February 2023: Hitchcock, Cunk on Earth, Tarkovsky, Mike Leigh, Elaine May
Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938) is further evidence, as if anyone needed that, to show at AH was one of the greatest film entertainers of all time, perhaps especially in the 1930s British period when he had fewer resources, distractions, and expectations that sometimes overwhelmed his films from the American period - a return visit to a few, such as North by Northwest, found them surprisingly long and convoluted, whereas the British films cut right to the chase so to speak. That that Lady V isn’t convoluted - who can possibly follow the machinations of the plot?, and yet who cares - there’s so much fun and verbal wit here, and lots of playing with our own perceptions: Did the lady truly vanish? Or are we seeing things, as the protagonist (Margaret Lockwood) seems to be? Are we fellow passengers, befuddled by her insistence that Mrs. From has been abducted or otherwise disappeared? Are are do we concur with her and assume a plot is afoot? AH keeps pushing questions at us: Whom to we believe? And if she hasn’t truly vanished, how do we explain the numerous coincidences? Throughout, there’s a lot of foolery, esp by the witty Michael Redgrave - animist of all AH gives us some amazing scenes: the daring ride outside the moving train, the British businessmen obsessed with the cricket results, the fight with the magician in the baggage car of the train, the big pointless shootout at the end that seems lifted from a Western, and more. Lots of fun to watch, and just don’t try to make sense of everything because, well, neither did Hitchcock.
Lovers of the unique world of Bollywood movies will sure get their money’s worth out of V. Vjayendra Prasad’s epic RRR (2022), which has lots of everything: song, dance, extended fight sequences, chases, a dangerous rescue attempt, clear and two-dimensional heroes and villains, lavish set design, enormous crowd sequences - and all in the first hour of this 3-hour drama, which is clearly not meant for all viewers, which is to say one hour for me was enough but if it’s your cup of Darjeeling go for it.
John Frankenheimer’s noirish film The Manchurian Candidate (1962 - based on Richard Condon’s novel, and remade in 2004)) is one of the great cinematic portrayals of psychological disorder - in this case, a popular concept of the Cold War era: Brainwashing (a trope that caused one Republican candidate to drop a presidential campaign [Romney sr.] - here treated as if brainwashing were possible - a way to get people to a permanent state of hypnosis and then to control them into, in this case, high-profile assassins. The concept on the face of it is absurd, but it was creepy enough to lead to mass hysteria, of which this film was the epitome: a group of US soldiers on patrol in Korea is captured and somehow “brainwashed” into doing anything they hear as a command, including the lead actor - Lawrence Harvey - in cold blood shoots to death one of this mates. Harvey, playing Sg Rayman Shaw returns to the states as a supposed hero but actually as an automaton who will kill on command. Others in the patrol group have vague memories of their imprisonment - notably an improbably cast Frank Sinatra, who does himself well. Frankenheimer used this film as a springboard to direct several other political thrillers of the 60s; this one has to be one of his best and most imaginative, with lots of superimpositions to get us into and out of Sgt Shaw’s head, and amazingly fast cuts, especially in the climactic sequence at the Republican National Convention in NYC.
Chalk up more 2022 films that I couldn’t finish watching: Armageddon Time (what a bad title!) and You People, the first of which had serious intent but seemed to me to ha ve no sense of what it’s like to be an artistic young man from a relatively wealthy Queens community, ca 1980?, who crosses some boundaries (smoking marijuana in a hallway) and gets transferred to a private school - I could not buy into the character, his horrible teaches, his mean parents; the other, You People, had some broad comic scenes but ultimately none of the lead characters - 2 30-somethings (white male, Black female) who very quickly fall in love and get engaged only to face family issues on both sides of the family, funny at times but never for a moment true to life.
There’s only one word for the British 5-part mocumentory series Cunk on Earth (2022) and that’s “very hilarious” (joke). A terrific sendup of pretentious and socially awkward mostly British academics and the grandiosity of many specials e.g. BBC’s David Attenborough and even PBS’s Ken Burns as star performer Diane Morgan tours the world to give us the supposed history of civilization in 5 easy pieces of acerbic and comic excellence. No sense in giving away any of the great gags, scenes, and lines - except that I missed some of the gags because I was laughing. Thx, Netflix.
One of the Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky’s last films (2nd to last actually) Nostalghia [cq] (1983) is the perfect film (please don’t extract this fragment for use in publication [joke]) if you like extremely long close-ups, panning shots, and tracking shots, so slow and statioc that you may give your flatscreen a rap to ensure that it hasn’t fallen asleep. It hasn’t; you might. But to be fair: I watched the whole 90 or so minutes with great interest. In short, as w/ most of his Soviet films, it’s by no means plot driven and never crystal clear about the actual plot but, let’s face it, each shot is gorgeous (Italian countryside, ruined castles and courts, a decrepit mineral water, an awkward and ill-lit hotel… ) and two subtle, provocative lead actors (Oleg Yankovsky, an emotionally drained Soviet writer in Italy to gather info for a book he’s writing on an exiled Russian author who’d taken solace in these mineral waters and his “tour guide” for his time in Italy, Erland Josephson). There’s lots of sexual innuendo - Oleg is attracted to his beautiful guide yet yearning to return to his wife in Russia, Erland, in a hysterical outburst accuses him (unjustly, it seems) of coming on to her. It’s hard to determine - intentionally - precisely what might or might not have happened among these characters - but the movie has great clarity and insight about its topography and archeology - so many beautiful long shots of the building and the rock grounds, the remnants of the super baths. Nota film for everyone and without doubt not the best entree into Tarkovsky’s work (see other entries on this blog) but an unusual and sometimes disturbing (one of the main secondary characters apparently feared the world’s end and thus imprisoned his wife and son in their apartment for 7 years!) work of art-filmish art.
Nate Bargatze's Hello, World comedy special is hilarious - a completely “clean” act (a note brought home when his 10 or so age daughter introduces him and we see her and comic’s wife backstage at opening of show - that finds humor in themes unlikely places, e.g., digging a hole to build a fish pond, tribulations of the first-born, a sliding door entry into a house … on the other hand Marc Maron’s well-meaning From Bleak to Dark touches all the right/expected places and is much aligned with us and the riotous NY audience re politics and culture and yet, the fact of the matter is, nothing in the first half (all we saw) of his routine was funny - we did not laugh once, so go figure.
Hard Labour (1973) is an early work, made the earliest work, by Mike Leigh, one of a series of TV dramas at the start of his career. It may also be the darkest work of Leigh’s career, as his characters, strange and eccentric as they may be, tend to come across as “rounded” and quite often as really funny (usually unintentionally). This film is light on humor to put it mildly; we follow a middle-aged working-class woman who helps support her family via working as a maid - where’ she is constantly mistreated and humiliated by the stone-cold, well-off woman for whom she works, constantly wiping surfaces or so it seems. Her husband, with whom she hardly communicates, works a night shift and is grumpy toward everyone. Her daughter, late teens?, makes some effort to confide with her mom, but the taciturn mother offers no comfort or solace. Toward the end, the mother - Liz Smith as Mrs. Thornley - seeks comfort in confession, but the priest hardly seems to be listening to her, quite an indictment of the Church. It’s not a joyous film, obviously, but it’s smart and credible, a great contribution to 60s/70s British films about the troubled working class.
(Jean-Luc) Godard’s La Chinoise (1967) was (once) ground-breaking and imaginative and a showcase for every photographic and cinematic device Godard could devise or reconstruct, from VO narrative to unscripted rants, to lecture and response on various leftist tracts and treatises and thinkers, to sounding music clips and strange typographical observations about film itself unfolding - deeply influencing world cinema in its day, at least temperamentally if not politically, a film that today looks more antiquated than a Soviet/Maoist treatise, which in part in is. The plot such as I can isolate and explain let alone understand any of it covers 4 (I think - I only watched 3 for about half the film length) movements as we watch the 20-something radicals living and breathing in a Paris commune and plotting, however feckless it may be, some kind of attack, crisis, war on the bourgeoisie - all of which unfurls for us, to a degree at least, as the director (unseen) questions several of the youth about their background, politics, thoughts - I’m glad to have watched it for an hour but that was long enough as the film eventually seems flaccid and self-indulgent, lacking in some of the aspects I, and most viewers of film, like the most, that is plot, emotion, insight, beauty, fright, laughs, exotica, reflection, and character.
Aside from one highly troubling sequence (a performance at a music hall by a small orchestra in Blackface), Alfred Hitchcock’s really early film, one of his first “Talkies,” Young and Innocent (1937) is a funny, even charming - really unusual for the acidic AH - tale and one of the first to establish a key element in all of AH’s work, “the wrong man.” In brief a handsome, well-educated young man spies a body supine on a beach and runs off to fine aid (somewhat improbable, but, OK); witnesses find him running from the scene and ID him as the killer. At first he’s blasé, sure that his class statue will get him out of this mess, but he soon sees that his lawyer is a dolt and he’s probably going to be convicted - but he manages to escape from the courtroom and thus begins a chase, when a lovely young woman - who happens to be the police chief’s daughter, picks him up, takes pity, and the two of them make a run for it, in part in search of a belt that was the killing device. So we’ve to a “wrong man” story, police incompetence, guy and girl on the run, a Maguffin (the belt), and a budding romance all in motion - and it’s a lot of fun with plenty of laughs and narrow escapes that anyone will enjoy, except, dammit, for the blackface scene, so, why? AH was so busy setting a huge crown and crane shot that he didn’t see what was right before his eyes, not that he would have cared, troubled guy that he was in his own life.
The Kiss of Death (1977) is another early work from Mike Leigh, this one part of anthology series from British TV, far from Leigh’s best work, this obscure movie with the quixotic title (this is not a vampire film!) is worth a look for David Threlfall’s debut as an Trevor, extremely shy and gawky youth in the British midlands (Birmingham?) where he works as an assistant to a funeral director and awkwardly tries to build a relationship with a young woman of his age. The scene toward the end in which Kay Adshead (Linda) guides Trevor toward his first kiss is justly renowned; for me the most powerful and disturbing scene, so underplayed and tense, involves the death of an infant. Overall, though, it’s a low-key film without a dramatic denouement - life just goes on for these poor “blokes,” although Trevor seems to have gained a bit of self-confidence. The main drawback, however, is that the film iOS too low-key - as the Midlands accent is nearly impenetrable to American viewers; give it a look, butI can assure you that you’ll miss a good half of the dialog.
I can assure you that Jerzy Skolimowski’s 2022 film Eo. (Oi in Polish, if you’re counting) will not win the Academy Award for best International film but it’s worth a look; I though I was clever in noting that the film is very closely aligned with the Bresson’s famous Au Hasard Balhazar, from about 50 years ago so who’s counting now?, but I see that the credits recognize Au Hazard, as well they should: Both chronicle the sad life and demise of a circus donkey removed from the ring (by animal-rights protesters) and goes on to lead a peripatetic life of loneliness and abuse - a sad story for which parents should certainly be alert. Still, it’s quite an achievement to have donkey as the prime mover of a mover, aside from animal-dudded tearjerkers such as Homeward Bound, which I found terribly moving long ago. So the lead/title character has nothing to say, or nothing in language to say, but there are some powerful sequences as well as some artistic touches such as flashing red lighting during dream/thought sequences. The scene most will remember concert some “football” hooligans who take out their wrath on you knows who - and the last scene, although it’s thankfully palliated by the assurance that no animals were hurt, etc.
The 3-part doc Murdaugh Murders (a title? a sentence?) from Netflix is groundbreaking in that the documentary is being aired just as the trial of the eponymous Alex gets under way, so we can get all the background and then watch it play out in a murder trial live as it happens. Thedocumentary itself breaks no new ground in regard to format, style, and conventions and the doc team faced a huge task in that there are so many people and possible crimes involves - plus of course the raw wounds that the trial has opened - but they did an admirable job in presenting the key moments of this years’-long drama, clearing away some of the underbrush and giving us a good idea about life in this small SC township and about the inter-relationships among the main players - some of whom seem to have started as spoiled teens w/ terrible judgement and odious behavior who, several years later, feel still sorrowful and wounded but, one hopes, matured and wisened by experience.
Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky (1976) is a nearly unique genre film, a story of two hoodlum gangster buddies (John Cassavetes and a young Peter Falk) who interact, squabble, fight, and engage in various low-life encounters over the course of done day - a rough-edged, fearless film - a film not generally associated with female directors and writers then or today - and totally engrossing it is. The plot in brief begins as JC calls his pal PF and asks him for help, he’s a dead man; Falk then guides Cass. out of his rented crappy hotel room and through a series of encounters = and we can see the strong tradition of improv at work, as these are 2 pro actors with strong backgrounds in live theater - culminating in a fight between the two guys and a tumultuous scene at the apartment of Cass’s girlfriend (one of the weirdest sex scenes ever) and a final visit to his long-suffering wife. Almost stealing the show is the dour hitman (Ned Beatty) who just can’t seem to catch a break - or a kill. We’re both repulsed by these guys and their dark milieu and we feel sad for them, smart guys who’ve wasted their lives, whose time is (almost) up - among the most personal and character-driven films of its time.
