The Forest for the Trees

2003, Germany, directed by Maren Ade (Original Title: Der Wald vor läuter Baumen)

Maren Ade's film school graduation project, The Forest for the Trees is a challenge to watch: with no histrionics or sentimentality, it charts the disintegration of a personality under what seem like banal strains - a new job, a new town, the struggle to define oneself and to find friends that aid in the endeavour. Technically, there are certainly rough edges, with the video sometimes looking washed out, but the nuanced performances, and Ade's acute observation of interactions between her characters, down to subtleties of tone and choice of words, give the film considerable power. It's rather like watching a show like The Office at times, where the film's ability to gnaw at the viewer stems from the recognizable reality it depicts, particularly the slightly off-key central character, though there's barely a note of humour throughout.

Revenge of the Nerds

1984, US, directed by Jeff Kanew

I'm not sure if it's chutzpah or complete obliviousness, but there's something impressive about the way that Revenge of the Nerds attempts to balance surprisingly inclusive views on Nerd-dom with extraordinary retrograde sexual politics, creating a safe house, literally, for all those excluded by the jock element on campus while happily invading the privacy of the sorority sisters. The energetic playing and direction almost make up for the contradiction -- there's a terrific shot of the nerds rampaging through a sorority house, the camera pulling back as they advance toward it -- while the filmmakers capture rather well, if in wildly exaggerated form, the way in which college can seem like a social experiment in which classes are at best a distraction from the wider education that's going on. There's not a single moment dedicated to the classroom experience, for instance, and the one time the jocks assemble for football drills the coach realizes, as the sequence concludes, that the team has forgotten to practice.

The Passing of the Third Floor Back

1935, UK, directed by Berthold Viertel

Yet another viewing prompted by David Cairns, who wrote at length about the film a couple of years ago, The Passing of the Third Floor Back puts Conrad Veidt in the difficult position of needing to be compelling while remaining saintly. As John Milton well knew, the devil is generally a more eye-catching character than the angel, but Veidt controls his performance, and particularly his voice, to hypnotic effect in order to counter-balance Frank Cellier's exuberant playing of Mr. Wright, the film's representation of all that is wicked.

As David notes in his piece, the religious symbolism is often quite overt, using crossed shadows, for instance, though to rather different effect than in Hawks's Scarface. The texture of secular London life of the period is equally present - references to the tenements that give Mr. Wright his filthy lucre, the organ grinder and his monkey, the joyous day out on the steamer. The cross-section of English society as gathered together in the boarding house also gives the film ample room to explore contrasts and contradictions in Britain's inter-war class system, too, although it's occasionally a struggle for the film to reconcile those differences with the narrative's need to bring the lodgers together in specific scenes.

I'm not all that familiar with the details of Berthold Viertel's career, but this feels like a much more personal outing than the following year's Rhodes of Africa, with its rather plodding narrative; the visual touches that render this film so consistently interesting are far less noteworthy in the biopic, too, although Viertel does create an interesting tension between the oppositional role that Paul Kruger is supposed to occupy and his rather endearing onscreen presentation. It's not hard to sense an echo of the contrast between Veidt and Cellier, both physically and psychologically, in the dynamic that operates between Walter Huston as Rhodes and Oscar Homolka as Kruger; Cellier re-appears in a small part in the later film, too, as a more sympathetic London striver.

The picture above is lifted directly from David's piece on MUBI; I couldn't make anything decent from my copy of the film, which is rather frayed around the edges.

Mid-August Lunch

2008, Italy, directed by Gianni Di Gregorio (original title: Pranzo di ferragosto)

Most of the reviews I've seen for Gianni De Gregorio's film use the word "slight" or some variation, which as far as I can tell is another way for the writers to express the idea that the film is light on plot. That's true - the film is about a few days in the life of a middle-aged slacker, played by the director, while he looks after his mother and several other older women - but the implication that the film itself is thus somehow lacking in substance is entirely misplaced. De Gregorio was one of the many writers credited on Matteo Garrone's film Gomorra, and there's a surprising continuity between the two films - an opening that takes one to the heart of the matter with virtually no context for instance, but particularly the rich series of character portraits, each carefully delineated so that we're able to follow the dynamic that develops between the unlikely group. Equally, there's a profound sense of place, of the details of Rome's August rhythms far from the tourist trail, with De Gregorio indulging his love for the city in the wonderful moped sequence that simultaneously pays homage to Nanni Moretti's very different celebration of Rome in 1994's Caro Diario.  In its quiet way, the film also eviscerates the lip-service paid to the cult of the "mama", revealing the reality for all too many older women without ever allowing the tone of the film to become embittered. Terrific performances all around, too, dignified and honest.

She Done Him Wrong

1933, US, directed by Lowell Sherman

I had only seen a handful of Mae West clips before She Done Him Wrong, all of them showcasing her brassy way with a one-liner and her unique vocal style, so the full-length film came as something of a surprise. Billed as a comedy, and certainly treated as such by the critics, it nonetheless features Mae in a role that flirts with the textbook definition of a sociopath: she's remorseless, self-absorbed, exaggeratedly promiscuous, and with apparently nary a care about the fate of her fellow man or woman. While her va-va-voom charms are amusingly in-your-face, there's a pitiless side to her character that's entirely without humor, and which only deepens as the film progresses, most obviously in a sequence where she tosses off a song after a violent death.

I wondered afterwards if West's reputation has remained so strong because later generations were simply able to see her films while many other strong women characters were suppressed by the strictures of the Production Code; now that so many other Pre-Code films are back in circulation, Mae's persona doesn't seem quite as unique when compared to, say, a Ruth Chatterton or a Barbara Stanwyck, to give but two examples. She's still a fascinating character, though not necessarily in a comic sense.

After enjoying Matt Moore's turn in Rain, it was nice to see his big brother, and bigger silent screen star, Owen show up here as Mae's incarcerated boyfriend, although his part doesn't demand much in the way of subtlety.

Scream 2

1997, US, directed by Wes Craven

Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson do their best to have their cake and eat it, rushing a sequel into production to capitalize on the success of their first installment while decrying the vapidity of most sequels. While the self-referential tone works well in the early going, particularly in the amusing re-creation of Scream's tightly-wound opening, before long a grim air of repetition sets in, occasionally enlivened by an amusing cameo or a clever set-piece, such as that involving a soundproof glass booth from which a character can only watch helplessly as the killer methodically sets to work.

The Italian Job

1969, UK, directed by Peter Collinson

I saw this years ago on television, and remembered only the extended chase scenes involving three colour-coordinated Minis, though half of the chase seems as much an excuse for automobile choreography as it is an actual escape attempt. By contrast, I had no recollection of the surprisingly lengthy preamble narrating a variety of Michael Caine escapades, nor of Noel Coward's royal-obsessed crime kingpin, who lives in the lap of luxury inside Her Majesty's prison bars. The cocky Cockney act is inevitably somewhat dated at this stage - there's finally some questioning of the romanticization of London's criminals, though these fellows are mostly of the non-violent type - but the chase sequence remains entertaining, and the cliffhanger ending, which I'd also forgotten, is impossible to imagine these days in a similar caper film.

Beauty and the Boss

1932, US, directed by Roy del Ruth

I half expect Warren William's name to appear in the credits as "Dastardly Warren William," for that was his modus operandi in the pre-Code years, and he plays to type here, dashing about from one woman to the next, hiring beauties to act as secretary while he auditions them for other roles, all the while opining about the role of women in the workplace. The film has a lot of fun with the different facets of his personality, never more so than in the scenes where he fires a woman with whom he's becoming infatuated only to turn, literally, on a dime to ask her out as soon as she's been fired - after all, she's no longer a subordinate, so where's the harm? Of course, the needs of drama demand that he meet his match, delivered here in the form of the mousy Marian Marsh, who undergoes a gradual makeover. There's not a shred of credibility to William's character as the film concludes - you never really want this rogue to reform - but the interplay between William and Marsh, each trying to put the other through their paces, is a frenetically enjoyable dance.

Judge Priest

1934, US, directed by John Ford

Judge Priest is a troubling and at times beguiling film: it weaves a captivating down-home atmosphere of 1890s Kentucky but the film's attitude to its black characters, even if rather better than most films of the period, leaves a puzzling taste, never more so in the scenes featuring Stepin Fetchit, an actor whose legacy still hasn't been adequately examined. While Fetchit profited from his career in movies, the price sometimes seemed rather high given his slow-witted, near-incomprehensible drawl and the overall portrait of sloth that reinforced so many (lazy) clichés. While Ford's film is perfectly happy to cast white characters in an unappealing light too - as country hicks, judgmental bigots, and so forth - the worst of the indignities do seem to be reserved for the black characters, not least when they are asked to break into a spirited rendition of "Dixie".

Elsewhere, though, Ford achieves a terrific sense of small-town place through the titular character, played by Will Rogers. The Judge is himself not averse to a spot of work-avoidance, and indeed that is the source of his bond with Fetchit's character, Jeff Poindexter, with whom he goes fishing. There's wonderful, wry comedy in the Judge's attempts to broker the peace both in the wider town and within his family: he's a political animal quick to spot others' weaknesses and vanities. The film's strongest sequence strips the Judge of his own vanities as he speaks in moving terms to his dead wife and child before turning in one evening; there's a moment where he touches their portrait, commenting on damage to the frame, that's heartbreakingly real, perfectly capturing the sense that this is just a brief extract from a much longer, if one-sided, conversation.

The Blue Lamp

1950, UK, directed by Basil Dearden

Although it's probably best remembered today as the (unlikely) progenitor of the long-running BBC serial Dixon of Dock Green, which featured the kindly bobby played by Jack Warner all the way to 1976 even though the plot here has him considering retirement, The Blue Lamp was a huge hit in 1950. It didn't do too well with the critics, though, who thought it compared rather unfavourably to American crime pictures, although I can't help thinking that this fails to pay much mind to the differences between the US circa 1950 and Britain in the same year, as well as implying that most American crime films of the period were gritty and hard-boiled (The Window, for instance, intersperses scenes of kindly, oblivious cops that make those of The Blue Lamp seem like relentless bloodhounds).

There's also some terrific location work that gives a vivid sense of several London corners, most obviously the scenes set at the dog track, long since dismantled by the wrecking ball, and it's nice to see someone other than John McCririck demonstrate traditional bookie hand signs. The sequences leading up to the climax recall Ozu's or Mizoguchi's use of desolate urban spaces, undermining the sense of the city as a vibrant, finished place.

Viva Riva!

2010, Democratic Republic of Congo/France/Belgium, directed by Djo Tunda Wa Munga

As much as I understand the motivations of the generation of African directors who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, who consciously worked against Hollywood cinema in particular, it's hard to avoid the impression that there's something approaching a taboo around the idea of fun in the average film from the continent. That is, in some ways, testament to the continued influence of Ousmane Sembène, who took the view that cinema was an important educational tool, though that's not necessarily an unproblematic idea since most colonial administrations took exactly the same view, even if the intended lessons were somewhat different. While there have been notable earlier exceptions, Ça Twiste à Poponguine or Quartier Mozart to name two, the explosion of Nollywood cinema, often wildly, wilfully entertaining even when engaged in social commentary, often makes the festival-circuit filmmakers seem a little staid.

Viva Riva!, then, is the first film I've seen in quite some time to comprehensively overturn preconceptions about African cinema: as one writer commented, it's as though Tony Scott took his camera to Kinshasa and cooked up one of his over-heated extravaganzas on the banks of the Congo. That's true of both the film's strengths - frenetic pacing, a justifiable cynicism about everyone's motivations, wildly colorful characters - and its weaknesses, most obviously its sexual politics, which are a muddle of progressive attitudes and retrograde images, although the sexual frankness is refreshing for African cinema, sometimes notably coy about matters of the flesh. The opening section is perhaps the strongest of all, a brilliant montage that sets up a background of financial penury and criminal energy with no fuss and no dialogue, while also giving us an unfiltered glimpse of African street life without a hint of ethnography. Even if the rest of the film can't quite rise to that level, it's a wild ride capable of pointed commentary: the ending is a rather bleak commentary on the realities of Kinshasa life.

Kongo

1932, US, directed by William J. Cowen

It might be easier to catalogue the ways in which Kongo doesn't offend against the (then still pretty toothless) Production Code. The film features prostitution, drug addiction, alcoholism, incest, torture, sadistic violence, widow-burning, mockery of religion, lascivious leering, and an all-around atmosphere of bone-weary seediness. The film is based on Chester Devonde's play, previously filmed by Tod Browning in 1928, and while I haven't seen the earlier version it's hard to believe that Browning, even with his penchant for the unusual, came up with anything quite so lurid: the atmosphere of moral and physical decay in deepest Africa is utterly unrelenting, making even a Kurtz figure seem relatively benign by comparison.

The film has plenty of rough edges, with several abrupt transitions in tone and characters who appear to be able to conquer their terrible demons of addiction in the cut from one scene to the next, but the overall atmosphere of ruin eats away at the viewer, while Walter Huston incarnates one of the most thoroughgoing screen villains I've encountered. He's a truly misbegotten character for whom even the film's brutal form of redemption seems insufficient in comparison with the outrages he has perpetrated up to the climax.

Even by the standards of 1930s Hollywood, the depiction of African characters is appalling, whether it's the casual use of names like "Fuzzy" or the venal motivations ascribed to virtually all of the African characters (who, of course, barely get any meaningful screen time). While some of the demeaning treatment of Africans is a reflection of the behaviour of Huston's character -- casually shooting a man in the back, for instance -- on other occasions the fault lies with the script (or perhaps the original play), such as the extended sequences which depict widow-burning, which appears to have been borrowed from India since it's at most a very isolated phenomenon in Africa.

11 Harrowhouse

1974, UK, directed by Aram Avakian

I'm following, yet again, in David Cairns's fine footsteps here. I was a little distracted initially by the intermittent plot similarities with the more recent Flawless - a diamond heist featuring an employee of the diamond company on the verge of retirement, American actors in prominent roles in a British setting - but 11 Harrowhouse ultimately occupies different territory, mostly because of Charles Grodin's voiceover, constantly commenting on and undercutting the onscreen action.

The effect is a little like watching a James Bond movie with a friend who provides a witty ongoing appraisal; it's not hard to imagine Grodin sitting right beside you, subverting the narrative, in which a couple of amateurs rather unexpectedly turn into note-perfect thieves. The point of films like Ocean's Eleven is that the thieves are skilled pros going about their work: those films are a celebration of the virtues of a job well done, whereas here the sheer unlikeliness of the transformation is what lends tension to the outcome, with inexperience threatening to trip the grand plan up. Although it's Grodin's smart underplaying that anchors the film, there are several fine turns from British thesps, too, most obviously James Mason, entirely convincing as a man on the verge of an unhappy retirement, though I also enjoyed John Gielgud's preeningly nasty performance.

Fric-Frac

1939, France, directed by Maurice Lehmann 

Maurice Lehmann was best known as a theatre director, and all of his four films were adaptations of stage plays, with three of the four involving Claude Autant-Lara as some form of co-director. Fric-Frac had a successful stage run in 1936, with both Michel Simon and Arletty reprising their roles from the original show, supplemented by Fernandel in all his toothy glory, perfectly cast as a naif. All three were established screen stars by 1939, and the interplay between the actors remains strikingly fresh even though the plotting sometimes feels rather forced.

The dialogue makes extensive use of le javanais, a Parisian argot that the film implies was the preserve of the criminal classes, although the characters are constantly translating their words for Fernandel's character, who's a respectable petit bourgeois with a couple of pals from the other side of the tracks. The interpretation, itself the subject of some repetitive jokes, tends to lessen the disorienting effects of the slang since nothing remains mysterious for very long.

While the performances are a delight - though I can only imagine the on-set clash of egos - the cinematic translation of the play isn't entirely successful: Lehmann and/or Autant-Lara elect to use close-ups and cuts at times when a medium shot featuring all of the characters would have better served the material, such as in a sequence when Arletty and Simon give contradictory messages to Fernandel's character before the eponymous break-in; instead of seeing the different expressions simultaneously, the directors cut from one face to the next in sequence, undermining the comedy value.

Rhodes of Africa

1936, UK, directed by Berthold Viertel

Although the film lays claim to a balanced portrayal of Rhodes (Walter Huston), mostly by making clear that he was a difficult man to like, single-minded and uninterested in opposing views, there's no real attempt to assess the man's actual impact and legacy in Africa: the film is so abbreviated that it mostly centers on a few personal relationships, jumping from one incident to the next over the years with little wider context, and implying that Rhodes laid claim to vast swathes of territory through sheer will (the film uses the term "superhuman" to describe its subject at one point).

It goes almost without saying that the film has essentially no interest in the impact of Rhodes's policies on Africans - the first African we meet is dismissed as untrustworthy, to be subjected to humiliations by his white bosses, and the only African character of any real note, Lobengula, the king of the Ndebele, is portrayed as a pathetic dupe, though the film doesn't linger over his fate or that of his people. There's marginally more interest in the Afrikaners, as represented by Paul Kruger (an arresting performance by Oscar Homolka), though the film implies he can be bought. Near the very end, Rhodes concedes that one African chief had the soul of a poet, given the man's choice of burial place; Rhodes's own similar final resting place comes across, then, as an act of intellectual theft...

As was the case for Sanders of the River, released the previous year, the film is split between studio sequences shot in Britain and location footage that is occasionally, and unconvincingly, patched together with the main players. The sections shot in Africa (based on the credits, they appear to have been filmed in Botswana and South Africa) are of some historical interest: these areas didn't appear onscreen much, and the mining and claim scrabble sequences give a fairly vivid sense of the realities of the mineral rushes of the period.

Scream

1996, US, directed by Wes Craven

Fifteen years later, after sequels, imitations and parodies, as well as the rise of an entirely new horror genre, it's hard to recall just what it was like to encounter Scream for the first time: like Halloween, it's as if the film is simultaneously unpicking both the teen horror film and its own deconstruction of that genre as it unspools. Although the tone is mostly light-hearted, playing with our knowledge of cinema convention by luring our attention to the corner of the screen or setting up what seem to be obvious boo moments before going in other directions, the filmmakers are still focused on delivering scares, though not necessarily with what's onscreen. After all, they even undercut the visual power of the bloody imagery by mentioning that movie gore is just red corn syrup, and so keep us off balance instead with constant changes in sound volume: I was particularly conscious of this with a young child sleeping elsewhere in the house as the volume suddenly jumped to deliver a thrill; the effect must have been much greater in a packed cinema in 1996.

Scarface

1932, US, directed by Howard Hawks

I won't try to add much to the wealth already written about Howard Hawks's film, a truly pared-down piece which charts the rise and fall of Tony Camonte (Paul Muni) as he marches relentlessly toward his inevitable end, the film discarding characters left and right without regard to potential audience sympathies. It's that single-mindedness that lingered most in my mind: even the apparent asides, such as the scenes in Camonte's parental home or the bits of comedy with his dim-witted assistant - not that Camonte himself is over-endowed with more than brutish intelligence - are ultimately germane to the outcome, with the comedy reversed to grim effect.

Although I've never cared for Brian De Palma's overblown 1983 version of the same tale, not least because Al Pacino's performance so unbalances even that most shrill of films, I better understood where it was coming from: Pacino's character, if not necessarily his performance, seems much closer in spirit to his 1930s predecessor than I originally realized, both men thuggishly single-minded and entirely oblivious to the likely consequences of their destructive behaviour. Paul Muni's brooding performance embodies a kind of Mr. Hyde character, all id with no sense of consequences; indeed, the characterization might have emerged from a 1930s horror movie as much as from the crime headlines. Ann Dvorak's performance, by contrast, seems to come from a later generation: there's a heart-rending authenticity to her fear and anger, far removed from the stylized screams of a Fay Wray.

(I was particularly amused by the scene where one of Camonte's underlings reveals the ending of the play, and 1928 film, Sadie Hawkins, particularly since Lewis Milestone's reworking of the story, entitled Rain, was in production right around the time that Scarface was released in early 1932.)

Rain

1932, US, directed by Lewis Milestone

Drawn from a stage play, and previously filmed in 1928 under the original title of Sadie Hawkins, Lewis Milestone's version retains a sense of the material's origins notwithstanding his occasional attempts to "open up" the material with brief forays to the outside world: the overwhelming majority of the film takes place in a creaky store/bar/boarding house that functions as a refuge from the driving monsoon of Pago Pago.

Indeed, apart from a few sections of "documentary" background which don't feature the main players, almost all of the action transpires on the ground floor or its various verandahs; Milestone makes use of crane shots and a surprisingly mobile camera to give the action a more cinematic profile. An early shot that circles around the cast, and the room, is repeated to comic effect a short time later, although those attention-getting flourishes are gradually de-emphasized as the darker heart of the story emerges in a confrontation between Sadie (Joan Crawford), a prostitute in search of a new life, and an inflexible man of God, the Reverend Davidson (Walter Huston), who sees Sadie as either a conversion project or an evil that must be cast out.

The pre-Code elements of the film aren't hard to find. Davidson is explicitly likened to a witch doctor by a perceptive local woman, and as the film progresses his maniacal tendencies become ever deeper, with Milestone shooting Huston such that his eyes are barely visible, a frightening character who might have wandered in from a Universal horror film of the period rather than from the pulpit. Although the character lacks much in the way of nuance, it's not hard to imagine how effective a stage actor Walter Huston must have been: a key scene where he declaims, over and over, the Lord's Prayer, is mesmerizing in its effect (within the film and for the viewer). Joan Crawford is allowed a degree more subtlety, her character struggling with a variety of choices for her future, although she's much more compelling when Sadie's in zesty flow with a string of men following in her wake (not unlike her turn in the same year's Letty Lynton). Sadie's comprehensive turnaround under the brow-beating of the preacher never seems entirely credible given her earlier brash self-confidence.

I was most taken with actor Matt Moore, given his unmistakable Irish accent; his character, a doctor who's a kind of counterweight to Huston's preacher, is a thoroughly decent, open-minded man. Despite his origins, I'd never heard of Moore, but he and his siblings Owen (Mary Pickford's first husband), Tom, Joe, and Mary formed quite the silent-era acting dynasty, with hundreds of screen credits between them - Meath's biggest Hollywood exports until Pierce Brosnan. Although Matt had a very healthy career in the silent era, with numerous lead roles, by the early 1930s his parts were getting smaller, and he's uncredited for most of his final two decades onscreen. He turns in a fine character performance here, sympathetic and humane in his dealings with Sadie, and authentic enough that I briefly wondered if he was an actual doctor.

The Window

1949, US, directed by Ted Tetzlaff

My film-watching has been significantly curtailed since our son was born six months ago, and although I've still succeeded in seeing some fascinating movies in that period, this was the first title that made me wonder what it will be like to sit down with Shay when he's older and introduce him to one of my own passions. I'm sure that this idea came to mind partly because The Window centers on a child - the film is hardly a model of a fine father-son relationship, or at least not the kind I aspire to - but perhaps also because it triggered such strong memories of Twelve Angry Men, a film I first saw in the company of my own father, when I was no older than the protagonist of The Window.

Although not confined to a claustrophobic room, The Window is another fine entry in the sweltering New York genre, with a key scene in which someone may have witnessed a murder on a hot, sweaty city night. If Bobby Driscoll, remains a little too winsome at this stage of his career for the gritty setting, the film still captures an authentic whiff of New York air, from the establishing shots that showcase long-changed parts of the city, to the anonymity that allows one's upstairs neighbor to engage, unnoticed, in casual criminality. There's also a real tension in the climactic scenes, despite one's suspicions as to the likely outcome, with Tetzlaff making fine use of a location (or set) in an abandoned building, filled with hazards and hiding places.

Doctor X

1932, US, directed by Michael Curtiz


This gig must have been a set designer's dream: the lab sections in Doctor Xavier's research institute have the expected retorts and bubbling flasks, but even his library is impressive, the shelves stretching up to the high ceiling, while Doctor Xavier's home on Long Island is a veritable gothic gallery, filled with bizarre scientific equipment.

Both locations allow Michael Curtiz ample room for the use of expressionistic shadows to create an atmosphere of dread, with every element of the house in particular becoming a threat at times, although Curtiz also makes effective use of sound, whether it's the teacup trembling in a terrified maid's hand or the pervasive, grating sound effects as the film reaches its climax. I don't know what the two-strip Technicolor effects would have looked like to a contemporary audience but in the version I saw, they contribute effectively to the off-kilter feel of the film, particularly in the lab sequences, with unexpected textures and flashes of colour.

Unfortunately, the overall mood is frequently thrown into reverse by Lee Tracy as the comic relief; it's hardly the actor's fault, but his fast-talking, double-taking newspaperman seems to have drifted in from a different film entirely (perhaps Blessed Event, given his character's approach to journalistic ethics). The various professorial types, by contrast, are a terrific gallery of creepy character acting, one more suspicious than the last, although the actual murderer isn't hard to discern, and indeed the plotting only makes the outcome more apparent.

Although the X in the background here during Lee Tracy's explorations of the old dark house might seem to be a reference to the eponymous doctor, I couldn't help but wonder whether it was in fact a discreet tip of the hat to Howard Hawks's Scarface, which came out during the filming of Doctor X; the symbol disappears when the camera cuts back to this perspective a few seconds later (the reference, if that is indeed the intention, is a little more subtle than Martin Scorsese's tribute to the Hawks film).

The Kennel Murder Case

1933, US, directed by Michael Curtiz

William Powell made three earlier appearances as Philo Vance for Paramount, but this fourth outing for Warners seems to have been a significant step up in terms of the man behind the camera; Frank Tuttle, who sat in the director's chair for the initial trio of films, seems to have been almost completely forgotten by film history. In addition to a modicum of his usual shadowplay, Michael Curtiz employs whip pans to signal movement both in time and space, a neat way to move the action forward and around in what's a typically crowded 1930s narrative (perhaps a touch overcrowded: the death of a dog remains somewhat mystifying, while a scene where Vance just happens to have detailed models of the murder scene is entirely unexplained), but his most striking touch is the use of a subjective camera to detail the murderer's exploits, a very early use of a technique that cropped up occasionally in the early sound years but which really came into its own after John Carpenter's Halloween.

Big Deal on Madonna Street

1958, Italy, directed by Mario Monicelli (original title I soliti ignoti)


Although it has an exceptional cast - Gassman! Mastroianni! Cardinale! - perhaps the producers weren't confident that their largely nascent stars had what it took to make the film a success, since the early posters for the film featured Totò misleadingly front and center. The older comic's role is rather small but Monicelli introduces him in clever fashion, hiding him in the centre of a scene and then gradually revealing him such that you suddenly realize he's been there all along, cloaked in darkness.

Perhaps Monicelli's greatest trick here is to combine a treasurable series of character portraits with the relentlessly downward spiral of his narrative, in which a grandiose robbery is transformed into farce; everything that could go wrong does go wrong, and a little more to boot. Those broad-brush portraits employ and dissect more or less every Italian stereotype - snobby northerners, cunning Neapolitans, pathologically jealous Sicilians - around, suggesting that somehow that a rather motley collection of individuals is capable of collaborating in some loose collective endeavour, albeit with plenty of mistakes along the way. It's not hard to discern therein that a commentary on the state of recovering post-war Italy, or rather an undercutting of the public success story with a counter-narrative of muddling through; that commentary is worn lightly, though, in a film that so adeptly creates an atmosphere of impending comic disaster.

Siamo Uomini O Caporali

1953, Italy, directed by Camillo Mastrocinque

My sister-in-law is from a small town near Naples, and when we travelled to the wedding I thought some research on that most iconic of Neapolitan film performers, Totò, was in order. I dragged my indulgent wife around an absurd number of shops in search of Totò DVDs only to find that very few of his films have English subtitles; I couldn't find any subtitled fare from before the early 1950s, and the few films I did find seemed, for the most part, like second-string affairs.

Siamo uomini o caporali ("Are We Men or Corporals?") was written by Totò, too, under his real name or an abbreviation thereof since he had noble origins, with the multiple names such afflictions entail. It's a sort of loose sketch film, framed by an extended interview in a doctor's office in which Totò, very much in Little Tramp-ish mode, expounds on his philosophy that men can be divided into two groups, the eponymous men and corporals, before narrating several instances in which he came into contact with such corporals.

The first section deals with Totò's wartime adventures in a German-run camp, and it's not hard to discern a somewhat queasy foreshadowing of Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful, with Totò's camp experience the background for a burgeoning romance, and a spoof of Nazi medical experimentation that seems distinctly unamusing. The subsequent sequences, particularly those which undermine the image of a beneficent American military, are stronger, although the overdubbing of the "American" characters, a standard Italian practice of the period, is distractingly poor.

Although director Camillo Mastrocinque worked frequently with Totò, he doesn't always seem to appreciate what he has on his hands: one of Totò's great strengths is his way with words, and he delivers a terrific near-soliloquy early on in the doctor's office, but Mastrocinque constantly undermines the performance by cutting away for reaction shots. Later, he has the good sense the to keep the camera squarely on his star even when engaged in conversation with another actor, for it's Totò's actions and reactions that make the scene.

Passing Fancy

1933, Japan, directed by Yasujiro Ozu

From the wonderful opening scene, tracing the journey of a wallet through a crowd of ethically challenged patrons, Ozu's 1933 comedy creates a vivid sense of urban life in the midst of the depression, with little details like the few coins in a wallet or the tattered paper of a screen door telling reminders of the realities of the period, as was also the case in his earlier Tokyo Chorus.

Such details don't for a moment obscure the essential lightness of the characterizations, however: the film features the first appearance of Kihachi, the loving if barely competent father who appears in a string of subsequent Ozu films, as well as another in the series of lively urchins played by Tomio Aoki. What's perhaps most remarkable, though, is the subtlety with which Ozu transitions from knockabout comedy - a rambunctious child hitting his hungover father on the shins to wake him up, for instance - to a revelatory passage wherein the bonds of family are movingly revealed, without any abruptness and while remaining true to the flawed, engaging characters.

L'Homme du Niger

1940, France, directed by Jacques de Baroncelli

Where British colonial films generally kept their stars safely back in the studio, several similar French productions shipped the headliners overseas - as was the case for this muddled propaganda melodrama, which blends a tale of lost love and leprosy with attempts to extol the Niger irrigation scheme. That scheme was a long-gestating dream of some French colonials, who imagined they could create a cotton-growing scheme in the Sahel, partly to give French cotton manufacturers a stable supply line and partly, perhaps, to compete with pretty successful British efforts along the same lines in the Sudan.

The film's credits include thanks to the ministry for the colonies, although the real power in matters irrigation lay with the Office du Niger, a quasi-independent entity that was at the height of its powers around this time; the Popular Front government had attempted, with very limited success, to rein it in a few years earlier, and the final scenes are something of an orgy of celebration of the vast though ultimately unsuccessful irrigation effort.

The opening and closing sections were filmed in what's now Mali, including in a working leper colony in Bamako, with an extended sequence back in Paris sandwiched in the middle. Leprosy is a key plot element - indeed L'Homme du Niger is the second Harry Baur film within two years to feature leprosy, though Baur's character was not the victim in either case. There's a nice bit of business, involving a lighter, cigarettes and an observant physician, to reveal the leprosy problem, although it's telling, and entirely expected, that a single European character gets far more screen time than the entire hospital of African patients, most of whom are dismissed in the usual patronizing terms.

Although he was a prolific director, particularly in the silent era, very few of Jacques de Baroncelli's films are available today, and although he extracts several nice performances here, particularly from Harry Baur - who is especially good in the key diagnosis scenes - and Victor Francen, the love story elements fail to convince, which seriously hobbles a film that's already uncertain of whether to emphasize the politics or the drama.

Street of Shame

1956, Japan, directed by Mizoguchi Kenji

Mizoguchi's final film returns to the theme of socially marginalized women, in this case the workers in a brothel, with the narrative stitched to a backdrop of (real life) political debates on the outlawing of prostitution in Japan in the mid-1950s. Mizoguchi punctuates the film with radio accounts of the discussions in parliament, contrasting those more formal exchanges with the prostitutes' own conversations on their collective future, as well as with the (generally self-serving and yet not wholly inaccurate) views expressed by the brothel owner.

The film is essentially constructed in two halves, the first introducing the primary characters and their life stories, with the second commencing as each storyseems to come unravelled - with sometimes dramatic outcomes - before the cycle begins again in the raw final scenes, capped by the final shot in which a young prostitute tries to shrink behind a wall, a sharp contrast to the defiant directness of the central character at the end of Osaka Elegy.

I'm surprised that there is so little work that compares the films of Mizoguchi with those of Ousmane Sembène: leaving aside both filmmakers' interest in the social importance of women, they are both political filmmakers in a very direct sense, intervening in ongoing social debates and, arguably, acting as important influences in those debates. For Sembène, such engagement was more or less a career principle, whereas some of Mizoguchi's films are only indirectly concerned with contemporary social commentary, unlike this film, which doesn't feel at all dated despite the very topical concerns. The resonances between the cinema of Mizoguchi and Antonioni feel particularly strong here, with Mizoguchi's exteriors prefiguring shots from Antonioni almost a decade later.

Deserto rosso (1964, Italy, Michelangelo Antonioni)

Street of Shame (1956, Japan, Kenji Mizoguchi)

Women of the Night

1948, Japan, directed by Mizoguchi Kenji

As is the case with De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, made the same year half a world away, Women of the Night infuses neo-realist themes with the skill and settings of an experienced studio director: the flavour of post-war Japanese experience is sharp, but there's nothing rough-edged about the treatment, whether in the interior shots, often models of deep focus construction, or the elegant camera movements, such as in the gripping scene where one of the film's central characters descends a staircase while concealing contraband from a nearby policeman. Mizoguchi's use of music also functions as a discreet but unmistakable emphasis to the onscreen action at critical moments.

The long final sequence, on a soundstage carefully constructed as though it depicts a bombed-out neighborhood, is a corrosive explosion of grief, anger and sadness, giving full voice to the emotions of the exploited, often desperate women of the title, all of them used or abused by men who are almost uniformly weaker yet socially more powerful. There's an unexpected moment when we see Christian imagery in a stained glass window that has somehow survived the destruction - a moment that perhaps recalls Mizoguchi's own identification with the downtrodden, but which also suggests the deep gulf between spiritual succour and harsh material realities in the Japan of the late 1940s.

Osaka Elegy

1936, Japan, directed by Mizoguchi Kenji

As in so many of Mizoguchi's subsequent films, particularly those with a modern setting, women are seen here as both the strength of Japanese society - taking on burdens men are either unwilling or unable to assume - while also remaining the most vulnerable class in that same society. Their pragmatic decisions, often taken to preserve family life at all cost, are nonetheless the source of their exploitation and social shame, a contradiction that's at the heart of Mizoguchi's critique. The false happiness of the domestic scene near the end is devastating, though there's barely time to absorb Mizoguchi's undermining of the family idyll before he cuts to the blunt final shots, that hang like an accusation before the viewer.

The picture above is a frame grab created by Jim Emerson as part of a fascinating post on staging and deep focus at his blog Scanners; he makes insightful comments on Mizoguchi's shot choices in one striking scene from early in the film, which establishes several of the key relationships in the film. That sequence is among the most interesting in Osaka Elegy, which feels at times like a dry run for his subsequent, and more confident, Sisters of the Gion, shot later the same year.

Patu!

1983, New Zealand, directed by Merata Mita

A fascinating film both for its content - an account of protests against the 1981 South African rugby tour of New Zealand - and for its insights into the documentary form, Patu! retains an exceptional immediacy even thirty years on from the events. There's a shocking fury onscreen in many scenes, encapsulating anger at apartheid South Africa and, as the film progresses, at the New Zealand government, which seemed to be prepared to do more or less anything, including turning parts of the country into a fortress as well as sending police riot squads into action against their fellow citizens, to facilitate the tour. As such, the film provides a compelling insight into the sheer levels of force that a country needs to deploy to calm a restive population: the comparison with South Africa itself appears at every turn, duly underlined by the filmmakers.

Merata Mita, a key member of New Zealand's small film industry who sadly died in 2010, doesn't attempt to provide a two-sided account of the events: her film is designed as a corrective to the narrative peddled by the New Zealand government and much of the mainstream media, which tended to present the protesters as unpatriotic troublemakers and denied them a voice. She weaves together an extraordinary variety of on-the-fly footage to create a sense of the very real political and social stakes at the heart of the protests, with filmmakers like Roger Donaldson and Alun Bollinger contributing their skills as camera operators.

There are inevitable gaps in the documentary record, although Mita generally allows the viewer to draw his or her own conclusions rather than providing an over-arching narrative; that said, the use of sound effects that don't always seem to stem directly from the onscreen events certainly heightens the emotional impact of certain scenes. Much of the film is rough and ready, as befits the shooting conditions, but it has exceptional value as a historical record - an insight into the dynamics of protest almost from the beginning of the anti-tour movement, with some of those featured onscreen, like the roots/reggae band Herbs, remaining influential today.

The film is available for online viewing at the (excellent) NZ ON Screen site, which has a terrific collection of New Zealand television, short films, and some full-length features. 

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

2010, Thailand/UK/France/Germany/Spain/Netherlands, directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

This was my first opportunity to see one of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's films on the big screen, and it's a stunning experience to be fully enveloped in his atmospheric world. His films are made very much to be projected on a large scale in the dark, the soundscapes and rhythms becoming that much more hypnotic when shorn of the distractions inevitable when watching on a television. That mesmeric quality seems to flow from one of his films to the next, each a kind of oasis from the sensual assault that is daily (urban) life. The city is a welcome absence here, with one character scornful of city life, although when Weerasthekul does film urban settings they seem shorn of the people and bustle one might expect.

As with the overall tone, there is a continuity of tropes throughout the director's work, with certain ideas cropping up over and over - car rides (all of his features feature an extended sequence shot from within a car if memory serves), medical matters, people in and out of their accustomed uniforms, folk tales reworked almost obsessively, and hovering behind everything the primeval power of the forest. That power isn't necessarily malign or alarming, though: the characters are perfectly comfortable with the idea of two different and interacting levels of reality, and there are flashes of humour as the two levels collide. Here the forest becomes a space of spiritual repose, as in the director's prior films Tropical Malady and Blissfully Yours, although it's not abstracted from the realities of Thai life - the location near borders with Thailand's neighbours is a source of insecurity for some even while it provides solace to others.

Weerasethakul's imagery is as striking as ever: there's a scene in the forest at dusk where the light creates the strange impression that everything is underwater, while other shots make use of bright swatches of colour, such as the saffron robes of a somewhat reluctant monk or the eye-popping hues in a temple. The characters are always placed with great care in the frame, too - the shot at the top reminds me of one in Tropical Malady (pictured in my entry on that film) where one character is right at the front of the frame while the main action happens behind him. 

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I

2010, UK/US, directed by David Yates

Although I'm sure that the prospect of global profits played a major role - if not the determining role - in splitting the final Harry Potter book into two films, the result is actually a much improved product on the cinematic level, with the breathing space to slow the action down a little - not a small consideration where the plot requires the central characters to experience an extended period of soul-searching/retreat. The additional running time allows for at least some character development, too, rather than simply a recounting of J.K. Rowling's plot, while director of photography Eduardo Serra uses his colour palette to channel some of the grimmer spirit of films like Children of Men, lending this installment a much more obviously adult feel despite the wizardry, with several sequences - a scene on a beach near the conclusion - feeling appropriately bleak. Since the narrative would otherwise be one distressing event after another, there's a nice smattering of humour to leaven the tone. Rupert Grint is assigned most of the best lines, although a sequence where the parts of the central trio of friends are played by three older actors, including the usually fearsome David O'Hara, is very nicely played, each of the veterans catching the mannerisms of his or her younger counterpart quite acutely.

Le Grand jeu

1934, France, directed by Jacques Feyder

Unlike Sanders of the River, Feyder's Le Grand jeu quite successfully marries its (fairly brief) location footage in North Africa with studio-shot material, although if anything this tends to underline the superfluousness of the overseas setting, which is used mostly as a means to justify using the Foreign Legion as a plot element. While the film further burnishes the regiment's legend, the action could - as Glenn Kenny notes in his appreciation of the film - have taken place more or less anywhere, such is the destructive spirit that animates the lead character, played by Pierre Richard-Willm.

Unfortunately, Willm is perhaps the weakest element in the film: although he didn't start in films until 1930, his style often seems like those of a silent film actor, more mannered and emphatic than was the norm by the mid-1930s; I felt as though an intertitle was about to pop up to provide further clarity. By contrast, supporting players like Charles Vanel and Françoise Rosay (Feyder's wife), who both had substantial experience in the silent days, feel entirely at home here; their cynical view of life's transactions is more in keeping with the film's overall tone, too.

While Feyder's sometimes intoxicating movement - the whirl through the casbah, for instance - is the more eye-catching stylistic element, he's as adept at more low-key moments, extracting great tension from the repeated card-readings (from which the film takes its title). I've always found there's something hypnotic in watching someone perform some feat of manual skill, whether it's Daniel Auteuil repairing a violin in Un Coeur en hiver or Rosay placing a series of cards or pouring a glass of wine - acts that slow down the rhythm of their respective films and draw the viewer into a world of carefully crafted gesture.

Sanders of the River

1935, UK, directed by Zoltan Korda

Of limited cinematic value -- even in the 1930s at least some reviewers noted the problems of marrying studio-set plot material with "authentic" background footage shot on location -- Sanders of the River holds considerable historical/anthropological value, both for the record of certain aspects of African life provided by those location sequences and for the insights into the British colonial (and domestic) mind.

Viewed through a modern lens, it's a terrifically problematic film, with Paul Robeson's Bosambo character an excruciating, obsequious "native" stereotype who breaks into song from time to time. Although it sounds as though Robeson -- who disowned his participation in the film -- was gulled somewhat by the production team, it doesn't help that he's not the subtlest of actors, at least on this occasion. He's more a presence, and sometimes an impressive one, than an actor, and at times you get the sense that he's following Zoltan Korda's direction rather too literally rather than attempting to inhabit a character.

As in his other colonial films, Korda has little interest in giving us actual insight into the territories that came under British rule: the location footage is a mishmash from across the continent, blended together as a composite, undifferentiated "Africa," and the studio actors playing the major African roles are almost invariably non-African. Nonetheless, and presumably inadvertently, Korda gives us a fine insight into the realities of Britain's much-vaunted "indirect rule" system, where the only indirect aspect was the fact that the will of the local colonial officer was on occasion nominally transmitted through indigenous ruling structures. The film also provides a pretty good illustration of how the colonial administration shed all pretence of indirect rule and inserted itself directly in local affairs as soon as things got tough - a theme explored in Moses Ochonu's book Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression, particularly relevant here given the time period.

Note: This is part of my Watching Movies in Africa project. The film was shown in post-independence Ghana in 1956 and 1957 by the government-controlled West African Pictures chain. It had been imported, and presumably screened, earlier in the 1950s, too. While I wonder what exactly audiences of the time made of the film, it was apparently box office gold: the Accra screenings in September 1956 broke local records, raking in G£464 in two nights, a huge sum by local standards when a single cinema might only earn £1,000 in a month.

The image above is from the DVD Beaver review of the Criterion Collection Paul Robeson - Portraits of the Artist. The film is also available to view online at the Internet Archive, although the quality isn't great.

My Man Godfrey

1936, US, directed by Gregory La Cava

Like many a Depression-era film, My Man Godfrey plays the social commentary light, with the generally privileged characters exposed to the tougher side of the life - the shanties and "forgotten men" - without ever being in any actual danger of joining their ranks (indeed, at some points the film seems to suggest that impoverishment is a robustly authentic lifestyle choice).

In any case, incisive socio-political analysis is very much a subsidiary concern for one of the zaniest of the screwball comedies, which features a wealthy young woman, played by Carole Lombard, whose eccentricities make many a Katherine Hepburn character seem even-keeled. As amusing as Lombard is, delivering dialogue at a blistering pace, the film is hardly the best advertisement for the subtleties of her talent since her character is such a relentless ditz (you can imagine Gregory La Cava offscreen gesturing wildly, "more ditz! more ditz!"). William Powell gets to display much greater range, playing essentially three versions of his character, with subtle transitions from one persona to the next; none of those personas seems a likely match for Lombard, but that's the magic of Hollywood, and the pacing is generally so swift that there's no time for reflection (entire trips abroad seem to pass in a flash).

Terribly Happy

2008, Denmark, directed by Henrik Ruben Genz (Aka: Frygtelig lykkelig)

Given the rather low levels of actual violence in Denmark, it has produced a remarkably dark-toned cinema, whether in the form of the concussive urban tales of Nicolas Winding Refn (the actor Kim Bodnia, a veteran of Refn's debut film, Pusher, plays a key role here) or in the more bucolic settings of The Green Butchers or Terribly Happy. Indeed, the notion that the the countryside hides much greater horrors than the big city is the film's running - if overplayed - joke, with a big city cop finding himself in an apparently byzantine world of criminality far beyond his usual experience. For the most part, director Genz plays things very straight, controlling the tone in ways reminiscent of Patrice Leconte's Monsieur Hire, although the insistent repetition of incident ultimately makes the film seem rather longer than it is; that said, a genuinely disturbing scene about halfway into the film gives the tension entirely new, distressing dimensions that underline the sense of psychological turmoil experienced by the main character.

Carlos

2010, France, directed by Olivier Assayas [Three episode mini-series version]

An absorbing, necessarily elliptical account of the career of the Venezuelan-born multi-national terrorist, Carlos isn't simply a biopic but an effective re-creation of the specific time of social ferment and debate during which such a figure could emerge. If anything, the running time of the mini-series isn't quite generous enough: while Assayas's central focus remains with Carlos, the side trips to explore the German extreme left wing have the potential to become compelling episodes in their own right, in the manner of Edgar Reitz's even more expansive 1993 social canvas Die zweite Heimat.

The film is especially compelling in exploring the contradictions between Carlos's own self-image - his experience of his actions, and his account of his motivations - and the actual success of Carlos and his fellow operatives. As depicted by Assayas, Carlos's planning is often haphazard and his negotiating skills flawed in the extreme, but he continues to believe in his own standing in the shadowy spy/terrorist nexus, as well as in his own skill as a leader, even where it's clear he's barely capable of controlling his own crew.

Assayas is always an astute user of music, and he deploys post-punk/new wave bands like The Dead Boys as a counterpoint to several of the film's most charged scenes - underlining the adrenalized experience of violence from the perspective of the perpetrator but also illustrating the way in which Carlos and his collaborators imagined themselves as media objects, complete with soundtrack, from the get-go. Indeed, it's in the smallest of details - the way a glass of Scotch is cupped, or the way that Carlos adjusts his sunglasses - that this obsession with self-image appears. It's an obsession that undermines Carlos's rhetoric of revolution at every turn, and which also marks him off as distinctly different from his more ascetic German colleagues. Those contradictions are acutely capture in Edgar Ramírez's terrifically committed performance: although he's a little too photogenic to be a fully convincing stand-in for the actual Carlos, whose magnetism was less apparent to the outsider, he embodies Carlos's sense of himself as a global, stateless actor.