Grand Hotel

This old chestnut is no classic, but just a testament to the power of Irving Thalberg, who assembled a cast of MGM stars and promoted the production into huge success and a best picture Oscar. In this all-star showcase, Greta Garbo is hammy and histrionic in a way she usually isn’t, uttering her trademark line, “I vant to be alone.” But with the Barrymores, John and Lionel, and Wallace Beery chewing the scenery around her, and Joan Crawford as the young tootsie on the make, it was every star for him or herself in this portmanteau production set in a dazzlingly-designed soundstage rendition of a swank Berlin hotel. Edmund Goulding’s direction is smooth and soulless, and the cream of MGM’s studio ply their various trades to impressive but empty effect. (1932, dvd, n.) *6-*

Good news for would-be Garbo fans -- a ten-disk dvd set will be issued in September, along with release of individual films, most available for the first time.

The Wire

I’ve now finished the first season and will go right on to the second, like finding a favorite author and putting down one book only to pick up the next, though there’s a stack of other stuff one needs to read. I won’t essay a review at this point, but just make a most importunate recommendation -- if you like highly literate, socially aware, witty and wise crime fiction (somewhere between Elmore Leonard and Richard Price), you must get this program on dvd and watch it straight through! You can’t approach it episodically (like NYPD Blue, for example), or come in late, but have to watch it chapter by chapter like a novel. This HBO series makes no concession to short attention spans, or to viewers who feel they need to know what’s going on now and not figure it out for themselves two or three episodes further along. I was way more than halfway into the first season’s thirteen one-hour chapters before I could keep the characters names and faces straight, despite consistently acute characterizations from every last one of the dozens of players. If this were a movie, I give it an *8+* and rising.

Brothers

This Danish film, directed by Susanne Bier, is an unDogmatic follow-up by a Dogme 95 signee, which by now is clearly seen as a PR effort by a group of filmmakers to justify the cinematic means available to their fiscal means, a way for a small nation’s films to insinuate themselves collectively on to the world stage. The dictates of Dogma do highlight, however, some essential elements of film craft. For example, this film’s violation of the edict against any music not emanating from the scene itself made me extra-aware of the fairly elaborate sound design of musical cues. And its in-your-face, on-the-fly camerawork is balanced by some striking visual effects, like the reflections on water that open and close the movie, and most especially the shooting down of a helicopter in Afghanistan, the hinge of the drama, which turns an action film cliche into pictorial art. The story is schematic but emotionally powerful. The good soldier brother turns bad, the violent bankrobber brother turns good, revolving in turn around the beautiful wife/sister-in-law. And wow -- is she beautiful! Connie Neilsen may just have been Nordic eye-candy in Gladiator, but here proves herself to be a woman in full. The male leads are up to their transformations as well, and there are two darling little girls, so you don’t mind spending time in very close and uncomfortable contact with this in-bred family. As it happens, I re-watched Coming Home not too long ago, and Ulrich Thomsen gives a much more believable portrayal of PTSD than Bruce Dern’s staring loony. This is a good, strong drama of opposition, of personality and nationality, of types and places, of love and death, but could have done with fewer underlinings and capital letters. It can be flinchingly powerful, but would have been better less dogmatic and more Dogmatic, less insistent and more abstemious in means. (2005, Images, n.) *7-* (MC-75, RT-87.)

The Merchant of Venice

The weak link here may be Shakespeare. The production values and acting seem impeccable, so maybe the play’s the thing that’s uninvolving. To be fair, the problem may not be the creakiness of Will’s dramaturgy, but rather that naturalistic line readings do not do justice to his poetry. Something is lost in the transfer to the screen, and despite the glory of the locations and sumptuousness of the visuals, this is not much of a movie. Lovely to look at, with players engaging to watch, this film lacks both the singularity and passion of a true classic. I didn’t doze off, but I did lose focus once or twice. I have no argument with any of the performances, from Al Pacino as Shylock to Jeremy Irons, Lynn Collins and all the rest. And I can’t point to any overt mistakes by adapter and director Michael Radford. So it must be Shakespeare’s fault after all. (2004, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-63, RT-70.)

Program Notes for Clark Summer Film Series

10 Under 50 =
Top Ten Directors Younger Than The Clark

Free Films Fridays at 4:00 pm at The Clark.

The Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute presents, as part of its 50th anniversary celebration, a selection of the best young filmmakers born since its opening in 1955, the careers to watch in coming years. These films are brash and bold, challenging and youth-oriented. This ain’t your grandpa’s Clark Art Institute, this is – ta-da! – The Clark, busily reinventing itself for the 21st century. And these are filmmakers for the 21st century, whose names will be attached to some of the most thought-provoking, funny, and passionate movies forthcoming. So herewith, a decade of directors for the decades ahead:

Viewer Advisory: Almost all these films are R-rated, but more importantly, each deals with mature themes in a fearless manner. They are shown without admission charge in The Clark auditorium, by digital projection from DVD.

July 1: Almost Famous. (2000, 162 minutes.) Cameron Crowe’s charmed and charming autobiographical tale of a 15-year-old rock journalist on the road with a band and its groupies in the early ’70s is presented in the director’s expanded “Bootleg Cut.” With Patrick Fugit, Kate Hudson, Billy Crudup, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Frances McDormand.

July 8: Three Kings. (1999, 115 minutes.) David O. Russell’s subversive, energetic caper set in the chaos of America’s first Gulf War is more relevant than ever, but just as swift and funny. With George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, and Ice Cube. Shown with Russell’s recent documentary on the second Iraq war, Soldiers Pay (2005, 36 min.), which was suppressed from the dvd reissue.

July 15: Ararat. (2002, 116 minutes.) Atom Egoyan digs deep into his Armenian heritage to unearth the story of the Turkish genocide of his people in the waning days of the Ottoman empire, weaving historical reconstruction with lives of characters in exile, including Arshile Gorky. With Charles Aznavour and Egoyan’s homegrown repertory company.

July 22: Election. (1999, 105 minutes.) Alexander Payne hit his stride long before Sideways, with this wicked satire on high school politics, scathingly funny while remaining all too true to life. Reese Witherspoon shines as the irrepressible student politician, and Matthew Broderick suffers Ferris Bueller payback as the hapless teacher who wishes he could repress her.

July 29: Waking Life. (2001, 99 minutes.) Richard Linklater offers an offbeat summation of his films to date, from Slackers to Before Sunset, in this innovative, mind-expanding meditation on dreaming, stunningly animated by computer from a live-action original. Take a trip through the outer limits of Austin, Texas.

Aug. 5: Great Expectations. (1999, 111 minutes.) Alfonso Cuaron navigates masterfully from Mexican originals to English literary adaptations, here transposing the Dickens masterpiece to present day Key West and Manhattan. Ethan Hawke is the Pip character, now a painter (paintings by Francesco Clemente), and Gwyneth Paltrow, Anne Bancroft, and Robert DeNiro represent Estella, Miss Havisham, and Magwitch.

Aug. 12: Welcome to Sarajevo. (1997, 102 minutes.) Michael Winterbottom is a prolific and eclectic filmmaker, plunging into different times and places, from Victorian England to contemporary Afghanistan, but here he examines the war in Bosnia and the siege of its cosmopolitan capital. Woody Harrelson is an American journalist, working with British reporters to get to the heart of the breaking story.

Aug. 19: Together. (2000, 106 minutes, Swedish with subtitles.) Lukas Moodysson casts an amused but sympathetic eye on a Stockholm commune in the 1970s, a hippie stew of idealism and ideology spiced by dashes of idiosyncrasy and desire, in which we learn that love is never altogether free. Frank and funny about sex and politics, the film demonstrates that family is where you find it.

Aug. 26: The Virgin Suicides. (1999, 97 minutes.) Sofia Coppola established herself as a major talent with Lost in Translation, but promised much with this first effort, an adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’ elegaic novel of love and death among teenagers in suburbia. With Kirsten Dunst as one daughter and Kathleen Turner as the mother of five, this is a film of family from a distinguished film family.

Sept. 2: What's Cooking? (2000, 109 minutes.) Gurinder Chadha brings a multicultural brio to her orchestrations of communities in flux. Best known for Bend It Like Beckham, here she takes a panoptic look at an assorted group of Los Angeles families getting ready for the trial of Thanksgiving. Alfre Woodard leads a diverse and delightful cast.


Programmer’s Note (from Steve Satullo): Unlike most film series at The Clark, “10 Under 50” courts controversy, not just in the subject matter of the films, but in the very choice of filmmakers. In an era of effects-driven corporate blockbusters, heavyweight stars, and franchised sequels, here the director is the star, the guiding visionary to whom attention must be paid. My choices are debatable, of course, and I urge viewers to debate them. Filmographies and career retrospectives will be posted week by week on Cinema Salon. I welcome comments posted here or emailed to: ssatullo@clarkart.edu

Dark Victory

I’m not saying we don’t have great movie actresses these days, but it’s nothing like the Thirties when female stars could sustain powerful careers even in a studio-dominated industry. Hepburn, Stanwyck, Garbo, and Davis may have been creatures of the system, but could carry films on the strength of their personae alone, as Bette Davis does here. In this shamelessly tear-jerking potboiler, she plays a heedless young heiress with a fatal brain disease, who marries her surgeon in order to learn how to die nobly and beautifully, and carries off the nonsense by sheer force of performance. Edmund Goulding’s direction and George Brent’s male lead are serviceable, but Humphrey Bogart as an Irish stablehand and Ronald Reagan as a drunken boy-toy are ludicrous in different ways, Warner contract players stuck in unsuitable roles before their destinies emerged. (1939, dvd, n.) *6*

More Greta Garbo

Conquest. (1937, TCM/T, n.) An expensive flop in its day, this Clarence Brown film has been strangely neglected since, despite a literate script, lavish production values, and excellent performances from Charles Boyer and Greta Garbo. Boyer seems at first glance to be an unlikely Napoleon, but turns out to be physically and temperamentally believable. Garbo is his lover, the Polish countess Marie Waleska, and the story of their affair is more sexually and politically sophisticated than you would imagine, which may be exactly why it failed at the box office. It’s a bit drawn out, and there is a limit to the changes Garbo could wring out of historical doomed love affairs, but while her acting is no longer a surprise to me, it is a reliable pleasure. *7*

(This is just the sort of hidden treasure I love to uncover for film series at the Clark, and would have perfect for the “Citizens and Sovereigns” series I planned to accompany the Clark’s current exhibition, “Jacques-Louis David: From Empire to Exile.” But like so many of the excellent films about the French Revolution and Napoleonic empire, it is not available in a decent projectable format, so I don’t regret having been told to make a program supporting the Clark’s 50th anniversary instead. Come to think of it, though, I can post a survey of films about the Napoleonic era on this website. See the exhibition of magnificent David portraits, along with mythological and historical scenes, and then check back here for further pictorializations of revolution and empire in France.)

Two-Faced Woman. (1941, TCM/T, n.) Perhaps it merely defines me as besotted, but I enjoyed this farcical romantic comedy. It was this flop that drove Greta Garbo out of movies for good, but she and Melvyn Douglas serve George Cukor as a mismatched, battling couple almost as well as Hepburn and Tracy. It was racy enough to run into trouble with the Legion of Decency, with Garbo as an earnest ski instructor who tries to woo back her impulsively-married husband, by assuming the persona of her imaginary evil twin, an unabashed golddigger and “lady of joy.” It’s a hoary (and whore-y) set-up, but it gives Garbo a chance to follow up the humor of Ninotchka and even to do a good-sport dance number. If you are tolerant of nonsense, this is an entertaining bit of screwball, and displays a different side of the enigmatic screen deity. *7-*

Bearing Witness

Barbara Kopple, an eminent documentarian, here shares the director’s credit with two others, but the film bears her mark. Harlan County, USA (1976) and American Dream (1991) are two epics of union organizing, among coal miners and meatpackers, and both are among my all-time favorites. I believe both won Oscars for best doc. She took an unfortunate turn toward celebrity profile with Wild Man Blues (1997), decently made but Woody Allen definitely does not need more exposure. Here she sort of splits the difference, latches on to characters with cachet but brings the news about an important story. The filmmakers follow five rather glamorous women journalists and photographers into Iraq in the wake of the U.S. invasion. Their individual stories unfold as the occupation does: one photographer is imprisoned in Abu Ghraib but winds up documenting the insurgency with her filmmaking boyfriend; another has put romance on hold and at 47 still lugs her video camera into hot spots around the world for CNN; there are two self-dramatizing but still admirable foreign correspondents, one who lost her eye to Sri Lankan government forces but regains her first hubby after the second has killed himself, and another who opts out of the danger rush to marry and have a baby before it’s too late; and most impressive of all, a young Asian-American woman working with Al-Jazeera in a brave if overmatched effort to foster mutual understanding in a world of conflict. The film works on a number of levels, interweaving intimate views of the breaking chaos in Iraq, explorations in the psychology of danger-seeking, and feminist decision-making on the balance of life and work. It’s not entirely self-admiring, but does credit the importance of Bearing Witness. (The only way to see this film outside the festival circuit is on the cable channel A&E, which gave me yet another reason to bless my TiVo, for allowing me to skip right over the inane commercial interruptions.) (2005, A&E/T, n.) *7+*

Enduring Love

Whoa, what happened here? I haven’t read the source novel, but I have enjoyed the last few books from Ian McEwan. Roger Michell made Persuasion, perhaps my favorite Jane Austen movie, and his Notting Hill was a better than expected romantic comedy. Samantha Morton is a reliably enthralling actress, and Daniel Craig and Rhys Ifans have been interesting elsewhere. So how did their combined efforts go so wrong? The first thing that got on my nerves was the aggressive color design, in which everything goes green to convey the protagonist’s obsession with what happened to him one afternoon in England’s green and pleasant land. Except for splashes of red, meant to recollect the hot air balloon that descended from heaven that day, into the green landscape, falling in distress. Anyway, a group of passers-by grab on to the gondola to rescue the boy inside, but a gust of wind carries it aloft, and they drop off in sequence till the balloon soars up and the last one falls to his death. It’s an arresting setup, but goes nowhere, which the insistent color scheme simply rubs in. Just because Antonioni did it, doesn’t make it arty when you do. I won’t describe the character development, because I didn’t believe any of it. This movie kept getting worse as it went, but like a frog in a slowly-come-to-boil pot I never had the sense to opt out. (2004, dvd, n.) *3* (MC-61, RT-60.)

Queen Christina

Allowing for the Hollywoodization of history, this is an effective drama about the 17th century daughter of Gustavus Adolphus who as a child ascended the throne of Sweden, then dominant in Europe, and twenty years later abdicated rather than accept a political marriage. Her probable lesbianism is obscured by a fabricated romance with a Spanish ambassador and her conversion to Catholicism unmentioned, but Greta Garbo makes her into a fascinating character nonetheless. Rouben Mamoulian’s direction is lush and smooth, and John Gilbert is not bad at all in a brief reunion with Garbo, after the advent of sound had destroyed his career. (Her stardom was such that she got to pick her entire cast and crew, but her first choice as love interest, the pre-Heathcliff Laurence Olivier, did not work out and was replaced by her old familiar.) If you are immune to the Garbo magic, this film may strike you as silly and false, but if you have fallen under her spell, you will find it witty and moving, a fitting vessel for a monarch of the silver screen. (1933, dvd, n.) *7+*

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

Alex Gibney makes a lively documentary out of the similarly titled book by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, detailing the worst excesses of buccaneer capitalism. The talking heads are cannily and pointedly edited, and spiced with witty visuals and music, though some of the riffs could have been excised to streamline the whole. Still, they all provide a useful public service in making the collapse of the biggest house of cards in American business history comprehensible and even entertaining, yet closer to Errol Morris than Michael Moore, dissecting the villainy more than mocking the villains, achieving a nice balance of rage and satire. Enron is a perfectly emblematic economic disaster that got buried in the rubble of 9/11, and this film makes an effective bridge to the upcoming trials of Kenny Boy and Big Jeff. With close Texas cronies in the highest of places, they’ll probably get off with a wristslap, but what an opportunity to lift the rock and look at the oil-soaked creepy-crawlies underneath. I’ve never been opposed to the death penalty philosophically, as much as I may deplore the vagaries of its execution, but just imagine the salutary deterrent effect on corporate malefactors of watching the odiose Jeffrey Skilling march to the gallows. (2005, Images, n.) *8* (MC-82, RT-97.)

Greta Garbo: an appreciation begins

I'd been pretty oblivious to the phenomenon of Greta Garbo, assumed she was just a bygone star, the unaccountable taste of anothe era, until I programmed Camille for a series at the Clark of film adaptations of 19th-century French novels. The acting I had expected to be flamboyant and stylized turned out to be startlingly natural and riveting to watch. I would have set out immediately to watch the rest of her films, but almost nothing was available on DVD. From the old Either/Or collection at the Milne Public Library in Williamstown, I had tapes of Anna Karenina and Ninotchka. I re-watched the former and determined that it was about as good as could be done, adapting an 800-page novel into a 90-minute movie -- not Tolstoy, but an estimable film. The latter, however, did not live up to the reputation of the “Lubitsch touch” -- it seems quite dated now, though Garbo proved she could do contemporary comedy as well as period tragedy.

Last month, however, the indispensible cable station Turner Classic Movies ran a Garbo festival, so now I have a half-dozen of her films on my TiVo “Now Playing” list. First I watched Flesh and the Devil (at TiVo doubletime, which works as well for silent films as it sometimes does for baseball games, century-old pastimes that can seem too slow to the 21st-century, overstimulated eye.) This soaper opposite John Gilbert was one of the foundations of her immense popularity in the Twenties, and let me tell you, the public is not always wrong. Popular art can be as artistic as any.

Director Clarence Brown also guided her into the sound era, with Anna Christie, most famous for its publicity campaign, “Garbo Talks!” But golly, she acts too. It’s fun to read the contemporaneous New York Times review, and see how startled audiences were by her deep, husky voice, uttering that first immortal line in a seaside bar, “Gimme a viskey, ginger ale on the side ... and don’t be stingy, baby.” Now her fans could be swept away by listening to her voice as well as watching her face. The sound technology is primitive, as you would expect, and also shackles the camera to its demands, but Garbo assures that this film is not any creaky antique. The camera may be stationery but it is manned by William Daniels, a magician of light who was almost her personal cinematographer. The words are better than you would expect, from a play by Eugene O’Neill, and so are the supporting players, especially Charles Bickford as the seaman whose love for Anna surmounts the revelation that she had been a prostitute, and Marie Dressler as the drunken slattern whom Anna sees as herself in forty years. Not a great film, but not a dead letter either. And Garbo is all that. A film goddess and a real person, despite the would-be gutter poetry. Anna Christie. (1930, TCM/T, n.) *7*

My Voyage to Italy

Martin Scorsese distills a number of his influences in this four-hour summary of Italian films from the ’40s to the ’60s, as he experienced them growing up in NYC and watching them with his parents on a tiny tv screen, till he took to the Mean Streets on his own. He covers the arc of neorealism, from Rossellini, DeSica and Visconti to Antonioni and Fellini, with extensive narrated excerpts. I’ve seen almost all of these films (some repeatedly) and most of the rest are already on my queue, so I am not the ideal audience Marty means to sway and entice. I share most of his enthusiasms, however, so I enjoyed the busman’s holiday. I especially appreciated the precis of Voyage to Italy, since so little of Rossellini is available on dvd and for a long time I have been meaning to give that film a second chance. I remember it from decades ago as excruciatingly boring, but it seems to have become a critical touchstone, and I’m certainly more interested these days in Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders than I was as a college kid. Marty’s voyage is meant to kick off my own voyage to Italy over the next two months, so expect me to be blogging a lot of Italian films. (1999, dvd, n.) *NR*

Palm Beach Story

Claudette Colbert is charming as the wife who would be a golddigger for her dreamy architect of a husband, Joel McCrea. After a wild night with the bumptious Ale & Quail Club on the train to Florida, she falls in with quasi-Rockefeller scion Rudy Vallee. Hubby flies down to retrieve her and makes a fourth with rich sister Mary Astor. Sex finally proves more attractive than money, but everyone ends up happy . . . or do they? For my money, however, the noise in this film drowns out the wit and The Lady Eve remains the one true classic that Preston Sturges wrote and directed in his shooting star streak across the Hollywood sky during WWII. (1942, dvd, r.) *6*

All About Eve

One of the great “talkies” from one of the great talkers. Talk, talk, talk -- Joseph L. Mankiewicz can reel it out, and about 90% of it is trenchant, wicked fun. This definitive backstage drama/satire came up in my intermittent Bette Davis retrospective, and its obvious relation to Being Julia moved it to the head of the queue. Theatrical in subject, form, and attitude, this is not a film calculated to win me over, but it does -- the vivid characters, the memorable lines, the great readings, the unblinking but jolly view of human venality, all of that which flows from Eve’s passion, her lust for the spotlight. The moral heart of the film, or absence thereof, is of course the viperish critic Addison DeWitt, elegantly etched in acid by George Sanders, winner of one of the film’s 6 Oscars, out of a still-record 14 nominations. Mankiewicz won two, and Zanuck took home Best Picture, but Bette Davis and Anne Baxter split the Best Actress vote so neither won, a delicious bit of confirming irony for a film all about an awards ceremony. An irony matched only by the subsequent marriage of Davis and Garry Merrill, even though his enamored theater director is the one weak spot in the film for me. About La Bette, what else can be said? -- Margo Channing is one of the classic performances, endlessly recycled by generations of female impersonators. Baxter is also definitive as the ruthless ingenue. And always startling in the film’s unspooling of delights is the appearance of a young and luscious Marilyn Monroe. This parable of stardom is ablaze with stars, still glowing in Hollywood’s firmament. (1950, dvd, r.) *9*

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring

This exquisitely-photographed modern Buddhist fable may have snowed some critics with its exotic “wisdom,” but remains a nice balance of cinematic simplicity with visual spectacle. Kim Ki-Duk’s film is set on an isolated mountain lake in Korea, around a tiny floating monastery. The cycle of the seasons is coordinated with the cycles of a man’s life, first as a young boy under the austere tutelage of a solitary monk, then as the teenage lover of a young girl who just happens to row out to the monastery, then a grown man returning in disgrace from the world, and finally a monk himself who undergoes training and an ordeal of expiation, only to find himself on the raft taking in a young boy much like himself. Meditative, witty, and oh-so-beautiful, the film may not require a suspension of disbelief to submit to its slow charm, but its rigor is more apparent than real. (2004, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-85, RT-94.)