Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 6
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
36/365: Chicago (Frank Urson, 1927) (Flicker Alley, Amazon Prime)
The original film version of the hit Maurine Watkins play, this cusp-of-talkies farce was produced by Cecil B. DeMille but actually, at least in part, directed by him as well — celeb auteur that he was, he didn’t want to despoil the current success of The King of Kings with something as impious as the story of Roxie Hart. It was meant as a finger-wagging cautionary tale in its day, of course, but the thrust is more like a shaken bottle of cheap champagne, decadent and acidic. It’s a flat-out satire on then-modern morality, tracking vain and brainless golddigger Roxie (Phyllis Haver) as she cheats on her squeaky-clean husband (Victor Varconi) with grotesque sugar daddy Eugene Pallette for his cash and that alone, until even he becomes sickened by her, tries to leave and gets shot for his trouble. Roxie is duly arrested and takes up the yellow press’s urge to ramp up her slutty-flapper persona in the limelight during her outrageous trial, not knowing or caring much how more quickly it’ll send her to Death Row. The basis for the show and Oscar-winning musical Chicago, the film doesn’t mince judging Roxie, and yet the shallow subtext underneath the broad acting and flapper goofiness suggests that she is nevertheless a victim of a society run by men and their desires. Haver, passing for Dorothy Malone’s mother and Meg Ryan’s grandmother, is a bleach-blond firecracker, and is the perfect fulcrum for one of Hollywood’s first flat-out satires of media scurrility, almost the Network of its day. DeMille’s opportunistic programme was, as usual, to deliver Christian morals using a loading dose of sex and amorality, but the results are a little too much fun to inspire sanctimony.
37/365: Warm Water Under a Red Bridge (Shohei Imamura, 2001) (Asian Crush, Amazon Prime)
For an old man’s movie, Imamura’s buoyant, embraceable absurdism is a classic gainsay — a young man’s walk in a codger’s shoes. At 76, Imamura has aged into a seasoned artiste’s providence as Bunuel had before him, with the relative nihilism of The Pornographers, Vengeance Is Mine and The Ballad of Narayama given way to a generous ardor for the capricious potentialities of movie narrative. Weary Japanese star Koji Yakusho is a jobless salary-man taken to loitering with Tokyo homeless as his beleaguering wife waits in the suburbs; he then vanishes for real when lands in a seaside village filthy with happenstance and quirk, and a beautiful woman (Misa Shimizu) prone to leaking clear fluid in rapturous trances. In the ensuing sexual tryst at the woman’s defunct-candy-factory house, our hero experiences a veritable gullywasher of vaginal amplitude, which Imamura’s camera follows as it trickles into the canal, attracting crowds of fish and gulls. The film’s ebullient sex scenes manage to satirize the idealized plenitude of female biology just as they revel in its intoxication, and this generous POV extends to provincial life, romantic delusion, prostitution and even racism. Indeed, in a sunny world of magical sexual floods, the only crime is industrial water-table poisoning. It’s hardly a diss to say the movie shares some DNA with Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero: a semi-mysterious fishing village cluttered with quixotic locals, African immigrants, running gags, scooters, and so on, but even so, it’s thrillingly original in its comic rhythms.
38/365: The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino; 1953) (YouTube, DailyMotion, Kanopy, Amazon Prime)
As a low-wattage Hollywood leading lady Lupino fought the system for years before deciding to independently produce and direct her own movies, with her husband Collier Young, starting in the late ’40s, and her modest oeuvre is vitally necessary — as the single woman directing films in America’s mid-century. The films are rich in gender-role ambivalence and narratives tilted toward emotional collision rather than action, but this thorny film noir is decidedly not femme in any obvious way — it is, in fact, tough as nails. An all-male guilt bolero in which flabby buddies Edmund O’Brien and Frank Lovejoy, off on a fishing trip but actually headed south of the border for hookers, stop in the middle of the night to pick up a hitcher, getting instead a serial psychopath on the run (William Talman), who holds a gun to their heads all the way down to a south Mexican badland where tourists don’t go. Remembering the confused, vulnerable masculinity she picked up from her four movies with Raoul Walsh, Lupino blurs the scenario’s edges, confounds genre stereotypes, and basks visually in the inky darkness of a postwar landscape unbothered by streetlights.
39/365: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (George Clooney, 2002) (Sling, Netflix, Amazon Prime)
With a screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, you know to be cautious — this avowed biopic of 1970s game show impresario Chuck Barris (Sam Rockwell), based on his own “unauthorized autobiography,” begins with the happy buzz of Barris’s ascension to fame and fortune, but then the worm turns: the book’s trump card, and raison d’etre, is Barris’ contention that for years he supplemented his profile as network producer and host of The Gong Show with work as a freelance CIA assassin, going so far as to maintain that European vacation prizes awarded on The Dating Game were chosen for their synchronicity with Barris’s black-book assignments. “The perfect cover,” is how his Company contact (Clooney, playing it drier than dry) puts it, and Clooney’s film luxuriates in Cold War cliches, down to Barris’s trenchcoat and mysterious vamp-operative (Julia Roberts). It’s a plum ruse played mediocre-movie straight, but for anyone who remembers Barris (an irreverent schmuck-jester to whom the very idea of hosting a TV show seemed deathlessly hilarious) and The Gong Show (itself a shapeless, self-destructing piece of anti-television), the espionage moonlighting subplot is the final public prank. Given that, it’s a daringly uncomedic film — did Kaufman forbid the comforting cues of farce to pass through his hard-drive, or did Clooney (directing for the first time) simply not know how to direct comedy? The movie keeps its cards close, and Kaufman is perfectly capable of starving his screenplay in order to save it, and perfectly happy with being misunderstood. The movie is, finally, an enigma, not because of Barris’s monstrous fibbing, but because it resists being experienced as satire for the sake of its own satirical integrity.
40/365: All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (Adam Curtis, 2011) (FilmsForAction, DailyMotion, TopDocumentaryFilms, Vimeo)
The latest calm-but-appalled epic of historical horror by BBC doc maestro Adam Curtis, this three-hour exploration does not cry wolf over our reliance on technology, but rather tracks the disasters wrought since the ’50s by social engineering, founded as it is on the idea that mankind and the environment is, like a computer, self-organizing and structurally logical. The motivating force behind all of this monkeying around is, of course, corporate and state control. Randian ur-capitalism, Buckminster Fuller idealism, the imperialist manipulations in Third World societies (read: Rwanda), the free-market “principles” responsible for the economic bubble-chaos in Asia and then worldwide since the ’80s, and so on — all of it the work of brilliant minds lost in utopian organizational idea-clouds, resulting in a litany of scourges, follies, genocides and ruin. Curtis’s formal method — archivals plus interviews plus his trademarked thoughtful-Brit narration — seems innocuous, but his work, especially taken in toto (starting with 1992’s Pandora’s Box), can be a scalding nightmare visit to the secret threads of recent history that have essentially ruined human culture (we live in it but because Orwell was right we never noticed), and yet remain almost unknown. Few other recent non-fiction films have as much at stake.
41/365: The Landlord (Hal Ashby, 1970) (YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Ashby’s funky, saber-toothed debut comedy trips through Brooklyn as though exploring the uncharted interior of Borneo. This was the day, suddenly, when raw-boned, ethnic, shot-right-there realism was suddenly movies’ lingua franca; the bikers of Easy Rider (1969) could tell anyone who asked that they were looking for “America,” because that’s what the film itself was doing, from Flagstaff to New Orleans. New York, of course, had its own unique scramble of charismatic megafauna, and it might be perhaps difficult to imagine how moviegoers living elsewhere reacted when the hero of Ashby’s film — Beau Bridges as a naive Long Island rich boy taking over a Brooklyn tenement — is met on his first day by Pearl Bailey in a headwrap and a thicket of Caribbean beads poking a shotgun into his face. In every way the audience is on the boy’s hip, launching chin first into this netherworld inner city where white men are strangers and hubcaps don’t last. At the same time, there isn’t a caricature to be had — including the honky, who never reverts to bigotry even when threatened, and comes to dig his tenants probably more than he should. It’s a fabulously resonant, witty, utterly convincing movie, and that includes the hero’s tense, neurotic, mansioned family complete with black servants and Susan Anspach as a stoned sister ready to swallow the roach she’s smoking when her parents get near. As far as Civil Rights Era movies go, Ashby’s is tough-minded, full of ambivalence and confusion, and notably lacking the easy stereotypes, black and white, that take up so much air today.
42/365: Shock Corridor (Samuel Fuller, 1963) (Criterion Channel, HBOMax, Kanopy, Amazon Prime)
Few auteur-gods are as retrospectively appreciated as Samuel 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. You could say they caught up: this late-breaking landmark, made independently for an unscrupulous producer, failed at the box office and helped make Fuller something of an Industry pariah (his filmography wouldn’t recover until 1980’s The Big Red One, when Fuller’s 40-year career was already being reevaluated). Designed as an assault, in the manner we’ve come to understand as Fulleresque, it’s an expression of an unfettered tabloid persona terrified that unless it screams it will be ignored. The story has the downward gravity of a bad dream: an amoral journalist (Peter Breck) fakes his way into a nuthouse in order to solve a murder, and tumbles down a hall of mirrors that looks increasingly like a batshit 1960s America in miniature. Fuller’s imagery can punch a hole in your memory, as with the hallucinated indoor rain storm and the hooded black meta-Klansman; his over-the-top style was always conscientiously calibrated to reflect the size and ferocity of the American social conflicts he took on, creating a film experience (like his next, The Naked Kiss) that bitterly reflects its national moment more powerfully than any number of contemporaneous “issue films.”
Year Three Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
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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