Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 27
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
183/365: Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939) (Tubi, Pluto TV, Vudu, HBO Max, Amazon)
Few American movies have been as relentlessly canonized as this classic western — in fact, Ford’s film was about as inventive and and rich and entertaining a western as anyone had made up to 1939, and westerns were the entire industry’s bread and butter. It seems today a must-see, if troublesome: many John Ford movies happily indulge in cliches about evil Native Americans and military honor and cute Irish alcoholism and female inferiority that can dampen your enthusiasm for the Monument Valley landscapes (seen in this movie for the first time in a western). The film’s structural simplicity (a motley assortment of characters, including Thomas Mitchell’s drunk doctor — an Oscar, but Mitchell made four other movies that year, including Gone with the Wind — John Wayne’s roguish outlaw, and Claire Trevor’s humiliated tramp, are stuck in the titular coach together during Geronimo’s warpath) is still compelling, but it’s also predictable in its rhythms, because Ford often made his characters do we wanted them to do, satisfying us in cheap fast-food kind of way, and because the set-up (supposedly borrowed from a Guy de Maupassant story) has been copied and reused so many times since. In 1939, the film was not high profile (Wayne was not yet a star, but would be afterwards), but Ford’s natural storytelling zest and knack for slightly irregular character collisions made the film a hit, and its reputation still persists, to the extent that a knowledge of 20th-century American film is handicapped without it.
184/365: The Missing Person (Noel Buschel, 2009) (Vudu, Amazon)
This toast-dry neo-meta-noir finds its MacGuffin in the reverbs from 9/11, but that shouldn’t put you off — the seemingly tasteless gambit works, because we get Michael Shannon as an oddly anachronistic private dick wearily doing Bogartian shamus crap in a world in which he doesn’t own a computer, he reaches for his rotary-dial phone before his cell, and he can’t get a cab to legally follow another car. Shannon’s unwavering look of heartburn consternation all but carries this wispy indie, as the hero is hired to find a man in Mexico, and of course finds out so much more, a lot of it about himself. Buschel has only slippery grip — some stabs at comedy seem too easy (Tarantino-esque banter among supporting characters is rife), while others land gently (a passing patrolman on a Segway hits the right note). Dark, grainy and regularly lapsing into subjective montages, the film is so cagey about its program that it seems made up largely of disconcerting moods — eventually, the real scheme is revealed, and since Buschel doesn’t dramatize it, we’re left to piece it together, and use it to retrace the movie in our heads, at which point the movie is not a joke any longer, or a mystery, but simply a tragedy. But maybe all of those old Hammett-Chandler-Bogart detective films were tragedies, too, winding up with a heartful of rue and too many bodies. Maybe the genre isn’t quite through with us.
185/365: Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (Roubemn Mamoulian, 1932) (Archive.org, Vudu, Hulu, Amazon, Sling)
Maybe the definitive version of the Robert Louis Stevenson chestnut, and the most berserk, thanks to Fredric March’s performance, which toggles between a rivetting portrait of an addictive personality helplessly caught in the gears of a new drug, and Hyde, who resembles nothing so much as a hyena trying desperately, and unsuccessfully, to act human. Welcome to the jungle: with his misshapen head, loose-in-the-socket eyes, primate gait and teeth that grow out of his face like trees from poisoned soil, Hyde is a true grotesque, an utterly mundane, utterly terrifying deevolved man, seething with malice. He’s so hungry to spite and defile humankind (particularly Miriam Hopkins’ terrified streetwalker) he can hardly keep from drooling. At times you can’t imagine that it’s the same actor; Hyde is even a few inches taller than Jekyll. (Not to mention, each incarnation of Hyde is physically distinct, as if the experiment is ongoing.) “How you must love me!” he spits sarcastically at Hopkins before a night of (off-screen) rape and whippings, and March makes us believe in Hyde’s black heart as few actors ever could. That March was Oscar-awarded instead of shunned by the industry for such a shocking exploration of degenerate desire, in the pre-Code early talkie days, feels like a miracle. It may be the most unsettling plunge into sociopathy Golden Age Hollywood ever saw.
186/365: How I Spent the End of the World (Catalan Mitulescu, 2006) (Tubi, Vimeo, Kanopy)
Another Romanian beaut, Mitulescu’s feature debut might be the closest thing Young Romania has had to a generational anthem-movie. Set in 1989, its rebel-without-cause is Eva (Doroteea Petre), a tempestuous, smart, rebellious-but-never-stereotypable high schooler dissatisfied with her smitten boyfriend and more or less completely fed up with the Ceausescu regime, prompting her to fraternize with a crazed anti-Communist nerd and to contemplate escaping. But to where? Mitulescu’s movie sings with the Slav-style mordant wit that so much of Eastern Europe does so well, and it also does the neo-naturalism jig with enormous skill (and without the longueurs and middle-aged grumpiness of many other Romanian hits). Mostly, it has Petre (winner of yet another Cannes trophy), whose watchful, impetuous performance knocks out what had become a 20th-century cliche — the revolutionary teen, bristling against authority and embracing rock n’ roll — into four lovely dimensions. Inevitably, Mitulescu’s movie climaxes with the revolution-is-being-televised events of December 1989, giving Eva’s story a thoroughly unsentimental happy ending that comes with its own kind of disappointing blowback, keenly felt across the country.
187/365: Mouchette (Robert Bresson, 1967) (Criterion Channel, Kanopy)
One of the great austere master’s masterpieces, this famous film is a wounding, epochal analysis of a neglected and abused teenage girl on her blank-faced way to the grave. An inarticulate country girl with a dying mother and an alcoholic father, Mouchette (Nadine Nortier) is almost ritually humiliated, insulted and exploited by everyone around her — an all-too-common paradigm for poverty-stricken, post-agricultural social settings, which was surely original novelist Georges Bernanos’s point. In Bresson’s no-nonsense hands, this grim fable becomes a pantomime stations of the cross, so completely focused on sensuous details, ethical interrogation and the fastidious lasering away of movie bullshit (like acting and action) that it comes close to the simple thrust of a medieval icon. That the film is a saint’s passion doesn’t mean it’s overtly Christian — Bresson is far less a spiritualist than a precision pragmatist, with a holy man’s crystal-clear moral vision. He shoots tragedy with an unblinking, unpunctuated lens — he corners you into empathy, without making it easy or easily forgotten. Still, however you read the Bresson experience, he may arguably stand as the most mysterious and elusive master filmmaker, demanding and repaying patience like no one else. The large library of critical scholarship on him still hasn’t fully sussed him out, or fully translated his intensely particular strategy into a relatable idea. He’s a tough cookie, and it may be that his movies cannot be written about eloquently, but only watched.
188/365: A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger, 1946) (YouTube)
Certain varietals of grandly gestured cinema inspires crazed, indecipherable, passionate devotion among cinephiles: the films by Welles, Ophuls, Sirk, Leone, Scorsese and Wong, for example, tend to magnetize our nerve endings more than our frontal lobes, and such infatuations tend to last a lifetime. Of course Powell and Pressburger belong on the list; it’s not a question of whether you’re in love with a P&P film, but which one. Cultists stake their ground all over, but the more romantic of them often steer toward this wartime swoon, titled in the U.S. Stairway to Heaven, because it actually involves a stairway, actually an escalator, to Heaven, taken up in the third act by WWII aviator David Niven, who somehow survives his parachute-free mid-battle disembarkment, arrives in England to fall in love with his American radio contact (Kim Hunter), and therein argue with the bureaucracy of Elysium that they should own the cock-up and let him live. As lovely a homefront British movie as was ever made during the war years, the movie strikes a special note of beleaguered, noble stubbornness; Niven’s persona could be read as London-can-take-it pridefulness boiled down to a savory cosmic-love reduction.
189/365: Still Life (Jia Zhangke, 2006) (Vudu, YouTube, Google Play)
Every now and then, the natural world and the massive self-satisfying erections of man provide filmmakers with ready-made metaphors of massive torque and resonance. Werner Herzog and Abbas Kiarostami have been experts at locating these visual/thematic El Dorados; Jia joins the club, with The World (set entirely within the titular, and largely depopulated, Epcot-ish amusement park, which presents mini-versions of global cities all clustered together within a single monorail track), and then this film, taking on the under-construction Three Gorges Dam, as it slowly devastates an entire countryside, displaces millions of people, and leaves countless towns and cities, many thousands of years old, permanently underwater. The enormity of the project and its impact on Chinese geography has created all by itself a post-apocalyptic landscape only hinted at in sci-fi movies; massive abandoned urban centers, vanished cultures, armies of refugees living under bridges and on plots of land earmarked for submersion, human culture refuse sent lost and floating, mountains covered with old concrete construction skeletons straining upward. It’s Waterworld: The Prequel, or one of Antonioni’s garbage dumps times a zillion — that is, an absurd crystallization of how developmental progress ruins lives across the globe. Employing the entire catastrophic mountainside city as its set, the movie is shot with observational long-takes that take on an odd personality as they persist: laborers hammering away at a building develops the aural and graphic thrust of a rhythmic dance routine, as the same syncopated cacophony provides the soundtrack for a team of hazmat inspectors, searching the ruins and its squatters for radioactivity. Jia’s story centers first on a middle-aged miner who comes to the region to find his long-lost wife and daughter, and finds their address under the river, and then on a younger nurse looking for her wayward, dam-worker husband. They’re just our reconnoiterers; from the first pans across the passengers of a crowded worker ferry, it’s clear that Jia is interested in the big picture, the full scope of social damage done.
Year Three 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 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, 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
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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