Foreign Correspondent (1940)

Rating 4/4

Foreign Correspondent was an extremely timely film. Released on August 16, 1940, Alfred Hitchcock’s film predicted the German aerial raids of London three days before they happened. When it was released in the UK they had already had.

The film had its beginning as a loose adaptation of journalist Vincent Sheean’s memoirs, but became something much more. After nearly five years of development by producer Walter Wanger and tons of rewrites the project was finally handed over to Hitchcock.

Johnny Jones (Joel McCrea) is a New York crime reporter who is assigned duties as a foreign correspondent to London. He’s to report on the conditions of Europe that will eventually lead up to World War II. His boss, Mr. Powers (Harry Davenport) is disillusioned with the correspondents previously sent over and he figures that perhaps sending a crime reporter would be best. War after all is the worst sort of organized crime. Like mafia men ordering a hit, war is often arranged by cleancut men in suits cheerfully distant from the misery and the mess they create. Much of these sort of men – become old and cynical – show a remarkable ambivalence toward war throughout the film.

His assignment is to interview a Dutch diplomat named Van Meer (Albert Basserman) who is to speak at a luncheon hosted by a Universal Peace Party. The party’s leader is one Stephen Fisher (Herbert Marshall) who has treasonous and very unpeacelike motivations of his own.
After Van Meer is seemingly assassinated Jones soon discovers that the diplomat had been kidnapped in secret by Fisher’s men and the assassination target was a decoy. Van Meer is one of only a few men alive who knows the truth about a secret clause in a treaty that would benefit the Nazi regime should it end up in their hands. The clause is never explicitly revealed in the film because it is not important. It is a macguffin. What is important is that Van Meer is rescued safe and sound at all costs.

Involved in the mess is Mr. Fisher’s daughter Carol (Laraine Day) who has fallen in love with Johnny and agrees to marry him. The complications that arise when she discovers her father is a traitor are obvious.

Before its climax Foreign Correspondent moves along with the same mastery of suspense that would color Hitchcock’s later films in Hollywood. One of its most famous scenes is when Johnny gets his coat caught in the gears of an old windmill and struggles to take it off before the machinery kills him. And in, what I believe, is an even more effective moment of suspense is when Carol unwittingly upsets Johnny and another agent’s plans. Johnny takes her on a trip while his colleague Scott ffolliott (George Sanders) tells Mr. Fisher she had been abducted and he needs to disclose the location of Van Meer to get her back. Carol who had not been made aware of the plan comes home early while ffolliot (the F’s are intentionally lower case) is still there threatening her father. Everything had been going so well up until then and the tension created is immediate. It left me hooked to see the outcome.

Foreign Correspondent ends with Johnny reporting over the radio that the Germans had begun bombing London. The lights and power go out, the explosions can be heard outside shaking the studio; but he goes on for the American listeners to hear. The scene was written by screenwriter Ben Hecht and it was added during post-production when all the other footage had been completed. Reports that the Germans would be bombing London soon convinced the filmmakers to replace the film’s original ending with this one.

The extreme timeliness of Foreign Correspondent’s ending made the film more than just one of the greatest political thrillers of all time. It also crafted an extremely well made and effective propaganda piece for both British and American audiences alike. Even the Nazis’ own chief of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, recognized it as such calling the movie “a masterpiece of propaganda, a first-class production which no doubt will make a certain impression upon the broad masses of the people in enemy countries.” Goebbels is now deservedly dead and so is his Third Reich. As a classic this movie and the nations that created it outlasted him so I suppose he must have been right.

The movie is also technically ahead of its time with an extremely riveting sequence depicting a plane crash. Using actual footage of a plane descending toward water, Hitchcock had it rear projected onto a screen made of rice paper with large water tanks behind it. With a push of a button the water crashes through the screen filling the cockpit set. Highly convincing and innovative for 1940. It was a technical achievement that Hitchcock remained very proud of for the rest of his life.
He was less proud of the casting, wanting Gary Cooper and Joan Fontaine for the main roles of Johnny and Carol. Producer David O. Selznick refused to loan Fontaine out and he had to settle with Laraine Day who is passable in the role.
Gary Cooper turned down the part of Johnny, but he came to regret it and later admitted he made a mistake. I am not sure he had. I really enjoy Joel McCrea’s performance in this as the good-natured and amiably sardonic Mr. Jones. Cooper is a great actor, but this role wasn’t for him.

La Chienne (1931)

Rating 4/4

When a good man commits a murder and a bad man who is innocent is hanged for it who is going to care and who should? Jean Renoir’s La Chienne may not answer these questions, but it does show us the consequences.

Renoir tells us in the film’s opening that the movie has no moral or message to give. Instead the movie simply shows us people being people. Renoir doesn’t believe in villains. He believes in humans who do bad things.

Maurice Legrand (Michel Simon) is an aspiring painter whose talents are unappreciated by his shrewish wife Adèle. She thinks he is wasting his time and her drawing room space with his hobby. Adèle frequently compares him negatively to her first husband who was killed in action. “A real man! A hero! A brave man who gave his life in 1914 for sluggards like you!,” she declares.
When the dead husband suddenly shows up very much alive Maurice lets him have her.
This leaves Maurice free to continue his love affair with the young Lulu (Janie Marèse) who is being prostituted by her boyfriend Dédé (Georges Flamant) to pay his debts. He’s greedy, abusive, and narcissistic. The very opposite of the kindly, but shy Maurice.
Lulu and Dédé hatch a scheme to sell Maurice’s paintings as her own. Maurice discovers this, but allows it to happen so she can use the money to live comfortably. Maurice’s naivete and Dédé’s greed end in tragedy for both of them.

The title of the film in English is “The Bitch” and Lulu more than earns it. Incapable of love or empathy she puts on a performance to gain Maurice’s affection and financially benefit from it. Lulu scoffs at his feelings, laughs at him, and is proud of her lack of scruples and two-facedness. Maurice kills her in a moment of passion and Dédé is hanged for the crime. The latter’s reputation as a scoundrel is set dead against him and Maurice finds himself able to live with himself afterward. The film ends with him an old man, a poor vagrant; but still as amiable and as kindly as he was before.

La Chienne, true to its promise that the movie contains no moral lesson, expresses no sense of outrage over what happens. The events happen as they do and the characters remain who they were. The audience is left to make their own judgments. The movie makes no comment.
Maurice is a man who got away with murder. He is also sweet-natured and is in no way an active menace to society. Dédé most certainly is. He’s a selfish bastard and perfectly capable of the crime he is accused of. Nevertheless he dies an innocent victim.
And Lulu is La Chienne. The bitch. She is manipulative, devoid of compassion, and embracing and proud of her duplicitousness. It gets her killed in the end, but the movie doesn’t tell us if she deserved it. It doesn’t tell us if the question of innocence or guilt even matters.
What Renoir’s film does tell us is that people do things, good and bad. And the consequences occur as they may, and not always in a way we deem fair.

La Chienne had the potential of making its title actress Janie Marèse a star in French cinema, but was sadly killed at the age of 23 in a car accident shortly after making the picture. Her co-star Georges Flamant was driving the car. After he survived the press vilified him and his career as an actor was almost destroyed. Adding to the tragedy, Michel Simon had fallen in love with her during production and never forgave Flamant or Renoir (whom he deemed partially responsible) for her death.

The aftermath of La Chienne’s production mirrored its theme. People did things as people often do and there were consequences. And as in the film, who was truly at fault remains unanswered.

Gilda (1946)

Rating 3.5/4

“Hate can be a very exciting emotion. There is a heat in it, that one can feel. Didn’t you feel it tonight? It warmed me. Hate is the only thing that has ever warmed me.”
Ballin Mundson (George Macready) is sincere when he says this to his wife and she doesn’t disagree. She repeats it herself to her lover Johnny (Glenn Ford) and he doesn’t disagree either.

Charles Vidor’s 1946 film noir, Gilda, is not a love story. It’s a hate story. It’s a story of people using love to cruelly punish and destroy each other.

Gilda (Rita Hayworth) hates Johnny for walking out on her years ago. Johnny hates her for humiliating him and making him feel less like a man. Her husband Ballin hates everybody and carries it wherever he goes so much that no one notices anymore. What comes of this hatred is one of the most unhealthy love triangles out of classic Hollywood.

Johnny makes a crude living as a cheating gambler in Argentina who believes “a dollar is a dollar in any language.” I looked it up and he’s right. What he’s wrong about, though, is that he can keep getting away with cheating. After he’s caught doing it at a Buenos Aires casino Johnny comes face to face with the understandably offended Ballin Mundson who owns the joint. Ballin takes a liking to the kid and instead of smashing his fingers with a hammer he offers him a job as personal security.

Their partnership is surprisingly a happy one although it is apparent that Ballin is keeping secrets from him. Things become more complicated when Johnny is introduced to Ballin’s new wife, the one and only Gilda, his ex. Ballin who has made hate so much a part of himself that he can recognize it begins to sense something is wrong right away. He doesn’t suspect that the two know each other, but he amazingly recognizes hatred coming from Gilda to Johnny immediately. Johnny and Gilda’s “introduction” is extremely cordial and lacks even the slightest innuendo of hostility. But Ballin picks it up all the same even when he cannot understand it.
The movie provides the viewer none of their backstory up to this point letting us see the scene from Ballin’s eyes. We are as perplexed as he is when he questions Gilda about her hatred and she coyly denies it. Not until she and Johnny meet each other later that the truth comes out. It is almost soap opera-like when she is suddenly introduced in this way. Johnny makes no previous mention of her in the film, not even in the frequent voice-overs that are true to film noir fashion. This way of bringing Gilda into the story is effective in making sense of Ballin’s actions later in the movie. He is an extremely complex character and very little of this film is given from his perspective. By doing so here is masterful screenwriting.

Ballin slowly begins to realize their history and starts becoming more possessive and watchful of her. Johnny does so to, but even more aggressively and he deceives himself by saying it’s for his boss’s sake.

Ballin’s dealings with German mafia adds more tension to the situation as Gilda and Johnny meanwhile begin an affair that is both hateful and passionate. For the both of them it is driven purely by sexual passion and they bitterly try to use it overpower the other.
The various twists and turns of the plot lead them closer and closer to each other and Johnny unleashes cruel emotional abuse to bring her down to the humiliation he once felt and which he believes she deserves. Power obtained, Johnny reveals himself to be an awful and vicious man who has resented this woman’s independence and confidence from the very beginning.

At the end we see them at the absolute lowest they can be and Johnny’s empire comes crumbling down around him. Ultimately the film robs us of any emotionally poignant resolution by providing a tacked-on happy ending that undermines the message. An unbelievable twist ending followed by no tragedy ruins the experience.

Overall Gilda is a great film that could have been better concluded. The movie made Rita Hayworth a Hollywood icon and sex symbol. It also launched a long affair between her – married to Orson Welles at the time – and co-star Glenn Ford.

The cinematography was done by Rudolph Maté also known for his work on Dreyer’s Vampyr. In Gilda he plays with light and shadow with the characters emotional states often masking their faces during moments when they are at their most honest.
Jack Cole’s choreography of Hayworth’s dance numbers are legendary and “Put the Blame on Mame” became a staple reused in other films noir.
The movie was produced by Columbia film producer Virginia van Upp who was only one of three women producing films at the time. She was also an accomplished screenwriter who had helped coach Hayworth for this role who was mostly known for doing musical comedies at the time.
The movie has a keen understanding of male emotional abuse in relationships and I think Virgina’s involvement shows.

Sleeper (1973)

Rating 3/4

Comedy, like science fiction, is ripe for social commentary and Woody Allen’s Sleeper, being both, is as brilliant as any.
Combining the physical antics of Buster Keaton and the wit of Bob Hope, Woody Allen had somehow achieved the impossible. He crafted alongside the comedy a highly intelligent vision of the future where the human race will have morally and intellectually degenerated into puerile sheep without ever challenging or being challenged. It’s as relevant and insightful as other great science fiction films like 2001: A Space Odyssey or The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Miles Monroe (Woody Allen) wakes up 200 years into the future after being involuntarily put in cryosleep after a routine surgery goes wrong. The doctors who wake him are able to cure him of his ailment, but what they can’t fix is a world where everyone is mentally infantile and sexually impotent. I am of course referring to the world of 2173. I can understand, I suppose, if someone became confused and thought I was referring to the present. I don’t think a man like Woody Allen could disagree.

Miles ends up on the run for his life after unwillingly getting involved with Marxist revolutionaries who want to use him to take down the government.

I’ve mentioned this film is a comedy while none of this sounds remotely funny. And yet, it is. With a highly well-thought out premise, Sleeper is a hilarious movie. The science-fiction background provides Allen with a comparative view of futurist mankind with how we are now. What being a comedy adds to it is a sharp take on absurdity and deservedly insults moral and intellectual laziness. The same sort of laziness threatening us now in 2024 just as much it did in 1973.

Miles meets Luna Schlosser (Diane Keaton) who is politically apathetic and lives an affluent life of ease. She writes bad poetry and thinks butterflies turn into caterpillars. She gets high with her friends by passing around and rubbing a ritual orb. She has a cheap understanding of sex and prefers to have pleasure artificially induced. Using a special chamber called an Orgasmatron people can now, not only skip the foreplay, but all physical activity involved altogether.

Throughout this insanity he disguises himself as a butler robot only to have his head nearly removed by a technician. He and Luna go on a quest to destroy the dictator’s severed nose to stop him from being cloned. Doctors tells him fudge bars and cigarettes are healthy now. And my favorite of all, he slips on a giant peel from a banana the size of a canoe. This same banana is owned and aggressively protected by a farmer who walks a six-foot high chicken on a leesh. Just in case the situation was not bizarre enough.

Miles is questioned in one scene about the meaning of a few fragments from his time in history. These include photos of famous political figures and selections from TV news broadcasts. The ironic and factually inaccurate answers he gives are some of the funniest and best-written lines in the movie. He also tells Luna this surreal story about how he asked his mother where babies come from. His mother misheard him and thought he said rabies so she tells him from dog bites. He says, “The next week, a woman on my block gave birth to triplets… I thought she’d been bitten by a great dane.”

Sleeper is also the sort of comedy that is rife with slapstick humor most of which is deliberately shot like old silent shorts from Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy. The camera is sped up to feign fast movement, the music – composed by Woody Allen himself – is jazzy, and the physical antics are cartoonishly out of this world.

Sleeper is funny from beginning to end and doesn’t become imbalanced with the social commentary. Both perfectly support the other and the rawer slapstick bits fit the the film’s overall tone. This might be the only sci-fi movie with classic bits like a pie in the face and slipping on a banana peel that doesn’t lose its preoccupation with social commentary in an Orwellian setting.

Sleeper is right up there with THX 1138, Logan’s Run, or Silent Running as a work of cerebral sci-fi. Simply because it swaps drama for comedy doesn’t make it any lesser and believing so would be a mistake.

King Kong (1933)

Rating 4/4

King Kong is the most influential movie monster put on screen save for perhaps Godzilla. Every child knows who Kong is even if they haven’t seen the movie. He’s on lunchboxes, been made into toys, and is even the namesake of a beloved Nintendo video game character. Kong is also one of the earliest icons in the pantheon of Hollywood heroes and villains preceded by only a few like Dracula and Frankenstein. Whole books could be written about his cultural impact and importance without bothering to even discuss the film itself.

The 1933 classic is a technically impressive spectacle achieved in a time when computer visual effects were wholly nonexistent. Despite their outdatedness the effects in this film required more talent and creativity than can be found in the average VFX artist working on movies today. Lacking the tools and software of the modern era the movie-magicians of 1933 pushed stop-motion animation to its limits alongside other techniques such as matte painting, rear screen projection, and composite shots. The images put on screen are truly a marvel for the time and what I find even more impressive than the effects achieved is the restraint put into their use by the filmmakers. What too often was the case for later b-movies produced in the following decades was an exploitative use of special effects that failed to impress their audiences but succeeded in providing insight into the films’ budgets.
Stop-motion pioneers Willis H. O’Brien (Harryhausen’s future mentor) and Buzz Gibson and cinematographer Frank D. Williams had a firm grasp on the limitations of the methods they were using. When the characters are attacked by a brontosaurus it’s introduced in the background rising out of the water under low-key lighting and masked in mist. All of the stop-motion effects in King Kong are shot in varying degrees of distance and never in close-up. For close-up shots of Kong a full-sized mechanical model of his head and shoulders was used.
Williams achieved the composite sequences of the actors seemingly performing in front of the monsters by using an optical printer to combine the animation, matte paintings, and actors in the foreground into a single shot. The result is staggering, and although it looks nothing like we can achieve on computers today; it took more imagination and broke more ground than what’s being done now which is largely safe, patented, and takes no risks. The last time computer effects succeeded in impressing me was back in 2009.

The film was directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Shoedsack, who already had experience with monkeys when filming silent documentaries like Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927) and Rango (1930). The trashy bestiality themed film Ingagi (1930) born out of the trends set by these pictures was enough of an exploitative hit that it was largely based on its success that RKO provided financial backing for King Kong.

The film’s lead is a documentarian jungle filmmaker named Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) who casts Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) to add sex appeal to his next picture; something his critics had found lacking. She is taken to the infamous Skull Island where Denham wants to capture footage of the big ape. She is kidnapped by the natives who want to sacrifice her to Kong. Instead he becomes infatuated with her. Denham makes frequent allusions to Beauty and the Beast interpreting beauty as the beast’s only weakness and cause for eventual downfall. This becomes realized when the woman is rescued and Kong goes apeshit (if you’ll pardon the expression) and attacks the natives’ village. He wrecks their homes, stomps on anyone and everything, and brutally chows down on the locals. Tame by today’s standards, much of the violence in this film is decidedly brutal for 1933 and would not be seen in mainstream cinema again for many years after the Hays Code was adopted by Hollywood a year later. In one earlier scene Kong battles a T-Rex also brought to life by stop-motion. The fight ends with a victorious Kong ripping apart the dinosaur’s jaw with dripping gore and gruesome cracking sounds added for good measure.

After Carl Denham gases Kong what follows is cinema history. He’s showcased at a fair in Manhattan only to break loose and terrorize the city. His climb up the Empire State Building with Ann in tow and being shot by airplanes is an iconic image achieving a fame scarcely less than that that of famous real-world photographs. Denham’s exclamation after Kong’s death, “No, it wasn’t the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast,” is equally iconic.

The film was a massive success and a sequel was rushed into production and released the same year called Son of Kong. He also became the subject of two Japanese kaiju films of the 60s in one of which he fought the legendary Godzilla. King Kong was remade twice in 1976 and then in 2005 and later became a key player in the now ongoing MonsterVerse series of films. None of these later pictures were as innovative as this one. King Kong tried and succeeded in doing things that had never been done before. I don’t think it would hurt much if more blockbusters coming out nowadays tried doing the same.

Now something should be said about the more problematic elements in the film that have aged even worse than the effects. I will not deny that these elements are there and I am not going to defend them. The movie is explicitly sexist and racist in many of its themes and dialogue. Ann Darrow is not a character, but a plot point to simultaneously titillate the camera and provide abysmal commentary on women’s roles. When she is being held terrified by Kong Ann doesn’t hesitate to pose in a way that brings more attention to her legs than a woman in peril actually would. She is also subject to condescension and patronizing from the crew which she takes with only marginal protest and the most sexist character in the film becomes her love interest. The island’s natives are presented as superstitious savages and virtually no anthropological and social interest is taken in them in the film’s script.
I believe the film’s historical context should be explained before being shown to younger views. I don’t think cutting these elements out for later releases is appropriate and is as damaging to it artistically as colorizing it was in 1989. I am quite fond of what Disney Plus has been doing by presenting its older films with these elements unedited with a mere disclaimer that explains that these attitudes are outdated and are as wrong then as they are now. Much of our accomplishments in art and literature is sadly mired by these issues and I think we as a society have matured enough to look at them and accept them for what they are without resorting to censorship and erasure. Looking at it I can praise the film for its accomplishments and condemn it for its flaws.
King Kong like any piece of art is several things. It’s an entertaining adventure story reminiscent of the works of H. Rider Haggard and Burroughs. It’s a special effects pioneer. And it’s a sad document of 1930’s sexual and racial attitudes. It is not an ethical failing to praise a film for its high points while also condemning its low ones.

Heidi (1937)

Rating 2.5/4

Shirley Temple is not everyone’s cup of tea. Many people I know find her work entirely too saccharine and they wince when she appears on screen. They’ve become unused to innocence in movies.
I don’t personally have a problem with Shirley Temple, but I also am able to identify her for what she was and accept it. She’s a heartstring tugger. A patented guaranteed box office draw by simply being cute. She laughs, she cries, she sings, she dances. I think my sister had a toy like her once.

It’s all subjective, but her type of saccharine appeals to some people, myself included. I am a father to two girls of my own and I am not offended by cute.

The 1937 adaptation of Johanna Spyri’s novel – one of dozens – was a later entry in Temple’s child acting career when the studios began wondering if she would soon age out of the sort of roles she was making bank at. However, she continued to be a success with critics and audiences during this period nonetheless.

Heidi is a decent entry in the Shirley Temple canon; not as memorable as Curly Top or as funny as Bright Eyes, but decent.
Temple, playing the titular lead, is sent to live with her grandfather (Jean Hersholt) in the Swiss Alps by her greedy, ill-mannered aunt Dede (Mady Christians) who doesn’t want to care for her after Heidi’s parents pass away. The townsfolk fear the old man who is said to be ill-tempered and isolated himself from society. He is only grumpy for a few minutes of screentime before suddenly growing to love Heidi and show her affection. Many movies from the 30s were edited to favor double-billing in theaters and thus the film is simply too short to portray a change of heart well. Hersholt plays the role less like an angry hermit and more like an old man who has been alone too long and needed someone to give him joy and a reason to live. This he does well and his fear and desperation when he discovers she has been taken away is effectively heartbreaking. Custody battles are painful for everyone.
Heidi is kidnapped from her grandfather’s home by the same aunt from before who was offered cash to deliver a playmate to an invalid girl name Klara (Marcia Mae Jones) in Germany. It makes for a delightful second act in which Heidi is forced to acclimate to snooty high society and forms a friendship with Klara. Sadly these scenes begin to weaken toward the end resorting to tone deaf slapstick involving an escaped monkey which is ignorantly referred to as a gorilla by the butler.
The third act further bastardizes the plot with an over the top chase sequence via sleigh when the grandfather comes to Germany to rescue her from an evil servant (Mary Nash) who tries to sell Heidi to some gypsies. If that sounds stupid to you, that’s only because it is.

All in all Heidi doesn’t work in every aspect, but it is entertaining if you don’t need to be convinced too much by the characters and story.

Breathless (1960)

Rating 3.5/4

“After all I am an asshole,” says Michel introducing himself. He speaks with resignation and without apology. The world has reached its verdict about him and he doesn’t disagree. And why shouldn’t he? Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is a thoroughly selfish and unlikable individual and cannot see himself being anything else. He steals cars, objectifies women, robs people in public restrooms, and mistreats everyone.
Michel idolizes Humphrey Bogart and plays it cool: wearing sunglasses indoors and rarely goes without a cigarette in his mouth. In Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, Belmondo became an instant icon of the French New Wave bringing classic Hollywood cool to young French audiences of the 60s.
He is in love with Patricia (Jean Seberg) an American girl who is rebelling against the expectations of society in her own way. She is smart and independent, but doesn’t seem to like it much. She confides in a friend that she is uncomfortable with her freedom and we see her become unhealthily drawn to Michel’s rude and narcissistic exterior. He tells her he knows he loves her because he wants to sleep with her. She knows this is nonsense, but lets it slide because she wants to sleep with him too. She quotes Faulkner at him, “between grief and nothing I will take grief.” Michel rejects this calling grief a compromise and says he wants all or nothing. In the end we see which of the two he receives.
In a lengthy bedroom scene Patricia’s every attempt to culture and civilize him is rebuffed by his apathy and he constantly interrupts any serious conversation by asking her to take her clothes off. Eventually she says to him, “We look each other in the eyes and I don’t know why.” Michel provides her excitement and not much else.

In the film’s opening Michel steals a car and goes for a ride. He monologues, occasionally looking at the camera toward the audience; and here we get our first clear look at his character. He expresses a number of harsh opinions about anything that is not remotely on his wavelength, refuses to pick up a pair of female hitchers because he thinks they are not attractive enough, and plays with a gun he finds in the glovebox as if it was a toy.
He is stopped by a policeman but gets away when the officer is killed. We don’t see Michel commit the crime. In a series of jump cuts a gunshot is heard, the policeman collapses, and Michel is then seen running away on foot. In Paris he drags Patricia into the mess as he tries desperately seeking men who owe him money so he can fund passage to Italy for himself and her. He steals a few more cars, beats up man in a restroom for the cash in his pocket, and cheats a taxi driver out of his fare. Patricia protects him by lying to investigators who are looking for him.

I am uncertain that Michel is guilty of the crime he is being accused of. The movie spends plenty of time after the murder showing us that even if he hadn’t he is certainly capable of it. After all, he is an asshole as he said himself. Every heinous and reprehensible act he commits is depicted clearly accept for the murder. For society and even Michel himself it doesn’t really matter. Society made its judgments. He is just as aware of his shortcomings as anyone. He just doesn’t care. It’s all the same when the world already hates him whether he did it or not. What he does after the murder won’t be any different no matter what his guilt. In the end his only feelings are of exhaustion and disgust.

Breathless takes a unique approach to its cinematography using custom film in a handheld camera that presents a distinctly documentarian look. The camera is never still for a moment, subtly moving even during still shots like in many of Scorsese’s films.
The scenes of dialogue are subjected to frequent jump cuts, sometimes between every line. Time lapses happen between the characters’ statements even when the next line directly follows the previous one. This was a last minute editorial decision made in post-production and it has been widely debated by viewers for decades. My own interpretation is that the time in which these conversations take place are being deliberately made unimportant by Godard. Different times, same conversation. Michel has given the same pillow talk and used the same lines to seduce women on multiple occasions. He is after all, an asshole.

Breathless – released in France as À bout de souffle – has become immensely popular among young theater goers since its release in 1960. There is a reason for this. It’s rough, raw, and hideously brazen in its honesty. The universe doesn’t blare trumpets declaring objectively that one person or the next is bad or good. People can only see their behavior whatever it may be and make their own judgments. Michel and Patricia are loathsome to many. Either for being unidentifiable or hitting too close to home. Michel is cool, but also a jerk with deep-seated insecurities and completely devoid of empathy or remorse. Patricia is infuriating. She’s beautiful. She’s clever. And every choice she makes is terrible and costs her more and more of her dignity and self-respect. She’s neither a feminist icon nor a stand-in for misogynistic ideals. She is wholly herself for better or worse.

I don’t like anyone in this movie. I don’t like what happens in this movie. Listening to Michel’s putdowns and enduring his selfish attitude is difficult at times. But people like him do exist. And Godard masterfully gives us a realistic and uncomfortable look at them without awkward moralizing or offensive apathy. I didn’t have fun watching the film. I wasn’t supposed to. And that’s what makes it a masterpiece.

Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

4/4

The Empire Strikes Back is flawless. Not many movies are. Only a couple are released per decade really.

After the original Star Wars film released in 1977 it was a massive success with critics and audiences alike, and no film since had such a groundbreaking impact on the future of cinema. Fans, young and old, eagerly waited three years for the next installment in the Saga and what often happens when hype is built up for a sequel is disappointment. Sequels typically never live up to the originals because filmmakers put every bit of their talent into their first pictures and second entries are almost always an afterthought. They become obligatory cashcows bringing back familiar settings and characters with no serious attempt at telling a good story.

And yet, The Empire Strikes Back is flawless. It improves upon the original in every aspect of its production: it’s more tightly edited, employs even better and more groundbreaking special effects, has stronger performances from its cast, and is overall better written. The fans waited patiently (and impatiently) for three years and they got what they expected and more.

In the last film the final shot is of our heroes facing the camera happy and celebrant. This one ends with Luke, Leia, and the droids facing away. Gazing at a distant galaxy, comforting one another; hopeful and fearful. They’ve been separated from their friends, the future is uncertain, and the best they can do is wonder, looking away to their destinies. It ends on a strong note, but not a happy one.

The Empire Strikes Back – directed by Irving Kershner and written by Lawrence Kasdan and Leigh Brackett – is the darkest chapter in the entire 9-film saga. More than a few will argue in favor of Revenge of the Sith, but that movie cannot by its very nature as a prequel ever fill us with the sort of tension and doubt that this one does. At least assuming you are viewing them in the correct order.

The film opens three years after A New Hope and the Rebel Alliance is now on a brand new hidden base on the frozen wasteland world of Hoth. After they are discovered by the evil Empire and viciously attacked the remaining forces scatter.
Their mission is to rendezvous at a distant location in space, but before they do our heroes have unfinished business. Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) is sent by the ghost of Obi-Wan Kenobi (Sir Alec Guinness) to find an elusive Jedi Master named Yoda to complete his training as a Jedi Knight. Han Solo (Harrison Ford), Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher), Chewie (Peter Mayhew), and the two droids Artoo (Kenny Baker, Ben Burtt) and Threepio (Anthony Daniels) need to stop for gas.
The evil Dark Lord of the Sith, Darth Vader (James Earl Jones, David Prowse) is obsessed with finding Luke Skywalker in the hopes of turning him to the Dark Side of the Force and make him an evil Sith Lord like himself. Vader can somehow sense Luke’s presence in the Force much like he could with his old master Obi-Wan. Unbeknownst to the protagonists it is this perception which motivated the Imperial attack on Hoth.
Luke begins his training on the boggy world of Dagobah under Yoda who is a two-foot high green little goblin voiced and performed by Muppet-alumnus, Frank Oz. Yoda introduces himself as a playful, mischievous urchin annoying Luke and Artoo both with juvenile pranks and mocking comments. Luke tells him, “I’m looking for a great warrior.” Yoda laughs. “Wars not make one great,” he says. His mirth and behavior exposes Luke’s deep-seated anger issues and lack of patience. It bestows humility on him without which his descent to the Dark Side would be all the easier. I think many Star Wars fans I have seen on the internet could benefit from a weekend on Dagobah with Yoda.
Yoda is a masterful technical achievement. As a mere puppet his texture and look is decidedly realistic and he was designed to feature a whole range of emotions with his eyes and face unseen previously in movie-puppetry.

Han and Leia’s story is further developed in the movie in the meantime. They bicker like an old married couple in a way that is reminiscent of old 1930’s rom-com romances. He’s brash, arrogant, and fatally attracted to the woman who annoys him so much. She’s fierce, independent, unintimidated, and fatally attracted to the man that she imagines to be beneath her.
The hyperdrive on the Millennium Falcon is damaged and they are unable to make it to the rendezvous without making repairs. Han recruits the aid of an old smuggler buddy named Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams) to help them. They go to Cloud City – a veritable castle in the sky floating over a gas giant – where Lando betrays them to the Empire. Vader deliberately tortures them knowing that Luke would sense it in the Force and come rushing to the rescue.
What follows is several grim happenings that are far removed from the heroic devil-may-care adventures of the previous film. Han is left incapacitated and captured by the space mafia and Luke is left physically maimed and devastated by the revelation that Darth Vader is his own true father. His world and pie-eyed optimism were dealt a singular blow and he never recovers or becomes the same person he was again.

What The Empire Strikes Back does is force its characters to grow up. It’s a much more psychological film than the other entries (save for perhaps the much-maligned The Last Jedi). The stakes get raised and there are serious losses. No one walks away unscarred and altered forever. The movie is about trauma and hope without guarantees. Simply being the good guy is not enough anymore.

Irving Kershner is a better director of actors and can get better performances out of his actors than George Lucas can, who takes a backseat from director’s duty and contributes instead to the story and provides creative input on the visuals. We get a much better film as a result with a tight script by Kasdan and Brackett.

Lucasfilm and ILM also had three years to further improve the special effects technology which makes for a spectacle miles ahead of the original film. John Williams also provides us with the best of the nine film scores composed for the Saga with several of them – The Imperial March included – having entered the pantheon of great classical pieces of music. His music is like that of a 19th century ballet and it sets the epic and dramatic tone of the film throughout.

I could keep going, but the fact is there is not a technical or dramatic aspect of The Empire Strikes Back that isn’t done perfectly. Really, after half a dozen or more paragraphs I can still summarize everything into one word. Flawless.

Arrowsmith (1931)

Rating 2/4

Art is at its best when it isn’t rushed. Otherwise what could be great becomes merely mediocre. And that is precisely what happened to John Ford’s 1931 picture, Arrowsmith. It’s a sad what-could-have-been with fine acting and excellent cinematography mired by a fast pace that comes at the expense of the story.

Based on the Sinclair Lewis novel, Arrowsmith tells the story of an ambitious country doctor (Ronald Colman) who struggles to balance his career fighting infectious diseases with his marriage to his longsuffering wife, Leora (Helen Hayes). She’s spunky, enthusiastic, and charms him with her wit. He’s noble, eager, and humble in his dealings with European professionals who seek his talents fighting plague in the tropics.

We first meet Martin Arrowsmith studying up on Gray’s Anatomy being told that the best doctors need only that book, the Bible, and Shakespeare to be well-rounded in their craft. It’s silly advice and Arrowsmith never takes it in the movie and the character who says it to him never reappears again. He later (and by later I mean in the very next scene) introduces himself to eminent bacteriologist, Dr. Gottlieb (A. E. Anson) who tells him he won’t take him on as a research apprentice until he finishes school. Years later (once again in the very next scene) he is finished with school and ready to serve. He meets Leora, a young nurse scrubbing hospital floors as a punishment for smoking on the job. He asks her out on a date and at the restaurant he proposes to her. If this seems a bit hasty, don’t worry, in a few moments the dialogue reveals they have been already dating for a couple of years.
And here is where I started seeing the problem that persists throughout the whole picture. The film constantly jumps ahead in time with only hasty dialogue explaining the passage of time. When it is not simply confusing it is robbing the story of any dramatic tension.
His life with Leora is always saccharine and happy and every moment of strife or conflict; any obstacle and hurdle they encounter is immediately rectified and resolved by the very next scene. Sometimes even in the very same scene.

Martin declines Gottlieb’s offer to work under him as a researcher in New York because the salary is not enough to support him and his wife. He goes into the country to work as a practical physician: pulling children’s teeth, treating sore throats, and even developing a serum to cure sick cattle. I never saw him charge payment and whenever the subject is brought up he nobly says “don’t worry about it.” I really don’t know why he declined Gottlieb’s offer then.
After his wife miscarries and becomes unhappy in the country he takes his family to New York after all, where his talents as a bacteriologist lands him in the tropics to test out a serum for bubonic plague on the population. What follows is a poorly written third act that tries to tackle research ethics in a way that I found offensive. He is instructed to test the serum on a selection of the population and withhold it from the other half to test its effectiveness. This is profoundly illogical. All of these people are ill and withholding the serum would prove nothing. The ethical question of experimenting in this fashion is brought up and then dropped with a whimper. What we get instead is a diabolical white savior plot that tells us that those who were outraged by the experiment were just being unreasonable. When the “big bad city folk” who opposed the experiment show up at his camp to receive the serum themselves they are portrayed as sycophantic hypocrites who got scared and came running to our hero. This is some of the most reprehensible moralizing I have seen in a movie. Tacked on to this is an implied affair Martin has with a woman named Joyce (a sadly wasted performance by Myrna Loy) that comes out of seemingly nowhere and is easy to miss and misinterpret. We get a scene with Martin in beautifully shot low-key lighting smoking a cigarette outside her room. She changes into a nightgown before the scene cuts to black. Another leering glance from her and a brief parting scene at the end is all that is further developed from this.

I mentioned the lighting above because that is where Arrowsmith’s strengths lie. Low-key lighting, sihouettes, and shadow terrifically capture the characters’ moods in moments of doubt. Ray June’s cinematography here was nominated for an Academy Award and it is merited.
Another strong point is the acting. Helen Hayes is terrific in here. Portraying exuberance, wit, love, grief, and humor; I could see the woman Martin fell in love with. She did not win or even get nominated for her acting in this movie, but I cannot complain since she still won that year for her role in The Sin of Madelon Claudet anyway.

I would have appreciated Arrowsmith more had it not been for the pacing and plot. The third act is morally questionable and quick and convenient resolutions to every conflict take away any investment I could have had in the story.

I read somewhere that producer Samuel Goldwyn allowed director John Ford – best known for his work with John Wayne – to helm Arrowsmith on the condition that he not do any drinking during production. Apparently Ford deliberately rushed through making the film so he could get back to it. I hate to say this, but maybe Goldwyn should have let him have a cheat day.

Star Wars (1977)

Rating 4/4

Star Wars since its release in 1977 has become one of those quintessential films like The Wizard of Oz or Snow White which everyone has seen and has entered into the collective consciousness of people all around the world. It’s as recognizable as Hamlet and Tom Sawyer and Hercules and Moses. And being a life-long die hard Star Wars fan and after the brand has expanded upon itself the last 40 years with sequels, prequels, comics, and novels it’s not easy to just review it purely as a movie from 1977. Star Wars is now a phenomenal mythic enterprise and viewing the film simply as a late seventies sci-fi hit created by the director of American Graffiti is not needed anymore.
Which is why I am not going to review it at all. What I would rather do instead is take a few moments of your time and discuss the phenomenon that this movie became and hopefully convey what it means to me personally.
I was 15 years too late to see this movie when it first came out in theaters; seeing it for the first time as a second generation fan in the early 90’s when I was about six years old. I have no recollection of that first viewing experience and as far as I am concerned Star Wars has always been around.
In my earliest memories Star Wars was already a near and dear thing to me. I played with the Kenner and Hasbro action figures, illiterately leafed through my uncle’s collection of comics, and eagerly picked up as much knowledge of the lore as I could. With the amount of affection I had for Star Wars, and how much space it took in my playtime and imagination; first seeing this movie must have been as close to a spiritual experience as I am willing to believe in.
I could drone on some more about how much Star Wars changed everything, but I would be being disingenuous. I never saw it change anything. Things had already been changed by it around the time I was born. The adults and teens who first saw it 47 years ago probably cannot understand how much my generation takes it for granted. It’s like the existence of automobiles, going to church, or just the presence of movies in general. A point in time in which it did not exist is beyond my comprehension.

But Star Wars did change everything. They say hindsight is 20/20 and I don’t disagree. I especially agree when I wasn’t even around back then in the first place. It baffles me how so many people in Hollywood had such little faith in Star Wars’ production. A quick glance at any of the making of features in print or on film will show constant references to risk-taking and predictions of failure. When I look at this movie I wonder how anyone in their right mind could have thought it was going to be a flop. Living in a time when movies like Star Wars are a dime a dozen and oversaturate the box office it’s hard to imagine the late 70’s when more serious pictures were being produced and science fiction/fantasy movies were frequent critical and financial failures. Believe it or not, sci-fi movies used to not be guaranteed blockbusters and many of them were your typical tax-shelter projects similar to what we are seeing being produced for the SyFy channel and Netflix today.

I won’t waste any more words on Star Wars changing cinema since we all know it did. What I find more interesting and less talked about is how much it changed George Lucas himself.
If one were to patiently sit through his early student films from the 60’s followed by his debut, THX 1138, you see the obvious influences and overall tone of his work. Lucas was making films for the anti-war counter-culture youth of America: fed up with Vietnam, fed up with Watergate, fed up with segregation and Jim Crow laws, and just plain fed up with The Man altogether.
He made THX as a Huxley-esque attack on authoritarian government and American Graffiti was a revisit to teenage life in California before Vietnam.
Star Wars was something different. Something special. Yeah, there is an echo of anti-imperialism in it, but much of it was written and produced with a more basic and ergo more important motivation. With his third film, Lucas left counter-culturalism in the background and sought instead to revitalize for younger moviegoers spirituality and myth in a language they could understand. And miraculously its success overshadowed its ambitions. Star Wars has achieved George Lucas’s goal more than he could have anticipated when he first began writing it in 1974. Probably even more than he anticipated when he was actually making the film which was fraught with budget problems, uncooperative cinematographers and crews, cynical execs having no faith in its success, supply problems, and labor difficulties of every kind…
But successful it was. Like the myths Lucas was drawing from, Star Wars became a natural part of our culture. The Force, wookiees, Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, the Millennium Falcon, and even Jar-Jar Binks are as familiar and recognizable to us as Thor, Zeus, and the Garden of Eden. Many of its characters, creatures, planets, and technology have become proverbial and require no exposition when used to make a point or reference. Many of my generation learned “May the Force be with you” before we learned to say “Amen.” The lightsaber is as iconic as Excalibur or Mjolnir. It would be self-indulgent to go on, but I could for a thousand more paragraphs if I wanted to.

George Lucas would not direct another film again until 1999 with the release of The Phantom Menace. In the meantime he produced and wrote less of the counter-culture material that characterized his earlier work and focused more on writing the remaining movies of the Star Wars trilogy and Indiana Jones as well as championing the progress of special effects in cinema with ILM. In 1997, two years before the release of his first prequel, the Star Wars trilogy was re-released in theaters in the form of Special Editions with the films’ negatives cleaned up and restored, enhanced special effects inserts, and occasionally a few cut scenes put back in. Many of these changes were controversial and ironically helped create some new proverbial myths of their own. “Han Shot First” has become nearly as recognizable as “May the Force be with you.”

You may have begun to notice that I have been so far speaking more about Star Wars as a saga and critically successful franchise than I am about the 1977 picture itself and there is a reason for this. Any review I could write about this movie would add nothing that hasn’t been already said and said better than I can. To be frank, if you haven’t seen Star Wars, nothing in this piece is directed to you. Which is why I must reiterate this is not a review. There are not enough people living under a rock for such a review to be useful and if they emerge I am not so vain as to think they would come flocking to this blog to see if Star Wars is worth watching or not.
It is, and you should go watch it again sometime. Not because I said so, but because you and I already both know that you should.