FORCE OF EVIL (Abraham Polonsky, 1948)

John Garfield dazzles as smart, tough, egotistical, charming Joe Morse, a mouthpiece for mobster Ben Tucker, who plans on taking over the numbers racket on July 4 by making “776,” which on that day is always voluminously bet on, a winner, thereby making it impossible for numbers banks to pay off what they owe. Morse is juggling three ambitions: make his first million; protect his older brother, Leo, who stands to lose everything because he runs one of the numbers banks; help transform the system of betting into a legal lottery. Unconsciously perhaps, he is also seeking reconciliation with Leo, from whom he is estranged, partly because Leo resents Joe’s material success and rationalizes his own small-time criminality as morally preferable to Joe’s association with big-time criminals. It turns out, however, that both brothers are going down; when Leo ends up dead, Joe finds himself guiltily welded to a train of causality that prompts his move toward justice for himself (disbarment, imprisonment) and redemption.
     Adapting Ira Wolfert’s novel Tucker’s People, writer-director Abraham Polonsky takes aim at American capitalism, showing how its manipulation of greed gives many something to aspire to. The opening aerial shot looking down New York City skyscrapers, accompanied by Joe’s aspiring voiceover, is ironic as a predictor of the downward trajectory of his career and arrogance—an irony of which Joe is aware since he is speaking to us after his fall. For the moment, though, we also see people walking far below on city streets: tiny insects, vulnerable to being crushed to assist Joe’s rise, with Joe’s one-time ambition lording over them. Other shots throughout play with darkness and light to suggest the infiltration of evil in characters’ lives.
     David Raksin’s haunting score is as irreplaceable as Joe’s poetic dialogue.

ROSE’S SONGS (Andor Szilágyi, 2003)

Imre Rózsa, a celebrated Jewish opera singer, remains in Budapest in his secluded mansion in the fateful autumn of 1944, when visible yellow cloth Stars of David were required wear for Jews and ghettoization had begun. Over the years, apparently, Rózsa had promised Jews that his residence was open to them in case of trouble; now, Jews are streaming in. This includes the Halászes: Géza (Franco Castellano, superb), an engineer; Lili, his wife; their young children, Julo and Tomi; and Grandpa. Rózsa never appears, keeping to the sanctuary of his uppermost room; but periodically he can be heard singing “Ave Maria.”
     This wartime survival story is drawn from actual events. (One wonders whether Géza and Lili really ended up under the same roof as Géza’s lover.) Twice, Nazis come knocking at the door; it is nerve-racking pleasure to see Géza’s ingenuity, intelligence and single quick stroke of violence prevail. But mostly Rózsa’s house is inhabited by fear. War’s end cannot come too soon. Some stop waiting, commit suicide.
     The complexity of Andor Szilágyi’s mise-en-scène helps develop his themes of Jewish solidarity versus self-division, sheer possibility; in perhaps his most brilliant shot, a lowered trap door in a wall reveals, within the same frame, faces surrounded by darkness in the hole and, in the foreground, others entirely visible in artificial light. A Rózsa énekei is a color film, but all the color, tending toward consistent monochrome, is hauntingly subdued.
     Some of the drama revolves around Tomi, adopting this child’s point of view. Roaming the mansion, Tomi overhears adult conversations and, to a degree I do not recall any other film matching (a basis for comparison is Carol Reed’s The Fallen Idol, 1948), the other eavesdroppers, we, experience both our more sophisticated understanding of conversations and his.

THE KITE RUNNER (Marc Forster, 2007)

The Kite Runner is vacuous drivel that trivializes recent Afghan history and loses a potentially humane drama of atonement amidst a tangle of silly plot and self-aggrandizing heart-tugging. Bad films are made from good novels all the time, but the whole aura of this film by Marc Forster, not to mention the story itself, persuades me that the novel by Khaled Hosseini on which it is based (which I haven’t read) is more likely than not trash also. The main plot-line about one boy’s betrayal of another is rigged, rhetorical and reductive.
     One thing, though, commends the film: Khalid Abdalla’s beautiful acting as Amir, a writer who leaves San Francisco to return to Kabul, which is in the Taliban’s grip, in order, it turns out, to confront childhood demons and locate his backbone. He learns this at least: Treat the servant’s son well, for fathers sleep around and your playmate may be your own brother.
     Oh, brother.
     The amount of anal rape that boys in one family have to endure is ugly in the extreme, no matter how “tastefully” it is all presented. I wouldn’t mind giving author Hosseini—the adaptation is by David Benioff—a good taste of my right fist.
     Incidentally, Amir can simply bring his nephew into the United States? It’s that easy?

THE DEED TO HELL (Glenn Andreiev, 2008)

One of the greatest literary works, Dante’s The Divine Comedy, makes its way to Paradise from the circular bowels of Hell. In independent U.S. writer-director-editor Glenn Andreiev’s terrific The Deed to Hell, all roads lead to Hell. This may be Andreiev’s funniest film, a satire of our foibles, legally, socially, familially, but once it enters Hell there is nothing at all to laugh at; its gory, sorrowful vision of torment, perpetual torture and dwindling hope for redemption, a “second chance,” is accompanied by scripted captions presumably issuing from a punishing cosmic entity or force direly communicating with miscreants. Of course, it is Andreiev’s own moral outrage that is targeting a tangle of individuals some of whose sins may reflect some of our individual own. We are not visiting a Hell along the stylish lines that Woody Allen concocted for his fine Deconstructing Harry (1997). Andreiev’s Hell is for real and only very rarely escapable. In one instance, Andreiev stings us with a variation on those who, “dead,” are medically revived and report having glimpsed a warm, radiant, family-friendly Afterlife. Here it is Hell that is glimpsed—and it is a dark, desolate, horrific place somewhat reminiscent of Hans W. Geissendörfer’s vision of Nazism in his Dracula film, Jonathan (1970).
     Andreiev himself plays one of the sinners, Sal, who backstabs his partner in theft, Andy, by shooting him and absconding with their ill-gotten gains. Before Sal flees for European capitals he commits an atrocity of the order of Scar’s casual killing of a dog in John Ford’s The Searchers (1956): he deposits his cat, in a ventilated carrier, into a dumpster, abandoning him. Andreiev recruited his own beloved pet, Boris, for the role; it is a relatively small act, perhaps, given the order of crimes and betrayals that the film catalogues, but for pet-owners it will be a haunting one; and there’s something unspeakably, if humorously, obscene in the discrepancy between the natty pet carrier and the cat’s ignominious fate.
     The film’s adventure begins in Brooklyn, New York, before taking off for Europe. Hell appears to be the flip side of reality, a surreal dimension that unites Earthly geographical points and, in a reversal of expectation, shows more specific evidence of time and time’s passage than there is in the normal world above, where past and present are often indistinguishable. Hell exists at the crossroads of interior guilt and shame and something metaphysical and absolute. The punishments we see enacted are enormously painful to contemplate. In other words, Andreiev’s film is so gripping it gets inside our head.

7 SONGS FROM THE TUNDRA (Markku Lehmuskallio, Anastasia Lapsui, 1999)

Anastasia Lapsui, co-writer and co-director of Seitsemän laulua tundralta, is herself a Nenet; her and Markku Lehmuskallio’s Seitsemän laulua tundralta, from Finland, portrays the Nenet people in the twentieth century. They may remind viewers of the also-Arctic Inuits—North American Eskimoes—that Robert J. Flaherty documented in Nanook of the North (1922).
     The opening shot is a snapshot: the lower two-thirds is covered with white snow, the upper one-third is white sky, and the line in between, the faintest gray in this long-shot, is interrupted by Nenets: at this distance, darker dots. One of the seven songs: “Lumps of snow fly from under our feet up to the clouds.” The composite image will remind some of us of a late Turner, with earth substituted for sea.
     This film about northern Finnish natives is divided into sections: “Land of the Nenets,” “God,” etc. The Nenets, we are silently told in titles, are “herders, fishers and hunters.” Speeded-up silent film amidst teepees and animals: archival or new? The camera pans rightward to a larch, under which three women perform some ritual and, with a jump-cut, disappear as the same song continues on the soundtrack and other Nenets come to the tree and, amidst dissolves, perform some ritual that includes painting a branch and possibly drinking the blood, the “paint,” from some sacrificed animal.
     History proceeds; collectivization. The new order: “[N]o rich people, no kulaks, no tsar.” Apparently there are different notions of freedom—rationalization from the side of native feudal leadership, who eat meat with fat while others make do with grouse and rabbit. Nenets lament the slaughter by Germans during World War II. In “Enemies of the People,” a young woman, pining, sings by a window. Two young women dance together to a gramophone record that’s stuck in a groove. Songs drift from communal to individual, almost interior, ones. Individuals talking to the camera are replaced by those talking amongst themselves.
     In “Syako,” we see the everyday realities wrought by Soviet collectivization. Children are taken out of homes and placed in boarding school. Cut to children at play outside school and, with the teacher ringing the bell, pouring into the schoolhouse. The sound of school activity, including children’s voices, is superimposed on a shot of the village.
     Things change; things don’t. Nine-year-old Syako is terrified that Russian officials will take her to school. Excited, her friend Maima, now Lida, tells her she is now “a pioneer.” Cut to a long-shot of a teepee in the snow. Uncle Lenin said, “You must study, study, study!” We see Syako dragged in long-shot to school.
     Interesting film, but not by a long shot the masterpiece that the gorgeously lit black-and-white photography by Johannes Lehmuskallio, Markku’s something-or-other, repeatedly announces.