Classic criteria

Having gone more than a month without making a post (while my viewing attention has been diverted to my dear Cleveland Indians – soon to be the Cleveland Blues, I hope) I’m opening another grab-bag of reviews under this rubric.  I’ve still been adding reviews under the previous three headings, particularly “Newly released” (right up through the new Charlie Kaufman on Netflix), but here I’m starting a fourth, to cover unearthed would-be classics that I’ve watched in passing.

What makes a film endure, worth watching generations later?  This post does not review the acknowledged classics, but explores the hidden corners of film history in search of surprise and delight.

The Criterion Channel collection “Early Douglas Sirk” did not contain any of the films I really wanted to see or re-see, but did fill in an unknown period in his career.  Having fled Germany and arrived in Hollywood in 1939, he managed to make two films during the war, and afterwards this array of studio films.  Understandably dissatisfied with the system, he returned to Germany for a short time, but then came back to Hollywood and made the series of 1950s melodramas for which he is justly celebrated.  His craftsmanship and control (and sense of irony) come through in whatever genre he’s working in: the historical-whimsical, crime-caper-comedy-romance of A Scandal in Paris (with George Sanders as thief turned Paris police chief) or Lured (in which Lucille Ball is the lure for a Jack-the-Ripper type killer in Late Victorian London), or the noir notes of Shockproof, or the sly showbiz musical comedy of Slightly French (with Dorothy Lamour and Don Ameche).  But you’d really need a particular reason or interest to seek out any of these late 1940s studio products.

Something Different (1963, CC) is certainly that, and an example of why the Channel is such a significant resource.  This early film by Vera Chytilova, a major figure in the Czech New Wave, is an absorbing alternation between two storylines that never meet, but resonate with each other.  One is essentially a documentary record of an Olympic champion gymnast training for a major performance, and the other is a fragmented portrait of a bored housewife, ignored by her husband and frustrated by her child, and led into an affair.  Together they offer a dual portrait of male domination and female resilience.

Criterion Channel is not the only place to dive deep into classic movies.  When it comes to New Yorker film critics, I’m more likely to enjoy – and agree with – Anthony Lane rather than Richard Brody.  But credit where credit is due, the latter does occasionally lead me to hidden corners and pleasant surprises.  Case in point: the unknown Howard Hawks film, Come and Get It (1936, AMZ), his distillation of an Edna Ferber epic about a logging dynasty in Wisconsin, from the late 19^th into the 20^th century.  The film has many points of interest, starting with a documentary-like sequence of old-time, old-growth logging that is both horrific and heroic at the same time.  Edward Arnold is good as the crew-boss turned lumber magnate, purportedly based on Hawks’ own grandfather.  Walter Brennan is his cornpone self as sidekick, albeit with a burlesque Swedish accent, garnering his first supporting Oscar.  Frances Farmer debuted here in a dual role, which has been praised – I’d never seen her in anything else and she seemed a bit off-kilter to me.  Joel McCrea as the magnate’s son and rival was shunted aside by Hawks, which was one of several reasons why he was fired, when Sam Goldwyn returned to the studio from a hospitalization and inserted William Wyler to finish the film.  It’s interesting to unpack the history of the film’s production, as emblematic of the studio era, and to see the conflicting motives and styles that emerge from the directorial divide.  And the story comes through reasonably well, even if neither director would claim the film after the fact. 

Brody also tipped me off to Dragonwyck (1946, YouTube), among his recommendations for films to stream with your children.  What attracted me was its setting among Hudson River patroons in the 1840s, amidst the so-called Anti-Rent War.  Brody mentioned Martin Van Buren, but he is only alluded to in the film, which is really a low-rent Jane Eyre or Rebecca.  Hard to see why Gene Tierney was ever a star, or even considered beautiful in her time.  Vincent Price is okay in the Rochester-like role, and Walter Huston shines as the girl’s farmer father.  Writer-producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz debuts as director, providing an intelligent and history-inflected script for a silly gothic romance.

I finally caught up with The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947, dvd) while making my way through a Natalie Wood retrospective for a forthcoming essay, but she plays a negligible role in this film, which re-pairs Tierney and Mankiewicz in another Gothic tale.  I found Tierney less simpering and more substantial here, as a young widow determined to live alone (with maid and daughter) in a rented seaside cottage formerly owned by a deceased sea captain.  Turns out he is still in residence, as engagingly incarnated by Rex Harrison, rogue-ish and domineering like Henry Higgins.  They “collaborate” on a book about his swashbuckling adventures, whose success enables her to buy the house, and live independently.  The ghost’s final benefaction is to save her from the cad George Sanders, leaving her to a blessed singleness, with the companionship of her own imagination.  Mankiewicz blends the romance and the humor into a delectable concoction.

When my brother Chris posted a list of his 25 favorite political movies, his inclusion of City of Hope (1991, AMZ) reminded me not just of a film I liked long ago, but of a director I long considered one of my favorites, but have not thought about for a long time.  Now that I’ve re-watched a couple of old John Sayles films, I’m inclined to embark on a full career retrospective, of someone who graduated from Williams at the same time I did.  Though I never knew him personally, I followed his work closely for decades, as he carved out an exemplary practice as a genuine American independent, filling a progressive and multicultural niche in a corporate environment, by financing his own films through screenwriting and script doctoring for more commercial movies.    

City of Hope is an old film that stands up very well, as testified in this 25^th anniversary retrospective in the Village Voice.  It doesn’t seem dated at all – unfortunately – but more as if it were ripped from today’s headlines.  It’s the story of a midsized NJ town that is one large web of corruption, racism, and intolerance. The story passes from one character to another, all eventually interconnected in a situation that cries out for help, where no help is to be had.  The adventitious widescreen camera transitions between characters are worthy of an Altman or Scorsese.  We follow so many distinct personalities and storylines as they intersect and veer off, for a truthful group portrait of a community under stress.  The cast is well up to the task of making a durable impression in passing.  Many Sayles regulars appear -- Joe Morton, Chris Cooper, plus Eph alums David Strathairn, Sayles himself, and his producer and life partner Maggie Renzi.  I don’t know where he found the money to make this film, but he put it all up there on the screen.

I also watched Passion Fish (1992, AMZ), which I liked back in the day and like even more now, distinguished by economical but evocative location shooting, and reliance on sharp writing and naturalistic performances.  This film revels in its Louisiana bayou locale, and gives great scope to two very fine actresses.  Mary McConnell plays a daytime soap opera queen, who’s been hit by a cab on a NYC street, and returns in a wheelchair to the ancestral home she fled in her youth.  Acerbic and self-pitying, she runs through caretakers, until the always-estimable Alfre Woodard arrives, with a will and a voice to confront the bitch-on-wheels on level ground, plus a backstory of her own.  Come to think of it, the set-up is something like Persona, but Sayles’ treatment is quite different from Bergman’s, as the women’s head-to-head isolation is broken up by a variety of incursions from the outside and the past.  Wrenching at times, but more often funny, the film’s local color also includes some rousing zydeco sequences.  So much as City of Hope seems in retrospect like a precursor of The Wire, Passion Fish seems to prefigure Tremé, if only in my own appreciation.

Back to the Criterion Channel, which was supposed to have been the focus for this post.  In the wonderful collection “Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger,” the only film I hadn’t seen was 49^th Parallel (1941, CC).  It’s more a curious period piece than one of their many great films, just their first collaboration before they became known collectively as “The Archers.”  (The other five in the collection are all masterful, but if you’re not familiar with any, start with I Know Where I’m Going – pure delight.)  This film’s overt purpose was to draw the United States into the war effort against Germany.  But even propaganda can maintain allegiance to the true and beautiful.  By the time the film reached these shores in early 1942, we were already in the war, but it went on to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.  The parallel in question runs between Canada and the U.S.  And a great part of the film’s appeal comes from the documentary footage of Canada’s vast sweep from the St. Lawrence to Vancouver, by way of Hudson Bay, as a half-dozen U-Boat survivors try to make their escape to the then-neutral States.  Their leader is a Nazi zealot, always ready to spout the Fűhrer’s message, but the other Germans have different perspectives, including those of a Hutterite community where they take shelter.  They also encounter a community of Eskimos, and another First Nation out in the Rockies, all belying the creed of racial supremacy.  Many of the day’s biggest stars contributed cameos, including Lawrence Olivier (going a little overboard as a French Canadian fur trapper), Leslie Howard, and Raymond Massey.  The Archers are the pinnacle of British cinema, rivaled only by David Lean, who actually was the editor of this film.

Count on Agnès Varda to compose as lovely a valedictory to herself as she did to her husband, Jacques Demy.  Varda by Agnès (2019, MC-85, CC) is a fond and witty summation of her career, a delightful introduction and a moving reminiscence.  She did this sort of autobiographical collage once before, with The Beaches of Agnes as she was turning 80, and now at 90 she does it one more time, still finding new things to say in a fresh way, as charming and with-it as ever.  She does not just celebrate her sixty-plus years of work, but uses it to illuminate the aesthetic and political principles and practice that underlie the entire corpus.  The whole is pieced together from a variety of public appearances and intimate self-interviews, interspersed with the work she is talking about, laying out the three phases of all art: imagination, creation, and sharing.  She was adept at all three, and died just the month after this film’s American premiere, after innumerable career appreciations including an honorary Academy Award.  The Criterion Collection is bringing out a boxed DVD set of her complete works, and much of it is now available on the Channel.  If you’re not familiar with Varda’s work, this final film is a good place to start, with other highlights noted in this NYT article.

One Varda film I wanted to re-see was not among the Criterion offerings, but I found it elsewhere and here repeat my earlier review, since it may be your very best point of entry to her work:  “Whether or not you’re already a fan of Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners & I and The Beaches of Agnès, or all the other films of her 60-year career, you ought to see Faces Places (MC-95, Kanopy), a thoroughly charming and characteristic collaboration between the 89-year old doyenne of the New Wave and a young French street-artist named JR.  He has a photo booth van in which they drive around to villages (as in the French title, Visages Villages), and invite people they meet into the booth, which immediately produces large-scale portraits.  When JR finds a surface he likes – abandoned house fronts, sides of barns, water towers, etc. etc. – he and his crew paste up huge images of local appeal.  Then Agnès films the reactions of the locals, as she and JR banter along.  The result is a miracle of delight and substance, a roadtrip into the heart and soul of France.”

Agnès Varda’s body of work is too big for me to encompass, but I am happy to visit or revisit for as long as this stunning resource is available.  Starting with a couple films I’d never seen before, I will follow up from time to time with more explorations of her oeuvre.  Daguerreotypes (1975) reminded me of a Frederick Wiseman film like In Jackson Heights in its fly-on-the-wall observation of a neighborhood.  But while his approach is analytic and self-effacing, its sociological arguments conveyed only by the editing and sequencing of scenes, her approach is warmer, more artistic and personal, with much more attention to visual and sound design.  This is literally the story of the Paris street where she lived for forty years or so, Rue Daguerre; she made it during the infancy of her son, when she wanted to stay close to home.  We come to know all the mom & pop shopkeepers on the street, from butchers and bakers to hairdressers and clocksmiths, plus instructors of driving and the accordion.  We learn where they came from, how they met, how long they’ve been there, but mostly we just observe the mingling life of the street.  A local performance by a magician provides an entertaining counterpoint to the daily grind, in this memorable portrait of a time and a place now long gone.

Earlier I wrote a bit about Varda and The World of Jacques Demy, her homage to her husband’s films, but now I’ve caught up with her earlier treatment of his life, Jacquot of Nantes (1991), which I absolutely loved, a beautiful portrait of the filmmaker as child, adolescent, and young man (played by three well-matched young actors), from the time he caught the storytelling bug till the day he reached film school.  As the film was being made, Demy was dying of AIDS and writing up his childhood memories, which Varda filmed meticulously in the exact Nantes garage where he grew up.  She mixes b&w footage with color, interspersing brief clips from his films to indicate how his childhood memories were transmuted there (e.g. the auto mechanic protagonist of Umbrellas of Cherbourg).  She also includes documentary footage of Demy himself in his final year, for an unflinching look at mortality in the midst of memories of growing up.  Like so many of her films, this is like nothing you’ve ever seen, and better than you could imagine.

In closing out this post, I want to recommend two very appealing Criterion Channel collections.  “Christo and Jeanne-Claude” recapitulates what was perhaps my most successful film program ever at the Clark, an all-day marathon of five Maysles brothers’ documentaries about Christo projects, during the two weeks when “The Gates” were installed in Central Park.   When their film about that project was completed by another filmmaker and released in 2007, I also showed that.  In this collection, I got my first chance to see Walking on Water (MC-63), about “The Floating Piers,” Christo’s 2016 project on an Italian lake.  Both the project and the film are typically appealing, but lack the presence and involvement of both Jeanne-Claude and the Maysles, whom Christo had outlived.  So if you’re new to this collection, start either with the first or with The Gates.

“Directed by Albert Brooks” is another collection I strongly recommend (with some urgency, since I think it will disappear at the end of October).  Lost in America is my all-time favorite Albert Brooks film, but I took the opportunity to re-watch Mother (1997, MC-76), which held up very well.  Brooks plays his usual neurotic self, as a sci-fi novelist who goes home after a second divorce to find out where his life went wrong, taking up residence in his recreated bedroom from high school, and trying to come to grips with his relationship to his mother, played tartly and sweetly by Debbie Reynolds, who is both truthful and funny.