Cairo Station (Bab el hadid)

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  • Cairo Station (Bab el hadid)

8/25/24 (Sat)

Egyptian director Youssef Chahine’s 1958 neorealist work is hailed as a landmark in Arabic cinema. The Arabic title translates to “The Iron Door”, but I think the English title is quite good given the dynamics of the setting with its raucous mix of rich and poor, the old guard and the new, and a number of overlapping stories among characters with their various aims. The story focuses on the poor workers scrambling to make a living in the station, though the poverty is less the point here than just background information. Amid the constant traffic of unknown people to unknown spots, they have formed something of a community offering mutual support.

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Street Without End (限りなき舗道)

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  • 限りなき舗道 (Street Without End)

8/31/24 (Sun)

Naruse’s 1934 drama, set in contemporary Tokyo, was his final silent film. Sugiko is a waitress in a pancake shop in Ginza. (Pancakes must have been the latest thing; patrons seem to have trouble figuring out what to do with the spot of butter on top.) She receives a marriage proposal from her poor but kind boyfriend, who is under pressure from his family to marry a girl arranged for him back home. Sugiko, pressed to make a decision, wanders carelessly into the path of a chauffer-driven car. That car belongs to Hiroshi, the handsome heir to an upper-class family, who takes her immediately to the hospital. Her boyfriend sees them together and, assuming she has rejected him, leaves town.

Hiroshi eventually falls in love with Sugiko and begs her to marry him in a romantic setting backed by Mt. Fuji. She is uncertain given the difference in their class, especially with the disparaging attitude of his mother and sister, who make no effort to hide their disdain. Still, the thought of a life of financial security and Hiroshi’s undeniable sincerity prompt her to give in to his persistence. The family has no choice but to agree.

As feared, however, the gulf between her and the family proves deep despite her best efforts. Continue reading →

Every-Night Dreams (夜ごとの夢)

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  • 夜ごとの夢 (Every-Night Dreams)

8/10/24 (Fri)

Naruse’s 1933 melodrama, one of his final silent films, already picks up on his much-visited theme of a woman forced to support herself due to weak or duplicitous men. Here, it is the former. Continue reading →

Brighton Rock

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  • Brighton Rock

8/1/24 (Thurs)

John Boulton’s 1948 British film is clearly modeled on American gangster flicks; I almost expected the lead to break into a Cagney-like “You dirty rat.” A local gang of hoodlums in the beach town hunt down a reporter whose exposé brought their activities to light, killing him on a haunted house ride. One of the gang members is spotted by a waitress, Rose, as he is attempting a cover-up. That unnerves the gang leader Pinkie (what’s with the pink and rose?), who becomes intimate with Rose in an attempt to eliminate the potential threat. The waitress, not even aware of what she has witnessed, unwisely falls in love with him.

They have neglected another witness, however. A loud and often drunk entertainer named Ida who met the reporter just before his death is convinced that there has been foul play. She gets no help from the police, who have determined that the man died of a heart attack – despite the fact that he never reemerged from the haunted house. She decides to solve the mystery on her own.

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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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A Look Back: Merrily We Roll Along

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Sourly We Roll Along

The notorious 1981 musical flop Merrily We Roll Along, known mainly to now for putting an end to the remarkable decade-long partnership between songwriter Stephen Sondheim and director Harold Prince, finally achieved Broadway success this year in a much-lauded revival of a revival imported from London. But claims that the show itself has finally found its audience seem far-fetched. Continue reading →

Lines in the sand

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Britain and France drew lines. A century ago, there were no nations in the Ottoman Empire’s former Middle Eastern territories: not only no Israel, but no Syria, no Lebanon, no Iraq, no Jordan. All were conjured up after the Ottoman collapse by the British and French, who essentially sketched lines randomly in the sand. If you were a Kurd, say, tough luck; your people get separated into various entities with no say in their own fates. Other ethnic and religious groups were similarly bound together, however uncomfortably, at the whim of the colonial powers.

So the British and French drew lines. Cross one line today, and you get a European-level standard of living, broad ethnic diversity, property rights, gay pride parades, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, a free press, democratic elections, Nobel prizes, a fair and functioning judiciary, a thriving private sector. On the other side of the line, you get, well, the opposite. That doesn’t mean just the Palestinian territories – it includes 100% of the former Ottoman lands.

You’d think the governments of those nations would want to emulate Israel. Instead they’d rather destroy it. And just what kind of world would they leave behind? Continue reading →

A Look Back: Germany and migrants

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A piece that I posted some years back has gained new relevance with the horrific violence that has broken out across the UK. The German government had taken in over 1 million migrants in a single year, the overwhelming number of whom were young Middle Eastern males who effectively just walked across the border. That seemed a recipe for disaster. As I noted, the native population are “not there for the money or security; they’re there because that’s who they are”. Yet those people had no say in a massive demographic shift that would affect them profoundly. I mentioned that while controlled immigration is one thing, a flood of migrants on that scale was bound to have consequences. And so it has proved, albeit in the UK. I wondered what might happen “when an oppressed people rise up against their oppressors – those people being the German public, and the oppressors the German government (substitute the names of other European countries as appropriate)”. We’re now finding out. 

Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were at the time still vying to be their respective party’s nominee for that year’s presidential election. Otherwise, the references should be clear. 

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