THE GRIM REAPER (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1962)

At his invitation, Bernardo Bertolucci completed Pier Paolo Pasolini’s script (along with Sergio Citti) and directed the result—beautifully. La commare secca thus became the 21-year-old poet’s auspicious film debut.
     An immense bridge, glimpsed from below, cuts diagonally through the frame; what resembles a burst of birds turns out to be a flurry of notepad pages descending from some unseen hand on the bridge. Driven by breeze, they find the corpse of a middle-aged prostitute in a Roman park. The idea of fate relates to the poverty that has driven her to this risky way of earning money, although, we learn, many times the johns she had picked up were themselves too poor to pay her.
     The film is structured as a series of interrogations by the police of five suspects. Something that happens along the way is that we see the situation in the park on the fateful, fatal night from different perspectives, giving the film a Rashômon-like quality; moreover, inserts of the victim in her home preparing for the night’s streetwalking accompany each of the suspects’ accounts. Sometimes what we see as flashbacks do not match what we hear the person tell the police; for instance, the first suspect, instead of spending the day looking for work, as he tells the police, meets up with two pals in order to find a stranger to rob in the park.
     The objectivity of the police interrogations combines with the subjectivity—in some cases, lyricism—of the flashbacks as Bertolucci surveys a brace of struggling and predatory Roman lives.
     Characters pass into and out of deep shadows and disquieting silence. The most sympathetic character is the victim herself; the least sympathetic, the one who, when arrested, explains: “I didn’t do anything! She was a whore!”

GATE OF HELL (Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1953)

Time has deflated the reputation of certain films. When originally released, Teinosuke Kinugasa’s Jigokumon, from Kan (Hiroshi) Kikuchi’s play Kesa’s Husband, won the top prize at Cannes, and the Oscar and the New York critics’ prize as best foreign-language film. Today, it is indeed difficult to grasp that it was regarded as superior to another 1953 Japanese film released in the States in 1954: Kenji Mizoguchi’s enduring masterpiece, Ugetsu monogatari. (Ozu’s Tokyo Story opened in New York nearly two decades later.) Nonetheless, Kinugasa’s film, a fusion of historical fairy tale and melodrama, is enchanting and, ultimately, very moving.
     In 1159, the Heiji Rebellion is underway; Lady Kesa volunteers to impersonate the Empress so that the latter may escape. Moritoh Enda falls in love with the imposter he is guarding. Upon discovering she is married, he impresses her into a plot to kill her spouse; but Lady Kesa, again play-acting, fatally substitutes herself for her husband, remaining as loyal to him as she is to the royal family.
     We have here, then, two competing versions of love, one selfish, the other unselfish—and, ultimately (for these are not the same thing), selfless. Moreover, secretly, under the duress of the pressure that Moritoh applies (which includes, at one point, threatening her life as well as her husband’s), Lady Kesa finds a way to carve a path of self-determination. Her loyalty is not feudally imposed; it is her choice.
     Thus Kinugasa’s film reflects the concerns of its own time, the 1950s, when the outcome of the war wobbled Japan’s traditional patriarchy. Many have missed this important dimension, perhaps because the film formally weds radicalism and tradition. The opening, with its sweeping sense of chaos, exactly follows a traditional ploy for announcing a story: the opening and unrolling of a scroll.
     However, it is for two other things that the film remains most famous. One is the superlative acting of Machiko Kyô as Lady Kesa, which drew commendation from the National Board of Review for its modernization of traditional Japanese acting. The other is Kohei Sugiyama’s color cinematography. Indeed, Kinugasa and Sugiyama prove themselves inspired collaborators. One example: the swordfight on the sand by the blue sea. Following a startling blow of the sword right into the camera and a quick cut, the victim falls face down, and with a dissolve the greenish waves, superimposed, cover the bloodied corpse: a momentary soothing of the violence; a consignment of the body, and of the conflict that took its life, to the lamentable history of Japan, of the world, of the universe. Time thus yields to timelessness, expressing—obliquely though rendingly fully—the hope that all the wounds inflicted on Japan in the Second World War, and on everyone else, will similarly wash away. Yes, the photography is gorgeous; but, quite beyond that, Jigokumon achieves moments of real visual poetry.

LOST SOUL (Dino Risi, 1977)

From a novel by Giovanni Arpino, Dino Risi’s Jamesian Anima persa is a voluptuous entertainment set mostly in a Venetian mansion that is at once luxuriant and decaying. Open the roll-top cover of the parlor piano and a bevy of rats come pouring out.
     Nineteen-year-old art student Tino is visiting his uncle and aunt, Fabio and Sofia Stolz (Vittorio Gassman, Catherine Deneuve). Weird sounds come down from the attic, where he learns that Fabio’s demented brother, a former science professor who obsesses on insects and arachnids, is kept locked up following the death of Bebe, Sofia’s young, innocent daughter from her first marriage—a death for which there are competing scenarios.
     Risi regular Gassman is brilliant as imperious, at times frighteningly severe Fabio, whose misogynism is linked to his adoration of the innocence that girls must relinquish in becoming women. (Fabio identifies even the reunification of Italy—Risorgimento—with a loss of innocence.) He likens women to vegetables and explains to Tino why he married Sofia: “There was a lull in the conversation, I didn’t know what to say, so I told her I loved her.” Fabio’s brother may not be the only mad Stolz scampering about.
     Risi’s film is gorgeous, partly by dint of his fluent use of camera, which, initially suited to innocent visitor Tino’s point of view, achingly contrasts with Fabio’s embittered nature. Tonino delli Colli’s color cinematography, dark, dingy and brooding, is a constant wonder to behold.
     Tino, who lacks an understanding heart and, the more he learns of the Stolz mysteries, is increasingly complacent, seems headed toward a Fabious “maturity.” He is likeable only because of his youth—a fact that retroactively adds irony to Aunt Sofia’s early expression of gratitude to him for bringing his youthfulness into her home.

AN ACT OF MURDER (Michael Gordon, 1948)

Fredric March gives one of his finest performances, as Judge Calvin Cooke in the sensationally titled An Act of Murder (the title of Moravian-Austrian author Ernst Lothar’s source novel translates as The Mills of God), a conservative judge who feels that the facts of a criminal case should be the sole determinants of a defendant’s guilt and punishment, not motive or “extenuating circumstances.” However, he is humbled into a more elastic, compassionate view of the law by a life-changing event: his wife Catherine’s pain-racked terminal illness, which moves him in the direction of a “mercy killing.” As Catherine, Florence Eldridge is nearly as brilliant as spouse March is as the judge.
     Michael Gordon has directed beautifully. The passage where Catherine is lost in an amusement park labyrinthine hall of mirrors wonderfully conveys her state of mind and the degree to which her pain, along with the illness’s assault on her perceptual integrity, has unwomanned her. But it is the film’s opening and closing that commend Gordon’s filmmaking most of all. Following two brief establishing shots of the courthouse where Cooke sits, two older gentlemen converse in front of the courthouse, one convincing the other to join him in the courtroom where Cooke, known for his harshness, is presiding. This conversation and the men’s journey into the courthouse and, then, the courtroom is all recorded in one sustained, point-of-view tracking shot. Once the two men have completed their service of chaperoning us into the courtroom, the camera slightly shifts, losing the pair forever, and the shot still continues all the way up to the bench. Finally, a cut gives us a clear view of the judge’s face. The bravura introduction of Cooke, along with the cut and the medium closeup, visually establishes his confidence and integrity, and suggests the long journey that has taken him to this point in his life and professional career. In this scene, by the way, Cooke is battling the defense attorney who wishes that Cooke would extend his rulings beyond the letter of the law to admit the emotional shadings of human behavior. The film’s final shot is also a long one, but here Cooke is the defendant, and his attorney—his daughter’s beau—is the defense attorney with whom he had locked horns in the earlier sustained shot. Pronounced “legally innocent” though “morally guilty,” Cooke is permitted to explain his change of philosophy—the outcome of his personal growth. In this instance Cooke is standing and the camera is fixed; in effect, this shot undoes the earlier shot, as correlative to Cooke’s shift in stance. March contributes as well a significant shift in demeanor. On his feet rather than snugly, some would say smugly, seated behind his judicial desk, facing the judge rather than being the judge, Cooke has made another long journey, the culmination of which is this resting-spot in his life. “If I am allowed to remain a judge . . . .”: he is no longer encrusted in by-rote certainty. Rather, there is a road ahead as well as behind him, and literally behind him we see his daughter and his attorney joining hands. Considerable intelligent thought on Gordon’s part relates this shot to the earlier one.
     This is a good film to see.

THEM! (Gordon Douglas, 1954)

“Them!”: This is how, after she finally comes out of shock, a screaming five-year-old child describes the assailants of her family and their camping trailer in the New Mexico desert. What is going on? The F.B.I. investigate when one of their agents is among those who are mysteriously missing. Two scientists, an elderly man and his daughter, are also called in, to identify strange footprints in the sand. It turns out that Dr. Harold Medford’s theory is correct: nine years earlier atomic bomb testing has generated a species of gigantic mutant ants—killers. The forces of light eradicate the monsters except for the queens, which make their way into the Los Angeles sewer system. The fight is on. How many more of these monsters are out (or in) there? Dr. Medford: “We have entered the atomic age. We’ve opened the door into another world. What we’ll eventually find nobody can predict.”
     Although it pales by comparison to Ishirô Honda’s Gojira the same year, Gordon Douglas’s Them!—from George Worthing Yates’s story, and Ted Sherdeman’s and Russell Hughes’s script—is an intermittently terrifying little sci-fi/horror film. The U.S., of course, had ended their war against Japan using the atomic bomb it had tested, while Japan found itself devastated by the bombs that the U.S. had dropped on cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan felt enormous guilt, triggered by this judgment against it from the skies; and the U.S., projecting that the rest of the world (for instance, the Soviet Union) was as viciously murderous as it had been, feared retribution. Them! was one of a spate of films that gave form to this fear. How President Truman had ended the Second World War: he always defended his decision to use atomic bombs. Once Truman was dead, however, private papers revealed the burden of his having made his gigantic—one might say, mutant—mistake.
     Douglas’s low-budget Them!, a bread-and-butter film from Warner Bros., succeeded despite the unconvincing nature of the fake giant insects; Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975), with its laughably unconvincing giant shark, reminds us that a bigger budget might not have helped in this regard. Them! succeeded because American audiences brought to movie theaters in the 1950s the surfeit of their own fear—fear that prompted them to suspend willingly their disbelief. By degrees, enlightened Americans were beginning to realize that the U.S. was the darkness threatening the existence of the Earth. The child’s utterance that gives the film its terse title suggests adult paranoia: the American fear of invasion as diversion from gauging American responsibility by looking at home and within.
     Other things helped the film: the documentary realism around the edges (for instance, the news reports on the radio playing in the background); the eerie use of black and white; the sober, concentrated acting of Edmund Gwenn as Medford. Gwenn’s Medford encapsulates American decency, vision, intelligence. Is it irrelevant that Gwenn had played Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street (George Seaton, 1947)? Isn’t the little girl who is in shock at the beginning a reminder of Natalie Wood in the holiday classic?