ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST (Milos Forman, 1975)

Behavioral comedy, his forte, is suffocated by nastiness and sentimental antics in Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a simplistic melodrama based on Ken Kesey’s novel by way of Dale Wasserman’s play. Its mawkish antiestablishmentarianism is passé now, and its misogynism remains strident and reprehensible. Forman manipulated audiences toward an expression of their ugliest moods, although it is on the basis of the hollow script, by Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman, that a number of high-profile actresses turned down the part of Nurse Ratched because of its misogynistic intent: Anne Bancroft, Ellen Burstyn, Colleen Dewhurst, Faye Dunaway, Jane Fonda, Angela Lansbury, Jeanne Moreau, Geraldine Page. Each of these women ought to be commended for putting decency and female solidarity ahead of career and personal ambition—although excellent Louise Fletcher’s acceptance speech in sign language did give Oscar one of its memorable moments.
     Randle Patrick McMurphy is a thorn in the side of the Oregon state mental institution to which he has been transferred. He opposes the hospital’s rules on general principle, and we cannot help but wonder whether his hospitalization is predicated on his difficulty for society. He doesn’t seem mentally ill—nor does every other patient in the facility; and regarding those who do we wonder whether their more or less incarceration contributes to or even causes their “illness.”
     Jack Nicholson, no redhead, isn’t tall enough to play McMurphy. Totally miscast, he substitutes his trademark alienation for McMurphy’s anarchism. This, one of his worst performances, also brought him an Oscar.
     When young, pimply, stuttering Billy commits suicide, McMurphy assaults Nurse Ratched, whom he blames, pinning her on the floor. The scene is shot as though he is raping her. Audiences cheer.
     Oscars, also, for best picture, director, script.

LONG LIVE THE LADY! (Ermanno Olmi, 1987)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Written and directed by Ermanno Olmi, Lunga vita alla signora is Italy’s most brilliant film comedy. The “lady” in question, decrepit though still holding on, represents capitalism and wealth. She is her own guest of honor at an elaborate formal dinner/business celebration. Closed-circuit television sets are rolled down the in-between path of the U-shaped dining table to broadcast record high profits.
     Her Ladyship wears a veil because, if ever breathed on directly or exposed to too much light, she would disintegrate. She doesn’t attend the opera, because culture might kill her, but she espies distant dinner guests through opera glasses from underneath her veil. Infantile, her Ladyship drinks wine through a straw.
     Yet she is not the protagonist of Olmi’s intricately edited, combustibly funny satire. Boys and girls from a cooking school who have been brought in to serve the wine and dinner are the focus. (Cooked by the lady’s own chef and staff, the unusual meal begins with frogs and reaches a climax with an unidentifiable sea-beast—those familiar with Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita, 1959, will savor the joke—whose skeleton, when it is ceremoniously carted away, is picked-clean and bone-dry.) A flashback-insert shows the working-class youths’ instruction and preparation: Don’t turn around suddenly. Don’t look bored, etc. A flashback is inserted inside the flashback, showing one of the boys being similarly instructed years ago in church: “Beware of impure thoughts!” Libenzio’s “career path” has been this: church; school; job. This path of obedience reflects the patriarchal structure that capitalism now dictates more essentially than the Church.
     Poignantly, Libenzio and his truck-driver father steal a private moment outside the mansion. After dinner, a guest tries to impress the waiter sexually, but, come dawn, Libenzio flees the maze of Her Ladyship’s domain.

CHRONICLE OF THE BURNING YEARS (Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina, 1975)

Enormously expensive, indulgently long and exceptionally hard to follow, Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina’s widescreen Chronique des années de braise, from Algeria, won the top prize at Cannes as jury chair Jeanne Moreau possibly impressed on other jury members her guilt over France’s colonization of Algeria. The film covers an epic sweep of national history, from World War II to the outbreak of Algerian rebellion against the French. But the narrative is too murky to muster moral clarity, and the film’s attempt at force at the conclusion is limp and lame.
     Two characters dominate. One is Ahmed, a loud, hollow, surly peasant who uproots wife and babies in search of water during a devastating drought. (Someone says, “If God doesn’t show mercy soon, we will suffer bad times, as usual.”) Eventually Ahmed becomes impressed into the French army and into the Algerian revolutionary movement. The loss of most of his family to typhus humbles him; he becomes a quiet man and then a galloping, sword-wielding hero. (The Vasilievs’ Soviet Chapaev, 1934, floats somewhere above him.) The other character is Malmoud, an even louder, more obnoxious character, who is dreadfully played by the director as a gadfly feigning lunacy, a burier of the dead, and a one-man Greek chorus. In Malmoud, Hamlet meets Our Town. After Ahmed is assassinated, Malmoud becomes Ahmed’s young son’s surrogate father. At the last, running like Antoine Doinel, but to a non-existent shore, the boy takes up the cause of both his fathers.
     Absent almost all humanity, this Lakhdar-Hamina family Chronicle is as schematic and tedious as Wyler’s Ben-Hur (1959) or Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962). However, it is visually graced by numerous lovely, intricately dynamic wide-angle shots of people, sometimes a moving mass of them, against a blank desert background.

THRONE OF DEATH (Murali Nair, 1999)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Asian Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

One of the most brilliant satirical films in recent memory, Marana Simhasanam, from Kerala, India, in the Malayalam language, is Murali Nair’s first feature. It won Nair the Caméra d’Or at Cannes.
     Along with his wife, Krishnan has one more day of seasonal low-caste/subsistent-pay employment to go. The film opens with him in the throes of hard physical labor; when he takes a cigarette break, no one will doubt he has earned it—and thus he ekes out the extra day. Years of hard work and deprivation have made the couple look prematurely old, and the introduction of a young boy as their son comes as a shock.
     “How long can we starve?” his wife asks Krishnan. That night, Krishnan attempts to divest the landowner’s tree of some coconuts, but his timing couldn’t be worse. Somehow, miraculously, perhaps by dint of higher caste, the landowner knows what Krishnan is up to beforehand; as he reaches for a coconut, there comes the posse already, by water, to apprehend Krishnan. Also, it is election season, and poor Krishnan becomes everyone’s pawn as candidates and supporters eke out what electoral advantage they can. The party in power adds an unsolved murder to Krishnan’s criminal résumé, while a Communist opponent goes on a hunger strike on Krishnan’s behalf so that Krishnan, rather than being hanged, can experience the “blissful death” delivered by the U.S.-invented “electronic chair” whose widespread distribution the World Bank is planning to underwrite! The end of the hunger strike and Krishnan’s execution each prompts a public event, with fanfare and grandstanding speeches. At the former, amongst a flurry of faux-documentary interviews, a villager says: “While I’m sorry he is going to die, I am happy that Krishnan’s death will be blissful.”
     Media influence!
     Grim, hilarious.

SPRINGTIME IN A SMALL TOWN (Tian Zhuangzhuang, 2002)

The 1948 version of Xiao cheng zhi chun, directed by Fei Mu, was adjudged at the 2005 Hong Kong Awards to be the greatest Chinese film ever made. Tian Zhuangzhuang’s recent remake had partly inspired a reconsideration of the original—a film that is brilliant, stunning, unshakable.
     For me, it is Tian himself who has made the greatest Chinese film, Horse Thief (1986), and his The Blue Kite (1993) is also an estimable work. However, his Springtime in a Small Town, because it is a remake, is almost inevitably inferior to the original.
     Fei’s film is much more stark, distanced (hence, intellectually engaging), revelatory of hidden human emotions, compelling. Tian’s version, on the other hand, is more languorous and lyrical in its lonely longings (nearly Wong Kar-Wai-ish, in fact), more tediously obvious, safer, prettier. It is more luxuriant; it doesn’t bear the same strong sense of war’s damage. Tian perhaps meant to hide the melodramatic nature of the material, to aim for something finer and artier. As a result, he has made a selfconsciously great movie, while Fei made an actually great movie.
     Still, Tian’s version is a good film. Perhaps the key to understanding its necessity, from Tian’s point of view, is its camera style: the slow pans, slow trackings, appealing long-shots, shots that glimpse its characters through trees and elaborate lattice windows. This style suggests that Tian is traveling back through the past, undoing the distance between the present and the postwar time in which Fei’s film is set, before the Cultural Revolution. Symbolically, Tian means wishfully to erase the Cultural Revolution.
     The actors in this version closely resemble the actors in the original, but are more glamorous: ironically, a sign of the decadence with which the Communists charged Fei!