9/18/21 (Sat)
I wasn’t sure I was ready for more Godard after Breathless, but this 1963 film about filmmaking is considered one of the director’s more accessible works. Plus it had Brigitte Bardot, who seemed an unlikely choice for the lead.
9/7/21 (Tues)
I was already in Truffaut mode after The 400 Blows, so with the news of Jean-Paul Belmondo’s death, I immediately decided to watch the actor’s breakthrough Breathless, which was co-written by Truffaut. Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 debut work is considered a milestone in film history – one critic says in apparent seriousness that movies can be divided into pre- and post-Breathless. It stands with the previous year’s Blows as one of the founding works of the French New Wave. Unlike that film, though, it hasn’t aged well.
9/4/21 (Sat)
Billy Wilder’s 1953 film about goings-on in a German POW stalag during WWII. That would seem an uncomfortable subject just a few years after the war, but it was based on a highly successful Broadway play by two former POWs recalling their own experiences. Continue reading
5/5/22 (Thurs)
Naruse Mikio’s 1951 film is the first of his six adaptations of novels by Hayashi Fumiko (e.g., Late Chrysanthemums, A Wanderer’s Notebook), an author known for her bleak female-centered works. This novel was actually an unfinished work, but Naruse ably fills in the gaps. The film is said to have launched or revived the shomingeki genre that concentrated on the lives of the common people.
4/30/22 (Sat)
Imai Tadashi’s 1950 film, inspired by a French novel, is a silly piece of sentimental fluff with a slight antiwar twinge. It was apparently a big commercial hit in its day and won the first Blue Ribbon Award as Best Film (Imai’s works won the top prize five times in the award’s first ten years) along with the Kinejun and Mainichi Awards. History has come down in favor of its rival Rashomon, and it is known now primarily for a romantic scene in which the man, loathe to leave his lover’s home, runs back and kisses her passionately from the other side of a window. A favorite of both audiences and critics, Imai is often called the forgotten director in the shadow of Kurosawa, Ozu and other contemporaries, and I did enjoy his Kiku and Isamu. So, having found this online, I figured it would be worth a watch.
It wasn’t. Continue reading
4/23/22 (Sat)
When you hear that an Orthodox Jew, played by Zero Mostel, is visited by an angel named Levine, you don’t expect to see Harry Belafonte. But that’s the premise in this oddball 1970 work adopted from a Bernard Malamud story about a modern-day Job and an emissary from Heaven sent to save him.
9/3/21 (Fri)
Truffaut’s fantastic 1959 film about a boy effectively pushed into delinquency was his first full-length feature but already feels like the work of a master. It is not a story so much as a slice-of-life sequence of events that follow events in the adolescent’s life. The curious title comes from a French idiom, faire les quatre cents coups, that apparently means “to raise hell”. The film was reportedly released initially as “Wild Oats”, which fits the meaning better, but the title soon reverted to the direct translation, where it has remained since. Still, the English title does work in its own way even devoid of context as a symbol of the seemingly endless vicissitudes that the boy is subject to, the blows being psychological as well as physical. And it sounds better than “The 400 Vicissitudes”.
11/23/21 (Tues)
Elia Kazan’s 1949 film about a light-skinned black returning to her roots. Continue reading
11/23/21 (Tues)
Vincente Minnelli’s 1956 film is widely characterized as a gay flick, but the truth is as usual a bit more complicated. Continue reading
11/6/21 (Sat)
Frank Perry’s hallucinatory 1968 diary of a mad has-been. The main character’s precarious mental state is reflected in the odd structure of the film and some bizarre editing. While inevitably a product of its time – not sure if the white, Waspy, nouveau riche setting would be possible today, whether true to the era or not, not to mention a passing reference to “stylish fags” – its unconventional setup has evidently given it a cult following.
11/8/21 (Mon)
Frank Perry’s 1981 gothic portrait of the late Joan Crawford as the mother from hell is well deserving of its reputation as a camp classic. Continue reading
3/16/22 (Wed)
Imamura Shohei’s directorial debut of 1958 is a rather silly comedy about a traveling theater group. Not much of the later provocative Imamura on view here, though he does concentrate on the lower classes in a struggling troupe that mixes popularized versions of classical pieces like Chushingura with titillating girlie shows to bring in unsophisticated rural audiences. In a sign of the future Imamura, it features numerous loud outbursts among the actors and crowds, leering audience members and peeping Toms, pilfering of money and geese, a reference to eating dogs, actors picking their noses, and an impressively vicious catfight between two actresses, among other delights. But this was all in a broadly comic mood.
sekenbanashi 