Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 1
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
1/365: Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978) (Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Malick’s second film and the last before his notorious 20-year hiatus, this moody period piece seems almost incontestably to be the most gorgeously photographed film ever made. (The Oscar-winning DP was Nestor Almendros.) It’s 1916, and lovers Richard Gere and Brooke Adams pretend to be siblings while working the wheat fields on the Texas panhandle, mingling with Sam Shepard’s dying farm-owner, with whom a tragic love triangle forms. The mild story is overwhelmed by the film’s famously “magic hour” visions of dusky Americana, but so? Isn’t it a masterpiece because of its unsurpassed textural pleasure? Buttressed by a semiliterate narration by Linda Manz (as Gere’s little orphaned sister), and Malick’s post-New Wave penchant for observing characters in off moments, it’s a breathtaking song of frontier dreams, and stands as one of Malick’s best films.
2/365: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964) (YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Entranced, romantic, utopian, Demy has always been the most patronized and underappreciated of the major French New Wave voices, because he largely eschewed realism. He was much more interested in the mutative crossbreeding of life and Hollywood, semi-real tales of love affairs begun and betrayed, everyday minutiae accumulating into bursts of swoony heartbreak, actual oceanside towns envisioned as slices of candy-coated heaven. This was his masterpiece, a wide-screen, chiffon-&-cherry-mousse wartime tragedy in which every word — even “Pass the bread” — is sung in a Michel Legrand lilt. One can only imagine the naysayers Demy had to persuade to get this helium-pumped dirgible off the ground, but the fact is it floats like a party balloon, and has a hypnotizing effect that may be unique in the history of movies. As a young girl working in her mother’s seaside umbrella shop and secretly in love with a mechanic destined to be drafted, Catherine Deneuve, barely 20, was more or less discovered amid the swoony ironies of Demy’s seaside idyll, and the machineries of romantic joy and heartbreak are visible around her like the workings of a beautiful but fragile clock.
3/365: Faust (F.W. Murnau, 1926) (Amazon Prime, YouTube)
Ah, the viscous synergy between the nihilistic angst of German Expressionism and the cozy, period-removed faux-menace of Gothic fiction, two great tastes that seemed inseparable until film noir, and which together have been responsible for inspiring more feet of film, pulpy and not-so-much, than Soviet montage and Italian neo-realism combined. Murnau’s film is a vintage tissue sample, a prototypical Ufa launch at the moment of the studio’s world-influential peak, and a grand cataract of cluttery, obtuse, cobwebby, vertiginous Teutonic dreaminess. The credits say it was adapted from Goethe by story-mills Gerhard Hauptman and Hans Kyser, but the original contract-with-the-Devil story is very Hollywoodized, straining to heroize Faust and turn his bargain into self-sacrifice. But no one goes to the German Expressionists for story and narrative sophistication, and Murnau, doped on the discovery of the magical force created by the camera moving in conjunction with action and locale, was the prince of the form, and his images are often Goyesque, sometimes Vermeerian. He shoots scenes through the shadows cast by billowing black smoke, mists up a crossroads as a preamble to Sunrise’s woods and swamp, and indulges in multiple double-exposures that not only pop Emil Jannings’ Mephisto in and out of “reality,” but transform the in-depth landscape as well. Then the camera leaves the launch pad, strafing curlicue model villages with the fervor of a cranked hobbyist, and hunting the oddly cramped-and-over-spacious Ufa streets and alleys like a witness enslaved by a Faust-like curiosity despite the oppressive threat of doom. It’s Murnovian, which means, in a sense, that they’re slabs of movieness experienced like music you watch.
4/365: Edvard Munch (Peter Watkins, 1974) (Amazon Prime, YouTube)
Arguably the last half-century’s least seen, least documented and most marginalized filmmaking master, ex-Englishman-cum-global-exile Peter Watkins made this massive historical tapestry in Norway, and it is an easily declared champion in the Greatest Artist Biopic Ever sweepstakes. It’s much more than simply a film about the troubled icon-artist and his controversial pictures — Watkins is the inventor of the dead-serious historical mock-doc, and the film is shot, edited and narrated like a record of the moment (1880s-1890s), with the actors-slash-characters often staring, warily, into the camera, and often interviewed talking-heads-style. As is de rigueur for Watkins, the cast is completely amateur, and are often called upon to speak their minds outside of their characters. But the nearly-four-hour film also places Industrial Age class injustice, including the small matter of pervasive child labor, in the foreground so relentlessly that Munch himself (personified by Erik Allum) often disappears into the social weft, and the film’s angry gravity and smoky visuals (cinematography by Odd Geir Saether) create an indelible period ambiance. (As it is, the fidelity to Munch’s technical achievements is breathtaking — you learn here how to make and print etchings by hand, how to woodcut, how to apply acid and cooked powder to printing plates, etc.) Munch’s visionary struggle and tumultuous public reception (often in the form of official censorship) obviously echoes Watkins’s own; for such a exhaustively historical film, it bears the anger lines of a personal outcry.
5/365: Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (Nathan Juran, 1958) (Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Gloriously, the 1950s were the first unbrassiered awakening of naked anxiety in American pop cinema — independent production allowed for all manner of cheap and rangy films to be made outside of the studio factories, and the war-baby generation was entering its adolescent years, full on its way to becoming what would be, historically, America’s first Pain in the Ass Teenagers. Only this era could have manifested something as absurdly iconic as this famous drive-in freak, a film more familiar for its notorious title and recycled poster imagery. A wealthy woman (Allison Hayes) with a dissolute and faithless husband (William Hudson) and her own history of booze and instability meets a vague alien presence on a night road (a giant white sphere, a giant hairy hand) and begins to grow. Simple as that — but who needs complications? Hayes’ growling puss and heaving torpedo bust, filling the fake studio sky as she rips the ceiling off the honky-tonk in which her husband is loitering, triggered a semi-conscious frisson in every male viewer, an expression and exaggeration of their own unvoiced, threatened desires for both fulfillment and punishment. It’s a shoddy film, naturally, but that is part of its nightmarish sheen — when the giant rubber hand (the production’s one elaborate prop) enters the bar, going for that jerk husband, it’s a moment when mid-century pulp moviedom transforms itself into your own heart-racing and vaguely dangerous dreams.
6/365: Happy Hour (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2015) (Amazon Prime)
At over five hours, this immersive Japanese drama requires commitment — but it’s actually a pleasure, a ruminative and mysterious act of companionship, as we follow four middle-aged friends into a series of slowly eddying life cyclones, after Jun, the hub of the quartet (Rira Kawamura), announces that she is getting a divorce from her emotionally null spouse. The revelation is somewhat irrationally catalytic for the others, because their lives are already on unsure footing: the tough-talking and single nurse Akari (Sachie Tanaka) allows herself to be seduced by a womanizing workshop mystic; dissatisfied housewife Sakurako (Hazuki Kikuchi) rebels against her unresponsive husband and son; and glamorous Fumi (Maiko Mihara) tries to keep her worklife in control as she watches her husband drift away. There’s a ton more: Hamaguchi spends enormous patience on his characters, in experimental self-discovery workshops, at public readings, at meals — the open-ended time spent with these lovely women (it’s all of the actresses’ first time on film) is its own reward. At the end, you can’t quite believe you don’t actually know them.
7/365: Kansas City Confidential (Phil Karlson, 1952) (Amazon Prime, iTunes)
Unarguably in the upper-percentile echelon of noirs, this heist-fallout meanie has had an outsized influence on American movies — scores of movies owe essential DNA to it, but the fingerprints on The Anderson Tapes and Reservoir Dogs, narrative and physical, are particularly unmistakable. Ardor for noirs can sometimes be asked to overlook clunky plotting or hasty staging, but no concessions need be made for Karlson’s badass character-fest, in which the rather Laurence Tierney-ish Preston Foster arranges a bank robbery with desperate losers Jack Elam, Lee Van Cleef and Neville Brand (who never meet without masks), carefully framing a delivery man (John Payne) in the process. After being tortured by the police, Payne’s hellaciously bitter stooge goes after the mysterious fugitives himself, all of them ending up in an all-studio Mexican tourist trap, where Payne inopportunely falls for Foster’s law-school daughter Colleen Gray, without anyone knowing who anyone is. The noir soil is rich with subtext, from the haunting memory of WWII (all of the men are scarred vets disgusted with the world they fought for) to ideas about lost identity and squandered purpose inherent in the crime plot itself. But it’s the surface perfection that’s stunning — this is a noir directed and written (by four scribes, plus Karlson and Payne without credit) who knew for real about risk, anger, gambling, poverty, and a pitiless postwar America.
Year One 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, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52
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