Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 36
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
246/365: Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Jaromil Jires, 1970) (Amazon Prime)
This flower-power Czech New Wave freakout has become the filmmaker’s greatest legacy, having survived its totalitarian context to become a trippy cult fave decades later in Central Europe and in the U.K. It’s not difficult to see why: a scramble-bag of vampire horror and soft porn and hippie largesse, the film is a parable on sexual maturation, a dream-in-a-dream collage of medieval fantasy and sexual predation that leaps shruggingly from episode to episode in a daze, often tumbling from one tableau to another, the next semi-nude violation, the next wild daisy dribbled with menstrual blood. Demons become fathers become lovers become priests become weasels — the titular heroine (played by a 14-year-old Jaroslava Schallerova) does happily admit, as she’s being carried over someone’s shoulder, “I am dreaming.”
247/365: The Brute Man (Jean Yarbrough, 1946) (Amazon Prime, YouTube)
Behold the haunting enigma of Rondo Hatton — this is the last of the three films he made that were released after his death at 51 — and what you’re actually watching is a ghastly kind of Hollywood freak pimping going on, the use in the movie sphere of a dying man for the sake of the disease that was killing him. Hatton’s disease, acromegaly, made him spectacularly ugly, and Universal, always the cheapest and most desperate of the big five studios, thought he was ugly enough to play a monster, and save on make-up costs. Jack Pierce, legendary make-up maestro behind the Universal Frankenstein and Wolfman creatures, is listed prominently in the credits, but perhaps only as a misdirection, a suggestion that Rondo’s extraordinary face was a crafted object, not a natural aberration. (Still, the studio never made a secret of his condition, described dishonestly in publicity materials as a result of his exposure to mustard gas during WWI.) Famously, this was Hatton’s only lead role, and the one film he made that, purposefully or not, echoed his life story — the tale of a robust and handsome varsity stud suddenly overtaken with disfiguring tragedy (in the film, an acid explosion), and turned into a killer. It’s a quick B movie, with a bizarre layer of sadness and injustice to it that only its star could provide — released during WWII, yet.
248/365: Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986) (Netflix, Hulu)
Not a safe space — this gargantuan psychosexual war zone of a movie is almost certainly the premiere achievement by our beloved master and founder of Lynchistan, a voyage into an American suburban life seething with malevolent secrets, Freudian explosions, and ’50s kitsch turned squirmingly inside out. Metaphorically, visually, texturally, it might be the single richest American film of its decade, but not for faint hearts or easily bruised sensibilities.
249/365: A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson, 1956) (Amazon Prime)
French master Bresson was a pioneering minimalist, always refusing to clutter up his movies with showbiz or action — or even “acting” — in order to maintain focus on our empathy, our capacity to understand another human’s plight. Here he adapts a French Resistance fighter’s memoir about his time imprisoned as a POW by the Nazis, and his granular attempts at escape. Stripping away all artifice and illusion, Bresson crafts a masterpiece of subtraction, focusing on the present moment, textures and obstacles and sounds, and gets under your skin in a way that’s as rigorous as it is pure-minded.
250/365: Swingers (Doug Liman, 1996) (Netflix)
From whence came Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau, as two guys in a pack of neo-Sinatra hipsters trying to be somebody, and score sexually, in ’90s LA. Written within an inch of its life by Favreau, and directed in a rollicking indie manner by first-timer Liman (who brought the same sense of spontaneity and energy to The Bourne Identity), it stands as one of the ‘90s’ best comedies, skewering masculine douche-iness and nostalgia while always sympathizing with these half-earnest jerks. Neither Vaughn nor Favreau have ever been as deftly funny in anything since.
251/365: Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943) (Vudu)
Essential Hitch, in which a cuddly Santa Rosa family is visited by a mysterious Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotton), who may or may not be a serial killer, a dilemma that dawns mostly on his teenage niece Charley, played with typically vibrant warmth by Teresa Wright. Something like an ancestor to Blue Velvet, the story (co-written by Thornton Wilder) looks at American small-town-ness through a lens darkly, as if calling the cards on how America liked to idealize itself in the 20th century.
252/365: Kwaidan (Masaki Kobayashi, 1965) (Vudu)
An epic three-hour kind of Japanese Tales from the Crypt, only a zillion times classier and scarier, this anthology film (based upon the stories of Lafcadio Hearn) inhabits a realm of Japanese ghost legends and traditions that feels profoundly strange but yet feels inevitable. Lavishly photographed and staged with heart-thumping alarm, it could be said to have inspired the J-horror wave decades later all by itself.
Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35
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