The ultimate Criterion

Reverting from my recent evaluations of streaming subscriptions, I’ve gone back to thinking of the Criterion Channel as the most essential, while wondering whether it’s really necessary to have Netflix or Hulu all the time, and deciding to save money by toggling on and off from month to month.  Criterion is certainly the most curated of all streaming channels, with the broadest mix of old films and a choice selection of new.  This is one channel where there’s always something to tune into, if you like to think while you watch.  Some people don’t, and that’s okay too.  There’s plenty for just plain looking.
 
What follows, if you click on the “Read more” button, is my summary of several months’ viewing on the Criterion Channel.  I confess it’s not for everybody, but more for hardcore film buffs, who have or are contemplating a subscription to Criterion.  (Note that the free library streaming channel Kanopy also has many of these titles, and some can be found on other streaming channels such as HBO Max.)

 
As for “just plain looking,” take the Deborah Kerr collection for example (even though the whole of it is no longer on the channel).  I initially took advantage to watch a Criterion restoration of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943, MRQE-94!), the Powell-Pressburger military satire/romance that Churchill tried to ban in the midst of WWII.  Kerr plays the red-haired dream girl of the title character, played by Roger Livesey, at three stages of his military career, with Anton Walbrook as his German counterpart from the Boer War through the first world war to the beginnings of the second.  That led me to some Kerr films I hadn’t seen, such as The Sundowners (thumbs up) and Bonjour Tristesse (forgettable).
 
By the time I got around to re-watching Black Narcissus (1947, MRQE-89), the larger Deborah Kerr collection had been phased out, but the channel retained a good selection of Powell-Pressburger films (by itself an excellent inducement to a trial subscription).  Kerr is the Sister Superior in a remote convent in the Himalayas, in what was once the local strongman’s harem.  The clarity of the mountain air, and the natives’ embrace of sensuality (one of them an unlikely portrayal by Jean Simmons), unhinge the minds of each of the nuns, in one way or another.  The intense Technicolor and vertiginous angles of Jack Clayton’s cinematography are legendary. 
 
Then in a Wendy Hiller collection, I caught up with Major Barbara (1941), which happened to include Deborah Kerr’s very first screen appearance.  This film, made in London under the Blitz, was the first of three that Gabriel Pascal produced and directed of Bernard Shaw plays.  Purveying Shavian wit, the cast is outstanding.  Hiller is the title character, an idealistic Salvation Army leader, and Rex Harrison is her Greek scholar love interest.  Robert Morley plays her munitions tycoon father, and Robert Newton is a rough soul she tries to save.
 
Flowing naturally from one curated collection to another, I rewatched an old Powell/Pressburger favorite starring Wendy Hiller and Roger Livesey, I Know Where I’m Going (1945), which I remember my mother alerting me to in the old days of the Either/Or Video Archive, and which I subsequently showed at the Clark while I was programming films there.  Hiller is a determined young woman setting off to marry her rich fiancé on an island in the Scottish Hebrides, where she runs into stormy weather, both climatological and emotional.  Don’t miss this delightful film.
 
Which led me to another enjoyable film from The Archers, as Powell and Pressburger were known.  A Canterbury Tale (1944) is a humorous mystery with a documentary feel, as the old cathedral town becomes a staging ground for Allied forces before D-Day.  Shiela Sims is a “landgirl” come to work on a farm, when she encounters two sergeants, one American and one British, and together they solve an inconsequential mystery that leads each of them on his or her own personal pilgrimage to the holy shrine.
 
From the same period, I took the opportunity to re-watch George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944) before it left the channel at the end of the month.  This Victorian-era melodrama earned Ingrid Bergman her first Best Actress Oscar, with Charles Boyer as the villainous husband conspiring to drive her mad, and Joseph Cotton as the Scotland Yard detective trying to save her, with the fillip of Angela Lansbury as the tart young maid in her first film appearance.
 
In another collection, titled “Between Us Girls: Bonds Between Women,” I’d already seen and liked many of the films, so I started with some recent ones I had not seen.
 
Fourteen (2020, MC-79) is Dan Sallitt’s Rohmer-esque portrait of the friendship between two women who’ve been close since middle school (hence the title), as they negotiate their twenties in Brooklyn, juggling jobs and boyfriends, but relying on each other.  Or rather, one is relied upon (and played with understated authority by Tallie Medel) and the other is repeatedly reliant (played with intense but fragile beauty and wit by Norma Kuhling).  They work jobs in elementary education or social work, and their relationships with men are more erratic than their steady connection, which starts to fray as time passes faster and faster (except when it nearly stands still).  Reminiscent of the indie “mumblecore” movement, this film is rather surprising in coming from a much older film critic and occasional writer-director.  I quite liked it.
 
Haifaa Al-Mansour, director of the very endearing Saudi film Wadjda, returns with The Perfect Candidate (2021, MC-71), about a female doctor who becomes one of the first women to drive her own car in Arabia, and finds herself involved in a municipal election, in order to have the road to her hospital paved.  She has two sisters who join her campaign, while their musician father is away on tour.  Their mother, who was a singer, is recently dead, and each misses her in an individual way.  There is a naturalness to the acting, and a strangeness to a fundamentalist society in the modern world, which make this film continuously interesting if not quite the delight of Wadjda.
 
The protagonist of Hive (2021, MC-71) also pays a price for being a female driver in a Muslim society, in her case Kosovo.  Her husband is among the missing from the war for independence from Serbia, and though she has taken up his practice of beekeeping, that does not provide enough support for her two children and disabled father-in-law, so she initiates a collective of presumptive widows to make and market a traditional red pepper sauce, which further irritates and alienates the males of the community.  I doubt that I’ve ever seen an Albanian film before, and certainly not one with a female director and such a strong lead performance, based a real woman’s story.  It won three major awards at Sundance, and definitely deserves a higher Metacritic rating and a place on my list of the best films of last year.
 
Besides these new films, the “Between Us Girls” collection offered the opportunity to watch a recent epic about female friendship.  Happy Hour (2016, MC-87) is an earlier film by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, now well-known for Drive My Car, quadruplely-nominated for this year’s Oscars.  It follows four longtime friends in their thirties, as each negotiates work and relationships.  Hamaguchi straddles the line between drama and documentary, like Mike Leigh workshopping the story for a prolonged period with his actors, mostly nonprofessional, to give the characters depth and resonance as well as lived-in naturalness.  The four women are nicely individuated, as well as integrated into the group dynamic and immersed in their work and family lives.  It’s pleasure and an education to sit in on their talks, to meet over drinks or coffee, to visit a hot springs, or attend an arts workshop or reading, in what feels like real time but reads as continuously revealing.  The seaside city of Kobe serves as a character in its own right.  At 317 minutes, this might have been better as a six-episode series than a terribly long sit in a theater, but by streaming you can watch it at your own pace.
 
Another collection that attracted my interest was “Talking Pictures: Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz.”  Among the selections, I’d tracked down Dragonwyck and The Ghost & Mrs. Muir elsewhere, and wrote them up here.  Much earlier, I trashed People Will Talk and praised All About Eve.  Now I re-watched the other Oscar winner from his peak around 1950, A Letter to Three Wives (1949), which held its own against Eve.  It’s a story of three Hudson River housewives, who together receive a letter as they are about to take a group of underprivileged kids on a picnic cruise, from a never-seen fourth woman who claims to have run away with one of their husbands.  They’re played well by Jeanne Crain, Ann Southern, and especially Linda Darnell, as each reflects on her marriage in flashbacks and wonders if the straying husband could be hers.  Kirk Douglas is one hubby, a high-school English teacher; Paul Douglas is the tycoon who “saved” Darnell from the wrong side of the tracks.  The whole is quite witty and engaging as a suburban satire.
 
Sandwiched between his two Best Director films came the outspoken noir No Way Out (1950), which is shocking in its explicit exploration of racism, in which nearly every slur against Blacks comes out of the mouth of Richard Widmark, as a violently prejudiced hoodlum, shot in a hold-up.  The repeated N-word is just the beginning of his racist bile; these days this film would require a trigger-warning, but in its day must have been quite revelatory.  Sidney Poitier, in his first screen role, is an intern at the county hospital, called upon to care for Widmark and his brother.  When the latter dies, the former embarks on a scheme of vengeance.  Linda Darnell is the dead man’s widow, and wavers between ingrained racism and admiration for the Black doctor and the white supervisor who supports him.  She’s not an actress I ever took note of before, but at least under Mankiewicz’s direction shows some chops.
 
Mankiewicz’s excellent Julius Caesar was not included in this collection, but I took the opportunity to watch his Cleopatra (1963), which I had never seen.  It’s bloated and unconvincing, but impressive as spectacle, even though it sunk a studio and derailed his career.  Elizabeth Taylor is risible as the Egyptian queen, and Richard Burton not much better as Mark Antony, though Rex Harrison makes a good Julius Caesar.  But you have to admire the pre-CGI logistics of the massive production.
 
Guys and Dolls (1955) was another film I hadn’t seen before, with Marlon Brando incongruously but piquantly cast as Sky Masterson and Frank Sinatra almost as odd as Nathan Detroit, in this musical based on Damon Runyon stories.  Jean Simmons is delicious in the Major Barbara-like role of a Salvation Army leader who falls for Brando, and Vivian Blaine reprises her Broadway role as the showgirl pining for Sinatra.  I quite enjoyed the film without believing a minute of it.
 
After reading a couple of magazine articles on Lorraine Hansbury, I realized I’d never seen A Raisin in the Sun (1961), which remains a filmed play that hardly opens out from the confines of a cramped Chicago apartment, but dynamic enough to be considered a classic worth watching today.  Not just the story but almost all the actors came directly from the play, the first all-Black production on Broadway.  Sidney Poitier is a chauffeur who longs to go into business by opening a liquor store.  Ruby Dee is his supportive wife, Claudia McNeil his disapproving mother, and Diana Sands a sister with her eyes on medical school.  The family is to receive a $10,000 insurance settlement on the death of the father, and each member has different ideas of how to use the money, setting up cross-currents of conflict.
 
Indicative of the amusing or edifying comparisons you can program for yourself out of the vast Criterion catalogue, one night I entertained myself with a father/daughter double feature.  First I caught Bruce Dern in Family Plot (1976, MC-79), Alfred Hitchcock’s final film and more comic than most of his work.  Dern is paired with Barbara Harris as a fake psychic working scams on the rich, when they encounter a much more dangerous couple, professional kidnappers and jewel thieves, played by Karen Black and William Devane.  The film is sprightly as the Master of Suspense’s swan song, though hardly a classic.  Laura Dern’s first starring role was in Smooth Talk (1985, MC-74), as a bored and restless 15-year-old awakening to her own sexuality and feuding with her mother (Mary Kay Place).  At home alone, she has an exciting but (un)wanted visitor in a James-Dean-wannabe played by Treat Williams, with whom she performs a dance of attraction and repulsion.  This was the first feature directed by Joyce Chopra, whose feminist documentaries I’d followed beforehand, so I relished it at the time, and the film definitely holds up all these years later.
 
Speaking of documentaries, they are well-represented on Criterion.   I recently watched three that illuminated corners of the Black experience.  Strange Victory (1948) by blacklisted filmmaker Leo Hurwitz contrasts America’s victory over fascism in World War II with the experience of Black soldiers returning to homegrown racism and repression.  This unusual Eisenstein-like film essay remains powerful and relevant today.  Altogether gentler in approach are two worthy films by Stanley Nelson.  I’d appreciated his documentaries about Jonestown, the Black Panthers, and most especially Freedom Summer, so I took advantage of a Criterion collection of his work to watch two I hadn’t seen before.  A Place of Our Own (2004) is a highly-personal account of a longtime Black vacation enclave on Martha’s Vineyard, which is illuminating in itself but shades into a personal reckoning with his own father.  Tell Them We Are Rising (2017) traces the history of historically Black colleges and universities all the way from the prehistory of Southern laws against teaching slaves to read, to today’s vibrant HBCU campuses.  Both are worth seeing, though not quite as essential as his others, including the Oscar-nominated Attica (2021), which I haven’t yet had the chance to see. 
 
Well, this has gone on long enough to convince myself, if not you, that a subscription to the Criterion Channel is essential for a serious film viewer, with so many different periods, types, and nationalities of cinema to explore.