Donkeys

2010, UK, directed by Morag McKinnon

Though its mordant humour is in a category of its own, Donkeys recalled to mind a couple of Irish films, Adam and Paul and Kings: the central pair here, a hopeless twosome played by James Cosmo and Brian Pettifer (one of the great faces of the modern British cinema), reminded me of a slightly more functional version of the co-dependents at the heart of those films. In all cases, these are men whose lives have gone off the tracks, filled with disappointments, ruined relationships, and self-loathing, but McKinnon grants her characters a certain self-aware dignity, and treats their stories with an often wicked humour, as well as a sharp visual style (the shot above, which she holds until after Cosmo's departure, is one of my favourites).

She manages remarkable transitions so adeptly that a laugh and a gasp of horror can co-exist almost in the same breath -- indeed, they're often appropriately paired reactions, so inept are the efforts of Cosmo, in particular, to restore order to a messy life. Although there's a ray of redemption in the air over the Barra markets as the film comes to a close, there's never a hint of sentimentality in McKinnon's portraits, and that lends these characters striking verisimilitude, with Cosmo's utterly unself-conscious performance -- fat stomach and unshaven jowls -- only enhancing the sense of people plucked from the Glasgow streets, filled with piss, vinegar and a way with a finely-wrought line.

For all the film's apparently low-key vibe, McKinnon also achieves something of the pace of farce in certain sequences -- I'd initially popped the disc in intending just to verify it was working, and before I knew it the film was over. It hooks you with story, and keeps you with characters, their stories carefully rhythmed to align in a sequence of squirming inglory before the film splinters in an entirely new direction that gives new meaning to the term gallows humour.

Louis Jouvet Filmography

My 2012 viewing project was to see every available film featuring the great French actor Louis Jouvet (1887-1951).

Jouvet made 32 films, a figure dwarfed by many of his acting contemporaries: his first love was always the theatre and he ploughed much of what he earned back into his own theatre company. Quite a few of his roles in the 1930s were of a supporting nature -- there's not much to his performance in something like La Maison du maltais though he's one of the highlights in Un Carnet de bal despite his brief time onscreen. It's largely in the postwar period that we really see him flex his onscreen acting muscles, and Un Revenant and Quai des orfèvres are, for me, the highlights of that period.

Many of his films are quite hard to come by these days, and it took me several years to track down some of the less-celebrated entries in the filmography. Even those who have written biographies of Jouvet don't appear to have been able to see either Ramuntcho or Sérénade (the former seems to be completely lost today while I could only find a very poor copy of the latter film), and I've only come across brief scenes from the 1933 version of Knock.

Topaze (1933)
Knock, ou la triomphe de la médecine (1933)
La Kermesse héroïque (1935)
Les Bas-fonds (1936)
Mister Flow (1936)
Un Carnet de bal (1937)
Drôle de drame (1937)
Forfaiture (1937)
L'Alibi (1937)
Mademoiselle Docteur (1937) [aka Salonique, nid d'espions]
La Marseillaise (1938)
Ramuntcho (1938)
La Maison du maltais (1938) [aka Sirocco]
Entrée des artistes (1938)
Éducation de prince (1938)
Le Drame de Shanghaï (1938)
Hôtel du Nord (1938)
La Fin du jour (1939)
La Charrette fantôme (1939)
Sérénade (1940)
Volpone (1941)
Untel père et fils (1943) [shot in 1940]
Un Revenant (1946)
Copie conforme (1947)
Quai des orfèvres (1947)
Les Amoureux sont seuls au monde (1948)
Entre onze heures et minuit (1949)
Retour à la vie (1949)
Miquette et sa mère (1950)
Lady Paname (1950)
Knock (1951)
Une Histoire d'amour (1951)

Wake in Fright

1971, Australia, directed by Ted Kotcheff

Restored after many years on the missing list, I could understand if many an Australian would be happy to have Wake in Fright remain under wraps more permanently: although there's a fascinating ambiguity at the heart of the film, which casts a skeptical eye on both the rugged mateship rituals of the outback and the city slicker who gets his comeuppance, there's nary a positive role model to be seen, with even the local police chief far more unsettling than reassuring. Said police chief is played by Chips Rafferty, in his final role. It's a fitting epitaph for the man who was Australia's one real home-grown movie star of the postwar years, for Ted Kotcheff's film was clearly one of the harbingers of the very different film industry that would emerge in the 1970s.

There can't be too many films that begin with a 360-degree pan, used in this instance to underline the utter emptiness of the landscape around the tiny, fictional settlement of Tiboonda, located deep in the New South Wales outback. Scale is the outback's main downside in the film's account, and that marks it out as rather different from much of what followed: while vast, the land isn't especially terrifying, and in a later sequence a city boy is able to feed himself easily enough during a lengthy foot trek. It's a far cry from a film like Picnic at Hanging Rock, or, much later, Japanese Story, where the land itself, rather than the people within it, is the primary threat. There's no doubting who we need to be cautious of here -- wild boy Jack Thompson, making his film debut, and alcoholic Donald Pleasance, seen most alarmingly in a shot where he stands on his head. The sight of a bearded, upside-down Pleasance is not a vision easily shaken.

This, then, is a headlong plunge into the excesses of white male outback Australia, and it has an anthropological feel at times, no doubt enhanced by the use of numerous non-professional extras, notably in the lengthy game of "two-up" where the schoolteacher's plans begin to go awry (Kotcheff integrates that material, shot back in Sydney, seamlessly with the exteriors filmed around Broken Hill; I had assumed, until I read an interview with the director, that they were sweaty real-life locales). There's a fascinating accumulation of detail as we encounter this alien culture -- the aggressive hospitality, the signage that reminds us the days of the "six o'clock swill" were barely in the rear-view mirror, the recognition of war dead (neatly bringing in another fine figure of Australian mythology, the digger). A genuine re-discovered treasure that is now very clearly a keystone in the development of the new Australian cinema.

Une Histoire d'amour

1951, France, directed by Guy Lefranc

Louis Jouvet's final film is, sadly, a relatively pedestrian affair for the actor, who died suddenly some months before the film was released; I wonder what other projects he had on the burner? Although the filmmakers attempt to extract some suspense from the flashback structure, this is a pretty straightforward police procedural, the kind of thing handled these days in a 45-minute television episode, and the sequences that recall Clouzot's great Quai des Orfèvres (the shots of the grimy corridors of the police station, Jouvet's interactions with a disapproving boss, indeed the very fact that Jouvet plays a rebellious police inspector) only serve to underline the weaknesses here.

Although the credits bill him top, Jouvet isn't even onscreen for much of the film, which focuses on the relationship between the wealthy Dany Robin and working stiff Daniel Gélin, who is employed by Robin's father (Dany Robin was herself the object of temptation for Louis Jouvet a few years earlier in Les Amoureux sont seuls au monde, a title that might easily have been re-used on this occasion). There's a Romeo-and-Juliet aspect to the youthful lovers, although across class lines rather than those of familial loyalty, and Jouvet's contempt for the haute bourgeoisie is rather enjoyable, particularly when the objects of his contempt seem oblivious to his ironic commentary (he doesn't have much more time for Gélin's ne'er-do-well father, a man allergic to work though not to its potential financial rewards).

I read online that Jean Grémillon, for whom director Guy Lefranc once worked, was originally supposed to take the helm. While Lefranc isn't lacking in competence, it's hard not to wonder what a less prosaic director might have done with the material: there are arresting flashes here and there, whether in the humour of the shot atop this entry, or in the intensity of the close-ups between the two lovers, late in the film, but they're a little lost in the routine of the procedural. One point of note, to my mind at least: in both this and Lefranc's previous collaboration with Jouvet, Knock, there is some striking location work, particularly the opening of this film in a junkyard, that gives both films an extra layer of richness, situating them in recognizably real places that anchor the melodrama and comedy. While obviously location shooting didn't begin with the nouvelle vague later in the 1950s, such well-judged intrusions of the "real world" aren't common in the earlier French films I've seen.

Knock

1951, France, directed by Guy Lefranc

Louis Jouvet's penultimate film is a return to the source as Dr. Knock, a new doctor arriving to take over a practice in an apparently misbegotten corner of France -- a part that Jouvet originated on the stage in 1923, and which he played in a prior film incarnation in 1933. Sadly, that earlier screen version seems to have all but disappeared, with the exception of a couple of scratchy clips online featuring both Jouvet and Robert Le Vigan, although those extracts give some brief insight into the ways in which the actor re-worked the character and his own screen technique over the decades.

Louis de Funès delivers his solitary line, and exits.

After so many years of mostly minor parts, Jouvet was front and centre most of the time in his postwar work, and rarely more so than here. That's not to say that he blows everyone off the screen, nor that he's even present in every scene, but rather that his character is so distinctive in his manias that he's very much on the viewer's mind even when he's offscreen; whether he is present or not, all of the other characters are reacting to him. By contrast, Jouvet the performer is very generous with his fellow actors, including familiar faces like Pierre Renoir and a young Jean Carmet, who was already well on the way to honing what would become his familiar comic persona. The strength of the support is central to the tic-tac of both dialogue and physical interaction -- for instance in the delightful bit between Jouvet and Renoir, playing the local pharmacist, where the two men hurriedly agree that they are entirely above base monetary motivations. Equally amusing, in a slapstick register, are the reactions of André Dalibert as Jouvet manipulates him in ways that would befit a fairly vigorous veterinarian. Much briefer, and of more historical note than anything else, is the one-line appearance of Louis de Funès, some years before stardom hit.

Guy Lefranc handles things nicely for his first turn at the helm (he had worked as an assistant on films by a rather distinguished array of directors -- Jean Grémillon, Raymond Bernard, Robert Bresson). There's a clever scene centering on one of the doctor's early diagnoses, for instance, where we get a point of view shot that circles the patient as the latter looks upward in search of reassurance from Knock. Elsewhere, the framing of the actors ensures that the focus remains on their performances, already well served by some very fine dialogue. That's key in the scenes when we see Jouvet's eyes wander away to the middle distance during a consultation, a clue to his state of mind that we're aware of even if his patients can't see the problem; cuts from one face to another would have made this rather less obvious. It's also a film of considerable zip -- not only do several months pass by in the blink of an eye, but the rhythm of the key scenes is imbued with a sense of momentum that underlines Knock's rapid takeover of local life.

Lawrence of Arabia

1962, US/UK, directed by David Lean

It's been a long time coming, though I had to be a good more patient than I would have liked: I was saving David Lean's film for the big screen, but it's increasingly rare for pictures like this to get the outings they deserve. In the end, I had to compromise on format, a point likely of interest only to people like my good self: I could have waited another age in the hopes of a local 70mm screening or settled for the new digital restoration on a somewhat smaller scale. While I'm sure that the 70mm experience would have been tremendously impressive, this was still quite the experience -- the sheer intrepidness of the filmmaking is quite astonishing, particularly when the actors, and presumably the numerous support personnel, are out in the desert for long stretches of the film.

The justly famous scene in which Omar Sharif first appears, almost as a trick of the light in the heat haze, gives a sense of the scale and the stakes, and that thrill is repeated, and perhaps even amplified by the momentum of the camera, in the subsequent sequence where we see Peter O'Toole materialise in the far distance after embarking on what seems a suicidal rescue mission. While I anticipated to some degree the scale of the picture, what was unexpected was the degree to which Lean's goals were those of intimacy and psychological insight: the thrills of the gorgeous landscapes, the swelling score, and the many points of physical and emotional drama are there not simply as moments of big-screen spectacle, but rather in the service of understanding just what drove this unusual, perhaps troubled man (in his screen incarnation, at least, given that the relationship to the actual Lawrence and his experiences seems frequently to be rather tenuous).

As articulated by Lean, it's a portrait of colossal egotism, where the fates of Arabian peoples are subsumed to Lawrence's own ambitions and efforts at self-understanding, though it's by no means the schematic psychology so familiar in latter-day Hollywood, which would probably set up Lawrence's anxieties over his parentage (his father held a minor title, and was not married to his mother, matters which are mentioned onscreen) as the precursor to a simplistic resolution. It's striking to see how Lean's concerns with psychological portraiture track from the much smaller scale of many of his 1940s films to his later epic phase.

Lady Paname

1950, France, directed by Henri Jeanson

A pleasant surprise, for somehow I was dreading this entry on the path to Louis Jouvet completeness; the idea of a comedy set in the world of the 1920s music halls had no particular appeal, despite the presence of the wonderful dialogist Henri Jeanson behind the camera for the one and only time in his career. My misgivings seemed to be confirmed when Louis Jouvet first appeared, for he seemed to be in high theatrical mode, with a silly beard to underline the point (the kind of thing he could do in his sleep, I thought).

How wrong I was. The film is absolutely charming, and Jeanson's dialogue often sparkles -- Jouvet and Suzy Delair, reunited for a third and final film after Copie conforme and Quai des Orfèvres, both make hay with their lines, and while Delair is sometimes an uneven actress she manages her character's transitions rather well here, pivoting from concerned sister to music hall star in convincing fashion, and clearly enjoying the spotlight (as befits her character). The scenes with Delair on stage aren't really to my taste, but the sequences are probably representative enough of the music hall setting -- although the film is set decades in the past, the filmmakers seem to have had no trouble rounding up the various acrobats and trick cyclists required for background colour.

The action, which is occasionally rather serpentine, zips right along -- Jeanson crams a terrific amount of background detail in to the film, evoking names and incidents of the music halls of yore, with a healthy dose of affection (it's a bit like the filmed equivalent of Charles Trenet's song Moi, j'aime le music hall in that regard). He's also generous in granting fine lines to the gallery of supporting players -- Monique Mélinand, Jouvet's companion, has a delicious sequence wherein she declaims that she only sleeps with men to either get rid of them or to become friends with them, since she can't stand them as bosses. Jouvet, of course, enters the room the moment she utters her line; as he begins his own speech, it's hard to avoid the impression that a grinning Mélinand is laughing at Jouvet (rather than at his character).

Retour à la vie

1949, France, directed by André Cayatte, Georges Lampin, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Jean Dréville

Though all of the episodes in this omnibus film came from the pen of Charles Spaak, the tone varies a good deal in the hands of four different directors (Jean Dréville directed the final two segments). The stories all deal with the return of imprisoned French men and women after the war, and while the initial narration suggests that we're about to see only the negative experiences that accompanied repatriation, that's not entirely true -- one of the segments is very light in tone, and two others end very much on an upbeat note.

The film was not a box office success, and while the list of hit portmanteau films is not exactly lengthy to start with, one suspects that this film a little too close to recent experience for many viewers. Even in some of the lighter sequences, Spaak inserts numerous small, even throwaway, observations about the nature of life in France just after the war. There are the fake ration coupons, the people keen to burnish their image as members of the resistance (it's of note when a character does not immediately mention his service, as though such self-effacement was uncommon, and perhaps a sign of more genuine participation), the almost absurd efforts of petty officialdom to recuperate the released prisoners for the nation's self-image, and the constant reflection on who did or did not collaborate and to what degree, with Spaak casting aspersions on the near-ubiquitous comités d'épuration of the immediate post-war period.

Clouzot's segment, the third, is by some way the film's strongest sequence, pushing both characters and audience to reflect on the nature, and perhaps the banality, of evil, and posing the question of how one might behave in extreme circumstances. Set in a hotel that accommodates those not yet able to return to their actual homes, the film, featuring Louis Jouvet, gives a vivid sense of the way in which many returnees felt caught between worlds, no longer in their original homes and yet desperate to start new lives if not quite to resume old ones. Spaak treats that theme with a good deal more humour in the fourth segment, in which a returnee finds his apartment has been requisitioned for the benefit of a puffed-up minor resistant. The only sequence that rivals Clouzot's in intensity is the first, a true chamber piece centered on a woman forced to deal with the property shenanigans her relatives have indulged in during her enforced absence. It's a brutally cynical segment, excoriating the idea of the noble France left behind.

In the end, the primary unifying thread is that of performance -- each segment has a very strong lead actor. Bernard Blier anchors the opener, with barely anything to act against in the film's most powerful scene since he's talking to a mute, virtually immobile invalid; it's among the strongest work I've seen from the actor. Louis Jouvet is predictably magnetic, and multi-layered, as the embittered interrogator forced to confront his own contradictions in Clouzot's lacerating section, and Serge Reggiani, playing a rather more pleasant character than is often the case, is also fine in the final segment even if the piece itself is far too neat. François Périer and the popular (and to me unfamiliar) actor Noël Noël feature in the lighter segments, and they convey rather well the way in which entirely ordinary, good-humoured men are confronted by the strangest of circumstances both during their imprisonment and on their return home.

Safety Not Guaranteed

2012, US, directed by Colin Trevorrow

Who'd have thought that the indie time travel-romance genre had room for more than one entry? The tone is decidedly more comic on this occasion, with a pretty conventional subplot about the deflowering of a nervous young man (the film gets a good deal of fine comic mileage out of studiously ignoring this plotline as soon as it apparently plays out), and a screenplay that's rather schematic -- the main story about dealing with one's past is paired with a rather obvious repetition of that same theme within another character's story.

What we're left with then, is mostly a set of genial, occasionally piercing, character observations -- moments in which disparate people connect with one another, or fail to understand the nature of their connections. Trevorrow doesn't really grapple with some of the bigger character questions he raises, though -- while the non-resolution of the above subplot is rather enjoyable, elsewhere he simply ignores problems that he can't resolve, simply moving on from the sticking point as though it didn't exist. That's especially problematic in the main story, where unfortunately it undermines the credibility of the nascent connection between Aubrey Plaza, who is genuinely charming, and Mark Duplass, who plays a potentially irritating kook commendably straight, which is key to finding a note of sympathy in the man.

Entre onze heures et minuit

1949, France, directed by Henri Decoin

Henri Decoin's second film in quick succession with Louis Jouvet opens with an extended sequence apparently designed to convince the audience that a plot centered on doppelgänger resemblances is not inherently implausible. That such effort is expended before the film proper even begins isn't a good sign, although there are certain meta-cinematic pleasures to be had given that the sequence uses Jouvet's own appearance in the earlier Copie conforme to aid in the argument. One of the points of that film, of course, was that a certain amount of work is needed for the resemblance to truly hold up to scrutiny, whereas here Jouvet's character -- a policeman with an uncanny resemblance to a criminal -- takes advantage of his appearance with barely a whit of preparation, and no idea whether, for instance, he sounds like the other man.

Sure enough, someone realizes pretty soon that the cop is not who he seems, though the film makes this even more implausible because no-one else in the man's inner circle draws the same conclusion (though henchman Robert Arnoux, who delivers a very droll performance, observes at one stage that he has the strange sensation of watching a dubbed film while in the presence of his "boss"-- an amusing overlap with the dialogue in the prior Decoin-Jouvet film, where the latter's character observes that a dubbed film is a film that has lost half its sense). Unlike in Copie conforme, Jouvet isn't really called upon to play two roles here, barely modulating his regular attitudes, which in turn seem copied rather blatantly in some respects from the cop he played in Clouzot's far richer Quai des Orfèvres. There are occasional moments when the film soars, however -- Decoin handles an early murder sequence with great flair, taking advantage of the unusual tunnel location near the Porte des Ternes as a man blithely walks to his death.

Les Amoureux sont seuls au monde

France, 1948, directed by Henri Decoin

Although certainly not as bitter as other post-war films, this is a rather downbeat drama -- at least in the version that appears to have survived, for I've read suggestions that director Henri Decoin shot two endings, one rather more optimistic in tone to the one on view here. As Farran Smith Nehme wrote recently, love stories that begin mid-marriage are rare cinematic animals, and this film opens with a lovely sequence in which Louis Jouvet and Renée Devillers, married for many years, re-enact their first meeting in a country banquet hall.

The script, by Henri Jeanson, has the couple playfully spar with one another, underlining their vast reserves of affection, while Jeanson also enjoys himself by assigning Jouvet a terrific monologue about going to the movies and suspecting that certain outcomes are possible or impossible simply because of the presence of the stars. The idea of game playing between couples crops up again throughout the film, though not always with the same benign and pleasurable results; the central narrative deals with suspicions of infidelity even in such an apparently grounded marriage.

Henri Decoin was a prolific director, though I've only seen two or three of his films; his work here is solid, and occasionally, as in the handling of the film's various monologues, something more (the montage in which Jouvet and Devillers narrate the history of their relationship in voiceover is especially good). There's an uncertainty in the tone, though, that's disconcerting at times -- the film slips from a kind of pastoral poetry in two forest sequences to an unexpected breath of realism in a scene where Dany Robin (as Monelle, the young woman who appears to distract Jouvet from his marriage) steps off a bus clearly filmed in the streets of Paris -- nouvelle vague shooting avant la lettre, and not sustained, for in the next shot Robin is clearly back on the studio sound stage.

Quai des Orfèvres

1947, France, directed by Henri-George Clouzot

Almost certainly Louis Jouvet's best-remembered film -- the only near competition comes, I think, from Marcel Carné's Hôtel du Nord, which isn't even on DVD in the US -- Quai des Orfèvres also features one of his very finest performances, as a dogged cop whose lack of respect for his superiors has limited his career prospects. As I noted previously, Jouvet didn't often play characters from this neck of the socio-economic woods, and yet this feels like one of the most thoroughly inhabited of his characters, a remarkably subtle, even fragile creation, with unlikely elements that somehow hang together. I suspect that to some degree that's because it's among the more underplayed of Jouvet's roles, in particular when it comes to the character's gruff expressions of affection for an adopted son, moments that provide brief, telling insights into the man's heart without being excessively mined for sentiment.

Indeed, that's typical of the film as a whole: as Luc Sante comments in the notes to the Criterion DVD edition, the film teems with Balzacian life, depicting in piquant details the worlds of both the music hall, the police station, and the crime journalist fraternity, as well as a complex crime, all without an indulgent running time. The very specific world of the music hall dominates the opening section of the film -- I had forgotten that Jouvet doesn't even appear until 40 minutes in, which underlines, yet again, how he tends to dominate one's memory of even the strongest films. As with Clouzot's later, and altogether more lightweight, film Miquette et sa mère, you get the sense that the director retained a persistent skepticism about those who chose to make their careers on the stage, or perhaps it was just that he couldn't turn off his sociologist's eye for the details of human behaviour even when turned on a milieu in which he himself spent so much time.

Copie Conforme

1947, France, directed by Jean Dréville

So often confined to small, if often indelible, roles, Louis Jouvet gets to dominate the screen here, playing two different characters -- and, into the bargain, three further incarnations essayed by one of those two characters, who is a con artist, a thief, and perhaps worse. Copie conforme wasn't the first occasion on which Jouvet played different roles, although previously it was the same character temporarily taking on a new persona, whereas here he plays two entirely different men.

The confrontation between the two men provides a fascinating opportunity to observe Jouvet's own development as a screen actor -- as much as he preserved many of his theatrical instincts, he learned ways to modulate them for the screen, and he draws careful distinction between the two characters without ever lapsing into obviousness. The requirements of the plot dictate that the two main characters gradually converge, which makes the onscreen action enjoyably confusing near the end -- both the other characters and the audience are constantly uncertain of who they are dealing with.

Jouvet's three smaller roles, little vignettes of criminal enterprise, are also very enjoyable, especially his turn as a jovial moving man wonderfully adept at dissipating all air of suspicion; it's a rare working class character for an actor more often associated with middle-class professions (or middle-class thievery). While Jouvet certainly does the heavy lifting throughout, there are a handful of notable supporting turns, too -- a very youthful Jean Carmet (above) has one of his first credited roles as  one of the criminal cohort, while Suzy Delair provides the love interest in the first of her two films with Jouvet that year.

Crimson Tide

1995, US, directed by Tony Scott

This was our small tribute to the late Tony Scott, one of the contemporary Hollywood directors whose work I most enjoyed -- without a trace of guilt. Visually, at least, Crimson Tide isn't representative of Scott's more recent work -- it's much more classical in its framing and construction, and the Scott's experimentation with the image is for the most part, confined to lens filters or cascading showers of sparks and water. The camera, though, is a good deal more mobile, even in the tight confines of a submarine, where the vast majority of the film takes place, and as such it's quite different to the more static style of films like Top Gun -- in motion in their overall action, but less so within the individual shot. Here, though, Scott's camera tracks up through the submarine and along the individual floors, sometimes moving back and forth to underline the central confrontation between sub captain Gene Hackman, playing a kind of distillation of the gruff Gene Hackman type, and younger buck Denzel Washington. In comparison with many of Scott's later films, the opening is relatively languid -- it takes some time, and a good deal of scene setting, to get us on board the sub, whereas later films often begin with us already within the action, or get us there awfully quickly. In this case, though, the set up works well, giving us reasons to invest in Washington's character in particular, which is critical to Scott's creation of tension later -- the people need to matter for us to buy into their confrontation, just as, a few years later, the back story is essential to our being caught up by Will Smith's sudden flight in Enemy of the State.

The Match King

1932, US, directed by William Keighley and Howard Bretherton

While Warren William had plenty of practice playing the cad, his role on this occasion is the concentrated essence of the type -- absolutely no-one is safe here, and the Ponzi schemes of the titular king are as much personal as financial, with everyone hoping for a return that can never possibly materialize. William plays a version of the real-life "match king" Ivar Krueger, and his business schemes are outlined with the characteristic Warner Brothers energy that infused everything from gangster bloodletting to social climbing with breakneck speed. Indeed, at times the film almost trips over itself in the early going, so much so that William repeats the same catchphrase four times in a few minutes, as though the filmmakers have forgotten he's just use the line. Things slow down a bit, not especially to the film's benefit, when William stumbles on the charms of the lovely Lili Damita -- as much as his rise to prominence convinces, blaming his downfall at least partly on the distractions of a beautiful woman fails to ring true given his utter ruthlessness on all other occasions.

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin

1978, Hong Kong, directed by Chia-Liang Liu

This was a bit of a shock after so many films from the 1930s -- it's been ages since I dipped a toe into Hong Kong action, particularly of the kung fu variety, and I'd forgotten just how busy the folio artists are kept, with every absurd swish and kick amped up to eleven. On this set, at least, the camera operator must have earned overtime for all the zoom work -- in the early sequences, the zoom seems to function as a kind of visual exclamation point to direct our attention to the key participants in a big fight scene.

The opening sequences are pretty standard quasi-historical-injustice stuff -- I'd forgotten just how generic these films can be in structural terms -- but the film really comes alive in the training sequences: indeed, where many kung fu films are essentially structured as a series of escalating battles, Liu throws the viewer off by adhering to the standard template only to set his story up, and then we're off to an imaginative and often very funny succession of training chambers, where our hero, Gordon Liu, hardens his abs and hones his skills in order to throw off the yoke of political subjugation. It's a template then re-worked many times over by subsequent filmmakers -- down to The Karate Kid, though where the Hong Kong film links kung fu training to a series of apparently abstract tasks, The Karate Kid turns that same exercise into a series of Tom-Sawyer-esque chores.

It was an absolute pleasure to see this on the big screen -- not the best print ever, with the colours a little off, but the vocal enthusiasm of the audience gave a little hint of what it must have been like to watch these films in crowded, bantering theatres on a Saturday night in the 1970s.

La Maison du maltais

1938, France, directed by Pierre Chenal (aka Sirocco)

Made the year after L'Alibi, this feels at times like the work of a completely different director: the opening section, set in an unnamed North African town, recalls Jacques Feyder's Le Grand jeu, not just because of the exotic location but for the wonderfully mobile camerawork, exploring the crowded streets of the casbah and the teeming life of brothels and nightclubs with equal zest. That vigorous movement is reflective of the state of mind of Marcel Dalio's lead character, a man bewitched by the sight of a beautiful woman and determined to do anything for her.

Later, when the plot transfers to Paris -- like so many of the colonial adventures of the 1930s -- the camera is a quieter presence, and Dalio, too, is tamped down by his bitter experiences, though Chenal can't fully hide his delight in exploring the new spaces offered to him by the change in setting -- a park, a thieves' lair, a lavish entryway. It's unusual to see Dalio squarely in the lead role, and his character is more unusual still: an exoticized but fundamentally sympathetic, hard-working Muslim character, hardly a regular occurrence at the time.

His support is top-notch, too: Raymond Aimos, one of the truly great character actors of the 1930s, is wonderful as Dalio's protective pal, while Viviane Romance, like Aimos a veteran of Duvivier's La Belle équipe, is entirely convincing as both prostitute and society dame, and the sequence where she revisits her past, in an attempt to purge it once and for all, is a terrific bit of acting, the actress perfectly moving between her different personae. Oh, and then there's a fellow by the name of Jouvet -- who excels in these smaller roles as oily lawyer/detective/factotum -- he's delicious here, turning on his clients as he spots the potential for much bigger paydays, though for once his part doesn't dazzle so much that it overshadows the remainder of the film.

The Guard

2011, Ireland, directed by John Michael McDonagh

The obvious point of reference for The Guard is In Bruges -- the same lead actor, the directors are brothers, the not-dissimilar mix of comedy and occasional action, and the occasionally absurdist bent to the dialogue in both films. Where In Bruges aimed for greater visual assurance, The Guard eschews some of the stylistic flourishes -- most of the film is shot pretty squarely, with characters bang in the middle of the frame -- in favour of a bit more character development. Indeed, while the film is marketed as a culture clash between Brendan Gleeson's cute hoor Galway guard and Don Cheadle's slick FBI agent, it's almost entirely Gleeson's film, and at times the film seems closer to the kind of personal study of Lenny Abrahamson's Garage (the latter film's star, Pat Shortt, has a lovely bit here as a peeved IRA man). He's a fascinating character -- a genuinely decent cop with a sense of community, a man absolutely comfortable in his own skin, with a hard-won dose of wisdom. Along the way, McDonagh also shows he's got a pretty decent handle on his ancestral homeland -- the opening sequence, featuring a bunch of youthful jackasses on a date with tragedy is all too reflective of the realities of Ireland's roads and deaths, and McDonagh handles it with brutal humour.

Mister Flow

1936, France, directed by Robert Siodmak

A bit of a genre mishmash, Siodmak's film, made during the French portion of his career, throws together crime, courtroom drama, romance, high society shenanigans, and a dash of humour. The shifts of direction occur with some crashing of gears, partly, I think, because Siodmak holds back from embracing the material's full potential for silliness -- unlike in, say, Cobra Woman a few years later and a very large ocean away, where he goes full throttle.

We're still in the early stages of Louis Jouvet's screen career here, and while Jouvet never abandoned his theatrical mannerisms -- something that was to our long-term benefit -- he gradually found ways to better integrate them with cinema style. At this point, though, his performances sometimes seem rather exaggerated -- certainly true when his character becomes a blubbering, hand-tic-infested mess. I'm sure the actor rather enjoyed concocting a character with two distinct personae, but it's not an especially subtle transformation, and it's instructive to compare this with his wonderful work a decade later in Copie conforme, where he plays, in essence, five roles, each crisply delineated without fuss, and each entirely convincing.

Jouvet's not the main attraction here, in any case: the leads are Edwige Feuillère, who sparkles throughout, and Fernand Gravey, who starts out as a down-on-his-luck lawyer who's rather easily convinced to begin a less straight-and-narrow existence, hardly helping the reputation of the legal profession in the process. Gravey sports a beard initially, an accoutrement that manages, paradoxically, to make him look even younger than he does when clean shaven, although the Harry Potter glasses don't help his cause either. The two actors seem to have great fun in each other's company -- a kind of Nick-and-Nora from the other side of the law, with roughly the same amount of alcohol consumed.

Impasse des Deux Anges

1948, France, directed by Maurice Tourneur

While Chabrol may, as I wrote recently, have grouped Impasse des Deux Anges with Panique and Macadam as examples of the cynicism and despair of post-war French film, the film reminded me more of Christian-Jaque's great 1946 movie Un Revenant -- both films have a gnawing sense of despair about the unrecoverable past, an idea with both general and very specific historical resonances in the France of 1948, while both also feature plotlines in which characters return to locations critical to their former lives. 

While Paul Meurisse plays, not for the first time, a fellow from the wrong side of the tracks -- and one who knows just what to do when a gun comes his way -- this is a different kind of criminal, with a sense of honour that goes well beyond the criminal code as he resolves the complications of his past affair with Simone Signoret, who has hit the marital big time in Meurisse's absence. Where Signoret is stunningly luminous -- she really was a great beauty, though she seems to have cared little for such accolades -- Meurisse hides his light under a bushel, underplaying to the point where it's almost aggressive. The sequence where he listens to Signoret exuberantly remembering their past together, barely nodding his head but clearly rapt, is a marvel.

Happy Accidents

2000, US, directed by Brad Anderson

The packaging is rather deceptive here, emphasizing the romantic qualities of the film when it's really a fairly self-aware bit of science-fiction, with tongue pretty firmly in cheek (there just happen to be characters who can easily debate the potential paradoxes of time travel, and there's a very amusing sequence in which Anthony Michael Hall pokes fun at himself -- the best thing of its kind until Domino came along). There's no real romantic heat between the main characters, though both Vincent D'Onofrio and Marisa Tomei are individually charming, and they come off as quirky roommates rather than romantic soulmates; that's not a paradox the film is interested in exploring, though.

Mademoiselle Docteur

1937, France, directed by G.W. Pabst (aka Salonique, nid d'espions)

Pabst's first slice of exotic wartime intrigue is rather more successful than the follow-up, Le Drame de Shanghai, not least, I suspect, because the setting is a couple of decades in the past and rather less bound to contemporary events; there are no asides on the geopolitical realities here. It's also a more carefully conceived bit of work -- it has some of the vivid set pieces that characterize the later film, particularly during an exuberant nightclub scene, but there's also a precision and care in the quieter sequences, the camera subtly moving from one character to another, or lingering on an apparently insignificant object while the action happens outside the frame.

Louis Jouvet appears here, too, as a spy whose cover story involves a vegetable shop; Jouvet's features and voice seem perfectly attuned to the kind of moral compromises that are inevitably part of the spy game, with a world-weariness apparent on his face before ever he opens his mouth. As so often during this phase of his screen career, Jouvet's part is brief but vividly drawn, though on this occasion the rest of the cast is also very strong: Pierre Blanchar's work as the oiliest of intermediaries is especially good, while Jean-Louis Barrault makes an indelible cameo appearance, while I'd never have guessed that Dita Parlo starred in L'Atalante -- she's entirely convincing as the self-possessed spy of the title, nothing like the barge-girl of the earlier film.