slightly carla: day seven

day seven is devoted to a masterwork from my favorite director, john cassavetes' the killing of a chinese bookie (1976).

on the surface, it's a gangster picture. if i just describe the plot it sounds like something straight out of the forties - a nightclub owner, having just paid off a loanshark he was indebted to, racks up a $23,000 debt in a card game. by way of squaring the debt, he agrees to kill a rival of his creditors. he is led to believe the target is a minor crime figure but it turns out that he heads the chinese mafia on the west coast. he pulls off the hit but gets a slug in his side for the trouble. the gangsters who assigned him the job, never expecting him to survive it, double cross him and a deadly game of cat and mouse ensues. standard genre fare, right?

wrong. cassavetes is not one to play it straight. his cinema is an intensely personal one, almost as much to me as to him. there is no other single filmmaker whose work i feel is so tailor-made for me. sometimes, if you're lucky, you find an artist that makes you feel like whatever they made, they made especially for you. i love him because he was restless and fearless. i love him because he was confrontational and love was the only thing worth a damn to him. i love him because he was endlessly fascinated by people and never stopped examining them. watching his movies feels like he has put a hot wire into my heart and has galvanized everything that is great and terrible in me.

i know it won't be the same for everyone. most people, especially fans of more standard cinema, are probably going to find his work tough sledding, which is exactly why they should watch. this movie is perhaps the best example of what sets him so far apart from other filmmakers. by fashioning a genre piece, he underlines the stark contrast between what he does and what everyone else does. even with the inclusion of traditional elements like shoot outs and strippers, he manages to make something wholly unique. he's speaking a different language.

what do i mean? cinema has a language, one that you have been learning for as long as you have been going to the movies. there is a shorthand that you pick up on from the things you have seen before. for example, in horror films when you have a character standing in a room framed in the center of the screen that character is delivering exposition, most likely. if that same character is standing in the same room but is framed to the right or left of the screen that character is cannon fodder. you are now unconsciously tense, doubly so if an open window or closet door is in that empty space. something terrible may or may not be about to fill the unoccupied portion of the frame. the language of cinema is built out of thousands of things like this. a fade indicates a passage of time, a character shot from below is someone to fear and so on and so on. no one has specifically explained them to you but you understand the intent of every one of them. well, john cassavetes did not care about the language everyone else spoke. did. not. care.

the only way to adequately explain this is to just provide a demonstration. to that end, i offer two short clips.
the first is from tate taylor's the help (2011). i choose it because it was the single highest grossing adult drama last year. there were other more successful films, but every one of those was either a children's film or a special effects/action extravaganza. no film last year that told a story for adults and contained the potential for conflict and complication was seen by more moviegoers. this is what people want. embedding is disabled so please click here to view the clip before going any further.

that is the language everyone knows. the camera moves, the meandering piano, the ACTING. now take a look at this from cassavetes' film:

 he is never going to make it easy on you. six people talk at once, elbows are held in front of faces during monologues, the camera searches the room for the most interesting thing that's happening, rather than dictating to you what that is. all these things are going on and, without you even noticing, the acting becomes invisible. did i mention ben gazzara's character has a bullet in his side at this point? contrary to conventional commercial wisdom, cassavetes expects you to remember that instead of cutting to an insert that reminds you of it. he expects grown ups to perceive subtext. crazy, i know. he has a complete disregard for what you think a movie ought to be. in fact, he holds it in disdain. the result of his technique is that you had better watch everything. the result is that every character is a discrete entity, difficult and harboring the potential to be extraordinary. he demands that you carefully watch and consider each one. he demands that you do the work, and for that i love him.

slightly carla: day six

a week with carla at the helm would be thoroughly incomplete without a healthy dose of music and today's program delivers a pair of excellent, diametrically opposed music documentaries. side A is damani baker and alex vlack's portrait of bill withers, still bill (2009).

the film takes up with withers at age 70, many years after he shunned the spotlight in favor of the pleasures of family life and not being famous. it's a decision that a good number of entertainers and athletes struggle with all the time, knowing how to quit while you're ahead. few seem to be able to manage it, but few possess the implacable calm of bill withers. the bulk of the film spends time with withers as he engages in conversation and celebration with friends and family and holds forth about the lessons he has learned growing up in the segregated south, overcoming a problematic stutter, serving in the navy and becoming a pop success at the age of thirty-two. it is quickly evident that the simple, soulful wisdom in his music isn't just artistic expression. it is that aspect of his personality that has seen him through all his trials and triumphs, from childhood to the present day. he comes across as honest, pragmatic, a loving father and husband and comfortable with where he has arrived. there is no evidence of the ego that frequently accompanies selling millions of records. he is well acquainted with the notion that even with the very famous there are still more people out there that don't know you than do and out of those that do a good number don't care. he sees himself as pennies in your pocket, content to be carried around and to be of use once in a while. the sections of the film i enjoyed the most were watching him go back to the town he grew up in and spend time with the people who have known him the longest. it probably appealed to me because i see a lot of similarities between him and my old man when i see dad with his brothers and old friends - loose, funny, down to earth, knows when to talk, knows when not to, completely at home in his own skin. i know a lot of reviewers have taken the film to task for the section where they shoehorn a conversation with cornel west and tavis smiley into the proceedings but i think it's pretty accidentally vital. it's easy to be homespun and genuine with the guys who have known you your whole life but it's an even more effective demonstration to watch withers sidestep the efforts to inject a false sense of high-mindedness into the film and just keep rolling, steady as she goes, dispensing truth and soul, giving you something you can use. i have faith that bill withers is the same man all the time, no matter who's in the room, no matter who's holding the microphone. it's one of the greatest compliments i can think to pay someone. he's not perfect, something he would tell you himself. there are flashes of some of the anxieties and frustrations that come with having an artistic temperament, but he seems fully in control of it all. he has succeeded in every facet of his life with modesty, humility and grace and his art is an accurate reflection of him as a whole. i admire the man very much.

our troubled B side is albert and david maysles and charlotte zwerin's gimme shelter (1970).

jesus, talk about catching lightning in a bottle. intending to make a simple concert film, the maysles and zwerin ending up documenting the one moment of violence that is widely acknowledged as having killed the sixties. the filmmakers are on board with the rolling stones in the waning days of their 1969 u.s. tour, at that point their first in several years. anticipation and expectations were high. the movie opens with footage of the show in madison square garden, a success by any measure. following that there are a couple of sequences documenting recording sessions at a muscle shoals studio that are among my favorite moments of the film. i thoroughly enjoy it when documentarians are confident enough to just record prolonged reactions. some of the most surprisingly profound, moving moments i have ever seen on film are of people just listening to someone or something. these are the last satisfied moments any of the principals have for the duration of the film. things get dark once the group gets to the west coast. the original venue for a huge free concert featuring the stones fell through and the event was moved to altamont speedway. logistics broke down on all fronts, the hells angels volunteered themselves/were pressed into service as ersatz security guards, bad drugs augmented the bad vibe and episodes of violence marred the event almost as soon as the gates were opened. by the time the stones took the stage, things were desperate and ugly and it all culminated in the murder of eighteen year-old meredith hunter by hells angel alan passaros. in gruesome detail, with the benefit of film editing equipment, we see hunter burst into the middle of the screen, an explosion of bright green suit brandishing an immense pistol. almost as instantly, he is set upon by passaros with an equally immense knife and stabbed twice right before our eyes. it is one of the most amazing instances of being in the right place at the right time with a camera that i have ever seen. the two things that stick with me from this experience are how much difference documentary film is capable of making and that people are sadly inexplicable to me. the events of altamont would have reverberated through the counterculture either way but the presence of the camera made it history. the altamont section of the film is such an immersive experience. it feels wrong from the moment we get there and that sick feeling in the pit of your stomach only grows as the film progresses. it is an environment that is so obviously out of control as to make you wonder how more people didn't die (four did total, the others being accidental/misadventure). everyone is on top of everyone else and people seem in pain or distraught everywhere you look. why anyone would want to go anywhere with 300,000 other people is beyond me in the first place. the massive administrative inadequacies were troublesome enough but things become criminally stupid when a young man dies because he was ridiculous enough to pull a gun the way hunter did. if this happens at a rock and roll show that was meant to be woodstock west and a gift to the people of the bay area, i am left to wonder what people would be capable of if they were faced with something truly grave. the maysles and zwerin didn't just turn out a movie, they produced an indictment - an indictment of the greed and ineptitude of the organizers and an indictment of the naivety of a generation that found its blood stomped into the dirt of a second rate speedway infield. bad news, good film.

tomorrow, things stay heavy with an entry from my favorite filmmaker ever.

crush my calm, you cassavetes.

slightly carla: day five

day five reacquaints me with pedro almodóvar's breakthrough film, women on the verge of a nervous breakdown (1988).

i was in love with his movies in the late eighties when he started to break big in the states but i suspect at eighteen or so i was not so well equipped to understand them. one of the great functions of the queue is that it sometimes acts as a time capsule, allowing me to unearth things that i packed away long ago and see them in a new light. before this week i had not watched this movie since 1988 and it was a very different experience this time around.

it was an interesting choice to follow pauline at the beach (1983), as it takes the farcical elements so subtly present in rohmer's film and spins them outward in ever more dizzying loops.

brits couldn't have made this at all. they would have ended up with something more like the latest installment of the carry on series.

carmen maura stars as pepa, a voiceover actress whose rat bastard lover, iván has just left her. she is despondent, contemplating suicide, even going as far as to make gazpacho spiked with a ton of sleeping pills. she never consummates the act, though, as everything and everyone in her periphery quickly spirals out of control. her friend candela is ringing her phone off the hook, frantic that she has just discovered that she had been unwittingly dating a shiite terrorist. pepa's lover's son and his fiancée show up in response to her ad to sublet her apartment and soon two and two are put together concerning everyone's respective associations with iván. a lawyer is consulted who turns out to be iván's latest paramour. phone repairmen, curious police, insane pistol-packing wives and hijacked bikers round out the supporting cast and pepa is shuttled back and forth between these loony episodes in the greatest, most ridiculous taxi ever dispatched. and what do you do when you have a houseful of guests you can't seem to get rid of? serve them gazpacho, that's what.

i think what i enjoyed about this film so much the first time around was its absolute manic energy. it's easy to get swept up in it. the film looked and behaved like nothing i had ever seen before at the time. its stylistic flourishes must have reminded me of a similar experience i had had with raising arizona (1987) just the year before. in much the same way the coen brothers redefined slapstick for my generation, that was what almodóvar did for me with relationship comedies here. it seemed incredibly audacious and unique. over two decades and literally hundreds of films later, though, i see a couple of things i didn't see the first time around. i see that in 1988 i was probably responding subconsciously to the fact that these mad characters were women. i hadn't seen an ensemble like this up to that point that revolved so fully around interesting, idiosyncratic women. i certainly hadn't come across many american films that delved, even zanily, into the sexual and emotional turmoil of a 43 year-old woman. i also see a fair bit more sadness in it now than i did then. i certainly understand regret much more now, hence it allows for a much more nuanced reading than i would have been capable of giving it so many years ago. as funny as it is, the catalyst for the comedy is heartbreak and trauma and when we get confirmation of pepa's delicate condition just before the credits roll we realize, once we stop laughing, that she is in a tough spot. a lot of complicated decisions lay before this character once everything has died down. the last thing i see is other movies reflected in this one. there are flashes of fellini, buñuel and hitchcock if you're being generous/de palma if you're not. pretty rich and ambitious for a slightly wacky black comedy about the pitfalls of modern romance.

once again, an excellent choice and it was a nice lesson in how much a great film has to offer just by holding its worth as you improve as a viewer.

tomorrow we are graced by a visit from a solid dude if ever there was one.

sing along. you know the words.

slightly carla: day four

slight is right. for the next several days my calendar is extremely full so i don't know exactly how much i will be able to get through between now and sunday. i will do at least one a day but i may have to extend the proceedings beyond my usual seven days. i definitely want to get everything in so bear with me.

today i begin work on filling in a shameful gap in my film knowledge with éric rohmer's pauline at the beach (1983).

éric rohmer has always been one of those i meant to get around to but for some reason just have not done it. there is even a copy of the aviator's wife (1981) just sitting here in my collection, mere feet away, that has been gathering dust since i bought it. i couldn't tell you why. the time has just never been right. now that i have experienced this film, though, i am kicking myself for waiting this long. i don't know how it compares to the rest of his work and i have no idea how fitting an introduction it is, but pauline at the beach is a seaside, sunlit revelation and a little difficult to adequately describe. if i had to subtitle it i would steal directly from raymond carver and call it what we talk about when we talk about love. what is magical about is elusive. if this is any indication, rohmer is more of an alchemist than a technician. one of rohmer's comedies and proverbs series, it begins with a quote from chrétien de troyes - "a wagging tongue bites itself" - laying out in five little words the essence of what will be chewed on and chased from beach to bedroom for the next hour and a half. fifteen year-old pauline and her older cousin marion are at the family vacation home on the normandy coast trying to get the last few sparks out of the dying embers of summer. an initial exchange in which marion delves into pauline's romantic history sets the tone for the rest of the film, exposing marion as the much more immature, though older, character and pauline as the pragmatic observer, wise beyond her years. as they while away their days on the beach their universe expands to take in pierre, an ex-lover of marion's who becomes infatuated with her all over again, henri, a womanizer only interested in living in the present with no responsibilities or confinements, sylvain, a local boy who strikes pauline's fancy and louisette, who sells candy on the beach. they each have a drastically different idea about the nature of love and are chasing their own tails when not chasing each others'. imagine if when anton chekhov was writing plays, instead of being a disillusioned doctor living amidst the rubble of a dying aristocracy he had been getting laid a lot. i exaggerate for comic effect and this is a far more sensitive, perceptive work than that but the image gets you pointed in the right direction, what with the constant dissection of desire and the elements of sex farce in the margins.

if brits had made this it would have been terrible.

which is odd for me to say because i often thought of mike leigh while i was watching this. the cast functions in the same lived-in, naturalistic manner as in the best of leigh's works and it's much more of an extended mood piece than a traditional narrative arc. and boy does it capture that mood. it is a vivid and acute distillation of late summer, so much so that you just have to experience it. that's the part of it that is nearly impossible to adequately describe. it is just a perfect evocation in so many ways of literal and emotional twilight coming on and how it will catch up to us no matter what steps we take to defy it, whether it's taking extra time with a cup of tea, talking until the sun comes up or engaging in ill-advised love affairs.

amanda langlet as pauline deserves special mention here. she has an almost supernatural wisdom about her. the understanding she communicates as she watches the adults in her sphere careen about, telling lies, deluding themselves and repeating mistakes is what i am going to think about a long time from now. her face has the softness of a young girl but when she smiles i think she is a thousand years old. she's onto all of us but it doesn't make her feel as if she's necessarily superior. she seems to understand more than all of us put together even as she is going through what will most likely be the most confusing time of her life. i can't say enough good things about her performance. i only hope the rest of rohmer's work is this wonderful and wise, simple and direct. thanks for insisting that i tend to that omission, carla. i feel as if i have been given a gift.

my apologies, but that's all there is for now. maybe tomorrow i can double up on today if i get hot.

we shall see.

slightly carla: day three

day three finds us globetrotting, beginning with akira kurosawa's yojimbo (1961).

influenced by hardboiled fiction and passing that influence on to spaghetti westerns, kurosawa's study of this rootless samurai is one of my favorites of all time. i actually composed a piece about it for another assignment just a couple of weeks ago. so, for once, instead of just hastily jotting down a few impressions i can give at least one of these films something closer to the response that they all deserve. here is what i had to say:

when you spend your life chasing after cinematic thrills there are certain inevitable regrets. invariably, one of the biggest is that you are a prisoner of the particular era you inhabit. it automatically relegates certain experiences to the realm of scholarship, rather than just going to the movies. there are certain things i am only ever going to be able to see as filtered through the mists of time. much like many other contributors and readers here, i would give my eye teeth to be able to have certain experiences first hand - to experience the seismic shifts from silents to talkies and from academy ratio to widescreen, regular saturday afternoon matinees, complete with cartoons, newsreels and serials, ten cent movie tickets, being knocked from complacency by the french and czech new waves, and on and on - my list, probably much like yours, is endless. this is not to say that there aren’t rewards for making discoveries the way i have. i think i belong to the very last generation that had to really dig, do the work, read/make ‘zines and haunt libraries and repertory houses to find these things. we were the last generation that came of age before the internet made everything instantly available, taking away some of the thrill of the hunt. it fostered in me a true appreciation for the entire experience - the reading about, the tracking down, the viewing of milestone films - to borrow from warren oates, those satisfactions are permanent. still, it doesn’t quell all of the envy i feel for the people that got to stand in line and buy that ticket in september of 1961 when yojimbo came to town.

yojimbo was the first film by akira kurosawa that i ever saw and it was revelatory for me, even on television. my old man, the first movie enthusiast i knew, loves the leone/eastwood films and by the time i was nearing adolescence we had already watched those together numerous times. little did i know, that was paving the way for kurosawa to come along and kick my ass. the leone films were already pretty exciting stuff, what with their gunfights, gold and alien landscape (alien to a kid in small town oklahoma, anyway). discovering kurosawa, and specifically yojimbo, though, was something altogether different and it taught me many a valuable lesson. it was a coming of age. just about every kid, for a little while at least, is possessed of the silly and romantic notion that their thing (whatever that thing is) is the first thing, the best thing. yojimbo may have been the first time i was made aware that there is nothing new under the sun - not in a discouraging way, mind you, but more in the sense that there is a much larger continuum out there that all art is a part of and, if it wasn’t already, my chase was now most definitely on.

the film itself, you’re probably all acquainted with. toshiro mifune’s samurai-with-no-name plays both ends against the middle in a deft jidaigeki mixture of high noon sagebrush, film noir rough stuff and feudal japanese class issues and swordplay. the result is a thrilling and cohesive whole that people are still ripping off/paying homage to today. the one thing that none of the predecessors or imitators have, though, is mifune. i had never seen anything like him. i still haven’t. the human face has fifty-odd muscles in it. that’s approximately 3 X 10⁶⁴ possible facial expressions. mifune is the only person on earth whom i believe is capable of making them all. the story is riveting but it is his fierceness and vitality that make this film still fresh and exciting fifty years down the road. for all the windswept streets, mulberry fields and lonely roads, the most important topography is that face. that’s where the whole story plays out. it is what i couldn’t take my eyes off of as a youngster and it is the thing that is going to make it a powerhouse fifty years from now. all that political shrewdness, earthy humor, cynicism and almost surreal violence bound up in one man, still so raw and intense, so entertaining. i thank the heavens every day for what technology affords us now, as cinephiles. i marvel at the fact that (if it were my only option) i can watch yojimbo on my telephone. we are alive in such an incredible time that we have access to film, and the ramblings of other film lovers, in ways never imagined half a century ago, but oh, what i would have given to be in the audience in 1961. it must have been like a bomb going off.

next, we go from japan to senegal by way of france with the first movie this week that was completely new to me, ousmane sembène's black girl (1966).

it is the story of diouana, a young senegalese girl who moves to france to continue on as governess for the wealthy white couple she worked for in dakar. prior to going, she dreams of leaving senegal behind for french shops and luxury, imagining her friends and family to be green with envy. her reality is a far different story, though. she soon figures out that the family was only really wealthy relative to most of the senegalese and now that they are back in france she is the only servant they can afford. she is cook and maid, as well as governess. her reality is the four rooms she works and lives in. no luxury, no shops, only what is essentially indentured servitude. as her spirit breaks, her white employers can only think to repeatedly ask her if she is ill, having no inkling of the psychological damage their manipulation is doing. theirs is the luxury of not having to care. they belong to the dominant class in this post-colonial setting and, as such, she is little more than property to them. her alienation and distress grows and when she can stand it no longer she commits suicide in their bathtub. it's an impressive work, born of desperation. it brought to mind a number of favorites of mine, either through tone or little bits of technique. i thought of how james whale had gloria stuart change clothes (the only character that does so) in the old dark house (1932) so that she looks like a white flame running up and down shadowy staircases, the one object we cannot look away from. sembène does a similar thing with mbissine thérèse diop here. once she arrives in france, she is immersed in nothing but sterile, light environments. her beautiful skin stands out in stark contrast with her surroundings, underlining both her isolation and the feeling that she has been institutionalized. the other filmmakers it brought to mind were american indies like john cassavetes, spike lee and jim jarmusch, specifically all of their first films. there is a lack of polish that they have in common that speaks to their absolute need to tell their stories, all feature films but shot with a raw documentary urgency. it's difficult enough in the u.s. to get films made. imagine how lacking in both filmmaking resources and infrastructure that senegal was in the mid-sixties. to get something like this done it had to be vital to you to tell this story. in that regard alone, it is something of a minor miracle, technically raw and rudimentary but rich with complex themes of post-colonial racism/slavery and alienation. this first new experience for me this week did not disappoint. it is a scant 56 minutes long but manages to be complicated and devastating all the same, provocative in a social context, inspiring in a creative one. excellent choice.

to end our day we go from antibes to suburban paris for our first entry in living color, jacques tati's magnificent mon oncle (1958).

perhaps more than any other filmmaker's work, tati's movies, for me, are just pure pleasure. tati's comedy, by way of his alter-ego monsieur hulot, gently appeals to the better angels of our nature and is so meticulously crafted as to look effortless. in this instance he plays the doting uncle of a nine year-old boy who lives with his rigid, status-hungry parents in a house that is a nightmare of modernity. they are consumed with consuming, slaves to their labor-saving devices and state of the art conveniences. hulot, with his awkward, halting gait, carefree wandering and ability to inadvertently turn the mundane into the exciting is the polar opposite of the boy's parents and provides him with a much-needed escape from their uninspired world. for the longest time, m. hulot's holiday (1953) was my favorite film of his, but i think as of this viewing mon oncle has edged into the lead. that is most likely due to the target of his affable satire this time around. focusing on the consumerism and materialism that was rapidly changing postwar france afforded him more opportunities to skewer the pompous while simultaneously incorporating a much wider range of the everyday rhythms of life into his comic routines than was possible in some of his other, more specific settings. as is common with tati's work, it is mostly free of dialogue. it absolutely does not depend on it. in its place you will find brilliant sound design built out of laughter, birdsong, snippets of conversation, neighborhood noises and the music of machinery. perhaps most importantly, he is still one of the most generous comedians i have ever seen. not every laugh has to revolve around him. peripheral characters get some of the best gags and his nephew's happiness is much more important than the execution of any piece of slapstick. we are just fortunate that he can do all of it at once. ultimately, his movies simply make me feel good. they are gently uncompromising, able to deflate our silly self-importance and the absurd things we cling to without making us feel badly about ourselves or sacrificing their own sense of wonder - a rare feat indeed. if i could live in tati's universe i feel like i would always be happy and content.

what a great note to end the day on. i think i will put it on again before moving on to the next film, hopefully fall asleep to it and dream tati dreams. properly rested, i will come out tomorrow with both guns blazing.

see you then!

slightly carla: day two

day two finds us catching up on yesterday's work with preston sturges' exceptional unfaithfully yours (1948).

this week is full of my favorite works of some of my favorite directors. preston sturges was more than a filmmaker, he was a cottage industry, far ahead of his time. he parlayed his success as screenwriter into complete artistic control as a director, building a stock company of actors who were in tune with his sensibilities and turning out a body of work that is consistently marvelous, slyly hilarious and always forward thinking. it is hard to pick a favorite but unfaithfully yours ranks way up there. rex harrison digs into his role as alfred de carter with a zest that registers just this side of errol flynn. he is a universally renowned conductor deeply in love with his younger wife, played by the stunning linda darnell. his directions to have his wife looked after in his absence were misinterpreted, resulting in the engagement of a detective. the private eye's findings are troublesome but de carter initially refuses to have anything to do with it. slowly but surely, though, doubt begins to creep in and soon his imagination has spiraled out of control. convinced of her adultery, he entertains three elaborate fantasy sequences, all playing out in his mind in conjunction with three pieces he is conducting. these sequences really are virtuosic pieces of black comedy, the hypothetical tangents moving through from his wife's destruction to his masculinity's destruction to his own at his own hand. it is perhaps the funniest distillation of a man veering into jealous insanity ever committed to film and harrison just goes all out. it sounds like he could be over the top but i don't want to give that impression. he nails it. his lunacy pushes the film over into an uncomfortable territory that 1948 audiences were probably a little thunderstruck by. thinking they were buying a ticket to a wacky romantic comedy, they soon found themselves enmeshed in a web of paranoid, homicidal flights of fancy, only pulling out of a steep dive in the final reel. it's damn near perfect, consistently sharply funny all while taking sturges' social satire to frantic depths only hinted at in his other work.

and it is the perfect gateway from screwball/romantic comedy into our next block of films, which find us in the netherworld of crime and film noir. we start this section with samuel fuller's pulpy punch in the gut, pickup on south street (1953).

holy cats, this film is raw. richard widmark plays a contemptuous pickpocket who lifts jean peters' wallet in a crowded subway car. unbeknownst to both he and peters, the wallet contains some frames of film that she is unwittingly delivering to a communist spy on behalf of her ex-boyfriend. his poorly-timed crime throws a wrench in the works of an investigation that has been active for months and was on the verge of breaking wide open. this macguffin kicks off a series of misfortunes for everyone that crosses widmark's path. overall, the film lives and dies by its tabloid nature. the red scare business plays almost like an afterthought, for the most part, seemingly there for no other reason than to give 1953 moviegoers something easy to be afraid of. the real story revolves more around the relative honor among thieves and widmark's reformation, what little there is of it, thanks to the love of a not-so-good woman. these are ugly, small people trying to stay one step ahead of each other and the law, doing whatever they need to to carve a tiny space for themselves in a shabby universe. widmark sneers his way through crowded train cars and empty diners, making a religion out of looking out for number one. jean peters seems custom built out of the sexiest/trashiest pieces of themselves that other women have thrown away. jesus, she is incredible. you can practically catch the smell of her sweat and makeup coming off the screen. she is so gloriously, irresistibly cheap. and fuller's photography leaves you no egress. it starts in extreme close-up about half the time and then moves in. you and these characters are in each others' personal space from the word go, so that all their shifty dealings and jockeying for position psychologically jostles you the whole time. and if all that isn't enough, you get vitagraph favorite, the sainted thelma ritter.

she essentially played one character her entire career and raised it to a fine art. a scrapper but weary, matronly but not sexless, well acquainted with just exactly what her place was in this mean old world, the mother teresa of the bowery who might just give you up to the cops for a sawbuck because, hey, she has to eat too. she is fantastic in this as moe, the stool pigeon with the heart of gold and mother figure to widmark's insolent punk. it is one of crime film's greatest moments when she tells richard kiley, knowing full well he is going to kill her for it, "even a fancy funeral ain't worth waitin' for if i've gotta do business with crumbs like you". her murder is the true catalyst for widmark's redemption, moving him much more than peters ever could. in her, we finally find the thing that matters to someone to whom not much matters at all. it's best (and easy) to just ignore the communism angle altogether and focus on these lousy small-timers and the way they affect one another's orbits. that's the grubby heart of this picture.

from here, we move to the other side of the atlantic to france where every criminal is weary for jules dassin's most impressive statement made in exile, the seminal heist film rififi (1955).

for the longest time, i was the furthest thing from a francophile when it came to cinema. as i was growing up, french film seemed the most foreign of all foreign film to me. i resisted, bolstered by only really being exposed to the elements of it that were most easily parodied. then i saw rififi. it turns out i had just been watching the wrong french films that whole time. i just needed one made by an american expatriate to grease the skids. this one is so beautifully bleak and cruelly efficient. it's an ill-fated perfect crime story, maybe the ill-fated perfect crime story. jean servais is perfectly cast as shelfworn gangster tony le stéphanois. newly released from prison, he is making tentative steps to re-establish his life. his former girlfriend is now the chattel of a rival gangster and he is being prevailed upon by old friends to get back to work. initially, he declines to participate in a planned jewel heist but, after an episode where announces his return by whipping the message into said ex-girlfriend's back, his course becomes clear to him and he joins his comrades in the heist. their plan lacks ambition, though. not satisfied with their idea of simply grabbing window displays, he decides they will make a play for the safe. what follows is one of the first and best robbery rehearsal and execution sequences in film history. i remember when i saw blood simple (1984) being knocked out at the audacity of the coen brothers and marveling at them putting a twenty-minute section with no dialogue dead in the middle of their movie. then i saw this and learned where they had potentially cribbed that idea from. thirty years prior, jules dassin had done it. for one quarter of this film, no one speaks and you can't take your eyes off the screen. of course, as with all jobs that you can't pull on your own, someone lets down the side, lousing everything up because of a dame, and the final act is a beautiful unraveling in which numerous, inevitable bad decisions are made, violent revenge is had and dassin takes subtextual shots at those who named names before the house un-american activities committee. of course it was the french who first noticed the development of, and coined the name for, film noir. who else could have? the existential malaise of the criminal underclass and the inevitability of their bad end is practically their cinematic birthright and you will never see it done better than this.

and, finally, we take a step out of noir toward the new wave with louis malle's feature film debut, elevator to the gallows (1958).

ah, jeanne moreau and her perfect, tired eyes. she and maurice ronet play lovers conspiring to kill her husband, a subcategory of perfect crime whose rate of failure would be, you would think, enough to discourage anyone from even considering it. hardly. ronet enacts their plan - which is clever, i admit - only to forget one little detail. as we all know by know, that one little detail is always enough. he commits the murder and begins to make good his getaway only to notice he has left a piece of evidence behind. abandoning his car to retrieve it, he becomes trapped in an elevator as the security guard shuts down the power to the building in preparation to leave for the weekend. meanwhile, the girl who works in the flower shop, where ronet has left his car running, and her juvenile delinquent boyfriend decide to take a joyride. ronet's hasty mistake added to the kids' dumb decision doesn't just amount to an idiotic sum, but a deadly geometric progression, as the young hothead kills a pair of travelers, leaving ronet's car and belongings behind as evidence. in the meantime, moreau wanders the streets waiting for word from ronet in that way that only french women can. moreau's performance here feels like she is single-handedly building a bridge between more traditional, conventional forms and the new wave that was just on the horizon. malle splits time between expertly ratcheting up the tension in the elevator and navigating the haze moreau finds herself equally trapped in, using this snappy genre exercise to point the way to what's next. in addition to that, miles davis' iconic score blows through the film like the last trumpet on earth, a sentiment echoed by paris' oddly empty streets. it all makes for a perfect, lonely, unsettling world in which nothing is perfect, least of all the perfect crime.

well, that was a beautifully dark day. tune in tomorrow for a special treat:

color! what'll they think of next?

trailer tuesday

this week's entry is for william sachs' monsterpiece, the incredible melting man (1977)!

slightly carla: day one

a couple of disclaimers before we get started: this week's list is a dream. all you jackals out there, all you bloodthirsty louts, you'll have to get your kicks elsewhere this time around. i know how much you enjoy watching me suffer and rip things to shreds during these li'l experiments. i just wanted you to know that there will be none of that this week. also, i have severely overbooked myself this week so this might extend beyond the usual seven days if i don't have adequate time to make it through carla's list.

that being said, here we go. day one was a program of effervescent classics beginning with ernst lubitsch's trouble in paradise (1932), the rosetta stone of romantic comedy.

if you don't know the work of ernst lubitsch then i recommend you rectify that as soon as possible. his films are among the most witty and elegant of hollywood's golden era and this pre-code jewel is probably the best example of what makes them so great. herbert marshall and miriam hopkins play a pair of thieves who fall in love while trying to swindle one another. realizing they are made for each other, they embark on a whirlwind, worldwide courtship, finally landing at kay francis' doorstep. they insinuate themselves into her household as confidante and secretary and put their plan into action to relieve her of several thousand francs. there's just one hitch - love rears its ugly head. it's truly brilliant. we are given a love triangle in which either option is equally viable, as opposed to the configurations we get today in which there is only one obvious, inevitable choice. at every turn, lubitsch gives us just what we need to keep the story moving briskly but in the least obvious manner. for example, we begin in venice, but instead of the standard opening shot of cityscape and canals imparting that information, we are offered a generic doorway and an overflowing trashcan. the contents are emptied onto a garbage scow that we learn is a gondola only as the shot expands to take in the city. in another instance we witness a pivotal romantic scene of the film with only a clock onscreen documenting the speed with which cupid works and offscreen dialogue. lubitsch never fails to find the least conventional way to tell the world's oldest story. he's never dull and never wasteful, every frame moving gracefully, fleetly along, always advancing the tale, beautiful to look at but never simply ornamental. the comedy itself is crisp and sexually charged, taking full advantage of freedoms that would be severely compromised before too long by the motion picture production code. the two female leads are only onscreen together twice but each scene crackles, their first meeting being a wry sparring match and their second being the inevitable showdown. it may be a little mannered and stagebound for some, but for the early sound era it is quite inventive and sophisticated and its influence is far-reaching. from this wellspring, we get everything from screwball comedy to gentleman thieves. it's lithe, lean and, most importantly, very funny. that lubitsch touch is on full display in this one.

next, we cut loose a little bit with howard hawks' ball of fire (1941).

on pedigree alone, this one is impressive. directed by hawks, written by billy wilder, starring gary cooper, barbara stanwyck, a young dana andrews and a houseful of the era's greatest character actors. cooper heads up a team of eccentric lexicographers who are stuck about halfway through the S's and to get the project moving again he goes out into the real world to do some research on his entry for slang. he meets nightclub singer and gangster's moll stanwyck who wields language like it was a thompson gun. she's the perfect research subject and, to avoid the pesky district attorney, she holes up with cooper and his fellow professors, a bawdy snow white to their newly-invigorated seven dwarfs, turning the house upside down while she teaches them the latest lingo. in the finest opposites attract tradition, cooper's straight arrow falls for stanwyck and counters the advances she made under false pretenses with a marriage proposal. she goes along with it, but only until she can marry andrews, which will relieve her from having to testify against him in court. wouldn't you know it, though? cooper's fresh-faced naivety wins her heart. as opposed to trouble in paradise, this one is more boisterous and offers no surprises. the plot is a bit silly but there are abundant pleasures to be found in the performances. gary cooper might as well own the patent on this kind of character. he can do it in his sleep but i'll be damned if he doesn't get me every time. his earnestness is disarming, his bumbling is adorable and if you don't pull for him then you must just be some kind of a jerk. stanwyck's performance is one of my favorites that she's ever put in, just the perfect mix and tough and sweet. she's a practical girl, and we all know how i like that, and their chemistry works well. best of all, the professors are a riot. you've seen their faces in the margins of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of some of hollywood's greatest films, but putting them all together in one house is a masterstroke. combine all that with dizzying linguistics and gene krupa playing a tiny drum solo with matchsticks and everything is jake.

there's a third film, perhaps my favorite of the bunch, that carla intended to be included in this opening cocktail and i am watching it as we speak, but there is no way i'll be able to finish and write it up tonight, as i have to be up for work at 6 a.m. i will include it in tomorrow's entry and then we'll take a walk at the dark end of the street.

keep one hand on your wallet and i'll see you tomorrow.