Provence is one of the most spectacular regions of France. It's the France of the great Impressionist painters. Monet, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, and (of sidelong interest here) Auguste Renoir captured the luminescent quality of the light there and the brilliance of the colors. At least as vital as its sublime scenery, the region's lifestyle has acquired the sobriquet "l'art de vivre," or "the art of living."
Toward the end of his career, director Jean Renoir, son of Auguste, indulged his lifelong affection for the theater in three films that literalize the consummately French "art of living": 1952's robust The Golden Coach (Le Carosse d'Or), the light and lovely French Cancan ('55), and a pastel historical with Ingrid Bergman, Elena and Her Men (Elena et les Hommes) from '56. Each plays around with one of the director's favorite themes: life as theater. They celebrate the preeminent value of art and artistes, as well as life's inherent pretenses, theatricality, and ephemeralness. They're Renoir's champagne-soaked response to Shakespeare's poor players who strut and fret their hour on life's stage before getting offed at the curtain line. Shakespeare tells us that life is phony and rife with lies and deception. Renoir says: Sure it is, so you might as well play along and enjoy it.
All three are period pieces about one woman pursued by three suitors. They're conspicuously stagebound for a director who helped take movies out of the studios and into the real world. In each film, this most artistically compassionate of directors evokes deeply felt emotionalism. Yet even amour, displayed here in abundance, is conjured without the gummy sentimentality of Renoir's American counterparts. Renoir loves his characters as people, not merely as furniture moved around for the sake of a plot.
Returning to France sixteen years after the tempestuous reception of Rules of the Game, Renoir aimed to win back his original audiences with French Cancan, "une comedie musicale." And that (at last) is where I find one of those scenes I love.
Through the devices of a backstage romantic comedy, this fictionalized birth of the infamous Moulin Rouge nightclub evokes a bygone Belle Époque "Paree." It gavottes around the story of a sweet-faced laundry girl, Nini (Françoise Arnoul), who is discovered by the impresario Danglard (Jean Gabin). Danglard promises to make this wide-eyed innocent a star in his upscale revival of the bawdy cancan dance.
Dedicating herself to his tutelage (and his bed) sets both of them at odds with the other men who love her — a moody baker boy (Franco Pastorino) and a wealthy foreign prince (Giani Esposito) — not to mention Danglard's previous mistress, a beautiful and headstrong diva (María Félix) so statuesque that we fear she could swallow Nini as an after-show mint. A comic brawl, intersecting love triangles, financial gamesmanship, and personal enmities put Gabin, the nascent club, and Nini's future beyond the washing baskets at peril.
When it comes to French films, or specifically Renoir's, French Cancan may be the most accessible point of entry for newcomers. It's certainly among the most joyous. All the actors are engaging and their romantic tangles charming. The stagy sets revive the fin de siecle Paris of our imagination, or of Auguste Renoir's paintings.
French Cancan's final twenty minutes take place at the opening night of the Moulin Rouge. (Singer Edith Piaf, the torchy touchstone of moody arts majors everywhere, gets a spotlight scene.) The climactic cancan dance is one of my favorite film dance sequences, a whirling, whisked meringue of motion, color, texture, music, and legs.
When Nini almost wrecks the big event by confronting Danglard about his taking yet another new performer as his mistress, the old showman turns unrealistic Hollywood-like conventions on their head by admonishing her that his heart's sole fealty is to his creations, just as hers should be to the Theater. Coming to her senses, she embraces the liberating new world of her art as she jaunts out to the dance floor to become what she was meant to be, the toast of the Moulin Rouge.
That slides us into a grand finale that blends exhilarating showmanship and a carriageload of characters reconciled, their intrigues and follies stepping aside for "the show must go on."
The film's final perfect little image — outside the vividly stylized Moulin Rouge, a drunken theater patron wobbles into view, stops, faces the camera, and gives us a boozy bow — feels like Renoir himself signing his name at the bottom.
That bow caps the clip below, the concluding cancan scene. This YouTube clip doesn't deliver the subtitles of the exquisite Criterion DVD (part of the terrific Stage and Spectacle boxed set, which also includes The Golden Coach and Elena and Her Men). But you get the gist of it well enough, oui?
And just because I like it too, here's that Edith Piaf spotlight scene, which occurs moments before the clip above:
Other big, colorful films have tried to bottle the bawdy fizz of the heralded nightclub. Renoir's French Cancan doesn't bother with the melodrama that freighted John Huston's 1952 Moulin Rouge. Nor, thankfully, is it the ice-cream headache of Baz Luhrmann's 2001 Moulin Rouge!
Music: Ella Fitzgerald, Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie! Near at hand: Kai the Mostly Malamute, asleep at my feet
Recently, while watching 1944's Laura with Elizabeth, I hit the Pause button during a pivotal scene featuring Gene Tierney. (Although it wasn't only to admire Tierney's form in that white satin gown during the party scene, I did turn to Elizabeth to mention,"You just want to reach out and stroke her ass." Replied Elizabeth: "Yep." We watch movies well together.) I paused it to note something that occurred to me while watching — that I wish the alluring yet mysterious Tierney we see in Laura had been cast as scheming temptress Brigid O'Shaughnessy opposite Humphrey Bogart's Sam Spade in 1941's The Maltese Falcon.
While I, like most movie buffs, adore The Maltese Falcon, I never have felt the lusty heat from or toward Mary Astor in the role of the "knockout" O'Shaughnessy. She feels miscast to me. And that's frustrating since I really do want to identify with Bogart/Spade as the hardest of hardboiled noir detectives falls for — and then cynically plays — the lying, murderous femme fatale for all he's worth. But I just can't find it in Astor's portrayal. I acknowledge that I'm in the minority on this one, as though I'm the only one who can't see the pretty pony in the picture full of colored dots, which just adds to the frustration.
Now, ordinarily I flinch away from using words like "unfeminine," and certainly this isn't a post that should meander into concepts such as the "male gaze" effect; nonetheless, for such a period "sexy dame" Astor strikes me as too, oh, mannish or schoolmarmish to generate the kind of sexual heat and disorienting desire that makes a tough cookie like Spade crumble, even temporarily, contrary to his own professional nature and personal interests.
In Dashiell Hammett's novel Brigid is — or at least successfully passes for — a "girl" only 22 years old, exuding an innocence and timidity so convincing that it works on both Spade and, to a deadly degree, his partner Miles Archer. I don't think I'm simply preconditioned by the novel when Mary Astor enters the office of Spade & Archer and I see a considerably older woman (Astor was 35) who's been around the block so often she has her own stool at the corner bar. From then on, the chemistry just isn't there, which has always slightly spoiled the experience for me.
So that crucial element of The Maltese Falcon has always held me at arm's length, and I miss that sweat-stained, seductive noirish heat.
It's all subjective, of course, whether an actress or actor pushes one's va-voom! buttons, and The Maltese Falcon has plenty of pleasures to keep me held from start to finish. Plus, Astor does a fine job in the role, even if she was wrong for it. Still, I've tended to watch The Maltese Falcon imagining Brigid played by, say, Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner, or Veronica Lake. Geraldine Fitzgerald had been offered the role, but when she opted to do a stage play instead, Brigid went to Astor. The Fitzgerald we see in the following year's The Gay Sisters would have put an intriguing, and in my mind more appealing, spin on the role, though I have to squint and cock my head to see her as the femme fatale type.
And now here I was watching Laura when it clicked — Gene Tierney would have been ideal as Brigid. She could have played a va-voom! sexuality hiding a steely determination, and mixed a dangerous schemer with an inescapable allure, all without leaning too hard on any single aspect of the character. Granted, Falcon was three years before Laura (Tierney would have been 21, ideal for Brigid), and Tierney was signed with 20th Century-Fox instead of Warner, and in Astor the studio had a much more established "name" than Tierney. But in my imagination's alt-Hollywood, it all works out.
No matter. I love The Maltese Falcon for the well-cast, crisply written, precisely directed classic that it is. A couple of Christmases ago Elizabeth even presented me with my own film-authentic Falcon, which sits looming on the DVDs case. It's what dreams are made of, as the man says.
Another thing that struck me about Laura — Dana Andrews seems to have studied for his role as the dick by watching Jimmy Cagney movies. Several times his body language reminds me of Cagney, although his trenchcoat-and-fedora shamus is of the Bogart mold. And Vincent Price looks 11 feet tall and linebacker broad, especially when he's wearing that prototype of David Byrne's Big Suit.
Maltese Falcon trailer hosted at TCM:
Music: Jessica Williams Trio, "Kristen"
Near at hand: Hammett's novel, hardback edition with cool slipcase
Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965) and Daleks — Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. (1966) were big-screen adaptations of the first two Doctor Who TV serials featuring the Daleks. They capitalized on the "Dalekmania" then sweeping across the U.K. (or at least the under-12 portion thereof), and came aimed squarely at children. They're unsophisticated and silly (like so often the TV series, then and occasionally now) and for true Whovians they're by no means canonical. Yet they have a Saturday afternoon tea-time-for-tykes charm.
For those of us who over the years have followed both the Doctor's adventures and Peter Cushing's iconic appearances in Hammer horror films and their ilk (not to mention his turn "holding Vader's leash" in the original Star Wars), it's a multiple nostalgia whammy to see him as the TARDIS's owner and operator.
In Cushing's second theatrical outing as "Dr. Who" (the Time Lords hadn't been invented yet and, unlike his TV counterpart, "Dr. Who" is treated as his actual name), receiving second billing is Bernard Cribbins. If you're a fan of the post-2005 return of the BBC TV series, you know Cribbins well as lovable old Wilfred Mott from the David Tennant years. In the movie he plays a London policeman who (understandably, considering) mistakes the disguised time-space machine for an actual police box, getting more than just a handy telephone in the bargain.
This fan-edited trailer makes the movie look better than it actually is:
Dr. Who and the Daleks and Daleks — Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. are each YouTube'd in their entirety (with commercials but in remarkable video quality) here and here.
Music: Ralph Vaughan Williams, Concerto in A Minor for Oboe and Strings Near at hand: Elizabeth's latest draft of "The Angel of Seattle" for my critiquing/editing enjoyment.
One of the joys of DVDs comes when we discover a previously unknown gem. Perhaps it's a film we know, if at all, only as a title overheard or through second-hand reports of limited screenings at distant "film forums." An arthouse-only release that came and went before the barista finished making our double-shot soy latte with the portrait of Pedro Almodóvar drawn in the foam.
Such a pleasure in a gem discovered came to me with The Spirit of the Beehive (El espíritu de la colmena), Víctor Erice's hypnotic and haunting Spanish film from 1973.
Beginning, significantly, with the imagination's On switch, "Once upon a time...," Spirit is set in a tiny, isolated Castilian village in 1940, soon after Spain's traumatizing civil war. It's a place and people clouded by the implicit background of Franco's repressive dictatorship. Franco's censorious fascist regime still held a cracking, gasping stranglehold when Erice made The Spirit of the Beehive, so looking for Erice's coded subversive critiques of the Franco government is one of the film's headier pleasures. (The superb two-disc DVD edition from Criterion helps us today watch the film in the context of what a Spanish filmmaker could and could not overtly say in his work at the time.)
However, our first approach to it should not be as a social commentary. It's a more immediate, oblique, and richer experience than that. As we follow it through the black, old-soul eyes of six-year-old Ana (Ana Torrent), The Spirit of the Beehive is a visually striking sketch of childhood at the place where childhood fantasy and bullet-hard reality come together. How those two opposites blend and shape one another gives us a graceful, lyrical masterpiece wound around one of the most natural and engrossing performances by a child actor I've ever seen.
The Spirit of the Beehive also turns out to be a poetic appreciation for the power that "movie magic" can have on us, especially when we're young. The triggering event arrives on a truck with a traveling exhibition of James Whale's Frankenstein. After the town crier alerts the villagers to their annual movie-going surprise, everyone arrives at the old town hall carrying their chairs and eager for whatever the roving picture-shower has in his battered tin reel-cans.
To Ana and her older (and evidently disturbed) sister Isabel (Isabel Tellería), Boris Karloff's Monster is literally the stuff that dreams are made on. That night, lying awake in their adjacent beds, their whispered conversation starts with Ana's curiosity about the Monster and the deaths she saw in the movie. Isabel tells her that the Monster is a real spirit that lives in an abandoned farmhouse nearby.
The scene captures exactly the way kids talk when grownups aren't around, their cadences and rhythms, and their easy, fantastical lies that bend the outer world through a child's interior lenses. It compels Ana to wish up Frankenstein's Monster at her moonlit window and, furtively at first, at the farmhouse. There she encounters an injured soldier who has jumped from a passing train (presumably one of the Spanish maquis guerillas resisting the Franco regime) and she tends to him as if he is the "spirit" she imagines.
But when government soldiers find and execute him, Ana — like Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird — must reposition her interior lenses for a world that continually redefines "monster." When Ana runs away and, alongside a lake in a forest at night, finally comes face to face with Frankenstein's Monster, it's just one of a hundred resonant ambiguities that feel rich with meaning if only we can suss it out. With a film this beautiful and well-crafted, reading the scenes for meaning and metaphor becomes a pleasure rather than a chore. Erice doesn't condescend by spelling it all out for us. Instead, he invites a mutual involvement that engages us directly, one-on-one, to lift The Spirit of the Beehive onto a level of artisanal filmmaking that defies reductive interpretation and pigeonholing.
Through its spare, elliptical script sculpted by strong performances and exquisite cinematography, the film layers on questions and mysteries. A harsh moment between Isabel and her pet cat, and later another between Isabel and Ana, tell us that there's something broken and cruel inside the elder sister. Is it that Frankenstein and the Death within that film have pushed her in a dark direction separate from Ana's, or did the civil war's brutal reality shape her first?
What meaning does beekeeping, and the translucent artificial hive he has constructed, hold for their wealthy father (Fernando Fernán Gómez), who's immersed in a treatise on his bees' industriousness in a land where the people are held motionless? (Kevin Wilson at thirtyframesasecond is worth quoting here: "Is the imagery of the community of bees and windows in beehive shapes reflective of community under Fascism - ordered, organised, but devoid of individuality or imagination? Is Ana the only hope, the only individual in a homogeneous society?")
Who is the man that their distracted, beautiful mother (Teresa Gimpera) writes letter after letter to — a lover-soldier captured and held in France? The girls' father and mother exist in their own self-imposed universes, interacting so little that for most of the film each may not even be aware of the other's presence.
Are the girls simply girls expressing their own interior lives as only children do, or is Erice showing a choice of two futures available to post-Franco Spain — one wide-eyed and open to magical possibilities, the other calloused and indifferent to suffering?
Here's a film that benefits from rewatching, each time adjusting our own interior lenses. And I love movies like that, that do that, that do that to me. It's doesn't happen often enough, and the older I get the more I look for it — honestly, the more I feel I need it.
Whatever The Spirit of the Beehive can be said to be "about" (and I don't have an answer pinned to the corkboard on that yet), there's something in there that I dig above all:
The people who populate Ana's world — her fractured family, her town (and by extension Spain under Franco's thumb), all seemingly stunned into somnambulance by that devastating civil war — exist, like the bees in their hives, as isolated units, potentially visible to each other but walled off behind the glass of rote routine and functionary movement, forced into pinched-off lives as much by self-induced inertia and introversion as by political repression and suppression. And what single source of outside stimulation shakes up that dreary order, adds some spirit to the hive, at least for Ana?
A movie. Frankenstein, one of my favorites.
When asked at Entertainment Weekly if The Spirit of the Beehive was an inspiration for his Pan's Labyrinth, director Guillermo del Toro replied: "It could be. Not consciously. I nevertheless must admit that Spirit of the Beehive is one of those seminal movies that seeped into my very soul. Night of the Hunter, Whale's Frankenstein, Bunuel's Los Olvidados, etc... The girl in Cronos was deliberately patterned after Ana Torrent in Spirit."
On a purely cinematic level The Spirit of the Beehive is a treasure box of discoveries. Its biggest impression comes from the honey-colored light and exacting compositions of Luís Cuadrado's cinematography, which evokes the Dutch master painters, particularly Vermeer. His church-window lighting and magic-hour landscape portraits of the desolate, windy Castilian plain and the village's dun-colored homes create a world that's so dreamlike we can wonder if, to Erice, it's an entire country that's waking to whatever its imagination conjures up.
Criterion's DVD gives us The Spirit of the Beehive in a typically exemplary presentation. The anamorphic image (1.66:1 OAR) is pristine and fresh-looking. The Dolby Digital 1.0 audio is likewise faultless. The language, of course, is Spanish, and the English subtitles are easy to read and appear to be translated very well.
Headlining the substantial supplements are a pair of strong documentaries on Disc Two. The Footprints of a Spirit (48 mins.) features director Víctor Erice, producer Elías Querejeta, co-screenwriter Ángel Fernández-Santos, and now-adult actor Ana Torrent. Shaped around a showing of Beehive in the tiny village of Hoyuelos (pop. 92) where it was filmed, this production reminiscence points up the film's rich visual elements and the mood-piece effects the director strove for. "Instead of scenes," Erice says, "I called them 'emotional spaces.'" Erice also discusses the difficulties artists faced under Franco's oppression.
Next is Víctor Erice in Madrid (48 mins.), an informative interview with the director, who acknowledges the influence of John Ford on his work. Two shorter but no less enlightening interviews are with Case Western Reserve film scholar Linda Ehrlich (16 mins., highly recommended) and actor Fernando Fernán Gómez (11 mins.).
Werner Herzog will never have an existential anxiety attack. Existential anxiety isn't foolish enough to attack him.
According to Einstein's theory of relativity, Werner Herzog can actually roundhouse kick Klaus Kinski into yesterday, where he'd kick him again.
Werner Herzog can fling a 35mm film frame with such deadly accuracy that it can slice the head off a marble statue at 100 yards.
Werner Herzog made Nosferatu the Vampyre as a musical, but only he can hear the songs. If we could hear them, a single note of the angelic hosts would explode our brains.
The only DVD God owns: Aguirre, the Wrath of Herzog.
There was no bear in Grizzly Man. That's just how Werner Herzog holds auditions.
Everyone remembers Orson Welles' speech about cuckoo clocks, jaunty and murderous at once. And Anton Karas' zither music, plucking minor keys around our expectations. Then there's director Carol Reed's vertiginous canted angles and the way they bevel Robert Krasker's rich, deep black-and-white cinematography. The atmospheric rubble and melancholy damp of war-smashed Vienna. That moment when the story turns on the cat that "liked only Harry." Beautiful and haunted Alida Valli's long final walk away from both the cemetery and the happy ending imagined by Joseph Cotten's sadder-but-no-wiser pulp novelist Holly Martins. Graham Greene's script that knows precisely when to light its fuses. All that glittering, quotable dialogue.
In The Third Man, from 1949, Martins is a "scribbler" of hack Westerns who arrives in postwar Vienna to land a job and join his old pal Harry Lime. Instead he finds himself drawn into a murder mystery and a network of deadly black-market racketeers. It's a suspense-thriller-romance steeped in Hollywood's best influences and "gimmicks," yet it's crafted with enough looming European "art-house" style to topple Fritz Lang into an existential funk. It's a hybrid that blurs the lines between what's comic and what's corrupt and cankerous. It melds melodrama with razor-blade noir tones, smirking lightheartedness with ruminations on seductive evil.
Why, The Third Man delivers so many well-loved attractions, and endures as a favorite among casual and dogmatically zealous movie lovers alike, that opening it up for a film-crit autopsy risks deadening its rewatchable pleasures with the whiff of formaldehyde. And yet the film's richness invites deep-think bathysphering for any allegorical "meaning" it may contain. A U.S. foreign policy lens — Holly as well-intentioned but clumsy and naive America sticking its nose into other countries' business only to have it bitten — is one perfectly cromulent interpretative stance.
"We had no desire to move people's political emotions," wrote Greene. "We wanted to entertain them, to frighten them a little, to make them laugh." Greene thought of The Third Man as a comedy-thriller. Reed directed it like the bleakest of noirs. It isn't often that such a push-me-pull-you dynamic brings out the best in both forms. As if taking cues from the scene where clueless pulp-fiction writer Martins withers before a high-toned book society, the film is both James Joyce and Zane Grey. It's fitting then that The Third Man — co-produced in England by Alexander Korda and in the U.S. by David O. Selznick — ranks #1 on the British Film Institute's list of all-time best British films, while also making the American Film Institute's list of top American films.
Yet for all the fine nuggets in Greene's script, and all the exquisite camerawork and deftly sketched characters (including a gallery of economically realized supporting parts), the favorite attraction here for me is the film's big reveal, handily the ne plus ultra of big reveals. Even after a dozen viewings, when we reach that scene we're keyed up with expectation: The camera tight on a content cat grooming itself in the shadows between a pair of polished shoes. A local resident, complaining about Martins' shouting, opens an upstairs window and poof!, like a magician's trick there's Orson Welles snapped into being beneath the window light. Welles caps the instant with an "I know a secret" smile that brings his boyish and charismatic Harry Lime to coruscating life.
Soon afterward, we ascend into the Prater Wheel sequence, where Harry reduces the victims of his crimes, including dead and crippled children, to mere dots and those cuckoo clocks.
Like Casablanca, here's a movie that jelled from a perfect storm of talent in every department, and that made Vienna's labyrinthine subterranean sewers as famous as Rick's Cafe. Man, what an ideal double-feature! The Third Man is Casablanca's dark-souled half-brother, the one Shakespeare would call the villain but the one who'd get the coolest speeches anyway.
Music: The BPA, "Seattle (featuring Emmy the Great)" Near at hand: Coffee mug with Tiffany Grapes Window pattern
Provence is one of the most spectacular regions of France. It's the France of the great Impressionist painters. Monet, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, and (of sidelong interest here) Auguste Renoir captured the luminescent quality of the light there and the brilliance of the colors. At least as vital as its sublime scenery, the region's lifestyle has acquired the sobriquet "l'art de vivre," or "the art of living."
All three are period pieces about one woman pursued by three suitors. They're conspicuously stagebound for a director who helped take movies out of the studios and into the real world. In each film, this most artistically compassionate of directors evokes deeply felt emotionalism. Yet even amour, displayed here in abundance, is conjured without the gummy sentimentality of Renoir's American counterparts. Renoir loves his characters as people, not merely as furniture moved around for the sake of a plot.
Through the devices of a backstage romantic comedy, this fictionalized birth of the infamous Moulin Rouge nightclub evokes a bygone Belle Époque "Paree." It gavottes around the story of a sweet-faced laundry girl, Nini (Françoise Arnoul), who is discovered by the impresario Danglard (Jean Gabin). Danglard promises to make this wide-eyed innocent a star in his upscale revival of the bawdy cancan dance.
French Cancan's final twenty minutes take place at the opening night of the Moulin Rouge. (Singer Edith Piaf, the torchy touchstone of moody arts majors everywhere, gets a spotlight scene.) The climactic cancan dance is one of my favorite film dance sequences, a whirling, whisked meringue of motion, color, texture, music, and legs.
That slides us into a grand finale that blends exhilarating showmanship and a carriageload of characters reconciled, their intrigues and follies stepping aside for "the show must go on."
