Dir Delmer Daves, 1947, B&W, USA
Bogart and Bacall
Viewed at Cinmatheque June 2004
Tremendous plot, very clever camera work. Figure, whose face we are not allowed to see (using in some cases some ‘first person’ camera work, seeing through the man’s eyes), escapes from prison and is picked up mysteriously by the beautiful and stern L. Bacall.
She has been watching his case, and has a personal interest – he is an accussed murderer. He gets, on a tip from a taxi cab driver, an ‘underground’ plastic surgeury facelift – and low and behold, when the bandages come off, it is Bogart. The final scene is ridiculously and artlessly sentimental; however a supurbe and in several ways innovative film. Five Stars.
Henri-Georges Clouzot, France 1953, BW subtitles
Grande Prix from Cannes, 1953. Best Film from British Film Group, 1954.
Viewed at Nathan/Justus’ house, March 2004. Rented as a guess.
A Latin America suspense masterpiece. 4 men stranded in a dead end town loaf all day on the porch of a local tavern. An accident occurs at the oil wells, and they need a delivery of tonnes of nitroglycerin. It can only be delivered, over three hundred miles, by two old trucks with antique suspension…our four disposed suddenly become would be heros, or would-be dead men.
Clouzot’s suspense is very very good. The slowness of the trucks, and visual build-up in the streets of the small town, and the harrowing scenes on the journey so full of risk. If this movie does not thrill one, if it does not deserve five stars, if it does not plumb the depths of these desperate men and turn them into9 magnificent possibilities – than what will?
*****
Chaplin
1940
2 Hours
Not bad, funny, with sound. The moralizing speech at the end shows the quixotic frailty of Chaplin himself; an odd, beautifully simple-minded idealist; one in great erst.
four stars, but no more.
Chaplin
1947
2 Hours
I just erased, in error, a very through review, and do not have the wakefulness to repeat it. A magnificent film, a critical and commercial failure that Chaplin described as “the cleverest and most brilliant of my career”.
Verdoux loses his position as a bank clerk to the depression: a position he has held for 30 years. He becomes a ‘blue bears’, a serial killer, seducing middle aged women and making the disappear when he is able to obtain their assets. This all to support, in middle class comfort, a young son and disabled wife.
The marvelous horror of it comes when the final market crash ruins hinm completely, despite his disparate methods of seduction and murder. The film than jumps to him as older, and worn out, and he describes how his wife and so did not survive the market crash. One suspects that, having used the most desperate measures to obtain the ignorant tranquil happiness of his family, he himself killed them to spare them the impossible but inevitable downturn that would have followed. Thus we see, like a great tower, the pride, even in his middle class standing, of this middle class hero and villain.
Chaplin
1923, 85 min
Starring two others – not Chaplin.
Listed as a masterpiece, it was Ok, but not great.
3 stars?
Filed under: 1970's, Audran, Stephane, Chabrol, Cinematheque, French, Huppert, Uncategorized
Violette
Claude Chabrol 1978
Isabelle Huppert and Stepahne Audren
Audran is the mother; Huppert is Violette – the notorious Violette – the daughter.
Her mother wishes her to be prim and sophisticated, and has ambitions for her. “You wish you’d married a train engineer, instead of a car man” says her husband, affectionately. Violette has affairs, sneaks out of her racy street clothes in the bathroom half way up the stairs to the apartment, and devotes herself slavishly to worthless me who bleed her dry for money. She is infinitely needy, but iron in her will for – something, at the same time.
Very good, like a still life on moving film. The two women are great, and the husband is a very nice backdrop. Their tiny apartment, which is nevertheless well furnished, embeds you in the frenzied psychological state of, in any case, two of the inhabitants. Violette wants more, but she does not know what it is she wants, she wants it too soon, and most of all, it is not a want a need, but a compulsive, dangerous, immediate need.
Chabrol as always, pulls no punches, and his knowledge of the hidden operations of the human mind is alarming because he makes no mistake, and makes it all natural, even when the results are so unexplained and disagreeable.
Chabrol, Claude (master of suspense)
Merci Pour le Chocolat
(Nightcap)
2000, France/Switzerland, colour w/ subtitles
Isabelle Huppert, Jacques Dutronc
Cinematheque, Nov 07th 2005, late film, by myself. Sent out a invite at last minute to Adrienne, Nathan and Guilia, but none showed.
A great film – Chabrol loses nothing, but perhaps has become – more subtle?
This review gives away the whole plot.
The heiress of a Swiss chocolate company remarried her ex husband, a piano teacher, now established in his fame. She id Mika Muller.
It is crossing of two families – a beautiful young girl, who looks like Liv Taylor, is a piano player who was, for a moment, mistakenly switched in the hospital for the Pianist’s son, when the child was being presented to the father. (The Pianist’s son by a former wife, now deceased from a car accident, and Mika’s prior close friend). There is something mysterious here, it causes tension, which is explained through he revelation that the daughter is born from artificial insemination – her father was sterile (not impotent). Thus when blood tests were used to ensure that the children were switched back correctly the mother had obscured the tests, as it was kept from the daughter that the man who raised her was not her biological father.
In any case the crux comes in that this sharp eyed girl, staying at the house for a few days to study with the pianist, sees the wife, Mika, spill the evening liquid chocolate on purpose. Something is afoot! Perhaps – a young girl’s imagination? Or perhaps more.
The girl’s boyfriend works for her mother- a forensic scientist. The spilled chocolate is on her sweater, and is analyzed, and contains – a drug! And the Pianist can only sleep when he takes a drug. And the girl is staying at the house – the same house that the Pianist’s first wife was staying at, the night she dies, as they were friends and always stayed there when the Pianist and his wife were in Switzerland. And that night the wife had to drive out for the sleeping pills, and first had her customary drink of cognac, and than crashed, and died. Her system was full of alcohol and the sleeping drug – which she never ever took! The mystery has never been settled.
But the Pianist feels something afoot. It is all too the same, too disturbing. The beautiful young girl is like his dead wife, staying as well at the house, going out to purchase the drug late, like his dead wife – because Mika ‘forgot’. And Mike also – poured the coffee (the maid, it seems, suddenly to her fortune had the night off”.
“You are washing the cups!” says the Pianist.
“Why are you washing the cups?” – “What have you done!”
“What do you mean. I am washing the cups because…”
“You washed the cups that night too!”
And it is all true. It is reconstructed. And the young girl is getting sleepy at the wheel, and crashes the car, with the son beside her. But they are OK. The Pianist gets the call. “Are they dead?” asks Mika. “No”, he says, “you were unlucky this time.” He is not angry, but now he knows all, and Mika admits it. “I am nothing” she says – not artist, not drivin. “But you have helped me so much” the Pianist says – a humane and thoughtful man. “Yes, always others. I say ‘I love you’ but I do not love. Everything for me is so calculated.”
So we have our brilliant and subtle psychological model. She is obsessed with the possession of her husband. The attraction of her friend, his wife, was unbearable, as is the connection to the young girl. She is fond of his son, who is likewise directionless. She destroys the wife, and it seems is keeping the son drugged regularly. Perhaps she preserves his lack of ambition in this way. They must be like her, or belong to her.
But – and here is the interesting part – she is not really evil as some would think of it. She is pathetically evil, tragic and flawed. She is calculating but not in intention — only in action! Quite a model, quite a film.
1900-1983
also known as Louis Bunuel
Mexican filmmaker, part of the summer Cinematheque series, however I missed his films.
“Bunuel is the greatest director in the world” – Alfred Hitchcock.
Belle De Jour, Tristana, The young One, Diary of a Chambermaid, Wuthering Heights, et al.
I have seen Belle De Jour. It can be believed that Hitchcock would love this film as the lady in question has a returning flashback image of horse bells jingling that corresponds with her infidelity and discontent. She is a perfect enigma (which Hitchcock would love), but more importantly, a motivated enigma, according to he past and upbringing. Freud would likely have something to say as well about the distinction horses have in the revelation to young persons of the physical form, exaggerated by the size of the animal, of the organs of the sexual apparatus.
I myself found the film perhaps too enigmatic, and too fleeting and ‘deep’ for my tastes. Howeve one cannot help admiring Catherine Deneuve’s white hot and freezing cold oblivion. Just when one begins to think she is really nothing at all – she turns her face, slowly, and one feels a slight flush coming on in admiration of this cool princess.
Filed under: 1950's, Bresson, Robert, Cinematheque, French, Uncategorized
Robert Bresson
France 1959 BW
Disappointing film. Loosely and poorly based on Crime and Punishment. Plot bad – filmmaking worse.
Horrible trait of presenting the characters on screen and than narrating all their actions and thoughts, rather than allowing the scenes to present themselves (in the first person). Thus he stands: thoughts are narrated. He walks: the narrator describes where he is going. He goes to the racetrack: the film contains not a single shot of a racing horse.
Fortunately the film forgets Dostoevsky at some points, forgets to be clever, and produces some rather effective and exciting scenes of various pick-pocketing methods, in particular in very clever sequences with three pickpockets working together. These scenes are what must account for the status and description of this as a remarkable film. I have seen worse – I have seen far better.
Filed under: 1960's, Bergman, Ingmar, Cinematheque, Sweden, Uncategorized
Ingmar Bergman
BW, 95 min, Swedish w/ subtitles 1964
Cinematheque, June 2005
Went alone however ran into Zsuzsa on the way out.
Two sister, beautiful, one ill, one with a son perhaps 10. They are on a train, than a hotel. Zsuzsa said that what she liked about it was that it portrayed people as we very rarely see them portrayed – when ill alone, dying. The woman I assume had cancer or something. Ester is sick, Anna feels revenge against her and finds solace in going out and sleeping with some random man. The boy runs in the halls of the extremely elegant hotel.
I didn’t like the movie very much, although a fair amount of it was beautiful to look at. The suffering was dwelled on too much; the close-ups are too close and too long. It becomes not only a picture of morbidity but somewhat morbid itself. I do not mind the portrayal of sickness – but I do not want me, and the director, to be a part of that sickness as well. Some bland/over-wrought/affected European-art sexuality, between the sister and with regard to the escape to the random sexual partner.
OK. Nice to see Zsuzsa.
Zsuzsa says to see CRIES AND WHISPERS on June 25, I do not know if I will go or not.
