D.W. Griffith’s 1916 masterpiece, described by Pauline Kael as perhaps the greatest movie ever made and the greatest folly in movie history, cuts among four stories linked by images of Lillian Gish and a quote from Whitman (Out of the cradle, endlessly rocking… ). The Nazarene stars Bessie Love, The Medieval Story involves the 1572 Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre of the Huguenots, The Fall of Babylon features Constance Talmadge, Elmo Lincoln, Seena Owen, Tully Marshall, and eye-popping sets, and The Mother and the Law is an exciting contemporary story starring Mae Marsh and Robert Harron. Probably the most influential of all silent films after The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance launched ideas about associative editing that have been essential to the cinema ever since, from Soviet montage classics to recent American experimental films. And in the use of crosscutting and action to generate suspense, the film’s climax hasn’t been surpassed. 178 min. (JR) Read more
Some people have called this 155-minute piece of French colonialist nostalgia by Regis Wargnier (1991) the French Gone With the Wind, which seems grossly unfair to both Victor Fleming and David O. Selznick. More accurately, this overripe epic about a Frenchwoman (Catherine Deneuve at her most flamboyant) lording it over a rubber plantation and worrying about her adopted Indo-Chinese daughter (Linh Dan Pham) between 1930 and 1954 is a fairly enjoyable camp melodrama with overblown acting, great scenery, and characters who all seem to have stepped out of daytime soaps. With Jean Yanne (a long, long way from his starring part in Godard’s Weekend), Henri Marteau, and Vincent Perez. (JR) Read more
On the verge of retirement, a Los Angeles police officer (Robert Duvall) sets out to solve an escalating series of vigilante crimes committed by a former defense worker (Michael Douglas) estranged from his middle-class family. Written by Ebbe Roe Smith and directed by Joel Schumacher, this string of violent though petty wish fulfillments (1993) is cynically contrived to exploit male middle-class dissatisfactions without exploring the basis for any of them. On a surface level, it’s fairly well realized as storytelling, cutting back and forth between the separate trajectories of Douglas and Duvall until they finally meet. But none of the characters ever rises beyond the level of his or her generic functions, and by the end the overall emptiness of the conception becomes fully apparent. With Barbara Hershey, Rachel Ticotin, Frederic Forrest, and Tuesday Weld. R, 115 min. (JR) Read more
A single mother (Maria Rojo) who’s pushing 40 spends every Wednesday night dancing in a Mexico City ballroom with a 50ish partner (Daniel Rergis); when he mysteriously runs away to Veracruz, she goes looking for him. In the course of her search she redefines herself through her friendship with a drag queen and her affair with a younger man. This 1991 feature, the second by Mexican filmmaker Maria Novaro, is leisurely paced and unemphatic but firmly conceived and executed, with a lot of feeling for female solidarity. It deliberately wanders, getting your mind to wander as well before finally taking you somewherean agreeable if far from earthshaking experience. It may also serve as an antidote to Strictly Ballroom, another picture about ballroom dancing that puts me in mind of chalk scraping across a blackboard. With Carmen Salinas, especially good as a world-weary landlady. In Spanish with subtitles. PG-13, 96 min. (JR) Read more
If you find filmic depictions of history alienating, these highly accomplished, bitterly and parodically funny, and justly praised experimental films may be something of a revelation. Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1991) and O No Coronado! (1992) both make extensive use of campy found footage from a variety of sources to illustrate a kind of all-American delirium that is heard on the sound track: in Tribulation 99 this delirium relates to paranoid fantasies of the fundamentalist right, while in O No Coronado! (which, along with the decomposing archival selections, includes some newly shot documentary and fiction footage with performers Nao Bustamante, Matthew Day, and Gina Pacaldo) it relates to the 16th-century conquistador Coronado’s fruitless search for the seven cities of gold in what is today Arizona and New Mexico. I find these ingenious postmodernist, antiimperialist rants alienating in an unhelpful way, but my position is a minority one. (JR) Read more
Sam Raimi’s lively third installment (1993) in his Evil Dead series begins with the hero, Ash (Bruce Campbell), crash-landing in the year 1300 along with his car, his chain saw, and his 12-gauge shotgun, then battling skeletons and engaging in other forms of sword and sorcery to get back to the present. Mercifully clocking in at 81 minutes, this enjoyably campy hokum combines A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Three Stooges slapstick, and frenetic comic-book pacing with special effects that seem like hand-me-downs from Ray Harryhausen’s Jason and the Argonauts; it’s calculated for ten-year-old boys of all ages and persuasions, whose howls of glee are programmed into the mock-macho material at regular intervals. This is old-fashioned fun until the climactic battle, which almost comes across like routine bone piling after all the flights of fancy. Written by the director and Ivan Raimi, and costarring Embeth Davidtz, Marcus Gilbert, Ian Abercrombie, and Richard Grove. 81 min. (JR) Read more
This is the first feature by the great Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist, cowritten with Lasse Summanen, and it’s a worthy and assured debut. Based on an actual event during a severe drought in Sweden in the 1860s, the story calls to mind Victor Hugo’s Les miserables, which was published in the same decade: a desperate farmhand (Stellan Skarsgard), afraid that his wife (Ewa Froling) and baby daughter will starve, steals and slaughters an ox belonging to the farmer he works for (Lennart Hjulstrom); after he eventually confesses his crime to the local pastor (Max von Sydow), he’s sentenced to a harsh flogging and life imprisonment. Not surprisingly, what’s most impressive here is the way this film looks–especially the unforced and lovely handling of landscape and period–and the purity of the performances, including those of Ingmar Bergman veterans Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson, who appear in smaller parts (1991). (Music Box, Friday through Tuesday, January 22 through 26) Read more
This is a docudrama about a couple (Nick Nolte and Susan Sarandon) whose five-year-old son who has a rare and mysterious degenerative disease called adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD). It’s hard to make such a project sound good, but in its own quiet way this is an astonishing film, both as a medical detective story that sustains taut interest over an extended running time and as a piece of cinema combining unusually resourceful acting and direction. Director George Miller, an Australian best known for his radically different Mad Max pictures and The Witches of Eastwick was trained as a doctor and authored the script with Nick Enright. He brings to this material an infectious political passion to make difficult concepts lucid to everyone and to place medical science in the hands of people who can do something about it–which means that this movie winds up having a great deal to say about AIDS as well as ALD, not to mention medical bureaucracies and power structures in general. Both Nolte, as an Italian economist, and Sarandon, as an Irish-American linguist, are in top form, and the secondary cast–which includes half a dozen actors as Lorenzo as well as Peter Ustinov, Kathleen Wilhoite, Gerry Bamman, and Margo Martindale–never let them down. Read more
Christopher Munch’s brilliant and concise account of what might have happened during John Lennon and Brian Epstein’s four days on vacation in Barcelona in 1963–written, directed, produced, and shot by Munch (who also photographed The Living End) on location in black-and-white 35-millimeter. Visually spare and running for only an hour, this benefits not only from one terrific performance (David Angus as Epstein) and a pretty good one (Ian Hart as Lennon), but also from a filmmaking confidence and lack of pretension that makes every passing nuance register keenly. On the same program, Stephen Cummins and Simon Hunt’s Australian short Resonance (1990), about gay bashing in Sydney. (Music Box, Friday through Thursday, January 8 through 14) Read more
Perhaps the most remarkable film-history revaluation currently in progress (highlighted at the Film Center this month) concerns Russian films made during the teens, fascinating today for their highly modern handling of space and decor, their resourceful mise en scene, their unambiguous feminism, and their embrace of tragic endings, among other things. If you assume, like most people, that world cinema has been steadily improving over the past 70-odd years, there’s plenty here to challenge that premise; this work, like the equally neglected work of Louis Feuillade from this period, is arguably in advance in some respects of not only D.W. Griffith’s films but also most contemporary mainstream movies. I’ve seen two of the four films on his program, which seems to be an excellent introduction to this cinema as a whole. Nicolai Larin’s beautifully shot rural thriller The Merchant Bashkirov’s Daughter (1913) belongs to the odd subgenre of “blackmail film” that flourished briefly during this era. (A film company would threaten to recreate a wealthy family’s scandal on film to procure hush money, then make the movie anyway with the significant names changed.) Petr Chardynin’s no less impressive The Wet Nurse (1914) concerns a peasant housekeeper made pregnant by her employer. Read more
After the unusual promise of Say Anything . . . , Cameron Crowe’s 1992 second feature as a writer-director, another romantic comedy, is so lightweight that you’re likely to start forgetting it before it’s even over. (Could the earlier movie’s distinctiveness be attributed in part to producers Polly Platt and James L. Brooks?) The skimpy plot follows half a dozen singles (Bridget Fonda, Matt Dillon, Campbell Scott, Kyra Sedgwick, Sheila Kelley, and Jim True) who drift around Seattle. (JR) Read more
Two short features by the prerevolutionary Russian auteur Evgenii Bauer. Twilight of a Woman’s Soul (1913), which I’ve seen, shows Bauer’s adept use of decor in his mise en scene; the film centers on the rape of a wealthy philanthropist by a slum dweller she’s trying to help. Silent Witnesses (1914), which I haven’t seen, also pivots on class differencesin this case an aristocratic woman and the maid in her Moscow mansion. Also on the program: Vasilii Goncharov’s The Pedlars (1910), a short that adapts the story line of a folk song and uses natural settings. (JR) Read more
The west coast’s answer to Woody Allen, Henry Jaglom lacks Woody’s verbal wit, but has tons of New Age understanding and 60s references to movies being movies to replace it with. Here he plays an independent writer-director-actor very much like himself at the 1989 Venice film festival, where he runs into an English former lover and leading lady (Suzanne Bertish) and embarks on a romance with a young French journalist (Nelly Alard) whose seriousness is certified by her being obsessed with his work. The self-infatuation on view is so thick you couldn’t cut it with a chain saw, and when the movie shifts to Venice, California, where the smitten French beauty follows the filmmaker, the society of admirers (including the filmmaker’s then-current girlfriend, Melissa Leo)all talking and acting with the same flaky earnestnessgets even gooier. Threaded through all this are talking-head interviews with real women about the failure of real-life romance to match up with movie romance; Jaglom cuts them together as if they’re the same person, yet another version of his wistful self repeating more or less the same glib homilies found in Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?, Always, and Someone to Love. Don’t expect to find any curiosity about people or places here; the film makes it pretty clear at the outset that Jaglom is so much in touch with his own feelings that he has little left to learn about either movies or the human condition (1992). Read more
Josephine Baker plays a poor African woman educated and trained by a white writer and passed off as an Indian princess. This 1935 French feature was directed by Edmond T. Greville and written by Baker’s manager and lover, Pepito Abatino. It’s an intriguing follow-up to her previous French feature Zou Zou, ideologically and otherwise. In French with subtitles. 77 min. (JR) Read more
For all their human decency and liberal intelligence, the films of John Sayles are generally more memorable for their intentions than for their achievements; exemplary yet stodgy efforts, more literary than cinematic, they rarely linger with any sort of vibrancy. But Sayles has gradually gotten better over the years, and this 1992 drama set in the Louisiana swamplands may be as good as anything he’s done. It’s about the adjustments made between an embittered former soaps actress (Mary McDonnell) turned paraplegic by an auto accident and her nurse from Chicago (Alfre Woodard), who proves to be undergoing a kind of rehabilitation of her own. Sayles develops the characters and introduces us to the small-town milieu at a leisurely pace (the film runs 135 minutes), but this clearly works to the film’s advantage; Woodard, in particular, responds to this extra space by turning in the best performance I’ve seen from herfull of small, offbeat notations about a woman who’s keeping most of her past and emotions firmly under wraps. There are moments when one is quite aware that Sayles, who hails from Schenectady, is far from his home turf (his grasp of a couple of catty local women who visit the paraplegic smacks of Yankee caricature), but by and large his natural curiosity about the region enhances our own, and there are many appealing character sketches among the secondary parts here (from David Strathairn and Vondie Curtis-Hall, among others). Read more
