Category Archives: Film

Irma la Douce (film)

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  • Irma la Douce

7/26/24 (Fri)

Billy Wilder’s film of the long-running French musical, stripped of its music, about a happy hooker and a clumsy admirer who wants to keep her to himself. It reunites Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine from The Apartment (after Marilyn Monroe, the original choice and Lemmon’s Some Like It Hot collaborator, passed away). The stage musical, which also had a healthy run on Broadway, was scored by one of Edith Piaf’s collaborators and has some great tunes, but Wilder kept them only as underscoring other than a brief snatch of “Dis-Donc”. The film had some impressive musical talent, including MacLaine and Bruce Yarnell (a terrific foil for Ethel Merman in the subsequent revival of Annie Get Your Gun), and some musical numbers were supposedly filmed. But Wilder evidently felt the songs slowed down the action and canned all the footage. Still, André Previn did a more-than-capable job of offsetting this. Wilder should have cut some of the protracted would-be comedy instead, especially involving the faux British guy. The film could easily lose half an hour from its 140-minute running time.

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No Way Out

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  • No Way Out

6/28/24 (Fri), home, 8:00-9:45p

Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1950 “social issue” film deals with racial discrimination in a public hospital, giving Sydney Poitier his breakout role. Continue reading →

Sorcerer

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  • Sorcerer

6/26/24 (Wed)

Friedkin’s exhilarating 1977 adaptation of the novel The Wages of Fear, which had already served as the source for a highly regarded French film back in 1953. I had assumed from the (terrible) English title that it must have some kind of supernatural element like the director’s The Exorcist, but that was happily not the case. For the record, it’s the name of one of the trucks used to transport the dynamite, but the name has absolutely nothing to do otherwise with this realistic suspense film.

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Air Doll (空気人形)

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  • 空気人形 (Air Doll)

6/30/24 (Sun)

Koreeda’s 2009 flick, an oddity in his ouevre, is on the surface about the life and death of a blowup sex doll. But it proves much more than that. (Air Doll is a literal translation of the Japanese title. Trivia: non-inflatable plastic sex dolls in Japan are known as Dutch wives, which my American friend never tired of mentioning to his Dutch wife.)

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The Duke

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  • The Duke

6/7/24 (Fri)

Richard Michell’s 2020 comedy is a charmer. It’s based on the incredible true story of the theft in 1961 of a heralded Goya painting from London’s National Gallery just days after its acquisition. Writers Richard Bean and Clive Coleman delve into the circumstances behind the case. The painting had been purchased by the British state for a princely sum just weeks earlier to keep it in the UK after an American attempted to buy it, so its loss from the tightly guarded state-run museum was a national embarrassment.

The incident was apparently headline news at the time, coming unbelievably 50 years to the day – almost to the minute – of the more famous pilfering of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. That coincidence and the apparent sophistication of the operation (based on the assumption that security was doing its job) led to widespread speculation that the robbery was carried out by an international syndicate; it featured in the first James Bond film, Dr. No a year later, where Bond does a double-take upon seeing the missing painting in the villain’s lair. The riddle remained when the painting was mysteriously returned in perfect condition in a train station locker four years later, but the museum became even more red-faced when the thief, turning himself in six weeks later after careless pub talk left him open to blackmail, proved to be an eccentric, disabled and overweight former bus driver with the odd name Kempton Bunton.

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Donkey Skin (Peau d’âne)

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  • Peau d’âne (Donkey Skin)

6/4/24 (Tues)

A French friend had raved about Jacques Demy’s 1970 musical fantasy and practically insisted that I watch it. The director’s earlier Umbrellas had been not only a joyous burst of song and color but a unique approach to musical film, so it didn’t take much persuading to watch this one. I had never heard of it, but it’s apparently a cult classic in France. It’s based on a fairy tale by Charles Perrault, author of, among others, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty, all of which feature in this film in some form or other.

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Let It Be

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  • Let It Be

5/30/24 (Thurs)

I kept having déjà vu as I watched this, making me think I’ve seen it before. Apparently, though, my mind was playing tricks on me as the film reportedly had only limited release at the time and has never been shown publicly since. Peter Jackson’s three-part remix of the rest of the intended documentary footage, called Get Back, inspired a re-release of the film for the first time in more than half a century.

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Still Walking (歩いても歩いても)

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  • 歩いても歩いても (Still Walking)

5/29/24 (Wed)

The title of Koreeda’s superior 2008 film is taken from Ishida Ayumi’s old pop hit “Blue Light Yokohama”. It literally means “regardless of how much [one] walks” or “despite walking and walking”, the implication here being that the person will never reach the destination. The song itself features in the film in a startling confession muttered off-handedly by the mother.

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Nights of Cabiria (Le Notti di Cabiria)

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  • Le Notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria)

5/7/21 (Fri)

Fellini’s fantastically uplifting 1957 film, with an astonishing performance by his wife and muse Giulietta Masina, fresh off the previous year’s La Strada. I watched the film mainly as the source material for Sweet Charity, which turns out to have followed the bare bones of the plot fairly closely. But the musical turned the lead into a dance hall girl and played her tribulations mainly for laughs, whereas the film’s Cabiria is a girl of the streets in a gritty post-war Rome still getting back on its feet. Continue reading →