Films of the Week (9/9/2024-9/15/2024)
I’m going to try something different at this place. Every week I'm going to take 3-6 movies I've seen and do some writing about them. These won't be full-on reviews, but they won't be the capsules I do on Letterboxd either. I can’t promise I will write 2000 words every week, I got too enthusiastic this time, but I hope to get over 1000 on a regular basis. I also wrote about Rebel Ridge, but it got a little bigger, so I decided to save it for my blog, you can all look for it there later this week.
I have some reservations about putting more of my writing in a place owned by some techbros, and about some of Substack's moderation policies (or lack thereof), but that seems to be the harsh reality of current web and in some ways even more so current film writing, and I always prefer when my writing can at least open up a little dialogue, and this place seems to work for that.
I'll try to use these posts to point to other work I've published online, so if you don't already know, I've started a new monthly column at the great Portuguese site À Pala de Walsh. It is only in Portuguese, but the first one is available here.
Key Largo (John Huston, 1948)
I’ve never been much of a fan of this, but there is something rather strong about the pairing of Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart. What matters about the movie is very much tied to their confrontation and when Huston pares it down to the two of them, there is a thrilling quality to it. Robinson is memorably big as the gangster and Bogart does the opposite; one is always setting things in motion while the other observes.
It is very disciplined work on Bogart's part to let Robinson walk away with the movie (he sort of does this in The Treasure of Sierra Madre, which he and Huston made back to back with this one too). Bogart first became famous (on stage and later movies) with The Petrified Forest, a similar gangster taking over a single set scenario and there are some similarities between them and Huston seems very aware of this (The Petrified Forest mattered enough to Bogart that he played the gangster again in a TV movie at the end of his life, it is on YouTube). So Key Largo does has some fascination as a star text (with the added bonus that Robinson was the actor Warner wanted to cast in the role in 1936), he is now the hero instead of the gangster, albeit a very passive one, but he is still Bogart, so we know the movie is a waiting game until he decides Robinson violence is enough. The dramatic structure isn’t very interesting, but the two actors’ reactions consistently are.
It is a shame that the movie around the movie is a bummer, Huston and Richard Brooks got an Oscar for their script, probably because it is so mechanical that it passes for good writing, but so much of the situations are phony and it is so predictable on Robinson humiliating others that it gets tiresome fast and the hostages are usually dull symbols with a lot of mannered performances (Lionel Barrymore and Claire Trevor are specially atrocious, she won an Oscar too). Everything in Key Largo seems to overthought from top to bottom (a common Huston limitation), but there is still the Robinson and Bogart performances anchoring it.
Law and Disorder (Ivan Passer, 1974)
This is a very forgotten movie by a very forgotten filmmaker that I happen to like. It is very much a product of Hollywood in the 70s, new and old, and even more the work of a foreign filmmaker in exile. “"USA would be a less violent place if Americans would just let out their inner perverts more" is definitely the world view of a European who is a bit disgusted by the barbarians around him. Caroll O'Connor and Ernest Borgnine are two guys who get a night's unpaid work as auxiliary cops, a new hobby they got because they were worried about local violence, but really because they like the power it gives them (they both have service jobs, and the movie includes several scenes of them having to deal with unsatisfied costumers). Law and Disorder is very much a movie about the cop uniform, the power it offers and how useless it ultimately is. The movie it most resembles is Richard Fleischer's cop elegy The New Centurions; it aims for a similar overwhelming melancholia, but the fact that these guys are fake cops gives it a more farcical dimension. It is not external social forces that have damned these two guys, but an inner desire.
Passer was of course Milos Forman Czech’s screenwriter, but he never took to Hollywood much well, and this has large broad satire laced with dramatic twists in a manner similar to their early work, it always in the verge of turning into full comedy and it is not ashamed to embrace embarrassment, but the places all look beatdown (great location shooting) and everyone’s desperation, social and existential, is reinforced. One of the many reasons this is so obvious made in 1974 is that Borgnine and O’Connor are surrounded by women (wives, daughters, lovers, costumers) who pretty much exist only to remind them that they are such failures. I wouldn’t call Law and Disorder one of Passer better movies, it doesn’t always nail the farce-plus-pathos tone it is going for (and it commits one of the worst sins a mid-70s movie could do in my book by wasting Karen Black), it is no Cutter’s Way or Born to Win (all Passer movies should be called Born to Win with irony), but it is risking a lot and all the weirdness is fascinating and there is something to how the movie works with its two stars, they are both cast to type, but the movie is very invested to allow them to gives those roles an extra emotional grounding.
The Whales of August (Lindsay Anderson, 1987)
One rewarding thing I've done this year is to go through an extensive portion of the Bette Davis filmography, most of her Warner movies in March and April, and then a more selective curation of her post-Warner years over the past three months. I ended with a rewatch of The Whales of August (I also saw a not very good but okay Ron Howard TV movie called Skyward early last week), I know she did Wicked Stepmother after that, but I love Bette and Larry Cohen too much to see that for a third time, and this was a fitting conclusion.
It is, of course, a movie about aging and death with a main cast made up of Davis (79), Lillian Gish (93), Vincent Price (76) and Ann Sothern (78). Hollywood in the 1980s is surprisingly packed with movies about aging probably a consequence of so many Hollywood stars at the twilight of their careers and of course the not-quite-movie star in the presidency who made nostalgia for old Hollywood a recurring idea (many actors were approached about appearing on this, including the couple Joel McCrea and Frances Dee, who most people would associate in the 1980s mostly as White House regulars). I think The Whales of August is the best of these, partly because of its relative restraint, it is sentimental, but mostly honest about illness and the sort of resentment that a long life can add on and it avoids generational conflict or any big catharsis, it ends with the very headstrong Davis offering a nice concession to her sister, but that is as far as it is willing to go.
Like Key Largo, this is a play adaptation that is very stagebound, the action taking place over the course of a day in the summer home of the two sisters and it is most them talking as people drop by to visit. It doesn’t have anything as showy as Karl Freund’s expressive cinematography and David Barry’s play is fine but far from distinguished, but it is low-key approach, very attuned to its actors, feels more fluid and it's a movie of gestures and pauses instead of big rhetorical and symbolic movements. It can play like a curious reversal of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, the movie that launched the late part of Davis career, again two isolated sisters whose relationship is poisoned by resentment, one taking care of the ill other, the arrival of a suitor forcing some more clear definition to their roles, but there is no horror shock effects, no baroque excesses, only a lot of human frailty. Lindsay Anderson directed it and there could not be anything further from his better known If..., but I like this better, and it is not for some contrarianism. It was his only American film and he obviously enjoys the setting and the way it allows him to focus in the action instead of some large statement.
He is very generous towards Gish, lots of great closeups and she repays him. He is very generous with Gish, lots of great close-ups, and she repays him. Davis is unusually accessible, very frail (she had some health problems at the time) and gets the most out of her lines, and there is remarkable work from Vincent Price as a Russian aristocrat hoping the sisters will become the latest in his line of wealthy benefactors, which is a mix of charm and pragmatism without any of his usual tics. There is a late scene between Gish and Price that is as good as this kind of movie gets. The Whales of August does benefit from context; aside from Ann Southern (who never acted again, but lived until 2001), all of the actors and Anderson were gone by 1994, so most of what is discussed in it feels considered and urgent.
La Passagère/Wild Seas (Héloïse Pelloquet, 2022)
Chien de la case/Junkyard Dog (Jean-Baptiste Durand, 2023)
I'll take the opportunity to use the column for some recommendations. These two French films are very worth seeing and I don't think they've been talked about much. I come to Pelloquet’s movie because she worked as an editor for some filmmakers that I like (Axelle Ropert, Guillaume Brac), it is an extramarital affair set among fishermen, about a woman in her 40s (Cecile de France, very good as usual) who starts in a relationship with the young hunk that starts working as an apprentice at her husband’s boat. It is an immersive movie and a practical one that maps the emotional territory of someone who has to think hard about what she is doing at every moment. Pelloquet is very good with the labor backdrop (the scenes on the boat have a great feel to them) as she tracks the different ways that both parties go about their relationship. Very intimate and observant. The guys (Félix Lefebvre as the young lover and Grégoire Monsaingeon as the husband) are quite good too and Pelloquet knows how each relationship is vastly different while benefiting from a general intimate chemistry. It is a very muted movie, which explains few reactions, made out of large emotions.
Durand's movie has a little more traction among critics, it is also very beautifully observed and interested in the environment and labor. It is about the emotional bond between two lifelong friends and also about class and the amount of opportunities that are given to them. After, I found out that Durand had a part in Alain Guiraudie’s new movie and that got a large laugh out of me because I stayed the whole film saying to myself “this sounds so much like Guiraudie”, partly because of the gaze, but also because of the specific way in which everyone is governed by instinctual reactions and desires, but more in a moral social way rather than a sexual one. Anthony Bajon and Raphaël Quenard are great as the friends, particularly when they are sharing space. The sense of place is quite wonderful, just great exterior shots throughout, and the description of contemporary working-class France with little editorializing is quite good. There is also a kind of love triangle when Bajon, who usually takes the abuse of the more assertive Quenard, gets a girlfriend who both opens up his world and does not, because the attachment to place and relationships is too great. What I like most about Chien de la case is that while it is very distended, it understands the value of thinking about its relationships and class observation through a fictional lens.
Cidade;Campo (Juliana Rojas, 2024)
This latest movie by Juliana Rojas, which on best director at Berlin's Encounters this year. is at times exciting and at others disappointing. She's one of Brazilian cinema better directors, so it makes sense to expect more artistic flair from her. Cidade;Campo means City;Country, the name alone carries a lot of weight, although the semicolon makes it clear that it's more of an extension than an opposition. Even so, there is something frustratingly illustrative about the movie, a need to conform to concepts arrived at before the camera rolled. There's less invention and discovery than in Necropolis Symphony and Good Manners.
When the movie tries to be more practical, it gets a bit bogged down in the need to score social observations, which rarely simply suggest a good eye. The scenes with Fernanda Vianna adapting to the city in the first half suffer greatly from this, despite the actress's best efforts. At these times, the movie points to some of the limits of recent Brazilian cinema, itself divided into the inside and the outside, in holding a candle to the international curators and another to the expectations of an engaged local audience. It's not a tension that is usually resolved very well around here, but I find Rojas' previous films freer of it (it's curious to observe that this year we had Leonardo Mouramateus' Greice, which is a movie about being suspended between Brazil and Portugal, by a guy who now lives there and who seems to have found in his displacement a much more personal perspective than that of his earlier films).
However, Rojas is very talented and so the movie sometimes goes off program, the characters' displacement in their respective places manages to have a genuine haunted resonance (it is better when the supernatural is more pronounced), in these moments the movie manages to exist in this crossing between places that is finally uprooted. A A Brazil out of place, where this impossibility of belonging in the here and now finds its own meaning. I don't think the second half is necessarily better than the first, but it benefits from coming after having already brought with it some of this effect.