23Jun08
The year 1950 marked a turning point in Anthony Mann’s career, the moment when he passed from the series of brilliant film noir B movies that had established him to the westerns that made him a major figure. Mann released three films that year, the definitive one clearly being Winchester ’73, his first generically proper western, taken over from Fritz Lang and starring James Stewart (the beginning of one of the most remarkable and sustained creative relationships in the history of Hollywood). Made before Winchester ’73 but released later in the year, the other two films were highly untypical westerns: Devil’s Doorway, which centered on the persecution of an Indian and starred Robert Taylor, and The Furies, a bigger-budgeted hybrid of a film with even more potentially explosive material. Part western, part woman’s melodrama, part excursion into Freudian psychoanalytic material that must surely have posed problems for the ever alert censors, The Furies is a complex and offbeat anomaly. All of Mann’s westerns—unlike, for example, John Ford’s—suggest deep psychological disturbance, but those currents never again manifest themselves as blatantly and explicitly as they do in The Furies. Perhaps because of this unusual equation, the film is not a complete success (its ending, especially, where so many complicated issues have somehow to be resolved, is, to say the least, problematic), but its failures actually add to its fascination, the narrative working itself to a point where only the most drastic resolution, beyond the conventions of the western genre, seems possible.
I want here to provide a context for the film before examining it more closely, to discuss some of the characteristics of Mann’s long and multifaceted career that inform The Furies and contribute to its complexities: the psychologically intense nature of all of his westerns, strongly marked by his choice and treatment of landscape; his obsessive desire to make a western based on the plot of King Lear, of which The Furies appears to be the first practical manifestation; and the fact that it is the only film of his maturity centered on a woman, affecting his representation of women in his later westerns.
23Jun08
Before the Rain brought a vision of “Balkan conflict” to the world that caused a sensation in the mid-1990s, winning the Golden Lion in Venice and an Academy Award nomination. Five years of increasingly horrific news from the former Yugoslavia, with fierce fighting and massacres in Croatia and Bosnia, made Milcho Manchevski’s searing yet lyrical film timely to a degree that few filmmakers have ever achieved. But this is far from a documentary treatment of Balkan violence, and the country that Manchevski put on the map—his native Macedonia—was in fact the only Balkan state at that time not to have been engulfed by war or ethnic conflict.
Manchevski had not set out to explain the devastating sequence of events that started in 1991, as federal Yugoslavia dissolved during the year that saw the Soviet Union itself fall apart. Having grown up in Skopje, he finished his film education in the United States, where he began to make a reputation in music videos during the eighties. And the arresting images and teasing dramatic structure of Before the Rain draw something from this experience. But if Manchevski belongs to the generation of filmmakers who have grown up with the pop poetry of music videos as part of their natural vocabulary, his other inspiration is surely the western—an impression confirmed by his equally ambitious second feature, Dust (2001).
16Jun08
I have a particular, even personal, relationship with this film. I experienced a shock of discovery when I first saw it and felt driven to write my first review about it. It was a short article, as the editor had requested, and probably superficial—I was young—but it was laudatory. It ended, “People say Classe tous risques is a B movie. Better B like Boetticher than A like Allégret.”
Nor was my reference to the director of Seven Men from Now a coincidence. Sautet shared Boetticher’s taste for ellipsis and stripped-down refinement, his narrative clarity and appetite for powerful emotions and marginal characters.
That first article was followed by my first interview. Discussing the influences that shaped the film, Sautet mentioned his love for the western Rio Bravo and told me he had asked Belmondo to see Seven Men from Now. Classe tous risques marked “the beginning of a beautiful friendship” that remained without a cloud, unwavering, until Sautet’s death. A double friendship, really, for some time later José Giovanni also became an important part of my life.
16Jun08
Claude Sautet occupies a unique place in French cinema. Although he directed some of the biggest hits of the seventies and worked with some of the biggest stars, few critics considered him an “auteur” in his lifetime. Paradoxically, it was at the end of his career, a time when most directors are in decline, that three major films sparked his rediscovery and enabled him to close out his body of work on a high note. His first feature had been an extraordinary crime film, Classe tous risques (1960), which may seem atypical for Sautet but is actually one of his most revealing works.
Though he arrived on the scene in the early sixties, the same time as the New Wave filmmakers, Sautet was never part of that movement. He had been shaped by the popular cinema of the 1950s, working as an assistant director, then as a coscriptwriter, on comedies and action films. In fact, although he always considered Classe tous risques his first “real” feature, he had already directed a 1956 comedy called Bonjour sourire. Initially hired as assistant to the director, Sautet was called on to replace him when he defected at the last minute. But as he hadn’t chosen the project, he thought of his work on it as purely “technical."
12Jun08
Spring is ready to surrender to summer here in the Big Apple, and in keeping with my intentions, I sat down and watched The Love Parade and Monte Carlo from the Lubitsch Musicals Eclipse set. I found them to be as funny and uplifting as I had hoped, and they made a great Mother’s Day present too!
Shortly after watching those films, I transcribed the play La ronde and couldn’t help but notice how the human behavior in the Lubitsch films and La ronde (from the early twentieth and late nineteenth centuries, respectively) is essentially the same as that in twenty-first-century entertainment. Whether it is the queen of Sylvania hiking her skirt up above the knee in front of her cabinet or a Miami party girl answering the door sans half her bikini, the look on the faces of the queen’s (male) advisers is the same one Harold and Kumar wear as they arrive at the party. In Schnitzler’s romp-filled La ronde, the count announces: “Pleasure. Intoxication. Fine. No complaints. You can depend on them.” And the actress to whom he is speaking later replies, “Count, you are a poseur.” Those lines of dialogue, after swapping in a few choice synonyms provided by the Urban Dictionary, could fit in seamlessly with the repartee found in The Real World or Flavor of Love.
