The Black Cat

Boris Karloff, a cat, and an unidentified ex in The Black Cat (dir. Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934)

Where to begin? Maybe with the names of Lugosi's and Karloff's characters: Dr. Vitus Werdegast and Hjalmar Poelzig. They are old friends turned bitter enemies who play out their final confrontation with the lives of a young honeymooning couple as the stakes. Lugosi's Werdegast has spent the last fifteen years of his life in a prison, after being betrayed by Poelzig, who has also taken away the love of Werdegast's life. Poelzig is an architect and war criminal, whose ultramodern mansion is built over the battlefield where men died as a result of his treachery. As if that weren't enough, he is also now a practitioner of the black arts. The mansion is rigged for self-destruction, as though Poelzig knows that his existence cannot sustain itself, that one day his evils must collapse in on him in House-of-Usher fashion. (Of all the Universal Poe films from the '30s starring Lugosi, this is by far the best, and the one that has least to do with Poe, though there are tonal and thematic elements from more than one text in addition to the title story.) The set design, more than any other single feature, accounts for much of the film's alluring strangeness: it was a stroke of genius to make Poelzig's house a futuristic palace rather than a moldy dungeon. The continuous music score by Heinz Roemheld creates the effect of a silent film. Speaking of music, blink and you'll miss John Carradine as the organist in Poelzig's Satanist cult.

Murders in the Rue Morgue

Bela Lugosi in Murders in the Rue Morgue (dir. Robert Florey, 1932)

Lugosi's curly hair as Dr. Mirakle (rhymes with grackle) makes him look like a sinister hybrid Marx Brother. He's a sociopathic doctor who for some reason works for a carnival, traveling around looking for women of a suitable blood type to mate with his intelligent gorilla, "Erik." (I just noticed that if you subtract Erik from Mirakle, you're left with mal.) Aside from how delightfully lurid Lugosi is, the one thing that makes this film a must-see is Karl Freund's cinematography. Almost every frame is an autonomous portal into mystery, from matte shots of Paris rooftops to close-ups of extras in the crowd. Look at this Fuseli-esque arrangement of Sidney Fox, post-ape-attack:



And I have to include a detail shot of Mirakle's stationery letterhead:

The Raven

Irene Ware and Raine Bennett satisfy the great public demand for interpretive dance based on Edgar Allen Poe in The Raven (dir. Louis Friedlander [Lew Landers], 1935)

"Yes ... I like to torrturrre!" The Poe-obsessed Dr. Vollin exemplifies the qualities that made Lugosi so horrifying: a repellent sexual selfishness that erupts into gleeful sadism, filtered through truly compelling bad acting. Dr. Vollin builds elaborate working models of the terrors in Poe's stories, including a full-size pit and pendulum into which he straps a virtuous old judge. There's also an early version of the trash-compactor room from Star Wars. Karloff stumbles around evoking mild sympathy as a two-bit criminal who hopes that Dr. Vollin will reverse the plastic-surgery damage he has intentionally done to his face if he does his bidding. Inspiration for Two-Face in Batman? Trivial highlight: the tabletop horseracing game that Lugosi and his dinner guests play.

How to Draw a Bunny

Still shot of Ray Johnson in How to Draw a Bunny (dir. John W. Walter, 2002).

Engrossing documentary about artist Ray Johnson and his dramatic "final project": his suicide by drowning in 1995. Interviews with Chuck Close, Roy Lichtenstein, Christo, Judith Malin, et al.

The Good Shepherd

Matt Damon in The Good Shepherd (dir. Robert De Niro, 2006).

With The Good Shepherd, Robert De Niro has directed the best Francis Ford Coppola film since Apocalypse Now. Unfortunately, that's not necessarily saying much, and though this is really a lot better than, say, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Tucker: The Man and His Dream, or The Godfather III, it's trying to be as good as The Godfather II. (I will give it the benefit of the doubt that it knew better than even to try to be as good as The Godfather I). Why does it fail? Partly because you just can't make that kind of movie anymore, since part of what was so great about that kind of movie was that movies like them hadn't been made before. Partly because Matt Damon just doesn't look twenty years older than himself, and the effect is sort of like watching a little kid in a grown-up hat and shoes. Partly because a movie whose main idea is that organizations like the CIA and the Skull and Bones Society function together as conflicted expressions of men's inability to trust each other as friends is missing most of the bigger picture. And partly because that Eddie Redmayne guy who plays the son is so, so, so annoying. The intertwining past/present plot is handled pretty skillfully, but there are a lot of insufficiently differentiated supporting characters, many of whom don't end up being very important anyway. It's amusing to listen to Michael Gambon play a professor who mumbles drivel about good poetry being as pure as mathematics.

Knocked Up

Katherine Heigl and Leslie Mann in Knocked Up (dir. Judd Apatow, 2007).

Guest reviewer Jordan Davis renders my own commentary superfluous:

My haircutter told me for about a year and a half that I needed to see The Forty-Year-Old Virgin but when I did finally she was like, oh, that movie. I saw Knocked Up on opening night--not so much to have something to say to relieve my terminal awkwardness but to see what the guy with the best lines in 40YOV--Steve Carell sees a bookstore employee's thong poking out of her pants, says "There's something wrong with her underwear," and Rogen responds, "Yeah, they're not in my mouth"--could do as a lead.

What I should have done was stay home and watch DVDs of Undeclared. Rogen is okay, the ensemble of homely stoners is okay, the script has its moments, and it turns out I can watch just about anything with Paul Rudd in it, but. Katherine Heigl is unpleasant as the E! producer-turned-talent who makes the heartwarmingly implausible decision not to terminate her pregnancy with a destitute man-boobed web designer. The plot points read like Syd Field workbook examples. Worst: no memorable zingers. Saving graces: club bouncer Craig Robinson gets a solid monologue on why he won't be letting Heigl and her older sister behind the ropes, and Kristen Wiig is very good as an envious TV executive.

I realize I'm not the audience, Harold Ramis-cameo to the contrary. If you're heading into freshman comp in the fall, you're going to need material for an essay on reproductive rights. Your B plus paper is already here. The movie, though, is a B minus.

The Prestige

Cats and hats: The Prestige (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2006).

There are three parts to a magic trick:

1. The Pledge: you show the audience an empty hat.
2. The Turn: you pull a rabbit out of the hat.
3. The Prestige: you have to ... somehow ... get the rabbit back in the hat?

I didn't really understand this movie, I guess.

Fallen Angel

Venetian blinds out of control: Dana Andrews and Linda Darnell in Fallen Angel (dir. Otto Preminger, 1945).

Preminger's follow-up to Laura has all the ingredients of classic noir, including gorgeous cinematography, a powerful soundtrack, and some jaw-dropping circumventions of the Breen Censorship Office's rigid code (a spent-looking couple lying in the same bed, for example, a prolonged steamy kiss, and a clear instance of butt-grabbing). Dana Andrews is great as the unscrupulous drifter who comes up with a plan to marry an old maid (Alice Faye) and bilk her out of her inheritance so he can win over the true object of his desires, the hot 'n' slutty waitress Stella (Linda Darnell). There are excellent supporting performances from Anne Revere, Charles Bickford, John Carradine, Olin Holland, Percy Kilbride (Pa Kettle), Bruce Cabot (of King Kong fame), and an uncredited Dorothy Adams.



HOT, indeed.

The only thing, to my mind, that keeps this picture from attaining true top-of-the-line classic noir status is the plot resolution, which requires us to buy a substantial change of sentiments in the main character without much motivation, and--here I will try not to reveal anything specific--misses an opportunity for a much more compelling whodunnit payoff, which would also provide an antidote to the first problem.

Strange Illusion

Jimmy Lydon in Strange Illusion (dir. Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945).

This variation on Hamlet is one of those films where a low budget and bad acting cannot alone account for the peculiar stilted and unreal quality of the mise en scène--there must be genius involved. Ulmer, you'll recall, was a designer for Max Reinhardt's theater and an assistant to Murnau. He became known for his ability to film movies on a six-day schedule (although Strange Illusion took thirteen). His masterpiece is arguably the hard-noir Detour (1944); strong cases could also be made for The Black Cat (1934) and a handful of others. It's unlikely that anyone would claim that position for Strange Illusion, but there is a kind of pleasure in it that few other films offer. It's tempting to imagine that David Lynch was influenced by its weirdly slow cadences and unheimlich staging. Lydon's character Paul Cartwright has a lot of similarities to Kyle MacLachlan's Jeffrey Beaumont in Blue Velvet, for example. These two films share an oblique indulgence in Hardy-Boys-style gee-whiz mystery hijinx, in which the intrepid young sleuth-in-the-making channels his fascination with the dark criminal underworld through his murky "father issues." The dream sequences that frame the story are the most obvious stylistic indices of Ulmer's ability to think beyond the merely narrative elements of the theme, but there is enough psychoanalytic skullduggery and Oedipal delirium throughout to maintain a general sense of surreality. Warren Williams is the consummate dastard as a usurping Claudius figure, and Sally Eilers is his Gertrude, whom everyone refers to (including her children) as "The Princess." Cherish the scene where Lydon breaks spontaneously over the phone into forties white teen hipster slang ("Hello vixen, what's mixin'?") as the wiretapping villains listen in in square bewilderment.

Cotton Comes to Harlem

Raymond St. Jacques as Coffin Ed Johnson and Godfrey Cambridge as Gravedigger Jones in Cotton Comes to Harlem (dir. Ossie Davis, 1970).

Adapted from Chester Himes' novel. Davis directs it as a weird mixture of blaxploitation slapstick and gritty police drama. Redd Foxx has a supporting role as a proto-Fred-Sanford junk dealer named Uncle Bud. He has a "moving snapshot" bit that we simply can't talk about because no commentary seems appropriate. The footage of 1970 Harlem gleams with reverence throughout, lingering on the storefronts and market stands and nightclub neon. As if nodding to a source for its own oddball aesthetic, at one point the camera swoops across the marquis of a theater showing Putney Swope.

Criss Cross

Burt Lancaster and Yvonne De Carlo in Criss Cross (dir. Robert Siodmak, 1949).

Now this is a noir. Fatalistic, snarly melodrama played for maximum tailspin effect. Dan Duryea is his typical heel self, and even though the film's in black and white, you get the feeling his suit is yellow. A good Miklos Rosza score, and taut cinematography by Franz Planer, who breaks the Los Angeles background up into multiple diagonal swaths: modernist architecture, elevated trains, hilly sidewalks. The suddenness with which Lancaster's Steve is sucked into the crime plot never feels contrived; even though he's come off as a big decent lug in most ways up to that point, as soon as it happens it feels sickeningly inevitable. The corruption that sets in from then on makes emotional sense not only as a consequence of his involvement with the criminal element, but as an outgrowth of character traits that, in retrospect, have been visible all along: bullheaded selfishness and embittered entitlement. Everyone warns him that De Carlo's Anna is all wrong for him, but by the end it's clear: they are made for each other.

Ministry of Fear

Publicity still of Ray Milland and Marjorie Reynolds in Ministry of Fear (dir. Fritz Lang, 1944).

Much of Lang's genius for evoking atmospheric dread in crowded public settings as well as dark stairwells is on evidence in this pleasant-enough diversion, which would probably be more impressive if it weren't clearly an attempt to mimic the formula of The 39 Steps and other of Hitchcock's early thrillers--an attempt that is about 65% successful. It also doesn't help that one senses some material has been ruthlessly and clumsily edited out. I was excited to see Dan Duryea in the title credits (he's insanely great in Lang's Scarlet Street from the following year), but he's only in the film for a total of five minutes or so. He does have one nice little bit that comes when you've given up on him, however. The most memorable scene is the very last, about which I will only say that it tries to be funny and succeeds, but not in the way it was meant to. Ray Milland's delivery of the final line deserves an award for sublime (mis-)timing.

Mon Oncle

Jacques Tati between worlds in Mon Oncle (dir. Jacques Tati, 1958).

There's a good-naturedness in Mon Oncle that overrides any bitter satirical taste: even the insidious automated modernist home is presented as a quaint little domicile with a winsome personality underneath all the buzzing gadgets and pretentious veneer. That personality rears up at one point in the form of two huge round windows lit up at night and animated by two watchful silhouetted heads into a pair of cartoon eyes. Conversely, M. Hulot's own ramshackle apartment building is homely in more than one sense. It's an eyesore, made appealing only by the human community that thrives in and around it. Hulot's neighborhood may be romanticized in some ways, but it's not a utopia: the people there are just as silly and hapless as the nouveau riche across the crumbling dividers (in the scene above, Hulot reaches down with a gingerly hand to replace a brick he's accidentally knocked loose, restoring a smidgeon of order to the rubble), and dogs run through the streets peeing all over everything. On the other side, the shiny cars and factory complexes may be sterile, but you can tell Tati loves their lines. And during a generally painful party at Hulot's sister's air-conditioned nightmare, the bourgeois plant manager goes eagerly to work, nice clothes and all, repairing a broken water pipe in the garden so that the horrible stylized fish in the cement pond can spout water again. He climbs with a smile out of the muddy pit he has dug and declares proudly, at least it works again. Like Hulot with his brick, he's constructive in the face of entropy.

The Criterion Collection DVD also features L'ecole des facteurs (School for Postmen), a magnificently pointless 1947 Tati short with a dance scene I will store in my memory against bleak moods.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

Keira Knightley and Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (dir. Gore Verbinski, 2007).

The droll verbosities and narrative languors of the Pirates films (especially the last two) are not, as one might assume, out of sync with the relentless action sequences and special effects. This contrast is in fact the most successful gesture made by the series, a shrewdly calculated alienation device that will gratify enough of an otherwise uninterested audience to make up for the truly alienated contingent, a good portion of whom are too young at any rate to walk out of the theater unescorted. The least ethical thing about the films, in fact, is that the younger audience is so heavily targeted in the first place, considering the nightmarishly realistic quality of some of the violence: children are hanged, women are shot in the face, villages explode. Young viewers in the theater I was in were visibly disturbed.

Taken together, as indeed they were filmed together, the previous film (Dead Man's Chest) and this one form a single cinematic epic, complete with the requisite machinery: a controlling goddess, ocean voyages, great battles, monsters, trip to the underworld, catalogs of troops, the hero's nostos or return, etc. But this epic also strains toward the conditions of mock epic, its allegorical elements constantly redirected from the standard themes of heroism, virtue, love, and so forth, toward a weakly-conceived, self-reflexive acknowledgment of the franchise's roots in a corporate theme-park ride. The backwardness of this derivation is perhaps the most interesting thing about the concept: its novelty lies precisely in the fact that the ride spawned the story rather than the other way around, and the convincingness of the backtracking invention almost works against it. How many viewers of the current generation even know or care about this paradox? It's the boomers in the audience who laugh when the dog brings out the keys.

For the mock-epic approach to bear full fruit, there has to be a further deformation of the amusement-park trope, and we see faint glimmers of such a tendency in the Pirates films' half-hearted gestures toward political commentary--the inclusion of history in small doses, the imperialist East India Company being the bad guys and all, their chief villain proclaiming that "the immaterial is now immaterial" and that betrayal "is just good business." Disney's complicity in this capitalist history remains (surprise) underexplored, beyond some highly suggestive dreamwork in the form of reduplicated Johnny Depps and the aforementioned conspicuities of animatronic derivation.

All this said, did I enjoy it? Alas, yes. I am trying hard to convince myself that one major plot development involving Keira Knightley is a sly Kathy Acker allusion. I applaud the shameless casting of Keith Richards as Captain Teague. Like everyone else in the universe, I am defenseless against the addled charm of Depp's witty Jack. There is one shamefully inept moment, however, which comes at the very end of the film, after all the credits have rolled, and which I have to believe was added at the insistence of studio hacks: a moment which is not only saccharine and flat, but which serves to ruin any sense of romantic tension the closing moments of the story might have created. It suggests--and this may be a foregone conclusion for many--that there is no point in further sequels.

Cheyenne Autumn

James Stewart, Elizabeth Allen's legs, and Arthur Kennedy in Cheyenne Autumn (dir. John Ford, 1964).

"By golly, I did know her in Wichita."

Dillinger

Warren Oates in Dillinger (dir. John Milius, 1973).

An underrated gangster film. In addition to Oates, cast members include Harry Dean Stanton, Michelle Phillips, Cloris Leachman, Steve Kanaly, Geoffrey Lewis, Richard Dreyfuss, and--as Dillinger's nemesis, G-man Melvin Purvis--the incomparable Ben Johnson. The romanticization of the gangsters is an effective part of the film's theme, though it's a bit underdeveloped. It never quite breaks all the way through from knowing self-reference to actual insight, nor does it take much care to avoid gratuitous sensationalism in the process of commenting on gratuitous sensationalism. Some well-done newspaper montage bits.

The Racket

Robert Ryan and Lizabeth Scott in The Racket (dir. John Cromwell, 1951).

When Howard Hughes took over RKO, he remade this film, the silent version of which he had also produced in 1928. It's a lackluster hodgepodge for the most part. In addition to Cromwell, Mel Ferrer, Tay Garnett, Nicholas Ray, and Sherman Todd all directed sequences at Hughes' command. Robert Ryan acts like he thinks he's in a good movie, as does William Talman (who went on to play the DA in the Perry Mason TV series), but Robert Mitchum and Lizabeth Scott make little effort to hide their boredom. I'm pretty sure Mitchum actually stifles some yawns. The best part is noir scholar Eddie Muller's engaging commentary on the Warner DVD: his ongoing observations on what a mess the film is are interesting in and of themselves, and when he occasionally points out things that are well done, it's almost exhilarating.

Dick

Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams in Dick (dir. Andrew Fleming, 1999).

The concept--a cross between Clueless, Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, and All the President's Men--is promising, and there are some pleasures here. The leads are appealing, if not quite at the peak of their talents. Dan Hedaya is a funny Nixon, though it would have been better if he'd worn a fake nose or something, because you can't ever stop thinking "that's not Nixon, that's Dan Hedaya." Will Ferrell and Bruce McCulloch as Woodward and Bernstein: brilliant, right? Except that it doesn't really work. Ultimately, the flick's a flop. Still, it's interesting symptomatically as a Clinton-era revisionist historical fantasy, in which the conservative ogres of the imperial past can be safely clobbered by even the virtuously shallow nymphs of late capitalist liberalism (the heroines are nineties girls through and through). If you put ironic quotation marks around the whole production, it's actually amusing in a grim way. But you really do have to put them there yourself, I'm afraid.

Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot

Nathalie Pascaud and Jacques Tati in Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot [M. Hulot's Holiday] (dir. Jacques Tati, 1953).

This film is often characterized as plotless, which isn't exactly true. It's storyless, certainly, but there's plenty of plot: the entirety of the film is a perfectly shaped series of linked emotional experiences, with its flawless transitions between successive intensifications of lyrical-pastoral slapstick vignettery. The culmination is the climactic sequence in which M. Hulot shoots off a shed full of fireworks, waking everyone at the seaside resort except for the lovely Martine, who in one brief shot lies angelically in her bed, her slumbering body lit up by the flashes of skyrockets through her window. This anarchic carnival of explosions retroactively transforms the serenity of every scene before it, and Martine's imperturbable peace, in turn, tempers this transformation, preserving the meticulous orchestration of balances and counterbalances that takes what is at base no more than a mobile arrangement of trifles and makes it feel like a profound philosophical sonata.

Included on the Criterion DVD: René Clément's 1936 short Soigne ton gauche, featuring Tati as a young farmhand who consults a how-to manual during his first boxing match.

In Old California

Check out the seahorse cutouts on the barroom doors: John Wayne in In Old California (dir. William C. McGann, 1942).

Most of this is standard-issue Hollywood oater--and there's nothing wrong with that! What's special is Wayne as an almost dandyish Boston pharmacist (he modeled the role after his father, who was a druggist in Iowa). Albert Dekker is a fine and hapless villain (Harvey Korman is basically impersonating Dekker in Blazing Saddles), and the two main comic supports, Patsy Kelly and Edgar Kennedy, are very winning. Kelly's Helga takes down her laundry by shooting the clothespins, and Kennedy's Bottom-esque Kegs claims that he's generally "gentle as a mooing dove," but when his chronic toothache starts acting up, he's "liable to throw you off a cliff"--the pain turns him into a "long-haired sea lion" who goes around "roaring." Wayne: "Roaring?" Kennedy: "ROARING!"