AUTUMN LEAVES (Robert Aldrich, 1956)

Robert Aldrich was named best director at Berlin for this melodramatic soap opera starring Joan Crawford as Millie Wetherby, a heavily guarded spinster who is charmed into marriage by a boy young enough to be her son. Millie knows little about Burt Hanson; it turns out he was previously married to Virginia, who cheated on him with his own father. A compulsive liar and mentally ill, Burt turns on Millie, beating her up and at one point slamming the freelance typist’s typewriter—a piece of equipment that was weighty in the mid-fifties—down on her hand. Father and ex-wife, it turns out, are conspiring to relieve Burt of his inheritance from his mother, whose failure to protect him from a cruel father now two wives have repeated. By coincidence, we have learned from a reverie of hers at a classical concert that Millie’s own Electra-complex has never been resolved. Somehow one doubts that her enjoining this to Burt’s unresolved Oedipus-complex will do the trick.
     Fanatics are continually pointing up visual elegancies in Aldrich’s filmmaking here, but the script dictates the nonsensicalness of the proceedings—the script, the unmitigated evil of Virginia and Burt’s father, and Crawford’s tearful eye-bulging and opulent masochism. As the men in white coats drag Burt, who is screaming, to the asylum according to Millie’s maternal decision to do what is best for him, Crawford puts on a show of hysterics that reduces any sane viewer to a fit of giggles. Indeed, her acting is histrionic and phony throughout.
     But Cliff Robertson plays Burt, and his acting is excellent. We are touched by the boy’s mental disarray. We are left to ponder what his condition owes to heredity, his stint in the army, and the betrayal he suffered from wife and father.

RIFIFI (Jules Dassin, 1955)

Vastly inferior to similar films made around the same time by Jacques Becker and Jean-Pierre Melville, Jules Dassin’s Du rififi chez les hommes is hollow and for the most part silly. Jules Dassin, blacklisted at home, made this in France, adapting Auguste le Breton’s novel, along with le Breton himself and René Wheeler.
     The film is most famous for a 35-minute set-piece showing the group theft with sound effects but no dialogue or background music. Technically, the passage is a tour-de-force. It recalls the opening overhead shot of hands holding cards around a poker table.
     In this lame film, brutality is just another form of sentimentality. The heist provides a respite in a generally dull film. I like Dassin’s The Naked City (1948) and Night and the City (1950); but Rififi, as the French film is called in the States, is exceptional only for its reputation.

THERESE (Alain Cavalier, 1986)

Like Tennyson’s “The Holy Grail,” Thérèse studies the religious impulse as sublimated sexuality—or, for one of the cloistered Carmelites, a socially accepted retreat from the “ugly [world] outside.” Alain Cavalier’s brilliant film marshals Rembrandt lighting and earth-tones for its portrait of Thérèse Martin, who was canonized as St. Thérèse of Lisieux in 1925, less that thirty years after her tubercular death. When she marries Jesus, the girl speaks proudly of her unworthiness, and it is just this sort of contradiction that renders her personality complex throughout. When she is waning, she remarks: “I see nothing after this life. A wall rising to the stars.” Shortly after, she decides that her doubt is Jesus’s own devious doing. “He is most handsome when he hides.”
     The film’s centerpiece is the Christmas celebration inside the convent. Exchanging small gifts on their “husband-child’s birthday,” the sisters hug and kiss each other while taking turns cradling in their arms a clay baby Jesus; the sound of an actual baby’s cries underscores the delusional nature of the event. A gift of champagne leads to singing, swaying, dancing—a mellow group ecstasy. Cavalier emphasizes the sisterliness of the sisterhood (Martin’s own sister is another member of the cloister)—a state that includes whispers, bonds, intrigues, little conspiracies, jealousy. Cavalier’s minimalist shots sometimes show nuns in groups of two or three; a good many shots consist of closeups of hands, such as at labor or of one soul’s hand wrapped inside another’s.
     “I love wide-open spaces,” Thérèse writes in her diary. “But is there pure love in my heart?”
     Who can say such love exists? Encapsulating the ambiguity is the closing shot: following her death, Thérèse’s cloth slippers, touching one another, on the floor by her bed—material scraps of an unfathomable life.