MISS JULIE (Alf Sjöberg, 1950)

August Strindberg’s great 1888 Miss Julie is transformed into a powerful, visually ravishing black-and-white film by director Alf Sjöberg and cinematographer Göran Strindberg, the Swedish playwright’s grandson.
     Strindberg’s theme is vibrant: the psychological burden affecting individuals because of classism, the deep division between aristocracy and the working poor, between master, or mistress, and servant.
     It is the dazzling sunlit day preceding Midsummer Eve. Like her mother, who went insane because of the straightjacketing conventional roles society imposed on her, Julie is a rebel. Since childhood, she has been in love with Jean, now her father’s valet, and he has been in love with her. But love in any wholesome sense is not possible between them, as indeed their union isn’t possible, not only because of class taboo, but because the institution of class difference has twisted their souls. Their dreams are exact opposites: Jean dreams of climbing; Julie, of falling. How else to redress the imbalance between them? But Julie’s dream makes her a “slut” in Jean’s eyes, and Jean’s dream makes him, to Julie, dangerously presumptuous.
     Formally, the first part of the film is exceptionally fine. Midsummer festivities—dances, sprints down rolling hills, horseback rides, rowing boats—compose a rush of movement that Sjöberg breathtakingly orchestrates. Creating a flexible, breathing fabric of the present, childhood memories and dreams, he cuts back and forth among them, and in several magical instances moves the camera from one to the other in a single shot. The latter part of the film, more of a chamber drama, is inherently less interesting as cinema.
     In the lead role, Anita Björk gives a fascinating, complex performance, capturing Julie’s haughtiness, perverseness, vulnerability and profound sadness. Ulf Palme is excellent as Jean. One more member of the cast delights: twenty years old here (imagine!), Max von Sydow.

SUN SEEKERS (Konrad Wolf, 1958)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from Germany, Scandinavia, Finland & Austria list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Sun Seekers, an East German-Soviet co-production, didn’t see the light of day for more than a dozen years after the Soviet Union suppressed it, ostensibly to keep details of uranium mining for its nuclear industry from the West.
     The protagonist is 18-year-old Lotte Lutz, whose barroom misbehavior gets her and a prostitute-friend impressed into being forced labor at Wismut mines in Felsach—the peacetime equivalent of being sent to the battlefront. Indeed, memories of World War II hang over the 1950 mining community as socialists and former SS members mix. It’s dark as a dungeon way down in the mine, and the film’s overelaborated script, by Karl-Georg Egel and Paul Wiens, presents numerous metaphorical instances of people being bereft of light. For instance, the Soviet engineer directing Wismut, one of three men who fall in love with “Lutz,” is a widower, whose wife, a painter, murdered by the German army, was always “searching for the light.”
     Lutz’s youthfulness offers men hope of renewal, but her more or less imprisoned life, not to mention the fact that she lost both parents in the war, casts her adrift in drudgery. Although she becomes pregnant by a young German miner, she marries instead the older pit boss, a former German army officer. Lutz, then, is herself tied to the past, although her husband conveniently becomes a casualty of a mine disaster, leaving her happily independent, holding Germany’s socialist future in her arms.
     Konrad Wolf’s direction of the camera is dynamic and intricate, full of eclectic camera angles and movements, including sudden instances of subjective (point-of-view) shots, such as a seemingly freefalling descent into the mine. By contrast, many scenes in the mine are static, claustrophobic. Visually, Wolf suggests both a world of socialist possibilities and the “buried” past these must persist in overcoming.*

* Please also see my full essay on Wolf’s 1967 I Was Nineteen. It is to be found elsewhere on this site under “film reviews.”

WINTER LIGHT (Ingmar Bergman, 1963)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from Germany, Scandinavia, Finland & Austria list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Winter Light, the middle part of Ingmar Bergman’s trilogy about the relationship between God and humanity, is cold, precise, exceedingly dry, as though Bergman had turned his human specimens upside down and emptied them of their lifeblood.
     Since his wife’s death, Tomas Ericsson (Gunnar Björnstrand, tremendous) has lost his faith but continues as village pastor as his congregation dwindles, failing to commit himself to the emotional or spiritual welfare of parishioners. One of these, Jonas, despondent over the state of the world, seeks counsel from Tomas. At their Sunday meeting, instead of trying to unburden Jonas, Tomas increases that burden by unburdening himself, gratuitously imposing on this fragile parishioner his own conviction that God does not exist, rendering the universe loveless. Jonas commits suicide that day.
     Tomas proceeds to church for evensong. Not one parishioner shows up. The church empty, as a matter of form Tomas nevertheless proceeds with the service. His isn’t an existential act willing some sort of individual heroic purpose in the midst of a meaningless universe; Tomas’s act is itself meaningless. It’s an instance of religious decadence.
     There is a fleeting second, as Tomas stands indoors near a window, when a ripple of winter light illuminates him: a natural occurrence inviting a false religious interpretation. This winter light is just winter light; it’s as bereft of meaning as the evensong that Tomas conducts and with which the film ends.
     Insofar as it bases existence in religious faith, the film argues, humanity lives lives of anticipation, not in-the-moment reality. Instead of looking around in order to tend to one another’s needs, people are looking ahead for their own salvation. The problem isn’t that God doesn’t exist but that people believe, or pretend to believe, he does.
     Winter Light is one of Bergman’s most perfect, most brilliant films.

WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS (Fritz Lang, 1956)

Born in Vienna, Austria, Fritz Lang was a genuine artist in Germany, where he made great films, among them the most magical one ever, Destiny (1921), the two-part Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), the two parts of Die Nibelungen (1924), “Siegfried” and “Kriemhild’s Revenge,” Spies (1928), and M (1931). (One of his most famous silent films, Metropolis, 1927, however, remains dubious despite two or three extraordinary passages.) His heritage half-Jewish, and his leftist sympathies having led to his making The Last Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), whose villains, judged by their comments, are in effect Nazis, Lang was given an ultimatum by the Third Reich: make propaganda films for us—“We will decide who is Jewish,” Goebbels is reported to have said to him—or suffer the consequences. Lang fled. In the mid-thirties he arrived in Hollywood. By no stretch of the imagination were his American films the equal of those he had made in Germany.

A few reasons immediately present themselves. For one thing, there is the discombobulation of his life that included not only the geographic and cultural relocation but also the loss of his wife, who had authored the scripts he had been directing, Thea von Harbou, who, electing to remain behind, had joined the Nazi party. (Over and over I wonder: How could the person who wrote M become a Nazi? Lang also must have wondered: How could the person who shared my life, including my bed, become this?) The consequences of his geographic and cultural relocation also help explain the decline of Lang’s work in the U.S. Lang had exchanged his European roots for life in a strange country and, more than that, a rootless nation whose citizens, never having had a culture to which they belonged, couldn’t possibly fathom the trauma he was experiencing. Without wife, without Europe, without the cultural moorings that helped corroborate his existence, Lang must indeed have felt alone. Too, he wasn’t just anywhere in the United States; he was in Hollywood, a place that manufactured movies and actively discouraged an artist’s pursuit of visionary work such as had occupied his career in Germany. Most of the projects that now came Lang’s way were dismal, and even the better ones did not permit him to use the resources of film in a highly personal or expressive way.

A rare exception is the brilliant passage surveying the operation of a fishing village’s processing plant in Clash by Night (1952). (The producer, Jerry Wald, is responsible for relocating the Clifford Odets play on which the film is based.) All in all, showcasing a remarkable performance by Barbara Stanwyck as someone entering late the foreign territory of marriage, Clash by Night is one of Lang’s few good American films. Others include the following: two starring Henry Fonda, who is superb in both, You Only Live Once (1937) and The Return of Frank James (1940); one of the several film noirs Lang made with Joan Bennett, Woman in the Window (1944); and the brilliant, fascinating western Rancho Notorious (1952), starring a former lover of Lang’s, Marlene Dietrich. (Please see my full essay on this film, also listed under “Hollywood film reviews,” elsewhere on this site.) I am also fond of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956), whose exceedingly farfetched plot cannot dampen the spark contributed by Joan Fontaine’s poised and elegant participation.

Perhaps the American film for which Lang is best known is Fury (1936), a dull “message movie” targeting a legal rush to judgment, including the sort of mob hysteria that leads to lynching. Lang himself liked this one most among his Hollywood films, and his second choice is just as lame, I’m afraid. I have finally seen While the City Sleeps, and it’s hardly worth the affection Lang felt for it. It’s a thin, plot-heavy and dispiriting film despite an impressive cast. For Lang, though, it was a major hit, and this may be why he recalled it with more satisfaction than the result merited.

The film’s narrative comprises two intersecting plots. One involves a contest at a New York City newspaper, the American Sentinel, to determine who will become the new publisher’s editor-in-chief. This new publisher, Walter Kyne, is the effete, borderline moronic son of the venerated king of the Kyne media empire, Amos Kyne, who has just died. (Kyne reminds us of Kane, and the company’s insignia, a ‘K’ inside a circle, corroborates the aural/visual echo of Orson Welles’s 1941 Citizen Kane.) The other plot involves “the story” that the three competitors for the prize job pursue in order to win against the other two. What is the identity of the “Lipstick Killer,” the serial killer targeting young women and terrorizing the city? It turns out that he is a boy who hates his doting mother as much as Walter Kyne hates the memory of his dismissive, derisive father.

Lang’s film wavers between being mild-mannered and being inert; little suspense is generated in terms of the outcome of the Sentinel’s internal competition, although somewhat more suspense—though not much—is generated regarding the police and media efforts to capture the misogynistic serial killer, a boy barely out of his teens played with sufficient panache by John Drew Barrymore (John’s son; Drew’s father) to put the lie to the ridicule his acting career at the time engendered. (We needn’t compare his performance with Peter Lorre’s amazing one as the serial killer in Lang’s M.) From a large cast, “John Barrymore, Jr.,” as he is billed here, gives one of the better performances. The best comes from Ida Lupino as the newspaper’s gorgeous women’s columnist, and two other good ones come from then-spouse Howard Duff as a police detective and Sally Forrest, who is especially winning as a news office secretary. Forrest, a discovery of Lupino’s, had starred in Not Wanted (Elmer Clifton, 1949), which Lupino had co-scripted and produced, and Hard, Fast and Beautiful (1951), which Lupino had directed. (An aside: Lupino, who is alluring, doesn’t require the falsies with which she is decked; these “enhancements” only diminish.)

Other cast members include Dana Andrews (a drunk, we’re told—but one who seems nimble enough here), George Sanders, Thomas Mitchell, Vincent Price, Rhonda Fleming, James Craig and, as an apartment house janitor, Vladimir Sokoloff.

I regret to say—and how often can one say this about a Lang film?—there is only one interesting shot in the entire movie: an unexpected downward, angled long-shot of the city street outside the apartment building out of which the Lipstick Killer comes tearing. I know; it can be argued that the electric charge of this shot largely derives from the prosaic nature of all the shots preceding it. How many of us would wish for just one bright second a day, however much the other mundane seconds intensified its brightness by contrast?

As it happens, we expect more from life, and we certainly expect more from Fritz Lang.

HUNGER (Henning Carlsen, 1966)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from Germany, Scandinavia, Finland & Austria list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Hunger, by Henning Carlsen (who also edited), is from Denmark, Norway and Sweden. It is based on the great 1890 first-person novel by Norway’s Nobel Prize-winning Knut Hamsun. The most phenomenal aspect of this crisp black-and-white film is its lead performance. As the starving, hallucinating writer, Per Oscarsson gives what is possibly the most brilliant film performance ever.
     Hunger opens on the street—actually, a bridge—and mostly takes place there or just off it. In Kristiania, with his back to the camera, a man is bending over, seemingly observing something below, or spacing out. Tinkly music evaporates into silence. The camera approaches the man slightly, sideways. A flock of birds flies upward past him—a suggestion of his crumbling sanity. On a street, the man bursts into inappropriate talk at a sitting stranger. In a subjective shot, now he is in conversation with his dilapidated shoes, explaining they must attend to one another because he is too busy to chat. With an acquaintance he chances upon, he inspects publicly posted want ads. The acquaintance offers him lunch; famished but proud, the protagonist just sits with him in the restaurant and watches him eat. Both are struggling to be published, but only the protagonist is barely holding on at the frayed end of his life.
     His belly is hungry. He also hungers for the feeling that life matters—that he matters.
     The film is a pilgrim’s non-progress, then, within a narrow range of incidents, such as ducking and confronting the landlord who wants to evict him.
     Where is the vessel bound that he boards at the end. Home? Eternity?
     Our hearts cry out for his future, but we know better. He is moving on to some other nowhere. We barely hold on at the frayed end of our own lives.