Nicholas Ray Triple Feature: Bigger than Life (1956) / Johnny Guitar (1954) / Wind Across the Everglades (1958)

Nicholas Ray never won an Oscar or a lifetime achievement award, worked in Hollywood for little more than a decade, and directed only a few canonized classics. His most famous film, Rebel Without A Cause, is remembered for James Dean's iconic performance rather than Ray's direction. Surprising, then, that this was the man whose career launched the auteur theory. François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Jean-Luc Godard sang his praises in the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma, seeing in his work the possibilities of a newly personal cinema, in which the director was the true author of the movie. When these same critics became filmmakers themselves, and the leaders of the French New Wave, they continually cited Ray as a formative influence. Godard even dedicated his film Made in U.S.A. to Ray, and once declared, in typically hyperbolic fashion, "The cinema is Nicholas Ray!" All this while Ray was ignored in his native land.

What, exactly, makes Nicholas Ray an "auteur?" Upon first glance, he might seem merely a workmanlike, efficient Hollywood director. Unlike his French admirers, Ray was never really an independent filmmaker, rather working under the confines of the studio system. Neither did he specialize in a particular genre, but rather dabbled in film noir, Westerns, Biblical epics, socially conscious dramas, adventure films, and more. But Ray's triumph was to make deeply personal films with popular appeal. Each of his films, no matter the genre, is graced with the same qualities: a dynamic and expressionistic visual style, and a thematic concern for the lonely and isolated. Ray's films also address societal issues like suburbanization, the Communist witch hunts, and environmentalism - themes that were overlooked at the time but which only make his movies more fascinating as time goes by.

Bigger than Life (1956) is perhaps Ray's masterpiece. The story could almost be an after school special: a suburban father begins taking an experimental drug, which dramatically transforms his personality and nearly destroys his family. In the end, though, he recovers, repents, and the happy family is reconciled. Under another director, Bigger than Life could have been an insufferable message movie. Instead, though, Ray uses this plot to launch a freewheeling critique of American society in the 50s. We begin to understand that Ed Avery, the main character played by James Mason, is not fundamentally changed by the drug - it merely unleashes his suppressed feelings about his life, his family, and his culture. The failings of American education, the obsession of consumerism, the banality of suburban life, the superficial distinctions of class, the realities of a loveless marriage - all are targeted in Bigger than Life.

Part of what makes Ray a great director is his ability to dramatize his themes visually, and Bigger than Life is perhaps the best example. The film is shot in the aspect ratio of 2.55:1, an extremely wide format that allows Ray to fill the frame with revealing details. Consider the way Ray films Avery's house. The house is a typical specimen of suburbia, and would not be out of place in Leave it to Beaver or Father Knows Best. As the film progresses, though, the house becomes a visual representation of Avery's character, an extension of his psyche. The walls of the house are plastered with posters of European cities that Avery will never visit. A deflated football on the mantelpiece is a sad reminder of his fading college football days. The spacious interiors and separation of rooms suggest the estrangement that Avery feels from his family.

Ray, who made some of the great film noirs, is certainly no stranger to shadows. In Bigger than Life, they are everywhere. Initially, most of the interiors are shot with muted colors and low light, but Ray ups the contrast later in the film, setting bright colors against dark shadows. Consider the shot below, in which Avery looms over his son, pressuring him to finish a math problem. So many themes of the movie are present in that one shot: the impossible expectations Avery sets for his son, the God complex that the use of cortisone has given him, the ugly demons that overtake his personality. And perhaps above all, Richie, the son, isolated in the foreground, overwhelmed and silently crying.

Richie, in fact, may be the key to the film. Upon a second viewing, it struck me that the viewer's sympathies - and certainly Ray's - lie almost entirely with this little boy. Richie is the wisest character in the film - the first to notice the effect of the drug on his father, the first to question his father's newfound obsession with spending money, and ultimately the one to call the doctor and make his father stop taking the pills. But Richie's mother dismisses his concerns, and his father considers him a failure. "Childhood is a congenital disease, and the purpose of education is to cure it," Avery says at one point. In the end, Avery gives up on even this cynical mantra, deciding to sacrifice his son in an imitation of Abraham slaughtering Isaac. Until a deus ex machina appears, of course, saving Richie and delivering a happy Hollywood ending.

Despite this obvious compromise, Bigger than Life remains perhaps Ray's greatest film: a social satire posing as a domestic melodrama that becomes something of a horror film. It is a movie of ideas, but these ideas never overtake the film's emotional center - Richie. He stands for his entire generation, I think, and he shares some affinities with the hero of Ray's previous film - James Dean's Jimmy Stark. It is easy to see how Richie, too, could become a rebel without a cause.

How to describe Johnny Guitar (1954)? François Truffaut put it this way: "It is dreamed, a fairy tale, a hallucinatory Western...Johnny Guitar is the Beauty and the Beast of Westerns, a Western dream. The cowboys vanish and die with the grace of ballerinas." That oft-quoted description comes close to capturing the film's wonderful strangeness, its bizarre remove from its own genre. Here is a Western where the gunslinger is a mopey, laid-back guitar player who hardly influences the action at all. The real drama, and indeed the final shootout, is between two women: Joan Crawford's Vienna, a saloon owner who is being run out of town, and Mercedes McCambridge's Emma, a Puritanical cattle rancher who wants her gone. The ostensible cause of the women's enmity is the love of a man, but the film is rife with barely concealed lesbian tension. "I never met a woman that was more man," a bartender says of Vienna, and Emma seems oblivious of all men in her quest to bring down Vienna.

The plot is patently ridiculous, the colors are outlandish, and the film has few of the traditional pleasures of the Western. It's easy to see, then, how Johnny Guitar has become something of a cult classic; it's also easy to see how it could be dismissed as little more than an eccentric example of genre revisionism. But the movie is better than that. Despite all of its ludicrous trappings, the true story of Johnny Guitar is a sincere, affecting one. It reiterates Ray's perpetual themes of loners and outsiders. Vienna is a woman hardened by life and unrequited love, who builds her saloon as a kind of haven. Johnny is a wanderer who returns to his ex-lover, Vienna, for a few days of happiness before Emma's posse descends on the saloon and ruins their paradise.

Johnny Guitar is also an unapologetic commentary on McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklist. About halfway through the film, Sheriff McIvers (Ward Bond) is desperate to frame someone for the robbery of a stagecoach, and his gang try to make townspeople testify against each other - a clear parallel to the House Un-American Activities Committee and their attempts to root out suspected Communists. The issue would certainly have had personal significance to Ray. His political views leaned towards the left, and many of his closest collaborators - among them Johnny Guitar's screenwriter Ben Maddow, and Humphrey Bogart - had been targeted by HUAC. Ray dresses the sheriff's gang in matching black, and arranges them in diagonal formations that suggest their gang mentality.

What emerges from Johnny Guitar most clearly, though, apart from these political overtones, is a sense of doomed romanticism. Ray's vivid use of color and space, the melancholic score, and the script's surprisingly moving romantic exchanges do indeed create a dreamlike quality, as suggested by Truffaut. This is not a hard-hitting Western, but a sensitive, passionate one, in which the characters all seem to be wounded and yearning for love.

Wind Across the Everglades (1958) is obscure even by Ray's standards. It was never released on VHS, let alone DVD, and its two main stars were hardly A-listers: Burl Ives and Christopher Plummer. What's more, it has to be asked if it is a Nicholas Ray film at all. The movie was the brainchild of screenwriter Budd Schulberg, and was produced by his brother Stuart; when they were unhappy with Ray's style, they fired him and Budd directed the rest of the film. The critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has described it as "a kind of litmus test for auteurists," and from that perspective it is a fascinating case study.

Unfortunately, and perhaps inevitably, the movie itself is somewhat choppy. Schulberg so resented Ray that he threw away much of his footage, and the narrative is not easy to follow. The story is set in early 19th century Florida, and concerns a game warden (Christopher Plummer) who comes to enforce conservation laws and goes up against a violent bird poacher (Burl Ives). There is also a romantic subplot that goes nowhere.

Wind Across the Everglades plays like a rough draft of a film that, if polished, could have become something much greater. Nonetheless, the movie is not without interest. For a 1958 film, it is curiously modern in its depiction of the environment. The opening scene depicts, in a documentarylike fashion, how the whims of women's fashion nearly decimated the population of birds in Florida. The main character, moreover, is a strident conservationist who pits himself against a ruthless hunter. The relationship between these two men is the core of the film. Both men are, in their own way, outcasts from society. Despite their professional differences, the two men unite over a drinking game, in an extended scene that seems spontaneous and improvised. Alas, such improvisational techniques are what got Ray fired from the film.

Wind Across the Everglades is less than the sum of its parts, but in some scenes Ray's brilliance is clearly evident. Ray's visual gifts are on full display, though this time he largely trains his camera on beautiful wildife exteriors, as opposed to the interiors of Bigger than Life and Johnny Guitar. A subplot involving a Native American is a classic example of Ray's outsider theme, and the performances he coaxes from the actors are uniformly strong. One only wishes that Ray had been allowed to see his vision through from beginning to end.

What makes a great director? For the famous critic Andrew Sarris, it was the presence of a theme. For Orson Welles and the New Wave critics, it was the extent to which the work represented the man who made it. Others might point to style, or influence. Whatever the criteria, Nicholas Ray seems to have it all.

Apologies for the delay with this post! When I saw these films in July at the Harvard Film Archive, I never expected that it would take 5 months to write the blog post on them. Hopefully, with my college apps almost done, I will have more time for blogging in the future.

7 Women (1966)

Few directors loom larger in American cinema than John Ford, and few directors are so commonly oversimplified. I make no pretensions of being a Ford scholar, but as I have explored his films over the past few months, I have not been satisfied with any of the generalizations typically applied to him. It has been said that he is primarily a director of Westerns. True, Ford's Westerns are the best-remembered of his films, but his filmography extends far beyond that genre. It has been said that he was a workmanlike director, who saw directing as a job rather than an art. That is certainly the impression that Ford conveyed in his interviews, yet his films are graced with an undeniable artistry, in his painterly compositions and the themes that repeatedly express themselves in his work. It has been said that he was a stoutly conservative man, who could even be backwards in his depictions of race, yet socially conscious films like The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and later Westerns like Sergeant Rutledge (1960) and Cheyenne Autumn (1964) contradict this theory. In short, Ford remains something of an enigma to me. Although he is quickly becoming one of my favorite directors, I can never quite pin him down.

Case in point: 7 Women (1966). Ford's final film was derided upon its release, as was much of his later work, as being the work of a man past his prime. A few film critics and Ford scholars have challenged that consensus, but the film still doesn't hold much of a reputation - meaning, inevitably, that it is unavailable on DVD and remains something of an obscurity. That is a shame, because 7 Women is one of Ford's most fascinating films: imperfect, yes, but distinguished by subtleties of character, a claustrophobic visual style, and a harsh cynicism that masks a kind of humanism.

In its broadest outlines, 7 Women could almost pass for a Western: in the middle of the wilderness, a group of bandits descends on an isolated outpost of civilization. However, the setting is 1935 China, the bandits are Mongolian warriors, and the outpost isn't a stagecoach or a frontier town but a Christian mission. The mission is run by Agatha Andrews (Margaret Leighton), a rigidly pious woman who betrays almost no warmth, except to Emma (Sue Lyon), a teenage girl whom she has taken under her wing. The other missionaries include a pregnant middle-aged woman, her husband, and several refugees from other missions who seek shelter after theirs is destroyed by the bandits.

This uneasy mixture is thrown into further distress upon the arrival of Dr. Cartwright (Anne Bancroft), a cynical and atheistic doctor who outspokenly challenges the beliefs and values of the missionaries. Much of the early drama of the film is psychological, as Cartwright wins the admiration of Emma and brings forth the repressed emotions of the women. Later, the drama becomes more pronounced, as a cholera epidemic rages through the mission and the bandits arrive.

It is curious that Ford, whose films are so populated with strong masculine characters, should choose as his last film a movie with an almost entirely female cast. What is more curious about 7 Women is its tone. Even in Ford's more "serious" films, like The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, there is quite a bit of comic relief, usually in the form of Andy Devine or John Qualen. But in 7 Women, the mood is consistently somber and ominous. There is a line early on that sets the mood for the rest of the film, as the frenzied Florrie Pethers shrieks out, "This is the last place on Earth!"

That kind of apocalyptic foreboding is well matched with Ford's visual style. Like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 7 Women was shot largely on studio sets rather than on location. Gone are the panoramic vistas of The Searchers and Ford's other Westerns. Instead, the movie has a decidedly artificial feel. The characters hardly ever leave the confines of the missionary; when they do, they merely stand outside the gates and muse about an outside world over which they have no control. As such, there is a palpable sense of confinement. Ford's use of color, too, is quite atypical. In contrast to the bright hues of, say, The Quiet Man, 7 Women is dark. Muddy browns, dirty greys, and dark purples are ever present.


With all of these anomalies, it can be difficult to look at 7 Women from an auteurist perspective. It doesn't really feel like a John Ford film. With the pronounced and dramatic use of interior space and the lesbian undertones of one relationship, it could almost pass for a Nicholas Ray movie.* Yet upon closer examination, the movie betrays several of Ford's recurring themes. One is the idea of community and tradition. In movies like The Quiet Man (set in rural Ireland) and The Sun Shines Bright (set in the American South), Ford explores the dynamics of fixed communities and their responses to change. His point of view is usually mixed: a combination of affection towards their traditions and criticism regarding their somewhat backwards ways. 7 Women illustrates this principle. Many of the missionaries - the self-described "soldiers in the army of the Lord" - are admirable characters that elicit our sympathies. But Miss Andrews is depicted in a rather unflattering light, as an unthinkingly stubborn adherent to an outdated form of Christianity. In the end, she is doomed to irrelevance, as all of the other missionaries come to reject and ignore her.

The real hero of 7 Women is Cartwright, the atheist. It seems odd that Ford, a devout Catholic, would celebrate her, but then again Cartwright is in many ways the embodiment of the Fordian hero - an outsider, tough, outspoken, brave, and yet compassionate. In the final scenes of the film, Cartwright must sacrifice herself to save the other women. This decision is not revealed with any teary speeches, but simply as the resolve of a woman who knows what she must do. The final moments of the movie are all the more moving because they seem so distanced and cold. There is no sentimentality, and the way Ford chooses to end the movie is brilliant - jarring, disturbing, and not easy to forget.

What, then, can explain the movie's negative reception, and its current obscurity? For one, several of the performances - particularly the supporting ones - are quite simply bad. Sue Lyon is wooden and bland; Betty Field is shrill and irritating. The script showcases some truly bizarre dialogue. And the portrayal of the bandits as a bunch of greasy, brawny musclemen randomly given to fits of uncontrollable laughter is more unintentionally funny than frightening.

Still, these are ultimately minor shortcomings in one of Ford's richest and strangest movies. It is telling that he himself considered it one of his best, and was deeply disappointed by the public's lack of interest. After 7 Women, plans for at least one more film fell through, and Ford retired from filmmaking. But it is a fitting capstone to his career, and the final scene takes on greater significance in this context. "So long, ya bastard!" Cartwright exclaims in a final act of defiance, and we are reminded of that gruff Irishman whose film this was, uncompromising to the end.

*About Ray - I initially planned to make the next post about him. But I saw "7 Women" and felt compelled to write about it. The next entry will be about three Nicholas Ray films, though - "Bigger than Life," "Johnny Guitar," and "Wind Across the Everglades."

Sunrise (1927)

Quick trivia question: what was the first Academy Award winner for Best Picture? The official answer is 1927's Wings, directed by William A. Wellman. But in fact, there were two winners that year: Wings won for "Best Production" but F.W. Murnau's Sunrise won for "Unique and Artistic Production." Over time, the dichotomy between those two films has grown even sharper: Wings, a romantic, expensive World War I spectacle, has all but receded from memory - or to be more accurate, is more remembered in name than for its artistic merits. Sunrise, on the other hand, was largely ignored by audiences upon its initial release, but has since become a film school staple and is widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made. Indeed, the greatness of Sunrise lies not only in its importance to film history - for combining the sensibilities of German and American filmmaking, and for its array of innovative visual and aural effects - but also in its sheer beauty. This is not a stuffy old silent film, but one of the most ravishing and lyrical films I know.

To summarize Sunrise is to trivialize it. The film involves three main characters: The Man (George O'Brien), The Wife (Janet Gaynor), and The Woman from the City (Margaret Livingston). The Man is a farmer who begins an affair with The Woman, who then convinces him to drown his wife. The Man brings his wife out on a boat to do the deed, but cannot go through with it. The rest of the film concerns The Man's attempt to repair and renew his relationship with The Wife.

Right down to the lack of character names, Sunrise has the potential for a simplistic, treacly allegory. That it is something more is above all a tribute to F.W. Murnau. Murnau was one of the most significant pioneers of German Expressionism - a bold, exaggerated style that utilized high contrast cinematography, oblique angles, and shadows to great effect. It was a style most famously used in horror (Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) and sci-fi (Metropolis); it also provided part of the inspiration for American film noir. Sunrise does not sound like it would need this kind of treatment. But Murnau uses it to explore the dark side of its protagonist's heart.

Murnau's visual style in the opening and closing scenes - looming shadows, canted angles, and dimly lit shots - reflect The Man's estrangement from his wife, and his tortured sense of guilt. At the beginning of the movie, this estrangement is out of choice; The Man chooses to abandon his wife to elope with another woman. By the end of the movie, the two have reconciled, but after a fateful storm, The Man believes he has lost his wife forever. In shots like the one below, Murnau seems to suggest that without his wife, The Man is quite literally a shadow of his former self.Murnau's visual mastery also extends to his use of superimpositions. Several times throughout the film, Murnau uses these layered images to explore the characters' dreams, hopes, feelings, fears, and nightmares. This kind of effect could be cooked up easily today, but in Murnau's time, it was a painstaking process. Whatever the limitations of the technology, though, the superimpositions still hold up today as evocative, sensuous, telling images.
I've barely scratched the surface of Murnau's innovations. I could also point to his roving camera, in an era when cameras were bulky and usually kept stationary. I could mention his use of Movietone, an early soundtrack system, to include not only a classical film score but also numerous sound effects. But the real genius of Murnau's film is how seamlessly these techniques are woven into the fabric of the story. His direction is never intrusive or distracting, and he knows when to simply pull back and observe. During the long reconciliation scene, Murnau leaves most of the heavy lifting to his wonderful, expressive actors.

I'm reluctant to call any film perfect, but Sunrise comes as close as any film I've seen. The movie was initially overshadowed by movies like Wings as well as The Jazz Singer, the first talkie, released the same year. Within a few years, silent films would be all but obsolete in Hollywood. Yet Sunrise reveals all the possibilities of that medium, and achieves a level of purity and simplicity that few films can claim. With silent films as great as this, who needs sound anyway?

Coming soon to the blog: a trio of Nicholas Ray films!

Make Way For Tomorrow (1937)

Upon first glance, Make Way For Tomorrow looks like an awfully treacly, didactic melodrama. The movie opens with a shot of the sky, a bombastic music cue, and a title card outlining the major themes of the movie - the "painful gap" between "the aged and the young." The whole thing caps off with "the ancient words of a very wise man - HONOR THY FATHER AND THY MOTHER." Thankfully, though, this well-meaning but rather overstated opening is hardly indicative of the film that follows. On the contrary - Make Way for Tomorrow is a remarkably subtle film, full of quiet observational grace. It regards its characters honestly, objectively, in all their faults and failings. And yet the movie balances this objectivity with deeply felt empathy. Though the film is 73 years old and tells a simple story of an elderly couple cast out of their home, it is universal in the way that it shows how we all live our lives.

As the film begins, the elderly Lucy (Beulah Bondi) and her husband Bark (Victor Moore) gather their children to make an announcement: they have lost their home to a bank, and need to move out in a few days. None of the children claim to have the resources to support both parents, so as a "temporary measure" Lucy stays with their son Robert (Thomas Mitchell), while Bark goes with their daughter Cora. The children assure their parents that everything will work out, but as Bark is quick to mention, "It never has worked for any one else."

The film picks up with the parallel stories of Lucy and Bark trying to cope with their new separate lives. Robert, ever the devoted son, looks kindly after his mother, but his wife Anita (Fay Bainter) and daughter Rhoda (Barbara Read) see her as little more than a nuisance. Bark, meanwhile, makes friends with a local Jewish storekeeper (Maurice Moscovitch), but otherwise feels neglected by his own family.

And so Make Way for Tomorrow proceeds - moment by moment, dealing in insightful observations rather than dramatic revelations. The story may sound slight, but the film's profundity lies in its details - in the embarrassed looks exchanged by the children in regards to their parents, in the way that Bark and Lucy withhold their emotions from their children, in the way actress Beulah Bondi delivers simple lines like "Don't worry about me" while suggesting so much more. Every scene of this film is full of such moments - details of family life that are so honest and observant that they can be painful.

The cast (largely unknown, but uniformly strong) and the writers certainly deserve praise, but at least equally important is the man behind the camera: Leo McCarey. McCarey is not remembered today; perhaps he worked in too many genres to be easily pinned down as an auteur. Moreover, McCarey follows the classical Hollywood tradition of invisible style: the camera shows only what needs to be shown, and the style never draws attention to itself. Still, this is surely one of the film's assets. Not a shot is wasted, and the whole movie unfolds with economy and precision. McCarey always knows where to place the camera. Consider an early scene, when Lucy loudly talks on the phone to Bark, interrupting the bridge game of Robert, Anita, and friends. For most of the scene, McCarey uses two camera set-ups, cutting back and forth between the two. The first shows Lucy in the foreground, with the scowling bridge players in the background. The second is a reverse-shot, isolating Lucy in the background while placing the others in the foreground.Those two shots are deceptively simple. McCarey is actually breaking one of the fundamental principles of continuity editing: the 18o degree rule. In doing so, McCarey creates a tone of awkward embarassment, revealing how oblivious Lucy is to her surroundings. But he also allows us, literally and emotionally, to see both sides of the scene. In the shot of Lucy in the foreground, we see Lucy's excited expressions, hear the happiness in her voice, and as a result empathize with her. In the second shot, we realize just how loud Lucy is, and how she is disrupting the game, and thus empathize with the bridge players. That seemingly simple camera setup is really a microcosm of what makes the film great: an ability to be objective about the story, to understand multiple sides of an issue.

As mentioned earlier, McCarey largely adheres to the invisible style of Hollywood filmmaking. But within the boundaries of that tradition, his shots are often rife with meaning. This ironic shot shows Lucy and Bark gazing at a window display with the advice, "Save While You Are Young" - exactly what they both failed to do.


That shot takes place near the end of the film, when Lucy and Bark are reunited in New York. They spend a few precious hours together - walking in parks, going to restaurants, visiting a hotel they both stayed at, talking about the past - before Bark must leave on a train for California. He is to move in with another son there; Lucy will be sent to a rest home in New York. It is in this final passage that all of the movie's themes become clear. "I figure that everyone is entitled to just so much happiness in life," Lucy tells Bark. "Some get in the beginning, and some in the middle, and others at the end. And there are those who have it spread thin all through the years." Lucy and Bark get one last day of happiness together, and then Bark leaves. In the final shot, Lucy gazes after the departing train, watches it go, and turns to leave the frame as it fades to black.

The studio tried to impose a happy ending, but McCarey refused. As it is, the ending is devastating but perfect. A happy ending would have been a betrayal of the movie's themes. It is a movie that contains great love and joyous moments, but more importantly it is about life's little disappointments, about how bad things can happen to good people for no reason. The title, I think, is ironic. This is not a cautionary tale about preparing for the future. In fact, the movie seems to say that we cannot prepare for what will happen. Tomorrow makes way for itself.

After years of being unavailable on video, Make Way for Tomorrow was released on DVD earlier this year as part of The Criterion Collection. It's certainly well worth your time to catch up with this neglected classic.

The Human Condition (1959-1961)

Masaki Kobayashi's The Human Condition is exactly what it sounds like - a long, sprawling, grandiose epic about war and heroism and patriotism and humanity and a whole variety of other things. Unsurprisingly, it is overlong and overambitious. More surprisingly, it is often a bore. The first film in the trilogy is at least engaging as a conventional war story and character study, but the second and third parts become so prolonged and predictable that when the trilogy finally stopped in its tracks, nine and a half hours after it started, I had lost interest. There is a lot of money thrown at the screen, and a lot of speechifying, and many pretty widescreen vistas. But none of that can hide the film's lack of a meaningful insight into any of the themes it considers.

The Human Condition was originally released as three films, each about three hours long. In Part 1, we are introduced to the protagonist, Kaji (Tatsuya Nakadai), a young management trainee who gets appointed to the position of a labor camp supervisor in Manchuria during World War Two. There, he tries to implement his socialist ideals in the treatment of the workers, but is opposed by an immoral and rigidly bureaucratic military system. In Part Two, Kaji becomes a soldier in the Imperial Army and is sent to the front lines. In Part Three, a disillusioned Kaji deserts in order to return to his wife Michiko (Michiyo Aratama).

If that plots sounds awfully tidy, it's because it is. From very early on, we know where this is heading. The film follows a linear decline: as time progresses, Kaji's circumstances become more dire, he becomes increasingly cynical, and the film's mood becomes all the more somber, its tone all the more self-serious. Even with nine and a half hours to spare, Kobayashi finds little time to develop his characters in any but the most basic ways. Kaji does change over the course of the trilogy, but his development seems perfunctory, always at the service of the plot and Kobayashi's grand thematic aspirations. The films were based on a six-part novel, and apparently Kobayashi was so enamored of it that he cut almost nothing from the book. But his slavish devotion to the arc of the novel doesn't give the film any room to breathe.

On a technical level, The Human Condition is somehow less than the sum of its parts. Kobayashi hired a new cinematographer, Yoshio Miyajima, specifically for the film. He also employed a then-innovative widescreen film format called Grandscope. Kobayashi's direction is clean and clear, but also rather dull. The camera seems to merely record the action. There are many wide shots of landscapes, but one gets the impression that Kobayashi and Miyajima are merely straining for grandeur; the shots lack depth and meaning. In terms of music, Kobayashi lays it on pretty thick, employing loud, bombastic swells to call our attention to anything particularly dramatic.

For a while, The Human Condition gets by on the strength of its cast. As Kaji, Nakadai is eminently likable, and convincing in his descent from sincere idealist to disillusioned cynic. Aratama, playing his wife, is equally good in what could have been a thankless supporting role. These two actors keep the audeience interested, even as the plot follows its all-too-predictable course.

The Human Condition is perhaps most interesting as a social and political document. Released 15 years after the end of World War two, the film - which depicts the entire Japanese army as a corrupt and outdated institution - was enormously popular in Japan. That says a lot about the nation's postwar attitude. The film's existential concerns also clarify why it was so popular; such themes were the staple of 60's "arthouse" cinema.

Still, the fact that the film's social and political context is its most interesting aspect suggests a larger truth - that over time, The Human Condition has become dated and esoteric rather than universal. Kobayashi's literal-minded and heavy-handed apporach to the film renders it curiously unaffecting. It seems to me the Japanese equivalent of a particularly overwrought Hollywood epic, or maybe a Japanese imitation of a David Lean film. Perhaps the only reason why this film is so revered, why the critic David Shipman called it "unquestionably the greatest film ever made," is that it comes dressed up in subtitles and a long running time, making it seem worth more than it really is.

Nashville (1975)

A minor controversy arose in the online film scene this past October, when Richard Schickel, film historian and critic for Time magazine, launched a scathing critique of Robert Altman in the LA Times. The occasion was a new book, Robert Altman: The Oral Biography, but Schickel spent most of the article denouncing Altman's personal failings, in addition to spouting out pithy attacks on his films ("To make sure the audience never quite understood what was going on, he overlapped dialogue..."). Schickel concludes that Altman's films are hopelessly dated, and will not "survive as anything more than historical curiosities."

A film like Nashville is undoubtedly emblematic of its times - what with the long hair, the hippies, the drugs, and the music. But what Altman manages to do is create a sardonic commentary on the times posing as a celebration of them. For a director whose films supposedly resemble "someone else's not-very-interesting drug haze," as Schickel claims, Nashville is quite critical of the 70s generation, revealing the hypocrisies that lie beneath the world of politics and the entertainment industry.

In describing Nashville, I am reminded of Mark Twain's preface to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: "persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." Like many of Altman's films, Nashville is essentially a series of character sketches and vignettes loosely tied to a main idea. The film follows no fewer than 24 major characters - a motley crew of hippies, folk singers, housewives, country stars, reporters, and political campaigners - as they descend on Nashville for a benefit concert. The candidate is Hal Phillip Walker of the "Replacement Party" - never seen, though his voice can be heard delivering speeches from his seemingly omnipresent van.

Using the campaign as a springboard, Altman paints a huge, sprawling canvas of American life. Altman follows dozens of storylines and fills each of his widescreen compositions with detail. His camera is fluid, constantly shifting perspective and revealing new details, making us an active observer. Aside from its technical feats, though, Nashville has grand thematic ambitions. The film is essentially an ironic response to Watergate; Altman contrasts the patriotic American ideals celebrated in the upcoming bicentennial with their seeming irrelevance in a disillusioned America. The whole tone of the film is set by the first song, a patriotic anthem sung by country star Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson) that includes the not-so-inspiring chorus "We must be doing something right to last 200 years."

That song is the first of many in the film; Altman has even classified Nashville as a musical. Certainly the songs are central to the film, helping to establish mood and develop character. (Almost all of the songs were written by the actors specifically for their roles). One of the most famous is Keith Carradine's "I'm Easy," sung in one of the film's greatest scenes. Carradine's character, a womanizing folk singer named Tom Frank, takes the stage at a local bar and dedicates the song to "someone special who just might be here tonight." Three women - Tom's habitual fling, Mary (Cristina Raines), Geraldine Chaplin's kooky BBC reporter, and a groupie played by Shelley Duvall - all think that the song is about them. But Tom is actually playing to Linnea Reese (Lily Tomlin), a housewife and gospel singer that caught his eye at a recording studio a few days ago. They go to bed, of course, but Linnea decides that the affair must go no further, and she returns to her family. Tom tries to incite jealousy by calling another woman, but Linnea remains strong and leaves with dignity. That scene alone, so rich with restrained emotion and subtle characterization, reveals what a terrific director of actors Altman was.

And it is moments like that which make Nashville so rewarding. For all of his cynical commentary on hypocrisy, Altman makes us genuinely care for his characters. So many of them seem adrift - the lonely old man with the dying wife; the waitress who wants to be a singer but can't sing; the country star's son, who manages his father's career but has no life of his own. In many ways, Nashville is about the ways that these characters envelop themselves in patriotic ideals, in country music - in anything - to make themselves feel better. That theme is there in the first song, and it's there in the last one. After an assassination occurs at the benefit concert, a wannabe country singer takes the stage to lead the crowd in a song called "It Don't Worry Me." "You might say that I ain't free, but it don't worry me," they all sing.

Is that song a stirring hymn of unity, or a feeble attempt to cover up a sad reality? Altman doesn't tell us what to think, and the film's ambiguity is what makes it so fascinating - and so frustrating to viewers like Schickel. Since seeing Nashville last month, I have read a number of reviews and essays concerning the film, but I am still far from penetrating its mystery. Altman once said that it depressed him when people told him they had seen one of his films, when what they meant was that they had seen it once. Coming from the man who made Nashville, you can see why.

****/****

Network (1976)

Sidney Lumet's Network, like The Graduate, is a genre-bender of such generational importance and undeniable power that it is at first easy to overlook its flaws. Most of these trace back to Paddy Chayefsky's script, one of the most acclaimed in American film. It is an astute and prescient satire of American culture, yes, but it also has the unfortunate tendency to devolve into caricature and a lot of speechifying.

Network focuses on the fictional, lowly-rated television network UBS. When longtime, washed-up news anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch) is fired, he announces on the air that he will kill himself. The controversy attracts much attention, so Beale is exploited and reinvented as "the mad prophet of the airwaves." Max Schumacher (William Holden), Beale's longtime friend and colleague, is fired and replaced by programmers Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway) and Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall), who will stop at nothing to get high ratings.

What is admirable about Network is the prophetic nature of its satire. Many things about Network are unbelievable, but the trashy Howard Beale Show looks more and more familiar every year. Years ahead of his time, Chayefsky seems to have predicted today's profusion of tawdry talk shows and mindless reality TV. And yet he is not so naive as to assume that things were ever entirely different. The film's moral center is Max Schumacher, Holden's character, who fancies himself an emblem of respectable journalism. Yet even he goes along with the Beale hysteria at first, only protesting when he is fired. No one is let off the hook in Network - least of all the TV viewers themselves, who are portrayed as passive, complacent players in the whole machine. An extremely cynical view, yes, but one the film expresses quite cleverly. In the movie's most famous scene, young people from all across the country, prompted by Beale's mad ramblings, yell out the window that they're "mad as hell and not going to take it anymore," a line regurgitated by an eager audience before each taping of the show. It is a frightening scene, and one that perfectly expresses how the masses can get behind a mindless catchphrase while thinking they are saying something meaningful.*

That is a skillful device, but much of Chayefsky's script suffers from a lack of such invention. Rather, he resorts to characters dishing out carefully worded monologues. Mind you, they sound great - until you realize that no one speaks that way in person. Chayefsky's script also suffers from tonal inconsistency, bouncing somewhat incongruously from satire to farce to drama. And many of his supporting characters are goofy caricatures; actors like Peter Finch, Ned Beatty, and Robert Duvall have little to do but rant and rave. The only actors who manage to give fully rounded performances are Faye Dunaway, William Holden, and Beatrice Straight in a small role as Holden's wife. Holden, especially, is terrific, injecting his role with sarcastic bite while remaining a likable, flawed character who is fully aware of his faults and limitations.

If there is one person who elevates Network to something greater than the sum of its parts, I am convinced it is Sidney Lumet. The director lacks any obvious auteurist touches, but as with 12 Angry Men, he does a superb job of building dramatic tension. Network also reveals that Lumet has a talent for comedy, and he never lets the film become too self-important. Finally, Lumet and his cinematographer Owen Roizman create a series of memorable images, from the famous "mad as hell" scene to the final, indicting shot.

In the end, the overall effect of Network is so powerful that its many imperfections almost seem not to matter. In one of the film's most affecting scenes, Holden asks Dunaway to love him, "primal doubts and all." She cannot accept him that way, but I embrace Network, inherent flaws and all.

Verdict: B+

*I don't mean to get political, but I keep thinking of this video.

The Searchers (1956)

Of all the canonical classics of American cinema, few are as highly disputed as The Searchers. It has been called the "Great American Film," and a generation of filmmakers, critics, and moviegoers have imbued it with an almost mythic stature. Yet a new generation of moviegoers have questioned its reputation, focusing on its perceived racism and jarring variations in tone. I find the accusations of racism hard to fathom, though The Searchers is far from politically correct. However, The Searchers is flawed in several important ways, most of them tracing back to the script.

As the film begins, crusty Civil War veteran Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) arrives at his brother Aaron’s ranch in Texas. Shortly afterwards, a Comanche raid leaves all but Aaron’s two daughters killed. Ethan sets off with a search party to rescue the two girls, but soon all have abandoned the quest except for Ethan and Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), Aaron’s adopted son. As the years go by, the racist Ethan becomes intent upon killing the lone survivor, Debbie, believing that after years of living with Indians she is beyond saving.

This central arc of The Searchers is compelling, but unfortunately screenwriter Frank S. Nugent surrounds it with a meandering romantic subplot. In several scenes, Jeffrey Hunter and Vera Miles play out a contrived romance which only serves to distract from the main story. Nugent’s script is also flawed in its treatment of the supporting characters, most of whom are caricatures being played for laughs. The comedy often sinks quite low – in fact, a big joke is made out of a large Indian woman being kicked down a hill. The script is altogether too comic, a flaw which often undermines the film’s suspense and the film’s tone in general.

What cannot be argued with, though, is John Ford’s superb direction. Monument Valley, no doubt a stunning vista on its own, becomes even more breathtaking when filtered through Ford’s discerning camera. Few films capture so well the beauty and breadth of the natural world, along with the inherent dangers that go with it. Ford also displays his skill for choreographing exciting and suspenseful action sequences. It is no surprise to see how often the film’s shots are quoted, in films ranging from Star Wars to Lawrence of Arabia to Kill Bill.

Yet Ford’s skill does not lie only in the cinematography. He takes a rather conventional Western script and draws out universal themes like obsession and the nature of heroism. This is done completely without pretension, and Ford never seems to stretch to lofty artistic ambitions. The Searchers reveals what a master Ford is, as he simultaneously delivers an entertaining Western movie and elevates it to something far more lyrical.

Still, I cannot pretend that The Searchers is the masterpiece that so many claim. I think the film's supporters tend to ignore the buffoonery of the supporting characters and the many imperfections of the script. It is one of the landmark Westerns, no doubt (though I prefer both My Darling Clementine and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance). But one of the greatest films ever made? That'll be the day.

Verdict: B

Persona (1966)

If there were ever a definitive answer to what Persona all meant, I would not want to hear it. Countless theories have tried to make sense of its enigmatic characters, of its surreal, seemingly random images, and of just what Ingmar Bergman was trying to say. Wisely, Bergman never commented on the film's meaning, preferring to let the film speak for itself. And so it does, 43 years after the fact. Persona is more disturbing than most horror films, more emotionally devastating than most dramas, and altogether more satisfying than almost any film I have seen.

The setup for this complex film is deceptively simple. Alma (Bibi Andersson) is a young nurse assigned to take care of Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullmann), an actress who one day stopped talking after a performance. As Alma's superior informs her, there is nothing physically or mentally wrong with Elisabet - she just refuses to speak. Alma is ordered to look after Elisabet at an isolated seaside home for the summer. Alma at first enjoys their time together, but as she spills more and more of her private life, Alma begins to break down.

"The human face is the great subject of the cinema. Everything is there." Bergman himself said that, and Persona is perhaps the greatest expression of this belief. The startling cinematography, by Sven Nykvist, often lingers on the actresses' faces in long, revealing close-ups. At other times, he frames shots so that the two actresses seem to be mirror images of each other, on opposite sides of the frame. Nykvist and Bergamn also constantly experiment with light and shadow, background and foreground. As a result, every shot looks gorgeous - and not just superficially, either, for this is a film in which every shot reflects, on an aesthetic level, the film's themes. The most dramatic example comes at the film's climax, when Bergman fuses the two women's faces together in an expression of how the characters' personalities have merged.

None of this would matter, of course, if it weren't for the actresses, who play off each other in consistently fascinating ways. Ullman is a tranquil, ethereal presence as the silent Elisabet. Andersson is equally brilliant as Alma, who initially comes off as composed and controlled, but is in fact full of doubts and insecurities. In one of the film's most famous scenes, Alma tells Elisabet about a sexual encounter she had with two strange boys at a beach. Bergman pulls no punches with describing the graphic details, and Andersson is compelling as her character confronts her guilt over aborting the child that resulted. Indeed, the film is full of such darkly compelling monologues. One, spoken by Alma near the end of the film, is actually spoken twice - once, with the camera focused on Elisabeth, and once with the camera focused on Alma. This seems tedious at first, but it serves the useful purpose of showing how inseparable these two women's experiences are.

This may all sound like pretentious, pseudo-psychological nonsense, but I assure you that Persona is nothing of the sort. Bergman's film may be ambiguous, but it is not esoteric. Persona is a true joy to watch, enveloping us in its spell. From the very first frame, I was utterly captivated by the film - so much so that I watched it again two days later with the same fascination. I also recently watched Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup, and was struck by how dated and stuffy it seemed in comparison - more of an intellecutal exercise than a fully formed film. Persona never lets its ideas stifle its emotions, and it is without a doubt one of the most beautiful films I have ever seen. Indeed, on every single front, Persona is that rare film that reminds you of everything that cinema can be.

Verdict: A+

The Graduate (1967)

"Hello darkness my old friend. I've come to speak with you again."

Preview

Those lines, from Simon & Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence", open and close The Graduate and they speak for much of the film's tone. Mike Nichol's film is, in some sense, a sex comedy. It also, in some sense, reflects the spirit of optimism and rebellion that characterized the 60s. Yet the pervading tone is sadness; this is above all a film about alienation and loneliness. The ending of the film is fondly remembered - the film's hero runs off with the girl of his dreams, getting on a bus as they begin their new life together. But the most telling shot comes when the couple sit down, and look at each other. They have nothing to say, nothing to share. There is a distance there that is unsettling. And then the sad chords of "The Sound of Silence" begin as the bus rolls off into an uncertain future.

I have spoiled the ending of the film, but The Graduate is so firmly ingrained in popular culture that I feel little guilt in doing so. Even those who are not familiar with The Graduate can feel its influence today. Of course, it launched the careers of such talented people as Dustin Hoffman and Mike Nichols, but its reach extends further. Released a year before the Summer of Love, The Graduate's frank depictions of sexual activity broke barriers in Hollywood. And it began the trend of popular music being incorporated into movie soundtracks. Yet despite all the imitators, The Graduate remains fresh today.

Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) is the quintessential overachiever - track star, award winner, bright young scholar. But he returns home after college with no idea of what to do with his life. Soon enough, he becomes seduced by one of his parent's friends, the attractive Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft). But soon after the affair breaks off, Benjamin falls in love with Mrs. Robinson's daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross).

This kind of material could be the stuff of soap opera, but not here. The film's director, Mike Nichols, initially looked for a typical Californian type - tall, blond, muscular - to play Benjamin. But Hoffman's nervous mannerisms won Nichols over, and the film is the better for it. Benjamin feels like an authentic person, as does Anne Bancroft's Mrs. Robinson, who hides a history of alcoholism and unhappiness behind her sexy sophistication. The two are also gifted comic actors, and the early seduction scenes are hilarious, and rightfully famous.
The Graduate is not a film that lives and dies by its acting, however. Director Nichols demonstrates an evident visual flair. At the very beginning of the film, I was struck by the simple image of a sad-looking Benjamin, in profile, gliding across a moving walkway at the airport. Throughout the film, Nichols create similar compositions that suggest Benjamin's utter loneliness. In one, he sits in a water suit at the bottom of an abandoned pool. In another, he stands in the middle of Elaine's college campus, dwarfed by his surroundings. These carefully composed images greatly enhance the film's mood.

I wish I could say that the film's second half was as good as its first. But Bancroft gets slighted in favor of Katharine Ross, playing her daughter Elaine. Although a great beauty, Elaine is also the dullest character in the film, with no discernible personality. Quite simply, nothing in the second half of the film matches the comedic heights or emotional depths of the first. Another problem throughout the film is the adult supporting actors, who all seem to be playing caricatures of superficial materialists. With the possible exception of Mrs. Robinson, there is not a single likable adult character, and this hamfisted generalization is tedious.

So yes, The Graduate does have its share of problems. But it casts such a captivating, almost effortless spell that its shortcomings are easy to forgive. The film is a snapshot of the 60s, to be sure, but to this day it has lost none of its emotional power. So here's to you, Mrs. Robinson.

Verdict: A-

The Deer Hunter (1978)

When The Deer Hunter opened in 1978, it won five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, and was nominated in many other categories. In 1996, it was chosen for preservation by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." In 1997 and again in 2007, it ranked on the AFI's list of the top 100 American films. Indeed, The Deer Hunter is so firmly established as a masterpiece that to watch it is revelatory. The film I saw was a turgid, predictable, arguably racist film that is only somewhat redeemed by strong performances and a few memorable scenes.

Director Michael Cimino's three-hour Vietnam epic is essentially divided into three acts. The first act introduces us to a group of Pennsylvanian steel workers - Steve (John Savage), Nick (Christopher Walken), and the natural leader of the group, Michael (Robert DeNiro). The three friends celebrate a wedding and go deer hunting before they are eventually sent to Vietnam, which begins the second act. Michael, Nick, and a delirious Steve are prisoners of war, and are forced to play a game of Russian roulette. They eventually escape, but along the way Nick gets left behind. The third act of the film deals with Michael and Steve's attempt to readjust to life in America, while Nick is stuck back in Vietnam.

Each act of the film has its problems, and the first act's problem is a basic one - overlength. There is nothing particularly offensive here, but the setup is tedious, and it seems to go on for ever. The wedding scene - which reeks of an imitation of The Godfather - is a particularly good example. But we also get scenes of the friends at work, at a bar, going hunting, etc. Cimino could probably have established the friendship dynamic in half the time he uses. It is also painfully obvious where the movie is heading in the first act. When Michael promises to Nick that he will never leave him behind in Vietnam, it's obvious that that is exactly what he will do. When Michael shares a dance with Nick's girlfriend Linda (Meryl Streep), we know that they will eventually fall in love. There is very little surprise in The Deer Hunter.

The second act of The Deer Hunter, with the three friends caught in a prison camp and forced to play Russian roulette, has a reputation for being particularly harrowing and disturbing. It is not harrowing - again, it is quite clear who will or will not die during the lethal game, and the scene is curiously devoid of tension. It is disturbing, however, but for all the wrong reasons - not for the violence it depicts, but because of its depiction of the North Vietnamese. All of the Asian characters are sadistic caricatures who gleefully laugh at violence. They are stereotypes, with no sense of humanity. One can easily see why the film was deemed racist upon release, although that word may be putting too fine a point on it. Still, Cimino lacks any sense of racial sensitivity, and the film's one-dimensionality is striking. All the Americans are heroes, and all the North Vietnamese are villains. It doesn't get much deeper than that.

Admittedly, the third act of The Deer Hunter is much stronger than the first two, with many memorable scenes. There is a quietly melancholic scene where Michael returns but can't bring himself to go to his coming-home party. In another scene, Michael explodes with startling anger at his friend Stan (John Cazale), who has been joking around with a pistol. The skilled cast is most responsible for making this material work, depicting the lives of ordinary Americans who are forever shaken after the war. This is best expressed in the film's final scene, which takes place at a dimly lit dinner table after a funeral. After a long, awkward silence, one character begins to hum "God Bless America." Soon all the cast joins in, quietly singing a patriotic tune that takes on a whole new meaning. It is a powerful, darkly ironic scene.

Still, I find The Deer Hunter to be a wildly overrated film. In almost every frame, you can see Cimino straining to make a Great American Epic, but his ambition succeeds his reach. There is nothing innovative or exciting here. It's a rather simplistic film, stretched to three hours and given a reputation that it simply does not deserve.

Verdict: C+

Triple Feature: Taxi Driver (1976) / Goodfellas (1990) / The Departed (2006)

Martin Scorsese is widely hailed as one of the great American directors, yet before I began this blog I had only seen three Scorsese films, and abnormal ones at that – The Last Waltz, No Direction Home, and The Aviator. I have never been particularly attracted by his films’ subject matter, which often tends toward the extremely and unpleasantly violent. But after seeing the astonishing work of filmmaking that is Raging Bull, I decided to catch up with three Scorsese classics. Taxi Driver, which has been called by some the best film of the 70s, is a psychological thriller from the point of view of a mentally unstable cab driver. Goodfellas is Scorsese’s widely praised drama about life in the mob over the course of three decades. And The Departed, the film for which Scorsese finally won an Oscar, is a crime drama about an Irish mob and corruption in the Boston police department.

Taxi Driver is the oldest of the three films, and certainly the most daring. Goodfellas and The Departed, for all their merits, are basically genre films, but Taxi Driver is a bold, unconventional portrait of a man losing his grip on reality. Robert DeNiro, in one of his most famous performances, plays Travis Bickle, a war veteran who is now a taxi driver in New York City. Suffering from insomnia, he spends his sleepless nights shuttling people across the city, always repulsed by what he sees. “All the animals come out at night,” Bickle declares, describing the whores, drug dealers, and addicts he sees every night. “Some day a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets. “ Bickle sees a glimpse of hope in his miserable life when he meets a beautiful young campaign worker (Cybil Shepherd), but their relationship soon backfires. He also gets involved in the life of a 12 year-old prostitute (Jodie Foster), whom he tries to save before it is too late. In the end, alienated by society, Bickle resorts to shocking violence.

When I sat down to watch Taxi Driver, I expected to see a violent revenge movie more than anything else. But the film is deeper than that. It is a contemplative, brooding film about loneliness and alienation. Everything is seen from Bickle’s perspective, and the driving scenes perfectly emphasize his isolation from the rest of society – separated by that little plastic window, mired in shadow, and ignored by his customers, we begin to understand Bickle’s frustration – although the film wisely never tries to explain Bickle’s actions. Rather, it relies on the strength of DeNiro’s performance, who makes the whole thing seem believable.

Yet for all its strengths, I cannot pretend that I walked away from Taxi Driver with any lasting impression, or real insight. There is nothing particularly wrong with the film – DeNiro’s performance is excellent, Bernard Herrmann’s eerie score is memorable, and the cinematography is remarkable. But for all of its efforts to delve into Bickle’s psyche, I never became invested in the character – I always remained emotionally aloof, like Bickle himself.

I was less impressed with Goodfellas, one of Scorsese’s most popular and critically acclaimed films. The film, as its tagline declares, depicts three decades of life in the Mafia. Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) grows up in the 50s in Brookyln, and as a teenager becomes attracted to the allure of Mafia life – the cars, the money, the privileges. Much to the concern of his parents, Henry begins working for the local family, led by Paulie Cicero (Paul Sorvino), and the notoriously violent Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) and Jimmy Conway (Robert DeNiro). Soon, Henry quits school and becomes part of the mob full time. Despite initial happiness, Henry’s lifestyle eventually leads him to a drug addiction, jail time, and an unhappy marriage, before he winds up in FBI Witness Protection limbo, where he still longs to return to the life of a “Goodfella.”

Goodfellas has often been compared to The Godfather, but for me there is no comparison. I will concede that Goodfellas is no doubt the more realistic mob movie – for all of its artistry, The Godfather is somewhat romanticized, the violence buried under slick montages and swelling music. Scorsese doesn’t fall for that – the violence is frequent, graphic, sudden, and often quite shocking. His movie is certainly an accurate portrait of the Mafia in America, and the performances all ring true. The dialogue always seems realistic and spontaneous, never rehearsed. Scorsese also does a suitable job of depicting the allure of Mafia life. The early scenes are at times playful and fun, reflecting Henry’s naïve perspective on the Mafia. “We were treated like movie stars with muscle,” Henry’s narration tells us, “we had it all just for the asking.” This at first glorious life is depicted with great flair in a long tracking shot where Henry and a date skip the line at an expensive restaurant, make their way through the kitchen, and find their seats while everyone else is standing outside in the cold. Of course, Henry’s lifestyle soon backfires into a hopelessly violent and amoral one.

But after a while, it seems like that is all Goodfellas has to offer – a series of violent, unpleasant incidents. The film lacks any basic sense of humanity, like The Godfather had. None of the characters are relatable. None of the characters are remorseful. And the film lacks any sense of elegance or grace. That may seem an odd complaint for a Mafia movie, but compare it to Taxi Driver. Both films deal with violent, disturbing material, but Taxi Driver uses violence sparingly, and does have a certain elegance about it. Goodfellas is just coarse, and in the end Scorsese relies too heavily on gratuitous violence to make his point – and there doesn’t seem to be much of a point anyway.

I will probably sound like a hypocrite for praising The Departed, because it suffers from many of the same flaws as Goodfellas – overlength, excessive violence, an over-reliance on four-letter words. But I found The Departed totally gripping from its first frame. The film begins with a narration by Irish mob boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), who declares, “I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.” In an opening prologue set to the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” Scorsese masterfully sets the scene, depicting Costello’s game – bribing kids off the streets of Boston, pulling them away from the Church and indoctrinating them into his mob. Flash forward many years later, and one such mobster, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) has become a mole in the Special Investigations Unit of the Massachusetts State Police. At the same time, the SIU sends its own mole, Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) into Costello’s gang. Of course, both sides soon become aware of an intruder, and a bloody cat-and-mouse game ensues.

As I mentioned earlier, The Departed is essentially a genre film, a basic crime story– Scorsese isn’t really experimenting here, he’s playing it safe with familiar material. But what a crime movie it is! The whole film crackles along at a galloping pace, propelled by strong performances. Part of the joy of watching The Departed is to see the giants of 70s cinema – actors like Jack Nicholson and Martin Sheen – matched with some of the most talented actors of today, like DiCaprio, Damon, and Mark Wahlberg. The cast is uniformly solid, particularly Nicholson, who is a genuinely frightening presence. The film also has a tremendous sense of location, making full use of its Boston setting. I was skeptical about The Departed – despite its Best Picture win, I had heard criticisms that it was excessively violent, warmed-over Scorsese. Yet all of these criticisms were trampled by the film’s narrative drive, and the sheer talent of all the players involved.

Taxi Driver: B+
GoodFellas: B
The Departed: A-

Apocalypse Now Redux (2001)

Rarely have I been left so utterly speechless at the end of a film than after I finished watching Apocalypse Now Redux. After sitting through Francis Ford Coppola's 3 1/2 hour recut of his 1979 Vietnam epic, I was shocked, terrified, moved, entertained, intellectually stimulated, and speechless. I knew that I had witnessed something extraordinary, but I did not quite know what to make of it. Of course, it is easy to appreciate the technical mastery of the early scenes, with their splendidly choreographed helicopter fights, luscious cinematography, and startling use of sound; the sheer size of the production is incredible. But what to make of the final scenes, in which the protagonist Capt. Willard finally comes face-to-face with the apparently insane Col. Kurtz, who is worshipped like a god in the middle of the Cambodian jungle? This portion of the film is heady and strange, yet there was something undeniably fascinating about it. At the film's end, though not fully understanding the ending, I nonetheless remained convinced that Apocalypse Now was a staggering work of art by one of America's greatest directors.

Apocalypse Now Redux opens with a powerful montage in which Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen) lies in a drunken stupor in his Saigon hotel room, waiting for a new mission. Soon enough, Willard is ordered to sail up the Nung River to Cambodia to find Colonel Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a once-promising soldier who has allegedly gone insane and betrayed the army. Willard's task is to terminate the Colonel's command - "with extreme prejudice." Willard is joined by four other men, and the film tracks their journey upriver to find Kurtz's compound.

Ambitious does not begin to describe Apocalypse Now. The production woes of the film are legendary - Sheen had a heart attack, Brando showed up unprepared and overweight, extreme weather destroyed sets, and principal production ended up taking 238 days to complete. To watch the film is to marvel that Coppola managed to pull it off. The air strike sequence, in which the maniacal Col. Kilgore (Robert Duvall) attacks a Vietnamese village to the tune of “Ride of the Valkyries,” is simply extraordinary. We see the point of view of the helicopters, as they swoop through schoolyards and blow up buildings with missiles, while the villagers scatter. The sheer logistics of directing such a scene, especially in the pre-digital age, are mind-boggling. It is simultaneously one of the most thrilling and disturbing battle sequences I have ever seen.

But the long river journey is the heart and center of Apocalypse Now. Willard’s team is filled with young and innocent soldiers, as Willard’s cynical narration tells us – “rock ‘n’ rollers with one foot in their graves.” There is the seventeen year old Clean (a young Lawrence Fishburne) from “some South Bronx shithole,” a Californian surfer named Lance (Sam Bottoms), the tightly wound “Chef” (Frederic Forrest), and the domineering Chief Phillips (Albert Hall). At first the journey seems almost pleasant – the men water ski, chat amicably, drink booze, and surf. But this feeling soon wears off as the journey continues. They are exposed to war atrocities, are attacked by a tiger, and in one tragic scene, accidentally kill a boatload of civilians. Several die along the way. The rest lose whatever faith in civilization they had.

When the survivors finally pull into Kurtz’s compound, they are greeted by a legion of native soldiers and a stoned American reporter (Dennis Hopper) who babbles on about how Kurtz is a “great man.” The camera passes over details like bloody staircases and decapitated heads without providing any explanation, thus leaving us to question who exactly this Kurtz is. The build-up here is effective, and it works on a parallel level, because of Brando’s reputation as a brilliant but difficult actor. When Kurtz finally appears, he is mired in shadow, a bald, cryptic old sage who cynically calls Willard “an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect the bill.” Brando is a frightening, mysterious, and powerful presence in his few scenes, and it is difficult to imagine any other actor playing the part so successfully.

It is in these final scenes that Apocalypse Now reveals its true ambitions. For all the impressive spectacle of its early scenes, Apocalypse Now remained a somewhat conventional war film. But in this final segment, Coppola dares to show us the darker side of human nature, and to reveal moral complexities. We begin to see Kurtz not as just a raving lunatic but as an ordinary man driven mad by the horrors of war. Yet Coppola offers no easy answers, particularly with an ambiguous ending that plays out like some ancient tribal ritual. This is a film that is meant to challenge, and so Coppola does, with the masterful spell that is Apocalypse Now.

Verdict: A+

Note: I have only seen the 2001 “Redux” version of Apocalypse Now, so all my views here are based on that version.

Double Feature: Day for Night (1973) / 8 1/2 (1963)

“I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between; I am not interested in all those films that do not pulse.”

So said François Truffaut, the renowned French director of such films as The 400 Blows and Jules and Jim. In addition to being one of cinema’s greatest artists, he was also one of its greatest patrons. Truffaut began his career as a film critic, and according to those who knew him, he had an encyclopedic knowledge of films and an unadulterated love for the filmmaking process. That love comes across in his 1973 film Day for Night, which examines the family dynamic that forms between the cast and crew of a lightweight studio film named Meet Pamela. An interesting counterpoint is Federico Fellini’s 8 ½, about a director whose long-in-development film leaves his personal life in ruin. Upon first glance, it would appear that the two films are polar opposites, but both films “pulse” with a creative energy and the joy of cinema that Truffaut was so adamant about.

Every frame of Day for Night is bursting with love for the movie-making process. Truffaut plays Ferrand, the director of the studio comedy Meet Pamela. Jean-Pierre Leaud is Alphonse, the temperamental young star. Jacqueline Bisset plays Julie, a slightly unstable actress who has the title role in Meet Pamela. Truffaut fills out his film with other movie types – the aging supporting actress, the script girl, and various crew members.

Day for Night takes the form of a series of vignettes rather than a developed narrative, giving us a fly-on-the-wall look at life on a movie set. We observe the crew film a busy crowd scene, a car chase stunt, a simple dining room scene, and all the while we pick up on various film-making techniques. We share in the frustrations of the crew, as a cat refuses to lap up milk on cue, or as the aging actress Severine stumbles over her lines. Off set, we witness the relationships that develop among the cast and crew – friendships, romances, flings. All the while, the cast and crew are seen as a family, who share good times and console each other during bad ones.

The center of the film, though, is Ferrand, played by Truffaut as a version of himself. Truffaut once said that when he first saw Citizen Kane, he realized that he had never loved anyone as much as that film. The same would certainly be true of Ferrand, who remains doggedly fixated on making his movie above all else. To be sure, Ferrand develops friendships with his actors, and is never emotionally distant. Yet when Ferrand tries to console Alphonse after a romance gone wrong, his advice is to focus on learning his lines, because “people like you and me are only happy in our work.” That is one of the film’s strongest scenes, and it exemplifies what is so compelling about Day for Night. Not only is Truffaut’s adoration of cinema infectious, but the movie is filled with truthful human relationships.

Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ is also ostensibly about the making of a movie, but it is not really a film about film in the way that Day for Night is. The protagonist of 8 ½ is Guido (Marcello Mastroianni), a celebrated director whose film and life are crumbling around him. On vacation at a resort spa along with his producers, writer, and potential stars, Guido is hounded from all sides by people who are telling him how to make his film. The truth is, Guido doesn’t know what film he wants to make, and he finds solace in drifting into his childhood memories and his fantasies, embodied by a luminous Claudia Cardinale as the woman of his dreams. At the same time, Guido has to compete with the real women in his life – his mistress Carla (Sandra Milo) and jealous wife Luisa (Anouk Aimee).

8 ½ is remarkable on many levels. Fellini’s film weaves seamlessly between reality and fantasy, past and present without seeming at all heavy-handed. Unlike Guido, Fellini is in full command of his craft, and each segment builds upon the last to create a fuller portrait of Guido. That is not to say that every single shot or symbol makes sense. In one bizarre outdoors scene, Fellini pans past a group of characters who smile directly into the camera, and move in perfect synchronization as if they are in a sort of dance. There is no apparent reason for this, except that Fellini, ever the visual stylist, thought it looked interesting. That is not a criticism, but rather an example of how Fellini refused to follow conventions, constantly experimenting with structure and movement and composition. The film was originally titled The Beautiful Confusion, and that is exactly what it is. Even when we don’t fully understand Fellini’s intentions, his masterful direction and Gianni de Venanzo lush black-and-white photography keep the audience fully involved.

I have probably made 8 ½ sound far too esoteric, but it is really quite an entertaining movie. Fellini kept a note attached to his camera that read “Remember, this is a comedy.” Indeed, it is a rather broad comedy at times. One of the film’s most memorable sequences is a dream envisioned by Guido, who imagines a harem filled with all of the women in his life. They dote upon him, giving him baths, washing his home and preparing dinner. In another scene, Guido remembers as a schoolboy visiting the severely overweight Saraghina (Eddra Gale), a prostitute who does a grotesque and hilarious dance on the beach.

Despite these comic scenes, though, I would not generally characterize 8 ½ as a comedy. Guido spends most of the film in an unhappy state, only taking comfort in his dreams and fantasies. Only in the end does Guido find happiness, as he abandons his movie and decides to pick up the scattered pieces of his life. “Life is a celebration,” Guido tells his wife Luisa, “let’s live it together!” Fellini, unlike Truffaut, seems to be concluding that life is more important than film. And yet Day for Night and 8 ½ are not at all incompatible; both emphasize the joy of making cinema in their own way. Truffaut points out the simple pleasures of movie-making, the day-to-day gratifications of being on a set. And Fellini, through the creation of 8 ½, shows us that he is an artist of the first order, using the tools of his trade to examine the pieces of a man’s life – a beautiful confusion indeed.

Day for Night: A
8 ½: A+