1950s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 3)

[the preacher]

"Vuelve Sebastiana" is a highly recommended introduction to Bolivian cinema prior to Jorge Sanjinés.

[zedz]

"Vuelve Sebastiana" is a highly recommended introduction to Bolivian cinema prior to Jorge Sanjinés.

I don't Bolivia!

I am very, very sorry.

[Wu.Qinghua]

What do you mean, zedz? I don't understand this wordplay. Do you think mentioning Vuelve Sebastiana (and the free streaming option) without assuming it might have a chance to make someone's list at all was unnecessary?

[matrixschmatrix]

Chile out, it's a pointless joke

[swo17]

Well aren't you two a clever Paraguys?

[knives]

Uruguay?

[Wu.Qinghua]

Oh, I don't have neither to chill nor to take a hot bath, because I'm neither angry nor excited in no way. I'm just wondering whether there's any deeper meaning in zedz' comment or whether this might be some kind of wordplay that I can't decipher though I've checked them with all my sometimes pretty heavy dictionaries.

Ooops 8-[ New messages!

[Tommaso]

Just a wordplay. "I don't believe ya"... Good one, though jokes explained lose a lot of their impact. Anyhow, I guess zedz was just in his JamesJoys-mode....

[Wu.Qinghua]

Oh, I see. Phonetics! Lol. How come I couldn't figure this out by myself? In my case, this joke explained didn't lose its impact!

[puxzkkx]

The Munekata Sisters is an Ozu melo that fares poorly when stacked up against his other 50s work simply because I think he makes the setting up and reconciliation of the "old Japan/new Japan" dialectic too foregrounded and obvious by embodying it in a pair of generationally-divided sisters. There are still moments to be treasured - the Ryu character, letting go of generational resentment in the face of death, and the younger sister watching a songbird flit about out-of-frame - and a sequence shocking in its metaphorical violence, the younger sister and her bitter Manchuria vet brother-in-law smashing up the family bar glass by glass. In fact the brother-in-law character, obsessed with the 'glory days', reading in German and drinking instead of looking for work, but ultimately lashing out at the antique, imperialist support structure that has left him in the cold in that one act of vicious self-assertion (shared by Mariko whose gesture is more positive, progressive and more general), provides one of the more disturbing and interesting metaphors of Ozu's 50s work. Great performances by Tanaka and Yamamura although Takamine seems a bit out of her wheelhouse here.

Robert Wise's The Captive City is an early Kefauver tribute pic that lays down the template that the better but perhaps more conventional The Phenix City Story would follow to a T three years later (unlike that film, which began with documentary footage, this one ends with it). Wise's constructive skill is only really on display in a few scenes (including a great noirish murder scene) but other attempts at generating fall flat. Still, valiant stab at developing a sense of danger through low-key exchanges with low-key people rather than through the mounting tenor of violence and distrust in Phenix City, with a solid, unstarry cast. Never develops that film's menace or concrete sense of location, though.

[swo17]

I can't decide if Robot Monster is perfect for the #50 slot on my list, or perfect for the #1 slot on my list.

On a completely unrelated note, I love the two '50s Asquith films available from Criterion, and for entirely different reasons. Does anyone recommend any of his other films from this decade?

[tarpilot]

Yes! The Woman in Question is a very fun Rashomon-type mystery with an abundance of gorgeous Wellesian compositions and an endearingly ridiculous performance by Dirk Bogarde as an American. It's on Hulu, I think.

Orders to Kill is actually one of my favourite war films. Great, great score by Benjamin Frankel and a nice little appearance by Lillian Gish.

[knives]

I can't remember if The Millionairess is from this decade or next, but either way run to its light and fun ways.

[swo17]

Thanks for the tips, guys. The Millionairess is from the '60s but I'll be sure to check it out for the next list. Also, it looks like Orders to Kill is going to be airing on TCM in a couple weeks.

[matrixschmatrix]

Forty Guns

This is unmistakably Fuller- from the shot where the brother falls in love with his wife to be framed in a gun barrel to the loving use of the Cinemascope frame as the titular men are arrayed across the screen in the opening, it's definitely a two fisted hunk of film- but it sometimes feels somewhat Nick Rayish, as the focus is as much on psychodrama and the injuries one does to those whom one loves and wishes to protect as it is on Old West Action (and Stanwyck's character recalls Crawford's in Johnny Guitar, though not so strongly as she does her own in The Furies). It's not entirely successful, I think- it's a bit lumpy, and the tacked on epilogue and repeated, horrible song detract from the overall experience- but it's got some killer aspects, and the feeling it gives one of fifties inner city tough guys transplanted into a Western is a pleasant change. And the scene that should have ended it is killer, a piece of brutality that reaches forward into something like Unforgiven (as does the public display of the corpse earlier in the film.)

[matrixschmatrix]

Murder by Contract

Even if I hadn't known this was a Scorsese fave going in, it would have been obvious pretty quickly- there's a Bressonian intensity to the study of a man in training, alone, and focused on his task in the beginning, a wit to the way the murders themselves are elided, and a spareness to the whole thing that brought both Taxi Driver and Raging Bull to mind. Overall, the first and last half hours are stronger than the middle- though I liked 'the boys' for their mundane, griping outlook, their interactions with the lead threatened to turn sitcomesque after lingering on the note for forty five minutes or so- but the overall movie is pretty killer, particularly for something that screams non-existent budget.

I particularly liked the way that the lead's self image as an iron man crumbled and his will to power fell apart without ever turning it into a 'his only weak point is his heart' thing. There's no real question that he's willing and able to kill anyone, man or woman, and his intended target is in many ways as hard as he is. One gets the feeling that his turning point is more a matter of weakness and impotence, and a pretty obvious terror of women, than it is some noble urge towards gallantry. I'm not sure if the movie is a masterpiece- I'll have to let it sit for a while- but even now it seems like a strong contender for the lower half of my list.

[knives]

I'm a huge fan of that film's director, Irving Lerner, who has another great noir on the second Columbia set. He unfortunately directed very few films and most of them are simply not available, but they all have that mean spareness which lends a disturbing air to this film.

[matrixschmatrix]

Apparently he may have been smuggling nuclear secrets to the Soviets before he started working in film. Which is, uh, something.

[knives]

Yeah he had a weird career and I believe one of the problems he faced was blacklisting (that aspect of his career seems less commented upon). Scorsese did dedicate New York, New York to him which I guess is nice.

[matrixschmatrix]

Diabolique / Les Diaboliques

Goddamn did this one work for me. This is probably a situation where hitting all the right notes helps- a murder mystery that turns almost metaphysical, with Hitchcock-esque atmosphere of tension, carried as much by characterization as by plotting. What else could one want?

Spoiler

It's actually fascinating how much of the movie seems to have resurfaced in other forms- the typewriter with a page fully of suggestive nonsense in The Shining, the dipshit husband who doesn't seem to stay dead in Blood Simple, two of the three leads in remarkably different characters in Army of Shadows, and the detective was almost shockingly Columbo-esque (seriously, the cigars, the allusions to being from a lower class background, the snooping bonhomie, even his gravelly voice.) Even having seen some parts elsewhere, though, nothing seems trite or out of place.

The primary twist wasn't too hard to guess, at least once you get into the home stretch of the movie, but the double twist- with the boy suggesting essentially that this whole thing was some brilliant double reverse con on Christina's part, or a genuine supernatural return, without actually committing to that- undercut what predictability there was. Moreover, though, I loved that the first half of the movie is full of the sort of dropped clues you normally see in a murder mystery- the kid seeing the sedative, the neighbors marking down the exact time of the bath, the guy who saw the water in their trunk and so forth. More than enough to set up a back half that would be a traditional unwinding of the first half, and more than enough to set a mystery junkie on completely the wrong path.

As much as it has a bit of the ring of studio mandated changes, I'm not sorry that the magic detective catches Michel and Nicole- having Michel come out on top would be infuriating, however good a twist it made for. I'll have to watch the movie again knowing what's coming to see how well Nicole's characterization makes sense with that knowledge, but as is this is one of the strongest movies I've watched specifically for the project.

I'm quite surprised at how much more I liked this than Quai des Orfevres- same director, same general genre, not too far apart chronologically, yet one seemed unremarkable and the other pretty well blew me away.

[NABOB OF NOWHERE]

Diabolique / Les Diaboliques
and the detective was almost shockingly Columbo-esque (seriously, the cigars, the allusions to being from a lower class background, the snooping bonhomie, even his gravelly voice.)

The writers of Columbo freely acknowledge this debt..at least according to Robert McKee. And as we know, he know it all.

[matrixschmatrix]

Good to know I wasn't imagining it, then.

Did anyone else get a really unpleasant sexual vibe from the scene where Michel is screaming 'swallow' at his wife while she's eating the bad fish? It's always difficult to tell through time and translation, but it felt hard to miss- certainly, there's a strong sexual undercurrent to a lot of the movie, and an obviously sexualized sadism to Michel's character.

[puxzkkx]

That one scene scared the shit out of me! I'm sure you know which one.

But otherwise I felt it to be a bit limited, in the end, by what turned out to be some rather schematic 'murder mystery' plotting. And Vera Clouzot needed to be Joan Fontaine, brittle and uncomfortable in a way that engages with the plot. Instead she was just brittle and uncomfortable and... bad.

[matrixschmatrix]

Seriously? I thought she was remarkable, giving an impression of more depth of character than Fontaine usually did- the feeling of persistent nervousness and the way in which she would occasionally overcome it so as to assert herself was perfectly performed, and her somewhat limited range of emotions displayed seemed ideal for the part. She's not totally a victim throughout, and she finds herself occasionally, but she's broadly a badly abused woman who is punished for most of her expressions of emotion by an abusive partner.

Certainly the fish eating scene was painfully convincing (apparently because that really was rotten fish)

[Sloper]

I'm with matrix, Vera Clouzot is brilliant in this film, all the more so for the guilelessness of her performance. Fontaine's agonies always seem mannered and artificial to me (not unlike Lillian Gish in that respect), which works fine for Hitchcock, but would have detracted from the raw power of a film like Clouzot's. That guilelessness, more than anything, is what makes the ending work so well - her face, and her voice, are easily the scariest things about that scene. Absolutely agreed on the fish as well... Even more uncomfortable on a second viewing.