CAUGHT - CRITERION CHANNEL

This review originally written for DVDTalk.com in 2014.

Leonora Eames (Barbara Bel Geddes) is a beautiful girl who has moved to the big city to attend finishing school and get a job as an in-store model. Once there, she plans to meet a rich man and get married and leave the single life behind. This happens sooner than expected, and not entirely according to plan, when a creepy shopper invites her to a yacht party hosted by one Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan). It's his name that compels Leonora to go to the party, and it's him that she accidentally meets when he sneaks away from his own soiree to go take care of some business. They are married in short order, though Smith takes her hand more to prove a point than out of love. Leonora insists she has genuine affection for him, but that is soon strained.

This is the set up of Caught, an intense melodrama from Max Ophüls, the master filmmaker behind such nimbly effective literary-minded films as Lola Montes [review] and The Earrings of Madame de... [review]. Caught came at the tail-end of the German director's American period, right around the same time as Letter from an Unknown Woman and That Reckless Moment. It's a city-based picture, set in New York, adapting Victorian and gothic romance to moody film noir trends.

Leonora's story really gets into gear when she first gets the gumption to leave Smith and strike out on her own. She gets a job as a secretary in a doctor's office, working for an obstetrician and a pediatrician. As the one doc explains, his colleague is responsible for bringing them into this world, whereas he is responsible for making sure they survive it--which he doesn't always succeed at it. It's a practical approach, but Dr. Quinada (James Mason) is a practical man. His inability to tolerate frivolity causes him and Leonora to chafe at first, but as she settles into her position, he becomes used to the idea of her, and they fall in love.

Yet, she's still a married woman, a secret she has kept to herself, and added complications mean it would be difficult for them to get together, even if Quinada did know the truth. Smith Ohlrig doesn't let go of his trophies that easily.

The dynamic in this love triangle hearkens back to the Brontë's. The good doctor is definitely a Mr. Darcy-type, prickly on the outside, but good at heart. His focus is on his work and on the good he can do, and his loosening up requires some humbling. Mason is spectacular, smoothly moving from being conceited and bullying into sensitive and earnest. His best scenes offer him both a chance at comedy and forceful drama. In the latter case, it's when he and Robert Ryan's character finally meet. It's a mental standoff, with both men standing on the opposite side of a bar, sizing each other up and taking each other down with words. Ryan has a rather indomitable presence when he's playing a bad guy, and there's some pretty sinister stuff going on here. Ohlrig is a vain abuser, but the actor keeps him from somehow being too over-the-top, letting hidden weaknesses provide nuance.

I suppose it says something about Barbara Bel Geddes, then, that Mason's moment of comedy is on his one date with Leonora, and not between him and his lady love. There's an amusing bit of business as a drunken woman continually interrupts their conversation. It works for the story, as it shows how Quinada can't be distracted from what he wants; it works for the movie because it provides a bit of relief from Bel Geddes' milquetoast performance. She's the weak link in her own starring vehicle.

Not that it matters much. Ophüls crafts a temperamental narrative, where the road to hell is a two-lane highway: good intentions on one side, selfish impulse on the other. Since the film was released in 1949, it shouldn't be a shock that most everyone gets what they deserve, though Caught avoids being too much of a fairy tale by delivering what is perhaps the most cynical of hopeful endings you're likely to find in cinema.

LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN - #1020

“Of all the seven deadly sins, jealousy is the most deadly.”

It’s ironic, I suppose, that I became positively obsessed with Gene Tierney the first time I saw Leave Her To Heaven. I tracked down every film I could at the time, which meant following a lot of the Fox reissue series from the DVD era. It was a good mini label, often using A&E and AMC programming as extras, and they numbered the spines. Someone was paying attention to the Criterion obsessives.

Why I say it’s ironic is because Tierney’s character Ellen is obsession personified. Driven by jealousy, she fixates on her husband, determined to share him with no one else. Not his brother, nor her sister, nor eventually even their own child. Ellen is so alluring and so attentive, he’s blind to it far longer than he should be, ignoring all warnings. And, of course, as a film fan, I was glued to her every move.

Leave Her To Heaven is considered a hybrid of film noir and the “women’s picture,” as perhaps best personified by Douglas Sirk. Like many classic movies, I sought out Leave Her To Heaven  based on a Martin Scorsese recommendation. My purism rejected the notion of a Technicolor noir, but resistance was futile. I ultimately had to see it and sample this cinematic Reese’s peanut butter cup. You got my noir in your melodrama!

When it comes down to it, though, Leave Her To Heaven has few noir trappings. It’s set in a rural domain, it’s mostly in sunlight, and it’s far more romantic than fatalist. It’s actually more of an upending of the “bad husband gaslighting his wife” movies, like Fritz Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door [review], Max Ophuls’ Caught [review], or Sirk’s own Sleep, My Love [review]. Director John M. Stahl--working from a screenplay by Jo Swerling, adapting a novel by Ben Ames--instead has the wife slowly undermining her husband’s faith in himself, ironically chipping away at his love rather than securing her position as the only thing in his life. (Fun aside: Stahl directed versions of both Imitation of Life and Magnificent Obsession before Sirk’s more famous remakes [review of both versions of Magnificent Obsession].)

Cornel Wilde plays the husband, novelist Richard Harland. Criterion viewers will know him for The Naked Prey [review], his triumphant directorial/starring vehicle, but he doesn’t fare as well here. He’s a bit of a weak link, failing to be charming or seductive. Honesty, his rap is so bad, down to quoting his own book, I have cause to wonder if Ellen picks Richard because he’s a bit dim and thus easily manipulated. Likewise, most of the supporting cast is fairly mediocre, giving more room for Tierney to control the frame. Her only competition is from her Dragonwyck co-star Vincent Price, who here plays her jilted lover, but who really gets to shine as the district attorney in the courtroom scenes that occupy Leave Her to Heaven’s final act. Price manages to distinguish himself because his character is the only one as driven as Ellen. His passion in front of a jury is blazing.

But then, he also doesn’t have to compete directly with Tierney. It also helps that he’s hot in ways that she’s cool, creating a balance between them. Tierney’s take on Ellen is sculpted out of ice and steel. The key to her villainy--and, arguably, to her sexiness--is how together she is. It’s not just that Ellen would never have a hair out of place, but that she rarely has an emotion out of place. She might seethe when she sees some competition for Richard’s affection, but the wheels immediately start turning on how to get the advantage back. Her best moment is that iconic scene on the lake, the one that is highlighted on the Criterion Leave Her to Heaven cover. In that segment, we see her coldly seize an opportunity and then course correct in order to cover her tracks when it appears she might get caught.

Leave Her to Heaven was shot by Leon Shamroy, the cinematographer of Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra, but it’s worth noting that there is also a Technicolor director, Natalie Kalmus. The colors here are phenomenal. Tierney in particular stands out for her gorgeous clothes, like the baby blue swimsuit and nightgown that she wears for a couple of her worst deeds--a color that the internet tells me should resemble “trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, intelligence, faith, truth, and heaven.” I doubt this is a choice that was made without consideration. All of Leave Her to Heaven has an almost unreal pastel look to it, arguably Stahl’s replacement for the shadowy confines of noir. In his world, evil is bright and pink and has shiny red lips.

This disc provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

L'ARGENT - #886

There was an “everything is connected” subgenre in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s that was perhaps kicked off by Richard Linklater’s Slacker, but that really traces roots back to Max Ophuls and La ronde [review]--films where characters are connected by social happenstance (13Conversations About One Thing) or perhaps an object (Robert Altman’s Gun TV series). One chat leads to another, one careless act affects a passerby, a butterfly flaps its wings and a writer looks for meaning.

Linklater is a devotee of Robert Bresson, and it would stand to reason that Bresson’s 1983 crime drama L’argent was an inspiration. Based on a story by Tolstoy, L’argent tells the tale of several lives thrown into upheaval by two selfish teenagers choosing to pass a counterfeit bill at a small camera and photo shop. When the storeowners decide to unload it, along with other fraudulent notes, on a trusting deliveryman, they not only expose their own unscrupulousness, but force the driver into a legal wrangle he can’t get himself out of.

This man, Lucien (Vincent Risterucci), is the closest we get to a main character--or at least he's the one we root for, if only temporarily. His life is the most damaged by the initial crime and the several more it inspires. His plight is transformative. He is the good man forced to be bad. It's a gradual change, one that seems natural, despite of--or perhaps because of--Bresson’s technique. The French director is famous for extracting emotion from performance and approaching his actors as poseable “models.” His cast blandly hits marks, delivers its lines with little intonation, and maintains a steady gaze. To some, it's stiff and amateurish, but once you tune in to Bresson’s wavelength, his narrative theories begin to make sense. You just have to lock them in place.

It's almost like kabuki in its formalism. By staging L’argent with such a rigorous dispassion, we are spared the melodrama, we are spared being swayed by our own feelings, and instead we watch the pieces move, staying in the moment rather than trying to guess the plot twists, reserving judgment until it has all passed, the audience serving as an observant jury. We don't judge Lucien, we don’t put ourselves in his shoes, we instead just watch. In fact, when he does show some real emotion, it's such an affront, Bresson has him bury his head in a pillow. Open weeping is for other movies.

Which isn’t to say we aren't invested. We totally are. The sheer cruelty of humanity underlying every callous turn is undeniable, it's just that we follow the events as we would a true crime story rather than a fiction, as if they already happened and are thus beyond inevitable. We can't help but feel for Lucien, but perhaps it makes us less sympathetic when he makes wrong turns. L’argent does not romanticize his crimes.

Ironic, then, that showing the crimes themselves is the only place where Bresson’s theories fail him. While the mechanics of the violence are evident, the abstraction renders them ineffective and even confusing. Is it that showing the actual blood and gore as evidence would bias us more than the director would like, or is he just squeamish? If we are the jury, we would need to consider the victims--even after some of them are declared unlikable--otherwise the testimony is incomplete. Lucien’s actions already seem outsized, and Bresson’s editing—chopping up the scenes, showing the beginning of the action and an implied outcome (jumping from a raised weapon to blood splatter, etc.) but never the in between, proves only to make them less believable.

Luckily, this does nothing to lessen the tragic poetry of L’argent. Particularly as the truly bad people, unmoored as they are by the appearance of this fake cash, suffer very little consequence. Bresson carves out a world where heeding one’s conscience only leads to mistakes and punishment. The survivors mostly serve themselves, or feign charity for effect. Which, when you really think about it, means the themes of L’argent are perfectly in sync with the storytelling. Remove emotion, stick to what can be known--and done.

This disc provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

JULIEN DUVIVIER IN THE THIRTIES - ECLIPSE SERIES #44

There’s a different rhythm to early sound films. Though discussion always focuses on how many actors and actresses found it difficult transitioning from silent films to talkies, be it due to an unsuitable voice or a lack of proper vehicles, there was also a transition required of the people behind the cameras. The staging and pacing was different once dialogue was required. Indeed, even filming was different, because you had to accommodate for the actors having to say actual words out loud and capturing them on microphone.

So, just like with actors, only the most adaptable directors carried on and even flourished. John Ford in America, to name one example. Hitchcock in England. And Julien Duvivier in France.

The Eclipse set Julien Duvivier in the Thirties offers up four of the director’s first sound films, starting with DavidGolder, released in 1930 and made a full decade after Duvivier’s first silent film. Though neither as well-known nor as accomplished of the director’s most popular feature, Pepe le moko, David Golder--and indeed, all of the quartet here--shows a skilled artist eager to master his evolving craft. From the opening sequence of David Golder--a rapid-cut, impressionistic overview of the cultural, industrial, and economic situation in France at the 1920s--it’s clear Duvivier is ready to zoom into a new era.

David Golder was based on the novel of the moment, a dramatic tome by Irene Nemirovsky, who enjoyed a renaissance in recent years with her novel Suite Francaise. The David Golder of the title, played by regular Duvivier leading man Harry Baur (the Jean Valjean of Raymond Bernard’s Les Miserables [review]), is a free-market businessman about to get a lesson in the ups-and-downs inherent in capitalist bullishness. Our first exposure to the man is his relishing the ruin of a former partner who plotted against him and struck out on his own. When said partner commits suicide, Golder is unmoved. He insists the traitor should have reinvented himself, something Golder has had to do many times. Turn your loss into a win.

Karma comes around pretty fast, though, and Golder finds himself on shaky ground, and partially because of the very thing he tried to deny in business: a personal life. Golder’s wife (Paul Andral) is living a lavish existence on the Riviera, spending money alongside the couple’s spoiled daughter, Joyce (Jackie Monnier). As things unravel for Golder, he shows where his true loyalties lie. He’d rather let his wife sink if it means his daughter can swim. Unsurprisingly, Mrs. Golder is not going to go down so easy, not without pulling the rug out and dragging her husband with her.

David Golder touches on a lot of important issues, including class, privilege, and race. Despite his money, there are many who look down on Golder because he is Jewish. Baur plays the dour character with an appropriate heaviness. He is as self-isolating as he is self-made. As a father, he is exasperated and indulgent, and the sprightly blonde Monnier uses his own weight against him, both narratively and in terms of performance. She is as airy as he is grounded. The contrast tires us as much as it does Golder himself, meaning we are as exhausted as he is at the end, a strange feat of empathy on the part of Duvivier.

Though the camera stays relatively stable for the majority of Duvivier’s film, it never feels dull or static. Scenes are long and there are gaps in dialogue, the way there often was before directors learned how to fill all that space, but there is also a precision to what is chosen that suggests that Duvivier is already comfortable with conversation. Sure, more is said that in a silent film’s intertitles, but the lack of excess means no word--or moment--is wasted. 

By 1932, when Duvivier remade his own Poil deCarotte, any hesitancy about movies with sound had long since passed. One could argue there might have been an added confidence in fleshing out material he already knew so well, though my own memory of the silent version of Poil de Carotte is hazy at this point, so I can’t say definitively how much the later effort differs [my review of the 1925 version is here].

Poil de Carotte is based on a novel by Jules Renard. It stars Robert Lynen as “Carrottop,” the youngest of three children in the Lepic family. His nickname is for his red hair, given to him affectionately by his father (a returning Baur), but generally used derisively. The Lepics are dysfunctional on their best day. Madame Lepic (Catherine Fonteney) doesn’t much care for her third child, instead doting on her oldest boy Felix (Maxime Fromiot), a bully and a thief, and the self-absorbed middle child, the girl Ernestine (Simone Aubry). Monsieur Lepic means well, but he’s distracted, particularly once his campaign for mayor is underway.

This leaves Carrottop (real name: Francois) to his own devices, and the imaginative boy is plagued by ghostly visions and a suicidal impulse. Both are shown by Duvivier via inventive special effects, including one scene where two dream images of Carrottop debate his future over the boy’s sleeping body, the proverbial angle and devil sitting on his shoulder. The superimposed figures are simple, but effective. Duvivier is stretching himself throughout Poil de Carotte. Armand Thirard and Emile Monniot’s cameras have become more active observers, sometimes probing a scene, moving between the players, and following the action within the frame. (Thirard was also a cinematographer on David Golder). In a particularly important segment, Carrottop’s youthful desires turn to a jealous rage, and the filmmakers let the anger take over. As the child whips on his horses, driving his wagon faster and faster, they use overhead shots of passing trees to show speed, POV vantage points from the front of the wagon to demonstrate the child’s looming madness, and also a wide view from behind, showing us how wild Carrottop’s path has become.

The cutting is sharper here, too. Editor Marthe Poncin uses dialogue to weave in and out of scenes, ironically juxtaposing a line with the image that follows, or stitching two separate pieces of dialogue together to connect different events.

Of course, all the technical wizardry in the world wouldn’t save Poil de Carotte if the performances were bad, and Duvivier pulls a particularly impressive turn from his young star. Lynen is the essential component of the film, and his performance is full of humor and emotion. He is equally convincing joking around as despairing over what he perceives to be his inescapable fate. The climactic scenes of his final attempts to end his life are disturbing and raw, but perhaps more memorable is the tenderness that comes before, when he shares a sweet moment with his childhood romance (Colette Segall). It’s an exchange so honestly felt, it’s almost too bad the film didn’t end there, with the innocence of young love giving Carrottop courage to carry on, rather than the borderline mawkish reconciliation between father and son.

The following year, Duvivier would attack genre in the most impressive La tête d’un homme, adapting the work of Georges Simenon. On the surface, this is a fairly conventional procedural: a man (Gaston Jacquet) loudly grouses in a crowded bar that he’d pay handsomely for his rich aunt to be killed and an opportunistic eavesdropper takes him up on it. When the deed is done, Inspector Jules Maigret (Baur) has to figure out who did the deed. He suspects the nephew is involved, and that the dim delivery man (Alexandre Rignault, Eyes Without a Face) that they’ve apprehended is just a patsy. The real culprit is Radek (Valery Inkijinoff), a Czech immigrant with a terminal illness and sociopathic tendencies.

La tête d’un homme isn’t really a mystery, it’s a character study. Duvivier shows us all the pieces, and we are generally one step ahead of Maigret. The central question is what is motivating Radek. Is he just a bad dude or is there something else behind it? His character unpeels slowly, with Inkijinoff projecting a cold confidence that eventually devolves into a more unhinged pathology. His performance in the latter half of the film seems to be cribbed somewhat from Peter Lorre’s in M [review], but Inkijinoff doesn’t sell it nearly as well. He’s best when being charming and calculating.

Harry Baur is barely recognizable as the detective. He is calm and cool, the wheels constantly spinning in his brain, and relatively unflappable. It’s easy to see why Duvivier used him over and over. You hardly track that it’s the same man from picture to picture. He can do anything, and should be listed alongside Michel Simon and Jean Gabin as one of the unforgettable masters of early French cinema.

Duvivier’s structuring of Simenon’s crime fiction is elegant and effortless. Thirard and Poncin return on camera and editing duties, and clearly the crew has locked into a groove by this point. The eye is drawn through a scene carefully, Duvivier making sure we see the right clues. He also remains inventive, with one stand-out sequence illustrating both the drudgery of canvassing witnesses but also the speed to which one cop follows up on leads. In the scene, the officer remains in the same space within the frame, but the locale keeps changing. Duvivier placed his actor in front of a rear-projection screen and has him talking to actors via pre-recorded footage, effectively jumping from location to location but without ever cutting. At one point, he even has another actress walk on to give the cop an answer, as if she were on the other end of the shop from the person the cop is facing. For modern audiences, the effect is obvious, but that doesn’t make it any less clever. (And watch for the actress tossing a look directly at the camera as she walks back off. Oops.)

The final film in Julien Duvivier in the Thirties is perhaps the best. Released the same year as Pepe le moko, Un carnet de bal (or Dance Card) is a crafty ensemble piece reminiscent of Max Ophüls. It stars Marie Bell as Christine, a newly widowed woman in her late 30s whose present grief inspires her to look back at past loves. A dance card from a ball she attended at age 16 provides a road map, of sorts; she will visit each of her former dance partners and see how the intervening decades have treated them. Also, they will hopefully know the whereabouts of Gerard, the one who got away.

What Christine finds on her journey surprises her. Life takes funny turns in twenty years. The lawyer has become a crook (Fernandel), the artist is now a priest (Harry Baur). Some of the men have married, some have had children. Most have realized their dreams on some small scale of success, even if, in some cases, tragedy followed. Christine is ill prepared for these turns of event, and even less so for the one underlying theme in the tales of all her former suitors: their lives changed the night of the dance, the night she broke all of their hearts.

Thought never explicitly stated, what Duvivier’s script explores are the reverberations a small action can have. In this case, the casual offer of affection, and the subsequent withdrawal of the same. Christine is never presented as callous or mean, except perhaps by the mother who claims her son took his life when Christine rejected him; yet that mother is reacting with her own broken heart, and we have no reason not to believe Christine when she says the boy had never confessed his feelings. Or could that be Christine’s greatest sin? She was oblivious. Even now, her real goal isn’t really to catch up with these old beaus, but to find out something about herself, and the irony is that, despite how things turned out for them, the one-time suitors whom she hurt have lived richer lives than the one of sheltered wealth she chose instead.

Un carnet de bal flows smoothly from one episode to another. Duvivier plays most of it straight. Outside of some intriguing cross-fades, he never really calls attention to his technique, the craft has become invisible. In fact, the director inadvertently creates his own metaphor for his style. When Christine first starts to reminisce about the fateful night of her youth, the memory literally dances in, a slow superimposing of past over present. It’s beautiful and elegant, an enticing invitation to follow where the reverie will lead.

As an artist, Julien Duvivier has done the same. His inventions have intrigued, his constructions occasionally dazzled, even as he slowly erodes the evidence of each, immersing us in his narratives until we are so thoroughly involved, we forget all else.

These discs were provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

BELLE DE JOUR (Blu-Ray) - #593

Luis Buñuel's 1967 adaptation of the Joseph Kessel novel Belle de Jour may be tame by today's standards in terms of what we actually see on screen, but the icy tale of sexual peccadilloes and alternative pleasures still has a psychological resonance, bolstered by the director's casual acceptance of fantasy as a means for expression. It's one of Buñuel's best films, as well as one of the most ideal roles for its beautiful lead actress, Catherine Deneuve. The star of Repulsion [review] and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (and of more recent films like Apres Lui [review]) has often been criticized for her chilly demeanor, but a smart director like Buñuel can take what others see as faults and turn it into a performer's greatest strength.

Deneuve stars in the film as Séverine, a 23-year-old newlywed who, despite having been married to the handsome doctor Pierre (Jean Sorel) for a year, has not yet consummated her marriage. The couple sleeps in separate beds, like the marrieds of a 1950s sitcom, and Pierre's attempts to cross the transom between are met with dismissal. You'd think the dirty dreams Séverine is having would otherwise stimulate her underwhelming libido, but as we see, these fantasies all involve some kind of degradation or violence. One such dream is Belle de Jour's opening scene, and in it, an angry Pierre has Séverine whipped by coachmen before handing her over to one of them to do what he will. Even if Pierre knew about his wife's hidden desires, it's hard to imagine he could do anything about them, he's too upstanding a citizen. Then again, if he knew that all of her fantasies somehow referenced cats, he could maybe buy a few kitties for the apartment. You know, meet his wife halfway.

Unsurprisingly, it's a man whom Séverine despises that changes her erotic life. Husson (Michel Piccoli, Dillinger is Dead [review]) is dating Séverine's girlfriend (Macha Méril, Une femme Mariée [review]). He's a brash character, and he even puts the moves on Séverine. When another woman in their social circle is rumored to be working in a brothel, Husson tells Séverine where his favorite house of ill repute is located. Intrigued, Séverine goes there and signs up for work. She is nicknamed "Belle de Jour" because she has to leave by 5 in the afternoon so her husband doesn't realize something is up.

What follows is Séverine's measured acceptance of her new lifestyle. She resists her first client, but he wants her to assume control, and that's not her thing. Her actual first customer (and by some implication, her first sexual partner) is a Japanese man with some kind of bizarre device that buzzes like a bee. It's hidden in an ornate box, and for all the things that censorship standards wouldn't let us see in Belle de Jour, Buñuel scores by playing on our imagination. I am sure everyone watching has some ideas about what the man has brought with him--though, the other prostitute's refusal to go with him might erase any innocuous interpretations. Whatever it is, it liberates Séverine, and she soon accepts her new job in full, going so far as to fall for one of her regular customers, a young criminal with a golden grill. Marcel (Pierre Clémenti, The Leopard) is just the kind of uncaring bastard Séverine has been seeking. It's only natural, then, that when he starts to care--albeit in his own way--the whole arrangement starts to unspool, and Séverine's life unspools with it.

With Belle de Jour, Luis Buñuel has given us a glimpse into a seedy world, but by virtue of how he shows it to us, it doesn't seem seedy at all. Rather, once Séverine is inside, the landscape changes and this secret society becomes normal. Within the walls of the brothel, her passions are just as accepted as any other. It's only when the internal business goes outside, or someone from the outside comes crashing in--such as when Séverine's alter ego is discovered by Husson, who is played to sleazeball perfection by Piccoli, even down to the man's bruised ego--that any question of the morality of Séverine's sexual adventure is ever raised. The threat of exposure could undermine everything. (Though, it may be worth noting that the one perversion dismissed is anything having to do with underage girls; Buñuel rightly gauges his audience's comfort zone. Also, this lends weight to the brief flashbacks to his heroine's own childhood, when she was abused herself.)

Belle de Jour is less about sex, anyway, and more about the notion of double lives and the difficulties that come with not being able to express who we are. Deneuve is quite affecting as Séverine, a woman trapped by her own fear and the social mores that give them foundation. She is bottled up, and it shows in her demeanor, how she stands, where she casts her eyes. As the movie progresses, and particularly after her time with Marcel, the actress shows Séverine warming up, becoming happy, and becoming surer of herself. This makes it all the more sad and, honestly, scary when it threatens to all come crashing down.

And at the same time, strangely reassuring when, in the end, she gets exactly what she wants, even if not in any way she could have predicted. She has a life of servitude with a man who knows exactly who she is, and she is now free to roam the landscapes of her erotic fantasy world without ever leaving the comfort of her marriage home.

Criterion's 1080p Blu-Ray transfer is encoded with MPEG-4 AVC and presented at a 1.67:1 widescreen aspect ratio. The quality of the transfer is quite lovely, with a fine level of detail and well-rendered colors. Luis Buñuel and director of photography Sacha Vierny have created an aristocratic look for Belle de Jour, with softly rendered backgrounds and a color scheme that resembles old paintings. This comes across nicely on the new high definition upgrade, particularly with the soft grain that permeates the whole presentation. You will still notice minor print damage remaining, some slight scratches on the image at times, but these are rare occurrences and the image quality far surpasses previous North American DVD releases.

Once again, Criterion has enlisted artist David Downton to provide covers for one of their releases (he has previously contributed to their Max Ophuls library [reviews]), and the results are stunning. He has done new artwork for the front cover and the cover of the interior booklet.

More on Catherine Deneuve.

For a complete rundown on the special features, read the full review at DVD Talk.

Please Note: The images used here are promotional stills not taken directly from the Blu-Ray.

LOLA MONTES - #503

"One day he asks her if she dare pose for him all in pink...She dares!"

Max Ophuls's final film is, by its own billing, a deconstruction of the femme fatale. The 1955 biopic Lola Montés is also a meta-cinematic tour-de-force of show-stopping entertainment. The real Lola Montés, Countess of Landsfeld, was a 19th-century woman of repute--some of it ill, some of it surely false. A self-constructed celebrity, Lola thrived on scandal, and despite apparently being possessed of little talent, furthered her own story by putting on productions of operas and plays that featured her as the star. In the Ophuls picture, Lola ends up working for an American circus, parading herself as the ultimate spectacle. She is the untouchable woman high above the adulation of her audience, eventually falling to the earth, thus fulfilling the fame cycle where all that go up are ultimately torn down by the same two-faced crowd.

I am not sure when the term "media circus" first came into play, but Max Ophuls clearly understood the nature of modern mythologizing. His three-ring entertainment is hawked by Peter Ustinov, a master of ceremonies who cares little for the truth. He tells Lola as much when the two parallel lines of the movie come together halfway and we see him laying the offer on her table at a hotel in the French Riviera. Lola is played by Martine Carol, whose beauty is austere and immaculate. She gives us a sex object that is never anything less than perfect, and in a bold move, rarely sexy. Ophuls teases us with the salacious details of Lola's adventures, but he keeps those mostly off screen. They are the tales the ringmaster tells, and they are even re-enacted within his circus tent. Yet, they are also the parts of the story of the most questionable truth, and perhaps of the least importance.

For all the early promises of lurid pawing through Lola's past, including an opening story of her affair with the composer Franz Liszt (played by Will Quadflieg), it's a bait and switch. Lola Montés is a more sympathetic character to Ophuls. She is not a victim of circumstance, more a creature of it. A master manipulator of circumstance. Her biography includes a sad early life--the mother who tried to marry her off to an old banker, Lola's own poor choice of an alternative husband, and the circumstances that led to her life in the theatre. Her first appearance in the gossip papers came as a result of her standing up for herself, and her eventual acquisition of her regal title came out of a love affair that had real love in it. Her extended stay with Ludwig I, King of Bavaria (Anton Walbrook), was the closest she would come to domestic bliss in her life. It all ended when the scandal caught up with her and revolutionaries chased her out of the country.

When Lola leaves Bavaria, she is accompanied by a young student she once romanced. This Latin-loving leftist (Oskar Werner) comes to her rescue because he sees Lola as symbol of freedom and love. By dancing her way across Europe unrestrained, she points the way to a more open future. I think this is how Ophuls sees her, too. A woman both too much of her time and also ahead of it. It's a high-wire act difficult to sustain.

Indeed, the lushness of Lola's romantic adventures is barely visible in the rundown circus. We see this kind of thing today, with the minor celebs who, after feeling the heat of the spotlight, do whatever they can to get back into it. If Lola thought the circus was bad, she should thank her stars there was no such thing as reality TV in the 1800s. Ophuls shows us the toll this lifestyle has taken on her. The ringmaster has to prompt her every line, as if her own belief in the stories is slipping away from her. Ophuls also has a mid-film interlude where a doctor comes to the circus to tell her boss (Friedrich Domin) that his star has a heart condition. Is there a more tragic ailment for an infamous lover to contract? Her heart was too weak to carry on. (The real Lola Montés died at the age of thirty-nine.)

In a bizarre twist of art imitating life, the film Lola Montés suffered much misfortune and misunderstanding, even as it was adored in some circles. After a disastrous premiere, the film's producers cut the movie down, restructuring it to fit a more traditional narrative. It would be thirteen years until a version even remotely resembling what Ophuls envisioned was put back together, and not until 2008 was a full restoration done. This is the version we are now getting on DVD.

Watching Ophuls's virtuoso filmmaking, it's hard to understand how more people didn't see how incredible Lola Montés was on its original release. It's like watching Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game or Orson Welles' Citizen Kane. (The latter's subplot with the Susan Alexander character being propped up in self-aggrandizing operas actually sprang to mind in regards to Lola Montés's similar theatrical follies.) These are films that look progressive and innovative even now, with more than half a century of cinematic and technological development coming after. If they are still better than so much of our contemporary best, how in the world weren't they adored in their own time?

Criterion started re-releasing the Max Ophuls catalogue in the summer of 2008, and it only takes watching a couple of his films to see the director's signature stylings emerge. He was fond of complex plots, ones that showed multiple layers of a story, effortlessly moving form one level to the next. We certainly get that here, with the jumping around in time, the stories within the story, etc. His ability to match that narrative agility with equally agile camerawork is a skill all filmmakers who have followed him should aspire to copy. He and cinematographer Christian Matras are as unbeholden to gravity as the trapeze-climbing Lola is in the film's final act. Ophuls loves to spin his camera around a scene, capturing the dizziness of a tale unleashed. Sometimes it's meant to invoke a loss of control, sometimes it's meant to show us a character letting go. He also loves to use depth of field, and to follow a character through the scenery. There are many memorable scenes of this type in Lola Montés, including tracking a young Lola as she zig zags down the many floors of an opera house or moving with her as she walks through a complex façade of a cruise ship. Ophuls discards practical limitations with as much confidence as Lola slays social mores. Indeed, Lola even tells us that her personal philosophy is to never stop moving, equating movement with life itself. No wonder Ophuls saw something in her story worth telling. (It also might be why he was protective of her, rather than exploiting her sexual escapades.*)

Lola Montés was shot in CinemaScope at a 2.55:1 aspect ratio, which means Max Ophuls had the widest possible frame to work in. He uses that size to open up our view of Lola's world, but also to contain it. Yes, we see the spacious fields of a garden party or feel the immensity of the circus' three rings, but Ophuls also regularly brings in the edges of the frame, opening and closing on different scenes like he is manipulating the curtains on a theatre stage.

Nowhere is an image of confinement more potent, however, than in the final shots. Lola is in a cage behind the circus tent, doted on by cherub-sized servants, reaching through the bars to shake the hands of male gawkers. She looks trapped in there, but she also looks like she is sitting on a religious throne, a madonna blessing her followers. It's Ophuls's final comment on fame. The onlookers trap even as they worship. His camera, still in flight, slowly moves back, levitating over the heads of the men trying to get their way to Lola. The line seems to go on forever. Arguably, it continues even now. Aren't we still gawking at Lola Montés today?

Lola Montés - Criterion Collection is a two-disc set. It comes in a nice cardboard book with an outer slipcase, and it features a stylish cover painting by David Downton. The artist also did design work on the trio of Ophuls films released last year (The quickest way to those three reviews is the "ophuls" tag on the posts), and by keeping the same design, collectors now have a matching Ophuls library.

* By the by, Ustinov's stories about how Ophuls viewed Martine Carol, as relayed in the excellent documentary Max by Marcel on DVD 2, somewhat contradict my theories about how the director viewed the Lola character.

Watch the trailer on YouTube

For a full rundown on the special features, read the full article at DVD Talk.

TRAVELS WITH HIROSHI SHIMIZU - ECLIPSE SERIES 15

In keeping with their mission statement, Criterion's Eclipse series once again brings together a collection of neglected films in a no-frills package in hopes of giving new life to material left by the wayside. In addition to their fantastic bundlings of films from well-known directors, the series has also created a space for more obscure creative powers. Early in the run, Eclipse released two masterworks by pioneering French filmmaker Raymond Bernard; last summer, they introduced a lot of us to the pleasures of Russian auteur Larisa Shepitko; and now four entries later, they unearth a quartet of early Japanese films by Hiroshi Shimizu.

Travels with Hiroshi Shimizu - Eclipse Series 15 is one of those delightful eye-openers that only come along once or twice a year, the kind of thing that surprises and dazzles the uninitiated and leaves those already in the know nodding their heads and wondering what took us all so long. A graduate of the earliest days of the Japanese studio system, Shimizu was a working director. IMDB's listing for the man lists a whopping forty-two films made between 1924 and 1957, though in the liner notes in this set, Michael Koresky posits that he made upwards of 150; from what I can tell, these are the first to ever be on DVD in the United States. It's one of the few cases where I wished the Eclipse Series actually did have an extra DVD bonus or two. I'd love a documentary feature to tell me where Hiroshi Shimizu came from and even more importantly, why he disappeared.

Travels with Hiroshi Shimizu starts of with a bit of a whisper. The 1933 silent film Japanese Girls at the Harbor (76 minutes) is a minor melodrama and may cause you to wonder at first what all the fuss is about. The script, adapted by Shimizu from a story by Toma Kitabayashi, is fairly typical. In the seaside town of Yokohama, schoolgirl Sunako (Oikawa Michiko) falls for local bad boy (Ureo Egawa). He goes by the name of Henry, a modern pretension that likely should have signaled to Sunako what kind of guy he is. He likes to hang out with gangsters and chase a little action on the side, namely a much faster girl named Yoko (Ranko Sawa). In a fit of rage, Sunako attacks her rival, leading to her exile out of town and the life of a bar geisha. By chance, she runs into Henry again, and he's now married to her school chum, Dora (Yukiko Inoue). Will Sunako learn from their happiness and get her own life back on track, or will she once again claim her man?

There aren't many narrative surprises in Japanese Girls at the Harbor. The Sunako character and thus, the resolution, really can only go one of two ways, and it doesn't take much to figure out who her mysterious neighbor is. What makes the film important, however, is the style that is already beginning to emerge. Shimizu displays an assured facility with the camera as well as a natural sense of framing. His mise-en-scene has a modern aesthetic in terms of his switching between close-ups and longer shots. He has an observational eye that is simultaneously inquisitive and attentive and a developing sense of movement. Outdoor shots at the waterfront, in particular, take on an almost contradictory intimacy in the way the director stands back and follows Dora and Sunako and watches their estrangement grow. They are practically silhouettes, yet their body language and the way the landscape isolates them lays their souls bare.

Shimizu also uses jumpy editing instead of a conventional zoom in revelatory scenes. Rather than one smooth push, he cuts from one camera position to the next, leaping closer to his guilty subject. I suppose the rough edits, harsh and almost violent in the evident physical damage to the film, are indicative of how ahead of his time he was, that he was maybe a couple of jumps ahead of the technology, too.

The three years between Japanese Girls at the Harbor and Mr. Thank You (1936; 78 mins.) might as well have been three decades given the degrees of sophistication that separate the two films. Criterion skips over at least six notches in Shimizu's belt to get from there to here, and in that time Shimizu had also made the switch from silents to talkies--though the sound era was enough of a new development that his working class cast of characters still aren't entirely sure what talkies are when the subject comes up.

Based on a story by the wonderful Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata, the titular Mr. Thank You is an overly polite bus driver (Ken Uehara) who shuttles townsfolk up and down the mountain where they live. His name comes from his habit of loudly thanking people along the way who step aside to let his vehicle pass, and the film follows him over the course of a day as he drives from the village at the top of the mountain to the train station at the bottom. Set during an economic depression, the passengers are all concerned with their various states of poverty, unemployment, and social standing. Mr. Thank You has driven many of the local girls down the mountain that have never made the return trip, sold into factory work or prostitution in order to help their families pay the bills.

One such girl on this trip is an innocent seventeen-year-old (Mayumi Tsukiji) heading to the train with her mother (Kaoru Futaba), where the two will reluctantly say good-bye. We don't know for sure what exactly is happening to the girl at first, but the true meaning of her journey is largely sussed out by the one other female traveler on the bus, a worldly drifter (Michiko Kuwano). Be it her innocence or her perceived ruin, the girl draws the attention of the men on the bus, including that of the driver, who over the course of the trip woos the girl in ways even he doesn't realize until they are pointed out to him.

Mr. Thank You is a film of constant motion. Whether Shimizu's camera follows the bus, peers out its windows, or catches the background as it passes while focusing on the interior passengers, we are always traveling. Quite effectively, Shimizu even puts us on the road, barreling down on the pedestrians whom Mr. Thank You must pass, and then dissolving to them as they walk away and the driver shouts his gratitude. In one way, we are watching the downward momentum of people on their way to various states of ruin, but in a much more hopeful way, we are also seeing how roads and transit are connecting people in a manner that was never possible before. The bus driver is a benevolent figure who knows everyone along his route, who isn't at all reluctant to do a favor like pass on a message or pick something up at a shop the next town down.

Nowhere is there a better symbol of the two sides of transport, the consequence of progress, than the sweet young road worker that Mr. Thank You stops to say farewell to. She was part of a crew of Korean immigrants building the mountainous path, but now that it's done, she is moving on to the next assignment. Though her hands went into changing the land, she can't afford the bus fare to enjoy the fruits of her labor in a modern style. Likewise, her father died while the progress was being made, and she must leave his grave behind in this foreign land to continue working elsewhere--the new leaving the old, the price of advancement, and also the plight of society's most marginalized individuals all rolled into one bittersweet package.

Comparing Hiroshi Shimizu to Max Ophuls may be a bit of a stretch, but there is something reminiscent of Ophuls' dizzying, constantly moving camerawork and the way Shimizu keeps his own story going forward while also making sure to turn and look at what is going by. Both unmoor their cameras in order to show the movement of life, but also to drink it all in and not miss a single detail. They both also have a true affection for the characters they capture, and in Mr. Thank You, Shimizu's portrait of the poverty stricken and their perseverance is sweet, hopeful, and positively endearing.

Two blind masseurs walk into a vacation spa...

Despite all the movement in Mr. Thank You, and though this next film does open with a marvelous tracking shot where the camera is always several steps in front of its main characters as they walk up a mountain road, Shimizu puts his camera down for The Masseurs and a Woman (1938; 66 mins.). He continues his interest in chronicling the smaller details of lives not normally chronicled, but within the confines of the mountain hotels where much of the action in The Masseurs and a Woman takes place, it's better to sit still, pick a vantage point just beyond the edge of the room, and watch.

Though the title does sound like the premise for a dirty joke, I assure you, it is not. Two blind men working as traveling masseurs (Shin Tokudaiji and Shinichi Himori) spend their summers in a mountain resort servicing the guests. One of them, Tokuichi, is so obsessed with his own mobility, he makes every walking trip into a race, counting the number of people he can pass on the road. Possessed of an incredible sensory perception, he can also determine who is near as they approach. Just by her smell, for instance, he can detect that one of the women on a passing carriage is from Tokyo. When that woman, Michiko (Mieko Takamine), finds these things out, she becomes intrigued by the man and his special skill set.

The masseur, Tokuichi, is intrigued in return, and he even develops a bit of a crush. Already self-conscious about his blindness, these feelings of love are further complicated by the woman's growing friendship with another man (Shin Saburi) visiting the resort, as well as a mysterious rash of robberies that seem to occur wherever the woman also goes. Are Toku's suspicions of Michiko valid or simply the result of his confused desire? When the truth is revealed, Shimizu, who also authored the script, yet again shows a tremendous sensitivity to the role of women in Japanese society at the time.

He also shows a tremendous appreciation for natural environments. In all four of these movies, the director used real locations to add a realistic character to his films. The mountain retreat of The Masseurs and a Woman is idyllic, and Shimizu takes his characters out to the streams and into the woods and photographs them amidst all the wonders to be found there. This realism gives an added oomph to the simple honesty of the story, which is at turns humorous, intriguing, and poignant.

You can also see the filmmaker's technique continue to improve. The jumpy zooms of Japanese Girls at the Harbor are used again in The Masseurs and a Woman, this time moving in on two pairs of feet in flight. Gone are the rough splices, replaced with smooth moves from one shot to the next. Fittingly, the movie also ends on another traveling shot, the camera once again in motion. This time, however, instead of preceding the walking masseurs, it follows a departing carriage, peering around a bend to wave good-bye.

The final film in the box, Ornamental Hairpin (1941; 70 mins.), also takes place at a seasonal mountain resort. A group of travelers come together for a summer amongst nature, and they find their tranquil retreat upset by the regular arrival of new and larger groups of vacationers. At the opening, it is a group of geisha, their presence on the road flanked by tall trees reminiscent of the start of The Masseurs and a Woman. Their noisy partying and sapping of the hotel's services annoy the other patrons, particularly a grumpy professor (Tatsuo Saito). Even after they are gone, their presence is felt, as a soldier on furlough, Nanmura (Chishu Ryu), steps on a hairpin left behind in the bath. When the owner, Emi (Kinuyo Tanaka), learns that he has been hobbled by her lost accessory, she returns to help him recover.

Love appears to be a foregone conclusion for these two. Nanmura dismisses his injury as an act of fate, likening the hairpin to poetry and claiming it is verse that has pieced his sole. Whether he realizes it or not, his group of new friends, which includes a married couple as well as an old man and his two grandsons, speculate over whether the pin's owner will be beautiful. When Emi arrives, they all concur that she is, and a quiet affection quickly grows between her and her victim as she watches him rehabilitate. All have seemed to forget that she was with the geisha, and only a few brief references to her past life remind us that she was not living a common existence back in Tokyo. Rejecting her newfound life of simplicity to return to the commitments she ran out on hangs heavily over her, becoming the thing that can be worried about instead of worrying about the ongoing war, itself alluded to less than even Emi's forsaken profession.

There is a sense of playful abandon in Shimizu's careening through the forest with his characters. Ornamental Hairpin is episodic in structure, a blustery anecdote of the professor saying something pompous here, the young boys busting that pomposity with a joke there. Subtle hints of class creep in, particularly since most of the central guests are sharing rooms and eating rationed food to get cheaper rates, while the Hiroyasu couple (Shinchi Himori and Hideko Mimura) is able to afford their own room and upgraded meals. At the center of it all, though, is the love story, though it's one only told in glances, in the space in between. The only open display of any affection is when Emi carries Nanmura on her back to help him the rest of the way when he is trying to traverse a rickety bridge as part of his challenge to walk on the hurt foot. Again, Shimizu is tipping his hat to the shifting roles amongst the sexes, to the added burden that women have begun to carry.

Though all of his films have a bright demeanor and a glass-half-full optimism, there is also a practicality to the features in Travels with Hiroshi Shimizu. There is always a sense that contentment is being lost, that advances are made in trade of something fundamentally good. As time wore on for the director, his stories seem to suggest that there is less of a chance for societal salvation. All of these movies end with some kind personal transformation for one character or another, but in both Japanese Girls at the Harbor and Mr. Thank You, there was also an element of community rallying around the one who needed redemption. That community is reduced to a duo in The Masseurs and a Woman, and the promise of a new life is something that lays beyond the conclusion of the film and even then, without the two who see the change being together. So, too, are the would-be lovers in Ornamental Hairpin kept apart. For Emi to free herself of all the things that bring her down, she must stay out of Tokyo, even when Nanmura returns there. She has happiness, but it's not without tears. Their plight surely mirrors that of many wartime affairs.

Though the first shot of Ornamental Hairpin is wide and contains the many, the last shot is closer in and contains a single person. Even so, it's Emi climbing the same steps that Nanmura had to climb to prove he was healed, and so too is she proving that she is whole again.

For a full rundown on the special features, read the full article at DVD Talk.