Reckless Review: UN FLIC

Every year, Turner Classic Movies (TCM) throws a few surprises into their Summer Under The Stars (SUTS) programming. As you may know, SUTS means each day in August is dedicated to the films of a single brilliant star. Along with actors you might expect, such as Humphrey Bogart (Aug. 1) and Bette Davis (Aug. 14), TCM always includes a few surprising choices. For instance, I don’t know of any other cable channel that would run nearly 24 hours of silent films, but that’s exactly what happened on Ramon Novarro‘s day (August 8). If you missed Ben-Hur (1925) starring Novarro and Francis X. Bushman, you really should check it out.

The other somewhat unconventional and totally welcome choice in the SUTS mix this year is Catherine Deneuve (Monday, August 12). As I said on Jean Gabin day in 2011…big ups to TCM for running 24 hours of subtitles. (Actually, there is one English-language Deneuve film, The Hunger, showing at 4:15 a.m. on Tuesday, August 13. But still…it’s not something you see every day.)

Of Monday’s films, I highly recommend Un flic (1972). It’s showing at noon on Monday and stars Deneuve, Alain Delon and Richard Crenna, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville.

Un flic is French for “a cop;” the film’s American title is less ambiguous: Dirty Money. Delon plays the title role, a brutal, not-so-clean police commissioner, who suspects that his friend, a nightclub owner (Crenna), is behind a series of bank robberies and drug deals. Cathy (Deneuve) is caught between them, sleeping with both and keeping both their secrets. Her model beauty and perfectly coiffed hair belie the anxiety in her nervous gestures and darting eyes. It’s a small part but a memorable one.

Melville is one of my favorite directors, he does crime pictures as well as anyone. His newsreel-style, on-location filmmaking was influential on Jean-Luc Godard (whose use of jump cuts was inspired by Melville). This was Melville’s last film, and like my favorite Le samouraï, Un flic may as well have been shot in the black and white of a film noir…cold desaturated colors, dark rooms, inky shadows. Thematically it’s as melancholy as any noir, and the line between the lawman and the criminal is as hazy as dusk in the Paris of Melville’s creation…this isn’t Woody Allen’s City of Lights. Part of it is unbelievable (you’ll know it when you see it), and I’m pretty sure Crenna was dubbed, but these are minor details in a suspenseful and enjoyable neo-noir.

UPDATE: No worries if you missed this on Deneuve day and you have Netflix. I searched the site on the off chance they would have Un flic on DVD, and lo and behold, not only do they have it, it’s also streaming. C’est super!

31 Days of Oscar: THE TRAIN (1964)

I talk about how much I love The Train all the time, I watch or DVR it every time it’s on, and I really want more people to see it, but I feel like I haven’t really said why. Its premise is deceptively simple: In the waning days of World War II, French railway inspector/Resistance member Labiche (Burt Lancaster) is ordered by Nazi-in-charge von Waldheim (Paul Scofield) to get a train through to Germany no matter what. Which wouldn’t be a big deal, except that nearly every important piece of art left in France is on the train. Von Waldheim has ruthless soldiers at his disposal, but Labiche’s Resistance friends, some of whom actually run the trains, are used to making sabotage seem normal. It’s an unpredictable, suspenseful chess match with French lives staked against the country’s soul.

Maybe it’s so good because it’s so real. How real? Lancaster did all his own stunts. He even did stunts for another actor. He was injured only once during filming but it had nothing to do with the movie: He sprained his knee while golfing. Director John Frankenheimer covered it by having Labiche get shot in the leg.

Lancaster was actually responsible for Frankenheimer’s presence on set. After the first day of filming, Lancaster didn’t think original director Arthur Penn was emphasizing action and suspense as much as necessary. The actor, who was also producing, had Penn fired and called on his Young Savages/Birdman of Alcatraz/Seven Days in May director, who was happy to help — provided his conditions were met: the film’s official title would be “John Frankenheimer’s The Train;” he would have final cut; and he would receive a Ferrari. The producers agreed to all of it. (Don’t feel too badly for Penn…he went on to make Bonnie and Clyde.)

In addition, when you see trains crashing or derailing, they’re very real, life-sized, often WWII-era, trains — Frankenheimer didn’t use miniatures. In one scene, the production was able to take advantage of the French government’s decision to scrap a railyard by “planting dynamite charges beneath the tracks….According to Newsweek, this brief sequence incorporated 140 separate explosions, 3,000 pounds of TNT and 2,000 gallons of gasoline” [source].

I could write another whole blog post about the filming of these scenes:

and I haven’t even mentioned Jeanne Moreau’s cameo as an innkeeper who may or may not be collaborating with the Nazis, the crazy weather delays and their effect on the film, or the real-life true story that inspired the script — Rose Valland’s autobiographical Le front de l’art: défense des collections françaises, 1939-1945.*

Furthermore, the film can be enjoyed as both a straight-up action picture and as a philosophical exploration of art and war. It asks the questions, “How much does art matter, and is it worth dying for?” and suggests that one’s answer will vary based on class. The Train’s preoccupation with social status is understated, but it reminds me of another film with an ambivalent outlook on war, La Grande Illusion. For starters, both have working-class Frenchmen, Labiche and Jean Gabin’s Lieutenant Maréchal, and aristocratic Germans, von Waldheim and Erich von Stroheim’s Captain (later Major) von Rauffenstein, though their differences are far more prominent in Illusion.

So The Train won a ton of Oscars, right? Not at all. It received one Academy Award nomination for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay – Written Directly for the Screen — which it lost, to Darling. Neither film is really all that well-known today, but I confess I have more affection for the somber World War II movie that could.

This post is part of Week 5 of the 31 Days of Oscar blogathon, hosted by myself, Aurora of Once Upon A Screen and Kellee of Outspoken & Freckled. Check out past weeks’ fabulous posts as well: Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4

* Per IMDB, paintings from the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris “were indeed loaded into a train for shipment to Germany during World War II, but fortunately, the elaborate deception seen in the movie was not really required. The train was merely routed onto a ring railway and circled around and around Paris until the Allies arrived.”

UPDATE: This post wouldn’t really be complete without Frankenheimer’s TCM tribute to Lancaster. The director talks about The Train, including the one-take scene Jack Deth referenced in his comment, here.

Evil Dead and a greedy family haunt the Redford Theatre

Our friends at the Redford Theatre are treating Detroit horror fans to two frightening classics this weekend. On Friday October 26th only, there will be a midnight showing of Evil Dead (1981), the now-classic story of the doomed trip to an isolated cabin in the woods undertaken by a group of college students. The film has quite a few Michigan connections. Writer/director/producer Sam Raimi and star/producer Bruce Campbell both hail from the Mitten, and a rough cut of the film, then known by its working title Within the Woods, was shown to potential investors at the former Punch & Judy Theater in Grosse Pointe Farms.

Most importantly for Friday’s showing, Evil Dead was first shown at the Redford Theatre back on October 15, 1981, and went on to become one of the best-loved and most influential horror movies ever. Don’t miss this opportunity to see all the blood and gore (it’s rated NC-17 for a reason) on the big screen. The organ overture begins at 11:30pm. Tickets are $5.00.

If goofy monochrome horror is more to your taste, never fear, the Redford has you covered too. On Saturday, they’ll be showing the rarely-seen silent, The Cat and the Canary, starring Laura La Plante. Heirs to a fortune find themselves spending the night at a menacing mansion, where mysterious and eerie things happen throughout the night. La Plante can only inherit her old relative’s money if she is declared sane in the morning.

Tony O’Brien will accompany the film on the Barton Theatre Pipe Organ, and as a bonus, the silent short The Haunted House starring Buster Keaton will precede the feature. The evening begins at 8:00 p.m. Tickets for this showing are $12.00 for adults and $8.00 for children 12 and under.

Universal horror at the Redford Theatre

On Saturday, October 20th, Detroit’s Redford Theatre is showing a Universal Studios horror double feature: The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (1943).

In Bride, a sequel to the wildly successful Frankenstein (1931), Boris Karloff returns as the Monster and Colin Clive reprises his role as Dr. Henry Frankenstein. This installment of one of the first horror movie franchises sees Dr. Frankenstein forced by another mad scientist to make a match for the Monster, with scary and sad results.

By 1943 Karloff had given up the mantle of the Monster, so Universal passed it to another one of their horror icons, Bela Lugosi. It seems as if the studio felt that one creature was good, but two was even better. So the film has the Monster facing off against the Wolfman, played by Lon Chaney Jr.

Seeing these two excellent examples of Universal horror classics is particularly appropriate this Halloween season as 2012 is the studio’s 100th birthday. And while you can see these movies at home (The Bride of Frankenstein is included on the newly released Universal Classic Monsters: The Essential Collection box set), seeing them on a big screen, like the Redford’s, adds much to the experience. Why not see these films as they were seen when they were first released —in a movie palace?

Reckless Review: Thirteen Women

Back in December, TCM had a day of Myrna Loy films and I recorded a bunch of them, including a goofy little pre-code picture called Thirteen Women (1932). I have to say, though Loy is excellent in it, this is an extremely odd picture. She plays a mysterious psychotic named Ursula who was bullied at a posh school by a bunch of mean girls and has set out to get revenge on them. This she does in a peculiar and ludicrous way. Capitalizing on the spiritualism craze of the time and the mighty power of suggestion, Ursula sends each woman a fake astrological chart, accompanied by a letter predicting death, dismemberment, or other calamity. She signs the letters with the name of the fake swami she works for. Each recipient then becomes so obsessed with her letter that the prediction comes true.

I always knew Loy’s beauty was spellbinding, but in this, despite five pounds of spackle, she actually hypnotizes men. Fixed in her gaze, the “swami” passes out. Ditto the chauffeur she employs to do her evil bidding later on. She forces him to send Irene Dunne’s son poison candy, but Mom has the sense to get it tested at the police lab. The chemist says, “This candy is fine but it was tampered with. If anyone had eaten it, they’d have died.” Then it isn’t “fine”!The film is full of odd moments like that: The first classmates/victims are two sisters in a trapeze act..sort of a weird career choice for alumnae of the type of upper-crust school they were all supposed to have attended. And if you actually count, only 10 women are accounted for. I remember reading that 15 minutes were cut from the film somewhere along the way. Single moms who have the nerve to be happy, career women, and sex talk remain, so God only knows what was cut. Maybe it would make more sense with the missing piece. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

The film keeps asking us to identify with the sorority girls, portrayed by Irene Dunne, Kay Johnson, Florence Eldridge, and Peg Entwhistle, among others. But it also keeps showing us the remains of this group’s adolescent clique-y-ness and their complete gullibility, so that, though the maniacally evil Ursula has the most exaggerated eyeliner caught on celluloid until Divine made his debut, she is the most consistently watchable and interesting character. Mostly the film is a soap-y curio from a time when every house had a Ouija board. Don’t try to make too much sense of it, just suspend your disbelief and enjoy this showcase for Loy’s gorgeous looks and make-the-best-of-it dramatic talents.

Film Noir Friday – TOUCH of EVIL

I’ve had a horrendous case of writer’s block this week, trying to come up with something original to say about Orson Welles’ 1958 film noir masterpiece, Touch of Evil. As I noted last August, it’s practically impossible to say anything that hasn’t already been said about Welles and his work. After all, there are countless books and movie blogs rightly singing their praises, and Touch of Evil has long been regarded as a great of the film noir genre. But I’ve got to add my $.02 because Detroit Film Theatre is showing the film on Saturday, January 14 at 4:00 p.m. as part of their DFT 101 series. So I’ll just list why I’m so looking forward to this opportunity to see it as it was meant to be seen:

Touch of Evil is arguably the last in the film noir classic cycle. Welles’ own Citizen Kane is considered an important influence on what would eventually come to be known as film noir, and it’s clear that he had mastered the elements of film noir style, exemplified by his use of chiaroscuro lighting and subjective camerawork. Welles also wrote the film’s script, which contains most of film noir’s thematic elements. A hero (Charlton Heston as a Mexican narcotics officer named Mike Vargas) lost in a labyrinth of shadiness and duplicity, shadowed streets, corruption, and seedy characters. In Welles’ hands, it’s a feast for the eyes.
Welles also stars in this, his last American film, taking on the role of corrupt, alcohol-soaked cop Hank Quinlan. Quinlan’s jurisdiction is Los Robles, a seedy town on the Texas side of the U.S.-Mexico border where all sorts of crime occurs, but Quinlan seems to be the worst. We see him slowly losing even the pretension of moral authority, as he conspires against Vargas, endangers Vargas’ wife (Janet Leigh), plants evidence, drinks to excess, and generally acts as judge and jury, convicting anyone he doesn’t like, usually a Mexican.

It will be a joy to see the film’s opening sequence, a three-minute, 20-second long take, on the big screen. We are shown a bomb being armed and concealed in the trunk of a Cadillac, which we then follow over the border in an amazing continuous shot, that ends with the explosion of the bomb.
As Tana (Marlene Dietrich) might have said about the 1958 version of Touch of Evil, “Honey, you’re a mess.” Welles wasn’t allowed to control the film’s final cut. The studio’s version placed the credits over the long take, added a musical soundtrack to it, and added some scenes to the rest of the film — apparently the film’s plot was deemed to intricate for the average moviegoer. Thankfully, DFT will be showing the 1998 restoration, which was based on a painstaking 58-page memo Welles sent to the head of Universal Studios (who ignored it), so that what we see on Saturday will be as near to what Orson Welles intended as possible. Don’t miss it!

The DFT is located on the John R side of the Detroit Institute of Arts, 5200 Woodward Avenue. To purchase tickets, call 313.833.4005 or visit the DFT Ticket Info page.

Stagecoach

Westerns were some of the first movies ever made, and they never really seem to go out of style. Look no further than your multiplex for confirmation — Cowboys and Aliens is opening this weekend. And at the Detroit Film Theatre on Saturday, there is also the opportunity to see one of the most significant and influential of the genre on the big screen: Stagecoach.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Westerns, but it is rare that one is as influential as Stagecoach. This is one of those movies that seems cliché-ridden because it has been borrowed from so many times. The plot may sound familiar even if you haven’t seen it: In the 1870s, a group of people from all walks of life board a westbound stagecoach. Everyone is worried about Geronimo’s Apaches attacking, but for various reasons must make the trip anyway. They are escorted by a marshal and along the way pick up an outlaw, the Ringo Kid, who has escaped from prison to avenge the murder of his family.

The characters are familiar: the disgraced doctor (Thomas Mitchell), the outlaw (John Wayne), the woman of ill repute (Claire Trevor), the society lady (Louise Platt), the dim bulb (Andy Devine), the pompous bank manager (Berton Churchill), the marshal (George Bancroft), the gambler (John Carradine), and the fastidious city gent (Donald Meek). Its conventions have been adopted, not only in westerns, but in nearly every other genre as well. For instance, the idea of people from varied walks of life being thrown together in life-threatening circumstances has been recycled endlessly. I am reminded of the Airport movies and Blazing Saddles; other reviewers have mentioned Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, The Maltese Falcon, Hotel, and Joss Whedon’s unfortunately-short-lived TV series Firefly. And Orson Welles allegedly screened it 70 or more times before he made Citizen Kane.

But the same elements that we now take for granted would have seemed novel when the film was released in 1939, as did its social commentary, which hadn’t really been employed in a Western before. The stagecoach is rife with socio-economic tensions. The lady refuses to sit with the prostitute. The Civil War wasn’t that long ago; the gambler and the doctor were on opposite sides. Director John Ford’s sympathies clearly lie with the outcasts — the doctor, the prostitute, and the outlaw — and there is much here that questions whether “civilization” is really civilized.

And something about it stays fresh. The characters manage to transcend their stereotypes, mostly due to sophisticated storytelling and great acting. The drunken doctor and the city gent redeem themselves. The secret, possibly scandalous connection between the society lady and the gambler is only ever hinted at, with looks and gestures. The outlaw leads by example.

Wayne, as the outlaw, gives one of his best performances. Sometimes his later Western characterizations seem almost self-parodying, but this one is fresh and likable, and he has solid chemistry with Trevor. It’s interesting that reportedly producer Walter Wanger was reluctant to cast Wayne because The Big Trail, Wayne’s first starring role, also a western, was a big flop. Wanger may also have been reluctant to increase his risk because Westerns were less popular since the advent of sound, due to the difficulty of recording outdoors. Ford pushed for casting Wayne, and then, rumor has it, so stressed him out during the filming, that Wayne forgot he was acting with more lauded talent like Trevor and Mitchell. Whatever Ford did, it worked. Wayne held his own, and this film, the 80th of his career, made him a star.

This film was and is also remarkable for its setting. John Ford loved Monument Valley in Arizona; this is the first of many films he eventually shot there. Whether it was the stunning natural beauty of the area or its remoteness from studio interference that took his fancy is anyone’s guess. But it is certain that the setting and the film will both look their best on the big screen, as they were meant to be seen.