Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 22
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
148/365: American Hustle (David O. Russell, 2013) (Amazon Prime, Vudu, YouTube)
Eric Singer’s original script was reportedly a dead-serious straight telling of the late-‘70s Abscam sting operation, a nasty blip in American political scandal-mongering that quickly became infamous both for the pocket-stuffing Congressmen it netted but also for the slimy tactics used by the FBI, all for such petty results. Russell, characteristically, rebuilt it as a scabarous comedy, an ethical screwball about the ambitious FBI buffoon in charge (Bradley Cooper), the seedy reprobate-conman he blackmails into the scheme (Christian Bale), the conman’s hotsy-totsy ex-stripper moll (Amy Adams), and his fast-thinking, morally-flexible Bronx wife (Jennifer Lawrence). To perhaps say that in its exploding-jukebox soundtrack, true-crime intricacy and larger-than-life performances the film robs the spirit of Scorsese at his Goodfellas peak is only to say that Russell knows a touchstone when he sees one — and yet, his movies are as uniquely his as his handprint smacked across your cheek.
149/365: People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag) (Robert Siodmak/Fred Zinneman/Edgar G. Ulmer, 1930) (Criterion Channel, Archive.org, YouTube)
“A film without actors,” this entrancing, quietly radical artifact of European silent cinema’s last hours takes a Vertovian stance toward capturing modern urban life while mixing in fictive juice. Conceived and crafted less as a professional project than as an experimental, minimalist lark, a sun-drenched afternoon gambol among friends, the friends being Siodmak, Ulmer, Zinneman, Billy Wilder, Curt Siodmak, art director-busybody Rochus Gliese, and cameraman Eugen Shufftan, all of whom pitched in as a gang regardless of their eventual credits, and the upshot is singularly natural, relaxed, intimate and serene. As in Engel’s Little Fugitive and thousands of indies since, the film often finds its protagonists on busy streetcorners, “acting” amid an oblivious throng; the quartet, all non-pros “playing” themselves, settle around a beach area outside of Berlin, snack, nap, swim, argue, brood, and life goes on around them. The poignancy of a Germany captured in its idleness, in the long afternoon of the fading Weimar “Golden Era” before the rise of Nazism, generates its own melancholy, but the filmmakers have a fabulous collective eye and ardor for their human landscape. Still, it’s not a film rich in conscientiously poetic moments — everything, from the workmen to the boats to the naked picnicking children cavorting in the sun, is equal and beautiful and worthy of their camera-time. When the film gently reaches out for an emotional visual moment, it’s a stunner: as one of the cads naps in the grass canoodling with one girl under his right arm, the other girl dozes curled up with his left, and we cut to a looming close-up of the sleeper, oblivious and pressing her face happily into his open hand. It’s hard not to conclude that Eric Rohmer loved this film to death; certainly, Renoir (who appeared in a film Gliese made in France the same year) knew it well, and the expansive, gentle tone of his work after 1930 may’ve been a result.
150/365: Inland Empire (David Lynch, 2006) (Hulu, iTunes)
Here is an undiluted, madcap cataract of purest grade-A cinema from our greatest and most uncompromising sui generiste, three hairy hours long and so furiously self-involved, so hermetically sealed yet explosive and fascinating, so purely a movie and nothing else, that roping it into any category with other movies seems a mistake. Named after the California region not because it’s set there, but because Lynch simply liked the sound of it, the film recalls Bergman’s Persona and Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits in its allusive structure and suggestions of a fracturing female psyche. Laura Dern plays, in the film’s clearest thread, a Hollywood-mansion-inhabiting actress with a homicidally jealous husband (Peter J. Lucas) and a new job: a role in a Southern melodrama that roughly parallels the romantic triangle that eventually forms with her co-star (Justin Theroux). But Lynch twists the diegesis like a mile of taffy, until there’s no there there, just dreams within dreams within movies within nightmares. Dern is stretched on the rack of being a crazy auteur’s favorite go-to girl, while a roomful of prostitutes dance to “The Loco Motion,” memories and/or shadows of Lodz haunt the periphery, other figures float stories and notions of murder, a family of rabbit people endure obscurely menacing domestic moments in their living room (all borrowed from Lynch’s 2002’s Rabbits shorts), movie sets open onto real homes and mysterious neighborhoods, interviews are held with no clear purpose, and on and on. Shot completely in HD video with little or no effort expended on making it look like celluloid, Inland Empire is a cataract of anxiety, Lynch’s semiconscious menagerie unleashed. It’s a film that exists for itself and for its maker, not necessarily for us.
151/365: Try and Get Me! (Cy Endfield, 1950) (Amazon Prime, YouTube)
Before being blacklisted by the HUAC in 1952 and coming to the UK to remake himself as Stanley Baker’s right-hand man, Endfield was for most of the ’40s a struggling freelancer stuck doing Joe Palooka and Bowery Boys sequels. That is, until 1950, when he made The Underworld Story and Try and Get Me!, two of the most shocklingly mature and merciless film noirs ever made. The latter (also titled The Sound of Fury) is virtually a Zolaesque epic of postwar desolation and tumbling-domino destiny, with Frank Lovejoy is a jobless family man who falls in with Lloyd Bridges’s slick, day-drinking sociopath, and inexorably the duo’s petty hold-ups evolve into a full-on kidnapping-murder. At the same time, hotshot bourgeois journalist Richard Arlen and newspaper editor Art Smith instinctively pump the crime spree into a headline frenzy, eventually initiating a massive lynch mob face-off (employing many hundreds of real-life Phoenix, Arizona residents) that ends, fearsomely, with a complete abandonment of order. Inspired by a real 1933 San Jose incident in which newspaper coverage spurred a crowd to break into a jail and hang two suspects in a city park (covered live by radio reporters), Endfield’s movie captures the steamrolling horror of it, firehoses and tear gas and all, while attending carefully to each character’s tortured ethical conflicts. As with the best noirs, the movie grips with the grim truthfulness of its details — the kids playing on sewer pipes, the cheap renters’ village with only one television, the marriage dissolving into nagging sobs with the lack of work. Indispensable, and as close to a masterpiece as this beloved genre has to offer.
152/365: Satantango (Bela Tarr, 1994) (EasternEuropeanMovies.com)
One of the planet’s great cinematic formalists, Hungarian master Tarr has a designated wedge of territory all to himself — apocalyptically run-down, dead-or-dying post-Communist villages on vast Mittleuropan plains of mud, poverty, crushed will, delusionary behavior and charcoal skies, all observed by a cinematographic point of view that stalks silently and patiently through the ruins like a ghost. Because it is first and foremost an experience, a seven-and-a-half-hour ordeal by shadow in which the passage of time upon the eyeballs is its reason for being, this monster of an art film stands as one of the late-century’s most formidable moviegoing experiences. It’s an epic trance state, a massive portrait of a withered universe; critics have noted that two-hour slices could stand as redoubtable films on their own. (Virtually any shot is a frameable work in its own right.) Set entirely in a rainy, desolate village fallen into inertia after the collapse of its collective farm, as well as on the surrounding flatland puszta, the film details the lives of the peasants as they await settlement money for the land — about which they are in a constant state of anxiety. Goldbricking is on everyone’s minds, particularly once it is rumored that a well-known grifter that everyone thought was dead is going to return — from the grave? — and, presumably, scam everyone out of their share in order to keep the dead dream of Communism going. Within this fraught structure, Tarr’s film wanders, dallies and watches, exhaustively, as the individuals worry and doomsay their way into one dead end after another — alcoholic ruin, cruelty, suicide, thievery, sodden despair, a plethora of scheming, paranoid human beasts playing out their final act in a Godless world.
153/365: A Ghost Story (David Lowery, 2017) (Amazon Prime, Vudu, YouTube)
A daring semi-indie — as in, it dares you to buy its crazy conceit, dares you to put up with its glacial pace, and dares you to connect with its almost completely inexpressive characters. The film is a kind of vacuum that grows into a mystery, and ends up getting under your skin. The central concept is nutsy enough: life seen from a ghost’s perspective, the ghost itself literally presented to us as a man with a sheet thrown over him, with blackened eyeholes cut into it, a la Charlie Brown. It’s not a horror film at all, but a kind of ironic dirge. Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara are a young, nameless couple renting an old, grubby ranch house somewhere in Texas, and we only spend a little time with their nuzzling and cooing before he is killed in a car wreck, right in front of the house. We hardly ever, in fact, get very far from that house — we, like Affleck’s affectless ghost figure, are stuck there, watching Mara try to grieve and continue with her life. Lowery’s gambit here, abetted by a moaning ambient score and beautifully dusty cinematography, depends upon the almost childish poetry of the implacable ghost figure, who expresses nothing and never speaks; it feels like a visual joke at first, but soon we accept it, and the movie begins to turn into something crushingly lyrical when another ghost appears in the window of a nearby house, and the two silently communicate (with subtitles). The second ghost (whose sheet has flowers on it) is waiting — “who for?” “I don’t remember.” Ever so slowly, Lowery’s self-serious experiment gains resonance you couldn’t have seen coming, largely by virtue of gigantic leaps in time and a resort to metaphysical cartwheels that take your breath away.
154/365: Three Outlaw Samurai (Hideo Gosha, 1964) (Criterion Channel)
Easy to overlook even if you were to simply consider the rush of world-beater Japanese films released in 1964 (Woman in the Dunes, Kwaidan, Onibaba, Intentions of Murder, Pale Flower, Manji, Gate of Flesh, etc.), Gosha’s chambara saga is in fact a vital milestone in samurai cinema, easily as beloved on its home turf as the early ’60s hits of Kurosawa. More a dedicated pulpmeister than a member of the New Wave, Gosha began as a TV director, and this was, in fact, a big-screen adaptation of a hit show by the same title, which was in its third original season when the film came out, and would plow on for three more years. You’d never know it — this, Gosha’s first feature, is a widescreen flood of muscular compositions, torrential movement, dramatic depth and some of the most detailed lighting ever expended on a genre film, even in Japan. The plot is paradigmatic: a cynical Bogartian samurai (Tetsuro Tamba) stumbles into a group of starving villagers who have kidnapped the local magistrate’s daughter, in order to make demands for equity and justice. Mistaken for one of their number by some of the magistrate’s infinite henchmen, Tamba’s surly badass sides with the villagers, which precipitates a cascade of bloodletting and torture, roping in a lazy vagrant samurai (Isamu Nagato) released from prison to act as an assassin, and a hedonistic samurai (Mikijiro Hira) “sponging” off of the magistrate but eventually put in a position where he has to defend the villagers and the two samurai that have recklessly chosen to fight for them. Brisk, complexly plotted, and visually eloquent, Gosha’s film is such a western it’s surprising that it has never been remade. Like all good westerns and all good pulp in general, the film’s thematic core is indelible. Power and class equals life-or-death struggle, as the magistrate even hires mercenaries to kill his other mercenaries, and the bitter ending helplessly leaves power to its own devices and surmises that no amount of bloodshed will change things. As indeed it hasn’t.
Year Two Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21
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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