First off, I'm sorry for not getting around to logging these until after this list project was over! These were first-time watches for me this past month...
An Autumn Afternoon (Ozu): The note of finality this strikes is evidently coincidental to the fact of it being Ozu's last film; it synthesizes his pet themes so well and feels both emotionally universal and highly specific to its place and time, in particular the way that memories of the war overshadow everything and hang in the air with a certain profound sadness. These anxieties over appearances and a fixation toward self-denial are explicit in a way they aren't in modern or American life but I feel they're still in place and evident all the time. Every one of these movies has so much to offer, it will be a long time before I satisfactorily unpack them if I ever do. I didn't even mention the colors...
Mutiny on the Bounty (Milestone): I'm aware this version of the story has its champions here but I found it a lot more ponderous than Frank Lloyd's 1935 interpretation, which has many problems and is by no means a great film but does boast a lot more charisma within its two leads in my opinion. The dropoff from Charles Laughton's Captain Bligh to Trevor Howard's is severe, and I like Howard.
L'Eclisse (Antonioni): I could basically copy and paste my
La Notte review; Antonioni may turn out to be the biggest auteur whose work I simply and uniformly don't care for. Of course there are breathtaking aspects to this; I don't have to tell you which one made the biggest immediate impression.
Billy Budd (Ustinov): This isn't all that memorable visually but it's a striking and well-acted version of the Melville story, and Terence Stamp is really wonderful in the title role, rendering fully credible the Christ parables that might have seemed hackneyed with a lesser performance, and Robert Ryan makes for a truly menacing villain. Seeing the tense court martial scenes enacted also caused me to idly wonder if Melville's story was an influence on
Paths of Glory, which engenders a similar sense of gross injustice in the viewer but without the rousing cosmic revenge that closes this film.
Sanjuro (Kurosawa): Been a while since I saw
Yojimbo but I really don't remember it being this straightforwardly hilarious. Slight by Kurosawa's standards but a lot of fun.
The Temptation of Dr. Antonio (Fellini): Fellini's struggles with sexuality find some of their most succinct and self-aware expression here. Even more than Fellini's other work of the period it feels like a nearly prophetic road map for the course the '60s would follow aesthetically, culturally, sexually. (The Beatles'
Magical Mystery Tour of five years later looks like a wan imitation of this in every manner.)
The Four Days of Naples (Nanni Loy): Straightforward, impressively mounted reenactment of the September 1943 uprising in Naples against the Nazis rendered in a Neorealist style, though its obligations toward factual presentation are such that it doesn't really probe into any but the broadest realities on living under fascism, at least not the way something like
Rome, Open City does. Has a certain
Battle of Algiers-like urgent quality despite covering a more distant period: cinema as pure communication more than shaded storytelling.
Sundays and Cybele (Bourguignon): Was prepared neither for the narrative bleakness of this nor for the eccentricity of its central relationship, which I admit I found a little hard to take even though there's a kind of childlike naivete to it all that's sort of beautiful. It reminded me of
Forbidden Games a bit. Interesting to compare the interpretation of "innocence" and mental illness here to what's in
David and Lisa.
That Touch of Mink (Delbert Mann): A bad sitcom at feature length, just one that happens to feature Cary Grant and Doris Day; the latter spends the film wringing her hands over whether to fuck Grant, an indecision that even with their age difference is a little unbelievable.
Advise & Consent (Preminger): Having never been fully seduced by forum favorite Preminger apart from
Anatomy of a Murder (which I saw before any of his other films), I loved this. The intrigue of it all wrapped me up but even more than that I appreciated how unpredictable its story was, and how it rendered life-or-death scenarios from the parlor games of politics: Preminger plays expertly with how trivial things are made to seem vital in this context, and vice versa. I thought Charles Laughton's southern accent was going to become insufferable but after a while I started to appreciate how his performance threw everyone else in stark relief, which serves the story well. And the
audience "fuck-you" at the finale was delightful to me, for whatever reason.
(Masumura): It's actually surprising this came
after Giants and Toys, which tackled corporate culture in a somewhat sharper way; whereas that film felt a little tame than its promise, this one goes way over the top in its narrative but funnels all that into endless talking, with its message imparted all too directly in dialogue toward the end of the film. I keep thinking I'm going to see the Masumura film that causes all the others to fall into place but it hasn't happened yet.
Revisits...
Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey): Holds up splendidly for me. It's eerie, it's funny, and there's a certain joy in it. The acting is uneven but that's part of the charm, and I think it's really beautiful-looking and brilliantly edited at its best, though it's pretty evident that the filmmakers cared about some scenes more than others!
Days of Wine and Roses (Edwards): This occasionally goes over the top, but it doesn't live there like
The Lost Weekend, and its basic structure is brilliantly unusual and haunting, tracking the way the couple feeds on one another's addiction even more than on the addiction itself. Seeing Jack Lemmon at full intensity reminds me of what a force of nature he was, surely one of the finest actors in Hollywood history, and Lee Remick is terrific here as well,
selling the impossibly heartbreaking, surprisingly ambigious ending,
which had me wondering
how much the illusions to this film throughout the current season of Better Call Saul may be setting us up for a similar kind of irreparable mutual self-destruction.
(Kobayashi): Monumental storytelling and an unusually probing social message about the entire patriarchal notion of "honor," plus a virtually boundless series of beautiful images that make the most of confinement and enormity alike and some genuinely witty if purposely unkempt editing -- to me this is in many ways the Samurai movie, at least in the sense that it feels like the sobering conclusion of
Seven Samuri drawn out to full length. It's a slow burn, and sometimes sadistic (with noble intention!), but it all comes out to justifying every bit of it. Tatsuya Nakadai's guiding presence, and supremely eclectic performance, is an asset every step of the way.
Antoine et Collette (Truffaut): This half-hour sequel to
The 400 Blows -- infinitely more lighthearted but, in a sense, nearly as upsetting -- is as self-aware as Truffaut ever got in its delightfully sad-boy chronicle of Antoine Doinel, now out of juvenile hall and independent from his parents, working for a record company and turning into a classical/experimental music snob whose attempts to court a woman he frequently sees out and about at concerts are both strikingly amusing in their small-time obviousness and cringe-setting in their sheer ineptitude. This is such a cogent portrait of young adulthood; it's been a while since I saw them, but I don't think any of the later Doinel sequels were nearly this perceptive and funny, and Leaud captures the brooding self-importance, familiar to everyone who was ever a dorky early-twenties guy, so fabulously. A great work, near the top of Truffaut's output for me.
The Hole (John & Faith Hubley): One of my favorite Hubley films, this Oscar winner is a generally abstract (with occasional hints of the duo's work for
Fail-Safe) portrait of a construction site with rudimentary caricaturing of improvised dialogue between Dizzy Gillespie and George Mathews, whose chat about matters both philosophical and practical -- the latter clearly growing exasperated with the former -- eventually takes an apocalyptic bent thanks to current events, as then does the state of the world as depicted in the film. It's a peacemongering and timely portrait of everything being on the brink, but it works because it's just so effortlessly funny.
