The Weekly Gravy #15

This past week, I was occupied mainly with the election results and writing my reviews of the two parts of Ivan the Terrible, so there was simply no edition of the Weekly Gravy. Rather than skip an edition, I’ll just write off last week as a week of rest (ha ha) and begin afresh this week with another Criterion (well, Eclipse) title…

The Baron of Arizona (1950) – ***

This is one of those films which tends to be considered a hidden gem, more for the fascinating and all too little-known true story it tells than for how good it really is. But it’s a solid film and a truly fascinating story, about one James Addison Reavis (Vincent Price), a government clerk who crafted an incredibly elaborate forgery, claiming that the Arizona Territory was the rightful property of the fictitious Peralta family, and that an orphaned peasant girl, Sofia (Karen Kester as a child, Ellen Drew as an adult) was its sole surviving member. He goes to extraordinary lengths to forge documents “verifying” the claims, including spending years in a Spanish monastery just to gain access to the right archives, taking up with a band of Romani to gain access to a nobleman’s library, and keeping a straight face for years as he stands firmly by the truth of his story.

He also marries Sofia, whom he’s had educated in the ways of a great lady, and establishes an office in Arizona to manage what he expects will be an incredibly lucrative business, bluffing his way into a mansion and many thousands of dollars. But a government investigator named Griff (Reed Hadley) is determined to expose what he’s convinced is a fraud, and the truth of Sofia’s love—which transcends any considerations of nobility or even honesty—might just be enough to shake Reavis’ resolve.

Price appeared in many A pictures over the years, but always seemed most at home in the Bs, with his air of seedy elegance, of refined fraudulence, of sinister dignity. So he’s ideally cast as Reavis, whether he’s playing the romantic (repeating the same lines to three different women), the defiant (holding fast to his claims despite threats of violence and attempts to buy him out), or the desperate (convincing a lynch mob to spare him because he’ll be worth more to them in court) aspects of this mountebank. It’s not his greatest performance (I’m partial to Theatre of Blood myself), but he’s very good indeed.

Unfortunately, nothing else in the film measures up to him, aside from the story itself. Vladimir Sokoloff is solid as Sofia’s foster-father, Pepito, and Ellen Drew is okay as Sofia (though she never comes across as anything other than a 20th-century American), but Hadley is pretty bland as Griff and Gene Roth is fairly bad as the head of the monastery; at one point I could swear one of his fluffed line readings made it into the finished film. Most of the cast come off as the contract players they are. On the other hand, despite the low-budget production, James Wong Howe’s cinematography is pretty good, and if it doesn’t have the lushness the material would justify, it looks fine.

This was my first time seeing a film by maverick director Samuel Fuller, and his direction is efficient but unremarkable; it’s presumably the writing and especially the choice of subject matter that mark the film as his own. The script makes at least one major mistake, beginning the film in 1912 as Arizona is granted statehood, and an older Griff tells the story to a group of statesmen over cigars and brandy. The scene goes on too long and is frankly kind of dull, telling us about Reavis’ motives when we should’ve seen them, and making us wait for Price to appear while Hadley dutifully lectures us.

The film should’ve begun with Reavis’ dramatic arrival at Pepito’s house on a rainy night, and ended with that great line when he’s asked why, after the lengths he went to to forge his claims, did he finally come clean: “I fell in love with my wife.” At 96 minutes, the film is arguably too long and structurally lacking. But Price, Reavis’ incredible ingenuity, and the fact that this actually happened (the film romanticizes the story, but it’s essentially true) carry it through, and you wonder if Arizona would’ve been better or worse off as a sham barony.

Score: 76

Duck, You Sucker/Giù la testa (1971) – ***

Duck, You Sucker aims to provoke from the get-go, opening with a quote by Mao Tse-Tung about the inherent violence of revolutions, followed by Rod Steiger washing ants off a tree with his own urine. He then flags down and is allowed to board a passing stagecoach, whose passengers are a group of aristocrats having lunch. They mock him, ask condescending questions, and generally treat him as sub-human, all while stuffing their faces disgustingly (with lots of close-ups of their mouths). The coach is then waylaid by a gang who turn out to be Steiger’s sons, and they rob and humiliate the passengers before dumping them, naked, in a hog waller.

Subtle it’s not, but Sergio Leone was never one for subtlety—nor was he really one for politics, and Steiger’s character doesn’t seem too concerned with making a political statement; he just wants to get the loot and stick it to some rich assholes. But then there’s a series of unrelated explosions nearby, which herald the appearance of James Coburn. Steiger waylays him, and discovers he’s an explosives expert with a price on his head (for revolutionary activities in Ireland). He also learns Coburn’s name is John Mallory, a hell of a coincidence since his own name is Juan Miranda. He demands Mallory help him achieve his dream of robbing the bank of Mesa Verde, and after a lengthy courtship of sorts (involving a lot of explosions and shouting), they arrive in the city, which is practically under martial law, as the time is the early 1910s and the place is Mexico.

Mallory introduces Miranda to members of a local revolutionary cell, who are planning an uprising in the city which centers around robbing the bank. Miranda is all too happy to help, but when he and his sons break into the bank, they find no money, only 150 political prisoners. He’s now a hero of the revolution, which he couldn’t care less about; as he explains to Mallory, revolutionaries are dreamt up by intellectuals but fought by the working classes, who end up dead or no better off than when they started. (Mallory responds by throwing away a volume of Bakunin’s writings.) But he and his sons are now a part of the revolution, and when tragedy strikes, he and Mallory must get their revenge…and at this point you might be surprised to learn there’s an hour still to go.

At 156 minutes, Duck, You Sucker is actually the shortest of Leone’s last four films, but whether it needed to be is a matter of debate; it was actually trimmed for international release, by 20 to 35 minutes depending on the market, and variously retitled A Fistful of Dynamite or Once Upon a Time…the Revolution. (Leone apparently thought “duck, you sucker” was a common expression in America, and couldn’t be persuaded otherwise.) The recutting and retitling did little to make it a success, and its subsequent reputation has been checkered at best.

I can’t really say it’s on a par with Leone’s masterpieces, because it’s not. It’s too long, too meandering, too unclear about its ultimate message (possibly by design, but it doesn’t land either way), too uncertain as to what it’s ultimately about. If it’s the story of Mallory and Miranda’s turbulent friendship, it’s only sporadically satisfying; it’s too sketchily drawn to fully click on that front. And if it’s the story of a revolution, it’s too focused on these two men, too politically vague, and too determinedly equivocal to really come off in that regard. It really works best as a sweeping action film, but even then it’s decidedly uneven.

There are definite highlights—the hilariously ironic bank robbery, the haunting scene in the cave, Mallory’s nostalgic memories of Ireland and betrayal, the climactic train crash and the subsequent battle—and the whole final hour, which is decidedly more somber in tone and has much less dialogue than the first 90 minutes, is mostly quite effective. When it’s funny, exciting, or moving, it’s definitely funny, exciting, and moving. It’s well shot, well directed, and if Ennio Morricone’s score isn’t on the level of his best work for Leone, it’s still pretty damn good. The good things in it are very good, there’s just too much dead air, too many one-dimensional minor characters, and too many shootings and explosions which don’t amount to anything in between them.

Steiger’s performance (and the character of Miranda) was clearly based on Eli Wallach’s Tuco in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, but he doesn’t have the same charm or wit; his hammy performance and grating, nasal accent tend to wear thin. That said, he does rather better when he tones it down, as in the cave scene and the mostly silent scenes which follow. Alongside his bombast, Coburn’s low-key cool is all the more refreshing, and we sometimes wish Miranda and Mallory would part ways (as Mallory often attempts to do) so we could follow the latter instead. But for better or worse, we follow them both to the end of the film, and we can certainly understand the expression on Steiger’s face in the final shot; he may be a hero, but without anyone to share his moment of triumph with, what use is it?

Score: 72

Double Suicide/Shinjū: Ten no Amijima (1969) – ***½

When I started watching Masahiro Shinoda’s film last night, I was waiting for the results of my Covid-19 test. When I finished watching it this afternoon, I had received the positive results and accepted the prospect of spending the next 10 days or so holed up in my apartment, with plenty of time for catching up on my film-watching. An appropriate time, perhaps, to watch a film about two tragic lovers whose destinies are shaped both by forces entirely in their control and beyond it?

In 18th-century Japan, paper-seller Jihei (Kichiemon Nakamura) is infatuated with the courtesan Koharu (Shima Iwashita), and she with him; he wishes to redeem her—that is, buy out her contract and free her from prostitution—but cannot afford to do so, and is pressured to give her up, especially when the wealthy Tahei (Hôsei Komatsu) sets his own sights on her. He finds Koharu with another client, whom she asks to be her primary client so that Jihei can’t force her into a suicide pact. The client turns out to be Jihei’s brother Magoemon (Yûsuke Takita), who has come to redeem the family honor by breaking off their affair.

Though Jihei home to his wife Osan (also Iwashita) and their children, he remains haunted by his love for Koharu, and Osan reveals that she had written Koharu a letter asking her to save Jihei by pushing him away, but that contrary to her seeming self-interest, Koharu is very much in love with him. Fearing that Koharu will kill herself from grief, they decide to pawn their belongings to raise the money to redeem her, but Osan’s father discovers the scheme and forces them to divorce. Jihei goes to Koharu, and they flee together, desperate to be together, knowing there is no outcome for them save death.

Based on a bunraku puppet play by Monzaemon Chikamatsu, Double Suicide is performed with live actors, but on stylized sets and with the black-garbed puppeteers of bunraku (called kuroko) haunting the edges of the action, helping to adjust the scenery and symbolizing the forces which dictate the lovers’ fate as well as the theatrical tradition the film draws on. The film even begins with preparations for a bunraku play, as the filmmakers discuss how the final suicide will be depicted, establishing a meta-dramatic atmosphere which doesn’t overwhelm the story, but informs it; like many tragedies, the outcome is never in doubt, whatever attempts are made to avert it.

I feel like I’m missing a certain degree of context that would allow me to fully appreciate the film (I’ve never read the original play, for one), but the story is compelling enough, the acting good enough, and the presentation striking enough to make it effective. There’s a painful fascination to stories of doomed love, and to tragedies whose outcome seems pre-ordained by the fates. When Osan expresses her fear for Koharu’s well-being, you just know that she’s sealed Jihei’s fate, even if his own weak-willed nature set him on this path on the first place, and keeps him on it when he doesn’t stop his father-in-law from dragging Osan away, or when he begs Koharu not to remind him of the children he’s forsaken.

Nakamura is quite good as the pathetic Jihei, so in thrall to his passion for Koharu that it destroys him, but it’s Iwashita who really dazzles, both as Koharu, desperate to be loved, reluctant to die but with no other way out of a life of being owned by men, and as Osan, who only wants to do right by Jihei and is willing to sell her clothes to save his lover—a heartbreaking level of humiliation. You might not even realize at first that she’s playing both roles—I suspected but I had to check—but with a bit of makeup, a slightly different voice, and a few subtle differences of mannerism, she effectively depicts two distinct characters.

Shinoda’s direction keeps the focus on the story and characters, where it belongs; there are stylish touches, but he keeps them to a minimum. Kiyoshi Awazu’s production design is especially impressive, with much of the story set against walls decorated with writing or woodcut art, and a scene where the simple walls which denote Jihei’s house are easily knocked down by Nakamura, suggesting the fragile foundation of his world, which his doomed passion has torn apart. Tôichirô Narushima’s black-and-white cinematography frames the action with stark grace, and Tôru Takemitsu’s score is suitably severe. There are many striking scenes throughout, but perhaps the most impressive is the lovers’ climactic moment of bliss in a cemetery—an act in which love, lust, death, and a defiance of society’s restraints combine to great effect.

If I don’t rate Double Suicide as a truly great film, I can’t argue with someone who would, as it’s unquestionably a fine, striking work. I can’t really find much fault with it, only that it didn’t have the kind of impact on me that a truly great film (in my book) would. But your mileage may vary, and it’s absolutely worth checking out; the currently available Criterion DVD lacks extras, but hopefully someday they’ll reissue it with bonus materials to help contextualize the story and Shinoda’s treatment of it.

Score: 84

The Boys in the Band (1970) – ***½

The Boys in the Band was a favorite film of my mother’s, and a continuing favorite of my father’s, which is just a bit of a burden to put on a film which also has the weight of 50 years of social progress on its shoulders—although, as the 2018 Broadway revival and the Netflix remake this year (which I’ll need to see) prove, Mart Crowley’s play, which he adapted for the screen with the original off-Broadway cast intact, remains highly relevant and dramatically effective. The film creaks a bit on account of its stage origins, but the acting and the enduring elements of the script more than compensate.

A group of gay men assemble in a Manhattan apartment for a birthday party. The host is Michael (Kenneth Nelson), a self-loathing Catholic who struggles with alcoholism and his own acerbic nature. His possibly former boyfriend, Donald (Frederick Combs), is in town for the party but is living on Long Island. Their friends include Hank (Laurence Luckinbill), a teacher who’s divorcing his wife because of his sexuality; Larry (Keith Prentice), Hank’s boyfriend, a fashion photographer who struggles with Hank’s desire for monogamy; Bernard (Reuben Greene), a black bookstore employee from Detroit whose first love was a white young man whose family his family worked for; and Emory (Cliff Gorman), an interior decorator who’s about as camp as humanly possible. There’s also Cowboy (Robert La Tourneaux), a cheerfully dim hustler who’s the birthday boy’s “gift”; Harold (Leonard Frey), the birthday boy, “a 32-year-old, ugly, pock-marked Jew fairy,” as he calls himself; and Alan (Peter White), a conservative WASP Michael knew in college who may or may not be in the closet.

As the party progresses, drinks are drunk (and drunk), games are played, secrets are revealed, barbs are swapped, a few punches are thrown, and in the end, Michael, having confronted his own ugly nature, leaves for a midnight Mass, sharing with Donald his father’s dying words: “I don’t understand any of it. I never did.” It’s that kind of party, that kind of play, that kind of movie. Accept it as such, and some of the more contrived elements—the quips that cross the line into shtick, the well-timed entrances and exits, the performatively deployed revelations—don’t seem like so much of an issue.

The performances certainly make up for a lot. Nelson in particular perfectly balances all the elements of Michael’s turbulent character: his acidic wit, his self-destructive impulses, his loneliness, and his dogged determination to force his friends into baring their souls. You feel bad for him, even though he’s being inescapably toxic. And Frey (best known for playing Motel the following year in Fiddler on the Roof) enters the picture with a swish but gradually reveals the tender, rather sad, sense of tough love he brings to the party. He gives Michael a major dressing-down near the end before leaving with Cowboy in tow, and all the elements in play—the sense of friend-as-foil and the sexually voracious cosmopolitan queer especially—come through just as they should.

But the whole cast is quite strong, even if Gorman crosses the line into caricature once or twice and La Tourneaux (whose subsequent life was rather tragic) is a bit too farcically doltish. Luckinbill and White in particular do fine jobs of depicting men who don’t fit neatly into preconceived notions (then or now) of queerness; in White’s case, we never know precisely what Alan’s sexuality is, and he doesn’t tip his hand one way or the other.

William Friedkin’s direction doesn’t hide the stage origins of the material, but does its best to make it cinematic without actually opening things up much beyond an opening montage of the characters going about their respective days. Arthur J. Ornitz’ cinematography crafts some genuinely striking moments, especially Harold’s first appearance (those purple sunglasses!), the party guests fleeing the patio when a rainstorm hits, or Cowboy lying under a glass table, drunkenly spinning glass eggs which distort his cheerfully grinning face. And John Robert Lloyd’s set is a properly flamboyant home for Michael, with the theatrical spotlights, paisley wallpaper, and other touches adding the right flavor.

Some landmark films haven’t aged well, and some of my parents’ favorite films haven’t impressed me much (like, I’m sorry to say, the similarly themed The Ritz). But this one still works. Score one for the folks.

Score: 85

Rated M for Mild

Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday/Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953) – ***

Mr. Hulot’s style is to commit a faux pas, and in attempting to correct it, commit a larger one, and perhaps a still larger one, until catastrophe is achieved. He doesn’t always go that far, of course; often one mishap will suffice, as long as Jacques Tati, the co-writer, director, and star of the film, can achieve a sufficiently clever effect. And clever he often is. But here, at least, he is not often very funny—certainly not as funny as the blurbs on the poster would suggest. Of course, comedy is as subjective a form of art as ever existed, but it’s strange for me to look back and realize that this was the smash hit that made Tati’s international reputation, while his later Playtime—for my money a far more effective film—was a flop which nearly ended his career.

As is typical with Tati, there is little in terms of plot or character here. Hulot goes to a seaside town on holiday, and has various misadventures with the other guests at his hotel. Among the most notable recurring characters are a pretty young blonde woman named Martine (Nathalie Pascaud), an Englishwoman (Valentine Camax) who’s thoroughly charmed by Hulot, and the surly proprietor of the hotel (Lucien Frégis), who takes an instant dislike to Hulot. Not that Hulot has a hint of malice in him, but he can’t help but make a perfectly polite mess of things. Episodes include a tennis match, a funeral, a costume ball, an impromptu fireworks show, and various nightly gatherings in the hotel lobby, all of which offer Hulot a chance to work his magic.

And so it goes for 87 minutes, and even the film’s admirers will admit they don’t fly by. (The version I watched was actually the result of Tati’s various tweaks over the years after the original release; the first version, available in Criterion’s Tati set, is about 15 minutes longer, which hardly appeals.) I won’t go so far as to call the film boring, but Tati’s insistence on keeping characterization, story, and dialogue to a minimum (and yet the script was nominated for an Oscar!), and his painstakingly subtle style of visual comedy, make for rather poky viewing at times. His style works better for me in Mon Oncle and Playtime, which skewer the modern world and its artificiality—a much better fit for Tati’s people, who are archetypes at best and simply figures on the screen at worst.

There are elements I can certainly respect, especially the delightful use of sound effects (although yes, we get it, the saloon doors make that sound), the cheerful light-jazz score by Alain Romains, the pleasant atmosphere, and the general good nature of the film. But I found myself only occasionally smiling and very rarely outright amused. The sheer mildness of it all simply left me cold much of the time, and I hope that his later films will hold up on revisiting. But perhaps, on revisiting, this one will improve.

Score: 71

Fear and Desire (1953) – **½

This was Stanley Kubrick’s first feature film, and he would soon disown it, disparaging it when he bothered to acknowledge it and discouraging anyone from actually seeing it. It’s now readily available, of course, now that he can’t do anything about it, and while it’s a far cry from what he’d be doing just a few years later, it’s not really that bad, especially in those departments he had control over. It’s the acting and the writing (especially the writing) that ultimately hold it back from being more than a curio.

The story is of a war, coyly described as “Not a war that has been fought, nor one that will be, but any war.” Well, to be honest, the protagonists seem to be Americans and the antagonists seem to be Germans, but whatever you say. Anyhow, four men—Lt. Corby (Kenneth Harp), Sgt. Mac (Frank Silvera), Pvt. Sidney (Paul Mazursky), and Pvt. Fletcher (Steve Colt)—have survived a plane crash and are trapped behind enemy lines. They attempt to make their way to the front, along the way discovering an enemy outpost commanded by a general (also played by Harp) and with an airstrip and airplane that might allow at least two of the men to escape. Mac wants to assault the outpost and take out the general, but Corby insists on building a raft and sailing to safety under cover of night. While scouting the area, the men encounter a young fisherwoman (Virginia Leith) and take her prisoner, fearful she might betray their location, but unable to actually communicate with her.

Corby orders Sidney to stay with her while the others go on patrol, and he tries to communicate with her, his behavior growing more erratic as he seems to be overcome by, well, fear and desire. He decides to untie her (they’ve tied her to a tree) for lascivious purposes, but when she attempts to flee, he kills her, suffering a total breakdown in the process. When Mac returns and discovers what has happened, Sidney flees towards the river. He and Corby argue about what to do, finally deciding that Mac will fire upon the outpost from the river, drawing away the infantry while Corby and Fletcher attack the outpost itself and take out the general, who is obsessed with fatalistic thoughts of his own…

The script, by the playwright Howard Sackler—a high-school classmate of Kubrick’s who’d later win a Pulitzer for The Great White Hope—is full of the kind of portentous, quasi-philosophical dialogue you’d expect from a first feature:

• “Cold stew on a blazing island. We’ve just made a perfect definition of war, Mac.”
• “It’s better to roll up your life into one night and one man and one gun.”
• “We spend our lives running our fingers down the lists in directories, looking for our real names, our permanent addresses. No man is an island? Perhaps that was true a long time ago, before the Ice Age. The glaciers have melted away, and now we’re all islands—parts of a world made of islands only…”

Though there’s an effort to get some serious themes across, like the corrosive effect of war on the human spirit, the toxicity of unrestrained lust, and the fact that whichever side of a war we’re on, we’re all human, the film is too overwrought and simplistic to provoke many thoughts. Sidney’s descent into madness is simply too absurd to be believed, and the bits of military strategy on display—“Once you understand how a mousetrap works, if you’re clever enough, you can use it as a springboard”—betray how neither Sackler nor Kubrick had any military experience.

The actors do their best to get the material across, but the results are mixed. Harp isn’t entirely convincing, especially not as the energy general, for whom he affects a vaguely German accent, but I can appreciate what he was trying to do, and he has the right kind of bland handsomeness. Mazursky hams it up pretty badly, but his talents really lay in writing and directing, and he would eventually establish himself in both fields. Silvera probably gives the best performance; he’s properly gruff and cynical, but with a tragic undercurrent of Mac’s wanting to do one really meaningful thing in his life. Colt is forgettable and Leith mostly just gets to look pretty.

What makes the film work when it does work is Kubrick’s direction, and especially his cinematography. Already an established photographer, his command of lighting and composition is impressive, especially as the film progresses, and if the occasional shot feels show-offy (the girl’s death scene, for one), on the whole it looks pretty damned good for what was essentially a student film. There are also some early hints of his ability to craft unsettling scenarios; the scene between Sidney and the girl, though marred by the writing and acting, does have a psychosexual tension (and some unnerving closeups) which heralds scenes in his later, greater films.

Those later films are as essential as any films ever made, while Fear and Desire is mainly for serious and patient/forgiving students of cinema. But given that, it’s a sight better than many have given it credit for—least of all its director.

Score: 64

That’s Entertainment! (1974) – ***½

Is there a place for a film like That’s Entertainment! in this day and age? Before the advent of home video, there certainly was; it allowed viewers to see many of the highlights of MGM’s musical legacy without having to see the individual films, some of which are no better remembered now (anyone watched Two Weeks with Love lately?) than in 1974, when this proved to be a huge hit for a studio which was once the biggest in Hollywood but was now a shadow of its former self—and it would never fully recover, making the opening credit “Beginning our next 50 years…” more than a little optimistic. (MGM does still exist, but in a considerably diminished form.)

As it is, there’s an element of nostalgia in watching this nostalgic reminiscence—and as I write this, I’m watching an extra on the Blu-Ray, a TV special created for the film’s gala premiere (hosted by George and Alana Hamilton!), itself an artifact of a bygone era. And there’s considerable sentimental value in seeing, in the film and at the premiere, MGM’s old stars coming together in a kind of class reunion to sing each other’s praises and talk about the times they had on the MGM lot…which we see in rather ragged condition, as much of it was in the process of being demolished. The film’s trailer even proclaims that this kind of celebration “will never happen again.” Maybe not to the same degree, but the success of this film guaranteed two official sequels and the spiritual sequel That’s Dancing! (Hollywood may be sentimental, but it’s also shrewd.)

But the question stands: do we need That’s Entertainment! now, now that we can see many of the films excerpted here in full? Obviously, there’s no excuse not to see The Wizard of Oz, Singin’ in the Rain, The Band Wagon, or Meet Me in St. Louis in full, and Best Picture winners like The Broadway Melody, The Great Ziegfeld, An American in Paris, and Gigi all merit at least one viewing for serious film buffs. (It’s bizarre that the climactic ballet of American is praised as “MGM’s masterpiece,” but is then shown only in truncated form.) The excerpts shown are a useful taste of what they have to offer, but no more. And even a casual musical fan should see Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, On the Town, The Pirate, and Show Boat (though some would argue the 1936 version is more essential than MGM’s version).

But then you’ve got the other films excerpted, films like Rosalie, Thousands Cheer, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, Words and Music, Three Little Words, A Date with Judy, Born to Dance, Babes on Broadway, Ziegfeld Girl, Bathing Beauty, Pagan Love Song, Million Dollar Mermaid, The Toast of New Orleans, Small Town Girl, and Hit the Deck. Maybe the devoted musical buff will insist on seeing them, but how many generic plots (which the film itself lampshades) do you need to sit through to get to see a good number or two? That’s the value of a film like That’s Entertainment!: it winnows out the glories of these otherwise forgettable films to give us an idea of the depth of MGM’s musical heritage—even the films depicted have plenty of other numbers, and there are plenty of films that didn’t make the cut.

Make no mistake, there are some rather dazzling numbers here, from Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell’s tap routine to “Begin the Beguine” from Broadway Melody of 1940, “I Gotta Hear That Beat” from Small Town Girl, with Ann Miller tapping amidst an abstract sea of a trunkless arms playing musical instruments, “Honeysuckle Rose” from Thousands Cheer, with Lena Horne getting one of her rare showcases from a studio that recognized her talent but didn’t challenge the prejudices of the era enough to let her make the most of them, and Astaire in Royal Wedding, dancing with a hatrack (in “Sunday Jumps”) and on the walls and ceiling of his room (in “You’re All the World to Me”). And there are some fascinating examples of how cinematography and production design can enhance a musical number, like an Esther Williams number (I’m not sure which) with performers on trapezes emerging from clouds of red smoke, diving en masse into an enormous pool.

It’s a fine anthology, and ample credit is due to editor Bud Friedgen and his team for blending the numbers together, if not always seamlessly then pretty damned well. The scenes in between the clips are more of a mixed bag, however. Some of the stars seem ill at ease wandering around the lot and reminiscing; Frank Sinatra in particular seems to be reading off cue cards, while others seem as graceful as ever, like Debbie Reynolds, and Donald O’Connor. Exactly how much of the narration was scripted and who by is unknown, and there’s only a smattering of real information leavened with a lot of gushing praise for the stars, the films, and the MGM that is no more. Not that I expect or even want dirt from such an overtly celebratory enterprise, but it might’ve helped to have an overarching, authoritative voice to provide some unity and hard facts amidst the nostalgia. So it’s hard to call it a great film, especially now, but with the studio system an ever more distant memory, and its stars distant memories themselves, there’s a certain comfort in looking back at looking back, a sweetly absurd feedback loop that’ll swallow you up if you’re not careful.

Score: 81

Red Desert/Il Deserto Rosso (1964) – ****

This was my first Antonioni film; maybe it was an odd choice to go with this instead of L’Avventura or Blow-Up, but this obviously impressed me enough to ensure that I’ll check those out in due time. I actually wasn’t sure what my rating would be until late in the film, but as it became clear what the film’s real theme is—which Antonioni himself explained, but it’s better to discover it for oneself—and how resonant and relatable the protagonist’s spiritual struggle is, it became clear that this was, without doubt, a great film. It’s greater for its exquisitely composed images, fascinating sound design, and leading performance than for its writing or other performances, but they don’t hold it back too much either, especially given what that real theme is.

In an industralized area of northeastern Italy, Giuliana (Monica Vitti) lives with her husband Ugo (Carlo Chionetti), a factory manager, and their young son Valerio (Valerio Bartoleschi). Giuliana has recently spent time in a hospital after a car accident which rattled her nerves, which Ugo explains to his colleague Corrado Zeller (Richard Harris). Corrado befriends Giuliana, who seems to be struggling emotionally; she wants to open a shop, an ambition Ugo doesn’t support, and she admits that she doesn’t know what she actually wants to sell. She accompanies Corrado on a business excursion and tells him about a girl she met in the hospital who felt like she was “sinking” and totally alone in the world—“but she’s all better now.”

As time passes, Giuliana’s spiritual crisis grows, and her behavior is often troubling, including what might be an attempt at driving her car into the sea. Valerio suffers from an undetermined illness which resolves as suddenly as it develops, which causes her much distress (“He doesn’t need me. It’s me who needs him”). She has a liaison with Corrado, but it does nothing to fill the hole in her spirit. Eventually, she seems to pull herself together enough to keep going, but is she really happy, or is she just able to repress her eccentricities? The key line in the film might be what Giuliana says to Corrado after their assignation: “There’s something terrible about reality and i don’t know what it is. No one will tell me.”

For much of the film, you might think her desolation/isolation is rooted in her class status; the film opens with a strike at the factory where Ugo works (by the men who work for him), and she is shown not to have a job, with the shop she wants to open possibly being a way of keeping herself busy. We also have a scene where she, Ugo, Corrado, and some friends of theirs hang out in a shack, drinking, eating supposedly aphrodisiac quail eggs, huddling together in the shack’s ersatz bedroom, and breaking up the walls of said room to feed the fire—this after we learn that the shack has been sold to one of the friends’ employees. But this is not just another skewering of the bourgeoisie.

Nor is it simply a lamentation of industrialization, as Antonioni himself explained, though you could certainly see it as one. The world in which Giuliana lives is certainly something of a hellscape, with factories that produce poisonous yellow smoke, ash heaps so devoid of color you’d swear the film had gone black-and-white, patches of fog and bursts of steam which suggest a battlefield, passing ships in the background which come so close to the buildings that the inhabitants could practically touch them, poisoned ponds turned yellow-green or a sickly silver-gray, and the constant sounds of one machine or other, often indistinguishable from the spare electronic score provided by Vittorio Gelmetti.

But as Antonioni himself stated, the film tries to find the strange beauty even in industrialization, and to show how some—namely, Giuliana—just can’t adapt to the life they’re living:

The line and curves of factories and their chimneys can be more beautiful than the outline of trees, which we are already too accustomed to seeing. It is a rich world, alive and serviceable…The neurosis I sought to describe in Red Desert is above all a matter of adjusting. There are people who do adapt, and others who can’t manage…

(Source)

Ugo isn’t the most empathetic husband, but nor is he the least; he, and many of the other characters in the film, simply can’t comprehend Giuliana’s detachment from her life and the distress it causes her. Corrado, who talks about his own feelings of restlessness, can at least comprehend it, but he’s found a way to live with it; Giuliana, for any number of reasons, cannot. Is it because she’s tied down by marriage and motherhood? Is it because she doesn’t have a passion to devote herself to? Is it because she has other emotional or psychiatric issues which aren’t being addressed? As is typical with Antonioni, the answer isn’t spelled out for us; the point is that we are moved to ponder it at all.

And ponder it we do, even as we drink in the brilliantly crafted images courtesy of Antonioni and cinematographer Carlo Di Palma. This was Antonioni’s first color film, and he uses color in fascinating ways, from the green coat Giuliana wears in the opening scene to the red walls in the shack to the way Corrado’s room turns pink after he and Giuliana have sex. But he also makes stunning use of composition, in how the enormous machines and buildings dwarf the characters, or how one scene, from Corrado’s perspective, has the camera pan to dwell on a bright blue stripe on a wall—suggesting perhaps that he fixates on minor details in the privacy of his own mind, the kind of quirk which Giuliana externalizes to the discomfort of others. And there’s some nifty use of soft focus throughout to amplify the sense of isolation and desolation.

But for all that alienation, Vitti’s performance anchors the film emotionally. Her mannerisms never come off as showy or forced, but as a very realistic depiction of someone who is profoundly uncomfortable in their own skin. Even when Giuliana is doing comparatively well, Vitti is able to suggest a kind of detachment—in the most literal sense, not in the sense that she is indifferent—doing her best to relate to Ugo, to Valerio, to Corrado, but never quite syncing up with them. In the opening scene, Giuliana goes up to a striking worker and offers to buy the sandwich he’s eating. He sells it, bemusedly, and she goes off, practically hiding behind a bush, to eat it. Why does she do this? Who knows, but looking back on it from the other end of the film, it fits with the character we come to know over the following two hours. It’s an excellent performance on her part.

Harris is okay; he’s dubbed, however, and we miss his great voice. Everyone else is adequate, but perhaps by design their characters aren’t as vividly depicted as Vitti’s; we don’t explore the facets of their characters because they are at peace with themselves and don’t explore their own natures, while Giuliana is constantly trying to determine who she is. The other characters are really a part of the setting, like the intriguing sets, the strange sounds (the sound design is really superb), and the imagery. And I should mention some of the strange, almost surreal touches throughout, like Valerio’s toy robot, running of its own accord in the middle of the night. No wonder Giuliana has trouble sleeping.

I suggested elsewhere that Red Desert could be seen as a kind of halfway point between Playtime and A Woman Under the Influence. Cutesy comparisons aside (and the fact that this film predates the other two), it’s a film which can be profitably approached in several ways, but which ultimately comes down to the struggle of one human spirit, who may well have struggled just as desperately in any other place or time. It comes down to the old question of nature and nurture, of environment and character, and the balance we must strike to survive in this world. It comes easily to most—but Heaven help the rest of us.

Score: 88