Pardon me while I return for the nonce to my original purpose in writing this filmlog, started on 1-1-00 and put online five years later. Namely, to keep track of what I’ve been watching and my immediate off-hand evaluation, to forestall the flaws of memory. So lately I’ve seen or re-seen a lot of films I don’t feel moved to “review” in any meaningful sense, but merely to register my reaction.
First off, in my “Drawn to Portraits” film series at the Clark, Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) lived up to its billing as noir classic though I was struck most by its comic elements, which made me think of The Big Sleep, though Gene Tierney is no Bacall and Dana Andrews hardly a Bogart. Portrait of Jennie (1948) delivered equally, in the vein of romantic fantasy, with sophisticated visuals and great location shooting in NYC by director William Dieterle, and well-played leads by Joseph Cotten and Jennifer Jones, lovingly produced by her husband, David O. Selznick. Only Vertigo failed to meet its overblown expectations – what are you thinking of, Sight & Sound critics poll, to vote this second only to Citizen Kane as the best film of all time? I could name a half-dozen Hitchcocks I think are better (first off – Strangers on a Train).
It was another critics poll -- this for best of past decade -- that drove me to give their #2 choice another chance, in this case David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), and I came away equally unconvinced. I still don’t get it, though the film does showcase Naomi Watts to advantage. Despite re-viewing, the film continues to make little sense for me, and any atmospheric impression it made quickly evaporated.
Another second look confirmed another less than enthusiastic response. Naked (1993) remains a strong but unpleasant experience. I am usually a big fan of Mike Leigh’s kitchen sink dramas, but though David Thewlis is powerful here as a blow-in from Yorkshire to London, where he crashes with an old girlfriend, while abusing her and her roommate and any other woman who happens by, this does not rank with my favorites. His tirades are compelling in a bitter, bilious, spittle-spewing way, but for me the misogyny was not redeemed by any empathy-extending understanding of the character.
Pure happenstance led me to re-viewing Wise Blood, John Huston’s 1979 adaptation of the Flannery O’Connor novel, but I recall from long ago a similar reaction of exhilaration and letdown. Brad Dourif is perfectly squirrelly as Hazel Motes, a GI who returns to the southern town of his hellfire upbringing, and rebels against the Jesus-soaked atmosphere by preaching fanatically the “Church of Truth Without Jesus Christ.” It’s extremely pungent, but in the end I find the story, like O’Connor herself, too extreme and arbitrary. But there is a reek of gothic reality and wicked satire along the way.
Also caught on TCM was Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1950), Albert Lewin’s surprisingly literate romantic melodrama set in a technicolor Spanish village, where American émigré songstress Ava Gardner captivates all the men and is in turn captivated by James Mason, the mysterious sailor whose identity is given away in the title. The movie aspires to myth in a manner that is lush but not totally laughable.
The same might be said of Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), which I watched because I was hoping to show a series of Cleopatra films at the Clark, in conjunction with an appearance by bestselling biographer Stacy Schiff, but that fell through. This fairly lavish production of the G.B. Shaw play features Claude Rains and Vivien Leigh to good effect, but ultimately doesn’t make a whole lot of sense out of the spectacle, a problem that may be characteristic of films about the Queen of the Nile.
Mildred Pierce (1945) I watched again to compare Joan Crawford’s performance with Kate Winslet’s, also good but also lost in an unengaging story. Michael Curtiz’s version adds a murder to spice things up, but the design and the acting, and the implicit social commentary on woman’s lot, are not enough to involve me with a bunch of not-so-interesting characters. Compare Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas for a more compelling movie about a mother sacrificing all for an ungrateful daughter.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1987) was another film I was willing to give a second chance, and it was no hardship to watch Daniel Day Lewis and Juliet Binoche, and director Philip Kaufman’s clever insertion of them into newsreel footage of the Prague Spring uprising, but it does go on and on, the characters remain opaque to me, and I eventually fast forwarded to the end. Lena Olin, however, caught my eye, so I went back to another film I remember liking more, Enemies, a Love Story (1989). Paul Mazursky’s adaptation of an Isaac B. Singer novel tells of a Holocaust survivor who finds himself in a vividly-realized 1949 New York, with “wives” in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx. One is Lena Olin, as electrifying as I remembered, and another is Anjelica Huston, wry and witty with deep submerged pain. To me there were a few key gaps in motivation and narrative, but the acting and atmosphere carried the day, though I found it hard to forgive Ron Silver in the central role for the actor’s subsequent emergence as a right-wing apologist.
One last note on what’s classic and what’s not: A while back I made an effort to confront the inflated reputation of Nicholas Ray, an especial favorite of my favorite director, Francois Truffaut. They Live by Night (1948) got me interested, with Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell extremely affecting as two hardscrabble kids in love and on the run, in a film that effectively combines social realism and doomed romanticism. So then I watched On Dangerous Ground (1951), and bought in somewhat to its reputation as a noir classic, intrigued by Robert Ryan as the rough-edged cop and Ida Lupino as the blind woman he investigates and falls for, though I still found something slipshod and unconvincing in Ray’s direction. Then I went back to Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and found the trio of James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo iconic but their story once again unconvincing. Johnny Guitar (1954) is indeed an eye-popping curiosity, a luridly-colored Western with a monumental Joan Crawford as the whore-turned-businesswoman, and Sterling Hayden as the gunslinging title character who wants to protect her against the raging jealousy of Mercedes Cambridge and her pack of vigilantes. But again I do not see the mythic Freudian depths that some choose to see in Ray’s work. And in King of Kings (1961) and 55 Days to Peking (1962), I see none of the intimate reality that Ray is purported to bring to his standard epics. I remember being impressed by the latter as a youth, but Charlton Heston is by now another actor I cannot abide because of his off-screen activities and on-screen impassivity. I understand that Nick Ray himself is a Bigger Than Life (1956) character in film history, but his films stubbornly do not make much of an impression on me. Someday I’ll give the highly-esteemed In a Lonely Place (1950) another chance, and catch up with a couple of other Ray films on TCM, but I don’t imagine I’ll come over to Nick in time.
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