PARRISH (Delmer Daves, 1961)

Delmer Daves’s genial, engrossing soap opera about Connecticut River Valley tobacco wars finds ruthless Judd Raike trying to squeeze out or burn out rival plantation owners, especially Sala Post, whose employee, Ellen McLean, he woos and marries. Ellen’s son, Parrish, is mentored by both Post and Raike, giving us something of an education in tobacco farming as well. Of course, since the time of this film, anything to do with tobacco has become politically incorrect; but few viewers will be up in arms over this.
     At times it is hard to believe just how ridiculous the film is. One example: When Post hand Teet’s daughter, Lucy, identifies Parrish’s rash as tobacco poisoning, she notes that it’s like poison ivy, except that one gets it only once. A sentence later, she remarks, “The first time I got it . . . .” Another example: Speedily pulling in at night, Post’s daughter, Alison, nearly hits Parrish, to whom she explains, “I didn’t see you.” Parrish, who is 6’3” tall, is wearing white pants!
     Most of the acting is atrocious: Troy Donahue as Parrish, Karl Malden as Judd, Connie Stevens as Lucy, Diane McBain as Alison. (Clark Gable, who would have been perfect, had originally been slated to play Judd; Jane Fonda, Alison.)
     On the other hand, Claudette Colbert is gracious and charming as Ellen, and Dean Jagger is flat-out marvelous as Sala Post, earning his Oscar for 12 O’Clock High (Henry King, 1949) all over again. Whereas everyone else is playing a type, Jagger makes Post a highly specific and credible individual.
     The bottom line is this: for all its shortcomings, the film is immensely likeable. Daves keeps both the narrative and its visual form clean and spare. For all its two hours and twenty minutes, Parrish rarely falters as old-fashioned sentimental entertainment.

PATHS OF GLORY (Stanley Kubrick, 1957)

Western front, 1916. A vainglorious French general orders a suicidal mission: the capture of a German stronghold. From no-man’s-land Colonel Dax’s surviving soldiers retreat; others have remained behind in their trenches. The general orders that the latter be fired upon, but the order is rejected, enraging the general, who ekes out revenge by having three soldiers court-martialed and executed as an “example” for French soldiers.
     Stanley Kubrick’s first important film derives from Humphrey Cobb’s novel. It is most interesting in terms of the slippery, convoluted nature of military politics. However, Kubrick meant for Paths of Glory to be an antiwar film, and his fans applaud it as such. In reality, there is no thematic content in it that comports with this intent. Rather, the film is curiously vague on the subject of war, seeming instead to be more virulently anti-French. It certainly seemed so to France, which banned it for fifteen years.
     Paths of Glory is very much the work of a former fashion photographer. Its portrayal of combat is highly aestheticized and anesthetized; proceeding and withdrawing tracking shots in the trenches give way on the battlefield to a sideways tracking shot. The one outstanding element here, as elsewhere, is Georg Krause’s black-and-white cinematography, which is especially effective in underlit bunker interiors.
     Hollow, witless, unfeeling, visually clumsy, stagy and sadistic, this is a terrible movie and an intellectually dishonest one.
     Much of the acting is so bad it is laughable.

12:08 EAST OF BUCHAREST (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2006)

Wryly written and directed by Corneliu Porumboiu, who was 14 when Nicolae Ceauşescu’s regime, and along with it Communism, collapsed in Romania in 1989, A fost sau n-a fost? questions the weight of this event—recent past for some; ancient for others—on Romania’s present. The setting is a small, sleepy town, Vaslui. Jderescu, the owner of a local television station, moderates a news-interview show; Manescu is an alcoholic, debt-ridden history teacher; Piscoci, a retiree and one-time Christmastime Santa Claus. Flanking him, the last two are Jderescu’s TV guests on December 22, the anniversary of the “revolution.” Behind the trio is a blown-up photograph of the Vaslui town square, where there either was or wasn’t a protest against Ceauşescu on that fateful day sixteen years ago before the dictator helicoptered his way out of Bucharest. Everyone agrees that once Ceauşescu fled for his life townsfolk flooded the square.
     Pompously assuring viewers that he is a journalist committed to discovering the truth, Jderescu relentlessly interrogates Manescu, who (convincingly) claims to have been one of four teachers to have participated in the protest prior to Ceauşescu’s hasty departure from power. (Two of Manescu’s compatriots are dead; the other now lives in Canada.) Call-in viewers assist Jderescu in his attack, claiming to have seen no such morning protest as Manescu describes and branding him a liar. But their accounts are riddled with inconsistencies, not to mention pro-Ceauşescu bias, that Jderescu declines to take on. When a Chinese-born caller defends Manescu, Jderescu proves himself a chauvinist. The final caller says that the moderator and guests should go outside and enjoy falling snow before the ground turns to mud.
     Except for the flat program set, interiors seem dreary leftovers from the days of Soviet domination.
     Exteriors are gorgeous.

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