Reviews

"The Red and the White" is not a conventional war movie; it moves at a continuous ceremonious pace, like the melody of a slow march. It creates an atmosphere where time seems suspended, and the situation, for all its violence, changeless; one side gains a victory and captures the other's position, then they in turn are captured, and then the balance shifts back again... There is continual motion, also, as the fighters move to and fro through great spacious natural landscapes, shot in sweeping black-and-white Cinemascope; the feeling for space is the most impressive feature of the movie (I'm sorry to say that this effect only comes through well on the large screen). The abstraction is enhanced by a total lack of "ordinary" conversation, which is usually intended to give the audience a sense of knowing the characters better, even if those characters are totally stereotyped. Here, however, there must be only half-a-dozen lines spoken which are not orders. It's hard to explain why all this should not be highly boring; I guess either you are fascinated by it, or you aren't.

As to the charge of being nothing but propaganda: certainly the Whites are presented in a much more unfavorable light than the Reds; but I don't think we Americans can plead innocent to the charge of demonizing the enemy in war movies. The scenes of atrocities committed by the Whites don't break the tone of the movie, since they are shot in the same calm manner as the rest, and there is no overacting. Most of all, there are no explicit lessons stated, a sure sign of propaganda. If you think this movie is propaganda, you've seen nothing yet; try one of the many Communist-backed films that really are heavy-handed and preachy, like, for example, the East German "Fünf Patronenhülsen", set during the Spanish Civil War.

The first two-thirds of this film are great; as a young and spectacular Barbara Stanwyck sleeps her way to the top, the film moves along with wit and a zippy pace. But then, alas, it returns to conventionality with a thud.

Basically, the point of this movie is that everyone worships Marianne Sagebrecht, both the director and her fans. She's got enough charisma and personality to carry the movie on her own. Otherwise, all it's got is a thin plot with some very funny scenes; the direction inclines to pointlessly flashy camerawork. But who cares about inessentials?

To a modern viewer, the acting comes off as ridiculously mannered; the sentimentality is cloying, and, when I saw it, the film drew several unintended laughs from the audience by pointing out an anti-Communist moral to the French Revolution! However, it's worth seeing simply for the lavish visual style; many shots are composed as beautifully as paintings.

In this country, Lucky Luciano is one of those 20s legends who have so often been glamorized in movies; we tend to be fascinated by such characters, and although films tend to either explicitly condemn them or show them coming to bad ends, they are among the most infallibly popular Hollywood staples. We also would concentrate on Luciano's years in America, which could be a familiar plot of the rise and fall of a gang boss. But Rosi's film begins with him leaving this country; it relates the long career that he had in Italy, in the drug trade, a time that Americans know little of -- it doesn't form part of the legend. Most of all, Rosi deliberately downplays the glamor. The drug trade is big business, and this middle-aged Luciano is a very solid businessman; the director (and the actor) have undercut the expected charisma. The efforts of police and government against him are portrayed as "factually" as possible (which makes aspects of their discussions rather unintelligible to Americans). Of course, all these things will make the movie seem rather boring to many viewers here! If you're looking for gangster thrills, go elsewhere; this is a movie of ideas, a critique directed at Italy in particular.

A lightweight, intermittently appealing movie of more than dubious sexual attitudes (are we supposed to think that Martina's prostitution -- for that's what it adds up to -- is charming just because the clients are weird? And their fetishes are not so terribly original.) However, there are some extremely funny moments. The dubbing of the blue movie is not to be missed.

I wish people wouldn't keep on praising this movie's effects, because, as anyone who's ever gritted their teeth at the thought of yet another summer sci-fi blockbuster knows, all the spectacular effects in the world add up to nothing without a meaningful story, individualized characters, and some wit -- all of which "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" does have, which will probably ensure that people will still be watching it when new technological advances have made its tricks as obsolete as "King Kong"'s. One of the movie's greatest achievements is its meticulous and loving creation of an alternate world, a dream-L.A. that never existed but in some ways is better than the real thing, an homage to the imagination of old popular culture. It also slips in some criticism of domination by big corporations (an odd thing for a movie coming out of the studio system), by contrasting, in the viewer's mind, the L.A. of the movie world with that of today, which is precisely what Cloverleaf Industries wants to create. Indeed, the corruption associated with the building of the freeways was a real event in the 1940's, so the fantastical elements gain immediacy by not utterly straying from reality, just as the toons seem solid by interacting with humans.

Boy, what a vision of our society Hitchcock had... he never tired of reminding us that "normality" was a lot more twisted than we liked to pretend.

After seeing the roles that Georges Clouzot had his wife Vera play here and in "The Wages of Fear", where her downtrodden character is painfully abused and exploited in just about every scene she's in, I have to wonder just what their home relationship was like. I don't know what she played in GC's "Les Espions", but she doesn't seem to have worked with any other director. There is a very real sadism to "Les Diaboliques"; the merciless twisting of the screws is shown head on, without respite, which makes watching it riveting, but also apalling.

The sequel is slicker, but not noticeably smarter than the original. At least Cameron found a co-screenwriter who writes slightly less torturing dialogue than the first one; that's a relief. And I can't deny that the ending provides an emotional high.

The bizarre mix of sentimentality and brutality is even more evident than in Part 1. The one interesting idea is Hamilton's supposed conversion to non-violence, but this, like every other idea in the movie, is not thought through to its consequences. Indeed, there is a wholehearted enjoyment of explosive, slamming special effects which flatly contradicts this claim of turning away from violence, and makes the insistence that no humans be hurt seem, if not hypocritical, at least delusional. Certainly this movie will not prevent its many fans from gleefully watching other action films where humans are blown apart and chopped to pieces.

Probably the scariest aspect of the whole movie is that Terminator 2 is actually one of the best action blockbusters of the last couple of decades.

The aimless protagonist is an all too believable character, and therefore there is considerable empathy for him, even when his behavior is not justifiable. This film really gave me something to think about; how many people would do better than Kenji if given 24 hours to put their life in order? In traditional Hollywood, everything would miraculously work out fine, but of course Wonsuk Chin knows better than that. This is a case where I think a bitter flavor is better than sweetness. Not all of the loosely-linked scenes work, and Sorvino can grate at times, but on the whole the movie is very much worth seeing. The opening is wonderful.

I saw this film when I was in Germany in '92. Naturally, I didn't get a lot of the jokes, but to judge from the way the audience was laughing, it really struck a chord with them. However, there were many parts of the movie which even for me were very funny, indeed. I suspect that the less familiar American viewers are with German culture and recent history, the less they will appreciate this movie (which has hardly made a ripple here, not surprisingly).

This film is a long way from sophistication. But it has a lot of sincerity, expressed with a directness that gets through to me, although I don't know very much about Senegalese film. It can't be compared with the subtle work of the great Ousmane Sembene, but it has its own virtues. One of its stories, the fate of a warrior resisting colonialism, is truly involving.

What could be a very average, although well-made and fast paced, gangster story is made memorable by an unsettling oddness, a cockeyed take on the pervasive violence of its setting. Yes, it's highly implausible, but that's appropriate to the slightly surreal overtones.

"Gun Crazy" is a lot more sophisticated than it seems at first viewing. Sure, the dialogue is often clunky, and John Dall's acting is decidedly stiff; but you can forget these things once you begin to notice the subtleties of the direction, which can depict a robbery or chase with clarity and suspense, make a location like the lonely snowbound shack where the lovers hide out clearly individual, or underline the dynamics of their relationship. Later takes on the lovers-on-the-run genre have added more and more violence without ever improving on this one. Peggy Cummins is unforgettable as Annie Laurie Starr; she becomes the focus of the energy of the film.

If only this remarkable movie hadn't had the misfortune to be released just when the enthusiasm for sound was sweeping all before it, it would probably have been more appreciated at the time and remembered today as one of the all-time classics. As an expression of the isolation of city life, it builds up an atmosphere of desperation, in spite of its romance with a happy ending. The scene where the boy searches frantically for the girl throughout crowded Coney Island, buffeted this way and that by the uncaring throngs, turned away by the indifferent faces of the amusement park workers, has few equals for anguish. Also unforgettable is the montage that cuts from one to the other of the lovers (who have not yet met) while they are at work, the one at a factory, the other at a telephone switchboard; the motions of the hands and the machines build to a frantic, overwhelming pace.

Unfortunately, before the movie was released it was sadly mangled by the insertion of several sound sequences, which stop the continuity dead with their absolute stasis, and feature dialogue so thunderously inane you have to suspect it was written by the sound technician. Nonetheless, "Lonesome" remains one of the most sophisticated examples of the silent movie, an art form that was killed by sound almost as soon as it had reached maturity.

This very strange movie is unlike anything made in the west at the time. With its tumultuous emotions and net of visions, dreams, and startling images, its effect is both beautiful and unsettling. The actors are choreographed more like dance than acting. It contains the only dream sequence I know of that actually resembles a real nightmare (sorry, Dali fans).

I'm sorry, but the audience who rejected this movie in 1923 were right: Mary Pickford just can't play it sexy. Neither is she convincing as a fiery ridiculer of authority. Her usual childlike impishness is sorely out of place here; when the king lusts after her, you have to suspect him of child molesting tendencies. However, the movie does have its funny moments, in a very Lubitsch way; the amusing efforts of the king to avoid the monogamous-minded queen make up for some deficiencies.

Robert Wiene repeats the techniques he used in "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" with far less success in "Genuine". His looming architectures and broad swaths of darkness are glaringly at odds with the utterly ridiculous story of the seductress-priestess-wild girl brought to unsuspecting Europe. There are some striking visual effects, such as the jungle of branches where Genuine climbs up and up to escape from her prison, but they don't add up to anything. (I should note that only fragments, adding up to about a half hour, survive of this movie; but I suspect that the parts I didn't see wouldn't have added any deeper meaning.)

A mess of nauseating sentimentality which does not even succeed in being funny, this story of a woman who makes a deal with Death, trading ten years of her own life for the survival of her son, is too much awash in candy-colored cheesiness to wring any tears from its most outrageous plays for pathos.

Taking a low-key approach to events that are only earth-shaking to the people involved, Asseyas has made something beautiful and moving from the lives of teenagers not that different from everyone else. The inevitable tragedy plays out with complete naturalness. And the entire sequence of the party at the empty house, rhythmed by the music, is breathtaking.

"The Black Cannon Incident" is a very cautious attempt at political satire; while it extracts a few laughs from the spiraling misunderstandings caused by a mysterious telegram sent by a technical translator, there is also an awful lot of tedium, at least for this Western viewer.

A personal favorite of mine, perhaps because it works up such a fine pitch of rebelliousness; also because there are several characters you can care about. I sometimes find myself regretting that nowadays it's a lot harder to get yourself kicked out of school!

It's good to know I'm not the only person in America who thinks "The Raiders of the Lost Ark" is stupid and offensive. With its villains designed only as punching bags (they are human, none the less...), its heroine intended to be ogled and scream at the right moments, and its pseudo-religious claptrap, all the praise it's gotten says something very disturbing about large numbers of people.

This is one of the most typical examples of the genre known as "Heimatfilme" (homeland films), and immensely popular in its day. It is characterized by an intense nostalgia and an almost complete denial of the realities of life after the war, although it is mentioned that some of the main characters are refugees from eastern German lands (as were a significant portion of the film's appreciative audience) and there is some joking about servants who don't stay in their place! The plot is a collation of almost all the cliches of the genre, from the comic romances to the villainous thief who must be brought to justice by the hero (in such stories, for some reason, it is almost always a poacher captured by a forester). The setting is a sunny countryside where a couple of lovable vagabonds provide musical interludes, singing the title song "Grun ist die Heide" while strumming the musical instruments that they carry around from village to village, sleeping in the fields like true sons of nature (no mention of what they do in the wintertime). In short, this movie is extremely interesting as a glimpse of the mentality of its times, but for no other reason.