Lost in Criterion

After making Thieves Highway in 1949 Jules Dassin was blacklisted for being a communist. The movie is about working class men -- Army vets at that -- trying to use capitalism to pull one over on a small-time robber baron, and when that fails there's some violence. It's not quite Marx, but it's not quite not Marx.

Anyway, Dassin would flee to Europe and continue working, first with Night and the City which we'll talk about next week, and later with Rififi, his masterpiece.

An Italian neorealist film where the prostitute doesn't represent the state of the nation! Probably. I mean, you could probably interpret it that way if you wanted.

Bernardo Bertolucci's debut, La Commare Secca is, in a lot of ways, clearly directed by a 20 year old first timer. But it's also got some really good stuff going on, even if it's a Rashomon-plot done by a guy who absolutely swears he's never seen Rashomon. We don't believe him, but it doesn't matter either way. La Commare Secca tells its story of on the ground life below the zooming highways, out of sight down by the river, and it's tells it well.

We get one last film from Becker and it's a French gangster film starring the star of French gangsterdom: Jean Gabin.

With Touchez pas au grisbi (1954) Becker does his Becker thing of focusing on the minor character elements instead of the plot points and manages to make one of the few French gangster films outside of Rififi that doesn't bore me.

We really, really loved our last outing from Jacques Becker. Le Trou stands as one of the pinnacles of non-horror suspense films we've seen. It was also Becker's final film, so perhaps we should assume that his earlier work would be less impressive.

We return to Becker this week with a period piece based on a real historical love triangle involving a woman with blond hair and some members of the notorious Parisian street gang Les Apaches.

Maybe it just suffers for not seeming as innovative as Becker's other work. Maybe the fact that it is a basic criminal love story is why it's so interesting as a Becker work. Though there's also that final sequence to redeem it. Maybe.

It's been 4 years since we last saw a Seijun Suzuki film.

It's been too long.

Branded to Kill and Tokyo Drifter were early favorites for Seijun's ridiculous sense of style and clear disdain for being told what to do. Made a few years and a few dozen films earlier in 1963 is Youth of the Beast, a Yojimbo-tale of an ex-Cop investigating his former friends death. Of course that plot synopsis glosses over the Seijun flare that makes it a film worth watching. And it is very much worth watching.

Cecile B. DeMille's silent religious epics are sights to behold, but not necessarily because they are, how do you say...good?

His 1927 The King of Kings takes quite a bit of liberty with the source material, but that's ok! The source material -- the four Christians Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John -- presents varying takes on the events they're recording anyway. DeMille, though, makes some pretty crazy choices, some good and some very bad. I just...I don't remember the orgy scene in the Gospels.

Technically released first, but planned second, the theatrical cut of Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander removes over 2 hours of material that, while perhaps non-essential, helps make the longer cut the better version. Three hours and eight minutes is still pretty h*ckin' long for a theatrical film, though it turns out there was a Swedish theatrical release of the full 312 minute "television cut" as one movie in 1983. I think that's probably a bad idea, too. Consume it as the four television episodes over the course of a few nights and you have a much more manageable and enjoyable experience.

This is part two of our discussion of Fanny and Alexander, following last week's discussion of the television cut.

Contrary to what Adam says toward the beginning of this week's episode, Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander was not first released in a 312 minute cut. The long cut was planned first, but the first release was the shorter 188 minute version in 1982, which we'll talk more about next week. Still this longer version was actually released to theaters in December of 1983 before being chopped into four episodes for Swedish television a bit later.

This is part one of our discussion, one because there's just too much Fanny and Alexander for one episode, an two because its impossible to talk about the shorter cut without talking about the longer, better cut. We'll see you next week for part two, which focuses more on the theatrical version of the film.

It's October so let's watch a classic horror film! (As if this was planned and not just a quirk in the randomness of the way the Criterion Collection presents films to us.)

Georges Franju was asked by producer Jules Borkon to make a British/American style horror film for a French audience, but one that didn't torture animals, have too much blood, or a mad scientist. So he made a film about a mad scientist who experiments on dogs and does a whole face transplant on screen.

Franju did so well emulating foreign horror that Eyes Without a Face was wholly disowned by the French film establishment. It's just that amazing.

Fat Girl is an unfortunately named coming of age story film that Catherine Breillat made in 2001 which led me to a greater understanding (though probably still not appreciation) of Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter which we discussed three and a half years ago. We're growing!

The film itself plays with similar, if much less Nazi-exploitative, themes to Cavani's work, speaking to the inherent violence of male-dominated sexual relationships. And it's ending! Oh goodness, the ending.

A clearly disturbed and vile president rants about the conspiracies against him while contemplating suicide, and somehow is so full of pathos that we find ourselves feeling pity instead of anger.

There are...modern parallels? Robert Altman's Secret Honor's exploration of Nixon's psyche is a class of its own, due mostly to Philip Baker Hall's masterful performance. Still it does remind us of certain contemporary pieces, namely the first episode of Comedy Central's The President Show (particularly starting at about the 5 minute mark), and Aimee Mann's brilliantly tragic entry for 30 Days 30 Songs "Can't You Tell?".

In 2003 the US Department of Defense held a screening of Gillo Pontocorvo's 1966 film The Battle of Algiers at the Pentagon. A flyer for the screening read:

How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film.

Subsequent US history tells us that the showing did not achieve its objectives.