Director: Max Ophüls
Adapted from Elisabeth Sanxay Holding’s novel The Blank Wall, which would also serve as the source material for a 2001 film entitled The Deep End with Tilda Swinton in the leading role, The Reckless Moment is the last picture that Max Ophüls made in Hollywood, and it is among the biggest deviations that he made from the romantic films that he built his reputation on. Joan Bennett plays a woman who attempts to cover up her daughter’s accidental murder of a callous, much older lover. After disposing of the body, James Mason shows up at her doorstep and blackmails Bennett, having found the love letters that the daughter had sent to the boyfriend prior to his death. In the way that Ophüls plays with morality and the shifting relationships between criminals and victims, the picture is familiar of Hitchcock. The scene in which Bennett is covering up the murder is shot with a number of long tracking shots, cutting intermittently to examine the eerily desolate landscape. Just as Hitchcock was fascinated by silence, Ophüls refrains from using any score in this sequence – all that is on the soundtrack is the sound of the boat’s motor as Bennett rides out into the sea. Besides the formal achievements, the picture is memorable due to Mason’s blackmailer, a predator who is nonetheless kind-hearted and wrecked with his own guilt. Watch how he defensively reiterates to Bennett that Nagle, the partner that he speaks of, is real. In the way that Mason delivers the line, the audience can come to any number of conclusions about the relationship between the two blackmailers, and how Mason himself is a victim of his accomplice.
Director: Max Ophüls
In his first of two noirs directed in Hollywood, Max Ophüls’ Caught is a scathing cultural critique sometimes undone by its tendency to overstate. Barbara Bel Geddes plays a young woman whose sole ambition is to marry rich. She succeeds in gaining the hand of the ultra-possessive Robert Ryan, who considers her as his wife to be an employee. Ophüls was always a feminist director, and in this picture he sympathizes with the expectations placed upon women by the media. It is significant that Bel Geddes is not solely criticized for her warped world view – the way that her arc plays out suggests that her attraction to the rich lifestyle is a sickness in the vein of alcoholism or drug addiction. The first images of the film are stills from fashion and modeling magazines, suggesting the dangerous allurement of celebrity and the way that women, in particular, are targeted by the fashion editors. The picture is well-acted and has moments of genuine suspense, however it begins to spin its wheels in the final act as the script bombards the audience with a multitude of speeches about how unimportant it is to be rich, a point that had been made clear an hour previous.
Director: Max Ophüls
An exile from his native Germany after the Reichstag fire of 1933, Max Ophüls lived in France throughout the thirties before moving to the United States in 1941. He was fired from his first directing gig in Hollywood due to his slow pace – the Howard Hughes produced Vendetta, which was eventually released in 1950 with Mel Ferrer as the credited director – however in 1947 Ophüls would be hired by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. to direct a historical swashbuckler that he had written and intended to produce. While an action picture seems out of character for Ophüls when one considers the elegiac grandiosity of his more typical romances, he brings to the picture his penchant for long tracking shots, following characters up and down stairs and from room to room, defining spaces and enriching them with detail. Additionally, though in its latter half The Exile is little more than a canvas on which Fairbanks can show off his gymnastics, it is the ill-fated romance that is at the heart of the picture. The Hollywood ending was bitter enough – Fairbanks chooses to retain the crown rather than going off with the lowly inn keep and flower girl, played by a delightful Rita Corday (billed as Paule Croset) – but the European ending even further amplified the girl’s feelings of abandonment, as the camera literally pans away from her to glimpse the plaque that celebrates the rightful king’s newly restored legacy.
Director: Sergei Eisenstein
With his most ambitious application of his theory of intellectual montage editing, Sergei Eisenstein’s October is his true masterpiece of the silent era. His visual sense is at his heights, reveling in the fog of twilight and the dingy camps wherein the Lenin-led Bolsheviks plot their next actions, as well as the surreal juxtapositional discourses into mechanical peacocks and thrusting church incense burners. The picture was one of two commissioned by the Soviet government to commemorate the October Revolution of 1917, and in it Eisenstein dramatizes the events leading up to the overthrow of the provisional government concluding with the storming of the Winter Palace. Several critics, as well as Leon Trotsky himself, have criticized the ending struggle of the picture, suggesting that the drama of the upheaval isn’t wholly successful. It, however, is much more effective than the often numbing conclusion of the otherwise great Battleship Potemkin, as the chaos is truncated and Eisenstein’s greater interest seems to be in the moving of the chess pieces preceding the take-over, making the drama all the more effective because of the sublime build-up. The picture is full of unforgettable moments – the dangling horse and carriage on a bridge, the rapid-cut montage of a machine gun and the man firing it, the succession of religious icons that suggest that religion is a tool of the government and must be overthrown. It is a film that stimulates more than thrills, and for that reason it leaves a more lasting impression than the all-out revolutionary anarchy of Strike or Battleship Potemkin.
Director: Yasujirô Ozu
A remake of his own highly successful silent film A Story of Floating Weeds, Yasujirô Ozu’s Floating Weeds is the more remembered version, though it suffers by comparison in not having the same concision in the storytelling. While the central narrative is largely identical – and, indeed, a number of scenes almost play as direct copies – his world is expanded with even more attention to the kabuki performances and a greater development of the auxiliary members of the troupe. Tonally, the picture is much lighter, which Donald Richie suggests is due to the Daiei studio (Ozu was typically associated with Shochiku), in which, “the chosen audience was young people looking for novelty.” The comedic elements work to the film’s detriment – in particular, an ugly woman in the village becomes a source of frequent comic relief, which today plays as mean-spirited and detracts from the seriousness of the melodrama. Kazuo Miyagawa’s (the famed cinematographer who also shot Rashomon and Ugetsu) color photography is perhaps the best justification for this story’s retelling. He delights in capturing the vibrancy of the colors in the costumes, and in his use of Ozu’s familiar point-of-view shots in which the characters speak almost directly to the camera he heightens the intensity of the confrontations.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 1934, a story of floating weeds, yasujiro ozu
Director: Yasujirô Ozu
David Bordwell assesses that A Story of Floating Weeds was the pivotal film in Yasujirô Ozu’s maturation as a filmmaker. Dealing with the destruction of a family, it first incorporates a theme that would become a staple throughout the rest of Ozu’s career, and it is in the picture that Ozu perfects his influential methods of camera placement, objects that serve as transitions, and a use of elliptical storytelling. Though Ozu’s own remake of the film, 1959′s Floating Weeds, garners much more attention today, the original remains the better achievement. The picture begins when a traveling kabuki troupe arrives in a seaside town. Kihachi, the leader, visits with his former mistress and checks in with the son who believes him to be an uncle. Complicating matters is Kihachi’s present lover, who enlists a fellow actress to seduce Kihachi’s son. In the protagonist, Ozu offers a terribly flawed, albeit wholly sympathetic man. When his son is approached and told that his father only wants him to become a “good man”, it is clear that what Kihachi means is that he wishes anything but his own fate for the boy. His profession as an actor is enlightening in this regard, as, though he has mastered the art of emulating others, he has yet to come to terms with the development of his own character, and so before the picture ends he is forced to re-embark on his perpetual journey.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 1962, robert bresson, the trial of joan of arc
Director: Robert Bresson
Though it is often compared to Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, Robert Bresson’s similarly conceived The Trial of Joan of Arc has little else in common with the silent great. Whereas Dreyer cast professional actors in the roles of the judges, whose faces would distort and grimace to a nauseating, terrifying effect, Bresson’s cast is entirely nonprofessional and their characterizations comparatively restrained. Maria Falconetti’s Joan, certainly among the finest performances on film, was often shot in close-up, with her flowing tears suggesting the profound anguish that she felt during the trial. Florence Delay’s representation, however, is much more elusive and difficult to identify with. This almost Brechtian approach is fitting for a picture so fascinated with the history of the trial, as it stubbornly presents only what the documents suggest to be the fact. While the film’s distance is a significant detractor for some, the proceedings are far from tedious. The structure attributes to the sense of hopelessness, in first involving the judicial questioning, and then depicting scenes of Joan in her cell as the authorities and guards peer in through a peephole and discuss the importance of having her executed as soon as possible. Through his framing, Bresson’s images exude a palpable sense of entrapment – the stoic priests in black and white garbs form a menacing backdrop during her trial, and the peephole scenes, which are among the very few long shots in the film, restrict Joan even further to a smaller frame-within-a-frame. The picture has a radically different approach to Dreyer’s version, and, though the comparison is perhaps inevitable, Bresson’s effort has been wrongly maligned by some because of association.
Director: Robert Bresson
In his first foray into color, Robert Bresson adapted Fyodor Dostoevsky’s short story “A Gentle Creature” as Une Femme Douce in 1969, which begins when a husband learns of his wife’s suicide and, through flashbacks, attempts to reach an understanding about what led her to the tragedy. The man, who serves as the narrator, is a despicable sadomasochist whose treatment of his wife does not stem merely from his own ignorance, but seemingly out of an impulse to assert dominance over someone that he feels he can easily control. Bresson scholar Tony Pipolo expands, “The very fact that he married such a young, unworldly girl speaks to his need for someone he can mold to conform to his requirements and endorse his delusive self-image.” His intentions of possessing her is alluded to in a number of images – a caged monkey at the zoo, the bars of the bed’s frame which, even in death, seem to imprison the body of his wife. While the husband believes that he comes to a satisfactory assessment of where he went wrong by the end of the picture, the final line emphasizes that his self-obsession is permanent. The film leaves one breathless, from its opening shots which elliptically illustrate the suicide of the woman through a sequence of images including a slowly falling patio table and a scarf adrift in the wind.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 1946, jean renoir, the diary of a chambermaid
Director: Jean Renoir
Often overshadowed by Luis Buñuel’s later, sexier adaptation of Octave Mirbeau’s novel The Diary of a Chambermaid, Jean Renoir’s interpretation was his penultimate Hollywood film, and it perhaps most closely resembles the themes that he addressed in his French work. Former Mrs. Charlie Chaplin Paulette Goddard plays Celestine, a young chambermaid who takes up her new post at the estate of the Lanlaire family. The matriarch of the household, Mrs. Lanlaire, exerts total control over both the servants of the mansion and her own husband, and through Celestine’s charms she wishes to seduce the son who ran away from her into staying at home once again. While the perversity of Buñuel’s version was closer to the novel – which was highly erotic on the page – Renoir choses to focus on the relationships between employers and servants in the generation following the French Revolution. Mrs. Lanlaire represents a product of the pre-Republic era – with the mass of silver she possesses suggesting that she holds onto the status that her family once held – and, in the film’s climax, Celestine redistributes the Lanlaire’s riches with the lowly townsfolk in an act of revolutionary socialism. The picture is wholly unique, with shifting tones and inventive juxtapositions – a murder taking place concurrently with an independence celebration, for example – and, while not often cited among Renoir’s best work, it is a fitting companion piece to The Rules of the Game.
Director: Jean Renoir
When Germany invaded France in 1940, Jean Renoir fled to the United States and worked in Hollywood for several years. The second of the American pictures that he directed was This Land Is Mine, a heartfelt propaganda piece about the importance of revolutions and the personal sacrifices that one needs to make in order to better the world for future generations. Set in an unnamed Nazi-occupied country (clearly meant to suggest France), the incomparable Charles Laughton plays a timid school teacher who finds the will to fight alongside the Resistance. The cast is uniformly excellent – Maureen O’Hara plays the love interest (who also starred with Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame), and George Sanders brings the smugness that one would expect from him, but also convincing shades of weakness. This is Laughton’s picture, though, who is surely among the finest that there’s ever been. Few have measured up to the vulnerability and tenderness that he could bring to the screen (I would argue that his Quasimodo is the best performance of that era). While the rousing courtroom speeches at the end of the picture feel excessive today, when one considers the historical context it must have been an appropriately uplifting call-to-arms.
