Links: Gilda

New York Times critic Bosley Crowther was utterly perplexed by Gilda on its premiere in March of 1946, not an unusual state for him.

"It is quite all right to make a character elusive and enigmatic in a film—that can be highly provocative—providing some terminal light is shed. But when one is conceived so vaguely and with such perplexing lack of motive point as is the dame played by Rita Hayworth in Gilda, the Music Hall's new film, one may be reasonably forgiven for wondering just what she's meant to prove, for questioning, indeed, the whole drama in which she is set. And that is what we frankly do.

Despite close and earnest attention to this nigh-onto-two-hour film, this reviewer was utterly baffled by what happened on the screen. To our average register of reasoning, it simply did not make sense. "



He was particularly dissatisfied with Rita Hayworth, whose charms somehow failed to interest him:

"Miss Hayworth, who plays in this picture her first straight dramatic role, gives little evidence of a talent that should be commended or encouraged. She wears many gowns of shimmering luster and tosses her tawny hair in glamourous style, but her manner of playing a worldly woman is distinctly five-and-dime. A couple of times she sings song numbers, with little distinction, be is said, and wiggles through a few dances that are nothing short of crude."



Writing a couple of weeks ago in The Observer, though, Phillip French sees what Crowther could not, the fantastical sexual subtexts that make Gilda so much fun:

"The movie revolves around the exotic Rita Hayworth and was produced by Virginia Van Upp, the most powerful woman at Columbia, who was charged by tough studio boss Harry Cohn with supervising the star's career. Hayworth is stranded in Buenos Aires at the end of the second world war, trapped between her sadistic, middle-aged husband, the Nazi-sympathiser Ballin Mundson (George Macready), and her ex-lover, the cruel, amoral American adventurer, Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford). The men have a homoerotic love-hate relationship. After Johnny sees Ballin's phallic sword-cane the first time they meet, he says admiringly: 'You must lead a gay life.'"



The excellent film noir podcast series "Out of the Past", hosted by academics Shannon Clute and Richard Edwards, devoted its 40th episode to Gilda, focusing in particular on the visual style of the film and the work of celebrated cinematographer Rudolph Maté.

"From the flip of her fiery hair to the reprise of her incendiary song, she sizzles the celluloid and burns herself indelibly into our collective consciousness. In fact, her presence so scorches that we are apt to miss the technical artistry of this film. Rudolph Maté's superlative cinematography uses banal objects pedagogically, to teach us to read the images: the blinds in Mundson's office make us aware of the fact we're looking, then show us how and where to look; the elaborate staging and framing of staircases make us wonder whether each character's fate is ascending or descending. While the Triad of superb players (Hayworth, Ford, and Macready) fleshes out the elaborate story, it is Maté's camera that builds the suspense. In then end, the cinematography combines with lines of dialogue pronounced by philosopher Uncle Pio to give us the world through noir-colored glasses—a "worm's eye view" that lends Hollywood's biggest stars a distinct earthiness."



Finally, Rita Hayworth is pretty.  The Rita Hayworth: The Love Goddess site has the hundreds of pictures to prove it.

Links: Laura

Opening in New York at the Roxy in October, 1944, Thomas Pryor gave it a generally positive review in the Times.  The film's only real flaw, he found, was in the performance of Gene Tierney:

"Yes, you get the idea that this Laura must have been something truly wonderful. Now, at the risk of being unchivalrous, we venture to say that when the lady herself appears upon the scene via a flashback of events leading up to the tragedy, she is a disappointment. For Gene Tierney simply doesn't measure up to the word-portrait of her character. Pretty, indeed, but hardly the type of girl we had expected to meet. For Miss Tierney plays at being a brilliant and sophisticated advertising executive with the wild-eyed innocence of a college junior."

Sacrilege, I say!  Everyone knows that Gene Tierney is flawless.



Dave Kehr didn't take a position on Ms. Tierney in the Chicago Reader, instead content once again to brilliantly capsulize a classic film:

"It reveals a coldly objective temperament and a masterful narrative sense, which combine to turn this standard 40s melodrama into something as haunting as its famous theme. Less a crime film than a study in levels of obsession, Laura is one of those classic works that leave their subject matter behind and live on the strength of their seductive style."



One of the many websites dedicated to the glory that is Gene Tierney, themave.com has, along with a bio and the requisite photos, a link to an article hyping Tierney in Motion Picture magazine.  Headlined:

"SIDNEY SKOLSKY COMES UP WITH A PICTURE OF GENE TIERNEY AS SHE IS TODAY, NOT THE DEMURE, PETITE BRUNETTE MOST PEOPLE THINK HER, BUT A GAY, SPUR-OF-THE-MOMENT KIND OF GIRL, REFRESHING AS A COLD SHOWER, AND SHE'S SEXY, T00!"



Skolsky (bylined as "Famous movie reporter") then writes:

"Gene Tierney. She's sex in any language.  On the screen, she's been Chinese, Polynesian, Eurasian, Arabian, Sicilian and just plain American. But regardless of the role she plays, she's always sexy. This international type actually was born in Brooklyn. The date is November 20, 1920. To further complicate her cosmopolitan attainments, she is married to a Russian, was partly educated in Switzerland and she speaks perfect French.

"Her full name is Gene Eliza Tierney and the initials spell "get." She has a driving ambition and generally gets what she wants."

I'm convinced.

Links: Rebecca

Critic and screenwriter Frank S. Nugent (The Searchers, The Quiet Man) reviewed Rebecca for the New York Times on the film's release in March of 1940.  He wonders if, in making his first American film, Hitchcock's "peculiarly British, yet peculiarly personal, style could survive Hollywood, the David O. Selznick of Gone with the Wind, the tropio palms, the minimum requirements of the Screen Writers Guild and the fact that a good steak is hard to come by in Hollywood."  The answer is a resolute "yes" as he finds that Hitchcock and the system worked together perfectly to create "an altogether brilliant film, haunting, suspenseful, handsome and handsomely played."  He also has high praise for Joan Fontaine's performance, and also her shoulders:

"Miss du Maurier never really convinced me any one could behave quite as the second Mrs. de Winter behaved and still be sweet, modest, attractive and alive. But Miss Fontaine does it—and does it not simply with her eyes, her mouth, her hands and her words, but with her spine. Possibly it's unethical to criticize performance anatomically. Still we insist Miss Fontaine has the most expressive spine—and shoulders!—we've bothered to notice this season."



I won't disagree with that, she has a great spine.



Writing 30ish years later, Dave Kehr in the Chicago Reader packs an impressive-even-for-him number of ideas into his capsule review.  He auteuristically hints that the film isn't as great as could be because of Selznick's strong presence, that the film is an allegory of adolescence and its incompatibility with the family, and that it and Hitch's other Fontaine film Suspicion are female-centered versions of his later masterpieces Vertigo and Marnie.



Hooked on Houses focuses on the unbilled star of the film, the mansion Manderley, where Laurence Olivier whisks Joan Fontaine away and she encounters the homoerotic tyranny of Judith Anderson.  There's dozen of great shots of the building (all shot in California and on soundstages, naturally) and a bunch of Rebecca trivia.

Links: Night of the Hunter

Bosley Crowther liked Night of the Hunter well enough back in September of 1955, though he had issues with the second half.  Writing in the New York Times, he said:

"All this has been crisply compacted into clear screen drama by the late James Agee and it is put forth under the direction of Mr. Laughton in stark, rigid visual terms. The locale is crushingly rural, the atmosphere of "the sticks" is intense, and Robert Mitchum plays the murderous minister with an icy unctuousness that gives you the chills. There is more than malevolence and menace in his character. There is a strong trace of Freudian aberration, fanaticism and iniquity. . . .

"But unfortunately the story and the thesis presented by Mr. Grubb had to be carried through by Mr. Laughton to a finish—and it is here that he goes wrong. For the evolution of the melodrama, after the threatened, frightened children flee home, angles off into that allegorical contrast of the forces of Evil and Good. Strange, misty scenes composed of shadows and unrealistic silhouettes suggest the transition to abstraction."



But Dave Kehr in the Chicago Reader finds that abstraction to be one of the film's great strengths:

"Laughton's direction has Germanic overtones—not only in the expressionism that occasionally grips the image, but also in a pervasive, brooding romanticism that suggests the Erl-King of Goethe and Schubert. But ultimately the source of its style and power is mysterious—it is a film without precedents, and without any real equals."



Michael Atkinson takes Kehr's side, writing in the Village Voice that:

"Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter is the movie freak's definitive love machine: maligned when first released in 1955, hopelessly out of synch with American postwar sensibilities, so aberrant and singular it may properly be called the first Hollywood cult movie. An arch, Kabuki-like morality play set in a Saturday Evening Post mid-country and populated by shrieking archetypes, the film was, famously, Laughton's only directorial effort, and the mind boggles to ponder what kind of auteur career the man might've had come the '60s. As it is, Hunter is a paroxysm of stylistic excess, so untempered by reality or taste that even its stiff-limbed child performances feel like bad dreams."



Finally, just a month ago, Night of the Hunter was current Times critic A. O. Scott's Critics' Pick of the week:

Links: Seven Samurai

Seven Samurai, as it should considering it is The Greatest Film of All-Time, has a 100% rating at Rotten Tomatoes.  The praise started way back in 1956, when the film was known in the US as The Magnificent Seven and the Time reviewer acclaimed it (in a review second-billed to Marlon Brando and Machiko Kyo in Teahouse of the August Moon) with casual racism and more than a few transcription errors noting that

"Arms and the men have seldom been more stirringly sung than in this tale of bold emprise in old Nippon. In his latest film, Akira Kurosawa (Rashomon) has plucked the epic string. And though at times, in the usual Japanese fashion, some dismal flats and rather hysterical sharps can be heard, the lay of this Oriental minstrel has a martial thrum and fervor that should be readily understood even in those parts of the world that do not speak the story's language. Violence, as Kurosawa eloquently speaks it, is a universal language."



Bosley Crowther agreed in the Times, noting a particular film comparison that manages to be, as only Crowther could manage, understandable and completely, totally wrong.

"To give you a quick, capsule notion of the nature of this unusual film, let us say it bears cultural comparison with our own popular western "High Noon." That is to say, it is a solid, naturalistic, he-man outdoor action, film, wherein the qualities of human strength and weakness are discovered in a crisis taut with peril. And although the occurrence of this crisis is set in the sixteenth century in a village in Japan, it could be transposed without surrendering a basic element to the nineteenth century and a town on our own frontier."



Closer to our own time, Dave Kehr, in his capsule for the Chicago Reader, notes the film's much more complicated relationship to the Hollywood Western:

"Akira Kurosawa's best film is also his most Americanized, drawing on classical Hollywood conventions of genre (the western), characterization (ritual gestures used to distinguish the individuals within a group), and visual style (the horizon lines and exaggerated perspectives of John Ford). Of course, this 1954 film also returned something of what it borrowed, by laying the groundwork for the “professional” western (Rio Bravo, etc) that dominated the genre in the 50s and 60s."



Moving away from daily reviewers, Patrick Crogan at Senses of Cinema writes about the film, and notes that its pretty much impossible to do justice to its many virtues in a short space:

"Space is too short to do justice to all the complexities of the film's story, or to the amazing performances of Shimura, Mifune and many of the other cast members who were part of Kurosawa's troupe of trusted actors in the 1950s and 1960s (including Minoru Chiaki who plays the samurai Heihachi and Bokuzen Hidari whose face radiates the affects of peasant fear and powerlessness as Yohei). Furthermore, the film's stunning formal and stylistic features-the influential slow motion death scenes, the reinvigoration of silent cinema narrational techniques, the dynamic spatial compositions-have hardly been mentioned. If anything can be said about these here, it should be insisted that Kurosawa's formal experimentation and choices as director and editor are an integral part of the film's exploration of these themes of social conflict and group versus individual ethics. At the same time they maximise the film's brilliant portrayal of action and dramatic events in order to make the film as enjoyable and moving as possible."

Check out the video version of Crogan's essay as well:

Links: A Matter of Life and Death

This week's film from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (the third of their many classics we've played, after The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus) seems to have been greeted with less than acclaim on its premiere in England as the first Royal Command Film Performance back in the fall of 1946.  Most seem to have taken it for a lame bit of pro-American propaganda, as can be seen in this collection of original reviews at powell-pressburger.org:

"Love wins, but only after a fatuous trial in which America and Britain become symbols of the love-clash and in which Britain makes all the concessions (for box-office purposes in America), I take it.

     The film is thin and pretentious, though possessing certain technical ingenuities." - The Daily Worker

"Old feuds, old grudges, old hatreds are revived in one scene of this film in a manner which is entirely unnecessary and irrelevant to the development of the plot. Ancient charges against British "imperialism" which, for the most part, never had any real substance, are paraded - and no defence is offered. So an impression is conveyed well calculated to confirm and strengthen whatever false ideas of this country and its history Isolationist propaganda may already have implanted in American minds.

     We believe that the great majority of Americans will, like the British people, be able to assess the picture suggested by this part of the film at its true worth. But there are in the United States to-day certain elements which will be only too eager to exploit it. A film of this kind can contribute nothing to international understanding. It is a pity that it should cross the Atlantic carrying the cachet which comes from its showing on such an occasion as last night's." -- The Daily Graphic

The Sunday Dispatch, though, managed to appreciate it:

"The trial is really a Matter-of-Life-and-Death operation. Watch for the shot of the patient's eye closing under the anaesthetic as he lies watching the ceiling of the operating theatre. You'll swear it's your own eye and that you are succumbing to that anaesthetic.

     The technique used in this, and many other shots, are a real step forward in screen photography. Kim Hunter plays the opposite lead with quiet but telling effect.

     This film was well worthy of their Majesties patronage; it is well worthy of yours."



Regardless of its status as pro-American propaganda, or perhaps because of it, Bosley Crowther at the New York Times loved the film when it was released in the US as Stairway to Heaven a few weeks later, though his headline writer gave it only second billing behind The Beast with Five Fingers, in which a severed hand chases Peter Lorre around an Italian villa.

"If you wished to be literal about it you might call it romantic fantasy with psychological tie-ins. But literally is not the way to take this deliciously sophisticated frolic in imagination's realm. For this is a fluid contemplation of a man's odd experiences in two worlds, one the world of the living and the other the world of his fantasies—which, in this particular instance, happens to be the great beyond. . . .

"That gives you a slight indication of the substance and flavor of this film—and we haven't space at this writing to give you any more, except to say that the wit and agility of the producers, who also wrote and directed the job, is given range through the picture in countless delightful ways: in the use, for instance, of Technicolor to photograph the earthly scenes and sepia in which to vision the hygienic regions of the Beyond (so that the heavenly "messenger," descending, is prompted to remark, "Ah, how one is starved for Technicolor up there!"). . . .

"But we'll have much, more to say later, when we've got Christmas out of our hair. Till then, take this recommendation; see "Stairway to Heaven." It's a delight!"



Here in the present, we get our movie reviews from podcasts, and last October Filmspotting reviewed A Matter of Life and Death as part of their Powell & Pressburger marathon.  Needless to say, they too found it to be a delight.

Links: In a Lonely Place

Bosley Crowther reviewed In a Lonely Place in the Times back in May of 1950, after spending quite a few inches on Betty Hutton in Annie Get Your Gun, naturally enough.  He liked it though, taking particular note of Humphrey Bogart's performance:

"Everybody should be happy this morning. Humphrey Bogart is in top form in his latest independently made production, "In a Lonely Place," and the picture itself is a superior cut of melodrama. Playing a violent, quick-tempered Hollywood movie writer suspected of murder, Mr. Bogart looms large on the screen of the Paramount Theatre and he moves flawlessly through a script which is almost as flinty as the actor himself."



Keith Uhlich, however, sees more of director Nicholas Ray in the film in a short review for Time Out New York:

"It’s a classic Nick Ray situation: two people fighting against their natures in a futile stab at normalcy. That the director’s own marriage to Grahame was breaking up at the time adds a good number of discomfiting layers to this pestilent valentine, as does a scene in which a supporting character’s attempt to psychoanalyze Steele and Gray’s situation is met with Neanderthal derision. Wherever people are, whatever their perspectives—lonely places all."



Dave Kehr, in his capsule for the Chicago Reader, agrees:

"The film's subject is the attractiveness of instability, and Ray's self-examination is both narcissistic and sharply critical, in fascinating combination. It's a breathtaking work, and a key citation in the case for confession as suitable material for art."



Finally, J. Hoberman in the Village Voice sees the film as deeply personal for both the actor and director:

"Dix had traits in common with the volatile, hard-drinking Bogart, a proud man who'd been publicly humiliated after the Congressional hearings—attacked by the press for initially defending the Hollywood 10 and compelled to publish an admission that he had been a Communist dupe. For Ray, Bogart was "much more than an actor." He was a symbol, "the very image of our condition [whose] face was a living reproach." An ex-Communist who was never persecuted, and must have wondered why, Ray saw himself in Dix as well. He cast his soon-to-be-estranged wife, Gloria Grahame, in the role that might naturally have gone to (and even seems written for) Bogart's wife, Lauren Bacall. Ray used his own first Hollywood apartment as the tormented writer's lair and, after splitting with Grahame, began living on the set."

Links: Double Indemnity

Bosley Crowther had a mixed reaction to Double Indemnity in the Times on its release in the fall of 1944, noting that "Such folks as delight in murder stories for their academic elegance alone should find this one steadily diverting, despite its monotonous pace and length."  He was right about the greatness of Edward G. Robinson though:

"The performance of Mr. Robinson, however, as a smart adjuster of insurance claims is a fine bit of characterization within its allotment of space. With a bitter brand of humor and irritability, he creates a formidable guy. As a matter of fact, Mr. Robinson is the only one you care two hoots for in the film. The rest are just neatly carved pieces in a variably intriguing crime game."



Mike D'Angelo at the Onion AV Club takes a close look at what he calls the "meet-hot" scene between Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck, in which the two actors make manifest the lust that drives the film (and provides the link to this week's circle of Hell).

"As much as I love that closing verbal sparring match, it's mostly the first instant in which they lay eyes on each other that slays me, with Stanwyck looking down on her pigeon-to-be from atop that "silly staircase," perfectly at ease standing all but naked in front of a total stranger, and MacMurray not even bothering to conceal his lust, radiating a brash self-confidence that even contemporary mega-studs like Clooney and Depp would be hard-pressed to pull off."



The Film Noir Blonde, as part of the recent blogathon to benefit the Film Noir Foundation, takes a look at Barbara Stanwyck's wig in Double Indemnity, quoting director Billy Wilder:

"Sure, that was a highly intelligent actress, Miss Stanwyck. I questioned the wig, but it was proper, because it was a phony wig. It was an obviously phony wig. And the anklet — the equipment of a woman, you know, that is married to this kind of man. They scream for murder."

Links: Touch of Evil

It's a little surprising to see that the New York Times, in the form of Howard Thompson raved about Touch of Evil back on its premiere in 1958, but only because the film has such a reputation as the film who's financial failure finally drove director Orson Welles out of Hollywood for good.  It's nice to see that even the gray lady was able to recognize its charms:

"Any other competent director might have culled a pretty good, well-acted melodrama from such material, with the suspense dwindling as justice begins to triumph (as happens here). Mr. Welles' is an obvious but brilliant bag of tricks. Using a superlative camera (manned by Russell Metty) like a black-snake whip, he lashes the action right into the spectator's eye."

Tom Charity has a nice overview of the film at Moving Image Source, including a timeline of the film's production, from the initial idea through all its various release versions.

"Touch of Evil was not the sort of thing that appealed to the tastes of the Academy, or indeed many of the critics, once they had paid to see it.

"The flashy interplay of queer character defeats itself in the end. Far from clear speech and pretentious lighting and photographic effects add to the confusion….Utterly incoherent and unpleasantly smelling of evil, the film will give most men, let alone women, the willies," warned the reviewer at Kine Weekly. In Reporter, Gerald Weales said it was “often laughably bad…pure Orson Welles and impure balderdash.”

Such reviews seem bizarre in light of the film’s critical rehabilitation over the years—championed by the Cahiers crowd, it developed a cult following over the 1960s and ranked 15th in the 2002 Sight & Sound critics’ poll after its reemergence in a re-edited version in 1998."

Next we have a long essay from critic Jonathan Rosenbaum on the nature of director's cuts, including his own work on the restored version of Touch of Evil:

"Commodification of artworks ultimately affects not only their definitions and catalog descriptions but also to some extent their distribution. As astonishing as this may sound, all original invitations from foreign film festivals to show the re-edited Touch of Evil were rejected by the woman in charge of foreign sales at Universal because, according to Rick Schmidlin, she was convinced that no one outside the United States had the least bit of interest in Orson Welles. Once she changed her mind, the film was of course shown all over the world, but arriving at this stage took some time."

Welles's original 58 page memo to Universal Studios, describing his preferred changes to their cut of his film, which formed the basis for the version we're showing this week, is available at Wellesnet, along with some background info on the film.

"I assume that the music now backing the opening sequence of the picture is temporary...

As the camera roves through the streets of the Mexican bordertown, the plan was to feature a succession of different and contrasting Latin American musical numbers - the effect, that is, of our passing one cabaret orchestra after another. In honky-tonk districts on the border, loudspeakers are over the entrance of every joint, large or small, each blasting out it's own tune by way of a "come-on" or "pitch" for the tourists. The fact that the streets are invariably loud with this music was planned as a basic device throughout the entire picture. The special use of contrasting "mambo-type" rhythm numbers with rock 'n' roll will be developed in some detail at the end of this memo, when I'll take up details of the "beat" and also specifics of musical color and instrumentation on a scene-by-scene and transition-by-transition basis."

Links: Vertigo

Back in 1958, the anonymous Time magazine reviewer captured the general sense of critical dismissal both Vertigo and its director, Alfred Hitchcock received at the time with this review, second-billed to an Alan Ladd-Olivia de Havilland Western:

"Hollywood's best-known butterball, Alfred Hitchcock, has been spread pretty thin in recent years. The old master, now a slave to television, has turned out another Hitchcock-and-bull story in which the mystery is not so much who done it as who cares."



Dave Kehr, on the other hand, gets it right in his capsule for the Chicago Reader, where he, as usual, packs enough ideas into a few short sentences to inspire a short book or two:

"One of the landmarks—not merely of the movies, but of 20th-century art. . . . The famous motif of the fall is presented in horizontal rather than vertical space, so that it becomes not a satanic fall from grace, but a modernist fall into the image, into the artwork—a total absorption of the creator by his creation, which in the end is shown as synonymous with death. But a thematic analysis can only scratch the surface of this extraordinarily dense and commanding film, perhaps the most intensely personal movie to emerge from the Hollywood cinema."

One of my favorite critics, Noel Vera, takes a long, spoiler-filled look at storytelling in Vertigo at his website, A Critic After Dark:

"Vertigo stands as testament to how far we will go, what lengths we will pursue, how close to the borderline of madness we will hew (and how far beyond that line we will, on occasion, venture), to indulge our thirst for whatever makes us feel alive. It's testament in particular to our need to know What Happens Next--even what happens in a narrative Hitchcock oh so carefully and perversely ends just moments (seconds?) before its proper resolution. Like many a great story, it leaves us in the same place it left Scottie--hanging on to a ditty in an endless loop, to a poem repeating itself over and over, to a story without real end or hope of any kind of resolution."



The Alfred Hitchcock wiki has 1000 Frames of Vertigo, as part of its 1000 Frames of Hitchcock project, which is exactly as cool as it sounds.

Links: In the Mood for Love

Roger Ebert once again knows what's what in his review of the film back in 2000, noting both the unique dramatics and the beautiful imagery in Wong's film:

"In his other films, like "Chungking Express," his characters sometimes just barely miss connecting, and here again key things are said in the wrong way at the wrong time. Instead of asking us to identify with this couple, as an American film would, Wong asks us to empathize with them; that is a higher and more complex assignment, with greater rewards.

The movie is physically lush. The deep colors of film noir saturate the scenes: Reds, yellows, browns, deep shadows. One scene opens with only a coil of cigarette smoke, and then reveals its characters. In the hallway outside the two apartments, the camera slides back and forth, emphasizing not their nearness but that there are two apartments, not one."



Stephen Hunter, though does not.  He even makes a nice and sensible comparison to the great Alain Resnais film Hiroshima, mon amour, but apparently he thinks being compared to that masterpiece is a bad thing:

"The affair itself is more like a slow-motion dance than a consummation of the sweaty flesh, consisting of a whole symphony of gestures and longing looks, chance encounters in the rain, almost-knocked-on doors, telephones unanswered, a general sense of groping but not gripping.

I wish I could report that a feverish erotic tension builds, but it really doesn't. In fact at times the film plays like Alain Resnais' notoriously elliptical "Hiroshima, Mon Amour," in which possibilities are suggested but physical and emotional clarity is not certain."



On a more academic front, Stephen Teo wrote about the film for Senses of Cinema back in 2001.  He situates the film historically both in the tradition of Chinese melodrama, including a comparison to the great 1948 film Spring in a Small Town, and within Wong's career as a underratedly literary director, including the fact that the film is an unofficial adaptation of a novel by Liu Yichang, whose The Drunkard was adapted into a fine film by Freddie Wong which I saw at last year's Vancouver Film Festival.



Finally, you can find all kinds of cool stuff about the film, including pictures and music at its official website.

Links: Rules of the Game

The Rules of the Game, now widely considered one of the greatest films of all-time, did not fare so well on its initial release:

"The film’s initial screenings in Paris in July 1939 are now part of film legend: badly received by both critics and the public, the premiere even saw chairs thrown at the screen and an attempt to set the cinema on fire. Shocked, Renoir cut the film from around 94 to 81 minutes, only to see the film banned by the government censors in October (the ban was rescinded some months later but then reimposed by the Germans during the Occupation). Finally, the negatives were destroyed in a bombing raid in 1942."

The above is from thefilmjounal, where Ian Johnston reviews the film and Criterion's DVD release, which is the version we're showing this week.

Also from Criterion is this essay by Alexander Sesonske, who notes that it is indeed:

"a dazzling accomplishment, original in form and style, a comic tragedy, absurd and profound, graced by two of the most brilliant scenes ever created. It is also, in the words of Dudley Andrew, “the most complex social criticism ever enacted on the screen.” A total box office failure in 1939, The Rules of the Game now ranks as one of the greatest masterpieces of world cinema."

See, I wasn't exaggerating.

OK fine if you don't believe me, or Sesonske, who I've never heard of either.  But would you believe Bernardo Bertolucci, world famous director of The Conformist, The Last Emperor and Little Buddha?  Here he is in The Guardian's The Films that Changed My Life series:

"Renoir is like a junction between the France of impressionism (the France of his father, Auguste Renoir) and the France of the 20th century. Sometimes it's as if he were making films about characters from his father's paintings. But what is really extraordinary about Renoir, particularly in La Règle, is that he loves all his characters. He loves the goodies and baddies, the ones who make terrible mistakes. He loves the ones who are on screen for just two minutes. This is something I have always tried to do."

Links: Serenity

The great Manohla Dargis reviews Serenity in the New York Times, and makes fun of George Lucas as an added bonus.

Mike Dawson of Left Field Cinema does an excellent job breaking down the first ten minutes of Serenity, examining its tremendous narrative economy in this podcast.

For all matter of Joss Whedon related news, information and discussion, check out the comprehensive Whedonesque blog.

Links: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

Overthinking It takes two plot holes from Wrath of Khan and well, overthinks it.

More information than you could ever possibly require is available at Memory Alpha, the Star Trek wiki.

And finally, Roger Ebert's original review of the film from 1982.

Enjoy.

Links: Aliens

Adam and Matty at Filmspotting recently counted down their top five films of 1986 and Aliens was conspicuously absent.  Listeners inundated them with support for the film.

Did you know Jimmy Cameron just went to Brazil, put on a bunch of yellow face paint and planted some trees??

And last but not least there is the 10-minute Aliens rap:

Links: Barton Fink

Offscreen hosts a 23-page essay by Randall Barnes on the expert sound design of Barton Fink.

The A.V. Club analyzes the early scene when Barton checks into the Hotel Earle in their Scenic Route series.

Heading to L.A. soon?  If so, you can visit the shooting locations of Barton Fink thanks to movie-locations.com 

A pair of bonus links this week since Sean and I were too lazy to write anything original for the blog.  Back in 2007 we participated in a Coen Bros blog-a-thon (that coincidentally everyone else was too lazy to write anything for).   Sean expertly defends the Coens from attacks by ivory-tower-ensconced critics, while I just basically drool over the Man Who Wasn't There.

Enjoy!

Links: Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Tasha Robinson over at the A.V. Club compares Who Framed Roger Rabbit with its source material in a lengthy and enlightening feature called Book Vs Film.

Jeff Lange over at Jim Hill Media reminisces about Roger's ubiquity at the Disney Studios twenty years ago.

Well, it hasn't joined the pantheon of his Great Movies series but here is Roger Ebert's original four-star review from June 22, 1988.

Lastly, two weird bonus photos related to Roger Rabbit.  First, some guy went to the trouble of envisioning what Jessica Rabbit would look like if she were real (his attempts at Homer Simpson and Mario are even creepier):

And a promotional image from the Walt Disney Company's 1983 Annual Report for the upcoming project: