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Not to forget William "better than Ford"* Witney


*according to Quentin Tarantino

Piège pour Cendrillon (aka Trap for Cinderella): André Cayatte's adapts Sébastien Japrisot's genre-inverting novel (unread by me) without necessarily imbuing any additive stylistic cues to emphasize the material, but it's a competently made film that could have benefited from oversaturating the psychological confusion of the source. Having just watched Anatole Litvak utilize form to accentuate the surreal qualities of another Japrisot adaptation, The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun, last night, I'm convinced that a more pronounced provocation of technique would have helped this rise above a cold examination of involving ideas. The story plays like an amusing twist on the whodunit mystery, reflecting back the 'who' into a mystery of self. Our amnesiac heroine is continuously shaken from cognitive balance as she plays detective to figure out the mystery of her condition, and then her own identity. I don't want to give away too much, but with the amount of roles of responsibility, potential motives, and identities she fluctuates between believing, a pragmatic and aloof narrative framing doesn't really meet this existential nightmare of futile psychological security where it's at. Some interesting touches, like a perverted sexual posturing in one flashback between the enigmatic Madeleine Robinson and a younger character, is just restrained and ambiguous enough to prompt our surrogate reality testing. These inclusions would be most welcome in a Pinter/Losey-imitated destabilization, but here wind up planted safely without the audacity to venture further with their incitement. The film is a worthwhile watch for fans of the genre, but I imagine reading the book- or seeing another riskier adaptation, if there is one- would be the ideal method of consumption. It is totally preposterous though, and by the time we entered the nth character introduction/narrative derailment, I checked myself out.

A few post-melodramas:

The L-Shaped Room: I’m not generally a fan of the kitchen-sink realism films of this era, finding most Richardson and even Widerberg’s championed works like Raven’s End to be middling, but this was one of the better- an observant study on makeshift families of outcasts formed amongst lonely souls in a decrepit boarding house. Forbes disrupts the fluidity of motion to prioritize perceptiveness, often focusing on minute details that the characters are aiming their eyes briefly before returning to the action. Many films do this, but this work seems to speak its characters’ truths of their emotional states in each and every scene. The film is comfortable taking a detour to flesh out trivial problems in the house with playful theatrics, or resting with a couple in the park flexibly out of time, but jagged suspense from confrontation always manages to intrude on the safe bubbles these durable characters have formed. Forbes has them respond with collectivist support and humor when they can to really stress the shades of characterization beyond despondency. Selfishness and isolation may prevail, but in the meantime there are some brief pockets of consolation to be found.

The film has the audacity to address and validate the self-centered side of stressors involved in social conflicts, from slut-shaming to accepting an impotent lack of participation in a child’s makeup, to the intent of generosity in a verbal gesture birthing financial insecurity in the receiver. Other kitchen-sink films seem to be myopically drowning in these milieus with their characters, without acknowledging the struggle of being right to oneself and wrong to another as an inherent contradiction not to be co-signed with frustration by the drama of the film itself. This film breathes life equally across perspective and uses its humanist microcosm as a terrific exhibition on life’s complexities.

Baby the Rain Must Fall: A great post-50s melodrama that recognizes a multifaceted system impacting one’s capacity to reform on every level, across social stigma, personal trauma, circumstantial pressures, selfish drives, and rooted core beliefs. These complex seeds are sewn conscientiously without the heavy-handedness of Sirk and more in the vein of the aforementioned kitchen-sink formula of unconditionally-curious expressionism. I love how no singular reason is trumped above the rest, and the film feels like it belongs on a double bill with Hud, where we are left to both empathize and judge characters based on how much rope we wish to allot to their responsibility vs. determinist hardships in any given moment.

Movies that are this fair towards life’s unfair incongruities are not as easy to come by as they should be. McQueen is at his best here, fitting the shoes of his self-destructive character who still retains a half-hopeful dream with an authentic energy that manages to strike a familiar sense of alienation, while responding to the stimuli of the formidable triggering usurping hopes of stability. Unfortunately, Remick is primarily sidelined as a voyeur, though her work is still strong. Murray’s character is largely absent from the main drama and resigned to the peripheries as a baseless vacuous personality, so the romance that develops in the third act feels largely unearned. I suspect there is a stronger two-hour film out there, and though I haven’t read the play or know how faithful the adaptation is, I have to imagine the relationship has a durability in other productions to assist the choices made in the story’s destination. Still, Mulligan frames everyone’s pathos with an urgent intimacy to give them exactly what they crave- whilst knowing that their dreams cannot be salvaged through the silver screen. We see them, feel for them, affirm their challenges, but it’s of no consequence to the outcomes ingrained in the fatal landscapes of their respective weighted archives.



Hud: Now this is a full-bred Newman perf, in one of his best and most complex roles. Written and presented like the best plays of Tennessee Williams, with characterization hidden beneath sheets of history pulsating at the seams, Ritt’s presentation of family dynamics is as rich as the soil in the soul of each member constantly averting, or being deprived of, its nutrients. This is a phenomenal exhibition of the psychological weights keeping tensions alive because they’ve become comfortable, a dire look at resilience and self-destruction as two sides of the same coin. The disease of the foot-and-mouth plague allegorically brings to a boil the disease of resentment-brewed behavior passed down from generation to generation, with Lonnie as the promising question-mark that the rest of these stained-clothes men orbit with their direct, magnetic influences.

The film is not all a depression-pit, nor is it a prophecy of self-inflicted harm from the inside. The milieu’s wide-open landscapes, comprised of apathetic structures and institutions, don’t support a collectivist identity or ambitious drive to transcend its humble offerings. This leaves folks like Newman drinking the barroom’s liquor, lazing around the empty, lethargic wastelands, ingesting the numbing products and foggy ethos where he’s been conditioned to seek his resolve (and the way another man picks a bar fight for no reason with Lonnie, there’s a hint of an environmentally-contingent need to become a rough and aloof individual).

Patricia Neal’s self-preservation involves an opposing attitude to these disinhibitions; she’s alert, restrained, too worldly to bury the knowledge of what awaits her if she drops her guard. This dissonance between Alma and Hud is in part gender-related, but it’s significant that Hud is not experienced towards wisdom in the way Alma is- his trauma is kept static, a self-fulfilling prophecy born from a fear of expanding his aspirations to absorb more from life. Hud hasn’t earned sagancy, he’s only worn-down, which is often the price accompanying enlightenment but here he’s kept in the worst and most pathetic position- weariness without worldliness.

The film dares to hold a position that dances between sympathy for Hud and an unsympathetic distancing from him regardless of his internal pain. It’s a realistic look at how people attract and separate from one another in adulthood, and a reflection of where we’re at in our current culture, dehumanizing those we don’t like as undignified and lesser than us. Here we have a man who is ridden with hurt, covering that tragic essence with defense mechanisms, but because he is unwilling and thus unteachable, and because his defense mechanisms offensively harm others, there is a strong case for Hud’s cancerous net-worth in the eyes of those in his vicinity.

Ritt manages to accomplish the tightrope walk all the way through Newman’s drunken march, where we can so clearly see his own torment on his disposition, towards a repulsive attempt at assault. One cannot ignore moral abasement even if it’s concurrently revolving around a brokenness many of us can broadly relate to and seek pity from, and thus for, this broken man. Douglas’ principled patriarch comes across as differentiated from Hud, so I can understand why some may not read the film as generationally-regulated in the consequences of character as I do, but Ritt is intentionally using this ‘present-minded’ depiction as part of his ethical dilemma of judgment. Douglas absolutely had an impact on Hud, admits as much briefly, and holds some accountability for his current state, though we aren’t privy to the specifics of this information. Ritt is asking whether or not this matters- do we ruminate on the past, on intention, on capacity for rehabilitation.. or do we take the person as they are right now and hold them responsible regardless of reason. Douglas is a moral man, but was he always? I doubt it, or at least not directed where it counted for Hud’s development, but perhaps that’s a moot point- a blunt proposition that's a tough pill to digest.

Douglas claims that when Lonnie grows up, he’ll have to decide what’s right and wrong for himself. Ritt doesn’t shy away from revealing Hud’s ugly and defective traits, but he doesn’t issue an omniscient verdict on his inherent worth either. There is a devastating ring to Hud’s final words of self-funded confirmation about Lonnie’s feelings about him. For those of us who have engaged in this kind of forced withdrawal from those we love to prove a negative core belief, this moment reaffirms Hud’s humanity, even if it’s too little too late as his own responsibility seals his fate in the here and now.

Personally, I wonder where the truth lies in Hud’s remark to Lonnie that he helped Douglas’ Homer out as much as Homer helped him. It sounds delusional, and based on everything we’ve glimpsed it just might be, but there is an impetus for this statement sourced in a perspective coated in history that we will never know. Lonnie doesn’t care to hear about it, and perhaps Ritt, and the audience, doesn’t either. We certainly don't get to- and how much of that is imposed disregard vs realism is trivial. But regardless of where it stems from, in the refutation of curiosity for that elision lies the conflict of the film: Hud has lost his right to voice his heart, through a combination of his own volition and his environmental reinforcers. Any truth that exists in what isn’t said has been fatally-etched in the history books and repelled back to Hud to swallow alone. As it stands, this cinematic composite of interpersonal and ecological dynamics is one of the most powerful and interesting psychosocial exhibits ever made.

Sex and the Single Girl

The more I return to this film, I become convinced that it isn’t only one of the best sex comedies, but it’s one of the greatest comedies, period. Joseph Heller’s stratified satirical wit is perfect to “adapt” a sincere non-fiction feminist book into a self-reflexively perverse narrative of gender wars that recontextualizes norms in an acidic cycle, brazenly reaffirming them. It’s such a genius idea (likely thought up by Joseph Hoffman who has story credit; I’m fuzzy on the particulars of the project’s history) that Charlie Kaufman would later replicate in his own Adaptation, taking on Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief in a similar vein. Quine’s interest in how human beings maneuver within the social prisons of systems makes this a playground for him, coming out at exactly the right time.

The film isn’t merely saying that women and men are not really self-actualized in the decade of liberation, but it’s exposing the joke inherent in how hard we need to force a perspective of our Natural Selves to believe it unconditionally, when the truth is that we have been conditioned to expect and actually desire stimuli from gendered roles. This is a profoundly layered work that doesn’t stop there, for underneath a posited view that institutional roles are a form of authenticity, that we are being inauthentic in resisting, there is a deeper level of physical desire for sex that is being challenged ironically through these faux-causes of salvation. Wood’s self-actualized feminist is continuously stumped by her binary worldview that rests in logic and resists a universal sexual urge underneath societally ingrained expectations from the other gender and her own. Curtis too is just as fair game as Wood, a man in a company hilariously exerting great effort to move against the grain of cultural mores, creating their own unique morality by simply doing the opposite- a rather pathetic delusion in itself. However, on an individual level, Curtis is seeking sex on a similar wavelength to Wood’s resistance of it; not motivated because he wants it from a primal angle, but because it will fulfill the next stage of professional and personal ambitions to ascend the ranks of his manufactured personality. Their aversions are sourced in myopic frameworks of artificially-concocted identities.

Both characters are torn between the impetuses of executive pragmatics in work, and fundamental instincts in sex. In an era where LSD is breaking down walls of the brain to achieve a harmonious internal state, externalized to connect all aspects of life in a collectivist ethos, we find one of the greatest social satires imaginable by rendering these zeitgeisty participants as helplessly diverting to black-and-white perceptions of mutually-exclusive choices that aren’t really choices at all and threaten their genetic needs. Where we arrive is in a biting commentary on the decade’s counterculture movements: that they are working to stunt harmony with oneself and others, rather than facilitate it.

Beyond the depths of how Quine, Heller, and Schwartz mash psychosocial ideas together and pull them apart, this is simply a goldmine surface-level humor. The early jokes on psychotherapy earn their belly-laughs for applying the rigidity of these intellectually-minded liberal soft scientists towards evolving concepts, with the running gag of Wood calling herself a father (not mother) figure to Curtis being one of the best era-specific digs on the stringent parroting within the psychology field I've ever seen. Curtis serves the more conservative-aimed satirical target of the heartless advertisement man, who resigns all morality to take care of 'him and his'. The way everyone at the company earns accolades for their intellect by simply doing “anti-___” smears the business world and counterculture movements alike, by stressing that capitalism’s relationship to counterculture is too easily forged, with enough of society converted to either Curtis or Wood’s dichotomous causes to deprive them of their self-flaunted singularness. This passively acknowledged usurpation of culture into privatized economics extracts self-actualization from the populations offscreen, in the film’s audience, and projects them back into the same ideological units that they sought refuge from in this new decade.

Curtis and Wood are very funny and I don’t know if either has ever been better, or more vibrant performers. The fluidity of Bacall and Ford playing characters with similar problems to the adult children of the next generation seals the film’s cheeky thesis of anthropological evolution as diagnostically inert. This plagued state of stagnancy is self-referentially reflected in the comedy bits themselves, from nodding to Curtis’ own filmography (and continuously getting mistaken for Jack Lemmon), to recycling screwball identity-switcheroos as familiar setpiece arcs to exacerbate third-act confusion, and ultimately veneering the passionate 'Grand Gesture' car chase with Hitchock-winking perverted-symbolism in mobile vehicles repeatedly driving through tunnels. In the finale each isolated vehicle messily squirms around to enter these orifices alone but clumsily more-or-less side by side, whilst desperately trying and failing to communicate and connect with the neighboring cars- Talk about total impotence all the way from the inability to engage in physical intimacy to the crushed will power to persuade a loved one towards vindication!

The end’s obligatory Happy Ending union, boldly sourced on fabricated expressions of emotion, is icing on the cake. Wood’s 'solution' of faking tears directly identifies the irony of honest emotions necessitating a dishonest manipulation in order to actually forge harmony and 'enter that tunnel' together.. perhaps just like how both genders need ideologically-perpetuated mores, and countercultural movements need the familiar dominant cultural systems like capitalism, to function independently and truly self-actualize. There is a subtle tragedy in how we’ve weighed ourselves down by ideas so deeply that we cannot escape these games, but- if we take a relativist look at authenticity in romantic unions (and, as I argued at the end of my writeup of Gone Girl) perhaps these ‘games’ are actually what we seek. They’re part of our innate primitive strategies, and socially-constructed patterns of behavior. It’s a chicken-and-egg situation, but interrelated evidence of our base interest and drives aimed at playing with power dynamics in sexually-charged relationships. Anyways, going by that reading- whether you want to define it as cynical or not- it’s a happy ending!

I should have read the first post more closely before revisiting The Honeymoon Killers - oh well, it's done for next year.

Still lots to like in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Neame) but it's surprising how the title characters ends up being less and less sympathetic as the film goes on, to the point you (I) conclude she's a shallow, histrionic narcissist who gets her due. I'm not sure if that was the intent here.

Makavejev’s debut Man Is Not a Bird strongly recalls Loves of a Blonde, shot the same year, in its tone, themes and qualities, but the somewhat fragmented ending disappoints a little.

I Knew Her Well (Pietrangelo). Mixed feelings about this one. The filmmaking here is as vital as the illusory dreams of the character in the world of appearances that's promoted by the Italian economic miracle is empty andpitilessly demolished: the frequently stunning mise-en-scène and photography, the near-constant use of the dizzying, numbing pop records. The film vaccilates between sympathy and neutral, critical distance towards the character. The monotonous repetition of her humiliating and depression-fleeing, manic experiences makes the film's point, but in the end the film suffers because of it dramatically, especially in the light of the film's length and relentlessly episodic nature.

Underworld U.S.A. is Fuller pulling out all the stops, whether in terms of level of energy, the daring of the no-holds-barred treatment (the little girl killed on her bicycle, the emotional bruising we feel when Cuddles bears her heart only to have it completely insensitively destroyed by Devlin), or the virtuoso shots and excess of style (e.g. those close-up shots of the drunk Cuddles in the park talking to Devlin straight into the camera in lieu of the traditional over-the-shoulder shot).

The Neame is definitely doing that intentionally, as made even more explicit in the original novel though even more parenthetically I haven’t encountered the play yet, as it precedes and takes down the inane Dead Poet’s Society idea of teaching. After Up the Downstairs it’s easily my favorite film about teaching.

Underworld U.S.A. is one of Fuller's rawest films, a personal favorite (or, close to it), and a serious list-contender. Glad you enjoyed it, RV!

As promised, I watched the two Cassavetes I hadn't seen from the decade, and as I feared, I have nothing to say about Too Late Blues. I didn't like it, but why it fails -where other films about a milieu of aimless, flawed characters work for me- is a mystery. Perhaps the film is too pristine and tightly orchestrated around apparent aims, that are pretty meaningless in favor of the details, to the point where said details don't breathe as the real purpose of the film's interest (and, similarly, perhaps it's because the characters are vapid without the idiosyncratic realisms of Cassavetes' other seemingly-hollow characters that are relatable within those peripheral traits). I know this film was affected by studio interference, so it's possible that much of this criticism can be chalked up to that.

A Child is Waiting, on the other hand, I do have some words for, and not kind ones. A compromised work welding Cassavetes’ acute, honest ethos and Kramer’s hackneyed, melodramatic style should be at least an interesting failure, but its inconsistencies are not the jagged waves I hoped they were (which would have been self-reflexively involving given the polarized views on the work within the film). Instead this plays more like a Kramer film, a potently sentimental exploitation of developmentally delayed children in residential care, and the adults who care for them.

There is a philosophical debacle briefly addressed that should be the focus of the film; whereby Lancaster and Garland aggressively intrude their own wills onto the fates of the populations they serve, so blinded by their own respective empathy that they’re unable to break free from their solipsistic prisons and see the other, just as valid, point of view. This is an authentic experience of those who do this work, and as someone who has worked in many roles within these communities, I feel it’s an important issue to tackle. But like Short Term 12’s similar misuse of this device, the film departs from the rhetorical discomfort of the dilemma and into exaggerated grandiose drama, which simply undercuts the realistically-immobile existential crises with fantastically-mobile narrative conventions, moving us right along, past the clashing of world views that are in desperate need of validation, exploration, and working through.

Kramer is a coward at tackling heavy material with heavy-handed interventions to deliver shamefully anti-progressive products inadvertently (did he secretly direct Sergeant Rutledge?) and outside of a few scenes between Garland and Lancaster debating the value of their different approaches to the work, and Gene Rowland’s excellent performance, this film devolves from topical progressive examination to offensive mental health pornography. I’m not a violent man, but I can understand why Cassavetes punched Kramer following a screening of what he had done to his movie, if we are to assume that it was much different before, which - having seen a solid amount of each auteur’s separate works- seems like a safe assumption.

Rayon Vert wrote: Sun Jun 06, 2021 4:27 pm

Underworld U.S.A. is Fuller pulling out all the stops, whether in terms of level of energy, the daring of the no-holds-barred treatment (the little girl killed on her bicycle, the emotional bruising we feel when Cuddles bears her heart only to have it completely insensitively destroyed by Devlin), or the virtuoso shots and excess of style (e.g. those close-up shots of the drunk Cuddles in the park talking to Devlin straight into the camera in lieu of the traditional over-the-shoulder shot).

Spoiler

The pool drowning scene, too... whoa

... and of course the film ends with the literal "cinema fist"

therewillbeblus wrote: Sun Jun 06, 2021 6:13 pm Underworld U.S.A. is one of Fuller's rawest films, a personal favorite (or, close to it), and a serious list-contender. Glad you enjoyed it, RV!

These are all revisits for me (as I've said I'll be sticking to those for a long bit). It used to be my favourite of his, maybe now at least top three or four, but yeah I think it's the greatest demonstration of what he can do.

knives wrote: Sun Jun 06, 2021 5:21 pm The Neame is definitely doing that intentionally, as made even more explicit in the original novel though even more parenthetically I haven’t encountered the play yet, as it precedes and takes down the inane Dead Poet’s Society idea of teaching.

Good to know, so it's not just me overreacting!

therewillbeblus wrote: Sun Jun 06, 2021 6:13 pmAs promised, I watched the two Cassavetes I hadn't seen from the decade, and as I feared, I have nothing to say about Too Late Blues. I didn't like it, but why it fails -where other films about a milieu of aimless, flawed characters work for me- is a mystery. Perhaps the film is too pristine and tightly orchestrated around apparent aims, that are pretty meaningless in favor of the details, to the point where said details don't breathe as the real purpose of the film's interest (and, similarly, perhaps it's because the characters are vapid without the idiosyncratic realisms of Cassavetes' other seemingly-hollow characters that are relatable within those peripheral traits). I know this film was affected by studio interference, so it's possible that much of this criticism can be chalked up to that.

I can understand that - the negative turn that Darin's character takes has something realistic about it but really depressing and as you say there isn't enough there to relate to. I do think Stella Stevens offers a really affecting performance, there's something quite vulnerable and magnetic about her, although depending on the scenes her character goes into a few unfortunate, excessive and clichéd reactions once the drama amps up. I still felt the film, in its very long takes and improvisatory feel (I'm using the word feel because I know Cassavetes didn't improvise as such), had something of a free-flowing jazz vibe (to match the music), and that's where it doesn't feel at all like a studio film. I don't get that vibe with A Child Is Waiting, though for its own reasons that also comes across as a strange studio-independent auteur hybrid

Rayon Vert wrote: Sun Jun 06, 2021 6:52 pm

knives wrote: Sun Jun 06, 2021 5:21 pm The Neame is definitely doing that intentionally, as made even more explicit in the original novel though even more parenthetically I haven’t encountered the play yet, as it precedes and takes down the inane Dead Poet’s Society idea of teaching.

Good to know, so it's not just me overreacting!

Agreed. One of the things I love about The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is that there are not exactly any clear-cut heroes and villains as there are in Dead Poet's Society, to use knives' comparison. Brodie is attractive because she so flamboyantly goes against the grain and indulges her students' more frivolous interests, but there is indeed a narcissistic quality in the celebrity status she cultivates among the girls and her male colleagues. She also has perhaps naive but genuinely dangerous political leanings that she preaches to her girls. What's fascinating is that, while her fate is deserved, it also comes about largely because of the other characters' selfish whims: Sandy's jealousy at discovering she is not the object of the art teacher's desire and the headmistress' long-standing hatred for Brodie. It's a case of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, and in that sense I do sort of feel sorry for Brodie in the end even though she is everything Sandy accuses her of being.

Also, I highly recommend the novel, from which the movie differs enough in story and structure that you won't feel it's been spoiled for you.

Feego wrote: Sun Jun 06, 2021 8:48 pmBrodie is attractive because she so flamboyantly goes against the grain and indulges her students' more frivolous interests

I'd add that part of that attractiveness is the general sense of freedom she represents, and within that more especially the sense of sexual liberation (which seems a big theme of the film in general). Given that the film takes place in the 30s but is realized in the social context that is the late 60s, that fools audiences more into expecting her to represent the heroine (vs. what the school principal represents).

I just had a great idea for 2021: This, but with Jordan Peterson instead of John Keating /Jean Brodie

twbb, you are the only other person I have come across that like Baby the Rain Must Fall! Perhaps it may not be an orphan after all (although I am not entirely sure it would even make my cut despite how much I like it given the decade we are dealing with).

nitin wrote: Tue Jun 08, 2021 12:49 pm twbb, you are the only other person I have come across that like Baby the Rain Must Fall! Perhaps it may not be an orphan after all (although I am not entirely sure it would even make my cut despite how much I like it given the decade we are dealing with).

I only bought the TT because domino praised it when their titles were going out of stock, and a quick Letterboxd search shows a few others like it here as well. I hate to inform you that it doesn't stand a chance at making my list though

Yeah, it’s a good movie and worth seeing, but wouldn’t even make a Top 200 60s List for me

Same, but there are over 200 nearly-perfect movies this decade so

Anyone have recommendations among the 6 1960s films in Anthology Films' free Baltic Modernism series?

I haven't felt compelled to write about many of the Masumuras I've seen lately, but A Wife Confesses is a terrific courtroom mystery, which has as much interest in the honest melodrama of the lives being detailed (in the present and flashbacks), as it does in any kind of thrills or moral-twisting exposure. This is one of my least favorite subgenres, but when done right it's truly captivating- and the reason why there are so many courtroom television series becomes clear- as we become the jury not for the case's outcome, but as a party studying and becoming aware of the urgency in the specific humanity's complex psychosocial experiences under our microscope.

Spoiler

The reveal is played far straighter than what Masumura seems to be brooding on below the surface- that intention isn't even conscious for us when we're influenced by so many cultural ideas that cloud the authenticity of our desires. Ayako Wakao appears to admit to her cognizant agency within the moment in question, but the impression from her surreal behavior and line delivery is that she doesn't even possess the tools to permit herself to analyze her actions as anything other than sentient objectives when equated to responsibility. It's a profound tragedy of sociologically-stunted self-actualization, and when she looks in the mirror (after that long stumbling daze) and says, "I do have a murderer's face," this is a direct expression by Masumura of her culturally-enforced depersonalization, where confusion added to an imposed narrative equals truth for a woman desperate for a sign that she's fitting one pathology. When rejected by her lover, the mirror affirms the fatal story assigned to her identity, when objectively it's only a piece of the layered psychological puzzle that deserves context for judgment. As she searches for a prognosis to latch onto, Masumura empathizes with the murderer, defines her as more than that, and so do we.

I'll be curious how others react to the ending, once they see it.

The Prime of Miss Jean brodie is probably my favourite short novel. Neame's adaptation, in spite of all the things it has going for it -- excellent performances from a well-chosen cast, and some nice directorial flourishes -- is a travesty. It discards the moral complexities and ambiguities of its source -- where Sandy was Judas to Brodie's Christ, the film makes her David to Brodie's Goliath. The much more black-and-white morality of the film goes hand in hand with an excess of vocal, articulate confrontations -- the Emotional Honesty at High Volume school of dramatics. The low point of the film which epitomizes its shortcomings occurs

Spoiler

when Brodie retreats from an end-of-year party, after a searing encounter with the art teacher, to an empty classroom. She flicks on the light, and behold, Sandy is standing in wait to confront her about dispatching a suggestible, retarded child to certain death in the Spanish Civil War. But Sandy couldn't possibly know Brodie was going to enter that classroom. And even if she did, she'd blink at the lights after waiting in the dark for any length of time, but there she stands, perfectly composed, erect, and square-shouldered to deliver her speech. Phooey!

All that said, I've encountered several people on line who think the movie is an improvement on the novel, including an English Lit professor whose judgment I respect.

I'm with you, bottled spider. While Prime isn't my favorite of hers (I think it's among her best, but I'd put four or five others—Hothouse...,Memento Mori,Girls of Slender Means,The Driver's Seat—ahead of it as my personal favorites), Spark's among my pantheon novelists, and as you say, the Neame movie sacrifices all that makes Spark special for something that feels unbearably schematic. I made the mistake of rereading the book immediately before watching the movie for the first time, so I probably can't say I gave it the fairest shot, but none of its alterations were for the better, nor even interesting or understandable compromises, to my eyes.

One change I can sympathize with is making the movie chronological, since trying to reproduce the book's structure probably wouldn't work. But the way the book moves back and forth in time is part of its poignancy, so I can't help missing that in the film.

More Masumura:

Manji is a twisted affair of psychosexual dynamics with an emphasis on the social component, especially during the final act as we arrive at a Pinteresque alternative to The Servant. Instead of the fragility of social roles leading to identity-diffusion via segregation, the group conforms to one goal masked under the guise of the only Truth they can tangibly know: that of potent emotion. As each person subscribes to an umbrellaed action, smiling but clearly not content (and not just because of what they're subscribing to!), we sense a surreal Lynchian dynamic of mismatched elated dispositions and aching psychological insides. It's a form of surrender securing these people together; if you're already vacuous and surrendering to your crises of self, might as well be in a collective!

Spoiler

The final punchline -that one cannot bring themself to accept that they belong or are wanted even in death, when finality seals those concerns!- is an oily reflection of existential demise, reminding me of The Blackcoat's Daughter's twist on its genre.

Red Angel: Another surreal blending of chaotic social interactions, this time transitioning from a facade of romance into the depths of wartime medical front lines, or as our protagonist calls it, hell on earth. Masumura allows some genuine humanity to bleed into the amoral madness, but even that is compromised and falls within the contextual bargain where hopelessness is a currency one uses to measure their life, including when to end it or turn the channel for a while with opioids. There's a bit of a saintly undertone to this, yet one so grounded in corporeal woes that if anything Masumura is reflecting on the impotence of saints in a dilapidated milieu such as ours. It's like M*A*S*H* during the apocalypse without jokes, a diseased land where Hobbesian reptilian behavior usurps all attempts at issuing virtue.

Baisers volés. Truffaut's first straight ahead comedy (Tirez sur le pianiste is a bit too genre-bending to call it that) is such light, quasi-insubstantial fare. Fittingly for its somewhat improvised, loose and unfocused quality, it resurrects a lightly New Wave-ish camera and style again, following the much more tightly structured and realized few films that preceded it. But in contrast to some of his later other lighter films, this achieves a vibrancy despite the episodic nature and downright silly moments (maybe even become of them, like that extremely prolonged scene of Antoine in front of the mirror: "Fabienne Tabard... Fabienne Tabard... Fabienne Tabard...") Amusing and sweet without necessarily there always being jokes as such, moments of pure joy in cinema as it were, and the film as a whole conveys a true coming-of-age quality without being in any way literal about it. Plus that whole episode with Delphine Seyrig where Antoine confronts the real woman behind his idealizations is very sensitively and movingly played, and adds a bit of depth.


Accattone. This is definitely an example of a fully fledged vision and style present in a debut feature. Obviously, this isn’t neorealism, what with the sacred Bach music (used again just as centrally in The Gospel According to Matthew) accompanying these visuals of human misery and baseness, as well as the overt Christian symbolism, but in another way this is a sort of seedier neo-realism than the immediate post-war Italian films. Pasolini gives no quarter in this hard study of the underclass, focusing specifically on a wretched pimp’s life, even as it sanctifies and poeticizes this degradation. One feels Pasolini genuinely loves these characters, which makes his attitude – one that is life-affirming in a radical way, that affirms life with all of its violence and ugliness as well as its purity and innocence – somewhat akin to Bresson’s Christianity in Au hazard Balthazar.


The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (Ritt). I didn't remember this well, which made me enjoy the plot twists that much more. I can't compare the adaptation to the book since I've never read it but this isn't only extremely solid as an entertaining thriller but extremely artful in terms of the subdued, realistic tone, the quality of the acting and the photography. Pretty terrific.


The Fall of the Roman Empire. For those who may not know, Gladiator is pretty much a remake of this film (though with the gladiators added!). It suffers in comparison with its Samuel Bronson-Anthony Mann predecessor El Cid, which was more cohesive, but it's still quite impressive in parts. The similarities with the Ridley Scott film are especially marked in the first part, but here that whole section involving a dying Aurelius holding the fort on the northern Germanic tribe frontier is stretched to almost half the film. It's also the best part, with Mann quite impressive in his compositions, use of the natural settings and filming of the gargantuan armies. There's an extremely wild and chaotic chariot race/battle down a wooded road that's so insanely dangerous you wonder how they did it. Stephen Boyd as the male lead isn't the most charismatic player, though, and he's not enough to sustain interest in the second more fragmented half that's gets mired in the more abstract political battles and ideologies (like El Cid, the film heavily promotes a world peace message), with the character dynamics moving a bit too much into the background. Which is too bad because for this part of the film the filmmakers crazily recreated an extremely monumental, detailed Roman Forum outside Madrid, apparently the biggest set ever built, all solid structures, statuary, temples, columns, etc., with no matte paintings. Christopher Plummer turns in his own memorable performance as Commodus, though, and the finale where he battles Livius in the middle of the Forum ends the film again on a high note. Despite its flaws, over all this is still one of the best films in this difficult genre.