Twentieth Century

1934, US, directed by Howard Hawks

Hawks' film can't keep up the terrific momentum he establishes in the the opening sequences -- it's not quite Scarface in a comic register -- but he's blessed with the presence of a boundlessly energetic John Barrymore, who delivers one of the great comic performances, both self-aware and self-parodying as a Broadway director who never shies away from the exaggerated effect in his personal stylings. By contrast, Carole Lombard is lumbered with too much in the way of irritating histrionics; she's a much more subtle performer than Hawks allows, and there's a repetitiveness to her character that causes the centre of the film to sag. Hawks' work behind the camera is often more subtle than in some of his other films, with careful setups of the actors rather than more visible stylistic flourishes; he frames the crowded train sequences in ways that surely influenced A Night at the Opera a year later, though that film pushed the idea for even greater comic effect. A final thought: at what point did the drunken press man disappear as a Hollywood staple?

Macadam

1946, France, directed by Marcel Blistène (and Jacques Feyder)

Claude Chabrol, in a long interview in Cahiers du cinéma, grouped Macadam together with Duvivier's Panique and Impasse des Deux Anges as three extraordinarily bleak postwar films, made at a time in France's history when -- as he saw it -- one might have expected a rather more hopeful mood to prevail. I'm not sure that his thesis is all that carefully thought-through -- the US produced some pretty downbeat fare during the same period, after all, while France was coming to terms with a terrible national trauma, a theme to which Chabrol returned in several of his films, but he's certainly on the money that these are three films with a frequently grim take on human nature.

Macadam begins with an off-kilter shot that gives an early indication of its skewed world-view -- even an apparently innocuous bit of domestic business becomes imbued with a sense of unease as the camera cants to the side, and such angles proliferate as the film progresses and we're introduced to the residents of a Paris hotel that holds little of the bonhomie of the pre-war Hôtel du Nord.

Françoise Rosay was never averse to playing less than sympathetic characters, though her turn as the hotel proprietor here is as jaundiced as they come, a woman who uses all of her wiles to survive, and who blithely uses her own daughter as a servant (where Arletty might have made such a survivor sympathetic, Rosay makes no attempt to paper over the flaws). There's a scene where the younger woman unexpectedly expresses affection for her mother that carries a deep frisson, as though we're privy to the moment when the daughter's Stockholm syndrome reaches its apogee, and the finale scene suggests that the apple has indeed stayed pretty close to the tree.

Rosay's character has no monopoly on misbehaviour -- when Paul Meurisse shows up with a briefcase in hand and asks Rosay to keep an eye on it, it doesn't take a genius to deduce that he may be up to no good. Meurisse played some light-hearted parts during his career, but it's the men from the darker side that stick in the memory -- the casual killer from this film, the sadist from Clouzot's Les Diaboliques, or the melancholy safe-cracker in Impasse des Deux Anges.

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.