WILD BOYS OF THE ROAD (William A. Wellman, 1933)

Hollywood took advantage of the absence of diplomatic ties between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.—the U.S. would recognize the Soviet Union the following year—by not bothering to credit the more substantial film that inspired its Wild Boys of the Road: Nikolai Ekk’s The Road to Life (Putyovka v Zhizn, 1931). Ekk’s film proceeds from a compelling basis: the countless orphans generated by the 1917 Revolution. Relocated, the Hollywood version replaced this with a sob story of the Great Depression. The original is marred by melodrama; this is even more so the case with the partial remake that Wild Bill Wellman directed much in the same vein as his earlier Public Enemy (1931), with its calculated mixture of sensationalism, corniness, vivid journalistic description, and liberal sentiment. However, no James Cagney in the new cast provides a riveting performance.
     Two small-town highschoolers, Eddie and Tommy, hop a train and head out for urban territories (first stop: Chicago), hoping to find jobs and not wanting to burden their unemployed and underemployed parents any further. They become a threesome when they meet Sally, an orphan, onboard the train. Thereafter, the police are a constant worry; Tommy loses his legs when a train crushes them.
     A happy ending to all this is not the only problem. Wellman juggles individual narrative and thematic social elements but fails to connect them in any meaningful way. The New York Times critic noted this problem upon the film’s original release, calling Wild Boys “pointless”—the most damning way of tagging this sort of film. Let us just say it is full of hope for F.D.R.’s first term.
     The best acting comes from Dorothy Coonan as Sally. Wellman, twenty years her senior, married Coonan. Their union lasted a lifetime.

LADY OYÛ (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1951)

Meiji-period Japan; a marriage has been arranged for Shizu and young carpenter Shinnosuke. Accompanied by her widowed sister who lives with her young child with in-laws who prohibit her remarriage, Shizu visits Shinnosuke, who instantly falls in love with Oyû, mistaking her for Shizu. Shinnosuke and Shizu marry, but in name only—he, to be able to see Oyû; she, to sacrifice her happiness for her elder sister, who loves Shinnosuke. Soon, there is potentially ruinous gossip. After Oyû’s child dies, the couple move away and make their marriage real, but Shizu still believes that her spouse loves her sister; Shinnosuke cannot convince her otherwise. When she dies in childbirth, which Shizu has more or less willed so that spouse and sister can reunite, Shinnosuke leaves their infant with Oyû, but without seeing her as he has vowed never to set eyes on her again. Unlike Oyû, he will remain truly wed to the deceased spouse.
     From the 1932 novel Ashikari by Junichirô Tanizaki, Kenji Mizoguchi has wrought an exquisite melodrama of suppressed feelings and both the nobility and tortured ambivalence that often lie behind these. Mizoguchi expressed dissatisfaction with the result, probably in part because Tanizaki vetoed the idea of the proposed film’s using the book’s series of long flashbacks to relate the tale. But Oyû-sama transcends this obstacle with its brilliant final shot, which finds Shinnosuke, after depositing his child at his sister-in-law’s place, standing amidst reeds and underneath a pale full moon, and then walking behind a tree and out of sight forever as the moon keeps haunting watch: an extension of Shinnosuke’s silent reflection, which converts the linear narrative, retroactively, into memory.
     Yuji Hori is wonderful as Shinnosuke, the memory of whose wife inspires him to sacrifice more than is apparent.

WHERE ARE THE DREAMS OF YOUTH? (Yasujiro Ozu, 1932)

On a college campus students are seated on the ground. A tracking shot surveys them as they watch a tennis match—a metaphor for the competition in the workday world that they presume they will face once they graduate. Cheerleaders stand in front of the seated students. Off alone, another boy is studious, his nose in a book. Crosscutting shows the comradery between three of the male cheerleaders and this serious student. Ironical, the crosscutting undercuts the impression of comradery and solidarity even as it establishes it. Yasujiro Ozu’s silent Seishun no yume imaizuko has begun.
     Elements of Kôgo Noda’s script somewhat resemble Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I. Upon the death of his business executive father, Taichiro chooses his own “succession” above his ties with college friends, whom he hires when they apply to his company, but upon whom he imposes subservience. In effect, Taichiro chooses tradition over the future, family over friendship. Consider the framing of the shot of Taichiro and his father. Taichiro holds his father’s hand to his cheek, but otherwise the father is excluded from the shot. Perhaps the death provides mere occasion for Taichiro’s doing what he would have done in any case, which is to assert his classism at the expense of those he considers his social inferiors. In retrospect, our first glimpse of Taichiro revealed a boy who was submitting his humanity to a cultivated image. The stoppage of a ceiling fan at a gathering of the four musketeers signals the ripping of Taichiro’s bond with the other three. (A working fan was a feature of Taichiro’s reunion with his dying father.) Sealing this, later, is an eruption of violence in near darkness.
     A 21-year-old Kinuyo Tanaka claims a supporting role.

CONSTANTINE (Francis Lawrence, 2005)

Francis Lawrence, a music video-dropout, directed Constantine, which opens with an exorcism performed by the titular detective, who has known a devil when he sees one since childhood (he still must plunge into Hell from time to time), and culminates in a confrontation between him and the Devil itself. The color cinematography by Philippe Rousselot is spectacular, but the film is inert, perhaps misguidely suggesting the genre that gave it birth; Constantine, which relocates the action from London to Los Angeles, is based on Delano & Ennis’s comic book novel Hellblazer.
     That is at least how I saw things the first time I watched this film a few years ago. Now I like it. I still cannot pretend to be able to follow the esoteric plot, which involves both angels and demons, and I cannot evaluate the “balance” between them that John Constantine at different times defends and opposes (“Screw the balance!”); but as a special effects dazzler and comic-strip adventure, it entertains. Intermittently. At least this is how it strikes someone who is unfamiliar with the graphic novel, as those who are familiar with this almost universally find the film lacking philosophical richness on the subject of faith and non-belief. But these folk, let me add, do at best a vague, unconvincing job of imputing intellectual depth to the source material.
     The plot and characters are schematic, with mirror-imaging suicides and suicide attempts a depressing element. The acting, however, is good; I was surprised, for instance, how affecting Shia LaBeouf turns out to be as Chas Kramer, the young cabbie who, in need of a father-figure, has attached himself to Constantine. Keanu Reeves is fine as Constantine, and Rachel Weisz is luminous as twin sisters. Tilda Swinton is a hoot as Gabriel—yes, that Gabriel.