The Killing

Several character types are enlisted for an intricate robbery of the money room at a California horse track but the plan starts to unravel when the greedy, disloyal wife of one the culprits begins to poke her nose in. Presented in disjointed time at breakneck speed, extremely hard-nosed, and with a modern feel, Stanley Kubrick’s crisply shot and edited early work stands among the cream of other noirs produced during the period. In a cast of great faces and tough supporters, Sterling Hayden is a standout as the no nonsense leader, Elisha Cook, Jr. is memorable as the pushover counter worker, and Marie Windsor is excellent as his nefarious wife. The finale is jaw-dropping with a perfect ending and closing line.

**** out of ****

A Man Escaped

A Resistance member (Francois Letterier) is arrested by the Gestapo, charged with sabotage and sentenced to die, and placed in a concentration camp in Lyon, where over 7,000 perished during the war. There he painstakingly sweeps his cell to develop means of escape, meanwhile acting as an impetus of hope to his fellow prisoners. Robert Bresson’s A Man Escape is an exacting, inward looking meditation, both beautifully and meticulously shot while generating quiet and palpable suspense. Nonactor Letterier is tremendous and reflective as the saintly inmate.

**** out of ****

Baby Doll

A middle aged failed cotton farmer (Karl Malden) lives in his dilapidated plantation house with his flirtatious, childlike 19-year old wife (Carroll Baker), with whom the marriage has never been consummated. When an immigrant rival (Eli Wallach) shows off his latest acquistion, a state of the art cotton gin, the wash-out sees fit to sabotage his operation leaving Baby Doll as an instrument for revenge. Eli Kazan's racy, scandalized, and very funny realization of Tennessee Williams' only original screenplay was strikingly filmed on flavorful Mississippi locations and features an atypically outlandish performance from Malden.

The Brave One

A Mexican peasant boy rescues and raises a bull calf and is stirred into action when his beloved pet is sold into a bullfighting program and trained to fight the country’s top matador. Written anonymously by Dalton Trumbo while on the Hollywood Blacklist, The Brave One is simplistic, often cloying and overwrought and shot with an awful, faded Technicolor process though still holds immense appeal and earned sentiment. The ending, with inter-cutting between the bullfight and kid scurrying to procure a presidential pardon, is stirring.

*** ½ out of ****

Bob le Flambeur

An aged noble gambling junkie (Roger Duchesne) assembles a motley team of underworld sorts to rob a casino and sees it through even as the police start to catch on. You can palpably feel the Hollywood noirish influences on Jeanne-Pierre Melville's Bob le Flambeur (Bob the Gambler) but you can also discern its impact, both the immediate one concerning style and substance on the French New Wave and also in the longer run on buddy crime pictures, Ocean's 11 coming foremost to mind. And though, much of Melville's film lies before it and in its wake, it is its own, creating a nostalgic, laconic feel, wonderfully incorporating irony, and offering a pious Duchesne in a very likable lead performance. Also, the finale is brilliant.

*** 1/2 out of ****

The Apu Trilogy

In this series of films, which consist of Pather Panchali, Aparajito, and The World of Apu, life is viewed through the eyes of a young, penniless Bengalese boy who loses his sister and then moves to the big city before again suffering the loss of his father, mother, and, as an adult, his wife, all the while succeeding as a student and attempting to stake his own claim in the world. From the writings of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Satyaji Ray's The Apu Trilogy is a succession of gracefully made films that capture a harsh, tragic, and impoverished life while also noting the joys of childhood and maturation, often through keen and beautifully poetic observation. The films positioned Ray on the international map and are made with a unique, fluid, and seemingly effortless hand.

**** out of *****

The Searchers

A Confederate soldier (John Wayne) with an intense hatred of Indians and whose whereabouts after the close of the war have remained mysterious, finally returns home to the family ranch after several years. There he helps ward off a Comanche attack which leaves several of his family members dead and his niece (Natalie Wood) kidnapped. Setting off with his nephew (Jeffrey Hunter) on an expansive, years long search, when they finally track down the girl it appears she has adopted the ways of her kidnappers and becomes a target for her maddened uncle. One of the most regarded of Westerns by John Ford, the genre’s most revered architect, The Searchers is bold and uncompromising, both in presentation and in Wayne’s iconic performance. The film boasts magnificent photography, incredible location shooting, a colorful cast of supporters, and that unforgettable final shot.

**** out of ****

Moby Dick

John Huston's filmization of Herman Melville's seminal novel, scripted by Ray Bradbury, detailing the foreboding journey of the Pequod, a Nantucket whaling ship, and its obssessive captain's biblical grudge with a massive, elusive white whale is made with technical and directorial prowess and offers a colorful supporting cast, yet is somewhat muddled and features a badly miscast Gregory Peck in a turgid performance as Ahab. After some tremendous opening scenes, including a remarkable cameo by Orson Welles playing a preacher, and some exciting whaling scenes, the film settles down becoming somewhat muddled leading up unto a disappointing showdown.

** 1/2 out of ****

3 Films on Vincent and Theo van Gogh

 Vincente Minnelli's Lust for Life, Paul Cox's Vincent and Robert Altman's Vincent and Theo are three films that all take the same basic story--the passion and madness of the renowned and beleaguered Dutch master and his relationship to his devoted art dealing brother--present them from different angles, and ultimately serve as extraordinary complements of each other. Lust for Life features considerable access to Van Gogh's paintings, often shown in widescreen closeup, and also the forceful and controlled performance from Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn's memorable, Oscar winning turn as the tortured artist's mentor Paul Gauguin. Cox's film is a documentary which presents footage of Van Gogh's supposed tumultuous journey, much of which is set in the idyllic South of France, and features John Hurt, ideally cast, reading Vincent's poetically revealing letters to his brother Theo. Altman's film stays true to its title devoting just about as much time to the less heralded Van Gogh sibling, has a dark tone and tempo meshed with the director's usual offbeat approach, and contains a snarlingly manic and remarkable performance from Tim Roth as Vincent and an equally well realized one from Paul Rhys as his counterpart.

Written on the Wind

A Texas oil heir (Robert Stack) galavants with his executive assistant and childhood friend (Rock Hudson) but their relationship takes a hit when the drunken playboy marries a secretary (Lauren Bacall) his pal had his eyes on, and is steered towards tragedy when his lusty kid sister (Dorothy Malone) makes a play for the same friend who was also her childhood sweetheart. On the surface, Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind is a tawdry 1950s soaper but upon closer examination reveals cleverly disguised references to impotence, sexual promiscuity, buried homosexuality and not to mention the usual betrayal, blackmail, and murder, all presented assuredly on an incredibly lush tableau. All the stars are perfectly suited to their roles with Malone even taking home an Oscar for her wide eyed, unhinged performance.

Forbidden Planet

Several centuries into the future, a space crew is dispatched to a foreign planet to determine the fate of another unit that went missing two decades prior. Upon arrival they meet a friendly, impeccably programmed, and super intelligent robot but receive a stern, ominous warning from the colony's leader (Walter Pidgeon) as it soon becomes apparent that he is harnessing a deadly secret. Forbidden Planet is a cheesy though quite well done B science fiction picture, ahead of its time, and containing fun special effects and performances while also featuring a rousing denouement and powerful message.

War and Peace (1956 and 1967)

Probably the two biggest cinematic assemblies of Leo Tolstoy's mountainous novel, which detailed the interweaving lives of several Russian families during the Napoleonic Wars, occurred first out of Hollywood in 1956 and then in a Russian adaptation of a no less mammoth scope in 1966. The American version, with marquee names like King Vidor in the helm, Jack Cardiff manning the cameras, and Henry Fonda and Audrey Hepburn in front of it, has gone largely forgotten despite some excellent photography, a fine performance from Fonda, and a generally well done treatment.

Sergey Bondarchuk's version, which has the greater historical reputation but has been about as equally consigned these days, set the record at the time for production costs, extras used, and a slew of other overages in a shoot that spanned several years. Despite its impressive scope, I found it to be murky, muddled, and uninvolving, with the saving grace coming in the form of performers Lyudmila Saveleva and Bondarchuk himself, who fill the same roles played by Hepburn and Fonda. One of the main issues, especially with the 1966 version (which did go on to win the Foreign Film Oscar and international acclaim) is that despite the fact of the sheer length of the novel, much of it is rhetoric or essay, all of which is not exactly fit for the screen and certainly not a two and a half hour movie or a seven hour miniseries.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 and 1978)

Ken McCarthy, star of the original film, cameoing here in the remake

Foreign invaders manifested in plant form begin to duplicate the human body as soon as the host enters a sleep state, eradicating the original frame and forming a race of emotionless drones. In Don Siegel's original 1956 version, which was concocted as an allegory in response to anti-communist fervor, Kevin McCarthy stars as a small town physician who begins to piece together these mysterious ongoings. When the film was remade by Philip Kaufman in 1978, Donald Sutherland took over the lead playing a San Francisco health inspector in a similar predicament. Both films are intense and wonderfully executed and also function well on their own terms. Siegel's original is a silly, sci-fi 50s B movie played straight and containing great photography, some genuine scares, and a memorable final scene. Kaufman's is a skillful update benefitting from his filmmaking acumen, some new twists on the material  and an outstanding performance from Sutherland.

Around the World in Eighty Days

British cad Phileas Fogg (David Niven) bets the other stuffed shirts at his social club that, due to the rapid advances in transportation of the time, he can traverse the globe in no more than eighty days. Travelling with his servant (Cantinflas), he begins a raucous journey that takes him in a hot air ballon,  to a Spanish bullfight, through the jungles of India, and the streets of Hong Kong and San Francisco, before engaging marauding Indians on a passenger train in the Wild West. Michael Todd's "Around the World in 80 Days", a grand but fundamentally empty spectacle he was able to march all the way to a Best Picture Oscar, you can see a lot of today's big budget dreck stemming from this film. In an overlongh adaptation of Jules Verne's 1873 novel directed by Michael Anderson, you never get the sense the characters are partaking in an arduous journey. Rather, you get a lighthearted romp, stretched out to three hours featuring a slew of impressive (Frank Sinatra, Marlene Dietrich, Buster Keaton, Peter Lorre to name a few), but sidetracking cameos.

The Teahouse of the August Moon

In a small village in Okinawa, as part of the U.S. military's postwar reconstruction of Japan, a by-the-book army captain (Glen Ford) is charged to build a school for the locals. Aided by a translator (Marlon Brando), the people prove wiser than the American officials give them credit for and trick the officer into building what they really want: a fully functioning teahouse. It is a little jarring at first (and shocking I might add) seeing Brando playing a Japanese translator in what could be described as a stereotypical portrayal. He quickly proves quite comically adept and delivers what is ultimately a very humanistic performance in Daniel Mann's very funny filmization of John Patrick's play film. Glen Ford is also in fine form also as the perpetual lughead and Paul Ford is also quite good playing his commanding officer.

The Court Jester

The King of England has been overthrown and the rightful infant heir to the crown lies with a band of merry revelers led by the rebel outlaw the Black Fox. Plotting to take back the castle and reinstate the proper successor, he leaves the babe in the charge of his calamitous but resourceful minstrel (Danny Kaye) and a beautiful fellow rebel (Glynis Johns). Soon though the plan becomes altered as they happen upon the castle bound court jester and, after his detention, the minstrel takes his place and attempts himself to infiltrate the palace. "The Court Jester" is a delightfully and lively Technicolor romp centering on a wonderful comic performance from Kaye, who in addition to his difficult role contributes several memorable songs to the picture. A wonderful cast also assists Kaye including the luminous Johns, Cecil Parker as the clueless pretender to the throne, Basil Rathbone as the malevolent brains behind the takeover, Angela Lansbury as a lusty princess, and John Carradine as the duped jester. The film contains many memorable sequences, including a boudoir scene between Kaye and Lansbury, in addition to a knight training one which features the famous pellet with the poison bit. "The Court Jester" is a disarming film, made at a time when comedies could actually contain thought, inspiration, life, and o yeah, actual laughs.

Somebody Up There Likes Me

Rocco Barbella was a scrappy street kid from Brooklyn who was never given a chance from the word go. With a drunken failed prizefighter father and a supportive yet frail mother, he was in and out of reformatories for most of his childhood. After being released from prison and drafted into the army, he went AWOL and stumbled upon a gym where he changed his name to Rocky Graziano and was able to channel his hate into boxing and, with the love of a young woman, became a world boxing champion. Robert Wise’s Somebody Up There Likes Me, a biopic on the early life of Rocky Graziano, was Paul Newman’s second role and was the film that introduced him as a top star. Replacing James Dean after his untimely death, Newman really delved into the role and delivered a high caliber performance that was really unlike the rest of his subsequent work, portraying Graziano as a headstrong tough guy. Supporting players Pier Angeli, as his sweet and loving wife and Everett Sloane, as his long suffering manager contribute fine work as well. The film was shot on New York City streets in beautifully stark black and white cinematography that won the Oscar. With Somebody Up There Likes Me, you can see the roots of great future boxing pictures, such as the buffoonlike likability of Graziano or the tenderness of his relationship with his girl evident in Rocky or the gritty black and white fight scenes which surely inspired Martin Scorsese when he made Raging Bull (he does commentary on the film’s DVD). Somebody Up There Likes Me is a fine sports biopic thanks to the Paul Newman’s amiability, the unexpected humor in Ernest Lehman’s script, and the fine direction of Robert Wise.