The Learning Tree

A principled black teen in 1920s rural Kansas looks forward to leaving his close-minded community, while savoring its life lessons and positives aspects, while witnessing a headstrong peer being driven towards a life of crime and poverty. In adapting his own autobiographical novel, Gordon Parks was involved in just about every aspect of the film's creation, including producing, writing, directing, and scoring the music while at the same time becoming the first black director of a major studio picture. That being said, The Learning Tree is an involving message movie with familiar elements that goes its own route, sometimes explicitly, which must have been eye-opening in its era. A genuine cast helps too.

*** out of ****

Rocco and His Brothers

An impoverished, stereotypical Italian mother moves her four sons from the country to Milan both to be near her eldest boy and to seek a better life. There, the two eldest (a cherubic Alain Delon and a debased Renato Salvatori) find success in the boxing ring and their lives torn to shreds over a stunningly gorgeous, reformed ex-prostitute (Annie Girardot). Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers is a sweeping, powerful, tonally shifting late period neorealism with great performances all around two second act unforgettable violent sequences involving Salvatori and Girardot.

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

Inherit the Wind

"He who troubles his own house will inherit wind, and the foolish will be servant to the wisehearted."

-Proverbs 11:29

A dramatization of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial as a backwoods school teacher finds himself under arrest after deliberately teaching evolution and knowing the consequences. He finds himself defended by the most reputed and aggressive defense attorney in the country (Spencer Tracy) as the local religious majority rallies behind a long-winded three-time Presidential candidate (Frederic March). Made with Stanley Kramer's typically overlong progressive moralizing, Inherit the Wind is nonetheless intelligently written and just as salient today as it was when released or set, and even retains much of its edge. A smarmy Gene Kelly is badly miscast in the H.L. Mencken role and exists solely for comic relief and to push the story along but Tracy and March both have their moments of humor and power.

*** out of ****

Purple Noon

Having been commissioned by a wealthy couple to convince their son to return to America,  Tom Ripley (Alain Delon) instead cavorts across Europe with his aimless charge all the while living off his dime and mimicking his manner of speech, dress, signature, and what have you for more sinister and calculated purposes. Rene Clement's treatment of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, while not always engrossing as it should be, is remarkably shot and edited, the protracted murder scenes particularly standing out. The material was reworked almost forty years later by Anthony Minghella and starring Matt Damon which I think I prefer, although this version is appropriately and somewhat surprisingly even more cold blooded.

*** out ****

School for Scoundrels

A perpetual loser discovers a school specializing in "lifesmanship" and, after enrolling, finds himself being learned in the art of sabotage, seduction and one upsmanship. The Elstree Studio's production of Robert Hamer's School for Scoundrels is a very British and often funny film which doesn't know when to leave good enough alone with many gags dragged out too long. As for the cast, Ian Carmichael is amiable, Jeanette Scott is gorgeous, and Terry-Thomas and Alastair Sim are hysterical.

** 1/2 out of ****

The Virgin Spring

A beautiful and pious maiden leaves her country home making her way through the woods to church when she is accosted and murdered by three vile brothers, who happen to find themselves at their victim's home and subject to her kin's mercy. Ingmar Bergman's adaptation of a 13th century folk ballad (which has been reworked several times as horror fodder that totally misses the point) is haunting, violent, and brooding, filmed with pristine black and white photography with many memorable sequences, the finest being its striking ending.

**** out of ****

The Apartment

C.C. "Bud" Baxter (Jack Lemmon) is a pencil pushing number cruncher in a sea of pencil pushing number crunchers at a top insurance agency but he has a leg up on the competition which will surely secure him a spot in middle management: a key to his flat which he lends out to supervisors for late night trysts. Soon he falls for an elevator girl (Shirley MacLaine), another wounded, lonely soul, and when it becomes apparent that she is involved with the CEO (Fred MacMurray), Baxter is forced to confront his love life, living arrangement, and work situation. Billy Wilder's The Apartment, a personal favorite from the great German emigre's unprecedented career, is so funny, witty, ultra cynical yet so heartfelt that it gets you to the point it hurts. Lemmon offers one of his finest, most tender performances, MacLaine is affecting in an early role, and MacMurray is excellent as the heartless dolt, with the rest of the cast (especially the lecherous members of upper management) in superb form.

**** out of ****

L'Avventura

A social debutante (Lea Massari) goes yachting on the Mediterranean with her lover (Gabriele Ferzetti) and a friend (Monica Vitti) and disappears without a trace during a brief island stop. Almost immediately, the two remaining party members forget their crucial task and begin a physical relationship. Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avenntura (Italian for The Adventure, and kind of a backhanded joke for literal minded movie seekers by title) shook up the film world upon its initial release, enthralling and perplexing half of movie audiences while putting the other half to sleep. This is the epitome of a difficult film. It took two long viewings and some further readings for me to even scrape its surface and gain a tenuous grip on it and still, in the end, I was left feeling as ambivalent about the picture as its vacuous characters.

La Dolce Vita

A week in the life of an aimless and disaffected gossip columnist (Marcello Mastroianni) as he goes from story to story and woman to woman throughout a decaying and decadent Rome, a lifestyle that, despite his dissatisfaction, he continues to cling to. La Dolce Vita contains so many themes, ideas, and notions (modernity vs. tradition, an amoral culture in a ruinous city, paternal sins being passed on,  and the benefits of a normal life compared to a "nightlife" [just to name a few]) and Italian master Federico Fellini does a masterful job of weaving them into a simultaneously beautiful and repulsive web. It features an unforgettable performance from Mastroianni and contains a final scene that belongs in the pantheon of great final scenes. This is difficult material to be sure, with some segments that are a little too protracted, but is as deep, layered, beautiful, and complex as the movies can get.

House of Usher

A city gentleman (Mark Damon) travels to the country home of his betrothed (Myrna Fahey) and encounters her ghoulish, suspicious, and standoffish older brother (Vincent Price) who denies him visitation due to her sickly heath and a family penchant towards madness. House of Usher was the first of Roger Corman's heralded Edgar Allan Poe films of the early 1960s (it's the second I've seen after The Pit and the Pendulum, also excellent) and was written by the great, recently deceased sci-fi writer Richard Matheson, creator of so many great TV episodes and films, who here does a fine job in generally capturing Poe's short story in a succinct movie. House of Usher features great lighting, photography, an extraordinary climax and of course an expectedly great performance from Vincent Price.

Peeping Tom

A disturbed photographer (Karlheinz Bohm), damaged by his over-analytical psychiatrist father during childhood, devises a method of capturing women at their most horrifyingly expressionistic moment possible, with his handheld camera which doubles as a bayonet. While becoming a suspect after an extra (Moira Shearer) on the film set he has been contracted on disappears, he begins a relationship with the kind young woman (Anna Massey) living in the flat below as he starts work on his latest masterpiece. Following a  career of astounding, against the grain projects, many with his longtime partner Emeric Pressburger, Michael Powell's "Peeping Tom" was panned as trash by a stuffy 1960's Britain and essentially marked the end of the distinguished director's career. In the passing years, the tide of opinion has shifted, and Powell's disquieting statement on voyeurism and psychoanalysis has been heralded as the unflinching masterpiece it is. Bohm gives a shocking, non-emotive performance and Massey is likewise excellent in this uncompromising and frightening picture.

Elmer Gantry

Elmer Gantry, a hard-drinking, boisterous, silver tongued travelling salesman (Burt Lancaster), discovers his true calling in preaching when he hears the sermon of Sister Sarah (Jean Simmons), another nomadic peddler cut from a much more pure cloth. After ingratiating himself into her circle, their revivals are greeted with massive turnouts and it appears that her ambition of building a church will be realized. However, the  acts of a vengeful prostitute (Shirley Jones) from Gantry's past threaten to tear town their dreams. Richard Brooks' "Elmer Gantry" is an adaptation of Upton Sinclair's 1927 scathing satirical novel, which must have been trimmed of much of its salaciousness, but is nonetheless a powerful indictment of cheap evangelicalism and the selling of religion to the people. It features a trio of indelible performances: Lancaster, one of the most deeply felt of all actors, in his powerful, uncompromising, Oscar winning tour-de-force; Simmons, almost angelic, who brings depth to what could have been a patronizing role, which went surprisingly unrecognized; Lastly, Shirley Jones who also walks a fine line in playing another conflicted character and also winning an Oscar for her services.

The Entertainer

In the midst of the Suez crisis, a chintzy  failed stage actor (Laurence Olivier) refuses to acknowledge his state of affairs, while performing in front of empty houses, cheating on his drunken wife (Brenda de Banzie), and ripping off his sickly father (Roger Livesey) to finance his latest production, all the while pulling the wool over his doting daughter's (Joan Plowright) eyes. "The Entertainer" was one of Olivier's greatest successes, on both stage and screen, and he truly is a veritable force, playing an unscrupulous and intensely unlikable character. Director Tony Richardson successfully catches the dingy London locations and the nasty aura of the story, but the movie is turgid and much of its ongoings are indistinguishable. It is also interesting seeing actors Alan Bates and Albert Finney in early, supporting roles, both playing Olivier's sons.

North to Alaska

Best chums Sam and George (John Wayne and Stewart Granger) have just struck in big in Alaska. While George and his brother Billy (Fabian) return north to their gold claim, Sam heads to Seattle to fetch George's fiance. Upon arrival however, he finds that she has taken up with another man, so being the noble friend that he is, he returns with a beautiful burlesque queen (Capucine) instead. Now Sam must not only fight off the scheming con man (Ernie Kovacs) making a claim on his land, but also come to terms with his feelings for the girl he intended for his best friend. "North to Alaska" is cheesy yet moderately enjoyable fare from The Duke and director Henry Hathaway, who would reteam several times, refining their light comedy/tough action style over the next ten years, most notably in "True Grit" and "The Sons of Katie Elder". Although this film too often resorts to slapstick and pratfalls, it is made in a very amiable fashion and never ceases to be watchable.

Shoot the Piano Player

Charlie was a once successful concert pianist who now plays in an out of the way dive in Paris. One day his ne'er-do-well brother comes stumbling into the joint, asking for his help in eluding two con men he's double crossed. Now mixed up in this mess, the reticent Charlie must ward off the bumbling crooks while protecting his kid brother Fido and romancing the beautiful cocktail waitress Lena. "Shoot the Piano Player" was legendary director Francois Truffaut second outing, and was one of the early film's of the French New Wave, clearly having been inspired by recent American crime pictures of the time. The film is a remarkable free flowing work, veering seamlessly from comedy to tragedy to romance to slapstick and back around again. Charles Aznavour is great in a dour performance as Charlie, playing a character who strongly resembles Truffaut. Marie Dubois is very beautiful and affecting as the cocktail waitress who has long had Aznavour's eye and Daniel Boulanger and Claude Mansard are an absolute hoot as Ernest and Momo, the bungling criminals. In trying to gauge my responses to this movie, I realized I had run the gamut. In this visually beautiful film, Truffaut has constructed a wild genre mashup that is simultaneously funny, touching, and seemingly effortless.

Psycho

After a tryst in a hotel room, a dissatisfied young woman returns to her job and impulsively steals $40,000 from her employer. Exhausted and on the run, she stops for the night at a vacant hotel off the old highway and makes the unfortunate acquaintance of Norman Bates, the young and effeminate hotel manager with mommy issues, to put it lightly. Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" is one of the most referenced and most influential films in the history of  the cinema. A masterwork if there ever was one, every shot and beat is carefully calculated by The Master is a work of sheer precision. Containing great performances from Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh as well as Bernard Herrmann's unforgettable, pulsating score, "Psycho" is a hair raising knockout which hardly any subsequent imitators have been able to replicate. The shower scene is arguably the most famous sequence in history, but consider these other definitive moments: the parlor scene between Perkins and Leigh in which she presses some wrong buttons and his vulnerability surfaces . Martin Balsam falling down the staircase after having his face slashed. "Mrs. Bates" delivering her eerie closing monologue. "Psycho" is a film that knows exactly what its doing and plays out brilliantly like a perfectly orchestrated medley.

Breathless

Sometimes it takes only one film to open the doors to the creation of innumerous subsequent films and watching Breathless, it is clear that many modern movies were made because of it. Made at the beginning of the French New Wave, it was written by Francois Truffaut and directed by Jean-Luc Godard and implemented a style that had not been used, or not widely used in mainstream cinema. Filmed with jump cuts (two different consecutive shots of the same focal point) and implementing a free form style light on plot and heavy on rambling dialogue, I was reminded of many following films with a similar style. It stars Jean-Paul Belmondo as a petty car thief who models himself on Humphrey Bogart. After killing a cop, he hides out in Paris while waiting for travel funds to come through. During this time, he romanticizes an American woman (Jean Seberg) while the two hold rambling and wide ranging discussions in their hotel rooms. Though I thought the film was maybe too loose and could have used a little more plot, it is undeniably influential and a movie that liberated the movies.
***1/2