THE YOUNG DOCTORS (Phil Karlson, 1961)

At a tightly budgeted New York hospital, young pathologist David Coleman arrives to join the department head, Joe Pearson, who is burned-out from years of fights with hospital administration, and who is set in his ways and not up-to-date. Callow, egotistical and cutting-edge, Coleman constitutes a challenge for Pearson. Two cases in particular find them opposing one another. One is contrived and soap operatic, and revolves around the bone tumor diagnosis of the young nurse with whom Coleman has fallen in love. Coleman says “benign”; Pearson, “malignant,” in which case Cathy’s leg should be amputated quickly. Cathy’s leg is amputated, and Coleman at least tells Pearson that his, Pearson’s, call was correct—but in a situation too complex to admit certainty of motive. We never learn whose call was correct.
     The other case is more compelling. Coleman has ordered a particular test for a baby who may be suffering from a rare blood disease. The issue is how soon the newborn should receive blood transfusions. Pearson overrules the test. The parents, intern Alexander and wife Elizabeth, have already lost their first child to the disease.
     Perhaps the film’s title, The Young Doctors, was a gimmick to draw in young patrons. Pearson is not “young.” But the title fits. After considerable sparring, Pearson tells Coleman that he, Coleman, reminds him of himself thirty years earlier (when Pearson was young): “I was right back then, and you are right now.” Aren’t these the “young” doctors?
     Fredric March is superb as Pearson; saddled with an unconvincing love story, Ben Gazzara is not so good as Coleman. But Aline MacMahon as Lucy Grainger, who commandeers the surgery on Cathy, and Phyllis Love as Elizabeth are both excellent. Dick Clark is deft and sensitive as Alexander.
     Phil Karlson directed.

THE FIRM (Alan Clarke, 1988)

Gary Oldman gives a tough, pungent and surprisingly poignant performance as Clive Bissel, “Bex,” a “30-year-old kid”—this is his wife Sue’s description of him—who holds down a respectable job and is a hands-on father to his infant son, but who also belongs to a “firm” of football hooligans who trade high-level street violence with fans of a rival team. The Inter City Crew (I.C.C.) that Bex spiritedly leads is based on the actual Inter City Firm (I.C.F.). Their shenanigans are serious; people get their faces cut and their lives lost. Right now Bex is irate—although he initially pretends calm as he contemplates revenge—because his car has been vandalized as part of tit-for-tat provocations. Sue asks Bex why he doesn’t stop behaving like an idiot. He retorts: “I need the buzz!” Besides, he asks her, “Have you seen what they did to my motor?”
     Bex’s relationship with his father suggests a further motive: family legacy. The firm-violence keeps Bex connected to his working-class roots now that his being a real estate agent threatens to shellac him with middle-class identity. Paradoxically, his Bexiness protects Clive from the reality that his upward mobility may be illusory in a nation built on class distinctions.
     The dialogue by Al Ashton (under the pseudonym Al Hunter) is often hilarious, and if you watch The Firm on DVD—for that is the mild-mannered name of the film—I suggest that you turn on the English subtitles so that you don’t miss a bit of it. Even so, it is Alan Clarke’s filmmaking more than the script that is the real star. Pulsating, raw, unmannered, spectacularly energetic, it is a young man’s filmmaking—in this case, by a man in his fifties. Sadly, Clarke only lived to be 54.

ANTONIO GAUDÍ (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1984)

Japan’s Hiroshi Teshigahara: I dislike his fictional films. But his documentary Antonio Gaudí, about Catalan architect and sculptor Antoni Plàcid Guillem Gaudí i Cornet, is exceedingly beautiful and adventurous. Teshigahara, assisted by color cinematographers Junichi Segawa, Ryu Segawa and Yoshikazu Yanagida, has created a nearly silent waking dream, with one “talking head” who (very late) speaks for only a few minutes. We listen carefully.
     Gaudí (1852-1926) derived his forms, he said, from the Book of Nature, and indeed one sees in his work the influence of honeycombs, spiraling seashells, the luxuriant growth of rough-textured trees, and regional caverns with their stalactites and stalagmites. Gaudí’s prolific work, which rambunctiously pursued curvilinear lines, especially turned Barcelona into a breathing, overflowing garden of public art. All this art still stands. One shot is framed so that a child glides backwards amongst columns that Gaudí designed—Teshigahara’s evocation, perhaps, of Cocteau’s use of reverse motion in the Underworld in Orphée (1949). But here it is daylight, the child is happy, alive, and a dip of the camera reveals she is on roller skates. She is unaware of the “art” she is maneuvering her way around, but in a sense those columns were designed and constructed for her, and the structure belongs to her by her use of it. Increasingly religious, Gaudí’s art is, at its best, splendiferous and mysterious.
     Teshigahara’s slow camera movements in every conceivable direction, including inwards, take us on a journey. (Teshigahara edited—brilliantly.) We see connections in and influences (besides Nature) on Gaudí’s art: in the medieval past, the Romanesque that evolved into the Gothic; in the present, Art Nouveau. (Gaudí himself influenced Surrealism.) Thrillingly, we journey into a portion of the mind of humanity.
     Antonio Gaudí is what Kubrick hoped his 2001 would be.

THE PUMPKIN EATER (Jack Clayton, 1964)

Jo Armitage is miserable in her third marriage, which has given her one child to add to her five others. Written by Harold Pinter (from Penelope Mortimer’s novel) and directed by Jack Clayton, The Pumpkin Eater is structured as Jo’s long flashback followed by a present-tense coda. Screenwriter Jake Armitage convinces Jo to abort their second pregnancy and to undergo a sterilization procedure. “I’m free!” Jo declares from her hospital bed as she fights to convince herself of this. Jo shops to fill the void but drops into a nervous breakdown. That Jake has now pressured the course of her body in two monumental ways, thinking he has every right to on the basis of his marital prerogatives, perhaps takes on a more sinister hue in light of the theft of autonomy involved in German medical experimentation and practices during the Second World War. Jo thus feels doubly manipulated and betrayed when she discovers that Jake has been serially unfaithful to her and that his current (married) mistress is likely pregnant on his account. She beats him up—which is to say, he lets her beat him up—and abandons him and her children to go into lonely, stock-taking retreat. A surprise visit from Jake and the kids makes Jo at the last smile through her tears.
     I would describe this ostentatious British soap opera in this way: chic and bleak. Clayton and black-and-white cinematographer Oswald Morris collaborate on images whose soft, woolen grays saturate everything we see with Jo’s downcast moods. While Peter Finch is excellent as Jake, who is the more sympathetic of the Armitages, Anne Bancroft (best actress, Cannes), strenuously reining in her angularity, is insufferably selfconscious and posturing. Her Jo never seems to breathe air or to occupy real space.