GIGI (Vincente Minnelli, 1958)

From Colette’s novella, Vincente Minnelli’s Gigi took the opposite route of other Lerner-Loewe musicals: it began as a film and was subsequently adapted for the stage. Lerner’s script and lyrics are excellent; Loewe’s music is rich, varied, wonderful.
     Turn-of-the-century Paris; to ensure her future, schoolgirl Gilberte (“Gigi”) is being groomed in the family tradition of becoming a courtesan. She is learning which pearls are “dipped” and how to select a high-class cigar. Raised mostly by her bourgeois grandmother, Madame Alvarez, she is being trained by wealthy Aunt Alicia, and there is some dispute as to whether this training is striking the correct balance between “rights” and “responsibilities.” This is an hilarious film about labor-management relations—and a touching one.
     Gaston Lachaille (Louis Jourdan, marvelous) helps make it so. He is the jaded playboy who is so into teasing Gigi as a big brother might that he doesn’t hear the promptings of his own heart toward her—that is, until these are too resounding to resist. At that point he can think of no other solution than to arrange to keep her. Despite Aunt Alicia’s training, Gigi, who loves Gaston, wants instead what every schoolgirl dreams of. “No scandal!” Madame Alvarez pleads, but Gaston asks instead for Gigi’s hand in marriage. Minnelli’s film is rare (among Hollywood entertainments) for accounting a boy’s love for a girl as momentous, as transformative, as a girl’s love for a boy.
     It is superlative yet on another score: Given Gaston’s relationship with Honoré, his uncle with a prodigious sexual past, it is far more deeply infused with the feeling of passing on Prospero’s magic wand than the two-years-earlier Forbidden Planet, a sci-fi version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
     Leslie Caron’s feisty tomboy becomes a beauteous swan before Gaston’s amazed eyes, and ours.

LANCELOT OF THE LAKE (Robert Bresson, 1974)

Robert Bresson’s Arthurian Lancelot du Lac, from Chrétien de Troyes, was meant to follow immediately Diary of a Country Priest (1950); by the time Bresson realized his dream project nearly a quarter-century later, his work had passed from black and white into color—color, here, rich, mysterious, hauntingly beautiful.
     Still, this isn’t a period film in which viewers “lose themselves.” One always hears a Bresson film as much as sees it, giving it immediacy. This time, it isn’t jangling jail cells or shuffling clogs or street traffic that we hear. It is alienating clanking armor, clashing swords, pounding hoofbeats. The film opens at night in the forest, and two armored men are wielding swords at one another—doubtless with skill, but also with difficulty. This is heavy combat. One prevails by slicing off his opponent’s head. Bresson creates, amplifies the sound of gushing blood, which we also see soaking the ground. Hero? Villain? Which is which? The two men look identical, and life is over so quickly. War’s trappings have changed; war has remained constant. King Arthur’s reign is coming to a sad, bitter close.
     Some of us learned about adultery, before we had a word for it, from Arthurian tales and films. Adultery absolutely fits in a world geared for war. Corrupt, it is, ironically, a reach for some antidote to corruption. Knights wear armor indoors in Bresson’s film to convey not just their vulnerability but also the burden of bloodshed into which they are locked. They hide their corruption, deceiving themselves, others, no one. Poor Gauvain so wants to continue revering Lancelot and Guenièvre and disastrously keeps defending them.
     Time passes all by. But these characters are also right here, along with their legacy: the disastrous confusion of idealism and corruption.

GIDEON’S TRUMPET (Robert E. Collins, 1980)

The jewel of the Hallmark Hall of Fame series, Gideon’s Trumpet is not to be missed no matter how televisiony it is.
     Henry Fonda is deeply affecting as Clarence Earl Gideon, a drifter being tried for a crime he did not commit, who asks the Florida judge at his 1961 trial for a court-appointed attorney since he lacks the means to hire on his own one to represent him. This request is denied. On self-serving eyewitness testimony, Gideon is convicted of breaking into a pool hall at 5:30 in the morning and stealing wine, beer and an unspecified amount of cash. He is sentenced to five years in prison—the maximum, perhaps because he had the audacity to ask the court to provide him with legal representation. He also had prior arrests and convictions.
     All this, of course, is based on fact. The U.S. Supreme Court hears his own appeal of his sentence based on the lack of legal representation; Abe Fortas, no less (José Ferrer, no less), represents Gideon before the Court. Chief Justice Earl Warren is played by John Houseman (as John Houseman, of course), and Houseman’s additional outbursts of offscreen narration underscores that we’re listening to no less than the voice of God! One long, detailed scene of discussion among Warren and his associate justices is alone worth the cost of the DVD rental. The Court, in effect reversing a 1942 decision establishing court-appointed representation for defendants based on a set of specified needs, now ruled that such representation should be provided for any defendant otherwise lacking legal representation.
     The real coup of this terrific piece of popular entertainment—besides a performance for the ages by the brilliant actor who had played Abe Lincoln, Tom Joad, Wyatt Earp and Clarence Darrow—is that we get to see and compare condensed versions of Gideon’s two trials, the first where he represents himself, and the second, two years later, where he is represented by counsel (Lane Smith, excellent). This is fascinating stuff! That we already know the outcome of the second trial doesn’t reduce the interest of this aspect in the slightest degree.
     This being Hallmark, not everything is perfect. (Dig that comfy, friendly Florida prison!) The film ends somewhat predictably with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s famous remarks about Gideon’s contribution to the U.S. justice system. Clichéd, to be sure; but just try holding back your tears.

25 TERRIFIC HALLOWEEN FILMS

This list is alphabetical by title. Three of the films are included in my list of the 100 greatest films; these are double asterisked. Eight others are included in other 100-best lists of mine (100 Greatest Films from Germany & Scandinavia, 100 Greatest English-Language Films, 100 Greatest Asian Films, and the 100 Best French list that I am currently working on). These titles are single-asterisked.

Arsenic and Old Lace (Capra)
*The Black Cat (Ulmer)
*The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Wiene)
Cat People (Tourneur)
The Chess Player (Bernard)
Dead of Night (Cavalcanti, Hamer et al.)
*Epidemic (Trier)
*Eyes Without a Face (Franju)
The Fearless Vampire Killers (Polanski)
Hour of the Wolf (Bergman)
The Innocents (Clayton)
*Jonathan (Geissendörfer)
*K[w]aidan (Kobayashi)
*Lost Highway (Lynch)
**Mulholland Dr. (Lynch)
The Mummy (Freund)
*Nosferatu (Murnau)
**Psycho (Hitchcock)
Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
Queen of Spades (Dickinson)
The Spiral Staircase (Siodmak)
Tell Me Something (Chang)
The Tenant (Polanski)
Trouble Every Day (Denis)
**Vampyr (Dreyer)