From France, Erick Zonca’s La vie rêvée des anges is one of the most infuriating working-class films imaginable. Its sentimental mythology distresses, even disgusts. Isabelle and Marie are joint protagonists. “Isa” has just arrived in Lille and lands a job where Marie works: a sewing sweat shop. Isa asks Marie for a place to stay […]
Monthly Archives: December 2008
I was so moved by the freshness with which Hungarian filmmaker Lajos Koltai invested Imre Kertész’s Holocaust material in Fateless (Sorstalanság, 2005) that I am saddened by the dreary, hollow, sentimental mess of his second film: Evening, written by Susan Minot, from her novel, and Michael Cunningham. Koltai, of course, has been one of the […]
After their triumphant The Blue Angel in Germany, Josef von Sternberg brought his star and mistress, Marlene Dietrich, home to Hollywood—along with his wife. (Dietrich also was married.) There, they made six films together, the last two of which are brilliant, The Scarlet Empress (1934), about Catherine the Great, and The Devil Is a Woman […]
Brilliantly written and directed by John Huston, who won Oscars for doing both, Treasure of the Sierra Madre begins in Tampico as a current of what appears to be good fortune launches an expedition for gold by three Americans, two young struggling laborers and old prospector Howard (Oscar-winner Walter Huston, John’s father), whose eyes tell […]
An eleven-year-old boy stands alone in a field, crying. “Enough, enough,” he says aloud before bursting into tears again. He stops crying, hits the road. The boy leaves behind his travel companion, his father. Both go unnamed, are homeless, his father having lost his job as an aeronautics engineer, part of the price of the […]
Dennis Grunes 