Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 49
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
337/365: The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) (Vudu, YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon)
For those only mildly distracted by those old John Wayne/John Ford westerns, here’s your Paradise Lost: the Duke plays righteous, bigoted Civil War vet Ethan Edwards, dedicated to hunting down the Indian chief and his kidnapped (and presumed-to-be-raped) niece — so he may kill them both for despoiling his bloodline. The search takes years, during which time the girl grows up to be chieftan concubine Natalie Wood and Edwards becomes more and more twisted by his fear and loathing. When he finds her, it’s the most compelling Judgment Day in American westerns. In a dense web of passing history and subplots, here is the stoic, dependable John Wayne myth roasted on a spit, and one of the most mysterious and ethically fraught movies to come out of old Hollywood. More or less ignored when it was released, this psychological epic has universally become an altar for genuflecting critics — it’s one of those films that can reawaken a passion for movies in the most exhausted viewer.
338/365: Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard, 2010) (Tubi, Kanopy, Amazon)
The most recalcitrant of world-class auteurs, Godard has been making non-narrative features longer than any other filmmaker, starting at least from 1969’s Le Gai Savoir, standing outside of fashion for so long he comes close to defining a separate outlaw idea of what movies are. Made when he was 80, this is by a notable stretch Godard’s most irascible film ever, a defiantly incohesive montage rumination on… maybe everything. He didn’t even subtitle the film’s French clearly — Godard mandated that truncated, elliptical “Navajo English” titles be used, two or three disconnected words at a time, so the unlucky monolingual viewers among us can get only the scantest ideas of what’s being said. Not that it matters — the floating monologues and exchanges often don’t match with the images at any rate, and are often obscured by ambient noise and the pervasive, menacingly sad score. Divided into three sections but insistently troubled by Palestine, Egypt and the legacy of Soviet rule in Odessa, the movie first prowls the decks and belly of a particularly garish Mediterranean luxury cruise ship, and secondly visits with a rural French gas-station-owning family suffering generational squabbles, and thirdly collapses into a free-for-all collage, obtusely glancing at imperialist history via film clips and stills, John Ford’s Indians to dead Palestinians to gladiator epics to Chaplin. Like all of his films, this octogenarian feat is a conversation Godard has with us, naked, inconclusive, bristling with half-thoughts, jokes and sudden revelations, and each of us will walk away with a different exchange in our heads.
339/365: The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971) (Netflix, Fubo, YouTube, Vudu, Amazon)
Friedkin, with this policier and The Exorcist (1973), immediately became the New Hollywood’s most daring pulp-realist provocateur; his trajectory faltered later, but when Friedkin called the shots on his films, they percolated with visual danger and muscular movement; even today, the urban tangle of The French Connection and the possessed Georgetown of The Exorcist and the malevolent rain forest of Sorcerer can make you grind your teeth and revisit long-submerged childhood fears. He grabbed onto Robin Moore’s bestseller with two hungry hands, and what began as a routine, medium-budget true-crime film was transformed, in equal partnerships with star Gene Hackman and cinematographer Owen Roizman, into a definitive, era-marking manifestation of post-Eisenhower New York grunge and amoral modernity. There’s no underestimating its escalation of the New Wave mythos — that is, taking the precedents of Bullitt, Midnight Cowboy and Five Easy Pieces and applying them to the mechanistic needs and pressures of hyperreal narcotics work, shot over the shoulder in a grim Gotham winter with such veracity that it became how we saw the contemporary city, and ourselves. It was the first American film most Americans had seen (because we hadn’t widely seen Cassavetes’s Faces or Barbara Loden’s Wanda) that felt no need to make anything pretty. Friedkin became Friedkin in those alleys and on those subway cars; the carbon odor of emergency is unmistakable.
340/365: Battle in Heaven (Carlos Reygadas,2005) (Kanopy, Amazon)
As ambitious as its title, this controversial Mexican film is a living mystery, notorious for hardcore-osity but serious about its formal intelligence and deep-dish in its evocations of inexpressible desolation. Be warned: the film doesn’t blink away from graphic sex. The story follows Marcos (Marcos Hernandez), a middle-aged, pot-bellied driver for a military general and his slutty daughter in Mexico City; in a the slow drip of clues, we slowly understand that he and his wife had kidnapped a baby, and the baby has died (off-screen). Reygadas is a master of brooding, minimalist epicness; one sex scene’s subjectivity is morphed into an almost cosmic statement, as a maestro camera move that backslaps Hitchcock and DePalma, Reygadas pan-dollies away from the rutting couple and out the window 360 degrees, picking up conversations in the surrounding neighborhood before returning to their prone forms, their issues unresolved. The boiling magma of the movie — Marcos’s internal guilt-rot — remains withheld, but its breathtaking tension builds from our dawning awareness, and from the catatonic opera of sex-escape and cultural-redemption hunger whipped up around Marcos’s dilemma. Signs and wonders multiply; we watch a tree as its noisy flock of birds converses with another farther away, and then, ominously, falls silent. The film’s relationship with a national state of the soul is tangential but crucial, while Mexico’s surreal approach to Christian iconography is seen freshly, down to the climactic set-piece shot amid an actual pilgrimage of thousands at the Basilica of Guadaloupe.
341/365: Nightfall (Jacques Tourneur, 1957) (Archive.org)
A lesser-known film noir, but a terrific, raw genre dish, shot fast on cheap sets with the punchy jitters of a punk record, and focusing on a swollen, shamefaced Aldo Ray as a proverbial man on the run, with a bloody backstory that’s teased out of him by straight-shooting insurance investigator James Gregory (a fabulous and unsung character beacon of the postwar years, leading up to his spectacular turns in Beneath the Planet of the Apes and Barney Miller), and hyper-wary alone-in-a-bar hottie Anne Bancroft. “Guys have probably been swarming around you ever since your second teeth came through,” he rasps at her (probably a line straight from the David Goodis novel), but soon enough the thugs come out of the shadows, leading to, among other extreme thoughts, a torture scenario employing the inexorable machinery of an oil field rig. You can imagine, for all it’s harried cheapness, why the movie’s been neglected (as compared at least to Tourneur’s Out of the Past), but the relentless state of bottled-up anxiety can’t help but insist that you contemplate the ’50s dark heart all over again.
342/365: Howl’s Moving Castle (Hayao Miyazaki, 2004) (HBO Max, Amazon)
Somehow, Miyazaki’s beloved stature in the US as withstood the Disney-Miramax habit of redubbing them with showboating Hollywood pros, but the film’s intoxicating irrationality always proves triumphant. Here as in other Miyazakis, judgments are suspended, character is always in flux, and forgiveness is in titanic supply. Loosely adapted from a popular 1986 teen fantasy novel by Brit genre priestess Diana Wynne Jones, the film airily occupies a hybrid past, half fin de siècle Ruritania, half WW II siege, and half Tolkienian magic play. Giant battle planes rain bombs on Tudor Euro-cities but also unleash swarms of flying war demons with pig snouts and top hats to combat intervening wizards. The titular castle is a groaning, ramshackle house on mechanical chicken legs, held together by a griping spirit and home to a petulant, mysterious wizard named Howl. It’s where the requisite Miyazaki heroine, Sophie, comes for help once a spiteful witch curses her with elderliness, although the curse quickly becomes a secondary matter, because the war is raging, the king’s syrupy minions are hunting for Howl, the castle slowly collects an ad hoc family under Sophie’s commonsensical guidance, and age-oblivious romance inevitably takes root. The entrancing weirdness is part and parcel with Miyazaki’s narrative personality: cause and effect are less reliable than dreams and empathy, and villains are treated so charitably they’re not villains at all. It’s a utopian vision of a calamitous world, and Miyazaki’s evocation of old-school war — a night city during a scarifying blitz, a crippled battleship drifting into a civilian harbor, behemoth vessels looming and roaring with imaginary engine work — can be awesomely discomfiting, but ultimately it’s an organic, childlike wonder, fabulously unpredictable and seethingly inventive.
343/365: The Death Kiss (Edwin L. Marin, 1932) (YouTube, DailyMotion, TheFilmDetective.tv, Amazon)
A surprising and forgotten fossil from Hollywood’s Poverty Row in the early-talkie age, this ambitious little murder mystery is set entirely on the lot of the very real Tiffany Studios, a tiny B-picture factory that closed the same year. You didn’t see this kind of opening in ’32 outside of Mamoulian and Ulmer: a nearly two-minute tracking shot from a car interior to a nightclub exterior, featuring multiple dialogue exchanges, and culminating in a drive-by murder on the steps, and a pan over to the film crew watching, as testy director Edward Van Sloan helms the the titular thriller-within-a-thriller. Life imitates art and the star is really dead — leaving nosy young staff screenwriter David Manners to one up the stodgy police and investigate. The hall of mirrors is pretty deep: everyone (including very suspicious studio exec Bela Lugosi) eventually gets around to examining the footage of the killing for clues — decades before Blow-Up and Blow Out. Meanwhile, the film delivers a stunningly rich and convincing portrait of how daily life ran on a small Hollywood lot; the story takes us through the real departments (lighting, props, etc.), populated by real crew workers, while the head office is home to splenetic Eastern-Euro Jewish owners, flunkies, egomaniac artistes, casting-couch-vet actresses, and backstabbing middlemen. There are even sneaky splats of golden hand-tinting, including projector beams, gunfire, sconce lights and even the pivotally non-accidental burning of the important footage in the gate, long before Two-Lane Blacktop. Of course the mystery itself, and Manners’ rather silly interlocutor, are roughly sketched in (the script was co-written by HUAC blacklistee-to-be Gordon Kahn), and of the three stars inherited from the previous year’s hit Dracula, only Van Sloan impresses with his savviness. But it remains a Pre-Code stand-out, and a bewitching hunk of history.
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, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48
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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