The 1960 Mini-List

[therewillbeblus]

DI, I revisited Rocco and His Brothers two months ago (and it rose considerably in my esteem) - that scene in your spoilerbox was also the most interesting element to me, so to save you some trouble, after my viewing I made my way through the dedicated MoC thread and was surprised that nobody commented on that aspect, unless I missed something. I tried to open the door with a basic question regarding any ambiguity (though I think it's pretty clear what happens) and got no response, so hopefully we can garner some discussion here. Anyways, here's my writeup:

I've never been a huge fan of this film, but it finally clicked for me today; not so much the operatic family dynamics, which are frustratingly comprehensible yet still a bit alienating, but the raw loneliness of each and every character is soul-stirring, as they strive to achieve -or delusionally manipulate and arm themselves with- ideological values to forge intimacy in an isolating world. This is a film where people are constantly taking other people by force*, using them as objects to fulfill their spiritual holes of existential pathos. There is no room for Rocco’s idealistic collectivist morals in this milieu of individualistic segregation, but what of the youngest brothers? Ciro seems to represent the tangible possibility of shrewdly evaluating and critiquing the ignorant propagation of unearned institutional allegiance, whilst also holding onto the importance of those institutional bonds in family, but loses hope on the latter. His monologue about how Simone helped construct Ciro’s ideological worldview only to shatter it with realism explains the progression of his eroding faith, as does his subsequent pitch of Rocco as a flawed saint incongruous with the world because abundant and filterless forgiveness leads to further harm.

However, Luca is in the position of hearing his brother's sagacious skepticism of blind faith in institutional morality, and also willfully capitalizing on the value in that harmony, not yet irreparably broken by personal experience. While Ciro is pessimistic about what the future holds for his younger brother, Luca has the opportunity to soak up his brothers' sacrificial experience to inform his own middle-road path as he develops into an adult. There then is some hope that Luca will be able to have his cake and eat it too with tempered traits of forgiveness without absolute endorsement in his social relationships, which starts with his disapproval of Ciro's actions and successive invitation to dinner.

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Is the implication that Simone is raped by the boxing promoter?

[DarkImbecile]

I was just reading that!

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It does seem to be a pivotal scene both in Simone's downward spiral and deepening and shading Rocco's commitment to masochistic sacrifice beyond his shocking response to Nadia's rape, so I'm sure it's investigated in more depth somewhere... if I find anything worth sharing, I'll pass it along.

[therewillbeblus]

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the scene where Simone seems to be trying to convince himself to prostitute himself with Duilio, then fights him, and then either gives in or is raped. His brothers don't seem to be aware of the full dynamic when they're in Duilio's apartment after he reports being robbed by Simone, but the insistence with which Rocco yet again climbs on his cross to protect his brother makes me wonder if he suspects more than the other siblings. Either way, that scene for me was so important to generating any scraps of empathy for one of the great shitheads of 20th century cinema, and making Simone's eventual murder of Nadia more than just jealousy or possessiveness, but an externalizing of his own self-loathing.

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This is a great reading- Simone already served as a 'cookie-cutter' representation of the "hurt people hurt people" psychosocial cycle of harm because of his emotional pain breeding violence. Yet adding an additional layer of being violated physically, and thus emasculated physically, in a world he sees as a 'physical' one where physical prowess is a uniform value system issuing his worth, makes everything all the more complex and pitiable. The emotional depths are important but through this scene there are implications that within the elisions of Simone's narrative there have been acts of perpetrated violence where he's been impotent to succeed in physically overcoming traumatic experiences, and has then issued that physical trauma in turn on others- family, friends, lovers, not just because he's emotionally fragile inside but because his social context and worldview have been concocted out of tangible experiences of physical trauma. He's wearing the victim hat in his memories, fighting every day to repress them unsuccessfully - hence the alcoholism (which is appropriately complex in attempting to bury actual traumas vs. jealousy around feeling 'less than' in the boxing world through social comparison) - and without the right supports to unconditionally create a safe space for his vulnerability, he instinctively takes victims himself. It's a classic case of social context informing patterns of malicious behavior, where the source is still worth empathizing with, even if the abuser must be morally judged.

[domino harvey]

I would be very shocked if Rocco wasn’t in the top ten for this list

[therewillbeblus]

Same, though it's currently just barely making the cut on my own

[DarkImbecile]

I would imagine its operatic intensity and literary density — not to mention the very disconcerting misogyny — feel less easy to embrace today than the some of the more intellectually cool and metatextual classics of the same year, but I tend to be much more responsive to the former (not the misogyny part). Having just flipped through the reactions of a few major film writers, all of Rosenbaum, Thomson, and Kael are pretty negative, with the latter two expressing a preference for Visconti’s more neorealist early phase and Rosenbaum particularly turned off by the regressive sexual politics.

[therewillbeblus]

Contrarily, I think this is far and away Visconti's best work, and one of only a couple I'd consider good at all

[domino harvey]

The Cahiers critics were huge fans, which is probably what led me to checking it out long ago when I was first getting into film. They were right about this one! I’m pretty sure, to the surprise of no one, that Scorsese is also a huge fan

[DarkImbecile]

That checks out; glad to hear I’m not an outlier!

[Rayon Vert]

Contrarily, I think this is far and away Visconti's best work

I agree with this half of the sentence.

[Rayon Vert]

Letter Never Sent (Kalatozov). Siberian plateau? No thank you. Yes, an easy list-maker. Some of those shots are really virtuosic, especially one of the first, extended ones as we follow the characters trying to make their way through the dense bush - you wonder how they did it. And yes it’s easy to see the influence on the early Tarkovsky here. The whole thing is very impressive. I also liked the way the film wasn't single-mindedly focused on the existentialistic survival epic aspect, but engaged some moving relational passion between the characters that echoed the forces of nature surrounding them.


Sink the Bismarck! (Gilbert). Pretty much like a Battleship game set to film, especially with the insistent focus on the London-based tacticians behind the scenes, which is fine by me. It’s not exceptional – you get chestnuts like the stock Nazi commander who’s all into the fact that’s he got the biggest one – but it’s an entertaining, perfectly likeable, well-done war sea flick, and it gets extra points for depicting a historical incident.


The Housemaid (Kim). This made me think of Bunuel’s Susana, with the melodrama driven by an off-the-chart return-of-the-repressed eroticism that serves to satirize the family institution, and where the excess almost turns the drama into black comedy. It’s such a wild film, especially when you read in the Criterion essay what usually characterized Korean film in this era. The extremely bold, modernist, shades-of-Psycho score brings out the horror dimension that’s there too. It’s masterful and it was easily heading for a safe space on my list. The film is so extreme, however, and so unrelenting in that extremism, that I found it kind of overspent itself by the last third with its emphasis on the violence, and at that point it felt the film would have been better served by a little restraint or maybe a slower build-up. The epilogue definitely framed that, though, and recovered it enough so that in the end it’s still on my list, but in a space where it could be knocked off depending on what comes down the pike for me in the next weeks.

[therewillbeblus]

I'm finally getting to some of my unwatched/revisit pile today, but in the meantime I came across an old post on two rare films that will easily make my list, for those with back channel access:

Les Scélérats

Robert Hossein helms and stars in this genre-pivoting dissection of malaise with an unexpectedly bitter aftertaste. The film begins its narration with an aloof Rear Window-framed curiosity before our faux-innocent lead slides into the observed melodrama with ambiguous levels of intrusive intent. Hossein immaculately balances the natural suspense occurring between segregated characters who all have their own desires and histories kept deliberately at arm’s length from one another, and by proxy us, and the film shines in its reflection of these futile efforts to connect with the broken. In the last act, Hossein tweaks the melodrama to elevate the themes- if not a full-step tone- into noir, but with a twist:

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Here the fatalism is manufactured from reverse-displacement of emotional hurt, as Perrette Pradier concocts a poisonous lie to harm the man who she ‘knew’ would reject her. Hossein may have sealed his own destiny by negating any affection turned his way, and Michèle Morgan certainly completed suicide out of a surrender to her depression. However, the sickest noirish punchline stems from Pradier- a naive youth (whose austerity would ostensibly be grounds for exclusion by cliques of coquettes) who appears to be resilient in her secret persistence to change Hossein- but who has actually sought to destroy her possibilities at love, as well as narcissistically infect the scarce ripe patches left on Hossein’s tattered soul, because she has sewn her own fate in the clouds before she gives herself the chance to officially proposition the man of her affections. It’s a nasty look at how even the most discernibly strong and adaptable people we meet can be preemptively setting fire to their vicinities under the guise of strength.

On n'enterre pas le dimanche

This nouvelle vague noir has already been written up much better by domino, so besides co-signing the first act's brilliance (especially the bizarre walk through the streets of Paris cloaked in an "odd job" disguise I won't spoil, under stirring voiceover narrative that cements Valence's feelings of social estrangement; but also the surreal introduction of his love interest, which occurs with simplified yet uneasy dreamlike art direction recalling modern Refn), I can only offer an alternative perspective on the last act's success:

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While I agree with domino that the film may have been more interesting if Valence's insecurities were left as enigmatic prisons, the gut-punch ending is arguably darker for validating the specific paranoias of this marginalized man, as opposed to feeding into the toxicity born from self-doubt. In this film, jealousy doesn’t so much seal one's fate, but the self-(and externally) prompted burdensomeness and innate alienation of a black man in a white society endorses these anxieties into actuality. It's not just a self-fulfilling prophecy but a comprehensive destiny of psychology’s intersection with environmental truths.

The key scene of the film for me is Valence's interaction with his Swedish white girlfriend following the murder, because only once he has a secret to hold over her does he feel a reprieve, solely from the high of a (fleeting and meaningless) subjective sense of power in the dynamic. The nastier reveal is how easily this brief security is violated by his girlfriend immediately guessing that he is the culprit, for a) it connects the racist undertones full circle, with his partner incapable of allowing that love to blind her from sociopolitical judgments, and b) her assessment is sourced in Valence behaving “strange” since the employer’s disappearance, with his strangeness operating on a level of tranquility. For this to stand out so drastically as to accrue suspicions of such a vile accusation with swift connectivity, Valence's negative core beliefs of being noticeably problematic, difficult, and anxious are objectively reinforced, becoming an evidenced reality beyond his internalized fears, that which were previously allowed to be ambiguously irrational.

The branding is inflicted from all angles, and we remember back to Valence wandering the streets of Paris isolated in his costume, wondering if he should shed it, bare himself, and embrace the world that he feels will not embrace him with compassion. We remember his suicide attempt, and his subsequent drive to capitalize on life's offerings. The film eventually offers a two-faced answer: That perhaps he shouldn't have taken off that costume, or wrestled himself out of that noose, because he has two worst enemies: himself and the outside world. Either way, he was doomed.

Other list-makers I probably won't have time to revisit and/or write up in full (and, consequently, will abbreviate some previous writeups, if eligible) include:

Strangers When We Meet: Richard Quine's excellent, appropriately dark melodrama pulls no punches on the devastating pathos born from ideological fatalism, sown into the stars of these characters' lives. Walter Matthau's character is a 180 degree turn from his supporting role in the also-dark Bigger Than Life, revealing some hair-raising true colors that reinforces the beneath-the-dirt (to use a full-throated Lynch motif) reptilian psychology spawned by the social segregation of the times. It's a 60s film looking back on the 50s melodramas with withered energy but sober optics.

America as Seen by a Frenchman: A documentary self-reflexively portraying cultural/medium artifice with a tone so wry it’s difficult to tell what is a joke or just an objective contextual paradox. The vibe feels imagined by a drugged Godard, moving away from intellectualized political agendas and liberating the images and neutralized detached language from the eye of subjective American intent to form its own unique sardonic spirit, yet not without its own authentic interest that inspires our own complex experience of digestion.

The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse: Lang unapologetically dives into full camp mode, striking a rich balance between his talents for technical precision in formalism and pacing with a surrender to imaginative crime-fantasy setpieces out of a shlocky dimestore novel. There's no extra fat here- something that can at times cause a rift between Lang's work and my enthusiasm for them- just absurd adventures, recalling some of the most engaging noirs and wrong-man pics of the two previous decades. There are clear noir tropes and yet it’s too eclectic in its mood to remain married to one genre. All the Langian interests are here: Nazis, cops, spies and skeptics, paranoia, voyeurism both behind the camera and implemented into the story, as well as insinuations that touch on history, psychology, society, and mysticism. There are so many goofy or cushy scenes, revamping in-jokes on the fly, which are entirely in step with Lang's humble divorcement from realism including emotional authenticity. This is a shiny, flavorful ride, accentuating directorial flourishes to the max to cast rays of pleasure on every interaction, idea, and setpiece. Lang is throwing everything at the wall here- and it's a blast to see how much of it manages to stick: A pitch-perfect note to go out on, for even if it's not the zenith of quality of his work, it's one of the most shamelessly indulgent.

Peeping Tom: Okay, so a lot has been written about this self-reflexive deconstruction of voyeurism for the audience as aggressive participant in cinema, but it's also an effective 'social horror' film, mimicking the kind of forced audience-binding to a deranged antisocial 'protagonist' that would become popularized with Taxi Driver next decade. Böhm is captivating as a fully-formed character who oscillates between defensive ignorance of his harm and painfully engaging with this part of himself as he taps into genuine human connection, which causes all the filth clogging the gutters of his relationship with the society (outside of his mind) to come flooding out with the 'good' sensations that posture at liberation from the confines of self. I find this film to be more fascinating now, with our current digital age of relationships developing more and more in masked spaces where fantasy is blended more obscurely with reality- the awareness of which, when one emerges from a solipsistic cocoon of subjective reality to greet someone or something in the flesh, causes shell shock and a fatalistic retreat back to the safety of the dream, yet now coated with an unavoidable experience that threatens this secure mental bunker to become a nightmare.

[therewillbeblus]

Three new viewings:

The Skeleton of Mrs. Morales: Jovial, moral man who has pretty black-and-white sympathetic positions in contrast to his ironically immoral devoutly-religious wife is pushed to a moral breaking point of murder. The central conceit of just how fully-aligned we should be with the murderous husband from every angle is amusingly perverse in theory, but banal in execution. The smaller instances of acidic comedy occasionally work, though the manner in which they're all woven into the fabric of the interplay is a bit too subtle and often undercut by ill-fitting heightened dramatics following the sly bit, drowning the breeze from a comic tone with melodramatic sewage (i.e. the “You’re spying on me?!” response to concern when caught trying to poison a defenseless animal, hysterical on its own, is diluted by the quick pivot and nosedive into unfunny hysterics that comes next). It’s well-shot and technically admirable, but the narrative payoff and gallows humor at the core of the film’s ethos left a lot to be desired. However, the film does tweak the expected, and typically unearned karmic resolution rooted in predicated morality clause, stumbling into humdrum places before ultimately working with a sick twist

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We expect that our antihero will ingest the chekhov's gun of poison to close the narrative loop, but he unwittingly takes a handful of more people to the grave indirectly. This sideways step steamrolls the finale into an inspired visual gag of rich dark comedy in the form of a funeral procession going on far longer than it should, recalibrating a moral comeuppance to make room for a few more victims, who are by all accounts actually innocent in the eyes of the audience this time!

Good-For-Nothing: Yoshido’s debut indicates a strong stylistic talent that would only amplify in the years to come, but its exhibition of youthful malaise has been expressed and meditated on with greater depth and in more interesting patterns in far better films from the decade before and the one kicking off here, not to mention within the same year!

Il rossetto: Not much to add to domino's writeup on the previous page- though while I was certainly uncomfortable by the dour turns fated on its characters, I found myself more curious around its manipulation of the mechanics of the films it's riffing on. This is in some ways engaging on a level of crime procedurals, as well as some of Hitchcock's darker pictures dealing with innocents and sociopaths, but this is also an inverted 'wrong-man' pic, icing the traditionally 'fun' Hitchcockian narrative landscape with deterministic dead-ends. The reveal of titular significance plays out in a manner that evokes the social horror of ubiquitous oppression, the film satiating the drives to assault the persecuted rather than allow them to shrug off doubts in magical acts of cinematic catharsis. And yet, this is a film that manages to pace itself in a procession of entertaining tonal briskness in tandem with the engulfing storm of claustrophobic alienation, making the pockets of drenching agony all the more violating and potent.

[Rayon Vert]

Elmer Gantry (Brooks). Who knew Mrs. Partridge could be so sexy? I don’t know if the Sinclair Lewis novel meant Gantry to be a pure con artist. It’s a bit ambiguous but even in the beginning of this film Lancaster’s character doesn’t come across that way – and by the time he meets up with Sister Falconer, even though he’s primarily driven by instinctual forces, his motivations seem to be fueled by his feelings for her more than anything else. I don’t know if this vagueness is a flaw of the script and direction, but that fluidity does make the film more interesting, and the same thing sort of applies to the way the topic of religion and revivalism is treated. An entertaining movie at the very least (unremarkable visually, though, and surprising given John Alton is the DP). Not great in my book but definitely more than just decent.


The Angry Silence (Green). Bryan Forbes wrote the screenplay for The League of Gentlemen in the same year, which also featured Richard Attenborough in a small role (and which I wrote-up not that long ago in the decades list). (Both films have Oliver Reed in a tiny role as well.) He wrote this one as well, with “Dickie” playing the lead, a no-holds-barred social issue drama piece about a principled scab who gets victimized by his co-workers. Until the last few minutes, it’s a pretty bleak indictment of people’s intolerance for difference and bystander apathy. Nice realism to the whole thing, effectively shot and directed (blu ray visuals are excellent), and pretty gripping.


Night and Fog in Japan (Oshima). Kind of amazing that the film concerns in part events that happened in June and that the film was out in theaters by October. Impressively bold in subject matter and form. I didn’t make it a point to study this systematically, but my impression is that all of the shots were long takes without a single cut, and of course because of that we get those frequent dizzying swish pans during the dialogue scenes at the marriage ceremony. It’s funny in a way that all of the reconsideration of the past events and the settling of scores by the characters in the present-day setting almost takes the tone of a Marxist analysis! The director is clearly interested in the merging of the personal and the political in the character dynamics. The film has a lot of energy but it’s so single-mindedly focused that by the end the effect was a bit battering and my attention wavered at times. Not to mention that there’s a lot to keep track of in terms of the information in the narrative. Watched this on a DVD that was quite dark and with an ugly greenish hue, so not the best viewing conditions either.

[therewillbeblus]

Elmer Gantry is a lock for my list. I see Gantry as a more realistic (and prevalent in the real world) kind of con artist; one who half-knows he’s manipulating his way into situations and accepts/rationalizes it as self-preservation and in step with how the world ‘works’ sans objective truth, and half-deludes himself into believing his own lies to keep from a moral crises of self-evaluation (or ‘mental’ self-preservation). His sobriety in the end as expressed vis the Bible verse confronts this duality: seeing the world as a grey space of moral relativism and deceit, and comprehending that resilience is in capitalizing on any idea that provides opportunities to force an upside to an otherwise depressing and energy-depleting situation, that would crush a ‘weak’ non-player in the game of dishonesty.

That’s why Simmons’ character is the most interesting in the film: she embodies the second part of Gantry’s character (the self-delusion) to its limits, but her total believer side bests the moral relativity when it comes down to it. The film dares to show her as an honorable person and also supports Gantry’s outlook in the denouement that this full-tilt embrace of an idea or moral principle would be catastrophic weakness (her fate directly addresses why his conscious recognition of moral relativity as valuable is self-preserving!) so there’s no rigid position taken by the film. Just two incongruous and competing ways of being that are both tragic for different reasons.

And that’s without mentioning the other two complex characters who draw from different wells around the same core ideas. Rarely do movies give us a foursome of layered personalities bouncing off each other in such rich, adult ways.

[domino harvey]

Die Bande des Schreckens (Harald Reinl)
Silly but entertaining Edgar Wallace adaptation about a condemned bank robber who vows to avenge his execution from beyond the grave against all those who foiled the job that got him convicted. There is more than a little Diet Mabuse in the way this German-language Britain-set mystery plays out, with the known loner criminal somehow having an entire network of lackeys to do his bidding. This is a movie where every third character turns out to be in on the “supernatural” shenanigans, but nothing here is flirting with credibility, so it doesn’t really matter.

Komisario Palmun erehdys / Inspector Palmu’s Error (Matti Kassila)
Named the greatest Finnish film of all time, this dreadful murder mystery damns an entire nation’s output if true. Centered around the investigation of a question mark accidental drowning of a petulant richie, the film gives us the titular detective character, one who apparently was embraced by audiences with a lot more zeal than I could muster. The name may be different, but I’ve seen this character in fifty other films, there’s nothing new or interesting or entertaining here in that regard. The rest of the film is broadly pantomimed by an array of annoying actors, and while this is allegedly a comedy, I sat stone-faced for the entirety of its running time. This one and the series of films its success spawned (and the sequels will forever remain unseen by me) is apparently still so popular that Helsinki offers Maps of the Stars-type tours of the films’ shooting locations. I’d rather tour the box factory.

Once More, With Feeling! (Stanley Donen)
Tyrannical maestro Yul Brynner is left adrift in his boundless ego when his wife Kay Kendall leaves him in this throwback to 30s screwball plot idiocy. You see, after she leaves, Kendall finds herself engaged to a boring doctor and needs a divorce, but aaaaaactually her and Brynner were secretly living in sin, so they need to be married so she can get divorced and then get married to the boring guy. So, you know, total Screwball Comedy logic. There are not too many laughs to be had here, but there are two surprisingly interesting things the film has going for it. One is an incredible running gag involving the sheer number of absurd self-portraits Brynner surrounds himself with– the movie kept finding new ones to show the audience well into the final act, and they are almost always funnier than anything happening in the script (and I am totally mystified at how this film wasn’t nominated for an Art Direction Oscar). The second thing this film has going for it is the broooooaaaaaaadddd comic perf of Kay Kendall, in what would sadly be her last role before her untimely death at 32. Kendall brings such an oddball hamminess to her antics that I honestly couldn’t think of any other actress working in the Hollywood at the time who was doing anything like this kind of manic mugging (you could go back a decade and compare it to Betty Hutton). Mixed with her erudite demeanor, it provides an amusing disconnect that hints at a never-realized career of Jerry Lewis-type cartoonishness. And like a lot of scrappy Lewis b-sides, one can only dream of how much funnier she’d yet be if the script was anywhere as amusing as she tried to make it! [P]

Un steack trop cuit (Luc Moullet)
Siblings Françoise Vatel (later to be one of the titular Brigittes for Moullet) and Albert Juross (from Les carabiniers and what is, Google tells me, a pseudonym for Moullet’s brother!) have some back and forth brattiness over dinner in this early preview of Moullet’s rough, amateurish anti-style. The short is often vulgar (Vatel tears up pages of Cahiers for her brother to wipe his ass with) and not especially funny, but there’s a certain charm to its scrappiness, though as with the recently unearthed early Rohmer shorts, this seems to exist for the self-amusement of the Young Turks’ inner circle versus any perceived public audience.

[Rayon Vert]

Cimarron (Mann). Haven’t seen the original, and this is one Mann I’ve skipped so far. I took a chance because of domino’s recommendation, and curiosity, but my low expectations were not exceeded unfortunately. There are some entertaining scenes here and there, the land rush scenes are fun and feature some impressive stunts, and there’s some surprises in the story especially in terms of characters getting killed you don’t expect to, or definitely not as quickly as they do. But that’s about it in terms of the positives. I gather it shares this with the original, but there’s definitely some sagging due to the saga dimension – there’s a lack of a strongly unifying narrative thread for the whole thing, and two thirds through it feels like this already-episodic film narratively just dies, and it has to be resurrected by developments that just aren’t as interesting as what occurred previously. I wasn’t crazy about the leads either – Ford’s character is a bit unfocused and the actor is surprisingly awkward at times, delivering some unconvincing, near-mumbling line readings, and Maria Schell, although very invested, I found pretty grating, and wondering why Yancey wasn’t leaving her for the Anne Baxter character! I guess this is also a remnant of the original, but the anti-racism that the film involves in is partially undone by how the film ends up with her being the central character, that we leave having been exposed to her racism and how she’s chosen social appearances and achievement over genuine relationships. The film ends with a note designed to evoke sympathy for her, but it’s hard to understand by 1960 standards.


School for Scoundrels (Hamer). By the title, I thought this was the original in relation to the (not very funny )1988 Steve Martin vehicle Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, but in fact this was remade more recently, while the Martin/Caine film was based on the 1964 Bedtime Story (which I’ve never seen) and since remade again. In any event, this was made at Ealing Studios when the production company no longer existed but, part of the recognizable cast and crew helping, this thoroughly feels like an Ealing comedy. (In an extra, critic Peter Bradshaw rightly points out similarities with Hamer’s Kind Hearts and Coronets in terms of its lead character attempting to break the class wall through his maneuvers.) The film is single-mindedly devoted to its simple but amusing conceit of the losing nice guy learning how to transform himself into a winning social manipulator/cad (I was tempted to take some pointers…), but it never becomes wearing or stops being amusing. The script is sufficiently witty in itself, but the actors’ completely charming performances bring this to another level.

[therewillbeblus]

I loved Cimarron, but I read Ford's character as deliberately pitched as he is, with a lot of complexity occurring in the elisions. Here's my writeup from the 60s thread:

Cimarron: This superior 1960 Mann adaptation of the Edna Ferber source is an adventitiously lean epic, engaging in relentless forward momentum from the outset, barely resting to introduce us to characters along the way, let alone the setup for the mission! What could have been a 3+ hour expedition is a greasy wheel that flows on without interference, but Mann drives his narrative in a manner that doesn’t cut back on the significant points for meditation. Part of what works so well about this film is that its methodology mimics Ford’s own slippery sidestepping of his history, attempting to outrun his shadowy past that his new wife continuously vies to gain knowledge of and is distracted away from such opportunity.

A lesser film would ruminate on the gravitas of Ford’s transformation, or the seriousness of his prior life with shame and consequences, but instead Mann spends half of his runtime placing Ford in a position of an ostensibly (yet deceptively) self-actualized man who is older and wiser and able to contemplate without sacrificing his own security around his established identity, or assist in placing doubt in his wife’s mind. Rehabilitation, a hot topic for many westerns, is executed with novelty. We are aligned with Ford’s wife in our suspicions (ie. lasting affections for Baxter, a sinister former life with lingering deviant qualities), and these are repeatedly not confirmed and often proven false, an unpredictable fizzle that opens our minds to the familiar challenge of trust reflected in the initial stages of a relationship that the central couple is going through.

Ford’s relationship with Tamblyn gives context to the present, without clearcut morals weighed against others. Ford’s recounting of Tamblyn’s trauma draws a more complex character conditioned by his environment, and Ford’s external musings about his own ‘what if’ responsibility in Tamblyn’s rehabilitation is less a cry of guilt and more of a helpless revelation of our limitations in reversing time and retroactively using hindsight to alter our efforts. It’s a tragedy, but one that isn’t oversaturated in melodrama. We are able to just sit there in the room with Ford, taking in the information just like his wife in her seat, and recollecting on the past that is fixed in space and time, affecting the present and reinforced against interventions for salvation.

The brutality also feels earned because of Ford’s enigmatic presence, particularly when he stops the lynching and not only defends himself but takes a second shot in straight murder. Again, I don’t think his eyes are the ones we’re looking through- it’s those of his wife, and when she’s not present an ignorant third party trying to comprehend the layers guarded under an exterior facade of moral principles. The camera angles, far off and objective (especially in this showdown scene- and its aftermath), sell this reading and insulate the coldness of the actions juxtaposed with the warm atmospheric color palette and sociopolitical harmonizing of conservative law.

This is a very Lockean western, where property means everything but the good characters respect the right to it and exhibit moral behavior around these rules. Baxter beating Ford to his spot is treated without heightened drama and more of a shrug and a handshake in its place. Conversely, the story of Tamblyn’s loss (that triggered his descent into crime) is rooted in immoral seizure of property, a threat to conservative structures that breed peace, and its expression without visualization is an excerption of action that is temporally elusive caught in time; a diagnosis that can be affirmed only tangentially via Ford's isolated monologue, while the sufferers perpetuate suffering in contemporary observation.

In this sense, Ford’s own iteration of his story is one of a lucky man, not a man who earns narrative attention to a difficult reform. The information we get is a reversal of these expectations, as the blind spots of his past aren’t ridden with risk factors and blockades that hindered self-betterment like Tamblyn’s risk factors have; so it’s to Mann’s credit that he directs the attention of the drama to where it rightly belongs. The film is operating on a level completely sideways to audience expectations- a bit part gets the brunt of the empathy and we don’t even get a flashback or emphasized narrative to help us funnel our care his way!

At least that’s the first half. As tensions come to a boil, Ford struggles with the fusion of his past and present, the kind he’s been thinking on but treating with avoidance from becoming palpable drama to be identified and treated. We wonder if his self-actualization was a defensive state, and one without a place for other women, or people, in it. So his transformation does begin to center our narrative but becomes far more interesting in its elisions than directly processing a dichotomous personality; he’s a man who has built walls around himself to survive, disappearing into a shell of a non-personality (no wonder Mann wasn’t interested in him for half of his film!) and as confused about himself as his wife is about him.

Does he even want a family, or is this part of his superficial ideological costume he dons to avoid attention, or from asking himself these tough questions? After posturing towards vulnerability, Ford rebounds with more surface-level theatrics as if this encounter never occurred, and tries to sell his wife a new life like a salesman who refuses to answer her retorts that prompt deeper intimacy. It’s a fascinating film to watch, because Ford is hiding as the main character in a lavish western epic, within a body of charm and tactics of diversion. I understand why people don’t like this movie- first we are snuck past introductory characterization in narrative form, then the central character conflict is aimed at a supporting player, and finally our protagonist breaks down briefly before slipping away again into conniving peripheries and escaping the expectation to dissect himself. We’re chasing our presumptions of a hero and Mann refuses to interfere with said hero's evasion of our projected requirements, but instead moves his film along to reflexively support the sly maneuvering, hiding and the seeking via elisions and refocusing the drama on those who actually face what they desire. Schell, as Ford’s wife Sabra, is the real hero, because she’s the one who confronts, demands what she needs, and earns our sympathies.

The second half leaves us with Ford prioritizing integrity in two actions of rejecting utility for his family in favor of personal morality, sandwiched between other selfish trips of avoidance. Here is a man who deeply cares about their wellbeing but cannot make the sacrifices necessary to provide, a man who is truly not secure posing as one who is. Pride isn’t a valuable quality in this film, because Ford hasn’t proved himself to be a worthy hero to worship. Sabra demonstrates that survival can incorporate compromise and confrontation, divorced from pride as a weakness and a poisonous sin, not to God but to corporeal loved ones as the hostages taken indirectly from a man's impotence to practice humility with sober pause.

Ford apologizes for loving because he has not been able to confront or compromise towards the collectivist family unit. His fear has destroyed his value, his claims of valuing patience have been hypocritically circumvented by himself, while his wife has abided by the request in practicing said patience in action, and the statue of him that the film ends on is placed with supreme irony. Such a relic is upholding an image of the rehabilitated, the motivated, the Lockean moralist, none of which truly accesses Ford’s essence that he and Mann (who refuses to be this character's enabler and settles for a reticent exploiter) have engaged in dodging for two and a half hours. The statue's material is as dense as Ford's self-imposed barriers, and its inaccessible substance reminds us that this is close as we or anyone has gotten, or will ever get, to knowing Ford. The final image may be intended as an honor, but it is immensely tragic.

[Red Screamer]

Et mourir de plaisir (Roger Vadim, 1960) This restrained-ish vampire drama is a small gem of ambient stylization moment to moment, though none of it ever really comes together. Vadim is smart enough to let the movie run on ~vibes~ since the narrative and visual motifs here were old hat 60 years prior. He’s a pretty good director of shots, jazzing them up with eye-catching color design and excessive camera movement, but he falters at pulling them together into a sustained, purposeful whole—notice how lifeless his montage sequences are, with one supposedly tense confrontation between a bucking horse and a newly infected vampire the telltale moment as Vadim awkwardly flips back and forth between static close-ups that don’t particularly gel or clash, as if the cutting itself will do all the work. I found this pretty mediocre overall but my roommates really liked it, for whatever that’s worth, particularly the black-and-white-and-red dream sequence.

The Young One (Luis Buñuel, 1960) A board search for this film mostly turned up a debate on the merits of the lead actress so I’ll start there: it’s a great performance. Meersman is a Buñuelian innocent, not sweet and charming like her Hollywood counterparts, but coarse, amoral, and disturbing. Her ignorance is a weapon as much as it is a virtue, like when she puts Hamilton's life in danger by hiding the fact that he gave her money for the supplies he took from the house. Buñuel is working with a solid conventional script, hung around a plot similar to several message movies of the era, but he makes the material his own, throwing wrenches in every dichotomy with his uneasy tonal shifts and ironic nuances. Buñuel’s elegant style smoothly incorporates all of the film’s disparate elements, from a Resnaisian flashback early on to the documentary nature inserts that sometimes bridge scenes together to the sweaty chamber drama at the heart of the script. His direction often slips into brief, stunning lyrical flourishes and, along with Figueroa’s shimmery cinematography, creates some hair-raising combinations of the beautiful and the sinister, including one perfect, Faulknerian image near the film's end where Meersman plays hopscotch in high heels, the planks of the island’s pier creaking and shaking beneath her. List material.

The Savage Innocents (Nicholas Ray, 1960) I can’t be the only one who finds Ray’s Inuit fairy tale by way of international co-production hard to swallow. Somewhere between violent, soulful poetry and offensive Epcot kitsch, the final result shows signs of Ray’s involvement both elevating and exacerbating his questionable material. For example, he leans in hard to the ethnographic angle, with a near constant detailing of unusual behaviors, cultural customs, and uses of language. On one hand, this keeps the element of racist spectacle uncomfortably at the center of the film, and the humor that accompanies it (something I rarely associate with Ray’s work) is for me just about the opposite of an aphoristic spoonful of sugar. On the other hand, Ray’s affectionate inventions (I'm no expert but invention seems like the right word for it) form their own striking cinematic vocabularly. The Savage Innocents is far removed from Ray’s intimate, spontaneous 50s mode, instead luxuriating in grand location footage, elaborate arctic sets, and a hyperactive, artificial style of blocking. At points the film is able to cut through the noise and reach a hermetic and blunt power—one poignant touch that made me realize how immersed I had become in Ray's synthetic world was Tani warming up Quinn’s feet against her stomach—offering a glimpse of what Ray might have ultimately had in mind. Though I have a hard time seeing The Savage Innocents as a major Ray, as some do, the defenses that are based on its bizarre audiovisual pleasures make more sense to me than those that praise its social commentary, which doesn’t go much further than the film’s title and the tradition it loudly evokes. Ray doesn’t even get as much mileage out of the broad concept—a naïve couple tries to form their own private world as they’re disturbed and hunted by an unjust and unnatural capitalist civilization—as he does in They Live By Night, and there the context makes the idea feel more provocative. I did like the moments where he gives English culture some of the same tweaks of goofy caricature that the Inuit get—how about those funny, Tashlinesque fake rock songs?

[domino harvey]

Dama s sobachkoy / the Lady with the Dog (Iosif Kheifits)
Two unhappily married people start an affair while on vacation. Slow and unconvincing Chekov adaptation that was on release one of the more notable and highly seen foreign exports of the era, but which has now more or less faded into total obscurity, and for good reason. The film is doomed from the beginning as the love pairing here is laughably inert, as is the subsequent pining the two share, as there is no chemistry or spark together or apart (it's telling that the only memorable character is the secondary comic relief, a bored aristocrat who amuses himself by throwing forks across the room at restaurants solely to make the waiter pick them up). The central dynamics come across like a bad imitation of early Bergman dramatics, and the amount of stretching the filmmakers do to fit this wisp of a story into a feature length package leaves lots of pregnant pauses that do not get filled with meaning or import.

Description d'un combat (Chris Marker)
Travelogue of sorts about the then-current state of Israel, filmed and edited in typical glib fashion with accompanying narration to match. This was enjoyable enough but its waters don’t run as deep as I suspect Marker thinks they do. Free advice: Don't read the Letterboxd reviews (which is increasingly becoming as obvious yet necessary as "Don't read the comments below a Yahoo News article")

Esther and the King (Raoul Walsh)
The Biblical story of Esther as you’ve never seen it before: now it’s a love triangle (?), with more cleavage from the virgins than the concubines plus some brutal murders of scantily-clad women thrown in because sure why not. As previously stated, I like these kinds of movies more than most people. So when I say this is the worst quasi-Biblical epic I’ve ever seen, keep in mind how low the bar already was that this piece of shit still couldn’t clear it. How bad is this movie? Joan Collins thought it was her worst film. Joan Collins, who has virtually an entire career of nothing but her worst films, thought this was bad. Only the thirstiest of auteurists would ever try to look at this with even an iota of positive interest, and Walsh’s name is all over this in the script, production, and direction, so its failure rests fully on his shoulders. Cinematographer Mario Bava does give us some very Bava-ish weirdly lit murder scenes, but they are at odds with everything else here and bring nothing of value on their own.

Surprise Package (Stanley Donen)
In what at first seems to be a comedy remake of Siodmak’s Deported, New York racketeer Yul Brynner finds himself stuck for life on a small Greek island and quickly schemes to steal a million-dollar crown from the exiled King of Anatolia, played with reliable drollness by Noel Coward, who gets 99% of the film’s best lines and best laughs (“I prefer ancient history. The problem with modern history is that I’m in it.”). While 1960 may have been the year of Greece with Never On Sunday’s massive success, I thought this film was far better than Dassin’s overrated touchstone… though that’s not saying much! Between this and Once More, With Feeling!, clearly 1960 was also the year of Donen and Brynner pairings, and while still not quite worth going out of the way to watch, this one is the better of that twosome as well-- though what on earth brought these two together for back to back projects is not evident on screen. [P]

[domino harvey]

CARTOON ROUNDUP

I am… not the audience for animated shorts. I do not value this genre very highly, and many well-established classics leave me cold. So of course I still watched a bunch of them from this year!

Goliath II (Wolfgang Reitherman)
A giant elephant leader is shamefully cursed with a miniature elephant son in this obnoxious Disney short that appears to have had its character designs and backgrounds lifted wholesale years later for the Jungle Book (and the crocodile is from Peter Pan). I didn’t enjoy this at all and have no idea why it was nominated for an Oscar or why it was so damn long.

Robin Hood (Uncredited)
A quick Cliff’s Note runthrough of the legend (minus Maid Marion for some reason), apparently using an existing childrens’ record for its narration (ah, capitalist synergy, it’s been there all the time in childrens’ entertainment, hasn’t it?). This is a little too straight-laced and could have used some humor, but I guess it was at least novel to see a cartoon short from this era that wasn’t wall to wall fast-paced buffoonery!

Many (perhaps all, I couldn’t always tell, but assume so given the shared director) of the rest of this round’s viewings are part Paramount’s Modern Madcaps series of cartoons, which I’d never even heard of before going down this rabbit hole. I find it interesting how MGM and Warner Brothers have done such a good job of keeping their titles in the public eye in the intervening years, and yet these (and I’m sure other studios’ series), some of which are better than their more popular contemporaries, have more or less vanished from any commercial releases.

Be Mice to Cats (Seymour Kneitel)
Texas Ranger mouse visits his city mouse relative and they square off against an alley cat. Highly derivative of the already highly derivative Looney Tunes cartoons that are just like this. Could not believe the gall the filmmakers had in making the Texas Ranger mouse a carbon copy of Yosemite Sam, with “darned” Find and Replaced with “Texas”.

Fiddle-Faddle (Seymour Kneitel)
Certainly I braced for the worst when the premise played out: a professor of music gives a lecture on his journey to “tame the savages” in the “deepest darkest of Africa”. But after the requisite ooga-booga native jokes, the focus is primarily on animals. While not a funny short, I did at least smile at the visual of a fox peacefully dancing with an alligator as the professor played his violin. But this short clearly wrote itself into a corner and the filmmakers didn’t bother to come up with anything better to end it than “He lie lol”...

From Dime to Dime (Seymour Kneitel)
Bizarre short clearly intended for adults about a hobo who is encouraged by a magical green pixie to spend his last dime on a slot machine. He wins and thus begins his descent into unfathomable good luck. This one has a really dark ending, and with no explanation given for who or what the viral marketer for Vegas even is, I’m not sure what I’m even supposed to take away from this. But I admire its chutzpah.

Monkey Doodles (Seymour Kneitel)
Surly stork mixes up his deliveries and accidentally drops off a baby chimp to an expecting suburban couple. The wife embraces the child, the father goes running to the photo album to see if the kid got it from his side. This was pretty dumb, but I still laughed at some of the not particularly inventive gags.

Peck Your Own Home (Seymour Kneitel)
A man is constantly awoken from his dream of being petted by a hott blonde thanks to the sounds of a woodpecker. Leaving aside for a moment the crass copycat premise here, I couldn’t reconcile the man’s actions with his problem. Dude, the woodpecker stops pecking after like 30 seconds and sets up his home in a new wooden thing. It’s over. Quit antagonizing him. Yes, I will apply logic to cartoons, and I’ll do it again!

Silly Science (Seymour Kneitel and Jack Mercer)
A nonstop joke delivery machine of imagined futuristic inventions. After starting in the home (where all of the gadgets truly adapt human behaviors and failings, most memorably when the automatic dishwasher has an added feature of occasionally breaking a plate), most of the short is concerned with gags about the increasingly relevant car culture of America. I particularly loved the visual image of the world’s longest movie screen, which stretches out along the highway and features a never-ending chase scene towards the far end. Recommended.

Trigger Trouble (Seymour Kneitel)
Droopy-voiced old sheriff attempts to take guns from a visiting outlaw in another lazy mishmash of gags I’ve seen before and better.

Also, did Godard watch this before filming Pierrot le fou?

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Trouble Date (Seymour Kneitel)
Two Odd Couple dog roommates, Jeepers and Creepers, track down the nerdy one’s childhood sweetheart. This ranks with Silly Science as one the best cartoons of this bunch, with a real energy and some good laffs. I enjoyed the fun character designs too, which in a reversal from a lot of these appear to have later influenced something rather than vice versa-- A Goofy Movie / Goof Troop’s “Everyone’s a dog” universe building versus the human women of the original Goofy shorts



I'm not sure if I'll work my way through the rest of the hardworking Kneitel's animated output from this year, but I'd probably at least make time for more shorts starring these two dogs. Not because I thought they were particularly interesting or amusing, but because they were at least surrounded with a visual sensibility that was. [P]

[knives]

Kneitel’s pretty bad. He was a member of the Fleischer family which is how he got into animation, but his films also tend to be stiff and poorly paced.

[domino harvey]

Candide ou l'optimisme au XXe siècle (Norbert Carbonnaux)
Manically-paced update of Voltaire’s novel set during WWII and the years after, with Jean-Pierre Cassel as the titular figure, Pierre Brasseur as Pangloss, and lots of other French comedic actors in smaller roles, including Michel Simon, Michel Serrault, Louis de Funes, and Jean Poiret as a prickly police detective decades before he’d become Lavardin. The basic plot lends itself to this kind of thing more than you might expect, but don’t worry, the film misses no opportunity to carryover all of the novel’s rape fascination (including, at one point, via a series of comic illustrations). These recurring gags are emblematic of the arch naughtiness of the movie, though here I’m not sure they amount to much more than the filmmakers being that kid in the back of the bus telling (mostly awful) dirty jokes. Even less successful is the film’s last minute swerve into an updated series of would-be gags about black men being beaten by police and mobs in America for talking to young white women. I get the winking self-reflexivity of the critique as presented here, but this film, unlike the source text, doesn't have the legs to withstand the weight of such an attempt (especially coming after the movie recycles the same old tired headhunting savages garbage in its Borneo section).

There is one admirably amusing sequence in the film, though, involving a revolving series of Argentinian dictators who proclaim their love for Dahlia Lavi in enthusiastic song before being assassinated and replaced by the next in line, who will do the exact same thing

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Culminating each time with the body being dragged through far door of the governor’s office, which opens directly onto a bullfighting ring because they're in Spain.

See, that’s actually funny, and no one even got raped! Though, I'm not convinced this film realizes Argentina isn't in Spain... [P]

Revolt of the Slaves (​​Nunzio Malasomma)
Typical Christians being oppressed by evil Romans stuff, with the usual indifferent nonbelievers who come to see the light and an obscene amount of violence to titillate audiences who surely know that’s why they’re there, not the Biblical stuff. This movie has an astounding number of costumed extras in many scenes, which means it must have cost more than usual for a B-string epic like this, so I was surprised that the best the producers could do to topline this was Rhonda Fleming and Serge Gainsbourg as the scrawny villainous Christian-hater! Gainsbourg is whatever in the role, but it does appear that he asked the costume department to make his tunic as short as possible. So if you’ve got a thing for Gainsbourg Gams, good gnus!

Ski Troop Attack (Roger Corman)
Efficient WWII actioner almost entirely set on various anonymous snow-covered cliffs and mountainsides that finds an American reconnaissance team battling white-wearing Nazis while trying to blow up a bridge. This was better than I expected going in, and there's even an amusing extended back and forth exchange around the concept of “a bullet with my name on it” that ranks with the best of this kind of wartime banter. I also particularly liked the work of Frank Wolff as the macho second-in-command who just wants to kill Nazis and hates the allegedly boring work they’re doing, even though I can’t imagine anyone could possibly kill any more Nazis than this outfit manages in an hour of screentime!

[swo17]

Does Ski Troop Attack have a decent DVD release?

[Rayon Vert]

The Naked Island (Shindo). This makes a natural 1960 double bill with L’Avventura: an existentialist narrative against the background of a small, isolated, stark, steep rocky island with a breeze blowing through. I liked this quite a bit. It wasn’t as abstract as I thought it would be – after the credits, there’s a long, very nice portion of film without any music at all, but when the music comes back it kind of takes the place of dialogue in terms of creating emotion. There’s something satisfying about a minimalist film where your entire focus is on the suspense of whether someone is going to drop a bucket of water! A hard life where every ounce of action seems to be at the service of survival, and yet there isn’t a sense of futility or absurdity –the mother gets slapped for dropping a bucket, and yet by the day’s end she’s clearly enjoying her bath and it feels like any negative emotion that that incident might have caused is now resolved. We do feel how this life is fragile though, as we see all the constant leg and arm muscle that’s continually necessary, and wonder what will happen if one of the parents hurt themselves, or when old age arrives. Something a bit odd too about how the family doesn’t seem to be living this reality out of complete necessity, as the rest of civilization is so close by. There is a painful but beautiful irony when

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one of the sons dies, and we see the family having to continue to exert the same painstaking, slow, carefully calculated efforts in the burial ritual, in the same way they tend to the crops.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Reisz). I don’t that I’ve got to say a lot about this except that it’s pretty great and an easy list-maker. Arthur’s vitality is kicking out at the frames of the society that boxes him in – no wonder the nice girl likes him. Finney’s tremendous performance goes a long way to make us root for him despite all his “moral flaws”. Pretty strong set of British films this year, crowding out the lower ranks of my list.


The Cloud-Capped Star (Ghatak). The Criterion essayist points out what otherwise I would have missed which is the centrality of the archetype of the Mother Goddess Durga in this film, which coupled with the fact that this is another story of a daughter’s sacrifice links it curiously with Ray’s Devi in the same year. The source of the suffering, though, here is clearly (and also not explicitly stated) is a result of the consequences of the Indian subcontinent partition, with the family trying to re-establish itself in a refugee camp. I really liked Devi, but I loved this film. The realistic melodramatic narrative is filmed through a powerfully expressionistic, at times almost surrealistic style. The soundtrack here - constant music and natural and other sounds, often multi-layered - is a key part of that style; it’s tremendously expressive, absorbing and almost literally spellbinding in its (sometimes almost psychedelic) effects. My favorite of the films seen so far for this project.