AN EDUCATION (Lone Scherfig, 2009)

Based on British journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir, which Nick Hornby (About a Boy, 2002) has adapted, An Education centers on 16-year-old Jenny Mellor, whose involvement with charming David Goldman, about twice her age, beginning in 1961 introduces her to a whirl of sophistication, fancy dinners and fine French movies that threatens to divert her from a rendezvous with Oxford University. Goldman, who is Jewish (he mentions this the first time that they meet, and Jenny’s father and headmistress each take up the topic in due course), charms Jenny’s parents as well—especially her father, who believes David when, telling one of his series of lies, remarks that he also went to Oxford and is planning to visit there his medieval literature guide, C. S. Lewis (by which time Lewis was at Cambridge): might Jenny come along?
     Lone Scherfig, the lone woman among the Dogme 95ers, directed this regrettable film that has drawn ungrounded charges of anti-Semitism, perhaps the ploy of its producers to generate whatever kind of talk about it they could. It is a plodding period-piece, the sort of thing one suffers through on Masterpiece Theater. It is a vapid, sanctimonious coming-of-age chronicle. Scherfig perhaps should stick to Denmark, including a Danish tourists’ foray into Italy (Italian for Beginners, 2000). At least, we are told, her bare-bones training in the Dogme 95 movement helped her to keep down the costs of An Education.
     Playing Jenny, Carey Mulligan (best actress, BAFTA, London critics, British Independent Spirit Award, National Board of Review, Toronto, Vancouver, Washington, D.C., Chicago critics, Dallas-Fort Worth critics) suggests she may be the British Claire Danes. She has convinced me that either she or Barber, or both, are vile, insipid, self-important. For the record, not a sliver of Mulligan’s performance reflects the sixties.

BARBARY COAST (Howard Hawks, William Wyler, 1935)

Miriam Hopkins, glitteringly lovely and massively moving, gives the performance of a lifetime as “Swan,” who beds with a dishonest man for security and loses her heart to an honest, poetically minded man in Barbary Coast, one of the most dazzling dramatic entertainments of the Great Depression. The film was written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, produced by Samuel Goldwyn, and directed in the main by Howard Hawks, who replaced William Wyler.
     The setting is mid-nineteenth-century San Francisco, a fog-bound town “owned” by thug Louis Chamalis (Edward G. Robinson, Little Caesaring), whose gambling house, Bella Donna, bilks customers at its roulette tables. Louis installs “Swan,” his mistress, at one of the wheels, where she parts prospector Jim Carmichael (Joel McCrea) from his gold, but with whom she has already fallen in love, setting the two men on a collision course. Meanwhile, the Vigilantes are taking the law into their own hands in order to “clean up” San Francisco.
     It is hard to say which moment is more sweepingly compelling: Jim’s declaration of love for “Swan”; her plea to Louis for Jim’s life. Belatedly, one realizes that a redistribution of the moral accents involved accounts for the transformation of this triangle in another film Hecht would write: Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946).
     All the acting is good, with two exceptions: Hopkins’s, which is brilliant; Walter Brennan’s, as loutish boat-rower and barfly “Old Atrocity,” which is irritating, hollow and boring—perhaps the worst performance that Brennan ever gave. (His best would also be for Hawks, in Rio Bravo, 1959.)
     Ray June’s black-and-white cinematography amidst heavy fog is gorgeous.
     Make of this what you will: the name of the protagonist, whose nickname is “Swan,” is Mary Rutledge—the names of Abraham Lincoln’s wife and former sweetheart.

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THE FABULOUS BAKER BOYS (Steve Kloves, 1989)

Fabulous isn’t the word for The Fabulous Baker Boys, a tinny, smutty “entertainment” about the double piano lounge act of two Seattle-based brothers, Jack and Frank Baker, that takes on a jazzy chanteuse to bolster their sagging appeal. Susie Diamond, otherwise a Holly Golightly in terms of employment, reawakens younger brother Jack’s love of serious music; Jack has suppressed his genuine musical gifts to accommodate his older brother’s musical vulgarity, sacrificing his life, more or less, to help provide income for his married brother. Frank, meanwhile, believes he is carrying Jack, whom he is fond of addressing as “Little Brother,” and handles bookings and business, sometimes carelessly. Meanwhile meanwhile, Jack, who has a young daughter, beds with waitresses in a series of one-night stands. He is musically frustrated, you see. Onstage, Frank is outgoing though yukky; Jack, tight-lipped and tense, even contemptuous of Frank. Offstage, Jack has sex twice with Susie, despite his brother’s admonition not to go there because of the work arrangement, and, when Susie asserts her intelligence in a conversation with him, delivers the nastiest line of dialogue I have ever heard: “I didn’t know that whores are so philosophical.” I don’t care much for either Baker boy.
     There are all sorts of holes to be found. For one, Michelle Pfieffer, who plays Susie, cannot sing, and the discrepancy between her labored attempts to do so and how wonderful a singer everyone in the film thinks she is irritates. Since Pfieffer cannot act either, the only reason for her being in the film is the enticement of that “Diamond” between her long, luscious legs. It is impossible for me to believe that anyone could be as stupid as Frank; how can he not know why his brother is the way that he is? And how has Jack, whom we can see is smart, gotten into the hole that he has? A Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?-flashback might have helped.
     Beau Bridges is messy as Frank; brother Jeff, superficial, as ever, as Jack. But Jennifer Tilly, Meg’s sister, is a little bit of heaven as a waitress who tries out for the singing job that Susie gets.
     Writer-director Steve Kloves has since moved on to where his “talent” is really needed: writing Harry Potter movies.

MERRILL’S MARAUDERS (Samuel Fuller, 1962)

Induced by Warner Bros. to make this film as a test run for his dream project, The Big Red One (1980), Samuel Fuller had wanted Gary Cooper to play U. S. Army Brigadier General Frank D. Merrill, who during the Second World War commanded the unit that the press dubbed “Merrill’s Marauders.” Cooper, dying, declined, perhaps adding thereby another wrinkle of defeat to Fuller’s widescreen elegance. Cooper’s replacement by nonentity Jeff Chandler didn’t help, but the even lower nonentities that flooded the lesser roles did their part to suggest the labor of the rifle platoon of anonymous volunteers. Merrill and his men are on assignment in Burma, waiting desperately for British replacements after a grueling campaign against the Japanese.
     Fuller’s film begins in color, with voiceover narration setting the historical scene in 1942, at which point the Allied effort was losing the war. Abruptly a square screen opens up inside the rectangular one; black-and-white archival material is suited to the continuing voiceover. Thus newsreel reality “breaks up” the colorful panorama—so much so that Fuller, here as Brechtian as John Ford, makes us question what in Technicolor we have been looking at: historical past; the location for the shoot. When the screen-within-the-screen disappears, we are left with Fuller’s bravura fusion of documentary and fiction: a war platoon movie that is anti-dramatic, consisting of short shots rather than extended scenes, altogether suggesting the fragmenting nature of war that unit cohesiveness contests and, hopefully, overcomes. Throughout, each faint appearance of a narrative arc is undermined and undone, although we—who know the outcome of the war—supply the conclusion against which we can measure what we see. Therefore, Fuller should have been allowed to end his film ironically, as he wanted; the upbeat militaristic parade is unconscionable.

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CUL-DE-SAC (Roman Polanski, 1966)

Roman Polanski recently won the directorial prize at Berlin for his exhilarating, humane The Ghost Writer (2009); but more than forty years ago a film of his took the top prize, the Golden Bear, at the same international film festival. This was the British Cul-de-sac, Polanski’s second, black-and-white film after exiting Communist Poland.
     Two wounded criminals invade a castle on Holy Island, off the coast of Northern England; Dicky, armed, terrorizes the occupants, a couple, nervous George and his much younger, nervy French wife, Teresa.
     Cleverly, quite beautifully, Polanski creates images of expiration: in a point-of-view shot, Albie, Dicky’s dying partner, watches Dicky walking away from him, to explore the castle, from inside their stopped vehicle, framed by the open passenger-side door; Dicky espies (what turns out to be) Teresa’s beachside adultery through slats whose restricted vision correlates to restricted breath; the camera facing him, ulcerous George is forced by Dicky to drink a cup of something alcoholic, the cup covering his nose and mouth—a metaphoric asphyxiation. (This moment echoes one in which Teresa has sexually humiliated George by compelling him to wear her negligee.) When Albie dies, moreover, Dicky has George bury him in a scene that somewhat suggests the gravedigging scene in Hamlet; but, given its publication two years earlier, one must plead the mediation of Warsaw-born literary critic Jan Kott’s Szkice o Szekspirze, especially since Polanski’s entire film is cloaked in absurdism, which some call Pinteresque, forgetting that Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot had been a major influence on Polanski’s work since his student days at Lódź Film School.
     Tables turn, and George shoots Dicky dead. The final shot, ”existentializing” Antoine’s final run in François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), finds George running furiously toward an ever withdrawing camera.
     Brash. Brilliant.

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