As film bloggers, we can do something about it: if we have disposable cash, we can donate to groups like the National Film Preservation Foundation.  If we’re a little short (of cash, that is), we can still help by using our bully blog pulpit to help get the word out, and there’s no easier way than by participating in the upcoming For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon, hosted by Ferdy on Films and Self-Styled Siren.

Though it’s too late for some films, there are still many worth saving, and we can all help.  Join in beginning Valentine’s Day, February 14, for a week of fascinating reading, and maybe even a little rabble-rousing aimed at saving some endangered works of art.

Though none but Amarcord match his earlier output, there are things to recommend all of his post-8½ movies, and any film by Fellini puts one by Rob Marshall or Michael Bay to shame. (Well, maybe not City of Women.) Take Intervista, for example, the director’s penultimate feature.  Filled with tenderness and humor, it is easy to forget that there’s not really a lot there.

Like all of Fellini’s films, it’s about himself, and this time he’s quite up front about it: it’s a fake documentary about Fellini making a movie,and preparing the long-planned, never-produced Amerika. As such, it is an at-times fascinating peek into the maestro’s methods, tempered by the fact that he was an inveterate, self-admitted liar.  Especially when the subject was himself.

It opens as the director is setting up a shot: huge arc-lights and Tonino Della Colli (director of photography) rise on a crane into the night sky.  Fellini is surrounded by old colleagues (Della Colli is one), and what strikes me at once is how old they all are.  The film-within-a-film — and Intervista itself, since all of Fellini’s cronies are also behind the camera — is being made by a gang of old men.  They look like extras from The Sopranos or a Martin Scorcese picture: old gangsters hanging around storefronts, gesticulating.  Fellini and his cronies are the mafiosi of Italian film.

As we follow Federico and his pals around Rome, we are reminded of all those circus scenes in the director’s films over the years.  Only this time, the circus is the production.  It is one of the maestro’s conceits in Intervista that he is a genial ring-master, and that his movies — at least in their making — are great big family carnivals.

The central character in the film is a young actor (Sergio Rubini) who auditions for the role of the reporter in the film Fellini is making.  Rubini is the latest, of  course, in a long string of Fellini alter-egos, the most famous being Marcello Mastroianni.  As Intervista progresses, the movie within a movie blends with the film Fellini has made.  It is not a particularly original notion, but Fellini pulls it off with a winsome twinkle, and not a little honestly-earned emotion.

In fact, as some observers have noted, there are four films here: (1) Intervista itself, (20 a documentary being shot by Japanese filmmakers, (3) filmed reminiscences of Fellini’s youth (played by Rubini), and (4) the fictitious movie they are supposedly making (an adaptation of Kafka’s Amerika).  Fellini juggles all these conceits with cheerful aplomb, rendering it impossible at times to tell which is which.

Two sequences stand out.  Sergio and the rest of the cast of the  film-with-a-film board a bus in Rome to travel to Cinecittà, the fabled Italian studio Fellini called home.  As they approach the studio, their characters become real, and suddenly we find ourselves within the production.  And as they travel along the way, they encounter Native Americans, Elephants, and a towering waterfall, which gets them all wet.  Though the studio is on the outskirts of Rome, for Fellini it represents something far more exotic, far more wonderful: it is a transporter, a transformer, that takes one away from the mundane.  It is only at the film’s end, as they shoot scenes among the ugly apartments adjacent to the studio back lot, that “reality” seeps into our consciousness.

The other standout is a sequence that starts with an encounter between Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni, playing himself.  Mastroianni is costumed as a magician for a role he is shooting on an adjacent soundstage; Fellini persuades him to travel with him and his young star Rubini to party.   And as they travel, we have the spectacle of two Fellini doppelgängers, side-by-side in the backseat of a car, and in the front seat the maestro himself.  A discussion arises of vices arises between them, and upon being asked about women, Rubini-Fellini says “Frankly, what I like best is jerking off.”  Mastroianni-Fellini approves:

“Ah. Good solution. An exercise in concentration that stimulates fantasy, and I’d say it develops a novelist’s turn of mind. My experiences, for example, were like installment novels – always new characters who introduced other ones: ‘Meet my sister. This is my cousin.’”

As it turns out, the party is at Anita Ekburg’s house, and as it swirls around them, Mastroianni suddenly takes center stage.  Waving his hat and wand, he conjures up a “movie screen,” complete with a puff of smoke, and on it are projected scenes from La Dolce Vita between him and Ekburg.  As the camera cuts between the aging stars and their flickering shadows — dancing at the nightclub, splashing in Trevi fountain — we are treated to a moment of delicate nostalgia and emotion that evokes the cinema’s power and magic in a visceral way.

Intervista celebrates the movies with the maestro’s trademark blend of crassness and humanism, and although it is not the equal of 8½, his more famous movie about the movies, it has pleasures all its own.  In the end, the magic that has sustained the film, that his buoyed it up over its self-referential core, ends, as the last scene of the fictitious Amerika is shot in the rain and mud, with the God-awful apartment buildings that surround Cinecittà.  Although the symbolism of a return to dreary reality at a film’s end is obvious, it’s one that we movie-lovers experience over and over.

Intervista was the Maestro’s penultimate feature, and it’s hard not to be nostalgic and more than a little sad while watching it.  Although it is a stone cliché to say so, he was a true original.  And if he got repetitive in his later years, so be it: his repetition fascinated me, at least, until the end,

Only, of course, it wasn’t, and five years later I got an enormous, 50-inch HD Sony.  One of the first things I slapped into the player was The Godfather, and WTF? It looked terrible.  The image was soft and lacking in detail.  It was muddy and dim — even dimmer than I remembered — and there were numerous nicks and scratches and jumps.  In short, I found out what many a film buff has in recent years: if you blow up crap, it doesn’t make it any better.  It just looks like bigger crap.

I was seeing a combination of crappy Paramount encoding and really bad prints; I raged against the machine (and the studio).  Two of the most significant American films of the last half-century — with Part III thrown in as a bonus — shamelessly mistreated at the hands of a system concerned only with profit.  I had visions of cigar-chomping Paramount executives, counting their pennies, asked to produce a quality product, and saying “Naw, it’s the Godfather, for Christ’s sake: they’ll take what we give ‘em and like it!”

Enter Francis Ford Coppola and pal Steven Spielberg, who had recently signed a deal between Dreamworks and Paramount.  Coppola asked Spielberg to put up the money for a restoration, and it was assigned to the redoubtable Robert A. Harris of Film Preserve Ltd in New York, and I must say it looks fabulous.

That’s a minor miracle, considering the condition of the camera negatives of the first two films, and especially the 1972 original.   “Emulsional Rescue,” the most fascinating special feature on the  new discs, details the grueling process and — perhaps more interestingly– the reasons the original elements were in such bad shape.  First of all, cinematographer Gordon Willis (AKA the Prince of Darkness) shot it with no room for error, i.e., with none of the usual compensations for film exposure latitude.  He did this so that the labs would have to print the films the way he shot them.

This resulted in a negative with a minimum amount of information — the featurette points out that in those inky blacks there was “nothing there,” no hidden detail that could be brought out by increasing the exposure of the print.  The same goes for the well-lit scenes, and the overall effect was to create a negative with minimum emulsion, and thus one that was exceedingly thin and fragile.

A second factor was that the 1972 feature was intended to be a low-budget gangster quickie, and was shot on stock not of the highest quality.  Due to its wholly unexpected success, over the years, the camera negative was used many more times than anticipated.  This, coupled with the negative’s original fragility, rendered it unusable by the early 2000s, resulting in scouring the globe for bits and pieces of usable prints.

Willis says he wanted to shoot the bright scenes with the look of  old ansochrome, in order to give it an antique, old-timey look.  In addition, he shot the film unfiltered, without in-camera color correction, expecting it to be done by the lab.  According to the D.P.,  he expected the lab to add four points of yellow and one of red to achieve the golden color he wanted.  And in the first prints, this was done, but as the years wore on, and especially in the transfer to various video media, more and more yellow was added relative to red.

This resulted in videos — tape, laser disc, and DVD — that looked like there was more information in those over-exposed brights than there actually is, as well as a more overall golden tone than was apparently the intent of the filmmakers.  For the restoration, the original intentions of the cinematographer have been honored as much as possible, and this can result in a shock to those of us who remember the films primarily from video and TV.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the first half-hour of the The Godfather, which cuts from the darkness of Don Corleone’s (Marlon Brando) study to the full sunlight of Connie’s (Talia Shire) wedding.  The indoor shots are gorgeous on the Blu-ray, with inky blacks and silken browns and grays. The wedding shots, however, look almost amateurishly over-exposed, with whites that are nearly blown.  In additon, because Harrison was more true to Willis’ intentions regarding color than the myriad video transfers, the restoration seems more reddish than many remember it, although they still have that golden hue.

All of this conspires to make viewing the restorations an interesting, at times even revelatory, experience.  There is detail — for example, in Al Pacino’s subtle performance — that hasn’t been seen since almost the beginning.  Instead of the muddy dupes and transfers we had grown accustomed to, it looks pristine and clear.  And it harkens back to a wonderful time when — yes children, it’s true! — Al Pacino was capable of a subtle performance.

The resulting product is gorgeous and indispensable, I would think, to anybody who loves the originals like I do, or anybody with a sense of their place in cinema history.  I can’t believe it took me over a year to get them, and at only fifty dollars a set (their current price on Amazon), they are an incredible deal.

Only twenty-five bucks a film, with The Godfather III thrown in for good measure.

At the film’s end — after Lime’s second funeral  — Calloway offers Martins a lift to the airport, and displays a grudging respect; at the same time, he’s still trying to ensure that Martins does indeed go away. Americans are like strangers who ride into town, vanquish the bad guys, but don’t bother to ride away when they’re done.

Films are often structured around a triangular set of relationships; in film noir, it is often a pair of interlocking triangles.   At the apex of one is a representative of law and order: a detective, perhaps, or an insurance investigator  (see, for example, The Killers and Double Indemnity).  The relationship between the protagonist and the femme fatale forms the common side of the two triangles (e.g., the axis around which both triangles interact).  Finally, the apex of the opposite triangle is often a “dupe,” a person — or group of persons — that the fatale and the protagonist conspire to swindle.  In The Postman Always Rings Twice and  Double Indemnity, this person is the husband of the femme fatale.

Although obviously a generalization, you can see that depending on how each of these “points” in the triangle are emphasized, and  how they are connected, variations in the dynamic of this basic structure are many.   Here’s the structure of The Third Man:

At the center of the structure (and thus the plot) is not the relationship between Martins and Schmidt but that between Martins and Lime, who fills the role of femme fatale. Within the plot, Schmidt acts almost as a MacGuffin, a device to bring together Lime and Martins.  Holly falls for Schmidt, and it is after Harry trails him to her place that they finally meet.

And that meeting is what we have been waiting for the entire film: the entire production is structured around it.   Here are some screen caps from the scene:

Martins has just left Anna Schmidtz’ apartment; from her window, he has glimpsed a watcher in the street, whom he assumes is a policeman, or a spy.  He is dwarfed by the architecture of Vienna, clearly out of his league.  He is also drunk.

Cut to a doorway.  There is a cat in it, and the hint of a shadowy figure.  We know what that means: in the previous scene, Schmidt tells Martins that the cat will only come to Harry Lime.  This is one of The Third Man’s many dutch-angled shots.  Close friend William Wyler is said to have sent Reed a spirit level, urging him to put it on the camera the next time he made a picture.

Holly hears the cat, and he veers from his path up the hill to investigate.  Cut to another shot of the doorway, this time from his P.O.V.  Even though we have tumbled to the significance of the cat, Holly hasn’t — he leans drunkenly on the a building yelling for the “spy” to come out.  He is always a step behind in the flow of things.

Cut to a close-up of the cat, in case we haven’t gotten it.  Suspense is built: although we know who it is, when will we going to see him?  How is he going to be revealed?  The cat, at least, is unconcerned.

We hear cursing coming from a window, yelling for Martins to keep quiet. Then a  light comes on et voilá: Harry Lime.  Once again, the truth has been revealed by the American’s blundering.

Although the iconic shot, the one we remember, is that final sardonic image (see below), this sequence shows the gamut of emotions from Lime.  It is not at all certain that this will be a happy reunion for Martins; although the scene on the Ferris wheel is more blatant, it is here that Welles first reveals the dangerous nature of his character.  He glances up at the light, then back at Martins, and is not at all glad to see him.

The shot for which this sequence (if not the entire film)  is remembered.  Lime has decided how he wants to handle the encounter, and for emphasis, the camera zooms in on his face.  When it gets there, Welles lifts his eyebrow and smirks; it is a defining moment.  He is breaking the fourth wall, smirking at us, letting us in on the joke, saying: “Ok, here ya’ go, what you were waiting for … Was it worth it?”

Cut back to Holly, then to the window with the cursing German, whose voice has been heard throughout the sequence.   Then the light is off and Harry is gone.  The entire sequence — from light on to light off — takes 21 seconds, but in those seconds, Welles gives a master class in acting, as Harry decides how to react.  And though we remember that final, raised eyebrow, we have seen the danger, and it’s stored down somewhere in our synapses, ready to be made explicit in a later scene.

Holly starts across the street, but a car comes speeding along, forcing him to hold up.  We can see the figure of Lime in the doorway.  Then Reed cuts to another angle, and backs up in time, repeating the last second or so.

The figure of Lime is in the first shot from this angle, and Martins sprints to the doorway, only to find …

Harry has vanished.  As if he was never there.  From the angles and the way the sequence is cut together, we see that it is impossible for Harry to have escaped without us — or Holly –  seeing him go, but he has.   He is a supernatural force … a ghost, a phantom.  All we hear are his footsteps.

Holly follows the sound of Harry’s footsteps around a corner, and sees his shadow fleeing, projected onto a wall.  He follows, and their images merge . . . Harry’s shadow becomes that of Holly.

Thus is the European ambivalence toward their allies made concrete:  America has a shadow side, and it is embodied by Harry Lime.  Harry is the worst impulse of the free market system, capitalism at its darkest: far from just dealing in black market gasoline or back-of-the-truck tires, he sells diluted penicillin, killing the children of Vienna.  Thus is profit made from the suffering of others; it reminds me of the current health-care debate, where profit is made not from people made healthy, but only a population kept ill.

]]> http://coosacreek.org/mambo/2009/12/24/friends-and-enemies-in-the-third-man-part-ii/feed/ 2 http://coosacreek.org/mambo/2009/12/17/wim-wenders-foot-and-kurosawa-too/ http://coosacreek.org/mambo/2009/12/17/wim-wenders-foot-and-kurosawa-too/#comments Thu, 17 Dec 2009 13:00:51 +0000 Rick http://coosacreek.org/mambo/?p=3732

Everyone has probably already seen this, but hey . . .  it’s new to me.  Wenders’  charming story behind the photo is in the Guardian. Kurosawa looks like he’s working, but maybe he’s just taking a nap.   (Click on the photo for a much better view.)

Everyone has probably already seen this, but hey . . .  it’s new to me.  Wenders’  charming story behind the photo is in the Guardian. Kurosawa looks like he’s working, but maybe he’s just taking a nap.   (Click on the photo for a much better view.)

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I did see a couple of films back-to-back over the Thanksgiving holidays.  My daughter and son-in-law were in town from Williamsburg (Virginia not Brooklyn),  and their mother and they hatched a plan to see two movies back to back, simulating a double feature.  The problem was that the films were (a) Fantastic Mr. Fox and (b) 2012. But, trooper that I am, I reluctantly went along, hoping for a little excitement as we snuck (sneaked?) from the first (Fox) to the second (2012). Alas, that was not to be: my straight-laced wife and children actually bought tickets for the second before we went into the first, leaving me to wonder: where is the sense of larceny these days?  Where is the sense of sticking it to “the man?”   Sigh.

In retrospect, and in view of the U.S. film industry’s batting average these days, one out of two ain’t bad.  I liked Fantastic Mr. Fox a lot, especially since I’m kind of a curmudgeon, at the moment, when it comes to animation.  Not that I dislike it, you understand, but so much of it these days is in the soul-less Pixar mode, and yes, I know I’m in the minority, but I can’t help it.

The point is that Fantastic Mr. Fox was a pleasant surprise: it is low-key and unassuming and nigh-onto irresistible.  And I qualify that (with Southern homeliness) because while I liked it, I wasn’t bowled over by it, and the reason for both reactions is the same: Wes Anderson.   First, the reason for the “like:”  I am a perennial fan of Mr. Anderson, and it displayed all the inventiveness of his better work.  The quirky humor, the understated performances (in this case, vocal performances), the post-modern ironic detachment.  All things I greatly admire about his work.  In addition, the physical humor — an under-appreciated facet of films like Bottle Rocket and The Royal Tennenbaums – has been amped up, Roadrunner style, by the freedom of animation.

At the same time, it is a Wes Anderson film, and it looks and feels like it.  The same sibling-rivalry concerns, and fatherly absence/detachment themes (etc.) are given life by the same devices: the introduction of scenes and locales via titles, the penchant for mapping out — literally — both plot and domicile . . . Remember the diagram of the ship in the The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou? The (literal) life-is-a-stage construction of Tenenbaums (and Rushmore and Zissou)?  When narrative quirks get to be standard operating procedure, it may be time to get some new quirks.

Still, it belongs in the top part of Anderson’s output (which, truthfully, includes all but the abysmal Zissou). That means it is very enjoyable, if not highly original, ant it’s more than I can say about the second half of our double feature.  2012 is the over-long, over-loud movie your mother (or maybe John Cusack’s mother) warned you about.  And the theater was packed: despite the fact that it and Fox opened the same day here in Tuscaloosa, the latter had only a smattering of people, while the end of the world was filled almost to overflowing.

Having seen it, I can say that I’ve read the usual critical complaints and I have little to add. Waste of a fine cast?  Check.  Defies the laws of physics?  Check.  Braying, jingoistic nationalism?  Check.  About an hour-and-a-half into this turkey, I looked at my watch in despair, hoping against hope that a chance meteorite might hit the fictional fan, thereby obliterating the entire cast, and ending the production, but no:  there was a whole hour left at that point.  Then I started hoping against hope that a meteorite would hit us.

Alas once again: there was no meteorite, and no guilty pleasure, either — just a bloated exercise in pandering filmmaking.  I was even looking forward to seeing Amanda Peet looking like a tranny, like my dearly-missed friend Fox said, but no dice.  She looked pretty good in an end-of-world, mussed-up-chic way, as she tried to  say all the ridiculous dialog with a straight face.

All I can say is thank God I paid for this; it was not worth sneaking into.

In this period, The Third Man stands out: though it is a product of British minds (director Carol Reed and screenwriter Graham Greene), it takes place in Vienna, a city occupied by the Allies for a decade after the War.   Because of this, there is a kind of multiple-sensibility about the production that reflects the multi-national character of its context.  First, there is the cynical, world-weary tone of the “natives,” who have seen — and many times done — it all.  They are survivors, eking out a living via the black market, shady trading deals, and just plain double dealing.  But over it all is an European veneer of erudition and gentility that infuses even the shadiest of characters.

Valli, Cotten and Howard

On the opposite end of the spectrum is the American Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) who is  brash, loud, and not very intelligent.  He wades right into situations he knows nothing about, propelled by an indignant sense of black and white not shared by his more sophisticated hosts.  He is a writer of pulp Westerns, of the serial variety, which is eminently fitting;  here’s a bit of early dialog between Martins and the British Major Calloway (Trevor Howard).  The major has picked the American up at his friend Harry Lime’s funeral, and is plying him with liquor while pumping him for information.

Martins (referring to Lime):  . . . Best friend I ever had.
Calloway:  That sounds like a cheap novelette.
Martins:  I write cheap novelettes.
Calloway:  I’m afraid I’ve never heard of you. What’s your name again?
Martins:  Holly Martins.
Calloway:  No, sorry.
Martins:  You ever hear of  “The Lone Rider of Santa Fe?”
Calloway:  Can’t say as I have.
Martins:  “Death at Double X Ranch,” uh, “Raunch” (feigning an English accent)?
Calloway:  Nope.

Calloway is, of course, the embodiment of an European sense of their own superiority over their saviors from across the pond. Like Martins’ heroes, they have ridden into the continental town and vanquished the bad guys.  Unfortunately, they didn’t have the decency to ride off into the sunset and leave them alone.  As Calloway tells him:  “This isn’t Santa Fe.  I’m not a sheriff and you aren’t a cowboy. ”

Although Calloway hasn’t heard of Martins’ stories, his aide Sergeant Paine (Bernard Lee) certainly has — he is a fan of Martins, and makes no bones about it.  But although he appreciates the American’s product, he nevertheless does not hesitate to punch him in the mouth when required.  Together with Calloway, they constitute the model of the traditional British power-structure: a decent working-class man serving an upper-crust “master.”  (Is Calloway of the landed class?  Is he the second or third son of a member of the House of Lords?)

This is opposed to lone cowboy Martins, who has no master, and is therefore dangerous to his British protectors, the shady Viennese criminals, and most of all, to himself.  Like the runaway dynamite truck in The Wages of  Fear, Martins hurtles downhill uncontrolled, threatening to mow everybody down in his path.  As Calloway tells him in the movie’s best throw-away line,  “You were born to be murdered.”

But like the Americans in World War II (or like this European portrayal of them, anyway), Martins’ ham-fisted bumbling manages to triumph in the end.  He brings the wily Lime to bay, something Calloway with all his European savvy and erudition had not yet managed to do.  And because of his clumsy bravery, he wins Calloway’s friendship — if not respect — in the end.

To portray all this European seediness, Reed and company chose film noir, an ostensibly American  genre. Of course, it is wholly appropriate to the subject matter: like Vienna’s lovely exterior, its beautiful photography hides a murkiness just beneath, where things are anything but black and white.  The Russian femme’s (Alida Valli) attraction to the dangerous Lime is tempered by her knowledge of his ilk; this classic noir trope embodies the the city’s ambiguity.   And as in post-War Vienna, things aren’t quite as they seem with noir itself:  though casual film goers think  it a purely Hollywood phenomenon, we pointy-headed cinephile types know it was built on a European chassis.  German Expressionism mated with French Poetic Realism and their bastard child was film noir.

But enough over-thinking (and metaphor mixing): Harry Lime (Orson Welles) is of a completely different stripe than his countryman Martins.  Holly is guileless, Harry the picture of deceit.  Holly is bumbling, Harry coldly competent.  Holly speaks in terms of black-and-white, right and wrong, but Harry gives us great, orotund gusts of self-serving gray.  He is the American doppelgänger of those in the Viennese underworld, and  is the subject of Part II, where we’ll dissecting the famous scene that reveals him as alive.  Be there or be square.

Anyway, I have nevertheless seen a few flicks on opening day, and one was Star Wars (yes, it’s true: I’m old).  On May 25, 1977 I walked into a theater in Spokane, Washington and paid some doubtless ridiculously low sum to see the first of George Lucas’ epics.  I was on a date which — believe it or not, given my present studly image — was not a common occurrence in those days.

I’d expected to have to stand in line (reason three for not going on opening day), because I’d read the ecstatic review in Newsweek.  But no: there was no line, and we just waltzed right in to the first showing of the evening.  Guess the folks in Spokane weren’t great readers of news magazines. But as the movie unspooled, as the adventures of Luke and Leia and et al. unfolded, I remember a gradual hush coming over the audience.  And although it was a different time, when people were more polite at the movies, there was very little jabbering, very little kibitzing as we all sat enthralled.

Looking back at that screening from a cinephilic advantage, I guess you might say I was on the ground floor on the day the movies changed, the day the movie that ushered in the modern blockbuster made it’s gorilla-sized impression.  But at the time I didn’t think a thing of it, of course:  I was just bowled over by something I felt I’d never seen before.  And none of it’s sequels have had quite as much an effect.

A second opening day couldn’t have been more different.  There Will Be Blood arrived in Tuscaloosa in early February of 2008,  months after it opened, and long after the online and in-print arguments pitting it against No Country for Old Men had heated up.  It was very strange: perhaps to fill column inches, or maybe theater seats, the two films were compared as if they were made to compete with one another.  And as the Oscars approached, and — yes — both were nominated for best picture, there were tallies showing how many critics, who should have known better, preferred on or the other.  For what it’s worth, No Country seems to have won out.

So anyway, there I was, at the opening performance — at something like 2:30 in the afternoon — of one of the greatest American films of the past decade, and nobody was there. I mean, virtually no one. There may have been a few hardy souls in the lower left, just outside my peripheral vision, but I couldn’t swear to it.

I sat in my preferred location — not too far forward, not too far back, and right in the middle — and as the first chords of Jonny Greenwood’s discordant score hit me, I became totally wrapped up in Daniel Plainview’s story.  But it wasn’t like it was 30 years earlier, at the Spokane premiere of Star Wars. Then, it was a communal experience, a common absorption, if you will.  We were in it together, discovering the marvelously new all at the same time.  We oohed and ahhhed in unison, and at the end, we applauded all at the same time.  And after it was all over, we walked out in the glow of having seen a great movie.

Not so with There Will Be Blood. That was a solitary experience, a private experience.  I was wrapped in a dark cocoon, brooding about what I was seeing, much as Plainview did onscreen.  And I didn’t move for the entire two-and-a-half hour running time, didn’t get up for a soda or the bathroom or anything.  And when I came out, the dark mood continued on into the lobby, until it was broken by a friend who asked me what I’d seen.  When I told her, she said “What’s that about?”

And I had no idea what to tell her.

[This is a couple of days late and more than a dollar short, and The Kid in the Front Row didn't exactly invite me, but I thought it was a cool idea and I did it anyway.  So there.]

Although I’m not in a position to judge that claim, having seen only a few of his pre-war features, for my money Lady is one one of Hitch’s most purely entertaining films, period.  It is a tightly plotted, highly-efficient exercise in (a) drumming up suspense and (b) igniting chemistry between two sexy stars: Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave.  Lockwood plays Iris Henderson, a callow playgirl traveling home to London to marry some House-of-Lords stiff named Charles.  Redgrave is Gilbert, a free spirit who is (of course) the opposite of everything Iris (of course) holds dear.

They meet cute in a mountain hotel in an imaginary European nation in political turmoil.  Iris’ train has been trapped in the snow, and Gilbert is engaged in a quest to document the indigenous folk music of the country’s happy citizens.  She is trying to get a good night’s sleep, he is upstairs presiding over an impromptu clogging session, and as is mandatory in these affairs, it’s love at first fight.

Meanwhile, strange doings are afoot.  Sweet old Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty) befriends Iris, and they take a compartment together on the train.  While Iris sleeps, the old lady up and disappears, and nobody in their compartment sees her go.  But here’s the thing:  no one in their compartment — or the entire train, for that matter — will admit to ever seeing the old lady in the first place.  Strange doings, indeed.

All of this is played with a light-hearted, romantic comedy vibe, as Gilbert gallantly takes Iris under his wing, and while they solve the mystery they come to respect and (dare I say it?) love one another. Solving the mystery,  it turns out, isn’t really that hard at all, but in case you’re one of the three people in the world who hasn’t seen it, I won’t give it away.

Along the way, we meet up with colorful characters,  among them a world-renowned surgeon (Paul Lukas), an Italian magician (Philip Leaver), and a nun who wears designer high heels (Catherine Lacey).  And half the fun is noting who is in on the conspiracy and who is just obfuscating for their own selfish reasons.

In the latter category are two English soccer fans, Caldicott (Naunton Wayne) and Charters (Basil Radford), who steal every scene they are in.  They are there as comic relief and as foils for the filmmakers’ agenda of skewering British cluelessness and entitlement.  They are perpetually befuddled by anything un-English, and hilariously single-minded about returning to London  in time for a soccer tournament.

Caldicott and Charters are also the focus of Hitchcock’s oft-noted penchant for gay subtext.  But in this case, it’s much more text than sub: in the hotel, circumstances conspire to force them to share a room with the upstairs maid. When the blithely innocent woman comes  in to change her clothes, Hitch cuts to the boys together in the room’s one bed; one of them is shirtless and we can clearly see the pants of the other, hanging next to the bed. In another sequence, we see a male extra come out of the train’s tiny bathroom, and then Caldicott pokes his head out, urging Charters inside to hide.  What is fascinating about it all is that in spite of this, the two became beloved characters in British cinema, appearing together in three other films.  One of which, 1940’s Crook’s Tour, is a bonus on the Criterion release of The Lady Vanishes.

A major contributor to the success of Lady is its screenplay, by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder.  It is lean and efficient, and reminds us of all that can be accomplished in 96 minutes;  would that some of today’s bloated “thrillers” learn that lesson.  Hitchock shoots it all with his characteristic style and wit, but unlike his later films, it is a sunny affair, with a hero and heroine  uncomplicated by doubts and untortured by their pasts.  You have to think — and of course this is hardly original to me — that World War II changed all that, and contributed to the cold-war paranoiac we all know and love.

There is something wonderful about The Lady Vanishes, something guileless about it’s charms.  Of course everything comes out OK in the end; even the villains turn out to be not all that bad.  Critic Robin Wood, in an essay for the film’s Criterion release, calls it one of Hitchcock’s “most perfect films” and says

If there is no chapter on The Lady Vanishes in my book on Hitchcock, this is purely because it is too perfect, so transparent that there is little to say. The labyrinthine complexities of Vertigo were far away.

And — no offense to Vertigo and its legions of fans — I’m glad of that.  Sometimes you just want a well-produced, delightfully-acted entertainment, and on that score, The Lady Vanishes delivers.

Alas, it was not to be.  Whatever Works … doesn’t.  Har.  I’ve always wanted to write one of those joke lines.  In fact, the best thing about this film is the potential for mischief in the title.  I can imagine Nothing Works, Water Works, and Nobody Works. Oh, yes, and simply Whatever … (pronounced, of course, in a Valley girl whine: What-ev-ah!).

The sad fact of the matter is that it doesn’t work, and rather than engage in the usual Wood-ites’ laments about how I don’t know why I even bother any more, how he’s failed his loyal fans again, I’ll just cut to the chase.  There are two things I think renders this film dead on arrival:  the casting and the script.

First, the casting:  Larry David (as Boris Yellnikov) is just horrible in this.  He has even less depth than Woody himself does as an actor, and that’s not a lot.  He is continually outclassed, first by Evan Rachel Wood as his (tiresomely) young, but (exceedingly) cute love, who manages to out corn-pone the Beverly Hillbillies in her horribly-fake Southern ways.  Then, just about everybody else runs rings around him, even one-note comic Michael McKean.   I understand why he was chosen to play Allen’s surrogate — David’s character on HBO is a kvetching mensch similar to Woody’s screen persona — but it just doesn’t work.  Zero Mostel would have been a better choice.

Which leads me to point two.  Apparently, Zero was Allen’s original choice to play this role, back in the mid-70s when it was written.  Yes, that’s right: the mid-70s.  And when Mostel died in 1977, he shelved it until the writer’s strike forced him to dig it out of wherever it was languishing; would that it would’ve been a deeper hole, or shelf, or … well, you get the idea.

Zero just maybe could have pulled it off … in 1975.  It has that dated feel about it, with Yellnikov as a “wise” guide, who turns to the camera and fills us in — wisely — about life.  Underneath Mostel’s gruff exterior (and razor-sharp comic timing) was a softy with soulful eyes, somebody from whom you might actually want to learn about life, the universe, and everything.   And the problem is, David gives the impression that underneath his gruff exterior lies nothing more than an asshole.  And who wants to learn about life from one of those?

But the one-man-Greek-chorus structure (which Mostel perfected in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in the first place) isn’t the script’s main problem.  The main problem is its free-spirit vibe that was dated even in the early eighties when Woody evoked it in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy. Bumpkins come to New York, learn about life, become free-loving — indeed, threesome-loving — bohemians, and all is right with the world.

Ho, hum.