Pour cent briques t'as plus rien

1982, France, directed by Edouard Molinaro

I'm not sure what it says about the glory days of the early Mitterrand era, but this is the third 1980s French comedy I've watched in a row in which one or more hitherto upstanding characters is rather easily persuaded to take the money and run. The idea is taken to its farcical extreme here, with the film's title giving an indication of the steep cost of Parisian living, and bank robbery the obvious solution to the problem--indeed, the solution is so obvious that everyone wants a piece of the action. This kind of thing was Daniel Auteuil's pre-Jean de Florette bread and beurre - actually, this is rather better than his 1980s average for the most part - and there are few hints of the future direction of his career; by contrast, Gérard Jugnot has ploughed a pretty consistent comic furrow in the intervening years, with occasional forays into sentimentality.

Les Spécialistes

1985, France, directed by Patrice Leconte

The first big step away from the comedies, mostly derived from plays, that were Patrice Leconte's bread and butter for a decade, Les Spécialistes is a fairly straightforward buddy film, albeit on the kind of widescreen canvas that recalls many of France's biggest comedy hits of the 1960s, most obviously those pairing Louis de Funès and Bourvil. Though they are less comically inclined than such illustrious predecessors, Bernard Giraudeau and Gérard Lanvin make an engaging tandem, their onscreen banter surely a major reason for the film's huge success in 1985; indeed, Lanvin had two huge successes in a row with Marche à l'ombre, directed by and co-starring Michel Blanc, and then this film, but he never re-formed either working partnership.

There's a hint of Bertrand Blier in Les Spécialistes, too, especially in the film's concluding scenes, although there's nothing of Blier's provocative take on sexual politics, and little to foreshadow the richer work that Leconte did at the end of the 1980s and into the 1990s. Still, the pacing is brisk, the location work and stunts often excellent, and the central heist sequence convincingly constructed; in other words, the great majority of the film's original entertainment value has survived the intervening years intact.

Les Ripoux

1984, France, directed by Claude Zidi

A huge hit in its native country, Les Ripoux is still pretty entertaining as a slice of seamy Parisian life, with an ebullient central performance from Philippe Noiret, but it seems terribly dated in terms of filmmaking technique. While I'm pre-disposed to like Thierry Lhermitte for his exuberant earlier work as a member of the Splendid café-théâtre troupe, he's almost entirely in Noiret's shadow here and there's barely an attempt to render credible the narrative arc that sees his strait-laced young cop make the transition to a rather more flexible view of the law. His character is also saddled with an unconvincing romance plot that regularly prompts director Claude Zidi to crank up the muzak and call for the soft-focus lenses, all of which only underlines how much better the film is when Noiret is front-and-centre. There are pleasures, though, from several of the character actors, especially those playing the film's petty criminals--among them Ticky Holgado and Michel Crémadès, both of whom subsequently incarnated numerous memorable oddballs.

Black Sheep

1935, US, directed by Allan Dwan

A nifty ship-board film centered on a bunch of card sharps and hustlers, Black Sheep features an engaging early appearance from Claire Trevor. She gives considerable depth and nuance to what might have been a throwaway role in support of Edmund Lowe, whose subsequent career was nothing like as interesting as Trevor's. They make a terrific pair here, deploying their dialog with plenty of crackle. The support cast, as so often in classic Hollywood, is eye-catching in its own right, whether in the form of gravel-voiced Eugene Pallette, Tom Brown (as fresh-faced here as in Judge Priest and Hell's Highway), or Herbert Mundin as a recurring drunken joke, and the resolution is poetically satisfying, particularly for those rooting against the aristocrats.

Five Star Final

1931, US, directed by Mervyn LeRoy

Given the recent revelations about immoral but standard operating procedures in the Murdoch newspaper empire, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the final shot of Five Star Final is entirely accurate both in its suggestion that such newspapers are true denizens of the gutter - and that they will continue to operate whatever the qualms of an individual journalist or the condemnation of a government. It's only when the buyers turn their backs on the product en masse, as the post-Hillsborough residents of Liverpool chose to do with The Sun, that any meaningful change occurs. The "journalists" at work here would no doubt have found lucrative employment at The News of the World or its American cousins, as they insinuate themselves by any means into the lives of their prey, events then spiraling out of control at breathtaking pace. Although Edward G. Robinson is the film's moral centre, however belatedly, it's Boris Karloff, as a spectacularly amoral hack, who steals the show; the character's personal proclivities and his willingness to smoothly lie his way through any situation roll together, his soft, British tones only enhancing the creepiness of the effect.

It

1927, US, directed by Clarence G. Badger

Where I struggled to comprehend the fuss made over Mae West's charms, I had no difficulty understanding just why Clara Bow's star blazed so brightly in the late 1920s: she's almost mesmerizingly charming, completely dominating the screen with her energy. In her way, Bow's character is as single-minded as West's in She Done Him Wrong or Barbara Stanwyck's in Baby Face, but her zestful approach to life is more endearing, if ultimately a similar exercise in social climbing. There's a striking zoom shot near the beginning that's highly unusual for the period - distractingly so at this remove, since I kept wondering whether the zoom lens had been invented that early or whether the filmmakers had used some other trick to achieve the effect.

Wings

1927, US, directed by William Wellman

I've only seen a sliver of William Wellman's sizeable filmography, and nothing in the last couple of years, but what struck me most here was his mastery of tone, adeptly navigating the switch from comedy in the idyllic pre-war phase through to poignant farewells, dramatic combat action and ultimately, even inevitably, catastrophe. Despite the scale of the production, there's a visual economy to his work, efficiently signaling emotional tone through placement of his actors - Clara Bow and Charles Rogers at play in a tight shot under a car, not a care in the world, followed later by the sober shots of Rogers's rival Richard Arlen and his parents as he prepares to head to war, with the film reaching is emotional high-point in the sequence reuniting Rogers and Arlen late on, the two men joined in tragic embrace at the centre of the frame as signs of destruction surround them.

Wellman displays an extraordinary invention in his shot choices, too, his camerawork often startlingly "modern" to my eye. An early shot of two lovers on a swing has the camera mounted on the swing itself, foreshadowing the woozy shot in Mean Streets where Martin Scorsese attaches the camera directly to Harvey Keitel. More showy still, and yet entirely in keeping with the liberating feel of the sequence, is the wonderful travelling shot through the patrons at the Folies Bérgères. Elsewhere, Wellman simply uses camera placement, rather than motion, to achieve his effects - as in the low-angle shot that emphasizes the enormous bulk of a German bomber.

I saw the film at the Chevalier Theatre in Medford, with live organ accompaniment by Peter Krasinski. His work became such an absorbing part of the action that it was easy to forget there was an actual human being up there near the screen, adding drama and, not infrequently, humour to the visuals. The choice of film was no accident: the Chevalier in question was a wartime pilot from Medford.

Picture credit: Still scanned/uploaded by Silent Film Still Archive.

Hot Tub Time Machine

2010, US, directed by Steve Pink

There can be no claims of false advertising with Hot Tub Time Machine: it does indeed feature the eponymous time-travel device, and it's about as silly as you might expect, though at least there's a certain unpretentious honesty on the filmmakers' part. It starts out brightly enough: most of the best jokes are in the first half, at which point the script-writers seem to run out of steam. The second half is a kind of manic, higher-pitched repetition driven mostly by energetic performances from Craig Robinson, by far the most sympathetic of the central quartet of time-travelers, and an incredibly profane Rob Cordrry. John Cusack, by contrast, is reliably catatonic in John Cusack style; although he's listed as a producer here, he gives off the air of a man who can't quite believe, after a quarter century in the business, that he's reduced to starring in fare like this.

Central Park

1932, US, directed by John G. Adolfi


Central Park manages to squeeze an awful lot into a running time of less than an hour - hoodlums, robbery, a beauty contest, gunplay, a kindly cop about to retire, a love story, an escaped lion, a mad prison escapee, and plenty of Depression-era background colour, including some nice footage of the eponymous green space. It's a little frantic at times with so much ground to cover, though the scenes between Joan Blondell and Wallace Ford have a lovely feel of two confused souls finding some solace, while Guy Kibbee as the aforementioned cop is terrific, playing a character who has a surprising kinship with the live-and-let-live Pacific island store owner he plays in the same year's Rain.

Turn Back the Clock

1933, US, directed by Edgar Selwyn

It's a Wonderful Life is surely the most famous version of the old "What if I'd had a different life?" (or in this case "wife") plot, but this is an energetic variation, scripted by Selwyn and Ben Hecht, which focuses on the comedic possibilities for most of the running time. Lee Tracy, as the man who gets to see his alternative path, is aware more or less from the beginning of what's happened to him, though his manic delight in being granted a do-over causes consternation among those close to him until he figures out a way to channel both his knowledge of future events and his energy. As with so many 1930s films, there's virtually no fat. Barely any time seems to pass between Tracy's return to his humble soda jerk origins and his appointment as a presidential adviser, with the film skipping huge chunks of time from one scene change to the next, but the narrative remains entirely coherent despite the frantic pacing. While I found Lee Tracy to be a mis-cast distraction in Doctor X, he's perfect here, over-caffeinated in precisely the spirit of Hecht's snappy dialogue.

Quick Millions

1931, US, directed by Rowland Brown

Before he turned saintly, circa 1938, Spencer Tracy played many a roughneck, and in Quick Millions he provides a pre-Scarface template for a criminal rise to the top. George Raft practices for his turn in that film by playing the same right-hand-man role here, although he is in rather more loquacious form than in Howard Hawks's film. The early 1930s seem to be littered with people who have an extraordinarily single-minded attitude to success in their chosen profession, and the fast-paced style of the early talkies tend to reinforce the sense of a dizzying ascent: the to-the-point montage sequences compress events so that in no time a two-bit hoodlum is making deals with the major players, although director Rowland Brown also makes time for insightful character asides, particularly when Tracy tries to show he's qualified to hang with the city's older money. The finale intercuts scenes at a church with an outbreak of violence, a good four decades before Francis Ford Coppola alternates between the same elements in The Godfather.

Hell's Highway

1932, US, directed by Rowland Brown

Like Scarface, which appeared the same year, Rowland Brown's film takes a social problem and exposes it to the harsh light of day as part of a call to government action, though on this occasion the issue is the treatment of miscreants behind bars rather than the actions of those same miscreants in the streets. That alone marks the gulf with today's cinema. It's hard enough to imagine a mainstream drama concerned with the treatment of prisoners in quasi-privatised work camps, never mind one that sees the government as a likely source of assistance, since these days prison administrations seem as likely to be in cahoots with private enterprise as they are to be concerned with prisoner welfare. Where's the Hollywood exposé of Joe Arpaio's methods?

There's a fierce energy to Rowland Brown's filming, and a bluntness in the way he depicts the physical realities of the prison camp - the dreadful food, the constant effort to save money at the prisoners' expense, the brutal work regime in which any hint of exhaustion is interpreted and punished as serious insubordination - that's mirrored in the physical presence of his lead, Richard Dix, the alpha male among the prisoners. Both Brown and Dix's character, Duke Ellis, pair a certain bullishness with strategic cunning, eyeing opportunities to make their points with either fists or brain as the occasion demands. 

The Forest for the Trees

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

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

Revenge of the Nerds

1984, US, directed by Jeff Kanew

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

The Passing of the Third Floor Back

1935, UK, directed by Berthold Viertel

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

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

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

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

Mid-August Lunch

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

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

She Done Him Wrong

1933, US, directed by Lowell Sherman

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

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

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

Scream 2

1997, US, directed by Wes Craven

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

The Italian Job

1969, UK, directed by Peter Collinson

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

Beauty and the Boss

1932, US, directed by Roy del Ruth

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