Sunday 24 January 2010
Friday 22 January 2010
Les Bas Fonds-1936
It is one of the curiosities in the history of cinema that Jean Renoir who has been busy making Une Partie de Campagne left it for directing a film, theme of which was apparently against his grain. Une Partie is like a painting of his father come to life where nature takes hand in determining the life of a nubile girl in the flush of her adolescence and her first love. The lovers surrender to nature and to their emotions, and go on to live naturally miserable lives apart. If we look at his father’s paintings we see similar tableaux of lovers with certain poses, foliage, sun and shade. But he left it for filming The Lower Depths in 1936.
Whereas The Lower Depths is a closed- in world bearing the superscription as in Dante’s Hell. (Despair is the key that is etched on the souls of its denizens.) What had the Gorky’s gutter play to wean him from the Maupassant story?
In 1936 the rise of Hitler in Germany and the Popular Front in France created within the French Left a new sense of solidarity with the Soviet Union. In that context the Russian immigrant producer Alexander Kamenka asked Jean Renoir to direct a film of Maxim Gorky’s play The Lower Depths. Renoir accepted the offer and before agreeing to take on the project, Renoir insisted that the film be set in France (not Russia), and that some drastic changes be made to the plot. The most significant change was the ending; the tragic denouement in Gorki’s play was replaced with a happier ending, in keeping with the mood of the time.
Trivia: Renoir was obliged to write to Gorki to receive permission for these alterations to the story, which was duly given (although Gorki died a few months before the film was released).
Plot
The story revolves around two characters that represent two ends of the society. One is titled and the other a common thief. The baron (Jouvet ) has stolen 30,000 rubles from the ministry and lost it gambling. Pépel (Gabin) has come to rob the baron’s luxurious house and finds nothing worth stealing there. The baron, returning home in a suicidal mood, interrupts Pépel’s theft. Here in their first encounter, each opens the eyes of the other to the possibility of change. Each glimpses a new possibility, the baron, a life without things; Pépel a life without thefts.
Soon the baron appears at the flophouse. The baron soon finds himself in the swim of things there. If thousand- ruble game in the casino had turned his world upside down he finds life there: he can still indulge his passion in the three-kopek game in the flophouse. If he has lost his class he has found his life. He sheds luxury and prestige without regret. When Pépel finds life in the lower depths unbearable and proposes to leave the flophouse, he asks the baron what he will do. The baron replies without hesitation, “I’ll stay here.” He has no desire to go. Unlike Gorky’s baron, his descent from aristocracy has not been degrading but liberating.
After Pépel leaves the baron’s carrying the bronze horses he steals some apples, then gives them to a child and tells him, “And if someday someone tells you Pépel is a thief, you’ll set them straight.” The film ends with homage to Chaplin's Modern Times as the lovers walk off down the road of life.
Acting:
The film is apart from its dark theme is carried by the acting of the two main characters. The Gabin-Jouvet pairing is a masterstroke, with both actors providing fine performances that are charged with conviction and humanity. Despite their different backgrounds and approaches to their art, the two actors complement each other perfectly, the down-trodden and passionate proletarian played by Gabin making a poignant contrast with Jouvet’s ruined but nonchalant aristocrat. The scene where the two characters meet and, realising the absurdity of the barriers which separate them, become friends is one of the enduring moments of the film, and is certainly in keeping with the ethos of the Popular Front. The large supporting cast gives the film its richness and colour, with notable performances from Suzy Prim, Robert Le Vigan.
Junie Astor as Natasha
While Gabin and Jouvet were excellent there was much to be desired in the acting of Natasha. Dramatically she plays a prominent role in the film, necessary for both the death of Kostylyov and Pépel’s escape from the lower depths. But her performance destroys almost every scene she is in. Renoir said of this, “She’s terrible, isn’t she? She was a friend of the producer. He asked me as a special favor to give her the part. I worked hard with her but it didn’t do much good.
“Some faces are beautiful, made for the camera. Some faces are not beautiful but interesting. But Junie Astor had a face that showed nothing to the camera. It is empty.”Renoir
“…the wonderful opening shot of the film: Jouvet stands upright, the only figure on screen, in the centre of the frame, silent but with an occasional superior smirk escaping him as his unseen superior rebukes him for embezzling ministry funds to pay off his gambling debts; and the camera swings round him first to the left and then further and further to the right finally to reveal his superior reflected in a mirror.
This single opening shot keys us to all the important features of the film: the priority given to star persona and performance; the degree to which the narrative differs from (adds to, opens out) Gorky's original play; and the significance of Renoir's camera style of this time, characterised by deep-focus depth-of-field, the moving camera, and the revelation of off-screen space, the world extending beyond the limits of the frame”(brightlights films.com- Ian Johnston)
Renoir and Kurosawa
Donald Richie calls Akira Kurosawa’s film of The Lower Depths a miracle of ensemble playing. In contrast Renoir makes of the play a vehicle for two fine actors, Louis Jouvet and Jean Gabin. The action of Kurosawa’s film occurs completely within the flophouse, as does the play, but less than half of Renoir’s Lower Depths takes place there. Still the flophouse remains, visually, the most interesting locale in the film, with its chiaroscuro lighting and dramatic shadows, its rough bricks, rude stairways, and old wooden posts that often divide the screen vertically or project diagonally across the frame and its length that lends itself so well to deep focus cinematography.
When Akira Kurosawa made his version of The Lower Depths in 1957 he had seen Renoir’s film. It was perhaps that which led him to try it himself. Unlike Renoir, Kurosawa follows Gorky almost scene for scene. In a style that resembles Renoir’s in its long takes and deep focus cinematography Kurosawa creates his flophouse as the locus of a world. But by the sheer vitality of the life in his film manages to overthrow the despair and pathos that permeate the play.
Kurosawa greatly admired Jean Renoir, thought him one of the greatest masters of cinema. The two met once in the 1970s, late in Renoir’s life when Kurosawa was in Los Angeles to receive an Academy Award and was invited to have dinner with the Renoirs. Kurosawa has written that his own decision to write an autobiography was prompted by reading Renoir’s My Life and My Films “and by the terrific impression Renoir left on me when I met him—the feeling that I would like to grow old in the same way he did.”
Kurosawa’s Lower Depths shows the power that could be achieved in cinema by staying close to the text and setting of Gorky’s work. Renoir did not see Kurosawa’s film until 1977. He watched it with great interest, then remarked, “That is a much more important film than mine.”
Although overshadowed by Renoir’s subsequent masterpieces (La Grande Illusion was made straight after this film), Les Bas-fonds is an impressive work, which, through its very evident humanity, remains a surprisingly modern film. Its wry comic touches have an ironic edge to them, a suggestion perhaps that Renoir might have preferred this to be a much darker work, in the vein of the poetic realists. This is also hinted at by the location filming which uses an almost neo-realist style to convey the grim reality of poverty. Noticeable also in this film is Renoir’s admiration for his two heroes of the silent era, Eric Von Stroheim and Chaplin.
A variant of the Lower Depths was made later where some of the Russian elements of the play were introduced that seems to have prevented the film from being a popular success. The film was well received by the critics, however, and was awarded the first Prix Louis Delluc in 1937.
Cast
* Jean Gabin - Wasska Pepel
* Louis Jouvet - The Baron
* Suzy Prim - Vassilissa
* Junie Astor - Natacha
* Jany Holt - Nastia
* Vladimir Sokoloff - Kostileff
Robert Le Vigan - L'Acteur; Camille Bert - Le Comte; René Génin - Le Vieillard; Paul Temps - Satine; Robert Ozanne - Jabot; Léon Larive - Felix, le domestique; Alex Allin; Maurice Baquet - Accordeoniste; André Gabriello - Le Commissaire; Lucien Mancini - Patron de la guinguette; Sylvain
Credit
Jacques Becker - First Assistant Director, Jean Renoir - Director, Marguerite Renoir - Editor, Jean Wiener - Composer (Music Score), Jean Bachelet - Cinematographer, F. Bourgas - Cinematographer, Arthur Mayer - Producer, Eugène Lourié - Set Designer, Jacques Companeez - Screenwriter, Jean Renoir - Screenwriter, Charles Spaak - Screenwriter, Maxim Gorky - Play Author
Similar Movies
Dodes'ka-Den; Die Freudlose Gasse; Austeria; The L-Shaped Room
(Ack: James Travers,2002, Alexander Sesonske-criterion collection-30Dec,2003)
benny
Whereas The Lower Depths is a closed- in world bearing the superscription as in Dante’s Hell. (Despair is the key that is etched on the souls of its denizens.) What had the Gorky’s gutter play to wean him from the Maupassant story?
In 1936 the rise of Hitler in Germany and the Popular Front in France created within the French Left a new sense of solidarity with the Soviet Union. In that context the Russian immigrant producer Alexander Kamenka asked Jean Renoir to direct a film of Maxim Gorky’s play The Lower Depths. Renoir accepted the offer and before agreeing to take on the project, Renoir insisted that the film be set in France (not Russia), and that some drastic changes be made to the plot. The most significant change was the ending; the tragic denouement in Gorki’s play was replaced with a happier ending, in keeping with the mood of the time.
Trivia: Renoir was obliged to write to Gorki to receive permission for these alterations to the story, which was duly given (although Gorki died a few months before the film was released).
Plot
The story revolves around two characters that represent two ends of the society. One is titled and the other a common thief. The baron (Jouvet ) has stolen 30,000 rubles from the ministry and lost it gambling. Pépel (Gabin) has come to rob the baron’s luxurious house and finds nothing worth stealing there. The baron, returning home in a suicidal mood, interrupts Pépel’s theft. Here in their first encounter, each opens the eyes of the other to the possibility of change. Each glimpses a new possibility, the baron, a life without things; Pépel a life without thefts.
Soon the baron appears at the flophouse. The baron soon finds himself in the swim of things there. If thousand- ruble game in the casino had turned his world upside down he finds life there: he can still indulge his passion in the three-kopek game in the flophouse. If he has lost his class he has found his life. He sheds luxury and prestige without regret. When Pépel finds life in the lower depths unbearable and proposes to leave the flophouse, he asks the baron what he will do. The baron replies without hesitation, “I’ll stay here.” He has no desire to go. Unlike Gorky’s baron, his descent from aristocracy has not been degrading but liberating.
After Pépel leaves the baron’s carrying the bronze horses he steals some apples, then gives them to a child and tells him, “And if someday someone tells you Pépel is a thief, you’ll set them straight.” The film ends with homage to Chaplin's Modern Times as the lovers walk off down the road of life.
Acting:
The film is apart from its dark theme is carried by the acting of the two main characters. The Gabin-Jouvet pairing is a masterstroke, with both actors providing fine performances that are charged with conviction and humanity. Despite their different backgrounds and approaches to their art, the two actors complement each other perfectly, the down-trodden and passionate proletarian played by Gabin making a poignant contrast with Jouvet’s ruined but nonchalant aristocrat. The scene where the two characters meet and, realising the absurdity of the barriers which separate them, become friends is one of the enduring moments of the film, and is certainly in keeping with the ethos of the Popular Front. The large supporting cast gives the film its richness and colour, with notable performances from Suzy Prim, Robert Le Vigan.
Junie Astor as Natasha
While Gabin and Jouvet were excellent there was much to be desired in the acting of Natasha. Dramatically she plays a prominent role in the film, necessary for both the death of Kostylyov and Pépel’s escape from the lower depths. But her performance destroys almost every scene she is in. Renoir said of this, “She’s terrible, isn’t she? She was a friend of the producer. He asked me as a special favor to give her the part. I worked hard with her but it didn’t do much good.
“Some faces are beautiful, made for the camera. Some faces are not beautiful but interesting. But Junie Astor had a face that showed nothing to the camera. It is empty.”Renoir
“…the wonderful opening shot of the film: Jouvet stands upright, the only figure on screen, in the centre of the frame, silent but with an occasional superior smirk escaping him as his unseen superior rebukes him for embezzling ministry funds to pay off his gambling debts; and the camera swings round him first to the left and then further and further to the right finally to reveal his superior reflected in a mirror.
This single opening shot keys us to all the important features of the film: the priority given to star persona and performance; the degree to which the narrative differs from (adds to, opens out) Gorky's original play; and the significance of Renoir's camera style of this time, characterised by deep-focus depth-of-field, the moving camera, and the revelation of off-screen space, the world extending beyond the limits of the frame”(brightlights films.com- Ian Johnston)
Renoir and Kurosawa
Donald Richie calls Akira Kurosawa’s film of The Lower Depths a miracle of ensemble playing. In contrast Renoir makes of the play a vehicle for two fine actors, Louis Jouvet and Jean Gabin. The action of Kurosawa’s film occurs completely within the flophouse, as does the play, but less than half of Renoir’s Lower Depths takes place there. Still the flophouse remains, visually, the most interesting locale in the film, with its chiaroscuro lighting and dramatic shadows, its rough bricks, rude stairways, and old wooden posts that often divide the screen vertically or project diagonally across the frame and its length that lends itself so well to deep focus cinematography.
When Akira Kurosawa made his version of The Lower Depths in 1957 he had seen Renoir’s film. It was perhaps that which led him to try it himself. Unlike Renoir, Kurosawa follows Gorky almost scene for scene. In a style that resembles Renoir’s in its long takes and deep focus cinematography Kurosawa creates his flophouse as the locus of a world. But by the sheer vitality of the life in his film manages to overthrow the despair and pathos that permeate the play.
Kurosawa greatly admired Jean Renoir, thought him one of the greatest masters of cinema. The two met once in the 1970s, late in Renoir’s life when Kurosawa was in Los Angeles to receive an Academy Award and was invited to have dinner with the Renoirs. Kurosawa has written that his own decision to write an autobiography was prompted by reading Renoir’s My Life and My Films “and by the terrific impression Renoir left on me when I met him—the feeling that I would like to grow old in the same way he did.”
Kurosawa’s Lower Depths shows the power that could be achieved in cinema by staying close to the text and setting of Gorky’s work. Renoir did not see Kurosawa’s film until 1977. He watched it with great interest, then remarked, “That is a much more important film than mine.”
Although overshadowed by Renoir’s subsequent masterpieces (La Grande Illusion was made straight after this film), Les Bas-fonds is an impressive work, which, through its very evident humanity, remains a surprisingly modern film. Its wry comic touches have an ironic edge to them, a suggestion perhaps that Renoir might have preferred this to be a much darker work, in the vein of the poetic realists. This is also hinted at by the location filming which uses an almost neo-realist style to convey the grim reality of poverty. Noticeable also in this film is Renoir’s admiration for his two heroes of the silent era, Eric Von Stroheim and Chaplin.
A variant of the Lower Depths was made later where some of the Russian elements of the play were introduced that seems to have prevented the film from being a popular success. The film was well received by the critics, however, and was awarded the first Prix Louis Delluc in 1937.
Cast
* Jean Gabin - Wasska Pepel
* Louis Jouvet - The Baron
* Suzy Prim - Vassilissa
* Junie Astor - Natacha
* Jany Holt - Nastia
* Vladimir Sokoloff - Kostileff
Robert Le Vigan - L'Acteur; Camille Bert - Le Comte; René Génin - Le Vieillard; Paul Temps - Satine; Robert Ozanne - Jabot; Léon Larive - Felix, le domestique; Alex Allin; Maurice Baquet - Accordeoniste; André Gabriello - Le Commissaire; Lucien Mancini - Patron de la guinguette; Sylvain
Credit
Jacques Becker - First Assistant Director, Jean Renoir - Director, Marguerite Renoir - Editor, Jean Wiener - Composer (Music Score), Jean Bachelet - Cinematographer, F. Bourgas - Cinematographer, Arthur Mayer - Producer, Eugène Lourié - Set Designer, Jacques Companeez - Screenwriter, Jean Renoir - Screenwriter, Charles Spaak - Screenwriter, Maxim Gorky - Play Author
Similar Movies
Dodes'ka-Den; Die Freudlose Gasse; Austeria; The L-Shaped Room
(Ack: James Travers,2002, Alexander Sesonske-criterion collection-30Dec,2003)
benny
Thursday 21 January 2010
Ashes and Diamonds-1958
Based on Jerzy Andrzejewski’s 1948 novel of the same name, Ashes and Diamonds is the Wajda’s last in the war trilogy, following A Generation and Kanal. Adapted for the screen by Andrzej Wajda and the author time and space have been condensed to less than twenty-four hours in and around a single location—the hotel Monopol. The title comes from a 19th Century poem by Cyprian Norwid ‘…Or will the ashes hold the glory of a starlike diamond/
The Morning Star of everlasting triumph.
Synopsis
The film takes place in an unnamed small Polish town on the day Germany officially surrendered ending World War II. Maciek and Andrzej have been assigned to liquidate communist Commissar Szczuka but fail in their first attempt, killing instead two civilian cement plant workers. They are given a second chance in the town's leading hotel and banquet hall, Monopol.
Meanwhile, a grand fête is being organized at the hall for a newly appointed minor minister by his assistant, Drewnowski (Bogumil Kobiela) who is in fact a double agent. Maciek manages to get an entry into a room with the desk clerk, who is also a fellow Warsaw native. They sadly reminisce about the past and over the chestnut trees in particular, which were lost when the Germans destroyed most of the city in the aftermath of the Warsaw Uprising. While Maciek and Andrzej bide their time to strike Szczuka, Maciek becomes infatuated with the hotel's barmaid, Krystyna (Ewa Krzyzewska).
Meanwhile, Szczuka is attempting to locate his long lost son, Marek who had served along with Maciek and was recently captured by the Red Army.
Maciek goes for a walk with Krystyna and ends up in a bombed-out church. Maciek realizes what he had been missing in life. He could have had an education or settle down to a regular family life every day warmed by love. Strange how love throws a diehard rebel’s train of thoughts askew? Awakened by his brief lovemaking with the barmaid the aridity of his past, a life of the mind is brought to surface. Contrast this with the reality of his guntoting days: two innocents felled down a mistake. This comes to him with a sledge-hammer force by the two victims he sees in the crypt. A mistake. It was all he had to show for his life as a sewer rat during the aborted Warsaw uprising and the present mission.
Maciek's crush on Krystyna grows perhaps as an antidote to the awful realization of his mission: shortly he must assassinate Szczuka.
When he does and as Szczuka falls, it is a dramatic moment and the built up tension in the viewer literally explodes: fireworks celebrating the end of the war fill the sky.
The next morning, Maciek goes to where Andrzej awaits in a truck. From concealment he watches as the other accomplice Drewnowski is exposed. Andrzej throws him to the ground and drives off. When Drewnowski sees Maciek, he calls out to him and Maciek flees only to run into a patrol of Polish soldiers. He is shot. It is pure cinematic moment where the clothesline fluttering in a light breeze a kind of peace, the sweat and bad humor of illtempered men and woman all washed clean. The camera pans slowly to a landscape strewn with trash.
Afterword:No empire or old order however feeble passes away quietly but makes quiet a din. We have in our time seen in the Balkans and it was so when the Ottoman Empire came crashing at the end of WWI. What a trash the new emerging nations make of the fine ‘ideals’ of the old order!
Directed by
Andrzej Wajda
Written by
Jerzy Andrzejewski
Starring
Zbigniew Cybulski,
Ewa Krzyzewska,
Waclaw Zastrzezynski
Running time
110 min.
Language
Polish
Trivia:
The entire film takes place over two days, May 8th and 9th 1945.
One of Martin Scorsese's favorite movies. He showed it to Leonardo DiCaprio while making The Departed (2006), as main characters of these two movies have to deal with the same dilemmas.
The title comes from a 19th century poem by Cyprian Kamil Norwid and references the manner in which diamonds are formed from heat and pressure acting upon coal.
Director 'Andzrej Wajda' realized that his leading man Zbigniew Cybulski would be constrained by period costume so he allowed him to wear clothes that felt more natural to him.
After the film's release, sales of sunglasses shot up because Zbigniew Cybulski wore them consistently throughout the film.
Wajda was particularly influenced by The Asphalt Jungle (1950).
Because of the film's nihilistic tone, the Polish authorities were not keen on it being exhibited outside of the country. Until a low-level official had a print shipped out to the Venice Film Festival where it played to great acclaim.
René Clair was a particular fan of the film.
(ack: imdb,wikipedia,criterion)
Similar Works
Nikto Ne Khotel Umirat (1966, Vytautas Zalakevicius)
A Generation (1954, Andrzej Wajda)
Do Posledney Minuty (1973, Valeriy Isakov)
Human Condition, Part 1: No Greater Love (1958, Masaki Kobayashi)
Vysoky Pereval (1982, Vladimir Denisenko)
Other Related Works
Is related to: Everything for Sale (1968, Andrzej Wajda)
Kanal (1957, Andrzej Wajda)
Foreign Actors (2006, Matthew Noel-Tod)
Andrzej Wajda - a Portrait
Trzecia Czesc Nocy (1971, Andrzej Zulawski)
benny
The Morning Star of everlasting triumph.
Synopsis
The film takes place in an unnamed small Polish town on the day Germany officially surrendered ending World War II. Maciek and Andrzej have been assigned to liquidate communist Commissar Szczuka but fail in their first attempt, killing instead two civilian cement plant workers. They are given a second chance in the town's leading hotel and banquet hall, Monopol.
Meanwhile, a grand fête is being organized at the hall for a newly appointed minor minister by his assistant, Drewnowski (Bogumil Kobiela) who is in fact a double agent. Maciek manages to get an entry into a room with the desk clerk, who is also a fellow Warsaw native. They sadly reminisce about the past and over the chestnut trees in particular, which were lost when the Germans destroyed most of the city in the aftermath of the Warsaw Uprising. While Maciek and Andrzej bide their time to strike Szczuka, Maciek becomes infatuated with the hotel's barmaid, Krystyna (Ewa Krzyzewska).
Meanwhile, Szczuka is attempting to locate his long lost son, Marek who had served along with Maciek and was recently captured by the Red Army.
Maciek goes for a walk with Krystyna and ends up in a bombed-out church. Maciek realizes what he had been missing in life. He could have had an education or settle down to a regular family life every day warmed by love. Strange how love throws a diehard rebel’s train of thoughts askew? Awakened by his brief lovemaking with the barmaid the aridity of his past, a life of the mind is brought to surface. Contrast this with the reality of his guntoting days: two innocents felled down a mistake. This comes to him with a sledge-hammer force by the two victims he sees in the crypt. A mistake. It was all he had to show for his life as a sewer rat during the aborted Warsaw uprising and the present mission.
Maciek's crush on Krystyna grows perhaps as an antidote to the awful realization of his mission: shortly he must assassinate Szczuka.
When he does and as Szczuka falls, it is a dramatic moment and the built up tension in the viewer literally explodes: fireworks celebrating the end of the war fill the sky.
The next morning, Maciek goes to where Andrzej awaits in a truck. From concealment he watches as the other accomplice Drewnowski is exposed. Andrzej throws him to the ground and drives off. When Drewnowski sees Maciek, he calls out to him and Maciek flees only to run into a patrol of Polish soldiers. He is shot. It is pure cinematic moment where the clothesline fluttering in a light breeze a kind of peace, the sweat and bad humor of illtempered men and woman all washed clean. The camera pans slowly to a landscape strewn with trash.
Afterword:No empire or old order however feeble passes away quietly but makes quiet a din. We have in our time seen in the Balkans and it was so when the Ottoman Empire came crashing at the end of WWI. What a trash the new emerging nations make of the fine ‘ideals’ of the old order!
Directed by
Andrzej Wajda
Written by
Jerzy Andrzejewski
Starring
Zbigniew Cybulski,
Ewa Krzyzewska,
Waclaw Zastrzezynski
Running time
110 min.
Language
Polish
Trivia:
The entire film takes place over two days, May 8th and 9th 1945.
One of Martin Scorsese's favorite movies. He showed it to Leonardo DiCaprio while making The Departed (2006), as main characters of these two movies have to deal with the same dilemmas.
The title comes from a 19th century poem by Cyprian Kamil Norwid and references the manner in which diamonds are formed from heat and pressure acting upon coal.
Director 'Andzrej Wajda' realized that his leading man Zbigniew Cybulski would be constrained by period costume so he allowed him to wear clothes that felt more natural to him.
After the film's release, sales of sunglasses shot up because Zbigniew Cybulski wore them consistently throughout the film.
Wajda was particularly influenced by The Asphalt Jungle (1950).
Because of the film's nihilistic tone, the Polish authorities were not keen on it being exhibited outside of the country. Until a low-level official had a print shipped out to the Venice Film Festival where it played to great acclaim.
René Clair was a particular fan of the film.
(ack: imdb,wikipedia,criterion)
Similar Works
Nikto Ne Khotel Umirat (1966, Vytautas Zalakevicius)
A Generation (1954, Andrzej Wajda)
Do Posledney Minuty (1973, Valeriy Isakov)
Human Condition, Part 1: No Greater Love (1958, Masaki Kobayashi)
Vysoky Pereval (1982, Vladimir Denisenko)
Other Related Works
Is related to: Everything for Sale (1968, Andrzej Wajda)
Kanal (1957, Andrzej Wajda)
Foreign Actors (2006, Matthew Noel-Tod)
Andrzej Wajda - a Portrait
Trzecia Czesc Nocy (1971, Andrzej Zulawski)
benny
Wednesday 20 January 2010
Films of Ritwik Ghatak
In Nagarik (The Citizen-1952) we have the contemporary existence for Bengali refugees in post-Partition Calcutta. Ramu (Satindra Bhattacharya) is the citizen whom we see early on. On seeing the young man dutifully helping an elder stranger cross the street one might think he is of affluent circumstances. But nothing could be more farther from the truth. His suit and shoes are borrowed for a job interview. It has been dusted and straightened out since these belong to his father (Kali Bannerjee) who has shed them long ago. He is now blind and ailing and it is a matter of extreme importance he finds a job to support his family including his sister whose future has been long ago splintered to secure his.
In the above we have the predicament of one citizen representing the woes of a subcontinent. We shall see how pertinent is this in the sad case of his sister. She is undereducated since the scant fortunes of the school teacher has been invested on the boy than on her. Such gender discrimination is perpetuated as a matter of course in a society where Sita the wife of Lord Ram is worshiped as a sacred symbol of motherhood. Mother India or Sita may be for public consumption held up as a revered image by those who in practice humiliate her at every turn. It is what the conduct of those suitors tells us. Her parents have little hope for a better life for her except to marry her off to anyone who is able to provide for her. Ritwik Ghatak in exposing this hypocrisy must have touched a nerve of the powers that be. Herein lies a clue to the failure of a man who was second to none as a filmmaker.
Satyajit Ray seems to have once said of his contemprorary Ritwik Ghatak thus: Had Nagarik been released before his Pather Panchali, Nagarik would have been accepted as the first film of the alternative form of Bengali cinema. Nagarik (The Citizen), the first film Ghatak ever made, was completed in 1953 but in fact released posthumously in 1977. In this simple fact we may conclude why one got praises while the other was neglected with more than unjustified criticism. In this contrast of two, both first rate filmmakers undoubtedly we have the persona of Ritwik, whose ant-establishment attitude made him unacceptable while Ray was presentable for the powers that be. Yes he was difficult –edgy, uncouth and insulting and he made them uncomfortable. He was the product of his times and his cultural awakenings were a bruise, which he came to terms in his own way. In a film like Nagarik he narrates the slender fortunes of a Bengali family and much of it is invested on Ramu and his finding a job has a bearing on the future of his sister. Chronicling Ramu’s attempts to find a job and his family's disillusioning may be economic necessity but a family marginalized and dislocated must fend for itself as a mongrel that has found in the territory of others. Much of Ramu’s woes owe to dislocation. No single cause other than partition of Bengal of 1905 and of 1947 could be explained as the pulse that beat underneath his artistic vision. Dynamics of so many works derive from it but for his cinematic idiom of course we need to look elsewhere.
The bugbear of commercial cinema Ritwik Ghatak( b. 4 November, 1925, Jindabazar, Dhaka, East Bengal now Bangladesh) remains despite of himself an icon whose influence we see in many younger film makers of India. There is a scene in Ajantrik in which two taxi drivers sit atop their car bonnets and belting away in a contrapuntal cacophony. What has this scene to do with the narration of the film? For that I can ask what has the chatter of grave diggers before the grave of Ophelia to do with the story of Hamlet? Does it not serve as a coda to the soliloquy of the prince holding the skull of poor Yorick? Films must visually lead us beyond the surface to put ourselves with the gusto of living which makes the two taxi drivers giving vent to their existence as the prince of Denmark must give his own life a context in terms of death confronting him at every turn. ‘Lalitha Gopalan's book on action genres in contemporary Indian cinema, Cinema of Interruptions, I came across a reference to the influence of a group of directors… in line with this account, we could say that Ghatak's legacy has been a kind of cinema that invites us …to contemplate “deeply of the universe” – to “focus more intently” rather than be “entertained.”(quoted from: archive.sensesofcinema.com- Megan Carrigy, October 2003)
The last film Ghatak completed was Jukti Takko Aar Gappo (1974) in which Ghatak played the lead role himself. Ghatak passed away on 6 February, 1976, at the early age of fifty, leaving many unfinished projects.
Meghe Dhaka Tara, 1960 [The Cloud-Capped Star]
Meghe Dhaka Tara is the first in a trilogy (the other two being Komal Ghandhar or E -flat -1961 and Subarnarekha-1965) and belongs to the genre of melodrama and has a parallel in poetic realism of the French cinema in the late 30s. Roots of melodrama in Indian context go further and has had played a vital role in rural Indian theatre and folk dramatic forms. In Bollywood films we have drama in real life ‘sexed up’ if we were to judge the way hero and heroine cavort around trees and melodrama is almost to the point of bathos. While Bengali filmmakers approach melodrama through the prism of their political standpoints art is an elusive element. It is true that Ritwik in Meghe Dhaka Tara had no use for such crudities found in Commercial films but in presenting the story extract as much pathos cinematically from the predicament of Neetu the film’s protagonist. Reality of characters and their circumstances helped to a great degree by cinematic techniques has become poetry of images. Sexed up, nevertheless, in a manner of speaking. This film is the best example of his genius. To quote Kumar Shahani ‘The three principal women characters embody the traditional aspects of feminine power. The heroine, Neeta, has the preserving and nurturing quality; her sister, Gita, is the sensual woman; their mother represents the cruel aspect. The incapacity of Nita to combine and contain all these qualities... is the source of her tragedy. This split is also reflected in Indian society's inability to combine responsibility with necessary violence to build for itself a real future. The middle-class is also seen in triangular formation, at the unsteady apex of the inverted form."
Synopsis
Neeta (Supriya Chowdhury) is the breadwinner in a refugee family of five. Her elder brother, Shankar (Anil Chatterjee) aspires to be a classical singer. Neeta postpones her marriage to the scientist Sanat (Niranjan Roy) to support the family and pay for her younger brother's and sister's studies. The father and younger brother both suffer accidents forcing Neeta to remain the sole breadwinner of the family in spite of her worsening tuberculosis. Her mother encourages Sanat to marry the younger sister Gita (Gita Ghatak). Finally, Shankar having realized his ambition , takes her to the hills for treatment. There terminally ill, having sacrificed her best years, Neeta cries out into the silence of the mountains her desire to live....
In Meghe Dhaka Tara, Ghatak tries to delve deep into our roots and traditions and discover a universal dimension within it. And for the first time, he says he experimented with the techniques of overtones. In the film, Ghatak succeeds in achieving a grand totality through an intricate but harmonious blending of each part with the whole in the inner fabric of the film. Meghe Dhaka Tara transcends into a great work of art that enriches and transforms the visual images into metamorphical significations...
The music in the film perfectly intermingles with the visuals, none dislodging the other be it a remarkable orchestration of a hill motif with a female moaning or a staccato cough with a surging song.
Lastly, the film is greatly helped by an absolutely stunning performance by Bengali Filmstar Supriya Choudhury as Neeta. Meghe Dhaka Tara is one of the rare instances when she was successfully able to break her star image and cover new ground as a performer. In the end as she cries out "I want to live", one cannot helped but be totally overcome by emotion. It is one of the greatest and most unforgettable moments in the history of Indian Cinema...
As with his other films we can see the socio-economic consequences of Partition.
benny
In the above we have the predicament of one citizen representing the woes of a subcontinent. We shall see how pertinent is this in the sad case of his sister. She is undereducated since the scant fortunes of the school teacher has been invested on the boy than on her. Such gender discrimination is perpetuated as a matter of course in a society where Sita the wife of Lord Ram is worshiped as a sacred symbol of motherhood. Mother India or Sita may be for public consumption held up as a revered image by those who in practice humiliate her at every turn. It is what the conduct of those suitors tells us. Her parents have little hope for a better life for her except to marry her off to anyone who is able to provide for her. Ritwik Ghatak in exposing this hypocrisy must have touched a nerve of the powers that be. Herein lies a clue to the failure of a man who was second to none as a filmmaker.
Satyajit Ray seems to have once said of his contemprorary Ritwik Ghatak thus: Had Nagarik been released before his Pather Panchali, Nagarik would have been accepted as the first film of the alternative form of Bengali cinema. Nagarik (The Citizen), the first film Ghatak ever made, was completed in 1953 but in fact released posthumously in 1977. In this simple fact we may conclude why one got praises while the other was neglected with more than unjustified criticism. In this contrast of two, both first rate filmmakers undoubtedly we have the persona of Ritwik, whose ant-establishment attitude made him unacceptable while Ray was presentable for the powers that be. Yes he was difficult –edgy, uncouth and insulting and he made them uncomfortable. He was the product of his times and his cultural awakenings were a bruise, which he came to terms in his own way. In a film like Nagarik he narrates the slender fortunes of a Bengali family and much of it is invested on Ramu and his finding a job has a bearing on the future of his sister. Chronicling Ramu’s attempts to find a job and his family's disillusioning may be economic necessity but a family marginalized and dislocated must fend for itself as a mongrel that has found in the territory of others. Much of Ramu’s woes owe to dislocation. No single cause other than partition of Bengal of 1905 and of 1947 could be explained as the pulse that beat underneath his artistic vision. Dynamics of so many works derive from it but for his cinematic idiom of course we need to look elsewhere.
The bugbear of commercial cinema Ritwik Ghatak( b. 4 November, 1925, Jindabazar, Dhaka, East Bengal now Bangladesh) remains despite of himself an icon whose influence we see in many younger film makers of India. There is a scene in Ajantrik in which two taxi drivers sit atop their car bonnets and belting away in a contrapuntal cacophony. What has this scene to do with the narration of the film? For that I can ask what has the chatter of grave diggers before the grave of Ophelia to do with the story of Hamlet? Does it not serve as a coda to the soliloquy of the prince holding the skull of poor Yorick? Films must visually lead us beyond the surface to put ourselves with the gusto of living which makes the two taxi drivers giving vent to their existence as the prince of Denmark must give his own life a context in terms of death confronting him at every turn. ‘Lalitha Gopalan's book on action genres in contemporary Indian cinema, Cinema of Interruptions, I came across a reference to the influence of a group of directors… in line with this account, we could say that Ghatak's legacy has been a kind of cinema that invites us …to contemplate “deeply of the universe” – to “focus more intently” rather than be “entertained.”(quoted from: archive.sensesofcinema.com- Megan Carrigy, October 2003)
The last film Ghatak completed was Jukti Takko Aar Gappo (1974) in which Ghatak played the lead role himself. Ghatak passed away on 6 February, 1976, at the early age of fifty, leaving many unfinished projects.
Meghe Dhaka Tara, 1960 [The Cloud-Capped Star]
Meghe Dhaka Tara is the first in a trilogy (the other two being Komal Ghandhar or E -flat -1961 and Subarnarekha-1965) and belongs to the genre of melodrama and has a parallel in poetic realism of the French cinema in the late 30s. Roots of melodrama in Indian context go further and has had played a vital role in rural Indian theatre and folk dramatic forms. In Bollywood films we have drama in real life ‘sexed up’ if we were to judge the way hero and heroine cavort around trees and melodrama is almost to the point of bathos. While Bengali filmmakers approach melodrama through the prism of their political standpoints art is an elusive element. It is true that Ritwik in Meghe Dhaka Tara had no use for such crudities found in Commercial films but in presenting the story extract as much pathos cinematically from the predicament of Neetu the film’s protagonist. Reality of characters and their circumstances helped to a great degree by cinematic techniques has become poetry of images. Sexed up, nevertheless, in a manner of speaking. This film is the best example of his genius. To quote Kumar Shahani ‘The three principal women characters embody the traditional aspects of feminine power. The heroine, Neeta, has the preserving and nurturing quality; her sister, Gita, is the sensual woman; their mother represents the cruel aspect. The incapacity of Nita to combine and contain all these qualities... is the source of her tragedy. This split is also reflected in Indian society's inability to combine responsibility with necessary violence to build for itself a real future. The middle-class is also seen in triangular formation, at the unsteady apex of the inverted form."
Synopsis
Neeta (Supriya Chowdhury) is the breadwinner in a refugee family of five. Her elder brother, Shankar (Anil Chatterjee) aspires to be a classical singer. Neeta postpones her marriage to the scientist Sanat (Niranjan Roy) to support the family and pay for her younger brother's and sister's studies. The father and younger brother both suffer accidents forcing Neeta to remain the sole breadwinner of the family in spite of her worsening tuberculosis. Her mother encourages Sanat to marry the younger sister Gita (Gita Ghatak). Finally, Shankar having realized his ambition , takes her to the hills for treatment. There terminally ill, having sacrificed her best years, Neeta cries out into the silence of the mountains her desire to live....
In Meghe Dhaka Tara, Ghatak tries to delve deep into our roots and traditions and discover a universal dimension within it. And for the first time, he says he experimented with the techniques of overtones. In the film, Ghatak succeeds in achieving a grand totality through an intricate but harmonious blending of each part with the whole in the inner fabric of the film. Meghe Dhaka Tara transcends into a great work of art that enriches and transforms the visual images into metamorphical significations...
The music in the film perfectly intermingles with the visuals, none dislodging the other be it a remarkable orchestration of a hill motif with a female moaning or a staccato cough with a surging song.
Lastly, the film is greatly helped by an absolutely stunning performance by Bengali Filmstar Supriya Choudhury as Neeta. Meghe Dhaka Tara is one of the rare instances when she was successfully able to break her star image and cover new ground as a performer. In the end as she cries out "I want to live", one cannot helped but be totally overcome by emotion. It is one of the greatest and most unforgettable moments in the history of Indian Cinema...
As with his other films we can see the socio-economic consequences of Partition.
benny
Tuesday 19 January 2010
Drôle de Drame-1937
In an age of anxiety leading to WWII filmmakers in France coped as best as they could. Judging from Drôle de Drame it would seem Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert looked past their everyday milieu and set in another era and clime. They set their sights across the Channel and show how silly the Edwardian London was.
A botanist who moonlights as a writer of lurid whodunits , having to cope with a nosy bishop and a psychopath on the loose, is bizarre even by today’s standards. A silly premise it may be as far as the story and ‘types’ are but it is a near classic. No mistake of that.
Carné -Prévert would go on to make a few enduring classics like le quai des brumes(1938), les visiteurs du soir(1942), and les enfants du paradis(1945). A threat of another world war is gone and age old anxiety is still around but we manage nevertheless to move on. Cinema has ceased to be as forceful or creative medium that touched our lives as before. The aforementioned films are a precious record of history of our world reinvented for celluloid.
These films are as tragic as drôle de drame is a black comedy.
The film is strong with such fine actors like Michel Simon, Louis Jouvet and Jean-Louis Barrault. The story by minute descends into a calculated chaos and the viewer’s all attempts to predict the direction it takes are foiled by the deranged view of life each character seem to display in response to situations. We can sympathize with a bishop who denounces the prurient interest of his flock in penny novels serializing detective dramas. But if he were to suspect the worst in his cousin and ready to use an impossible subterfuge to visit his home, his sanity may be called to question. Similarly we have a respected botanist whose passion in lucid moments is for his mimosa and it is understandable if he would require an outlet for creative congestion of his brain. He has an alter ego and he is Felix Chapel, who is the subject of the Bishop of Bedford’s wrath. Dr. Molyneux merely has found a way to buy himself some peace from his wife and his neighborhood. This sedate creature who passes his life quietly in harmony with his mimosa nevertheless revels in blood and gore, albeit written by his double Felix Chapel.
It turns out, Molyneux gets the stories from his adopted daughter Eva, who in turn gets them from the milkman, who's madly in love with her. If he has his wife killed off as an excuse to explain a domestic inconvenience we may say for sure there are some loose cannons around and things go from bad to worse. Eventually Scotland Yard is called in to clear things up. How these square off their combined derangement is what makes the film memorable.
Summary
England, the early 1900s. Irvin Molyneux is a quiet botanist who secretly writes pulp fiction under the pseudonym Felix Chapel. His books raise the ire of Archibald Soper, the Bishop of Bedford. Soper invites himself to dinner at the Molyneux’s home one evening, at a time most inconvenient to him. His servants have walked out on him forcing his wife to double as the cook. Molyneux's clumsy attempt to account for the absence of his wife arouses the bishop's suspicions. When he sees Molyneux mysteriously leave the house that evening, he contacts Scotland Yard, convinced that his cousin has murdered his wife. Later, when the Molyneux couple are away from home and the scrutiny of the press, Irvin Molyneux, as Felix Chapel, is invited to write an account of the mysterious Molyneux affair on the scene of the presumed murder. Disguised as Chapel, Molyneux returns to his house, which has been taken over by the police who are still investigating the alleged crime. He does not realize that the psychopath William Kramps, the notorious butcher killer, is in the area, determined to kill Felix Chapel. Meanwhile, the Bishop of Bedford realizes he must return to the houe of Molyneux in disguise...
The film bears affinity to the films of René Clair or Marx brothers as far as to include it as genre of comedy but it is vitriolic all through.
Cast
Michel Simon as Irwin Molyneux alias Felix Chapel
Françoise Rosay as Margaret, his wife
Louis Jouvet as Archibald Soper
Jean-Louis Barrault- William Kramps
and Jean-Pierre Aumont as Billy
Directed by
Marcel Carné
Produced by
Edouard Corniglion-Molinier
Written by
J. Storer Clouston (novel)
Jacques Prévert (adaptation)
Music by
Maurice Jaubert
Cinematography
Eugen Schüfftan
Running time
94 min
benny
A botanist who moonlights as a writer of lurid whodunits , having to cope with a nosy bishop and a psychopath on the loose, is bizarre even by today’s standards. A silly premise it may be as far as the story and ‘types’ are but it is a near classic. No mistake of that.
Carné -Prévert would go on to make a few enduring classics like le quai des brumes(1938), les visiteurs du soir(1942), and les enfants du paradis(1945). A threat of another world war is gone and age old anxiety is still around but we manage nevertheless to move on. Cinema has ceased to be as forceful or creative medium that touched our lives as before. The aforementioned films are a precious record of history of our world reinvented for celluloid.
These films are as tragic as drôle de drame is a black comedy.
The film is strong with such fine actors like Michel Simon, Louis Jouvet and Jean-Louis Barrault. The story by minute descends into a calculated chaos and the viewer’s all attempts to predict the direction it takes are foiled by the deranged view of life each character seem to display in response to situations. We can sympathize with a bishop who denounces the prurient interest of his flock in penny novels serializing detective dramas. But if he were to suspect the worst in his cousin and ready to use an impossible subterfuge to visit his home, his sanity may be called to question. Similarly we have a respected botanist whose passion in lucid moments is for his mimosa and it is understandable if he would require an outlet for creative congestion of his brain. He has an alter ego and he is Felix Chapel, who is the subject of the Bishop of Bedford’s wrath. Dr. Molyneux merely has found a way to buy himself some peace from his wife and his neighborhood. This sedate creature who passes his life quietly in harmony with his mimosa nevertheless revels in blood and gore, albeit written by his double Felix Chapel.
It turns out, Molyneux gets the stories from his adopted daughter Eva, who in turn gets them from the milkman, who's madly in love with her. If he has his wife killed off as an excuse to explain a domestic inconvenience we may say for sure there are some loose cannons around and things go from bad to worse. Eventually Scotland Yard is called in to clear things up. How these square off their combined derangement is what makes the film memorable.
Summary
England, the early 1900s. Irvin Molyneux is a quiet botanist who secretly writes pulp fiction under the pseudonym Felix Chapel. His books raise the ire of Archibald Soper, the Bishop of Bedford. Soper invites himself to dinner at the Molyneux’s home one evening, at a time most inconvenient to him. His servants have walked out on him forcing his wife to double as the cook. Molyneux's clumsy attempt to account for the absence of his wife arouses the bishop's suspicions. When he sees Molyneux mysteriously leave the house that evening, he contacts Scotland Yard, convinced that his cousin has murdered his wife. Later, when the Molyneux couple are away from home and the scrutiny of the press, Irvin Molyneux, as Felix Chapel, is invited to write an account of the mysterious Molyneux affair on the scene of the presumed murder. Disguised as Chapel, Molyneux returns to his house, which has been taken over by the police who are still investigating the alleged crime. He does not realize that the psychopath William Kramps, the notorious butcher killer, is in the area, determined to kill Felix Chapel. Meanwhile, the Bishop of Bedford realizes he must return to the houe of Molyneux in disguise...
The film bears affinity to the films of René Clair or Marx brothers as far as to include it as genre of comedy but it is vitriolic all through.
Cast
Michel Simon as Irwin Molyneux alias Felix Chapel
Françoise Rosay as Margaret, his wife
Louis Jouvet as Archibald Soper
Jean-Louis Barrault- William Kramps
and Jean-Pierre Aumont as Billy
Directed by
Marcel Carné
Produced by
Edouard Corniglion-Molinier
Written by
J. Storer Clouston (novel)
Jacques Prévert (adaptation)
Music by
Maurice Jaubert
Cinematography
Eugen Schüfftan
Running time
94 min
benny
Monday 18 January 2010
Last Holiday-1950
Last Holiday is a 1950 British film featuring Alec Guinness in his sixth starring role. An alternative title could be, beg your pardon, ‘A Man Doomed to Die’ lifted straight from the Bosley Crowther review of 1950.
Unlike his previous film Kind Hearts and Coronets, Alec Guinness plays only one part and he modestly carries it to perfection. He takes the role of George Bird an agricultural implement salesman, who as the film opens is told by his physician the awful truth: he has not much time left to live. He suffers from Lampington’s Disease, a rare form of disease for which there is no cure and the doctor who has found it in him therefore may indulge in a bit of smugness and advise him to spend all his savings on his last holiday. It is precisely what Mr. Bird intends to do. The film has much to do with his meeting certain specimens, the kind Charles Dickens had in another era made famous in print. The haberdasher who fits out the doomed man knows that his moustache is wrong for the apparel he just got at a bargain price of 65 pounds. Mild mannered that Gorge Best is we see him sans his moustache from then on and he goes to Pinebourne, a holiday resort. Checking into the hotel we have more personages that could only be bred on the British Isles on tea with cucumber sandwiches and tea cakes talking rather strange. Having read nothing beyond Debrett’s Peerage and the Times, these are for tracing the lineage of Mr. Bird who has the manners of a nob.
George Bird the one who, at the beginning, confesses to his physician that he has no relatives or friends soon falls in love and is offered a fruitful business opportunity, but these events only serve to make him reflect on what he had not achieved in life.
Finally, Bird speaks to a hotel guest who is the namesake of the disease he was diagnosed with. The physician assures him there must be a mistake and that Bird does not have the disease. After a trip back to the city, Bird confirms the mistake, and is ready to begin life anew with his sweetheart and his business opportunity. The twist is that he never makes it back to the hotel. He ends up in a car accident on the way and is killed. The hotel guests, having learned the truth, have moved on to their humdrum pastime of ‘ counting titled heads’. Kay Walsh, in the role of an embittered housekeeper of the baronial Torquay hotel and Beatrice Campbell as the beautiful wife of a young adventurer who is helped in her distress by the doomed man carry their parts well and with ease. Sidney James, as an out-of-place tourist, and Muriel George, as a dowdy nouveau-riche, stand out among the several assorted and significant British types. Of course Alec Guinness makes the film memorable and to the ranks of the best to come from the British studios.
Last Holiday was loosely remade in 2006, starring Queen Latifah as Georgia Byrd, LL Cool J, Timothy Hutton, and Alicia Witt.
Let me end this appreciation quoting from Bosley Crowther,’… it is Mr. Guinness who carries the main role in this film, which Mr. Priestley has not only written but has also helped produce. And it is Mr. Guinness' facility at suggesting intense emotional moods through his perfect command of stoicism that lifts the poignant story to its peaks. His doomed man is pitiable in his misery, he is funny in his bourgeois attempts at fun, but, above all, he is touchingly noble in his serene and wistful despair’.(-NY times November 14, 1950)
Directed by
Henry Cass
Produced by
Stephen Mitchell, A. D. Peters, J.B. Priestley
Written by
J. B. Priestley
Starring
Alec Guinness
Beatrice Campbell
Kay Walsh
Gregoire Aslan
Jean Colin
Muriel George
Release date(s)
1950
Running time
88 minutes
Country
UK
benny
Unlike his previous film Kind Hearts and Coronets, Alec Guinness plays only one part and he modestly carries it to perfection. He takes the role of George Bird an agricultural implement salesman, who as the film opens is told by his physician the awful truth: he has not much time left to live. He suffers from Lampington’s Disease, a rare form of disease for which there is no cure and the doctor who has found it in him therefore may indulge in a bit of smugness and advise him to spend all his savings on his last holiday. It is precisely what Mr. Bird intends to do. The film has much to do with his meeting certain specimens, the kind Charles Dickens had in another era made famous in print. The haberdasher who fits out the doomed man knows that his moustache is wrong for the apparel he just got at a bargain price of 65 pounds. Mild mannered that Gorge Best is we see him sans his moustache from then on and he goes to Pinebourne, a holiday resort. Checking into the hotel we have more personages that could only be bred on the British Isles on tea with cucumber sandwiches and tea cakes talking rather strange. Having read nothing beyond Debrett’s Peerage and the Times, these are for tracing the lineage of Mr. Bird who has the manners of a nob.
George Bird the one who, at the beginning, confesses to his physician that he has no relatives or friends soon falls in love and is offered a fruitful business opportunity, but these events only serve to make him reflect on what he had not achieved in life.
Finally, Bird speaks to a hotel guest who is the namesake of the disease he was diagnosed with. The physician assures him there must be a mistake and that Bird does not have the disease. After a trip back to the city, Bird confirms the mistake, and is ready to begin life anew with his sweetheart and his business opportunity. The twist is that he never makes it back to the hotel. He ends up in a car accident on the way and is killed. The hotel guests, having learned the truth, have moved on to their humdrum pastime of ‘ counting titled heads’. Kay Walsh, in the role of an embittered housekeeper of the baronial Torquay hotel and Beatrice Campbell as the beautiful wife of a young adventurer who is helped in her distress by the doomed man carry their parts well and with ease. Sidney James, as an out-of-place tourist, and Muriel George, as a dowdy nouveau-riche, stand out among the several assorted and significant British types. Of course Alec Guinness makes the film memorable and to the ranks of the best to come from the British studios.
Last Holiday was loosely remade in 2006, starring Queen Latifah as Georgia Byrd, LL Cool J, Timothy Hutton, and Alicia Witt.
Let me end this appreciation quoting from Bosley Crowther,’… it is Mr. Guinness who carries the main role in this film, which Mr. Priestley has not only written but has also helped produce. And it is Mr. Guinness' facility at suggesting intense emotional moods through his perfect command of stoicism that lifts the poignant story to its peaks. His doomed man is pitiable in his misery, he is funny in his bourgeois attempts at fun, but, above all, he is touchingly noble in his serene and wistful despair’.(-NY times November 14, 1950)
Directed by
Henry Cass
Produced by
Stephen Mitchell, A. D. Peters, J.B. Priestley
Written by
J. B. Priestley
Starring
Alec Guinness
Beatrice Campbell
Kay Walsh
Gregoire Aslan
Jean Colin
Muriel George
Release date(s)
1950
Running time
88 minutes
Country
UK
benny
Sunday 17 January 2010
Loves of a Blonde-1965
Is the first film that brought Miloš Forman international fame and he followed it with such classics as One flew over a cuckoo’s nest(1975) and Amadeus(1984). Forman’s early movies are still very popular among Czechs. Many of the situations and phrases are now in common usage: for example, the Czech term zhasnout (to switch lights off) from The Firemen’s Ball, associated with petty theft in the movie, has been used to describe the large-scale asset stripping happening in the country during the 1990s. Having introduced the director let me now get on with my appreciation of the movie.
Loves of a Blonde (Czech: Lásky jedné plavovlásky) is a 1965 Czech film and it works at different layers. On the surface it is a simple story of Andula, a young factory girl falling head over heels with a traveling musician for whom it is a one night stand. Whereas the girl her whole life she shas invested ,-for its emotional depth I can only cite Renoir’s une partie de campagne(1936) for comparison, and must salvage it from falling to pieces. Unlike Henriette the Czech girl dares to follow it up.
The film begins with the general (’my hooligan love’ a pseudo Beatle number) to the particular musically represented by ‘Ave Maria’ at the end. The bach-gounod number in this case is meant to be a paen to the blonde working girl who in her elemental goodness stands as a modern Maria.
It is also a social satire.
The film takes place in the provincial Czech town of Zruc, which Forman sketches in a few shots: a train station, a housing block, a shoe factory that could have been lifted from any of the East European films of the communist era. Andula, the blond protagonist of the film is a worker in the shoe factory, one among some 2000 who outnumbers male population by 16 to one. The film opens with the benign manager of the factory asking army officials to place a regiment in Zruc, as a way of redressing the local imbalance of available males and yearning females. “They need what we needed when we were young,” the manager says to an avuncular Major who can well understand the manager’s predicament. ‘Sex liberates woman from their drudgery and social isolation’ seems to be the watchword and how the government tries to meet the expectations of the female workforce touches the very flaw of party manifesto as written and in practice.
Froman always had a felicity in casting the right actors for the parts. Just as he made the roles of Baron von Sweiten, Count Rosenburg and the valet in Amadeus memorable the three ‘old farts’ of army reservists who try to date the three workers are unforgettable.
In honor of the army reservists brought to the town a party is organized where girls in all sizes and expectations take part. The age old mating game played in the pub has plenty of room for comedy, which the director uses to lead the viewer to the heart of the film. Andula catches the eye of the comparatively dashing young pianist, Milda (Vladimir Pucholt). The next morning, the traveling musician assures her repeatedly, “I do not have a girlfriend in Prague.” Milda leaves town, as expected, but Andula has fallen in love with him, and decides to journey to Prague to track him down. A low-key black-and-white ensemble comedy, Loves of a Blonde was cast predominantly with non-professional actors.
In Prague Andula meets the dysfunctional family of Milda and it is clear that in his parents we have the duplicate the blonde and her feckless groom on the making. Forman’s dark comedy must be seen to be enjoyed. His comical sense reaches its best in the part where the parents try to cope with a strange girl who has intruded upon their private space though it is for one night. From that point the director tickles the funnybone, as it were with a scalpel, and only later we realize that whatever future happiness Andula may have with Milda shall only be a downer, an anti-climax to the trite line we are so familiar with, ‘and they lived happily everafter’.
‘Over the course of the three acts, the film’s context evolves from social satire (set in a public space) to emotional intimacy (confined to the private space of a single room and a single bed) to domestic drama (set in the awkward private-public space of a family apartment). The thematic shifts reflect the shifts in setting: the first section is centered on youth and infinite possibility; the second on young adulthood and romantic fulfillment; the third on maturity and inevitable disappointment.’ (Dave Kehr Feb 12, 2002-criterion collection)
Similar Works
Dolgaya Schastlivaya Zhizn (1966, Gennadiy Shpalikov)
The Pornographers (1966, Shohei Imamura)
Kitchen Stories (2003, Bent Hamer)
The Firemen’s Ball (1967, Milos Forman)
Noa at 17 (1982, Isaac Yeshurun)
Adoption (1975, Márta Mészáros)
( ack: wikipedia,criterion collection, Allmovie)
It was nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1967. It is also known under an alternate title of A Blonde in Love.
Directed by
Miloš Forman
Produced by
Doro Vlado Hreljanović
Rudolf Hájek
Written by
Miloš Forman
Jaroslav Papoušek
Starring
Hana Brejchová
Vladimír Pucholt
Vladimír Menšík
Music by
Evžen Illín
Running time
90 min.
Language
Czech
benny
Loves of a Blonde (Czech: Lásky jedné plavovlásky) is a 1965 Czech film and it works at different layers. On the surface it is a simple story of Andula, a young factory girl falling head over heels with a traveling musician for whom it is a one night stand. Whereas the girl her whole life she shas invested ,-for its emotional depth I can only cite Renoir’s une partie de campagne(1936) for comparison, and must salvage it from falling to pieces. Unlike Henriette the Czech girl dares to follow it up.
The film begins with the general (’my hooligan love’ a pseudo Beatle number) to the particular musically represented by ‘Ave Maria’ at the end. The bach-gounod number in this case is meant to be a paen to the blonde working girl who in her elemental goodness stands as a modern Maria.
It is also a social satire.
The film takes place in the provincial Czech town of Zruc, which Forman sketches in a few shots: a train station, a housing block, a shoe factory that could have been lifted from any of the East European films of the communist era. Andula, the blond protagonist of the film is a worker in the shoe factory, one among some 2000 who outnumbers male population by 16 to one. The film opens with the benign manager of the factory asking army officials to place a regiment in Zruc, as a way of redressing the local imbalance of available males and yearning females. “They need what we needed when we were young,” the manager says to an avuncular Major who can well understand the manager’s predicament. ‘Sex liberates woman from their drudgery and social isolation’ seems to be the watchword and how the government tries to meet the expectations of the female workforce touches the very flaw of party manifesto as written and in practice.
Froman always had a felicity in casting the right actors for the parts. Just as he made the roles of Baron von Sweiten, Count Rosenburg and the valet in Amadeus memorable the three ‘old farts’ of army reservists who try to date the three workers are unforgettable.
In honor of the army reservists brought to the town a party is organized where girls in all sizes and expectations take part. The age old mating game played in the pub has plenty of room for comedy, which the director uses to lead the viewer to the heart of the film. Andula catches the eye of the comparatively dashing young pianist, Milda (Vladimir Pucholt). The next morning, the traveling musician assures her repeatedly, “I do not have a girlfriend in Prague.” Milda leaves town, as expected, but Andula has fallen in love with him, and decides to journey to Prague to track him down. A low-key black-and-white ensemble comedy, Loves of a Blonde was cast predominantly with non-professional actors.
In Prague Andula meets the dysfunctional family of Milda and it is clear that in his parents we have the duplicate the blonde and her feckless groom on the making. Forman’s dark comedy must be seen to be enjoyed. His comical sense reaches its best in the part where the parents try to cope with a strange girl who has intruded upon their private space though it is for one night. From that point the director tickles the funnybone, as it were with a scalpel, and only later we realize that whatever future happiness Andula may have with Milda shall only be a downer, an anti-climax to the trite line we are so familiar with, ‘and they lived happily everafter’.
‘Over the course of the three acts, the film’s context evolves from social satire (set in a public space) to emotional intimacy (confined to the private space of a single room and a single bed) to domestic drama (set in the awkward private-public space of a family apartment). The thematic shifts reflect the shifts in setting: the first section is centered on youth and infinite possibility; the second on young adulthood and romantic fulfillment; the third on maturity and inevitable disappointment.’ (Dave Kehr Feb 12, 2002-criterion collection)
Similar Works
Dolgaya Schastlivaya Zhizn (1966, Gennadiy Shpalikov)
The Pornographers (1966, Shohei Imamura)
Kitchen Stories (2003, Bent Hamer)
The Firemen’s Ball (1967, Milos Forman)
Noa at 17 (1982, Isaac Yeshurun)
Adoption (1975, Márta Mészáros)
( ack: wikipedia,criterion collection, Allmovie)
It was nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1967. It is also known under an alternate title of A Blonde in Love.
Directed by
Miloš Forman
Produced by
Doro Vlado Hreljanović
Rudolf Hájek
Written by
Miloš Forman
Jaroslav Papoušek
Starring
Hana Brejchová
Vladimír Pucholt
Vladimír Menšík
Music by
Evžen Illín
Running time
90 min.
Language
Czech
benny
Friday 15 January 2010
The Earrings of Mme.de...-1953
In one of the three Guy de Maupassant–derived stories of Ophuls’s Le plaisir (1952), the rejected model jumps out of a window and winds up in a wheelchair. The artist, now forcibly married to her, and with plenty of time to work, voices the bitter aphorism, “There’s no joy in happiness.” In the present film Danielle Darrieux invites unhappiness since it is the only way she can feel the pulse of her innermost universe where the heart rules. In Ophulsian universe, men and women occupy separate but equal spheres, and if the men have more power and agency in the world, the women are the conquistadors in the more important realm of the heart. They are the ‘militarists of love’ as Stendhal would call them. For the general’s wife in the Earrings of Madame de… a piece of jewelry serves as nicely as one marries above one’s rank to be reckoned as a woman of importance. Louise is married and she has a lover. 'Loss’ of her earrings presented to her by her husband could set in motion, events of such import as a kingdom lost at the throw of a dice. Such a personal article ( a trifle in itself) could as the kerchief of Desdemona lead to death in some cases or social disgrace. Louisa belongs to the rank and file of the militarists of love who gamble with trouble, knowing tragedy is around the corner. Why do they still do it? I recall a passage where Stendhal (Red and the Black) quotes the case of Margaret du Valois, the wife of Henri IV. She needed such dangers in order to feel her existence. Not having anxiety was as being in a limbo, out of the pale of social respectability her station and rank commanded.
The Earrings of Madame de . . . is based on a 1951 novel by Louise de Vilmorin simply called Madame de, who, in pawning the earrings given her by her husband, sets off a chain of circumstances that, when she falls desperately in love, tightens around her and destroys her. It’s like a brooch, small in scope but filigreed and chiseled masterly as the works of Ophuls often are. The film has a special sheen brought out by incisive wit, irony and understanding. His films are all a treat to watch. It is all on the surface like light caught and the many facets of the stone keep you attentive to what goes on beneath. ''Madame de...'' is one and his ''La Ronde'' (1950) and ''Lola Montes'' (1955) are similarly masterly. Take for instance the scene where he makes Baron Fabrizio Donati writing his lover day after day, with no letter back. Of course Louise frail in health and unable to stay in Paris tears up his letters and throw them out of her train carriage all the more despondent. She must play her part as demanded of her. In her thoughts,-her tears and unhappiness on reading them were as good as replies to them. ‘ I’ve answered all your letters my love,”says she. She lacked the courage to reply in any other manner. Louise is married to a general. Their marriage has style but no substance. In fact as the general observes it is superficially superficial. In the same context he sententiously adds, - it is his way of serious conversation, 'our conjugal bliss is a reflection of ourselves'.
The way she views her earrings is a clear indication of her feelings with regards to marriage. The diamonds, a gift of her husband she doesn’t mind selling since her debts that necessited it, are part of household expenses. She has run up debts in keeping her station in the society while the gift coming from Baron Donati is from desire. She makes it clear in her tryst in his carriage that she will always keeps them by her bedside. That is what love means to her. In the end when she presents the gift to the Church its significance cannot be lost on the viewer.
The diamond earrings like RL Stevenson's Bottle Imp turns up often to expose their shallowness as a couple and it echoes Renoir’s La Regle du Jeu: marriage as an institution in the pre WWI France meant for the privileged precious little no more than parading their good breeding and privileges. In this film also disaster follows the woman who makes a false step. Louise will lie to cover the absence of her earrings that makes her lover take offense first and then lead to a duel between two persons who mean most to her. All this will make the viewer agree with the general who quotes Napoleon,"The only victory in love is to flee".
‘The Earrings of Madame de...,' directed in 1953 by Max Ophuls, is one of the most mannered and contrived love movies ever filmed. It glitters and dazzles, and beneath the artifice it creates a heart, and breaks it. The film is famous for its elaborate camera movements, its graceful style, its sets, its costumes and of course its jewelry. It stars Danielle Darrieux, Charles Boyer and Vittorio De Sica, who effortlessly embody elegance. It could have been a mannered trifle. We sit in admiration of Ophuls' visual display, so fluid and intricate. Then to our surprise we find ourselves caring’.( Roger Ebert-2001)
ack: Press Notes: Ophuls, A Pleasure Indeed, Criterion-Sep. 19, 2008
Cast
Comtesse Louise de Danielle Darrieux
Générale André de Charles Boyer
Baron Fabrizio Donati Vittorio De Sica
Monsieur Rémy Jean Debucourt
Monsieur de Bernac Jean Galland
Lola Lia Di Leo
Credits
Director Max Ophuls
Based on the novel by Louise de Vilmorin
Adaptation by Marcel Achard, Max Ophuls and Annette Wademant
Cinematography: Christian Matras
Music : Oscar Straus and Georges van Parys
Costumes: Georges Annenkov and Rosine Delamare
Sound : Antoine Petitjean
Editing: Borys Lewin
* Run Time: 105 minutes
* Filmed In: B&W
benny
The Earrings of Madame de . . . is based on a 1951 novel by Louise de Vilmorin simply called Madame de, who, in pawning the earrings given her by her husband, sets off a chain of circumstances that, when she falls desperately in love, tightens around her and destroys her. It’s like a brooch, small in scope but filigreed and chiseled masterly as the works of Ophuls often are. The film has a special sheen brought out by incisive wit, irony and understanding. His films are all a treat to watch. It is all on the surface like light caught and the many facets of the stone keep you attentive to what goes on beneath. ''Madame de...'' is one and his ''La Ronde'' (1950) and ''Lola Montes'' (1955) are similarly masterly. Take for instance the scene where he makes Baron Fabrizio Donati writing his lover day after day, with no letter back. Of course Louise frail in health and unable to stay in Paris tears up his letters and throw them out of her train carriage all the more despondent. She must play her part as demanded of her. In her thoughts,-her tears and unhappiness on reading them were as good as replies to them. ‘ I’ve answered all your letters my love,”says she. She lacked the courage to reply in any other manner. Louise is married to a general. Their marriage has style but no substance. In fact as the general observes it is superficially superficial. In the same context he sententiously adds, - it is his way of serious conversation, 'our conjugal bliss is a reflection of ourselves'.
The way she views her earrings is a clear indication of her feelings with regards to marriage. The diamonds, a gift of her husband she doesn’t mind selling since her debts that necessited it, are part of household expenses. She has run up debts in keeping her station in the society while the gift coming from Baron Donati is from desire. She makes it clear in her tryst in his carriage that she will always keeps them by her bedside. That is what love means to her. In the end when she presents the gift to the Church its significance cannot be lost on the viewer.
The diamond earrings like RL Stevenson's Bottle Imp turns up often to expose their shallowness as a couple and it echoes Renoir’s La Regle du Jeu: marriage as an institution in the pre WWI France meant for the privileged precious little no more than parading their good breeding and privileges. In this film also disaster follows the woman who makes a false step. Louise will lie to cover the absence of her earrings that makes her lover take offense first and then lead to a duel between two persons who mean most to her. All this will make the viewer agree with the general who quotes Napoleon,"The only victory in love is to flee".
‘The Earrings of Madame de...,' directed in 1953 by Max Ophuls, is one of the most mannered and contrived love movies ever filmed. It glitters and dazzles, and beneath the artifice it creates a heart, and breaks it. The film is famous for its elaborate camera movements, its graceful style, its sets, its costumes and of course its jewelry. It stars Danielle Darrieux, Charles Boyer and Vittorio De Sica, who effortlessly embody elegance. It could have been a mannered trifle. We sit in admiration of Ophuls' visual display, so fluid and intricate. Then to our surprise we find ourselves caring’.( Roger Ebert-2001)
ack: Press Notes: Ophuls, A Pleasure Indeed, Criterion-Sep. 19, 2008
Cast
Comtesse Louise de Danielle Darrieux
Générale André de Charles Boyer
Baron Fabrizio Donati Vittorio De Sica
Monsieur Rémy Jean Debucourt
Monsieur de Bernac Jean Galland
Lola Lia Di Leo
Credits
Director Max Ophuls
Based on the novel by Louise de Vilmorin
Adaptation by Marcel Achard, Max Ophuls and Annette Wademant
Cinematography: Christian Matras
Music : Oscar Straus and Georges van Parys
Costumes: Georges Annenkov and Rosine Delamare
Sound : Antoine Petitjean
Editing: Borys Lewin
* Run Time: 105 minutes
* Filmed In: B&W
benny
Umberto D.-1952
Is old age that bad if enduring masterpieces could be teased out of it? Surely the Bard of Avon in King Lear sounded a warning note and made a case using the old king as an example, of the pitfalls of growing old without being wise. Ingmar Bergman showed what a motherlode the old age contained through his film Wild Srawberries. Vittorio De Sica has similarly created a masterpiece using a civil servant who has been left to fend for himself after the society squeezed everything worthwhile out of him. He has a piddling pension. It is ever shrinking and yet the governments dole is his by right but as for his needs for company and ancillaries he is on his own. In that twilight zone a dog is not just a dog but company that can light up his hours. Carlo Battisti as a retired civil servant, impoverished and isolated puts his all in that relationship. Screenwriter Cesare Zavattini and director Vittorio De Sica gave Umberto Domenico Ferrari a certain dignity despite of lacking youth, family, friends, health, money, and home. But with little Flike, he could, clutching him to his breast, fretting over his well-being, ultimately begging the dog to come play with him he could go on as though life still continued to beat as with his infancy. But when it runs away the effect on him—on us watching—is devastating. “I have no hesitation in stating that cinema has rarely gone such a long way toward making us aware of what it is to be a man. (And also, for that matter, of what it is to be a dog.)”– André Bazin, 1952
‘It was the fourth film that Zavattini and De Sica made together after World War II, and the first to fail. Shoeshine (Sciuscià, 1946) and The Bicycle Thief (Ladri di biciclette, 1948) had brought into focus, for domestic and international viewers alike, the intuitions, concerns, and methods of Italy’s best postwar filmmakers, and so had established neorealism as a movement. The impact on critics was enormous. “No more actors,” André Bazin wrote of The Bicycle Thief, “no more story, no more sets, which is to say that in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality there is no more cinema”—or, rather, that the film is “one of the first examples of pure cinema.” The impact on audiences was equally strong, with both Shoeshine and The Bicycle Thief winning the Academy Award for best foreign-language film’.( Seeing Clearly Through Tears: On the Smart Sentiment of Umberto D. by Stuart Klawans-22Jul03)
We have the first images of Umberto D. out of an impromptu street demonstration of old-age pensioners. The police disperse the crowd leaving the central character to take up the rest. Positioning Umberto between two characters of contrasting status we are given a hint of futility of culture since his intelligence or learning makes no contact or sympathy with his landlady with pretensions to bourgeois respectability. Despite being a gentleman, Umberto finds himself in concert with the housemaid who is uncluttered with book learning or culture. ( a nonprofessional actor, Maria Pia Casilio, discovered by De Sica when she was an apprentice seamstress). Flike is the only major character other than the landlady to be played by a trained performer, the canine actor Napoleone.
* Key Cast: Carlo Battisti, Maria Pia Casilio, Lina Gennari, Ileana Simova, Elena Rea, Lamberto Maggiorani, Alberto Albani Barbieri, Memmo Carotenuto,
* Awards: Best Story (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Scie 1956), Best Foreign Film (New York Film Critics Circle 1955)
* Run Time: 89 minutes
benn2
‘It was the fourth film that Zavattini and De Sica made together after World War II, and the first to fail. Shoeshine (Sciuscià, 1946) and The Bicycle Thief (Ladri di biciclette, 1948) had brought into focus, for domestic and international viewers alike, the intuitions, concerns, and methods of Italy’s best postwar filmmakers, and so had established neorealism as a movement. The impact on critics was enormous. “No more actors,” André Bazin wrote of The Bicycle Thief, “no more story, no more sets, which is to say that in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality there is no more cinema”—or, rather, that the film is “one of the first examples of pure cinema.” The impact on audiences was equally strong, with both Shoeshine and The Bicycle Thief winning the Academy Award for best foreign-language film’.( Seeing Clearly Through Tears: On the Smart Sentiment of Umberto D. by Stuart Klawans-22Jul03)
We have the first images of Umberto D. out of an impromptu street demonstration of old-age pensioners. The police disperse the crowd leaving the central character to take up the rest. Positioning Umberto between two characters of contrasting status we are given a hint of futility of culture since his intelligence or learning makes no contact or sympathy with his landlady with pretensions to bourgeois respectability. Despite being a gentleman, Umberto finds himself in concert with the housemaid who is uncluttered with book learning or culture. ( a nonprofessional actor, Maria Pia Casilio, discovered by De Sica when she was an apprentice seamstress). Flike is the only major character other than the landlady to be played by a trained performer, the canine actor Napoleone.
* Key Cast: Carlo Battisti, Maria Pia Casilio, Lina Gennari, Ileana Simova, Elena Rea, Lamberto Maggiorani, Alberto Albani Barbieri, Memmo Carotenuto,
* Awards: Best Story (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Scie 1956), Best Foreign Film (New York Film Critics Circle 1955)
* Run Time: 89 minutes
benn2
Wednesday 13 January 2010
The Godfather Part II-1974
The kernel of the film is same as what Machiavelli in his book The Prince seems to say. The book was meant for Lorenzo de Medici, the Magnificent. Of course the Medicis of another age and clime hold parallel to the Corleone family in as far as that they could acquire power and maintain it. As Medicis before them the Corleone family embody the American Dream and in it they didn’t have such taste or luck as the Medicis had. Michaelangelo under the aegis of the Corleone family surely would have churned out kitsch by dozens. The film has no pretensions to art and culture but is a crime drama. In order to ensure success what a bloody trail the Corleones leave in their wake? The Machiavellian methods dictated a course that is violent and amoral. Afterall given the stakes involved, the warring parties cannot then as now afford to let their objectives clouded by fine sensibilities. In this context the film quote "Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer," has the directness of a thrust from a stilleto or a spray of bullets from a machine gun. The second part of the Godfather is the saga of Vito Corleone from his childhood in Sicily (1901) to his founding of the criminal Corleone Family in New York City while still a young man (1917–1925) and like the Prince is a modern treatise for any one who would want to maintain his position acquired by fair means or foul.
The plot includes two parallel storylines. One involves Mafia chief Michael Corleone following the events of the first movie from 1958 to 1959 and the other his father is a series of flashbacks. In the present, Michael Corleone attempt to steer the family business towards respectability but at great cost to his own relationships. Even his own brother, Freddie (John Cazale) is sacrificed to Michael's grim and ultimately pointless determination. The Godfather Part II became the first sequel ever to win the Academy Award for Best Picture and garnered and even bigger Oscar haul than The Godfather. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola from a script co-written with Mario Puzo the film stars Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, John Cazale, and Talia Shire. New cast members include Robert De Niro( who won the Best Supporting Actor) , Michael V. Gazzo and Lee Strasberg.
Trivia: Paramount was initially opposed to name the movie The Godfather Part II. According to Coppola, the studio's objection stemmed from the belief that audiences would be reluctant to see a film with such a title. The success of The Godfather Part II began the Hollywood tradition of numbered sequels.
Cast
Al Pacino as Don Michael Corleone
* Robert Duvall as Tom Hagen
* Robert De Niro as Young Vito Corleone
* Diane Keaton as Kay Corleone
* John Cazale as Fredo Corleone
* Talia Shire as Connie Corleone
* Lee Strasberg as Hyman Roth
* Michael V. Gazzo as Frankie Pentangeli
* Morgana King as Mama Carmella Corleone
* G.D. Spradlin as Senator Pat Geary
* Richard Bright as Al Neri
* Marianna Hill as Deanna Corleone
* Gastone Moschin as Don Fanucci
* Troy Donahue as Merle Johnson
The Godfather Part II ranks among the most critically and artistically successful film sequels in movie history, and is the most honored. Many critics praise it as equal, or even superior, to the original film.
...a sumptuous flamboyant entertainment - not a work of art perhaps but a rich, enjoyable wallow of a movie.
~ Barry Norman, 100 Best Films of the Century
benny
The plot includes two parallel storylines. One involves Mafia chief Michael Corleone following the events of the first movie from 1958 to 1959 and the other his father is a series of flashbacks. In the present, Michael Corleone attempt to steer the family business towards respectability but at great cost to his own relationships. Even his own brother, Freddie (John Cazale) is sacrificed to Michael's grim and ultimately pointless determination. The Godfather Part II became the first sequel ever to win the Academy Award for Best Picture and garnered and even bigger Oscar haul than The Godfather. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola from a script co-written with Mario Puzo the film stars Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, John Cazale, and Talia Shire. New cast members include Robert De Niro( who won the Best Supporting Actor) , Michael V. Gazzo and Lee Strasberg.
Trivia: Paramount was initially opposed to name the movie The Godfather Part II. According to Coppola, the studio's objection stemmed from the belief that audiences would be reluctant to see a film with such a title. The success of The Godfather Part II began the Hollywood tradition of numbered sequels.
Cast
Al Pacino as Don Michael Corleone
* Robert Duvall as Tom Hagen
* Robert De Niro as Young Vito Corleone
* Diane Keaton as Kay Corleone
* John Cazale as Fredo Corleone
* Talia Shire as Connie Corleone
* Lee Strasberg as Hyman Roth
* Michael V. Gazzo as Frankie Pentangeli
* Morgana King as Mama Carmella Corleone
* G.D. Spradlin as Senator Pat Geary
* Richard Bright as Al Neri
* Marianna Hill as Deanna Corleone
* Gastone Moschin as Don Fanucci
* Troy Donahue as Merle Johnson
The Godfather Part II ranks among the most critically and artistically successful film sequels in movie history, and is the most honored. Many critics praise it as equal, or even superior, to the original film.
...a sumptuous flamboyant entertainment - not a work of art perhaps but a rich, enjoyable wallow of a movie.
~ Barry Norman, 100 Best Films of the Century
benny
Tuesday 12 January 2010
To Be or Not To Be-1942
The movie chronicles the adventures of a Polish theater company before and during Nazi occupation. The film draws its life from two players of that company: Josef Tura and his wife, Maria. The former is a ham who is fixated to play the soliloquy from Hamlet whenever he could hold the centre stage. Hence the title of the film.
To Be or Not to Be is a 1942 comedy film directed by Ernst Lubitsch who adapted from the story by Melchior Lengyel. The film stars Carole Lombard, Jack Benny, Robert Stack, Felix Bressart, Lionel Atwill, Stanley Ridges and Sig Ruman. Supposedly a comedy film the film fell flat on its release because the general public felt that making fun of such a real threat as the Nazis was revolting. (During the premier, Benny's own father walked out of the theater disgusted to see his son in a Nazi uniform during the first scene.) Worse still the film was released two months after actress Carole Lombard was killed in an airplane crash.
Plot
The movie chronicles the adventures of a Polish theater company that has also been performing Shakespeare's Hamlet, with Maria as Ophelia and Tura in the title role. Maria is curious to know the handsome young pilot who has been sending her flowers. Lieutenant Stanislav Sobinski sends a note asking for permission to finally meet Maria, and she agrees, telling him to come to her dressing room when her husband begins his "To be or not to be..." speech, so they can be sure of privacy. As a result, the young man walks out (very obviously) just as Tura begins his monologue and it causes the highly-strung actor great distress. Maria is attracted to Sobinski when they meet, and the two arrange to meet again. But then
Germany has declared war on Poland just as Sobinski is beginning to win her heart and news such as this must spell disaster for lovers. He leaves to join the fight and the actors take shelter under the theater as bombs begin to fall. Rest of the proceedings are fairly predictable what with the theater troup trying hard to stay afloat while sinister plots to ferret out Polish resistance are put forward and checkmated. The film bears ‘the Lubitsch touch’ that keeps the film from falling apart. His light touch is evident throughout keeping what could be a mindless farce into a zany but intelligent caper . For an example let me sketch the final scene. Tura and Maria escape into England and the actor is once again on stage as Hamlet and reaches the moment of "To be or not to be." He eyes Sobinski in the audience as he begins the speech, but both of them are struck dumb when a new young man gets up and heads backstage.
Cast
* Carole Lombard as Maria Tura — an actress in Nazi-occupied Poland.
* Jack Benny as Joseph Tura — an actor and Maria's husband.
* Robert Stack as Lt. Stanislav Sobinski — a Polish airman in love with Maria.
* Stanley Ridges as Professor Alexander Siletsky — A Nazi spy masquerading as a Polish resistance worker; tries to seduce Maria in order to persuade her to become a Nazi spy.
The film was remade in 1983 by Mel Brooks.
Trivia: ‘A prescient line was cut out of the film after the death of Carole Lombard: when Lombard is invited by Robert Stack's smitten airman to fly in a plane with him, she says: "What can happen on a plane?" The line has since been restored to available prints of the film’.(ack:wikipedia,all movie guide)
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch
Produced by Ernst Lubitsch
Written by Melchior Lengyel
Edwin Justus Mayer
Music by Werner R. Heymann
Uncredited:
Miklós Rózsa
Cinematography Rudolph Maté
Editing by Dorothy Spencer
Running time 99 minutes
Similar Movies
La Traversée de Paris (1956, Claude Autant-Lara)
The Great Dictator (1940, Charles Chaplin)
La Grande Vadrouille (1966, Gérard Oury)
La Poudre d'escampette (1971, Philippe de Broca)
Novye Pokhozhdeniya Shveyka (1943, Sergei Yutkevich)
Bon Voyage (2003, Jean-Paul Rappeneau)
The Producers (1968, Mel Brooks)
L'As Des As (1982, Gérard Oury)
Senechal the Magnificent (1958)
Yankee Doodle in Berlin (1919, F. Richard Jones)
Movies with the Same Personnel
Ninotchka (1939, Ernst Lubitsch)
Heaven Can Wait (1943, Ernst Lubitsch)
The Shop Around the Corner (1940, Ernst Lubitsch)
Nothing Sacred (1937, William Wellman)
That Uncertain Feeling (1941, Ernst Lubitsch)
Trouble in Paradise (1932, Ernst Lubitsch)
Wilson (1944, Henry King)
Tarzan Triumphs (1943, William Thiele)
Other Related Movies
is related to: Ay, Carmela! (1990, Carlos Saura)
Mephisto (1981, István Szabó)
has been remade as: To Be or Not to Be (1983, Alan Johnson)
benny
To Be or Not to Be is a 1942 comedy film directed by Ernst Lubitsch who adapted from the story by Melchior Lengyel. The film stars Carole Lombard, Jack Benny, Robert Stack, Felix Bressart, Lionel Atwill, Stanley Ridges and Sig Ruman. Supposedly a comedy film the film fell flat on its release because the general public felt that making fun of such a real threat as the Nazis was revolting. (During the premier, Benny's own father walked out of the theater disgusted to see his son in a Nazi uniform during the first scene.) Worse still the film was released two months after actress Carole Lombard was killed in an airplane crash.
Plot
The movie chronicles the adventures of a Polish theater company that has also been performing Shakespeare's Hamlet, with Maria as Ophelia and Tura in the title role. Maria is curious to know the handsome young pilot who has been sending her flowers. Lieutenant Stanislav Sobinski sends a note asking for permission to finally meet Maria, and she agrees, telling him to come to her dressing room when her husband begins his "To be or not to be..." speech, so they can be sure of privacy. As a result, the young man walks out (very obviously) just as Tura begins his monologue and it causes the highly-strung actor great distress. Maria is attracted to Sobinski when they meet, and the two arrange to meet again. But then
Germany has declared war on Poland just as Sobinski is beginning to win her heart and news such as this must spell disaster for lovers. He leaves to join the fight and the actors take shelter under the theater as bombs begin to fall. Rest of the proceedings are fairly predictable what with the theater troup trying hard to stay afloat while sinister plots to ferret out Polish resistance are put forward and checkmated. The film bears ‘the Lubitsch touch’ that keeps the film from falling apart. His light touch is evident throughout keeping what could be a mindless farce into a zany but intelligent caper . For an example let me sketch the final scene. Tura and Maria escape into England and the actor is once again on stage as Hamlet and reaches the moment of "To be or not to be." He eyes Sobinski in the audience as he begins the speech, but both of them are struck dumb when a new young man gets up and heads backstage.
Cast
* Carole Lombard as Maria Tura — an actress in Nazi-occupied Poland.
* Jack Benny as Joseph Tura — an actor and Maria's husband.
* Robert Stack as Lt. Stanislav Sobinski — a Polish airman in love with Maria.
* Stanley Ridges as Professor Alexander Siletsky — A Nazi spy masquerading as a Polish resistance worker; tries to seduce Maria in order to persuade her to become a Nazi spy.
The film was remade in 1983 by Mel Brooks.
Trivia: ‘A prescient line was cut out of the film after the death of Carole Lombard: when Lombard is invited by Robert Stack's smitten airman to fly in a plane with him, she says: "What can happen on a plane?" The line has since been restored to available prints of the film’.(ack:wikipedia,all movie guide)
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch
Produced by Ernst Lubitsch
Written by Melchior Lengyel
Edwin Justus Mayer
Music by Werner R. Heymann
Uncredited:
Miklós Rózsa
Cinematography Rudolph Maté
Editing by Dorothy Spencer
Running time 99 minutes
Similar Movies
La Traversée de Paris (1956, Claude Autant-Lara)
The Great Dictator (1940, Charles Chaplin)
La Grande Vadrouille (1966, Gérard Oury)
La Poudre d'escampette (1971, Philippe de Broca)
Novye Pokhozhdeniya Shveyka (1943, Sergei Yutkevich)
Bon Voyage (2003, Jean-Paul Rappeneau)
The Producers (1968, Mel Brooks)
L'As Des As (1982, Gérard Oury)
Senechal the Magnificent (1958)
Yankee Doodle in Berlin (1919, F. Richard Jones)
Movies with the Same Personnel
Ninotchka (1939, Ernst Lubitsch)
Heaven Can Wait (1943, Ernst Lubitsch)
The Shop Around the Corner (1940, Ernst Lubitsch)
Nothing Sacred (1937, William Wellman)
That Uncertain Feeling (1941, Ernst Lubitsch)
Trouble in Paradise (1932, Ernst Lubitsch)
Wilson (1944, Henry King)
Tarzan Triumphs (1943, William Thiele)
Other Related Movies
is related to: Ay, Carmela! (1990, Carlos Saura)
Mephisto (1981, István Szabó)
has been remade as: To Be or Not to Be (1983, Alan Johnson)
benny
The American Friend-1977
(Aka Der Amerikanische Freund)
It was Mark Twain who wrote Innocents Abroad. In that 1869 book he referred to his fellow trvellers as innocents. His fellow pilgrims while visiting the Holy Land were not for freeing their minds but trivializing the past and to be convinced of their set opinions as true. Alas it was then. The American in this film is entirely a mutant of naïve Americans of his age of which Tom Ripley is one. He is the new pilgrim and he is a criminal. He is more of the Harry Lime mold than of Mark Twain’s fellow Americans.
The American Friend is of the neo-noir genre. The film is based on Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley series. The Third book Ripley's Game (of five) is directed by Wim Wenders who also gave us Wings of Desire. (The Talented Mr. Ripley and Purple Noon are both based on the first book.)
Wim Wenders mines Dennis Hopper's real-life experience as a painter and collector in this existential take on the American gangster film. Unlike Matt Damon in The Talented Mr. Ripley Dennis Hopper’s role is subservient to that of Zimmermann.
Dennis Hopper stars as the eponymous American, currently a middleman selling the work of American painter Derwatt (Nicholas Ray), who has feigned his own death to increase the value of his paintings. While auctioning this work in Berlin, he meets art restorer Jonathan Zimmerman (Bruno Ganz), who he learns is suffering from an incurable blood disease. When a shady friend (Gerard Blain) requires Ripley to find a "clean" non-professional to do a contract hit in order to pay off a debt, even he is reluctant. But he quickly realizes that the physically vulnerable Jonathan would be perfect for the job, and tries to get him to accept by employing various subterfuges to persuade him that his condition is even worse than it is. For his part, Blain guarantees the restorer that his family will be financially secure for life, and a deal is struck.
Naturally, complications arise.
In case of Wenders his characteristic ambiguity blurs the difference between Ripley and his victim. A sense of contingency and randomness permeate his work. For the same reason he stops himself from developing the desperation Zimmermann needs to make this story work. The result is a kind of watching the proceedings take their own course than being involved.
The doppelgänger motif, which threads through Highsmith's work is the dominant metaphor of Wenders' film. The cinematography is both bleak and pretty -- bouncing between Paris and postwar Germany. There are cameo roles for directors Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause) and Samuel Fuller (Shock Corridor).
Cast
* Dennis Hopper - Tom Ripley
* Bruno Ganz - Jonathan Zimmermann
* Lisa Kreuzer - Marianne Zimmermann
* Gérard Blain - Raoul Minot
* Nicholas Ray - Derwatt
Run Time: 127 minutes
In A Girl and a Gun: The Complete Guide to Film Noir, David N. Meyer says, "— The American Friend is worth the effort. Few movies from any era or genre offer such rich characters, realistic human relationships, gripping action sequences, or sly humor."
Similar Movies
Chinese Boxes; The Passenger; Öszi Almanach; Purple Noon; Il Faut Tuer Birgitt Haas; With a Friend Like Harry...; Mafioso
(Ack: wikipedia, Michael Costello, All Movie Guide
Christopher Null, Filmcritic.com)
benny
It was Mark Twain who wrote Innocents Abroad. In that 1869 book he referred to his fellow trvellers as innocents. His fellow pilgrims while visiting the Holy Land were not for freeing their minds but trivializing the past and to be convinced of their set opinions as true. Alas it was then. The American in this film is entirely a mutant of naïve Americans of his age of which Tom Ripley is one. He is the new pilgrim and he is a criminal. He is more of the Harry Lime mold than of Mark Twain’s fellow Americans.
The American Friend is of the neo-noir genre. The film is based on Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley series. The Third book Ripley's Game (of five) is directed by Wim Wenders who also gave us Wings of Desire. (The Talented Mr. Ripley and Purple Noon are both based on the first book.)
Wim Wenders mines Dennis Hopper's real-life experience as a painter and collector in this existential take on the American gangster film. Unlike Matt Damon in The Talented Mr. Ripley Dennis Hopper’s role is subservient to that of Zimmermann.
Dennis Hopper stars as the eponymous American, currently a middleman selling the work of American painter Derwatt (Nicholas Ray), who has feigned his own death to increase the value of his paintings. While auctioning this work in Berlin, he meets art restorer Jonathan Zimmerman (Bruno Ganz), who he learns is suffering from an incurable blood disease. When a shady friend (Gerard Blain) requires Ripley to find a "clean" non-professional to do a contract hit in order to pay off a debt, even he is reluctant. But he quickly realizes that the physically vulnerable Jonathan would be perfect for the job, and tries to get him to accept by employing various subterfuges to persuade him that his condition is even worse than it is. For his part, Blain guarantees the restorer that his family will be financially secure for life, and a deal is struck.
Naturally, complications arise.
In case of Wenders his characteristic ambiguity blurs the difference between Ripley and his victim. A sense of contingency and randomness permeate his work. For the same reason he stops himself from developing the desperation Zimmermann needs to make this story work. The result is a kind of watching the proceedings take their own course than being involved.
The doppelgänger motif, which threads through Highsmith's work is the dominant metaphor of Wenders' film. The cinematography is both bleak and pretty -- bouncing between Paris and postwar Germany. There are cameo roles for directors Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause) and Samuel Fuller (Shock Corridor).
Cast
* Dennis Hopper - Tom Ripley
* Bruno Ganz - Jonathan Zimmermann
* Lisa Kreuzer - Marianne Zimmermann
* Gérard Blain - Raoul Minot
* Nicholas Ray - Derwatt
Run Time: 127 minutes
In A Girl and a Gun: The Complete Guide to Film Noir, David N. Meyer says, "— The American Friend is worth the effort. Few movies from any era or genre offer such rich characters, realistic human relationships, gripping action sequences, or sly humor."
Similar Movies
Chinese Boxes; The Passenger; Öszi Almanach; Purple Noon; Il Faut Tuer Birgitt Haas; With a Friend Like Harry...; Mafioso
(Ack: wikipedia, Michael Costello, All Movie Guide
Christopher Null, Filmcritic.com)
benny
Monday 11 January 2010
The 39 Steps-1935
The 39 Steps is a 1935 British thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, based on the adventure novel The Thirty-nine Steps by John Buchan. The film stars Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll.
There have been four major film versions of the book. Hitchcock's original has been the most acclaimed, and remains so today: in 2004 Total Film named it the 21st greatest British movie of all time.
In this nicely paced thriller, Canadian Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) is at a London music hall theatre, watching a demonstration of the superlative powers of recall of "Mr. Memory" (Wylie Watson) when shots are fired. ( Shades of The Man Who knew Too Much!) In the ensuing panic, he finds himself holding a frightened Annabella Smith (Lucie Mannheim), who talks him into taking her back to his flat. There, she tells him that she is a spy, being chased by assassins. She claims to have uncovered a plot to steal vital British military secrets, masterminded by a man with the top joint missing from one of his fingers. She mentions the "thirty-nine steps", but does not explain its meaning. Only Hitchcock can spin a web of intrigue out of some dry as dust ‘steps’ and seem like cotton candy in a child’s hand. Of course in the best Hitchcockian manner she is murdered and the police suspect Hannay.
Alfred Hitchcock directed many memorable movies over his long career, but one of his most charming remains his 1935 film The 39 Steps, and to me Donat’s light touch came as a surprise in comparison with his many other movies. Pity that such a talented actor died so young(at the age of 53).
Hannay decides to travel to Scotland and try to figure out what's going on, and during his journey he learns from newspapers that the police have identified him as the prime suspect in the murder. He also meets a good-looking icy blonde named Pamela (Madeleine Carroll), and she reluctantly becomes his traveling companion. At one point, Hannay and Pamela become handcuffed together and wind up bedding down in a room in a country inn that way!
The film follows Hannay as he goes through a series of dangerous adventures, and at the same time it shows the development of his romantic relationship with Pamela. There's plenty of humor in the movie, too, as when a crass salesman of women's underwear displays and discusses his products on a train. Or when Hannay asks a milkman if he's married and gets the response, "Yes, but don't rub it in."
The film departs substantially from Buchan's novel, introducing a love interest. In this film, The 39 Steps refers to the clandestine organisation itself, whereas in the book and in the other film versions, it refers to physical steps, albeit located in different places and with different significances to the plots. When in the film Annabella (who is a man called "Franklin P. Scudder" in the novel) tells Hannay she is travelling to meet a man in Scotland, Hitchcock is avoiding one of Buchan's wild, unexplained implausibilities: the way in which Hannay, with the whole country to hide in, chances to walk into the one house where the spy ringleader lives.
Hitchcockian elements
The 39 Steps is the first in a line of Hitchcock films based upon the idea of an innocent man on the run, including Saboteur (1942) and North by Northwest (1959).
Alfred Hitchcock cameo: A signature occurrence in almost all of Hitchcock's films, he can be seen tossing some litter while Robert Donat and Lucie Mannheim run from the theatre at the beginning of the film.
Run time:86 minutes.
There have been four major film versions of the book. Hitchcock's original has been the most acclaimed, and remains so today: in 2004 Total Film named it the 21st greatest British movie of all time.
In this nicely paced thriller, Canadian Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) is at a London music hall theatre, watching a demonstration of the superlative powers of recall of "Mr. Memory" (Wylie Watson) when shots are fired. ( Shades of The Man Who knew Too Much!) In the ensuing panic, he finds himself holding a frightened Annabella Smith (Lucie Mannheim), who talks him into taking her back to his flat. There, she tells him that she is a spy, being chased by assassins. She claims to have uncovered a plot to steal vital British military secrets, masterminded by a man with the top joint missing from one of his fingers. She mentions the "thirty-nine steps", but does not explain its meaning. Only Hitchcock can spin a web of intrigue out of some dry as dust ‘steps’ and seem like cotton candy in a child’s hand. Of course in the best Hitchcockian manner she is murdered and the police suspect Hannay.
Alfred Hitchcock directed many memorable movies over his long career, but one of his most charming remains his 1935 film The 39 Steps, and to me Donat’s light touch came as a surprise in comparison with his many other movies. Pity that such a talented actor died so young(at the age of 53).
Hannay decides to travel to Scotland and try to figure out what's going on, and during his journey he learns from newspapers that the police have identified him as the prime suspect in the murder. He also meets a good-looking icy blonde named Pamela (Madeleine Carroll), and she reluctantly becomes his traveling companion. At one point, Hannay and Pamela become handcuffed together and wind up bedding down in a room in a country inn that way!
The film follows Hannay as he goes through a series of dangerous adventures, and at the same time it shows the development of his romantic relationship with Pamela. There's plenty of humor in the movie, too, as when a crass salesman of women's underwear displays and discusses his products on a train. Or when Hannay asks a milkman if he's married and gets the response, "Yes, but don't rub it in."
The film departs substantially from Buchan's novel, introducing a love interest. In this film, The 39 Steps refers to the clandestine organisation itself, whereas in the book and in the other film versions, it refers to physical steps, albeit located in different places and with different significances to the plots. When in the film Annabella (who is a man called "Franklin P. Scudder" in the novel) tells Hannay she is travelling to meet a man in Scotland, Hitchcock is avoiding one of Buchan's wild, unexplained implausibilities: the way in which Hannay, with the whole country to hide in, chances to walk into the one house where the spy ringleader lives.
Hitchcockian elements
The 39 Steps is the first in a line of Hitchcock films based upon the idea of an innocent man on the run, including Saboteur (1942) and North by Northwest (1959).
Alfred Hitchcock cameo: A signature occurrence in almost all of Hitchcock's films, he can be seen tossing some litter while Robert Donat and Lucie Mannheim run from the theatre at the beginning of the film.
Run time:86 minutes.
Sunday 10 January 2010
Ivan the Terrible-1944
Ivan The Terrible (written Иван Грозный in Russian, pronounced Ivan Groznyy) is a two-part historical epic film about Ivan IV of Russia. During World War II, with the German army approaching Moscow, Stalin wanted Eisenstein to undertake a film on nationalistic subject. With the success of Alexander Nevsky behind him the subject was in a manner of speaking was chosen for him. Joseph Stalin admired the first Tsar, seeing him as the same kind of brilliant, decisive, successful leader that Stalin aspired to be. Russian director Sergei Eisenstein conceived as a triology, but Eisenstein died before filming of the third part could be finished.
Part 1 was released in 1944 but Part 2 was not released until 1958 due to political censorship.
Part I begins with Ivan's coronation as Tsar of all the Russias, amid grumbling from the boyars. Ivan makes a speech proclaiming his intent to unite and protect Russia against the foreign armies outside her borders and the enemies within. Shortly after, the scene changes to Ivan's wedding celebration in which he marries Anastasia Romanovna. This causes him to lose the friendship of his two best friends, Prince Andrei Kurbsky and Fyodor Kolychev. The latter receives Ivan's permission to retire to a monastery, while Kurbsky attempts to resume his romance with the Tsarina, who repels his advances.
The marriage feast is interrupted by news of the burning of several boyar palaces, carried into the Tsar's palace by a mob of the common people and a war with Kazan.
The city of Kazan falls to the Russian army.
During his return from Kazan, Ivan falls seriously ill and is thought to be on his deathbed; the court intrigue begins to work. Ivan’s aunt Efrosinia Staritska wants the people to swear allegiance to her son, Vladimir the "boyar tsar" instead of the infant Dmitri, Tsar’s choice. Kurbsky is uncertain of his own loyalty, trying to decide between the two sides. However, when the Tsarina says, "Do not bury a man before he is dead," Kurbsky realizes that Ivan is still alive, and hurriedly swears his allegiance to Ivan's infant son, Dmitri.
The Tsarina now falls ill, and while Ivan is receiving bad news from all fronts, the boyars plot to kill her. Efrosinia comes into the palace with a cup of wine hidden in her robes, in which she has put poison. Just as the royal couple receives word that Kurbsky has defected to the Livonians, Efrosinia slips the cup of wine into the room and listens from behind a wall. The Tsarina has a convulsion and Ivan, looking around for a drink to calm her, takes the poisoned wine and gives it to her.
The scene changes to show the dead Tsarina lying in state in the cathedral, with Ivan mourning beside her bier. While a monk reads biblical verses over the body, Ivan questions his own justifications and ability to rule, wondering if his wife's death is God's punishment on him. However, he pulls himself out of it, and sends for Kolychev. At this point, Alexei Basmanov arrives, suggesting that Ivan surround himself with men he can trust - "iron men," the Oprichnina - and offers his (rather startled) son, Fyodor, for service. Ivan accepts, and sets about recouping his losses. He abdicates and leaves Moscow, waiting until the people beg him to return, saying that he now rules with absolute power by the will of the people.
Part 2
Part II picks up where Part I left off, at Ivan's return to Moscow. He begins by reforming the land distribution: he takes the boyars' lands, then reinstalls them as managers, increasing his own power at their expense. His friend, Kolychev, arrives, now the monk Philip; after a heated debate, Philip agrees to become metropolitan of Moscow, if Ivan gives him the right to intercede for condemned men. This is mutually agreed upon. But as soon as it is settled, Ivan, propelled by Malyuta, finds a way around this: he executes condemned men quickly, before Philip can use his right. In this way he has three of Philip's kinsmen executed.
Fyodor Basmanov, the first of the Oprichnina, helps Ivan figure out that the Tsarina was poisoned, and both suspect Efrosinia of poisoning the cup of wine. Ivan orders Fyodor not to say anything about it until he (Ivan) is certain beyond doubt of her guilt.
The boyars, close to desperation, plead their case to Philip and eventually win him over. He vows to block Ivan's abuse of power, and confronts him in the cathedral while a miracle play is being presented. As the argument heats up, Ivan, angry, proclaims that he will be exactly what the boyars call him - terrible - and has Philip seized. The boyars now decide that their only option is to assassinate Ivan, and the novice Pyotr is selected to wield the knife.
Ivan, now certain of Efrosinia's guilt, invites Vladimir to a banquet with the Oprichnina. Ivan gets Vladimir drunk while the Oprichnina sing and dance around them; Vladimir mentions that there is a plot to kill Ivan, and he (Vladimir) is to replace him as Tsar. Fyodor Basmanov notices the assassin leaving, and signals Ivan, who, pretending surprise at Vladimir's revelation, suggests Vladimir try being Tsar for a while, and has the Oprichnina bring throne, orb, scepter, crown and royal robes, and they all bow down to "Tsar Vladimir." Then Ivan tells Vladimir to lead them to the cathedral in prayer, as a Tsar should lead. Hesitantly, Vladimir does.
In the cathedral, the assassin runs up and stabs the mock Tsar, and is immediately seized by the Basmanovs. Ivan orders them to release Pyotr, and thanks him for killing the tsar's worst enemy. Efrosinia arrives, jubilant at the apparent death of Ivan, until she sees Ivan alive; rolling the corpse over, she realizes it is her own son. Ivan sentences her and then relaxes, proclaiming that all his enemies within Moscow are vanquished and he can turn to those outside.
Parallels drawn between Stalin and Ivan the terrible agree since struggle for power or establishing central authority over various power centres are as old as the first man who founded a city. Echoes of Tsarist Russia of the sixteenth century and Russia of the 20th century are about the same issues. Kulaks whom Stalin liquidated in the 30s were a thorn on his side as Boyars was to Ivan. Eisenstein may have presented a truthful examination of the life of Ivan the Terrible as cinematic art would allow and it so happened that Stalin found some parallels pleasing while other that he found troublesome. (Eisenstein was forced to offer the most abject of apologies: “The sense of historical truth was betrayed by me in the second part of Ivan.”)
One may either love or hate the film as one may respond to an opera. The style of acting is like that in silent film and, also as in opera gestures and expressions are exaggerated. Prokofiev's music heightens the emotional intensity. Some will find the highly stylized quality of this film annoying. Here we see Eisenstein’s visual vocabulary has come of age that for a student of film something to learn from. Ivan the Terrible has been voted onto several lists of the top ten films ever and at least one list of the worst fifty!
Cast:
Nikolai Cherkasov ... Czar Ivan IV
Lyudmila Tselikovskaya ... Czarina Anastasia Romanovna
Serafima Birman ... Boyarina Efrosinia Staritskaya
Mikhail Nazvanov ... Prince Andrei Kurbsky
Mikhail Zharov ... Czar's Guard Malyuta Skuratov
Amvrosi Buchma ... Czar's Guard Aleksei Basmanov
Mikhail Kuznetsov ... Fyodor Basmanov
Pavel Kadochnikov ... Vladimir Andreyevich Staritsky
Andrei Abrikosov ... Boyar Fyodor Kolychev
Aleksandr Mgebrov ... Novgorod's Archbishop Pimen
Maksim Mikhajlov ... Archdeacon
Vsevolod Pudovkin ... Nikola, Simpleton Beggar
benny
Part 1 was released in 1944 but Part 2 was not released until 1958 due to political censorship.
Part I begins with Ivan's coronation as Tsar of all the Russias, amid grumbling from the boyars. Ivan makes a speech proclaiming his intent to unite and protect Russia against the foreign armies outside her borders and the enemies within. Shortly after, the scene changes to Ivan's wedding celebration in which he marries Anastasia Romanovna. This causes him to lose the friendship of his two best friends, Prince Andrei Kurbsky and Fyodor Kolychev. The latter receives Ivan's permission to retire to a monastery, while Kurbsky attempts to resume his romance with the Tsarina, who repels his advances.
The marriage feast is interrupted by news of the burning of several boyar palaces, carried into the Tsar's palace by a mob of the common people and a war with Kazan.
The city of Kazan falls to the Russian army.
During his return from Kazan, Ivan falls seriously ill and is thought to be on his deathbed; the court intrigue begins to work. Ivan’s aunt Efrosinia Staritska wants the people to swear allegiance to her son, Vladimir the "boyar tsar" instead of the infant Dmitri, Tsar’s choice. Kurbsky is uncertain of his own loyalty, trying to decide between the two sides. However, when the Tsarina says, "Do not bury a man before he is dead," Kurbsky realizes that Ivan is still alive, and hurriedly swears his allegiance to Ivan's infant son, Dmitri.
The Tsarina now falls ill, and while Ivan is receiving bad news from all fronts, the boyars plot to kill her. Efrosinia comes into the palace with a cup of wine hidden in her robes, in which she has put poison. Just as the royal couple receives word that Kurbsky has defected to the Livonians, Efrosinia slips the cup of wine into the room and listens from behind a wall. The Tsarina has a convulsion and Ivan, looking around for a drink to calm her, takes the poisoned wine and gives it to her.
The scene changes to show the dead Tsarina lying in state in the cathedral, with Ivan mourning beside her bier. While a monk reads biblical verses over the body, Ivan questions his own justifications and ability to rule, wondering if his wife's death is God's punishment on him. However, he pulls himself out of it, and sends for Kolychev. At this point, Alexei Basmanov arrives, suggesting that Ivan surround himself with men he can trust - "iron men," the Oprichnina - and offers his (rather startled) son, Fyodor, for service. Ivan accepts, and sets about recouping his losses. He abdicates and leaves Moscow, waiting until the people beg him to return, saying that he now rules with absolute power by the will of the people.
Part 2
Part II picks up where Part I left off, at Ivan's return to Moscow. He begins by reforming the land distribution: he takes the boyars' lands, then reinstalls them as managers, increasing his own power at their expense. His friend, Kolychev, arrives, now the monk Philip; after a heated debate, Philip agrees to become metropolitan of Moscow, if Ivan gives him the right to intercede for condemned men. This is mutually agreed upon. But as soon as it is settled, Ivan, propelled by Malyuta, finds a way around this: he executes condemned men quickly, before Philip can use his right. In this way he has three of Philip's kinsmen executed.
Fyodor Basmanov, the first of the Oprichnina, helps Ivan figure out that the Tsarina was poisoned, and both suspect Efrosinia of poisoning the cup of wine. Ivan orders Fyodor not to say anything about it until he (Ivan) is certain beyond doubt of her guilt.
The boyars, close to desperation, plead their case to Philip and eventually win him over. He vows to block Ivan's abuse of power, and confronts him in the cathedral while a miracle play is being presented. As the argument heats up, Ivan, angry, proclaims that he will be exactly what the boyars call him - terrible - and has Philip seized. The boyars now decide that their only option is to assassinate Ivan, and the novice Pyotr is selected to wield the knife.
Ivan, now certain of Efrosinia's guilt, invites Vladimir to a banquet with the Oprichnina. Ivan gets Vladimir drunk while the Oprichnina sing and dance around them; Vladimir mentions that there is a plot to kill Ivan, and he (Vladimir) is to replace him as Tsar. Fyodor Basmanov notices the assassin leaving, and signals Ivan, who, pretending surprise at Vladimir's revelation, suggests Vladimir try being Tsar for a while, and has the Oprichnina bring throne, orb, scepter, crown and royal robes, and they all bow down to "Tsar Vladimir." Then Ivan tells Vladimir to lead them to the cathedral in prayer, as a Tsar should lead. Hesitantly, Vladimir does.
In the cathedral, the assassin runs up and stabs the mock Tsar, and is immediately seized by the Basmanovs. Ivan orders them to release Pyotr, and thanks him for killing the tsar's worst enemy. Efrosinia arrives, jubilant at the apparent death of Ivan, until she sees Ivan alive; rolling the corpse over, she realizes it is her own son. Ivan sentences her and then relaxes, proclaiming that all his enemies within Moscow are vanquished and he can turn to those outside.
Parallels drawn between Stalin and Ivan the terrible agree since struggle for power or establishing central authority over various power centres are as old as the first man who founded a city. Echoes of Tsarist Russia of the sixteenth century and Russia of the 20th century are about the same issues. Kulaks whom Stalin liquidated in the 30s were a thorn on his side as Boyars was to Ivan. Eisenstein may have presented a truthful examination of the life of Ivan the Terrible as cinematic art would allow and it so happened that Stalin found some parallels pleasing while other that he found troublesome. (Eisenstein was forced to offer the most abject of apologies: “The sense of historical truth was betrayed by me in the second part of Ivan.”)
One may either love or hate the film as one may respond to an opera. The style of acting is like that in silent film and, also as in opera gestures and expressions are exaggerated. Prokofiev's music heightens the emotional intensity. Some will find the highly stylized quality of this film annoying. Here we see Eisenstein’s visual vocabulary has come of age that for a student of film something to learn from. Ivan the Terrible has been voted onto several lists of the top ten films ever and at least one list of the worst fifty!
Cast:
Nikolai Cherkasov ... Czar Ivan IV
Lyudmila Tselikovskaya ... Czarina Anastasia Romanovna
Serafima Birman ... Boyarina Efrosinia Staritskaya
Mikhail Nazvanov ... Prince Andrei Kurbsky
Mikhail Zharov ... Czar's Guard Malyuta Skuratov
Amvrosi Buchma ... Czar's Guard Aleksei Basmanov
Mikhail Kuznetsov ... Fyodor Basmanov
Pavel Kadochnikov ... Vladimir Andreyevich Staritsky
Andrei Abrikosov ... Boyar Fyodor Kolychev
Aleksandr Mgebrov ... Novgorod's Archbishop Pimen
Maksim Mikhajlov ... Archdeacon
Vsevolod Pudovkin ... Nikola, Simpleton Beggar
benny
Friday 8 January 2010
A Double Life-1947
This film tells the story of an actor whose mind becomes affected by the character he portrays. The role of Othello is not what every actor can bring off so easily knowing he is only play-acting. Much less can, however talented put on the role of the Moor night and after night without paying the price. It is like going through the revolving doors so often and and not knowing at a given point of time if he is coming or going. Anthony John (Colman) is a successful actor who has a problem, an occupational hazard, and becomes increasingly out of touch with reality. He has so convincingly got inside his role so much so he cannot distinguish the role with the real. Originally written for Laurence Olivier, A Double Life ultimately served as the vehicle, which brought Ronald Colman his only Oscar.
The award was a well deserved one, and his voice one of his chief assets is described as "a bewitching, finely-modulated, resonant voice." The descending madness like the avenging angel tips the thespian over the edge in the very success (in movie, Anthony John stars in a Broadway production of Othello, that plays more than 300 performances and runs over a year.) and as we see his personal life is in doldrums and must cope with his sanity even as he speaks set speeches so convincingly. The shadow of madness, the frenzy, the fight for sanity are all portrayed in an electrifying manner. Colman makes this man both monstrous and appealing.
In a fit of delirium, he strangles his casual mistress, Pat (Shelley Winters), but retains no memory of the awful crime. Press agent Bill Friend (Edmond O'Brien), unaware that Anthony is the killer, uses Pat's murder as publicity for Othello. Anthony becomes enraged at this cheap ploy, and attacks Friend. At this point, Anthony realizes that he has been living "a double life" and is in fact Pat's murderer. This duality of the central character is visually impacted in the viewers mind by mirrors and reflection, somewhat remniscent of films as diverse as M or The Servant.
A Double Life was written for the screen by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin.
Directed by George Cukor the film brings out creditable performance from all and especially a convincing and vulnerable performance from Shelley Winters. (Hal Erickson, Craig Butler, All Movie Guide
Cast
* Whit Bissell - Dr. Stauffer
* Ronald Colman - Anthony John
* Betsy Blair - Girl in Wig Shop
* Signe Hasso - Brita
* Edmond O'Brien - Bill Friend
* David Bond - ["othello" Sequence]
* Harlan Briggs - Oscar Bemard
* Shelley Winters - Pat Kroll
* Georgia Caine - [A Gentleman's Gentleman Sequence]
* Ray Collins - Victor Donlan
Julie Kirgo wrote that A Double Life is truly a picture of opposing forces, mirror images and deadly doubles: "Anthony John is at war with Othello, the elegant world of the theater is opposed to the squalid existence of Shelley Winters' Pat Kroll, and illusion versus reality are all conveyed in opposing lights and darks of Krasner's luminous photography."
Music by Miklós Rózsa
Cinematography Milton R. Krasner
Similar Movies
Carnival (1931, Herbert Wilcox)
The Glass Web (1953, Jack Arnold)
The Gang of Four (1988, Jacques Rivette)
Carmen (1983, Carlos Saura)
Curtains (1983, Richard Ciupka, Jonathan Stryker)
Perfect Strangers (2003, Gaylene Preston)
Movies with the Same Personnel
The Prisoner of Zenda (1937, John Cromwell, George Cukor, W.S. Van Dyke)
The Seventh Cross (1944, Fred Zinnemann)
The Racket (1951, John Cromwell, Nicholas Ray)
Winchester '73 (1950, Anthony Mann)
The Senator Was Indiscreet (1947, George S. Kaufman)
The Gangster (1947, Gordon Wiles)
Fear in the Night (1947, Maxwell Shane)
Pat and Mike (1952, George Cukor)
Other Related Movies
is related to: Othello (1952, Orson Welles)
Who Am I This Time? (1982, Jonathan Demme)
I Love a Man in Uniform (1993, David Wellington)
* Run Time: 103 minutes
benny
The award was a well deserved one, and his voice one of his chief assets is described as "a bewitching, finely-modulated, resonant voice." The descending madness like the avenging angel tips the thespian over the edge in the very success (in movie, Anthony John stars in a Broadway production of Othello, that plays more than 300 performances and runs over a year.) and as we see his personal life is in doldrums and must cope with his sanity even as he speaks set speeches so convincingly. The shadow of madness, the frenzy, the fight for sanity are all portrayed in an electrifying manner. Colman makes this man both monstrous and appealing.
In a fit of delirium, he strangles his casual mistress, Pat (Shelley Winters), but retains no memory of the awful crime. Press agent Bill Friend (Edmond O'Brien), unaware that Anthony is the killer, uses Pat's murder as publicity for Othello. Anthony becomes enraged at this cheap ploy, and attacks Friend. At this point, Anthony realizes that he has been living "a double life" and is in fact Pat's murderer. This duality of the central character is visually impacted in the viewers mind by mirrors and reflection, somewhat remniscent of films as diverse as M or The Servant.
A Double Life was written for the screen by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin.
Directed by George Cukor the film brings out creditable performance from all and especially a convincing and vulnerable performance from Shelley Winters. (Hal Erickson, Craig Butler, All Movie Guide
Cast
* Whit Bissell - Dr. Stauffer
* Ronald Colman - Anthony John
* Betsy Blair - Girl in Wig Shop
* Signe Hasso - Brita
* Edmond O'Brien - Bill Friend
* David Bond - ["othello" Sequence]
* Harlan Briggs - Oscar Bemard
* Shelley Winters - Pat Kroll
* Georgia Caine - [A Gentleman's Gentleman Sequence]
* Ray Collins - Victor Donlan
Julie Kirgo wrote that A Double Life is truly a picture of opposing forces, mirror images and deadly doubles: "Anthony John is at war with Othello, the elegant world of the theater is opposed to the squalid existence of Shelley Winters' Pat Kroll, and illusion versus reality are all conveyed in opposing lights and darks of Krasner's luminous photography."
Music by Miklós Rózsa
Cinematography Milton R. Krasner
Similar Movies
Carnival (1931, Herbert Wilcox)
The Glass Web (1953, Jack Arnold)
The Gang of Four (1988, Jacques Rivette)
Carmen (1983, Carlos Saura)
Curtains (1983, Richard Ciupka, Jonathan Stryker)
Perfect Strangers (2003, Gaylene Preston)
Movies with the Same Personnel
The Prisoner of Zenda (1937, John Cromwell, George Cukor, W.S. Van Dyke)
The Seventh Cross (1944, Fred Zinnemann)
The Racket (1951, John Cromwell, Nicholas Ray)
Winchester '73 (1950, Anthony Mann)
The Senator Was Indiscreet (1947, George S. Kaufman)
The Gangster (1947, Gordon Wiles)
Fear in the Night (1947, Maxwell Shane)
Pat and Mike (1952, George Cukor)
Other Related Movies
is related to: Othello (1952, Orson Welles)
Who Am I This Time? (1982, Jonathan Demme)
I Love a Man in Uniform (1993, David Wellington)
* Run Time: 103 minutes
benny
Thursday 7 January 2010
Les Visiteurs du Soir-1942
The film (aka: The Devil's Envoys)
is unquestionably a masterpiece that came out of France under the most trying conditions. Despite the Nazi Occupation with the restrictions on materials and media we have two films that have achieved high watermark in the history of French cinema. Les vistieurs is one film and Les Enfants du Paradis is another (1945). Both are backward looking in the sense one appears to be a simple romantic fable set in a fairy tale castle with demons, knights and princesses while the 1945 film deals with the theatrical world of a century before. Both came out of the fruitful collaboration between director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert. The film was hailed as a major cinematographic achievement upon its release in 1942 and remained one of the most popular films made under the Nazi Occupation.
The film begins with the title: in this lovely month of May 1485 Messire Satan on earth sent two of his creatures to despair men ..."
Summary
In the 15th Century, two traveling musicians named Gilles and Dominique arrive at the castle of Baron Hugues, amid celebrations for the impending marriage between Hugues’ daughter Anne and a knight Renaud. The two musicians are in truth emissaries of the Devil, sent to disrupt the wedding for their own amusement. Whilst Dominique seduces Renaud, Gilles makes an easy conquest of Anne. However, Anne’s purity overwhelms Gilles and he in turn falls in love with her. This unexpected turn of events forces the Devil into making a personal appearance...
On the surface, the film appears to be a simple romantic fable but there is clearly more to this film than first meets the eye. Many have seen an allegorical sub-text in this seemingly innocuous romantic fable. The reluctance of the two lovers Gilles and Anne to separate in the second half of the film, despite the best efforts of man and Devil, can be understood as a covert message to the French nation to hold out against the German overlords. Historically we may see the parable as apt. The Third Republic may be an edifice in stone stripped of marble and gold by the fall of France but there shall still beat the Gallic spirit as the pair of lovers in the film.
One feature from the film that stands out even after so many decades is its cinematography. Not content with conventional photographic techniques, Carné developed some new methods for creating just the effect he was after as In Les Enfants. (In the latter Carné was particular of giving the shirt front of the notorious thief and murderer Lacenaire an unnatural luminosity contrasted with Baptiste the man in white.) In Les Visiteurs he makes the dance scene memorable, where the film is slowed to give the impression of time coming to a halt, allowing the two Devil’s emissaries to commence their evil machinations. Later on, a similar trick allows Carné to transport his fated lovers to a dreamlike garden. The arrival of the Devil in the second half of the film is no less impressive, using a combination of noise and lighting to conjure up an instant sense of drama and anticipation.
A combination of an excellent script, creditable acting from Jules Berry and Arletty sets this film apart from many other of the 40s French films. Berry is at his best playing the role of the Devil with a burlesque relish, and with villainous charm.
* Director: Marcel Carné
* Script: Jacques Prévert, Pierre Laroche
* Music: Maurice Thiriet
* Cast: Arletty (Dominique), Marie Déa (Anne), Fernand Ledoux (Le baron Hugues), Alain Cuny (Gilles), Pierre Labry (Le seigneur), Jean d'Yd (Le baladin), Roger Blin (Le montreur de monstres), Gabriel Gabrio (Le bourreau), Marcel Herrand (Le baron Renaud), Jules Berry (Le diable)
* Runtime: 120 min; B&W
benny
is unquestionably a masterpiece that came out of France under the most trying conditions. Despite the Nazi Occupation with the restrictions on materials and media we have two films that have achieved high watermark in the history of French cinema. Les vistieurs is one film and Les Enfants du Paradis is another (1945). Both are backward looking in the sense one appears to be a simple romantic fable set in a fairy tale castle with demons, knights and princesses while the 1945 film deals with the theatrical world of a century before. Both came out of the fruitful collaboration between director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert. The film was hailed as a major cinematographic achievement upon its release in 1942 and remained one of the most popular films made under the Nazi Occupation.
The film begins with the title: in this lovely month of May 1485 Messire Satan on earth sent two of his creatures to despair men ..."
Summary
In the 15th Century, two traveling musicians named Gilles and Dominique arrive at the castle of Baron Hugues, amid celebrations for the impending marriage between Hugues’ daughter Anne and a knight Renaud. The two musicians are in truth emissaries of the Devil, sent to disrupt the wedding for their own amusement. Whilst Dominique seduces Renaud, Gilles makes an easy conquest of Anne. However, Anne’s purity overwhelms Gilles and he in turn falls in love with her. This unexpected turn of events forces the Devil into making a personal appearance...
On the surface, the film appears to be a simple romantic fable but there is clearly more to this film than first meets the eye. Many have seen an allegorical sub-text in this seemingly innocuous romantic fable. The reluctance of the two lovers Gilles and Anne to separate in the second half of the film, despite the best efforts of man and Devil, can be understood as a covert message to the French nation to hold out against the German overlords. Historically we may see the parable as apt. The Third Republic may be an edifice in stone stripped of marble and gold by the fall of France but there shall still beat the Gallic spirit as the pair of lovers in the film.
One feature from the film that stands out even after so many decades is its cinematography. Not content with conventional photographic techniques, Carné developed some new methods for creating just the effect he was after as In Les Enfants. (In the latter Carné was particular of giving the shirt front of the notorious thief and murderer Lacenaire an unnatural luminosity contrasted with Baptiste the man in white.) In Les Visiteurs he makes the dance scene memorable, where the film is slowed to give the impression of time coming to a halt, allowing the two Devil’s emissaries to commence their evil machinations. Later on, a similar trick allows Carné to transport his fated lovers to a dreamlike garden. The arrival of the Devil in the second half of the film is no less impressive, using a combination of noise and lighting to conjure up an instant sense of drama and anticipation.
A combination of an excellent script, creditable acting from Jules Berry and Arletty sets this film apart from many other of the 40s French films. Berry is at his best playing the role of the Devil with a burlesque relish, and with villainous charm.
* Director: Marcel Carné
* Script: Jacques Prévert, Pierre Laroche
* Music: Maurice Thiriet
* Cast: Arletty (Dominique), Marie Déa (Anne), Fernand Ledoux (Le baron Hugues), Alain Cuny (Gilles), Pierre Labry (Le seigneur), Jean d'Yd (Le baladin), Roger Blin (Le montreur de monstres), Gabriel Gabrio (Le bourreau), Marcel Herrand (Le baron Renaud), Jules Berry (Le diable)
* Runtime: 120 min; B&W
benny
Wednesday 6 January 2010
Pépé Le Moko-1937
In 1931, the year France celebrated the centenary of the conquest of Algeria Pépé Le Moko, a thriller written by “Détective Ashelbé” (a pseudonym for Henri La Barthe – Ashelbé is a homophone for the initials H.L.B.), was published. The Exposition coloniale staged in Paris was the culmination of the celebration of French colonialism. Designed to “give the French an awareness of their Empire,” the exhibiton reconstructed habitats, and displayed folkloric dances, artifacts and merchandise, from North and West Africa, Indochina. Colonialism is dead and gone which is a good thing. The film is to be seen as a souvenir that one might every now and then pick up with nostalgia.
Directed by Julien Duvivier in 1936, with a prestigious technical crew and starry cast headed by Jean Gabin, Pépé Le Moko came out on January 23, 1937. It was a box office and critical success which on release was described by Jean Cocteau as “a masterpiece” and by Graham Greene as “one of the most exciting and moving films I can remember seeing.” ( According to a BBC documentary, it served as inspiration for Greene's acclaimed novel, The Third Man.)
Pépé Le Moko has since continued to fascinate. The film was remade twice in Hollywood, as Algiers in 1938 and Casbah in 1948. There were other echoes, tributes and parodies to the spoof Toto le Moko (1949), which now gives its name to a Roman pizzeria. (Morrissey uses excerpts of the film in the song You Were Good in Your Time of his 2009 album Years of Refusal.)
The book is by Ashelbé who is a contemporary of Georges Simenon and wrote at a time when the thriller was undergoing a spectacular boom in France. His contemporary published his first Maigret books also in 1931. Unfortunately the book has not worn well with time as the film has.
It is a tale of French petty criminals sheltering in the Casbah at Algiers. Pépé Le Moko ('Moko' is slang for a man from Marseilles) unlike Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion, which also appeared in 1937, is not a classic in the sense as the Renoir film touching greatness thematically or technically. Pépé Le Moko despite its unsavory world and common style, transcends its pulp fiction material, and turns it into a powerful emotional statement on identity, desire and loss.
Pépé Le Moko is a classic because it is key to the French film noir tradition of the 1930s. As T.S. Eliot put it in a different context, it “represents the perfection of the common style.” Lastly of course it stars Jean Gabin.
Plot
Pepe le Moko (Jean Gabin) is a well-known criminal mastermind who eludes the French police by hiding in the Casbah section of Algiers. He knows he is safe in this labyrinthine netherworld, where he is surrounded by his fellow thieves and cutthroats. Police inspector Slimane (Lucas Gridoux), who has developed a grudging respect for Pepe, bides his time, waiting for Pepe to try to leave the Casbah. When Gaby Gould (Mirielle Balin), a Parisian tourist, falls in love with Pepe, the inspector hopes to use this relationship to his advantage. He tells Gaby that Pepe has been killed, knowing that the heartbroken girl will return to Paris -- and that Pepe will risk everything to go after her. The part where the ship takes to sea with the foghorn tooting signals the poignant resolution to a love story that is too gossamer thin to be real.
Similar Works
Le Grand Jeu (1934, Jacques Feyder)
Moontide (1942, Fritz Lang, Archie Mayo)
Port of Shadows (1938, Marcel Carné)
Au-Dela Des Grilles (1948, René Clément)
La Bandera (1935, Julien Duvivier)
Le Jour Se Lève (1939, Marcel Carné)
Casablanca (1942, Michael Curtiz)
The Conspirators (1944, Jean Negulesco)
Other Related Works
Is related to: Casbah (1948, John Berry)
Is spoofed in: Totò le Moko (1949, Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia)
Has been remade as: Algiers (1938, John Cromwell)
(Ack: Hal Erickson-allmovie., Ginette Vincendeau, from the introduction to Pépé Le Moko , a monograph published by the British Film Institute-1998., www.Filmforum.org)
benny
Directed by Julien Duvivier in 1936, with a prestigious technical crew and starry cast headed by Jean Gabin, Pépé Le Moko came out on January 23, 1937. It was a box office and critical success which on release was described by Jean Cocteau as “a masterpiece” and by Graham Greene as “one of the most exciting and moving films I can remember seeing.” ( According to a BBC documentary, it served as inspiration for Greene's acclaimed novel, The Third Man.)
Pépé Le Moko has since continued to fascinate. The film was remade twice in Hollywood, as Algiers in 1938 and Casbah in 1948. There were other echoes, tributes and parodies to the spoof Toto le Moko (1949), which now gives its name to a Roman pizzeria. (Morrissey uses excerpts of the film in the song You Were Good in Your Time of his 2009 album Years of Refusal.)
The book is by Ashelbé who is a contemporary of Georges Simenon and wrote at a time when the thriller was undergoing a spectacular boom in France. His contemporary published his first Maigret books also in 1931. Unfortunately the book has not worn well with time as the film has.
It is a tale of French petty criminals sheltering in the Casbah at Algiers. Pépé Le Moko ('Moko' is slang for a man from Marseilles) unlike Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion, which also appeared in 1937, is not a classic in the sense as the Renoir film touching greatness thematically or technically. Pépé Le Moko despite its unsavory world and common style, transcends its pulp fiction material, and turns it into a powerful emotional statement on identity, desire and loss.
Pépé Le Moko is a classic because it is key to the French film noir tradition of the 1930s. As T.S. Eliot put it in a different context, it “represents the perfection of the common style.” Lastly of course it stars Jean Gabin.
Plot
Pepe le Moko (Jean Gabin) is a well-known criminal mastermind who eludes the French police by hiding in the Casbah section of Algiers. He knows he is safe in this labyrinthine netherworld, where he is surrounded by his fellow thieves and cutthroats. Police inspector Slimane (Lucas Gridoux), who has developed a grudging respect for Pepe, bides his time, waiting for Pepe to try to leave the Casbah. When Gaby Gould (Mirielle Balin), a Parisian tourist, falls in love with Pepe, the inspector hopes to use this relationship to his advantage. He tells Gaby that Pepe has been killed, knowing that the heartbroken girl will return to Paris -- and that Pepe will risk everything to go after her. The part where the ship takes to sea with the foghorn tooting signals the poignant resolution to a love story that is too gossamer thin to be real.
Similar Works
Le Grand Jeu (1934, Jacques Feyder)
Moontide (1942, Fritz Lang, Archie Mayo)
Port of Shadows (1938, Marcel Carné)
Au-Dela Des Grilles (1948, René Clément)
La Bandera (1935, Julien Duvivier)
Le Jour Se Lève (1939, Marcel Carné)
Casablanca (1942, Michael Curtiz)
The Conspirators (1944, Jean Negulesco)
Other Related Works
Is related to: Casbah (1948, John Berry)
Is spoofed in: Totò le Moko (1949, Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia)
Has been remade as: Algiers (1938, John Cromwell)
(Ack: Hal Erickson-allmovie., Ginette Vincendeau, from the introduction to Pépé Le Moko , a monograph published by the British Film Institute-1998., www.Filmforum.org)
benny
Tuesday 5 January 2010
Films of Ingmar Bergman
One feature of Bergman films is an unconscious acknowledgment of personal influences of his world on him. Bergman was working for Svensk Filmindustri while Alf Sjöberg made The Road to Heaven (1942), a stark medieval allegory, hints of which we can see in The Seventh Seal. The fact that he went on to put Miss Julie, the film that established the reputation of Sjöberg on the boards after his death, cannot be coincidental. If Bergman has found relentless use of close-up of the face a technique to reinforce the existential and moral problems of his characters we may find in Carl Dreyer’s use of such close-ups as forerunner. In citing these in no way detracts the artistic excellence of this Swedish filmmaker. Another feature of Bergman’s subject matter is his introspective quality derived of course from his childhood memories, adolescence and personality. The Seventh Seal for example is his search for faith in the absence of a personal God. In a way he repudiates the faith of his fathers and in its place coalesce certain existential sureties from his own a clue of which in his film Persona (1966).
"Today I feel that in Persona — and later in Cries and Whispers — I had gone as far as I could go. And that in these two instances when working in total freedom, I touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover." If we consider this film in particular we see it as self-revelatory as to his interior life. Take for example the images of Elizabet Vogler and Alma merging as one. This shot is a follow up of the birth of Elizabet’s son and it is narrated by her nurse. It is a painful memory for the actress and she hates herself and her baby. In merging the two faces of the nurse and the patient, Bergman is merely reliving his own condition. It is the reverse of the son towards his father. What spiritual baggage that he is left holding is anathema considering circumstances of its birth. The child- parent relationship must have been traumatic that it is explored in his movies again and again like a melody that one cannot get rid of. His Autumn Sonata (1978) and Fanny and Alexander (1982) are cases in point.
This rather obsessive aspect of Bergman where he would rather get rid of the world and its uses on which politics, commerce and culture gather strength (and by which nations may trade their tawdry goods across,) he would confront his viewer and also himself by deep concerns that his own countrymen found as excesses. Consider ‘Bergman's tight use of a 1.33:1 frame which often excludes any clear glimpses of the world beyond a face which finds no up, down, left or right in which to direct its gaze’. (The radical intimacy of Bergman-Hamish Ford) I for myself cannot think Bergman could pull off a film like say Ophul’s ‘The earrings of Madame de…’ or Fassbinder’s Lola. His metaphysical make-up is too ingrained in him to let him get into a serious business of commenting on political or social concerns of his day.
His first success came with Port of Call (1948).
In telling the love story of Gösta a seaman who saves a girl from drowning and keeping her by his side Bergman resorts to rather straightforward narrative. Berit has a terrible past and she would rather risk telling it before she commits herself to Gösta. In resolving their differences and mutual acceptance he touches upon social themes like failed parents sending their daughters to reformatories, the reliance of working class women on back-street abortions. We see him more as a disengaged filmmaker from polemics. I mentioned this film to show Bergman, as he has himself admitted at the time, was heavily influenced by Italian neo-realism. ‘The is most apparent in the stunning location sequences of Port of Call, where the influence of Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica can be seen in virtually every shot. Some of these sequences have a raw documentary-feel… that is lacking in virtually all of Bergman’s other films’. (James travers-2007)
Take a film like Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) where love, marriage and infidelity angle of the film is of a different league than the lighthearted touch of Renoir (The Rules of the Game) for instance. The aging Egermann takes his young wife to the theater to see his former mistress. His directorial touch doesn’t bring out anything new in their three-way confrontation except some heavy observations. The three actresses on stage mock men, love and marriage. One of them says that a woman can do anything she wants to a man as long as she doesn’t hurt his dignity. Bergman won a jury prize at Cannes for the film (1955). His handling of the comedy of romantic entanglements was as different from his Magic Flute or the Silence. With films as disparate as the Magician or So Close to Life he showed that he was not confined to any particular style as his genius to put on what he had thematically chalked out. The subject matter determined the style. It could have come only from his intuitive understanding of various modes and viewpoints of filmmakers of his age.
Critical acclaim of his films have waxed and waned. Bergman’s status in late 50’s and in the 90s are light years away. Ingmar Bergman is not to be judged by films per se but in the way he opened us to appreciate the shared condition of life and film art beyond the fads and polemics. It is purely an internal experience. Elizabet, his character in Persona stopped speaking unable to respond effectively with ‘large catastrophes’ such as Holocaust or Vietnam War. Bergman was also confronted by catastrophes that in his case were private. Luckily for us he responded with films.(Ack: James Travers, Hamish ford, Pedro Blas Gonzalez.)
Benny
"Today I feel that in Persona — and later in Cries and Whispers — I had gone as far as I could go. And that in these two instances when working in total freedom, I touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover." If we consider this film in particular we see it as self-revelatory as to his interior life. Take for example the images of Elizabet Vogler and Alma merging as one. This shot is a follow up of the birth of Elizabet’s son and it is narrated by her nurse. It is a painful memory for the actress and she hates herself and her baby. In merging the two faces of the nurse and the patient, Bergman is merely reliving his own condition. It is the reverse of the son towards his father. What spiritual baggage that he is left holding is anathema considering circumstances of its birth. The child- parent relationship must have been traumatic that it is explored in his movies again and again like a melody that one cannot get rid of. His Autumn Sonata (1978) and Fanny and Alexander (1982) are cases in point.
This rather obsessive aspect of Bergman where he would rather get rid of the world and its uses on which politics, commerce and culture gather strength (and by which nations may trade their tawdry goods across,) he would confront his viewer and also himself by deep concerns that his own countrymen found as excesses. Consider ‘Bergman's tight use of a 1.33:1 frame which often excludes any clear glimpses of the world beyond a face which finds no up, down, left or right in which to direct its gaze’. (The radical intimacy of Bergman-Hamish Ford) I for myself cannot think Bergman could pull off a film like say Ophul’s ‘The earrings of Madame de…’ or Fassbinder’s Lola. His metaphysical make-up is too ingrained in him to let him get into a serious business of commenting on political or social concerns of his day.
His first success came with Port of Call (1948).
In telling the love story of Gösta a seaman who saves a girl from drowning and keeping her by his side Bergman resorts to rather straightforward narrative. Berit has a terrible past and she would rather risk telling it before she commits herself to Gösta. In resolving their differences and mutual acceptance he touches upon social themes like failed parents sending their daughters to reformatories, the reliance of working class women on back-street abortions. We see him more as a disengaged filmmaker from polemics. I mentioned this film to show Bergman, as he has himself admitted at the time, was heavily influenced by Italian neo-realism. ‘The is most apparent in the stunning location sequences of Port of Call, where the influence of Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica can be seen in virtually every shot. Some of these sequences have a raw documentary-feel… that is lacking in virtually all of Bergman’s other films’. (James travers-2007)
Take a film like Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) where love, marriage and infidelity angle of the film is of a different league than the lighthearted touch of Renoir (The Rules of the Game) for instance. The aging Egermann takes his young wife to the theater to see his former mistress. His directorial touch doesn’t bring out anything new in their three-way confrontation except some heavy observations. The three actresses on stage mock men, love and marriage. One of them says that a woman can do anything she wants to a man as long as she doesn’t hurt his dignity. Bergman won a jury prize at Cannes for the film (1955). His handling of the comedy of romantic entanglements was as different from his Magic Flute or the Silence. With films as disparate as the Magician or So Close to Life he showed that he was not confined to any particular style as his genius to put on what he had thematically chalked out. The subject matter determined the style. It could have come only from his intuitive understanding of various modes and viewpoints of filmmakers of his age.
Critical acclaim of his films have waxed and waned. Bergman’s status in late 50’s and in the 90s are light years away. Ingmar Bergman is not to be judged by films per se but in the way he opened us to appreciate the shared condition of life and film art beyond the fads and polemics. It is purely an internal experience. Elizabet, his character in Persona stopped speaking unable to respond effectively with ‘large catastrophes’ such as Holocaust or Vietnam War. Bergman was also confronted by catastrophes that in his case were private. Luckily for us he responded with films.(Ack: James Travers, Hamish ford, Pedro Blas Gonzalez.)
Benny
Monday 4 January 2010
Miss Julie-1951
According to film scholar Peter Cowie, Alf Sjöberg’s boldly experimental 1951 adaptation of Strindberg’s Miss Julie inaugurated “a new cinematic language”. Alf Sjöberg one of the brightest stars in Scandinavian film scene in the ‘40s and ‘50s, is now rather overlooked for the simple reason Ingmar Bergman is far greater draw than he. (see Sjöberg, Bergman and Swedish films). Of his oeuvres Miss Julie is a classic. Alf Sjöberg won the Grand Prix du Festival at the Cannes Film Festival twice: in 1946 for Torment (Swedish: Hets) (part of an eleven-way tie), and in 1951 for Miss Julie (Swedish: Fröken Julie)
August Strindberg owed much to Émile Zola’s “Le naturalism au théâtre” and in the works of the Goncourt brothers. This 1888 play belongs to the period of naturalism in theater begun around 1880. Their dictum was to depict life through a temperament and to maintain a strict dramatic form resting on the three unities of time, place, and action. In Miss Julie, for instance, Strindberg confines the entire action to the estate kitchen, the conflict takes place in a short time span during Midsummer’s Eve, and dramatic potential of power play is delineated by three characters: Julie, the twenty-five-year-old countess; Jean, her father’s valet; and Jean’s fiancé, the robust cook Kristin. Naturalism also decreed that a drama demonstrate a law of nature—in this case it was the survival of the fittest: the likes of Jean will live on while Julie, the product of an effete aristocratic family, will succumb.
Two different mediums
Before I get on with the details of the film proper let me point out a few points that distinguish film treatment of a play as ground breaking as that of Strindberg. In the manner film exploits the basic theme more trenchantly Sjöberg shows his superlative talent. He came originally from the stage and showed his genius could transcend the limits of theater by letting the camera to explore the nuances of self destructive love as essayed by willful countess and her valet.
The film opens as in the play on midsummer night of 1874 on the estate of a Count in Sweden. The film roams freely over the grounds of the count’s estate, unlike the claustrophobic mood of the theater. The evocative mood awakened by the festive atmosphere of solstice, the torpor and heat in which inhibitions are lowered, only film can bring about effectively. One may compare it with Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night (1955).
In theater the directness of actors and speech must work despite of a confined architecture and painted scenery; the all- enveloping intimacy in which the actors create reality is all that they have in order to succeed. Their stylized gestures and rhythmic speech are their props. Whether it is an Ibsen or Pinter play, speech and truth of action in stylized acting or natural, reality is in carrying the audience along till the very end. In the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes cleverness of the makers of Emperor’s new clothes succeeded. In such immediacy of a make- believe world, reality was broken by the child who shouted, ‘the emperor is naked’. In short reality of the theater doesn’t suffer audience to drift into fantasy or introspection. Not so with cinema. To quote
‘Cinema is peopled with ghosts and chimeras who weightlessly defy the boundaries of space and time. This abrogation of external laws pulls the medium into the realm of introspection, imagination, and dreams.’(Peter Matthews-criterion 21 Jan’08)
Basic themes
The film as with the play essays power play of power, class and gender. The frolic of the lower classes typified by the solstice is a counterpoint to the hidebound social mores under which Miss Julie exists. This underlying tension runs throughout in visual terms as well as in the development of two protagonists. Julie takes added delight in playing her games with Jean, seeing fit to consistently demean this servant through such acts as forcing him to shine her boots. He submits to her will since his station requires it.
Taught by her mother to hold all men in contempt, Miss Julie nonetheless gives herself to him and it is a point where balance of power shifts. The affair with valet Jean (Ulf Palme) shows what is her future. He wants her to elope with him to Switzerland where he expects her to entice customers to the inn that he intends to set up. His victory over her can never be that of one of an equal to her either in class or in aristocratic unflappability. Only he needs hear the ring of two bells and in Pavlovian reflex he reverts to his servile upbringing.
The tension of their doomed romance is revealing in in their dreams: Jean speaks of a recurring dream where he is ever trying to climb a tree and the countess is free falling. Such contrasts, in Sjoberg’s handling render disparity of their childhood, taking us into the past, illustrating the events and people who came to shape both Julie and Jean’s disparate outlooks on life. Raised a servant’s son and scorned by those above him, Jean is subjected to cruel humiliations early on in life which has the dual effects of both fostering contempt for the ruling class he lives under but also shapes him into a poltroon. And with Julie, her life is genuinely shaped by the sins of the father and mother; in her case, an emotionally weak father and psychologically unbalanced mother’s own war of attrition shaped and trained the young girl to distrust all men. (Strindberg points out with painful clarity the ways in which children become the weapons through which their parents can strike hardest and deepest at each other.)
‘The chief innovation that Sjöberg brings to his Miss Julie is the seamless way in which he presents both main characters’ past and present in a unified whole; as Julie begins to reminisce over her own childhood, the camera pans away and we are taken into the past only to be brought back into the uncomfortable present in one continuous motion, which speaks to the ever-present nature of memory in our lives as we live out in real time. This seamlessness injects a dreamy surrealism into an otherwise, caustic realism as well as foreshadows Bergman’s own use of this approach in films like Wild Strawberries.
However, the film’s dramatic core is sustained by Bjork and Palme’s performances as the main characters. Powerfully open emotionally, Bjork is expert at imposing the character’s will believably in the first half as well as transitioning into the shattered psyche that exposes her vulnerability and leads her to the tale’s tragic denouement'.
Cast:
Anita Björk ... Miss Julie
Ulf Palme ... Jean
Märta Dorff ... Kristin, cook
Lissi Alandh ... Countess Berta, Julie's mother
Anders Henrikson ... Count Carl, Julie's father
Inga Gill ... Viola
Åke Fridell ... Robert
Kurt-Olof Sundström ... Julie's Fiancé
Max von Sydow ... Hand
Margaretha Krook ... Governess (as Margareta Krook)
Åke Claesson ... Doctor
Inger Norberg ... Julie as a child
Jan Hagerman ... Jean as a child
Technical
Produced by
Rune Waldekranz .... producer (uncredited)
Original Music and arranged by
Dag Wirén
Cinematography by
Göran Strindberg
Film Editing by
Lennart Wallén
Art Direction by
Bibi Lindström
Bergman and Sjöberg, Swedish films
Alf Sjöberg (21 June 1903 – 16 April 1980) was a Swedish theatre and film director.
Born in 1903, Sjöberg was in the thick of artistic developments of new medium of cinema. Victor Sjöström( The Outlaw and His Wife-1918) and Mauritz Stiller( Sir Arne’s Treasure-1919) were engaged in making Swedish cinema a force to reckon with. Hollywood sensing threat bought over Sjöström and Stiller along with his protégé Greta Garbo to MGM. Into this breach stepped in Alf Sjöberg, trained at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, and he caused a sensation with his very first work, The Strongest (1929), an intense fable of seal hunters in Greenland. But the mortal blow to the industry had been struck, and he retreated to the boards, mounting acclaimed, innovative productions of Strindberg and Shakespeare through the 1930s. Meanwhile, Swedish cinema entered a struggling, populist phase. The smash of the decade was Gustaf Molander’s glossy soap Intermezzo (1936), soon to be remade for David Selznick -( once again,this time plundering its ingenue star, Ingrid Bergman).
Ironically, Sweden’s neutrality during the Second World War turned the grim situation around. A ban on foreign imports deemed propaganda (that is, nearly everything from the Axis or the Allies) gave domestic filmmaking a sudden shot in the arm. Determined on a renaissance, the visionary head of Svensk Filmindustri, Carl Anders Dymling, symbolically enthroned a repatriated Sjöström as the company’s artistic supervisor, then wooed another indispensable auteur. Sjöberg had been tempted back to cinema for an urgent, antifascist melodrama, They Staked Their Lives (1940), and consolidated his prestige with The Road to Heaven (1942), a stark medieval allegory that holds more than an embryonic hint of a later folktale about a certain chess-playing knight. At the time, the author of that classic was a hustling junior in the script department of SF, and Dymling had an inspiration: why not arrange a creative marriage between this whiz kid Bergman and the veteran Sjöberg? The result was Torment (1944) The young Bergman came to represent the youth and Sjöberg, the Establishment. In Sweden as elsewhere, the war’s trauma had propelled youth culture—and though Bergman could be profitably sold as a rebel than Sjöberg.
Whatever might be said of Bergman’s burgeoning talent it was unlike that of Sjöberg who had cut his teeth on 1920s German expressionism. His camera mobility and deep-focus framing is evident in Torment.
Bergman would absorb some aspect of his technique for Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) and The Silence (1963), eventually conceding that “Alf Sjöberg . . . taught me a great deal.” If it was a case of oedipal rivalry, then momentarily the father outpaced the son. Screwed over on Torment, Sjöberg recouped with Iris and the Lieutenant (1946) and Only a Mother (1949). Despite his success with films Torment (1944) and Miss Julie, Alf Sjöberg was above all, and foremost, a stage director; perhaps the greatest at Dramaten (alongside, first, Olof Molander and, later, Ingmar Bergman). He was a First Director of Sweden's Royal Dramatic Theatre in the years 1930-1980, where he staged a large number of remarkable and historic productions. Sjöberg was also a pioneer director for early Swedish TV theatre (his 1955 TV theatre production of Hamlet is a national milestone).
A clue to the weight of two directors one only needs to watch Torment where Bergamn’s part only called for script and some four days shooting towards the end. Yet Bergman has become saleable and his name appears more striking than that of Sjöberg.
Sjöberg died in a car accident on his way to rehearsal at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm.
Versions of Miss Julie
* The first, Fröken Julie by the Swedish director, Alf Sjöberg in 1951.
* Another version was produced in 1971 by Tigon British Film Productions. It starred Helen Mirren as Miss Julie.
* A version was directed by Mike Figgis with Saffron Burrows in the role of Miss Julie and Peter Mullan in the role of Jean in 1999.
(Ack: independentfilmquarterly, Brigitta Steene, Miss Julie: The Three Bergs-peter Matthews, criterion collection
answers.com, wikipedia,)
benny
August Strindberg owed much to Émile Zola’s “Le naturalism au théâtre” and in the works of the Goncourt brothers. This 1888 play belongs to the period of naturalism in theater begun around 1880. Their dictum was to depict life through a temperament and to maintain a strict dramatic form resting on the three unities of time, place, and action. In Miss Julie, for instance, Strindberg confines the entire action to the estate kitchen, the conflict takes place in a short time span during Midsummer’s Eve, and dramatic potential of power play is delineated by three characters: Julie, the twenty-five-year-old countess; Jean, her father’s valet; and Jean’s fiancé, the robust cook Kristin. Naturalism also decreed that a drama demonstrate a law of nature—in this case it was the survival of the fittest: the likes of Jean will live on while Julie, the product of an effete aristocratic family, will succumb.
Two different mediums
Before I get on with the details of the film proper let me point out a few points that distinguish film treatment of a play as ground breaking as that of Strindberg. In the manner film exploits the basic theme more trenchantly Sjöberg shows his superlative talent. He came originally from the stage and showed his genius could transcend the limits of theater by letting the camera to explore the nuances of self destructive love as essayed by willful countess and her valet.
The film opens as in the play on midsummer night of 1874 on the estate of a Count in Sweden. The film roams freely over the grounds of the count’s estate, unlike the claustrophobic mood of the theater. The evocative mood awakened by the festive atmosphere of solstice, the torpor and heat in which inhibitions are lowered, only film can bring about effectively. One may compare it with Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night (1955).
In theater the directness of actors and speech must work despite of a confined architecture and painted scenery; the all- enveloping intimacy in which the actors create reality is all that they have in order to succeed. Their stylized gestures and rhythmic speech are their props. Whether it is an Ibsen or Pinter play, speech and truth of action in stylized acting or natural, reality is in carrying the audience along till the very end. In the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes cleverness of the makers of Emperor’s new clothes succeeded. In such immediacy of a make- believe world, reality was broken by the child who shouted, ‘the emperor is naked’. In short reality of the theater doesn’t suffer audience to drift into fantasy or introspection. Not so with cinema. To quote
‘Cinema is peopled with ghosts and chimeras who weightlessly defy the boundaries of space and time. This abrogation of external laws pulls the medium into the realm of introspection, imagination, and dreams.’(Peter Matthews-criterion 21 Jan’08)
Basic themes
The film as with the play essays power play of power, class and gender. The frolic of the lower classes typified by the solstice is a counterpoint to the hidebound social mores under which Miss Julie exists. This underlying tension runs throughout in visual terms as well as in the development of two protagonists. Julie takes added delight in playing her games with Jean, seeing fit to consistently demean this servant through such acts as forcing him to shine her boots. He submits to her will since his station requires it.
Taught by her mother to hold all men in contempt, Miss Julie nonetheless gives herself to him and it is a point where balance of power shifts. The affair with valet Jean (Ulf Palme) shows what is her future. He wants her to elope with him to Switzerland where he expects her to entice customers to the inn that he intends to set up. His victory over her can never be that of one of an equal to her either in class or in aristocratic unflappability. Only he needs hear the ring of two bells and in Pavlovian reflex he reverts to his servile upbringing.
The tension of their doomed romance is revealing in in their dreams: Jean speaks of a recurring dream where he is ever trying to climb a tree and the countess is free falling. Such contrasts, in Sjoberg’s handling render disparity of their childhood, taking us into the past, illustrating the events and people who came to shape both Julie and Jean’s disparate outlooks on life. Raised a servant’s son and scorned by those above him, Jean is subjected to cruel humiliations early on in life which has the dual effects of both fostering contempt for the ruling class he lives under but also shapes him into a poltroon. And with Julie, her life is genuinely shaped by the sins of the father and mother; in her case, an emotionally weak father and psychologically unbalanced mother’s own war of attrition shaped and trained the young girl to distrust all men. (Strindberg points out with painful clarity the ways in which children become the weapons through which their parents can strike hardest and deepest at each other.)
‘The chief innovation that Sjöberg brings to his Miss Julie is the seamless way in which he presents both main characters’ past and present in a unified whole; as Julie begins to reminisce over her own childhood, the camera pans away and we are taken into the past only to be brought back into the uncomfortable present in one continuous motion, which speaks to the ever-present nature of memory in our lives as we live out in real time. This seamlessness injects a dreamy surrealism into an otherwise, caustic realism as well as foreshadows Bergman’s own use of this approach in films like Wild Strawberries.
However, the film’s dramatic core is sustained by Bjork and Palme’s performances as the main characters. Powerfully open emotionally, Bjork is expert at imposing the character’s will believably in the first half as well as transitioning into the shattered psyche that exposes her vulnerability and leads her to the tale’s tragic denouement'.
Cast:
Anita Björk ... Miss Julie
Ulf Palme ... Jean
Märta Dorff ... Kristin, cook
Lissi Alandh ... Countess Berta, Julie's mother
Anders Henrikson ... Count Carl, Julie's father
Inga Gill ... Viola
Åke Fridell ... Robert
Kurt-Olof Sundström ... Julie's Fiancé
Max von Sydow ... Hand
Margaretha Krook ... Governess (as Margareta Krook)
Åke Claesson ... Doctor
Inger Norberg ... Julie as a child
Jan Hagerman ... Jean as a child
Technical
Produced by
Rune Waldekranz .... producer (uncredited)
Original Music and arranged by
Dag Wirén
Cinematography by
Göran Strindberg
Film Editing by
Lennart Wallén
Art Direction by
Bibi Lindström
Bergman and Sjöberg, Swedish films
Alf Sjöberg (21 June 1903 – 16 April 1980) was a Swedish theatre and film director.
Born in 1903, Sjöberg was in the thick of artistic developments of new medium of cinema. Victor Sjöström( The Outlaw and His Wife-1918) and Mauritz Stiller( Sir Arne’s Treasure-1919) were engaged in making Swedish cinema a force to reckon with. Hollywood sensing threat bought over Sjöström and Stiller along with his protégé Greta Garbo to MGM. Into this breach stepped in Alf Sjöberg, trained at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, and he caused a sensation with his very first work, The Strongest (1929), an intense fable of seal hunters in Greenland. But the mortal blow to the industry had been struck, and he retreated to the boards, mounting acclaimed, innovative productions of Strindberg and Shakespeare through the 1930s. Meanwhile, Swedish cinema entered a struggling, populist phase. The smash of the decade was Gustaf Molander’s glossy soap Intermezzo (1936), soon to be remade for David Selznick -( once again,this time plundering its ingenue star, Ingrid Bergman).
Ironically, Sweden’s neutrality during the Second World War turned the grim situation around. A ban on foreign imports deemed propaganda (that is, nearly everything from the Axis or the Allies) gave domestic filmmaking a sudden shot in the arm. Determined on a renaissance, the visionary head of Svensk Filmindustri, Carl Anders Dymling, symbolically enthroned a repatriated Sjöström as the company’s artistic supervisor, then wooed another indispensable auteur. Sjöberg had been tempted back to cinema for an urgent, antifascist melodrama, They Staked Their Lives (1940), and consolidated his prestige with The Road to Heaven (1942), a stark medieval allegory that holds more than an embryonic hint of a later folktale about a certain chess-playing knight. At the time, the author of that classic was a hustling junior in the script department of SF, and Dymling had an inspiration: why not arrange a creative marriage between this whiz kid Bergman and the veteran Sjöberg? The result was Torment (1944) The young Bergman came to represent the youth and Sjöberg, the Establishment. In Sweden as elsewhere, the war’s trauma had propelled youth culture—and though Bergman could be profitably sold as a rebel than Sjöberg.
Whatever might be said of Bergman’s burgeoning talent it was unlike that of Sjöberg who had cut his teeth on 1920s German expressionism. His camera mobility and deep-focus framing is evident in Torment.
Bergman would absorb some aspect of his technique for Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) and The Silence (1963), eventually conceding that “Alf Sjöberg . . . taught me a great deal.” If it was a case of oedipal rivalry, then momentarily the father outpaced the son. Screwed over on Torment, Sjöberg recouped with Iris and the Lieutenant (1946) and Only a Mother (1949). Despite his success with films Torment (1944) and Miss Julie, Alf Sjöberg was above all, and foremost, a stage director; perhaps the greatest at Dramaten (alongside, first, Olof Molander and, later, Ingmar Bergman). He was a First Director of Sweden's Royal Dramatic Theatre in the years 1930-1980, where he staged a large number of remarkable and historic productions. Sjöberg was also a pioneer director for early Swedish TV theatre (his 1955 TV theatre production of Hamlet is a national milestone).
A clue to the weight of two directors one only needs to watch Torment where Bergamn’s part only called for script and some four days shooting towards the end. Yet Bergman has become saleable and his name appears more striking than that of Sjöberg.
Sjöberg died in a car accident on his way to rehearsal at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm.
Versions of Miss Julie
* The first, Fröken Julie by the Swedish director, Alf Sjöberg in 1951.
* Another version was produced in 1971 by Tigon British Film Productions. It starred Helen Mirren as Miss Julie.
* A version was directed by Mike Figgis with Saffron Burrows in the role of Miss Julie and Peter Mullan in the role of Jean in 1999.
(Ack: independentfilmquarterly, Brigitta Steene, Miss Julie: The Three Bergs-peter Matthews, criterion collection
answers.com, wikipedia,)
benny
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