Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara is best known for his second feature, Woman in the Dunes (1964), a collaboration with novelist-playwright Kobo Abe and modernist composer Toru Takemitsu. But Pitfall (1962), the trio’s first project, is no less arty, allegorical, or bold. Combining elements of agitprop, ghost story, and police procedural, it focuses on the murder of an out-of-work coal miner (identified in subtitles as a deserter, but only from the enslavement of his former job) by an enigmatic killer dressed in white. Teshigahara’s visual flair, evident in his sculptural use of wastelands and remarkable superimpositions, is matched by the singular assault of Takemitsu’s unorthodox score, though the film attempts too many things at once to have the impact of its successor. In Japanese with subtitles. 97 min. (JR) Read more
Director Maurice Tourneur adapted this celebrated 1915 silent from a Paul Armstrong play based on O. Henry’s story A Retrieved Reformation. Robert Warwick plays the title character, a famous safecracker. This must have been commercially successful, because it was remade twice during the silent era. 50 min. (JR) Read more
The rationale behind this unattractive animated comedy, a U.S.-German coproduction, seems to be that since it can’t create a fairy-tale world of its own, it might as well riffle through many of the more familiar ones, with particular emphasis on Cinderella’s, pretending to deconstruct them with postmodernist glosses, adolescent wisecracks, and a few high-tech anachronisms. Prince Charming is a vain doofus and his androgynous pretty-boy valet takes over as hero, while the equally androgynous Ella gets menaced by her curvy stepmother and protected from trolls by the seven dwarfs. Paul J. Bolger directed Robert Moreland’s script, and some of the familiar voices belong to George Carlin, Sigourney Weaver, and Wallace Shawn; I believe I also heard Bob Hoskins, though he’s uncredited. PG, 87 min. (JR) Read more
An animated Japanese feature about good and evil deities whose existence has been hidden by the Japanese government. Read more
