Quickies, Vol. XXII

Duplicity (dir. Tony Gilroy, 2009) – Refreshing and helpful to see this one for the first time since the big screen. What stands out now is how it turns on its head the traditional caper movie, something that Gilroy was probably only too glad to do after penning the Bourne stuff. So what this amounts to is playing a trick on the cinema audience. Normally, as in the Oceans movies et al., we’re mostly informed as to the plan, but left in the dark about a key part of it so as to wow us at the end. That’s what we’re led to believe is happening in Duplicity, until the big upset twist at the end. The fact that it’s the corporate world that gets the best of the little guys (not to mention their corporate rival), is the movie’s reference point with reality. These days, even high-class thieves that look like Julia Roberts and Clive Owen can’t best the bigwigs in the high-rises.

A Hard Day’s Night (dir. Richard Lester, 1964) – We could by cynical about it and say it was intended to create a particular image for the Beatles, or we could be idealistic about it and say it embodied who they were, or we could be realistic and say that the truth, as always, is probably somewhere in the middle. Stylistically, its content is just so well-suited to its form. Despite the screaming girls in the background, John, Paul, George, and Ringo seem mostly ambivalent about them and prefer to goof off for the camera. It’s no accident that this came out just in time to incorporate a number of nouvelle vague techniques, since it was the same world that needed a major break in cinematic form as the one that needed a major change in popular music and accompanying persona.

The Palm Beach Story (dir. Preston Sturges, 1942) – Saw this one not too long ago, but just long enough ago that details are evading the memory. Recalling that everything is pretty wonderfully backwards about it; it turns the happily-ever-after story on its head, and explicitly so, from the beginning. While the rest of the country is recovering from the Depression, this couple is entering their own financial and romantic recession; or maybe Sturges thinks it’s finally kosher to joke around about financial woes. The target of his critique isn’t only the everyman, but the rich folks (“John D. Hackensacker” = John D. Rockefeller). As always dialogue and pacing are generally pretty quick; vintage Sturges. Some of the scenes, however, seem to lag on, although probably intentionally. The train car sequence is one of these, with a club of drunk men swooning over and serenading Claudette Colbert.

Frantic (dir. Roman Polanski, 1988) -Polanski is channeling Hitchcock here, as everyone can’t help but point out when they watch Frantic. It’s another case of urban spaces and the havoc they can wreak on the dweller, or, in this case, the tourist. The opening credits are overlaid on images of American Richard Walker (Harrison Ford) and his wife driving into Paris in a taxi (surely the inspiration for the opening shots of Lost in Translation and others). (The closing credits follow the couple back out of town toward the airport.) When a tire blowout halts their arrival in the city, we know immediately that Paris will throw plenty of curve balls at Walker, which he will be better at fixing than the Parisians (he seems more adept at changing the tire than the cab driver, but even then is prevented on account of a flat spare). The famous early shots in the hotel room split Walker and his wife within the same screen in both visual depth and aural fields; they often can’t hear each other or talk past each other. They’re on different pages, much in the same way that Walker won’t be able to communicate with the Parisians whose help he needs to locate his wife. So much suspense; so little that actually happens; so much depth of field; and so many of those dwarfing, claustrophobic de-profundis shots.

Point Blank (dir. John Boorman, 1967) – They call it a neo-noir, of the modernist sort (as opposed to simply “modern” or “postmodern”), since it utilizes noir themes and styles while critiquing its assumptions. That seems fair. Boorman injects formal surrealism into it, with a shockingly chaotic use of colors, liquids, cuts, and flashbacks. Walker can’t escape his past, figuratively, but we’re never quite sure if he’s escaped it literally. It may be all a dream, a vengeful fantasy. The centripetal urban space of traditional film noir is sacrificed for what L.A. really is: a sprawling, centrifugal, somehow-urban plain that scatters rather than gathers. One of the noir assumptions that Point Blank challenges and rejects is the practice of, simply, making assumptions. The one character whom Walker trusts and in whom he confides turns out to be the real enemy the whole time. This goes also for the spectator, who traditionally could trust whomever the protagonist trusts. We, like Walker, are punished for this misplaced faith. Also, instead of the war-torn gumshoe, the pretty-much upstanding private eye, we have here a war-torn criminal who’s been double-crossed. Let’s call a spade a spade; there’s something sinister lurking within the genre and there always has been, and Boorman has the guts to foreground it. Finally, can’t help but love the name “Walker,” especially when considering Dimendberg’s oft-cited work Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity, particularly the chapter on the “walking cure” as the temporary fix of urban malaise.

The Lady Eve: Sinner/Seductress

Unfortunately, the most obvious thing to comment on regarding The Lady Eve may just be the most commented-on issue in film studies, a topic that’s been given more than its due elsewhere here. But, it is what it is: gender role reversal. It’s Preston Sturges again, who gloried in twisting his narrative to clash with viewer expectations. The recently viewed Unfaithfully Yours morbidly allowed us into the fantasy world of a jealous and overly imaginative husband who wanted to murder his wife. Here, we’re given some pretty remarkable access to the woman Jean/Eve (Barbara Stanwyck). The narrative, really, is told from her point of view more than anyone else’s, and it’s her desire that gets the front seat to Charles’ (Henry Fonda) mutual affection countered by his own naïveté. So therein’s the twist, although the title betrays a more conventional tendency, one that has been around since the beginning of time: finger-pointing at the woman, the temptress, the first sinner. Interesting how the original Edenic account got twisted and the blame got shifted; as if there weren’t a serpent in the tree doing the real tempting, poor Eve is not so much seen as the first sinner as the one tempting the man to sin. This constitutes what they call a “trope,” that awful word connoting a pattern that humanity can’t seem to get away from and in which cinema comes to a comfortable rest whether or not it means to. Charles has a pet snake, but he’s rather oblivious to the implications behind such an animal. Eve, on the other hand, is terrified of it to the point of imagining its presence when it’s nowhere near her. We could investigate these things further, but it would be too much.

Quickies, Vol. XII

Unfaithfully Yours (dir. Preston Sturges, 1948) – Another Stanford Theatre gem. Sturges tops the  So-Embarrassed-I-Don’t-Know-Their-Stuff List. This was a fortuitous screening, since after viewing The Hudsucker Proxy, with all its Capra influences, I was reminded that Capra is dwarfed in the Coens’ oeuvre by the influence of Sturges, who is far more grotesque, straight-up morbid. Rex Harrison’s character Sir Alfred is appropriately cast as a British immigrant symphony conductor on the other side of the Atlantic. This keeps him aloof and snooty (would the Palo Alto locals have noticed this?), and the perfect man to fill the role of the conductor. He orchestrates not only the strings, horns, and percussion, of course, but various plans of offing his wife. At the latter he’s not so good, as is apparent from the bumbling failure of materializing such an idealistic plan. The banter here is apparently not as sharp as earlier Sturges, but the scenes are staged quite effectively. The perpetual, symphonic musical soundtrack keeps us within Alfred’s mind, whether we enter his mind’s eye (literally) to imagine along with him how he might respond to the alleged infidelity, or we’re accompanying him around town and back home as he flubs his own investigation and role as executioner at every turn. Sturges is surely a cynic, though the Coens take his cynicism to new levels. The happy ending of this film is decidedly forced. Probably wouldn’t have been released without it, though.

Broken Embraces (dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 2009) – Phew. More to come here, to be sure. Film deserves more than one viewing, easily, before making any kind of analysis, to say nothing of assessment or judgment. A recent Film Quarterly article has been helpful, but thesis work now prevents me from interacting with it. In a word, this one’s beautiful, somehow supreme, very 8½, of course. There is something compelling and simply honest about films that deal with sight. Without it, there’s no cinema, right? Hard not to think of Pan’s Labyrinth in this sense, another beauty from another Spanish-speaking filmmaker. Also, Penelope is one tough chica.

Days of Heaven (dir. Terrence Malick, 1978) – If you’ve read this far, you should have arrived at the conclusion that this has been an excellent week (so far) for films. Malick is a visual poet perhaps up there with the best of them. Plenty of people think so, but this is my first taste of Malick aside from a high school viewing of The Thin Red Line. Really didn’t get it then, but looking forward to giving it an “enlightened” look. Wish this first one had been Badlands, but that’ll come soon enough. This is a very tight, image-driven epic, but less a “slice of life” than a whole pie. It’s round and full and rich, gorgeous and sad. It might be more biblical than anything else, in terms of adjectives anyway. If you’re familiar with Genesis, especially, it’s hard not to think of Cain & Abel, Abraham & Sarah, Lot & Sodom. Then there’s Ruth, although post-Genesis. But it’s “biblical” not only in terms of narrative elements (and narration, too?), but in terms of the form itself. If some of those OT books had been “written” with images, they might have looked a lot like this. Such a broad scope but with every frame and element maximized, it’s so much bigger than its size. Needs another viewing, next time on Criterion blu-ray.

Where Eagles Dare (dir. Brian G. Hutton, 1968) – A classic, pure spectacle. The Alistair MacLean novels lend themselves well to cinema, with others like The Guns of Navarone, Bear Island, and Ice Station Zebra also a pleasure to watch. This one heroizes the Brits via Richard Burton, but the token inclusion of Clint Eastwood as the gun-ready American lieutenant makes it as well-rounded as necessary for a film of this sort. Pacing is steady, working consistently toward a final climax through so many little climaxes. It’s hard not to like this one. Even the ladies, who use their gifts to the Allied advantage, show competence and agency despite soft spots for Mr. Ladies’ Man Richard Burton himself.

Vivre sa vie (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1962) – A rather cursory viewing, one that demands thought and attention. Danger here is to see simply “Godard” instead of something unique, which it seems to be. The French is typically translated as “My Life to Live,” which is fitting, since Karina’s character insists on her own agency/responsibility within the narrative. How Godard’s camera, editing, etc. deny her agency while acknowledging something like subjectivity is worthy of note. He seems to be at his most vicious here, casting his then-wife as the female character who is rather “bound” for prostitution and death. She’s just the image, at first unreachable, then, once gotten, cast into the gutter. Godard is honest if nothing else. At one point he employs a rapid-fire cutting sequence overlaid with a machine gun sound effect. His camera is his weapon, the look as fatal as can be. She wants to be looked at, but it doesn’t go so well to get what you want. Inclusion of Poe’s story “The Oval Portrait” may be as overt as Godard ever gets about his own murderous kind of authorship.