Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 28
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
190/365: Caught (Max Ophuls, 1949) (Amazon Prime, YouTube)
Ophuls’ moment-in-the-sun Hollywood days resulted in three masterpieces, including this femme-noir, following the trajectory of Barbara Bel Geddes’s sensible and skeptical working girl as she searches for financial relief by crossing paths with Robert Ryan’s Howard Hughes-esque control-freak industrial millionaire; he decides to marry her simply to prove his shrink wrong, and from there she’s a pampered prisoner perpetually flying the coop (and taking a job in heroic slum doctor James Mason’s med office). A peerless study in deranged masculine tyranny, and of traditional gender-role combat in general, made with no small payload of ire a few years after Hughes had fired Ophuls and buddy-producer Preston Sturges from another film, this densely textured drama resonates both from Ophuls’s insistence on subtle and varied naturalism in the acting (Bel Geddes, like Joan Bennett before her, never resonated in the same way), and from his still-amazing camera expressiveness. Not a single shot isn’t germinated from an emotional idea, layering visual textures on top of roving restlessness and shifting compositions that tell the story all by themselves.
191/365: The Entity (Sidney J. Furie, 1983) (Hulu, Sling, Amazon Prime)
There may not be, outside of David Cronenberg’s wonder cabinet, a more nitro-powered horror-movie metaphor hell than the one fueling this post-Exorcist remnant, in which Barbara Hershey, as a ordinary working-class woman (one that supposedly exists in reality, though verification is scant) who is repeatedly attacked and raped by a huge, invisible being. Aurally and visually calibrated like a flamethrower, Furie’s movie doubles-down on the ‘70s-genre grittiness and then wallops you with unrelenting trauma; the bizarre prosthetic effects, of Hershey’s body being assaulted by unseen hands and body parts, would be merely one of the most lashingly Surrealist visions in American movies if it weren’t also deeply upsetting on so many levels that it’s like the movie is writing its own library of fiery feminist theory. The soundtrack, too, is so effective it’s toxic. The anxiety the movie produces was too hot to handle, and after years of delays it was dumped; today it remains unnerving and savage, arguably the most eloquent movie ever made in Hollywood about the struggle of the sexual underclass.
192/365: La Moustache (Emmanuelle Carrere, 2005) (Amazon Prime, YouTube, Google Play, iTunes)
You could down a trough of Kafka and Bunuel and still not come up with an absurd domestic apocalypse as simple and disconcerting of Carrere’s, which begins with a banal bathroom question: should I shave my mustache? Marc (Vincent Lindon) asks his wife this as he’s lathering up in a bath before a dinner party; “Never seen you without it,” Emmanuelle Devos’s Agnes shrugs. He does the deed, hides his face coyly, and then the unimaginable happens — she says nothing. His friends don’t notice, his co-workers are mute. Every conversation is a spit in his eye, because it’s a denial of the obvious. Does anyone ordinarily notice him? At first, it seems an elaborate joke, then Marc wonders if he’s having delusions, both of which are happier scenarios than the last stop on this existential rail line to nowhere: that Carrere’s hero is in fact invisible, incorporeal, present but somehow irrelevant, a Kafkaesque non-person. Is this psychology, or something scarier, something cosmic, like It’s a Wonderful Life! and its psychosis-evoking penultimate act? The disconnections spiral outward, until everything is in question. The acting is peerless: Devos, she of the relentlessly fascinating Picasso face, never wavers in her conviction, but it’s Lindon’s film. Thick-faced but lipless, with a natural frown and the worried eyes of an old dog, he is perfectly cast as an average semi-macho schmoe caught in the ultimate andropausal nightmare.
193/365: The Island of Lost Souls (Erle C. Kenton, 1932) (Amazon Prime)
This misty hothouse classic acutely evokes H.G. Wells’ original battery of qualmy ideas — filthy secret jungle lairs, megalomanic vivisectionism that prophesizes the ugliest Nazi experiments while mocking the new 19th-to-20th-century leaps made in evolutionary biology and physiology, the disturbing dread of radical miscegenation obliterating our safe beliefs in the separation of human and animal. A year before Robert Armstrong made it to the humid primeval chaos of Skull Island, we visit upon Dr. Moreau (Charles Laughton) and his sweaty, overgrown enclave, peopled entirely by furry, bestial humanoids created in the lab out of imported animals, and whose tribal community in the darkness eventually decides, after transgressions wrought by the doctor following the happenstantial presence of castaway Richard Arlen, that they’ve had enough of the good doctor’s House of Pain. Watching the film, you have the distinctive sense of visiting a genuine social phobia, an exercising of centuries of human exceptionalism growing nauseated and sick by the reality of Darwinism and the rise of secular science, which privileges no meat puppet over any other. But in its careful depiction of the manimals’ own self-regard — they’ve been led to believe they’re the inheritors of a new evolutionary mantle, and when the lie is exposed the insurrection ignites — the film steps into sociopolitical waters that were just getting murky in Germany. Wicked enough in its day to warrant an outright ban from British censors.
194/365: Little Big Man (Arthur Penn,1970) (Dailymotion, Amazon Prime, Netflix)
The last of the red hot postmod picaresques — and maybe the only red hot postmod picaresque — Penn’s satirical western epic is far more typical of his filmography than of the American New Wave anti-westerns. Traipsing through Thomas Berger’s novel, the movie trips through the reminiscences of a 121-year-old nursing-home codger (Dustin Hoffman, under a carpet of latex) who claims to be the last white survivor of Custer’s Last Stand. The narrative is lightly absurd, bouncing impishly in flashback along the hero’s arc, from pioneer orphan to Cheyenne adoptee to Christian pilgrim, snake oil seller, gunslinger, mountain man, and, eventually, a scout for Custer (who, as personified by a supremely outrageous Richard Mulligan, is a preening megalomaniac and the film’s greatest farcical stroke). Obviously Berger’s agenda had his singular Everyman live out, and undermine, every single Western cliche, while reorienting the genre toward the Native American perspective, and Penn’s film happily condenses the roving plot into skit comedy on the frontier. Still, the humor is classically un-PC, complete with gags about rape (the hero’s butch sister longs to be abused by her Indian captives) and the Cheyenne tribe’s resident swishy gay man. The film feels inspired particularly when we stay with the Cheyenne and the slow-talking Chief Dan George, whose hilariously wizened dimness nabbed him an Oscar nomination.
195/365: The Naked Kiss (Samuel Fuller, 1964) (Tubi, Amazon Prime, iTunes)
Few auteur-gods are as retrospectively appreciated as Fuller; we kvell over his hyperbolic, hard-boiled narrative drive and yet have a difficult time understanding what mid-century audiences could have made of this rampager’s utterly distinct, often insanely overwrought movies. This teeth-gnashing noir feels designed as an assault, blunt in the manner we’ve come to understand as Fulleresque — expressions of an unfettered tabloid persona terrified that unless it screams it will be ignored. The pristine and unslatternly Constance Towers plays a hooker who fights back — in the opening stunner, having the wig pulled off her bald head and she bludgeons her pimp with her purse, like someone putting out an oil fire — and then tries to reinvent herself in a small town, only to be confronted with its secret horrors and compelled to kill a pedophile. Fuller’s over-the-top style was always conscientiously calibrated to reflect the size and ferocity of the American social conflicts he took on, and this film found no audience in its day, almost predictably becoming beloved in the video era as a freak in the congregation.
196/365: Parkland (Thomas Landesmann, 2013) (Kanopy, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
A eulogy-film semi-indie set largely in the titular Dallas hospital on November 22 and 23, 1963, this thoughtful consideration of that day’s assassinational business does not traffic in conspiracy speculation, nor does it get misty over the dead president’s extinguished promise. The agenda is more fundamental: revisit the emotional experience on the ground, with its inherent limitations of knowledge, its palpitating sense of trauma, its ominous feeling of a modern era instantly ignited, in which nothing is exactly how it may seem. A handful of Dallas citizens are visited — eager camera bug Zapruder (Paul Giamatti), greenhorn ER doc Jim Carrico (Zac Efron), officious head nurse Doris Nelson (Marcia Gay Hardin), office clerk Robert Oswald (James Badge Dale), and so on — glancing off them hurriedly and seamlessly mixing in archival news footage, as the motorcade approaches. Then, it happens, but all we see is Giamatti’s Zapruder filming, in mounting horror. From there, the movie slows to an almost real-time crawl through suffering, incorporating almost two dozens points of view, and focusing on nothing beyond the electric daze of emergency tension, peaking with the appearance of a gore-soaked Jacqueline Kennedy, seen mostly from the back, wandering in and cupping a palmful of brain, which Hardin’s pro nurse shakily scoops into a bowl. The ironies of history do a lot of the work — from the hospital staff’s perspective, no work of fiction could’ve brought them the head-shattered president one day and then, through the same doors, his bullet-peppered assassin two days later.
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, 27
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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