My favorite John Ford feature (1953) was also the director’s, and it’s one of his cheapest and coziest, made in black and white at Republic Pictures. Vaguely a remake of his 1934 Judge Priest, set in an idyllic Kentucky town at the turn of the century, it features the same alcoholic herothis time played by Charles Winninger and even more transparently a stand-in for Ford. The busy plot, confused by insensitive studio cutting, concerns racial strife, prostitution, prudery, and death and involves the entire community; Ford makes the film a ceremonial elegy and testament to everything that he loves and respects. With Stepin Fetchit, John Russell, Arleen Whelan, Francis Ford (in his last screen appearance), and Slim Pickens (in his first). 90 min. (JR) Read more
My favorite John Ford feature (1953) was also the director’s, and it’s one of his cheapest and coziest, made in black and white at Republic Pictures. Vaguely a remake of his 1934 Judge Priest, set in an idyllic Kentucky town at the turn of the century, it features the same alcoholic hero–this time played by Charles Winninger and even more transparently a stand-in for Ford. The busy plot, confused by insensitive studio cutting, concerns racial strife, prostitution, prudery, and death and involves the entire community; Ford makes the film a ceremonial elegy and testament to everything that he loves and respects. With Stepin Fetchit, John Russell, Arleen Whelan, Francis Ford (in his last screen appearance), and Slim Pickens (in his first). 90 min. Screening in a double feature with Judge Priest (see separate listing). Sun 1/29, 7 PM, Univ. of Chicago Doc Films. Read more
For the first time since his brilliant debut feature, Real Life (1979), Albert Brooks plays a semifictional character named Albert Brooks, this time a guy who heads an ill-conceived State Department mission to discover what makes people in India and Pakistan laugh. Questioning and mocking himself, he combines personal worries about his dwindling career as a comic performer with more general ones about this country’s lack of smarts when it comes to the third world. Filmed mainly in Delhi, this provocative comedy couldn’t be more up-to-date. As usual, Brooks’s penchant for realism involves filming from a distance in extended takes and sometimes challenging the viewer to accept him as both an identification figure and a foolthough a softening of his usual obnoxious persona confuses matters a little. With Sheetal Sheth and Fred Dalton Thompson (also playing himself). PG-13, 98 min. (JR) Read more
The neglected English master Peter Watkinswho came into international prominence with The War Game (1967)has specialized in political forms of pseudodocumentary throughout his career, including a treatment of historical subjects done in the form of TV news shows. In 1971, he made his only major feature in the U.S., a terrifying look at a future America where civil liberties are suspended, deliberately blurring many of the usual boundaries between documentary and fiction while staging a kind of psychodrama with his nonprofessional actors. The results are both hysterical and unforgettable, as well as creepily up to date in certain respects. There are other Watkins features that I prefer, but all are worth seeing. 88 min. (JR) Read more
The decision to use torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib can be traced to the highest levels in U.S. government, and much of the value of this excellent documentary by Michael Kirk, broadcast on PBS’s Frontline last October, lies in its comprehensively mapping how the policy got carried out. Kirk reveals the pecking orders and blurred lines between military police and military intelligence, and the impression of ill-informed incompetence leading to frustration and sadism on the part of the torturers is devastating. The interviewees include Colonel Janis Karpinski, who appears to have been a convenient scapegoat, and Tony Lagouranis, an army interrogator in Iraq for four years who also speaks chillingly of how innocent Iraqis were and still are abused and tortured in their own homes. 90 min. (JR) Read more
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s most minimalist film to date (2003) is a bracing return to form, a provocative and haunting look at Tokyo and the overall drift of the world that’s slow to reveal its secrets and beauties. Commissioned by the Japanese studio Shochiku as an homage to its famous house director Yasujiro Ozu, it references Ozu only indirectly, through the repetition of a few visual motifs and through details that indicate how much the world has changed since his heyday. The 23-year-old heroine (pop singer Yo Hitoto), single and pregnant, is a freelance writer obsessed with the life of Taiwanese classical composer Jiang Wenye (whose music we hear in the film); she’s helped in her research by a friend equally obsessed with recording the noises of subway trains. The plot is spare, but the sounds, images, and ambience are indelible. In Japanese with subtitles. 103 min. (JR) Read more
The decision to use torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib can be traced to the highest levels in U.S. government, and much of the value of this excellent documentary by Michael Kirk, broadcast on PBS’s Frontline last October, lies in its comprehensively mapping how the policy got carried out. Kirk reveals the pecking orders and blurred lines between military police and military intelligence, and the impression of ill-informed incompetence leading to frustration and sadism on the part of the torturers is devastating. The interviewees include General Janis Karpinski, who appears to have been a convenient scapegoat, and Tony Lagouranis, an army interrogator in Iraq for four years who also speaks chillingly of how innocent Iraqis were and still are abused and tortured in their own homes. 90 min. Fri 1/20, 7 PM, Chicago Filmmakers. Read more
For the first time since his brilliant debut feature, Real Life (1979), Albert Brooks plays a semifictional character named Albert Brooks, this time a guy who heads an ill-conceived State Department mission to discover what makes people in India and Pakistan laugh. Questioning and mocking himself, he combines personal worries about his dwindling career as a comic performer with more general ones about this country’s lack of smarts when it comes to the third world. Filmed mainly in New Delhi, this provocative comedy couldn’t be more up-to-date. As usual, Brooks’s penchant for realism involves filming from a distance in extended takes and sometimes challenging the viewer to accept him as both an identification figure and a fool–though a softening of his usual obnoxious persona confuses matters a little. With Sheetal Sheth and Fred Dalton Thompson (also playing himself). PG-13, 98 min. Reviewed this week in Section 1. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Lake, Landmark’s Century Centre, River East 21. Read more
A young woman (Yoko Tsukasa) whose husband is killed in an accident returns to her hometown, where she keeps encountering the guilt-stricken young executive (Yuzo Kayama) who drove the car that ran over her husband. Against all odds, they fall in love. Mikio Naruse’s characteristically fatalistic last feature (1967)in color and ‘Scope and at times evocative of Douglas Sirkis too melodramatic and formulaic to be one of his best films, but Tsukasa, who also worked for Kurosawa (Yojimbo) and Ozu (Late Autumn), is wonderfully expressive. It’s a pity Kayama, effective in a parallel role in Naruse’s 1964 Yearning, can’t quite keep up with her. In Japanese with subtitles. 107 min. (JR) Read more
Made during his richest period, Mikio Naruse’s 1954 adaptation of a novel by Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata about the bonds between a lonely wife (the great Setsuko Hara), her brazenly philandering husband, and her brooding, sympathetic father-in-law (So Yamamura) was one of the director’s favorites. Characteristically, the poetry of the mise en scene and the economy of the editing are terse and unsentimental, with Naruse’s sense of life’s perpetual disappointments firmly in place. In Japanese with subtitles. 94 min. (JR) Read more
John Sturges directed this routine skin-diving thriller (1955, 99 min.) about searching for sunken treasure. It was filmed in ‘Scope, so beware of scanned TV prints eliminating body parts belonging to Jane Russell, Gilbert Roland, Richard Egan, Lori Nelson, and even Jayne Mansfield, the main sources of attraction. (JR) Read more
Woody Allen’s streamlined erotic thriller (2005) is similar to his Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) but with more clever and intricate plotting, less rhetorical flab, and no distracting one-liners. An Irish upstart (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) marries into the London aristocracy but betrays his new wife (Emily Mortimer) by having an affair with an American expatriate (Scarlett Johansson) who was previously engaged to his brother-in-law (Matthew Goode); threatened with exposure, he begins entertaining thoughts of murder. An efficient genre piece with a few provocative metaphysical trimmings; the mainly English cast is effective. R, 124 min. (JR) Read more
This week the Gene Siskel Film Center launches a two-month retrospective on Japanese filmmaker Mikio Naruse (1905-’69) with two features: the 1952 melodrama Mother (see listings) and this late masterpiece (1964) about a war widow whose beverage store is being supplanted by a supermarket. The film clarifies why Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Yasujiro Ozu are all better known than Naruse: his turf is the lower middle class, and his chronically unfulfilled characters are typically unexceptional. Yet one can’t predict what any of them will do from one moment to the next, and despite the seeming simplicity of this tragic story, its psychological complexity is bottomless. No less remarkable are the abrupt, unsentimental editing and the remarkable mise en scene (in black-and-white ‘Scope), which shows the characters’ increasing entrapment even as it moves from claustrophobic interiors to scenic wide-open spaces. In Japanese with subtitles. 97 min. (JR) Read more
Released in 1960, as the French New Wave was getting started, this terse and fatalistic (if conventional) noir about a gangster on the run from Milan to Nice to Paris was hastily swept aside, though Jean-Pierre Melville defended it passionately and wound up appropriating its star (Lino Ventura), actor Jean-Paul Belmondo (costarring here immediately after Breathless), source novelist (Jose Giovanni), and some of its male-bonding manner in various projects. The aesthetically conservative director, Claude Sautet, went on to make chamber pieces like Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud (1995); among the other notable contributors are composer Georges Delerue, cinematographer Ghislain Cloquet, and actors Sandra Milo, Marcel Dalio, and Betty Schneider. In French with subtitles. 103 min. (JR) Read more
This week the Gene Siskel Film Center launches a two-month retrospective on Japanese filmmaker Mikio Naruse (1905-’69) with two features: the 1952 melodrama Mother (see listings) and this late masterpiece (1964) about a war widow whose beverage store is being supplanted by a supermarket. The film clarifies why Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Yasujiro Ozu are all better known than Naruse: his turf is the lower middle class, and his chronically unfulfilled characters are typically unexceptional. Yet one can’t predict what any of them will do from one moment to the next, and despite the seeming simplicity of this tragic story, its psychological complexity is bottomless. No less remarkable are the abrupt, unsentimental editing and the remarkable mise en scene (in black-and-white ‘Scope), which shows the characters’ increasing entrapment even as it moves from claustrophobic interiors to scenic wide-open spaces. In Japanese with subtitles. 97 min. Sat 1/7, 5 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more
