Scaramouche - Let Us Do the Fandango

The mob from the Ingram Scaramouche.

FILMS OF 2016

I can tell that it’s that time again because the drunks throwing up outside in the streets of Surry Hills are wearing Santa Hats. I list out the films which I saw for the first time and impressed me during the year to get my own recollections in order as much as for any benefit that may accrue world wide. I discover that IMDB stared as a similar exercise.

That’s (in some kind of order of preference) Rex Ingram’s 1922 SCARAMOUCHE with Ramon Novarro finally, a demonstration that major work started earlier in the twenties than I’d thought. The GOOD DINOSAUR Peter Sohn wonder of an animation,  STEVE JOBS from Danny Boyle, FLORENCE FOSTER JENKINS Stephen Frears back on form, YOUTH the same true of Paulo Sorrentino, Tom Ford’s NOCTURNAL ANIMALS, extraordinary for a second film, Tom McCarthy’s scathing SPOTLIGHT, William Wellman’s 1932 SO BIG with the first great Barbara Stanwyck performance, Salvador del Solar’s MAGALLANES appearing from nowhere, Anne Fontaine’s 2011 MON PIRE
CAUCHEMAR (My Worst Nightmare) with Isabelle Huppert and Benoît Poelvoorde, WO BU SHI PAN JINLIAN  (I Am Not Madame Bovary) a piece of extraordinary complexity from Xiaogang Feng who also headed up the cast of the Hu Guan & Runnian Dong  Lao pao er / Mr. Six , Vladimir Strizhevsky’s 1929 Der ADJUDANT DES ZAREN (L’aioutante dello zar/ Zarens Adjudant /The Adjudant of the Tsar) with Ivan Mozjoukine (figuring again), Jacques Audiard’s DHEEPAN, Shane Black’s The NICE GUYS, SAINT AMOUR from Benoît Delépine & Gustave Kervern, also regular offenders here.

Nocturnal Creatures - Amy Adams

 

 

 Also considered were Ken Cameron’s 2012 Dangerous Remedy,  Stéphane Brizé’s La loi du marché / The Measure of a Man with Vincent Lindon, Avril et le monde truqué / April and the Extraordinary World/  April and the Twisted World steam punk toon from Christian Desmares & Franck Ekinci, Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge, Gillo Pontecorvo’s Ogro  / Operación Ogro of 1979 with Gian Maria Volonte, Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, Lee Tamahori’s Mahana / The Patriarch,  Bertrand Tavernier’s Voyage à travers le cinéma français/  Journey Through French Cinema, Samuel Benchetrit’s Asphalte/  Macadam Stories, David Mamet’s 2013 Phil Spector,  Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Mustang, Álex de la Iglesia’s Mi gran noche/ My Big Night, Martin Zandvliet’s Under sandet / Land of Mine, Mario Monicelli’s Risate di gioia / The Passionate Thief, Larmes de joie / Tears of Joy, Roar Uthaug’s Bølgen, Vittorio Cottafavi’s 1943 winning I nostri sogni / Our Dreams with De Sica, Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake - indignation as entertainment, Cesc Gay’s Truman, Jay Roach’s Trumbo,  Stephen Chow’s Mei ren yu/ Mermaid, Doris Dörrie’s Grüße aus Fukushima /Greetings from Fukushima / Fukushima Mon Amour, Sinclair Hill’s 1929 Guns of Loos,  Barbara Kopple’s Hot Type: One Hundred and Fifty Years of  The Nation, Adam McKay’s The Big Short  and for the fun of it William Wyler’s 1935 The Gay Deception.

 
  There is minimal connection with the lists put out overseas.

Andrew Garfield - Hacksaw Ridge

I Daniel Blake seems to appeal and Hacksaw Ridge, and Nocturnal Creatures get mentions. This can be put down to my taste (or lack of it) late delivery of product here and also the fact that, now that there is a bigger pool to draw from, a lot of  films just never come up for consideration. Unless they crack it for the festival circuit and usually not then, Indian, Chinese or Arab (but not Israeli) film are considered either too inferior or alien for critics to admire or even watch. I feel the same way about the franchise spectaculars myself .

There has also been a shift. The replacement of 16 mm. by video should have meant a wider range of specialist material. However the electronic media has failed to produce significant long form work - most notably in porn and activist product.

Works of high seriousness like Piero Messina’s ponderous  L'attesa / The Wait or the output of celebrity directors like Pedro Almodovar or Jim Jarmusch have the inside track and popular entertainment - think Two Guns or We’re the Millers or indeed Mon pire cauchemar and Risate di gioia - are considered beneath consideration.

Also you might think it’s a bit early to bemoan productions missing in the Australia scene with the catch up of festivals, a limping SBS and special events still to come, so I went back to the New York Times’ ten best lists of  2011 and of their chosen material I can’t recall the appearance here of  A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang); Cedar Rapids (Miguel Arteta) Mysteries of Lisbon (Raúl Ruiz) Le Quattro Volte (Michelangelo Frammartino), Tuesday, After Christmas (Radu Muntean), Abracadabra (Ernie Gehr) Aurora, (Cristi Puiu) The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (Andrei Ujica), My Joy (Sergei Loznitsa), Poetry (Lee Chang-dong), Seeking the Monkey King (Ken Jacobs) and Voluptuous Sleep (Betzy Bromberg) and a few more I left out to be safe. I don’t have a team of subsidised interns to verify this list, so my apologies to any diligent festival director or entrepreneur who may have got around to them but just suppose my impression is correct and down the years admired material has regularly just not hit our shores - not to mention the popular or specialised titles. Wouldn’t this have an effect on the quality of film awareness and all the things that flow on from it?

Bertrand Tavernier.- Voyage á Travers le cinema Français

SWORDMASTER KILL (3D) and the Good Old Days.

In the nineteen seventies Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers Studios dominated the Chinese speaking market. They had obliterated the colony’s small screen, black and white productions and the mainland’s Marxists had thrown in the towel for the Cultural Revolution.

The kung fu film was conquering world markets and a sub section of that, the wu xia pian or swordsman film modeled on the work of King Hu, was their most prestigious offering.

This cycle came to be dominated by the films simplified by Chu Yuen, the one important survivor of the pre-Shaws era, from the convoluted newspaper serials of writer Ku Lung. Master swordsmen battled killer clans in studio fields sewn with paper flowers and dominated by the red lamp sun hung above them. In the company of  his Xiu hua da dao / Pursuit of Vengeance (1978) or Chu Liu Xiang zhi You ling shan zhuang / Perils of the Sentimental Swordsman (1982) Chu Yuen’s San shao ye de jian / Death Duel (1977) was a relatively minor entry, with it’s highlights being guest shots by Shaw stars David Chiang, as a master who they have to keep in a cage, driven to madness by his kung fu studies, and Lo Lieh as one anguished to the point of smearing his face with blood after a killing. Though he was notably overshadowed by opponent Lin Yun, it did however launch the stellar career of  Chiang’s brother Derek Tung-Shing Yee, who joined the ranks of costumed heroes in these films.

Derek Yee and the gang - Shaws' Death Duel.

Forty (!) years later Yee is an established director (Shinjinku Incident) and great survivor Tsui Hark  has produced his re-make of  San shao ye de jian as Swordmaster Kill (3D) and that turns out to be an event movie.

Very little of the seventies plot survives - injured master shelters with the village family of  a brothel girl and opponents face off for the death duel to establish supremacy in the Divine and the Demonic world.

The old buzz of recognising the preposterous Ku Lung plot complications & imagery is back, this time transforming his universe into one of the most extraordinary things contemporary cinema has to offer. The Palaces, brothels and villages we remember from the Shaw’s films are now visualised with more complexity and scale and the film doubles back with flash backs to account for all those inexplicable plot developments we used to take for granted. It’s realised with an extra four decades of  digital effects technology. Elaborate studio decors played against a coloured sky are divided into planes by 3D camera work. The jug is split with a slomo sword stroke that shows us the liquid suspended in it’s two halves. We are regularly showered with digital spears and arrows.

San shao ye de jian / Swordmaster Kill.

The film is a succession of extraordinary moments. The ice shattering under the impact of the fallen warrior, the disgruntled lieutenant, who has talked white robed Princess Yiyan Jiang out of slaughtering the handmaidens to accompany the perceived faithless deceased Kenny Lin Gengxin into the nether world, impales the eager one he has been offered as a swap for his royal love object. Snake tattooed Peter Ho splits the timber memorial to his fallen adversary, the Third Master of  Supreme Sword Manor, with a single stroke. (“Losing a rival is like losing your soul mate”).

He goes off to sleep in his coffin in the flower covered mountain cemetery. The whore house handyman psyches out the hoons, who refuse to pay, by standing there while they stab him four times. There’s the great scene of Ho arriving in the background hauling his grave stone as Kenny takes down the nasties menacing the village. The Master of Supreme Sword Manor (Norman Chu, once the lead of Hark’s 1980 Di yu wu men/ We are Going to Eat You) realises the skull masked attackers are using poisoned weapons and sends in his girl fighters, as he forms an array on the castle steps, and streaked black doplegangers emerge from Ho in the battle where each combatant has too much respect for his opponent to hold back.

I’m not sure that all this is an advance on the sensuous created decors and studied ridiculousness of the Chu Yuen movies but it’s certainly a fascinating comparison and a great movie experience all on it’s own.

If you’re looking for insights into the human condition, you’re in the wrong theater but if you can deal with some of the wildest imaginations at play, right now rush to the multiplex. Small screen won’t do it justice.

Photo Richard Wong

FILM FREAK ABROAD 2016.

I guess I’ve got to count this year’s trip to Europe as a success. I didn’t ride taxis. I didn’t have a meal in McDonalds and I didn’t take any selfies of myself with a 12th Century Madonna. I also didn’t encounter a single refugee, though I did have a sudden unexpected eye movement finding my lady friend engulfed by Romanian pick pockets.

As far a films go the results were mixed.

Paris as an ever renewing source of vintage American movies is a well known phenomenon but the same thing is true for their Italian films. Rue Champolion has for years had re-runs of Italian sex comedies of the seventies. By and large these are not funny and not sexy as poor Laura Antonelli struggles with her indignities, though Luigi Commenici’s Mio Dio, come sono caduta in basso! /Till Marriage Do Us Part did manage a nice joke strip tease in period costume.

However the choice is widening.

The Cinematheque’s crime movie season provided  Daniele Vicario’s presentable il passato e una terra straniero of  2008 where lawyer Elio Germani's meeting with a woman triggers the flashback of his being sucked into the lower reaches of society. More curious was a three cinema opening of Antonio Pietrangeli’s first movie Il sole negli occhi / Empty Eyes fifty three years after it first appeared. The director went on to make Adua e le compagne / Hungry for Love so I was curious enough to investigate. Pietrangeli’s film however proved a formula weepy about poor young Irene Galter ill used in the big city. The real streets, homes and the local dance hall showed the realist tradition but the plot was from stock with the society of her fellow maids the only mildly innovative element.

Cinema Zero's tote bag."Ce la forza sia con te."

Pick of the batch proved to be Anna Magnani, Toto and Ben Gazzara in what may be Mario Monicelli’s best film, the 1960 Risate di Gioia (Tears of Joy) with Toto getting roped into blonde movie extra Anna’s plan to join the New Year celebration, where they don’t want her, and the pair trapped in Ben’s scheme to mount a major scam before the night is out and his criminal associates close in on him. After unfamiliar plot developments in real settings there’s a startling scene where Gazzara turns on the pair who have woken up to him at last and declares that at least he works at his scams. Otherwise he’d be as pitiful as they are.

A beautiful sub-titled digital copy did justice to Leonardo Barboni’s wide images. It’s sad to think that a film as remarkable as this vanished after a brief first run dubbed as The Passionate Thief in the English language market. It left me frustrated at not being able to get to the other unfamiliar titles in La Filmotheque’s twenty plus schedule.

Film maker introduced screenings are a near daily occurrence in Paris and not just people promoting their new product. Jean Sorel was fronting a selection of his movies from the sixties. Only clashes in timing kept me away. I did however get to marvelous animator Michel Ocelot’s session with a kid audience (we were the tallest ones they had) for his new production Ivan Tsarévich et le princesse changeant - actually three new episodes to his animated series where the silhouette voice actors argue about he plot before we get the story segment. Colour and design are again brilliant and it was interesting to see Ocelot working the children’s question and answer session (“Quoi - vous n’avez pas vue Kirikou?”) till it got stretched to the point where they wanted to get the pastries in the foyer.

 

Michel Ocelot animation.

 One tiny asked him why he worked with black (silhouette)  figures and Ocelot answered that it had been an economy move at first but he persisted because it boosted the use of imagination. I’ve heard a lot less informative exchanges among big people at the Sydney Film Festival.

Mainly I let the new French product slide by on the principal that it would be offered at the French Film Week - and with sub titles - but I did knock out  Bernard Bonello’s Nocturama which may be the first of the inevitable movies on the Paris bombings. No one seems to worry about the fact that the terrorists are the good guys in this one. Not a great film but it does field a few great images - the group filmed in the nose cone of the driverless train as it emerges from the Metro tunnel to show the La Defence arch on the skyline or the face of the golden statue engulfed in flames. Ma loute is the new Bruno Dumont movie with its celebrity stars Fabrice Luchini, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and incredibly Juliette Binoche transformed into grotesques, as the action comes to focus on the cross dressing daughter of the big house making a couple with the brutish fisherfolk family’s son. If Camille Claudel 1915 and Flanders which Dumont also made with  producer Bouchareb are off kilter, this one is totally dotty and not in a good way.

Joachim Lafosse’s L'économie du couple / After Love is a slick relationship piece with the marriage of the comfortably off couple disintegrating. It showcases now hot star Bérénice Bejo opposite busy writer-director-actor Cedric Kahn. I might have liked it better with translation.

 

Pick of the bunch was 2014’s Mon pire cauchemar a reworking of the Theodora Goes Wild formula with slobby Benoit Poelvoorde getting mixed into chic Isabelle Huppert’s life. The switch of audience sympathies between them is more deft than anything I’ve seen in director Anne Fontaine’s other work. This is the kind of picture that wows the sub-titles crowd who should have been offered it by now.

Unfamiliar vintage French cinema is always turning over there. The ever intriguing Le Desperado was doing Raimu & Pierre Fresnay which gave me  a chance to see Jean Delannoy’s 1953 La Route Napoléon with Fresnay heading up a P.R. operation reconstructing the Emperor’s return from Elba with a garish caravan of sponsor labeled vehicles diverted from the chateau the bailiffs had sealed and having to set up in a small village well away from the original progress. This one should have been funnier.

 The kind of film I’m more interested in seeing in Paris is the European made in English language movie. Think Mateo Gil’s Blackthorn, the Matieu Almaric-Arnaud Desplechin  Jimmy P. : Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian or Pupi Avarti’s Bix. These never seem to get significant distribution in Australia and are often  excellent. Accordingly I homed in on Soy Nero a Germany - France - USA - Mexico co production from Iranian director Raffi Pitts, which claims to discuss the green card soldiers, foreigners promised nationality for fighting with US troops and then deported. This one opens out into the whole  question of nationality, with Johny Ortiz born in the US to illegals and accordingly not recognised, meaning he has to smuggle himself back into his country of birth. The second half, about his time fighting in Iraq, is another movie but ingeniously echoes the US material.

It will be more than revealing to see which if any of these make their way through the distribution mechanism to Australia.

 B.P.

PORDENONE 2016

The Pordenone Gionate del Cinema Muto is one of the last hold outs for the serious (or indeed frivolous) movie goer. Even as the train was pulling out of Venice Centrale, the action was starting as familiar faces began the kind of informed conversation that is  missing from the Australian film scene. I would find myself discussing the career of Chow Yun-fat over diner and trading Gian Maria Volonte DVDs in the breaks.

This is all agreeable - no exceptional - but the enthusiastic surface covers serious divisions. Now that there is actually money changing hands, tensions are emerging over who actually owns vintage films (which most of the time means old Hollywood). The companies, the archives and the entrepreneurs all eye one another suspiciously. Kevin Brownlow has lost the right to show the Gance Napoléon, his lifetime project.

My sympathies tend to lodge with the buccaneers. Salaried officers at institutions seem too eager to think that outsiders, who have been sufficiently enterprising to acquire at their own expense work that the civil servants might have been expected to find themselves, should hand it over for nothing. If there really is a question of who owns the material that companies and archives have ignored, sometimes for a century, the answer clearly is the viewers. It was made to their specifications and they paid for it - sometimes not enough but that’s another matter.

This year’s Pordenone Silent Movie week landed their new director Jay Weisberg with the big ask of following last year’s twin highlights, a great Victor Fleming retrospective and the six hour Henri Fescourt Les Miserables, with Neil Brand on piano, doing the whole show and getting a standing ovation.

M. Fescourt was back again this year with his 1929 Monte-Cristo for which they furloughed Neil Brand to offer Donald Sosin and Frank Bockius doing a perfectly adequate score for a mere two and a half hours. The pair had to compete with the still resonant memory of last year.

Montecristo becomes an anti climax, stuck with Jean Angelo (Epstein’s Robert Macaire, Feyder’s L’Atalantide) who could be a passable costume hero but would never match Miserables’ Gabriel Gabrio as a performer. Angelo’s early scenes, made up youthful, get him off to a shaky start. The ever impressive Lil Dagover, Bernard Goetzke, Gaston Modot and young Marie Glory don’t get much scope. The production was ambitiously decorated and a largely forgotten support cast inhabit the familiar characters well enough. The departures from the usual adaptations were minor - giving Angelo time to explore the island of Monte Christo and offering unusual prominence to Tamara Tsezenko’s Hayddée.

Hopes ran high for a William Cameron Menzies season coming in the wake of James Curtis’ book on him as art director phenomenon - creator of the role of Production Designer, populariser of the concept of Story Board and instigator of Bat Man. This proved a bit of a fizzer with Curtis’ book nowhere to be had and no exhibition of the Menzies sketches which would have made a notable event on their own.

The films on show were mainly familiar items like Lewis Milestone’s Garden of Eden and better the John Barrymore Tempest both 1928 or they were fragmentary - Roland West’s 1927 The Dove and a couple of Menzies sound shorts. Raoul Walsh’s 1922 Kindred of the Dust had little of design interest beyond building the shack setting on a real shore line and Henry King and Sam Taylor’s 1928 The Woman Disputed lost impetus after a rousing opening with the prisoner going over Menzies shadowed prison wall with gun shots from his jailers shattering the street light next to which Norma Talmadge is peddling her wares. For those first couple of minutes, characters who vanish or become key to the intrigue pile onto the screen, including Gustav Von Seyfertitz reproaching our fallen women heroine. After this, attention falls away and cliché takes over.

The big night was a live orchestra presentation of the Fairbanks-Menzies Thief of Bagdad. This season is being expanded for a New York showing and I’ll get back to Menzies.

Der Adjudant des zaren directed by Vlad Strizhevsky in 1929 added to that gallery of swashbuckling, uniformed Ivan Mozhukhin heroes that continually delight the regulars at Pordenone. Unfamiliar till a copy was retrieved from Der Danske Filminsitutet, I was one of the people who confused it with the Mozhukhin Courier of the Czar, his Michael Strogoff. It turns out to be the most perfect of the star’s vehicles. His other films were sometimes more ambitious, sometimes better but this one is flawless.

Rescuing cloche hat damsel in distress, the winning Claudia Boni, from a crisis at the rail station, Ivan is rapidly smitten. They marry. However she is not what she appears, actually a pawn in the hands of sinister revolutionist Alexander Granach (later in Kameradschaft & Hangmen Also Die). Fearsome Chief of Police Fritz Alberti guards the safety of the Tsar, who they treat with a surreal reverence. When Ivan tumbles the plot, it looks like he will have to sacrifice his great love to the cause (startling moment when they realise she has left her purse with the small pistol in it where Alberti will find it) Troikas race to the border and shots are exchanged.  I felt like cheering.

Blowing the dust off the grim Mozhukhin-Volkoff 1924 Kean one more time was an anti climax.

Most agreeable surprise proved to be Sinclair Hill’s 1928 The Guns of Loos, another glimpse of the little viewed British silent films. This one featured the screen debut of a (brunette) Madeline Carroll opposite Ironmaster Henry Victor (L’Argent, Confessions of a Nazi Spy) as the munitions magnate who leads his workers battalion when shipped to the WW1 Battle of Loos, and is overtaken by “funk”. The film’s great set piece is the scene of galloping the artillery to safety under fire.

It’s comments on class and politics are a bit on the scary side (Victor punches out one of those bolshy workers’ leaders the way Leslie Banks does in Michael Powel’s Red Ensign) but the imposing staging, not obvious in never fielding more than a couple dozen people on screen, gives the impression of great film making skill. All right then, how about Sinclair Hill’s 1927 Boadicea?

The British cinema was also (sort of) represented by US director George Fitzmaurice’s presentable 1922 version of  Three Live Ghosts shot there with a cast that included Norman Kerry and Edmund Goulding. The copy was retrieved from Russia, where it had originally been re-edited to conform to the socialist ideal, removing the inter-titles by Alfred Hitchcock. The competition to have the earliest Hitchcock is fierce, with the British offering one reel of the Seymour Hicks two reeler Always Tell Your Wife where they speculate Hitch worked on the missing half.

It was OK to see the splendid Garbo Mysterious Lady again on the big screen with an orchestra, though Carl Davis failed its ultimate silent movie music test.  The set piece scene of Conrad Nagel pacing his cell in time to the superimposed drum beats of his court martial needs inspired handling.

After that the pickings got thin. There were a few nice pieces among the shorts.  The largely uninspiring Al Christie programs did include the 1923 Navy Blues from Harold and better known brother William Beaudine with Dorothy Devore involved in lively hijinks at sea. Lau Lauritzen Sr’s Danish 1917 Min svigerinde fra amerika was a surprisingly racy infidelity quarter hour. There was another look at George Lacomble’s imposing La Zone. An uncharacteristically serious 1913 Selig Tom Mix The Escape of Jim Nolan stood out in the always intriguing early westerns and it’s nice to see the pre WW1 Emile Cohls. The Japanese Momotaro cartoons were also enjoyable and the unknown 1928 Disney Africa Before Dark in a beautiful copy was a treat.

On the other hand, the screening of Hans Werkmeisters’ 1920 Algol with Emil Jannings demonstrated that no matter how good the restoration is, a nice copy of a pretentious and boring film is still a pretentious and boring event. The English Shakespeare primitives could also have been left on their DVD. 1913’s Ventianische Nacht, an early film by Max Reinhard no less, with Alfred Abel (Metropolis) proved just a ballet in real location curiosity, though, among the primitive material, I did enjoy the German Chromolithograph loops printed from the hand painted coloured films made for the projector toys in the pre WW1 era.

The novelty of repeated street scapes and City Symphonies wore off and the so called canon programs revived items like Mauritz Stiller’s drear 1920 Erotikon (Lars Hanson & Tora Teje) and Renoir’s grubby 1926 Nana with the lackluster duo of Jean Angelo and Catherine Hesling fronting Werner Krauss and Valeska Gert. We scored an even tackier 1917 version with one Tilde Kassay. Bring back Martine Carol I say! The legendary Esther Shaub Fall of the Romanov Dynasty  compilation offered terrible lab work and pedestrian assembly.

Also outlasting its welcome was the serial - actually series - Who’s Guilty? where the same players enact different social reproach dramas in each half hour episode. Howard Estabrook, Anna (Q.) Nilsson and Tom Moore figured. No connection to the Columbia fifties serial beyond the name.

Too many featured seasons proved unrewarding, like a John H. Collins retrospective. It was interesting to watch his awareness of film form develop from 1915’s On the Stroke of 12 through to his Riders of the Night of 1918, as he realised that editing could be a tool rather than a just means of recording and the quality of his collaborators improved with John Arnold (The Wind) on camera but his sensitivity remained stage melo. Collins’ celebrated Blue Jeans even has the hero rescued from a great big saw that gets nearer and nearer. Collins’ wife and star, the pixieish Viola Dana, who has a double role in his 1917 The Girl Without a Soul, would turn up years later as the lead in Frank Capra’s That Certain Thing.

There’s always the spot the star game - Richard Alexander, Flash Gordon’s Prince Barin and Ike Clanton to Walter Huston’s Wyatt Earp, makes a pass at Garbo in Mysterious Lady, already venerable Russell Simpson presides over his court room in  Blue Jeans and there’s a spunky young Hermoine Badley speaking up for the factory girls in The Guns of Loos.  

Poland contributed a dispiriting selection. Opera director Richard Ordynski’s draggy, incomplete 1928 costume drama Pan Tadeusz  (also on U-Tube in a nice tinted but untranslated copy) lacks a rousing finale in it’s present form. 1929s Mocny Czlowiek / The Strong Man  has a more modern feel but fails to involve as ambitious protagonist Gregori Chmara steals his dead friend’s MSS and finds his multiple duplicities catching up with him during a stage presentation of the work. Henryk Szaro’s 1930 Janko Muzykant was a ring-in where where they’d lost the track, with lengthy shots of the lead bowing away soundlessly on his violin. I was sitting there watching the l919 frock coat melo Ludzie bez jutra without any enthusiasm, thinking maybe I was being too hard on Polish movies when the man in the next seat started snoring.

Historical material like this has a place in an event like Pordenone, though how big is speculative. (I just wish they’d play it on the years I don’t go) It’s a bit much to expect the event to string masterpieces end to end when they have so many academic, business and national factions to satisfy. I guess it's enough that they are there and that they offer the satisfactions that they do.

NOT MY MADAM BOVARY. 

Fan Bing Bing - I Am Not Madame Bovary.

At the George St. Centre, possibly only till Wednesday, we’ve got Xiaogang Feng’s  Wo
Bu Shi Pan Jinlian / I Am Not Madame Bovary. 

It occurs to me that what I know or think I know about modern China comes mainly from watching the films of  Xiaogang Feng - If You Are the One, Aftershock the first Chinese IMAX movie or Personal Tailor. He’s had his feet off the pedals lately but Madam Bovary is a serious effort. Pity about the dumb title - Emma Bovary’s predicament is totally different from that of Bing-bing Fan in the new movie, for which they struggled to find a cultural equivalent.

The normally glamorous Fan, who has been in English language multiplex movies, is a wife involved in a One Child Family apartment scam divorce, which left her without a child or a husband. Seeking redress she goes to a distant relative in the legal bureaucracy, with a gift of meat she has personally cured, and works her way up the chain of local officials (“Who cares what a peasant woman wants?”) till she decides that people in Beijing are smarter and gets the ear of a Chairman at a Party Conference.

Diligent movie viewers are saying it’s the plot of Jang Yimou’s 1992 Qiu Ju da guan si and that’s part of the point. That film’s message was that village whistle blowers just don’t get the big picture (compare other socialist country pieces like  Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Amator/ Camera Buff). Here we start hearing about looking outwards not upwards and the spread of the Internet. It’s a film about listening to the people uncannily anticipating Brexit and the Trump era. It’s argument is complicated but not difficult. Fan is barking but a real society should be able to accommodate crazy people. Even if you reject it, it’s something to be considered.

On top of that, the film making is remarkable. Feng shoots most of the action through a round matte, making for unfamiliar compositions and providing striking moments as in going though a tunnel or when the camera moves sideways, uncharacteristically following her lover-rapist who keeps on coming back into frame further undressed, or the transition to a vertical format when the action arrives in the capital, along with an ultra wide screen coda. The visuals are continually strikingly beautiful. They need to be viewed on a big screen.

What we are seeing at two hours plus may be the uncensored version. The piece has had a rough passage on it’s home turf. You may not get another crack at this one.

Tavernier - Voyage

Voyage à travers le cinéma français/  Journey Through French Cinema 

Script & directed by Bertrand Tavernier     

   

 It’s kind of suitable that the end of my European movie excursion should be Bertrand Tavernier's Voyage a travers le cinema francais his three hour plus answer to the Martin Scorsese films about Scorsese’s discovery of US and Italian movies. The Taverrnier documentary arrived with a Gaumont logo stating “from the very first...” and packed the 2.00 o’clock at UGC Les Halles.

The opening montage, of great shots from key movies beautifully reproduced, immediately wins over an audience. We are going to see usually exceptional material in the correct format. The film isn’t an account of Tavernier’s own work or a run through of French cinema history. It’s about the director’s discovery of French movies. We kick off with the story of WW2 shortages leaving young Taverier with TB for which he was sent to a sanatorium where they ran Le Dernier atout long before he became aware of it’s director Jaques Becker and his career, of which we get an analysis. We learn that Jean Paul Gaultier watches Becker’s Falbalas every year for it’s analysis of the fashion industry.

Starting with Tavernier’s dad filmed in the family garden the director used for l'Horloger de St. Paul, autobiographical elements like the Nickleodeon Cine Club and the time spent in the now demolished Cinémas du Quartier, along with Tavernier’s work on enthusiast
movie writing get coverage, in with his job as assistant to Jean Pierre Melville, who told Tavernier he was the worst assistant he’d ever had and introduced him to a producer friend who put him to work as a press officer. Missing is the story about Tavernier telling Sam Peckinpah that he might be a great director but he was a total menace to publicity, winning Tavernier the choice of promoting any film the approving  producer had on his books.

Also under the microscope are Jean Renoir (“How could the nephew of Auguste Renoir become an American citizen?”) and Jean Gabin, with whom Tavernier did a long interview and whose career is analysed giving as much time to films like Gas Oil as the acknowledged masterpieces. Tavernier finds it revealing that Gabin produced the reviled le Chat. 

Jean Gabin late career.

The Von

 Particular emphasis goes to Edmond T. Greville (“the ultimate cult director” – well his
1937 Mlle Docteur is better than the Pabst film it cannibalizes). I loved the story of
Greville being told by Von Stroheim that the actor intended to play an amputee in  his role in Menaces and the director, desperate, coming up with the half  mask to cover the character's WW1 injuries - the Janus face, War and Peace. The Von was totally absorbed with the mask idea and forgot about the amputee thing.

The surprise is when we get to Eddie Constantine, whose films are to Tavernier a break with the tepid French crime movies that precede  them. The punch up with the director in John Berry’s 1955 Ça va barder - gets as much time as Alphaville.

Voyage ends surprisingly with a long section on French film music repeating Trufaut’s endorsement of Maurice Jaubert, though I’m puzled how Tavernier can say that Le Jour se leve has no theme when the same nine note phrase repeats from the titles to the ending even coming up as the music behind Jules Berry’s music hall dog act.  Tavernier rightly picks out the great Joseph Kosma (triply forbidden to work on Carné’s Les Enfants du paradis as a Jew, a Communist and a fugitive, but still providing the music for the mime scenes) and resolves the question of why, earlier in this production, the ending of Renoir’s Partie de Campagne wasn’t shown when Tavernier described it as the most touching scene in the cinema.

Watching his documentary is like talking to Tavernier himself. I keep on wanting to disagree with what he's saying while admiring the passion and effort behind his choices and there's always the odd moment of connection - our shared delight in Delannoy's 1939 "Von Sternbergian" Macao, l’enfer du jeu which gets early prominence equal to Renoir and Gabin - and Eddie Constantine and Jean Sacha.

I sweat on it turning up locally with subtitles. Part Two is said to be on the way.

KOREA AT THE CROSSROADS

Ahn Jong-hwa’s 1934 Cheongchun-eui sipjaro / Cross Roads of Youth, the one surviving Korean Silent Movie, has become the subject of a great night out restoration which comes not only with a Byeonsa Talker (Korean equivalent of a Japanese Benshi narrator), a four piece orchestra and (hey this is new!) a couple of accomplished musical theater vocalists who step into the spot light and do songs in Korean to accompany the action.

We kick off with yet another train entering a station, a brief montage of passing rails Berlin Symphony of a City style and disembarking passengers, among whom we spot hero Lee Wong-yong who has traded village life and carrying loads of firewood for a job as a porter at Gyeongseong (now Seoul) Central Station. An upright youth, he helps and old woman and her daughter rather than well dressed foreigners.

His luck is changing however as he catches the eye of cheerful “Gas Girl” service station attendant Kim Yeon-si. Meanwhile his aged mother has died in the village and his young sister Shin Yil-sun comes to the city in an attempt to find him. However villainous mustached sharpies are on hand. Money lender Park Yeon is there to prey on vulnerable girls and he manages to detour both the sister and the Gas Girl via the beach to his swank apartment, where he attempts to have his evil way of the sister.  Learning of the pump girl’s attempt to re-schedule her ailing dad’s debt with the dastard, Lee Won-yong goes to the low life’s home only to be humiliated, trampled and sent on his way without realising that both the young women who hold a place in his affections are inside.

However our hero discovers the awful truth and sets out to meet out justice to the slicker-usurer at his swank club, where the bouncers are ineffectual in stopping him. Our lead’s two comic side kicks seem to only function as observers.

Catching up with the bounder, who thought he had escaped unmarked, the burly hero gives him what for before being restored to the adoring females.

In fact the actual movie, which was a poll-topper in it’s original market, is the weakest element of the show. Murkily reproduced and having some technical flaws and a creaky melodrama plot, it ranks below the Japanese classics or the best of the Shanghai movies of it’s day.

The glimpses of  Gyeongseong are less that revealing but we can spot the same contrast between the innocents of the countryside and the decadence of the city, where women smoke in bars and the well off drive cars. It’s not too far away from what we see in thirties Australian films. Along with the sustained shot that’s out of focus and the uprights that are not quite vertical we can notice a few touches of visual sophistication - the side kicks adding chalk tears to their drawing of the heroine in adversity, a pan to a mirror which shows the distressed girl in the heavy’s flat or a striking close over the shoulder filmed downwards on a stair case.

The restoration was a major effort as all the archive had was untitled picture which baffled them confusing the female characters until they got in a lip reader who spotted Shin Yil-sun articulating the word “brother” and found other clues and they delved into newspaper files which put the plot together for them. I’m still puzzled about the faithless sixteen year old fiancée who makes the hero carry water for her?

The copy which came with good English subtitles was backed with the full voice over, not just doing the characters’ speeches but adding comments on the action and setting, deep breaths, the odd sound effect and even some critical comment like noting that Lee Won-jong emerges from the big fight with his make up smeared or that all the girls that the Byeonsa is re-voicing himself sound the same. That one got a big laugh. We are not all that far away from Robert Youngston’s 1950s silent movie compilations.

The score, which might have fallen back on wood blocks and single string fiddles, instead
goes for a Tango sound, at first seeming anachronistic but on reflection correct for a country then under Japanese occupation with overseas musical influences flowing in.

All this delighted a mix of Korean and other nationalities who turned up, not a full house but a good showing. The movie enthusiast community was as usual conspicuously absent.

2016 SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL.

Córki dancingu / The Lure,  Down Under, Everybody Wants Some!!  Grüße ausFukushima /Greetings from Fukushima / Fukushima Mon Amour, In the Sadow ofthe Hill, Juste la fin du monde / It's Only the End of the World,  Mahana,Magallanes,  Miss Sharon Jones & Hot Type, Mul-go-gi / A Fish,  Raman Raghav / Psycho Raman, Saint Amour, Smrt u Sarajevu /Death in Sarajevo, Toni Erdman. 

What the good citizens who put up the few hundred quid it took to set up the first Sydney Film Festival with the help of the films societies (remember film societies?) more than half a century back would say about the current event is speculative, with their two
hundred plus movies in a dozen venues and flags flapping on civic lamp posts. Once the total gets past fifty movies of course it is impossible to take in everything. It becomes half a dozen film festivals. I picked my way through the program and probably saw more worthwhile material than ever at one of these - until I got into the ten dollar dazzlers they were selling off. This is not they way to get the best value out of the event. Often the best material and the films that justify film festivals are surprise discoveries. I checked my selection against the prize winners and the Herald coverage and there was minimal overlap - In the Shadow of the Hill which I saw for a comparison with Tropa de elite.

The couple of films with Madman’s logo on the front should show up at popular prices and quite a bit of the material I ignored is gone for ever. Trouble is that those arrive without documentation and you make expensive mistakes if you just wade in.

Also though the festival is now the only local organisation with the dollars to handle this, they continue to ignore the chance to offer the ground breaking retrospectives that still surface from time to time in international Cinematheques. Maybe it’s just as well, as the ability to screen vintage material correctly is fast fading here without anyone much worried. Also it looks like there still are people who haven’t seen all Martin Scorsese and they are a better financial risk. The great man was not freighted out to present his work though the film maker introductions were one of the more agreeable features of the event.

Agnieszka Smoczynska’s Córki dancingu/  The Lure proved to be a handsome ‘scope production mixing punk numbers, excess and fantasy, with Splash and “The Little Mermaid” mashed in. Not what you might expect of a Polish film with Agnieszka Holland’s consultant credit buried in the titles. 

Córki dancingu : Michalina Olszanska, Marta Mazurek denurely poised.    

At night mermaids (or more accurately Sirens) Silver Mazurek and Gold Olszanska surface to do their duet, causing to the musicians playing on the shore to invite them out of the water before Preis (Four Nights with Anna) lets out a scream. Back at the decadent night club, the duo are accepted as back-up singers and there’s a demo of pouring water on their legs which transform into long fishy (undivided) tails.

The club acts include a stripper, Preis’ songs and eating the head off a budgie. Things get rough with Olszanska coming in covered in gore which she passes off as a victim cow, though we know better. She bites the thumb off one of the clubbers who displeases her and the sisters get dumped off a bridge wrapped in rugs.

Menacing mermaids must be in at the moment with this one and Stephen Chow’s Mei ren yu. It’s kind of unsatisfying that the makers can’t come up with something more involving than the fairy tale story line that they keep on losing in gross out detail but having a couple of appealing young women go topless for a large part of the action does get attention.

An ocker comedy about the 2005 Cronulla riots - maybe - but that needs real finesse. Think the Farrelly Brothers.

With Abe Forsythe’s Down Under we kick off with the actual text message that called for patriotic Australians to drive the menace of the Lebanese off  the Beaches sent the day before, and we get into actuality or re-staged actuality of the streets engulfed with rioters in “Ethnic Cleansing” shirts and police driving back hoon attackers.

The film’s action takes place the next day, with Ockers and outraged Lebs recruiting (“There’ll be fuck loads of cars”) to patrol the streets that night. The Aussie lead is more worried about his missing brother and looking after the high functioning Downs Syndrome kid cousin who just slammed the family car into the garage roller door. Uneasily enlisted by a gung ho friend, they are given a WW1 303 with one bullet and a grenade held together with Blutak. A Lebanese car lot do better, scoring a hand gun from a luxury meths lab. who demand the driver’s trousers - “to make sure you’re not wearing a wire.”

The film is planting the elements for the ending rather obviously at this stage. There are a few successful blackly comic moments, like the new car load of hard case racists demanding the boy beat up a passing Leb (he turns out to be the Chinese news agent they know, out walking his dog) or the car diverting from it’s Patriotic mission with the takeaway kebabs the driver’s pregnant girl friend demands, under the penalty of three maintenance orders.

The night time suburban beach atmosphere is quite well set up with the observation that it’s Gallipoli, except this time it’s our turf, but the development is marred by that familiar movie character ability to take beatings undamaged and the fact that the people fronting it remain fugitives from local sitcoms in which they were recruited.

Music is particularly destructive to the balance between cautionary tale, movie suspense
and knockabout they are trying to establish.

Even writing about a film using the Cronulla riots as a subject is a delicate task. TV director Forsythe  (the “Ned Kelly was Irish” gag recalls his earlier Ned) needed to bring more than the sensibility of a Housos episode to pull this off. It will be interesting to see what sort of a response his  film gets.

Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! ( Dazed and Confused 2) opened the next week and doesn’t really require comment. It kicks off  like a slicker 1980 edition of Porkies, complete with gross out banter among the arriving college baseballers and a scene of girls mud wrestling.

 The film’s got an off putting mood of endless competition - “practice as you play” while the undercover scout may be painting the roof outside the fence. It also runs to technical
flourishes like the one take (?) gross out scene in the locker room or a nice split screen ‘phone call. Everything is a bit too shiny and clean.

However Linklater shows in the relationship between jock Blake Jenner and theater major Zoey Deutch, who he suspects may have taken a faked interest in him to put down the louder guys in the car. Nice common ground scenes in knowing the difference between Rod McKuen and Walt Whitman and being used to being the best at what they did in college, suddenly finding themselves surrounded by other people with that same experience. The film is genuinely likeable.

Anything from from Doris Dörrie is an event though her new film Grüße aus Fukushima /Greetings from Fukushima / Fukushima Mon Amour is not her best work. It repeats her attempt to come to terms with Japanese culture that we saw in Erleuchtung garantiert/ Enlightenment Guaranteed  and Cherry Blossoms but moves us into the new area for her, scary ghost movie, done in striking ‘Scope black & white.

After a disaster that leaves her trying to hang herself in her bridal gown, very blonde Rosalie Thomass leaves Germany for what proves to be a gig as clown entertainer in a hostel for aged refugees from the Fukushima melt down. Unlike her Japanese mentor’s plastic bag ballet, Thomass’ Hula Hoops exercise routine fails to engage the oldies. One gives her a demo and comments “Bullshit.”

Our heroine is about to give up when she’s recruited by another resident, Kaori Momoi (Memoirs of a Geisha, Sukiyaki Western Django), into driving her into the “safe” zone which has now been re-opened, though no one wants to be there. Turns out that the ex-geisha has repeatedly tried to move back into her old, derelict house. The hostel people are angry but Thomass does a U-Turn seeing her new mission as working with the Japanese woman on restoring her home.

There is complication in the form of the girl spirit of  Momoi’s former pupil who sheltered with her on the one leafless tree during the tidal way. Momoi’s blames Thomass for her grief attracting the spirits and puts salt on her shoulders to drive them off. They are like the ghosts in Kyoshi Kurosawa’s eerie Kishibe no tabi/ Journey to the Shore refusing to believe they are dead - why didn’t we score that one here? 

Turns out that there’s more to Momoi story than she’s letting on.

The spooks, done in stretch printed high contrast, are effective and the film carefully emphasises the striking imagery it places in the frame - the fields of black bags filled with contaminated soil, white compressing gates with arrows, the sash still hanging on the tree branch, Thomass’ dress dwarfing Momoi’s daughter when she holds it up to put it in the wash or the cat headed man. 

As always Dörrie manages to make her bumbling characters endearing (the saki drinking session with the bald priest is particularly nice) though here the veneer of charm over disturbing material is stretched thin in a couple of places.

Australian Dan Jackson’s In the Shadow of the Hill is a handsome documentary and effective special pleading. Following FIFA’s World cup and anticipating the Olympics “one stupid white man with a camera”, as he characterises himself,  is drawn into the affairs of  Rocinho the Rio hillside favella  in the process of a “pacification” program.   A local man last seen being taken away by the police becomes the subject of a campaign by his family, run despite police threats and parliamentary offers of protective custody.

The world wide “Where is Amarildo?” campaign finally unites the slum dwellers, the  media and the aware population in a massive demonstration in front of the parliament.“All Brazil is come together.” A police Captain and twelve of his associates go to jail.

While this is happening, a local artist stages his Via Sacre / Way of the cross street theatre piece despite being told that all available funding is going into the Sports Events, and a dispossessed healer with cancer makes herself over into Miss Passionfruit, a recognised public entertainment figure dragging herself out of poverty.

Interviews include Amarildo de Souza’s family and civil rights lawyer Jao Tancredo who are seen facing off the police. Jackson manages to include a shot of a dog walking over a “Where Is Amarildo” poster, an actual fire fight, one distant view of Christ the Redeemer on his hill and a single night time glompse of  advancing black beret BOPE troops, the only police force which carries no handcuffs.

Put this to gether with José Padilha’s alternate view Tropa de Elite movies, which are briefly excerpted, and you still only get an incomplete account of the favellas but it’s enough to leave you profoundly disturbed.

The event’s most hyped film was Xavier Dolan’s Juste la fin du monde / It's Only the End of the World based on a play by one Jean Luc Legrace previously filmed in 2010.

This kicks off in a plane taking Gaspard Ulliel to the family he hasn’t seen for twelve years. Arriving by cab he is immediately assailed by complaints that he should have had them drive him and manages to get into close over the shoulder two shot dialogue with each member of the family in turn - sister in Law Marion Cotillard, mother Natalie Baye in a red wig, sister Léa Sedoux and resentful tool maker brother Vincent Cassel. It would be hard to make a bad film with this cast but Dolan gives it a go.

There’s muted colour, some Goddard (Jean Luc not Paulette) style driving with thecamera in the back seat behind the silhouettes of the brothers, a misleading flashback, a ‘phone call that sets up the disturbing information that the family don’t have and a bird appears to fly out of the cuckoo clock. The most exciting thing to happen is serving desert.

I found myself dozing, which meant I missed a key plot point.

Dolan is agro about the bad notices his cast have received and with him getting the Cannes Grand Prix you’ve got to wonder what came in second.

Hispanic film is always the major tradition we know the least about.  Salvador del Solar’s Magallanes is remarkably assured for a first film. This one kicks off  with chauffeur lead Damián Alcázar driving wheelchair bound Colonel (the great) Fedderico Luppi and, with his “Taxi” sign stuck back on the windshield, picking up Magaly Solier (Blackthorn) taking her to what proves to be a product rally for a something called U-Life where, like a hot gospel preacher, the MC flogs the cosmetics line she can’t sell in her beauty salon. We’re just getting interested in this when it turns out to be a misleading digression.

In his rat hole cellar home, Alcázar has a sketch of the girl and a photo of her with a younger Luppi. This triggers an intriguing low tech. scam which evokes sequences by Kurosawa (Tengoku to jigoku / High and the Low) and Brian de Palma (Body Double). The most audacious set piece however, even if it doesn’t fully succeed, is Solier giving Alcázar a haircut and shave. His schemes unravel with rejection and violence leaving him increasingly isolated.

The ugly portrait of seedy Lima in its growing prosperity, after a period of Shining Path terror and ferocious military reaction, is effective but the movie’s strongest moments are it’s shots of the characters’ faces. Alcázar, Solier and the support are exceptional but it’s aged Luppi who dominates each of his brief scenes, projecting unquestioned authority run to seed. The cut to him with a chock ice is beautiful. The progress of the yellow envelope of in the final reels is also great story telling.

Remarkably articulate on film and in person, Del Solar’s proposes art as the way to address the area’s violent past rather than polemics or the courts. He uses talents from across the “Ibero American Industries" is an attempt to reach a wider public.

Intriguingly the film has the same conclusion as John Lvoff’s also remarkable and under screened 2001 L'homme des foules - the secret policeman denied punishment. It would be interesting to know if  del Solar was aware of the precedent.

Mahana proved to be New Zealander Lee Tamahori’s best movie - to date - and his most memorable effort since Once Were Warriors launched him and its star Temuera Morrison as internationally recognised  personalities.

We’re soon into the vintage car race between the Mahana and the Poata Maori families. There’s tension between Morrison and grand son Akuhata Keefe, who was fourteen when he was cast in the part. Morrison has him slopping out the barn at the house rather than going out with the older members shearing distant farms.

The kid is at “that damn Pakhea school” where he’s memorised George Bernard Shaw’s “A family is a tyranny dominated by it’s weakest member” as well as a suitable John Wayne quote and he speaks out against the severity of the justice system, instead of thanking the judge, on the class excursion to the courts where no Maori is spoken. White settlement gets a mixed report card in this film but it’s not the subject. This one is about holding families together in the face of the change that new culture, the impending shift to cities will bring.  Morrison is the man who kept his own from fringe life and digging
roads, giving him an ambivalence like the one Jake the Muss had.

The climax comes when the boy defies him and his father defends the kid against the old man’s brutality. His family are banished but grandma gives them her run down house and land (communing with digital bees there). After an impressive storm rips the sheet iron off the roof and his dad is injured young Keefe takes charge, getting shearing work and entering the Golden Shears competition against his own and the rival clan - another set piece. It would be interesting to know if Tamahouri taught his actors to shear or found shearers to act.

These characters were watching The 3:10 To Yuma and Flaming Star the same time that I was, which has a personal relevance to go with all the unfamiliar material. The flying wedge formation making their menacing haka like entrance to the Tungee funeral at the community hall (which contrasts with the white man’s church) is particularly disorienting.

Mahana Temuera Morrison

Mahana has an exploratory feel like The Learning Tree, where Gordon Parkes became the first black American to direct a Hollywood movie. It is not without self consciousness and the occasional irritation (why don’t they clear the cobwebs before they hang curtains at the rundown house) but his is a great looking film and it is saying something about families that has a whole lot more conviction than Juste la  fin du monde.

In there with Michael Moore and Ken Burns, Barbara Kopple has entered the Brahmin cast of the documentary world with her two Oscars, (Harlan County USA & Wild man Blues) and thirty productions behind her. She got two films into the current even.

Miss Sharon Jones covers a performer called a female James Brown who was told she was “too fat, too black, too short and too ugly” to be a singing star, but managed to run up a three decade headliner career.

We start of  with Jones holding a handful of her own hair as her head is shaved in preparation for the treatment that may save her life from pancreatic cancer with the question of her recovery for the demanding world tour that has been booked for the following February looming. “I’m responsible for everybody’s pay roll.” 

Intercut with performance and interview footage, we see her receiving chemotherapy and home care. The film weaves back through her life, starting in a district where the store had a parrot trained to scream “nigger stealer” when a black customer came in. After entry level jobs (including a run as prison guard) she managed to work up star status. She gets a float in Macy’s parade and her dream of dancing on the show with Ellen is realised (with minimal coverage.)

The people around her seem devoted and there is no hint of resentment when one of her musicians gets a regular spot in the Jimmy Fallon Show’s band. Jones performance energy is extraordinary.

A handsomely mounted film, to a soul music fan this one would be a treat.

Also on show is Kopple’s three year filmed coverage of Nation Magazine Hot Type, which has been stating the anti establishment case in the US since 1865, a subject with a built in following among her potential audience. Foreground are the magazine’s current editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, and her predecessor and mentor Hamilton Fish.  Heuvel describes her experience of guidance from Fish as Talmudic ”You’d leave the office more confused than when you went in.”

The film emphasises the internship program (apparently everyone there started as an intern) and shows them following the advise that they were given about not having a professor write about Venezuela instead of sending a reporter to Venezuela, showing their journalist (and Kopple’s crew) on the ground in Haiti, (three hundred thousand still homeless after the earthquake) Wisconsin and North Carolina where the Civil Rights campaign is struggling to hold the ground won in the sixties - protesters with duct tape over their mouths.

This comes with a historical sketch showing that the magazine began as the voice of the
Republican party speaking for the dispossessed after the civil war, shifting to it’s present
stance in WW1 and getting up steam about “(Senator) McCarthy’s disloyalty to the
truth.”

As revealing as their treatment of the Big Issues, are marginal touches like the complaint that editorial passed copy with the question mark, that should have been inside the quotation marks, outside them or the writer who wants to do Breaking Bad saying cultural criticism is  relevant too.

The film is amusing and holds attention. The craft aspects, cutting, recording, graphics and  narration by Susan Sarandon and Sam Waterston impress. It makes it’s subjects seem smart and appealing. You’ve got to feel recruited when you see one of their ten year olds leading protest chants on a bull horn. They double this up by closing with the clip of vanden Heuvel leaving the normally super articulate John Stewart at loss for words when she lists the shifts in attitudes the magazine has seen.

As much as her skill as a film maker, you’ve got to admire Kopple’s ability to get her work out to an audience.

Also a first film Mul-go-gi / A Fish  comes from Hong-min Park it’s Korean director who spent a year preparing, absorbing the atmosphere of the location.

It’s a mistake to try and construct a plot out of the non consecutive glimpses of a Professor whose wife has left him and a private detective claiming to have located her as a Shaman, intercut with two fishermen in a fog bound studio row boat having a  Beckett like conversation about the stupidity of fish. When that pair decide to sashimi the catch, it chants in protest and the characters all get to meet in a shack where the reflections in the mirror are wrong. Throw in a bit of Cocteau (the character looking over the side for the one who isn’t in his boat anymore) and some Buddhist ritual.

Well, weird can be all right and there are a few moments and images that do intrigue in this one but not enough to reward viewing at length. The 3D photography makes the textures of  waves & straw matting striking and achieves the floating image quality we don’t get much now, making it the film’s major feature. 

The Indian Raman Raghav 2.0 / Psycho Raman is a grim mash up of Crime & Punishment and le
Juge et l'assassin in greenish, grainy colour from the director of Gangs of Wasseypur .

Nawazuddin Siddiqui is doing it tough, eating garbage and having nowhere to stay so he retrieves a bent iron bar and moves on his sister who has escaped his advances and started a family - which he promptly offs. The (fuzzy) image of him running in his bike helmet dragging the pipe along the floor is genuinely disturbing.

Detective Vicky Kaushal recognises his photo as the man who used to hang round the police station confessing (“I am God’s own CCTV camera”) to his previous murder and not believed. His associates fail to trap the fugitive in the back alleys when he kills a police informer, and hides under the surface of a fetid pool emerging covered in muck.

Kaushal proves to have problems of his own getting dope from the Nigerian whose side kick he doesn’t hesitate to blow away and treating his attractive socialite mistress badly.

Siddiqui offs the Dhulipala’s maid, getting her house key, and when Kaushal brings a girl he picked up at a festival to her flat, the cop ends up killing the mistress observed by his quarry who permits himself to be brought in and explains that they are now in a symbiotic relationship determined by the Death God and the only thing which can prevent him taking the blame for the cop’s killing is the testimony of the festival girl. Ends with Kaushal at the witness’ door.

It’s really too nasty to be entertaining and too ritualised to be convincing but it does have atmosphere and menace. The division between the poor who sleep out of doors and the well off with cars and well furnished homes is obvious.

Benoît Delépine &  Gustave Kervern (Aaltra, Mammuth) are among the best we have now. They have become the heirs to Marco Ferreri and Bertrand Blier, doing their great balancing act between art movie and Grands Boulevards big picture.

The pair’s Saint Amour has an univolving start with farmer Gerard Depardieu grooming his giant cow while son Benoît Poelvoorde goes drinking round the regional wine pavilions at the agricultural show. He alarms Picardie region hostess Marthe Guérin Caufman, who he failed to pick up the year before, and ends up sleeping in the straw with penned pigs. 

It’s fascinating to watch Depardieu and Poelvoorde meshing, - stars from different generations and traditions. Father and son soon pile drunk into the taxi driven by  stroppy Vincent Lacoste and start out on a two thousand Euro cab fare tour of the real French countryside route that is till now only represented by wine bottle labels stuck on their map. This sets up sets up misleading comparison with the agreeable local Paul Hogan - Shane Jacobsen Charley and Boots and a few more. However it’s not long before the film escapes into the funny-quirky zone where we find Delépine-Kervern

The first clue is that Lacoste reproaching Depardieu for his raucous snoring in the hotel room proves unjustified when they go into the next door garage and find a complete family in sleeping bags. Benoît enters the W.C. where his recently widowed dad is making an intimate phone call from one of the stalls and the film’s cell ‘phone becomes one of  its best inventions.

Their travels get to involve Benoit getting picked up as “Mr. Misery” by a car full of green wig drunken merry-makers and waking in drag. Lacoste detours to find old flames disastrously. He has the travelers confidently charge a hotel breakfast to a random hotel room number and as they tuck into the lush buffet, the aged diner at the next table (Andréa Ferréol no less, confirming the Ferreri connection) rumbles them. It’s her room number they picked.

That works out OK for Gerard with the driver commenting “I though it was only in movies that old guys got laid.” Benoit gets action too with the well built Ovidie, the Real Estate saleslady he’s trying to scam and he performss the 12 stages of drunkeness montage. When they ask directions from red head Céline Sallette on horseback, she heads them into the tree top cabins park where they have to break the eggs for her omlette before she confides she needs the help of all of them.

Sallette riding past the Tour Eiffel is a great image and the farm work ending is a warmer variation on what we expected from Blier at his peak.

Danis Tanovic comes from the heart of Film Festival / Ethnic broadcaster land and represents a kind of film that is losing ground to Saturday Night Fever and Apocalypse Now on SBS. Why the tax payer should fund showing Saturday Night Fever and Apocalypse Now, when Insurance Companies and the Fresh Food People are only too willing to bank roll them on the commercials, is doubtful. After the fate of Channel 44, SBS must feel the need to demonstrate their importance with viewer numbers.
Tanovic's new Smrt u Sarajevu /Death in Sarajevo is from the Boznia-Hertzogovenia film
industry with which, on the other hand, we can't claim an over familiarity.

The action kicks off with trim concierge Snezana Vidovic making her way, accompanied
by the snaking Stedicam, through the corridors of manager Izudin Bajrovic’s failing
Serajevo luxury hotel. It becomes the major character. 

An E.U.congress is scheduled and their inspector is rejecting the clapped out Olympic cutlery that V.I.P.s, including Bill Clinton, used in better days. No one, including the manager has been paid for three months, and the staff are going on strike. The children’s chorus of welcome is practicing in the lounge and has to be fed cheese sandwiches while visiting French V.I.P. Jacques Webber is rehearsing his speech watched on the CCTV cam, that shouldn’t be there, by the security guy who does lines of coke off the cell ‘phone he uses to argue with his wife about buying a new couch.

Meanwhile on the roof, a TV reporter is doing  interviews for her program on Balkan history (the real life authority even gets a name caption on screen). Her next subject is Hadzovic, an agro descendant of the Arch Duke’s assassin. The discussion becomes heated to the point where she leaves her assistant to continue the recording and gets into an on-going rant with that “Chetnic Assassin” finally reaching to the stage where they seem likely to get it on.

Everything of course goes pear shaped

The dispiriting recounting of Balkan history they jam in is the most interesting element. The personal stories aren’t bad but the everybody fails ending is antic climactic and a downer.

Performances are strong and the muted greenish colour gets by. Nice to see authoritative Webber (the Depardieu Cyrano) getting top billing.

Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann  is too long and not clever enough. It’s mainly a star turn for Sandra Hüller who commands on camera, sings and gets naked.

We kick off with grey haired  Peter Simonischek joking with the German postman about mail bombs and leading his blind dog around. He goes off to visit his daughter Hüller, who is with a firm consulting on outsourcing in Romania and she fits him in around her day, taking him to the American Embassy reception where he passes himself off as a diplomat.

They have a fight and she watches him take a cab to the airport.

However at the hens’ night with her friends, where she says dismissively that his visit was because his old dog died in earshot, he turns up in a shaggy wig with false teeth and goes about with fake business cards presenting himself  in various identities to her embarrassment.

Her affair with a colleague and the meeting with the clients are all going badly. The Naples job she was promised is postponed again and she gets stuck with organising a gathering for their Romanian associates.

Back at her apartment preparations are in hand for the reception and she (for no particular reason) answers the door bare assed and tells everyone that it’s a Naked Reception sending her woman friend off hostile and her boss out to get a stiff drink before he participates. Only the well built young secretary gets with the program. At this point dad shows up in the eight foot fur man suit the Romanian family they visited had. When he goes, Hüller in a wrap follows and embraces him, leaving the Romanian guests to face the unclothed associates.

Film making is routine. Without Fraulein Hüller, the film would be super bland. The business manoeuvring and family relations are under documented. It’s the raunchy material that gets this one the attention.

The Sydney Film Festival used to be the high light of the year. Now it's hard slog. Maybe the only reason it's still about is that it turned into big business while all those now vanished enthusiast activities stayed fun. Sobering thought.

REDISCOVERING SAM WOOD.

Natalie Kalmus and Sam Wood examine the Technicolor camera.

 

 

 

If you started serious movie going in the last years of re-issue cinemas and the first years of  Australian TV, director Sam Wood was inescapable - Night at the Opera, Goodbye Mr. Chips, Gone With the Wind, Our Town, Kings Row, The Devil and Miss Jones, Kitty Foyle, For Whom the Bell Tolls - he seemed to be the major source of quality film on offer. When I began dealing with movie literature, I was amazed that his name wasn’t on every other page. It was a long time till I found out why.

Wood had been Hollywood’s leading anti Communist and widely detested over it. That situation is re-visited briefly in the new Trumbo movie. Knowing this gives an emphasis to details in his films that wouldn’t register in other directors’ work - Robert Armstrong cautioning the police “This ain’t Russia” in Paid or the contrast between diner jacketed G-Men and proletarian hoodlums in False Faces.

It had two consequences. No one was game to admire Wood’s work and no one went looking for the missing films, which dated back as far as 1920. No archive restorations here or Cinematheque seasons, like the ones that honored John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock or Raoul Walsh. As collateral damage, his associate, designer William Cameron Menzies, seemed to have vanished along with Wood.

Late night TV did occasionally offer us an accidental glimpse of his 1930s MGM house style films and pretty ordinary they proved to be too - Lord Jeff, Navy Blue and Gold, the Gladys George Madam X included. Not that there was anything unprofessional about the handling but most prestige directors would have refused those lemons. Determined salaryman Wood just made lemonade.

Wood’s silents and early sound films remained a void in everyone’s knowledge. Eighty years after they first hit the screen however, early Sam Wood movies are bubbling up to the surface. National collections, bootleggers and the Warner Archive are coming to the party.

You can now find a murky copy of his second film, the 1920 Wallace Reid movie Excuse My Dust centering on the LA to Frisco road race and having possibly the first fiction movie aerial shot included in the coverage. That’s quite enjoyable as is 1921’s Peck's Bad Boy, resurfacing after its years as a rare Kodascope sixteen millimeter silent,  still a polished and engaging vehicle for Jackie Coogan, following his success as Chaplin’s The Kid. More notable, in Milestone’s nicely restored copy, is Beyond the Rocks of 1922. Rudolph Valentino and regular Wood leading lady Gloria Swanson were made to share star billing as a disciplinary measure, which backfired when they got along a treat and would go off and play tennis together after the day’s shooting. The Eleanor (“Three Weeks”, “It”) Glynn original novel and some early process photography inserting the leads in post card scenics don’t help but it’s nice to see the pair at work, even if she is far more at ease doing comedy romance than Rudy. 

Beyond the Rocks: performer, set musician, Wood, Swanson, Valentino & Glynn.

Slim pickings for a near thirty silent movie career.

Like most of the upper echelon Hollywood directors, Wood didn’t make the transition to sound easily. Europeans had the precedents of the American talkies to learn from and didn’t plow under anything like the amount of  awkward or misjudged productions when they got into the act. Delmer Daves, who worked on the scripts of several of Wood’s films, was there the day Wood became infuriated when the sound man told him he couldn’t have the performers continue speaking while starting a car and ordered them to climb in and drive off, getting a few words before the car pulled the microphone cable out of the wall. Wood’s first sound films are  interesting as much for the screw ups as for the things he got right.

Hard to tell the order in which his talkies were shot, some possibly being held back to soften the impact of their failings on their stars’ careers. Most likely the dreadful Way for a Sailor came first, though it’s dated 1930. Ambitious enough, with back lot Asia and whore littered London docks, process photography, fire scenes and mechanical zooms, it is defeated by technical limitations, as where only the close ups in the sea shore dialogue between John Gilbert and Leila Hyams are in synch., the mike not being able to get close enough to them to record dialogue in the long shots which had to be added unsynchronised. Gilbert must have been a fast learner because his performance is dreadful here and assured in the sound films which followed. He has no chemistry with Hyams and Wally Beery is confined to dumb ass comedy.

So This Is College is dated 1929 probably correctly. It has curious features like opening scenes with the screen empty of action and the thumping of feet as the performers run in  or rough matching on the football actuality and new shooting. One of Wood’s college movies (1932’s Huddle with Ramon Navarro is better), it features young Robert Montgomery and Elliot Nugent (director to be on remakes - the Bob Hope Cat & the Canary and the Allan Ladd Great Gatsby and the stage & screen versions of his own college story, the winning The Male Animal from the play he wrote with James Thurber). Set at a scary USC, the big game gets far more footage than any class room. Comedian Max Davidson is a Jewish tailor they delight in swindling and a young Joel McCrea gets the girl. Script is by Del Daves and Nugent.

Probably Sam Wood’s second sound film, It's A Great Life, billed as "all talking", opens misleadingly with a lively comic chase in the silent manner, the film's only exteriors. It stars the winningly awful sister act The Duncans, then peaking on the success of their teeth grating Topsy and Eva act. They dream of Playing the Palace but are working in Mandlebaum’s giant emporium, where show business is represented by a store show put on by Laurence Gray, head of  sheet music. The show is a two strip colour inset shambles.

The Duncan Sisters - It's a Great Life

The girls do get to their pleasant enough hit “I’m Following You” which is plugged through the film relentlessly and resolve to go on Big Time Vaudeville, getting as far as Brooklyn. “It’s just across the bridge from Broadway.”  When Vivian marries Gray who the strident Rosetta detests. The sisters split and the act that Vivienne does with her now husband is paid off before the end of the run. (“I never heard so much silence in my life”) Here the film goes maudlin. Vivian gets pneumonia motivating the second two colour section big stage climax “the Hoosier Hop” before a slightly weird finale with dancers sliding on slippery dips past the girls on a cloud.

Numbers like “Rainbow Round My Shoulder” play in the background track without getting a performance. Benny Rubin shows up late and doesn’t have much to do, not even a song. Un-billed Ben Blue as a stage hand has nearly as much prominence. Wood gets his camera onto the stage among Sammy Lee’s dancers and seems to be shooting the dramatic material the same way as the numbers, from a stalls position and cutting in closer angles instead of close up - medium shot. The pacing is quite fair until the soggy end. It’s a drab looking film. Designer Gibbons hasn’t entered his all white phase.

Things pick up with They Learned About Women (1930) the first version of the Gene Kelly Take Me Out to the Ball Game which used mainly the conflicting baseball and vaudeville careers element of the plot. Top billed variety duo Schenk & Van are quite presentable as the buddy Blue Socks team members. Van is engaged to bubbly Bessie Love at her ukulele playing zenith but he is fooling around with eighteen carat gold digger Ann Doran, so Schenk steps in at the cost of his own career. The story is passable and there is some interesting uses of sound (jazz under the Metro lion, the sports commentator on the silent movie style title etc.) The piece is uneven, having been begun by Jack Conway. They Learned About Women was never shown to the press and bombed at the box office. The lead duo made only this one film. 

William Haines & Leila Hyams

 At this stage William Haines’ brassy leading man was the biggest earner in movies - incredibly. Acceptable as a fresh faced juvenile, he was plausible in silents by King Vidor, James Cruze, Victor Seastrom and Wood himself  but when you add his voice doing “Sez you!” dialogue the character was grating. Wood’s film The Girl Said No turns Haines, the small town’s cut up, into George Amberson Minifer as, at the calamity of  his father’s death, he is reduced to clocking on with his packed lunch at the local factory to support his family and trim blonde Leila Hyams is drawn to his new humility.

Given false hope of a new career in a stock broker’s office, Haines is sabotaged by rival Ralph Bushman (son of Francis X) with an assignment to flog the Denver City Bonds she has already rejected to mean plutocrat Marie Dressler. Her one scene, coming late in the picture, anchors the piece, with Wood impressively making human and appealing the two grotesquely unsympathetic star personalities. That leaves a slapstick ending anticipating It Happened One Night. Hyams warming to Haines is surprisingly plausible and when he snaps back into his bullying persona it comes as a shock, followed by the winning revelation that this was a trick.

Seeing Wood handling the ham fisted Haines in physical comedy here (the pursuing dog, auto and improvised kilt scenes) leaves you wondering what would have happened if Metro had paired the director with Buster Keaton, a comic who was genuinely funny and inventive. That was not to be, with Keaton having his own people manage his then flagging sound career. Wood worked with Haines in another two films.

Paid (1930) is entirely different. Promising start with a close up of the court docket opening out to fill the screen with the sentencing of shop girl Joan Crawford falsely accused of stealing from her slave wage employer Purnell B. Pratt, with the attorneys, Crawford and her accuser arguing over one another. Compare this with the gives-up opening of Metro’s 1929 The Voice of the City where Willard Mack just shows a guard listen outside the court room we never see.

Paid: Montgomery & Crawford.

However hopes are rapidly dashed when the piece turns into a tedious transcription of  a play by Bayard (“The Trial of Mary Dugan”) Veiller previously filmed in 1917 with Alice Joyce. Having suffered indignities in the big house, like having to share showers barefoot with Louise Beavers, Joan comes out hard bitten and uses the criminal contacts of fellow prisoner Marie Prevost (so good in Lewis Milestone’s The Racket)  to wreak her revenge on Pratt by marrying his son Douglas Montgomery (the James Whale Waterloo Bridge, Way to the Stars). The support cast are carefully chosen not to overshadow Joan, who gets lots of soulful close ups. Mainly played in windowless interiors, this one is a long 81 minutes. Crawford and Wood never worked together again. 

 
Surprisingly a sentimental, assimilationist fable proved to be the peak of the cycle. Wood’s The Sins of the Children of 1930 is both innovative and touching. Broadway actor Louis Mann made only this one sound film and Wood appears to have tailored the production to him. Instead of breaking his scenes into a variety of angles, they are played in carefully planned, unedited wide shot which gives the performers the chance to move at will and talk over one another. They do this in the dialogue Mann plays with character comedian Henry Armetta. The abrupt close up of the bowl of porridge introduced into the family breakfast scene appears to be there to cover a transition.

Mann is about to put his earnings into a Savings and Loan business with neighbor Robert McQuade but has to use them to send his young son to a Sanatorium. Years later the boy is grown to be Bushman jr. who changes his German name for his career as a doctor. The film is full of people from Wood’s other films - Armetta, Elliot Nugent as the mechanical minded son, eternal mum Clara Blandick and particularly manicurist Ann Doran whose seated, one take monologue totally overshadows Leila Hyams, the daughter character with her remarkably delicately suggested pregnancy.  Robert Montgomery, as McQuade’s no good son, is responsible (compare “Hindle Wakes”) and the scene where he makes his life changing decision is played effectively with him in the background.

Louis Mann: Sins of the Children

In the best MGM manner the problems are resolved at a Xmas family gathering and the outcome is genuinely endearing. The excessive sentimentality and studio artificiality of the company’s out put have not yet choked the life out of it’s product. Much of what followed at Metro for Wood was mediocre with the odd hiccup like the particularly ripe Ramon Novarro The Barbarian but it’s agreeable that we can glimpse the major talent which would emerge. Spot the bridal party cascading into the boudoir in Girl Said No anticipating Night at the Opera’s cabin scene. That film's the wrong back cloth gag is anticipated in It's a Great Life - hauled up to show the pyramid of gymnasts we never see again or there's Mann ageing like Mr. Chippings. That’s as rewarding as the curiosity value and entertainment the films offer.

These early Sam Wood Productions do have a unity as they show the makers coming to terms with the new medium and Wood and his regulars meshing - from writer Charles MacArthur soon to form a tandem with Ben Hecht for “The Front Page” and their own films, master editor Frank Sullivan (Fury, Terror in a Texas Town) and Metro chief designer Cedric Gibbons, who is anything but unobtrusive, contributing the dark beamed Grove Cafe Night Club and Dressler’s Aztec themed study to The Girl Said No or John Miljan’s office with the blinds that lift to show the corridor action in Paid. - even walk-ons like Armetta and unbilled comedian veteran Herbert Prior, the mute General in Paid and victim diner in The Girl Said No.  Soon to drop out of his films, these are not the people that would accompany Wood in the years of his mature and acclaimed work, where Menzies, Hal Wallis, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman carry the load.

It seems unlikely that we’ll ever get the full length study of Wood’s imposing thirty plus
year career and this article is only a snapshot of one section of that. 

 

 

Barrie Pattison 2019