Three documentary shorts by French New Wave maverick Agnes Varda, stretching from 1963 to 2004, make up Cinevardaphoto (Cinema Guild), a triptych presentation released theatrically in 2004. Like Varda’s recent non-fiction films, these are more film essays than traditional documentaries and connected by the theme of photography and Varda’s cinematic exploration of the art and meaning of the still image.

Salut le Cubains

Salut le Cubains (1963), constructed entirely of still photos from Varda’s 1962 trip to Cuba a few years after the revolution, is a joyous and idealized celebration of this socialist ideal from a young artist intoxicated by the best of what she saw, and while it is organized and presented with the sensibility of an artist, it lacks the reflection of her later films. Ulysse (1982) is more introspective and contemplative, a rumination on a photo she took in 1954 that invites the remembrances of her models and the interpretations of others to mingle with her inspirations, intentions and working methods. It becomes a free association montage that weaves its portrait out of personal inspiration, reflection of the young artist by the older self, material revisits to the scene of the art and the commentary from the perspective of other eyes and sensibilities.

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3 Silent Classics by Josef Von Sternberg (Criterion)

Josef von Sternberg is the great stylist of the thirties, a Hollywood maverick with a taste for visual exoticism and baroque flourishes (which prompted David Thomson to dub him “the first poet of underground cinema”). That’s the cliché, anyway, based largely on his collaborations with Marlene Dietrich, a tremendous body of work that charts the evolution of the director into increasing narrative abstraction and emotional dislocation.

Sternberg Before Sound (and Dietrich)

But step back into his silent work and you’ll find a storyteller of unparalleled talent and one of the great directors of silent cinema. The three films in Criterion’s magnificent box set Three Silent Classics by Josef Von Sternberg may be all the evidence we have to this era (most of his silent films are lost and his directorial debut, the 1925 The Salvation Hunters, is unavailable on home video, though clips are included in the set supplements) but they are more than enough to show his mastery of the medium and the rapid evolution of his style, both a visual sculptor and as a cinematic storyteller. The “von” of his name (an affectation that didn’t originate with him but one he embraced who-heartedly) suggests an a European émigré and technically that’s accurate—he was born in Vienna and came the United State an early age—but Sternberg is an American, with European tastes perhaps but an American storytelling sensibility.

These films also showcase his often overlooked genius as a director of actors. While Sternberg fills the frame with light and shadow and layers of texture, he strips the performances down to the elemental base, their entire approach to life in their faces, their walk, the way they lean in for a comment or drop their eyes when they catch another’s gaze. In such carefully orchestrated performances, the smallest gestures, a lift of an eyebrow, a shift in body language communicates everything.

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Machine Gun McCain (Blue Underground)

John Cassavetes was doing his Orson Welles thing—by that I mean acting in whatever movie paid well so he could finance his own, personal productions—when he took the lead in an Italian mob picture/heist movie hybrid shot in large part on location in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. His presence in the film is defining, or perhaps redefining. Strolling out of prison with not so much a swagger as a comfortable amble, giving his farewells to inmates and guards alike and bantering with an estranged, slickly outfitted son who arranged for his early release, we immediately face a singularly independent operator about to bump up against the conformity and command of the syndicate.

John Cassavetes: Hank McCain sizes up the situation

Cassavetes is Hank McCain, an old-school criminal in the new order, sprung specifically to rob a Vegas casino that West Coast mob honcho Charlie Adamo (Peter Falk) is trying to muscle his way into, but McCain is not really a team player. Which really complicates things when Adamo gets called on the carpet by the New York godfathers. It’s not just that Vegas is out of Adamo’s territory. The casino that he’s putting the squeeze on is secretly owned by the East Coast mob. When Adamo tries to call it off in typical mob fashion (by putting a hit out on McCain), it just makes the lone wolf McCain determined to go it alone.

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I can’t believe that I missed George Romero’s Survival of the Dead (Magnolia), both in the theaters and on DVD, but that’s my life as a DVD columnist now: Kathleen Murphy wrote a fine review on MSN, so I spent my limited time catching up on films that weren’t already reviewed on MSN. I skipped The Back-up Plan (Sony) for entirely more selfish reasons: I had better things to do. Like a family weekend to celebrate my father’s 70^th. He survived the festivities, thankfully, but I returned with a tight deadline. I did squeeze in a few before I left, however, like the great box set Three Silent Classics by Josef Von Sternberg (Criterion), with a trio of magnificent productions from the golden age of Hollywood’s silent era (reviewed on my blog here), and Ajami (Kino), the Oscar-nominated drama from Israel that is far more worthy of the Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film than The Secret in Their Eyes, a thoroughly conventional mystery from Argentina.

A brief moment of hope in Ajami

Set in the volatile Ajami neighborhood of Jaffa, where Israelis, Arabs and Palestinians live in a wary détente surrounded by crime, mistrust and retribution, Ajami follows five separate stories of the families caught up in the web of violence, each finally entwining with the others until every life—and every act of violence—reverberates through the reluctant community. This searing drama film begins as with a ferocious act of violence (the drive-by shooting of an innocent bystander mistaken by Bedouin gangsters for their real target) that, effective as it is, unwinds as a familiar story of the criminal world’s violence hurting everyone in its blast radius. The difference—at first anyway—is the setting and culture that informs the characters and the story.

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Here’s another curiosity I came across thanks to an assignment from Turner Classic Movies, all the more fascinating because it’s all true (well, most of it anyway). Music hall actor Meyrick Clifton James really did impersonate General Bernard Montgomery in a British plot to distract Nazi intelligence during the lead-up to D-Day, and he plays himself in the film based on his memoir, which screenwriter Bryan Forbes and director John Guillerman saw fit to enhance with added drama and action that never actually happened. It’s not a great film but it is an interesting historical curiosity and a great gimmick, and perhaps most interesting for the fact that James is rather bland on screen until he inhabits the Monty role, where he suddenly fills out with confidence and authority.

Meyrick Clifton James is General Bernard Montgomery's double

While James is the subject of the film I Was Monty’s Double, John Mills takes the leading role as British Intelligence officer Major Harvey. Mills first made his name as a British everyman in such wartime films as In Which We Serve and solidified his reputation in David Lean’s Great Expectations as one of the class acts of British filmmaking. By 1958 he had aged into tougher, more varied character parts, and he brought confident bravado and a sly sense of humor to Harvey, who enters the film dodging agents and hitting on girls. Charged with hatching a scheme to draw the attention of the German High Command to Africa, he observes James successfully fool a British theater audience (including himself) into thinking he’s the real General Montgomery making a surprise appearance and is struck with an inspiration. With the blessing of his commanding officer (Cecil Parker), Harvey has James transferred, under the guise of working for the army’s film unit, and offers him a part in the biggest show of his career. He studied Montgomery’s speech and mannerisms as a temporary member of his staff, drilled names and events, rehearsed his presentation and was finally sent to Gibraltar and Algiers to play the part for his most demanding audience: Allied officers and soldiers and the network of spies and informants swarming around the bases. With his real identity hidden from all but a few key co-conspirators, James had to keep up the performance at almost all times until the plan was complete, and while the film shows a stalwart James holding up ably under the stress, it was considerably more difficult for the real James.

See the complete feature at TCM here. I Was Monty’s Double (which is not on DVD) plays on Sunday, August 22 as part of a day-long tribute to John Mills.

Not the strongest week for New Releases, unless you have a fondness for Nicholas Sparks tearjerkers or Miley Cyrus vehicles (in which case the Disney drama The Last Song is just for you) or mindless cartoonish slapstick featuring live-action animals with animated facial expressions acting like Looney Tunes characters (that would be Furry Vengeance, from Summit).

The Weird

But if you reach beyond the multiplex, you’ll find The Good, the Bad, the Weird (MPI), which plays like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly by way of Peking Opera Blues and Dragon Gate Inn. For a while, Korean action cinema seemed like the heir apparent to the great Hong Kong action cinema of the eighties and pre-reunification nineties, but its mastery of slick, explosive action and creative set pieces was always so deadly serious and humorless. Kim Jee-won’s self-described “Oriental Western,” set in 1930s Manchuria and featuring a cast of Korean thieves and killers and bounty hunters, is a madcap chase for a treasure map filled with double crosses, crazy escapes and lots of black humor.

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Orlando (Sony)

“Do not fade. Do not wither. Do not grow old.” So commands Queen Elizabeth I to the androgynously beautiful young aristocrat Orlando (Tilda Swinton), the boy she has taken for her lover, and so he obeys, remaining unchanged over four centuries, or almost unchanged. One morning some hundred years later, the lad looks into the mirror while dressing and realizes he has transformed into a woman. “Same person, no difference at all,” she muses. “Just a different sex.” But true as that may be, her social and legal identity is completely redefined.

Tilda Swinton: Orlando transformed

Tilda Swinton was largely unknown to the filmgoing world when she took on the role of fair, ageless young man who transforms into an ageless woman over the centuries and her androgynous looks evoke 17^th century portraits of young male aristocrats. The Oscar-winning actress is of course far more famous today and the visual shock of the transformation no longer so surprising, but the journey is just as fascinating, entertaining and unexpected.

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Black Orpheus (Criterion)

Shot in Rio de Janeiro by a French director, adapting a Brazilian playwright’s take on a Greek myth, with a Brazilian cast and a non-stop beat of Brazilian percussion and Bossa Nova music, the 1959 Black Orpheus offered a look at Brazil’s culture far different from the clichés seen in Hollywood’s South American romantic fantasies. This showed poor black Brazilians who lived in the shacks in the poor favelas high above the more affluent Rio, a part of the city that Brazil’s government would have preferred to keep the rest of the world from seeing.

Carnival!

This was the world Orson Welles hoped to show in It’s All True, the ambitious project that was cancelled before it had barely begun. But where Welles was determined to show the poverty as well as the exoticism of Carnival, this portrait created its own fantasy of the favelas, all joy and communal idealism and color. It’s a far cry from the Cinema Novo films that more politically motivated directors like Glauber Rocha made in the sixties, and a decidedly romanticized portrait of slum life that films like City of God have put to rest in the past decade. And yet knowing that this is an exoticized portrait of Third World peasants by a European director doesn’t stop me from appreciating the energy and music and dance presented by director Marcel Camus and his cast (a mix of stage actors, musicians and non-professionals) and crew, or from enjoying the fantasy that is on screen.

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The essays I write for the Turner Classic Movies website all come to me as assignments. I don’t get to the pick the films, which means I get a variety of titles coming my way, some of which I’ve seen and a few that I haven’t. But there is a real pleasure in revisiting classics that you think you know but haven’t seen in years, perhaps decades. Such is the case with The Wild Bunch (1969), which I last saw on the theatrical re-release of the restored cut. I hadn’t forgotten much in the way of story, but the rhythms and the characters seem fresh, or at least refreshed, seeing it again for this piece. This time through it became clear just how Pike Bishop’s pronouncements of a code were simply empty words that had lost all meaning to him. “This time we do it right” means something after he’s been getting it all wrong all along and trying to fool himself into thinking it wasn’t so. It’s not revenge, it’s atonement, and it feels right for this bunch.

This time they do it right

The film that branded Sam Peckinpah with the nickname “Bloody Sam,” The Wild Bunch (1969) exploded in the era when Bonnie and Clyde (1967) redefined the portrayal of screen violence in a major studio production with glamorous movie stars and brought a more cynical attitude and bloodthirsty spectacle to the landscape of American westerns. In fact the original screenplay by Roy N. Sickner (a stuntman in the westerns) and Walon Green was influenced by the violent Italian genre known as “the spaghetti Western.” In their story, a brutal gang is ambushed during a heist and chased to Mexico by a posse led by a former member of the gang. They agree to steal American rifles from a military transport for a Mexican General but end up facing the General and his entire regiment, fighting to the death in a hopeless attempt to rescue one of their own. The title was borrowed from the name of the gang led by real-life outlaws Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but they had nothing on this bunch. The script was short on character and narrative development and big on violent set pieces. Lee Marvin was interested in playing Wild Bunch leader Pike Bishop — he had attached himself to the project even before it was sent to Peckinpah—and the studio saw the film as another macho action picture along the lines of previous Marvin pictures The Professionals (1966) or The Dirty Dozen (1967). Peckinpah saw something more and began rewriting the script, fleshing out the characters, enriching their stories with defining flashbacks and giving a dramatic foundation to the action and the spectacle of violence.

It’s not exactly a romantic portrait of the outlaws of the west — these men are killers and thieves who think nothing of using civilians for hostage or cover – yet Peckinpah favors these men over the ruthless, hypocritical forces of law and order such as the “gutter trash” bounty hunters who see dollar signs rather than people and fire on anyone who wanders into their gun sights: civilians, railroad employees and even American soldiers. His vision never denies the brutal reality of their lives or their actions, but it does recognize their humanity under the gristle, as well their faults. Pike is a man who professes a code — “When you side with a man, you stay with him,” he lectures his gang, “and if you can’t do that, you’re like some animal!”; it’s a code he has failed to live up to with his own actions and by the end of the film, he faces his own hypocrisy and sets out to “get it right,” in his own words.

Read the complete feature on TCM here. It plays on Friday, August 13, as part of a Robert Ryan tribute, and is also available on DVD and Blu-ray.

I’ve been traveling a lot lately and posting less—paying assignments get top priority for my time at home—so I’m a little behind. And this week at my MSN column I left the Hollywood new releases to the blue-star panel of MSN film critics (you can find their reviews quoted in my coverage of Date Night (Fox), Death at a Funeral (Sony) and The Joneses (Fox)) and gave cursory coverage to the painfully self-indulgent self-produced comedy of midlife crisis and career ennui Multiple Sarcasms (Image). I finally caught up with the newly restored Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (Kino) and put down a few words on the recent box set releases spotlighting directors Sacha Guitry and Akira Kurosawa, stars Errol Flynn and Kim Novak, and the King himself, Elvis Presley.

The Gondry clan watches Michel's documentary about them

What does that leave for this column? How about Michel Gondry’s The Thorn in the Heart (Oscilloscope), an intimate portrait of his Aunt Suzette Gondry, the strong-willed patriarch of the Gondry family, and her thorny relationship with her son Jean-Yves.

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Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (Kino)

I have a soft spot for Albert Lewin, a literary Hollywood writer/producer turned director with a continental sensibility an eye for handsome imagery (if not always cinematic storytelling). His productions tended toward literary adaptations (The Good Earth, 1937, which he produced, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1945, which he scripted and directed) but Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (Kino) is an original script (“suggested by the Legend of the Flying Dutchman,” in the words of the credits) reverberating with mythological themes, literary and classical references and a Hemingway-esque atmosphere of the lost generation of idle wealthy Europeans in early thirties Spain.

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman

All of the men in the tale are in thrall to Pandora (Ava Gardner), a beautiful American nightclub singer who has come to Esperanza, Spain, via London, and spurns the attentions of her admirers with a mix of cruelty and ennui. Then she is drawn to the mysterious ship anchored in the bay and meets the ageless Renaissance man Hendrik (James Mason), a haunted loner whose story is the stuff of legends, and becomes captivated by this mystery man who seems to know her yet makes no advances.

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The best new release of the week is The Ghost Writer (Summit), which I review here for MSN, while the most enjoyable special release is a toss-up between the new DVD edition and the Blu-ray premiere of the original Roger Corman-produced Piranha, which I review on my blog here, and the box set Turner Classic Movies Spotlight: Errol Flynn Adventures (Warner). And there are more sets than I have time to cover as completely as they deserve: The First Films Of Akira Kurosawa (Eclipse Series 23) (Criterion), The Kim Novak Collection (Sony) and a massive Elvis 75th Anniversary DVD Collection (Warner) and more modest Elvis Blu-ray Collection (Warner). But given all that, the big release this week will surely be Kick-Ass (Lionsgate).

Chloë Grace Moretz takes aim at the comic book movie

Kick-Ass is a comic book movie with a killer premise: what if regular people in the real world became costume vigilantes like the superheroes in comic books? Based on the uber-violent comic by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr., this film tosses a high school teenager (Aaron Johnson) into a crime-fighting culture he isn’t the least bit prepared for, and then pairs him up with an adolescent schoolgirl (Chloë Grace Moretz) who has been trained by a mentally unbalanced (yet absolutely loving) father (Nicolas Cage) into becoming a ferocious filling machine. Yeah, it’s completely f*****d up, and that’s what is both right and wrong with the film. Your appreciation will depend in how much you can appreciate it’s utter wrongness as a twisted virtue. Or how much you appreciate Nicolas Cage’s impression of Adam West’s Batman. Matthew Vaughn directs with plenty of brutal black humor, but he can’t quite follow the real-world blowback all the way down the inevitable spiral of doom. For all the collision between adolescent fantasy and material world reality, it’s just another kind of superhero fantasy, but with more blood and expletives along the way.

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