Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 32
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
218/365: Greed (Erich von Stroheim, 1924) (Apple TV, Archive.org, Amazon)
An infamous behemoth-slash-staple of old-school film school, this silent adaptation of Frank Norris’ novel McTeague — a relentless saga of poverty, venery and betrayal in 1800s San Francisco — is most famous for having been seized from von Stroheim by the studio and hacked of over half its length (which itself was half of the six-hour-ish vision EVS had in his head). It was still revered, and considered for decades one of the world’s greatest films, but now it’s commonly available in a quasi-restored 242-minute version, after a 1999 reconstruction added on a full 115 minutes of existing footage, new titles (from the original script) and hundreds of recovered stills, as well as a new score and a new digital application of Von Stroheim’s originally smudgy gold-tinting to certain objects within the black-and-white image. The voluminous use of stills doesn’t flow with the movie as the restoration team obviously wished they would, despite panning-&-irising handstands; the effect is something like Ken Burns doing The Gold Rush. But what we’ve got now is more of a piece of visual scholarship, itself a unique, invaluable and hypnotic thing. Von Stroheim’s rep, after a long dormancy, has been on the rise, and this is his greatest work, however condemned by history to be a half-measure. (That is, until someone finds those lost five hours in an Argentinian hospital storeroom, or something.)
219/365: Frailty (Bill Paxton, 2001) (Vudu, Apple TV, HBO Max, YouTube, Amazon)
Paxton’s only directorial effort, with its feet planted squarely in Texan grave dirt and its head lost in the ether of Christian derangement, this neglected indie needs reassessment. The framing device — an obviously disturbed, stolen-ambulance-driving Matthew McConaughey appears late at night in the office of FBI detective Powers Boothe to solve a serial murder investigation — is executed with enough queasy tension to keep us perpetually wary, but the movie’s meat is his flashbacks to a motherless ’70s boyhood ruptured by homicidal righteousness. The conscientious, aw-shucks car-mechanic Dad (Paxton) wakes his two young sons (Matthew O’Leary and Jeremy Sumpter) to some awful news: he’s been visited by an angel, assigned the task of demon-killing, and the family’s project will thereafter be a secret mission to rid the earth of evil. Suffice it to say that once Dad returns home with his first harvest — an uncomprehending nurse, bound and readied for execution — O’Leary’s unbelieving 12-year-old is trapped in the ultimate down-home Hell, made to dig shallow burial pits after macaroni dinners.
The trace residue of Stephen King is evident (the traces that know about poverty and pain), but kept under sobering control. Paxton’s directorial approach parallels his acting — shallow but earnest enough to convince us, focusing on the kid’s-view details of butchering perfect strangers and letting the confined scope of the story rescue it from self-importance. (Occasionally, he latches onto an image that steals your reserve: an under-the-car angelic vision, one brother pouring water through a knothole in a shed-dungeon door to his imprisoned brother beneath, etc.) It’s one of the most pungent American-Pentecostal mini-nightmares the new century has yet produced.
220/365: Napoleon Dynamite (Jared Hess, 2004) (Vudu, Cinemax, Apple TV, YouTube, Amazon)
With the low-budget-comedy wastrel deadpan — the one Jim Jarmusch stole from Warhol, and Wes Anderson has made semi-mainstream — got down to a hard science, Hess’s debut is an epic, almost magisterially observed pastiche on all-American geekhood, flooring the competition with a petulant shove. At the discomfiting core of this delightfully plotless space-out is the titular uber-nebbish (Jon Heder), cursed with a toothy pre-man voice that sounds like basset hounds humping, and a talent for essentially nothing at all. Napoleon is so outrageously awkward he might be the ne plus ultra of cataclysmic pubertal portraits; beyond even the misaligned-joint body language and entropic curls, he’s a perfectly conceived and executed battery of melodramatic harumphs, bruised exhalations, defensive squints, clueless pronouncements and explosively irate retorts. Outcretinizing even Heather Matarazzo’s doormat in Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse and Wiley Wiggins’s unschooled freshman in Dazed and Confused, Heder’s Napoleon is such a fantastic creation you can’t help seeing him as both a catastrophically extreme case and the common flailing nerd we all still shelter in our deepest memory banks.
Set in a vague ’80s vapor, the movie is richly inventive but spare — little is, finally, at stake. But the comic details are thick as a brick, most of them willfully absurd: the Idaho landscape of desert highways, Chicano gang cars, chicken farms and llamas; Napoleon’s older, even wimpier brother Kip (the rather amazing Aaron Ruell) landing a girlfriend he’s not aware is a man; the boys’ unsavory Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) videotaping himself throwing touchdown passes. Napoleon himself tries to “score” with “babes,” and coordinates a student-body election run for his only friend, the new, slightly dim Mexican kid in town (Efren Ramirez). But the unlikely climactic triumph aside, Napoleon Dynamite is more concerned with texture and daffy non-sequitur, down to the supremely kitschy Casio score by John Swihart. Mention should be offered of Tina Majorino, who as a quiet, misfitty teen entrepreneur wipes her dainty feet on her generation’s better-known starlets. But the center of Hess’s cyclone is Heder and his tetherball-playing monster teen, who is both the film’s forbidding hero and its great object of derision. Unlike the Solondz film, Hess’ exudes little sense of social horror; it struggles to maintain a sunny disposition despite the traumatic social meltdown we witness and the apparent fact that Napoleon is headed not for a tech college but for a long, dire career in food service. He’s all too emblematic of too many Americans, and if Hess’s movie weren’t so funny, it’d be a tragedy.
221/365: 3 Women (Robert Altman, 1977) (Apple TV, Vudu, YouTube, Amazon)
A gauzy, perfectly executed vacation in doppelganger-land, this conscientiously mysterious psychodrama caps off Altman’s extraordinary ’70s run — ten films in eight years, after which the master’s touch more or less evaporated and the era was over. Today, its enigmatic game-playing looks less pretentious than it once did, and more revelatory of its late-decade moment. The first half is supremely Altmanic: in an underpopulated California resort town, a young, inexperienced Texas girl (Sissy Spacek) starts work at a rest home-spa, eventually leeching onto Millie (Shelley Duvall), a lanky and semi-glamorous nurse prone to a cigarette vogue and silly fashion-magazine ideas. The textures are picture-perfect: Duvall is an uncanny creature, the locations are shot so indelibly the dust and steam get up your nose, the social collisions are fraught with awkward electricity. It’s the film’s conceptual triumph that although the off-kilter Pinky reveres Millie — and the film’s structure invites us to consider them opposites, hick teen vs. glam queen — Millie is in fact a monstrous misfit, oblivious to her own pariah-hood and living in a cheesy media ether. But the post-Bergman ominous-dissonance soundtrack (by Gerald Busby) and Boschian artwork tell us that the superbly rendered milieu will soon be context for a looming psychodramatic switcheroo, which however predictable remains a creepy interrogation of post-‘60s SoCal identity games.
222/365: Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio de Sica, 1948) (Criterion Channel, Vudu, YouTube, Kanopy, Amazon)
The first of the “New Waves,” Italian Neo-realism was the starting gun of postwar film culture, and de Sica, was one of its point runners, particularly with this well-worn, well-beloved miniaturist classic. Imagine watching it when it was fresh, and you were used to Betty Grable and Bob Hope — or used to the kind of rich-people-problems “white telephone” movies de Sica made as an actor in Italy up to then — and you experience something like a strike to the throat. “Neo-realism” earned its name in its day by way of context — these were films like detergent cutting through the slick grease of Hollywood. But realism is relative, of course, and yesterday’s radical roughness is today’s humanist polish. Seven decades hence, the Italians can feel less than the “real” masterpieces they were once heralded as, and more like paving stones for the non-industrial experiments to come.
De Sica’s best film wasn’t even that “neo-real,” being a studio film that used back projection and employed a number of supporting-role pros. But it remains one of art film’s most powerful gateway drugs, still haunting in its painful simplicity (one man, one kid, one stolen bike in a city full of bikes), and unforgettably laced with behavioral moments that may be de Sica’s greatest claim to posterity. Acting since his teens, and a suave theater idol in the ’20s before launching into films as Italy’s equivalent to Cary Grant or William Powell, de Sica had a miraculous ear and eye for nonprofessional actors, particularly children. (Little Enzo Staiola remains the least forgettable child actor in film history.) If you haven’t yet seen it, your duty awaits.
223/365: It’s Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, 2019) (Apple TV, Criterion Channel, Mubi)
The first film exported from Lesotho (the small donut hole in the center of South Africa), Mosese’s third feature is a realist vision of south African village existence that’s also saturated in myth and tribal tradition, set in the nominal present day but in a realm where there’s no significant difference between now and the distant past. The heroine is Mantoa (Mary Twala), an octogenarian widow whose stripped-down life in her subsistence-farming hamlet is just cut down further, as she hears that her grown son, working far away, has died in a mining accident. Left with literally nothing, Mantoa begins preparations for her own funeral — “Death has forgotten you!” someone tells her — not long before news arrives of a dam’s construction, which would leave the entire village underwater. This of course includes the local graveyard, home to family members long dead and freshly interred, and for Mantoa this is the intolerable crime. She then dedicates herself to buying a gravesite and getting in it before the waters come — and her defiance infects the community, which ignores the inevitable resettlement and starts planting crops regardless, and eventually the unseen powers of state take notice and violently strike back.
The story has the oracular rhythms and brute force of a folk legend, and Mosese’s realizes it with a totemic visual vocabulary, full-frontal, primitivist, and drenched in deep colors, Vermeerian candlelight, and mountainous vista dizziness. The primal poetry of gravesites, gravedigging and ancestral presence is in your face; a tragic house burning rounds up with a snowstorm of ashes and a huddle of curious sheep. Still, Twala is the film’s most authentic artifact — a veteran South African actor, her memorable appearance in Beyonce’s Black Is King turned out to be her final work, before she died from Covid-19 last in 2020. Often silent, with a deadly gaze, Twala doesn’t act so much here as profoundly exist, with a face so beaten and creased by time and life that looking at her feels like looking at a forgotten truth about human life on this planet.
224/365: Our Hitler: A Film from Germany (Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, 1977) (Vimeo, Mubi)
It was one of the most fabulous, rumored-about, challenging, psychotic film events of the modern age: Syberberg’s Hitler, a Film from Germany, arriving in New York in 1980 as Our Hitler, to be shown at the Ziegfeld theater in an unheard-of nearly-seven-and-a-half-hour form (it was made as a four-part German TV program, but the networks rejected it), bearing hype as a brazenly non-narrative epic addressing the legacy of Hitler as a kind of cultural consciousness, carrying the crest of Francis Ford Coppola as “presenter,” and trailing after it, in February 1980 in The New York Review of Books, Susan Sontag’s immediately famous appreciation proclaiming the film to be “unprecedented” and “on another scale from anything one has seen on film.” Of course Syberberg’s patchwork epic cannot withstand the burden of all that anticipation, all that ballooning Sontagian hype, all of that pioneering rhetoric; no film could. A kind of stagebound, Wagnerian discourse-voyage through the meanings and ramifications of Hitler’s place in the 20th century (think of it has “Thirteen x 13 Ways of Looking at Hitler”), the film is a “mosaic,” in Sontag’s term, a salmagundi of theatrical effects, tropes, and set-pieces, and, purposefully, nothing is left out: puppet theater, re-enacted history, philosophical speculation (a lot of that), masquerade, vaudeville lampoon, Nazi film and audio clips, memoir recitations, symbolist tableaux, homages to German Expressionism, ad friggin’ infinitum, all of it shot in a wreath of mist and in front of a giant projection screen in a cavernous Munich warehouse.
A large chunk of the film is taken up with the recitation of Hitler’s butler’s detailed memories about der Fuhrer’s soap brand and underwear and breakfast preferences; another with the recollections of his projectionist. Another riveting section involves a Hitler ventriloquist dummy answering his critics — and correctly damning scores of other countries and corporations for their Hitlerian actions (“Hiroshima — your Auschwitz! Bravo!”). It’s a challenge, no question, slow and sometimes fuzzy in its thinking, as well as visually repetitive. But such criticisms, Sontag would surely argue, are irrelevant in the face of a film that strives for such massiveness, that dares so boldly, that creates its own way of watching. And she’d be right. Whatever: it’s an astounding, intellectually adventurous monument, and obviously a cinephile’s required viewing, if in fact the cinephile in question wants to remain worthy of the label.
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, 28, 29, 30, 31
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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