#266: The King of Kings

(Cecil B. DeMille, 1927)

I mean, look. You aren't coming here to hear about Jesus, and this movie was all a little much for me. If you ask me to pull out a Jesus movie to watch, like any good athiest I'm going to pick The Last Temptation of Christ 99 out of 100 times. The other time I'll watch the South Park where Jesus and Santa team up in an action spectacular. The King of Kings had no better chance of being my kind of movie than The Magic Flute did - it's not the quality of the film but the very reason for its existence that eliminates my interest.

That said, The King of Kings is really quite the spectacle. I think there might be more people in this movie than there are in Heaven's Gate, which I actually thought was impossible. Watching a movie like this reminds you what a joke big crowd scenes are in movies today, where they take one dude and replicate him 500,000 times so people think they got a bunch of people to be in the movie. Yeah, I get it, it's not supposed to be about the scope of the production, it's about the scope of the story. But still, when you are paying upwards of 10 cents for your ticket, you want to know they shelled out the stops and pulled out all the big bucks.

There's definitely some cool stuff here, and I hate to imply that the movie is worthless, because it's not. I do wonder, however, how different this movie really is from something like, say, Armageddon, other than that it came first. Other than the Jesus stuff (which really isn't that different from the America stuff) it's mostly just big spectacle and special effects, right? The Jesus stuff isn't that big of a deal, is it?

#256: A Constant Forge

(Charles Kiselyak, 2000)

My Metier, the absorbing documentary covering Carl Th. Dreyer's career, was a little over an hour and a half long. A Constant Forge, covering John Cassavetes's "life and art," is more than twice that length at a full 200 minutes. Although they both made about the same amount of movies, I will admit that the core of Dreyer's career (the films he made from The Passion of Joan of Arc on) consisted of only six movies, while 10 of the 12 films Cassavetes made are considered the meat of his work. But still, even after accounting for Cassavetes's huge position in American independent filmmaking, Dreyer is undoubtedly the more dominant figure in film.

So what necessitates this enormous length, a length longer than any of the director's own films? Not much, in my opinion, other than the desire to cram as much of each interview Kiselyak got into the film. While I appreciate the structure of the documentary, which largely eschews a straight chronological telling of his career, the technique is still extremely conventional, with an assortment of talking heads, clips from his work, various production photos, and only the occasional video footage of Cassavetes working. There is also a voice over of an actor reading Cassavetes's own words. All this makes the movie a Cassavetes-fan-only release, and the full three and a half hours was not easy for me to get through.

Having said that, everything that is covered in the documentary is interesting and insightful with regards to both filmmaking in general and acting specifically (which can also be said of Cassavetes's work itself). And, really, if you're buying a five disc set of Cassavetes's core films, you are pretty much guaranteed to find this documentary to be a valuable addition to the set. So while someone like me - an admirer of Cassavetes who lacks an emotional connection to his films - would find this to be an overlong film with mild appeal, its inclusion in the set is a big plus for anyone who wants to go deeper into the work of one of the major cult figures in American cinema.

#258: Tanner '88

(Robert Altman, 1988)

One of the few TV series in the Collection, Tanner '88 is a grand experiment. It's also one of the earliest triumphs for HBO, which would go on to revolutionize the medium. Created on the fly by Doonesbury strip writer Garry Trudeau, the series tracks Jack Tanner, a fictional congressman played by the pitch-perfect Michael Murphy, in his quest to become the Democratic nominee for president in 1988. The hook? Tanner isn't running against made up opponents - he's trying to take down Jesse Jackson and Michael Dukakis, the eventual real nominee. Even more interestingly, he's doing it in real time, following the actual primary process as it unfolds rather than looking back on a race long since run.

This premise happens to fit perfectly with both Trudeau's and Altman's respective styles. Trudeau, of course, has made a career out of torn-from-the-headlines subject matter tweaked into subtle satire. In a conversation with Altman on the DVD, Trudeau explains that he suggested Altman to HBO for the project because he assumed they couldn't get him, thereby allowing him to pass and move on to his other obligations. If true, it's a happy coincidence, because Altman's improvisational style, built on multi-layered conversations, documentary-style camera techniques, and naturalistic performances, was not just perfect for the subject matter but perhaps even essential. It allowed Trudeau to build loose scenes and a broad structure for each episode without causing the whole series to collapse. Altman's sly, cynical eye (especially on display a few years later in my favorite film of his, The Player) builds on Trudeau's ironic themes and organic humor with similar efficiency, making the message of the series deeply relevant beyond the contemporary political climate.

The influence of the series is clear both in terms of subject and style. Obviously, Aaron Sorkin was a fan of the series - the core characters of The West Wing share a fatalistic dedication to their mission, and is there any chance it's just a coincidence that Martin Sheen's chief of staff character in The American President was named A.J.? But perhaps more notably, the reality-style, off-the-cuff tone and look of the series has become ubiquitous, as have the various appearances of politicians playing themselves and politics woven into entertainment and media narratives. The story arc is similarly recognizable for its slow burn, novel-style pacing. As with modern masterpieces like The Wire and Breaking Bad, Tanner '88 doesn't really get going for a few episodes, putting off conventionally desirable goals for a television series like hooking a viewer within the first ten minutes, allowing for character introductions, or front-loading major plot developments to keep the audience engaged. We certainly have Altman to thank for this, but HBO's confidence - or at least willingness - to go there with him is an early indication of just how the mindset of one network transformed television in the decade and a half to come.

There are a wide number of reasons why Criterion hasn't selected more TV shows for inclusion. Obviously, Criterion is not in the business of releasing multiple seasons, so any more conventionally successful show is out (it doesn't hurt that these "successful" shows would probably be impossible to license). Similarly, while there were quirky or complex shows in the fifty years of broadcast television prior to The Larry Sanders Show and The Sopranos, the last twenty years have seen probably the vast majority of the greatest television series of all time, from the British Office and Arrested Development to Mad Men and Deadwood (not to mention the four shows mentioned above). This explosion has of course coincided with the popularity of DVD, where virtually every show - whether it runs for 20 seasons like The Simpsons or 12 episodes like Wonderfalls - gains immortality through wide release.

But I think the real reason there are so few TV shows in the Collection is that, well, it's a "continuing series of classic and contemporary films." Although Fishing with John might not be the most cinematic show of all time, there seems to be a certain connection to the film world, whether through guest appearances, tone, or the strange cult following the show has amassed. The other three big television offerings in the collection are two miniseries from Ingmar Bergman (each an unqualified masterpiece whose inclusion is self-explanatory) and a huge boxset (that, knowing what a beast it will be, I have yet to dig into) called The Golden Age of Television. This title rings not just untrue to me (the golden age? we're living in it!) but also somewhat ironic since the boxset isn't really TV as we know it, but rather films that happened to have been made for television. Tanner '88, despite its episodic structure and topical story developments that would not have worked for film, seems to have one foot in the theater, too. Along with having Robert Altman at the helm (this is one of four Altman inclusions in the Collection, all released in close proximity in the 200s) the show's one-off nature, unique (for television) tone, and performances that feel much more theatrical than what was being put on the air in 1988 all lend it a feeling more akin to an experiment in cinema than to the conventional television show.

I don't offer up these reasons to argue why Tanner '88 is deserving of inclusion more than other shows, but rather to try to get at the reasons why it might be included - thereby opening up the potential for more television shows - when no shows have since received similar attention. Again, I think the format and rights issues at the center Criterion's decisions about release are most important in this regard, but it does make for a giant hole in the Collection. Certainly if any show should be included, Tanner '88 is deserving. But opening up the gates for TV as potentially eligible - and then offering such a small selection - gives the impression that the medium has less to offer than is actually the case. This is not Tanner '88's fault, I just thought it was worth pointing out.

#272: La commare secca

(Bernardo Bertolucci, 1962)

I'm not especially familiar with Bertolucci's storied career, having only seen Last Tango in Paris, The Last Emperor, and a handful of his more recent, less impressive films. With only this cursory familiarity with his work, La Commare Secca feels like an unusual debut, more indicative of Pasolini - who is credited with the story upon which the screenplay was based - than of Bertolucci himself. However, when you consider that Bertolucci was only 22 when he made this directorial debut (22!), it's less surprising that he had yet to establish a thematic or technical identity - and the film can certainly be appreciated on its own as a moderately enjoyable Rashomon-style mystery.

La Commare Secca revolves around the death of a prostitute, seen in the opening moments of the film as her body lies motionless in a park. The plot is a familiar one: the police interview suspects, who recount their story in flashbacks, leading the investigation from person to person and eventually circling back to the guilty party. None of the stories are especially different from the others in terms of facts, so the film is less about the arbitrary nature of perspective or the difficulty in arriving at one truth (as films of this nature so often are) and more straightforwardly thrust towards the final solution to the mystery in the style of a CBS procedural.

The movie can seem quite conventional when focusing exclusively on the plot or the story in 2011, but Bertolucci's exuberance and talent make the film oddly visually striking. I have to assume Gaspar Noe has seen and loved La Commare Secca, as the film certainly reads as a precursor to the reckless and much less graceful Irreversible. There are also nice touches that show a director interested not so much in narrative pull but in pacing and cinematic evocation, most notably the moments during the rain shower that links the stories together in which each narrator takes shelter from the storm. La Commare Secca is one of the less impressive films in the Collection when viewed as a standalone work, but like many other selections of a similar nature, it seems to have been included because it points a way forward for a budding talent of memorable stature.

#269: Fighting Elegy

(Seijan Suzuki, 1966)

I love Suzuki's work for the most part, but Fighting Elegy left me cold. The basic satirical premise - that sexual frustration begets fascist violence - is neither especially convincing nor funny to me. So instead of viewing the film as an amusing and insightful look at the pre-WWII environment in Japan, I was annoyed by the main character and dissatisfied with the film's take on his actions.

One surprising aspect of my reaction to this film was how highly I regarded Crazed Fruit, the similarly sexually charged (but less politically focused) Japanese offering from a decade before. I tend to feel this is an issue of cultural recognition. Crazed Fruit is totally recognizable, easily comparable to similar films from American cinema (A Place in the Sun and Rebel Without a Cause come to mind immediately). It clearly displays a sense of the new, a major breakthrough in taboos that Fighting Elegy isn't afforded. The  protagonists in the film have similar concerns and exhibit similar social deficiencies, but Fighting Elegy doesn't allow for sympathy towards or an ability to relate with its main character because of the satirical bent. It's difficult to find a way in because of this when you are less familiar with a situation, where a movie might speak volumes to a similar person already invested in the culture.

#264: The Making of Fanny and Alexander

(Ingmar Bergman, 1982)

The Making of Fanny and Alexander was the first of two feature-length documentaries I watched to round out my mini Bergman fest. Included as a supplement in the Fanny and Alexander boxset (but nevertheless given a spine number due to its length), the documentary is an interesting look behind the scenes at Bergman's last masterpiece, but it's by no means a standalone piece.

The documentary is arranged as vignettes that run through the entire course of filming, broken up only by cards written by Bergman which set up each sequence (and/or make witty little asides). The result is a sparse aesthetic and a gentle hand behind the camera and in the editing room which makes for a good document but not much of a documentary. Worth viewing only for true fans of Bergman and Fanny and Alexander.

#262: Fanny and Alexander (TV Version)

(Ingmar Bergman, 1982)

Watching this four-and-a-half-hour masterpiece, I was reminded of one of the great tragedies of cinema, the (as far as we know) complete destruction of Orson Welles's original cut of The Magnificent Ambersons. The surviving 90-minute version of the follow-up to Citizen Kane is still one of the great films of the 40s, and inevitably what had been done with the original cut would have been even more impressive.

Welles had complete artistic freedom when he made The Greatest Film of All Time, but the rest of his career basically consisted of him being shit on by everyone in the industry. Bergman had a much more conventional experience for a master director, so thankfully, by the time his swan song rolled around, he had been given free rein on his films for decades. This allowed him to create both a three-hour theatrical version of the film (which won Best Foreign Film, Bergman's third) and this full-length version. Based on the cuts described, I can't fathom preferring the shorter edition of the film, as some of the cuts seem to sink to the core of the film's strengths.

The movie itself is ridiculously confident, touching upon nearly all of Bergman's most recognizable themes. But it's also Bergman's warmest and most nostalgic movie, reflecting fondly upon a simulacrum of his childhood. There are certainly dark, even harrowing, moments, most notably the scene of Emilie wailing in the night after the death of her husband and the riveting scene of the showdown between Alexander and the bishop. But they are countered with the joyous banquets that bookend the film and a sense of mystery and playfulness that shines with the love of film, which is to say the love of entertainment, discovery, trickery.

I thought of The Magician, Smiles of a Summer Night, Winter Light, The Silence, Wild Strawberries, and The Seventh Seal while watching Fanny and Alexander, and I'm sure subsequent viewings would add to that list. Plenty of people have recognized or posited that the film is a sort of autobiography of Bergman, but when they say that they are often speaking of the director's childhood. Clearly there are moments that confirm this, but I think the film is far more relevant to his later years, the years of his career as a filmmaker. It makes for a rare opportunity to experience the summation of a great career within a compelling and memorable story that stands on its own.

#255: Opening Night

(John Cassavetes, 1976)

Opening Night is the last Cassavetes film in the Criterion boxset John Cassavetes: Five Films, both chronologically and for me personally. The five films, Shadows, Faces, A Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Opening Night, are also the only Cassavetes films I've seen (though I did see most of Gloria a long time ago but remember little of it). Within the group, A Woman Under the Influence is the only one I really loved and this final one, Opening Night, is my least favorite.

Without any of the crackling energy of Shadows or Faces and none of the dramatic resonance of A Woman Under the Influence or The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Opening Night felt extremely dull. It didn't help that the movie was about the stage (which, as I've discussed before, holds little interest for me), but what really got to me was the trademark Cassavetes looseness of the tone and dialog. Certainly the director that has most carried the Cassavetes torch since his passing is Mike Leigh, another actor's director who turns intense rehearsal and improvisation into tight literary works that operate as a kind of technical exploration of personal interaction. It shouldn't come as much surprise to hear that I'm not much of a fan of Leigh's either.

One thing I want to get on this blog is some opening thoughts on a dismissal of either a great film or a great director. Obviously in this specific case I don't think Cassavetes is a bad director, I don't even think that people who love his films are wrong. They simply do not have any kind of significant impact on me, and his style rubs me the wrong way. I think there is a big difference between this perspective and tearing down someone's work in the way that I believe, say, Lars Von Trier's films deserve. Honestly, with a director like Cassavetes, I would much rather stay silent on his work, simply because I don't feel like I bring anything to the table since his films didn't engage me, and I certainly wouldn't write on them if it wasn't for the format of this blog.

I think this tends to be a big problem in film criticism, where new work must be reviewed regardless of the impact (or lack thereof) it had on the writer. This makes for a lot of mediocre work that sometimes dismisses films that deserve a closer look and praises films that should have a sharper critical eye taken to them. The former is the true tragedy, and I think emphasizes the responsibility of critics as cultural gatekeepers (though really in this age of technology overload more as cultural quality control). Just because a work doesn't move you is no reason to dismiss it. But it's also not a reason to discount your own personal experience with the work. Genuine art - as opposed to commercial skill-based product masquerading as art - must always demand respect, but it does not demand appreciation. John Cassavetes spent his entire life struggling to navigate a difficult studio system and the trials of raising the enormous sums of money necessary to produce films because he deeply believed in the work he was producing. While none of this separates him from Ed Wood, the fact that his work isn't merely about making films for the sake of films, but about examining the human condition makes his work worth examining, and his technical skill sets him apart. What this means is that my word, like the word I have given on every film on this blog, is by no means meant as a definitive look at a film or his work, but as a personal response meant as a soundboard for both readers and myself as I look back on these thoughts. Just as reviewing L'Avventura gave me a new perspective on the film that greatly improved my opinion of it, twenty years from now I may feel very differently about Cassavetes. Considering how well made his films are, I wouldn't be surprised.

#254: The Killing of a Chinese Bookie

(John Cassavetes, 1976)

I rather enjoyed The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, but I watched it on Netflix, and for some reason they decided to include the 108-minute version instead of the original 135-minute version. I don't know if those extra 27 minutes would have turned this film from good to great, but it didn't quite make me want to go back and find out (if someone really thinks it's worth it, speak now). This was obviously an experiment on the part of Cassavetes, attempting to insert his style and approach into a conventional gangster story. Deep down, I was kind of hoping the movie would reference some of the great French impressionist gangster masterpieces, but I didn't actually expect that to happen. The movie ends up being for more Cassavetes than Melville, which inevitably has its pluses and minuses.

The big plus is undoubtedly Ben Gazzara, who is understated, deceptively deep, and ultimately heart-wrenching as the club owner forced to murder in order to resolve his debts. He reminded me very much of Philip Baker Hall's broken man in Paul Thomas Anderson's Hard Eight aka Sydney, and both performances transcend their respective films as a whole.

The movie itself reminded me of two movies. The first is Donnie Brasco, Mike Newell's seemingly forgotten portrait of the mafia underclass. It's easy to look at the films that are produced about nightclub owners, organized crime, and hitmen and decide that it's a glamorous world ruled by men who know what they are doing and live the good life doing it. It's movies like this which take you beneath that myth and explore the people who attempt to live this way, but aren't able to actually succeed. Gazzara is broken in the film long before his debts are called in, long before he is forced to do something that is against his best instincts. His whole life, as he basically explains in his final monologue, revolves around pretending to be someone else, performing for the crowd. It's just unclear whether that crowd is the people around him or the audience.

The second film is a Criterion film and a masterpiece of crime cinema, The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Like Gazzara and Hall (and Pacino) Robert Mitchum is struggling to make ends meet as a member of the "glamorous" underworld. But The Friends of Eddie Coyle, certainly a precursor to the greatest television show of all time, The Wire, is all about reflecting reality, intertwining so many people and their motivations that the story is no longer so cut and dry, and the viewer is left with an empty feeling that the system is ready to choke down and spit up anyone that's no longer useful. With this in mind, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is no more realistic than the gangster movies to which it is a counterpoint. That doesn't make it a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination, it just means that time has somewhat passed it by, whereas Eddie Coyle, made three years earlier, feels fresher than ever.

#270: Casque d'Or

(Jacques Becker, 1952)

Although Becker had made a number of movies before Casque d'Or, this was the first film in his career to achieve international success (and apparently it didn't do that well in France), and is still considered his masterpiece among many. For me, I don't think Casque d'Or holds a candle to the genius of Le Trou, which is a spectacular, memorable epic. Part of the problem for me is Simone Signoret. A beautiful actress who would give a number of other truly great performances, even in Diabolique just a few years later, Signoret just doesn't have the kind of fire in her belly in this film that she should. I don't see the romance or the tragedy I need to with a story like this. I don't know, maybe it was a mood I was in, but the whole idea of this film as a romance falls flat to me.

The other thing that is funny is how much Casque d'Or seems just like other Becker movies, despite the fact that it was set in a different time period. The movie was apparently turned down by Max Ophuls and Henri-Georges Clouzot, and it would have been interesting to see how different this film would have been from these vastly different directors. In the hands of Becker, it's a good, not great one.

#252: Faces

(John Cassavetes, 1968)

The first half of Faces is tough going. The story seems to be swirling around the drain, not really going down, and like all Cassavetes movies, seems more concerned with letting a scene play out naturally with emotional honesty and balls to the wall performances than with advancing any kind of plot. In fact, the plot of Faces could probably be the first (or last) 20 minutes of any other movie. It's extremely dull until about an hour in when things start to get going a little bit more. For sure, the women are much more interesting than the men, and the story of the wife's infidelity is much more interesting than the husband's. And perhaps the husband's reaction to finding out his wife slept with someone else was a little more interesting in 1968, but having seen this play out a thousand times since it doesn't generate the same thought.

Sometimes I think Cassavetes was so good he made himself irrelevant. Faces doesn't need to be seen anymore because its been recreated and mainstreamed thousands of times. Cassavetes wins, but the viewer isn't any more satisfied.

#271: Touchez Pau Au Grisbi

(Jacques Becker, 1954)

I thought I was being insightful when I realized halfway through Touchez Pau Au Grisbi, Jacques Becker's extremely enjoyable and nearly classic noir, that the film echoed a similar near masterpiece, Melville's Bob Le Flambeur. But, alas, Roger Ebert's great movies essay on the film is largely dedicated to the clear similarities between these two movies which center around an older man, highly respected in the underworld, nearing the end of his criminal career and succumbing to his weaknesses. Perhaps I'll get a little more credit for the comparison to one scene in the film and what I take as a direct lift in Fargo? Check the scene in which two cars encounter each other and the passengers of one car gets mowed down. A fat man runs from the gunman, only to be shot in the back and fall to the ground with a thud as he is running away. Surely Joel and Ethan Coen saw this scene and took notes.

Touchez Pas Au Grisbi doesn't 100% work for me, and there's one glaring reason why. I simply didn't buy Max's relationship with his friend, and didn't feel it had been established enough. So when Max risks his entire future in order to save his friend, I was kind of like wtf. I will say one thing about the movie though. Unlike many French noirs, this one doesn't feel like it has any connection to the American films that came before it. Max doesn't feel like a Bogart rip of, he feels like a Frenchman. I like that, but more as a curiosity than as something that defines the film. As a viewing experience, the movie is just simply entertaining, and little else.

Side note: Lino Ventura, who plays Max's nemesis Angelo here, would go on to play the lead role in Melville's grand tragedy Army of Shadows.

#251: Shadows

 (John Cassavetes, 1959)

Shadows is the first film by John Cassavetes, the father of modern independent cinema. He's also the ultimate example of commercial cinema to pay the bills/art cinema to feed the soul, having amassed a more than decent career in front of the camera in film and television alongside the dozen or so movies he made as a director.

Cassavetes is also the quintessential actor's director, the kind of filmmaker that would rather get at the truth in someone's portrayal of a character than advance the story. This makes his movies somewhat difficult for me: I don't thrill at the approach to a role that takes me by surprise. Shadows is even more difficult than his typical film, and not just because it was made on 16mm, features mostly inexperienced actors, and looks like it's been through the ringer over the past fifty years. There's a plot that wanders through the film about love and race that would be the subplot in any other film but is the only real appreciable story, while the rest of the film is more about the time and place than any kind of narrative.

Like they do in Blast of Silence, the characters take a back seat to New York City, once again shot in musty black and white as the camera crawls through side alleys into Times Square. But unlike that film, Shadows is entirely of its time, a movie made by its cast and crew to reflect exactly what they knew and what they experienced struggling to make a living in the city at the end of the decade. For this reason in particular, Shadows is just as important as a representation of one of cinema's finest goals as it is as the first film by a director that changed cinema itself. That the movie isn't particularly interesting or, well, good has to take third billing.

#259: Fat Girl

(Catherine Briellat, 2001)

I said when I saw A Nos Amours that I wondered what it would have been like if a woman had directed it. Well, Fat Girl might not be the exact result of this experiment, but it's pretty damn close.

Of course, calling Catherine Briellat a woman is like calling Gaspar Noe a man. She has a very specific point of view, and she uses it to provoke almost incessantly. Like Noe, she's an expert filmmaker, but unlike her contemporary, she has a respect for her characters which makes her films transcend their use as an intellectual exercise in abusive cinema.

Fat Girl was both less disturbing and better than I thought it would be. Considering how significant the movement to which it belongs has been in French filmmaking in the past few decades, it should certainly be represented in the Collection, and I think Fat Girl is the best of the genre I have seen, not only because Breillat pulls off the shocking ending with such technical mastery (the scenes on the highway before the women park are almost more terrifying than their subsequent end), but because she infuses her main character with such empathy that it leaves a film like Irreversible in the dust. But I wouldn't call Fat Girl a great movie, or even a film that is necessarily worth watching. It is merely relevant filmmaking, and for that I am glad I saw it, but don't plan on ever seeing it again.

#267: Kagemusha

(Akira Kurosawa, 1980)

Kagemusha is another Kurosawa masterpiece, this one - like Ran and Dreams after it - in color that straddles the line between the vivid and the surreal. At three hours, the movie's epic nature doesn't seem as essential, perhaps, as earlier films like Seven Samurai and The Hidden Fortress. The battle scenes here don't compare to the later spectacles of Ran, and the scenes of horses squirming on the ground go on too long and feel a little heartless.

Still, the film is an emotionally engaging look at some of the most interesting Kurosawa and Japanese themes, such as the gulf between social standings, loyalty, and the line between reality and fantasy, life and death. The differences between Kurosawa's earlier films and this modern-era epic are obvious: apart from color, the movie breathes more than his earlier movies, with looser editing and a focus on auteur-side thematic emphasis over storytelling. These elements may be different, but they feel so natural that it is clear Kurosawa did not have the same difficulties that many directors of his generation had translating their style into the modern cinematic era.

Interestingly, it took Kurosawa many years to find the funding for Kagemusha, and when it finally arrived it came from George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, who became executive producers. They would also executive produce another masterpiece about Japan a few years later, Paul Schrader's Mishima.

#275: Tout Va Bien

(Jean-Luc Godard, 1972)

Another thing about Godard movies: it's very hard to truly appreciate one of his films without knowing how it was made. Tout Va Bien is a perfect example of this. Made with Jane Fonda and Yves Montand, the film would mean virtually nothing without viewers recognizing these two stars, as the film largely centers around the idea of them at the center of a radically political film. Much less likely to be noticed is the fact that the workers at the striking salumi plant were played by unemployed actors (interacting, of course, with these world-famous stars). An interesting point, made totally irrelevant in the actual viewing of the film.

Tout Va Bien has other flaws (or strengths depending on what your perspective is on process as art), and it is like other Godard films in that it is inherently contemporary, unable to be separated from its time. But the film is much more frequently entertaining and challenging than some of his lesser films, and does not deserve its negative reputation (or Godard's own scorn). It's an interesting film, if far from a truly great one.

#273: Thieves' Highway

(Jules Dassin, 1949)

Spectacular artwork on this one, and the movie didn't disappoint. This is a strong addition to the film noir genre, complete with backstabbing criminals, street-smart women, and the dark side of life in the city. Like all good noir, the city is as big a character in the film as any of the actors, and San Francisco doesn't disappoint, coming across as a shadowy town where people roam the streets hungry for apples and revenge.

I don't know if I would go so far as to rank it up there with classics like Double Indemnity, Out of the Past, or even Dassin's own Night and the City, which he made after this, but this is the kind of movie that was able to get made in 1949 without much fanfare. If only the average boilerplate thriller was still made with this much craft and intelligence.