#810: In a Lonely Place

(Nicholas Ray, 1950)

Something a little different this time - I guested on a Criterion Close-Up episode discussing the first Bogart entry in the Collection.

Criterion Close-Up Episode 45 - In a Lonely Place

#805: A Poem Is a Naked Person

(1974, Les Blank)

It says Leon Russell's name on the cover, but A Poem Is a Naked Person might as well have "A Snake" in its place (or any one of the other myriad characters here) for all the movie is about Leon Russell. This might be chalked up simply to the style that Blank has used in his many shorts, most of which can be found on Always for Pleasure, the superb retrospective Criterion released a few years ago. But as that collection showed, Blank was more than capable of giving a subject its proper due, most notably on Sprout Wings and Fly and The Blues According to Lightnin' Hopkins, the latter of which was likely the film that got him this for-hire gig after Russell and his business partner landed on a wild idea that was likely matched with equally impressive amounts of illegal narcotics.

The more likely reason Blank drifted away from Russell says little about the nature of Blank's talents and more about where his interests lay. Most notably, Blank was a student of tradition and the dying micro-cultures of America. Music was one of his major pursuits, and this is why his pairing with Russell made at least some sense. But Russell's primary musical success came with a very trendy at the time style of blues rock merged with gospel and country underpinnings, something that likely horrified Blank more than it interested him. It's easy to see where Blank's interests overlap with Russell's: a full George Jones acoustic performance (and a superb one at that) is given its due, as is a rousing session musician rendition of "Goodnight, Irene," a standard country song. When Blank talks to Ambrose Campbell or the man the film's press release claims to be a suspect in the famous D.B. Cooper hijacking case, you get the sense he really wishes the movie was about them, not Russell. On the other hand, Russell's concert performances are often shot haphazardly and rarely played out for more than a short beat. If you didn't know the movie was supposed to be about Russell, you wouldn't know watching the film, though you might think Blank was a little more into the guy than it seems considering he was ostensibly paid to film him.

Like Blank, I won't be taking much Leon Russell away from A Poem Is a Naked Person, despite enjoying the film very much. I have mixed feelings about Russell, who wrote some great songs and did a lot of session work for great musicians, but never seemed like much more than an average performer for his times. He was often susceptible to the common indulgences of the times both in his recordings (which are uneven) and his live performances (which are dated). Still, I do think he comes off well enough here, and as mentioned the performance of "Goodnight, Irene" that he leads is one of the highlights of the film. What's most memorable about the movie is the infusion of Oklahoma and Texas, particularly the balance of traditional conservative middle America and the offbeat revolution that was sweeping the country in the early 70s. It's wonderful to see the crowd at Willie Nelson's performance at Floore's, priceless to hear from the everyday folks coming out to see buildings get taken down in the city, and the way Blank balances it all on the precipice of art and commerce, yesterday and tomorrow, makes the film more than just a movie about someone it doesn't want to be about.

#762: A Master Builder

(Jonathan Demme, 2014)

I have no business writing anything on this movie, so instead I'll talk about the boxset that was released at the same time, which lacks a spine number. Andre Gregory & Wallace Shawn: 3 Films includes three very different movies from three separate decades that come from a collaboration between two very talented actors focused primarily on the theater and ways in which its structure can inform life. Two of the films included in the collection were directed by Louis Malle, while Jonathan Demme directed this third installment, released to festivals in 2013, making it one of the more recent films in the Collection.

Of the three films, there is no question that My Dinner with Andre is the one that I like best. I'll quite easily admit that part of this is my general disinterest in theater, though there are some theater-focused films in the Collection that I like very much. Both Vanya and A Master Builder are older plays that have been tweaked or updated for their respective film adaptations, but Vanya takes a significantly more radical approach that at least let the film stand out from the average filmed play that many traditional stage-to-screen adaptations are.

My Dinner with Andre similarly flouts conventional filmmaking, but it does so in way that to me is highly cinematic - though I haven't seen it in years, it's one of my favorite Malle films. The conversation the two actors have is extremely engaging, and the way Malle shoots it underscores the simple drama of an enlightening human-scale interaction. It's a film like Waking Life or the documentary The Power of Myth that gets creative gears turning and makes you think about the potential of art and human creation. It's also just a fun experience, like sitting alone eavesdropping on people who are far more interesting than whoever didn't show up to have dinner with you.

This isn't a box for me - I don't like theater as I've made clear on this blog before - but for people who do like this sort of thing, A Master Builder is deserving of its place next to the other two films, even if it's clearly the weakest of the bunch. Shawn in particular is such an engaging and unpredictable actor that even I was occasionally entranced by his performance. With one straight classic, one extremely strong swan song from one of the most important directors in the Collection, and a final film from another major director to round out the journey, this is an admirable set, and one that could mean a lot to a certain kind of fan of acting and the process.

#789: Burroughs: The Movie

(Howard Brookner, 1983)

Burroughs: The Movie spent nearly three decades in the wilderness, waiting to be found by director Howard Brookner's nephew 20 years after his death. This of course adds to its off-kilter central figure and the film's loose structure, giving the film more underground cred, the key to a successful portrait of Burroughs. The author was one of the great subversives in American culture in the 20th century, and Burroughs: The Movie does an admirable job of serving as a companion piece to his writing by presenting Burroughs the character.

I've never read any of Burroughs's books in full, though I have read excerpts here and there. I'm not a huge fiction prose guy, but I do respect the work that Burroughs has done and the doors he opened for other writers who were similarly interested in exploring themes and subjects that had been suppressed by the mainstream. Unlike something like Bergman Island, however, I don't think you have to appreciate the author's work to enjoy the documentary - this is a film about a person and a movement that is certainly going to be welcomed by his fans, who will get a deeper understanding of the artist here, but it's also a well-made documentary about a unique character in American intellectual history.

What struck me most about Burroughs was this status as a true character. I think there are two kinds of artists in the world: people who practically sweat their work out of their pores and walk to a different beat than the rest of us and people who work really hard to attempt to be the first kind of person. Talent doesn't really enter into either of these things. There are very talented artists who are normal people who are simply able to translate their observations and skills into beautiful timeless material, while true artists languish in obscurity because they aren't able to translate their idiosyncratic vision into meaningful work. Burroughs is quite obviously a capital A Artist, which makes watching his documentary so fascinating and why a similar work on someone like, say, Paul McCartney or Tom Wolfe would be insufferable.

Because of the quirkiness of his character, the most direct comparison in the Collection is certainly Grey Gardens. Although Burroughs is nowhere near as clueless (and mentally unstable) as the Beales, Brookner takes a Maysles-style approach to the characters, and we enter a world that seems foreign to modern mainstream society (although most of that world in this movie is already gone by the time the cameras arrive on the scene, and we hear about it only in interviews). The cover Criterion created for the edition fits in with this theme - obviously there was no other choice but to put Burroughs front and center, but the use of black and white and the close up of Burroughs in his middle America uniform makes it seem like it would fit right in as a cover for Salesman. This balance of upstanding style and dark themes was, as Luc Sante points out in the accompanying essay, central to Burroughs's success as a writer, and it makes Burroughs a fun watch and a worthy oddity in the Collection.

#774: Mister Johnson

(Bruce Beresford, 1990)

Mister Johnson is a halfway decent movie. It's often beautiful with impressive production design, and most of the performances (I'll get to that in a minute) are well-balanced and more nuanced than the page demands. The story it tells has potential as both a complementary piece to Beresford's classic Breaker Morant that sits next to it in the Collection and as a unique commentary on colonialism and its impact on Africa. In some stretches, usually when focused exclusively on the Africans, it nearly fulfills this promise.

But alas, it's not meant to be, and Mister Johnson ends up as a mediocre and forgettable film that is wholly undeserving of its place in the Collection. This is not a bad movie, but merely an unsuccessful one. The script is obvious and nearly literal when it should be poetic and complex. The characters are often overdrawn and ham-handed, and the film centers around a character who is unlikable and often rings false. This character, the titular Mister Johnson, is played by Maynard Eziashi, who admittedly has a very tough role to play here. But while his choices for the character feel right, his abilities fail to match the complexity that his character demands. Someone who should be struggling with his balance between two worlds at all times instead vacillates between the two as the script (often too obviously) demands. This is an especially big problem because none of the other characters in the film are given enough complexity to carry some of the weight. The closest anyone really comes is the racist drunk general store owner, which is probably not a good sign.

But the worst thing about Mister Johnson is that all of its complexity as a portrait of colonialism on Africa is lost in the simplicity of the white absolution of guilt for the actions taken on their behalf. Though I do not doubt that people similar to Mister Johnson appeared to exist to the white adventurer in the early 20th century, I also doubt that this simplistic and condescending representation of the character is authentic to the experience. The essay Criterion includes in their release ends with a reference to the great novel Things Fall Apart, and the direct comparison is a reminder that this approach to the issues of colonialism smacks of the same cultural subjugation as the invasion itself. In the essay they mention that Walter Huston was initially considered for the director chair here before his death, and while Huston is the (infinitely) better director, I wonder if this poisonous tree could have borne edible fruit with anyone at the helm.

Bruce Beresford has made two good movies in his career, Breaker Morant and Tender Mercies, and one Best Picture winner in the also mediocre Driving Miss Daisy. That film took a similar approach to racial politics, but its identifiable characters and universal relationships helped endear it to the Academy of old white people. Since then, he's made films ranging from total dreck to passable studio schlock. As a companion piece to Breaker Morant, perhaps as other Criterion fans have suggested as a bonus film on that disc, Mister Johnson is an interesting investigation of Beresford approaching a different angle of the British Empire, illuminating his limitations in this regard. As a standalone disc, however, Mister Johnson is worse than the bad movies like Armageddon and I Am Curious in the Collection; again, it's not a horrifically bad movie, just one that lacks anything at all of note in film history or in the way of understanding the medium. I'd be surprised if anyone could make a convincing case for its inclusion in the Collection beyond Beresford telling them they could only take Breaker Morant on a date if they let its ugly little brother tag along. Even then, they should have let it out of the car on the way to the theater.

#750: Ride the Pink Horse

(Robert Montgomery, 1947)

Ride the Pink Horse is the kind of movie that falls through the cracks in Criterion's release slate, but represents one of the best things the company has to offer. This is not an iconic work of world cinema, nor is it even a five-star or cult classic. But it is a decidedly quirky picture that carves out a relevant niche in noir history.

That it is noir is of relevance to Criterion, as they have dug particularly deep on this genre with pictures like Blast of Silence and a surprisingly wide range of Dassin's American films. Noir is obviously one of the definitive genres of the medium, and its intertwined history with the New Wave filmmakers like Godard who pushed for the recognition of the genre and incorporated its signifiers into their works makes it Criterion friendly. These were also often B movies, making their value in home video less apparent and therefore available to Criterion - which is also why unlike other major genres Criterion has almost none of the core definitive classics of the genre like Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon, or Out of the Past (though they do have Kiss Me Deadly and recently added the sort-of-noir Gilda, plus a wide range of foreign films that were either influences on the genre or inspired by it).

Ride the Pink Horse is similar to the other American noirs in the Collection in that it didn't have an especially high profile before its Criterion release, and really doesn't have much of one now, either. As a director, Robert Montgomery is probably best remembered for his debut, the Chandler-based noir The Lady of the Lake, one of the few movies to sustain a first-person POV for the entire film (Montgomery plays the famous Philip Marlowe in the movie, whom we see only through mirrors). It's a novelty that grows tiresome quickly, and I only made it through the film out of pure devotion to the idea of experiencing Chandler's work with such an unusual concept (one that Chandler himself didn't care for, unsurprisingly). Ride the Pink Horse, on the other hand, held my attention throughout, and while I don't think it's an unheralded masterpiece or anything, I have a hard time imagining any fan of noir having any serious problem with the movie.

One of my favorite things about the film is the opening. The credits roll over a desert scene matched with music that would be at home in any Western of the era. When combined with the horse in the title, it is a confusing opening for anyone convinced of the film's noir bonafides. Yet as the credits end a Greyhound bus comes roaring in and the camera pans into a town in the contemporary West. It starts the film off by subverting your expectations, a trick that comes in handy as the plot unfurls and people are not always what they seem.

Montgomery is not the best director in the world, but he was a solid leading man and he had a ton of top shelf help here, from the great Russell Metty behind the camera (who would go on to shoot the similar but significantly superior border noir Touch of Evil for Orson Welles) to a screenplay by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer, two of the greatest writers in film history. The dialog is spectacular - really, I could watch this movie ten times just to take it all in and savor the great lines.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Ride the Pink Horse, though, is its depiction of Mexicans. Montgomery has an unfulfilled love affair with a younger woman who attempts to bridge the social divide (played in brownface with a Speedy Gonzalez accent by a white lady), but the stand out character is Pancho (the actor was, according to Criterion, the first Latino ever nominated for an Academy Award for this performance). Pancho carries plenty of the stereotypes of Mexicans, living the poor-but-happy life of an alcoholic who falls asleep under his sombrero. But he's also a stand-up guy with loyalty that survives intense and violent testing. Mexican characters don't often fare well in early border pictures (think even Charlton Heston playing a Mexican in Touch of Evil, one of the more regrettable elements of that classic), so even though Pancho often lacks the full three dimensions of humanity it's nice to see a lovable and honorable character like this in a film from the 1940s.

Ride the Pink Horse is unlikely to become anyone's favorite noir, but many of its defects are the very reasons why it would be easy to fall in love with it. The various stylistic choices (the wordless opening, the merry-go-round rough-up, etc) seem disjointed, in need of a steady hand to connect them that isn't really there. Similarly, the quirky bits of character and asides that are unrelated to the core plot hurt the momentum of the suspense, but are the exact moments that separate the movie from its noir cousins. There's a lot of talk about what the best or worst releases from Criterion are, but Ride the Pink Horse is unlikely to come up in either conversation. Instead, this little-seen previously unavailable blu-ray says a lot about Criterion's continued devotion not only to the classics or contemporary film, but to the history less traveled in order to give a better, fuller picture of what cinema is all about.

#735: Ride in the Whirlwind

(Monte Hellman, 1966)

Where The Shooting used simplicity to deliver an existential Western unlike any other in its genre, Ride in the Whirlwind uses simplicity to deliver... a really simple Western. This doesn't automatically render the film ineffective - in fact, this is actually a pretty good movie with a stripped down concept that might be even more entertaining than its companion piece. But it does make this a merely solid low budget genre pic where The Shooting was a unique and borderline classic Western that's unlike anything else.

It should be noted that The Shooting was written by Carole Eastman, who would go on to write Five Easy Pieces (and wrote the English dialogue for Model Shop, Demy's American sequel to Lola - Unexpected Criterion Crossover Alert!) while Ride in the Whirlwind was written by Jack Nicholson, famed writer of Drive, He Said (OK, he also wrote Head, which is great, but hardly deep). So it's not necessarily surprising that The Shooting would be more impressive, though it's kind of amazing when you consider the fact that almost everything else about the two films is identical, from location and cast to director and time of production. Hellman certainly does a great job on both, but the significance of his moody style varies with subject and structure.

While The Shooting is significantly more worthy of inclusion in the Criterion Collection, it makes total sense that the two films would be grouped together - really there's no way to separate them, and it's arguable that The Shooting is less valuable without being attached to the second film Hellman and company made in the desert. That said, Ride in the Whirlwind is a movie to be watched and filed away, whereas The Shooting is one for the ages.

#721: Love Streams

(John Cassavetes, 1984)

One of the hardest things I had to get over in my initial burst of activity in this journey was making assumptions about a film based on prior films by directors I was less than enthusiastic about. Staring at 10 Ozu or Fassbinder films and assuming they would all be boring or distasteful (respectively) was not going to allow me to open my mind to an individual piece of art and experience it with a fresh perspective. This would inevitably take me down the path to viewing my watching habits as a chore to be completed. Avoiding this pitfall has paid dividends, particularly when looking at the two directors mentioned above - Ozu is now one of my most loved directors, and while I may have a more, ahem, complicated relationship with Fassbinder, a few of his films have been spectacular cinematic experiences I will treasure.

Still, this isn't always easy, and it gets progressively harder the deeper into a filmmaker's Criterion catalog you get. After having a fairly mixed response to the Cassavetes box, when Love Streams popped up as a Criterion release I couldn't help but think "dammit." This is especially true because of the nature of the film. As I mentioned in my post on Une chambre en ville, many Criterion films from the 80s are late-era works by the established masters of 50s and 60s cinema, and many of them are not particularly good when viewed outside the context of their respective director's oeuvre. So knowing that I didn't like Cassavetes too much and seeing that Love Streams was a lesser-known later work from the director made me quite wary. It immediately seemed like a token release only for the fans, a movie that wouldn't belong in the Collection without the name above the title. I sat down to endure it and file it away on the blog.

I was totally wrong. Not only do I think Love Streams is deserving of its place in the Collection, I think it's one of the best Cassavetes films, and it's the one that I loved the most. What's most interesting about my reaction is that this is most definitively A Cassavetes Film, with verite-style camera work, craft-heavy performances, and deliberate pacing. It's also got all the raw drama and broken characters of his more high-profile work from the 60s and 70s. Yet the movie never seems like an exercise in character craft the way even his strongest early films like Faces do. This is a fully formed world Cassavetes reveals, and the fact that the movie is based on a play would be difficult to pull out of what we see (apparently it was heavily rewritten by Cassavetes). Rowlands in particular, one of the great underrated actresses of her generation, inhabits her role so seemingly effortlessly that you hardly remember you are watching a performance. The way Cassavetes shoots her only underscores this impressive feat - look at the shot they used for the cover, the way he frames her in between the composed background and the harsh imposing foreground, squeezed into a folding chair. Her brother is reaching out to her but we can only see his hand - the camera doesn't move to reveal him, but instead lingers in this middle-ground emptiness for the length of the shot. Nothing about the way Cassavetes does this is overbearing or even necessarily prominent, yet it is deliberately present. This is filmmaking of the highest order.

Although it doesn't get to the core of what I loved about the film, the most striking thing about watching the first half hour of the movie was how much it reminded me of Boogie Nights. Despite the fact that this film wasn't available for large stretches of its afterlife, I have little doubt that PTA saw the movie and examined it for style and rhythm. The most obvious comparison is the custody scene, which PTA seems to have lifted almost directly from this movie, but Rowlands in general must have had an impact on Amber, Julianne Moore's character in Boogie Nights, and Cassavetes also seems like a direct influence on the Burt Reynolds character. Similarly, the way Cassavetes pities his characters while following them unflinchingly into their emotional depths and living with them there is the most impressive achievement of Boogie Nights (and PTA's early career in general). The characters that Cassavetes and Rowlands portray here are not good people, but they are people, real and breathing and fighting for life.

Boogie Nights, of course, is packed with flashy cinematic flourishes and modern ideas about editing, music use, and dialog. Love Streams is a much quieter and more confident picture. Part of this contrast is that one film was made at the beginning of a career, the other at the end. But most of it is the way in which the two directors work. I am a big fan of PTA, and I think the last three movies he's made will eventually have a stronger reputation than any of the first four. But he's a director that is constantly crafting a movie. He wants you to know it's a movie, partially because he wants you to see all the things he's doing, but mostly because he really likes movies. Why not make your movie a movie?

Cassavetes doesn't particularly care for movies. He's a filmmaker almost incidentally, because it's the pen he uses to craft his work. Just as he carried on his acting career to support his filmmaking, his filmmaking is there to support his worlds. What's most important to him is his characters and their inner-journeys, and finally how this reflects back onto our own inner-lives. I think this is a big part of why I didn't immediately identify with his films (I'm a movies guy, fyi) but here with his craft so refined and spare it doesn't keep me at so much of a distance. There is plenty of heartbreak in Love Streams, but the way Cassavetes lets his characters breathe assures us that they will live to fight again.

There's always a lot of consternation on the internet about projects like mine. "Gosh darnit, movies shouldn't be a mission to complete!" etc. There's probably something to that, and it certainly isn't for everybody. But with an infinite number of films available (especially these days with streaming), picking a curated set of movies and forcing yourself to take in each and every one means you will inevitably watch a large number of movies you would never otherwise watch. Many of these movies will end up being ones you never should have watched after all (Salo and The Magic Flute come to mind in my own journey, for entirely separate reasons). But a handful will change the way you look at movies, and over the course of a journey it will change the way you look at watching movies. Love Streams reveals for me personally that even after nearly 800 of these films I still have things to discover and learn in the most unexpected places. I'm eternally grateful to Criterion for that, and whether you are doing what I'm doing or pick whatever you're in the mood for tonight, I hope you make an effort somewhere in your artistic consumption to force yourself out of your comfort zone.

#734: The Shooting

(Monte Hellman, 1966)

The Shooting is about the Kennedy assassination, which seems to me to be like saying the fish is about the '88 Olympics. Don't let this mystical analogy bother you, though, because this is a fine, unique Western that fits nicely into the Collection. Monte Hellman (who also made the cult-classic Two-Lane Blacktop) made the two Westerns in this collection back-to-back (they received individual spine numbers, and so will get individual posts) in 1966. Interestingly, neither received a wide theatrical release - they were bought out of festivals by a company that put them on television, which was the only place to see them until home video.

I haven't watched Ride in the Whirlwind yet, but I found The Shooting to be incredibly engrossing. The mystery at the center of it starts slowly and the simplicity of the plot is deceiving (there are only really four characters in the film, and they all maintain more or less the same purpose throughout the film with minimal evolution). But once it gets going it's quite suspenseful and tightly constructed.

The cast is also surprisingly strong for such a small production. Jack Nicholson, who had been working for ten years by then but was still three years away from his breakthrough role in Easy Rider, is the most famous actor in the small cast, and he plays his menacing but removed hitman with a mythic quality. Millie Perkins doesn't get much to do, but she delivers a sort of spoiled obstinance that in retrospect becomes determined obsession. But the film rests on Warren Oates's performance. Though he found reasonable success as a character actor before his early death, Oates had the charisma and screen persona of a Western star. If he had been born a few decades earlier I think he would have been huge, but it's nice to have this film to preserve his potential.

Although I'm ultimately at a loss to make the connection between the film and the Kennedy assassination, I find the surreal existential qualities of the ending (and what it means for the rest of the film) to be appealing in a Waiting for Godot sort of way. The film's deliberate march toward the final showdown turns it into a minimalist Western that transcends the cliches of the genre by consciously avoiding anything resembling a conventional story. It's not the masterpiece that similar deconstructionist Westerns were around the same era like The Wild Bunch or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but it is a nice complement to those films and deserves its place in the Collection as a crucial facet of the original film genre.

#726: Macbeth

(Roman Polanski, 1971)

I usually know within about five minutes whether or not I'm going to like a Shakespeare adaptation. This might even be true of unconventional Shakespeare adaptations like Throne of Blood or 10 Things I Hate About You (incidentally, this is the only time those two movies have appeared in a sentence together) because you know if the choices the filmmakers made in order to tweak the story are working or not right away. But it's especially true of direct adaptations like Branagh's Hamlet or Luhrman's Romeo and Juliet (yes, it counts as a direct adaptation). Once you dive into a Shakespeare film, the tone, acting style, and directorial choices are almost immediately apparent, and because I know just about all the big Shakespeare plays reasonably well, you often see where it's going pretty quickly.

Polanski's Macbeth made a few impressions on me in the first stretch of the film that didn't change through the next two hours. First, it's remarkably filmed, with stark but oddly beautiful land stretching across the screen. It feels real and dirty in a way that the stage never can and that few film adaptations even attempt. Second, it's kind of just bloody in the way that Macbeth probably should be but that isn't as notable as it might have been in 1971. Third, and perhaps most important, the acting is naturalistic without standing out in any particular way. It didn't grab me the way Macbeth should (this is the only Shakespeare tragedy I really like), but maybe I just wasn't in the mood for Macbeth.

There was one thing I did really like about this film - the music is spectacular. I didn't know Third Ear Band (named after the legendary group Third Eye Blind) before watching the movie but love the progressive folk movement they were loosely affiliated with and plan on checking out more of their music.

#291: Heaven Can Wait

(Ernst Lubitsch, 1943)

I recently rewatched one of my favorite movies for (surprisingly) the first time since I began this blog, so I thought I'd put down a few thoughts on what Heaven Can Wait means to me both as a work of cinema and on a purely emotional level.

I came to Ernst Lubitsch through the work of another significant director in my life's journey through cinema, the great Billy Wilder. My first exposure to Wilder came - like many budding cinephiles - from Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard, but as I soon graduated to the impeccable The Apartment and Ninotchka, which he wrote for the director he idolized, Ernst Lubitsch. His stories of Lubitsch (including Wilder's famous office sign that read "How would Lubitsch do it?") clued me in to the high stature of the earlier director and gave Wilder a deep connection to early comedy and the original Hollywood. I loved Ninotchka, not so much for the brilliant but dated satire of communism and capitalism alike, but for the small, perfect moments that I would soon find out were examples of the "Lubitsch touch," that ineffable genius that would come to be bastardized but never equaled in screenplay writing through the rest of Hollywood history. Soon after I saw The Shop Around the Corner and To Be Or Not to Be, but in the 90s many of Lubitsch's movies were difficult to find - some, like the best, Trouble in Paradise, weren't even available on VHS.

One late night on TCM I came across Heaven Can Wait, a Lubitsch picture that was well-regarded in its time (Lubitsch and the picture were even nominated for Oscars), but had slipped into his second tier as the director had gone out of fashion and its stars had failed to attain the legendary status of Lubitsch luminaries like Greta Garbo and Jimmy Stewart (Ameche is now much better known for his later career as an older character actor in films like Trading Places and Cocoon, while Tierney - who made the absolute classic Laura right after this film - had a tragic decline in the 50s due to poor treatment for mental health issues). There have only been a handful of movies in my life that I've stumbled upon and loved as much as I loved Heaven Can Wait.

The movie is a sort of unconventional romantic comedy, in that it's a comedy and a romance, though it doesn't follow the typical boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-becomes-a-gorilla template of a romantic comedy. The entire movie is told from the perspective of Ameche's character after his death, where he makes the case to the devil why he should be in Hell. This is the kind of high concept premise for a movie that Lubitsch often used as a jumping off point, which is to say the movie isn't really about Henry Van Cleve getting into Hell anymore than My Dinner With Andre is about eating food. The Devil does have a few great lines, most notably "Sometimes it looks as if the whole world is coming to Hell." But it quickly transitions to Van Cleve's life story. It never gives up the narration, using it most often to transition from one segment of his life to another, and Lubitsch (and his screenwriter, Samson Raphaelson) uses Van Cleve's birthday as a anchor in each segment to tell the story, most elegantly with the use of ties as birthday presents as Henry gets older.

There are many great things about Heaven Can Wait, but the star of the film is Charles Coburn, who plays Van Cleve's grandfather. Coburn was one of the great character actors of all time and he steals every scene he's in here, even the ones with Eugene Pallett, another legendary actor who plays Van Cleve's father-in-law. Coburn almost never has a line come out of his mouth that is anything less than the best line in any other movie it would find itself in, and his character is the beating heart of the film. I love so many moments from Coburn - and often quote "And so farewell Mr. E.F. Strable, we'll take Martha, you keep Mabel!" - but the one I always come back to is when his son (and Ameche's father) declares that he would never even know where the backdoor of a show would be and he promptly replies "It's around the back, down an alley. You can't miss it." It's a great Lubitsch joke, but the way Coburn delivers the line with a mix of exasperation, condescension, and matter-of-fact honesty sells it so brilliantly that you wonder where talent like that has gone.

Coburn and Pallette (who has a great scene at his breakfast table) are eternally memorable in the film, but the rest of the supporting cast leaves the film with a wealth of riches. Allyn Joslyn as Albert is pitch-perfect as usual, but Signe Hasso as the French maid and Spring Byington, who was another great character actor from the era, have their moments, too. Gene Tierney was beautiful, but she never really had the screen presence of the top tier stars of the 40s. Still, her best scene here is when Ameche convinces her to run away with him (or so he thinks) and she breaks down in tears about the risk of living alone in Kansas and she nails it. Ameche, too, rises to the occasion, with a mile-a-minute delivery that sells his character's sly behavior as lovable and innocent.

It's this sly behavior that makes the film a complicated love story, though. When evaluating Van Cleve's philandering in the context of what is a memorable and moving love affair, two pieces of context need to be taken into account. First, Heaven Can Wait was made in the code era, when clear extramarital affairs needed to have clear consequences (see: Double Indemnity). This means that Van Cleve's indiscretions were destined to be a little vague. It's not entirely clear how far he goes either before or after he is married to Martha, though the implication is certainly there. Second, the film is told from Van Cleve's perspective as he makes his case to the devil, providing us with an unreliable narrator. This means that the way Martha is portrayed (an unflinching angel with the best of intentions) or the way Albert is portrayed (a clueless know-it-all with nothing but the short end of the stick) or really even the way Van Cleve himself is portrayed cannot be fully trusted. Now, of course, the film breaks this rule on multiple occasions, most notably when Martha runs away and we see her parents before her arrival and while Albert helps her return. And, as I mentioned before, Lubitsch is really using this framing device as a way to tell the story rather than as the intended thrust of the narrative. So the influence of both pieces of context are difficult to pin down. Perhaps the code wasn't a conscious barrier to the story Lubitsch wanted to tell, and perhaps Raphaelson never intended to lead the audience to believe Van Cleve was bending the story, and each scene was written without the second-hand nature of the telling in mind.

It's the love story itself that makes you want to believe that the code played no part but Van Cleve's storytelling made him out to be worse than he was. Henry and Martha seem so perfect for each other, so in love and so well-matched in what they want from life and what they can take in the other person, that you can't help but forgive Henry his indiscretions as much as Martha can. The final moment of the couple together dancing as their life together has passed by is one of the beautiful scenes in Lubitsch's career, and it caps off one of the great Hollywood love stories I've ever seen. If Henry is unfaithful to Martha, and if Martha was as perfect as she seems, then she knew it and didn't care, she was willing to accept the bad with the good, and isn't that enough for us to avoid judgement? Surely if Satan himself can do it we can, too.

The rest of the movie manages to balance the light and the deep with similar ease. The movie never stops delivering quick lines and delightful scenarios, but it also has a depth that the average comedy lacked even in the golden age of Hollywood. Lubitsch manages to show the evolution of New York from the late 19th century to the mid 20th century with ease, while the circular nature of the film's family lends weight to Henry's life arc. His son's indiscretions plant the seed for Henry's own realization about his youth, while his own maturing over the course of the film underscores the inevitably of life's forward pull. Like many movies of the era, Henry is a protagonist born into wealth who never has to worry a day in his life, but this is forgiven as another of his mild indiscretions. The concern of both Henry and the film is women, and anything else is merely a distraction.

Heaven Can Wait is one of the few movies I have actually suggested to Criterion - I did so way back in the early 2000s. I suggested it because I felt confident that Lubitsch was enough to get anyone's attention, and if they actually saw the thing it would be impossible to avoid falling in love with it. These many years later it still affects me in ways that are unexpected considering just how little any of it relates to my own life experience or relationship. That speaks to Lubitsch's ability to take something that is essentially a piece of craft and make it breathe. The director made better movies in his career, but none of them are closer to my heart than this one.

#765: The Black Stallion

(Carroll Ballard, 1979)

The Black Stallion seems like a surprising choice for Criterion on paper. Made in the late 70s by Coppola's short-lived studio and a little-known (but underrated) director, the film is a fairy tale for the 8-12 set. Yet even a cursory viewing makes it clear why this release has a wacky C in the corner of its cover: this is a serious work of cinema, and one of the most beautiful films in the collection.

The story of The Black Stallion is divided into two halves, and while the protagonist of the film is a young boy, the stars of their respective halves are the stallion himself and Mickey Rooney as the trainer. The first half, which opens on a ship off the coast of Africa before a shipwreck leaves the young boy alone on an island with the horse, features a powerful story from the boy's father, a terrifying disaster sequence, and finally a mostly wordless sequence on the beach where the boy and the horse become inseparable. This sequence is obviously the great challenge of the film, and Ballard and his cinematographer, Caleb Deschanel (Zooey's and Emily's father), rise to the occasion. Although two scenes jump as particularly memorable - the horse saving Alec from a snake and Alec finally mounting the horse - it's the rest of the action that is most impressive because they manage to make small moments and stunning scenery engrossing without a flashy style.

The second half of the film turns into a more typical underdog sports film, which makes it less appealing. It's saved from cliche by Rooney's performance and Ballard's determination to do things different and take his time with the characters. The drama is focused intently on Alec and his horse, leaving little room for the typical melodrama that we're accustomed to in this sort of movie. Furthermore, the visuals stay beautiful and inventive - I love the way the final race is shot and edited, moving back and forth from long side shots where Black appears to be gliding through space and over the shoulder shots moving at breakneck speed with thundering hooves underneath. I'm glad I got to see this on blu-ray, as Criterion's transfer is absolutely stunning, particularly in moments of quick movement like the final race (though I love the colors of the film throughout). There's not much in the way of suspense or significant insight in these final scenes of the film, but the gentle way the story has been told leaves the viewer satisfied anyway.

It doesn't take more than a quick glance at Ballard's IMDB page to see that his career has been a challenging one. With just six films spread over four decades, Ballard saw little commercial success and paid the price with irregular work and a pigeonholing of his talents as a children's movie director with an emphasis on animal stories. The interview Scott Foundas does with Ballard on the Criterion disc is interesting and informative, but Ballard definitely comes off as a little bitter about the way his career went. The three child/animal films that make up half of his feature output (this, Fly Away Home, and Duma) are all superior kids films that depict relationships with animals that are virtually the exact opposite of the anthropomorphic creatures that make up today's "family" film landscape. Ballard treats Duma and Black with a dignity and respect in their films that is the equal of his treatment of his young viewers - these are not movies meant to condescend or cater to adolescents, but are instead challenging, mystical, and wondrous depictions of youth and man's place in nature. This is not an easy thing to do and it is not encouraged in today's family landscape, where movies need to appeal to viewers from 5 to 95. It's what makes Ballard's films so valuable. The Black Stallion is a particularly beautiful example in this regard.

#727: The Innocents

(Jack Clayton, 1961)

Much like its characters, The Innocents seems to exist between worlds; England and Hollywood; code cinema and modern authenticity; reserved mystery and psychological horror; proper literature and exploitative pulp; art film and studio product. It straddles these worlds in such a way that makes the film feel even more off-kilter and terrifying, underscoring the strengths of the story rather than weighing it down. It's certainly one of the most significant horror films in the Collection.

The movie is immediately surprising for a Fox film from 1961. It opens without any picture as a young girl sings a folk song without accompaniment. This continues even over the 20th Century Fox logo (rare enough for it to be striking) and leads into a brief shot of a woman praying before moving to the opening scene of the plot in which Kerr is hired as the governess. The opening sets the creepy, old-fashioned tone for the film but is largely forgotten until the song pops up again, and finally is explained as the end doubles back on the moment, leaving one to wonder how much of what's happened was a flashback, a dream, or a psychotic fictionalization of what happened.

The original story of Henry James's Turn of the Screw, on which the play was based that was then adapted into the film, is able to create a larger mystery because when the governess sees ghosts they are simply from her perspective. A film cannot show a ghost to a character without the viewer seeing it, unless the ghost is always offscreen, which even then would prove as suspicious as seeing the ghost is assuring. This means the mystery of whether of not the governess is a reliable narrator is deeper and the book is consequently more psychological. Still, there is something about Kerr here that feels off, and I don't think it's impossible to argue that her own actions are a bit unhinged, even if it is easier to take everything literally. In a way, the movie is more appealing if there are no ghosts, because the story of the evil couple that possessed the children is so puritanical and superstitious.

My favorite thing about the film was unquestionably the cinematography, and it's this aspect of the movie that makes the mystery richer. There's an explanation of why the film was shot with a blurred border in the Criterion set, but the end effect is satisfying on its own. The movie seems to exist in a beautiful fever dream, with the characters isolated from each other and reality. I thought of two Kubrick films while watching The Innocents. The first, The Shining, came up for obvious reasons - a woman stuck in an isolated giant building haunted by ghosts. But the film I was most reminded of was Barry Lyndon, another candlelit masterpiece with stunningly beautiful (albeit color) photography. Both films use their natural lighting to heighten reality and set the mood for the time period. The Innocents delivers candles that seem to create the photography on their own, resulting in the soft edges and mysterious glow of the film's nighttime scenes.

Although there were a handful of "creepy children" films before The Innocents, this is the oldest film I've seen that uses most of the elements of this subgenre in the modern way (children singing simple songs, music boxes, possessions, creepy dialogue that has multiple meanings, etc). This doesn't necessarily make it a better film (though all of these elements are executed better than in most subsequent films) but it does help its case as an important step in the evolution of horror.

If I was going to hesitate to canonize The Innocents (and I am), it would be because of the somewhat creaky plot machinations of Kerr's character. It's not entirely clear why her character seems to know with great certainty every step needed to free the children of her curse - though of course this makes the case for her insanity - and the way she goes about explaining it all to Mrs. Grose is the kind of exposition that hurts the film rather than helping the viewer. Kerr's performance is difficult to pick apart considering it was done in 1961, but she can occasionally come across as inauthentic and dated in today's eyes, something I've always thought about her and was hoping to avoid with this performance. That said, these are minor quibbles that do not overshadow the remarkable accomplishments of The Innocents, and it's worth underscoring just how vital the film feels to modern horror and supernatural filmmaking. I'd put it on the shortlist for any director interested in learning more about horror technique, and I look forward to watching it again to see how it's all put together.

One other interesting note about The Innocents: I decided to watch this now basically at random - it was the next film by spine that I don't own and isn't on Hulu - unaware that it was written by Truman Capote. Of course, In Cold Blood was just released in the past few months and covered by David Blakeslee over at Criterion Reflections, where I expressed mixed feelings about that much more famous and based-on-a-true-story thriller. Interestingly, Capote wrote the script for The Innocents while researching In Cold Blood, further tying the two to each other. Putting The Innocents in this context might make my positive response to a movie that ends (spoiler alert) with a dead child seem a bit hypocritical (despite the obvious excuse that the film is purely fictional). But I think it's important to put the entertainment value of horror in the context of the themes its intending to explore and expose for the viewer.

#788: Speedy

(Ted Wilde, 1928)

I've long been a staunch defender of Buster Keaton as the grandmaster of silent comedy over the sentimental and dated Chaplin. But here comes Harold Lloyd, the wild card exploding the idea of any binary perspective on an era's worth of the medium's humor. Lloyd is every bit as funny as the two more famous stars - as modern and clever as Keaton and as likable and charismatic as Chaplin. Perhaps because he didn't direct his own films the actor never got the recognition he deserved in the auteur age, but hopefully these Criterion releases will help spur a reevaluation of his work.

After Safety Last and The Freshman, two classics that deserve to be placed alongside the great comedies of any era, Speedy seems slight in comparison. But that doesn't take away from its energy or sheer entertainment value. The film revolves around a timeless comedic conflict - an old man's outdated business (in this case a horse-drawn trolley in New York) is trying to be gobbled up by a greedy corrupt businessman who wants to create a conglomeration to make even more money. Lloyd is charged with getting the man the compensation he deserves, mainly because he wants to marry the man's granddaughter. Hilarity (and suspense) expectedly ensue.

Along the way, the film occasionally descends into a strong of bits, most notably when the couple takes a largely unnecessary jaunt to Coney Island. Yet even in this stretch there are moments of incredible comedic sophistication. The most notable for me was the sequence in which Lloyd eats more than it seems like he really should. The film cuts to Lloyd's back and we see he is bent over and heaving, presumably from vomiting, while his fiance comforts him. Just as it seems like the shot is going on too long the camera pans back to reveal Lloyd has been blowing into a hose that tests his lungs at the carnival. There's another later bit that uses viewer obstruction involving a dog's tail - both times it's as surprising as it is funny, a masterful use of the young medium. It's also worth noting the cameo of Babe Ruth, a reminder that celebrity appearances in comedies are not a new trend and further cementing the film's appeal as a forward-looking comedy trying to deliver fresh ideas as much as it wants to make you laugh.

The other star of the film is of course New York City, and this might be what makes Speedy so special. We get a number of great looks at the Big Apple of 1928, but the most sustained exhibit is the final horse race through the streets. Lloyd rushes by the public library, slams into an elevated train post, and rushes under the Washington Square Arch and by the fountain. 1928 was the thick of change for the city, when cars were completely taking over and the Depression had yet to wreak havoc. It's a city that doesn't feel so different from the one now, albeit with more independent craft stores (including a nice stereotypical Chinese laundry owner!) and subways running overhead. It's even more thrilling than the city depicted in Lonesome, and Speedy's slick technique and artful comedy weave in and out of the city so effortlessly that the whole film buzzes with the energy of the city. I wouldn't go so far as to call Speedy a classic - its structure isn't as elegant as the other Lloyd films in the Collection - but it is a must-see for fans of silent comedy and New Yorkers interested in the city's past.

#737: Les Blank: Always for Pleasure

(Les Blank, 1968-1995)

The best parts of Les Blank's films are when no one is talking. In these moments, people cook, dance, sing, smile, play instruments, walk through nature. The buildings hum with their unique histories, bound by their American essence; a run down house with a man playing guitar on the porch stoop; a simple roadside tavern ignited by a neon sign advertising the music within; farms and tents; kitchens and living rooms; an occasional store selling records or repairing instruments or making sausage. Parades go by. Meals are prepared by the pound. The omniscient narrator (who never learns to talk) is distracted by another song or good soup on the stove.

The themes of music and food are consistent throughout Blank's 14 films collected on Always for Pleasure (along with a handful of shorts and some extras covering his career). Even in a film like Gap-Toothed Women, which explores conventional ideas of beauty, Blank can't help but home in on an apple or an artist's portrait of musicians. But Blank is most at home filming the musicians themselves, who make up the vast majority of individuals he profiles here and even crop up in films that are ostensibly about something else like garlic or gumbo. He no doubt does this because of his own interest in music (and it's worth noting his connection to the Lomax family, as John's son and Alan's brother John Jr. introduced him to Lightnin' Hopkins and Alan's daughter Anna helped edit on a few of his films), but it's also a conscious decision to make the various elements of each culture he explores inextricably linked, thereby creating a fuller picture of the specific element he's highlighting. Other elements, such as fashion, marriage, work, and friendship, come up frequently as well. But the two constants throughout are music and food.

Blank's films get more conventional as the set goes on, with his last few films featuring significantly more talking and something that approaches mainstream documentary storytelling. Yet there are unique charms to each of his films, while they all retain Blank's singular perspective. A relatively lyrical film like A Well-Spent Life crackles with the same energy as In Heaven There Is No Beer?, which could be a (still fairly quirky) PBS special, and both are equally enjoyable, even as the silences begin to come less frequently and with more action to fill up the space.

The biggest issue here is, of course, the cultural tourism label that has also dogged the Lomax family as their legacy has grown. Blank comes from a well-off family in Florida, but the bulk of his subjects, particularly in his early films, are poor country people, often black, dotting the backwaters of Louisiana. As someone who is unfamiliar with that world, it's impossible to know how "right" Blank got it, but his work here never feels disrespectful and always seems aware of his outsider status. Certainly a film made by someone of each culture would deliver a richer and truer portrait of its subject in both form and content. But this doesn't make Blank's perspective any less valuable, because for the vast majority of people his camera is the placeholder for our own forays into the world he is filming. We would dwell on the pig being slaughtered just as Blank does; we might delight in the tall tales and idealize the easy (hard) living of the Cajuns ourselves; we get caught up in the colors and sounds of Carnival in New Orleans to an even greater degree than Blank's camera.

Ultimately, Blank's career was spent documenting isolated American cultures at the dawn of mass media. While the pockets Blank highlights remain, their window to the outside world has grown larger and their choice to remain separate from the greater culture has become more conscious. The moments depicted in Blank's film already seem mournful and urgent, begging for a few more minutes with this time that might never come back. Just as he filmed a broad range of musicians at the twilights of their careers and lives, the music played and the food cooked feels short for this Earth, even as it seems like it has existed forever. America's future is homogeneous and bright, so it's best to get a good look before the past and present are gone.

#704: Riot in Cell Block 11

(Don Siegel, 1954)

What a find. Riot in Cell Block 11 is a certain kind of film Criterion puts out rarely, but always with impressive confidence and great value to the marketplace. Created as a b-level social picture in the wake of a series of prison riots in the early 1950s that stemmed from poor treatment of the prisoners, this is a lesser-known early picture from Don Siegel, who would go on to direct Criterion release The Killers before producing the higher profile Dirty Harry and Escape from Alcatraz. It's not the best-acted movie I've ever seen, and it can often feel a bit preachy in its consistent social message. But it also rings just as true today as it did in its time.

The style of the film is a reminder that throughout film history movies that were considered lesser or even exploitative often had more to say about the ills of society than the prestige pictures of their era. The movie that won best picture the year Riot in Cell Block 11 was released was another future Criterion film, Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront, and while I'm not here to discount that masterpiece, I do think the message of Siegel's film is more complicated and more relevant in today's America.

The scenes with the warden are generally didactic, but it's the final scene, in which the warden explains to the leader of the riot that he has been betrayed, where the message is most loud and clear. It's the truth no one wants to believe but everyone should see as obvious: riots work. They work because people are afraid of society crumbling, and part of the way society stays afloat is that the people with less and who are forced to stay that way agree to keep the peace (at least generally speaking). That detente is broken only when things get so bad that the system needs a virus to run through its body and clear out all the toxins. In Riot in Cell Block 11 (as in the US of the early 50s), the oppressed community was prisoners, growing up in LA it was black people in the early 90s. As the movie shows, riots don't solve everything, but they do bring the kind of attention to oppression that only violence can bring.

People who think prisoners should rot in jail for whatever they did to get there will probably be able to ignore the message of Riot in Cell Block 11. For people like me, the film is preaching to the choir. Yet there is a whole middle of the population that simply hasn't considered these kinds of issues because they didn't need to. These are the people Cell Block 11 was made for, and just as the political message of riots had to be draped in violence, so too does a message such as this need to be drenched in noir and simmering with pulpy aggression. Does Riot in Cell Block 11 raise to the level of many of the classics in the Collection? Of course not. But it doesn't need to - it does what it was meant to do, now just as well as in 1954. This is a vital thread of film history in the American system, and this particular film represents one of the best, making it a great addition.

#720: The Big Chill

(Lawrence Kasdan, 1983)

I watched The Big Chill for the first time when I was a teenager, and there are few more depressing movies to watch at that stage of life. For people with limitless options ahead of them, this is a film about people who are dead inside, horrified with the decisions they have made, and desperate to regain their freedom. They are unlikable and self-absorbed. Like Kevin Kline's later film, The Ice Storm, it's an unpleasant and uncomfortable viewing because it's hard to wrap your head around the choices you watch.

Once you've grown up, started a family, waded deep enough into a career or whatever they call it these days, the film is oddly less depressing, more comforting. It's a reminder that no matter how bad things get, you can always go home. It's a reassurance of the interpersonal connections that don't go away when philosophies and priorities change.

Of course, while the fundamental conflict of The Big Chill, the struggle with getting older and wrestling with dreams and responsibilities, is timeless, the resolution is specific to the boomer generation the film claims to represent. If The Big Chill was made today - and seeing how difficult it is to have adult dramas get made in the Hollywood system, it wouldn't be - the moral of the story would be distinctly anti-nostalgia, a lesson about appreciating what you have in life instead of longing for the past. If the children are our future in The Big Chill, the future is a disembodied voice we police from a distance while we dance and screw away the blues to the safe pop rhythms of our youth. The Big Chill is drenched in a nostalgia that would be tossed aside immediately by my generation, even as we struggle to uphold our own truths from a bygone era.

At one point, a character complains that "even fortune cookies are getting cynical" - a cynical comment about too much cynicism. The group of friends in The Big Chill finds comfort in the idealism of their youth because they know how foolish and carefree they were; they've tasted the apple and wish they hadn't. This was a bitterness that was passed on to their children, a generation intent on avoiding the disappointment their parents endured, but destined to fight some other kind of disappointment that doesn't come from anything more specific than the realization that no one is exempted from losing their cool.

The Big Chill is far from a great movie, but it's lasted as long as it has not because of its impressive cast and almost unbelievably stacked soundtrack but because it speaks to a simple and quiet truth about a milestone in life that often goes unmentioned. These are the kind of moments the Hollywood of the 80s was best equipped to handle, and it's a reminder of what our current cinematic landscape is missing: movies that aren't for everyone, but might mean everything to you.

#681: Frances Ha

(Noah Baumbach, 2013)

The rumblings below Criterion posts about Frances Ha on social media are reminiscent of the outright avalanche of anger unleashed with the Tiny Furniture release. In one way, this is not surprising, and even makes sense; like Tiny Furniture, Frances Ha is a contemporary film (nearly always controversial for inclusion in the Collection) about a self-absorbed New Yorker (certainly not a broad crowd pleaser of a genre).

But in a much more sinister way, the backlash is indicative of a serious strain of sexism that is very present in the film nerd community. I have little doubt that Frances Ha would receive none of the complaints that have been voiced if the film was about a male character. Likewise, the comparisons to Tiny Furniture would not seem as obvious, simply because there are tons of movies about neurotic men in New York - in fact, one of the greatest directors in our lifetimes built an entire career on them. This portion of the Criterion audience makes me very uncomfortable, especially because women filmmakers are so underrepresented in Criterion and in film in general.

I would defend Frances Ha from these attacks regardless of how I felt about the movie itself. But this is actually one of Baumbach's best movie, certainly my favorite since Squid and the Whale. Greta Gerwig, who co-wrote the movie, gives the kind of performance we don't get to see anymore in Hollywood films. While I somewhat agree with the criticism that she has yet to stretch out beyond her lone persona as an actress, her work here is extremely impressive. She's in virtually every scene, and she carries the film on her back.

Although Tiny Furniture is a fair comparison, it's that other neurotic I mentioned that comes to mind first here. It's impossible to film New York in black and white and not have people immediately compare what you are trying to do to Manhattan, and the film shares many overlapping themes with that one. But ultimately Frances Ha is less of an exploration of self-absorbed lives against the backdrop of a tragicomic opera of a city and more about adulthood and letting go of what is safe to find your landing place. It doesn't always succeed, but Gerwig's performance and the brilliant dialog from her and Baumbach's sparkling script means it's constantly enjoyable and over before you want it to be.

Two notes here: great fucking cover that is perfectly evocative of what's great about the movie but also what is true to its themes and story. Really, it's perfect. Second: this movie has one of my new all-time favorite lines in "He's the kind of guy who would like buy a black leather couch and be like 'I love it.'"

#677: The Uninvited

(Lewis Allen, 1944)

The Univited is another perfectly enjoyable old-Hollywood entry in the Collection. But unlike I Married a Witch, I think The Uninvited is very much deserving of its place. This is mainly because of the seemingly effortless way the story is told. Like many non-Hitchcock suspense pictures of the 40s and 50s, it lacks the master's greater significance, but often the pure craft on display is just as impressive. Interestingly, like the modern Hitchcockian masterpiece The Vanishing, The Uninvited was made by people who have relatively routine careers outside of this one artistic success. Director Lewis Allen, who impressively made his feature debut here, had a handful of moderately received pictures over the next decade (only one of which I've seen - Suddenly, starring Frank Sinatra) but gradually shifted into television. Co-screenwriter Dodie Smith, believe it or not, went on to write The Hundred and One Dalmations, the original book the film was based on. Joel McCrea, the best-known actor here, was a second-tier movie star who frequently put in more-than-serviceable performances (and of course heads up the cast of the impeccable Sullivan's Travels) but never really achieved immortality. [Duh, Ray Milland, not Joel McCrea.]

So what makes The Uninvited stand out from the average tight-ship Hollywood program? I think it's the spark of mystery that remains present in the film from the very beginning until the last few scenes. Like many early Hitchcock classics - especially his British pictures, which quite clearly influenced this film - the movie never loses its sense of fun, even when it is often suspenseful and at times downright creepy. It's not a movie that is going to give anyone older than ten nightmares (at least I don't think so...) but it has the potential for subsequent viewings to be just as enjoyable, just as suspenseful, and even more impressive at how well the plot is tied together in a neat little package. The Uninvited is often regarded as the first movie to treat ghosts seriously. If this is the case, it's even more impressive that they were able to thread the supernatural into this standard suspense template without dropping the ball at some point. This isn't an undiscovered masterpiece that is going to make a splash, but it's absolutely deserving of the bigger audience this release will afford it, and I think there will be quite a few people finding this in their regular rotation once they been exposed to it.

#336: Dazed and Confused

(Richard Linklater, 1993)

Dazed and Confused is one of the unusual pop culture artifacts that is both nostalgic and, with the passage of time, itself a piece of nostalgia. Richard Linklater wrote the film in his mid-thirties as an ode to his high school experience in the 1970s, but upon its release the film was embraced by teenagers who identified with the bell-bottoms, long hair, and pot culture in a time when kids were desperate to reject their 80s upbringing. It subsequently became a defining work of the 1990s - no movie other than perhaps Clueless represents my generation of teenagers more effectively, a feat that seems totally ironic considering its dedication to its setting. (Note, too, that Clueless is based on Jane Austen's "Emma" - and what says more about the post-modern 90s than that?)

This achievement is less surprising when you consider how honest and loyally crafted Dazed and Confused is. Though he clearly has the cynical, destructive 80s in mind (most obviously when Marissa Ribisi theorizes that the 80s will be amazing - a clear knowing wink), Linklater never succumbs to the sort of saccharine nostalgia for innocence that George Lucas's American Graffiti is beholden to with regards to the pre-Vietnam War era. Likewise, his ability to shuttle between social strata and lend them all the same level of attention to detail and dignity is remarkable, even more so when considering how rarely this has actually been achieved. Adam Goldberg's nerd and Sasha Jenson's meathead are crafted with equal care for their intelligence and relative sophistication. It would seem unlikely that anyone who sees Dazed and Confused would be unable to recognize at least part of themselves in one or more of these vivid characters.

I've seen Dazed and Confused more times than I can count, but this most recent viewing was the first in years. I was struck by how impressed I was with the filmmaking, particularly from a storytelling perspective. Despite including multiple storylines, Linklater managed to structure the film seamlessly, giving everyone their moments without bumps in the film's momentum. The characters are well-established both through dialog and direction. Framing and establishing shots are carefully selected to hammer home each world with which Linklater is concerned. But there's also a quirkiness that emphasizes Linklater's personal connection to and love for his characters. Linklater is not often mentioned as an influence on Wes Anderson, another Texas director - though less often linked to the state, but the connection came to mind frequently while watching Dazed and Confused.

Linklater's work can often be dismissed as slight and undeserving of serious reflection, even if his movies are almost without fail intellectually stimulating. I think a big part of this is his unambitious scale; with very few exceptions, Linklater mainly focuses on average, thoroughly human characters doing average, thoroughly human things. His core masterpieces, the two Before films (I have yet to see the third), hardly concern themselves with any characters beyond the two leads, while even conventional story structure falls by the wayside. Though Dazed and Confused is similarly narratively loose, the film's format is recognizable to anyone who has seen compressed-time coming-of-age films, and this can make it seem a lot less revolutionary and a lot more specific to its time and place (both in setting and release). Hopefully, this won't prevent new generations of movie lovers from discovering the film, because it deserves a place as one of the fine films about adolescence, even after its nostalgic appeal has faded.