Potpourri

I defy you to find any connection amongst them -- neither style nor era nor nationality --but here’s a quick rundown of some films I’ve been watching lately, each worthy in its way but not something I would urge you to put in your Netflix queue unless some detail piques your interest.

Given what Kate Winslet and director Peter Jackson have gone on to since, I was interested to revisit Heavenly Creatures (1994). Jackson’s transition from his early splatter movies (unseen by me) to the imaginative fantasies of his Lord of the Rings trilogy (seen by everyone) is blessedly reticent with the bloodletting, though it details a real-life murder in 1950s New Zealand. As a tale of adolescent lesbian infatuation and the intense fantasy world the girls create for themselves, the film is so convincing and absorbing that it’s a shame it has to come round to a sensational climax. The Kate Winslet character went on in real life to become the British writer of historical mysteries, Anne Perry.

I remembered being impressed with Lady with a Dog (1959) decades ago, but I don’t know what prompted me to watch it again, though I do know that I would have enjoyed it more if I had read the Chekhov story first, since while this Russian film is lovely, it is so filled with soulful staring into space that it would have helped to be able to fill in the interior monologue. As a quiet study of bygone manners and passions, Josif Heifits’ film was a striking surprise to come out of the Soviet era.

Watching all the Rossellini I can get my hands on, I got around to the one commercial success of his career, Generale Della Rovere (1960), which stars a superlative Vittorio De Sica as a collaborationist con man and gambler, who tries to save his own skin by impersonating a resistance leader at the behest of the Nazis. In prison he comes to know the men he’s spying on, and by indirection himself, as he becomes the fearless leader he pretends to be. This is a waystation, or even an aberration, on the way from Rossellini’s classic postwar neorealism to the televised docudramas that occupied the end of his career, with the staginess and meticulous mise en scene looking backward and forward at the same time. Purportedly Rossellini and DeSica got together and decided to make a film that would win the Golden Lion at Venice and revive both their careers, and then they did so. The Criterion dvd has some excellent extras, including interviews with Isabella and the other Rossellini children, which bring out how autobiographical the film was for both men.

Anthony Mann is one of those directors who was once seen as a Hollywood journeyman and is now seen as an auteur, and I have been belatedly catching up on his oeuvre, so I made a point of recording Man of the West (1958) when it came round on TCM. Unfortunately, what seems archetypal to some seems formulaic and implausible to me. Likewise, some have no trouble with the fact that Gary Cooper is decades older than the character he is meant to portray, in fact older than Lee J. Cobb who plays his uncle, the raging gang leader whose protege he once was. Cooper has gone straight but Cobb longs to drag him back into his Old West crime family. Julie London is on hand as a saloon canary (though she never gets to sing), to demonstrate Cooper’s innate nobility and the gang’s sexualized nastiness.

I had never seen a Batman movie nor thought I would, but credible recommendations and an opportunity to watch on big-screen hi-def led me to take a gander at The Dark Knight (2008). Yes, there is some impressive visual spectacle. Yes, there is the appeal of familiar faces in so many roles, notably the late Mr. Ledger. Yes, Christopher Nolan directs this comic book for adults, with characters and situations that are indeed impressively dark. But yes, it is awfully long and exhausting, and no, you don’t have to see it if you don’t want to.