Yearly Archives: 2003

Cluny Brown

This late, delicious comedy of manners by Ernst Lubitsch is a notch below his best, but the character acting is so good one hardly notices. A plumber’s daughter (Jennifer Jones) and a refugee (Charles Boyer) meet in England prior to World War II, and Una O’Connor, Peter Lawford, Helen Walker, Reginald Gardiner, C. Aubrey Smith, Reginald Owen, and Richard Haydn are around to take up what slack there is. This 1946 film is the last one Lubitsch completed. 100 min. (JR) Read more

Bringing Down The House

Steve Martin plays an uptight tax lawyer whose on-line sweetheart turns out to be an escaped convict (Queen Latifah) trying to get some help disproving what she claims are false charges. Even though I expect glibness in a Disney comedy, I was rankled by the movie’s strategy of cheerfully ridiculing racial stereotypes that are already half a century out of date in order to revert to its own contemporary racial stereotypes (white as well as black) as if they were beyond criticism. In Jason Filardi’s sloppy script, characters undergo inexplicable changes in a flash (Martin can’t understand a word of hip-hop lingo until he decides to voyage into the hood, at which point he immediately becomes a master), though it may be quixotic to demand credibility from a screenwriter when almost every one of his characters is a liar. Eugene Levy is the only actor who emerges relatively unscathed in this fetid climate; as for Joan Plowright, I hope she took home a healthy check. Adam Shankman directed. 105 min. (JR) Read more

The Smiling Lieutenant

This rarely shown Ernst Lubitsch musical (1931), derived from the Oscar Straus operetta The Waltz Dream, matches up Viennese lieutenant Maurice Chevalier with both Claudette Colbert (as leader of an all-woman orchestra, whom he fancies) and Miriam Hopkins (as a king’s unglamorous daughter, whom he doesn’t know how to refuse). Eventually everything gets resolved when Colbert teaches Hopkins how to jazz up her lingerie (this is pre-Production Code, in the best sense), but before this happens, the proceedings are a bit brittlenot exactly dark and funereal like Lubitsch’s later The Merry Widow, but still rather heartless, what with Chevalier’s forced gaiety and his sexual rejection of Hopkins. This was shot in Paramount’s Astoria studio, which may explain why some of the interiors feel cramped, but it’s quintessential Lubitsch in the way it suggests sexual dalliance with the brightening or darkening of a gas lamp outside a bedroom. 88 min. (JR) Read more

Unknown Pleasures

At least since I Vitelloni and The Wild One in the 50s, movies about disaffected youth have constituted a kind of subgenre for filmmakers interested in historicizing the present. Distinguished practitioners of this undertaking in Chinese-language cinema include Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang; now they’re joined by the much younger Jia Zhang-ke, whose stunning epic Platform (2000) marks him as the most gifted Chinese filmmaker to have emerged in years. His third feature, shot on digital video, isn’t an achievement on the same order, though it takes on the same theme, in a story about two unemployed 19-year-olds. Jia’s virtuoso long takes, choreographed mise en scene, and feeling for character and behavior place him in a class by himself, yet in China his films have mainly circulated on black-market videosa point alluded to here in a sequence where his first two features are being sold, along with Pulp Fiction, by a vendor on a bicycle. In Mandarin with subtitles. 113 min. (JR) Read more

The Uncertainty Principle

One of the most remarkable things about Manoel de Oliveira, now in his 90s, is the supple way in which he’s been shifting gears between features. This film follows I’m Going Home, which focused on France and the theater; here he takes up Portugal and the novel, adapting Agustina Bessa-Luis’s Joai de familia. This is the fourth Oliveira film based on Bessa-Luis’s workthe others are Francisca (1981), Valley of Abraham (1993), and the third episode of Inquietude (1998)and she also furnished the original idea for The Convent (1995) and the dialogue for Party (1996). Valley of Abraham was something of an update of Madame Bovary, and in some ways this feature suggests a gothic version of Henry James. Beautifully shot by Renato Berta, effectively accompanied by bursts of Paganini, it deals with a modern-day, apparently innocent young heroine (the film’s title refers mainly to the ambiguity of her innocence), the daughter of a compulsive gambler who compares herself to Joan of Arc and winds up in an arranged marriage with a corrupt, well-to-do man who brings her to live in the same house as his brothel-owning mistress. This is more difficult than other recent Oliveira films because of the slow, highly stylized mise en scene, with characters often looking past one another, which evokes Dreyer’s Gertrud, and because of its old-fashioned mannerist treatment of decadence, which suggests late Bressonand in one visual trope, Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. Read more

Monsters In The Kitchen

With the exception of Kate McCabe’s somewhat interesting Das Neue Monster (2001), in color 16-millimeter, this program is devoted to creepy stuff in black and white. Well worth the price of admission is Dream Work (2001), which concludes the internationally celebrated Cinemascope trilogy of Austrian experimental filmmaker Peter Tscherkasy. The 35-millimeter films elaborately rework found footage, and this one, inspired by Man Ray, draws on Sidney J. Furie’s 1983 shocker The Entity. Unfortunately one also has to sit through Scott McAnally’s static and unpleasant video Yancy’s Kitchen and Deco Dawson’s Film (dzama), which is relatively pleasant but still just 22 minutes of elaborate doodling with nudes and animal costumes. (Dawson shot Super-8 footage for Guy Maddin’s The Heart of the World and clearly comes from the same arch Winnepeg mentality.) Somewhere in between are Marcel de Jure’s video And . . ., Mark Hejnar’s film 0502, and John Standiford’s unsettling 16-millimeter short Plain English, which is fairly original but also rather xenophobic in its still photographs of Japanese characters. 75 min. (JR) Read more

Max

The Dutch-born Menno Meyjes, best known as the screenwriter who worked for Steven Spielberg in the 80s and cowrote The Siege in the 90s, makes his debut as writer-director with an ambitious but only fitfully successful account of Adolf Hitler during his failed-artist phase. The future fuhrer (Noah Taylor), already making headway in the beer halls with his racial and political invective, is befriended by a Jewish art dealer (John Cusack) who’s lost an arm during World War I and is an invention of Meyjes. The portrait of Hitler is convincing as a kind of intellectual conceit, but the fact that everyone speaks Englishand that period details veer toward postmodernist flourishes meant to remind us of the presentultimately disqualify this Canadian-German-Hungarian coproduction as history. With Leelee Sobieski and Molly Parker. 106 min. (JR) Read more

One Hour With You

Many consider Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 musical remake of his groundbreaking silent The Marriage Circle (1924) inferior to the original, but I find it funnier and in some ways more sophisticated. Maurice Chevalier, who plays a doctor married to Jeanette MacDonald, becomes attracted to Genevieve Tobin (while Charlie Ruggles, as his best friend, goes after MacDonald) and periodically turns to the audience for advice. George Cukor was hired by Lubitsch to direct but almost had his name removed from the credits because Lubitsch did so many retakes; stylistically there’s never any question that Lubitsch, working with his favorite screenwriter, Samson Raphaelson, is the one in charge. 80 min. (JR) Read more

Cry, The Beloved Country

This 1951 version of Alan Paton’s novel about South African apartheid, directed by the underrated Zoltan Korda and starring Canada Lee and Sidney Poitier, is far better than the 1995 remake with James Earl Jones. The cinematography is by the accomplished Robert Krasker. Check it out. 111 min. (JR) Read more

On Guard

On the basis of his earliest features, French filmmaker Philippe de Broca was sometimes regarded as a member of the New Wave, but subsequent films such as Cartouche (1962) and That Man From Rio (1964) showed him to be an adept commercial director. This entertaining 1998 swashbuckler, based on Paul Feval’s 1857 novel Le bossu (The Hunchback) and shot in ‘Scope, proves that de Broca hasn’t lost his touch. This is effective as straight-ahead, action-packed storytelling, losing some of its energy only in the final stretch of its 128 minutes. The cast is especially good, including Daniel Auteuil as the peripatetic hero (an acrobat-turned-chevalier-turned-actor), Fabrice Luchini as the villain, and Vincent Perez, Marie Gillain, and Philippe Noiret. It’s a pity that the distributors didn’t stick to the original title, that of the novel, and substituted the graceless and unnecessary English translation of a French fencing term. In French with subtitles. (JR) Read more

Remember Last Night?

A screwball comedy and murder mystery in the Thin Man mode, directed by James Whale, who’s never been properly appreciated for the wit and the engaging minor characters found in some of his nonhorror features. Along with The Great Garrick, this 1935 release is one of the best of that neglected batch; its sheer goofiness helps explain why critic Tom Milne once compared Whale to Jean-Luc Godard. With Robert Young, Constance Cummings, Edward Arnold (as the detective), and Edward Brophy. 81 min. (JR) Read more

Films by Ernst Lubitsch

This week the Film Center launches a retrospective of Ernst Lubitsch’s Hollywood pictures with two of his finest: The Love Parade and Trouble in Paradise (many would add Ninotchka, also playing this week, but not me, even though it has Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas). The Love Parade (1929, 110 min.), Lubitsch’s first talkie and musical, helped to define continental romance as well as opulent operetta for Depression-era audiences. Racy and innovatively shot, it pairs Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald for the first time, and it’s one of their funniest films, with some of the best laughs coming from secondary leads Lillian Roth and Lupino Lane. Trouble in Paradise (1932, 83 min.), about a pair of jewel thieves (Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins) exploiting the owner of a French perfume company (Kay Francis), is one of the wittiest and most glamorous romantic comedies ever made and has as much to say about the Depression as any Busby Berkeley number. Unfortunately the series omits the underrated and atypical The Man I Killed (aka Broken Lullaby), but otherwise all of Lubitsch’s essential Hollywood pictures are showing this month; they virtually defined Hollywood entertainment when the term still meant something other than explosions and hard-sell advertising. Read more

Beat And Beyond: Films By Alfred Leslie

These three films by painter-provocateur Alfred Leslie constitute a sort of healthy beatnik sandwich. The first bread slice is Pull My Daisy (1959, 29 min.), his legendary Lower East Side collaboration with Robert Frank (who shot and codirected), Jack Kerouac (the writer and narrator), Anita Ellis and David Amram (jazz vocalist and jazz composer respectively), and Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Peter Orlovsky (all silent actors here, along with Delphine Seyrig in her first film performance). The second slice is the lesser known Birth of a Nation 1965 (1997, 25 min.), a tantalizing fragment salvaged from a two-hour sound feature that was shot on 8-millimeter in the 60s and then largely lost in a fire. Goofy, funny, challenging, and unruly in the best sense, it’s mainly a group grope with unrelated subtitles, plus a guest appearance by Willem de Kooning as Captain Nemo and the voice of Patrick Magee as the Marquis de Sade. Laid between these irresponsible and lighthearted works is The Last Clean Shirt (1964, 40 min.), a teasing bit of Zen minimalism and a prestructural-filmmaking prank that I hope won’t drive the audience out of the theater. It runs us several times through the same uneventful car ride, timed by a clock that’s mounted on the dashboard and accompanied on the sound track by the woman passenger’s untranslated chatter in what sounds like an eastern European language; various sets of subtitles translate the chatter, reveal the black driver’s thoughts, and creatively confuse us even further. Read more