Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 11
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
71/365: Le Doulos (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1962) (Criterion Channel, Kanopy, Apple TV, Amazon)
Neo-noir artiste Melville transformed the noir paradigm into a full-on dark night of existentialist tribulation, and this film may be his prime achievement, in converting noir’s haphazard Zeitgeist into the expressionistic poetry of modern alienation. He was a one-man filmmaking combine who famously lived in an apartment above his own studio; both Bertrand Tavernier and Volker Schlondorff schooled here, and the Cahiers du cinema crowd loved him. While not his most romantic or ambitious movie, Le Doulos might be his best; there’s no underestimating the thrill of having seeing it in 1962 and sensing that the overcast, uncaring, starkly capitalist world you live in was being captured on film for the first time. It begins simply enough, in drizzly gray black-&-white that begs for a trenchcoat: Faugel (Serge Reggiani) is a crook released from prison and engaged quickly in a simple heist. But then it seems as if his friend Silien (Jean-Paul Belmondo) ratted on him, but then it seems he didn’t, and as the film reveals its narrative selectively, Melville’s film becomes an epistemological inquisition: how much do we think we know about anyone, and how much of that is true? Most of the time, we, like Faugel, do not know who to trust. (To paraphrase William Hurt from The Big Chill, men in hats are always doing something terrible.) With its doublings and mirror episodes and postponed judgments, the films is a famous Tarantino correlative (you can imagine that as a Manhattan Beach Video clerk Tarantino took home Le Doulos, City on Fire and Diner one night, and Reservoir Dogs was born). It’s still one of the most innovatively conceived crime movies ever made, and one that feels intimate with the fringe mob life in unique and convincing ways.
72/365: Import/Export (Ulrich Seidl, 2007) (Amazon, Kanopy)
Austrian miserabalist Seidl was one of the pioneers of the full-frontal, semi-comic three-walled-tableaux-of-Euro-depression that the Romanians have inherited and made their own, but he’s also a hardcore gutter dog, and so when matters of sex work are explored, as they have to be by characters at the end of their economic tether in Eastern Europe, what happens is what we see, no ratings apply. The two narratives intercut here, as the title plainly states, are journeys of immigration: Olga (Ekateryna Rak) is a Ukrainian nurse who, after her paycheck is withheld and her attempt at webcam sex fails, decides to leave her baby behind and find work in Austria. Simultaneously, Pauli (Paul Hofmann), a frustrated and rather brainless exercise freak and jobless punk in Vienna, allows his lousy employment opportunities to propel him eastward, eventually landing in Kiev. They never cross paths, but their complementing odysseys form a scathing statement about the New Globalism, where one downturned landscape after another radiates echoes of the Communism’s failure and the hodgepodge exploitation that followed. However dismal Pauli’s prospects are, delivering vending machines to Slovakian ghettoes and tolerating his stepfather’s hamhanded pickup routines, they’re nothing compared to Olga’s eventual situation, as a hospital maid on an Austrian geriatric ward where virtually no infirmity or indignity is spared us or her, and where, of course, the desiccated, diapered patients are all real people, not actors. In Seidl’s hands, this banal ring of Hell, filled with painfully real dying people, is a movie onto itself, a cruel and mocking distillation of humankind to its dire and helpless end moments, even as the exultant entirety of life backed up behind each bed-ridden coot becomes palpable, too, lending the scenes a strange, lovely sense of invigoration. The film in the end is about economics and its nomadic discontents, which bunches it together with an entire Naughts school of contemporary culture focused on the not-so-secret “secret economy” that involves more and more global citizens everyday.
73/365: The Sun (Alexander Sokurov, 2005) (Kanopy, Amazon, SovietMoviesOnline)
Using a kind of waxworks sobriety as its secret weapon, this film by the prolific Russian limns the final days of WWII in the company of Hirohito (Issey Ogata) as if the man had already died and found himself stuck in his own private antechamber of Hell. Rounding off Sokurov’s eccentric, conceptual trilogy of 20th-century totalitarian final-days biopics, this movie deals with a dazed, nervous and emotionally benumbed royal figure who’d rather be studying hydrobiology, and who struggles mostly with the fact that his nation believes him to be a god and by war’s end he knows he must admit he’s not. The film itself is anything but realistic — Sokurov spends the first third of the film inside Hirohito’s sepulchral bunker, which is decorated and shot like a Lynchian dream-room or Quay puppet cellar, and everyone, from the emperor to his generals and servants, live in a state of knotted dread. Then the film seizures, with a Boschian vision of a burning city (Tokyo?) over which flying fish sail through the flames and smoke. Sokurov is an impulsive poet, and as meditative as his films are, his narrative and tonal decisions can be baffling, even when still beautiful. This film is a haunting question mark, in which the usual questions about a dictator’s wartime culpability, leaders’ psychology and real politics are obviated in favor of empathy for the ironic mysteries of Hirohito’s 1945 days, lost in his own kingdom, twitching and meekly acquiescing to Japan’s failure, and eventually having to enter into an awkward social relationship with MacArthur (Robert Dawson), resulting in the war’s official end. For Sokurov, Hirohito is just a diffident man who made decisions and succumbed to delusions and lived 24-hour days like the rest of us (Issey’s performance is chilling and hard to forget), and who seems shut off from his decisions’ consequences, like royalty everywhere.
74/365: The League of Gentlemen (Basil Dearden, 1960) (Criterion Channel, Apple TV, Amazon)
Here, in the paradigmatic postwar British heist film, elaborate felonies were only committed out of desperation and cynicism, in a world that had left too many veterans of WWII without purpose, reward or power in their own lives. Dearden’s film is a crackling yarn that oozes irony from its very pores — in this 1950s England, Jack Hawkins’s cast-aside Army colonel decides to get mercenary revenge on a modern culture that has pensioned him out, by enlisting seven other middle-class vets to stage a military raid on a London bank. How could they not succeed, he reasons, with their battle-seasoned savoir faire and excellent training? Dearden, by way of John Boland’s novel, stacks the deck by having the team selected for their histories of crimes and venalities (including sodomy, prostitution and porn peddling) as well as their Army skills — each man, Hawkins’s mastermind details, has a criminal record shamefully trailing after him, keeping them on the fringes of a new England and from sharing in the postwar prosperity. There’s Roger Livesey’s smut-selling fake reverend, Richard Attenborough’s slot-machine “fixer,” Nigel Patrick’s slick gigolo, Kieron Moore’s brawny gay masseur, etc., each of them nursing wounds and each hearkened back by Hawkins’s orotund ex-officer to the respect and camaraderie they enjoyed in Her Majesty’s service. The basic pleasures of the heist film come close to being invented here, in montages ironically scored with a plucky-proud military march, as the team coalesces and first lays masquerade siege to a nearby military base, to procure weapons, and then rehearses their attack on the bank. Watching each actor fill out each of the disparate character’s faults and talents, and rise to the occasion of the nail-biting heist, is akin to watching baseball, or cricket — the struggle of the team is reflective of and in contrast to the role of the individual, and both are rousing, heroic fun. The standouts are Patrick, as the compulsive weasel of the group, easily falling into a second-in-command position and incapable of not calling everyone “darling,” and Livesey, whose phlegmy Welsh voice and resilient manner make you think twice about his character, who may be the most pathetic of the eight. As with Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955), the heist itself is executed with no dialogue — until someone asks for a match, and the fireworks start in earnest. It’s a masterful genre film, exploiting the pulpy aspects of its central conceit while laying bare some uneasy realities about how British culture was handling the emotional fallout of the war generation come the late 1950s.
75/365: The Saphead (Winchell Smith & Herbert Blache, 1920)(Archive.org, YouTube, Amazon, Kanopy)
Recognized now as the greatest American filmmaker the silent era ever produced, Buster Keaton as a filmmaker never wasted a frame or a gesture, hardly ever stooped to a close-up or any kind of visual emphasis, and knew just as Ernest Hemingway did at around the same time that less is often more. His dead-on, dry-eyed strategy remains a model for brisk, unpatronizing, eloquent moviemaking, and as an actor, he’s famous as cinema’s first great realist; his characters react to trauma and catastrophe as if he doesn’t have time for reaction at all, and as if the social situations he’s in could not tolerate an outburst. More to the point, Keaton acts as if unleashing emotional reactions in his stories would be, for him, too embarrassing — his performance minimalism is actually a resonant character trait, a sign of his heroes’ modesty and tentative egos. It’s a surprise, then, to confront this, his first feature, and find how distinctly unKeatonesque it actually is. This is because it’s not truly a Keaton film — after years of making knockabout two-reelers with Fatty Arbuckle, Keaton cut his own deal for shorts with producer Joseph Schenk, who then asked his new contractee to star in this adaptation of a play, which on Broadway had starred… Douglas Fairbanks. Keaton had no hand in writing or directing the film, which is otherwise shot and assembled (the directors were Winchell Smith and Herbert Blache, ex-husband to first-woman-director-ever Alice Guy Blache) in a manner typical of ’20s studio productions: stately paced establishing shots and medium shots, and a story largely dependent upon title-card dialogue. The title role is a wealthy, clueless dimwit, ostentatiously named Bertie, whose awkward romantic plans are ruined by his evil brother-in-law, who tries to pass off his illegitimate child as Bertie’s, and who attempts to ruin the family business. All in all, it’s a lot of melodramatic machinations for a comedy to sustain; Bertie, after stumbling through the tale obliviously, rises to a heroic pitch and, though he doesn’t quite know what he’s doing, saves the day. This last act is the film’s saving grace, because it’s the most Keatonian — needing to prove himself a businessman in order to marry, and having bought himself a seat on the New York Stock Exchange (thinking it was an actual chair), Bertie is first subject to a rough-&-tumble hazing by the broker brotherhood, and then, as he needs to buy up shares of his father’s silver stock in order to squelch the plot to devalue them, leaps about the exchange floor like a flying squirrel, tackling brokers and creating havoc. Here the film must’ve been jerryrigged to accommodate Keaton’s particular abilities, and the result is a breath of fresh air, and a sign of things to come.
76/365: The Omega Man (Boris Sagal, 1971) (Vudu, Apple TV, YouTube, Amazon)
Richard Matheson’s landmark novel I Am Legend has yet to be filmed properly, with its full set of sociopolitical fangs intact, but of the three movies birthed from it thus far, this one is the most resonant, the one writhing with ideas and anxiety beneath its hippie-dippie coolness. Sure it dates, but Charlton Heston was nothing if not the ‘Nam era’s middle-aged poster-boy cynic-prick, here swapping out Matheson’s hammer-&-stake for a zombie-dispatching submachine gun in a post-apocalypse Los Angeles where Wadleigh’s Woodstock is still playing at the downtown bijou “for the third straight year!” (Alone, Heston runs it for himself, reciting the dialogue.) Post-flower-power despair hangs in the movie like smog, but humanity’s salvation comes in the form of an interracial commune, inoculated with the aging conservative gun-nut’s copiously flowing blood. At the same time, Matheson’s bloodsuckers are retranslated here (by menopausal husband-wife screenwriter team John and Joyce Corrington) into cowl-wearing, acrobatic night-worshippers as creepy and inexplicable as your average plague of young E-stoked club-goers, sleeping the day away and occupying the after-hour streets with bonfires and chanting. (The lead boogeyman, the movie-stealing Anthony Zerbe, is more of an unsavory cult-leading opportunist than a rebel without a cause.) Sagal was merely a hack schooled in cheap TV, and his clueless eye doesn’t help things, but his film cannot help but exude a sense of waste and catastrophe that ranks as one of the clearest for the Nixon years, and which definitely finds new salience today, not in terms of generational combat but of sheer social-order chaos.
77/365: Sing a Song of Sex (Nagisa Oshima, 1967) (Criterion Channel, Archive.org)
The Japanese New Wave could be seen as a set of cherry bombs tossed down our film-culture toilets, but really the more accurate-yet-outrageous simile might be to see the films as anarchist gasoline fires set in the rock gardens of traditional Japanese culture. Even in the context of the other crazy New Wavers — Suzuki, Imamura, Masumura, et a. — who were all vividly enthusiastic about critiquing postwar Japan as a dogpit of whores and lunatics, Oshima was a nose-thumber without parallel, taking cues directly from Godard and betraying audience reflexes at every turn. This discontented, entirely improvised narrative essay (the actual title is A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Songs) is framed around four students who chase women after their exams, imagine compounded rape scenarios, wonder why they’re not bummed about the death of a professor, and generally stand in for the soulless, aimless generation Oshima witnessed caring little for adult society but also barely even caring about the carnage of Vietnam. Absolutely of a piece with If…, La Chinoise and Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution, although more overtly critical of the generational waste in a capitalist culture doped on indulgence and self-satisfaction, the film is one of the late ’60s key documents, a disillusioned holler with double-bladed edges.
Year Four Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
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, 49, 50, 51, 52
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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