Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 28
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
190/365: She-Devil (Kurt Neumann, 1957) (YouTube, Mubi)
In this remarkable mid-century genre handgrenade, a scientist (Jack Kelly) creates a serum derived from fruit fly immune-system cells that promotes instant healing in any organism, Wolverine-style, and of course he wants to experiment on a human. His elder statesman colleague (a stentorian Albert Dekker) reluctantly selects a hospitalized woman dying of tuberculosis (Mari Blanchard), who rejuvenates immediately and, having nowhere else to go, moves in with the comfy bachelors. Drippingly sexy, newly invincible and essentially sociopathic, Blanchard’s feline femme is still at social-independence ground zero — the film’s narrative tension stems entirely from the two scientists’ struggle to keep this wild woman captive in the house, under control, and, we can surmise, available for sex and housework. Her perspective is the radical post-de Beauvoir opposite — from where she stands, what the men refer to as her “monstrousness” and her “inhumanity” is exactly her sense of self-empowerment and autonomy, and the whole film plays out as a bell-jar miniature of the mid-century battle between masculine control and women’s attempts to liberate themselves from the roles preconceived for them.
That Blanchard’s amoral vamp steals and kills, simply because she wants to and can, allows the film to maintain its male-centric moral ground. But it’s never very convincing, because though Blanchard is supposed to seem utterly menacing and irrational, she actually comes across as merely opportunistic, responding to an unfair social system as a rogue outlaw might, by simply playing by the men’s rules. Of course, neither the men nor the film they’re in can quite fathom this woman’s willful thinking — why won’t she do what we say? — leading the scientists toward a surgical solution (involving the pineal gland — hearkening forward to Stuart Gordon’s From Beyond). Subtly, then, the film begins exploring the Cuckoo’s Nest experience of having your individualism, because it is individualism and not conformity, judged as illness and therefore requiring a “cure.”
A good section of the 77-minute film involves the strenuous efforts of the two conspiring men to simply anesthetize this reckless, sexually dangerous woman, piping carbon monoxide into her room through the radiator pipes and crouching at her window like voyeurs, waiting for a candle flame in the room to gutter and vanish, along with her fiery and bewitching sense of self-determination. Some kind of playing-God Frankenstein moral is suggested, but the sense of the film’s sexual politics spiraling out of the filmmakers’ grasps is unmistakable. Based on a story by science-fiction pope-king Stanley G. Weinbaum (under a pseudonym), and shot by Murnau vet Karl Struss, the film deserves a feminist cult, and if it has so far been ignored by theorists that can only be due to its obscurity.
191/365: Private Confessions (Liv Ullmann, 1996) (Mubi, YouTube)
Ingmar Bergman’s post-retirement films — examining as if through a hall of mirrors his own childhood and his parents’ troubled marriage — began with Bille August’s The Best Intentions and Daniel Bergman’s Sunday’s Children, and continued with this white-knuckler, bristling with Bergman’s signature emotionalism, focus on acting set-pieces, and psychological logorrhea. Ullmann’s movie fragments into five sections, which are essentially five “conversations,” at the core of which is the troubled marriage between Anna (Pernilla August), a housewife and mother caught in the grip of a fierce extramarital romance, and Henrik Bergman (Samuel Froler), a neurotic minister. Each of the “conversations” is framed, quite naturally, between two individuals (including elder priest Max Von Sydow and lover Thomas Hanzon), and set at different points during Anna’s life: during the affair, after its first blush, at its end, a decade after the fact and, lastly, when she is all of 18.
The tortured discussions (the lengthy scene between Anna and Hendrik, when she confesses, is extraordinary) contemplate the nature of truth a great deal, and of course the nature of truth itself changes in each section. The film’s throbbing heart is Anna, and August is amazing in what is essentially a grueling decathlon of long, uninterrupted closeups. (She played the same role in The Best Intentions, winning Best Actress at Cannes.) Despite, or perhaps due, to the film’s intricate structure, the ringer it puts you through is rare and powerful.
192/365: Invention of Destruction (Karel Zeman, 1958) (Criterion Channel, Mubi, YouTube)
Czech fantasist Zeman was an artist whose 35-year-long career was perpetually agog at storybook fantasies, always hungry for new and recombinative visual techniques, and almost entirely unsullied by adult concerns. He was the real Drosselmeyer, the exploding-toychest artisan who never forgot the buzz of a gradeschool imagination passionately lost at sea, and who was the only international filmmaker who consistently kept ardent faith in the relevance of Jules Verne. This crazed spritz, based on Verne’s atomic-bomb-forecasting intrigue tale Facing the Flag, is where what’s was Zemanesque authentically explodes, from the Verne-derived tale’s swarm of airships and submarines and subterranean cities to the (entirely animated) deep-sea divers swordfighting underwater and the giant octopus killed in a blooming black cloud of blood.
Zeman’s textures are the money: even the sea rocks at night and the pounding engine pistons are made of classic-engraving draughtsmanship, and the roiling sea is made of undulating pen marks, all of it both 2D and 3D at once; the uncanny mixture of layers and effects and forced perspectives is so carefully and inventively executed, it generates a sense of fanciful astonishment that has almost nothing to do with the story. In a predigital world Zeman seems to have had no problem putting whatever he wants wherever he wants it, and almost every shot virtually insists you look away from the actors and examine every rococo surface around them. Zeman’s bald-faced recycling of the original 1896 Verne edition’s steel engravings, by master artiste and chronic Verne illustrator Leon Benett, fuses gorgeous old-fashioned artisanship with state-of-the-art triple-exposure special effects, and the result, moment to moment, is a plastic dream that resists easy assignation. Released internationally as The Fabulous World of Jules Verne, it’s thought to be the most successful Czech film ever made.
193/365: In the Company of Men (Neil Labute, 1997) (Crackle, fubo.tv, Amazon, Apple TV)
Set in modern corporate cube-farm-land, Labute’s scabrous indie takes barbed-wire misogyny as its theme, and it corners you on-site and in the joke-telling bad breath path of every tie-wearing, dick-swinging deadeye you ever met. A virtual PSA about evil MBAs, the beautifully acted movie attacks masculine vanity and anxiety — two sides of the same bar coaster, after all. Minor-league execs traveling to a branch office in a nameless city, Chad (Aaron Eckhart) and Howard (Matt Malloy) do little except whine about being recently dumped by their long-term mates. They’re an indelible pair — Chad the log-necked, blue-eyed ex-BMOC around whom the universe, if it had any sense, would certainly revolve, and Howard the smart, weasely, bespectacled wannabe whose still never quite sure how to be a grown-up. Looking to salve their frustration, the two agree to a cathartic scheme: they’ll pick an inexperienced girl during their trip, both hit on her until her head spins, and then both drop her like a short match. They pick a perfect victim — Christine, a deaf typist (Stacy Edwards) who’s as green as she is awkwardly pretty.
The tandem romances ensue amid the petty business of business, Chad’s approach assured and devastating, Howard’s bumbling and earnest, until the fratboy scam becomes a bewildering duel between the men. Naturally, nothing turns out as it was meant to, with Chad revealed as being many times more venomous than anyone had suspected, and Howard many times more lost. Jittery with downsizing angst and backed-up testosterone, In the Company of Men also tends toward Hal Hartley-esque emptiness — we never learn what the company does, where the boys are or where they’re from. But context enough is provided by the acting: Eckhart, with his varsity shoulders and lug-nut jawline, is unforgettable as the scenario’s sly, powermad scumsucker, and Malloy adds layers of fluctuating confidence to what could’ve been a mousey stereotype. The film’s climax belongs to him, though its appalling force is Labute’s alone.
194/365: Korkoro (Tony Gatlif, 2009) (Vudu, Kanopy, Amazon)
With his eighth film since the crash-landing of Latcho Drom in 1993, Gatlif has become the official chronicler/balladeer of the 20th-century Romani experience, but he’s much more than an anthropologist — his films are conscientiously Rom in spirit, and he has this swatch of nomad turf all to himself. This may be his most ambitious film, insofar as it could be thought of as the Rom version of the Taviani’s The Night of the Shooting Stars, landing down in the laps of an extended caravan family trying to evade the tightening WWII web of the Nazi encroachment and the cooperative (read: bigoted) Vichy forces. Exploring this pivotal historical intersection for the first time, Gatlif may have come upon his most salient ethnic dynamic — from this film’s perspective, the Roma’s peripatetic identity (the title is Romani for “freedom”) was particularly assaulted by the Nazis’ control, and the whole film feels like one long bristling desire to simply start running and never look back.
Reportedly the first feature about the “porajmos” (“the devouring”), Gatlif’s film begins with a magical stunner: concentration camp barbed wire strumming by itself in rhyme with the melancholy opening soundtrack theme. The clan we meet (complete with an iconic madman, played acrobatically by James Thierree as a kind of ur-Gypsy, dying to escape any sort of imposed order or law) is on the run from the war but not for long — they run out of wilderness, and get quasi adopted by one French village’s humanist vet (Marc Lavoine) and schoolteacher (Marie-Josee Croze); just as the noose starts tightening, the nomads are forbidden to roam, and the local camps begin filling up. Complicating matters is an orphan boy (the fortuitously named Mathias Laliberte) who attaches himself to both the travelers and the vet. Despite the scope of its subject, Korkoro is less an epic than a snapshot, a lyric, and far more energetic and crazy than its Taviani interface suggests. Gatlif knows how to limn an entire cultural essence in a single image — as when, after the vet has granted his family’s old house to the Romani family so they can be propertied enough to evade the camps, we glimpse them wandering confusedly around the weedy grounds, not knowing how to conduct themselves or own something of value. The staging, camerawork and characters all teem with naturalistic brio, breathless even in its cliches.
195/365: The Most Dangerous Game (Irving Pichel & Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1932) (Tubi, YouTube, Amazon, HBO Max)
An early-talkie exotic that proved a huge (and relentlessly remakable) hit, and which plays like a foreshock leading up to the quake of King Kong in 1933, this adaptation of the famous 1924 story by Richard Connell is actually a brother film to Kong — Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper shot it on the same sets, with much of the same cast and crew, and at the same time (stars Joel McCrea and Fay Wray even run across the famous chasm-bridging log), leaving the impression of a secondary narrative taking place somewhere else on Skull Island while the giant ape thumbs Bruce Cabot and company. The first introduction of human blood sport as pulp metaphor in modern pop culture, the tale is pure proto-Nazi homicidalism, with an eye-bulging Leslie Banks as the erratically-accented, island-owning Russian count now obsessed with hunting humans. Relative to other early talkies it’s action-packed and bloodthirsty, initiating a subgenre that still thrives in The Hunger Games franchise and other dystopias. It’s a sweltering matinee afternoon daydream of menacing jungles and sweaty tension, complete with the ominous soundtrack ellipses common to the period. Wray’s extraordinary dewiness makes up for the thin character development; you begin to wonder, between the two films, if Wray thought she’d never get out of that rain forest.
196/365: Unfriended: Dark Web (Stephen Susco, 2018) (Vudu, YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon)
This Blumhouse-produced horror series, here at entry number two, aren’t the only FaceTime/Zoom Call horror films, a sub-subgenre which presumably beckons with at least the seductiveness of budgets that could be close to zero. But the shock of it is how this film, which shares only the Skype-&-text vocabulary of the first film, converts this limiting template into a fairly gripping genre experience, a new kind of au courant techno-pulp. At the same time, the constricted PC syntax has the effect of delivering a stark and scathing interrogation of the solipsism of 21st-century life, in which seemingly all social business has been atomized and mediated through apps and keyboards, replacing contact with virtuality and physical certainty with what little one can screen-see with the technology we have right now. The film doesn’t make commentary about this, it is this, in an almost Haneke-ish fashion, right down to the story’s implication of mass psychopathy lurking everywhere just off-screen, or hidden on hard drives.
There’s also the simple fact, perhaps impossible not to exploit, of the set-up’s inherent, anxiety-producing reduction of our viewing omnipotence — the less you see, the jitterier you get, as if we’re alone at night with our laptops and getting wind of something terrible and unseen. This kind of visual cutback has been a horror-genre weapon of choice since The Blair Witch Project, but here it’s limited to webcams and iPhone video, with their low resolution and mobility, accompanied by a nonstop flurry of alternate screens, file directories, web pages, downloading progress bars, etc., none of it giving us the access to action and narrative information we’re used to. At times there are up to five screens open at a given moment, and knowing where to look is not always intuitive; the effect is a creeping sense of panic, as the story mounts largely beyond our awareness. The slowly revealed narrative, shared with us by six friends lazily communicating online instead of actually gathering, begins with a stolen laptop and its hidden snuff-film files, and extends out with the crafty use of a deaf character, stalked a la Audrey Hepburn in Wait Until Dark (or, more to the point, the premise of 2016’s Hush). Oddly, it’s the restrictive format itself that jacks the rote stalker story’s blood pressure into the red.
Year Four 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
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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