The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions (Decade Project Vol. 4)

[therewillbeblus]

You’re right I totally meant “validating the ‘experience’ of suppression” and internally looked at it like a PEMDAS order-of-operations math problem (perhaps a strange analogy) where “suppression of self-actualization” was an idea in my head in parentheses, and Sirk was validating the idea being that of that oppressed, hushed experience. I get why that read differently, so my bad - and no worries at all, it was fun to be appropriately pushed into reflecting on a film I was not able to do independently without the prompt, and it’s what this discussion forum is literally all about, so thanks - I feel like these friendly challenges don’t happen enough anymore!

Also in polarizing it against my favorite melodrama, Peyton Place (which we also had an involving conversation about) I only came out appreciating each film more for what they respectively do so differently with approaches to melodrama, so it was all worth it for selfish reasons too

[therewillbeblus]

In a Lonely Place

My admiration for this film far outweighs my enjoyment watching it. I actually think it’s a great film, but its position on noir lists has always puzzled me because it doesn’t function along the philosophical beats I love about the genre. This film is all psychological without ever venturing into the mind of the ambiguous beast, completely detached and observant while he remains the main character. It’s bizarre storytelling, drawing us into Bogart’s camp and repetitively shoving us back with red flags and erratic, unpredictable behavior. The point of view winds up shifting to the object of desire from the first half, Gloria Grahame, who transfers her role from elusive mystery to the only familiarly human character we can latch onto by the end. Still, her own internal logic of attraction is hardly decipherable, and we rely on cryptic behavioral idiosyncrasies that manifest as dense flirts to interpret the relationship dynamic and what each sees in the other.

Bogart’s performance is daring as he uses his own hardened demeanor and emotional composure that always feels at a deceptively calm boiling point as tools to create a thick animalistic mystery of a person, who manages to be unknowable and yet overflowing with emotions we are familiar with: anger, jealousy, possessiveness, fear, witty provocation, sensitivity, and loneliness, just all to extreme degrees and following puzzling anti-logic that distances us from him as soon as we are drawn in.

The film is a work of genius because of how it plays with expectations and forces a psychological exercise of confusion on the part of the audience and then pits the characters against each other based on our established conflicting dynamics with them, only after aligning us to each separately while leaving the other indecipherable in the shadows. The narrative and surrogate jumbling mimics the characters’ own relationship, and watching Ray compose this dance in a noirish vibe without the classical noir components is like watching a completely unique film about familiar concepts, strung together in a pattern never done before or since quite the same way. But it’ll leave you with a sore gut after the turmoil of the experience, and even by the final frames we’re still coming to terms with the implications of distrust inherent in social engagement.. how even when you love someone they remain objectively unknowable to some degree in our innate blind spots of subjectivity.


Anatomy of a Murder

Maybe I'm forgetting some masterpiece out there, but Preminger’s courtroom drama is probably my favorite of the subgenre. Stewart’s ‘Everyman’ recontextualizes his empathic innocence into looseness in ethically flexible, provocative individualism, and I love how he’s able to keep his gentleman-qualities and morality while sprawling out in experimental behaviorist tourism that feels like one his most authentic characters. The introductions of each character are so well-written into the detailed atmosphere I find this to be one of the more involving first acts in cinema, exacerbated by Preminger’s tact for patience, pacing, and balancing the perversity and tempered approaches to heady material.

The philosophy within the narrative is interesting, and it helps that we know the basic facts right out of the gate to enjoy the ride, because regardless there is compulsively compelling excitement around the intricate facets of the trial- though it’s the lived-in world and people built and breathing here that sell me time and time again. Lee Remick steals scenes as the unreadable sultry wife, but O'Connell embodies the alcoholic co-worker with a realism that exists between the worlds of cinema and documentary. He is exhibit A of Preminger’s restrained objectivity that manages to pierce the threshold of a character’s psychology in movement and framing just enough to tell us all we need to know without holding our hands.

The jazz score livens up the subject matter, as does the repetition of incongruities, most obviously in Remick’s flirtatious attitude not matching her claims of her husband having no reason to be jealous, but also the picking at ambiguity in statements of perspective in cross-examination- my favorite thematic exposition in ping-ponging tense grey composites applied to seemingly clear-cut space of facts in the house of law and order. This all adds to Preminger’s own impartial formalism reflecting his apparent worldview of compounding perspectives that shatter truth in belief. He’s one of the few filmmakers to make relativist stances so smooth and light in vibe, yet not sugarcoating the brash seriousness of the story.

The tone is neutral yet spirited, and how Preminger makes a film about a trial for rape so consistently enjoyable feels like an oxymoron, but he’s expertly skilled at eliciting piercing energy with calm hues that, like every time I try to talk about his style, I’m left speechless. He lets the fact that the case is being manipulated through some non-verbally communicated witness coaching slide right by any opportunity to stew in judgment, and even cracks a joke in the courtroom about the groundbreaking lewd content discussed in his film. Come to think of it - his filmmaking is a lot like this trial. Deceptively straightforward, with the magic in the process. After seeing this as many times as I have, I still don’t know what to think or feel about the ‘truth’ of the findings, and yet that mystique could not be more honest. O'Connell’s “12 different minds, 12 different hearts” speech about juries only drives home the verity of individualized context, completely in step with my own musings on the topic. This is a lock for my list.


Lola Montès

A declaration of truth, and nothing but the truth, in history by a showman immediately signals a paradox that mutes perspective, so we must find it in cinema. The nature of spectacle, external clothing superficially declaring an image and persona that signifies connotation to viewers, is familiar to the art form itself, though the history underneath carries with it another power that only cinema can unlock - one’s own memory transmitted into tactile exposure. Dreams are private, they cannot be shared. This is a story of memories, dreams, and reality meshed together and shared with us through the movies as magic.

Lola declares that attractiveness inhibits emotional mindfulness when speaking to her first husband, translating the pattern of escaping from uncomfortable decisions and invisible feelings in the physical aspects of life we can assess with confidence. This is actually a very similar theme to Pickpocket in its existential questioning, but Ophüls uses a different methodology and narrative scaffolding to deliver his thematic intent, on a grander scale to amplify our awareness to the bloated possibilities of life, the medium, and the need for spectacle - to feel it in ourselves, to be it for others, and to simply witness it to feel alive.

“Life is, for me, a movement” - How self-actualized Lola is from day one, in the first few lines of her first translated memory! It’s no coincidence that Martine Carol’s performance is no pageant. She is a blank vessel for our own impenetrable truths, a dense shell of apparent monotony, with excitable qualities buried deep within her that we cannot see. What we are afforded is the chance to enter her memory of her life. Was she actually this self-actualized? Does she want to believe this to promote self-reliance, or does she want to show us just how far she’s fallen from herself - setting herself up to be deprecated, reinforcing the narrative she holds of her life, and fulfilling the spectator’s desire to join with what cannot authentically be shared. Even characters onscreen are out of reach, with Lola’s hand stuck out in isolated air, unreturned as a carriage rides away before she can make contact for a goodbye.

This is the nature of impermanent, fleeting memory - or life as a movement - but film can capture it and immortalize experience just like memory. There is a scene early on where Lola, suffocated by emotional dysregulation, comes up from the busy populated boat cabins into the open air, and we linger on her in that moment in time for what feels like forever. It’s beautiful up there; colorful, vibrant, and we can feel the warm breeze ourselves as the collective reprieve merges with brief admittance of powerlessness.

And this kicks off a narrative about the reduction of agency - of objectification of human beings by other human beings, and prisons of ideas. The specifics of which half-truths are emanated in Lola’s memories or the carnival show are not important, but the very fact that they are only fractions of objectivity is - leaving room for perspective (as Samuel Fuller would say) to fill in the gaps to create the whole truth. This piece of subjectivity is key - Lola’s own perception is her own reality, and so the unraveling of jurisdiction in her own life, as she traverses through the friction of a social world where participation as a female means compromised agency and commodification, is just as ‘real’ as an ‘objective’ account would be.

Lola must prove herself through auditions to have her identity accepted, something she loses patience for and ultimately surrenders to, for better or worse. In one cryptic scene, the sides of the frame close in and flicker like a nervous twitch as she silently presents herself to a king, retreating slowly with her beauty but remaining the doorway so as to be seen, as if incapable of escaping from her own skin which is her cross to bear. Swallowing pride is one path to humility but it can also lead to apathetic concession. Lola’s illegible external canvas allows this fine line to remain a question for any given one of us, as a reminder of how fragile the process of living life on life’s terms can be.

As Lola’s memory bleeds into her reenacting experience on the stage, we feel both implicated in this intrusion and aware of the impossibility in conveying honest experience of another. Ophüls’ own acknowledgment of cinema’s limitations are laid out in front of our eyes, but he still created this stylish narrative to validate the complexities hidden behind the walls we are judged by. Lola, and we, are summarized by visible details that elicit a perception in another, and we are issued penalties for those discriminations.

This happens all the time in our current climate, and we all likely make tens of flash-judgments every day simply by having a moral compass and subjective perspective by which we evaluate our social environments. I don’t think Ophüls is telling us to be careful, I think he is telling us that whatever we think we know is not the whole truth - and hopefully that realization can lead to increased care for others and humility in ourselves. I’m generally hot and cold on Ophüls, but this is my favorite and a likely list-contender.


The Man From Laramie

Up there for my favorite of the Mann/Stewart Westerns, this feels far more narratively vast in scope, and unlike the other favorites is cemented in an ingrained milieu of ‘order’ rather than in the shadowy spaces of rugged disorder. The opening signals the mystification of death as Stewart muses on the remnants of what appears to be a massacre, and the camera's slow pans and Stewart's grasping onto physical relics of charred history sends a clear message about the transient and harsh unpredictability of life in the west.

Stewart states that his idea of home is where he is at any given moment, an existentialist mantra on the resilience of migration and meaning in presence. He is a moral man who is aware of his lack of grand importance and who nonetheless lives by empowerment to standing up to what is right. Charlie’s early declaration of passion to Stewart on the admission of his loneliness and friendship - or more importantly finding another human being with a similar moral compass as priceless - is heartening and true, and directly contradicts Alec’s own perspective on ‘like vs. love’ based on blood and not trust or values. Mann's cynicism regarding human nature yields affection and camaraderie to be earned and consequential from moral behavior, rather than innately deserved, for the 'innate' nature isn't anything to be proud of.

Stewart’s behavior may be coherent and predictable on the outside, but if we look closely his intentions have layers of psychological ambivalence that disrupts a purity in persona. James Stewart’s own intuitive kindness draws complex shades here beyond a simple ethical interpretation, where the morality he flaunts has a depth of imperfection where the superego that drives him meshes with his ego, and his strong convictions are revealed as rooted in emotional fallibility that inherently comes at a price. Stewart’s resurgence to attack on moral grounds makes his own trouble, and when he pays for it brutally, Mann slyly gestures that it’s partly his own fault. Principle may be important but it is illogical and based in a selfish revenge, even if masked as utilitarian and justified philosophies.

The Shakespearean aspects to the plot may bother some, especially those who return to Mann’s westerns for the concentrated psychological chaos born from philosophical relativity in overwhelmingly infinite territory of disorder. But even when beached in a setting with borders, law and expected consequences are mirages that are superseded by the emotional ferocity of human nature. Mann’s own philosophy on the west as a funnel for humanity cannot even be contained in the few spaces that should, by all accounts (even Thomas Hobbes(!) on whose sociopolitical ideas Mann seems to base his own) be able to suppress selfishly-driven nature from boiling up so frequently. Sure, it’s expected in a western community and even a society in bouts, but here nearly every character on screen has their moment of defying the weak holds on discipline. Even dreams, enigmatic emotionally-charged experiences, are irrationally trusted as primary guiding maps for behavior- that’s how insecure even the most powerful men are in their societies, revealed here as myths of stability.

Mann appears to argue that Stewart’s ego-dominant personality is better than the id-infections of other characters who operate on fear, anger, and power more than their own self-importance, but of course they all exhibit attitudes and actions with murky mixes of these sources. And so we are led to a similar revelation as in Man of the West, perhaps a luck of the draw in conditioning that has led some men to turn out ‘better’ than others, for which they become heroes- but only relatively speaking. Even the 'man in his dreams' who becomes our 'villain' is himself a relatively moral individual who has remorse, has killed only in self-defense or by mistake, and lied by omission out of understandable fight/flight fear. That blurry line of labels and the discernment of responsibility compared to accountability, all within a false imitation of your typical constructed Shakespeare narrative, says so much on its own. He only consumes the weight of all the guilt in the end because his partner dies, and the tidy ending allows Stewart to place him in a box as responsible-by-proxy for more than what we knew, but Mann makes clear that there are no simple answers when summarizing man's relationship to their own conflicting doctrines.

[knives]

Since you so rightly loved the Preminger you have to see Advise and Consent next decade. I think it's his masterpiece and helps contrast his step as a giant of producing the way a contrast between Rear Window and North by Northwest would work.

[therewillbeblus]

I’ve seen it, and most Preminger for that matter, though it’s been a while and he’s a director I usually return to more often so it’s due a rewatch. While I’ve seen Anatomy of a Murder many times over the years I’ve only seen that one once, and funny enough I confused it with Witness for the Prosecution for so long due to Laughton and a hazy memory that when I revisited the Wilder a few years back the letdown was excruciating, and may contribute to why I still don’t like it as much as most.

[Rayon Vert]

Yeah Anatomy of a Murder will be very high on my list - I wrote about it in another list project, I forget which. Also greatly esteem Advise and Consent, looking forward to revisit that eventually. I also love Exodus so this period of Preminger's is my favorite.

[knives]

Two list topics for the price of one, but I think that would be a let down for most anyone especially nowadays when how to process a film like the Preminger is so easy. I remember when I was going through Wilder very early in my cinephilia Witness being the first example for me that the maker of great movies doesn't always make great movies. I was very disappointed it was only okay.

[domino harvey]

As much as I love Law and Order with a passion, courtroom drama isn't much of a film genre in terms of returns on investment for me. I mean, sure, Trial and Inherit the Wind come to mind, but their greatness is not found in the mechanics of the trial. I can sure think of a lot of bad ones, though, including some recent Criterion stinkers

[therewillbeblus]

Yeah it's not really some grand statement to name the Preminger as the best for me for that reason.

[Rayon Vert]

Back to revisits here for me, possibly from here on out.


Les Enfants terribles (Melville 1950). So much of this is in purposely, suffocatingly enclosed rooms, with the outside world shut off, that you could add it to the thread of the “confinement” films. I won’t pretend to have a full grasp of Cocteau’s themes and ideas, but the mise-en-scène, including all those otherwordly shots from above, plays up the mythic quality of this tale. Nicole Stéphane, as has frequently been observed, is very powerful and evocative and she’s the driving force both of the story and the movie. It’s almost two films, the first half this strange world of these extremely eccentric, unreal “children” playing in an incestuously close, dream-like world, the second a classical tragedy, with Élisabeth turning into a Racinian character, this modern-setting infused by the period evoked by the name-dropping of the play Athalie and the extreme use of the Bach and Vivaldi. You either like or don't this sort of very stylized, poetic-literary drama (I understand how Truffaut so much enjoyed it, as the narration throughout, as well as other literary elements, foreshadows the filmmaker's work in some dimensions) but there's no denying its strong cinematic qualities. Those close-ups of Élisabeth and Paul, sometimes as they're looking straight into the camera, like the sets and the way they’re staged and shot, leave a lasting impression.

Winchester ‘73: This used to be near the top of my favorite Mann westerns once upon a time and while it doesn’t hold a candle to at least two, maybe three, it remains an excellent use of episodic story strung together by an object or idea. Stewart is good and mysterious, as is much of the action and interplay. Instead of deep psychological meditations we get fleeting scenes like at the campfire where Stewart admits his fear, comments on the sounds in the dark, and wakes up to re-engage with the world. This movie is ultimately spectacular entertainment in small spurts of narrative arcs with problems and the facing of said problems, so while there may not be a long buildup to some long-gestated catharsis (although to be fair, there is that too) we mostly get a continuous loop of relief and satisfaction. In a decade where Mann made some of the best westerns- and films- of all time, this gem still may make my final list after the three that are already shoe-ins for the top half.

Winchester ‘73 (Mann 1950). This was my favorite of the Mann-Stewart westerns the first time around, but now will fall at least below Laramie. The episodic nature of the film, like twbb described, is really what stood out to me this time, and at the very end we do finally get a sense of a bigger narrative arc getting revealed and completed, but that didn’t entirely erase moments in the general experience where the narrative-driven interest dipped a bit (the sequence where we join up with the cavalry being one). Partly that may also be because for different sequences we leave behind Lin and follow other characters. But most of those “episodes” are still quite magically played and shot, and that final shootout among the boulders definitely is one of the best such western action sequences. Probably my favorite scene, though, doesn’t involve Lin and is just that wonderfully written and played sequence at Riker’s with the Indian trader. McIntire as the trader, Stewart, Winters, Duryea, Mitchell, Flippen and McNally as Dutch all excel in their roles.


Kansas City Confidential (Karlson 1952). Not too much to say here but just a very solid, very physical noir, with a strong story and script above all that keep you glued. You would think this would hurt the film but the fact that the victim, played by John Payne, is tougher than the criminals gives it another kind of edge.

[senseabove]

Sweet Smell of Success (Mackendrick, 1957) My roommate and I have been watching movies together every few nights during shelter-in-place, and the routine we've gotten into is that I pick 4 or 5 movies, he'll narrow it down to two, and I'll make the final call. A few nights ago, I discovered an unexpected wrinkle in our naturally-evolved method of selection: "See, the problem is that you’ve narrowed it to a movie I haven't seen and a movie that is quite perfect. If we watch the one I haven't seen and it's anything less than very good, the whole time I'll be thinking how I could've been watching Sweet Smell of Success..." I'm honestly a little surprised this missed the top 10 last time, and though there’s a healthy standalone thread for it, it doesn't seem to have garnered much discussion in the past or present decade threads. I assume that's because it needs no introduction, but just in case…

Generally speaking, I'm averse to notions of efficiency, precision, "tightness" as markers of some kind of inherent quality. Those qualities have their uses, but they are too readily used as shorthand praise (which I'm nevertheless guilty of). Give me excess, overflow, exaggeration (see my preceding and following blurbs…). Sweet Smell is, though, one of those perfect cases of efficiency, doubly so for being coupled with a complimentary excess–a little fat to make it sizzle. The trick, I think, is in how carefully relentless it is: never overwhelming, always escalating, always a little sugared with overt cleverness, but perpetually on the brink. Act breaks, as much as they exist, last as long as a cut and an establishing shot; breathing room in a scene comes not so much from deescalation but attention's porousness to verbal wit as you’re briefly distracted by parsing a turn of phrase, and so miss the next one. (In that light, I actually think Steve's oft-criticized blandness, both as an actor and as a character, works well—he's your only chance to relax and take someone at face value.) But while the script’s distracting verbal excess serves a tactical purpose, by acting as a kind of release valve for your attention, it also rounds out the characters, who are dazzling and befuddling the people who just can’t quite keep up—like Steve—just as much as they’re dazzling us. "People" don't talk "like that," but these people do, and they know how odd it is and the power it has. Every word of every sentence is a parry and thrust, for everyone in their racket but especially for Falco and Hunsecker, such that even someone landing a blow against them is admirable; imitation is sincerest flattery, and they're keeping form even against unprepared opposition: "You're picking up my lingo, hon." "I read your column every day." And, whether you think them clever or too much by two halves, the lines that take a few half-seconds to process, not even appreciate, are so densely packed that different fireworks go off every single time I see this movie.

In talking about efficiency vs expansiveness after the movie, my roommate made the comparison to the opening narration over the visual dramatis personae of All About Eve, another recent watch for us. In Eve, that expansiveness establishes the ground for a very long arc, during which we see Eve and Margot and most of the other characters becoming wildly different people to us, maudlin or sympathetic, empathetic or raging, under the different pressures of the narrative. Comparatively, in Success, no one, save one, changes in the least. There’s no time. The first table scene at 21 briefs us on everything we will ever know or need to about the two leads and their relationship; if they change, it happens as the credits roll. Even before that table scene, we get the idea from Falco rushing the street merchant for the early edition and throwing away his half-eaten hotdog, and of Hunsecker after a single line of dialogue delivered over the phone: one’s hungry for an exact something and knows what he needs to get it, the other's got it and knows what he’s got. And they never even get tired of being this revolting. The two scenes where they spar with Dallas, in Falco's office and in Hunsecker's theater, reveal nothing so much as the single-mindedness behind every face each shows. Every revelation the script paces out is not shades of character or complexity of motivation; the shock, the surprise buried in each scene is only that everything you see is still and only a new manifestation of that same desire for power.

So much of that depends on the unspeakably smooth performances of Curtis and Lancaster. Watching them play off each other without even looking at each other during the theater scene is thrilling—both those characters know the game they’re playing so well they can do it with a blindfold on. And the final twist is wonderful because it’s the only barely ambiguous motive in the movie:

SpoilerShow

is she sinking to their level out of expediency, putting them at each others' throats because she thinks that will give her a brief window to get out of the muck herself, or is she just sinking to their level, period, ruining the lives of the men who ruined hers because that's what she's finally learned?

And that’s not even mentioning Elmer Bernstein, Chico Hamilton, James Wong Howe…

(As an aside: I wish someone could tell me who Mr. Hasenpfeffer is. Is it just supposed to be an inside joke between Susie and Steve, or is there a cultural reference I can't dig up there?)


And after that, a movie that hardly needs my bolstering, now on to what will almost certainly be one of my orphans—a sad panda avant-la-lettre.

Member of the Wedding (Zinneman, 1952) I was all in my feelings a few nights ago, because those are riding high these days anyway and I had a frustrating day at work, so I decided I wanted to wallow instead of taking a chance on something new that might fail at pulling me out of it… That’s the mindset going in, so you’re prepared. And I should confess at the start to having a soft spot for Julie Harris' particular brand of histrionics—I also have an unreasonably profound love for The Haunting and Reflections in a Golden Eye. I should also confess that the self-identification is strong: I was that weird, precocious, emotional kid in a small Southern town, who knew early on and only that Not Here was exactly where I needed to be. And if feeling you're slow on the uptake today, "weird, precocious, emotional" is code for gay, which this movie is. Very. Not just for 1952. Not even codedly or guiltily so. A boy is excited and incredulous that he's been given—allowed to be given—a doll and impersonates a womanly hip-swagger walk and puts on a tutu at one point and heels and a hat and a purse at another and gets called both "candy" and "butch" as loving nick names, and no one chastises him for any of those things. The titular character is a girl with short hair, overalls, and dirty elbows. If it's coded, it's coded like pig latin: no one needs to explain it. But getting beyond all those reasons that I sympathize with the movie, I still, presumably, should try to argue that it's good, and worth your 89 minutes, and maybe even worth giving $7 to Twilight Time in their going-out-of-business sale.

So I'll say that I sometimes wonder what this movie's reputation would be if, in general, emotional excess were seen as arguably valuable or inherently thrilling as violent excess. Excessive violence is, supposedly, edifying or poignant in a roundabout, self-reflexive way; no one needs to explain anymore why Peckinpah opens a movie featuring historic on-screen violence with kids torturing insects for fun, and if anyone ever feels the latest Tarantino is unnecessarily violent, the burden of proof is on them. And if it's not edifying, it's just excessive movie fun for its own sake, you spoilsport. Or it's both. Talk amongst yourselves—I don't really care. Plenty of people are arguing about violence and its concerns and I don’t have much to add. But emotion... give me surfeiting excess. And does this movie ever. It is the mood swings of puberty captured on film. It is wailing-and-slamming-the-door condensed and canned. It is not realistic; it is not reasonable; and most likely neither were you at 12. And neither are you now, really, but you've learned to mitigate those excessive emotions with reason and understanding so that you can function as an adult.

F. Jasmine Adams fails profoundly at understanding anyone else. She is willful and cries and resists and is figuring out, vividly, what it means to want to be "an I person" and "a we person.” She has learned a little better how to do it by the end—or, if you're cynical, at least learned some ways that it can be easier to get to be a "we person" with the "we" you want to be, at the expense of being an "I person" with the "we" you have, as she trots off to be a third wheel and leave her long-suffering nanny quietly sing-sobbing in the kitchen. (If someone ever writes about queer movies where, rather than "getting to choose your family," sometimes, for better or for worse, you take what queer—in a very broad sense—family you can get...) But she's forgotten, for now, that Berenice got her there: "We go round tryin', first one thing, then another, but we're still caught—that's how I see it in my mind's eye." The emotional climax, a gently sung, soul-balming hymn with Frankie's sharp angles and John Henry's precociously mooning face crowded close around Berenice, is an unchosen, incongruous "we" for Frankie, one she'll be oblivious to, valuing a part of it in retrospect but oblivious to what remains. I confess this is the point where the movie gets bogged down in itself. It probably could or should rightly have ended with that fade to black. The town interlude and the short skip forward in time are both too strictly functional to be effective—excepting that the latter allows us the balance of Berenice's hymn, bitter comfort for being newly, still, caught. But it’s the stage-bound, pubescent intensity of the first 2/3 and the final scene, and Harris's burning, incongruous, unreasonable intensity, that send this one into orbit for me.


Touchez Pas au Grisbi (Becker, 1954) grows in my estimation every time I see it. It takes a plot and themes that a million other noir/gangster/heist movies will treat as rote justifications, and turns them into a kind of subdued male melodrama, skating lightly past the causes and effects (and displays) of disappointment, inadvertent betrayal, and resignation, to dwell instead on the emotional tolls they take. The first hour spends so much time, both in dialogue and in camera focus, showing us just how tired Jean Gabin's Max is. He doesn't even want to wait for his significantly younger showgirl girlfriend to get done—it'll be after midnight! He just wants to retire, tonight and forever. The transitions in the plot happen almost in the background—we see something happen, and then a few scenes later, after we've watched Max slog through the interim, he explains why it matters. Which means we retroactively realize that the near-lethargy we've been seeing in him is the weight of holding that knowledge until he can explain to these people—whom he loves—just how badly things have gotten fucked. It's a weirdly subdued play on how criminal friendship is what allows and enforces the kind of sociopathy you often see presented more strongly in movies of this sort; Max isn't sitting down to lunch at the end because he wants to, but because he has to. But still he's able to, convincingly.

In Heaven, where movie palaces grow like mushrooms, there's a dingy one with a closed balcony playing this and Le Doulos on a permanent double feature.

[therewillbeblus]

Johnny Guitar

This one took a while to grow on me, but a few years ago I had a revelation watching it where all of Godard’s obsessive accolades clicked. This film is pure, concentrated emotion. It’s theatrical, with bold colors and loud characters wearing their emotions on their sleeves even when trying to hide them. Every interaction is explosive, every glance or facial tic bleeds, and every sound thunders. The ominous music over the opening credits is layered with intensity, signaling a film that needs not build to a zenith because it’s already a somersault of crescendos.

The most beautiful aspect of the film is in how its bloated passion is so thick it can be cut with a knife, practically tangible, and yet enigmatic enough to transcend any specific signifiers. There is no clarity in sexuality, anger, pathos, or regret, but in identities composed of all of these, swirling into human beings who are surged by competing determinations to reflect on nostalgia in history, or to live in the present and look forward to the future. The characters do all of these things, but the struggle of the two stances contrast and painfully posture at resentment, acceptance, bruises and resilience.

Nothing in this film is superficially honest. Each frame is oozing with exaggerated elements of cinema, and this may be why I struggled to access the depth at first. The gold is beneath the surface though, the screams of sentiment and pulsating fury barely contained from erupting and destroying the film. When every vowel has an accent, what does the word sound like? The story doesn’t matter, nor does Crawford’s likeability, whether Hayden is interesting, Bond’s sensitivity to social pressure, or whether McCambridge’s psychology is as simple as sexual repression so unbearable it transforms her into a sociopath.

A dying man declares that his heroic gesture is the first time he’s felt important, validated by being ‘seen.’ These statements, and the characters’ intensities display their intuitions in bombastic theatrics. When McCambridge maniacally grins at Crawford’s inn encompassing her past and future set on fire, we become nauseated with the dual feelings of resentment and gloom to the point that allegiance doesn’t matter. Maybe Crawford is supposed to be more endearing than I think she is, or Hayden is supposed to be more excitable. McCambridge is certainly a formidable villain diluted of compassion toward displaced rage, but her irrationality doesn’t bother as much as her emotional weaponry casts a storm of harrowing tension. The emotion can be violently nightmarish and romantically dreamy, interchangeable between edits.

The external ‘natural’ sets and deux ex machina saving graces from each action scene infuse artifice by design to elicit grand emotional pulls of cinema. These are all details that will drive many people away, but for me, every revisit I am only drawn deep in to the whirlpool of passion for filmmaking and all that is possible to signify from cinema. I can understand why Godard loved this so much: It takes every idea from the classics and assimilates them into compact spaces woven into each other like a rainbow quilt. How can this not appear synthetic when it accentuates every sound and image to their limits, but how can its parts not affect us either if we extend an arm to touch the scalding hot frames. One just needs to accept that the significance is coming from that universal bald fervor, nothing more and nothing less, but figuratively, and literally, spectacular.


Shane

I know this isn’t a board favorite but I’ve come around to liking this one over the years after an apathetic reaction in college. I find the action scenes to be engaging, well-choreographed, and occasionally intense- especially the Palance/Elisha Cook Jr. dare. It’s a fun western, and also one that explores the complicated questions of natural or constructed identities, and how vigilantism initiates harm no matter how good the intentions, creating a moral paradox that has been explored many times since (most recently, The Dark Knight comes to mind).

Shane’s disruption to the family system is interesting to experience without Heflin’s emasculated patriarch reacting as strongly as expected, even as he is on the verge of being cuckolded. Shane’s projected role becoming his identity by everyone, including the child, makes his own predicament complex. His reactiveness to sound insinuates a more traumatic root to his response than your average western when this occurs, uncovering a brewing of nervous tremors that sit permanently under the guise of calm confidence, and the boy’s point-of-view on events lends to a forced maturation in vulnerabilities of adults, which conflicts with icon-worship ideals. These are conscientiously not reduced to fantasies but show how men can actually become heroes in a subjective sense within the confines of reality and their own fallibility. This is no epic or exceptionally intelligent western a la Ford or Mann, but among the cute western-melodrama programmers, it’s one of the better standouts.


Forty Guns

This might be another unpopular opinion but this is in the upper tiers of Fuller for me. His tough-knuckled worldview is perfect for the western genre, and the inclusion of aggressive weather contributes to the reminder of spontaneous disorder lurking everywhere. There are some abrasive cuts and the wedding scene is edited so intensely it’s one of the very best examples of human-propagated disorder in all of westerns, into a scene that should be a safe place of romantic elation. There are a few savage deaths, and even the general behavior can be completely devoid of restraint on this front (Eastwood’s Unforgiven stole a particularly crude visual idea from here that shows how people can be creatively, publicly disrespected, even after they’re dead). It’s not a perfect film- there are more than a few curious detours and uninvesting arcs, but what does work more than makes up for what doesn’t. It's a shame though that the narrative itself isn’t as intriguing as the uninhibited sharpness of human behavior, because this film feels born for a greatness it can’t quite reach. The final shootout plays like only Fuller would do, and it’s absolutely brutally (in every meaning of the word) honest, and the sick discussion in the aftermath using killing as a declaration of love is perverse twisted perfection.

This probably won’t make my list, but for other Fullers, my favorite, Pickup at South Street, undoubtedly will. I don’t have a ton to say about it other than that it’s so narratively pleasing, combined with Widmark’s loud persona chewing scenery like never before (bold statement, though I stand by it) and Thelma Ritter somehow matching him on hamming it up through wily dealings. Fuller’s attention to detail is perfect, and features like the pully system on the bucket of beer in the water to stay cool are etched in my memory more than most significant setpieces. Plus it goes hand-in-hand with Bresson's masterpiece!

Also a list-contender is The Steel Helmet, Fuller’s first excellent war film that doesn’t shelter anyone from the horrors and stress of the experience. That it also addresses racial dynamics and other social integration topics in a brisk runtime is a testament to Fuller’s brash tactics in no-holds-barred technique, shoving the audience’s face in his truth and not letting go until the credits roll. One of my favorite war films too in addition to a favorite Fuller. While his 60s films are often hailed in higher regard these are the top two for me, and Underworld U.S.A. would be third, and the best of next decade.


Sweet Smell of Success

I also rewatched this the other night, and I'm glad senseabove took the lead at digging in places I would have surely overlooked so I don't have to grasp at straws in exploring the crevices of genius here. It's well-known that the acidic script is airtight, and the film should be listworthy based on that alone (my personal favorite line is "my right hand hasn't seen my left hand in 30 years"), but on a purely visual note the film flourishes in very unique ways. While not really a noir, the shadows cast on the characters mark each face with visible shades of deception, especially Lancaster's. In his introducing scene, Howe uses masterful lighting to shoot Lancaster's glasses to reflect the incoming light so as to transform his eyes into shadows themselves, empty sockets that resemble black holes, impossible to interpret. Lancaster’s eyes become the optimal physical pronouncement of power, as every interaction becomes like one with an unreadable, alien God.

Thematically I have to disagree about the lack of change, although the change may not come in a traditional behaviorist measurement, but in disruption of comfortable systems it absolutely does. The finale, where JJ is stripped of his one vulnerability- his only human attachment in his sister, which he has deceived himself to believe as authentic when she has, blind to him, served as another possession- is a thrilling comeuppance. Lancaster makes statements throughout the film that “Susie is all I’ve got” before he expresses his emotional connection as one of pragmatism on his terms. He only knows how to engage through control, and so the depths of his loneliness is revealed only when his cyclical wheel of workaholic dealings slows down and he gazes into the abyss of an empty world, as an empty man beneath the exterior of materialism. To me that final stare into the city is the culmination of destruction that has forced change on the one man who cannot fathom destruction, force, or change initiated by anyone but him and certainly not on himself. As the film progresses we get close shots of Lancaster's eyes clear and bright, hinting at his own walls breaking down and showing the sensitive tissue within hardened facades of strength.

Also, Sydney finds and possesses his own morality after spending the film in an ethical desert, which drives him to Susan even if he falls back on his relativist bite after arriving, and Susan, well, you already noted her change:

And the final twist is wonderful because it’s the only barely ambiguous motive in the movie:

SpoilerShow

is she sinking to their level out of expediency, putting them at each others' throats because she thinks that will give her a brief window to get out of the muck herself, or is she just sinking to their level, period, ruining the lives of the men who ruined hers because that's what she's finally learned?

I read it a bit more simply,

SpoilerShow

that Susan is not compromising herself so much as actually attempting to escape via suicide, and then remaining silent in a state of combined shock and hopelessness. If she is intentionally resisting saving Sydney by telling the truth, she is adapting to the rules of their game in another moment of desperation to regain agency in her life.

If I entertain that reading for a moment, I'd say it's a resilience that doesn't come at a lasting moral or ethical price that will scar or change her personality permanently beyond this moment, other than hopefully heighten her capacity for empowerment. She has tried to maintain some independence via naive methods, ill-fitting for the dark milieu she lives in, and when faced with aggressive selfish beasts, she uses a form of self-defense to lure them into a trap and escape. I can see how that could be either of your ambiguous proposals, but I guess I reframe it for myself as in step with her motive to be issued the average amount of control any dignified adult deserves, and any short-term strategy is more of a pump-fake/side-step on a sports field to escape a tackle rather than initiating an aggressive tackle herself - to use a sports analogy for the first time, maybe ever.

However, I think she has far less agency in what transpires in the final scene, and is mute more as a conditioned response to save face out of fear of her brother's judgment, only having the courage to pack her suitcase when the secrets spill out and she finds a brief moment to elevate herself from her trappings, a 'spiritual awakening' so to speak.

On a final note, what a perfect ending - everything from Susan's downward and outward movement feeling like a liberated ascension, to Sydney's fatalist consequence (did Llewyn Davis borrow it?) to JJ's dumbfounded expression signaling an existential crisis of developmentally-repressed introduction to loss, all over the aggressively inspiring score. It doesn't get much better than that.

[therewillbeblus]

Night and the City

I never appreciated this one as much as most, as I always found it relatively thin compared to other noirs with deeper thematic tension. I’ve come around over the years to respect this for exactly what it is rather than what I had built it up to be. This is Widmark’s personality used best, even if I prefer his role in Pickup on South Street, but here he is on fire showing his full range of weaponry in emotional manipulation, spilling out onto the screen. The wielding and dealing is relentless, walking the line between greed and self-preservation. The end is noir fatalism in its purest form, a final twist in embracing what the engine has been overheating in running from for 90 minutes, and the nonchalant disposal of the body into the water at the end gets me bug-eyed every time. The forced Code-obliging save is a hoot too after what they get away with!


The Breaking Point

I never commented on this when Criterion announced it but it would have been one of my releases-of-the year, a favorite rented often from my library and miles better than the earlier Hawks loose adaptation. Garfield is great at playing a likeable man who lives morally but not without valid internal conflict and serious imperfections. He lies to and taunts his wife, yet we never doubt that he loves and is devoted to her. His groundedness is authentically stretched and Curtiz’s camera fills the frame with wide shots of busy chaos, push-ins to reflect Garfield’s movement through them and isolation within them, and some that pack most of the screen with his face, often from the side, intruding on his secure principles and control, and showcasing his struggle.

The film’s mise en scene paints a breathing atmosphere, countering Hawks’ theatrical chamber piece. Part of why this film works better is the faithfulness to the novel, where dialogue and scenes of action are realistic and don’t follow cinematic logic. A flirtatious brewing tryst with Patricia Neal doesn’t go its expected route, and serves more as a mirror for Garfield’s own value-testing and relationship stability. A deceptively simple planned dropoff doesn’t go expected either for reasons unclear, yet the drama is felt with thick energy of life-and-death. A struggle for a gun isn’t coated with omniscient comprehension outlining the sequence, but the sweat on Garfield’s brow transfers onto ours, and we share his experience on detached observational, as well as aligned psychological and even physiological degrees. Phyllis Thaxter is terrific, and helps make Garfield’s wife, already a well-written character, empathic, sensitive, motherly, and individualized. The scene where she changes her hair lingers on her self-consciousness and desperation to be seen, and the subsequent exchange with Garfield appears ripped out of time, lived-in and complex. I love how the inner workings of a family system are stripped down, revealing an entire complex history in only a few delusively simple exchanges.

As a noir, this fits with many of the ideas of the genre, with Garfield carrying himself with a weight everywhere he goes, desperately clinging to an identity involving control as a symbol for freedom. The postwar hardships, especially economic insecurities, are felt here on a very raw, realistic level that adds respect to the stakes at play, and the reasons for getting into the predicament in the first place. The final act is riveting, occurring in real time, with a rare shootout that feels accurate to how it would actually play out. Throughout the tense build-up, Garfield’s expressionist density contains intelligence, regret, strength, and fear collectively fuming under a cool-tempered disposition.

Everything about this film works, and it might be my favorite Curtiz when it comes down to it, especially with the gut-punch of an ending where we are forced to face the casualties who don’t get a narrative, a happy ending, or validation of any kind, in more ways than one - storywise and via systemic oppression through underrepresentation. It’s also a reminder of the harm-by-proxy from Garfield, and man in general.


On the Waterfront

Another example of a classic that has sunk in my esteem through the years, but even if it is no longer the powerful awakening of my childhood, there is plenty of merit. What distances me from the film constantly is its particular strain of didacticism. Regardless of the historical roots of characters and events, this film unfolds like a filmed play with every actor preaching or expelling their loudest voice, movement, or facial expression to shake the audience. It almost feels like a competition and this makes the drama and characterizations appear artificial. What bothers me about this aspect isn’t an artificiality, which can be present in my favorite films, including of this decade, when used in a creative way; but that Kazan seems to be hiding the theatrical elevations, hushing them from the consequences of embracing their exposure, and tricking the audience into believing this is realism.

So what of it? We know that Spiegel enforced rewrites to transform Brando’s character from a hidden Everyman into a dynamic protagonist, and that his other demands compromised Schulberg’s script. The end result isn’t bad at all, it’s exactly what a 50s Hollywood message-movie looked like except with a layer of grit in otherwise smooth direction and acting that screamed a pitch few had heard before. Brando’s performance woke people up, and he does deliver something interesting here, even when viewed today with a high stack of method-acting perfs between. The final act clicks together and I can't help but root for the man who transcends social customs of honor and dishonor in 'ratting' for moral reasons, though the fair reading of Kazan's insertion-of-self into the role of Brando as a righteous informer to the HUAC is a bit puzzling, yet loose enough to let it go.


Paths of Glory

Sometimes I forget just how fierce and transparent this film is, from the portrayal of shell-shock, to oily corruptions of governments, helpless injustices, and the unfairness of life yielding consequences like death. Integrity has meaning in Douglas' moral advocate, but he is dubbed an idealist and the only collectively humanist moment is of soldiers stopping their lewd chants to sit in silence at singing, communally scared and reflective of their positions - harmony in pathos.

The film's three-act structure incorporates brutal war film, thunderous courtroom drama (Douglas’ closing argument, “there are times when I’m ashamed to be a member of the human race and this is one such occasion” never fails to make me grin), and finally a sickening execution, where Kubrick forces us to stew in real time. Men admit to their sexual side effects of fear, break down in tears, and cannot comprehend their own sacrifice. The way Douglas forces the soldier with a chip on his soldier, who offered a soldier up casually due to resentment, to participate in the responsibility of his choice is a great example of asserting agency through fury within restrictions of powerlessness.

There is also a very uncomfortable truth in Timothy Carey’s casting playing a man who is scapegoated due to his eccentricities, speaking to us as the reason he was picked, which have allowed the actor to become noticeable but could easily have led him to be marginalized in another occupation. It's an example of perfect casting, and an actor noting his own aura, self-aware and accepting it, something we all do in various ways but here applied to his death notice rather than the outlet for his career. How strange it is for our individualized ambiences to define our paths despite our inner selves. People who have generous god-gifts of cleft chins and confident energies like Douglas may be born for paths of glory, but the Careys of the world, pre-theatrics, may have been judged as odd and sent down other paths against their wills, and in spite of identity.


Bigger Than Life

I already wrote up some thoughts in response to RV's great post earlier in the thread:

Aside from form, part of the reason I think Bigger Than Life is so excellent is that it is at once the ultimate melodrama and the anti-melodrama. By taking the male head of the household and turning him into the sole problem in the home, the destruction of the patriarch crumbles this family and transforms the film into essentially horror at the unpredictability of such a role diffusion, which makes it the extreme melodrama. However, the fact that the male is the only problem sheds a light on the family’s ability to function well, and makes transparent the facade of the father figure as essential by essence rather than by social construct. Therefore, he’s reduced to being emasculated of both his power as stable leader and as a necessary role of leader in the first place. The entire family systems theory of the 50s collapses and the melodrama dies in the wake of seeing the other, typically depicted as ‘weaker’ members- or at least composed of problems with equal value to show a fair distribution of individual stress, emerging as resilient and self-actualized. The family only stresses because the father is incapable of being cast out in this social structure and yet Ray seems to insinuate that they could survive just fine if the mores shifted. This reveals an equality of strength that destroys the idea of patriarchy but also of traditional family and societal necessities beyond the roles, a jarring proclamation for the time that ends the melodrama by ending the assumed ideas of family.

On a recent revisit, my attention was caught by an even clearer theory along these lines: that of how addiction plays into Mason's weakness, and the specific effects of cortisone reveal a secret desire - to be so individualized, and rule with such extreme authoritarian methods, that the cute harmonious family system is even too banal for the head of the family, who already has a significant power imbalance! The drug unlocks the nature of man, the Hobbesian destruction of social structures and order, and simultaneously exhibits man's instability in trying to conform to these necessary systems and the suppression of nature that creates tension and pain.

Ray seems to be arguing that this conflict is exacerbated by the lack of self-reflective awareness families take due to fear of disruption of these systems, as well as not having the tools to dissect roles and identities beyond those outlined for them by society. In many of his films, the best being Rebel, Ray is ahead of his time for identifying these psychological needs and breaking down systems through melodrama to highlight them. Here he institutes bold colors like Johnny Guitar that paint a comfortably warm family home, yet slowly dictates how unsafe everyone, including the father, is in their current forced positions. Mason's awful pain when returning to his 'normal' self signifies an inability to cope with both the return to this role (even if via an unconscious bodily signal) as well as distress regarding the behavior that he's capable of. There is a faux-happy ending but the implication is that Mason is torn between two unbearable poles, and that a true happy ending won't be maintainable until America wakes up and engages in socially-acceptable therapeutic practice that celebrates identity and liberation from the chains of ideological functions.

[knives]

The Ghost of Yatsuya (dir. Nakagawa)
Wow, this is a delightfully grimy piece. I've seen a lot of variations of this story, but this stands out as the best yet in part because of the sumptuous use of colour and widescreen as well as leaning into the seedy nature of the plot. For a film that revels in showing off gross after effects its pretty traditionally beautiful. There's lots of sumptuous greens, blues, reds, whites, and blacks which bleed into each other in an effective way. Each frame really is a painting in itself as much as I recognize that is a cliche criticism, but do try to find an imperfect frame to prove it as misused in this case. You simply won't be able to.

I also really enjoy the way the film changes the crimes of its samurai to lean the theme of toxic masculinity that is central to the story. Rather than merely being a neglectful husband or adulterer this is a truly evil man. It's a lot of fun.

Kill the Umpire (dir. Bacon)
Essentially a sitcom episode or two rendered to barely feature length. Bendix is fairly reliable as the doofus father so it makes sense he got an actual sitcom deal a few years later. Tashlin's script is mostly DOA through a few witticisms and bizarre antics reveal his hand throughout the uncertainty.

The Snow Flurry (dir. Kinoshita)
Here's finally another truly great film from Kinoshita though afterwards it caused me to have to do some research as there are elements of the film which don't make sense unless you are fluent in Japanese. This movie is perhaps the most beautiful film I've seen from Kinoshita using rustic browns and reds alongside a distant camera to give a frightful sense of the isolation and history the characters are stuck in. It's a tremendously sad film like the first signs a terse autumn will become a violent winter.

Welcome Mr. Marshall (dir. Berlunga)
This is a major step up from The Executioner with many of the jokes landing and the point of satire being developed in a satisfying way. It's still very flop sweaty and reminiscent of some of the wackier Italian comedies, but it leans into that and maximizes the absurdity. A series of dreams near the end exemplify that while also just being hilarious. They range from a silly western parody worth Bugs Bunny to a bizarre take on American persecution that mixes up HUAC, the KKK, and FBI in a delightful show of ignorance that's all the more satisfying for how it represents character development.

[Michael Kerpan]

I don't remember Snow Flurry as being one of the Kinoshita films on Criterion Channel. Is it newly added -- or did I just miss noticing it?

[knives]

Beats me, but it's there now. I think they have a little over half of his films up there.

[therewillbeblus]

The Quiet Man

This Ford romance is one of his best of the 50s, where he finds a lot of observational humor in human behavior within his traditional formalism. There are scenes that unfold as buffoonery with tragic bite, and the fish-out-of-water arc for Wayne is pushed to its limits both comically and dramatically, often in the same scene. When he kicks down a door there is immense power, and following this with a sight gag sums up Ford's ability to place people in the right way within a frame to allow their ludicrous antics to coexist with the seriousness of life, in all its confusion and beauty. I always get the sense when watching a Ford film that his major theme is that death and life are intensely real, and so every action, choice, energetic relationship or color should be framed with significance, even if he decides to be playful with the value of dramatics within that hardened truth.

The family dynamics Wayne encounters embodies its own foreign values, like the dowery that Wayne must chase to prove himself. It's not a new concept to make personal sacrifices for love, but the path Wayne navigates within himself to engage in the mission of O'Hara's money is as interesting as the actual physical actions that occur. I'm a fan of the whole spacious composite here, including the tumble at the end.


The Big Heat

This noir doubles as supreme entertainment and a reality-shattering melodrama. I like this one for strange, personal, likely unintentional reasons beyond the obvious fun aspects to the plot, namely that Glenn Ford's Bannion is a hollow, awful character; a square detective who is constantly facing truths without seeing them. His faith is fully planted in the stability of ideological state apparatuses. Christian morality, law and order, nuclear family units, and engrained routine are his codes, and even after a major character dies, as we empathize with them filling the screen, breath gone, he goes on and on about a cute little ritual his wife used to do for them; smiling like a goon, head in the clouds. Ford carries himself as superior, judging everyone around him, with rigid posture and self-serious demeanor, and throughout the narrative progression, stands out more and more as the exception to the rule in the eroding milieu around him.

His lack of self-reflection makes him rather pathetic, and so the heart of the movie twists itself to Gloria Grahame. I’m pretty sure that this reading of Ford as a subliminal sacrificial lamb was not the intention of the film, but in a decade where the best melodramas reflected the strains of change, here is one where the protagonist doesn’t just resist, but cannot even use his imagination (if he has one) to picture a perspective, or dignify the worth of an individual, outside of his stubborn worldview. I think Ford’s detective is one of the most pathetic characters of the decade, and this only adds to the strength of this film in historical evaluative context using a modernist lens. The villains aren’t good, but at least they are somewhat self-aware realists!


Baby Doll

Some people may want to throw tomatoes at me, but this is my favorite Kazan, mostly because his strategy to elicit wild performances is at its most generous and unrestrained. Tennessee Williams stacks two of his stories together to create a rancid, caustic love triangle that is practically surreal in its execution. The eclectic filmmaking style is technically liberating, cameras engaging with actors like a mercurial dance that follows them around, and cuts and invades impulsively, as they size one another up with dubious intent.

The perversity of the film is famous for good reason. From the very first interaction between two stars, we are invited in to a genius writing setup of introducing characters. Creepy sexual voyeurism turns into repelling discomfort when we see the childish regression being spied on, and then when we find out the nature of the relationship we can hardly believe that, though their first conversation turns into an argument of even more unsettling nature in sexual coercion! Within the first ten minutes enough surprises have occurred to make some turn this cesspool of stimulation off, but for me it’s intelligent construction of a screenplay matched with unapologetic grime in visual dress and decor, vibrant, unpredictable performances, and indulgent direction. The expansive middle section with Wallach is a compelling twofer that should keep anyone still invested glued to the screen for what feels like only minutes but lasts about half the film. Kazan made a fair amount of good to great films, but something about a lot of them feel feigned in a manner that either discredits other elements, or detaches me slightly from the sensationalism he is brewing. This one fully adopts the overdone dramatics, sour personalities, and rotten spaces of cinematic configuration as stand-ins for graphic entities that, regardless of whether or not they exist or have existed, ardently belong in the world of this film. This may be a twisted place, but everything that grows in the frames is organic to the acid rain that salts this earth.

[knives]

I wouldn't be surprised if that was the forum's favorite Kazan. If nothing else it is one of the best acted movies of the '50s.

[domino harvey]

It’s top ten material and, yes, my favorite Kazan

[swo17]

The forum's favorite is surely either that or A Face in the Crowd

[therewillbeblus]

Damn, I had my money on Gentleman's Agreement

[HinkyDinkyTruesmith]

Few movies ever reach the heights of Gregory Peck's ecstatic (may I say, near-orgasmic) reaction to his realization that he could pass for Jewish in Gentleman's Agreement.

[therewillbeblus]

Well now you've done it. I had blocked the film almost completely out of memory, and I kinda feel like I need to go back to see that reaction face now

[domino harvey]

I'll save you the work:

[therewillbeblus]

Now that's the promises of Kazan's method-acting school coming true!

[therewillbeblus]

Wagon Master

A long-time favorite, and neck-and-neck with The Searchers this is Ford’s best of the decade for me- oddly enough eliciting the polar opposite attitudes and formalist bearings, to the degree where they become practically different genres (and honestly impossible to compare in merit). The importance of family, and more aptly social threads of meaning, is apparent but they’re loosely defined by bringing in Mormon cultural practices and extending the familial significance to the band of criminals too. Perhaps the strangest bond is the central romance, where each partner maintains their separate individuality whilst courting and forming a connection all the same. I believe Ford declared this to be one of his own favorites in his oeuvre, and his heavy participation in writing its story shows the balance of tenderness and harshness that by all accounts composed the mysterious man himself.

This is a very humanist film, a descriptor that aspects of Ford’s films can occasionally be granted, but rarely an entire vehicle. The judgment of ‘others’ is meditated on from white to brown men, and cool-headed acceptance is didactically offered by Ford through Ben Johnson’s calm neutral individualist. His stance is one of detached humanism, not a social justice warrior who pretends to understand the Mormon way of life, not a defender or a chastizer, but an ally to all impartially. He takes an early position of the ‘not-knowing’ humility that has come to be a preferred response to the ‘cultural-competence’ liberal police of faux-humanism, and most embodies what Ford’s biographers have spoken about his own persona - a socially liberal, sensitive, empathetic man under a hardened, impenetrable independent exterior.

The mood is kept mostly light, with musical breaks, romance, adventure, and even action all tempered and smooth. The stirring opening pre-credits scene is almost a fake-out gag, letting us know that at some point typical-western human adversaries will present themselves as problems, before opening up a broad narrative with varied problems of all sorts entering the picture: natural, foreign, and eventually human conflict. Ford understands that life is a series of problems and overcoming problems, but he also doesn’t necessitate that these problems are always debilitating or deflating. They can be as simple as crossing a river, sparking a conversation with a member of the opposite sex, engaging in a petty disagreement, or attempting to understand, or be understood, by a member of a different social context.

Attitude defines people for Ford, even if he isn’t naive enough to pretend that they alone can combat physical danger. In The Searchers, Wayne’s hard attitude has been a strength to save his life, most likely, in who-knows-how-many situations. Yet his perspective must be flexed to welcome a humanist side of him, suppressed by ideology and resilient codes, in order to morally save a life, stressfully remaining in step with his ideology of family-first by compromising his ideology of racist intolerance. In Wagon Master, attitude doesn’t carry the weight of man’s psychological parting with engrained conditioning or worldviews. Ford is conversely interested in the malleability inherent in the parts of the psyche that are relaxed and detached from such self-serious, socially-imposed mechanics.

The playfulness of the character dynamics and interactions exist even in the gravest of scenarios, and it’s no coincidence that they encounter a medicine troupe, entertainers by profession, who are privy to whimsy and dramatics and help infuse each passing moment with their talents. There is almost a sense of fairy dust in the air here, like a Shakespearean comedy, subtly incorporating the magical manipulations of A Midsummer Night's Dream allegorically into the harsh western terrain. Ford’s own informal position toward predicament and socialization elevates the possibilities of mood to expanded peripheries of attitude, empowered to be liberally eclectic rather than rooted in a rigid moral or purpose.

Real problems do occur in this film, and there are some very intense moments with unsettling implications, as well as characters who shoot to kill, and dehumanize the dead as “snakes.” Still, Ford doesn’t paint the villains as stronger than their captives, and there is an equality amongst the men as far as their basic abilities to function. Some are quicker to act, to think, and to move on from hot-blooded interactions, but there is no superman, supervillain, or any caste system of human value. That doesn’t stop dumb criminals from receiving natural consequences for their actions, but reciprocally the heroes are awarded consequences for the amount of perspective they can take to engage with others on a level playing field.

There is no 'deserve' or spotlight hues gracing our characters as they remain fixed in isolated space, like Ford's camera can do in some of the rigid-Wayne persona entries. Here they need to adapt and compromise, not as a weakness but a strength, to earn their turn in front of the camera through action. This is an optimistic contrast in the politics of the camera compared to The Searchers too, including that final shot in the Wayne film which is brilliant in its own right, but this film's methodological commentary seems to extinguish the power of in favor of collectivist spirit. I like to think that Ford is trying to say that life is hard but it doesn’t always have to be, and even when problems arise, as they do daily, we can greet them with open arms or anxious retreat. There is a lot of credit allotted to agency here, but even that doesn’t need to be a troublesome weight to bear, as much as an opportunistic one to embrace with a smile.


Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter

A great example of a comedy where the bits are as clever and funny as the broader ideas involved. This is one of Tashlin's most fun films, which is saying a lot, with so much obvious sexual innuendo that I'm still scratching my head around how he got all the content past the censors. The scathing satire is more complex that the film initially lets on, attacking the public's preoccupation with celebrity and the infusion of advertising and television's adoption in our culture, as well as human psychology as a product of fame or the desire for ego-inflation. The film does not hold back on the significance of power and sex to the characters. Every time someone makes a comment about Rock Hudson's potential for being handsome, he forgets all else in favor of this comment that singles him out as briefly superior to his fellow man. The power angle reminds me of The Apartment as a full-on comedy (Rock even mentions that he now has "a key to the executive wash room!" It's actually the first thing he says because that's how awesome that key is). The argument that the Wilder film initiated the prediction of future maleness as full of feminine sensitivity is a good one, but this pre-dates that film, and the emotional expressiveness in Rock is so emotional and needy sometimes that it's childlike (not a dis, it's perfect).

I don't know how many Tashlins can fit on my list, but probably not many. After yet another revisit of Susan Slept Here a month ago, I'm pretty confident that'll be the one, but this is up there. Any other list-worthy Tashlin recs would be great.

That's about the end of revisits, outside of one or two more that I may do later, or tomorrow, including a list-definite.