Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

“Well, this isn’t exactly a team sport,” assistant coach Mayo quips sarcastically to star skier Johnny Creech after overhearing him complain about renegade team member David Chappellet. It has been argued for quite a few decades now—and to the point of tedium—whether filmmaking is a team sport or, in the end, essentially an individual event. But in the case of Downhill Racer, one of the best of the many adventurous, probing, and bracing films Hollywood made (sometimes in spite of itself) from roughly 1967 to 1975, it was the fortuitous combination of contributions by three singular talents—actor (and uncredited producer) Robert Redford, director Michael Ritchie, and writer James Salter—that shaped the picture’s flinty personality, questioning nature, and striking physicality.

Downhill Racer is the story of a determined loner from Colorado who, having earned a spot on the American ski team upon the injury of another athlete, single-mindedly pursues the goal of winning, with a total disregard for protocols and personal niceties. David Chappellet is a heel, a good-looking backwoods hick who hides his ignorance and social unease with a defiant impenetrability. In real life, he’d just be a prick; in the film, he joins the plentiful ranks of antiheroes who helped define American movies of the era. Even forty years ago, Chappellet seemed like an icy, recalcitrant character, and his clamped-down, emotionally inaccessible nature no doubt played a part in the film’s commercial failure. But his stubborn antiauthoritarianism was standard-issue equipment at the time—think Warren Beatty in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, Dustin Hoffman in Mike Nichols’s The Graduate, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Hopper’s Easy Rider, Jack Nicholson in Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces, Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H—so while his attitudes were purely selfish rather than intellectually worked out, his instinct to buck the system and go his own way did not then seem as extreme as it does today.  

Downhill Racer

Michael Ritchie

1969

101 min

Color

1.78:1

Eugene O’Neill’s groundbreaking The Emperor Jones is making waves again. The controversial 1920 play is back, in a heralded new off-Broadway production starring John Douglas Thompson as Brutus Jones, the Pullman porter turned Caribbean island despot. It’s a role Paul Robeson made famous, onstage and evenutally on-screen, and that in turn made him the most popular African-American actor of the first half of the twentieth century, despite his initial misgivings about its racial politics—as explained here in an essay written for the Criterion collector’s set Paul Robeson: Portraits of the Artist by New Yorker theater critic Hilton Als. The revival, which is directed by Ciaran O’Reilly and has been getting rave reviews (Thompson is “wondrous,” writes New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley), is now playing at New York’s Irish Repertory Theater and has been extended through December 6.

When, in 1920, Eugene O’Neill’s expressionistic The Emperor Jones was to be first performed, at the Provincetown Playhouse, the show’s original director, George “Jig” Cook, was determined to find a black actor who could bring the title character of Brutus Jones to life; before that time, major black characters were played by white actors in blackface. So Cook cast the brilliant, erratic Charles Gilpin in the title role. But Gilpin drank, and he also didn’t take easily to O’Neill’s portrayal of black life, specifically his use of the word nigger. For the 1924 revival, then, Cook and O’Neill turned to the titanic Paul Robeson.

As a member of the Harlem Amateur Players, Robeson had heard a great deal about Brutus Jones from the Playhouse’s set designer, Cleo Throckmorton. Moved by Robeson’s performances with the Manhattan-based troupe, Throckmorton was the first to approach him about donning the emperor’s clothes. But the Harlem Amateur Players’ star performer did not like what he heard. “You may know this kind of person, and Mr. O’Neill may know this kind of person, but I don’t,” Robeson said. (There were other “race men” who were less conflicted about O’Neill’s take on race and power. In a piece written for the 1923–24 season of the Provincetown Playhouse, W. E. B. DuBois said that O’Neill was “bursting through” black stereotypes onstage and giving us “Negro blood.”) In the end, however, Robeson, convinced of the play’s worth, accepted the assignment.  

The Emperor Jones

Dudley Murphy

1933

105 min

Black and White

1.33:1

Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist

Saul J. Turell

1979

30 min

Color & Black and White

1.33:1

If ever there was a European art film that could be all things to all people, it’s Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire (1987). Marking Wenders’s career midpoint like a lightning strike cutting across tree rings, the movie is at once audience-seductive and demanding, holistic and aestheticized. It has beguiled the Wenders aficionado as reliably as it’s absorbed the spiritually hungry civilian, the rogue filmhead, the bookish square, and the nondenominational seeker. It seemed upon its release closer to the effervescent fantasias of Michael Powell, Maya Deren, Georges Méliès, and Jean Vigo, as well as Victorian postcards, than to Wenders’s earlier New German Cinema existentialism, or to the troubled legacy of German cinema as a whole. Even after the two-decades-plus of global exploration that has followed for the filmmaker, it appears to be sui generis, born from its own shadowy nitrate soup.

So, let’s think subjectively, you and I, about possible ways to look at the movie, and if none suit you, others are not hard to find. In thumbnail, Wings of Desire belongs to a trafficked subgenre, the angel-on-earth ballade (Victorian, modern-comedic, or otherwise, and usually trifling), but it’s clear we’re a world away from Raoul Walsh’s goofy 1945 Jack Benny comedy The Horn Blows at Midnight (though perhaps closer, in the first half, to the sylphlike angel presences chaperoning the sermonic fables in Lois Weber’s 1915 dream film Hypocrites). There’s little doubt as to the originality of the experience from the very first airborne camera patrols of autumnal cold-war Berlin. In Wenders’s silvery black-and-white view, this is the paradigmatic city wasteland of its age, still war-torn and withstanding a historicized physical and political schizophrenia like no other, symbolized, like the elephant in the parlor, by the wall itself, snaking through the urban spaces covered with graffiti, obliterating your view, wherever you stand, of the city’s other half. This cognitively dissonant urban experiment had frequently been the grim arena for sixties spy noir, but never had we seen Berlin become Berlin so clearly, so eloquently before. (The more sober and evocative German title translates as The Sky over Berlin.) Of course the city is haunted.  

Wings of Desire

Wim Wenders

1987

127 min

Color & Black and White

1.66:1

Who speaks of Howards End these days? Who expounds on the virtues of this magnificent drama, whose traditional style seems almost as distant as its Edwardian setting? Seen today, years past its 1992 release, it strikes one as not only the ultimate accomplishment of the Merchant Ivory team but also the high-water mark of a certain kind of filmmaking, a landmark example of movies of passion, taste, and sensitivity that honestly touch every emotion. Below its exquisitely modulated surface, this film may set off lasting and heartfelt reverberations in the viewer; every time you see it, it moves you in different ways.

Certainly, Howards End was appreciated in its day. Made for only eight million dollars, it received nine Oscar nominations, including for best picture, director, cinematography, and supporting and lead actress, for Vanessa Redgrave and Emma Thompson. The latter won, along with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s script and Luciana Arrighi and Ian Whittaker’s art direction and set decoration. But the film seems to have been half-forgotten precisely because of those old-fashioned qualities once heralded as its strengths. Beyond its already distant source material—E. M. Forster’s 1910 novel of families in love and conflict—it offers filmmaking techniques that owe nothing to the flash and dash of contemporary movies. Yet alongside an elegantly unfolding script and impeccable acting across the board from people like Anthony Hopkins, as well as Redgrave and most especially Thompson, extravagant directorial flourishes would have just gotten in the way.

After creating a number of films in Edwardian dress, producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory knew how to be more than merely faithful to the look of those times—they knew how to make that world seem genuinely inhabited. From production designer Arrighi, who was after “how people lived, not a set,” to costume designer Jenny Beavan, who wanted “real clothes made in an authentic way,” the level of realism in Howards End is all the more convincing for its having been so casually accomplished.  

Howards End

James Ivory

1992

142 min

Color

2.35:1

Costa-Gavras’s 1969 political assassination thriller Z appeared at the end of a decade of burgeoning cultural change and rampant paranoia. In the United States, this Algerian-French coproduction sparked a sensation, not just relaying the European political crisis but perfectly capturing a global mood of apprehension at a moment when America was at its most vulnerable, our domestic security seemingly breached by the consecutive concussive shocks of our own political assassinations (John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy). Based on true events, the film vividly imagined and uncovered the machinations behind the May 22, 1963, killing of the Greek social democrat and pacifist Gregoris Lambrakis in Thessaloníki. It made the fact of political murder cinematically real, as no Hollywood film at that time could dare. And by borrowing Hollywood action techniques, the Greek-born Constantinos Gavras raised the genre to a new level—one that he would define as his own.

This type of filmmaking, of course, was familiar to American moviegoers from the work of such post–World War II Hollywood directors as Elia Kazan, John Huston, Robert Siodmak, and Jules Dassin, who all combined startling social observation with narratives powered by violence and suspense. The activist-aesthete’s genre was not part of the peaceable 1960s counterculture, however. Not even John Frankenheimer’s now-vaunted The Manchurian Candidate was a box-office success. It took a European with one foot in a family political legacy and the other in cinematic craft to update the political thriller in terms both commercial and vital.  

Z

Costa-Gavras

1969

127 min

Color

1.66:1

So many worlds stream in from every direction in Monsoon Wedding that it comes to seem as if the whole globe is converging on a single family home in New Delhi: relatives from Houston, from Australia, from Dubai (“Muscat, actually”); workers from the countryside and rainfalls of marigolds; cousins whom no one can quite place and brass bands and white horses and event managers and the eventfully managed. “I don’t even know who’s who half the time,” says the groom, in a wonderful moment. It’s as if every kind of mood and genre—dreams of escape and memories of brutality, uncertain futures and promises of a better life—is converging too, to make a glorious celebration as teeming and fond and constantly shifting as any uncle’s reunion I’ve attended in India.

The first time I saw Monsoon Wedding was one day after I had left a large assembly of family and friends in Delhi, and its portrait of life was so vividly real, and familiar in every particular, that I felt as if I’d never left Delhi at all. I recognized the cool global kids trying to slip away from their families, even as a fussing, anxious father was calling his youngers idiots and fools (and in one priceless coinage, Number One Most Stupid Duffer). Several languages were mingling in every sentence, so that even a two-word curse was sometimes polylingual—“bloody feranghi” (dutifully translated in the subtitles as “bloody foreigner”). Here was all the laughing chaos, the delighted jostle of a country where phone connections suddenly go dead in midsentence, the electricity flickers into darkness, a downpour threatens at every moment, and nobody knows when anybody is coming (“Ten minutes, exactly and approximately,” promises the unreliable organizer in the opening moments). And as with any family reunion—in Poughkeepsie as much as New Delhi—the mood is that of a golden castle constructed, step-by-step, on thinnest ice, as always happens when people who know, and don’t know, each other too well get together. Which means that comedy, song and dance, romance, and the outlines of tragedy also all flow in through Mira Nair’s wonderfully open door.  

Monsoon Wedding

Mira Nair

2001

114 min

Color

1.85:1

MAN IS NOT A BIRD: FLYING AWAY

The term “independent cinema” has lost its punch in recent years, from overuse and misapplication. One need only look to the films of Dušan Makavejev for a reminder of its true meaning. This Serb, who lived and worked in Communist Yugoslavia for decades before his exile in 1973 (due to the fallout from his biggest sensation, the politically provocative WR: Mysteries of the Organism), believes first and foremost in individual freedom. He specializes in contradictions, both in his artistic sensibility—eternally wry yet not an avowed satirist, hopeful about humanity yet unrelenting in his grim portrayals of our willing complacency—and in the very form of his films, which use collage and juxtaposition as tools for liberation from social and cinematic strictures. Skeptical of authority and any official ideology, as well as the straitjacket of linear story­telling (“Narrative structure is prison; it is tradition; it is a lie; it is a formula that is imposed,” he once said), Makavejev aims to tear down and rebuild the basic blocks of moviemaking itself. Toggling easily, even imperceptibly, between fiction and documentary, his films can appear to be vérité portraits of everyday life one minute and unhinged, surreal comedy the next—like a Jean Rouch ethnography crossed with absurdism by way of Luis Buñuel.

Those filmmakers were indeed among Makavejev’s stated inspirations, but they were just two in a long list of influences that can be detected throughout his complex, oddball oeuvre, appropriated to make something wholly unique. Raised on a diet of Disney cartoons, Russian silent films, 1930s British documentaries, and Laurel and Hardy movies, the young, movie-mad Makavejev began expanding his already broad horizons when the first Yugoslav Cinémathèque opened its doors in 1952. He was then studying psychology at Belgrade University and had begun experimenting with film, producing his first amateur short, The Journey to Old Yugoslavia, about a neglected Gypsy community, that same year. It was in 1954, when cinephile extraordinaire Henri Langlois arrived in Belgrade with fifty-two films from the Cinémathèque française—including works by Feuillade, Clair, Vigo, and many more—that Makavejev truly cultivated his taste, which soon encompassed the Soviet cinema of Dovzhenko and Vertov, and underground American films by Cassavetes, Shirley Clarke, Frederick Wiseman, and Bruce Conner.  

Man Is Not a Bird

Dušan Makavejev

1965

78 min

Black and White

1.66:1

Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator

Dušan Makavejev

1967

68 min

Black and White

1.66:1

Innocence Unprotected

Dušan Makavejev

1968

75 min

Color & Black and White

1.33:1

Le jour se lève was Marcel Carné’s fourth collaboration with screenwriter and poet Jacques Prévert and their third entry in the poetic realism cinema movement, following their vanguard Drôle de drame and Port of Shadows. Both of those films were widely admired, but Le jour se lève turned into something bigger, one of the most influential French films of the prewar period and to this day an unvarnished classic. Poetic realism’s bleak outlook reflected the waning of Popular Front idealism as fascism began to spread throughout Europe. Carné’s vision was not explicitly political, however. Foreshadowing film noir’s more oblique pessimism and flashback-laden regret, Le jour se lève starred Jean Gabin as working-class everyman François, who murders in the name of love. Still, it was too much for French authorities, who saw the emotional subtext as potentially subversive. The film was banned in December 1939, as war approached, and again under Nazi occupation.

Vital to the realization of Carné’s realist-romantic vision was Alexandre Trauner, the self-proclaimed “artisan” production designer, who had an enormous influence on French cinema in the thirties and who would work with Carné on the classic Children of Paradise (1945). Constructing sets true to working-class milieus while also helping to impart character psychology through careful attention to atmospheric details, Trauner was able to manifest Carné’s twin impulses. It was Trauner who insisted on constructing François’ apartment without movable walls—making filming extremely difficult—and shooting real bullets through them for the film’s finale. And his demands paid off: the claustrophobic, vividly threatening environment perfectly evokes François’ mental state.

By 1939, Gabin was already the most popular French actor of his generation. Rugged, handsome, and convincing playing the kinds of common people who flocked to his movies, he is undoubtedly the soul of Carné’s film, which hinges on the sympathy it is able to draw for a perpetrator of a passionate crime. Gabin uses his talents to magnificent effect here, winning us over without ever forcing innocence or luckless ignorance. Many have attempted to imitate his artless brand of masculine sensitivity, but none has ever succeeded quite so grandly.

Le Jour se lève

Marcel Carné

1939

93 min

1.33:1

Director René Clément had conveyed the darker aspects of human nature in 1952’s heartbreaking Forbidden Games, which became an international, award-winning hit despite the rawness and melancholy of its antiwar message. The bitter irony and willingness to grapple with the grittier side of life that informed that film were even more pronounced in Gervaise, his 1956 adaptation of Émile Zola’s L’assommoir—commonly referred to in English as The Dram Shop, though that’s not a strict translation of the colloquial, arcane title, a nineteenth-century term for a cheap liquor shop derived from the verb assommer, “to bludgeon or render senseless.”

Such an expression feels wholly appropriate for the uncompromising experience that is Gervaise, which, while not impeccably faithful to its source, is widely considered to be one of the most accurate film representations of Zola’s writing and sensibility. Though there have been nine film versions of L’assommoir (the first as early as 1902, with Ferdinand Zecca’s Les victimes de l’alcoolisme), Gervaise remains the most acclaimed. Perhaps this is because Clément and the prolific, proudly left-wing screenwriting team of Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost (La symphonie pastorale) were the perfect match for Zola’s brand of social realism and his unerring attention to the struggles of the working class. Winnowing the book down from approximately five hundred pages, Aurenche and Bost still manage to capture a sense of epic struggle in the story of washerwoman Gervaise (Austrian Maria Schell, winner of best actress at the Venice Film Festival for her role), who is determined to run a laundry business of her own in an impoverished quartier of Paris in 1877.

Gervaise’s desperate efforts to establish financial independence and a presence in the neighborhood are met with enormous setbacks, beginning with a rooftop accident sustained by her steeplejack husband, Coupeau (François Périer), which necessitates expensive doctor visits and leads to his increasingly crippling alcoholism. Clément depicts her fragile existence in an accumulation of impressively mounted scenes, from a violent, sudsy fight with her laundress nemesis Virginie (Suzy Delair), to a tense birthday celebration disrupted by Coupeau’s tipsy boisterousness, to his terrifying final, DTs-fueled explosion. Clément refuses to soften the brutality or consequence, right up through the devastating conclusion, when his focus shifts to Gervaise’s young daughter, Nana.

Here, at the end of the film, Clément reaffirms, in the briefest but most powerful of moments, not only his gift for eloquently directing child actors, as so memorably illustrated in Forbidden Games, but also that film’s fatalistic view that children bear the failures and mistakes of their parents’ world. And by ending on the image of Nana scampering freely, without supervision, through the Parisian streets, attracting neighborhood boys with ribbons in her hair, Clément, Aurenche, and Bost remind us that the little girl—who can’t help but recall Games’s angelic yet corrupted Brigitte Fossey—will grow up to be one of Zola’s most memorable characters, the prostitute protagonist of the 1880 novel Nana.

Gervaise

René Clément

1956

117 min

Black and White

1.33:1

Almost twenty years before they enacted such splendid suffocation in Max Ophuls’s swoony masterpiece The Earrings of Madame de . . . , the agelessly glamorous Charles Boyer and Danielle Darrieux first starred together in another tear-jerking big-screen romance. Giving them each one of their most radiant roles, Mayerling was a star-crossed-lovers tale based on a true story, one that’s unimaginably tragic and, even more than a century later, debated. From a novelization by Claude Anet of the events surrounding the apparent 1889 suicide pact of Archduke Rudolf, heir to the Austrian throne, and his lover, Maria Vetsera, a baron’s daughter he was forbidden to see, Mayerling spins vivid, evocative melodrama.

Despite the delicate material, Mayerling avoids outright sensationalism thanks to the sensitive direction by Anatole Litvak. Though little remembered today, Litvak has a formidable biography: A Jew born in Kiev, he studied philosophy in Saint Petersburg before moving to Germany in the late twenties to work in the movies (including editing for G. W. Pabst). Upon the Nazis’ rise to power, he fled, hatching a successful directing career in both England and France with Gaumont, and then proceeding to Hollywood, where he became an acclaimed, Oscar-nominated director, husband to Miriam Hopkins, and collaborator on Frank Capra’s Why We Fight films during World War II. He even served in the U.S. Army, heading up the photography division that documented the D-day landing in Normandy. Once in Los Angeles, Litvak was, according to David Thomson, “a great womanizer, a Hollywood socialite, and a dashing figure.” None of this would have been possible if not for Mayerling, the success that got him noticed in America and led to his first studio contract, at Warner Bros.

It was not only Mayerling’s flamboyant central tragedy (which occurred at the royal hunting lodge that gives the film its title) that attracted the leftist Litvak to the material, but also the story’s politics: more than just a Romeo and Juliet–like romance, the film also touches on the repression of liberal activism in nineteenth-century Vienna by reigning emperor Francis Joseph. The emperor’s only son, Boyer’s Rudolf, is introduced being accidentally rounded up along with a group of student protesters, which also includes his friend the left-wing journalist Szeps, the monarchy’s public enemy number one.

Further outraging the authorities and alienating him from his father and his livelihood (Rudolf states at one point that the crown and his happiness are “unfortunately irreconcilable”) is his adulterous affair with the seventeen-year-old Maria, whom he meets one night at the Prater, and who initially doesn’t recognize him as the crown prince. Their love, of course, is the central concern of the film, and Litvak portrays it as an impossible romantic ideal, cloaked in doubt and shadows, leading inexorably to a sad conclusion—the events of which are still disputed by some, who suspect Rudolf and Maria were victims of political conspiracy.

The real-life aftermath is well-known and even more tragic: in Rudolf’s absence, the crown was inherited by his cousin Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination incited World War I. But Litvak stays focused on the beautiful lovers—their wordless glances, their surreptitious meetings. The truth about their demise may never be known, but Litvak’s Mayerling remains a stirring dramatization and a lovely reminder of the beauty of two screen legends.

Mayerling

Anatole Litvak

1936

91 min

Black and White

1.33:1