SÉANCE ON A WET AFTERNOON (Bryan Forbes, 1964)

Kim Stanley (best actress, New York critics, National Board of Review) gives a tremendous performance as unhinging psychic Myra Savage, who impresses a weak-willed, asthmatic spouse, Billy, into a dangerous scheme to bring celebrity to her, one involving kidnapping a schoolgirl whose parents are wealthy, extracting a ransom, and divining at her weekly séance the whereabouts of both child and loot. Presumably, Myra is guided by the spirit of the Savages’ deceased son, Arthur, who, it turns out, did not survive birth. Billy notes with horror that his wife is increasingly comfortable with the idea of murdering the kidnapped child.

Bryan Forbes wrote and directed the film, which is based on Mark McShane’s early-sixties novel. Two aspects of the script fascinate: one, the piecemeal disclosure of the Savages’ plot, by which Forbes’s wily filmmaking lures the audience into siding with the Savages; two, the extent to which Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? seems to be hovering about, although in fact the book and the play were both written at about the same time.

The setting is a shadowy Victorian house, where the victim, told that she is in a hospital, is confined to “Arthur’s room.” Suspicious, the police keep a-callin’, but Myra’s apparent self-control seems unshakable. However, Myra falls apart once Billy, fearful for the child’s safety, explodes.

Gerry Turpin’s black-and-white cinematography captures the gray weather, whose dissolving edges convey Myra’s steady withdrawal from reality. John Barry’s fine score enhances the melancholy mood. But there is one major weakness: producer Richard Attenborough cast himself as Billy, and his acting is blatant and abominable.

Otherwise, this is a suspenseful tour-de-force for Forbes, and Stanley, considered by many to be the finest American actress of her generation, deeply moves, chills and astounds.

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FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD (John Schlesinger, 1967)

Nearly a century after the publication of Thomas Hardy’s novel on which it is based, the “mod” writer and director of Darling (1965), Frederic Raphael and John Schlesinger, respectively, surprised everyone by making the big-budget film version of Far from the Madding Crowd. By this time a pastoral period-piece, the three-hour portrait of rural Victorian England was almost universally panned (the National Board of Review, though, named it the year’s best English-language film); its style was Hardy-sturdy, its story (except regarding the fate of ironically named William Boldwood) faithful to Hardy’s, although overly romanticized—and it is doubtful that Schlesinger appreciated the danger that Nature poses, beneath an accommodating mask, in Hardy’s scheme of things. Nor did he bother much with the rural loneliness that motivates so many of the feelings and actions of Hardy’s characters. In any case, he was closer to the mark than “sensitive” Roman Polanski would prove in Tess (1980), the unsuitably impressionistic film based on Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

That noted, Schlesinger’s plodding saga is an attractive bore (Nicolas Roeg color cinematographed), and Julie Christie’s central performance, as fiercely independent Bathsheba Everdine who manages the farm that she inherits from her uncle, never quite comes into focus. None of Bathsheba’s relationships with men forcefully weighs in, and Prunella Ransome’s pathetic Fanny, by contrast, is vivid as she pleads with caddish Sergeant Troy not to abandon her. Perhaps Terence Stamp comes off best as Troy, who tries to impress Bathsheba with his prowess with his sword.

Alan Bates is adequate as shepherd Gabriel Oak, whose name admits no irony, while Peter Finch (best actor, National Board of Review) invites giggles with his over-the-top enactment of farmer Boldwood’s unrequited love for Bathsheba. I giggled also over Boldwood’s hat.

LE HAVRE (Aki Kaurismäki, 2011)

I take my Jean-Pierre Léaud, perhaps my favorite film actor of the past fifty years, as I happen to find him, and an inside joke in Finnish writer-director Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Havre is that he is playing much the same creep that Jean-Luc Godard himself played in A bout de souffle (Godard, 1959). For the record, Godard’s several-times brilliant Léaud is a tight-faced snitch in his third outing for Kaurismäki, and he is (of course) plain wonderful, albeit in an unpleasant part. For the rest of it, though, Le Havre finds Kaurismäki in an unusually amiable, fanciful, even sentimental mood. Courting the audience, and in French, this may be his worst film.

Another “joke”: Whereas Léaud played a London immigrant in Kaurismäki’s terrific I Hired a Contract Killer (1990), here he is an impediment to a Senegalese boy’s illegal emigration to London after becoming separated from his cargo-ship stowaway family in Le Havre and on the run from authorities, who seek to send him back to Africa. Proving themselves the salt of the earth, Le Havre’s—the haven’s—working-class inhabitants join forces to protect the boy and help send him on his way to his family. Their leader is a shoeshiner reassuringly named Marx, expertly played by André Wilms, who once played Albert Schweitzer, no less (The Great White Man of Lamberene,Bassek ba Kobhio, 1995). Indeed, Marx and wife Arletty (the name of the great French actress who tumbled from grace by proving herself an internationalist when it comes to sex during the Occupation, and played—surprisingly uncertainly—by Kaurismäki stalwart Kati Outinen) take the boy in to hide him in their apartment. But will Inspector Monet live up to his name by turning a blind eye to the boy?

The whole thing is made all the sillier by Arletty’s terminal illness, which—well, suffice it to say that the New Age of Miracles is at hand.

Best film, Louis Delluc Prize; best film, Chicago; best film, best direction, Jussi Awards; best film prize of the international critics, Cannes.

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TO DIE IN MADRID (Frédéric Rossif, 1962)

Given the monumental nature of the Spanish Civil War, the outcome of which is one of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century, Frédéric Rossif’s compilation film, to which ghostly tracking shots have been added, amounts to a disappointing historical overview. Lorca’s capture and execution, vast human dislocation and suffering, Franco’s insufferable monstrosity: none of these register with particular force in Mourir à Madrid. Rigid chronology even attaches to the archival materials a sort of spirit of adventure that the heinous reality freshly betrays. This film has nothing on Joris Ivens’s staggering, quicksilver The Spanish Earth (1937) in either version, whether Welles or Hemingway is narrating.

Rossif’s film has its own roster of narrators headed by the superlative Suzanne Flon; but the multiplicity of voices seems a tad sensational, and the heart-plucking music by Maurice Jarre—one of his finest scores—rather patly manufactures a “haunting” quality. I am afraid that Rossif has done for the Spanish Civil War what Steven Spielberg would do for the Holocaust in Schindler’s List (1993): sentimentalized gargantuan horrors. I found the film to be cloyingly French.

Franco was still in power in Spain at the time of this film, and this insinuates caustic irony into the proceedings, while a good many of the images are trenchant; but a self-congratulatory air hangs over and cheapens everything. I cannot comprehend that so opportunistic a work should have won Rossif both the Jean Vigo Prize in France and the Robert J. Flaherty BAFTA Award for best documentary.

The film’s producer is Nicole Stéphane, whom you may recall as a splendid young actress in films by Jean-Pierre Melville in the late 1940s. How I wanted to like this film; indeed, I expected to. But watching it proved a shallow, suffocating experience.

MASKERADE (Willi Forst, 1934)

A legendary film, Willi Forst’s Maskerade lives up to its exalted reputation. A Viennese operetta, it takes place in 1905, beginning with an extravagant high-society carnival party, full of music and dance and romantic rivalry, and ending amidst falling snow at night, a window glimpsing in on a tender moment of love. It is all heartbreakingly beautiful, silkenly photographed in sparkling grays and black and white by Franz Planer, the future cinematographer of Max Ophüls’ Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948). The brilliant script by Walter Reisch and Forst took the screenwriting prize at Venice.

Somewhat stiffly played by Adolf Wohlbrück (who later fled to Britain and became Anton Walbrook), painter Heideneck draws gorgeous Gerda, wife of Dr. Carl Ludwig Harrandt (Peter Petersen, magnificent), wearing only a mask and a muff—the latter borrowed from Anita Helfer, the lover whom Heideneck has dumped and who wants him back. (Engaged to the court orchestra director, the doctor’s brother, she would also like her muff back.) When his maid is incorrectly responsible for the muffed drawing’s publication, Heideneck gives a made-up name to identify the nude model. Alas, it is the actual name of a homely maidservant, Leopoldine Dur, whom Heideneck starts to romance. They fall in love—a situation that Anita finds unenDurable. How common “Poldy” is!

And utterly kind and decent—and superbly and most movingly played by stage actress Paula Wessely. Poldy, it turns out, is the film’s protagonist.

Throughout, the camera moves subtly and graciously, and the shots are to die for. When Heideneck refuses one last time her plea for the restoration of their love affair, Heideneck offers her Sacher candies instead, which fall upon the snow-covered ground like drops of blood when Anita shoots him at point-blank range with her combination pistol/cigarette dispenser. Heideneck falls down right after.

Gaiety thus curdles. If Anita cannot have the man she loves, no one else can have him either. And light, lovely snow keeps descending.

Enrico Caruso, deceased by the time of this film, is nonetheless a character in it—an actor onstage in long-shot, matched-up with actual recordings of Caruso’s singing. The charms of this Austrian film run wide and deep.

A masterpiece.

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