- The Naked City, 1/16/23 (Mon)
Jules Dassin’s 1947 hit was supposedly highly influential as a prototypical film noir, setting a pattern for an entire genre. Continue reading
Category Archives: Film
A Colt Is My Passport (拳銃は俺のパスポート)
- 拳銃は俺のパスポート (A Colt Is My Passport), 1/9/23 (Mon)
If Sergio Leone had made a yakuza flick, it would probably look a lot like Nomura Takashi’s fine A Colt Is My Passport, including its no-talk-all-action star Shishido Joe in the Clint Eastwood role, the final shootout in a deserted landscape, and Ibe Harumi’s superb Morricone-like score. (The film was released a year after the completion of Leone’s Dollars Trilogy.) It also borrows a moment from Hawks’ Rio Bravo when Joe’s erstwhile companion, played by half-British pop singer Jerry Fujio, is handed a guitar that just happens to be sitting there (“It’s been a while. Sing something”) and croons a ballad. Itami Juzo’s 1980s comedy Tampopo is famous as a takeoff on a spaghetti Western, but this film beat that by two decades, though as homage rather than parody. Others have noted touches of the French New Wave in the detailed way that Joe puts together his weapon for the initial kill and later carefully builds the bomb for the climactic scene.
Still, the creative and confident way these elements are used gives the film a vibe all its own. Continue reading
This Gun for Hire
- This Gun for Hire, 1/3/23 (Tues)
Frank Tuttle’s 1942 film is supposedly a pioneering noir classic, but it has aged badly in its stale dialogue, stereotypical characterizations, and limp acting. A killer named Raven is hired to retrieve some valuable information for a client but is double-crossed when the money received from the client turns out to be marked bills that have been reported as stolen. He then becomes both hunter and hunted as he seeks revenge on the client while being sought by the police. Continue reading
Assassination (暗殺)
- 暗殺 (Assassination)
1/1/23 (Sun)
The Edo government, aiming to make peace with rival forces in Kyoto, hires a local ronin (unemployed samurai) for protection as its representatives travel to forge an agreement. The ronin agrees to help but turns on the government once in Kyoto. He is subsequently assassinated for his betrayal.
That’s the simple version of the story underlying Shinoda Masahiro’s ever-shifting 1964 kaleidoscope of a biography of Kiyokawa Hachiro, the two-timing ronin who played a minor role in Japanese history. Continue reading
L’Enfant
- L’Enfant
12/30/22 (Fri)
The Dardenne brothers look again at the Belgian underclass in this 2005 film, which won the directors their second Palme d’Or in three years. Continue reading
Beau Travail
- Beau Travail
12/08/22 (Thurs)
In Claire Denis’ disjointed 1999 film, Galoup, a sergeant in the Foreign Legion in Djibouti who basks in the imagined approval of his commander, is upset when an unwitting rival enters the picture after heroically saving victims in a helicopter crash. The kid is young, muscular and effortlessly good looking, and seems to stand above and apart from the usual misfits that make up the Foreign Legion (such as a less attractive Russian who seeks to join). When the commander learns that the boy was abandoned as a baby and found in a stairwell, he shrugs and mutters approvingly, “It was a good find,” upsetting Galoup even more. Galoup’s obsessive jealousy at thinking himself displaced in his commander’s affections leads him to take action against the kid: seizing the chance when he catches him giving water to a fellow soldier who is being punished, he takes the boy out into the desert, gives him a broken compass, and dumps him in the middle of nowhere. The consequences prove severe for everyone.
The film, based loosely on Billy Budd, has an unmistakably homoerotic feel with plenty of shirtless men and suggestive camerawork from start to finish, though Galoup’s motivations are left ambiguous: he could just as well be upset at the thought of being usurped power-wise as taken by the kid’s otherworldly beauty (or, for that matter, the commander’s masculinity). Still, the inclusion of music from Britten’s opera Billy Budd suggests that the director knew very well what she was doing. The idea of a all-too-beautiful interloper disrupting the military order is reminiscent of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and Nagisa Oshima’s Gohatto, but those are more straightforward and compelling in story terms.
Cabaret (film)
- Cabaret, 1/22/23 (Sun)
I hadn’t seen this film since it came out in 1972 and vaguely remember loving it. So when it showed up this month as part of a local theater’s morning classic film series, I jumped at the chance to catch it again on the big screen. It was much talked-about in its day for taking on themes like sexual liberation, anti-Semitism, homosexuality, abortion, and societal complacency in the face of evil, all in a musical format. It’s not the first musical to feature Nazis – The Sound of Music beat them to that. But that was a story of resistance to an established regime, whereas Cabaret examines how society got that way in the first place. The theater was impressively full for a movie over half-a-century old.
Flower Drum Song (film)
- Flower Drum Song, 1/20/23 (Fri)
Rodgers and Hammerstein’s mini-hit musical must have seemed old-fashioned even in its day (1958) given the quality of shows playing elsewhere on Broadway at that time, which included My Fair Lady, West Side Story and Gypsy. It pursues the well-trod theme of a generation clash between immigrants and their native children, i.e., tradition vs. assimilation, but this time in a Chinese-American context. The characters could easily be Italian, Jewish or Irish, but the Asian theme provides new visual and musical possibilities that must have attracted the creators, who already had two huge Asia-related hits under their belt.
A Man (ある男)
- ある男 (A Man)
11/26/22 (Sun)
Ishikawa Kei’s multi-tiered exploration of identity. Rie (Ando Sakura), traumatized after losing her youngest child and divorcing her husband, has moved back with her small son to her hometown in Kyushu, where she works in the family’s stationery store. She comes to know a shy young customer named Daisuke (Kubota Masataka), who gradually opens up to her after showing her his sketches. Now working as a lumberjack, Daisuke tells her that he comes from a family that runs a well known inn in Ikaho Hot Springs (great place) not far from Tokyo. They fall in love, marry and have a child of their own, and he proves a wonderful husband and father. Some time later, however, tragedy strikes when Daisuke is killed in a work accident. That shock hardly prepares Rie for the next one: at his memorial service a year later, she is visited by Daisuke’s older brother, who upon seeing the dead man’s photo on the altar, reveals that the person in the photo is not in fact Daisuke – that is, Rie’s late husband was not who he pretended to be. Rie, stunned, asks her lawyer, Kido (Tsumabuki Satoshi), to find out just who it was she married.
Inn of Evil (いのちぼうにふろう)
- いのちぼうにふろう (Inn of Evil)
9/25/22 (Sun)
Kobayashi Masaki’s 1971 black-and-white film about smugglers on an island just off Edo who decide for once in their lives to do a good deed. I wanted to see it ahead of next week’s stage version featuring the film’s star Nakadai Tatsuya, who at 89 is still very much active with his Mumeijuku theater group and celebrating his 70th anniversary as an actor.
The official English title, Inn of Evil, is rather odd. For one thing, the facility referred to is neither an inn nor evil. The frequenters are basically just random misfits rejected by society; it is the police who prove evil, such as spontaneously killing a random man for being too talkative. Also, the “inn”, Anrakutei (安楽亭), is in fact a tavern, translated in some essays as Easy Tavern but more like Tavern of Comfort. The Japanese title Inochi Bo ni Furo, literally “let’s give up our lives”, better sums up what’s at stake and appears in the dialogue (twice). The phrase usually refers to wasting one’s life or giving up one’s chances in life, but the active tense here suggests a suicidal act, presumably for a higher cause, a well-worn theme in Japan.
Intimidation (ある脅迫)
- ある脅迫 (Intimidation), 9/6/22 (Tues)
Kurahara Koreyoshi’s accomplished 1960 flick (the Japanese title is “A Certain Blackmail”) is sometimes referred to as the first Japanese noir, and while I doubt that’s true, it does seem to be the first to have made a real impression. Kurahara is best known for the Takakura Ken vehicle Antartica (南極物語), which reigned for years as Japan’s highest-grossing domestic film (and remains second for non-anime works). This film, worlds away from that epic, is a tightly wound suspense piece that manages to lay out a carefully plotted story and nicely delineated characters in just over an hour. Talk about efficiency. It’s based on a story by Takigawa Kyo, who gave his villain the similar name Takita Kyosuke.
Destry Rides Again
- Destry Rides Again, 8/20/22 (Sat)
Was the west ever this wild? In George Marshall’s 1939 romp, the son of a legendary tough sheriff is called in to bring law and order to an anarchic town controlled by a corrupt rancher after the previous sheriff mysteriously disappears. He attracts ridicule when he emerges from his carriage with a parasol and birdcage and no weapons, but his unorthodox methods and persistence, with help from a voluptuous saloon manager who shifts loyalties, gradually bring the villains to heel.
The film is a parody of a Western from the very opening, when a massive brawl, one of many to come, is taking place in front of the Last Chance Saloon (a name that itself signals a lampoon). Marshall handles crowd scenes with great skill, culminating in the hilarious final scene where the wives, fed up with the men’s uncivilized behavior, do some cleaning up of their own. That in turn nicely sets up the murder scene of two key characters, the final in a number of shooting deaths throughout. The superb script, which reportedly veers sharply from the source novel, offers an abundance of fascinating characters and keeps all its plot strands adeptly in play to the end. Very well filmed and choreographed.
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