27May09
Critics writing about our new Eclipse Series 16, Alexander Korda’s Private Lives, seem to have felt compelled to pick their favorites—and, interestingly, they run the gamut. Turner Classic Movies’ Glenn Erickson calls the collection “a quartet of fine films by the famed producer-director,” but comes down for the 1936 Rembrandt, “the most mature and melancholy . . . , a tender and insightful contemplation of the artist’s relationship to society.” Michael Sragow, writing in the New Yorker, is also a fan of Charles Laughton’s portrayal of the Dutch painter, as well as the actor’s legendary performance in The Private Life of Henry VIII, a pair of films that “prove that the producer-director Korda and the idiosyncratic star Charles Laughton were, in their prime, as formidable a filmmaking team as John Ford and John Wayne or Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro . . . Laughton’s movies, with their meatiness, anchor this set and elevate it to rare artistic heights.”
Meanwhile, DVD Verdict’s Clark Douglas singles out The Rise of Catherine the Great, which Paul Czinner directed and Korda produced: “Czinner made a fine substitute, actually offering a considerably more ‘cinematic’ experience than Korda.” And Dave Kehr, in the New York Times, blazes his own trail: “The major discovery of the Eclipse set is The Private Life of Don Juan . . . As deeply felt as it is merciless, this Don Juan could almost be a lost film by Ernst Lubitsch.”
25May09
In the new Criterion special edition of Peter Yates’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle, we have reprinted a lengthy and extraordinary profile of Robert Mitchum from the March 1973 issue of Rolling Stone. Reported from the set of Eddie Coyle by New Journalism trailblazer Grover Lewis, the article, “The Last Celluloid Desperado,” includes conversations with actors Peter Boyle and Richard Jordan, as well as Mitchum’s daughter, Trina. Most memorably, it also features extensive, idiosyncratic monologues by Mitchum himself, a sample of which follows.
* * * * *
When Mitchum returns from lunch, he has clearly been exercising his elbow, perhaps both of them. His gait is unsteady, his speech is thickly burred, and he is, in fact, distinctly one step over the fucked-up line as he draws two cans of Bud from the fridge, waggles a beckoning finger at the writer, and sags onto a clothing-strewn couch at the rear of the camper.
“Very seldom have I a trailer,” he mutters darkly. “On most locations, there is one, usually, yes. But there’s rarely room for me. Rarely room for me. People crowd in—friends, strangers. I try to tell ’em, but they won’t listen. ‘Stand back, jack. No?’ Ka-whap!” Laughing mirthlessly, Mitchum swigs a lug of beer and lets one eyelid droop toward a brooding wink.
21May09
People just can’t get enough of The Red Shoes, judging by the buzz surrounding the new digital restoration of Powell and Pressburger’s Technicolor masterpiece, which premiered last week at the Cannes Film Festival. And the latest offering in the swirl of press coverage is a great one: an eight-minute video interview in the Guardian with the celebrated Thelma Schoonmaker—Powell’s widow and Martin Scorsese’s longtime editor—about her work on the glorious reissue.
21May09
. . . in town for a special screening at the Film Society of Lincoln Center of his 1974 Boston crime caper The Friends of Eddie Coyle.
20May09
The title alone screams incongruity. Shohei Imamura’s 1961 black-and-white caper movie Pigs and Battleships bursts with the confusion and exuberance of a cross-cultural encounter. In its lively portrayal of enthusiastic Japanese locals welcoming the U.S. Navy on R&R to the former fishing village of Yokosuka, the film holds true to the stereotype of Americans as big, dumb, pleasure-seeking oafs. But it thoroughly capsizes the idea of Japanese people relishing only the quiet dignity of Zen gardens, the tea ceremony, flower arrangement, haiku poetry, and filial piety. With this, his breakthrough film and fifth feature, Imamura, a leader of what would retroactively be called the Japanese New Wave, sets out to debunk the myth of the self-effacing, culturally refined, and socially ultrapolite Japanese, as characterized in the films of his former boss and mentor, Yasujiro Ozu.
Imamura’s interest lay in the contradictions of the Japanese character, and he came to take a near anthropological approach to the subject, one that couldn’t be further from Ozu’s decorum. This fascination first truly emerged with the depiction of the two young protagonists of Pigs and Battleships. Haruko (played by newcomer Jitsuko Yoshimura, who would also appear in Imamura’s next film, 1963’s The Insect Woman) works in a tiny bar in Yokosuka’s entertainment district and is recklessly in love with Kinta (played by Hiroyuki Nagato), who thinks his future lies with a gang of murderous extortionists starting a pig-farming business to feed the hungry U.S. military. Kinta, with his flashy silk dragon jacket and his bomber pilot sunglasses, is no match for the moral solidity that underlies Haruko’s lipsticked facade. Both endure poor role models in their own families: Kinta has no mother, and his Japanese navy veteran father (Eijiro Tono) is a drunk who goes out fishing in his dinghy when he’s awake. Haruko has no father, and her mother provides for the three younger siblings with the allowance Haruko’s older sister gets from her American lover. Haruko suffers constant pressure from her mother and sister to move up similarly in the world by becoming an American’s mistress.
20May09
Iconoclasts are meant to kill their idols, and so it’s fitting that Shohei Imamura launched into his career as if on a patricidal rampage. Like Nagisa Oshima, the other towering figure of the Japanese New Wave, Imamura (1926–2006) rejected the orderly, tradition-bound portrait of Japan that a previous generation of filmmakers had imprinted in the national and global consciousness. He started out as an apprentice to Yasujiro Ozu, and would take pains to distance his methods and priorities from those of his former boss. Several critics, including Donald Richie, have since pointed out that the two have more in common than they may seem to, in that both were obsessed with the notion of “Japaneseness.” It could be they had very different ideas of the national essence. Or perhaps they just came at it from opposite sides: while Ozu, considered the most Japanese of Japanese directors, emphasized the taming and concealment of the natural state, Imamura, a master conductor of libidinal energies, affirmed it was to be found everywhere.
There was no aspect of the official culture that Imamura sought more vigorously to revise than the depiction of women as passive victims who achieved transcendence through suffering. “My heroines are true to life—just look around you at Japanese women. They are strong, and they outlive men,” he told Audie Bock, in her seminal volume Japanese Film Directors. “Self-sacrificing women like the heroines of Naruse’s Floating Clouds and Mizoguchi’s The Life of Oharu don’t really exist.” The prototype of the Imamura woman—an unmistakably sexual being, self-sufficient by necessity, perfectly capable of outwitting and indeed outliving the men who exploit her—is the headstrong Haruko in his breakthrough film, Pigs and Battleships (1961), who escapes the life everyone else has imagined for her in the sex trade near a U.S. naval base. The sisterhood stretches across every phase of his career, from the stoic rape victim turned would-be killer of Intentions of Murder (1964) to the glorious biological freak whose gushing orgasms are a river-replenishing source of life in his final film, Warm Water Under a Red Bridge (2001). But The Insect Woman (1963), which opens with a microscopic close-up of a beetle stubbornly crawling and scrambling its way through a patch of earth, is his baldest statement on the nature of Japanese womanhood.
20May09
Early in Shohei Imamura’s Intentions of Murder, the librarian Riichi distractedly peruses Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization while conversing with his clinging mistress, Yoshiko. One can read the reference in many ways: as a glancing jest, as an (uncharacteristic) Imamurian homage to an intellectual influence, or simply as one of many signifiers of Western culture on the cold, autocratic Riichi, embodiment of much of what Imamura loathed in contemporary Japan. That a seemingly insignificant detail turns out to be richly suggestive and key to the film’s meaning indicates how cunningly contrived Intentions of Murder (1964), like so much of Imamura’s work, is.
The very setting for this assignation—rows of books indexed and arranged—bespeaks the official culture, ordered and rational, with which Riichi is repeatedly associated, in contradistinction to the slovenly, obtuse, and instinctual nature of his peasant wife, the film’s heroine, Sadako, whom Imamura described thus: “Medium height and weight, light coloring, smooth skin. The face of a woman who loves men. Maternal, good genitals, juicy.” The asthmatic Riichi is, by comparison, reedy, dry, his sparse, pinched features contrasting with Sadako’s sturdy, bovine plumpness. (She gorges herself on leftovers after being raped, instead of killing herself as Japanese code dictates.) As so often occurs in Imamura’s films, Eros and instinct, ancient and intractable forces, here incarnated by Sadako, undermine and ultimately triumph over civilization.
20May09
With its madcap mixture of the political and the, uh, porcine, Shohei Imamura’s Pigs and Battleships is a strange (and strangely satisfying) beast indeed. To better understand where the director was coming from when he made this breakthrough work, we turned to venerable cinema scholar Tony Rayns, who contextualizes it historically and thematically in a video interview contained in our new DVD box set Pigs, Pimps & Prostitutes, which includes Pigs as well as Imamura’s two follow-ups, the equally eccentric The Insect Woman and Intentions of Murder. Here’s an excerpt from that interview, illustrated with clips, in which Rayns recounts the years from Imamura’s apprenticeship at Shochiku to his move to the more radical, youth-oriented Nikkatsu, which led to Pigs and the subsequent works.
20May09
It was going to take a wise man indeed to adapt Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, and as always John Huston was up to the literary challenge. According to critics, the translation is a rousing success. In Time Out New York, Keith Uhlich writes that “O’Connor’s incisive sense of person and place is brilliantly captured in this 1979 film adaptation of her highly regarded first novel, which plays out as a broad comedy set within a timeless purgatory.” In the Los Angeles Times, Dennis Lim sings the praises of both “the singular richness of O’Connor’s creation and the canny intelligence of Huston’s interpretation,” while saving special praise for “a mesmerizing performance by Dourif, a terrific character actor digging with relish into the juiciest role of his career.” And Turner Classic Movies’ Glenn Erickson concurs: “Wise Blood does justice to O’Connor’s mysterious, quirky examination of Bible Belt mania . . . The impeccably cast and brilliantly acted film seems to be happening in an alternate universe of frauds and heretics.”
18May09
“I think that work like his is necessary for people to understand something about the humors of the criminal mentality,” said Robert Mitchum of the novel The Friends of Eddie Coyle and its author, George V. Higgins. Yet he could have been describing the film itself, a melancholy succession of clandestine encounters conducted in the least picturesque parts of the Greater Boston area during late fall, going into winter. A middleman bargains with a gunrunner, the gunrunner bargains with a pair of wannabe bank robbers, a cop bargains with his stoolie, and the stoolie bargains with the man who works for the Man. The chips on the table may be machine guns or information or money, but the “humor” looming over every encounter is survival.
Politeness and bonhomie are strictly provisional, and everybody knows it, which is what gives this film its terrible sadness. In the miserable economy of power in Boston’s rumpled gray underworld, Eddie and his “friends” are all expendable, and the ones left standing play every side against the middle, their white-knuckle terror carefully concealed under several layers of nonchalance and resignation. There’s not a punch thrown, and only two fatal shots are fired, but this seemingly artless film leaves a deeper impression of dog-eat-dog brutality than many of the blood-soaked extravaganzas that preceded it and came in its wake.
