#22: Summertime

Summertime, 1955, directed by David Lean, screenplay by H. E. Bates and David Lean, based on the play The Time of the Cuckoo by Arthur Laurents.

At a time when anything European is held up for scorn by the right wing, it's salutory to remember the place Europe once held in the American imagination. Summertime is the zenith of romanticized views of Europe. Or, I should say, a very 1950s way of romanticizing Europeans. It's not the "so cultured! so bored with life! so existential!" romantic European who dominated the 60's, but the 50's version: cultured, but not yet bored, and most of all, sensual.

Katherine Hepburn plays a retired secretary from Akron, Ohio, touring Europe for the first time; Summertime is about an affair she has with a married Italian (Renato de Rossi, played by Rossano Brazzi) while staying in Venice. I can't imagine what this was like as a play, because if you took away the lush travelogue shots of Venice, you'd be left with maybe 30 minutes of film. Those 30 minutes have their moments, but the central love story between Hepburn and Brazzi didn't really interest me. This is one of those movies where the woman says "Renato! Renato!" and it's a big plot point, which is fine for what it is, but not my kind of film.

Even if the main story left me flat, there are some great touches; Jane Rose and MacDonald Parke play an older couple on a mile-a-minute tour of Europe. Their travel agent has planned everything out for them, including an hour of "I. A." (Independent Activity) each day. They're amusingly gauche; MacDonald Parke turns down a drink, saying, within earshot of his Italian hostess, "I'd like to, but this wop food has ruined my digestion." Later, he marvels at the Academy of Venice: "Pictures! Thousands and thousands of pictures. All of them done by hand!" The ugly American is a staple of this sort of film, of course, but these two are a cut above, not least because they're genuinely charming and not unsympathetic. This sort of character is usually only an object of scorn, but Summertime gives them at least a little breathing room.

The movie also succeeded in making me miss Italy; Venice has never looked better. And Lean doesn't have any qualms about shooting the whole thing like it was being made for the tourist board; he has a lot of shots of Venetian landmarks that have nothing to do with the story. Is a character walking into the Piazza San Marco? That's enough to motivate two minutes of basically static shots of architectural details of the palazzo ducale. I'll admit it; when I was there I shot a whole roll of film of the same building, and it fits the story to give in to that impulse and shoot it like a tourist (in fact, Katherine Hepburn carries an 8mm movie camera with her throughout the first half of the film). Although I enjoyed seeing the city again, I prefer a more economical style of directing; with movies like this, people talk about the setting like it's a character. It's not.

This is also the first movie I've seen that unironically cuts from two characters embracing to fireworks going off in the background. No kidding; I always thought that was more of a theoretical cliché than something that ever really happened. And yes, Brazzi runs after Hepburn's train as it leaves the station. He doesn't catch it, though. And Hepburn leaves him, goes back to the states. So in that sense, Summertime is not as hackneyed as it could have been. And Hepburn's performance, especially towards the beginning, is very good; they get exactly right what it feels like to be alone in a city you don't know. Venice was that way for me.

#17: Salò

Salò o le 120 Giornate di Sodoma, 1975, written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, based on 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade.

Critics often describe movies as visceral. If they haven't seen Salò, I respectfully submit that they don't know what the fuck they're talking about. This film literally made me vomit. (And yes, I'm using "literally" correctly there). I don't think that makes it a good film, but "visceral," in the sense of "affecting the internal organs?" Yeah, Pasolini's got that.

Salò is a small town in Brescia that was the seat of government for the Italian Social Republic, the German puppet state that Mussolini established after the Nazis "liberated" him. Pasolini's movie is a retelling of the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, set in Salò during the waning days of World War II. It's kind of a genius transposition: the childish nihilism of de Sade is a good fit for the preening, self-annihilating cult of death that was Fascism. So I give Pasolini credit for that. But that isn't enough to defend this atrocity of a film.

The basic story: four Fascist officials, knowing that the Republic of Salò will soon fall to the Allies, and knowing that they will deserve anything their conquerors care to do to them, decide to really earn their fates. You could say with a straight face that these characters are Rumsfield's archetypical dead enders. They kidnap nine young men and nine young women and retire to a country villa. Once there, they proceed to torment, rape, torture, and kill their prisoners.

I don't really want to go into too much detail as to what is done to these eighteen men and women, except to say that it gets worse as the movie goes on. There are four sections to the film: Antechamber of Hell, Circle of Obsessions, Circle of Shit, and Circle of Blood. In that order. The Circle of Shit, which features a giant banquet of human excrement, is what made me lose my dinner. My body completely rejected what I was seeing. And the Circle of Blood was even worse.

I think Salò is interesting movie to think about in the abstract, but watching it is poisonous. For me, it raises the question of at what point filming atrocities is itself reprehensible. Pasolini clearly didn't intend for Salò to be pleasurable to watch. And I wouldn't say art has to have a purpose, or be enjoyable, to be good. But in this movie, human beings are reduced to objects; they suffer, cry, beg for their lives, betray their companions, and die. There's no interest in them except as bodies; even in the credits, they are listed as "Victims (Men)" and "Victims (Women)." It's impossible to watch this kind of degradation and not be degraded by it yourself; and indeed, that seems to be Pasolini's goal. The end of the film allows us to watch the torture and murder of the victims from a safe distance, through the eyes of the Fascist officials; the viewer is explicitly implicated. A certain amount of viewer implication is a good thing; see Psycho, or Badlands. But this is something else entirely—I don't feel that I have anything in common with the depraved killers in Salò, now or ever.

Pasolini put together this film at a low point in his life (and shortly before he was strangled to death by a male prostitute). After making several successful movies, Pasolini, a dedicated Marxist, decided that by producing entertainment, he was helping keep the masses content and stupid. Salò was conceived as a kind of Brechtian fuck-you gesture from Pasolini to his audience; his stated intention was to produce an "indigestible" movie. Mission accomplished.

#9: Hard Boiled

Hard Boiled, 1992, directed by John Woo, screenplay by Barry Wong, story by John Woo.

Hard Boiled is about the way violence lurks just beneath the surface of our day-to-day life. The movie is set in Hong Kong, where guns are illegal. It opens with Chow Yun-Fat breaking up a gun deal in a teahouse. The guns in question are hidden in the bottom drawers of birdcages, which, this being a John Woo movie, means there are some slow-motion shots of birds trying to take off during the ensuing shootout. From that point on, we are shown again and again that the more innocent something seems, the more likely it is to be dangerous.

Some of the places guns are concealed in Hard Boiled:

• Birdcages
• The second volume of a complete set of Shakespeare in a public library
• Welded inside cars
• In a secret room off the morgue of a city hospital

The hospital is a particularly great touch. Woo had a standoff in a hospital in The Killer, but in Hard Boiled, the hospital is the climax of the movie, the site of a thirty minute gun battle. It's really genius to have the gun runners' cache be in the basement of a hospital; if I'm ever running guns (again) I will keep that in mind. But to characterize Hard Boiled as solely a portrait of a world where violence and betrayal permeate every aspect of life is to do it a disservice. It's also about stuff blowing up real good.

So how good does stuff blow up? Real good. Take the warehouse fight sequence halfway through the movie, for one example. A group of eight or nine killers on motorcycles tear into the place, shooting it up from moving bikes. The baddest of the badasses, a guy called Mad Dog, played by Philip Kwok, rides in on his bike at full speed, shooting at someone in front of him, then puts the bike into a skid, still shooting at the guy, steps off the moving, skidding bike, and in one motion stands up and shoots two more guys. There's a real stuntman doing this, it's not an effects shot. The movie's worth seeing for that shot alone.

The Killer had a simple geometric plot. Hard Boiled isn't so easily diagrammed. I suspect this is because Barry Wong, the screenwriter, died halfway through the shoot, before finishing the script, and no one knew where they wanted to go with it. Also, the opening sequence was shot when they had a completely different script, one in which Tony Leung's character was a psychotic who was poisoning babies' milk. No kidding. At some point Leung decided that wouldn't be the best career move for him, so his character was changed into an undercover cop, and the entire movie was rewritten. It's kind of amazing to me the plot makes any sense at all.

And it does make sense, more or less. It's at its best when showing how Leung is forced to betray more and more people to keep his cover. It's at its worst when focusing on the love story between Chow Yun-Fat and Teresa Mo, both cops.

Woo's directing is a little out of control in this movie; it's great for the action sequences. It's interesting seeing this right after The 400 Blows, because Woo clearly learned a lot from Truffaut. Perhaps a little too much; he has maybe ten 400 Blows-style freeze frames. Not all of them make sense dramatically, and the ones that do, the impact is lessened by how often the technique is used. Still, with a Woo movie, whatever else you say about it, you come back to staring slack-jawed at the action sequences. Which I encourage you all to do.

Randoms:

• The DVD commentary track features Woo, Terence Chang, Dave Kehr (a critic), and... Roger Avery! Avery's commentary has a valuable lesson in it for anyone asked to record a commentary track: don't talk about a project that hasn't happened yet. Avery mentions "Hatchet Man," which he was writing at the time for John Woo to direct. The movie never happened; it was put into turnaround in 1995. (At New Line, actually; I asked around but there's no library of stuff that didn't get made, so the script isn't available). On the track, though, Avery talks about it like it's going to come out in a month or so from whenever you're listening to the commentary.
  
  
• Also, it's not a good idea to talk about Joseph Campbell on commentary tracks. It just isn't.
  
  
• At the end of the teahouse shootout that opens the movie, Chow Yun-Fat does a slide through a bag of flour, which coats his clothes, hair, and face. He then shoots a man in the head at point-blank range; the blood spatters on the flour, for a nice effect. Whoever designed the DVD menus called that chapter "Flour Power." Ouch.
  
  
• John Woo's answering machine plays the music from Lawrence of Arabia.
  
  
• Woo is very good at using his settings to suit whatever emotional beat he's trying to hit. He puts people in cramped quarters when they have to deal with each other, has Tony Leung betray his boss in a gigantic warehouse; this isn't any great observation, but it's something I noticed and I think I could do more often in my own writing.
  
  
• There's a handheld camera shot in the hospital sequence that looks exactly like a first-person shooter; the same kind of tracking through the hospital. It's also a special effects masterpiece--it's about two-and-a-half minutes of action, with squbs, explosives, and elaborate choreography, and there aren't any cuts, it's just one shot. On the commentary, Woo says he decided to try to do that shot because he and his crew were getting bored.
  
  
• The DVD also has trailers for all of John Woo's Hong Kong movies. They're worth watching; he did a Cantonese Opera movie at one point, and a lot of Kung Fu films. Including Countdown in Kung Fu, a very early (1976) Jackie Chan movie.
  
  
• Dave Kehr's commentary is interesting; he talks about The Killer showing at midnight at Sundance and what that was like, and for the most part he's right on when talking about Woo's movies, at least the ones I've seen. The movie Dave Kehr is crazy about, though, I haven't seen. That's Bullet in the Head, which is a Vietnam movie. It looks good from the trailer; I'm going to check it out.

With this movie, I've now finished numbers 1–10 of the Criterion Collection. Next up will probably be Salò.

#5: The 400 Blows

The 400 Blows, 1959, directed François Truffaut, screenplay by Marcel Moussy & François Truffaut, story by François Truffaut.

François Truffaut is a polarizing figure—at least if you're William Goldman. Goldman blames him for auteur theory and for ruining Alfred Hitchcock's career by convincing Hitch that he was an auteur. He's right about auteur theory: Truffaut's writings for "Cahiers du Cinéma" set that whole mess up. Hitchcock, I'm not so sure about, but he does make a good case. Truffaut interviewed Hitchcock in 1967. Before that, he made North by Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds. Once he knew he was an auteur, thanks to François, he treated the world to Topaz, Torn Curtain, Frenzy, and Family Plot. That said, Marnie (1964) isn't so hot, either.

The 400 Blows precedes all that, and it's an exctiting and interesting film. It's easy to see, watching it, why filmmakers fell in love with this guy; it's subjective and idiosyncratic, but not self-indulgent. Truffaut's choices serve the story, not the other way around. (Wes Anderson, I'm looking at you here!) The 400 Blows comes from a French expression meaning, roughly, to sow one's wild oats. It's often described as a movie about a kid who's going wild, but this, I think, misses the point. For me, the movie was more about the ways children forge their own experiences, separate from the adults who surround them. The main character, Antoine Doinel, lives in a world where adults orbit in the distant background, inscrutible and best left undisturbed. In that sense, the movie captures early adolescence perfectly. Of course, Antoine is also a cipher to his parents, his teachers, and the other adults in his life. Jim Shepard has written beautifully about the ways the adults in The 400 Blows fail to understand Antoine; I won't retread that ground. Suffice it to say that Truffaut gets the wary relations between adolescence and adulthood perfectly right.

This movie's a good one to talk about point of view. Truffaut almost always limits his movie to the things that Antoine directly experiences and sees. In individual scenes, this is used to great effect; there's a scene, for example, where Antoine's parents come to school (they know he's been missing classes), drag him out of his seat, slap him in front of his classmates, and send him back to sit down. His parents have a conversation in the hall with his teacher, but you don't see it. The camera stays in the classroom as the teacher sees adults outside, steps out into the hall; we see Antoine's mother, but only through a window in the class door. It's an incredibly tense scene (which resonates with anyone who got in trouble in school; man, there's nothing worse than seeing your parents outside your classroom). It woudn't play as well if Truffaut hadn't let the audience stew in the classroom with Antoine. In a similar fashion, there's an amazing scene where Antoine overhears his parents fighting; the camera stays on his face, in close up, as we hear his (step-)father yell things like "I gave the boy my name! I put food on the table!" It's heartbreaking. I counted three times we see things Antoine doesn't; not bad. It's also pretty clear the camera identifies with Antoine; when his mother visits him at reform school, the camera focuses on the hat she is wearing as Antoine spaces out while she lectures him. This reminded me of Raging Bull; that scene in the locker room where Jake zones out staring at his spit bucket (if I'm remembering that correctly). Anyway, good use of first-person point of view. For a much better explanation of filmic point-of-view in general, I refer you to Terry Rossio.

The story is very good, but Trufaut's directorial style also commands attention. He could only afford black and white film stock, but he also went ahead and shot in Cinemascope. Ultra-widescreen black and white is not something you see very often. He loves long shots; the penultimate shot is nearly a minute and a half long (and it's not a Touch of Evil-style choreographed marvel, just a simple tracking shot). But check out the sequence in the Rotor (one of those spinning carnival rides where the floor drops out): he's cutting every five seconds or so. It's interesting; usually I think directors and editors that draw a lot of attention to themselves like that are hurting the stories they tell, but I feel like Truffaut really gets that to work for him; you're aware he's doing it, but his directorial choices are perfect for whatever scene, mood, or story point he's trying to get across. (I say "story point" like this is a tightly plotted movie—it isn't. It's still great). He's also an actor's director; he got an incredible performance out of Jean-Pierre Léaud. I also loved Albert Rémy as the boy's cuckolded father. All in all, well worth checking this one out.

Randoms:

• The DVD has another film by Truffaut, Antoine and Colette, which was Truffaut's portion of a 1962 omnibus called Love at Twenty. Something like Four Rooms. It's Antoine several years later, falling in love with a woman he meets at a concert. I can't tell you how great it is; like The 400 Blows, it has a feeling of veracity to it. As someone who is well familiar with the sinking sensation you get when you realize that a woman's parents like you better than she does, I found it painfully amusing to watch. The best part; he writes her a love letter and gets a letter in reply that begins "Your love letter was well-written..." Ouch.
  
  
• There are also a few interviews with Truffaut on the DVD; he's excellent. He was 27 when this film came out, and he's young and kind of goofy and charming. I hate him less than Orson Welles because he waited a few years longer to succeed magnificently. Still, I'm officially behind both of those guys as far as success goes. And as Truffaut says in one of the interviews, "Success is everything in America." (To be fair, he was criticizing Americans for neglecting financially unsuccessful, but great, films. But hey, I'm American, so what can you do?)
  
  
• As a young man, Truffaut tried to read a set of classics (something like the Harvard Classics, can't remember the name), in alphabetical order. He made it to Balzac and quit. I can relate to that kind of obsessiveness, as you can see from this website.
  
  
• There's a documentary about Cannes in 1959 on the disk that ends with the narrator saying of Truffaut, "Let's enjoy his films before he starts lecturing about them!" So I'm going to shut up now.

#19: Shock Corridor

Shock Corridor, 1963, written and directed by Samuel Fuller.

Like The Naked Kiss, this movie has a lot to offer if you're looking for lurid camp. Peter Breck stars as Johnny Barrett, an ambitious reporter who goes undercover at a mental hospital to solve a murder. This is a great premise, well worth stealing; but Fuller takes it in strange directions. Johnny doesn't just pose as a garden variety manic depressive in order to get committed; he gets his stripper girlfriend (played by Constance Towers—what a great name!—who also starred in The Naked Kiss) to claim to be his sister and file a police complaint against him, getting himself put into the mental hospital as a hair fetishist with an incestuous obsession with his sister. When characters are thinking, you can hear their thoughts in voice over, while the camera pushes in. So, yeah, it's that kind of a movie.

I didn't think it was possible to create a more ridiculous and unlikely mental hospital than The Silence of the Lambs, but I guess I was wrong. It's shot well; it isn't a great set, but it reminds me a little of Avedon's photos of the East Louisiana State Mental Hospital (which I think he took in the sixties). When Johnny first arrives, an orderly walks him down the long hallway on the ward; sullen inmates are leaning against the walls, staring into space, shuffling around. None of them are talking. The orderly tells Johnny that he's lucky, because he's gotten there just in time for the "Make Friends Hour."

The murder mystery Johnny's trying to solve isn't very interesting and the guilty party is quite predictable. The witnesses he has to interview are excellent, though; taken together, they form a nice, if unsubtle, critique of post-war america. There's:

• Stewart, who was captured and brainwashed by Communists while serving in Korea. After breaking with Communism and getting returned to the states, he was dishonorably discharged and rejected by the rest of the world. So he convinced himself that he was Jeb Stewart, Civil War General, and marches around the asylum in a CSA hat.
• Trent, the first black student at a Southern university, who cracked under the pressure and switched sides. He gives moving speeches about how America is for Americans, and carries a sign reading "Integration And Democracy Don't Mix."
• And Dr. Boden, a Nobel-Prize-winning nuclear physicist, one of the architects of the atomic bomb, who has regressed to the mental state of a six-year-old and does a lot of drawing with crayons.

Of the three, Trent is the most interesting, just because it's really disconcerting to see a black man say, in all earnestness, things like, "Now, they're all right as entertainers..." and "So they like hot jazz music, do they? Well, let's burn those freedom buses!" The other guys are too much, though; I think they must have played better in 1963, but even then, it bears remembering that the year before, this came out. So although Shock Corridor attempts to say a lot more about America than most B-pictures, it's not the most blistering critique of post-war America at the time. It's a camp classic, and a cult classic, but I'm not so sure I'd call it a classic. I certainly enjoyed it, though

Randoms:

• When the other inmates are describing their dreams, which doesn't happen until maybe forty minutes or so into the movie, Fuller switches to color (and what I thought was stock footage, but apparently he shot it). It's really disarming.
  
  
• Both this movie and Ray, which I saw last night, have a similar "nightmares about water" thing going on. It's more impressive in Shock Corridor, because Johnny imagines a downpour of rain inside the hospital; it's a really good sequence.
  
  
• The trailer tries to sell this as a peek inside the inner workings of a mental hospital. It's referred to in the trailer as "incredibly realistic." This after showing us the main characters and having the narrator say, after each one, things like "Diagnosis: Erotic Dementia!" and "Diagnosis: Manic Sensualist" (but not, sadly, "Diagnosis: Monique!"). And, of course, at one point durring the trailer, the narrator says, "Then there was the day Johnny was trapped in the ward of love-maddened women..." So whatever critics may say about this, it's pretty clear that marketing saw it as pure pulp.
  
  
• Peter Breck has a horror-movie-girl scream. I mean, he really screams like a woman in this movie; it's disturbing.
  
  
• You know you're in good hands when your main character wanders into the female ward by mistake, sees a group of women, and thinks (in voice over) "Nymphos!" in an alarmed tone. And then gets surrounded, wrestled to the ground, and given a bit of the rough, presumably; the next time we see Johnny his face is all bruised.
  
  
• And it doesn't hurt when you have someone ask, "How's he getting on?" and gets the result, "Very well. He's in Dance Therapy now."
  
  
• Or when someone says, "Ever since I was a kid, my folks fed me bigotry for breakfast and ignorance for dinner."
  
  
• But best of all, Fuller has a psychiatrist look sadly out a window and intone, "What a tragedy. An insane mute will win the Pulitzer Prize!" I could write a million screenplays and never top that line.

#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.