Rich and Strange (Alfred Hitchcock, 1931)

Henry Kendall and Joan Barry in Rich and Strange

Fred Hill: Henry Kendall
Emily Hill: Joan Barry
Commander Gordon: Percy Marmont
The Princess: Betty Amann
The Old Maid: Elsie Randolph

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Alfred Hitchcock, Alma Reville, Val Valentine
Based on a novel by Dale Collins
Cinematography: Jack E. Cox, Charles Martin
Art direction: C. Wilfred Arnold
Music: Adolph Hallis

One of Alfred Hitchcock's early talkie flops, Rich and Strange begins well, with an opening shot of Fred Hill at work in an expressionist-style depersonalized office set, followed by a montage showing his attempt to make it home on the Underground, dealing with elbowing crowds and a recalcitrant umbrella. There's a nicely synched bit in which umbrellas open to musical flourishes before Fred's fizzles. Then it's home to a drab and chaotic existence before the Hills receive their wished-for deliverance from the daily muddle: A rich uncle tells Fred that he can have an advance on his inheritance so he and his wife, Emily, can live a little. They set off to see the world. This early part of the film is perhaps the best because it mostly picks up on the skills Hitchcock learned through his work in silent movies. In fact, it is shot through with droll title cards and very little dialogue of consequence. The Hills are overwhelmed by Paris and shocked at the Folies Bergère, then board ship -- not a promising moment for Fred, who succumbed to seasickness on the Channel crossing -- for a cruise on the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal toward Asia. (The American title was East of Shanghai.) And then the talk takes over, as both Fred and Emily have shipboard romances, she with a somewhat dashing bachelor on his way to Ceylon, he with a German "princess" who cons him out of his money. Rich and Strange is a curious mess, with Henry Kendall, a once-well-known music hall comedian, awkward in the romantic part of Fred's story. Joan Barry steps out in front of the camera behind which she was lurking to speak the lines for Anny Ondra in Hitchcock's  Blackmail (1929), but she's not much more than pretty.  Hitchcock liked the film, but nobody else did very much, and opinion doesn't seem to have changed with time.

The Young Rebels (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1980)

Tomisaburo Wakayama in The Young Rebels 

Journalist: Go Kato
Asakawa Senjo: Tomisaburo Wakayama
Takiko: Junko Mihara
Yukio: Tatsuya Okamoto
Orie: Tomoko Saito

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Masao Kosugi

The title of Keisuke Kinoshita's polemical pseudo-documentary, The Young Rebels, sounds like that of a Hollywood film from the 1950s, the era of naive, sensational, and didactic dramas about "juvenile delinquency." Which is exactly what The Young Rebels turns out to be: an exploitation film about why kids go wrong. The answer is a simple one: their parents. The kids, Kinoshita is saying, are not all right: They ride around on motorcycles, they cut school, they shoplift, and they have sex. This was not exactly news in 1980: Nagisa Oshima, for example, was onto these facts in 1960, when he made Cruel Story of Youth, and he blamed it on dysfunctional parenting in 1969's Boy. But Oshima's films are about people more than they are about problems. Kinoshita has lost sight of the people in his obsession with the problem, and the result is a scattershot film designed to ferret out examples of parental irresponsibility both high -- affluent parents who are so obsessed with climbing the corporate or social ladders that they either ignore their children or spoil them -- and low -- parents who are so mired in poverty and its attendant ills like alcoholism and crime that they abuse their children. The narrative framework of the film is as simplistic as its point of view: a journalist goes in search of answers and interviews children and parents. Kinoshita is enough of an artist that he knows how to tell the several stories uncovered by the journalist, which gives The Young Rebels enough dramatic substance to keep the polemic at bay during the storytelling, but the piling on of miseries turns into overkill. Eventually, the journalist visits a kind of reform school in Hokkaido, the north of Japan, where wayward boys are nurtured back into society -- but there's even some recidivism there. At the end, the point seems to be that every kid needs a loving mother and father -- the Japanese title translates as a cry for help: "Father! Mother!" It has been pointed out that people raised children for millennia until, sometime in the mid-20th century, they became self-conscious about it and turned it into a problem. Kinoshita's humorless and even hopeless polemic does little to solve the problem, especially when the film often seems bogged down in fogeyism: A scene of joyriding motorcycle gangs, for example, is treated as a vision from hell.

The Skin Game (Alfred Hitchcock, 1931)

Phyllis Konstam and Edward Chapman in The Skin Game

Mr. Hillcrist: C.V. France
Mrs. Hillcrist: Helen Haye
Jill Hillcrist: Jill Esmond
Mr. Hornblower: Edmund Gwenn
Charles Hornblower: John Longden
Chloe Hornblower: Phyllis Konstam
Rolf Hornblower: Frank Lawton
Dawker: Edward Chapman
Mr. Jackman: Herbert Ross
Mrs. Jackman: Dora Gregory
Auctioneer: Ronald Frankau

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Alfred Hitchcock, Alma Reville
Based on a play by John Galsworthy
Cinematography: Jack E. Cox

Despite winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932, John Galsworthy is one of those authors nobody reads much anymore, partly because his reputation was eclipsed by the great modernists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf whom the Nobel committee overlooked. His series of novels that constitutes The Forsyte Saga came back in vogue for a while in 1967 and again in 2002 when they were adapted for British television, playing on that nostalgia for the good old days of the British class system that more recently made a hit of Downton Abbey. Class, especially the conflict of the landed aristocracy and the new-monied bourgeoisie, was his big theme, and he explored it not only in his novels but also in plays like The Skin Game, which was first performed in 1920 and immediately snapped up for a silent film adaptation. Hitchcock apparently saw the play and liked the idea of turning it into a talkie, wrote the screenplay with his wife, Alma, and even cast Edmund Gwenn and Helen Haye in the roles they had played in the silent film. The problem is that Galsworthy forbade any deviation from the original plot and dialogue, leaving Hitchcock for the most part stagebound. There's occasionally some interesting camerawork, especially in the auction scene in which swish pans are used to build suspense during the competitive bidding over the property that the old-money Hillcrist wants to keep out of the hands of the self-made industrialist Hornblower. But too often Hitchcock reverts to stage tableaus -- some of them badly blocked -- that show off the melodramatic hamming of some of the actors, as well as some stilted dialogue carried over from the play. There's a long take in which Chloe Hornblower confronts Hillcrist's scheming agent, Dawker, that particularly exposes Phyllis Konstam's mannered acting. The plot hinges on Chloe's dark secret, which seems much ado about nothing today: that she once worked as a professional co-respondent in divorce cases before marrying Hornblower's son, Charles. But Hitchcock retains Galsworthy's ambivalence about his characters, making neither Hillcrist not Hornblower purely admirable or villainous. We dislike Hornblower for his callous treatment of some old tenants of Hillcrist's after he buys property from the squire and for his willingness to despoil the land with his factories, but we also have to condemn Hillcrist's snobbery and his readiness to drag Chloe Hornblower's name through the mud. As he often did, Galsworthy put his faith in the younger generation, Hornblower's son Rolf and Hillcrist's daughter, Jill, who seem fated to bring both houses together, but Hitchcock doesn't quite give these characters room enough in the film version to make that point. He later told François Truffaut that he "didn't make [The Skin Game] by choice, and there isn't much to be said about it," but as so often, Hitchcock was fiddling with the truth. It's not one of his better films, hindered as he was by Galsworthy's restrictions, but there's some meat on it.

The Merchant of Four Seasons (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1972)

Hans Hirschmüller and Irm Hermann in The Merchant of Four Seasons

Hans Epp: Hans Hirschmüller
Irmgard Epp: Irm Hermann
Anna Epp: Hanna Schygulla
Harry Radek: Klaus Löwitsch
Anzell: Karl Scheydt
Renate Epp: Andrea Schober
Mother Epp: Gusti Kreissl
Hans's Great Love: Ingrid Caven
Kurt: Kurt Raab
Heidi: Heidi Simon

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Cinematography: Dietrich Lohmann
Production design: Kurt Raab

Schlubby little (much is made of how much shorter he is than his wife) Hans Epp joined the Foreign Legion after washing out of the Munich police force for receiving a blowjob from a prostitute he had arrested, and now sells fruit from a pushcart he trundles through the courtyards of apartment houses. He is the object of scorn from his family because he never found a white-collar job, unlike his upwardly mobile brother-in-law and his intellectual sister Anna. His wife assists him in the fruit-selling business, working from a street stall, but it's clear that their marriage is troubled -- she spies on him at work, counting the minutes that he takes to deliver a bagful of pears to the woman he once proposed to. (She turned him down.) Even his mother doesn't love him: When he returns from the Foreign Legion and tells her that the friend who enlisted with him was killed, she retorts, "The good die young, but you come back." When he suffers a heart attack, his wife cheats on him while he's in the hospital, and then later lets him hire the man she slept with to take over the heavy-lifting part of the job. Despite all that's stacked against him, Hans manages to make a go as a merchant, but just as his family begins to praise him instead of dumping on him, he sinks into a deep depression and winds up drinking himself to death. If this all sounds terribly heavy-handed, it's lifted out of the suds in precisely the way Douglas Sirk made his films rise about their soap-operatic plots with sharp-eyed direction, flashes of wit, and sly social comment. The comparison to Sirk is an obvious one: Rainer Werner Fassbinder's breakthrough film was inspired by his study of the Hollywood master, whom he deliberately set out to imitate and, I think, managed to excel, if only because he wasn't handicapped by the money-making concerns and censorship of American film. There are some delicious performances, not only from Hans Hirschmüller as the sad-sack Hans and Irm Hermann as his sly helpmeet, but also from Hanna Schygulla as the somewhat sympathetic Anna. And the film ends with one of the most chilling exchanges in any Fassbinder film, as Irmgard and Harry, Hans's old Legionnaire buddy who has gone to work for him, drive away from the funeral and she proposes a business-like marriage to him. His terse reply, "Okay," perfectly sums up the emotionless, mercantile tone that pervades the film.

Murder! (Alfred Hitchcock, 1930)

Norah Baring, uncredited actress, and Herbert Marshall in Murder!

Sir John Menier: Herbert Marshall
Diana Baring: Norah Baring
Doucie Markham: Phyllis Konstam
Ted Markham: Edward Chapman
Gordon Druce: Miles Mander
Handel Fane: Esme Percy
Ion Stewart: Donald Calthrop
Prosecutor: Esme V. Chaplin
Defense Counsel: Amy Brandon Thomas
Judge: Joynson Powell
Bennett: S.J. Warmington
Miss Mitcham: Marie Wright
Mrs. Didsome: Hannah Jones
Mrs. Grogram: Una O'Connor
Jury Foreman: R.E. Jeffrey

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Alfred Hitchcock, Walter C. Mycroft, Alma Reville
Based on a novel and play by Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson
Cinematography: Jack E. Cox
Art direction: John Mead

Hitchcock's third talkie, after the commercial success Blackmail (1929) and the comparative flop Juno and the Paycock (1930), is a solid start toward establishing his reputation as a master of the thriller, or in this case the murder-mystery subgenre. Hitchcock's direction of it is full of innovative touches: an opening sequence in which a scream is heard and the camera pans across a series of windows from which curious heads emerge; a neatly staged scene in which the investigation of the murder takes place in the wings of a theater, where people being interrogated sometimes interrupt their testimony to make their entrances; a scene that takes place in the jury room and lingers there as we overhear the sentence being delivered, with only a janitor tidying up in the actual frame; a voiceover by Herbert Marshall as we see his reflection in a mirror -- accomplished in those pre-dubbing days by playing a recording of Marshall speaking his lines. But frankly, Murder! is a bit of a mess, filled with improbable twists. For example, Marshall's character, Sir John Menier, an eminent actor-producer, winds up on the jury even though he has a prior acquaintance with the defendant, Diana Baring. And somehow, even though he believes her to be innocent, he is bullied by the other jurors into voting guilty. He then turns detective to try to overturn the verdict. The motive for the murder is equally muddled: something to do with the fact that the murderer, who turns out to be a circus trapeze artist who performs in drag, is "half-caste" -- a secret that he is willing to kill in order to protect. But this muddle has its moments, such as the one in which the dignified Sir John spends the night in a house near the murder scene, to be awakened by the landlady (the always valuable Una O'Connor) and her gaggle of noisy kids. Better, tighter scripts were to come, but Hitchcock gives this one better than it's due.

Boyhood (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1951)

Akiko Tamura and Akira Ishihama in Boyhood

Ichiro: Akira Ishihama
Mother: Akiko Tamura
Father: Chishu Ryu
Teacher Shimomura: Renaro Mikuni
Toyo: Toshiko Kobayashi
Mrs. Yamazaki: Mutsuko Sakura
Furukawa: Takeshi Sakamoto
Headmaster: Ryuji Kita

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita, Sumie Tanaka
Based on a novel by Isoko Hatano
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

It's easy to see why Keisuke Kinoshita was one of Japan's most popular directors: He had that audience-pleasing ability to create identifiable characters and familiar situations, along with a sincere desire to make a statement about ordinary people caught up in the sweep of history. Like his Twenty-Four Eyes (1954), Boyhood is about people in wartime but not where the conflict rages most fierce -- the conflicts in Boyhood are interpersonal and internal, not international. Ichiro is a 15-year-old boy, too young to fight in the war. When his family -- mother, father, two younger brothers -- relocates to the country during the war, Ichiro chooses to stay behind in Tokyo so he can continue his studies. But the first air raid finds him on a train to see his family, and when he returns to school he finds that he has fallen behind the other students and is stigmatized for his flight. So he joins his family in the country and starts at a new school, where he is an outcast, in part because the rural people treat the refugees from the city with scorn. He also feels at odds with his father, an intellectual who tacitly disapproves of the war, and is disturbed by the fact that his mother does most of the work to keep the family fed and housed, while his father continues with his studies. Ichiro is regarded as a weakling by his fellow students, and the teachers, most of whom preach the militaristic virtues of strength and self-sacrifice, do little to help. When the lake freezes over in winter, for example, Ichiro finds that he is incapable of learning to skate, and though he makes a determined effort, he's mocked for his failure. Not as wrenchingly sentimental as Twenty-Four Eyes, Boyhood still elicits strong feeling because Kinoshita sticks with Ichiro's point of view -- his desire to fit in, his closeness to his mother, and his confusion about his father's distance from the reality of what is happening around them. At the conclusion of the film there's a measure of triumph in the defeat of militarism at the war's end, but there's also a feeling of a lack of resolution to Ichiro's story.

Julieta (Pedro Almodóvar, 2016)

Adriana Ugarte and Rossy de Palma in Julieta

Julieta Arcos: Emma Suárez
Younger Julieta: Adriana Ugarte
Xoan: Daniel Grao
Ava: Inma Cuesta
Lorenzo: Darío Grandinetti
Beatriz: Michelle Jenner
Marian: Rossy de Palma
Julieta's Mother: Susi Sánchez
Beatriz's Mother: Pilar Castro
Antía: Blanca Parés
Young Antía: Priscilla Delgado
Young Beatriz: Sara Jiménez

Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Screenplay: Pedro Almodóvar
Based on stories by Alice Munro
Cinematography: Jean-Claude Larrieu
Production design: Antxón Gómez
Music: Alberto Iglesias

Julieta is low-key for a film by Pedro Almodóvar. It has the familiar bright pops of color and the characteristic involvement in the lives of women, but it rarely surprises or startles you with either its events or outbursts from its characters. Its use of two actresses to play the same title character has been likened to Luis Buñuel's casting two actresses in the same role in That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), but Buñuel's film features two very different-looking actresses in scenes that are occurring in the same time period, a disorienting effect when Buñuel switches from one to the other. In Julieta, Emma Suárez and Adriana Ugarte play the title character at different periods in her life, and although the two actresses don't look very much alike, there's little disorientation when one takes on the role from the other. Almodóvar has said that he didn't want to mess around with old-age makeup, and he's right. As the film begins, the older Julieta is packing to move to Lisbon with Lorenzo when a chance encounter on the street with Beatriz, an old friend of her daughter, Antía, causes her to abruptly chance her mind and stay in Madrid. We learn that Julieta and Antía have been estranged for many years -- the daughter even has children that Julieta has never met. In hopes that Antía will make a move to reconciliation, Julieta even moves to an apartment in the same building in which they lived when Antía was growing up. And she begins to write the story of how she met Antía's father, Xoan, initiating a flashback in which Ugarte takes over the role of Julieta from Suárez. Like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Almodóvar has always had strong ties to the films of Douglas Sirk, with their tortured love affairs and strong, beleaguered female protagonists, and like Sirk, both filmmakers use melodrama as a vehicle for social comment, particularly on the roles of women. Julieta touches on the still-pervasive and often repressive role of religion in Spanish life, but the film isn't out to make a point about it other than incidentally. The real focus of the film is on the unraveling of the story of Julieta herself as she comes to terms with female friendships and rivalries. The men in the film, from the passionate Xoan to the almost sexless Lorenzo, are decidedly secondary, there only to stir the plot and to spur Julieta's involvement with the other women in their lives. It's a splendidly crafted movie, but it feels at the end like one that was begun without a clear destination.  

Starz

Two English Girls (François Truffaut, 1971)

Jean-Pierre Léaud and Kika Markham in Two English Girls

Claude Roc: Jean-Pierre Léaud
Ann Brown: Kika Markham
Muriel Brown: Stacy Tendeter
Mrs. Brown: Sylvia Marriott
Madame Roc: Marie Mansart
Diurka: Philippe Léotard

Director: François Truffaut
Screenplay: François Truffaut, Jean Gruault
Based on a novel by Henri-Pierre Roché
Cinematography: Néstor Almendros
Production design: Michel de Broin
Costume design: Gitt Magrini
Music: Georges Delerue

Late in his life, Henri-Pierre Roché wrote two semi-autobiographical novels about his life and romantic entanglements in the artistic circles of Paris at the turn of the 20th century. Since François Truffaut had his first great success as a director with one of them, Jules and Jim (1962), it's not surprising that he turned again to Roché for inspiration almost a decade later in Two English Girls. Both are about romantic triangles, though with a woman and two men in the first film, and a man and two women in the second. But where Jules and Jim is loose and larky, Two English Girls is slow and stately, its characters stewing in their frustrations and uncertain desires. Part of the difference may lie in the fact that the pivotal character in the first film is Jeanne Moreau and in the second film it's Jean-Pierre Léaud. Both are remarkable actors, but Moreau centers the film an element of mystery that gets diffused when Léaud becomes the protagonist, forced to deal with his attraction to two very different sisters. We know instantly why Jules and Jim are so fascinated by Moreau's Catherine, but in Two English Girls the difficulties among Claude, Ann, and Muriel, centering in large part on sexual morality, are not so provocatively drawn. So the tension among the figures in the triangle goes a little slack in Two English Girls, which at some point turns into a meditation on the differences in nationality and religion (or the lack of it). Roché's novel was titled Les deux anglaises et le continent, emphasizing the Channel-wide gap between the characters. ("The continent" is the Brown sisters' epithet for Claude, erecting a kind of geographical barrier reminiscent of the one between Henry James's Americans and Europeans.) Two English Girls is beautifully filmed by Néstor Almendros, and it has a lovely unobtrusive score by Georges Delerue (who also appears on camera in the role of Claude's business agent), but Truffaut's adaptation, relying heavily on voiceover narration, never overcomes a lack of dramatic incident inherent in the source. It takes patience and concentration to fully appreciate the intricacies of the relationships in the film.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Blackmail (Alfred Hitchcock, 1929)

Cyril Ritchard and Anny Ondra in Blackmail

Alice White: Anny Ondra, Joan Barry
Frank Webber: John Longden
Tracy: Donald Calthrop
The Artist: Cyril Ritchard
Mrs. White: Sara Allgood
Mr. White: Charles Paton
The Landlady: Hannah Jones
The Chief Inspector: Harvey Braban

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Alfred Hitchcock, Benn W. Levy
Based on a play by Charles Bennett
Cinematography: Jack E. Cox
Film editing: Emile de Ruelle
Music: Jimmy Campbell, Reginald Connelly

Anny Ondra has the distinction of having appeared in both Alfred Hitchcock's final silent film, The Manxman (1929), and his first talkie, Blackmail. Unfortunately, it was the arrival of sound that put an end to her nascent career in English-language films. Blackmail was begun as a silent movie, but not long after filming started Hitchcock got what he wanted: permission to turn it into a talkie. Which presented a problem for Ondra, who was born in a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire that is now Poland and grew up in Prague, where she was a successful stage actress, and had been unable to lose her accent. In the infancy of film sound, a satisfactory technique of dubbing another actor's voice had yet to be developed, so actress Joan Barry was hired to speak Alice White's lines off-camera as Ondra silently mouthed the words. (After Blackmail, Ondra returned to the continent and was a major star in Czech and German films; she married boxer Max Schmeling in 1933.) The tricky problem of synching Barry's voice with Ondra's performance only spurred Hitchcock to other innovative uses of sound, for example the scene in which Alice White, stunned by having stabbed her assailant to death, hears a neighbor chattering about the murder and repeating the word "knife," which becomes increasingly louder until Alice breaks down in hysterics. Hitchcock also pioneers a gag he will use again: Alice opens her mouth to scream, but in a quick cut the scream comes from the landlady who has discovered the victim's body. The cut anticipates the one in The 39 Steps (1935) in which a woman's scream becomes the shrill whistle of a locomotive. Sound was still such a novelty that a silent version of Blackmail was made for theaters still not equipped for it. And even in the sound version the first six minutes of the film, which take place in the streets where the London police "flying squad" makes an arrest, are silent except for the background music, even though we see cops talking to each other and there are plenty of opportunities for ambient sound. Some scenes also have that curious slackness of pace of early talkies, as if the directors were uncertain about how quickly audiences could assimilate spoken dialogue. But it's far more "Hitchcockian" than most of his late silent films in that he's working effectively with thriller material, including a chase through the British Museum that anticipates his later exploitation of such landmarks as the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur (1942) and Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest (1959). It also contains the longest of Hitchcock's familiar cameo appearances, as a passenger on the Underground being tormented by a small boy.

Turner Classic Movies

Germany Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, 1948)

Edmund Moeschke in Germany Year Zero

Edmund Köhler: Edmund Moeschke
Herr Köhler: Ernst Pittschau
Eva Köhler: Ingetraud Hinze
Karl-Heinz Köhler: Franz-Otto Krüger
Herr Henning: Erich Gühne

Director: Roberto Rossellini
Screenplay: Roberto Rossellini, Carlo Lizzani, Max Kolpé
Cinematography: Robert Juillard
Film editing: Eraldo Da Roma
Music: Renzo Rossellini

Roberto Rossellini's harsh, tragic vision of Germany in the immediate aftermath of World War II is suffused with an odd mixture of sentimentality and Schadenfreude. Any film that centers on the experiences of a 12-year-old boy in the ruins of Berlin is bound to be touched with sentiment, of course, but Rossellini's Edmund Köhler becomes less a real human child than the embodiment of ideas about the war, its causes, and its legacy. At the film's beginning, Edmund is seen with a kind of documentary clarity as he's fired from a job as a gravedigger because he's too young, then on his way home encounters a crowd of people hacking meat from the carcass of a horse that has apparently fallen dead in the street. Shooed away from there, he manages to scavenge a few lumps of coal that fall from a passing truck. It's when he reaches home that he becomes a figure in a fable: His family, billeted by the authorities on the reluctant owner of an apartment house, consists of an invalid father, a somewhat petulant older sister, and a brother whose refusal to register with the authorities -- he was a soldier in the Wehrmacht to the bitter end and remains convinced that the Nazis were right -- deprives them of a stipend they need to survive. His sister cadges cigarettes -- a virtual currency in the postwar barter system -- from men in nightclubs but is too proud to prostitute herself, so Edmund is the primary support of the household. This eventually puts him in the literal and figurative clutches of an unfortunately stereotypical homosexual, a former teacher of his whose pederastic tendencies are manifest in his constant fondling of the boy. The nightmarish story of what happens to Edmund is well told, but Rossellini's determination to make it a kind of Götterdämmerung of the German people, deservedly punished for their crime of bringing Hitler to power, undermines what gives the film its real strength: its documentary vision of a city and a country in ruins.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Early Hitchcock

The Ring (Alfred Hitchcock, 1927)

Ian Hunter, Carl Brisson, and Eugene Corri in The Ring

"One-Round" Jack Sander: Carl Brisson
Bob Corby: Ian Hunter
Mabel: Lillian Hall-Davis
The Promoter: Forrester Harvey
The Showman: Harry Terry
Jack's Trainer: Gordon Harker

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Alfred Hitchcock
Cinematography: Jack E. Cox

The Farmer's Wife (Alfred Hitchcock, 1928)

Lillian Hall-Davis and Jameson Thomas in The Farmer's Wife

Farmer Sweetland: Jameson Thomas
Araminta Dench: Lillian Hall-Davis
Churdles Ash: Gordon Harker
Widow Windeatt: Louie Pounds
Thirza Tapper: Maud Gill
Mary Hearn: Olga Slade
Mercy Bassett: Ruth Maitland

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Eliot Stannard
Based on a play by Eden Phillpotts
Cinematography: Jack E. Cox


The Manxman (Alfred Hitchcock, 1929)

Anny Ondra, Carl Brisson, and Malcolm Keen in The Manxman

Pete Quilliam: Carl Brisson
Philip Christian: Malcolm Keen
Kate Creegen: Anny Ondra
Caesar Creegen: Randle Ayrton
Mrs. Creegen: Clare Greet

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Eliot Stannard
Based on a novel by Hall Caine
Cinematography: Jack E. Cox

These nicely restored silent Hitchcock films don't have a lot that's "Hitchcockian" about them except his ability to tell a story visually. Even compared to his other silents like Downhill (1927) and especially The Lodger (1927), they feel a little routine. What sets them apart from his later work is the focus on working-class people: carnival workers, farmers, and fishermen. Two of them are romantic melodramas involving a love triangle, the other a comedy about a widower in search of a wife. The Ring is the liveliest, with an impressive opening sequence that establishes the carnival setting with some kinetic camerawork and introduces the hero, "One-Round" Jack Sander, a carny boxer who takes on all comers, with the promise that anyone who lasts more than one round with him wins a pound. His girlfriend, Mabel, is the ticket-taker, and our first sight of Jack in the ring comes as she pulls up a flap between her booth and the interior -- a characteristic Hitchcock point-of-view take. Hitchcock also doesn't show the fights at first, only the boastful contenders being knocked back by Jack's punches, until his real antagonist, the professional fighter Bob Corby, puts up a real fight. From there, it's a story of Jack's rise as a pro and Mabel's increasing infatuation with Corby, even after she marries Jack. This is the only film on which Hitchcock took a solo credit as screenwriter, and though it's an entirely predictable plot, it's a workable one. Carl Brisson, the handsome Danish actor who plays Jack, returns in The Manxman, which is somewhat overplotted -- it's based on a popular novel. Once again, he's on the outs in a marriage. Pete, a fisherman, loves Kate, a publican's daughter, who agrees to wait for him while he earns his fortune on an overseas voyage, but she also loves Philip, Pete's best friend, a lawyer with ambitions to become a "deemster," the name for a judge on the Isle of Man. And when a report comes that Pete has been killed, she and Philip feel free to indulge their love, though his family opposes their marriage as destructive to his ambitions -- apparently Philip's father damaged his career by marrying beneath him. When Pete turns up very much alive, he marries Kate, who is pregnant with Philip's child, whereupon much anguish ensues. Eliot Stannard wrangles the material from the Hall Caine novel into something coherent, but Hitchcock rarely seems terribly interested in it. The Farmer's Wife gives Hitchcock a chance to show off a talent for comic pacing that he rarely exhibited in his later career except in the "lighter side" moments of his thrillers and in such marginally successful comedies as Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941) and The Trouble With Harry (1955). The film opens with Farmer Sweetland's wife on her deathbed, followed shortly by the marriage of their daughter, leaving the farmer open to suggestions that he needs to take a new wife. Completely, and somewhat illogically, ignoring the pretty housekeeper, Araminta, he courts -- disastrously -- some obviously unsuitable local women before realizing that Araminta is the one for him. A hint of misogyny pervades The Farmer's Wife in the comic portrayals of the mannish Widow Windeatt, the prudish Thirza Tapper, and the hysterics-prone Mary Hearn. It could be said that a similar misogyny colors the portrayals of Mabel in The Ring and Kate in The Manxman, women who seem to have no fixity in their affections. But Hitchcock was never the most "woke" director when it came to the treatment of women in his films.

Turner Classic Movies

Love in the Afternoon (Éric Rohmer, 1972)

Bernard Verley in Love in the Afternoon

Frédéric: Bernard Verley
Chloé: Zouzou
Hélène: Françoise Verley
Gérard: Daniel Ceccaldi
Fabienne: Malvina Penne
Martine: Elisabeth Ferrier

Director: Éric Rohmer
Screenplay: Éric Rohmer
Cinematography: Néstor Almendros

Love in the Afternoon, released in the United States originally as Chloé in the Afternoon, is the last of Éric Rohmer's cycle of "Six Moral Tales," and it may be the most conventionally moralistic of them all. It's about a man, Frédéric, happily married, with one child and another on the way, who indulges in the fantasies about women in which all men indulge -- even Jimmy Carter, remember, confessed to committing lust in his heart. He's careful to avoid anything other than fantasies until an old acquaintance, Chloé, re-enters his life. Free-spirited and footloose in ways that Frédéric once remembers being, Chloé offers an enlargement of his fantasies: a dalliance that never extends to sexual intercourse -- until, of course, the day that consummation actually looms. Like most of Rohmer's "Tales," Love in the Afternoon is mostly talk -- rich, stimulating dialogue that only the philosophically loquacious French seem able to indulge in. It's a tour de force in sexual tension, with splendid performances by Bernard Verley and Zouzou -- one of those supremely French jolie laide actresses who audibly suck on their cigarettes.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel

The Element of Crime (Lars von Trier, 1984)

Michael Elphick, Me Me Lai, and Lars von Trier in The Element of Crime

Fisher: Michael Elphick
Osborne: Esmond Knight
Kim: Me Me Lai
Kramer: Jerold Wells
Therapist: Ahmed El Shenawi
Housekeeper: Astrid Henning-Jensen
Coroner: János Herskó
Coroner's Assistant: Stig Larsson
Schmuck of Ages: Lars von Trier

Director: Lars von Trier
Screenplay: Niels Vørsel, Lars von Trier
Cinematography: Tom Elling
Production design: Peter Hølmark
Music: Bo Holten

Film noir becomes film jaune. The sulfurous hues of Lars von Trier's first feature-length film were apparently achieved with the use of sodium-vapor lamps not unlike the ones used in some cities as streetlamps and parking-lot illumination to cut down light pollution. The nightmarish monochrome so pervades the film that an occasional irruption of blue light comes as a welcome relief, especially since the determined grunge of the settings gives the eye no place to rest.  The Element of Crime is, in short, an assault on our expectations that a film will involve us in either its characters or its story. It's a detective story, in which Fisher, a former police detective now living in Cairo, visits a therapist to help him in remembering his last case -- the one so disturbing that it caused him to go into exile from Europe. Under an induced trance, he returns to the scenes of the crimes committed by a serial killer who murdered and dismembered young girls who sold lottery tickets. But the Europe -- no specific country, but though everyone speaks English, the place names are German -- to which Fisher returns in the trance is not the one his conscious mind recalls: It's a trashed-out land where the sun never shines and it always seems to be raining. There is a conventional film noir plot at work throughout the movie, but von Trier is less interested in it than in crafting a sinister dreamworld. He succeeds at that exceptionally, but fails to create a film that lingers in the mind as more than a tour de force in giving you the creeps.

Filmstruck Criterion Collection

Effi Briest (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974)

Hanna Schygulla, Wolfgang Schenck, and Ulli Lommel in Effi Briest

Effi Briest: Hanna Schygulla
Instetten: Wolfgang Schenck
Major Crampas: Ulli Lommel
Frau Briest: Lilo Pempeit
Herr Briest: Herbert Steinmetz
Roswitha: Ursula Strätz
Johanna: Irm Hermann
Wüllersdorf: Karlheinz Böhm

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Based on a novel by Theodor Fontane
Cinematography: Jürgen Jürges
Art direction: Kurt Raab
Costume design: Barbara Baum

Our ideas of the movie costume drama adapted from a literary source were formed by MGM and Merchant Ivory: Lushly produced, expensively costumed, glamorously cast, but often a little askew from the original novel. So it's informative to see what a writer-director with a determinedly contemporary oeuvre that often features satiric glances at modern life comes up with when he turns his hand to adapting 19th-century literature. Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Effi Briest is based on a novel by Theodor Fontane with which most anglophones (I include myself) are unfamiliar. Instead of lush, it's spare; instead of sweepingly romantic, it's stately and slow; instead of glorious Technicolor, it's filmed in a rich and textured black-and-white. But it's also fascinating and, from all accounts, steadfastly close to the source. Fassbinder even uses dialogue and narration -- he does the voiceovers himself -- straight from the novel. Scenes often end with abrupt whiteouts that some critics liken to turning the page of a book, and there are intertitles in Fraktur, the font used in German books well into the 20th century. It's a film that demands attention -- especially because some of the dialogue and commentary were meant to be read and not spoken, so that they can sometimes feel a little oblique and stilted -- and reflection upon its themes, which center on moral rigidity and the pursuit of social status. Yet Fassbinder also makes it highly cinematic, particularly with his characteristic framing of figures in doorways and mirrors. There is, for example, a key conversation between Instetten and his friend Wüllersdorf that's glimpsed mostly in an ornate mirror with beveled mirrors in its frame, so that we get a fragmented, almost cubist take on the figures seen in it. The story is about the failure of the marriage of lively young Effi to a man who is twice her age when they wed, and her removal from a cosmopolitan household to one in a provincial backwater. The analogous stories are those found in Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, among other famous novels, but Fassbinder turns his tale of adultery into a sharp indictment of German respect for authority and class -- the time is the late 19th century, but you can clearly see the attitudes that plunged Germany into two world wars. I wouldn't recommend Effi Briest to anyone who isn't already familiar with Fassbinder's work -- it's not a film that reaches out and grabs your attention eagerly -- but I would rank it among his best.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)

Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Joel Barish: Jim Carrey
Clementine Kruczynski: Kate Winslet
Patrick: Elijah Wood
Stan: Mark Ruffalo
Mary: Kirsten Dunst
Dr. Mierzwiak: Tom Wilkinson

Director: Michel Gondry
Screenplay: Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry, Pierre Bismuth
Cinematography: Ellen Kuras
Production design: Dan Leigh
Film editing: Valdís Óskarsdóttir
Music: Jon Brion

I have a sneaky feeling that there's less to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind than meets the eye. That it is nothing more than a romantic drama tricked out with intricate storytelling devices like misleading cuts and deceptive flashbacks and an overlay of sci-fi. The story of the affair of two misfits, the morose Joel Barish and the eccentric Clementine Kruczynski, has been told before. How far, for example, are Joel and Clementine from C.C. Baxter and Fran Kubelik in Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960)? The course of true love never did run smooth, but Eternal Sunshine doubles down on that premise, putting Joel and Clementine through the bumpy paces twice, leaving us to ponder if Michel Gondry, Charlie Kaufman, et al. are telling us that their mismatched couple were meant to be together no matter what. Did Joel and Clementine split prematurely, rushing into the radical solution of erasing themselves from each other's memories, when instead if they had stuck it out they could have resolved their differences less drastically? No matter, because Eternal Sunshine is so efficiently and originally accomplished that we can overlook the conventional situation that is masked by so much cleverness. It is certainly the peak of Jim Carrey's boom-or-bust career, Kate Winslet demonstrates once again how invaluable she is as an actress, and the supporting cast is made up of top-caliber actors. I suspect that the film owes more to the fertile imagination of Charlie Kaufman, who won an Oscar for it (along with Gondry and Pierre Bismuth), and film editor Valdís Oskarsdóttir than to Gondry's direction -- he has yet to make another film as impressive as this one.

Showtime

Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937)

Pierre Fresnay and Erich von Stroheim in Grand Illusion

Maréchal: Jean Gabin
Boeldieu: Pierre Fresnay
Rauffenstein: Erich von Stroheim
Rosenthal: Marcel Dalio
Elsa: Dita Parlo
Cartier: Julien Carette
An Engineer: Gaston Modot
A Teacher: Jean Dasté

Director: Jean Renoir
Screenplay: Charles Spaak, Jean Renoir
Cinematography: Christian Matras
Production design: Eugène Lourié
Music: Joseph Kosma

I have to confess that when I first saw Grand Illusion a long, long time ago, I didn't get what the fuss was about. Why was this mildly amusing prison-escape movie considered one of the greatest films of all time? I mean, I got the general idea: That people are the same everywhere and that what divides us more than nationality is class. But where was the action? Why was there so little suspense? Why don't we get the raucous humor of Stalag 17 (Billy Wilder, 1953) or the heroics of Steve McQueen in The Great Escape (John Sturges, 1963)? All of which is to say that our expectations have been so shaped by Hollywood to the point that it's difficult for the casual filmgoer to fully appreciate the subtlety of Jean Renoir's treatment of a story about which we have so many preconceptions. The greatness of Grand Illusion consists in Renoir's understanding of people and in his cast's dedication to bringing depth to the roles they are playing. To expect Grand Illusion to give us the full Hollywood measure of laughter, thrills and tears is like expecting War and Peace to stop teaching us history and concentrate entirely on the love life of Natasha Rostova. Like a great novel, Grand Illusion is designed to be savored and reflected upon, not to be watched and swiftly forgotten. The rapport between enemies, i.e., Boeldieu and Rauffenstein, and the tension between allies, i.e., Maréchal and Rosenthal, is what the film is about, and not Boeldieu's self-sacrifice and Rauffenstein's pomposity. It's also why we don't have closure on the stories of Maréchal and Rosenthal: Do they survive the war? Does Maréchal return to Elsa? Does Rosenthal become a victim of the Nazis? It's only because they have become such real characters to us that we even feel a twinge of frustration at not knowing those things. Hence the irony of the film's title. Hollywood gave us illusions. Renoir is determined to let us see the realities behind them.

Elle (Paul Verhoeven, 2016)

Isabelle Huppert in Elle

Michèle Leblanc: Isabelle Huppert
Patrick: Laurent Lafitte
Anna: Anne Consigny
Richard Leblanc: Charles Berling
Rebecca: Virginie Efira
Irène Leblanc: Judith Magre
Robert: Christian Berkel
Vincent: Jonas Bloquet
Hélène: Vimala Pons
Ralf: Raphaël Lenglet
Kevin: Arthur Mazet
Kurt: Lucas Prisor

Director: Paul Verhoeven
Screenplay: David Birke, Harold Manning
Based on a novel by Philippe Dijan
Cinematography: Stéphane Fontaine
Production design: Laurent Ott
Music: Anne Dudley

Elle begins with Michèle Lebanc being raped by a man in a ski mask wearing black. He slugs her viciously during the act, and when he finishes, he takes her underwear and wipes himself off, then flings it at her before leaving. Michèle picks herself up and, as the audience silently cries out, "Save the evidence," sweeps up the broken glass and the underwear and dumps it in the trash. The next day she is back at work as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, working on a video game -- she owns the company along with Anna -- that features violent sex, and even urges her programmers to make it more violent. When she finally mentions the rape, in an almost off-hand manner, to her friends, she refuses their advice to go to the police. We learn that Michèle has never trusted law enforcement since she was 10 years old and her father was convicted of the mass murder of a number of children in their neighborhood. Elle is, in short, not a pleasant film, though it begins to take on the character of a thriller as we learn more about Michèle, her family, her ex-husband, and her friends. When we do find out the identity of the rapist, things become even more disturbingly odd. It takes an actress of the caliber of Isabelle Huppert to bring off a role like Michèle, and she remains the chief reason for watching this provocative, disturbing film. Paul Verhoeven has always been a director out to shock, and Elle is hardly an exception in an oeuvre that includes Basic Instinct (1992). But thanks in large part to Huppert, Elle becomes a probing character study, an exploration of the life of a woman whose moral compass was severely damaged by an intensely traumatic past. Huppert's performance, which earned her an Oscar nomination, helps lift the film above sensationalism into something with a solid psychological grounding, but if ever a film merited "trigger warnings," it's this one.

Starz

Sandakan 8 (Kei Kumai, 1974)

Kinuyo Tanaka in Sandakan 8

Keiko Mitani: Komaki Kurihara
Osaki Yamakawa: Kinuyo Tanaka
Osaki as a young woman: Yoko Takahashi
Okiku: Takiko Mizunoe
Hideo Takeuchi: Ken Tanaka

Director: Kei Kumai
Screenplay: Sakae Hirosawa, Kei Kumai
Based on a book by Tomoko Yamazaki
Cinematography: Mitsuji Kanau
Production design: Takeo Kimura
Music: Akira Ifukube

Kinuyo Tanaka was one of the world's greatest actresses, celebrated particularly for her work with Kenji Mizoguchi in The Life of Oharu (1952), Ugetsu (1953), and Sansho the Bailiff (1954), and she gives a heartbreaking performance in one of the last films she made before her death in 1977, Sandakan 8. She plays Osaki, an elderly woman who was sold into prostitution as a girl, servicing overseas Japanese in brothels in what's now Malaysia. In the film she tells her story to a young woman, Keiko Mitani, who is researching the history of the karayuki-san, women who were sent throughout the South Pacific to work as prostitutes. We see Osaki's life in flashbacks in which she's played beautifully by Yoko Takahashi. Osaki struggles at first against the life she has been forced into, but eventually gives in to the reality of her situation. Still, once the practice of selling girls for overseas prostitution is ended by the Japanese government and Osaki is able to return home, she finds herself the object of scorn. Even in old age, living in a shack on the outskirts of a town, she is looked down upon by her neighbors because of her past. When Keiko first visits her, Osaki tries to pass her off to the neighbors as her daughter-in-law from Kyoto. (After her first return to Japan, Osaki went to Manchuria, where she married and had a son. He sends her money, but his wife has never visited and seems determined to have nothing to do with her.)  Sandakan 8 tells a compelling story without excessive sentimentality or sensationalism. It drifts occasionally into clichés, as when Osaki falls in love with a shy young man who loses his virginity with her and promises to return when he's made enough money to buy her out of prostitution, but eventually he betrays her when he finds her exhausted after servicing a pack of randy sailors that has swarmed into the brothel after their ship came to port. But the rapport that develops between Osaki and Keiko is splendidly portrayed, as is Keiko's determination to make the story of the karayuki-san known in a country that would prefer to keep it an unknown episode in Japan's history.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970)

Daria Halprin in Zabriskie Point

Mark: Mark Frechette
Daria: Daria Halprin
Lee Allen: Rod Taylor
Cafe Owner: Paul Fix
Lee's Associate: G.D. Spradlin
Morty: Bill Garaway
Kathleen: Kathleen Cleaver

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Screenplay: Michelangelo Antonioni, Franco Rossetti, Sam Shepard, Tonino Guerra, Clare Peploe
Cinematography: Alfio Contini
Production design: Dean Tavoularis
Music: Jerry Garcia, Pink Floyd

It sometimes seems as if every bad movie eventually finds an audience, even if only as fodder for wisecracks on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Makers of bad movies even have movies made about them, like Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994) or James Franco's The Disaster Artist, his upcoming film about Tommy Wiseau, the auteur of The Room (2003), a film whose badness turned it into a cult movie. Things get a little more complicated when the filmmaker is a director of the stature of Michelangelo Antonioni. Zabriskie Point is certainly a bad movie by any usual standards of plot or performance. Its endorsement of the revolutionary fervor of the young felt naive at the time and now seems at best simplistic. It was a critical and commercial flop: Roger Ebert called it "silly and stupid," and it banked only $900,000, against a cost of $7 million, on its initial theatrical run. But like another major flop, Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980), it has been the subject of a continuing reassessment, attracting defenders and even a small coterie -- not to say cult -- of admirers, especially for its ending: a spectacular demolition of a desert house, with interpolated shots of the contents of a refrigerator and a closet being lofted in the air in slow motion. The fact remains, however, that Zabriskie Point really has nothing to say except that capitalist consumerism is bad and being young is good -- especially if you're hot. Neither point is made subtly and persuasively. The most glaring weakness is in the casting of its two young leads, Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin, who give almost hilariously inept performances as lovers drawn together in their rebellion. We never learn, for example, why Daria becomes so destructively disillusioned with her boss, real estate developer Lee Allen, that she imagines the cataclysm that ends the movie. It seems to have been inspired by her improbable encounter with Mark, who has stolen a small plane and, seeing her driving far below, decides to buzz her automobile. When he lands and they meet, they wander out into the desert, where they have sex. Their coupling is multiplied by a fantasy sequence of perhaps a score of couples rolling around in the dust. Incredible as the meeting of Mark and Daria is, it's perhaps more incredible that Antonioni, who had worked with actors of the caliber of Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, Alain Delon, and Monica Vitti, should have found anything to work with in Frechette and Halprin, whose lack of affect and stilted delivery verge on the ludicrous. Still, the film always gives us something to look at. Cinematographer Alfio Contini has an especially keen eye for the absurd and ugly jumble of billboards and signs that clutter Los Angeles, but he's equally skilled at capturing the beauty of Death Valley and the high desert in Arizona. Too bad that the visuals only serve to reinforce the banal contrast between civilization's corruption and nature's purity.

Turner Classic Movies

Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002)

Jason Franklin, Bette Henritze, and Julianne Moore in Far From Heaven

Cathy Whitaker: Julianne Moore
Frank Whitaker: Dennis Quaid
Raymond Deagan: Dennis Haysbert
Eleanor Fine: Patricia Clarkson
Dr. Bowman: James Rebhorn
Sibyl: Viola Davis
Mona Lauder: Celia Weston

Director: Todd Haynes
Screenplay: Todd Haynes
Cinematography: Edward Lachman
Production design: Mark Friedberg
Music: Elmer Bernstein
Costume design: Sandy Powell

Homage never turns into parody in Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven, a film whose very title alludes to Douglas Sirk's great 1955 melodrama All That Heaven Allows. Haynes's film is set in 1957, only two years after Sirk's was released, but the sensibility that controls it is very much of an era almost half a century later. Haynes has the liberty to deal with matters that were taboo for American filmmakers in 1955, specifically miscegenation and homosexuality -- two terms that now have an antique sound to them. But his film has the same resonance as Sirk's: Both expose the raw wounds inflicted on people by social conventions, by the desire to "fit in" with what a given community establishes as its values. We like to think of the 1950s as the nadir of American conformity, a society on the brink of having its repressive qualities exploded by the rebellious 1960s, but although Haynes's film is a "period piece," I think it also provokes us to evaluate what restricts us today. We can pat ourselves on the back that we -- or at least the liberal-minded people in the circles in which I travel -- no longer recoil in horror at an interracial couple or find ourselves shocked, shocked that there are people who love others of their own sex. But just as Cathy Whitaker and her circle of friends retreat into an exclusive community, we too often find ourselves falling into a similar trap of smug self-righteousness that won't withstand the cold shock of reality -- like, for example, a presidential election gone awry. Cathy's blithe intellectualized conviction that all people are created equal is tested when she crosses the invisible line between the races. Her frustration at not being able to have a friendship with a black man -- i.e., someone other than the dull suburbanites that surround her -- is mirrored by her husband's inability to make his way out of the closet. But Cathy naively thinks that there's a "cure" for his problem, making it a lesser trial than her own, which she can blame on society. In the end, the beauty of Haynes's film is that he never yields to the temptation to impose a false liberation on his characters, an ending in which everyone lives happily ever after. Cathy sees Raymond off at the station, knowing that she'll never visit him in Baltimore. Frank is holed up in a hotel room with his lover instead of his spacious suburban home, his family life and probably his job now at an end. They are real enough characters that we want to know what will happen to them, but we suspect that there are no stirring triumphs ahead, only a struggle to rebuild damaged lives. Haynes and his team of cinematographer Edward Lachman, production designer Mark Friedman, costumer Sandy Powell, and composer Elmer Bernstein have crafted a 1950s world that's familiar to us from countless movies, but because of the shrewdness of the screenplay, the depth of the characterization, and the brilliance of the performers the film succeeds in making it real. There are stereotypes in the film, like Celia Weston's malicious gossip, but they are balanced by roles that could have fallen too easily into stereotypes -- Patricia Clarkson's best friend, James Rebhorn's doctor, Viola Davis's maid -- yet manage to develop dimensions of actuality. Far From Heaven also does something that very few films inspired by older ones do: It illuminates its source, so that it's possible to watch All That Heaven Allows again with a new understanding of Sirk's achievement.

Starz

Marcel Pagnol's Marseille Trilogy (1931, 1932, 1936)

Marius (Alexander Korda, 1931)

Raimu and Pierre Fresnay in Marius

César Olivier: Raimu
Marius: Pierre Fresnay
Honoré Panisse: Fernand Charpin
Fanny: Orane Demazis
Honorine Cabanis: Alida Rouffe
Félix Escartefigue: Paul Dullac
Albert Brun: Robert Vattier
Piquoiseau: Alexandre Mihalesco

Director: Alexander Korda
Screenplay: Marcel Pagnol
Based on a play by Marcel Pagnol
Cinematography: Theodore J. Pahle
Art direction: Alfred Junge, Vincent Korda

Fanny (Marc Allegret, 1932)

Fernand Charpin, Raimu, Pierre Fresnay, and Orane Demazis in Fanny

Cast identical to Marius, except:

Félix Escartefigue: Auguste Mouriès
Aunt Claudine: Milly Mathis
Elzéar: Louis Boulle
Dr. Venelle: Édouard Delmont

Director: Marc Allegret
Screenplay: Marcel Pagnol
Based on a play by Marcel Pagnol
Cinematography: Nikolai Toporkoff
Production design: Gabriel Scognamillo
Music: Vincent Scotto

César (Marcel Pagnol, 1936)

André Fouché and Raimu in César

Cast identical to Fanny, except:

Césariot: André Fouché
Félix Escartefigue: Paul Dullac
Innocent Mangiapan: Marcel Maupin
Elzéar: Thommeray
Pierre Dromard: Robert Bassac
Fernand: Doumel

Director: Marcel Pagnol
Screenplay: Marcel Pagnol
Cinematography: Willy Faktorovitch, Grischa, Roger Ledru

Critics of the auteur theory -- that the director is the true "author" of a film -- point to Marcel Pagnol's Marseille trilogy as a glowing exception: It's the writer's characters and dialogue that carry all three films, even when Pagnol himself is the credited director, as he is in the third film, César. This amounts to nitpicking, I fear. Pagnol was on hand for all three films, even when they were nominally being directed by Alexander Korda and Marc Allegret (neither of them inconsiderable directors), and by all accounts Pagnol was not at all silent about making his opinions known. He had been an early enthusiast of the talkies, and immediately saw that his plays, Marius and Fanny, were naturals for the screen. What better way to sweeten his stories about life in Marseille than by opening them out with visuals of the actual waterfront? But for Pagnol, the words and the sounds came first: It's said that he would turn his back as a scene was being shot, and would only give his approval when what he heard sounded right. That presupposed, of course, a cast capable of making the words work, which meant starting with the original César, the actor known only as Raimu (Jules Auguste Muraire), and the original Panisse, Fernand Charpin, both of them born in the neighborhood of Marseille. The Marius, Pierre Fresnay, and the Fanny, Orane Demazis, had to be coached in the dialect, but most of the rest of the cast were from the south of France. The dialect is lost on us subtitle-dependent Anglophones, but it seems to have been one of the reasons that all of France took the trilogy to heart, relishing this slice of provincial life even in Paris. And it is a glorious trio of movies still, rich with comic performances, dominated of course by Raimu as the blustering, sentimental César. It's hard to find a performer to compare with Raimu, but the one that comes to my mind is Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden, certain of himself and capable of explosions that go off with lots of noise and very little actual damage. Raimu, Charpin, and the actors that form their little circle -- best seen when playing cards, as in the classic game in Marius -- are a superb ensemble. There is some controversy over Demazis as Fanny -- the actress is described in one source as "pudding faced," and if you're expecting a gamine type like Leslie Caron, who played the part in the 1961 Fanny directed by Joshua Logan, you'll be disappointed. But I don't mind Demazis at all. While it's hard to think of her as the most beautiful girl in Marseille, she has the ability to pull off the more melodramatic scenes -- admittedly the weakest moments in the trilogy -- with real feeling. Pierre Fresnay is a touch too old in Marius and Fanny, but he comes into his own in César, when the character is closest to his actual age. But what makes it work are the ebullient characters and the splendid comic timing of the performers.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Fear of Fear (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975)

Margit Carstensen in Fear of Fear

Margot: Margit Carstensen
Kurt: Ulrich Faulhaber
Mother: Brigitte Mira
Lore: Irm Hermann
Karli: Armin Meier
Dr. Merck: Adrian Hoven
Mr. Bauer: Kurt Raab

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Cinematography: Jürgen Jürges
Design director: Kurt Raab
Music: Peer Raben

As the title of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film suggests, the protagonist, Margot, is stuck in a kind of emotional feedback loop: Her anxiety is exacerbated by the fear that she'll have another anxiety attack. As a sufferer of free-floating anxiety myself, I know the problem: Your inability to control fears that you know to be absurd undermines your sense of self, thereby arousing more fears. Fear of Fear, made for German television, is not an entirely satisfactory portrait of the problem: Fassbinder loads too much against Margot. Beautiful, model-thin, she's married to a loving but homely schlub, who is so preoccupied with passing an examination that he tends to shut her out. Moreover, they live in the same house as her mother-in-law, a homely woman who resents Margot's beauty, and constantly rates her for laziness, for neglecting her children, for not cooking wholesome meals for her family, and the criticism is only echoed by Margot's sister-in-law, Lore. Brigitte Mira and Irm Hermann bring these Dickensian harpies to full life, but the element of caricature in the conception of the roles, though it adds a splash of needed dark humor, tends to undermine one's sense of Margot's plight as a real-world experience. Margot tries to escape from her ills into exercise, but she even gets criticized for swimming too much. So the other avenues of escape follow: Valium, alcohol (she guzzles cognac straight from the bottle), and sex. She begins sleeping with the handsome pharmacist across the way, partly to thank him for illegally refilling her Valium prescription when she runs out. Naturally, her dalliance is discovered, and Lore's husband, Karli, even tries to make a move on her. Finally, after being misdiagnosed as schizophrenic, she goes to a mental institution where she's treated for depression. Seemingly cured, she returns home, but the film ends on a doubtful note: After learning that the strange man who stares at her and her daughter on their way home from kindergarten has committed suicide, she once again experiences an anxiety attack, which throughout the film Fassbinder has shown from Margot's point of view as a kind of rippling in the image. Margit Carstensen's performance carries the film, with the help of Fassbinder's shrewd direction, filming scenes through doorways and in mirror frames to suggest Margot's entrapment.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Gaslight (Thorold Dickinson, 1940)

Diana Wynyard and Anton Walbrook in Gaslight

Paul Mallen: Anton Walbrook
Bella Mallen: Diana Wynyard
Rough: Frank Pettingell
Nancy: Cathleen Cordell
Ullswater: Robert Newton
Cobb: Jimmy Hanley
Elizabeth: Minnie Rayner

Director: Thorold Dickinson
Screenplay: A.R. Rawlinson, Bridget Boland
Based on a play by Patrick Hamilton
Cinematography: Bernard Knowles
Music: Richard Addinsell

One of the more famous crimes of MGM was its attempt to destroy the negative and all existing prints of Thorold Dickinson's 1940 version of Gaslight in order to avoid any comparisons between it and the 1944 remake directed by George Cukor. It failed somehow, and the two versions can now be seen back to back. The 1944 film is superb entertainment, winning an Oscar for Ingrid Bergman and showcasing Charles Boyer to very good effect. By its side, Dickinson's version can feel a little undernourished -- or is it just that the later version is overfed, fattened up by Hollywood largesse? I feel very kindly toward the earlier film, which doesn't attempt to disguise the fact that it's sheer melodrama with backstories that try to add psychological realism. All we really need to do is accept the film's Victorian subtext and to know is that Paul Mallen is a foreigner and that his wife, Bella, grew up breathing the pure air of the English countryside to see whose side the film is on. Just the way the Viennese-born Anton Walbrook smooths his mustache is enough to let us know he's a rotter. And was anyone more born to play the gaslighted victim than Diana Wynyard who, with her slight strabismus and her habit of staring into the distance, seems to be seeing things that no one else can? The 84-minute run time sets everything up efficiently and moves steadily through some truly suspenseful moments to its tables-turned conclusion. The 1944 remake runs half an hour longer and while its performances may be more elaborate (and in the case of the teenage Angela Lansbury's conniving maid, superior), Thorold's version keeps us nicely tantalized. The casting of Robert Newton as Bella's cousin is amusing, considering that Newton would go on to make his name as an actor with the terrifying Bill Sikes in David Lean's Oliver Twist (1948). Those of us who saw that film first may suspect that he's up to no good in Gaslight, but we'd be wrong.

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Suspicion (Alfred Hitchcock, 1941)

Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine in Suspicion

Lina McLaidlaw Aysgarth: Joan Fontaine
Johnnie Aysgarth: Cary Grant
General McLaidlaw: Cedric Hardwicke
Mrs. McLaidlaw: May Whitty
Beaky Thwaite: Nigel Bruce
Mrs. Newsham: Isabel Jeans
Ethel: Heather Angel
Captain Melbeck: Leo G. Carroll

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Samson Raphaelson, Joan Harrison, Alma Reville
Based on a novel by Anthony Berkeley as Francis Iles
Cinematography: Harry Stradling Sr.
Music: Franz Waxman

"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you," as Joseph Heller put it in Catch-22. Considering how many plots of Alfred Hitchcock's films are variations on that theme, he might well have had the phrase posted on his office wall. Suspicion is one of the purest explorations of that premise: A woman thinks her handsome rotter of a husband is out to murder her, and the evidence keeps piling up up that she's right. Of course, she isn't, but it takes an hour and 39 minutes to reach that rather anticlimactic conclusion. Suspicion was Hitchcock's fourth American film, and it shows that he was still getting used to working in a rather different studio system than the one he had in England. After the micromanaging of David O. Selznick on his first, Rebecca (1940), he had a comparatively easier time with producer Walter Wanger on Foreign Correspondent (1940) except for the difficulty of making a film about impending war in Europe while the United States was still officially neutral -- so the bad guys could never be explicitly identified as Nazis, for example. But his third film, Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941), his first set in the United States, was a dud, in large part because Hitchcock had yet to master American idiom: The prissy character played by Gene Raymond, for example, was supposed to have been the best fullback at the University of Alabama. I doubt that Hitchcock knew what a fullback was, let alone one from Alabama. So for Suspicion he retreated to familiar territory, England at a time when there wasn't a war going on, and some actors he had worked with before: Joan Fontaine, Nigel Bruce, and Leo G. Carroll from Rebecca, as well as May Whitty, who had starred in The Lady Vanishes (1938). The chief newcomer was Cary Grant, who would become, along with James Stewart, one of Hitchcock's most reliable leading men. But Grant's presence in the film presented its own problems: He was known as a charming actor in romantic comedy. Would an audience accept Grant as a potential murderer? One story, reportedly verified by Hitchcock himself, holds that the studio, RKO, didn't want to mar Grant's image and insisted on a change from the novel's original ending, in which Johnnie Aysgarth really is guilty. Biographers, however, have disputed that story, claiming that Hitchcock really wanted to focus on Lina's paranoia and not on Johnnie's villainy. In any case, the film's ending feels wrong, mostly because it resolves nothing: Is Johnnie's fecklessness really curable? The chief problem is that Lina herself is an unfocused character, improbably wavering between shyness and passion, between common sense and paranoia, between tough determination and a tendency to faint. Fontaine did what she could with the part, and won an Oscar for her pains, but the film really belongs to Grant. Hitchcock was the one director who could really bring out Grant's dark side.* He did it more brilliantly in Notorious (1946), but in Suspicion Hitchcock effectively exploits Grant's ability to turn on a subtle, cold-eyed menace.

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*A possible exception to this statement is George Cukor, who first explored the "other" Cary Grant as the Cockney con-man in Sylvia Scarlett (1935).