Film Ignorance #25: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Film: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Rating: Best. Film. Ever.
Director: Jacques Demy
Stars: Catherin Deneuve, Nino Castelnuovo
Year: 1964
Reason for Ignorance: Never Heard of it
Ignorance Rating*: Pending

In today's Tarantino-driven climate of pastiche, mash-up, homage, and outright theft, it's not often that I get to watch a film from any era that looks and sounds and feels like simply nothing else I've ever seen. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is such a movie. It's a certain kind of musical, one which I suppose I knew was theoretically possible but had never actually witnessed: there is no spoken dialogue, just singing. No musical numbers, no dancing, just 90 minutes of singing and a constant, jazz-influenced score.

But Umbrellas isn't such a revelation merely because it's all singing. It's a candy-colored confection, with every outfit shining brightly and every room wallpapered in some garishly glorious pattern. And, in addition to having colors that would make Powell himself weep, it's a very real and moving story of young love set during the French-Algerian war.

Our principals are Guy, a charming young gas station attendant, and Genevieve, a luminous young woman who represents my first visual experience of Catherine Deneuve (her voice acting role in Persepolis doesn't count). The two are in love, but Genevieve is too young to marry, and the draft looms in Guy's future. Genevieve's mother urges her to give up Guy and marry a rich suitor, especially since their umbrella shop doesn't seem to be doing very well, even though it's constantly raining.

Rather than try to disguise the three-act structure, Demy emphasizes it by telling us when each act begins with a title card. The first is the story of young love, and the charm of the music and the setting is matched only by that of the young lovers. The second act is the story of Guy's absence; the film's story switches to stark realism, which inexplicably works just as well in song in Candyland as it ever did in black-and-white in postwar Italy. And the final act, although the briefest, is the greatest of all: Guy's return is a brightly colored, musically and emotionally deep melodrama that provides all of the powerful sentiment in 20 minutes that The Red Shoes was unable to deliver in a 120.

I'm trying to regulate the giving of "Best. Film. Ever." so I initially rated this one as merely a classic. But it's more than that. Demy's vision gives us a triumph of life, art, love, color, fantasy, and realism, all wrapped together, and all inexplicably congruous. If you've ever enjoyed any musical and you haven't seen this one, give it a whirl. It's cinematic candy and a rich full meal, all in one.

*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 #11: White Heat

What we have here are my thoughts on White Heat. Head on over to MovieZeal, if you haven't already, to get somebody else's thoughts on White Heat, and all the articles on noir you can handle in a month. It's noir month over at MovieZeal, and I'm just along for the ride.

Film: White Heat
Rating: Best. Film. Ever.
Director: Raoul Walsh
Stars: Burt Lancaster, Margaret Wycherly, Edmond O'Brien
Year: 1949
Reason for Ignorance: Hated The Public Enemy
Ignorance Rating*: 40 (5 Votes)
"Made it, Ma, top of the world!"

A couple days after The Departed came out, I was trying to make sense of its over-the-top nature (the rat scene, Jack with the dildo, the FBI nonsense) and I came up with an analogy. Just as White Heat came out 20 years after the heyday of the gangster movie of the early 30s, and represented a ratcheting up of its melodramatic and libidinal concerns to a point nearing self-parody, so did The Departed represent a hyperbolic and near-parodic rendering of the concerns of the classic 70s gangster movie. White Heat: The Public Enemy, Scarface, Little Caesar::The Departed: The Godfather Parts 1 and 2, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver. (The fact that you could replace The Departed in that analogy with 1983's Scarface didn't bother me in the slightest, even though Scarface is basically a White Heat remake).

Of course, as you can tell from its status as Film Ignorance, I had only read about, not seen, White Heat. Please, whatever you think of my analogy, allow me a little delayed self-congratulation: I can't think of any movie (not even Infernal Affairs) as similar to The Departed as White Heat. Not only are both absolutely over-the-top gangster movies that nevertheless manage to tell tight and exciting stories, both of them feature gangsters whose sexual desires have been radically diverted. And the coup de grace is: unbeknownst to me, White Heat is also an undercover cop story. Dynomite!

In the 30s gangster film, and particularly in Cagney's Public Enemy, critics noticed that the gangster seemed more attached to his Ma than to any more appropriate object of sexual desire. Dames and molls could come and go, and might get a piece of grapefruit in their face for their trouble, but the gangster would always love his Ma. White Heat's Cody Jarret takes these subtle undertones and makes them blatant, blazing overtones: Cody kills his own men indiscriminately, and displays almost no interest in his wife (sexual or otherwise) but this dude loves, loves, loves his Ma. In a very Freudian move, he used to fake headaches to get her attention, but now the headaches come unbidden as part of his psychoses. Cody Jarrett is a portrait of degeneration; he's falling apart at the seams, and getting more violent as he does so, as his libido builds up without finding an acceptable outlet. The only place it can come out is in death and destruction, which White Heat has in spades: I cannot believe the Production Code allowed such a murderous sociopathic portrait to hit the big screen. I've always considered Cagney a comical overactor (hence my dislike of Public Enemy) but in this film, his overwrought mannerisms are both enjoyably comical and murderously chilling (just like Jack's in The Departed).

But White Heat is not just about Jarrett and his hangups. It's an absolutely fantastic gangster film and undercover cop film. When Jarrett's in jail - having confessed to a crime he didn't commit to get an alibi from a worse crime - the FBI sends their undercover specialist Hank Fallon (Edmund O'Brien) to get info on the crime Jarret actually committed. Posing as a criminal, Hank has to get close to Cody, which is nigh impossible, as Cody seems to only trust his mother. Furthermore, Hank had a career as a regular FBI agent, so he also has to avoid criminals who know him. As in The Departed, this makes for some of the tensest and most exciting sequences in gangster film history, as Hank has to gain Cody's trust while keeping his own sanity and avoiding those who know him. If Cagney is the movie's flaming ID, O'Brien is its tortured Ego, trying to keep himself intact while performing a troubling moral balancing act.

To put it simply, White Heat is one of the most exciting and satisfying movies I've ever seen. Both the vicious opening heist and the overblown final heist provide action and suspense, as does the relationship between Cody and Hank. And the film's awkward love parallelogram between Cody, his wife, second-in-command Big Ed, and Ma has got sexual energy to spare. White Heat is a romp through America's criminal underbelly, not one in which criminality is revealed as the wretched, doomed inverse of the American dream, but the absurd, violent, and sexually charged perversion of the American dream. No film would make the romp so much fun until The Departed (or maybe Goodfellas).

*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 #9 : Mildred Pierce

This post is a part of Noir Month over at Movie Zeal. If you have any comments, be sure to make them over there - literally dozens of people will read them. Whereas over here...I'll read them, and my mom probably would, except I'm pretty sure she doesn't know about this blog.
Film: Mildred Pierce
Rating: Best. Film. Ever.
Director: Michael Curtiz
Stars: Joan Crawford
Year: 1963
Reason for Ignorance: Never heard of it
Ignorance Rating*: 25 (8 votes)
"Oh men. I never met yet one of them that didn’t have the instincts of a heel. "

Michael Curtiz may not have been one of the greatest Hollywood directors; he was certainly no Hawks or Ford. But he was an excellent director who made more than his share of great films, and produced one movie that anyone, from any era, would be proud of: Casablanca. To that elite list of unchallenged masterpieces, I'd like to add a second film: Mildred Pierce.

Based on a novel by James M. Cain, the author of Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce is a classic genre mashup. In the canonical noir films, there's a femme fatale who can bend everyone to their will, an alluring woman whose charm is inescapable for the male of the species. In the canonical 30s and 40s melodrama, there's a lost mother who will give everything for her children, and ultimately must sacrifice herself for their happiness. Mildred Pierce does something brilliant, yet so simple that it's a wonder it was never done before: Joan Crawford, in the title role, is a femme fatale who is also a self-sacrificing mother. The plot threads of the noir and the melodrama come together, intertwine, and double up, and the result is a noir as fine as The Maltese Falcon and a melodrama as moving as Stella Dallas. It's hard to ask for much more.

Allmovie notes: "his detractors have noted that Curtiz's much-praised visual style was due more to Warner's team of cinematographers and art directors than to the director himself." I can't speak for the accuracy of those statements, but I can tell you that the cinematography and art direction in this movie are pitch perfect. We begin at the end: a man is shot, calling out "Mildred" as he falls, and Mildred - femme fataled out in a glamorous fur coat - flees the scene of the crime and, after being interrupted in a suicide attempt, lures an old flame back to the beach house to take the rap. The house takes on the funhouse look of the best Welles noirs - striking mise-en-scene lit for a chiaroscuro effect and filmed from unexpected angles.

Eventually, we flashback to the events that lead up to the murders, and the story slowly develops. We see Mildred, decidedly un-fataled out, as a regular housewife dealing with her devoted younger daughter and her spoiled older daughter. A number of men are in play: her deadbeat husband, her husband's ruthless partner (who turns out to be the patsy), and a rich man who gives both Mildred and her elder daughter a taste of the fine life - who is described as her second husband, and who we recognize as the corpse. These people come in and out of Mildred's life, as she tells her story to the police. The twist is: although she's tried to setup her first husband's partner, the police have latched on to her first husband as the villain.

As a melodrama, Mildred Pierce is a story of class and a social rise and fall, as Mildred builds her fortune and gives her daughter the best things in life, but is unable to achieve happiness through wealth. As a film noir, Mildred Pierce is a story of degeneration, telegraphed by Mildred's increasing taste for whiskey and her eventual indulgence in things like the fur coat we see her in in the opening scene. Both Hollywood noir and Hollywood melodrama have their roots in the naturalistic literature of the late 19th century (Dreiser, Zola, etc), and thus Mildred Pierce represents a sort of homecoming. The decadence of melodrama and the degeneration of noir are reunited, a double-shot of naturalism that burns like fire going down but gives you a taste for the seedy side of life you won't ever be free of. I recommend drinking it straight. You won't regret it.

*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 #8: The Conversation

I wrote this post for Film Ignorance several weeks ago (you can tell by how long it is; I've made a conscious choice to write shorter posts). After I'd written it, a happy surprise: The Conversation is the Large Associations of Movie Blog's Movie of the Month! Head on over to The LAMB to see what other film bloggers think of this movie (if they don't like it, be sure to leave them irrational hate comments)


Film: The Conversation
Rating: Best. Film. Ever.
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Stars: Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Harrison Ford
Year: 1974
Reason for Ignorance: Shame Spiral
Ignorance Rating: Pending

For a considerable amount of time, I believed that Francis Ford Coppola was the greatest American director of all time. Although he made only four films that were considered great, their greatness was so unquestioned that I didn't think it was an indefensible statement: The Godfather, The Godfather pt. II, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now.

The only problem was my hidden film ignorance: I hadn't seen the third masterpiece. I don't know why I never got around to it. It wasn't even in my queue. And one reason why I started arguing for John Ford or Orson Welles instead of Coppola was the shame of not having seen The Conversation.

Now that I've seen it, my shame is multiplied many times. The Conversation is a masterpiece. Although it's a small picture, nothing like Coppola's three epics, it stands worthily along side of them as a picture that is not only excellent, but pushed the entire world of filmmaking forward.

The film opens with a man and a woman having a furtive, awkward, fearful conversation in a busy public square, while Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) runs a little surveillance group recording their conversation. Later, in his loft office/safe-house, Caul takes the three different low-quality tapes his team obtained and melds them into a single high-quality recording. And, in an obvious reference to Antonioni's Blow-Up, he hears something: the man says "He'd kill us if he had the chance."

From there, it's downhill for Harry Caul. His life is all about compartmentalization, locked doors, sealed-off spaces. He becomes upset when he learns his landlady has a key to his apartment - she used the key to leave him a birthday gift. He refuses to give his girlfriend his number, but only drops in on her unexpectedly late at night. He won't tell his sidekick (John Cazale) anything about their projects or technology. And above all, he wants to seal himself off from the potentially dangerous consequences of his surveillance subjects could suffer. So when confronted with the direct knowledge that this tape could get his subjects killed, Caul goes into a downward spiral, unable to break through his compartments and take action but equally unable to resume his normal, compartmentalized life. He's caught between his professional ethics and his personal morals, and the film becomes a creepy, suspenseful thriller as the events continue to play out and Caul haunts them like a ghost.

The film, as is to be expected, is a technical marvel. The minimalist score, containing both diagetic and nondiagetic elements, is haunting. The sound editing is perfect. The film editing is inspired, serving the storytelling by working with and against the sound editing to leave the viewer, like Caul, uncertain of what's coming next. And there's a bathroom scene that's even tenser and scarier than the classic one in Psycho.

The acting, of course, is superb. Caul is one of Hackman's best and most subtle performances, and 70s super-supporting actor Cazale is, as always, the perfect second-fiddle. Harrison Ford plays a rare heavy as Caul's employer's emissary, and Allen Garfield practically made my skin crawl as Caul's chief competitor, an overly friendly man obsessed with one-upping and disorienting Harry.

If you can believe it, The Conversation came out the same year as The Godfather Part II. Coppola was nominated for both best picture and best screenwriter for both pictures, winning both awards for The Godfather. This is the strongest praise I can give The Conversation: I can't tell you whether or not the Academy made the right choice.

Film Ignorance Addendum #1: Our Man in Havana

Film: Our Man in Havana
Rating: Best. Film. Ever.
Director: Carol Reed
Stars: Alec Guinness, Burl Ives, Maureen O'Hara, Noel Coward
Year: 1960
TSPDT Ranking*: Not on the List
Reason for Ignorance: Unavailable on DVD
Film Ignorance Rating**: Pending


Not content merely to give myself more than 300 films to watch and write about, I've decided to add films to the Film Ignorance list as I go along. These Film Ignorance Addendums will be classic films that I watch which, upon watching, I can't understand why they didn't make it onto any of the lists used for Film Ignorance. This is the first of these films; unfortunately, there will be more.

It's hard to understand how this film didn't make the BFI's Top 100 British film lists. The creative team is the same as the BFI's #1 film, The Third Man - director Carol Reed and writer Graham Greene. And the cast includes Alec Guinness, the most decorated actor on the BFI list and one of my personal all-time favorites, Irish beauty Maureen O'Hara, legendary writer, director, actor, and multiple BFI honoree Noel Coward, and the magnificent Burl Ives.

Our Man in Havana is billed as a comedy, but it's much more than that. Yes, the film is very funny; a British vacuum cleaner salesman named Wormold is living in Havana and is approached by an inept British secret service agent (Coward) to be the secret service's eyes and ears in Havana. Wormold is no good at the job, but needs the money to support his daughter; eventually his drinking buddy Dr. Hasselbacher (Ives) points out that secrets can always be made up, since secrets can't be confirmed by outside sources - that's why they're secrets. In no time, the secret service's Man in Havana is their most popular agent; the drawings of Cuban doomsday devices that he sends them attract the attention of the Prime Minister himself, who notes that they look like giant, diabolical vaccum cleaners.

Fear the Vacuum Cleaner! (from Aggregat456)

But like The Third Man, which mixes some very funny bits into its bleakness, Our Man in Havanna is very chilling as well as funny. Wormold is soon in over his head; his daughter, Dr. Hasselbacher, and his own life are in danger, as are the lives of the Cuban citizens he is pretending to get information from. Furthermore, he's so successful that he's sent extra staff; his secret service secretary (O'Hara) trusts him completely but complicates matters enormously. As this is a Graham Greene script, the price that Wormold ends up paying is enormous, and his transgressions weigh deeply on his conscience.

A final note: Our Man in Havana is a historically good-looking film, not only because it was filmed by Carol Reed. If you've seen The Third Man, you know that Reed has filmed some of the crispest black-and-white photography this side of Citizen Kane, and Our Man, despite a different cinematographer, looks just as good as Third Man does, albeit with fewer Welles-style off-kilter camera angles. Moreover, although Our Man is set in pre-revolutionary Cuba, it was filmed in a magical window of time: in 1959, after Castro's revolution but before his alliance with the Soviet Union and the U.S. embargo. That means Our Man in Havana is the first, and that I know of, only, Anglophone production ever to be shot in Castro's Cuba. As such, Carol Reed's film is not just beautiful, but is a one-of-a-kind document of early revolutionary Cuba.

I heartily advise all of you to see this film, although I do not know how you can see it. I taped it a couple of weeks ago off Turner Classic Movies. My advice: check TV guide for when it comes on again. Until it's out on DVD, this will be a rare and precious gem indeed - rarer still because it represents such a special congruence of talent, artistry, and historical contingency.

*TSPDT stands for They Shoot Pictures Don't They, a 1,000 film list which attempts to index every best films of all times list and choose a consensus best 1,000 films ever. For every Film Ignorance Addendum film, I'll let you know where it stands on the TSPDT list - in other words, how weird is it that this film didn't make my list.

**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 #2: The Palm Beach Story

Film: The Palm Beach Story
Rating: Best. Film. Ever.
Director: Preston Sturges
Stars: Claudette Colbert, Joel McCrea
Year: 1942
Reason for Ignorance: I have no idea. Embarrassing
Ignorance Rating: 25

Just like It's a Wonderful Life, The Palm Beach Story is one of the acknowledged masterpieces by one of my favorite directors, in this case writer-director Preston Sturges, which for some reason I had not seen. And just like It's a Wonderful Life, I'm kicking myself now: The Palm Beach Story is one of the fastest, funniest, sexiest, and all-around best movies I've ever seen. If this whole Film Ignorance project is like this, I am really going to enjoy myself.

To give you an idea of how crazy this movie is: its opening sequence, a series of silent scenes set to music, is the climax to some other film we haven't seen. A maid faints. A groom (Joel McCrea) dashs out of a hotel into a taxi, struggling into his tux as he goes. The pastor looks anxious at the church. A bride (Claudette Colbert) rushes over the fallen maid, while another woman, her hands bound and her mouth gagged, struggles to free herself. Eventually, the bound woman kicks her way out of the closet, causing the maid to faint again, but it's too late; the bride and groom, both visibly relieved, have made it to the alter and gotten married. The title card reads "And they lived happily ever after...Or did they?" Years pass.

This sequence is never explained, although the final scene of the film, which is absolutely as ridiculous and as inexplicable, references it. It's as though Sturges is saying: "Crazy stuff happens. I can't make sense of it. Neither will you. Just have fun."

The movie itself is a classic screwball comedy, of the fast-paced, slapstick kind. After the Wienie King who is mistakenly in her apartment gives Gerry (Colbert) enough money to pay off the rent, she leaves Tom (McCrea) so she can divorce him and finagle the $99,000 he needs for his get-rich scheme - a mesh airport suspended over a city - from a rich bachelor. The bachelor shows up on the train to Palm Beach: John D. Hackensack (Rudy Vallee), oil tycoon. Gerry steps on John D.'s face, but that's ok - he liked it. The Wienie King is once again in their apartment, and this time he gives Tom money to fly to Florida and win Gerry back; he ends up being courted by John D.'s sister, Princess Centimillia (Mary Astor).

I can't make any more sense of the film than that, but that's not what matters. Only two things matter in this film: comedy and sex. The first is provided in buckets, as broadly as possible. The Wienie King is deaf and misunderstands everything, but learns enough to give them money. Hackensack breaks more than a pair of glasses per scene. The millionaire Ale-and-Quail Club, led by Sturges regular William Demarest, gets drunk and shoots up their private train car. The princess' companion, Toto, speaks some language no one understands and takes a pratfall more than once per scene. I shouldn't say anymore; I know these things might not sound funny on the page, but on the screen they're literally hysterical.

The Production Code keeps Gerry's dress on, but that's ok - we can tell what we're supposed to look at

The sex is a different matter. The Hays Production code was being enforced, so innuendo is the rule. Almost every single piece of dialogue in the entire film could be interpreted sexually, but none of it is stated openly. As I said before, Gerry steps on Hackensack's face - and he likes it. The Wienie King advises people not to eat his wienies - and won't reveal where he gets his meat.

I think I'm going to stop writing now, because I simply can't do justice to this film. Most of the comedy is so broad that it sounds preposterous; most of the sex is so subtle that there's no way to explain it. So I'll end with this: In The Palm Beach Story, Preston Sturges has crammed more sight gags and double entendres into 88 minutes that many comedic directors manage in their entire careers. I can't imagine a better introduction to his filmmaking magic.

Allmovie Entry: http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=1:37136

Film Ignorance #1: It's a Wonderful Life

Film: It's a Wonderful Life
Rating: Best. Film. Ever.
Director: Frank Capra
Star: Jimmy Stewart
Reason for Ignorance: Saw it as a kid. Never got around to rewatching it
Ignorance Rating: 100% (10 Votes)

I've counted Frank Capra as one of my favorite directors for some time, and when the LAMB asked me for my three favorite movies, I picked Meet John Doe, often regarded as Capra's best film, as one of my entries. But I'll say this now, publicly: It's a Wonderful Life is better.

It's only fitting that I watched this movie on the same week I chose to make Jimmy Stewart my first Western star of the Week , because the only other possible choice was Gary Cooper - the star of Meet John Doe. Once again, I'm going to choose Stewart over Cooper.

Stewart really makes this film. He's always remembered, especially in this film but also in many others, for being the best, the brightest, the kindest, the most all-American of people. But this is a misremembering that we all fall prey to. He is all of those things, in this movie more than any other, but he always begrudges the town his kindness. In It's a Wonderful Life, he's sort of an Andy Griffith figure: he does everything right and is loved by the whole town, till his breakdown near the end of the film. But he actually hates the town. He calls it crummy. He wants to leave it and never set eyes on it again. And remember, the film opens with him planning suicide (much like John Doe); Capra is hitting us over the head, not with good-heartedness, but with the reminder that even those with the best of hearts fall victim to crushing despair. George Bailey doesn't stand up to Mr. Potter because he wants do. He just doesn't happen to see anybody else around who will, and if he doesn't, people will suffer. It all boils down to this: he is unwilling to ignore the suffering of others.

This is the brilliance of Jimmy Stewart, especially as George Bailey: he's the best American we could imagine, but not in a smaltzy way. He always stands up for the little guy, but we can see in his eyes that he doesn't really want to. He has to - it's the right thing to do. And he's rewarded with the everlasting love of the town Bedford Falls. But he never wanted that love. He never wanted to carry on in his father's footsteps. He never wanted to be an everyman, but rather an adventurer and explorer. So we love him, not because he always did the right thing and always had a kind word for everyone, but because he always did those things against his will. He's remembered as a cardboard cutout of righteousness and goodwill, but what he actually was was a complex and deeply conflicted character whose righteousness is the product of deep internal conflict.

The same could be said of this film and of Capra in general. Capra was a man of great optimism; even in Meet John Doe the optimism frequently shines. But if Capra's optimism always won out, it always did so in defiance of the despair that Capra clearly also felt. The role that suicide plays in both It's a Wonderful Life and Meet John Doe is no coincidence. If Capra imagined for us the best of all possible Americas, he also reminded us that a better America requires the incessant navigation of despair, as the project of improvement and goodwill is constantly diverted or manipulated for the purposes of self-gain, by unscrupulous figures like Mr. Potter. Capra's greatest strength was always acknowledging these obstacles, but also always asking us to believe that they could be overcome. And that is why It's a Wonderful Life, and Stewart's performance in it, are among the best that I have ever seen.

Welcome to Film Ignorance. I won't always write such long entries, or such impassioned ones. But I'm glad you're along for the ride, and I hope you'll stick with me. I have a lot of films to watch, and it's always better to watch films with friends.