SABRINA - CRITERION CHANNEL

This review was originally written in 2008 for DVDTalk.com.

Audrey Hepburn's second film was the first of hers I saw, though if I recall I watched Sabrina for Humphrey Bogart, whom had become a bit of an obsession by then. I was also starting to learn a little something about director Billy Wilder through a blooming interest in film noir, so it was an unexpected twist in my movie-going plot that these two gentlemen would be upstaged by the gamine up in the tree of this romantic comedy.

Sabrina (Hepburn) is the chauffeur's daughter, a gawky teen who hides in the bushes spying on David Larrabee (William Holden), the youngest and the wildest son of the rich Larrabee family. By contrast, David's older brother, Linus (Bogart), is all stuffed shirts and responsibility. He runs the family company and is more likely to race through numbers and statistics than he is to race the roadster that David is so fond of. Ironically, it's only Linus that notices Sabrina, finding her in the throes of a dramatic suicide over David's cluelessness. Sure, Linus doesn't realize that this silly kid is being serious, but at least he knows her name.

All of this takes place on the eve of Sabrina's departure for Paris, where she will spend two years at a cooking school learning all about soufflés while also learning all the ways of the world that a girl can only acquire in France. She returns to Long Island a sophisticated seductress, ready to claim David as her own. The one wrinkle: Linus has promised David to the daughter of a sugar cane magnate so the Larrabees can get their hands on all the sugar they need for a new plastic compound they are pioneering. Seeing the thrice-married David about to go off message yet again, Linus runs interference, pretending to entertain his baby brother's fickle yearnings while keeping Sabrina occupied. Of course, no numbers or charts can prepare him for Cupid's arrow, and a legitimate love affair blooms in the unlikeliest of places.

Bogart is at his hound-dog best in this picture. Put the man in a tailored suit and take him out of the rough-and-tumble urban and wilderness environments he is better known for, and he actually cuts quite a dashing figure as an aging Prince Charming. Sure, there is a disparity in the years between him and Audrey Hepburn, but it doesn't seem nearly as pronounced as the age gap between her and some of her other leading men. (Wilder would pair her with Gary Cooper in Love in the Afternoon three years later, and it's never quite right; the pair are loving in two entirely different afternoons.) Perhaps it's Bogart's subtle vulnerability that makes it work. His Linus is a lonely man who may know plastics and even how to negotiate social mores as if they were boardroom gambits, but whom has ignored his heart as a result. Just as much as Sabrina needs to be rescued from that cad David, Linus needs someone to rescue him from himself. If there is a bit of a fatherly air to his schooling of the ingénue, the ingénue must also play mother to a boy who is still emotionally underdeveloped. Just look at the scene where Linus tries to dress up in his old college sweater: it's like he's swapped places with Sabrina, trying to look young much in the same way she's trying to appear grown up.

Audrey Hepburn is as delightful as can be in the film. To her acting credit, she is almost capable of entirely conquering her own natural glamour to make the teenaged Sabrina appear gawky and naïve. This also allows her to pull off the character's return from Paris, where she must first look like a little girl playing dress up only to reveal she truly is sophisticated in spite of herself. As romances go, one couldn't ask for a smarter director than Billy Wilder, who realizes that when falling in love, the reactions we show to one another aren't nearly as telling as the ones we think no one sees. When the David-Sabrina-Linus triangle begins, we can chart the various emotional upheavals on the dancefloor by the way a character's face changes amidst the turn of a slow dance. Thus, an unsuspecting Sabrina can enter a spin out of love and come around to face us again in love.

As with most Billy Wilder movies, Sabrina moves at a brisk pace, teasing the viewer along in ways that are never obvious or manipulative, even when we should be able to see the romantic outcome a mile off. Wilder co-wrote the screenplay with Ernest Lehman and Samuel Taylor, who originally wrote Sabrina as a stageplay, and he knows where all the pieces go. The director has an inherent storytelling instinct for when the narrative can be diverted into a humorous aside and when it needs to get down to serious business. At its core, Sabrina is a Cinderella story, but the fun twist is that the husband she's going to meet at the ball is not the one she expects, and as the audience, we get to go along for the ride as Sabrina figures it all out.

NIGHTMARE ALLEY - #1078

Illegal acts of human cruelty.

That’s the reason the local sheriff gives when he shuts the carnival sideshow down. He’s specifically acting on a tip that the carnival has a “geek,” a human who will bite the head off a live chicken or eat whatever filth is tossed his way. But the cop might as well be talking about everyone in the troupe, and all the things they do to each other. And wait until hear hears about what happens when that kind of energy is sent out into the real world. 

Nightmare Alley is a story of double-crosses fueled by petty jealousy, and the price of ambition when funded by emotional pain. Tyrone Power stars in this freaky noir as Stanton Carlisle, a hustler who picks up tricks for the sideshow mentalist Zeena (Joan Blondell) and her alcoholic partner Pete Krumbein (Ian Keith). After an accident involving moonshine and some potential jail time threatened by that same local sheriff, Stan reveals who he is to everyone in ways both intentional and unintended. He ends up being forced into a marriage with Molly (Coleen Gray), the carnival ingenue, but not before they have both learned Zeena and Pete’s system. It’s enough to break out of the rural confidence racket and go legit in big city nightclubs doing the blindfold act, where Molly tips Stan off using a verbal code so he can make the audience think he’s reading their minds.

I love the names in this movie. Stanton Carlisle just sounds like the name of a crook trying to be fancy. And then there’s Krumbein. Anyone else hear Nelson Muntz getting upset that Marge Simpson called him a “Crumbum”? And we haven’t even met Lilith yet, the psychoanalyst played by Helen Walker that inspires Stan to expand his racket to more personal cons involving seances and spiritualism. What his encounter with the confident professional ultimately shows him is that everyone is on the take. Shakedown artists work in fancy offices, too. And Liliths have a reputation for a reason.

Released in 1947, Nightmare Alley held a strange reputation for a while. Edmund Goulding’s film was one of those lost classics that one could read about in books but never find on video shelves. It was infamous for its bleak outlook, especially its shocking ending. Amongst film noir scholars, it was considered particularly weird, the rare noir that wasn’t all bullets and concrete, but just as cynical in the way it trades on mental games and “the other side.” When I finally saw Nightmare Alley, it was via a bootleg at my local arty video store. They had a copy someone had taped off of AMC. Same story with Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole [review]. True cult favorites left to languish even as their status amongst cineastes grew.

Even watching it via a faded and low-resolution tape, the genius of Nightmare Alley was not lost on me. Tyrone Power grafts steely determinism onto a fragile ego, inventing an incredible noir anti-hero, a fast thinker whose brain also had whatever the mental equivalent to a glass jaw might be. One hit, and he shatters. The actor is electric onscreen, possibly never better. Perhaps a veteran actor like Power understood too well the veil between performance and reality, how Stan was much better at reading other people’s cards rather than his own.

Cards are important in Nightmare Alley. Not just the ones that Stan and Molly use in their act, where diners write down the questions that open them to Stan’s fleecing, but tarot carts. Zeena does two readings in the movie, and each predicts the downfall of a man in her life. Being a noir, neither should be a spoiler, but I’ll let you guess. Just yesterday I watched Blondell as a side player to Barbara Stanwyck in Archie Mayo’s pre-code marriage drama Illicit, and despite there being fifteen years between the two movies, she was probably even more vibrant in this one than in the earlier role. Blondell makes Zeena a formidable woman, remorseful for her past sins, but unafraid of challenging Stan when he wrongs her. She steals the show from both the other actresses, who don’t quite have the chops she does. Then again, maybe Goulding and writer Jules Furthman are doing it on purpose, reducing the women that Stan ostensibly betrays Zeena for, by making Molly a nervous sap and Lilith calculated and unemotional. (Side note: Criterion includes tarot cards representing the main characters in their new edition, which also boasts a transfer that isn’t just light years ahead of the bootleg I rented once upon a time but also the Fox DVD from the ’00s.)

I make no secret of Nightmare Alley’s influence on my Archer Coe book series. There are nods to it in various names used in the comics, just as there is a major tip of the hat to Orson Welles. When wanting to find a way to do a private detective comic that wasn’t your standard riff on Chandler, Cain, or Hammett, it came to mind to make the character a stage hypnotist instead, someone whom people in trouble might ask into their lives and share their intimate secrets with in order to get help. Of course, the big difference is that Archer Coe is a former bad man trying to make good, and Stanton Carlisle is just plain bad. 

“Should I let the man’s soul be lost forever, or should I stake my own to save it?”

The change of routine and setting is freeing. Nightmare Alley doesn’t fall back on typical noir tricks. There is no gunplay or bag of money (though there is an envelope). The traditional hand of fate in most noir is now tied to mysticism, karma, and according to Molly, Stan is also tempting the hand of God. The charlatan’s problem is he wants to be a denier, but deep down he’s a believer. The hubris that will bring on the Godsmack is in trying to kid himself and Molly that there’s something good in his thieving, that he’s helping the people he harms. We know he knows it’s a trick, but he also knows the consequences of messing around with people’s memories of their lost loved ones, and like the criminal who pulls the heist even after one of the crew falls off, he chooses to ignore it.

Reassessing that in noir terms and examining how Lilith dresses him down in the final act, Stan is your typical genre screw-up but ultimately victim of memory. In this case, the memories he exploits causes the past he’s tried to disregard to catch up with him. The tuxedoed high society performer is exposed as a carnie in a wife beater. Maybe if he had taken the time to get an answer to some of his earlier questions regarding how a man could drop so low, Stan would have been wiser. It’s that damn hubris again. It was never going to happen to him. 

One final sidenote, in addition to the fine package Criterion has put together with the old show poster design, interviews, and porting over Fox’s critical commentary, they also commissioned a new essay from the incomparable Kim Morgan. It’s no coincidence that Kim is also the co-writer of the upcoming remake of Nightmare Alley with director Guillermo Del Toro. Just take a look at the cast – Bradley Cooper as Stanton, Cate Blanchett as Lilith, Toni Collette as Zeena – and this new version has a chance to be something. Look for Nightmare Alley later this year!

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

SOME LIKE IT HOT - #950

It’s funny how movies come to you sometimes. For years, the only thing I knew about Some Like It Hot was that it was mentioned on an episode of The Facts of Life. The show’s matriarchal figure, Mrs. Garrett (as played by Charlotte Rae), was comforting the girls in her charge following the death of someone close to them. Mrs. Garrett shared that when her father had passed, the grief was too much to bear, and so she and her siblings went to see Some Like It Hot. They laughed for two hours, forgetting for a brief time that they had previously been crying...and that was okay. Life has to move on.

This stuck in my head for years before I ever saw the film. I don’t know if I finally sought it out because of my teenage obsession with Marilyn Monroe or my Billy Wilder hero worship, it could have been both, but upon first viewing it was immediately apparent why the Facts of Life writers had chosen Some Like It Hot as their example: it was a comedy that was empirically funny, that could be mentioned to any film fan, casual or devoted, and they’d be able to say, “Yes, that’s a good one.”

The slugline of Some Like It Hot is rather simple: two musicians (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) inadvertently witness a gangland execution. To escape mob retribution, they dress as women to hide out in an all-girl band. As a result of the close quarters, one of them, Curtis’ Joe/Josephine, falls for the group’s blonde lead singer Sugar (Marilyn Monroe), and he woos her under a third alter ego, that of the heir to an oil empire. But once they are in love with each other, how does he reveal who he really is?

It’s not exactly a classic case of mistaken identity, more like misdirected identity. For his part, the other fugitive, Lemmon’s Jerry, a.k.a. Daphne, ends up running interference by letting himself be wined and dined by a legitimate millionaire, a goofy little fellow named Osgood Fielding III (Joe E. Brown, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World). He’s a persistent Casanova, ready to shower Daphne with diamonds and talk of marriage. Surely no one is going to get hurt when the truth comes out, right?

Actually, that is right, and that’s what allows Some Like It Hot to resonate all these years later. Thematically, it’s about a group of misfits who, for better or worse, being unable to fit in their current situation, create a space where they belong. This can be in the literal sense, with Joe and Jerry remaking themselves to avoid gangsters, or it could be in the more metaphorical sense. Sugar’s foibles and bad decisions with men keep getting her in trouble, so she ostensibly removes the male temptation by joining a band of women who themselves all seem to be a little out of place in polite society. Joe falls for Sugar knowing these things about her, she’s confided her weakness to him woman to woman; he loves her anyway.

More important, however, is Osgood’s acceptance of Daphne in the movie’s famous last scene, and its oft-quoted final lines. As the four of them rush out to sea, Joe and Jerry having ditched the mob at last, Jerry--still dressed as Daphne--tries to let the smitten tycoon down easy. Except he rejects every reason Daphne can come up with to say they can’t be together, until, in exasperation, Jerry rips off his wig and declares he’s a man. To which Osgood simply replies, “Nobody’s perfect.”

And indeed, nobody is, not in this group, not anywhere, and the simple acceptance of that is, well...the simplest perfection. Released in 1959, Some Like It Hot was coming at the tail end of Hollywood’s Golden Age, meaning it was still subject to the morality police that had required the studios to create a homogenized image of American life for several decades running. Homosexuality was considered taboo, and even with more enlightened times to come, it would be many years before the notion of a character in drag would be played for anything but ridicule. It would have been easy for Billy Wilder and his co-writer I.A.L. Diamond to wring laughs out of scenarios where people were reacting “ewwww, it’s a man in a dress.” That there is not a whiff of that anywhere here is not just commendable, but astounding. Not to mention subversive! Ending the film where they do, Wilder and Diamond are suggesting that Osgood and Jerry could stay together...and that there’s not anything wrong with that. Because they’ve already set up Joe to take Sugar without any judgment for past misdeeds, and her to forgive him for not being on the up-and-up.

Of course, this requires a lot more than good intentions to work. Some Like It Hot is an embarrassment of riches. The sharp dialogue and clever comedic scenarios provide a solid foundation. Just about anybody could have made that script funny, but it’s important that not just anybody did. The pitch perfect casting of Curtis, Lemmon, and Monroe--all at the top of their game, all potentially never better--means that we like all three of the characters they portray as much as they like each other, and thus we can also accept them for who they are, even when their actions are, let’s be honest, totally underhanded. We want to see Joe and Jerry get away, we want to see them all find love, we want them to be happy.

Because their happiness makes us happy. And allows us to forget our troubles.

Just like it did for Mrs. Garrett. Laugh instead of crying.

This is not the first time Some Like It Hot has been on Blu-ray, but it is the first time from Criterion, and the black-and-white image is phenomenal. The picture is so sharp, it looks like Some Like It Hot was shot yesterday. This restoration is the best you’ll have seen this movie. It’s pretty much perfection.

Owners of previous editions of the movie are also treated to new supplements, but also some behind-the-scenes featurettes that are holdovers from the MGM packaging (meaning you’ll weigh hanging on to old discs based on what is missing here). The bulk of the extras focus on interviews, with all the principles represented, via archival pieces featuring Curtis, Lemmon, Monroe, and Wilder.

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

THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT (Blu-ray) - #740

Casting back in my memory, I think I first heard of Rainer Werner Fassbinder at the same time I first heard of Douglas Sirk, back in the late 1990s or so when Martin Scorsese and others were trying to introduce Sirk back into the conversation. So, even though it would take me longer to actually experience the cinema of Fassbinder (I was drawn in by the stories I heard of Berlin Alexanderplatz [review]) than it would Sirk, whom I sought out immediately, the two would remain inextricably linked. Largely because Fassbinder wanted it to be so.

The German director’s 1972 film The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is his tribute to Sirk, an attempt to adopt some of the same themes as the master of melodrama, to tell a story of women and their concerns, and to do so with the same colorful backdrops. While I’d suggest that the final result might be more aptly described as “Norma Desmond by way of Ingmar Bergman,” one can still see the sudsy fingerprints of Sirk all over it. Yet, it’s also more than homage: The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is very much its own thing.

Fassbinder’s film is an adaptation of his own play, and the theatricality of the staging and structure of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant would betray that even if the credits did not. (And, again, like the Sirk influence, this is a good thing). The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is essentially a story in four acts, plus an epilogue, set in the same space, Petra’s apartment. Petra (Margit Carstensen, later seen in Fassbinder’s World on a Wire) is a middle-aged fashion designer who has sealed herself off in a claustrophobic world of her own creation. She still works, but mostly from bed, and as we watch, honestly, we only see her longsuffering, silent servant, Marlene (Fassbinder-regular Irm Hermann), actually put brush to paper and design anything.

Within her decadently decorated four walls, Petra receives many guests, including her cousin Sidonie and eventually Sidonie’s friend, Karin. (They are played, respectively, by Katrin Schaake and Hanna Schygulla, also regulars in Fassbinder films; in the way he builds a stock company of female actors, one might also draw comparisons with Pedro Almodovar.) It’s Karin who throws a spanner in the works. Petra is drawn to her, so in Act Two, she lures the younger woman back to her apartment, and in a case of “who’s playing who?” convinces her to stay with her after hearing Karin’s sob story about how tough her current living situation is.

Petra’s interest in Karin is more than charitable, and by Act Three, the fact that they are lovers is quite obvious, even if it’s not explicitly said so out loud. Yet, it’s also already over, the parasitic union having run its course for Karin, who has gotten what she wants. Leading to the final act, wherein Petra is despondent and suicidal on her birthday. Enter her college-aged daughter (Eva Mattes), whom she verbally abuses, and her aristocratic mother (Gisela Fackeldey), who clearly still rules the roost despite Petra’s many successes, and we see the pattern of three generations of broken women and their dysfunctional understandings of love. Petra lays everything bare, possibly making it clear for the first time for some of the more sheltered viewers in the early-’70s audience, and the melodrama reaches a crescendo.

Fassbinder divides all of these scenarios clearly, inserting a fade to black between and also marking the various sections with different songs, including hits by the Platters and the Walker Bros. Between those fades, he prefers long takes with invisible edits. There are cuts, there are angle changes, but they are never obvious. Once the drama has sucked you in, you’d be hard-pressed to notice or recall editor Thea Eymesz’s nips and tucks. Likewise, cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, who later went on to work with Scorsese and Coppola (not to mention Prince), uses the camera merely as a framing device. He doesn’t push, he doesn’t highlight--rather, his work is in capturing the drama, as well as color and the costuming. Petra as written and as Margit Carstensen plays her, is forceful enough a presence on her own to command the montage without any added help. Well, except for maybe costume designer Maja Lemcke. The woman’s moods are telegraphed by her outfits and wigs. When she is seducing Karin, she is like an exotic queen out of some mythological history, all baubles and distractions; when she is being jilted, she is more covered, and her hair is a hard-lined bob; on either end of the movie, when she is in despair, she wears a plain nightgown and no wig at all. The space between is so long, we forget her most honest face before we are reminded of it again at the end. Without the warpaint and the wardrobe, she is vulnerable. At her most naked, she is the most alone.

For technical specs and special features, see the full article at DVDTalk.com.

REDUX: THE DARJEELING LIMITED - #540

This is my second write-up of Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited. You can read my older review here. What is below isn't actually a legit review, or even a finished piece. These are my rough notes for an introduction I made last night before a screening of the movie, complete with "Hotel Chevalier," as part of the NW Film Center's "Wes's World: Wes Anderson and his Influences" festival. It features some old ideas cribbed from my previous write-up, and some new ones based on my re-watching the film. The piece is still a bit ragged, as it was just meant to act as a guide for while I talked, so there are likely some typos; each time you encounter one, imagine me saying...

The Darjeeling Limited has become the default Wes Anderson movie that no one cares about. You bring it up, everyone’s got an opinion about it.

To me, it’s one of the more interesting and challenging of his movies. It’s a eulogy for the Anderson movies that came before it, ending one phase of his career and setting the stage for the next.

As Marc Mohan said last week introducing The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou [review], the filmography of Wes Anderson is almost like one giant film, the way Susan Sontag described the 1960s work of Jean-Luc Godard. It’s all connected, and if not literally one volume to the next, it’s at least a shared universe. Thus, there are treads and characters that connect: to all of his other movies. You have Max Fischer, Richie Tenenbaum, maybe a little Eli Cash.

You have Steve Zissou, being left behind, almost like a phantom. To my way of thinking, the bit part Bill Murray plays here is actually their father, whose passing has prompted the journey the three brothers at the center of the movie are taking.

In essence, the father figure is dead. It’s time to move on in search of the next thing. This makes for one of the more emotionally raw of Anderson’s films. It wears its heart on its sleeve.

Which means it gets personal in ways Anderson movies haven’t before. There are three writers behind this: Wes Anderson, his filmmaking compatriot Roman Coppola, and actor Jason Schwartzman, who is also Roman’s cousin. Each writer has created an avatar for himself in the three brothers in the movie, and infused their mannerisms and fetishes with coded symbolism.

In fact, the whole movie, like much of Anderson’s work, has kind of a secret code that you have to break. The filmmaker is often accused of being precious, but every detail matters. He is precious in that he is like a little kid trying to build what he sees in his imagination, and he cares deeply about getting it right.

Owen Wilson plays Francis, the eldest, and he serves as a stand-in for Wes Anderson. Francis is the beleaguered ringleader, unappreciated and beaten-up--which was probably how Wes felt following the tepid reception to The Life Aquatic. Like his creator, Francis also wants to get it right. He wants to contain the chaos, but finds he can’t. You can’t manufacture a spiritual journey. He tells his brothers to “say yes to everything,” but then hands them an itinerary.

Jason Schwartzman plays Jack, and in doing so represents himself: the arty romantic looking to stake a claim.

I’m glad they are including the prologue of “Hotel Chevalier” because Darjeeling is really incomplete without it. Particularly in regards to Jack. He is essentially Max Fischer looking to be grow up and be taken seriously, stuck in a fugue at a time where the fictions he has created have become too real and have overtaken him.

Look around his hotel room, you’ll see he has essentially built himself a replica of his childhood bedroom, a la Edward Appleby, the dead romantic figure in Rushmore. [review] There are toy cars, art pieces, and objects that are important to him. He’s locked away, indulging in books and movies.

He’s watching Billy Wilder’s Stalag 17 on the TV. In that film, William Holden’s character is like the Max Fischer of the POW camps: he has the whole place wired. He built a racetrack and runs mice on them. He has a telescope for looking at the women in the neighbor camp. He is both separate and apart.

You also might spot a Nancy Mitford book on his bed. It’s a twofer, one of my favorites, the combined The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. Mitford is a bit like F. Scott Fitzgerald as a woman, known for beautiful prose and writing thinly veiled fictions about her and her sisters; Jack does the same about him and his brothers. No matter how much he claims it’s all made up.

Things go wonky for Jack in his exile when that his estranged lover--played by Natalie Portman--shows up unannounced and invades his space. Bad for him, lucky for us, in that it’s easily the sexiest a Wes Anderson movie has ever gotten. But Natalie Portman also utters the first of many portents in Darjeeling: “Don’t you think it’s time you go home?” He can’t escape his past any more than he can escape her.

“Hotel Chevalier” ends with a song by Peter Sarstedt, “Where Do You Go To My Lovely,” which is the most Wes Anderson of songs. It’s all references--Marlene Dietrich, the Rolling Stones--using these superficial details to get into a lover’s head. There’s something so self-conscious about it, it’s hard not to think Anderson is toying with us. “Where Do You Go To” becomes Jack’s love theme.


Finally, we have the most complex character to decode: Roman Coppola, as represented by Adrien Brody. Peter is also trying to establish himself as his own man, and his real-life parallel maybe has the most to overcome in that regard. Roman Coppola is a film director himself, he made a movie called CQ many years back--about, surprise, a young filmmaker trying to avoid turning into a hack. His resume also includes a lot of second unit work for his famous father: Francis Ford Coppola.

Francis Coppola one of the more influential titans of the 1970s. He was surely an influence on Wes Anderson. The Conversation, the Godfather films [review], Apocalypse Now.

Keep that in mind when you observe Adrien Brody in Darjeeling: he is the one who keeps stealing his dead father’s clothes for himself. He wears the old man’s glasses, so as a metaphor is looking through his eyes, despite it being a different prescription than his own. As the offspring of a famous man, it’s hard to establish your own vision.

This carries over into the theme of fathers. I think it’s Peter, Brody’s character, who gives the best evidence that Bill Murray is their dead dad. Watch how he looks at the Bill Murray in that first scene, both when he passes him, and once he’s on the train.

Peter is also dealing with his own issues: he could the next Royal Tenenbaum or Steve Zissou. His wife is pregnant, and he is running away. Sadly, later, he’ll be the one who fails in saving another child. Not a good omen.

The fact that Wes Anderson is trading some of his daddy issues to focus on mommy issues is kind of fascinating. Anjelica Huston as the mother in both Tenenbaums [review] and Zissou was still invested in what the men were doing, she’s the one who takes care of things, even reluctantly. Not this time. For the first time in Anderson, the mother has abandoned her post. (Not counting the late Mrs. Fischer.) Maybe in that sense the German women on the train are supposed to make us think of Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. [review] She can’t help but get out of there, and you can’t blame her. She’s had enough.

Extending the Coppola comparison, for a second, and sticking with fathers and mothers: there is a journey here akin to Apocalypse Now. In looking for their mom, the boys are seeking the rogue who has gone native.

There is also Hearts of Darkness, the documentary about the making of that film, where we see it was Roman Coppola’s mother, Eleanor, who kept the movie--and his father--on track when Francis Ford’s mad boyish adventure went off the tracks.

Also in Apocalypse Now, there is the threat of a tiger attack, which we have repeated here. Francis Ford Coppola himself was referencing William Blake: “Tyger Tyger, burning bright, / In the forests of the night; / What immortal hand or eye, / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”

This maybe wasn’t intentional on Anderson’s, but if you were here for Shawn Levy’s introduction to Rushmore, these things extend back whether it’s planned or not. Shawn quoted Borges stating that artists create their own precedents, even if by osmosis or coincidence. And one of the major reasons for this series is to make these connections, we want to see how the themes all lock together.

I was struck watching this last night, actually, that the train porter serves as a kind of father figure, immediately usurping Owen Wilson’s authority the moment they step on his train. If we want to go a little silly, then that means Jack/Jason Schwartzman sleeping with the porter’s girlfriend has some Oedipal overtones. Not to mention Natalie Portman and Anjelica Huston have matching haircuts.

But that may be going to far. It’s still worth considering, thought, that Owen Wilson’s Francis might want to take over for his dad, but what we end up seeing is that he’s just like his mother. All his habits are from her. I like the line he says, “Did I raise us...kind of?” She won’t validate him, he’s hoping his brothers will.

Moving on from that...

The other important film connection to make here is to India. India provides Wes Anderson an opportunity. Where I think Darjeeling provides a bridge between the two phases of Anderson’s career is he steps outside of his own uncanny valley in away he hasn’t before. It’s his first time away from an entirely curated world.

We left the city in Steve Zissou, sure, but Zissou still lived in an imaginary landscape, one that he could control, it was his Life Aquatic.

In Darjeeling, while the characters still bear a stylistic connection to the Anderson aesthetic, they have been moved into a world that is beyond their control, where they don’t fit. While cinematically, it’s the India that the director saw in early Merchant-Ivory movies and Satyajit Ray, it still resembles something other than Anderson’s common landscape. The Darjeeling Limited both as narrative and as process is an adventure of displacement.

As I mentioned, Francis is trying to manufacture and manicure the spiritual experience, but it’s way to controlled for a legitimate epiphany. To the point that to have a real experience, the boys have to be thrown off the train and see life as it’s really being lived, away from the conveniences of privileged travel. It makes me think a little of Lost In Translation, [review] and Scarlett Johansson leaving the hotel where she’s been hiding and viewing Japanese life as an observant witness. (A film, of course, made by Roman Coppola’s extremely talented little sister.)

These guys are presented with a real awakening moment out at the river and in the remote village, but of course, they kind of miss it. Anderson makes the connection for them, he goes from one funeral back to another, letting us see the events prior to burying their father, but these guys are dense. They immediately fall back into their old tricks once they return to the city, and have no choice but to go back out again and finish what they started.

After this, we would see Anderson retreat back into his own environment, and even take it to new extremes. Moonrise Kingdom [review] and to a greater extent Grand Budapest Hotel [review] has moved him even further from reality. There is a kind of magical realism, a cinematic illusion a la Georges Méliès, that has taken over his material. It’s actually hinted at in this movie with the very obviously fake tiger. There’s a part of him that wants the illusion to appear as illusion

I don’t know if the poor reaction to Darjeeling inspired it, but there is almost a sense that Anderson decided to take his ball and go home. If we didn’t want him stepping out into a recognizable world, then he wasn’t going to. He would create his own. I imagine him sitting in his studio listening to the Beach Boys’ “In My Room” and dreaming up this new fantasy life, untethered and unrestricted. It’s what’s made his latest films so fresh, but what also makes The Darjeeling Limited so effective. As they say, you have to leave before you can come back.

NIGHT AND FOG - #197

If Memorial Day is about remembrance, then one should remember clearly and accurately. Maintaining a properly attuned record of history is the purpose of Alain Resnais’ 1955 documentary Night and Fog, a short but potent chronicle of the Nazi concentration camps, from construction to destruction. From the very opening, Resnais seeks to remind us that the atrocities perpetrated in WWII are not an example of extraordinary human circumstance, but born of something more common, more baseline, something primal within ourselves. Resnais states it from the very start: All roads lead to human cruelty, whether intentional or not, and we must be vigilant to make sure the worst paths are never obscured.

Night and Fog is built around what was, at the time, contemporary footage of the closed camps. The grass was growing over the rubble, the sun was shining on the wreckage as if nothing had ever happened. For all intents and purposes, the ruins could have been any working community that had been shut down--and using archival footage and photographs, Resnais shows us that, in their way, that’s exactly what the death camps were. The Nazis established their own normalcy. The imprisoned had structure. There was commerce, labor, and politics.

And there was also brutality and humiliation. Resnais eases us into the true horror. His narration is matter-of-fact, Hanns Eisler’s music is at times jaunty, underscoring the dark comedy of a death mask. “We must live with this, as we do everything else,” Night and Fog seems to say. “This is what was, and this is what is.” Clarity is essential.

Yet, as the film takes us deeper into the lifecycle of the concentration camp, the presentation ever so subtly shifts. There is no denying the gruesome facts. People died. They died horribly. The perpetrators presented an ordered front, but behind that were the worst things you could imagine. Resnais’ point seems to be that this is the easiest aspect to forget. As history becomes comfortable, as we get used to the past being the past, the mind glosses over the jagged edges. Two years prior to Night and Fog, there was Stalag 17--a good movie, but one that must have seemed unimaginable to many. A concentration camp comedy! And one with no Jews, no ovens, no mass graves! Night and Fog is the antidote to such flippancy.

Memorial Day can often give over to rah-rah sloganeering--which, let’s not get it wrong, it’s not the same thing as honoring the soldiers or paying tribute to a good fight and hard victories. Those things should be remembered, too, but not at the exclusion of the other side. We should consider the cost of war, the price paid by those who participated, be they soldier or civilian. You can watch a John Wayne movie, you can watch Saving Private Ryan, but you should also watch Night and Fog. Its chilly denouement will make the heroes of those other films seem all the more heroicyou’re your considering what their sacrifice was for. 

PEOPLE ON SUNDAY (Blu-Ray) - #569

Sometimes a DVD release feels more like the product of a daring rescue mission than it does a movie premiere. Like the producers and technicians and artisans went spelunking into some cinematic cave to pull out a frail motion picture that had fallen in the hole and broken its leg.

People on Sunday is an enchanting curio from cinema's past, a 1930 silent film with murky origins, missing pieces, and a backstory as fascinating as what actually made it onto the screen. The German movie has a credits list that reads like a who's who of classic Hollywood craftsmen, but reading over the testimonials in the booklet that comes with the Criterion release of the film, there are many different takes on who did what. Given that the principle participants have long since shuffled off this mortal coil, there will likely be no getting to the bottom of it. All we have left is the mystery...and the wonderful film.

The movie is called People on Sunday, and that's exactly what it's about. Five lives intersecting on a Sunday afternoon, and specifically, four of them as they go from Berlin to the lakeside of Nikolassee to enjoy their day off. Put together as an independent production to compete with the all-powerful German studio UFA, People on Sunday was approached as an experiment. To keep costs down, the filmmakers found five non-actors and paired them together, playing versions of themselves, engaged to act in scripted scenarios, but in a manner prefiguring the Italian Neorealists. They were encouraged to be themselves, to not be actors.

The five are a taxi driver, a record store clerk, a wine salesman, a film extra, and a model. The driver and the model are dating, and the wine seller is their neighbor. The other two girls are friends. The wine seller, Wolfgang, meets the extra, Christl, on Saturday and makes a date with her for the day after. She brings along her friend Brigitte, and he brings along Erwin. Erwin's gal, Annie, never makes it out of bed, so he ends up being Wolfgang's wingman for the whole day. The wine seller is a true wolf, however, and his pushy pick-ups drive Christl away, and when he then turns his attention to Brigitte, it causes drama between the two girls. The romance plays out as they enjoy the water and the forest, having a picnic and playing records--a break from the working week, a respite from city life.

People on Sunday is itself meant as a temporary diversion, a representation of the brief pleasures the common man enjoys that would also give similar pleasure to all who watch it. And boy, does it ever work as such! This simple story of a day at the beach is charming and seductive, and even as Wolfgang reveals what a cad he is and the drudgery of Monday morning starts up again, the smile that the excursion has inspired doesn't fade. In addition to the story, the filmmakers also sidetrack into documentary footage of what other people are doing with their time off, both on the streets of Berlin and out in the sand of Nikolassee. Among these is a delightful centerpiece in which a photographer takes pictures of the daytrippers. It's a parade of German faces, young and old, people being themselves and frozen in time in the seconds it takes to create a snapshot. To go along with this, the Mont Alto Orchestra has created a period-sounding musical score, lending both humor and pathos to the proceedings. Their work is particularly effective when Annie plays her records, and the musicians recreate popular tunes from an afternoon in the sun long ago. (Criterion also offers a second score by Elena Kats-Chernin and the Czech Film Orchestra that is more contemporary in approach.)

In less talented hands, People on a Sunday could have ended up a mere trifle, but the eager young talent that gathered to pull this experiment off show a preternatural gift for making movies. It's no surprise that they would all eventually leave Germany and make a name for themselves in Hollywood. In terms of the credits, things break down something like this: Kurt Siodmak and Billie Wilder observed people on their actual Sunday activities, and out of their notes, Wilder fashioned a script. Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer directed, with Eugene Schüfftan serving as cinematographer and Fred Zinnemann assisting him. In the U.S., Kurt would become Curt and would write some of the great Universal monster movies, including The Wolf Man, and Billie would become Billy, writing and directing such marvelous motion pictures as Sabrina [review] and Ace in the Hole [review]. Amongst Robert Siodmak's later credits are the excellent film noirs The Killers and Criss Cross, while Ulmer is maybe best known for Detour. Fred Zinnemann also moved on to direct, with credits like Member of the Wedding [review], High Noon [review], and From Here to Eternity.

Eugene Schüfftan may be the least recognized name amongst this roster, though Criterion fans should know him as the man who shot Eyes Without a Face and Port of Shadows, in additon to some Hollywood pictures. His cinematography on The Hustler even earned him an Oscar. Schüfftan also directed three short films, and his 1931 effort Ins Blaue hinein (Into the Blue) is included here as a supplement. It's a sweet film, and a talkie--though the sound is mainly rudimentary dubbing done in post. The jaunty tale has much in common with People on Sunday: it details three colleagues from different social classes out for an afternoon ride in one of their cars. They pick up a young lady that one of the guys knows and compete for her affection before deciding to form a dog washing business together. It's a breezy bit of fun that turns to full comedy by show's end.

Also in the supplements is a half-hour documentary from 2000 called Weekend am Wannsee. In it, filmmaker Gerald Koll attempts to reconstruct the history of People on Sunday, partially by talking to the man literally reconstructing the print, Martin Koerber. For anyone who ever wonders just how a film like this is out back together, there is a fascinating explanation of how many versions Koerber had to work with, where they came from, and what they each had to offer. Surviving participants Curt Siodmak and actress Brigitte Borchert are also interviewed, and the documentary explores what happened to all the players following the movie's release.

The Blu-Ray of People on Sunday uses a print that cobbles together the most complete version of the film from a variety of sources. No absolutely whole version exists. Despite a warning card at the start of the movie alerting viewers to the fact that this version was pieced together from several prints, I would have never guessed. Though there is some damage and scratches here and there, nothing stands out as being obviously sourced from any different places, not nearly as much as, for example, the Argentinean clips in The Complete Metropolis [review]. The overall presentation is stellar, this rescue team brought People on Sunday out of the darkness with a minimum of injury.

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