Souleymane Cisse’s extraordinarily beautiful and mesmerizing fantasy is set in the ancient Bambara culture of Mali (formerly French Sudan) long before it was invaded by Morocco in the 16th century. A young man (Issiaka Kane) sets out to discover the mysteries of nature (or komo, the science of the gods), but his jealous and spiteful father prevents him from deciphering the elements of the Bambara sacred rites and tries to kill him. In the course of a heroic and magical journey, the hero masters the Bambara initiation rites, takes over the throne, and ultimately confronts the magic of his father. Apart from creating a dense and exciting universe that should make George Lucas green with envy, Cisse has shot breathtaking images in Fujicolor and has accompanied his story with a hypnotic, percussive score. Conceivably the greatest African film ever made, this wondrous work provides an ideal introduction to a filmmaker who, next to Ousmane Sembene, is probably Africa’s greatest director. Not to be missed (1987). Winner of the jury prize at the 1987 Cannes Festival. (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Friday and Sunday, July 29 and 31, 6:00, 443-3737) Read more
Charles Crichton, the septuagenarian British director who made his biggest mark with The Lavender Hill Mob in 1951, teams up with actor, cowriter, and executive producer John Cleese to make a madcap caper comedy about another large-scale robbery that is every bit as funny as its predecessor. Like many of the best English comedies, much of the humor here is based on character, good-natured high spirits, and fairly uninhibited vulgarity (a speech impediment and dead dogs supply the basis for some of the gags). The superlative cast includes Americans Kevin Kline and Jamie Lee Curtis, the latter at her sexiest, as well as Michael Palin and Cleese; and Crichton keeps the laughs coming with infectious energy. (Commons, Water Tower, Harlem-Cermak, Yorktown, Hillside Square, Webster Place, Norridge, Old Orchard, Deerbrook) Read more
From the Chicago Reader (July 27, 1988). — J.R.
Sergei Eisenstein’s controversial, unfinished trilogy, with a Prokofiev score and a histrionic, campy (albeit compositionally very controlled) performance in the title role by Nikolai Cherkassov (1945). The ceremonial high style of the proceedings has been interpreted by critics as everything from the ultimate denial of a cinema based on montage (under Stalinist pressure) to the greatest Flash Gordon serial ever made. Thematically fascinating both as submerged autobiography and as a daring portrait of Stalin’s paranoia, quite apart from its interest as the historical pageant it professes to be, this is one of the most distinctive great films in the history of cinema–freakishly mannerist, yet so vivid in its obsessions and expressionist angularity that it virtually invents its own genre. 184 min. In Russian with subtitles.
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Possibly the most radical of the “black exploitation” films of the 70s, this movie was an overnight success when it was released in 1973, and then was abruptly taken out of distribution for reasons that are still not entirely clear. A mild-mannered social worker (Lawrence Cook) is recruited by the CIA as a token black, and then proceeds to learn (and later apply) the techniques of urban guerrilla warfare in Chicago (although most of the filming was done in Gary, Indiana). Corrosively ironic and often exciting, this adaptation by Sam Greenlee of his own novel, directed by Ivan Dixon, remains one of the great missing (or at least unwritten) chapters in black political filmmaking. Chicagoan Greenlee will be present at this rare screening to discuss the making of the film, its subsequent repression, and its effect on his career. (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Friday, July 22, 8:15, 443-3737) Read more
One of the most underrated of all children’s fantasies, and conceivably the most interesting movie that Stanley Kramer ever produced. Dr. Seuss wrote the screenplay (with Alan Scott); his wartime buddy Carl Foreman was originally supposed to direct, but the Hollywood witch-hunts soon made this impossible, and Roy Rowland took Foreman’s place. The plot basically consists of the florid nightmare of a ten-year-old boy (Tommy Rettig) about his authoritarian and vaguely foreign piano teacher (Hans Conried); in the dream, the piano teacher forces 500 boys to play his monotonous exercise on a continuous keyboard located in his gargantuan palace, while the boy’s mother is locked, hypnotized, in a gilded cage. Dr. Seuss originally wrote the part of an elderly plumber who befriends the boy for Karl Malden, but “commerce” intervened, and Kramer insisted on using radio star Peter Lind Hayes instead, with Hayes’s partner Mary Healy as the mother. Despite these and other problems–the film proved to be a financial disaster–the film remains a unique and truly imaginative wonder, fascinating both ideologically as an expression of its period (1953) and aesthetically as a very inventive form of delirium. Cinematographer Franz Planer, production designer Rudolph Sternad, and choreographer Eugene Loring all made astonishing contributions–their dungeon ballet, with an assist from Dr. Read more
One of the great modern films, Jacques Rivette’s 193-minute comic extravaganza is as scary and as unsettling in its diverse narrative high jinks as it is hilarious and exhilarating in its uninhibited slapstick. Its slow, sensual beginning stages a mysterious, semiflirtatious meeting between a shy librarian (Dominique Labourier) and a nightclub magician (Juliet Berto). Eventually, an outlandish plot-within-a-plot magically takes shape between them–a Jamesian, Victorian, and somewhat sexist melodrama featuring Bulle Ogier, Marie-France Pisier, Barbet Schroeder (the film’s producer), and a little girl–as each of them, on successive days, visits an old dark house where the exact same events take place. Oddly enough, both of the plots in this giddy comedy are equally outlandish, but the remarkable thing about this intricate balancing act is that each one holds the other in place; the elaborate, Hitchcockian doublings are so beautifully worked out that this movie steadily grows in resonance and power, and the final payoff is well worth waiting for. The four main actresses scripted their own dialogue in collaboration with Eduardo de Gregorio and Rivette, and the film derives many of its most euphoric effects from a wholesale ransacking of the cinema of pleasure (cartoons, musicals, thrillers, and serials). The use of locations (Paris’s Montmartre in the summertime) and direct sound is especially appealing, and cat lovers are in for a particular treat (1974). Read more
The first feature directed by the excellent English cinematographer Chris Menges, based on a sensitive autobiographical script by Shawn Slovo, is set in Johannesburg in 1963. A white, middle-class antiapartheid activist (Barbara Hershey) is arrested for her activities after her husband has had to leave the country for related reasons, and her 13-year-old daughter (Jodhi May), through whose eyes much of the story is told, has to adjust to the breakup of her home. In many respects, this film succeeds admirably in everything that Cry Freedom tried with much awkwardness to achieve; while the focus is once again more on the sacrifices and dedication of committed whites to the struggle against South African racism, there is never any sense of inflated melodrama or displaced emphasis here in the story the filmmakers have to tell, and the performances by Hershey, May, Jeroen Krabbe, Paul Freeman, and David Suchet–are especially powerful. (Fine Arts) Read more
Possibly the most radical of the blaxploitation films of the 70s, this movie was an overnight success when released in 1973, then was abruptly taken out of distribution for reasons still not entirely clear. A mild-mannered social worker (Lawrence Cook) is recruited by the CIA as a token black and proceeds to learn (and later apply) the techniques of urban guerrilla warfare in Chicago (though most of the filming was done in Gary, Indiana). Corrosively ironic and often exciting, this adaptation by Sam Greenlee of his own novel, directed by Ivan Dixon, remains one of the great missing (or at least unwritten) chapters in black political filmmaking. 102 min. (JR) Read more
Although it was directed by Billy Wilder, this 1955 CinemaScope classic sometimes seems presided over by Frank Tashlin, with its satire of 50s puritanism and its use of wimpy Tom Ewell as the married and harried book editor driven to dreams and distraction by his upstairs neighbor (Marilyn Monroe, magnificent) while his wife and son are on holiday. Scripted by Wilder and George Axelrod (who bowdlerized his own play to appease the censors); with Sonny Tufts, Evelyn Keyes, and Robert Straussalso memorable employment of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto. 105 min. (JR) Read more
Basil Dearden’s neglected 1959 British thriller is about an attractive young music student who’s found dead and who, it’s discovered by police inspectors Nigel Patrick and Michael Craig, had been passing for white. A detective story that reveals something of London’s black community in the late 50s. (JR) Read more
The title of Alain Tanner’s melancholy 1985 film refers to the rural zone between Swiss and French customs, where a group of small-time smugglers eke out a precarious, in-between existence. Films about border tensions (La grand illusion, Touch of Evil, Luc Moullet’s unjustly neglected Les contrebandieres) tend to treat their locations metaphorically, and this one is no exception, although it’s also a losers’ club movie in the manner of The Asphalt Jungle about a band of assorted malcontents who dream of escaping to a better life. Decorously framed and shot, with stately camera movements, lingering landscape shots, and a wonderful Terry Riley score, this movie glides along with a kind of graceful inertia that eventually defeats its spectators as well as its characters by gradually leading both to the same impasse. With Hughes Quester, Myriam Mezieres, and Jean-Philippe Ecoffey. In French with subtitles. (JR) Read more
The best thing about this glossy musical biopic of 1952 is the Frank Loesser score, which includes such tunes as Wonderful Copenhagen, Inch-worm, Thumbelina, and the title song. Purists might object to the Hollywood treatment of the author’s life, but at least we can see Danny Kaye (as the lead), Jeanmaire (who performs several dance sequences with Roland Petit), and Farley Granger; Charles Vidor directed. (JR) Read more
Elegant but tedious, this Masterpiece Theatre-like mounting of Evelyn Waugh’s famous (and partially autobiographical) novel about upper-class adultery in the 30s reunites the producer (Derek Granger) and one of the directors (Charles Sturridge) of Brideshead Revisited. Eileen Diss’s production design is certainly handsome, as are the main actors (James Wilby and Kristin Scott Thomas as Tony and Brenda Last; Rupert Graves as John Beaver, Brenda’s layabout lover), and the transposition of Waugh’s satirical nastiness seems reasonably faithful, but as cinema this is for fans of Merchant-Ivory’s congealed if polished miniaturescompetent and intelligent, but also rather passionless and remote. With Judi Dench. (JR) Read more
Billy the Kid (Emilio Estevez) joins an Englishman (Terence Stamp) and a group of young renegade hired guns to fight the hoodlums terrorizing their town in New Mexico. Other young hombres include Kiefer Sutherland, Charlie Sheen, and Lou Diamond Phillips. Christopher Cain directed this western from a script by John Fusco, and on the whole seems much more comfortable with the scroungy and scatological dialogue than he does with the action sequences. Full of odd notions and interludesa Brian Keith cameo, a peyote session among the young guns overseen by the Navajo in the group, a lot of gratuitous grinning from villain Jack Palancethe movie never really comes together, but fitfully suggests a cross between Boys Town and Greaser’s Palace. (JR) Read more
The first feature directed by the excellent English cinematographer Chris Menges, based on a sensitive autobiographical script by Shawn Slovo, is set in Johannesburg in 1963. A white, middle-class antiapartheid activist (Barbara Hershey) is arrested for her activities after her husband has had to leave the country for related reasons, and her 13-year-old daughter (Jodhi May), through whose eyes much of the story is told, has to adjust to the breakup of her home. In many respects, this film succeeds admirably in everything that Cry Freedom tried with much awkwardness to achieve; while the focus is once again on the sacrifices and dedication of committed whites to the struggle against South African racism, there is never any sense of inflated melodrama or displaced emphasis in the story the filmmakers have to tell, and the performancesby Hershey, May, Jeroen Krabbe, Paul Freeman, and David Suchetare especially powerful. (JR) Read more
