Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 42
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
288/365: Bonnie & Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) (Netflix, Vudu, Google Play)
One of the startling trigger films of the American New Wave, this strangely upbeat, overwrought, broadly comic biopic/gangster saga introduced a new generation to the titular outlaw lovers (Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, stars in their 30s playing punks in their 20s), whose Depression-era crime spree and martyrdom made them prototypical counter-culture legends. The film plays oddly today, full of semi-theatrical blustery acting (a Penn specialty) and a kind of sudden, explicit violence that made 1967 audiences quake in their seats, but it’s still revered as a pathmark of American cinema, and it was an epochal smash in its day. You decide.
289/365: Woman in the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964) (Amazon Prime)
Exactly the sort of confrontationally metaphoric movie that got heads buzzing in the day, this Japanese classic is both fearsomely tactile and abstract, with an ideogram for a plot: an unsuspecting teacher (Eiji Okada) becomes trapped in an enormous dune pit and kept there by a pack of mysterious villagers. In the pit with him, dumbly going about the Sisyphean task of shoveling away the sand that perpetually threatens to engulf them, is a servile woman living in a driftwood shack; she is essentially the perpetual-motion device that prevents the villagers’ home from being buried, and he is her designated helpmate. The harrowing dead-end existentialism originated with avant-garde novelist/scripter Kobo Abe, but the chilling beauty of the thing is Teshigahara’s master stroke.
290/365: The Wild Blue Yonder (Werner Herzog, 2005) (Amazon Prime)
Embrace your inner Werner! A mock-doc in format, but a film that actually finds its strangest epiphanies in genuine non-fiction footage, this sci-fi oddity introduces us to a wild-eyed Brad Dourif, glaring directly into Herzog’s camera from a ghost-town streetcorner, and recounting in a fuming rant the story of his race — aliens from a ruined world who came to Earth and failed to thrive, while humans at the same time fled from their destroyed biosphere to explore this other, abandoned planet. This story obviously came second — what came first was the unseen, real-world footage illustrating the human sojourn: life aboard the NASA shuttle mission STS-34 sent into orbit in 1989 for purposes of launching the Galileo craft at Jupiter. Here’s Herzog at play in the fields of absurd physics, rapt as the astronauts float in no-gravity space, attend to personal hygiene with surreal difficulty, and sleep strapped to the wall — behavior Herzog poetically reinvents as the emotional tribulation of space-lost loneliness. The crowning flourish is the arrival at the alien planet: Herzog uses breathtaking footage shot in the waters of the Antarctic to depict a barren, blue world with a liquid atmosphere and a sky of ice. Vital to each of these visual orchestrations is the achingly mournful soundtrack mass, a fugue between jazz cello, Senegalese vocalists, and a five-man Sardinian shepherd choir.
291/365: Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954) (Hulu, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Google Play)
Before the ’60s, westerns had a lot of rules — it was Hollywood’s most beloved and reliable genre, and it therefore had a set of unshakable themes and a cast of die-hard stereotypes. You saw trouble on the horizon, though, if in the mid-‘50s you eyeballed this gender-bender devised by renegade auteur Ray and octopus-like screenwriter Philip Yordan, in which cattle owners, led by a semi-androgynous Mercedes McCambridge, wage war against Joan Crawford’s brazenly independent saloon proprietor, with multiple men, jealousies and sexual spite caught between them. Bold and campy, this was the genre’s first and strangest sociosexual, cross-dressing overall, beloved by culture-studies scholars ever since, and so bizarre it was chosen for the Library Congress’ National Film Registry, simply because it was and is one of a kind.
292/365: All the President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976) (Netflix, Vudu, Amazon Prime, Google Play, YouTube)
In the middle of the post-Nixon, New Wave ’70s came this big Hollywood-from-a-bestseller to-do, going granular about the journalistic detective work performed by Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) in uncovering the Watergate break-in and its Presidential cover-up. You’d think it’d be a glossy, smug affair, but thanks to Pakula, it’s very much of its period: paranoid, creepy, grittily realistic, and tinged with an edge-of-the-cliff apocalyptic dread that should be very familiar to us now, in 2019. Fascinating and convincing, and a bracing primer in both journalistic procedure and American political history.
293/365: Crossfire (Edward Dymtryk, 1947) (Vudu, Google Play, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
A brooding film noir with a preachy postwar sermon about anti-Semitism at its heart — but before you get there, it’s a tapestry of noir night-ness, pathological hate and lurking violence. A Jewish civilian is found murdered after a drunken night out with a mess of demobilized sailors — one of whom (Robert Mitchum) decides to investigate on his own. Mitchum is characteristically, coolly magnificent, but Robert Ryan is unforgettable as the friendly sociopath/bigot at the trail’s end, and so is Gloria Grahame, in her first substantial role, as a life-worn party girl. (Both Ryan and Grahame were Oscar-nominated, as was the film and director, a first for a B-movie.) Still, entire haunting passages involve other characters — like the strange-apartment confrontation between hungover amnesiac soldier George Cooper and deceptive lowlife Steve Brodie.
294/365: Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990) (Criterion Channel, Amazon Prime)
This must-see Persian artichoke — in many ways the Iranian New Wave’s seminal creation — will never age out. Kiarostami began the movie by filming the court case against one Sabzian, an out-of-work Iranian man who, posing as controversial director-celebrity Mohsen Makhmalbaf, insinuated himself into an upper-class Teherani family’s life under the pretense of using them in a film. Ironically, Kiarostami does use them thus: entire segments of Sabzian’s strange little history with the family are reenacted for the camera, and we’re never clear exactly how much of what we see is true and how much is fiction. The courtroom footage is authentically “real,” but that means little as the cameras and Kiarostami become important forces in how Sabzian’s fate is handled by the court and his accusers. Of course, eventually Makhmalbaf himself enters the reenactment fray, as himself. The hall of mirrors is deep, but they all reflect, humanely, on both Sabzian’s and his prey’s intoxication with movie-world fame and respect. Like nearly every other Kiarostami film, Close-Up takes questions about movies and makes them feel like questions of life, death and meaning.
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, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41
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