Danny Kaye did more than rein in his zaniness to play S.L. Jacobowsky, a Polish Jewish refugee attempting to exit Paris before the entrance of the Germans in 1940; he pretty much dispenses with it, giving a restrained, monotonous performance, and a nearly credible one, for which he won a Golden Globe. How I wish I enjoyed more Peter Glenville’s film version of Franz Werfel’s play Jacobowsky und der Oberst, or at least halfway believed the sort of détente reached by humble, philosophical Jacobowsky and the fellow refugee with whom he is attempting his escape, Colonel Prokoszny, an arrogant anti-Semite who comes from the same village in Poland. Actually, Curd Jurgens is far more convincing as the loutish colonel, and even he fails to convince on the score of this late-arriving détente between the two men. It doesn’t help that Suzanne, Prokoszny’s French companion and mistress, inflames his jealousy by warming up to Jacobowsky’s wryness and wit.
It’s a slight (although long) thing, a comedy that takes poor advantage of the correct decision to be in black and white. It generates little suspense as to Jacobowsky’s fate because Kaye does not sufficiently inhabit the role he is playing; one knows that another Kaye film is soon to follow. However, I cannot dismiss the film entirely; it was a particular favorite of a friend of mine, whom I lost to leukemia a while back, and for the sake of whose memory I finally viewed it for the first time. Me and the Colonel, as it is called in this incarnation, is very gray and somewhat droll, but not imbued with the kind of power that we hope for from a film whose action needs to be measured against the sacred territory of the Holocaust.
Archive for October, 2011
ME AND THE COLONEL (Peter Glenville, 1958)
October 27, 2011ME AND ORSON WELLES (Richard Linklater, 2008)
October 26, 2011Seventeen-year-old Richard Samuels may be daydreaming, hoping for release from the stultifying high school English class that’s now taking up Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. It must be a dream, but the Jewish boy finds himself, on a Manhattan street, hired by Orson Welles to play Lucius, Brutus’s page, in the actual 1937 Mercury Theatre production of the play, scheduled to open in a week. Richard is replacing an actor whom Welles fired for contesting his authority. As Joe Cotten, a member of the company, will later explain, “Orson must always be right.”
The same-titled novel on which Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles is based was written by Robert Kaplow, a New Jersey high school film and English teacher. In the film, there’s no possibility that Richard is daydreaming; indeed, everything in it is exceedingly literal. As a result, the whole thing ends vaguely, with the self-importance of an outdoors overhead long-shot, with people the size of ants way below, masking this vagueness. Nor does the circular dream-possibility weigh in that the boy whom Richard replaces as Lucius is somehow himself. Vincent Palmo Jr. and Holly Gent Palmo wrote the script.
Otherwise, Linklater has directed well, with a montage of scenes vividly conveying the anti-fascist air of the legendary modern-dress, 90-minute Julius Caesar, which Welles relocated from ancient Rome to Mussolini’s Italy. After the opening-night audience rises to its feet in thunderous applause following the performance, Welles wonders aloud: “How am I going to top this?” On radio, with War of the Worlds perhaps? In cinema, with Citizen Kane?
Zac Efron is close to sensational as Richard, whom Welles calls “Junior,” partly to keep himself from dwelling anxiously on his own youth. (Welles was 22 at the time.) For most of the film Efron strikes one note; but how wonderful a note! When Richard’s breezy confidence takes a darker turn, deeper colors come sprinkling in—especially regarding Richard’s opposing Welles on the matter of Welles’s on-the-make production assistant, Sonja Jones, whom Richard mistakes for his girlfriend after a single night of sex (his first, it seems). Ben Chaplin is also good, as George Coulouris, who, according to this fantasy, desperately needs Welles’s reassurance backstage on opening night—perhaps to tweak the seeming self-certainty of Coulouris’s most brilliant roles (in Citizen Kane, Watch on the Rhine, None But the Lonely Heart). Overall, much of the film is indeed funny.
And no one is funnier than Christian McKay’s egomaniacal Welles; although McKay is a dozen years too old to play this early incarnation of Welles, the Brit had fine-tuned his convincing impersonation onstage in his 2004 one-man show, Rosebud: The Lives of Orson Welles. Moreover, McKay achieves late in the film a haunting moment suggesting Welles’s tragic self-awareness. The San Francisco critics named McKay the year’s best supporting actor.
Still, be prepared: Welles had not yet become the Orson Welles we all dearly love.
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THE HOUSEMAID (Kim Ki-young, 1960)
October 24, 2011Brash and brilliant, and starkly beautiful in black and white, writer-director Kim Ki-young’s Hanyo is a bona fide classic of South Korean cinema. I watched it for the first time last night, on DVD, and am still basking in its residual glow. A pop-eyed, sultry young housemaid quite takes over the bourgeois household of a music teacher, Dong Sik, whose wife, pregnant with their third child, is sometimes bedridden; the narrative grows ever more deliberately extreme, way, way past the requirements of realism: this, a satire of the genre of domestic melodrama to which, apparently, South Korean popular culture is prone. This increasingly violent, weirdly, darkly funny tale also admits into its satirical aim a coarse, misogynistic, perhaps national sensibility. (Han Sang-gi’s emphatic score is a riot.) A “surprise ending” provides—maybe seemingly provides—welcome perspective.
The opening stuns. The camera passes through a window, and drenching rain, to focus on a couple’s “discussion” of a newspaper article reporting a married man’s infidelity with the family housemaid; Dong’s wife seems suspicious of her husband and his attitude. The camera pulls back to reveal their seated children, a girl and a boy, feverishly intent on their game of “cat’s cradle,” here, so aggressively played that all joy has been sucked out of their play. (The boy will be shown to be a sadist who taunts his physically handicapped older sister and causes her to fall down the home staircase.)
Throughout, the camera passes back and forth between outside and inside, and the housemaid, Myong-ja, proves a Shakespearean snoop, constantly eavesdropping on marital scenes, with the camera deliciously alert to each of her silent transgressions. Needless to say, Myong-ja and her master become lovers; indeed, Dong has already bedded with at least one of his students—with tragic results. Locking herself into a domestic rage, Dong’s wife keeps at her sewing machine: her “cat’s cradle.”
Gripping punctuation: an overhead shot of two dead rats by the dish of poison left out for them—and a haunting anticipation of the double suicide toward which the action scurries.
Has some affinity with Sam Fuller’s delirious melodramas later in the decade.
Kim Deok-jin is the masterful cinematographer; but the IMDb won’t tell me whether or how he is related to the director.
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THE STRANGE CASE OF ANGELICA (Manoel de Oliveira, 2010)
October 20, 2011It is awesome to consider: prolific Portuguese writer-director Manoel de Oliveira was 102 years old, last year, when he made the exceptionally lovely O Estranho Caso de Angélica. (De Oliveira, at 103, is currently making another film—and, ever the optimist, is already planning yet another.) This dark fable, which ends in a room from which all light is shut out, filling the frames with voluminous mystery in conjunction with the death of the protagonist, nonetheless hints at eternal love and life: through open doors we see the man’s spirit ascend with the spirit of his beloved just prior to a medical doctor’s pronouncement that the person has died. Toward the end, we hope for all sorts of things.
The time is the 1950s; de Oliveira first wrote the script, in fact, in 1952. The most unusual aspect of the romance is that the “lovers” never meet other than in imagination and dreams. They are both real individuals, but the young photographer, impoverished and wearing a threadbare jacket as a cloak of pride, is summoned by a wealthy household to shoot the final pictures of the daughter who has just died, all in the wee hours when no other photographer can be found. Isaac doesn’t “belong” in the rich house; a Sephardic Jew, he must assure the deceased’s sister, a nun, that he is unprejudiced—a wonderful glimpse of the kind of hoops that a poor person must jump through to get and retain even a fleeting job. In another sense, though, Isaac does belong there. The moment he sees the corpse, which seems to be smiling and even appears to look at him, he is in love.
<uch of the early part of the film, which begins in darkness and heavy rain, in part as a projection of Isaac’s lonely, alienated existence, is doused in reddishness, both outdoors and in-. The blood of life? Or spilt blood, suggesting death? (The rain-battered street seems drenched in blood that washes away.) Later, blues and blue-green supplant the reds and rosy pink. A calming, or the chill of death that is creeping up on Isaac? Sabine Lancelin, de Oliveira’s superlative cinematographer, assists him in creating an atmosphere, a mood, at once powerful and delicate: an awakening of the heart’s desire as life is poised to evaporate. A haunting piano-piece by Chopin—although overused, as these things tend to be in movies—deepens the effect.
One night Isaac dreams of Angelica (for that was the deceased’s apt name). With the color nearly drained, her ethereal spirit comes to take Isaac’s ethereal spirit—his body remains asleep in bed—on a lofty, lateral journey, a drifting through space and time. The primitive special effects recall silent cinema (de Oliveira himself began as a silent film director), specifically, the weightless solitary descent of the dreaming heroine in Jean Renoir’s 1924 La fille de l’eau.
Isaac heretofore had not been a “dreamer.” The usual subjects of his photography were farmers and farm workers. Identifying with the working class, he documented their labor. Given the trajectory of this film, shots of men tilling the earth anticipate Isacc’s death—and his “renewal.”
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THE UNSEEN (Lewis Allen, 1945)
October 29, 2011Way, way better than his more lavishly produced The Uninvited the previous year, Lewis Allen’s The Unseen is an intriguing, eerie, occasionally terrifying murder mystery. Adapted from Ethel Lina White’s novel Her Heart in Her Throat by Hagar Wilde and Ken Englund, with additional polishing by Raymond Chandler, no less, the film also invokes Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. An unsolved years-ago murder and the fog-drenched London setting complete the suggestion of menace lurking. Since childhood, I have counted this one of my favorite Hollywood entertainments.
The protagonist is Elizabeth Howard, a transplanted 22-year-old Bostonian who accepts the post of governess to widower David Fielding’s two young children and encounters a series of clues that her employer is a killer. Her predecessor left under mysterious circumstances, the boy, Barnaby, may still be in contact with her (he has strange phone conversations with somebody), and another murder recently befell a woman in the street, late at night, on Salem Alley, right near Fielding’s house. Could Hollywood allow handsome Joel McCrea to play a killer? His Fielding is certainly moody, with a quick temper.
This is an exceptionally witty film. Its bravura opening, at fright night, spins off the title. First, there is voiceover—the radio-type commentator is “unseen”—filling us in on the murder twelve years earlier; now there’s a light, unbrokenly passing through the darkness of Fielding’s house and the adjacent one, which has been boarded-up and vacant since the murder, noticed by a woman in the street walking home; and, finally, we are teased by the title into not seeing chasing this woman what she ultimately “sees” at forfeit of her life: the “unseen” presence that murders her. The Unseen is indeed not done with fresh murder.
Gail Russell, Ginger Rogers’ protégée and Duke Wayne’s future mistress, is dreamily self-composed as Elizabeth, and McCrea is at his best as David. Nona Griffith is sweet and adorable as Ellen, the little sister whom Barnaby keeps more or less terrorized. Ellen’s ache for Elizabeth’s friendship will break your heart.
Warning: After you see this film even once, Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer”—a “ghost song,” since it was posthumously published—will no longer soothe your heart nostalgically. It will scare the shit out of you.
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