SYLVIA SCARLETT (George Cukor, 1935)

George Cukor’s favorite among his films, Sylvia Scarlett has Katharine Hepburn kissing a woman on the lips—but don’t worry; Sylvia, Hepburn’s character, is in drag as Sylvester, which is the way she appears throughout much of the film, as she and her father, an embezzler, flee France and try to elude British police, becoming grifters. Audiences way back then were scandalized. Indeed, this may not be as you like it.
     I, however, love the film, for its Shakespearean air, its Dickensian exploration of the remarkable poor living at their wit’s ends, and Cary Grant’s nervy performance as con-man Jimmy Monkley (“. . . sparrows and ’awks: that’s Nature”), who knows another poor Cockney, Maudie, who works as a maid for the rich.
     Of course, Hepburn could not possibly pass for a boy (Jimmy isn’t fooled); but Sylvia’s masquerade is no less convincing than the tran/barfly’s in The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992). And Hepburn is hilarious collapsing into teary-eyed French to dupe an English crowd with a hard-luck story that actually isn’t far from the truth. (Her burst into English and laughter gives away the con.)
     With Cukor, there is often theatricality. “Sylvester” mistakes (or pretends to mistake) Maudie, dressed in her employer’s clothes, for a “fine lady”—gender transvestism confronting social transvestism: delicious! “Sylvester” persuades the other three to join her in becoming a vaudeville troupe that performs seaside. Thus “Sylvester” meets the artist with whom she falls in love. When “Sylvester” shows Michael Fane her true gender, he exalts, “No wonder I talked to you the way I did.” (Hm.)
     Cukor’s gay sensibility comes through more unmistakably in some films than others, Camille (1937), Justine (1969) and Rich and Famous (1981) among them. But nowhere more so than in Sylvia Scarlett.

BLOODY SUNDAY (Paul Greengrass, 2001)

January 30, 1972: Bloody Sunday, when British troops opened fire on a peaceful protest march by Catholics in Derry, thus ending for all time the Northern Ireland civil rights movement and reigniting the Irish Republican Army, for which the day’s horror provided a recruitment bonanza. British soldiers claimed they had been fired on first—a lie that an official inquiry at the time nevertheless backed, with Queen Elizabeth subsequently decorating those who had organized and perpetrated the massacre. No British soldiers were killed; in addition to the dozens of marchers and bystanders who were injured, thirteen persons were killed, including one who was shot in the back. “The gentle rainfall drifting down/ Over Colmcille’s town/ Could not refresh, only distil/ In silent grief from hill to hill.”*

Paul Greengrass’s heart-walloping Bloody Sunday, which took both the top prize, the Golden Bear, and the Ecumenical Jury Prize at Berlin in 2002, wears its bias for truth on its sleeve. (We can discount the small amount of foolishness, such as the fact that Greengrass’s script has the soldiers swearing and Irish Catholic mouths remaining pristine.) Beginning the night before the tragic event, the film employs the faux-newsreel handheld camera style of cinéma-vérité, which, coupled with the restricted time element, achieves great intensity. Reinforcing the film’s sense of unfolding reality is an impressionistic technique that divides the action into a series of seemingly camera-captured vignettes, most of relatively short duration, each consecutive two of which are separated by a faded-into blackout suggesting the operation of a camera shutter. This technique is abetted by the newspaper-style print used to identify scenes by time and location. Style, then, unifies the film.

The central character is Ivan Cooper, beautifully played by James Nesbitt (Best Actor, British Independent Film Awards, Stockholm Film Festival). A civil rights activist, Cooper is the idealistic organizer of the march. Unlike the overwhelming majority of the marchers, this Member of Parliament is Protestant; throughout the film, therefore, despite the viciousness of the intrusive British troops, Cooper holds out hope for us of the possibilities of justice, fairness, decency and humanity. Cooper’s mind and heart have long since convinced him of the wrongness of the inequality of rights borne by majority Protestants and minority Catholics in Northern Ireland. One should remain mindful of the existence of such people. Indeed, countless Protestants wanted British troops out of their country as much as Catholics did. At the end of the film, Cooper addresses the British for what they did on Bloody Sunday: “You will reap a whirlwind.” As Nesbitt enacts the moment of prophecy, Cooper’s sorrow is a match for his anger and disillusionment.

A finely gauged film, Bloody Sunday fully conveys the violence that the British soldiers unleashed while at the same time maintaining the distancing that’s the hallmark of genuine art. Greengrass keeps his aim always in the forefront of his mind; he wants to show us what happened so that we better understand why other things happened later. He doesn’t want to rub our faces into what happened and whip us into a frenzy of hate against the British. We never lose sight of the justice that Catholics in Northern Ireland merit.

The entire large cast is perfect, including Tim Pigott-Smith, Kathy Keira Clarke, Gerard Crossan and Allan Gildea. All the actors and actresses are largely responsible for the film’s riveting sense of realism.

In addition to its triumphs for Greengrass at Berlin, the film won as best film, Greengrass as best director and also as best scenarist at the Irish Film and Television Awards. Greengrass also won for the film or its direction at the Jerusalem Film Festival and the British Independent Film Awards. In the U.S., Bloody Sunday took the audience award at Sundance.

* These are the final lines of Thomas Kinsella’s great poem commemorating Bloody Sunday, Butcher’s Dozen: A Lesson for the Octave of Widgery. Colmcille refers to Saint Columbcille, the sixth-century monastic who prophesied the course of Irish history, including much that has unfolded and some that has yet to unfold.

THE BOURNE SUPREMACY (Paul Greengrass, 2004)

Amnesiac Jason Bourne is relentlessly pursued by Russian intelligence, whose agent kills Bourne’s romantic partner, Marie, while aiming for him, and (formerly) his own Central Intelligence Agency, the latter of which wrongly thinks he has murdered one of their agents. Out in the cold, Bourne is again on the global run.
     This film version of the second Bourne novel by Robert Ludlum finds Paul Greengrass having replaced Doug Liman, director of The Bourne Identity (2002): a vast improvement. This one is a more humane thing than the first in the series, but it’s still action-packed and incredibly fast-paced—although its string of anti-climaxes grows somewhat tiresome. Another problem is Joan Allen’s lousy acting as bureau chief Pamela Landy.
     In the main, though, Supremacy is an appealing, exciting entertainment that weds its bloody pace to bluesy-moody visuals—two things that aren’t usually combined. But here the “slow,” almost lyrical visual aspect bathes the rapidly edited images in an aching melancholy that sums up Bourne’s current existence as he loses whomever he loves and is periodically bombarded by shards of memory that tell him what a killing bastard he was for the C.I.A.
     The unifying theme of Greengrass’s film is our capacity to make moral choices in whatever situation we find ourselves, and Bourne’s struggle to regain his humanity over his former life, even with everyone after him, touches. Matt Damon, who plays Bourne, is no mean-spirited, cold-blooded Tom Cruise; he is throbbingly human.
     Bourne learns his real identity: David Webb. But what difference can that make now that he is also learning more about what Webb did, and what the consequences are for others no matter who he is? Bourne, terribly alone, has lost all that the rest of us hope never to lose.

THE FALL OF FUJIMORI (Ellen Perry, 2005)

Ellen Terry’s superlative The Fall of Fujimori documents the political fortunes of Alberto Fujimoto, president of Peru from 1990 to 2000. It is a deft mosaic of news footage and interviews that calls into question, sometimes with dazzling wit, the film’s centerpiece: Perry’s interview with Fujimori in Japan, the nation of his ancestors, to which he fled once becoming a fugitive for his various crimes, including murder. The piecemeal presentation of Fujimori’s self-serving remarks becomes perfectly correlative to Fujimori’s lack of integrity. For Perry and other U.S. Americans, it is doubly chilling that Fujimori’s rationalizations sound eerily like George W. Bush’s for identical and similar anti-democratic activities.
     Fujimori became an international celebrity for his “war on terrorism,” which transformed Peru, for a spell, into a police state in which the legislature was abolished and a wide net police net captured innocents and honorable political opponents, as well as feisty rebels protesting Peru’s widespread backwardness and poverty. Death squads were routinely sent out, and people disappeared in the night.
     On the other hand, Fujimori instituted genuine reforms, and stabilized and revived the Peruvian economy, bringing in foreign investment.
     One can bemoan that Perry spends so little time sketching in the intricacies of Peruvian history and politics; but one then risks missing the movie Perry aimed at and brought in. Fujimori’s popularity, at home and abroad, performs a dance with his outrageous cruelty and demented “leadership,” which he is able in the present to cover over with smooth talk that shows continuing political adeptness-in-exile. How ironic that Fujimori’s fall was precipitated only by the exposure of a close associate’s corruption.
     Fujimori lies and lies well enough to fool an offspring and countless Peruvians. But not his ex-wife!
     ”El Chino” hopes someday to return to power.

SENSO (Luchino Visconti, 1954)

Senso proved as doomed as the mostly one-sided, purplish romance at the center of its plot. Ingrid Bergman and Marlon Brando agreed to star; but when (under pressure from spouse Roberto Rossellini) Bergman withdrew, Brando followed suit. Cinematographer Aldo Graziati was killed in a road accident during filming. The producer worried that the film’s depiction of Italy’s nineteenth-century Austrian occupation would open old psychic wounds, and more recent ones as a result of the German occupation, and demanded changes. Censors intervened even more drastically, obscuring filmmaker Luchino Visconti’s aim at Italy’s aristocracy, whose sense of privilege, Visconti’s film was supposed to argue, contributed to Italy’s military defeats in its struggle for independence. Visconti’s own roots were aristocratic, but, a Communist, his politics urged an honest confrontation with Italy’s past. This didn’t make it to the screen. In the U.S., an additional half-hour was slashed, but the sensational title slapped onto it suited the result: The Wanton Contessa.
     Venezia, 1866; Countess Livia Serpieri (beauteous Alida Valli, strikingly good) implores Franz Mahler for her rebel cousin’s release from jail following his participation in an anti-Austrian demonstration. She falls in love with the Austrian lieutenant. Their sordid, for her extramarital affair begins the process of her degradation. Her heart urges her pursuit of the lieutenant even after the sexual profligate has cold-shouldered, really, betrayed her, and she ends up betraying the cause that had led to their initial meeting.
     To say the least, this is an unhappy film, with Livia is tears in her carriage and recklessly on foot, attempting to re-meet Mahler after he has moved on. The Visconti film it most resembles would also prove to be one of his worst: Death in Venice (1971). The mangled result, though, necessitated Visconti’s masterpiece about Risorgimento, Il Gattopardo (1963).