Films of the Week (9/16/2024-9/22/2024)

I said I'd try to start writing less, but I think I've written even more for this newsletter. As I promised, I posted a review of Rebel Ridge this week at my blog.

It’s Always Fair Weather (Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, 1955)

It’s Always Fair Weather is the last and least talked about of the three musicals Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly made together, but I’ve always loved it. The movie started out as a straight sequel to On the Town, but it seems that MGM decided they didn't want to spend any money on Frank Sinatra. They probably should have, as it was a major flop, but we ended up getting it and Guys and Dolls in 1955, so I think everyone but MGM won (and that seems always the best outcome).  

On pure formalist terms, it is one of the genre’s major achievements.  Quite frankly instead of writing anything about it I could just link YouTube scenes from this movie because images speak louder than words, especially when they mix the highest imagination with the best skill money could buy in 1950s Hollywood. Cyd Charise dancing with the boxers? Yes. Gene Kelly doing his little variation on Singin’ in the Rain on roller skates? Yes! The Blue Danube? Yes! Yes! Yes! I could probably just keep going, but I'd ended up posting half the movie and you guys already can get the idea.

The movie isn’t that far off from Singin’ in the Rain in that it similar set up around the idea that there is a manic anxiety around that can only be expressed/healed through song and dance, only it brings it much more to the fore, as "guys returning to the US after the war and getting disappointed with their lives" is certainly much closer to the audience than the arrival of talkies. Some friends compared it to The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), but it mostly made me think of those Italian post war comedies about male comradeship that are both lively and bitter. It is pure Hollywood hokum but by the time the fantasy wins, it feels very earned. Kelly and Donen are just as at top form as choreography and the scope images couldn’t be better. The only negative thing I can say about it is that Andre Previn score isn’t an MGM high, but the numbers have so much joy, skill and energy that I don’t care if I wouldn’t play it outside the movie context.

It was by most accounts an unhappy shoot, between MGM’s uncertainty, two filmmakers not seeing why to eye and Kelly hating doing it in scope (despite Donen more than rose to the challenge). Afterwards, Kelly did his ambitious ballet movie and then settled into mediocre pattern, while Donen keep mixing first rate formal work with assignments at least as far as Movie Movie (1978), neither ever done anything great in the musical genre again (save from Kelly’s choreographing his own numbers in Demy’s The Young Girls from Rochefort), although Kelly did got his shot and Donen’s musical training informed many of his later achievements.   

A Cry in the Night (Frank Tuttle, 1956)

In my quest to watch every Hollywood crime of the 1950s (call it a compulsion if you will). I keep watching Edmond O’Brien movies that time forgot. They are always routine, although some are better than others, but they have that assembly line mid to low budget movies a studio puts out because they have a certain amount of movies to put out a year and that used to be able to reveal some interesting things. I do like O’Brien because he was in Walsh’s White Heat (1949) and also in a John Hayes’s depressing psycho movie called Dream No Evil (1970), and that pretty much runs the gamut of Hollywood from the top of the world to the gutter. A true journeyman.

Anyway, I like A Cry in the Night because it is one of those movies that reveals something worthwhile inside the routine.   O’Brien plays a cop whose daughter Natalie Wood gets kidnapped by the mentally unstable Raymond Burr so he goes into a long night trying to get her back no matter what. The movie is based om a novel from Whit Masterson, who wrote Touch of Evil. It is a very hysterical movie, all the guys are suffering from some severe macho anxiety that they have to overcompensate for, O’Brien is desperate that his daughter is aging out of his control (she was in lover’s lane, late at night, imagine the horror), her boy friend Richard Anderson feels castrated for failing to protect her, Burr has a dominating mother and so on. The exception is Brian Donlevy as O'Brien's partner, who gives the film's funniest performance by simply concentrating on the work of acting in the most routine crime procedural, he is an anchor of stability, society's and Hollywood's call for order.

A Cry in the Night was directed by Frank Tuttle who had been making movies since the late silent era and was for a long time a Paramount contract director, he is known mostly for doing This Gun for Hire with Alan Ladd, which is pretty good, and Ladd produced this one, so it was either supposed to star him at some point or he was doing a favor to a filmmaker he liked. If Tuttle is known is mostly for political reasons, he was one of the original driving forces in the director’s union and he later had the same arc as Edward Dmytryk, getting blacklisted, staying in Europe for a few years, naming names, but instead of doing major movies after that, he stayed in the purgatory of stuff like this.

I mentioned the by-the-numbers nature so much because a lot of what is good about the movie is related to it. The best part are the scenes between Wood and Burr (who is way better on this than such a movie needs), they are so tense and that Tuttle treats him like a sad lost puppy while Wood and the movie knows he will definitely kill her if he ever gets too unhappy adds to the chilling effect. Then the movie cuts to the cop manhunt which is pitched very high but has all those low budget cop movie trapping to them. The movement between them just works. I saw a movie O’Brien co-directed earlier this year called Shield for Murder (1954), he plays a murderous cop in that one and use it as an excuse to go very intense, whatever the movie cut awat to the cops in his trail, it is just the dullest scenes, the back and forth works better on A Cry in the Night, because the plainness highlight how hysterical the movie actually is and the cop scenes are always very close to breakdown too. It is a conservative fantasy about closing those 50s anxieties, but it comes with far too many cracks to quite work like that.

Le Solitaire (Alain Brunet, 1973)

Filipe's little recommendations corner. Speaking of routine movies, I really like this one, even though it's basically just a very well-made genre movie. It's a France/Germany co-production and a vehicle for Hardy Kruger, whom I've always liked because he's one of the young leads in Hatari (1962). He's a professional thief in jail who gets the chance to take part in an escape if he first steals the prison warden's safe. It's a good hook for a movie of this kind and the movie is very clever in mixing the prison setting with the heist scenes (of course this man is in prison no matter where he is)

Almost everything good about Le Solitaire is about doing good about the popular movie it wants to be. The three main action scenes that take up close to half of it are all very well imagined, immersive and executed. The movie is dramatically predicted in the promise of its title, Kruger prefers to remain alone, so the action scenes build on this man/world tension in which Kruger usually acts alone, but the off-screen maintains the paranoia that everything could go wrong at any moment through some betrayal. Brunet is skillful with the prison setting and, when the lead character leaves it, with isolating him in urban spaces. As expected of a French crime film from the early 1970s, it has a certain sub-Melville vibe, but Kruger is good at selling the disaffected, melancholy thief. There's a sentimental subplot about him reconnecting with his daughter that isn't great and after the final heist the movie builds to its conclusion in a very functional way. But it's good all-around filmmaking, which is pretty much all you expect when you see something like this..

Le Pelican (Gerard Blain, 1974)

A beautiful and desperate movie. Pure feeling. It's one of the features Gerard Blain directed in the second half of his career and one of the two he played the lead in. Blain is, of course, the other young protagonist in Hatari, but I swear I didn't plan on it. In any case, The Pelican and Le Solitaire couldn't be more different in their approach, even though they curiously share some of the same dramatic principles. Blain is a man who will do anything for his young son, he ends up in jail for getting involved in a scheme to make a fortune abroad, eight years later he returns to France ready to see his son again, but his ex-wife has divorced him and married a rich guy, they tell the boy that his father has left and his new stepfather is not at all keen to have him in their lives. So Blain doesn't have the practical/financial/legal means to change the situation.

The movie is only about one thing: that man's need to be with his son. It doesn't really dramatize it, for much of the action Blain is just wandering around, there are few confrontations and few sequences in which the movie advances any plot and when they do exist it's only to reinforce the practical reality of his situation, one man has a lot of money and a reputation and the other has none, so society has already decided which of them is right. The movie simply presents that man's effort to exist in a space and role that has been denied to him.

The heart of the movie lies in a series of scenes in which he approaches his ex's house, leans on the wall and watches his son playing outside. We see long shots of the boy as the camera pans around the place and we see Blain fascinated as he hangs there. At one desperate moment, he drives there at night and just sleeps by the wall. We never doubt his commitment and sincerity, just as the movie is very honest about how disturbing and unhealthy it all is for him. From the initial pre-prison scenes, it's clear that from the moment the boy was born, this man no longer had any identity other than that of a father. It's a movie about an overwhelming and suffocating feeling. There are many movies like this about romantic love, but that of a father to his son is much rarer.

Blain treats his movie as a first-person novel; all we get is that man's intoxicating experience. Occasionally his consciousness shifts, a memory, a recollection of some past feeling, and the movie follows it, but its forward movement is always to reinforce this paternal emotion. It's a movie with little drama, but rather Romanesque. Cinema naturally tends towards a more materialistic relationship with the world, and in a way Blain's struggle as a filmmaker is how to disrupt this, how to move from an objective and dry representation of events to this other space that exists almost deliriously in this person's vision, a rescue of the film image in the name of sentiment. It's one of the best movies I've seen for the first time this year.     

A Traveler’s Needs (Hong Sang-soo, 2024)

I watched quite a few new movies, but it was not a good week for them, even when they were interesting like Abderrahmane Sissako’s Black Tea, which was better than the reviews it has been collecting since Berlin, or Tilman Singer’s disappointing but often exciting collection of past Eurohorror images Cuckoo, they were not exactly good, but I did get to see the first of the two 2024 Hong Sang-soo movies and I love it as I assume anyone who reads me regularly assume I would. There are few constants in the world and Hong Sang-soo will release two or three movies every year and I will love the majority of them is one of those.

At this point he has become cinema’s greatest amateur one-man-industry. He very much cut whatever links he had with Korean cinema around the time of the well-publicized start of his affair with Kim Min-hee and he has been cutting down on collaborators. Kim does not act in this one which is strange as she becomes such a big part of them even when she is just in a supporting role, but she does get a credit as “production manager” which is good because otherwise Hong Sang-soo would have finally achieve been the only non-actor credited in one of his movies.

The handcrafted quality of these late Hong movies is a major part of their appeal, these are extremely casual movies, they seem almost stolen on the set and they derive their meaning from that. Hong has always been a very good director of actors, his movies are about vibratingly recognize small bits of behavior that slowly add up, early on this involved embarrassment or desperation, but his emotional palette has expanded a lot after he started focusing more on women around 2010 and recently his very best movies (The Woman Who Run, last year’s wonderful In Our Day, major parts of this one) bring a shared intimacy and complicity to the fore. And his later day taste for giving actors their scenes only set have added to his good eye for their gestures. I won't pretend there weren't drawbacks, sometimes a movie is a bit thin, and the minimalist approach means that when his concept works less well, he doesn't have as much to fall back on.

I’m sorry if I’m talking more about Hong than the movie, but there is a sense of his work for at least decade or so of a larger project ((and I'm very defensive of it). A Traveler’s Needs is Hong’s third movie made with Isabelle Huppert (full disclosure: the first one In Another Country is one of the few late Hongs I don’t quite love), those are very self-aware movies and her foreigner status and the need of an extra language to communicate becomes central to them, also Hong is very used to work with Korean movie stars, nut they are integrated and Huppert never is. She remains cinema’s greatest current movie star because who else would decide to go into this no-budget, no-crew movie where she most hangs around in public places and try to communicate with Koreans.

The role of language has always been prominent in his Huppert movies and maybe even more so this time, even as he refines his movies more and more, Hong never gives up his taste for literary narrative concepts and Huppert’s Frenchness functions in this as the cat does in In Our Day. I love Huppert in A Traveler’s Needs,  I love how she just stands around and feels at ease in every space, she is relaxed and on vocation in the best way, this little movie just has an opening to the world, to wind, to the places, to his leading actress’ face, that is quite touching for me. Is there barely a movie there? Yeah, but it is also much more because of that. We could probably use more masters taking on the role of amateurs, at least when they're as talented as Hong.