THE FORTY-FIRST (Grigori Chukhrai, 1956)

Boris Lavrenyev’s novella Sorok pervyy had been filmed as a silent, from the author’s own script, by Yakov Protazanov in 1927. Now came Grigori Chukhrai’s immensely popular version nearly three decades later—with sound, and in color.
     In the “turbulent, beautiful” early days of the Revolution, a Red Army sniper escorts a captured White Army officer to headquarters by boat across the Aral Sea. A storm shipwrecks them. Sick with pneumonia, the lieutenant is nursed back to health by his Red escort, and the two fall in love. At the last, however, Mariutka shoots him dead when he tries to escape, thus making him “the forty-first.” In the Civil War, Mariutka’s marksmanship claimed forty victims.
     Stalin’s death in 1953 helped release Soviet cinema from a state of stultification, and Chukhrai’s film seemed like a breath of fresh air, removing iron-clad propaganda and emphasizing the feelings of individuals. For love, the young lieutenant drops his irony and arrogance; the girl, her humorlessness and self-sufficiency—that is, before resuming their quarrelsomeness. Today, we find ourselves watching a dated film with more than a little Leanishness to its pictorial grandness and with preposterous bursts of singing and orchestral music on the soundtrack. Chukhrai would next make the warmer, more intimate Ballad of a Soldier (1959) in black and white to sharpen the antiwar message that was largely lost in The Forty-First.

ROMÁNTICO (Mark Becker, 2005)

A wonderful documentary that takes its spirit from its human focus, Mexican mariachi musician Carmelo Muñiz Sanchez, and adds haunting imagery to his thoughtful, engrossing life story, which he has waited his entire life to tell, Romántico only seems adrift in its opening movement. The loose-endedness is correlative to Sanchez’s life in the United States. Undocumented, he and best friend Arturo Arias perform for tips in San Francisco Mission District bars and taquerias. The little money that he makes, which is more than he would be able to make in his small Mexican village, Salvatierra, Sanchez sends home to his wife. Sanchez is doing the best that he can for her, their two daughters and his dying mother. They are appreciative, but he has been away from home for years and they want him back as much as he wants to go back. A point-of-view shot of a car going through an automated carwash spotlights the Mexican figurine on the dashboard that projects Sanchez’s aching desire to go home.
     Impoverished people live on hope—at the very least, hope of a better life for their kids than they have had. Nearing sixty, dangerously diabetic, lonesome for family, Carmelo goes home. (There is little chance that he will ever be able to return to the States.) We watch him relax into his family again and try to make some money again. Romántico documents what would otherwise be for most of us an anonymous, invisible life. Millions live like Carmelo and his family.
     Apart from the gorgeous, heartrending music that Carmelo and Arturo play and sing, what makes this film so engaging is the decency, kindness and humility with which director-cinematographer-editor Mark Becker follows and considers Carmelo, who is himself at least Becker’s equal in decency, kindness and humility.
     Becker, whose first feature this is, edited the documentary Lost Boys of Sudan (Megan Mylan, Jon Shenk, 2003); he is younger than Sanchez by two decades. His fortuitous first full-length film—Becker had made the short Jules at Eight (1996)—began with an openness comparable to that of François Truffaut vis-à-vis Jean-Pierre Léaud during the shoot of The 400 Blows (1959). Originally Becker had in mind to make a more surveying, objective film about mariachi musicians in his neighborhood; but a far more personal work—for Sanchez and himself both—emerged as a result of his decision to let Sanchez’s life and narration direct the course of the film. (It is also a more implicitly political film about the circumstance that motivates undocumented Mexicans to cross the border.) Luck in Becker’s case has something to do with one good soul recognizing the goodness of another.
     There are so many mean-spirited “entertainments” out there. Take in Romántico for its sheer generosity of spirit.

CHINATOWN (Roman Polanski, 1975)

Written by Robert Towne, vaguely inspired by the Richard Nixon/Watergate scandal and about which hangs an elusive aura of the savage murder of the director’s wife, Chinatown fancifully conjures an instance of municipal corruption in Los Angeles in the late 1930s. Jack Nicholson plays J. J. Gittes, a private detective whose adolescent egotism periodically helps get his clients killed. “Jake” evidences an incapacity to learn from his own past, while the father of a mysterious client whose husband has been murdered, Noah Cross (John Huston, whose 1941 The Maltese Falcon provides a model instance of film noir), represents another quintessentially American trait: a sense of entitlement.
     One of his most popular films, Chinatown is also among Roman Polanski’s worst. It isn’t the director’s fault, as Polanski navigates nimbly and wittily the fiendishly convoluted goings-on. John A. Alonzo’s magnificent color cinematography is another definite asset. Alas, Towne’s script reduces a hidden case of family incest to a point of plot, and Faye Dunaway’s stiff acting as Cross’s imperious/vulnerable daughter also contributes to the film’s disarray.
     Nonetheless, Polanski pulls off a heart-walloping finish that encapsulates the film’s theme of moral blindness: the shooting out of a woman’s eye.

Please see my piece on a much better film noir made the year after Chinatown, Dick Richards’ Farewell, My Lovely, which you will find elsewhere on this site, filed under Hollywood film reviews.