Hell is Other Movies: Seven Samurai for Seven Samurai

Tatsuya Nakadai and Toshiro Mifune in Yojimbo

The samurai as Western hero in Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo.  A loose adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's hard-boiled novel Red Harvest, it was remade by Sergio Leone as A Fistful of Dollars.  Kurosawa's sequel Sanjuro is a comic take on a short story by Shūgorō Yamamoto that was also adapted as a more serious dramatic film starring Tatsuya Nakadai called Kill! that was directed by Kihachi Okamoto.

The Loyal 47 Ronin

The samurai as historical tragedy in Kenji Mizoguchi's epic 1941 version of one of the most famous, and most filmed, episodes in Japanese history, in which the titular ronin avenge their wronged master and commit honorable suicide.  Kurosawa's Kagemusha also uses history as a means to examine the samurai world, in this case the fall of the warlord Shingen Takeda during the civil war that ultimately established the Tokugawa Dyanasty in 1575.

Toshiro Mifune in Throne of Blood

The samurai as Shakespearean tragedy in Kurosawa's Throne of Blood and Ran.  Adapting Macbeth and King Lear, respectively into Japanese settings and utilizing the conventions of traditional Noh theatre, Kurosawa loses the language but gets to the heart of the brutal violence and treachery in Shakespeare.

Tatsuya Nakadai in The Sword of Doom

The samurai as homicidal maniac in Kihachi Okamoto's pitch-black The Sword of Doom.  Tatsuya Nakadai plays the most bad ass samurai around, who kills indiscriminately and can only be stopped by a freeze-frame (the film is the first in a trilogy, but the remaining movies were never made).  One of the most vicious and evil protagonists in film history in an immensely enjoyable movie.

Tomisaburo Wakayama in Shogun Assassin

The samurai as grindhouse classic in Shogun Assassin.  Director Robert Houston melded together parts of the first two films in the Lone Wolf and Cub series (directed by Kenji Misumi) and dubbed them into English for release in the US.  You probably know it best from the many samples used in GZA's seminal album Liquid Swords.

Nobuko Otowa in Onibaba

The samurai as victim of the people in Kaneto Shindo's Onibaba.  During a great war, an old woman and her daughter-in-law hunt down wounded samurai and murder them, stealing and selling their weapons and armor for food (this is also a plot point in Seven Samurai).  They are eventually repaid with a terrible curse, one that involves one of the scarier masks in film history.

Harakiri

The samurai as social commentary in Masaki Kobayashi's Harakiri, in which Tatsuya Nakadai (in one of the great performances in film history) seeks revenge on the samurai clan, and the feudal system in general, that lead to his son-in-law being forced to disembowel himself with a bamboo sword.  Kobayashi's Samurai Rebellion, starring Toshiro Mifune along with Nakadai, is also a frontal assault on the samurai system, with Mifune rebelling against the irrational demands of his lord.  Japanese directors often used period settings to disguise their critiques of contemporary, and especially wartime, Japanese society.  Sadao Yamanaka's Humanity and Paper Balloons is one such film, following the struggles for life in a slum both for masterless samurai who can barely survive and the common people, who weren't much better off.  Made in 1937, Yamanaka was drafted the same day the film premiered and he died in Manchuria at the age of 28.

Hell is Other Movies: One Week with Nicholas Ray

The director of this week's classic, In a Lonely Place, Nicholas Ray, only had 15 years as a working Hollywood filmmaker, but in that time managed to establish himself as one of the greatest, and strangest directors to emerge from the industry.  His one big hit came mid-career with Rebel Without a Cause, but the rest of his work was only mildly successful at best and disastrous at worst, at least among the mainstream.  He was unconditionally adored by the folks in the French New Wave, and their followers.  Jean-Luc Godard, for example, began his review of Bitter Victory with this memorable bit of hyperbole: "There was theatre (Griffith), poetry (Murnau), painting (Rossellini), dance (Eisenstein), music (Renoir). Henceforth there is cinema. And the cinema is Nicholas Ray."

As I did with Hitchcock a few weeks ago and Billy Wilder last week (which I never wrote about because I caught a cold instead, but suffice it to say that 5 Graves to Cairo and Avanti! are pretty good, and One, Two Three and Kiss Me, Stupid are pretty great) I spent the past week watching some of Ray's film's I'd not gotten to yet.



Run for Cover - Netflix has this instantly available in a pretty poor, cropped print, but it's worth watching nonetheless.  James Cagney stars as a man with a shady past drifting through the West who meets a kid (John Derek) on his way into town.  When the two are mistaken for train robbers and shot, Cagney gives a big speech denouncing mob violence and helps nurse the kid back to health.  The town makes Cagney the sheriff, but finds it hard to give up their lynching ways.  Meanwhile, the kid, disfigured with a limp, can't give up his anger at the townspeople and turns bad, forcing Cagney to hunt him down and bring him to justice.  It's this kind of peculiarity in Ray's films that makes him so popular amongst auteurists (aside from his more obvious technical skills): given the most generic of film set-ups, the movie invariably turns into a Nicholas Ray film.  Derek plays another in a long line of Ray heroes who unable to cope (James Dean in Rebel, Robert Ryan in Flying Leathernecks and On Dangerous Ground, James Mason in Bigger than Life) , and Cagney is another outsider who just can't fit in (Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar, the young lovers on the run in They Live By Night, even Jeffrey Hunter's Jesus in King of Kings).  As weird as it is seeing Cagney in a Western, and believe me, it is weird, the film still works because Ray's obsession with these character types, and their inability to come to any kind of resolution or peace with themselves and their world, is endlessly fascinating.



Bitter Victory - One of Ray's more acclaimed films, in certain circles at least.  Richard Burton and Curd Jürgens star as British officers sent to Benghazi to steal Nazi documents during WW2.  It also seems that, before the war, Burton and Jürgens's wife had had a relationship and she may still be in love with him.  During the attack, Jürgens fails to stab a Nazi according to plan, and Burton steps in to do it.  On the return trip, Jürgens repeatedly tries to get Burton killed, either to cover up for his cowardice, or out of jealousy, or perhaps neither, possibly just because Burton keeps needling him about how much he wants Burton dead.  One of the bleakest of WW2 films, most of it is set in the North African desert, a landscape which has never looked more alien or abstract, lending its tragedy a vibe not entirely unlike that of The Twilight Zone.  Burton was in his prime as an actor; his completely cynical and utterly romantic hero is second only to his performance as the weary to the soul CIA agent in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.  It feels like the end of the WW2 film in the way Touch of Evil is the end of film noir.  A beautiful film, I don't think I can come close to plumbing its depths in this short a space, especially after seeing it only once mere hours ago.



The True Story of Jesse James - The third major Jesse James film I've seen, after Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford from 2007 and Samuel Fuller's debut film, I Shot Jesse James.  Fuller has a lot in common with Ray, as both are revered by auteurists for their profoundly personal films made largely within the confines of the studio system, and their careers are roughly parallel, running from the late 40s to the early 60s (Fuller lasted a bit longer, making a pair of significant films in the 1980s).  Unlike those other two films, which focus as much or more on James's killer, this film is more of a straight biopic, as, after a opening sequence establishing a robbery gone wrong and James's mother lying sick in bed, various characters relate the major events of James's life in 15 minute episodes.  The character, as Ray apparently sees him, is not the charismatic hero of legend, but rather an angry young man, driven by the atrocities his family suffered during the Civil War to revenge himself on Yankees by stealing their money, first from banks, then trains.  He's barely more sympathetic than a traditionally psychotic outlaw like Billy the Kid.  Part of that, though, may be casting.  James Dean was apparently supposed to play the part, but died before the film could be made.  A wholly inadequate Robert Wagner takes his place, and resembles more a pretty, empty suit than a legendary outlaw.  Jeffrey Hunter is better as Frank James, though the age difference between him and Wagner doesn't seem close to being correct.  The best part of the film comes at the end, after Ford has killed James and the James household his rushed by curious townspeople.  Frank James chases them away, but not before a couple of on-lookers help themselves to some Jesse James memorabilia.  As the camera pulls away from the house, a homeless drifter walks along singing the "Jesse James" folksong.  His body yet to turn cold and already his true story is transformed into mythic art.



The Savage Innocents - Here we find Ray in the Arctic, making a film with Anthony Quinn as an eskimo (Quinn the Eskimo, get it?)  Set in the present, but completely outside of modernity, the first half of the film chronicles Quinn's way of life, especially focusing on his finding a wife and creating a family.  This life is shattered with a bang as Quinn encounters an eskimo who has traded for a gun.  Making his way to the trading post to get his own gun, Quinn and his family encounter white men and rock and roll and Christianity for the first time.  A misunderstanding leads to the death of a missionary and Peter O'Toole (not in his own voice, which rightly annoyed him: he had his name stricken from the credits) spends years hunting Quinn down to bring him to "justice".  In addition to being a moving examination of a culture clash, the film is also very funny, and not in a condescending way, more like Dead Man or The Outlaw Josey Wales in its treatment of the relations between Natives and Europeans.  Owing an obvious debt to Robert Flaherty's groundbreaking documentary Nanook of the North, it also reminds me a lot of another Flaherty film, 1948's Louisiana Story, which also chronicles the disappearance of a traditional community at the hands of modernity.  Visually, the location work is breathtaking, anticipating Lawrence of Arabia in the widescreen vastness of its spaces, but the film is marred by a lot of bad 1960s-era process shots.



55 Days at Peking - Ray's last Hollywood film is an epic disaster, and he didn't even manage to finish it, suffering a heart attack halfway through filming (he went on to a variety of other things, notably teaching filmmaking and making a movie with Wim Wenders in the late 70s).  This one, however, is one of the many international epics that conspired to destroy Hollywood in the 1960s (think Khartoum, Exodus or Ray's previous film, King of Kings).  Set during the Boxer Rebellion, an event for which we are given little in the way of context, it tells the story of the Europeans trapped in their corner of the city as the Chinese attempt to kick them out of their country and they wait for reinforcements to save them.  David Niven plays the leader of the British delegation, whose decision it is to stay and fight because otherwise. . . well, we aren't really sure, but Niven assures us it would be bad (supposedly not so bad for the Chinese, but that's beside the point).  Charlton Heston is the American military commander in town, and he leads his men in various war movie exploits that take up much of the film (and were apparently not directed by Ray).  Ava Gardner plays a Russian countess who's being shunned because her husband killed himself after she had an affair with a Chinese officer who rehabilitates herself by hooking up with Heston and becoming a nurse.  The most interesting thing about the film is how you end up rooting for the Chinese to overthrow their racist and imperialist oppressors (this, more or less, is Heston to a buddy who's considering bringing his half-Chinese daughter, otherwise orphaned, home with him, "What chance would she have in Illinois?  She's better off here with her own kind.")  The film also features some rare pre-Shaw Borthers kung fu, featuring Yuen Siu Tien, the father of famed director and choreographer Yuen Woo-ping.  The film is a mess, and appears to have been edited down to the edge of incoherence.  Scenes end abruptly and there's little of the nuance or insight that defines a Nicholas Ray film.

In the interest of list-making, here is how I'd rank all the Ray films I've seen:


1. Johnny Guitar
2. In a Lonely Place
3. Bitter Victory
4. Rebel Without a Cause
5. The Savage Innocents
6. Bigger than Life
7. On Dangerous Ground
8. They Live by Night
9. The Lusty Men
10. Party Girl
11. Flying Leathernecks
12. Run for Cover
13. Macao
14. King of Kings
15. Hot Blood
16. The True Story of Jesse James
17. Knock on Any Door
18. 55 Days at Peking

The late Farley Granger in They Live by Night

Hell is Other Movies: One Week of Hitchcock

In honor of this week's showing of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, I decided to watch a bunch of the master's films that I hadn't seen yet.  Here's some short reviews of them, along with my personal ranking of every Hitchcock film I've ever seen.

Sabotage - This is an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent, renamed because the other film Hitchcock directed in 1936 was also called The Secret Agent.  The local movie theatre owner (Oskar Homolka) is under surveillance by Scotland Yard as a suspect in a series of bombings around London.  Sylvia Sidney, star of Fritz Lang's Fury and You Only Live Once, and 60 years later the alien-destroying Grandma in Mars Attacks!,  plays Homolka's wife.  Homolka's very good as a sap who gets manipulated into committing far greater crimes than he ever intended, but the signature sequence in the film, in which a young boy unknowingly carries a bomb through London (we see a clip of this in Inglourious Basterds) goes a little too far.  With it, Hitchcock tested the limits of the audience's taste for suspense and learned that we'd react badly if he toyed with our emotions too mercilessly.  It's really very unpleasant.

Saboteur - Similarly named but wildly different is this 1942 film starring Robert Cummings as a factory worker who's wrongfully accused of blowing up an aircraft factory in wartime.  The movie basically feels like a rough draft of North By Northwest, with less charismatic actors and less of a sense of humor.  The first hour of the film moves fairly slowly, as Cummings luckily finds a blind man who trusts him and slowly earns the trust of Priscilla Lane's pretty blonde model.  The second half rushes across the country, dropping plot holes left and right in a rush to get the leads to the top of the Statue of Liberty, in a sequence apparently designed to give me an attack of vertigo. 

Under Capricorn - My favorite of this whole batch of movies, and one of the bigger flops of Hitchcock's career.  It's not a thriller, but rather a gothic melodrama set in 1830s Australia starring Joseph Cotton and Ingrid Bergman (whose scandalous relationship with Roberto Rossellini may have had as much to do with the film's failure as its lack of suspense).  Like the previous year's Rope, it's as much an experiment in the use of the long take as it is a conventional film, and as such it feels at times like Hitchcock doing a Max Ophuls impression, with the long, stunning tracking shots weaving a dreamy sense of the snakelike interrelations between the characters and their pasts.  Cotton plays an ex-con who's become rich but is tortured by his past.  Bergman plays his alcoholic wife, similarly tortured by her past.  When young Irishman Michael Wilding comes to town, he resolves to nurse Bergman back to health and uncovers the secrets both Bergman and Cotton (and the evil maid, Margaret Leighton (from John Ford's 7 Women) are hiding.  It's a movie about two people who can't help destroying their own lives for each other's sake, which is about as Hitchcockian a theme as there is.

Torn Curtain -  After Hitchcock's otherworldly run of films in the late-50s and early-60s (Vertigo, North By Northwest, Psycho, The Birds), any one of which could be considered his greatest, came Marnie, possibly his most psychologically disturbing and emotionally traumatic film.  By the mid-60s, Hitchcock must have been exhausted, and so the fact that his next two films are relatively impersonal espionage thrillers should be no surprise.  This beautifully composed 1966 film, starring Paul Newman and Julie Andrews is as solid a suspense film as you're likely to find.  Newman plays a nuclear scientist who poses as a defector in order to worm a secret out of an East German scientist.  Andrews plays his girlfriend who tags along, not knowing his scheme until halfway through the film (we know Paul Newman's beautiful, beautiful eyes could never betray his country, but she doesn't).  The last two thirds of the film or so are constructed almost entirely out of textbook suspense sequences, as the two leads are either interrogated (often with a deadline) or chased across Berlin by communists, scientists and one mean ballerina.

Topaz - A worthy entry in the 1960s multinational epic thriller genre (think Guns of Navarone or Exodus) is this 1969 adaptation of Leon Uris's novel about spies on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  John Forsythe (who looks like a weird mix of Humphrey Bogart and Richard Nixon, or maybe Jack Webb) plays the CIA agent who's Soviet defector has info on Cuba, and also of a spy ring in the upper echelons of the French government.  He enlists French spy Frederick Stafford to go to Cuba and find out what's going on, and then expose the evil French guys.  With John Vernon (The Outlaw Josey Wales, Animal House) as the bad Cuban, Karin Dor (You Only Live Twice) as the beautiful Cuban, Michel Subor (Le petit soldat) as Stafford's journalist son-in-law, Claude Jade (Stolen Kisses) as Subor's wife, Roscoe Lee Brown (The Cosby Show) as a French agent and Michel Piccoli (Contempt) and Philippe Noiret (Cinema Paradiso) as suspicious Frenchmen.  Hitchcock keeps things moving briskly through its two and a half hour running time, making it one of the rare entries in its genre that isn't bloated and self-important.

Frenzy - Both a return to the dark psychology of his greatest films, and another experiment in what a filmmaker can get away with is this 1972 film, Hitchcock's first to earn an R rating.  Finally free from censorship, he gives us another wrong man story, this time the hero being accused of serial-killing women with a necktie.  We learn the identity of the real killer fairly early on, in a horrifying sequence in which the murderer rapes and strangles his victim.  Hitchcock ruthlessly puts us in the midst of the scene, in what, like Sabotage, must have been the director trying to find out exactly how far the audience was willing to go (the sequence would not look out of place in the one of those horror films about torture that I don't go see).  Just as disturbing, for me at least, are the scenes later in the film, when the Scotland Yard detective is served dinners by his wife, an aspiring gourmet.  She gives him a fish soup that might be the most disgusting thing I've seen on film.  It's a nasty film, and not nearly as tightly constructed as it should be, even by Hitchcock's MacGuffin-driven standards.

Family Plot - Hitchcock's final film seem like it comes from another world entirely.  A screwball thriller more along the lines of The Trouble With Harry than any film he'd made over the previous 20 years.  Barbara Harris (Nashville) plays a faux-psychic who is hired by an wealthy elderly woman to find her long lost nephew so that he can inherit the family fortune.  Enlisting the help of her actor/cab driver boyfriend (Bruce Dern), the two uncover a lifetime of criminal activity committed by the nephew (William Devane), who now runs a kidnapping-based jewel collection racket with his girlfriend, Karen Black (also in Nashville).  Dern makes a great detective, sarcastic and whiny and always chewing on a pipe while Devane, for some reason, talks like Jack Nicholson through the whole film.  I don't know if that was an affectation, or just how he talked 35 years ago, but I have to say, it works.  Together with Frenzy, it forms a fitting summary of the tensions running throughout Hitchcock's career: the combination of whimsically dark humor and disturbingly dark psychology that made him a truly great artist.

Finally, here is a ranked list of the 33 Hitchcock features I've seen, keeping in mind that I like all of these movies and every single one of them is worth seeing:

1. Vertigo

2. Rear Window

3. Psycho

4. North by Northwest

5. The Birds

6. The Lady Vanishes

7. Notorious

8. Rebecca

9. Suspicion

10. Under Capricorn

11. The 39 Steps

12. Shadow of a Doubt

13. Dial M for Murder

14. The Man Who Knew Too Much ('55)

15. Strangers on a Train

16. The Trouble with Harry

17. Torn Curtain

18. Lifeboat

19. Blackmail

20. Marnie

21. To Catch a Thief

22. The Wrong Man

23. I Confess

24. Family Plot

25. Rope

26. Topaz

27. Foreign Correspondent

28. The Man Who Knew Too Much ('34)

29. Frenzy

30. Saboteur

31. Spellbound

32. Sabotage

33. Jamaica Inn

Hell is Other Movies: Leaves from Satan's Book

We've never played, as part of Metro Classics, a film by Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer, though we came close to running Day of Wrath last spring and have considered both The Passion of Joan of Arc and Vampyr a few times.  Dreyer was a notoriously non-prolific director, managing to complete only five features over the 35 years after Passion, his breakthrough hit, one of which he disowned.  His reputation as one of the great directors of film history rests almost entirely on five films: Passion, Vampyr, Day of Wrath, Ordet and Gertrud.  Leaves from Satan's Book was his third feature, made in 1921, and it's the earliest of his films that I've seen.



Loosely adapted from the bestselling 1895 novel The Sorrows of Satan by Dreyer and Edgar Høyer, the film owes a tremendous debt to DW Griffith, a director I'd never really connected to Dreyer (as opposed to this series' Night of the Hunter, which foregrounds its influences in the casting of Lillian Gish, Griffith's greatest star) but probably should have.  Like Griffth's masterpiece Intolerance, released in the US in 1916, but probably not in Dreyer's native Denmark until 1919 (after the war), Leaves tells four stories from different periods in history organized around a central theme.  Instead of Griffith's story of "Love's Struggle Through the Ages", Leaves presents Satan as a tragic figure.  For his sin of pride he has been not only thrown out of heaven, but condemned to walk the Earth tempting humanity to evil.  The devious twist in the punishment is that for every person Satan succeeds in tempting, another 100 years is added to his punishment, while for every person who resists him, 1000 years are knocked off his sentence.  Satan is constantly disappointed by humanity: he feels their failures more deeply than they could ever know, but is always commanded by God to "continue thy evil ways."



Unlike Intolerance, the stories are not intercut, but instead told one at a time, in sequence.  Interestingly, though, the filmmaking evolves as the stories progress in time, becoming increasingly more modern.  The opening section, a Passion focusing on Judas, the style is that of mid-10s silent films the world over: tableau shots with little to no camera movement but with the occasional close-ups.  The second section, set during the Spanish Inquisition (nobody expected that!) is a little more visually ornate (and often quite lovely to look at, in a twisted Inquisitiony sort of way).  The third, during the French Revolution, is the most narratively intricate and the fourth, during the Finnish Civil War of 1918 (between Reds (communists) and Whites (conservatives)) shows the influence of German Expressionism (scary shadows, canted angles) and Griffith's most advanced editing techniques (there's even one of Griffith's signature damsel in distress chase scenes).



The sense of moving through history then is the movement through cinematic history, a history that at that point was barely 25 years old.  It's an audacious kind of film for a young director, and one that prefigures Dreyer's singular style.  By the time of The Passion of Joan of Arc, eight years later, he'd completely left his contemporaries and influences behind.  All of his remaining films are wholly unique works, unlike anything that had been made before or since.

Hell is Other Movies: Children of Paradise

This week marks the start of our 12th Metro Classics series.  So far, over 102 weeks we've played 106 different films.  Perhaps because of this, Metro Classics Goes to Hell is probably our broadest theme yet, with a near unlimited number of films that could be considered as representative of one of Dante's circles of Hell.  To that end, we're going to try to discuss some of the films that aren't part of the series, but easily could have been here on the website.  First up is Marcel Carné's Children of Paradise, which might have been part of a three week addendum to this current series if we weren't perpetually behind schedule.

I first learned of Children of Paradise when, back in 1998 (pre-internet and stranded in Spokane, my home town) I read in the newspaper(!) a response to the AFI's recently published Top 100 American Films of All-Time list.  The writer, whose name I don't recall, but I believe he wrote for a paper in Arizona, made a list of the top 100 foreign language films to counter the blinders imposed by the AFI's mission (they are the American Film Institute, after all.  Which I guess they interpret as being the Institute for American Film, as opposed to the American Institute for Film).  Children of Paradise was #2, as I recall, behind only Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game (which was coincidentally our last Metro Classic, last December).

Living in Spokane, the film was unsurprisingly unavailable at my local video stores, whose foreign film selections tended to consist entirely of the major works of Kurosawa, Fellini, Bergman, Gerard Depardieu and the dubbed Jackie Chan.  But, knowing I would soon be moving to Seattle, I clipped the list out of the paper as a guide to future viewing.

When I did move here, the first thing I did after unpacking my mom's minivan was walk the two blocks to Cinema Books.  After pouring over the packed shelves for an hour or so, I left and walked a further block to Scarecrow Video.  I spent a couple of hours wandering the stacks wide-eyed and open-mouthed.  I was like Lawrence catching his first glimpse of the Suez Canal after wandering the Sinai for days.  I didn't buy anything at Cinema Books, or rent anything at Scarecrow that first day: I was too intimidated.  But I woke up early the next day (and by "early" I mean around noon) and tried again. My initial stack of videos from Scarecrow was about twice as many as one was allowed to rent, so I had to put several back on the shelves.  But one of the ones I kept was Children of Paradise.  I watched it that afternoon (loved it!) and the next day I went to Cinema Books at bought the BFI monograph on the film by Jill Forbes (one of the first of many previously unavailable cinema books now lining my bookshelves).



But I hadn't watched the film again since then.  A few years ago I bought the Criterion DVD, but it had been gathering dust until last week.  I was afraid that my love of the movie was more about the context in which I watched it, both the novelty of the big city and as one of my first steps into serious cinephilia.  I'd toyed with the idea of trying to get my wife to see it, but the prospect of a three and a half hour black and white French film about mimes in the 19th Century is kind of a tough sell.  For the same reason, I've been reluctant to try and play it as a Metro Classic. Well, I'm happy to report that the film is just as great as I remember it.  And while it may not be the second greatest foreign film of all-time, it's still pretty awesome and is certainly the best film I've seen from 1945.

As novelistic as any film ever made (the common comparison as been to call it the French response to Gone with the Wind) it chronicles the complex love pentagon around the beautiful Garance (played by Arletty, who was shortly to be imprisoned for having an affair with a German officer during the war).  She's loved by the roguish, womanizing aspiring actor Frédérick Lemaître, the villainous thief Lacenaire, the shy and sensitive mime Baptiste and a rich aristocrat.  The first hour and 15 minutes of the film is breathtaking in the scope of its storytelling despite taking place entirely in the course of a single day.  Carné and his accomplished screenwriter, Jacques Prévert, introduce every major character, theme and relationship in the film while creating a fully detailed and realized world for those relationships to intersect within.

The film is structured almost entirely as a series of one-on-one conversations, intercut with performance footage of the actors at work (most memorably Baptiste's pantomimes and Frédérick's improvised, and crowd-pleasing mutilation of the terrible play he's starring in).  Every major character gets a scene with every other character, so in addition to the dramatics of the love triangle, and the fascinating of the details of 19th century theatre, we get to see a whole range of human interaction.  Whereas Gone with the Wind, to the benefit of the kind of story it's telling, I think, remains resolutely focused on its heroine's point of view, with every scene and most every conversation being about her, Garance at times fades into the background of Children of Paradise, allowing the men to become as fully realized as she is, if not more so.  The difference is that between creating a great character and a great world.

After the first third, the film is not quite as remarkable.  The relations and complications introduced in that first day play out, first a few weeks later, with Garance and Frédérick living together and performing in Baptiste's pantomime and then years later when Garance returns to Paris after running away with the aristocrat.  In the end, everyone meets and talks with everyone else, some people die and everyone is unhappy except the audience, the true residents of Paradise.  (Literally, that's what they called the theatre balcony).

Pre-Game Warm-Up: Galaxy Quest

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a trekkie. In fact, before seeing a smattering of the original series and the first two films in the franchise in anticipation of J.J. Abrams' enjoyable reboot last summer, I had never seen a scrap of Star Trek. I have always pledged allegiance to George Lucas and his Star Wars universe, despite how much he desecrates the legacy in the future. I can't help it, I was born into it. I will no doubt spend my final breaths defending Revenge of the Sith. But I digress.

The Star Trek that I have seen has charmed me in its earnest proseltyzing and utter geekiness. I like how the world is based in some sort of scientific fact. There is at least an attempt at explaining the peculiarities. There are also myriad tropes that appear time and again within the show's universe that become familiar friends as you learn the Universe's language. (I mean that metaphorically, I'm not even close to taking a linguistics course in Klingon.) This brief introduction to the series was more than enough to prepare me for the inside jokes and affectionate parodying of Galaxy Quest, easily the greatest non-animated Tim Allen movie of all time.

I had heard of Galaxy Quest for years before only recently catching up with it.  Most of the praise beamed my way was from my hopelessly geeky older brother who saw it in an empty theatre when it opened back in 1999.  He went on a lark with little expectations and was completely blown away, rolling on the floor in laughter within minutes.  On many occasions in the ensuing decade he would regale me with some Galaxy Quest anecdote.  I steered clear.  You see, my big brother and I agree completely on about two-thirds of art but on that other third we are diametrically opposed.  He hates Bob Dylan and was indifferent to the Wire.  That's all I'm saying*.  I figured Galaxy Quest fell into that black hole.  How wrong I was.

The plot of Galaxy Quest is that of a thinly-disguised Star Trek cast actually being sent to outer space to help an alien race fend off a vicious insectoid villain and his army.  The aliens mistook transmissions of the long-cancelled show as documents of heroic battles fought many years ago on Earth, not cheap syndicated teleplays.  Tim Allen plays the Kirk-esque commander and he is wonderful.  His unwarranted braggadocio and cocky swagger are perfect for the clueless captain.  The supporting cast too is a treasure trove.  Tony Shalhoub as a stoned Scotty; Sigourney Weaver as a Uhura with few lines (on the fictional show) but ample cleavage; Alan Rickman as a serious thespian remembered solely for his Spock-like alien; and the amazing Sam Rockwell as a one-off red shirt (heretofore unseen extra who is beamed down to that week's planet and inevitably dies a grisly death) who inadvertently joins the fun.

The movie perfectly straddles a fine line of mocking the tropes of Star Trek and the lives of its legions of fans while showing a sincere love for the world and its followers as well.  It's meta without being pretentious, geeky without being marginal and hilarious without being vindictive.  It is truly my favorite Star Trek film (J.J. Abrams's too apparently) despite it not actually being affiliated with the series.  Hopefully we muster up the courage to show Galaxy Quest as a future Metro Classic.  Until then, rent it (or win it this week thanks to Scarecrow), glue on your Spock ears, snuggle up to your loved ones proceed to pee your Underoos in mirth.

*We both don't dig Mad Men so that counts for something.

Pre-Game Warm-Up: Frank and Ollie

One of the most prominent legends of the Walt Disney Studios is that of the Nine Old Men, Walt's personal nickname for his core animators (the name was cribbed from F.D.R.'s less charitable description of the Supreme Court).  Disney's nine all started with the studio in the early 30s, (except for Les Clark who joined in 1927 working on Steamboat Willie).  They all stayed with the studio for decades.  After Walt's death in 1966 they became the torchbearers for the original guard, preserving the integrity and legacy of animation at the studio.

Two of these Nine Old Men were Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston; classmates, collaborators, neighbors and best friends for seventy-plus years.  They are the subjects of the lovingly produced Frank and Ollie, a low-key, charming documentary released by the Disney Studios in 1995.  The film was directed by Frank's son Theodore, who uses his close relationship to catch many intimate moments between his family and Ollie's, including a touching scene of Ollie's wife Marie dancing happily to Frank's piano playing in his living room.  Interspersed throughout the film are vintage footage from the studio, moments with Disney historians slobbering over themselves in awe of the work Frank and Ollie created, as well as cute vignettes of Ollie acting out a classic animated scene, followed by the scene itself.

In regards to their output here is a list of scenes and characters Frank and Ollie were responsible for:

Ollie:

-The "Pastoral Symphony" in Fantasia
-Pinocchio's nose growing
-Half of the Jungle Book (including the final scene)
-Thumper meeting Bambi
-Pongo licking Perdita in 101 Dalmatians
-The ugly stepsisters in Cinderella
-Rufus the Cat in the Rescuers
-Mr. Smee

Frank:

-The funeral scene in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
-The spaghetti scene in Lady and the Tramp
-"I've Got No Strings" from Pinocchio
-The pond skating scene in Bambi
-Captain Hook
-The Queen of Hearts
-Flora, Fauna and Merriweather
-King Louie

Frank and Ollie is a loving portrait of two lives spent tirelessly in pursuit of artistic acheivements.  The film is a victory lap of sorts but it would not be the duo's last hurrah.  A decade after the documentary's release, Frank and Ollie make their last onscreen appearance at the end of Brad Bird's the Incredibles.  What could be more fitting than going out in cartoon form?

Pre-Game Warm-Up: Gloria Swanson Edition

To prepare for this week's Metro Classic, I decided to finally watch some of Gloria Swanson's classic silent films. She started in films at Essanay in Chicago (Charlie Chaplin's studio at the time) around 1914. By the end of the war, she'd moved to Hollywood and starred in a string of films directed by Cecil B. DeMille that by 1921 made her one of the biggest stars in the world. Here's two of those films:


Don't Change Your Husband - Gloria Swanson doesn't get any close-ups in this Cecil B. DeMille film from 1919. This seems a little too early for that kind of thing, at least for him. Most of the scenes play out in two shots, with occasional inserts for close-ups of objects. DeMille keeps it all moving though, so the film ends up feeling as light and pleasant as its story (and there's some wonderful fantasy sequences as Swanson imagines what her new life would be like, they've got the same spirit of spectacle that would eventually take over DeMille's filmmaking). The plot has Swanson dissatisfied with her husband (he's a slob, he appears to eat nothing but onions, he can't dance), so she divorces him and marries the romantic young man who's been wooing her. But the new guy turns out to be even worse! He's a gambler and a drunk and he's cheating on her with a girl named 'Toodles'. Meanwhile, Husband #1 has got himself a rowing machine, shaved his mustache and become even richer as the head of the new Hemp Trust (seriously!). Has poor Gloria learned her lesson? It's really quite a fun film, and it's always good to be reminded that romantic comedy plots haven't advanced one bit in at least the last 90 years.


Why Change Your Wife? - This time, it's the husband (Thomas Meighan, who looks a bit like Joseph Cotton, or a unholy mix of Jude Law and Norm MacDonald) who's dissatisfied, seems his wife is always interrupting his shaving, trying to get him to quit smoking, looks down on his reading movie magazines and turning off his hot new foxtrot music and making him listen to some violin piece called "The Dying Poet". To try and spice things up, he buys her some lingerie, which she's too shy to wear properly, so he goes to a show with the lingerie model (a typical flapper-type). Divorce, followed by the realization that Spouse #2 is even worse, ensues. This is pretty much in the same style as the first film, and Swanson is just as good (still hardly any closeups, though). There's a long, expensive-looking sequence at a hotel pool that features some of the craziest, most impractical swimwear you've ever seen. Swanson I guess was famous at the time for her interest in haute couture, and for being one the first famous fashion stars. Personally, I think most of the clothes are pretty hideous and totally unflattering, but what do I know?

Swanson's success continued throughout the 20s, and by the end of the decade she was still star enough to produce her own films, joining United Artists with Chaplin, DW griffith, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. As a producer, she financed what would end up being Erich von Stroheim's last film as a director:


Queen Kelly - Swanson's first and only collaboration with director Erich von Stroheim, her Sunset Blvd. costar, was this unfinished film. She and her boyfriend at the time, Joseph Kennedy (yes, that one) produced it and she hired von Stroheim to direct. The projected film would have been about five hours long, but she fired von Stroheim about one-third of the way (and $800,000 or so) through. It seems her changed the script without her approval (or the approval of the Hays Office) to have most of the last section of the film take place in a brothel instead of a "dance hall", and knowing it would get censored, Swanson killed it. She went back later (with Gregg Toland) and shot a quick ending to the surviving footage, and Kino's used some production stills to recreate and give a sense of von Stroheim's version of the film. As it stands, neither version is particularly satisfying. The completed section is pretty terrific, with Swanson as a young convent girl (Kelly) whom the Queen's fiancé falls in love with. The Queen herself (Regina V, played by Seena Owen) is crazy and violent and likes to whip people and walks around naked with only a cat covering her breasts. All this is a lot of fun, but in the long version, it would have only been a sort of prologue, with the rest of the film taking place in Africa has Swanson is forced to marry an evil looking guy (an incredibly creepy Tully Marshall), take over her aunt's brothel and become a madam. All that survives of that is the forced marriage sequence, which is suitably horrifying. Swanson's ending cuts out all of that, taking an abrupt conclusion on to the Prince & Queen story.


After that miserable experience, Swanson successfully moved into sound pictures, getting an Oscar nomination for her first one, The Trespasser, which she and director Edmond Goulding (whom Swanson had hired to help her finish Queen Kelly) made in a matter of weeks and was enough of a hit to pay back all the losses on the von Stroheim film. But by the mid-30s, she appears to have lost interest in making movies (she moved to New York at the end of the decade) but instead worked in theatre, early television, fashion, painting, sculpting and writing. The Kino DVD of Queen Kelly has a fascinating special feature of Swanson herself introducing the film and talking about the experience of making and trying to finish it for a showing of it on television. She's totally charming, and seeing just how different she actually was from Norma Desmond reminds you of just how brilliant her performance in Sunset Blvd. really is.