I’ve been on a Saul Bass kick for a while, falling love with his incredible opening sequences and stunning posters. One of the posters I liked the best was one from an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’sSaint Joan by Otto Preminger. Based of this I thought that films about Joan of Arc would be a good theme for the week.
So anyway, as I said, Saint Joan is an adaptation of the Shaw play of the same name, from a screenplay by Graham Greene. I’d read the play years ago. I don’t remember much of it beyond the anachronistic behavior of the characters and the play ending with the dead Joan appearing to King Charles VII in his bedroom.
In this version the film begins at this point with flashbacks to the beginning of Joan’s career and then moving forward to her trial and execution.
This was pretty good, taking full advantage of Shaw’s witty dialogue and Premiger creating an interesting theatrical quality throughout the film. Any problems I have with it mostly come from Shaw. I’m not completely sure what Shaw was going for here. Many of his plays try to make a satirical point. Here I’m mostly certain he was doing the material straight. Of course from my perspective I’d need a degree on the subject to recognize any of Shaw’s dog whistles.
The next film on my list was Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. This is a pretty straight adaptation of a transcript of Joan’s trial as the judges try to trick her into saying things that will discredit her claims. The film is a study of one’s woman’s faith and personal strength and the inevitable tragedy when all of this fails.
This really isn’t really a film for every one. It has an extremely expressionistic style and consists almost entirely of closeups. I mostly enjoyed it as a study of some wonderful faces and expressions.
I while watching one of my favorite film theory youtube channels the other day when It spent a minute talking about British New Wave. Since I’d never even heard of British New Wave (at least not under that name) I thought this would make for a good theme to base this week’s selection on.
The first film on my selection, Karel Reisz’sSaturday Night and Sunday Morning, based on the novel of the same name by Alan Sillitoe, tells the story Arthur Seaton, a machinist working in a bicycle factory in Nottingham, played by Albert Finney. Arthur is jaded by all of the people around him who he thinks have either wasted their lives, or have been burnt out, and refuses to be like them.
He goes about this by going to a lot of pubs to drink on Saturday nights and having an affair with a coworker’s wife.
This was an interesting film. The strong Midlands accents made it a little hard to follow, but it does a good job of showing lower-class life in 1960 Britain and doesn’t shirk from controversial issues, like abortion.
What makes this film work though is the fantastic performance from Finny playing Arthur as an arrogant bastard and a compulsive liar.
The next on my list, Lindsay Anderson‘s if… starts out with what looks like a brutal expose on British public schools but then it seems to change its mind half way through and gets REALLY weird.
It’s a new term at College house and all the students are from new students terrified about what’s going to happen to them to the jaded veterans like Mick Travis played by Malcolm McDowell starting out his film Career. From here we watch day to day life at the school, with its petty rivalries, bullying, and classist pecking order. Until the whole thing explodes… almost literally.
This was a fun film. McDowell’s performance as a high school rebel gives us a taste of what he would do as Alex in Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange. It goes back and forth from humor to horror to flat out surrealism. Part of me kept comparing it to Harry Potter… Though if Hogwarts was anything like College House, Voldemort would have run away in terror.
For this week’s selection, I did films that were explicitly lit about Sherlock Holmes. Or to be more precise, films about reasonable facsimiles of Sherlock Holmes but really aren’t fooling anybody.
On a nice side note these were pretty obscure titles and definitely put the breadth of Scarecrow’s collection to the test.
Kudos.
The first film on my list was They Might Be Giants starring George C Scott. (In case anyone is wondering this is the film that the band got their name from) Scott plays Justin Playfair, a former lawyer, who, since his wife died, has become convinced he is Sherlock Holmes. His Brother tries to get him committed, (partially for his own good and partially to get control of his fortune) He is taken into the hands of Dr. Mildred Watson (Joanne Woodward) and now that Holmes has his Watson he can now solve his greatest mystery… Whatever it is.
This was a fun little film based loosely on one of the main premises of Don Quixote. “Sure, we know they’re windmills… but they MIGHT be giants”. Following a series of strange clues (such as bags of garbage) Justin leads Mildred down the rabbit hole to a different perspective where disenfranchised mad people live in their own world and are quite happy about it, thank you very much.
I enjoyed this film. Sure it was short and mushy, it was a lot of fun. To put this in very geeky gamer terms I kept imagining this to be a story about a VERY benign coterie of Malkavians from the World of Darkness… and Scott and Woodward play off each other very well.
My next film is the German 1933 film, The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes. Tells the story of two con artists (or at least we think they’re con artists) Morris Flynn (Hans Albers) and Macky McMacpherson (Heinz Rühmann) who try to pass themselves off as Holmes and Watson (in their defense they don’t SAY they’re Holmes and Watson… they just get on the train dressed in a deerstalker smoking a pipe and carrying a violin when they give their real names… they just don’t correct anyone who assumes they’re Holmes and Watson in disguise.
This gets them free passage on the hotel and free room and board at a fancy hotel. But it also gets them the attention of the police who want their help with a counterfeiting ring.
I’m not sure if I can truly recommend this film, but it was fairly well done, with solid comic performances from the leads, and perfectly enjoyable.
Regarding where and when it was made, the cynic in me kept regarding it as a propaganda film, as if it was trying to tell me “See? All of us Germans are happy people! Nothing to see here!”
I’ve been a fan of Doug Walker’sNostalgia Critic page for some time. While I don’t pretend to agree with him all the time, his analysis is always good and his points are sound. One of my favorite series he did was something called “Old vs New” where he compared a well-known film and it’s equally well-known remake and decides which was the better. Of course, the only problem with this format, as I saw it, was new had to mean recent which left out a whole lot of good examples. Since I don’t have that problem, I thought I’d give the format a try without that restriction, starting with one of the great classics of the mobster genre, Scarface.
I was drawn to the original Scarface as a way to continue my way down my list of Howard Hawks films (though I was surprised by some of the details since I’m pretty sure I was getting it mixed up with Little Caesar)
Scarface, based on a novel of the same name by Armitage Trail, is very loosely based on the life of Al Capone and tells the story of Antonio “Tony” Camonte, (played by Paul Muni,) a soldier in the the Southside mob run by mafioso John “Johnny” Lovo, (played by Osgood Perkins) He quickly climbs in the ranks killing Lovo after a failed assassination attempt and takes his place.
Everything begins to fall apart when Tony kills his chief lieutenant, Guino Rinaldo, (George Raft) after he married Tony’s sister Cesca, (Ann Dvorak). After this it’s all downhill with him being hunted down by the police, killing him in a climactic firefight.
I won’t call this my favorite Hawks film, but it is still incredibly good. It’s a fine cast led Muni who plays Tony as a ruthless animal who needs to be put down. My only problem with it is it’s done as a blatant morality play about how one should not take up a life of crime and the sermon frequently weighs down the plot.
Brian De Palma’s 1983 remake, with Al Pacino as Antonio “Tony” Montana, updates the plot to the 1980s with the Mariel boatlift with Tony as one of the many criminals Castro threw into the mix.
Thrown into a Miami refugee camp he is released by drug dealer Frank Lopez (Robert Loggia) in exchange for assassinating a former Cuban government official. He quickly rises through the ranks until he’s trusted enough to go on business trips to make deals with a Bolivian drug lord Alejandro Sosa (played by Paul Shenar )
This leads growing mistrust from Lopez until he finally has him killed. When this fails Tony kills him and takes over the operation.
His rise to power is swift until he gets arrested on RICO charges. In an attempt to get out of it he makes a deal with Sosa in exchange for assassinating a political activist. When Tony balks on the plan at the last minute, and after he kills his best friend for marrying the sister, Sosa has his mansion attacked with a small army, killing Tony in a climactic firefight.
I’m not sure what I feel about this version of Scarface. It certainly isn’t bad, but for various reasons, I always found a lot of the scenes, that are supposed to shock us over the sheer brutality, to be over the top and almost silly.
So how do the two Scarfaces hold up? At first, I was expecting the whole morality play quality of Hawks’ Scarface to drag it down and make it the lesser of the two. Instead, the stylized and theatrical qualities of it’s condensed story make it make it much more vivid (you can forgive the cartoonish way everybody throws punches) But at the same time, it’s still a little too condensed, as if Hawks can’t wait to have justice finally prevail.
De Palma’s Scarface has a lot more time to work on the details. Showing just how Tony rises to power, and more importantly, giving us more time to see Tony in his position of power.
Finally, the biggest thing to pay attention to is who’s the better Tony. For this, I have to give it to Muni in the first film. Pacino performance is at first glance tough and ruthless, but since we get more time to see him, he’s ultimately childish in his violent temper. Muni comes off as a force of nature who can’t be bargained with and takes what he wants.
This week I found myself drawn to watch some more Samurai Films. (Not counting the Kurosawa films I always watch) Specifically, I thought I’d try some of the darker ones. The ones that overtly criticize the code of bushido and wear their cynicism on their sleeves as a badge of honor. On a side note, these both have the same lead actor, the great Tatsuya Nakadai ( while I was certainly aware that he had a great career, to my shame, I was only aware of him as the psychotic gunfighter in Yojimbo)
The first film on my list, Kihachi Okamoto‘s Sword of Doom, tells the story of disgraced swords man, Ryunsuke Tsukue (played by Nakadai) who is exiled from his fencing school after killing his opponent in a match.
From there he starts to make a living as a hired sword taking the jobs that let him kill the most, and hunting (in this case the term is painfully literal) opponents to fight and kill.
You know that when a film begins with our protagonist cutting down a pilgrim we know that things are not going to be pleasant. This was a dark and depressing film that goes into great detail about Tsukue’s gradual mental breakdown. Until finally in the climax, he’s too busy fighting figments of his imagination to even notice the people who have actually been sent to kill him!
In the next film Masaki Kobayashi‘s Harakiri, peace time is not good for the samurai class. So much so in such time’s, there was a scam going around where a starving ronin would ask to commit seppuku in the family grounds and be buried. The idea was that they expected to be talked out of it and given some money out of pity.
Except in the Iyi family who decide to call one Ronin’s bluff and force him to go through with it. Made all the more terrible because he had sold his swords to pay for medicine and only had blunt bamboo props.
It’s later when another ronin, Hanshiro, (played by Nakadai) who turns out to be the ronin’s father-in-law comes to repeat this ceremony and get his revenge in at the same time.
I really loved this film. It was a great performance from Nadaki and the camera work on the final climax is amazing.
So anyway, as I said, Saint Joan is an adaptation of the Shaw play of the same name, from a screenplay by Graham Greene. I’d read the play years ago. I don’t remember much of it beyond the anachronistic behavior of the characters and the play ending with the dead Joan appearing to King Charles VII in his bedroom.
The next film on my list was Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. This is a pretty straight adaptation of a transcript of Joan’s trial as the judges try to trick her into saying things that will discredit her claims. The film is a study of one’s woman’s faith and personal strength and the inevitable tragedy when all of this fails.
