OKRAINA (Boris Barnet, 1933)

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

In “the backwaters of tsarist Russia,” life exists at a sleepy remove: ducks feed in murkily reflective water; a man dozes in his spindly coach as his horse shakes its head, the epithet “Good God!” seemingly coming from it, but as likely coming from its come-to offscreen master; a smiling girl, alone on a bench, noting couples—and an alternate possibility of her future: an unhappy unattached woman. From the outdoor leisure of strolling couples, the camera cuts to a shoemaking workshop: an unseen woman’s foot is measured; the sounds and sights of speedy mass labor. Thus begins Boris Barnet’s inventive, comical Okraina (literally, Outskirts, a.k.a. Patriots), an early Soviet sound film, and a brilliant antiwar film.
     Two things rouse the town: a factory strike, compelling the cobblers to stop cobbling and join their comrades in solidarity; German invasion and war. The latter is a touchstone of the plot regarding the girl on the bench and her father, one of whose tenants is a German friend with whom he plays checkers. War sets them to bickering, the tenant moves out and they are friends no longer. Later, the daughter becomes infatuated with a German prisoner-of-war, stealing him into the boarding house before, roused from sleep, her father tosses him out. The boy, the one shoemaker in town willing (and eager) to work, is beaten up by folk, as though the town were the front. Meanwhile, the scenes at the front are trenchant, disclosing the horror of war. An extreme long-shot of one surrenderer and a man from the other side coming peaceably together, each followed by a flurry of soldiers, is surpassingly moving, as is the weary march of prisoners-of-war into town. Gorgeous lyrical inserts of Nature mark the 1917 revolution. Tsarist Russia is no more.

BLACK HILLS

for Marty Cohen

1.

Inverted quicksand,
Black Hills stretch through a dream of our ride
down to San Francisco.
Back east, no landscape like this;
I hadn’t guessed the chastity of solid night.
What I dream I flood with light,
inner, silent, specious.
You drove us through from Portland,
where now I am headed back.
These black hills point to a change.
I point them there myself.

2.

In the Scorsese musical,
this early shot:
Francine at table in the club,
with a flock of undrunk drinks,
cherries all plucked out.
Here is her character at a glance,
unobscured by song or dance:
she takes what she wants.

3.

The fine gold chain around my neck
my mother gave me when I last
visited before her death.
At first it was tight,
but the undulations of my
neck have loosened its grip.
I slip into it.

TWENTY-FOUR EYES (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1954)

Hideko Takamine, a Japanese child star who grew up to be a middling actress, plays Hisako Oishi, who teaches school in a rural island village beginning in the late 1920s, in Nijushi no hitomi, from Sakae Tsuboi’s novel. Written and directed by Keisuke Kinoshita, this soft, elegiac antiwar classic spans two decades, deriving its poignancy from the eventual deaths of students in World War II, the depth of affection that students retain for Oishi, and the aural punctuation of nostalgic melodies on the soundtrack, including ones familiar to Western audiences. Whether this last is a sly reference to the U.S. occupation of Japan following the war I cannot say. Oishi, one notes, wears Western clothes. Indeed, it is her modernity that initially draws resistance to her acceptance from the island’s inhabitants.
     Kinoshita’s films always somewhat disappoint, and this leisurely, very appealing one is no exception. Although Kinoshita applies a degree of restraint and, as a result, it isn’t mawkish, Twenty-Four Eyes is not immune to the label tearjerker. While its repetitiousness dulls its capacity to jerk all the tears it aims for, this sad film racks up a good many bull’s-eyes.
     Perhaps the film’s finest aspect is its translation into form and feeling of the idea of time’s passage. It always depresses me that so many Hollywood films whose story spans a number of years—an example: The Way We Were (Sydney Pollack, 1973)— convey no sense of this. It is sometimes difficult in the case of Kinoshita’s film to match up the faces of actors playing the same character at different stages; but, watching this film, one feels the flow of time and, with it, the irony that the process of education sometimes prepares people for death in war rather than productivity in life.

SPRING IN A SMALL TOWN (Fei Mu, 1948)

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

Adjudged in 2005 to be “the greatest Chinese movie ever made,” Fei Mu’s blustery, black-and-white Xiao cheng zhi chun focuses on a “not normal” marriage that defines an historic space betwixt the Second World War, which in more ways than one has left China in rubble, and the Cultural Revolution up ahead.
     Liyan, who is sickly, and Yuwen, his wife, sleep in separate rooms; Liyan’s teenaged sister sleeps elsewhere on the grounds. Yuwen is a dutiful though unloving partner. This Liyan cannot see because the vestiges of feudalism that are attached to him blind him to his wife’s silent anguish and misinterpret her dutifulness. But everyone’s consciousness is about to change as a result of Liyan’s best friend’s visit: Zhichen, now a medical doctor, turns out to be the boy that 16-year-old Yuwen loved ten years earlier, near the time of the Japanese invasion. A seemingly speedily rising moon in the nighttime sky is Fei’s symbol for a breakthrough in understanding that occurs in each of the main characters.
     The early part of the film is inundated with Yuwen’s mundane voiceover (“I pushed away my own door and sat on my bed . . .”), for inside her head is more or less where she lives, not in the small town where, she laments, “nothing ever changes.” (Irony.) The substantial erasure of this stream-of-consciousness voiceover once Yuwen has Zhichen with whom to interact comes as a jolt; from it, we feel the shift in Yuwen’s mental and emotional life.
     ”I hope he dies!” at one point Yuwen says aloud to Zhichen about Liyan. She is properly aghast at this first-time notion. Individualism, once a refuge, has now become a source of decision-making and deeds.
     The “decision” here is not to murder anyone.

GO INTO YOUR DANCE (Archie Mayo, Michael Curtiz, Robert Florey, 1935)

One of the most richly scored, dazzlingly entertaining Hollywood musicals ever, and perhaps my father’s favorite film, Go Into Your Dance was directed by Archie Mayo, although a few extraneous, inserted scenes were directed by others. Al Jolson is brilliant as Al Howard, a stage star trying to get back into the business after walking out on one show too many. Rebuffed, Howard aims to produce his own musical show with the financial backing of mobster Duke Hutchinson, who wants his wife, Luana, to have the comeback she desires. To steady her career jitters, though, Luana advances sexually on Al, tossing everything into jeopardy, including Al’s life.
     Arguably the greatest musical entertainer of all time, Jolson claims here his most electrifying onscreen delivery of a song—and what a song it is: “She’s a Latin from Manhattan,” music by Harry Warren, lyrics by Al Dubin: “. . . She can take her tambourine and whack it,/ But to her it’s just a racket;/ She’s a hoofer from Fifth Avenu-ue./ She’s a Latin from Manhattan,/ She’s a 42nd Streeter;/ She’s a Latin from Manhattan,/ Señorita Donahue.” All the film’s thematic strands beautifully come together in this song, including American self-reinvention, theatrical illusion, moral transvestism. With its Gatsbyism delightfully deepened by Jolson’s sexual ambiguity, this may be the best song Warren and Dubin ever created (although they won Oscars that same year for “Lullaby of Broadway” in Gold-Diggers of 1935). Throughout, the dancing is wonderful, but it is specifically for the “Latin from Manhattan” number that choreographer Bobby Connelly was Oscar-nominated.
     Jolson and then-wife Ruby Keeler are warm and hilarious together (this is also Keeler’s best performance), and Helen Morgan, as Luana, hauntingly sings “The Little Things You Used to Do.”