USA

Metropolitan (1989)

André Crous

USA
3.5*

Director:
Whit Stillman
Screenwriter:
Whit Stillman
Director of Photography:
John Thomas
Running time: 98 minutes

Tom Townsend is not very likeable. He pretends to have very firm ideas about literature and social structures, but prefers literary criticism to actual novels, citing his displeasure at the inherent inventedness of fiction. He reminds me a lot of Jesse Eisenberg’s character in Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale, albeit with fewer father issues.

Tom lives on New York’s West Side and attends Princeton, but when we meet him during the cold winter holidays, wearing a raincoat over his dinner jacket, instead of a proper overcoat, we recognise that he does not share the wealthy lifestyle of the group of friends who, on the spur of the moment, invite him to attend a deb (débutante) party with them. Usually, he would avoid these kinds of events, but since he has little else to do, and he is virtually coerced by the most vocal and self-assured of the pack, Nick, into joining them, he goes along and intrigues the others – all of them in their early twenties.

We know next to nothing about Nick, and over the course of the film, we get to learn very little, except that he has convinced himself that he has a good relationship with his absent father, though we can see he is deluding himself. His lack of expressiveness and straightforward attitude about the things he believes in and those he opposes are refreshing for one timid girl, Audrey, who quickly gravitates towards him. But Nick is blind to her attention and is still hooked on Serena Slocum, a girl who apparently, according to the gossip in the group, was dating as many as twenty boys at the same time.

At first, the group (designated as the “Sally Fowler Rat Pack”, or S.F.R.P.) seems completely isolated from the rest of society, an upper-class enclave that functions on its own, removed from the vast mass of people around them that populate Manhattan, and it is comical, reminiscent of Maggie Smith’s character in Gosford Park, when one girl declares that she “can’t stand snobbery or snobbish acts of any kind”, while someone outside the group is easily labelled as “riff-raff”. But gradually, largely thanks to the character of Audrey, who is the most vulnerable, the group shows signs of humanity, the kind of social interaction that we can relate to, and thaws the very cold façade with which we are initially presented.

The film is mostly a kind of chamber film, consisting of dialogue-heavy scenes that involve only a handful of characters, discussing social interaction and gossiping about others. Very few laughs are to be had, and the most uproarious moment occurs when they decide to dance the cha-cha-cha. But the writing is very good and writer-director Stillman delivers many insightful gems that distil and persuasively relate social wisdom.

Metropolitan provides a nice snapshot of this segment of New York society and the decline and ultimate disintegration of the group is fascinating to watch, made all the more captivating by our realisation that it all takes place over the course of the winter holidays. “You go to a party, you meet a group of people, you think ‘These people are gonna be my friends for the rest of my life.’ Then you never see them again. Where do they go?”, asks an adult, a former Princeton man, towards the end of the film.

The film takes great care not to alienate the audience from the characters but doesn’t do so to the detriment of the characters themselves, who remain complicated despite their failure to recognise their own faults. The actors, most of them amateur players, are very competent and deliver the lines with admirable self-assurance, though Charlie (Taylor Nichols) has some of the most cerebral lines and does not always come across as entirely convincing. Metropolitan strikes a more sombre tone than The Squid and the Whale, but its approach is perhaps more deliberately realistic and certainly worth a look.

The Great Train Robbery (1903)

André Crous

USA
3.5*

Director:
Edwin S. Porter
Screenwriters:
Edwin S. Porter
Scott Marble
Directors of Photography:
Blair Smith
Edwin S. Porter

Running time: 12 minutes

Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 film, produced in the first decade of the motion picture industry, was not the first film to present the viewer with a narrative, but it must have been one of the most exhilarating films of its time, with action scenes that would clearly serve as the blueprint for similar scenes in tens of thousands of subsequent films. As a 12-minute film, The Great Train Robbery moves along briskly to show us the beginning, the middle, and the end of the train heist, focusing almost completely on the action while being indifferent to its perpetrators (the film is much more interested in the victims).

The film consists of a mere sequence of 14 shots, but unlike many contemporary films that have a similar average shot length (in this case, around 50 seconds), no shot feels too long, for the pace is quick throughout as we rush from one action to the next. The actions, as the title makes clear, all revolve around a train robbery and involve gunfights in the forest, fistfights on top of a moving train and chases on horseback. The shots are mostly static, but the action inside the frame will keep your attention.

As I mentioned above, the filmmaker focuses our attention on the very human individuals caught up in the action – for example, the telegraph operator at the train station, who is tied up, unable to alert the authorities of the bandits’ plans to rob the train, or the passenger shot in the back when he tries to escape. In the last instance, the passengers all have to line up to empty their pockets and give up their jewellery, when one man tries to run away. He is shot, but the bandits proceed to rifle through all the other passengers’ belongings; when they finally leave, the camera stays with this passenger, who has been lying motionlessly in the foreground.

Meanwhile, we never learn who the bandits or what their motives for this robbery are. It was not the film’s intention to educate its viewers but rather to entertain them, and it certainly succeeds in doing that, even though its rudimentary editing might seem laughable to a viewer today: in one scene, there is a very visible cut before a man is thrown off the train – what was a very lively individual before the cut suddenly turns into a lifeless dummy after the cut…

The most famous shot in the film is completely gratuitous and contains a close-up of a bandit who looks directly into the camera, points his pistol at us, and fires six shots. The shot comes after the narrative proper, as a kind of epilogue, or coda, and is clearly used for effect rather than serving as a continuation of the narrative. All the bandits having been killed by the end of the film, one could argue that the breaking of the fourth wall is warranted and so is the use of the close-up, which the director had avoided in the rest of the film.

The Great Train Robbery does not outstay its welcome; it is undoubtedly an important historical document that presents us with the origins of the action film, but while one can forgive the film for its technical shortcomings, the narrative still feels too rough around the edges and I would have appreciated a better sense of context and characters. However, as one of the first narrative films, it is remarkably coherent and worth a look, just to see where it all started.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

André Crous

USA
4*

Director:
John Frankenheimer
Screenwriter:
George Axelrod
Director of Photography:
Lionel Lindon

Running time: 126 minutes

The Manchurian Candidate leaves the viewer with a lasting impression of conspiracy and treason at the highest levels of government, and is filled with magnificent set pieces, from the brilliantly staged nightmare sequences that frighten us because horrific acts are perpetrated with poker-face serenity and a willingness to carry out the orders given, to the film’s thrilling climax at a political party’s National Convention.

In light of the film’s premise, that evil forces are at work and will stop at nothing to infiltrate the government and take over the country on a wave of anti-communist nationalism, the film slowly picks up speed before charging towards its suspenseful resolution. These final moments are enormously rewarding, for despite having received confirmation of all the characters’ intentions and desires, we are still left with lingering doubts about the plot, which soon clear up once the tension reaches breaking point.

The film is about brainwashing and about communism; however, in a reversal of the usual approach, the former is treated very seriously while the latter is used for the sake of humour, though it has some darker implications. In 1952, a soldier and his platoon are captured in Korea, but on their arrival back in the United States, some time later, this soldier, Raymond Shaw, is awarded the Medal of Honor for having saved the lives of his fellow soldiers, who – each and every one of them – describe him as “the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”

Shaw is the stepson of Senator Joseph Iselin, a buffoon who is about to be re-elected, the campaign run by his devious, ambitious wife – Shaw’s mother, Eleanor (Angela Lansbury). Shaw clearly has some mother issues, but these will only come into focus in the second half of the film. For the time being, we are treated to Shaw’s former captain, Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra), who struggles with the same hellish nightmare over and over every night, in which he sees the decorated Shaw forced to murder two soldiers of the platoon – the exact same soldiers who were supposed to have “died” in Korea.

It is revealed that Shaw has been brainwashed to respond to certain cues – phrases or images – that make him susceptible to suggestion, and these are directly linked to his relationship with his mother, a diabolical woman who will stop at nothing to quench her lust for power and her unspoken lust for her own son. In case you were wondering: yes, Freud is mentioned explicitly, though not within the context of Raymond and Eleanor. In flashback, Raymond’s first love, Jocelyn, mentions Freud when she tells him of her father’s fear of snakes.

The film does have its handful of flaws, most important of which is the development of Janet Leigh’s character, Eugenie, who meets a tired Marco on the train, speaks to him in what seems like coded language, and proceeds to fall head over heels in love with him. Perhaps this part of the story was included to counterbalance the tragic relationship of Raymond and Jocelyn, but Eugenie brings very little to the plot and could have been ditched completely. The role of a Korean interpreter, Chunjin, who comes to America and takes a job as Raymond’s valet, is also left too vague, and by the end of the film we have no idea whether his intentions were pure or not.

As a cautionary tale, released around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis at the height of the Cold War, shortly after the McCarthy years and one year before the assassination of JFK, the film was relevant to the point of being clairvoyant. It contains some unforgettable scenes, including a tense scene with the Star-Spangled Banner, though the music at other points in the film can be quite heavy-handed. The idea of a communist acting as a publicly anti-communist crusader is also still very relevant today, as can be seen in the American Congress, where quite a few closeted gay men are, in public, vehemently opposed to homosexuality. Today, watching Eleanor mention the kinds of emergency powers she intends to secure for her husband, saying that they would “make martial law seem like anarchy”, one immediately thinks of the Patriot Act, which just goes to show that politics change very little over time. It’s not entirely clear to what extent Senator Iselin is aware of his wife’s grand design, but the fact that he dresses up as Abraham Lincoln during a dinner party (and is reflected in a portrait of the president in another scene) provides interesting clues to his awareness of what everything is leading up to.

Frankenheimer, who would go on to direct another political thriller, Seven Days in May, slowly reveals the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, and in the end, we do get the whole picture, but some pieces seem to belong to a different puzzle.

The Fall (2006)

André Crous

USA
3*

Director:
Tarsem Singh
Screenwriters:
Dan Gilroy
Nico Soultanakis
Tarsem Singh
Director of Photography: 
Colin Watkinson

Running time: 117 minutes

The abilities of Tarsem Singh (or just “Tarsem”, as the credits refer to him) as storyteller have not improved since he gave us his début feature The Cell in 2000, but he has continued his fascination with the representation of images in the mind, and The Fall is filled with breathtaking visuals that will send a shiver down your spine.

It is true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but few would argue with the view that The Fall contains some of the most spectacular locations ever put on film. The Pyramids, Charles Bridge, the Taj Mahal, the Blue City of Jodhpur, and many others are scattered throughout the film and compose a unique world in which the mythical story-within-a-story is set.

This particular story is told by Roy — a stuntman who is lying in his hospital bed in Los Angeles after a stunt in which he was supposed to jump from a bridge onto a horse — to a gap-toothed young Romanian girl named Alexandria, who is recovering after her family’s house was burnt to the ground. The story he tells her is “epic” in nature and concerns the adventures of five men who, having been banished by the evil Governor Odious, decide to track him down. They are a mixed bunch of fellows, from Charles Darwin who struts around in what seems to be a peacock fur coat (!) to a burly Italian explosives expert, Luigi, who wears a long, bright yellow coat.

The filmmaker’s only interesting tactic in terms of telling his story is the slow integration of elements from Roy’s own life in the development and composition of the story he tells. However, this tactic would have had much more impact if it had not been present from the very beginning. The transition between the world of the story and the world of the hospital is very often made by allowing the words of the characters of both worlds to overlap.

The film is also quite unclear about the point of view from which the story is told, and individuals from either Roy’s or Alexandria’s life feature as characters at various stages. It is fun to recognise other entities in both worlds, but we get spectacle instead of functionality. When Alexandria says that she likes elephants, Tarsem gives us a scene with an elephant swimming in tropical waters, and no more.

The Fall has been criticised for its total focus on the visual aspect while completely neglecting its content and I tend to agree. The film is rather shallow, and while the beautiful images do keep our attention, most of the time, the filmmakers have paid very little attention to the film’s narrative and music. The only piece of music that is well-chosen is the second movement from Beethoven’s “Seventh Symphony”. In terms of acting, little is expected of the adventure story’s characters, since their world plays as a fragmentary, wholly imagined realm of imagined adventures, but unfortunately a great deal of the film is devoted to this story.

That being said, the story that takes place “in the present”, that is at some point during the early days of the motion picture industry, probably around the time of World War I, is not uninteresting. Alexandria is not irritating, and Roy, played by Lee Pace, is accommodating, generous, friendly and thoroughly likeable. I had some difficulty believing him as a man tortured by love, because his face is happy even when it is sad, but this was a minimal objection to his performance.

The film has a satisfactory resolution, though hardly the kind of ending we were looking for in a story that ought to be “epic”. Many images will stick with the viewer, in particular one moment when a keyhole serves as a pinhole camera and draws the shadow of a moving horse upside-down on the wall opposite. However, given the lack of substance, and despite the pleasant interaction between Lee Pace and first-time actress Catinca Untaru, the film itself has very little purpose except as a kind of travelogue about the country of India.

Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)

André Crous

Make Way for TomorrowUSA
4*

Director:
Leo McCarey
Screenwriter: 
Viña Delmar
Director of Photography:
William C. Mellor

Running time: 91 minutes

Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow will forever be known as the American film that anticipated Yasujiro Ozu’s celebrated Tokyo Story by more than a decade. It is the story of an elderly couple who have lost their home during the Great Depression and need the support of their five children, all of whom are unwilling to put a roof over both their parents’ heads because of the disruption it would create in their own lives. So, their father and mother spend most of the film separated from each other, waiting for a letter or a phone call that would offer reassurance about each other’s health and good spirits.

The film is affectionate towards its two main characters without being sentimental or schmaltzy, and the director’s very simple presentation of the material makes for an unassuming visual quality that does not seek to highlight any part of its content; the impact of the film on the viewer is the result of many small incidents that we fear might tear at the relationship of a couple who has been married for fifty years.

Barkley and Lucy Cooper are in their late sixties or early seventies and the bank has recently foreclosed on their home, because Barkley hasn’t worked in four years, and is visibly affected by his age. They have gathered together their children to explain the situation, but their children seem to think it would be a terrible bother; not one of them is keen on putting up both the parents, so Barkley and Lucy go their own ways to spend time with their children for what is supposed to be a temporary arrangement. It does turn out to be very temporary, and in the process the generation gap quickly becomes evident and unbearable. The film itself starts with a title card that implies the natural difficulty of communication across the generations: “…there is no magic that will draw together in perfect understanding the aged and the young. There is a canyon between us, and the painful gap is only bridged by the ancient words of a very wise man — ‘Honor thy father and thy mother’.”

We spend most of the film in the company of Lucy, the mother, who is staying with her son George, his wife and their daughter. We quickly realise that Lucy is not as out of touch with reality as her family thinks she is, and while she doesn’t want to impose, her daughter-in-law, who teaches bridge at home in the evening, makes no bones about the fact that her stay is interfering with the established rhythm of the family. In the meantime, her own son has made contact with a restroom for elderly women. I found, however, that certain scenes were a bit overdramatic in the sense that Lucy did meddle with the guests – being the only person standing up, while the others are seated at the tables, she goes around looking at people’s cards and making comments about their hands.

Lucy’s husband, Barkley, is spending time with his daughter Cora, a woman whose pride blinds her to the generosity of others and whose stinginess makes her appear to be completely heartless. As opposed to the events of Tokyo Story, the children in this film, while arguably even worse than the children in Ozu’s film, do realise, in the end, that they have not lived up to their parents’ expectations. The emotional shock that George’s wife gets when she becomes aware that there is also a communication gap between her and her daughter is a significant development, for it becomes a mirror held up to the adults and reflects their relationship with their parents.

The film contains beautiful moments of reminiscence between Barkley and Lucy that may be compared to the beginning of Up, and by the time Lucy recites a poem she memorised as a young girl, half the audience will have teared up. Make Way for Tomorrow is not a life lesson as much as it is a look at a couple whose relationship has lasted 50 years, and can even withstand the condescension of their own children, though we might not always believe what they are capable of.

The poem that Lucy recites is the following:

A man and a maid stand hand in hand,
Down by a wedding band.
Before them lay uncertain years,
Promised joy, maybe tears.
‘Is she afraid?’ thought the man of the maid.
‘Darling,’ he says, in a tender voice,
‘Do you regret your choice?’
‘We know not where the road will wind,
Or what strange byways we may find.
Are you afraid?’ says the man, to the maid.

She raised her eyes, and spoke at last.
‘My dear,’ she said, ‘the die have been cast,
The vows have been spoken,
The rice has been thrown,
Into the future we travel alone.’
‘With you,’ said the maid, ‘I’m not afraid.’

The Thin Red Line (1998)

André Crous

USA
3*

Director:
Terrence Malick
Screenwriter:
Terrence Malick
Director of Photography:
John Toll

Running time: 163 minutes

The most distracting thing about Terrence Malick’s longest film is not the length, nor is it the extremely slow pace of the narrative or the reflective, fragmentary voice-overs we are treated to by many different characters. No, it is the number of celebrities, almost all of whom unfortunately draw our attention away from the film’s desire to approach the characters of its soldiers as intimately as possible. Forget Grand Hotel; this film features Jim Caviezel, Sean Penn, Woody Harrelson, Elias Koteas, Tim Blake Nelson, Adrien Brody, Jared Leto, John C. Reilly, Ben Chaplin, John Travolta, Nick Nolte, Nick Stahl, John Cusack, George Clooney and a few more. It is ludicrous to pack a film as sensitive as this one with names like these, and while the celebrities almost certainly secured Malick the budget he needed, the effect on the appreciation of the film is devastating.

If you’ve ever heard of Terrence Malick, then you shouldn’t be surprised that The Thin Red Line is not your average war epic. Malick’s voice-overs fill the soundtrack as much as actual dialogue, and despite the battle waged between the Americans and the Japanese, nature is the real character of the film. Set almost entirely on the island of Guadalcanal, part of the Solomon Islands in the Pacific Ocean, it focuses on the experiences of a group of soldiers who are fighting the Japanese and coming to terms with formerly abstract terms such as “death” and “danger”.

One of these soldiers is Private Witt, who went AWOL and is living on an island with native Melanesians when his country tracks him down at the beginning of the film and makes him join Charlie Company, an outfit whose mission it is to take out the Japanese on Guadalcanal. His idyllic life on the island had been beautiful and carefree, but he is about to be confronted up close with the loss of life and the loss of natural innocence, as a streak of blood on a blade of grass subtly informs us early on.

Nature, interior reflection – in the form of voice-overs – and reactions to death are what this film mostly concerns itself with. As Private Witt, Jim Caviezel delivers a performance that draws the viewer like a magnet. He is cool, calm, and wise, with a spirit much older than his youthful face could ever reveal. Witt is one of the few characters that we can hold on to while others slide in and out of view, without reason. Admittedly, Malick does make an explicit point that it is possible for all men to somehow share a big spirit, and that we, like nature, are all connected by a spiritual thread we fail to recognise. But very little is done to develop this insight, which quickly disappears.

There are many voice-overs, always delivered dispassionately, but since the story is not tied to a particular individual, it is often very difficult to establish whose voice we are hearing; sometimes, the speaker doesn’t even appear in the scene. In this way, we hear the disembodied voices of (at least) Privates Witt, Bell (Ben Chaplin), Private First Class Doll (Dash Mihok), First Sergeant Welsh (Sean Penn) and Lieutenant Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte).

Some actors deliver stellar performances, most notably Jim Caviezel and Ben Chaplin, who absorb the chaos around them without being overly shaken by it and yet portray absolute humanity and a dignity that is beautiful. I also want to acknowledge the strength of Elias Koteas’s character, Captain Staros, who seems to possess divine force when he speaks his native Greek, and Nick Nolte’s Lieutenant Colonel Tall, who is euphoric at his first taste of real war and doesn’t flinch even while grenades explode around him. Some actors are quite bad, such as Dash Mihok (an actor who has played wonderful roles in other films), who seems to be scared when he is not shocked and who never loses his slightly childlike demeanour. And then there are many actors who were not given any opportunity to develop their characters. Adrien Brody, always wide-eyed in this film, is seen but almost never heard, and George Clooney pops up in an interesting role… in the film’s final scene.

As usual for a Malick film, the audiovisual elements are simply stunning, and the director has included a romantic angle, which in this case does not serve the film well. One feels slightly embarrassed when Private Bell (Ben Chaplin) receives a letter from his wife, the context having been sketched previously with simple flashbacks that do not present us with a concrete picture, but Chaplin copes exceedingly well. For all the weaknesses of the screenplay (the entire plot can be summarised in a very short paragraph), the camera does some amazing tricks with its pitch perfectly coloured images, and the Melanesian choir music is unforgettable. Look out for an early scene, after the death of two soldiers, when sunlight turns the grass from dark-green to yellow.

Malick gets at the complexity of war and there are many interesting moments scattered throughout the film, including a captain’s desire to see his men protected, no matter what the effect on the battle, the awkwardness of battle depicted by soldiers running into each other while fleeing gunfire, and the universality of suffering, when a Japanese prisoner cries for the dead friends around him. But these moments, while rich and insightful, do not cohere into a strong narrative and ultimately we get the sense that Malick is meticulous but unable to move beyond the abstract and give us a physical experience of his world. The film has an abundance of water and greenery, and a sharp eye for human emotion, with some strong performances, but these are lonely elements in a film that gets caught up in its own rhetoric.

Seven Days in May (1964)

André Crous

USA
3.5*

Director:
John Frankenheimer
Screenwriter: 
Rod Serling
Director of Photography:
Ellsworth Fredericks

Running time: 118 minutes

John Frankenheimer’s Seven Days in May is a slow cooker, and even though it doesn’t punch you as hard as some other political films, most notably Frankenheimer’s own The Manchurian Candidate, released two years earlier, it is as eerily relevant today as it was during the Cold War.

It’s early May in Washington, D.C., and the temperature is rising fast. Outside the White House, protesters are lamenting the president’s decision to sign a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union, which, they say, would put the United States at a disadvantage, and demonstrates the naiveté of their commander-in-chief, President Jordan Lyman. On their side is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a four-star general named James Mattoon Scott, who has nothing but contempt for the treaty and the Russian communists it seems to appease.

The story centres on the administration’s concerns with Scott and his secretive dealings at the highest levels of the government, including the construction of a secret base near El Paso. Thanks to a number of fortunate slips of the tongue in the company of one of Scott’s subordinates, General Casey, known simply as “Jiggs”, a plan to overthrow the government slowly comes to light, and it is the administration’s task to contain the imminent threat to their national security.

Two questions surface: How does one go about containing this threat, when this act of sedition (by one of the most public, vocally patriotic individuals in the government, no less) is almost unthinkable? And does General Scott, despite his plans being labelled as treason, actually have a point when he stands up to defend his country against what he deems to be enemies both foreign and domestic?

The first question is obviously the narrative thread of the film, while the second question relates to the film’s relevance to politics today. Does patriotism (or nationalism) ever trump democracy and its institutions? The populism of General Scott is made clear during an address to a stadium packed with like-minded individuals furious at the president’s insistence on peace with communist Russia. Scott declares that patriotism, loyalty and sentiment define the USA, but he fails to recognise the importance of the institution of democracy. He has a Messiah complex and pretends to speak for “the people”, but his judgement is clouded by arrogance and a refusal to compromise or to discuss. Referring to the era of uncertainty brought about by the Cold War, Lyman makes the following statement:

And from this, this desperation, we look for a champion in red, white and blue. Every now and then, a man on a white horse rides by, and we appoint him to be our personal god for the duration. For some men it was a Senator McCarthy, for others it was a General Walker, and now it’s a General Scott. 

Parallels with current politicians and presidential candidates are self-evident, although they make a point of using the Constitution to protect themselves, even though, more often than not, they confuse the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

The film has many highlights, including our first view of General Scott – in close-up, from behind, so we can’t see his face during a committee hearing. When Jiggs watches television, to see General Scott speak in front of the big crowd, the tension built up by the crowd’s euphoric reaction (they keep chanting “We want Scott!”) is also very well depicted by means of quick-fire editing, both inside the frame on the television set, and between these images and Jiggs’s face. There are also two excellent scenes inside the White House: In the first, Jiggs tells the president of his suspicions; in another, the showdown between the president and General Scott, the atmosphere is electric.

But the film also has its faults. Boom and camera shadows are visible, some scenes seem a bit too contrived (the scenes at El Paso, both in the restaurant and at the base, and the extraordinary timing of a key piece of evidence in the final scene), and the film ends with a speech every bit as cheesy as President Thomas Whitmore’s victory speech in Independence Day.

The film was ahead of its time with its use of videophones (giving an accurate impression that the film was set a few years into the future), and it has some wonderful moments of sharp dialogue. The use of actor Martin Balsam, who had appeared as detective Arbogast in Hitchcock’s Psycho a few years earlier, is also very clever, and when he picks up the phone after a significant encounter, we know that he won’t make it back in one piece.

Seven Days in May is a serious look at the potential for betrayal in government ranks and is worth a look. Though it doesn’t have the dramatic power of The Manchurian Candidate nor the power of drama disguised as comedy, as in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, the film provides an insightful glimpse of the fear that the Cold War not only had dire international, but also intranational, implications. And these fears have not disappeared with the fall of the Iron Curtain, for populism and the likelihood of a man or woman “on a white horse” are even more frightening as the years pass.

Days of Heaven (1978)

André Crous

USA
4*

Director:
Terrence Malick
Screenwriter:
Terrence Malick
Directors of Photography:
Néstor Almendros
Haskell Wexler

Running time: 95 minutes

Terrence Malick is a big ol’ romantic; just consider Badlands and The New World. Days of Heaven is in the same vein, and its images are breathtaking. It stars Richard Gere and Brooke Adams, who pretend to be brother and sister, lest other people “start talking”, and go to work in the Texas Panhandle in 1916, where they sack the wheat on the farm of a bachelor roughly their age. The farmer is never given a name, but ironically, he is the best-drawn character of the three.

Days of Heaven starts with the music of Camille Saint-Saëns, the famous seventh movement (“Aquarium”) of his “Carnival of the Animals”, and the music sets the tone for the rest of the score, composed by the master, Ennio Morricone. Malick’s images are dreamlike in colour yet very clearly “of this world”, and his characters seem to float through existence even though we can easily project our own fears onto them. For once, I think the film’s images themselves surpass even the beauty of the film’s Criterion DVD cover (the poster image at the top).

The film was famously shot mostly at magic hour (that brief window of time after sunset and before darkness), and as a result, the horizon is often bright orange, the sky is tinted purple-orange and the characters are bathed in hues of pink. Malick’s decision to shoot primarily (though, importantly, not exclusively) at this time of day inevitably led to some trouble, including errors in continuity, because shots would change from magic hour to full sunlight in a single scene. However, his directors of photography, Almendros and Wexler, knew how to cope with the demands of their director, and for the most part, these changes in lighting are not very significant.

It is true that the film has less plot than some music videos, but honestly, one doesn’t really care. Malick is a visual storyteller, and he easily manages to fill an entire film with action set on a single farm. The majestic farmhouse, perched on a hill, which looks out over the whole property and is reminiscent of the famous farmhouse in George Stevens’s Giant, appears in many shots in the background, and sometimes the camera pans from the action in a pond or in the fields back to the house in the background.

Brooke Adams’s character, Abby, who looks like a young Ali MacGraw, catches the eye of the farmer, who asks her to stay on at the farm past the end of the season. Her boyfriend, Billy, had heard that the farmer is ill, and they decide to let Abby stay on so that they could inherit the farmer’s money when he dies. Of course, he doesn’t die as quickly as they’d like,  and this fact generates some frustration in Billy. But Abby is carefree and starts to fall in love with the farmer, played by Sam Shepard, who never looked more handsome and genuinely cares for her.

Days of Heaven plays as a kind of memory – an idea supported by the voice-over of Abby’s young sister, Linda, who also joins them at the farm. But for some reason, the Linda on the soundtrack is the voice of the Linda as a young girl, which doesn’t make much sense. Also, the point of the view of the camera is always displaced from one character to another.

The inspiration for David Gordon Green‘s film, Undertow, is obvious, especially in the way both directors use dialogue in their respective films. In scenes with dialogue, Malick uses the age-old rule of starting a scene as late as possible and ending it as quickly as possible. These conversational moments are effective, although some scenes exist purely for the sake of producing one or two lines of important dialogue before we move on to the next poetic scene with wheat ears quivering under a gentle breeze.

Days of Heaven‘s finest moment, the attack of the locusts, may be compared to the buffalo hunt in Dances with Wolves, but it also has a very important symbolic role to play, as it comes at a critical point in the narrative, and Malick makes use of this moment to introduce his only vertically downward shot – a divine point of view that plays on the locusts’ significance in a biblical context as well.

But for all the beautiful imagery, the central story and, in particular, the characters of Abby and Billy needed to be fleshed out a bit more. Abby, in particular, seems to have no real attachment, and one doesn’t get a clear idea of her true interest. The film contains some interesting glances from smaller characters who are suspicious of the relationship between Abby and her “brother”, Billy, and these are well integrated into the flow of the story.

Terrence Malick’s film is enchanting and, despite any objections one might have about the story or the characters, he demonstrates that the cinema has a powerful ability to present even the simplest of stories in harmonious sounds and images that can be truly astounding.

Witness for the Prosecution (1957)

André Crous

USA
3.5*

Director:
Billy Wilder
Screenwriters:
Billy Wilder
Harry Kurnitz
Director of Photography:
Russell Harlan

Running time: 116 minutes

It’s all about the ending. Billy Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution, based on the Agatha Christie play with the same title, was a landmark film in the sense that it was one of the first films whose main attraction was a final plot twist. Before The Sixth Sense, before House of Games and even before Psycho, there was Witness for the Prosecution, and, just like Hitchcock, who launched a marketing campaign to ensure people don’t give away the ending (nor the beginning), Wilder’s film ends with a voice-over asking the audience to please keep silent about the film’s last-minute coup de théâtre.

Unfortunately, this is by far the film’s most interesting aspect, and this is what saves it from mediocrity. Charles Laughton delivers a wonderful performance as the stubborn barrister who is convinced of his client’s innocence, despite the lack of tangible proof and the decision of the defendant’s wife (or, ex-wife) to be the titular witness for the prosecution, and he knows how to undermine proceedings when they do not seem to be progressing in his favour. But the screenplay, co-written by Wilder, does not possess the same verve that one generally associates with his work, and the dialogue in particular is merely functional where it should have delivered more punch.

Set in London in 1952, the film was shot exclusively in a studio and in fact, nearly the entire second half of the film takes place in the courtroom (the Old Bailey). From the title one can already surmise that this will be a courtroom drama, and of course one has the expectation of discovering who the “witness for the prosecution” will be. It is indeed a courtroom drama, but Laughton, starring as Sir Wilfred Robarts, plays it as comedy, shifting his weight around to make an entrance, keeping brandy in a flask that ought to be for his warm cocoa, and trading jabs with his nurse, the high-strung Miss Plimsoll.

Shortly after his release from the hospital, Sir Wilfred is paid a visit by a man named Leonard Vole, who has been accused of murdering the elderly, very wealthy Miss Emily French (whom I considered a bit of an excitable blabbermouth). Sir Wilfred is intrigued by the case, especially when Vole’s German wife, Christine (a wonderful job by Marlene Dietrich), seems not at all convinced about her own husband’s innocence. Sir Wilfred decides not to use her as a witness, but before long she is recruited by the prosecution, who alleges that Mrs Vole was already married when she first met Leonard and therefore is allowed to testify against her own husband.

Sir Wilfred easily discredits Mrs Vole, but he is not entirely happy with the way the case has proceeded, and frankly, neither was I. Compared with today’s courtroom dramas, or even Judgment at Nuremberg, released in 1961, this film is incredibly simplistic, and it would seem that the case is decided within two days. But then there is a deus ex machina that appears in the form of a drunk in a bar at Euston Station, and before we know it, things take a pleasant and wholly surprising turn.

It would seem that the case is open and shut, but Sir Wilfred still waits for the banana peel, and when we get this information, in the film’s final minutes, it turns the whole case upside down, with remarkable adroitness. The film is all about the ending, and it is a pity we have to wait two relatively tepid hours for the finale, but when it does come, it strikes a thunderous blow to our preconceived notions.

Sherlock Jr. (1924)

André Crous

USA
5*

Director:
Buster Keaton
Screenwriters:
Jean Havez
Joseph A. Mitchell
Clyde Bruckman
Directors of Photography: 
Elgin Lessley
Byron Houck

Running time: 44 minutes

Sherlock Jr. is a film that uses every trick in the book to produce electrifying moments of comedy that can still thrill audiences today. It is also a shrewd representation of the place of film in our lives.

The poster shows Buster Keaton as a detective and as a beloved (projectionist). The credits merely list him in his parenthetical capacity, and in fact, this occupation embraces the central part of the film, which takes the audience on a journey full of twists and turns that is very clearly related to the first part of the story.

Keaton, the man with the expressionless face who manages to find himself in extraordinary situations, stars as a guy who wants to be a detective as much as he wants to marry the Girl, but when he is framed by another suitor in the matter of a lost pocket watch, and his detective skills fail him, he dreams up a scenario in which he is the ultimate sleuth. This part of the film is presented in a way that excites by means of its presentation and its content.

This medium-length film is interesting on many levels, and while the action transcends mere slapstick (it is not repetitive and does not have any condescension for the film’s characters), Keaton’s conception of the film’s biggest stunts makes for remarkable commentary on the perspective of the viewer. Consider the following movements:

1) During a film screening in a big theatre, with a large audience watching, Keaton approaches the big screen and walks into the film. He subsequently appears in different scenes as the film cuts from one location to the next, and Keaton has to keep up with objects that appear out of nowhere.

2) In this film-within-a-film, Keaton follows some undesirables to their hide-out. He puts a rounded suitcase with a costume inside on the outside of the window, and when he escapes from the house by jumping through the window, he is instantly covered by this costume, and the criminals don’t recognise him. This particular scene is further enhanced by a cut-away image (produced by means of a kind of double exposure, a gimmick Keaton also uses to great effect in his 1928 film, The Cameraman) when the inside of the house can be seen “through the walls”. Technically, it must have been quite a job, but the final effect is breathtaking.

There are many other instances of such trickery, and in spite of (occasionally) less than perfect editing to disguise the manner in which they were done, the products are unexpected and work very well. Two other moments specifically target the perspective of the viewer:

1) When Keaton has already “entered” the screen, the camera dollies closer and closer, until the screen fills the frame, so that any subsequent scenes or cuts would appear like any other film and we forget that we are watching a film that is also being watched by the film’s audience. In this way, the second-level film becomes just as real or just as fake as the first-level film.

2) When Keaton wakes up from his dream and looks through the window of his projectionist’s booth towards the screen, his face is framed by a very clear border, similar to the image he himself is looking at: the framed image of the film in the theatre.

While Keaton doesn’t approach his subject with the same complexity as Woody Allen in The Purple Rose of Cairo, it remains a very entertaining film that touches on some important aspects of film reception. Unlike Chaplin, Keaton does not behave at all like a child, but rather like a very lucky average Joe, and since his technical skills enable a very entertaining telling of his story, he is by far the more serious director. In Sherlock Jr. he manages to craft a film that, while clearly not meant to be a feature-length idea, has enormous potential to entertain.