Rambling round-up

I’ve been laid up for a little longer than expected after a knee operation, so I’ve used some of the leg-up time to catch up with movies on my TiVo playlist, some recorded more than a year ago. There’s none I’d recommend outright, but in the interests of viewer advice, I’ll suggest why you might want to watch any of them.

For cinephiles of my generation or a little older, Antonioni was always a touchstone. I never had a taste for him -- too dour a personality, too grim a viewpoint -- though I could see the appeal of his formal cinematic approach. Back then, L’eclisse (The Eclipse) (1962) struck me as the liveliest of his trilogy looking at fashionable modern alienation between men and women, so when I spotted a chance showing on TCM, I recorded and finally got around to watching it again. Monica Vitti is all that as a vision of romantically troubled blond beauty. Alain Delon is just as pretty as the hyperactive and distractable stock trader, who may or may not meet up with her in the end. The scenes at the Bourse exchange lend a frenetic vitality to what otherwise might sink into vapidity. Antonioni has a sure hand, a steady eye, but a cold and lonely heart.

I recorded Lust for Life (1956) to re-watch for possible showing at the Clark some time, and would not be embarrassed to show it, despite Kirk Douglas’s teeth-gritting, scenery-chewing performance as Van Gogh -- he certainly looks the part of all those self-portraits, though a little louder than the paintings. Just as loud, and colorful, are the widescreen visualizations of director Vincente Minnelli, who clearly favors art over kitsch in his adaptation of the Irving Stone bestseller.

I’ve had several occasions to review the slim pickings of feature films about the American Revolution, and each time I noticed recommendations of the filmed musical 1776 (1972), so I recorded it off TCM and eventually found it to be surprisingly adult in its portrayals and dialogue, set in the Continental Congress leading up to the Declaration of Independence, with songs full of content if not exactly hummable, such as one on the triangle trade of molasses, rum, and slaves. William Daniels is John Adams, Howard da Silva is Ben Franklin, and Ken Howard is Tom Jefferson, in performances more flavorful than you would expect, with impressive sets and costumes, and even some location shooting at Independence Hall. The proceedings do drag a bit, however.

As I was making my way through the top films in the indieWire critics poll for American releases of 2008, I happened to spot #21, The Duchess of Langeais (2006), showing on the Sundance Channel. New Wave veteran Jacques Rivette’s latest won’t make my list of best of year or of his career, but was certainly interesting to watch (MC-74.). This adaptation of a Balzac story set in the 1820s features Jeanne Balibar as the duchess who captivates the wounded Napoleonic general Guillaume Depardieu, and is captivated in return. With manners and conventions barely subduing unruly passions, these two dance around each other until it’s too late for anything but tragedy. What the production lacks in psychological realism, it makes up in elegant formality. Though nowhere near as long and slow as certain Rivette masterpieces, this film doesn’t hurry through its florid emotions and sensational plot, but marinates them in his obsession with theatrical performance, in life as well as on stage.

Because I’m showing Ball of Fire in a Barbara Stanwyck film series at the Clark this summer, I was intrigued when I saw that Howard Hawks later remade it as a musical, A Song is Born (1948), with Virginia Mayo in the Stanwyck role and Danny Kaye subbing for Gary Cooper. As you would expect, it’s not as good. But it’s still good fun, with the “seven dwarves” becoming musicologists instead of lexicographers, and the gang moll instructing them in the ways of jazz instead of slang, and rollicking guest appearances by the likes of Louis Armstrong and Tommy Dorsey.

A more plausible film to show at the Clark sometime might be Age of Consent (1969). I was interested in it as Michael Powell’s all but last film, and also for the promised sight of a teenage Helen Mirren frolicking in the nude both underwater and above. Successful New York painter James Mason decamps to an underpopulated island on the Great Barrier Reef north of Australia, where he encounters child of nature Helen, who inspires him to paint again. There are elements of inappropriate humor and questionable sentimentality, but in its portrayal of an aging painter reinvigorated by a naked young muse, it bears comparison to Rivette’s magnificent La Belle Noiseuse.

While Age of Consent was issued on dvd in tandem with an old Powell-Pressburger favorite of mine, A Matter of Life and Death (1946, aka Stairway to Heaven), the Criterion Collection brought out an earlier production of “The Archers” -- The Small Back Room (1948). Let it be said that any Michael Powell film is worth seeing, but coming after the fevered color dreams of Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes, this is a look back, to WWII in B&W -- a tense but multivalent story of a bomb disposal specialist, who must contend with a tin foot and a drinking problem, as well as a difficult relationship with a lovely, loving secretary, and a new booby-trap bomb that the Germans have taken to dropping on the English countryside. I watched the film in a fragmented way, but it was not only that that forced me to go back and re-view the beginning to put together all the pieces. It doesn’t blow up in his face, but the film is not among Powell’s best.