#13: The Silence of the Lambs

The Silence of the Lambs, 1991, directed by Jonathan Demme, screenplay by Ted Tally from the novel by Thomas Harris.

The last time I saw this movie in its entirety, I was in high school. It's held up amazingly well over the years, and it was great to see it again. Clarice Starling is an FBI trainee who must enlist the help of serial killer Hannibal Lecter to catch another serial killer. Or, as the poster would have it, "To Enter the Mind of a Killer She Must Challenge the Mind of a Madman."

I have plenty to say about the movie itself, but I want to talk a little about adaptation first. This is a movie that was popular enough that the source material and the screenplay are widely available. The book, you can buy anywhere; you can find the second draft of the screenplay here. So I read the novel, then the screenplay, then watched the movie.

It's pretty much axiomatic when writing a screenplay that the shorter version is always the better version. The genius of Ted Tally's script is in its compressions, packing as much information as possible into as little space as possible. The second draft is still very faithful to the book; apparently Ted Tally knows Harris socially, which I guess would make it harder to cut. Still, some of it's there. An example: here's the end of Jack Crawford's briefing to Starling in the novel:

"Be very careful with Hannibal Lecter. Dr. Chilton, the head of the mental hospital, will go over the physical procedure you use to deal with him. Don't deviate from it. Do not deviate from it one iota for any reason. If Lecter talks to you at all, he'll just be trying to find out about you. It's the kind of curiousity that makes a snake look in a bird's nest. We both know you have to back-and-forth a little in interviews, but you tell him no specifics about yourself. You don't want any of your personal facts in his head.

...

"Do your job, just don't ever forget what he is."
"And what's that? Do you know?"
"I know he's a monster. Beyond that, nobody can say for sure. Maybe you'll find out; I didn't pick you out of a hat, Starling. You asked me a couple of interesting questions when I was at UVA..."

That's on pp 6–7, and I've already abreviated it greatly. On page 11, after introducing Dr. Chilton and the asylum, we get this exchange:

"...We tried to study Lecter. We thought, 'Here's an opportunity to make a landmark study'—it's so rare to get one alive."
"One what?"
"A pure sociopath, that's obviously what he is."

In the second draft of screenplay, it reads like this. N.B.: At the time the second draft was written, the rights to the characters hadn't been cleared (probably they were tied up because of Michael Mann's 1986 film Manhunter). So in this draft, Crawford is called "Campbell," Chilton is "Prentiss," and Hannibal Lecter is "Gideon Quinn." Here's the scene:

                    CAMPBELL
          Be very careful with Gideon Quinn.
          Dr. Prentiss at the asylum will go
          over the physical procedures used
          with him. Do not deviate from
          them, for any reason. You tell him
          nothing personal, Starling.
          Believe me, you don't want Gideon
          Quinn inside your head... Just do
          your job, but never forget what he
          is.

                    CLARICE
               (a bit unnerved)
          And what is that, sir?

                    PRENTISS (V.O.)
          Oh, he's a monster. A pure
          psychopath...

CUT TO:

INT. PRENTISS'S OFFICE - BALTIMORE STATE HOSPITAL FOR THE CRIMINALLY INSANE - DAY

CLOSE ON an I.D. card held in a male hand. Clarice's photo, official-looking graphics. It calls her a "Federal Investigator."

                    PRENTISS (contd., O.S.)
          It's so rare to capture one alive.
          From a research point of view, Dr.
          Quinn is our most prized asset...

Tally combined two exchanges where Starling has basically the same line, and used it to make an elegant jump in location. In the finished film, it's shorter and more elegant still. Instead of having Chilton begin over Clarice and Crawford in the office, his line is over an exterior shot of the Baltimore Asylum. Which is not a real asylum; I don't know what the building they shot for that exterior actually is, but it looks more like a castle than a building with any practical use. It looks like it would make you crazier. In any event, the point is that Tally does a great job throughout his script of getting the core out of every scene. By the shooting script, he had this down to a science.

One more perspective on adaptation. Terry Rossio writes that:

Your goal in writing an adaptation absolutely cannot be to 'preserve the source material onto the screen.' It must be to 'make an effective film based upon the source material.' Lorenzo DiBonaventura, currently in charge of Neil Gaiman's SANDMAN project at Warner Bros., put this quite succinctly: "Sometimes keeping too true to the material results in not doing justice to the material."

Tally's second draft "preserves the source material onto the screen." Cut and pasted into Final Draft, it clocks in at about 160 pages; it has all the subplots from the novel and most of the scenes. The movie's just under two hours long (generally, a page of script means a minute of screen-time, so this means about 40 minutes have been cut). The process of revising a screenplay, I'm coming to find out, is taking out everything you can spare from your rough drafts, until you're not wasting a single word. The result, in the case of The Silence of the Lambs , is a movie that feels like a more faithful adaptation than the second draft does; it's "an effective film based upon the source material," not "the source material onto the screen."

Enough with adaptation; the movie itself. The opening sequence was the first thing I ever discussed in a film class (once again, thanks, Shepard, Tifft, and Rosenheim!). The beginning is worth studying again and again, just for watching how cleverly the viewer is prepared to meet Hannibal Lecter. Here's how it works.

• We start in Quantico, watching Jody Foster run the obstacle course. She is told to go meet with Jack Crawford, the head of Behavioral Sciences.
  
  
• To get there, we track her inside the building: she walks through a lab where students seem to be learning to clean pistols, then down a hallway with other students. These rooms look like a normal school.
  
  
• She takes an elevator down to Crawford's floor (which is, it would seem, in the basement). Here, the walls are blue cinderblock and the hallway is narrower.
  
  
• She's shown into Crawford's small, windowless office. While waiting for Crawford, she looks over a bulletin board covered with crime scene photos and a tabloid headline reading "Bill Skins Fifth."
  
  
• Crawford shows up and they start talking. Out of nowhere, he looks directly into the camera and says, "Do you spook easily?" The conversation ends with the exchange quoted above.
  
  
• We see an exterior shot of the Baltimore hospital, which is insanely gothic.
  
  
• We're in Dr. Chilton's office. He's shot closer than Crawford was, and he's really smarmy and creepy.
  
  
• Chilton leads Clarice down to meet with Hannibal. They go down a flight of stairs.
  
  
• They're on a hallway with two metal gates, manned by guards. As they rush down this hall, Chilton tells Clarice the elaborate rules for dealing with Lecter.
  
  
• Chilton and Clarice go down another flight of stairs to a red metal gate. As they go through this gate, Chilton shows Clarice a photograph of a nurse Lecter brutalized.
  
  
• They pause just past the red gate, bathed in red light, while Chilton and Clarice continue talking. Another metal door opens and they go into a guard area.
  
  
• Chilton leaves Clarice here. She has two more gates to go through, which leads her to:
  
  
• Another hallway of the asylum. This one has rough stone walls and metal cells, and looks like a dungeon. Clarice has been through six security checkpoints that we've seen, and the prisoners on this hall are behind bars.
  
  
• But even that is not secure enough for the prisoner at the end of the hall. His cell has walls of inch-thick plexiglass. Clarice sees this as she approaches, and meets:
  
  
• Hannibal Lecter, standing calmly in the center of his cell. He greets Clarice with a pleasant "Good morning."

The whole thing takes about ten minutes. In those ten minutes, the viewer seamlessly moves from the world we know to increasingly gothic and nightmarish surroundings. By the time we see Lecter, we believe him to be the most dangerous guy ever. Ever. Seven gates are not enough...this guy needs plexiglass. Plexiglass! The glass was apparently the production designer, Kristi Zea's idea. My writing partner Adam thinks it makes the movie, and I'm inclined to agree.

Randoms:

• On the commentary track, Jodi Foster is really unhappy with one of her costumes; she says "Clarice Starling would never wear what she is wearing here to go to Hannibal Lecter's cell." I've never heard an actor disagree so violently with a creative choice someone else made, at least not on the record. So what do you have to say to that, Acadamy Award winning costume designer Colleen Atwood?
  
  
• The deleted scenes on this one are transfers straight off of a cut made from the dailies, seemingly from an early workprint of the movie. They still have the timecode, but it's a timecode for a total run of the film, not the timecode you'd see on the dailies themselves. These sequences may have been taken from a tape that executives were shown, or one that was used for test screenings. My roommate Eric Rolnick pointed out to me that there are diagonal grease-pencil markings visible on some of the transitions, and explained what this means: when editing on actual film (instead of a computer), editors mark dissolves with a grease pencil (actually drawing across the film frame). When a cut of the film is locked, the actual dissolves are processed using the negatives; but this isn't done until there's a final version. Since the cut those scenes were taken from was never used, the dissolves were never printed; seeing these tells you that Craig McKay was editing on actual film, not using a computer.
  
  
• About two-thirds of the way through the movie, Demme and Tally break a screenwriting commandment; when Clarice has been sent home to Washington and Lecter has escaped, we spend about fifteen minutes without seeing either Lecter or Starling. Instead, we have an extended sequence of the Memphis SWAT team trying to find Lecter. There aren't any main characters here. You couldn't do the movie without this sequence, and the payoff (Lecter in the ambulance) is entirely worth it, but it is weird; the audience hasn't spent any time with the SWAT team before, and here they have to carry the movie. Adam thinks, and I agree, that this is why Chris Isaak was stunt-casted as the SWAT commander. He's a recognizeable face, so the audience feels like they know him (he has maybe three lines); it makes this sequence less disorienting. It's a smart cheat.
  
  
• The extras on this DVD include excerpts from the FBI crime classification manual; descriptions and case studies for Organized Sexual Homicide, Disorganized Sexual Homicide, Mixed Sexual Homicide, and Sexual Sadism. Fun reading. The menu to this section breathlessly informs us that Clarice Starling would have studied these classifications (actually, the extras have a lot of stuff that seems to assume that you're more interested in serial killers than filmmaking). Anyway, it's unclear what Harris would think of this being treated as useful information, but it's clear what Lecter would think. It doesn't come across in the movie, but in the book, the questionaire that Starling has brought Lecter is part of that classification system. Here's Lecter and Starling:

  "They're dividing the people who practice serial murder into two groups—organized and disorganized. What do you think of that?"
  "It's...fundamental, they evidently—"
  "Simplistic is the word you want. In fact, most psychology is puerile, Officer Starling, and that practiced in Behavioral Science is on a level with phrenology...Organized and disorganized—a real bottom-feeder thought of that."

Next up, Shock Corridor. No fooling this time.

#18: The Naked Kiss

The Naked Kiss, 1964, written and directed by Samuel Fuller.

I'd heard of Samuel Fuller recently because a restored cut of The Big Red One was in theaters this year. I read the reviews; it's a WWII epic. So I was expecting something up Terence Malick's alley. Man, was I ever wrong. If you're planning on seeing this movie, the less you know the better; not because it's a surprise ending, but because it's the weirdest movie I've ever seen in my life. And I see a lot of movies. I wouldn't want to spoil anyone's slack-jawed disbelief at what's onscreen. So feel free to skip this and just rent the movie.

If you're still here, the opening scene: a woman beats the shit out of an extremely drunk guy with her purse. Jazz plays on the soundtrack, really insane bebop. And she's shot head on, swinging with the shoe; the first shot is her just pulling back and walloping the guy; you can't help but flinch. She's wearing a slip, heels, a strapless bra, and a scarf. Halfway through the fight, he grabs her hair, which all comes off; it's a wig, and her head is shaved. This just makes her madder. So now you have this really angry bald woman beating away at this guy; she knocks him down, sprays him in the face with a seltzer bottle (!), and steals $75 from him. Then she gets dressed and puts her wig back on; the minute she puts it back on, the music changes to weepy strings. Looking into the camera like it's a mirror, she carefully adjusts the wig, combs it, and makes experimental pouts at the camera over the opening credits. Then, the jazz comes back on the soundtrack while she walks over to a wall of photos, takes hers down, and rips it up. And if you think that's weird, you should see the rest of the movie.

The basic story is pretty straightforward. Kelly, the woman from the first scene, is a prostitute. She moves to a small town called Grantville, and after sleeping with a local police officer, decides to go straight. She then falls in love with the most prominent guy in town, much to the dismay of the cop, who's good friends with the guy. So far, this could be a late-fifties weeper. But the devil's in the really, really, really bizarre details. Kelly doesn't just go straight, she gets a job as a nurse at a local hospital for handicapped children. And she dresses them all up like pirates, for some reason. And teaches them to sing. Teaches them to sing Cab Calloway's "Little Child,"¹ to be precise. So about an hour into the movie, you get a full-on musical number, starring a multiracial group of eight-year-olds in crutches and leg braces. Sample lyric: "Tell me where is the bluebird of happiness found?" And remember, they're all wearing pirate hats. I'm not kidding about this, it's really in the movie.

What else is in the movie:

• An old woman who talks to a dressmaker's doll that she's dressed in her long-dead fiancé's military uniform. She calls him "Charlie." And he's in the credits: "'Charlie'...Himself."
  
  
• A brothel called "Candy's," where the girls are called "Bon-bons," and a sign above the bar reads "Sweets Guarantee Indescribable Pleasure."
  
  
• Unwanted pregnancy.
  
  
• Child molestation.
  
  
• A whole lot of Beethoven on the soundtrack, and a guy who has a Schroeder-style bust of Beethoven up above his reel-to-reel tape player.
  
  
• The following line of dialogue, spoken without a trace of irony:

  I see myself by moonlight, by the lake of the Siene, in a boat wandering through a leafy alley, and Beethoven's hands playing the Moonlight Sonata. He carved that sonata out of moonlight.

So as you can see, Samuel Fuller is not the most understated writer you'll ever run across. The closest thing to the feel of this movie that I'm familiar with is David Lynch. Not too surprisingly, Lynch stole from Fuller; that brothel called Candy's shows up in Twin Peaks as "One Eyed Jacks," down to the design of the place. It's not theft, it's homage!

Randoms:

• A recurring theme in coverage of Johnny Carson's recent death was that Carson gave kids the idea that adulthood was cool, and slightly mysterious; that at his height, he was an emblem of a certain kind of adult world that no longer exists. (Now, the meme goes, adults act like kids. I certainly do. I think it has to do with not wearing suits to work, or drinking every night, or being drafted). Anyway, this movie has that kind of adult in it, and that kind of adult dialogue. Some of it is nearly as good as Billy Wilder, but not quite. My favorite line; the cop to the prostitute: "You and me will get along like noise and a hangover." Nearly as good, Kelly saying that all she had to look forward to in life was "the buck, the bed, and the bottle."
  
  
• There's a scene in this movie where Kelly makes Candy, the madame, eat $25 she'd offered to a local girl to get her to work in her brothel. Whacks her in the head with that deadly purse from the first scene, and shoves it in her mouth; leaves her with a mouth full of bills. (Her line is, "Ten. Ten. And five! Now you stay away from Bunny!") I'm going to steal that idea; I'm amazed I haven't seen it in more movies. Especially given the number of Se7en rip-offs that pride themselves on creative revenge. Anyway, in this movie, it works like gangbusters.

The next movie I'll be seeing is Shock Corridor, also by Samuel Fuller. He's insane! I can't wait.

¹This song is actually referred to by any number of names. It's been called "The Little Child (Mon Enfant)," "The Little Boy and the Old Man," "Mommy Dear," "Daddy Dear"... and so on. Best reference ever: Tony Danza apparently had his daughter record a version, and then told Pat Sajak about it. See, the more I try to learn about The Naked Kiss, the deeper down the rabbit hole I go. To find out more, go here (the Who's The Boss Resource page, of course!) and search for "Bluebird." Googling monkeys forever!

#8: The Killer

The Killer, 1989, written and directed by John Woo.

On his commentary track for The Killer, John Woo explains several times that he is a devout Christian who believes that man should live in peace and harmony. Peace and harmony seem to be something of a problem for his characters, inasmuch as they can't stop shooting at each other. Well, actually, they do stop shooting each other, when it's time to join forces and slaughter anonymous henchmen by the score. I didn't try to keep a body count in this movie but it's easily over one hundred (the IMDB has it at 120). And these aren't implied deaths, they're squib exploading, body-jerking, blood-splattering-on-the-wall carnage. I don't want to question Mr. Woo's faith or optimism, but you sure wouldn't infer it from watching The Killer.

Chow Yun-Fat stars in The Killer as an assassin who mistakenly blinds a nightclub singer while on a hit. He feels guilty about it and sort of adopts her (she can't see him, so she doesn't know he's the man who blinded her). Hilarity ensues. No, wait. Carnage ensues: Chow Yun-Fat takes one contract too many, and is double-crossed by his manager, who is a retired hitman himself. On the run from the police and his former employers, Chow Yun-Fat stays alive the only way he knows how: by shooting lots and lots and lots of anonymous henchmen.

Although the structure of the plot is predictable, the character relationships are neat and easily to diagram: there are three friendships that make up the movie: Chow Yun-Fat is friends with his manager and mentor, Sydney. Inspector Li, the cop trailing Chow Yun-Fat, is friends with his partner and mentor, Chang. Inspector Li and Chow Yun-Fat come to be friends as well; so it's a rectangle; Sidney and Chang don't know each other but the other characters connect. And they all want to protect Jennie, the nightclub singer Chow Yun-Fat blinds in the second scene of the movie.

Which brings me to the problem I have with the film. Woo learned a hell of a lot from Peckinpah about how to set up and shoot action sequences. The balletic violence in The Killer is nearly as good as The Wild Bunch. But although they film it in similar ways, I think Woo and Peckinpah have fundamentally different ideas about what violence is and how it works, and I think Peckinpah got it right. My understanding of The Wild Bunch comes mostly from a fantastic lecture about the movie that Jim Shepard, Shawn Rosenheim, and Stephen Tifft gave (I don't remember who was actially talking that day). Anyway, the great thing about The Wild Bunch is that in that movie, in that moral universe, you can't control violence. No matter how carefully planned and executed it is, once guns start firing, things get very messy, very fast. You can see this in the opening sequence, where the well-thought-out robbery turns into an absolute bloodbath, with plenty of innocent people getting slaughtered. (If you haven't seen the movie, it opens on an out and out shootout between a group of bandits and a group of bounty hunters. The gunfight takes place on a street where a temperance group is holding a parade. It doesn't go well for the temperance marchers. Or the bank employees. Or the bandits, or the bounty hunters, or the town's buildings, or the horses). Peckinpah's movie stands in contrast to earlier westerns, in which the heroes are always able to use violence very precisely; what defines a hero is that he never hurts the wrong people. But in a Peckinpah movie, you can't help but hurt the wrong people when things get violent. You can't help but hurt everybody.

In The Killer, you have the same out-and-out bloodbaths as in The Wild Bunch . According to the IMDB, 60.000 blank rounds were fired during the filming of the last two fights. But both Chow Yun-Fat's character and Inspector Li never hurt the wrong people. In fact, Chow Yun-Fat goes to great lengths to clean up after the bad guys, when they do hurt the wrong people: early on in the movie, he takes great personal risks to deliver an injured child safely to a hospital. He didn't shoot her; they were aiming for him. But she shouldn't have been hurt. Jennie is the only person Chow Yun-Fat hurts by accident. I just don't think the world works that way. And for a character with such a strong sense of outrage when the innocent are harmed, Chow Yun-Fat has a tendency to turn everywhere he goes into an abattoir.

Leaving aside the morality of John Woo's movie, there's a lot of terrific filmmaking here. Watch for a great scene where Chow Yun-Fat and Danny Lee, guns pointed at each other, pretend that they are old high school friends for the benefit of Jennie. The shootouts, when they happen, are very well choreographed. And although John Woo has singlehandedly turned some of his favorite images into clichés (slow motion shots of birds flying, gunmen in churches), they became clichés because they worked at one time, and they work here.

Trivia and other thoughts:

The video on this one is kind of lo-res and tinted at times with red. It looks to me a lot like Mean Streets or Taxi Driver, in terms of the grainy texture it has. I think that makes the violence seem all the more intense because it looks illicit, like you're watching a snuff movie or the satellite channel in Videodrome. It looks seedy.

Worst line of dialogue: the cop is trying to describe the killer to a police sketch artist. He says, "He looks determined, without being ruthless. There's something heroic about him." I don't think that helps the sketch artist much.

Best line of dialogue: "Nostalgia is one of our saving graces."

On the commentary track, John Woo says of his leading lady Sally Yeh: "Sometimes she overacts a little. She did try very hard." Ouch. She also cut her schedule short and forced Woo to change the ending of the movie cause he couldn't shoot her last scene. So perhaps he holds that against her.

Guns are not legal in Hong Kong. And John Woo has never fired one (or hadn't when he recorded the commentary track).

Woo's advice for filmmakers is to work as an editor first; that forces you to examine exactly how a scene was shot, and learn how to piece it into something that makes sense. Which makes it easier to decide how to shoot something yourself.

I really liked the idea of hitmen having managers to set up their deals. They probably do, these days.

The actor who played Johnny Weng, the worst bad guy, was a property manager in Hong Kong. He has the face for it; you would not pay this guy late. Martin Scorcese also cast a real life landlord in Goodfellas; Chuck Low, who played Morrie, the annoying wig salesman.

Woo hates writing his scenes before he shoots them, because he gets bored with watching actors do something he's already imagined. I don't quite know what to make of this, except to point out that he was working for a studio where the executives didn't watch the dailies. At all. Contractually. The first frame of film they saw was the first workprint. So I think Woo had a bit more freedom to screw around on set than anyone working for an American studio.

Finally, there should be an equivalent phrase to "Tyburn Jig" for death by machine gun. I suggest "Hong Kong Shuffle."

#16: Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island

Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island. 1956. First, Eiji Yoshikawa wrote the novel. Then Hideji Hojo wrote the play. Hiroshi Inagaki and Tokuhei Wakao turned the play into a screenplay, and Hiroshi Inagaki directed it on film. That's the last time I'll have to summarize those credits. As you may have noticed, I'm a stickler for getting the writing credits right, cause I write screenplays. And my general impression is that unless the director wrote it as an original screenplay, auteur theory is kind of bullshit.

This is the last of the Samurai movies, and it's the best by a lot. And I liked the first two. I also think it would be impossible to follow without seeing the first two, so it's not an "If you see one movie in the Samurai series this year, make it Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island" type situation. But seriously: wow.

Duel at Ganryu Island opens with both Miyamoto Musashi and Kojiro Sasaki having parallel duels with men armed with spears. Miyamoto's fight gets broken up by a priest who wants to save the spearman's life; Kojiro's is more interesting. He is dueling as sort of a job interview: he wants to be the fencing instructor for a local noble. Using only a wooden sword (and fighting a guard with a metal-blated spear), Kojiro cripples his opponent for life. He doesn't get the job, because, well, he crippled his opponent in what was meant to be a demonstration match. So Kojiro increases the feudal lord's opinion of him by visiting and apologizing to his fallen opponent. That doesn't get him the job. So he decreases the feudal lord's opinion of his current fencing instructor by killing four of his students without provocation, in the street. And he gets the job. It's not a bad way to approach the hiring process.

Kojiro's real goal, though, is to provoke Musashi into dueling with him; no one else is a match for him, and he's bored. Musashi initially agrees, then doesn't show up, asking to postpone the duel for a year. Heroic! Kojiro agrees (though he doesn't have much choice; Musashi has fled), and in the intervening year, Kojiro works as a fencing instructor and Musashi settles down in a small farming village and tills the soil. It wouldn't be a samurai movie if the farming village weren't terrorized by brigands, and not too surprisingly, Musashi ends up defending the village. After a bloody battle with the attacking brigands, he finally sets off to Ganryu Island to duel Kojiro.

Women still get kind of badly treated by the characters in this installment, but they seem more aware of it. Akemi (who, remember, was sold by her mother to a wealthy man in the second movie) gets warned that if she crosses a particular part of the country alone, she will be raped by brigands. Her reply: "Men have made a plaything of me. I don't mind anything now." She knows what's going on, and she's bitter about it. Still, she directs all her hostility toward Otsu, her rival, rather than the men who have ruined her life; and when she dies, it's in Musashi's arms, content that he is finally holding her. So even if the women are more verbal in Ganryu Island about what's going on, they still pretty much buy into it.

The pacing of this movie is weird; the final battle between Kojiro and Musashi doesn't begin until 6 minutes before the end of the movie. Remember, this fight is the climax not just to this movie, but to three other movies, totalling 300 minutes of screen time. I would have liked a longer final duel. But even at six minutes, this sequence is very satisfying and visually beautiful. The two samurai fight on a sandy beach on Ganryu Island, facing west towards the mainland, at sunset. This must have taken a very long time to film, as the shots are in sequence, with the sun slowly dropping during their fight. (Actually, I just rewatched it, and the sun does go back up a bit in the last shot. But for the most part the continuity is right). They would have had about a ten minute window to shoot every day. For some shots, they would have had seconds: there's a shot where Toshirô Mifune's head perfectly blocks the sun, then he steps to the side, blinding Kojiro. Good luck getting that right.The light is this incredible soft pink, and as the sun goes under the mainland, it picks out trees on the hills across the ocean; it's fucking great.. The camera is shooting right into the sun most of the time, which I'm not sure how they accomplished; but with the exception of one matte shot, it all seems to really be outdoors. It's hard to fake an ocean.

The other strange thing about the last sequence is that it has lens flares, which I was led to believe everybody avoided like the plague until the late sixties/early seventies. Not that you could avoid them, shooting into the sun; maybe they decided it was worth it. Last thing about this: I haven't seen Kill Bill Vol. II, but I read the script a few years back. Isn't the last fight in that on a beach in Malibu at sunset?

Last thing: you know the scene in The Karate Kid where Mr. Miyagi catches flies with chopsticks? That's a straight lift from this movie.

#15: Samurai II: Duel at Ichijoji Temple

Samurai II: Duel at Ichijoji Temple, 1954, directed by Hiroshi Inagaki, screenplay by Hiroshi Inagaki and Tokuhei Wakao, from Hideji Hojo's theatrical adaptation of a novel by Eiji Yoshikawa. I'm going to see if I can find a third way to describe those writing credits for the third part of the trilogy. Inelegant variation, thy name is Dessem.

So this is the second movie in the trilogy, and exists to set things up for the third installment; as such, I won't have as much to say about it as I would for an all-new movie. Usually, the second movie in a trilogy is my favorite; if there are any big reversals, that's where they happen (like the second act of a script. The best middle movies set you up to believe that the third movie will probably be the greatest thing ever created. Which means you're poised for maximum disappointment when they march out the Ewoks.

In Duel at Ichijoji Temple, Miyamoto Musashi continues his training, this time learning to temper his physical power with introspection and mercy. Which is kind of strange; in the first movie, he got locked in an attic with stacks of books for three years or so; one would think he'd already have mastered the introspecion stuff. And since there aren't any training sequences in either movie, it's not clear who taught him to fight—he wasn't bad with a sword in the first movie, but in this one he's using two katanas like he's been doing it forever. I don't think I could hold two blades like that one handed, much less swing them, much less swing them accurately. So here's to you, Toshirô Mifune!

There are three big fight sequences in this one; my favorite is the first, between Musashi and a guy with a ball & chain. The third one is the Duel at Ichijoji Temple from the title; it's Musashi v. 80 swordsmen from a samurai school that's gone to pot. I think the fight between the Bride and the Crazy 88 in Kill Bill drew a lot from this movie, although Musashi's fight is in a rice paddy (muddy!), not indoors.

In this installment, the female characters really come into their own. And by "come into their own," I mean, get alternately raped, imprisoned, and betrayed. And then they take it out on each other. Akemi gets sold by her mother to a man who rapes her, then locks her up when he finds out she loves Musashi. Otsu, abandoned in the last movie by Matahachi, gets abandoned in this one by Musashi. Both Akemi and Otsu get sort of passed around throughout the movie to a variety of male protectors; the only decisions they make are motivated by their desire for Musashi. And since they have so much in common, they loathe each other; Akemi nearly kills herself but decides not to, in order to make sure that Otsu doesn't end up with Musashi. I'm rereading Martin Amis's Money, and read this paragraph the day I saw this movie:

I've been told that men don't like women, period. Oh yeah? Who does then? Because women don't like women.

Anyway, the point: Japan circa 1605: not a good time and place to be female.

Other things in Samurai II: my roommate Eric asked me if I thought the second movie had a bigger budget than the first one (I'm not sure why this was his first question; he'd seen about thirty seconds of the first movie and less of the second at the time he asked). I didn't know, and still don't, but it did seem to me that the second one had a lot more stuff shot on soundstages, and some really bad matte paintings.I'm not sure if that would cost more than shooting outdoors (I suspect it would cost more if the weather was good, less if it was bad), but it certainly looked worse. I wonder about the production history of these movies; if the second one depended on the success of the first or if they were done as a trilogy to begin with. As I noted before, Inagaki had already made all three movies before in the 40's.

I can say one thing for certain; they weren't all filmed at once, a la The Lord of the Rings. Matahachi is played by a different actor in the second movie. But he's still a pansy; he spends a lot of this movie taking orders from his elderly mother. And he still gets the most ridiculous lines. This time around my favorite was, "Mother wants me to kill you. But I don't want to. Let's elope!" I've filed that away to remember if I ever propose: irresistable!

Kôji Tsuruta, who plays Kojiro Sasaki, has what may be the creepiest smile I've ever seen. It's not a classic villain smile, and it's not crooked or anything. But he looks like he's wearing a Noh mask whenever he smiles. He's a great villain. Duel at Ichijoji Temple sets up a big battle between Sasaki and Musashi for the third installment; I'm looking forward to it.

#14: Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto

Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto, 1954, directed by Hiroshi Inagaki, screenplay by Hiroshi Inagaki and Tokuhei Wakao, from a play by Hideji Hojo, from a novel by Eiji Yoshikawa. That's my best guess at the writing credits; the novel predates the play, and although Hideji Hojo isn't credited in any of the essays I read about this movie, he is listed on the IMDB. The title is also kind of a best guess; that's the title the Criterion Collection gives the movie. The main character's name is Miyamoto Musashi; Miyamoto is his first name and Musashi is his family name (actually, the name in its entirety is an adopted one; Musashi is the name of his hometown). Anyway, for the sake of clarity, I'm going to use first name followed by last name for actors and characters; that's what the IMDB does.

Miyamoto Musashi. He was a historical character, and is featured in a number of Japanese movies; see here and here. A little bit about two of those movies: first, the 1954 version was not the first time Hiroshi Inagaki directed this movie—he also made a movie called Miyamoto Musashi, based on the same Eiji Yoshikawa novel, in 1940. Furthermore, like the 1954 version, it was the first part of a trilogy, all based on the novel. Unfortunately, it no longer exists; for some reason, the Japanese didn't keep prints of too many of their movies from 1940–1945. I can understand remaking a single movie, especially if the original is lost. So the point is that Hiroshi Inagaki was well prepared to make the 1954 version of Musashi Miyamoto, as he'd already done it 14 years earlier.¹ The second point is that it's a mistake to call it "the 1954 version," because a rival studio made another movie called Musashi Miyamoto in 1954; it wasn't based on the novel but it was about the same character. Even more confusing, Rentaro Mikuni plays Miyamoto's friend Matahachi in Hiroshi Inagaki's movie. In the other Musashi Miyamoto, he plays Miyamoto himself. So he had leading roles, in the same year, of two movies about the same character and historical events.

So about that character, and those historical events. Toshirô Mifune (from Seven Samurai, and about eight billion other movies) plays Takezo, a crazy mixed-up kid in a Japanese villiage in 1600. At the time, Japan was in the middle of a vicious civil war. Takezo convinces his friend Matahachi that they should seek their fortunes in war; Matahachi abandons Otsu, his fiancé, to do so. The two friends promptly end up on the losing side of the battle of Sekigahara, an abattoir in which 70,000 people were killed. But not our two heroes; they escape and are nursed back to health by a mother and her daughter. Their paths diverge when Oko, the mother, is rejected by Miyamoto and lies about it. The movie follows Takezo from here on; he tries to return home to tell Otsu that Matahachi is still alive, but after a run-in with some border guards, he is hunted down, captured, nearly executed, escapes, falls in love with Otsu, undergoes three years of spiritual training at the hands of Takuan, a Buddhist monk, adopts the name Miyamoto Musashi, abandons Otsu, and marches off into the sunset. As you can guess, there's a whole lot of plot in this movie; it packs a lot into 90 minutes. It's very clearly the first movie of a series; the end of the film is a setup for further adventures, and a lot of storylines have just begun. I haven't seen the second or third movie yet, so I don't know what's going to happen. But I want to find out, which is a good sign; I was kind of dreading watching the first one of these, because I have all three; if I didn't like the first one, having the next two staring at me accusingly from the shelf would be bad news.

The cinematography is beautiful some of the time; they shot on Eastmancolor and got these amazingly vivid greens. I've never been to Japan but that's my impression of it: green. On the other hand, they did a lot of day-for-night shooting and the blues turned out really muddy. So it's a mixed bag.

Two great lines of dialogue. Matahachi says to Otsu, apropos of nothing, "You are engaged to marry me, aren't you?" Worst. Expository dialogue. Ever. Again, Matahachi, when attacked by brigands, gives the courageous battle call: "Do not touch the women! We can talk!"

Two things that show up in this movie and Seven Samurai: country folk who make a living stripping armor and weapons from the corpses of dead samurai, and peasant armies with bamboo poles. You never see anyone sucessfully kill, wound, or even annoy anyone with a bamboo pole in these movies, but when a village is in trouble, they all load up on bamboo poles.

The movie's in Academy Standard format, so it fits neatly on a TV screen. One shot in the movie made me think about how few directors really use the space that format gives you: there is one shot of Takezo, hanging from a tree (he's been captured), talking to Takuan who is standing on the ground. Takezo is about 20 feet in the air, and the shot is composed so that both bodies are fully visible; it's a very vertical composition, which is something you almost never see. Obviously you couldn't do that on a 1.85:1 frame; and I guess most things are shot that way now; but you'd think I would have seen this kind of composition more often in older movies..

That's all about this one; I'm looking forward to seeing the next two.

¹The Japanese make the same movies over and over again a lot: Takeshi Shimizu directed Ju-on as a made-for-TV-movie in 2000, then remade it as a feature called Ju-on: The Grudge in 2003, then remade it again, in English, as The Grudge, in 2004. He also made Ju-on 2 for TV in 2000, Ju-on: The Grudge 2 as a feature in 2003, and is in pre-production on both The Grudge 2 (in English) and Ju-on: The Grudge 3 (in Japanese). This guy must love those characters.

#11: The Seventh Seal

The Seventh Seal, 1957, written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. So, as the day fades into a long, suicide-filled Scandinavian night, Ingmar Bergman sits down to write another screenplay. This movie has its moments, but for the most part did very little for me. It's the story of a thirteenth-century Crusader who challenges Death to a game of chess. He does this for two reasons: first of all, he is questioning his faith and wants to try to find some definitive answers about God's existence before walking off into the dying of the light. Second, he hopes to be able to achieve one last significant action before dying. He succeeds in the second goal by saving the lives of a husband and wife team of actors and their baby son. The first, however, is hopeless.

The plot of the movie barely hangs together; the movie exists more as a philosophical exploration than any real narrative. The problem with this is that I don't think film is a very good medium for philosophical inquiry, except in very indirect ways. Peter Cowie, in his commentary track, talks a lot about what it meant for him to see this movie when it came out, after spending his childhood watching Tarzan movies. So I think again that this is a movie that you kind of had to see when it came out to get the full effect. There's something to be said for being the first person to just plunge right in to big philosophical questions, I guess, but a lot of the dialogue seemed very stilted, unnatural, and even trite. That's a little harsh; there are a few sections that transcend the rest of it (and here I'm speaking simply of the dialogue, not the images, which are great, and of which more later). One example would be shortly after the knight mistakenly reveals part of his strategy to Death; it's a low point for him, but as Death leaves him, he says:

This is my hand. I can move it. Feel the blood pulsing through it. The sun is still high in the sky and I, Antonius Block, am playing chess with Death.

Which is better when read by Max von Sydow, but even on the page, not a bad statement of our situation. A lot of the other writing is pretty turgid, though:

I want to confess as best I can, but my heart is void. The void is a mirror. I see my face and feel loathing and horror. My indifference to men has shut me out. I live now in a world of ghosts, a prisoner in my dreams.

That's the most vague quote I could find online but believe me, there are much worse in the movie itself. The movie also switches between very earnest philosophical exploarations and earthy humor. The knight has a squire who's a dreadful cynic, and most of his scenes are comic. I didn't find them all that funny; Death was really the only character who consistently made me laugh. His jokes are very dry and very malicious. Right up my alley.

The cinematography, lighting, and costume design in this movie are great, not because they're particularly technically amazing, but because taken together, they create a number of images that get burned into your skull. Death, as played by Bengt Ekerot, is the best of the lot; he's not on screen much (maybe fifteen minutes out of the movie) but he's what everyone remembers. Unfortunately, he's also what everyone rips off, so I'd seen twenty watered-down versions of this role before seeing the original. (Best derivative version: right here). Monty Python also rip this movie off a lot, both in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Meaning of Life. In fact, part of the fun of seeing this is watching for scenes and characters that have shown up elsewhere; it's pretty clear this movie had a huge impact on a lot of creative people.

One other thing about this movie. I think Ingmar Bergman would have been the greatest horror director ever if he'd gone in that direction. The last reveal shot of Death is a good example; it's a very long shot of six people sitting at a table. As the camera tracks back, slowly each one of them notices something out of camera range and looks toward it. After an agonizingly long time, he cuts to Death standing in the doorway. It's not really played that way, but it's the classic horror movie reaction shot.

My thoughts about this were confirmed when I watched the Illustrated Filmography that's included on the Criterion edition; it includes excerpts from Wild Strawberries and The Magician. There's a dream sequence in Wild Strawberries that is scarier than anything I've seen in a very long time; it has all the right creepy, memorable touches. Clocks without hands, a horse-drawn hearse, a man with his face swollen into something grotesque (the only similar thing I can think of is the torturer's masks in Brazil). Best of all, he nails the awful sense of wrongness you get in the worst nightmares. It's rare that a movie taps into that kind of dread (The Ring did that, for me). The five minutes or so of Wild Strawberries I saw did that better and more economically than any other movie I've seen. That small part of a DVD extra made the whole experience worthwhile for me.

#10: Walkabout

Walkabout, 1971, dir. Nicholas Roeg, screenplay by Edward Bond from a novel by James Vance Marshall. Sometimes a writer or a director will think they're making one movie but will end up making something quite different. On first viewing, Walkabout is a simple enough story: a brother and sister are stranded in the middle of the Australian outback; they meet an Aborigine boy who helps them find their way back to civilization. In fact, the surface story is all right, but it's very much of its time: the Aborigine is preternaturally good and noble, the opening scenes of civilization (set in Adelaide, I think), are mind-bogglingly stultifying, &c. &c. Guess which Aborigine is forever scarred and destroyed through his contact with Western society? But, as Roger Ebert has noted, the surface story is not what sticks with you; there are deeper things going on here which are more subtle.

Jenny Agutter plays the sister; she was probably 16 at the time of the shoot. In the commentary track, she says of her character, "the things that she requires are the things that her society has set up for her." I think that's very true and pretty insightful; society works by setting up needs and desires and then fulfilling them. If you have lived long enough to have gotten the jones for things like a house, a job, a spouse, it's pretty much impossible to imagine leaving the confines of the society that can provide those things for you. So when Jenny Agutter meets David Gulpilil, the Aborigine, she isn't really interested in him except to the extent he can get her back to the things she needs. Her younger brother (about 6) is more flexible, and doesn't yet have expectations. Jenny Agutter's characther isn't bad, or callous, or "the corrupting influence of modern society" or whatever; in fact, she behaves heroically in saving her brother. She is just profoundly uninterested in Gulpilil's society, and that proves to be his undoing. Strangely enough, the Aborigine does seem interested in the brother and sister. You can check out Ebert's essay for a more eloquent explanation of the failures of communication in this movie; suffice it to say that I think he's right, and the more I think about Walkabout, the righter I think he is.

A few notes and random observations about the movie:

In the opening scenes, Jenny Agutter serves fruit from a mixing bowl that my mom had: it's a bright red plastic bowl with a handle and a very broad spout. I think she threw it away years ago; it must have been a pretty common model at the time. I only mention this to note that household items like that are not important at all until you see one of them years later; then the tiniest, stupidest thing can spark all sorts of memories.

This is not a film to watch if you're squeamish about blood or dead animals. There are lots and lots of hunting scenes, all of them graphic. The most heavyhanded intercutting in the whole movie takes place during a scene where the Aborigine spears, dresses, and cooks a kangaroo: the whole (extremely bloody) process is intercut with a butcher cutting chops. It's a connection everyone in the theater can make without having it pounded into their heads. And it's one of the things in the movie that has dated; my first reaction was "A butcher! I've been looking all over LA for years for a good butcher!"

When Jenny Agutter first became interested in appearing with the film, it was going to be financed by Apple Corp. (the Beatles' company). As it turns out, she saw appearing in the movie as a necessary stepping stone to meeting the Beatles.

The movie was shot over four months, and they didn't do any location scouting or rehearsal, just went out to the desert and started filming. Try finding someone to produce a movie today under those terms. Furthermore, a wombat chewed through the wires on a bunch of the film equipment, and Jenny Agutter buried her 6-year-old co-star to his neck in the sand while on lunch break one day. The impression I got from her commentary was that she should probably have been better supervised.

The score is by John Barry, who you might remember from such stuck-in-your-head-forever pieces of music as the James Bond theme.

The last thing is something I've been wondering about for a while. On the commentary track, Nicholas Roeg says something really interesting about the way he uses flashbacks. He says he hates the term flashback, and when he shows something out of sequence, he's trying to literally show what's happening in the character's mind at the moment. As he puts it, "We don't think in pages of the written word, we think in images." Well, I don't think in images, and neither does my writing partner; my thought process involves a pretty literal internal monologue; I think in words. But some people do think in images; I have to work at it. I am pretty sure that thinking in words is an advantage if you're a novelist, but I wonder what's easier if you're writing a screenplay. Lawrence Kasdan's thing about screenwriting is that you should think of it in terms of watching the movie and "write what you see"; that sounds to me like the way to do it if you think in images. It's junior high school stuff to wonder what someone else's subjective thought process is like, but from what I've figured out informally, it seems to me that thinking in words is less common. I'd be curious to know what other people's experiences with this are like.

# 6: Beauty and the Beast

I've decided to stop putting any kind of rating on these movies. Who knew that distilling the most complicated films ever made to a single word would seem reductive?

La Belle et la Bête, 1946, dir. Jean Cocteau, screenplay by Jean Cocteau from a story by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont. This is the first DVD in the series that has a real surfeit of information and extras on it. In addition to the film, this includes two commentary tracks and an alternate soundtrack, plus about an hour of other extras, interviews with the actors and crew, production stills, trailers, and on and on and on. So it took rather a while to see everything, and it's hard to know where to start writing about this movie; I've spent a lot of time with it recently.

Whether you know it or not, Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête has a lot to do with the way you know the story of Beauty and the Beast. For example, Cocteau came up with the details of the Beast's castle that we're familiar with: talking doors, food that serves itself, and so on. The Disney version ripped this off and added the voice of Angela Lansbury. Cocteau's castle is much creepier (although Angela Lansbury can be plenty creepy).

Christian Bérard and Lucien Carré, the production designers, used humans as part of the set decoration, and it's remarkably unnerving. For example, the main fireplace in the castle has two caryatids on either side; their faces are real (extras, heavily made up to look like statues, stood in extremely uncomfortable positions behind the mantel and stuck their faces through the set. One of the best sets in the movie is a hallway with chandeliers held by human arms coming out of the wall. The old "arm-through-the-wall" trick has been ripped off since then time and time again (the arm thing most notably shows up in Labyrinth, which maybe isn't a great movie but made a big impression on me when I was a kid). The sets aren't fantastically impressive by today's terms but they're better than I could have put together in France in 1946. Apparently the production was shut down several times when linens, curtains, and other props were stolen: they were in such short supply in France then.

The costumes are phenomenal, and also have been much ripped-off since then.

The astute viewer will notice some similarities between these two Beasts.

As well as their costumes.

The Beast's mask was made in three parts and took five hours to apply to actor Jean Marais's face. It's hard to see this from a still, but it is incredibly expressive. It was also, apparently, incredibly difficult to photograph; the fur absorbed light far better than skin and so Marais had to be lit very brightly while Josette Day was not. You can kind of see that in the still above, though the Beast seems overlit in this one. I don't know enough about cinematography or lighting to really appreciate the technical achievement here myself, though.

Here's the thing about La Belle et la Bête, though. The ending is unbelievably unsatisfying. I liked the movie a lot until it ended, and then was just pissed off. On seeing the movie, Greta Garbo is reported to have said "Give me back my Beast!" and there seems a general consensus about this. Most critics, e.g., the ones on the two commentary tracks, attribute the let-down of the ending to the lure of evil, the fact that the Beast is inherently more interesting than the perfect Prince Charming, and so on. After watching the movie four times, I think my disappointment was a little different and it has to do with the way Cocteau constructed the ending: he made promises in the narrative that didn't pay off. To elaborate:

In Cocteau's version, Beauty has two wicked sisters and a lout of a brother; she is being wooed by a young man named Avenant (also played by Jean Marais). He's the basis for the Gaston character in the Disney version, but he's not such a bad guy in this movie. You know the basic ending, the Beast is transformed into Prince Charming and he and Beauty live happily ever after. Here's exactly how it plays out:

• Belle gets the Beast to agree to let her go home to visit her sick father. After some protest, he agrees.
• To show her how much he trusts her, he tells her all his secrets. They stand on the balcony outside Beauty's room and he points out a pavillion in the distance. He says, "All I possess I possess by magic, but my true riches are in that pavilion. It is called Diana’s pavilion."
• He further tells her the five secrets to his power. They are:
  • The rose (that Belle's father picked)
  • The glove (his glove can be used to teleport anywhere)
  • The horse (he has a horse that can be used to travel back to his castle)
  • The key (the key to Diana's Pavillion)
  • The mirror (a magical mirror in Belle's room which she can use to see things at a distance).
• As a token of trust, the Beast gives Belle the key to Diana's Pavillion. She uses his glove and travels home to see her sick father.
• Belle's sisters, her brother, and Avenant go to great lengths to steal the key to Diana's Pavillion from her while she is home.
• Belle stays longer than promised, and the Beast begins to sicken. He straps the magic mirror to his horse and sends the horse to Beauty's house.
• The sisters send Ludovic (Beauty's brother) and Avenant back on the horse (Beauty doesn't know the horse is there). Avenant and Ludovic plan to kill the Beast and steal everything in Diana's Pavillion.
• The sisters deliver the magic mirror to Belle.
• Belle gets the mirror, sees the Beast is sickening, decides to go back to the castle to save him. She transports herself back using the glove, but immediately remembers that she's forgotten the key at her house. So she uses the glove to transport herself back home and looks for the key. She can't find it anywhere. While she's at home, the magic mirror shatters.
• Belle goes back to the castle, finds the Beast. She doesn't say anything about the key she's lost.
• The boys find Diana's pavillion, start to put the key into the lock, then decide not to use the key, but instead climb on the roof of the pavillion and shatter a skylight.
• Ludovic lowers Avenant through the skylight—a statue of Diana comes to life and shoots him in the back with an arrow. Simultaneously, the Beast dies in Belle's arms.
• As soon as Avenant is hit with the arrow, he tranforms into the Beast. Ludovic drops him in horror, and his lifeless body lays on the floor in Diana's pavillion.
• The Beast is transformed into Prince Charming, and he and Belle fly away.

Cocteau goes to great lengths to emphasise the importance of the five symbols of the Beast's power but it doesn't matter when he starts losing them. Then the brothers go to great lengths to get the key, which they don't use. Belle is distraught that the key is missing, but when she can't find it, she never mentions it again. Ludovic leaves the story after he drops Avenant, and Beauty never knows what's happened to her ex-boyfriend. Neither Belle or the Beast mentions the missing key or the broken mirror, and they don't seem to care what was in Diana's pavillion. There's all this narrative stuff that never pays off, and I think that's what makes the ending so disappointing. It's the old "gun from the first act goes off in the third" thing; if you're not going to make these devices pay off or do anything, they probably shouldn't be in your movie.

It's also true, of course, that Prince Charming's costume is pretty foppish.

Final notes on this. The extras on this DVD are incredible. The best: Philip Glass wrote an opera designed to be performed while this film is projected without sound. So the vocals in his opera sync with the lips of the actors onscreen. This edition has the opera as audio track 2, in Dolby 5.1, and it's pretty amazing. My favorite part is the music that plays when Belle's father explores the Beast's cast.

There's also a documentary about the movie in which they brought Jean Marais, Mila Parély (who played one of the sisters), and Henri Alekan (the cinematographer) back to some of the locations to walk around and do interviews. There's a brief shot of Parély and Marais watching an early scene from the movie; they're both in their sixties or seventies here. The scene they're watching is an early one in which Avenant slaps Félicie ( Parély's character). I don't think Marais was expecting his character to do this because he jumped a little and apologized to Parély for hitting her. She kind of smiled at him and said, "You said that after every take." Maybe my favorite thing on the whole disc.

#7: A Night To Remember

CONSIDER

You could fill a whole shelf with movies about the sinking of the Titanic. The first one was made in 1915, just three years after the ship actually sank. A Night To Remember (1958, dir. Roy Ward Baker, written by Eric Ambler from the book by Walter Lord). This one's mostly for the history buffs, I think. Lord's book is an exhaustively researched account of the sinking of the Titanic, and the movie crams as much of what actually happened as possible into its two hours of screen time. I think it's a much better treatment of the subject than the 1997 Titanic, but that's kind of damning with faint praise. Something I didn't know: Fox has produced at least two Titanic films; the first was in 1953 (and won a best screenplay Oscar). Like James Cameron's version, the 1953 film had a fictional love story set on the Titanic: the IMDB has maybe the best ending to any summary on this one: "Their problems soon seem minor when the ship hits an iceberg." That's about the size of it.

So: A Night To Remember. There aren't any fictional subplots in this version, although they do give Second Officer Lightroller all the good lines, whether someone else actually said them or not. The sets look pretty accurate, by which I mean they look just like the sets in Titanic. The grand staircase and first-class dining area get just as much emphasis in this film as the later one: you can see the staircase in the back of this still. The movie opens with a dedication ceremony for the Titanic that never happened, and you get to see the ship dragged out from the drydock into open water. They did this with archival footage of other ships, but it's really impressive. William MacQuitty, who produced the movie, actually saw the Titanic launched. Didn't see it sink, though.

One of the problems with writing anything based on actual events is that people who were there are going to be very concerned with how they appear in the movie. In this movie the big loser is J. Bruce Ismay, the chairman of the White Star Line. I don't remember how he's treated in the 1997 version, but in this one, he's an ineffectual coward who sneaks onto a lifeboat at the last minute. Apparently his wife was none too pleased with this movie, for good reason. Everyone else comes off all right, though. My favorite character is Thomas Andrews, the designer of the ship. His last scene in the first class dining room is the one point where the movie achieves a real sense of tragedy. An honorable mention goes to the ship's baker, who gets increasingly drunker and drunker during the sinking: he has a bottle of whiskey hidden in a dresser drawer and keeps returning to it until his cabin is underwater. As it turns out, this actually happened: despite not being allowed to have alcohol on board per White Star policy, this guy did, and told people about it afterwards. He survived, of course: patron saint of drunks and all that.

Because the filmmakers where very concerned with accuracy and completeness, the movie spends a lot of time on boats that were near the Titanic when she sank, most notably the Californian. This is the boat that was closest, but didn't respond to wireless calls for help or distress flares. Actually, Cameron apparently shot a whole sequence on the Californian as well, but cut it from the film. These guys come off a little worse than Ismay: the captain can't be bothered to get out of bed, the wireless operator goes to sleep and misses the calls for help, and the crewmen who see the flares decide that the Titanic must be celebrating. These guys are my kind of sailors. That said, these sequences kind of kill the momentum of what's going on on the Titanic itself, and I don't think the movie would be worse for cutting them.

The special effects are pretty impressive: there are a lot of model shots that look passable, if not great. In addition, a gigantic replica of the center portion of the ship was constructed on land, and some shots were done with other ships painted to look like the Titanic. At the time this was made, people didn't know the Titanic broke in two before she sank, so that doesn't happen, but through the magic of a tilted set and even more tilted cameras, you do get to see the mad rush to the back of the boat as it starts going down, complete with people hanging from the railings and sliding haphazardly down the deck into the icy water. They filmed the engine room sequences in the last working engine like what was on the Titanic, on a dam somewhere in England. And all the other sequences that you'd expect are here: Captain Smith returns to the bridge to go down with the ship, Thomas Andrews stands in the empty first class lounge listening to the creaks of the ship as it goes down, Guggenheim and his valet dress formally to go down like gentlemen (I wonder what the valet thought of that, though; I think I'd quit at that point), Molly Brown is sturdy, vulgar, and American.

All the detail is kind of the problem, though: the movie feels to me like it's too much just one thing after another. And then this happened, and then that happened, and so on. I think it would be a wonderful movie if you knew a little about the sinking of the Titanic and wanted to learn more, or if you were already a buff. I'm not really in either of those categories, so I can't recommend the movie wholeheartedly.

#2: Seven Samurai

RECOMMEND

So, after a long delay thanks to Netflix sending me the wrong version, I've finally seen Seven Samurai (1954, dir. Akira Kurosawa, written by Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, and Hideo Oguni). If you're a language purist, you can call it Shichinin no samurai, or for real deal insane purists, 七人の侍.

I've got a sordid past with this movie, actually. In fall of 1997 I took The Feature Film at Williams, which was a great class, despite being a gigantic lecture-type thing. Jim Shepard, Shawn Rosenheim, and Stephen Tifft taught it; they were great, the class was great, and what interest I have in film these days has a lot to do with that experience. If you'd like a taste of the class, here's Jim Shepard's review of Analyze This, which ends up being more or less about The Godfather and Goodfellas. I think he wrote a more recent essay about those movies in The Believer but I don't have that issue. Anyway, point is, these guys were solid; I never missed a lecture. For me to be up in the morning that fall was no small feat. So. As I recall, screenings of movies were Monday nights at 7:00 and 9:00, class was Tuesday & Thursday mornings, and we did a movie a week. Being the kind of slackass I am, I pretty much only made the 9:00 screenings. When Seven Samurai was showing, I came, as always, to the 9:00 screening. I was there a few minutes after 9:00, and the movie had already started. So I sat down and watched an hour and a half long movie about samurai. I didn't think Kurosawa did a great job developing the characters, but I enjoyed it. The next day in lecture, we watched a clip, which I'd never seen, and which was far too long to have been shown between 9:00 and 9:05. So I did a little research on the web and realized there'd only been a 7:00 showing; I'd been two hours late and had no idea. Point is, this is a long, long movie, a solid 207 minutes. So be prepared for that.

That said, watch it in one sitting, it's great. The movie suffers a little from the sense of belatedness that I talked about when writing about Grand Illusion, and I want to revise my comments there. I mean belatedness in the "arriving too late at the party to appreciate the innovations in the movie since I've seen them revised and improved upon since then" sense, if that is, in fact, a sense. For non-English majors, the English major sense of the word is "having arrived too late on the historical scene, at the end of a Western modernity that had completely mapped out the landscape in advance." Not my definition (stole it from here), but it's pretty good. It's usually a synonym for "why I can't finish my novel." Point is: when writing about Grand Illusion, I implied that belatedness was mostly a problem for technical innovations, and now I see that isn't true; narrative innovations suffer from it too. And I guess I mean narrative innovations in the sense of "plot points," not storytelling techniques. Seven Samurai has been ripped off more times than I can count. It's about a group of villagers in midieval Japan who hire a group of Samurai (one guess how many) to protect them from a roving gang of bandits. The first half of the movie covers hiring the bandits and building defenses around the village; the second half is all about the attack. There are entire scenes that have been lifted out of this movie into others; the whole sequence where the ragtag band of Samurai are recruited is in heist movies, escape movies, defend the village from the bandits movies, and so on and so forth. The samurai themselves have been put in other movies; there's:

• Kikuchiyo: The wild and crazy guy who doesn't seem to have the discipline to be a samurai at first. Desparate to prove himself worthy. Has a mysterious past.
• Kambei: The wise, older samurai who leads the group. He has a great sense of the absurd and tragic, but perserveres.
• Heihachi: The guy who can always be counted on to make a good natured joke and brighten the mood when things seem hopeless.
• Katsushiro: Rich, young, inexperienced, over-eager, he proves himself in the end

And so on. These characters have shown up in some version or other again and again and again. Kurosawa didn't invent these characters, but if you take any movie that features a motley gang facing impossible odds, from The Usual Suspects to Hard Ball (that's right, I said Hard Ball), you'll see these guys show up. And as Hard Ball taught us all, the most important thing in life is showing up.^* Kurosawa does these characters better than most other people, but I've seen them before. So don't expect many narrative surprises from this movie.

The acting is solid straight through. Toshirô Mifune is a whole lot of fun as Kikuchiyo; he takes an insane amount of glee in causing chaos. There's a great sequence where he goes behind enemy lines to steal one of the bandits' three matchlock rifles. Kikuchiyo kills a bandit, wears his clothes, sits happily down next to another bandit on guard, who thinks he's one of them. The bandit says something about what a rough time they're having and Kikuchiyo says something along the lines of "Don't worry. Your suffering will soon be over." They have a whole conversation like that, and finally the bandit realizes what's up just in time to be gutted. It doesn't sound as funny as it actually is. Also, throughout the whole movie he torments Yohei, one of the most feckless of the feckless villagers, and his imitation of him is priceless. I'd like to see Mifune in other movies; I'm not sure if any of his other films are part of the collection.. Looking at his credits, I see he was cast as Admiral Yamamoto no fewer than four times; did he resemble him physically or was he just the go-to guy for Yamamoto impersonations?

The DVD includes the intermission, which has an overture. It's a nice touch. It reminded me of a question I've had for a while that isn't related to Seven Samurai. In Italy, movies are always shown with an intermission. Even if there's no break, they have a slight pause in the middle, and sometimes they break for as long as ten minutes. This is true when movies are broadcast on television as well; there's a break (and that's where they run commercials, about five minutes worth, but the rest of the movie is uninterrupted, which is much nicer than every fifteen minutes). Anyway, when I asked about it, I was told that the break in the middle was for a reel change. But reels of film are much shorter than 45 minutes to an hour, on any projector I've seen, and if they're using platters, they shouldn't need to change reels at all. So what gives? Are Italian movies projected on platters or with five or six reels like American ones? I thought projector designs were pretty standard internationally. Is the intermission just a tradition there? The break is actually on the films, it's not like they stop it arbitrarily; there's a title that comes up announcing the first part of the film is over. If anyone knows the answer to this, please let me know, cause I've wondered about it for years.

Back to Seven Samurai, random notes and observations.

• Seeing the word "Sheeyit" in a subtitle (spelled like that) is an interesting experience.
• Kurosawa does this thing where he cuts onn an action, e.g., you see Kambei draw his sword in a shot from behind and halfway through drawing it, you cut to a shot facing him and he charges toward the camera. I'm mostly interested in screenplays right now but if I ever start editing film that's a trick I'm going to remember, cause it makes the action seem very fast.
• I've never seen a movie with more detailed tactical information about the critical battle. You're walked through every step of defending the village and really know all the weak points. I could draw a map of the village. The sequence where Kambei plans the defenses and simultaneously shows you each part of the village is really genius: it gets an incredible amount of information across but every scene in that sequence advances the plot; it's not exposition.
• That said, the longer the battle for the village goes on, the more the tactics fall apart, and the end is just this giant mess of a battle. In pouring rain, which just makes it messier.
• Kambei knows how many bandits there are, and he has a drawing with a circle for each one. Every time they kill one, he crosses out a circle. It's a really nice visual, and it also lets the audience know exactly where we are in the battle. The DVD menu mimics this: there's a circle for each menu item and you move a cross from circle to circle to select things. It's a very nice design job.

That's all for this one. The 400 Blows is going to have to wait until I can borrow the Criterion Collection edition from my friend Chad Shonk. So next will probably be A Night To Remember. Non-Criterion Collection recommendations: The Incredibles, Maria Full of Grace, and Final Destination 2. The last one less than the first two.

^*N.B.: I don't actually like Hard Ball.

#4: Amarcord

Amarcord (1974, dir. Federico Fellini, written by Federico Fellini & Tonino Guerra). This is a movie I've had the opportunity to see in the past and I didn't do it, pretty much strictly because of the graphic design on the poster—the seventies were not kind, as far as fonts go. Anyway, I guess I figured Fellini was right on the edge of being completely self-indulgent in 8½, and I couldn't imagine he got more restrained in his old age. I was wrong, though; this is worth seeing.

Or at least it was worth seeing for me. I'm a sucker for Italian movies; I lived in L'Aquila from 1994–1995, and I miss the country and the language something fierce. So seeing anything shot there is nice for me; I always see something I'd forgotten about. In this movie, it was the obituary posters that people put up on city walls when someone dies. It took me a long time when I got over there to figure out what those were about; being American I figured they were ads, until I read enough Italian to put it together. I also really enjoy hearing the language again. It takes me about twenty minutes to reacclimate myself to it, and then I can understand it again. But back on point:

"Amarcord" is a dialect contraction of "mi ricordo," which means "I remember." Actually, looking at it, the dialect is probably from "a me, mi ricordo," which is the same thing, only even more reflexive. Gotta love Italian. The movie is pretty formless; it covers a year, from spring to spring; towards the end, there's a scene with a banner reading "VII Mille Miglia," which would be April 1933 (thanks, Google!). So let's say it's spring to spring, 1932–1933. Anyway, it's basically a year in the life of an Italian town at that time; there's a teenage protagonist who is in many of the scenes, but not all by a long shot, and although the plot mostly revolves around his family, it's pretty much just one damn thing after another; there's not much progression. I guess that is part of the point with a memory piece like that, though. This would be about ten years into Mussolini's rule, and the war that's on its way kind of hangs over the movie; it's never really mentioned explicitly, but you're always very aware that you're looking at a world that is now gone. The closest thing to it I can think of in terms of tone is In the Mood for Love, although that has a little more of a story (but is also more boring; go figure). Anyway. Fellini being Fellini, there are a lot of abrupt fantasy sequences, some of which are hilarious (e.g., there's a wedding between a fat kid and a cute girl his age, presided over by a gigantic (and really frightening) billboard of Mussolini's disembodied head). Scene for scene, it's pretty entertaining, which is often all I ask of a movie. But I wouldn't want to read the screenplay.

So why give a recommend to a movie with no plot? Cinematography, cinematography, cinematography. Giuseppe Rotunno shot this movie, and it's beautiful. He's worked on just about everything, although his most recent American work is, well, I don't know; maybe it's beautifully shot too, but I'm not going to watch the movies and find out: he did Regarding Henry, Wolf, and the 1995 version of Sabrina. But Amarcord is one of those very painterly 70s films. My roommate says it was probably done with Technicolor's "imbibition" process, a dye transfer that produced really rich colors. The Godfather, Part II was developed with that process, so if you think of the visual tone of that, you've got what Amarcord looks like: very rich yellows, and the whole screen kind of glows; it looks like everything was shot right as the sun went down.. Grab just about any still from this movie and it will look good. I'm not usually a nut for cinematography, and I'm much less of one now than I used to be, but man did Giuseppe Rotunno nail this.

Last thing: Fellini: not a fan of the Twiggy-style woman. And very much into the ass. I knew that from 8½, but he really goes overboard in this one.

#3: The Lady Vanishes

RECOMMEND

Seven Samurai will unfortunately have to wait: Netflix sent me a different, non-Criterion edition (a real Japanese edition, from the looks of it). Oddly, the sleeve still said "The Criterion Collection," so I think that someone has been taking the Criterion editions and replacing them with cheaper editions of the same movies. So:

The Lady Vanishes (1938, dir. Alfred Hitchcock, screenplay by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder from a novel by Ethel Lina White). This is a weird one: it starts as a comedy, turns into a thriller and ends up an action movie, albeit an early, pre special-effects and choreography action movie. The beginning is genuinely funny and the suspense part is genuinely creepy, but the end is kind of a drag. Margaret Lockwood stars as Iris, a young woman returning from a central European country to England to get married. Michael Redgrave is a music theorist; they're taking the same train back. Dame May Witty plays Mrs. Froy, the Lady in the title. As you might have guessed, at a certain point in the movie, she vanishes.

You could never get away with the structure of this movie if you were writing it today: the first twenty-three minutes are straight comedy, with a crazy ethnic hotelier, a pair of cricket-obsessed Englishmen, a hotel room full of scantily clad (well, for 1938) women, and lots of slapstick. Nothing even vaguely ominous or suspenseful happens until this long comedy section is finished: I can't imagine a script reader making it far enough to realize that this wasn't a comedy. And what McKee would call the "inciting incident" doesn't happen until later, at least thirty-five minutes in. Not to say that the beginning isn't funny: it is. Margaret Lockwood and Mrs. Froy hear odd banging noises from the room above them and send the hotel manager up to get the guest up there to shut up: he enters to find Michael Redgrave lying in bed loudly playing a clarinet while four elderly natives of the country perform a peasant dance with lots of stomping and clapping. He keeps stopping them to take notes (he's working on a book about native dances or something). Anyway, the scene is exactly what you expect is going on when people a floor up are making weird noises.

Once Mrs. Froy disappears, the movie really takes off. Iris takes a nap on a train; when she goes to sleep, Mrs. Froy is in the seat facing her. When she awakens, Froy is gone, and everyone on the train denies ever having seen her. It's creepy, and the other people on the train are all really grotesque. There's an Italian magician named Doppo who has this very threatening grin all the time, a bride-of-frankenstein looking Baroness who's always looking disapprovingly, a brain surgeon from Prague who has kind of a Dracula look about him; none of them are travelling companions you'd want. After Margaret Lockwood has been searching for Mrs. Froy a while, she reappears in the same sleeper car. Only it's not her, it's a woman who looks nothing like her. You see her first from behind annd she looks like the missing woman. The shot of her turning toward the camera is really striking; it's Freud's uncanny in action. There's also a really bizarre sequence where Mrs. F's face is superimposed on the face of the other people in the sleeper car.

Once the mystery is solved, there's a long, pretty much unnecessary sequence with a shoot-out and a train / automobile chase. It goes on too long and it doesn't really add anything. As train chases go, it's much worse than The General. All the major plot stuff has been resolved by this point. There are a lot of surprises and reversals until this sequence but this part is just straightforward. According to the commentary, this section was added by the screenwriters at Hitchcock's request. Maybe he really, really wanted to shoot something with trains and the production had some money left over; along with the comic opening, this part is really strange structurally.

The last weird thing about this movie from a plot perspective: nothing bad happens to the villians, which is really a shame; they're not exactly complicated characters, so they don't need a big realization of what they've done. But you would expect at least Paul Lukas's brain surgeon to meet some terrible fate: he really is a great villian and the story just kind of drops him. Everyone escapes, but that's it. Also, the bad guys are really terrible shots.

Despite the slow opening and unnecessary action ending, the movie's worth seeing for the middle part, which is ace suspense. I'd recommend steering clear of the DVD extras, though. There's a terrible demonstration of the restoration work, which (a) they didn't do a very good job on; there are a lot of visible hairs and scratches on this version and (b) the demo itself is terrible; it's just four sequences played in gradual faster motion, with no explanation of how the work is done, what print they were working from, or anything. The commentary is all right, but focuses more on the careers of the various people involved in the project than on the actual movie that's showing. Which is really all I'm interested in.

Final note: Margaret Lockwood and Linden Travers: stone cold foxes.

#1: Grand Illusion

Grand Illusion (1937, directed by Jean Renoir, written by Jean Renoir and Charles Spaak) isn't the kind of movie I usually go nuts about, but I did enjoy it. It's set, for the most part, in a series of German POW camps during World War One. Renoir got the idea for the story from a pilot he knew during the war who was shot down seven times, captured by the Germans seven times, and escaped from POW camps seven times. Renoir was himself a pilot; the DVD features a still of him in a completely ridiculous all-wooden plane. Anyway, the movie isn't really much like the idea; it's not a Stalag 17 or whatever. You only see one actual escape attempt (though a few happen off-screen). Mostly, it's about I'd seen one other Renoir movie before this one, The Rules of the Game. Which, incidentally, is fantastic.

Grand Illusion isn't quite my cup of tea. Renoir's thing is kind of elaborate shots that have been really carefully blocked out and framed. An example in this movie is a really neat shot where the camera circles around a dinner table; although the conversation seems natural, everyone who's talking is in frame as the camera goes counter-clockwise. It's really claustrophobic and cool; and it's also been copied and refined since then. Shoulders of giants and all that: Scorsese does the same stuff, but better. Not a fair comparison, because he had better equipment and much more money. But because I saw Goodfellas before Grand Illusion, I wasn't as surprised or amazed by the camera work as I might have been otherwise. And yes, yes, Scorsese wouldn't have been able to do his thing without studying Renoir and people who learned from him, but the end result is that although the camera work is really, really impressive in this movie, I appreciated it abstractly more than viscerally. T.S. Eliot (who I've been loathe to quote since a high school phase, but wait for it):

Someone said: "The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did." Precisely, and they are what we know.

So, you know, Renoir's got that going for him. I mean, Eliot's right, and it's the reason for studying older art generally. But in film more than other arts, there's a thrill in seeing something being done for the first time that can't be reproduced by watching a movie nearly seventy years after the fact. And I think it has a lot to do with the fact that film is so dependent on technology, in a way that literature isn't; writing hasn't really changed that much in the last thousand years. Don't get me wrong--there are techniques that are developed and refined over time, and writers build on their forebears. But it's still language; it's not like that has been improved on so much recently. Not like, say, Steadicams. The movies I think are really great are about narrative, not technique, and they stand up. Grand Illusion has a lot of very obvious technique, so some of it feels dated; what my friend Adam calls a "homework movie."

The acting is quality: Erich Von Stroheim is great as a German career officer. He shoots down the two main characters at the beginning of the war, and disappears from the movie till about the halfway point, when he's been seriously injured and is running a prison camp that's supposed to be impossible to escape from. Once injured, he limps around in a corset and neck brace, wearing white gloves to cover horrific burns. He's better in Sunset Boulevard but he's pretty amazing here. And the shot that announces his return is a classic horror-movie style thing; the camera tracks over all his (really bizarre) possessions, then settles on his orderly, getting his white gloves ready, follows him all over the room, and finally puts Von Stroheim in the frame. Picture worth a thousand words:

The DVD has a really cool extra on the restoration of the film; a little of the history. The movie was released in 1937. There was an American version, much shorter. Grand Illusion in this version screened at the White House on Eleanor Roosevelt's birthday--after seeing it, FDR said "Everyone who believes in democracy should see this film." I think politicians should endorse movies and books more often; this is a good start. The Nazis banned the movie, but they saved a print or two. When Berlin fell, these were shipped back to Moscow by the Russians, who looted the German film archives (well, not so much looted as "carefully catalogued," but still). In 1958, a restored version was made from a duped negative; it was very scratchy, and the whole right side of the film was blurry. Criterion did a restoration job on this version in the eighties, but it was still pretty scratchy and blurry. In the early nineties, though, the original camera negative (the film that was actually running through the camera when it was shot) was found in the Russian film archives, and that's what Criterion restored for this edition. The featurette shows each version; you see the scratches, hair, cigarette burns, and blurry focus disappear with each successive restoration.

Random notes and things I liked:

• Some phrases stay in English, even in Europe, e.g., "Top Model." I was really happy to see someone credited as "Script Girl" in the otherwise all-French credits.
• Not just FDR: Benito Mussolini liked this movie enough that he invited Renoir to lecture on film at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. Weirder still, he did it. No word as to whether the Duce said "Everyone who believes in fascism should see this film!"
• Casablanca wasn't the first movie in which French patriots drown out Germans by singing La Marseillaise.
• BONUS FEATURE: KNOW YOUR NAZIS!!!: The guy who does the audio essay on this DVD incorrectly identifies the song the Germans are singing in Casablanca as the Horst Wessel song. It's actually "Wacht am Rhein."
• Clever dialogue from an aristocrat lamenting democratization: "The pox used to be our privilege, but not anymore. Cancer and gout aren't working class diseases, but they will be, believe me."
• I can't stand scenes between lovers where they both are facing the camera. This works on stage but good riddance to this in film.
• The narrative structure of this movie is very, very weird. It's three acts and an epilogue, I guess, but the third act (in which two of the main characters hide out with a German woman near the Swiss border) seems very out of place--the rest of it is all men, all the time. This last part starts about twenty minutes before the end of the movie, so you're not expecting a big shift in focus there. It's kind of like the early stuff in Mexico in The Wild Bunch, all of a sudden you're surrounded by domestic stuff that was completely lacking before. But it happens very late in the movie and really doesn't seem that connected to the rest of the story.

Next up, Seven Samurai.

#258: Tanner '88

Robert Altman and Gary Trudeau collaborated on this HBO series, which follows a fictional presidential candidate through the Democratic primaries, from New Hampshire to the convention floor in Atlanta. Jack Tanner (Michael Murphy, who you might remember from Magnolia or Nashville) is a left-of-center candidate who goes to real campaign events throughout, from a meeting with a community group in the projects of Detroit to a fundraiser in Los Angeles. The joke is, they actually followed the primary campaign very closely, and so Tanner meets with all kinds of people who were players that year, from Bob Dole to Kitty Dukakis. In fact, it seems like Altman ambushed several of these people—Pat Robertson seems to have no idea who Tanner is, but he shakes his hand and wishes him luck.

The production values on this show are pretty terrible—it’s all shot on video using hand-held cameras. Apparently it was a very rushed and it looks it—Altman talks at one point about waiting anxiously by the fax machine for new plot points from Trudeau, who was writing at the last minute so he could respond to current events (and they do a pretty good job of this). It has that cheap-video sheen to the colors, which I find very hard to watch. And it’s typical Altman style on the sound mix, too, by which I mean muddy and confused; I found it easier to follow at many points if I had the subtitles on.

The acting is kind of suprisingly bad for such a good cast. Michael Murphy's consistently good, but a lot of it looks like improv that wasn't rehearsed enough. Which is probably exactly what it was. Cynthia Nixon is in this, looking about 14 (she would have just turned 22). Pamela Reed does a pretty good job too, as Tanner's campaign manager. The rest I could take or leave.

The fun of this isn't the actors, though, it's the background of the real campaign. There are some things that I think would have made more sense in 1988 (I have a copy of What It Takes, so I should know more about that year, but the fact is I've started it three times and never made it to page 100, so that's probably not going to happen). Anyway, I get the sense there are in-jokes. For example, at the New Hampshire campaign stops, Al Haig's supporters are always drunk and running through the hotels wreaking frat-boy-style havoc. No idea what that's about, but I like the sound of it.

There's also at least one secret history-type connection: After dropping out of the real race, Bruce Babbit did an extended cameo in which he gives Tanner advice on continuing to run; they both talk about how artificial the other candidates seem. Babbit says that he thinks that someone should ask one of them what the price of a quart of milk was, that none of them would know; they don't deal with that part of the world at all anymore. Four years later, somebody baffled Paul Tsongas at a campaign stop with that very question (I think he asked about a gallon, not a quart, but still). I'd like to think the questioner (some anonymous New Hampshire resident) saw Tanner '88 back in the day. Other cameos, all of whom are playing themselves: Jesse Jackson, Chris Matthews, Michael Kinsley, Ralph Nader, Gloria Steinem, Rebecca De Mornay, and Waylon Jennings. And those are just the ones I recognized. Like Wonkette says, there's famous, and then there's famous for Washington.

The show's not just a parade of cameos, though—although most of the show isn't especially moving or convincing, it does have a few scenes that are pretty amazing. The one that got to me most has Michael Murphy and Cynthia Nixon on the convention floor in Atlanta while they're still setting up, before the delegates arrive. He says something like, "We made it, honey," and she says "We sure did, dad." Then the camera zooms out as Tanner walks across the floor and climbs up on the still-under-construction podium: as he goes, in the background you hear exerpts from famous speeches by Democrats past: FDR, Adlai Stevenson (this one I can't find on the net, but it's the one where he talks about being governed at last by reason and by law), LBJ, Kennedy, and Cuomo, from just four years earlier. Anyway, I've linked to the speeches, but the passages themselves are pretty choice; e.g., here's the part of Cuomo's speech they use:

We believe as Democrats, that a society as blessed as ours, the most affluent democracy in the world's history, one that can spend trillions on instruments of destruction, ought to be able to help the middle class in its struggle, ought to be able to find work for all who can do it, room at the table, shelter for the homeless, care for the elderly and infirm, and hope for the destitute. And we proclaim as loudly as we can the utter insanity of nuclear proliferation and the need for a nuclear freeze, if only to affirm the simple truth that peace is better than war because life is better than death.

Oh, also, this series contains the worst wedding toast ever, given by Tanner's estranged father at his son's wedding; it's something like this:

100 years ago, after a particularly grueling session of Parliament, William Gladstone shouted across the aisle to his arch-rival Benjamin Disraeli, "You'll end up on the gallows or with venereal disease!" Disraeli retorted, "That depends, sir, on whether I embrace your principles, or your mistress." I bring this up because...

And then somebody cuts him off. Too, too droll. I leave you with a bit of Tanner in 2004, talking about losing:

There are no moral victories in politics. There's only winning. And if you have even the slightest doubt about that, you shouldn't be in it. You should move aside for those who care enough to do what it takes to win.

I didn't used to think that was true, but this election I'm not sure.

Welcome!

Hello, and welcome to The Criterion Contraption, the newest project in my campaign against spending any of my free time outdoors. Here's the way we play the game: I just subscribed to Netflix cause they lowered the price. I've put the entire Criterion Collection of DVDs into my Netflix queue, and I'm going to watch them all; I figure $20 a month is a fair price to pay for a basic grounding in world cinema. If you're not familiar, Criterion is a company that's been releasing high-end laserdiscs and DVDs for years; they're known for incredibly lavish extras, and beautiful film transfers & restoration work. The DVD part of their collection (I won't be watching the laserdiscs) can be found here. Here are the rules:

1. I'm going to watch the movies in more or less catalog order (except the first one, which I'd been really wanting to see).
2. If I can't find the Criterion edition, I'll watch whatever I can find. If you have any out of print titles you want to loan me, I won't say no.
3. I'll watch all the extras and commentary tracks. Since I'm getting them from Netflix, however, I won't have access to any of the essays included on the DVD inserts.
4. I'm going to write somewhere between 500 and 1000 words about each one. This is not, not, not film criticism, just trying to organize my thoughts after watching these movies.
5. For the short-attention-span crowd, I'll head each post like it's coverage, e.g., RECOMMEND, STRONG CONSIDER, CONSIDER, MILD CONSIDER, PASS. From good to bad.

So. Welcome! UPDATE: Added a few rules, linked to the collection's website (H/T: Rog).