Turner Classic Movies celebrates the 100th birthday of Akira Kurosawa with a month-long retrospective of the director’s work. Every Tuesday in March features an evening of Kurosawa films. I wrote on a couple for the website,  beginning with The Idiot (aka Hakuchi) (1951), his adaptation of the Dostoyevsky novel.

Setsuko Hara and Masayuki Mori speak no evil in The Idiot

“This story tells the destruction of a pure soul by a faithless world.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky was one of Akira Kurosawa’s favorite novelists and a great influence on the director; he had long wanted to make his novel The Idiot into a film. After completing Rashomon (1950), he finally embarked on his passion project, which he transposed from 19th century Russia to a contemporary Japanese setting. Where Kurosawa took great liberties in adapting subsequent western works into Japanese contexts, from Shakespeare (Throne of Blood, 1957, and Ran, 1985) to Maxim Gorky (The Lower Depths, 1957) to Ed McBain (High and Low, 1963), here he remained almost totally faithful to the original novel.

Read the complete piece on the TCM website here. The film plays Tuesday, March 9, on TCM, and is available on DVD in a box set from Criterion’s Eclipse line.

Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven plays on Monday, March 1 on Turner Classic Movies as part of their “31 Days of Oscar” series. I wrote a feature on the film for the TCM website.

"Days of Heaven": The magic hour

Malick’s use of the naïve narrator and the lovers on the run from a murder (they even create a short-lived Eden-like existence in the forest at one point) recalls his debut feature, Badlands (1973), but the resemblances end there. The story of Days of Heaven has echoes of the Old Testament story of Abraham and Sarah placed in the grandeur of the endless horizon and majestic skies of the Texas plains. The manor house and the grain elevators of this wheat empire stand like monoliths watching over the unending plains. The images of workers in their landscape look like impressionist paintings that cinematographer Almendros creates on the screen with the natural light of his location (Alberta, Canada, standing in for Texas).

Malick wanted to evoke the silent cinema of the teens, which was shot with available light and strove to create clear, sharp, vivid images. Almendros added to that the sensibilities and visions of such American painters as Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper, artists who strove for an evocative simplicity of image and lighting. In his autobiography, “Man With a Camera,” Almendros praised the working relationship with Malick, who not only approved of but encouraged his efforts to dispense with traditional Hollywood lighting and push his experiments with available light photography, and a core group of collaborators (including set designer Jack Fisk and costume designer Patricia Norris) who were equally dedicated to recreating the era in all its detail and texture.

Read the complete feature here.

It’s the annual “31 Days of Oscar” at Turner Classic Movies this month, with Oscar winners and nominees screening in the days leading up to the 2010 Academy Awards. On Friday, February 26, it’s Serpico and I wrote a feature on the film for the TCM website.

Al Pacino as Frank Serpico: a counter-culture character in a conformist world

The real-life Frank Serpico made headlines as the scandals broke and, as an independent commission delved into the scope of the corruption, he was almost killed on the job under suspicious circumstances. Peter Maas put his story into a non-fiction bestseller, which Martin Bregman optioned as his first feature as a producer. Previous films about police corruption tended to frame the issue in terms of bad apples in an otherwise healthy barrel. This was very different, yet Bregman was more interested in the man and his experience than a story of corruption and investigation, and the episodic script follows Serpico as he is bounced from one precinct to another and becomes more alienated, frustrated and desperate. He found a collaborator on the same wavelength in Sidney Lumet, a TV-trained director with a reputation for strong performances, literary adaptations and, in films like The Pawnbroker (1964), creating a sense of street realism. The New York-born Lumet shot most of Serpico on the streets and in standing buildings rather than sets wherever possible, and he brought a distinctive sense of place with his choice of locations and his documentary-style approach to shooting. While that became a hallmark of seventies police dramas and crime thrillers to follow, it was still quite new at the time. Along with The French Connection (1971), Serpico was one of the films that brought this new realism to the screen portrait of American cops with its realistic portraits of procedure and systemic failure and flawed, human characters behind the badges.

See the complete feature here.

I review the Facets DVD release of Werner Schroeter’s Palermo or Wolfsburg for the Turner Classic Movies website.

Germany as seen by Nicola

Werner Schroeter is one of the least well known of the New German Cinema directors in the West. While fellow filmmakers like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog and Margarethe von Trotta were bringing their sensibilities to the screen by bending the dramatic narrative form to their needs, Schroeter was content to explore the non-commercial realm of experimental shorts and fragmentary features through the 1970s and thus his films did not receive the exposure of his colleagues. It wasn’t until 1978 that Schroeter made his first “traditional” feature film, The Kingdom of Naples, an ambitious portrait in the life of a neighborhood over several generation that earned Schroeter the Best Director prize at the German Film Awards, his first of three such awards to date.

Palermo or Wolfsburg (1980), his second 35mm feature, returns to the poverty of Sicily explored in The Kingdom of Naples and then follows a young, unemployed man as he moves to Germany to find work. It’s a drama of cultural collision and alienation, a simple story with a dense mix of styles and an almost passive figure at the center. Nicola Zarbo, a non-actor with no other recordable screen credits, plays the dutifully religious Sicilian man also named Nicola Zarbo, the eldest son of a widower who dreams of buying the plot of land he works for the local landlord but always behind the rising asking price.

Read read the entire feature here.

Abbas Kiarostami’s Palme D’or-winning feature Taste of Cherry plays on Turner Classic Movies on Sunday, January 31. I profile the film for the TCM website.

Taste of Cherry

Taste of Cherry confirmed Kiarostami as the most acclaimed director of Iran’s rich film culture, which was just getting seen by the rest of the world through such releases as Jafar Panahi’s 1995 The White Balloon (written by Kiarostami), Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven (1997) and Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Gabbeh (1996). But where these films (like the early works of Kiarostami) viewed the world through the eyes of children, Taste of Cherry was decidedly adult, serious and provocative. Islamic law prohibits suicide, which created difficulties with Iranian censors (Kiarostami reportedly edited the film at night, to avoid the prying eyes of officials), but it’s not really about death. It’s about life and reasons to live. Mr. Badii, driving circles through the barren hills, picks up three passengers through the course of his long day. The young Kurdish soldier flees in a panic at the request. An older seminary student, an Afghani, attempts to change his mind, reminding him of the Muslim strictures against suicide. Finally a Turkish taxidermist climbs into the passenger seat, a sympathetic man who shares his struggle with suicide but reluctantly agrees to help for reasons of his own. Through the course of this search, the dusty landscape and the age-etched face of Homayoun Ershadi become familiar, comforting, and finally riveting as he engages each of the strangers in conversations both discomforting and nakedly honest. In between the conversations are long silences and views of the world passing by outside the window, interspersed with magnificent long shots of the car winding through the hills, a tiny spot of color crawling along the asphalt strip through the rolling landscape, as the world continues on. In the distance we see soldiers drill, children run and bulldozers grind away at the hills, all unaffected by Badii’s crisis, yet as the light shifts from afternoon to evening (apart from the coda, the film takes place over a single day), it’s like the sun is setting on Badii’s soul.

Read the complete feature here.

(In conjunction with Criterion’s release of Paris, Texas on DVD and Blu-ray, I offer this uncut version of an essay originally published in the Scarecrow Video “A Tribute to Wim Wenders” program in 1996)

“A lot of my films start off with road maps instead of scripts.”

In Wenders’ student short Alabama (2000 Light Years) we first see what will become a hallmark in feature after feature: the world as viewed through the windshield of a moving car. We’ve seen many variations of this image (through a car side window, through the window of a train or a plane) but it’s this first image that is key to Wenders’ works, which puts us in the drivers seat, so to speak.

The view from the driver's seat of "Paris, Texas"

Wenders makes films about travelers, people on the move, and he continually returns to the road film: Alice in the Cities, Wrong Move, Kings of the Road, Paris Texas, and Until the End of the World. In other films, travel becomes a central element of the narrative: The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, The American Friend, The State of Things, Lisbon Story, and of course the journeys from heaven to earth in Wings of Desire and Faraway, So Close! His world is a landscape of winding country roads through fields and forests, city streets and urban cityscapes, railroad tracks and speeding trains, coffee shops, hotels, jukeboxes, photo booths and other roadside attractions. The road serves as both an escape and a way back, the route for escape from responsibility, the winding path back to self. From the self exiled wanderer to the determined traveler, the road ultimately becomes a pathway to (or the possibility of) grace.

Read more »

Ida Lupino: Dressed to Bowl

My essay on Road House (the 1948 film with Ida Lupino, not the Patrick Swayze bar-bouncer classic) in up on the Turner Classic Movies website.

A minor classic of forties film noir with major pleasures, Road House (1948) is an unusual, and unusually fascinating, variation on the genre. Instead of the usual urban jungle, this road house is decidedly rural, a bar and bowling alley in the thick forest outside of a small town near the Canadian border. Ida Lupino is Lily, the big city chanteuse who sashays into the joint, all scuffed cynicism and brassy attitude. She’s the new “discovery” of the hopelessly smitten owner Jefty (Richard Widmark), who has discarded a string of similar sexy discoveries over the years. Cornel Wilde, at his most brawny beefcake and stolid, is the tree trunk of a manager Pete, who instantly clashes with this sassy dame. The antagonism is instant, the attraction a matter of time and the showdown with the explosively jealous and possessive Jefty inevitable, but the method of his madness (and it does indeed turn into full blown madness) is genuinely pathological. Even in the realm of film noir, a genre rife with unstable personalities and violent reactions to emotional betrayals, Jefty’s obsessively plotted vengeance is unusual to say the least.

Road House may sound tawdry, with a title that evokes a rowdy juke joint (the design suggests a rural nightclub bar with an aggressively rustic design), a romantic triangle that turns pathological and a performance from Widmark that evolves from immature hothead to dangerously erratic sadist. But for all its urban toughness in a back country town setting, it’s a handsomely made film with adult banter and a tough cookie with a tender center in British-born but thoroughly Americanized and streetwise Ida Lupino.

Read the complete feature here. The film is also on DVD, featuring commentary by film noir expert Eddie Muller and my friend and fellow MSN contributor Kim Morgan.

I explore the mid-life crisis of John Cassavetes’ Husbands (1971) for Turner Classic Movies online, for the film’s TCM showing on Saturday, January 2.

Husbands and friends

The term “midlife crisis” became a familiar phrase in the seventies—and in seventies cinema—but when John Cassavetes released Husbands (1970), the term was just being born and the concept just starting to make its way into the movies. Subtitled “A comedy about life death and freedom,” Husbands follows three middle-aged men (Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk and Cassavetes), long time friends and family men, in the wake or the sudden, premature death of the man who completed their fun-loving group. “I’m not going home,” proclaims one as the funeral ends. “I’m going to get very drunk.” Thus begins an epic bender, an attempt to drown their sorrows, escape their guilt and duck the disappointments of compromised lives.

This is a Cassavetes kind of mid-life crisis: they indulge their worst, most selfish instincts as they attempt to outrun the fear of mortality that has all but slapped them in the face. They carouse in all-night drinking binges, gang up on a poor old lush as they “judge” a singing contest among morning drunks, then abandon their families and rush off for a weekend of gambling and cheating in London. Only while safely hidden in a bar room toilet, where the non-stop drinking has comes back to haunt them with an epic round of vomiting (one of the film’s most controversial and divisive scenes) do they let their fears pour out. Yet these are inarticulate men, middle class husbands and fathers whose complacency has been shaken to the soul, and they slip into boyish giggling and sniggering whenever the conversation gets too personal. They can’t find the words to describe their feelings. Perhaps vomiting is the most honest expression of their condition.

Read the complete essay here.

I investigate the 1939 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the second Holmes feature starring Basil Rathbone as the brilliant master detective, for Turner Classic Movies. The film is one of TCM’s Christmas Day presents to viewers: it plays on Friday, December 25.

Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce with co-star Ida Lupino

Decades after his final portrayal of Arthur Conan Doyle’s coldly logical detective, Basil Rathbone still remains the definitive screen Sherlock Holmes for many of the character’s fans. There had been many screen incarnations before him (John Barrymore quite distinctively played the sleuth in the 1922 silent feature Sherlock Holmes) but most were forgotten when the gaunt, classically trained Rathbone, with his crisp diction and piercing eyes and aquiline features, stepped into the deerstalker cap for the 1939 thriller The Hound of the Baskervilles. Accompanied by Nigel Bruce as a portly Dr. Watson, Rathbone became the first screen version of Holmes to solve crimes in the flickering gaslight atmosphere of Victorian England, the era in which the original stories were set, and it was this incarnation in which he first uttered the signature line of the series: “Elementary, my dear Watson.” (Though Conan Doyle never quite has Holmes deliver such a line in his stories, Holmes does say “Elementary” and refers to his companion as “My dear Watson” a few times in print.) Rathbone received second billing to Richard Greene, the handsome, dashing young actor who played the haunted Baskerville, in his first appearance as Holmes. However, in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939), the film’s immediate follow-up, he rose to top billing: the first for the respected stage star and screen character actor.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is not based on any of Conan Doyle’s original stories and, according to Holmes scholars, only nominally adapted from the credited stage play by William Gillette. The film pits Holmes against his arch-nemesis, Professor Moriarty (played with cool cunning and obsessive drive by frequent screen heavy George Zucco), who escapes a murder charge in the opening scene and proceeds to bait Holmes with a challenge. “I’m going to bring off right under your nose the most incredible crime of the century, and you’ll never suspect it until it’s too late,” he taunts the detective. “It’ll be the end of you, Sherlock Holmes.” Thus he begins a master plan that involves enigmatic letters, a flustered young beauty, a murdered aristocrat, a South American stalker (complete with an eerie wooden flute that haunts the victims) and the priceless (and fictional) Star of Delhi. Ida Lupino co-stars as the terrified young heiress worried that her brother has been marked for death, a case that Holmes takes up despite his promise to oversee the transfer of the jewel to the Tower of London. Needless to say, Moriarty’s fingerprints are all over these seemingly disparate cases, but the mystery is just exactly how and why.

Read the complete feature here.

I write on Frank Capra’s first film with Barbara Stanwyck, the early sound film Ladies of Leisure (1930), for Turner Classic Movies. It plays on TCM on Monday, December 21.

Ralph Graves and Barbara Stanwyck

Frank Capra was the closest thing to a star director that Columbia Pictures had going for it as it moved into the sound era when the studio was still a minor player compared to Hollywood’s five major leaguers. Studio head Harry Cohn made his respect for the director clear when he gave him the screen credit “A Frank Capra Production” on the 1928 film Say It with Sables and other studios were taking notice. Yet, at the dawn of the talkies, Capra was still a rising young director and not a household name yet.

Ladies of Leisure was Capra’s first film of the new decade – he began shooting in January, 1930 – and film critic and Capra biographer Joseph McBride argues that it marked a turning point in Capra’s career. Based on the 1924 play “Ladies of the Evening,” written by Milton Herbert Gropper and produced in Broadway by David Belasco, it dealt with mature subject matter and turned on the clash of social classes in the heart of the depression. It also featured a character endowed with passion, ambition and street smarts, brought to life by an actress whose screen career almost ended before it began.

Read the complete feature here.

I travel  to A World Apart, which in this film based on real life anti-Apartheid protester Ruth First (played by Barbara Hershey) is 1963 South Africa, for its showing Turner Classic Movies. It plays on Friday, December 11.

Jodhi May with director Chris Menges

Like Cry Freedom, A World Apart dramatizes the evils of Apartheid and the racist policies of the ruling government through the story of white South Africans, in this case journalist and activist Diana Roth (Barbara Hershey) and her husband Gus (Jeroen Krabbé), who is seen fleeing the country for his safety in the opening scenes. It’s the last that his thirteen-year-old daughter (named Molly in the film and played by Jodhi May) sees of him in the film. The time is 1963 and Molly is just old enough to question the appalling treatment of the country’s black citizens by the whites. The setting also resonates with American history: the civil rights struggle in the American south was intensifying in the early sixties.

A World Apart is the feature directorial debut of Chris Menges, the Oscar®-winning cinematographer of The Killing Fields (1984) and The Mission (1986). Like those earlier films (both directed by Roland Joffe), there is a strong social consciousness and political content, but Menges also brings a subdued dramatic atmosphere and rich visual sensibility to the film, layering scenes with telling details that illustrate the conditions of life in this place and time. He takes care to view the story from the perspective of Molly and draws a poignant and powerful performance from the young May. She is excellent as the spirited, affectionate, curious girl who communicates her growing awareness with wide eyes and pained expressions that wash across her face. Watching an elderly man knocked violently off his bicycle in a hit-and-run by a white driver is startling, but it’s the callous apathy of the white bystanders that haunts her.

Read the complete feature here.

The films of Lisandro Alonso have finally landed in Seattle, thanks to a retrospective organized and presented by Northwest Film Forum, which is also distributing his most recenty feature, Liverpool, in the U.S. In addition to showing his four films, NWFF brought the director himself to introduce his films, answer questions, host a Master Class and even shoot a film with local Seattle talent. I wrote about Alonso for the Stranger website.

Lisandro Alonso's "Liverpool"

[Lisandro] Alonso’s films are about lone men, isolated by some combination of circumstance, choice, and temperament, and their movement through their landscapes. In La Libertad, it’s the logger in the forest (with a brief trip into a village hacked into the middle of the wilds). In Los Muertos (2004), it’s a man released from prison making his way up river to his village home and a reunion with his daughter (it could be either reconciliation or retribution, given the film’s uneasy tone). And in Fantasma (2006), the (non)actors from these two films go to see a screening of Los Muertos in a cinema so empty it’s unnerving.

Alonso doesn’t put them under a microscope; he’s more of a naturalist and these men the subjects of a fictional documentary, shot with a camera that hangs back to observe them in their natural habitat. But there’s also a tension in the way his camera studies spaces, arriving before his characters and lingering after they’ve left. It creates expectations that Alonso inevitably defies, and sometimes it creates mysteries that dig under the skin of the viewer, especially when things happen offscreen and are left for us to explain.

Read the complete feature here.

I also wrote a companion piece on Alonso for Parallax View here, and put together a page of links of essays, reviews, interviews and other resources also at Parallax View here.