Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 34
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
232/365: When We Were Kings (Leon Gast, 1996) (Sling, Fubo, Hulu, Amazon)
A riveting, spectacularly entertaining documentary about the 1974 Ali-Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle” fight in Zaire, Gast’s film took two decades to appear thanks to financing falling out, after the fight was postponed and ticket revenue evaporated. It’s a forgotten chapter in the grand duel between sports and publicity, between Ali and the white establishment he discontentedly served, and between America and the rest of the world. The circumstances were complex: the overpoweringly huge Foreman was the champ, Ali the comeback kid, Zaire a brand new nation forged out of the post-colonialist Belgian Congo and run with a prototypically African mercilessness, the fight a promotional stunt designed for Zaire itself, for Ali (who is clearly the most engaging presence to master a press conference in the history of televised news) and for utterly amoral promoter Don King. George Plimpton and Norman Mailer were there covering the event for various high-profile white-guy men’s magazines, and they’re interviewed again by Gast about their memories of the fight itself and its extraordinary circumstances. Once Foreman’s injury put the fight on hiatus, Ali turned the frustrating layover into a publicity opportunity, taking every chance he was handed to pump the media and the populace into a Foreman-hating frenzy. Along the way, Ali and his predicament as the possibly the most famous man alive who however powerful still struggles within a white man’s context is brought into sharp relief, as is Foreman’s situation as a civil, mountain-sized man whom all of Africa suddenly hated. (Coming off the plane with a German Shepherd on a leash, just as the Zaireans remember the oppressing Belgian police doing years before, didn’t help.) We may never see the likes of Ali ever again: whether literally sparring with the camera, wisecracking at reporters (“Just the other day, I killed a rock!”) or expressing genuine and eloquent concern for race relations back home, Ali was the real Elvis, our culture’s truest cult of personality. Although the recently late Gast overexposes old farts Plimpton and Mailer, he shares Ali with us in all of his glory.
233/365: Miss Mend (Boris Barnet & Fedor Ozep, 1926) (Kanopy, Amazon)
A fascinating silent Soviet thriller serial that’s as feminist in its way as Abram Room’s Bed and Sofa, Miss Mend catapults forward for over four hours into a conspiracy plot that allows for a virtual catalogue of pulp tools to be employed: chases, hypnosis, poison gas, world domination, kidnapping, and so infinitely on. The titular heroine is a single working mom (Natalya Glan) resistant to romantic entanglements, who righteously aids three rambunctious, acrobatic reporters (one is played by Barnet) as they trail after a conspiracy to wipe out the USSR — but good guys and bad guys alike are all Americans (Leningrad stands in for Anycity, USA), and the movie is a hilarious, self-satirizing window on how American culture was perceived by Russians, as a slapdash riot of drunks, mercenary newspapermen and seething subterfuge. Propaganda or not, it’s hardly anti-American; ater, Barnet and Ozep clearly loved American pop cinema, and they consciously robbed everything they could from contemporaneous Yankee serials, from set pieces to shot length to a general irreverence. (A bottle-hurling barfight recalls battles in several Fatty Arbuckle-Buster Keaton two-reelers.) The result is, as they used to say about Ruth Roland’s westerns, “cyclonic,” full of visual wit and inter-movie borrowings, and the occasional moment of scathing commentary. When a black man is shot in a brawl, the American policeman shrugs.
234/365: The Bronte Sisters (Andre Techine, 1979) (Apple TV+, Amazon, YouTube, Google Play)
“A vampire story” is how Techine himself characterized this sepulchral, wax-museum biopic, his fourth feature and an ambitious and peculiar co-optation of native Brit culture by one of the most native French directors of his generation. Certainly, the film is filthy with stylized Gothic mood; shot on location in Yorkshire, the whole film, from its skies to its cast, glowers and broods with Keatsian fury. The narrative, trimmed down from an initial three-hour cut, centers on the mature siblings Emily (Isabelle Adjani), Charlotte (Marie-Frances Pisier) and Anne (Isabelle Huppert) attempting to survive into adulthood in 1840s Haworth, secluded and without suitors and buzzing with writerly ambition, alongside their brother Branwell (Pascal Greggory), whose prospects are the family’s only hope and yet whose dissolute habits and self-pitying romanticism eventually spell his doom. The “vampirism” is patriarchy-mandated, it seems, as the helplessly homebound sisters, occasionally working only as governesses, fume and worry about their brother’s fate, and use his tragic death-spiral (here abetted by laudanum) as inspiration for their off-screen writings. Techine’s strategy is strangely arch and frosty — however crammed with Romantic symbolism and atmosphere, the scenes are staged like catatonic tableaux, as if in an attempt to evoke a stylized idea of notorious British repressiveness. In one sense this zombified air is an effective plus, saving the film from the emotive cliches common in writers’ biopics (the plot-stuff of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre does not intervene). And the pallette does vary: amidst the poised portents, Pisier brings a fierce sincerity (Adjani and Huppert are held still at being, respectively, righteously indignant and watchfully timid), Greggory makes a game Byronic failure, and Adrian Brine, as a monstrous reverend-lord employing Bran and Anne as children’s tutors, is an unforgettable homunculus. Techine, too, finds substantial poetry on the moors; a majestically observed sequence involving a cat, a windowsill and the estate grounds outside is almost Tarkovskiian, and the climactic passage when the two younger sisters finally contract tuberculosis (which in effect killed the whole family, six siblings in all) is sudden and terrifying.
235/365: Training Day (Antoine Fuqua, 2001) (Netflix, Vudu, YouTube, HBO Max)
A hardcore, acidic antidote to hundreds of cheesy buddy-cop movies, Fuqua’s movie — the only entry in his filmography worth remembering — is an urban odyssey into horrifying risk and seeping corruption that never opts for absurd action, simplistic characterizations, or easy Hollywood answers. David Ayer’s script keeps things low to the ground, keeping us in a constant state of apprehension. Of course Denzel Washington, a well-deserved Oscar (how often do we get to say that anymore, a “well-deserved Oscar”?), kills as a street-savvy, savagely corrupt undercover narc cop prowling the streets of L.A. and, for the one day the film chronicles, leading his new partner Ethan Hawke in way over his head. Hawke is terrific in the pivotal innocent’s role, but it’s Washington’s movie any way you stand it up. Invested with his beloved cocktail of effortless movie star charm, quick intelligence and noble bearing, Washington has always been tailor-made to play righteous heroes, which is what makes this vicious rogue so devastating. More than just playing against type, Washington uses his natural authority to make the man and his grift believable, turning his gift for trustworthiness into the character’s most devastating tool, and betraying us just as he portray’s Hawke’s happless rookie. A nasty stomach-knot of a film, it easily overcomes its own dire justice-served climax.
236/365: The Executioner (Luis Garcia Berlanga, 1963) (Criterion Channel, YouTube, Amazon, Apple TV+)
Heretofore little known outside of Spain, Berlanga hits his peak with this darkly hilarious Iberian entry in one of the era’s signature European subgenres: the totalitarian black farce of upward social mobility, where life and family fall into the Fascist crosshairs thanks to the hapless protagonist’s ambitions. A deft anti-capitol-punishment tumble of dominoes, the story follows Nino Manfredi’s restless state undertaker (mostly he delivers bodies to and from funerals), as he faces growing older alone (his profession is romantically off-putting), until he falls in with an elderly government executioner (Jose Isbert), who’s facing retirement. The old coot’s grown daughter (Emma Penella), also alone due to her father’s career, is more than available, and after a speedy pregnancy and shotgun marriage, the mini-family can vie for new state housing only if our reluctant hero replaces his father-in-law at his post. Manfredi’s irritable schmuck is constitutionally unable to even think about performing his new job (the death-row postponements and delays send him in and out of seizuratic anxiety), and well he might be: the method in Spain at the time was the garrote, which entailed manually strangling the prisoner by turning a crank, as he’s bound to a wooden chair. Berlanga never gets graphic — it would’ve given the Franco-era authorities a convenient censorship out — but the stakes are full-frontal, and certain images, like the vast white courtyard space in which guards have to drag-escort both the convicted man and his wilting executioner to their final moments together, bind in the memory. Berlanga’s style — he loved detailed compositions bustling with four or more characters talking over each other, keying into modern Spain’s frustration and claustrophobia — sometimes requires attention and re-viewing, but the payoff is rich and resonant. Yet another fascinating New Wave-era resurrection that rewrites what we thought we knew about postwar European cinema.
237/365: Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003) (Apple TV+, YouTube, Amazon, Google Play)
An experimental explorations of the ghost of Columbine, Van Sant’s sublime meditation attempts to do nothing more than ask the questions — if we can’t answer them, they go unanswered. With no stars and a formal approach that amounts to having its restless camera prowl the corridors of High School U.S.A. like an unsatisfied spirit (a strategy inspired by the tracking shots of Bela Tarr), the film puts you in the middle of that moment: lost in the dreamy labyrinth of American teen-life without a hall pass, waiting for something bad to happen. Structured around the crisscrossing paths of a half-dozen or so kids as they wade through another dreary day in public education, the film doesn’t prepare you for the climactic massacre, which you see from several points of view. But neither does Van Sant indulge in violence or tearjerking. It’s a cool, wandering movie, intended as a visceral experience and as an emotional interrogation: what was it like to be there that day? Who could’ve seen it coming? What does it mean to be an American teenager living in a world where this happens? Elephant respects the ambiguities and complexities of preadult life, and for that it might be entirely unique, as well as the best film about teenagers since, well, maybe ever.
238/365: The Lawless (Joseph Losey, 1950) (Apple TV+, YouTube, Amazon)
Losey’s virtually forgotten second feature, made when the director was still three fast movies and less than two years away from seeking European sanctuary from the HUAC machine. In fact, the movie might be the die-hard Leftist’s most politically impassioned, a steel-nerved indictment of American racism and minority inequity, taking on the ever-prescient issue of Anglo-Chicano relations in the Southwest and predating Michael Wilson’s Salt of the Earth by four years. Independently produced (by the B-movie-factory “Dollar Bills,” William Pine and William Thomas) and shot on-location, the film broadly limns a smalltown divided — color-wise and by wealth — between “fruit tramps” and the well-off whites (who are the “lawless” of the title). Losey goes to the bone with a single cut, between a Mexican teen’s outdoor shower out of a tin can and a white teen’s bathroom ministration in an ivy-covered mansion. Brawls ensue, a Mexican kid gets chased for assault and steals a car, bad luck mounts and soon, thanks to the sensationalist TV and radio hacks hollering about mad-dog criminality, a bigoted riot is in the offing. Caught in the middle is Macdonald Carey as a weathered journalist just recently come to town to run its newspaper and interested only in recapturing his childhood dream of suburbia, and Gail Russell (her faint Chicana makeup just making her giant languorous eyes even more startling) as his opposite number, a crusading Mexican-American reporter for the town’s scrubby Spanish-language paper. The townspeople themselves, once the very upsetting, car-overturning mayhem begins in earnest, destroy Carey’s idealized vision of smalltown tranquility, especially once they descend on the newspaper offices like a tornado. The nexus between race, class and the media is fairly complex, and of course pertinent to the temperature and dialogues still happening in American politics, particularly in the states along the Mexican border. It was salient enough in 1950 to get it quickly yanked from theaters and sent to the vault by Paramount.
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, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33
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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