peter Bogdanovich's They All Laughed), before being cruelly, senselessly murdered by her jealous husband. Hemingway has reinforced not only her breasts but her promise of becoming a sensitive and accomplished actress in her portrayal of the ill-fated Dorothy. The rest, however, is a disappointingly shallow display of images cut together in an apparently haphazard fashion; flashes back and forward are liberally sprinkled with meaningless vistas of naked flesh. This superficial view extends to the characters; in particular, Dorothy's ambitious, hustling husband (Roberts), and her quiet film director/lover (Rees), never really step outside their cardboard cut-outs, making the whole thing feel more like a naughty snapshot than any artistic achievement.

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Rumsey Taylor]

Paul Snider looks in the mirror and he sees an unrealized celebrity, his muscles sharply defined, his face clean shaven save for a moustache, and his coiffure recalling — if not perfecting — what he perceives to be the latest fashion. The reflection obscures a deep, overwhelming insecurity; when Paul shakes your hand for the first time, he’s clutching on with both hands and wildly interested eyes, a castaway with a monstrous incentive to be pulled into the boat.

His jobs are various. Ostensibly, he is a salesman; any time he is seen working (or, more appropriately, profiteering) his façade is inauthentic. More experienced personalities see his desperation immediately, so Paul tends to associate himself with more naïve people, most of them women.

He meets Dorothy Stratten, a clerk at a Dairy Queen, and he is enthralled with her immediately. She is in high school, and even though unsophisticated, more beautiful than she knows. Paul’s attention is incessant, and in short time he is her prom date (afterward, he spends the night photographing her in his bedroom). She is his transport through the looking glass, and henceforth he is careful to protect his investment. At the prom, ignoring her pleas for behavior, he juts a nail file into her ex-boyfriend’s thigh.

This exposition, roughly Star 80’s first twenty minutes, is intercut with images from Paul’s conclusion: he paces about his bedroom, having inverted the face of his precious starlet with a shotgun, between collages of Dorothy’s Playboy photo shoots on every wall, narrating his virtues as he did before in the mirror. Only blood ruins his perfect face and body, and he sees with awesome clarity an evil he now personifies. He turns the shotgun on himself.

This violence is brewing throughout Star 80, Bob Fosse’s final film, because our knowledge of the murder-suicide that concludes it is made known from its opening minutes. It is leniently based upon the actual fates of the pair (the title is derived from Snider’s vanity license plate), whose dissolution was, among other factors, instigated by Stratten’s affair with Peter Bogdanovich, in whose They All Laughed she acted just prior to her death. Fosse’s approach is deft: faux-documentary interviews (with Stratten, et al) are interspersed between the “fiction,” told in flashback. Liberties are taken with many of the episodes’ components (Bogdanovich, for one, is rendered as “Aram Nicholas”; Cliff Robertson’s Hugh Hefner is, in contrast, an accurate facsimile), but the tabloid intrigue remains intact; the conclusion, even, was filmed in the actual apartment Dorothy Stratten and Paul Snider died in.

This is not to say Star 80 is mere exploitation. Unlike Paul Schrader’s telling of naïf corruption in Hardcore, Fosse is responsible in how impartially he renders his characters, many of them seen in voyeuristic close-up (enhanced, surely, by Sven Nykvist’s photography). Of major note is Eric Roberts’ brutal performance as Paul, modulating between a hysteric insecurity and stoic determination, often within a single shot. Any telling of Dorothy’s fate renders him a vicious, smarmy pervert, but Roberts makes him sympathetic, entrapped by Hollywood’s promise of fame and, significantly, the burden of obscurity it imposes when he fails to achieve it. Upon entering the Playboy mansion, Paul is hooked onto Dorothy’s arm, grinning with excited eyes, impatiently awaiting permission to find his friends on the most wondrous playground he’s ever imagined. This eagerness — this outright determination — is insatiable, and it will leave him a finished man.

Pulsing Cinema

The real-life story of doomed 1980 Playmate of the Year Dorothy Stratten and her impersario John Snider was a story custom-made for the hollywood glitter which both of these tragic figures strived for during their brief, violent lives. The first attempt to capture this tragic story came in the form of1981's Death of a Centerfold: The Dorothy Stratten Story. a lame tv-movie starring Jamie Lee Curtis which exploited the melodrama of sitatuaion. There's was more to the story however, an underbelly of sick obsession. Enter the obsessive Bob Fosse, whose own adaption Star 80 was not very well-recieved upon its original release but remains probably the most truthful account of the whole affair, if not from a factual standpoint than from a deeply emotional one.

Fosse presents begins the film through a slow build of fake interviews with Stratten (Mariel Hemingway) and other various characters, beginnig with lounge owners and other sordid figures which Snider (Eric Roberts) associated himself with in Canada just before a chance meeting with the then-age fourteen Stratten changed his life forever. The film suddenly shifts into a more traditional dramatic mode, showing us scenes of their growing emotional attachment to each other, their inital contacts with Playboy and then the slow shaft which is driven between them as Snider is exiled by Stratten's new high-powered friends. Snider retaliates in an explosive finale which showcases some of the finest acting in Roberts' entire career.

It's a testament to the craftsmanship of Fosse that the film's unsusaul combination of straight drama and faux documentary never seems contrived. Fosse manages to almost conjure up the spirit of Snider in Roberts, supposedly mixing Snider with ample amounts of Fosse's own dark pathos. He also presents Stratten as the passive creature dominated constantly by influential or powerful men who all contribute to her decline. Even Hugh Hefner isn't absolved of guilt; Cliff Robertson's Hefner could almost be seen as a mainstream version of Snider, a pimp who hustles girls in the more legitimate arena of adult publishing.

Warner Brothers unfortunately decided to release Star 80 through their budget dvd. simply recycling what is probably the same old 1.33:1 transfer that was used for the laserdisc and recent video re-release. While The cinematogrpahy by Bergman regular Sven Nykvist is not totally destroyed by the film's slightly grainy yet sharp and colorful video, it would still be interesting to see how Nykvist combined with the meticulous Fosse would've framed the film in it's theatrical aspect ratio. The disc contains no extras and features a simple menu containing only chapter stops.

Despite the shortcoming of the disc itself, the movie is an essential purchase for those interested in solid filmmaking.

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Silver Screen Reviews

dvdfuture.com (George Castillo)

Thoughts on Stuff Patrick

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

GREAT PERFORMANCES: DANCE IN AMERICA – made for TV

from original TV series: "Great Performances: Dance in America" (1976)

USA (127 mi) 2001 d: Matthew Diamond Fosse – choreographer

digitallyOBSESSED! DVD Reviews Debi Lee Mandel

"He goes through the demonstration, and the cigarette is burning. He does this combination, the ashes don't fall...All the dancers are staring at the cigarette. Nobody gets the step. He finishes...takes the cigarette out, flicks the ash and he says, 'Okay, now do it.' And I said to myself, This guy is cooooool." —Ben Vereen

"Do ya wanna have fun? Howzabout a few laughs? I could show you a good time..."

You don't need to be a dance fan to be a Bob Fosse fan. I'm not, and I am. The minimalist virility of his choreography grabs attention from the first gesture—could be as minute as the flick of a wrist or as broad as a tableau of figures writhing, en masse—and his audience is hooked. This sexually aggressive style changed the Broadway stage and the musical genre in the right way at just the right time.

"Say, wouldn't you like to know what's going on in my mind?"

If dance is poetry in motion, Bob Fosse is the medium's Allen Ginsberg. His staccato cadence updated the artform to reflect the times, and a jazzy, seamy style became his trademark. He also directed his signature to audiences of the big screen with hits like Sweet Charity (based on Fellini's Le Notti di Cabiria), Cabaret (based on Christopher Isherwood's The Berlin Stories) and the autobiographical All That Jazz, as well as non-musical projects, highlighted by Lenny, a bleak film about the career of his friend and controversial comedian, Lenny Bruce. In 1973, he won an Oscar® for Cabaret, a Tony® for Pippin and an Emmy® Award for Liza With a Z.

Fosse is a Broadway production, a 1999 tribute stringing together his "greatest hits." Thirty dancers take the stage at New York's Palace Theater in front of an appreciative audience. Two brief interview segments slice the presentation into three acts; the first with long-time Fosse collaborators Ben Vereen and Ann Reinking, who are joined in the second by dancer Dana Moore. Vereen reminisces about his first audition for the stage production of Sweet Charity and Reinking discusses her teacher's dichotomous vision. The concept for this extravaganza originated with Fosse wife, acclaimed dancer Gwen Verdon, who is credited here as artistic director.

Fosse presents 30 featured highlights from a variety of shows, including Big Deal (a musical adaptation of Mario Monicelli's Big Deal on Madonna Street), Sweet Charity, Chicago, Pippin and All That Jazz, among others. Most of the work presented is still relevant today, with perhaps 1978's Dancin' seeming the most dated—and there's just nothing like watching a stage filled with young, athletic dancers smoking lit cigarettes, a tip of the hat to the evening's honoree. Fans of today's pop performers will find the roots of all those MTV moves right here.

"Spend a little time with me..."

Fosse covers the full range of the choreographer's career and is the kind of dynamic performance that just might find you jumping out of your seat and trying a move or two yourself: better, then, on DVD in the privacy of your own home. Mesmerizing from curtain up to curtain call, if you have any connection to the dance, buy this disc.

"Fun. Laughs. Good time. Howzaboutit, pal-zy?"

CHICAGO B+ 92

USA Germany (113 mi) 2002 d: Rob Marshall Fosse – writer, choreographer, and director of original stage production

Chicago Anthony Lane from The New Yorker

The time is the nineteen-twenties, but the setting is so stylized, so shamelessly grounded in a hundred other shows and films, that "Chicago" barely qualifies as a period piece; indeed, it merrily jabs at the celebrity-lust of our own era. Catherine Zeta-Jones is Velma Kelly, and Renée Zellweger is Roxie Hart. Each is a man-killer, and each resides in jail, plotting her defense with the silken legal help of Billy Flynn (Richard Gere). The music and lyrics by Kander and Ebb operate on the old-fashioned principle that every song should be a showstopper, regardless of whether the show should be stopped. The director, Rob Marshall, cuts away furiously during every song, and this chronic wish to glance aside makes us wonder: could the performers not weather the camera's unstinting gaze? The only player to conquer the movie is Zeta-Jones, who gets by on a full tank of unleaded oomph. The film has punch, but it never really conveys the delicious, redeeming sense that life can be lived on the hoof.

Slate [David Edelstein]

Rob Marshall's film of Chicago (Miramax) isn't just the most explosively entertaining movie musical in a couple of decades. It's going to be the most influential: the one that inspires the rebirth of the Hollywood musical, that leaves audiences everywhere wanting more dancing, more singing—more, more, more!!!

It's a more-ish kind of picture. Every number is a showstopper. Every performer is working at the top of his or her game. The story of Roxie Hart (Renée Zellweger), the hopeful chorine whose 1929 killing of her duplicitous lover proves to be her ticket to tabloid stardom, simply bowls you over. At the huge press screening that I (and the rest of the New York media) flocked to in early December, we were transformed into a bunch of musical-comedy queens on the verge of tearing the place apart. If the cast had shown up, we'd have stormed the stage: "Renée, have my baby!!!" "Catherine, Michael doesn't love you like I love you!!!" "John C. Reilly! … Gee, you're in a lot of movies these days …"

Who would have thought that a movie-star sex goddess like Catherine Zeta-Jones would also be a belter, that she'd have the hunger of such rapacious musical-comedy creatures as Chita Rivera—who played her part in the original Bob Fosse production (which I saw twice in the mid-'70s)? As Velma Kelly, who finds her sister and her husband together in bed, shoots them both, then confidently strides onstage to do the scintillating vamp anthem, "All That Jazz" ("I'm gonna rouge my knees/ and roll my stockings down …"), Zeta-Jones has a smoldering confidence that takes your mind off her not-always-fluid dancing—although she's a perfectly fine hoofer, with majestic limbs and a commanding cleavage.

It doesn't really matter that she's no Chita (or Gwen Verdon or Ann Reinking) because these dances are cut into lots of small pieces instead of long takes—and if these actors wouldn't survive a Broadway marathon (or a one-fluid-shot Fred-and-Ginger dance), they're positively electric in the sprints. Besides, it's fun to see movie stars pull off big musical-comedy numbers—to see that Zellweger's smeary-eyed sweetness comes through when she sings and that she can play a selfish little tramp like Roxie Hart (who tries to pin her murder on her sap husband, played by John C. Reilly) without making you adore her one drop less than when she was the snortingly tremulous Bridget Jones.

You couldn't guess that Richard Gere—as Roxie's sharpy lawyer, Billy Flynn—would be so ingratiating a song-and-dance man, or that when he sang out, he'd have that silly, back-of-the-palate tremolo like Anthony Newley (with a touch of Jerry Lewis). It helps that the supporting players (Queen Latifah as the big-mama matron of female prison, Christine Baranski as a snooty trial/gossip columnist) have proven musical chops and that the company of singers and dancers are simply the snazziest in the biz. When a succession of convicted murderesses (among them Roxanne Barlow, Ekaterina Chtchelkanova, and Jayne Eastwood) hurl themselves into "He Had It Coming!" in the Cook County Prison, every verse stops the show.

As designed by John Myrhe and photographed by Dion Beebe, Chicago is occasionally an eyesore. Gere's "Razzle-Dazzle," done as a three-ring circus under red and green lights, looks especially ugly and cluttered. And the numbers are mostly in the Benihana school—chop chop chop chop and a lot of fluttering limbs. I usually hate that style—it's what drove me nuts about the dancing in last year's monument to attention-deficit disorder, Moulin Rouge! But director Rob Marshall is also a choreographer, and if he edits too much, he has learned from Fosse to edit in synch with the dancing—to make the cut an extension of the dance gesture. (Think of the way that Fosse edited "Mein Herr" or the title song in Cabaret [1972]—that's the model.)

It helps that Chicago isn't a "realistic" musical, in the movie-musical-killing tradition of Oklahoma! (OK, that's a provocative statement and needs some elaboration. I like Oklahoma! fine, but this so-called '40s "coming of age" of the Broadway musical was an aberrant outgrowth of stage naturalism, which attempted to foster an illusion of seamlessness and which has mostly shackled performers to cornball realistic plots. Think of Shirley Jones in all those deadly Rodgers and Hammerstein adaptations or Julie Andrews in anything—it's no mystery why the musical died.)

Anyway, Chicago is a quasi-Brechtian vaudeville—the sort of movie in which the numbers are presented as numbers. Marshall and screenwriter Bill Condon have given the film at least two levels: the racy '20s tabloid melodrama of jazz murderesses; and the world of the vaudeville stage, in which an emcee/bandleader (Taye Diggs) introduces each number as an opportunity for the character to express his or her innermost self. The musical, with its marvelous score by John Kander and Fred Ebb, was engineered to Fosse's talents. Every number is in a different vaudeville style, from the Jolson-esque "Mr. Cellophane" (in which John C. Reilly proves to be a lyrically dopey crooner) to Flynn's soft-shoe declaration of showbiz cynicism, "Razzle-Dazzle."

Chicago wears its showbiz cynicism with gaudy pride. The central conflict is between Roxie and the simmering prima donna Velma to see who will emerge the bigger murderess/star. Which means that Chicago is one of the rare musical comedies (Gypsy is another) to tell the truth about the people who compete for your entertainment dollars. It says that musical-comedy bitches and bastards will do anything for a showstopper—even kill you. Chicago kills.

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Foster, Jodie

THE BEAVER

USA (91 mi) 2011

The Beaver Tim Grierson at Cannes from Screendaily

The Beaver is a strange creature. Marital melodrama, social satire, dark comedy, coming-of-age tale, father-and-son story: Director and co-star Jodie Foster’s film is emotionally bold, willing to follow the lead of its main character (played with real passion by Mel Gibson), who is very slowly having a complete mental breakdown. But despite its ambitious tonal sweep, The Beaver ends up feeling like pieces of a lot of different films, making it a movie that’s more interesting than it is great.

Screening at Cannes and opening in limited release in the US on May 6 before expanding two weeks later, this Summit film will both be hurt and helped by the controversy surrounding its star. With Gibson’s name more associated of late with tabloid scandals involving racist and anti-Semitic comments than with moviemaking, curiosity may be piqued to see him in a film in which he plays a deranged individual, which is dangerously close to his public persona at this point. Still, with its dark subject matter and bizarre plot about a man who uses a beaver hand puppet to interact with the world, The Beaver is resolutely an indie offering, thereby limiting its potential box office.

Suffering from depression and watching his marriage fall apart, Walter (Gibson) seems to have hit rock bottom when one night he finds a beaver hand puppet in a dumpster. After an accident in which he gets hit on the head by a television, he wakes up and begins to believe that the puppet is a separate personality, whom he gives a British accent and keeps attached to his hand at all times. He tells his disbelieving wife Meredith (Foster) and resentful older son Porter (Anton Yelchin) about this development, only speaking to them through the voice of the beaver, whom Walter believes will help him turn his life around.

Jodie Foster’s third film as a director (after Little Man Tate and Home For The Holidays) almost from the beginning flaunts a style that mixes between dark humour and seriousness. Anchored by Gibson’s fully committed performance as a man who absolutely believes the puppet is real, The Beaver is a bit of a tightrope act as Foster tries to ground Walter’s behaviour in reality while at the same time cuing the audience to be shocked and amused by the ludicrous situation he’s putting his family through.

But while Gibson’s hangdog vulnerability and gradual mental collapse are performed with precision, the rest of the film isn’t nearly as tightly focused or consistently affecting. Even though Yelchin is superb as Walter’s son who fears he possesses the same self-destructive, depressive characteristics as his father, too much of Kyle Killen’s screenplay studies Porter’s burgeoning relationship with his high school’s valedictorian cheerleader (played by Winter’s Bone’s Jennifer Lawrence), which feels like a pale mirroring of the movie’s larger themes about trying to find your voice.

Also distracting is a comedic through-line in which Walter’s odd beaver friend helps inspire an idea for his floundering toy company that saves the business. This in turn makes Walter a celebrity because of the fact he talks through a hand puppet, but the filmmakers don’t invest enough time into these ideas to give them much comedic or satiric value.

When The Beaver settles on the damaged relationship between Walter and Meredith and “the beaver’s” attempt to repair it, Gibson and Foster demonstrate a real rapport that suggests the ups and downs and sustaining love of 20 years of marriage. Otherwise, Foster the director hasn’t given Foster the actress much of a role to play, sticking her with a drab wife/mother character that mostly serves to react to Walter’s growing instability. 

MONEY MONSTER C+ 77

USA (98 mi) 2016 ‘Scope

A dark film with timely ambitions of having something relevant to say about the global financial crisis of 2008 and the inexplicable bailout of Wall Street that actually caused the crisis, cynically suggesting the rich get richer by fleecing the public with get rich schemes that require manipulating the market, where there are winners and losers, but few questions asked, even under the most dire circumstances. At the same time, the film caters to our prisoner of the moment fascination with the news, where only catastrophes get our attention, and then only for a moment to see how it all plays out before moving our attention elsewhere. The film may unintentionally offer validation that we’re living in a police state, that the lives of the poor are not only marginalized, but sacrificed on a regular basis in the interests of protecting an elite class, whose own crimes are so willingly overlooked. Featuring A-list Hollywood actors and tabloid icons, not to mention perennial People’s Choice nominees George Clooney and Julia Roberts, who first worked together in Soderbergh’s OCEANS ELEVEN (2001), they come across as best friends both on and off the screen, where Clooney plays Lee Gates, a smug TV host of his own show entitled Money Monster, complete with a musical theme and dancing girls, with a supposed knowledge of all things Wall Street, handing out stock tips, while Patty (Roberts) is the behind-the-scenes producer in the booth. Their all-too ordinary lives get upended by the presence of an armed intruder on the set, Jack O’Connell as Kyle Budwell, an irate investor that lost $60,000, his entire life’s savings, who decides to hold the host hostage, claiming he’s responsible, placing him in a bomb-rigged suicide vest for insurance while holding the detonator in his hand. From that point on, events unravel in real time, as viewers around the globe become fascinated with a live feed of the entire experience. The question of whether Jodie Foster can direct is answered by the sheer conventionality of the film, which offers surprisingly few new ideas, lacking originality and a better screenwriter. The product of a Hollywood system in which she was raised as a child actress, Foster probably thought this was a big story that would fill headlines, where there’s an urge to enlarge everything and make it bigger than it is, as if that’s entertainment, while a more carefully crafted film would break it down to smaller, more poignant moments that actually matter, where we might delve under the surface for intimate details of the character’s lives.

“I might be the one with a gun here, but I am not the criminal,” explains Kyle to the cameras, reminding Gates that he was the one who recommended a certain stock named IBIS as a sure thing, but yesterday the stock plummeted, costing investors $800 million dollars, where the company’s vague explanation was the action occurred inexplicably due to a computer glitch. Unable to grasp what that even means, but threatening to blow them all up unless they provide real answers, there is a side story following executives at IBIS, who are perplexed by the sudden disappearance of their CEO Walt Canby (Dominic West), who left unexpectedly for Geneva, Switzerland and is supposedly in the air on his executive jet, though he was scheduled to be a guest on the show. Instead, they send a PR talking head, Diane Lester (Caitriona Balfe), who was hooked up to a TV monitor, but makes a mad dash back to the office when she sees what transpires, where she and another male executive are simply befuddled about what to do other than stall until their CEO surfaces. It’s interesting that the film takes great interest in exposing the layout of the television studio from all angles, how it looks from the booth, hearing Patty’s specific instructions to each of them, calling up certain monitors for the live shot, following the camera operators doing their jobs, yet this careful examination gets greater scrutiny than any of the characters, where instead we get neverending wisecracks from everyone involved, where the routine of the job has simply allowed them to tune out anything serious happening in their lives. As a result, the film pales considerably from works it obviously drew inspiration from, such as Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and Network (1976), iconic 70’s thrillers that doubled as absurdly humorous yet incisive cultural critiques. Unfortunately, there’s an absence of humor and insight here, where small talk is allowed to take its place, ending up with the kind of dialogue that’s easily forgettable. What is remarkable is that no one takes the computer glitch remark seriously, where instead this comes across as utter fiction, yet the news team goes to great lengths to identify the Korean computer programmer that designed the algorithm allegedly used by the company, whose explanation is that only a “human hand” could have caused the system to act the way it did.

Meanwhile, even as the set is under siege, with Gates’ life repeatedly threatened by an increasingly unstable hijacker whose righteous anger is desperate to begin with, he seems to run out of options, so Gates, with Patty whispering instructions to him through an earpiece, is forced to try to find this kid some answers, turning him into something of a sympathetic figure, going into full investigative journalism mode in order to scour the inside operations of IBIS, while simultaneously the New York City police surround the set, install a few carefully placed snipers in the upper regions of the rafters, while they examine the possibility of shooting out the electric detonator receiver located on the suicide vest just above the kidney region, questioning whether Gates would survive a shot. All bets are off, however, when the police find Kyle’s pregnant girlfriend (Emily Meade), putting her on a monitor with a live feed, but instead of sympathizing with Kyle, she rails against him in a lengthy tirade telling him what an idiot and complete loser he is before the police finally cut the feed. This seems to sap all the life out of Kyle, turning him into a broken mess, where Gates has to come to his rescue. As Diane begins to doubt the truthfulness of her boss, realizing he was never in Switzerland, she begins to feed inside information exclusively to Patty, which is then fed to Gates on the air. Initially skeptical, Patty is forced to reassure Diane, “We don’t do gotcha journalism here, Diane—we don’t do journalism, period.” It turns out Canby has returned to New York and intends to speak to the press at Federal Hall nearby, the site of the nation’s first capitol. Unbelievably, Gates encourages Kyle, along with loyal cameraman Lenny (Lenny Venito) to march down the streets of New York, like a scene out of Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014), surrounded by a legion of cops with guns and rifles aimed straight at them, with Kyle continually blocking the vest transmitter, receiving hoots and catcalls from the mobs of bystanders on the street as they make their way to Federal Hall to confront Walt Canby. Preposterous as it is, there is little to no suspense, largely due to the unimaginative way it’s filmed, losing its way in an attempt to tie up loose ends and make it all perfectly understandable, while the case against global capitalism simply fizzles into thin air. Unfortunately, unlike the work of a professional investigative journalism team from a reputable news organization, like what was uncovered in Spotlight (2015), Foster resorts to manipulation tactics when the damning evidence is instead provided by a couple of drunken hackers in Iceland playing video games, who instead of proving the system is rigged, or making the case that corporations conspire to manipulate the markets by duping investors, which would be boring and way too complicated, can instead only provide evidence that Canby is lying to cover up his real intent, where his response to the cameras is simply, “What’s wrong with making a profit?” Perhaps unsurprisingly, this film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, and while hardly an exposé equivalent to the tobacco industry’s decades-long history of lies and cover-ups that resulted in Michael Mann’s THE INSIDER (1999), the real conspiracy would be finding viewers who are stupid enough to place their financial fortunes in the hands of a TV Quiz Show host dressed in gold lamé pants, a glitter top hat, and surrounded by Fly Girls.

The Reel Bits [Richard Gray]

A tense cross between Network and Dog Day Afternoon, there’s a plethora of twists in Jodie Foster’s latest directorial turn.

The global financial crisis of 2007-08 was so bad that economists called it one of the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Like that golden age for Hollywood, cinema has responded once again. From documentaries such as Too Big to Fail through to last year’s Oscar-winning The Big Short, these films have attempted to hold accountable those financial institutions that have seemingly escaped personal consequence. In MONEY MONSTER, director Jodie Foster chooses the thriller genre to make a point about banker responsibility.

Styled after Jim Cramer’s Mad Money persona, financial guru and TV personality Lee Gates (George Clooney) is in the middle of his bling-filled broadcast when viewer Kyle Budwell (Jack O’Connell) busts in and holds Gates hostage. Having lost money in a “algorithm glitch” that caused IBIS Global Capital’s stockholders to lose $800 million, the distressed Budwell demands justice from advisers like Gates and IBIS CEO Walt Camby (Dominic West), not just for himself, but for all investors who lost money.

While the film may not directly be about the GFC, the thriller approach is a unique take on accountability, albeit an ill-advised response in real life. Where MONEY MONSTER becomes interesting is when it takes the formula and uses it to point an unwavering finger at Wall Street bankers and financiers, and even the media itself, for allowing this to happen in the first place. What begins with elements of the rapid-fire Aaron Sorkin-esque dialogue of a workplace turns into a spin on Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975) as our sympathies begin to fall in line with Budwell’s. This is partly thanks to the versatile British actor Jack O’Connell, as well as the case Foster and screenwriters Alan Di Fiore, Jim Kouf, and Jamie Linden begin building against the institutions. Here the film suddenly becomes a journalistic investigation, with more than a dash of Lumet’s other biting satire of the 1970s, Network. The media circus itself becomes the news, recreating the very conditions that led to misinformation in the first place. “If nobody understands the math,” comes the sage advice in relation to the allegedly failing algorithm, “nobody has to explain the money.” It’s as true of any complex media report smothered in the distractions of the banal, and Foster makes her case solidly on this point.

The use of formula and tips of the hat to classic films are one thing, but there are some cinematic clichés, from producer Patty Fenn (Julia Roberts) who is a few days away from taking a new job, to the family life of Budwell that simply exacerbates his hysteria. As this is being presented as a thriller, it’s also reliant on perhaps one too many twists, occasionally obfuscating the ultimate message of the film. Yet if nothing else, it may be you only opportunity to see George Clooney make it rain in a gold glitter top hat.

The Kim Newman Website (Kim Newman)

After a supposed ‘computer glitch’ wipes 800 million dollars off a Wall St trading company’s books, disgruntled (and busted) small investor Kyle Budwell (Jack O’Connell) invades the live broadcast of the Money Monster TV show and straps smarmy host/stock tipster Lee Gates (George Clooney) into a suicide bomb vest – demanding an explanation of exactly how his money disappeared.  Director Patty Fenn (Julia Roberts) has to keep the show going and everybody alive while corporate PR flack Diane Lester (Caitriona Balfe) begins to wonder whether her boss Walt Camby (Dominic West) has been 100% truthful about how a big deal went south. 

The model for this satirical thriller is obviously Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (down to a couple of plot developments), though the set-up might be slightly influenced by Costa-Gavras’s little-remembered Mad City – and, with live-on-air ‘siegeface’ Lee weaselling all through the hostage drama, it comes close to being a remake of Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa.  Written by Jim Kouf (who has been around since The Boogens in 1981),Alan DiFiore and Jamie Linden and directed by Jodie Foster, this is stuck with the central dilemma of posing and then answering an unanswerable question.  Like The Big Short, it contemplates the mysteries of the money market and finds the flim-flam and voodoo trotted out by experts and insiders useless as a means of understanding What Went Wrong.  To turn the premise into a satisfying thriller, the story has to deviate from a general  howl against global capitalism and identify an actual hissable baddie who has done something indictably wrong and gets due punishment.  ‘Nobody complained so long as I was making them money,’ is hardly a heroic rationale.

More gripping is the character business, with hollow man Lee and just-about-to-quit Patty growing as the crisis gets out of control – and schlub Kyle getting deeper and deeper in his mess as hostage negotiators, snipers, supposed loved ones (Emily Meade has a showstopping turn as Kyle’s pregnant girlfriend in the equivalent to Chris Sarandon’s role in Dog Day Afternoon), looky-loos and audiences around the world (with significant input from Seoul, Iceland and South Africa) get in on the act.  There’s a touch of another Lumet classic, Network, in the jabs at trash TV, though this is also very much in Clooney’s producer-as-auteur field of interest (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Good Night, and Good Luck). Foster – not hitherto much regarded as a director of suspense or comedy – does a great job of keeping the ticking clock going and wringing laughs from the variously demented folks who suffer indignities – from the assistant producer (Christopher Denham) having to try out impotence cures in the wings to the cameraman (Lenny Venito) working at gunpoint – to keep the show on the air.  The corporate conspiracy side of things is more rote, though Balfe is strong and there’s splendid untrustworthy-in-a-suit acting from Dennis Boutsikaris as an exec with a lot to hide.

O’Connell plays a loser, but is also hemmed in a little by the film’s approach – he isn’t quite sympathetic or scary enough to hold up his end of the siege (the equivalent character played by Colm Meaney in Alpha Papa was actually more effective) but that’s not the actor’s fault.  The film is naturally more interested in the Clooney and Roberts characters because its makers identify with them far more than with non-showbiz civilians.  Because of this it’s not as angry or affecting as it might be – but it is entertaining, suspenseful and funny.

Deep Focus: Money Monster - Film Comment Michael Sragow, May 12, 2016

On my way to the screening of Money Monster, I got stuck behind a gleaming white BMW with vanity plates reading “RVLTION.” I couldn’t help thinking of that car and those plates during this limousine-liberal melodrama about a deliveryman (Jack O’Connell) who holds a cable financial news clown (George Clooney) hostage for recommending a trading fund called Ibis.

Yes, that’s Ibis. Rhymes with Isis.

Loaded gun in hand, the working-class antihero, Kyle Budwell, sneaks onto a finance show’s live set in New York, forces Lee Gates, the buffoonish star, to don an explosive vest, and demands that Gates and his scheduled guest, Ibis CEO Walt Camby (Dominic West), explain how $800 million of stockholders’ investments could have gone up in smoke in one day. The company contends that a glitch in its unique high-speed trading algorithm was the sole culprit. Budwell doesn’t buy that. Unfortunately, Camby has canceled his appearance on Money Monster (the name of the show) and flown off (he says) to Geneva, leaving his Chief Communications Officer, Diane Lester (Caitriona Balfe) to dodge questions from a hookup between the Midtown studio and Federal Hall in lower Manhattan. Will Gates and his wily producer, Patty Fenn (Julia Roberts), prolong the conflict until they can chase Camby down and get some answers? Will the young man’s fury and despondency rouse their journalistic conscience and re-awaken their fellow feeling? All I can say is: as sure as his name is Budwell.

The movie starts out like a replay of Jon Stewart taking down Mad Money’s Jim Cramer—that is, if Cramer were a silver-haired, silver-tongued smoothie like Clooney’s Gates and if Stewart were a woebegone misfit like O’Connell’s Budwell, who placed a losing bet on a “stock tip of the millennium” with the only windfall of his life, the sale of his recently deceased mother’s home. Just as Stewart on The Daily Show ragged on Cramer about testifying to the solidity of Bear Stearns and generally embarrassed him with video clips, Budwell insists that Gates acknowledge touting Ibis as safer than a savings bank. When Gates refuses to own that statement, Budwell makes him watch himself saying it.

This public shaming is Budwell’s only accomplishment. His pregnant girlfriend (Emily Meade) scorns him for sinking their nest egg into Ibis and for sneaking down to the basement to read books. Reading aside, Budwell displays scant mental dexterity. It’s bucko Gates and his gal Friday, Fenn (directing him via earpiece from the control room), who must further this sad sack’s goal of bringing sleek fat-cat Camby to justice.

We’re supposed to identify with Budwell’s agony and desperation, yet the movie condescends to him even more than Gates does. When the cops try to get Budwell’s girlfriend to talk him down, and she rants at him instead, it’s played as a sick joke. (Several other plot twists go beyond plausible.) The director, Jodie Foster, and the screenwriters (Jamie Linden, Alan DiFiore, and Jim Kouf), don’t know what to do with Budwell—or O’Connell, either. This young actor has been an instinctive genius in British movies like David Mackenzie’s Starred Up (13), but he may be the rare English actor whose talents can’t cross the pond. He wasn’t up to playing a paragon of the human spirit, Louis Zamperini, in Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken (14), and as Budwell, his performance is all flaring nostrils and inchoate rage, giving way to wet-eyed vulnerability.

Early on, Gates pleads with his audience to purchase Ibis stock and drive up the price so that investors will get their money back and Budwell won’t take his life. The filmmakers don’t expect his TV fans to believe that he suddenly becomes a humanist who urges Americans to care for each other. But the portrait of the people who follow Gates’s show is more chaotic than complex. Some do appear moved by Gates’s plea, but others act as though it’s a game, and still others react to his ringing recommendations like Pavlov’s dogs to a bell. If the tone were more consistent and caustic, this film’s putdown of America’s mass-entertainment audience might have acquired some satiric weight. But Money Monster is little more than a hostage melodrama that generates comic relief by deflating inspirational clichés. Then, sadly, it gives into them.

At a fleet 98 minutes, Money Monster is too compact and superficially energetic to become boring. It’s heartening to see robust actors like Giancarlo Esposito and John Ventimiglia show up, even in stock cop roles. The cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, does a canny job of helping Foster camouflage clumsy plot turns with constant motion. The editor, Matt Chesse, cuts deftly among charged interchanges taking place on the Money Monster set and in the control booth, at Ibis headquarters, and in South Korea, Iceland, and South Africa.

The film hustles along, illustrating one slick mechanical contrivance after another as it plays out. Money Monster is the work of veteran Hollywood professionals, so perhaps it’s not surprising that the movie ends up celebrating a seasoned team. (Clooney and his longtime production partner Grant Heslov are two of the producers.) Too bad. When the film swerves from updating Dog Day Afternoon and Network and becomes Broadcast News with a gun to its head, the shift registers as part of a bait and switch. It not only beggars credibility, it also skews the meaning of the movie.

Apparently, decades of pandering haven’t blunted Gates’s communication skills, and Fenn has always been waiting for the chance to jump on a big exposé. It’s hard to fathom, much less believe, a supposedly heartwarming vignette near the finish. Have Gates and Fenn suddenly become idealistic muckrakers? Clooney, though game, is so clumsy at broad satiric comedy that it does come as a reprieve when he takes his twinkle down a notch, at least until he turns as sentimental as he was in his own The Monuments Men. (Where is the great actor who powered Michael Clayton?) Roberts’s opening ennui is so convincing that we’re glad she gets to slough it off and focus on calamity with steady X-ray eyes. (Foster actually does her best direction with the mysteriously alluring Balfe as Ibis’s surreptitiously righteous CCO.)

Still, it’s both tasteless and baseless for Foster and company to leapfrog over Budwell’s tragic destiny to focus on a tableau of the two middle-aged news pros realizing that they’re back on their true game. Money Monster tries to glide home on charm in an ugly context. It wants to be a responsible topical thriller, but the change in focus from the fed-up prole to the battle-hardened broadcast virtuosos is so misjudged that the movie comes off as socially unconscious.

Who are the criminals? - World Socialist Web Site Joanne Laurier

Jodie Foster's gripping, bitterly funny Money Monster is ... - The Verge Tasha Robinson

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Review: 'Money Monster' is old-fashioned issue-driven - HitFix Drew McWeeny

Movie Review: Jodie Foster's 'Money Monster' Is a Wall ... - The Atlantic David Sims

Alt Film Guide [Mark Keizer] also seen here: Money Monster Review: Contrivances, Cowardice Kill Message Film

Taking Hostages Won't Reform Wall Street or Fix Jodie ... - Village Voice Melissa Anderson

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Money Monster | A Fresh, Independent Voice In Film Criticism ... J. Olson from Cinemixtape

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Money Monster: the financial thriller that'll leave you ... - The Guardian John Patterson

Money Monster review - George Clooney goes Leslie ... - The Guardian Peter Bradshaw

Money Monster review – a shouty blend of The Big ... - The Guardian Wendy Ide

Film reviews: Jodie Foster's Money Monster, Bobby ... - The Independent Geoffrey Macnab

Didn't understand The Big Short? Then Money Monster is for you ... Robbie Collin from The Telegraph

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Money Monster Movie Review & Film Summary (2016) | Roger Ebert Christy Lemire

'Money Monster' review: Jodie Foster's hostage thriller struggles to ... Michael Phillips from The Chicago Tribune

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Foster, Norman

WOMAN ON THE RUN

USA (77 mi) 1950

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

With his lumbering frame and granite mug, Dennis O’Keefe was one of film noirs most endearing hard cases, and his presence is one of the many delights of Woman on the Run, Norman Foster’s 1950 romantic thriller about a San Francisco woman (Ann Sheridan) who, along with an intrepid journalist (O’Keefe), goes in search of her in-hiding husband after the man witnesses a murder. Frankly depicting marital estrangement while offering up a vivid, progressive portrait of feminine strength that’s scarcely sullied by one strangely misogynistic offhand comment (“Mrs. Johnson, didn’t your husband ever beat you?”), the film is a superb showcase for Sheridan, who balances resentment, fear, and ferocity with graceful fluidity while navigating the winding tale’s shadowy twists and turns. The actress’ forcefully nuanced performance is nicely counterbalanced by O’Keefe’s charmingly blunt one-dimensionality – which, for reasons I can’t quite articulate, remains irresistibly appealing – just as Foster’s story eventually offsets its occasionally languid, overly melodramatic plotting with a blistering nighttime carnival finale involving a speeding rollercoaster.

FilmsNoir.Net [Tony D'Ambra]

A great b-thriller from Foster, who had a (disputed) role in the making of Orson Welles’ Journey Into Fear (1943)  and directed Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948).  The  picture moves apace on the streets, tenements, dives, and wharfs of San Fransisco, with a novel climax at a beach-side amusement park.  A nice twist half-way through the movie ramps up the tension to the finale on and around a roller-coaster. Anne Sheridan is great in a role that moves from an indifferent wife in a failing marriage through a street-wise dame with a razor wit to the hysterical woman back in love desperately trying to save her husband’s life. The supporting b-cast performs well by playing stock characters with some considerable vitality and depth.

The movie’s noir credentials come not only from low-key lighting and sharply angled night shots, but from an intelligent screenplay that explores the ennui of a disintegrating marriage and its revival after the protagonists learn more about each other from other people than they can have imagined.   The savage murder of an innocent young cabaret dancer that gets in the way of the killer desperately trying to hide his identity, is off-screen,  but poignantly handled to add a tragic undertone to the story.

A truly engaging film.

Woman on the Run (1950) - Articles - TCM.com Sean Axmaker

The title is a tad misleading. The woman on the run in Woman on the Run is actually more of an amateur detective on the streets of San Francisco. Ann Sheridan is Eleanor Johnson, a woman searching for her husband Frank (Ross Elliott) with the help of dogged, fast-talking reporter Dan Legget (Dennis O'Keefe). Frank is a failed artist now doing window displays in a San Francisco apartment store and she's fed up with a marriage going nowhere fast. But when he goes into hiding after witnessing a murder and barely escaping an attempt on his own life, she dutifully warns him that the police are eager to track him down and get him into protective custody, which he believes will just make him a bigger target.

Director Norman Foster trained as a journeyman filmmaker in the thirties, learning how to make the most of a low budget and move a modest picture along while toiling on Charlie Chan pictures and other B-movies. Orson Welles hired him as an assistant on the ill-fated It's All True and promoted him to helm the exotic spy thriller Journey Into Fear, the only Mercury film that Welles didn't direct himself. Woman on the Run returns Foster to the shadowy world of killers and the city at night, but this time the city is San Francisco and Foster makes excellent use of location shooting, from the dynamic murder that opens the film to a striking montage sequence of Sheridan and O'Keefe in front of San Francisco landmarks. The low angles and tilted framing gives the shots a dramatic punch, but also suggests a world off balance, an appropriate state of affairs for her character. The climax takes the characters to a waterfront amusement park, a favorite film noir location to show characters uprooted from their familiar lives and thrust into chaos and confusion and alienated craziness. The rollercoaster in particular becomes a marvelous metaphor for the panic, helplessness, and emotional turmoil of the rider trapped on the ride.

Ann Sheridan was nicknamed "The Oomph Girl" (a name that she detested) by studio publicists to promote her as a Hollywood bombshell but she's better known by classic movie fans as a talented dramatic actress (They Drive By Night, 1940; King's Row, 1942) with a knack for both comedy and hardboiled toughness. This role showcases all three elements, with Sheridan dishing out sardonic cracks with deadpan snap and then softening as she discovers new dimensions of her estranged husband on her odyssey. It's refreshing to see in a film noir, a genre known for predatory relationships, one-sided love affairs and sexual obsession, a story about a rediscovery of affection that has been ground to indifference and resentment over time.

Dennis O'Keefe made the transition from light leading man to hard-boiled tough guy in low-budget crime movies in the forties and he combines the two for his character, a newspaperman with a mercenary streak and a snappy patter that could have come from the lively newspaper pictures of the early 1930s. This dogged, fast-talking reporter matches Sheridan's smart remarks with snappy repartee delivered with an all-American grin. Film historian and Film Noir Foundation founder Eddie Muller calls it "the best Dennis O'Keefe movie there is, in my estimation."

Filling in the supporting cast is a collection of memorable character actors: Robert Keith, a familiar face specializing in authority figures, as the cynical, seen-it-all police inspector; soft-spoken John Ford regular John Qualen as an affable co-worker at Frank's department store; J. Farrell MacDonald as a gruffly friendly retired sailor bumming around the boardwalk; Steven Geray, a diminutive Hungarian import who specialized in Eastern European characters both sympathetic and sinister, as Frank's concerned doctor; and Victor Sen Yung, who played Charlie Chan's "number two son" Jimmy in 11 movies and Tommy Chan in another five features, has a small role as a Chinese-American dancer who helps Eleanor's search.

Woman on the Run was distributed by Universal Pictures but it was independently produced and it became something of an orphan after its release, when the rights fell into the public domain. Since no studio had a financial incentive to preserve the picture, there was no one to take care of the elements. Muller tracked down a print in the Universal vault and screened it in 2003 at the Noir City festival, describing it as "a revelation--partly because it offered a travelogue of the city in all its mid-20th century glory, and partly because it was thrilling to find something so completely unknown that was so good." He was planning a full restoration when the sole known surviving 35mm print was destroyed in a fire at the Universal Studio lot. When he discovered pre-print elements in the vaults of the British Film Institute a decade later, he embarked on a campaign to finally restore the film and preserve a 35mm copy for future screenings. The restoration was undertaken by the UCLA Film Archive and premiered in 2015 at Noir City 13, fittingly enough back in San Francisco.

Review: Woman on the Run | everythingnoir

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Film Noir of the Week Floyd

Film @ The Digital Fix - Woman on the Run Clydefro Jones

The Long Wait of Norman Foster - Bright Lights Film Journal Jake Hinkson, April 30, 2011

Woman On The Run (1950) — Reel SF lists 19 pertinent locations, also the entire film on YouTube

Eye for Film Daniel Hooper

Morgan on Media [Morgan R. Lewis]

Woman on the Run | UCLA Film & Television Archive Steven K. Hill

Antti Alanen: Film Diary: Woman on the Run (2015 UCLA ...

#NoirSummer: 'Woman on the Run' with Ann Sheridan ... Daniel S. Levine

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Woman on the Run (Norman Foster, 1950) - Goodfella's ... Dave from Goodfella’s Movie Guide

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Mystery Loves Company, And TCM's Noir Movie Marathon ... Beth Accomando from NPR, June 12, 2015

Tonight's Movie: Woman on the Run (1950) - Laura's ... Laura’s Miscellaneous Musings

Mill Creek Musings: Woman on the Run (1950) | the motion ... Lindsey

Woman on the Run | Music Box Theatre

Woman on the Run, Good Friday Night Noir - TCM Message ... TCM Film Forum, June 4, 2015

Film Noir Foundation list of films restored

'Czar of Noir' reveals how crime melodramas became cool Lou Lumenick interviews “Czar of Noir” and Noir Fest founder Eddie Muller, June 3, 2015

Noir City shines a light on neglected artists | Film International Michael T. Toole interview with the “Czar of Noir” and Noir Fest founder Eddie Muller, January 28, 2012

TV Guide

Restoration of 'Woman on the Run' highlights Noir City 13 ... G. Allen Johnson from the San Francisco Chronicle, January 14, 2015

'Woman on the Run' a rediscovered must-see noir on TCM ... Jeffrey McGullion from the San Francisco Examiner, June 9, 2015

UCLA Film - Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan from The LA Times

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DVDBeaver.com [Gregory Meshman]

Woman on the Run - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fotopoulos, James

30.40

USA (5 mi) 2005

30.40 Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

One of the strangest and, to my eyes, under-elaborated films of the year, 30.40 is a five-minute video that seems to be in dialogue with certain aspects of the UCLA visual art scene without really making concrete connections. The piece begins with an icy elect(ron)ic blue screen, which serves as the ground for shifting images throughout the remainder of the running time. Several vaguely 3-D figures are superimposed alongside random 2-D images, and they never move. 30.40 is a series of static tableaux presented one after the other. The figures, whose relationship to sculptural reality was difficult for me to determine -- were they completely computer generated, like Shrek, or processed images of actual sculptural models? --, were slightly off-putting naked sex dolls, two large-breasted, clean-shaven porno women (one with flaming red hair, perhaps a nod to hentai porn) and one man with an oversized head, sporting a five o'clock shadow and a toothy, country-bumpkin grimace that reminded me of Billy Bob Thornton mutated in accordance with the facial proportions one associates with Down's Syndrome. Sometimes they squat in pre-copulation mode; other times they just stand side by side, pivoted to show their organs, backsides, or vacant stares. Fotopoulos evinces a familiarity with the distorted pornotopia attitudes of artists like Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, and especially Charles Ray. But part of the uncanny frisson of these artists' work comes from the fact that, in a gallery, we're forced to coexist with these lacquered humanoids. 30.40 plays like a set of cellphone photo captures, arranged into "video art" after the fact. This piece was commissioned by Mike Plante, shorts programmer for CineVegas, so it's entirely possible that Fotopoulos, an artist whose work I've admired in the past, was exploring a conceptual avenue particular to "Las Vegas" as a construct: sex tourism, random image interplay (cherry-BAR-lemon), and high-sheen artifice. But as shown by his masterful feature film Back Against the Wall, Fotopoulos is at his best when he explores the seamy side of the material world, not its garish faux-idealization.

Fox, Jennifer

MY REINCARNATION

USA (82 mi) 2011 Official site

TimeOut Chicago Matt Singer

In Buddhism, patience is one of the perfections to be practiced on the path to enlightenment. By that measure, Jennifer Fox (Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman) must be a near-flawless filmmaker: She spent 20 years chronicling the uneasy relationship between Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyal Namkhai Norbu and his son, Yeshi, who initially rejects his father’s path and resents Dad’s aloof parenting. It’s fascinating to watch Yeshi grow from a skeptical teenager into a spiritual leader—a transformation that still doesn’t bring him any closer to his father. The film could use one scene of the two men acknowledging their differences, but even without that, My Reincarnation won’t test your patience.

NewCity Chicago Ray Pride

The great strength of Jennifer Fox’s documentaries is her directness, and considering that her best-known work, “Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman,” is longitudinal in the extreme, a six-hour survey of her romantic life and the lives of women she meets across three years, from the ages of forty-two to forty-five, and her “My Reincarnation” (2010) encompasses twenty years of experience, it’s certainly a virtue. In “Reincarnation,” Fox has personal connection to Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyal Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche, for whom she was working as a secretary when she met his Italian-born son in 1989. The father-son dynamic when Yeshi opts out of the family business—to reject his “destiny” as a reincarnation of a late uncle, a revered teacher—offers Fox a chance to examine a range of culture and conflict while encompassing other personalities, including the Dalai Lama. There’s much to contemplate in the dogged, understated “My Reincarnation’s” brief running time, but there is clarity in sufficient measure. 82m.

My Reincarnation - Page 1 - Movies - New York - Village Voice Michael Atkinson

A mellow doc that seems all set to cash in on the “spirituality” market, Jennifer Fox’s new film was actually in production for more than 20 years, beginning when Yeshi Silvano Namkhai was a half-Italian acne-victim teen just learning that he’d been dubbed the reincarnation of a famous Tibetan yogi. The judgment was passed down by his world-famous Tibetan spiritual-leader dad, Rinpoche Chögyal Namkhai Norbu, and Fox wastes no time or footage placing the rebel-Euro-son-versus-iron-man-Asian-dad dynamic front and center. It’s a juicy setup that begs for a thick Oprah novel, not get-in-get-out nonfiction. In fact, Fox’s briskness leaves certain questions gaping open. As in, how cynical and derisive is she deliberately being of Rinpoche’s teachings, since all we get are trite homilies and vague advice? (In a seconds-long consultation, one terrified HIV-positive seeker is told, “Everything is relative.”) Can you film Buddhist instruction without seeming skeptical? Are Yeshi’s years of reticence regarding his appointed destiny an avoidance of “truth” or self-help baloney? Fox ends up clearly on Rinpoche’s team, but her film suggests a deep wariness with Eastern mysticism, of the needy Westerners who lap it up, and with figures like Rinpoche who exploit that jones. Which makes it, perhaps unintentionally, pointed and daring.

MY REINCARNATION Facets Multi Media

This epic documentary, 20 years in the making, traces the relationship between Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyal Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche and his Italian-born son. Director Jennifer Fox (Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman) was working as Rinpoche's secretary when she first met his son in 1989. Eighteen-year-old Yeshi had conflicting feelings about a father whom he saw once a year for three or four days, but whom other people constantly sought out for guidance and counsel. "They see him as a solution", he surmises, "but they forget that he is human." He was recognized at birth as the reincarnation of Rinpoche's uncle and master, and now he feels a great responsibility resting upon his shoulders. His growth from truculent resistance to a measured accommodation of his heritage is watched over by a father fulfilling his own ancestral destiny.

With her signature intimate entry to both family and icons including the Dalai Lama, Fox expertly distills a decades-long drama into a universal story about love, transformation, and destiny. In a world where indigenous cultures are lost and homogenized every day, My Reincarnation is a rare positive story of cultural transplantation, adaptation and renewal. It is a dramatic tale which is rewarding on many levels: as a study of exile; of Eastern spirituality in the contemporary West; as a classic father/son struggle; and not least as a contemplation of mortality, inheritance and spiritual continuance.

My Reincarnation: Movie Showtimes and ... - Washington Post Michael O’Sullivan

"My Reincarnation" is a fascinating, if inexpertly told, yarn. Its narrative flaws aren't enough to ruin the documentary by filmmaker Jennifer Fox, but they do weaken its power.

Part of the problem is built into the subject matter. Jumping around in time via two decades of footage, and covering multiple transmigrations of souls over at least three generations, "My Reincarnation" centers on Yeshi, the worldly, Italian-born son of exiled Tibetan Buddhist master Chogyal Namkhai Norbu.

The film is mostly the story of Yeshi's struggle to come to terms with the determination by Tibetan Buddhist elders that he is the reincarnation of his father's late uncle and former teacher, Khyentse. He died in Tibet, 10 years before Yeshi was born, while in detention by the invading Chinese. (Norbu himself is considered a Rinpoche, which is a Tibetan term of respect, meaning "precious one," and identifying him as an incarnation of a lama, or spiritual teacher.)

Got all that? Good, because I had to do 10 minutes of Internet research after watching the movie, just to tie up loose ends left by the movie's imprecise timeline. At one point, "My Reincarnation" appears to suggest that Yeshi's great-uncle Khyentse might not have died until after the boy was born. (In fact, Khyentse died in 1960; Yeshi was born in 1970).

On-screen titles pop up identifying scenes - shot in Italy, Massachusetts, Russia and elsewhere - as taking place, variously, in "1989," "six years later," "one year later," etc. But after a while, it's easy to forget where exactly we are in the time-space continuum.

It doesn't help that Yeshi talks about having dreams - not about his past life, as it turns out, but about the future. One such scene, set during a visit by Yeshi to his father's homeland, shows him recalling an earlier vision he had about just such a trip.

Maybe it's intentional. After all, belief in reincarnation is based on the premise that this life - or series of lives - is impermanent and illusory. There are plenty of such deep thoughts sprinkled throughout the film, along with a compelling story line about the relationship between a distant father - compassionate and wise to his students, but emotionally unavailable to his family - and his headstrong son.

That alone is a story worth telling. Fox's narrative skills may need sharpening, but the contours of the drama are still visible. "My Reincarnation" is a watchable, if frustrating, account of one man's resistance to his fate and his ultimate acceptance of it.

My Reincarnation - Movie Review - 2010 - Documentaries - About.com Jennifer Marin

Slant Magazine [Chuck Bowen]

Spirituality & Practice [Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat]

My Reincarnation Review By harveycritic - MovieWeb.com

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My Reincarnation (2011 Fox, Tibetan Buddhist ... - Ross Anthony Hollywood Report Card

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Variety Reviews - My Reincarnation - Film Reviews - Sydney ... Richard Kuipers

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Foy, Jon

RESURRECT DEAD: THE MYSTERY OF THE TOYNBEE FILES B- 80

USA (86 mi) 2010 Official site

The first thing that comes to mind about the makers of this documentary is that they have all too much time on their hands, as for over ten years they have been fascinated with following the mystery of whoever has been laying street tiles around Philadelphia and other urban centers with cryptic messages, called the Toynbee tiles, as they reference British historian Arnold Toynbee’s idea, a possible interpretation of the ending of Kubrick’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), suggesting humans are scientifically evolving to the point where they can molecularly recreate themselves after death, creating their own afterlife, replacing the idea of God and heaven, expressed in the Kubrick film during the final segment entitled Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite. The investigation begins in an era when there was no Internet, around 1987, where one was simply confounded by the presence of street tiles showing up all over the city of Philadelphia, wondering where they came from and who was responsible. Eventually one of the investigators was so excited he skipped school so he could explore the origins of this mystery at the public library on the brand new Internet, but it appears his investigative computer skills were sorely lacking, as the entire concept was still brand new. There were search engines, but Google hadn’t been invented yet. This first time director, who scored the music to his own film, discovered a group of three zealous individuals, also from Philadelphia, who seemed to be concerned about nothing else in life except the mystery behind this strange and mysterious occurrence. Together they started working on the film around 2005 (a year after the public unveiling of Google) and have been following their leads for the better part of half a decade, releasing this film at Sundance in 2011, where Jon Foy won the Best Director Award for a Documentary Film.

The principle investigators: Justin Duerr, initially seen as a possible suspect behind the mystery because his knowledge and fanaticism are so extensive, an art school dropout with a manic obsession about anything relating to this subject: Colin Smith, who appears to be the lead Internet guy, as he runs the Toynbee Tiles Internet message board known as Resurrect Dead Message Board - Home, and a guy who has sifted through mountains of Internet messages and possible clues: Steve Weinik, a photographer that documents the tilings, curiously familiar with this issue since grade school. What immediately strikes one about these guys is that they are good natured souls without any qualifications whatsoever in becoming sleuths, as they are purely amateurs, just ordinary guys who spend a lot of time on the Internet. This identification with the average viewer is one of the startling aspects of the film, as they represent exactly how people spend their time nowadays, usually parked in front of a computer checking out all sorts of information, becoming amateur sleuths where our collective computer searches have led Google to become one of the most successful businesses in the last decade. What these guys uncover, and how they uncover it, form the basis for the film, where it’s not all dry facts, but an assemblage of humorous as well as outlandishly impossible leads, all of which eventually aid in narrowing down the possible suspects. My favorite was a guy named “Railroad Joe” that used to work for the railroad, who spent countless lonely hours passing through nearly all of the affected cities in the dark of night, as his route was like a roadmap to the street tiles. The pace and sudden interest in the film spikes with the possibility that this is our guy, as everything fits, but boink—the guy’s been dead for years, so unless he came back from the dead to lay a few more titles, this is not our guy. This incident beautifully exposes the weakness of ordinary guys working without training, following leads and creating suspect profiles, building up all this false hope that suddenly fizzles and evaporates like the air was let out of a balloon.

This seems to be the kind of film conspiracy theorists would love, as the mastermind behind this operation, who claims to be only one man, leaves a series of clues that speak to his overly paranoid state of mind, where he thinks people are following him and trying to kill him, where in a moment of personal rage he rants “Kill all the journalists.” Perhaps he was referring to the lawyers in Shakespeare’s nasty little history play Henry VI, which deals with a series of bloody horrors between two rival royal families known as the Wars of the Roses. But like the Unabomber, the tiler leaves behind one tile that serves as his manifesto, a lengthy diatribe outlining his enemies which he describes as the Cult of the Hellion. This is all too surreal except that the tone of the film is joyously upbeat and humorous, as these guys find endless fascination in pursuing and unearthing every clue, where much of this resembles the gleeful innocence of Mark Borchardt in Chris Smith’s AMERICAN MOVIE (1999), where people can become obsessed and spend the rest of their lives following their own strange curiosities, which they idealize as dream projects. It’s amazing what lengths these guys go to in tracking down even the most unlikely possibilities, yet they’re all-in, reconfiguring how this all plays out in their minds, where they’re continually reevaluating the evidence, showing a surprising degree of sensitivity to the possible subjects, as they don’t wish to taint these individuals with the brushstrokes of their own mistakes and misperceptions, so they keep a careful distance, making sure of their facts before they intervene. But these guys are not 60 Minutes, and while their knowledge is fascinating and peculiarly mystifying, their success rate is abysmal, leaving the viewers wondering about becoming obsessed with personal pursuits and dreams, where after awhile, once you start chasing after the illusory windmills of Don Quixote, it’s impossible to stop.

Note: due to the sudden elevated interest in Toynbee tiles from the release of this film, there has been an outbreak in copycat tilers, where the original has now been replaced by a series of cloned tilers that are continuing to carry out the work of the original mastermind, which ironically meets the scientific definition of regeneration, where apparently his work will continue well after he’s dead and gone, not on planet Jupiter however, but right in his own home town.

Time Out New York [David Fear]

They started showing up in Philadelphia, these odd tiles carrying cryptic messages such as: Toynbee idea / in Kubrick’s 2001  / resurrect dead / on planet Jupiter. Soon, they appeared in other cities; some carried peripheral ramblings that suggested either a paranoid mind or master prankster was behind it all. Documentarian Jon Foy spent a decade following both the phenomenon and those who’ve tried cracking the code, and while his film offers little in the way of answers, it says volumes about delusional obsessives. Devote your every waking hour to hunting down what may be an elaborate art-project-cum-hoax, and you could find yourself going down a rabbit hole—or simply end up making an Errol Morris–lite essay that’s a mildly diverting curio at best.

NewCity Chicago    Ray Pride

Jon Foy’s “Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles” is a ten-years-in-the-making amalgam-cum-hybrid documentary that would sit as nicely in the 1970s as it does in the present moment. A nicely anachronistic conspiratorial air lurks in the film’s pursuit of “The Toynbee Tiles,” unsigned handcrafted slabs of art, asphalt and linoleum mosaics, that have been embedded in streets around the country. Philadelphia resident artist and musician Justin Duerr may be the most enthusiastic of Foy’s figures in pursuit of these strange, cracked artifacts, each with the message, “Toynbee Idea/In Kubrick’s 2001/Resurrect Dead/On Planet Jupiter.” From those few words, Foy and his amateur detectives follow leads that run from Chile to Larry King to a David Mamet one-act. The story, inevitably, becomes as much about dogged pursuit as it does pat solution. The forceful aspect of the filmmaking is the deft juggling of tense, of testimony and surmise and recreation: potential realities swirl rather than collide. Foy won the 2011 Sundance documentary directing prize; executive producer Doug Block (“51 Birch Street”) was instrumental in guiding this strange and compelling film to the festival, and to distribution. 88m.

RESURRECT DEAD: THE MYSTERY OF THE TOYNBEE TILES Facets Multi Media

Toynbee Idea in Movie 2001. Resurrect Dead on Planet Jupiter. Beginning in the early 1980s, hundreds of tiles carrying this cryptic message were found embedded in the asphalt of city streets as far apart as New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Santiago, and Buenos Aires. Street art? A prank? A message from space?

Filmmaker Jon Foy recounts how young artist Justin Duerr became fascinated with the strange plaques and, with two other "Toynbee tile" enthusiasts, Steve Weinik and Colin Smith, spent years trying to discover what they meant and who made them. The unlikely investigators uncovered increasingly bizarre clues: a newspaper article, a David Mamet play, a Jupiter colonization organization, and a Toynbee message that "hijacked" local news broadcasts. That the origins of a street tile can be so captivating is testament to both Duerr's passion and Foy's filmmaking. Artfully constructed, Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles thrusts us into the black hole of this fantastic mystery but also reflects on Duerr himself, and the personal connection he develops with finding an answer.

The A.V. Club [Alison Willmore]

A South Philadelphia neighborhood, the British historian/philosopher Arnold J. Toynbee, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and a one-act play by David Mamet all turn up as important elements in the investigation conducted during Resurrect Dead: The Mystery Of The Toynbee Tiles. It can, at times, feel like a DIY version of The Da Vinci Code. Instead of an oddly coiffed Tom Hanks, Jon Foy’s documentary has for its hero Justin Duerr, a Philly-based artist and grown-up punk who becomes entranced by a series of mysterious tiles that for years have turned up embedded in the pavement of his home town and other cities ranging from Pittsburgh to Santiago de Chile. “Toynbee idea in Kubrick’s 2001: Resurrect dead on planet Jupiter,” reads a typical one, an enigmatic declaration that Duerr and the two fellow obsessives he teams up with attempt to unpack as they look for the figure behind this strange work of guerilla art.

It’s a ride worth more for its journey than its destination. Resurrect Dead does offer a convincing but anticlimactic “solution” to the Toynbee tiles, but the elements along the way are what make it an engaging film. Duerr and his fellow amateur gumshoes scour the Internet, the library’s microfiche selection, and local bars, and turn up countless bits of intriguing lyricism—a man named Railroad Joe who came from a family of tombstone carvers, a giant piece of glass that was delivered to South America for use in one of the world’s largest telescopes, the secret pirate-radio area of a shortwave-radio convention. Foy’s giddy score and facility with filtering creative graphics and archival imagery into his own footage adds to the film’s sense of being an urban fairytale in which fascinating characters and secret histories lie hidden under every sidewalk shard.

Seemingly realizing that its mystery isn’t substantial enough to sustain the film on its own, Resurrect Dead turns its focus at times to Duerr, shuffling in interviews about him with his brother, his magnificently mustachioed friend, and his ex. A wiry, energetic figure, Duerr is interesting in his own right, but the film doesn’t delve deep enough into his life to make him, or his years-long Toynbee fondness, seem worthy of the screen time they’re given. It feels as though the film was hoping for a little more madness in the driven but entirely grounded Duerr, and a little less in the man he ends up believing is behind the tiles, one who puts the outsider in “outsider artist.”

Resurrect Dead: Toynbee doc offers unexpected ... - Globe and Mail Jennue Punter

Direct from the “truth is stranger than fiction” files, the fascinating, accomplished and surprisingly emotional new documentary thriller Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles should, at the very least, remind bustling city-dwellers that there are more intriguing sights in the urban landscape than the contents of their smart phones.

The film centres on the journey of Philadelphia artist and musician Justin Duerr, who was living in a squat and working as a courier in the mid-1990s when he began photographing and cataloguing dozens of large, handmade linoleum tiles embedded in the asphalt streets of his hometown. Most of these tiles contained what initially seemed to be cryptic message written in four lines – “Toynbee Idea / in Movie 2001 / Resurrect Dead / on Planet Jupiter” – often accompanied by side messages in smaller text making a paranoid-sounding statement about major media or government agencies.

After the library began offering computer access to the Internet, Duerr realized he was not alone in his obsession with discovering the meaning and creator of this guerrilla art. He also learned this urban mystery reached far beyond Philadelphia city limits. Beginning, it is believed, around 1987, hundreds of "Toynbee tiles” started appearing in major cities in the American east and Midwest and even a few cities in South America. The online universe contained hundreds of theories but few hard clues.

One late night in the winter of 2000, Duerr left a take-out joint and discovered a fresh tile in the middle of the street. Having come tantalizingly close to laying eyes on the creator, Duerr was both rattled and recharged. A flurry of media interest in the Toynbee tiles also surfaced around this time, but the reports were mostly “oddity” items that come at the end of a news broadcast or articles about the online buzz.

Enter Philadelphia native and filmmaker Jon Foy, who begins pounding the pavement (so to speak) in 2005, with Duerr and fellow tile enthusiasts Colin Smith and Steve Weinik in an intense, connect-the-dots investigation full of both dead ends and strange revelations.

The main narrative of Resurrect Dead, which won Foy the documentary directing award at the 2011 Sundance festival, charts the trio’s investigation. Some of the “dots” they connect include a South Philadelphia street address, a 1980 late-night Larry King radio phone-in show, a one-act David Mamet play, information from local shortwave radio buffs and messages that appeared on bus-stop handbills. To say how these connect would definitely be a spoiler.

But what elevates Foy’s impressive first feature (he also served as editor and composer of the dark, whimsical score) above, say, your average “unsolved mystery” TV episode, is the emotional connection he gradually builds between Duerr and the elusive creator of the Toynbee tiles. Duerr’s own story as a gifted, rebellious high school dropout, and his combination of confidence and fragility, make him a compelling character who not only makes us eager to join his quest but also helps us better understand the mind of an outsider artist.

Slant Magazine [Joseph Jon Lanthier]

The House Next Door [Arthur Ryel-Lindsey]

Village Voice [Eric Hynes]

Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles - JustPressPlay

Wired Eric Harshbarger

Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]

Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]

Twitchfilm [Kurt Halfyard]

On Technology and Media [Kendall Whitehouse]

Box Office Magazine [Steve Ramos]

exclaim! [Bjorn Olson]

Dustyisgodless [Dusty Wallace]

The Wooden Kimono [Joe Gastineau]

playbackstl.com [Sarah Boslaugh]

indieWIRE Anne Thompson from Thompson On Hollywood

New York Post [Kyle Smith]

New York Daily News [Elizabeth Weitzman]

Building a Mystery: The Toynbee Tiles and Jon Foy’s Filmmaking Quest director interview appears in Knowledge@Wharton, August 19, 2011

AV Club: director interview Elliot Sharp interview, September 21, 2011

The Hollywood Reporter [Justin Lowe]

Roger Ebert

The New York Times [Andy Webster] also seen here: New York Times

Toynbee tiles - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fraga, Jorge

THE NEW SCHOOL (La Nueva Escuela)

Cuba (89 mi) 1973

The New School Life in Cuban boarding schools, by Valerie Landau from Jump Cut

Fraga, Kristian

SEVERE CLEAR

USA (93 mi) 2009

Here is the truth about being a Marine that you won’t find on the local news. We’re loud. We drink too much, fight too much and swear too much. Truth be told, our rifles are the only things we think about more than sex. —First Lt. Mike Scotti

User reviews from imdb Author: brsc007 from United States

This is by far the best Iraq war film of the decade and definitely in the documentary category! However, do not consider this film your typical talking heads documentary. This is definitely a war film that really shows what it's like to be a soldier. You really get to understand what the mentality is as well as understand the brotherhood. I think all veterans, their families as well as current soldiers should see this but as well as the general public and politicians so that they can get a better appreciation of what war is and what soldiers go through as well as veterans coming home! If you like the brutal and tense battle scenes of Black Hawk down as well as the shear experience of blair witch or paranormal activity- meaning being absorbed in the film as well as shocked and scared et all, then go see this film. The score from Cliff Martinez will definitely keep you engaged as it is brilliant and the editing from the director Kristian Fraga is mesmerizing!

Time Out New York review [2/5] Nicolas Rapold

Like the big-budget thriller Green Zone, which is also opening this week, Kristian Fraga’s documentary catapults us back to the chaos of Iraq circa 2003. But instead of action figure Matt Damon, we get garish, staccato images and hard-bitten voiceover from First Lieutenant Mike Scotti; Fraga worked with the marine’s own MiniDV footage and journal entries, like a one-man War Tapes. Soldiers goofing off or kvetching, locals grinning or threatening, sprawling desert landscapes with burnt-out wrecks—everything zips by our eyes, thanks to the director’s penchant for editing together footage of mutilated corpses and tense gunfire way too snappily.

That’s arguably the point of most real-life wartime depiction—all extreme content and sheer sensory overload—but you don’t have to sell material like this, and the filmmaker, who hooked up with Scotti by chance, acts like a kid in a YouTube candy store. The soldier’s relentless reflections, sometimes spoken as if spat out, don’t provide much respite: It’s the equivalent of a being trapped on a long ride with the requisite cynical-joe philosopher in a fictional war movie. There’s a wealth of raw experience captured here, in every sense of the word, but Severe Clear still gets bogged down in a paradox that’s not uncommon in documentaries: insisting we’ll never know what fighting is like, but peddling a style that seems designed to baffle deeper understanding.

IFC [Matt Zoller Seitz] Page 3

"I Am a Camera" could be an alternate title for Kristian Fraga’s "Severe Clear." This documentary about one Marine’s experience in Iraq is opening for a one-week Oscar-qualifying run at New York's IFC Center (it’s part of DocuWeeks 2009, a July 31-August 20 program that includes 18 nonfiction features and a program of shorts). Fraga is a friend and a sometime filmmaking collaborator, so I hesitated to include the movie in this column for obvious reasons; I’ve never before reviewed a feature by someone I consider a close friend. I’m making an exception in this case, because "Severe Clear" needs to be seen and appreciated; it’s a great movie as well as a deceptively complex work of popular art.

Built around camcorder footage shot by former U.S. Marine and writer Mike Scotti, who participated in the 2003 advance on Baghdad, the movie blends traditional documentary devices and elements we associate with fictional war movies. Narrated by Scotti in a Michael Herr-style deadpan, broken up into numbered chapters and interspersed throughout with hand-scrawled titles, the movie is the book Scotti carried around in his head but never got around to writing. The result is equally indebted to Jonathan Caouette’s first-person documentary "Tarnation" and Stanley Kubrick’s "Full Metal Jacket."

There’s the expected amount of raw handheld footage of artillery barrages and gas mask drills, but Fraga also finds space for Scotti’s wistful remembrances of a friend who died on 9/11, and comic imagery of grunts acting like grunts on aircraft carriers and in desert encampments. One of the movie’s best sequences is Scotti’s monologue about what it means to be a Marine, which intercuts snippets of TV news video and straightforward archival training footage (the Official Image of the few and proud) with down-and-dirty images of Scotti and company dancing and cursing, pulling pranks and participating in "Jackass"-style stupidity, wrestling and dry-humping and otherwise acting like what they are: young men hopped up on testosterone. (The sequence is scored to the overture to Rossini’s "The Thieving Magpie" -- a cue that was famously used in another film about violence and social conditioning, Kubrick’s "A Clockwork Orange.")

Fraga’s goal is to create the motion picture equivalent of a first person, inherently unreliable memoir. What we’re seeing isn’t a dry representation of what happened, nor is it characterized as such. Events are compressed, heightened by sound effects and music, stylized through inventive transitions. We're seeing Scotti’s account of what happened -- memories recollected in tranquility, colored by his thoughts and feelings. If Fraga’s tone weren’t so aw-shucks humble, the movie’s fluidity and virtuosity would be more apparent; but if it were more apparent, "Severe Clear" wouldn’t be half as impressive. The movie is art posing as journalism posing as entertainment, no small feat.

Cliff Martinez’s dreamy score, Fraga’s sharp but largely invisible edits and Scotti’s straightforward prose combine to create an essential combat picture that would fit nicely on a double-bill with Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" -- not just for its non-ideological approach to a controversial war, but for its nonjudgmental depiction of a soldier’s life and mindset. It’s a must-see for anyone who’s interested in an honest look at war and its casualties, and essential viewing for anyone who has served in combat or knows someone that has.

DVD Talk (Jason Bailey) review [3/5] theatrical review, also seen here: Jason Bailey

We get the tip-off early on that Mike Scotti is more than a Marine lieutenant who happened to grab a video camera on his way to fight in the Middle East. As he packs his bags for his deployment to Iraq in January 2003, he tells us that he broke his previous camera when he strapped it to his body while rappelling out of a chopper. "But I got the shot, though," he grins. That's not something a soldier shooting home movies says. That's filmmaker talk.

Director Kristian Fraga's Severe Clear assembled the hours of tapes Scotti shot in 2003, as his company traveled the Persia Gulf to Kuwait, and through Iraq as part of the first push to Baghdad. In its specific focus on that moment of the War on Terror, it's something like a non-fiction version of Generation Kill. As with that show, it offers an honest and gloss-free look at the men on the ground--presumably thanks to Scotti's status as a member of the company, his fellow troops feel free to be themselves, so it often feels like we're eavesdropping, catching these guys with their guards down. "I think every marine is inherently loyal and a little bit crazy," he notes, and there's no evidence to the contrary here.

Though Scotti is not the credited writer/director, Fraga takes great pains to present his story as a first-person narrative; the footage of his mission is supplemented by voice-overs of journal entries and letters home. It lives in the present tense with him--he does not comment from the vantage point of the present day, either to the comments over others (those infuriatingly inaccurate Bush, Cheney, and Powell clips are allowed to speak for themselves) or himself. That makes the voice-overs about why he's there all the more unfortunate; he carries a picture of a high school friend who died in the 9/11 attacks as a reminder of why they're there ("I just have to look at my picture of Beth and I know we're doing the right thing"), talks of the mission being "revenge" and "payback for September 11th," and asserts, "there will be no debate once we find Saddam's weapons."

By the end of the film, he will have some different things to say. You start to sense the frustration of the marines early on, as they point out their weak equipment, or when, in the midst of an unsuccessful translation attempt, Scotti remarks into camera, "Note to Secretary of Defense: next time we invade a country, you might wanna send a couple more guys who speak the native fucking language." By the end of the film, as his frustration mounts, Fraga allows himself a few ironic counterpoints, like playing Rumsfeld's "henny penny the sky is falling" comments over chaotic video of looting, bloodshed, and bodies in the Iraqi streets. Those moments pack a punch, as do the unfortunate truths of Scotti's final letter home from Iraq.

There is, unsurprisingly, an abundance of handheld footage, and folks who get woozy from a surplus of that would be well-advised to stay away. Some of the post-production filmmaking is a little sloppy as well--there are clear mistakes and occasional typos in the subtitles (you "breathe in" air, not "breath in"), which are frequently required because of the poor audio quality from the built-in condenser microphones typical of handheld consumer cameras.

There's also the issue of overkill; there has been, as you might have noticed, an overabundance of Iraq-related documentaries over the past several years, from the intellectual policy analysis of No End in Sight to the media analysis of Control Room to the investigations of Standard Operating Procedure and Ghosts of Abu Ghraib to the personal profiles of The Ground Truth and Body of War to the partisan bomb-tossing of Uncovered and Fahrenheit 9/11. Even this kind of up-close, handheld account of the conflict has been done before, in films like Gunner Palace. To be frank, there's a glut of these movies, and this late in the game, a documentary has to be extraordinarily powerful, or gut-wrenching, or moving, in order to stick out from that pack. Severe Clear isn't quite that good. But it does have some keen insights and valuable footage, and it conveys a palpable sense (the fires, the bodies, the smells) of its subjects' day-to-day lives.

Spout.com SpoutBlog

SEVERE CLEAR – The Stench of Wa... Michael Tully from Hammer to Nail

filmsoundoff.com [Ted Faraone]

Slant Magazine [Andrew Schenker]

indieWire Eric Kohn

Film-Forward.com Brendon Nafziger

A Soldier's Perspective [CJ]

Boxoffice Magazine review Sasha Schieron

The Village Voice [Aaron Hillis]

The Hollywood Reporter review Frank Scheck

Variety (Ronnie Scheib) review

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review

Frammartino, Michelangelo

LE QUATTRO VOLTE (The Four Times) B+ 91

Italy Germany Switzerland (88 mi) 2010 Official Site

This is cinema of the sublime, a rare instance where it’s near impossible not to be amused and enchanted by a director’s vision and imagination. A few years back there was a festival film called HUKKLE (2002), a near wordless film from Hungary that drew many admirers for its unusual format, basically telling a story with few words. This does the same, only there are no words whatsoever and there’s little, if any, storyline. Instead there’s a series of images shown in a documentary manner, though one wonders if it even fits the documentary format. First and foremost, the film is utterly gorgeous, shot by Andrea Locatelli in Calabria, Italy, easily the most beautiful film seen so far this year where the focus of attention is the verdant green rolling hills where a herd of goats grazes in a natural state of grace. This is Bresson’s Balthazar (1966) without the Sisyphus-like series of human horrors that follows its short lifespan on earth. These goats already live in their own paradise, free from any human interference save for the constant barking of herder dogs and the worn out footsteps of an aging shepherd who has a hard time keeping up anymore, who has to continually stop and rest along the way, where amusingly, and politely, the goats wait for him to sit down before they rush ahead along the narrow pathway through the woods. The goats themselves are natural scene stealers, as these are among the healthiest goats ever to grace the screen and they frolic and freely jump onto anything they can climb, showing a rare exuberance in the wild, where the constant bleating has a calming effect. But it’s the beauty of their environment that holds the key to this film, as that ultimately is the film’s subject. The goats are simply non-professional actors willing to work cheaply, adding their own unadulterated realism to every shot, shown using long, extended takes and natural sound.

As he herds the goats back home where they spend the night in a gated pen, the shepherd visits the church where he picks up a package of dust collected from the floors of the altars, which he places in his water at night as his medicine. Come morning, there is a rooftop shot overlooking the goats laying in their outdoor pen as a truck pulls up and parks nearby, as the occupants disappear and slowly a procession passes down the street, where afterwards a poor girl is penned in by the herder dog that continually prevents her from passing, an amusing game between man and beast that idly passes the time until the girl is finally left unimpeded. The dog is more interested in kicking the rock out from underneath the truck’s tire, causing a near catastrophe in the making. But the camera amazingly swings away in the opposite direction as the viewer can only imagine what happened, an interesting diversion before swinging back and showing a truck that rolled downhill backwards through the goat’s pen, as they are now milling around the street like curious bystanders. This is a particularly humorous sequence as interior shots show goats bounding up the stairs, some standing on tabletops, others just bunched together around the poor shepherd who never made it through the night. As the villagers carry his casket and lay it to rest, one can still hear a heartbeat which is quickly segued by a newborn goat falling out of his mother’s amniotic sac, dropping to the ground where it remains squashed on its knees until it can gather enough strength to stand. This gorgeous white kid goat becomes the focus of the camera’s attention, seen in various stages with other goats, both adult and baby goats, where their interaction couldn’t be more human, as the babies are cleverly mischievous at play and can’t wait for their mothers to return when left alone in a cleanly swept barn all day.

One of the most transcendental shots is following this white kid goat as it passes through the mountainside hills and gullies with the bigger goats, but gets stuck in a dry gulch that the others easily cross, losing contact with the herd. With utter effortlessness, the vulnerability of the goat is exposed by its unanswered bleats, a heartbreaking moment that may be the shot of the film as after wandering aimlessly all day he finally lays to rest at night beside a giant tree. After a quick series of shots that hold the same image affixed during changing seasons, the focus is shifted to the tree, which becomes the subject of the annual Spring Tree Festival. In a visualized pageantry, dozens of villagers are seen climbing and surrounding the tree in an attempt to harvest it, a largely symbolic gesture that signifies the season for harvesting and the gathering of wood for fuel. Later more trees are subsequently reduced to ordinary sized firewood that is charred in a hand built smoker. This ancient ritual is a painstakingly deliberate process of building the hut out of sticks and mud, then slowly packing and drying the mud until it can withstand heat, adding smoke holes for ventilation, transformed into a giant smoker that turns the wood into usable charcoal, which is later distributed throughout the village. This is a beautifully edited, naturalistic, cycle of life film that inventively keeps changing the focus of the film, using plenty of wry humor and exquisite imagery that connects one section to the next, always finding involving footage that shows ageless wisdom and maturity behind the camera. This is extremely enjoyable filmmaking, highly original and compelling throughout. While the cyclical nature is a story in itself, it’s the beauty of the landscapes, the rooftop overviews, and the inventive compositions that continue to delight the viewer, as it’s easy to become transfixed by the near Biblical austerity of a timeless place that continues to exist in the present much as it has for centuries.

Le Quattro Volte Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Geoff Andrew

From dust to dust… Frammartino’s second feature echoes the likewise wonderful Il Dono in being set in an impoverished Calabrian village, in its often drily comic, wordless, ellipitical narrative, in its exquisite images, and in its focus on time and ritual, life and death. The four minimalist ‘stories’ in the cyclical narrative here suggest an almost pantheistic take on the world, shifting from the human (an old goatherd who mixes church dust with water for his cough), through the animal (a newborn kid) and vegetable (a tree cut down for a village festival), to the mineral (charcoal burned by locals). Each transition evokes rebirth, but fear not: the film’s philosophical concerns are contained within a larger poetic schema that allows for much humour: herds of goat provide laughs aplenty, and one virtuoso long take boasts a brilliant comic performance from a dog. Very special.

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young]

Reliant on images and sounds rather than dialogue, this ambitiously understated study of life in and around a tiny, hilltop Italian village observes proceedings with an almost documentary-style detachment. Demanding in ways that may well perplex and infuriate some – especially on a first viewing, when it’s perhaps difficult to grasp exactly what’s going on and why – the picture is sustained by a delightful, original strain of humour that prevents it from becoming excessively ponderous or precious, and by writer/director Frammartino’s skill at choreographing non-human protagonists to become key players in his narrative. The main “story”, such as it is, concerns an elderly, ailing, religious goat-herd, his goats, and his jaw-droppingly smart dog, though there are other sections devoted to the weird rituals of a local festival and to the laborious work of the district’s charcoal-burners. Scene by scene,The Four Times builds into an offbeat, deceptively complex study of how communities are created and sustained, the interconnectedness of all things, and the droll weirdness of both natural and human phenomena.

Visit our Blog for reviews of individual films Doug McLaren from Cine-File, March 19, 2011

Michelangelo Frammartino’s sophomore film is a transcendent work, by far one of the best films to screen at the Toronto International Film Festival last year and likely one of the best to screen at this year’s EU Festival. Following Pythagoras’ notion of the four-fold transmigration of the soul from human to animal to vegetable to mineral, the film contains four possible chapters, progressing/regressing from an aged goat herder to a tree rendered to charcoal. Lacking dialogue and barely containing a plot, the film relies on Frammartino’s superb pacing and his ability to construct a series of seemingly random events into a theological extrapolation of Jacques Tati’s filmic oeuvre. Indeed, this is Tati written for the cosmic scale. The camera’s omniscient placement gives a perceived anticipation of all events, and the film’s long, static shots engross the viewer with the beauty of Italy’s mountains, providing Frammartino the chance to weave thematic threads throughout the frame. This being a film about the transitive soul, we begin to see its presence in everything, from the dust that falls in the chapel to the goats that roam the hillside. There is a sublimely wry sense of humor throughout much of the film, but it drops away in the last third, as the tree that may or may not be the transmogrified body of our elderly herder is segmented and shipped off to be turned into charcoal. With almost the same solemnity and patience as Tarkovsky’s bell-casting scene in ANDREI RUBLEV, we see our fresh-cut protagonist piled up, buried, and smoked into its final, mineral state. Considering the braided and hermetic nature of LE QUATTRO VOLTE, it would perhaps be ideal to screen the film as an infinite loop, allowing the viewer to ruminate at the film’s own perennial pace. As it is, buy a ticket for each screening: you will want to see this a second time. (2010, 88 min, 35mm)

exclaim! [Kevin Harper]

Director Michaelangelo Frammartino is said to have stated at the film's public festival screening, "The audience must do the work." This may sound like a challenge, and it is, but the reward reaped is bountiful.

Virtually free of dialogue, The Four Times unfolds ever so slowly, drawing the audience into a completely immersive experience. Rife with dry, yet surreal, humour, an elderly shepherd passes on and we see his spirit pass into a newborn baby goat, a tree, a lump of coal and finally, dust evaporated into the air. It's a simple setup for a story, but Frammartino holds the viewer's interest with such compelling imagery that it's a sight to behold.

The first half-hour of the film may have viewers wondering exactly what course the film is taking, and what they will take away from it. But stay with it — even as each scene is a singular masterpiece, it takes well into the film's refreshingly brief 90-minute run time to begin to discover the "story." Once the spirit journey becomes clear, the cohesive whole of the film takes hold.

Watching the shepherd's final days, along with his ceremonious end, puts the viewer in the camera's eye, as Frammartino allows long, lingering shots to incredibly stage minor miracles and catastrophes. The animal work is especially stunning, with such natural presence from the goats one would think they read the script.

The Four Times encapsulates truly stunning filmmaking in 2010 — elements feel at once totally familiar yet unlike anything yet seen. A truly artistic exploration of the passage of life and spirit without ever appearing self-consciously "arty," Frammartino's matter-of-fact view of life and the afterlife is touching, without any sense of cloying sentimentality. See it with a friend.

Review: Le quattro volte - Film Comment Nicole Armour from Film Comment, March/April 2011

Combining documentary and fable, Le quattro volte depicts life in an unnamed hilltop town in Calabria, Italy’s southernmost region. The village is surrounded by a vast tract  of forested countryside that beautifies and isolates in equal measure. Nature here is not the stuff of bucolic idylls but rather as Hayao Miyazaki conceives it: imposing and awe-inspiring. Quietly and with formal rigor, Michelangelo Frammartino’s film observes the community’s daily labors and religious ceremonies, using stationary long shots and extended takes that allow the pastoral beauty and the inhabitants’ rural practices to speak for themselves. But a deep sense of mystery abides as the film contemplates small-scale regional life and the nature of existence simultaneously—one of several ways in which the mundane is fused with the expansive. 

Organized into four sections, Le quattro volte eschews the notion that man is at the center of the universe (or of cinema for that matter) by attentively depicting a cycle of transmigration through its human, animal, vegetable, and mineral stages. The depiction begins with the daily activities of a goatherd who leads his animals to pasture and back again. Apart from a nagging cough, he’s virtually silent, leaving ample room for the goats to steal their scenes. One morning, the goatherd doesn’t turn up as usual. The goats go to his home to find that he’s died in his sleep. Here Frammartino abruptly cuts to the birth of a kid, with as little fanfare as when an apple falls from a tree. Instinctively, the newborn animal begins to walk almost immediately—a monumental sight. During its first journey to pasture, the kid becomes separated from the herd. A tiny imprint within this seemingly eternal forest, it wanders alone, eventually coming to rest at the foot of a towering fir. This tree is then shown over several seasons before being felled, hauled to the village, and hoisted up as part of an elaborate festival ceremony. There are more villagers present for this event than in any other scene, but they appear as one large mass rather than as individuals. When the celebration ends, the tree is stripped and sawed into pieces, then delivered to local charcoal-makers and added to a pile of logs. The wood is then arranged to form a dome, and at its center, what resembles a funeral pyre is lit on fire.

The town’s religious traditions derive from both Catholic and pagan sources. In a lengthy slapstick sequence that takes place in a single tracking shot, villagers walk in a religious procession wearing Roman costumes and carrying a large wooden cross. When the goatherd’s dog attempts to protect the goats by darting out and barking, the participants break both character and the solemn mood to shoo him away. The interaction is hilarious because the dog is simply behaving naturally, but it also shows the procession to be a performance and an interruption of daily life. Dog and man are at odds since, being an animal, the collie is incapable of either respecting the villagers’ iconography or making the imaginative leap necessary even to conceive of symbols. Like the ceremonial tree, the dog remains resolutely earthbound. The procession passes through town and out past the goats’ pen, echoing the goatherd’s daily journey with his flock. The old man’s age and solitude suggest a long-standing connection to the natural world, and when the goats enter his quarters to discover his corpse, they not only bear witness to his life but to the end of their joint existence.

Earlier, observing another pagan rite, the goatherd trades milk for dust collected from the floor of the village church, which he dissolves in water and drinks at night before sleeping. During one of these exchanges, Frammartino cuts away to focus on dust motes suspended in shafts of light. The goatherd’s practice seems superstitious but is a way of acknowledging that we all breathe the same air. Everyone around him already takes these particles into their lungs, and ingesting them is his last bid at maintaining his corporeal existence. This sense of material interconnection pervades Frammartino’s movie and defines the villagers’ lives: they drink animals’ milk, eat plants grown in the soil, and cook and keep warm with charcoal. By calling attention to the dust, the director emphasizes the fragile and invisible, the small specks of matter that make up the whole. Long before we finally see the coal-making process, the film reverberates with its sounds, caused, we eventually learn, by the thudding of large paddles against the sides of the dome. This percussive thump unites the region’s varied activities, a collective heartbeat linking all things in time and space.

SBS Film [Simon Foster]

An old shepherd lives his last days in a quiet medieval village perched high on the hills of Calabria, at the southernmost tip of Italy. He herds goats under skies that most villagers have deserted long ago. He is sick, and believes to find his medicine in the dust he collects on the church floor, which he drinks in his water every day.

The travails of a Calabrian spirit through four earthly forms makes for a unique and captivating meditation on existence in Michelangelo Frammartino’s Le quattro volte.

For audience members who miss the beats in Frammartino’s wordless narrative, the film will be a frustrating, interminable parade of pretty images and well-staged but pointless setups. But those attuned to the quartet of inter-related shorts that capture profoundly the integration of a spiritual entity with its Calabrian community surrounds – will be swept up in its warmth and its ‘ashes-to-ashes’ existential symmetry.

The opening act details the daily routine of an elderly, ailing goat-herder. He coughs incessantly, each hack draining a little more life from him. He collects ash from the local church, which he mixes with water as a night time elixir. His few earthly possessions consist of his goat herd and trusty sheepdog – a combination that, ironically, sets in motion the events of the old man’s final hours. This sequence, an extended single shot that takes in the staging of a Roman passion play procession, the astonishing antics of the dog and the accidental release of the goat herd from their pen, is an accomplished piece of filmmaking.

The elderly man’s passing leads to the film’s most captivating sequence, formed around the short life of a young goat. From its graphic birth, Frammartino’s static camera captures the kid (whose bleating continues the audio cues established by the man’s cough) as he frolics with the flock; the director’s skill at subtly anthropomorphising the goat’s personality is a joy to watch. Upon being separated from the herd on his first foray into the countryside, he is drawn by the strange familiarity of an enormous tree (the same tree beneath which the shepherd once rested), where he lays for the final time.

The tree, itself now imbued with the spirit, becomes an integral part of the village life as the centrepiece of the annual Spring Tree Festival (an event captured by documentarian Vittorio De Seta in his award-winning 1959 short, The Forgotten, which surely inspired this portion of Frammartino’s film.) Its symbolic function fulfilled, the tree is destined for the traditional furnaces that create the coal that warms the village, including the church. And with that, the journey is complete…

The young director captures the people of the mountain village and its surrounds with a lyricism that is both deeply romantic and observant of the long-established customs of the centuries-old settlement. (Frammartino’s parents were raised in just such a place.) Forest and cobblestone brick exist as one, as the camerawork of Andrea Locatelli suggests – at times, his lens soars above the fir trees of the woods, then juxtaposes it with the sparse, dark corners of the candlelit homes. The film’s sense of place is confidently defined, so too its abstraction of time.

Le quattro volte becomes somewhat mired in the villagers’ routine in its third act. The melancholy of the elderly man and the playfulness of the young goat give way to a more pedestrian section involving the fate of the tree trunk. But in a film that champions the the overall journey as a representation of a truly spiritual existence, these final scenes are crucial to Frammartino’s intent. His deceptively simple film is, in fact, brimming with universal wisdom and life-affirming sincerity.

The Four Times (Le quattro volte) Michael Sicinski from The Academic Hack

The House Next Door [Aaron Cutler]

Eternal Sunshine Of The Logical Mind [Bob Turnbull]

Edward Champion [Edward Champion]

Cannes 2010. Favorite Moments: Days 5 & 6 Daniel Kasman from The Auteurs, May 19, 2010

CANNES REVIEW | Spirituality and Goats: “Le Quattro Volte” Eric Kohn at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 22, 2010

The Four Times (Le Quattro Volte) — Inside Movies Since 1920 Vadim Rizov from Box Office magazine

Sound On Sight (Simon Howell)

Screenjabber.com [Justin Bateman]

Phil on Film [Philip Concannon]

User reviews from imdb Author: Pieter Willems from Amsterdam, The Netherlands

User reviews from imdb Author: muon0101752249 from Reykjavík, Iceland

Cannes 2010. Michelangelo Frammartino's "The Four Times" David Hudson at Cannes from The Auteurs, May 21, 2010

Natasha Senjanovic at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 16, 2010

Variety Reviews - Le quattro volte - Film Reviews - Cannes ... Jay Weissberg

Franchi, Paolo

THE SPECTATOR (La spettatrice) B+ 90

Italy (98 mi) 2004

A truly gorgeous looking film, slow, brooding, using soft focus accentuating the color blue, with soft, cool jazz playing underneath, it has the look and feel of Michael Mann without the rock music or the violence. Barbora Bobulova is the impeccably beautiful lead who lives in the apartment across the window from another impeccably dressed man, and in her silent world, she watches him. While she exhibits a cool demeanor, seemingly not in need of special attention, she inexplicably becomes preoccupied with this man, actually following him to another city where she can keep her eyes on him, leaving a note for her girl friend explaining she must do this, “at all costs.” The film then veers into a choreography of voyeurism with missed opportunities, close calls, near misses, where she is seen in the lower corner of the frame dressed in a black overcoat watching him wherever he goes. There’s a bit of weirdness to all this, as it plays on the audience’s imagination as well, as we’re constantly anticipating what she’s going to do, like we’re locked in a mental labyrinth trying to find our own way out. Most will probably not like this as much as I do. This is a style over substance film, and I grew up on this Italian style. This film reminded me of my youth when films like this were plentiful, French, Italian, German, all great looking films featuring beautiful nude women engaged in some of the strangest fantasy sequences. Call this a daydream, but it works for me.

2005 Syracuse International Film and Video Festival Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Interestingly, maybe even intelligently bad, but bad all the same. This is the story of an oh-so-European existential problem, a woman with virtually no discernable subjectivity. This can work like gangbusters on me (cf. She's One of Us) when it's done right, but here Franchi channels it into a terminally vague stalker narrative, his protagonist, Valeria, coming off like a distaff Tom Ripley, leaving us never sure just how far she'll go. All this could have possibly worked, to an extent, but unfortunately Franchi (in his first at-bat) shows few gifts as a filmmaker. His compositions are flat and negligible, his direction of actors awkwardly bland. When something striking enters the frame, like red brake lights through a bus window, it's clearly by accident, the way a broken clock is correct twice a day; almost immediately the flashes of style dissipate and the general near-competence surges to the fore once again. For much of the running time, it appeared that Franchi was employing a smart (if mishandled) structural conceit -- fading immediately to black any time sex, violence, or a dramatic twist occurred. Thus, I thought, he's calling attention to our own spectatorship, denying us the conventional pleasures of narrative cinema. But then, an hour in, he gives us a sex scene, and my hypothesis went out the window. Reasonably well-written, and never aggressively poor, The Spectator is the sort of film that despite its faults (maybe because of them) could have slipped undetected into the 2003 New Directors / New Films line-up, been gently but firmly dismissed by Stephen Holden, and sank without a trace. Instead, even that sad fate has eluded it.

Franco, James

AS I LAY DYING

USA (110 mi) 2013

Los Angeles Review of Books - James Franco On His Adaptation Of ... Michael Bibler interviews James Franco from The LA Review of Books, May 15, 2013

WHEN YOU STUDY Southern literature, it sometimes feels like all roads lead to William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, even if you had no intentions of going there. Case in point: while researching for a book on Truman Capote, I found a review he wrote in 1949 about — of all things — a modern dance adaptation of As I Lay Dying. And this discovery led me to a whole string of adaptations of the novel, including a French avant-garde mime drama, an opera, different forms of physical theater, and a multimedia performance with marionettes.

Now, 73 years after the novel’s publication, Faulkner’s vision is finally coming to the silver screen, adapted and directed by James Franco, who also stars in the role of Darl. Filmed on location in Faulkner’s northern Mississippi, the film follows the epic journey of the Bundren family as they battle flood, fire, injury, and insanity to bury the mother, Addie, in her hometown of Jefferson. The novel is told in a series of 59 monologues spoken by 19 characters, giving it the feel of both a fragmentary dramatic script and a series of internal meditations, making it exceedingly difficult to translate to other media. As Mr. Franco explains below, bringing the novel to film poses interesting opportunities and challenges for anyone trying to capture and reimagine both the peasant realism and the modernist surrealism of Faulkner’s self-proclaimed tour-de-force. The film has already generated a great deal of buzz and will no doubt be the subject of much discussion, academic and otherwise, in the years to come. As As I Lay Dying debuts at the Cannes Film Festival this week, Mr. Franco granted me this email interview about his adaptation.

Cannes Film Festival 2013 review: As I Lay Dying ... - The Independent Geoffrey Macnab at Cannes from The Independent, also seen here: Geoffrey Macnab

The Great Gatsby isn’t the only adaptation of a classic American novel screening in Cannes this year. Also premiering is a film version of William Faulkner’s 1930 novel As I Lay Dying directed by and starring the prolific James Franco.

Faulkner’s modernist novel is an even tougher book to transfer to film than Gatsby. It has multiple narrators including one who speaks from beyond the grave, and is written in a stream of consciousness style. Franco’s approach to the task is bold and yields some startlingly beautiful sequences but, as feature length drama, it is also lumpy and very uneven.

This is a road movie of sorts. Addie Bundren, a mother of a poor southern family, dies early on. Her husband Anse and children resolve to honour her wishes and bury her in the fictional town of Jefferson. The problem is getting there. The family set off in a wagon on an epic journey.

In a bid to emulate Faulkner’s polyphonic narrative style, Franco makes heavy use of split screen and voice-over. This works well enough. So does cinematographer’s Christina Voros’s hand-held camerawork, even if the costume and production design are very traditional.

But the macabre humour and shaggy dog story elements in Faulkner’s novel aren’t really captured, and the filmmaking is far too solemn to yield many laughs.

The performances are uneven. Tim Blake Nelson is good value as the grizzled patriach Anse Bundren, who may seem devoted to his wife but is also a venal, deeply selfish figure, as concerned with his teeth as with his family. Franco has his moments as Anse’s impetuous son Darl but is arguably too clean-cut to play such a strange and unbalanced character.

It’s an honourable enough attempt at adapting Faulkner but ultimately seems too much like an academic exercise to convince.

As I Lay Dying Allan Hunter at Cannes from Screendaily

Baz Luhrmann revisited F. Scott Fitzgerald with 3-D fireworks and exuberant elan. James Franco takes a less flamboyant approach to another giant of twentieth century American literature but his adaptation of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is just as stylistically adventurous.

Franco attempts to capture and match Faulkner’s stream of consciousness prose with split-screen imagery, interior monologues and slow motion to create a film that might seem more at home as an art museum installation than a mainstream cinema release.

Franco’s aesthetic choices result in a ponderously paced slice of Southern Gothic that becomes something of an endurance test. Franco’s rising star and Faulkner’s literary reputation might create some modest theatrical curiosity in America, and Festival interest internationally, but as a nonplussed Bud Grossman remarks in Inside Llewyn Davis: ” I don’t see much money in it.”

Published in 1930, Faulkner’s novel follows a dirt poor, backwoods family intent on respecting their mother’s last wishes. Her eldest son Cash (Logan Marshall-Green) prepares a handsome coffin as Addie Bundren (Beth Grant) lies dying. Later, her widowed husband Anse (Tim Blake Nelson) and their offspring begin an epic journey to bury her rotting corpse in the nearby town of Jefferson.

It is almost a Biblical quest towards some promised land as they risk life and limb crossing treacherously swollen rivers, escape burning barns and unburden themselves of the secrets and sorrows they have previously kept hidden.

That sounds like an accessible, linear narrative, but Franco allows the entire film to drift in and out of split-screen using the two frames for different perspectives on the same events, keeping one half of the screen dark or providing some counterpoint between the two images.

It feels distracting and gimmicky without adding anything to the experience. Characters speak directly to camera, voice- over gives expression to interior monologues and the few dramatic moments tends to be drained of any potential to excite by being rendered in slow motion.

The prevailing mood of the film is one of inertia and its stubbornly resists viewers becoming involved in the plight of the lead characters with only the odd moment of humour or heartache escaping to the surface.

Franco himself appears as Addie’s son Darl and has assembled an able cast that includes impressive newcomer Brady Permenter as the youngest son Vardaman and Tim Blake Nelson as Anse. Gormless,toothless and with his mouth permanently agape, Nelson looks every inch the part of the none too bright patriarch but his thickly impenetrable accent, again true to Faulkner, makes a good deal of his dialogue impossible to comprehend adding another barrier to an already challenging film.

Kevin Jagernauth at Cannes from The Playlist

Boyd van Hoeij at Cannes from indieWIRE

Guy Lodge at Cannes from Hit Fix

Mary Corliss at Cannes from Time magazine

Cannes 2013: Franco's As I Lay Dying and Robichaud's Sarah ... Chuck Tryon at Cannes from Filmmaker magazine, also seen here: Chuck Tryon

Tom Christie Thompson on Hollywood

Daily | Cannes 2013 | James Franco’s AS I LAY DYING David Hudson at Fandor

Cannes: Directing 101 with James Franco - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir interviews James Franco from Salon, May 21, 2013

Ariston Anderson interviews Franco, Ten Lessons on Filmmaking from James Franco, from Filmmaker magazine, May 21, 2013

Logan Hill interviews Franco from The New York Times, May 21, 2013

As I Lay Dying Review - Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy

Leslie Felperin at Cannes from Variety

Catherine Bray at Cannes from Time Out London

Cannes 2013: As I Lay Dying – first look review Peter Bradshaw at Cannes from The Guardian

Franco, Jesús

VAMPYROS LESBOS

Germany Spain (89 mi) 1971

Vampyros Lesbos Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine

Jesus Franco's Vampyros Lesbos is a pyscho-sexadelic celebration of soft-core lesbianism and vampire lore. The sexy Linda Westinghouse (Ewa Strömberg) is lured into the film's erotic world of vampirism by the even-sexier Countess Nadine Carody (Soledad Miranda, who was killed shortly after the film finished shooting). Nadine's seaside abode is a minimalist's wet dream; Eames-era furniture is the perfect compliment for the film's erotic stripteases. Unlike some of Franco's more rushed productions, Lesbos is effortlessly dreamlike if not entirely loopy. At its best, Lesbos is an old-fashioned celebration of lesbian angst; indeed, Nadine's hypnotic calls to Linda could be the repressed wails of the female subconscious. Franco's attention for color and overwrought metaphors (here, kites and scorpions figure prominently) adds to the film's sinewy allure. If anything, check it out for the film's legendary retro soundtrack.

Girls, Guns and Ghouls Boris Lugosi

This little treasure is probably one of Spanish cult auteur Jesus Franco's best-known films. With his original muse, the stunning Soledad Miranda, starring as the main vampiress character, there's also a wonderful, psychedelic soundtrack that I believe has been made popular by sampling sections of it in some modern techno music. Filmed in Istanbul, there's some amazing scenery and settings, a gorgeous retro-seventies look to the decor and clothes - dig the sunglasses above that Soledad's wearing, sheer Heaven - and a charismatic performance, as usual, from Soledad herself. Let's take a look at the film.

We open with one of Franco's typical bohemian nightclubs, where Soledad is performing a bizarre number with a voluptuous (and nude) blonde. This number consists of Soledad, in a flowing read scarf that appears many times throughout the film, and lingerie, dressing the blonde woman slowly in another set of lingerie. All this is accompanied by frenzied jazz and sitar music. Another blonde woman, Linda Westinghouse, (Ewa Strömberg) sits aroused in the audience, along with her partner Omar (Andrés Monales). Later, she tells her psychiatrist Dr. Steiner (Franco regular Paul Muller) that she dreams of a passionate affair with a woman - and that the woman she saw at the club was the image of the femme fatale in her dreams.

Later, on a business trip in Istanbul with a Countess Nadine Carody, Linda's trip is delayed by some administrative bungling and she stays in a hotel on the mainland. She encounters a strange servant played by Franco himself who makes up her room, but then later warns her that death and evil lie ahead on the island. Linda spots him tormenting a bloodied and seemingly dead woman, but believes it's all in her imagination and heads off by boat to the island. Finally meeting the bikini-clad Countess, (Miranda) and her tall, silent assistant Morpho (bespectacled José Martínez Blanco) she's stunned by her beauty. Nadine explains about how Count Dracula left all his money to her, and how Linda will be able to help her administer the fortune. It's not long before they're both skinny-dipping on the beach. Oh, it's a terrible scene to watch, folks. Soon, frolicking turns to sapphic seduction and Nadine bites Linda on the neck - she'd earlier drugged her into submission with some wine. The actresses don't look hugely comfortable doing the seduction scenes, but they're not that explicit. Nadine rises with an elegant stream of blood running down her mouth. She then vanishes and the confused Linda awakens and finds seemingly Nadine drowned in a pool, naked but for her flowing red scarf. She faints away completely.

Meanwhile, one of Nadine's past lover's awakens in a frenzy. She still craves her lover's attentions but is now living in the asylum of one Dr. Seward (Dennis Price). Dr. Seward is becoming more and more of an expert on the subject of Vampires, as he learns more information about the Countess from the girl, and even craves to become one of them. Linda mysteriously wakes up in Seward's dwellings and can't remember anything. Soon, Omar tracks Linda to Seward's abode and indentifies her. She leaves with him. We then see that Nadine is not dead at all. She professes to Morpho about her love for Linda and her history - how, hundreds of years ago in a war in Hungary, soldiers raped the virgin Nadine but Dracula intervened, killing them and taking her as his immortal Vampire bride. She lived on through the centuries, hating men and taking women as lovers who sustained her with their blood. Then she met Linda, whom she truly loved. She calls Linda telepathically, who answers the call by returning to the Countess. Nadine offers her a goblet of blood and she accepts, becoming one of the children of the night. They make love again.

Omar turns up drained of some blood at Dr. Seward's, with the partially vampirized Linda not putting two and two together. Seward explains to Linda that he thinks she's in trouble with the supernatural. He tells her that a Vampire can only be killed by destroying the brain, preferably by a spike driven through the head. Agra, Nadine's former lover, has another fit and tells Seward that the Countess wants to see him. Later, Nadine and Morpho visit Seward, who confesses that he wants to be a vampire too. Nadine refuses to grant him the status of the undead and has Morpho kill him. Agra tells Omar as he leaves Seward's asylum, that Linda is with Nadine and is in danger. He goes to the same nightclub alone to watch Nadine's act, and she seems to kill her blonde performance partner this time.

Omar convinces Dr. Steiner to help him find Linda, who is actually in the clutches of Memmet, the hotel worker she'd glimpsed with the dead woman earlier. This time the madman has tied her up, and raves about how his wife, who is actually Agra, was taken from him by Countess Carody. In his madness at the loss he has been killing women who fall under Nadine's spell, but Linda turns the table on the gibbering lunatic - Franco seems to love playing degenerate half-wits in his films - and kills him with the blade of a saw. She rushes back to Nadine's manor, only to find her dying through lack of blood. Linda refuses to become one of the undead and finally decides both their fates, as Omar and Dr. Steiner come crashing into the house ...

We've got a classic on our hands here, friends. Franco is probably guilty of churning out cheap, rough-and-ready potboilers at times, but not here. There's a lot of loving attention in the details as well as the broader brushstrokes. Franco inserts brief glimpses of flying kites with red tails, scorpions and trapped moths to illustrate all the characters. Of course, Nadine is the scorpion. Soledad is perfect as the Countess, I can easily see how Franco was entranced by the dark-eyed beauty. What a shame she died so young. There seems to be a sadness in her eyes, that makes you sympathise with any character that she plays. It's not even that she has such a stunning body, it's that distinctive face and eyes that makes her an icon. Couple the magnetism of the lead actress with the Istanbul setting, the bright cinematography, superlative music and Franco's general jazz-bohemian aesthetic and you've got a classic of European seventies cinema.

If you have any interest in pop culture, you really owe it to yourself to see Vampyros Lesbos. It's Jesus Franco firing on all cylinders as a director and a great viewing experience, even for those who don't get much out of horror. The horror and gore elements are played in the background, instead we have an exercise in pure, glorious seventies style.

Vampyros Lesbos - Not Coming to a Theater Near You Anna Bak-Kvapil

And You Call Yourself a Scientist!

Ferdy on Films [Roderick Heath]

Moria - The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]

Classic-Horror [Matt Spence]

DVD Times [Michael Brooke]

DVD Talk [Ian Jane]

digitallyOBSESSED! [Rich Rosell]

DVD Talk [Carl Davis]

DVD Verdict [Scott Sharplin]

DVD Review - Vampyros Lesbos - The Digital Bits Todd Doogan

The Spinning Image [Steve Langton]

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Movie House Commentary Tuna

Sound On Sight Tyler Baptist

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

The DVD Journal (Quick Review)

Vampyros Lesbos - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Franco, Michel

DANIEL & ANA

Mexico (90 mi) 2009

Daniel & Ana Allan Hunter at Cannes from Screendaily

Underground porn is a lucrative criminal trade in Mexico, especially if it involves adolescents. Daniel & Ana places a human face to the trade’s grim statistics by recounting the true-life ordeal of a brother and sister.

Director Michel Franco’s debut feature handles disturbing subject matter with commendable restraint, creating a sombre, quietly compelling drama. The very nature of the material makes the film a hard sell but Daniel & Ana should catch the eye of global Festival programmers and might secure some theatrical sales in territories that have responded to the films of fellow Mexican Rodrigo Pla or Lucrecia Martel.

Franco quickly sketches in the comfortable lives of the title duo. Ana (Marimar Vega) is planning her marriage and a bright future. We see her selecting a dress and firmly insisting that her fiancé Rafa (Jose Maria Torre) will not be accepting a job offer in Spain.  Her 16-year-old brother Daniel (Dario Yazbek Bernal - brother of Gael Garcia) is a typical teenager; hanging out with friends, speculating on his luck with girls and waiting for the day that their wealthy father will buy him a car of his own.

Driving through the streets one day, they are abducted at gunpoint. Their captors offer them the choice of being raped and killed or agreeing to have sex with each other that will be recorded by a cameraman. The siblings have little choice in the matter. Once they are freed, they simply return to their daily lives. The authorities are not alerted which is apparently a common feature of such cases. Their unsuspecting parents never discover what happened. The lasting psychological damage that follows the ordeal provides the bulk of the film.

Franco only provides the viewer with as much information as the two lead characters. We never learn what becomes of the footage, why they were a target or who was behind the abduction. Even the parents are pushed to the edges of the story as they seem powerless to fathom the reasons why their children have fundamentally changed from bright, hopeful individuals into youngsters who hide away in their rooms and barely communicate.

Franco adopts a very unassuming style throughout. The camera is often static, inviting the viewer to watch what is happening within the frame rather than doing anything to heighten the impact of material that requires no embellishment. The voyeuristic potential of the siblings on-camera sex is negated by the discretion of its execution. You shudder to think what a more attention-seeking auteur might have brought to the script.

Franco’s considered approach creates a thought-provoking film with some startling, unexpected developments in the relationship between the siblings. The young performers are entirely convincing with Marimar Vega gaining audience sympathy for the steely determination she brings to Ana’s recovery and decision to reclaim control of her life.

Daniel’s actions are harder to fathom or accept although Dario Yazbek Bernal is suitably sullen and intense as the traumatised youngster.

Closing credits inform us just how prevalent underground porn is, how it mostly involves adolescents, is rarely reported and is widely circulated in a multi-media world. It is a suitably sobering conclusion to an unsettling film.

AFTER LUCIA (Después de Lucía) B 83

Mexico France (114 mi) 2012

This film was a surprising winner of the Best Film from Un Certain Regard at Cannes this year, from a selection of films shown outside the main competition, where the award is given for innovative and daring works. While the tone of the film is daring, revealing the bleak reality of how high school bullying becomes a collective, almost gang-like activity, the kind of thing almost no one would think of doing on their own, but when a new girl in school starts receiving the attention from some of the cute boys, some kids may resort to any means to embarrass and discredit the new girl’s reputation, while insecure others can’t help piling on once they realize someone’s in a lower stratosphere than they are. Stylistically, however, using fixed camera angles and long takes, copycat minimalism is no longer daring, but a fairly common occurrence in this past decade, especially from the likes of Kiarostami, the Dardennes brothers, and New Wave Romanian films, where a bracing realism is observed without a hint of sentimentality, almost always utilizing the style for greater effect while also addressing moral issues. Perhaps a film this most closely resembles is Juan Antonio Campos’s AFTERSCHOOL (2008), which does a much better job addressing the social complexities that exist within various social strata in high schools.

This film has a point to make, and it is what it is, but offers little more, never really questioning the underlying circumstances that lead to such horrific events, or investigating how the authorities or the victim might have handled things differently, but simply suggests a worse case scenario, like a high school from hell, where one student goes from being relatively popular to being an object of scorn and derision, where literally every conceivable student mocks and humiliates her. This film has an aversion to character development, as if stressing the idea this isn’t about one particular person, but could be anyone, so simply fill in the blanks accordingly. Part of the problem with that is the film is so detached that there’s no viable connection to anyone, where there’s no driving force to persuade the audience to act or give a damn. In this movie, nearly everyone is despicable, taking Buñuel’s portrait of the wretched of the earth in LOS OLVIDADOS (1950) and extending it to the over-pampered youth of the middle class.

Showing a love for the back seat cam, a good 10% or more of the time spent in this movie is from the back seat of a moving vehicle, where you get a detached view of the backs of passenger’s heads, which is an economy of means, but we get the point without having to be so repetitive. With little backstory, we soon understand a father (Hernán Mendoza) and his teenage daughter Alejandra (Tessa Ia) are moving from Puerto Vallarta to Mexico City following the death of the mother. Both suffering adjustment problems, the father is a chef in a newly opening restaurant while Alejandra will be starting at a new high school, immediately revealing the difficulty of fitting in, where people who are supposedly your friends are secretly moving behind your back to embarrass you in front of the group. Honing in on the warnings of social media, the young, in particular, are vulnerable to negative exposure, where naked pictures that end up in the wrong hands from a stupid mistake at a party can literally crucify you. This same subject was explored by German director Christian Petzold in Beats Being Dead (Dreileben 1 - Etwas Besseres als... (2012), where a young girl’s sexual exploits in the woods with a member of a biker gang is secretly photographed on his iPhone, which she immediately throws in the lake, perhaps the right course of action for Alejandra as well.

Instead, the film delves into the psychological torment of an unprotected young girl whose photos are plastered all over the Internet, who already lost her mother, who has no protection network around her, and doesn’t feel comfortable talking to anyone about it, so her life takes a miserable descent into complete victimization, where her initial attempts to stand up to fellow student harrassment are replaced with benign acceptance, where in her eyes it’s easier to get it over with than struggle and prolong the agony. Showing this degree of vulnerability just opens the door to unlimited torture, where other students couldn’t be more sadistic, inflicting a neverending ordeal of humiliating acts, changing the tone of the film to outright horror. While the film doesn’t flinch, never hiding the inflicted brutality she endures, one wonders why she just allows herself to continually walk right into the heart of the horrors, as she’s an otherwise intelligent girl. The point, however, is to make her defenseless, where she literally gives in to her perpetrators, where her only defense is becoming numb to it all. While it all leads to an equally disturbing finale that is deftly shown, it’s all quite disheartening, as it’s a grotesque and disturbing portrait of an escalating spiral of targeted violence risen to some modern level of spectator sport.

Note: As the film did not arrive to the theater, the version seen was a 3^rd rate screener copy which visually was about on par with a poor VHS copy movie. While the gritty subject matter and dire style do not accentuate beauty in any sense, nonetheless, one hopes the poor film quality did not give rise to any negative critical comments, where one hopes they can remain objective.

Phil on Film [Philip Concannon]

In cities across the world it seems that the troubles faced by teenagers every day are largely the same, and one particularly difficult hurdle is the task of fitting in at a new school. Alejandra (Tessa Ia) has moved with her father (Hernán Mendoza) to Mexico City, where they hope to rebuild their lives after the death of her mother in a car crash. She is initially popular at her new school, but one stupid drunken mistake at a party quickly tarnishes her reputation and makes her an outcast. From this point onwards, After Lucia observes Alejandra's ongoing silent despair as she is subjected to the most horrific bullying from her classmates, with Michael Franco's long takes and fixed camera angles refusing to spare us any details of her ordeal. Unable to open up to her grief-stricken father, Alejandra withdraws and simply accepts her place at the bottom of the food chain, becoming almost catatonic as abuse upon abuse is heaped on her. The cruelty of Alejandra's fellow teenagers sometimes feels a little overplayed, both in the disgusting extremity of their attacks and the complete lack of adult supervision or dissenting voices as the entire classroom gangs up on her, but the power of Franco's film is impossible to deny. It may be unbearable to watch in places, but the tender performances at its centre from both Ia and Mendoza make it equally hard to look away, and the film becomes particularly riveting during its extraordinarily tense final stretch, which builds to a shocking climax. Franco's ultimate point, that violence begets violence, has been very forcefully made.

A history of violence: After Lucia Demetrios Matheou at Cannes from the Sight & Sound blog, May 28, 2012, also seen here: A history of violence: After Lucia

Mexico’s Carlos Reygadas may have picked up this year’s Best Director prize for his – in my and many people’s view – mannered and exasperating head-scratcher Post Tenebras Lux, but it’s fair to say a younger compatriot has made a much more significant mark on the festival. Michel Franco’s Después de Lucia (After Lucia), which won top prize in the Un Certain Regard sidebar, has the forthright power that we used to associate with Reygadas.

A few months after the death of his wife, Roberto and his teenage daughter Alejandra relocate from Puerto Vallarta, on the Pacific coast, to Mexico City. He’s coping less well with his grief than the girl, who gives a masterclass in how to make friends and settle into her new school. But then quite unexpectedly a lapse in judgement turns her into its number-one pariah.

As a film about bullying this is almost impossible to watch – I was literally doubled up in distress, so increasingly extreme are the humiliations and abuses inflicted upon Alejandra. But rather than exploiting his scenario for cheap thrills, writer-director Franco has something serious to say about a phenomenon that’s been much in the news in his country; outside the school, Roberto himself proves to be an index of the pervasive casual violence and day-to-day lack of anger management that can only inform the behaviour of impressionable kids.

Most saddening is the lack of conversation between a father and a daughter who clearly love each other. The suggestion is that Alejandra is protecting her grief-stricken father from further distress, a selfless yet foolish gesture that ultimately benefits neither.

Franco has a rigour in the way he goes about his business, a way of developing tension and horror through seemingly banal situations that reminds me of Gerardo Naranjo’s work in Miss Bala. This film opens and closes with two sequences involving the bear-like Roberto: in the first he collects the newly-repaired car in which his wife died, driving it for what seems like an eternity while we wait, on edge, programmed for the worst; in the second he’s at the wheel of a motorboat at sea, riding towards the camera, threatening to express his parental passions in a way that is at once unthinkable and worryingly thrilling. Each is a piece de resistance from a director who really knows how to hold his nerve.

The Un Certain Regard jury was presided over by Tim Roth. It’s hardly surprising that the director of The War Zone, itself a harrowing depicting of child abuse (albeit from another quarter), would appreciate Franco’s film.

This is the Mexican’s second appearance in Cannes; his second film, the kidnap drama Daniel & Ana, screened in the Directors’ Fortnight strand in 2009. It’s only a matter of time before he’s in Competition. In the meantime, hopefully this prize will entice someone to distribute After Lucia in the UK.

CineVue [John Bleasdale]

Showing in the Un Certain Regard section at the 65th Cannes Film Festival, Michel Franco's After Lucia (Después de Lucía, 2012) is a devastating and harrowing look into high school bullying. Following the death of her mother in a car accident, teenager Alejandra (Tessa Ia) and her father Roberto (Hermàn Mendoza), a successful high-end chef, move to a new town. Her father, however, is in a deep depression and oscillates between complete disengagement with the world and impatient anger, though never directed at his daughter.

Roberto's relationship with his daughter is one of adoration and she seeks to protect him as much as possible. At first, she seems to have settled into her new school with remarkable ease. She befriends some rich kids and soon finds herself invited to parties as part of the group. However, things take a turn for the worse when Alejandra has sex with Juan. He films it on his phone and soon the video has gone round the school. Labelled a slut, she is soon considered fair game and all her friendships either vanish or her ostensible friends turn against her.

Not since William Golding's Lord of the Flies has the extents of adolescent cruelty been depicted so extremely. This is strong medicine indeed, and as the dread and claustrophobia close in, the film becomes increasingly difficult to watch. Franco, now on his second feature with After Lucia, keeps his camera fixed and unmoving, trapping us as effectively as Alejandra herself becomes more and more trapped. The cruelty is truly horrible and, in one scene, literally sickening, but it is never incredible, or even improbable.

Alejandra tells no one about her mother's death, but it's unlikely that it would have changed anything even if she had. Once open season is declared on her then everyone is entitled to take part and the humiliations and violations escalate accordingly. Alejandra - out of love for her father - refuses to seek his help and submits with a stoicism, which soon resembles catatonia. The school authorities are conspicuous by their absence, except to threaten Alejandra with expulsion when she fails a drug test at the beginning of her school period.

Franco has created a disturbing and urgent recreation of teenage despair and what it must feel like to be the victim of almost unthinkable and casual cruelty; to be hurt in the worse possible ways to the sound of laughter and house music in the next room. It reminded me a little of Gaspar Noè's portrayal of rape in Irreversible (2002). Like the aforementioned film, there is no escape. However, Franco keeps everything grounded in reality (without Noè's Grand Guignol distractions or giddying camera work) and when, in its last act, After Lucia turns towards revenge, the director keeps a steady hand and never allows the film to get away from him.

Cannes Review – Después de Lucía (After Lucia) « Hayes at the ... Hayes at the Movies

After Lucia | Review | Screen Howard Feinstein at Cannes from Screendaily

Cannes: After Lucia (Despues de Lucia) « Movie City News David Poland

After Lucia: Cannes Review - The Hollywood Reporter David Rooney

Variety Reviews - After Lucia - Cannes Reviews - Un Certain ...

Franju, Georges

Franju, Georges World Cinema

An original figure in French cinema, Franju worked in set design and scientific film and was one of the cofounders of the Cinémathèque Française. His first documentary short, Le Sang des bêtes (1949), shot in a Parisian slaughterhouse, had an enormous impact, revealing Franju's acute perception of the cruel and the uncanny within a realistic setting, as did Hôtel des Invalides (1952). This prepared the terrain for his best-known features which, rarely for French cinema, worked within the genre of the "fantastic," especially Les Yeux sans visage / Eyes Without a Face (1960) and Judex (1963), a tribute to Louis Feuillade's 1917 series (Franju also directed a film on Georges Méliès in 1952). Among his other features are some distinguished literary adaptations, notably Thérèse Desqueyroux (1962, based on François Mauriac) and Thomas l'imposteur / Thomas the Impostor (1965, based on Jean Cocteau). He also worked in television.

— Ginette Vincendeau, Encylopedia of European Cinema

All-Movie Guide Sandra Brennan

BBC Biography

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Franju, Georges They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Wikipedia

BLOOD OF THE BEASTS (Les Sang des Bêtes)

France (20 mi) 1949 Criterion (29 mi)

Channel 4 Film

It's hard to believe that this gruelling short was made in 1949, given that some of the imagery and subject matter it portrays would be hard to stomach even by today's standards. With its documentary-esque feel, the film compares and contrasts life in idyllic, post-war Parisian suburbs with that of the average worker in one of the nearby slaughterhouses; director Franju is unstinting when it comes to details of both the human and animal suffering. As an early example of ultra-realism in cinema, this is hard to beat, although even more difficult to sit through; you'll want to take a very long shower afterwards.

Time Out

Despite the grim content, this description of three abbatoirs (horses, cattle, sheep) is no vegetarian tract. What most fascinates Franju is the inflicting of violent death as a matter of banal 9-to-5 routine. We soon pick up the process: the pickaxe through the skull, the throatcutting, the steaming blood (it's winter) spilling across the stone floor, the hacking and dismembering. We become accustomed to the echoing sounds: the banging and clattering, someone off-camera singing 'La Mer'. The slaughterhouses are placed in geographical context, with Kosma's lilting waltz theme accompanying an evocation of the outskirts of post-war Paris: canals, junk markets, scrubby wasteland. It's a gift of a subject for a surrealist like Franju: an everyday nightmare, at once atrocious and outlandishly beautiful.

Critic Doctor [Peter Sobczynski]

Nowadays, it seems as though hardly a week goes by without another swarm of politically-oriented documentaries emerging on the marketplace. Like most fads, it will eventually die out and while a couple will probably demonstrate an extended shelf life (such as "Fahrenheit 9/11" and "The Corporation"), most will probably end up on the DVD equivalent of the bargain section of your local bookstore. However, the most powerful such film you are likely to see this (or any) year is one that I suspect that most of you have never heard of. It is George Franju's "Le Sang des Betes" ("The Blood of Beasts"), a shocking and stunningly relevant 29-minute short that says more about the world situation today than any other film in recent memory. This is all the more impressive when you consider that the film is 55 years old, French and has absolutely nothing overtly to do with politics at all. Instead, Franju depicts, in a completely straightforward and objective manner, the inner workings of a French slaughterhouse as we see animals go through every part of the process in gory detail (trust me, when I say "gory detail", I mean it) as the factory workers reduce them to meat. The first time you see the film, you will be repulsed by the carnage on display, especially when contrasted to the utterly blasé attitudes that the workers have towards what they do for a living. (Even the most confirmed carnivores in the audience will find themselves going for salads for a few days.) The second time you see it (for multiple viewings, as you will see, are integral for the film to have its full impact), the initial shock has disappeared and it becomes rather boring-most viewers will find themselves writing it off as a bit of shock theatre that doesn't hold up on a second viewing.

The third viewing, however, is where the full impact of the film takes hold. By now, viewers will feel as jaded towards the bloodshed as the workers, no matter how grossed out they might have been previously. While it would be easy enough to see the film as simply criticizing those who go about committing wholesale slaughter everyday by removing themselves so completely from the proceedings that they don't need to give it a second thought, the true horror that Franju depicts is the fact that those watching the film can so quickly become hardened and emotionless to sights that once disgusted them. The ease that complacency can grow-whether it is towards animals being turned into meat or towards rights and liberties being trampled in the name of "freedom"-that both fascinates and scares Franju. Of course, many other films have said the same things over the years but none have done so with the brevity, poetry and overwhelming impact of "Le Sang des Betes".

Although the opportunity to own a copy of the film by itself would be enough for most film buffs (especially considering how difficult it has been to see in recent years), :Le Sang des Betes" is actually a supplemental feature of Criterion's outstanding presentation of Franju's 1959 horror classic "Eyes Without a Face". Also well worth seeing, the film tells the story of a mad doctor who goes to elaborate, gruesome lengths to repair the face of his hideously scarred daughter-no matter what the cost in other innocent lives. A key influence on any number of films, this is a recently restored masterpiece that should provide the maximum numbers of creeps this Halloween. So far, Criterion has raised the bar for DVD presentations this year with amazing packages for "Videodrome", "Slacker", "A Woman is a Woman" and "The Battle of Algiers"-this one, while less reliant on the bells-and-whistles, is just as outstanding.

Critical-Film.com (Jason Pitt)

EYES WITHOUT A FACE (Les Yeux sans Visage)

aka: The Horror Chamber Of Dr. Faustus

France Italy (88 mi) 1960

Edinburgh U Film Society [Mark Radice]

One of the greatest horror films ever made, and also one of the most bizarre. Franjus's haunting direction combines realism and fantasy, poetry and polemics, and savagery and tenderness to unique effect, creating a surreal nightmarelike vision, and a superb study in obsession.

The plot is grotesque and incredible. A mad professor feels guilty for having mutilated his daughter's face in a car accident, so he takes to murdering young girls and grafting their faces on to his daughter's. In terms of visceral impact, this film can claim, along with Psycho, co-paternity of the splatter genre, but the horrific side of the film is counter-balanced with Franju's portrait of tenderness and love. The doctor's sadism is born out of undying love, and the girl's final act of murderous catharsis is caused by her sympathy for her father's victims.

The film owes much to Cocteau, who had said, "the more you touch on mystery, the more important it is to be realistic", and in this manner, Franju injects a cold insistent realism into his poetic fantasy. His love of silent films is also evident in the elegance of his images. The sheer magic of the imagery is most memorable when the daughter drifts through the house in a waxen mask of eerie beauty, and especially in the extraordinary final sequence. Lit by an incandescent flame of beauty, terror and madness, the victim turns on the torturer, looses the dogs on her vivisectionist father, and wanders free through the night, her mask discarded but her face seen only by the dogs at her feet and the dove on her shoulder.

This is an astounding film. Its sheer cinematic force is immeasurable, and I strongly urge you to see it.

City Pages [Jim Ridley]

Has a title ever defined moviegoer more succinctly or poetically? The image, at once surreal and horrific, suggests disembodiment--the literal and figurative subject of this grisly shocker from 1959. The plot is potboiler Grand Guignol: A mad surgeon (Pierre Brasseur) harvests the faces from pretty girls, hoping that one day his "heterografts" will restore the visage of his disfigured daughter (Edith Scob). In the hands of former documentarian Georges Franju, however, it forms a missing link between a Feuillade serial's eyes-wide-shut hallucinations and the flesh-rending body horror of David Cronenberg's best movies. The scene that made the movie a triple-dare must-see when released here in 1960 (as The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus) remains unnerving today: the doctor casually peeling the tissue from a victim's skull, pulling the still-dripping skin toward our own widened eyes. (Franju's famed slaughterhouse doc Blood of the Beasts no doubt served as training.) Even creepier are the shots of the daughter wandering Daddy's abattoir of a mansion, her own mangled face hidden by a featureless mask that resembles a haunted mannequin. Screenwriters Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac wrote the novel that inspired Vertigo the year before, and in some ways this is just as eerie a portrait of fixation and desire. As in Hitchcock, an obsessed man is doomed to project (or, in this case, actually graft) an image of perfection over and over onto a woman, blind to the fact that it's the image he really loves. Flesh fades, falls apart; flesh can only disappoint, while the image retains its power. As proof, there's Franju's fairy-tale nightmare of a film, still exerting its sinister fascination long after its creator's death.

Eyes Without a Face Mike D’Angelo from Time Out New York

Jaunty carnival music accompanies the haunting opening credits sequence of Eyes Without a Face, Georges Franju's almost unbearably creepy exercise in what one might call Petit Guignol, but don't get too accustomed to having your emotions directed by Maurice Jarre's superlative score. Best known in France for a disturbing short documentary depicting Parisian slaughterhouses, Franju understands well the power of the uninflected image; much of Eyes unfolds in clinical silence, the uncomfortable stillness punctuated only by labored breathing or the muffled sound of barking dogs. When the mad Professor Génessier (Brasseur) takes his scalpel and begins methodically removing the face of a young woman (Mayniel) he's abducted, you'll have no trouble hearing your fellow audience members shifting in their seats.

Originally released in this country as The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus (you can still find it under that title in Leonard Maltin's annual video guide), Eyes Without a Face doesn't seem particularly interested in condemning Génessier for his hubris, though the character meets a predictably grisly end. Instead, the film takes on the mournfully watchful mien of Christiane (Scob), the professor's daughter and the intended recipient of his hideous surgical largesse. (Her own face was all but destroyed in an auto accident.) Wandering the vast estate in a formfitting mask that makes her resemble an alabaster mannequin, Christiane seems less like a damaged human being than a fallen angel, melancholy and envious; it's a testament to the grace of Scob's almost balletic performance that when we briefly see her real, ethereally beautiful face, our first instinct is to recoil.

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

Opening for Halloween in a new print, Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face (1959) is a masterpiece of poetic horror and tactful, tactile brutality. In the movie's sinister first scene, anxious-looking Alida Valli drives by night through the deserted suburbs of Paris, searching for a place to dump the inert humanoid passenger slumped in the backseat. The look is black on black, with gleaming highlights; the musical accompaniment is gleefully carnivalesque.

Franju, best known for the 1949 abattoir doc Blood of the Beasts, was a surrealist fellow traveler and Eyes Without a Face has a beyond-lurid premise. Plastic surgeon Professeur Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) attempts to restore his daughter's mutilated face with skin obtained from young women abducted by his zombified lover (Valli). In between grafts, Génessier's birdlike daughter, Christiane (Edith Scob), flits about the château, eyes peering through the sockets of a molded plastic mask. In the end, Christiane regains her humanity—although perhaps not in precisely the way we might expect, vanishing into the darkness in a cloud of doves.

On the one hand, Eyes Without a Face is a mad-scientist fairy tale in the tradition of Professor Cyclops or Island of Lost Souls; on the other, it's one of the three movies (along with Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, both 1960) that created the modern slasher-shocker. Like Jean Cocteau's Orpheus, Eyes Without a Face is enriched by free-floating allusions to then-recent European history. It takes no stretch of the imagination to hear the hounds of "night and fog" or see the coldly psychopathic Génessier as a Nazi scientist. Even crueler than the operation at the movie's center is the utter callousness with which he buries someone else's daughter, pretending she's his own.

The Boston Phoenix Chris Fujiwara

The central scene of Les yeux sans visage, the 1959 Georges Franju classic now in reissue, shows the surgical removal of the face of a young woman. If this scene is still shocking today, after 45 years of horror-film imagery far more gruesome and elaborate, it’s because Franju’s intention is not primarily to shock. The scene disturbs not just because of the scalpels, scissors, and blood but because of the irreversibility and cruelty of the surgeon’s act, and because we know that the still-living patient, on whom the operation is being performed against her will, is going to wake up.

The surgeon, the brilliant and renowned Professor Génessier (Pierre Brasseur), is no sadist; he’s a monster who seeks to restore the face of his daughter, Christiane (Edith Scob), who was disfigured in the crash of a car that Génessier was driving. A specialist in experimental skin grafts, Génessier believes that his only recourse is to steal the face from a living donor and put it on his daughter. He seems driven less by compassion for Christiane than by the need to justify himself. The cold fury that characterizes Franju’s film is directed against Génessier, and through him at male power and the need to dominate. "I love order," he tells his devoted assistant, Louise (Alida Valli), but the order he seeks to establish is paranoid and repressive.

Shot in lustrous black and white by Eugen Shuftan, Les yeux sans visage is obsessed with skin and smooth surfaces: Louise’s slick black raincoat and black gloves, Génessier’s plastic surgical gloves, his shiny black car. At one point Christiane says that though her father has had all the mirrors in her room removed, she can still catch glimpses of herself in the reflective surfaces of objects. Franju keeps Christiane’s destroyed face hidden from the camera, usually behind a white mask. He shows what’s behind that mask only once, from the point of view of the doomed face donor (who’s strapped to the operating table): by photographing the face out of focus, Franju mutes its shock effect, making the image less a depiction of horror than a premonition of it.

The sorrow of this bleak fairy tale is overwhelming. Franju and Shuftan create an inescapable mood of desolation, much of it surrounding the isolated Christiane. Presumed dead and denied contact with the world, she’s become a sort of art object (Franju and Scob imply that even Christiane sees herself as such). Scob’s performance is a set of precise details: her desperate eyes floating in the blankness of her mask; her birdlike wispiness; her high collar buttoned to the neck and raised stiff at the back; her arms frozen doll-like at her sides as she glides through the corridors and staircases of her father’s mansion. Christiane’s alienation finds its most painful expression in her mute phone calls to her fiancé. Her only companions are animals: the caged bird in her room, the dogs her father keeps caged in a kennel (adjoining his operating room, where, we presume, he uses them for his experiments). Visiting the kennel, she stops at each cage to caress its occupant; it’s one of the few acts of compassion seen in the film, and the more powerful for taking place in a prison so terrible.

Besides the melancholy lyricism of the scenes with Christiane and the horror of the surgery scene, Les yeux sans visage incorporates more-conventional mystery-thriller elements. But Franju exaggerates the quaintness of these elements (as in the scenes of the police investigation, which might have been written in 1840) and gives them an odd sophistication and creepiness, as when Louise prowls Paris in search of poor female students to sacrifice to Génessier. In one indelible sequence, Louise drives her latest conquest from Paris into the country. The glistening road at dusk; the student’s growing apprehensiveness as she realizes that the vacant apartment she’s been offered is farther from the city than she’d been led to believe; the suggestion that Louise sympathizes with her victim — all the details of the scene combine in an eerie and inexorable movement. The scene exemplifies Franju’s achievement in Les yeux sans visage: a balance between cruelty and tenderness that has rarely been attempted in cinema.

Appearances to the Contrary: Eyes Without a Face Criterion essay by Patrick McGrath, October 15, 2013

Eyes Without a Face: The Unreal Reality Criterion essay by David Kalat, October 16, 2013

Eyes Without a Face (1960) - The Criterion Collection

Images Journal Gary Johnson

Kinoeye [Curtis Bowman] A Film Without Politics, September 9, 2002

Kinoeye [Elizabeth Cowie] Anxiety, Ethics, and Horror, September 9. 2002

Kinoeye [Reynold Humphries] Dr Franju's "House of Pain" and the political cutting edge of horror, September 9, 2002

Turner Classic Movies Paul Tatara and Jeff Stafford

Turner Classic Movies James Steffen DVD review

DVD Times Kevin Gilvear

Epinions [metalluk]

DVD Verdict - Criterion Collection Bill Gibron

Fangoria Michael Gingold

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick)

The DVD Journal | Quick Reviews: Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux ... Mark Bourne, Criterion

Eyes Without a Face Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com Sven Atanasov, Criterion Blu-Ray

DVD Savant Blu-ray Review: Eyes Without a Face Glenn Erickson, Criterion Blu-Ray

Eyes Without a Face Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Kevin Yeoman, Criterion Blu-Ray

Eyes Without a Face | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Jordan Cronk, Criterion Blu-Ray

Eyes Without A Face: Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review ... Randy Miller III, Criterion Blu-Ray

'Eyes Without a Face' (Criterion Collection) Blu-ray Review ... Brad Brevet from Coming Soon, Criterion Blu-Ray

CriterionForum.org: Eyes Without a Face Blu-ray Review

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti Gary Mairs

not coming to a theater near you (Rumsey Taylor)

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

Slant Magazine [Chris Barsanti]

FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg Bagley]

Reel.com DVD review [Rudy Joggerst]

Classic-Horror.com Nate Yapp

FilmStew.com [Todd Gilchrist]

WearetheMovies.com ak

filmcritic.com Doug Hennessey

And You Call Yourself a Scientist! (Liz Kingsley)

Combustible Celluloid Jeffrey M. Anderson

The Spinning Image Pablo Vargas

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Mondo Digital

Turner Classic Movies Phil Hardy, Encyclopedia of Horror

DVD Talk (Matt Langdon)

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer)

Jerry Saravia

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)

BumsCorner.com [Squim]

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Time Out

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

The New York Times (Stephen Holden)

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

Eyes Without a Face Blu-ray - Alida Valli - DVD Beaver

JUDEX

France Italy (104 mi) 1963

Time Out

Franju's superbly elegant and enjoyable tribute to the adventure fanatasies of Louis Feuillade sees the eponymous righter-of-wrongs (Pollack) abduct a wicked banker in order to prevent villainess Diana (Bergé, glorious in black cat suit) laying her hands on a fortune the banker's daughter (Scob) is due to inherit. Cue for a magical clash between good and evil, with the director revelling in poetic symbolism (the opening masked ball finds our hero, with forbidding bird mask, creating a dove out of thin air), black-and-white photography that thrills with its evocation of a lost, more innocent era, and surreal set pieces.

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

There's a world of difference between the natural and "found" surrealism of Louis Feuillade's wonderful lighthearted 1914 French serial and the darker, studied surrealism and campy piety of Georges Franju's 1964 feature-length remake. Yet in Franju's hands the material has its own kind of magic and wonder (as well as deadpan humour), and this is one of the better features of his middle period, which also yielded Les yeux sans visage (aka The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus). Judex (Channing Pollock) is a cloaked hero-avenger who abducts the villainous banker Favraux in order to prevent the evil Diana (Francine Bergé in black tights) from stealing a fortune from the banker's virtuous daughter (Edith Scob). Some of what Franju finds here is worthy of Cocteau, and as he found when he attempted another pastiche of Feuillade's work in colour, black and white is essential to the poetic ambience. Since the original Feuillade serials, among the supreme glories of movie history, are rarely screened, this film, ironically, may be the best place to find the true origins of Batman.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

DVDBeaver Gary W. Tooze

Frank, Robert

Robert Frank Film Series - MACBA

A decision: I put my Leica in a cupboard. Enough of lying in wait, pursuing, sometimes catching the essence of the black and white, the knowledge of where God is. I make films. Now I speak to the people in my viewfinder.
—Robert Frank

The retrospective exhibition Robert Frank: Storylines, co-produced with the Tate Modern, is complemented by this unusual cycle of Robert Frank’s films, practically unknown here in Spain, which makes clear the importance of these works in his artistic career. Robert Frank is known for his significant and unquestionable contribution to photography in the mid-twentieth century. However, towards the end of the ‘50s, just when he had achieved the status of ‘star’, he temporarily gave up photography and became a filmmaker. This selection of films, in which many different formats are used ranging from direct or pseudo-documentary cinema to road-movies or a personal diary, allows closer examination of film’s critical influence on the narrative and sequential aspects of his photography. For his films were not an isolated chapter in his career, just the opposite. In the films he develops and radicalises the interests he had begun to explore with his photographic work. These include his reflections on the act of creating itself, the contamination between time and space that photography and cinema allow, the dichotomy between reality and fiction, or the analysis of the relationship between memory, language and images.

INTERVIEW: Robert Frank - "Highway '61 Revisited" (1987) Marlaine Glicksman interview from Film Comment, August 1987

Interview with photographer Robert Frank, Film Comment, August 1987

By Marlaine Glicksman

“I’d like to make a film which would mingle the private aspects of my life with my work, which is public by definition… how the two poles of this dichotomy join, interlace, are at variance , and fight each other, as much as they complement each other…

“Two houses. Two countries. Two points of view. One is outside cultural life , the other right in it. One is the other’s refuge. Both are at the same time necessary and useless…

“I’d like to make that film.”

– Robert Frank, Pantheon Photo Library, 1983

In China, it is the Year of the Rabbit. In film, it may be remembered as the year of the phoenix. Once recognized, now underground, poets of literature, photography, film, and music will rise cenerstage with upcoming films. Bob Dylan will appear as an older but wiser musician in Hearts of Fire; cult poet Charles Bukowski goes public as screen writer of Barber Schroeder’s Barfly; The Clash’s Joe Strummer will appear in Alex Cox’s Straight to Hell and Walker, which was written by Rudy Wurlitzer (screen writer for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid), who himself returns, along with Roben Frank, as co-director of Candy Mountain. Perhaps no artist more than Roben Frank typifies this phoenix-like rise from the ashes. At the apex of his photography career, Frank put his still camera away and convened his eye to filmmaking, directing several personal films which were followed mostly by those already familiar with his still work. With Candy Mountain however, Frank reaches for a wider audience in a four-wheeled film quest that strikes images from his own life.

Robert Frank first hit the road when he emigrated from his native Switzerland to New York in 1950 as a fashion photographer. In 1955, he traveled the American asphalt as a Guggenheim fellow for pho tography, and the resulting book of stills, The Americans, published in 1958, gained him both fame and infamy. Woven throughout the black and white photos are images of American flags, graves, juke boxes, cars, political and religious icons, and the road itself. By the critics, he was condemned for his “joyless,” “disillusioned,” and especially “anti-American” photographs that depicted America and its citizens from New York to the Deep South to the West. Yet by photographers he was hailed, and then imitated, for his spontaneous and poetic style, which looked outward upon America while, at the same time revealing Frank looking in ward upon himself. Some of the photographs have since become so well known – in one photo, a black nursemaid holds a privileged white baby in South Carolina, while in another, people stare blankly from a trolley car in New Orleans – that they themselves have be come American icons.

It would be the last project for which Frank considered himself a photographer. Film, where he found a “kinship in the negative,” became the next logical step for him. A diary entry at that time (Pantheon Photo Library, 1983) states: “1960. A decision: I put my Leica in a cupboard. Enough of lying in wait, pursuing, some times catching the essence of the black and the white, the knowledge of where God is. I make films. Now I speak to the people who move in my viewfinder.”

The first film to earn Frank a reputation as a filmmaker was Pull My Daisy (1959), made with a traveling companion from The Americans journey, Jack Kerouac, as well as other Beat and artist friends: Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, and Alice Neel. With a voiceover by Kerouac, the unscripted film continued the same spontaneous and poetic style of Frank’s photographs while also utilizing many of the same themes of music, religion, power, and the American flag.

With Ginsberg’s participation, Frank made a nother film, Me and My Brother (1965-68), about Orlovsky’s institutionalized brother, Julius. He continued to make more films (among them Conversations in Vermont, 1969, and About Me, A Musical, 1971) and in 1972, at the invitation of the Rolling Stones, Frank went on the road again, as part of the Stones’ American tour, which he filmed with as sistant Danny Seymour. The documentary won him notoriety again, this time with the Stones, who didn’t agree with the frank and excessive sex-and-drugs-and rock-and-roll light they were cast in. The film remains banned (by legal order) to this day. Frank then made Life Dances On (1979) after the death of his daughter, Andrea, in a plane crash in 1974 and even a video, Home Improvements (1984-85).

With Candy Mountain, Frank skims the pavement again with the semi-auto biographical narrative of a two-bit musician, Julius (Kevin J. O’Connor), and his search for the legendary, but long unseen, guitar maker Elmore Silk (Harris Yulin), with whom he hopes to make the quintessential American deal guaranteed to bring him fame and fortune. This road film from New York to Canada (parallelling Frank’s own move from his New York City base to Nova Scotia in 1969) introduces Julius to a cast that includes Tom Waits, Buster Poindexter (a.k.a. David Johansen), Dr. John, Leon Red bone, Joe Strummer, and even filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, who wound up on the cutting room floor but whose own films, Permanent Vacation and Stranger Than Paradise, bear a slight resemblance to Frank’s Pull My Daisy.

The Swiss-French-Canadian co-production was written by Rudy Wurlitzer. It is Frank’s first scripted film. While Frank was behind the camera for most of his previous projects, it was Swiss cinematographer Pio Coraadi who shot this one. Frank would arrive on the set, survey the room, and tell Coraadi exactly where to put the camera but would barely look into it.

Gerald Dearing, Frank’s American based producer, said the film was originally intended as a co-production between Switzerland and Canada. However, since the two countries had no production agreement, but had common production agreements with France, two French companies were asked to participate. The cast and crew was constructed from the three countries as well as the States, “but,” emphasizes Dearing, “it’s an American film.” Candy Mountain brings together previous themes of Frank’s work: power, fame, loss, American life, and inward search.

In Switzerland, Frank, along with Giacometti, is considered one of the last two great Swiss artists. He is, as the same time, a very American artist, whose position on the outside of our culture has allowed us to look, sometimes painfully, inside America, our American lives and values, and ourselves.

-M.G.

MARLAINE GLICKSMAN: How did Candy Mountain come about, and why, after all these years, did you decide to do a scripted film?

ROBERT FRANK: Rudy (Wurlitzer) and I, we’ve been friends for quite a while. We’re sort of neighbors up there in Canada. We made two films together. And then the idea was that I would like to make another film, a very simple film, which is based in part on some biographical facts of my life and so on. That was about four years ago or so. So I asked Rudy to write something in that respect, some simple story, you know, of living here and going up to Canada, that has a connection with me. And actually, that was used as a text for that photographv book {Pantheon Photo Library}. And that was the beginning of the film, really; that was the basic idea.

MG: The text that said you wanted to make a film that was a journey from the center of one culture to the margins of another?

RF: Yeah. So it had to do with living in two places. So it came out of that, and at that time I also worked on a video called Home Improvements, which also had elements of what is happening in my life. So the idea was just to make a short, simple film. But then it developed. Rudy wrote more about it, it became a regular script, and then we met some Swiss people by accident – Ruth Walburger, a producer, whom we met in Zurich. It was a total accident. She had a friend who wanted Rudy to write a script, and then Rudy said, “Well, I’m working with Robert on this… ,” and she knew about my being Swiss, so that’s how it came about.

MG: What were the other two films that you worked on with Rudy?

RF: I worked with him on Keep Busy and Energy How to Get It.

MG: You directed those films and Rudy wrote them?

RF: Keep Busy, I probably had more to do with directing that. And the other, Energy and How to Get It, was a cooperation between three people, Gary Hill and myself and Rudy, and we sort of split it up. Keep Busy was an almost unscripted film – not much of a script – but Energy and How to Get It had documentary footage in it. We started to make a documentary on a guy who was interested in electrical storms to harness lightning and produce electricity. It’s called ball lightning. We found this guy in Nevada somewhere and started to make a documentary on him, and then later Rudy submitted more of a script; it could be done as a bigger film. We got money from PBS to do it.

MG: How did you feel about working on a more scripted film?

RF: It’s, like, if you work on a scripted film like this, you move in heavy anillery, you know. To kill it. I mean, you have a target and you’re nor going ro run around with this little air gun. You really move in with this heavy equipment. And you kill it. I mean, you hit it, you know. You are going to be on target. You know what you have ro do with that heavy equipment. So I think the most difficult thing was to realize that there could be very little improvisa tion. I mean, you have to stick ro the shooting schedule, you had so much time, you couldn’t change the camera angles. After a while, I settled for it, and it’s one of the things that I don’t know… I wouldn’t do it like this again. I would refuse to settle for it that way.

MG: What would you do differently?

RF: I would try not ro move in that heavy machinery; I would like to limit it. It could have been more limited in this film. Bur somehow, it got bigger and bigger all the time, and there was no way to stop it. And I think it was detrimental to the film. It also came about because of the music; it made it even bigger, the fact that there were a lot of musicians involved, and mu sic. So the machinery became even heavi er, with all this sound equipment. And I think it would nor have had to be like this. That’s my strongest feelings toward the film-that it was like a hype.

MG: Did that come from the business? Or did the script warrant it?

RF: It came from raising money, you know. You have to say there’s going to be a record, there’s going to be .. . In order to raise money, you have to say what you do, and you have to say, ‘”They are the musicians, and they’re going to play, and we’re going to have a lot of music and we’re go ing to do it right. We’re going to have it recorded right.” And so it gets bigger and bigger. And actually, most of all that big sound stuff that was used in the film, you have to pay a lot of money for. In the end it didn’t get in the film. It was cut out.

MG: You co-directed with Rudy. What was that like? Who did what?

RF: That’s very difficult. That’s like mak ing a baby, two people making a baby. You can imagine. Actually, I think that is a very good comparison. I mean, a film is a little bit like making a baby. You know, the film is made and it’s lying there, and you say, hey, it’s got red hair, or it’s fat, or whatever. But you’re happy it’s there. It’s alive. It talks. You know, it’s got color. So co-directing was a little bit like, you know, you make the baby together. And that doesn’t really work that well.

MG: Why?

RF: Well, I think that Rudy was very good at the content of a scene, and the lines and what’s behind the scene. And there was no rehearsal. I came in front of the camera and decided we shoot the scene in a cer tain way, you know, these three camera angles and that’s what I want. And then I would watch them [the actors], how they move, and I would say, “Do it differently.” Sometimes I would say something about the words, but most often it was mainly a thing about how to deliver them or how to space it, the spaces in between. It was a thing of movements.

MG: Why did you choose to make a film that was autobiographical?

RF: Well, it’s all fictional. It just has moments that I knew very well, what it meant to me, so that I could tell the actor more, how I thought about it, how I felt about it, having gone through the situation, thinking back about people from New York who want to hold on to me, who I’m a valuable property to, you know, make money from. So I could explain to an actor the feeling that I had about that what I felt. I felt very secure in that. So when these moments come about in the film, I feel good about it. I feel there’s like a little glimmer of the truth there, you know?

MG: Why did you portray America with the oil fields and the women in housecoats, and the television game shows?

RF: The industrial landscape of New Jersey? Well, I think because it’s a road movie and it starts out in New York, it moves you out of the city, through the industrial part, toward the Canadian border, where things get quiet and the landscape would become more empty till we’re in Canada, where it becomes very peaceful and empty, and slow. That was the idea.

MG: You first became interested in America through country music – and music is so much a part of Candy Mountain. Why?

RF: Music is very interesting. Music is also very entertaining. Music is powerful in films. I don’t think that’s what makes America interesting, though. But I think that if you can use it right and use it right in the film, it will help the film a great deal. It really makes it go, moves the film.

MG: In The Americans, there were several pictures of jukeboxes, and this is a film about musicians. What role does music fill for you?

RF: I don’t see any connection between my photographs of jukeboxes and the music in this film. I made another film a long time ago, A Musical About Me, and I used a lot of music in that. You know, sometimes I get very tired of words. Words get kind of boring. Music is more uplifting. It’s lighter, it’s easier, it’s faster. Sometimes it’s wonderful to have music, and then silence, and then words. I think it’s a good combination. So the idea in this film was to use musicians more as actors. You know, they act, but they’re musicians. So we have Dr. John – he doesn’t appear at all as a musician. In the final scene, we had a big number where he plays music. And we didn’t use it. So it was interesting to see how musicians like Buster Poindexter (David Johansen) – how they were as actors. Or Tom Waits, acting. And then we had a little bit of music with them in it.

MG: What did musicians as actors bring to the film?

RF: Well, first of all, when they play music, they’re musicians, they don’t have to act. I think it’s more interesting than the other way around, where you use an actor, and he’s not a musician. So I think that was very valuable, although that wasn’t as complete as we hoped it would be.

MG: And why Joe Strummer, a musician on the outskirts of British culture, and Tom Waits, a musician on the outskirts of American culture?

RF: Well, we knew them. I knew Tom Waits, and I had a connection with Joe Strummer and, you know, these are people who are sympathetic to the project and who wouldn’t want to do it just for big money. They liked the project.

MG: In the film, there is a lot of swapping cars.

RF: Well, because [Julius] gradually, as he sets out on the trip, has a girlfriend, loses the girlfriend, loses his car, and gets an other car. He ends up getting there and finding the guy, and has nothing in the end.

MG: The Americans in the film always wanted to make the deal where they come out on top. The closer he got to Elmore, the more Julius had to trade down.

RF: Well, it’s son of a metaphor for how, in America, money is very important. Like Dr. John [Elmore’s son-in-law], his fury is that he lost out [on the possibility of making money on his father-in-law’s guitars] – that he had nothing. I think that’s very American. To be left out of a big deal. Julius’ fantasy of making this big deal, coming back with this suitcase full of money. You know, it’s that kind of dream. The closer he gets to it, the less likely it is. Or the more he loses and the more he sees that it’s really not going to happen.

MG: Why did you choose to make a road picture?

RF: Well, I think that’s very simple. It started out from this little plan to make this little film which goes from New York to Canada. So how do you get there? The first version of the script, [Julius] even went to Europe, to Berlin, to look for [Elmore], and then back to Canada. Well, the fact that you move in a moving picture is very good, you know. You keep going. And I think one of the good parts in the film is [its editing]. It continuously moves. Once he leaves New York, Julius is really on the road and doesn’t stop until he gets up there. And then he’s up there and he goes right back again…

I liked the Wenders film a lot, the one in Germany he made, which was, you know, a road picture, with the repairmen of the projectors, Kings of the Road. Well, that has a son of connection to it. This is an American story. I think Rudy likes [the genre] a lot. He did Two Lane Blacktop, which is a road picture.

“In making films I continue to look around me ; but I am no longer the solitary observer , turning away after the click of the shutter. Instead!’ m trying to recapture what I saw, what I heard, and what I feel. What I know!”

-Robert Frank, Pantheon Photo Library, 1983

MG: You went from a still photographer to a filmmaker. It seemed so easy for you.

RF: It’s easy? It’s not easy at all. It’s a struggle. I think it’s very different to be a photographer. Because in photography you are alone. You don’t need anyone else. Whereas in film, there are a lot of people around you. You have to explain what you do. The other films I did, most of them were really not very well planned – often without a script – which is the hardest way you can make a movie. It has its wonderful moments, but as a whole it’s much more difficult than to do a scripted film.

MG: Did you have specific ideas in mind be fore you started, or did you construct your films in the editing?

RF: Well, like Me and My Brother was something that just went along, that changed as I went along. I started out to do a film about a poem of Ginsberg’s, and it ended up to be a film about Peter Orlovsky’s brother, whose name was Julius. So it continuously changed. Then you sort of focus on this person. And by what happens to him over a longer period of time, the film changes. Or in this case, he disappeared, and you find something else to take his place. But it’s made like that. And then, you see, it didn’t succeed, when you see the footage, and then you try in the editing to put something together. And I think that was a mistake. I edited for a long time on Me and My Brother. And I should have just accepted what was there and not try to make it into something else. I think that’s what I learned from that film. I really tried to twist it into a shape that I felt the film needed in order to be a full length film. And now, if I was to re-edit the film or redo it, I would let it be the way the footage came out and not try to over edit it or force it into telling a a specific story. I mean, I would have more confidence in the material that I had.

MG: Did Julius in Me and My Brother have any connection to Julius in Candy Mountain?

RF: No. No connection.

MG: You worked with Sam Shepard on Me and My Brother?

RF: Well, Sam Shepard wrote just one little scene, and then Antonioni asked him to do Zabriskie Point. Sam Shepard left for the glory of the glory.

MG: Why did you choose to become a filmmaker when there were other media you could have chosen?

RF: If you are a photographer for that long…. You have film, which is a negative, so you find there’s a kinship there. I can’t paint, I don’t want to write poetry, I’m not a writer. So you just continue make images.

MG: Your newer stills contain serial images.

RF: That’s a direct influence, I think, from the movies, once I started to make movies. I certainly didn’t rhink about the single photographs anymore. Not very much.

MG: And how about using words with the photographs?

RF: That also comes from film. Well, it’s a combination, but it all comes from being forced to explain somerhing, being forced to communicate your ideas to the people you work with in films. So when, when I went back to photographing with the Polaroid camera, it didn’t leave me. I wanted to communicate something else – not necessarily to explain it, but to communicate something else with the photographs. The picture in itself didn’t mean that much to me anymore.

MG: Why a Polaroid as opposed to 35mm?

RF: Because a Polaroid was immediate. You had, just like in any other photograph, a negative. And then I could immediately put on the negative forever – I mean, scratch in, in a way, to destroy the image – writing something over it that would be spontaneous, and that would be an expression of what I felt, the moment or the time I took these pictures. Usually I take eight pictures together on a cassette. It was always between two and eight. Never more. And very seldom one. And if it was one, then it had words in it.

MG: Do you think Polaroids, which are so immediate, also came out of your interest in film?

RF: No. Film is not at all instantaneous be cause you have to bring it to the lab, it has to come back. And it’s not the same as video. In video you also get it back right away, but you can’t do anything with it. I mean, it’s electronic. But here the beauty was that you had a negative, just like any other negative -immediately – and you could see it and then you could print it much later. Then you could change again. But the most important thing was to be able to express right away, on the film, on the print, how you wanted it. And later on you went to the darkroom and sometimes it didn’t work. But sometimes it worked, that spontaneity of expressing your feelings.

MG: Which of your films has been the closest to you?

RF: Well, I like Life Dances On in a way, because it deals with three people I knew, and I like each one. And it talked about the friends I had, and my daughter. That was the most personal to me, but it was very simple. And it had a certain truth. Reality.

MG: It was about Danny Seymour and Andrea…

RF: Yeah, it was sort of dedicated to rhem. But also the film took three characters then – my son Pablo, who lived in Vermont at that time, and Marty Greenbaum, who was an old friend who was struggling to be an artist and Billy, a bum I got to know on the street. And I felt that each one of rhese three people was walking on the edge. And that’s what made the film. And it also had these references to my daughter, and I was always in it. It was always me who forced these people to talk, who made them talk about themselves or expose themselves in a way, I didn’t hide that interference and that brutality that pushes a filmmaker to get something out of people…

Probably I didn’t know then how I fit into this, how I found myself in the center of these three people with whom I had different relations. I never said that before, but I think that’s what interested me – pure intuition, I didn’t plan on this. I didn’t make a point of this in the film. But it comes out sometimes stronger than at other times. I think now if I would make a film, I would be much too conscious of it.

Me and My Brother had similar elements in it, but I think it’s trying too hard, you know, to be a real film. It was also in part because I was given money by some people who then immediately demanded that I do it in color. But I liked to work with Joe Chaiken. That was a very good experience. And I learned on each film. I mean, that’s a very wonderful thing, in films, if you are really almost obsessed by making a film. You know, as soon as the film is finished, that it isn’t made according to a scheme or to a formula. I can see what is wrong, or what I could have done better, or what I should have done better.

How I don’t wa nt to make a film like this anymore, but change. That’s very interesting. It doesn’t happen like this in photography. It just doesn’t come up for me. It just doesn’t have that challenge.

MG: Is that what keeps you going?

RF: Absolutely.

MG: The photography at one point was much more certain. You had a reputation, and you could have kept on going – which most people would choose to do. You chose to do something that was less certain. It’s much harder to succeed in film.

RF: Well, that also gave me the impetus. I want to risk things in film. I don’t want to go middle of the road. I’m not interested in making a safe film. That’s not the point anymore for me. I don’t even want to make money in films. I mean, I’d like to get paid, I’d like to be able to live. But I want to make a film that really rakes risks, that expresses some of my lifestyle and some of my experience.

MG: How have your films and your ideas about film changed since Pull My Daisy?

RF: On each film you say, I’m never going to edit two years on a film, I’m never going to work without a script… After this film, I’m never going to work with the heavy machinery like that. I’m not going to have 25 people around me when I make a film. It’s not necessary. You can do it with less. We were really very careful to keep the dialogue, to really stick with the script; it was the schedule, it was like an airline schedule, the plane leaves and you’ve got to make the plane, make the connection! would not be so slavish about this anymore. I would risk more, to throw the schedule away, to depart from it.

MG: You stayed away from structure for a long time in your work. Was that to take those kinds of risks?

RF: Yeah. And here I felt everything became secondary to the structure of the film. No spontaneity. You preserve that structure. You absolutely don’t want to dstroy it. Now I would feel, well, fuck it. I don’t have to. You try to shoot the film in sequence, which we mostly did. We wanted it, and I thought it was very good and much easier. But in a strange way, it made you really more a slave to the structure. If we had not shot it in sequence, it would have been easier to say, well, we don’t need this, we can do it differently.

MG: Why did you choose to shoot the film in sequence?

RF: Well, because it’s a road picture. It had to start here; because here it’s fall and up there it was winter.

MG: Do you see any parallels between the social scene at the time of Pull My Daisy and the downtown New York scene today?

RF: No. Unfortunately, I don’t see any. Because in New York, it becomes more difficult to operate, to be free, because of the tremendous amount of money that you need to exist in New York. And I think it’s not that open. People know too much now. You know, they really want to be sure to succeed somehow.

MG: And back in 1959 it was much freer?

RF: It was much more open. Everything was possible, everything was new. But now that spirit doesn’t exist. Things are not that new. If they make new galleries on Avenue C, that’s a new location. But it’s a similar game. But in the late Fifties, early Sixties, there was a tremendous optimism to bring in something new, to make it different. People are much more careful today. They go to school for many years, they prepare everything very carefully. They know exactly what they want and how they want it. Because it must fit into this category, and this is where they have to fit in. Because if they don’t fit in, they don’t make it. They’re left lying down the road. And I think that’s a very strong feeling today, also with younger people, that they have to fit. None of us had that feeling. You didn’t have to fit. It was okay.

MG: Why did you leave Switzerland and why did you say it was difficult to be Swiss?

RF: Well, I think what I meant probably was, it’s a small country. And to stay in Switzerland as a Swiss, you know, you really are in an orbit that you can’t get out of. I think I meant it that way. And if you leave the country, you go to America. I don’t know what other country I would go to. Still, I think the U.S. is the best country for me.

MG: In what respect?

RF: It’s free. People let you do whatever you want to do. You can live your life any way you want to. Especially in New York. I really talk about New York. I talk more about New York than America. But it’s also the bigness of America. You can leave. You can go to Montana. Here, nobody gives a fuck what you do. It’s wonderful in New York in the subway. There’s solidarity in some ways. And I also feel that in a way, it’s more democratic. It’s depressing to see how many people are poor. And everyone seems to get more and more so. I really have become an American in that way.

MG: Why did you leave for Canada?

RF: I didn’t want to die in New York.

MG: Why not?

RF: It’s pretty horrible. It’s a very depressing place to get sick. Actually, one morn ing I woke up in the loft and I said, “Jesus Christ, I could die here in this loft, you know.” I always lived near the Bowery.

MG: But I’m still curious why you didn’t want to die in New York, what was it about New York?

RF: Well, you pay a high price to live in the city. It wears you out, it wears you down. So after living here 30 years, you get to know it, it gets in your system. And you know that there is something else.

You can go back to Europe. But you can also go to a peaceful country that’s vast, and you can go back to nature. I never liked to go in the middle of the road, and so you go to the edge of the continent. I liked the cold and the winter. I liked the people there. They have roots, and they are very simple people. And very decent people. And they also leave you alone. There’s so much space there, and you come and they watch you. They know that you’re going away, you can’t stand it after a while. And so it’s quite wonderful. It’s so beautiful. The landscape. It’s so quiet.

MG: How are the Canadians different from the Americans?

RF: How are they different? Well, they are much less aggressive. They are calmer. They’re not afraid to be run over, there’s not so much pressure there. I’m talking from New York to Mabou. I’m sure there’s somewhere – Duluth, for instance – where it’s very different. But also I went to Canada not so much because I loved Canada, but because I simply could not afford to buy land near the water in America. I didn’t have that kind of money.

MG: I’ve read a lot about the importance of spirituality to your work.

RF: Spirituality? I can’t answer that. You have to be religious? I don’t know. I think in New York it is really important for you to believe in yourself, for you never to give up this belief. And in New York it’s sort of easy to reinforce that, because artists are egotistical people. They really have to look out for themselves, always. They really think about their work, their imagination, their dreams. They put it down; they are able to show that. So New York is very strong; it’s very powerful to reinforce that feeling and to make it even stronger. And I think, when you go to a place like Canada, where all of a sudden it’s empty and there’s nobody standing behind you, nobody standing in front of you, and no feedback, then you’re alone. Then you begin to watch nature, to watch… You watch something else, and you become a better human being.

Well, after making films here when I go to Canada, I feel much better. I look at myself as almost a better person. I’m the same person there as I am here, it’s just that this is an inhuman place.

MG: Why do you feel an affinity for the odd man out?

RF: I think it was my choice not to want to belong to any group, be connected with any group.

MG: How do you feel about getting older, and how has that affected your work?

RF: I’m 62. And I’m very concerned with getting old gracefully. My main concern now [laughs]… Now, as you get older, it’s a more peaceful feeling, because you know that it’s going to be over in the next ten years or so. It’s okay. You just try to get your stuff in order. That will take a long time. You don’t have to climb up the ladder any more. It’s an awkward feeling, but you don’t have to do things anymore the way you did before. It’s a more peaceful feeling.

MG: Any ideas for another film?

RF: No. No ideas. I don’t have any ideas. But I’d like to find them, I’d like to go to a place where I can have a choice. It’s not like going shopping, you know.

MG: You have a book of photographs coming out.

RF: I’m going to be republishing a book called The Lines of My Hand, in which I will add all the other stuff that I’ve done. Which is sort of the only other book I want to do. I don’t want to do more books.

MG: That’s it.

RF: Yeah. Well, that’s a lot of words here.

Marlaine Glicksman is a filmmaker, photographer, and journalist based in New York.

Robert Frank - Steidl Verlag artist website

Robert Frank Collection | The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Following The Prints Of Robert Frank : A Photographer's... William Wilson from The LA Times, July 23, 1987

Reel Life: Robert Frank's quest for identity | Calendar | Chicago Reader Bill Stamets, June 22, 1995

Opening Lens to a Wider Experience - latimes David Ehrenstein, March 1, 1996

Capturing America's Psyche : A Survey of Robert Frank's... Christopher Knight from The LA Times, March 4, 1996

On the Road Again J. Hoberman from Artforum, November 7, 2008

Deus Ex Filmica: The Films of Robert Frank – Border Crossings ... Robert Enright, December 2008

Robert Frank's Snapshots From the Road - The New York Times December 14, 2008

print story - Stop Smiling Magazine :: Interviews and Reviews: Film + ... Michael Joshua Rowin from Stop Smiling magazine, February 6, 2009

Los Angeles Times – Culture Monster The Making of Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans,’ by Karen Wada, June 13, 2009

Artnet Perfectly Frank, by Sidney Lawrence, July 4, 2009

Robert Frank's Groundbreaking Photographs Featured in Major ... Met Museum, August 24, 2009

The New Yorker Road Show: The Journey of Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans,’ by Anthony Lane, September 14, 2009, also seen here: Road Show

Looking at Robert Frank's "The Americans" > Terry Dunford New English Review, June 2011

Essay: Robert Frank's “U.S. 90, en route to Del Rio, Texas” | Adonis ... Adonis Pulatus, February 20, 2012

Essay: Robert Frank’s “Trolley – New Orleans (1955)” Adonis Pulatus, June 5, 2012

Robert Frank's “The Americans”: Timeless Lessons Street - Eric Kim January 7, 2013

Photographer Looks to Retrace the Footsteps of Robert Frank in 'The ... Gannon Burgett from Peta Pixel, July 18, 2014

Robert Frank takes a look at his own photographs - SFGate Leah Garchik from San Francisco Chronicle, November 18, 2014

The Man Who Saw America - The New York Times July 2, 2015

An Introduction to Pull My Daisy: A Filmed, Aesthetic Triptych by ... William Anthiony Nericcio from Eyegiene, August 6, 2015

A Mesmerizing Marathon of Robert Frank's Movies - The New Yorker Nicholas Dawidoff, July 12, 2016

Altered States: Robert Frank Uncovered America ... - Village Voice Melissa Anderson, August 2, 2016

The Beat Spirit of Film: A Robert Frank Retrospective - News - Art in ... Craig Hubert from Art in America, August 4, 2016

LAURA ISRAEL Learning to Listen — Musée Magazine Andrea Blanch interview with Laura Israel on Robert Frank, March 8, 2016

PULL MY DAISY

USA (30 mi) 1959 co-director: Alfred Leslie

Chicago Reader [Don Druker] (capsule review)

Remember the beat generation? Here is a perfect parody of it, scripted by the man who invented it, Jack Kerouac. Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie's nonsense comedy blends improvisation and careful construction so well that more than a few serious commentators took the film for pure slice-of-life naturalism—and were properly offended. Fluid and funny (1959).

Time Out

Those who know Frank's stark, dispassionate pictures of blank-faced Americans will be surprised by the zany humour of this film. A group of Frank's friends (Ginsberg and painter Larry Rivers) loon about in a New York loft improvising round a scene from a Kerouac play about the Beat Generation. Straight society is represented by the bishop, his disapproving mother and prim sister, who are entertained with drinking, cussing, poetry and jazz. Kerouac provides an insane voice-over commentary which distances the audience by emphasising the artificiality and self-parody of the play-acting. The uneasy mix of informality and posturing makes the film a forerunner of Warhol's 'home movies'.

Shock Cinema [Steven Puchalski]

The Beat Generation of the late '50s came to cinematic life in this short film, populated by some that era's most indelible talents. Narrated by Jack Kerouac, and co-directed by Robert Frank (CS BLUES) and Alfred Leslie, this was a radical experiment when first released, and is still a seminal glimpse into the Greenwich Village lifestyle which typified the Beatnik counterculture. Welcome to the world of the Beats, or more particularly, a typical NYC, East Side loft. Occupied by a female painter, her railroad-breakman husband and their young son, the fun begins when the friends and visitors arrive, in the form of Alan (Alan Ginsberg), Gregory (Gregory Corso), and Peter (Peter Orlovsky) -- struggling poets who endlessly discuss their work. When husband Milo (Larry Rivers) arrives home and encounters this impromptu gathering of poets and artists, he warns them to keep cool, since they're also expecting some conservative guests: A Bishop, plus his mother and sister. Meanwhile, they discuss Buddhism, lounge about the apartment, play their music, and even after they wake up Milo's little boy, the party still doesn't stop. One of the only films actually created by the founding members of the Beat movement, this is a joyous celebration, with such a spontaneous air that it was often mistaken as a documentary. Unlike Hollywood's limp attempts to recreate the era (THE SUBTERRANEANS, HEART BEAT), this project successfully captures not only the Beatnik slice of life, but their creative energy. Loosely based on Kerouac's unfinished stage play, "The Beat Generation", and inspired by the lifestyle of Neal Cassady and his wife Carolyn, the actual footage was shot without sound, while Kerouac's inspired narration was spontaneously created during his first viewing of the movie. Full of "hep-cats" and "hipsters", his voice-over brings a genuinely unpredictable vitality to these "gum-chewing geniuses." Though gleefully unfocused in terms of its story, the emphasis is instead on high-spirits and stark imagery, juxtaposed with Kerouac's increasingly loopy, always poetic narration, and bookended with "The Crazy Daisy" theme, sung by Anita Ellis and with lyrics by Ginsberg and Kerouac. Fueled by a laid-back, urban realism rarely found in films of that day; appropriately enough, when first released in New York City, this was double-billed with John Cassavetes' independent watershed SHADOWS.

An Introduction to Pull My Daisy: A Filmed, Aesthetic Triptych by ... William Anthiony Nericcio from Eyegiene, August 6, 2015

Pulling Our Daisy: The Illusion of Spontaneity - Beatdom David S. Wills, April 11, 2014

No Exit: Pull My Daisy and Shadows (Text Only) - bu people Ray Carney website

PopMatters [Chris Robé]

photo-eye | Magazine -- Is Pull My Daisy Holy? John Cohen, August 8, 2008

Pull My Daisy. A Bebop Revolution | Villa | FORUM: University of ... Pull My Daisy: A Bebop Revolution, by Sara Villa, Summer, 2006 (pdf)

On the Road Again J. Hoberman from Artforum, November 7, 2008

Watch: 30-Minute Short 'Pull My Daisy' Written By Jack Kerouac & Co ... Ken Guidy from indieWIRE, May 20, 2014

Pull My Daisy: 1959 Beatnik Film Stars Jack Kerouac and Allen ... Colin Marshall from Open Culture, October 11, 2012

Jack Kerouac Reads from On the Road (1959) Colin Marshall from Open Culture, September 7, 2011

Jack Kerouac’s Hand-Drawn Cover for On the Road (And More Great Culture from Around the Web) Colin Marshall from Open Culture, August 6, 2012

Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg Visit the Grave of Jack Kerouac (1979) Colin Marshall from Open Culture, August 17, 2012

Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac's brilliant 1959 short, 'Pull My Daisy ... Amber Frost from Dangerous Minds, May 16, 2014

UNL | Frame by Frame | Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie's “Pull My Daisy” Wheeler Winston Dixon, November 7, 2016

Pull My Daisy - Robert Frank - Steidl Verlag

Pull My Daisy - Literary Kicks Levi Asher

Wednesday Poem of the Week – PULL MY DAISY by Jack Kerouac ... Get Into the Shade, June 20, 2012

Pull My Daisy | film by Frank | Britannica.com

New York Times (registration req'd) Richard Eder

Movie Review - - 4 Shorts at Film Forum a Blend of Charm and Naivete New York Times, October 17, 1975

Pull My Daisy - Wikipedia

Pull My Daisy on Vimeo (26:24)

Pull My Daisy (1959) YouTube (26:24)

COCKSUCKER BLUES

USA (93 mi) 1972

CS Blues, directed by Robert Frank and Daniel Seymour ... - Time Out

It's Cocksucker Blues of course, a film made of the Rolling Stones on tour in North America, 1972 (at the time of their excellent Exile On Main Street LP). It has acquired considerable cult status, largely on account of the group's reluctance to have it shown - whether because they are portrayed as Satanic Majesties, or just an above-average rock group, is not altogether clear. There is some intravenous use of heroin, not by the principal characters, natch, and some mucking about with groupies. There are also some well composed and shot concert sequences, but what the film does best is present a picture of the mini-society that attached itself to the group at its peak. A pretty dismal society it is, too. For fans this is practically unmissable, but less partisan voyeurs are likely to concur with guitarist Mick Taylor's observation on one of the many dreary drug-taking scenes: 'I've never seen a hotel room filled with such Olympian ecstasy.' He's joking.

Cocksucker Blues | Chicago Reader JR Jones

The Rolling Stones never permitted filmmaker Robert Frank to release this 1972 chronicle of their Exile on Main Street tour, and I've seen it only as a bad video dub. Even with the best picture imaginable, it can't help but suffer in comparison to Gimme Shelter, but it's still an indelible look at a rock band on the road. Frank unflinchingly records the rough sexuality and substance abuse of the Stones' entourage (there's footage of tour personnel dragging some groupies into an orgy while Mick Jagger and Keith Richards laugh and pound out a tribal beat on percussion). Nonfans will be bored stiff, and even true believers may find the last half hour interminable, but the film's real distinction may be its willingness to be dull: like the Exile LP, it has a bleary, disoriented, 3 AM feeling. The band and crew watch TV, play cards, jam, masturbate, fuck, do drugs--anything they can think of to kill time until the next show. 90 min.

User comments from imdb Author: Brett Scieszka from United States

I used to think that 'Gimme Shelter' was the end all, be all of Rolling Stones documentaries. The Maysles' film is undeniably heroic, but its shine and polish, its squeaky clean view of the Stones as consummate professionals utterly belies the fact that road life with the skinny brits did involve a good deal of sex, drugs, and a bit of rock and roll too. Filmed during a tour to promote my personal favorite Stones record, 'Exile on Main St,' 'Cocksucker Blues' is a grimy, sordid foray in the behind the scenes workings of the Rolling Stones machine.

Gloriously filmed in both color and black and white super 8, and artfully presented with a strong focus on non-diagetic audio tracks, 'Cocksucker Blues' is no simple document of events, but a solid work of art in its own right. The haphazard filming style during performances is more kinetic and subjective than the Maysles' lens and suits the jarring, hell-bent nature of the music.

The craziness of tour life is captured in some particularly amazing and unforgettable scenes. The kook, nearly suicidal fan, whose baby's been taken away due to mom's acid habit, the primitive and forceful disrobing of women on the plane while the band cooks up a beat to go with it, and the junky sound man all create a subterrainian truthful texture to the Stones experience that was most likely not available to the Maysles brothers.

Movie Review - Cocksucker Blues - eFilmCritic The Ultimate Dancing Machine

A trivial example of a trivial subgenre--i.e., the rock-stars-screwing-around-backstage movie--COCKSUCKER BLUES apparently didn't even please its subject, Sir Mick Jagger and his fellow Stones; they gave it one of those "no resemblance to actual persons, etc." disclaimers (huh?), and went to court to prevent its release. Consequently, this film has been available chiefly through washed-out bootlegs, becoming over the years something of a hot underground item. As far as I'm concerned, the underground can keep it.

A couple of decent performances can't keep COCKSUCKER BLUES from lapsing into navel-gazing tedium: it's mostly a lot of random hotel-room hijinx, with Keith Richards providing the film's highlight when he chucks a TV off the balcony--though some viewers might be wowed by the surprisingly graphic sex-and-drugs footage. (We're talking full nudity, male and female, as well as a few shooting-up bits.) As with Bob Dylan's very similar EAT THE DOCUMENT, it's interesting precisely to the extent that you dig the band; most viewers will quite properly find it self-indulgent and pointless. The movie reveals very little if anything about the Stones or their music. No one should be surprised to see the boys hanging out with drug-crazed groupies, like the hapless airhead interviewed here who complains that she lost custody of her daughter--just cause her mommy does tons of LSD ("She was born on acid"). The excessively shaky "you are there" camerawork doesn't help either.

At least the closing credits are fun: among other oddities, television-destroyer Richards is listed as "TV Repairman." SOMEBODY involved with this movie was having fun--too bad little of it ended up on screen.

User comments from imdb Author: ericl-2 from New York

Sheer brilliance from Robert Frank, one of the great visual artists of our time. Let's say right at the start that the concert footage (the only portions of "CB" in color) captures some of the Stones' best performances ever on film, including a splendid "Midnight Rambler" and a wonderful medley of "Uptight" and "Satisfaction" with Stevie Wonder.

But the meat of this film is in the off-the-cuff, life-on-the-road footage, shot in a beautiful, grainy black and white. Other important filmmakers worked with the Stones before and after (J-L Godard on "One Plus One," Hal Ashby on the regrettable "Let's Spend the Night Together"), but this is the great one because it does the opposite of glamorizing the band -- it reveals the quotidian nature of their antics on the road. Lots of outrageous things happen: roadies shoot up, Keith Richards throws a TV set out the window and displays himself in various states of extreme intoxication and/or nodding off, groupies are abused on the tour bus, etc.

But Frank reveals it all in his unique deadpan style, letting you see the band members as individuals carrying on an everyday existence rather than as celebrities. In his camera, the excess is all of a piece with the mundane details: Jagger sitting on his hotel bed ordering a bowl of fruit, a conversationless walk along a road, etc.

Frank doesn't deglamorize his subject, either -- despite the squalor of some of what he shows us, he isn't out to debunk the Stones and their hangers-on, but to reveal them to us as part of everyday life and the spectacle they put on as a workaday component of the larger spectacle society feeds to the masses as entertainment. The effect is a little like the messier backstage scenes of such films as von Sternberg's "The Blue Angel," Bergman's "Sawdust and Tinsel," or Fellini's "Variety Lights," where the everyday routine that goes on behind the making of an illusion seems somehow harder and crueller than it would in any other setting. But it's life, as Robert Frank observes it in our airbrushed, late-capitalist world.

The wonderful last shot, as Jagger throws his arm into the air amidst an explosion of lights and camera flashes, ends it with a flourish, but by now we've seen the mess behind the flash. This film grows you up.

Officially, "CB" was the film of the Stones' 1972 US tour, but for murky reasons (one hears it was the shooting-up sequences that did it) the band barred its release and only allows it to be shown occasionally. In its place, the relatively uninspired "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Rolling Stones!" was released. Too bad -- catch "CB" if you can, or seek out one of the many bootleg videotapes circulating, although the color repro on the latter can sometimes be lousy.

Cocksucker Blues: The Rolling Stones and Some Notes on Robert ... Steven Gaunson from Senses of Cinema, October 11, 2010

Cocksucker Blues: Robert Frank's Rolling Stones documentary ... - Slate Jack Hamilton, July 9, 2013

not coming to a theater near you review Katherine Follett

The Rolling Stones: Cocksucker Blues - Culture Court Rick McGrath

“Cocksucker Blues”: Robert Frank's Suppressed Rolling Stones ... Richard Brody from The New Yorker, July 20, 2016

Perfec Sound Forever: It's a Tedious Life- Cocksucker Blues and the ... John Dougan from Perfect Sound Forever, February 2005

The Ultimate Rock 'n' Roll Bootleg - ALVAR MAGAZINE Daniel Cantagallo, June 2014

Where the Long Tail Ends Matt Gamble

Flickhead [Ray Young]

Rolling Stone [Eric Hellweg]

Rolling Stones' Controversial Tour Documentary "Cocksucker Blues ... Patrick Doyle from Rolling Stone, October 26, 2009

Subterranean Cinema including excerpts from an interview with the director

All Movie Guide [Mark Deming]

Time Magazine [Grant Rosenberg]

'Cocksucker Blues': The Rolling Stones in a Fabled 1972 Backstage ... Variety

While the camera was rolling | Film | The Guardian John Robinson, October 8, 2004

Rolling Stones"Cocksucker Blues DVD Documentary by Robert Frank" YouTube (1:29:50)

Rolling Stones - Cocksucker Blues (Complete Pt.1) YouTube (44:42)

Rolling Stones - Cocksucker Blues (Complete Pt 2) YouTube (49:26)

Cocksucker Blues Part 1 - Rolling Stones 1972 YouTube (31:13)

Cocksucker Blues Pt 2 - Rolling Stones - 1972 YouTube (30:43)

ENERGY AND HOW TO GET IT

USA (28 mi) 1981

User reviews from imdb Author: druid333-2 from United States, May 24, 2009

Robert Frank is somewhat of a enigma as a film maker. He is probably best known for his banned documentary of the Rolling Stones 1972 tour, 'C********r Blues' (which even today cannot be screened due to legal issues, plus you know that even most art cinemas won't place the title in it's adverts, much less the marquee), as well as 'Pull My Daisy'from 1959 (with a screenplay written by Beat Generation poet,Jack Kerouac). 'Energy And How To Get It', from 1981 concerns Robert Golka, a scientist who wants to generate free electricity to the masses. The only thing blocking his vision is the government power agency, headed up by a money hungry power Czar (played by writer William S.Burroughs). The film seems to want to teeter somewhere between a documentary & a docudrama. Avant Garde poet, John Giorno is also on hand as Burrough's right hand man, as well as a musical appearance by Dr.John & Libby Titus. The film's grainy black & white photography gives it a nice kitchen sink look. Worth taking a look at for mostly fans of Burroughs. No MPAA rating, but does contain some raunchy language

Energy and How to Get It | IDFA

Robert Golka is an inventor with an ideal – a dream, an obsession. If he succeeds in achieving nuclear fusion using artificial ball lightning, he’ll be able to provide the world with an unlimited supply of energy. He works in a huge hangar in Nevada packed with equipment that looks like it came straight off the set of some old sci-fi movie. As dangerous-looking lightning bolts shoot noisily back and forth, Golka explains the principles behind his experiments to his dog Proton. Robert Frank and scriptwriter Rudy Wurlitzer step into this surreal scene and take it a step further with an experiment of their own. They add fictional elements that transform this film project into a mockumentary of sorts. Dressed in a bathrobe, Robert Downey plays a skeptic from Hollywood, while underground author William S. Burroughs appears as Energy Czar. Golka encounters resistance on all sides, but he understands perfectly well that that’s because the big labs and oil companies won’t stand for any competition. He was willing to risk life and limb for the tests, but now he’s at the end of his rope. The only ones urging him on are his faithful companion Agnes and the musical duo Dr. John and singer Libby Titus – they perform an uplifting song for him on the piano.

William S. Burroughs in 'Energy and How to Get It' | Dangerous Minds Oliver Hall

Robert Frank and Rudy Wurlitzer collaborated on a few movies in the 70s and 80s. Frank, of course, is the photographer behind the book The Americans, the Beat movie Pull My Daisy and the notorious Stones-commissioned, Stones-banned Cocksucker Blues; Wurlitzer is the novelist and screenwriter who wrote the scripts for Two-Lane Blacktop, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and Alex Cox’s Walker.

(Incidentally, Wurlitzer and Cox allege that Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man is a ripoff of Zebulon, an unproduced screenplay Wurlitzer wrote for Sam Peckinpah in the 70s. Several years ago, Wurlitzer refashioned Zebulon as the novel The Drop Edge of Yonder.)

Among Frank and Wurlitzer’s collaborations is the 1981 pseudo-documentary short Energy and How to Get It, about real-life Tesla admirer Robert Golka’s experiments with fusion. It includes an entertaining turn by William S. Burroughs as the sinister Energy Czar, whose interests are threatened by Golka’s experiments and who knows how the world is really run:

Prayin’ is for the moron majority. They’re handy, they’re useful, but we don’t go in for that sort of rubbish. No, I mean, if we had to start prayin’, we’d be prayin’ to ourselves. ‘Cause we’re the source. If you want anything, you have to come to us.

Earlier this year, about fourteen minutes of the 28-minute short surfaced on YouTube. I’m not sure whether this is just the movie’s first half or if it’s the edited version that was released on Giorno Poetry Systems’ home video It’s Clean, It Just Looks Dirty. In any case, to see the 28-minute cut, you’ll have to track down the out-of-print German DVD Robert Frank: The Complete Film Works Volume 4. Good luck with that. In the meantime, behold this tantalizing glimpse of a future that never was.

Energy and How to Get It | IDFA Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam

Energy and How to Get It (1981) directed by Robert Frank • Reviews ... Letterboxd

Rudy Wurlitzer — Short Films

CANDY MOUNTAIN A 96

Switzerland Canada France (91 mi) 1988 co-director: Rudy Wurlitzer

Once more before I go, out to Killarney
Once more before I go, beg me to stay
As the wind blows across my grave, I will be calling
Once more before I go, once more for ever more

—“Once More Before I Go,” by Al Silk (Tom Waits)

From the depths of the archives of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, who allegedly hold copies of Robert Frank’s entire cinematic output, comes yet another undiscovered gem, and while it was made in the late 80’s, remains one of the best films to effortlessly express the complexities and ambiguities of the 50’s and 60’s, refusing to be defined or labeled, searching through unchartered waters for that inexpressible meaning in life, whatever and wherever that may be, taking all circuitous detours on the road, living off the grid, studying everything around you, while living in the gray matter of your young and all too impressionable mind. Perhaps what ultimately matters in this film is that Frank was a recognized artist before he became a filmmaker, so an artist’s sensibility runs throughout the picture. Knowing the personality of the foreign-born director adds to a greater understanding of his works, as like many migrants before him, he arrived in this country filled with hope and optimism, where he was first and foremost a photographer, remaining fascinated with American culture, but his views changed, where the optimism of the 50’s led to a disparity in wealth and unmistakable realities of class and racial differences, finally viewing the country as an often bleak and lonely place. He met key figures of the Beat Generation in the late 50’s, including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, making his first impromptu movie with them called PULL MY DAISY (1959), which was written and narrated by Kerouac, based on a play by Kerouac and featured the beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky, as well as painter Larry Rivers and actress Delphine Seyrig, made a year after he published his most famous work, The Americans, a collection of photographs that could be described as a prototypical road movie with Kerouac writing the introductory text. Sean O’Hagan writes from The Guardian, November 7, 2014, "Robert Frank at 90: the photographer who revealed America won't look back":

Frank was 31 in 1955 when he secured the Guggenheim Grant that financed his various road trips across America the following year with his wife and his two young children in tow. He shot around 28,000 pictures. When Les Americains was published by Robert Delpire in France in 1958, it consisted of just 83 black and white images, but it changed the nature of photography, what it could say and how it could say it. Published in the United Sates as The Americans by Grove Press a year later, it remains perhaps the most influential photography book of the 20th century. […]

Frank’s America is a place of shadows, real and metaphorical. His Americans look furtive, lonely, suspicious. He caught what Diane Arbus called the “hollowness” at the heart of many American lives, the chasm between the American dream and the everyday reality. With his handheld camera, Frank embraced movement and tilt and grain. Contemporary critics reacted with a mixture of scorn and outrage, accusing him of being anti-American as well as anti-photography. A review in Practical Photography dismissed the book’s “meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness.” The Americans portrayed a place and a people that many Americans just could not, or did not want to see: a sad, hard, divided country that seemed essentially melancholic rather than heroic. As Jack Kerouac put it in his famous introduction, Robert Frank “sucked a sad poem out of America.”

Frank was an outsider by temperament and design. Born and raised in Zurich, where he trained as a commercial studio photographer, he fled his solidly bourgeois family in 1947, tired of “the smallness of Switzerland.” In New York, he landed a job at Harper’s Bazaar, where famed art director, Alexey Brodivitch, had hired the likes of Cartier-Bresson and Bill Brandt, but deadlines and the dictates of magazine work quickly wore him down and he set off for South America, shooting in the towns and villages of Bolivia and Peru and living hand to mouth.

These journeys set the tone for much of what was to follow as Frank traveled through England and Wales before embarking on his road trips across America. Though he rejected Walker Evan’s more formal approach, he learned much from the older photographer, whom he accompanied on shorter trips after they met and became friends in New York. Their differing attitudes to photography – and to life – were essentially generational: the impeccably well-bred Evans once asked Frank, “Why do you hang out with those people, Robert? They have no class.” He was referring to Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, whom Frank had recognised as fellow iconoclasts in search of another wilder America that matched their outlaw imaginations.

Their influence would seep into Frank’s later work like a virus: the freeform flow of his fly-on-the-wall short films and the uncompromising diaristic style of the infamous Cocksucker Blues, a documentary about the Rolling Stones 1972 tour of America that caught the boredom and dissolution of life on the road in a grainy verite style that was way too revealing for the group. They sued to prevent its release and sent a sheriff to his door to confiscate his copy of the film. Legend has it that Mick Jagger acknowledged the film’s greatness but told Frank: “If it shows in America we’ll never be allowed in the country again.”

Frank met screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer in the 1960’s, as both were living in Cape Breton in Nova Scotia, about as far from the all-consuming bright lights of Los Angeles as they could possibly get, both living in the shadows to survive, while also keeping in touch in New York’s Lower East Side, growing more inspired by his work with Monte Hellman in Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) and Sam Peckinpah’s last western, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973), initially working together on the film KEEP BUSY (1975), an absurdist glimpse at a group of artists in Cape Breton, and ENERGY AND HOW TO GET IT (1981), a near 30-minute short funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a documentary spoof about a lone engineer who believes in free energy butting heads with an Energy Czar, played by William S. Burroughs. The best fusion of their talents, however, is this Canadian co-directed film, largely improvised and open-ended, combining Frank’s abstract, narrative free artistic vision with Wurlitzer’s cryptic dialogue in near apocalyptic road journeys to nowhere, where on the DVD commentary track of Two-Lane Blacktop, Wurlitzer is quoted as saying, “The horizon is everything that the rear-view mirror isn’t. It’s the unknown.” Despite its rambling style, often feeling lost and incoherent, the film is one of the better extensions of the 60’s counterculture, with plenty of autobiographical references, described by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum (The Countercultural Histories of Rudy Wurlitzer | Jonathan Rosenbaum) as “the deliberate relinquishment of power, a key aim of 60’s counterculture, (and) represents the closest thing in his work to utopia,” arguably resonating more deeply than Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) and Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces (1970), for instance, both de-glamorizations of Hollywood culture, but considered standard-bearers and among the first counterculture films to be viewed by a mass audience, while this film, made nearly twenty years later, is nearly forgotten, sent to the trash heap, barely mentioned, if not omitted from an actor’s resumé, and only available in an obscure European Region 2 DVD format. While it continues Wurlitzer’s meditations on the myths of the American frontier, it uses a music format to do so, not just on the eclectic soundtrack, but in the use of interesting glimpses of musical figures of the 70’s and 80’s who populate the film as actors, all of whom share an undeniable artistic integrity and creativity, each figuring prominently in the storyline, adding a special appeal, wry humor, and a hint that their appearance brings an alternative universe (and subversive meaning) into nearly every scene. With so many singers and musicians appearing in the film, who may or may not have been under contract at the time, one of the reasons the film may be so endlessly lost in a legal quagmire of limited distribution is no one has attempted to untangle the complicated rights issues involving the various artists and their music, which is heard throughout, but largely uncredited, as it’s incorporated into the overall narrative.

While the film is, in effect, a rejection of trendy American culture, especially how musicians are literally owned by record labels and measured by capitalist dollar signs, with death only increasing their value, as we witnessed when a slew of iconic 60’s rockers (Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Keith Moon) died before their time, reduced to having their names emblazoned on marketable merchandise, lost in a land with an overriding obsession with money, where the film title is a fictional place mentioned in a depression era song, The Big Rock Candy Mountain, a hobo’s dream of paradise on earth, “where the jails are made of tin / and you can walk right out again.” Nonetheless we begin our journey on the mean streets of New York, following the exploits of a dreamer protagonist throughout, a not so bright but idealistic and ambitious young kid who wants to be a star, Julius Book, Chicago-born Kevin J. O’Connor, who was stuck with the label of being the next James Dean and is simply brilliant throughout, the son of a Chicago cop, more recently seen in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007) and The Master (2012), and a recurring character in the TV-series Chicago P.D. (2014 to present), a stand-in for the pursuit of the American Dream, as he dreams of breaking into the music business, but thinks only of success and money. Initially, however, after walking off his job, he can’t even get his guitar back from Mario (Joe Strummer, punk icon of the Clash) and his strange cohort, Arto Lindsay (New York no wave group DNA), who instead sends him on a non-paying gig with Keith Burns (David Johansen, aka Buster Pointdexter of the New York Dolls), appearing here with a group of musicians, including his drummer, Tony “Machine” Krasinski, but Burns ridicules his playing ability during a band rehearsal. Instead he picks up on Burns’s obsession with Elmore Silk guitars, supposedly the finest handmade guitars on the market, each worth more than $20,000, but made by a recluse who has all but disappeared from sight, making his guitars even more valuable. Julius gets Burns’s attention by pretending to know the man, claiming he can track him down and get him to sign an agreement to sell Burns a few of his guitars. Julius, it turns out, lies through his teeth, claiming experiences he doesn’t have, where mostly he’s a shiftless music wannabe with coiffed hair and a black leather jacket, where he’s got the look but not the talent. Yet with the stroke of a pen, Julius hits the road, receiving wheels and an advance of $2000, where the free-wheeling style of the film really kicks into gear, featuring the ever-widening, open expanse of Swiss cinematographer Pio Corradi, whose credits list 100 films, yet none are remotely recognizable, which only adds to the film’s charming allure. While Frank’s photographic eye captures the striking beauty of vast natural landscapes, isolated roads, and lonely characters who haunt the texts of so many American poems and songs, yet over the course of his journey, there are many who remind the aimless Julius “the road ain’t what it used to be,” turning this into a kind of anti-road movie, where Wurlitzer seems to be commenting on this generation, which has been sold a bill of goods about freedom and the mystery of “the road,” having heard about Kerouac or Easy Rider, but never reading the book or seeing the movie, where instead they’re nearly incapable of actually learning anything from the experience.

Early on, Julius is given a sage bit of advice from a toothless truck driver (Rockets Redglare), “Life ain’t no candy mountain,” before being bilked out of money. In an amusing series of vignettes, Julius meets Al Silks (Tom Waits), Elmore’s upscale brother, like a character out of a Buster Keaton movie, a rich man living in opulence (“There are rooms in that house that I haven’t even been in,”) whose advice to Julius, as he practices on a putting tee, is that “You should be playing golf. You’re young. You should be playing A LOT of golf.” Both getting soundly drunk, Julius takes a nap to the sounds of Waits gravel-filled voice, cozied up next to a piano singing “Once More Before I Go,” Tom Waits in Candy Mountain - YouTube (7:15). Interestingly, in the same year as the film’s release, Waits released Frank’s Wild Years, the final in a trilogy of albums that included Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs, music that had absolutely nothing to do with the 80’s music scene, instead enveloping the idea of absolute freedom of creation, which lingers through the cracks as a prominent theme of the film. When Julius wakes, Silks offers him his 60’s T-Bird for half his cash, claiming Elmore is living with his daughter, who in stark contrast, is living in a disreputable trailer park. By the time Julius gets there, he discovers Alice (Laurie Metcalf) lives with her paraplegic husband Henry (Dr. John, who plays no music) in a wheelchair, both fighting like cats and dogs, with Henry especially incensed to learn Elmore’s guitars are so valuable and he missed out on an opportunity to make money on them, leaving him with nothing, as instead they literally drove him out, and in no time we can see why, as they are a hilarious picture of turmoil and constant dysfunction, Dr. John in Candy Mountain YouTube (6:31), but take the T-Bird off his hands for a broken down VW Van and a forwarding address in the remote hinterlands of Canada. The VW breaks down almost immediately, with Julius trading it in, along with some cash, for a pickup truck that takes him into the snowy landscapes of Canada. Running throughout the film is a recurring motif involving automobiles, as every time Julius arrives in a new place, he leaves in a different vehicle. Similarly, as he discovers people from Elmore’s past, Julius is stripped of his cash and all material possessions, yet inevitably stumbles forward on his quest for fame and fortune with his same ideals intact, while remaining oblivious to his surroundings. None more apparent than a drunken encounter that leads him into the hoosegow, as falling asleep at the wheel, he happened to veer his car into the property of an extremely pious and sanctimonious Justice of the Peace (Roberts Blossom) and his equally eccentric constable son (Leon Redbone), and is unable to pay for the damages, spending days locked up in an adjoining room of the house, Leon Redbone in Candy Mountain YouTube (10:19), but eventually his freedom is celebrated with a spirited (and drunken) father and son rendition of “On the Road to Nowhere.”

Easily the most poignant stop along the way is his visit to Cornelia (Bulle Ogier, a French actress who’s worked with Rivette, Fassbinder, Chabrol, and Buñuel), one of Elmore’s former loves, a moving sequence filled with a haunting pathos, like a memory of a forgotten incident, where she couldn’t be more graciously tender and accommodating, even inviting him into her bed, informing him “Elmore wants to step off the edge of the map,” but Julius is hell-bent on finding him. It’s only when he appears to be at the end of the road that the film comes together, where we’ve learned bits and pieces of information about Elmore along the way, creating a near mythical status before he ever makes an appearance. While the film is oddly amusing throughout, it perhaps shouldn’t surprise us that when he finally discovers Elmore’s home, there’s a message written on a mirror in the living room, “You owe me one.” When Elmore (Harris Yulin) finally does show up, located at the farthest point of Cape Breton, Julius thinks he’s hit the jackpot, clueless to what’s taking place before his eyes, as Elmore actually takes him under his wing before walking out the door, perhaps reminding him of his own carefree youth, suggesting he stick around and soak up some of the surroundings, “I say freedom doesn’t have much to do with the road, one way or the other.” What this underlines is that there is no secret to happiness, and the farther you run away in pursuit of your authentic self, you’re no closer to finding it, as we soon learn Elmore cuts his own deal with a mysterious Asian buyer (Koko Yamamoto), and as part of the deal, destroys all his other guitars while pledging to never make another, enormously jacking up the prices of his existing works, enough for him to live on comfortably for the rest of his life, which turns out to be no problem for him at all, with Julius strangely helping him burn his remaining inventory. In the end, perhaps stomping on earlier dreams and promises made, the last vestiges of earlier hopes abandon us as we approach our own mortality and even the best of us are prone to sell out. While the finality of it all is a bit surreal, and somehow magical, viewers are treated to a magnificent performance by Cape Breton’s First Lady of Song, Rita MacNeil singing “Everybody,” Rita MacNeil in Candy Mountain YouTube (3:12), as authentic and big-hearted a voice as you’ll ever find, conveying in one song a lifetime of honesty and sincerity, where she may as well represent the true artistic inspiration of the film, what Julius keeps hoping to find, but once again ignores. A celebration of marginal characters and a moving evocation of poets, vagabonds, and loners, the fleeting beauty of the brief musical interludes reminds us of their significance in our lives, where this is a rare film that on one canvas captures that rambunctious yet elusive spirit of freedom while also demonstrating a unique flair for an appreciation of beauty. Made on a limited budget for next to nothing, this is the real thing.

Candy Mountain | Calendar | The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Candy Mountain, Robert Frank's collaboration with novelist Rudy Wurlitzer, follows a struggling musician (Kevin J. O’Connor) who sets out to find legendary guitar maker Elmore Silk (Harris Yulin) in hopes of striking a deal to make himself rich and famous. The film also stars Bulle Ogier (Celine & Julie Go Boating) and features cameos by iconic figures of the 1980s music world: Dr. John, Joe Strummer, Buster Poindexter, Leon Redbone, Rockets Redglare, and Tom Waits, among others.

“In a way, this shaggy-dog hipster road film is Frank's ultimate work—evoking the end of the road and even the end of Endsville—but he has persevered.” —Village Voice

Candy Mountain, directed by Robert Frank and Rudy ... - Time Out

A witty anti-road-movie with a subplot on the nature of the artist. Julius (O'Connor, who looks streetwise but plays with aching vunerability) is young, broke, and dreams of rock star fame and fortune. He lands a job with a dodgy band and an assignment to track down Elmore Silk (Yulin), a reclusive, masterly maker of acoustic guitars. Things don't go well: Julius loses his girl and car at the first gas station. From then on, his search is determined by providence and a host of (perfectly cast) off-the-wall characters - a glamorous Frenchwoman (Ogier) stuck out in the middle of the prairies, a father and son laying down the law in barely inhabited North Canada, a woman who kidnaps him for company. As Silk's plaid-clad brother, Tom Waits rasps credibility into the script, telling Julius to 'play golf instead of travelling without knowing where you're going': so begins a steady undermining of the road as a symbol of freedom. The journey ends in Nova Scotia with our James Dean-ish hero humbled by the road but not quite broken. It's left to Elmore Silk to hammer the nail in the coffin of his ideals. Not beat and not downbeat, the general message is a reaffirmation of life after Kerouac.

Cine-File Chicago: Ben Sachs

The cast alone—an eclectic mix of musicians and respected character actors—is worth the price of admission. Joe Strummer, Laurie Metcalf, Dr. John, David Johansen of the New York Dolls, Tom Waits, Harris Yulin, Bulle Ogier, Leon Redbone, Arto Lindsay, and Roberts Blossom all make appearances in CANDY MOUNTAIN, and the succession of cool cats makes this rarely-revived international coproduction feel like one of the best art parties you’ve never attended. (In its hipster all-star line-up and come-as-you-are vibe, the movie anticipates Jim Jarmusch’s COFFEE AND CIGARETTES, and wouldn’t you know, Jarmusch himself makes an uncredited appearance here too.) The directors are plenty hip themselves: Robert Frank is a noted photographer who helmed the Beat Generation short PULL MY DAISY and the long-suppressed Rolling Stones documentary COCKSUCKER BLUES, while Rudy Wurlitzer, who also wrote this, is an esteemed counterculture novelist who wrote the scripts for TWO-LANE BLACKTOP, PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID, and Alex Cox’s WALKER. The slim plot has an aspiring musician and second-rate bullshit artist named Julius Booke hitting the road to find a reclusive guitar maker named Elmore Silk, whose goods are much desired by some music industry players whom Booke wants to impress. Booke leaves New York City for eastern Canada, burning through several cars and a few thousand dollars over a few days that come to feel like a lifetime. Along the way, he meets various relatives and colleagues of Silk’s, all of them eccentric and wrapped up in themselves, but, as in such Wurlitzer novels as Flats and Quake, a spirit of transience comes to overwhelm any sense of character. This is a quietly sad movie about a cipher of a man who gets swallowed up by the open road, the type of person who might have been sung about in a Depression-era folk ballad. But, as this was co-directed by the photographer of The Americans, the open road here as an undeniable beauty about it. Preceded by Robert Frank’s 1981 film ENERGY AND HOW TO GET IT (28 min, 16mm).

News | Chicago Film Society Cameron Worden

The cult rock ‘n’ roll weirdo road movie of your dreams, the wildly underseen and very funny Candy Mountain somehow manages to be both a lark and a creative and thematic apotheosis for both of its codirectors, photographer/filmmaker Robert Frank and novelist/screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer. Mediocre musician and all-around jackass Julius (Kevin J. O’Connor) insinuates himself into a deal to track down legendary and reclusive guitar maker Elmore Silk, an oblique figure who has left a trail of disgruntled family members and forlorn ex-lovers in his wake. Julius finds that nothing about his assignment is easy as he loses vehicle after vehicle, drinks himself into a stupor, and meets innumerable deranged personalities (a great many of whom are played by notable musicians, including Tom Waits as a yuppie, Joe Strummer and Arto Lindsay as the world’s worst no wave band, and Dr. John as a wheelchair-bound psychopath) whom he invariably leaves frustrated, confused, or enraged. Given that Frank and Wurlitzer were best known, respectively, for the photography book The Americans and the screenplay for Two-Lane Blacktop, it should come as no shock that their feature film collaboration would so greatly concern itself with America’s preoccupation with the road and wayward notions of freedom. Nor should its deeply odd, dead-end splendor surprise us, given the tremendous creative brain trust involved. (CW)

91 min • Xanadu Films  • 35mm from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Preceded by: “Energy and How to Get It” (Robert Frank, Rudy Wurlitzer, and Gary Hill, 1981) – 16mm – 28 min

Brooklyn Magazine: Scout Tafoya August 31, 2016

Frank saw not just the parting of the clouds that led to the freedom and love and acceptance and radicalism of the 60s, he saw the car crash that followed, when the love met the hate, the violence poured into the streets, and the artists he loved and came up with died, or worse, became accepted as tokens of a wild counterculture that had been dampened to uselessness. Frank was never turned into Jesus by the market like Jack Kerouac, Che Guevara, Malcolm X or William Burroughs. His wildness was never mistaken for a desire for domestication and he lived on as marginalia, watching his family shrink and his peers drift. Some of Frank’s loneliness and confusion made its way into Candy Mountain, which he made with Rudy Wurlitzer. Like Frank, Wurlitzer stayed in the shadows to survive. The two of them wander up through the wooly Canadian wilds looking for solitude, peace of mind, a reason to keep living on the straight and narrow. Kevin J. O’Connor, back when he was going to be the next James Dean, plays a kid who wants to be an artist, but who’s stuck running errands for David Johansen, whose hard edges had been sanded off by that point. He was a film actor, for god’s sakes. How much more safe could he get?

Along the way he passes one more rocker or poet, one brick-throwing hellcat older than the last guy who thought he’d never make it to this age. He encounters Joe Strummer, Arto Lindsay, Rockets Redglare, Tom Waits, Dr. John, Roberts Blossom, Leon Redbone, Bulle Ogier, Wayne Robson and finally Harris Yulin’s Colonel Kurtz in this frosty Apocalypse Now. The chill of a Canadian winter has to take the place of napalm heat while O’Conner realizes there is no secret reality to flee to, not anymore. The hope is dead and gone, and the further north he goes, he’s just one step closer to the truth that even your idols sell out. Everyone does. How else are you supposed to stay warm? Frank and Wurlitzer knew the rules that their ilk used to live by were unstable at best, untenable at heart, and as long as capitalism held sway, the things they once touched would only be measured in the money collectors would be willing to pay for them. The lives of rebels had dollar signs next to their names, and the anger would be palpable if the sadness weren’t so much louder. The horror will always find you. It found Frank even as he, like Yulin’s recluse, retreated as far north as the elements would allow. He dreamt so loud we could hear him, so naturally his number came up. Candy Mountain is a fictional place, where the jails are made of tin, as the song goes, because we keep walking back inside, accepting that the artist will always be someone’s property. Candy Mountain will always be a long climb towards an anticlimax, but as long as gatekeepers ignore its lessons, it will always be relevant. Those of us on the margin need to know there’s continuity to our suffering, purpose to our longing. We’ve always been lost but there’s beauty in never getting where you’re going.

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

Who is Robert Frank? The most influential of mid-century American photographers? Eternal boho and Beat Generation fellow traveler? Venerable titan of the (old) New American Cinema?

Although he's made over 20 personal films since 1959, it's symptomatic of Frank's subterranean career that his best known is still the Beat family portrait Pull My Daisy, co-directed with painter Alfred Leslie and narrated by Jack Kerouac. Still, Anthology's comprehensive retro "Mapping a Journey: The Films & Videos of Robert Frank" (November 7–16, coinciding with the artist's 84th birthday) could hardly begin anywhere else. The first two programs are devoted to Frank's beatnik movies—notably his faux cinema verité feature Me and My Brother (1968), which, although ostensibly a portrait of poet Peter Orlovsky and his catatonic sibling Julius, is filled with theater people and self-identified actors.

Me and My Brother, which Frank re-edited in the late '90s, is the weightiest item in his oeuvre, but, for my money, he came into his own as a filmmaker with the first-person Conversations in Vermont (1969), which concerns his ambivalent confrontation with his adolescent children. Anticipating by several years Yvonne Rainer's more polished avant-celebrity psychodramas, Conversations in Vermont and its successors Life-Raft Earth (1969), documenting a week-long "starve-in" organized by Wavy Gravy and Stewart Brand, and About Me: A Musical (1971), which mutated from traditional music doc to startlingly manic self-presentation, are steeped in the pungent clutter of late-'60s hippie boho life. The elusive, ineffably sad Life Dances On (1980) provides a postscript to this period, touching on the accidental deaths of Frank's daughter Andrea and his young assistant, Danny Seymour.

Frank's legendary and usually restricted Rolling Stones documentary Cocksucker Blues (1972) is scheduled for two rare screenings. Less sensational but more felt is the (very) quasi-commercial feature Candy Mountain (1987), a collaboration with novelist Rudy Wurlitzer. In a way, this shaggy-dog hipster road film is Frank's ultimate work—evoking the end of the road and even the end of Endsville—but he has persevered. "Mapping a Journey" includes subsequent low-tech music videos (for New Order and Patti Smith), eccentric tributes to fellow artists (Kerouac and Alfred Stieglitz), and at least one nearly unknown gem, C'est Vrai! One Hour (1990), a single-take chunk of real time choreographed one summer afternoon in the artist's Lower Manhattan neighborhood.

Here, 30 years later, is the (almost) spontaneous action documentary Frank claimed to have made with Pull My Daisy. Even the milieu is similar: C'est Vrai! begins in the artist's impressively disheveled studio; the camera moves outside to the corner of Bleecker and Lafayette and into a beat-up van that drives in circles around the neighborhood, occasionally stopping to allow the camera to run out into a diner or record a bit of on-street conversation. Truth is an elastic concept: One soon realizes that Frank has salted the area with staged events. C'est Vrai! is a one-of-a-kind stunt, both street theater and an urban road movie.

What a Feeling! [Robert Horton]

“The road is gonna eat you up, man,” says the minor rock star to the slicked-back kid. That line in Candy Mountain is typical of the film’s self-conscious obsession with the road as a myth and symbol in American life and culture. This is a film that means to be something like the ultimate road movie.

And it should be, given the credentials of its creators. The writer, Rudy Wurlitzer, has practically made his career on the road, from the early hippie movie Glen and Randa to Two-Lane Blacktop. He shares the co-directing credit on Candy Mountain with Robert Frank, the renowned photographer and underground filmmaker. Frank’s most famous work may be a collection of photographs called The Americans, which captured life along the American highway. Frank also made a dizzy short movie in 1959 called Pull My Daisy, which was written by Jack Kerouac.

The restless spirit of Kerouac looms over Candy Mountain, too. It’s about a footloose musician named Julius (Kevin J. O’Connor, who played the beatnik poet in Peggy Sue Got Married), who’s trying to hustle his way into the big time. When he hears that a rock star will pay big bucks to locate a reclusive guitar maker—supposedly the Willie Mays of the instrument—Julius claims to know the man, Elmore Silk, and offers to find him and bring back the guitars.

The rest of the movie is his quest, which takes him through a series of misadventures. Each successive address for Silk leads Julius to another eccentric, and he goes farther north, up into Canada, until he runs out of continent.

The film is dotted with musicians playing small roles: David Johanson (also known these days as Buster Poindexter) as the star who wants to buy up the guitars, Tom Waits as Elmore’s middle-class brother, Joe Strummer as a punk, Dr. John as Elmore’s cranky son-in-law, Leon Redbone as one-half of a peculiar Canadian family who enjoy imprisoning passers-by.

Everywhere Julius sees the pull of the road on ordinary people, until he runs into Elmore himself (Harris Yulin), who doesn’t seem to be running anymore.

Sometimes Candy Mountain states too much, but it’s a beguiling film. O’Connor easily makes his anti-hero fundamentally likable, and Frank’s photographic eye catches the subtle gradations in light and color as Julius moves from the fall colors of New York state to the mists and fogs of Canada.

You might think that a movie directed by a still photographer would have a static, composed quality, but Frank goes the opposite way, to a raw, gritty sense of life. Life may not be a candy mountain, but Candy Mountain finds some unexpectedly sweet moments.

First published in the Herald, August 25, 1988

I will confess it’s the kind of movie I’m a sucker for. This was before O’Connor became very unusual looking, and his interesting road led to playing Igor in Van Helsing and the man who informs There Will Be Blood‘s Daniel Plainview he has a brother.

60s Wisdom [CANDY MOUNTAIN] | Jonathan Rosenbaum August 12, 1988

The Blue Vial: Candy Mountain (Robert Frank & Rudy Wurlitzer, 1988)

VHS or Bust: Candy Mountain | Facets Features Gregory Hess, August 26, 2010

Candy Mountain (Robert Frank & Rudy Wurlitzer, 198... Drew McIntosh from The Blue Vial, June 24, 2010

"Road Show: The journey of Robert Frank's "The Americans." Anthony Lane from The New Yorker, September 14, 2009

Writer Rudy Wurlitzer's Underappreciated Masterpieces - VICE Jonathan Dixon, February 25, 2015

Thursday Editor's Pick: “Candy Mountain” (1983) - Alt Screen

The Countercultural Histories of Rudy Wurlitzer | Jonathan Rosenbaum November 18, 1998 (capsule review)

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

Candy Mountain | Jonathan Rosenbaum capsule review, also seen here: Candy Mountain | Theater Critic's Choice | Chicago Reader

Candy Mountain, Screenplay & Co-Directed by Rudy Wurlitzer

"Drop Edges of Yonder: The Films of Rudy Wurlitzer" on Notebook - Mubi David Hudson, April 27, 2011

Conversing with Rudy Wurlitzer: ‘A Beaten-up Old Scribbler’ Rodger Jacobs interview from Pop Matters, February 5, 2009

VERTIGO | Return of the Frontiersman: Rudy Wurlitzer in Conversation Lee Hill interview with Rudy Wurlitzer from Vertigo magazine, June 18, 2008

Robert Frank: the beauty and horror of 1950s America – in pictures ... The Guardian, August 29, 2014

"Robert Frank at 90: the photographer who revealed America won't look back". Sean O’Hagan from The Guardian, November 7, 2014

Washington Post [Desson Howe]

Washington Post [Hal Hinson]

Review/Film; Hitting the Highway - The New York Times Caryn James

Candy Mountain - Wikipedia

Frank, Scott

THE LOOKOUT B- 82

USA (99 mi) 2007

James Gordon-Leavitt finds another body to inhabit, this time he’s Chris Pratt, a smart, gifted high school athlete from the suburbs outside Kansas City who’s driving under the stars down a country road one night with a car full of friends, dousing the lights to get a better view of the fireflies inhabiting the space all around them, failing to see a farm carbine stuck in the middle of the road. The film picks up four years later after he’s suffered noticeable brain damage, acute memory loss, and carries a card in his wallet to remind people of his shortcomings. Despite rehabilitation intervention, he continues to be haunted by that night, as several kids died, his girl lost part of her leg, and he still can’t remember his life, only fragmented pieces that he can’t put together, returning to the scene of the accident over and over again as if something will click, but remaining frustrated by the mundane world of forgetting where things are, making him feel isolated and alone, yearning for the life he used to have.

Screenwriter Scott Frank (OUT OF SIGHT, GET SHORTY, THE INTERPRETER, MINORITY REPORT) makes his directing debut here with a moody, psychological thriller that works when it touches on the austere fringes of his life, with quick cutting flashbacks that appear unexpectedly in moments of crisis, reminding him of the source of all his pain. He has a steady job as the night janitor in a local bank, with friendly visits from a night cop who brings him doughnuts and with the kind assistance from one of the tellers at the bank, she’s teaching him how to qualify as a bank clerk, though his memory deterioration is an obvious obstacle. The story is defined by his routine, by the things he writes in a little note book to remind him of what he needs to remember, by the phrases he constantly repeats to himself in hopes that he will remember and learn, and by his smart aleck room-mate, Jeff Daniels as an obnoxious but quick witted blind man, whose intelligence hides his dependence on Chris, as he fears feeling alone in the dark and enjoys his companionship.

The film takes a dark turn when an ex-con starts setting him up, Gary Spargo, Matthew Goode, a confidence man who lures him into a bank heist of his own bank, offering as bait a former stripper named Luvlee Lemmons, Isla Fisher, a silent partner whose job is to make Chris feel comfortable, writing sexy notes in his notebook after seducing him. But Spargo and his gang are bad news, personified by the barely audible shotgun carrying man in black, Sam Shepard, always wearing a trench coat to hide his gun and shades. At the last moment, Chris wants out, but it’s too late, the wheels are in motion, yet the plans go haywire, leaving Chris spinning out of control, but driving away in the getaway car carrying sacks of money. He reads in his notebook one of the clues Gary made sure he jotted down, “Whoever has the money has the power.” Things continue to spin out of control, but for the robbers as well, as no bad deed goes unpunished. While there’s a nice use of the snow, beautifully shot in Manitoba, Canada, and an interesting cast, especially Gordon-Leavitt and Goode, there’s really not much depth or complexity to this film. Much of it takes place in the deep recesses of Chris’s damaged brain, which is the most interesting part. It’s the mundane world of the rest of the film that meanders along in all the usual places.

Austin Chronicle [Josh Rosenblatt]

If the army of psychologists, life coaches, and TV therapists who have become the shamans of our quick-fix age is to be believed, the first step toward absolution is simply forgiving yourself. No fasting, Hail Marys, or hair shirts required. The same holds true in Hollywood, a world where Robin Williams has only to repeat the phrase “It’s not your fault” a dozen times to a weepy Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting to set him on the path to redemption. Forgive yourself, our psychiatrists and screenwriters tell us, and the whole world forgives with you. Chris Pratt (Gordon-Levitt), the hero of The Lookout (which premiered in Austin at the SXSW Film Festival), could use a little forgiveness. It’s been four years since an act of youthful recklessness resulted in a car wreck that led to the deaths of two of his best friends and left him with brain damage severe enough to impair his motor skills, cloud his memory, and impel him to throw out squeamishly inappropriate pickup lines in bars. Now he’s essentially a functioning invalid, dependent on a collection of scribbled reminders on note cards and the generosity of others to keep him alive while he splits his time between rehabilitative life-skills classes, a dead-end janitorial job, and return trips to the scene of the accident, where he relives his crime over and over again in his head, searching for some peace of mind. Which can be hard to find when your mind is little more than a dish of scrambled eggs that’s only recently begun to coalesce back into something you have any control over; poor Pratt can barely remember where the can opener is, much less discern the difference between an accident and mortal sin. Smelling an opportunity, a seductive criminal named Gary Spargo (Goode) and his partner, a former exotic dancer seductively named Luvlee Lemons (Fisher), convince Pratt to take part in a robbery at the bank where he works. Pratt’s involvement leads him on a precipitous downward spiral into a world of nasty, black-clad gangsters and shootouts with the cops, but writer/director Frank deflects any moral judgment with the fiendishly clever argument that any action taken in the name of your own independence and emotional solace can’t be all bad. The Lookout marks Frank’s directorial debut after years of working as a screenwriter on movies like Get Shorty and Out of Sight, and though his new movie may lack the sexual tension and bubbly wit that elevated those films to rarefied heights, there’s a newfound, and not unwelcome, sobriety to his writing. It’s hard to imagine George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez ruminating on atonement in the trunk of a getaway car. But then, it’s a lot easier to engage in witty banter when you’ve got your wits about you.

Between Productions [Robert Cashill]

In making his directorial debut, screenwriter Scott Frank (Out of Sight, Dead Again), has outfoxed himself. The Lookout (Miramax; opens March 30) has a genuinely interesting protagonist, keenly played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who gave such a raw and forceful performance in 2005's Mysterious Skin and is clearly destined for better things. But Frank has plunked him down in a tired heist scenario, so rote that, like Gordon-Levitt's Chris Pratt, I'm having trouble remembering much about it just a few weeks later.

Chris is a star athlete in high school who, in the blink of eye, lost everything, including his short-term memory capacity and his world-for-the-taking attitude, in a murkily recalled car crash. Paired with a blind roommate, Lewis (the ever-reliable Jeff Daniels), while in rehab, and trying to stick to daily routines (which, Memento-style, he keeps pinned to his refrigerator, and repeats to himself time and again), Chris pushes a broom after-hours at a local bank. Into his narrow, cautious life swaggers Gary (British actor Matthew Goode, from Match Point), who encourages him to live it up--and if that includes dallying with his stripper girlfriend Luvlee (Wedding Crashers co-star Isla Fisher), so be it. Gary's fidelity is to the almighty dollar, and the one string attached to his friendship is Chris' participation, willing or not, in the robbery of his bank.

Wisely underplaying Chris' disabilities, and a good enough actor to skirt the fact that he is in no way a jock, Gordon-Levitt gives an honest, empathetic performance, a discretion that might have helped Goode, who's a little too zealous playing American. Except for its lead performance, however, the film is unexciting--a little too respectable--and as flat as its Midwestern landscapes (Winnipeg standing in for Kansas City, a locale used for more flavorful crime in The Ice Harvest). It's so tidily made the disappearance of a major character from the story creates a gaping hole, something that a little smoke and mirrors might have more easily disguised, and setting up a potential twist that never pays off. How and why Frank failed to seal this crack, which mars the clean if dulled surfaces of The Lookout, is a bigger mystery than anything in the film.

The Village Voice [Robert Wilonsky]

Slant Magazine [Nick Schager]

Salon.com [Stephanie Zacharek]

CineScene [Chris Knipp]

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

FilmStew.com [Brett Buckalew]

Zoom In Online (Annie Frisbie)

Film Journal International (Erica Abeel)

BeyondHollywood.com Brian Holcomb

Epinions.com [Steven Flores]

ReelTalk [Frank Wilkins]

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Rumsey Taylor]

James Berardinelli's ReelViews

Los Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]

New York Times (registration req'd) Matt Zoller Seitz

Frankel, David

THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA C+ 77

USA (109 mi) 2006

Playing the formulaic card from start to finish, it’s a pity that someone of Meryl Streep’s stature has to work in mediocre entertainment ventures such as this, as everything about this film reeks of commercial mainstream television, from the opening seconds where the music is all wrong for anything thought provoking or substantive, usually the sign to change the channel. From within this predictable format rises Meryl Streep to her usual elevated heights, as every single scene she’s in, along with Stanley Tucci in his supporting role, is immersed in someone else’s artistic vision that is far and away better than anything else in this picture.

Streep plays a Martha Stewart-like CEO of a high powered, standard-setting fashion magazine, an abusive, over-demanding, sour pussed Cruella De Vil persona calling all the shots, smiling only when being insincere, rattling off orders on her to do list that require immediate and complete adherence, used to being catered to, expecting 24 hour a day service where her staff must quit whatever they’re doing to answer her beck and call, living in a jet set universe of lavish styles, glamorous parties and appearances. Everyone cowers to her presence, even getting out of elevators just so she can ride alone, then apologizing for being in there in the first place. Into this world enters a young, idealistic girl fresh out of journalism grad school who thinks the world needs her intelligence and integrity. Little does she know there’s precious little of that in the business world, and what little there is must be reserved for only those few at the top who will take credit for it. So in a rags to riches story, our young princess (Anne Hathaway from THE PRINCESS DIARIES) sells her soul to the fashion Mephistopheles and begins her transformation from just one of the girls, an ordinary person in an ordinary life, to a fashion diva living with a cell phone in her ear with the power to make the seemingly impossible happen, changing her every waking thought to accommodate her boss’s most minute needs.

Her Cinderella Fairy Godfather transformation is led by the irrepressible Stanley Tucci who is Streep’s alter-ego and fashion expert, who overnight turns her into a walking Audrey Hepburn, earning oohs and aahs and quick guarded glances from all the other girls in the industry who recognized her lack of fashion taste as a sure sign of her eminent departure. The cat fights that ensued in this sterile, antiseptic environment were hilarious, as all this fashion industry back-fighting from bitchy glamour queens, gays and divas alike, was probably the best thing about this film, where personality-driven characters could go wild with eccentric theatrics, led by the always underplaying Streep, who barely ever raised her voice, but drew attention to herself the softer she spoke. She wouldn’t let an act of nature stand in her way, and when all flights were grounded in Miami, we find her talking on the phone by her hotel window, a storm raging outside, thoroughly denouncing the enormity of the hurricane’s forces by calling it “a mere drizzle.” Away from the executive suite, however, the rest of the film and all its many mediocre characters held little interest and just falls flat. After all, given the options offered in this film, who would rather be ordinary?

BFI | Sight & Sound | The Devil Wears Prada (2006) Liese Spencer from Sight and Sound, October 2006

Frankenheimer, John

Film Reference John Baxter, updated by Rob Edelman

The seven feature films John Frankenheimer directed between 1961 and 1964 stand as a career foundation unique in American cinema. In a single talent, film had found a perfect bridge between television and Hollywood drama, between the old and new visual technologies, between the cinema of personality and that of the corporation and the computer.

Frankenheimer's delight in monochrome photography, his instinct for new light cameras, fast stocks, and lens systems like Panavision informed The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May, and Seconds with a flashing technological intelligence. No less skillful with the interior drama he had mastered as a director of live television, he turned All Fall Down and The Young Savages into striking personal explorations of familial disquiet and social violence. He seemed unerring. Even Birdman of Alcatraz and The Train, troubled projects taken over at the last minute from Charles Crichton and Arthur Penn, respectively, emerged with the stamp of his forceful technique.

Frankenheimer's career began to sour with Seconds, a film that was arguably too self-conscious with its fish-eye sequences and rampant paranoia. Grand Prix, an impressive technical feat in Super Panavision, showed less virtuosity in the performances. His choices thereafter were erratic: heavy-handed comedy, rural melodrama, a further unsuccessful attempt at spectacle in The Horsemen, which was shot in Afghanistan. Frankenheimer relocated to Europe, no doubt mortified that Penn, Lumet, and Delbert Mann, lesser lights of live TV drama, had succeeded where he failed.

Despite a career revival with the 1975 French Connection II, a sequel that equaled its model in force and skill, Frankenheimer has not hit his stride since—at lease with regard to his big-screen projects. The director's choices remain variable in intelligence, though by staying within the area of violent melodrama he has at least ceased to dissipate his talent in the pursuit of production values. Black Sunday is a superior terrorist thriller, Prophecy a failed but worthy horror film with environmental overtones, and The Challenge a stylish Japanese romp in the style of The Yakuza. Unfortunately, new directors who grew up with the Frankenheimer work as benchmarks do such material better.

Frankenheimer's late 1980s and early 1990s features—Dead Bang, The Fourth War, and Year of the Gun—did nothing to resuscitate his career, and were quickly forgotten as they made their way to video store oblivion. Only the 1987 theatrical re-release of The Manchurian Candidate, after decades of unavailability, earned Frankenheimer high critical praise. In fact, the film was atop many critics' lists as among the best to come to movie houses that year. Additionally, the emergence of the high-tech thriller genre, so popular in the 1990s, has been critically traced back to The Train. From the mid-1990s, you might say that Frankenheimer returned to his professional roots, re-crossing that bridge between theatrical films and television. He did not completely abandon big-screen features, directing one generic espionage yarn (Ronin), one pedestrian crime tale (Reindeer Games), and an undistinguished adaptation of H.G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau. The last is of note only for the presence of Marlon Brando, hamming it up outrageously. By far Frankenheimer's best films of the period—and most acclaimed work in years—are a quartet of fact-based, social issue-oriented TV movies. Against the Wall is a solid prison drama that retraces the events surrounding the 1971 Attica prison riots. The Burning Season is even better: an outstanding, politically savvy account of the life of Chico Mendes, the political activist/union leader who battled against the exploitation of those who toil in the Amazon rain forests of Brazil and paid for his valor with his life. The final two may be linked as chronicles of one aspect of the mid-nineteenth century and mid-twentieth century American South. Andersonville offers a vivid portrait of the infamous Confederate prisoner-of-war camp, where almost 13,000 Union soldiers died; George Wallace is a solid biopic about the controversial anti-segregationist Alabama governor. All were above average, quality-wise. Three of them even netted Frankenheimer Best Direction Emmy Awards.

All-Movie Guide Rebecca Flint Marx

John Frankenheimer • Great Director profile - Senses of Cinema Stephen Bowie from Senses of Cinema, November 5, 2006

John Frankenheimer The Museum of Broadcast Communications' Encyclopedia of Television overview of Frankenheimer's television work

A Key Unturned: Seconds • Senses of Cinema Peter Wilshire, December 29, 2001

Guardian Unlimited Article John Frankenheimer by Brian Baxter, July 8, 2002

John Frankenheimer / John Frankenheimer (1930 – 2002) brought art ... Steven Peros from Moviemaker magazine, Fall 2002

My Time with Frankenheimer / One moviemaker's dream collaboration ... John Weidner from Moviemaker magazine, Summer 2003

Oscar Snubs / 20 Great Films That Should Have Won an Oscar, but Didn’t... Donald Melanson from Moviemaker magazine, Spring 2005

Seconds Is the Creepiest, Freakiest Movie You May Ever See Dana Stevens from Slate, August 6, 2013

Frankenheimer, John They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

John Frankenheimer Survives Hollywood feature and interview by Tim Rhys and Ian Bage from Moviemaker magazine, April 1996, also here: 1996 MovieMaker Interview

DGA Interview by Jerry Roberts, March 2000

John Frankenheimer Memorial Gallery The Directors Guild of America's Frankenheimer Memorial Photo Gallery

THE YOUNG SAVAGES

USA (103 mi) 1961

filmcritic.com Christopher Null

Despite its pedigreed cast list, The Young Savages, John Frankenheimer's first feature film, is a relatively tepid affair, though it hints at a grittiness and edge that films that would come 10 years later would start to exhibit. The story involves a small juvenile Italian gang that murders a blind Puerto Rican boy, but Burt Lancaster's prosecutor isn't so sure the case is cut and dried. Interesting ponderation on racial tension, but far from classic.

X, Y and Zee to Your Past Is Showing Pauline Kael

John Frankenheimer made this melodrama about juvenile gangs in Spanish Harlem, recruiting some of the boys on location. You're awfully conscious that the picture means to be hard-hitting; it sometimes succeeds, but a lot of it is just worthy. Burt Lancaster is the assistant D.A. who came out of the slums and has now got himself married to Dina Merrill, no less. Others involved include Shelley Winters, Telly Savalas, and John David Chandler. Script by Edward Anhalt and J.P. Miller, based on Evan Hunter's novel A Matter of Conviction; cinematography by Lionel Lindon. United Artists.

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford

In broad daylight, three hoodlums attack a blind man on the steps of his apartment and stab him to death. When the police catch the three suspects - members of an Italian gang - Hank Bell (Burt Lancaster), an ambitious assistant D.A., agrees to prosecute the case as a favor to his employer, Daniel Cole (Edward Andrews), who is running for Governor of New York. Cole demands a conviction as proof of his commitment to fighting crime but Bell, who grew up in the slums where the murder occurred, discovers that the case is more complicated than it appears. For one thing, one of the accused is Danny di Pace (Stanley Kristien), the son of his former girlfriend Mary (Shelley Winters). And the victim, Roberto Escalante (Jose Perez), was not the innocent he appeared to be - he harbored weapons for a rival gang. Extra pressure is brought to bear on Bell by his wife who feels the defendants are being used as political scapegoats and that her husband is shirking his true social responsibilities. In the course of the highly publicized trial, Bell uncovers the true murderer while making an important decision involving his own career.

Based on the novel A Matter of Conviction by Evan Hunter, The Young Savages (1961) was the first collaboration between director John Frankenheimer and actor Burt Lancaster (they would go on to make four more films together including Birdman of Alcatraz, 1962). Like other powerful social dramas of the late fifties/early sixties (12 Angry Men (1957), the TV series, East Side, West Side), The Young Savages addressed issues which undoubtedly appealed to the liberal Democrat in Frankenheimer and Lancaster yet the film was not a labor of love. "What had happened," according to the director (in Frankenheimer: A Conversation), "was that the production company of Hecht-Hill-Lancaster had got itself deeply into debt they'd had to agree to do four very inexpensive pictures, with Burt Lancaster getting $150,000 instead of his usual price of $750,000. He'd just come off Elmer Gantry [1960], and the last thing on earth he wanted to do was this movie."

The screenplay for The Young Savages was written by Edward Anhalt, who was partially responsible for Frankenheimer being hired as director. He had recommended him to executive producer Harold Hecht who was sufficiently impressed by the young director's acclaimed work on such Playhouse 90 TV productions as J. P. Miller's The Days of Wine and Roses. Ironically, Frankenheimer brought in J. P. Miller to rework Anhalt's script, resulting in a shared screen credit even though the two writers never met or collaborated. "I rewrote it like one jump ahead of them," Miller recalled (in Against Type, the Biography of Burt Lancaster by Gary Fishgall). "I was writing it while they were shooting it. I was dictating to two secretaries part of the time. And they would come up and say, 'What are the sets like for tomorrow? What are we going to build tonight?'"

For the sake of authenticity, most of The Young Savages, which was set in Spanish Harlem, was shot in and around West 117th Street, Central Park and Lancaster's former neighborhood which had special significance since his character, Hank Bell, also came from the same impoverished background and community. At first Frankenheimer had some trouble convincing Hecht to let him shoot on location as opposed to using back lots in Hollywood. "I had to keep trading with him to get what I wanted," Frankenheimer recalled. "He wanted Paul Anka as one of the delinquents so he could sing the title song. To beat that idea I agreed to use a girl he also wanted in the picture. I wanted Lee Grant very, very badly, so I agreed to use Dina Merrill, whom he wanted in the picture. Ironically after the first day of shooting in New York I had to let Lee Grant go, and I hired Shelley Winters in her place."

The reason Grant was replaced, according to Gary Fishgall in Against Type, was because she hated working with Lancaster. Even Frankenheimer had problems with the actor, stating "...we just didn't get along...halfway through the film Burt and I had an argument and I wouldn't back down and it ended badly. Hecht said, 'You just blew any chance you ever had of doing Birdman.'" When Lancaster saw the final cut of The Young Savages, however, he changed his mind about Frankenheimer, realizing the young director was enormously gifted. Soon afterward, he fired his director on Birdman of Alcatraz and replaced him with Frankenheimer who guided him to an Oscar®-nominated performance in that film.

Shelley Winters had her own history with Lancaster. They had been lovers for a brief period around 1948 but had not been in contact with each other since that time. "Our strange relationship culminated in a dreadful real-life scene on the final day of shooting," Winters revealed in her autobiography, Shelley II: The Middle of My Century. "We did the scene on the back lot, quite late in the afternoon. In it my character denounces his for having deserted and betrayed the poor people he has said he became a lawyer to help and protect. He denounces me in legalistic language for having neglected my young son and allowing him to become a murderer and criminal. After a few low-key rumbles, Frankenheimer decided not to rehearse the scene. I just ran through my cues and lines with Sydney Pollack...We got into the scene, and suddenly we weren't acting any more. We both began to break from the dialogue and call each other terrible names...It got so bad that the crew, embarrassed, left their stations, and a security guard heard us a block away and came running with his gun drawn. Frankenheimer had turned off the camera and yelled, "Cut," two hundred feet ago, but we were almost ready to tear each other apart physically. When we ran out of breath, Sydney Pollack stood between us, and then we both left the set and climbed into our respective cars and drove away." Later the two actors were called back to reshoot the scene, which went without incident, but Winters later commented, "I didn't know what Burt and I had been screaming about - was it the scene in the picture, or were we blaming each other for what had gone wrong in our lives in the last decades?"

For Sydney Pollack, The Young Savages marked an important turning point in his career. A personal friend of Frankenheimer, he had been hired initially to help coach the nonprofessional street gang members with their dialogue scenes; his true ambition though was to become a director. Lancaster recognized Pollack's talent with actors on the set and later recommended him to Lew Wasserman, the head of MCA. That introduction led to Pollack directing television movies for MCA and eventually to directing Lancaster himself in The Scalphunters (1968) and Castle Keep (1969).

Due to its edgy subject matter, The Young Savages had limited appeal for broad audiences but it performed well in urban areas and most reviews were positive. Variety called it "a kind of non-musical east side variation on "West Side Story." It is a sociological cussword puzzle, a twisted riddle aimed at detection of the true motivation for juvenile crime..." The review also praised Lancaster's performance and noted that "the picture is inventively, arrestingly directed by John Frankenheimer with the aid of cameraman Lionel Lindon. Together they have manipulated the lens to catch the wild fury of gang pavement warfare." The Young Savages marked Frankenheimer's second film after his unhappy experiences on his debut five years earlier, The Young Stranger (1957).

Seen today, The Young Savages is still relevant though Pauline Kael's assessment of it in 5001 Nights at the Movies nails the film's main weakness: "You're awfully conscious that the picture means to be hard-hitting; it sometimes succeeds, but a lot of it is just worthy." Still, many things from the movie continue to linger after it's over - the startling opening sequence, the gritty urban setting, the music score by David Amram and John Davis Chandler's chilling screen presence (he plays gang leader Arthur Reardon). He may have been a victim of typecasting but his gallery of psychotic villains have enlivened many films from his scene-chewing role as Mad Dog Coll (1961) to Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country (1962) to his homicidal drug dealer in The Hooked Generation (1968).

Joe Bob's Ultimate B Movie Guide (Joe Bob Briggs)

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)

ALL FALL DOWN

USA (111 mi) 1962

All About Eve to America, America Pauline Kael

Adapted by William Inge from a James Leo Herlihy novel, this ambitious and elaborately staged John Frankenheimer film is set deep in the Inge territory of homespun and gothic-that strange area of nostalgic Americana where the familiar is the Freudian grotesque. It's also a peculiar kind of fantasy, in which hideous, lecherous women (schoolteachers seem to be the worst offenders) paw handsome young men, and the one girl who might seem attractive (played by Eva Marie Saint) disqualifies herself by becoming pathetically pregnant. As the mother, Angela Lansbury at times steps free of the howling caricature she's playing and becomes extraordinarily moving. But the film turns out to be a portrait of the writer as an adolescent (Brandon de Wilde plays the part) who grows up-"matures"-when he learns that the older brother he idolizes (Warren Beatty) is an empty wreck. Does anybody really grow up the way this boy grows up? He learns the truth, squares his shoulders, and walks out into the bright sunlight, as Alex North's music rises and swells in victory. How many movies have pulled this damned visual homily on us, this synthetic growing-into-a-man, as if it happened all at once and forever? Suggested party game: ask your friends to tell about the summer they grew up. The one who tells the best lie has a promising career ahead as a Hollywood screenwriter. With Karl Malden, Barbara Baxley, and Madame Spivy; cinematography by Lionel Lindon. Produced by John Houseman, for MGM.

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford

Virtually ignored by the public when it was released in 1962, All Fall Down (1962) is a finely etched portrait of Berry-Berry Willart (Warren Beatty), an irresponsible ladies' man whose hedonistic lifestyle and aimless drifting creates a family crisis when he visits his family in Cleveland. Although he is idolized by his younger brother, Clinton (Brandon de Wilde), the infatuation ends when Berry-Berry takes advantage of a vulnerable, older woman (Eva Marie Saint), exposing his true nature.

1962 proved to be a banner year for director John Frankenheimer. Following The Young Savages (1961), he was offered a choice of properties to direct. One was Irwin Shaw's Two Weeks in Another Town (which eventually went to Vincente Minnelli) and a novella by James Leo Herlihy called All Fall Down. The playwright William Inge (Picnic) adapted the latter for executive producer John Houseman and Frankenheimer eagerly agreed to do it in-between post-production on Birdman of Alcatraz and preparation for The Manchurian Candidate, both of which were released the same year to unanimous critical acclaim.

In The Cinema of John Frankenheimer by Gerald Pratley, the director comments on the filming of All Fall Down: "The only thing I didn't like was the insistence of MGM that we had to do the interiors and the mid-Western part of it at the studio, to use their back lot; and as John Houseman had agreed to that there was really nothing I could do because we did need four seasons. We needed that seasonal change and they could do this artificially in the studio...If I'd known then what I know now we would have shot it on location. But I didn't. The best part of the film was the location part in Key West. I had a terrific fight with MGM who wanted to shoot the inside of the bus in process and I said, 'There's no way.' You can tell the difference. And how. In reality there was a whole scene that took place inside the bus that we had to cut out. It just didn't play."

According to John Houseman, it was William Inge who suggested Warren Beatty for the role of Berry-Berry and while it remains one of Beatty's finest performances, the rising young star created considerable tension on the set. In his autobiography, Final Dress, Houseman said, "From the start, our most serious problem was young Mr. Beatty. With his angelic arrogance, his determination to emulate Marlon Brando and Jimmy Dean, and his half-baked, overzealous notions of "Method" acting, he succeeded in perplexing and antagonizing not only his fellow actors, but our entire crew. While the company was on location in Key West, our veteran cameraman, Curly Lindon, became so exasperated with him that he flew a camera-bearing helicopter within a few inches of his head. And on the last day of shooting, in a secret agreement with the local police, Warren Beatty was left to languish overnight in a bare cell of the Key West jail while the company flew back to California." While Houseman also criticized MGM for the inept marketing and distribution of All Fall Down, he remained fond of the film: "Two of my films that I often find myself bracketing (although they were made more than a dozen years apart) are All Fall Down and They Live By Night (1949). Both were modest, adventurous, emotional films about young people made by young directors at the start of their careers."

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The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)

BIRDMAN FROM ALCATRAZ

USA (147 mi) 1962

Apollo Movie Guide [Dan Jardine]

There is an innate theatrical nature to the prison drama. With the cell acting as a stage, the director of such films must contain and compact the action, the same way a dramatist must compress the action in a stage play.

The director of The Birdman of Alcatraz is John Frankenheimer, who, in 1962, was on the verge of his most creative period as a director, and he crafts a film at its best when the setting’s claustrophobia and character’s misanthropy combine to create a deliberately despairing film. Burt Lancaster plays the decidedly unsympathetic protagonist, the imprisoned murderer Robert Stroud, whose surliness is matched only by his sullen, assertive rebelliousness. Stroud has an Achilles heel that would make Freud proud: he loves his mama. This unexpected expression of tenderness leads to the movie’s most gripping scene, set in the prison mess hall, when Stroud seeks out a guard to plea for his mother’s visitation rights, only to be rebuffed and threatened with a Billy club. Stroud’s lethal retribution is swift and sure, as is his subsequent sentence: solitary confinement for as long as he draws a breath.

Lancaster, who is in virtually every scene of this two-and-a-half hour film, delivers a performance of gargantuan dimensions; he guides Robert Stroud’s transformation, catalyzed by the film’s spiritually symbolic swallows. Lancaster’s Stroud gradually and seamlessly evolves from sour to soulful, violent to sensitive, brutish misanthrope to sweet-hearted intellectual.

Frankenheimer makes a wise choice with the striking black and white cinematography. Prisons are undeniably photogenic, as the bars cast dramatic shadows, while the story, which stretches across the entire first half of the twentieth century, emphasizes themes that beg for the noir-ish grimness that black and white enhances. Cinematographer Burnett Guffey (Bonnie and Clyde) deservedly received one of the film’s four Academy Award nominations. Furthermore, the film’s potent and uncompromising neo-realist style anticipates the Richard Brook’s docu-drama style in his 1967 adaptation of Truman Capote’s factual novel In Cold Blood.

As the film approaches its conclusion, its liberal-minded aspirations become clear. Birdman of Alcatraz provides a riveting study of the effects of isolation on the human spirit, but also dreams of offering a searing indictment of the penal system. At this, it is much less successful if for no other reason than we seldom see the correctional system in action. We are, like Stroud, trapped in solitary confinement – out of general circulation. Had Frankenheimer resisted this urge to say something sweeping and important, the film would have been tighter and more compelling entertainment. The earnest, well-meaning third act (once he redeems himself, Shroud becomes an increasingly uninteresting character) nearly derails the film.

Still, despite these flaws, Birdman of Alcatraz is a fascinating reminder that even in the darkest heart there resides the possibility of redemption. In these days where vigilante justice masks as a culture of “closure,” where capital punishment becomes a vengeful weapon of psychological resolution, perhaps it is time that we all took note of the film’s life-affirming message.

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford

Based on a 1955 biography by Thomas E. Gaddis, Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) is the story of Robert Stroud, a hardened criminal who was convicted of a murder in Alaska and later killed a guard while serving time in Leavenworth Prison. Through the efforts of his mother, Stroud's death sentence was commuted to a life sentence at Alcatraz and it was there that he had a life-altering experience. After nursing a wounded sparrow back to health in his prison cell, Stroud devoted himself to the study of birds, eventually acquiring over 300 birds and establishing himself as one of the world's leading authorities on canaries.

Director Joshua Logan was originally slated to do the picture but that changed when the project was passed to producer Jack Cummings who dropped his option after encountering resistance from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. Screenwriter Guy Trosper then took his script to executive producer Harold Hecht, who felt it offered a great role for his partner, Burt Lancaster. The actor not only agreed to play Stroud but became heavily involved in all the creative decisions, including the selection of the cast and crew. British director Charles Crichton, who was most famous for his comedies, soon proved to be an inappropriate choice for helming the feature and was fired after a week of filming. On the rebound, Hecht managed to get a commitment from director John Frankenheimer whom Lancaster had previously worked with on The Young Savages (1961). Ironically, Frankenheimer had once been approached to do a live television drama about Robert Stroud, but it proved too difficult to film due to the unpredictable nature of working with birds on live TV, among other reasons.

According to Gary Fiskgall in his biography, Against Type: The Life of Burt Lancaster, the filming of Birdman of Alcatraz was an emotional experience for everyone. Lancaster said, "One of the problems an actor faces, and it's a very dangerous thing, is to get so involved in a role he loses control of what he is doing. With Birdman of Alcatraz - I couldn't stop crying throughout the film. I mean, if there was a line when someone said, 'Sorry, Stroud, you can't have your parole,' I'd burst into tears."

Co-star Karl Malden, cast in the role of Warden Harvey Shoemaker, probably felt like crying too when he was faced with numerous rewrites of the script constantly. He would learn his lines the night before only to be confronted with pages of new dialogue to memorize at the morning's shoot. Later, he admitted that his on-set frustrations with Lancaster helped create the necessary on-screen dramatic tension between his character and Stroud's.

Frankenheimer faced a more serious dilemma than Malden. He was stuck with a final cut that ran four and a half hours. In John Frankenheimer: A Conversation With Charles Champlin, the director said, "Lancaster had been offered a part in Judgment at Nuremberg and he didn't know what to do. I said, 'You go do Judgment at Nuremberg and we'll re-write the script.' That's what we did. Then we went back and re-shot the whole first part of the movie. As it happened, Burt now had to wear a toupee over his own hair. There's not a frame of the movie in which you see Burt's own hair. But the result was the movie you see. I was never allowed to meet the birdman, Robert Stroud. Lancaster finally saw him after the movie was completed. And Stroud himself was never allowed to see the movie. He died without having seen it."

Birdman of Alcatraz was nominated for four Academy Awards including Best Actor (Lancaster lost to Gregory Peck for To Kill a Mockingbird), Best Supporting Actor (Telly Savalas - he lost to Ed Begley for Sweet Bird of Youth), Best Supporting Actress (Thelma Ritter - she lost to Patty Duke for The Miracle Worker), and Best Cinematography by Burnett Guffrey. Unfortunately, Elmer Bernstein's touching, evocative score was not nominated but it remains one of his career highpoints.

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The New York Times (A.H. Weiler)

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE A 100

USA (126 mi) 1962

Despite the fact this film is like the perfect science fiction Star Trek episode, complete with the perfect American hero, Frank Sinatra, in the Captain Kirk role, with heroes and villains cast in an absolute black and white world, and despite the fact there is little dazzling cinematography here to match Orson Welles and CITIZEN KANE, this is arguably one of the greatest American films ever made, a superbly written masterpiece, unseen for about 20 years after the assassination of President Kennedy, taken from the Richard Condon novel, screenplay by George Axelrod, the story is about brainwashing and political assassination, in this case, finding a scenario for winning the Cold War.

Laurence Harvey is perfectly cast as Raymond, the emotionally wooden Korean War hero, awarded the Medal of Honor, but he was actually captured and programmed by Chinese Communist Pavlovian brainwashing experts to obey any command, even murder, and to feel no guilt or remorse, as he would completely forget the incident. The brainwashing scenes are especially memorable, programming a human time bomb with dark, very dark DR. STRANGELOVE style satire. His entire unit was captured and their memories erased, programmed to believe a fictitious battle scenario to account for the medal, a medal which comes in handy as Raymond is the step-son of a McCarthyesque right-wing US Senator with political aspirations, a step-father and mother he has come to hate, but they milk his war hero image for all it’s worth.

Raymond’s commanding officer is Major Marco, Frank Sinatra, who, along with other unit members continue to have strange nightmares about their actual programming, visualizing events that they know couldn’t be true, all somehow connected to Raymond. Marco is a US Intelligence officer and reports his nightmares, but it’s all attributed to the horrors of war. Marco, however, suspects something, as he and his fellow soldiers all attribute personal characteristics to Raymond, which they repeat like a mantra: “Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever met in my life. He saved my life,” which contradicts their real feelings, as they all detest the man.

Marco is sent on a medical leave where he meets Janet Leigh on a train and a romance begins. Afterwards, Marco is re-assigned back to his Intelligence position, where he is ordered to investigate Raymond, who reveals his romance with Leslie Parrish. Both men are involved in psychologically odd relationships, as the girl Raymond fell in love with is the daughter of the left-wing US Senator who opposes Raymond’s step-father, labeled by him a Communist, but Raymond loves for the first time and for the first time, feels lovable. But Raymond’s mother changes all that, a female Darth Vader with ambitions for world domination, Angela Lansbury, in an off-the-wall performance, who controls her husband, treats him like a child, and always tells him exactly what to do, while also controlling Raymond, as she is the American Communist contact assigned to give Raymond his instructions at precise points in time, and it was she who sent him off to war in the first place, all the while planning her husband’s future.

First Raymond is ordered to kill his girl friend’s father, the Senator who would stand in the way of her husband’s nomination for Vice President at the National Convention, an order he obeys, killing his girl friend as well, as she witnessed the murder. Marco, meanwhile, is trying to de-program Raymond, using a card game of solitaire, which produces the queen of diamonds, using that card to trigger a command which Raymond would obey, one time sending him off to jump in a lake after hearing an off the cuff remark in a bar where another customer told someone to go jump in a lake, so off goes Raymond. Marco can’t figure out what Raymond is programmed to do, leading him to use a deck of cards where every card is a queen of diamonds, attempting to cut all the circuits until the game is over and he is a free man at last. But his mother has another crack at him, ordering him to assassinate the Presidential nominee at the Convention, clearing the way for her husband to become the President of the United States, and after that, global domination. It’s hard to believe this is a Hollywood film, as it is incredibly direct, strange, stimulating, thoroughly unpredictable, with hilariously dark satire and humor, with terrific writing, filled with suspense, and brilliant, non-stereotypical casting, in a truly weird, macabre, powerfully moving and ultimately terrifying film.

The Man on the Flying Trapeze to Marnie Pauline Kael

A daring, funny, and far-out thriller about political extremists. George Axelrod adapted the Richard Condon novel, and John Frankenheimer came to life as a director. This picture plays some wonderful, crazy games about the Right and the Left; although it's a thriller, it may be the most sophisticated political satire ever made in Hollywood. With Angela Lansbury, Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh, James Gregory, John McGiver, Henry Silva, Madame Spivy, Whit Bissell, James Edwards, Leslie Parrish, Khigh Dhiegh, and Albert Paulsen. United Artists.

Washington Post [Hal Hinson]

Twenty-five years after its original release, John Frankenheimer's "The Manchurian Candidate" is back, and the mysteries surrounding the film as it returns to theaters are almost, though not quite, as compelling and bizarre as the movie itself.

Explanations of why the film -- which stars Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey and deals with a Communist plot to send a brainwashed American war hero to assassinate a presidential candidate -- are not as clear cut as the popular film lore might suggest. Even the exact length of time that the picture has been unavailable is hard to pin down.

One version has Sinatra, who obtained ownership of the rights to the film from United Artists in 1972, withdrawing it from release, along with the 1954 film "Suddenly," which also was about an assassination plot, after it was revealed that Lee Harvey Oswald had watched the latter before he shot President Kennedy.

The screenwriter George Axelrod, who adapted the Richard Condon novel for the screen, says "The Manchurian Candidate" has been out of release since immediately following the president's death in 1963, when the film's producers and United Artists decided to call it in.

"The climate of the times was such," says Axelrod, who produced the film along with Frankenheimer and Sinatra, "that having an assassination picture floating around seemed to be in grotesque bad taste. Particularly since Frank had been friends with the president."

As for whose idea it was to withdraw the film, Axelrod says, "We practically all picked up the phone at the same time." But, he adds, "The decision was Sinatra's with our agreement -- we were the tail of the kite, really."

Axelrod reports that United Artists, the company that produced the film, had always been nervous about making the picture, but not because of any fear that it would encourage assassinations. "They didn't want to make it because they thought that it was un-American," he says. Ironically, it was a phone call from President Kennedy -- made at Sinatra's request -- that persuaded Arthur Krim, then head of United Artists and also the national finance chairman of the Democratic Party, to change his mind and start production.

(An additional irony, which may be more curious than telling but is entirely in keeping with the tone of the film, is that it was Frankenheimer who drove Robert Kennedy to the hotel in California the night he was assassinated.)

Seductive as all the theories may be, Richard Condon isn't buying them, and his response to Axelrod's version of the events is unequivocal. "Ridiculous!" he said when reached by phone at his home in Dallas. "I don't think it was ever actually 'pulled' from release. It had begun to peter out and play on late-night television. I know Sinatra has a very high regard for it. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if he put the film away, as one does, as an anchor to windward."

According to Frankenheimer's office, the film has, in fact, not been seen in this country, either on television or theatrically, except for scattered festival screenings, since its original release. But a spokesman there says that the Kennedy assassination was only "one of the reasons" the film has been out of circulation. The others, he says, are largely financial.

"It was money that held this thing up," says Axelrod, who first came up with the idea of turning the book into a movie.

"Unromantic economics."

Sinatra himself was unavailable for comment, and when questioned on these matters, his spokesperson had no comment, except to say that Sinatra was "pleased and delighted" that the film would once again available to moviegoers.

Controversy seems to have always followed this off-beat political thriller. When it first came out, one critic called it "the best film of the year, and the most irresponsible." And about the same time, the film was picketed in Orange County, Calif., for being pro-communist, while in Paris, protesters denounced it as right-wing propaganda.

In truth, the film, which takes off on McCarthyism and the anticommunist hysteria of the '50s, is an exceedingly loopy satire of the entire American political circus, and could be viewed as offensive to the sensitive-souled in either camp. And time hasn't in the least softened its bite.

The movie, which opened yesterday at the Key in Georgetown, has an excoriating, destabilizing wit that seems as knowingly sophisticated today as it must have then. The story is that of Raymond Shaw (Harvey), a Medal of Honor winner who, along with his platoon, was subjected to elaborate mind-control techniques by Soviet and Red Chinese officials after they were captured in Korea, and sent back to the States to do their captors' bidding.

Sinatra is really the film's hero, and apart from the musicals he made with Gene Kelly, he was never cast more sympathetically. Here Sinatra plays Bennett Marco, a member of the platoon who's plagued by recurring nightmares in which the brainwashing sessions are replayed, and who eventually exposes the fiendish Red scheme.

What the movie suggests, in the most offhandedly outrageous manner, is that it is possible for a Red-controlled stooge to reach high office while niftily avoiding detection by presenting himself as a rabid anticommunist. And it's this wry, cold-blooded attitude toward American political foibles that may have provoked such controversy at the time of its original release. Scoundrel times had barely passed when the movie recast them in the figure of the buffoonishly drunken, cue-card-reading Sen. Iselin (James Gregory). He is the man behind the charges that the Defense Department is lousy with Reds. But the brains behind Iselin is Raymond's mother, played by Angela Lansbury, who along with the Asian Machiavelli Yen Lo (Khigh Dhiegh) completes the cast of monsters.

Everything in the movie seems to carry with it layers of subtext, of double meanings and hidden codes. And, with Lionel Lindon's archly composed black-and-white cinematography, the movie's jagged, emphatic visual style is perfectly matched to its Chinese puzzle-box structure.

The movie adheres closely to Condon's original, which is perhaps why the author is such a fan of the film. "They did as faithful a reproduction of a novel as any I've ever seen," Condon said. "The dialogue is smack on and the characters are absolutely intact. It's a wonderful film. Back then those two boys -- Frankenheimer and Axelrod -- had wrinkles in their bellies and worked and turned out this marvelous picture."

Axelrod, too, rates the movie pretty high. Though at the time the screenwriter concurred in the decision to remove the film from circulation, it wasn't an easy move. "I was restive, because after all, how many good ones do you do? I think it's the best screenplay I ever wrote; certainly it's Frankenheimer's best picture, and it's one of Sinatra's top three performances. And of course Angela Lansbury very deservingly got a nomination for what she did.

"The poor thing, you know, went from failure to classic without ever passing through success. It would be nice for it to have some success."

The Manchurian Candidate: Dread Center Criterion essay by Howard Hampton, March 15, 2016

The Manchurian Candidate (1962) - The Criterion Collection

The Best Bad Novel: “The Manchurian Candidate” - The New Yorker Louis Menand, September 15, 2003

The Manchurian Candidate · Film Review The Manchurian Candidate ... Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club

DVD Times Mike Sutton

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not coming to a theater near you (Rumsey Taylor)

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Crazy for Cinema

Film Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers]

The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks

The City Review [Carter B. Horsley]

Turner Classic Movies the idea behind the film, by Rob Nixon

Turner Classic Movies scenes behind the camera

Turner Classic Movies quotes and trivia from the film

Turner Classic Movies a few critic comments

eFilmCritic.com (Justin Helmer)

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti Arthur Lazere

Jerry Saravia

13 Conspiratorial Facts About 'The Manchurian Candidate' | Mental ... Eric D. Snider from Mental Floss, August 30, 2016

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger)

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The Manchurian Candidate: Special Edition (1962) | PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs, Special Edition

The DVD Journal | Reviews : The Manchurian Candidate: Special ... Gregory P. Dorr, Special Edition

DVD Review - The Manchurian Candidate: Special Edition DW Dunphy

Special Edition: DVD Town [John J. Puccio]

The Manchurian Candidate Blu-ray Review - Blu-ray.com Svet Atanasov, Criterion Blu-Ray

DVD Savant Blu-ray Review: The Manchurian Candidate Glenn Erickson, Criterion Blu-Ray

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Scott Reviews John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate ... Scott Nye from Criterion Cast, Criterion Blu-Ray

eFilmCritic.com (David Cornelius)

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

not coming to a theater near you (Matt Bailey)

REVIEW: JOHN FRANKENHEIMER'S "THE MANCHURIAN ... Raymond Benson from Cinemaretro

Apollo Movie Guide [Dan Jardine]

Classic Film Guide (capsule)

Edinburgh U Film Society [Stephen Townsend]

George Chabot's Review of The Manchurian Candidate

The Village Voice [Ed Park] also brief comments on SECONDS

Review: 'The Manchurian Candidate' - Variety

The Manchurian Candidate review – Philip French on John ... The Guardian

Washington Post [Desson Howe]

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 1988

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 2003

New York Times [Bosley Crowther]

FILM; A Co-Production Of Sinatra and J.F.K. - The New York Times September 14, 2003

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

The Manchurian Candidate Blu-ray - Frank Sinatra - DVD Beaver

The Manchurian Candidate (1962 film) - Wikipedia

SEVEN DAYS IN MAY

USA (118 mi) 1964

filmcritic.com [Christopher Null]

Classic political intrigue, with Kirk Douglas, Fredric March, and Burt Lancaster wrapped up in a plot to overthrow the president! Heavy stuff, courtesy of Rod Serling's master writing. Unfortunately, when the going gets good -- really hitting a fever pitch on day seven -- the story goes limp and the ending is a big letdown. Still, Lancaster is unparalleled in a rare bad guy role, helped amiably by a solid supporting staff. One of Frankenheimer's best works.

Time Out

Political thriller in which the military Chiefs of Staff (led by Lancaster) plot to overthrow the US president (March) after he concludes what they consider to be a disastrous nuclear treaty with Russia. Conspiracy movies may have become more darkly complex in these post-Watergate days of Pakula and paranoia, but Frankenheimer's fascination with gadgetry (in his compositions, the ubiquitous helicopters, TV screens, hidden cameras and electronic devices literally edge the human characters into insignificance) is used to create a striking visual metaphor for control by the military machine. Highly enjoyable.

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford

What if the Joint Chiefs of Staff decided to overthrow the president of the United States in a military coup that would have dire consequences for American democracy? That's the intriguing premise behind Seven Days in May (1964), another political conspiracy thriller from the director that gave us The Manchurian Candidate (1962) - John Frankenheimer. Based on the popular novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II, the film pits President Jordan Lyman (Fredric March) against General James M. Scott (Burt Lancaster), a right-wing extremist consumed with patriotic zeal who considers the president's recent disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union an act of treason. Scott's attempts to overthrow the president through the help of other Pentagon officials and his own forces at a secret Air Force base in Texas provides a chilling scenario of the dangers of misplaced power in the military-industrial complex. It was certainly a relevant theme in the early sixties when relations between the U.S. and Russia were tense at best, and it remains a hot topic today.

The Knebel-Bailey novel was purchased for the screen through the joint efforts of Frankenheimer and Kirk Douglas, who agreed to produce and star in the film. However, the director almost backed out of the project when he learned that Douglas was intent on casting Burt Lancaster in the film. Frankenheimer had previously worked with Lancaster on Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) and found it to be a frustrating, demoralizing experience. During one heated argument over camera placement, the actor had picked Frankenheimer up off the ground, carried him across the room, and plunked him down, stating emphatically, "That's where the camera goes." Yet, despite major reservations about working with Lancaster again, Frankenheimer was assured by Douglas that there would be no problems on the set; Douglas even agreed to offer Lancaster his choice of roles, a generous gesture he would later regret.

Seven Days in May was shot on location in California, Arizona and selected areas in and around the District of Columbia. President Kennedy was particularly interested in seeing a movie version of the book and, thanks to his support, Frankenheimer was able to secure permission to film a riot sequence in front of the White House. But the filmmakers knew it was futile to ask any Pentagon officials if they could shoot any sequences at their headquarters; they returned to Paramount Studios to film those, except for one scene which was filmed without the Pentagon's knowledge. In Gerald Pratley's book, The Cinema of John Frankenheimer, the director said, "We had the camera in the back of a station wagon with a black cloth over it. Kirk...changed into his Marine Colonel's outfit. He...drove up and parked his car, got out and walked into the Pentagon. Three men saluted him. Three other officers saluted him. They really thought he was a colonel. He walked into the Pentagon. We had two cameras, each with a different lens. He turned right around, walked out, and got back into his car and drove off. This gave us entrance and exit shots. We were gone in about five minutes."

As Douglas had promised, Lancaster didn't create any problems for Frankenheimer during production on Seven Days in May. However, Ava Gardner was another story; she would call the director into her dressing room daily after several drinks to complain about the production, her part, or his favoritism toward other cast members. (She even accused the director of having a homosexual relationship with Kirk Douglas due to their numerous private meetings!) At the same time, some of the actors found Frankenheimer's directing style a little odd. Martin Balsam, in particular, was annoyed at Frankenheimer's habit of firing pistol shots close behind him during critical moments.

In John Frankenheimer: A Conversation with Charles Champlin, the director recalled his experience on Seven Days in May: "We rehearsed for two weeks and shot it in fifty days. The only big problem was that, just as I'd warned him, Douglas realized more and more that the colonel was a lousy part, much inferior to Burt's. One day in his dressing room in his undershorts he launched a tirade at me, including the fact that I did not seem to know a major star when I saw one....On the other hand, Lancaster and I became close friends during the making of Seven Days in May....I think one of the best scenes I ever directed was between Burt and Fredric March in the president's Oval Office, when Lancaster is telling him he has to resign, and March won't....I don't think I ever directed anyone who had the same kind of presence on the screen - and off the screen - as Burt."

As for Kirk Douglas, he certainly had a few things to say about Frankenheimer in his own autobiography, The Ragman's Son: "It's ironic. I arrange this rapprochement between Frankenheimer and Burt, and then the two of them go off, great buddies. In interviews later, Frankenheimer played the role of the great auteur - and I was just some actor working under his tutelage, grateful for his guidance. He twisted the whole thing around."

In his autobiography, Douglas also provided a little-known detail about Seven Days in May. "We also shot an ending that I liked very much, but which we didn't use. General Scott, the treacherous Burt Lancaster character, goes off in his sports car, and dies in a wreck. Was it an accident or suicide? Coming up out of the wreckage over the car radio is President Lyman Jordan's speech about the sanctity of the Constitution. Instead, the last time we see Burt is in his confrontation with me. He regards me as a traitor to him; I know he has been a traitor to the country. He says to me, "Do you know who Judas was?" I answer, "Yes. He's a man I used to work for and respect, until he disgraced the three stars on his uniform."

When Seven Days in May opened theatrically, it fared well with critics and audiences alike. The New York Times reported that it was "taut and exciting melodrama, as loaded as a Hitchcock mystery" and the film also picked up two Academy Award nominations; one for Best Supporting Actor (Edmond O'Brien's colorful turn as a southern senator fond of booze) and one for Best Art and Set Decoration.

Dragan Antulov

DVDTown [John J. Puccio]

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The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

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DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

THE TRAIN

USA France Italy (133 mi) 1964 alternate version (140 mi) Uncredited original director: Arthur Penn, fired and replaced

Time Out review Tom Milne

Discount some self-conscious talk about Art as a national heritage, as well as clumsy dubbing of the supporting cast, and you have a rattling good thriller about a World War II German general (Scofield) determined to flee Paris just before the liberation with a trainload of Impressionist paintings. One obsession runs headlong into another as a French railway inspector (Lancaster), once unwillingly started out in opposition, finds he cannot stop, and must go on finding new ways and means of delaying the train for an hour here, a day there. In Frankenheimer's hands, the whole paraphernalia of trains, tracks and shunting yards acquires an almost hypnotic fascination as the screen becomes a giant chessboard on which huge metallic pawns are manoeuvred, probing for some fatal weakness but seemingly engaged in some deadly primeval struggle.

Turner Classic Movies review Bret Wood

Questioning the sanity of war, even as it valorizes those who sacrificed their lives to win it, The Train (1964) is a World War II action film tinged with a Cold War sensibility from director John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate, 1962).

Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde, 1967) was originally slated to direct the film but was relieved of his command less than one week into filming by star Burt Lancaster, who was also one of the film's producers. Lancaster was concerned that Penn was neglecting the story's potential for action and suspense, and remedied the situation by calling in Frankenheimer, who had directed Lancaster in The Young Savages (1961), Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) and Seven Days in May (1964). Frankenheimer in turn discarded Penn's footage, brought in his own writers to overhaul the script, and ultimately delivered the WWII thriller Lancaster had hoped for.

Lancaster stars as Labiche, a railway inspector and member of the French Resistance, who is asked to somehow detain a train loaded with priceless paintings - national treasures by Gauguin, Degas, Cezanne, Renoir and others - confiscated by the occupying forces. This sets in motion a series of elaborate deceptions, hairbreadth chases and ironic twists that constitute The Train's intricate and satisfying plot.

Shot almost entirely on location in France, the production faced unexpected difficulties, especially in regards to the inclement weather in Normandy. "The Allies couldn't invade Normandy until June," Frankenheimer later recalled, "and we were trying to shoot this thing in September and October when the fog comes rolling in from the Channel." Eventually, the production was shut down until the following spring, allowing the crew to shoot interior scenes in Paris and to begin assembling a cut of the film. Once the weather improved, they knew exactly what they needed to finish the picture.

Aside from the weather, there were many other challenges involved in making The Train. To film the bombing of a railway yard, special effects supervisor Lee Zavitz spent six weeks planting dynamite charges beneath the tracks of an actual rail yard (which the French government was already planning to tear apart and renovate), for a scene that lasts only 50 seconds. According to Newsweek, this brief sequence incorporated 140 separate explosions, 3,000 pounds of TNT and 2,000 gallons of gasoline. No miniatures were used in The Train, a fact that is readily apparent when one views such sequences of carefully-orchestrated destruction that punctuate the film's tightly-wound narrative.

A fine example of the film's life-sized special effects is a collision of two steam locomotives, which was not as simple as it appears. The tracks of the approaching train were dismantled and re-laid below ground level so the impact would be more dramatic, causing the locomotives to destroy one another and tear apart the earth around them rather than bouncing in different directions.

One sequence that proved to be unexpectedly complicated was the derailing of a slow-moving locomotive. Instead of approaching at the planned speed of seven miles per hour, the driver accidentally tripled the speed. As a result, the train left the rails and proceeded to destroy every camera in its path....except one. No crew members were injured, six cameras were demolished, and the sole surviving camera provided a shot better than anything Frankenheimer had anticipated: a close-up view of the catastrophe, concluding with one steel wheel spinning mere inches from the lens of the camera.

When a cut of the film was screened for United Artists executives, the producers were asked to add one more action sequence. Anticipating this request, Frankenheimer already had a scene in mind and, for an additional $500,000 (approximately $5 million by contemporary filmmaking standards) willingly provided it. This scene, of the train being strafed by a British Spitfire, racing toward the safety of a mountain tunnel, proved almost fatal to Frankenheimer and some of the crew. Filming from a helicopter just ahead of the train, the helicopter accidentally pulled into the path of the Spitfire as it sped toward the mountainside. "The Spitfire was roaring toward us at 300 miles an hour," Frankenheimer remembers, "I could see the pilot's face and he looked as terrified as I felt. He missed us by ten feet... My wife was watching on the ground, and she fainted."

Although the sequence is not closely tied to the rest of the plot, it is a masterful achievement of heightened and prolonged suspense that helped solidify The Train's reputation as one of the best action films of the 1960s.

The Film Journal (Stephen B. Armstrong) review ["John Frankenheimer’s ___"]

Film Court (Lawrence Russell) review March 2000

House Next Door [Matt Zoller Seitz] also seen here: Dallas Observer.

Epinions [metalluk]

Sgt. Slaughter Goes to War (Ben Cressy) review

Decent Films Guide (Steven D. Greydanus) review [A]

filmsgraded.com (Brian Koller) retrospective [57/100]

Viewpoints George Chabot

Cinephiles Anonymous

AMG Lucia Bozzola from American Movie Guide

DVDTalk [Paul Mavis] The John Frankenheimer Collection

PopMatters [Marco Lanzagorta] The John Frankenheimer Collection

DVD Verdict [Victor Valdivia] The John Frankenheimer Collection

Channel 4 Film

Variety review

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

SECONDS A 97

USA (107 mi) 1966

terrific, like watching one of the best ever TWILIGHT ZONE episodes

Time Out

Hemmed in by an arid marriage, paunchy middle-aged banker Randolph grasps another chance at life when a secret organisation transforms him into hunky Hudson and gives him a new start as an artist in Californian beach-front bohemia. Freedom, however, turns out to be a rather daunting prospect, and the struggle to fill the blank canvas comes to typify Hudson's unease with his new existence. Saul Bass' unsettling title sequence sets the scene for the concise articulation of fifty-something bourgeois despair, as visualised by James Wong Howe's distorting camerawork and the edgy discord of Jerry Goldsmith's excoriating score. After that, the film's uptight view of the hang-loose West Coast feels like a slightly forced argument, until Frankenheimer regroups and the jaws of the narrative shut tight on one of the most chilling endings in all American cinema. Little wonder it flopped at the time, only to be cherished by a later generation, notably film-makers Siegel and McGehee who drew extensively on its themes and visuals in their debut Suture. (This downbeat sci-fi thriller completed Frankenheimer's loose 'paranoid' trilogy - earlier instalments being The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May.

All Movie Guide [Mark Deming]

Given what we now know about Rock Hudson's personal life, it would be easy to read a great deal into his performance in Seconds; his work as a tortured man living a lie that he willingly allowed others to create for him may well be the best and most deeply felt acting of his career. But to view Seconds as a film about Rock Hudson is to underrate and misinterpret one of the most original thrillers of the 1960s. Just as America's obsession with youth culture was about to shift into overdrive, Seconds offered a potent warning about the desire to be young at all costs, and few movies have ever offered a more interesting (and more literal) spin on the notion that "You can't run away from yourself." Director John Frankenheimer brings a brooding and kinetic tension to the proceedings that seems ahead of its time for 1966 (and still feels potent today), while James Wong Howe's masterful camerawork is rich and crisply detailed when it needs to be, and superbly disorienting when the story is at its most bizarre. In the decade in which angst finally made its way to the surface of American popular culture, few other movies were as full of dread as Seconds, which looked into the dark and frightening heart of human identity and the American mindset and found it fascinating and bleakly funny.

Channel 4 Film

Rock Hudson stars in this memorably unsettling 60s sci-fi film directed by John Frankenheimer. An unfulfilled, middle-aged banker pays to fake his own death and joins a community of mysteriously energised swingers all enjoying "seconds"

This riveting piece of sci-fi-influenced psychodrama has been criminally overlooked in the years since its release, possibly because of its weighty tone and bleak conclusion. Arthur Hamilton (Randolph) is a fifty-something banker deeply disappointed by life. Summoned to 'The Corporation' he meets Old Man (Geer) and brokers a Faustian deal. For a fee they'll fake his death and set him up with a new face, body and life. Shortly thereafter he's reincarnated as Tony Wilson (Hudson) and joins a community of similarly reinvigorated folks living on Malibu beach. He paints, he parties, he's admired and desired but still he's gnawed at by a dreadful sense of emptiness.

Among the film's great strengths is the seriousness with which Frankenheimer approaches the subject matter. Hudson displays more range and depth than any of his other performances, and Oscar-nominated cinematographer Howe captures the community's orgiastic excess in a series of freaky sequences, among them a scary grape-crushing party.

Like The Swimmer, this is a film very much at odds with the pleasure-seeking decade in which it was made, but those who like their cautionary tales dark will relish its underlying message: there's no such thing as a free lunch.

Cerebral psychodrama packed with startling images and unexpected deviations. Raises a whole load of interesting questions about identity, value and society and, in its own bleak way, answers them too.

Movie Vault [John Ulmer]

Rarely are thrillers used as an expression of pure, unadulterated, dreaded fear. Nowadays, most so-called "thrillers" are comprised of cheap shocks mixed with bad special effects. It's a giant cliché, but it's also a true one: They just don't make 'em like they used to anymore.

John Frankenheimer was one of Hollywood's most overlooked directors. He's created a bundle of terrific films, yet Frankenheimer himself has never achieved the coveted worldwide recognition of great mainstream directors such as Spielberg, Lucas, or Kubrick. Frankenheimer worked with some of the best actors of all time, and made some splendid motion pictures, yet he only has a small circle of true die-hard followers.

Recently a reader of mine noticed my review of Frankenheimer's solid thriller "Ronin," with Robert De Niro, and invited me to join his John Frankenheimer Internet Dedication Group. I explained that I don't have enough time to be active in any type of small Internet group, particularly at this time in my life, but the idea that there are some people out there who admire his work as much as I do is always an uplifting thought.

Frankenheimer's "Seconds" (1966) is one of his best, a deeply disturbing blend of psychological thriller with a hint of paranoia and repression thrown in for good measure. It involves the adventures of an everyman who gets to re-start his life by literally re-shaping his facial attributes. But playing God is going too far, as we soon learn as the film progresses onwards.

In the disturbing opening credits sequence, we meet the man on his way to work. Frankenheimer uses low angles with an occasional close-up to get us into the mind of this man--and it works splendidly. It is a sublime feeling, as rare an effect I've ever seen, and without these camera tricks the effect of the film would be somewhat dulled.

Tired of his routine lifestyle, the man receives a phone call from his old friend--who is supposed to be dead. But his old friend isn't dead, and lets him in on a little secret: His death was faked by a special company that gives you the rare opportunity to start your life over again. They faked his friend's death, gave him a facial makeover, and moved him to a faraway location where he was able to start over from scratch.

After a brief pondering, our character decides to do the same, by leaving his wife behind, faking his death, getting his face altered, and moving far away from his current life.

After it's all said and done, the man transforms himself into a handsomer, stronger, bigger, better Rock Hudson. For a price this entire operation is completed and the man moves out to a beach condo, living life over again with a butler and a girlfriend and money and everything we, as humans, have ever thought was a necessity in life--or things that we couldn't have before but we'd surely wish for if a magical genie appeared out of thin air and granted us a wish or three.

But then the morals kick in. The film's main character doesn't feel content with his surroundings and new lifestyle. He can't forget his past. It keeps catching up with him, and it begins to drive him towards insanity ever so slowly.

From the opening credits to the end, "Seconds" is very strange, and disturbingly demented at a level of psychosis. The photography focuses around a man's face in the beginning. It closes in on his ear, up his nostril, near his pupil. It's very odd and creepy. And then the film opens with some typical John Frankenheimer techniques--as I mentioned before. We see shots of a camera pinned over a man's shoulder. We see him sweating like a pig. We see people rushing about around him in fast motion and the camera focuses on him all the while.

Perhaps the pioneer of the modern-day mystery-paranoia you see today (e.g. "Memento"), "Seconds" is as chillingly effective as it is strangely subdued. And it pioneered more than just distinct tones of character expressions that would later be delved into by such dark artists as Christopher Nolan and David Fincher--this must also be one of the earliest (if not the earliest) mainstream films to show full frontal nudity (in the only scene of the film that gets a bit too prolonged).

Yes, this film was surely far ahead of its time. Even by today's standards this is disturbing and eerie--to fathom that these camera techniques and expressionist feelings were exhibited in 1966 is simply mind-blowing. Frankenheimer was a genius behind the camera--and here's more than ample proof.

"Seconds" creates the deepest and largest sense of paranoia I have experienced in years. It is completely original, strikingly bold with its visuals and feelings, and ultimately an unforgettable motion picture. The movie is odd, and sometimes it's almost too odd to even enjoy as a popcorn picture. This is a movie you really must prepare yourself for. Don't expect a tame film. It's terrifyingly hardcore.

Indeed, something layered beneath the surface of "Seconds" creates a sick sense of nausea in the bottom of your stomach. It's that same feeling I get when I watch, say, the grand finale of "Se7en" and other such motion pictures. But this is the pioneer of all of those films, and--to be quite honest--it's even more disturbing than "Se7en." (Although I enjoy "Se7en" more for what it has to offer on the whole.)

This movie has scarred me. It's a milestone motion picture, filled with dementia and paranoia and odd feelings. It's film evocation at the height of its abilities to master the audience. There's a true artist behind the camera on this film--and perhaps in the years to come his work will become subsequently more popular, and the truth of his excellence will finally be as renowned as Kubrick's or Scorsese's.

A Key Unturned: Seconds • Senses of Cinema Peter Wilshire, December 29, 2001

Seconds Is the Creepiest, Freakiest Movie You May Ever See Dana Stevens from Slate, August 6, 2013

The Sci-Fi Movie Page James O’Ehley

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GRAND PRIX

USA (179 mi) 1966 ‘Scope

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]

It's too bad John Frankenheimer died before he could record a commentary track for his 1966 Euro-racing melodrama Grand Prix, because he was a commentary-track champ, always balancing good anecdotes with useful technical information. His feature Ronin is one of the more underrated action films of the '90s, but the commentary track is arguably better, because Frankenheimer detailed exactly what went into every one of the hairpin turns in the movie's famous car chase, describing them in terms of their logistical challenges and their meaning. At least on the double-disc Grand Prix DVD, a set of superb featurettes takes up the slack, covering everything from a mini-history of Formula One racing to Frankenheimer's fiery temperament.

It'd be a stretch to call the special features better than the movie, because whenever the cars are running, Grand Prix is one of the best studio efforts of the '60s. The film only stalls when it's off the track, which is where more than half of this three-hour epic takes place. James Garner stars as a headstrong racer who gets kicked off his team after he injures teammate Brian Bedford, then works his way back to the circuit through the graces of industrialist Toshirô Mifune. Garner also makes time with Bedford's playgirl wife Jessica Walter—who'll look surprisingly va-voom to those who only know her as the boozy mom on Arrested Development—while colleague Yves Montand gets close to photo-journalist Eva Marie Saint. It's all typical potboiler stuff, dosed with the blandly international flavor common to oversized '60s moviemaking, and weighed down by the way Garner's early thorniness gives way to drab professionalism (mirroring his career as an MGM studio hand, actually).

Still, even the soap-opera material is beautifully shot. Years before Nicolas Roeg's famous sex/post-sex cross-cutting in Don't Look Now, Frankenheimer built a stunning triple-exposure shot containing the whole dance of seduction, from cocktails to bathrobes. Then he jumps back to one of the racing montages he co-designed with cinema-stylist Saul Bass, sequences with the snap of a classic Sports Illustrated layout, mixed with the athletic impressionism of Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad. While hardcore racing fans have quibbled with the movie's excessive emphasis on crashes, the insert-shot-heavy, camera-in-the-car immediacy of the track scenes has remained the standard for auto-racing movies, all the way down to Pixar's Cars. And amid the spectacle, Frankenheimer was graceful enough to indicate the onset of a life-threatening rainstorm by cutting to a single close-up of a stopwatch dotted with water. That's called artistry.

Cleveland Press (Tony Mastroianni)

Fasten your seat belts for "Grand Prix," a movie about automobile racing that makes the best use of Cinerama since that roller coaster ride many years ago.

Director John Frankenheimer has moved his cameras out onto the great tracks of the Grand Prix circuit— Monaco; Spa, Belgium; Brands Hatch, England; and Monza, Italy—for the most authentic and exciting racing sequences ever filmed.

As long as he keeps the cameras there—which he does most of the time, thankfully—the picture is a wild and gripping affair.

It is when he gets off the track that the movie does too.

The film follows the fortunes of the handful of elite drivers qualified to drive in the Grand Prix events, the men who drive the Formula One cars. These are the autos created for one purpose and one only, to compete with each other.

It concentrates on four drivers—American James Garner, Frenchman Yves Montand, Englishman Brian Bedford and Italian Antonio Sabato.

When the movie is not concerned with the racing of Formula One cars, it is concerned with that other Formula One—the one about the men who live dangerously and the women who weep and wait for them, etc.

The women in this case are Eva Marie Saint as Montand's mistress, Jessica Walters as Bedford's faithless wife and sometimes girl friend of Garner, and Francoise Hardy as a girl picked up by Sabato.

The dialog is cliche-ridden, the situations predictable but every time matters start to limp somebody revs up the motors and the movie is on its way again.

Director Frankenheimer has not cheated in offering his audience the thrills of auto racing. There is no use of rear projection screens with scenery rushing by in back of a stationary actor in a stationary car. The actors drove and while they may not have been clipping along at 180 mph the closeup footage is authentic enough to match the genuine racing sequences.

Nor has there been any monkeying with camera and projector speeds.

In "Grand Prix" audiences get a drivers-eye view of racing. Cameras on racing cars mounted just inches from the ground create the effect of the track rushing at you so fast you want to duck. Alternating with these scenes are others taken from a helicopter, scenes that give the whole awesome picture of fast cars twisting around these dangerous roads.

The picture goes a trifle far in realism in one respect. It has a deafening soundtrack filled with the roar, screech and scream of high speed engines. On top of this is Maurice Jarre's noisy musical score.

When Frankenheimer does resort to trick photography it is of a type that enhances the movie. He has partially licked the problem of Cinerama in dealing with closeups by using a split screen, keeping the image small and multiplying it many times.

Or sometimes he splits the screen two, three or four ways and not always evenly offering contrasting sequences, different length shots, a scene with dialog played as counterpoint to a panoramic racing shot.

Only once does he abandon realism and in an effective sequence the scene becomes hazy and the cars seem to float languorously and there is a little bit of quiet. And then sight and sound explode once more.

There are some fine acting portraits in minor roles— Jack Watson as a racing car owner, Adolfo Celli as an Italian industrialist, Claude Dauphin as a wealthy racing enthusiast. Toshiro Mifune in his first English-language part seems to be speaking by rote, otherwise he emotes acceptably.

As for the leads—Garner is rugged and stoical, Bedford is sensitive and stoical and Montand is disillusioned and stoical. Montand comes off best.

Ignore the actors—the autos have the best parts.

Turner Classic Movies Bill Goodman

Hollywood has always had a love affair with fast cars. If you've ever been stuck in L.A. traffic, it's easy to understand why. Who wouldn't yearn to tear past the other cars, leaving your fellow drivers to cower in your wake, and pedestrians to stare open-mouthed at your car as it blows past them in a blur, covering their ears from the deafening roar as they at once fear and marvel at your power? It is that feeling exactly that John Frankenheimer sought to capture on film with Grand Prix (1966).

In order "to show what racing was really like," Frankenheimer molded an amalgam of events and drivers into the story of Pete Aron, played by James Garner. After causing an accident at the Monaco Grand Prix that injures colleague Scott Stoddard (Brian Bedford), Aron is fired from his team. Literally adding insult to injury, Aron takes up with Stoddard's wife, Pat (Jessica Walter), who is bored by her husband's "brooding-in-the-shadow-of-my-dead-brother" routine. Along with all this, we are introduced to Jean-Pierre Sarti (Yves Montand), a two-time world champion on the brink of retirement, and his lover, Louise Frederickson (Eva Marie Saint), a magazine editor who is touring the racing circuit. Aron eventually finds another job with a Japanese team and, after earning back his reputation with a few wins, finds himself in competition with Stoddard and Sarti for the world championship at the British Grand Prix. As could be expected, a tight race ensues with plenty of thrills, chills, and spills, before a final victor emerges from the big event.

Grand Prix is Frankenheimer's first color film, and his first original screenplay since The Young Stranger (1957). Having been an amateur racer himself, Frankenheimer is intensely passionate about the subject, calling Grand Prix "one of the most satisfactory films I've made." Shot in 70mm Cinerama, Frankenheimer used the wide space to his advantage with a creative use of split-screen - an idea he got from the film To Be Alive at the New York World's fair, and from watching the World Series on television. To further the visual experience, Frankenheimer and cinematographer Lionel Lindon used specially constructed cameras mounted on the racing cars, which put us on the track with the drivers. By combining the "on-track" footage with helicopter shots of the cars in a split-screen action sequence, Frankenheimer combats the monotony of racing cars merely driving around in circles.

To achieve the level of realism that Frankenheimer wanted, there were no "process shots" used in the film. All scenes, whether they involved racing or not, used real cars with mounted cameras. For the spectacular crashes, special effects man Milton Rice created a hydrogen cannon, which functioned as a giant pea-shooter. A car could be attached to a shaft on the cannon, and then "shot" out like a projectile at speeds in excess of 125 miles an hour. The cannon was so effective it was used for all the crash shots, including the wreck at the beginning of the film at the Monte Carlo Grand Prix. On an oddly prophetic note, Lorenzo Bandini, a driver who helped stage the crash at Monte Carlo in the film, was later killed in exactly the same place in a crash at a subsequent Monte Carlo Grand Prix.

The production schedule for Grand Prix was a race in itself. Frankenheimer began shooting in May, and wrapped the first week of October. By December 21, 1966, Grand Prix was in the theaters. Though a relative success, Frankenheimer has said he felt the film would have done better had he been able to cast Steve McQueen, his first choice for the James Garner role. Garner was, in fact, Frankenheimer's third choice behind Robert Redford. But casting decisions aside, Frankenheimer's enthusiasm and passion for racing comes across on screen, as the action doesn't merely race past you but straps you into the driver's seat. Grand Prix didn't race past the Academy either, earning three Oscars for Best Sound Effects (by Gordon Daniel), Best Editing, and Best Sound.

eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver)

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) also seen here: Turner Classic Movies

Tao Yue

The Lumière Reader - DVD Tim Wong

Two-Disc Special Edition, DVD Town [John J. Puccio]

DVD Town - HD-DVD Edition [John J. Puccio]

DVD Verdict [Dave Ryan]

DVD Verdict - HD DVD [Ryan Keefer]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer)

FulvueDrive-in.com [Chuck O'Leary]

DVD Talk (Adam Tyner)

Celluloid Heroes [Paul McElligott]

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

THE ICEMAN COMETH

USA (239 mi) 1973 DVD release (171 mi)

The Iceman Cometh : The New Yorker Pauline Kael

Eugene O’Neill’s great, heavy, simplistic, mechanical, beautiful play has been given a straightforward, faithful production in handsome, dark-toned color. A filmed play like this one (originally released in 1973) doesn’t offer the sensual excitement that movies can offer, but you don’t go to it for that; you go to it for O’Neill’s crude, prosaic virtuosity, which is also pure American poetry, and for the kind of cast that rarely gathers for a stage production. The play is essentially an argument between Larry, an aging anarchist (Robert Ryan), and Hickey (Lee Marvin); Larry speaks for pity and the necessity of illusions, Hickey for the curative power of truth. Ryan has O’Neill’s “tragic handsomeness” and the broken-man jowls, and at the end, when Larry is permanently “iced”—that is, stripped of illusion—we can see that this is the author’s fantasy of himself: he alone is above the illusions that others fall back on. Yes, it’s sophomoric to see yourself as the one who is doomed to live without illusions, yet what O’Neill does with this conception is masterly. And Ryan (who died shortly after) got right to the boozy, gnarled soul of the play.

MediaScreen.com Paul Brenner (link lost)

Nobody can beat Jason Robards Jr. as the doomed snake oil salesman of the soul, Hickey, in Eugene O'Neill's classic play "The Iceman Cometh," but Lee Marvin gives it the old college try in John Frankenheimer's 1973 American Film Theatre version of the play, now available on DVD through Kino Video's American Film Theatre Collection. The setting is Harry Hope's skid row bar in 1912, where a collection of drunken lowlifes and losers drink themselves into stupefaction, cherishing their failed pipe dreams to avoid the end-of-the-line reality. As cynical anarchist Larry (Robert Ryan) declares, "To hell with the truth. The history of the world proves that the truth has no bearing on anything. It's lie and the pipe dream that gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us -- drunk or sober."

The denizens of the dive await the arrival of Hickey for Harry Hope's (Fredric March) annual birthday celebration, counting on Hickey's usual quota of wild stories and free drinks. But Hickey arrives like a phantom to shake their souls free of their delusions. Frankenheimer glories in the artifice of the stage with no cinematic concerns to open up the production. The camerawork is confined to seated compositions with the howling bones of the characters' faces creeping from the shadows like ghosts in limbo. All the condemned have their moments -- particularly Marvin, March, Bradford Dillman, and Jeff Bridges. But the revelatory performance belongs to Ryan, who infuses a stridently written character with haunted eyes and a tattered soul.

This two-disc set is the complete play, logging in at 239 minutes. Disc One features a host of special features -- the theatrical trailer, an essay by Michael Feingold, the American Film Theatre "CineBill," a stills gallery, an interview with co-producer Edie Landau, a '70s promotional short with AFT founder Ely Landau, a collection of trailers of other AFT productions, and a collection of articles and essays.

The Iceman Cometh | DVD Video Review | Film @ The Digital Fix Noel Megahey

There are a number of ways of approaching the adaptation of theatre to the screen and a decision has to be made whether to remain faithful to the text or open the film up to the screen. The American Film Theatre tried several different approaches with varying results, some plays adapting to the screen more naturally than others. A great deal of care must be taken however with important plays that owe much of their power to the very theatricality of their setting, which is why some adaptations such as Pinter’s The Homecoming, Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh remain close to their theatrical staging and still remain powerful screen experiences.

The Iceman Cometh is set in a bar where a gathering of assorted barflies are awaiting the arrival of travelling salesman Hickey (Lee Marvin). Among the characters in the bar are drop-outs of different sorts – jobless, disillusioned revolutionaries, disgraced police officers and old soldiers, hookers and philosophers. They all have rooms in the very establishment where they drink their lives away. Everything is going to be done tomorrow, things will be better tomorrow, they’ll pay their rent tomorrow and get their lives back on track tomorrow. Hickey arrives, as he does every year to celebrate the birthday of the bar’s proprietor, Harry Hope (Fredric March), buying booze for all around. However this year, Hickey has changed. He’s off the booze and wants to save everyone. Not from the drink as much as from the underlying cause of their problems – the pipe dreams that have led to their disillusionment.

Each of these characters have reached a point where alcohol alone can no longer drown out the guilty secrets that torture them – they also rely on each other to support the others’ illusions, holding the bottle to their mouth and repeating the well-worn stories and falsehoods they have built-up around the wrecks of their lives. Hickey wants each of them to face up to their weaknesses, give up on those pipe dreams that prevent them from facing reality and make them walk out of the bar once again. But how will each of the characters react when deprived of their delusions? And what has motivated Hickey’s change of character?

Eugene O’Neill’s reputation remains sacrosanct in American literature – winner of four Pulitzer Prizes and America’s only Nobel Prize-winning dramatist, a director messes with O’Neill’s text and staging at their peril. Frankenheimer knows that no opening-up of the play is necessary, that the strength of the play lies in its characters, the dialogue and the setting and he remains faithful to that. The film not for one minute leaves the dingy interior of the saloon, to such an extent that the viewer is just as ‘in the dark’ as the characters, unable to see or even conceive of any world beyond the saloon. But there’s more to Frankenheimer’s direction than merely following the text – he captures the morning-after-the-party feel of the piece, the deep-rooted disillusionment that cannot be covered by the alcohol-fuelled fog the characters try to hide behind. The film also benefits, as many of the AFT films do, from an exceptional cast that includes many old-timers performing to their best – Robert Ryan, Fredric March and Lee Marvin and a good performance also from a young Jeff Bridges.

The Iceman Cometh is an important piece of American drama that still retains its power and is a gripping account of the lies and self-delusions that people cling to. The compelling power of the piece comes through in the American Film Theatre adaptation, with performances that keep the viewer held throughout the three hour running time. The running time however should be four hours, so it’s disappointing that we have been given a cut-down version of the film, particularly as it spoils the completeness of the collection. The full-length version of the film incidentally is available on the equivalent Region 1 Kino 2-disc set. The quality of the print used for the UK DVD is quite poor, but the film is just about strong enough to not need to rely on the quality much and the extra features are typically illuminating and informative.

iceman cometh - review at videovista Emma French

Michael D's Region 4 DVD Info Page

The Village Voice [Michael Feingold]

Brian Koller

Eugene O'Neill's Penultimate Testament: “The Iceman Cometh ... Jonathan Rosenbaum from Fandor

A Review by Tony Mastroianni - The Cleveland Memory Project

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]

New York Times [Nora Sayre] (registration req'd) also seen here: Movie Review - The Iceman Cometh - Iceman' Film DoesJustice to ...

The Iceman Cometh - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Iceman Cometh (1973 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

FRENCH CONNECTION II

USA (119 mi) 1975

Time Out

Far superior to Friedkin's original, simply because Robert Dillon's script is much more critical in its probing of the Popeye Doyle character. As Doyle visits Marseilles to track the drugs ring to its source, his natural, bigoted arrogance and sense of superiority are undermined, not merely by being a stranger in a strange land, but also by being shot full of heroin and forced to suffer the terrors of cold turkey. Hackman takes the enlarged role by the scruff of the neck and delivers yet another fine performance of doubt and the dawning awareness of his own weakness. Frankenheimer directs in taut, pacy fashion to keep the suspense high.

Films on Disc (Stuart J. Kobak)

As good as The French Connection plays, The French Connection II is even more gut wrenching. The setting is Marseilles. American narcotics cop Popeye Doyle, the proverbial fish out of water, has come to track drug lord Alain Charnier in a cooperative effort with the French police. Director John Frankenheimer's consistently outstanding choices make The French Connection II sing in perfect key from the outset. There’s a huge amount of French spoken in the film, but there are no English titles. Effectively, this puts the audience int he same shoes as Doyle, who probably doesn’t even understand merde, and must dance around the language dancing around the language. The heroine injections sequence is dirty and despicable. Hackman’s transformation is harrowingly real as Doyle descends into a nightmare of liquefied powder. They are only topped by the amazingly forceful and unpredictable depiction of a cold turkey cure.

Much of the movie is filmed in the back alleys of a seedy Marseilles. It feels dangerous and corrupt. There are several set pieces in The French Connection II that are just as thrilling as the first French Connection. Doyle’s breathtaking Marseilles street chase is nothing short of brilliant. Move by move, relentless, long strides bulling through crowds, legs bucking under the enormous strain, Doyle’s focus never breaks. It’s a wondrous and seamless montage of image.

Frankenheimer clearly determined to give French Connection II visual treatment similar to the original. The style works brilliantly well again, adding danger to every Marseilles corner. French cinematographer Claude Renoir provides the perfect images and lighting with a variety of hand-held shots and dramatic zooms.. The French Connection II is a paradigm of visual filmmaking. John Frankenheimer can tell a story without words; not just action, but a thoughtful and pensive story. The film lives just as vitally as an internal and brooding work of art.

Casting is superb. With Hackman and Fernando Rey repeating their roles as Doyle and Charnier, most of the other significant parts are cast with French actors. Bernard Fresson has the center of gravity of a Sumo wrestler in creating a tough policeman. Philippe Leotard is another fine choice as Charnier's henchman Jacques.      Doyle's obnoxious charm comes across far more effectively in French Connection II. The scene in the small French Bar is a diamond on its own. Doyle locks horns with a fire plug of a French policeman Barthlemy in II. He's a much more satisfying colleague adversary than the Federal Narcotics Bureau man in the original.  

Along with the the hand held photography, there are lots of long zooms lending a grainy look to the film. The DVD transfer delivers tightly controlled grain. Images are uniformly sharp save for those long lens zooms that are originally softened. Overall, the original elements are very clean. The DVD exhibits no artificial edginess. Skin tones have a nice range. Contrast is excellent. Black level is deep, shadow detail revealing. Various lighting schemes are captured perfectly. Color purity is very good. The Dolby Digital 2 Channel mono is free of any distortion. 

There are two commentaries as special edition extras. The articulate John Frankenheimer supplies his memories of the challenge of making a sequel to such a terrific film as The French Connection. Frankenheimer is on target and his recollections are fresh. A second commentary features producer Robert Rosen and Gene Hackman. Rosen's commentary is recorded while watching the film while Hackman's seems cut in from an interview, though the commentary is introduced by both principals with a welcome to the special edition of The French Connection II. There's a lot more Rosen than Hackman, but Rosen is a good speaker and his memories are welcome and entertaining.     

George Chabot's Review

Daniel Fienberg -- Epinions

The Unknown Movies Page

eFilmCritic.com Slyder

Reel.com DVD review [Tor Thorsen] reviewing FRENCH CONNECTION I and II

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

Fraser, Paul

MY BROTHERS

Ireland (90 mi) 2010

Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]

Another actor to watch is Timmy Creed in My Brothers, a well-written Irish drama and the second road movie in this write-up, though this one has flat tires and flatulence. He plays 17-year-old Nolan, who steals a delivery van to drive across the country to replace his dying father’s smashed watch. Creed has a quietly appealing and honest presence, just what this film needs, while the director allows two child actors to run rampant. They play Nolan’s younger, bouncing-off-the-walls brothers. They test your patience as only a seven- and 11-year-old can, but Creed’s maturely sensitive performance keeps the film grounded in screenwriter Paul Fraser’s strong debut.

IFC.com [Alison Willmore]

"My Brothers" is the directorial debut of Paul Fraser, who's co-written several of Shane Meadows' films, from "TwentyFourSeven" to "Somers Town." Watching it, I felt a renew appreciation for Meadows' dexterity with material that flirts with but generally (and magically) avoids taxing sentimentality. "My Brothers," alas, has no such miraculous delicacy, and takes regular dips into bathos -- its premise, of three brothers who go on an impromptu road trip to replace their dying father's broken watch, makes that practically unavoidable. The problem isn't a lack of sincere emotion -- the specifics of the late '80s Irish setting made it clear before ever checking that the story was informed by aspects of writer William Collins' youth -- but the scaffolding that surrounds and eventually obscures it.

The brothers are 17-year-old Noel, 11-year-old Paudie and seven-year-old Scwally, played by Timmy Creed, Paul Courtney and TJ Griffin, all essentially newcomers. The watch is a cheap but treasured digital one that's crushed, along with Noel's wrist, by a schoolyard bully. Noel gets it into his head that he'll borrow his boss' rickety bread delivery van for the weekend in order to get a new one, but with his injury, he needs help shifting gears, and so he recruits Paudie. And because Scwally sees them, he ends up tagging along as well for what turns into a nearly two-day picaresque ordeal of car breakdowns, creepy pedophiles, kindly pub owners, schoolgirl sports teams and one beached whale.

How children process grief is difficult but potentially rich territory, particularly over the different levels of maturity represented by Scwally, who scarcely comprehends, Paudie, who's starting to, and who's boisterous and faster to anger, and Noel, who's been dragged into adulthood early by all his added responsibilities. And there are glimpses of something genuine and complicated there, from Paudie and Scwally sitting blithely on the edge of their dying dad's bed to watch his TV to Noel's diary, in which he's always scribbling, and in which it turns out he speculates that the burdens of working his "shit job" in order to support the family weighed his father down.

But the journey, heavily seasoned with music queues and episodic digressions, feels purposeless, even before we learn that the boys are headed to a seedy seaside town in which the family once vacationed in order to try to win the replacement watch from a claw vending machine at the arcade. At that point, all "they're not acting rationally because they're sad" or "they'd all just like to forget their problems for a while" or "they're young and not thinking things through" rationalizations were, for me, rendered moot -- they left their mother alone to tend to her dying husband without telling her where they were headed, for that? That's the kind of contrivance that would shame the worst stereotype of a Sundance movie, and that's saying something.

Variety Reviews - My Brothers - Film Reviews - Rome Film Festival ... Boyd van Hoeij

Three male siblings -- a wannabe teen poet, a flatulent fat kid and a "Star Wars"-obsessed tyke -- go on a road trip through Ireland to find a cheap watch for their dying dad in "My Brothers," a film with more nuance than any reductive description might suggest. Helming debut of Shane Meadows' regular scripter, Paul Fraser ("Somers Town"), working from a screenplay by newbie scribe William Collins, is a low-budget coming-of-ager that finds the right balance of humor, drama and genuine pathos. Pic should do well in ancillary, with an outside chance of Euro pickups beyond the British Isles.

Sensitive Irish lad Noel (Timmy Creed), though only 17, has already taken over many of the duties of his ailing father (Don Wycherley). When his old man asks for the return of his cheap watch, which accidentally got smashed at school while Noel was wearing it, the eldest son feels the weight of responsibility fall on him, and he decides to set out on a road trip to find another watch just like it. Though not exactly planned, Noel's cocky, heavyset middle bro, Paudie (Paul Courtney), and young Scwally (T.J. Griffin), who seeks refuge in the universe of "Star Wars" despite never having seen the films, also tag along.

In a bakery van that's only a screeching halt away from completely falling apart, the boys set off for an arcade at a seaside resort on the other side of the country, where Dad originally got his watch. Fraternal bickering, encounters with assorted country folk (some good, some bad) and car trouble are on the somewhat predictable menu, but Williams and Fraser make sure they get the mix right, alternating broadly played comedy with more melancholy moments. The latter mainly involve Noel, who keeps a diary in which he tries to process how he feels about the many terrifying things that are happening in his life, including his father's imminent death and a terror known to many 17-year-old boys: girls.

Fraser wisely decided to film someone else's screenplay for his directorial debut, thus avoiding easy comparison with Shane Meadows' direction of Fraser's own scripts, though "My Brothers" certainly suggests the novice helmer would be just fine tackling a subject he wrote himself, especially since its overall feel is not that far off from that of "Somers Town."

Besides demonstrating a clear talent for tone and a strong sense of rhythm, the rookie helmer coaxes terrific and wholly natural performances from the three non-pro actors playing the brothers, with Creed especially a find.

Pic was made on a tiny budget but shows no strain in any department. P.J. Dillon's lensing firmly places the story in the verdant, eternally rainy landscapes of Ireland, while the guitar-based score, which was co-written by the lead singer of Snow Patrol, Gary Lightbody, is simple but effective.

Camera (color), P.J. Dillon; editor, Emer Reynolds; music, Gary Lightbody, Jacknife Lee; production designer, Mark Geraghty; costume designer, Lara Campbell; associate producer, Claire McCaughley. Reviewed at Rome Film Festival (Alice in the City), Oct. 29, 2010. (Also in Tribeca, Mill Valley film festivals.) Running time: 91 MIN.

The House Next Door [Lauren Wissot]

My Brothers, a coming-of-age tale set over Halloween weekend 1987 that follows three young siblings as they make their way to the Irish seaside to find a replacement watch for their dying father, on its surface bears all the hallmarks of a Shane Meadows film. So it's no surprise that the movie marks the directorial debut of Paul Fraser, a frequent writing collaborator of Meadows. Unfortunately, like another Tribeca Film Festival selection, sex & drugs & rock & roll by Mat Whitecross, co-director of Michael Winterbottom's The Road to Guantanamo, it's also in dire need of the auteur half of the partnership at its helm.

Seventeen-year-old Noel, played with lovely nuance by novice actor Timmy Creed, sets Will Collins's over-the-top script in motion when (in a metaphorical effort to stop time?) he takes a cheap watch from his half-conscious father's wrist. He then gets in a fight, which leads to both the watch and his wrist being smashed. But because the sentimental trinket had been won at an arcade in Ballybunnion, Noel is then forced to find a way to get to the tiny town, which leads to his borrowing his employer's bread van without permission. Unfortunately, though conveniently for the story, he can't shift the vehicle's gears with his injured hand, so he enlists the help of his pudgy, 11-year-old brother Paudie (Paul Courtney). Their seven-year-old, Star Wars-obsessed sibling Scwally (TJ Griffin) also comes along for the ride after threatening to tell their mum if they don't take him with them.

In other words, like Meadows or that other critics' U.K. favorite, Andrea Arnold, Fraser is interested in small character studies involving universal situations set in a specific era. Unlike Meadows and Arnold, however, Fraser puts the cart before the horse, or rather, the script before the characters. The problem with My Brothers is that it's made up of broad ideas in lieu of believable human beings. Other than the fact that Paudie likes to fart and burp and that Scwally takes his light saber everywhere, we get no sense of who these kids are beyond run-of-the-mill working class lads. (It doesn't help that the child actors, neither of whom have appeared in a film before, seem constantly, self-consciously aware that they're on camera.) Contrasting Noel, who understands too much (the weight of responsibility to be the man in the family hanging over everything, even his crush on a classmate), with his younger brothers, who can't grasp the magnitude of death, is worthwhile in theory. But combine this with actors who lack chemistry, and characters that are forced to fit into calculated plot developments rather than leading a story that unfolds organically, and the film feels as cheap as that dying father's watch.

What's left is a series of sight gags and quirky scenes that don't build upon one another, but are instead haphazardly stacked on top of each other, like the three pairs of 3D glasses that Scwally wears to watch a Halloween flick on TV. "Pull my finger," Paudie tells Scwally, and the van's tire goes flat. The vehicle's side mirror falls off and its doors stick a la Little Miss Sunshine. When they pass a funeral on the road, the director, in a fit of uninspired editing, cuts back and forth between the procession and the solemn siblings watching it. A scene with sparklers seems like an outtake from an R.E.M. video. A pederast unbelievably appears out in the middle of nowhere. The brothers encounter a dying whale. By the time they reach their destination, the entire journey feels so designed alternately for laughs and deep drama that Noel's grabbing for that replacement watch with a robotic hand in a coin-operated game holds no tension whatsoever. Lacking a subtle director to flesh out the story and breathe life into these characters, it just seems like a bloody lot of trouble to go to for a trinket.

Jason Bailey also seen here: DVD Talk

Monsters and Critics [Ron Wilkinson]

Frears, Stephen

Frears, Stephen Art and Culture

Many British directors have, by choice or necessity, turned to Hollywood. Filmmakers from Ridley Scott to Alan Parker and David Puttnam left their native land for the financing that would land their most ambitious visions on screen. Some might call this a sell-out, but it's arguable that some of these Brit-Hollywood hybrids -- "Chariots of Fire," "Blade Runner," "The Killing Fields," "Midnight Express," "Local Hero" -- have maintained a distinctly independent agenda. Stephen Frears has played both sides of the fence in multiple ways: independent and Hollywood, small story and big story, contemporary setting and period piece.

Frear's career began in British television ("the least worst television in the world," as Milton Schuman tagged it). TV has traditionally been a driving force in British entertainment, and Frears found himself rising quickly through the ranks as an original young voice. In 1985 he made "My Beautiful Laundrette" for the small screen, but its surprise success earned it a cinema release in the U.S. and an Academy Award nomination. Frears was on his way.

But rather than rush to Hollywood, he opted to collaborate a second time with Hanif Kureishi (screenwriter for “Laundrette”) on another racial and cultural exploration called “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid.” A third feature, “Prick up Your Ears,” chronicles the life of Joe Orton, London playwright and outsider.

Finally a big-budget project came along that lured Frears into the American studio system: the impeccable and sinister "Dangerous Liaisons" (1988), which earned several Academy Awards. Shot exquisitely in the elegant, geometrical world of eighteenth-century France, the film boasts a tension-filled sexual duel worthy of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Frear nailed the film's polished, understated tone as precisely as he captured the energy of London's streets. His versatility caught the eye of Martin Scorsese, who went on to produce his next effort, "The Grifters” (1990). Based on Jim Thompson’s classic Noir novel, the film captures the walk and the talk of small-time American con artists. It also won Frears an Academy Award nomination for Best Director.

Since then, Frears has alternated between Hollywood and London. A 1992 star vehicle titled “Accidental Hero” was one of his less successful efforts. In its aftermath he returned to the independent world with “The Snapper” and “The Van,” both made for British TV. In between came “Mary Reilly,” a retelling of the Jekyll/Hyde story with Julia Roberts as an unsuspecting British housemaid.

The controversy surrounding Frears' "High Fidelity" (2000) reflects his double life. With this film, he took a novel by British writer Nick Hornby and agreed to move its setting from London to Chicago. While the storyline remains the same, the British element is stripped completely away; the film is tranformed into a story about American pop music. Although the film was an American success, critics contend that once again a British director has fallen prey to the big money wash-out of Hollywood.

Despite the controversy, Frears’ films reach beyond their locales in their exploration of the human spirit. Frears has captured the spirit of England, America, and even France by focusing on tight renditions of his films' human elements. At once taut and comic, stylish and sarcastic, Frears' films have shown that he is a director of major importance and originality.

All-Movie Guide Rebecca Flint Marx

Filmbug Biography

Film Reference Wheeler Winston Dixon, updated by John McCarty

Frears, Stephen They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

IndieWIRE Interview #1 by Erica Abeel

IndieWIRE Interview #2 by Anthony Kaufman

Telegraph Article: Filmmakers on Film feature and interview, December 7, 2002

Movie City News Interview (2003) feature and interview by Leonard Klady, July 24, 2003

Tomboy Films Frears film trailers

Telegraph's Top 21 British Directors of All Time

MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE

Great Britain (98 mi) 1985

Edinburgh U Film Society [Nicola Osborne]

A perfect slice of Thatcherite Britain. And a fab gay romance. My Beautiful Laundrette is the story of Omar, a young restless Asian man caring for his alcoholic father in Thatcherite London. Escape comes in the form of his uncle's many and varied business ventures...

Omar dreams of success so works to achieve it. Along the way he meets up with old school-friend Johnny, who has betrayed him by falling in with a group of neo-nazis. Omar soon has Johnny working for him and his uncle. Turning the tables on him as he is made to rely on the very people he has been taught to hate. Johnny is almost continually followed and observed by his old gang of friends who are like a strange sort of Greek Chorus passively hanging around taunting Johnny for associating with Omar and his family whilst making almost no effort to better themselves; something which ambitious Omar strives to do.

The chemistry between Omar and Johnny is palpable and their relationship handled totally matter-of-factly. It's actually about the only part of the film not trying to score any political points and the whole matter is handled without the need for labels and self-defining - which is a breath of fresh air compared to most films where any gay romance appears in the plot.

Tension in the film is far more the result of socio-economic and racial inequalities. The whole thing is handled with grace, charm and wit. Anyone remotely familier with British film in particular will note the starry casting of supporting roles (many of whom you may have spotted in East is East most recently), though Danial Day Lewis is - now - the biggest star of the show. Here he shows the real substance behind his fame - more so than in any other film of his seen to date. The cast is universally excellent and the unique shooting, pacing and dialogue, quite quite brilliant despite the fact that this film was basically one of the first made for the FilmFour tv slots.

Some of the shots in this film could be used as a template for brilliance. An unexpected kiss in a dark alley is easily the most erotic single shot I have seen in a film. The grand opening of the launderette also includes a fantastically edited sequence. Despite a few reviews I have read claiming otherwise, I don't believe you need to be gay or Asian to get something out of this picture. Living in Britain may help, though it's a lot less than essential...

And hey! Wouldn't you love to throw your knickers into the washing machines of a neon-lit music-filled laudrette from heaven run by two young and insatiably energetic lovers? Well I would anyway! Pass the detergent this way please!

Slant Magazine Eric Henderson

While Personal Best and Making Love have faded into obscurity as The Celluloid Closet footnotes, My Beautiful Laundrette has become a benchmark in the '80s new queer cinema. The film's approach to portraying homosexuality is as much grounded in raw, sensual realism as some of the film's other themes are in buoyant fantasy. That those other themes—racism, immigration, and economic Darwinism in Thatcher's England—don't inherently lend themselves to a lighthearted interpretation is an example of how Stephen Frears adapts the worldview of the characters he presents: the devil-may-care Johnny (a star-making performance by Daniel Day-Lewis) and the blissfully culture-straddling Omar (Gordon Warnecke, who makes ideological ambivalence seem like the sexiest attribute of them all). Omar, whose Pakistani family is torn by materialistic extremes (including organized crime) on one side and by radical political Leftist convictions on the other, is given the opportunity by his greasy-palmed uncle Nasser (Saeed Jaffrey) to refurbish a dingy laundromat. Omar views this as the ultimate compromise. Not only will the management position allow him upward economic mobility, but it will also give the lower class neighborhood a touch of class. Enter street punk Johnny, who not only becomes Omar's business partner but his lover. Though gently pressured by many members of the Pakistani community to get married, Omar and Johnny do very little to conceal their true relationship, which culminates in a tender, erotic scene of the couple making love in the back room of the laundromat while Nasser and his mistress dance out front. Throughout, Frears' lens is ever the explorer, with flamboyant crane shots caressing every corner of every scene. My Beautiful Laundrette is still fresh and remains a model case for creating moving, liberating cinema from an oppressive environment. It's every bit the landmark gay film it deserves to be.

Epinions [metalluk]

DVD Verdict Dan Mancini

Apollo Movie Guide [Dan Jardine]

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

BFI Screen Online Shalini Chanda

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Full Review Vincent Canby from the New York Times

SAMMY AND ROSIE GET LAID

Great Britian (100 mi) 1987

BFI Screen Online Shalini Chanda

Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) was Hanif Kureishi's second screenplay, and like his first, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) was directed by Stephen Frears and produced by Tim Bevan. This collaboration, however, was different. Its costs were much greater and it failed to make a profit. It met with more mixed reviews: its main flaws were a lack of focus and a fragmented and didactic storyline. Finally, its first theatrical release took place not in Europe (where Laundrette had been a sleeper hit), but in the United States, where there was a much higher expectation of box office success.

Images of London dominate both the script and the visual landscape of the film. While making the film, Kureishi wrote in his published diary, "My love and fascination for inner London endures. Here there is fluidity and possibilities unlimited." When Rafi (Shashi Kapoor) urges his son to move to Pakistan, Sammy (Ayub Khan Din) narrates over a montage of locations from the towpath toward Hammersmith, past the Albert Hall and Royal Court Theatre to the ICA. Here Kureishi emphasises the cosmopolitanism of Sammy's true "homeland".

However, the 'ideal', romantic, even utopian vision of 1980s London that Sammy imagines is in stark contrast to the dismal, hopeless reality of the burning wasteland of the streets outside. Kureishi's London is rent by contradictions between assimilation and separation, conservatism and liberalism, and tradition and progression.

Against a backdrop of homelessness, racial hatred and squalor, the voice of Margaret Thatcher praises prosperity; Sammy and Rosie live on a middle-class street on the edge of a war zone; and while interracial love and extra-marital sex may be a social breakthrough, it is inarticulate, unfulfilling, and ultimately a pursuit of freedom for freedom's sake. We see each of the three couples in a visually striking triple, horizontally-split scene, one pair on top of each other, inhabiting a separate setting, experiencing the same hollow satisfaction of sexually-driven adulterous affairs.

Kureishi called the film his "declaration of war on the British establishment". For all its attempts at an original portrayal of gender, class, race, politics in Thatcher-era London, its main flaw was that this "declaration" was too self-conscious, too transparent, and insufficiently contextualised. It was its all-too-obvious attempt at hipness that left it open to ridicule, while its obsession with sex was a complaint of more than just conservative critics.

Washington Post [Hal Hinson]

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Full Review Vincent Canby from the New York Times

DANGEROUS LIASONS

Great Britain USA (119 mi) 1988

Edinburgh U Film Society [Andrew Hesketh]

Chordelos de Laclos' 1782 novel of sexual power games was a stage hit before Frears picked it up, reproducing the pre-revolutionary French setting in decadent, lavish detail.

Former lovers, the rakish Vicomte de Valmont (John Malkovich) and the Marquise de Merteuil (Glenn Close), continually indulge each other in feats of manipulative infamy. The Marquise challenges Valmont to deflower the virginal Uma Thurman before her marriage to Merteuil's former lover (Keanu Reeves). He finds this too easy and decides to seduce the virtuous Madame de Tourvel (Michelle Pfeiffer).

Malkovich, underrated as ever, plays the Vicomte as a sly, suave sexual predator, backed by the calculating Close, the puppeteer and overseer of all his actions. Pfeiffer puts in a typically polished performance, continually running from the intimidating Malkovich.

The compelling aspect of this film is two Machiavellian main characters and their ultimate downfall. They use and abuse indiscriminately, and it is not until the end when, in one of the most thrilling climaxes ever, we see their fragile and insecure side.

"A gloriously seductive comedy in the most delicate shade of black *****" - Empire

DVD Times Mike Sutton

Washington Post [Hal Hinson]

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Full Review Vincent Canby from the New York Times

THE GRIFTERS

USA (119 mi) 1990

Edinburgh U Film Society [Keith Thomson]

This wonderfully entertaining highly stylised piece of early nineties film noir follows the life of three grifters (or con artists) who are embroiled in an ill-fated love triangle. Especially since two of them are mother and son. Just trying to live a normal day to day existence proves to be horrifically difficult when both your mother and girlfriend are conspiring against you and amongst themselves.

John Cusack simply excels in his portrayal of the doomed hero/ villain who is, apparently, the only one with a decent amount of compassion for the other two. His mother, played with a cold conceited air by Angelica Huston, and his girlfriend, the archetypal "moll" Annette Benning, both appear to be aware of Cusack's well-meant intentions and use it for all it is worth. Although no saint, one ultimately feels for him.

The Grifters is an underrated gem of the nineties that no fan of dark, intelligent, film noir should allow themselves to miss. If you need any more encouragement, it was produced by a certain Martin Scorsese.

Film Intuition Jen Johans

British director Stephen Frears was handpicked by first choice Martin Scorsese (who served as the executive producer and un-credited narrator) to helm the big screen adaptation of Jim Thompson’s hardboiled novel about three crooks. At the time Frears was mostly known for his huge hit for British television—the interracial gay love story My Beautiful Laundrette starring Daniel Day Lewis and the lush period film Dangerous Liaisons. After securing The Grifters, his reputation was cemented as one of the most stunning and diverse talents in England—he’s directed several actresses in their Oscar nominated performances (including both Anjelica Huston and Annette Bening in The Grifters) and seems to be especially fond of films involving love triangles and bitchy women. He found a humdinger in the work of Jim Thompson, whom his biographer calls the most “nihilistic” of the second generation of American Noir Crime Writers. Thompson’s work echoed his pessimistic view of nature, which Donald Westlake (the screenwriter of Grifters) said seemed to argue that everyone was doomed to go to hell.

Thompson’s life was a sad one—as a child his father was convicted of embezzlement and scandal and the job of supporting his family fell on Jim’s shoulders. Donald Westlake also admits that Thompson was always in the wrong place at the wrong time and argues that a writer of his caliber was in a dead-end living in the southwestern desert (not that literary of a location) where his work would never fully be appreciated or understood during his lifetime. Thompson’s first real job was as a bellboy in Hotel Texas, a Fort Worth dive that acquainted him with the city’s low lives and underworld and part of his job was procuring women, men, drugs or whatever the clients had in mind. This training ground and the works of the first generation of crime writers (men like Hammett and Chandler) inspired his fiction. Westlake and Thompson’s biographer argue that there was a political subtext to his work as he did his best writing when Eisenhower was in office and his work became popular after his death (when none of his books were in print) when the Regan/Bush administration turned back the clock in the political climate of America. Thompson was a member of the communist party and used the name Dillon as his party pseudonym—the name Dillon is littered throughout his fiction and it’s given to characters for whom he has the most sympathy such as Roy Dillon as played by John Cusack in The Grifters.

Roy is a small time cheat who finds himself in a weird triangle involving his young, beautiful mother who’d had him when she was fourteen (there are Greek tragedy elements of incestuous overtones although everything is beneath the surface) and his sexy, slightly older girlfriend Annette Bening. The three characters are introduced in a bravura opening sequence that has all three onscreen in separate settings at the same time. The film and novel upon which it’s based contain some autobiographical elements from Thompson’s life as he’d written The Grfiters after being hospitalized and nearly dying from severe bleeding ulcers (he gives Roy Dillon a serious near death stomach ailment) and throughout the film Roy’s addiction to “the grift” seems to represent Thompson’s alcoholism as Roy tries convincing his mother in a classical alcoholic way that he is in control and can quit anytime he wants to although he’s a hopeless addict. When he finally makes his mind up to quit and his mother does the same, a tragic event occurs, solidifying the character’s descent into “hell.” The film is visually impressive with painter-like decisions (Frears’ wife is a painter) as the color red is carefully avoided until the introduction and entrance of Benning’s character and her red dress that she becomes known for wearing and plays a key role near the end of the film, according to IMDB Online. Critics have pointed out the number of influences from noir classics and indeed there is a Phoenix motel sequence lifted homage-like right from Hitch’s Psycho but it’s Frears’s own work and he brings out the best in his actors, especially the underrated Cusack who developed such a bond with Frears that he asked him to direct his adaptation of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity years later.

Kamera Tim Applegate

Raging Bull [Mike Lorefice]

George Chabot's Review

DVD Verdict - Special Edition Nicholas Sylvain

Huston, Anjelica essay by Gerald Peary

Washington Post [Hal Hinson]

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

HIGH FIDELITY

Great Britain USA (113 mi) 2000

Cinephiles Yazmin Ghonaim

High Fidelity is directed by Stephen Frears (The High-Lo Country, Dangerous Liaisons) and is written for the screen by D.V. DeVincentis, Steve Pink, Scott Rosenberg and John Cusack, from the novel by Nick Hornby. High Fidelity offers a comedic look at its heartbroken main character and narrator, whose recent breakup forces him to rethink his previous failed romances and to confront the fear of commitment.

The owner of a vinyl record store, Rob Gordon (John Cusack: Being John Malkovich) feels misled and mistreated by his new ex-girlfriend Laura (Iben Hjejle: Mifune). Bored and confused, Rob decides to revisit a series of old girlfriends (played by Lili Taylor, Joelle Carter and Catherine Zeta-Jones) in order to learn from their reasons for having rejected him. When his research produces a somewhat optimistic view of himself, Rob's self-esteem is revitalized and he feels compelled to pursue a new adventure with the exotic Marie DeSalle (Lisa Bonet). Conflicts arise when Rob learns about Laura's sudden interest in his intolerable neighbor Ian (Tim Robbins).

High Fidelity portrays the banal aspects of falling in and out of love. Its main character, who personifies the identifiable ups and downs of bachelorhood, often turns to the camera to describe his misfortunes and to incite the viewers' sense of sympathy and humor. High Fidelity draws most of its comedy, however, from Rob's two eccentric employees, Barry and Dick (Jack Black and Todd Louiso), whose well-defined personalities and distinct tastes in music contrast Rob's overall ambivalence. High Fidelity offers a strictly male point of view by depicting a world where every male character --troubled or not-- is nonetheless a funny character, and where all female characters are either too angered, too hurt or too indifferent, yet always serious. This choice supports the protagonist's perception of the female mind as impenetrable and makes High Fidelity a film which comments one-sidedly on the irrationality of love.

Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kyle A. Westphal

Now that Stephen Frears has retreated into middlebrow British heritage filmmaking (THE QUEEN, PHILOMENA, etc.), his director credit on HIGH FIDELITY, the all-American Sub-Pop romcom, is all the more mysterious and unaccountable. Transplanting Nick Hornby's London-set novel to Chicago with the assistance of star/producer/writer John Cusack and his boyhood friends from Evanston, HIGH FIDELITY succeeds largely on the basis of its slippery but firmly committed command of local detail. Cusack's record store, Championship Vinyl, is located at the intersection of Milwaukee and Honore in a Wicker Park that's post-Liz Phair but still pregentrification and consequently overrun with overachieving Charlie Brown crust punks. All the aspiring grownups live in one of those lovely old apartment buildings in Rogers Park or Lakeview, where the rain washes away your tears as you stomp through the unkempt courtyards. The hyper-specific observation always wins out, even when it's purely invented. (There's a moment when Cusack hops onto the Purple Line at Armitage. The train enters a tunnel and goes underground. Now, every CTA rider knows that the Purple Line remains elevated for the duration, but that's banal. HIGH FIDELITY implicitly suggests something better: a Purple Line ride that retains the ecstatic promise of coming out again on the other side in a blast of sunshine.) You always feel grounded in the film's crowded chronology, calling up personal memories that are inevitably intertwined with pop signposts: we had that conversation the week that The Boy with the Arab Strap came out; we went on that date the same night that THE DREAMLIFE OF ANGELS opened at the Music Box. It's all of a piece with the incessant list-making, the encyclopedic editorializing, the ever-fragile mantel of expertise. "This is a film about—and also for—not only obsessed clerks in record stores," suggested Roger Ebert upon HIGH FIDELITY's release, "but the video store clerks who have seen all the movies, and the bookstore employees who have read all the books. Also for bartenders, waitresses, greengrocers in health food stores..." Yes, HIGH FIDELITY speaks to all these people fine, but let's be real: this is a movie that is deeply, specifically, and unmistakably about the culture of record stores. It uncannily contains a piece of every single record store in which I've ever stepped foot. And if they all vanished tomorrow, the species could be genetically reconstituted purely on the basis of the collected side-eyes, chortles, guffaws, growls, and straight-up a**hole moves in HIGH FIDELITY. It's anthropology, but it's also a superlative romantic comedy—an up-to-date ANNIE HALL purged of Allen's misogynistic impulse to crack all the jokes at the woman's expense. No matter how small the role, everybody here from Iben Hjejle to Todd Louiso is a threedimensional presence. (In the closing reel, Jack Black gets elevated to a crowd-pleasing four-dimensional plateau.) It might not be in my Top 5, but it's damn close

High Fidelity Mike D’Angelo from Time Out New York (expanded version)

Nick Hornby's comic novel High Fidelity is perhaps the quintessential portrait—simultaneously affectionate and sarcastic—of a very specific, faintly ridiculous phylum of young adult males. These sad specimens (I suppose I ought to confess that I fit the prototype to a T) are frequently misidentified as slackers, a cognomen that implies apathy and indifference; in truth, they tend to be intensely, sometimes alarmingly, passionate, albeit about matters so trivial that the pursuit seems pointless to people with, you know, lives. Shrevie, the obsessive music buff played by Daniel Stern in Diner ("You never ask me what's on the flip side!"), has long been the type's cinematic standard-bearer; now, with Stephen Frears's deft, hilarious adaptation of Hornby's book ready to hit the multiplexes, there's a legitimate contender for the throne.

The title, a bit of wordplay conflating records and relationships (for instance, it's side one, track ten of the 1980 Elvis Costello and the Attractions LP Get Happy!!—and no, I didn't have to go check), turns out to be remarkably apt. A switcheroo in locale notwithstanding—the book was set in London, the movie takes place in Chicago—this is perhaps the most doggedly faithful adaptation of a novel ever, with Cusack reciting great, whopping chunks of Hornby's text almost verbatim—and directly to the lens, no less, à la Alfie or Ferris Bueller. Incredibly, this potentially alienating device more or less works; with another actor in the role—just about any other actor—it might well have been disastrous, but Cusack specializes in confessional, straight-talking, fundamentally guileless everyguys (Say Anything's Lloyd Dobler being the epitome; by the way, that movie was released in mid-April 1989, the same week as Ted Kotcheff's Winter People and the Tony Danza vehicle She's Out of Control), and somehow it feels completely natural each time his character, music-shop owner Rob Gordon, addresses the audience.

What our bud Rob is incessantly yakkin' about is this: His longtime girlfriend, Laura (Hjejle, who can also currently be seen speaking Danish in Mifune), has just packed up her things and moved out of their one-bedroom apartment, possibly to shack up with their supremely irritating former neighbor, Ian, a.k.a. Ray (a cameo by Cusack's pal Tim Robbins—did I mention that they've previously appeared together in Tapeheads, The Sure Thing, Bob Roberts and The Player?). Rob, despondent, has no choice but to retreat to the comfort of his store, Championship Vinyl, and lick his wounds; ready to inadvertently pour salt in them, meanwhile, are his two pathetic employees, painfully awkward Dick (Louiso) and preternaturally abrasive Barry (Tenacious D's Black). Occasionally, a customer intrudes on their sparring, but for the most part, the day's activity involves the formulation of various asinine lists: top five opening tracks on debut albums, top five songs about death, top five devastatingly painful breakups. But only we in the audience get to hear Rob's picks for that last one, as he begins methodically revisiting his past in an attempt to determine where he might have gone astray.

Stephen Frears isn't a director with an immediately recognizable visual style or a tendency to return to a particular theme—his filmo-graphy runs the gamut from ice-cold thrillers like The Hit and The Grifters to warm community portraits like The Snapper and My Beautiful Laundrette—but he knows how to get the hell out of the way of a first-rate script, a talent more would-be auteurs would do well to cultivate. With a minimum of fuss and with self-confidence aplenty, he's done a superb job of translating the novel's snarky wit and hierarchy-obsessed worldview to the screen; the scenes at Championship are instant classics (Black's already massive cult following is likely to triple), and Cusack's typically self-effacing performance manages to evoke a fair amount of sympathy for a character who's often borderline despicable. When it examines the foibles of stunted masculinity, which is most of the time, the film's tone never falters; it's as raunchy and true as the opening guitar riff of the Stones' "Can't You Hear Me Knockin'?" (from Sticky Fingers, 1971, originally released on the band's own eponymous label, since reissued by Virgin).

Characters without a Y chromosome, alas, don't fare quite as well—a minor failing of the novel that's slightly more damaging on film. Cusack is such a live wire that any actress who isn't equally keyed up is liable to fade into the woodwork; fast-talking, impossibly frizzy Minnie Driver made the ideal Cusack foil in Grosse Pointe Blank, but while Hjejle is unquestionably talented, attractive and hardworking, she's ultimately just too goshdarn sensible and down-to-earth, not remotely the kind of woman with whom this incarnation of Rob Gordon would ever be smitten. (The book's other major female role, a singer with whom Rob has a brief affair, has been reduced to a walk-on for Lisa Bonet. Three cheers for colorblind casting, though.)

Since the relationship between Rob and Laura constitutes the movie's emotional fulcrum, this absence of chemistry is a wee bit problematic; the pair flounders in such a thoroughly engaging milieu, however, and Hornby's observations are so embarrassingly acute, that the misstep is eminently forgivable. And the soundtrack, needless to say, represents sheer nostalgic nirvana for those of Cusack's generation; I was especially gratified to hear a snippet of the Kinks' "Everybody's Gonna Be Happy," rarely heard on the airwaves since its initial release on—oh, hell, look it up yourself.

Reel.com DVD review [Vanessa Vance]

Jigsaw Lounge Neil Young

Chicago NewCityNet [Ray Pride]

World Socialist Web Site David Walsh

High Fidelity Stephanie Zacharek from Salon

Slate [David Edelstein]

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]

CultureDose.net [John Nesbit]

Flipside Movie Emporium Rob Vaux

DVD Verdict Gary Militzer

Movie Reviews UK Michael S. Goldberger

James Berardinelli's ReelViews

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden

The Song Remains the Same  Manohla Dargis from LA Weekly

DIRTY PRETTY THINGS B+ 91

Great Britain (97 mi) 2003

Taut, well-written, interracial love story, which, by itself, is unique, but there's plenty of intrigue setting the story in a murky undercurrent of interconnecting lives, all seemingly invisible refugees manipulated by their desperate need for money, with some terrific supporting players, one of the better lead performances of the year by newcomer, Chiwetel Ejiofor, a surprisingly honest and effective film, considering it has one of the worst and most misleading titles, and a somewhat miscast Audrey Tautou 

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

Don't bother looking for Big Ben or Buckingham Palace in Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things. Its characters share city limits with those landmarks, but they live in a world of gray markets, handshake deals, and bosses who don't pay much attention to immigration status. Though trained as a doctor, African immigrant Chiwetel Ejiofor works a day job as a cab driver and a night job as a hotel porter just to get by, in addition to treating the occasional patient too ashamed or afraid to go through official channels. His reward: a space on the couch in a tiny apartment belonging to fellow illegal worker Audrey Tautou. His world runs on human sweat, and occasionally some blood, with one hungry immigrant eager to fill any position left open by another. The scheming expression worn by Ejiofor's hotel boss, Sergi López, says all that needs saying about Ejiofor's uncaring adopted homeland, or so he believes until he finds a half-flushed human heart, in an early scene that surely ranks as the scariest encounter with a toilet since The Conversation. Turning detective, he learns just how deep immigrant desperation, and others' willingness to feed on it, goes. Working from a script by Steve Knight, Frears has directed a surprisingly sturdy hybrid of thriller and social melodrama, even if the thrills turn ludicrous and the social critique grows a little pat. Tautou doesn't make for the most convincing Turkish national, but she's balanced out by Ejiofor's assured lead and a strong supporting cast, particularly López, who chews scenery as a character who grows more villainous with each scene. He's the ugly face of an otherwise faceless system, and Frears goes to great lengths to map out how that system works. Eventually, the director becomes a little too insistent for the good of the film, but what's come before makes his urgency easy to understand.

Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]

With Dirty Pretty Things, the estimable filmmaker Stephen Frears (The Grifters, High Fidelity) has concocted one of the most low-key thrillers ever made. Although Frears’ new film is somewhat interesting for its subdued suspense qualities alone, the real heart of his movie lies in its portrait of characters generally unnoticed by the international cinema. The central characters – indeed, the dirty pretty things of the title – are the illegal immigrants who live shadow existences in London by taking the jobs no one wants and the apartments without addresses, all in an effort to stay several paces ahead of the immigration officials who are constantly breathing down their necks. Like Frears’ early film My Beautiful Laundrette, Dirty Pretty Things captures a multicultural London, where the forgotten fringes of society huddle and mingle and create a substrata that is far removed from "proper" society. Okwe (Ejiofor) is a refugee from Nigeria who, by day, drives a cab and, by night, is the desk clerk at the Baltic Hotel. We learn that in his home country Okwe was a doctor and has a wife and a daughter, but the details of his former life and escape are rather sketchy. Okwe sleeps a few hours every day on the couch of Senay (Tautou, who was so beguiling in Amélie), one of the Turkish maids at the hotel, while she is at work. Just as the immigration authorities begin hounding Senay, forcing her to move and change jobs and do whatever is necessary to survive (without relinquishing her virginity), Okwe stumbles into some nasty doings at the hotel, which involve the sale and removal of bodily organs by immigrants desperate for the forged passports their donations will earn. This is the thriller aspect of the movie, although it tends to be less absorbing than the rare peek we’re allowed into the world of the illegal fringe dwellers. As Okwe describes them, "We’re the people you never see. We drive your cabs, clean your rooms, and suck your cocks." Frears’ interest and perceptiveness in telling their stories is what makes Dirty Pretty Things a fascinating sight to behold.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Subterranean Homesick Blues Nick James from Sight and Sound, November 2002

Given how smoothly Stephen Frears seems to be able to hop from US-based movies like The Grifters(1990) and High Fidelity (2000) to British-scale features from My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) to Liam (2000), it ought not to be such a surprise to find him portraying the hidden workers of London. Yet Dirty Pretty Things is startling in the current climate because it's so unafraid of qualities which script-formula gurus advise against. It's a seamy urban thriller with no obvious special effects and a weighty political dimension. It stars a little-known male lead in Chiwetel Ejiofor (admittedly playing opposite such European names as Audrey 'Amélie' Tautou and Sergi López) and is set in a downbeat milieu of the dispossessed, filmed with appropriate tension and bleakness by Chris Menges.

Okwe (Ejiofor) is a Nigerian man, once a doctor but now ducking sleep to pull wages on two low-paid posts in London - nightman at the seedy Baltic hotel and daytime minicab driver - with a further sideline in ministering to the STDs of his equally 'stateless' colleagues. He sleeps on a couch belonging to one of the Baltic's cleaners Senay (Tautou), a Turkish immigrant working illegally. When the attentions of the immigration inspectors force her out of her job, she's ripe for victimisation. Okwe feels responsible for her but seems powerless to help. Soon they are caught at the rim of a vicious whirlpool of deprivation.

The sense of a class of workers invisible to the citizens they serve but dependent on each other is deftly achieved. But you shouldn't get the impression this is a worthy film. It's an effective thriller made all the more urgent by the social concerns at its heart, and its horrific elements are as queasy and gripping as anything in The Grifters. Some might find Tautou's inescapable cuteness a touch inappropriate at times, but she remains plausibly brittle and holds her own among this terrific cast. Most of all it seems like a film that could have come from the heyday of 1980s television-financed film-making that we seem to have lost sight of recently - except that the issues it illustrates could not be more vital to the present.

“Dirty Pretty Things” - Salon.com Andre O’Hehir, July 8, 2003

Nitrate Online [Cynthia Fuchs]

DVD Times Colin Polonowski

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Images Movie Journal David Gurevich

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eFilmCritic.com [Erik Childress]

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DVD Verdict Mike Jackson

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Guardian/Observer

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Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

MRS. HENDERSON PRESENTS

Great Britain (103 mi) 2005

The Village Voice [Jorge Morales]

An unassuming backstage yarn, Mrs. Henderson Presents overcomes several obstacles—not the least of which are its torpid title and inevitable comparisons to Topsy-Turvy—to win our jaded hearts with its effortless charm. Blame Judi Dench. She plays the title character, a dotty dowager in Depression-era London, as a rude and obstinate snob, equal parts endearing and appalling, engaging in the sort of behavior that passes as eccentric among British upper classes but would be diagnosed as psychopathic in anyone else. (She reacts equally to good and bad situations by interjecting, "Well, isn't that delicious?") Bored by widowhood and her Gosford Park friends, she suddenly decides to do what any of us would in the same situation: She buys herself a vaudeville theater.

The real-life Mrs. H. hired a music hall veteran, Vivian Van Damm, to run the company; executive producer Bob Hoskins plays him here as second-fiddle sparring partner, Tracy to her Hepburn. Their Revuedeville fizzles, and to spice up the act, Van Damm has his showgirls go the full monty, requiring special dispensation from the censorious Lord Cromer (dry, miscast Christopher Guest). Director Stephen Frears widely avoids cheap sentiment, even when the story veers into the Blitz and Hoskins's Van Damm starts speechifying about resilience like a tin-pot Churchill. But this is Dame Judi's show. However extraordinary an actor she may be, she cannot conceal the obvious fact that she's having the time of her life here. Isn't that delicious?

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

No one does haughty imperiousness like Judi Dench, who slings witticisms from on high like lightning bolts from Zeus, but with a certain bored apathy, as if she can barely be bothered to insult those below her station. In her two bravura scenes in the recent Pride & Prejudice, Dench goes toe-to-toe with one of the most headstrong women in literature and proves a perfectly intimidating match. As a bored and slightly blinkered old widow in Stephen Frears' Mrs. Henderson Presents, she couldn't be more ideally cast, especially in the frothy opening half, when she boldly sets about reviving a theater in London's West End with just a wave of her hand. When called upon, Dench can also deliver serious gravitas, but after a few reels of pleasantly insubstantial behind-the-scenes theatrics, the specter of World War II is too much for Frears' airy period comedy to bear. The movie seems as closed off from reality as Dench's aristocratic heroine, and the dropping of Nazi bombs pierces its brittle shell.

As the film opens in the late '30s, Dench's powerful husband has just died, and she's already grown tired of playing the grieving widow. A friend suggests embroidery as a hobby, but a single pinprick sends her off to a more ambitious endeavor: rebuilding a theatre to entertain the downtrodden masses. To that end, she hires Bob Hoskins, whose brusque temperament and stubborn single-mindedness creates an affectionate friction between the two. They initially open the continuously running "Revuedville"—a musical revue with elements of vaudeville—but when receipts start to sag, Dench retools the show into an all-nude revue.

That causes an uproar, of course, with Christopher Guest's snooty Lord Cromer brought in to approve the baring of breasts, provided that they be displayed in tableaux as if in a museum. Poking fun at uptight British civility has long been a monocle-shattering comedic staple, and Mrs. Henderson Presents gets by for a while on its genial naughtiness. But when the war intrudes and Dench reflects on the loss of her son in World War I, the frivolity abruptly ends, and the movie perishes along with it. A stirring speech to the troops seems certain to secure Dench another Oscar nomination, but considering the wispy artificiality that surrounds her, she could just as well deliver it from the award podium.

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THE QUEEN B+ 91

Great Britain (97 mi) 2006

I don’t know why all Labor Prime Ministers go ga-ga for the Queen

A film that’s easy to get caught up in the sweep of the moment, as it relives the week following the death of Princess Diana, a week where the secluded royal monarchy spent most of it hiding from public scrutiny without any comment, where they filled the time personally deriding Diana among themselves as only getting what she asked for, wondering what all the fuss was about as she wasn’t even royalty anymore, while each day Prince Philip ushered the boys out into the great outdoors of the Scottish highlands in search of an elusive elk, thinking a little fresh air was all they needed after losing their mother. Meanwhile, newly elected Labor Prime Minister Tony Blair, realizing the recently divorced Diana was out of the royal linneage but was still beloved by the British public, attempted to persuade the aloof Queen to come out of hibernation and appear in public, to walk among her subjects, and restore a semblance of dignity to the monarch’s faltering image, hounded by the press for remaining out of the public eye while tens of thousands of British citizens were publicly expressing their sympathy and grief. Taking advantage of the sharp wit in the insightfully amusing script from Peter Morgan, where Blair is seen time and again asking anyone in the room if someone could please save this dysfunctional family from destroying themselves, there are also top notch performances from the entire cast, including notable moments in some of the lesser roles, as the film creates a sympathetic grasp of why the monarchy is still beloved and respected after a thousand years of ruling from antiquity.

My favorite quote is from Michael Phillips of the Tribune: As for the star, it’s unlikely any of us will ever read the following sentence in a review: “Helen Mirren disappoints in the title role.” Quite literally, Helen Mirren is the Queen, which is evident in the opening moments of the film, sitting in elaborately ornate decor while having her portrait painted, perfectly at ease with the artist, having a delightful conversation. The camera focuses on an even more stately look, where she is dressed from head to toe in colorless formal attire, and in a stroke of directorial relish, she turns and stares straight into the camera without a hint of expression on her face, like something we might see from a cheap horror flick. It takes the tension right out of the room and suddenly we’re immersed in the quaint parlor rooms of the royal family, who continue deluding themselves about the interest in Diana, certain that the public will soon forget her so they can perform her “private” funeral services in quiet dignity, as that’s the way things are done in the House of England.

Michael Sheen perfectly captures the Cheshire cat grin of Tony Blair, the 10^th Prime Minister in the Queen’s reign going back to Winston Churchill, which is made clear to Blair instantly, diminishing his stature almost immediately. He’s looked upon as a nemesis as he’s a champion of modernization, representing a shift in power from the party responsible for the achingly conservative years of Margaret Thatcher. But it’s Blair’s wife, the blunt speaking Helen McCrory, who gets off some of the best zingers in the film, whose pathetic looking curtsy to the Queen is the subject of behind-the-scenes scorn from the royal family, but also suggests the degree to which she detests such humiliating pretentiousness. Many others match the rhythm and perfect pace of the film, Roger Allam as the impeccably mannered, subservient, yet all-knowing personal secretary of the Queen, or Tim McMullan, Blair’s brilliant but arrogant press secretary who devised the phrase “the People’s Princess,” Sylvia Sims as the gruff, never-give-an-inch Queen Mother who looks sublime with a feather in her hat on a momentous walk, or James Cromwell’s amusing take on Prince Philip, always deliriously out of touch with the public, a haughty man filled with bitterness and scorn that public sentiment, typified by the popular photogenic appeal of Diana, should in any way affect him, bringing the house down in an intimate moment when he crawls into bed alongside the Queen, telling her to “Move over cabbage.”

One of the most affecting scenes in the entire film is Mirren’s reaction to that mythical elk her husband and the boys are hunting. In a private moment, after her Land Rover that she drives at breakneck speed through the grounds of the 40,000 acre estate breaks down at a particularly pastoral landscape, leaving her alone to collect her thoughts and perhaps actually grieve for a moment. The elk makes an appearance, which under her breath she calls a “beauty,” and becomes emblematic of an undefinable nobility of spirit. It becomes clear that the Queen cares more about that elk than she ever did about Diana or any of her own children, who get deprioritized to the rear and are all but invisible from her view. But she takes notice of that elk in a mystifyingly reverant moment. Compare that with her reaction to her son Charles (Alex Jennings) who carefully attempts to bring up his parent’s unhealthy contempt toward Diana, which is met with a wall of stone, as she irritatingly jumps out of the Land Rover with her dogs, making a quick exit from the conversation, and decides she’ll walk the rest of the way “without” Charles. The strength of this film is in the performances, interspersing images of Diana only from televised newsreel footage, including the outpouring of public support, unconventionally exploring the royal family through humor, a surprisingly unique angle that eventually leads to a quiet, genteel humanization that only comes reluctantly. One question that springs to mind, however, is why does it really matter what goes on in the minds and hearts of British royalty?

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

Helen Mirren speaks with flawless, imperious diction throughout The Queen, but it's worth noting how much acting she does between lines. As Queen Elizabeth II, she reaches several turning points during the course of the film, most of them taking place when she's alone and silent, or as another character natters on about protocol, propriety, and what tradition states obviously must be done. Meanwhile, Mirren has already accepted that changing times have sent "what must be done" out the window.

An account of life inside the royal family during the week following Princess Diana's 1997 death in Paris, the film is bookended by official meetings between Mirren's Elizabeth and then-newly elected Prime Minister Tony Blair (Michael Sheen). In the first meeting, Sheen undergoes the formality of being asked to form a government in Mirren's name. In the second, they mend their relationship after the muted power-struggle that forms the heart of the film. Between the two, director Stephen Frears and writer Peter Morgan capture an era fading, if not quite disappearing, into the past.

Their tone is alternately affectionate and toothsome. Combining facts from the public record with dramatic speculation, Frears and Morgan portray the royals as simultaneously an ordinary family and anything but. The scenes of Mirren driving an SUV—with considerable brio—across the Scottish countryside, or gathering with her family around the television to catch the news, don't quite jibe with the queen's implacable public image. But then the subject turns to the proper number of days to wait after the death to begin hunting, or most tellingly, Mirren's bafflement that the country could be so upset over someone who wasn't even a royal any more.

The warts-and-all approach ultimately makes its subject seem more human, and lets the film focus on the much larger subject of how times change. The Queen slowly shifts into a low-key tug-of-war between Mirren and Sheen's Blair, then riding a wave of Cool Britannia optimism. Taking the public temperature, he draws Mirren, however reluctantly, into a media-driven end of the century in which the royal family might have more currency than the average celebrity, but it would be best not to overestimate by how much. Frears plays out their struggle with dry wit, dark humor, and surprising compassion, in the end turning it into a moving state-of-the-nation report. Mirren begins the film having her portrait painted, looking every inch the monarch and proud to play the part. By the end, she's let the pressure of one week, and maybe a lifetime, show in her eyes.

The Queen Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Confession: I sort of went into this film with my knives out. I even sort of composed the review in my head beforehand, since I strongly suspected that The Queen is a symptom of our cultural moment's general disdain for creativity and art. What with the commercial dominance of memoir over fiction, I thought, along with the rise of reality television and the recent spate of Oscar-bait performances that are little more than impersonations of well-known celebrities (Truman Capote, Katherine Hepburn, Edward R. Murrow, Idi Amin . . . you can tell I had a real think-piece going), The Queen would encapsulate this. It's a bunch of mimics re-enacting one of the most media-saturated events in the last ten years. (By the way, my basic argument is elaborated with considerable erudition by William Deresiewicz in The Nation; thanks to Paul Fileri for pointing it out.) Anyway, The Queen turned out to be something a bit different, and more conventional and old-school. It's an attempt to get "behind the headlines," to use dramatic speculation to fill in the bold outlines of Queen Elizabeth, Tony Blair, Prince Charles, etc., with the sort of private psychology we can never really know. It's actually borrowing from the media-saturated real world in order to exploit classical narrative values. This doesn't make it any more interesting, but it is effective as far as it goes. Frears offers Blair (Michael Sheen), just a regular fellow eating fish sticks with his family and continually aghast by the inscrutability of those wacky royals. (The film telegraphs this with zero subtlety; Sheen's comments -- "Where do they find these people?!" and "Someone save these people from themselves!" -- stop just short of a spit-take.) On the other hand, the narrative process of The Queen is all about teaching us (along with the disgruntled, post-Diana Brits) how to identify with and even admire the Queen. In this respect, there's an irony to Helen Mirren's skillfully muted performance. She's now the women to beat for the Best Actress Oscar, and she deserves it, but an acting job this quietly inward almost never gets noticed in Hollywood. It's the thaw, along with that reality factor, that's providing Mirren extra insurance. Directorially, Frears keeps it professional and nondescript, and Peter Morgan's screenplay doles out dollops of lumpy symbolism just stingily enough to avoid embarrassment. (Until the buck. Oh, the buck....) And neither gentleman can resist a not-so-thinly-veiled parting shot at Blair, once the golden boy and now W's bitch in Iraq. But the primary thrust of The Queen could be said to allegorize Frears' own filmmaking approach. It purports to be about modernity vs. staunch traditionalism in British culture, but in its flagrant lionization of Blair, The Queen is really a paean to politics by public relations, poll numbers, and stage management. (Why should the Windsors' defiant willingness to make unpopular decisions be equated so casually to being out of touch?) It stands to reason that Frears in on the side of slick pandering in the guise of populism. That's been a hallmark of his last fifteen years of filmmaking.

Royal Pains: The Queen - Film Comment Graham Fuller, September/October 2006

The Queen may be Stephen Frears’s most subtle film, but it’s also a political time bomb that will ignite a firestorm of outrage in Britain. Frears and writer Peter Morgan presumably made it as a companion piece to The Deal, their 2003 TV drama about the alleged brokering of a pact between Labour Mps Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to give Blair the party leadership; Michael Sheen plays Blair in both.

The new film depicts the newly elected Prime Minister’s battle of wills with Elizabeth II (Helen Mirren) following the death of the former Princess Diana on August 31, 1997. For nearly a week, Elizabeth resisted Blair’s entreaties that she fly the Royal Standard at half-mast over Buckingham Palace and leave her Scottish retreat, Balmoral, for London to reciprocate publicly the overwhelming grief of her subjects. Reluctantly setting aside hundreds of years of royal protocol and tradition, and her antipathy for the errant Diana, Elizabeth eventually decided to return to the capital, grant her a public funeral, and chat with mourners outside Buckingham Palace. These concessions represented a victory for Blair, though Elizabeth supposedly restored her reputation with her late rally and subsequently by stepping up her charitable works.

Elizabeth is portrayed, initially at least, as cold and unfeeling, Prince Philip (James Cromwell) as callous and elitist, Prince Charles (Alex Jennings) as manipulative and paranoid, and the Queen Mother (Sylvia Syms) as dotardly and self-absorbed. Blair is ostensibly compassionate, though he seizes the opportunity to enhance his popularity. His unabashedly republican wife Cherie (Helen McCrory) is appealingly blunt, describing the dysfunctional Windsors as “a bunch of freeloading, emotionally retarded nutters.”

The film makes brilliant use of juxtaposition to underscore the class divide between the Windsors and the Blairs. It contrasts Philip and Charles in their tweeds and kilts with Blair in his soccer shirt, Philip tinkering with his barbecue in the Highlands with Blair being asked by Cherie if he wants fish sticks for tea. But in its balanced dialectical perspective, the movie is more objective than London’s tabloid red-tops and Tory “qualities” are likely to be when it opens in the U.K. If it’s not a socialist lament like Frears’s collaborations with Hanif Kureishi, My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, it is finally critical of Blair’s softening of the “modernization” ticket on which he swept to power. As the subtext—should Britain become a Republic?—emerges, the champion of New Labour begins to defend Elizabeth, earning Cherie’s scorn: “Is it a mother thing?” she asks him, “I don’t know why all Labour Prime Ministers go ga-ga for the Queen.” (McCrory has the best lines.) By the time he meets with Elizabeth two months after the crisis to discuss his agenda for his first Parliament, he has become an appeaser, one whose “fulsome” praise does not fool her.

Elizabeth slowly gains in empathy. She can be mettlesome—slamming the phone down on Blair, getting out of her Land Rover when Charles starts whining about his fear of being shot, speeding the same vehicle along a bumpy Highland track and attempting to cross a river, where it breaks down (“Bugger it,” she pleasingly remarks). But by then doubts about her motherhood, and her conflict about her responsibility to the Crown on one hand and the people on the other, have made her a diffident, careworn woman.

Typically passionate in the title role of HBO’s Elizabeth I, Mirren has seldom been a passive actress, but she dominates the screen here with quiescence: her Elizabeth is clipped, dry, and repressed, if not without wry humor. Frears frequently captures her in repose—simply thinking. What she is thinking in the pair of sequences that comprise the film’s central metaphor is unclear. As she waits by the Land Rover for help to come, she is seen from above and behind, isolated in her crowdless domain, and starts to sob. Her face is completely blurred in the next frame, which she shares with a stag looming up over her shoulder in the middle distance. The beast is the object of a “stalk” absurdly arranged by Philip to distract princes William and Harry from their mother’s death. This is an obvious reference to the way Diana was hounded by the paparazzi and, indirectly, by the royal family, an idea presumably derived from the funeral address by her brother, Charles Spencer, in which he commented on the irony of his sister being named for the virginal huntress of Roman myth, who was often depicted with a deer. “Oh, you beauty,” Elizabeth cries when she sees the stag—implying she never said it to the lovely, idealistic girl who had married her son.

The metaphor takes on a double meaning the day Elizabeth leaves Balmoral. Learning that the stag had been shot on a neighboring estate, she visits the gazebo there. As she looks at the hanging carcass and then its head, which sits on a counter awaiting the taxidermist, the gillie beside her ironically echoes her exclamation about the stag being a beauty. Elizabeth may be contemplating how her family’s repudiation of Diana led to her death, but the fact that this monarch of the glen has been beheaded suggests the fate of Charles I, whose demise ushered in the 1649–60 republic.

Never one to genuflect to stylistic modishness, Frears directs the film with classical discretion, though often he allows news footage to take over: affecting close-ups of men and women crying in the streets; an overnight camper with a broad Liverpudlian accent telling the camera that the Queen’s actions “just aren’t good enough”; a cinematic aerial shot that pulls back from the throng outside Buckingham Palace as a cloud of smoke drifts across the frame—this followed by a grainy shot of Hollywood royalty walking up the aisle of Westminster Abbey. Frears make expressive use of angled shots to show Elizabeth’s pain: we again see her from above as she stands alone in the Balmoral kitchen, and from below as she ventures out from the palace to inspect the flowers left for Diana, which have been tagged with messages like “They didn’t deserve you” and “They have your blood on their hands.” Flowers proliferate—decorating Elizabeth’s drawing rooms, standing guard by Diana’s coffin, spreading in an ever-expanding field outside the palace gates.

The film’s structuring absence, of course, is the martyred “people’s princess” and self-anointed “queen of people’s hearts.” Seen in news clips only, Diana last appears at the end of her funeral service, in which her brother has pointedly extolled her “classlessness.” In a brilliant editorial stroke, Frears cuts in a shot of Diana looking to the left with a hint of accusation in her eyes, whereupon we see a close-up of Elizabeth. The queen isn’t dead, though—her nemesis is. When Elizabeth last appears, she’s strolling in the gardens at the palace alongside the Labour Prime Minister (who has sardonically been dubbed “Mr. Savior of the Monarchy” by Cherie). That their values have meshed feels like a betrayal.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Royal Blues Philip Kemp from Sight and Sound, October 2006

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TAMARA DREWE C+ 79

Great Britain (111 mi) 2010 ‘Scope

It’s hard to imagine what graphic novel audience this was originally intended for, as typically they cater to a younger crowd, but this version features plenty of old fogeys ostensibly paying for a writer’s vacation sitting at their computers lost in their literary thoughts while enjoying the comforts of a quiet, pastoral farmland of Dorset, the bucolic region in England where most of Thomas Hardy’s novels are set. Mostly this is an undisturbed region where absolutely nothing happens, where people have known one another through generations, and where two teen girls are so bored that they have to invent subversive activities to keep themselves occupied. While this is actually based on Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd, the world this most closely resembles is a rustic version of the long-running television series Murder, She Wrote’s (1984 – 1996) Cabot Cove, a seemingly harmless place wrapped up in the unhurried pace of small town charm where nothing unexpected ever happens until one day something out of the ordinary occurs, usually a murder, wreaking havoc on the otherwise peaceful serenity of the region. In this case, the summer doldrums are broken up by the return of the sexy title character (Gemma Arterton) to sell her mother’s house, where flashbacks reveal she was a plain Jane girl growing up teased for her gargantuan nose, who has now, with the help of a nose job, blossomed into a stunningly beautiful and quite flirtatious journalist. Apparently she and Andy (Luke Evans), the shirtless handyman across the cow pasture to the writer’s farm, were childhood sweethearts until he unceremoniously dumped her. Their on again and off again interest comes back into play upon her return, as he helps rehab the house.

While this is an all-in-good-fun character driven story that ends up feeling like not much more than an afternoon daydream, it’s mostly a spoof on the perceived erudite seriousness of Hardy novels themselves, where once they’ve been introduced, they are all perfectly detestable characters in their own right, especially the vain arrogance of the overly pompous writer Nicholas (Roger Allam), who lives with his perpetually downtrodden wife Beth (Tamsin Greig) at the writer’s farm, bathing in all the attention garnered by being a successfully published author, which he uses to his full advantage by lying and constantly cheating on his wife with much younger women, emulating the behavior of Hardy himself. Tamara does a feature on a celebrity rock star Ben (Dominic Cooper), who looks like something the British version of American Idol might have sensationalized into stardom, but he jettisons into her bedroom quickly enough, and to Andy’s disgust, isn’t set on leaving anytime soon. This seems to upset the equilibrium of all parties concerned, espcially two teens, Jessica Bardem as Jody and Charlotte Christie as Casey, who both go bananas once they discover their rock idol Ben is in town, flittering away in delight at the prospects of meeting him. More than anyone, they’re angered by Tamara for hogging him all to herself.

What starts out as a relatively tame and harmless story about a woman who eventually sleeps with three different men and an inept and agonizingly amateurish wannabe writers being starstruck by the close proximity of their pretentious host suddenly turns on a dime and becomes a teen fantasia about having a crush on the celebrity of the day whose face is plastered all over the popular tabloid magazines. While he speaks with a dash of rudeness, constantly wears a black leather jacket and drives a yellow convertible sportscar, the teens aspire to get his attention, but are heartstruck when Tamara and Ben both move to London, where she all but disappears from the story. Devising a plot to bring him back, the teens resort to devious means, the anonymously sent e-mail, to stir up some controversy, where accusations and back-stabbing rumors are hurled about the community thoughtlessly, where gossip arouses the town’s suspicions, and only the instigators, the two teens themselves, escape unharmed. While the entire film is a preposterous, tongue-in-cheek parody of celebrity with a glorified recreation of Hardy’s world, including an American writer (Bill Camp) who is fixated on writing a book about Thomas Hardy, what begins humorously enough soon turns sour, as the childish mischief results in some real unintended catastrophe for which someone else pays the price. The devlish teen girls remain unaffected by their pranks, leaving the community in utter turmoil so that they can enjoy the fruits of their labor. It’s a clever ending, focusing on the teens themselves, that subverts everything that came before, too much of which was spent having to endure the not so interesting behavior of despicable characters all bathed in an artifice of pettiness, self-indulgence, and make believe.

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd gets reconfigured into a toothless British countryside rom-com in Tamara Drewe. Based on Posy Simmonds’ graphic novel, Stephen Frears’ film pirouettes around the titular Drewe (Gemma Arterton), a former ugly duckling who returns home with a new nose, short shorts and a promiscuous libido, and promptly sets in motion a series of sticky romantic predicaments. Tamara is nominally back in town to sell her ancestral estate, but finds most of her time spent on seducing first a rock drummer (Dominic Cooper) and, later, the pompous and adulterous crime-fiction author Nicholas (Roger Allam) who runs the nearby writer’s retreat, all while shirking the obvious affections of gardener ex-boyfriend Andy (Luke Evans). Arterton’s fetching looks can’t quite compensate for her bland screen presence but Frears’ cast is otherwise reasonably spot-on, especially during an amusing late-act scene in which a distraught Nicholas responds to an autograph request by tearing a fan’s book to shreds. Despite its overt references to Hardy and his favorite themes, though, Tamara Drewe modernizes its source material in only superficial, ho-hum ways (for example, email takes the place of a letter) and reduces the landscape itself – such a vital component of Hardy’s thematic inquiries – to merely a picturesque backdrop for frivolous cutie-pie comedy. 

The Onion A.V. Club review [B] Noel Murray

Director Stephen Frears covers familiar ground in Tamara Drewe, an aimless but engaging update of the classic English pastoral, adapted from Posy Simmonds’ graphic novel of the same name (which itself is a play on Thomas Hardy’s Far From The Madding Crowd). Gemma Arterton stars as a breezy journalist who returns to her late mother’s estate in the country and proceeds to cause trouble for the people at a nearby writers’ retreat. Among the troubled: philandering celebrity crime novelist Roger Allam, his much-put-upon wife Tamsin Greig, their American academic lodger Bill Camp, and their hunky handyman Luke Evans. Tamara Drewe assembles this cross-section of society—throwing in teenagers and rock stars as well—and keenly observes their interactions. The movie’s full of bed-hopping and erudite banter, and sticks to the “lies and misunderstandings” mode of classic English literature, even as it acknowledges that much has changed in an era of gossip magazines and weekend music festivals in farmers’ fields.

But while Tamara Drew is enjoyable throughout—right up to its loony, loony ending—it’s more than a little scattered. The title character’s only in about a third of the film, and that diffused focus saps Tamara Drewe of a lot of its drive. Some of this is the fault of the source material, which was originally serialized and sprawling, more interested in engaging readers from installment to installment than in hanging together as a proper novel. If Frears and screenwriter Moira Buffini had reworked Simmonds’ novel and told the story through the perspective of one or two characters, the movie would be a lot stronger. And it needn’t have been the main characters, either. The most consistently entertaining people in the movie are Jessica Barden and Charlotte Christie, a pair of local girls who watch all the action from the periphery and give the characters nicknames like “Plastic” and “D-List.” They embody what Tamara Drewe is really about: showing how times change and generations turn over, but people continue to grow up full of grudges and ennui.

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

Comely, independent, willful young lass returns to collect family inheritance in rural England, drives the local men wild, makes several misalliances, and inadvertently precipitates a catastrophe before nature finally takes its course. Adapted from Posy Simmonds’s excellent graphic novel, Tamara Dreweknowingly updates Thomas Hardy’s gloomy pastoral Far From the Madding Crowd and entertainingly postscripts Hans Christian Andersen’s “Ugly Duckling.”

As directed by old pro Stephen Frears, the film is an ensemble affair, akin to a weekend-party comedy. The country house is a working writers’ retreat (“far from the madding crowd” per its classified ad), owned by a smugly successful, womanizing hack (Roger Allam) and administered by his long-suffering, cake-baking domestic muse (Tamsin Greig). Notable residents include a Hardy-specializing academic nebbish (Bill Camp) and the farm’s hunky handyman (Luke Evans). The eponymous heroine, formerly burdened with a world-class honker, makes her triumphant, nose-jobbed reappearance in the near-perfect form of Bond girl Gemma Arterton. The guys are smitten from the moment she bounds over the fence in tank top and cut-offs, although she confounds them by taking up with a sullen rock star on sabbatical (Dominic Cooper).

The dramatis personae are rounded out by a dissolute pair of local teens (Charlotte Christie and Jessica Barden) who worship the rocker, resent Tamara, and loathe the smooth and doughy hack. Commenting on the action as a rude Greek chorus even while providing the plot’s deus ex machina, the schoolgirls are the movie’s funniest characters; Tamara, whom they call “Plastic,” is the most complex. Despite the evident pleasure that this adventurous, super-confident creature takes in her newly acquired powers (she’s a newspaper columnist as well as a beauty), her anatomy is still her destiny: Tamara’s dealings with men are as consistently unfortunate as those of her less attractive sisters, the hack’s matronly wife and the rocker’s adolescent admirers.

Tamara Drewe is self-consciously rustic (cut to shot of urinating cows) and broadly played, particularly in comparison to Simmonds’s darker, more nuanced novel, in which the characters are less cuddly and the denouement not so tidy. Frears might have accelerated the comic pacing, but the story is a good one and events come nicely to a boil. There have been far worse literary chick-flicks. Still, Woody Allen, to name one worker in the field, would doubtlessly have provided funnier one-liners.

Slant Magazine (Fernando F. Croce) review

Having previously investigated the gamesmanship of seduction in screen versions of Choderlos de Laclos, Jim Thompson, and Colette, Stephen Frears in Tamara Drewe turns his attention to Thomas Hardy. Sort of. The basis for Frears's bucolic roundelay is cartoonist Posy Simmonds's modernization of Far from the Madding Crowd, which ran as a serialized graphic novel for two years and envisioned Hardy's willful 19th-century heroine Bathsheba Everdene as a new-millennium ugly duckling turned hot-pants swan sashaying among pompous artistes and adolescent thrill-seekers. The narrative switch from the Industrial Revolution to the Facebook epoch, not to mention the variety of mediums involved in the update (novel, comic strip, film), promise something more interesting than this calculatedly saucy Brit-com, a full-bodied and empty-headed creature that gracelessly squashes Hardy's themes and the characters' foibles with equal broadness.

The setting is an airbrushed version of the British countryside, where wordsmiths gather at a sleepy writers' resort presided over by Nicholas (Roger Allam), a smug, openly philandering mystery novelist, and his biscuit-baking doormat of a wife, Beth (Tamsin Greig), who virtually has the words "long-suffering" sewn into her apron. Enter Tamara Drewe (Gemma Arterton), a local wallflower who returns from her big-city sojourn equipped with a surgeon-sculptured nose, her own webzine column, and the ability to inflame every male in sight. Among those trying to get into her denim cutoffs are condescending hack Nicholas, grungily rambunctious rock drummer Ben (Dominic Cooper), and noble-hearted, habitually shirtless farmhand Andy (Luke Evans). A couple of subplots—the tentative courtship between Beth and a bashful American scholar (Bill Camp), the antics of two pubescent pixies (Jessica Barden and Charlotte Christie) obsessed with celebrities—suggest not so much a libidinous community as a film losing interest in its own protagonist.

A textbook example of a polished camera trying to camouflage a hollow center, Tamara Drewe showcases Frears not as the piquant seeker of My Beautiful Laundrette, but as the off-key confectioner of Mrs. Henderson Presents. The filmmaker's nimbleness serves him well in the rare instances when Moira Buffini's screenplay finds a clever contemporary equivalent for Hardy's turbulent Victorian details (a military officer's phallic saber is turned into an eyeliner-wearing rocker's drumsticks, a clandestine love letter becomes a prankish email). Elsewhere, however, Frears's insistence on keeping things pastel and breezy gives way to slick caricature, flattening the hardworking cast, fumbling the story's third-act seriousness, and displaying the kind of Wildean wit that has Camp's fuddy-duddy Yank comparing writing a book to passing massive stools—an apt metaphor to make in a film so filled with clogged-up artistry and septic cuteness.

Tamara Drewe Mark Adams at Cannes from Screendaily

There’s a whole lot of fun to be had with Tamara Drewe…a charmingly entertaining film that sees director Stephen Frears in relaxed and funny form and flavour-of-the-moment actress Gemma Arterton delivering a sweet and smart performance. It is a fresh and witty film that also delves into a little darkness from time-to-time, but looks like it should deliver audiences as well as strong reviews.

On one hand Frears might appear to be a less than obvious director to take on an adaptation of a comic strip - his most recent films have included The Queen and Cheri - but he has always been at his best with subtle comedy, and let’s face it - Tamara Drewe is no simple comic strip about superheroes or other less than heroic characters.

Rather the acclaimed strip, created by Posy Simmonds for the UK’s The Guardian newspaper, is a modern reworking of Thomas Hardy’s 19th century novel Far From The Madding Crowd, and is an astute and engaging pastoral comedy set against the bucolic backdrop of the verdant English countryside.

Newspaper journalist Tamara Drewe (Arterton) returns to her sleepy rural Dorset village home after the death of her mother to renovate and sell the family home. She had left as an awkward young thing, but returns (with sparkling new nose job) as a media celebrity and smouldering femme fatale.

Her arrival sparks interest amongst the males of the community…such as philandering fiftysomething thriller writer Nicholas Hardiment (Roger Allam), who once spurned the teenage Tamara; her former boyfriend Andy Cobb (Luke Evans), now a local handyman at the village’s writer’s retreat, and teen idol rock musician Ben Sergeant (Dominic Cooper), who had moved to the village to be near her after she had interviewed him at a music festival.

As autumn moves onto spring and summer Tamara sets about writing and autobiographical novel, and the various men vie for her attention in different ways. The romantic machinations provide plenty to interest for visiting American Thomas Hardy scholar Glen McGrevy (Bill Camp), and other writers at the retreat.

Moira Buffini’s smart adaptation of Posy Simmond’s comic strip perfectly suits Frears (who shows suitable appreciation of the source material by sometimes shooting scenes that look to be panel-for-panel shots from the comic) who subtly allows the comedy to bubble to the surface, and makes great use of his strong cast, with Roger Allam especially good as the crumpled thriller writer.

But to a large degree this is Gemma Arterton’s film. She has gone the Hollywood route and played feisty femmes in Prince of Persia: The Sands Of Time and Clash Of The Titans as well as playing it down-and-gritty in The Disappearance Of Alice Creed, but here she shows a steely and easy charm that enraptures the village men.

Review: Tamara Drewe - Film Comment Amy Taubin from Film Comment, September/October 2010

Among the delicious reasons to see Stephen Frears’s Tamara Drewe is the spectacle of the movie’s most mendacious and manipulative character getting his comeuppance—a punishment that has been diligently foreshadowed and yet is so shockingly grotesque when it comes barreling down on him as to have you both gasping and hooting with laughter. Another highlight is Gemma Arterton—every inch of her, but in particular her thighs, which seem to be as much natural wonders as products of hard labor in the gym. (When she jumps over a fence, they jiggle ever so slightly.) A judicious comic actor, Arterton plays the eponymous Tamara, who throws a small English village into a tizzy when she returns from London to put the family cottage on the market. As a teenager, Tamara was burdened by a schnoz as big as Jimmy Durante’s, but thanks to a nose job the proportions of her face are now as perfect as those of her body and she’s glorying in the power her beauty gives her over men.

Adapting Posy Simmonds’s comic strip (later a graphic novel) that British readers of The Guardian describe as either based on Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd or the venerable 60-year-old radio rural soap opera The Archers or both, Frears and screenwriter Moira Buffini keep the slightly exaggerated visual style of the comic and also its complicated characters, all of them driven by conflicting needs and desires that they barely comprehend. But they’ve also sharpened the satire and tightened the plot so that the film trips lightly about the sleepy countryside, barely pausing for breath.

There are two interlocking storylines. One involves Tamara and her various lovers: Dominic (Ben Sargeant), a rock-star drummer with a large, pure-bred, ill-mannered boxer whom he dotes on and who becomes the narrative’s deus ex machina; Nicholas (Roger Allam), a middle-aged mystery writer and compulsive womanizer; and Andy (Luke Evans), who has loved Tamara since childhood even though his family was forced to sell their house to Tamara’s when they could no longer afford to farm. Andy is a handsome lug—a farmhand out of D.H. Lawrence’s imagination—and the opening shot of him alone in a field, lofting a log-splitter as if it weighed a mere few ounces, immediately sets the slightly absurd, more-sweet-than-sour tone of the satire.

Nicholas and his tolerant-to-a-fault wife Beth (Tamsin Greig) run a writer’s colony down the road from Tamara’s cottage, and the complications of Nicholas’s promiscuity and the competitive relationship that Glen (Bill Camp), one of the guest writers, develops with him is as amusing—although not as alluring—as the bedroom farce taking place on the Drewe premises. Glen, who can’t get past the first page of his biographical study of Hardy, takes Nicholas’s ability to churn out one thriller after another as a personal affront, not to mention that he has designs on Beth, who distractedly tends to the guest writers in much the way she does her prize chickens.

The female characters are far more attractive and interesting than the male, and that includes a pair of foul-mouthed, rock-star obsessed adolescent girls (Jessica Barden and Casey Shaw) who graduate from egging cars to gumming up Tamara’s love life because they want Dominic for themselves. In fact, none of the men deserve the women they have or want, which is true of most movies these days. But the entire cast, regardless of gender, is stellar. A word of caution to creative types: after seeing Tamara Drewe, you will never entertain the possibility of going to an artist colony again.

The Observer (Philip French) review September 12, 2010

Stephen Frears began his distinguished career working at George Devine's Royal Court, a theatre company devoted to new writing on contemporary themes. He then entered the cinema as an assistant to the leading directors of the British new wave, Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz, both dedicated to challenging the complacent, middle-class values they thought were stifling our cinema.

Following the Royal Court's original ethos, Frears always appears to have seen himself as the servant of the scripts he's undertaken, finding an appropriate style for the work in hand. Unlike his overly fastidious cinematic mentors, he's been prepared to undertake as wide a range of subjects and genres as the great studio professionals of Hollywood's golden age, men like Michael Curtiz and Henry Hathaway. But in films as superficially different as My Beautiful Laundrette, Dangerous Liaisons and Dirty Pretty Things, he's shown an interest in certain recurrent themes and situations, among them the taking of moral decisions in precarious situations, the secret manipulation of other people's lives and the ironic, usually unintended, consequences of our everyday actions.

Tamara Drewe, then, is very much a Frears movie in its skilful fidelity to the delightful Posy Simmonds cartoon strip on which it is based and to the reflections on British life and character in the changing times that it dramatises. Exquisitely drawn and written, Simmonds's strip tells of the impact over a single recent year of the alluring, ambitious Tamara (Gemma Arterton) returning to her native West Country village of Ewedown, having established herself as a self-absorbed newspaper columnist and had a nose job to enhance her looks. Her aim is to do up the old family house, write a chick-lit bestseller and become an international personality. Naturally, her appearance creates a stir in the neighbourhood both among the impoverished locals, now marginalised and rootless, and in the fashionable circle of prosperous outsiders represented by Stonefield, a writers' retreat visited by a variety of authors, variously popular, academic and hopeful.

Extremely amusing and acutely observed, the book and film gain dramatic strength and satirical thrust from using Thomas Hardy's first Wessex novel Far From the Madding Crowd as inspiration and armature. (Hardy's title is used in the small ad attracting people to Stonefield.) Tamara Drewe is a modern version of Hardy's headstrong Victorian heroine Bathsheba Everdene and Bathsheba's three swains have their present-day counterparts. Her true love, the shepherd fallen on hard times, Gabriel Oak, the dashing, treacherous soldier, Sergeant Troy, and the dull, deeply serious gentleman farmer, William Boldwood, become respectively the handsome odd-job man, Andy Cobb (Luke Evans), the wilful rock star, Ben Sergeant (Dominic Cooper) and the successful, middle-aged, crime novelist, Nicholas Hardiment (Roger Allam), womanising owner of Stonefield. The foolish trick that Bathsheba plays on Boldwood by sending him a card on Valentine's day is brilliantly recreated when two village teenagers, bored by their empty lives and high on romantic magazines, sneak into her house and use her computer to send the identical Valentine message ("I want to give you the biggest shagging of your life") to the odd-job man, the rock star and the novelist.

The two village girls, the forward, star-struck Jody (Jessica Barden) and the more reserved Casey (Charlotte Christie) are the characters who most resemble Posy Simmonds's drawings with their unformed 15-year-old faces and range of clothes from school uniforms to hanging-out casual to glammed-up sophisticated. Jody and Casey are touching, endearing, infuriating, but never patronised.

Playwright Moira Buffini, whose Welcome to Thebes was recently presented at the National, has done an admirable job in adapting Simmonds's book. She's added many jokes, introduced a couple of twists and, while retaining the violent climax, has, perhaps wisely, dropped that intrusion of tragedy that gives the book's final pages a troubling jolt. She's also deepened the Hardy connection. One small addition has been a scene in which Ben Sergeant uses his drumsticks to seduce Tamara, a low-key reference to the scene in Hardy in which Sergeant Troy impresses Bathsheba by flashing his phallic sword, one of the most memorable moments as performed by Terence Stamp to impress Julie Christie in John Schlesinger's 1967 film of Far From the Madding Crowd.

She's also turned Glen (Bill Camp), Stonefield's resident American literary intellectual, from a French specialist into a student of Hardy on whom he's writing an academic work. Until the final panel of Simmonds's strip, Glen's wire-rimmed glasses are left blank and the effect is funny in itself. Now we see his eyes, they worry and twinkle and he becomes less comic. This will no doubt endear him to US audiences, especially as he's positively sweet in his concern for Beth Hardiment (Tamsin Greig), the philandering novelist Nicholas's devoted wife, who holds Stonefield together.

This carefully cast and incisively acted movie is sharp on the literary life and on the present crisis in the countryside and to this extent it's another of the "state of the nation" films that have been regular features of Frears's career for the past 30-odd years. It notes the leading characters' insensitivity, self-deception, rationalisation and manipulation, not least in the case of the saintly, long-suffering Beth, the movie's apparent heroine. But Frears and Simmonds have generous and understanding hearts and there is no malice in their humour nor in the people they quietly satirise.

Tamara Drewe: What is a Stephen Frears film? | Emanuel Levy August 17, 2010

Critic's Notebook [Sarah Manvel]

Digital Spy [Stella Papamichael]

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Living in Cinema [Craig Kennedy]

CANNES REVIEW | Drenched In Sarcasm: Stephen Frears’s “Tamara Drewe” Eric Kohn at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 18, 2010

Movieline (Stephanie Zacharek) review [6.5/10]

Phil on Film (Philip Concannon) review

eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [5/5]

Moving Pictures Magazine [Elliot V. Kotek]

Little White Lies Magazine [Matt Bochenski]

DVD Talk (Jason Bailey) review [2/5]

TIME Magazine review Richard Corliss, October 6, 2010

Richard Corliss at Cannes from Time magazine, May 17, 2010

IFC.com [James Rocchi] James Rocchi at Cannes from IFC, May 17, 2010, also seen here: Cannes Review: "Tamara Drewe" and here: James Rocchi

Cinematical (Joe Utichi) review at Cannes, May 17, 2010. also seen here: Joe Utichi

Cannes '10: Day Six Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club, May 18, 2010

Eye for Film (Owen Van Spall) review [4/5]

The Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review

Sound On Sight Justine Smith

Screenjabber review Anne Wollenberg

Filmcritic.com Jules Brenner

exclaim! [Robert Bell]

Digital Spy [Simon Reynolds]

Cannes Film Festival 2010: Day Six Matt Noller at Cannes from The House Next Door, May 18, 2010

Tamara Drewe: Step Down for Stephen ( Emanuel Levy, May 23, 2010

Guy Lodge at Cannes from In Contention, May 19, 2010

RopeofSilicon (Brad Brevet) review [C-] at Cannes, May 17, 2010

Ray Bennett at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 17, 2010, which includes an interview by Stuart Kemp of Frears here: THR

Gemma Arterton on Alice Creed, Blockbuster Fatigue and the Politics of Being Tied Up Actress interview by S.T. VanAirsdale from Movieline, August 4, 2010

Stephen Frears on Tamara Drewe, Directing by Ear and the One Comic Book Movie He Likes Director interview by S.T. VanAirsdale from Movieline, September 28, 2010

Entertainment Weekly review Owen Gleiberman

Variety (Leslie Felperin) review

Time Out London (Wally Hammond) review [2/5]

Geoff Andrew at Cannes from Time Out London, May 18, 2010

The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [4/5] September 10, 2010

The Independent (Geoffrey Macnab) review [3/5] at Cannes from The Independent, May 18, 2010, also seen here: Geoffrey Macnab

Film review: Tamara Drewe | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw, September 9, 2010

Tamara Drewe Peter Bradshaw at Cannes from The Guardian, May 17, 2010

Tamara Drewe comic strip charms Cannes in film form Charlotte Higgins chats with Frears at Cannes from The Guardian, May 17, 2010

Sukhdev Sandhu at Cannes from The Telegraph, May 17, 2010, also seen here: The Daily Telegraph review [3/5]

The Daily Telegraph review [3/5] Sukhdev Sandhu, September 9, 2010

The Globe and Mail (Liam Lacey) review at Cannes, May 17, 2010, or a capsule version here: The Globe and Mail (Liam Lacey) capsule review [2/4]

The Boston Phoenix (Jeffrey Gantz) review

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle, Chronicle Movie Critic) review [3/4]

Los Angeles Times (Robert Abele) review

Chicago Tribune (Alexis L. Loinaz) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]

New York Times (registration req'd) More Sex, Please, We’re British Rustics, by A.O. Scott, October 7, 2010

Naughty Advances at a Writers’ Retreat Sarah Lyall chats with the director and cast members from The New York Times, September 8, 2010

Fresnadillo, Juan Carlos

28 WEEKS LATER

USA Spain Great Britain (100 mi) 2007

28 Weeks Later Geoffrey Macnab from Screendaily

28 Weeks Later is superior genre fare, directed and performed with such gusto that you scarcely notice its creaks. Atmospheric and creepy production design, excellent use of London locations and a succession of bloodcurdling chase sequences keep the tempo high, even as the improbabilities and contrivances mount.

The film-makers sometimes seem uncertain as to whether they are making a straight zombie B-movie or straying into the realm of Children Of Men-style political allegory, even referring obliquely to the US occupation in Iraq. Attempts at characterisation are undermined by the fact that so many of the protagonists either succumb to the rage virus or fall victim to the zombies. Nonetheless, audiences should not be bothered by the occasional shift in tone nor clunky moment: above all, 28 Weeks Later is an exhilarating ride.

The film's progenitor, Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later (2002), was a solid box-office hit, grossing well over $50m worldwide, and the follow-up has every chance of overtaking those figures when it is released in the UK and US on May 11. Although Spider-Man 3 will already be in cinemas, the zombie sequel will have a few weeks' grace before the unleashing of such monster summer movies as Shrek The Third, Pirates Of The Caribbean 3 and the new Harry Potter, which will skew towards younger demographics.

Audiences clearly still have the stomach for zombie movies, and, as the success of Children Of Men suggests, they are also interested in dystopian sci-fi yarns with a strong contemporary political resonance. On one level, 28 Weeks Later also works as a family melodrama, albeit a very gruesome one, and this too might extend its appeal. An epilogue suggests we may be in for a third installment.

The film starts with a shakily shot and very bloody prologue. As zombies infected with the Rage virus continue to rampage, various survivors are hiding out in a boarded up house somewhere in the English countryside, among them Alice (McCormack) and Don (Carlyle.) They are down to their last tin of tomatoes and last bottle of wine. Inevitably, the zombies find their hiding place. Don flees, uncertain as to whether Alice has survived.

Six months after the original infestation, the US army is the occupying force in the UK and has declared that the virus has been wiped out: now, reconstruction can begin. Survivors are housed in a comfortable but heavily policed compound in East London's Docklands, an equivalent to Baghdad's Green Zone.

Here, Don is reunited with his children, who have been allowed to come back to Britain, and tells them that their mother is dead. In thinking that they have wiped out the virus, the US soldiers are guilty of hubris: you don't need to be a soothsayer to know that the zombies will soon return.

Fresnadillo (whose debut feature Intacto won a host of awards) brings an eerie lyricism to the storytelling that effectively counterpoints the many gruesome moments. For example, there is a haunting sequence early on in which Robert Carlyle is shown on a little boat going down river through the deserted rural counties surrounding London.

Equally evocative are the scenes of the brother and sister (well played by newcomers Imogen Poots and Mackintosh Muggleton) venturing through an empty London on a tiny motorbike. The inclusion of the kids in the story proves an astute move allowing the film-makers, to take a child's eye view of the apocalyptic events depicted.

As in Alejandro Amenabar's The Others, there are moments here which echo Jack Clayton's famous ghost story The Innocents. For instance, the director includes several sequences of forlorn or threatening characters with their faces pressed up against windows.

There is a buddy movie aspect to the storytelling too, with a tough-talking, testosterone-driven US sergeant and his friend, a helicopter pilot, proving unlikely heroes. The dialogue is occasionally jargonistic, with soldiers discussing earnestly about containing the virus and running tests on corpses.

Many of the ideas and settings echo earlier films. The idea of zombies hiding in the bowels of the London Underground was explored in Gary Sherman's 1972 classic Death Line. The use of the football stadium (the newly rebuilt Wembley) evokes memories of the 1979 Quatermass series, in which Wembley also featured prominently.

Meanwhile, when zombies are mashed up on the blades of outboard motors or helicopters or when they are shot by snipers or incinerated, it is hard not to be reminded of similar moments of bloodletting in George Romero movies or those of his countless imitators.

There is also something deeply contrived about the way the virus is allowed to re-emerge. Still, even at its most derivative, 28 Weeks Later seldom loses its edge or relentless narrative drive.

Early on, as we see an occupying US army struggling to cope with an insurgency it doesn't understand, the parallels with Iraq are unmistakable. By the final reel, the film has turned into an old-fashioned chase movie. The overlaps with Children Of Men (stalling cars, children that must be saved for the benefit of humanity etc) are coincidental but striking nonetheless.

Amid the carnage, actors struggle to bring much emotional depth to their roles but the key performances are all lively enough. Catherine McCormack registers strongly as the traumatised and grief-stricken mother while Robert Carlyle, hamming it up just a little, enjoys getting almost as angry as he was when playing Begbie in Trainspotting.

The film is slickly shot and designed, and the unexpectedly elegiac music proves a plus.

Freund, Karl

THE MUMMY

USA (73 mi) 1932

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Hardly a horror film in that it refuses to go for shock effects, this tale of Im-ho-tep, an ancient Egyptian priest brought back to life by an archaeologist, is a sombre and atmospheric depiction of eternal passion and occult reincarnation. The script throws up a heady mixture of evocative nonsense that bears little relation to the realities of Egyptian religion and history, but the whole thing is transformed by Karloff's restrained performance as the mummy who becomes, in his new life, an Egyptian archaeologist stalking Cairo in search of his beloved, a reincarnated princess; and by Freund's strong visual sense (he had previously been cameraman on Murnau's The Last Laugh, Lang's Metropolis, and the original Dracula). Not as great as Universal's earlier Frankenstein, but a fascinating instalment in the studio's series of classic fantasies.

Turner Classic Movies review Frank Miller

Boris Karloff rose from the grave -- again -- when Universal Pictures decided to add a new monster to their repertoire in 1932. Where they had drawn on legend and literature for such past hits as Dracula and Frankenstein, however, they invented their own horror mythology with The Mummy, introducing to the screen the idea of "the dead who walk." Not that the 1932 feature was the screen's first depiction of a revivified mummy. That honor goes to a 1911 silent with the same title. But it was Universal and writer John Balderston who created the idea of a reanimated mummy trying to bring back the woman of his dreams. Their version of The Mummy would inspire a string of sequels in the '40s and a similar series from England's Hammer Studios in the '60s and '70s.

Studio head Carl Laemmle, Jr. got the idea from the furor over the discovery of King Tut's tomb in 1922. Shortly after archaeologists unearthed the intact tomb, members of the expedition began dying in mysterious ways. Public interest in the so-called curse was at an all-time high in the early '30s, so Laemmle thought to cash in on it with a new monster and a new vehicle for the studio's top horror star, Boris Karloff. The initial treatment, Cagliostro, told of an ancient Egyptian who uses nitrate injections to keep himself alive for 3,500 years while he kills anybody who resembles the woman who once betrayed him. Laemmle approved the story idea, then passed it on to John Balderston, co-author of the hit stage adaptation of Dracula. Balderston re-shaped the material, borrowing liberally from the vampire tale, to tell of an Egyptian priest buried alive for trying to revive his lost love from the dead. When archaeologists inadvertently bring him back to life, he goes in search of his love's current reincarnation, fighting her young lover and an older expert on Egyptology to possess her. Also pointing up the film's resemblance to the earlier Dracula was the casting of that film's elderly expert (Edward Van Sloan) and young lover (David Manners) in similar roles. Balderston named the villain Im-Ho-Tep, after the high priest serving under Pharaoh Zoser, then gave him the alias Ardath Bey, an anagram for "death by Ra." After the working titles of The King of the Dead and Im-Ho-Tep, Laemmle changed the name of the film to The Mummy during filming.

Having scored triumphs in Frankenstein, The Old Dark House and The Mask of Fu Manchu, Karloff was considered the successor to Lon Chaney's mantle. With The Mummy he achieved an almost unique honor; he was billed solely by his last name as "Karloff the Uncanny," putting him on a par with Greta Garbo in terms of audience recognition. The price he paid for stardom was high, however. For the few scenes in which he is in full mummy regalia, he had to sit in the makeup chair for eight hours. Make-up artist Jack Pierce applied layers of Fuller's Earth, beauty clay (the same clay used to remove wrinkles on women), cotton soaked in collodion and 150 feet of rooted linen bandages to his body. When director James Whale, who had cast Karloff as the monster in Frankenstein, saw the makeup for the first time, he said it looked as though the star had had a pail of garbage dumped over him. Of course, that was exactly the effect Pierce wanted; he always considered it his favorite of all the many make-ups he had created. Through the day, the Fuller's Earth kept getting in Karloff's eyes. Afterwards, the whole thing had to be melted off. Things improved only slightly once the mummy took on human guise. Karloff still had to sit for hours as more cotton strips were applied to his skin to cover his face and hands with wrinkles for the remaining seven weeks of filming.

To direct The Mummy, Laemmle gave a chance to pioneering cinematographer Karl Freund. Shooting silent films in Germany, he had invented the dolly shot and several special effects techniques. He was also one of the first to use a handheld camera. After filming Dracula at Universal, he got his shot at directing. He even improved on a trick he had created for the earlier horror film. To give Karloff's eyes an unholy light, he focused baby spotlights on them while dimming the rest of the lights. It was one of the film's greatest effects.

Freund worked his cast and crew tirelessly in the days before Hollywood unionization. He frequently kept them on the set until after midnight, which was particularly grueling for Karloff, who had started in the makeup chair eight hours before shooting began. But he finished the film ahead of schedule and under budget (for less than $200,000). His visual sense paid off. Later critics have hailed The Mummy as a photographer's film, while critic and historian William K. Everson called it "the closest that Hollywood ever came to creating a poem out of horror" (in Classics of the Horror Film). The film did huge business, with patrons lined up around the block for its Christmas-season opening. Clips from the picture would resurface in all of Universal's later mummy films, while the giant statue of Isis in the final scene would be reused as "the great god Tao" on the planet Mongo in Flash Gordon (1936).

Karloff would continue as the screen's reigning monster king for decades, acting until his death in 1969 and even after that (some of his low-budget films wouldn't be released until 1971), but this would remain his sole appearance as the mummy. Freund would direct a few more films, including the Peter Lorre classic Mad Love (1935), but soon returned to camera work , claiming that it was a more creative line than directing. His innovations would continue with Oscar®-winning work on The Good Earth (1937). Even when he turned to television, as chief cameraman for I Love Lucy, he made his influence felt as inventor of the three-camera system used for most television series.

Two prominent members of The Mummy's cast would have only short film careers. Leading lady Zita Johann was primarily a stage actress when she played Karloff's reincarnated lady love. The Hungarian-born beauty had turned down Hollywood's first contract offer -- the chance to star in Universal's 1929 version of Show Boat -- to remain on stage. She only made The Mummy because another film planned for her at Universal had fallen through, and she wanted to complete her obligation to the studio. She would later complain that Freund made her the scapegoat anytime he had problems on the set and even tried to get her to pose naked for him. She also wasn't pleased when a series of elaborate flashbacks depicting the Egyptian princess' other reincarnations were cut before the film's release. She made only four more films before returning to the stage, where she worked with such giants as John Houseman and Orson Welles. She only made one more film, a cheap horror film ironically titled Raiders of the Living Dead (1986), before her death in 1993.

Romantic leading man David Manners had made his film debut by chance. He was on his way to a job on a Hawaiian plantation when he visited Hollywood and was spotted by director James Whale, who cast him in his World War I drama Journey's End (1929). The casting of an unknown was so shocking that more experienced actors would cuss Manners out in the street. But he stayed in leading roles for years, including work in the 1934 horror classic The Black Cat, until he abruptly retired from filmmaking to focus on writing and painting in 1936. Although his official statement was that he was simply tired of the grind of making films, rumors persist that he either had a nervous breakdown or got tired of pressure to hide his homosexuality by taking a wife for appearances. But though he lived more than 60 years after leaving Hollywood, he was always best remembered as the star of three of Universal's most famous horror films.

THE MUMMY Ernest Larsen from Jump Cut, July 2000

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A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

Classic Movie Guide [A.J. Hakari]

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]

Variety review

The New York Times review A.D.S.

Freundlich, Bart

WORLD TRAVELER B+ 90

USA Canada (103 mi) 2001

While I agree this film has one of the lamest scripts I've ever heard, the dialogue is so amateurishly recorded it sounds like it's coming from some echo chamber and is sometimes barely audible, the original music written for the film was initially so bad I was on the verge of bolting the theater, it was that dreadful, something that wouldn't even make for good television, there were dream sequences that sort of stumbled into the reality of the story, Cal, Billy Crudup's lead character, was just a wretched individual who wasn't worth anyone's attention, there really wasn't much to like about this film at all - until - the comatose entrance of Julianne Moore's character, Dulcie, her screen appearance is easily the defining moment in the film, bringing what was a comatose film to life, changing everything that had come before and everything that would come after.  Let's just say the film up to that point was lost in a haze, bits of scrambled sketches that didn't work, but Dulcie brings to the screen what I would call authentic peculiarity, this is the real thing, and Julianne Moore is brilliant, she makes you sit up and pay attention to everything she is doing, it's impossible not to notice that she is an absolute gem of a character, a pearl of a girl, and for the first time in the film, things are starting to come together, and finally, the music captures the moment, a dark, neon-lit slow dance sequence in a bar as the juke box plays a Willie Nelson and Tracy Nelson duet, "Hold On."  All seems right with the world, but then this momentary bliss unravels into one of the most emotionally devastating break-ups, how she feels at exactly that moment is precisely what this film is about, he was driving away with the only thing that mattered to her, her son.  It is the most powerful, most vivid scene in the film and I still find it haunting. Cal's relationship with his father, again a marvelous and understated performance by David Keith, who was also oddly cast in the dream sequences, is unusual, as they look nearly the same age. I thought they might even be brothers, or partners, and in a sense they are, so this aspect was startling, but dramatically it works, as their similarities appear obvious, all the more impact when their differences become clear, amazingly realized in, of all things, a levitation sequence.  

So why would you recommend such a shitty film?

All faults aside, the 3 leading actors are more than terrific.  Crudup, in particular, is one of the finest actors currently on screen, reminiscent of Montgomery Clift.  But in this film, particularly with his pretty boy looks and his crude behavior, he's a throwback to Jack Kerouac, whose book  "On the Road" is not only exhilarating, but also one of the saddest books to read, his experiences are filled with such incredibly sad lives, unfulfilled love, as much as they are approaching new experiences, new sensations, they are also leaving girl friends, wives, and children behind, and running away from any sense of responsibility.  In the end the world always comes crashing down on them and they appear woefully inadequate. 

Hey, wait a minute.  That wasn't in the film.  That's all in your head.

In my view, it was in the film, as we have Cal and his father taking the same road, the elder believes he was seeking "a better life for himself" by leaving his unborn son behind, and Cal is following the same path searching for new roads, new sensations, and he seems perfectly willing to pay the price for it, leaving his wife and child behind. But this feeling of abandonment grows in intensity until it rises to an Edward Munch "Scream" when Cal pulls away from Dulcie.  This is his own child he has left behind.  In reality, his own child is only on screen for a few minutes.  That's all.  Yet he, and Dulcie's child, are central characters.  Some of the best moments in recent films have been the scenes where children, or even toys, have been abandoned - both TOY STORY 2 and A.I. - scenes where the parents or kids drop off the toys, or the artificial boy, and then drive away.  These scenes are devastating, suggesting the way you treat, or mistreat your toys reflects the way you treat, or mistreat your friends.  It's a reflection of your own humanity.

All right, so we have a Kodak moment at the end.  What's the point of sitting thru this if most of it is so painfully lousy?

Because that's the point of our lives, as reflected by the fucked up life of Crudup on the screen. He's no Jack Nicholson finding redemption in a chicken salad sandwich, or in his face in a mirror, or in a truck heading someplace cold.  Believe it or not, that's all too neat and clean for our age.  We're much more fucked up than that.  Crudup accurately reflects that state of mind, as there are so many fucked up people that desert their own kids for no good reason.  Crudup can barely express himself in the first half of this film, but he finds his voice with his father.

Hey, I don't want to hear about anyone's fucked up life.

But that's what's so intriguing about this film, particularly the levitation sequence, suggesting you literally have to pull yourself out of the holes you've dug for yourself, then rise above it. If I may quote Maya Angelou: 

"You may write me down in history 

With your bitter twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I'll rise...

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I'll rise."

O shit.  Another Kodak moment.

Sorry I've been so long-winded here.  But what I've tried to say is that some of the films that take the most negative criticism still have something to offer, in this case, plenty to offer, as they aren't really about what the criticism has to say.  Sometimes you can throw film criticism out the window. That's not really important here, emotional authenticity is. A perfectly made film without the accompanying emotional kick has a lot less to offer an audience than this rude awakening, which I would recommend you see before it disappears overnight from the theaters.

Frič, Martin

Martin Frič Vladimír Opela from Film Reference

Scion of a notable middle-class Prague family, Martin Frič left the road marked out by family tradition at the age of sixteen to follow the uncertain path of a cabaret performer, actor, and filmmaker. In 1919 he designed a poster for Jan Stanislav Kolár's film Dáma s malou nozkou (Lady with a Little Foot), and thus began his years of apprenticeship. He was by turns an actor, a scenarist, a film laboratory worker, and a cameraman. Of crucial importance to the young Frič was his collaboration and friendship with Karel Lamac, the most influential director in Czech film. Lamac taught him the film trade and enabled him to become familiar with the film studios of Berlin and Paris.

In 1928 Frič made his debut with the film Páter Vojtěch (Father Vojtech) and followed it immediately with his most important film of the silent era, Varhaník u sv. Vita (The Organist at St. Vitus), which dealt with the tragedy of a man suspected of murder. In the sound era Frič quickly gained a position of prominence, chiefly through his ability to work quickly (making up to six films a year) and, no matter the circumstances, with surprising ease and dexterity. Comedy became his domain. His comedies, often produced in two–language versions (German or French), featured popular comedians as well as actors and actresses whose comic talent he recognized and helped to develop. First and foremost of these was Vlasta Burián, who appeared in the situation comedies On a jeho sestra (He and His Sister) with Anny Ondrákova, Pobočník Jeho Výsosti (Adjutant to His Highness), Dvanáct křesel (The Twelve Chairs), Katakomby (Catacombs), and also in the film adaptation of Gogol's Revisor (The Inspector).

Frič had much to do with shaping the film acting of Hugo Haas in such films as Zivot je pes (A Dog's Life—the first Czech screwball comedy with Adina Mandlová), Ať žije nebožlík (Long Live the Deceased), Jedenácté přikázání (The Eleventh Commandment), and Ulička a ráji (Paradise Road). Together with Voskovec and Werich he made the social comedy Hej rup! (Heave-ho) and the modern political satire Svět patří nám (The World Is Ours). Then came Kristián (Christian), a social comedy with Oldrich Nový that is undoubtedly Frič's best work.

But Frič also demonstrated his directorial abilities in infrequent excursions into other genres. His Jánošík, a poetic epic about a legendary highwayman, is one of the pinnacles of Czechoslovak cinematography. Frič showed sensitivity and an understanding of the atmosphere of the time in his film rendition of U snědeného krámu (The Emptied-out Grocer's Shop), a story by the nineteenth-century Czech writer Ignát Hermann. He also made felicitous film versions of the dramas Hordubalové (The Hordubals), based on the novel by Karel Capek, Lidé na kře (People on a Glacier), and Barbora Hlavsová. Following the nationalization of Czechoslovak filmmaking, Frič aided in the development of filmmaking in Slovakia with his film Varuj. . . ! (Warning!). In 1949, in collaboration with Oldrich Nový, he fashioned his next masterpiece, Pytlákova schovanka (The Kind Millionaire), a parody of film kitsch. Following the successful costume comedy Císařuv pekař a Pekařuv pekař (The Emperor's Baker and the Baker's Emperor) with Jan Werich, and an excursion into the biographical genre with the film Tajemství krve (The Secret of Blood), Frič made a few films that were—for the first time, actually—neither a popular nor a critical success.

Frič's last creative surge came at the beginning of the 1960s. He made fine adaptations for Czechoslovak television and directed Chekhov's tales Medved (The Bear), Slzy, které svě nevidi (Tears the World Can't See), and Námluvy (Courting), and once more returned to the studios. The tragicomedy Hvězda zvaná Pelyněk (A Star Named Wormwood) and the comedy Nejlepší ženská mého života (The Best Woman of My Life), the premieres of which he did not live to see, close out his final period of creativity.

Frič's creation is the work of a solid and honest artist who demonstrated his talent in diverse genres from psychological drama to madcap comedy. He produced two masterful comedies, Kristián and Pytlákova schovanka, which can be numbered among the world's best of the period. The best proof of the quality and vitality of his creative work is the fact that almost a third of the films he made are still shown in the theaters of Czechoslovakia, where they bring pleasure to new generations of viewers.

HEAVE HO! (Hej Rup!) A- 94

Czechoslovakia (87 mi) 1934

Despite minimal subtitling, which is near non-existent in this talkative screwball comedy, this is a film that zigs and zags all over the place, but never fails to be wildly entertaining, including some rousing musical numbers set to the socialist collective theme, including the catchy movie title, which serves as the theme of the film. Imagine if you will, IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE without George Bailey, where only Lionel Barrymore as Mr. Potter ran things. Preceding that film by a good dozen years, the evils of capitalism are represented by another gruff old man in a wheelchair, Josef Skrivan plays Worst, the ruthless president of a cannery business who connives and kidnaps and resorts to any evil scheme to always keep the upper hand against his competitors. One such millionaire was driven to bankruptcy, Jan Werich as Simonides, kidnapped and kept drunk on alcohol for a week until his stock took a dive, leaving him with nothing left at all. When he sobers up and realizes his fate, he takes it amazingly well, expressed through a tracking shot as he walks past two giant wall-sized advertisements, from Simonides to Worst, a commentary that would feel right at home in an early Jean-Luc Godard film, and even breaks out into song with a fellow unemployed worker, Jiri Voskovec as Filip, as both commiserate in their plight at the bottom. This brings to mind the fall from grace portrayed by the millionaire drunk in Chaplin’s CITY LIGHTS, Sturges’ SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS, or even a musical fantasy of Fassbinder’s FOX AND HIS FRIENDS, though with a completely different outcome, where Fox’s agonizing plummet from fortune to failure would rebound through the unstoppable energy of the musical socialist collective.

The film works equally well presenting success or failure, as it’s always presented with a madcap flair of zany inventiveness. Werich is brilliant as the slightly pudgy Simonides, where he exhibits a kind of Cagney show biz flair, very comfortable in his role as a bum, an entrepreneur, or even when pulling off one of those outrageous musical numbers. In the course of events, his equally talented buddy Filip (apparently the duo was a Czech slaptstick comedy team) does impersonations of Chaplin swallowing the whistle and that Douglas Fairbanks smile before practicing his kissing techniques as Charles Boyer on a beautiful young girl. In a Buster Keaton touch, as Simonides races to get to a stockholder’s meeting which could reverse his fortunes, his method of transport is a scaffold that moves at a snail’s pace from atop a skyscraper, eventually tumbling him overboard, where he’s hanging first from his pants, but later from a single rope until he can be rescued, but as he’s hanging in this perilous position, it doesn’t prevent him from reaching through a window ledge for a telephone to mobilize his workers. It is simply impossible not to like this film.

CZECH MODERNISM IN FILM: The 1920'S to the 1940's Charles Coleman, Facets Film Programmer

Bearing more than a passing resemblance to Renoir's Popular Front films, this film is a rarely seen combination of socialist comment and riotous laughter; imagine the Marx brothers taking their name politically and you have some idea of the joys of Heave Ho!. Generally considered one of the best cinema outings by famous slapstick duo of Voskovec and Werich, the plot concerns an industrialist and labor organizer working together to create their own socialist nirvana. The auteur duo of Voskovec and Werich spent the WWII years in political exile in America. After the war Werich returned to Czechoslovakia while Voskovec stayed in New York. Voskovec became one of the stars of Sidney Lumet's acclaimed film 12 Angry Men. Sadly the Communist regime never allowed for the influential artistic duo to reconnect. With Jiří Voskovec, Jan Werich. Directed by Martin Frič, Czechoslovakia, 1934, 35mm, 87 mins.

Czech Modernism in Film: The 1920s to the 1940s JR Jones from the Reader

Released in 1934, this proletarian comedy delivers such wacky delights as a musical number in which stars Jan Werich and Jiri Voskovec cavort before a giant bar graph of rising unemployment. Werich plays a factory owner who's ruined by a scheming competitor, and Voskovec is the revolutionary-minded worker who shows him how the other half lives. Their adventures on the road play like a Laurel and Hardy version of Sullivan's Travels, though the balance of the film centers on the factory's revival by a jubilant workers' collective. A popular comedy team in Czechoslovakia, Werich and Voskovec fled to the U.S. in 1939, where Voskovec, using the name George, enjoyed a long career as a character actor (most memorably in 12 Angry Men).

Village Voice   J. Hoberman (excerpt)

Something of the same mood, even more absurd and cartoonish, may be found in Heave Ho! (December 9). Directed by Martin Fric, this 1934 comedy is one of four made by the cabaret team Jirí Voskovec and Jan Werich—unique, unpredictably droll social satirists who drew on both Dada and American slapstick. In this Depression comedy, Voskovec is an unemployed worker, and his partner plays a bankrupt industrialist. Both seem vaguely inebriated as they navigate a mildly surreal landscape of flophouses and breadlines. Despite the paucity of subtitles, the movie will seem wonderfully familiar to anyone with a taste for the anarchic Paramount comedies of the early '30s.

The Reeler   Peter Hames

Fridrikkson, Fridrik Thór

Fridrik Thor Fridriksson Rob Edelman from Film Reference

ON TOP DOWN UNDER – short B+ 90

Iceland Australia (27 mi) 2000

Visually gorgeous without dialogue, a reflection on the consequences of a summer afternoon spent together by two strangers, a woman from Iceland and a man from Australia, with atmospheric space age music in this erotic tale of a beautiful, naked Icelandic woman alone, Nina Gunnarsdottir, who finds a use for daydreaming in the steaming hot springs during the day while sucking and fucking on transparent icicles in the shape of a massive penis during in the night. While alone in the Australian outback, a man alone decides to hang himself while standing on stacks of ice, waiting for them to melt. There is a connection between them as she apparently has a copy of his book in her arms as she spends a restless night alone.

Friedkin, William

Film Reference Marie Saeli

The success, both critical and commercial, of William Friedkin's films has been uneven since the release of his first feature in 1967. Although his works span several different genres, they share some common thematic and technical characteristics. His heroes are nontraditional and find themselves in unconventional situations or environments foreign to the average viewer.

Technically, Friedkin often seems more concerned with creating mood and establishing atmosphere than with the progress of the narrative or character development. His great attention to detail and characteristic use of long establishing shot sequences do create mood and atmosphere but often do not contribute to the film as a whole.

In two of Friedkin's early films, The Birthday Party and The Boys in the Band (both based on stage productions), the use of establishing prologues works very well. The Birthday Party begins with an early morning shot of a deserted beach. Empty canvas beach chairs look out over an unnatural vastness of sameness—a seemingly endless grayish blue ocean that disappears into a grayish blue sky. This slightly unsettling visual sets the mood for Harold Pinter's play. To the beginning of The Boys in the Band, Friedkin adds a montage prologue that introduces all of the main characters. But these are the only personal interpretations evident in these two works.

In The Night They Raided Minsky's, Friedkin's attention to detail successfully establishes 1920s period authenticity and adds to a richness of character missing in his other works. The film was criticized, however, for having too broad a narrative told through overly long sequences that do not contribute to the story. This characteristic would prove to be a major flaw of several of Friedkin's subsequent films. Friedkin's two most popular films, The French Connection and The Exorcist, have some aspects in common. In addition to nontraditional heroes in unusual situations, both films have broad narratives expressed through similar filmic techniques: minimal dialogue; long, detailed sequences; and documentary-style use of the camera.

The French Connection, Friedkin's most critically acclaimed work, maintains a precarious balance between becoming tedious to watch and portraying the tedium and fatigue of Jimmy Doyle and Buddy Russo's lives. Friedkin uses a long prologue to establish the drug operation in Marseilles. This sequence, filmed with little dialogue and great attention to detail, not only serves to introduce the drug operation but also to contrast the lifestyles of French narcotics dealer Alain Charnier and New York City cops Doyle and Russo. This very long sequence is followed by another that establishes the cops' personalities and beat. Consequently, it takes quite some time before the actual narrative begins.

Friedkin's ability to create atmosphere does work well in The French Connection because the environment itself, New York City, is one of the main characters. The city and its inhabitants are depicted in detail. The scenes—sometimes gritty, sometimes gory, sometimes dull—produce the urban reality, and at the same time reflect the reality of policework, which is also sometimes dull, but sometimes dangerous.

The Exorcist, a commercially successful film, is tedious throughout. The film plods along through an excessively long opening sequence (the significance of which is never made clear), a pseudo psychological explanation of the character Father Karras, countless close-ups of "meaningful" facial expressions, and predictable stages in both the possession and exorcism of Regan MacNeil. Friedkin does succeed at times in creating tension and suspense, but this mood is not sustained throughout the film. Apparently, the shock value of watching the disturbing physical transformation of Regan from young girl to hideous monster is enough to maintain viewer interest, since this continues to be a popular film.

Sorcerer did not follow the trend of commercial success begun by the two previous films. A remake of Clouzot's The Wages of Fear, Sorcerer is a good action adventure once the story finally gets underway. Like other Friedkin films, it is weighed down by several long introductory sequences. After these initial sequences, the use of documentary technique, including hand-held tracking shots, creates a reality of place that can almost be smelled and touched.

Friedkin's subsequent films contain his characteristic cinematic techniques. His filmic representation of the sadomasochistic homosexual subculture in New York City in Cruising is too realistic and brutal for many reviewers. Deal of the Century, although not commercially or critically popular, is a fair satire on the profitable business of selling arms to Third World nations, using an introductory sequence very effectively to set the tone.

The Guardian, Friedkin's first horror film since The Exorcist, was not well received critically or at the box office. As in The Exorcist, Friedkin employs an unconventional situation for the narrative and uses mood and atmosphere to gradually turn reality into a nightmare. Unlike the narrative in The Exorcist, however, this story of a yuppie couple who hire a nanny that feeds newborns to trees is told on a much smaller scale, but still is not consistently interesting. Jade, Friedkin's most recent feature, has been criticized not only for unsuccessful attempts to establish mood that bog down the narrative, but also for unoriginal dialogue and stale action sequences. The screenwriter of Jade, Joe Eszterhas, is equally credited for the film's flaws, along with Friedkin, in many critical reviews.

William Friedkin's Own Website

All-Movie Guide Lucia Bozzola

Bright Lights Film Journal Feature Gary Morris, April 1999

Article: Entertainment - Theater: Back in the spotlight Paul Hodgins from the Orange County Register, March 10, 2006

The call of the wild Independent, The (London) - Find Articles Alice Jones, February 21, 2007

Friedkin, William They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Guardian Unlimited Interview by Mark Kermode, October 22, 1998

Directors Guild of America Interview by Rod Lurie, July 2003

William Friedkin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE PEOPLE VS. PAUL CRUMP – made for TV

USA (52 mi) 1962

Facets Multi Media - Item Detail: The People vs. Paul Crump

A powerful documentary--the debut film by William Friedkin (French Connection, To Live and Die in L.A.)--The People vs Paul Crump is an impassioned plea for mercy and justice, based on the true story of Paul Crump--a man who is still in Illinois prison. In 1953, five young black men robbed a food plant in the Chicago Stockyards. Their getaway went awry, one security guard was shot to death, and five employees were severely beaten. Within a week, all five were arrested. The fifth man, Paul Crump, then 22, was sentenced to die in the electric chair. He is sentenced to life in prison, and was at the brink of execution some 15 times between 1953 and 1962. William Friedkin met Paul Crump in jail, and so believed in his innocence, his record of rehabilitation as a model prisoner and his worth as a human being, that he made this artistic tour-de-force which is an impassioned plea for Crump's return to society.

village voice > film > Rediscovered '60s Death-Row Doc Walks the ... Michael Atkinson from the Village Voice

You may not be able to accurately tag William Friedkin's The People vs. Paul Crump (1962) a forgotten film—in most senses, it has never been truly known. Made for network TV by the budding twentysomething filmmaker but never aired, Crump didn't earn a blip on the radar despite festival screenings and a short-lived and questionable VHS edition decades ago. Showing at Anthology's Walking Picture Palace series in an archival print recently struck for the Torino Film Festival, Crump is a mad, agitprop fever-spike—a primo example of what one salient critic once called "vulgar modernism." Crude, rude, and bursting with 'tude, Crump is historically a kind of verité-era prophecy of Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line—both in its focus on an unjustly convicted death-row convict and in its brazen chop-shop approach to the precepts of documentary filmmaking.

Friedkin follows reporter John Justin Smith into the Cook County Jail to interview Crump, a black Chicago man set up by his cohorts for a stockyards-robbery murder he didn't commit. (Friedkin re-enacts the crime in a rough-and-tumble, Phil Karlson style.) Still, Crump is so fictionalized—starting with the re-enactments and continuing through Smith's rehearsed proto-noir interrogation—that it constitutes more of a furious prison ballad than a work of nonfiction. (The opening shot, of Crump standing at his bars as another convict blows on a harmonica in the foreground, is a crucial, melodramatic-cliché tipoff.) No small amount of pre-Kiarostamian frisson is mustered by the presence of Crump's mother, Lonnie, who plays herself in flashbacks trying to dissuade the infamous Chicago fuzz from apprehending her son, portrayed by Brooks Johnson.

About an hour long, Crump is economical yet flamboyantly righteous, as it should have been—the existence of the film played at least a small part in keeping Crump out of the chair. (He spent 39 years in stir before being paroled in 1993.) For our purposes, Friedkin's firecracker stands brazenly center stage in a suite of revived films conjoined by way of the "tranquility of influence"—as opposed to "anxiety"—with which raw film images and motifs get relayed from one work to the next. Thus, Crump is buttressed (on different days) by Alfred Hitchcock's The Wrong Man (1956), naturally; Stan Brakhage's Eyes (1971), the master's fractured remake of a Quinn Martin cop show by way of the very real Pittsburgh police; Ken Jacobs's Perfect Film (1986), in which news footage of witnesses to Malcolm X's assassination is presented as is, "perfectly"; and Bruce Conner's magisterial Report (1967), a frighteningly eloquent found-footage essay on the JFK killing that renders virtually every other consideration of the cultural moment obsolete.

Paul Crump; wrote book while in prison Chicago Sun-Times - Find ... Carlos Sadovi from the Chicago Sun-Times, October 15, 2002

THE BIRTHDAY PARTY

Great Britain (123 mi) 1968

Time Out

Film version of Pinter's first full-length play, a rather unsubtle and flashy piece of seaside gothic in which a scruffy, stay-at-home boarding-house lodger is terrorised by two sinister visitors: rather clever inversions of the stereotypic stage Jew and Irishman. Seems long and fussy, partly the fault of both play and director, but some marvellous performances (Nichols creating her Silly Moo character, Tafler superb as the anecdotal Goldberg) make it worth seeing.

User reviews from imdb Author: lancaster2778 from New York, USA

As one of this world's more zealous Robert Shaw fans, I feel obliged to put this gem in every once in a while and follow Shaw's every move. I must say, this film amazes me; it confounds me every time. There's only one emotion that overwhelms my passion for Mr. Shaw's gift in front of the camera--irritation--and it's aimed right straight at the storyline. You will find yourself wondering what's going on and why, as the actors' performances blind you with their shabby, touching directness. Don't let the story creep and seep too far into your brain. The story will cloud your ability to appreciate what this film is full of--brilliant, golden performances. They all shine, especially Shaw as poor Stanley. I enjoy watching films that take me to England in the 60s. The surroundings are dreary and depressing and totally marvelous. This film is well worth seeing; but, once again, I warn you--ignore the story; adore the actors! Oh, and an extra bonus (for what it is worth)-- After watching this film, you'll never look at a newspaper the same way again, I guarantee you. Enjoy!

VideoVista Debbie Moon

The director of The Exorcist, tackling one of the classics of 20th century theatre... Is there some mistake? Well, no. Harold Pinter's twisted farce may not have blood and crucifixes, but the theme of inexplicable evil hiding among the everyday is very much present.    

Middle-aged Stanley lives in a shabby seaside guesthouse, doted on by his neurotic landlady, sleeping late and reminiscing about his glittering career as a concert pianist. Then, on his birthday, two sinister guests arrive. Within hours, they've insidiously taken control of the house, the birthday party - and Stanley.    

As they wear down his resistance with a stream of interrogational questions, they hint at some unspeakable crime that they've come to punish him for. Is Stanley a Republican terrorist, a sexual deviant, an absconded spy? It's only when he makes his final appearance, suddenly, unnaturally immaculate in suit, tie and shiny shoes, that we realise the real nature of his crime. He has not conformed.    

A strong cast, including Robert Shaw and Patrick Magee, bring some real weight to the drama, and the grim 1970s' boarding house is so convincing you can almost smell the damp. Inevitably, the piece has a stagey feel, and the heightened dialogue style can seem slightly overdone at such close quarters.    

DVD extras: nothing to write home about. A few brief notes on director and writer, and some unexciting stills. However, if you still miss Play For Today, this is the disc for you.

Channel 4 Film

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

THE NIGHT THEY RAIDED MINSKY’S

USA (99 mi) 1968

Channel 4 Film

Although the film evoked some of the seedy charm of New York's Lower East Side in the 20s, 28-year-old Friedkin was not content to recreate the comic acts and musical numbers of the period, but, jumping from one character and situation to another, allows nobody and nothing time to develop. It is also difficult to accept the lugubrious Robards as part of a comedy duo with Wisdom (in his first and last Hollywood movie) or Ekland as a naive virgin who just happens to invent striptease by accident. Gould in his screen debut plays Minsky of the famous American titillating burlesque club.

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

"The Night They Raided Minsky's" is being promoted as some sort of laff-a-minit, slapstick extravaganza, but it isn't.

It has the courage to try for more than that and just about succeeds. It avoids the phony glamour and romanticism that the movies usually use to smother burlesque (as in "Gypsy") and it really seems to understand this most-American art form.

Burlesque was born and thrived at a time when America was engaged in the early stages of the current moral revolution, when the rural Puritan ethic and the tentative "sophistication" of the cities discovered each other. Burlesque was essentially vaudeville plus sex, and in the early days the sex was direct, naive and almost innocent.

Director William Friedkin presents exactly that period, when there was an exuberance and healthy, robust quality burlesque later, dismally, lost. And he has placed his film solidly inside the Lower East Side society that produced Harold Minsky's burlesque. His characters live a public, voluble life, inhabiting delicatessens (and eating incredible, hilariously photographed meals). They dream up the sort of persecution of vice detectives that Ben Hecht was recording in Chicago. They regard burlesque not so much as an occupation, more a way of life.

The story concerns a young Amish girl (Britt Ekland) who comes to the big city and is blinded, as they say, by the glittering marquees. She dreams of dancing at Minsky's. She is contested for by two comics (Norman Wisdom and Jason Robards); pursued by her bearded, fundamentalist father, and she accidentally, inadvertently and charmingly invents the striptease.

Friedkin has deliberately used stereotypes in casting. Miss Ekland is as wide-eyed and innocent as anyone since the young Debbie Reynolds and her father is a refugee from a morality play. So the story itself takes on some of the simplicity of the burlesque skits which liberally illustrate the action.

Norman Wisdom, the great British comedian and music-hall veteran, is very good as the tenderhearted comic; Jason Robards isn't quite so good as the straight man and big operator. Bert Lahr is present just enough to make us mourn his recent death, and the film's last scene is a touching farewell.

The New York Times (Renata Adler)

THE BOYS IN THE BAND

USA (118 mi) 1970

Movie Magazine International [Erik Petersen]

"The Boys In The Band" is one of the films to be re-released as part of a recent William Friedkin retrospective. Originally issued in 1970, it stars the stage cast of the hit off-Broadway play written by Matt Crowley.

As the first film from Hollywood to focus exclusively on gay men and their issues it doesn't hesitate to serve up frank and often time's graphic conversation. Groundbreaking at the time of it's original release almost thirty years ago, it still packs a punch.

Adhering to its theatrical roots, nearly the entire movie was shot on one set, lending a feeling of intimacy to the film. That along with the skilled use of a hand held camera by cinematographer Arthur Ornitz makes us feel as though we're eavesdropping on a cocktail party where the venom flows as freely as the liquor.

The action takes place in an upscale apartment in Manhattan belonging to the seemingly benevolent Michael. Michael played by Kenneth Nelson acts as ringmaster for a group of old friends who have gathered to celebrate the birthday of their pal Harold, played with an air of cool detachment by Leonard Frey.

What starts off as a night of good-natured teasing and bitching becomes by gradual turns a brutal coming out for each guest's inner demons.

As the formerly sober Michael takes a swan dive off the wagon and begins tossing back glasses of Vodka like they were soon to be last year's fashion, he prods his guests to take part in a revealing game of truth.

With everyone good and soused Michael really cuts loose, using his finely honed wit to carve his guests up one by one. Ultimately of course it's Nelson's Michael who reveals the most and ends up delivering the film's poignant message about self-hatred.

Although at times "The Boys In The Band" can be dated and melodramatic it offers a talented group of actors delivering the first realistic and intimate portraits of the gay lifestyle on the big screen. With recent gay theme films like "In and Out" or "The Birdcage" taking a comic approach it's interesting to see a serious film about gay men before the acronym AIDS existed. Sadly, several stars of the film, Leonard Frey, Keith Prentice and Robert La Tourneaux ended up dying premature deaths due to AIDS.

San Francisco Chronicle [Edward Guthmann]

It's impossible and probably unfair to look at ``The Boys in the Band,'' a 1970 film that opens today at the Roxie Cinema, without judging it in the context of its time.

When it opened off-Broadway in 1968, ``Boys'' was the first mainstream play to approach homosexual life on its own terms. Until then, gays on stage or screen were objects of pity or derision, or framed in language -- like the Paul Newman character in Tennessee Williams' ``Cat on a Hot Tin Roof'' -- that sanitized or clouded their nature.

Mart Crowley's work was celebrated as bold and compassionate -- a breakthrough play on a taboo subject. But when the Stonewall riots of June 1969 triggered the movement toward gay self-esteem, ``The Boys in the Band'' rapidly became dated. With gays redefining themselves as strong and proud, a play about acid- tongued, self-pitying fairies was bound to resemble the gay equivalent to a minstrel show.

By the time ``Boys'' was released in 1970, starring members of the stage cast and energetically directed by William Friedkin, it had already earned among gays the stain of Uncle Tomism -- even though the establishment media praised the film and Time magazine cited its ``landslide of truths.''

Set during a gay birthday party in Manhattan, ``Boys'' opens on a playful note with party hosts Michael (Kenneth Nelson) and Donald (Frederick Combs) sniping at each other and guests arriving to a volley of dishy one-liners (``Who do ya have to f-- to get a drink around here?'').

One of the guests is black, one's Jewish, one's a screaming queen, one's ostensibly hetero (we know better) and one's a dumb hunk (Robert Latourneaux) who's been rented for the night as a gift to the birthday boy. Tellingly, the least stereotypical characters, a straight-appearing couple played by Laurence Luckinbill and Keith Prentice, were mentioned least in reviews of the play and film.

These men are funny and smart and share an outsiders' camaraderie, but they don't like themselves much and their self-loathing soon spills out. When they speak of coming out of the closet, it isn't couched in terms of dignity and self-assertion, but in terms of surrendering to a grim and inevitable truth.

``You are a sad and pathetic man, Michael,'' says the venomous Harold (Leonard Frey). ``You are a homosexual, and you don't want to be, but there's nothing you can do to change it.''

In its second half, ``Boys'' turns dark when a rainstorm forces the party indoors and the friends confront one another with a vicious truth game out of ``Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'' Michael finally breaks down and in a maudlin, melodramatic speech he laments, ``If we could just learn to not hate ourselves quite so very much.''

Twenty five years after the film's release, Crowley defended ``Boys'' in ``The Celluloid Closet,'' a documentary by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, based on Vito Russo's 1981 book, that illustrates Hollywood's depiction of gays and lesbians.

``I knew a lot of people like those people,'' Crowley said of his characters. ``The self-deprecating humor was born out of a low self-esteem, from a sense of what the times told you about yourself.''

At the time he wrote the play, Crowley said, ``Homosexuality was still classified as a mental illness. If you went in a gay bar you were liable to be arrested if the place was raided. There were not just attitudes but laws against one's being -- against the core of one's being.''

Today, ``The Boys in the Band'' is a genuine period piece but one that still has the power to sting. In one sense it's aged surprisingly little -- the language and physical gestures of camp are largely the same -- but in the attitudes of its characters, and their self-lacerating vision of themselves, it belongs to another time. And that's a good thing.

Bright Lights Film Journal Gary Morris

outrate.net (Mark Adnum)

Turner Classic Movies Margarita Landazuri

FilmFanatic.org

Channel 4 Film

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

THE FRENCH CONNECTION

USA (104 mi) 1971

MovieFreak.com (Dylan Grant)

Two New York City detectives follow the rungs of a criminal ladder all the way to The French Connection, and they make the biggest drug bust in United States history. 

A career maker for Hackman and Friedkin, The French Connection invented what later became cliché. Good cop/bad cop, the cat and mouse game that goes on between the cop and the criminal and the fine line that separates the two, and the hyperkinetic chase scene, old hat now but brand new in 1971, this film opened the doors for the kind of hard boiled cop movie that has become all too familiar. 

Virtually unknown at the time the film was made, Gene Hackman gives one of his finest performances as Popeye Doyle, the gritty, tough talking, legendary supercop who lives and breathes his job. Hackman does not just play the part, he is Doyle, giving him a blue collar, down-and-dirty quality that reeks of honesty. Roy Scheider, himself an unknown at the time, plays Doyle’s partner, Russo, the perfect yin to Doyle’s yang. Fernando Rey is the Frenchman, Charnier, the aristocratic drug smuggler who is always a step ahead of Doyle. Despite the Oscar for Hackman, the acting always seems to be one of things about the film that is rarely talked about, but all of the performers are incredible. They are so believable that it would be easy to forget that we are watching a performance. It looks like life. 

The film was shot in a documentary, cinema verite style, as though the camera just happens to be on the scene when the action takes place. With this style, the city of New York becomes another character in the film, the living, breathing city with its ever present squeal of tires, the honking of horns, the sidewalks and the subways. We are taken to corners of the city that are not advertised. New York comes alive in ways that it seldom does in other films. 

Everyone acknowledges the seminal chase scene in the film, and that scene still holds up, but the whole film is so taut, becoming more tightly wound as Doyle and Russo close in on their man. The scene that leads up to the chase, the one where Doyle is almost killed in a sniper attack, and another scene in the subway are equally suspenseful, driving the film ahead. 

Not just a great crime thriller, The French Connection is also a great character study, portraying these people not as caricatures, but as real people. That is the real power of the film. 

The French Connection is a classic film that has held up well since its release, despite its imitators. That, coupled with the voluminous extras makes this a must-have for your collection.

filmcritic.com (Blake French)

The French Connection puts the majority of contemporary action movies to shame. It proves how potentially smart this genre can be, and how dumb recent action films really are. Unlike many modern-day thrillers, this film is an exciting, taut, and realistic portrayal of urban police life, but it does not fill its running time with gratuitous violence, nonstop profanity, and copious amounts of sex. Character motivation and story drive the film forward--not a needless excess of violent, antisocial behavior. It’s a standout cinematic achievement that won five Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Gene Hackman), Best Film Editing, and Best Writing.

Ernest Tidyman’s story follows the adventures of two New York narcotics cops, "Popeye" Doyle (Hackman), and his partner, Russo (Roy Scheider). They track a lead about a large drug delivery that develops into a plan that could entirely destroy the marijuana trade between Paris and New York.

The movie contains convincing, memorable action sequences. In an unexpected, timely scene, Doyle walks down the street when suddenly a sniper hiding on top of his apartment opens fire. The sniper misses and hits an innocent bystander. Doyle finds cover behind a tree. More pedestrians rush to care for the injured victim. Doyle tells them to run. This sequence convinces us that the threat of the sniper is real, which leads us to one of the most thrilling chase scenes in film history.

Most modern action scenes involve massive gunfire from both the good and the bad. It’s almost as if the bullets have read the screenplay, hitting their targets only at the plot’s discretion. The French Connection gives us convincing situations without the plot contrivances and predictable shoot-outs. The story flows smoothly because everything that happens is character driven.

Recent action movies contain special effects that make The French Connection look like child's play. Nowadays, a film can contain enormous explosions, amazing car chases and crashes, impressive computer generated images, and enough gunfire to impress the Army. But it’s not the special effects that make The French Connection a true classic, it's the quality of the performances, the enticing direction by William Friedkin, the brilliant editing, and the intensity and selectivity of the action sequences. Today’s filmmakers can throw almost anything into their movies, but there’s one thing that they often forget that The French Connection hits right on the nose: action itself doesn’t drive a story forward, character does. In today’s world, that's almost a novelty.

The double-disc DVD collection contains more Connection arcana than most can fathom, supplying an exhaustive amount of detail about the production (those car chases were shot in real traffic, folks) and its stars (the real cops on whom the film is based appear in small roles). I learned a lot in watching the deleted scenes, documentaries, and various commentary tracks -- seeing how low-budget the production actually was gives you a new respect for the film.

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

The French Connection, which caps Film Forum's "NYC Noir" series with a week-long run in a new 35mm print, is a multifaceted period piece—and not just because of its Rheingold beer and reel-to-reel technology.

A newfangled genre flick, fraught with urban decay and racial tension, William Friedkin's bang-bang procedural created a paradigm for the tell-it-like-it-is cop drama; it was the third-highest-grossing film of 1971 and swept the Oscars, winning Best Picture (over A Clockwork Orange, Fiddler on the Roof, The Last Picture Show, and Nicholas and Alexandra) as well as awards for its 32-year-old director, on-screen anti-hero Gene Hackman, screenwriter Ernest Tidyman, and secret star, the editor Jerry Greenberg.

Friedkin once had documentary aspirations; that The French Connection was shot almost entirely on the mean streets of Marseilles and New York, grounds the fantastic exploits of Hackman's Popeye Doyle and his more low-key partner (Roy Scheider) in a gritty naturalism, if not a crumbling mess. Hackman is a prince of Fun City, crowned with an absurd porkpie hat and inhabiting his part so totally, it's amazing that Jackie Gleason and Jimmy Breslin were among the half-dozen personalities first considered for the role. Being a cop is Popeye's vocation; he establishes his street cred early on by single-handedly browbeating and brazenly N-wording the soul-brother patrons of a Bed-Stuy bar. These post–Great Society policemen have to go it alone, collaring perps by any means necessary. As the original ads put it: "Doyle is bad news— but a good cop."

When it opened, The French Connection seemed like glorified Don Siegel—the justly celebrated elevated-subway chase through Bensonhurst is an adrenaline- pumped example of the action montage Siegel pioneered in The Line-Up (1958), while Popeye suggests the heroically disaffected cops who populate Siegel's Madigan (1968) and Dirty Harry, which opened six weeks after The French Connection in December 1971. While Dirty Harry provided audiences an anti-establishment legal vigilante, The French Connection introduced the notion of the heroic working-class narc. Blue-collar to the bone, Popeye lives in public housing and feeds his face with a rancid-looking slice in the course of a freezing afternoon spent staking out the Upper East Side boîte where the French smuggler who is about to unload 100 pounds of uncut heroin (debonair Fernando Rey) leisurely consumes a multi-course feast. Popeye also earned counterculture points by mistakenly shooting a federal agent and exhibiting a conspicuous lack of remorse.

The French Connection was based on an actual case, and while it has the obligatory end-title follow-up, it was released too early for the ultimate punch line: The year after the movie opened, it was revealed that the huge cache of heroin seized as evidence had been stolen from the office of the New York City property clerk.

DVD Times Mike Sutton

Turner Classic Movies Stephanie Thames

The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson)

George Chabot's Review

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]

eFilmCritic.com (David Cornelius)

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

DVD Verdict Barrie Maxwell

Chris Jarmick

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick)

eFilmCritic.com Slyder

Films on Disc (Stuart J. Kobak)

digitallyOBSESSED! DVD Reviews Mark Zimmer

Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz)

The Flick Filosopher's take MaryAnn Johanson

DVDTown [John J. Puccio]

Reel.com DVD review [Tor Thorsen] reviewing FRENCH CONNECTION I and II

Time Out

The French Connection: No 14 best crime film of all time John Patterson from The Observer, October 17, 2010

The French Connection: shock of the old Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, July 14, 2011

Has film really outgrown racism? Danny Leigh from The Guardian, August 1, 2011

Cleveland Press (Tony Mastroianni)

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The New York Times (Roger Greenspun)

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

THE EXORCIST

USA (122 mi) 1973 Director’s Cut (132 mi)

Time Out

Friedkin's film about the possession of a 12-year-old girl works as an essay in suspension of disbelief and on the level of titillatory exploitation. Although harrowing, its effects depend entirely on technical manipulation, and with Friedkin's pedestrian handling of background story and supporting characters, we're left more or less willing the film towards its climax. Sure enough, during the act of exorcism the girl obliges with a spectacular levitation. It would all be forgiveable, somehow, if the film was at all likely to alter anyone's perceptions one jot. But all The Exorcist does is take its audience for a ride, spewing it out the other end, shaken up but none the wiser.

Nitrate Online (Joe Barlow)

William Friedkin's The Exorcist owes much of its renown to the era in which it was created. When the film was unleashed on an unsuspecting public in 1973, it generated an international debate that, surprisingly, still rages today: is it art or garbage? Both sides of the argument had its followers -- in New York, picketers protested the movie upon its release, calling it blasphemous and obscene, despite the fact that the Roman Catholic Church participated in its making. Religious organizations demanded that the film be pulled from theaters and all prints burned. Thousands of weak- stomached viewers fled midway through the movie. At most cinemas, the line for admittance stretched several city blocks. Viewers loved it. Viewers hated it. Critics raved. Critics bemoaned. As the year wore on, the debate (and the resulting media attention) caused theater attendance to skyrocket; even today, The Exorcist remains one of the highest-grossing horror films of all time.

Part of the reason the film inspired such division was its aversion to playing by the established rules of horror. Although there had been a few exceptions (Rosemary's Baby, for instance), most pre-Exorcist horror movies hadn't tried very hard to tell a worthwhile story. The cheesy "monster flicks" of the 'fifties and 'sixties had set a standard that audiences had come to know and expect. The Exorcist caught everyone off guard by utilizing psychological terror for its chills, instead of the typical "creature jumps out from behind a tree and says BOO!"-type of scenes. It made history by doing so.

Despite the movie's supernatural elements, the story itself revolves largely around inner turmoil. Father Damien Karras (an excellent performance by Jason Miller) is a priest in the middle of a crisis of faith. "There's not a day in my life that I don't feel like a fraud," he laments to a colleague. Wallowing in grief after the recent death of his mother, Karras is on the verge of renouncing the deity to whom he has devoted his life.

The priest's life becomes increasingly complex, however, after he meets actress Chris MacNeil (Ellen Bursten). MacNeil believes her beloved daughter Regan (Linda Blair) has been possessed by Satan. The skeptical Karras initially disbelieves her claim, but as a favor to the clearly distraught mother, he agrees to evaluate Regan's condition. Much to his horror, Karras realizes that there may be some truth to MacNeil's claims, and he calls in Father Lankester Merrin (Max von Sydow), an experienced exorcist, to drive the spirit from the body of this innocent child. From this point on, the movie performs double-duty as both a suspense/horror story of the highest caliber, and as the tale of Father Karras's spiritual redemption.

The Exorcist isn't a sprightly moving picture. The film's prologue is deliberately slow, but not because of a lack of skill on Friedkin's behalf. The director possesses an innate mastery of the art of storytelling, and he unleashes the plot at a restrained pace, thereby allowing The Exorcist to weave its web so stealthily that the audience doesn't even realize that it's being ensnared. Once things get moving, however, look out!

Warner Brothers released an excellent DVD edition of The Exorcist a couple of years ago. The disc is packed with a generous bounty of special features, including two audio commentary tracks (one with Friedkin, the other with writer/producer William Peter Blatty), and a ninety-minute BBC documentary on the making of this classic film. Now Warner Brothers has done itself one better, theatrically reissuing a new director's cut of the movie that adds eleven minutes of previously unreleased footage and boasts a mesmerizing new surround sound mix to boot. Those viewers who have memorized every frame of the original film will find many new surprises here, including Regan's legendary "spider walk" sequence, which was cut from the original release.

The new audio mix is a vast improvement over the original soundtrack, which is no small praise: the film won the 1973 Oscar for Best Sound in a Feature Film. ("Tubular Bells," the story's much-celebrated theme music, has never sounded better.) And yes, digital die-hards: a new DVD of the director's cut is expected once the film completes its current theatrical run.

Time can be a cruel mistress, but The Exorcist hasn't aged in any discernible way since its initial release twenty-seven years ago. It continues to captivate (and terrify) new viewers with each passing year, and no wonder: in terms of story and execution, few films have ever surpassed it. If a great horror movie is like a fine wine, then The Exorcist's bouquet becomes more refined with each passing year.

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 1973

The year 1973 began and ended with cries of pain. It began with Ingmar Bergman's "Cries and Whispers," and it closed with William Friedkin's "The Exorcist." Both films are about the weather of the human soul, and no two films could be more different. Yet each in its own way forces us to look inside, to experience horror, to confront the reality of human suffering. The Bergman film is a humanist classic. The Friedkin film is an exploitation of the most fearsome resources of the cinema. That does not make it evil, but it does not make it noble, either.

The difference, maybe, is between great art and great craftsmanship. Bergman's exploration of the lines of love and conflict within the family of a woman dying of cancer was a film that asked important questions about faith and death, and was not afraid to admit there might not be any answers. Friedkin's film is about a twelve-year-old girl who either is suffering from a severe neurological disorder or perhaps has been possessed by an evil spirit. Friedkin has the answers; the problem is that we doubt he believes them.

We don't necessarily believe them ourselves, but that hardly matters during the film's two hours. If movies are, among other things, opportunities for escapism, then "The Exorcist" is one of the most powerful ever made. Our objections, our questions, occur in an intellectual context after the movie has ended. During the movie there are no reservations, but only experiences. We feel shock, horror, nausea, fear, and some small measure of dogged hope.
Rarely do movies affect us so deeply. The first time I saw "Cries and Whispers," I found myself shrinking down in my seat, somehow trying to escape from the implications of Bergman's story. "The Exorcist" also has that effect--but we're not escaping from Friedkin's implications, we're shrinking back from the direct emotional experience he's attacking us with. This movie doesn't rest on the screen; it's a frontal assault.

The story is well-known; it's adapted, more or less faithfully, by William Peter Blatty from his own bestseller. Many of the technical and theological details in his book are accurate. Most accurate of all is the reluctance of his Jesuit hero, Father Karras, to encourage the ritual of exorcism: "To do that," he says, "I'd have to send the girl back to the sixteenth century." Modern medicine has replaced devils with paranoia and schizophrenia, he explains. Medicine may have, but the movie hasn't. The last chapter of the novel never totally explained in detail the final events in the tortured girl's bedroom, but the movie's special effects in the closing scenes leave little doubt that an actual evil spirit was in that room, and that it transferred bodies. Is this fair? I guess so; in fiction the artist has poetic license.

It may be that the times we live in have prepared us for this movie. And Friedkin has admittedly given us a good one. I've always preferred a generic approach to film criticism; I ask myself how good a movie is of its type. "The Exorcist" is one of the best movies of its type ever made; it not only transcends the genre of terror, horror, and the supernatural, but it transcends such serious, ambitious efforts in the same direction as Roman Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby." Carl Dreyer's "The Passion of Joan of Arc" is a greater film--but, of course, not nearly so willing to exploit the ways film can manipulate feeling.

"The Exorcist" does that with a vengeance. The film is a triumph of special effects. Never for a moment--not when the little girl is possessed by the most disgusting of spirits, not when the bed is banging and the furniture flying and the vomit is welling out--are we less than convinced. The film contains brutal shocks, almost indescribable obscenities. That it received an R rating and not the X is stupefying.

The performances are in every way appropriate to this movie made this way. Ellen Burstyn, as the possessed girl's mother, rings especially true; we feel her frustration when doctors and psychiatrists talk about lesions on the brain and she knows there's something deeper, more terrible, going on. Linda Blair, as the little girl, has obviously been put through an ordeal in this role, and puts us through one. Jason Miller, as the young Jesuit, is tortured, doubting, intelligent.

And the casting of Max von Sydow as the older Jesuit exorcist was inevitable; he has been through so many religious and metaphysical crises in Bergman's films that he almost seems to belong on a theological battlefield the way John Wayne belonged on a horse. There's a striking image early in the film that has the craggy von Sydow facing an ancient, evil statue; the image doesn't so much borrow from Bergman's famous chess game between von Sydow and Death (in "The Seventh Seal") as extend the conflict and raise the odds.

I am not sure exactly what reasons people will have for seeing this movie; surely enjoyment won't be one, because what we get here aren't the delicious chills of a Vincent Price thriller, but raw and painful experience. Are people so numb they need movies of this intensity in order to feel anything at all? It's hard to say.

Even in the extremes of Friedkin's vision there is still a feeling that this is, after all, cinematic escapism and not a confrontation with real life. There is a fine line to be drawn there, and "The Exorcist" finds it and stays a millimeter on this side.

James Berardinelli's ReelViews

DVD Journal Gregory P. Dorr

And You Call Yourself a Scientist! (Liz Kingsley)

The Exorcist and radical therapy by Bill VanWert from Jump Cut

The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

HorrorWatch The Horrorist

Eccentric Cinema Troy Howarth

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick)

Edwin Jahiel

The Onion A.V. Club [Joshua Klein]

Flipside Movie Emporium (Rob Vaux)

Classic-Horror.com Brandt Sponseller

filmcritic.com (Norm Schrager)

eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin)

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala)

The Flick Filosopher's take MaryAnn Johanson

DVD Review of the 25th Anniversary Special Edition Guido Henkel

DVD Verdict Norman Short, Special Edition

DVD Verdict] Bill Treadway

ToxicUniverse.com (John Nesbit)

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti David Fear

Reel.com DVD review [Sarah Chauncey]

DVDTown [John J. Puccio]

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

PopMatters John G. Nettles

Edinburgh U Film Society [Keith H. Brown]

ToxicUniverse.com (John Nesbit)

Jigsaw Lounge (N Young ) 2000 recut

George Chabot's Review of The Exorcist

Decent Films - faith on film [Steven D. Greydanus] Steven D. Greydanus

DVD Verdict - The Complete Anthology [Bill Gibron]

Monsters and Critics - Complete Anthology DVD review [Jeff Swindoll]

DVD Talk [Phil Bacharach] The Complete Anthology

Cleveland Press (Tony Mastroianni)

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 2000

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

SORCERER

aka: Wages of Fear

USA (121 mi) 1977

Time Out

Friedkin's remake of Clouzot's 1953 thriller, The Wages of Fear, at a cost of more than twenty million dollars, bombed spectacularly in the States. Even cut by almost thirty minutes for British release, the film's narrative of four desperate men trucking nitroglycerin through 300 miles of South American jungle advances at far too slow a pace to aspire to the suspense value of the original. Friedkin hints at political themes, but the film suffers most from condescendingly over-emphatic direction, and a generally tedious, relentless grimy realism in the opening half hour. One simply wonders what, say, Peckinpah might have made of it.

All Movie Guide [Michael Costello]

The decline of William Friedkin's career, one of the most dramatic of the past three decades, began with the box-office failure of this unjustly neglected thriller. Inspired by Clouzot's masterful Wages of Fear, the film tells the story of four amoral men trapped by fate in a godforsaken Nicaraguan town. Nearly broke, they accept an oil company's offer to drive two trucks full of nitroglycerine over treacherous roads for 10,000 dollars apiece. Friedkin dropped the existential overtones of the Clouzot film, which insisted on the characters' basic isolation, and instead, emphasized the way in which these four very different men, united only by their criminality, must overcome their worst instincts and work together to survive. The tension never slackens in the carefully paced thriller, which is made even more gripping by the kind of realism that the former documentarian brought to films like The French Connection (1971) and To Live and Die in L.A. (1984). All of the actors are solid in parts with limited character development, and the film is beautifully shot. Aside from its misleading title, to which many have attributed its failure, it may be that like To Live and Die in L.A., audiences found it difficult to sympathize with the unsavory characters.

Movie Vault [Avril Carruthers]

In these days of computer generated special effects it is refreshing and awe-inspiring to visit the work of a master of cinema such as William Friedkin, whose French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973) put the stamp on suspenseful thrillers. I had not seen the original, from which 29 minutes were cut, and in this, its first Australian release with the extra footage, I was kept uneasily teetering on the edge of my seat by this tightly packed, intensely realistic thriller. The beginning scenes are so fast and unconnected that they require some effort on the part of the viewer to grasp just what is happening. That effort is well worth it, for later in the film and especially in the very last scene, Friedkin’s genius in separately weaving the remorseless karmic threads of the characters allow the audience easily to create the unseen scenario following the end of the film. After the stomach-churning extremes of sheer terror and lip-biting anticipation experienced as though we ourselves were in it, the realisation we have is searing. It’s brilliant.

After a brief montage of the stone carving of a grimacing sorcerer’s face under whose apparent aegis the events that unfold take place, the film hits the ground running with a fatal shooting. The assassin, whom we later find out is called Nilo (Francisco Rabal), disappears while a band plays on in a square in a South American city. A hand-held camera here, as in other action sequences, increases the intensity. Through other unrelated acts of violence we see the background of four desperate men and how they come to end up in the South American hellhole of Porvenir, a village where the labourers of a near-by oil refinery subsist. In quick succession we see a terrorist bombing in Jerusalem involving Kassem (Amidou); a partner’s shooting suicide in Paris after a failed business venture, causing Victor Manzon (Bruno Cremer) to run; and a mobsters’ attack on a Elizabeth, New Jersey church resulting in a spectacular car crash from which only Jackie Scanlon, (Roy Scheider) escapes alive. Porvenir is a place where the local bar is appropriately named El Corsario (The Pirate) and a shot of a drunken barfly is segued insouciantly into a shot of the barkeep spraying futilely with fly spray. In Porvenir new arrivals are not questioned on their past, but the local police exploit their situation by blackmail and extortion. It makes their prison all the more galling and suffocating. Low wages, appallingly squalid conditions and needing to pay the authorities to get around their illegal status creates a situation where desperate men will do anything to escape.

A horrendous explosion at the oil field 200 miles distant, possibly caused by rebel guerrillas, results in the deaths of many of the workers. It sparks a violent protest by the grieving people of Porvenir as well as igniting an unquenchable fire at the derrick. Dynamite is needed to douse the fire, but only some highly unstable nitroglycerine in mouldy boxes is available. In the scene where the explosives expert gingerly withdraws his hand, dripping with pure nitroglycerine and flicks it ever so carefully outside the explosives hut, the resulting explosion is terrifying because we see just how volatile this nitro is. Volunteers are required for the suicide mission to drive two trucks with the nitro on sawdust beds 200 miles through rugged jungle trails to the oil field at Poza Rica. Nilo, Jackie, Kassem and Victor, all now known by other names, end up being chosen, with Victor negotiating $10,000 each and legal residency as their price.

From this point on there is no relief in the tension, which continues to build with little respite till the end. Their first frantic task is to cannibalise all the decrepit trucks in Porvenir for parts to engineer workable vehicles. They eventually start off with their perilous cargo and the driven purpose of each these men, not aided by political and ethnic hatred between the Zionist Nilo and the Arab Kassem, pushes them through exhaustion and impossible terrain on their way. Coming to a fork in the trail, with some conflict over the map, the men ask a wizened Indian, who has the bland all-knowing look of a sorcerer, which way to Poza Rica. “Poza Rica is dead,” is his reply.

What follows are some of the most extraordinary white-knuckle stunt scenes I have ever seen. The trucks drive growling like tortured beasts on cliff-side roads, their wheels hanging over the edges. They sway alarmingly over rope and timber bridges frayed and moulded, only feet from the rushing torrential river, through driving and relentless rain, all at 4 mph and with the boxes of nitro sliding gently in the back. How they deal with the trigger-happy rebel guerrillas they meet and an apparently insurmountable giant tree-fall across their path is electric with suspense. Qualities of ingenuity and single-minded persistence force us to care for these men just as through the two-day journey their necessary teamwork forges a bond between them. Moments of grace become precious and the surreal elements of some of the final scenes – particularly Roy Scheider in the weird dream landscape of wind-sculpted sandstone mirroring his inner journey to an existential question - are amazing as exhaustion, unremitting tension and hallucinations take their toll. Surely, after what they’ve been through, these men deserve redemption. But as this movie does not compromise all the way through, nor does it at the end and we are forced to accept the reality it portrays.

For sheer gut-wrenching screenplay, for astonishingly visceral cinematography, for a superb musical score by Tangerine Dream, for the grittiness of the acting and all in the fabulous richness and overlaid texture of technicolour, this movie is hard to beat. To this reviewer at least, in terms of cinema experience, modern day computer graphics and simulated special effects simply cannot measure up to the sure sorcerer’s touch of a director such as William Friedkin.

Friedkin Friday: Sorcerer (1977) John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, August 15, 2008

The Film Journal (Tim Applegate)

Talking Moviezzz Evan Waters

Serdar Yegulalp

DVD Net (Anthony Clarke)

DVD MovieGuide [Colin Jacobson]

CRUISING

USA Germany (102 mi) 1980

Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir]

Quite a different vision of gay life can be seen in William Friedkin's "Cruising," the leather-bar murder mystery starring Al Pacino that was the object of rowdy street protests during filming in 1980. It's long been unavailable on home video, and is being briefly rereleased on the way to a terrific DVD version. Viewed from almost three decades' distance, "Cruising" now looks like a masterly work of psychological disorientation, guilty only of a certain insensitivity -- in putting the most extreme imaginable example of gay sexual subculture into a mainstream film -- but innocent of any homophobic intention. Pacino's performance as the undercover cop who gets drawn into the leather underworld (how far he gets drawn in, we mostly have to guess) is extraordinary and sensitive, and the film's frank depiction of the pre-AIDS night world of gay Manhattan remains shocking. (Most of the nightclub extras were recruited from the local S/M leather scene, which was largely supportive of the film.) No one would get away with it now, or even try. (Opens in a limited rerelease Sept. 7 in New York and Los Angeles; the film's first DVD release, with illuminating extras, will follow.)

Cruising (William Friedkin, 1980) Eric Henderson from When Canses Were Classeled, May 17, 2004

It has come to my attention lately that Cruising — a movie I’d made a conscious effort to avoid for a good portion of my movie-watching life because (a) it was purported to be nothing more than unfettered, hysterical fag-baiting, and (b) because William Friedkin was a director that I’d found increasingly less interesting as I inversely found a lot more to like about, say, Alan J. Pakula — has actually developed something of a revised critical take. So I watched it last night and, to my surprise, it hit me in much the same way The Exorcist did, at least initially. It is a complicated, disturbing, complex and, yes, occasionally offensive work of cinematic provocation. Neither film is tidy, and as far as I’m concerned that’s easily their best quality.

Al Pacino plays an undercover cop investigating a string of murders in the underworld gay S&M leather scene (which were obviously committed from the within, as victims are discovered post-coitus), which requires him to learn their code of behavior and attitude where one false step could potentially destroy his attempts at subterfuge. (Apparently, both the film and the novel it’s based on were created in response to similar sets of NYC crimes that received less-than-full attention from the police department, for reasons that seem apparent.) So he plunges headlong into the world of amyl nitrate, abrasive punk-disco beats, bandanas-in-pocket and endless, sidelong pas de deux glances. The major difficulty, though, isn’t that Pacino has to delve into an ethnographic case study without a safety rope, but that he has to try and delineate the very narrow difference between a culture of sex role-playing that puts its focus on violence and body-controlling machismo (i.e. fisting) and a criminal murderer who uses the S&M society’s longing, pleading need to fulfill wishful fantasies as a trap.

So, I’d argue that if there is anything in the film that can be safely designated as homophobic, it’s the notion that there’s very little difference between gay rough trade and homicidal frenzy. (Apparently, though, that’s not what bothered gay audiences in 1980 so much as the suggestion that practically every fucking fairy in NY walked around at night in either drag, leather chaps or jock straps. That, too, is tricky territory, but I think it’s justified by the film’s overall concern with immersing its main character into a vast sub-society.)

Another ethically dubious notion is the way Al Pacino’s character appears to lose his sense of heterosexual identity as he burrows deeper into his alternate persona. He frequently rushes back from his stakeout apartment on Christopher Street to have sex with his girlfriend (Karen Allen). As the film goes on, he appears to engage in increasingly rougher sex, and the film suggests he needs to hear that faggy disco beat in his head to get in the mood with her. Is Friedkin trying to suggest that homosexuality is indeed learned? I’m not sure, but there is something to be said for the bald, “listen in folks” way Pacino reads the line “There’s a lot you don’t know about me” in his first scene in bed with Allen. It’s left to speculation whether Pacino is already of questionable sexual identity (especially in light of his interactions with the gay couple that live next door and the severely open-ended result of that story thread), and not simply just because he starts spazz-dancing at the club instead of wallflowering. Cruising’s decidedly odd take on homosexuality is that it’s a façade, an alter-ego, a uniform to be worn at night and then stored away in the bedroom closet. Which is not at all unlike the way Friedkin portrays the methodology of police-work, no?

One of the most surreal moments in the film is when a naked Nubian bodybuilder is brought by the cops into one suspect’s interrogation to beat a confession (and ejaculate) out of him (despite the fact that all they’d need to do to free him from suspicion is take his fingerprints), a weird little detail that’s never fully explained in a way that makes standard police-thriller sense. But with it, Friedkin is clearly making an attempt to tie the two worlds of testosterone-fueled codes of conduct together by their respective balls. In this respect, I think it’s tough to dismiss the film as homophobic nonsense. Masculinity in general is what’s being dissected here. I was going to write “post-feminist masculinity,” but there’s only one female character in the whole damned movie, and she’s more or less a tool with which Friedkin pries open Pacino’s sexual Pandora’s Box. (Hell, the last shot of her in the film features her wearing Pacino’s undercover leather gear, complete with what appear to be the killer’s sunglasses.)

I recognize that the implications that Pacino’s seduced by the gay lifestyle and the further notion that, in succumbing, he would naturally turn violent as a matter of course are alarming propositions. (Personally, I pretty obviously couldn’t care less about genuflecting before cinematic good taste, as my favorite filmmaker Brian De Palma routinely delves into the whole “bloody orgasms” equation…) But at the same time, I’d argue that the film’s homophobic conceits are the means, not the ends. Crusing is not a film about the society of homosexuals reflecting a “culture of death” (to swipe a phrase from my ideological opposition’s handbook). It is a film about mankind’s inability to bridge the psychological gap that exists within, the gap between what brutal fantasies our imaginations are capable of and what we bury deep inside our tightening, twisted psyches in order to present ourselves in a manner befitting the mores of the social enclaves we most desire to populate.

Slant Magazine [Eric Henderson] a follow up review, September 3, 2007

Why Cruising? Why now? And why does it feel like how you answer those questions will determine which side pocket you keep your handkerchief in?

The gay blogosphere has largely treated the re-release of William Friedkin's 1980 ode to fisting, faggotry, and flash cuts with a level of indifference nearly equal to the fury of the disco era's gay community. What currency could Al Pacino's battle with the monsters in his closet possibly have when held against the ironic shitter-stall malfeasance of a real live DOMA-endorsing, Clinton-tutting Republican Senator? The bloggers at AfterElton went so far as to wonder if Warner Bros. hadn't virally engineered media coverage of Sen. Larry Craig's graceless political curtain call with as many "cruising" references as possible, which seems a remarkably cavalier attitude toward a film that, in its day, was essentially accused of sanctioning gay murder in the same sense that Dressed to Kill was thought to justify rape. (Brian De Palma had initially considered adapting Cruising before apparently realizing how much he would rather work in his element: high heels, venereal disease, and Park Avenue whores.)

But at least Friedkin and Warner Bros. thought to tack on a defensive statement before the film (at least in its original run) that read "This film is not intended as an indictment of the homosexual world," which admittedly proves they knew exactly how thin a line they were skirting. It's still fascinating to weigh the film's current attempted renaissance (one which, as Ed Gonzalez's unequivocally contrary blog entry on the film suggests, will still probably wind up in a critical draw) against the current political climate—as well as the current state of gay cinema. Our culture has now scaled Brokeback Mountain and breathed in the thin, undernourished, Oscar-hungry air thereabout. For all its bad judgment, questionable portrayals, and arrogant artsploitation aims, Cruising is precisely what Brokeback and all excepting a small handful of eternally rewarding fringe gay movies (Tropical Malady, Bad Education, Mulholland Drive) are not: an interesting film. If Cruising's homophobia is also in contrast with Brokeback Mountain's purported lack, well, no one said art (or even faux-art) went down easy. Just ask John Waters, who put the words "the life of a heterosexual is a sick and boring lifestyle" into the snaggle-toothed mouth of Edith Massey years before Cruising got so many dicks bent out of shape.

Cruising, based on a book inspired by a series of murders that would in later years be termed hate crimes, is a film that had to answer for a lot of unfair expectations. Chief among those is the burden of being one of the first major studio pictures to present gay sexuality on the screen (as opposed to the more innocuous gay "identities" of The Boys in the Band). Firsts are always in some measure definitive, and the reservations of those who were not portrayed accurately by Cruising are understandable in light of the film's implication that each and every last fag in the tri-state area fell into three groups: leather daddies packing cans of Crisco, mincing tranny bitches, or sweet-natured eunuchs caught in-between, doomed (because of their unwillingness to fly their freak flag) to spend their miserable, artistic existence in solitude. (I left out a fourth archetype, but since that would be the predatory murderer demographic, I don't imagine including that to pump up the diversity quotient would appease Cruising's detractors.)

Some of the film's objectionable presuppositions can be dismissed, others not. In the former camp is the notion that the adjustment of the sexual alignment of Pacino's undercover cop emerges from having spent a few nights pumping his arms on the grimy dance floors of the S&M clubs. He frequently rushes back from his stakeout apartment on Christopher Street to have sex with his girlfriend (Karen Allen). As the film goes on, he appears to engage in increasingly rougher sex, and at one point seems to need to hear that disco-punk beat in his head to get in the mood with her. While to some this is a flagrant demonstration of the insidious, seductive allure of homosexuality that is passed like vampirism, I think Friedkin's scenario is far more interested in examining the fragility of undercover policemen's identity.

That Pacino's crisis is held against the idea (still pretty fresh in the late '70s) that homosexuals could be as traditionally macho as heterosexuals is almost accidentally serendipitous, at least as far as the plot is concerned. It's not necessarily Friedkin's fault that a few gay men took the baton of that newfound machismo and shoved it too far up each other's asses. A tad less forgivable on Friedkin's part, though, is the outcome of Pacino's crisis (which is probably about as much worth a spoiler alert as is the theory that AIDS may have been contracted among some members of the film's cast, and on camera at that). Much as Friedkin tries to put a cute question mark on his coda a la The French Connection, you'd have to be pretty desperate for ambiguity to not assume Pacino ends up knifing the one gay man he could have brought himself to love. Now, I'm as repulsed by the mechanisms of fisting as the next guy, but it's hard to imagine any sane non-fundie with half a wit (or at least a snapped hymen) could reason that all acts of male-on-male penetration are equal, be they consensual or homicidal.

The politics of homosexuality in America are in a continuous wrestling match with the societal standards of heterosexuality. Every policy, every attitude, every lifestyle choice is made in reaction to the standard of hetero monogamy. The Larry Craig incident is only the latest example; countless editorials surmised that airport bathrooms will continue to bear the brunt of unwiped spooge trails until homos are allowed the rights intended them by our nation's forefathers to violently thrash the springs of their marital beds, that sex between two men (or two women, though you wouldn't know it even exists listening to media talking points) would be dirty until the act of filing taxes jointly validated it for everyone. Does the resuscitation of Cruising at this moment when political correctness is on its deathbed have more impact from a cultural standpoint than it does from an aesthetic one? Unquestionably. No matter what any number of Army of Shadows-fellating critics will tell you, the aesthetic values of re-released films are rendered negligible by their cachet as time capsules. In that sense, the appalling horror some may glean from Cruising isn't its cold, clinical efficiency as both a thriller and a fag-baiting manifesto of hate. Its truly unnerving quality is that its existence is a brutal reminder from the past that homosexuality is not heterosexuality, and that any attempt to reconcile the difference will only breed resentment, confusion, and violence. Or perhaps it will only lead to more lame Hallmark movies of the week like Brokeback Mountain.

Friedkin Friday: Cruising (1980) John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, August 8, 2008

Slant Magazine [Ed Gonzalez] in a derisive tone, interesting Slant on Slant comments, August 29, 2007

outrate.net (Mark Adnum)

indieWIRE by Michael Koresky from Reverse Shot, September 4, 2007

PopcornQ Susan Gerhard

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice KJ Doughton, September 11, 2007

Gay Old Time Nathan Lee revisits what had the city’s gay community up in arms in 1979 for the Village Voice, September 4, 2007

Bright Lights Film Journal [Gary Morris]

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson] or a longer review, which includes an interview with Friedkin here: cinematical.com

Friedkin Out Bill Krohn from Rouge

DVD Verdict (Brett Cullum)

DVD Talk (Ian Jane)

The QNetwork [James Kendrick]

All Movie Guide [Brian J. Dillard]

FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg Bagley]

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

eFilmCritic Reviews among the most negative reviews out there, by Jack Sommersby in 2005

San Francisco Examiner [Bob Stephens]

San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]

CRITIC'S CHOICE; New DVD's Dave Kehr from The New York Times

DVDBeaver [Gary Tooze]

TWILIGHT ZONE – made for TV

(Season 1, episode 4: Nightcrawlers)

USA (43 mi) 1985

User reviews from imdb Author: Nick Lappos from United States

The one-show trilogy has one segment, "Nightcrawlers", directed by William Friedkin (Sorcerer, The Exorcist, The French Connection) that will blow your socks off. The unconventional format allows the director to spend just the right amount of time, without the need for the screenplay padding often pumped into the standard time slots (or even more destructively, the need to make a 43 minute slot to fill the network hour.) This tightly woven, breathlessly paced mini-drama is spooky and scary, all the more when the realization of what is happening dawns on the viewer. ** spoiler follows ** It concerns a haggard Vietnam veteran who has a strange affliction, and how he affects those who pass in his wake. It is an unrelenting look into the heart of man, and the price of violence as a way of life. Buckle your seat belt when it comes on, TV just does not get any better!

TO LIVE AND DIE IN LA B+ 91

USA (116 mi) 1985

Guess what, Uncle Sam don’t give a shit about your expenses. You want bread, fuck a baker. —Richard Chance (William Peterson)

If you didn’t know any better, you’d think this was a Michael Mann film, a gritty portrait of Los Angeles filled with a stylistic flourish from the exquisite cinematography of Robby Müller with gorgeous shots of the city at sunrise and dusk illuminated by a sheen of smog and a 1980’s Wang Chung soundtrack that gives the film a pulsating edge. Very much driven by a synthesized techno beat so prominently featured in FLASHDANCE (1983) and the Miami Vice TV series (1984 – 90), this is a hard hitting, adrenaline-laced cop drama where the cops straddle the same ethical line as the criminals, in fact they are mirror images of one another, oftentimes getting more caught up in the business than they’d prefer, usually driven by a manic personality that settles for nothing less than a full-out assault. Using a cast of relative unknowns, featuring two prominent Chicago actors who got their start in local community theater, this was William Peterson’s first starring movie role while John Pankow, whose older brother plays in the rock band Chicago, had worked earlier in Miami Vice. Both play FBI agents in the counterfeit division, Chance and Vukovich, where their boss is murdered when he gets too close to one operation, giving this a tone of revenge, where getting this guy becomes personal, using any means necessary to bring him down. Willem Dafoe is excellent as the cold-blooded killer and counterfeiter Rick Masters, a complete professional who carries out his business with icy control, whose creepiness becomes more accentuated through his eerie calm. He also has his hand in kinky sex and modern art, often blending the two, almost always with a gorgeous girl, Debra Feuer, who follows his every lead.

Shot all on location in some of the seedier sections of town, Friedkin offers a cynically realistic approach to the film noir crime thriller, using a near documentary style, but the characters are all outcasts, outlaws beyond the reach of the law and cops who think they are above the law, both living on the margins, creating a feeling of detachment and alienation. One of the most extraordinary scenes is watching Masters diligently working at his craft, printing counterfeit bills, step by step using his artistic skills with the meticulous precision of a Bach cantata, where his detailed professionalism is nothing less than impressive, offering a window to the audience into this highly skilled criminal enterprise. It’s interesting that Friedkin reveals so clearly what Chance is up against, as this is Peterson’s film, where he dominates the action sequences and all the build up to them, as he’s a man on a mission, an adrenaline junkie who’s not afraid to bungee jump off a bridge with a rope tethered to his foot, swinging just above the water’s edge, creating a rush of energy that he needs to make him feel alive. He also has a girl, Ruth (Darlanne Fluegel), an inmate out on parole working at a strip club where she hears things, where Chance uses her for sex and information, threatening to cut off her parole if she stops feeding him tips. His moral character is questionable, as he’s like a cowboy with an itchy trigger finger, obsessed with tracking down his man, where he doesn’t care what methods are used to pull it off. His partner Vukovich is more nervous about his full throttle, free-wheeling style, thinking it’s reckless and outside the bounds of department regulations, but it’s his partner, a guy you just don’t cross in police business, so he goes along with it, creating, in effect, a counterfeit persona.

The measure of an action thriller, of course, is the action, and this one features a doozy of a car chase, one precipitated by Chance’s dubious choice to carry out a robbery to raise the needed cash in an undercover sting operation that his own bureau won’t cover. What seemed like a sure bet turns into a sprawling mess, where they literally kidnap a guy for the contents of his briefcase. In perhaps the turning point in the film, they bring the guy to a freeway underpass to open the contents, but he hasn’t got the key, so in a fit of rage Chance repeatedly smashes the briefcase against the cement pylons only to discover they are taking rifle fire from the road above. This event seems to activate his hair trigger, clicking the on switch, as the ensuing car chase ends up as a hair-raising ride through a crowded warehouse district before ending up on the freeway going the wrong way, creating a tremendous logjam, not to mention a stockpile of cars smashing into one another. This is thrillingly photographed, slowly developing where initially you’re not even aware it is a car chase before it kicks into high gear, where the action seems to symbolize Chance’s spiraling moral void, as the look into his eyes as he’s driving suggest the actions of a madman. Just as they think they might have gotten away, Frieidkin yet again defies all expectations by continuing the heist gone wrong theme, where the ramifications are endless, all spinning out of control, where the audience is treated to a visceral experience that again opens a window into this kind of dangerous world, where Vukovich especially continually sees his career and his life passing before his eyes during the final third of the film. This is a rare style of film in that it provides incidents of graphic nudity mixed with blunt trauma in such an entertaining style, which was highly unusual in its day. The counterfeit theme is intriguing as well, blurring the lines of moral corruption between the police and the criminals, where the Los Angeles police are notorious for their rampant abuse and misconduct, where it’s impossible to tell with the human eye just which cops and what pedestrians walking down the street are free of criminal interests and associations.

Time Out Capsule Review

Dafoe is an LA supercrook, forging dollar bills for a city whose sole form of social intercourse resides in the getting, counting, and spending of large sums of money. This is a city (photographed by Robby Müller with the same luminosity he brought to Paris, Texas) where everyone is on the take, and that includes the two FBI agents (Petersen and Pankow) who are out to break Dafoe by any means. It all goes horribly wrong when they decide to pull their own heist in order to secure the necessary funds to stay in hot pursuit. Friedkin plays it as brutal and cynical as he ever did with The French Connection; and this time the car chase takes place on a six-lane freeway at the height of the rush hour, going against the traffic. Today, the play-dirty antics of Popeye Doyle probably look rather dated; God knows what state we will have to get into before all this looks tame.

FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg Bagley]

Few films define the 1980s as decisively as William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A.: from its synthesized soundtrack to its outlandish fashion sensibilities, every aspect of the film evokes flashbacks to this notorious decade of questionable taste. Stylistic issues aside, however, the film remains a top-notch thriller, one which follows a familiar storyline trope — cop seeks revenge for his dead partner — but is executed with panache and skill. As noted below, Friedkin (ably assisted by cinematographer Robby Muller) makes excellent use of L.A.’s grittier environs, and the lengthy freeway car chase is a worthy follow-up to the infamous chase scene in his earlier cop classic, The French Connection (1971). Performance-wise, stage-actor Petersen isn’t all that charismatic or memorable in the lead role, but he does a fine job showing his character’s moral struggle; however, it’s Dafoe’s cold-hearted criminal who truly shines here, oozing greed and amorality at every turn.

Peter Sobczynski (link lost)

Long missing in action on video over questions of who held the rights (a laserdisc place I used to frequent would rent a long-out-of-print disc as long as you put down a $200 deposit up front), William Friedkin’s 1985 crime thriller "To Live and Die in L.A." has finally made its DVD debut and watching it again confirms that it is not only arguably Friedkin’s finest film (far surpassing even "The French Connection" or "The Exorcist"-only the equally underrated "Sorcerer" compares to it) but one of the most criminally overlooked films of the 1980’s. In his feature-film debut, William L. Petersen (later to star in "Manhunter" and TV’s "C.S.I.") plays a semi-crazed Federal Agent who is obsessed with bringing a counterfeiter (Willem Dafoe) by any means necessary. To do so, he is willing to risk not only his life but those of his partner (John Pankow) and informer (Darlanne Fluegel) and when he can’t get his superiors to authorize enough money to pull off a sting operation, he engineers a crime of his own to get the funds.

That twist leads to the most famous scene in the film, a truly hellacious car chase in which the participants are hurtling down a crowded freeway against the traffic. "To Live and Die in L.A." is action-packed (a chase through an airport terminal is another highlight) but for once in a cop thriller, the story and performances are equally important. Although the film still works as a cynical indictment of the Reagan era in which it was made (in which the desire for money-real or otherwise-could pervert even the most noble-sounding of goals), it hardly feels like a period piece (with the exception of the now-dated Wang Chung score); hopefully, this disc (which contains a Friedkin commentary and deleted scenes-including a fascinating alternate ending) will allow the film to reach the audience that it so richly deserved the first time around.

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] Special Edition

William Friedkin's 1985 action grinder To Live And Die In L.A. is part of a loose trilogy that includes the 1971 Oscar-winner The French Connection and 2003's polished gem The Hunted. All three are tough movies about urban pursuit, in which motion and location take precedence over plot and character. Not that To Live And Die In L.A. lacks for story. William Petersen plays a risk-taking U.S. Secret Service agent tracking master counterfeiter Willem Dafoe, a sexually ambiguous villain who dabbles in decadent modern art. John Pankow plays Petersen's straight-arrow new partner, who grudgingly goes along with his colleague's ethically loose swipes at Dafoe, until Petersen begins planning a real heist to raise funds for an undercover buy, at which point Pankow rightly speculates that it might be easier to abandon all codes and just assassinate the bad guy. Friedkin adapts Gerald Petievich's novel with his usual eye for the details of crime and violence–the counterfeiting sequences are as fascinating as the car chases–and the film is laced with pungent dialogue. (Petersen dismisses his money-grubbing girlfriend by snapping, "You want bread, fuck a baker," and when Dafoe asks incarcerated henchman John Turturro how he's getting along, Turturro answers, "Like every other swingin' dick in here makes it... day by motherfuckin' day.") Live And Die even includes the original buddy-cop cliché: an officer with three days to go until retirement muttering, "I'm getting too old for this shit," just before catching a bullet. The salty talk and amoral action is enhanced by Friedkin's bent toward documentary realism, aided by skilled guerrilla cinematographer Robby Müller. Live And Die can't fully escape its '80s-ness, from the Miami Vice-inspired color scheme to the pervasive (and not half-bad) Wang Chung soundtrack. But Friedkin's methods make '80s Los Angeles as vivid as '70s New York is in The French Connection. The movie opens with outtakes of a Ronald Reagan policy speech and a tussle with an Islamic terrorist, and its vision of L.A. includes actual working-class neighborhoods coated with actual gang graffiti. On the DVD's insightful commentary track and featurettes, Friedkin says the story addresses "a counterfeit world," a theme revealed through what the characters do as much as through what they say. His heroes are liars, his shootouts are messy, and the film's recurring visual motif is people getting shot in the face, an explicit image of human vanity and duplicity obliterated.

To Live and Die in L.A. - Culture Vulture Phil Freeman

The runaway success of the CBS crime drama C.S.I. may finally win one of the1980s’ best thrillers the audience and respect it’s always deserved. To Live And Die In L.A. introduced William Petersen, a superb and criminally underrated actor, to the world. More than that, though, it brought a whole different worldview to bear on the crime film. Michael Mann’s Heat, to name just one example, is utterly indebted to TLADILA for its tone and its depiction of Los Angeles as a wasteland where everyone’s got an angle and no one is incorruptible, not even the purported hero.   

Petersen plays Secret Service agent Richard Chance, who’s on the trail of master counterfeiter Rick Masters. Willem Dafoe plays Masters as more lizard than man, utterly cool, never seeming to blink, even when he’s using his girlfriend to seduce down the door of a man he intends to kill for stealing from him. It’s an astonishing performance, and one that prefigures his entire career, even his take on Jesus. (Before TLADILA, Dafoe had only appeared in Streets Of Fire and a few other, small roles. On the DVD commentary, director William Friedkin explains that he deliberately cast the film with relative unknowns, to allow the characters to overtake their interpreters. It was a wise choice.)   

As Chance gets closer and closer to Masters, he becomes obsessed with the take-down, only partly because the counterfeiter murdered Chance’s partner. His new partner, John Vukovich (John Pankow), is increasingly put off by Chance’s recklessness and willingness to do seemingly anything to get his man. This is where Friedkin’s bone-deep cynicism comes to the fore. As shown in his earlier films like The French Connection, Cruising and Sorcerer, he’s really not a director with a whole lot of nice things to say about humanity. A story like this one, where literally every character seems to have a combination of secrets and grudges separating him or her from every other character, is almost archetypal Friedkin territory and he handles it masterfully. Action set-pieces (not just the infamous wrong-way car chase, but a foot-race through LAX and a fiery fight scene) are brilliantly blocked and shot, but never to the detriment of the unnerving unspooling of the universally unsavory cast of characters.   

The film’s greatest shock comes near the end, and naturally it won’t be revealed in this review. But what’s even more disturbing, in the long run, is the impact on the character of Vukovich, who had seemed like a moral man lost in a wilderness of crime and vengeance. When, as the film oozes to a close, he seems just as trapped as everyone around him, everyone he’s tried to break away from for the preceding 90 minutes, it’s as crushing a blow as has ever been delivered in film noir.   

The DVD edition of To Live And Die In L.A. presents the film in a great, widescreen print, and features director’s commentary, a latter-day documentary about the making of the film (including interviews with cast members), and one deleted scene, which wouldn’t have added much and might, indeed, have detracted from the film’s visceral impact.

To Live And Die In L.A. Brian McKay from eFilmCritic

God bless the 80's. We laugh at them now, but they gave us some some great action movies and some equally great music (we could have done without all of the skinny ties, leg warmers, and big hair, though). From William Friedkin, the director of THE FRENCH CONNECTION, we get a sylish piece of 80's action-noir, with an amazing original soundtrack by forgotten one-hit wonders of the decade, Wang Chung.

From the opening scene, I was hooked. The sun slowly rises on a smog-choked downtown Los Angeles, backlighting its skyscrapers with a deepening blood-red sky as the hypnotic title track kicks in. This is not the glamorous L.A. that Hollywood usually shows us. Friedkin's vision of L.A. is grim and gritty, a wasteland of vacant trash-strewn lots, grungy industrial areas, and freeway underpasses.

William Peterson is Richard Chance, a Treasury agent who likes living dangerously and has no qualms about being as ruthless as the criminals he pursues. His partner and best friend is only days away from retirement, and after uttering the stock cop-movie line "I'm getting too old for this shit", he goes off on his own to track down a lead on counterfeiter and all-around bad guy Rick Masters (played excellently by Willem Dafoe). Hmmm, let's see - days away from retirement, and goes off on his own . . . is there any way this character could not be killed off in the first fifteen minutes?

Needless to say, this puts Chance into hell-bent revenge mode. He's going to do anything and everything to avenge his partner's death, with or without the law on his side. The only problem is he's forced to work with a new partner, the by-the-book and overwhelmed John Vukovich (John Pankow). Though he tries to play tough guy, Vukovich is clearly out of his element as Chance drags him deeper into the shady gray area between highly unethical and outright illegal.

Meanwhile, Masters is printing up lots of play dough and trying to off one of his former associates, Carl Cody (John Tuturro), a sleazy mule who was busted by Chance while holding some of Masters' funny money, and is about to turn state's evidence.

There are a number of cop-movie cliches and some lines of dialogue that are fairly cringe-inducing. Once in a while the script seems to have been lifted from some 1940's detective story (who the hell says "The whole caper is blown" anymore - even in the 80's?). And why the hell does Chance keep calling everyone "amigo"? Is he Mexican? Are they in Mexico? Is he adressing people from Mexico? And what is up with that really flamboyant scarf, jeans, and mirrored sunglasses ensemble he likes to bandy about in the earlier scenes? Okay, so Peterson is a bit over the top in this one, but he's still cool. And while some dialogue comes off stilted, most of the lines are fairly crisp and often amusing. Like the scene where Vukovich chases down a credit card thief, who shouts:

"Why are you chasing me, man?"
"Why you running?"
"Because you're chasing me!"

And then there's the scene where Chance slaps down a request for more money from his informant Bianca Torres, after having just slept with her (played by the hot Debra Feuer, by the way, who sadly dropped off the Hollywood radar in the early nineties):

"I need more money. I've got people leaning on me."
"Uncle Sam don't give a shit about your problems. You want bread? Then go fuck a baker."

But where the film really pays off is in the fantastically seedy locales, the ultra-slick music-video montages featuring the hypnotic tunes of Wang Chung (including the classic theme song), infrequent but excellent action sequences, and the best chase scenes since The French Connection on L.A. freeways against traffic. If you liked the 14 minute freeway chase in Matrix Reloaded, and wonder where at least part of the inspiration for it came from, then check this shit out!

And while you're at it, go check out that Wang Chung original soundtrack. It really is good. I picked it up from the bargain bin of a record store a few years back. Best $3.99 I ever spent. Look, there's even a handy little link to buy it right near the top of this review. You have no excuse left!

If you grew up watching MIAMI VICE, you gotta check this shit out. While it is certainly not the most original cop movie ever, its slick style and dreamlike music-video qualities hide a multitude of sins.

Watching Under the Influence: To Live and Die in L.A. | The House ... Michael K. Crowley from 24LiesASecond at The House Next Door, April 12, 2008, originally published April 29, 2004

Friedkin Friday: To Live and Die in L.A. (1985): A Game of "Chance" John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, July 25, 2008

Film Noir of the Week: To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) Richard

To Live And Die In L.A. - Culture Court Lawrence Russell

Radiator Heaven: To Live and Die in L.A. January 21, 2011

Film Threat - Footage Fetishes: “to Live And Die In L.a.” Pete Vonder Haar from Film Threat, Pt. 1, October 24, 2002

FOOTAGE FETISHES: “TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A.” Pete Vonder Haar from Film Threat, Pt. 2, October 24, 2002

Film Freak Central review [Bill Chambers]

Peter Reiher

Dragan Antulov

A look back at William Friedkins blistering cop drama To Live And ... Drew McWeeny from HitFix

To Live And Die In LA - PopcornReel.com Omar P.L. Moore

seanax.com [Sean Axmaker]

DVD Times DJ Nock

The DVD Journal | Quick Reviews: To Live and Die in L.A. DSH

DVD Town [John J. Puccio]

DVD Verdict Patrick Naugle

To Live & Die In L.A. (MGM DVD) - Fulvue Drive-In.com Nicholas Sheffo

To Live and Die in L.A.: Special Edition : DVD Talk Review of the ... Jason Bovberg, Special Edition

Blu-ray Review: To Live and Die in L.A. | High-Def Digest Joshua Zyber

Blu-rayDefinition.com - Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]

DVD Verdict (Blu-Ray) [Dan Mancini]

To Live and Die in L.A. (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Stuart Galbraith IV

Blu-ray review of To Live and Die in L.A. | Hollywood in HiDef

TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A. Blu-ray Review Andre Dellamorte from The Collider

AVForums (Blu-ray) [Cas Harlow]

FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg Bagley]

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson] November 21, 2003

Combustible Celluloid interview - William Friedkin, To Live and ... Jeffrey M. Anderson interviews Friedkin, November 21, 2003

Scenes We Love: To Live and Die in L.A. Jeffrey M. Anderson from Cinematical, February 8, 2010

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

A Regrettable Moment of Sincerity Adam Lippe

To Live and Die in L.A. < PopMatters Cyrus Fard

House of Self-Indulgence: To Live and Die in L.A. (William Friedkin ... Yum Yum

Shelf Life: To Live And Die In L.A. Todd Gilchrist

A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]

DVD Review: To Live and Die in L.A. Mark R. Hasan

To Live and Die in L.A. - Directed by William Friedkin ... - Exclaim! James Keast

George Chabot's Review

MovieFreak.com - "To Live and Die in L.A." Special Edition DVD ... Dennis Landmann

The Films of William Friedkin - Reviews by David Nusair

14 Classic Film Noirs to Feed Your 'L.A. Noire' Fix Sharon Knolle (listed as #11) from Moviefone, May 30, 2011

Behind the Scenes With My Favorite Actors: John Pankow in To Live and Die in L.A. Jeremy Richey’s still photos from Moon in the Gutter

To Live & Die In L.A. : Wang Chung : To Live And Die In L. A. ... Soundtrack info

To Live And Die In La Wn.com, more soundtrack info

Variety.com [Variety Staff]

San Francisco Examiner [Wesley Morris] also seen here: "To Live and Die in L.A.': Friedkin's finest hour

"The 25 best L.A. films of the last 25 years" staff writers (listed as #19) from The LA Times, August 31, 2008

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]

NY Times Original Review Janet Maslin, also seen here: Movie Review - To Live and Die in L.A. ... - Movies - New York Times

DVDBeaver.com [Gary Tooze]

To Live and Die in L.A. (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

To Live and Die in L.A. (Wang Chung song) - Wikipedia, the free ...

To Live and Die in L.A.: Information from Answers.com

BUG B 89

USA (102 mi) 2006

From a brilliant opening shot that swoops down from an aerial view of a darkened sky into a desolate, neon-lit, hole-in-the-wall Rustic Motel, a woman stands alone outside her door as the phone rings simultaneous to the credit title – BUG, where such perfect timing gives it an ominous ring. Very much in the exact same mode as her previous performance wearing no makeup in COME SUNDAY MORNING (2006), though venturing into completely unexplored territory here, Ashley Judd plays a feisty, independent minded, hard-drinking country girl working at a roadside bar, whose sexual interests appear to run toward whoever’s available, that initially happens to be one of the other younger cocktail waitresses, the blond, sexy, heavily tattooed R.C. played by Lynn Collins. The two of them bring a guy (Michael Shannon) back to her motel room for a little intimate party, and the guy’s shyness intrigues her, as it’s quite a contrast to her overly aggressive, abusive ex, Harry Connick Jr, who’s about to be paroled from prison. Shannon is the kind of guy who naturally fades into the woodwork leaving no trace of himself, easily forgettable, yet what comes out of his mouth is quietly soft-spoken and reflective, revealing an awkward, uncomfortable nature that needs nurturing and reassurance. As he apparently has no place to go, she allows him to spend the night, as she’s been getting suspicious prank phone calls from a caller who never says a word, which she believes are coming from her ex-husband.

Initially based on a play by Tracy Letts, where the film requires the audience to accept skips of large blocks of time, similar to the structure of a play, the staging and subject matter bear a strange resemblance to Sam Shepard’s play FOOL IN LOVE (1985), as both take place in total isolation, far beyond any traces of civilization in what looks like the most run down, dilapidated motel imaginable. Both feature attractive, vulnerable women with indescribably dark secrets, and both feature men who stretch the limits of the imagination, where the women can’t seem to help themselves from following these dreamy yet equally demented men into their own mysteriously scarred pasts. While Shepard offsets his strangely bizarre lovers with a gentle and soft-spoken gentleman caller, who might provide a much needed respit from her tortured soul, this film counters with the manic fury of Harry Connick Jr, who plants a fist to the mouth of Judd as his way of saying hello after a two year absence, where she must obviously look elsewhere from the dead end path of fear and abuse, which leads her into the hands of this strange and peculiar guy. What does transpire is her complete willingness to lose herself over this guy she barely knows, where their first sexual encounter ends with a near subliminal image of a bug that only begins their journey together.

An odd tale of love and loneliness, perhaps a variation on beauty and the beast, BUG is a bit preposterous, but an extremely effective escalation of horror taking place inside the minds of this young couple, where there are sudden shifts in mood that only grow darker and more intense, and where out of the blue, the film veers closer to Cronenberg’s THE FLY (1986), as once he convinces her to believe the room is infested with unseen bugs, where he offers his own off-the-wall, paranoiac theories about their origins, both characters morph into transformed versions of themselves that bear little resemblance to their former selves, where even the look of the motel room undergoes such a radical transformation that one wonders if we missed something. When the guy’s army doctor arrives, paying some credence to his wacky theories about being the victim of horrific medical experimentation, Friedkin kicks into high gear with a truly dramatic, somewhat surrealistic surge of delirium that defies explanation, exaggerated by the frenetic movements of a hand held camera, pulsating white lights, and the elevated use of sound from a hovering helicopter, all of which combine to shatter our sense of complacency, where an unknown, unseen force is truly kicking at the doors of our perceptions. Nothing short of an apocalypse is waiting outside. The acting is especially good, with Judd pushing the limits of her persona beyond anyone’s expectations, becoming nakedly trusting, even describing herself as a woman who looks surprisingly better with her clothes off, then bravely proves that to be the case. The growing anguish that accompanies her nightmarish descent into legitimate horror carries no false notes; Shannon as well lends an off-the-fringe believability, leading to an inevitable conclusion that feels light years from the shy initial encounter that started it all. Please note – the film continues during the final end credits, leaving a final image only after the credit sequence has actually ended.

Bug Allan Hunter in Cannes for Screendaily

An old dog tries to show off some new tricks in Bug, as veteran director William Friedkin (The Exorcist) attempts the tricky transfer of a bizarre theatrical hybrid to the cinema screen. The back-to-basics approach pays dividends in terms of the intensity of the performances and the sustained sense of menace. The challenge of the exercise appears to have reached the parts of Friedkin that big budget studio material has failed to excite in recent years and he should earn the kind of surprise and respect accorded Joel Schumacher when he made Tigerland.

Unfortunately the material itself leaves you wondering if it was worth all the effort as it seeks to fuse together a messy saga of domestic abuse, loneliness, paranoid delusions, violent murder and bugs. Earning full marks for originality, Bug is likely to find a cult niche somewhere beneath the more satisfying The Machinist, but is too extreme and offbeat to attract mainstream interest. It played in Directors Fortnight at Cannes.

Set largely within the confines of a couple of rooms in a rundown motel, Bug’s initial focus is on Agnes (Judd), a lonely waitress who has learned to mistrust the world. Insulated from life by booze and drugs, she fears the return of her abusive ex-husband Jerry (Connick Jr) who has just been paroled.

So far you could be forgiven for assuming that we had wandered into a Sam Shepard play. Then Agnes befriends Peter (Shannon), an awkward drifter who quickly becomes a trusted friend. It is Peter who first senses the presence of bugs in the motel and persuades Agnes that the world is no longer a safe place.

Making exemplary use of sound, from the whirl of a helicopter blade to a insistent ring of a phone, Bug convinces you that something awful is about to happen. The most obvious threat is from the ex-husband but Harry Connick Jr’s character belongs to a different, more conventional film and almost serves as a red herring.

Straying into the kind of territory mapped out in Todd Haynes Safe (1995) and Darren Aronofksy’s Requiem For A Dream (2000), Bug becomes an increasingly weird and garrulous psychological thriller in which the line between reality and delusion is wiped away as a deranged Peter convinces the vulnerable Agnes that they are both the victims of a dastardly military conspiracy.

In a welcome change of pace from the women in peril thrillers that have defined her screen image, Ashley Judd shows great dedication to the role of the trashy, tragic Agnes. But it is Michael Shannon who is the revelation, committing himself body and soul to a tour de force performance as a man who faces his greatest threat from the forces that are inside his mind.

Bug Bilge Ebiri from Screengrab, including an interview with Bug director (and living legend) William Friedkin

Once upon a time, William Friedkin was Hollywood's premier director of thoughtful genre flicks. Who else could have snagged ten Oscar nominations for a film like The Exorcist? With disposable work like The Hunted and The Rules of Engagement, he's been in a wilderness for the past decade or so (some would say longer), but he appears to have found his moorings with Bug, a tense psychological thriller that indulges his obsession with extreme behavior and tells a riveting tale.

Based on Tracy Letts' play (and adapted by the playwright himself), Bug pairs lonely waitress Agnes (Ashley Judd) with unnervingly nice war vet Peter (Michael Shannon) in an Oklahoma motel room. For all his crippling, slightly creepy shyness, Peter seems to be an honest, stand-up guy, so we can understand why Agnes is taken with him (especially after we meet her former lover, an abusive ex-con played by Harry Connick). And when Peter claims that their motel room is infested by dangerous, microscopic bugs, we, like Agnes, want to believe him.

To reveal more would do Friedkin and Letts a disservice, although I should note that Lionsgate's trailers for the film, which suggest an Exorcist-esque horror flick, are misleading. Bug does share some qualities with The Exorcist, though — not because it's a sensational genre flick but because, like Friedkin's best films, it explores the ways a forceful presence or personality can take over the desperate. Put two people in a room, and other directors might be interested in the struggle between their two personalities; Friedkin understands that more often than not, one easily dominates the other. He's interested in the process of subordination.

Friedkin has directed some truly intense performances over the years, and Judd and Shannon display a remarkable ability to ratchet up their characters' growing desperation. But perhaps their greatest asset is their chemistry. True, this is a dark chamber piece, where the landscape of the mind becomes palpably real, and a claustrophobic hotel room becomes a breeding ground for paranoia and madness. But it's also, in the end, the unlikeliest of love stories.

Slant Magazine [Ed Gonzalez]

With Bug, William Friedkin uses light, color, and sound to evoke subjective experience. In a crucial scene, the ominous buzz of a shoddy smoke alarm is confused for a cricket's chirp. His craft gives the film an impressionistic quality that complicates the allusive dimensions of Tracy Letts's screenplay, adapted from his own award-winning play. This horror story is largely metaphoric, a weirdo reflection on post-traumatic stress that invites comparison to our nation's current state of affairs—namely the way crisis is sold to an unsuspecting, gullible public (WMD might have been a more pointed title for the film). Call it reaching, but it's not like Friedkin (or his characters) don't ask us to.

Ashley Judd, in the performance of her career, stars as Agnes, a waitress rooming in a run-down motel who intuits from a series of strange phone calls that her ex-husband (a ridiculously buff Harry Connick Jr.) has been paroled from prison, at which point her lesbian gal-pal (Lynn Collins) brings the mysterious Peter (Michael Shannon) to look after her. What follows is a study of metamorphosis through gross empathy. Agnes lost her son in a supermarket years ago and Peter fought in an unspecified war. She's accepted her loss, looking for her son only in her sleep, but he claims to have been the subject of scientific experiments that left him with sacks of aphid eggs in his body. Is she nuts to believe him? More importantly, are we?

Like Peter, who has an ostensible gift for picking up on things that are "not apparent" (he is ostensibly incapable of rhetorical thought), Friedkin lucidly plays up the subject matter's fixation with inner and outer states of experience raging against each other, intriguingly suggesting a behavioral association test with a series of shots presented in quick, seemingly meaningless succession—images of a stock of onions, an empty shopping cart, and girls smooching at a lesbian bar—that later reveals its meaning. Like Agnes, the audience is forced into a position of trying to make sense of Peter's obsession with the insects supposedly crawling in and out of his body, which lead him to transform Anges's room into a massive, tinfoiled bug trap.

Agnes and Peter's first and only act of sexual intimacy is a product of pity and is staged as a hornied infestation. Fittingly, Friedkin's camera repeatedly travels over and arrives at this place as if it were bacteria about to launch an attack on a lonely cell in a vast capillary system. This is not Friedkin's best or most consistent vision, but it's certainly his freakiest—manically attuned both to the corporeal and the psychological. What is what and who is who here? More importantly, are the film's crazies actually crazy at all? Just as Peter gets under the skin, pulling out his teeth in a particularly gruesome stretch of celluloid, so does Friedkin, stressing split selves through nervy delineations of space. Whatever has gotten into Friedkin, let's hope it stays in there.

The Village Voice [Rob Nelson] also seen here: City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul

The most volatile, least easily psychoanalyzed of '70s auteurs in Peter Biskind's classic New Hollywood tell-all Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, William Friedkin may have mellowed since unleashing The Exorcist, sliding into box-office hell, and marrying a major studio boss. Indeed, the recovering bad-boy movie brat—now 71, believe it or not—has directed more operas than motion pictures in the past decade. But his new Bug, made on the cheap for the horror-loving kids at Lionsgate, is genuinely freaky-deaky, not to mention more inventively unsettling than anything Friedkin has mustered in the quarter- century since twisting little Linda Blair into a satanic spewer of pea soup and F-bombs.

Seems an old dog can learn new tricks after all. Based on Tracy Letts's Off- Broadway hit from a few years back, Friedkin's most modestly produced feature since 1970 mostly confines its creepy-crawly head games to one dingy motel room, where an Oklahoma honky-tonk barmaid (Ashley Judd) holes up with a wigged-out stranger (Michael Shannon) just back from major combat operations in the Middle East. To varying degrees, these two damaged, desperate souls let their imaginations run wild in tight quarters, leading to full-on madness and an erotic/violent climax right out of Almodóvar's Matador. For now, let's just say the vet has got something under his skin—an itch he can't sufficiently scratch. As for Judd's jittery Agnes, who collects coins in a glass jar and opens a wine bottle with her teeth, she has been having a rough time ever since her toddler son went missing; in recent years, she has also struggled to keep a distance from the inmate ex-husband (Harry Connick Jr.) who battered her. At the start of the movie, Agnes gets crank phone calls that suggest the convict has been sprung. Message: The war at home is a killer, too.

Not to say that Friedkin, whose demonic-possession flick threatened to exorcise the unholy women's-lib movement in '73, has finally gotten political. Flamboyantly absurd, Bug often plays like a satire of the lefty paranoia cinema that was big in Friedkin's Hollywood heyday. And yet its psychological insights into mental illness remain acute, even sensitive; if nothing else, the newly penny-pinching director doesn't disparage the veteran head case whose bugged-out condition lends such post-traumatic ingenuity to the bare-bones production. Halfway through, when the cheap-motel mise-en-scéne begins to feel familiar, our resident weirdo—convinced that a nefarious Army experiment has left him with tiny "rogue aphids" in his bloodstream—proceeds to wrap the entire room in tinfoil. Presto—a new movie set at Reynolds Wrap prices!

Friedkin's other affordable manipulations are unnervingly effective as well. In tight close-ups, he favors flicking the zoom lens forward just a smidgen to enhance the flop-sweat feel of an already clammy, claustrophobic film. More than Vacancy, the season's other room-for-rent thriller, Bug has an aesthetic bead on the cut-rate menace of motel hell: The sounds of clanging old phones, buzzing fluorescent lights, and an ill smoke alarm are amped to aptly torturous levels. But beyond the movie's minor effects, including snippets of cattle prod shock-style cutting, ostensibly there to goose the first hour for Saw fans, Bug is principally a showcase for actors, rarely more than two on-screen at a time. Connick's testy scenes with Shannon are precise studies in she's-mine macho posturing, allowing Friedkin to imply that, for the heroine, the abusive ex-con isn't the only man she may need to fear. As for Judd, her persistent interest in working-class- female neurosis continues to be about more than trading the makeup kit for a shot at Oscar gold. Needing a man, any man, even a self-mutilating lunatic ("Guess I'd rather talk with you about bugs than nuthin' with nobody"), her Agnes undergoes an extreme, insect-like metamorphosis, turning Bug itself from a horror movie into something like a love story.

Love? How will such mushy stuff fly with Lionsgate's core gore audience? Well, at a mere $4 mil, seemingly recoup- able on DVD alone, Bug makes what the kids think appear rather irrelevant— which in turn makes the film look like a rare triumph for the old New Hollywood. Friedkin's fellow '70s players—Coppola, De Palma, Scorsese, Spielberg—wouldn't dare work at this neo-grindhouse level, and it's a damn shame. Only with nothing left to lose will a heartbroken survivor— like Agnes, like Friedkin—be willing to get down and dirty.

Scratch That Itch: William Friedkin on Bug. By Andrew Tracy feature and interview, Cinema Scope, 2006

To say that Bug is William Friedkin’s best film in 20 years might seem like faint praise, but his cunning and perfectly tuned adaptation of Tracy Letts’ claustrophobic play hardly needs comparisons to Jade (1995) to prove its worth. Of course, Friedkin’s rosier past will surely be invoked to defend Bug against the inevitable catcalls that will greet its release in North America, after it caused a stir at Cannes by picking up the FIPRESCI prize in the Director’s Fortnight. Friedkin may soon be “returning to form” in any and every publication near you, and you can bet there’ll be more said about The Exorcist (1973) for the umpteenth time than Bug—although the lazy social readings now inseparable from the former will surely be broken out once more for the new film. Indeed, how could they fail to be for a work which deals with the infectious spread of paranoia through the heartland, and whose stage original was playing in Chicago when 9/11 hit?           

To write Bug off as an unchecked explosion from the contemporary id would, however, be something of an insult to its very traditional—in the best sense—virtues. Friedkin’s new film is timely to the extent that its construction and the deployment of its effects are, for all intents and purposes, timeless: how to orchestrate a performance, pace a scene, use the camera judiciously, calculate audience response the better to knock them off balance—in short, tell a story. The zeitgeist, where and whatever it may be, doesn’t eclipse several decades’ inheritance of dramatic craftsmanship. Letts wrote his play after the Oklahoma City bombing, which calls up a very different image of terrorist carnage than the brand which the media informs us is dominating our thinking these days. Yet even though Friedkin retains Letts’ references to Timothy McVeigh and Ted Kaczynsci, there’s not a whiff of datedness to the film. Style doesn’t recognize new paradigms.           

As zeitgeist fiends high and low troll through each new release, it’s been increasingly forgotten that these timely echoes are texture, not source—as David Bordwell puts it, culture doesn’t turn on the camera. Friedkin and Letts have taken exactly what they need from the world around them and plugged it in to their nasty little nerve machine, heightening and sharpening the pieces they select the better to calibrate their gut punches. If this sounds rather coldly engineered, I’ll take it if only for the sheer sensual pleasure of the mysterious opening. A brief shot of a bizarre, silvery room, which would look like the inside of a computer but for the unidentified corpse making a mess on the floor; a cut to black, a ringing, a telephone in close-up as it is picked up, a woman’s voice saying “Hello?” to silence; suddenly, a cut to a gorgeous helicopter shot, travelling across a desert to a small cluster of lights in the distance, as the sound of the phone being slammed down and the woman’s voice muttering “Bastard” calls up the film’s title. With a few simple machinations, Friedkin simultaneously disorients and intrigues, slyly plays on the typical “opening up” of a stage work on the screen by taking it to the furthest extreme possible, and enhances visually—cinematically—the theme which the play could only convey in words: a dark, threatening world pressing in upon people who have retreated into their personal fortresses to ward it off.           

Those retreats, naturally, are as much psychological as physical, and the film’s tension hangs upon when these two realms will meet, and ignite. It’s this expectation of the inevitable that Friedkin and Letts so cannily play upon. The film’s first hour is a well-played and tautly written specimen of a very familiar scenario: Agnes (Ashley Judd), a down-and-out waitress imbibing vodka and coke (in powdered form) in her dirty motel room, nervously awaits the return of her ex-con ex-husband, Jerry Goss (Harry Connick, Jr.), who she assumes is the source behind the barrage of silent phone calls. Her lesbian best friend and co-worker, R.C. (Lyn Collins), brings over Peter (Michael Shannon), a passer-through she picked up at the bar. Polite, serious, and contentedly square (“I’m not a serial killer,” he calmly repeats after overhearing Agnes joking with R.C.), Peter begins to break down the bitter wall behind which Agnes takes refuge. After platonically spending the night and witnessing Agnes’ black-eyed “reunion” with Jerry the next morning, Peter’s remarks and behaviour start becoming darker and more enigmatic—especially when he discovers that a certain Dr. Sweet (Brian F. O’Byrne) has been asking questions about his whereabouts.           

The explosion does come, of course, but not at all in the form expected. Instead of dropping the other shoe, Bug abruptly catapults into a deranged other dimension, where the finely shaded tones and carefully orchestrated tension of the first hour are exploded gaudily outwards, risking outright absurdity at every turn. That it never goes over the brink is due solely to the drawing of the film’s characters, which is to say that the demands placed upon the film’s actors are uniquely heavy. Camera, sound, editing, and all the fragmentary processes of cinema mean nothing in a film such as this without a unified ensemble of performances at the core. After a few false moves and flat readings in the early minutes, Judd hits exactly the right note of slowly eroding guardedness, her touching vulnerability becoming the film’s ingress to the horror that emerges. As well, her rather calculated deglamourization becomes both affecting and arousing—her casual kisses with R.C. are both wholly natural and genuinely erotic, light years removed from the sapphic salaciousness Friedkin exploited in To Live and Die in L.A. (1985). Connick’s brute is all the more intimidating for the intelligence and wit entwined with his brutishness, creating a palpable sense of violence by withholding it, flashing the mocking smile that reminds one that he could unleash it at any moment.
The revelation here, however, is Shannon, who originated the role in London. Peter’s growing madness is terrifying rather than risible because Shannon meticulously reveals the relentless, twisted logic on which it is founded: the carefully weighed words, the taut face and searching eyes of the first hour remain locked in memory when the batshit eventually hits the fan. It’s a fine line which Friedkin and company walk in the last 40 minutes, the turn into left-field insanity requiring a lunatic pitch that must be sustained and then built even further. It’s seldom that actors will risk looking foolish for such a prolonged stretch, and it’s to their great credit that self-defensive laughter ultimately freezes in the throat. No doubt there will be some scribes who will have a field day chortling over Judd and Shannon’s daring. That’s all to the good. Leave the small-minded to their scraps and exult in that inimitable bellow to the heavens: “I am the supermotherbug!”

CINEMA SCOPE: How did you first become acquainted with Letts’ play?

WILLIAM FRIEDKIN: The play first appeared ten years ago, though he’s revised it a lot since. It played London and Chicago, and I saw it in New York off-Broadway about two years ago. It moved me considerably when I saw it; it was extraordinarily powerful. I thought it had really been written for me. I got Ashley Judd interested in it, and it just took off from there. We made it in 20 days for $4 million, and since there’s not really any special effects or CGI, we could just concentrate on the material.

SCOPE: Considering that you’re usually grouped with the New Hollywood of the ‘70s, you never seem to have strained to create as much of a stylistic persona as some of those other filmmakers. The demands of the particular film always seem to come first, which certainly seems to be the case with Bug.

FRIEDKIN: Well, I think that the themes that run through most of my films are similar: the thin line between good and evil, the thin line between the policeman and the criminal, and how with the slightest nudging the darkest demons can come to the fore and rule us. I wasn’t conscious of this originally, but I am now. I don’t have to look for this stuff, though, it tends to find me one way or the other. As far as Bug goes, however, it certainly is a return to a much earlier period of my career. I’ve made films like this back in the ‘60s, when I did Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party (1968) and Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (1970), which are both stage adaptations shot basically in one location.

SCOPE: Since “opening up” is one of the traditional hurdles, and often faults, of adapting theatre work to film, that makes the opening of Bug all the more ballsy: cutting from this inexplicable interior to this beautiful helicopter shot. The interior and exterior really play off each other in this film, this intense, paranoid drama going on inside seems to be filtered in from this vast, threatening world outside.

FRIEDKIN: That’s exactly what was intended. I saw in this play an immediate intensity, and I just built from there. The paranoia portrayed there is real. I think that what Peter talks about is valid. I understand where he’s coming from, and I think to a certain extent, this guy is not crazy, he’s just extreme. There are probably thousands, or millions, of people walking around out there who share Peter’s fears, if not his way of dealing with them. The central idea of this script is so powerful, this idea of how paranoia can spread so easily when people feel that they’re being threatened, whether it’s real or imagined. And most people today, I think, do feel threatened. It used to be you could go to a train station, a bus depot, or to get on an airplane, and you never thought about it as being possibly dangerous. My wife and I were in London a couple of weeks ago, flying on American Airlines from Heathrow to Los Angeles. And had the timing been different we could have been on one of those flights which was supposed to be blown out of the air.

SCOPE: That’s part of what gives the final apocalyptic scenes of Bug such power, because for most of the first hour we’ve been rooted in this sense of normality. In Shannon’s case, particularly, when he lets loose it’s not just some Hannibal Lecter-style mugging: from what we’ve seen of him in the first hour, we really get the sense that this is coming from somewhere deep inside him, from some other place.

FRIEDKIN: That’s a great piece of acting, Michael’s performance, and Ashley I think really helps push it up to that level of intensity and sustain it. Agnes is kind of Peter’s medium for unleashing the destruction he does at the end: because she’s so vulnerable in her relationships with men, her habits, her insecurities, she taps right into his paranoia, goes along with it, and eventually exceeds it.

SCOPE: Your films are often remembered for the money shots: the car chase in The French Connection, of course, or the spinning head—well, lots of things in The Exorcist. But what often gets overlooked is that the actors are very much part of the effects you pull off, even something that went virtually unnoticed, like that strange, private body language Benicio del Toro was playing around with in The Hunted (2003). How do you work with your actors on set? There are all those famous stories of you and Hackman going toe to toe…

FRIEDKIN: Well, as to that, it works differently with different people. With guys like Tommy Lee Jones or Sam Jackson, you have a really brief conversation about who their characters are and what the arc of the story is, and then other than giving them a staging plan, you don’t say much to them, because if you do you can spoil it. And then there are actors like Benicio, who likes to talk endlessly: about the character, about the underlying ideas and themes in the script, about the backstory of his own character. And of course all or most of that you have to make up. But he needs a psychological grounding for his character which requires a lot of discussion. Most of the actors I’ve worked with like to work in that way, but not Tommy Lee or Sam. They walk in before the first day and they’ve got it, and you know they have it, so you just modulate it as it goes along, a little bit more or a little bit less.

SCOPE: How did you work with the actors on Bug?

FRIEDKIN: Ashley and I talked extensively about the film before we did it, and we were really on the same page. To achieve Shannon’s performance took a great deal of discussion, toning, modulation. Shannon is primarily a stage actor, he’s only done small parts in films, though I’ve been told he has a very good role in World Trade Center, a small but pivotal part. He needs a lot of attention, love, appreciation. He becomes that character. And you have to realize that you’re talking to the character and not to him when you start rehearsing. You’ve got to walk on eggshells. He would tend to go over the top too soon, so I’d have to bring him down. But whenever I would modulate his performance, he almost took it as an insult to his character!

I’d met Connick at a party before I was casting this film, and I saw that a very large part of him was this guy. When I called him to do this role and sent him the script, I told him about some of his behaviour which I’d observed, and he knew exactly what I was talking about. There’s a part of him that likes to put people on like Goss does, sometimes maliciously.

SCOPE: Connick does some really strong work in the film. He sets the menacing tone of the first half so powerfully.

FRIEDKIN: He sets the tone for menace, but of course he’s not the menace, and the fear he creates moves instead onto someone like this mild-looking guy, Dr. Sweet—who, by the way, is played by one of the very best stage actors in the English-speaking world, Brian F. O’Byrne. He was in John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt on Broadway, and before that he did something else that won him a Tony award, and he’s just an absolute genius. You need that calibre of actor even in what seems to be a secondary part in a film like this. They all have to score, because if there’s a false note it can bring the whole thing down. For a film to work for anybody, I’d say about 50% of it is the script, 45% is the cast, and if the elements in the other 5% work well—like the stuff I do—they can enhance it, but without the right cast and the script it’s not going to happen.

SCOPE: The long shots and sustained sequences you allow Judd and Shannon in the first half of the film are quite refreshing, and they make the more frantic camerawork in the second half a lot more jarring. You don’t often see that kind of breathing space being given to actors in a lot of mainstream American films these days, where even veteran directors are adopting the fast cutting model, even for simple dialogue scenes.

FRIEDKIN: Well, they’re just trying to get with the trend. I’m just sick of all that. Most of the time it’s there to disguise the fact that there’s no solid material. I don’t like most of the American films that I see. The films that interest me the most today are often from Europe, and in particular from France. Michael Haneke, for instance: The Piano Teacher (2001), and his last one, Caché (2005), this is real cinema to me. I have a DVD of that and I watch it over and over.

SCOPE: Do you find there are things you’re learning from these films that make their way into your own, or are you more or less certain what you want and need?

FRIEDKIN: At this point I can’t really change what I do, and it’s hard to be affected by anything now. Of course when I started making films, I was affected by many other people, a great many other people, and since I knew nothing, I started out by imitating them, and not very well. But eventually I developed my own interests and my own style, even though you rightly point out that my films don’t really have a particular visual style. But what they do share is a respect for the material, for the most part, and a concentration on the characters.

Something that has greatly fed my filmmaking is the operas I’ve been directing for the last decade or so. Zubin Mehta first invited me to do Alban Berg’s Wozzeck in 1996, and since I had two and a half years to prepare, I agreed. We did it in Florence, which is one of the great homes of grand opera, and fortunately it was a success there, so I’ve had all these other offers to do operas since. I’ve done Samson and Delilah in Tel Aviv, last year I did Aida in Turin just before the Olympics, right now I’m preparing Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi to open the Kennedy Centre season before going to Munich to do Salome with the Bavarian State Opera company.

When people ask me how directing an opera differs from making a film, I reply that it’s very much the same, except there’s no camera. You have to conceive the production, the sets, the lighting, the costumes. You work with designers and technicians. You can’t change a word of the libretto or a note of the music, but within that there’s a lot of room for personal interpretation. And the great singers I’ve worked with want pretty much the same things that good actors want, which is a psychological underpinning for their character and a staging that works. I love opera, and working in it has made me much more aware of what’s important in both arts. I think Bug was a better film because of the operas I’d done leading up to it, especially Wozzeck.

SCOPE: You made Bug on a relative shoestring after two mid-level studio films. What is your relationship like with the studios these days, especially in terms of the freedom they allow you?

FRIEDKIN: It’s really a question of the kind of films the big studios want to do as opposed to what I want to see. I’m much more interested in Haneke or Dominik Moll or others than in some adaptation of a comic book. I would much prefer to spend the rest of my film career making low budget, character-driven pieces, but even that’s a difficult proposition with the studios these days, where $60 million is considered low budget.

SCOPE: You were certainly making commercial films in the ‘70s, but there must have been a marked difference in the freedom allowed you then as opposed to now.

FRIEDKIN: Well, there was even more freedom long before my generation, in the time of John Ford, Raoul Walsh, and the other great directors we learned so much from. There was a greater sense on the part of the guys who ran the studios that there had to be all kinds of different films. And they had respect for the filmmakers. They didn’t always know what they were doing, but they knew there was going to be a certain degree of professionalism and a connection with the audience. There was a lot of freedom there, even though the studios controlled everything. Today, there are any number of filmmakers who have a lot more contractual freedom than any of those guys had, but I don’t see the same great body of work being produced.

As to my generation, a director like Sidney Lumet is a lot less free, whether it be in his subject matter or his approach to filmmaking, than he was when he made his great films. Coppola hasn’t made a film for a very long time. He’s working on something now, and I have no idea what it’ll turn out to be. He’s entered another chapter in his life, and I don’t know if he’s even trying to make films on the scale of Apocalypse Now (1979). Not that he needs to, because those films will last as long as there’s an archive.

SCOPE: So you don’t think there’s any need for a grand valedictory Friedkin project?

FRIEDKIN: Who needs it? I’ve been working steadily, even though you haven’t seen a lot of films from me in recent times. I’m almost never inactive. I don’t even think in those terms. It’s just boring to me.

Sunset Gun: Bugs In The Belfry: The Crazy Genius of 'Bug' Kim Morgan

Bug (2007) Joe Valdez from This Distracted Globe

eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski)

PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs)

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Filmbrain

Zoom In Online (Annie Frisbie)

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] 2006 Torino Film Festival report

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)

BUG Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion

Bug Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Film Journal International (Frank Lovece)

Reel.com [Tim Knight]

James Berardinelli's ReelViews

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

New York Times (registration req'd) Jeannette Catsoulis

KILLER JOE B 86

USA (103 mi) 2011 Official site

Friedkin’s second consecutive film based on a Tracy Letts play, adapted by the Pulitzer playwright himself from his first work written in his mid-twenties, is a blisteringly dark morality play exaggerated to gruesome and grotesque proportions by poverty and family dysfunction, where the seedy, trailer trash atmosphere gives rise to violence, corruption, and blatant exploitation. Initially, the first thought that comes to mind is the Quincy Jones song by the same title Quincy Jones - Killer Joe - YouTube (5:10), but this is not in the film. The jazzy musical score, however, from Tyler Bates underlies much of the psychological tension which draws heavily from the sophisticated, underlying groove of the soundtrack. Shot in and around New Orleans, the film is notable for its distinctive locations, supposedly more than two dozen, where they always seem to be set in the middle of nowhere, suggesting life at the end of the world. While there are comical elements that turn distastefully extreme, the film is replete with disturbing content, including graphic violence, sexual degradation, and some brutal mistreatment of women, likely spurring cries of misogyny, especially when used to comical effect. The film challenges the concept of moral order, however, especially the male view, where resorting to criminal behavior (boys will be boys) is deemed acceptable so long as people get what’s coming to them and a semblance of social order is preserved. At times the film borders on the ridiculous, adding a comic book feel to the woes of trailer park depravity, something along the lines of Frank Miller’s SIN CITY (2005), where sex and violence merge into a twisted and perverse sense of human outrage, which ends up being the closest thing to justice.

Killer Joe (Matthew McConaughey) is a Dallas detective who moonlights on the side as a killer for hire, the stereotypical image of a man in black and an avenging angel who straddles the fence between human salvation and the worst Mephistophelean nightmare. McConaughey brings a mark of distinction to the outrageously uninhibited role and is up to the formidable task of portraying the personification of evil, playing with unusual relish the moral cesspool he rises out of. Repulsive and often shocking, Friedkin has created another one of his demented but always provocative horror stories, this one laced in noirish black comedy, often pushing the boundaries of absurdity. Emile Hirsch, so good in Sean Penn’s Into the Wild (2007), may be slightly miscast here, the only weak link in an otherwise superb cast, is Chris, a lowlife, Texas drug dealer who couldn’t be more of a pathetic loser, always down on his luck, but now in dire need of $5000 he owes to a loan shark. This sets into motion the family dynamic, as he’s been kicked out of his mother’s house and now comes crawling to his father Ansel, the irrepressible Thomas Hayden Church, excellent here as a passively subdued, always mentally challenged good ol’ boy living in a dilapidated trailer with his sexually extroverted wife Sharla, Gina Gershon, and Chris’s overly protected sister Dottie, Juno Temple, from Gregg Araki’s Kaboom (2010). Both women prance around in a state of natural undress that borders on exhibitionism for Sharla, but Dottie is the virginal picture of innocence, an angelic creature unspoiled by the world’s darker impulses, where the leer factor enters into play with the audience, veering into sexual exploitation territory, conjuring up lewd and lascivious thoughts. While the action centers around the men, the heart of the story instead focuses upon the women.

Desperate to save himself, Chris comes up with the harebrained scheme to hire a hit man to murder his hateful mother, someone he and his father conclude nobody would miss, especially since Dottie is the sole beneficiary of the $50,000 life insurance policy. When Killer Joe reveals his nonnegotiable $25,000 up front fee, the deal seems off until Joe suggests the idea of a retainer, where he takes Dottie as collateral until they come up with the payment. These dumb and contemptuous degenerates, who continually bite themselves throughout in the ass, actually rationalize that “it just might do her some good,” cruelly leaving her alone for a dinner date with Joe that she never knew was coming, where the eerie horror of her sexual initiation recalls Treat Williams and Laura Dern in SMOOTH TALK (1985), only becoming more graphically deplorable. When Joe moves into Dottie’s room afterwards, literally taking over the family, Chris is suddenly repulsed by his own reprehensible behavior and has a change of heart, only to find Joe is in no hurry to let any of them out of his clutches. This is a film that wallows in its wickedness, relishing its accelerating maliciousness like an after dinner dessert. The over-the-top, choreographed mayhem that develops is utterly appalling and absurdly ridiculous, perhaps even objectionable, but Joe has to be tarnished by his own wickedness for the final act to matter, as he’s no hero, but a thoroughly disgusting sewer rat. While both Joe and Dottie are brought together by the most ghoulish circumstances of a Grimm fairy tale, the irony is that when Dottie’s Prince Charming finally arrives he’s a brutally efficient killer for hire. McConaughey brings a fiendish delight to what constitutes male evil, yet his authoritative masculinity, as opposed to the bumbling and ineffectual father and son act, suggests he’s the kind of man women are drawn to, often without thinking, blinded and deluded by dreams of what they want to believe—that’s Killer Joe. Beautifully shot by Zooey Deschanel’s father, Caleb, the film concludes with an audacious and sexually haughty choice of music Clarence Carter- Strokin' - YouTube (4:39) playing over the final credits.

Killer Joe Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Guy Lodge

Missing presumed dead in the wake of a string of duds, ‘The Exorcist’ director William Friedkin’s edge made a vicious comeback in 2006 with ‘Bug’: a feverish, claustrophobic psychodrama adapted by Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Letts from his own play. Clearly a step in the right direction, Friedkin concluded; he’s stuck with the Oklahoman playwright for his follow-up.

A bristly adaptation of Letts’s first play, this riotously nasty trailer-park noir makes no apologies for its debt to Tennessee Williams, though even Williams might have baulked at some of the warped goings-on in this Southern family. Hounded by money-chasing gangsters, young hoodlum Chris (Emile Hirsch) hits upon a solution: having his mother killed and raking in the insurance payout. A bent cop moonlighting as an assassin, Joe (Matthew McConaughey) is happy to oblige. But when Chris can’t pay the deposit, Joe claims his sister Dottie (Juno Temple) as a sexual ‘retainer’. Fun for all the family ensues, with virginal Dottie taking to Joe with disquieting ease, assorted characters getting beaten to the consistency of mince, and Gina Gershon (excellent as Hirsch’s scuzzy stepmother) doing things with a drumstick that may put you off KFC for life.

Friedkin’s direction is rough and ready, but Letts’s tangy writing is the star here. Or perhaps that distinction should go to Temple: as a guileless baby-doll turned ravenous Lolita, the 23-year-old Brit is the standout among an already sparky ensemble.

The House Next Door [Kenji Fujishima]

After seeing Killer Joe, I'm starting to think maybe I just don't jibe at all with Tracy Letts's darkly comic, sneeringly cynical sensibility. This increasingly over-the-top demolition of a greedy, selfish clan in Texas reminded me of my reservations about the playwright's later 2008 play August: Osage County. As with that Pulitzer Prize-winning play, this is a dysfunctional-family drama that tries to pass off "shocking" behavior as edgy provocation to mask the utter conventionality at its heart; Killer Joe merely adds extravagant doses of Grand Guignol and trailer-trash condescension to add a superficial flavor of "novelty." On the other hand, how many movies will you see that features a climactic scene of a battered, bloodied woman sucking on a fried chicken leg in a degrading simulation of oral sex?

For what it's worth, William Friedkin has directed this emptily outré material with gusto, fully committing to the play's madness with the same intensity that he brought to his 2008 adaptation of Letts's Bug. (A nightclub scene in Killer Joe is bathed in a blue light that recalls the hellish hotel-room folie à deux of that superior film's final act.) And the cast is extraordinary across the board—especially Matthew McConaughey, who is a revelation as the titular corrupt cop, a particularly nasty specimen who may well be the most honestly immoral of this band of scheming nasty specimens. Who knew that McConaughey, memorable more for his handsome blandness in many of his previous roles, was capable of rising to the depths of this character's depravity so persuasively and menacingly? This proudly perverted morality play is certainly done well; whether it ought to have been done at all is an open question.

Time [Richard Corliss]

Killer Joe makes a point of going postal from the start — as Texas rain pelts a trailer, a frantic Chris (Emile Hirsch) begs to be let in, and the door opens to reveal the luxurious crotch of his stepmother Sharla (Gina Gershon) — then gets defiantly bonkers. In hock to a drug lord, Chris needs money quick and stumbles on to the scheme of hiring a hit man to dispatch his mother, whose $50,000 life insurance policy is supposed to go to his sister Dottie (Juno Temple). Chris has heard of Joe Cooper (McConaughey), a Dallas cop who moonlights as a contract killer. Joe's nonnegotiable price is $25,000, but in its stead he might take the slutty, virginal Dottie as a kind of carnal collateral. That's a proposition that Dottie's dad Ansel (Thomas Haden Church) agrees to, rationalizing "that it just might do her some good."

In his first play, written in his mid-20s, Letts was just starting to scale the craggy comic heights he'd achieve in 2007 with the Pulitzer Prize-winning August: Osage County. This garish species of Southwestern Gothic rolls a little too pig-like in the mud of its shock value, as Joe smoothly manipulates members of this backward brood into humiliation, desperation and, in one of the all-time "What!?" climaxes, the forced fellating of a fried chicken leg. ("You're very good at this," Joe tells his victim of the moment. "Please moan.") But, hey, if star actors want to risk their careers in an S-M amorality play, it's only good manners for audiences to check out the rubble.

Besides, Killer Joe serves as a sort of bookend, ornamented with gargoyles, to two important films early in Friedkin's directorial career. One is the 1968 The Birthday Party, a faithful adaptation of Harold Pinter's play depicting a man (Robert Shaw) being teased and terrorized by visitors who insist it's his birthday. The other is The French Connection. Forty years after that Oscar-winning drama about a New York City detective (Gene Hackman) obsessed with finding a French heroin dealer, Friedkin revisits the theme of crazed cops, but with the emphasis less on police work than on the splendor of psychopathy. Popeye Doyle, meet Drumstick Cooper.

One way for a star actor to expand his range is to play a riff on his basic character in a strategically different context. McConaughey has lately given evidence he could be an avatar of Paul Newman — specifically, Newman as Hud, the rancher dude with acres of Texas charm and not a square foot of scruples. He played that card smartly in The Lincoln Lawyer; here, his Joe is totally bad and quite possibly mad, but McConaughey employs the same effects as in his romantic comedies. He uses his sotto-voce musicality for threats instead of wooing, but he speaks to his prospective clients about a murder as he would to a pretty girl about dinner and a movie. Of the five characters in Killer Joe he's the sickest and the most comfortable in his role: whispering master to the family's wailing, pathetic slaves. A McConaughey male, in any movie, always thinks he should be on top.

Toronto 2011 has proved to be a cool showcase for genuine movie stars either in full strut (Brad Pitt in Moneyball) or locating rich subtleties (George Clooney in The Descendants). McConaughey is no less impressive and quite a bit bolder, doing pro-bono work in this indie-movie equivalent of an off-off-Broadway play. I'm told that Killer Joe, which had its world premiere a week ago at the Venice Film Festival, is close to finding a U.S. distributor. McConaughey's fans might be shocked to see him in this role — more likely, they'd skip the opportunity — but they ought to give his performance a shot. The dimpled demon lover proves he can be just as seductive playing Texas's creepiest, craziest cop.

Twitch [Kurt Halfyard]

When the name William Friedkin comes up in conversation, you cannot help but think of the directors crazy genius period in the 1970s with iconic films such as The Exorcist and The French Connection, or even his highly enjoyable To Live And Die in L.A. in the 1980s.  The 1990s and early 2000s appeared to show a decline in quality output and it appeared that the magic was gone as the director headed into his seventies.  Then came his chamber-drama Bug, a paranoid science-fiction noir with a whole lotta crazy showed delightful submission to the lead performances, Michael Shannon and Ashley Judd that its ricky one-room conceit worked some real magic.  Two films hardly make a trend, but take his latest film and you've got to sit up and take notice:  The man is taking some risks with genre and succeeding in doing things a little different with his collaboration with playwright Tracey Letts.  Killer Joe is a straightforward, if slightly uninspired, noir picture with an excellent cast - all chewing scenery in their own ways - that gets a shot in the arm with its nutty act.  I suspect that this improves the picture on balance, even as it threatens to bring the whole house of cards down with twisted glee.  Not unlike Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, the film is built out of classic noir conventions but keeps the circle of characters contained with in the family, to form a knotty plot that results in a domestic hell.  Killer Joe goes one further as it morphs into a satire of power and violence and diminishing returns for the sons of America.

Set in a poorer corner of Dallas, Texas, a corner of town that almost feels rural with a sea of gas stations, a crumbling themepark and dusty industrial buildings.  It is sweltering heat during the day, and pounding rain at night, a place where dogs are perpetually barking, and the reading comprehension is not too high amongst the locals.  The plot gets kicked off when perpetual low-life Chris (Emile Hirsh, cast against type) gets a face full of his mother-in-law Sharla's (Gina Gershon) wild pubic hair.  Not in a sexual tryst mind you, this is just the way this family opens the door to one another in the middle of the night.  Chris has been kicked out of the house by his mother, Adele, who stole his $6000 worth of cocaine with her new hubby Rex and went on to further screwed up the sale, leaving Chris in the violent crosshairs of the biker gang (sprouting Blue tooth headsets) who want their money.  He plots with is confused father, Ansel (Thomas Hayden Church) to kill Adele - Ansel's ex-wife - for her $50,000 insurance policy which would go to the sole beneficiary 17 year old Dottie (Juno Temple, her accent flawless and giving Imogen Poots a run for her money in rising Hollywood starlet department.)  With the ratty trailer being small enough and the business of plotting pretty much carried out at a shout, Sharla and Dottie are soon wise to the scheme, and having little issue with removing Adele, all become co-conspirators.  Chris hires a local lawman who moonlights as an assassin, the eponymous Joe (Matthew McConaughey, rocking a Stetson and a Zippo), to do the deed. The catch is that he wants $25 up front, with no exceptions.  Of course, in this type of movie there are always exceptions.  After Chris makes a no-show for his first meeting with Joe, Dottie is there to make the killer a cup of joe, unconsciously flirting with him during small talk.  The chemistry is palpable.  Joe agrees to do the work in exchange for Dottie's virginity and keep her as a sex toy until the money comes in from the insurance company.

The pleasure in this type of film is watching just how despicable the family (and newly minted business partners) can behave towards one another.  It walks a tightrope between amusing and exploitive, but never devolves completely into a Jerry Springer level freakshow.  Chris constantly calls his dad a simpleton to his face, while Ansel retorts, "Just go kill yourself, and save us all the trouble." At one point, Ansel heads to the insurance company in a cheap suit to look respectable.  Sharla notices a loose thread at the sleeve, and while they are waiting, she casually picks at it, resulting in the entire arm of the suit to detach.  A fitting enough visual indication as to how flimsy this scheme is, and how quickly it is going to unravel.  But it hardly prepares for the mockery of table manners that comes in a head during the climactic confrontation, which in tone flirts with the insanity of Texas Chainsaw Massacre to the constant refrain of "Is that your Dick?"  It also makes one wonder if Kentucky Fried Chicken got money for some rather interesting product placement.  The awkward and uncomfortable, yet farcical, nature of this scene its at complete odds with the tightly wound performance of McConaughey for the rest of the film, but at this point, Joe has been integrating himself into the family, and proves he is as much of an ape as the rest of them.  Is the film a masterpiece?  Hardly, as no film that uses Clarence Carter's "Strokin'" as an anthem could be.  But there are so many pleasures in watching this cast doing their thing, I would rather have the crazy on display than simply another retread of Red Rock West or Blood Simple.

Bad Billy: William Friedkin on Killer Joe - Cinema Scope feature by Olivier Père and interview by Manlio Gomarasca, November 11, 2011

With The French Connection (1971), The Exorcist (1973), Sorcerer (1977), Cruising (1980), and To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), to cite some of his most famous films, William Friedkin has made a deep impact on contemporary American cinema, establishing himself as one of the most talented and uncompromising of the New Hollywood filmmakers. As well as reaching critical and commercial success, he invented a new approach to the cop, horror, and action films, pitching their tones between hyperrealism and hallucination; all told, he traumatized several generations of viewers and cinephiles, and influenced a fair number of young directors. From The French Connection to Bug (2006), he has consistently explored his themes of choice: madness, Hell, the narrow borders between reality and nightmare, good and evil. And he’s often taken the risk of going too far and confusing the audience, as evidenced by the fiasco of his masterpiece Sorcerer and the polemic surrounding the production and release of Cruising.

Though famous for his masterly action scenes, Friedkin has never claimed to be a genre director. He has directed several psychological dramas, such as his early works, the Harold Pinter adaptation The Birthday Party (1968) and The Boys in the Band (1970). It is clear that his two most recent films, Bug and Killer Joe, display a kind of symmetry with these first films. Theatre + humour noir + sexual violence is the winning recipe for Killer Joe, Friedkin’s new sucker punch of a film, and shows that far from quieting down with age, he relishes taking viewers on an emotional rollercoaster ride.

Six years after the formidable Bug, which revived cinephiles’ interest in his work, Killer Joe confirms the filmmaker’s theatrical tendency; in fact, Friedkin, in between directing numerous operas across Europe, staged a string of productions by playwright Tracy Letts. After the paranoid craziness of Bug, a film almost entirely concentrated within one motel room, Killer Joe is a murderous family game that also unfolds for the most part in a single setting: a seedy trailer. It’s not the action scenes (filmed on location) that give the film its impact, but the extraordinary energy of the verbal confrontations between five insalubrious characters, all of them “dirty, ugly, and bad,” in the enclosed space: this familial conspiracy story soon veers into violent and obscene farce. Free of studio-imposed constraints, as well as audience expectations—Killer Joe was produced by Frenchman Nicolas Chartier, previously an instigator of Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008), and it will have a limited theatrical release in the US—Friedkin has doubtless found an opportunity in Letts’ stories to make his most personal films that allow him free rein to explore his penchant for extremely black humour and extreme situations that reveal our basest impulses.

A survivor from the ‘70s, but still possessing an incisive mind and talent, Friedkin does not hide his disaffection with the present, and especially current film production. He makes a point of stressing his isolation and marginalization within contemporary American cinema, a club to which he has lost all desire to belong. His last two films are highly symptomatic of both a misanthropic turning and an increasingly paranoid and claustrophobic view of the world, but also of a filmmaker at the top of his form who delights in using his chamber films as explosive lessons in filmmaking thrown in Hollywood and puritan America’s face. 

Cinema Scope: It seems that your two last films, Bug and Killer Joe, emphasize the claustrophobic dimension of your cinema.

William Friedkin: The films of mine that I am most a fan of that I have made over the years deal with people in claustrophobic situations, like The Birthday Party: it’s my favourite, and it all takes place basically in one room. About one third of The Exorcist takes place in one room. The Tracy Letts films that I have done are really brilliantly written, and they are about themes that I’m drawn to: paranoia and obsession. And they play out in tight spaces, not in open country, the Wild West, or even in the streets. If you look at The French Connection, even though it is shot all over New York, it is basically a claustrophobic film, these guys are locked in their own world.

Tracy Letts is the best playwright in America today, without a doubt. His last play won the Pulitzer Prize. People now recognize him. He writes for himself. He feels no obligation to an audience, the actors, or the director regarding what it is about. And now people understand totally. They get it that it’s focused on the oppression of the weak by the strong, the oppression of organized religion.

I feel the same. I am very happy if people like my films, or if they go to see them. If they don’t, it’s not my problem. I never felt that about any of the films I made that were huge successes. It’s not that I don’t care about the audience; it’s that I don’t wish to depend on the audience. I know what the audience wants: superheroes, videogames, and stupid comedies. Maybe I could make a hit, but I couldn’t even watch it. I don’t want to make a film that I can’t watch.

Scope: What about American cinema today?

Friedkin: Clint Eastwood gave an interview the other day where he talked about the difficulty he had getting Mystic River (2003) and Million Dollar Baby (2004) made. The studios didn’t want to make them, and they were done with outside financing and the studio as distributor. He said he went to one studio head that he worked with—he didn’t name him but I imagine it’s the guy at Warner Brothers who just left, Alan Horn—and he said to Eastwood, “We don’t make dramas anymore.”

I feel the studios are certainly in touch with a possible audience that is in America between 18 and 29, and they keep feeding that machine. Do you think Haneke is thinking about the audience when he is making Caché (2005)? I don’t think so and it’s a great movie. Most films that I admire should not be watched with your mind, but should be watched with your emotions. I think that a movie should at least attempt to move an audience. Now the audience wants instant gratification. That is not an audience that I am seeking.

So I have to find a smaller audience, or not make films. I still love films but not the stuff that is for the most part being made here. I just think there are some very talented directors here, but not like when I wanted to make films, dozen of people all over the world whose films I couldn’t wait to see like Antonioni, Fellini, Kurosawa, Rossellini, the French New Wave…We waited every day for a new film.

While talking with Friedkin, we are interrupted by two female diners, both around 50 years old. They have been listening to our conversation and insist on giving us their opinion as to what they believe a good film to be: an entertainment that offers you a good time and makes you forget your everyday concerns, a film like The King’s Speech (2010). They are interior designers. They have no idea who they are talking to, and will never know. One of them is particularly vehement.

Lady: When I go out of the theatre after a movie, I want to feel good, not to feel scared or miserable.

Friedkin: Did you ever see The Exorcist?

Lady: Yeah, it scared the hell out of us.

Friedkin: You don’t want that? You don’t want to be really frightened by a film?

Lady: That was great, clever, that makes you think.

Friedkin: What does it make you think?

Lady: Of the Devil.

Friedkin: But you don’t need a movie to think of the Devil!

They finally decide to leave us alone. Friedkin, who has remained patient and polite throughout, rejoices.

Friedkin: That will be marvellous in your interview. It makes my point. These perfectly normal American women probably have an education, and are gainfully employed, but I don’t have a clue what they’re talking about. The movies they liked, “feel-good movies,” are fucking awful, beyond stupid, like Sex and the City (2008) and Bridesmaids.

Scope: Do you think that it is possible to change the rules?

Friedkin: Killer Joe is very much against the grain. There are a handful of films that I can name that changed the rules: the first one was The Birth of a Nation (1915). Not only in telling an epic story that was controversial and attracting a big audience, but it changed the style in which films were made. The next film was Citizen Kane (1941); it changed films completely in terms of the narrative possibilities. After that was Godard’s Breathless (1960). When I made The French Connection I was conscious of Godard and the jump cuts.

What today? I don’t know. It’s more than likely that a film like Killer Joe, an American- made movie with a big movie star, is too tough for an American audience. I don’t want to make films for these stupid women; I don’t care what they like or don’t like. I don’t respect their opinion; that is not an audience that wants to be challenged; they just want to “feel good.” And what “feeling good” means is looking for stuff that is opium for the eyes, and nothing for the mind. Killer Joe is very much a challenge to an audience, and I know that. And I don’t expect a great audience for this picture, but it doesn’t matter to me. I would be happy if there were, but I am not going to change it.

Despite the relative public and critical indifference to most of his films from the ‘90s and first decade of the new century, the director’s prestige remains intact, as evidenced by the superb cast of Killer Joe, which contains some of the top talent in American cinema today, in unflattering or particularly shocking roles. Matthew McConaughey plays Joe, the corrupt cop with a sideline as a contract killer, a million miles away from the pretty-boy leading roles in commercial productions we’re used to seeing him in recently. He is accompanied by Emile Hirsch (Chris, the psychopathic, bad seed son), Thomas Haden Church (Ansel, the somewhat simpleton father), Gina Gershon (Sharla, the rather slutty stepmother), and Juno Temple (daughter Dottie, somewhere between Lolita and Baby Doll). They have a field day with all the insanity and perversity, clearly egged on by the director. Gershon, for whom this is a major comeback following her earlier stellar performances in Bound (1996), Showgirls (1995), The Insider (1999), and demonlover (2002), is especially brilliant and fully invests in her character. She is not the only one to appear naked in Killer Joe, a film that stands out as one of the most provocative American films of recent years, and relishes its abundance of risqué scenes.

Although Friedkin condemns the plethora of sex in some recent films, one could justifiably retort that his films have often been extremely graphic in their representation of sexuality, and particularly homosexuality.

Scope: What do you think of the near-pornography of Killer Joe?

Friedkin: A lot of people considered James Joyce’s Ulysses and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer pornographic. I don’t believe in heroes or villains, bad guys or good guys, and especially not for drama. So why should I put that in a movie? In The French Connection, the cop is worse as a human being than the French drug smuggler. I don’t believe in the clichés of human behaviour.

In terms of cinema, like The Boys in the Band or Cruising, I believe that everyone has within him all of the male and female genes. When I made those films there were people who actually thought that gay life was evil. I saw The Boys in the Band as a love story—it just happened to be a love story about men. Cruising simply uses the background of S&M for a kind of a strange police procedural. I believe that most people are sexually confused.

As a young man growing up in Chicago, I started out fucking whores, black prostitutes that I would pick up on the streets, because it was simply a matter of getting off. Now I find a great sadness in the whole idea that someone’s daughter has to become a prostitute. I could not have sex with a prostitute if she was the most beautiful woman on earth. Once I achieved a little success I became attractive to women, and I fucked every woman I could. In the ‘70s, the directors had trailers on the set and they gave you blow jobs between shots. And I did this, everyone did, married men…I was single. It didn’t matter. Sexuality to me was not about love at all; it was to do with biology. The only love stories I have made are Bug, which is to me a strange love story, and about someone who is in love with another person and captures their paranoia, and The Boys in the Band. But I am not drawn to show sex on the screen; in fact I find it mostly humorous. Have you watched two people having sex? For good reason we call it “the beast with two backs.” It’s ridiculous! I don’t enjoy putting sex on the screen; in Cruising, the sex is sex without love; in Killer Joe it is a kind of love story.

Killer Joe is about the desperate need for family, not necessarily sex, but family. Dottie is in a dysfunctional family, where her brother Chris and her father Ansel tried to pimp her out. And her mother tried to kill her, and her stepmother Sharla is nice to her but she’s a slut. And Joe is a guy who only sees, like most cops I know, the dark side of human nature. Joe is interested in Dottie because if you listen carefully to what they say to each other early in the film, they both want the same thing, which is some kind of family. Tracy Letts’ work is about the search for family. In many ways that’s what The Godfather (1972) is about too: family.

Scope: Killer Joe is already famous for at least two highly unseemly scenes, the kind that you are the only one today who still dares film: an opening scene that ends with full frontal female genitals, and a rape scene that involves a chicken wing. Both are in Letts’ play…

Friedkin: I wrote to Tracy and I said: “If I show the woman in the opening scene the way you suggest it, we will probably get an X rating. How would you feel if I show her only from behind?” He wrote me an eight-page memo saying: “Don’t be afraid of the pussy. It is a signal to the audience to fasten their seatbelts; that this is going to be an unusual experience. Yes, it is set in a trailer, but there are going to be things happening in that trailer that you do not expect to see.”

I understood that very well, why there was a need to show her that way. My initial impulse was that it could be distracting, but then he reinforced this idea that it’s meant to be a comedy. The movie is a comedy, for the people that can get the jokes. But we have had great response from women, so far, to my amazement!

Chicago Reader [Drew Hunt]

The Lurid Pleasure of Killer Joe Nick Pinkerton from The Village Voice

Killer Joe, starring Matthew McConaughey, reviewed. - Slate ... Dana Stevens

REVIEW: Ultraviolent, Shock-Seeking Killer Joe Is A ... - Movieline Michelle Orange

“Killer Joe,” “Klown” Reviews : The New Yorker Anthony Lane

DVD Talk [Jason Bailey] also seen here: Fourth Row Center [Jason Bailey]

Slant Magazine [Ed Gonzalez]

Movie Shark Deblore [Debbie Lynn Elias]

Electric Sheep [Greg Klymkiw] also seen here: Daily Film Dose [Greg Klymkiw]

Killer Joe | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Scott Tobias

'Killer Joe' Review: Matthew McConaughey's Creepiness ... - Pajiba Amanda Mae Meyncke

Killer Joe - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

Ashley Clark [Permanent Plastic Helmet]

Filmleaf [Chris Knipp]

ReelTalk [Frank Wilkins]

Review: 'Killer Joe' is Southsploitation at Its ... - Film School Rejects Landon Palmer

Review: McConaughey is electric in Friedkins dark and ... - HitFix Drew McWeeny

Confessions of a Film Critic [John Maguire]

Film-Forward.com [Jack Gattanella]

BrutalAsHell.com [Stephanie Scaife]

FilmFracture [Kathryn Schroeder]

Ai Weiwei | Ruby Sparks | Killer Joe ... - The Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Badass Digest [Meredith Borders]

SXSW 2012 Review: 'Killer Joe' Offers Laughs ... - Film School Rejects Jack Giroux

Digital Journal [Sarah Gopaul]

Fr. Dennis at the Movies [Dennis Kriz] reviewed by a man of the cloth, who walked out

EdinburghGuide.com [Dylan Matthew]

EFilmCritic [Jay Seaver]

Critic's Notebook [Tim Hayes]

Exclaim! [Robert Bell]

Phil on Film [Philip Concannon]

The Reel Bits [Richard Gray]

Sound On Sight [Ricky D.]

Combustible Celluloid Review - Killer Joe (2012), William Friedkin ... Jeffrey M. Anderson

SBS Film [Peter Galvin]

Dread Central [Heather Wixson]

ColeSmithey.com [Cole Smithey]

Review: Killer Joe - Community.compuserve Harvey Karten

'Killer Joe' Review - Screen Rant Kofi Outlaw

Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]

Film Blather [Eugene Novikov]

Smells Like Screen Spirit [Linc Leifeste]

Digital Spy [Emma Dibdin]

Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]

Georgia Straight [Mark Harris]

CineVue [Patrick Gamble]

Darkmatters [Matt Adcock]

William Friedkin Tells Us About Killer Joe and What's ... - Village Voice Casey Burchby interview from The Village Voice, July 25, 2012

Billy Friedkin Talks KILLER JOE and So Much More Jason Gorber interview from Twitch, July 27, 2012

William Friedkin talks Killer Joe and shares some ... - The AV Club Sam Adams interview, July 27, 2012

Killer Joe's Gina Gershon on merkins, film ratings ... - The AV Club Sam Adams interview with actress Gershon, August 9, 2012

TV Guide [Jason Buchanan]

The Hollywood Reporter [Neil Young]

Variety [Justin Chang]

Killer Joe – review | Film | guardian.co.uk Jason Solomons

The Guardian [Peter Bradshaw]

Killer Joe: Twistier than an East Texas back road - The Globe and Mail Adam Nayman

'Killer': Trailer-trash film based on a foul play - BostonHerald.com James Verniere

Review: Killer Joe - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Jake Mulligan

Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]

Killer Joe :: rogerebert.com - Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Times

Opening of 'Killer Joe' - Chicago Sun-Times Heidi Weiss, theater critic for The Chicago Sun-Times

'Killer Joe,' Directed by William Friedkin ... - The New York Times Manohla Dargis

Fruchtman, Rob and Rebecca Cammisa

SISTER HELEN B+ 91

USA (90 mi) 2002

An unflinching documentary film that follows the travails of a tough-talking 69 year old Benedictine nun, a reformed alcoholic herself who joined the order at age 56, who runs a home for recovering male addicts in a rat-infested, crack-house neighborhood of New York City.  Using the power of her personality alone, which is larger than life, she somehow wills these troubled individuals to follow her rules, which includes early curfew to attend meetings and surprise mandatory urine tests, almost all kicking and screaming and finding some excuse, many fall back into their addictions again and again, but all are grateful that she has given them a chance to put their lives back together again when no one else will.  The power of her no-nonsense style is evident, especially when one considers what would happen to these men without her, she truly transforms the lives of others into having the opportunity to be better, but of course, the choice is always theirs.  While 21 men lived in the home, only a handful agreed to have their lives exposed in front of the camera, and what we are allowed to see is a pretty rocky road. 

Fruhauf, Siegfried A.

MIRROR MECHANICS

Austria (7 mi) 2005

Mirror Mechanics Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Fruhauf is an interesting member of Austria's Sixpack posse. I have seen only two of his works (this one and 2001's Exposed) and both have been accomplished, well-crafted, and fully conversant with the dominant textures and surfaces that define advanced cinema of the 00s. Peter Tscherkassky (in a catalog blurb) finds that Fruhauf's films "follow a discernible order, a concept which is worked out in advance," "broken up with humor," and "made with a wink and a nudge." But I'm not sure. Mirror Mechanics is clearly a beautiful film, but its simplicity seemed to provide diminishing returns over the course of the running time. Essentially a mirrored symmetrical duplication of the same found footage (a young blonde actress, a piece of found footage I couldn't identify) intersecting with and enfolding into itself, the film recalls other works by Tscherkassky, but without the same degree of complexity. Likewise, Mechanics has certain affinities with the rippling cine-tapestries of Matthias Müller, but thankfully Fruhauf doesn't share his taste for grand theatrical gestures. I'm certain Fruhauf's film would have had a much stronger impact had I been able to see it on the big screen, an opportunity I'll take whenever possible. But I guess I just don't quite have a bead on what it is Fruhauf is trying to do. Unlike the most exciting examples of minimalist cinema, Mirror Mechanics has a reductiveness that actually just feels reductive. Nevertheless I strongly suspect that an immersion in Fruhauf's work might provide clearer answers and more definite rewards.

Fui, Chris Chong Chan

KARAOKE

Malaysia (74 mi) 2009

Karaoke Lee Marshall at Cannes from Screendaily

A karaoke bar on a Malaysian palm oil plantation provides the backdrop for this thoughtful feature debut, which owes a debt to the slow-moving existential meanders of Thai arthouse master Pen-ek Ratanaruang and the laconic visual style of the director’s compatriot, Malaysian-born (but Taiwan-based)Tsai Ming-Liang. But although it possesses a certain quiet grace, this elliptical coming-of-age tale is more of a roadside snack than a sit-down meal.

Still, the film has character and a surprisingly mature directorial poise, and could work as a crossover calling card for video artist Chris Chong Chan Fui in the festival tour that seems sure to follow Karaoke’s Directors Fortnight Cannes premiere.

The bar scene that opens the film sets the film’s unhurried tone with a leisurely montage of faces, gestures, drinks, accompanied by snatches of random conversation – almost as if the camera and microphone are searching for their story. This emerges gradually as we settle on the bar owner, Kak Ina (Mustaffa), and her son Betik (Adzim) (though the narration is so unassertive that it takes us a while to work out that they really are mother and son). Betik, it emerges, has returned to this village plantation after two years studying in the big city, and he walks through the place in a daze, as if he’s already beyond it yet unable to cut his ties.

The schmaltzy love and religious songs playing on the karaoke system (which were written to measure) echo through their lyrics those themes of love and loss that underpin the film. Betik begins a shy flirtation with a diffident young girl, Anisah (Nisaa), and helps a karaoke video director make the kitsch soft-focus romantic vignettes that accompany the songs, which are filmed on the beach or next to waterfalls; when a model fails to appear, he is cast himself as the male lead. Though there’s a certain romantic tension in the central girl-boy story, the only real drama comes in a two-minute conversation towards the end, when we learn that Betik never returned for his father’s funeral, and that his mother is selling the bar and moving away with Betik’s uncle.

What Chong really seems interested in as a director are the relations between people and the landscape (which is captured in a series of carefully-framed photographic fixed- shots by DoP Pengpanich), and the way that the characters’ conflicting desires make them always a little out of tune with each other, in a sort of emotional karaoke. It’s also about the exploitation of paradise – in beauty-spot karaoke videos, but also in the palm oil plantation, with its long symmetrically-planted rows of trees.

Fukada, Kôji

HARMONIUM (Fuchi ni tatsu) B+ 91

Japan (120 mi) 2016

Those happy times have been and gone.

—a song sung by Yasaka (Tadanobu Asano)

An unsettling and slowly developing film that has a way of creeping up on you, where the intensity and full force of this innovative film comes as a complete surprise. While the Japanese title might best be translated to Standing On the Edge, this is a typical working class drama that might lull you to sleep with its simplicity before suddenly taking a strange turn veering into the horror genre. While not as audacious as Takashi Miike’s AUDITION (1999), the two-part technique is similar, though this restrained family drama is much more carefully calibrated to send the audience swooning into the ambiguity of unanswered questions. Winner of the Jury Prize (2^nd Place) in the Un Certain Regard at Cannes, and one of the better directed films of the year, Fukada upends the traditional format for a Japanese domestic drama, creating an eerie film that stands alone in its stark originality, where you may wish to see it again just to review the embedded clues that you might have missed the first time around, as events escalate quickly, catching the viewer off-guard. An ordinary husband and wife, Toshio (Kanji Furutachi) and Akié (Mariko Tsutsui), live an uneventful life with their beloved 10-year old daughter Hotaru (Momone Shinokawa) who is learning to play the harmonium, seen practicing with a metronome in the living room for an upcoming recital. What might seem strange to international audiences is just how expansive Toshio’s industrial workshop is, where he has created a small machine factory as an addition to the family home, which opens to the street like a garage door. To see welding and sheet metal cutting happening in one’s garage is not something you see every day, where the decibel level would have to be extremely high, an ear-splitting presence to any neighborhood. In America you’d have to get certain zoning changes permitting industrial work in what is otherwise a residential neighborhood, but in Japan, this may be a fairly common practice. Nonetheless, Toshio retreats to the private sanctity of his work in the garage much like other husbands head off to work every day, where the audience gets used to the routine, with the husband returning into the home later that evening where they all sit down for dinner. There is little back and forth banter between the parents, as mostly they ignore one another, while the mother and daughter say grace before meals and then chat away, with the father remaining silently isolated and alone.

Without a word to his wife and daughter, Toshio is unexpectedly met in his garage by an old friend, who is invited to stay with them temporarily, where he will help with the needed work while living with the family. Yasaka, the invited guest, is played by Tadanobu Asano, who has a storied career in Asian cinema working with some of the best directors, most recently in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s JOURNEY TO THE SHORE (2015) and his earlier BRIGHT FUTURE (2003), Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s LAST LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE (2003) and INVISIBLE WAVES (2006), playing the uncle in Katsuhito Ishii’s The Taste of Tea (Cha no aji) (2004), a samurai swordsman in Takeshi Kitano’s ZATOICHI (2003), and the sadomasochistic killer in Takashi Miike’s ICHI THE KILLER (2001), but also has appeared earlier in Nagisa Ôshima’s GOHATTO (1999) and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s first film MABOROSI (1995). To say the man carries dramatic weight is an understatement, yet we learn he was recently released from prison, but more about his past remains a mystery, so it’s not clear why Toshio offers him the job and invites him into his home. What is immediately apparent is the stilted and impassive manner in which Yasaka carries himself, always dressed for a funeral in a clean white shirt buttoned up to the neck, retaining an eerie air of stillness, suppressing all emotions, speaking in a hushed and halting deadpan, yet always exceedingly polite. He’s a bit spooky, with unclear motives, turning up mysteriously, seemingly appearing out of thin air like a ghost, where he simply has a strange and daunting presence. When Akié asks about their longstanding friendship, as she never heard her husband mention him before, nothing about his past is revealed, where the husband’s usual stoicism is to remain tight-lipped. Yasaka’s table manners, however, are amusing, as he noticeably slurps his noodles while instantly devouring a meal in seconds. Still unconvinced, Akié remains suspicious of his presence until Yasaka takes an interest in Hotaru and teaches her a melodic song to play on the harmonium, which she eagerly wants to play at her recital. In fact Yasaka develops a closeness to Hotaru that is missing with her own father. As if that’s not enough, he makes flirtatious moves on Akié as well, who at first seems open to the idea, a comment on her diminishing relationship to Toshio, but then firmly slaps him on the face, a jolt that seems to kickstart the film into another gear.

While the first hour cleverly reveals the hidden illusions of a marital couple, where the stranger pinpoints and accentuates their weaknesses, we also learn bits and pieces of Yasaka’s unraveling mystery, namely that he served eleven years in prison for murder. Without warning, the pace of the film quickens for one chilling moment that is simply shocking. Coming on the heels of the slap, and the revelations of his prior crime, Yasaka suddenly finds himself in a precarious position hovering over a fallen Hotaru and disappears from sight, where she is never the same afterwards. One mysterious event shakes the family’s tenuous equilibrium, leaving them heartbroken and despondent, as if touched by a permanent stain of guilt that they can’t wash away, though we see Akié constantly scrubbing her hands in Lady Macbeth style, refusing to allow anyone to touch her, as her obsession with momentarily failing her daughter can never be scrubbed clean. The film jumps ahead another eight years with the arrival of another new young worker, Takashi (Taiga), who seems helpful and respectful, until they learn of his connection to the past. As if resurrected by their own internal shame, the film suddenly surges into foreign territory, becoming wracked with tension, with the family descending into a neverending pit of emotional chaos, with viewers along for the ride, as Toshio and Akié sense the unseen presence, once again, of Yasaka drawing near, throwing the family into disarray. With waves of dread creeping back into their lives, the couple is tormented by their past, revealing scenes of searing emotional power, as they are quick to search for answers. Believing Yasaka may be living nearby, they curiously explore what appears to be a pristine Japanese neighborhood that could be the subject for wood prints or brush paintings, as the wooden houses blend so perfectly into the abundant foliage of the hilly landscape, with few roads or sidewalks, like a throwback to the interior of Japan before modernization, just a gorgeous, beautifully developed paradise on earth. They believe they hear the sound of Yasaka’s song that he played on the harmonium, as if calling out for them, or it may simply be their own drudged-up memories coming back to haunt them, as they are shaken to the core, unable to distinguish between reality and fantasy. Elegantly shot by Kenichi Negishi, the formal minimalism includes a few startling cuts, where the sheer look of the film grows increasingly impressive. A film about guilt, sexual repression, and personal boundaries, when there is a violation of personal space, an inevitable explosion occurs, where by the end of this film it’s hard not to feel like something extraordinary occurred.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Michael Glover Smith, also seen here: Harmonium | White City Cinema

A deserving winner of the Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard sidebar at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Koji Fukada’s meticulous slow-burn thriller is an impressive feat of screenwriting, directing, and acting. Toshio (Kanji Furatachi) is a seemingly contented small-business owner and family man with a loving wife and daughter. When his old friend Yasaka (a sinister Tadanobu Asano) is released from prison, Toshio extends a helping hand by hiring the deceptively polite young man to work in his factory and live in his home. Slowly and insidiously, Yasaka causes cracks to appear between members of the family as he brings a dark secret from Toshio’s past to light (in many ways, the film’s narrative trajectory is the opposite of Takashi Miike’s VISITOR Q, where a strange houseguest used murder to bring a dysfunctional family closer together). Not many filmmakers would be able to pull off Fukada’s bolder cinematic conceits (a symbolic use of the color red, an unexpected leap-forward in time, an abrupt and daringly ambiguous ending) but every such decision seems pressed to the service of illustrating a karmic cycle of crime, punishment, and redemption that feels firmly rooted in believable character psychology and a realistic social milieu. This haunting film is one of the great Japanese exports of recent years.

Cannes Review: Koji Fukada's Chilling Un Certain Regard Prize ... Jessica Kiang from The Playlist

A slow first hour builds to a deeply involving and uncannily affecting second half in Japanese director Koji Fukada‘s chilly and chilling examination of familial guilt, “Harmonium.” Marking a fascinating return to the themes of the director’s celebrated sophomore film “Hospitalité,” yet also a 180-degree change in tone from that film’s droll, occasionally raucous black comedy, “Harmonium” also takes as its subject a working-class Japanese family, and the chaos and disruption that occurs when they invite a stranger into their home. Here too, a general crossing of boundaries (in both films, the interloper becomes both guest and employee, as in both films the home space directly adjoins the workshop area) leads to complications and conflicting currents of desire and suspicion, but here they take on a tragic, maybe even horrific air. Fukada’s deliberate pacing and deceptively indifferent shooting style might seem off-putting at first, but that’s only before we realize that this nuclear family story is actually a nuclear explosion, played out in extreme, minutely observed slow-motion.

The detonation device here is recently released ex-con Yazaka (the effortlessly charismatic Tadanobu Asano), a taciturn sleek presence in a white shirt buttoned all the way up to the neck. He shows up at Toshio’s (Kanji Furutachi) metal workshop, a small garage space attached to the home Toshio shares with wife Akie (Mariko Tsutsui) and their bright, extrovert little daughter Hotaru, who is learning to play the harmonium with the help of a ticking metronome. Toshio and Yazaka have a history that apparently places Toshio under a burden of gratitude, and so he hires Yazaka on the spot as an apprentice/assistant in the metal shop, much to Akie’s surprise and initial dismay.

But after Yazaka seems to bond immediately with little Hotaru, even promising her harmonium lessons, Akie’s disapproval gives way to curiosity and then fascination with the newcomer, and until the sudden mysterious event that bifurcates the film and plunges the family into a different world entirely, it feels like a dramedy in which Yazaka’s function will be as a catalyst for exposing the complacency of supposedly stable family life and this apparently solid, if unexciting, marriage. But then the film’s defining moment happens (offscreen, meaning the truth of it will always remain elusive) and it falls like a guillotine blade, slicing off the past from the future. We cut next to eight years later, after a new normal has established itself following the trauma, but the apparent calm of the situation is soon revealed to be purgatorial rather than truly peaceful. Yazaka’s absence taints the family’s lives more than his presence ever did, until his son stumbles more or less unwittingly onto the scene, and the film’s last circuit toward its final tragedy begins.

Hovering in the gray space between genres, and never quite settling into one or another, part of Fukada’s cleverness is to use and subvert those conventions to add to a sense of unease. After the considered (sometimes frustratingly so) interpersonal drama of the first half, the film toys with a coping-with-tragedy arc, cycles through hints of revenge thriller and arcane morality play, and finally ends up somewhere closer to existentialist horror. But if there is a guiding throughline, it is guilt: from the Lady Macbeth-style handwashing and hygiene obsession that Akie develops after the tragedy, which seems a literal desire to scrub herself and the tragedy’s innocent victim clean of her myopic infatuation with Yazaka; to Toshio’s inner torment at his shady past association with the man; to the way that Yazaka’s son, though ignorant of his father’s transgressions, is nonetheless held accountable for them — and most remarkably, seems to accept this kind of sins-of-the-father blame as his own cross to bear — the story of “Harmonium” is sodden with guilt at every level.

It is a guilt that cannot be expiated by external means: When they seek catharsis or closure, they bungle it, and ultimately only visit more misfortune on themselves. This is a bleak world in which clues don’t match up to solutions and a promising lead is just as likely to turn out to merely be someone who resembles the man you’re looking for from behind. Aided by the terrifically surefooted performances from Tsutsui and Furutachi (who also appeared in “Hospitalité,” playing the interloper role, interestingly), Fukada’s unshowy direction becomes more aggressively offbeat as the film pushes into its mundane yet borderline surreal closing stages. Disorienting edits leave us in the middle of one scene only to pick up suddenly in another, where the mood has changed and the questions posed before the cut remain unanswered.

It doesn’t make for uplifting viewing, and the film’s steadily increasing hold takes a while to really bite during the repetitious, metronome-like pacing of the first half, but “Harmonium” builds to something peculiar and unusual by its close, and has a melancholic, discordant, uneasy sustain that lingers long after. As a study of the isolation it’s possible to feel even within an apparently content unit living in close quarters, and as an enigmatic cuckoo-in-the-nest-style psychological thriller, it exerts a considerable pull. But most of all, it operates on an almost subconscious level as a portrait of the family as a living organism — only here the life is being leached out of it in a slow bloodletting, and its members, paralyzed and helpless, are powerless to save it. [B/B+]

Cannes Interview: Kôji Fukada - Film Comment Nicolas Rapold interview, May 22, 2016

Winner of the Prix du Jury in Un Certain Regard at this year’s Cannes, Harmonium observes a family as it’s dealt a tragic blow and then no less shaken by the process of recovery. Toshio (Kanji Furutachi) runs a garage workshop that opens right into the home he shares with his wife, Akié (Mariko Tsutsui), and their cute-as-a-button daughter, Hotaru (Momone Shinokawa). Trouble arrives when Toshio hires Yasaka (Tadanobu Asano), a friend with an unsavory past who’s in need of a break—though the complicated effects of his arrival on the close-knit family are best left unrevealed. FILM COMMENT spoke briefly with director Kôji Fukada (Hospitalité, 10), just a few days before he accepted his award at the UCR ceremony with an effusive speech one might not expect based on his new film’s fragile reserve.

What was the inspiration for the story?

To be honest, I wrote the one-page synopsis for the film about 10 years ago, so I don’t remember what inspired me to write it. But there are two things that I wanted to explore in this project, and the first one is family. Through the depiction of a family, a married couple or parent and child, I wanted to explore solitude—the essential, fundamental solitude that we all possess as individual human beings as part of the human condition. The second thing I wanted to explore was this sense of violence that can happen to any of us and disrupt our daily lives.

Do you think of Harmonium as a tragedy, in a classical sense?

It is a classical tragedy, in the sense of Greek tragedy and all the tragic stories throughout history that have been told repeatedly. You could say that they all offer points of view on life, and in that sense I think the film falls into that category as well.

The setting you choose is quite fruitful cinematically, because the family’s lives—their work lives and their home lives—are tied up together. And as the story goes on, that kind of entanglement continues in other ways for the family, morally and emotionally. Could you talk about the setting?

That kind of environment where you have the house and workshop together has been a traditional Japanese setting. It’s not unusual at all, but I thought that spatially it could be very interesting and, as you said, fruitful. It’s interesting also in terms of building the drama, because it’s neither completely private nor completely public. In the Japanese theater world, it’s called a “semi-public” setting, where it’s much easier to express the information and the emotions that you want to convey to the audience, instead of having a completely private space or a public space. And because I’m a writer as well, it’s a very interesting way to mix things up.

Thinking about the performances, I wonder if you could talk about what kind of direction you gave the actors about approaching this material. The style of acting is often very subdued, especially for the mother, Akié (Mariko Tsutsui), but there are also these outbursts.

For all the actors that I work with, what I first ask them to do is never to try to explain the character or the emotion that they’re feeling at any given moment, and not to work backward from who they are or what is required in that scene. That’s because in real life, as now for example, I’m sitting next to you, and I’m talking to you, but I don’t say something to you based on my “characteristics”—at all. It’s about communicating, it’s about interacting with each other, and of course your character shows in your attitude, but that’s not how people communicate. So what I ask the actors to do is to be there, to be present, to communicate with each other in front of the camera, to interact truly, instead of trying to figure out, “Okay, I should be feeling this, or I should express this, based on my character.” And obviously, the tone of my voice will change for anybody I’m close to, versus somebody I detest, and that comes naturally, but that’s all live communication.

What we feel about these characters also changes from moment to moment, as well as gradually over the course of the film. Who in the family do you think feels the deepest guilt? I have my opinion…

The wife.

That’s where I ended up as well—ultimately. But early on, I thought more the father. It changed during the movie.

Thank you.

Could you talk about your visual scheme for the film, especially the composition and the lighting?

For any film that I make, I try to keep the relationship between the camera and what’s being shot as simple as possible. Basically, when I’m shooting a person, it’s usually at the height of their eyeline, and it’s frontal—as if you’re drawing a flower in a vase. That’s the baseline. And the reason I do that, strangely enough, is because instead of trying to have the camera explain what’s being shot, what I want to do is to place things in the screen just like a picture. That’s what I try to do with my camera. And in terms of lighting, for this film I wanted a very strong contrast between light and darkness, and in collaboration with the DP [Kenichi Negishi] I tried to achieve that.

Which filmmakers do you most admire?

Eric Rohmer. And since this is for an American film magazine… I have many American filmmakers I like: Aldrich, Lang (who’s German but kind of American too), Hawks, George Cukor—A Star Is Born, Gaslight…

'Harmonium': Cannes Review | Reviews | Screen Sarah Ward

Koji Fukada's "Harmonium" examines the consequences of the past in ... Panos Kotzathanasis from Asian Movie Pulse

MIFF 2016 Review: Harmonium - Filmed in Ether Hieu Chau

Cannes Dispatch #2: Paterson, Happy Times Will Come Soon ... Blake Williams from Filmmaker magazine

Previewing the 52nd Chicago International Film Festival - Week Two Daniel Nava from Chicago Cinema Circuit

Koji Fukada Harmonium - Toronto International Film Festival Giovanna Fulvi

Sonatine [Grazia Paganelli] (Italian)

LinkinMovies.it [Adriana Rosati] (Italian)

Filmmaker: Blake Williams May 17, 2016

philadelphia film festival : Harmonium

Daily | Cannes 2016 | Kôji Fukada's HARMONIUM | Keyframe ... - Fandor David Hudson

'Harmonium' ('Fuchi ni Tatsu'): Cannes Review | Hollywood Reporter Deborah Young

'Harmonium' Review – Cannes Film Festival 2016 | Variety Maggie Lee

'Harmonium': Dangerously good family drama | The Japan Times Mark Schilling

At Cannes, Balancing the Fresh and the Familiar - The New York Times Nicolas Rapold

Harmonium (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fukasaku, Kinji

BATTLE ROYALE (Batoru rowaiaru)

Japan (114 mi) 2000 director’s cut (122 mi)

Battle Royale (2000). Bryant Frazer from Deep Focus

A sensation in its native Japan and nigh unreleasable in the U.S., Battle Royale is one of the year's most amazing movies-a vicious take-off on reality TV that turns a high-school milieu dominated by cliques and childish relationships into a war zone. Now, I have no actual way of knowing whether venerable Japanese director Kinji Fukasaku had Survivor or programs like it in mind when making the film, or whether those programs influenced the novel by Koshun Takami upon which it is based. But the film is permeated by a sadism that's redolent of the voyeuristic pleasure American audiences have taken in Survivor and programs like it, entertainment that involves the humiliation of at least one participant per week on national television.

A pre-title scroll elucidates hard times in what seems to be an alternate-universe Japan ("the nation collapsed ... 15 percent unemployment ... 800,000 students boycotted school"), and pits adults versus teenagers by explaining that the government passed something called the Millennium Educational Reform Act, which apparently provides for one class of ninth-graders to be chosen each year and set at each other's throats in a "battle royale" set in a remote locale. Each student is given a weapon, and all are warned that only one shall survive.

The movie tells the story of one such class, which is bused to a deserted island under the supervision of Kitano (Takeshi Kitano), a teacher of theirs from two years before and now, apparently, one of the leaders of the project. "Because of folks like Kuninobu here," Kitano says, berating one of his former students, "This country's absolutely no good anymore. So the bigwigs got together and passed this law: Battle Royale. So today's lesson is you kill each other off 'til there's only one left. Nothing's against the rules."

Kitano's words echo a line of dialogue from Takashi Miike's Audition, an equally disturbing nightmare vision of contemporary Japan, in which one middle-aged businessman sums up the economy by saying, "The fittest will survive. Everyone just struggles to keep his business," and then, more directly, "Japan is over." The current surge in dark Japanese cinema is a reflection of a darkness felt in that society, where hard work and scholarship are no longer enough to secure a good job and where there's a perception that violence among young people is on the rise. Audition's Aoyama deals with his own feelings of fear and emptiness by duping a pretty young woman into dating him; he soon finds that she's not exactly what she appeared to be. And Battle Royale's Kitano handles a classroom of what he feels to be spoiled children by setting them at each other's throats. "Life is a game," he barks. "So fight for survival and find out if you're worth it."

Battle Royale is in part wish fulfillment for adults who are fed up with, and maybe a little afraid of, the younger generation. The first 25 minutes of the film are a tour de force, exhilarating and terrifying, shot through with dread and black humor. From there, however, Fukasaku is very generous with his young characters, following them through friendships and failed alliances and emphasizing the sway that emotions hold over their psyches. One couple teams up with a mysterious "transfer student" who seems to have a real grip on the proceedings. A girl, Mitsuko (Kou Shibasaki), becomes a ruthless angel of death, knocking off her rivals with a smile on her face. And a group of girls takes over a lighthouse and forms an alliance that goes to hell when doubt and mistrust creep in.

Mostly, Battle Royale is a war movie, with all the violence that hand-to-hand combat suggests and then some. Nowhere is Fukasaku's worldview more apparent than in a scene where two girls take to a hilltop with a megaphone, pleading in amplified voices for peace. The two are promptly machine-gunned from behind by an assailant who picks up the megaphone and uses it to magnify one girl's death murmurs for the benefit of the other combatants. This is nasty stuff.

That serrated edge is what carries the film past numerous narrative misdeeds. If, as is suggested in a prologue, the Battle Royale is reported on by the news media almost like a sporting event, it's unclear how the student participants could be so unaware of the game when Kitano first rounds them up. (OK, maybe it's because they're self-involved idiots, but it's still a stretch.) Moreover, Kitano's behavior in the final third of the film, when he reveals his fixation on one of the students, doesn't quite gel. (Kitano, the consummate performer, is generally immune to questions of credibility and motivation, and his performance is unqualifiedly fantastic.) And promising story threads, like the one involving a complicated plan by one subgroup to hack into the central computer system and then destroy the compound with jerry-rigged explosives, sputter out abruptly, leaving us with only more shootings and stabbings to look forward to.

Whatever Fukasaku's motives in making the film, his sympathies ultimately lie with the teenagers, whom he portrays as sweet, resourceful, and mostly inclined to live together peaceably. Several reviewers have noted that ninth grade is the last year of compulsory education in Japan, and that competition for space in higher-education programs-which supposedly secure future jobs-is fierce, adding a layer to the hapless desperation of the ninth graders seen here. Whatever the subtext, the picture ends with an exhortation to its young protagonists. "No matter how far, run for all you're worth," hisses the unseen narrator in the final scene. "RUN!"

Tuna from Asian Cinema Drifter (link lost)

The concept is catchy. I don’t care how immoral it is. I don’t really care how violent it is either. I don’t care what effect this would have on children. It’s quintessential modern Japanese cinema. It represents everything Hollywood filmmakers would never be allowed to do. It finds a way to answer an issue through one of the most original premises in recent years. The concept is so simple on the surface while it’s also a perfect set up for intense complications. It succeeds in making an easily corruptible premise a mature thematic film.

In the “near future,” Japan is in a state of turmoil. Kids are out of control and are rebelling against adults. So in order to keep them in line, the government sets up the “Battle Royale act” which publicly selects a 9th grade class of about 40 kids to be sent to an island for 3 days. Attaching collars to their necks (which will explode when tampered with) and giving strict detailed rules to follow, the government and army force the kids to eliminate each other. They give each kid one weapon and supplies and let them know that if there is not one survivor at the end of the three days then they all lose.

Thematically, Battle Royale is as rich as they come. Rather than taking an exploitation route with senseless carnage backed by a good premise, Kinji Fukasaku takes his own tragic WW2 experiences and shapes it into something personal. The film plays out horror film style following several groups of characters around, edited and paced to the right effect. Granted, it focuses on a minority of the fourty children, but even so, it adds tons of depth to characters that die the next minute. When key characters die early on, you realize that even the main characters can suddenly bite it and the focus can shift to the next group. The suspense is one of the perks of the film entertainment-wise. I love a good horror film that stays away from the formulaic plots and explores the characters equally to surprise you later on with deaths.

The entertainment does not omit substance either. The main tagline of Battle Royale is “Can you kill your best friend?” The themes of betrayal and friendship re-occurs with every character interaction in the film. Emotions ranging from suspicions to love rise and cause the audience to get involved too. Battle Royale is the perfect example of the type of film its audience imagines themselves in. One can’t help but think how they’d react to a situation. It’s this type of connection that makes the themes even stronger. On the widescale of things, the messages the film tries to pass aren’t as clear as they should be, but Fukasaku does make an effort to deliver. The film questions society, the kids/adults relationship and general human nature (think Lord of the Flies). The most striking aspect of all of this substance is after the film, you may not want to talk about the gory way “so and so” died, but instead the messages and the overall meaning of the film. Though the novel actually offers a believable and interesting explanation for the whole program, the film is forced to change the meaning and shorten explanations for time issues.

The cast is terrific, containing several stars and many unknowns who hold their own. The honesty in the casting helps add to the realism the director is going for. Takeshi Kitano being the most notable is just as good as ever as the man in charge of the island. Kou Shibasaki probably comes in second as playing Mitsuko, one of the most beautiful and evil combinations you will probably see in a film. Chiaki Kuriyama, now well-known here for Kill Bill has a rather memorable role too. Other recognizable names include Masanobu Ando as the cold-blooded killer Kirayama or Tatsuya Fujiwara as one of the protagonists, Shuuya who both do as honest and convincing a job as any of the others. Finally, technically, the film is gorgeous. Good cinematography includes nice shots of the island and overview shots showcasing the latest victims. The editing and choreography for fights were decent, although some of the darker confrontations could have been better lit and more comprehensible (yet they do provide text updates on screen whenever anyone dies, which is another neat addition of realism.) The music is compromised of classical pieces, many of which you will no doubt recognize and this is another example of how Fukusaku adds to the maturity and sincerity of the film.

Battle Royale’s notoriety should be enough reason to see it. It sheds negative light on the Japanese government and appalled the general public prompting for calls to ban it. Naturally, some may be offended by this movie for the sheer nature and situation for the violence, not actual blood or gore itself. Kids killing kids is a harsh subject and over here apparently isn’t something people are used to. Still, don’t listen to anyone that says the film is pointless exploitation and violence. Even if you don’t particularly like it, the sincerity of the film is there. It’s just up to you how much of it you decide to take in.

Fukinaga, Cary Joji

VICTORIA PARA CHINO

USA Mexico (13 mi) 2004

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [4.5/5] Jeremy Mathews

Claustrophobic darkness pervades in Cary Fukunaga’s "Victoria Para Chino,” which depicts the true story of a large group of more than 80 Mexicans hiding in a truck’s trailer to get across the border. Rather than wasting time with political speeches, the short film captures the dark and mysterious experience.

User comments from imdb Author: ObsidianSW from United States

I viewed this film under the impression that it would be about China, and more specifically, the successful Chinese invasion of America or other Western countries. This film, directed by Cary Fukunaga and shown at this year's Sundance Film Festival, is however not about Chinese people, but actually Mexican people who pay to be transported "into the heartland of Texas" in an eighteen wheeler. There are about 80 of these people, and the film, at the end, shows you that 19 of them died, presumably from dehydration, lack of air, and possibly previous illness (and it is suggested maybe even with the consent of fellow passengers in some situations). The film has beautiful visuals and feels very 'polished' and tells this tragic story with aplomb. It might have been interesting to see the film without subtitles, so that the Mexicans really have their own identity and you have to really pay attention to them. This can be easily accomplished by the viewer, however, by making your hand flat like the horizon, and then putting your horizon hand over the subtitles. This starts to hurt after a while because even though this film is short, you must keep your hand there for the whole time as the whole thing is basically in Spanish.

SIN NOMBRE B+ 91

USA Mexico (96 mi) 2009 ‘Scope

Expressed through verve and imagination, this is a raw, in-your-face exposé that parallels two intersecting stories, one that highlights the internal violence within the Mara Salvatrucha gang, better known as MS-13, one of the most notoriously violent South American gangs that has an international outreach, similar to the mafia, and also a Honduran father who was deported from New Jersey who is now attempting to return to America illegally with a brother and daughter he left behind. The teen daughter, Sayra (Paulina Gaitan), still carries a grudge about being left behind in the first place, so expresses little interest in the opportunity until her uncle convinces her that there’s nothing for her in Honduras while a family and a future await her in New Jersey. Most of the first half, however, is bogged down in gang ritual, which shows heavily tattooed adolescent men carrying on initiation rituals, where new entrants are forced to kill one of the captured enemies from rival gangs along with receiving an ass-whooping from fellow gang members. Casper (Edgar Flores) is seen bringing in a young initiate Smiley (Kristian Ferrer), a short kid who’s barely old enough to be called a teenager, where they immediately encounter a certain amount of friction from the local warlord Lil’ Mago, the heavily facial tattooed Tenoch Huerta Mejia, who senses Casper is holding something back from him. And indeed he is, namely his love interest, Martha Marlene (Diane Garcia), for which all pay a severe penalty, as Mago, playing rough, accidentally kills her, showing no remorse whatsoever while Casper is overwhelmed with grief.

While seemingly taking its time getting going, my interest was fast disappearing until the family took a boat from Guatemala to Mexico where they hopped a fully loaded train heading north, where even the tops of the train were full, the same train that Mago decides to rob, along with Casper and Smiley, though when he starts to rape Sayra, Casper slashes him with a machete, the weapon of choice within this gang infrastructure, before forcing Smiley to return back home, as he alone will face the consequences. Only at this point did the film catch fire for me, as Casper renounced his earlier life with a single act of brutal vengeance, one for which a price is immediately placed on his head, as Smiley and the entire Central American gang hierarchy is sent after him in retaliation. The rest of the film has an energized, on-the-run feel while at the same time Central Americans are trying to make their way north through Mexico, where initially they are met with fruit thrown onto the train, but much later in the journey it becomes rocks and bullets when locals are threatened by the influx of “foreigners.” Sayra feels a special attachment to this silent soul who literally saved her life and perhaps lost his own in the process. Though warned by her father to ignore him, she continues to reach out to him, feeling somehow he is connected to her salvation.

The film does an excellent job grounding the narrative circumstances with the Mara Salvatrucha gang, as we soon discover through Casper that from them there is no escape, which parallels the flight north for Central Americans who are fleeing circumstances from which there is also no return, where the outcome for both is near futile, where only a few survive. Once they are on the route north, it becomes largely a mood and character piece, as the intensity increases and the editing becomes more precise, with a brief look of DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978), where gorgeous landscapes and musical selections ground the film in a natural Spanish element of transition. While the filmmaker is a native Californian, the language and geography is exclusively south of the border Spanish, where he spent time riding the rails, gathering a rhythm in motion and an appreciation for understanding the likelihood of unexpected misfortunes, evoking a similar experience where malicious men await their path hoping to expropriate every last dime from these intensely desperate people. The chosen locales have the look of believability, as does the sincerity of the characters that are forced to make horrible choices along with hundreds of others who are similarly easy prey. There are no good outcomes, as even those who survive endure several different opportunities with the most vile forces of evil, experiences that leave them traumatized and grief stricken, saddened by how much they’ve lost just to survive.

Christian Science Monitor (Peter Rainer) review [B]

The debut feature of writer-director Cary Joji Fukunaga, "Sin Nombre," in Spanish with English subtitles, offers a new variation on a familiar theme. Instead of illegals crossing over the US border from Mexico, Fukunaga shows us Central American migrants trying first to make it through Mexico en route to a better life in America. Sayra (Paulina Gaitan), a Honduran teenager, attempts the life-threatening emigration with her father and uncle by riding the rails. Her story runs into another, more conventionally melodramatic one involving Casper (Edgar Flores), a member of a ruthless Mexican gang who becomes her unwitting protector. Fukunaga has a fine, spacious film sense and a gift for action, but the doomy, heavy-handed plot devices and overwrought, overacted gangland set pieces betray a novice's hand. "Sin Nombre" received raves at this year's Sundance Film Festival. This young director may very well make a marvelous movie one day, but let's not get too carried away right now.

Political Film Review Michael Haas

Sayra (played by Paulina Gaitan) is on a long train trip from Honduras to relatives in New Jersey through Guatemala and México in Sin Nombre (nameless), directed by Cary Fukunaga. Although she must elude the border patrol, the main peril is gang warfare inside México, beginning at the Chiapas border. At gunpoint, the Salvratrucha gang (an actual gang that also operates in Los Angeles) tries to extract money from migrating Guatemalans as well as Mexicans, including Willy (played by Edgar Flores), who eventually is trying to escape a death sentence from his own gang and a rival gang. For Willy, the gang’s disrespect for his girlfriend is a motive to kill its leader, Mago (played by Tenoch Huerta Mejia), who is molesting Sayra. The two then bond but only one survives. Because the film shows exactly how the trek occurs for millions of migrants, how the criminal gangs operate, and why most migrants do not complete the trip, the Political Film Society has nominated Sin Nombre as best film exposé of 2009.

Village Voice (Scott Foundas) review

Before setting pen to paper, Sin Nombre writer-director Cary Joji Fukunaga purportedly rode the rails in the company of real illegal immigrants traveling from Mexico to the U.S. But from the looks of it, he spent even more time studying Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles's slicked-up slum porn City of God: diminutive kids with guns—check; carefully lit and art-directed shantytowns—check; doomed teen romance—yep, that too. In fairness, Fukunaga's film isn't quite as ostentatiously vulgar as Meirelles's: Its loftier aspirations are obvious from the opening shot of El Casper (Edgar Flores), a young initiate in the fact-based Mara Salvatrucha gang, staring fixedly at a photo enlargement of a leafy wooded landscape—a signal flare (along with his teardrop tattoo) that he's really a soulful poet-dreamer trapped in a violent existence. After his girlfriend is raped and murdered by the gang's more elaborately tattooed leader, Casper makes a break for it, hopping the same U.S.-bound freight train on which Honduran teen Sayra (Paulina Gaitan) and her father are heading to the promised land. Meanwhile, Casper's best friend, Smiley (pint-sized Kristian Ferrer), is dispatched to track the fugitive down—hmmm, do you think these two amigos will find their personal loyalty tested by obeisance to La Mara? Lushly photographed and meticulously sound-designed, Sin Nombre is visceral without being vital, researched without ever seeming lived-in. The best that can be said is that it's a more honest film on the subject of immigration than the recent Crossing Over—but then again, so is Beverly Hills Chihuahua.

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

In some ways an extension of his 14-minute short Victoria Para Chino, a favorite at festivals from New York to Park City a few years back, Cary Joji Fukunaga's Sin Nombre dramatizes an immigrant journey from Central America to the Texas-Mexican border. Fukunaga assumes his audience is well-versed in the usual horrors that drive people from their homelands, at least as they've been trivialized in abominations such as Trade and Blood Diamond, avoiding predictability by focusing on gang warfare in Latin America as a form of cannibalistic oppression. The off-putting corporate sheen of the film belies Fukunaga's sincere, casually fixated attention on the quotidian habits of his characters—from their culinary appetites to their superstitions. Nothing is spelt out yet everything is clearly understood: how El Casper (Edgar Flores)—who flees his homies after killing their obscenely tattooed leader, Lil' Mago (Tenoch Huerta Mejía)—straps himself to a latch atop a train so the trees and wind won't knock him off; how the kindness a girl, Sayra (Paulina Gaitan), shows him after he saves her from rape doesn't stem from gratitude alone but from an understanding of their mutual loss; and how no one wants El Casper around because his presence seemingly threatens doom. Throughout El Casper and Sayra's train ride, Fukunaga evokes the complexity and diversity of public opinions to such flights (people on the sidelines either shower them with food or stones), but his main interest always remains the territorially-obsessed nature of being part of a gang. Interestingly, Fukunaga doesn't see El Casper's behavior, or that of his young upstart El Smiley (Kristyan Ferrer), as some affront to civic and national pride but as a compulsion strangely akin to that of Sayra and her family to enter a capitalist society. Which is why the last image in the film is so jolting: From beginning to end, the director understands that life for most immigrants is an expansive turf war—one anxious initiation and pledge after another.

The Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review

By Hollywood standards "Sin Nombre" is a very small movie, shot on a tight budget in Mexico, but it's a very big deal. This astonishing debut feature announces the arrival of a lavishly gifted filmmaker, Cary Joji Fukanaga. (He's California-born, of a Swedish-American mother and a Japanese-American father.) The subject is immigration, the language is Spanish -- with good English subtitles -- the scope is epic and the achievement, though solidly grounded in conventional storytelling, is a revelation.

For much of its 96-minute running time, "Sin Nombre" ("Nameless") functions as a road movie -- a railroad movie. Freight trains carry unauthorized loads of human cargo -- scores of impoverished immigrants perched precariously atop the cars -- as they lumber through Mexico. The riders share a single purpose, to make their way ever northward, then try to cross into the United States. The images are stunning -- there's a sense of whole populations on the move -- and all the more so for being shot, by Adriano Goldman, in 35mm color. (The use of film cameras instead of digital equipment was a crucial aesthetic choice that contrasts grinding squalor with graphic grandeur.)

The dramatic scheme is straightforward. An ardent teenager, Sayra (Paulina Gaitan), travels on foot from her native Honduras into Mexico in the company of her father and uncle. Their dream destination is New Jersey, where members of their family await the phone call they hope to make from somewhere in Texas. Though they succeed in boarding a northbound train in the southern state of Chiapas, they intersect fatefully with Casper, aka Willy (Edgar Flores), a desperate gang kid with divided loyalties and a moral structure that's barely begun to coalesce.

Within that scheme, the camera makes vivid discoveries: chilling gang rituals; a national gang network of cell phones, covert spotters and secret signs; a Mexican response to Central American freight-train riders that ranges from tossing oranges to throwing rocks. And within the harrowing narrative lies the affecting beginnings of a love story.

The filmmaker directs his actors -- some of them seasoned professionals, some of them in front of the camera for the first time -- with an absolute authority that's absolutely invisible. Scenes play as if caught on the fly by a documentarian. (One of the movie's most conspicuous strengths is its quasi-documentary detail.) "Sin Nombre" makes no judgments on immigration as a political issue. Mr. Fukanaga's purpose is to evoke the immigrants' experience, which he does with such eloquence and power as to inspire awe.

Cinematical (Erik Davis) review at Sundance

Salon (Andrew O'Hehir) review including an interview with the director

Pajiba (Brian Prisco) review

eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [4/5]

Screen International review Mark Goodridge at Sundance

Critic's Notebook [Robert Levin]

Monsters and Critics Ron Wilkinson

filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [2.5/5] also seen here: Reel.com review [2/4]

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

Variety (Todd McCarthy) review

Time Out New York (Joshua Rothkopf) review [4/6]

Time Out Chicago (Ben Kenigsberg) review

Boston Globe review [2.5/4] Wesley Morris

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [3/4]

Los Angeles Times (Betsy Sharkey) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]

The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review

Mara Salvatrucha - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Altered Dimensions: MS-13 Gang

Mara Salvatrucha Gang - MS-13

Mara Salvatrucha by Luis Sinco- The Digital Journalist February 2006

Gangs - Murders and Attempted Murders - Crime - MS-13 - Newark ... A Fearsome Gang and Its Wannabes, by Cara Buckley from The New York Times, August 19, 2007

FBI — MS-13 - Press Room - Headline Archives 01-14-08

Fuller, Sam

from DVDBeaver Director’s Chair: http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/reviews.htm

Samuel Fuller's screenwriting, production and direction established him as a controversial political figure in American cinema. Consistent opposition to standard conventions and ideology including traditional Western lifestyles developed his reputation as a highly acclaimed auteur by many leftist European film-makers. At the age of 12 Fuller became a copyboy on The New York Journal and at 17 a crime reporter for the San Diego Sun. His colorful past included hopping freight trains while touring the country and later a stint in the army (World War II) fighting in North Africa and Europe. His greatest recognition came with Forty Guns (1957) which was initially condemned in the U.S. because of its ham-fisted deconstruction of the narrative, but in Europe it was strongly praised for its stylistic and aggressive vigor. Among the director's unfinished projects was a film about Abraham Lincoln, in which Lincoln is seen in a uncharacteristically critical light.

Fuller, Sam Art and Culture

“Film is like a battleground,” Sam Fuller once said. Although he was speaking not as himself but in a cameo role as a filmmaker in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Pierrot le Fou,” the comparison applies perfectly to his own directorial work. Cigar firmly planted between his lips, Fuller has been getting tough in the American trenches since the late 1940s.

Whatever the source of Fuller's cynical views -- perhaps his experiences as an infantryman in World War II or his stint as a tabloid crime reporter -- the battleground he plays on does not allow for simple fights between good guys and bad guys. In Fuller's films, good and evil blur and shift, and moral value is never absolute. In “Underworld USA” (1961), the crime fighters are as dirty as their criminal counterparts. Even the central character, who pursues the drug lords responsible for his father’s death, is driven more by bloodlust than a desire for mere revenge. In “Shock Corridor” (1963), a journalist enters a mental institution, posing as a psycho in order to solve a murder. But as he grows obsessed with winning the Pulitzer Prize, his own sanity comes ironically into question.

Many of Fuller’s films explore the tension between group mentality and individual identity. While social groups in Fuller's world, be they families or nations, are supportive and comforting, they are often corrupt or perverse as well, threatening the emotional and ideological autonomy of the individual. Faced with this duality, characters discover that neither independence nor collaboration comes without cost. Fuller seems to delight in letting his characters stumble through these contradictions on the way to their own demise.

Fuller’s preoccupation with conflict is reflected in his style: abrupt, startling montages and close-ups alternate with intricate camera movement and long takes. Although his shocking, low-budget melodramas did not earn him the great esteem of his contemporaries in Hollywood, Fuller is now highly regarded for his thematic and visual complexity. Critic Andrew Sarris crowned the director “a true American primitive” -- perhaps the truest praise Fuller could wish for.

Film Reference Dana B. Polan

Sam Fuller's narratives investigate the ways that belonging to a social group simultaneously functions to sustain and nurture individual identity and, conversely, to pose all sorts of emotional and ideological threats to that identity. Fuller's characters are caught between a solitude that is both liberating and debilitating, and a communality that is both supportive and oppressive. Unlike Howard Hawks, whose films suggest the triumph of the group over egoism, Fuller is more cynical and shows that neither isolation nor group membership is without its hardships and tensions.

Many of the films touch upon a broad kind of belonging, as in membership in a nation—specifically the United States (although China Gate comments on several other nationalities)—as a driving idea and ideal, national identity becoming a reflection of personal identity. For example, in Fuller films about the building of the West, such as Forty Guns, The Baron of Arizona, or Run of the Arrow, the central characters initially understand their own quests as necessarily divergent from the quest of America for its own place in the world. Even though the course of the films suggests the moral and emotional losses that such divergence leads to, the films also imply that there is something inadequate in the American quest itself, in the ways such a quest undercuts its own purity by finding strength in a malevolent violence (the readiness of "ordinary" people in The Baron of Arizona to lynch at a moment's notice), in mistrust and prejudice (unbridled racism in Run of the Arrow), or in political corruption.

Similarly, in films such as House of Bamboo, Underworld USA, and Pickup on South Street, about criminal organizations infiltrated by revenging outsiders, the narrative trajectory will begin by suggesting the moral separation of good guys and bad guys, but will then continue to demonstrate their parallelism, their interweaving, even their blurring. For example, in Underworld USA, the criminals and crimefighters resemble each other in their methods, in their cold calculation and determination, and in their bureaucratic organization. Tolly, the film's central character, may agree to map his own desire for revenge onto the crimefighters' desire to eliminate a criminal element, but the film resolutely refuses to unambiguously propagandize the public good over personal motives.

At a narrower level of group concern, Fuller's films examine the family as a force that can be nurturing but is often stifling and riddled with contradictions. Not accidentally, many of Fuller's films concentrate on childless or parentless figures: the family here is not given but something that one loses or that one has to grope towards. Often, the families that do exist are, for Fuller, like the nation-state, initially presenting an aura of innocent respectability but ultimately revealing a corruption and rotted perversity. Indeed, The Naked Kiss connects questions of political value to family value in its story of a woman discovering that her fiancé, the town's benefactor and a model citizen, is actually a child molester. Similarly, Verboten! maps the story of postwar America's self-image as benefactor to the world onto an anti-love love story. A German woman initially marrys a G.I. for financial support and then finds she really loves him, only to discover that he no longer loves her. Love, to be sure, is a redemptive promise in Fuller's films but it is run through by doubt, anger, mistrust, deception. Any reciprocity or sharing that Fuller's characters achieve comes at a great price, ranging from mental and physical pain to death. For example, in Underworld USA, Tolly is able to drop his obsessional quest and give himself emotionally to the ex-gangster's moll, Cuddles, only when he is at a point of no return that will lead him to his death. Against the possibility of love (which, if it ever comes, comes so miraculously as to call its own efficacy into doubt), Fuller's films emphasize a world where everyone is potentially an outsider and therefore a mystery and even a menace. No scene in Fuller's cinema encapsulates this better than the opening of Pickup on South Street where a filled subway car becomes the site of intrigued and intriguing glances as a group of strangers warily survey each other as potential victims and victimizers. Echoing the double-entendre of the title (the pickup is political—the passing on of a secret microfilm—as well as sexual), the opening scene shows a blending of sexual desire and aggression as a sexual come-on reveals itself to be a cover for theft, and passive passengers reveal themselves to be government agents.

In a world of distrust, where love can easily betray, the Fuller character survives either by fighting for the last vestiges of an honest, uncorrupted love (in the most optimistic of the films) or, in the more cynical cases, by displacing emotional attachment from people to ideas; to myths of masculine power in Forty Guns; to obsessions (for example, Johnny Barratt's desire in Shock Corridor to win the Pulitzer Prize even if that desire leads him to madness); to mercenary self-interest; to political or social ideals; and ultimately, to a professionalism that finally means doing nothing other than doing your job right without thinking about it. This is especially the case in Fuller's war films, which show characters driven to survive for survival's sake, existence being defined in Merrill's Marauders as "put(ting) one foot in front of the other."

Fuller's style, too, is one based on tensions: a conflict of techniques that one can read as an enactment for the spectator of Fuller themes. Fuller is both a director of rapid, abrupt, shocking montage, as in the alternating close-ups of robber and victim in I Shot Jesse James, and a director who uses extremely long takes incorporating a complex mix of camera movement and character action. Fuller's style is the opposite of graceful; his style seems to suggest that in a world where grace provides little redemption, its utilization would be a kind of lie. Thus, a stereotypically beautiful shot like the balanced image of Mount Fujiyama in House of Bamboo might seem a textbook example of the well-composed nature shot but for the fact that the mountain is framed through the outstretched legs of a murdered soldier.

All-Movie Guide bio info by Jason Ankeny

Samuel Fuller Profile Bret Wood essay from Turner Classic Movies

Samuel Fuller Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television

Samuel Fuller • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Jeremy Carr, October 3, 2014

Narrative Tabloid of Samuel Fuller Grant Tracy from Images (Undated)

Creature Contact Richard T. Jameson, originally published in Movietone News, June 1976, republished in Parallax View, May 1, 2012

“When it’s night time …”: Myth and the Geography of the Unconscious in ‘I Shot Jesse James’ Rick Hermann, originally published in Movietone News, June 1976, republished in Parallax View, May 3, 2012

The Steel Helmet: “I’ve got a hunch we’re all going around in circles” Kathleen Murphy, originally published in Movietone News, June 1976, republished in Parallax View, May 7, 2012

‘Run of the Arrow’: Birth Pangs of the United States Rick Hermann, originally published in Movietone News, June 1976, republished in Parallax View, May 8, 2012

Sam Peckinpah Sam Fuller, originally published in Movietone News, February 1979, republished in Parallax View, May 2, 2010

Sam Fuller Article by Gerald Peary Cigars and Cinema with Sam Fuller, from The Real Paper, September 4, 1980

The Big Red One Robert Horton, originally published in Movietone News, March 1981, republished in Parallax View, September 24, 2009

Unofficial Sam Fuller site Battleground of Film, by Richard von Busack from Metro, November 6 – 12, 1997

At last … the really ‘Big Red One’ Richard T. Jameson, originally published in Steadycam, February 13, 2005, republished in Parallax View, May 9, 2012

Forty Guns • Senses of Cinema Tony Williams, October 20, 2005

Beyond Fuller • Senses of Cinema Barrett Hodsdon, September 14, 2009

Sam Fuller: An Introduction Sean Axmaker, from a Fuller retrospective in 1999, republished in Parallax View, May 1, 2012

Pickup on South Street • Senses of Cinema Rick J. Thompson from Senses of Cinema, July 18, 2000

Merrill's Marauders • Senses of Cinema Kin Ferate, October 4, 2002

The Bottom Shelf by Adam Jahnke feature and DVD reviews from The Digital Bits, May 6, 2003

Eye Weekly Article Medium Cool: Fuller Frontal Assault, by Jason Anderson, October 14, 2004

Some Notes on The Big Red One to Honour the 10th Anniversary of ... Christa Lang Fuller, November 25, 2007, also seen here: Some Notes on The Big Red One to Honour the 10th Anniversary of Sam Fuller’s Death

Why Samuel Fuller? • Senses of Cinema Tag Gallagher, April 14, 2009

White Dog • Senses of Cinema Jennie Lightweis-Goff, September 14, 2009

Underworld, U.S.A. • Senses of Cinema Wheeler Winston Dixon, September 14, 2009

A Fuller View: The Films of Samuel Fuller: If You ... - Senses of Cinema A Fuller View: The Films of Samuel Fuller: If You Die, I’ll Kill You! by Lisa Dombrowski, reviewed by Adrian Danks, April 4, 2010

Samuel Fuller: "Film is like a battleground" - Parallax View Sean Axmaker, May 1, 2012

The Samuel Fuller Film Collection  Richard T. Jameson from Parallax View, May 9, 2012

Fuller, Samuel They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Hey, Mom, Where’s My Suicide Note Collection? Richard Thompson article and interview from Movietone News, June 1976, republished in Parallax View, May 2, 2012

In Appreciation: Samuel Fuller and François Truffaut Tim Wong from The Lumière Reader

Samuel Fuller: About Film Noir an interview (from 1972 – 1976) by Robert Porfirio and James Ursini from Images journal, while the full unabridged interviews appear here: Film Noir Reader 3

I SHOT JESSE JAMES

USA (81 mi) 1949

Time Out

Fuller's first film is a virtual illustration of his dictum that the cinema is like a battleground: 'Love, hate, action, violence, death...in one word, Emotion.' Having to choose between loyalty to the past and a love for Jesse James (Hadley), or a desire for a future and the love of a woman, Fuller's outlaw hero Bob Ford (Ireland) makes the wrong choice. He shoots James, only to discover that his whole life has become defined by this deed: doomed to re-enact the murder on stage, and condemned to notoriety in 'The Ballad of Jesse James'. His vision of the future fades into jealousy, economic hardship and, as Phil Hardy has pointed out, 'misplaced love'. As such, more a psychological drama (emphasised by the use of close-up) than a Western, and a highly original film.

The New York Times (-- T. M. P)

A new, or perhaps it would be more accurate just to say another, chapter was added to the screen's own growing Jesse James legend yesterday with the opening at the Palace of "I Shot Jesse James." Poor Jesse isn't around very long before Bob Ford, that "dirty little coward," etc. of ballad renown, shoots his friend in the back and then the picture settles down to relating how the treacherous Mr. Ford lives on for a year or so regretting his black deed.

Bob Ford, according to the screen play written and directed by Samuel Fuller, was motivated to kill Jesse bacause he wanted to settle down on a farm with a gal named Cynthy Waters, who wanted an honest man for a husband. The governor of Missouri had offered a reward plus amnesty for any criminal who turned in Mr. James dead or alive. But Cynthy, much as she loved the rascally Bob, couldn't stand to marry a man who would so betray a friend. As a matter of fact, no one else could stand Bob Ford either.

In preparing his picture, Mr. Fuller concentrated more on character study than action and since the character study is not particularly interesting, "I Shot Jesse James" is a very mild pretense at being an entertainment. John Ireland, as Bob Ford; Barbara Britton, as the girl; Preston Foster, as the honest citizen who eventually wins her and Reed Hadley, as Jesse James, give helpful performances, though their work is without distinction. In short, "I Shot Jesse James" adds up to a commonplace movie.

Turner Classic Movies Jeremy Arnold

At first glance, I Shot Jesse James (1949) might seem to be a disappointment. For a western, there's very little gunplay, landscapes or even horses on display. Most scenes take place in rooms, and the substance of the movie exists more inside the characters than out. Once one realizes that this is exactly what writer-director Sam Fuller was going for, I Shot Jesse James can be experienced as an intense examination of betrayal and its consequences, with a power that lingers.

The story, obviously enough from the title, is that of Robert Ford, the outlaw who infamously shot his friend Jesse James in the back in order to be granted amnesty and receive a reward. As written by Fuller and portrayed by John Ireland, Ford is a sympathetic, tragic figure - not really a hero, but also not a villain. He's a man whose decision to murder Jesse seems to have sprung more from simple-mindedness than from malice. Nonetheless, he is tormented by his actions and forced to relive the murder over and over, be it by reenacting the event in a stage show, hearing a song about it from a traveling minstrel, or simply enduring the scorn of others wherever he goes. While he claims not to care that he killed his pal for money, he develops ever-increasing self-loathing and a broken heart. He's deluded enough to think that a showgirl, Cynthy (the somewhat miscast Barbara Britton), will now marry him, but in fact she fears him to the point of being unable to tell him "no."

Also in the cast is an appealing Preston Foster as John Kelley, who may or may not be trying to win Cynthy for himself. Ultimately he becomes town marshall as well as a friend to Ford, but he must face him in a final showdown. Every major character is morally ambiguous and satisfyingly complex.

It may not be Fuller's most seamless picture, lagging a bit at times, but it is an auspicious directorial debut with many memorable moments. There's a striking vividness to certain sequences which Fuller would soon elevate to masterful levels in films like The Steel Helmet (1951) and Park Row (1952).

Before I Shot Jesse James, Fuller was a pulp novelist with several screenplay and story credits under his belt, as well as a former reporter and infantryman. Fuller's stories, including his novel The Dark Page, had caught the eye of independent producer Robert Lippert, a smart businessman who had begun his own career by pioneering the drive-in theater and in later years would invent the concept of the multiplex. Lippert was now offering Fuller the chance to write and direct his own low-budget movies.

Fuller pitched his idea for a movie about Robert Ford, Lippert agreed to it, and the two men shook hands. "That was all that was needed," Fuller later wrote. To Fuller, I Shot Jesse James was "a yarn about a guy who kills the man he loves... Holdups, revolvers, leather gloves, and galloping horses didn't do anything for me. The real aggression and violence in the film would be happening inside the head of a psychotic, delusional killer... What excited me about the yarn were the echoes of the Cain and Abel fable in Genesis, the first murder. The 'brother' killer is condemned to relive his crime over and over, never escaping the shame and outrage of it. I wanted to show Ford realizing that he's sick, then follow him as he sinks deeper into his sickness."

Fuller also took the chance to upend the Jesse James myth a little bit. Fuller believed that the real Jesse was bisexual, and there's a famous sequence here of Ford scrubbing James' back as James takes a bath - moments after Ford considers shooting him instead. The implication might have been lost on Lippert, but critics noticed it and were impressed with the complexity on display in the Ford-James relationship.

Fuller shot the picture in ten days for $100,000. "The time constraints and small budget," he wrote, "made I Shot Jesse James one of the toughest films I ever did, but I loved every minute of it. The scenes with little or no action were the most difficult. I used close-ups to reveal as much as possible about my characters' emotions."

The result was a sizable hit - quite a big deal for an independent movie in 1949, and a big confidence booster for the fledgling director: "Lippert had trusted me, giving me the independence to do the film my own way, and I hadn't let him down. The film's critical and box-office success was thrilling... There were scores of phone calls from producers with all kinds of offers. But I was going to stick with Lippert because he'd believed in me." Indeed, Lippert went on to produce Fuller's next two movies, The Baron of Arizona (1950) and The Steel Helmet, both of which are also now available in this new DVD boxset from The Criterion Collection's "Eclipse" line. While there are no extras other than some liner notes, picture and sound quality are up to Citerion's excellent standards, and the low (for Criterion) retail price makes the set a must-buy.

With the recent DVD releases of Jesse James (1939), The Return of Frank James (1940) and The True Story of Jesse James (1957), not to mention the upcoming Warner Brothers feature The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), I Shot Jesse James makes for mighty interesting viewing and shows how the most potent American myths can lend themselves to multiple interpretations.

Eclipse Series 5: The First Films of Samuel Fuller Criterion essay by Nick Pinkerton

Me and Sam Fuller Criterion essay by Lisa Dombrowski

Eclipse Series 5:The First Films of Samuel Fuller - The Criterion ... Criterion Collection

“When it’s night time …”: Myth and the Geography of the Unconscious in ‘I Shot Jesse James’ Rick Hermann, originally published in Movietone News, June 1976, republished in Parallax View, May 3, 2012

Fuller By Two Donald Phelps from Rouge, also reviewing PARK ROW

The House Next Door - Eclipse Series 5 [Keith Uhlich] also reviewing THE BARON OF ARIZONA and THE STEEL HELMET from The First Films of Sam Fuller

DVD Talk - Eclipse Series [Jamie S. Rich] also reviewing The First Films of Sam Fuller

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) also reviewing The First Films of Sam Fuller

The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin] also reviewing The First Films of Sam Fuller

DVD Verdict [Ben Saylor] also reviewing The First Films of Sam Fuller

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] also reviewing The First Films of Sam Fuller

DVDBeaver - Eclipse Fuller boxset [Gary Tooze]

THE BARON IN ARIZONA

USA (97 mi) 1950

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

Writer-director Samuel Fullers's second feature (1950), shot in only 15 days, is an oddball western, based somewhat on fact, about James Addison Reavis, a 19th-century forger who staked a claim to the entire Arizona territory, and his young ward, who becomes his wife. Not one of Fuller's best films, though the subject is fascinatingly offbeat, the cinematography is by James Wong Howe, and no personal Fuller project is devoid of interest; perhaps the undernourished budget and a relative absence of action are the problem. With Vincent Price, Ellen Drew, Beulah Bondi, and Robert Barrat.

The House Next Door - Eclipse Series 5 (Keith Uhlich] (excerpt) also reviewing the First Films of Sam Fuller

In contrast, Fuller’s second feature, The Baron of Arizona (1950) is all thumbs, as much a forgery as the one perpetrated by its protagonist James Addison Reavis (Vincent Price). Price can get his freak on with the best of them, and he’s justified in declaring Reavis one of his all-time favorite roles. But his assaying of this charismatic con artist (who creates a detailed rock-paper-people trail that ascribes to he and his heirs full ownership of the state of Arizona) is strangely muted within Fuller’s muddled whole. The Baron of Arizona is a globetrotter, traversing a poverty row-forged path from the United States’ harsh western countryside to a puzzle-box Spanish monastery (where books are chained up for their own protection) and back again. Yet it never attains the hypnotic precision of Fuller’s best work (the psychologically charged sense of a nightmare unfolding), and this despite the presence of master cinematographer James Wong Howe, working for chiaroscuro-evocative scale.

Epinions DVD review [Stephen O. Murray]

Criterion Eclipse has just released a bare-bones set of early Sam Fuller movies, including the 1950 "Baron of Arizona" with Vincent Price playing the title role. Through most of the movie (having had some difficulty staying with it in the first half hour), I thought that it was less outlandish than the other two Fuller westerns I've seen--"Run of the Arrow" with a very eccentric portrayal of a bitter Confederate Army veteran going native among Plains Indians, played by Rod Steiger with a strong Irish brogue; and "40 Guns" with Barbara Stanwyck at her bossiest, bossing the 40 gunmen she employs.

I expect something extreme in Fuller movies. The scheme to claim the whole of Arizona Territory (18,000 square miles) by forging a Spanish land grant (a complicated project that includes carving three stones as well as getting into two places that are difficult to access in Spain) is pretty far-fetched, but the real Fuller(ian) twists come late. The opening frame, a bunch of self-satisfied leading Arizona citizens celebrating Arizona statehood in 1912, is stultifying, and the start of the lengthy flashback to 1880 about the scam James Addison Reavis (Vincent Price) concocted and executed over the space of many years to claim Arizona for an orphan whom he had raised by Beulah Bondi (utterly wasted in the movie) and then married. Where the money to finance all the preparations came from is never addressed. Getting to the land grant books in Spain occupies nearly half the movie's running time, and involves becoming a monk and then recruiting a band of gypsies (by seducing its de facto leader).

Reavis was reputedly Price's favorite role. As Reavis, Price has some charm, if more megalomania, and the movie turns quite romantic (I suspect Production Code demands being a factor). I find it difficult to credit Reavis's success as a seducer of a tough gypsy woman, but Price is quite good back in Arizona, extorting money (and turning down a very large settlement offer), and being challenged by John Griff, the Department of the Interior's forgery expert, the author of the book from which Reavis learned forgery (played by Reed Hadley, who played the title character in Fuller's first movie, "The Man Who Shot Jesse James," which is also in the Criterion Eclipse set).

Ellen Drew is not bad as the baroness who worships her husband, though uncomfortable about the amount of hatred the claims he makes for her land. Tina Pine is totally unconvincing as the gypsy leader.

My own favorite Vincent Price performance is in "His Kind of Woman" (1951 with Jane Russell and Robert Mitchum, directed by John Farrow), but he was often entertaining, as he was here.

Fuller seems to me to have had a weakness for melodrama and to have made a mistake in having Griff narrate the film, particularly to a group who could be presumed to know most of the story already. I think that because he was so independent, Fuller has been overrated by auteurists (European and American), though the movie he made after "Baron," "Steel Helmet" (1951) is a great one. (I also particularly like "The Naked Kiss," (1964), find considerable interest in his 1953 "Pickup on South Street," much of interest in "Shock Corridor" (1963), and find his magnum opus, "The Big One" (1980) almost entirely unbelievable. There are scenes that fall very flat in all of the Fuller movies I've seen. I think he is another writer/director who needed the aid of a strong editor.)

I should make explicit that there is very little of a western here, though the main action scene definitely belongs in the genre of western. The movie is about an extortion scam--and love--not a shoot 'em up action picture.

(There are no bonus features on Eclipse DVDs.)

There really were land grants forged by James Addison Reavis, who married the heir he selected and billed himself as "Baron of Arizona," and the documents were proven to be forgeries by an expert named Royal Johnson. The court case in the movie bears little resemblance to the historical ones (not least in that Reavis was not an effective courtroom advocate for himself and that the real Reavis had forged alliances with rich and powerful figures, including George Hearst and the Southern Pacific Railway (which sent him off to check out claims in the first place).

Eclipse Series 5: The First Films of Samuel Fuller Criterion essay by Nick Pinkerton

Me and Sam Fuller Criterion essay by Lisa Dombrowski

Eclipse Series 5:The First Films of Samuel Fuller - The Criterion ... Criterion Collection

DVD Talk - Eclipse Series [Jamie S. Rich] also reviewing I SHOT JESSE JAMES and THE STEEL HELMET from The First Films of Sam Fuller

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) also reviewing The First Films of Sam Fuller

The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin] also reviewing The First Films of Sam Fuller

DVD Verdict [Ben Saylor] also reviewing The First Films of Sam Fuller

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] also reviewing The First Films of Sam Fuller

DVDBeaver - Eclipse Fuller boxset [Gary Tooze]

THE STEEL HELMET

USA (85 mi) 1951

Time Out

A characteristically hard-hitting war movie from Fuller, charting the fortunes of Gene Evans' Sergeant Zack, sole survivor of a PoW massacre in Korea. Saved by a Korean orphan and joining up with other GIs cut off from their units, Evans' cynical veteran embodies the writer-director's abiding thesis that, to survive the madness of war, a ruthless individualism is necessary. Fuller glamorises neither his loner protagonist nor the war itself: if he clearly supports the US presence in Korea, battle is still a chaotic, deadly affair, and nobody has much idea of why they fight. The action scenes are terrific, belying the movie's very low budget.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] (excerpt) also reviewing The First Films of Sam Fuller

Sam Fuller was a WWII veteran as well, but he made his anti-war statements by depicting the hell he'd experienced firsthand. From 1951, The Steel Helmet was the first American movie set during the Korean war, but it's drawn more directly from Fuller's experience in the trenches. At times, it's an awkward cross between a genre war picture and a full-on Fuller yarn, but it has moments of sublime power, as when one soldier strikes up "Auld Lang Syne" on a portable organ, only to find out it's the same tune as the Korean national anthem. Plus, you finally get to find out where Steven Spielberg got the name "Short Round" from.

Raging Bull Miker Lorefice

Early Fuller masterwork is one of the top few war films, and one of the only that's actually fairly worthy of the anti-war tag. One of the most remarkable things about Fuller is he could move between tone so well, sometimes the film is loud and bombastic others times it's an astute minimalist masterpiece. Fuller let's the absurdity of war speak for itself, and the situation dictate, but in his anything goes pull no punches fashion that made him arguably the most intelligently radical filmmaker ever to succeed in the Hollywood system. In doing so he creates a work that's both witty and truthful, in my opinion a far more entertaining and worthwhile film than more famous entries like Stalag 17 and M.A.S.H.. It's the first Korean war movie, one that came out during the war yet is anything but the usual flag waving kill the enemy of the year propaganda and even slyly works in criticism of some of our most dubious acts of racism like the Japanese internment and racial segregation. The soldiers have nothing in common except that they are fighting on the same side, a side that for various reasons considers them to be second class rejects. The people they are fighting for and against are indiscernible to them, all "gooks". Gene Evans, in his screen debut, is brilliant as the raw battle weary survivalist sergeant who winds up leading the rag tag group for a box of stogies. Tagging along with him is a Korean boy, who befriends Evans despite his obvious racism, and winds up in battle because of what his religion teaches him. Adding to the preposterousness, the soldiers pick the sacred site in the country they are fighting for, the Buddhist temple, for an "observation post" and though they of course intend to leave it as they found it, well, you can guess. The film is very pro soldier, making them dignified and proud, willing to fight for what they believe in even if it doesn't believe in them. It's pro humanity, that's why it's anti-war. As important as identity is, the message is what's important is survival. But to survive they have to not only be lucky but be able to shut off the very things that makes them worthwhile, their emotion and humanity, and perhaps that's more than anyone can ask.

The House Next Door - Eclipse Series 5 [Keith Uhlich] (excerpt) also reviewing the First Films of Sam Fuller

But Fuller’s next film (the final one in this set) is an indisputable masterpiece. The Steel Helmet (1951) is a fever dream of the Korean War, entirely possessed of its own unique, inimitable rhythms. Gene Evans’ gruff, cigar-chomping Sergeant Zack acts as de facto head of a ragtag assemblage of soldiers and hangers-on only a few steps removed from complete caricature. The film is primarily a series of clashes between skin color, physiognomy, ideology, and attitude, but what separates this from the liberal pieties of lesser filmmakers is Fuller’s masterful abstraction of the landscape in which these confrontations occur. A battle with snipers in a fog-shrouded forest seems to go on for an eternity – it goes past the point of exhaustion to a disquieting place of hyper-awareness. Like a virus, it infects each and every subsequent action so that, say, a booby-trapped explosive packs all the numbing, horrific punch that it should – it’s not merely a punctuating, manipulative grace note; it resonates with all that has come before and all that is yet to be.

The Steel Helmet’s primary location is, fittingly, an abandoned temple that the soldiers attempt to fortify. But even with the presence of a literal deity (a passive-aggressive statue of Buddha), God is entirely absent from this place. The men argue over menial tasks, engage in casual racism and impromptu discussions of same (in this respect, Fuller was way ahead of his time, practically predicting the progress made by civil rights luminaries like Rosa Parks), but the only certainty in this brute-intellectual hothouse is death, which comes, quickly and gracelessly, on a good many of the inhabitants. The loss of William Chun’s young Korean tag-along Short Round (no doubt an inspiration for Steven Spielberg, who owes a mostly unexplored aesthetic debt to Fuller, especially in The Steel Helmet-reminiscent War of the Worlds, similarly a tale of battle-scarred survivors) drives Sergeant Zack over the edge, though his madness, for all its outward aggression, is in no way physically debilitating. Perhaps this is the ultimate tragedy for Fuller: that despite the many horrors we witness and experience, our bodies so rarely allow us respite from the everyday grind. To some, this might be a prevailing example of the indomitability of the human spirit, but Fuller’s cinema, for all its life, for all its bravado, possesses a troublingly antithetical undercurrent, a resolute desire – on the part of its characters and, perhaps, of their Creator – to escape into the pure, unencumbered bliss of insanity.

Maybe that’s what movies are for.

Eclipse Series 5: The First Films of Samuel Fuller Criterion essay by Nick Pinkerton

Me and Sam Fuller Criterion essay by Lisa Dombrowski

Eclipse Series 5:The First Films of Samuel Fuller - The Criterion ... Criterion Collection

The Steel Helmet: “I’ve got a hunch we’re all going around in circles” Kathleen Murphy, originally published in Movietone News, June 1976, republished in Parallax View, May 7, 2012

Jerry Saravia

Lars Lindahl

2 Things @ Once

Channel 4 Film

DVD Talk - Eclipse Series [Jamie S. Rich] also reviewing I SHOT JESSE JAMES and THE BARON OF ARIZONA from The First Films of Sam Fuller

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) also reviewing The First Films of Sam Fuller

The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin] also reviewing The First Films of Sam Fuller

DVD Verdict [Ben Saylor] also reviewing The First Films of Sam Fuller

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)

DVDBeaver - Eclipse Fuller boxset [Gary Tooze]

FIXED BAYONETS!

USA (92 mi) 1951

Time Out

'His films are like scenarios made from communities of rats, the camera itself a king rat,' David Thomson wrote of Fuller. The rat trap is the Korean war, in a studio set of fake rock and fake snow, literally a theatre of war. The constantly moving camera isolates the tensions within an American platoon fighting a rearguard action. As the leaders are picked off by the 'alien' reds, one sensitive corporal's struggle with the responsibilities of leadership drags the plot in a slow dance of death; only to be blasted apart by a typical cigar-chewing affirmation of good old Yankee guts. From John Brophy's novel Immortal Sergeant (previously filmed in 1943).

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

Samuel Fuller's second Korean War movie, after the masterpiece The Steel Helmet, also stars Gene Evans as a grizzled sergeant. This time, he's Sgt. Rock, leading a ragtag rear guard through the snowy Korean terrain, attempting to convince the enemy that their numbers are greater than they actually are. Richard Basehart is the Corporal who can't bring himself to fire his weapon and worries how he will lead when his time comes. A handful of dogfaces come to life for brief moments thanks to their vicious, rambunctious dialogue, but even so it's often difficult to tell them apart, especially wearing their heavy snow gear. Fuller's action sequences were one of a kind, getting close to the fray and moving quickly, but never more quickly than the eye can follow. James Dean apparently has a bit part in this movie, but I was unable to spot him. Fuller claims in his great autobiography A Third Face that Dean has a line -- "Who goes there?" -- which echoes around in his head to emphasize isolation, but I didn't see this scene in the movie.

Fox has released Fixed Bayonets! on a new 2007 DVD in a beautiful, black-and-white widescreen transfer. It comes with a trailer and a still gallery, but nothing else. Some information on Dean and his whereabouts in the movie would have been a good addition.

Slant Magazine [Eric Henderson]

Excepting those by Terrence Malick, modern war movies appear to be engaged in battle with all earlier war movies, attempting to one-up each others' verisimilitude in both the fury of combat and the camaraderie between men during times of distress. We've come a long way from the days of Patton, which had no room for camaraderie (Scott's Gen. Patton was more than enough character for the whole film) or combat (which was only there to justify the endless scenes of strategy planning). If the Korean War B-movie Fixed Bayonets! has endured, along with Samuel Fuller's various other war epics culminating with The Big Red One, it's because of a few aspects particular to Fuller's career, which began not in film but in yellow journalism and pulp writing. The films of Fuller, who was himself a soldier during WWII, share with current war movies a seeming desire to emphasize war realistically, which is to capture both the random moments violence as well as the anxious tedium surrounding them. If the penny-dreadful obviousness of Fixed Bayonets!' painted backdrops and cardboard mountains are plainly evident throughout, it's worth considering that Fuller was probably never half as interested in conveying realism on cinematic terms as he was solidifying the alternate "realism" of his bulldog persona. (His magnum opus may not even be a movie at all but instead his mammoth, 600-page autobiography A Third Face.) The technical shortcomings of many Fuller films lend credibility to his "roll up your sleeves and start slinging the shit around" approach to moviemaking. That he apparently slung them out so quickly and efficiently (the very same year saw Fuller releasing the even more respected war effort The Steel Helmet) gives them the impression of being much closer to the truth, with far fewer filters in-between. When comparing even the clumsiest sequences of Fixed Bayonets! to something like Saving Private Ryan (whose opening scene probably comes as close as any film ever has to fulfilling Fuller's much-repeated quip that for audience members to really understand what it meant to be in the middle of combat, you'd have to plant a sniper in the theater and pick off a few at random intervals), it's hard not to trust Fuller's plain English mise-en-scène as the real deal, basic reportage. Any number of war films have shown what it's like to watch the soldier standing to your side get vivisected by shrapnel. Only a few have offered complementary moments of dull revulsion as raw and masculine as Fixed Bayonets!' platoon stomping their bare feet on the cold, rocky floor of a cave in a vain attempt to break up the frostbite.

DVD Outsider Slarek

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson)

Turner Classic Movies Jeremy Arnold

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

Orlando Weekly (John Thomason)

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)

DVDBeaver [Gary Tooze]

PARK ROW B 89

USA (83 mi) 1952

This is a real hokey piece of Americana, a good 4th of July feature shot on New York City's Park Row in the 1880's, a street set among the statues of Benjamin Franklin, Johannes Gutenberg, and Horace Greeley, icons representing the birth of democracy, specifically freedom of the press, complete with heavy handed, jingoistic idealism that is sure to put a smile on your face, as it has the CITIZEN KANE newsreel narration force of absolutism telling us that journalism is something powerful and unstoppable, akin to the priesthood for laying the groundwork of the moral fabric of the nation, OF THE WORLD!  It kind of reminded me of a black and white STAR TREK episode, everyone's either all good or all bad, a financial flop financed by the director, filmed during the McCarthy era, my guess is this was considered subversive at the time.

The film pits two rivals in the newspaper business against one another, located nearly across the street.  Gene Evans plays Phineas Mitchell, a hard nosed, cigar chomping, no nonsense editor of "The Globe," with an unbridled enthusiasm for the principles of journalism, reminding us at every turn that on Park Row, a free press lays the cornerstone of our freedoms.  He is pitted against the ravishingly beautiful, elegantly attired Mary Welch, who plays Charity Hackett, the formidable publisher of "the Star," Mitchell's former employee, to whom he replies:  "Is that the only dress you've got?  You remind me of the obituary column.  You're always in black."  According to "The Globe's" ace reporter Davenport, "her name is Charity, of which she has none." There's some terrific underlying sexual overtones about the ruthless competition of the business, including a private meeting with close ups in the dark, their faces illuminated in light.  "You could have money, contacts," she tells him, he kisses her with the camera swirling all around them to sweet music, but in their proposed marriage, a merger of the two papers, each is hell bent on dominating the other.  Again, Davenport's assessment as he speaks to Ms Hackett under a giant portrait of herself, "I'm glad you're a woman, cos when you die, your name'll die with you." 

In response, she gives him the marching orders of war, laying siege, stopping "The Globe's" supply of equipment, paper, type, ink, but her hooligans get carried away and start physically assaulting employees, breaking the legs of a little kid who works for them, which sets the scene for Mitchell's retaliation.  In a single take, starting in the newspaper composing room, the camera follows him, weaving in and out of buildings, then on down the street as Mitchell is engaged in hand to hand combat , punching anyone from "The Star" who stands in his way, punching one man mercilessly under the statue of Horace Greeley, then another under the statue of Benjamin Franklin, the Patron Saint of Park Row, but it's no use, they eventually bomb him out of business just as he's about to expose "The Star" for creating such a scandal, for forging receipts for money "The Globe" was trying to collect from ordinary citizens in their efforts to collect $100,000 to build the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. 

At the same time, Davenport, his aging chief reporter, dies, writing his own obituary, a ringing endorsement for the freedom of the press, which "doesn't exist in most countries.  The press can be good or evil, depending on the character of those that run it...Never let anyone tell you what to print," patriotic words which persuade Ms Hackett to finally utter:  "For the first time, I see what you're fighting for," telling Mitchell that now "I killed my own newspaper so yours can be born."

The film ends with an image of the Statue of Liberty, a symbol of the friendships of two republics.  The citizens of France donated their own money to help build the statue, a people to people project without government interference, ending with the majestic words:  "I want the whole world to know we have the Statue of Liberty because of a newspaper."

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

This neglected Samuel Fuller feature from 1952, a giddy look at New York journalism in the 1880s, was his personal favorite--he financed it himself and lost every penny. A principled cigar smoker (Gene Evans) becomes the hard-hitting editor of a new Manhattan daily, where he competes with his former employer (Mary Welch) in a grudge match loaded with sexual undertones; meanwhile a man jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge trying to become famous, the Statue of Liberty is given to the U.S. by France, and a newspaper drive raises money for its pedestal. Enthusiasm flows into every nook and cranny of this cozy movie: when violence breaks out in the cramped-looking set of the title street, the camera weaves in and out of the buildings as through a sports arena, in a single take. "Park Row" is repeated incessantly like a crazy mantra, and the overall fervor of this vest-pocket Citizen Kane makes journalism sound like the most exciting activity in the world. 83 min.

Epinions [Stephen O, Murray]

The fifth movie made by writer/director Sam Fuller (1911-1997), and, alas, not available even on VHS, let alone DVD, "Park Row" is at once very sentimental and quite misogynist. "War" is not a metaphor in the description "newspaper war" as Fuller portrays publishing in the New York City of the 1880s. Phineas Mitchell (Gene Evans) envisions better ways of doing things, including sponsoring the invention of linotype, inventing newspaper stands, and launching a campaign to raise funds to put up the Statue of Liberty (accepted by Congress without any appropriation of tax dollars for erecting it in New York Harbor).

Across the street from his marginal facility for The Globe is the established Star, published by a ruthless woman misnamed "Charity" but with a fitting last name (Hackett). What seems like a Joan Crawford or Gale Sondergard role was played passionately by newcomer Mary Welch. (Sondergard was blacklisted. Welch made no other movies and died while giving birth in 1958.)

An old sidekick of Horace Greeley named Josiah Davenport (Herbert Heyes) encourages Mitchell's innovations and encourages Ms. Hackett to get out of a man's business. After all such antagonism between a man and a woman can only mean they are in love, right?

Although the movie is difficult to get into and is filled with stock characters and hackneyed attitudes, the look of the old-time machinery and Fuller's talent for filming mayhem make an interesting spectacle. "Citizen Kane," it ain't, but Fuller did a lot without much budget or cast talent. Ordinary material and often cliched dialogue were filmed from some striking angles with very fluid (often tracking) camerawork (credited to Jack Russell, who would later film "Psycho" for Alfred Hitchcock).

Fuller also put a statue of Ben Franklin to interesting use.

The movie celebrates freedom of the press, that was endangered in the McCarthy era and is all but extinct in America now (or translated into the freedom to trample privacy of individuals rather than to examine what the US government is doing in our name and the shredding of the Constitution by Alberto Gonzales et al.).

"Park Row" is notably upbeat compared to some other Fuller movies such as "Shock Corridor" and "The Steel Helmet." (The latter is my favorite Korean War movie, BTW.)

Fuller By Two Donald Phelps from Rouge, also reviewing I SHOT JESSE JAMES

Channel 4 Film Richard Luck

The Cinematic Threads Matthew Lotti

Time Out

The New York Times A.W.

PICK UP ON SOUTH STREET

USA (80 mi) 1953

The Lumière Reader (capsule) Mubarak Ali

Or Honour Among Thieves, Fuller-style, is all loopy about a top-secret microfilm that our pickpocket hero unknowingly obtains while pulling a 'job' on the film's unlikely femme fatale. Fuller's rough and distinctively frugal filmmaking is evident in this classy crime-drama-noir – which shares the stratosphere of fifties noir cinema with Kiss Me Deadly and The Big Heat – and you can almost taste the sleaze as it threatens to bubble to the surface (though not in the absolute uninhibited glory as in some of his later works). And the kiss that passes between Widmark and Peters is electrifying, as is Thelma Ritter's gritty, Oscar-nominated performance.

Pickup on South Street Dave Kehr from the Reader

It isn't his best, but this 1953 feature may be the archetypal Sam Fuller film, a condensation of his themes and techniques with the steam still rising. As Fuller's typically perverse, pigheaded hero--a pickpocket who accidentally lifts a roll of top-secret microfilm--Richard Widmark draws on the snickering, psychotic style that first made him a star as a heavy. Fuller's didacticism is fully vented, as is his flair for chunky, racking violence: the film contains an unforgettable image of a thug's chin being bounced rhythmically down a flight of stairs. There's an excellent, layered performance from Thelma Ritter, an actress generally given to cartoonishness. With Jean Peters and Richard Kiley. 80 min.

Time Out

A superb thriller dismissed by many as a McCarthyist tract on its first appearance. Nominally about the hunting of Commie spies, it broadens to probe the hysterical New York underworld of the '50s, effortlessly capturing the feel of the milieu. The character Fuller seems to admire most is Widmark's pickpocket, a petty criminal who finally helps the FBI not because of any political commitment, but to settle a personal score; and although there are patriotic lines in the film, like Ritter's 'What do I know about Commies? Nothing. I just know I don't like them', they usually have an ironical slant in that they stem from private rather than public motives. Perhaps finally flawed by its overt political assumptions, but the film remains a desperate kind of masterpiece.

Pacific Cinematheque (link lost)

Pickup on South Street A lurid mix of crass anti-Communist propaganda and violent vintage noir, Pickup on South Street confounded many critics upon its first appearance, but is now rightly regarded as a chief exemplar of American primitive Sam Fuller's brutally kinetic cinema. Richard Widmark has the lead as "three-time loser" Skip McCoy, a New York pickpocket who finds himself dangerously embroiled in Cold War espionage when he inadvertently lifts some microfilm from the purse of Candy (Jean Peters), former mistress of a Red spy. The action unfolds in a shadowy, shabby universe of subways, waterfronts, and seedy rooms; the film's patriotic American heroes are all petty criminals, prostitutes, and stool pigeons. Thelma Ritter, as lovable informant Moe -- "What do I know about Commies? Nothing. I just know I don't like them" -- earned an Oscar nomination for her supporting role. "A superb thriller. . . The film remains a desperate kind of masterpiece" (Time Out).

Pickup on South Street Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television

Is Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street (1954) a film noir? One might point out that it was made after the main heyday of noir, although major noir films were still being made. The film involves international Communism and espionage, and this is also very different from the crime backgrounds of most noirs. Fuller is staunchly anti-Communist, and this gives a moral dimension to the film that is absent from most noir. The characters, especially the women, struggle heroically to prevent weapons secrets from falling into the hands of the Communists. This sort of moral point is simply not in most noir film's world view. They tend to take place with purely criminal matters in a world without much transcendent moral purpose.

For another, none of the women in the film are femme fatales. The glamorous looking heroine turns out to be the main male character's redeemer, not his destroyer. No one seems emotionally obsessed, and no romantic passion leads to death.

If the term "film noir" simply refers to any black and white non-whodunit crime film made in Hollywood in the 1940's and 1950's, then Fuller's film is automatically a film noir. Otherwise, one might point out that Fuller's work does not fall into standard aspects of noir themes or style. His work seems very different from true film noir. Fuller rarely uses the extreme angle photography found in Fritz Lang or Robert Siodmak. Night scenes do not involve high contrast.

The title of this film echoes Raymond Chandler's prose mystery tale "Pickup on Noon Street" (1936). Later, Fuller will also create Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street (1972), so he likes this form of title. Such street titles were also a feature of the semi-documentary film noir, such as Henry Hathaway's The House on 92nd Street (1945). That film, like Fuller's, deals with foreign spies trying to uncover important weapons secrets in New York City; in both, FBI agents try to counteract them.

Pickup on South Street • Senses of Cinema Rick J. Thompson from Senses of Cinema, July 18, 2000

Writer-director Samuel Fuller opens his sixth film, a low-life, petty criminal, nominally anti-Communist B-pic, with a wordless sequence of striking virtuosity. The film opens in a New York subway car during rush hour. It's packed--standing room only. No dialogue--just train noises. We recognize Jean Peters, looking very trampy, gazing vacantly out the window. We don't know her character or her place in the story--whatever that's going to be--and the screenplay refuses to divulge these things (nor does the deadpan acting prepare us for the vigorous performances to come--in the cases of Widmark, Peters, and Kiley, downright athletic). Willis Bouchey is very interested in her--he's watching her like a hawk, and so is his offsider (we know their relationship from their exchange of glances as the scene developes). Fuller builds this through medium shots and close-ups. Then a very well-groomed Richard Widmark enters the car in a pale grey suit, neat tie, and snapbrim fedora, carrying a folded newspaper. He slides between people until he finds a space opposite Peters. Bouchey isn't interested in Widmark. Widmark surveys but avoids making eye contact. The close-ups shift to waist level, between Widmark and Peters. He places the folded newspaper over her purse. Under the paper, his hand opens the purse and slides in, firkles about, removes the valuables, closes the purse. Peters is none the wiser (a fair description of her character in the ensuing story), but Bouchey is watching. It takes him a minute to figure out that he has just watched a professional pickpocket at work. Perfect timing: by the time he does, Widmark has exited at his stop. Bouchey and sidekick, frustrated by the crowd, can't follow him. It is a stylish and seductive opening (and it will be reprised at the climax of the film as Widmark surreptitiously disarms his unknowing enemy).

Pickup on South Street is a good introduction to Fuller's tabloid world in all its breezy improbability. The hero, Skip (Widmark), is a small-time pickpocket, a three-time loser just out from his last jolt; one more arrest and he goes back forever. The heroine, Candy (Peters), is no better than she needs to be (she asks Skip how he got to be a pickpocket; indignantly, he replies, "How did you get to be what you are?" which, combined with her fashion choices, makes it pretty clear for 1953). She is the mistreated girlfriend of Joey (Kiley), posing as an industrial espionage entrepreneur. She doesn't know he's a Commie, or that he is having her deliver a strip of microfilm with state secrets on it to a contact who will take it straight to Moscow. Skip doesn't know that he has stolen it with her wallet; when he finds it, he hides it, assuming (quite rightly) that it will have some exchange value. Willis Bouchey is an FBI agent shadowing Joey and Candy; he intervenes with Skip's nemesis, Captain Tiger of the NYPD pickpocket squad, to cut a deal with Skip. Threading through this is Thelma Ritter as an aging professional informer used by all the other characters in their pursuit of each other and the microfilm.

In their own contradictory ways, Candy and Skip become a couple ('fall in love' somehow doesn't quite fit the film's emotional aesthetics). Anna Dzenis found Fuller's later gangster film, House of Bamboo (1955), the most romantic film she'd seen all year, a judgment which surprised many. In a similar way, Pickup on South Street is Sam Fuller's cheerfully iconoclastic romantic comedy. Candy has to find Skip in order to get Joey's film back; when she does, in Fuller's version of a "cute meet", he knocks her out. And goes through her purse again. Later, in tight close-up two-shots, she tells him she's kissed a lot of guys: "but it's really different with you Skip--I really like you". Skip answers: "Everybody likes everybody when they're kissing."

It was once popular to try to locate Fuller's work within a 1960s-1970s political spectrum, but it didn't work out well--he wasn't that sort of thinker. The microfilm-Red agents McGuffin in Pickup, like the uranium in Hitchcock's Notorious (1946), could as easily be 100% pure heroin, or diamonds, or--as Joey tries to persuade Candy--simple, bread-and-butter industrial espionage. And while the dialogue establishes that the film's demimonde characters, in a rough sort of loyalty, uniformly reject the commies, it also establishes that they actually don't know much about what Communism is--except, of course, that it is the enemy.

Pickup was also a regular fixture on top ten lists of film noir before feminist intervention in that discussion made a femme fatale mandatory for the category. Seen now, it's Fuller sui generis, making films that are like no others. Nearly always working with tiny budgets, Fuller always spent up big on cinematographers, in this case Joe MacDonald. Fuller and MacDonald build the film on two extremes: tight closeups lit for sharp facial modelling; and free, sometimes flamboyant camera movement.

Pickup is assembled from standard pulp fiction components: situations, stock characters, conventions, cliches, attitudes, images, gestures, actions, and relationships. Unlike later practitioners described as neo- or post- , Fuller's work is at one with such material, not outside it. The film draws its energy from creating a world from within this pulp paradigm in all its crudity, brutality, sleaziness, and pure improbability (Fuller had a set built for Skip's home: an abandoned bait shack built on piles ten meters out in the East River, reached by a wooden gangplank. Its refrigerator is a crate lowered by a rope into the river. Its only amenity is a hammock. Fuller gets full value out of the set, using every inch of it across several scenes--wonderful filmmaking. Living there, how does he keep his suits so perfectly pressed? Where's the wardrobe? Does he cook? Why would a professional criminal choose a place with only one way in and out? Don't ask).

At the center of all this, Fuller, MacDonald and Widmark create the Skip character: cocky, breezily insolent, violent, skilled, devoted, suspicious, held together with a luminous self-confidence. Widmark doesn't get much better than this--nor does Fuller.

Pickup on South Street: Extra! Pickpocket Foils Doom Plot! Criterion essay by Luc Sante

Me and Sam Fuller Criterion essay by Lisa Dombrowski

Pickup on South Street (1953) - The Criterion Collection

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culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti Phil Freeman

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Pickup on South Street Colin from Ride the High Country

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filmcritic.com drops off South Street Christopher Null finds it unremarkable, too far-fetched to take seriously and too frivolous

Mondo Digital also reviewing STREET OF NO RETURN and TIGRERO (Directed by Mika Kaurismäki starring Samuel Fuller and Jim Jarmusch)

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HELL AND HIGH WATER

USA (103 mi) 1954 ‘Scope

Time Out

Known for his uninhibited camera movements, Fuller was the obvious person for Fox to ask to make a CinemaScope movie in an enclosed space in order to prove to doubting executives that the walls of the cinema would not appear to rotate during tracking shots or pans. The result was Hell and High Water, which is mostly set aboard a submarine, and tells the story of a group of patriots and mercenaries who stop the Chinese from dropping an atomic bomb from an 'American' plane at the time of the Korean war. A deeply pessimistic film, it questions the roots of loyalty and identity by examining the stated motives of its characters at every stage of the film. Widmark is at his ambiguous best.

Slant Magazine [Fernando F. Croce]

In A Third Face, his magnificently pulpy memoirs, Samuel Fuller called Hell and High Water his least favorite film. The film may not smash through the Cold War thriller format as ferociously as Forty Guns smashes through the western format, but it's enough of a distinctive and personal work to put its creator's dismissal in perspective as another entry in that notoriously untrustworthy biography, or possibly an instance of a great filmmaker throwing his fans a curveball, like Luis Buñuel dubbing A Woman Without Love his worst picture. In any case, the film kicks off like gangbusters, with a flurry of international intrigue surrounding the disappearance of noted French scientist Prof. Montel (Victor Francen). The professor turns up as the leader of a cabal of "private individuals" who have taken upon themselves to fight the atomic threat hanging over the Free World; their instrument is ex-Navy officer Jones (Richard Widmark), who's hired to pilot a re-tooled Japanese submarine through neutral waters and uncover some dastardly Commie scheme. As a men-on-a-mission adventure film, Hell and High Water more than holds its own with such other all-business '50s naval flicks as The Enemy Below and Run Silent Run Deep. But then again, Fuller's greatness resides less in constructing genre pieces than in bursting their seams, and the film's tight action sequences don't linger in the mind nearly as much as its oddities, like crew member Cameron Mitchell trying to woo scientist babe Bella Darvi by displaying his tattooed torso, or a Chinese sailor strumming a slangy version of "Don't Fence Me In." Often seen as typical '50s Red-baiting propaganda, the film is actually a companion piece to Fuller's great Pickup on South Street, with a less savage Widmark playing another mercenary (he even reuses the "flag-waver" remark) with a hidden, intuitive moral code that ultimately transcends knee-jerk patriotism. It's a code acknowledged by Francen's repeated axiom ("Each man has his own reason for living, and his own price for dying"), a concept which, much like Fuller's brand of cinema, achieves true force only once it ventures past abstract homily and into visceral concreteness.

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HOUSE OF BAMBOO B 86

USA (102 mi) 1955 ‘Scope

The first postwar American film to be shot completely in Japan, while Bogart’s TOKYO JOE (1949) was the first to film there, creating newsreel shots while most of Bogart’s film was actually completed in the studio. Opening with a daring train heist taking place under a Mount Fuji backdrop, where a man is killed and another seriously shot, Fuller makes terrific use of colorful Tokyo locations. Playing out like a B-movie, there’s a major contrast between the colorful Japanese costumes of bright kimonos seen on the streets and the mandatory trench coats and fedora hats of film noir, where much of the dialogue has that gruff American gangster style, which in this overly polite and ultra conformist Asian world is strange, to say the least. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting take on Japan attempting to establish a new postwar identity and America trying to find its rightful place in the postwar reconstruction. It plays out like a travelogue, but also, due to the obvious culture shock, is filled with a continued series of unfortunate misconceptions that are overly stereotypical to the point of being crude and offensive, much like how American GI’s impose their own shallow, Ugly American manners and customs on any foreign nation where they happen to be sent, which usually includes their predominate need for a heavy dose of alcohol and prostitutes. Interestingly, what happens here is Americans bring their criminal mentality of gangsters and hoods into what is otherwise a pacified nation with little to no crime, where few individuals outside the police even have access to guns. Adapted from a Harry Kleiner play that was originally featured in the William Keighley movie THE STREET WITH NO NAME (1948), a rousingly patriotic FBI tribute that’s also a suspenseful noir, where the near documentary, on-location scenes in Washington, D.C. and the FBI training facilities in Quantico, Virginia have been transported to gritty locations in Tokyo and Yokohama, Japan in 1954, shot in ‘Scope where Fuller uses the same cinematographer, Joe MacDonald. This successful blend of a Hollywood melodrama set within the actual settings of an exotic Asian locale was used again in Richard Quine’s THE WORLD OF SUZIE WONG (1960), where an American artist reluctantly finds love with a local prostitute among exquisite Hong Kong locations. In each, the semi-documentary setting is so visually pronounced that whatever story there is hardly matters, becoming time capsules of a specific place in time. Akira Kurosawa was much more successful capturing an authentic postwar look of Japan, especially his ability to capture unforgettable street scenes in DRUNKEN ANGEL (1948), STRAY DOG (1949), and IKIRU (1952).

When an American GI dies from the train robbery before naming his crime boss, U.S. Army intelligence working in cooperation with Japanese police authorities determine he was secretly married to a Japanese woman, a secret he covered up, believing if others knew it could cost her life. Enter the wooden-faced Robert Stack as Eddie Spanier, a man with few words, a trench coated American hood with a tendency to barge into situations and demand someone in charge who speaks English, chastising anyone who can’t speak the language, rousting some of the local gambling dens, asking for protection money, bringing the whole attitude of film noir into what are otherwise dazzling, color saturated street scenes. Searching for the girl, he walks through a kabuki theater dress rehearsal, basically pushing them out of his way, also an elaborate labyrinth of boats and wooden walkways at the pier, basically an excuse to film at such a beautifully authentic seaside locale. After a brief search, he finds the girl, Mariko (Shirley Yamaguchi), pretending he was her husband’s army buddy, acting surprised to learn he’s dead. His nosing around brings him straight to the crime boss, Robert Ryan as Sandy Dawson, who is curious who’s still walking around Tokyo using such outmoded collection methods. Dawson and his den of thieves live in an elaborately decorated abandoned temple, with manicured gardens and a view of Mount Fuji, where Spanier’s no nonsense approach appeals to Dawson, as he’s a guy that won’t ask any questions, he’ll simply carry out his assignment, like he’s been doing all his life. The twist here is that Spanier is really an Army intelligence officer infiltrating the crime syndicate, hoping his information can trace the gun that shot the American at the train heist. All goes according to plan, except Dawson wants to know the Mariko angle and why he’s mixed up with her, eventually settling on the made up explanation that she’s Spanier’s “kimono girl,” a bought and paid for prostitute. What’s interesting is Fuller’s spin on her profession, where neighbors aren’t ashamed that she’s a prostitute, but that she’s serving an American, a foreigner, something considered beneath their dignity, as that brings dishonor and disgrace to the neighborhood.

While the American and Japanese love interest is conveyed in an artificalized, over-the-top melodrama with a syrupy musical soundtrack, this stands in stark contrast to their undercover roles, both assuming false identities, as through their eyes is an unsentimentalized glimpse into a gritty, surprisingly violent criminal underworld that Dawson, a former GI himself, runs like a military operation, where what they’re discovering is the corrupt influence of the American occupation of Japan. Fuller tries to get inside the head of the gang culture itself, which has a ranking system of favoritism, where Eddie quickly rises to the top of Dawson’s trust, which doesn’t sit well with some of the others, especially the way Dawson lavishes praise and attention with a chummy homoerotic intimacy, undercutting the group’s morale. But when he’s informed by a reporter that Eddie is an inside plant from military intelligence, Dawson vows to get his revenge, angry that he’s misjudged him, taking his betrayal personally, mapping out a job where he’s sure to get killed. As events spiral out of control, what seems clear is other than death, there’s no measure of justice among thieves, where this sinister portrait of underworld amorality undermines the Japanese reconstruction effort, where America is supposed to be helping reconstruct a postwar moral order. Using lush colors and fluid camera movements, the surface look of Japan couldn’t be brighter, but like Cagney in WHITE HEAT (1949), Dawson gets trapped evading the police, ironically stuck in a children’s amusement park filled with mothers and tiny children, where’s he’s seen wandering around with a gun in his hand with families screaming in panic. As police try to clear everyone away, there is utter pandemonium, like a GODZILLA (19954) disaster movie, where Fuller stages a momentous scene with Dawson herded up to an elevated revolving globe, like a Disneyland attraction. From this height, Dawson unleashes ferocious firepower, seemingly never running out of bullets, continually spraying the grounds, keeping police at bay. Eddie arrives and tries to track him down, initially with no success, but while there’s plenty of bullets in the air, this is a dramatically staged shoot out in such a memorable location. A mix of color and pulp style, where Fuller attempts to interject Japanese street scenes and culture throughout, the film survives as a highly entertaining piece of Americana set in a fragile period of Japanese history.

House of Bamboo Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Tony Rayns

1954. American-led gang pulls raids in Tokyo, Yokohama. Ex-GI involvement suspected. Lone American infiltrates gang. Identity, motives unclear. House of Bamboo offers all Fuller's key themes and motifs in a characteristic thriller form: dual identities, divided loyalties, racial tensions, life (and cinema) as war. Part of it is Fuller the war correspondent, reporting from the front, leaving the viewer to fight out meanings alongside the characters. Part of it is Fuller the American tourist, shamelessly reducing Japan to stereotypes, twisting local colour to his own ends. Godard used to think it was Fuller's best movie.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List Tristan Johnson

Sam Fuller's eighth feature is a pulpy post-war noir played out in American occupied Japan, where a veritable nest of unsavory sorts peck at the sides of a civilization still scrambling to get back on its feet. Set in 1954 Tokyo, filmed in Cinemascope, HOUSE OF BAMBOO is a pureblooded noir, whatever the opening train robbery or the occasional travelogue tendencies may otherwise suggest. Robert Stack plays Eddie, an ex-con with a job prospect and a pinch of wanderlust who makes his way to the city only to find himself hopelessly entwined in both his dead comrade's circle of scoundrels and the police investigation slowly honing in on them. Eddie does what any aspiring antihero would do and shacks up with his friend's widow, all while courting favor from brash racketeer Sandy--a villain's villain, played by Robert Ryan--and it's not long before he's in well over his head. The grand finale is a manic game of cat and mouse through a city carnival, a setting not unheard of in the annals of noir, but Fuller's denouement paints a very literal vision of America's postwar playground abroad, a visually ridiculous but altogether serious showdown that stands perfectly on its own merits.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

House of Bamboo runs slightly cooler, and is stronger for it. Filmed in Japan, as an opening voiceover and shots of Mount Fuji remind us, the loose remake of Street of No Return finds Robert Stack's Army intelligence officer infiltrating a crime ring headed by genteel but ruthless Robert Ryan. In their informative commentary, noir historians James Ursini and Alain Silver say that Stack was unaware that Fuller intended to portray a homoerotic attraction between the two men, but the cultured Ryan caught on; his is certainly the more nuanced performance, while Stack's intelligence officer seems anything but. As in Forty Guns, the hero is tied down with a heterosexual romance, but here it's perfunctory as well as unconvincing, despite Shirley Yamaguchi's sensitive performance. In the movie's most delirious sequence, Stack starts shaking down the pachinko operators who pay Ryan protection. Two successive encounters progress identically, line-for-line, until Stack gets through a rice-paper screen and finds Ryan and his gang waiting for him. A comment on the repetitions of genre as well as police work, it's a startling moment: Stack might as well have been thrown into the audience. (In its bold theatricality, the scene recalls the films of yakuza filmmaker Seijun Suzuki, who was among several Japanese directors Fuller studied before making his film.) Fuller's oeuvre has been slow to come to DVD, but the release of these two films, particularly with their CinemaScope images properly preserved, is a major step in the right direction.

House of Bamboo - Directed by Samuel Fuller • DVD ... - Exclaim! Travis Mackenzie Hoover

Manny Farber once described a Sam Fuller movie by saying "the film is sincere about inexplicable mush." So it is with House of Bamboo, a crime thriller set in occupied Japan for purposes that we mortals may never know for sure. Reworking the far less interesting Street With No Name, it features furrow-browed Robert Stack as the cops' inside man infiltrating a group of ex-G.I. criminals led by Robert Ryan. The complication this time is Shirley Yamaguchi, the Japanese girlfriend of one of Ryan's victims, who falls for Stack only to be shunned by her gaijin-hating neighbours. There's no mistaking Fuller's sympathy for bi-racial couplings and flair for socko compositions; there's also no divining what the hell it's saying about the Japanese, Americans in Japan, or anything else having to do with the human race. There's no real exploration of the post-Occupation situation, no real delving into Japanese culture and, inexcusably for a Tokyo-set crime film, no mention of the word Yakuza — they could have shot it in Cleveland for all they do with the setting. No Fuller film is without its points of interest, such as Ryan's terrifically ominous performance and an impossibly brilliant reveal after someone gets thrown through a paper screen. But though it makes hysterically personal what Street made poker-faced and remote, I'm clueless as to what it's so worked up about. James Ursini and Alain Silver provide another "Fox Film Noir" commentary, which is excellent at mapping the many confusing thematic threads; apparently, Fuller allowed a crowd to beat up on Stack when they mistook him for an actual criminal. Also included are a couple of audio-free newsreels involving the principals, and the American and Spanish trailers.

Slant Magazine [Keith Uhlich]

A few years back I rented a pan-and-scan video copy of Samuel Fuller's House of Bamboo and within minutes of its opening sequence (a brutally detached train heist, enacted in the shadow of Mount Fuji, that climaxes with an extreme close-up shriek) I turned it off in disgust. It's already somewhat unprincipled to watch a movie—any movie—outside of its proper frame ratio, but something rang particularly false about House of Bamboo's rectangle-to-square reduction that was only brought into focus once I viewed the film's DVD transfer.

Quite simply, House of Bamboo has some of the most stunning examples of widescreen photography in the history of cinema. Travelling to Japan on 20th Century Fox's dime, Fuller captured a country divided, trapped between past traditions and progressive attitudes while lingering in the devastating aftereffects of an all-too-recent World War. His visual schema represents the societal fractures through a series of deep-focus, Noh-theatrical tableaus, a succession of silhouettes, screens, and stylized color photography that melds the heady insanity of a Douglas Sirk melodrama (see, as an especial point of comparison, Sirk's 1956 Korea-set war film Battle Hymn) with the philosophical inquiry of the best noirs.

The result is a rather uncharacteristic dual love story, one explicit (between the film's mystery-shrouded, ugly American protagonist Eddie Spanier, played by Robert Stack, and his stunning Japanese mistress Mariko, played by Shirley Yamaguchi) and one implicit (in the subtly homoerotic relationship between Eddie and Tokyo-based American crime boss Sandy Dawson, played by Robert Ryan). The serious critical studies of Fuller's film tend to focus on the latter interactions between Eddie and Sandy (understandable considering the inspired pairing of Stack's perpetually stoic cluelessness with Ryan's subdued sexual menace), while ultimately dismissing the Mariko/Eddie relationship as substandard Hollywood kitsch. Indeed, film historians James Ursini and Alain Silver, on an otherwise excellent DVD commentary track, suggest that Fuller is completely disinterested in these scenes and then go on to state—or, rather, contemptuously bemoan—that the heterosexual love story is what the "audience" (that reductive, amorphous blob of a description that we critics fall back on far too often) really wants to see.

I'd counter that the Mariko/Eddie scenes are as interesting as the ones between Eddie and Sandy, though for entirely different reasons. Ursini and Silver unwittingly hit upon the points of interest when they superficially note that the gender roles in the gauzy romantic scenes are reversals of the norm, with Eddie often undressed or "feminized" in a kimono while Mariko—with a kind of ingratiating, yet robotic thoughtfulness—attends to certain of his bodily needs. Interestingly, though she cooks his meals, massages his shoulders, and compliments his eyebrows, sexual gratification is not among Mariko's offerings. Indeed, the only time she kisses Eddie (Fuller working quite cognizantly and subversively against Hays code hysteria) is in a moment when he needs quick-think protection from one of Sandy's gang members. And as the film progresses, Mariko becomes more and more motherly, with Fuller finally tossing her out of the narrative in an alternately cruel and heartbreaking scene, occurring about 20 minutes before House of Bamboo's actual climax, where she races around Eddie's room—all the time opening and closing the director's omnipresent screens and doors—and worriedly calls his name.

I'd guess that many viewers focus on the Eddie/Sandy relationship because of its relative subtlety, which is in strict opposition to the explicit and overbearing nature of Mariko's interactions with Eddie (always accentuated by Leigh Harline's weeping-violin orchestrations). To an extent, this is a product of the times—obviously, homosexual attraction could not be openly spoken of in a '50s studio picture, so the tendency for a modern viewer is, perhaps, to latch onto House of Bamboo's subtextual motivations as its most interesting aspects. Yet this is to give short shrift to the Mariko/Eddie love story, which complements the soft-spoken undercurrents of the Eddie/Sandy bond with big, broad colorful strokes and effectively accentuates the romanticism of Fuller's atypically nonchalant portrayal of an interracial relationship, a union that, in the film's final, beautifully composed long shot, seems graciously blessed by the gods. It's the hetero yin to the film's homo yang and it should ultimately be clear, as the saying goes, that you can't have one without the other.

Notcoming.com [Ian Johnston] also seen here: not coming to a theater near you

DVD Savant Review: House of Bamboo Glenn Erickson

House of Bamboo (1955) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Jeremy Arnold

House of Bamboo - Turner Classic Movies Richard Harlan Smith

House of Bamboo DVD review | Cine Outsider Slarek

American Cinematographer Kenneth Sweeney

DVD Talk [Stuart Galbraith IV] also seen here: DVD Talk

DVD Verdict [Paul Corupe] also seen here: DVD Verdict

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

digitallyOBSESSED.com Jeff Wilson

Notebook Reviews: Samuel Fuller's "House of Bamboo" (1955) on ... Fernando F. Croce from Mubi

Fulvue Drive-in Nate Goss

MovieFreak.com Dylan Grant

Dennis Schwartz also seen here: Ozus' World Movie Reviews

Eye for Film Leanne McGrath

eFilmCritic.com Jay Seaver

eFilmCritic.com Greg Muskewitz

KQEK DVD Review [Mark R. Hasan]

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

Reel Film Reviews David Nusair

Variety

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) also seen here: The New York Times

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

House of Bamboo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

FORTY GUNS

USA (79 mi) 1957 ‘Scope

Time Out

Possessed of a gun-crazy sting all its own, Fuller's near-legendary B Western still excites dazed amazement and still resists critical shorthand. As an explicitly sexual range-war yarn, you'd automatically dub it a Freudian Western, except that the good doctor's shade could never cope with dreams like Fuller's: vivid, abstract, brutal affairs of naked emotion and violence. So you're left cataloguing the movie's startlingly pleasurable elements - the daring, darting camera style; the keynote performances from Stanwyck as a sensual autocrat and Sullivan as a tired, Earp-like killer; the radical jettisoning of comfortable myth - until you happily concede that essences are irreducible. And this is the essence of American action cinema. Just watch, and be stunned speechless yourself.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Samuel Fuller was never one to be restrained by the shackles of genre, but he could play along when it suited him. Although Forty Guns, a Western from 1957, and House of Bamboo, an underworld thriller from 1955, make alterations to their native genres, they can't really be called revisionist, since to Fuller, genres weren't worth revising. Guns, with Barbara Stanwyck as a tough-talking ranch owner who dresses in men's clothing, has superficial similarities to Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar, but where Ray amps up the Western's themes to operatic heights, Fuller brings in themes which are both uniquely his own and faithful to his setting. The romance between Stanwyck and stiff-necked U.S. Marshal Barry Sullivan is unconvincing, as most of Stanwyck's were, but the coldness here seems deliberate: Their major love scene is played in a stable, and instead of billing and cooing, Stanwyck recalls seeing her first dead cattle, learning the difference "between meat and men." By contrast, Fuller gets a substantial erotic charge out of the scene where one of Sullivan's men is fitted for a rifle by a comely young gunsmith; he sights her through the barrel (giving Fuller the chance for an iris-in reminiscent of silent movies), she caresses the blond wood of the stock. The trouble with Forty Guns is that there's not enough such craziness; Fuller keeps coming back to the fairly rote plot in which Stanwyck's hot-headed younger brother causes trouble for Sullivan's lawman, and Sullivan's performance is more lumpish than iconic.

Slant Magazine [Dan Callahan]

Forty Guns, a magnificent B-western shot in a little over a week, features Sam Fuller's punchy combination of crazy vulgarities and keen psychological insights; it's one of his best films. Jessica Drummond (Barbara Stanwyck), a Catherine the Great of the Arizona range, lords it over her territory with the help of a whip and 40 hired guns. She even has her own theme song, "High Ridin' Woman," first sung by Jidge Carroll in a jaw-dropping tracking shot that highlights the artificiality of the song's pre-recorded playback rather than hiding it (an example of Fuller's lip-smacking stylization). Jessica intrigues U.S. marshal and former professional killer Griff Bonnell (Barry Sullivan), and she is tickled by him. The balance of power seesaws between them as the body count piles up.

Fuller plants plenty of outrageous sex jokes in the film: when Jessica asks to feel Bonnell's pistol, he smirks and says, "It might go off in your face." Jessica smiles back, understanding his meaning perfectly, and says, "I'll take a chance." In a moment like this, the bawdiness is enhanced by the actors' and the director's enjoyment of how far they're going, as if they're saying, "How are we going to get away with this?" Fuller studs the beginning and middle of Forty Guns with such Sirk-ian dirtiness that when he suddenly turns reflective and melancholy, the drastic change in tone strengthens the seriousness he's after.

Fuller's Cinemascope frame for Forty Guns is harsh yet poetic, with lots of dissolves and dreamy camera movements that feel quite atypical for him. He utilizes the widescreen frame most strikingly in the film's finest scene, the moment when it switches gears. Bonnell and Jessica are talking, very quietly, in her parlor, and they are interrupted by gunfire. It turns out that the bullet round came from Ned (Dean Jagger), one of her men. Ned then confesses his love for Jessica in a halting, oblique, very painful way. Fuller isolates the three people in the frame: Bonnell on the left, embarrassed by Ned's speech; Ned, who stands at the center where he knows he doesn't belong; and Jessica, who stands to the right, frozen with deep feeling, as she takes in what Ned is saying. Fuller uses Cinemascope here to visually emphasize the chasms between people, and Stanwyck helps him enormously as a performer by taking control of the scene with her stillness and gently lifting it up into a heightened realm of emotion. It's hard to forget the desolate way Ned finally exits the frame, disappearing off to the left into darkness.

The directorial flourishes continue when Jessica's no-good brother Rocky (John Erickson) shoots Bonnell's brother on his wedding day. When the groom is hit and his bride grabs a hold of him, Fuller lowers the camera gradually with a few blow-like quick cuts, so that you literally feel as if you are sinking to the ground with the couple. When Jessica is losing her power, Fuller dissolves on a still photo of her image and keeps it there as horses ride across the range over her face, a powerful metaphor for her impending loss.

Stanwyck, by turns imperious and sly, dominates the movie. She did her own stunts, including a dangerous scene where her foot is caught in a stirrup and her horse drags her across the screen. Her physicality is impressive, but her emotional depth is even more so. Fuller, like so many great directors before him, knows how to use Stanwyck's mastery to his advantage; the shift into melancholy he contrives toward the end would never have worked, or worked so well, with any other actress. When Bonnell says to Jessica, "You look upset," she howls, "I was born upset!" This iconic line of dialogue defines both Fuller and Stanwyck and the masterpiece they made together.

Forty Guns • Senses of Cinema Tony Williams, October 20, 2005

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CHINA GATE

USA (97 mi) 1957 ‘Scope

Channel 4 Film

It is the French phase of the Vietnam War, and a group of mercenaries are recruited to blow up an arms depot. Lucky Legs (Dickinson), a local smuggler, agrees to use her connections with a guerilla leader to help them, if they can get her son into America. Sergeant Brock (Barry), who leads the group, is the racist father of the boy, and has no respect or time for the Eurasian woman, despite her sacrifices. This is typical Fuller: complex, raw, compelling and action-packed. Note an eye-catching performance from Nat King Cole in a supporting role.

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)

ALTHOUGH the Far East is still a seething area, "China Gate," which opened at the Paramount yesterday, reveals something less than hot melodrama.

While its depiction of a successful sortie by a French and Vietnamese patrol to destroy a major Communist munitions dump hidden in a mountain fastness occasionally makes for excitement, its simultaneous attempts to make capital of an off-beat love story is discursive and repetitious. Sabotage and romance do not seem to mix in "China Gate."

As a triple-threat, Samuel Fuller's writing and character dissection are not on a par with his ability to keep his principals moving against an alert enemy. But the people in his patrol are strangely unconvincing types even though they are dedicated to a just and honorable cause. A viewer can't help feeling that although recent history is on their side they are involved in somewhat contrived situations.

The leader of the patrol, for example, is Sgt. Johnny Brock, an American veteran of the Korean war, portrayed dourly by Gene Barry. The half-caste guide of the expedition is the singularly Caucasian-looking Angie Dickinson, who, it turns out, is Brock's estranged wife. Their 5-year-old son is the crux of this emotional upheaval. It seems that he is entirely Oriental in appearance, a fact his father can't face. His mother, on the other hand, is making the dangerous trek only because it means her son will be sent to a haven in America.

The other Legionnaires making the mission are equally unusual citizens troubled by memories of the past. There is Goldie, played in restrained fashion by Nat (King) Cole, who reverts to type only to sing the title song. He is a veteran of World War II and the Korean conflict who wants to see international peace and justice again.

There also are George Givot, an ex-Parisian cop who finds surcease in taking orders, and Gerald Milton, as a Greek expatriate and Paul Busch and Sasha Hardin, as an ex-German and an ex-Czech soldier, respectively. And there is Lee Van Cleff, the Communist commander in love with Miss Dickinson, who, it should be noted, cannot be blamed for appearing confused on occasion.

Miss Dickinson, it must be added, is a decorative brunette, who makes good one or two opportunities to project genuine emotion. Unfortunately, the rest of the cast do not. They are much too busy with superficial soul-seaching and sneaking through spurious Vietnamese jungles.

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

RUN OF THE ARROW

USA (86 mi) 1957 ‘Scope

Time Out

With an ostensibly similar narrative and theme to Lawrence of Arabia, Fuller's film exhibits all the genuine cinematic intelligence and forcefulness that Lean's so sadly lacks. Here Steiger is the 'victim' of a cultural identity crisis, turning his back on America after the Civil War and being accepted into a Sioux tribe, his sojourn equating in many ways with Lawrence's among the Arabs. A 'mere' genre movie, but its subject is the concept, the ideal and the imperfect reality of the United States; political and psychological reconciliation in the face of hate, prejudice and guilt, vigorously expressed.

Chicago Reader (Don Druker)

Sam Fuller's study of Indian/white loyalties (1956) is one of his strongest films. Rod Steiger is an unreconstructed Confederate soldier (with, curiously, an Irish accent) who lights out for the territories and joins the Sioux nation (losing his brogue in translation), only to find that his real loyalties lie with the beleaguered cavalry. Steiger's character is a walking panoply of identity crises, and Fuller's treatment of natural versus artificial allegiances (despite his clearly imperialistic bias) is among the most complex and sensitive in the American cinema. With Brian Keith and Charles Bronson. 86 min.

Turner Classic Movies Paul Tatara

A revisionist Western that makes complex statements about the nature of race, identity, and loyalty, Run of the Arrow (1957) is a key film in the oeuvre of renegade director Samuel Fuller. Though Fuller was often criticized for lacking a social conscience - his taste for lurid pulp fiction usually excluded it - this picture paints as open-minded an image of the American Indian as you're likely to find in 1950s cinema. The main character, played by Rod Steiger, actually sides with the Indians for the better part of the film, a stance that runs decidedly counter to what John Wayne and his ilk had been doing for the previous 20 years.

Steiger plays Pvt. O'Meara, a Confederate soldier who fires what turns out to be the final shot of the Civil War. A Union lieutenant named Driscoll (Ralph Meeker) is on the receiving end of the bullet, but he recovers from his wound. Unwilling to accept the "death" of his beloved South once the peace treaty is signed at Appomattox, O'Meara heads West. There, after establishing his worthiness through an endurance test known as "the run of the arrow," he joins a Sioux Indian tribe. Eventually, he falls in love with a beautiful maiden named Yellow Moccasin, played by Sarita Montiel, whose voice was dubbed by RKO contract player Angie Dickinson!

Tension mounts when the U.S. Army, lead by Lt. Driscoll, builds Fort Abraham Lincoln just beyond the edge of a hallowed Sioux hunting ground. When a popular captain (Brian Keith) is killed by an enraged Sioux warrior (H.M. Wynant), Driscoll uses that as an excuse to attack the Indians. This leads to a failed peace-keeping attempt by O'Meara, and an exceptionally bloody battle in and around the fort. The ambiguous finale suggests that O'Meara is finally done with his personal Civil War, but remains torn between the Sioux and the world he left behind.

Steiger never met a piece of scenery he couldn't chew, but he's actually well-suited to Fuller's bulldozing method. Though he seldom enjoyed the luxury of a big budget, Fuller pushed the boundaries of what could be accomplished by commercial filmmakers, with a blunt primitivism that was championed by the French New Wave critics of the 1960s, and ultimately influenced such directors as Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino. The often hysterical melodrama of Fuller's scripts can overshadow just how brilliantly he employs his camera. Run of the Arrow is as fluidly and economically shot as any of his films.

In Sam Fuller: Film is a Battleground by Lee Server, the director recalled the sequence toward the beginning of Run of the Arrow where Steiger says goodbye to his mother: "The Confederate in that scene who sang the song against the Constitution was played by a Southerner, whose hobby was collecting folklore and ballads. He loved it, being a Southerner and against the damn Yankees. My art director on the picture was a very virulent Yankee. I'm only telling you this because there's an evil streak in me that I like. I thought it would be wonderful to get them together in my office. I'll never forget it; it was the most wonderful moment of my life to introduce these two men who despised each other. They immediately got into a tremendous argument. I heard the whole Civil War fought all over again in my office." Fuller also commented on the famous "run of the arrow" sequence: "I shot that scene without my star. Steiger sprained his ankle right before we shot it, and he was taken off to the hospital. I used a young Indian in his place. Nobody noticed it. They thought I was being highly creative, highly artistic: "Imagine! Almost a boy wonder, a genius! Sensational! The way he shot it by just showing the feet!" Well, I would have shot about eighty per cent of the scene with just feet anyway, because that's the whole idea of the Run. But occasionally I would have liked to whip up with the camera and show Steiger's face."

Movie buffs will note the similarities between Run of the Arrow and Kevin Costner's Oscar-winning epic, Dances with Wolves (1990). Both films feature disheartened lead characters who journey West at the end of the Civil War, only to find new strength in the culture and teachings of the Sioux Indians. In due course, both men are forced to test their new-found beliefs when other war veterans arrive on Sioux land, guns at the ready. Fuller, however, is somewhat more inclined to let bullets and tomahawks do the talking than Costner is. After all, he was making B-pictures, not sensitivity training films.

Though supporting actor Tim McCoy was an Indian agent who started his film career as a technical advisor on silent Westerns, it seems unlikely that he did much advising on Run of the Arrow. The Sioux, for instance, would never kiss on the lips as shown in the movie. And, though Fuller suggests they're ready to skin a person alive at one point, they were never proponents of torture. There's certainly overstatement in the finished product, but Fuller refused to pull punches at a time when his much more honored peers were busy minding their manners. His white-hot passions permeate Run of the Arrow, making it one of the more fascinating entries in a truly American body of work.

‘Run of the Arrow’: Birth Pangs of the United States Rick Hermann, originally published in Movietone News, June 1976, republished in Parallax View, May 8, 2012

William Jones - Epinions.com

Channel 4 Film

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)

VERBOTEN!

USA (87 mi) 1959

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr)

"Their love was Verboten!" screamed the ads in 1959, and this sleazy masterwork by Sam Fuller is no less shrill, beginning with a sniper being tracked down to the strains of Beethoven's Fifth and continuing with the romance of an American soldier and an off-limits fraulein in occupied Germany. Sweaty, claustrophobic, occasionally frenzied, and often brilliant, in a thoroughly iconoclastic (and marginally psychotic) way. With James Best and Susan Cummings; 93 min.

Channel 4 Film

Fuller said that this movie dramatised the dangerous and 'most important question that has arisen out of the Second World War: what is the difference between a Nazi and a German'. The film failed commercially and was for years his only film set in Europe. According to a detailed Cahiers du Cinema review, there are less than a hundred shots in it (a tiny number - about a sixth of a conventional movie), and some are minutes in length, with the resultant complex shots containing the action. It's crude, passionate and tells the story of a Yank in Berlin involved with a woman who is surrounded by destructive forces determined to revive Nazism.

Time Out

The great Fuller at his punchy, unsubtle best, beginning with a long tracking shot of an American GI clambering through the grim rubble of war-torn Berlin (the rifle shotd of snipers intercut with the opening chords of Beethoven's 5th), and ending with an image of raging flames. In between, the film, set mostly in the immediate postwar period, charts the troubled relationship of the American, working for the occupying Allied Forces, with a German woman who saved his life and whi is surrounded by compatriots - including her younger brother - determined to revive the power of the Nazi movement. It's a tale of betrayal, violence, confusion and stark ironies, and takes in bravura action sequences, scenes of argumentative discourse, and documentary footage of the Nazi atrocities shown at the Nuremberg War Criminals Tribunal. Fuller's methods may not be sophisticated, but they are complex; as such, his own inimitably brash brand of didactism makes for riveting and powerful cinema.

Turner Classic Movies Bret Wood

From its suspenseful start to its explosive finish, Verboten! (1958) is Sam Fuller in his prime, directing a cynical drama about the American occupation of Germany in the months following World War II. James Best stars as Sgt. David Brent, who is wounded by a gunman while his ill-fated squad explores a bombed-out village. When a young German woman (Susan Cummings) saves his life, Brent falls in love with the pretty fraulein and, since soldiers were forbidden to fraternize with the Germans, decides to quit the military. Rather than return to the States, he signs on with the American Military Government (AMG), dispensing food and other rations to the devastated German people. Once married, Brent and Helga's happiness is threatened by the harsh economic conditions of war-torn Germany and the rise of neo-fascism in the form of young underground Himmlerites calling themselves the Werewolves, who scavenge food, commit sabotage, and threaten the newly-forged peace.

Because gung-ho WWII movies had largely fallen out of fashion in the late 1950s, Verboten! was instead promoted as a juvenile delinquent film, at a time when leather-clad, marauding youths were the hot-button topic of paranoid parents and low-budget filmmakers alike.

Part love story, part war movie, Verboten! is an angry attack on the complacent mentality that allowed fascism to flourish in 1930s Germany and to continue long after the war had ended. Fuller's cynical view of German denial was not something he had read about in newspapers, but had witnessed first hand. "I did not meet a single German, from the day we invaded Germany to the end of the war in Czechoslovakia, who said he was a Nazi," Fuller told biographer Lee Server, "The one exception was a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old girl...who told us she was a Nazi and told us to go to hell." Fuller served in the First U.S. Infantry Division during WWII (the legendary "Big Red One") and was part of a military unit that liberated a Nazi concentration camp near Falkenau. Corporal Fuller shot 16mm home movie footage of the camp, and this material later became the centerpiece of the 1988 documentary Falkenau, the Impossible, in which he returns to the site and recounts the experience.

The memory of the death camps was scorched in Fuller's mind and he wanted others to witness the same, lest we forget. When Helga's teenage brother and aspiring Werewolf Franz (Harold Daye) refuses to believe the horror stories of the Third Reich, she takes him to the Nuremberg trials, where he and the audience are subjected to a no-punches-pulled, documentary-style summation of the atrocities committed by the Nazis -- narrated by Fuller himself. Seldom were moviegoers of 1958 subjected to such horrific images, especially woven into the fabric of a traditional war movie. The audacious scene is quintessential Fuller -- a cinematic punch in the gut. "I used the contrasts in shooting to help maintain chaos," Fuller told Server.

Fuller often flirted with contrasting styles in his films, mixing Molotov cocktails of emotion, imagery and messages, none of which were ever administered with much subtlety. Verboten! typifies this reckless approach to filmmaking, a hard-boiled war movie that opens with a syrupy love song ("Verboten!") sung by Paul Anka. Once this ends, the American dogfaces are shown advancing upon a bombed out, sniper-ridden village, their dance of death eerily choreographed to the strains of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony (a favorite piece of Fuller's, which also appears prominently in The Naked Kiss, 1964). Fuller also flavors the film with the grandiose works of Richard Wagner, a composer whose operatic works have come to represent the sweeping power of German legend, even as it reminds us of the anti-Semitism lurking beneath.

At times, Fuller seems to be offering an olive branch to the German people, while at other times, he merely wants to crush those weak-willed sympathizers who allowed the Nazis to take over their country in the first place. In one powerful sequence, Brent becomes fed up with hearing the Germans blaming the Americans for their misfortune, demanding food and medicine from the AMG. "We're not here as liberators!" he shouts at the angry mob, "We're here as conquerors! And don't you forget it!" Immediately thereafter he dives, fists swinging, into the crowd of ungrateful "krauts."

One reason this jumbled and angry film manages to succeed as entertainment is the central performance by Best, who portrays Brent as a hopeful, lovesick, loyal puppy of a sergeant, absolutely dripping with sincerity. When, near the film's climax, he is fired from his government job and begins to suspect that Helga has only married him for his political connections, the painful disillusionment he suffers is heartbreaking, as his boyish idealism crumbles into bitter resentment. Originally, Fuller intended to have Brent shot by military police in the end (after being mistaken for a German), but this conclusion was considered too pessimistic.

Best was a talented character actor who provided Southern color to many a Western and war film during the 1950s and '60s (including the asylum inmate who thinks he's a Confederate General in Fuller's Shock Corridor, 1963). Unfortunately, this delicate character work has been overshadowed by his most famous role, that of the bumbling Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane on TV's "The Dukes of Hazzard."

THE CRIMSON KIMONO

USA (82 mi) 1959

Channel 4 Film

One of Fuller's least well-known crime thrillers, this has his characteristic punchy style, though the tale of two LA detectives, one Japanese-born, investigating and solving a stripper's murder, is rather basic. However, the virtually unknown cast, atmosphere of urban alienation and race issue are interesting. The Japanese detective believes his race has prevented his promotion, and the then rare interracial affair show Fuller taking new risks.

Time Out

Fuller developing his theme of urban alienation: landscape, culture and sexual confusion are all juxtaposed, forcing the Japanese-born detective (who, along with his buddy, is on the hunt for a burlesque queen murderer) into a nightmare of isolation and jealousy. Some fine set pieces - like the disciplined Kendo fight that degenerates into sadistic anarchy - and thoughtful camera-work serve to illustrate Fuller's gift for weaving a poetic nihilism out of his journalistic vision of urban crime.

Slant Magazine [Ed Gonzalez]

Manny Farber wrote, "The reason movies are bad lies is this audience's failure to appreciate, much less fight for, films like the unspectacular, unpolished 'B,' worked out by a few people with belief and skill in their art, who capture the unworked-over immediacy of life before it has been cooled by 'Art.'" Samuel Fuller was one of those people and The Crimson Kimono was one of those films. The opening is a triumph of grungy lyricism achieved through snaky cutting and blunt compositions: Sugar Torch (Gloria Pall), a blonde and bodacious piece of stripper meat, is shot to death in the middle of a Los Angeles street after witnessing a murder inside her dressing room. The tenor of the film oscillates between tight-fisted noir and chamber drama, but the theme is always the same: cultural and romantic unrest. Two detectives, Charlie Bancroft (Glenn Corbett) and Joe Kojaku (James Shigeta), travel to the Japanese quarter of the city to break the thorny case but fall in love with Christine Downs (Victoria Shaw). Harry Sukman's score courts condescension whenever the action shifts to Little Tokyo, but it's the film's only slip. Fuller's feat is giving the film's nonstop interrogations, meetings, and confrontations profound racial and political meaning.

The Crimson Kimono Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz)

UNDERWORLD U.S.A.

USA (99 mi) 1961

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr)

Sam Fuller's harsh, obsessional 1960 crime drama is narrated in the style of a comic book gone berserk. Cliff Robertson is the neurotic hero, bent on avenging his father's death by infiltrating and destroying a crime syndicate that operates under the redolent name "National Projects." Corruption is all-pervasive in this vision of America, and Fuller disturbingly suggests that only a madman can make a difference. One image from Underworld--of a heavy striking straight at the camera--prompted Jean-Luc Godard to describe Fuller's films as "cinema-fist." There is no more apt phrase. 99 min.

Time Out

In typical fashion, Fuller transforms the 'organised crime on the move' plot into that of a war film, with the FBI and the Syndicate each housed in their own skyscrapers overlooking the battlefield of America on which their troops are locked in conflict. The film's opening sees the Syndicate and the FBI at war, but it is the behind-the-scenes skirmishings and double-dealings of Tolly Devlin (Robertson), fighting his own no-holds-barred war of revenge (the Syndicate killed his father), which finally win the day for the FBI. For Fuller, the State is maintained not by its own machinery, but by the personal efforts of its citizens.

Channel 4 Film

Superior B-picture, now with a cult following - thanks to the enthusiasm of Quentin Tarantino for this and the rest of Fuller's sassy, hard-nosed, firmly journalistic career in crime flicks. It's a revenge plot with cod Freudian overtones, in which a testosterone-packed Robertson takes revenge on the racketeers who did for his dear old dad. Kay is an older woman with whom he negotiates a subtly Oedipal relationship. The documentary style - full of tricks learnt from Henry Hathaway's 1940s true crime thrillers - gives the unlikely plot verisimilitude. Robertson's savage determination and strident amorality anticipates the portrayals of casual, ironized violence that characterized 1990s gangster pictures.

The New York Times (Howard Thompson)

JUST to remind us that crime doesn't pay, "Mad Dog Coll" and "Underworld U. S. A." give it to the customers right between the eyes. For all the brutality, snarling, corruption and flying lead that these two Columbia releases have in common, put them down as another pair of old-fashioned crime entries, adrift in blood. Furthermore, in both pictures there are girls who adroitly steal the show from all the killers and their hunters.

In the case of "Underworld, U. S. A.," written, directed and produced by Samuel Fuller, it is no less than Beatrice Kay, the singer of old-time ballads, making her dramatic debut (we believe) beautifully. As a leathery, hearty saloon keeper who befriends a revengeful ex-convict, Cliff Robertson, Miss Kay, with her honest acting, cuts through the picture as straight as a shark's fin.

Mr. Fuller's one-man enterprise does have its points, as in the way Mr. Robertson inveigles his way into a huge crime empire to nab his father's killers. There is grim irony in the slick machinations of the kingpins, the "respectable" middle-aged men, "fronting" behind charitable projects.

While the outcome is always predictable, and Mr. Robertson's hero isn't especially likeable or even convincing, Mr. Fuller's directing is nimble, particularly in his use of close-ups. Dolores Dorn is appealing as a lovelorn blonde, and Larry Gates and Robert Emhardt are very good indeed on opposite sides of the law.

Underworld, U.S.A. • Senses of Cinema Wheeler Winston Dixon, September 14, 2009

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

MERRILL’S MARAUDERS

USA (98 mi) 1962 ‘Scope

Channel 4 Film

Fuller admitted that he was obsessed by war and that he wouldn't have made war movies unless he'd seen combat (he did, with distinction). This movie plays like a gutsy draft of his cherished project, The Big Red One, and looks as if it could have influenced Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line (compare the steady destruction of the entrenched Japanese as the men advance on them). Merrill's men are in Burma on a pitiless mission that we are dragged into emotionally, then almost physically, by Fuller's up-front direction, as we gradually realize its suicidal nature.

Time Out

Fuller's superb patrol movie - taut, bleak and damning - was a self-confessed 'rehearsal' for his long-gestating The Big Red One, following a World War II American platoon in Burma on a suicidal trek, suffering from what the unit doctor diagnoses as AOE - 'accumulation of everything' - and burdened by madness, exhaustion, and the demonstrable irrationality of their wasted energies. Fuller draws potent ironies from his casting of young cowboy 'heroes' (including Bronco and Tenderfoot), and mobilises his camera in violent sympathy with the men's physical and psychological effort.

George Chabot's Review of Merrill's Marauders

Director Samuel Fuller's "Merrill's Marauders" is a great "guy movie". It shows the bonds that quickly develop between men under pressure that many people leading more sheltered lives never experience. The movie also had a deeper, more sinister meaning for me -- it foretold the ominous developments that were about to occur in Southeast Asia. Could it be that Samuel Fuller had a premonition of U.S. involvement in Vietnam?

WWII was the first big experience the U.S. GIs had with jungle warfare. The China/Burma/India Theater did not make as much news as the Pacific or European Theaters of Operations, so it was nice to see some information concerning that area. The commander of the CBI Theater was General Joseph W. "Vinegar Joe" Stillwell, a difficult man, and one who did not like the coddling Washington demanded for Generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek, nominal ruler of the Chinese. Brigadier General Frank Merrill's unit was Stillwell's secret weapon, to operate behind enemy lines, destroy Japanese supply lines, and capture the Burma Road, leading up into the soft underbelly of occupied China. The Marauders operated under the code name "GALAHAD". Their real name was much less glamorous: The "5307th Composite Unit (Provisional)". Jeff Chandler, in a fine performance, played the lead.

The movie did a good job of showing the difficulties of terrain, climate, and disease the Marauders had to cope with, nearly all men still on their feet were riddled by tropical diseases by the end of their mission. Besides the challenges mentioned, there was always the Japanese. The 3000-strong Marauders fought five major battles and 30 minor engagements with the numerically superior Japanese 18th Division in such unpronounceable locales as "Walawbum" and Myitkyina.

The comraderie exhibited by the supporting cast such as Claude Akins "Sergeant Kolowicz", Ty Hardin, "Lt. Stockton", and Peter Brown "Bullseye" was very heartening to me as these men, so far from home, bore each other up throughout their various trials and tribulations. The Marauders did achieve their objective, they did help win the war. Why are they not remembered better? The answer is, in a roundabout way, "they are." The U.S. Army Rangers, and to a certain degree, the Special Forces Green Berets, are descended from the Marauders. That's quite an epitaph for the 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional)!

Merrill's Marauders • Senses of Cinema Kin Ferate, October 4, 2002

Sgt. Slaughter Goes to War [Ben Cressy]

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

Doug Pratt's Laserdisc Review also reviewing THE BIG RED ONE

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

SHOCK CORRIDOR

USA (101 mi) 1963

Time Out

You may have to swallow a morsel of disbelief over the wonderfully Fullerian premise that a reputable newspaper editor and a psychiatrist would connive at the crazy scheme whereby the reporter hero (Breck) has himself committed to an asylum so that he can win the Pulitzer Prize by solving the murder of an inmate. Once done, you're in for a gripping ride. The journalist's latent paranoia is beautifully observed in his relationship with his stripper girlfriend (Towers), as well as in the relish with which he notes the success of his simulation of madness; and the gradual descent into real madness, as he frustratedly waits and watches for flashes of lucidity in the three inmates who witnessed the murder, is riveting story-telling. The camera-work (Stanley Cortez), tracking and constantly adumbrating the descent into darkness, is amazing.

Edinburgh U Film Society [Keith H. Brown]

Reporter Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck) hatches a scheme to get himself committed to the local mental asylum in order to solve a murder that occurred there and, in the process, get a scoop that will win the Pulitzer Prize he covets. Barrett's stripper girlfriend Cathy (Constance Towers - Fuller's wife at the time) is worried about what might happen to him if something goes wrong but eventually agrees to go along with his scheme.

Having got into the asylum Barrett sets to work, subtly questioning the other patients for information. But it's difficult to be a sane man in an insane place and the atmosphere of the shock corridor' proves to be infectious. The closer Barrett gets to the truth, the closer he gets to insanity. Maybe he's going to end up staying longer than he had planned.

Remember that tagline for Ed Wood - "he made films like no-one else"? Well, the same could be said of Sam Fuller. Director and often writer and/or producer of his films, Fuller was a true auteur, whose idiosyncratic "tabloid" or "American primitive" style has become an acknowledged influence on countless contemporary directors, from Godard to Wenders to Tarantino. Here Fuller brilliantly plays upon exterior and interior contrasts (the asylum/the outside world; the patients' minds/the outside world) until his shock corridor finally becomes a microcosm of 1950s America.

To know what Fuller's about you really have to see his films. Where else would you find a black man who thinks he's a Ku Klux Klansman, spouting off white racism? Or the bold visual conceit of using (colour) footage from a different film, shot in a different aspect ratio, as a means of conveying a paranoid fantasy?

I can't recommend Shock Corridor, or Fuller's films in general, highly enough. Go see it, and if it whets your appetite seek out his kinky western 40 Guns (1957), with Barbara Stanwyck as "a high riding woman with a whip", or the dementedly sleazy The Naked Kiss (1964).

Sam Fuller: Shock Corridor Derek Malcolm from the Guardian

"Shock Corridor is not only outright trash, but stands also as one of the most vicious and irresponsible pieces of film-making that the screen has given us in years." This kind of American review, which characterised Sam Fuller as a semi-fascist vulgarian - a yellow journalist translating himself into a purple film-maker - was once so prevalent that when the French started fashioning him into an auteur on the same level as Nicholas Ray, another of their saints, absurdity seemed to be being piled upon absurdity.

There is no doubt that Fuller was a remarkable film-maker. But that doesn't mean we have to accept every film he made as some kind of gospel. You certainly can't accept Shock Corridor as such. But I defy anyone to see it for the first time and not be in some way amazed by its energy or even by its passionate crudity.

Johnny, the central character, is a crime reporter, like Fuller once was. A man called Sloane has been murdered in a mental hospital and he persuades his editor that he should be passed off as insane to get inside the asylum, solve the case and win the Pulitzer prize. Cathy, his stripper girlfriend - "Her body is a symphony, her legs a rhapsody," according to the screenplay - is reluctantly forced to say that she's his sister and he's been making incestuous advances. After questioning, he's admitted for sexual therapy.

But faced by the inmates, one of whom was once a genius who helped make the atomic bomb and who may or may not have witnessed the murder, Johnny's own mind begins to snap. Attacked by voracious patients in the nympho ward, he starts to believe Cathy really is his sister and he's given shock treatment. In the end he finds the killer, looks like getting his Pulitzer prize but is too insane even to feel Cathy's desperate hug.

Such a story, if put before your average producer now, would be laughed out of court. It's trashy, lurid and preposterous. But you can't take your eyes off the screen because, despite the tatty sets and often ludicrous lines, the film-making is incredibly brave, direct and furious. The whole film is like a thunderstorm. What does it say? Not a lot about mental asylums, awful as they probably were at the time; but, when you consider the patients, quite a lot about America.

One of them let down his country as a soldier in Korea and was branded a traitor, another couldn't stand the pressures of being a black guinea-pig at an all-white Southern college, a third realised what he had done working on the A-bomb. As for Johnny, he is obsessed not with justice but with his own ambition. The only truly sympathetic character in the movie is Cathy, the stripper. If her mouth is a tunnel, as the screenplay suggests, it's the only one that speaks consistent sense.

Possibly Fuller made better films, such as The Naked Kiss and Pick Up on South Street. Shock Corridor, though, is a good introduction to the artless art of a true original. I did two Guardian interviews with him at the National Film Theatre, when he was a still incredibly energetic old man. But by then, chewing his regulation cigar and spitting out aphorisms, he had cast himself in the guise expected by his adoring fans. Vastly entertaining as it was, you couldn't get beyond that to the real man. Truffaut put his worth as well as any. "Sam Fuller," he wrote, "is not a beginner, he is a primitive; his mind is not rudimentary, it is rude; his films are not simplistic, they are simple, and it is this simplicity I most admire."

Shock Corridor Criterion essay by Tim Hunter

Me and Sam Fuller Criterion essay by Lisa Dombrowski

Shock Corridor (1963) - The Criterion Collection

Shock Corridor Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club

Images from Shock Corridor

Film Court (Ajo)

Shock Corridor Karl Wareham from DVD Times

DVD Verdict Mike Pinsky

The Criterion Contraption [Matthew Dessem]

And You Call Yourself a Scientist! (Liz Kingsley) or here: Liz's Essential Film Reviews

ToxicUniverse.com (John Nesbit)

Apollo Movie Guide [Patrick Byrne]

The Lumière Reader

VideoVista Peter Schilling

Nick's Flick Picks (Full Review) Nick Davis

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)

Critical-Film.com (Jason Pitt)

The Digital Bits Adam Jahnke from Digital Bits, also reviewing NAKED KISS

Boston Phoenix [Peg Aloi]

San Francisco Chronicle [Edward Guthmann]

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

THE NAKED KISS

USA (90 mi) 1964

Austin Chronicle [Jerry Renshaw]

Constance Towers plays Kelly, a hooker who gives up the life of a prostitute to start anew in a small town. Redemption is a hard road, however, when she discovers a world of hypocrisy and perversion in her new surroundings. Her new life starts as the local cop propositions her and then becomes her last trick. She gets a job at the local hospital working with disabled kids, flogs the daylights out of the madam at the local brothel, and falls in love with a pillar of the community. Her lover, however, turns out to harbor even darker secrets; in outrage, Kelly brains him with a telephone receiver and winds up in big trouble. The Naked Kiss finds Sam Fuller's tabloid sensibilities boiling to the surface, as it dwells on the uncomfortable and taboo subjects of deviancy, prostitution, and small-town sanctimony. In typical Fuller style, it's a hard look at a nightmarish world, lurid and absorbing enough to demand that the viewer watch. It's part melodrama, part sensationalism, and part surreal, but above all it's absolutely, positively 100% Sam Fuller, with all the nuance and subtlety of a swift kick in the butt.

Slant Magazine [Eric Henderson]

Postwar cinema was plenty country, and more than enough rock n' roll. But whether we're talking The Egg and I or High School Confidential, the drive-in era's depiction of the effects of urban hangover upon idyllic small town Americana invariably revealed a wounded-but-upright oasis of morality, if only because you couldn't expect the Big City's fashionable crime to trickle down for at least a decade. Speaking of being ahead of the curve, noir films stood out among their dated contemporaries like pure hip-hop. And Sam Fuller's fizzy, wigged-out masterpiece The Naked Kiss drops it from frame one, with Constance Towers purse-smacking a P.O.V. shot, brandishing a seltzer bottle and upbraiding her pimp, essentially demanding "What, you slipped? Fell? Landed on her dick?" Fuller's fierce prologue is only an appetizer for the depths he sinks to when his reformed ho tries to hoist up her stockings and reach for anonymity in the rural wild. The Naked Kiss grows positively feral as Towers uncovers the town's perverse, thriving criminal underbelly and comes to the conclusion that even being a two-bit, big-city tramp is more noble than living anywhere that has a Main Street. It's Sirk-on-a-shoestring, and twice as cynical.

Bright Lights Film Journal Gary Morris

The opening sequence of The Naked Kiss is justly celebrated as one of the most unnerving in cinema. The story just starts, no credits, in the midst of a brutal attack on a pimp by one of his whores. The lack of credits is typical of writer-director Sam Fuller (1911-1997), who liked nothing better than to disorient his audience. He magnifies the sense of a world out of whack with shaky, hand-held camerawork and a screaming saxophone riff. But it’s the imagery that’s most unsettling: while the whore is bashing the pimp’s face with a high heel, her wig falls off to reveal that she’s bald. This increases her rage and accelerates the assault; finally sated, she inexplicably pauses to collect a small amount of money — “just what you owe me, eighty dollars!"

The Naked Kiss was Fuller’s follow-up to Shock Corridor, and it’s every bit as tabloid-theatrical as the opening implies. The whore, Kelly (Constance Towers), leaves town to escape the wrath of her bloodied pimp. She settles in “Grantville,” fucks the town cop, then decides to give up prostitution for a job at a hospital for crippled children, where her program in self-reform flourishes. She thoughtfully teaches the children to sing mournful ditties about their disability (“Why can’t I fly? Tell me why.”), rescues one new friend from a life of whoredom, and pays for another to have her kid rather than abort. In short, she transforms herself and the town; Grantville becomes a paradise of Old World morality, with Kelly fanatically righting every “wrong” she sees, usually violently. Eventually she repeats what she did at the beginning, with more tragic results, when she discovers that her fiance, the beloved, wealthy Grant, has a very nasty secret.

Fuller leavens these dark proceedings with a kind of hard-boiled humor that approaches camp, and makes the operatic plot compulsively watchable. Absurdly terse character names like Griff, Grant, and Buff abound. And then there’s the local whorehouse, run by an aging shrew called “Candy”; everyone refers to her girls as “bon-bons” but they answer to names like “Hatrack” and “Marshmallow.” But Fuller’s primitive poetry resonates throughout, and lines like Kelly’s warning to a young girl contemplating prostitution — “You’ll be sleeping on the skin of a nightmare for the rest of your life” — recall, and rival, the work of lit-noir masters like Jim Thompson.

San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]

Originally released in 1964, it seems at first like a campy noir film about a call girl trying to go straight. But stick with it. This is one of the wisest, slickest and most unorthodox feminist films one could ever hope to see.

Written and directed by Samuel Fuller, who died at 86 in October, ``The Naked Kiss'' continually fools the viewers into thinking they're smarter than the filmmaker. They're not. Every time the movie seems headed into cliche, Fuller turns the tables. Conventional plot elements are used for one reason only -- to identify the lies at their core. [an error occurred while processing this directive] For example, take the way the movie portrays the town brothel keeper (Virginia Grey). At first we get the usual no-nonsense businesswoman who has a hearty rapport with men. What a great old dame. Only later, and subtly, is it suggested that this lady is evil, vampirizing her own sex for dirty money.

Then there's the gruff good-guy cop (Anthony Eisley), who a thousand previous movies lead us to believe will be the mouthpiece for the filmmaker. He turns out to be just another exploiter. In ``The Naked Kiss,'' Fuller's sympathies are with the call girl, Kelly (Constance Towers), who is shown, in the movie's first moments, pummeling her pimp with her spike-heeled pump. (Say that three times.)

Two years later, Kelly moves to the picturesque small town of Grantville, where she makes $20 for having sex with the cop, then abruptly decides to change her life. She gets a job nursing disabled children -- the only people in town worse off than the women -- and starts a relationship with Grant (Michael Dante), the community's wealthiest and most respected resident.

At this point, the audience may think it's on familiar territory, but, in fact, it's on Jupiter. The unexpected turns of plot, which are fast and furious from this point on, won't be revealed here, but they do more than surprise and titillate. They suggest something deeply sick underlying the early '60s version of normality.

That film noir is often the most woman-hating (or at least woman- fearing) of genres makes ``The Naked Kiss'' all the more unexpected. Only when you back up and look at it does it become clear that the entire film is about the abuse and exploitation of women. Kelly meets women who are hookers, who are pregnant and abandoned, who are destitute. Meanwhile the men run the show, make the money and perpetuate the double standard.

The film's title comes from a remark that Kelly makes, in which she says you can tell a dangerous sexual deviant from his ``naked kiss.'' Fuller suggests that the way men treat women in American society is nothing less than perverse -- a heck of a statement for 1964.

Towers is remarkable as the fierce street angel, hard as ice and cold as nails, and the picture is beautiful to look at. The glossy visuals are thanks to legendary cinematographer Stanley Cortez (brother of actor Ricardo Cortez), who died last month at 92.

The Naked Kiss Criterion essay by Michael Dare

Me and Sam Fuller Criterion essay by Lisa Dombrowski

The Naked Kiss (1964) - The Criterion Collection

THE NAKED KISS Dan Schneider from the Alternative Film Guide

DVD Times Karl Wareham

The Criterion Contraption [Matthew Dessem]

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford

In Appreciation: The Naked Kiss Tim Wong from The Lumière Reader

The Naked Kiss (Reviewed by Brannavan Gnanalingam) from The Lumière Reader

VideoVista Richard Bowden

DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht)

Apollo Movie Guide [Elspeth Haughton]

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

Xiibaro Productions (David Perry)

DVD Holocaust Naked Kiss

The Digital Bits Adam Jahnke from Digital Bits, also reviewing SHOCK CORRIDOR

Time Out

The New York Times (Eugene Archer)

DVDBeaver Alain Dupont and Gary W. Tooze

SHARK!

USA Mexico (92 mi) 1969

Time Out

Although Fuller disowns this because it was cut against his wishes, it still remains worth seeing for what's left. The search for sunken treasure by four totally amoral protagonists, all intent on double-crossing each other, is capably handled; but the lasting impression is of how well Fuller conveys the atmosphere of hot and dusty small towns in the middle of nowhere.

Channel 4 Film

During the 1960s Fuller experienced lean times as a director, even turning to the indignity of TV hackery and reworking his Pick Up on South Street as a feature in South Africa. Near the end of the decade he made this US/Mexican co-production about a quartet of no-gooders who go on a search for sunken treasure and end up double-crossing each other. The film ended up out of the maverick director's hand in an editing suite, and he took his name off the project

DVD Maniacs Ian Jane

An early starring role for Burt Reynolds, Samuel Fuller's Shark! predates Spielberg's better known killer shark movie Jaws by roughly six years.

Whereas in Spielberg's movie the creature was chowing down on anyone and anything in its path, innocent or not, here its dinner treats are a band of no good criminals trying to salvage a lost shipment of gold resting on the ocean floor off the coast of Mexico.

A scientist and his pretty blonde assistant lose their diving helper when he falls prey to the titular beast, and that's when an American named Kane (Reynolds) comes on board. He takes a job with them but soon thinks he can outsmart them and horde the booty for himself when he learns of its whereabouts. Soon everybody is double crossing everybody else in order to get to the treasure without being eaten on the way.

The main reason that Shark! remains a fairly well known film isn't because it's all that good (though it's not all that bad either) but because of the controversy surrounding the death of a stunt man who was killed by a live shark on the set. Samuel Fuller disowned the movie when the producers used the accident to promote the film, thus assuring it a little bit of controversy and therefore a little bit of box office.

Samuel Fuller made a few memorable action/adventure movies, sadly Shark! isn't one of them. It's not that it's truly terrible, it just isn't memorable. No one is very good in front of the camera and while the underwater photography is nice and the sharks have a fascinating screen presence, the rest of the movie looks rather flat and lackluster.

If it had been a truly horrid movie it might have been saved in a sense by some serious camp appeal, as the potential is there for some quality MST3K moments but it never really reaches those horrible depths either and just sort of stumbles through it's ninety minutes half heartedly shrugging its shoulders as if it doesn't care. Some more tension and stronger performances could have made it a good actioner but Fuller just doesn't pull it off here. It's an ok watch for a rainy Saturday afternoon if you can't think of anything else to do, but there are a whole lot of other movies out there you'll probably want to check out first.

DVD Verdict David Johnson

Oh, the Humanity! Alan and Rob

DEAD PIGEON ON BEETHOVEN STREET (Tote Taube in der Beethovenstraße) – made for German TV “Tatort”

Germany (102 mi) 1972

Gerald Peary - film reviews, interviews, essays, and miscellany Gerald Peary

Cult directors fill their movies with references to the jarring closeups and inventive editing of "B" director Sam Fuller. Yet Fuller, who died in October, went the same movie-quoting route in his 1972 Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street. There are respectful steals from The Maltese Falcon and Breathless, and a mirthful scene in a Cologne movie theatre shows a dubbed-in-German Rio Bravo.

Typically Fuller, spectacular action sequences (and, here, inspired non-Berlin German locales) are in combo with awkward writing and dubious acting. The story is about a cheap detective (sunbaked Glenn Corbett, a bologna-sandwich performer) searching Europe for tawdry photographs which can ruin his client, a Nixonian US senator (Fuller himself in a Republican-baiting cameo).

Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television

Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street (1972) is Fuller's playful homage to the private eye genre. Fuller had appeared as himself in Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot Le Fou (1965), and this film shows the influence of Godard. It has wild titles, with giant letters that flash on the screen, just like a Godard title sequence, or the words that interrupt and punctuate his films. Fuller has always been wildly inventive. But Pigeon has a playful, tongue in cheek quality that reminds one of Pierrot and other Godard movies. Of course, much of Godard's rush of invention was inspired by Fuller's films, so their is a circle of inspiration here: 1950's Fuller influencing 1960's Godard, who in turn influences 1970's Fuller.

The location filming here also recalls Godard, and the French New Wave. Most of Fuller's Hollywood films had been shot on studio sets. Here Fuller has taken to the streets. This was a general change in filmmaking practice in the 1970's, not just restricted to Fuller. But still, Fuller's use of location seems especially Godardian. Fuller, like Godard, often follows his characters along urban streets. There is a documentary like quality to these scenes, in both Godard and Fuller. Just as Godard's Breathless (1959) showed the streets of Paris, and Le Petit Soldat (1960) Geneva, so does Fuller's film display Köln. The many cafe sequences in Godard are echoed by the restaurant scenes in Fuller. Even Godard's interiors, which emphasize props against white walls, find an echo in the early hotel scene in this film. Godard's use of hanging painting masterpieces on the walls as cultural references is also employed by Fuller here. It is a whole Godard movie Fuller is making here, employing every Godard technique he can lay his hands on. Fuller had always loved to play with the grammar of film. Here he has a whole new set of toys to play with.

A shot out of a huge hospital window recalls the similar large apartment windows in Antonioni's L'Eclisse (1961).

The fight on the hospital stairs here recalls the earlier subway scene in Fuller's Pickup on South Street (1954). The scenes with the babies in the hospital recall the children's ward in The Naked Kiss (1964). Fuller also juxtaposed the innocence of children and the corruption of adults in Underworld U.S.A. (1961).

Fuller had always enjoyed including religious symbols and architecture in his films. One thinks of the monastery in The Baron of Arizona (1950), the crucifix in The Big Red One, and the Buddhist temples and statues in The Steel Helmet (1951) and The Crimson Kimono. Here Köln Cathedral plays a prominent role.

from imdb Author Christopher Mulrooney from Los Angeles (review expunged):

The whole constitutes an apparent recomposition of Richard Thorpe's The Scorpio Letters, concerning undercover operations in a blackmail ring.

It opens with Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, first movement, before the recapitulation, on a stained bronze head of the composer outdoors. Then a pigeon (an extra from Dreyer's The Passion Of Joan Of Arc) flies and a shot is heard. Title and credits.

The first scene is mirrored at the end, and both are drawn stylistically from Breathless, by way of The Quiller Memorandum. A dog attends the operative's body, anticipating S.O.B. Exceedingly sharp cutting and the zoom lens are featured. A chase scene briefly is reflected in The Sting.

The face is Fuller's medium, even to the eyes in an extreme close-up as here. A Welles stunt: picture postcard cuts to picture.

A phone booth's rhomboid frosted panes give a Matisse portrait. The modulating power of the overhead shot later in The Mackintosh Man animates a street scene.

Rio Bravo, richly enjoyed by the hero, goes on about its business. Passersby are treated à la Bresson.

A mickey dropped in the girl's coffee dissolves in three quick separate shots, like Tippi Hedren in The Birds. The essence of photography is her face reflected in a store window, setting up the sort of André Kertesz joke that follows: blackmail photos on a couch (afterward, the contemporary painting on the wall is replaced by a seventeenth-century portrait). The game of switching heads in a photo is played.

Fuller's idea of drama is that the drugged girl wakes up and starts to leave, tout simple, as calm and bewildered as Frank Nelson after being knocked unconscious in an episode of I Love Lucy.

An exterior crowd shot at closing time looks like The Stars Look Down. Renoir's track-and-pan is set out, with an adjustable zoom.

You have to look to Peckinpah for a comparable style—The Killer Elite, for example. A quick quote from Psycho's shower scene is put to good use.

The interrogation scene is most violent by suggestion. Anton Diffring simply puts his face close to Glenn Corbett's in a two-shot and slaps his head a few times, but the compression is enormous.

Beethovens Geburtshaus is now a museum (this scene might be Sherlock Holmes In Washington). Corbett and Lang dawdle over glass cases containing his spectacles and ear trumpet, amid portraits and a pianoforte (its keyboard is covered by Plexiglas).

The comical ease of Fuller's Cologne is in a shot (compare the Place de l'Opéra in Polanski's Frantic) as the two walk down a narrow lane past commercial shops (Dr. Scholl's DIENST AM FUSS—Fusspflege) to a König Pilsener under the rubric of China.

The charming business at the Hotel Petersberg (mickey in champagne, the search for His Excellency, his touching state of druggedness) is one of several comic episodes, punctuated by Chinese landscapes of fog and hills, a ruined tower, Alphaville, Krupp's factory, etc. They end with a stretto of world leaders in snapshots, Lang's mailed hand, and the punchline of the secondary joke (below), accompanied by Debussy's Syrinx heard for the second time as the camera pans across a cocktail party and discovers the flutist.

Boat interior, night: purple cloths, golden light, leopard-skin, city lights slowly drifting past...

Fuller's art is, among other things, the transformations of time in small increments, as in the carnival scene with hostile clown and confetti (thrown into the tight angled tracking shot). He looks up at the cathedral spires and tilts down to a parade with a marching band playing the song at the end of Paths Of Glory. He gives you a monumental high long shot of the train station interior.

The prime joke is the swordfight, which blundering Corbett wins by throwing everything in the room at Diffring before cutting off his head. The secondary joke is an alternate version of a famous case handled by (if memory serves) Jerry Giesler, concerning a man on trial for attempted rape who turned out to be impotent.

The Eastmancolor cinematography (by Jerzy Lipman, of Knife In The Water) and the score are priceless. The German title adds "scene of the crime" (Wer is dod?—Sporbrod.) to the equation, and there is a novelization by Fuller.

Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street Fuller’s passionate anarchism, by Ernest Larsen from Jump Cut

THE BIG RED ONE A- 93

USA (113 mi) 1980 reconstructed version (158 mi) 2004

I have never been a fan of war movies, featuring lengthy battle scenes, exploding body parts, and officers encouraging their men into battle to die for blood, guts, and glory. The worst example is probably John Wayne in the 1968 film THE GREEN BERETS, the only American film made in support of the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, and is one of the ugliest, most reprehensible films I’ve seen, as it perpetuates this jingoistic illusion that we are somehow morally superior to the enemy, that God is only on our side, so therefore only they deserve to die. However, as I get older, I appreciate more the perspective of those who have been on the battlefield, and have grown more curious about what they have to say. In the 1962 James Jones Guadalcanal novel “The Thin Red Line,” there is absolute contempt by the infantry soldiers for those officers who remain protected behind fortified shields while they are ordered ahead to die and be mutilated for someone else’s glory. Those who hesitate or who question authority are labeled cowards, creating a psychological madness in the midst of a battlefield onslaught which is equally maddening. Terence Malick in his 1998 film THE THIN RED LINE re-creates the madness using stunning images of the natural landscape, in the quiet serene beauty which is being unearthed by the inner beast of man, reflected by the haunting, inner thoughts of the men which are revealed in a purely poetic language, paying reverent homage to all who have crossed that strange line in a cinematic requiem for the wounded and the dead.

I have to admit I was shocked to see how many similar poetic devices Malick used that originated here in this Sam Fuller film, his highly personalized autobiographical film about his World War II experiences as seen through the eyes of a young rifle squad in the First Infantry Division, Fuller’s own unit, that demonstrate uncanny survival skills led by Lee Marvin, their battle hardened Sargeant as they fight across North Africa, Sicily, Omaha Beach in France, through Belgium, Czechoslovakia, and Germany, particularly the insanity of war questioned constantly by the humor of the men, claiming the lives are fictionalized but the deaths are real. Like Malick, there are brief glimpses of animals in the wild, peaceful images of an iguana sunning itself on a rock, or a rabbit or a deer in the snow that seems so out of place in the midst of a battlefield where soldiers narrate their interior horrors, “The creepy thing is you’re always alone. All you can see is the guy right next to you, and the bodies you keep tripping over.” And, like Malick, there are scenes that take place with the men completely engulfed in a fog, which seems to represent the line between sanity and madness, images so eloquently depicted in Akira Kurosawa’s brilliant interpretation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in his 1957 film THRONE OF BLOOD.

I’m not aware of a vast improvement or of any tonal shift in the reconstructed version, which is simply additional footage near the end that appears sequential following the march through the Belgium forest engulfed in a total fog, including the unit indulging in a French party sequence, based on the sexual fantasies of men in their unit that did not survive, including an unsuccessful infiltration of their unit by a German spy, whose table etiquette eventually gave him away, also a black and white sequence which shows Fuller himself filming the soldiers in a temporary moment of relaxation, and finally includes a small group of elderly German protesters who meet them at the border chanting Hitler slogans, carrying Hitler signs, all swearing they promised the Führer they would not let anyone pass. The exquisite near wordless finale remains the same, featuring a traumatized concentration camp girl that never utters a word, who is befriended by the Sargeant who provides food, water, even a small music box that offers an amazing sense of sorrowful tenderness, and eventually a piggyback ride that is haunting in the full force of its simplicity. In the end Marvin, never more effortlessly genuine, meets a German soldier who appears briefly throughout the entire film, like a shadow soldier who fought against them on every field of battle, who will be there to fight when the inevitable human struggle resumes.

James Jones, from the novel “The Thin Red Line”:

Here there was no semblance of meaning. And the emotions were so many and so mixed up that they were indecipherable, could not be untangled. Nothing had been decided, nobody had learned anything. But most important of all, nothing had ended. Because tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that, they would be called upon to do the same thing again – maybe even under worse circumstances. The concept was so overpowering, so numbing...Island after island, hill after hill, beachhead after beachhead, year after year. It was staggering...They had been initiated into a strange, insane, twilight fraternity where explanation would be forever impossible. Everybody understood this; as did they themselves, dimly. It did not need to be mentioned. Everyone was sorry, and so were they themselves. But there was nothing to be done about it. Tenderness was all that could be given, and, like most of the self-labeled human emotions, it meant nothing put alongside the intensity of their experience.

Big Red One, The Anthony Lane from the New Yorker

Twenty-four years after its first appearance, Samuel Fuller's Second World War drama is not merely rereleased but revitalized. Under the loving tutelage of Richard Schickel, forty-five minutes of missing footage have been restored to their rightful place, and viewers will be able to assess this harsh and glaring testament as Fuller meant it to be. The bones of the story remain: Sergeant Possum (Lee Marvin) and four of his infantry men (Mark Hamill, Robert Carradine, Bobby Di Cicco, and Kelly Ward) fight together, and stay alive, all the way from North Africa to the concentration camps. If the restoration provides surprisingly little fluency, that is because Fuller wanted his representation of combat to be more jagged than smooth, closer to a prolonged psychotic episode than a military campaign; such style works supremely for the chaos of D Day and the breaching of enemy defenses, less so in such forcibly weird sequences as the assault on German troops inside a lunatic asylum. What binds the fragments together is the presence of Marvin; his gaze was never more icy, and the world-weariness of the action hero was never more finely caught.

The Big Red One Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television

The Big Red One (1980) has recently been reconstructed, with much of the footage cut (against Fuller's wishes) in its first release restored. By any standard, this is a considerable improvement.

However, I am baffled both by this film, and its enthusiastic critical response. Much of the movie is just combat scenes, relentless looks at the main characters firing at the Germans, and the Germans firing back at them. I could rarely see anything interesting or significant about this depressing footage. There is no educational value to the film, few of the documentary-like scenes that have been of such substance in previous Fuller works. There is little plot - just a string of incidents - and we learn almost nothing about the characters or inner lives the five main soldiers followed throughout the film. And the film's visual style rarely seems distinguished. Consequently, Fuller is playing against the strengths that distinguish his best work as a filmmaker.

The films does have some above-average scenes. The early scene of the Americans and the French trying to be allies, despite a vicious pro-Nazi Vichy general, is impressive. This has both the off-trail drama and historical insight that recall Fuller at his best. Such peace time interludes as the welcome from the Sicilian women, and the birth of a baby, are also nicely done. A brief scene with Christa Lang as an opportunistic, corrupt German aristocrat has both the historical background and characterization that is so sorely lacking in much of the rest of the film. A battle in an insane asylum is at least off-trail, reminding us that Fuller made Shock Corridor, and also featuring an all-too-brief good performance by Stéphane Audran, representing the New Wave (she is the talented star and wife of Claude Chabrol). Fuller also evokes some of the fanatic support Hitler had from many Germans, including a truly sinister pro-Hitler protest, a scene I have never seen in any other film.

In general, I really dislike war movies. I regard having to see combat on screen at a thoroughly unpleasant experience. Fuller deserves credit for not making the combat in this film seem like "fun", or some sort of cheap video game: it is harrowing and nightmarish. This film seems morally and politically inoffensive. It does not glorify war, or serves as a recruiting poster. But it is not especially creative or interesting either, a few good scenes aside.

Nashville Scene [Jim Ridley]

"See, there's no way you can portray war realistically.... For moviegoers to get the idea of real combat, you'd have to shoot at them every so often from either side of the screen. The casualties in the theater would be bad for business. Such reaching for reality in the name of art is against the law." —Samuel Fuller, A Third Face

This is fictional life," reads the title card that opens Samuel Fuller's The Big Red One, "based on factual death." That kick in the gut may be the most honest description ever made of war movies. At various times, war movies have been gung-ho propaganda meant to rouse enlistment, period pieces treated as lavish spectacle, antiwar jeremiads of blood and horror. And yet, as Fuller's quote says, all share one thing: a line of experience that movies cannot cross. For viewers who have no clue how it feels to face a bayonet, the best a war movie can do is report.

Fuller was the man for the job. As a teenager in the early 1930s, he had covered a blood-and-guts beat on New York's legendary Park Row. Already he was a cigar-chomping raconteur, and he honed an eye for detail, a zest for sensation, and a lifelong delight in what he called "a helluva yarn." When he became a filmmaker after serving in World War II, his veins still pumped tabloid ink. While Hollywood was still patting itself on the back for racism-is-bad parables like The Defiant Ones, Fuller fired off 1963's Shock Corridor—in which a black student integrating a Southern college internalizes so much white hatred that he turns into a Klansman.

The Big Red One was Fuller's dream project, an account of his wartime exploits with the First Infantry. He waited 30 years to get it made, and by the time he got the chance, he was constrained by a skin-tight budget. For release, in 1980, the movie was cut by at least an hour. Now, seven years after Fuller's death, The Big Red One is finally touring the country in a meticulously reassembled restoration. Yet even in this substantially longer version, its limitations as a war movie—especially its restriction to Fuller's own wartime experience—are more rewarding than its ambitions.

"Restriction" isn't exactly the right word, since Fuller saw a hell of a lot. Like Zab, the Fuller surrogate played by Robert Carradine, the writer-director humped it from North Africa to Normandy as a dogface, and when GIs kicked open the doors at Falkenau he was there to record the horrors within. All that is in The Big Red One, as Fuller channels a string of astounding memories into the story of a world-weary sergeant (Lee Marvin) shepherding four recruits from landing to armistice.

What makes The Big Red One so vital, and ultimately so haunting, is the specificity of those memories. The critic Manny Farber devised the term "termite art" to describe the work of directors like Fuller: movies that burrow as deeply as they can into one small area, rather than taking on grandiose airs. Fuller isn't making a grand pronouncement about war; he's just telling us everything he knows about his war.

Compare Steven Spielberg's staging of the bloody landing at Omaha Beach in Saving Private Ryan with Fuller's here. Spielberg wants us to know not only how it felt to be there but how it felt for everybody: there are cameras buzzing everywhere, lots of piled-up bodies and a sound mix that amounts to a shelling. Fuller's version is less technically impressive, but its minute details are poetically apt. The time is recorded in the watch on a dead man's wrist, in surf washed red with blood. However more "real" Private Ryan seems, the narrowness of Fuller's focus has an unshakable, cumulative firsthand veracity.

As you find in Fuller's riveting autobiography A Third Face, only the moments that seem least plausible in The Big Red One are true. The French woman who gives birth in a tank attended by wide-eyed GIs. The unforgettable scene where the sergeant chucks away a soldier's blown-off testicle. Or the scene in which the stone-faced Marvin carries a gnarled child from the death camps, to the plinking of a music box, long after the girl has slumped lifelessly on his shoulders. The episodes spin almost breathlessly, as if a dying man had one shot to tell his entire story.

While the new Big Red One is considerably more fluid and less episodic, the main thing it restores is more of these memories. Fuller isn't around to shoot at us from the screen's edges. All he left us, to get across some scrap of the experience of surviving war, is this movie. The only glory is staying alive, Zab says at one point, and that's the only thing that will never change. One soldier stumbles upon a World War I memorial and marvels, "The names are the same." Marvin replies, "They always are."

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

A World War II infantryman who landed in North Africa, Sicily, and Normandy, and was wounded twice, the late director-writer Samuel Fuller loathed what he called "phony heroics." Fuller, who turned down opportunities to direct The Longest Day and Patton, maintained that it was impossible to show combat on the screen—unless, perhaps, one were to "fire real shots over the audience's head [and] have actual casualties in the theater."

There's a sense in which all of Fuller's fabulously blunt and dynamic movies are about war. But his oeuvre does include four remarkable and provocative examples of the combat genre: the Korean War scoops The Steel Helmet (1951) and Fixed Bayonets (1951), the mutilated but gruelingly effective Burma roadster Merrill's Marauders (1962), and his autobiographical labor of love, The Big Red One (1980). The latter is a movie that, once he nixed the idea of a John Wayne vehicle, Fuller struggled for decades to make. In the late '70s, Peter Bogdanovich miraculously persuaded first Paramount and then the short-lived indie studio Lorimar to take the project.

Shot for an extremely modest $4 million and released in a severely edited version, the movie was a disappointment; in his memoirs, Fuller was still dreaming of his original four-hour cut, which he imagined residing in a Hollywood vault after Warner Bros. acquired the rights. Richard Schickel's restoration, shown at Cannes and in the New York Film Festival, isn't that particular holy grail, but it does add nearly an hour to the release version.

"Fictional life based on factual death," per Fuller's hard-boiled formulation,

The Big Red One recounts the combat as a series of grotesque (or grotesquely corny) adventures in which Lee Marvin's stoic god of war leads a platoon of callow recruits through the carnage. In one Fullerian gag, Marvin is briefly captured and smooched by a Nazi doctor, who exclaims, "I adore supermen!" Hate merges with love as the enemy is personalized. In another, a half-dozen avid soldiers deliver a baby in a tank—a sort of benign gang bang that makes far too much out of the coincidence that poussez (push) sounds like "pussy."

Given its strikingly abstract Omaha Beach sequence, if not the comic battle in a lunatic asylum, many have bracketed The Big Red One with Saving Private Ryan. Indeed, with impressive sleight of hand, Spielberg managed to evoke the inspirational rhetoric of Ronald Reagan's 1984 D-Day pageant while channeling Fuller's battle-hardened brutalism—not The Big Red One so much as Fixed Bayonets and Merrill's Marauders.

The Big Red One is certainly a testament to Fuller's tenacity, but recent raves notwithstanding, it's no masterpiece. The performances can be execrable and the timing is off; the movie suffers from its low budget, but even more from the self-consciousness that afflicted Fuller's work after Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street. (The real gem of his late career is the astonishing White Dog, made the following year.) The Big Red One isn't even Fuller's greatest war film. Of those, I'd rank it fourth—but that's not half bad.

Chicago Reader [Jonathan Rosenbaum]

When I enter his suite at the Plaza, he's finishing lunch, expressing his regret about missing Godard in Cannes, remarking on the absurdity of prizes at film festivals, asking me what Soho News and Soho are. (The one he knows about is in London -- he fondly recalls a cigar store on Frith Street.)

"It isn't hard to figure out why Mark Hamill affectionately calls him Yosemite Sam, or why Lee Marvin simply says he's D.W. Griffith. Bursting with the same charismatic, comic book energy that skyrockets through most of his movies, old crime reporter, novelist, war hero, writer-director and sometime producer Samuel Fuller, almost 69, still moves and talks like his daffy action flicks -- like the wild man from Borneo -- in quick, short, blocky punches, like two-fisted slabs of socko headline type."

The purple prose was mine, the year was 1980. Fuller was promoting his semiautobiographical war picture The Big Red One, even though the studio had just cut half of it -- something he wasn't making any effort to hide. It had also added an offscreen narration he didn't like, spoken by the character based on him and written by (though not credited to) filmmaker Jim McBride. Fuller's own two versions had no narration. His first cut was 260 minutes, his second two hours. "Second cut they hated," he told me. "They wanted the elements of the four hours and 20 minutes. Sizewise, impossible. In my cut I took out sequences -- I don't circumcise or shorten scenes. That's when they hit the ceiling."

It was the first time I'd met him, and seven years would pass before our next encounter. By then I was an academic preparing to move from the University of California at Santa Barbara to Chicago to start writing for this paper. I was running UCSB's summer school in film studies and invited Fuller to fly over from Paris, where he was then living, to serve as our artist in residence. Every course showed at least one of his films and received him as a visitor once during his nine days on campus. Each night my colleagues and I took him to a restaurant and listened to his stories until closing time. Then he and I flew to Berkeley for a couple of days so I could interview him at the Pacific Film Archive before he returned to Paris.

We stayed in touch over the remaining decade of his life -- he died in 1997 -- and I dedicated my book Movies as Politics to him. That's why I can't regard dispassionately film critic Richard Schickel's effort to reassemble Fuller's version of The Big Red One.

Schickel and producer Brian Jamieson recovered as much of Fuller's footage as they could -- some of the cut footage had been lost -- and they had his script. Their 163-minute film isn't so much a restoration of either of Fuller's versions as a more thoughtful and nuanced reworking of the 113-minute release. Reading the script, I suspected that "four hours and 20 minutes" was an exaggeration -- more a reflection of the ideal cut in Fuller's mind than what he'd edited the work down to, which was probably closer to three hours. His novel of the same title, which he wrote just before the script, provides another indication of his intentions. We also have his posthumously published autobiography, A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking (just out in paperback), which is an account of the real experiences that inspired the novel and script.

In that book Fuller wrote, "I was driven to turn my wartime experiences into a movie in order to convey the physical and mental upheaval of men at war. That's how I ultimately came to grips with my experiences. Tactics, strategy, troop movements on maps were for military historians. My screenplay reduced the war to a small squad of First Division soldiers -- a veteran sergeant and four young dogfaces -- and their emotions in wartime. Each fictional character was an amalgam of real soldiers I'd known." One of the dogfaces, Zab, played by Robert Carradine, is a transparent stand-in for Fuller.

Later in the book Fuller wrote, "During the final months of [script] revision, [my wife] Christa told me I'd have terrible nightmares, screaming out unintelligible phrases in the middle of the night." He also revealed that he'd had these nightmares about his combat experiences for much of his life. He often spoke about those experiences to friends, but as far as I know, he never spoke about the nightmares.

A man who combined a profoundly pessimistic view of mankind with a singular gusto for life, Fuller was often misunderstood by people who had only his ambiguous movies and their frequently oafish heroes to go by. He was labeled primitive, right-wing, racist, and warmongering, even though he was left-wing, antiracist, and antiwar. He was almost never described as a working-class street kid, though that was far a more accurate label, even when he was in his 70s and 80s. (The numerous war orphans who turn up in The Big Red One -- especially in the longer version, one of them played by his daughter Samantha -- capture his wide-eyed innocence better than any of the grown-ups.) In spite of all his well-earned military decorations, he thought a war movie that might make someone want to enlist was morally suspect, regardless of the cause. He was pleased that when 700 Pentagon officers, including General George Patton, son of the World War II general, saw The Big Red One, Patton complained, "It has no recruitment flavor." When Fuller visited Santa Barbara, the Iran-contra hearings were in progress, and he scoffed at Oliver North and his fatuous patriotism.

Fuller's life can be divided fairly neatly into three phases. He started selling papers on the street at age 12, became a copyboy, and was a crime reporter until he enlisted in the army at 29. He served four years in a Big Red One rifle squad, a unit distinguished by a red stripe worn on the shoulder, then spent 40-odd years making movies. It's telling that the four years in the military fill many more pages of A Third Face than his childhood and his 17 years in journalism combined.

His journalistic career is indirectly but splendidly celebrated in his favorite of his completed features, Park Row (1952), a crowded history of journalism in lower Manhattan during the 1880s that features a cigar-smoking editor (Gene Evans) who runs his paper like a rifle squad. Shot on a paltry budget, which came out of Fuller's own pocket, it was a disaster at the box office, but he never regretted making it. (This rough jewel rarely turns up, but it's showing this Saturday at the LaSalle Bank Cinema.)

Fuller's stint in the Big Red One took him to North Africa, Sicily, England, France, Belgium, Germany, and Czechoslovakia, where he helped liberate a concentration camp in Falkenau and shot his first film footage, on a 16-millimeter camera. His experiences were too various, extreme, and traumatic to be contained in a single feature, particularly given that he wanted to move beyond his combat unit and include scenes with French and German characters, underlining the idea that all soldiers are in the same boat. In The Big Red One he was obsessed, as he was elsewhere, with the moment when a treaty is signed, when what was formerly deemed killing becomes murder -- a reality he highlights in the black-and-white prologue devoted to the end of World War I as perceived by Lee Marvin's character, known only as the Sergeant.

As a consequence, The Big Red One -- despite all the framing devices and self-imposed conceptual limitations, such as the decision to omit basic training and flashbacks to home life -- comes across a bit more as a compendium than as a single story. Adding to that impression are the bold stylistic shifts from realism to surrealism, from action to horror to lyricism to black comedy to allegory and back again. Similar shifts characterize most of Fuller's late films as well as his 1980 novel, which veers from quaint in-jokes -- such as naming all the French officers after French film critics who championed his earlier movies, including (Luc) Moullet, (Bertrand) Tavernier, and (Henri) Chapier -- to terse epigraphs that suggest the dark poetry of someone like Lautreamont: "'Why are you crying?' [says] an insane child to a burning tank."

In The Big Red One Marvin's sergeant is an allegorical death figure, a benign yet gruff surrogate father to the dogfaces (much like Fuller), a comic straight man, an action hero, a device for spouting diverse kinds of information, and an almost documentary rendition of a soldier repressing emotion under stress. (It's only in the longer version of the film that the performance given by Marvin, who also saw combat, registers as one of his best.) Even some of the film's single images have an eerie way of serving double or triple duty. One of the most vivid recurring ones -- close-ups of a wristwatch on a corpse lapped by waves at Omaha Beach on D-day -- seems like it could have come directly out of one of Fuller's nightmares, yet it also registers as painfully real rather than simply imagined.

When I was interviewing Schickel at a screening of this film in October at the Chicago International Film Festival, I discovered that we had radically different readings of a highly disturbing sequence set in Falkenau, where the character played by Mark Hamill can be seen maniacally firing his rifle at a silent, unseen target inside a seemingly empty crematorium. The target briefly becomes a soldier with a machine gun in a foxhole. Schickel interpreted that as realistic. I saw it as a crazed hallucination. The film's pendulumlike swings between a documentary sense of reality and an overall mood of fantasy inevitably produce eerie moments when it's difficult to tell them apart.

Schickel's cut is incomparably better than the 1980 release, though it only reduces rather than eliminates the offscreen narration Fuller objected to. There are defensible reasons for keeping it, such as making the action easier to follow and identify with, but I can't help wondering what conceptual aspects of the original it obscures. I wouldn't call even this version Fuller's best film, though in some ways it's the richest; the New York Times's A.O. Scott rightly calls it a "messy, muscular masterpiece." I also wouldn't call it his best war film; to my mind that's the first one he did, The Steel Helmet (1950), shot in only ten days and dealing with a war he never fought in, the one that was going on in Korea.

The Big Red One simmered in Fuller's brain for at least three decades, and he always regarded it as his magnum opus. It can't contain all his ambitions, which must have accumulated over the years in layers, some of them contradictory -- which may account in part for the film's stylistic shifts. In 1980 I concluded in my review for the Soho News that this 50s war movie might be something of an antique, but it was "also the most intelligent American movie in any genre I've seen this year." Encountering a much longer version a quarter century later, I find it looks less like an antique, and its eccentricities now seem timeless: few American directors in the 50s were quite as allegorical or as surrealist as Fuller. And if a more intelligent and, yes, contemporary American movie has been released this year, I haven't seen it.

Sam Fuller - Directors Guild of America Reconstructing Sam Fuller’s The Big Red One, by Richard Schnikel, originally published in Film Comment, May/June 2004

The Big Red One Robert Horton, originally published in Movietone News, March 1981, republished in Parallax View, September 24, 2009

Unofficial Sam Fuller site Battleground of Film, by Richard von Busack from Metro, November 6 – 12, 1997

At last … the really ‘Big Red One’ Richard T. Jameson, originally published in Steadycam, February 13, 2005, republished in Parallax View, May 9, 2012

Some Notes on The Big Red One to Honour the 10th Anniversary of ... Christa Lang Fuller, November 25, 2007, also seen here: Some Notes on The Big Red One to Honour the 10th Anniversary of Sam Fuller’s Death

The Big Red One Survival of the Fittest, by Chris Fujiwara from The Boston Phoenix, December 3, 2004, also here: The Boston Phoenix

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WHITE DOG C 70

USA (90 mi) 1982

While I realize I do not share the prevailing view on this film, which in my view, is a lame excuse for an anti-racist parable, and while others may find significance in this original script written by Sam Fuller and Curtis Hanson, a film Jonathan Rosenbaum calls “one of the key films of the 80’s...a powerful and corrosive masterpiece about American racism,” a film which by the end actually generated some slight applause in the theater, I, on the other hand, found it laughable in its simplistic rather than subversive tone, reducing the magnitude of the evils of race hatred and the impact on mankind into a film about some idiot programming a white German shepherd dog to hate black skin and attack blacks on sight, called a White Dog, racism depicted as Cujo, which, to me, subverts the awesome power of truth. It would take an entire country of Cujo’s sent out to attack all at once, not a single dog, to reflect the actual horror and domination of living under the thumb of a society of racists. Perhaps I’m stating the obvious, but in this film, I felt the message portrayed was a poor substitute for the real thing, as it fails to evoke the cost, the human price that has been paid, from centuries of deep-seeded human abuse, power-gone-wrong in the name of law and order, justice only for the majority, not just targeting individuals but savagely terrorizing minority communities, treating them as less than human, as we would our enemies in war, virtually eliminating all avenues to defend themselves, subverting their means of expression and power, depriving them in unfathomable ways of basic human rights, which is the reality of racism.

Here the suggestion is: once a killer dog, always a killer dog, or once a racist, always a racist, offering a solution of utter hopelessness, which, by the way, accurately reflects the abysmal disillusionment of the racial anti-optimism of the Reagan era, which makes me wonder, why make the film? The sheer futility of dealing with a society of racists that can continually protect themselves behind an evershifting field of blind denials is a historical given. To make a film which doesn’t venture beyond the obvious – one should have bitter contempt for this point of view, as it belittles those who are actively engaged in lifelong commitments to alter this reality. Just because a film is on the right side of a moral issue doesn’t mean it’s any good or deserving of praise. I’ve seen plenty of TV shows that want to say the right things, but turn out to be feeble expressions of the obvious. It’s just absurd how little insight this film actually adds to the subject of racism. Where is the human heart? Where is the humanity? Where is the moral outrage? Where is there any sense of purpose or passion for eradicating conditions of such human indecency? I didn’t find it in this film, which I believe actually avoids rather than deals with the subject, therefore has little relevance to anyone who actually cares about learning how to live in a world already filled with racists, which I find to be the predominate issue of our day, not just a concept.

Time Out

From the opening shot of a white flashlight piercing a black screen, Fuller's film is a model of intelligent simplicity. McNichol runs over a beautiful white Alsatian, takes it home to care for it, and discovers that the beast has been conditioned as a 'white dog' which attacks any black that it encounters. Rather than destroy it, she takes it to a black animal trainer (Winfield) to try to de-condition it... Just one of the many remarkable things about Fuller's impeccable treatment of racism is that it investigates that vile trait without showing a racist character; the dog is a perfect symbol for the confused and vicious conditioning that runs riot throughout the human world. Fuller has never heeded the false optimism of liberal creeds, and is well aware that there are no easy solutions to the problem; as the film's ending possibly suggests, you might just eradicate racism, but you'll never be rid of hatred. With Bruce Surtees' uncluttered camerawork, a superb score from Ennio Morricone, and fine acting throughout, this is one film of Fuller's which is most complex in its emotional sway: compassionate towards both animal and humans in the error of their ways, but fuelled by a seething anger. There is certainly no finer film on its subject.

The New York Times (Janet Maslin)

"White Dog," the unreleased 1981 film about racism that opens the Film Forum's tribute to Sam Fuller, the B-movie giant, cast a long shadow before it ever saw the light of day. Long deferred in preproduction, and at various times assigned to directors as disparate and unlikely as Roman Polanski and Tony Scott, "White Dog" was made with an N.A.A.C.P. representative on the set and with threats that the film might be boycotted if and when it was ever finished.

Both Paramount Pictures, the film's distributor, and NBC, which had planned to show it on television, shied away from this controversy. So "White Dog" surfaced only briefly for test-marketing before disappearing from theatrical release. In light of the finished film, which is a fascinating oddity and as clear an indictment of racism as one might ever see, this furor seems all the more remarkable.

"White Dog" is based on a Life magazine story by Romain Gary, about a dog trained by white bigots to attack blacks (an image Mr. Gary later used as the title of his book about his marriage to Jean Seberg). It was turned by Mr. Fuller, who had had his own experiences with German-trained G.I.-hunting dogs in World War II, into the story of a young actress named Julie Sawyer (Kristy McNichol) who one dark night finds what she thinks is a lovable pet. Finding the dog hit on a road, she winds up seeking a veterinarian's help and then adopting the dog herself. Mr. Fuller's command of stark, spooky imagery is sufficiently intense to make even the visit to the vet's office an exercise in the bizarre.

Over time, it becomes apparent to both Julie and the audience that her white German shepherd has a vicious streak that is activated in the presence of any black person the dog happens to see. This first part of the film has the blunt, unnerving power of a horror story, as the dog's rampages are captured in chilling detail. A sequence in a church, where a well-dressed black man flees from the dog and takes refuge, is outstandingly ghastly.

But the film takes almost a humorous turn when Julie brings the dog to Noah's Ark, an animal-training center that trains wildlife for movie work. "I tell you what, use our panther -- he's safe, and he knows every camera angle," the center's director (Burl Ives) is heard saying over the telephone. This same director throws darts at a poster of a little robot, who is undoubtedly bad for business. At Noah's Ark, the dog meets its match in a devoted animal trainer named Keys (Paul Winfield), who goes about the task of reprogramming the dog with scientific precision. Keys, who considers the dog a valuable weapon in the war against racism, insists on exposing more and more of his black skin to the animal every time he makes a suspenseful foray into the dog's cage.

"White Dog" earnestly tackles the issue of the dog's racist behavior, and even provides a surprising explanation for how the animal received its early training. And Mr. Winfield is outstandingly good in turning Keys into a much more interesting character than he might have been. But much of the film's appeal lies simply in its B-style bluntness, and with its wittily obsessive attention to movie-world minutiae. Mr. Ives's character insists that as the animal trainer who handled the snakes for the movie, he helped John Wayne win his Oscar for "True Grit." Miss McNichol, when she pays a hospital visit to a fellow actress whom the dog has attacked on a movie set, brings a copy of the Truffaut-Hitchcock interview book as a present.

The scene in which this actress is attacked is both appalling and droll, since the two women are seen pretending to be touring Venice in a gondola. The dialogue: "Is that Lord Byron's house?" "I think so." "I love his poetry."

The screenplay for "White Dog," by Mr. Fuller and Curtis Hanson, contains much more in this B-chestnut vein. "Noah's Ark is like a laboratory that Darwin himself would go ape over," somebody says. And as befits the film's blunt, inelegant simplicity and occasional shocking tenor, there is never any mincing of words. "Do you have children?" Mr. Ives asks Miss McNichol. "When you do have them, by the time they're 25 there won't be any animals."

Bruce Surtees's cinematography, which gives a lurid, otherworldly glow to shots that seem almost to penetrate the dog's thoughts, and Ennio Morricone's eerie score contribute greatly to the enduring strangeness of "White Dog."

White Dog: Sam Fuller Unmuzzled Criterion essay by J. Hoberman

White Dog: Fuller Vs. Racism Criterion essay by Armond White

Me and Sam Fuller Criterion essay by Lisa Dombrowski

White Dog (1982) - The Criterion Collection

White Dog • Senses of Cinema Jennie Lightweis-Goff, September 14, 2009

BFI | Sight & Sound | DVD: White Dog (1982) Tim Lucas from Sight and Sound, February 2009

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THIEVES AFTER DARK (Les Voleurs de la nuit)

France (98 mi) 1984

User reviews from imdb Author: bobmonell (bobmonell@hotmail.com)

Young lovers on the run in Paris attempt to elude a number of sinister characters. French new-wave filmmaker Claude Chabrol, appearing in a bizarre role as a voyeur, is one of many in-jokes/references to Fuller's fascination with European culture. The film is structured as a chase yet has a tentative, fantasy matrix which makes it the opposite of a realistic thriller. It's charming, personal, tender and nihilistic all at the same time. Fuller fans may have some trouble finding this rather obscure film, but it's well worth searching out.

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz)

A below-average "Bonnie and Clyde" tale, about lovers on-the-run after a murder in Paris. A young couple is pursued for a murder they never did. This B-film, directed by Samuel Fuller, is one of the few he did that failed. The setup seemed so wooden, while the bourgeois villains seemed more like cartoon figures than real people. Even the hero and the heroine failed to be convincing.

François (Di Cicco) is an unemployed violinist. Isabelle (Jannot) is looking for work as an art historian. They are both at the unemployment agency-ANPE-and feel humiliated looking for work and not being offered jobs they feel are respectable. He's offered a job as a dishwasher by Mr. Crepin (Chabrol), someone he mocks by calling him Tartuffe. Isabelle sees Ms. Morelle (Salik), whom she calls Mussolini, and is offered a job in a porno theater. The counselors have no regard for their unemployed clients and treat them like dirt. Tartuffe hits on his female applicants, while Mussolini combs her mustache instead of listening to her applicants.

Isabelle can't take it anymore and throws a chair through Mussolini's window, as the gentle François rescues her in the ensuing chaos. They flee together, have some coffee, and become lovers. Not able to get jobs or make it as street musicians, they decide to become thieves. They rob the three counselors they despise  -- Mussolini, Mr. Desterne, and Tartuffe -- and humiliate them in the same way they have been.

When they rob Tartuffe, he accidentally falls off the ledge of a building. But Isabelle thinks she killed him by frightening him to death. The cops are also after them, led by Inspector Farbet (Lanoux). Their mentor, Jose (Voutsinas), an ex-con now running a junk shop and reconstructing old musical instruments, helps them get a fence (Fuller) for their stolen goods. Jose will later help the lovers escape the police.

The lovers flee to the border where they are recognized, and Isabelle is unnecessarily killed by a custom police officer. François responds by killing two officers, and is arrested after giving a violin concert. The police now know the couple was innocent of murder, as a witness came forward verifying the death as accidental.

This one might be appreciated only by devoted Sam Fuller fans.

STREET OF NO RETURN

France Portugal (93 mi) 1989

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]

The late pulp filmmaker Sam Fuller began his directorial career in 1949 with I Shot Jesse James, and wrapped his final big-screen film, Street Of No Return, in 1989. In the intervening 40 years, he created a cinematic universe filled with crusty reporters, unsentimental soldiers, cynical gunmen, and sexually experienced women, and he worked with whatever resources were available, bleeding out low-budget B-pictures and applying the same grit to his few higher-budget projects. The new-to-DVD Street Of No Return has the seedy, blacked-out look of an '80s video-store shelf-filler--the interiors lack a sense of defined space, while the exteriors are dominated by trash-strewn, bonfire-lit alleys--but it's still a Fuller film in every sense. Keith Carradine stars as a Neil Diamond-like pop star who falls in love with dancer/model Valentina Vargas and decides to take some time off from the celebrity grind. A gang of contrarians, including Carradine's lovestruck manager and Vargas' mobster boyfriend, nix the singer's plans by having his throat slit. From there, Street Of No Return develops into a fairly routine revenge story, as a scraggly, destitute Carradine (looking uncannily like his brother David) manipulates cops and crooks alike to get another shot at the conspirators. The back half of the film doesn't offer much that can't be found on Showtime at 2 a.m., but Fuller applies the full force of his imagination to the setup, jumping back and forth in time with clean match-cuts and giving the show-business and Dumpster-diving environments equal doses of lurid hyper-realism. Carradine the bum gulps dripping water from broken pipes, and hides behind enormous milk boxes stamped "Good For The Whole Family." Carradine the idol makes dispassionate love to Vargas, after which Fuller whip-pans around the room, catching glimpses of the lovers' naked bodies. These touches of directorial grace don't exactly redeem Street Of No Return, but they do liven up what might have otherwise been a dull grind. The DVD adds a commentary track by Carradine (whose memory of the production proves faulty), as well as 30 minutes worth of insightful interviews and footage from the set. None of the disc's features pretend that the film offers more than effective genre storytelling, although those with an eye for thematic significance may note how Fuller keeps bringing the action and dialogue back to the crotch. One of the first lines of dialogue has a street person dismissing the potential pestilence of an alcohol-drowned mouse, saying "Every germ in it was deader'n my cock," and at a climactic moment, a bad guy takes a bullet to the groin. With Street Of No Return, Fuller ended his career by taking literal shots at the virility that fueled his characters' violence.

The Digital Bits Adam Jahnke

Street of No Return opens with a bang, literally. The very first shot is of a guy taking a hammer blow straight to the head. We're in the middle of a race riot that's erupted on the streets of an unnamed American city. Watching from the sidelines is Michael (Keith Carradine, Robert's brother). Years ago, Michael was living the high life as a rock star. That is, until he fell for Celia (Valentina Vargas), the gorgeous girlfriend of criminal mastermind Eddie (Marc De Jong). In retribution for stealing his girl, Eddie slashes Michael's throat, destroying his vocal chords and robbing him of his one gift. Now, Michael lives on the streets, all wild eyes and wilder hair, drinking the booze left in the shards of broken whiskey bottles and able to speak only in a croaked whisper. In the aftermath of the opening riot, Michael discovers that Eddie's behind the racial tensions tearing the city apart. He teams up with the beleaguered police chief Borel (Bill Duke) to bring Eddie down and rescue Celia.

Street of No Return isn't a great movie but it's certainly enjoyable and instantly recognizable as belonging to Sam Fuller. From the stylized dialogue to the moody cinematography of French DP Pierre-William Glenn, the movie snaps along with Fuller's usual intensity. While the story occasionally becomes unfocused, it never threatens to derail entirely and, at a brisk 92 minutes, never outlives its welcome. Street of No Return also has that weird limbo feel of a movie set in America but obviously shot on location in Europe (in this case, Portugal). This actually helps in this case, since this is a city populated by people with just one name (Michael, Celia, Borel) who seem to be totally adrift and unable to control their own lives.

Fantoma deserves congratulations for rescuing Street of No Return from obscurity and even more praise for bringing it to DVD in style. The anamorphically enhanced picture is very nice, exhibiting only mild shimmering here and there to distract the eye. Apart from that, the disc makes it easy to get lost in Glenn's smoke and shadow filled cinematography. The 5.1 surround audio is surprisingly aggressive, filling the rear speakers with gunfire, action and music. Dialogue is front and center and it's easy to tell which characters were dubbed in post-production but there isn't much to be done about that.

Finally, Fantoma has released a disc with extras worthy of Fuller's body of work. The highlight is a 30+ minute documentary, The Making of Street of No Return, shot on location by an apparently French film crew. The piece is full of valuable footage of Fuller at work, chomping on his ubiquitous cigars and regaling the crew with war stories. This feature demonstrates what a tragedy it is that Fuller died before DVD became a force to be reckoned with. He was one of the most memorable characters to ever helm a film. Unlike a lot of directors, who'll fill a making-of piece with fluff like what movies inspired them, Sam Fuller was a born storyteller who actually lived a life outside of Hollywood. He answers every question with an anecdote from his days on the crime beat or the war or his early days as a writer. If Fuller had lived, he would probably have to record two or three commentaries for each of his films, just to get all the stories in.

Keith Carradine provides an audio commentary over the film itself in which he provides his observations and remembrances of Fuller... and struggles to remember anything specific about the making of the film itself. He has less and less to say as the movie goes on but the commentary is still worth at least half a listen. His memories of Fuller are warm and respectful and he's refreshingly candid about the strengths and weaknesses of the movie. Also included on the disc is a text interview with Fuller, excerpted from a French book, the original trailer, and well-written liner notes by Lee Server, author of the biography Sam Fuller: Film is a Battleground.

Images (Grant Tracey)

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford

PopMatters David Sanjek

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Fulvue Drive-in Nate Goss

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

Chris Jarmick

Mondo Digital also reviewing PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET and TIGRERO (Directed by Mika Kaurismäki starring Samuel Fuller and Jim Jarmusch)

The New York Times (Janet Maslin)

Fund, Ivan and Santiago Loza

THE LIPS (Los Labios)

Argentina (103 mi) 2010

Deborah Young Deborah Young at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 18, 2010

CANNES -- Almost a documentary, "The Lips" takes the viewer on a slow, measured journey into the outbacks of Argentina, areas of great poverty, where three women medics arrive on a government-sponsored health mission. Co-directors Santiago Loza and Ivan Fund show enormous respect for these selfless idealists and for the people unto whom they minister. But it's an exceedingly small film that will find little space outside festivals.

Uncommitted viewers may give up in the opening 15 minutes, which is basically a long overnight bus ride taken by three unknown female characters. They get off in the middle of a country road and are accompanied by a local man, Raul, to the abandoned hospital which is to be their home. The place is in ruins and flooded. No one utters a word of complaint.

The body of the film is given to their visits to the area's scattered residents, who suffer from malnutrition and other ills caused by poverty. Part sociologists, part paramedics, they question the locals closely about their children's diet and how many family members sleep in one bed. Lead by an older women, Coca (Adela Sanchez), the younger women go quietly about their business with a stoic heroism that occasionally breaks down in tears. A final happy dance sequence in a local bar is enough to close the film on an upbeat note.

The Lips (Los Labios) Lee Marshall at Cannes from Screendaily

Three female medical workers travel to a distant part of Argentina to help the locals in this graceful, humane and unclassifiable drama. It’s a fragile, slow-paced and declaredly indie number, but the film’s intriguing blend of acted scenes and others apparently improvised around real patients in this impoverished (and never named) part of the country keep us going through the occasional longueur.

That said, it would take a courageous buyer to take a punt on this one. Though some of the scenes of the women’s’ healing misson are delightful, this doesn’t quite have the feel good factor of, say, Alamar - another recent Latin American title that blurs documentary and fiction. At home in Argentina, and possibly in other territories in the region, the social issues it deals with should find it a home with an ultra-arthouse public.

We first see Coca, Luchi and Noe in a bus station. They clearly have an appointment, but don’t seem to know each other - or at least stout, schoolteacher-like Coca has never met the other two before. Noe seems the most urbane and sexually confident of the three; Luchi is pretty but insecure. After a nightride by coach they arrive at a remote country crossroads to be met - eventually - by Raul, a local government employee who takes them to the abandoned hospital that is to be their accommodation.

For all we know at this point the film could be heading into horror territory; it’s only after twenty minutes, when we see them with their first patients, that we realise the three are community care workers, whose task it is to visit people in remote villages and check on their state of health and nutrition.

In a series of affecting, apparently un-acted scenes we meet Patricia, an mother with six kids; an unemployed man looking after two small children; a 78-year-old man with pneumonia and severe malnutrition who the women take to the hospital; and Roxana, a teenage girl who is pregnant for the second time, possibly by her father.

The extraordinary thing about these patients is that they are clearly real locals. Which gets us to wondering whether the three actresses - who are giving jabs, taking temperatures and asking all the right questions - are actually doctors playing actresses playing doctors.

The tension set up by this question carries through to the end, but it’s at its most taut and engaging in the medical visit scenes. In between, the three women hang out in the dingy ex-hospital, part of which is being demolished. They do each other’s hair, put on lipstick, and slowly bond. There seems to be some sort of one-way crackle in the air between Luchi and Noe. But these bridging scenes feel a little staged compared to the local/cast interactions.

The three women’s characters are hardly sketched in, and we are given no backstories. This has the effect of throwing us wonderingly into their present - especially in a final bar scene which is a compelling example of the directors’ improvised docu-drama approach. Camerawork is close-up and handheld, but there are moments of visual poetry in the morning and evening light that bring out the gloriously earthy colours of the rural setting.

Guy Lodge announces FIPRESCI winners at Cannes from In Contention, May 22, 2010

Cannes 2010. Hong Sang-soo's "Ha Ha Ha" + Un Certain Regard Awards David Hudson at Cannes announces the Best Acting prize from Un Certain Regard, from the Auteurs, May 22, 2010

Fuqua, Antoine

TRAINING DAY

USA (122 mi) 2001 ‘Scope

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Antoine Fuqua's Training Day is a rock-solid Hollywood thriller that traces a corrupt cop's twisted abuse of the innocent. While Alonzo Harris (Denzel Washington) isn't the kind of meaty religious cripple worthy of Ferrara, he's a roughneck cop who eschews a pathology far more terrifying than that of Harvey Keitel's bad lieutenant. Fuqua's gracefully scripted chamber piece delicately traces the business of crime; here, cops (referred to as pigs) and thugs become indistinguishable from one another in the big time game of drugs and money. Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke) is the rookie: Alonzo's "nigger," "bitch" and, ultimately, fall guy. Halfway through Fuqua's exploitative action yarn, Alonzo is revealed to be more than just an over-aggressive do-gooder—he's a self-serving criminal who uses his police badge to overpower a ghetto-full of black brothers. While Training Day may feel like Washington's one-man terror show, the narrative is ironic and succinct. An order of white men (two cops and a DA) toast the fact that a petty criminal successfully convinced a jury of his insanity by shoving peanut butter into his ass cheeks and eating it before his sentencing was announced. Alonzo is cut from the same vein; he feels that if he successfully works the system, he deserves his freedom. By film's end Alonzo becomes not unlike a piece of stagnant meat thrown into a ghetto coliseum by an empowered Jake and forced to take on the hungry, vengeful brothers he was supposed to protect. Business is business in Training Day but, in the end, it's all about who has your back.

Slate [David Edelstein]

If nothing else, Training Day is a gorgeous pedestal for Denzel Washington, who proves that he can pull out all the stops without losing his charismatic focus—think Al Pacino in Scarface (1983), only sane. His character, a plainclothes narcotics detective named Alonso, is also giving the performance of his life—trying to psych out a "daisy fresh rookie" (Ethan Hawke) who's so eager to prove himself that he doesn't realize (until it's too late) the ways in which he's being ensnared.

The first two-thirds are a funny and horrifying study in vigilante outlandishness—a near-surreal concentration of all those movies and TV shows about by-the-book idealists being taught the dirty but essential ways of the street by their cynical elders. ("To protect the sheep from the wolf you gotta look like the wolf.") And we don't know where it's going: Will Alonso's methods (which include pummeling drug dealers, maiming rapists, faking warrants, and cozying up to kingpins) be vindicated? Will he turn out to be correct about how to stay alive—and defeat evil—on the street, or will he end up embodying an even higher evil? As long as that question remains unanswered, Training Day is a brilliant tour-de-force of writing, directing, and acting—a young cop's descent into hell the way that After Hours (1985) was a yuppie's descent into hell. As a steadfast opponent of the vigilante ethic, I like the side on which the movie comes down. But giving Alonso a melodramatic secret—a reason for this particular behavior on this particular day—trivializes the whole exercise. And Denzel Washington has too much stature to squander it on just another movie about a chuckling psychopath with a God complex.

Bright Lights Film Journal [Mark G. E. Kelly] February 2005

Nitrate Online (Cynthia Fuchs) also seen here: PopMatters

Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir]

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young]

Decent Films Guide - Faith on film Steven D. Greydanus

Crazy for Cinema

The Onion A.V. Club [Mike D'Angelo]

Alternative Film Guide [Andre Soares]

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

ReelViews [James Berardinelli]

Needcoffee.com - DVD Review Widge

The Film Desk [James Kendrick]

DVD Verdict Patrick Naugle

HD-DVD Edition, DVD Town [John J. Puccio]

DVD Verdict [Ryan Keefer] - HD-DVD

DVDTalk Blu-ray Review [Joshua Zyber]

DVD Verdict - Blu-ray [Dennis Prince]

The Village Voice [Amy Taubin]

George Chabot's Review

Xiibaro Reviews [David Perry]

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray

filmcritic.com on Training Day Blake French

Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]

Movie Vault [BigDan]

Exclaim! [Greg Loon]

BBCi - Films New Pierce

Guardian/Observer

San Francisco Chronicle [Bob Graham]

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]

New York Times (registration req'd) Elvis Mitchell

KING ARTHUR

USA Ireland (126 mi) 2004 director’s cut (140 mi)

Film Comment James Crawford

SHOOTER B- 81

USA (124 mi) 2007

A pyrotechnic’s dream film, also anyone who loves helicopter shots, as there were more swooping aerial shots in this film than any other in recollection. The story itself is fairly standard stuff, a secret government within the government, with references to the JFK assassination as well as other assassinations abroad in Africa that cover up secret private enterprise atrocities that make a lot of Americans rich, particularly a seemingly invincible corrupt U.S. Senator from Montana, Ned Beatty, his U.S. Army Lieutenant protector Danny Glover, in another evil turn much like WITNESS, along with his sadistic henchman Elias Koteas. All the usual suspects appear, this time operating under a secret FBI plan to supposedly protect the President from an assassination plot, luring a retired Marine gunnery sergeant out of retirement, as his specialized skill at accuracy from long range is unparalleled, but he ends up being the fall guy in a set up that was actually intended all along to assassinate a visiting President of Ethiopia, sitting on the same podium as the President, and blaming a dead Marine in the process. But after taking a few bullets, the Marine escapes and eludes capture, only to find his face is pasted all over the news as the man charged with an attempted assassination of the President. But as in all good revenge flicks, this time they hired the wrong fall guy. Mark Wahlberg as Bob Lee Swagger is perfectly cast as a loner living out in mountainous isolation with man’s best friend, his dog, three years after an incident gone wrong where his spotter was killed in a secret military operation in Ethiopia where they inexplicably got left behind. As he mutters at some point when someone wonders how he’s still alive, he was trained not to die so that he could utilize his training skills to kill people – something that could easily have been said in any RAMBO movie. That’s just the kind of movie this is.

Fast paced, with plenty of action thrown in to keep the audience awake, with enough gun references to be an NRA recruiting film, providing plenty of close ups of big guns, gun specifications, gun drawings, gun Internet sites, not to mention well designed action scenes with hordes of men with guns shooting at one another, but Wahlberg is a man not to be messed with, so he can defy all odds and take out anything this secret military wishes to throw at him – and all from one afternoon’s one-stop shopping spree where he can buy not only bullets and bombs, but napalm. He’s clever, good looking, strips down to reveal his muscles when he gets wounded, and, in a new angle, he searches out his former partner’s now widowed girl friend, Kate Mara, to help nurse him back to health. Together they comprise a Bonnie and Clyde two person outlaw gang on the run that takes on the entire U.S. intelligence operations. If that’s not ambitious enough, well, the film did have to establish Wahlberg’s credentials. In another interesting twist, Swagger uses an FBI operative (Michael Peña) as bait to flush out some bad guys, then moments after Peña thought he was finished, he turns him against his own agency and adds him as an accomplice in his revenge scheme.

Two scenes stand out in particular, simply for the sheer audacity of the moment, a scene where Wahlberg gets hellbent on revenge not because he was set up, but, as he explains it: “I don’t think you understand. These boys killed my dog!” and another that features the world’s leading gun expert, an eccentric old coot (Levon Helm) who enjoys examining his visitor’s hands to evaluate their gun expertise, a man with seemingly unlimited knowledge about secret operations around the world, apparently able to infiltrate every known conspiracy theory, a veritable gun conspirator’s Deep Throat.

Without getting too carried away, this is a movie in the old-fashioned sense, the kind where you’re supposed to sit there munching on popcorn and enjoy watching the people’s heads and the world explode, where the good guy walks out of a cloud of fire and behind him the bad guys explode, all in slow motion, of course. There’s something pitifully entertaining about all this, as the characters are attractive, Wahlberg is the right guy, Mara is drop dead gorgeous, speaks with just the slightest Southern drawl, and she knows a thing or two about guns, which makes her even more attractive to the gun fantasy community, Glover has always made a terrific bad guy, and government conspiracy theorists get their wish fulfilled as this is hard core revenge vigilantism at its finest. There appears to be a healthy balance for all parties concerned, and the director doesn’t completely screw it up, he keeps the action moving along. All in all, nothing special, a delusional fantasy, but enjoyable.

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

Based on the novel Point Of Impact by Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter, Shooter is a Charles Bronson movie that thinks it's The Parallax View. What begins as standard-issue airplane fare—equal parts In The Line Of Fire and The Fugitive, but with a gun fetishist's love for hardware—gradually morphs into a full-scale vigilante picture, sparked by the sort of deep government paranoia that would play well to separatist militia groups. The film thinks it's knowing about political power, but there's no substance behind its little conspiracy theories about villages razed for oil pipelines or evil senators who puff stogies while orchestrating mass murder. The difference between Shooter and the '70s paranoid thrillers it emulates is the difference between disillusionment and cheap cynicism. Movies like The Parallax View and All The President's Men were made out of concern that the government had gotten away from the people; Shooter just uses dirty politics as an excuse for gruesome headshots.

Trading his natural charisma for tough-guy stoicism, Mark Wahlberg stars as an expert marksman who retreats into seclusion after the military leaves him stranded during a secret operation in Nigeria. He's drawn back into the fray when a consortium of government higher-ups, led by Danny Glover, asks for his help in thwarting an assassination attempt on the President. When the operation turns out to be a double-cross, a wounded Wahlberg flees the scene with seemingly every law-enforcement agent in three states on his tail. His only allies are Michael Peña, a disgraced FBI agent who starts to doubt the official line, and Kate Mara, the widow of Wahlberg's former spotter, who provides temporary cover and dresses his wounds.

At a certain point, the search for justice becomes such a farce that Shooter crosses over into an exceedingly ugly revenge film, with Wahlberg's trusty rifle popping heads like zits from a mile away. As the body count increases, the kills become so gratuitous that the effect is numbing, like watching a line of metal ducks get pinged at the state fair. Director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) keeps the action moving efficiently, but he doesn't know when to stop piling it on, and eventually, Wahlberg's army of one becomes more a comic-book vigilante than a righteously disgruntled patriot. He'll be a big hit at the next NRA meeting.

Mike D'Angelo

Few recent action heroes have been as aptly named as Bob Lee Swagger, the world-class marksman and Ramboesque patriot/badass played by Mark Wahlberg in Shooter. Swagger this dude does, all right, though in a pinch he can also strut, scowl and, of course, stroll calmly away from massive fireballs (of his own making) in fetishistic slo-mo. When John Woo does this sort of thing, he at least has the presence of mind to give his phlegmatic icon a long coat that can billow out behind him like a cape, tacitly acknowledging his superhero status. Shooter, however, was directed by Antoine Fuqua, who seems determined to prove that the excellence of Training Day (2001) was a complete fluke. Here, working with a screenplay adapted (by Jonathan Lemkin) from Stephen Hunter's novel Point of Impact, he seems unsure whether he's making a caustic examination of real-world corruption and duplicity or a black-and-white Nietzschean fantasy, and winds up with a preposterous thriller that further insults your intelligence by purporting to address hard and unpleasant truths about the world we live in.

The basic premise is très Manchurian: Living in seclusion high in the mountains following a bungled mission in Ethiopia, former gunnery sergeant Swagger is approached by a trio of government operatives (Danny Glover, Elias Koteas and Rade Sherbedgia, playing a rousing game of oilier-than-thou) who say their intelligence indicates that a sniper intends to assassinate the U.S. president in a few weeks. Only a handful of marksmen on the planet, Swagger included, could possibly hit the target from over a mile away, as would be required. Could he possibly provide them with a detailed blueprint for such an attempt? You know, how he would kill the president, if he were of a mind to, or if some malevolent dudes in designer suits wanted to make it look as if he did. And would he additionally be so obliging as to join them at the event in question, observing from a long way off, peering through binoculars, utterly oblivious to what's going on around him? That would be ideal.

Needless to say, Swagger is soon running for his life, assisted only by the widow of his former spotter (Kate Mara) and by a rookie FBI agent (Michael Peña) who does some poking around and correctly deduces that Swagger was framed. With his boyish face and befuddled demeanor, Peña (Crash, World Trade Center) makes for a far more sympathetic and compelling victim of circumstance than Wahlberg, who plays Swagger with the sort of superhuman concentration and endurance not seen since the heyday of Schwarzenegger and Stallone. Wahlberg is a terrific character actor who richly deserved his Oscar nomination for The Departed, but he lacks the brute charisma necessary to command an entire screen all by his lonesome; placed at the center of attention, he reverts to clichéd Marky machismo, turning blandly hard and remote. He does, however, manage to wring a belly laugh from Swagger's most ridiculous Eastwoodism, uttered in reply to Peña's sensible suggestion that they let the police handle things: "I don't think you understand. These boys killed my dog."

The mutt dies offscreen, thankfully, which is more than can be said for the many victims of Swagger's righteous wrath. Connoisseurs of head wounds won't want to miss Shooter, which at times starts to seem like an extended remix of the Zapruder film. But what's truly galling is the way that the movie pays cynical lip service to our well-earned distrust of authority—the trail of slime ultimately leads to a red-state senator—while simultaneously effacing or ignoring the myriad complications of real-world institutional corruption. (For those, check out any season of HBO's The Wire.) Shooter's repugnant finale is a Branch Davidian wet dream, the orgiastic triumph of undue process. Incredibly, LA Weekly critic Scott Foundas sees in Swagger "the last honest exponent of old-fashioned American virtue," apparently unruffled by the former sniper's violent contempt for civil liberties. He even concludes his review with "Bob Lee Swagger for president." But we already have a president who's certain that the ends justify his means.

The Village Voice [Scott Foundas]

In the same week that sees Adam Sandler playing a grieving 9/11 widower in Reign Over Me, another lone figure reeling from post-traumatic stress fills the central role in the new Antoine Fuqua–directed thriller, Shooter. Named Bob Lee Swagger and played with appropriately gruff machismo by Mark Wahlberg, he's a former Marine gunnery sergeant and scout sniper who's also lost someone special—not his wife or girlfriend, but his spotter, Donnie (Lane Garrison). (In military terms, the shooter-spotter relationship is about as close as two guys can get without asking or telling.) Three years ago in Ethiopia, both men were left for dead by their superiors when their "unofficial" mission got officially all fucked up. Only Swagger made it out alive.

Cut to the present and some shadowy ex-military types (led by Danny Glover) who show up on Swagger's doorstep with a really big favor to ask: They want him to kill the president of the United States—or rather, they want him to tell them, O.J. Simpson–style, how he would kill the prez if he were to do it. Internal government intelligence, it seems, has uncovered an assassination plot timed to the president's upcoming public appearance in Philadelphia, during which the fatal shot will be fired by an expert marksman from a distance of more than a mile. Swagger's expertise is needed in order to flush the suspect out. The men in black speak of honor and duty and patriotism. "Do we let America be ruled by thugs?" they ask Swagger rhetorically. "Sure, some years we do," he replies. Still, he agrees to take the job, even if we rightly suspect that any deal made by Glover and his oily private contractors (Elias Koteas and Rade Sherbedgia) is certain to prove a devil's bargain.

Sure enough, Swagger soon finds himself once again trapped behind enemy lines and on the run from hostile pursuers, only this time he's not in Africa but the city of brotherly love, and everyone in America (save for one rookie FBI agent and the widow of Swagger's former spotter) thinks he just tried to cap the leader of the free world. The feature-length cat-and-mouse game that follows is nimbly executed by Fuqua (Training Day, King Arthur), who's grown immeasurably more confident as a director since making his debut with the slapdash Chow Yun-Fat vehicle The Replacement Killers, which was like the movie equivalent of bad Chinese take-out. Fuqua isn't a virtuoso stylist, but he shoots the kind of lean, efficient action scenes that directors like Ted Kotcheff and John Flynn once specialized in, and the entire movie exudes a refreshingly low-tech vibe that's of a piece with the resourcefulness of its protagonist, who can fashion a makeshift IV out of grocery-store sundries and, in what may be the most squirm-inducing act of self-medication since Bruce Willis pulled broken glass out of his bleeding bare feet in the original Die Hard, applies a granulated astringent called Quik Clot to his gaping gunshot wounds.

Wittily adapted by screenwriter Jonathan Lemkin (The Devil's Advocate) from the first in a trilogy of Swagger novels by Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter, Shooter is a generically titled studio action picture that turns out to be a surprisingly deft satire about Americans' loss of faith in their government following the 2000 election, the 9/11 attacks, and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Betrayed by Uncle Sam both at home and abroad, Swagger starts to seem like the last honest exponent of old-fashioned American virtue—a John Rambo for the Bush II generation—and the more he learns about the conspiracy that has taken hold of his life, the further he sees that it reaches: that everything really is about oil money and that, in the words of the movie's fat-cat red-state senator (a wonderfully smarmy Ned Beatty), there are no heroes and villains or Democrats and Republicans—only haves and have-nots. Cannily programmed at the start of the 2008 election season, this rampantly amoral and Darwinian film persuasively argues that, in today's America, it's every man for himself and commerce against all. Allow me to be the first to propose: Bob Lee Swagger for president.

Film Journal International (Lewis Beale)

Cinematical [Scott Weinberg]

BeyondHollywood.com Richard Lewis

James Berardinelli's ReelViews

New York Times (registration req'd) Manohla Dargis

Furie, Sydney J.

THE ENTITY B 87

USA (125 mi) 1982 ‘Scope

Welcome home, cunt! —The Entity

Today, the biggest film at the Box Office is PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2 (2010), bringing in a whopping $40 million dollars in just the first week, while much of it resembles the paranormal section of THE ENTITY made nearly thirty years earlier based on a true incident in Culver City, California in 1974 where UCLA parapsychologists set up cameras in the room where a woman reported being brutalized by repeated sexual assaults from a powerful invisible being, including bruise marks all over her body. The victim was Doris Bither who lived in a typically mainstream neighborhood, but whose life was substantially upgraded for the movie version. In real life, Ms. Bither was a chain-smoking alcoholic who spent most days in a drunken stupor, continually abusive and belligerent to others, whose house was in such a state of squalor that it had been condemned twice by the city. She was the single mother of three sons and a six-year old daughter. The eldest son admitted seeing his mother being tossed around the room, claiming when he tried to intervene, he was thrown across the room by the unseen force.

In 1974, paranormal researchers Kerry Gaynor and Barry Taff investigated the case, witnessing objects move about her house while capturing photos of a stream of lights, including an arc of light above Ms. Bither’s head, but never witnessed any physical attack. Ms. Bither suffered abuse her entire life and appeared to have an intensely personal relationship with the “entity,” continually taunting the creature and screaming abusive language at the top of her lungs. When she moved away, the entity apparently followed her, while future residents of the house report nothing out of the ordinary, where the house today remains ghost free and is in good condition. Canadian director Sidney J. Furie attempts to recreate the victim’s altered mental state by telling the story virtually through a series of off-balanced camera angles, while creating a Stephen King-like CHRISTINE (1983), demonic possession effect.

In the movie version, Carla Moran is played by Barbara Hershey, a beautiful, intelligent, and sympathetic woman who is inexplicably sexually attacked by a brutally aggressive unseen male creature on a regular basis in and out of her home, where the director always accompanies the rapes with aggressively pounding industrial metal music which feels like the blaring noise of some torture you can’t escape. Carla seeks out immediate medical help, where Freudian psychiatrist Dr. Sneiderman (Ron Silver) believes it’s a classic case of suppressed trauma, which suggests these are delusional episodes, a figment of her imagination. Yet they persist with even greater frequency and severity, where even her son gets injured attempting to rescue her, leaving the entire house traumatized by this poltergeist monster. Purely by chance, she overhears a couple of guys converse on paranormal activity at a bookstore, so she invites them to her home to observe, where their initial skepticism is met with a rude awakening, as in their eyes, there was clearly an unseen force in the room, which gives her sanity a momentary reprieve.

While there is a certain despicable factor to nearly all the men in her life, also a nicely developed ambiguity about whether the incidents are real or imagined, what’s most interesting is Hershey’s self-assurance throughout the entire ordeal. Getting no help from science, alternative science, friends, fiance’s, or family, she has to resolutely fend off this creature single-handedly, retaliating with a kind of feminist fury, bringing an apocalyptical Resurrection Day standoff between herself and this thing, where Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. But what’s interesting is how, despite a dazzling archicturally designed, giant set piece frought with potential life-threatening hazards where the paranormal scientists actually try to capture this thing, they’re met with their own puny human and scientific limitations while she’s instead forced to internalize this standoff, which continues to wreak havoc in her life, even as in real life she moves from place to place. The film pre-dates POLTERGEIST (1982), produced by Stephen Spielberg, and GHOSTBUSTERS (1984), originally planned for a 1981 release, but the U.S. release followed a September 1982 international release three month’s after POLTERGEIST, opening in the United States in February of 1983, two years after the completion date.

Time Out review

Perhaps any movie with such a wretched central idea (woman sexually assaulted by an invisible demon), supposedly based on fact or not, deserved the feminist picket-line which attended its West End screening. But for reasons that may be fortuitous, The Entity doesn't emerge quite as one-dimensionally nasty as its synopsis suggests. The film's men are so uniformly creepy, and its heroine so strong and sympathetic, that apart from a couple of unpleasant moments the story often seems less like horror than feminist parable, especially when Hershey (giving a fine performance) is reduced to a laboratory object with her home recreated in the psychology department. None of this may be intended, of course, but it goes to show that commercial movies sometimes hit spots that more intentionally didactic efforts can't reach.

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

Before Poltergeist or Ghostbusters came this based-on-a-true story horror pic about a single mother (Barbara Hershey) who is repeatedly raped and psychologically tormented by an unseen demon. A psychiatrist (Ron Silver) tries to persuade her that it's all in her head, but we in the audience know better. Though reviled upon its original release, The Entity is in hindsight quite interesting, especially for the way it doesn't wear it's based-on-a-true story claim on its sleeve. Veteran director Sidney J. Furie (The Ipcress File) films in an appealingly inky widescreen frame, employing a very intense hammering score to underline the terror. The A-list cast and very good dialogue by Frank De Felitta -- who adapted his own book -- helps a great deal. Seen here at the top of her game, the deeply beautiful Hershey especially goes the extra few yards for her agonized performance. At age 72, Furie is still working steadily as of 2005, having logged nearly 50 pictures -- mostly of the "B" variety -- since 1959.

The Entity | Film Society of Lincoln Center

Starring Barbara Hershey in a tour de force performance, this notorious, truly harrowing shocker has a deeply disturbing premise: A single mother is repeatedly visited, overpowered and sexually assaulted by an invisible being or force. She seeks help from a sympathetic but skeptical psychiatrist (Ron Silver) and eventually turns to a group of university parapsychologists who attempt to investigate these visitations by scientific means. Supposedly based on a true case, the film was picketed by feminists when originally released. (In more recent years, its images have been repurposed by avant-garde filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky, while Quentin Tarantino borrowed cues from the soundtrack for use in Inglourious Basterds.) Per horror authority David Pirie, “The Entity doesn’t emerge as quite as one-dimensionally nasty as its synopsis suggests. The film’s men are uniformly creepy, and its heroine so strong and sympathetic, that apart from a couple of unpleasant moments, the story seems less like horror than a feminist parable, especially when Hershey is reduced to a laboratory subject with her home re-created in the psychology department.”

Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings (Dave Sindelar) capsule review

A woman is being assaulted and raped repeatedly by an invisible demon.  She seeks help from both psychiatry and parapsychology.

According to the end crawl, this movie is a fictionalized account of a true story.  This means that the movie in and of itself can't be considered a true story, and one would have to know the true story (whatever it is) to compare with the movie to know what supposedly happened and what has been made up.  For what it's worth, the movie does at least one thing to give it a sense of verisimilitude; true events don't wrap themselves into tidy, neat little packages, and neither does this movie.  Unfortunately, as a result, the movie isn't quite satisfying since there are a number of things that are never really resolved.  Still, the movie does feature a strong performance from Barbara Hershey, and it shows some good insight and intelligence at times.  And, given the subject matter, it's probably about as tasteful as it could be without wimping out altogether.  It would have helped had it been a bit shorter than its two hour five minute running time.

The Horror Review [Egregious Gurnow]

Before Poltergeist or Ghostbusters, director Sidney Furie presented us with a tale of graphically-brutal horror in the form of a supernatural antagonist in The Entity.  During a time when the genre was laden with slasher films, Furie skirted the line between a ghost story (the entity is mobile and not location dependent) and demonic possession (the entity is separate from its victim).  In so doing, The Entity is an engaging tale of the battle between hard science and new age logic brought to the forefront by one of Barbara Hershey’s greatest performances. 

Carla Moran (Barbara Hershey) awakens one night to find herself being raped by an unseen entity.  The violent visitations increase in severity and frequency as Carla’s friend, Cindy Nash (Margaret Blye), flippantly dismisses her claims.  She then seeks help from psychologist Phil Sneiderman (Ron Silver), who readily diagnoses the situation as a case of Freudian regression and sublimated guilt.  Desperate, Carla contacts two parapsychologists, Doctors Weber (George Coe) and Cooley (Jacqueline Brookes), who endeavor to resolve her dilemma while attempting to thwart the efforts of Sneiderman.

Director Sidney Furie is very delicate with the subject matter, not in creating an ambiguity based upon whether or not the supernatural assailant is real or merely a figment of Carla’s imagination, but rather in how he forces his audience sway to and fro between the rationales for the malevolent presence given by psychology and parapsychology.  His challenge becomes convoluted by his refusal to present neutral characters for both parties in order for the audience to approach Carla’s situation objectively.  Rather, he issues well-rounded individuals with their own strengths and weaknesses which, consequently, muddies the water so to speak in regard to how the audience perceives the various parties’ assessments of the entity.  Also, Furie establishes and maintains a diligent pace which reinforces Barbara’s assiduous drive toward a resolution.

However, there are a handful of heavily distracting weakness with the film.  First, there is a scene midway through the film which consists of special effects depicting ethereal lightning as it strikes Carla’s son, Billy (David Labiosa).  The work is excessively dated and fails to retain the intensity of the film.  The ending, in its presentation and its writing, detracts from the power the production had laboriously spent constructing.  Perhaps it is an attempt to disprove the existence of the paranormal (which would negate the effectiveness of the film).  Yet, if this was the intent, Furie could have been more creative in providing a more stable, plausible resolution to his otherwise haunting tale (though based on a true story, the work diverges from its source material liberally).  This is not to say that the climax negates the film.  The work as a whole has a lasting effect due to two primary factors.  One, Barbara Hershey’s acting is superb considering she must convincingly portray being molested by an invisible rapist throughout the film.  Thankfully, Furie never presents such scenes gratuitously.  Instead, with each incidence, our bond with Carla becomes more sympathetic and thus, the audience’s reaction to the diametrically-opposed warring factions yearning to help Carla becomes quite personal as a consequence.  Two, Charles Bernstein’s grueling industrial score, which pounds the viewer’s ears during each rape, is devastating and masterfully effective.  As soon as the hammer blows begin after the first visitation, the viewer automatically winces in reluctant anticipation of what is to come.  Some have deemed it overbearing in its repetition, however, I would quickly retort this is the metaphorical intent.

The Entity is a solid effort which, unfortunately, took a turn for the narrative worst during the final scenes of the film.  However, the premise is captivating and retains the viewer’s attention due to Sidney Furie’s pertinacious pacing and Barbara Hershey’s stunningly brave but nonetheless convincing portrayal of a woman being repeatedly raped by an invisible attacker and her efforts to rid herself of her predicament.

The World's Greatest Critic [J.C. Maçek III]

There's an unseen serial rapist on the loose in Southern California, and he's got his lust directed toward a single suburban mother. If that's not bad enough, this invisible demon has brought with the rest of his three piece Heavy Metal band who only knows one chord. Sure this helps, so that you know he's coming and can run, but in actual fact, dealing with this jackass is made all the more irritating because he's with the band.

Yes, I'm talking about The Entity, yet another sadistic horror movie detailing the malevolent menacing of an innocent person by much more powerful forces that claims to be based on a true story. Much like others that make this dubious claim, the real deal Holifield is probably much less close to the truth than the Studio Marketing Group would like you to believe.

However, this one's a bit deeper.

Unlike The Exorcism of Emily Rose and The Amityville Horror, The Entity is significantly harder to find the Kernel of truth within. In fact, it's hard to gain any real consensus on whether our main character Carlotta "Carla" Moran (here played by the lovely Barbara Hershey) ever really existed at all. It's hard to say that she has gained any Texas Chainsaw Massacre-like "Urban Legend Status", mainly because few people really remember this critically panned horror film, or the 1978 Frank De Felitta novel it's based on. Still, many of those who do are dead-serious about the idea that Carla Moran and The Entity itself are both 100% real. Many women have even come forward claiming to actually be Carla Moran. None of them are named Carla or Moran, but hey... ah? Hey!

Perhaps it's just as well, as such theories of reality are maybe the only things that keep The Entity's following, such that it is, going. As I said, the film was poorly received by critics, and it's truly "Not That Great". However, in hindsight The Entity isn't so bad either. It features a solid cast, some challenging ideas, palpable fear (even if the audience isn't scared they believe the characters truly are) and some very lovely nudity on the part of the cute and shapely Barbara Hershey. Still, with such classics as Poltergeist, The Exorcist, and any number of also-rans in the same category (like the original The Amityville Horror) it's also hard not to feel that this is a gratuitous and superfluous sub-entry into a dying category.

Carla Moran is a suburban, hard working mother of three. While she's got two well-behaved young daughters (Natasha Ryan's Julie and Melanie Gaffin's Kim) and an older, take charge teenaged son (David Labiosa's Billy), she doesn't exactly have it all. As if she didn't have enough problems, along comes The Entity, an invisible night stalker who makes old Alex De Large look like H.R. Pufnstuf. Upon their first meeting, Carla is thrown onto her bed, a pillow is thrown over her face and she's violently raped and humiliated.

It pretty much goes downhill from there.

Of course the concept of a woman being raped by an invisible lead singer to an equally invisible heavy metal band comprised of horny midgets is a little hard to swallow, so Carla's best girlfriend Cindy Nash (Margaret Blye) insists that she seek medical help.

Unfortunately, kindly doctor Phil Sneiderman (Ron Silver) is convinced (at least at first) that this is all a figment of Carla's imagination and a psychological side-effect of her overly puritanical and abusive upbringing, followed by a colorful and semi-promiscuous adulthood. In short... she's doing this to herself because she has a problem with men. Yeah, now THAT's an enlightened attitude. Way to go, guys! I'll bet the Feminist Alliance is just pouring donations your way. Hell! Man, I'll bet old Sneiderman's boss Dr. Weber (George Coe) is the same kind of doctor who thinks the Women's Suffrage movement was the bi-product of mass PMS, and that the Female Orgasm is a myth. Man, I tell you... if the Female Orgasm is a myth that pretty much burns away the only thing I'm truly good at doing.

What follows is a collection of the mostly-familiar with repetitive scenes of rape and humiliation laced throughout its run time. You've got the Paranormal Psychologists that set up camp in the haunted house (led by Jacqueline Brookes' excellent Dr. Elizabeth Cooley), the controlled environment where the experiment is recreated, the skeptical doctors... everything but the creepy priest showing up to give ominous warnings.

It's hard not to predict this film piece by piece and step by step. And that includes the ending. However, there are some pretty original elements here and there, including some earnest acting and interesting effects. For one, the typical clichés of poltergeists, like shaking walls and horrible smells, are supplemented with an interesting use of free floating electricity. This lightening suggests the form of The Entity and gives us the only clues about whether this is real or not. Further, some of the special effects are interesting to the point that it's hard to tell how they did them. For example, there's an exciting scene in which Carla is sleeping topless, and her breasts are being fondled and suckled by an invisible presence. And let me tell you, there is no question that they are being fondled and suckled. I don't know how they did it but they did it beautifully! Yes, I realize that sounds like the same old Brother Kneumsi Lechery, and you're right, I'm fixated on breasts, however, think about this. Regardless of the part of the body we're talking about, the fact that we could see exactly what the effects artists wanted us to see, and detect the biological responses thereof is something noteworthy. Seeing as how we do see Barbara's Beautiful Breasts in another scene, I have to say that if this was a mock up of her chest and torso with bladders, pumps and gizmos inside, I'd have to point out that Stan Winston's special make-up and effects group knows Ms. Hershey's boobs pretty perfectly. They must have paid even more attention than I did, which says something. Man, what a job. I'd feel guilty for even accepting a paycheck for that.

Aside from that, it's rather cheesy, and while The Entity can be watched and enjoyed, especially by fans of the Genre, if you're going to watch a movie like this anyway, why not shoot for Poltergeist? By the time the conflict between Silver's Dr. Phil and the double-pronged approach of Paranormal Investigators Richard Brestoff's Gene Kraft and Raymond Singer's Joe Mehan really gets going it's hard to stay that interested without more Barbara in the Nude. And it's hard to really get behind anything her do-nothing, occasionally appearing, dumbass boyfriend Jerry (Alex Rocco) does. Of course he's just a drop in the misogynistic bucket that is The Entity. This could have turned out to be a great nudity-packed supernatural horror flick, but by about the fifth time some myopic male treated our heroine like a "silly little girl", I was about ready to turn the ol' TV-bone off, punch myself in the balls and limp around the neighborhood apologizing to anyone and everyone without a Y Chromosome I could find, on behalf of all males.

Still, you could do a lot worse, especially when the predictable, yet exciting ending comes around. For you fans of films like The Amityville Horror, Poltergeist and especially The Exorcism of Emily Rose (the balance between illness and possession is explored in spades here), make sure you add The Entity to your Netflix list. Two Stars out of Five for director Sidney J. Furie's The Entity. For those wondering what to expect from a Furie Film, his most famous works are three of the four Iron Eagle movies and his most infamous is Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. Yeah, I know, I know, I know, but again, Barbara Hershey is naked in The Entity. But will she be naked in the next reel? Let's find out, I'll see you there.

Found Face: on Outer Space • Senses of Cinema Christa Blümlinger, October 5, 2003

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review

Monsters At Play (Lawrence P. Raffel) dvd review

DVD Times Gary Couzens

The Entity Richard Scheib from The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review

Foster on Film

DVD Crypt [Mike Long]

Horror View Billion$Baby

Arrow in the Head ("The Arrow") review [3/4]

"11 Scariest Horror Movies of All Time" Martin Scorsese lists The Entity as # 4 on his list from The Daily Beast, October 28, 2009

20 Horror Movies Based on a True Story - Horror Movies Based on ... Mark Harris from About.com

“The Entity” haunting: The true story of Doris Bither Javier Ortega from Ghost Theory, September 21, 2008

"The Entity – Interview with Doris Bither’s son" Javier Ortega interview from Ghost Theory, May 18, 2009

Haunt in Doris Bither House 11547 Braddock Dr. Culver City, CA ...

Images for Doris Bither

The Entity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Furumaya, Tomoyuki

THIS WINDOW IS YOURS (Kono mado wa kimi no mono) B+ 90

Japan (95 mi) 1994

A terrific coming of age film about three couples who play musical chairs, seemingly looking for the right space, where one couple falls in love, but never touch or kiss, wonderfully revealing their adolescent happiness and uncertainties. There’s a gentle, wacky sensibility featuring one of the greatest screen performances ever by Yukako Shimuzo, told with an artistic off-beat look.

Fywell, Tim

ICE PRINCESS B- 82

USA (92 mi) 2005

Adapted from the writings of novelist Meg Cabot, who brought us the storybook world of The Princess Diaries,” this is in the fantasy world as well with an appealing lead performance by Michelle Trachtenberg, from the cast of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, as a graduating high school senior with an eye on obtaining a special physics scholarship in order to attend Harvard, and in the process of writing an entrance research paper, examining the aerodynamics of figure skaters, she decides to try her luck with her own findings, hiding her new love for the sport from her more academic mother, Joan Cusack, who teaches feminist literature. The result is improbable, very much in the ROCKY mode, actually turning down Harvard to enter the world of competitive figure skating, learning jumps in months that it would take others years to learn, but it’s hard not to pull for her. In the meantime, we get a pretty good glimpse of high school life, where a science geek becomes mesmerized with the glamorous world of figure skating, becoming instantly popular, like being one of the cheerleaders, with its emphasis on fashion, looks, makeup, boys, parties, and all the things mothers try to keep their skating daughters from finding out about, as it would distract too much from their focus, and they literally haven’t the time for such mundane matters. While there’s probably too much “pop” emphasis, including the music used for the skating sequences, there’s plenty of good ice time, even if skating doubles were used, behind-the-scenes bickering and backstabbing, but also some genuine affection shown by some of the kids. There’s a surprising amount of humor to keep it entertaining, and all in all, even with a G rating, a very positive effort.