Prospecting for the Clark

Here’s a group of films that I watched recently in choosing forthcoming series at the Clark. I’d already nailed down my “Four Japanese Masters” for a series in June, but Kon Ichikawa’s The Burmese Harp (1956) remained on my Netflix queue, and it turned out to be new to me. I had it confused with his other famous WWII film, Fires on the Plain (1959), which I didn’t really want to see again, though its images of cannibalism among the defeated Japanese troops have stuck with me since I saw it long ago. The Burmese Harp also deals with the aftermath of Japanese surrender, but in a gentler way. One survivor is nursed back to health in a Buddhist monastery, and rather than return with his unit to Japan, he becomes a monk and stays in Burma to bury all the dead troops that litter the landscape. Looking good on a Criterion Collection DVD, this film was in its day an international hit for its lovely evocation of pacifist sentiment after the carnage of war.

I’ve been taking a break in the middle of re-watching the 26 episodes of The World At War, but continuing to explore the themes of World War II in film (as the world economy careens toward disaster, it’s reassuring to know we’ve come back from much worse devastation). So the confluence of several strands of interest finally got me to watch Open City (1945), which had been on my TiVo playlist for a year and a half. Roberto Rossellini’s film about the Roman resistance in the waning days of the war in Italy, filmed on the spot before the war had ended, is taken to be one of the founts of neorealism. It’s so much a monument that it’s hard to approach it freshly as a film. How well it’s made is almost beside the point of it’s being made at all. Its blend of the real and the cinematic remains a nearly miraculous result of minimal means. If I get to do my film club series on Italian neorealism next fall at the Clark, this is sure to kick it off.

One way that Open City is the mother of all Italian postwar cinema is for making famous Anna Magnani, one of the few professionals in the cast. She also appears in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Momma Roma (1962), almost as if she had survived the earlier film and had the son she was pregnant with at the time. Retrieving him from rustication, after years of supporting him by walking the streets of Rome, Magnani tries to forge a new life in a housing development with her semi-delinquent teenager. Pasolini pulls out all the stops, but the whole does not sustain itself. There are bravura sequences, like two where Magnani walks through the streets of Rome and narrates her story to a succession of street characters who fall in step with her, and stylistic quirks, like the almost Ozu-like frontality with which Magnani and others address the camera. But there was a whole level of symbolic signification that didn’t work for me at all, so the film made no unified impact. There’s a lot of emotion on display in which I did not share.

I filled the last slot in my “Projections of Rome” film series with Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), trivial as a romantic comedy, but eye-popping as a digitally-restored Cinemascope travelogue of Rome. Enough of an innovation in location shooting to win the Oscar for cinematography, it became a surprise hit. In front of the star of the show -- the sights of Rome, seen only occasionally in jarring back-projection -- three unlikely American secretaries (Dorothy Maguire, Jean Peters, and Maggie McNamara--an Audrey Hepburn-lite whose career fizzled) dance in pursuit of the men of their dreams (Clifton Webb, Rossano Brazzi, and Louis Jourdan) and -- surprise! -- meet them altogether in the end, in front of the Trevi Fountain where they made their wishes at the start of the movie, to the strains of Frank Sinatra singing the title tune.