BARABBAS (Richard Fleischer, 1961)

Engrossing, (by Raymond Poulton and Alberto Gallitti) brilliantly edited, Richard Fleischer’s Barabbas is nonetheless an outrage on two fronts. It is mostly mediocre, at times tacky. The (actual) solar eclipse is gorgeous, but little else evokes any Christian sense of mystery. Outrageous also is the fact that an earlier, purportedly excellent version (1953) of Pär Lagerkvist’s novel, from Sweden, written and directed by Alf Sjöberg, is widely unseen largely because of Fleischer’s more “spectacular” film, in English, from Italy.
     Anthony Quinn plays Barabbas, the thief whom Roman crowds vote to free on a holy day, choosing to send Jesus of Nazarene instead to his death by crucifixion. Guilt over his survival at the expense of someone others believe to be the Son of God launches Barabbas’s stumbling long odyssey in the direction of Christian identity and crucifixion. What a great story—one more exciting than the story about Jesus; but, despite two or three terrific episodes, this movie doesn’t amount to much. None of Fleischer’s films—unlike the animated ones by his father, Max—do.
     Quinn, so-so, mumbles grumpily. But Jack Palance, baring his upper teeth in a menacing smile, claims his most insane role: Torvald, a gladiator who so considers himself the king of the arena that he turns down three offers of freedom from his emperor. Giving the best performance, however, is Vittorio Gassman as Sahak, Barabbas’s fellow prisoner in the sulfur mines and a glowing example of early Christian faith and commitment. His dignified, endearing acting balances Quinn’s glumness and gloom. Surprisingly quick and good, as another devoted Christian, is Ernest Borgnine. Harry Andrews, though, may be too solemn as Peter. When he reports a joke made to him by Jesus one regrets that he seems incapable of any joke of his own.

NOT ONE LESS (Zhang Yimou, 1999)

“Words should be as big as a donkey’s turd.” This is what a village primary schoolteacher tells Wei Minzhi, his substitute for the next month, so that she doesn’t exceed the school’s allotment of chalk. The dilapidated one-room school is obviously underfunded. Minzhi is thirteen years old; her pupils are eleven on down. The regular teacher makes attrition Minzhi’s principal responsibility. Already ten students have recently dropped out. There should be not one less student in attendance upon his return.
     When his father dies, and with his mother sick, 11-year-old Zhang Huike does drop out, moving alone to Jiangjiakou City in order to find work. Hitherto shy, Minzhi becomes an expert classroom teacher as she summons practical mathematics in order to figure out, with the help of her students, what money they must raise in order to get her to the city and back, along with Huike. How many bricks must they move at what renumeration per brick at the nearby factory? But all plans fail, and a determined Minzhi, armed with Huike’s work address, walks and hitchhikes to Jiangjiakou City. But Huike has disappeared, and so Minzhi must find him first. Along the way, strangers make helpful suggestions, and Minzhi’s efforts lead her to a television studio, where, appearing on the highest-rated talk show, she breaks down into tears as she implores people to help her find Huike. Meanwhile, Huike, homeless, has nearly starved. He and Minzhi reunite. The TV show’s anchor asks him on the bus ride home what he will most remember about the city. His reply: “That I had to beg for food.”
     There’s a vast visual contrast between the countryside, where Minzhi can feel at home and lead younger children, and the city, where she is forever lost and asking for directions. The forbidding TV camera lens into which she is coaxed to speak resembles HAL from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 (1968), but progress has its benefits: donations to the school come pouring in from viewers. Still, Zhang’s film primarily reflects on the destructive role played by China’s new capitalism. Throughout the film, one thing or another requires money—and without it, people are dismissed and discarded. Among the film’s closing statistics is this: “Poverty forces over one million children to leave school every year.” This is the threat that Minzhi herself feels. In trying to rescue Huike, she is empathizing from the depth of her own poverty that has sent her, ill-prepared, into this month-long, ill-paying job of hers.
     Nonprofessionally cast, Yi ge dou bu neng shao is a “message movie” with incredible heart (a wide range of characters, including the children, are affectionately drawn), and it is one of Zhang’s most beautiful films.

METROPOLIS (Fritz Lang, 1926)

Raving the latest restoration/incarnation of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, dance critic Mindy Aloff noted at the last, “The problem is that it’s Metropolis.” No matter how Lang’s most famous science-fiction epic is doctored, expanded or otherwise amended, it is still Metropolis.
     So long as it hews to expressionistic representations of robotic mass labor, Metropolis is a great film. Alas, while these give the film its most memorable and trenchant images, not to mention social import, they make up only a small part of the film’s broad design. Grandiose, frivolous, silly, most of the film is far from successful—and now that it is the twenty-first century, in which the film’s futuristic action is set, Metropolis seems especially lame. The grand joining of hands between ownership and labor is purely a matter of narrative neatness, the aesthetics of facile plot resolution. Capitalism’s enslavement of the masses, currently deepened by globalization, and the harshness of industrial labor continue to convince; nothing else in the film, though, bears any ring of truth.

SPIES (Fritz Lang, 1928)

Written convolutedly by wife Thea von Harbou from her novel, Fritz Lang’s breeziest film is perhaps his most entertaining. A spy thriller, Spione presents a contest between good and evil, a government agent, Number 326, who is a master of disguises, and a banker, Haghi, who seeks world domination. The opponents are almost mirror images; both represent secret organizations and are fiendishly clever, as the agent needs to be in order to match Haghi mind for mind. But despite his numerical identity, the agent proves all too human when he falls in love with the decoy, Sonja, that Haghi has thrown in his path to thwart his infiltration of Haghi’s underground operation; Sonja falls in love with 326 as well. Haghi (played by the same actor) looks back to Lang’s Mabuse and, (seemingly) wheelchair-bound, ahead to Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. But it is hardly the characters that count most in Spione; it is the exhilaration of the competition and the chase—and the message underneath: the vulnerability of Germany’s Wiemar Republic.
     The prologue sets the style: in closeup, the breaking into a safe, the rifling of a crucial secret document, the assassination of a minister in broad daylight, a montage of comically explosive anxiety in phone-connected official quarters, the assassination indoors of a soul just about to identify the culprit. Peace in the world risks a tumble. Alfred Hitchcock’s debt to Lang is unmistakable.
     Lang’s visual coups include hilariously over-the-top inserts of a punitive father and lewd, drunken mother that are part of a spy’s ruse so her prey, instead of sending her home, will take her in out of the rain.
     The finale, with the closing in on Haghi, who is performing as a theatrical clown (named Nemo!), and ending with his public suicide, is creepy-brilliant.