Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 44
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
302/365: A Canterbury Tale (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1944) (Criterion Channel, Amazon Prime)
Is this the strangest film produced by (and about) an Allied nation during WWII? So much of what’s hauntingly unique about Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s films is the blithe mating between Powell’s visual emotionalism and Pressburger’s completely off-kilter stories. This wartime nutlog seductively modernizes the Chaucerian pilgrim paradigm, dreamily captures the Kent countryside, and invokes a sweet, melancholy sense of abiding life proceeding in wartime that few films did, but the primary plotline involves a serial harasser who dumps glue into the hairs of local girls to, we find out later, ethnocentrically dissuade them from dating the boys from the local Army base. It’s as berserk a MacGuffin as any in cinema, but also accompanies an unpredictable frankness, what with the discussion of sexual misconduct, premarital sexuality (Sheila Sim’s “land girl” reminisces at length about the weeks she spent in a “caravan” with her boyfriend, now MIA), and glib reference to pot. 1944. This ultra-lyrical film never seems at odds with itself, and the final 25 minutes, when the “pilgrims’” odysseys come to their conclusive salvations, feels like a benediction.
303/365: Edward Scissorhands (Tim Burton, 1990) (Hulu, Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
Perhaps the most satisfying confrontation between Tim Burton’s cartoon gothic pupliness and mainstream Hollywood, this bracingly original modern fairy tale already feels as though it’s always been there, a pop myth from the 20th-century American fringe. Once upon an ironic time, the residents of a candy-color Eisenhower-era Florida suburb meet a mechanical boy (Johnny Depp) with giant blades for fingers, and decide to integrate him into their comfortable-but-all-too-violence-prone American ranch-house lives. Indexing scores of aspects of mid-century American history — good and horrible — but gently, sadly, this movie has always been read as Burton’s take on his own misfit Florida childhood — which only makes this tall-tale poetry resonate more.
304/365: Wanda (Barbara Loden, 1970) (Criterion Channel)
In a period of gritty, working-class neo-neo-realism, here was a genuine indie (unlike most of the American New Wave’s more lauded films) that out-low-classed the competition, and fell into the bowels of history since. Elia Kazan’s wife and a highly respected actress (at least on Broadway), Loden wrote, directed and starred in this fascinating portrait of a dim, soul-beaten woman who shruggingly allows her children to be taken away from her in court, and then, with literally nowhere else to go, falls in with an antisocial holdup man (Michael Higgins) on the road to nowhere. Equal parts Cassavetes-style verite (complete with sudden doc zooms), Actors Studio resolve, and remarkable prophecy of the say-little, know-less, just-watch minimalism of recent Asian cinema, Wanda is also an overwhelming portrait — caught in grainy 16mm — of Middle America in the late ’60s. There’s a commitment to real people, and the backlands of Pennsylvania coal country, that you may have never seen before. Loden never made another film, and, according to Kazan, died angry, ten years later, of cancer.
305/365: No Country for Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2007) (Netflix, Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
The Coens meet Cormac McCarthy, drop the comedy, and craft one of the modern era’s most troubling, maddening, peculiarly inventive must-see movies — which means you’ve probably seen it already. If it’s been a year or more, see it again: the dialogue (almost all of it in McCarthy’s hypnotically enigmatic voice) requires study, the story is a pretzel with several knots tying up off-screen, and the overall vision of a modern age gone desolate and deranged is intimidating and profound. Oscars all over, of course.
306/365: The Saga of Gosta Berling (Mauritz Stiller, 1924) (DailyMotion, Amazon Prime)
Swedish pioneer Mauritz Stiller has never been completely forgotten, but the majestic epics he made in his homeland before disastrously (for him) escorting Greta Garbo to Hollywood are rarely watched. This three-hour, 19th-century-set epic tracks the pilgrim’s progress of an alcoholic defrocked priest (Lars Hanson), whose tumultuous adventures bring him in cahoots with a young Italian wife (Garbo), both of them are eventually chased, in a breathtaking sequence, across a frozen lake by a pack of wolves. A grand, undulating Nordic tale of greed, lust, slaughter and salvation, set in a perpetual winter and boiling with Stiller’s restless pacing, the film has the payload of classic fiction; indeed, some credit should go to Nobel-winning source-novelist Selma Lagerlof, whose gargantuan melodramas perfectly fit the vocabulary and short-hand sweep of silent cinema.
307/365: Viridiana (Luis Bunuel, 1961) (Amazon Prime, Criterion Channel, iTunes)
After 13 years of establishing his post-Surrealist voice in the penny arcade of Mexican cinema, Luis Bunuel returned to Franco-ruled, censorship-crazed Spain and made, characteristically, the most incendiary feature of his mature career. The infamous scandal-film is no less than a schematic attack on Catholic piety, with Silvia Pinal’s sugar-spun nun returning to her uncle’s estate only to have the old lech (Fernando Rey) drug her and lie about raping her so as to corner the traumatized virgin into marriage. From there, it’s suicide, betrayal and a catastrophic experiment in philanthropy, as still-devout Viridiana transforms the estate into a hostel for the homeless, who gleefully turn on her like plague rats. Bunuel enjoyed viewing Christianity as a fat whore at which to throw rotten fruit, but Virdiana is also a claw-hammered critique of liberal aristos, responsible for constructing a society that creates a beggar class, and then “doing good” through fits of unwelcome charity. The film was banned in Spain, condemned by the Vatican, and awarded top prize at Cannes.
308/365: A Room with a View (James Ivory, 1986) (Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
When this Merchant-Ivory smash was first released, filmgoers didn’t know what hit them: the movie’s creation of a thoroughly inhabited, semi-mythic, utterly buoyant Britannic universe was so enthralling even E.M. Forster aficionados were taken aback. The movie stayed in theaters for over a solid year in this country; in England, obsessed audiences saw it every week, a kind of Edwardian Rocky Horror Picture Show. Indeed, it is the most gloriously repeatable of movies, unpredictable, eccentric, large-hearted, rhapsodic and wildly funny. You can easily imagine that more than a few suicides, or at least depression-based behaviors of some regrettable stripe, were prevented in 1986–87, as low-feeling customers returned again and again to balance their lives in favor of essential joy. The movie’s summertime vibe — either in its Florentine chapters, or in the idealized Surrey greenscape — is absolutely infectious. The saga of Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham-Carter) is, archetypally, one of repressed romance, a singsong piece of parlor-room fluff, really. But the movie itself is downright irrepressible, filthy with charming tidbits and background performances and a generous, irreverent tone, paced like a lazy afternoon. There doesn’t seem to be a limit to its ability to seduce, relax, gladden and captivate. From whence, for most of us, Bonham Carter, Daniel Day Lewis, Judi Dench, Julian Sands, and Simon Callow first appeared.
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, 42, 43
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