Audient Classics: The Long Goodbye

This is the final entry in my 2023 monthly series rewatching movies from before I was born that I'd loved, but that I'd seen only once. 

Going into December, I'd had representatives in this series from every decade from the 1920s onward -- except the 1970s. 

There are only three years to draw from in the 1970s if you want to get something from before I was born, but that doesn't mean this decade should be excluded from all the fun.

So I finished with a film from the year I was born, 1973 -- which indeed feels appropriate, since I just celebrated my 50th birthday two months ago.

Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye came out exactly 227 days before I was born, on March 7th of that year. It took me until 2012 to see it, despite an obsession with the films of Robert Altman that was already more than 20 years old at that point, dating back to the release of The Player. I shouldn't suggest to you that I'm an Altman completist -- in fact, there are a staggering 25 films Altman has directed that I haven't seen, compared to 11 that I have seen. Still, The Long Goodbye seemed like my most notable Altman blind spot when I finally got to it 11 years ago.

And loved it. 

In fact, the film single-handledly made me question my assumptions about whether I liked noir or not. I am still trying to figure that out today, having just rewatched another instance of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe on film, The Big Sleep, a few weeks ago, after finishing reading the book. You can read about that here if you want. 

Now that I've had a year of noir films in 2021, in which I identified probably my new favorite noir (Key Largo), as well as done the whole Big Sleep revisited project, it seemed like a good time to look at where noir's road to recovery began with The Long Goodbye.

Well ... 

I'd say that my holiday season exhaustion claims another cinematic victim, except that would be overstating the decrease in my affection for The Long Goodbye on this viewing. I still liked it, maybe even quite a bit, but I was fighting sleep and a tequila on the rocks I'd had before dinner. There were naps and I felt discombobulated for much of the film.

Then again, this is a discombobulated film, which is one of the things I loved about it the first time. It's shaggy as hell, personified by Elliot Gould as Marlowe, always confused about what decade he's in and how the present seems to have left him behind. Marlowe's actual heyday was three decades earlier in Chandler's original incarnation of the character, so Altman specifically confronts this Marlowe with things like beautiful nudist neighbors doing yoga and a cat that will only eat one sort of cat food. 

In fact, I'm pretty sure I fell in love with The Long Goodbye's first ten minutes, back in 2012, and never looked back. I was in love with this film's milieu, and once the film grabbed me at the start it would have taken quite a lot to loosen the hold.

The hold was looser this time, in part because I wasn't as surprised by this movie as I was the first time (though the ending is still pretty shocking, a total upending of our understanding of Marlowe as a character from the Chandler books, and completely different from the actual book). The film shambles along with not exactly a plot but a number of individual interludes, which do add up to something interesting, but maybe not something quite as interesting as I thought they did 11 years ago. 

One thing I did consider this time is how this film is in conversation with the first Altman film I ever saw. There's a lot of The Player here, in the way this film is directly in conversation with Hollywood. The Long Goodbye features a security guard to a gated Malibu community who does a different celebrity impersonation for each car that passes. Can't you imagine this guy trying to get a job on the same lot where Griffin Mill works as an executive? Then there's the fact that one of this film's suspects is a boozy screenwriter who has to spend his time in detox not to kill himself or someone else. 

As much as I do like Altman's films set in and around Los Angeles -- you can add Short Cuts to that list -- another great candidate for this series would have been McCabe & Mrs. Miller, which I also love, and which came out two years before this. I owe that film a second viewing, having started a second viewing sometime in the past five years and having had to abandon it before I finished. Either the movie was due back at the library or I just decided that I'd missed my original window once I didn't finish it that night. Maybe something for early in 2024.

There's probably more I should say about The Long Goodbye, but instead I'll say goodbye to this series. Here's a quick reminder of what I watched:

January: Sherlock Jr. (1924, Buster Keaton)
February: Roman Holiday (1953, William Wyler)
March: The Exterminating Angel (1962, Luis Bunuel)
April: The Wages of Fear (1953, Henri-Georges Clouzot)
May: The Women (1939, George Cukor)
June: Ace in the Hole (1951, Billy Wilder)
July: Harakiri (1962, Masaki Kobayashi)
August: The Great Dictator (1940, Charles Chaplin)
September: The Virgin Spring (1960, Ingmar Bergman)
October: The Birds (1963, Alfred Hitchcock)
November: The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928, Carl Theodor Dreyer)
December: The Long Goodbye (1973, Robert Altman)

The 1960s had the most representatives with four movies.

In addition to varying up the decades, I varied up the other demographic details, never repeating a director and selecting works from a variety of locations around the world, the U.S. being the only one that was repeated.

Of course I can't help but think of all the movies that were on my larger list that I couldn't fit in, as is inevitably the case in a series with only 12 spots. Here are the ten movies I most regret not getting to watch, in alphabetical order, which only means I may know how to direct my "just for pleasure" rewatches in 2024:

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972, Werner Herzog)
Arsenic and Old Lace (1944, Frank Capra)
The Battle of Algiers (1967, Gillo Pontecorvo)
The Conformist (1970, Bernardo Bertolucci)
Key Largo (1948, John Huston)
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936, Frank Capra)
Ordet (1955, Carl Theodor Dreyer)
Rope (1948, Alfred Hitchcock)
Solaris (1972, Andrei Tarkovsky)
Zulu (1964, Cy Endfield)

Even picking this list of ten was difficult, so I've got some great viewing ahead of me.

I'll tell you about my 2024 monthly series at some point soon after the calendar changes. 

Audient Classics: The Passion of Joan of Arc

This is the penultimate in my 2023 monthly series Audient Classics, in which I rewatch films from before I was born that I loved, but have seen only once.

I wrote yesterday about Internet Archive, the site where there's a chance you'll find movies that you can't seem to get through normal channels (either a digital rental or a streaming service). And plenty you can get that way, but since I view the site sort of as "cheating," I usually use it only for the lost causes.

But then there are also movies that have been around so long that I feel like I shouldn't have to pay for them. I don't know, maybe after all this time, they've slipped into the public domain? That's my thinking anyway.

And so it was that I started to watch my second-to-last film in Audient Classics on Internet Archive -- for about ten seconds, until I realized it would have no musical score.

At that point I capitulated to paying the $3.99 for an iTunes rental of the 95-year-old The Passion of Joan of Arc, in order to watch/listen to it as I did the first time back in 2012, with Richard Einhorn's 1994 score "Voices of Light" accompanying it. (Hiring a live piano player to come play with the Internet Archive version would have cost a lot more.)

It was as part of another series on this blog that I first watched the movie. That was my 2012 Getting Acquainted series, where each month I chose some cinematic luminary whose works had so far eluded me, and watched three of them. That was a great April as I also watched Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet, which is also in my top 200 on Flickchart and was also a candidate for this series. (The third film, Day of Wrath, was good, just not in the same stratosphere as these two all-timers.)

As you would know, The Passion of Joan of Arc contains what is considered to be one of the single greatest acting performances of all time by Maria Falconetti. I'm not reading up right now on what her method was, but Falconetti seemed to effortlessly produce tears on command, to give these thousand-yard stares that indicated the way she was weighing her duty to God against her instinct for self-preservation. I'm sure there are some viewers who would think of her performance as too much, as would be the case with any performance that might qualify as someone's description of the best of all time. A consensus best acting performance would also come close to a "most acting" designation, but I challenge anyone to watch this movie and not see it as an unparalleled commitment to embodying an emotionally tortured woman.

One thing I forgot about -- both from history and from this film -- is that Joan actually lost the battle between her ideals and her survival instincts, at least initially. Her judges from the church, eager not to actually execute her, held her limp, defeated hand up to a confession written out for her on parchment, though we are meant to believe it was she who ultimately made the movements that would qualify as a signature. 

But then, before she lost all respect for herself, she recanted -- meaning that she was more or less lashed to a stake within the hour. Or so this movie tells it. 

It's the storytelling of this film that so fully astonishes. In 1928, obviously we were on the verge of the sound era and of film truly graduating to the more dynamic medium we know it to be today. But it still amazes me that Dreyer was doing such interesting things, that seemed so far ahead of their time, with angles, shot depths, camera movements and editing. Close-ups were never used as memorably -- before, but perhaps also since -- as they are in The Passion of Joan of Arc.

Did I catch some Jesus Christ Superstar-style anachronisms in there as well? Joan lived in the early 15th century, but some of the outfits of military types reminded me more of the late 19th century, possibly even World War I (which would have been only ten years in the past at this point). This I did google, and it turns out they are meant to resemble Prussian soldiers. The Franco-Prussian War was in 1870 and 1871, and that makes sense as that would have still been in the memory of some French who were alive in 1928. It's the soldiers who are most anachronistically dressed in Jesus Christ Superstar as well.

Which makes a good transition to Joan as a Christ figure. I was reminded here of the way the Romans and Pharisees were simultaneously contemptuous of Christ and basically pleading with him to save himself, which he refused to do. Joan underwent the same ordeal with the same outcome. That may be obvious to students of history, but since I know what I know about Joan from this film (and to a lesser extent the one directed by Luc Besson), rather than from the history books, it was helpful to be reminded of the real parallels between hers and Christ's martyrdoms. 

As impressed and sometimes shocked as I was about parts of this film, there may have been no part that left me more shocked than the way it continues to go back to Joan's corpse after the fire has already consumed her. It's not graphic by today's standards, but neither is it left to the imagination. Eventually the charred body slumps over and disappears from view. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. This woman had a corporeal aspect, but the film leaves little doubt that it believes her soul escaped her and into eternity. Or if it doesn't believe this, at least it believes that Joan believed it.

Although I've already got my final film in Audient Classics already line up for December, I do now really want to rewatch Ordet -- and there's nothing stopping me once this series is over. Dreyer continued to wrestle with Christian themes like resurrection and martyrdom throughout his career, Ordet being a prime example.

Okay, only one more film to go before this series is a wrap. 

Audient Classics: The Birds

This is the tenth in my 2023 monthly series rewatching movies from before I was born that I loved but have seen only once.

I don't like magpies.

Australian magpies, I should say, which are different from what's called a magpie in other parts of the world.

These black-and-white birds are the most territorial I have ever encountered. Now granted, in my late teens and early 20s I worked on an island where if you went out on the rocks and approached a seagull nest, they would attack you. We carried sticks with us, not to use to hit the birds, but so they would attack the top of the stick when you held it up, rather than your head. 

I assume the same is true of magpies, or might be anyway. The problem is, their territory is the same as yours. You don't have to walk way out on the rocks to get to their nests. They build their nests in any old tree that they fancy, right in your neighborhood, and when it's nesting season, they swoop. Unless you want to carry a stick with you at all times you walk outdoors -- a strange look to be sure -- you are in constant danger of being swooped in the Australian springtime. Which is now.

I have not actually had a traumatic swooping experience, though about a month ago, a magpie flew very close to my son and me as we were walking to school. I think it was intended as a swoop, but the bird didn't touch us. Around the same time, though, my wife was swooped closely enough that she felt the bird's wing against her neck.

There was a swooping incident in the Sydney area some ten years ago where a mother carrying her infant was swooped and lost her balance. The baby suffered a traumatic injury in the fall and ultimately died. If I remember correctly, a Japanese tourist himself died from a perfectly located peck that perforated some part of his brain through his ear canal. Would have been one in a million, but it did happen. 

So, magpies are no joke. When I'm walking past one, I keep a wide berth and I eyeball it like David Duke walking through Harlem.

I even saw one weird situation recently where one magpie was walking along the bike path on the ground, and another one was flying in a tight circular pattern above it, changing altitudes from about waist height to head height if measured on a human. It was like they were some two-pronged attack machine -- even if this maneuver was primarily devised for defensive purposes. 

So I thought this was a good Halloween season to finally rewatch Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.

Ranked #777 on my Flickchart (out of 6395 films), The Birds makes easily the lowest ranked "favorite" I've rewatched for Audient Classics, and therefore, the least qualifying for the definition of "classic." There were probably higher ranked pre-1973 horror movies I could have watched if I wanted a horror movie for October, and certainly higher ranked Hitchcock movies I've seen only once. (Rope, I'm looking at you.)

But keeping in mind the long preamble of this post, The Birds seemed like the right movie.

If you wanted, you could call it a horror comedy, keeping with the theme I'm pursuing this month in my other horror viewings. By today's standards, there is something funny about the snapping beaks of fake birds as the film's human characters fight them off. Sixty years ago, Hitchcock didn't have the more sophisticated effects we have today. (Thank God for that, I'd argue.)

Watching the film, though, you are not inclined to laugh. It's sinister as hell. We don't know why these birds are attacking, which makes them different from a magpie protecting a nest. They just decided they were fed up with millennia of micro- and macro-aggressions from humans and now, enough was enough.

A thing I really noticed on this viewing, which I'm sure is one of the regular talking points about The Birds, is that there is no conventional musical score, Bernard Hermann or otherwise. The only soundtrack is the menacing screeching of the birds, when they are attacking. Otherwise the only sounds are silence and dialogue.

What I found fascinating and unnerving -- another talking point I'm sure -- is why the birds sometimes attack, and sometimes don't. The movie's most famous scenes are undoubtedly not the attack scenes, but the ones where characters move slowly through an avian field perched on various fence posts and jungle gyms, as though waiting for a signal to attack, but not actually attacking. When a character gets close enough, a bird offers some mild pecks, kind of like a puppy's first attempts to nip someone's finger. But they know they do not have -- permission, would it be? -- to really go at this human. Not at this exact moment, anyway.

The thing that makes it a great horror, rather than just the genre of suspense that gets applied to the majority of Hitchcock's films, is the bodies left in the birds' wake. The first we see is a man whose eyes have been pecked out, lying in the corner of a room in his house, which he certainly would have thought was a safe haven. Then there's the character played by Suzanne Plechette -- who I initially mistook for Shirley MacLaine -- lying at the foot of her front steps, one of her own feet cocked up at an angle as it rests on a step. We don't really get to see her face -- a little bit of mercy from Hitchcock on that one -- and we only learn what happened to her because young Cathy explains it to Teppi Hedren's and Rod Taylor's characters after they extract her from the situation. Could Hitchcock have showed us the birds swarming on Plechette's Annie Hayworth -- covering her, as Cathy says? Maybe, but maybe he knew he couldn't get the effect right to convey the horror. Better leave it to our imagination.

One effect he does get right, I think, is the relentless close-range pecking of the birds in other situations, as they open new wounds and steadily exhaust the stamina of the victim. It's chaotic and unrelenting and you really feel the anxiety Hitchcock is going for. If you went into this film thinking someone couldn't be pecked to death, you emerge feeling quite the opposite.

Because it is a Hitchcock film, I found myself looking for the mise-en-scene techniques Hitchcock was famous for, ways of arranging elements in the shot that we always studied in film class. I don't think The Birds is really that sort of film, and that could be why it isn't among the director's most revered. Again this is something that would have been written about, but without reading anything about it myself, I'm concluding that Psycho was such a radical film that prompted so many varying reactions that he just wanted to make a more contained genre picture with his next film -- even though this does get into some of that movie's same themes about mothers and sons. (Jessica Tandy plays Taylor's mother, something I might not have noticed or at least remembered from my first viewing.)

I do think, however, that there was a little more carryover from Psycho. With the editing of the birds attacking at close range, I couldn't help but think of the knife strokes that end Janet Leigh in that film's infamous shower scene.

Other random observations:

1) The girl Cathy is played by Veronica Cartwright, who went on to a long career, including the woman who screams so horribly when she sees the alien burst out of John Hurt's chest in Alien.

2) I continue to be surprised that this is from a novel by Daphne Du Maurier. I think of her as a writer of latter day Elizabethan novels, as her books Rebecca, Jamaica Inn (which I've read) and My Cousin Rachel all are of that ilk (and all adapted into films, in some cases multiple films). That she would write a horror novel about attacking birds has always struck me as a disconnect, and continues to do so.

3) And while it was indeed based on Du Maurier's novel, I learned just now that part of the inspiration came from a real-life event Hitchcock heard about in a seaside town in California, in 1961, when the film was already in development. Sea birds dive-bombed the town as a result of what is now known to have been toxic algae, though the cause was a mystery at the time.

Okay, only two more months in this series ... time to clamp down and really figure out which, among my dozens of remaining choices, are most demanding of my attention. 

Audient Classics: The Virgin Spring

This is the ninth in my 2023 monthly series watching great movies from before I was born that I've seen only once before.

A rhythm had developed with Audient Classics, where just before the new month would begin, I would develop a seemingly spontaneous but then unshakeable hunger to watch one of the movies I'd identified for this series. I'd usually follow through with no problem in the first two weeks of the new month.

That didn't happen in September, and in fact, I had to go fishing around for a bit before I landed on my choice.

The Virgin Spring is the lowest ranked movie on my Flickchart that I've watched for this series, coming in at "only" 735 out of 6354, or 88%. There are plenty of contenders ranked higher who will miss out on the series, since I have only three installments remaining.

But I landed on Ingmar Bergman's 1960 film after a couple of other choices weren't as easy to come by on my existing streaming services as I'd hoped, and this one clearly was. In fact, not long after I jumped into my Kanopy watchlist, there it appeared -- all the sweeter for only being 90 minutes, which is especially useful for me still being a bit sick after eight days of nursing a persistent cold.

The choice was also fortuitous because it has just become spring in the southern hemisphere. As I've mentioned many times before, the seasons change on the first of the month in Australia, and September 1st marked the arrival of spring after a fairly moderate winter.

Of course, it took my second viewing of The Virgin Spring to be reminded that it's not the season this title is evoking, but rather, the water source. Since I'd forgotten the exact nature of the final scene of this movie, that moment in the story produced a little gasp from me when it arrived.

As I did the first time, I considered the fact that this movie provided the template for The Last House on the Left and its various reboots, one of which, Chaos, currently holds the second lowest spot on my Flickchart. In truth, though, I've only seen the original and Chaos, and I've now seen this twice since I've seen either of them, so this movie is more of a current frame of reference for me than either of those. 

The almost disarming simplicity of this story made it a good choice for a sick night. Bergman's films tend to be on a continuum from very challenging to not very challenging, and if something like Persona is on one extreme end of that spectrum, The Virgin Spring might be on the other.

I don't really consider it a spoiler to talk about a film that is 63 years old, but just in case: SPOILER ALERT.

The plot is as simple as it can be. In medieval Sweden, virginal girl and the only child of her parents goes on a day's journey to take candles to a church. Trusting by nature -- fatally so -- she shares her lunch with a trio of herdsmen, two men and a child, who proceed to rape and murder her. They steal her fancy garments in the hopes of selling them, and try to do so at the place they are staying for the night. That happens to be the home of the girl who is now missing, and her mother recognizes her daughter's clothes when the lead herdsman proffers them to her. She tells her husband, who awakens the men from their slumber to murder them. 

It's the final scene I alluded to earlier that I found particularly interesting in the way I frequently find religious miracles captured on him (in Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet among others) compelling. When the family and its companions track down the girl's body (with the help of their servant, who considers herself to blame for the daughter's death due to her feelings of jealousy), a mysterious spring of water appears from behind where her head is lying in the grass. This is, effectively, God's answer to the vows of the father, who says he doesn't understand God's ways but also feels guilt over his own murderous vengeance, declaring he will erect a church in this very spot.

Characters struggle with their faith repeatedly in the films of Ingmar Bergman, and this one in particular considers the eternal question posed by such people: "Why do good things happen to bad people?" The daughter Karin, played by Birgitta Pettersson, is the epitome of the innocent, the one who doesn't see the danger in other people and therefore succumbs to it. 

It was interesting to me to see how swiftly Bergman orchestrates the deaths of the characters who die, as though he acknowledges that these are necessary waystations in the thematic journey of the narrative, but he does not relish them in any sense. Karin's rape is more implied than shown, although there's some depiction of her desperate struggle. When she is killed, it is from only a single blow with a stick. While most movie characters survive injuries that should kill them, she is the opposite, expiring symbolically as much as she expires physically.

The same restraint is shown when her father (played by Bergman regular Max Von Sydow) kills the men. Their struggles are a bit more elongated, but in each instance the knife he drives into their bodies does not seem the kind of wound that would kill them instantly. The child suffers a similar death to the man's own daughter, from a head injury suffered by being thrown by Von Sydow's character into a shelving unit. Bergman shows no instinct to luxuriate in any of this physical violence. It's the violence of human nature that is of greater interest.

Bergman's regular DP Sven Nykvist renders the proceedings simultaneously plain and suffused with a sort of dark magic. The incredible look of this film makes it clear why Bergman wanted to continue working in black and white as long as he could. In fact, every Bergman movie I've seen in color, even the ones I've loved, has made me long for the non-color alternative that so expertly underscores his themes. 

Okay on to October, when I have to decide if there's a horror movie that qualifies for this series. 

Audient Classics: The Great Dictator

This is the eighth in my 2023 series Audient Classics, in which I'm rewatching movies from before I was born that I loved but that I've only seen once.

For a couple months in a row, I've had a candidate for this series rise up into my consciousness of its own accord, and that's been the movie I watched. That didn't happen for August, so I just decided to pick a movie that was already in my Kanopy watchlist, that being Charlie Chaplin's 1940 Hitler spoof with a strident and righteous conclusion, The Great Dictator. 

The funny thing was, it was in German.

I don't know how Kanopy goes about sourcing the movies that are available to us to watch for free, but let's just say there's some eccentricity to it. 

At first I asked myself: "Was this film actually released in German at the time? I don't think Chaplin speaks German." But the fact that he does the Mel Brooks version of German, speaking German gibberish using some real German words and then just a bunch of nonsense that sounds German, in the way Brooks would do it a couple decades later, did make me question my own memory of this film, which I saw for the first time in 2015.

But then I noticed that the mouths weren't matching up, and then I realized definitively that this was a dubbed version of the film. 

I thought at first there might be a way to turn it off. I could turn on the English subtitles, and watched about five minutes of the film that way. But actually changing the spoken language was not an option.

For a moment I considered watching the whole movie this way. It would be appropriate, given that Chaplin made this movie to first lampoon fascism and then to shout it down in no uncertain terms with his closing speech. Germans scolded in their own language would be rich.

But then I decided that I don't want to watch a foreign film dubbed into English any more than I want to watch an English film dubbed into a foreign language. In either case it is a lesser version of the original art.

So I went to what has quickly become a go-to site for me, called Internet Archive.

If you are not familiar with this, it's an apparently free and legal site that has all sorts of old films saved on it, which you are apparently allowed to watch any time you want. I watched my last two films for Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta this way, those being Judgment at Nuremberg and Mildred Pierce, after I couldn't find Nuremberg available for streaming or rental anywhere, and one of the others in the group made me aware of it. The Great Dictator made it 3-for-3.

In another example of the Kanopy-style catch-as-catch-can model, though, the Internet Archive version of The Great Dictator was hilarious in that it was listed as "FULL VHS: The Great Dictator (1940) [Playhouse Video] (1985)." So yes, I watched a VHS copy of Chaplin's classic, uploaded to the internet, telltale VCR screen distortions and all.

It was quaint and a bit hilarious, and better than watching the whole film in German.

Knowing the movie was more than two hours, I started in on it before dinner, but only got to watch about 15 minutes due to having to change sources. I still didn't finish until almost 1:30 in the morning, as the living room heat and my spot lying on the couch made me sleepy, and many short (long) naps ensued.

I think I might have liked the film a little bit less than the first time, but its strengths still shone through for me -- this time in a more episodic way. I think I remembered it having a bit more of a rigidity to its narrative structure the first time, though in reality it's more of a collection of bits and set pieces that come from Chaplin's always creative mind. These set pieces reflect his instincts for physical comedy, but also his burgeoning political awareness. I'm not going to assume Chaplin had never been political, and many of his films skewered the fat cats and the system. But in The Great Dictator he sets aside the narrative entirely to address the audience at the end, stepping outside of the character of Adenoid Hynkel, the dictator of Tomainia, to address any fascists in the audience and inspire the rest of us to stand up to them. (Of course, it's actually Chaplin's Jewish barber character dressed as Hynkel, but the effect is the same.)

It occurred to me as I was watching this famous speech that this is what Spike Lee does at the end of his movies, and what he would have done if he were making movies 83 years ago. It may be an obvious takeaway that Lee would have taken inspiration from The Great Dictator, although a googling of relevant search terms does not return any results. I have to think it was fairly unusual at that time and that audiences would have been taken aback by it, pleasantly so I would hope. His call to tolerance and anti-fascism is simply stirring.

I think what makes it so stirring is that, even preceded by a few moments of the sort of melodrama that might appear in Chaplin's silent films, it was so tonally unexpected. Even moments before this speech, Chaplin is doing a bit about Hynkel sitting in a chair and breaking it, and then the remaining chairs getting shuffled at high speed among several potential sitters, including Jack Oakie's Benzino Napoloni. Scarcely a minute before this speech we are still laughing at this sort of thing, to the extent that it would be considered the film's primary mode.

I was also struck again by the guts it took to make this, and by that I don't mean the potential loss of the German box office. It's not that Hitler was really a risky target in that he had a chance to meaningfully retaliate, or that there were any reasonable percentage of the audience who would jump to his defense. It's more that it felt like a risk in terms of what audiences would find funny or what they felt Chaplin would be equipped to handle sensitively. Remember that this is well before the world learned of the murders of six million Jews in the concentration camps, but even then it might not have seemed possible that a film about Hitler could be funny, or that it would be the right mode to strike. 

I won't go through the individual set pieces that made me chuckle aloud again just as they did in 2015, with the exception of one that I had forgotten. The other character Chaplin plays, the Jewish barber in the ghetto, shaves a customer to the tune of Brahms' "Hungarian Dance No. 5," his movements of the blade and dashes of shaving cream perfectly aligning to the pace of the song and the changing of instruments. It's a short master class in what Chaplin did best.

Okay, just four more months of this series, and nearly 90 more potential candidates that I originally identified in a Letterboxd list back at the start of the year. Maybe I'll need to start making more purposeful choices. Then again, there's nothing to keep me from continuing to rewatch these older films in 2024, just for my own pleasure ... of which they have been providing me quite a lot. 

Audient Classics: Harakiri

This is the seventh in my 2023 monthly series rewatching pre-1973 movies that I loved but have seen only once. (What is 1973? The year I was born, of course.)

Masaki Kobasyashi's Harakiri becomes easily the movie in this series that I'd seen for the first time most recently. I watched it for Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta in May of 2019 -- late May at that. 

So it isn't so much dereliction of my duty to rewatch older films I love that has brought me back to Harakiri, but rather, excitement about seeing it a second time.

That's a funny comment for a film that runs two hours and 13 minutes, whose actual plot might justify a running time an hour shorter than that.

Yes, this is a samurai film with almost no sword fighting, a movie about seppuku in which the act is talked about far more than it actually occurs. (I just looked it up, and "seppuku" is essentially a synonym for "harakiri," and apparently, the only word the Japanese themselves ever use.) And boy is there a lot of talking.

Didn't matter. I was just as engrossed.

I'll give you a little bit of the setup.

The film has a flashback structure that is kicked off when the inciting incident recalls a similar incident within the past year, which is then also recounted in detail. A samurai named Tsugumo Hanshiro (Tatsuya Nakadi) arrives in the forecourt of the estate of the Iyi Clan, asking to engage in the ritual of harakiri on the grounds of the estate as a means of further ennobling the act of the samurai taking his own life. It's 1630 and a period of general peace in Japan has resulted in many samurai being out of work and starving. Instead of reducing themselves to pathetic societal leeches, these samurai profess a desire to end their own lives. The man is received with a certain suspicion, since the circumstance of him approaching the estate recall those of another man earlier in the year, Chijiwa Motome (Akira Ishihama). This samurai also asked to end his life on the Iyi grounds.

Unfortunately, Motome had the misfortune of arriving at the tail end of an epidemic of starving samurai showing up on the grounds of local clans and requesting to commit harakiri. One clan had, to their regret, offered work to one such samurai when he came asking to kill himself, which led any number of other samurai to their doorstep -- samurai who didn't actually intend to kill themselves, but were looking to be turned away in exchange for a small amount of money, which the estate would gladly give in order not to deal with the logistics of hosting this ritual and disposing of the body afterwards. 

So they call Motome's bluff, and it does indeed appear they were correct to do so. However, Motome may not have exactly the motivations they think he has. Nonetheless, they are convinced he must go ahead with the harakiri -- to send a message to other prospective beggars -- and threaten to strike him down themselves if he tries to renege.

I don't think I should give you any more of the story, but let's just say there are plenty of unseen twists and turns to this tale -- none of which qualify as big revelations, exactly, which could just be because Kobayashi's mode is so restrained. The script is incredibly clever, and also insightful about human nature, about our tendency to teach lessons to people who try to trick us -- possibly involving assumptions about them that turn out to be incorrect.

When I saw this in 2019, I was truly blown away. It's inevitable that I was not quite as enamored with it the second time. Some of that had to do with my state of exhaustion at the time I watched it. Things are going to get busy for me in a few weeks so I wanted to get this viewing in before too much more of July elapsed, leading me to choose this particular Tuesday night. I may have still had some lingering fatigue from a bad night of sleep on Sunday night, though, or maybe the heat was just on too high in my living room. (That's a thing now that we've had our split system installed earlier this year.) In any case, I didn't get through the running time without stopping for about three short naps that each lasted less than 15 minutes.

But there's no doubt that this is a truly exceptional example of the samurai film, and I reckon far more memorable than one that tries to endure in our affections on the basis of fight choreography and other action. There is action in this film, eventually, and our wait for it, in which we are simply spellbound by the words of the characters and how they dramatize the characters' world view, makes its ultimate arrival all the more rewarding.

If I am drawing comparisons to the work of other Japanese masters, I'd say there's a part of this that reminds me of Kurosawa's Rashomon, given the flashback structure and how it relies on characters' interpretations of events based on the incomplete understanding inherent in their limited perspectives.

As for anything else you might care to know about it, well, just see the movie.

See you in August for the next installment of Audient Classics. 

Audient Classics: Ace in the Hole

This is the latest in my 2023 monthly series watching movies from before I was born that I loved, but that I had only seen once.

This year marks ten years since I wrote Flickchart Road Trip, a weekly 2013 series on the Flickchart blog in which I "drove" throughout the United States, watching one movie I hadn't seen set in each of the 50 states and then dueling it against five other films from that state I'd already ranked, to see where it landed among them. I also wrote a blurb about each movie, like a mini review, as well as a description of what I "did" while I was in that state on my trip. (Since I was actually in none of those states, this part was a lie -- perhaps following in the footsteps of the man featured in this month's film.)

It was a fun and arduous project, since I was not only watching and writing one of these each week, but I was also formatting it and posting it. (And also trying to source the movies, which was not always easy in the days before streaming was huge, and involved me buying some random DVDs that are still kicking around my house somewhere.)

 It was especially arduous because I also moved to Australia -- quite unexpectedly, if you had asked me in January when I started Flickchart Road Trip -- and didn't miss a beat despite the massive upheaval and not having internet access in my new house for the first couple weeks. It remains probably the defining example of my dedication to projects I start and my refusal to miss the internal deadlines they involve. The only reason I didn't tell you about it on this blog was that I was still going incognito at that time, writing under the alias Vancetastic rather than my name.

Because I lived in Los Angeles at the time, I started "driving" east from there and would make California my final stop in Week 50. The first two movies I watched both bowled me over, each earning a full five stars on Letterboxd. In Arizona it was Smoke Signals, the moving portrait of life on a modern Native American reservation, and in New Mexico it was Billy Wilder's 1951 Ace in the Hole.

Rarely will you see a more excoriating portrait of the profession of journalism -- which had been, and in some ways still is, my own profession. I loved it.

And it turns out, still do, even though I was way too tired on Monday night to watch it. (I couldn't sleep during the morning baseball games that started at 3 a.m. local time, since it was the end of a very close week of fantasy baseball, which I'm glad to say I won.)

The brilliant thing about Ace in the Hole is that the ways Kirk Douglas' Chuck Tatum is a compromised professional -- corrupt? yes, close to that -- are ethically debatable enough to prompt discussion among journalism professionals. He doesn't lie, cheat or steal -- not exactly -- so the ways he milks his story are potentially within the realm of fair play. However, the real journalists who employ him at his Albuquerque newspaper, where he has landed after a series of previous firings, can tell right away that his methods are sketchy. And is it turns out, they might cost a man his life.

Tatum has been kicking around Albuquerque for a year, trying to return to New York, where he experienced his glory days before getting canned. He's given the editor a great deal on his services in the hopes that exposure is all he needs to get back to the big time. However, a year later, he's still covering lame local ceremonies like the rattlesnake hunt to which he is headed when he learns there's a man trapped in cave, into which he had spelunked in order to acquire buried Native American artifacts.

I was surprised on this viewing to see that Tatum doesn't immediately grasp the opportunity here. It's the cameraman he's traveling with who at first seems more interested in the story. It doesn't take Tatum all that long to realize the chance that's presenting itself, but I found it funny that it takes him any time at all given that he's just given a whole speech about the professional doldrums that is this Albuquerque beat. You'd figure he'd grasp at any straws that present themselves, especially on his way to an assignment that typifies the misery he finds himself in. 

But soon enough Tatum is formulating his idea for a long-running human interest story that he can stretch out for days. He's not exactly going to impede the efforts to save this man from where he's buried, ironically just out of reach of a place people can get to. Tatum, the doctor and others can make their way almost to within arm's reach of Leo Minosa, but the unsteady walls of the cave prevent them from going any further to avoid dumping a fatal avalanche of rocks onto the pinned Leo. They bring him food and water and cigars, and at first Leo is pretty jovial about the whole situation. As that stretches on, with crews digging down from above in careful ways to reach him, his outlook becomes steadily more grim.

True enough, Tatum has been able to whip this in to a media frenzy, getting an arrangement with the local sheriff to help promote his reelection in exchange for exclusive rights to comments from the police and being the only journalist allowed to make his way down to Leo. Meanwhile, Leo's wife Lorraine (Jan Sterling) seems to be just waiting for him to die, as it turns out they had a bad relationship and Leo was cruel to her. Thousands of people gather around the site, to the extent that a whole commercial shanty town has built up, including amusement park rides -- hence the original title of this film, The Big Carnival.

What makes Tatum so mercenary is that he also plays a role in helping ignore some potentially useful advice about an alternate method of saving Leo -- all so his story can achieve him the maximum possible fame and exposure to the career opportunities he wants.

The overwhelmingly acerbic sensibilities of Wilder really surprised me while watching this film, which I saw at a time that I hadn't yet seen some of Wilder's darker films like Sunset Boulevard and The Lost Weekend. (Actually, my records show that I'd seen Sunset Boulevard, but it was only four months earlier so perhaps my impression of Wilder had not yet fully shifted. Sunset Boulevard also immediately preceded Ace in the Hole in Wilder's career, so what a run for him.) 

And what a mature understanding Wilder showed of the fickle media cycle, where a story becomes a sensation for a week at a time and then is completely forgotten once it reaches its resolution one way or another. The characters who are portrayed as heroes probably are not -- not only is Leo bad to his wife, but he was only in the cave on what was essentially a mission of thievery. Of course, those who bring the story to us might be even worse. The carnival outside Leo's cave is a perfect symbol for the overwhelming quantity of attention paid a story while it is hot, and its ability to leave town as soon as it is not.

Because it only just happened, I was reminded of the story of the Titan, the Titanic submersible that was lost last week, killing its five occupants. Although there would have been no Chuck Tatum figure, the man with the exclusive who kept the story in our news feeds, I can imagine that news editors everywhere wanted that story to go longer without a definitive resolution, since we all eagerly refreshed our browsers for updates on it. When the debris was found, meaning the loss of the souls aboard, we all quickly moved on and I bet many of us have not even thought about it again since.

Douglas, accustomed to being a hero at the time I think, really leans into the villainy of his character. Chuck Tatum is not fundamentally an awful person, just a selfish one -- as well as a violent one. The way he treats Lorraine, grabbing her hair and once strangling her with a mink shawl, is repulsive. But it would be overplaying this film's hand, so to speak, to suggest that Tatum is the epitome of evil. He's genuinely ashen when he learns that his own decisions may have doomed Leo. However, one wonders whether the main reason he cares is that the only way he comes out rosy in this whole affair is if they do eventually save the man. If they don't, he can kiss his prospective career gains goodbye.

It seems clear that the same circus surrounding the media, so to speak, has been in place for time immemorial. Still, Ace in the Hole seems prescient about the function the media has in our world today. Although there are very good journalists depicted in this film -- Wilder's message is certainly not that they are all venal and corrupt -- the film certainly has its finger on the segment of the profession that will sensationalize just to sell newspapers. Or get eyeballs. Or accumulate mouse clicks.

Okay, on to another classic in July. 

Audient Classics: The Women

This is the fifth in my monthly 2023 series rewatching movies from before I was born that I love, but that I've seen only once.

How can a movie that doesn't feature a single man in its cast fail to pass the Bechdel Test?

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you The Women.

If you need to brush up on your Bechdel Test, here's a reminder of it boiled down to its basics on Wikipedia:

"The test asks whether a work features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man."

As you can see in the tagline on the poster itself, "It's all about men!"

Yes, that was certainly a 1939 bet hedge by MGM, who surely didn't want to limit the film's audience to only the fairer sex. But it's actually true.

This movie features about 20 women in speaking roles, and probably about six main characters -- but never are they not speaking about the men in their lives.

I had remembered that George Cukor's film was essentially an ensemble piece, and I thought for sure that among the characters an array of different story arcs were featured. One would be dealing with infidelity, to be sure, but another was trying to push her career forward, one was struggling with motherhood, etc. That's how they'd make it today. (And I'm sure how they did make it when the movie was remade in 2008, though I don't remember the details of that particular film.)

Nope. It's all just about men, how they tend to be unfaithful to their wives, and whether it is a good idea to forgive them and take them back, or keep your pride by pushing for a divorce. 

And in the process, what presents on the surface like it could be a sort of proto feminism is actually pitting the women against each other for much of the time -- even to the point of showcasing the members of the animal kingdom they most closely resemble in a memorable opening credits in which the characters are first introduced.

That's the harsh view of The Women. The more generous view -- and the one I certainly adopted when I saw it for the first time more than 20 years ago, the date of that viewing falling prior to when I started keep track of viewings in early 2002 -- is that it's a very clever, often very funny movie that is about as progressive as a movie made in 1939 was capable of being.

That these women -- primarily the lead character Mary Haines, played by Norma Shearer -- would even consider divorce was probably a big deal at that time. I see that The Gay Divorcee predates this by five years, but I generally think of this as being a more conservative time when women were encouraged to accept their lot in life. Of course, that isn't a true portrait of that era, particularly that era on film -- the Hays Code was brought in in 1934 precisely because movies were getting too racy -- but perhaps it's a true portrait of what a certain segment of powerful people thought reality should be, at least as reflected by our popular entertainment.

And women who are characterized as cats and display incredibly catty behavior throughout? Embodied by the film's two other biggest stars, Joan Crawford and Rosalind Russell, the latter of whom is more gossipy and thoughtless while the former is truly pernicious? Well, if you don't have any men in your film, someone's gotta fulfill the role of antagonist, doesn't she?

Let's talk about that gimmick. Not only is a male character never visible on screen, but neither is there a male voice even heard. I thought I had remembered that some male children were seen at one point, but that wasn't the case either. No, Cukor et al stick to their concept throughout, and it's a fun one indeed. While it is not strictly speaking "realistic," it does uncover a truth about well-to-do society in New York at the time, and likely society in general: the genders operated in very different spheres, with the men working in male-dominated worlds and the women moving through female-dominated spheres like the spa and the high-end fashion shop. Women could move from a high tea to an early sort of calisthenics back to the apartment almost without encountering a man, who were slaving behind their desks -- and stepping out on their wives with other women who sometimes moved through these same female spheres.

You do have to adjust your expectations when watching The Women. If you want it to stand up to a 21st century version of women's rights and Hollywood morals, it won't. Without spoiling too much, I'll just say that the possibility of a woman getting back together with her philandering husband, after he regrets his philandering, is treated as a hypothetical happy ending (remembering I'm trying not to spoil too much). Today, that man is kicked to the curb, no two ways about it.

But there is a lot to like here, a lot I really did like in probably 2001 or so when I saw first saw it, and a lot I liked only a bit less now. For one it's the performance of Shearer in the central role, her heartbreaking work as she learns about her husband's affair through salacious gossip and is forced to occupy the same social settings as the very woman with whom he's cheating, not even knowing which one she is, even though all her catty friends know it. There's a very complicated version of female loyalties painted here, with some characters appearing loyal to Mary but then engaging in their own awful behavior, and others considering loyalty a possibility, but not if it gets in the way of a good gossip session. Some of this, of course, is a pretty dated and uncharitable view of female interpersonal dynamics, but other bits of it have aged reasonably well. 

I became a little less interested when the film takes a detour to Reno, where people can get a quickie divorce. (I suppose Vegas would have also worked, it being within the state of Nevada.) Some of the film's more slapstick moments occur here, and there are rather too many coincidences. However, this is when Mary meets some of her most loyal friends, who seem especially so contrasted with some of those who purport to be her friends in New York, but are really just opportunistic bottom-feeding gossips. 

I did also enjoy Crawford's performance as Crystal Allen, this I suppose being one of the films that helped establish her reputation as a bad girl. (Or maybe that reputation grew due to her later life exploits, captured in Mommie Dearest.) It's a bit over the top at points, but The Women never said it was going for subtlety. 

As for Russell, who I have seen plenty of times but about whom I don't have a fixed notion of her personality, she reminded me a lot of Lucille Ball, in a good way. I would have said Russell came first, but they were more or less contemporaneous, with Russell only four years older than Ball. In fact, two years earlier Ball was in a film that on the surface seems somewhat similar to The Women, 1937's Stage Door, which I saw earlier this year but actually didn't like all that much. 

Overall the two hours and 15 minutes of The Women passed faster than it might have. I'm not smitten with the film like I was when I awarded it five stars on Letterboxd -- after the fact, of course, since Letterboxd wasn't around in 2001 -- but it still makes for a fitting entry in this series.

Which will continue in June.

Audient Classics: The Wages of Fear

This is the latest in my 2023 monthly series rewatching movies from before I was born that I loved but that I've seen only once.

When I was watching the masterpiece The Wages of Fear (1953), from director Henri-Georges Clouzot, last night, the famous quote from director Howard Hawks came to mind: "A great movie is four great scenes and no bad ones." 

Of course, that's not actually what Hawks said. The bar was actually lower for Hawks, who only required three great scenes.

Because I didn't remember that in the moment, I thought it was a particularly apt description for The Wages of Fear, which contains four terrific major set pieces on the 300-mile journey to deliver nitroglycerin by truck over uneven and unpredictable roads. And because it has no bad scenes, well, it's a great film indeed.

If you don't know the story, it involves four men (Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Peter van Eyck and Folco Lulli) who are selected from a pool of applicants for a job they know may be their last. They're in a dead-end South American town with no money or means of moving on, but an opportunity arises when the SOC (Southern Oil Company) needs to truck the nitroglycerin to the site of one of its wells, which is a raging inferno that has already taken a dozen lives. The nitroglycerin is design to help blow out the inferno -- like a candle, one character says -- but first they have to get it there, and any sort of hard contact or even too vigorous bouncing on the road will blow the whole truck sky high. Fortunately, they've got two, meant to be spaced 30 minutes apart from each other, though that doesn't exactly work out as planned. The job would pay them $2,000 apiece, a fortune in 1953 and for these men in particular. 

(Just so I don't forget, Montand's character is named Mario, and Lulli's character is named Luigi. I have to think that was a coincidence and not the basis for Nintendo's flagship product, but it was funny to note it, especially just days after seeing The Super Mario Bros. Movie. A few others on the internet have commented on this but it does indeed appear to be a coincidence.) 

The harrowing journey itself would obviously be enough to sustain an entire feature, but Clouzot starts us off with a good 45 minutes in this town, which establishes the personality of the characters as well as the hopelessness of their situation. Both times I've watched the film, I've wondered if we needed that much in the town -- and both times I've decided we do. It contributes to the epic scope of the film, and since we're going to spend so much time with these characters, it's useful to see them outside of the context of their suicide mission. As a point of contrast, William Friedkin's 1977 remake Sorcerer clocks in a half-hour shorter, at two as opposed to two-and-a-half hours. Some of the plot details are changed -- if memory serves, that movie involves more political intrigue -- but the long opening section is also lost, just one of the reasons that one doesn't hold a candle, so to speak, to this one.

Once we do get on the road, it's just one moment of clenched teeth after the other. You know, because of the length of the film, that at least one of the trucks will survive certainly the first, but very likely the second and also the third pickle they find themselves in. That does not decrease the tension one iota. And because there are two trucks, you really don't know when one of them will go kablooey -- but almost certainly that one of them will.

I don't want to tell you too much about the obstacles these four men encounter along the way, because if you haven't seen the movie, you need to correct that straight away. But I do want to tell you something about them, and I might as well tell you about the first one -- don't worry, even knowing that both trucks make it through, you'll still feel stressed as hell watching the scene. It involves a stretch of road called "the washboard," whose regular bumps will certainly be enough to detonate the nitroglycerin -- unless you go really fast or really slow. The fact that the two trucks each choose one of these methods of bypassing this area -- remember, there were no CB radios for them to talk to each other -- is all you need to know to grok just how disastrous the scenario has the potential to be.

Outside of the four distinct impossible scenarios these trucks face, each of which is more anxiety producing than the last, the dynamics between the characters are just as easy to savor. We spend a lot more time with Montand and Vanel, both Frenchmen, whose bond takes an unexpected turn when one of the pair reveals himself to be a coward, in direct opposition to his previous bluster. The fact that they have this bond makes the situation all the more complicated -- one man would like nothing more than to ditch the other, except that he needs him, and the other would almost rather wander off and die of heat exposure in the wilds than keep waiting for it all to just end in a flash. The relationship is fascinating, demonstrating a complicated form of love between the men.

We don't spend as much time with either the Dutchman (Bimba) or the Italian (Luigi), but we do get snippets of their downtime conversations and life philosophies. All four are fully drawn characters with their strengths and weaknesses, all of which will be on display over the course of the film.

Their solutions to their issues are equal parts ingenious and nuts. This sort of task means being on a knife's edge between survival and calamity, and the ways they do or don't rise to the occasion are always fascinating.

And there's a gut punch. I won't tell you about the gut punch. But it's a good one, an unexpected one. 

I watched The Wages of Fear at end of the day on a holiday (ANZAC Day) after too many late nights in a row. I did consider whether being able to get through a two-hour and 28-minute black and white movie, mostly in French or Spanish, was in the cards in this scenario.

Well, as great movies always do, The Wages of Fear kept me wide awake, straight to the end, wondering what would happen -- even if I already knew.

Audient Classics: The Exterminating Angel

This is the third in my 2023 monthly series rewatching movies from before I was born that I loved, but that I've seen only once.

The thing about movies you love is, if you loved them, you've usually found a way to write about them on your blog at some point -- especially if you've had that blog for a long time. And since I've now passed the 14-year mark on The Audient, it's getting increasingly likely that choices for a rewatch series are movies that I saw, and wrote about, during that time. 

At least with my first piece on The Exterminating Angel in 2016, it wasn't the sole focus of that piece. It was a piece that combined two movies about dinner parties that went disastrously wrong, the other being The Invitation. Still, I'll write about it now before I see what I wrote about it then.

Thursday night found me in a particularly interesting fugue state to watch this movie.

An hour before I started, I scarcely felt myself capable. To get my steps in, I'd taken an hour-long walk before dinner. That isn't the kind of thing that normally wipes me out, but it did this time, or at least the end result was that I was collectively wiped from a busy day at work and, I don't know, maybe the last three years of my life. My wife had also talked about being extremely tired, and we'd even COVID-tested my younger son when he came home from school because of some sniffles he was reporting. He was negative and neither of us really felt our "symptoms" were enough to warrant a test for ourselves. That's proven to be the right choice as I felt fine again yesterday.

Because I was going to be out all day yesterday -- I didn't return home until after 1:30 last night, in fact -- I made sure to do an extra dose of the normal nighttime chores on Thursday, putting away enough laundry for three families before it was finally time to sit down with the movie. And then I noted, well, maybe this was a partial explanation: I was starting to get a migraine. My migraines aren't usually painful, but they do involve the blotchy visuals that present a bit like retinal burns, and they can last for more than a half-hour.

So it was exactly in this condition that I did sit down with Luis Bunuel's film. I might have called an audible if not for the fact that I had already seen the movie and knew that its Spanish language dialogue was not going to be crucial to consume in toto, seeing how little it has to do with establishing a rigid plot. 

The plot of this movie basically is: A bunch of fancy Spaniards attend a dinner party, and then they can't leave.

They get to what we would think of as an ungodly hour, but it might not be for the Spanish. In that country where we famously know that they often will have dinner at 11 p.m., a 3 a.m. evening is not particularly out of the ordinary. But at that time that they would usually close up shop and go home, instead they all start reclining on the fancy furniture and camping down for the night, the result of a sort of unspoken group decision. A few comment on the apparent absurdity of it, but not with any aim of resisting.

A week later, they're still there. Not only in that house, but in that particular room of that house. 

And since all but one of the servants left before this even started, the only ones they're sharing the house with are a trio of lambs running up and down the stairs, and a bear cub that can be seen climbing the various columns and bannisters.

Yep, this is Bunuel at his finest alright.

We don't actually know it's a week -- one of them says it feels like a month. But before long the passage of time becomes difficult to discern, the guests begin hallucinating -- one even sees a disembodied hand creeping around the room -- and their collective sanity is hanging by a thread.

I'm quite certain there is a specific inspiration for this satire beyond just Bunuel's typical interest in warfare between the classes. In fact if I remember reading something about it at the time, there may have been coded references to a particular government or foreign conflict or something of that nature that 1962 audiences would have understood.

I could look that up, but I prefer not knowing. I like thinking that Bunuel's surreal ideas spring just from his imagination, not from something so banal as a political protest. 

The visual splotches of my migraine did dissipate after maybe 15 minutes, but at certain junctures of the movie I had to give way to short naps. That's become increasingly common in my movie viewing, but in The Exterminating Angel it seemed particularly appropriate. I was watching a movie about people who couldn't understand how they'd found themselves draped over the furniture, sleeping the night after an ordinary social outing, rather than at home in their beds. And I woke from these one or two naps with a similar sort of disorientation, draped over my own couch, my TV having gone into a screen saver mode, showing images that were not from 1962, but rather, deserts and oceans and other random bits of beautiful photography from the 21st century. It was dreamlike for certain.

If I liked it a little less this time, it's only because The Exterminating Angel is such a wonderful oddity that subsequent viewings can't compare to your initial discovery of it.

Let's see what parts of Exterminating Angel I chose to focus on in 2016.

Well, it's only fair that I don't correct earlier mistakes made in this piece. The sharper of you will already know that I got the location of the movie wrong. Although Bunuel himself was Spanish, this movie is set in Mexico, which makes the original lateness of the hour I mentioned less of a cultural tradition. Oh well, egg on my face I guess. 

Actually as it turns out, I didn't want to tell you even as much as I've told you in this piece (which is not nearly all of it) because I thought it was so lovely to discover the plot developments of The Exterminating Angel without them being spoiled in advance. There's only a single paragraph devoted to the movie, as the piece existed largely as a vehicle to discuss five other movies (also briefly) in which disastrous dinner parties occur. Those were Clue, Gosford Park, It's a Disaster, Rope, and Bunuel's own The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.

That last is something I should also rewatch, though not for this series -- I'd like to at least vary up the classics I watch by subject matter, filmmaker and country of origin. 

Let's see what April has in store. 

Audient Classics: Roman Holiday

This is the second in my 2023 monthly series watching classic movies I loved but have seen only once.

I chose Roman Holiday for February in conjunction with Valentine's Day, but I should have questioned the wisdom of that when it was 10 o'clock on Tuesday night and I hadn't yet started it.

My first port of call was to have my wife watch it with me -- it being the holiday that celebrates romance and all -- but it's hard to pin her down to watch any movies these days, let alone a 70-year-old one that she's probably already seen more than once. (I've only seen it once, hence its inclusion in this series.)

When she didn't want to, I was thinking of watching it Wednesday, in conjunction with American Valentine's Day.

But then it turned out that we decided not to do anything for Valentine's Day at all. Our lives have been busier than we can handle lately, and her birthday is this weekend, so February 14th doesn't have much of a presence in our household even in a year when we're less busy. When we decided to treat it as a normal night rather than faking it, it was actually a huge relief.

But that meant that once we had had a cocktail and started our newest puzzle -- which I guess means we were, sort of, celebrating it -- I did have time to watch the movie, after we were all cocktailed and puzzled out.

Whether I should have started a nearly two-hour movie after 10 p.m., when I'd already had cocktails, if I wanted to fully appreciate it, is another matter. Welcome to my last week of movie decisions.

Although I was never bored, I did find the movie a bit slow, as in, it seemed like relatively little was happening to fill a whole two hours. It takes nearly the whole first hour for Gregory Peck's Joe Bradley and Audrey Hepburn's Princess Anne to even finish up their first night together.

Now, that makes a certain sense as the whole movie covers only about 48 hours in these characters' lives. And I didn't make this observation out of boredom, as suggested previously. I was just amazed that William Wyler's film had been entertaining me relatively well on so relatively little for so relatively long.

I'm not sure if any movie can keep me from falling asleep on my couch nowadays, as lately I'm too tired to watch basically any movie uninterrupted. So yes, I did fall asleep a couple times (always and forever pausing when I do this) and didn't finish until 1 a.m.

Basically I was very charmed by the movie, but I didn't swoon for it like I did the first time. You wouldn't recall this, I'm sure, but I included it as one of five movies I would watch on a blimp in this post, based on a silly ad they were playing at MIFF, and I chose it specifically for its swoony romantic qualities. Those registered this time but they didn't overwhelm me or anything.

I was, as I always am, reminded of how much I like Peck as a romantic lead, and how darling Aubrey Hepburn was in the right role. (Unfortunately, the role that is probably her most iconic, Holly Golightly, also appears in a movie remembered for its awfully racist impersonation of a Japanese man by Mickey Rooney.) There's a lightness to this movie, even at the times it feels slow, and Eddie Albert makes the perfect third wheel for part of their adventures, playing the cameraman who secretly snaps all the shots of Princess Anne on her "day off."

Shots that he turns over to her at the end, unpublished. The ending of Roman Holiday certainly makes use of conventional Hollywood narrative arcs, as Joe Bradley stops short of his betrayal of Anne, reforming himself before it's too late in a fairly standard case of character redemption. But Dalton Trumbo's script doesn't insult our intelligence by having Anne drop everything and run off with a reporter who has been interacting with her on false pretenses. They had a lovely adventure together but they both have real lives to return to, and hers is just a little bit sad, since we know its many routines and proprieties are suffocating to her. We hope, of course, that a taste of freedom might mean she can learn how to incorporate similar adventures into her future, so that her whole life feels a bit less stultifying. And I suppose if you are a true romantic, you might believe that even she and Joe may find each other again, outside of the bright heat of the spotlight.

The sort of romantic who comes out on Valentine's Day, and watches a romantic movie on February 14th even if it kills him.

Audient Classics: Sherlock Jr.

This is the first in my 2023 monthly series Audient Classics, in which I rewatch films from before I was born that I loved, but that I've seen only once.

As you would know, January was a busy month for me, so I decided to start Audient Classics with what will certainly be the shortest movie in the series. It will also certainly be the oldest, so it works in a couple different ways.

That's right, I was long overdue to revisit Sherlock Jr., my favorite Buster Keaton film and possibly my favorite silent film ever, though other contenders for this series -- such as The Passion of Joan of Arc and Greed -- may have something to say about that.

This is, I believe, also the first film that I've ever watched for two different monthly series on this blog, though I'd have to go back and check on that. This was the second film in No Audio Audient, my 2016 series watching silent movies. It won't be the last to repeat, as I figure to revisit some others this year that I first discovered through one of these other viewing series. 

So the challenge of this series will be to say something fresh about each film, since some of them will have already received a write-up on this blog in a very similar format to the current one. I will intentionally not check to see what I wrote back then, until once I'm done and I can compare and contrast which things I thought were worth talking about on each viewing. Then I might make a couple comments to that effect at the end of this piece.

Everything is worth talking about in Sherlock Jr. I can't imagine this much technique, this much heart, this much humor, and this much just plain movie magic being fit into a movie even twice its 45-minute running time. (I'll wager the phrase "movie magic" came up at least once in my other write-up.)

I'll start with one of the bits of humor. I laughed out loud when Keaton's main character (I don't think he has a name so we can just call him "the projectionist") timidly gives his sweetheart a ring with a very small diamond in it. She has trouble seeing the diamond so he helpfully produces a magnifying glass from his pocket to assist. I don't know which I think is funnier, that the projectionist has clown car pockets and can produce anything wants from them (and without looking or digging too hard), or that he brought along the magnifying glass purposefully because he knew she would need it.

The film is of course full of camera tricks, perhaps most memorably when the projectionist walks into the movie screen and starts seeing his background changing behind him as he tries to sit down on items that are suddenly no longer there, or dive into water that suddenly becomes snow. But I think the most seamless trick in the whole movie is when he's escaping some hoods who are chasing him and he literally dives into a briefcase being held open by another man at his chest. I know how they accomplished it, I'm pretty sure -- a man holding a briefcase in one shot, briefly a dummy with a trap door that allows Keaton to vanish through a hole in the fence, then back to the man again, all edited so quickly that you can't tell -- but I still find it extremely impressive for a movie that was made 99 years ago. 

For a 45-minute movie, I was surprised about the things I didn't remember from only seven years ago. I remember the basic contours of most of the set pieces, but I didn't recall the rather lengthy -- by the standards of a 45-minute movie -- scene involving billiards and the three traps that might get the projectionist, now the detective (an explosive 13 ball, a poisoned drink and a booby-rapped chair). I also remembered the tenor of the ending being a little different. I remembered him not getting the girl (oops, spoiler alert) and that it was far more melancholy, maybe even that he stepped into the screen and we never saw him again. (I think that probably does happen in some other movie.) Of course when I saw the girl discovering the truth of what happened at the pawn shop, which occurs much earlier, I knew I must have probably gotten that wrong.

I remembered the magic. As I said before, it's bursting with it. Keaton's gifted stunts and pratfalls are just a small, though very important, portion of it. The whole thing is just exquisite.

I could keep being Chris Farley and saying "Remember the part where he jumps through the window and puts on the old woman's shawl as a disguise in one single motion? That was awesome," but if I talk about too many of the great individual moments, it'll be unfairly stacking the deck in favor of having mentioned these moments in both this piece and the one I wrote in 2016. I'd like to see which ones struck me both times, and so I will go read that piece right now. 

Huh, not one use of the phrase "movie magic."

I do talk extensively about both the billiards scene and the ending, despite having subsequently forgotten those details in the ensuing years. I also discussed both the changing backgrounds scene and the briefcase scene, though in the latter case, I claimed to not know how they did and that I didn't want to know. I guess this time I was willing to speculate on what they obviously must have done to create the effect, and maybe that's the point of a second viewing -- you are analyzing the brilliant details rather than just letting them wash over you.

I also gave a plot synopsis, which I did not do this time -- I guess figuring that if I were watching it a second time and already knew the plot (at least the parts I could remember), then the same is probably true of you.

If you want to read that previous post, it's here. 

As much as I long to continue talking about this brilliant film, my busy January hasn't yet let up so I'll just say to come back here in February to see what great moment in cinema history, probably decades later than this one, comes next. 

Rewatching the classics in 2023

Most years when I select a theme for my new monthly viewing series, it's to address some urgent perceived deficit in my viewing habits.

That's usually with films I haven't seen, but it doesn't have to be. 

I had an idea lined up for 2023, and I was going to be happy enough with it -- I won't tell you what it was in case I do it in 2024, which seems pretty likely. (Film noir knows the feeling, having gotten bumped back from 2020 to 2021.) 

But in December I found something more urgent.

In 2022 I had 85 rewatches of films I'd seen previously, which is becoming more the normal number, though obviously that was inflated by the 26 rewatches of my previous #1s. (Twenty-seven, actually, since I rewatched Inside Out twice.) I remember the years when I'd only rewatch about a dozen. It wasn't that long ago.

The decade breakdown of these rewatches was as follows:

2020s - 15
2010s - 21
2000s - 22
1990s - 14
1980s - 11
1970s - 1
1960s - 1

So essentially I only rewatched movies from my own lifetime.

Only one of the 84 films (Inside Out twice) was released before I was born, that being Herk Harvey's cult classic Carnival of Souls from 1962. And even when I watched that, it was the result of an intentional choice to watch something older -- to intentionally buck my personal preference of revisiting recent favorites.

In 2023, I intend to make that choice once a month.

I'm not sure exactly how I'm going to organize it, but it may be as simple as rewatching the top 12 movies on my Flickchart that were released prior to October 20, 1973, that I've seen only once. (And yes, I'll be turning 50 in 2023, giving this series an additional resonance that I didn't consider until I actually started writing this post.)

I would like to keep a little flexibility in my viewings, though, so it might not be as regimented as that. But I'll certainly use these highly ranked one-timers as a starting point for my selections.

To be clear, not every year is as bad as 2022 was in this regard, but 2021 wasn't much better. Given that 2020 and 2021 were both pandemic years, they featured a lot of cinematic comfort food, not "homework" like rewatching black and white movies. And then in 2019, I was rewatching mostly films from the previous decade in order to finalize my best of the decade.

When I tried to think back to a classic I had rewatched recently, I thought of 12 Angry Men -- that was pretty recently, right?

No. It was nearly six years ago, in March of 2017.

That's not the last older movie I rewatched, but the fact that it was the first one that came to mind is saying something. 

It'll help that I don't have an intense viewing project that focuses on recent films, as I did in 2019 and 2022, and that I don't have two pandemic years, as I did in 2020 and 2021. So the last four years can be written off, really, and not demonstrative of my overall tendencies as a cinephile.

Still, to suggest those years say nothing about my viewings of older movies is also clearly incorrect. If I tended to revisit movies from before I was born with regularity, they might have been the comfort films I watched in 2020 and 2021.

I may never get to considering the sorts of movies I'll watch for this series to be comfort food. As a cinephile, I definitely prioritize the new, or personal nostalgia, over becoming a master of the seven decades of film that preceded my birth.

But I can get closer to that idealized state, and watching movies I haven't seen is only one part of it. It's rewatching the older movies I've loved that may really start to deepen my appreciation.

And what'll I call this series?

I'm starting to run out of clever plays on the word Audient -- have been for several years now -- so let's just go with Audient Classics.

Has a bit of a classic ring, no?