5/9/21 (Sun)
I was browsing through Criterion’s selection of Best Foreign Language Oscar winners and chose this 1965 Czechoslovakian film by Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos without knowing much about it. It turned out to be a Holocaust comedy, not a crowded category, set in 1942 in the newly created Nazi puppet state of Slovakia. The Tiso regime has accepted the Nuremberg Race Laws, setting off the conflict that drives the drama.
4/29/21 (Thurs)
An amateurish murder mystery from 1961, based on a popular book, that wouldn’t pass muster even as a daytime television film. A woman is just a week into her arranged marriage when her husband mysteriously disappears. He is found dead at the bottom of a cliff, an incident that is ruled a suicide – but is it? The women comes to find that there is more to her husband’s past than she had imagined.
Three films by the unjustly neglected Shimizu Hiroshi. Continue reading
4/1/21 (Thurs), Netflix
Part of August Wilson’s 10-play cycle of the black experience in the US in the 20th century. A white-owned record company in Chicago has contracted to make a recording with the imperious Ma Rainey (Viola Davis), a real-life Southern singer from the 1920s known as Mother of the Blues. The record makers hope to broaden her appeal by commissioning new arrangements from Levee (a spectacular Chadwick Boseman), a young black musician who is more tuned in to the tastes of the broader public and sees this as his stepping stone to fame. Unfortunately Ma doesn’t take kindly to suggestions, well meaning or not, and takes every opportunity to stick it to the white man regardless of how that affects others, including the young kid’s future. The clash between Ma and Levee – over music, her various demands, her woman (over whom both are fighting; the real Ma was evidently an unashamed lesbian) – leads to fireworks.
3/17/21 (Wed)
The idea of The Prom was promising: a group of down-and-out actors looking for publicity decide to stage a protest in Hicksville (played here by Indiana), where a lesbian has effectively been kept from taking her lover to the school prom. I thought it was going to be a spoof on overzealous leftists and their any-cause-will-do attitude, and it starts off lively enough. But it quickly devolves into the usual flaccid material, a plodding story about identity and let’s-love-each-other and be-true-to-yourself platitudes. Yuck. Continue reading
2/14/21 (Sun)
The notorious director Suzuki Seijun has essentially torn his 1967 movie into pieces, thrown them into the air, and spliced them together wherever they landed. It’s as if Picasso and Dali were fighting for the same brush. This is a big inside joke for fans of yakuza flicks, an irritation to the rest of us.
3/18/21 (Thurs)
An amazing film of 1934 by John Stahl based on a novel published the previous year. Bea (Claudette Colbert) is a widowed mother who has taken over her husband’s maple syrup sales route, doing what she can to keep food on the table for her small daughter. Delilah (an unforgettable Louise Beavers), a black domestic, shows up at the door having mistaken the address on a want ad, but manages to talk Bea into letting her work for just room and board for her and her own grade-school daughter. Struck by Delilah’s delicious pancakes, Bea turns her syrup and the pancakes into big business, becoming extremely wealthy in the process. She scrupulously sets aside a half-share for Delilah, viewing her as an equal business partner. But Delilah’s only ambition is to care for her beloved daughter along with Bea’s household. When Bea suggests that Delilah buy her own home with her earnings, the latter panics, thinking she is being thrown out. She begs to continue living as a domestic with Bea, who has little choice but to agree.
As their girls grow up, each mother faces a dilemma. In the less persuasive story, Bea has finally found her dream man in the form of a hunky ichthyologist (they apparently exist, at least in this film) but discovers that her daughter has fallen for him as well. That is resolved in melodrama. Meanwhile, Delilah’s light-skinned daughter has been able to pass as white and, having grown up with Bea’s daughter, has essentially taken on a white identity. As a young woman, fearing exposure of her black heritage, she brutally rejects her shocked mother (“I don’t know this woman. Does she look like my mother?”) and walks out. That is resolved in tragedy. Delilah’s experience lifts the film into another dimension.
1/7/21 (Thurs)
I had a bit of time at the end of the day and picked this 1945 film because it was an early Kurosawa piece (just his fourth film), started at war end under Japanese censorship and completed just after the war under US censorship; it was based on the popular and eminently film-worthy Kabuki classic Kanjincho (itself based on the Noh classic Ataka); and, not least, it was short at just one hour.
12/29/20 (Tues), Tokyo
Silent film helmed by Italian director Augusto Genina. The filming was finished in 1922, but it reportedly took another three years to color it using the innovative but labor-intensive Pathé Stencil Color process. A big plus was the star, Pierre Magnier, who was the understudy in the original production back in 1897. After seeing Cyrano, My Love and Mifune Toshiro’s samurai adaptation in recent weeks, Cyrano was on my mind, so this was perfect timing. It was presented by a benshi narrator, Sawato Midori, who improvised dialogue and other developments throughout, and musicalized by a lovely four-piece orchestra (piano, cello, flute, percussion).
Cyrano is an interesting choice for the silent treatment given its talkative title character and gorgeous verse. The entire central conflict revolves around a young handsome soldier’s inability to express himself to a beautiful woman, prompting Cyrano to step in and speak in his place. I was interested to see how that would be handled. The answer is: not very well. Continue reading
12/15/20 (Tues)
Finally a screwball comedy that doesn’t depend on impossible plot twists or unnaturally eccentric characters. Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 film offers a straightforward story delivered in exceptionally high style, including a fabulously quotable script and totally believable three-dimensional characters. It’s the closest I’ve seen an American show come to British drawing room comedy, albeit written by an American, Samson Raphaelson, based on a Hungarian play. It benefits from supremely confident performances by the three main performers, especially the unflappable Herbert Marshall as the sleekest of crooks, along with wonderful supporting character actors. The romantic settings of Venice and Paris, the social world of the high life – or low life pretending to be high life – and particularly the champagne banter are pretty near perfect. This is operetta in prose.
12/14/20 (Mon)
Leo McCarey’s 1937 screwball comedy classic. Irene Dunne and Cary Grant play a glamorous bickering couple who, each doubting the other’s fidelity, agree to a divorce, only to discover during the 60-day waiting period that they need each other after all.
The plot is dubious but is only there anyway as a framework for some fun characters and crackling dialogue in what amounts to an American restoration comedy. Continue reading
12/13/20 (Sun)
Inagaki Hiroshi’s 1959 adaptation of Cyrano as a Japanese period flick, also known less literally as Samurai Saga (though neither is a particularly good title). I learned about this after seeing the previous day’s Cyrano, My Love, and while I wasn’t wild about Inagaki’s Rickshaw Man, the idea of Mifune Toshiro as Cyrano – not too far in spirit from his roles in Yojimbo and Sanjuro – was too perfect to pass up.
sekenbanashi 