“But, my friend, happiness is not a joyful thing.” Was Max Ophuls the greatest, the most perfect of the classical film-makers? In a series of masterpieces throughout three decades (the 1930s, 40s and 50s) he composed images with the soft luminescence, hazy or precise, of Degas (with a similar feeling of constant movement), and stories … Continue reading Le Plaisir (1952, Max Ophuls)
La Poison represents Sacha Guitry condemning a perfidious public, and then gifting that condemnation to them in form of the bleakest, the sourest of comedies. This is not the sort of dark comedy which relies on infantilism, the adolescent or the easy expression (ironic or not) of bigotries and predjudices to make its effect, in … Continue reading La Poison (1951, Sacha Guitry)
Every so often a film just blindsides you. I have been a fan of Claude Chabrol almost as long as I’ve been a cinephile, my admiration stemming from early, formative viewings of Le Boucher and La Ceremonie, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Chabrol work quite like this one and was not expecting … Continue reading La Rupture (1970, Claude Chabrol)
Bitter Victory has none of the self-conscious epicness in its filming of the desert that afflicts so many other works set in the same or similar terrain. The film is shot in cinemascope so there is still a sense of grandness, but this bare expanse becomes a nothingness, a void, a blank of sorts against … Continue reading Bitter Victory: Alternative View
And so the onetime-apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright here makes men look like the ruins of buildings. Jimmy Leith (Richard Burton), a civilian volunteer who was once an archeologist, and Major David Brand (Curt Jurgens) are leading a mission through the Libyan Desert, transporting a set of stolen Nazi documents from Benghazi back to HQ. … Continue reading Bitter Victory (1957, Nicholas Ray)
Sometimes one can’t see what is under their nose. Peruse the reviews of Wisconsin Death Trip from the time of its release and the film is described variously, in positive and negative terms, as a document of one particularly crazed and cursed town, as a fever dream and as the equivalent of a couple of … Continue reading Wisconsin Death Trip (1999, James Marsh)
This is the J-Horror at its most methodical, although it’s not necessarily always grimly methodical. Shimizu is careful and intelligent, constructing a non-linear narrative that at first seems sloppy but reveals itself as quite tight and able to branch out into further unsettling territory with a number of unexplained, inexplicable visions of the future on … Continue reading Ju-On: The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu, 2002)
Make no mistake: this is a beautiful film, beautiful for its modesty, its respectfulness, its clarity and piquancy of image both sundraped and nocturnal. Rendez-Vous de Juillet is a young film about young characters. It was not made by a young man, but it keeps its spirit and feeling of youthfulness because, like the young, … Continue reading Rendez-Vous de Juillet (1949, Jacques Becker)
A thriller directed by the underrated Robert Siodmak and derived from the overrated David O Selznick’s company. Siodmak revels in silence in The Spiral Staircase, for it is when the dialogue, the cosy literariness familiar from the films Hitchcock made under Selznick’s eagle eye and controlling grasp, slips away that he can exercise himself. In … Continue reading The Spiral Staircase (1945, Robert Siodmak)
“… and only despair was left at the end.” Another film, like Pulse (2001, Kurosawa), that is about loneliness. In Retribution Tokyo seems almost as empty as at the end of that film, sparsely populated by the odd human, the ruins of past industrialisation and bulldozed lots where condominiums once stood. In this land, constantly … Continue reading Retribution (2006, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
