Understanding Editing: A Place in the Sun

This is the fifth in my 2025 monthly series Understanding Editing, in which I am alternating Oscar winners for best editing between those I've seen and those I haven't, chronologically, to get a better sense of what makes a superlative version of that craft.

Up until ten minutes before I started watching A Place in the Sun, I thought I was going to be watching King Solomon's Mines. 

Mines, the 1950 Oscar winner for best editing, had been the movie slotted in to take the May spot in Understanding Editing since the series started. I'd say the reason for that somewhat arbitrary decision was that I saw the remake of King Solomon's Mines from 1985, starring Richard Chamberlain, and it was one of the first movies I saw in the theater that I remember really hating. Of course, I couldn't in 2025 meaningfully compare the Oscar winner with a movie I saw 40 years ago, but it was a useful tiebreaker anyway.

I can't remember if I scouted it to check its availability for rental at the time I set the schedule for the series, but if I did, I didn't do a very good job. I tried a couple places to rent it on Tuesday night and couldn't find it, and obviously it was also not available on any of my streamers. (It came up on Amazon as a movie I could watch if I tried one of those sub-services they are always offering, but I never like to get myself involved in that sort of thing. I don't need any more streaming services, even if these smaller services end up being like four bucks a month.)

So in order to get another movie from between the release year of last month's already seen best editing winner (1946's The Best Years of Our Lives) and next month's already seen best editing winner (1953's From Here to Eternity), I just shifted one year ahead and there was 1951's A Place in the Sun, a movie I'd heard of but knew nothing about. 

In fact, throughout the entirety of my knowing about this title, I've confused it in my mind with A Raisin in the Sun, a Sidney Poitier movie from ten years later, which I also obviously have not seen. But A Place in the Sun is not A Raisin in the Sun.

What it is is a melodrama starring Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift and Shelley Winters, far darker than I was expecting, which it took me a while to warm up to. Once I started warming up to it, though, I warmed up to it in a big way.

I could sense an auteur's sensibilities in the film's opening, which shows Clift's George Eastman trying to hitchhike his way on a dusty roadside to get to a job in his rich industrialist uncle's factory. This opening, plus the black and white filmmaking, put me more in mind of an independent film than a movie by the director (George Stevens) who would go on to make the large canvas color films Shane and Giant later in the decade. I'm not sure A Place in the Sun is at their level, but it's in the same conversation.

However, as I said, I couldn't tell where this film was going for its first half, and felt a bit frustrated with it. George takes up with another factory worker, Alice Tripp (Winters), against factory rules, so he has to keep their relationship a secret. Because it's a secret, that also leaves him, publicly, a free agent when he meets the beautiful socialite Angela Vickers (Taylor) and falls for her. Things get dark as he juggles the two women and bad decisions need to be made -- or get made, anyway. As nepotism allows George to get promoted well above Alice's station, themes of social class and moral responsibility get a workout. 

It's the shift out of neutral and into the dark, which occurs around the halfway point, that really got me on board, since it also gave the plot a definitive shove in some direction. I guess I'm going to get a bit spoilery from here, so if you care about having the details of a 74-year-old movie unspoiled, tread carefully.

Although I don't see any mention of this relationship on the internet (actually there's just one that I just founded when I expanded my search), I felt like A Place in the Sun has a moment in its second half that is a direct allusion to F.W. Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. And yes, it does make me feel like a successful cinephile when I can recognize an allusion in a 1951 film to a 1927 film. This is where things get spoilery.

In both movies, a man takes a woman out on a rowboat with the intention of pushing her off and killing her. I won't tell you how it goes in either movie, since you may also not want spoilers for a 98-year-old film. I will say that both characters have a major crisis of conscious as they get farther down a path from which there is no return, and we see the toll of it on their face. However, since I've already characterised the second half of this film as "dark," that will probably lead you to conclude a few things about what may or may not happen.

I suppose I should get to talking about why this film won best editing, and why it feels like a distinctive artistic achievement specifically for that fact.

For that frustrating first half, it felt a bit like a redux of last month's viewing of The Best Years of Our Lives -- not because my feelings about the movies were similar (I love Lives), but because in both of them, I could not see the movie's decisive edge in its editing that won it the Oscar. Then I started to really notice a technique being used by editor William Hornbeck, who had this one win out of four nominations (including It's a Wonderful Life). He also served as Stevens' editor on Giant. 

Dissolves have been around since the start of cinema, so I was out of luck if I hoped that Hornbeck had played any significant role in moving their usage forward. However, the way he uses them is distinct and purposeful.

Since I don't want to assume you know a lot about editing, I'll explain what a dissolve is. It's when the image from one scene slowly transitions into the image from the next scene, such that one image is "dissolving" and the other one is taking its place, and both are visible during the period of transition. There is also usually, though not always, the suggestion of the passage of time, so it works well in a montage of images that suggest time elapsing. 

With A Place in the Sun, its the duration of their simultaneous visibility that struck me as profound. There were a lot of instances of this in Hornbeck's dissolves, but I think specifically of one involving Taylor's face with a look of concern on it, lingering for an almost uncomfortably long amount of time over the next scene, which depicts the thing she's concerned about. It almost makes her a presence in that scene, hanging over it like an apparition. 

I say it's uncomfortably long not because Hornbeck misuses the technique, but because the extra three to five seconds is enough to make us notice this as a violation of the normal usage rules for dissolves. Editing techniques are almost designed to go unnoticed, as editing is most often the silent aide to good storytelling, not calling attention to itself. When it does call attention to itself, it's to a purpose, and of course there are both good and bad versions of it calling attention to itself. Here, it's very much good, and only calls attention to itself, I would argue, if you are looking for it, as I was. For most viewers, it would just be subconscious.

In A Place in the Sun, the dissolves had the effect of casting a slow pall of the inevitability of the unfolding tragedy. I didn't mention it before now, but A Place in the Sun is adapted from a 1925 novel which also became a play called An American Tragedy. The dissolves used here mostly show a slow crawl of one thing to another thing to another thing, changing scenes and passing a period of time for us, but also underscoring the preordained nature of the events that follow when you make one bad decision. You can't dissolve through things that are unpredictable, only through things that are playing out according to a tragic predetermination. And the use of this technique becomes ever more thought provoking as we see where the narrative is going.

In retrospect, the inability to get King Solomon's Mines seems like a very lucky stroke indeed. That might have gotten me more examples of editing in an action or adventure context, as I had in earlier series entries like The Adventures of Robin Hood and Sergeant York, but it likely wouldn't have deepened my appreciation of the narrative capabilities of editing like A Place in the Sun did.

Next month, as mentioned earlier, it will be my second viewing of From Here to Eternity, the 1953 best picture winner -- which I know for certain will be available to rent. 

Mission: Letterboxd submission gag

This post could have also been titled "I finally saw: Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning: Part 1," because indeed, I'd been one of the last holdouts. 

I wasn't opposed to seeing it in 2023, even though the entries in this series since my favorite, Ghost Protocol, have underwhelmed me. It seemed especially likely that I'd see it since I saw the mini featurette about the making of Tom Cruise's motorcycle cliff jump about six times before other movies. But I just never worked it out, and the lengthy two hour and 43-minute running time certainly didn't help, though that is of course a standard running time for a blockbuster these days.

If you read the post I wrote yesterday, you wouldn't think it was particularly likely I'd be seeing a 163-minute movie now either -- but then my son was invited over to his auntie's for a sleepover last night, meaning his usual informal claim to the living room was non-existent. So I started watching it at just after 7, and still didn't finish until after midnight -- though that was also because I stopped for dinner and to watch a show with my wife, as well as, yes, have a short nap.

There are any number of things about the movie itself I could write a whole post about, given my low bar for writing a post, but I'll just touch on a few quick ones before getting to what I'm actually writing about today. 

One thing I wanted to know is, why doesn't Ethan Hunt ever think about his wife anymore? You know, the one played Michelle Monaghan? I'm not sure if she left the franchise on bad terms, but any time Ethan has to think about his past, he thinks about another woman who died (did we see her in other movies?) as well as Ilse Faust. What happened to poor Michelle? Maybe she didn't die (I don't think she did) which is why he doesn't need to think about her.

Also, I found some of the execution in this movie really hammy. I was really distracted by a scene near the beginning when a bunch of government bigwigs are telling the CIA director about this new "entity" that's the MacGuffin for this movie and for the one coming out next week, and there's one full line of exposition about it that goes on for about two or three minutes, with cutaway images showing the "entity" in the background -- efficient screenwriting you will agree. The thing I thought was hammy was that the characters continue one long thought about it, but they trade off who's speaking at intervals of about every sentence. And there are like five characters participating in this exposition. I know that's supposed to be more interesting than if just a single person were doing the exposing, but it's artificial as hell.

The thing I'm writing about is what happens when you add Dead Reckoning on Letterboxd.

I went to add it this morning, and as soon as I clicked the submit button, the whole screen was taken over by a black computer screen with green writing on it, coming in little bursts, as green writing on computer screens does. For half a second I was like "Oh shit, what just happened," which was probably the point. I quickly realized it was a movie tie-in as it started talking about my review self-destructing in five seconds, and then a notification that Ethan Hunt had short-circuited the self-destruction sequence.

Cute. But since it went on for about 15 seconds, eventually, kind of annoying.

It made me wonder if there has been any other movie that has partnered with Letterboxd for this sort of promotional tie-in, which, when you think about it, is kind of unnecessary. I mean, I'm adding it because I've already seen the movie. I resented it a little bit, because I was able to conflate the promo with Tom Cruise's ego, and I imagined that Letterboxd isn't getting anything out it. In reality, they probably are, but maybe I'm still a little bit annoyed.

Anyway, if you haven't added Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning: Part One to your Letterboxd yet, you might do it just to see this little bit -- which I am now myself promoting, I guess. 

Losing my ability not to sleep through movies

The poster for Bumblebee accompanies this post, but if you are reading this within the first 12 hours or so after it's published, you won't see Bumblebee listed as my most recently watched movie in the area to the right.

That's because despite starting it two nights ago, I still haven't finished watching it.

I guess as you age a little bit, you lose a step on some of the things you used to do well. As a prime example, as I type this, I am wearing reading glasses, which I've had for maybe a year now, despite always seeing perfectly for my first half-century on the planet.

More pertinent to today's post, I appear to be losing my stamina for watching a movie at night -- and also, sometimes, my ability to pause it.

It's not that I never fall asleep during movies. I do frequently have a nap during a movie, which probably plays havoc with my actual sleep later on, but what are you going to do. However, in those situations, I have always, invariably, almost without fail, paused the movie for the entirety of my nap. Which I could often keep to a reasonable length of 15 to 20 minutes, leaving me slightly more refreshed for the home stretch.

I have, in fact, paused during the "nap" -- more like a prelude to my full night's rest -- that has gotten me each of the last two attempts on Bumblebee. It's just that after starting around 11:30 last night, it didn't end until 1:50 -- at which point I just decided to save the remaining 25 minutes of the movie for today.

However, there are some examples recently of movies I've finished the same night I watched them, with some pretty sketchy details of what happened in the second half of the movie.

On Tuesday night, for example, I watched and loved Paper Moon. However, there's a lot I don't remember about how the father and the daughter he refuses to acknowledge is his own -- played by real-life father and daughter Ryan and Tatum O'Neal -- went from scamming people on bible sales to the moonshine business. There's some stuff related to an exotic dancer played by the incomparable Madeleine Kahn that is also pretty fuzzy.

Across Sunday and Monday, I feel like I saw all of Abigail, but it did take me two nights to do it. 

Then last week it was Another Simple Favor, which I wasn't really liking anyway, so I didn't consider this such a loss. And though I was there for the very end, I couldn't remember what had happened with the movie's main villain, played by Alison Janney. I had to look it up online later on, and it wasn't that I couldn't remember what happened with her -- I'd never seen it. And I couldn't be sure if it was just a crucial 30 seconds of sleep or if there's a whole ten- to 15-minute chunk of that movie I didn't properly experience.

I suppose this is not going to get better anytime soon. My younger son, who says the internet doesn't work properly in his room, doesn't clear out of the living room until 10 o'clock most nights, and even if he did, my wife would still be doing household chores until at least that time, and I feel like a heel if I don't try to keep pace with her. Plus, I'm getting older and probably sleepier, though life is making my pretty damn sleepy these days due to my busiest period ever at work. 

So if I'm not going to start watching movies earlier, and if I'm already trying to watch shorter movies to compensate for my likely failure to finish them in one evening, then not only am I missing out on the longer movies that might be an organic part of my viewing schedule, we might start seeing a lot of weeks where I watch three movies rather than six movies. 

Which most people would consider fine. I'm not most people. And especially in the short run, I am trying to watch as many movies as I can. For reasons I won't tell you now because they will become clear in another six weeks, I am trying to watch another 40 movies before the end of June in order to accomplish something, viewing-wise, that I "need" to accomplish by the end of that month. So yeah, I'll be trying to squeeze in as many cheeky afternoon movies as I can until then.

As for Bumblebee ... although it's unfair to make a final pronouncement on it, since I haven't finished watching it, I'll say I was hoping it would be a lot more different from a standard Transformers movie than it has been. I mean, it is different for sure ... but it still has Transformers in it, which is pretty damning to the prospects of any movie. 

Is this the career Dan Stevens thought he'd have?

Don't get me wrong, Dan Stevens has had plenty of work, especially compared to the other alumni of Downton Abbey. Possibly only Lily James has had a comparable level of post-Abbey success.

But is the career he's having now really why he left the green pastures of Julian Fellowes' show for the seemingly greener pastures of Hollywood?

Because he left a hit show at the height of its success, Stevens follows in the footsteps of cautionary tales like David Caruso, whose snubbing of NYPD Blue saw him out in the wilderness of middling movie success until he scurried back to television with CSI: Miami. 

Stevens has done better than that, but he'll still carry with him -- at least with me, and I'm sure other Abbey watchers -- the reminder of having bailed on the show at the height of our shipping of his Matthew Crawley and Michelle Dochery's Mary Crawley. (Don't worry, it's not as gross as it sounds. They were distant cousins, if memory serves.) It's probably not a spoiler at this point to say they killed him off in a car accident at the end of season 3, I believe it was, at the actor's request, in a way that always seemed sudden if you're being generous, abrupt if you're not. (The only reason we wouldn't say they Poochie'd him was because he requested it instead of being fired.)

The reason I'm considering this today is that last night I watched Abigail, the perfectly acceptable horror movie from last year in which Stevens stars. There's actually another reason thinking back on Downton Abbey is particularly appropriate with Abigail, but I'll get to that later on.

"Perfectly acceptable" describes Stevens' career in general. Let's look at some of the highlights, or maybe I should say, mid-lights:

The first movie I remember him being in after he left Abbey was The Guest, which is not anyone's idea of a big, "announce yourself to everyone else who doesn't watch Downton Abbey" role. It's a sort of home invasion thriller directed by Adam Wingard, who yes, was a name there for a bit and directed a couple Godzilla movies. But I don't really hear anyone talking about The Guest in any of my cinematic circles.

Also in 2014, among the movies I saw, were The Cobbler and Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb. The former, an Adam Sandler vehicle, was sort of a laughingstock, even though it was directed by a director with credibility (Win Win's Tom McCarthy), and I don't think he even had a particularly memorable role in the third Night at the Museum movie, though I don't really remember that movie so it's not surprising I don't remember his role in it.

I saw him in Colossal in 2016 -- don't remember him in that but he wasn't the star -- but probably his first really "big" showcase was as the titular beast in Beauty and the Beast in 2017. And while this is certainly a prominent showcase, it is also, notably, a showcase that does not put his real face on display for all but a very small percentage of the running time. 

I suppose the best movie I think he's made since leaving the show was Alex Ross Perry's Her Smell, which ranked in my top ten in 2018. This is not the sort of movie you make, though, if you are leaving a show because you want bigger and better things, because you want to see your name in lights. (More on that thought in a moment.)

His concentrated efforts in the year 2020 may be both the most sustained interesting period since he left the show, and also the most illustrative of where he finds himself at this point. I really liked both Dave Franco's The Rental and especially Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, which was just outside my top ten for the year. However, in both films he's clearly the member of an ensemble, not the star. The same can also be said for Blithe Spirit, but the interesting thing about this film is that it is almost exactly back in the milieu of Downton Abbey -- which could be kind of interpreted as the equivalent of Caruso running back to TV with CSI: Miami. 

And TV really is where Stevens found himself the past four years, for the most part, until Abigail and Wingard's second Godzilla movie, both last year.

Look there are some good titles in there. I'm not saying there aren't.

But I think if you leave a show like Stevens left Abbey, when we had come to love him so much and felt like there was so much that could be done with his character that we would enjoy watching, he should expect us to scrutinize his choices, and to wonder if it was all worth it.

Then there's the other possibility: Dan Stevens just doesn't care.

There's the possibility -- and maybe reading just a little bit on the internet could confirm this, though you know how I don't like to do that -- that he just didn't think Downton Abbey was challenging him enough. We know David Caruso thought he could be a movie star. I'm only assuming Dan Stevens had the same goal, and maybe I'm wrong about that. So what seem to me like misses on his part, failures to take off in the way he surely wanted, might just be him trying to choose an interesting array of roles that didn't always require him to be a rich lord dressing in 1920s garb.

I said there was a Downton Abbey element about Abigail that I wanted to come back to.

A big reveal at the end of the movie -- and this only counts as a spoiler if you care about "surprises" in the cast, though this actor is not really big enough to qualify -- is that a Big Bad vampire, who is only referred to previously in hushed tones, is played by Matthew Goode.

And what is the significance of this, you ask?

Well, after Mary Crawley lost her new husband to a crash in one of those newfangled automobiles, she eventually took up with quite an ironic new partner in that regard: a race car driver. This is who she ended the series with, as her happily ever after.

And that race car driver was played, of course, by Matthew Goode.

I'm not sure if Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the directors of Abigail, really cared about this connection or made the choice with any intentionality, though they do have Goode's character and Stevens' character do battle at the end. Whether that was fighting to decide the matter of Mary Crawley once and for all, I do not know.

Movies as imitations

I don't like true crime very much. 

I had been thinking about this on the very morning I watched Joel Anderson's Lake Mungo (2008), which is not a true crime story but is told like one, with interviews, old photos, old videos stopped into freeze frame, and a central mystery. It's actually more like part of the ghost hunters genre than the true crime drama, but you'll agree those have a lot of overlap in their basic structure.

Anyway, I'd been thinking, with no small amount of superiority -- and my apologies if this offends you personally, dear reader -- that loving true crime means you are not a very interesting person. You are much more interesting if you spend multiple hours each day obsessing over the professional performances of a bunch of men who hit a tiny ball around a field, because you assembled them into an imaginary team that competes against other imaginary teams all season long. (The point is, we all have our comfort food.)

But a movie that imitates the true crime format? Hell yeah, I like that a lot. Maybe even love it.

Lake Mungo is in the broader found footage/mockumentary genre that had plenty of life back in 2008, but it feels like a more sophisticated effort than many of the things you would typically find in that genre. More sophisticated for how it looks, but not because it looks slick or visually dynamic in the ways we usually aspire to see in motion pictures. No, it's more sophisticated because it looks and feels exactly like real true crime, with actors giving performances that mimic the rhythms of real people so closely, you'd swear these were actually Australians living in regional Victoria circa 2008.

In fact, I was surprised to discover that the movie is set in the town of Ararat, surprised because I had never been to that town until a week ago. I can't actually say I've been to it, because we decided against stopping there to charge our car on the way back from camping last weekend, opting to continue on through to the larger Ballarat about 45 minutes later. But I've driven through it, and only a week ago. A week later, I randomly watched this. (It's been a week of quite a lot of movie coincidences. I also saw, but have chosen not to write about, two different movies set partially on the Italian island of Capri, which were Contempt on Monday night, which I wrote about for other reasons, and Another Simple Favor, which I saw Thursday.)

Anyway, it's about a teenage girl who drowned -- not actually in the titular lake, which is not actually a lake but an arid desert-like climate -- and about her family trying to piece together what led up to it, and also what came after it. The latter being that they may still be seeing her around as a ghost. 

It's one of those ghost stories that you'd think would be less chilling because of the documentary-style format surrounding the spooky details. But it's pretty damn chilling. It put me in mind of the scariest real documentary I've ever seen, The Nightmare, in that the talking head interview format not only doesn't sap the movie of its scares, but might actually increase them in some conterintuitive way.

But back to what I really came here to talk about.

One of the core reasons we like movie is because they imitate. One of the highest pieces of praise we can give a movie, albeit a somewhat broad and simplistic piece of praise, is to call it "realistic." The closer something on screen seems to resemble something we can actually recognize, the more successful we think a movie has been.

Of course, there are obvious exceptions to that. Sometimes you want a movie to be fanciful, to purposefully explore the artificial. But even in wild fantasies or experimental films, we want to connect to something that is emotionally true or observant about whatever it is the movie is exploring.

I don't suppose this is a surprising revelation, or that it is even a revelation. All art attempts to communicate emotion truth to the observer, something we can relate to our own lives or experiences, even if the art contains subject matter that is vastly different from our own experiences. 

But a movie like Lake Mungo can reveal things that may be obvious to us in new ways. Specifically, that there is something in the very act of imitation that is, in itself, fascinating, and that, in itself, elevates the material even beyond our own particular preferences.

I have no particular preference for true crime/ghost hunter material, in fact, quite the opposite. But I have peripherally caught enough of it to understand the basic narrative details of the genre. And Lake Mungo certainly appeals to me for two reasons: 1) because it scared me, which may be the most important part; 2) because it is so good at reproducing the core narrative building blocks of a familiar genre that this act of reproducing is itself an engrossing fascination, leading me to spend 90 minutes watching a thing I might not care to watch if it were a documentary. Since it's only an imitation of a documentary, I love it.

Insufficient evidence to damn Jean-Luc Godard

When I added Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (Le Mepris) to my film spreadsheet after Monday night's viewing, I noticed that the auto-fill of the director's name wanted to add it without the hyphen. That meant I had previously typed it that way, so I searched for his name to make the correction.

And was surprised to find I had only seen two other Godard films. (One of which did have the hyphen on my spreadsheet.)

Those two films are Breathless (1960), which I watched during my series Audient Audit in 2019 to see if I had correctly or incorrectly added it to my big list of movies watched (incorrectly, I decided), and Notre Musique (2004), which isn't even Godard in his French New Wave prime. 

I have a much more well-established notion of the strengths and weaknesses of Godard than I should for having seen so few of his films. There was a lot of assuming going on here, it appears.

For a long time the impression I thought I had of Godard was of a proto Jim Jarmusch, whose characters all wore wife beaters and smoked cigarettes. That's actually only an element of a few Jarmusch films, and I actually like some of them. Only a few of Jarmusch's films that meet that description actually irk me.

Anyway, this impression was obviously formed by Breathless, some small amount of which I think I saw in a French class (that was my conclusion during Audient Audit anyway). So that impression was with me when I saw Notre Musique, sometime after 2004 but I think fairly close to 2004, which was actually my first Godard. 

Notre Musique offended me in a different way to how I thought I had been offended by the little amount of Breathless I actually saw. Although I'd be hard-pressed to call up a lot of details of it, this was a far more experimental film, abstract in different wrong ways than I thought Breathless had been abstract, but still pretentious as hell. 

And then I must have thought I'd seen another three to four Godard films that I never saw. 

I did have one more way my Godard impression was molded, but that's been more recent, and I'd say it probably confirmed my impression rather than molding it. This was the director's brief appearance -- I say "appearance" because it was notable for being an absence -- in the Agnes Varda film Faces Places, in which the director is sort of taken to task for his lack of warmth or sentimentality or anything remotely resembling genial behavior, in a way Varda portrays generously, leaving most of it up to our interpretation. He's talked about but doesn't appear on screen, apparently because he opted out, coldly. 

So on Monday night I finally saw Contempt, having first become aware of it on this awesome tumblr site some 15 years ago. 

And look, it did not vastly change my impression of Godard. However, it made me appreciate him a lot more. (Um, that sounds like a vast change in your impression, Vance.)

I still think there's a lot of intimate talking that doesn't really go anywhere, that could be cut in half without seriously damaging the narrative. You get a lot of that in Breathless, in addition to the guys smoking cigarettes in wife beaters.

But there were a couple things about Contempt that really drew me in:

1) It has a fourth-wall breaking aspect that I thought was pretty ahead of its time for 1963. That's not to say no one ever talked to the camera before then; they certainly did. In fact, no one talks to the camera here. But what I mean by breaking the fourth wall is that it steps out of a fictitious world and into our real world by using real people playing themselves. For example, Fritz Lang is in it as ... Fritz Lang. He may be the only real person playing himself, but the film is about a director trying to push through a troubled shoot of The Odyssey, and he's well suited to playing himself in it. (And fortunately it does not require a huge amount of scenes from him.)

2) The incredible last 20 minutes or so in Capri. There are parts of Contempt that spin their wheels before this point, but when the production shifts to this Italian island that's subbing in for ancient Greece, the camera just drinks it in. Raoul Coutard's camerawork is not only beautiful on a sheer travelogue level, but Godard has him set up his equipment in such a way to accentuate strange angles in the architecture that disorient us and deepen the feeling of strangeness that the film has slowly built up. There's one particular staircase shot from above that I can't stop thinking about. Here, I'll show you.

3) Brigitte Bardot. Sure, some of the extended aesthetic about Godard that sort of bothers me is his very French worshipping of female beauty. But she was quite the beauty, and the camera also lovingly caresses her clothed and sometimes tastefully nude body. (Tastefully nude = always seen from behind only.)

4) Jack Palance. He's in this! My knowledge of Palance extends mostly to some older and some newer westerns, so it was interesting to see him show up here as a smarmy movie producer.

Look I don't have to list a lot of things. I wasn't even sure I really liked the movie until its last 30 minutes, and especially its last shot, started to leave me -- um -- breathless. There's still a lot of back and forth between the screenwriter (Michael Piccoli) and his wife (Bardot) about whether she does or doesn't still love him and why. I could have done with 25% less of that.

But it did make me realize that the cinematic world of Jean-Luc Godard probably contains some multitudes I didn't realize it contained. Which I really should have realized before now, considering that the two movies of his I've seen are not very similar at all.

I've got another, let's see, 37 features to get to, if I've parsed his filmography on IMDB correctly, and pulled out all the things that were shorts, segments of omnibus features, uncredited films and other bits cinematic ephemera.

Better get to it, tout de suite.