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неделя, 17 април 2011 г.

MovieRetriever's 100 Greatest Movies: #34 Sunrise

The plot of Sunrise was adapted to Hollywood conventions from a naturalistic novella by Hermann Sudermann. It is wrong, however, to assume the changes were all for the bad, as so many critics have done. The film's plot is neither hopelessly sentimental nor melodramatic. It is true that Carl Mayer and F. W. Murnau, with a free hand from the studio, changed the tragic ending of the novella to a happy one for the film. This change can be viewed as an improvement upon Sudermann's gratuitously ironic ending of having the young husband's death occur after the couple's reconciliation. If not viewed as an improvement, the popular-art convention of the happy ending is certainly no worse than the naturalistic one of culminating a work with a tragic twist whether it is apt or not. Also the third party of the love triangle was, in the novella, a servant girl and, in the film, is a vamp from the city. On the basis of this change, all too many critics have accused Mayer and Murnau of setting up a simplistic "good-country" and "evil-city" polarity; however, they forget that the couple's experiences in the city, with all its modern delights, bring the husband and wife back together – or perhaps together for the first time. The plot allowed Murnau to draw upon his background in art history and literature, and above all it offered the basis for a cinematic narrative par excellence. This plot was made for the camera, especially in motion, and for the radical oscillations of lighting and mood that are so conducive to a temporal art like film. In such fertile soil, the talents of cameramen Rosher and Struss flourished.

Human characters, in Sunrise, are secondary to the true protagonist – the camera. The scenes in this film are neither conceived as a staged work, like so many silent films, nor as slices of actuality on which the camera allows us to spy. The premise of the film is that the camera will move; and that it will have any excuse to move. Plots and characters seem pretenses for movement and light; boats, dance halls, trolley cars, and other city traffic – not intrigue and love – are the true forces of motion in Sunrise. Akin to the ballets created by the avantgarde in the Paris of the 1910s and 1920s, patterns of movement seek their raison d'etre in the slimmest threat of plot. In addition, the camera (and the cameramen) have been allowed so much freedom that the camera soon takes on a life of its own. Even when the camera is at rest or pauses within a shot, the effect is electric.

According to the testimony of Rosher, Murnau was obsessed with capturing the play of light, especially as it occurred on the surface of the lake – either in nature or in the studio. Water, boats, moonlight, and reeds are pretenses for capturing the fleeting effects of light, much in the same way that clouds and waterlilies are used in Claude Monet's last paintings. Indeed, the film's frequent use of mist, dim lighting, and blurred exposures reminds one of Monet's work. This impressionistic concentration on light is not just limited to the scenes of the lake; in the city, glass replaces water. In the famous restaurant scene, lighted figures are seen dancing behind a glass window; people move in front of the window and are reflected in it; and the camera moves to catch the reflected light from different angles. The effect is shimmering.

A frequent complaint concerning Sunrise is that the film is divided into disjointed parts and stylized scenes often clash with more naturalistic ones. Murnau compared his own narrative structure to that used by James Joyce. Just as in Ulysses, there is a radical shift of style to match the spirit of different episodes; so too, in Sunrise, is there a fluctuation between the actual and the artificial. Murnau may have had another source for his scene-structuring in the German Expressionist theatre – especially in the works of Ernst Toller, where naturalistic scenes alternate with expressionistic ones. There are few films that depict such an astute sense of the spirit of place and the events that occur there, as, for example, where the husband secretly meets the vamp, and passes through a studio-set marsh with a broodingly low horizon lit by a moon shining through the haze. Also, the trolley ride taken by the husband and wife gives the sense of a location shot made in daylight; the joyful effect is complete down to the bouncing of the trolley car. The trolley soon moves into the city, actually a studio backlot construction, that is scaled larger than life in order to convey the awe of the country couple who are seeing the city for the first time. The actual only seems to be so. Acting, like the lighting and the sets, is conceived of scene by scene. Murnau took great pains in making the actors' gestures and facial expressions fit the moment; therefore, the styles of acting fluctuate between the naturalistic and the expressionistic. And over all there is the evermoving mercurial camera. In every way, each scene is contrived to have its own particular mood, and each fits with another like pieces of Byzantine mosaic.

Hollywood fell under the spell of Sunrise, and under its influence the camera took wings, only to have them clipped by the limitations of primitive sound equipment. In the long run, however, the lessons of Sunrise resurfaced in such films as John Ford's The Informer and Orson Welles's Citizen Kane. The camera searching through the night and fog for a reflected gleam of light was a thematic and formalistic motif in these films. On the one hand, Sunrise culminated film's silent experience; but, on the other, it foreshadowed the first maturity of sound.

Release Date: 1927
Rating: Unrated

Starring: George O'Brien, Janet Gaynor, Bodil Rosing, Margaret Livingstone, J. Farrell Macdonald, Ralph Sipperly, Jane Winton, Arthur Houseman, Eddie Boland, Gina Corrado, Barry Norton, and Sally Eilers
Director: F. W. Murnau
Writer: Carl Mayer

Source Citation: Farnsworth, Rodney. "Sunrise." International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers. Ed. Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast. 4th ed. Vol. 1: Films. Detroit: St. James Press, 2000. 1169-1171.

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MovieRetriever's 100 Greatest Movies: #52 Double Indemnity

Although James M. Cain's memorable novel of crime and passion, The Postman Always Rings Twice, predated his equally potent, similarly themed Double Indemnity by almost a decade, it is Indemnity that has proven the more influential, due largely to the uncompromising and suspenseful film writer-director Billy Wilder made from it. Wilder's film remains the model for just about every film noir of this type (Born to Kill, The Prowler, The Pushover, Body Heat, et al.) to come our way since.

Cain's novel was translated to the screen with the full force of the author's ugly tale of lust, greed, and murder intact. In fact, the film version is in many ways tougher than its source. Wilder's intention to make it so prompted his longtime partner, writer-producer Charles Brackett, to back away from the project even though he and Wilder were one of Hollywood's most successful teams. Brackett found Cain's book distasteful and felt the film would be little more than a "dirty movie." He told Wilder to get another collaborator. Wilder tried to get Cain himself, but the author was busy on another project, and Wilder opted for Raymond Chandler instead.

Chandler detested working with Wilder and disliked the final film. Cain on the other hand totally approved of what Wilder had done to his book, even considered it an improvement. The two works are certainly different. In addition to changing the names of Cain's main characters (in the book they are Walter Huff and Phyllis Nirdlinger), Wilder changed the ending and altered other aspects of the story as well. Whereas Cain unfolded his tale in a linear manner, Wilder revealed the fate of his protagonist in the opening scene. Insurance investigator MacMurray arrives at his office mortally wounded and confesses into the dictaphone of his colleague, Robinson, the murder plot and insurance scam gone awry that led to MacMurray's downfall. Wilder cuts back to the dying MacMurray several times, but for the most part the film unfolds as a series of flashbacks showing how MacMurray got embroiled with femme fatale Stanwyck in a scheme to murder her oilman husband, make it look like an accident, collect a bundle on the husband's double indemnity claim, and run away together. But when their scheme began to unravel, their relationship fell apart, and they wound up shooting each other. (In the book, the lovers get away with the crime because the Robinson character who is hot on their trail has no proof, but are doomed anyway due to their growing mistrust of one another.)

Cain loosely based his novel on the real-life Roaring Twenties case of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray who conspired to murder Snyder's husband for $100,000 in insurance money. Snyder and Gray were caught and went to the chair. An enterprising newspaper reporter smuggled a camera into the execution chamber and snapped a shot of Snyder moments before the juice was turned on. The ghoulish shot caused a furor when it was published in the paper. Wilder wanted to end his film with a similar scene showing MacMurray's execution in California's gas chamber. The scene was shot, but Wilder decided against using it; he felt it to be too strong and anticlimactic as well. He replaced it with the trenchantly written and beautifully performed final confrontation scene between the self-destructive MacMurray and the fatherly Robinson that movingly concludes this exceptionally fine and biting film noir. As MacMurray slumps to the floor, he tells Robinson how he'd been able to elude the dogged investigator. "Because the guy you were looking for was too close, Keyes. Right across the desk from you." "Closer than that," Robinson responds emotionally as the film fades to black.

Release Date: 1944
Rating: Unrated

Starring: Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson, Porter Hall, Jean Heather, Tom Powers, Byron Barr, Richard Gaines, Fortunio Bonanova, John Philliber, and Clarence Muse
Director: Billy Wilder
Writers: Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler

Source Citation: McCarty, John. "Double Indemnity." International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers. Ed. Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast. 4th ed. Vol. 1: Films. Detroit: St. James Press, 2000. 346-348.

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MovieRetriever's 100 Greatest Movies: #71 The Philadelphia Story

The Philadelphia Story is one of the most successful and best loved screwball comedies of the classical Hollywood era. It is based on the 1939 Broadway production of Philip Barry's play which starred Katharine Hepburn. The film employs the 1930s screwball plot device of the idle rich whose wealth has blinded them to the simple joys of life and the worthiness of middle-class values. Tracy Lord is the arrogant Philadelphia socialite who is planning her wedding to a stuffy social climber when her ex-husband, C. K. Dexter Haven, arrives at the mansion. Haven is a charming millionaire who openly displays his love of life and his disdain of pretentiousness while he secretly longs for the reunion with his ex-wife. Jimmy Stewart and Ruth Hussey are the reporters from the scandal sheet Spy Magazine who have been assigned to cover the wedding. Anti-romance, verbal and witty relationships, and the tendency to poke fun at the rich are all in abundance providing humorous distractions and obstacles to Tracy's and Dexter's final reconciliation.

Director George Cukor here shows his preference for understatement in romantic comedies through his emphasis on plot and performance. Following Frank Capra's example in It Happened One Night and his earlier success Holiday, Cukor employs a screwball comic style which avoids explicit romance between two leading characters. He instead pits them against each other, creating romantic courtship through character tensions.

Because the audience knows that the characters are Hepburn and Grant, two movie stars who have been paired before in Cukor's Sylvia Scarlett and Holiday and Howard Hawks's Bringing Up Baby, the audience is predisposed to want them to get together. Cukor plays with this expectation throughout the film but especially in the famous opening scene: Grant is tossed out the front door; Hepburn appears at the door where she breaks one of Grant's golf clubs; she tosses the clubs after him and slams the door; Grant returns to the door and rings the bell; when Hepburn answers, he pushes her in the face.

Not a single word is spoken in this scene. Its comic success depends as much on Hepburn's star image as on the superb timing. During the latter 1930s, Hepburn headed the list by the Independent Theatre Owners Association of "box-office poison" movie stars. Critics found her grating, "mannish," or too intense. Cukor, who had directed Hepburn in five previous films, said that she was unattractive to audiences in the late 1930s because she "never was a 'love me. I'm a lovable little girl' kind of actress. She always challenged the audience, and … they felt something arrogant in her playing." In The Philadelphia Story, Hepburn and Cukor capitalized on these aspects of her image, turning them to Hepburn's advantage by establishing Tracy as a haughty, inflexible snob who becomes lovable when she exposes her underlying vulnerability and fragility.

The Philadelphia Story broke attendance records at the Radio City Music Hall in New York City. The critical and popular success of the film was especially sweet to Hepburn, who had selected the film as a vehicle for her return to movies after a two year hiatus. After Holiday and Bringing Up Baby had brought her additional negative reviews, she angrily left Hollywood. Hepburn vowed to return only if the role and circumstances were right. The Tracy Lord character in The Philadelphia Story not only provided the right role, but it afforded Hepburn the opportunity to create the right circumstances. During her Broadway stint in the play, she acquired the movie rights which she then sold to MGM in a deal that guaranteed her the movie role of Tracy Lord and choice of director and co-stars.

The Philadelphia Story's success led to its remake as a film musical in 1956. Though High Society features music and lyrics by Cole Porter and stars Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Grace Kelly, it lacks the sparkle and comic tautness of the original.

Release Date: 1940
Rating: Unrated

Starring: Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, James Stewart, Ruth Hussey, John Howard, Roland Young, John Halliday, Virginia Weidler, Mary Nash, Henry Daniell, Lionel Pape, Rex Evans, Russ Clark, Hilda Plowright, Lita Chevret, Lee Phelps, Dorothy Fay, Florine McKinney, Helene Whitney, Hillary Brooks, Claude King, Robert de Bruce, and Veda Buckland
Director: George Cukor
Writers: Donald Ogden Stewart and Waldo Salt (uncredited)

Source Citation: Rabinovitz, Lauren. "The Philadelphia Story." International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers. Ed. Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast. 4th ed. Vol. 1: Films. Detroit: St. James Press, 2000. 938-941.

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The Ten Greatest Canines in Cinema History

As you may have guessed, we here at MovieRetriever.com have a certain affinity for dogs (in case you’re just joining us – our mascot is an anthropomorphic movie-reviewing Labrador retriever). So, you can imagine how thrilled we are with the recent slew of films concerning man’s best friend that have come our way via the multiplex. There’s Marley & Me, which strikes just the right balance of humor and emotion and Bolt which proves that not all non-Pixar made animated films have to necessarily suck. There’s even another live-action canine caper in Hotel for Dogs. It’s truly a good time to be a filmgoer and a dog person. To proclaim our appreciation of our furry companions, we thought we might take a look at the ten best film dogs of all time…. **********

10. VERDEL from

AS GOOD AS IT GETS

It was a damn shame that Verdel the dog wasn’t nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar as was costar Greg Kinnear. As anyone can clearly see, Verdel is the glue that holds the entire movie together. The plot completely revolves around him. Let’s face it, without this little guy Nicholson would have never gotten up the courage to change a single thing in his obsessively compulsive life (hence no movie after the opening credits).

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9. BABE

While not technically a dog, Babe is a Sheep-Pig! Or, at least he thinks he is, and that’s good enough for us. Babe is proof that you shouldn’t be confined by the conventional definition of your station in life and that a pig is just as good of a best friend to man as the traditional alternative ever was. Babe also routinely teaches us that if you have a kind heart you’ll be rewarded three-fold.

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8. ASTA from the THIN MAN series

Without Asta, would Nick or Nora Charles have solved a single mystery? We here at MovieRetriever.com are inclined to think probably not. Scooby-Doo owes a deep debt of thanks and a big box of Scooby Snacks to this particular pooch who is the forefather of the modern sleuth hound. Asta was an ever present and dependable companion who appeared in every Thin Man film.

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7. SAM from I AM LEGEND

Sam (short for Samantha) is the only companion that world-wide plague survivor Robert Neville (Will Smith) has as he wanders the desolate streets of Manhattan. By day, Sam assists Neville with the chores of hunting and gathering food and by night she protects him from the victims of the aforementioned plague who are now zombie-like flesh-eating creatures. Since Neville also happens to be a scientist trying to develop a cure to the disease, Sam tries to help out in any way she can there too. What else are friends for? These two are so close you can almost tell what each of them is thinking based on the other’s reaction to their counterpart. Sam is unquestionably the embodiment of the term “man’s best friend.”

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6. SKIP from MY DOG SKIP

This film may be one of the finest portrayals of a dog’s relationship with his human. Skip has his work cut out for him when he has to guide nine-year-old Willie (Frankie Muniz) through adolescence and then his teen years. But Willie proves to be a fairly smart kid and quickly catches on to everything that Skip is trying to teach him. Plus, he drives a car a helluva lot better than any other dog has before or since (just check out the photo above if you don’t believe us).

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5. MARLEY from MARLEY & ME

Marley is a rambunctious, uncontrollable Yellow Labrador retriever owned by John Grogan and his family. Simultaneously adorable and maddeningly untrainable, Marley rarely does as he’s told and more often that not wreaks havoc wherever he goes. But, since Marley is bestowed with a heart of gold and his actions seem to be performed without malice, his transgressions are overlooked and he is forgiven all of his sins. He’s the best example of the cute dog that doesn’t go too far. **********

4. HOOCH from TURNER & HOOCH

While other police dogs may be clean-cut and subscribe to a by-the-book approach to their crime-fighting duties as if they just graduated top-of-the-class from the Academy, Hooch puts on no such airs. He is the stereotypical grizzled veteran movie cop. While he may not have chosen the job (the job did, in fact, choose him when his master was murdered). He eventually works well with his partner (Tom Hanks doing what he does better than anyone else – making people laugh) after a few harrowing episodes and even grows to love him. If you’re planning on busting some low-life criminal you couldn’t do any better than having a partner like Hooch at your side (just have plenty of towels on hand to wipe up the drool).

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3. OLD YELLER

Old Yeller’s story is easily the biggest tear-jerker that you’ll find on this list. Reluctantly taken in by the Coates family as a stray, Yeller eventually wins them over by performing one heroic deed after another. However, while saving 15-year-old Travis’s life, Yeller is bitten by a rabid wolf and must be put down, ultimately giving his life to protect his adopted family. Of Yeller, we can say only this, of all of the souls written about here, his was the most human.

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2. LASSIE

Widely considered one of the greatest dogs in entertainment history, Lassie made her first film, Lassie, Come Home in 1943 and there’s been no stopping her since. Through countless incarnations the ferociously loyal collie is frequently found helping her owners get out of trouble or traveling cross country to reunite with them after they’ve somehow gotten lost. With yet another version made as recently as 2005, there is no reason to believe that she won’t continue her adventures well into the future.

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1. RIN TIN TIN

Rin Tin Tin is undeniably the bravest and most courageous of all cinematic canines. Well, at least he was afforded the chance to show off his bravery far more often than any other dog was ever given. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve the accolades though. Blessed with an intelligence well above that of the average dog (and most of the above average animals on this list for that matter), Rin Tin Tin routinely rescued scared or lost humans who happened to find themselves in trouble all without demanding any recognition. If that’s not the definition of a hero then there’s something wrong with the dictionary. Along with Lassie, Rin Tin Tin is the only other member of this list to be honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

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Other canine stars we love (or at least those we felt we should acknowledge):

Benji from Benji – Missed the main list for the petty reason that the Hound thinks Benji is a little too adorable for his own good. He’s the Meg Ryan of the canine set for cryin’ out loud and there’s only so much “Oh look at cute little Benji doing something adorable and being all cute and saving the day and stuff.” Yes, the Hound is bitter but it’s his web site and he can write whatever he wants.Toto from The Wizard of Oz – Would have been made it to the top ten but we feel he just never lived up to his potential after that first film. He could have gone so far but squandered it all. After all, are there any other dogs on this list who can say that they helped kill a witch?Bud from Air Bud – His first film was charming but the series quickly became tedious (like the Ernest movies) and unbearably cutesy (especially after Bud became a three-sport athlete – even Bo Jackson knew to stop at two sports).The Beast from The Sandlot – Hercules, as he’s called to his friends, is the stereotypical misunderstood dog on the other side of the fence who everyone thinks is a blood-thirsty monster but is really a big softy who wants to play catch.The Sheepdog from The Shaggy Dog – One of the screen’s first flat-out brilliantly comedic dogs and one of VideoHound’s guilty pleasures. Baxter from Baxter – “Beware of the dog who thinks” reads the tagline for this wonderfully macabre and often humorous tale of an introspective bull terrier as he bounces from master to master pondering the meaning of existence. While Baxter is not the perfect pooch, he may be the most spot on portrayal of humanity found on this list. **********

What do you think? Did we forget your favorite pooch? Beethoven? That little talking dog from "Men in Black"?

Sign up for a MyVideoHound account today, post a comment, and let us know what YOU think.

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MovieRetriever's 100 Greatest Movies: #26 Ugetsu Monogatari

Ugetsu monogatari was not the first Kenji Mizoguchi film to be shown in the West, but it was the first to reveal him to the West as a major artist. Swiftly establishing itself (especially in France) on many critics' "Ten Best" lists, the film opened the way for the acclamation of the work of Mizoguchi's final period. For some, he became the supreme filmmaker, the cinematic Shakespeare, realizing to the fullest the potential of film as an art form. That was at the time when the "potential of film" was generally felt to have been identified and adequately expounded by Andre Bazin; and assessment which can still be accepted if we add the proviso that Bazin accounted for only one of film's many potentials.

However, the supremacy of his "late" period and the kind of achievement that it represents, has been increasingly challenged since the 1960s. Two factors help account for this: one is the discovery of Mizoguchi's earlier films, previously almost unknown; the other is the politicization of film criticism and the growth, within it, of an ideological awareness. In recent years, Noel Burch's To the Distant Observer, Joan Mellen's The Waves at Genji's Door, and Frieda Frieberg's useful pamphlet Women in Mizoguchi's Films – three books written from quite distinct critical positions, with quite distinct estimates of Mizoguchi's work – have agreed on one point, the application (in a derogatory sense) of the term "aestheticism" to Mizoguchi's late work. Films previously hailed as the greatest ever made – Ugetsu, Sansho dayu, The Life of Oharu – are suddenly perceived as evidence of Mizoguchi's withdrawal from the radicalism of his work in the 1930s and 1940s, and a retreat from a social/political viewpoint into the realm of aesthetic contemplation.

The relationship between aesthetics and politics is incredibly complex: the critical problems it generates have never been successfully resolved. It is true that Ugetsu monogatari is ideologically more conservative than, say, Sisters of Gion or My Love Has Been Burning. The crux lies in the treatment of women. From the radical feminist protest of his earlier films to the celebration of woman as self-sacrificer, redeemer, and mother in Ugetsu is certainly a large and disconcerting jump. (Mizoguchi's conversion to Buddhism in the early 1950s is doubtlessly a related factor.) Further, Ugetsu can be read as advocating the resignation to and the acceptance of one's lot. This withdrawal from the active struggle in favor of a spiritual transcendence makes the hardships of the material world not so much endurable as irrelevant. The film encourages such a reading, yet cannot be reduced to it.

Ugetsu contains within itself an answer to the charge of aestheticism. The story of Genjuro the potter can be taken as Mizoguchi's artistic testament. At the beginning of the film Genjuro is a materialistic artisan, mass-producing pots as a commodity. His encounter with the Lady Wakasa introduces him to the world of the aesthetic. She shows him fragile and exquisite vessels that she presents, and he accepts, as his creations, but that are totally unlike the crude, functional wares we have seen him almost brutally shape earlier. The complexity of response that this whole central segment evokes is sufficient in itself to call into question the reduction of the film to a single clear-cut statement. The Lady Wakasa is both evil spirit and a pathetic, victimized woman; the world of the aesthetic (which is also the world of the erotic) has a fascination and authentic beauty that make it far from easily dismissible. That alluring world, however, has three negative connotations. First, it is presented as a possible option only if one turns one's back on reality. It is a world of fantasy and illusion where the suffering of human beings in a material world of oppression, cruelty, greed, and human exploitation cannot be permitted to intrude. (One of the most expressive cuts in the history of the cinema is that from the exquisite scene of love-making on the cultivated lawn beside the lake to Miyagi, fearfully peering out from her hiding-place, a woman vulnerable to attack from all sides of a society created by men.) Second, Wakasa herself is not presented as an autonomous character, even in her appreciation of beauty. Everything she knows, her father had taught her. Her father (long since dead) appears in the film as a hideous, emaciated skull-like mask speaking in a disturbingly strange subterranean voice. The aesthetic, whatever else it may be, is clearly defined as a patriarchal imposition: "taste" is what women are taught by men. Finally, the father is linked to war, domnation, and imperialism. Wakasa's father had the misfortune to lose, and have his clan exterminated, but the film makes clear that he would have inflicted precisely the same fate on his enemies, had the outcome been reversed.

The overall effect of the film is to suggest, not that the aesthetic is invalid in itself, but that it cannot validly exist in this world. (The film's contemporary relevance is by no means compromised by its setting in the sixteenth century.) The pot Genjuro is making at the end of the film, under Miyagi's spiritual supervision, is significantly different from the two previous kinds of work: it is made with loving care, but also the product of experience; it is a work of art yet made to be used by Genjuro's peers rather than admired by a cultivated elite. The great beauty of the film is of an order altogether different from the aestheticism of the Wakasa world. Mizoguchi never aestheticizes pain and suffering (in the manner of, say, David Lean in Dr. Zhivago). The extraordinary sequence-shot showing the mortal wounding of Miyagi is a case in point: the aesthetic strategies (long take, distance, complex camera movement, depth of field showing simultaneous actions in foreground and background) serve to sustain the characteristic Mizoguchian tension between involvement and contemplation, but do not in any way mitigate the horror of the scene.

If on one level Ugetsu tends to reinforce traditional myths of woman, on another it remains true to the radical spirit of Mizoguchi's earlier Marxist-feminist principles. The actions of both Genjuro and Tobei are motivated by the values forced upon them by patriarchal capitalism. They both seek success (Genjuro through the acquisition of wealth, Tobei through the prestige of becoming a Samurai) in order to impress their wives, neither of whom shows the smallest interest in such ambitions. The film is a systematic critique of the kind of male egoism (expressing itself in greed and violence and the destruction of human relationships, always at the expense of women) that a patriarchal capitalist civilization promotes.

Release Date: 1953
Rating: Unrated

Starring: Machiko Kyo, Kinuyo Tanaka, Mitsuki Mito, Masayuki Mori, Sakae Ozawa, Sugisaku Aoyama, Kikue Nori, Mitsusaburo Ramon, Ryosuke Kagawa, Kichijiro Tsuchida, Syozo Nanbu, and Ichiisaburo Sawamura
Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Writer: Matsutaro Kawaguchi

Source Citation: Wood, Robin. "Ugetsu Monogatari." International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers. Ed. Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast. 4th ed. Vol. 1: Films. Detroit: St. James Press, 2000. 1254-1256.

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MovieRetriever's 100 Greatest Movies: #86 The Gold Rush

The Gold Rush was Charlie Chaplin's favorite among his own films, so much a favorite that he deliberately did not copyright it, allowing it to pass into the public domain as a gift to his future public. As a result, the film has been seen more frequently than any other Chaplin feature, especially between 1952 and 1972, the two decades of Chaplin's disenchantment with America, when he withdrew all his other feature films from public circulation. Inspired by stories of the Donner Party, trapped in a desert of ice, and perhaps by the icy landscapes of Robert Flaherty's popular documentary feature, Nanook of the North, Chaplin took his Tramp character to the frozen gold fields where human beings endure great hardships so that they might strike it rich. As usual in a Chaplin film, the Tramp is very much an outsider in the world of The Gold Rush, even in this society of outsiders and outcasts. The Tramp is too kind, too sensitive to human needs, and too spiritual for that isolated, materialistic world. The Tramp's kindness in befriending Georgia, an abused dance-hall girl, contrasts with other human actions in the film – with those of Jack, Georgia's handsome boyfriend who treats her as his sex object; or with those of Black Larsen, a man so hungry for gold that he robs and kills others.

Despite the serious moral issues which the film raises in its contrast of material and spiritual human pursuits, its popularity derives from the power of its comedy sequences. In one of the most famous of Chaplin's transpositions of objects – his conversion of one kind of physical object into another – the Tramp cooks a dinner for himself and his starving friend, Big Jim McKay. Lacking anything else to eat, the Tramp sacrifices one of his own symbols, his floppy shoe, which he boils carefully in a pot, testing it with a fork for tenderness. He then carves it like a roast beef, twirls the shoestrings around his fork like spaghetti and sucks on the nails like chicken bones. In a later sequence, lacking even a shoe to eat, Charlie converts himself into a mammoth chicken – or so Big Jim imagines. The contrast of Charlie's chickenish actions with the cannibalistic dreams of his sometime friend reveals the typical Chaplin method of making comedy out of the most basic and elemental human needs – love, shelter, hunger.

Balancing the comedic scenes is one of the most effective and powerful sequences of pathos and poignancy in the entire Chaplin canon. Charlie has invited Georgia, whose picture he preserves under his pillow next to a rose, and several of her friends at the dance hall to supper on New Year's Eve. They, making fun of the pathetic little Tramp, have teasingly promised to attend the supper. As he waits for them, Charlie falls asleep and dreams of the delightful dinner that will never be. He entertains the girls by sticking two rolls on the ends of two forks and using them to dance the "Oceana Roll." The sight of Charlie's playful face, coyly peering over the tops of these two tiny, dancing legs is one of the most memorable single images in Chaplin's work. But Charlie awakens to find that his social success has only been a dream – like his many dreams of love and success in earlier films. The pathos of his loneliness is emphasized by the communal society of revelers singing "Auld Lang Syne," while Charlie, shown isolated within the frame, stands outside the circle of their friendship and observes.

However, almost miraculously, the Tramp eventually finds both love and wealth in this film. Charlie, now rich from his gold strike, discovers Georgia on board the same ship on which he is travelling home. She has had enough of the frozen wasteland (Chaplin typically uses the hired dance-hall girl as a metaphor for prostitution, the conversion of female sexuality into a commodity to be bought and sold). Georgia reveals her kindness when she protects Charlie from the ship's captain, believing him to be a stowaway. And Charlie, in turn, returns the girl's kindness by embracing her, now that he can offer her money as well as love. In what seems Chaplin's own conscious comment on the film's happy ending, a group of shipboard photographers, taking pictures of the former Tramp now a millionaire, criticize a photograph of the Tramp's kissing Georgia: "You've spoiled the picture." Chaplin seemed to have been anticipating the film's critics whom he expected to attack this last scene.

The issue that the ending raises is whether the Tramp can ever find happiness with a romantic-sexual mate. Must the Tramp, as outcast and outsider, also be disqualified from the consummation of love, which in our society is formalized by marriage? The previous Chaplin films to end with a happy, affirmative answer to this question (The Vagabond, A Dog's Life, The Kid) also suggest something dreamlike and impossible about such a solution. This dreamlike suggestion about the Tramp's attainment of marital happiness becomes explicit in films like The Bank or Shoulder Arms, in which his attainment of the lady of his dreams literally turns out to be a dream. His next three films, The Circus, City Lights, and Modern Times, will return to the marriage theme with far more ambiguity and uncertainty. The Gold Rush, which lies at the crossroads of Chaplin's lighter early work and his more mature and darker features, is probably his most successful film at producing a completely happy ending without "spoiling the picture."

Essay by Gerald Mast

Release Date: 1925
Rating: Unrated

Starring: Charles Chaplin, Mack Swain, Tom Murray, Georgia Hale, Betty Morissey, Malcolm White, Henry Bergman, John Rand, Albert Austin, Heine Conklin, Allan Garcia, and Tom Wood
Director: Charles Chaplin
Writer: Charles Chaplin

Source Citation: Mast, Gerald. "The Gold Rush." International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers. Ed. Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast. 4th ed. Vol. 1: Films. Detroit: St. James Press, 2000. 469-472.

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MovieRetriever's 100 Greatest Movies: #22 Psycho

There are those for whom Alfred Hitchcock is a "master of suspense" the premier technician of the classical narrative cinema; there are those for whom Hitchcock's mastery of film technique, of "pure cinema" as he liked to call it, amount to a species of pandering, or even of an audience-directed cruelty; there are others for whom Hitchcock's fables of emotions trapped and betrayed are seen as self-reflexive, enticing the viewer to participate in the drama of suspense only to call that participation into moral question; and, finally, there are those who find in Hitchcock's films submerged allegories of grace, of mistakes acknowledged, redeemed, and transcended. Despite such general differences of opinion, however, it is commonly agreed among Hitchcock scholars that Psycho raised the issue of Hitchcock's artistic status and intentions (or lack thereof) in its purest form, as if it were his most essential, most essentially Hitchcockian, film.

Indeed, the shower murder sequence in Psycho – wherein Janet Leigh's almost confessional cleansing is cut short by the knife wielding "Mrs. Bates" – is frequently cited as a textbook instance of cinematic suspense and formal (montage) perfection. Moreover, it is this murder of the film's ostensible heroine, roughly a third of the way through the narrative, that most critics focus on when discussing the significance of the entire film, as if it were the film writ small, as if the film were itself an act of murder that we are commanded, via Hitchcock's expert use of subjective camera, to take part and pleasure in.

Two kinds of evidence are typically invoked to support such a reading of Psycho and of Hitchcock generally. One of these is Hitchcock's lifelong commitment to popular cinematic genres, mainly the thriller. The underlying premise here is that Hitchcock had ample opportunity to break out of the thriller format, to become an "artist" in the way that Fellini and Antonioni are (it is often pointed out that Psycho and L'avventura were released within a year of each other), so that his apparent decision not to do so can be read as a matter either of obsession (as if he feared to) or satisfaction (as if he aspired no higher). And underlying this premise is the conviction that popular genres, of their very nature, are inimical to serious art, are too much the product of popular tastes and box-office calculation to allow for humane insights or serious artistic self-expression – hence O. B. Hardison's argument that Hitchcock is less an artist than a "rhetorician."

A second sort of evidence is also cited to support the claim that neither Hitchcock nor Psycho need be taken seriously – his comments to interviewers, especially regarding his working methods and intentions. Hitchcock's description of Psycho as "a fun picture," one that takes its audience through an emotional process "like taking them through the haunted house at the fairground" (in Movie 6), is a notorious instance of this apparent dissociation between the seriousness of his ostensible subjects (crime, murder, sexuality) and the triviality of Hitchcock's approach. As David Thomson puts it, "Psycho is just the cocky leer of evil genius flaunting tragic material but never brave enough to explore it."

The case against Psycho is grounded in a reading of intention and effect, the charge being that Hitchcock's intentions are mercenary and that the effect of the film is a kind of brutality, directed equally at the film's characters and its audience. The accepted case for the film follows a similar line of reasoning, though to different conclusions. Thus critics like Robin Wood and Leo Braudy would agree that in Psycho Hitchcock "forces the audience … to face the most sinister connotations of our audience role" by playing with, yet disturbing, our normal expectation "that our moral sympathies and our aesthetic sympathies [will] remain fixed throughout the movie." Our desire to "identify" with sympathetic characters is thus called increasingly into question as our "identification" shifts from the reasonably normal Marion Crane to the seemingly normal Norman Bates – who finally becomes "Mrs. Bates" in an epiphany of confused identity. Indeed, it is this voyeuristic tendency to identify with others, or to identify them as the views we take of them, often without their knowledge, that the film calls into ethical doubt, forcing viewers "to see the dark potentialities within all of us."

Such arguments for and against Psycho are problematic, however, on several counts – not the least of which is the common assumption that the film, of its very essence, is "naturally voyeuristic." Is it more or less voyeuristic than still photography, or painting, or sight generally? Also a problem is the clear implication in both arguments that audience response is so thoroughly under Hitchcock's control that "the spectator becomes the chief protagonist." Upon what grounds can we claim to know how all members of a given audience, much less all members of all possible audiences, will respond to a particular film? Furthermore, what warrants our generalizing from predicted audience response to authorial intention? And of what relevance is intention to our evaluation of Psycho in any event? Much discussion of Psycho assumes that our decision to take Psycho seriously as a work of art depends upon our reading of Hitchcock's intentions regarding it; but one can more reasonably argue that the very decision to treat the film as an aesthetic object renders intention irrelevant. As Stanley Cavell puts it, all that matters for our experience of any film is "in front of your eyes."

A final reason for doubting the wisdom of the accepted approaches to Psycho is the focus they place on individual psychology, of the characters, of the viewer, at the expense of other facts of the text. One such fact, often read as an Hitchcockian irrelevancy (a "MacGuffin"), is money – as personified by the oil-rich Mr. Cassidy and as an implicit factor in the attitudes and actions of nearly every major character. It is Sam's lack of money that prompts Marion in the first place to steal Cassidy's $40,000. Sam and Lila assume that money is behind Norman's silence regarding Marion (Norman himself hints that money played a part in the relationship of his widowed mother to her lover); the Sheriff assumes that money is behind Arbogast's disappearance. Indeed, Psycho can be read as a meditation on money and its effects – negative effects as far as the film's characters are concerned, but also positive effects in regard to the audience, or at least in regard to those members of the audience who take Psycho seriously as a warning of the deadly effects that money can have. It is in such terms that the audience can become an implicit "character" in the film – the character who does benefit from the past mistakes and who is therefore capable of transcending them.

Release Date: 1960
Rating: R

Starring: Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, John Gavin, Martin Balsam, John McIntyre, Lurene Tuttle, Simon Oakland, Frank Albertson, Pat Hitchcock, Vaughn Taylor, John Anderson, Mort Mills, Sam Flint, Francis De Sales, George Eldredge, and Alfred Hitchcock
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writer: Joseph Stefano

Source Citation: Poague, Leland. "Psycho." International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers. Ed. Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast. 4th ed. Vol. 1: Films. Detroit: St. James Press, 2000. 974-977.

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MovieRetriever's 100 Greatest Movies: #82 The Silence of the Lambs

The Silence of the Lambs is the most authentically terrifying movie since Psycho, and it is appropriate that Hannibal Lecter (as incarnated in the superb performance of Anthony Hopkins) should have established a position within our culture's popular mythology comparable to that of Anthony Perkins' Norman Bates three decades earlier. By "authentically" I mean that the terror the film induces is not merely a matter of contrived "shock" moments (though, as in Psycho, those are not lacking). The film brings us into intimate and disturbing contact with the darkest potentialities of the human psyche and, by locating the existence of the serial killer within a context of "normality," connects it to those manifestations of what one might call the "normal psychosis" of the human race which we read about daily in our newspapers: the practice of "ethnic cleansing," the protracted torture and eventual murder of a teenager by "peacemakers" in Somalia, the horrors of child abuse (sexual, physical, psychological) that are the product of our concept of "family" and the guarantee of their own continuance into future generations.

The humanity of Hannibal Lecter is clearly a central issue: if we see Lecter as only a monster, quite distinct from ourselves, then the film fails, becomes "just another horror movie"; as Jodie Foster says of Lecter in the laser disc commentary, "he just wants to be accepted as a human being." Therefore the filmmakers' problem lies in persuading us to do just that without ever becoming complicit in his obsessions (killing and eating other human beings): a difficult and dangerous tightrope to walk. It is their degree of success that distinguishes the film from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, in which the fascination exerted by the monstrous cannibal family is not countered by any adequate positive force, the undercharacterized victims mere objects for torment, the film (for all its undeniable power) degenerating into an exercise in sadism.

The success is not complete: it seems to me that Jonathan Demme made two unfortunate errors of judgment. The first is the excision of a crucial sequence that was shot and is included in the supplement to the Criterion laser disc. This sequence includes Lecter's "psychological profile" of the serial killer, accompanied by evocative tracking-shots around Jamie Gumm's living quarters, in which he explains to Clarice Starling that a serial killer was a severely abused child (a theory for which there is a great deal of factual support), and that Gumm grew up with no sense of identity whatever, so that his attempts to construct one are unreal fabrications. The scene would have partly answered the widespread complaint that Gumm is presented as gay, reinforcing a malicious popular stereotype; it would also have linked the phenomenon of the serial killer to familial practices we now know to be all too common. I find the decision to suppress it inexplicable.

The second error (for which the screenwriter Ted Tally must share responsibility) is the film's famous last line, Lecter's "I'm having an old friend for dinner." Ironically, Tally complains at length (in the commentary on the laser disc's alternative audio track) about the appropriation of Lecter for "camp" purposes, that so many young people find him smart and seductive and even collect Lecter memorabilia: that last line precisely invites such a response, especially in view of the fact that Lecter's imminent victim Dr. Chilton/Anthony Heald is presented throughout as irredeemably despicable, enabling the audience to view his fate with equanimity and even satisfaction. The punch line is slick and funny: one can readily understand the temptation, but it is one that should have been resisted.

The film's distinction lies ultimately in its powerful and convincing embodiment of the force for life, in the character of Clarice Starling, Jodie Foster's performance matching that of Hopkins in its strength and vividness. There is another documented fact about serial killers too obvious for the film to have to state explicitly (it is enacted clearly enough): virtually all serial killers are male. Like the issue of child abuse, this reinforces the need to see the phenomenon not in terms of individual and inexplicable "monsters" but as intimately involved in the so-called "normal" actualities of the culture: the issue of gender-as-social-construction, of the cultural production of "masculinity" in terms of aggression and domination. The achievement of Demme and Foster is to create Starling both as a clearly defined and convincing character and as the embodiment of an ideal: the human being in whom the finest qualities traditionally associated with "masculinity" and "femininity" coexist in perfect balance. The film's title derives from Starling's definitive childhood memory: the young girl's unsuccessful attempt to save one lamb from those waiting to be slaughtered, whose frantic bleating distressed her. The "silence" of the lambs is brought about only by her rescue of Gumm's latest female victim, a feat of heroism requiring a fusion of "masculine" activeness, energy, reasoning and determination with the capacity for identification with the "feminine" vulnerability, sensitivity, empathy with the oppressed. If we recognize Lecter and Gumm as 'human beings' produced by the worst excesses of patriarchal culture, we simultaneously recognize Clarice as the fully human being of a possible future.

Essay by Robin Wood

Release Date: 1991
Rating: R

Starring: Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn, Ted Levine, Anthony Heald, and Brooke Smith
Director: Jonathan Demme
Writer: Ted Tally

Source Citation: Wood, Robin. "The Silence of the Lambs." International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers. Ed. Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast. 4th ed. Vol. 1: Films. Detroit: St. James Press, 2000. 1106-1108.

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понеделник, 4 април 2011 г.

MovieRetriever's 100 Greatest Movies: #23 Rio Bravo

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January 26, 2011MovieRetriever's 100 Greatest Movies: #23 Rio BravoPosted by Turk182 in 100 Greatest Movies

Rio Bravo is one of the supreme achievements (hence justifications) of "classical Hollywood," that complex network of determinants that includes the star system, the studio system, the system of genres and conventions, a highly developed grammar and syntax of shooting and editing, the interaction of which made possible an art at once personal and collaborative, one nourished by a rich and vital tradition: it is an art that belongs now to the past; the period of Rio Bravo was its last flowering.

The film at once is one of the greatest westerns and the most complete statements of the themes of director Howard Hawks. One can distinguish two main currents within the western genre, the "historical" and the "conventional": the western that is concerned with the American past (albeit with its mythology as much as its reality), and the western that plays with and develops a set of conventions, archetypes, "stock" figures. Ford's westerns are the finest examples of the former impulse, and in the westerns of Anthony Mann (for example, Man of the West) the two achieve perfect fusion. Rio Bravo is among the purest of all "conventional" westerns. Here, history and the American past are of no concern, a point amply demonstrated by the fact that the film is a virtual remake (in its thematic pattern, its characters and character relationships, even down to sketches of dialogue) of Hawks's earlier Only Angels Have Wings (set in the Andes mountains) and To Have and Have Not (set on Martinique). Hawks's stylized and anonymous western town is not a microcosm of American civilization at a certain point in its development but an abstract setting within which his recurrent concerns and relationships can be played out. All the characters are on one level "western" archetypes: the infallible sheriff, the fallible friend, the "travelling lady," the garrulous sidekick, the comic Mexican, the evil land-baron. On another level, however, they are Hawksian archetypes: the overlay makes possible the richness of characterization, the detail of the acting, so that here the archetypes (western and Hawksian) achieve their ultimate elaboration. With this goes the remarkable and varied use Hawks makes of actors' personas: Martin, Dickinson, and Brennan have never surpassed (perhaps never equalled) their performances here, and the use of Wayne is extremely subtle and idiosyncratic, at once drawing on his "heroic" status and satirizing its limitations.

The film represents Hawks's most successful transcendence of the chief "binary opposition" of his work, its division into adventure films and comedies. Here the thematic concerns of the action pictures – self-respect, personal integrity, loyalty, stoicism, the interplay of mutual respect and affection – combines with the sexual tensions of the comedies (Wayne's vulnerability to women permitting a fuller development of this than is possible with, for example, Bogart in To Have and Have Not). The ambiguous relationship of Hawks's work to dominant American ideological assumptions (on the one hand the endorsement of individualism and personal initiative, on the other the rejection of established society in favour of the "primitive" male group, the total lack of interest in such central American ideals as marriage, home and family) permeates the whole film. The "gay subtext" that many critics have sensed in Hawks's films – their tendency to become (in his own words) "love stories between men" – surfaces quite clearly in the Dean Martin-Ricky Nelson relationship, though it is never allowed expression beyond the exchange of looks and is swiftly "contained" within the group (a progression beautifully enacted in the famous song-sequence). Within a system necessarily committed, at least on surface level, to reinforcing the status quo, Hawks's cinema continuously suggests the possibility of alternative forms of social and sexual organization.

Essay by Robin Wood

Release Date: 1959
Rating: Unrated

Starring: John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, Angie Dickinson, Walter Brennan, Ward Bond, John Russell, Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez, Estelita Rodriguez, Claude Akins, Malcolm Atterbury, Harry Carey, Jr., Bob Steele, Myron Healey, Fred Graham, Tom Monroe, and Riley Hill
Director: Howard Hawks
Writers: Jules Furthman and Leigh Bracket

Source Citation: Wood, Robin. "Rio Bravo." International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers. Ed. Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast. 4th ed. Vol. 1: Films. Detroit: St. James Press, 2000. 1024-1026.

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Posted by Turk182 in 100 Greatest Movies - January 26, 2011 at 10:01 AM

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