Monthly Archives: December 2013

December 30, 2013

Top Ten Films of 2013

By michaelgloversmith

Below is a list of my 10 favorite new films to first play Chicago in 2013. For each title I’ve written a new capsule review. I’ve also included a list of 30 runners-up titles. Readers should feel free to include their own best-of lists (or provide links to them) in the comments section below.

10. Upstream Color (Carruth, USA) – Music Box. Rating: 8.9

upstream3

“Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” This is a well-known passage from Thoreau’s Walden, a book that serves as an important reference point (and prop) in Upstream Color. But it could also be the manifesto of the film’s defiantly independent writer/director Shane Carruth. A work of blazing originality, his second feature is a difficult-to-categorize sci-fi/thriller/romance that uses fragmented close-ups, a super-shallow depth-of-field, zig-zagging editing rhythms and heightened natural sounds to create a portrait of two damaged souls (Carruth and Amy Seimetz) who come together as a couple and forge a new collective identity. But the way this begins as a kind of intellectual horror movie before slowly and surprisingly transitioning into a touching love story will likely mean something different to every viewer who sees it. What’s not in doubt is the masterful filmmaking, a clear advance over Carruth’s cult-classic debut Primer from nine years earlier. This is low-budget independent American filmmaking at its finest — ambitious, fearless, smart, and very, very personal. Full review here.

9. Bastards (Denis, France) – Siskel Center. Rating: 9.2

bastards

If The Immigrant is, as I note below, a tragedy, then perhaps the word “tragedy” is inadequate to describe the all-encompassing blackness of Claire Denis’ latest, a loose adaptation of Faulkner’s Sanctuary. There is after all a small measure of redemption for some of James Gray’s characters. In Bastards, everything turns out as badly as possible for everyone involved. Yet unlike the case with miserabilists such as Michael Haneke or Kim Ki-duk, there is nothing fashionable nor cynical about Denis’ vision. This is a genuine, utterly convincing howl of despair over the way some men will use their power to victimize others for their own pleasure. Vincent Lindon is Marco, an oil tanker captain who takes a leave of absence from work when tragedy befalls his sister’s family (her husband has commited suicide and their underage daughter is at the center of a sadistic sex-ring scandal). His opposite number is Laporte (Michel Subor), the bastard-businessman who brought the family to ruin, and the personification of human evil. But Marco’s desire for revenge is complicated by the fact that he is also having an affair with Laporte’s wife, Raphaëlle (Chiara Mastroianni). Across her career, Denis’ great theme has been colonization — whether of countries or individuals — though the complicity between victims and abusers on display here leads to a stomach-churning finale that is more disturbing than anything else in her filmography. As Bob Dylan once said, “Some things are too terrible to be true.” If an artist is going to document them, we should all be grateful that it’s one of Denis’ caliber.

8. Neighboring Sounds (Mendonça, Brazil) – Siskel Center. Rating: 9.2

neighbouring

I somehow completely missed even hearing about this gem when it briefly turned up at the Siskel Center in February but caught up to it later on home video thanks to the enthusiastic recommendation of my friend Alan Hoffman. Neighboring Sounds, set in the northeastern Brazilian city of Recife, tells a series of episodic stories about the tensions between the yuppies who inhabit a high-rise condo building and the resentful working class characters who serve them — especially the members of a shady security firm hired to patrol their block. How incredible is it that such a superbly orchestrated slab of sight and sound (the use of offscreen space and the dense soundtrack often recall Jacques Tati) also manages to explicate class divisions in such an unsettling and yet non-didactic way? The film’s ominous theme, at once specific to Brazilian politics and universal, has to do with the past sins of the upper class returning to haunt them (with interest) but this assured debut by Kleber Mendonça Filho also contains a welcome dose of dry, absurdist humor: the only thing that made me laugh harder than the scene of the bored rich housewife using her washing machine as a masturbation aid was when the same character later scores weed off the guy who comes to refill her water cooler.

7. Computer Chess (Bujalski, USA) – Music Box. Rating: 9.2

computer

Regardless of how one may feel about the past efforts of indie writer/director Andrew Bujalski — and I have decidedly mixed feelings myself — it’s hard to deny that this unexpected masterpiece of American comedy represents a quantum leap forward in terms of his artistry. In a shabby motel in the early 1980s, a group of socially awkward computer programmers (including Dazed and Confused‘s Wiley Wiggins and film critic Gerald Peary) meet for an annual computer chess tournament. Simultaneously, a new age cult — as “in touch with their feelings” as the programmers are out of touch with theirs — meets for a convention in the same location. As he cross-cuts between members of the ensemble cast with the assurance of Robert Altman at his finest, Bujalski unnervingly posits that an unholy marriage between these binary opposite groups is what somehow gave birth to our modern-day “social media.” But there’s more, much more: the film’s audacious narrative and structural innovations call to mind everything from the Godard of Alphaville to the Pynchon of Gravity’s Rainbow and will undoubtedly take many viewings to unpack. Bujalski ingeniously shot this in lo-fi black-and-white video on vintage Sony camcorders, and the resulting ghostly images, along with the expert production design (the assemblage of Coke-bottle glasses alone is awe-inspiring), effectively conjures up America in the 1980s better than most films actually produced during that time.

6. The Immigrant (Gray, USA) – Chicago International Film Festival. Rating: 9.3

immigrant

James Gray’s fourth and best feature film is a period tragedy chronicling one Polish woman’s harrowing experience immigrating to America in the early 1920s. Shortly after arriving at Ellis Island, Ewa (Marion Cotillard) is virtually blackmailed by a pimp (Joaquin Phoenix) into prostituting herself in exchange for being able to stay in the country and freeing her tubercular sister from the hospital where she’s been “quarantined.” Does salvation lay in the overtures of a charming magician (Jeremy Renner) who also happens to be the pimp’s cousin and rival? The golden-hued cinematography and early 20th-century New York setting will undoubtedly cause many lazy critics to compare this to the Godfather films upon its release next year but Gray has cited opera and silent movies as his primary sources of inspiration. This makes sense because the revelatory Cotillard, whose voluptuous figure is atypically concealed and downplayed, comes across as waifish, doe-eyed and as soulfully expressive as any silent film heroine; and Gray’s commitment to her plight is heart-wrenching without ever crossing over into the terrain of melodrama. The Weinstein Company purchased the distribution rights to The Immigrant at Cannes last May (probably believing that it had good “awards chances”) but apparently lost confidence in it somewhere along the way. Whoever is responsible for not giving this the marketing push it deserves should rot in hell. More here.

5. Before Midnight (Linklater, USA) – Wide Release. Rating: 9.4

SONY-BDOS-01_Onesheet4.16.13_Layout 1

Richard Linklater cemented his status as the best and most interesting American director of his generation with this near-perfect third and final installment of his celebrated “Before” trilogy. It has been nine years(!) since Before Sunset, which closed with Celine (Julie Delpy) telling Jesse (Ethan Hawke) he was going to “miss that plane” while she seductively danced to Nina Simone and the screen slowly faded to black. To say that cinephile expectations were high after that sublime tease of an ending is an understatement. That Linklater and his lead actors and co-authors Delpy and Hawke were able to not just meet but exceed expectations with Before Midnight is something of a miracle. It helps that they didn’t merely repeat the formula of the first two films — this is not a romantic comedy centered on a chance meeting or unexpected reunion featuring a suspenseful deadline-structure. Linklater instead drops in on the now-married characters while they vacation in Greece with their children, allowing him to show the realities — joyful as well as painful (as in the incendiary climactic hotel-room fight) — of being in a long-term monogamous relationship. His models Eric Rohmer and Roberto Rossellini would no doubt be proud. Full review here. More thoughts here. Director profile here.

4. Tabu (Gomes, Portugal/Mozambique) – EU Film Festival. Rating: 9.6

tabu2

This lyrical and entrancing black-and-white movie, which boasts an intriguing two-part structure, announced the arrival of a major talent in the person of 39-year-old Portuguese writer/director Miguel Gomes (who had worked as a film critic and made just two features previously). The first half, entitled “Paradise Lost,” concerns the death of Aurora (Laura Soveral), an old woman and compulsive gambler suffering from dementia in contemporary Lisbon. The second half, entitled “Paradise,” flashes back to Aurora’s youth when she was the beautiful wife of a colonialist-farmer, living on “Mount Tabu” in Africa, and having an affair with Ventura, another Portuguese ex-patriate and the drummer in a rock-and-roll band. I loved everything about this movie: its dreaminess, its eroticism, and its extended poetic reflections on time and memory. And this is not to mention that it also pays homage to F.W. Murnau’s classic 1931 film of the same title and features a bitching Portuguese-language cover of The Ronnettes’ “Be My Baby.” Oh yeah! Full review here.

3. Zero Dark Thirty (Bigelow, USA) – Wide Release. Rating: 9.8

zero2

Has it ever been less intellectually fashionable to love a movie that was so critically and commercially successful? Or, to put it another way, has there ever been a case where the vociferous objections of cultural commentators generated way more noise than anything film critics had to say in shaping how the dialogue about a movie played out in the public arena? I saw this astonishing film, director Kathryn Bigelow’s best, three times in the theater, then gladly watched it again after purchasing the Sony Blu-ray, and felt shaken to the core after every viewing. It depresses the hell out of me that I know some smart cinephiles, even some who liked The Hurt Locker, who nonetheless stayed away from this dark and brooding meditation on the cost of our “invisible war” out of fear that it was spiking-the-football propaganda (to borrow a phrase from President Obama). Remember, folks: torture isn’t morally wrong depending on whether it does or does not get results for those who practice it. It’s morally wrong, period (as Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal do actually show). Jessica Chastain, who puts a human face on — and provides an emotional center for — the very public and global story of the decade-long manhunt around which these debates swirled, gives a performance that is nothing less than phenomenal. The final, ambiguous close-up of her face, tears streaming down her cheeks, haunts me to this day. Full review here. More thoughts here and here.

2. Stranger By the Lake (Guiraudie, France) – Chicago International Film Festival. Rating: 9.8

stranger

Alain Guiraudie’s film begins on a beautiful sunny day in an idyllic lakeside park populated by frolicsome gay men, and ends a little over an hour-and-a-half later on a note of existential terror as a single character stands alone in the nearby woods engulfed in pitch-black darkness. In between, sex and death are inextricably intertwined as one of the “cruisers” commits murder while another witnesses the act but doesn’t report it, mainly because of his sexual attraction to the killer. Adventurous viewers will find many dividends to be paid from the way the rigorous construction of the Hitchcockian-thriller elements meets a fascinating, near-ethnographic view of a very specific queer subculture, but in the months since I first saw it I keep thinking about it mainly as a sly cautionary tale: who hasn’t been guilty of rationalizing the obvious, potentially dangerous faults of a person to whom one is physically attracted? While much ink has been spilled about the movie’s Hitchcock connection and the explicitness of the sex scenes, there hasn’t been enough discussion about just how funny this is. My favorite example of Guiraudie’s humor is the pesky police inspector-character, who could’ve almost stepped out of one of Claude Chabrol’s daffier efforts, repeatedly popping up at the most inopportune moments. More here.

1. A Touch of Sin (Jia, China) – Music Box. Rating: 9.9

touchofsin2

Mainland China’s greatest contemporary filmmaker, Jia Zhang-ke, made what is arguably his most vital film to date with this angry, occasionally shocking work of social criticism, in which four loosely connected stories are used to show how the collaboration between the Chinese Communist government and big business is wreaking havoc on the lives of ordinary Chinese citizens. Each story culminates in an act of tragic violence (all of which were apparently based on real events) while also paying deft homage to the “honor killings” that permeate the wuxia classics of yesteryear (beginning with King Hu’s A Touch of Zen, from which Jia’s movie derives its punning title). Shot by Jia’s longtime cinematographer, the great Yu Lik Wai, these stories unfold in long shot/long take tableaux that dazzle with their cinematic sophistication while also reinforcing the notion of tragic inevitability suggested by the circular narrative structure. Out of all the films I saw this year, this is the one that I suspect will be of the most interest in a few decades time when future cinephiles want to know what the year 2013 was like. Full review here.

And the runners-up:

11. Stray Dogs (Tsai, Taiwan) – Chicago International Film Festival. Rating: 9.1. More here.

12. Dormant Beauty (Bellocchio, Italy) – EU Film Festival. Rating: 9.0. More here.

13. The Grandmaster (Wong, Hong Kong/China) – Wide Release. Rating: 8.9. Full review here.

14. Inside Llewyn Davis (Coen/Coen, USA) – Wide Release. Rating: 8.9

15. You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet (Resnais, France) – EU Film Festival. Rating: 8.9. Full review here.

16. The Wolf of Wall Street (Scorsese, USA) – Wide Release. Rating: 8.8

17. Top of the Lake (Campion/Davis, New Zealand/Australia) – The Sundance Channel. Rating: 8.7. Full review here.

18. Barbara (Petzold, Germany) – Landmark. Rating: 8.7. Full review here.

19. Drug War (To, Hong Kong/China) – Siskel Center. Rating: 8.6

20. Frances Ha (Baumbach, USA) – Landmark. Rating: 8.5. More here.

21. Spring Breakers (Korine, USA) – Wide Release. Rating: 8.4. Full review here.

22. Things the Way They Are (Lavanderos, Chile) – Chicago Latino Film Festival. Rating: 8.4. More here. Director interview here.

23. The World’s End (Wright, UK) – Wide Release. Rating: 8.3

24. Laurence Anyways (Dolan, Canada) – Facets. Rating: 8.2

25. Stoker (Park, USA/S. Korea) – Landmark. Rating: 8.1. Full review here.

26. The Last Time I Saw Macao (Rodrigues/Guerra da Mata, Portugal/Macao) – EU Film Festival. Rating: 8.1. More here.

27. Soul (Chung, Taiwan) – Chicago International Film Festival – Rating: 8.1. More here.

28. The Unspeakable Act (Sallitt, USA) – Siskel Center. Rating: 8.0. More here.

29. The Conjuring (Wan, USA) – Wide Release. Rating: 7.9. More here.

30. Museum Hours (Cohen, USA/Austria) – Wilmette Theater. Rating: 7.9

31. Sun Don’t Shine (Seimetz, USA) – Siskel Center. Rating: 7.8. More here.

32. A Love (Hernandez, Argentina) – Chicago Latino Film Festival. Rating: 7.7. More here.

33. Grabbers (Wright, Ireland) – Facets. Rating: 7.7

34. American Hustle (Russell, USA) – Wide Release. Rating: 7.7

35. Faust (Sokurov, Germany/Russia) – Music Box. Rating: 7.6

36. Closed Curtain (Panahi/Partovi, Iran) – Chicago International Film Festival. Rating: 7.6. More here.

37. The Bling Ring (Coppola, USA) – Landmark. Rating: 7.6. More here.

38. Hannah Arendt (Von Trotta, Germany) – EU Film Festival. Rating: 7.6. More here.

39. Wadjda (Al-Mansour, Saudi Arabia) – Siskel Center. Rating: 7.5

40. Trapped (Shahbazi, Iran) – Chicago International Film Festival. Rating: 7.3. More here.

Advertisement

55 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Best Films of 2013

December 28, 2013

The Last Ten Movies I Saw

By michaelgloversmith

1. 12 Years a Slave (McQueen)
2. The Wolf of Wall Street (Scorsese)
3. Faust (Sokurov)
4. The Jeffrey Dahmer Files (Thompson)
5. Wadjda (Al-Mansour)
6. Leviathan (Castaing-Taylor/Paravel)
7. The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (Rohmer)
8. American Hustle (Russell)
9. Triple Agent (Rohmer)
10. The Lady and the Duke (Rohmer)

8 Comments | posted in The Last Ten Movies I Saw

December 25, 2013

Happy Holidays from White City Cinema!

By michaelgloversmith

100_2764

3 Comments   |  tags: , , | posted in Holiday Posts

December 23, 2013

The Top Home Video Release of 2013: Watching Blu Paint Dry

By michaelgloversmith

Below is my continuation of last week’s post concerning the most essential home video releases of 2013:

1. Coffret Eric Rohmer, l’Integrale (Rohmer, France, Potemkine Blu-Ray)

eric

Last month, French home video distributor Potemkine — in collaboration with everyone’s favorite fashion designer/patron of cinema, Agnes B. — unleashed a gargantuan Blu-ray and DVD box set that not even the most ardent Francophile-cinephile would have ever dreamed possible: a complete career-spanning retrospective of one of the giants of French cinema, influential film critic-turned-master filmmaker Eric Rohmer. The set, entitled Coffret Eric Rohmer, l’intégral (“The Complete Eric Rohmer Box”), includes all 24 of the writer/director’s feature-length movies, plus numerous shorts, made-for-television films and documentaries, nearly all of which have been restored and presented in high-definition, plus many extras, spread across a total of 52 discs (both Blu-ray and DVD). Among the goodies included are a 100-page book (en Francais only), a set of collectible postcards, a poster for Claire’s Knee (1970), and two teabags(?!) thrown in for good measure. The artwork adorning the box and the digipaks that house the discs is colorful, hand-drawn and delightful, making the entire enterprise feel like the precious collector’s item that it is. Although the Blu-ray discs are “Region-B locked,” meaning North American Rohmer fans will need a multi-region Blu-ray player to enjoy them (and, really, what better excuse do you need to buy a multi-region player than this?), all 24 of the features, plus the essential 1962 short The Bakery Girl of Monceau (the first of Rohmer’s “Six Moral Tales”), fortunately come with optional English subtitles. This ambitious project is easily the most impressive home-video release ever devoted to a single filmmaker, eclipsing the “Ford at Fox” DVD box set from a few years back, Universal’s “Alfred Hitchcock Masterpiece Collection” Blu-ray set from last year and anything else that I own or can even think of.

collectionneuse

Raymond Carver titled one of his most famous short stories “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” which could have served as an equally fitting subtitle for this box set. I am prepared to argue that no artist in any medium, not just cinema, explored the subject of romantic love as thoroughly as Rohmer — although it takes a certain amount of life experience to appreciate the depth of his accomplishment. I initially saw most of Rohmer’s films when I was in my early twenties and, save for the Moral Tales (his most well-known work), I hadn’t bothered to revisit his filmography until now — at the age of 38. After recently watching all of his movies in the span of less than a month, I now understand and appreciate his artistry in a way that I never had before. While I always considered myself an admirer of his “official masterpieces” (the later Moral Tales and certain key films in his other two prominent cycles: “Comedies and Proverbs” and “The Tales of the Four Seasons”), some of his films struck me as dull or even annoying, mainly because I found the characters annoying — without realizing that this was fully Rohmer’s intention. See, for example, the last segment of 1995’s Rendezvous in Paris, a hilarious satire of “mansplaining” (before the term even existed). But the most important revelation I’ve had about Rohmer is the realization that his special genius lay in his illustration of how the vast majority of human desires remain unfulfilled — the drama of his scenarios arises from the tension between what his characters want and their refusal/inability to attain it. Rohmer knew that eros has a way of making one talk, act and think differently, and this is what his camera documented with the precision of a microscope. And I’m not just referring to the kind of strong desires that make us want to sleep with person X or try to make person Y our significant other; he showed how eros can make one act just the tiniest degree nicer to a person to whom one is attracted, even when — or perhaps especially when — one feels that nothing may come of it.

mauds

The Coffret Eric Rohmer, l’intégral set feels so right. It makes sense to bundle together the complete works of Eric Rohmer even more than the filmographies of most other major directors. From The Sign of Leo in 1959 to The Romance of Astrea and Celadon nearly a half of a century later, Rohmer showed a remarkable consistency in terms of his stylistic and thematic preoccupations. Sometimes he came in for criticism for it but Rohmer really did tend to make the same movie over and over again, sometimes with only minor — though crucial — variations in the characters and settings (something that can’t really be said about his compatriots in the nouvelle vague). The conventional wisdom, at least in certain mainstream cinephile circles, is that Rohmer was a kind of French Woody Allen: an intellectual who wrote and directed “talky” (i.e., dialogue-heavy and “uncinematic”) romantic comedies about upper class characters for upper class audiences. But far from being the cinematic equivalent of “watching paint dry,” to quote the famous putdown by Gene Hackman’s detective character in Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975), Rohmer’s films are both more exquisitely cinematic than his detractors give him credit for while also keeping more of a critical distance from their protagonists than many of his supporters are willing to admit. (Having said that, I can’t quite go along with the assertion of critic Gilbert Adair that Rohmer’s characters “are among the most foolish, ineffectual and pathetic milquetoasts ever to have graced a cinema screen, [and] that, on a generous estimate, 90% of the celebrated talk is sheer, unadulterated twaddle” — even if Adair meant that as a compliment!)

love

As far as Rohmer’s too-little-remarked-upon visual mastery is concerned, its virtues lie in the most discreet aspects of mise-en-scene. Yes, his films are about people talking, oftentimes in a self-deceptive fashion that is humorous for the way it rings of psychological truth, but there is often a poignant discrepancy between what his dialogue tells and what his camera shows. I would argue this is dialogue that would not add up to much on the page or even the stage. It does, however, come spectacularly alive on the cinema screen because of its very specific real-world context. In other words, the things that matter most in Rohmer’s movies are the material facts of where and when his characters do their talking — character and environment are inseparable. The main interest in watching Boyfriends and Girlfriends (1987), for instance, stems not from the romantic musical-chairs plot but rather from the way this plot unfolds against the backdrop of the horrific modern “architecture” of the pre-fabricated Parisian suburb known as Cergy Pontoise. And even more important than locations in Rohmer are the seasons, the time of day and the weather (“My films are slaves to weather,” he pronounced in one interview): has the particular color of summer sunlight ever registered so vividly as in Nestor Almendros’ photography of the French Riviera in La Collectionneuse (1967)? Is it possible to watch Jean-Luis Trintignant attend midnight mass at Christmastime in the black-and-white My Night at Maud’s (1969) and not feel the coldness in one’s bones? In Rohmer’s last masterpiece, 1998’s An Autumn Tale, what sticks with one the most about the beautiful character study is the sense of what it’s like to walk among the vineyards in the Rhone wine-region of France on a perfect fall day. But Rohmer knew a thing or two about interiors too. Check out Claire’s Knee, in which Aurora, a 30-something female novelist, wears matronly dresses with floral patterns that subtly link her to the wallpaper around her (and thus the concept of domesticity), in pointed contrast to the teenaged and bare-kneed Claire (who is repeatedly associated with the outdoors).

greenray

It is precisely because Rohmer was a director who cared about such minute details that his movies — even with their lack of dramatic external “action” — deserve to be seen in high-definition. I can honestly say that I’ve never enjoyed watching movies at home more than I did while poring over the contents of this box set during the past month. Unfortunately, it seems the public has been taught to think of the Blu-ray format as one that is somehow most conducive to showcasing state-of-the-art CGI and bone-crunching sound effects. I am therefore particularly grateful to Potemkine for putting out such a lavish set devoted to this modest master with such loving care. The image and sound quality of all of the films included here are remarkably faithful to their source material, and also remarkably consistent from one film to the next (something that cannot be said about the Hitchcock Masterpiece Collection — where the A/V quality varied wildly). Note that this set consists of 30 DVDs and 22 Blu-rays. Three of the features, which have not been restored, are available on DVD only and not Blu-ray: The Lady and the Duke (2001), Triple Agent (2004) and The Romance of Astrea and Celedon (2007). This means that, ironically, the three most recent titles in the bunch are also the most underwhelming in terms of their tech specs. (Speaking as someone who prefers Rohmer’s contemporary films to his period pieces without exception, this is no big loss as the three most recent titles are also my least favorite movies in the box.) Below are my ratings of all of the individual films. The first letter grade is for the movie itself, the second is for the A/V quality.

1. The Sign of Leo: B+/A
2. The Bakery Girl of Monceau (short): A-/B+
3. Suzanne’s Career: A-/B+
4. La Collectionneuse: A/A+
5. My Night at Maud’s: A+/A
6. Claire’s Knee: A+/A+
7. Love in the Afternoon: A+/A+
8. The Marquise of O: B/A
9. Perceval: B/A+
10. The Aviator’s Wife: A+/A
11. A Good Marriage: A-/A
12. Pauline at the Beach: A/A
13. Full Moon in Paris: A/A+
14. The Green Ray: A+/A-
15. Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle: A+/A
16. Boyfriends and Girlfriends: A-/A
17. A Tale of Springtime: B+/A+
18. A Tale of Winter: A+/A+
19. The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque: A/A
20. Rendezvous in Paris: A/A
21. A Summer’s Tale: B+/A+
22. An Autumn Tale: A+/A+
23. The Lady and the Duke: C+/B-
24. Triple Agent: B-/B+
25. The Romance of Astrea and Celadon: B+/B+

rohmerblu

Coffret Eric Rohmer, l’intégral can be ordered from Amazon in France here: http://tinyurl.com/klppeud

6 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Blu-ray/DVD Reviews, Film Reviews

December 19, 2013

The Last Ten Movies I Saw

By michaelgloversmith

1. A Summer’s Tale (Rohmer)
2. Rendezvous in Paris (Rohmer)
3. The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque (Rohmer)
4. A Tale of Springtime (Rohmer)
5. Behind the Candelabra (Soderbergh)
6. Museum Hours (Cohen)
7. Boyfriends and Girlfriends (Rohmer)
8. Picnic (Logan)
9. Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (Rohmer)
10. The Green Ray (Rohmer)

Leave a comment | posted in The Last Ten Movies I Saw

December 16, 2013

Top 10 Home Video Releases of 2013 (#10 – #2)

By michaelgloversmith

I’m breaking the list of my favorite home video releases from 2013 into two separate blog posts. Below are numbers 10 through 2 from my top 10 list (each with a capsule review), as well as a list of 20 runners-up favorites. Next week’s post will be devoted entirely to my numero uno favorite home video release of the year — for reasons that will become clear in due time.

10. Dracula (Fisher, UK, Lions Gate UK Blu-ray)

dracula

Hammer Studios’ 1958 production of Terrence Fisher’s Dracula is one of the most influential horror movies of all time — it was the first film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel to endow the title Count with fangs, as well as the first to slather the now-familiar story with both blood-red paint and a healthy dose of eroticism. These latter aspects come through better than ever on Lions Gate UK’s new Blu-ray, which happily restores about 20 seconds of previously unseen sensuality and gore. (The fascinating story of how this missing footage was recently unearthed in Japan is included in a documentary among the disc’s copious extras.) If you love this movie, you need to own this definitive version. If you’ve never seen it, I would recommend a blind-buy; it features, after all, the best ever screen Dracula (the darkly charismatic Christopher Lee) pitted against the best ever Van Helsing (the morally rigid Peter Cushing). What more do you need? Full review here: https://whitecitycinema.com/2013/05/06/blu-hammer/

9. Underground (Asquith, UK, BFI Blu-ray)

underground

In recent years, the British Film Institute seems to have spearheaded an effort to raise awareness of silent British cinema in general, which I’ve been delighted to find is of interest beyond the earliest masterpieces of Alfred Hitchcock. One of my most pleasant film-related surprises of the past year was discovering the great silent movies of Anthony Asquith, an English director better known for his less-exciting sound-era work. BFI’s home video division released a revelatory Blu-ray of Asquith’s second film, 1928’s Underground, back in June. The plot, a love triangle between a shop girl, a nice-guy subway worker and a douchebag power-plant employee, allows Asquith to indulge in some wondrous cinematic conceits — including astonishingly fluid crane shots during a protracted climactic chase scene — and offers a fascinating, documentary-like glimpse of “ordinary” Londoners from a bygone era besides. The image has been painstakingly restored (as evidenced by a short doc included among the extras) and the new orchestral score by Neil Brand sounds brilliant in a 5.1 surround-sound mix. Can the Blu-ray release of the same director’s even better A Cottage on Dartmoor, a late silent from 1929, be far behind?

8. Black Sabbath (Bava, Italy, Arrow Blu-ray)

black

Did the three best vampire movies of all time receive Blu-ray releases in 2013? In addition to Kino’s Nosferatu release (on my runner-up list below) and Lions Gate UK’s Dracula release (number 10 above), UK-based Arrow Video dropped a superb version of Mario Bava’s 1963 horror anthology Black Sabbath, featuring “The Wurdalak,” the only film in which the legendary Boris Karloff played a bloodsucker. The other stories included here are the proto-giallo “The Telephone,” and “A Drop of Water” (the source of the unforgettable and terrifying dummy/corpse/prop pictured above). Arrow’s extras-laden Blu-ray includes two radically different versions of the film (the European and American cuts), audio commentary by Bava expert Tim Lucas, a handsome collector’s booklet, a DVD of the movie, and more. Most importantly, it is the most faithful home video transfer Black Sabbath has ever received, which is so crucial for a director with as precise a sense of color-timing as Bava (Kino’s Blu-ray, also released this year, skews unnaturally green by comparison). A must-own for Bava fans.

7. Foolish Wives (Von Stroheim, USA, Kino Blu-ray)

foolish

Kino/Lorber and the Blu-ray format have proven to be a match made in heaven, and the company’s release of Erich von Stroheim’s masterpiece Foolish Wives is one of their finest releases to date. The Stroheim legend in many ways begins with this 1922 super-production, widely credited as the first “million dollar movie.” A delightfully decadent melodrama starring Stroheim himself as a monocled fake-aristocrat out to seduce and swindle the wife of an American diplomat stationed in Monte Carlo, Foolish Wives was brutally cut down by MGM executives from multi-hour epic status to a runtime of less than two hours for its original theatrical release. According to Kino’s press materials, the Blu-ray was “mastered in HD from an archival 35mm print of the 1972 AFI Arthur Lenning restoration” and runs 143 minutes. The quality varies, sometimes from shot to shot, as this restoration was clearly cobbled together from prints of varying quality but, my God, am I glad to have this. With its “innocents abroad” characters, nefarious criminal plots involving devious impostors, and potent, barely-concealed eroticism, this is as close as the American cinema ever came to the serials of Louis Feuillade. Also included as a very welcome bonus is The Man You Love to Hate, an informative, feature-length documentary on Stroheim made by Patrick Montgomery in 1979, which has also been newly remastered in HD. Now where’s Greed?

6. Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (Murnau, Germany, Masters of Cinema Blu-ray)

tabu

I had never bothered picking up the Eureka/Masters of Cinema DVD of F.W. Murnau’s great final film and was therefore only previously familiar with the serviceable Milestone DVD, which is both missing footage and in the wrong aspect ratio compared to the restoration that has served as the basis for Eureka/MoC’s releases. It was therefore quite eye-opening for me to see the German maestro’s gorgeous tone-poem of a movie as close as possible to the way it was meant to be seen via this new Blu-ray. Murnau had become disillusioned with both the mainstream German and American film industries when he went to Tahiti to independently make this tale of doomed love set among native islanders. He couldn’t have known it would be his last production (he died in a car accident shortly before its premiere) but the movie in general — and its haunting final scene in particular — serve as a fitting epitaph for the career of the man known as the best director to have only worked in the silent era. The images on Masters of Cinema’s Blu-ray have a silky, silvery quality that fully does justice to the lyrical intentions of Murnau and his cinematographer Floyd Crosby (who deservedly won an Oscar for his work on this film).

5. Intolerance (Griffith, USA, Cohen Media Group Blu-ray)

intolerance

In less than a year, Cohen Media Group has established itself as a major new player in the U.S. home video market. Among their welcome 2013 releases were invaluable editions of Luis Bunuel’s Tristana and Raoul Walsh’s Thief of Bagdad but my absolute favorite title in their catalogue is this stellar new Blu-ray of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance. One of cinema’s great mad follies, this quartet of stories about “love’s struggle through the ages,” which intercuts boldly and freely between different countries and centuries in order to show the tragic universality and timelessness of the title subject, looks as mind-blowingly fresh today as it must have in 1916. What’s new is Cohen’s admirable adherence to Griffith’s final cut of the film (the great director continued to tweak it well into the 1920s), which runs about 30 minutes shorter than the previous Kino DVD version; in other words, you definitely want to pick this up but don’t get rid of your old DVD either. Among Cohen’s many welcome extras are two of the segments edited by Griffith himself into stand-alone features (both of which feature footage not included in Intolerance). Essential.

4. The Quiet Man (Ford, USA, Olive Films Blu-ray)

quiet

There were actually quite a few John Ford movies that received their Blu-ray and/or DVD debuts in 2013. The best of them, in terms of image quality, is undoubtedly Olive Films’ unimpeachable Blu-ray of Ford’s beloved Ireland-set romantic comedy The Quiet Man. As I wrote in my appreciation of the recent flurry of Ford releases last week: “This movie has never looked good on VHS or DVD, the old video transfers of which were soft and blurry and sported sadly faded color (a particularly offensive crime since Ford insisted on shooting in Technicolor, the premiere color process of the day, over the objections of Republic Pictures boss Herbert Yates, who had patented his own color process — the cheaper, more lurid TruColor). So Olive Films did the world a huge favor by taking Ford’s single most personal film (and the only passionate love story he ever directed) and restoring it to something approximating its original luster.” Ford’s photography of the red-haired, blue-eyed Maureen O’Hara, herding sheep barefoot in an impossibly green, grassy field, is my idea of visual heaven, a claim I don’t think I would have made until I saw this particular transfer, which was made from the original camera negative. More here: https://whitecitycinema.com/2013/12/09/2013-the-year-of-the-ford/

3. The Big Parade (Vidor, USA, Warner Blu-ray)

bigparade

MGM’s prestigious production of King Vidor’s 1926 anti-war epic was the most commercially successful film of the entire silent era. For some reason (undoubtedly related to “rights issues”) it has never been released on DVD in the States but finally received its belated digital debut via Warner Bros.’ Blu-ray this past fall. And it was worth the wait: this is the single best-looking release of any silent movie I’ve ever seen on any home video format (besting even the superb Eureka/Masters of Cinema release of F.W. Murnau’s City Girl from a few years ago). I’ve never seen a silent film — and I watch them all the time — look so pristine and so blemish-free. For God’s sake, I own Blu-rays of movies originally made in the 21st century that look worse than this (ahem, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford). The movie, a unique blend of broad comedy, heartfelt romance and tear-jerking tragedy, follows the experiences of John Gilbert’s American soldier before, during and after World War I, and is absolutely worthy of this impeccable restoration (allegedly taken from the original camera negative). One hopes that this release will be successful enough to encourage Warner Bros. to release the other classic MGM silents they control — including Vidor’s supreme masterpiece, The Crowd.

2. Three Films By Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman (Rossellini, Italy, Criterion Blu-ray)

voyage

Roberto Rossellini had already revolutionized the movies with his pioneering Italian Neorealist efforts in the 1940s before he single-handedly gave birth to the modern European art cinema with the second phase of his career — a cycle of five films starring his new paramour Ingrid Bergman — in the early 1950s. The Criterion Collection’s gorgeous, extras-stacked box set collects the three best Rossellini/Bergmans into one essential package. In Stromboli, Bergman is a Latvian woman who marries an Italian fisherman in order to escape a refugee camp after WWII. She soon finds life intolerable in his small village, which is located at the foot of (and threatened by) a large, metaphor-rich volcano. Europe ’51 explores the possibility of sainthood in the modern world as Bergman plays a mother who, grieving over the death of her young son, tries to live like a contemporary St. Francis of Assissi but winds up in a mental hospital instead. This shattering film features what may be Bergman’s best performance. Journey to Italy is quite simply one of the finest movies ever made: Bergman and George Sanders are an eight-years-married couple, the Joyces, who travel to Italy to settle the estate of a recently deceased “Uncle Homer.” With idle time on their hands for the first time in years, their marriage crumbles. Just as James Joyce posited Ulysses as a modern psychological epic (and perhaps the only way to fittingly redo Homer’s Odyssey in the 20th century), Rossellini finds a filmic equivalent of Joyce’s prose (made explicit by a nod to “The Dead”) in a story where nothing happens on the level of “story” but everything happens inside of his characters. The result paved the way for, among other things, L’avventura, Le Mepris, Certified Copy and Before Midnight. Regardless of who you are, you should own this.

1. To Be Continued . . .

20 Runners-Up (Alphabetical By Title):

11. Before Midnight (Linklater, USA, Sony Blu-ray)
12. The Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler, USA, Warner Blu-ray)
13. City Lights (Chaplin, USA, Criterion Blu-ray)
14. Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Lang, Germany, Masters of Cinema Blu-ray)
15. The Hitch-Hiker (Lupino, USA, Kino Blu-ray)
16. How Green Was My Valley (Ford, USA, Fox Blu-ray) Full review here: https://whitecitycinema.com/2013/03/11/how-blu-was-my-valley/
17. John Cassavetes Five Films Box Set (Cassavetes, USA, Criterion Blu-ray)
18. Laura (Preminger, USA, Fox Blu-ray)
19. The Life of Oharu (Mizoguchi, Japan, Criterion Blu-ray)
20. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Ford, USA, Paramount UK Blu-ray) More here: https://whitecitycinema.com/2013/12/09/2013-the-year-of-the-ford/
21. A Man Escaped (Bresson, France, Criterion Blu-ray)
22. Nosferatu (Murnau, Germany, Kino Blu-ray)
23. Rebel Without a Cause (Ray, USA, Warner Blu-ray)
24. Safety Last! (Newmeyer/Taylor, USA, Criterion Blu-ray)
25. The Thief of Bagdad (Walsh, USA, Cohen Media Group Blu-ray)
26. Tokyo Story (Ozu, Japan, Criterion Blu-ray)
27. Tristana (Bunuel, Spain, Cohen Media Group Blu-ray)
28. Two-Lane Blacktop (Hellman, USA, Criterion Blu-ray)
29. White Heat (Walsh, USA, Warner Blu-ray)
30. Zero Dark Thirty (Bigelow, USA, Sony Blu-ray)

9 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

December 12, 2013

The Last Ten Movies I Saw

By michaelgloversmith

1. Full Moon in Paris (Rohmer)
2. Pauline at the Beach (Rohmer)
3. A Good Marriage (Rohmer)
4. Perceval (Rohmer)
5. The Aviator’s Wife (Rohmer)
6. The Marquise of O (Rohmer)
7. Love in the Afternoon (Rohmer)
8. 3-Iron (Kim)
9. Before Sunset (Linklater)
10. An Autumn Tale (Rohmer)

7 Comments | posted in The Last Ten Movies I Saw

December 9, 2013

2013: The Year of the Ford

By michaelgloversmith

jf

On one level, every year is the “Year of the Ford” in the Smith household. I am, after all, watching his movies all of the time, both for my own pleasure and in classes that I’m teaching. I’ve shown more films by John Ford, and in a greater variety of film studies classes (Intro to Film, Film and Society, Perspectives on Film, World of Cinema, etc.), than any other director. In less than five years I’ve managed to screen seven Ford features: Stagecoach (1939), How Green Was My Valley (1941), My Darling Clementine (1946), Fort Apache (1948), The Quiet Man (1952), The Searchers (1956) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962); and this is not to mention that I also frequently show Peter Bogdanovich’s documentary feature Directed By John Ford in full — as well as clips from various other Ford films, including 3 Bad Men (1926), The Informer (1935) and The Battle of Midway (1942). My insistence on teaching Ford is in part because his very name seems synonymous with the American cinema — in much the same way that William Faulkner might be said to be synonymous with American literature or Bob Dylan synonymous with American music. (I’ll never forget how intensely gratifying it was to hear a young Korean student say she felt she was able to “understand America better” after watching Ford’s movies in my class.) Yet, even given my Ford-o-philia, 2013 was something special.

The year began on a sour note for some Ford aficionados when Quentin Tarantino repeatedly badmouthed Ford’s movies for their supposed “racism” to anyone who would listen (including Charlie Rose and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) while traveling around the world to promote his presumably more enlightened Django Unchained. Fortunately, Ford soon received the most eloquent defense his admirers could have hoped for in the form of a Film Comment rebuttal from the great Kent Jones. Then, in the following months, the world was reminded of the maestro’s continued relevance when four of what I would argue are among his five best movies were released on Blu-ray for the first time: How Green Was My Valley, The Quiet Man, The Sun Shines Bright and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. (Ford’s other best movie, The Searchers, was released on Blu-ray years ago.) Incredibly, none of these titles were released together as part of any sort of Ford-themed package or box-set deal. Instead they were dropped, coincidentally and separately, by three different labels: 20th Century Fox, Olive Films and Paramount UK. TCM and Sony also teamed up to release the “John Ford Columbia Films Collection” box set but the five titles included there were made available on DVD only (and as much as I welcome the digital debuts of such underrated gems as The Whole Town’s Talking and Gideon’s Day, I passed on this set because I no longer purchase DVD-only releases). Finally, 2013 also saw the very welcome DVD release of the recently rediscovered Ford silent Upstream (included on the National Film Preservation Foundation’s “Treasures New Zealand” anthology). The rest of this post, however, will be devoted to the four new Ford Blu-ray titles that rocked my world in 2013.

how

How Green Was My Valley is my second favorite Ford film and my favorite of his non-westerns. I am also fond of stating that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences correctly named it the Best Picture of 1941 over Citizen Kane, with which it curiously shares a flashback structure and a “subjectivity of memory” theme. This beautiful, melancholy story of one family’s disintegration in a turn-of-the-20th century mining town in Wales (though Ford was clearly thinking of Ireland) is set against the backdrop of union struggles and was one of the director’s most personal films. In it, he presents a vision of an idealized family life, the kind that he personally never knew (where Donald Crisp presides with benign authority over a brood of dutiful, mostly male offspring), and offers a stirring illustration of his Catholic belief that one’s physical death is not “the end.” Yet the film’s obsessive focus on the inevitability of change simultaneously marks it as one of Ford’s most pessimistic works. How Green Was My Valley has amazing deep-focus cinematography courtesy of the great D.P. Arthur Miller, a poignant Alfred Newman score and a star-making performance by the lovely Maureen O’Hara (working with Ford for the first of many times). Fox’s Blu-ray, which I reviewed at length back in February, is perfect.

quiet

The Quiet Man is the most impressive of the new batch of Ford Blu-rays, not only because it looks and sounds incredible but also because it represents the most dramatic upgrade over all of the film’s previous home video incarnations. This movie has never looked good on VHS or DVD, the old video transfers of which were soft and blurry and sported sadly faded color (a particularly offensive crime since Ford insisted on shooting in Technicolor, the premiere color process of the day, over the objections of Republic Pictures boss Herbert Yates, who had patented his own color process — the cheaper and more lurid TruColor). So Olive Films did the world a huge favor by taking Ford’s single most personal film (and the only passionate love story he ever directed) and restoring it to something approximating its original luster. This new version boasts a high-definition transfer and remaster of the original camera negative and the results are glorious: primary colors (especially greens and reds) are vibrant and saturated: when John Wayne’s Sean Thornton first spies Maureen O’Hara’s flame-haired Mary Kate Danaher walking barefoot in an impossibly green grassy field, he wonders aloud “Is that real? She couldn’t be.” I said the same thing when I first watched this Blu-ray.

sun

In contrast to How Green Was My Valley and The Quiet Man, both of which are popular classics beloved by many casual movie fans, The Sun Shines Bright has always been the Ford-lover’s Ford movie. A remake of the director’s own Judge Priest (1934), a Will Rogers vehicle that remains a great film in its own right, this 1953 version similarly blends comedy and tragedy in a story of racial intolerance set in post-Civil War Kentucky. But it also daringly restores the incendiary lynching scene that censors ordered to be cut from the original, which was Ford’s acknowledged reason for revisiting the material to begin with. While the film may have looked deliberately old-fashioned by the standards of the early Fifties, this beautiful slice of Americana, and its impassioned plea for tolerance, looks positively ahead of our time today — Stepin Fetchit and all. Again, this is a terrific transfer courtesy of Olive Films: the original black-and-white cinematography comes across as satisfyingly film-like, showing admirable depth and grain, and the DTS-HD rendering of the mono soundtrack is likewise subtly awesome. Both Victor Young’s score and the crisp sound design (notably the rhythmic sound of marching feet in the back-to-back processions that serve as the movie’s double-climax) make a big impression.

manwhoshot

1962’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was Ford’s last great western — and the first of many great movies belonging to a subgenre concerning “aging cowboys” (followed swiftly by Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country). As the West is on the brink of being “settled,” the way of the gun (John Wayne) must cede to the rule of the law (Jimmy Stewart). While Ford sees this progress as being both inevitable and right, it is obvious that his heart belongs more with Wayne’s rancher-character, Tom Doniphan, and that he mourns the passing of the era when men like Doniphan existed, which turns the whole thing into a complex and ironic tragedy. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is in many ways Ford’s magnum opus (with explicit nods to earlier classics like Stagecoach and Young Mr. Lincoln) and Paramount UK’s hi-def transfer does this masterpiece proud. It bests Paramount’s very good previous DVD in terms of image and sound — boasting a robust new 5.1 mix in the latter area. One does wonder why Paramount U.S. hasn’t yet bothered to release the same title although given that the U.K. edition is region-free (and can thus be played on any Blu-ray player worldwide), the cost of international shipping isn’t too much of a price to pay for a release this essential.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance also, of course, contains some of the most important dialogue Ford ever directed: “This is the west, sir. When the fact becomes legend, print the legend.” These lines, delivered by a newspaper editor to Stewart’s Ransom Stoddard, have frequently been misunderstood — including by Steven Spielberg in the pages of Time magazine — as somehow being an argument in favor of the importance of inspirational “heroes and legends.” I would argue that they actually play out on screen as a sad reminder that official histories are often tragically incorrect. Fortunately, in 2013, John Ford’s own legend has been solidified more than ever due to the magnificent Blu-ray releases of four of his most timeless works. I am jealous of anyone who gets to see them in such pristine form for the first time.

jf

15 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Blu-ray/DVD Reviews, Essays

December 5, 2013

The Last Ten Movies I Saw

By michaelgloversmith

1. Claire’s Knee (Rohmer)
2. My Night at Maud’s (Rohmer)
3. The Headless Woman (Martel)
4. Grizzly Man (Herzog)
5. La Collectionneuse (Rohmer)
6. Yi Yi (Yang)
7. A Winter’s Tale (Rohmer)
8. Suzanne’s Career (Rohmer)
9. The Sign of Leo (Rohmer)
10. Contracted (England)

3 Comments | posted in The Last Ten Movies I Saw

December 2, 2013

The Secret History of Chicago Movies: The Raven

By michaelgloversmith

walthall

In late 1915, Chicago’s Essanay Film Manufacturing Company was in decline. World War I had halted the export of the once-formidable studio’s films to Europe, which had previously been a lucrative source of revenue; Charlie Chaplin, the company’s biggest star, was dissatisfied with the way the studio was run and had no intention of renewing his contract when it expired at the end of the year; and, worst of all, the Motion Picture Patents Company, a consortium of studios to which Essanay belonged that was intent on monopolizing the industry, was being sued by the United States Justice Department for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. The most significant Chicago-shot Essanay films of this era were The Raven, an Edgar Allan Poe biopic directed with imaginative flair by Charles Brabin and starring the great Henry B. Walthall, and Sherlock Holmes, a seven-reel feature directed by one Arthur Berthelet. The latter was the first feature-length Sherlock Holmes movie as well as the first film in which the famed detective was portrayed wearing his soon-to-be-iconic deerstalker cap. William Gillette, an acclaimed theatrical actor who had originated this look onstage, reprised his role for the screen version. In her Chicago Daily Tribune review, film critic Kitty Kelly wrote, “It is a production to which Essanay may point with pride and may file away in the strong box for future and again future revival.” Unfortunately, the Essanay “strong box” was not strong enough. Sherlock Holmes does not survive today. The Raven, on the other hand, happily does survive and is available on DVD from Grapevine video.

The Raven begins with an exceptionally bizarre prologue that traces Edgar Allan Poe’s ancestors all the way back to Ireland in the 18th century. This scene has absolutely nothing to do with the story that will follow but it does introduce some interesting trivia, such as the fact that Poe’s biological parents were theatrical actors. Brabin then shows a still photograph of the actual Poe, which dissolves into a close-up of lead actor Henry B. Walthall. The moment is startlingly effective because Walthall bears a striking resemblance to Poe — albeit if Poe had possessed movie star good looks. (Walthall’s casting may also have been the result of his having starred in D.W. Griffith’s Poe-inspired The Avenging Conscience a year earlier.) This dramatic introductory scene was also fitting for a star of Walthall’s caliber: The Raven was the eleventh of twelve films he would appear in that were released in 1915. (The second was Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, in which he played the lead role of the “little Colonel.”) The Raven‘s narrative proper begins with Poe as a young man living in Virginia as the adopted son of the wealthy Allan family. Poe courts his cousin Virginia (the first of several women in the movie, real or imagined, to be portrayed by Essanay contract player Warda Howard). One of the most interesting sequences in the film is from this section: Poe sees a black slave being beaten by his owner and, though he cannot really afford it, arranges to buy the slave’s freedom. The shocking progressiveness of this scene as written is somewhat tempered, however, by the fact that the slave is played with broad comedic flourishes by a white actor in blackface makeup.

The death of Poe’s beloved bride is seen as precipitating his descent into madness, which provides The Raven‘s dramatic high point: a reenactment of the title poem with Poe in the role of the narrator, alone in his study, taunted by a real raven and haunted by the ghost of his “lost Lenore” (Howard). In this scene, Walthall’s tortured and highly emotive performance is effectively matched by director Brabin’s use of proto-Expressionist high-contrast lighting and an impressive and creative use of superimpositions (e.g., a human skull appears as an eerie vision before Poe). The Gothic atmosphere of this climactic scene — and Poe’s “wine”-induced hallucinations — was certainly ahead of its time: the horror genre would not really catch on in the American cinema until the late silent era, after it had already fully blossomed in Germany. The Raven would prove to be the highlight of Walthall’s tenure at Essanay although he would continue to appear in productions for the studio on and off through 1917 before returning to Hollywood for good. Among the scrapbooks that belonged to Marvin Spoor (brother of Essanay-founder George Spoor and one of Essanay’s top directors of photography) that are now in the archives of the Chicago History Museum, one is devoted entirely to photographs of The Raven, an indication of just how important the studio thought the movie was. Charles Brabin would go on to a fairly distinguished Hollywood career, directing, among many other films, the Boris Karloff vehicle The Mask of Fu Manchu in 1932. He may be best known today, however, for being the husband of notorious stage and screen actress Theda Bara. Their long and — unusual for Hollywood — successful marriage lasted from 1921 until her death in 1955.

raven2

The Grapevine Video version of The Raven can be purchased on amazon here: http://tinyurl.com/kg2drd9.

It can also be rented from http://www.facetsmovies.com.

Beware of public domain versions (including one uploaded to YouTube), which are not only missing scenes but garble the story by presenting the reels in the incorrect order.

7 Comments   |  tags: , , | posted in Essays, Film Reviews

%d bloggers like this: