Lost in Criterion

A few months ago we were surprised to learn that HG Wells, the famed 19th century science fiction writer, survived long enough to comment on film adaptations of his work. This is a silly thing for us to be surprised by, because the man was only 66 when Island of Lost Souls, the movie that he commented on, came out. Just a few years later Alexander Korda hired Wells himself to adapt Wells' futurism work into Things to Come (1936), working with a crack team of art directors and artists including William Cameron Menzies as director, Vincent Korda officially acting as art designer, and a cadre of others including a mostly cut sequence by Hungarian experimental filmmaker László Moholy-Nagy. It's a beautiful film that looks at a future that Wells imagines is not a technocratic dystopia even though that's what he portrays.

To Pat, Mike Leigh’s Life is Sweet (1990) feels a lot like a Very Special Episode of a 90s sitcom. Adam tries his best to rescue Pat from that particular abandoned refrigerator, and we arrive at the film as an interesting critique of capitalism in the era of Margaret Thatcher’s “There’s no such thing as society.” We also get five shorts from an unrealized television project Leigh originally shot in 1975. All six works take interesting looks at working class life.

Haskell Wexler was hired to make a film adaptation of Jack Couffer's The Concrete Wilderness, a 1967 novel that seems a lot like an American version of Barry Hines A Kestral for a Knave which came out the next year. Like some of our other favorite films in the Criterion Collection, Wexler nearly completely rejected the brief and took his adaptation far from the source material to make Medium Cool, a film that retains certain story elements from the book but focuses less on the child protagonist and more on the political education of his mother and the news cameraman job of her new boyfriend. If it were just that, it might be interesting, but what Wexler turns in is a film that mixes that narrative fiction with Cinema Verite documentary on the political powderkeg that is Chicago (and the whole US) in 1968, with fictional characters interacting with real-world events as they actually unfold, culminating in a breathtaking Direct Cinema-esque sequence of one character attending the Democratic National Convention as another wanders through the police riot outside.

The second in our pair of Delmer Daves westerns is certainly the superior movie: taut, beautifully shot, and that theme song! Like last week's film 3:10 to Yuma (1957) stars Glenn Ford, this time playing a villain who seems to have a monopoly on violence 'round these parts being taken in by a farmer (Van Heflin) with a real sense of wanting things to be normal for once.

3:10 to Yuma is also our first movie in the Collection based on the work of Elmore Leonard, a prolific writer whose work has been adapted into dozens of films of a varying quality over the years (from Burt Reynolds' Stick (1985) to Paul Schrader's Touch (1997). Despite there being some truly great films on that list, we won't see anything more from Leonard in this project for about 12 years when we reach the Ranown Westerns boxset at Spine 1186.

Criterion hasn't shown us a lot of classic westerns; this is only our sixth western in a broad definition, and of those only our third made before 1980 (or 1960 for that matter). I don't know if there's any conclusions to be drawn, but it seems a bit weird given how popular the genre has been throughout film history. Anyway, when we do get them, Criterion seems to favor ones that are elevate melodrama to Shakespearean levels, and Delmer Daves Jubal (1956), "Othello on the Range", is firmly in that camp, with an absolutely phenomenal cast to boot.

Our third and final week in the Pierre Etaix boxset brings us the final two movies Etaix directed. The narrative film Le grand amour (1969) is perhaps the most entertaining (and self-aware) director-going-through-a-divorce movie we've ever seen. The documentary Land of Milk and Honey (1971) belongs to our favorite genre of documentary: director hired to make a puff piece turns in an artistic final product that his producers despise (see also Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad (1965)). Unfortunately, it wasn't just the producers that hated Milk and Honey, and Etaix never directed again.

We continue through the Pierre Etaix boxset with two more features and a short. Yo-Yo (1965) is even more of an overt homage to the history of film comedy than anything we've seen from Etaix so far. As Long As You've Got You're Health (1966) is a series of shorts aimed at different aspects of modern French society, not least of the rising car culture. And the short Feeling Good was originally released as part of As Long As... but Etaix re-edited the film in 1971 to take out Feeling Good and add the earlier shot Insomnia in its place.

This week we kick off a boxset of the 1961-71 works of French clown, comedian, and filmmaker (and illustrator and gag writer for Jacques Tati). The collection contains four narrative features and three shorts all co-written (and occasionally co-directed) by Jean-Claude Carrière, who may just be the most represented screenwriter in the Criterion Collection, as well as one documentary. For this first week we cover the shorts Rupture (1961) and Happy Anniversary (1962) and the feature length The Suitor (1962). We also cover the boxset's only substantial extra: Pierre Etaix, un destin animé (2011) a documentary on Etaix by his wife Odile Etaix just before his death.

In 1984 Alex Cox burst onto the scene with Repo Man, a hilarious critique of America's (then unique?) system of credit-capitalism, embodied in the industry of repossessing past-due cars. In a world where it is now possible to not only buy a hamburger today and pay for it next month, but to do so through multiple layers of corporate exploitation that will deliver it right to your door, Repo Man has not lost any of its punch. And the soundtrack is still dang good, too.

Daiei Film's first color film, Teinosuke Kinugasa's Gate of Hell (1953) is an absolutely beautiful film and one of those rare instances where we really wish the Criterion Collection had included any bonus features at all, maybe something on the film's restoration or on Eastmancolor film in Japan. Anything. But we still manage to find something to talk about among the film's striking colors and very Buddhist message.

As the US government was hounding him for various "anti-American"isms, Charlie Chaplin made his first movie since before the war: a black comedy where in lieu of the lovable Tramp (or the Tramp-esque Barber) Chaplin plays a polygamist serial killer. Monsieur Verdoux (1947) isn't so much a change of form for Chaplin, though, as the movie goes through great pains (of misogyny) to make Verdoux sympathetic and gives him a third act monologue that's nearly as great as The Great Dictator's.

Terrence Malick's debut film is a story of America, of wanton violence driving across the great plains. Badlands (1973) isn't just Manifest Destiny marching over the continent; the film's from 1973, it's Vietnam, it's a murderous young man saying "Not that I deserve a medal." Malick hits the ground running with the spiritual lyricism he's known for, and kudos to the Criterion Collection for showing us our new favorite Malick right after showing us our new favorite Bresson.

Robert Bresson makes a prison escape film is the sort of premise that we cannot help but fall for, particularly as A Man Escaped (1956) is also our favorite sub-genre of crime film: the criminal procedural. While we really fell in love (sort of) with the "full Bresson" of Au hasard Balthazar or Mouchette, both a decade later, A Man Escaped takes Bresson's style into a genre we weren't expecting, and it is perfect.

Our hopes were so high for Ministry of Fear (1944). Sure, Carol Reed is the best at adapting Graham Greene novels, but Fritz Lang? He's just one of the best European directors there is. Lang adapting Greene? Making a movie called Ministry of Fear in 1944? We didn't think anything could go wrong. Enter Seton I. Miller, executive producer and screenwriter, a dangerous combination in normal circumstances, but when dealing with a director who famously had little regard for the script, the end result is...not great?

Sociologist Edgar Morin and anthropological filmmaker Jean Rouch join forces for the Québécois filmmaker Michel Brault to turn their ethnographic lens on the empirical core and create the foundational text of cinéma vérité. It may be that this is the most truthful a French (or any) documentary had been up to this point, but the film's subjects often seem to be holding back, with many speaking in abstractions about the current political situations. The lack of honesty is further underscored by Criterion including Un été + 50 (2001), a 50-years-later followup where everyone can be a lot more upfront about their political associations, associations that probably would have landed them in jail or worse if mentioned in the original film. And while perfectly understandable -- we also would not like to be in French prison -- it still leaves us wanting for much of the film.

Probably the best acted, best scored, best directed, most beautiful, self-serving justification of being a traitorous jerk ever put to film, Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954) could have been better if it was more true to the real life events that inspired it and less a justification for naming names to the House Unamerican Activities Committtee. Thank the unions and enjoy your May Day weekend by watching the best movie with the worst politics, or watch Salt of the Earth instead, a film that came out the same year but from people who were named instead of the people doing the naming of names. But we already talked about Salt of the Earth on our Patreon, so now we gotta talk about On the Waterfront.

Similar to the ways that Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's Rosetta (1999) reminded us of a modern day version of Breson's Mouchette, their film The Kid with a Bike (2011) feels like an updated The 400 Blows. Of course, the Dardenne's bring their unique style to the story of Cyril and Samantha, once again ending not with an established community, but a shaky hope of one, if we want it.

Keisuke Kinoshita's The Ballad of Narayama is a film about enforced austerity, about capitulating to the fascist power structures, about how we can be conditioned into killing ourselves even without a boot directly on our neck because that's the status quo. It's about what we do to others and to ourselves not because we have to but because we've been conditioned to think we have to. "Its power seems inescapable."

Also it's an atmospheric fairy tale telling of a of a folkloric practice, a forced abandonment of our most vulnerable, even when they're not really that vulnerable. 

Wim Wenders had planned for years with German Neo-expressionist choreographer Pina Bausch to make a film of her work, but Wenders didn't know how he could do it justice. Then he saw U2 3D (2008) and knew that digital 3D was the technology he needed. Unfortunately, as technology caught up to Wenders' vision, Bausch passed away, and Pina (2011) morphed from just a document of her work into a tribute from Wenders and Bausch's dance troupe. What they create together is an overwhelming piece of art.

In the first 140 Spines of the Criterion Collection there were five Alfred Hitchcock films, leading us to believe we'd be seeing a lot more from him over the years, but it turns out The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) is the first Hitchcock we've watched for the podcast in just shy of a decade.

This is the original The Man Who Knew Too Much, one of Alfred's first big breaks before moving to Hollywood and the movie that introduced Peter Lorre to English speaking audiences. It's a tight little thriller that may also involve a dog turning into a man and getting arrested.

While the first two films in Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi Trilogy were built on filming in particularly locations, in Naqoyqatsi, the image itself becomes the location as editor and "digital cinematographer" Jon Kane takes us into the simulation that is modern life. Unfortunately, like the early unused setpiece footage from Koyaanisqatsi, the tech here has not aged well, though this time Reggio doesn't seem to realize its cheesiness.

Sadly, we lost take one of this conversation and Jonathan Hape was not able to join us for the re-recording. He added a lot to our discussion of the first two Qatsi films, and we wish it could have worked out. You should still go to https://www.jonathan-hape.com/ and check out his music.

We continue through Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi Trilogy with 1988's Powaqqatsi. Reggio works with Phillip Glass again but they lost Ron Fricke for this one and his absence is felt, particularly in the editing. While the first film looked at what US industrialization has done to its own people, Powaqqatsi travels around the world to look at the effects of industrialization on postcolonial peoples.

Jonathan Hape joins us again for this journey, and along the way we talk about Reggio's Christian Anarchist and anarcho-primitivist influences, the 1990 Time Warner Earth Day Special, and Roger Ebert missing the point.

We start into Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi Trilogy this week with what many consider the strongest of the three films, mostly because Ron Fricke's cinematography and editing is masterful in it. Built from scenes of natural beauty and alienating industry with a phenomenal sountrack by Philip Glass, Koyaanisqatsi is a deeply effecting visual poem.

Our dear friend Jonathan Hape (https://www.jonathan-hape.com/) joins us for the entire trilogy (probably).

Christopher Nolan's first feature, Following (1998) is a neo-noir with an achronological story structure. The man loves a neo-noir with an achronological story structure. Nolan describes the film as the pinnacle of what he could achieve in a low budget and just working with his friends. which is damning if true because it's just not very interesting.

René Clément's 1960 adaptation of the 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, Purple Noon is seems to find the director and screenwriter Paul Gégauff trying to drain the homoeroticism out of the source material. Fortunately, cinematographer Henri Decaë and star Alain Delon (in his breakout role) knew how to add it back in through both Delon's fantastic facial acting and some of the most erotic shots of a shirtless man ever to be put to film.