Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 19
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
127/365: The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (Martin Ritt, 1965) (Apple TV, Vudu, Amazon, Archive.org)
Ah, the movies of the Cold War: those Euro cities, sunless and cold and gray and wet, comprised of decaying historical buildings and ancient alleys but fraught with up-to-the-minute mortal dread, inhabited by stone-faced men in trenchcoats without hearts. Espionage was such a gift to cinema: ordinary urban locations became electrified with international import, and the criminal schmucks of noir became romanticized existentialist figures, lost in the patterns of political force like mice in a maze. No movie better pegs this vibe than Ritt’s adaptation of John le Carre’s genre-defining bestseller, hewing so closely to the dishonest and soulless quotidian of spy work that the effect is thoroughly grown-up, a bracing whisky shot after drinking gallons of James Bond-brand pink lemonade. Richard Burton is a misanthropic and drunken field agent going undercover as, essentially, himself, and getting played from every side across Europe, and the actor’s sour, plummy glamour has never been as effective. His character’s natural, bottomless insolence is not only his best cover story, but what makes him genuinely hate what he does. Ritt directed with his customary lack of personality, but also with a degree of modesty and clarity; the discovery of layers of machinations and double-crossing are complex enough to demand a certain understanding of Cold War politics, and of the day-to-day nature of espionage. Here is revealed the genre’s greatest claim to fame: that the life-or-death stakes of espionage are almost by definition not matters of action-movie heroism or physical skill but of operations that must play out within, or secretly beneath, conventional social situations. Behavior is scrupulously examined, and alliances always under question. Even if you win at a spy game, you lose your soul. By the end of the film, where the Berlin Wall is used perhaps for the first time as a movie icon of 20th-century schizophrenia, the hope that the ends justify whatever means democracies use is dashed in the darkness.
128/365: Uptight (Jules Dassin, 1968) (Apple TV, YouTube, Amazon)
A totally forgotten civil-rights American New Wave freakout that represented the first film blacklistee Jules Dassin had shot on American soil since 1949’s Thieves’ Highway, this film is a rather inspired transposition of Liam O’Flaherty’s The Informer, from Ireland to inner-city Cleveland amidst the churnings of black militancy. However you may detect the odor of earnest white liberalism (Dassin did do jail time for his ideals), it’s a pure-hearted slice of ghetto hyperdrama, coming a few years before the advent of blaxploitation. Co-writer Julian Mayfield, sweating like a proto-Forest Whitaker, is the Gypo Nolan avatar, a drunken oaf hanging on to the fringe of the local revolutionary underground and, once he’s officially ostracized, trading in what he knows for reward money and thereby sealing his own fate. Beginning with lengthy footage of Martin Luther King’s televised funeral, Dassin’s long-delayed return to the U.S. garnered him assistance from a surprising roster of lefty artistes — the DP is Boris Kaufman, the credits are animated by John and Faith Hubley, Ruby Dee co-wrote the screenplay and starred, and the score is by Memphis soul pioneers Booker T. and the M.G.s. Something of a low-budget indie production but released by Paramount, Uptight was almost certainly the first film centered on the rise of armed militancy groups like the Black Panthers, and on their notion of inevitable race war. True to Dassin’s legacy and agenda, the movie traffics mostly in overwrought righteousness and confrontational hubris, and it’s the latter payload that amazes today, particularly in the raging revolutionary-cell debate scenes, in which a veteran activist is ousted only because he is white, and divisions within the black community are drawn with lit gasoline. But Dassin was still a tried-and-true noiriste, with a cops’ siege on a balconied tenement building that is dynamic and dense. (The Cleveland Indian’s essentially racist baseball team mascot, Chief Wahoo, is seen everywhere.) He’s also up to the era’s post-Godard experimentalism, staging a confrontation between Mayfield’s self-immolating fugitive and a farcical gaggle of white race-conflict tourists in a carnival-arcade, complete with amused questions about the militants’ “plan” to kill Whity shot through distorting funhouse mirrors.
129/365: Favorites of the Moon (Otar Iosseliani, 1984) (Amazon)
The first film Iosseliani made in Paris after expatriating from Soviet Georgia in the early ’80s, this relaxed, perambulating farce tapestry is not as atmospheric as his earlier films, but it’s still a movie no other person except this particular and most lovable master of human ceremonies could’ve made. Always more French in his bones than Caucasian, Iosseliani introduces himself to Parisian life here, which he seems to find absurdly propulsive. The story crisscrosses characters in the streets (and in time) in the context of following a set of (often broken) hand-painted china and a portrait-painting, which gets progressively smaller through time as it is cut from its frame and stolen, over and over again. The polyglot ensemble (including Laszlo Szabo, Maite Nahyr, and a young Mathieu Amalric) are terrorists, antique buyers, teachers, philanderers, bomb builders, detectives, artists, beggars, burglars, hookers, punk rockers, children, dogs — some more than one of these — all going about their isolated business, yet constantly intersecting with each other. A bombing (of a spitefully loathed public statue) and a burglary are more or less the hubs around which the fabric weaves, and shades of Renoir and Tati, the upshot is an accumulation of passings, watchings, transactions and confrontations, all observed with a warm, unjudgmental equanimity. Class stratifications are crossed and exploited, routinely with the higher classes churning with unmet desires, and the lower (and often criminal) element content in the bosom of companionship. The comic set-pieces are select, but Iosseliani’s priority has always been about the unemphatic comedy of flow, and so we settle as he does, all of us like patient boulevardiers on our second glass of Pernod. Winner of a Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival.
130/365: A Throw of Dice (Franz Osten, 1929) (Kanopy, Amazon, YouTube)
An obscure archival fossil, Osten’s movie is for all intents an Indian silent, set in ancient times and detailing the backstabbing struggle between two young, gambling-obsessed provincial kings and their combative desire for a young maiden. Derived from The Mahabarata and fluid in its use of landscape, the movie is actually a passionate work of Euro-exoticism, co-produced by a British company and directed by a German ex-expressionist who later belonged to the Nazi party even as he lived in India and continued making Indian films, in Hindi. Made for everyone, it would seem, other than Indians, in the same year that a modern Indian flag was first flown over Lahore in defiance of British control, Osten’s film is a revealing and pulpy fancy, on one hand exploiting the escapist nature of cinema as ethnographic spectacle (showing audiences what they’d only read and dreamed about), and on the other indulging in imperialist assumptions. (Germans have always had a cartoony yen for the subcontinent, as we saw 30 years later in Fritz Lang’s The Indian Tomb diptych.) Ironically, when Osten’s film was restored and shown in London in 2008, it attracted crowds of desi emigres, just as seducible by fairy tale visions of the old country as the First Worlders had been three generations earlier.
131/365: The World Sinks Except Japan (Minoru Kawasaki, 2006) (YouTube, Amazon)
Kawasaki specializes in super-goofy, cosplay-riffing pop-cult satires — his bursting filmography includes titles like The Calamari Wrestler, Attack the G8 Summit!, Executive Koala and Pussy Soup. His visual and narrative methods are pure Skid Row — using available office space and barely bothering to dress it, having scenes begin with characters walking into rooms, etc. — but his comedic ideas are high-flying, and the absurd plots are given just enough respect to make us wonder whether a scene or image is an outright joke or a taunt or a mistake or, perhaps, none of the above. This quasi-epic, coming equipped with one of the drollest titles of the new century, goes apocalyptic: global warming literally drowns every scrap of land on Earth except Japan, a titanic cascade of events Kawasaki depicts with cheaply animated maps, cheaply exploding model cities, and a roster of cynical characters hanging out in bars and watching social upheavals on the street (as in, police beating on “foreigners” trying to get away with stolen daikon radishes). The wave of refugees that swamp Japan include world leaders and surviving American movie stars (one named “Jerry Cruising”), but Kawasaki’s taste for low-ball mockery lashes out at everyone, and Nippon nationalism is chided as mercilessly as the Bush-ian idiot President and Kim Jong Il. As doomsday scenarios go, it’s the new compliment to Roger Corman’s Gas! Or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It (1970), and twice as shabby.
132/365: Il Boom (Vittorio de Sica, 1963) (Mubi, Amazon)
De Sica’s rarest film, and a rip of bitter, post-Neo-Realist whimsey, with mega-schmoe Alberto Sordi is a would-be parvenu in the same crass Italian bourgie circles Antonioni and Fellini were skewering in the ’60s; as they endlessly party (doing the Twist and the Madison!) and making plays for each other’s spouses, he sinks into damning debt, and ass-kisses everywhere searching for a hapless investor to rescue him. It’s a doozie when it comes: the wife of a one-eyed tycoon (Sordi thinks she wants sex, for which he will happily be paid) offers a princely sum for the man’s donation of a single eyeball. It’s a simple and pungent scenario that could’ve asked its horrible questions in a 30-minute Alfred Hitchcock Presents (or Black Mirror) episode, but de Sica goes for protracted discomfiture, and Sordi’s cow-eyed deadpan gradually evolves from hilarious to queasily tragic. Famous for his pioneering Neo-Realist stakes first and his sex comedies second, de Sica (along with his always-partner, screenwriter Cesare Zavattini) always had an appetite for dissecting hypocrisy, and his cynicism about his own postwar society, among which he was a favorite son, should never be underestimated.
133/365: The Wolfman (Joe Johnston, 2010) (Peacock, Vudu, YouTube, Amazon)
A miscalculated box-office bomb, this Universal Horror Classics remake couldn’t please everybody — only the rare few who remember the depths of yesteryear “monster culture,” who can recall the 1941 film in detail, who can conjure vivid memories of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine and The Monster Times, who harbor memories of local TV station “horror hosts,” and so on. Is that you? The film is at least 65% Gothic clutter, busting the ceiling for arch Halloween atmosphere set by Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, and it’s too serious by three-quarters, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t an excessive blast of old-fashioned aerosol cheese, ready for a million crackers. The casting of Benicio del Toro may seem odd until you realize he resembles the original Lawrence Talbot, Lon Chaney Jr., sad and swollen rumpot that he was, and del Toro knew it. Freely quoting from the classic 1965 Frank Frazetta werewolf cover painting for Creepy magazine (see what we mean?), the film also dares to have del Toro’s post-transformation wolf-guy actually resemble Chaney’s old Scottish-terrier lycanthrope more than the digital lupine creatures from Harry Potter, Twilight, etc. The best is saved for last, when the film devolves (or escalates, depending where you stand) away from the Chaney paradigm and toward the grotesquely pennyante ’70s monster epics of Spanish sleazoid Paul Naschy (Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror, The Wolfman vs. the Vampire Woman, etc.). If you’ve been there, you know what we mean. The climactic pata-a-pata battle, complete with trampoline jumps and flips through the cavernous castle parlor, is your reward for enduring the pout of Taylor Lautner, among a great many other things.
Year Four Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18
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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