Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 27
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
183/365: Peter Ibbetson (Henry Hathaway, 1935) (Dailymotion, YouTube)
Semi-obscure and precious as a pearl, this woozy mid-Depression Hollywood swoon is filmed like a silvery opium daydream, but the story is what makes your head spin: after being separated as devoted children, grown-ups Gary Cooper and Ann Harding meet again with a husband between them; after a fight, Cooper’s unpretentious architect is crippled, and goes to prison for life. But, as the moony couple ages, they literally meet, forever young, in their dreams. For decades. French critic Georges Sadoul wrote about this incomparable romance in his famous 1965 reference volume Dictionnaire du films, saying that “it is difficult to discuss this film without tending to invent certain details more than 25 years after being burnt by its flame.” He didn’t invent much in his synopsis, but the flame is very real.
184/365: The Long Day Closes (Terence Davies, 1992) (Criterion Channel, YouTube)
The final chapter in British auteur Davie’s languorous autobiographical film cycle, this rapturously-made movie follows Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), which focuses on his older siblings and the tyrannical psychobeast father that wrecked their lives and succumbed to stomach cancer when Davies was 7, in the late ’40s. This far more relaxed film is a return to the childhood years of freedom and peace that followed, up to and including Davies’ torturous entry into secondary school at age 11. Doped on remembered details, the film often stops dead in its hovering course to simply observe the central family’s mum (Marjorie Yates) fuss with laundry and sing “If You Were the Only Girl in the World,” but also ascends, as in the breakout money sequence, scored to Debbie Reynolds crooning “Tammy”: a sum-it-all-up, epiphanic overhead pan of the young lad playing by his house, dissolving into overhead social portraits of the respective congregations of church, school and the movies. One of the very best films about memory, because it’s both archaeological and aching with fondness and gratitude.
185/365: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (William Greaves, 1968) (Criterion Channel, Kanopy)
A legendary but unreleased phantom from the crazy, hazy summer of 1968 that finally got an actual release in 2005, Greaves’ film may be the ultimate paradigm of self-reflexive cinema, eating Godard’s tail for him and one-upping the classic Chuck Jones anti-cartoon Duck Amuck by submitting to a natural entropy and a self-inquiry so relentless the movie, Zeno-like, never moves from square one. The suave, implacably jovial Greaves plays Greaves playing a vague indie filmmaker shooting a film about marital rupture in Central Park; with three mutually interrogating cameras going at all times, the set and surrounding passersby (including cops) get folded into the meta-verite mix, which is often prismed out for us as a split-screen triptych. Eventually, the discontented and cerebral crew begin filming themselves complaining about Greaves (and his script) when he’s not there, scenes that are sometimes cut up by Greaves later on; in entire chunks of the film, shooting and editing are actions in deep conflict with each other. Or so it’s made to seem, or made to seem possible. “Stop acting!” someone hollers early on; the magical moment when we see two simultaneous shots get refocused on distractions (a squad car, the actress’s legs) is trumped only by the sound team’s vituperative critique of Greaves’ “acting” — on and off-camera.
186/365: Pennies from Heaven (Herbert Ross, 1981) (Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Google Play)
This peculiar ’80s meta-movie musical, adapted and condensed from Dennis Potter’s famous BBC mini-series, explores the American ’30s in a crazily unique way: via the original popular recordings of the day, straight off the old, scratchy records, coming out of the karaoke mouths of Steve Martin, Bernadette Peters, and Co. as their characters live out a pathetic tale of economic destitution in a mythical studio-set city that, for the songs, frequently turns into a glitzy fantasy realm. And then back again: the undulation between sky-high oldie and dour “reality” is both fascinating and disturbing, and the film ends up posing uncomfortable questions about the role pop culture plays in social ruin.
187/365: Come Drink with Me (King Hu, 1966) (Amazon Prime, YouTube, iTunes)
Female fighting machines are de rigueur today, by Hong Kong cinema was putting them front and center ages ago, as in this seminal classic from legendary director Hu, which, by the way, is where Kill Bill and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and that movie’s far too many candy-colored imitators, came from. King’s epic is many times more arresting because the razzle-dazzle and vaulting combatitude is arrived at not via digital effects but with old-fashioned stuntwork, snap-crackle editing and simply filmmaking savvy. We’re in the amorphous period of medieval dynasties, where a bandit clan with big grudges has kidnapped an official, and Golden Swallow (Cheng Pei-pei; think of her as the Sandra Dee of spine-shattering kung-fu) is sent to the rescue. Whatever: the plots of Shaw Brothers movies from the ’60s onward were clotted, preposterous and often simply abridged for the sake of action. In fact, the film’s first major set-piece — when the harmless-seeming Golden Swallow arrives at a country inn in bandit country, and soon has to take on dozens of bad guys alone, using the tables and rafters and everything else — is visual explosiveness and high-flying breathlessness almost completely sans narrative. You can get whiplash trying to keep up with the flurry of perspectives and lightning-fast shifts of physical activity, but you won’t ever accuse the movie of playing to the cheap seats or telling you something twice.
188/365: Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968) (Netflix)
What can be said about this deathlessly famous skincrawler, except the craft of unease and claustrophobic dread it generates, sometimes simply by way of camera placement, puts 99% of contemporary horror films to shame. Igniting the who’s-more-Catholic horror wave of the ’70s, and also pioneering the intimate use of the all-American family unit as not the victims of irrational horror but the locus of it, Polanski’s movie (his fifth, and first American production) is a peerless anxiety machine still, with masterfully imaginative performances from everybody, including egg-fragile young-wife-on-the-nest Mia Farrow, solicitous-yet-creepy hubby John Cassavetes, and Ruth Gordon as the snoopy New Yawk neighbor, limning a real type so acidly it won her one of those Oscars no one has ever argued about.
189/365: The Imposters (Stanley Tucci, 1998) (Amazon Prime, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play)
Since the Marx Brothers’ Monkey Business, the luxury-ship-stowaway comedy has been more or less in remission, and so Tucci, writing and directing and starring, concocted this happy explosion of pure vaudeville, following two utterly lousy thespians (Tucci and Oliver Platt) as they find themselves accidentally aboard a ship among European anarchists, spies, grieving ex-royalty, a pompous theater star (Alfred Molina), a suicidal nightclub singer named Happy Franks (Steve Buscemi, unforgettably), and sundry other broadly played types (including a Nazi-esque ship officer triumphantly personified by Campbell Scott). It’s a wonder Tucci never had another comedy in him; this lark is so unpretentious and dizzy — right to its credit sequence, when the entire cast conga-lines right off the set — you wish he’d make one a year for life.
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, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26
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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