Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 14
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
92/365: Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1969) (Amazon Prime, Vudu)
Leone’s hot, sweaty mastodon of a movie may be the greatest of all spaghetti westerns, the most overwrought, supercool, breathtakingly lavish, preposterously lyrical western ever made. The sets are huge (farmhouses appear to have 12 or more rooms), the story absurd, the music rapturous, the faux-desert sun roasting hot. Every aspect of it is swooning with the love for Movies — every scene is a western standard jacked up into a feverish fit. The incredible opening credits sequence alone (Jack Elam, Woody Strode, a fly, a deserted train station…) is worth the rental fee, and, like the rest of this super-widescreen mock-opera, must have given the video transfer guys serious headaches. The story involves the westward push of the railroad, a mail-order bride (Claudia Cardinale), a rogue outlaw (Jason Robards), a mysterious man-with-no-name bent on avenging his father’s murder (Charles Bronson), and Henry Fonda marvelously countercast as the vilest western villain of all time. As berserk and self-conscious as it is, it’s also profoundly sad — Ennio Morricone’s crescendoing music makes the loss of the Old West seem a heartrending reality.
93/365: Heart of Glass (Werner Herzog, 1976) (Vudu)
One of the great New German Cinema renegade’s greatest experiments — a medieval parable about a Bavarian village that descends into madness when its chief glassblower dies, and takes the secret of the town’s famous ruby-red glass with him. Always eager to make how a film is made part of its story, Herzog had each of his cast members hypnotized before every shot, then feeding them dialogue and suggestions and allowing their subconscious states to overtake them while shooting. The result is a one-of-a-kind experience, a surreal parade of desire and anxiety, as the actors perform in a swoony, dreamy haze, seemingly not quite sure they’re in a movie, or being observed at all. The closest any movie has come to a dream.
94/365: Mr. Thank You (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1936) (YouTube)
An almost exact contemporary of Ozu’s, Mizoguchi’s and Naruse’s, Shimizu was a far busier industry craftsman (over 160 films total), and this early talkie (1936 was early for Japan) is a graceful, quietly generous tale of a sweet rural bus driver and his motley load of passengers, as they each for separate reasons make the journey from their Depression-wrecked villages to Tokyo. Rich with resonating landscape, the delicacy of unspoken feelings, and the inevitable tragedy of romance in an inhospitable world, it’s a palm-sized masterpiece, as specific to ’30s society as it is universal in its tensile humanity.
95/365: Out of Sight (Steven Soderbergh, 1998) (Netflix, Amazon Prime)
From Elmore Leonard’s novel, Steven Soderbergh reestablished his cred with this bravura heist thriller-slash-romantic farce, weaving a savvy flirtatious pas de deux between Jennifer Lopez’s entirely capable federal marshall and George Clooney’s inveterate bank-robber. The two leads are so relaxed and quick and game they’re like rumbling cats (Lopez was never as good again), and the whole immeasurably witty, sexy and supercool package is shored up by a back-up cast of quirk-filthy heavy-hitters, including Steve Zahn as a jabbermouthed crook, Don Cheadle as a crime lord maneuvering for more power, and Albert Brooks as a millionaire accountant stuck in the middle. Every line, every bit of actory business, sings. Hollywood should be able to make dozens of films like this every year, but alas, Soderbergh can’t even.
96/365: Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975) (Amazon Prime, Vudu)
Every Kubrick film was an event, radically different from each other in their surfaces but similar in their zombiefied view of human life, and here he follows up 2001 and A Clockwork Orange with a plunge into the deep past, adapting the 1844 Thackeray novel about an Irish scoundrel making his way through the aristocracy and wars of the mid-1700s. Ostensibly a farce, the film twists away from comedy with every breathtakingly beautiful landscape and deadpan tableau; it’s a landmark among period films, but it also may be the most gorgeous film ever made about soulless people.
97/365: High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952) (Hulu, Vudu)
This classic Oscar-winning western is as simple as a film can be and still lug around an astonishing amount of ideological freight. The bad guys are returning to town; the retiring sheriff (an already cancer-tired Gary Cooper) must do his duty; the ass-covering townspeople bail and leave the lonesome cowboy to face the music alone. In its Cold War origins, of course, the movie is a parable of HUAC conformism — screenwriter/blacklistee Carl Foreman was literally evicted from the set by Stanley Kramer for fear of McCarthyite reprisal, a stunning instance of fiction becoming fact. A fresh look at this bitter film suggests that only demagogues could mistake the movie for a jingoistic ballad — the meat being roasted is small-town Americans, not Cooper’s reluctantly self-sanctifying sheriff — who, once evil is vanquished, tosses his star in the dirt out of disgust. More than 65 years later, Foreman was right after all: the movie is a sour portrait of American complacence and capacity for collaborationism. Innumerable Oscars, hosannas and AFI salutes later, it’s the movie that fooled the world.
98/365: Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson, 2012) (Netflix, Amazon Prime)
Anderson’s hipster-toychest farce factory goes decidedly retro in this well-loved take on ’60s childhood, New England summer camps, early-adolescent romance, mid-century American structures (Anderson’s view of family, government, Boy Scouts and law enforcement all feel like organizing toy soldiers), and, perhaps, nostalgia itself. Dry as toast and often hilarious, which is not something Andersonites will need to hear. For everyone else, at least, it’s enough that this film, like his others, feels and looks like absolutely no one else’s.
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Smashcut 365 is a weekly recommendation of films for budding cinephiles — seven films a week, one a day, no repeats — ranging from classic masterpieces to new and provocative indies and imports, intended to kickstart your cinephilic habit.
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