THE SEARCH (Fred Zinnemann, 1948)

In 1946 nine-year-old Karel, a Czech boy who had been liberated from Auschwitz, flees a refugee center in U.S.-occupied Germany while his mother, whose husband and daughter were murdered by the Nazis, continues her search for him. The child and “Steve,” an American G.I., meanwhile have formed a close bond. It is Steve’s intent to bring “Jim”—what he calls this boy who has no memory of his real name—to the United States.
     Fred Zinnemann’s The Search, written by Richard Schweizer, David Wechsler and Paul Jarrico, is one of the most painful tearjerkers in existence precisely because the material it is ransacking—the death camps and those who survived them—is so agonizingly real and momentous. One of the commendable things that this film does is give some sense of the enormous number of displaced children.
     The story is, however, ludicrous in the extreme, and unconscionably the film runs on contrived missed opportunities for the mother and the son to reunite. Finally, after each believes the other to be dead, they find one another.
     But commending The Search are gripping documentary shots of Berlin in ruins and four memorable performances: young, agile Montgomery Clift as Steve, Aline MacMahon as the bright, compassionate director of a refugee center for children, opera singer Jarmila Novotna as the mother and, above all, Oscar-winner Ivan Jandl as the little boy. Jandl is almost unbearably affecting.
     Still, what does one say about so merciless an “entertainment”? It isn’t inhuman of us to respond to something like this film; our doing so may even certify our capacity for genuine feeling. Rather, it is inhuman of those who have contrived the film’s narrative and other elements in order to manipulate our emotions. What they have done, what they have wrought, is despicable.

NIGHT ON EARTH (Jim Jarmusch, 1991)

Indie-darling writer-director Jim Jarmusch’s biggest production consists of five separate episodes revolving around a different taxi cab driver’s on-the-meter encounter(s) with one or more passengers. Each of the episodes is located in a different city—Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome, Helsinski—and all five are stitched together as though occurring progressively through a single night and crossing the Finnish line at dawn.
     This travelogue of human nature is a robustly funny, delicately poignant comedy. Each episode is announced by a city-labeled clock and a point on a Casablanca-type map. Some episodes are more richly humorous than others, but the overall effect is one of enchantment. The film’s haunting quality is deepened to the soul by the most beautiful nighttime color cinematography in existence; Frederick Elmes (Blue Velvet, River’s Edge, Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers) indeed won the year’s Independent Spirit Award.
     In the L.A. episode a casting agent (Gena Rowlands, witty and gorgeous) tries unsuccessfully to convince her young cabbie (Winona Ryder, loutish, androgynous) to pursue a movie career. Corky instead feels that her current job might lead to the realization of her lifelong dream: to be a mechanic. It is a lame O.Henry launch. Better is the New York episode, where the passenger, who at first cannot get a cabbie to stop and pick him up because he is African-American, ends up taking over the driving chores when the cabbie (Armin Mueller-Stahl, excellent), an East German immigrant who used to be a clown, not only doesn’t know the city but scarcely knows how to drive. Paris produces one of the two best episodes. A self-sensitive Ivory Coast immigrant drives a cutting, oblivious blind woman (superdramatic Béatrice Dalle, here hilarious). In Rome, a self-involved, oblivious cabbie (Roberto Benigni, at least initially hilarious) drives his fare, a priest, to a fatal heart attack by confessing his sexual history with pumpkins, a sheep and his brother’s wife. Helsinki is gold; the cabbie (Matti Pellonpää, wonderful) and an unconscious fare, whose horrible day is related by two companions, compete for the title of having the more unfortunate life. Drunk, the two conscious passengers, give the prize to Mika, the driver, and abandon their friend to the snowy vicinity of his residence. My money, though, is on their buddy, who would have won had he been able to defend his own candidacy.
     Surprisingly warm, Jarmusch’s film easily transcends the cynicism of its set-up.