A SUCCESSFUL MAN (Humberto Solás, 1985)

A Cuban The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970) that enlists some of the style of Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969), Un hombre de éxito is largely a sweeping, although carefully detailed portrayal of upper-class extravagance and decadence, and middle-class opportunism, during the last gasps of Machado’s increasingly censorial presidency and the long nightmare of Batista’s vicious police state. Cuba’s liberation by revolution comes as a brief, rushed coda; the front page newspaper headline thanking Fidel Castro may or may not hide a bit of irony, given the press’s subsequent difficulties with Castro’s regime. Written by the director and Juan Iglesias, Humberto Solás’s film won the top prize at Havana.
     The action principally revolves around three individuals: two brothers, Javier and Darío Argüelles, and their mother. Javier, an opportunist, survives Cuban political upheavals, possibly selling out his revolutionary brother, who retains the political idealism that they once both seemed to share. This trite, formulaic approach to complex national history, somewhat akin to soap opera, allows the film to bypass all nature of interesting material. At the very least, such a film as this might have probed in earnest someone’s—I believe, Darío’s—remark that he had traded in violence for “words.” The mother, I might add, appears grossly sentimental. My hope that the film would prove as powerful and humane as Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006), also about brothers politically opposed to each other, didn’t pan out.
     On the other hand, the use of blacked-out space, especially early on, to suggest haunted historical memory, from which lit bits of figures and forms struggle to emerge, is exquisite. Moreover, numerous period songs and set-pieces of people dancing—there’s a stupendous amount of dancing in this film—poetically, sadly evoke the passage of time.

VARIETY LIGHTS (Alberto Lattuada, Federico Fellini, 1950)

Since he is credited first and his wife, Carla Del Poggio, co-stars, we may assume that Alberto Lattuada is the co-director of Luci del varietà who counts more heavily; but, since the hectic atmosphere surrounding the vaudeville troupe resembles that of a circus (Fellini came up with the story from which he, Lattuada, Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano wrote the script), and Giulietta Masina, Fellini’s wife, is a prominent cast member, some may think of this beautiful, visually intricate film primarily as Federico Fellini’s.
     Eerily anticipating Chaplin’s Calvero in Limelight (1952), Checco Dal Monte is the troupe’s principal comic. Masina (superb—best supporting actress, Italian critics) plays Melina Amour, another careworn troupe member and Checco’s caring partner. (At one point she asks Checco, “We will get married one day, won’t we?” but so casually, fleetingly, it is more an expression of doubt than a question.) Del Poggio’s Liliana insinuates herself into the troupe, by degrees taking over Checco, who takes over the troupe to advance her career. Lily, though, trades him in for someone who can be many more times helpful in making her a star. (Del Poggio is more realistic and complex than Anne Baxter in a similar though more flamboyant role in All About Eve, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950.) Checco, beaten, goes back to Melina; at a station, while Lily’s train is headed for Milan, Checco and the troupe’s train is headed in the opposite direction, toward another series of inconspicuous small towns. The film ends with Checco eyeing another girl on the train; perhaps she, too, will become a star.
     Lattuada and Fellini create memorable shots: an angled one of a nighttime street suggesting phantasmagoria; a metaphor for the troupe and its tenuous existence: a goose in a straw basket.

B(U)Y THE BOOK

MY BOOK, A Short Chronology of World Cinema, IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM THE SANDS FILMS CINEMA CLUB IN LONDON. USING EITHER OF THE LINKS BELOW, ACCESS THE ADVERTISEMENT FOR THIS BOOK, FROM WHICH YOU CAN ORDER ONE OR MORE COPIES OF IT. THANKS.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Dennis+Grunes&x=14&y=16

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Dennis+Grunes&x=14&y=19

THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY (Alfred Hitchcock, 1955)

Rich with a sense of autumnal beauty, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry, which was promoted as “[a] comedy about a corpse,” turns on the joke that the corpse of Harry Worp, found in the woods one morning with what appears to be a fatal gunshot wound, won’t stay buried. Four times after clandestine burial the corpse is dug up for one reason or another. Hitchcock’s “lighthearted” style, however, has been widely misinterpreted as showing how harmoniously the residents of a sleepy Vermont town live with death and the idea of death. Characters may wish to get over their mortal fear as easily as one resident, absorbed in reading a book, obliviously steps over the corpse. (Later, still reading, he stumbles over it.) But the corpse’s serial reappearances ironically suggest that humanity fails in its attempts to look the other way when it comes to death. Consult Poe on the subject of the reappearing dead.
     Yes, I know, there’s the early shot of the town church to put the “season of dying” into perspective; after wintry death, spring’s rebirth follows. But our glimpse of the church comes in a long-shot—one not from any human perspective, but perhaps only from God’s. Humanity hopes that their faith holds water, yet their fear of death persists. Hitchcock’s film, written by John Michael Hayes, adapting (and transplanting) Jack Trevor Story’s novel, premiered in New York in late 1955 but was withheld from nationwide distribution until 1957, during which time its best promotion was pondered. Two of Hitch’s next three films, Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960), also involve “corpses” that will not stay buried, but which are suited to much “darker” styles than is The Trouble with Harry.
     Indeed, note that Hitchcock’s “light” comedy is full of talk of the passage of time, which is contrasted with five-year-old Arnie’s total lack of the concept, which is beautifully encapsulated in his failure to recognize the corpse as that of his uncle and stepfather. Moreover, its parallel new romances—an older couple; a young couple—suggest the need for companionship in the shadow of mortal fear. The very slow pace of the film, suited to how people live their lives in this neck of the woods, also suggests a concerted effort to forestall the dreaded end.
     Miss Ivy Gravely’s—note the name!—protracted virginity provides an extreme example of someone’s mortal fear having determined the course of her life. Thank goodness she has a gentleman caller now. Thank goodness, also, for Mildred Natwick, who gives the film’s best performance as this spinster.
     This was Bernard Herrmann’s first score for Hitch and Shirley MacLaine’s first, and still best, film performance. Jerry Mathers plays Arnie, the son of MacLaine’s Jennifer Rogers; the future Leave It to Beaver star, hauling a dead rabbit, endears.