Film Ignorance #31: City Lights

Film: City Lights
Rating: Yep, It's a Classic
Director: Charlie Chaplin
Stars: Charlie Chaplin, other, less important people
Year: 1931
Reason for Ignorance: Saw clips in film class, never finished it
Ignorance Rating*: Pending

The American Film Institute just named City Lights the greatest romantic comedy of all time. I'm pretty sure that's a mistake for two reasons. First of all, it's nowhere near as good as the best screwball comedies of the 30s and 40s. It also doesn't stack up well against Woody Allen's best romantic comedies of the 70s and 80s.

My second objection is that it's just not a romantic comedy. Granted, I'm the very last person to police categories and genres. But this movie is in fact two intertwined tales. One of them is a classic, tragic romance involving Chaplin's Little Tramp and a blind flower girl who thinks he's a rich suitor. The other story is a slapstick comedy involving the Little Tramp and a suicidal millionaire who considers Charlie his best friend while drunk, then kicks the tramp out on the street every time he sobers up.

Although these two stories do end up intersecting at the end of the film, they're completely separate for the majority of the movie. In other words, this can't be a romantic comedy, because the comedy isn't romantic, and the romance is tragic. It's a comedy and a romance, side by side.

And it is a very funny comedy and a very sad romance. The suicidal millionaire who constantly befriends and then disowns Chaplin leads to a number of very funny moments, particularly whenever the Tramp has to prevent his suicide attempts. And the romance between the Tramp, who pretends to be a rich man, and the blind flower girl is quite moving.


Although I liked this movie a lot, I think it's pretty overrated; it's certainly not one of the greatest films ever made, and doesn't even stack up to a more sophisticated Chaplin film like Modern Times. And I can identify why it's received such critical acclaim: the final shot. The final shot of City Lights is one of five or ten most famous closeups in the entire history of cinema. Film luminaries from Fellini to Woody Allen to P.T. Anderson have closed some of their best movies with an homage to that shot. Without it, this is just an excellent Chaplin movie; with it, this "comedy romance in pantomime" has become a cinematic standard.

Bonus Game: What closeups can you think of that are as famous or more famous than this one? I think the "more famous" category is probably empty. But possibly as famous:

1.Gloria Swanson's "I'm ready for my closeup" closeup in Sunset Boulevard

2.Orson Welles is introduced in The Third Man

3.John Wayne is horrified by captive white women in The Searchers (I would also accept: John Wayne is introduced in Stagecoach)

Film Ignorance #30: To Be or Not to Be

Film: To Be or Not to Be
Rating: Yep, It's a Classic
Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Stars: Jack Benny, Carole Lombard, Robert Stack
Year: 1942
Reason for Ignorance: Never heard of it
Ignorance Rating*: Pending

Based on this and Ninotchka, I believe I understood the Ernst Lubitsch formula: take a serious subject with world historical implications, in which many people have or will die, and then turn it into a ludicrous comedy. In Ninotchka, Soviet famine and the threat of Stalinist liquidation became the subject for a sophisticated, ingenuous romantic comedy. In To Be or Not to Be, Germany's occupation of Poland, the Polish resistance, and the threat of concentration camps are the basis of an absurd and very, very funny farce.

The star of To Be or Not to Be is Jack Benny, a radio comedian who would occasionally do movies. He is not a suave or sophisticated comic player along the lines of Grant, nor does he offer the rugged charms of Gable, or the folksiness of Stewart. He is a radio comedian, at least one brow lower than all of those that I just mentioned, but very, very funny. Think Bob Hope, and you'll be in the right ballpark.

After seeing the ultra-sophisticated Ninotchka, I wasn't quite expecting slapstick farce of To Be or Not to Be. But it's damn funny. Benny and Lombard are a husband and wife team starring in Hamlet in pre-war Poland. Lombard doesn't take her vows too seriously, so she starts romancing a young Air Force flyer (Robert Stack, in a pre-Unsolved Mysteries role). Stack gets up for a little rendezvous with Lombard every time Benny starts hamming his way through "To be or not to be." This enrages Benny, but World War II breaks out and there's nothing to be done about it.

After the war, Benny, Lombard, and Stack get involved again, both romantically and in a plot to murder double agent Professor Siletsky before he can meet with the German commander, Col. "Concentration Camp" Ehrhart. From there, the movie throws every gag imaginable at you, and most of them work. An actor playing Hitler says "Heil myself." Benny does a bad, hammy impression of Ehrhardt for Siletsky, then gives Siletsky the same treatment for Ehrhardt. Lombard also has to seduce them both, and keeps getting caught in sticky situations. And over and over again, no matter who he's impersonating, Benny asks everyone if they've heard of him. The running joke is that no one has ever heard of him, but finally Ehrhardt has head of him, and dismisses him as a ham.

This is really a movie that shouldn't have worked. For starters, it's an absurd farce about the Polish resistance trying to assassinate a Nazi double agent; form and content started off at odds with one another. Benny can't really act, and was clearly just a radio ham doing ridiculous impersonations on screen. But the role (like all of those Woody Allen writes for himself) takes advantage of the fact that the comedian has zero range, is a complete buffoon, but knows his way around a one-liner. By playing that thinly veiled version of himself/his showbiz persona, Benny makes this cockeyed creation seem sublime. Ninotchka it ain't, but there aren't many movies that are funnier.

*The "Ignorance Rating" is the percentage of people who voted "Yes" on the poll for this film. If ten people vote in the poll, and 5 of them have seen the movie, I give it an ignorance rating of 50. It's just a ballpark way for me to know how egregious my ignorance was in this case.

Film Ignorance #28: The Apartment

Film: The Apartment
Rating: Yep, It's a Classic
Director: Billy Wilder
Stars: Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray
Year: 1960
Reason for Ignorance: Never got around to it
Ignorance Rating*: Pending

Not only could Billy Wilder do no wrong, he could do no wrong in any genre he put his mind to. He was one of the greatest noir filmmakers of all time, and one of the greatest romantic comedy filmmakers of all time - one of the least comprehensible developments I can imagine. In all of Hollywood history, only Howard Hawks showed a greater ability to do more genres with such skill (Hawks films would be in my top 10 for the gangster, romantic comedy, screwball comedy, noir, and western genres, without ever having to use the same film twice).

So it is with some consternation that I tell you that The Apartment is brilliant, and I have no idea what genre it represents. It doesn't seem that romantic, it's certainly not very screwball, it's probably not a comedy at all, but I wouldn't want to call it a melodrama or just plain drama. What it really is is the premise for a crappy sitcom that's been turned into a damn fine movie.

C.C. Baxter (Lemmon) is a young corporate insurance employee. He's a good worker, but surrounded by thousands of other good workers, so his future wouldn't be bright - except for the fact that he's got an inside track on promotion. He keeps his apartment furnished with cheese crackers and liquor, and allows four of the company's executives to use it whenever one of them wishes to spend a little time with his girlfriend before going home to his wife. This means that Baxter gets great recommendations to the company's top HR guy.

Unfortunately, the HR guy Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) knows something is up, and will only give Baxter the promotion if he gets a piece of the apartment action. That's fine with Baxter, who finally gets up the nerve to ask out the object of his desire, the elevator girl Ms. Kubelik (MacLaine). She says yes, but eventually can't make it, because she winds up, you guessed it, at Baxter's apartment with Sheldrake.

That's the sitcom element here, but the dramatic irony isn't pitched for dumb laughs. It's actually heartwrenching stuff; the lovable Baxter pines after the unobtainable Ms. Kubelik, while the vulnerable Ms. Kubelik carries on a thankless affair with Sheldrake, who promises to divorce his wife and marry her in one of the least plausible lies ever. From there, the plot twists and turns; I won't spoil the fun, but Wilder's gift for dialogue and plotting is on full display.

Each of the the actors fits snugly into their role, as if they were meant to play them. Lemmon, a Wilder favorite, is charming in his classic persona: an affable, nervous fellow, a sort of low-key pre-Woody Allen, who overthinks things, lets himself get walked on, but through it all produces a string of pretty funny jokes. And MacMurray, another Wilder favorite, brings his full charm to exactly the sort of smarmy, so charming that he must be insincere role that Pierce Brosnan currently specializes in. Brosnan is great, but MacMurray is the all-time king; amidst the career deterioration that included Flubber, Son of Flubber, The Shaggy Dog, and My Three Sons, this movie stands out as a triumph.

But this is Shirley MacLaine's movie. I'm not sure I've ever seen an actress so at home with herself. Ms. Kubelik is an acting challenge: to most of the company she's the unobtainable ice queen, to Baxter she's a charming and almost obtainable girl next door, and for Sheldrake she's an emotional wreck, strung along by a career player because she's talked herself into believing in him. MacLaine embodies all of these aspects of this complex woman; she's both achingly available and achingly unobtainable. In her elevator outfit she's a forbidden treat ogled by the entire company, with Sheldrake she's a vulnerable woman, but with Baxter she's just herself. She comes to life when asked to do the least - to just sit, and talk, and be with him. The whole movie, in fact, could be described that way: it confounds genres and offers a complex resolution because, for all its high concept premise, it's about real people trying to make their way through the world, through love. There are relatively few movies that can say the same.


*The "Ignorance Rating" is the percentage of people who voted "Yes" on the poll for this film. If ten people vote in the poll, and 5 of them have seen the movie, I give it an ignorance rating of 50. It's just a ballpark way for me to know how egregious my ignorance was in this case.

Film Ignorance #27: 12 Angry Men

Film: 12 Angry Men
Rating: Yep, It's a Classic
Director: Sydney Lumet
Stars: Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, Ed Begley
Year: 1957
Reason for Ignorance: Never got around to it
Ignorance Rating*: Pending
"I don't really know what the truth is. I don't suppose anyone will ever really know."

Although 12 Angry Men was made in the 50s, it never feels like a 50s movie. Sure, the star power is there; Henry Fonda had been one of the biggest stars in Hollywood since the 30s. And the look is right; the crisp black and white cinematography and the abundant closeups fit right in with the movies of the age. But this movie, directed by the very young Sydney Lumet, feels if anything even more progressive in its politics than something like In the Heat of the Night. And it's setup is by 50s standards practically avant-garde: the movie plays out in real time, confined almost entirely to one room, as 12 men try to work through the facts of a murder case and overcome their own prejudices to get to the truth. It's the setup for a play or TV movie (both of which it was first) but is filmed and acted so well that it seems experimental, not uncinematic.

The movie takes place during a vicious heat wave, as a Puerto Rican youth is accused of murder and 12 middle-class white men have to decide his fate. 11 of the men are adamant that the young man is guilty, several of them arguing that "you know how they are" and of course one of "them" committed the murder. Only Juror #10, Henry Fonda, has some reasonable doubt. As you probably know by now, the inimitable Mr. Fonda coaxes and wheedles the other 11, breaking down the prosecution's case, noting the defense attorney's indifference, and piece by piece dismantling his colleague's assumptions about the case and their prejudices. Some are receptive to this, some aren't, and violence is threatened more than once.

By emphasizing the notion of "reasonable doubt," this movie becomes more than just an endorsement of the American justice system and a diatribe against racism and closemindedness. 12 Angry Men is also meditation on truth and uncertainty. Fonda reminds the jurors over and over again that none of them know what happened, that all they can do is approximate the truth, and that what matters is not proving guilt or innocence but knowing the limits of truth.

The film thus becomes a fantasy, in which the dangerous prospect of nihilism is harnessed by the American legal system to ensure justice is done. It's hard to know whether the jury's reasoning and their definition of reasonable doubt would allow any murderer to be convicted. But for me at least, it's a worthy fantasy: a reminder that, in a country that retains the death penalty, convicting someone of Murder One is an irrevocable decision that will permanently end a life. No one can, or should, ever be certain enough to take human life, which I think is ultimately the message of this ultimate message picture. It's not about the young man being innocent, or about a nihilistic belief that we'll never be able to ascertain the truth about anything. It's that a justice system that is willing to take a life must do so knowing that the truth is provisional, and that any worthy human being would shy from such a prospect. As such, 12 Angry Men should be what it probably already is: one of the foundational documents of how our modern justice system should and can work.

*The "Ignorance Rating" is the percentage of people who voted "Yes" on the poll for this film. If ten people vote in the poll, and 5 of them have seen the movie, I give it an ignorance rating of 50. It's just a ballpark way for me to know how egregious my ignorance was in this case.

Film Ignorance #26: In the Heat of the Night

Film: In the Heat of the Night
Rating: Yep, It's a Classic
Director: Norman Jewison
Stars: Sydney Poitier, Rod Steiger
Year: 1967
Reason for Ignorance: Never got around to it
Ignorance Rating*: Pending

The setup for In the Heat of the Night is so simple as to be almost high concept. A rich white man is killed in a small Southern town, and the local fuckup cops pick up the only stranger they can find, a well-dressed black man waiting for a 4 am train. To the chagrin of the cops, the man they arrested is Virgil Tibbs, Philadelphia's #1 homicide detective. To the chagrin of both Tibbs and Bill Gillespie, the local redneck police chief, Virgil's Philadelphia police chief does more than confirm his identity: he offers Gillespie his top man for the week. The rich man's widow forces Gillispie to keep Virgil, and thus the most racially charged buddy cop movie ever made is born: Tibbs is stuck in a tiny racist town helping people he knows hate him, while Gillespie has to watch a man he believes to be racially inferior to him display a level of intelligence and competence that is far beyond his own.

This is first and foremost an actors movie, and both Poitier and Steiger shine. Poitier, Hollywood's first major black star, walks through this movie radiating an intense contempt for everyone he has to deal with: Gillespie, Gillespie's men, and all the locals. But it was Steiger who won the Academy Award, and he deserved it. Best known for this movie and as Brando's brother in On the Waterfront, Steiger was always a second fiddle. And Gillespie is possibly his finest hour: an overweight, underpaid small town police captain who loathes Tibbs but must play his caddy and protector for political reasons. This is the flashy role, and Steiger delivers; his distaste for Tibbs and his shame at Tibbs' superiority are palpable in every scene. He has many of the movie's best lines, as he browbeats inferiors, screams ineffectually at Tibbs, and occasionally waxes folksy philosophical.

If you know anything about this movie, besides that it became a bad TV show, you probably know the famous line "They call me Mr. Tibbs." It's no good without the setup:
Gillespie, enraged and shamed, says to Virgil: "Virgil, that's a funny name for a nigger from Philadelphia. What do they call you up there?" Virgil puts him in his place, distilling all of Poitier's gravitas in a single line to remind Gillespie which one of them does actual police work: "They call me Mr. Tibbs."

Norman Jewison was nominated for best director for this movie, but he didn't win, which makes sense. Although he brought all the elements together for this crackling battle of wills, the strengths here are the performances and the screenplay, and the camera work and editing are both sometimes clumsy. Throw in a slightly overdone score, and this picture is far from perfect. But it succeeds in a lot of ways, as both a whodunit and as a message picture, and Poitier and Steiger have a level of chemistry rarely seen in any movie.

It's also a very compelling portrait of a steamy, racist Mississippi town, which is surprising: the movie was actually shot in Illinois. Although they were making a message movie, the filmmakers weren't about to risk Poitier's life by asking him to spend an extended period of time in 1967 Mississippi. Damn.

*The "Ignorance Rating" is the percentage of people who voted "Yes" on the poll for this film. If ten people vote in the poll, and 5 of them have seen the movie, I give it an ignorance rating of 50. It's just a ballpark way for me to know how egregious my ignorance was in this case.

Film Ignorance #22: L'Avventura

Film: L'Avventura
Rating: Yep, It's a Classic
Director: Michaelangelo Antonioni
Stars: Gabriele Ferzetti, Lea Massari, Monica Vitt
Year: 1960
Reason for Ignorance: Didn't Like Blow-Up
Ignorance Rating*: Pending
“Why, why, why?”

When Antonioni passed away, I was confronted with the fact that I'd never seen any of his films, so I watched the one I had heard the most about: Blow-Up. But Blow-Up sucks. It's a crappy movie (pretentious, draggy, pointless) which, like Ben-Hur or The Red Shoes, is built around an amazing sequence, in this case a photographer enlarging a seemingly innocent picture he took and discovering a potential murder plot. Needless to say, after feeling so contemptuous of Blow-Up, I didn't seek out anymore Antonioni.

But L'Avventura is an excellent film, maybe even the masterpiece it's cracked up to be. What's more, even though it's a 2.5 hour long plotless foreign art house film with aspirations of profundity, I actually enjoyed the experience. It's the story of Sandro and Claudia, who, along with Sandro's moody and unpredictable girlfriend Anna (who is Claudia's best friend) and a bunch of decadent elites, go for a summer boat trip. The group stops at one of a series of barren islands, Anna goes off on her own...and disappears. No one knows if its a prank, suicide, a kidnapping; she's just gone.

Film theorist David Bordwell argues that, although art cinema shares with Hollywood cinema an interest in "psychological causation," "the characters of the art cinema lack defined desires and goals." It's no surprise that L'Avventura is one of his examples. We don't know why Anna was so rude on the trip, why she seemed dissatisfied with Sandro, and why she ran away (as everyone suspects her of doing). We don't know why Sandro looks so hard for her, why Claudio and Sandro are so attracted to each other during their search, or why they feel so guilty about their attraction to one another, in the face of Anna's probable actions. We're wandering in a field of questions without answers, and can do more than follow along with the characters, observing their thoughts and feelings, unable to comprehend them, and unable to stop trying to comprehend.

And what a field it is we're wandering through! I said I enjoyed this movie - it's because of the gorgeous black-and-white photography. The first hour transforms the sea and its rocky islands into haunting and mysterious locations; they're so crisply barren that I myself wanted to jump off a cliff. And the rest of the movie is devoted to architecture; Claudia and Sandro (a failed architect) travel from small town to small town, and Antonioni manages to make the ancient architecture they find in small-town Italy seem even more desolate and lacking in humanity than uninhabited islands. The landscapes are what make this film, and what shape its characters; the bleakness of the settings are the closest thing we get to an answer to all the "whys?" we're asking. That, of course, and the total vacuousness of the society that Sandro and Anna traveled in: a preening, image-conscious, and self-obsessed collection of artistes and elites.

Through this wasteland of people and places, Sandro and Claudia try to find something worthwhile to hold on to. They eventually seek that worthwhile thing in each other. Although I've seen the entire film, I still don't know if they succeed.

Now that's art house.

*The "Ignorance Rating" is the percentage of people who voted "Yes" on the poll for this film. If ten people vote in the poll, and 5 of them have seen the movie, I give it an ignorance rating of 50. It's just a ballpark way for me to know how egregious my ignorance was in this case.

Film Ignorance #20: The Red Shoes

Film: The Red Shoes
Rating: Yep, It's a Classic
Director: Michael Powell (and Emil Pressburger)
Stars: Anton Walbrook, Marius Goring, Moira Shearer
Year: 1948
Reason for Ignorance: Waited to watch it with the Mrs.
Ignorance Rating*: Pending

Even though I rated this movie Yep, It's a Classic, The Red Shoes was a massive disappointment. It's considered by many to be the best film by The Archers, a mid-century team of Brits - director Michael Powell and writer Emil Pressburger - who are among the most acclaimed creators of all time. I'd seen only one Archers film, Black Narcissus, which was excellent, and a Powell solo film, Peeping Tom, which is like Psycho meets Rear Window, but better than either of those admittedly great films. (George Romero has said many times that another Archers film, The Tales of Hoffmann, is what inspired him to become a filmmaker.)

Which is why, by being merely a classic, The Red Shoes was disappointing. And that score is a composite, because the vast bulk of this picture is just a good movie - a standard midcentury melodrama about love and art. Two young people, Julian Craster and Victoria Page, unexpectedly gain employment with the world-renowned Lermontov Ballet company, Craster as a composer and Page as a dancer. Through a series of unexpected events, Craster becomes the composer for the new ballet, The Red Shoes, and Page is the star. Along the way, they fall in love, but eventually become involved in a tragic love triangle (the third element of the triangle being, of course, "Art").

I certainly want to lay the fault for this movie at the feet of Pressburger, the writer; the melodrama is so cliched, the characters so stereotypical, that the whole thing just seems by the numbers. But the acting is great - particularly Walbrook, as "heartless monster" Lermontov, and various supporting members of the ballet company. And Powell's direction is so good, his gorgeous Technicolor cinematography makes everything, from the outlandish costumes to Shearer's hair, glow like it's ablaze.

But that's not what makes it a classic. If Ben-Hur is a technically impressive but crappy movie built around an exciting chase scene, The Red Shoes is a technically impressive but only good movie built around the best dance sequence ever filmed. For about twenty minutes, right in the middle of the film, we watch the performance of the Red Shoes Ballet and are transported to a ballet that unites music and color unlike anything I've ever seen before. Even the best dance sequences in An American in Paris don't compare to The Red Shoes ballet. The ballet is touching and terrifying, and represents a triumph of spectacle which might still be unmatched in cinematic history.

For that reason alone, this movie is a classic. Otherwise, it's merely a pretty good story that indulges deeply in stock characters and a rather silly belief in a romanticized vision of art (ie, "Art"). I've got plenty more Archers movies on my list, so I hope the rest of them are more like Black Narcissus than The Red Shoes...

*The "Ignorance Rating" is the percentage of people who voted "Yes" on the poll for this film. If ten people vote in the poll, and 5 of them have seen the movie, I give it an ignorance rating of 50. It's just a ballpark way for me to know how egregious my ignorance was in this case.

Film Ignorance # 17: Strike

Film: Strike
Rating: Yep, It's a Classic
Director: Sergei Eisenstein
Stars: "The Actors of the Proletcult Theater" I'm not kidding, that's what they were billed as.
Year: 1925
Reason for Ignorance: Silent Soviet propaganda film...no thanks
Ignorance Rating: Pending

I was immediately blown away by this movie. Not since the first time I saw Breathless can I remember seeing a film which so forcefully announced itself as a cinematic masterpiece. In only the film's first minute, Eisenstein had already put together four incredible shots. First, there's a dissolve from a closeup of an evil capitalist to the scurrying workers providing his wealth and back again. Then a gorgeous crane shot of the enormous factory where much of the film is set (did they have cranes in 1925?). Then we watch some factory workers go about their business from behind a lighted screen, rendering them faceless silhouettes, part and parcel of the machinery of the factory. Finally, our first introduction to the strikers is shot as an upside down reflection from a puddle, so that we start by seeing the reflection of the factories smokestacks, then see the conspirators' feet appear upside down in the shot as they walk through the puddle, only to reappear rightside up in the reflection. And these are all in the first minute of the film, in Eisenstein's first feature film.

In other words, this dude wasn't fucking around. In case you don't know, Eisenstein was a Soviet film pioneer who more or less invented montage and used it to terrific effect. This movie is, like all of his others, a blatant ode to Soviet ideals. A strike at a large factory gets going when a loyal worker is falsely accused of theft. To prove his innocence, he commits suicide (another stunningly well shot scene, which cuts between the belt and footstool he uses before finally settling on his lifeless feet), and this galvanizes the factory to strike. The capitalist pigs in charge (who, with their fancy suits, top hats, and moustaches, look exactly like the capitalists in American films of the 30s and 40s) don't like the situation at all, and the shit hits the fan.

And boy does it hit the fan. Seriously, this is an insane movie. Babies are kicked, midgets dance on tables, boots are thrown at kittens, and toddlers are thrown off buildings. A team of hobo arsonists (led by a dwarf) are recruited out of the barrels they live in to burn down an apartment building that the strikers live in, and when the firemen arrive, they turn their hoses on the dispossesed people instead of the burning building. This last development is one of many that I couldn't figure out. This film was incredibly difficult to follow; the plot swings wildly from place to place, all the workers look pretty much alike (as do the spies in their midst), and I was generally clueless. But Eisenstein cuts so rapidly, so frequently, and so ostentatiously that I usually didn't have time to worry about it.

The weak link here is probably the worst acting I have ever seen on film. Somehow the workers manage to overact stoic defiance. But the capitalists...my god. There's hardly a single shot of a capitalist where he's not laughing with obvious evil, gasping with rage, or both. They laugh, they quiver, they gyrate, and they even jump up and down as evilly as they can manage. It would have been more subtle to simply dress them up with red horns and pitchforks that to led those particular proletcult players try to act "evil." It was absurd, over the top...and yeah, a lot of fun.

Which is a great way to describe this movie. It is propaganda of the most overt sort, with atrocities coming left and right far beyond believability, and acting to match. But it's also one of the most heavily stylized and forcefully edited movies I have ever seen. I can't promise you'll like it, but I can't imagine that you could ever be bored by it. This movie goes to 11!

Film Ignorance #16: Masculin/Feminin

Film: Masculin/Feminin
Rating: Yep, It's a Classic
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Stars: Jean-Pierre Leaud, Chantal Goya, various French people I've never heard of, and Brigitte Bardot for about two seconds
Year: 1966
Reason for Ignorance: Thought it was Truffaut
Ignorance Rating: 28 (7 votes)

Jean-Luc Godard viewed himself as more than a filmmaker; he believed he embodied the figure of the poet, the novelist, the painter, and perhaps above all the existential-political philosopher in the tradition of Sartre. You can instantly tell all of these things from his endless references to philosophy, to poetry, to painting. You can also tell, in Masculin/Feminin, when one of the title cards proclaims that the filmmaker and the philosopher have the same role.

Masculin/Feminin is more or less plotless. We see aimless Paul and his rising pop-singer girlfriend Madeline (played by 60s French pop star Chantal Goya) listlessly go through the motions of a relationship, surrounded by a few of Paul's friends and a seemingly endless series of incredibly pretty ex-coworkers of Madeline's. We watch these stylishly dressed hipsters go to bars, go to cafes, go to the cinema, ride the train, and do other, everyday stuff - and it's all, frankly, enrapturing. Because in addition to the pure and simple pleasure we get from watching these beautiful people in a beautiful city, we get to hear them talk.

Paul, Madeline, and their friends talk about everything. The "Masculin" side of the equation seems to be most interested in politics - Paul and his revolutionary friend bemoan de Gaulle, the Vietnamese War, the sad lack of interest in revolutionary politics. The "Feminins" make it quite clear that they don't care about politics, are squeamish about birth control, and prefer fashion and beauty above all things. This doesn't make them look particularly bad; Paul, after all, confronts the projectionist of a theater, passionately ordering him to stop showing a movie in 1.85 aspect ratio because it was decided that anything above 1.75 is excessive, and Godard points out several times that you can't spell "Masculin" without "Cul," which means "ass."

Speaking of: In his typically abrasive style, Godard points many things out to us in title-card asides and pronouncements. The most important one: this movie is about the children of Marx and Coca-Cola. It's about an exciting and turbulent time that was about to give birth to mass protests in both American and France; more to the point, it's about the collision of political values and cultural style, playing across the lives of a bunch of uncertain young people. Along the way, Godard makes his political and philosophical points - a man stabs himself for no reason, another sets himself on fire in a Vietnam protest - but if the film certainly is didactic, it never feels didactic. It feels, instead, like exactly what it is: overwhelmingly natural and free-form, flowing from scene to scene and conversation to conversation with no goal except the capturing of this fragmented moment in the city of Paris.

In the trailer for Masculin/Feminin, Godard tells us: "Minors under the age of 18 not admitted...because it is about them." It seems to me that, to this day, it's about us. If you haven't seen Masculin/Feminin, but you've ever watched a Wes Anderson movie, or read some Sartre or Camus, or tried to look European while smoking a cigarette, or worn a fashionable trenchcoat, I recommend you see it. It's a film about the hipsters of 40 years ago - and they look and talk exactly like the hipsters of 2008. Except, you know, in French.

Film Ignorance #14: Kiss Me Deadly

This post isn't technically a part of MovieZeal's Noir Month, but I thought I'd get all the noir I could into this month while my favorite blog was celebrating it. Head on over to Movie Zeal for another review of Kiss Me Deadly, and so much more noir.


Film: Kiss Me Deadly
Rating: Yep, It's a Classic
Director: Robert Aldrich
Stars: Ralph Meeker, Cloris Leachman
Year: 1955
Reason for Ignorance: Never heard of it
Ignorance Rating*: Pending
"They. A wonderful word. And who are they? They are the nameless ones who kill people for the great whatsit. Does it exist? Who cares."

Allmovie calls Kiss Me Deadly "the ultimate film noir." It's hard to disagree with them; the movie follows the perfect noir arc, as our private detective protagonist meets a dame, has the dame die on him, and then must travel through the underworld, acquiring contacts that die minutes after meeting him, in search of "the great whatsit." And our hero, Mike Hammer, walks a nice balance between classic noir heroes: he's half upright detective, half sadistic thug.

On the other hand, his name is "Mike Hammer." Get it? He's big and hard and hits people. Mickey Spillane is a well-regarded hard boiled writer (and Kiss Me Deadly is reportedly not terribly faithful to the source material), but he was certainly no Chandler, Cain, or Hammett. Kiss Me Deadly is the ultimate film noir because it takes every noir element - already a hyperbolic treatment of the standard pulp story - and ratchets it up even further. There's no subtlety, no confusion, and most of all none of the fascinating character development that makes the greatest noirs so compelling.

The only thing I'd seen Ralph Meeker in before Kiss Me Deadly was the Anthony Mann-Jimmy Stewart western The Naked Spur. I guess he specialized in dense sadists; his Naked Spur role was an amoral cavalry man discharged because he was psychologically unfit. Mike Hammer fits right in with that role; he looks and sounds bland, and is a somewhat improbable lady killer, but his eyes light up when he's asked to do physical violence to a human being (improbably, he never hits a lady. What kind of noir is this?). He also apparently likes blonds a great deal; his partner/secretary/girlfriend is absolutely gorgeous, a film fatale who works for him gathering information, and spends her spare time practicing her ballet moves. But like L.B. Jeffries of Rear Window, Mike doesn't seem to have much interest in "hammering" this gorgeous lady who's in love with him. Instead, like Hitchcock himself, he chases every single blond he comes across, including the damsel in distress who starts off the whole thing, her equally in distress roommate, and even the sister of one of the heavies who menaces him.

Even if you've never seen Kiss Me Deadly, the great whatsit will seem familiar when it finally appears on screen: it's a dangerous glowing box that shouldn't be opened. But if Kiss Me Deadly's MacGuffin appears in Pulp Fiction, Repo Man, and even Raiders of the Lost Ark, the movie is most similar to Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez's Sin City. The body count is massive, the violence is sadistic, and the misogyny is palpable. Mike is like a slightly subtler version of Marv; he doesn't seem to be brightest detective, but he finds out what he needs to know by slapping, punching, and, in one particularly sadistic moment, slamming the coroner's fingers in a desk drawer. Like Sin City, Kiss Me Deadly is larger than life noir. It goes on a bit too long, it's completely lacking in subtlety, and it's loaded with violence. But if you like noir, it does represent one of the ultimate experiences, especially if you enjoy it painted with a broad brush.

*The "Ignorance Rating" is the percentage of people who voted "Yes" on the poll for this film. If ten people vote in the poll, and 5 of them have seen the movie, I give it an ignorance rating of 50. It's just a ballpark way for me to know how egregious my ignorance was in this case.

Film Ignorance #13: In a Lonely Place

Ok, so it's a bit late in the day, but I've got another film ignorance entry for you on the same day that the same film is featured as part of Noir Month over at MovieZeal. Enjoy!

Film: In a Lonely Place
Rating: Yep, It's a Classic
Director: Nicholas Ray
Stars: Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame
Year: 1950
Reason for Ignorance: Never heard of it
Ignorance Rating*: Pending

Dix Steele (Bogart) is a hard case in a bad way. He's a hard-drinking screenwriter who hasn't had a hit for years. His only friends are a drunk Shakespearean who bums brandy off of him and his loyal agent. He's got a hair-trigger temper, a history of barfights, and is a rumored abuser of women. But he's not a murderer. Or is he?

Steele can't stand to read the trashy novel he's supposed to adapt, so he invites the hat check girl who read the book while holding it for him back to his place to tell him the story. He immediately loses interest in the crappy story, gives the girl cab fare, and sends her home. The next day, she turns up dead in a gorge. Steele's heartbroken:

The police captain: You're told that the girl you were with last night was found in Benedict Canyon, murdered. Dumped from a moving car. What's your reaction? Shock? Horror? Sympathy? No - just petulance at being questioned. A couple of feeble jokes. You puzzle me, Mr. Steele.
Steele: Well, I grant you, the jokes could've been better, but I don't see why the rest should worry you - that is, unless you plan to arrest me on lack of emotion.

Luckily for Steele, his neighbor provides him an alibi: she saw the girl leave. And after meeting each other at the police station, Dix and Laurel start to fall in love. With her, his passion is rekindled, his new script flourishes, and his violence seems restrained. But cracks appear at the edges, and as Laurel gets to know him better, and witnesses him nearly kill a man in a fit of road rage, she begins to question his innocence.

This is a shockingly difficult film to watch. There's no doubt in my mind that it's Bogey's darkest film and his darkest role. We legitimately don't know whether or not Dix is the killer. We can tell that he loves Laurel, and that she loves him, but although his violence and his drinking seem in check, her doubts are our doubts. At first I simply didn't believe the idea of Bogart as a murderer, but by the time we finally learn whether or not he killed the girl, I no longer had any such convictions. Either result seemed equally plausible; Dix was, particularly before meeting Laurel, a broken, violent, and unpredictable man.

Of course, by the time you learn the truth, it has largely ceased to matter. The film shifts from the noirish murder-mystery that it seems to be to an authentic, troubling love story. Dix and Laurel are two very different, equally vulnerable people. Laurel has a history of running out on men; Dix has a history of holding on too tight. Bogart and Grahame are both shockingly believable; it's been argued that Dix, as both a violent tough guy and a vulnerable depressive, is closer to the real Bogart than any of the tough guys he played. And Gloria Grahame was a good actress under any circumstances, but the deterioriation of her marriage to director Ray brings added poignancy to this tale of two broken people who found each other but are breaking apart.

Which brings me to Nicholas Ray. Talk about Film Ignorance: I had never seen a film by this legendary auteur. I always feared that what people regarded in the 40s and 50s as shocking sensitivity and profound alienation would seem dated and contrived today. But if Rebel Without a Cause and Ray's other pictures are like this one, I have nothing to worry about. This is a remarkably true story, with characters that think and act and feel real. It reminded me, of all things, of Woody Allen. This, at long last, explains the appeal of Bogart to Allen; although I see few similarities between Allen's Little Jew persona and Bogart's Casablanca/Big Sleep/Maltese Falcon persona, Allen and Dix spiritual brothers. They're both real people, just trying to find love in a crummy world of alienation and unhappiness. In other words, they're just like the rest of us.


*The "Ignorance Rating" is the percentage of people who voted "Yes" on the poll for this film. If ten people vote in the poll, and 5 of them have seen the movie, I give it an ignorance rating of 50. It's just a ballpark way for me to know how egregious my ignorance was in this case.

Film Ignorance #12: Gun Crazy

Another day, another Film Ignorance entry in the world of noir. If you don't know already, this is Film Noir Month at MovieZeal, and that site will be running its own (undoubtedly inferior) review of Gun Crazy. Not to mention numerous other noir-related reviews and features.

Film: Gun Crazy
Rating: Yep, It's a Classic
Director: Joseph L. Lewis
Stars: John Dall, Peggy Cummins
Year: 1949
Reason for Ignorance: Never heard of it
Ignorance Rating*: Pending

Bart Tare (John Dall) is a regular kid. Although he's an orphan, his sister has done a great job raising him. He's a nice, well-adjusted boy who usually behaves well in school. He's got a few close friends, including the sheriff's son. He may not be the brightest kid who ever lived, but by all accounts he's a good guy. Except Bart likes guns a whole lot.

Now, it doesn't seem to be the most unhealthy obsession. He kills a baby chicken with a BB gun once, and is so horrified by the experience he vows never to kill again. He wants to have a profession that involves guns, but he certainly doesn't want to hurt anybody. He's not mean, or cruel, or deranged. He just likes guns.

This film is a nice psycho-analytic companion piece to White Heat. In White Heat, Cody Jarret becomes deranged because all of his sexual desires are tied up with his mother. In Gun Crazy, Bart Tare begins a life of crime because he finally finds a sexual object that gratifies his love for guns. The object in question is Annie Starr (Peggy Cummins), a carnival sharpshooter who returns his favors because she sees in him a kindred, gun crazy spirit.

In the misogynistic world of film noir, Bart is a lovable guy who just happens to like guns. But Annie is something worse - the film's alternate title is "Deadly is the Female." Annie wants a life of crime, and she drags Bart into it. But while she certainly is a femme fatale, Annie's not out to get Bart. She just wants to go a little deeper into the world of guns and violence than he does; while he's fascinated by it but ultimately too good-hearted to delve into it, Annie is willing to kill. But their relationship does flourish; like Bonnie and Clyde a couple of decades later, their sexual life is ignited by their life of crime.

Gun Crazy probably has the most authentic relationship of any film noir I've yet seen. Annie and Bart's dialogue is perfectly naturalistic, and they bicker and make up and bicker again just like any other couple. Dall is perfectly suited to play Bart, who would be a harmless screwball if his attraction was for anything besides guns. Cummins makes Annie a sympathetic femme fatale, a woman who's a bit further off than Bart, but who loves him and who is a far cry from the vicious femme fatale type. Their relationship especially shines through in their last heist, which is shot in a single take, from the back of their car, and features a real small town and improvised dialogue to heighten the naturalism. Seeing them actually drive the car through town gave me enormous joy, especially when Hitchcock would still be splicing cars and scenery together more than a decade later.

The authenticity of their relationship, and their deep feelings for each other, make this film a classic. Annie might be bad news, but she's also just like Bart: a lost soul who briefly found happiness with another of the same type. As such, Gun Crazy is just one happy ending away from being a screwball comedy - a happy ending that we know, from the very first scene, isn't coming.

*The "Ignorance Rating" is the percentage of people who voted "Yes" on the poll for this film. If ten people vote in the poll, and 5 of them have seen the movie, I give it an ignorance rating of 50. It's just a ballpark way for me to know how egregious my ignorance was in this case.

Film Ignorance Guest Blogger #3: Midnight Cowboy

Welcome back to Film Ignorance, our first non-Batman related entry of the week. This week, Mike of Big Mike's Movie Blog weighs in on Midnight Cowboy, a movie that's on my Film Ignorance list, but I haven't gotten to yet. Thanks for the post, Mike! I'll try to get to the film this week, so we can go head to head.Film: Midnight Cowboy
Rating: Yep, It's a Classic.
Director: John Schlesinger
Stars: Jon Voight, Dustin Hoffman
Year: 1969
Ignorance Rating: Pending

Watching Midnight Cowboy for the first time and taking in the historical context of the film, while people might inevitably compare it to Brokeback Mountain, I was reminded of Raging Bull. Raging Bull was made at the end of the Seventies and became regarded as one of the greatest movies of the Eighties. Likewise, Midnight Cowboy, released during the summer of love in 1969 became an indication of the direction films would take in the Seventies.

The ‘gay cowboy movie’ of my parent’s generation, Midnight Cowboy was important in many different ways, the least of which was its subject matter. Jon Voight stars as Joe Buck, a naïve young Texan who goes to New York City with dreams of becoming a male hustler. It’s not long before he realizes that it won’t be beautiful women paying him for his body, but the Jackies on Forty Second Street. Then he meets Ratso Rizzo, played by Dustin Hoffman who after scamming Joe out of money, tries to take him under his wing and manage him in the ways of the New York hustler. That’s the movie in a nutshell, with the pair becoming closer as they get more impoverished and desperate for cash.

Both Voight and Hoffman were nominated for Best Actor for their performances. Voight plays the part of the dumb hick to perfection and you can get a sense of the hungry, young actor inside, yearning to please and be accepted. This movie would catapult him from a struggling New York theatre actor to a star, like The Graduate had done for his co-star the year before. Hoffman’s role has become almost the stereotype of a New Yorker by now, but it was miles removed from Benjamin Braddock and cemented his status as a serious actor in only two years in Hollywood.

Directed by John Schlesinger, whose claim to fame had been the Julie Christie movie Darling, he made the film more personal than people knew. He was in the closet at the time and was constantly under the stress of keeping his private life private. I was struck by how he shows us clips, montages and flashes of Joe’s life in Texas and a violent event that has changed him, but we’re never told explicitly what happens. Schlesinger shows us without telling us. In a way, I could understand his motivation and he desire to share secrets with us, but holding back from giving away too much. It was this style of filmmaking that really made it remarkable to me.

The movie was released with an X rating for the sexual content and brief nudity. Eventually, it was changed to R in 1971 without having to change a frame. However, it would win the Oscar for Best Picture carrying the X rating, the only film with that distinction. It helped the fight for freedom of expression that continues to this day and also won Oscars for Best Director and Screenplay (Adapted).

I couldn’t help but notice how cyclical the movie was. In the end, Joe is basically back where he started from, geographic location notwithstanding. He is alone in a new city, but his experiences have changed him and his outlook on life. Joe didn’t change to adapt to the city, but tried to remain true to himself and while some may think he failed, I believe he succeeded by surviving and moving onto the next chapter. It almost seemed to me like the film predicted how the Seventies would go for Hollywood. After the big budget, star driven films died off to be replaced by the films of people like Schlesinger, Voight and Hoffman; the studios would eventually regain control to put out large budget, star driven movies of the Eighties. Sadly, thirty years later, Schlesinger would be reduced to directing romantic comedies for Madonna and as for Voight and Hoffman… I only have two things for you. Karate Dog and Mr. Magorium. Like a friend of mine wrote earlier this week, both of them should be ashamed of themselves. Between the two of them, they were in Midnight Cowboy, Catch-22, Straw Dogs, Deliverance, Marathon Man, Coming Home and Papillion. In the past FOUR years, they have made TWO National Treasures, Lemony Snicket, Bratz and Meet the Fockers.

For shame

Film Ignorance #6: Nosferatu

Film: Nosferatu
Rating: Yep, It's a Classic
Director: F.W. Murnau
Stars: Max Schreck
Year: 1922
Reason for Ignorance: Silent
Ignorance Rating: 57 (7 Votes)

I feel like I should begin by mentioning that I have seen more or less zero feature-length silent films that were not comedies of the Chaplin/Keaton variety. Accordingly, I'm reviewing this movie in a bit of a vacuum. But that's what this project is all about; by the end of Film Ignorance, I'll have viewed literally several more of these films.

In case you don't know, Nosferatu is F.W. Murnau's version of Dracula, but he couldn't get the rights to Bram Stoker's novel from Stoker's wife, so he just filmed the story of Dracula more or less exactly and just changed the names (hence, Nosferatu instead of Dracula).

Nosferatu isn't scary, not the way The Exorcist is, at least when you watch it on your laptop screen on the couch while nursing a sprained ankle 86 years after it came out. But it is impressively creepy. As one of the key examples of German Expressionism, it features many of the characteristics that make those films notable: grotesque make-up, eerie lighting, haunting shadows, decaying and desolate mise-en-scene. And the grotesquerie is not just limited to obvious candidates like Nosferatu the vampire and his mind-controlled minion Knock. The entire country, gripped by the plague of Nosferatu's feeding, has become a gross distortion of life; even our hero Hutter, with his Victorian clothing and haircut, strikes me as grotesque.

Knock (left) creepy. Protagonist Hutter: Also Creepy

We get a taste of this in the very first scene, in which our hero Hutter enters and gives his wife a beautiful bouquet of flowers. She recoils in horror, exclaiming: "But you've killed them." In the world of Nosferatu, the act of giving a bouquet has been transformed into an act of violence, the willful destruction of the natural world. Indeed, as creepy as Max Schreck is as the vampire, this is the scene that bothered me the most. It makes it clear that Murnau's vision is a totalizing one, and rendered the ultimate victory over the vampire merely a partial one. Hutter and his wife might get rid of the vampire, but they still live across the street from the foreboding gothic monstrosity that he purchased. With or without vampires, the world of German Expressionism is a terrible one.

Even if this weren't Nosferatu's shadow, it'd probably still freak me out

So, Nosferatu isn't a film that's going to scare you. And it certainly looks like a film that was made more than 80 years ago; the special effects are impressively understated and the film-craft on display is mind-boggling for the time period, but your average 21st century music video is superior in technical achievement. But Nosferatu is full of indelible images and remains, to this day, an amazing achievement in vision and mood. Now if only someone could write a decent soundtrack for it...

Film Ignorance #3: Deliverance

Film: Deliverance
Rating: Yep, It's a Classic.
Director: John Boorman
Stars: John Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty
Year: 1972
Reason for Ignorance: Never seemed that appetizing, for some reason...
Ignorance Rating: 25

I went to the University of South Carolina, which means there was a plaque about 50 feet from my freshman dorm proclaiming the campus as the site where poet James Dickey wrote the novel Deliverance. One of my professors, Dr. Greiner, was full of stories about Dickey's life and his dying words; another professor, who happened to be one of the worst human beings I had ever met, bragged about beating Dickey at tennis. It was a place suffused with the spirit of Dickey. But beyond the time when I was little that my dad showed me the dueling banjo scene because he thought I'd like the music, I never encountered this rough-hewn story of four friends on the canoe trip from hell in any form.

Deliverance, it turns out, is every bit the grueling and gut-wrenching experience I had always assumed it to be. It's also a masterpiece. Director John Boorman follows the four friends down the river to their catastrophe, and imbues the entire film with a sense of inevitable dread; although certainly any modern viewer of this film gets an extra dose of dread in the first 50 minutes, awaiting the famous "squeal like a pig" scene. Intense close-ups give all of the actors a chance to showcase their responses to the disasters that befall them, and all of them respond well, especially Voight. Although the violence is not especially graphic, it's nevertheless deeply disturbing when it occurs, and becomes even more disturbing when we watch the faces of the victims and the victimizers in its aftermath.

The canoe trip is a response to Reynolds' survivalist predictions of doom; a river is being damned for hydroelectric power and Reynolds wants to canoe down it before the opportunity is lost to civilization forever. Early in the film, when his character decides to trust the Griner brothers (coincidence?) with their vehicles, John Voight's character suggests it might not be such a good idea to trust their cars to these "rough-looking characters." Reynolds responds: "You can't judge people based on how they look."

The message of the first half Deliverance seems to be that Reynolds is wrong. Lewis (Reynolds) looks like a good ole boy with outdoorsy pretentions, and he certainly is. Ed (Voight) looks like a regular guy, and he is. Drew (Ronny Cox) looks friendly and affable, and he's the one who befriends the banjo-playing inbred hillbilly boy. Bobby (Ned Beatty) is short, round, soft, and piggish looking, and he gets anally raped. And yes, the inbred hillbillies doing the raping look violent and uncivilized. The second half of the film provides an interesting deconstruction of this way of judging, in ways that I cannot go into without ruining things for those who remain blissfully ignorant about the trials of Deliverance.

Ultimately, Deliverance is someone's (Dickey's?) nightmarish fantasy about a world without civilization. It's a world that Lewis hungers for; when he tells Ed that civilization has gotten too complicated and will inevitably fall, Ed responds: "You sound like you're looking forward to it." Ed gets what he wants, but it's not the backbone-building experience he was hoping for. It's a world of violence but, more importantly, suffering, and above all a world where unruly systems crush human beings. All humanity can do is try to build other, more humane systems in response. As their taxi driver says about Aintry, the town to be swallowed by the lake: "It's the best thing that's ever happened to this town."