Heaven Can Wait (1943)

Posted on January 5, 2012 by
Heaven Can Wait (1943) dir. Ernst Lubitsch

Don Ameche goes to Hell.  Or, at least he thinks he does.

Ameche plays Henry van Cleve, who assures the devil that he has lived a life of sin, and can’t imagine being let into Heaven.  A heavy opening, but as with A Matter of Life and Death, there’s no solid theological content here.  The afterlife is a framing device for a wholly conventional romance.

Heaven Can Wait (unrelated to the 1978 Warren Beatty film with the same title) is based on a the play Birthdays written by Laszlo Bus-Fekete.  In the play, each scene was set on a character’s birthday.  I believe Heaven Can Wait is too, but the script doesn’t make a big deal of it, and it plays no real role in the plot.

We begin with Henry as a small child in New York, shortly after the Civil War.  He is being raised in a wealthy family, and even at this age, he has the makings of a roue.  He grows up a regular womanizer, with plenty of jokes for the 1940′s audience, who saw the 1890′s and the 1920′s as the times of sexual liberation.

The characters are all surprised when Henry marries Martha, played by Gene Tierney, but the audience sees it coming a mile away.  The film does start to shift tone when Henry’s adultery is discovered, but Lubitsch quickly snaps it back into a more comfortable zone.  We are supposed to like Henry, after all.

Critic James Bowman makes note that none of the events of the larger world play a role in Henry’s life.  Depressions, technology and the Great War come and go without mention.  This is the anti-Forrest Gump.

I was often bored by the story.  But, all of this is in gorgeous technicolor, and Gene Tierney has rarely been more beautiful.

Heaven Can Wait is #967 on the 2011 edition of the TSPDT 1,000 list I’m blogging through.  I’ve now seen 424.

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Cul-de-sac (1966)

Posted on December 30, 2011 by
Cul-de-sac (1966) dir. Roman Polanski

I feel a bit out of my depth trying to evaluate Cul-de-sac, because a) I’ve never seen a production of absurdist theater and b) I didn’t enjoy Cul-de-sac very much at all, aside from Donald Pleasance’s performance.  It reminded me a lot of Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf, a failed attempt with a similar structure and style.

“An odd mix of the plays of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter and such hard-edged Humphrey Bogart hostage thrillers as The Petrified Forest (Archie Mayo, 1936), Key Largo (John Huston, 1948), and The Desperate Hours (William Wyler, 1955)…” – Christopher Weedman, Senses of Cinema

The sense I get from most of the reviews – negative and positive – is that Cul-de-sac is sort of Polanski’s graduate thesis, comprised of re-written crib notes from other filmmakers and playwrights, re-arranged in hopes of appearing either original or intelligent.  (hoping for both would be too much)

Polanski’s “commentary” on sexuality consists of an emasculated cuckold wearing lipstick and a dress – all the subtlety of a Clint Eastwood film on racism.  Any of the characters would be better suited for a parody of theater or a Tarantino pastiche instead of a straight-up attempt that Polanski tries here.

Cul-de-sac is #888 on the 2011 edition of the TSPDT 1,000 list I’m blogging through.  I’ve now seen 423.

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Zelig

Posted on December 30, 2011 by
Zelig (1983) dir. Woody Allen

As a Woody Allen film, it stands out more for being unusual than for being particularly funny.

Zelig is a mockumentary about Leonard Zelig, the “human chameleon.”  He has sort of a Quantum Leap type ability, where he transforms into the type of person that he’s around, to fit in.  When with rich snobs, he’s a rich snob.  When with children, he’s a child.  When with African Americans, he turns black.  That sort of thing.

It might have been a nice metaphor for conformity, but then the plot blatantly comes right out and says so.  Again and again and again and again.  You know, just in case we didn’t get it.

And then, Zelig goes in the most obvious of all directions, and has the man fly to Germany and join the Nazi party.

It’s not a bad movie.  It might have been nostalgic for the older generation in 1983, in the same way Forrest Gump was a decade later.  And the technology used to insert Allen into historical footage was ahead of its time.

Reviews were ecstatic when it was released.  Maybe the concept seemed fresher back then.

Zelig is #766 on the 2011 edition of the TSPDT 1,000 list I’m blogging through.  I’ve now seen 422.

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The Man in the White Suit

Posted on December 30, 2011 by
The Man in the White Suit (1951) dir. Alexander Mackendrick

The early parts of The Man in the White Suit could have been written by Ayn Rand.  Alec Guiness is a genius inventor who cares only for his work.  He is serially employed at textile mills, where he sneaks around and works on a project involving a special sort of fabric.  One day, the daughter of one of the factory owners recognizes his gift, and procures a laboratory for him.  Guiness then presents his creation — a new fiber which stays forever clean and doesn’t wear out.

Our Prometheus’s invention is not welcomed.  The factory owners get together and scheme to suppress his creation.  They worry that an indestructible suit would eliminate the incentive consumers have to buy new suits, thus destroying their profit margins.

Meanwhile, the union realizes the same thing.  If one person only needs one suit, they’ll all be out of a job, and soon.

Up until this point, Guiness has been portrayed as a hero.  A run-of-the-mill (no pun intended) parable would have the union and the owners suddenly realize that they can make money by selling different colors and styles of suits.  Or, more prosaically, they would realize that if consumers no longer had to replace their suits every few years, they would have more money to spend on other goods and services, thereby increasing society’s overall wealth, and leading to a net increase in jobs.

But, the script cleverly stays neutral on the debate.  Whether the union and owners are factually right in this imaginary case is irrelevant; we can easily come up with our own scenario. [1] [2].  The point is that the audience suddenly doesn’t know who to root for.

Or, rather it’s rooting for everyone.  It wants our affable genius to succeed, but it also doesn’t want everyone else’s lives to be ruined.  Can we have both?

The brilliance of the satire doesn’t really, really hit home until the final moments of the film.  What would be a happy, hopeful ending in most films is subtly turned into an ambiguous, playfully sinister “plop plop gurgle” of the test tubes.

The Man in the White Suit is #859 on the 2011 edition of the TSPDT 1,000 list I’m blogging through.  I’ve now seen 421.

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The Asphalt Jungle

Posted on December 29, 2011 by
The Asphalt Jungle (1950) dir. John Huston

The real fun heist movies are the ones that let you think “I could do that.”  You can look around at your friends and pick out which one would be the heavy, which the safecracker, and which the master planner (me).  And of course, which the double-crosser.

Everyone in The Asphalt Jungle is a real person.  Nobody can hack into a traffic light using a cell phone, or win a rice rocket in a street race.  At least, nobody I know.

Even Asphalt‘s genius, Doc Riedenschneider, overestimates his own capabilities.

Several critics credit Asphalt as the first real heist movie, where the criminals are the protagonists. [1] [2]  It certainly set the template.  60 years later, the only real deviation from the Backstory-Idea-Plot-Everything-Goes-Wrong-I-Thought-I-Could-Trust-You plot is how things end up.  But of course, The Asphalt Jungle was working in the Code-fueled Noir era.

The Asphalt Jungle is currently available on Netflix watch.

The Asphalt Jungle  is #288 on the 2011 edition of the TSPDT 1,000 list I’m blogging through.  I’ve now seen 420.

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Scarlet Street

Posted on December 28, 2011 by
Scarlet Street (1945) dir. Fritz Lang

After seeing The Woman in the Window – made with the same director and lead cast the year before – I was much more sympathetic to Joan Bennett’s character in Scarlet Street than I perhaps should have been.  It was, after all, based on the French novel La Chienne (The Bitch).

It also took me an inordinately long time to realize that Miss. Bennett was a prostitute.  Perhaps I, like Edward G. Robinson didn’t want to consider the possibility.  Even after The Woman in the Window, and the warnings it provided, I wanted to believe that she really could have feelings for Chris.  Maybe she would realize that Johnny was just stringing her along, and she’d leave him for the nice, sensitive gentleman who likes to paint.

Of course, Chris is married, and this is a Frtiz Lang film.

As with The Woman in the Window, passion – both artistic and sexual – lead to disaster if not constrained, and perhaps, even suffocated.  Emasculation is survival.

Even in Kitty and Johnny’s line of work, there are codes to follow and lines not to cross.  If they keep their heads down and play it safe, they can maintain a comfortable life.  Once they get greedy; once they try a different tack and stray off the path of turning tricks; that’s when they court disaster.

Chris’s Raskolnikovian nightmare – “Johnny, oh Johnny!”  ”Lazy legs.”  ”Jeepers, I love ya, Johnny!” – is the auditory version of Ray Milland’s booze-starved stagger through the city in The Lost Weekend of the same year.  And, it’s a precursor to the fast-paced insanity of Aronofsky’s Requeim for a Dream and Black Swan.

I also can’t help but wonder if Chris’s marriage inspired parts of Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita.  The portrait of his wife’s late husband and the way it serves as her ikon brings Shelley Winters’s devotion to her husband’s ashes to mind.  As does the betrayal and hatred towards the second-hand wife.  And, more obviously, the Buñuelian foot fetish.

Scarlet Street is available to watch for free, legally, online.

Scarlet Street is #997 on the 2011 edition of the TSPDT 1,000 list I’m blogging through.  I’ve now seen 419.

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The Navigator

Posted on December 28, 2011 by
The Navigator (1924) dir. Buster Keaton and Donald Crisp

The Navigator has a bit of a Frat Pack plot.  Our hapless protagonist wins over the initially disinterested woman by goofing around.  We like him because he is a doofus, but a good-hearted one.  He stumbles into accidental heroism, and we cheer as he holds his supermodel bride in his arms.

Thankfully, Keaton did his humor long enough ago that we can share his work freely.

 

The Navigator is #375 on the 2011 edition of the TSPDT 1,000 list I’m blogging through.  I’ve now seen 418.

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