This is the first in my 2018 series watching two movies per month by directors who are completely unfamiliar to me, and also have something of a reputation for their distinct visions. You know, auteurs.I had aspirations to start this series in January, giving me a full 12 directors to focus on. But cramming two movies into the last ten days of January -- a period that was also designed to include a short break from movies after publishing my year-end list -- was always a bit ambitious.
Besides, after the start I've gotten off to, I'm glad to have only 11 slots to fill. We'll see if I can do even that.
In short, sourcing is going to be an issue for this series, particularly with the names I named in this post. Which I won't repeat here, because there seems like a good chance I might not get to half of them.
Suffice it to say that I tried both the library and iTunes on a number of titles from the people on my initial list, before calling an audible and going with a name I hadn't even singled out: Chris Marker. And this was also going to be a bit of a cheat, as La Jetee, his most famous film and the inspiration for 12 Monkeys, is not even feature length. But I figured, I've never seen that movie, and a short month is a good time for a short viewing assignment.
But my library reservation for his film Sans Soleil, which also includes La Jetee, is stuck in some kind of purgatory. They acknowledge it as being on the shelf in the City branch of the library, yet it's been more than two weeks and it has not progressed to my local branch, North Melbourne. (I think I know why that is -- when I went there to look for it myself, none of the titles were alphabetized. Sigh.)
So about five days ago I started scrambling, and went for probably the most popular director on my list: Ernst Lubitsch. In fact, Lubitsch seems to have been enough of a product of Hollywood that I'm not even sure he would really be accurately described as an "auteur." But that definition is going to be stretched quite a bit in this series, and let's just say I was happy to find two titles on iTunes to squeeze into the end of this short month.
I didn't know that much about Lubitsch, which shouldn't be a surprise as I'm doing this series to get acquainted with directors I don't know. I think the German name made me think he was perhaps more of a maverick than he actually was. In truth, he seems to have been a conventional Hollywood director in a number of respects, someone who you might almost call a "studio hack" if you were feeling snarky. But he appears to have been incredibly well respected among his peers, and had a career (starting as an actor) dating back to the earliest phases of the silent era. What's more, he had something which people called "the Lubitsch touch," which identified his urbane subject matter and the way he made comedies of manners. Which describes both of the films I watched in February.
1. Ninotchka (1939)I was familiar with Ninotchka not as a Lubitsch film, but as one of the films that gets cited when people rattle off the names of all the terrific films that were released in 1939, many of which (including Ninotchka) were nominated for best picture. (In fact, of the ten films I've seen from 1939, seven of them were best picture nominees. How could they not have nominated The Women?) Not only was this my introduction to Lubitsch, but if you can believe it, it was also my introduction to Greta Garbo.
Okay, not quite. I'm realizing now I saw Garbo in Grand Hotel. But let's just say I did not notice/appreciate the fact that I was watching Garbo in that movie, Garbo being the kind of outsized personality that demands you know you are watching her, or else you aren't really watching her at all. Or so I am led to believe about her.
So it was interesting to see her play a character who is reserved almost to the point of being robotic, although in reading more about Garbo, I understand a certain iciness was part and parcel to her persona. The reason "Garbo laughs" was a good tagline for the movie, other than being a play on the phrase "Garbo talks" that had heralded her breaking into talkies, was that she was thought to have done it very rarely.
Garbo plays a Russian envoy sent to Paris to help broker the sale of a some precious jewels, in which several interested parties claim a stake, including the Russian government. She's so deadpan in the delivery of her lines in the opening half of the movie that I wondered if one of the many narratives about Greta Garbo was that she was not a very good actress. In fact, she was nominated for an Oscar for this performance for the third and final time, winning none. (She acted in her final film only two years later, though lived another 50 years sort of reclusively and generally out of the spotlight.)
Anyway, her heart is melted -- rather abruptly, it would seem, as part of laughing over him after he falls out of his chair -- by a count played by Melvyn Douglas, another interested party in the jewels and a man who is supposed to be kind of her adversary. See, they meet randomly on a street corner and spend a whole day together before they realize they have a connection to each other. Mild and tame hijinx of a sort ensue.
The whole thing is very mild and mannered, though as I said, she does come out of her shell quite a bit and I easily saw her star charisma coming out as the movie moved forward. I can't really explain why I was taken enough with Ninotchka to award it four stars; its classic status must have factored in there somewhere. And I was falling asleep a bit toward the end, a fault of trying to burn the candle at both ends for a while now. But I did really like the film, and decided that maybe that's kind of the thing about Lubitsch -- nothing flashy, just really good movies.
2. The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
Fast forward only a year to Lubitsch's very next film, another film whose reputation preceded it, and perhaps the only one I was conscious of having been directed by Lubitsch before I started researching him for this project. The Shop Around the Corner was known to me primarily as the progenitor for You've Got Mail, though Lubitch made several films that were later remade, including To Be or Not to Be and Heaven Can Wait.
This was an interesting film to have ended up pairing with Ninotchka, as it also features a romantic coupling who don't realize they have a special connection to each other when they first meet. Though this time it's kind of the inverse of Ninotchka, as Margaret Sullavan's and Jimmy Stewart's characters take an instant dislike to each other, despite having an intellectual or emotional connection that should draw them together. They're both corresponding with a love interest (each other) that they have yet to meet in person -- a premise that was logically updated for the email era by Nora Ephron -- though they work in the same shop, rather than rival businesses (unlike You've Got Mail). That shop is a Budapest trinket shop owned by Frank Morgan -- the wizard from The Wizard of Oz!
And here we see another way Lubitsch deviates from the "Hollywood hacks" to which I have uncharitably, unfairly and reductively compared him. If he were just some Hollywood director, his films would not only be shot on a Hollywood set, as these both were on the MGM lot, but they would be set in Hollywood or at least somewhere in the U.S. Both Ninotchka and The Shop Around the Corner are set in Europe, even if it's a fairly Americanized version of Europe. I mean, I'm about as convinced that Jimmy Stewart is Hungarian as I am that he's Chinese. But it works, and it gives Lubitsch a distinctive flair. I'd have to read up more to see if these settings were important decisions, or just incidental ones, but either way, they're decisions he got to make it.
I guess I liked The Shop Around the Corner about the same as Ninotchka, which means again I might have given it 3.5 stars but was feeling generous and went for four. It does have some slow spots and character dynamics that are a bit belabored, but I found its plotting satisfying enough and it felt conventional in a way that I liked rather than rebelled against. It's funny, when my wife found out I was going to watch it, she told me she had really liked it but thought that it was too drawn out. As the film is only 99 minutes, I was a bit surprised at that assessment and was wondering if she were thinking of a different movie. After watching it, I can sort of see where she was coming from, but I was still a fan of it.
One of the things the movie does slightly better than Ninotchka is play for laughs. I enjoyed the performance of William Tracy as Pepi, an errand boy working at the shop who has ambitions of becoming a clerk, and becomes a bit of a power-hungry taskmaster once he achieves that goal. The movie makes time for these supporting performances, and it works. But it also has an interesting underlying melancholy, as at one point a depressed Mr. Matuschek (Morgan) has to be saved from a suicide attempt. I got a bit of a flash of another comedy that dabbles with tones like this, Billy Wilder's The Apartment.
Okay, good start. I don't mind telling you that I've had a couple breaks that will make the sourcing of materials a lot easier for March. But I'll hold off on telling you about that until then, in part because I now think I have two viable options and I don't know which one I'll choose.
No comments:
Post a Comment