L'Ainé des Ferchaux

1963, France, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville

L'Ainé des Ferchaux seems to be the forgotten man amidst Melville's 1960s output  -- all of his other 1960s films, and then some, have received the Criterion treatment, while this film hasn't been released in the US at all (it was remade in 2001 for French TV with a much older Jean-Paul Belmondo playing the role taken here by Charles Vanel).

I wonder if there's a rights issue that's holding it a release, since the film's certainly not without merit or interest, not least as one of two films that Melville shot (partly) in the US. The "partly" is the more significant here in that he didn't bring his actors with him for the American shoot -- apparently in a fit of pique over Charles Vanel's desire to have the trip double as a honeymoon, something that Melville, with his exceptionally, and perhaps sometimes unreasonable, high standards found to be unforgivably unprofessional.

Whatever the rationale, the outcome allows Melville, as he acknowledged, to have plenty of fun stitching together American location footage with studio material and, here and there, exteriors shot in southern France but purporting to be in the US. The stitching doesn't quite work if you happen to have taken a similar road trip through the American east and south, with the locations occasionally shifting unexpectedly, but Melville's not really after strict verisimilitude, and his vignettes of early-1960s Americana remain diverting, while there's a genuine care to find continuities between the neon colours he finds in the American streets and the studio sets back in France. He seems to be thoroughly enjoying his first work in colour, although he switched back to black-and-white for his subsequent film.

Always an admirer of the US, Melville gets to indulge that love here, both in terms of the places he chooses to put on the screen and the films to which he pays homage -- starting off with The Set-Up in the opening scenes, to the western music that underlines much of the central road trip that Charles Vanel, a banker on the run, takes with his new assistant Jean-Paul Belmondo. Many a road movie mines the differences between the protagonists for comic effect, but Melville is much more interested in the cat and mouse dynamic between Vanel, an ailing older man, and his brash young bagman, who's clearly on the hunt for a score. Melville underscores the difference between the men by constantly placing them as far apart as possible in the frame, so that even when they are ostensibly crammed together in a car they're at odds; the effect is even more pronounced when they settle for a time on the fringes of New Orleans, with Belmondo, in the example below, barely inside the frame.

For the most part, Melville films the two men in long and medium shot, eschewing close-ups until two key moments in the narrative in which Vanel and Belmondo invade the frame, as if to intensify an already fraught scene. The shots also reinforce the claustrophobia of their New Orleans existence -- a near-tropical setting that recalls Vanel's past in the French colonies. The atmosphere of decadent decay surely influenced Bertrand Tavernier's Coup de Torchon (based on an American novel transposed to Africa) years later; Tavernier worked for Melville on Le Doulos.

More screengrabs:

Sherlock Jr.

1924, US, directed by Buster Keaton

I'm not even going to attempt to dissect Keaton's wonderful comedy, which provided easily the most laugh-filled evening I've enjoyed at the cinema this year, except to note that after only a few minutes I started thinking about how much I was looking forward to screening this for my son, still only 18 months old and thankfully as yet pretty uninterested in the television (except in so far as the remote control can be used as an improvised telephone). I loved Chaplin and Keaton when I was young, and Sherlock Jr reinforced my sense that it's been far, far too long since I spent time in their excellent company. I'm not sure if I'd ever seen this particular Keaton before, but the imaginativeness of the gags, both small-scale and death-defying, is often breathtaking; you're still recovering from the previous gag, or the previous portion of a multi-layered gag, when the next laugh is upon you.

Untel père et fils

1943, France, directed by Julien Duvivier

Duvivier's film, shot in 1940 but not released until much later, recounts 70 difficult years in France's history -- from the Franco-Prussian war to the coming of World War II -- through the experiences of one over-burdened French family, from the trenches to the home front. There's an extraordinary amount of narrative action packed into the film's brisk 80 minutes, but there is still room for some distinctive Duvivier touches, particularly his repeated use of traveling shots, most effective in the clever shot in which he focuses on a man running behind a plane, perhaps as a means to avoid special effects; that shot has a parallel later in the film when Robert Le Vigan's character anxiously watches warplanes over the Marne.

There's also a hint of Duvivier's earlier La Belle équipe in the set of an artist's rooftop studio, although the backdrops with Montmartre, the Arc de Triomphe and the colonies could have been taken from any Hollywood backlot. Despite the historical through-line, the film isn't entirely coherent: it's never really made clear why Louis Jouvet's character needs to depart France forever after a failed love affair, for instance, though the metaphor of Raimu's decline from youthful glory to shabby old age is pretty straightforward.

Volpone

1941, France, directed by Maurice Tourneur

I loved Ben Jonson's original play when I read it in college, but I'd never previously seen Volpone on stage or film, and somehow it never occurred to me that it might be quite so broad in performance. This version is at a couple of removes from Jonson -- it's a filmed version of a stage adaptation that came the pens of Jules Romains and Stefan Zweig, which altered Jonson's original ending -- and perhaps it plays up the farcical elements to an even greater degree. That's especially true of Harry Baur's performance in the title role: although Baur is capable of great subtly elsewhere, his work here hits the same note over and over, with only the briefest of more nuanced asides -- the performance is in keeping with his enormous fake nose, as seen above.

Louis Jouvet, as Volpone's sidekick Mosca, is rather more toned-down, at least within the context of the play, and there are some terrific supporting players, especially Charles Dullin, a great theatre actor who tutored Jean-Louis Barrault and Marcel Marceau, among others; he plays the decrepit Corbaccio so convincingly that it's easy to forget the actor was only in his fifties. Maurice Tourneur, so good a director elsewhere, mostly settles for observing the actors at work, with only a handful of interesting shots (a conversation shot in silhouette, or the shadows of dancers late used as a striking backdrop); it sounds as though the film had a troubled production history in the early months of the Occupation, and perhaps in the end it's most valuable as a record of a work which had its greatest fame on the stage.

Drive

2011, US, directed by Nicholas Winding Refn

Something of a tightrope act, to be sure, Nicholas Winding Refn's film almost courts accusations of pretentiousness, with its unnamed central character, a Hawksian figure without the laconic dialogue, and the slow-burn pacing that eventually erupts into sustained and brutal violence. Ryan Gosling is terrific, remaining absolutely buttoned-down and conveying in the process a deeply wounded psyche with his own moral code, a kind of modern-day Los Angeles ronin with a rather old-fashioned sense of chivalry. Refn makes full use of his frame, his characters often situated at extremes of the screen, inviting the eye to explore the empty spaces and reinforcing the sense that these characters are too flawed to be able to bridge the gaps that separate them in any sustained fashion.

Mon Meilleur ami

2006, France, directed by Patrice Leconte

Leconte has a pretty uneven filmography, with a fairly strong run in the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, bookmarked roughly by Tandem at one end and Ridicule at the other, with the occasional high point since. This is pretty standard issue fare, though: the concept, with an antique dealer forced to show he has an actual friend rather than just a series of business connections, is pure Hollywood, and you wouldn't be surprised to see, say, Steve Carell, in the Daniel Auteuil role while Boon, for his part, busily hones the affable persona deployed with such success in the subsequent Bienvenue chez les ch'tis. Leconte's films, even when fairly empty-headed, usually look fine, and there's a warmth to the lighting in several of the early sequences here that's quite beguiling, though the regular use of zooms is a distraction, if in keeping with the television aesthetic that dominates late on when Boon's character stars on the French version of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?

Young Adult

2011, US, directed by Jason Reitman

It's refreshing to come across a mainstream American film that so resolutely refuses to conform to standard Hollywood psychology. Charlize Theron plays a genuinely dreadful person, utterly self-obsessed, but there's no attempt to provide her with a simplistic psychological back story -- indeed the film goes out of its way to demonstrate that psychological back stories in no way determine the subsequent ability to behave like a human being -- nor is there that familiar story arc wherein a character learns the error of her ways and grows as a person. That trope -- or tripe -- is so familiar that it's absence is weirdly bracing, particularly when the character at the heart of the film is such a piece of work.

Haywire

2011, US, directed by Steven Soderbergh

Crisp, quick and ultimately rather forgettable, Haywire is another of Soderbergh's films that functions rather better as a concept than a final film -- with the concept here presumably being to ask what it might be like to cast a person with genuine action skills, in the person of MMA champ Nina Carano, as an action hero, thus eliminating all that messy stand-in work. Carano's more than adequate as a performer -- the mainstream action films hardly make many demands of their stars anyway, and few enough of them have the balls-to-the-wall conviction of a Bruce Willis, who manages to invest everything with a little extra vim -- and the plot is brisk enough, if rather obviously a Bourne knockoff, with Ewan McGregor doing his best to exude menace. In the end I found myself more taken with Soderbergh's sojourn in Dublin, where he makes geographically accurate use of the capital to stage several fine sequences, than with the substance of his film; Soderbergh rather undercuts his central concept anyway by casting Michael Fassbender for one of the film's key fights, and I couldn't tell whether it was Fassbender himself, or his stand-in, doing the punching and grunting, but still enjoyed the sequence.

Offroad

2012, Germany, directed by Elmar Fischer

Further proof, if ever it were needed, that European film industries are perfectly capable of churning out low-grade, pre-fabricated films of their own; there's virtually nothing original or especially charming in Elmar Fischer's film, and certainly no reason to root for the heroine, played by Nora Tschirner. She's apparently one of Germany's more energetic young stars, but this is a poor showcase indeed.

Intouchables

2011, France, directed by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano

I found the basic plotline -- exuberant black man from the banlieue gives wealthy, quadriplegic wealthy white man new reason to live, often by mugging within an inch of his life -- rather discomfiting, and the fact that the tale is ostensibly based in fact doesn't really function as a saving grace, not least because the model for the black character was Algerian, and considerably more rough-edged than his screen incarnation. The film tries to garner some credit from filming in the banlieue itself, though its attempts to add a layer of grit flounder when the crowded public housing projects are used as just another source of comedy.

Trading Places covered a surprising amount of the same ground with a good deal more perceptiveness nearly thirty years ago; Omar Sy is as magnetic here, though, as Eddie Murphy was in his prime, and I hope that Sy gets some better outlets for his charm in his subsequent projects (there are, admittedly, several genuinely funny sequences, particularly when the film emphasizes Sy's lack of sentimentality rather than his background, and François Cluzet makes for a fine foil). No matter how good they may be, Sy's future films are unlikely to be near as successful, of course -- this is now France's second-most successful homegrown hit of all time, on the heels of yet another odd-couple comedy, as reliable a genre as they come in terms of the French box office. 

Barbara

2012, Germany, directed by Christian Petzold

Christian Petzold's previous few films were all set very firmly in modern Germany -- indeed several of them might be read as an indictment of that modernity, at least in terms of what Petzold takes to be the superficial nature of many contemporary interactions and obsessions. Barbara, by contrast, is set in a small town in Eastern Germany in 1980, though it's unmistakably a Petzold film -- an intense character study, extraordinarily observant of small details of both psychology and setting, with much of the communication elided.

As with films like Wolfsburg, the setting of the film is strangely depopulated -- Petzold's towns seem to be barely inhabited, enhancing the claustrophobic sense that one is always likely to run into someone one knows, though not necessarily for the better. It's an idea given a new resonance in Barbara, where the nature of small-town life brings the titular character, an exiled-from-Berlin doctor played by Petzold favourite Nina Hoss, into contact with the local Stasi man as both object of study and potential provider of healthcare. There's no romanticizing of such interactions, however, as in, say, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others (von Donnersmarck's swift decamping for Hollywood comes as no surprise; it's much harder to imagine Petzold making such a transition).

Petzold's characters are frequently rather poor communicators, or at least they don't say a whole lot on occasion, and yet Petzold's own style is crisp and clear -- a shot of that Stasi man in the building where a family member lies ill tells us all we need to know, while the film's final shot similarly manages to compress a great deal of unsaid business between the two main characters, capping this particular onscreen narrative while opening the way to a new, untold story. Petzold also stitches his story together with what seems to be the world beyond his film, having a character recount the story of an actual book, or describing in great detail the story of a painting; the warmth of these sequences, among the more verbose in the film, suggest that the director is using them to share with us some particularly personal pleasures.

La Charrette fantôme

1939, France, directed by Julien Duvivier

I've been gradually watching my way through as much of Louis Jouvet's filmography as I can, although I've been coming to the conclusion that using Jouvet as the unifying feature isn't the most productive way to view many of his films. A great many of the actor's appearances, at least in the 1930s, are rather brief supporting roles, barely more than cameos in some cases, so using him as a starting point can end up being a fast track to disappointment as he disappears so quickly from the screen. That's true, yet again, in Duvivier's remake of Victor Sjöström's 1921 film: Jouvet steals scenes early on from actual star Pierre Fresnay, and leaves an indelible trail behind that Fresnay, whose character is a rather hard-to-like fellow, can't compete with; it's never a good sign when you're being one-upped by your offscreen co-stars, though in this case Fresnay also has to deal with Micheline Francey, who goes all-out in a role as a Salvation Army sister who's not averse to a touch of martyrdom.

The sequences featuring the eponymous phantom carriage are eerie -- the use of sound is especially good, evoking something like the macabre ticking of Poe's Tell-Tale Heart -- but I suspect that Duvivier lifted the double exposure imagery pretty directly from Sjöström, at least if the screen captures I've seen are representative; though memorable in patches, particularly in those sequences capturing the grinding poverty in which so many of the characters live, as if foreshadowing the privations of the war, the film ultimately doesn't feel like a project in which Duvivier (or Jouvet) is fully invested, unlike their previous collaboration on La Fin du jour.

Hôtel du Nord

1938, France, directed by Marcel Carné

I hadn't seen Hôtel du Nord for more than a decade and had completely forgotten the tale of youthful amour fou that initially sets the film's plot in motion -- a lapse of memory that I suspect affects many a viewer given that the young couple, played by Annabella and Jean-Pierre Aumont, is so straightforward in comparison to the parallel couple played by Louis Jouvet and Arletty.

Even though neither of the latter pair had yet cracked true stardom, the comparison between the actors seems entirely unfair in retrospect: no audience was very likely to identify with the melodramatic Annabella at the expense of Arletty, incarnating one of the true Parisian heroines, playing a ballsy street urchin of a kind also incarnated around the same time, on the music-hall stage, by Edith Piaf (both women had unapologetic professional personas that seemed, frequently, to mesh with their offscreen lives). Similarly, Jouvet takes such pleasure in the lines provided for him by Henri Jeanson that even a performer as solid as Aumont could only ever come off worse in the comparison; Jouvet's character is very much in the world-weary vein that he made something of a specialty as the decade wore on, but here he has the screen time and the script to flesh the character out in ways that are rather more satisfying than some of his earlier blink-and-miss-it appearances.

Though the film also gained fame -- even infamy -- for its extraordinarily elaborate sets, recreating the Canal Saint-Martin in extraordinary and entirely convincing detail on the studio backlot, the more straightforward interiors of the titular hotel also serve as backdrop to some of the most memorable sequences -- even an apparently simple scene in which Arletty takes her leave from the hotel, wrapping a fur around her neck, is meticulously constructed with actors placed strategically in depth away from the camera, while Carné finds a wonderful warmth in the various mealtimes, whether it's the convivial dinner enjoyed by the hotel residents or the bustle of a noonday meal for local workers, all of them competing for the attentions of Annabella, an unlikely if effective waitress.

Le Drame de Shanghaï

1938, France, directed by G.W. Pabst

Pabst's film is an oddball mixture of fairly straightforward 1930s exoticism featuring the Shanghai underworld and torn-from-the-headlines political intrigue related to the Sino-Japanese War of 1937. Where a later film like Casablanca kept the historical specifics pretty loose, one of the many reasons that film remains so fresh 70 years on, Le Drame de Shanghaï is rather dated for an audience not exposed to news from the front. Still, while the segments on Chinese nationalism are pretty stodgy fare, there are several memorably atmospheric sequences in and around the nightclub on which much of the action centers -- especially those sections featuring, all too briefly, Louis Jouvet in what is, by his standards, an unusually despicable role. He plays a gangland figure who appears to come back from the dead, and the scene where he reappears, tilting a lamp toward his interlocutor, is the kind of detail that might have caught the eye of a Jean-Pierre Melville; there's also a genuinely creepy scene in which Jouvet and other criminal bigwigs preside over the death of an unfortunate coolie, brought to the club merely to demonstrate the effectiveness of an assassination method the men are considering.

Sunrise

1927, US, directed by F.W. Murnau

I'm always a little lost for words when dealing with the true masterpieces, mostly because it often seems as though everything's already been said -- even when writing mostly for myself, I have the strange sense that my thoughts are more than likely just repetitions or reworkings of things I've read along the way.

Murnau's film carries the sub-title "A Song of Two Humans," and that's as good a description of the film's effect as anything else -- despite the difference of medium, there's a direct, intense lyricism that reminds me of the best popular music, which functions as a kind of emotional essence in three of four minutes. Though the running time is rather longer here, as with the subsequent City Girl, Sunrise has the simplicity of mythology: a man yields to the temptation of another woman, a visitor from the city, before rediscovering his love for his wife. It might be a country song -- and there's no dismissive sarcasm in the comparison.

The point, of course, is what Murnau does with this bare skeleton: while preserving that straightforward narrative, the director finds complexity in the emotional shadings of the central couple as they stumble toward some form of reconciliation, a reconciliation embarked on in the most unpromising of circumstances. The director's effect is achieved particularly through the mastery of shifts in tone, from the leading man's darkest hours -- as he struggles with murderous thoughts -- through to the extraordinary explosion of joy both at the moment he realizes the depths of his love for his wife, and in the film's final granting of a kind of redemption just when things seem once again to be lost. There's a intentional universality to the setting, too: filmed in the US, the scenery transitions from what looks like a gloomy European village through bucolic landscapes to the razzmatazz of the vibrant 1920s city, as if to underline that this particular story could play out against any backdrop; the tram that marks the passage from country to city is almost like the tornado of The Wizard of Oz, whirling its passengers to a new and different world.

Entrée des artistes

1938, France, directed by Marc Allégret

As in so many of his films, particularly from the 1930s, Louis Jouvet is offscreen for much of the running time of Entrée des artistes, and his absence for long stretches here only heightens the sense that much of the remainder of Marc Allégret's film is rather routine. The narrative mostly focuses on the petty, even vicious, love squabbles between a group of theatre students overseen by M. Jouvet, who is presumably playing a role not a million miles from his offscreen professional life at the head of a theatre company. The moments when he seems to be most fully inhabiting that real-life role are wonderfully rich, as he gives gentle direction to his charges and takes an interest in their home lives; there's nothing of the Svengali about this particular man of the theatre, though the students clearly regard him as possessing great power.

The sequence where Jouvet visits the laundry where one aspirant spends her days is an absolute treasure, with his character tamping down a distaste for the surroundings only to find it erupting again in the face of blatant philistinism he encounters when attempting to persuade the girl's relatives of the value of her new career choice. As he departs, he mutters "quel atmosphère," a word made immortal a few months later by Arletty in Hôtel du Nord -- and in Jouvet's presence. The two films share a writer (Henri Jeanson, author of many an immortal word) and I wonder if Jeanson liked the sound of the word so much he reused it soon afterwards, as the two films were made in quick succession. Jouvet gets most of the best lines here, but his supporting cast is also filled with treasures -- Bernard Blier in a very, very early role though he's already portly and bald, Julien Carette, the poacher from La Règle du jeu, Roger Blin, a very sinister heavy in L'Alibi, Marcel Dalio... It's all testament to the extraordinary richness of the French cinema in the era, with even the bit parts seemingly played by actors of some consequence.

Mona Lisa

1986, UK, directed by Neil Jordan

Neil Jordan's films often have a tendency toward the fairy tale, and I had a bad feeling about the direction Mona Lisa seemed likely to take when Bob Hoskins' small-time gangster started falling for the high-end hooker (Cathy Tyson) he's employed to drive around. It's a relief, then, when Jordan goes down less obvious paths, concocting something that's a vaguely London variation on Paul Schrader's Hardcore, with Hoskins, who has just emerged from prison, descending into the tragically cheap underbelly of the London sex trade.

This is territory on which many a filmmaker has foundered, caught between ogling the seamy goings-on and finger wagging: Jordan uses the Hoskins character as an oddball surrogate, with Hoskins generally more repelled than engaged by what his pre-prison colleagues do to make money, while there's barely a hint of glamour in the sex trade here. Hoskins's glimmers of conscience set the stage for a redemption that manages to be simultaneously a touch too neat -- shades of the fairy tale again -- and surprisingly convincing. Hoskins finds ways to make an initially unsympathetic character far more nuanced, with the character's growing awareness of how others see him both tragic and oddly triumphal, while Michael Caine does a fine job with the part of Hoskins' terrifically seedy boss, desperately trying to swim in more exalted waters but undone by his baser instincts.

The Sign of Four

1932, UK, directed by Graham Cutts

The transition from Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock for the 2010s to Arthur Wontner's 1930s edition is a little disconcerting -- and certainly not kind to Wontner, who comes across as older than his already middle-aged years, and entirely unlikely as a purveyor of fisticuffs (perhaps that's why Graham Cutts speeds up the action sequences, since otherwise Wontner might have looked rather lethargic while swinging his fists). Wontner appeared in five Holmes vehicles between 1931 and 1937, one of which is entirely lost; while Wontner isn't my cup of tea as Holmes, it's amazing to me that the remaining films all available only in dreadful public-domain copies, and that no-one has attempted to market cleaned-up versions to the presumably large Holmes fanbase. For the most part, this is pretty routine stuff, with a very pallid Watson in the form of Ian Hunter, though Cutts makes nice use of sound to enhance the suspense, and there are a few agreeably lurid supporting roles -- Graham Soutten, as the villainous Jonathan Small, looks as though he might have seen Lon Chaney's performance in West of Zanzibar, though Soutten's onscreen disability -- a missing leg -- was entirely genuine.

Hitch and Lye

This is a contribution to the (third annual) For the Love of Film Blogathon, co-hosted by the Self-Styled Siren, Ferdy on Films, and, for the first time this year, This Island Rod. Please read the posts, participate as a poster or commenter, and, most important of all, donate!

The cause this year is an especially fine one: the blogathon aims to raise the funds needed to put recently rediscovered reels from the 1924 film The White Shadow, a hitherto-lost component of Alfred Hitchock's early career, online for all to see Free of Charge.

The aftermath in Secret Agent

Though the discovery of several reels of The White Shadow in a New Zealand shed is understandably being celebrated as Hitchcock's most notable antipodean connection -- unless we count the backlot Australia of his film Under Capricorn -- there is at least one other New Zealand association buried deep in the master's filmography. Sadly, though in the spirit of this particular blogathon, the snippet of screen history on which I'll focus is lost to film viewers; in the event that someone can rectify the loss, perhaps with dusty materials from a London attic on this occasion, the film preservation community will have another coup to fête...

Len Lye, in movie villain mode

Back in 1936, as Hitchcock was putting the finishing touches to his film Secret Agent, he employed the services of a New Zealander filmmaker/artist by the name of Len Lye, who had been in London for a decade after making his way across the Pacific and eventually northwards, his perambulations the partial inspiration for his film Tusalava, which got the British censors in something of a lather because they just knew that Lye was up to something funny with his weirdly biological imagery even if they couldn't figure out quite what was going on.

Lye was very much an artistic polymath, in the midst of one of his most productive periods as a filmmaker at the time he crossed paths with Hitchcock: in the mid-1930s he made several wonderful and wildly colourful films for John Grierson's GPO Film Unit as well as advertising shorts for clients ranging from Shell to Imperial Airways, with the occasional foray into the commercial cinema. Hitchcock somehow came across Lye on the London film scene and asked Lye to try his hand at some special effects for the climactic train-crash sequence of Secret Agent. Roger Horrocks' wonderful biography of Lye doesn't go into great detail on the encounter between the two men, and most of the very many Hitchcock volumes don't mention Lye at all, though perhaps Secret Agent star John Gielgud, of whom more below, had a hand in arranging the encounter; equally, that GPO Film Unit experience surely helped open doors at the time.

In any case, however the two men ended up meeting, Lye delivered as requested, and apparently his efforts made quite an impression. As the train disaster unspooled, Lye created a colour effect in this otherwise black-and-white film that gave all the appearance of the celluloid itself going up in flames, to further underline the point that the sequence marked a radical, emotionally wrenching break for the characters -- the shattering impossibility of going back to the world before the crash. However, it had occurred to precisely no-one that this apparently very realistic visual trick might cause alarm for the unfortunate projectionist, who initially assumed that there was a fire in his booth.

The incident came to the attention of the higher ups at Gaumont British, who were concerned that audiences, well aware of the flammable properties of film at the time, would similarly panic when they saw Lye's trickery -- with potentially grave consequences (not an empty fear: as an example, I came across reports of a stampede at a New York cinema in 1913 caused when a film caught fire, with two women killed in the ensuing panic). Hitchcock was apparently quick to agree with the higher-ups request that the sequence should be cut, not least because he seems to have thought the idea was a bit pretentious to start with, although he makes use of a similar idea in Spellbound a decade later, with a couple of tinted red frames at a key moment. Hitch's  producing partner Ivor Montagu wanted to make a stand on artistic grounds -- or just because he wasn't willing to comply with the bean counters -- but once the master had made clear he wasn't too worked up about the cut, the sequence was inevitably if unfortunately discarded. Apart from that one test projection, the Lye-enhanced version of the train crash never seems to have been seen by an audience, not even the press corps, and so the Hitchock-Lye connection sadly remains in the realm of the curious anecdote.

Lye's signature from Free Radicals

Much of Lye's other film work has survived, and indeed the 1979 version of his film Free Radicals, reworked in several iterations after Lye relocated to the United States, was selected for inclusion in the Library of Congress's National Film Registry in 2008. However, there are still key gaps, perhaps most notably his 1935 short film Full Fathom Five, which featured a pre-Secret Agent John Gielgud as narrator. Gielgud read three passages from Shakespeare over images from Lye's first "direct" film, where he manipulated the film stock itself to achieve his effects, a departure from the more conventional animation techniques he had previously employed. Full Fathom Five film is virtually lost, and other of Lye's works exist only in fragmented or partial form, while still other portions of his filmography are in need of preservation -- future projects all!

I can't help but spare a thought for poor old Graham Cutts, too, as film-lovers across the globe shunt him stage-left off his own project in favour of the youthful, yet-to-be-rotund Mr. Hitchcock (it's nice to see Cutts get a little bit of his due from David Cairns in this very blogathon). As much as I bow to the reality that the preservation of The White Shadow is a priority in large measure because of its illustrious connections, I'd argue that it's ultimately worthy of preservation in and of itself, even if it is of more limited interest as "a film by Graham Cutts" -- as an illustration of what was being made, and watched, in 1924.

Cutts has some history with the experience of being written out of his own films: The Sign of Four, his 1932 Sherlock Holmes adventure, is noted chiefly for the credits of a variety of behind-the-scenes American contributors who went on to greater things, though the film is a solid adventure with the occasional dash of genuine flair, and Cutts makes nice use of sound to generate suspense (in other words, it's pretty typical early sound fare, a little creaky to be sure, and the available prints are in parlous condition).

The Sea View Hotel, Accra, long past its days of glory

Similarly, when Cutts' 1935 Oh Daddy! is remembered -- which is rarely -- it's largely as a film to which Michael Powell made some early contributions rather than for Cutts' own work. Oh Daddy! is intriguing on at least another level, though -- it showed up a couple of years later in a colonial movie theatre in Accra, advertised with some fanfare at the Sea View Cinema as an attraction in December 1937, presumably one of many locations the world over where the by-all-accounts rather modest film was eventually seen. That's the kind of out-of-the-way, end-of-the-line place that films like The White Shadow eventually found a home so perhaps there's an overheated room somewhere in the Ghanaian capital yet to yield a treasure for a future blogathon -- or even just a copy of Oh Daddy!

Click on Hitch to donate!

The Karate Kid

1984, US, directed by John G. Avildsen

My wife took it upon herself to rectify this gap in my cinematic education -- and since my family didn't get a VCR until well in the 1990s, she has her work cut out to catch me up on some of the hits of the 1980s in particular. Nearly 30 years on, there's not a whole lot of point in taking on a cultural phenomenon -- I finally know where some of those lines come from! -- but not much interest on my part either: despite much silliness, and a ridiculously cheesy ending, I thoroughly enjoyed the screening. It's hard to imagine the people behind the Karate Kid equivalents of 2012 adopting such a relaxed approach to the central narrative, or providing so few actual fight sequences -- high school romance is at least as important here, and there are a couple of sweet sequences between Ralph Macchio and Elizabeth Shue before we finally get to the main event. Admittedly, I'm not about to test this theory by watching a slew of recent films directed at the teen audience.

Although the film is hardly an ad for subtle analysis of Asian-American history, it's still somewhat notable that the villain of the piece is the Vietnam-vet soldier with the kill-kill-kill attitude, in contrast to the quietly heroic Japanese-American, played by Pat Morita, who does what he can to deliver his various aphorisms with as much good sense as possible. If you ever wanted to teach a class on how Hollywood films ignore boring old reality, this wouldn't be a bad place to start -- no-one ever bothers to explain the almost complete disappearance of Ralph Macchio's mother from the film for a good hour, nor how Macchio is apparently released from school obligations to train all day at his personal dojo (the film takes place over the course of the fall semester).

La Marseillaise

1938, France, directed by Jean Renoir

Renoir's film begins in the same spirit as Ken Loach's much later pair of historical features, Land and Freedom or The Wind that Shakes the Barley, as an attempt to dramatize some sense of the actual lived experience of a major historical event, in this case the French Revolution. The intention is ostensibly democratic, bringing us both to Louis XVI's bedside in Versailles and the lower levels of revolt in the south of France, though there's never a moment of doubt as to where the film's sympathies lie (and perhaps there's a little cheating in the decision to halt proceedings well before the Revolution's bloody excesses begin, when sympathies become much more complex).

As the film progresses, and particularly after our introduction to the titular song (then an unknown air that was to grow in popularity), the film becomes much more didactic, with rather obvious conversations about the meaning of France's new sense of citizenship that are clearly more in the spirit of 1938, in the shadow of fascism, rather than explorations of the meaning and reality of 1789 and beyond. Of course, the notion of participatory citizenship is key to the French social ideal, so the debates between the newly-anointed citizens function in two different time periods, but they are occasionally rather heavy-handed, a matter not helped by the fact that the two main actors are not the weightiest of performers.

Andrex, most often seen at the side of his pal Fernandel, isn't able to do much with some of the stodgier lines, while Edmond Ardisson, making his debut here, occasionally seems to be acting in an entirely different movie, perhaps a broad comedy -- his goofy expressions appear to have been shipped in from a Revolution-era spoof, while his fey manner, perhaps unremarkable in 1938, tends to undermine his romantic exploits (see the first image!). Many of the supporting players are rather stronger, including Renoir's older brother Pierre as Louis XVI (particularly in a terrific moment, late on, when the king suddenly understands how his world is about to change), or Louis Jouvet in a small role as the government representative Roederer, tasked with persuading the king to appear before the parliament.

Il Sorpasso

1962, Italy, directed by Dino Risi

Through the luck of the draw, I've come across a handful of films with stings in the tail of late, but nothing tops the finale here -- an utterly jarring conclusion to a generally breezy film, filled with throwaway Italian pop music of the era. The film opens on a note that recalls Nanni Moretti's wonderful 1994 Caro diario, in which Moretti drives the empty Roman streets during the height of the summer, before the film develops into a picaresque account of the open road, replete with enjoyable minor characters and a constant onward momentum -- the next town, the next adventure, the next corner -- that's fundamental to the character played by Vittorio Gassman. He's a man whose apparently joyful view of life gradually reveals itself to be a cover for his fundamental inability to follow through on anything serious or worthwhile; there's fear rather than delight at the heart of the character. That said, the film's way of resolving this problem is, to say the least, a slap in the face; if the analogy is to Italy of the post-war era, the film takes a dim view indeed of the state of the country circa 1962. Gassman is terrific -- finding the tenderness in a character who might otherwise just have been boorish, while Jean-Louis Trintignant is an enjoyable foil, gradually, if very tentatively, loosening his self-imposed restrictions in the company of a man incapable of taking no for an answer.

Scarlet Street

1945, US, directed by Fritz Lang

The other entry in Fritz Lang's diptych of films with Edward G. Robinson/Joan Bennett/Dan Duryea, Scarlet Street flips everything in The Woman in the Window on its head: where the first film is all in the mind, with the consequences purely on the level of the salutary warning, here we see the full, frightening splendour of the whims of fate at work, with devastating consequences. Both films kick off with apparently minor decisions that quickly spiral beyond the protagonists' control -- and Robinson takes everyone down with him on his brutal descent.

Loren K's take on Edward G. Robinson*

It's a re-working of the novel and play originally brought to the screen by Jean Renoir as La Chienne, a film with which it shares one central weakness, namely that the wife at the center of both films is such an unbearable shrew for her entire onscreen time that it's difficult to believe that not one but two (very different) men could have agreed to marry her. I felt myself dreading each scene in which she features -- Rosalind Ivan plays the thankless role here -- simply because the character is so completely without nuance; while Joan Bennett and Dan Duryea are hardly the most subtle of bad guys, their characters at least have some character arc, nicely adapting to the lucrative situation that so unexpectedly presents itself to them as the film evolves. Though ultimately utterly bleak, it's as morbidly compelling a film as its predecessor -- if likely to make the viewer rather queasy as you watch the irredeemable fall of a fellow creature.

* The second image is lifted from Loren's blog Woodcuttingfool, where he documents his carving projects; I'm a big fan of woodcut prints generally, and black-and-white stars seem a natural subject for the medium. His recent portrait of Lauren Bacall is one of my favourites.

City Girl

1930, US, directed by F.W. Murnau

On the narrative level, Murnau's film is pared down to almost mythic levels -- boy meets girl, boy marries girl, boy struggles to win father's acceptance of marriage. That's hardly the point, though -- Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven, directed inspired by City Girl, similarly transcends the simplest of narratives to strive for emotional resonance, again among the hypnotic wheat fields of the heartland. The early sections of the film take place in the big city, where a young man has been sent to sell his family's crop. Murnau's unpicking of the city experience is as acute as Chaplin in Modern Times -- he re-casts a city restaurant as a a virtula factory, each widget, or diner, quickly slotting in to replace the last, every minute frantically assigned a purpose by the streams of workers. It's an overwhelming experience for a man used to rhythms dictated by the seasons and the elements rather than by the daily clock, and the joyful return to the land as the film advances is surely not just the joy of a young man in love but equally an embrace of another way of living. His run through the wheat fields, new wife in tow, is the high point of the film, an apotheosis of filmmaking romance as the camera is in exhilarating motion with the pair.

Senna

2010, UK, directed by Asif Kapadia

It's more than a little strange to watch a film that's essentially focused on the inevitability of someone dying -- not as a plot point or as the natural end to any biography of a deceased person but as an actual event that takes place in front of our eyes. The fact that I'd seen this same event in real time in 1994, a collision so fast and jarring that you immediately knew nothing good could possibly come of it, even before the screen filled with emergency vehicles and the race at Imola was (temporarily) halted, didn't blunt its effect here, not least because the film creates such an intense impression of Ayrton Senna as a vibrantly alive young man, albeit a young man who seems constantly to be questioning his own goals and reflecting on his (extraordinarily comfortable) life. I'd forgotten just how eloquent and interesting Senna could be -- though as the film makes clear, Formula 1 is not short on figures capable of compelling commentary -- and certainly had no recollection of his expressions of religious faith, which seem at odds with the technological and commercial image of his chosen sport.

Perhaps as a result of the degree of cooperation from Senna's family, Senna doesn't probe too deeply into controversial subjects -- Alain Prost comes across as the relative villain of the piece, at least on the track, but even in a sport with a degree of inherent recklessness it's at least possible that Senna's motivations and behaviour in some of his duels with the French driver crossed the line into heedlessly dangerous territory. It's hard, for instance, to imagine either driver suggesting that they trusted and respected each other in such confrontations -- unlike the memorable encounter between Gilles Villeneuve and René Arnoux at the French grand prix in 1979, when their cars repeatedly touched as they vied for second place.

The Lincoln Lawyer

2011, US, directed by Brad Furman

I enjoyed Michael Connelly's source novel, even if it's not quite Connelly at the peak of his form, and Brad Furman's adaptation is pretty faithful, perhaps even too faithful given the plot-cramming required by the running time. That does a particular disservice to the crucial backstory that becomes central to the evolving plot, and which has considerably more space evolve on the page. Matthew McConaughey is well cast in the central role -- there's a certain charm-offensive continuity with his early lead role in A Time to Kill, though his lawyer character here is light on the liberal guilt and heavy on the self-interest -- but it's the support that really shines, even if many of the players have barely a scene or two in which to shine. I'm not quite sure what Furman was offering to convince fine actors like Marisa Tomei and Michael Peña to accept minor parts, but they make the most of their limited screen time; I'd rather have Tomei as a luminous supporting player than not at all.

L'Alibi

1937, France, directed by Pierre Chenal

Pierre Chenal is one of those directors I'd earmarked for further consideration, but while L'Alibi has the occasional visual idea of note it's memorable largely for the performances of Erich von Stroheim and Louis Jouvet -- and jumps up several notches in their scenes together. Von Stroheim plays a stage medium with something of a gangland backstory, and the film opens with him dispatching an enemy from his American days; that sequence, shot in back-projected fashion as two cars race across Paris, is quite arresting, both in visual terms and because we're not generally accustomed to films that eliminate the whodunit aspect so early on.

Josée Cathala suggests, in her book on Louis Jouvet, that the film's tension then comes from wondering when one of the main characters will crack, though for me the real frisson lies in the actorly confrontation between Jouvet and von Stroheim, a deliciously careful waltz between two experts in both their on- and offscreen incarnations. The more I see of Jouvet's filmography the more I'm convinced that he only rarely had vehicles worthy of his extraordinary talent -- though his busy theatrical schedule and his own rather dismissive view of the cinema, especially in the 1930s, didn't help -- but he's quite wonderful here as a Javert-like policeman, tenaciously on the trail of his man. The sequence in which he and von Stroheim speak partly in English is perhaps the highlight, though the language surely wasn't much of a stretch for Jouvet, who spent nearly two years in New York on a theatrical tour years earlier.

Bridesmaids

2011, US, directed by Paul Feig

Anyone to whom it came as a surprise that women might both concoct and enjoy a raunchy comedy with bodily functions front and center clearly hasn't spent a whole lot of time in the company of actual human women, though Hollywood apparently falls into the "who'da thunk it?" category. While Bridesmaids hardly re-invents the romantic comedy -- it likes to have its cake and eat it by mocking wedding excess while nonetheless cataloguing in all its expensive glory, in ways that have served Hollywood well for sixty years -- it takes the genre in welcome new directions, exploring its characters' faults and insecurities in ways that occasionally veer into noticeably less comic territory. Indeed, at times I couldn't help feeling that there was some The Break-Up-style bait-and-switch at work -- the wild antics of the trailer replaced by a close-to-the-bone examination of the main character's less than admirable behaviour.

The hand of producer Judd Apatow is never far away: director Paul Feig has Apatow's generous instincts with his performers, granting everyone a scene or two in which to shine, though he also has the same Apatovian tendency to allowing some of those scenes to go on rather longer than necessary. Feig/Apatow introduce the American audience to several overseas TV treasures in the process, whether it's the bizarre sibling duo played by Matt Lucas and Rebel Wilson (despite the actors audibly hailing from opposite ends of the English-speaking world) or the local cop played by Chris O'Dowd, though the script does at least throw in a line to explain the regular eruptions of broad Roscommon accent. Somehow, though, all of the support complements rather than distracts from Kristen Wiig, who makes a fine leading lady more than willing to catalogue her character's flaws without begging for the audience's sympathy (she's sensible enough to realize we're probably all on Melissa McCarthy's side anyway; McCarthy seizes her own role with extraordinary and unapologetic relish, ultimately finding a genuine and deserved truth in her character).

Anthony Zimmer

2005, France, directed by Jérôme Salle

I'm a sucker for this kind of thing -- sleek movies about master criminals and mistaken identities, and the first half of Jérôme Salle's film is a thing of beauty, a little like watching a BMW accelerate smoothly through the gears. Unfortunately, it can't quite sustain that momentum, reverting to something rather more conventional as things wrap up, but I was tempted to watch the thing all over again from the beginning just as the end credits rolled just for the visceral thrill of seeing the well-oiled cinematic machine at work. The central intrigue hinges on a young woman -- Sophie Marceau channelling Monica Bellucci so well that a few years later she was essentially cast as Bellucci in the doppelgänger movie Ne te retourne pas -- who attempts to divert the attentions of the authorities from her lover, the titular M. Zimmer, by taking up with the vaguely sad-sack Yvan Attal.

The film doesn't play fair, of course, suggesting entirely different motivations at times through its shot choices, but that's part of the game. Salle's approach suggests something of a Hollywood calling card -- crisp car or foot chases of the kind that crop up subsequently in Guillaume Canet's Ne le dis à personne or multiple overhead shots of trains and cars criss-crossing the south of France -- but several of the most enjoyable sequences hinge on the precise little details of conversations -- between Marceau and Attal in their first encounter, or Attal and a young police lieutenant, or any of the scenes with Sami Frey, playing the Javert-like cop who has devoted his career to tracking down Zimmer.

Forfaiture

1937, France, directed by Marcel L'Herbier

Although the film is a broad remake of Cecil B. DeMille's 1915 picture The Cheat (which I've not seen, though the film was apparently very influential on French filmmakers), I was struck more by the thematic and plot correspondences with star Victor Francen's later film L'Homme du Niger. As in that film, Forfaiture takes place in an exotic, quasi-colonial setting, with Francen responsible for a grandiose construction project and in love with a much younger woman.

In this case, said younger woman is played by Lise Delamare, an early appearance by an actress who was, from what I can tell, most frequently a stage performer. The young woman gets herself in all manner of bother when she makes some rather poor decisions at the local gambling parlour, though her behaviour seems to stem as much from boredom -- old Victor's character is always more interested in his work than in his women despite his protestations of devotion -- while her problems are compounded by the ill intent of the local prince, played by Sessue Haykawa, who reprises his own role from the DeMille film. His character is a fairly typical untrustworthy oriental, of predictably inscrutable motivations, and oily enough that his often amoral French fixer, played by Louis Jouvet, appears as a relative man of virtue.

I'm not familiar with Marcel L'Herbier's work -- I don't think I've seen a single other film by the director -- so I've no idea how typical it is, but he has a sure sense of atmosphere in the overseas locations, whether it's the dusty exterior shots or the smoky interiors of the gambling house, and there's terrific tension in the later stages in the courtroom, with carefully constructed flashbacks that gradually reveal a kind of truth. The film provides a rather interesting glimpse into the functioning of the French legal system, at least the screen version thereof, which is quite different to its more familiar American counterpart. Victor Francen really isn't my cup of tea as a performer -- there's a gritted-teeth sincerity to his delivery at times that I just don't buy -- but Louis Jouvet is quite wonderful as the suave go-between, ever flexible in his politics and his self-interest save for a late stab of conscience; his line deliveries in the courtroom are wonderfully precise, as he tries to comply with the requirements of the legal system while adhering to his own private code.

Cobra Woman

1944, US, directed by Robert Siodmak

Wow. Where to begin. I'd previously only known Robert Siodmak as a director of noirish material so this lurid Technicolor frenzy came as something of a surprise. Even with Hollywood's loose approach to historical and geographical accuracy, this is fevered stuff, set on a series of isolated islands that feature both snake charmers and chimpanzees, not to mention both young Sabu, forced to utter his lines in a rather hideous pidgin ("I are..." etc.), among the "natives."

The film was one of a series featuring Maria Montez and Jon Hall (and Sabu in some installments), and the emphasis is on lavish escapism. Where others were already delving deeply into noir territory in 1944, including Fritz Lang in The Woman in the Window, this is pure distraction, completely goofy and unsurprisingly now treasured as a camp classic. The eye-opening cobra dance, performed not once but twice by the estimable Ms. Montez, is worthy of the price of admission by itself; Siodmak must have experienced severe whiplash shuttling between such material and the same year's psychologically acute Phantom Lady.

Note: This is part of my Watching Movies in Africa project. Cobra Woman was screened numerous times at Kumasi's Rex cinema in January 1951. The Ashanti Pioneer of January 18, 1951 includes a brief piece credited "By Our Film Critic," though the terminology employed owes more to the vocabulary of advertising than that of journalism: “Do you like the beautiful, are you fascinated by the mysterious, do you take to the colourful? If so, you cannot spend a more entertaining time than by being at the Rex Cinema to-night.” A number of Ghanaian newspapers were owned by entrepreneurs who also had interests in the cinema business; the same may well have been the case here though I've not yet tracked down direct evidence of the link. Update: I've since found evidence that the film was showing in Accra's Rex theatre as early as June 1946. That venue was owned by the same company that later screened the film in Kumasi, and by all accounts the contemporary rental system used in Ghana allowed exhibitors to keep films for up to five years.

The image above is taken from FilmFanatic.org.

Crazy, Stupid, Love.

US, 2011, directed by Glen Ficarra and John Requa

With much of its action taking place in and around a single location, and the main characters all implausibly interlinked, Crazy, Stupid, Love comes across like a stage farce at times or, perhaps less charitably, like a sitcom: despite the various outings to malls, restaurants, and schools across Los Angeles we're continually drawn back to the bar in which an unlikely friendship develops between sad sack Steve Carell and ladies man Ryan Gosling, both playing very much to type, though that's not to say their interactions aren't enjoyable.

Still, the film's real spark comes from the presence -- rather sparingly doled out -- of Emma Stone, who has an extraordinary capacity to light up the screen even in her quieter moments (the lovely, extended conversation between her character and Gosling's, for instance, which hints at en entirely different film). As is entirely typical in Hollywood cinema, Carell's character gets to have his cake and eat it, too, tending the flame for his spouse and looking put upon while learning to play the field with Gosling's sage advice; there's not much that even a game performer like Marisa Tomei can do with her role as one of his conquests, although she gives it the old woman-scorned try. Still, the big reveal is pretty fun, even if the latter sections try rather too hard to milk the tear ducts.

Drôle de drame

1937, France, directed by Marcel Carné

Louis Jouvet had several memorable actorly face-offs over the course of his screen career, and while his character here is deeply unsympathetic he has one treasurable scene over the dinner table with Michel Simon, in which he probes relentlessly to satisfy his curiosity as to the unexpected absence of Simon's spouse (Françoise Rosay). Simon's increasingly convoluted explanations set the plot's farcical ramifications on their way, and Jouvet, for his part, is gifted with the line "Bizarre, bizarre," rolling the word around in his mouth as he ruminates on the information supplied to him.

It doesn't sound as though Jouvet enjoyed himself to any great degree on the production, objecting in particular to the ridiculous, if comically effective, costume he has to wear near the conclusion, though the experience can't have soured him entirely on Marcel Carné, making his second feature here, since he appeared in the director's subsequent film, Hôtel du Nord, the following year. Still, he and Simon apparently both set out with the intention, not necessarily declared out loud, to drink the other man under the table during said dinner scene. It takes quite a man to even contemplate engaging with an opponent of Simon's legendary appetites: perhaps he looked like an easy mark since he played characters far beyond his years for much of his career; sadly, I've no idea who won this particular battle, though the actors renewed their combat in La Fin du jour a couple of years later.

As for the film itself, Drôle de drame is chiefly concerned with appearances and disguises, especially the gulf between the public face and the private man; Jouvet plays the hypocrite-in-chief, and while he's by no means the only person hiding something, in the film his moral failings far outweigh the bloody crimes of Jean-Louis Barrault, perhaps cinema's least likely serial killer, bouncing around the screen between offing the occasional butcher when he's not flinging himself at an eyelid-batting Françoise Rosay. The disguises adopted by one and all are intentionally absurd, in line with the farcical turn -- Simon applies a bit of fake beard, and renders himself completely unfamiliar to every single person in the film such that he can wander around his own home while suspected of being on the run for murder. Realism, though, is hardly the goal here.