Imitation of Life (1959)

QFS No. 152 - The invitation for September 25, 2024
Director Douglas Sirk’s name is synonymous with melodrama. As someone who studies film and works in entertainment, this is one of those givens you know about even if you don’t know his movies. I first learned about Sirk when Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven (2002) hit the theaters. When it came out, Haynes made it clear it was an homage to Douglas Sirk films, in the story, the time period, and the style of the filmmaking.

Sirk, a Danish-German filmmaker was one of the many artists forced to flee persecution from the Nazis in the 1930s, just as Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder had to in the same era. Sirk made several German films before leaving the country and even directed short films into the late 1970s long after retiring from Hollywood filmmaking. I’ve been eager to see one of the classic Sirk melodramas – All that Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind (1956), and this week’s film Imitation of Life – for some time. And this one stars Lana Turner who has a fun connection to our QFS No. 150 screening of L.A. Confidential (1997).

So envelop yourself in lush color tones, sweeping music, and likely overwrought emotion for our next film, the Douglas Sirk classic Imitation of Life (1959).

Imitation of Life (1959) Directed by Douglas Sirk

Reactions and Analyses:
A girl struggling with her racial identity, trying to find acceptance and ashamed of her mother. Her mother trying to convince her that she has nothing to be ashamed of, that she is enough. Another mother striving to achieve in her profession and follow her ambitions in a competitive, ruthless industry – the cost is time with her daughter, who feels a sense of neglect when she’s older despite all the comforts the mother has provided.

These all sound like story elements for a film in 2024, and yet Imitation of Life (1959) takes on all of this. The word our QFS discussion group kept returning to was “modern.” For a film that’s 65-years old set in a very specific time, this was surprising to all of us given Douglas Sirk’s approach to filmmaking.

While the narratives within the film are modern, Imitation of Life wouldn’t be mistaken for modern in its style. The film isn’t a gritty realistic portrayal of American life in the 1950s nor does it feature Method performances that were on the rise at this time (this film is only a few years after On the Waterfront, 1954) that mirrors today’s style of acting. Instead, in Imitation of Life we quickly find the popping color of the costumes, sweeping orchestral music, theatrical lighting with brightness punctuating the darkness, Lora (Lana Turner) emerging from shadows at the exact right moment.

Embrace the wonderous theatricality of the stage lighting in Imitation of Life. 

These are all hallmarks of melodrama, production elements intended to enhance the emotions of the scenes, to create something that’s just slightly more elevated than reality. Take just the opening sequence – it’s set on a beach in New York City. It’s clearly a stage, a clever rear projection or painted backdrop juxtaposed with the live foreground of a beach.

Lora (Lana Turner) and Annie (Juanita Moore) clearly on a stage, but it's all an "imitation" of life, you see.

But we forgive this detachment from realism quickly. One member of our discussion pointed out that it’s this lack of adhering to pure realism which allows us to accept the melodrama, to allow us to be swept along with it because we don’t question as much as we would something that’s more realistic. If you’re taken up by it, you can easily forgive the somewhat flimsy setup of a woman who meets a stranger at the beach and invites her and her young child to stay the night and eventually move in. For some reason, this didn’t bother me but perhaps in a film that commits to a broader cinematic realism, I would’ve been lost right away.

Breaking into song and dance on top of a moving train in Dil Se.. (1998).

This elevated reality is what serves musicals very well, and I thought immediately of Hindi cinema a.k.a. Bollywood. In Hindi films, we are keenly aware of the theatricality because, of course, people don’t break out into song in real life, strictly speaking. So the melodrama inherent in Bollywood is forgiven because the cinematic language sets up this deviation from reality.

All About My Mother (1999) is rife with melodramatic twists, but somehow is rooted in reality.

I was also reminded of another country’s master filmmaker, Spain’s Pedro Almodovar. At QFS we watched his All About My Mother (1999, QFS No. 109) and what struck me then is that the film felt like a telenovela with its plot twists and turns. Almodovar’s mastery of balancing melodrama and realism is one of a kind and is perhaps the only filmmaker I know who’s been able to pull off authentic emotion with twisting and turning plots that defy reality.

Somewhere in the spectrum between Bollywood and Almodovar lies Douglas Sirk. More than half a century ago, Sirk uses melodrama in Imitation of Life to probe the problematic racial dynamics in his adopted country, the United States. Originally from Germany, the filmmaker fled Nazi persecution and made a career in the American movie industry. I’ve noticed that often it takes a foreign-born director to keenly see some of the divisions of America and render them into art on the screen. In college, I had a terrific course that explored America through the lens of foreign-born directors. Though Sirk wasn’t in the course, he very well could have been where he would’ve joined the ranks of Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 1975, QFS No. 75), fellow German émigré Fritz Lang (Fury, 1936, QFS No. 37), and Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas, 1984), among others.

One of the commonalities those directors displayed was a foreigner’s ability to both admire their new homeland and also criticize it, warts and all. Which is also a way of expressing love of their adopted country. In Imitation of Life, Sirk sees that a white person can flourish, reach their heights, seemingly on their own. But in the background, working in the kitchen unseen, is their black counterpart toiling away. Lora ascends to the top of her career while Annie (Juanita Moore) supports her faithfully.

Lora has a chance to flourish while Annie supports her in the background, out of focus.

But at what cost? Annie is unable to convince her daughter Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) – a girl who can pass as white – that being black is nothing to be ashamed of. Perhaps the love and care she spent supporting Lora and her daughter Susie (Sandra Dee) is the cost for Annie. While Sarah Jane’s struggles are deep, existential, and wrenching, Susie’s amount to feeling as if her mother wasn’t around to spend time with her. Not to trivialize Susie’s angst, but Sirk feels like he’s making a sly commentary here. A black girl’s struggle in America is very deep and profound while a rich white girl can have the luxury of not worrying about her personal identity but instead can worry about the usual things children worry about.

Annie spends the entire film attempting to help Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) that she shouldn't be ashamed of the reality of who she is.

Susie (Sandra Dee) feel neglected, which is valid but perhaps less existential than Sarah Jane's struggle.

What struck me throughout the film is that the characters don’t live in a time where they have language to address or understand race relations. Lora doesn’t offer meaningful support other than to suggest that things will get better. And Annie is unable to talk to her daughter about race in a nuanced or meaningful way. Of course, they are living in a time where divisions are very real between white and black families – the decision that struck down legal segregation, Brown v. The Board of Education, only happened five years before Imitation of Life was released – so it’s understandable that they don’t know how to talk about race in a constructive way. We’re still struggling with it now, but we have more language and tools. What I’m saying is: everyone in this movie would’ve benefitted from being in therapy.

For me, the entire film is worth it for this one particular payoff: the scene where Annie in essence says goodbye to Sarah Jane. Annie has discovered that Sarah Jane has moved across the country to Hollywood with a new name, working in a chorus line as an object of desire (or as lascivious a job as could be permitted to portray in 1959). Annie goes to her and is done fighting with her daughter, but instead only wants to hold her. As a final act of motherly love, she does what Sarah Jane asks – to leave her alone and pretend they aren’t related.

This extraordinary scene also is worth watching Imitation of Life. The performance, the writing, the staging - superior work by Douglas Sirk.

Annie, telling Sarah Jane that she will leave her alone but is there if she needs her.

Annie, relentlessly mothering, gives Sarah Jane her final act of love - the freedom Sarah Jane thinks she wants. 

The hold each other and both cry in each other’s arms. The roommate enters and as Annie leaves, she tells the roommate she used to raise “Miss Linda” – Sarah Jane’s new name, tacitly acknowledging her daughter is someone else now. After Sarah Jane closes the door, she cries sans says she was raised by a “mammie” “all my life.”

It’s devastating, and I did my best to keep from crying as much as they did. Throughout the film, Annie attempts to relentlessly be a mother. And in the end, what’s the most motherly thing she could do? Set her daughter free and assure her she could come back any time and her mother would be there to love her.

Sarah Jane collapses against the door in a way that I was prepared to do by the end of this scene. 

The melodrama builds and crescendos to this and somehow, even though the film doesn’t adhere to strict realism in anyway, I felt like I knew these people, these characters. As an American-raised child immigrants, I too have felt in many ways the way Sarah Jane felt in the film. I didn’t want to be seen as different than the other kids at school and at times not want my parents around where my classmates could see them. Sarah Jane is mortified when her mother comes to school to bring her an umbrella, revealing to the others that she’s actually black. I can’t say that I had experiences exactly like that, but I completely understood the character’s struggle in those scenes in a deep way.

Douglas Sirk gives the heft of the narrative to this story of identity, of race, in a way that’s uniquely American, and puts the burden on Juanita Moore in a titanic performance as Annie. In a meta way, Annie, the black character, has the bigger character arc, the bigger struggle, than Lora, played by one of Hollywood’s biggest stars Lana Turner. But it’s Turner that gets top billing, gets the posters and the recognition and, of course, the money. This too is a commentary, though unintended, about America, about life, and about Hollywood. In that way, Imitation of Life penetrates on more layers than maybe it even intended.

How do you tell a child that she was born to be hurt? Juanita Moore shoulders the emotional load in Imitation of Life. 

Halfway through the film, Annie deeply knows Sarah Jane’s struggle and says to Lora, “How do you tell a child that she was born to be hurt?” To utter this in a mainstream film in 1959 is no small feat. The fact that it’s probably still relevant is the real tragedy of Imitation of Life. Yet another aspect of what a modern 21st Century film this 1959 melodrama truly is.

Godzilla Minus One (2023)

QFS No. 151 - The invitation for September 4, 2024
Godzilla Minus One (2023) is the first kaiju film selected by Quarantine Film Society. Kaiju, of course, is the film subgenre in which giant monsters destroy things. I think it’s amazing that what seems like a very limited type of film has a named subgenre, but this is where I’m wrong. There are tons of these movies and television shows varying in quality in the 70 years since Godzilla (1954) came out from Japan. I’m certainly no expert on these films, but I do enjoy a good giant animal picture now and again.

Godzilla Minus One created quite a buzz last year and I really wanted to see it. I’ve heard good things about it from a filmmaking and storytelling perspective, but also in the visual and special effects. If I’m not mistaken, they had a very slim VFX team compared to say big studio movies. And yet, they took home the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, beating out a Marvel film, a Mission: Impossible film and Ridley Scott who is no stranger to Visual Effects. The first foreign language film to win the Visual Effects Oscar, which is cool.

Speaking of, this will be our fifth selection from Japan but our first Japanese film from this century. So curl with Godzilla Minus One and watch a giant lizard break things! (#spoiler) Join us next week for Godzilla Minus One.

Godzilla Minus One (2023) Directed by Takashi Yamazaki

Reactions and Analyses:
Is Godzilla’s destruction purposeful? Does he (it, she, they) know what he’s destroying? Is it intentional? Or is the destruction indiscriminate?

That was one of my main questions for the QFS discussion group and several were curious about this as well. And perhaps, for a mega-superfan of kaiju films, this is a question that’s very basic. But for someone like myself, it seemed an important question.

Perhaps the reason why I’m curious about this is that I’m not sure how to feel towards Godzilla. In some sense, if the destruction is unintentional, there’s a bit of sympathy one can feel towards the creature. It doesn’t know what it’s doing, it’s primal and a production of human tampering with nature – then it’s almost justified in its actions. A force of nature. After all, you can’t be angry with the actions of a hurricane or a volcano because it’s something unlocked by the Earth.

Is Godzilla an avenging god, a force of nature, or something of both in Godzilla Minus One (2023)?

But if Godzilla is an avenging god, wreaking havoc on a populace already suffering from the toll of devastating global war – then, it gets a little complicated. Godzilla, portrayed for seventy years on the big and small screens, appears in Godzilla Minus One as being fueled - or at least “embiggened” - by human’s insatiable need for bigger, larger and more destructive weapons. A scene, almost a cutaway scene, depicts the US dropping experimental nuclear bombs on the Bikini Atoll – with an insert shot of an underwater monstrous eye opening and powering up. The implication is this is what humans hath wrought. Nuclear war and self-annihilation.

Or as metaphor, a giant uncontrollable lizard getting larger and larger as it destroys more and more. A stand-in for the arms race writ large.

All Godzilla films are metaphoric and perhaps cautionary, from the original 1954 version to this one in 2023, borne of post-war Japan where nuclear annihilation was not theoretical but actual. It’s astonishing to realize that only nine short years after World War II and on the heels of the nuclear bombs wiping out Nagasaki and Hiroshima, that Toho Studios would make a film about a creature that was destroying Japanese cities. I even had this feeling while watching the 2023 iteration, that these poor people had suffered enough from fire bombings and nuclear weapons – isn’t it a bit too much to also subject them to a giant destructive lizard?

Haven't the Japanese people gone through enough in World War II? And now a giant lizard monster?!

Perhaps this is where cultural tastes and takes diverge between the US and Japan, which came up in our conversation. It’s easy to imagine that if the roles were reversed, that US filmmakers would very much make a film of giant monsters attacking Japan or Germany – their enemies in that war – as opposed to attaching its own populace on the shores of the Untied States . We found ourselves pondering what would’ve happened if Japanese filmmakers did indeed decide to make a 1954 film of Godzilla attacking the US, a revenge fantasy film in the way that would make the likes of a young Quentin Tarantino proud. Retribution through art is something we’ve seen before, but the Japanese have resisted that and instead turn inward with the Godzilla films.

And especially in Godzilla Minus One. Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) was a naval flyer in the war but when we discover him, he’s abandoned his duty as a kamikaze pilot honor bound to die in a suicide attack against the Allies. Although this is shameful, culturally, in 2024 looking back the filmmakers turn this around and seem to say – yes, that was your duty then, but now we need to live and build our nation. And by ejecting just before he flies into Godzilla’s mouth with his bomb-laden plane, Shikishima saves the day, lives honorably, and lives on – even rewarded by discovering that Noriko (Minami Hamabe) is still alive. So living is worth living for, you see.

Don't do it!

Don't do it!!!

Ohhhhh....

The nationalistic pride in Godzilla Minus One evoked another recent film we’ve screened from another part of Asia - RRR (2022, QFS No. 86). In S.S. Rajamouli’s revisionist period piece, India is a place that had physical might and used violence and warfare to overthrow British rulers. Never mind the fact that this never happened and India is well known for its nonviolent moral and intellectual revolution that truly changed the world (as portrayed in Gandhi, 1982, QFS No. 100) – the India of 2022 is trying to assert a new world dominance. One that shows its military, technological and physical might as opposed to its intellectual and moral one from the past. RRR is a virulently nationalistic work of fiction that seeks to scrub that past and recast India as a mighty nation, ready to do battle. I, for one, found this appalling and will discuss further in the RRR QFS essay that remains TBW.

The violent conclusion of RRR (2022) reimagines Indian independence from the British through force and might. 

As seen here in blood splattered across an icon of the British crown.

And yet, there’s a parallel we found in our discussion with Godzilla Minus One. Japan was demilitarized after World War II and there was a sentiment that they might prefer to live that way, to build their society and give up their imperialistic past. In 2024, the world is a vastly different place. With a resurgent and belligerent China at their doorstep, is Godzilla Minus One recasting Japan’s past, to show that they have might in numbers and a national pride? And that this means their love of the Japanese country fuels their current military force for good and will keep the Chinese at bay? The former soldiers in Godzilla Minus One fight not because it’s their duty as soldiers, but it is their collective duty to build a nation of people, assembling a “civilian” navy to fight an enemy at their shores. One can interpret that this is all proxy for regional domination and moral superiority over a foe, even if it’s not overt. (Though, to me and others in the group who brought this up, it feels overt.)

The civilian feel comes together in Godzilla Minus One and can defeat monsters (which might include China?)

Saluting Godzilla's demise, having done their patriotic duty to save Japan. 

But while the film does have this national pride coursing through, there is ample criticism of the Japanese government. The former admiral Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka) says:

Come to think of it this country has treated life far too cheaply. Poorly armored tanks. Poor supply chains resulting in half of all deaths from starvation and disease. Fighter planes built without ejection seats and finally, kamikaze and suicide attacks. That's why this time I'd take pride in a citizen led effort that sacrifices no lives at all! This next battle is not one waged to the death, but a battle to live for the future.

There you see this pride, but also damnation of nation’s leadership. It’s a fine line for the filmmakers to walk and they do so pretty well. Which got us to thinking – this is about as good as you can make this type of film, isn’t? The filmmakers balance politics, human drama, and action in a film about a giant lizard destroying everything in its path. There’s ample metaphor, there are emotional stakes – it all comes together in an science fiction film.

"Is that ... Godzilla?" is unintentionally hilarious. 

I does feel, however, of the scant Japanese Godzilla films I’ve seen, this one has taken some of the worst of American action film schlock and absorbed it, much the way Godzilla absorbs ammunition rounds. There’s the extremely cheesy lines, the overwrought emotions and overly convenient storytelling. Unfortunately, Noriko is saddled with several of these – Is your war finally over? As her first line to Shikishima when they reunite at the end feels straight out of the worst Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay collaboration. Is that … Godzilla? Is one of the more useless expressions of dialogue you’ll find in a movie but it did make me laugh out loud (unintended comedy laughter is still laughter I guess). And of course, Noriko somehow survives Godzilla’s energy breath blast giving us the happy American-style (or Bollywood-style) ending we’ve come to expect with a massive film like this. Not to mention the somewhat predictable climax, where Shikishima ejects and survives as well.

Many of the action scenes are excellent, but the flying sequences featuring Shikishima zooming past Godzilla are exhilarating. 

Are these flaws or features? Any way you slice it, to make a film about an indiscriminate killing force that destroys on a large scale, is no small feat (pun intend… small feet… never mind). But to make it memorable, you have to make it about people, not about the lizard. And even if their emotions are not totally believable, they sure are more believable than a giant monster reigning terror across a nation. The bringing together of both make for what might just be the apex in kaiju – specifically Godzilla – movie making.  

Godzilla gonna Godzilla. 

L.A. Confidential (1997)

QFS No. 150 - The invitation for August 28, 2024
I’m fairly certain that everyone or nearly everyone reading this has seen L.A. Confidential, one of the great Los Angeles movies and truly a modern classic in so many ways. You’ve got a young Russell Crowe, not yet a household name, the steely-eyed Guy Pearce, Kim Basinger with probably her best performance, director Curtis Hanson’s exacting detail of the period and his fantastic adaptation of James Ellory’s period novel. And, well, okay, it does have Kevin Spacey but we don’t have to talk about that right now.

Aside from him, I’m partial to the overall excellence in the cast, which was put together by casting director Mali Finn. Mali cast L.A. Confidential and Titanic (1997), both of which came out the same year. Three years later, I moved to Los Angeles and was hired by Mali to be her assistant – my first job in the industry. To my additional great fortune, in the spring of 2001 we started work casting Curtis Hanson’s follow-up to L.A. Confidential, the Eminem-starred 8 Mile (2002). A cinephile who was closely involved with the UCLA Film & Television Archives, Curtis told us early on that he was approaching 8 Mile as a modern Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and hosted a screening of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1978) for insight into the tone. What I’m saying is that Curtis would’ve enjoyed being a part of QFS or at least the idea of it.

Curtis, James Cameron, Joel Schumacher, Sharat Raju* and dozens of other directors loved having Mali as their casting director and she was known as a director’s casting director. She cast “real” seeming people and didn’t fall for beautiful faces, something I came to appreciate in my time working in her office alongside her. If you look at the films she worked on – and there were a lot of them – you would likely see a commonality in the actors who make up the fringes of the supporting cast. The ensemble for lack of a better term. I would argue (I mean, I have argued this point) that Titanic’s supporting cast are just as compelling as the main stars and possibly more so. That’s Mali’s fingerprints on Titanic, and you’ll be able to see that care in populating a cinematic world in this week’s selection as well.

L.A. Confidential is also part of what is truly an incredible film year, 1997. Check it out –  joining this week’s film and Titanic, at the Academy Awards alone you’ve got As Good as it Gets, Good Will Hunting, Life is Beautiful and The Fully Monty hitting the big categories. Then throw in Boogie Nights, Contact, Princess Mononoke, the first Austin Powers, Jackie Brown, Men in Black, Liar Liar, Wag the Dog, The Fifth Element, Tomorrow Never Dies (the best of the Piece Brosnan Bond films?), Con Air, The Game (underrated Fincher film), Face/Off, Gattaca, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Donnie Brasco, Gross Pointe Blanke, My Best Friend’s Wedding (solid Julia Roberts romantic comedy), Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm – I mean good lord we could have a screening series just on 1997!

I remember watching L.A. Confidential in the theater before I had ever even visited Los Angeles, and loved it. I’ve rewatched the film numerous times since moving to and living in LA and there’s an additional level of enjoyment you get from seeing sites that still exist – which can be an oddity in LA – as well as areas that feel very much a part of the city's past. Curtis Hanson, a native Angeleno who was probably a child when the events of this film take place, is meticulous in his recreation of that time. The DVD (which I still proudly have on my shelf) has terrific featurettes that are basically Curtis giving a tour of shooting locations in LA and they’re bite-sized and lovely.

Our 150th selection just felt like an appropriate time to revisit this film and its cool, stylish take on 1950s Los Angeles that has the slightest of connections to yours truly. I’m looking forward to revisiting it with you all and raising a glass for crossing a new QFS milestone. 

*Shameless, I know.

L.A. Confidential (1997) Directed by Curtis Hanson

Reactions and Analyses:
Closer to the end of L.A. Confidential (1997), Captain Dudley Smith (James Cromwell) holds a conference with his Los Angeles Police Department officers announcing the details of the death of one of their own, Detective Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) and instructs everyone to find the killer at all costs. This is all misleading, of course, since it’s Dudley himself who killed Vincennes. But only we, the audience, know that.

The press conference about Jack Vincennes death from L.A. Confidential (1997).

Captain Smith (James Cromwell) asks about "Rollo Tomasi."

As the officers are filing out, he summons Detective Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) and mentions that Vincennes had a lead, and maybe it was in regards to his killer. The name, uttered in Vincennes final breath to Dudley, was “Rollo Tomasi.” The name is a fictional moniker Exley gave to the name of the man who killed his father and was never found – and only Vincennes knows about it.

It’s here that Exley now knows the truth – Dudley killed Vincennes. It’s the final piece of the puzzle that solves the Night Owl killings and answers a host of other questions for which Exley had been searching.

Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) knows. Director Curtis Hanson and cinematographer Dante Spinotti capture it in a simple, tight close up that holds long enough to register. A confluence of performance, writing, directing, and cinematography.

The shot has remained on the back of Exley’s head throughout this exchange. But once this name is mentioned, it cuts to his close up. And lingers on it – long enough for the audience to know, but we also want to know what is Exley going to do or say? It’s suspenseful, it’s tense and it’s simply a cut to a close up. Exley has to register it, decide, not betray any emotion, and come to a realization – all in a simple close up.

The next shot, it’s back to the back of his head, Dudley leaves, and Exley turns to camera, a close up again – and he’s shaken and something has changed.

It's an extraordinary moment in an extraordinary work of directing. It’s a bringing together of performance, cinematography, writing, and directing. It encapsulates what a great director does – bring together all the elements that make up a movie and synthesize them into something greater than their parts. Curtis Hanson does this masterfully throughout L.A. Confidential and re-watching the film for the seven hundredth time (give or take) gave us the opportunity to revel in the true excellence of his craft.

Perhaps it’s easy to forget that Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe (as Bud White) were total newcomers to American audiences in 1997. And take Crowe’s Bud White in Hanson’s hands as both director and writer. When I first saw the film in the theater 27 years ago, I remember loathing Bud White but also fearing him, which I think is the point. But this time, I picked up on something that might seem obvious but was new to me.

All the characters in the film are hiding something or angling for something. Dudley clearly is hiding his corruption. Exley is a climber – on the surface he’s a good cop, and truly he is. But he’s playing the angles, understanding how to get higher in the ranks. Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger) is literally appearing to be Veronica Lake but is actually a girl from Bisbee, Arizona – and cheats on White with Exley to get Exley in trouble or killed. Pierce Patchett (David Strathairn) appears to be a businessman but he’s caught up in prostitution and drugs. The D.A. (Ron Rifkin) is a closeted homosexual. Vincennes appears slick but loathes what he does. And so on.

Bud White (Russell Crowe) is the only character not playing an angle in L.A. Confidential.

But the only one who is “pure,” who we can say is what you see is what you get – that’s Bud White. In a way, he’s the least corruptible. That’s not saying he’s a clean cop. On the contrary, he’s part of Dudley’s squad that beats up rival gangsters off the records. But he’s true to himself, the boy who watched his father beat his mother to death and has the physical and mental scars to prove it.

If there’s a thesis in L.A. Confidential it’s this – to have people protect us from the evils in the world, you can’t do it with just brawn and you can’t do it with just brains. You need both. So while Bud White is the brawn, he uses his brain to connect the dots and discover that his former partner Dick Stensland (Graham Beckel) lied to him and was part of a heroin racket.

And Exley, in what is probably the best glasses-wearing police officer portrayal in history, goes from what we believe is bookish, shrewd, and prestige-chasing to someone willing to plant evidence and shoot someone a fleeing suspect in the back. The very things he tells his superior, Dudley, he’s not going to do because that’s not the right way. And it’s Dudley who he shoots from behind after all is said and done.

Moments before does what Dudley asked Exley asked him he's capable of doing - shoot a suspect in the back to prevent him from causing more harm. 

This convergence of brain (Exley) and brawn (White), and how each transform into the other, culminates in the scene where the two nearly kill each other. Exley barges into Lynn’s home and they then have sex – but it’s all a setup with Sid Hutchins (Danny DeVito) taking blackmail photos “accidentally” given to White by Dudley so White then is driven to kill Exley. And he very nearly does until Exley reveals that he knows Dudley killed Vincennes. White, still enraged, ultimately burns off and does not go through with destroying Exley.

White doesn't kill Exley. This is the moment, the fulcrum of the film. It's this moment when he uses his mind and not his muscles that allows them both to team up and find the real villain. 

It's this turn, this moment where brawn gives way to brains, this moment that saves both of them and sets them on a path to ending Dudley’s secret reign of terror. Brain without brawn is feckless and powerless. Brawn without brains is primitive and intractable. Both are needed to balance each other, a yin and yang.

L.A. Confidential succeeds in being rooted in reality, and while it starts with the cast – every single one of them is a full three-dimensional human, fleshed out and realistic – the world created by Hanson makes the film feel as if it was something that actually happened in Los Angeles in 1953. Of course, though some storylines are based on a handful of real stories in James Ellory’s original novel, Hanson’s visually recreates 1950s Los Angeles with exacting detail. But he doesn’t do it for show or make a big deal of it – it’s all in the background. The pushing back of the details gives the film a verisimilitude that brings it to life.

There’s one example in particular that is detailed in a terrific museum piece at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. Production designer Jeannine Oppewall and set decorator Jay Hart talk about Lynn Brackett’s home – it’s filled with flowing, silky, “lounge-y” fabrics in a home with archways and layers. But in the back of the home sits Lynn’s bedroom, hidden away and small. It’s simple and the camera pans over to a little pillow that’s clearly homemade of Arizona, with the town of Bisbee highlighted.

The Arizona pillow, a symbol of the real Lynn Bracken, deep in the recesses of her home.

That’s the real Lynn Bracken – a girl from Bisbee with layers of glamour on the surface, hiding the true person inside. It’s a symbol of the film, the story, and frankly of Los Angeles. And it provides an example of the attention to details that are in the background and though you might not notice them, they do their work on you, the viewer, to root it in a reality. And with that in the background, the performers have a chance to in the foreground of the film.

The details in Lynn Bracken's home and throughout L.A. Confidential are in the background and service to the story.

This is also another example of what it means to be a director, to pull in those elements and create a world what is this richly layered and detailed.

This use of foreground and background, enhanced by the strong horizontals and angles of the Pierce Patchett's (David Strathairn) Neutra home, is the masterwork of filmmaking - the combination of production design, cinematography and directing. And one of the many great character introductions Curtis Hanson pulls off throughout.

One of those elements that routinely shines is Dante Spinotti’s immaculate cinematography. In particular, how he and Hanson use close ups in the film. As described above, closeups are used as punctuation – of Ed Exley realizing that Dudley is Vincennes’ killer. But one close up in particular stands out and it’s the moment that White discovers Lynn at the liquor store. At first he can’t see her face – she’s in a black clock with white trim. But then, she turns to him – to us, the camera – into a stunning close up, Kim Basinger/Veronica Lake/Lynn Bracken in all her glamorous beauty.

Dante Spinotti and Curtis Hanson's stunning close up of Lynn Bracken as she snaps her head towards camera and Bud White - their fates eventually will intertwine. A classic frame evocative of early Hollywood glamour headshots.

It’s evocative of the glamour headshots of the era, of the stunning shallow focus, frame-filling shots of the time. And it’s a powerful character introduction. This is a person of consequence to the story. Throughout the film, Spinotti and Hanson push the limits of the close up, cutting off top of heads in the 2.35 aspect ratio, to bring us very close to the subject. For a film with so many main characters, it’s never confusing whose perspective we’re in at any given time. We always know whose eyes we’re seeing a scene through. Whether it’s looking up to see a Santa Claus decoration on a roof that’s about to come down or looking at two suspects in an interrogation room, we always know whose story we’re following and when – that’s the work of a director, a cinematographer, and an editor telling the story visually.

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L.A. Confidential is one of those rare films in which every single person involved in it is at the top of their game. Everyone is hitting home runs. It’s a powerhouse of collaboration which means it’s a powerhouse of directing. A textbook film to watch if you’re interested in production design, period costumes and props, locations, history, cinematography, editing, music, performance, writing – therefore a textbook of filmmaking. Let’s hope we’re still studying now and for years to come.

Scarface (1932)

QFS No. 149 - The invitation for August 21, 2024
In 1931 and 1932, there were a few gangster pictures that helped established the genre – Little Cesar* (1931), The Public Enemy (1931) and this week’s selection Scarface. Any of those would’ve been fun to watch, especially with stars like Edward G Robinson and James Cagney (who you may remember as being wonderfully bonkers in White Heat, 1949, QFS No. 74). So perhaps we’ll visit one of these other Pre-Code gangster films in the future.

“Pre-Code” of course refers to a film that predates the Production Code Administration censorship era that befell Hollywood starting in 1934. In 1932, the year Scarface was released, the film industry’s distribution oversight commission – called the Hays Code – had no real authority to mandate the removal of controversial elements from a film. Their notes were suggestions which were adhered to or not adhered to depending on the filmmaker’s or the studio executive’s muscle. This self-policing model gave rise to conservative vanguards of moral decency who threatened widespread boycotts of films with content they deemed immoral. The PCA was established and its stamp of approval began in 1934 and aimed to quell the discontent from these voices. That system continued for the next 36 years, finally replaced by a rating system that’s a precursor to our letter-based one we use today.

So there was a window of time from about 1922-1934 where many films pushed the boundaries of content, tone, style, and story. Scarface fell in that realm and faced real opposition with heavy censorship efforts from the studio. The PCA code intended to make sure that films didn’t glorify gangsters and other evil-doers, and instead they should receive comeuppance. Crime doesn’t pay, is the acceptable moral takeaway. To be somewhat fair to these censors, the 1930s was still rife with mafia-driven crime in major cities. Al Capone – upon whom Scarface is apparently based – was still very much alive and influential in Chicago in the ’30s.

Speaking of Capone – though loosely based on a novel, the Scarface script is co-credited to the legendary Ben Hecht who is almost certainly the most prolific writer in movie history (though he was one of five writers on this script – five!). Hecht apparently had once met Capone and based the main character on him, so much so that Capone had two men “visit” Hecht in Hollywood to make sure it wasn’t … too much based on Capone. (We’ve watched a Hecht penned film before, Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Notorious (1946, QFS No. 117)

All of this is compelling enough to want to see Scarface, and that’s before mentioning that it was produced by the most famous wealthy future recluse of all time, Howard Hughes. With Hawks at the helm, you’ve got a double Howard film. The Full Howard, as it’s known by no one.

Watch the 1932 Scarface (not the 1983 one!) and let’s discuss!

*Not to be confused with the pizza, though both are made out of celluloid (ZING!).

Scarface (1932) Directed by Howard Hawks

Reactions and Analyses:
“The World Is Yours.” This is the advertisement Tony Camonte (Paul Muni) – the titular “Scarface” – sees when he looks out the window of his gaudy new apartment, financed from moving up in the ranks as the strongman to Johnny Lovo (Osgood Perkins). There it is, a literal big, bright, shining sign, illuminating his vision forward.

If there’s a thesis statement for Scarface (1932, and by extension the 1983 version), it would be that exact statement. The ambition of a man low on the totem pole, seeking more power, more money, more women, more of whatever it is he desires. You can take it – after all, it’s yours. “Do it first, do it fast, and keep doing it,” Tony says early on in the film.  

The World Is Yours according to this advertisement outside of Tony Camonte's window in Scarface (1932).

And throughout, Tony appears to be angling, smiling, grifting, posturing. His charm and charisma are obvious and as officially the muscle of Lovo’s operation, it’s clear that this is a problematic staff hire Lovo has made. Tony’s proving that he’s not really someone who follows orders and we see the two different dynamics of gangsters – a dynamic that plays out in gangster films for decades to come. The shrewd, calculating and often cautious puppet-master/chess player on the one hand and the violent, unpredictable, hot-headed reactionary who’s not afraid to dive headlong into battle. This is the Michael Corleone/Sonny Corleone dichotomy that’s at center of The Godfather more than 40 years later, for example.

Tony Camonte (Paul Muni) is charismatic, but it's clear that Johnny Lovo's hiring of a maniac like Tony is short-sighted at best.

Scarface, along with the other Pre-Code gangster classics Public Enemy (1931) and Little Cesar (1931), all released within a few years of each other, form an origin triumvirate of the gangster genre that continues all the way through today. Throughout the film there are familiar faces, ideas and themes – but in 1930s, they were likely novel. You’ve got the second-in-command Rinaldo (George Raft) with his coin-flip as a signature tic, the woman who is attracted to criminals and bad boys, the clownish sidekick Angelo (Vince Barnett), the attempt to go out in a blaze of glory, the relentless gunfire, the psychopathic and heartless killer, and so on. It’s actually sort of thrilling to watch this genre in its infancy.

About the psychopathic and heartless killers, Hawks and screenwriter Ben Hecht likely had portray antihero Tony as someone who would inevitably have no chance of ending up on top. This is a contrast of course to Michael in The Godfather who does succeed by vanquishing his foes, killing his sister’s traitorous husband, consolidating his power and earning the respect of his underlings. The Pre-Code censors in 1932, however, would not permit a positive portrayal of a ruthless gangster. He has to have his comeuppance, and Hawks concedes to the censors and places a plea for help in the opening title card:

This picture is an indictment of gang rule in America and of the callous indifference of the government to this constantly increasing menace to our safety and our liberty. Every incident in this picture is the reproduction of an actual occurrence, and the purpose of this picture is to demand of the government: 'What are you going to do about it?' The government is your government. What are YOU going to do about it?

There’s also this aspect of Tony that he isn’t just cruel, but that he must also have a psychosis in the way that James Cagney has in White Heat (1949, QFS No. 74). At the time, Hawks likely couldn’t portray Tony as simply an ambitious Shakespearean tragic figure, about one man’s pursuit of power because that would in a way be an indictment about the American dream. Fifty years later, Brian DePalma and Oliver Stone have nothing in their way to prevent them from reimagining this tale as a saga of an immigrant coming up from nothing and earning his place in a twisted version of the American dream. The World Is Yours, after all. Both go down in a blaze of glory, but Tony Montana in 1983 goes down, guns blazing, crashing into a pool. Tony Camonte in 1932 goes down sniveling, afraid of being alone and distraught at what will happen to him. A “hero’s” end in 1983 but a coward’s end in 1932. This is perhaps the biggest distinction between the films and between the eras. We sort of admire Tony Montana, ruthless as he is; it’s hard to say that same about Tony Comonte.

In 1932, Tony Comante dies sniveling and begging. 

In 1983, Tony Montana (Al Pacino) goes out in a more "heroic" or honorable blaze of glory in Brian De Palma's Scarface.

In the 1932’s Scarface, Tony gets his hands on a new weapon of mass destruction – the Tommy Gun, ubiquitous in gangster films from here on out. And he’s filled with murderous glee, looking to turn the North Side into Swiss cheese. He lashes out furiously at his sister Cesca (Karen Morley) for dancing with men at a club and strikes her. Later, he kills his best friend Rinaldo in a rage later on when he finds Rinaldo and Cesca together not knowing that they secretly were married while Tony was away. Perhaps a way to show that this is not a man to admire is to show that all of this behavior is aberrant. In a way, it ends up being an anti-gangster film. A member of our group pointed out that for about two-thirds of the way into most gangster films, the lifestyle seems pretty great. It’s the downfall that’s brutal.

Look how similar these two images are! And the joy in Tony Comante's face.

Both the 1932 and 1983 version feature weapons capable of doing maximum harm and serve no appropriate civilian purpose - more explicitly addressed in Howard Hawks' film than in De Palma's. And here, in this photo, Tony Montana (Al Pacino) has a little friend. You must say hello to it.

Members in the discussion group pointed out one particularly unfortunate and dispiriting aspect of Scarface, but not in a story sense. Mid-way through the film, a publisher and a politician who appear in essentially only this one scene, lament that these automatic weapons gangsters are now using have no purpose except for mass murder – and that they’re powerless against them unless the government does something about it. We’re still having this problem now, in 2024! It was actually a very depressing scene – and overtly racist unfortunately, arguing that half of these Italians aren’t even American citizens and thus should be rounded up and deported. We’re still having people argue this now, in 2024! The scene goes on to have one of the characters enumerate other ills of society in a list that almost exactly mirrors the text in the Hays Code of 1932 and the Production Code in 1934 – a scene clearly meant to appease the censors. The scene also features the publisher of the Chicago paper defending their work, saying that they have to report on the news while the government takes the position that the newspapers are simply glorifies gangsters and violence. We’re still having this discussion now, in 2024!

If you're a gangster, just don't down sit near windows during a gang war. 

Gun control debates, racist tirades and media complicity aside, Scarface is surprisingly advanced for 1932 and artistic in the seasoned hands of Hawks. The car stunts are exciting and clearly dangerous. The gunfire is realistic because, well, we learned they had to use real bullets firing around the actors to create bullet hits since this film predates the use of squibs. Nearly every single picture window gets utterly demolished, which leads one to question why any gangster would openly sit near a window at all during a drug war. They are liberally spraying bullets all over the place in the film and it’s quite thrilling, I have say. Hawks is an underrated artist in the grand arc of American cinema history, but this film showcases his artistry as a director – the use of the letter “X” somewhere in the frame whenever someone is about to die might be the first ever Easter Egg in a movie? But his use of action is very effective and it’s clear that he’s mastered the use of early special effects to simulate cinematic reality – all only a handful of years after the end of the Silent Era, which is amazing.

In so many ways, gangster films have come a long way. But in a lot of aspects, the fundamentals of the genre can be traced to this film and others from this time before American censors really crack down on portrayals of criminals as heroes. One commonality is the idea that if you are ruthlessly committed to the pursuit of power, then glory awaits. The world, after all, is yours.  

End credits of the 1983 version pay homage to filmmakers of the 1932 original.

Blow Out (1981)

QFS No. 148 - The invitation for August 14, 2024
Brian Da Palma is one of the great polarizing filmmakers of our time, I think I can safely say. He has made some of classic films – Carrie (1976), Obsession (1976), Scarface (1983), The Untouchables (1987), the first Mission: Impossible (1996) – but has also made several bombs. Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) was a legendary box-office disaster and Mission to Mars (2000) is a truly terrible film and I dare you to convince me otherwise. But it’s not the financial failures that have made him polarizing.

His thrillers are dark psychological affairs with often erotic storylines, disturbing imagery, and bloody violence. Dressed to Kill (1980) ignited protests over the portrayal of a transgendered person as a deviant psychopathic murderer. Body Double (1984) upset his studio so much that they ended his multi-picture deal. Scarface (1983) was criticized for its brutal violence and glorification of drug use. His admirers are legion, but his critics point to misogynistic tendencies in his films, in particular his thrillers. (Speaking of misogyny, he's been accused – or praised, depending on your perspective – of ripping off Alfred Hitchcock a little too liberally.)

But De Palma never made the same film twice and his filmography is impossible to characterize or really fathom. His work includes: a Stephen King-horror film, a violent immigrant gangster opus, a slick Chicago-set period piece with an homage to a Russian silent film, the launching of a major movie franchise, a war film, science fiction, musical, comedy, thrillers. It’s really astonishing the breadth of films De Palma made, especially for an auteur. The sheer fact that the studio system rewarded De Palma in the 1980s is fascinating, and a sign of the times perhaps. It’s harder to imagine a De Palma-type succeeding now.  

Still, you could make the argument that Quentin Tarantino – who is De Palma Fan #1 – did do just that in the 1990s. Tarantino and De Palma are two filmmakers who have a committed and deep following, in almost a cult-like manner. It’s safe to say that many of his films are indeed being rediscovered as cult classics these days.

This week’s Blow Out is a film that has endured, at least for many cinephiles. Perhaps in part for John Travolta, as he was near the apex of the first half of his career and this is another early star turn for him. Whatever the case may be, this has been on my list of films to see for some time now, so I’m looking forward to finally adding a De Palma film to the QFS List.

Blow Out (1981) Directed by Brian De Palma

Reactions and Analyses:
Early in Blow Out (1981), Jack (John Travolta) is on a bridge recording sounds as part of his work as a sound engineer for a movie production company. It’s a scene that becomes the inciting incident of the film, but at first it simply shows the character’s particular skill and expertise as Jack scans with his shotgun microphone through the night over the river. The scene also serves to show Brian De Palma at his best, putting his directing genius on display. If there’s one sequence I’d show someone from this (or any) film on what it means to tell a story visually, this might be it.

Jack (John Travlota) listening in on a couple while out field recording for his day job, from Blow Out (1981).

We first hear a couple talking near a bridge, in a wide shot while Jack is in the distance who’s listening in. The sound then trails to something mysterious, only to be revealed as a frog croaking. We hear some sort of clicking but don’t yet know what it is, but it leads to the owl hooting. The owl turns its attention, as we the viewer does and Jack does, to the sound of an approaching car. A pop – was it a gunshot or just a blow out?! – and the car spins out of control and goes over the bridge, which sparks the entire narrative journey of the film.

Jack hears the owl.

Hears something else, and a car approaching.

What De Palma does, and what Alfred Hitchcock also did so well, was to bring out attention to whatever the director wanted us to see. He puts the owl in close up, with Jack small in the frame behind him. We see the frog in foreground, but small and little, almost invisible the way it was to Jack but for hearing it. When we need to pay attention to something, De Palma puts it front and center.

Jack sees the car, then hears the blow out - or is it a gunshot?

Then, when the “accident” happens, we’re far away and don’t have all the details – which is exactly how Jack is experiencing it. This is textbook filmmaking, a sequence that should be mandatory for directors to show how to accurately direct the audience’s attention and to show first-person perspective in filmmaking.

Jack sees the car launch from the bridge. 

De Palma, however, tops this by returning to the sequence and scene of the accident when Jack finally has a moment in a motel room with Sally (Nancy Allen) passed out on the bed after returning from the hospital. Jack listens to his recording and we return to the scene, hearing it and seeing it through Jack’s eyes. But now, we’re in different points of view, a fleshing out of the scene. The couple on the bridge is now seen from Jack’s perspective. The frog is clearly visible, now from a new angle. The owl, in close up, looks right at us and turns to the car approaching – but a new angle.

Then, the terrific shot of a flash in the bushes, the tire exploding – all with Jack and his headphones superimposed on the action, as if we’re in his head seeing and hearing it happen. It’s extraordinary – the stakes of this scene are high, this is what is setting up the central tension of the film. Jack has proof it wasn’t an accident, but an assassination attempt. Will anyone believe him?

Jack "hearing" the gunshot and hitting the tire while we see it - the shot is one of De Palma's masterstrokes in Blow Out.

Throughout Blow Out, De Palma’s work with cinematographer Vilmos Zigmond brings an elevated artistry to a suspense thriller, much as Hitchcock did a generation earlier. De Palma and Zigmond seem to know always where to put the camera to tell the story in the most compelling way possible. Take the opening sequence. In what feels like it could very well be the actual opening sequence of the film – a tawdry Halloween-esque opening that explores into a sorority house – is actually the film-within-the-film that Jack is working on. The scene goes on past what we expect for such a misdirect and it goes on for quite some time, finally revealed after a woman is about to be stabbed in the shower where her scream defies credulity and the images freezes. We’re now in the sound mixing room with Jack and his co-workers.

The sequence is itself a work of technical mastery – as much De Palma’s and Zigmond’s fine construction as it is Garrett Brown, inventor of the Steadicam, who executes the vision with his new device with perfection. Without having seen Blow Out before, I truly thought this was the beginning of the story. And what is serves to do (other than perhaps a comment on De Palma’s overt misogynistic tendencies, which we’ll get to) is to introduce us to Jack, his area of expertise, and also that he’s living in a sort of trashy B-movie world. The scream is a bit that will be returned to again and pays off at the end.

Film-within-a-film opening sequence ends in the mixing room.

Introduction to Jack and his line of work.

But before Blow Out ends, we’re treated to De Palma’s masterful attention to detail. For three quarters of the movie, roughly, De Palma’s attention to extreme detail is exacting, the way it is for Jack. We see close ups of the photos of the crash, frame by frame, as an editor would have to do. We watch all the practical and technical manipulation of the esoteric machines that shoot animation cells or string audio tape through a splicer, with chalk marks on the frames for reference. It’s tactile, the way filmmaking was, with physical levers and tapes that can be demagnetized. For a filmmaker who is part of what is likely the last generation to be trained in both analog and digital formats, all of this warmed my heart to see and that of several of us in the QFS discussion group.

The tools of sound and filmmaking.

Jack studies the stills of the car crash.

Jack cuts sound the old fashioned way.

Speaking of old-time filmmaking – Travolta portrays a sound engineer with utmost accuracy. Having known and worked with several, I can say that Travolta doesn’t feel like an actor playing a sound engineer, he somehow brings an authenticity to the role with his clear love of careful listening and focus. He fits perfectly into the role of Jack and I would’ve bought all the Travolta stock I could after this film – which is only funny in retrospect considering the following nosedive his career suffered until his resurgence in 1994 with Pulp Fiction (directed by De Palma Fan #1 Quentin Tarantino). But here in Blow Out, Jack is compelled to do something, anything he can, with the knowledge he has. He can’t believe how no one belives him and encounters forces out there, unseen, that are dangerous and are trying to manipulate our world.

This post-Watergate paranoia remains a fascination of mine. It was in the air - something or someone is manipulating you; you are being watched; no one can be trusted - and maybe not even your own eyes. Not too long ago we selected Klute (1971, QFS No. 128), one of Alan J Pakula’s paranoia films of the era or even Francis Ford Coppola’s masterful The Conversation (1974). Blow Out fits right in. But the conspirators here are almost comically incompetent. They hire a … hitman? Or maybe just a psychopath in Burke (John Lithgow). Looking at the entire picture, Burke reveals himself to be utterly terrible at his job. He’s supposed to disable the car with the presidential candidate, but instead he kills him. (The plan, of course, was pretty faulty from the start.) Then he kills the wrong woman who he thinks is Sally. And then – he does kill Sally but gets killed in the end too. That’s not to mention that Burke, for no apparent reason, kills a prostitute in the train station just for fun! This is not the “professional” you should hire when attempting to commit political violence.

Sally dies before Jack can arrive with fireworks from Liberty Day igniting above them. The conspiracy wins.

In the end, the unseen forces win. Not only did they eliminate the candidate from the contest, but they’ve essentially eliminated all trace back to the conspiracy. Only Jack knows, but he has no proof and is haunted by the burden of being the only one with the truth.

The QFS group mostly agreed that the film would be an unqualified masterpiece had De Palma was able to stick the landing. The final quarter of the film is something of a disaster, which lead us to speculate whether De Palma felt the need to amp up the action given the larger budget he received when casting Travolta in the lead role. For some reason, Jack drives directly through the Liberty Day parade to get to the subway exit to where Burke is heading with the captured Sally. In an attempt to save one person, Jack nearly kills hundreds before crashing into a wall, getting knocked out, an ambulance comes (off screen) and when he comes to, he escapes the ambulance and gets to Sally too late. It’s preposterous and in many ways doesn’t fit the tight thriller that De Palma crafted leading up to it.

Jack's "superpower" is his attention to detail and sound.

The film showed Jack as an intelligent artistic type with a “superpower,” for lack of a better term – to be able to discern specific sounds. The story is setting up for him using this skill to solve the puzzle or to save the day – perhaps by hearing the clicking sound of Burke’s watch garrote, or by being able to hear Sally’s whereabouts more readily. Instead, De Palma focuses on Jack having to overcome past demons by wiring Sally – something he did in the past before he got one of his undercover informants killed. That haunts Jack, and so the story focuses on overcoming that part of his past. He fails with Sally, just as he did before, which led one of us in the group to conclude that the moral of the story is: don’t let Travolta put a wire on you because you’ll end up dead.

It's one of a number of plot and logic holes, including loose ends that never are addressed. The news guy (Curt May), is he on the up-and-up? How did he know all that about Jack? We’ll never know because that doesn’t pay off. How could Jack possibly be left unguarded in the ambulance after nearly running over people in his Jeep and crashing into a department store display? Why would it matter about the dead man’s reputation now that he’s dead? Just to protect his family? And why didn’t the people who were trying to embarrass the candidate simply just go with the usual plan Sally and Manny (Dennis Franz) do all the time – burst through a room and take pictures of the candidate in bed with Sally? Did Sally kill Manny or just knock him out? And so on.

Despite all of the above – including the questionable third act of the story – the film remains an essential piece of filmmaking. The sequence on the bridge alone is worth the price of admission. When Jack discovers all his tape has been demagnetized, De Palma has the camera spinning steadily on its access, panning around the room as Jack gets into a panic, heightening the anxiety. It’s incredibly effective and I found myself feeling the same thing the character felt - which is exactly the goal of a director in telling a story cinematically and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it done quite as well as it’s done here. In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, it would be gimmicky. But here, it’s perfect.

The shot after the continually panning shot is this overhead that shows all the mess left after Jack's frantic attempt to see if any of his tapes still work.

But I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up one particular aspect of Blow Up that’s dogged De Palma in much of his work, and that is his misogynistic tendencies. First of all, Sally is portrayed as an utterly clueless ditz, incapable of fighting for herself and seemingly out of it the entire time. She is so thinly portrayed and not even given a moment on screen for her to grasp that she almost died if it wasn’t for Jack saving her. In the only scene in which Sally shows any depth comes as she’s sharing with Jack her dreams of being a makeup artist in the film business. To which Jack blows her off as unserious and childish. The opening itself, the salacious POV through the women’s dorm ending in the shower, is fun for teenage boys and of course is evocative of those types of slasher pics De Palma may be lampooning, but is definitely on the gratuitous side.

But if you look more closely at this opening section – the final shot is of a naked woman in the shower, as mentioned above. The actress’ scream is inadequate and it’s Jack’s job to fix it. And he does in the final scene of the film – he uses Sally’s final moments of her life that he recorded and puts in the film. The only worth this woman, Sally, brings to the filmmakers is her sound, her primal cry out to the world. And it will live on as coming from the mouth of a naked woman in a shower. For someone like De Palma who delved into the deep psyche of humans and often has darkly sexual storylines, this feels like it’s no accident.

One of Sally's (Nancy Allen) final screams, eventually used in the trashy film Jack is working on.

A charitable way of looking at the ending is that this final sound of Sally will haunt Jack him, and will be his torment, and only he will know how she exists forever in this film. The less chartable way of looking at this is that all a woman is worth is to be seen on the screen as sex objects, to be used even in their final moments for entertainment and as a commodity. Perhaps there’s something in between, but it’s bleak nevertheless.

How do we square De Palma? I have trouble with him, to be honest. I love much of his work, but he revels in the profane, the salacious, and seems to be able to only make male characters fully human. (People level this latter critique against Hitchcock, too.) Yet, there is true artistry in his best films. He creates iconic images and uses the language of past filmmakers to his advantage, creating something new and indelible. Hitchcock’s legacy appears in most of his films, but there’s also of course Michelangelo Antonioni (Blow-Up, 1966 for Blow Out), Sergei Eisenstein (from Battleship Potemkin, 1925, for The Untouchables, 1987) and others along the way. Tarantino, for his part, takes inspiration from De Palma and thus the circle of filmmaking continues.

It's hard to place De Palma in the pantheon of great American directors, but he must be among them. And it’s easy to argue that Blow Out is his finest work, warts and all. Perhaps like the filmmaker who crafted it.

Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959)

QFS No. 147 - The invitation for July 17, 2024
Let’s complete another chapter in our on-going Introduction to Indian Cinema 101!

Guru Dutt is one of the unheralded filmmakers from India. “Unheralded” is in quotes because he’s quite ... heralded? ... in India. Though recognized as a great in his own country, he never achieved international acclaim in his lifetime the way that Satyajit Ray did, for example. For me, I was first introduced to Dutt’s work about twenty years ago when Time magazine’s legendary film critic Richard Schickel listed Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa (1957) as one of the 100 greatest films ever made. Pyaasa is a classic that’s moving and also has the unofficial Hindi film mandated musical numbers. But the musical numbers in Pyaasa are not superfluous – they serve the story, bringing poetry to life and enhancing the story. His follow-up Kaagaz Ke Phool – which translates to “Paper Flowers” – is known as one of the great films from the Golden Age of Hindi Cinema.

Now is a good time to recap our course materials for Introduction to Indian Cinema. Here are the films the QFS has selected (in chronological order):

1. Apur Sansar (World of Apu, 1959, QFS No. 16) – part of Ray’s “Apu Trilogy” and the origin point of Indian independent and art cinema.

2. Sholay (1975, QFS No. 62) – a glimpse of a big mainstream Indian movie during an era when such films were uninfluenced by global cinema. Also, our first viewing of Amitabh Bachchan, the most famous movie star in the world.

3. Dil Se.. (1998, QFS No. 32) – where we could see the influence of MTV’s arrival into South Asia, in which a movie produced standalone music numbers that felt separate from the main film. Also showcasing the ascension of Shah Rukh Khan as global heartthrob and second most famous movie star in the world.

4. 3 Idiots (2006, QFS No. 118) – closer to present-day Hindi filmmaking ripe with broad humor, earnestness, and adapted from a popular contemporary novel.

5. RRR (2022, QFS No. 86) – example of a regional language film (Telugu) that exploded into the world consciousness, showcasing modern filmmaking India style.

That’s not bad for a four-year, unstructured and barely planned course into the filmmaking of the largest movie producing country on earth!

You’ll notice in the above list that Apur Sansar and this week’s film are both from 1959. But they represent completely different branches of Indian cinema. Apur Sansar is from Bengal and not considered part of the national films of India (which we now call “Bollywood” but is really known as “Hindi Films” you may recall from our previous lessons). Ray’s Apu Trilogy was more popular abroad than in his own country, where he produced and directed from outside of the national movie industry. He is the first known filmmaker to make a successful film outside the traditional Indian movie studio. The independent scene in India remained very thin for the next 50 years, but the Apu Trilogy is where it begins.

Whereas Guru Dutt was already a Hindi film star known all over India by 1959. While Ray toiled as what we would now call an independent filmmaker, Dutt was a studio filmmaker. He operated within the Hindi film ecosystem, casting stars (including himself) but told deeply personal stories in between the songs and the dances. Kaagaz Ke Phool represents our QFS selection from the Golden Age of Hindi Cinema.

And while Dutt made commercially viable films, his personal life was marred by strife. Perhaps the melancholic storytelling he showcased on the screen came from his world at home. Tragically, he died before he turned 40 possibly from an accidental overdose or possibly, he committed suicide. This is his final film as a director (he acted in eight or so more after this) and though his life was short, he left behind an incredibly impressive body of work as a filmmaker. Dutt remains a revered artistic luminary in India and in film circles – both Pyaasa and Kaagaz Ke Phool appear on “Greatest” lists in India and internationally, including the latter once appearing on the BFI/Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time list in 2002. I believe India also issued a stamp in his honor as well. 

So join us in watching Kaagaz Ke Phool – the first Indian film in Cinemascope! – and we’ll discuss in about two weeks.

Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959) Directed by Guru Dutt

Reactions and Analyses:
In Guru Dutt’s Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959), there are a few scenes that concern horses and take place at a horse racing track. For a movie set primarily in the world of the 1950s Hindi cinema industry and very little to do with horses, this feels superfluous. And, for the most part it is superfluous – it doesn’t have much to do with the main storyline. But it pays off in a way later on thematically.

Rocky (Johnny Walker), who owns and bets on horses, reveals late in the film that one of his prized horses had to be shot and killed because it broke its leg and couldn’t race any more. Not much good now, but the horse had made me millions before, Rocky says. So we had to shoot the horse, he reveals, almost as an afterthought.

At the same point in the film, the protagonist Suresh Sinha (played by Dutt himself), a director who was successful and made many hits for his studio, has hit rock bottom. Drinking, depression, and abject loneliness left him a shell of a man – unemployable and forgotten. Not much good now, but this director made them all millions before. Suresh is not being put out of his misery in the manner of a horse, but perhaps he should be?

The metaphor is clear, and it’s brutal. Fame is fleeting and also no matter what you’ve done before or how successful you once were, you end up dead and alone. Which is what happens to Suresh, who, in what is the most savage scene of the film, dies quietly on the soundstage in which he had once flourished. The morning crew comes and finds him dead in a director’s chair, but the producer doesn’t care. He just wants the body moved (“what, you’ve never seen a dead body before?” he shouts) because the show must go on. The camera rises up to the heavens in a wide shot as light pours into the stage from the outside as Suresh’s lifeless body, small in the frame, is carried off.

Suresh (Guru Dutt), slumps into the director’s chair, now a broken old man left only with memories.

And the crew enters the soundstage to start the day, Suresh’s lifeless body callously removed as the production marches on.

It’s an incredibly cynical portrayal (and likely accurate from Dutt’s experience) of a ruthless world, specifically the movie industry. The fact that this is in a 1959 Hindi film – a film industry very well known for cheery, elevated and escapist fare – makes it even more surprising. What’s less surprising, perhaps, is that audiences at the time weren’t too keen on seeing Kaagaz Ke Phool, a notorious flop, only to be rediscovered and cherished now. Perhaps that says more about the times we currently live in than the quality of the film itself.

And to that quality – Kaagaz Ke Phool is a stunning masterwork of directing. Someone in our QFS group pointed out that not only do the shot selections evoke Orson Welles – deep focus, wide frames, low angles utilizing Cinemascope lenses for the first time in India – but Guru Dutt himself looks a lot like a young Welles himself. Both were prodigy actor-directors, both fought inner demons. And while Welles lived with his for a long lifetime in which he fought to regain the fame and power he had when Citizen Kane (1941) reached its ascendancy, Dutt’s demons proved too much for him, and instead died before he was 40. Dutt left behind a legacy of classics and a the tragic feeling that we were deprived of more great and meaningful films to fortify the Indian film industry.

It's easy to find parallels between Suresh in Kaagaz Ke Phool to Dutt’s own life. But beyond that, the film is a masterclass in portraying loneliness. Dutt with VK Murthy – one of India’s legendary cinematographers – has Suresh move between shadows and silhouettes, throwing the focus on the background and trusting the audience with extracting meaning from his imagery and juxtaposition of characters in the frame.

Beams of light, shadows, darkness - all part of the language Dutt uses to portray loneliness and distance.

Dutt’s use of framing foregrounds versus background evoked the work of Orson Welles, another actor-director prodigy.

Perhaps the most evocative scene comes about halfway through the film. Suresh has discovered and clearly has fallen in love with the luminous Shanthi (Waheeda Rehman), a non-actor who reluctantly becomes a star in his movies. He’s still technically married to Veena (Veena Kumari) but has fallen in love with Shanthi, and Shanthi, has definitely fallen for him. But they can never be together. To portray this visually, Dutt has music playing between the two characters on a darkened soundstage, featuring the now-legendary Mohammed Rafi song “Waqt Ne Kiya Haseen Sitam” which roughly means “What a beautiful injustice time has done (to us).” There are only shafts of light in an otherwise dark space with each going in and out of shadows and light. It begins with his wife Veena in the scene (possibly imagined), looking distraught as the camera pushes in to a close up, cut with a similar closeup of Suresh as well.

Next, in a wide profile angle, Veena and Suresh are on opposite sides of the frame, the light is shining down in a shaft between them. Then, ghost-like, their translucent “spirit” selves separate from their bodies and move towards each other. The spirits come together in the center of the frame, a special effect shot dispatched for emotional utility. Then, Veena walks into a shadow, but when the figure emerges - it’s now Shanthi, the lover he cannot be with, smiling at him as the music swells.

Dutt uses special effects to convey an imagined connection instead of a physical one, the characters in love but never able to be together.

It’s beautiful, it’s magical realism, and it feels as a definitive example of this is the Golden Age of Hindi Cinema. What characterizes the Golden Age of Hindi Cinema? My admittedly scant knowledge is that the Golden Age is this: all the hallmarks of Hindi film as we know now – melodrama, plot contrivances, depths of extreme emotion, goofy comic relief, evocative musical numbers – but told with a level of cinematic artistry and a trust in the audience’s ability to make meaning from the visual language made by the filmmakers. In the decades to follow, it’s clear that many of those hallmarks continue but two aspects don’t as often – the artistry and trust in the audience.

Not to say that Hindi films today aren’t awash with art and color and life – they surely are. But where Dutt uses all the language of cinema through camera, movement, performance, blocking, light, shadow, and nuanced performance (relatively speaking), modern Indian filmmakers tend to rely on spectacle and over-wrought performance and emotion. This is, of course, broad and my own observation as an Indian American filmmaker born and raised outside of that country’s film industry. But to me, it’s clear why so many Indian film goers who are old enough to remember the Golden Age lament the state of modern Hindi cinema. It simply was better in its basic storytelling, if not the technology and craft. Also, note the musical numbers. They express emotion and flow into the story, as opposed to the standalone numbers that follow and become the standard as Indian cinema progresses in the 20th Century.

Shanthi (Waheeda Rehman) beautifully photographed in a musical number, riding in a car. The scene is quintessential Golden Age filmmaking - music used to convey the inner emotions of the characters as we see them falling in love.

One thing that was surprising for all of us in the QFS discussion group was how “modern” Kaagaz Ke Phool felt – a movie about movies and movie makers. The opening shots, if you weren’t paying attention, could’ve been out of Welles or John Ford or Michael Curtiz, reminiscent of American cinema of the 1940s. The film, though indigenously India and about India’s own cinema industry, could’ve been very easily the Hollywood of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) or All About Eve (1950). There’s a timeless elegance to it – and perhaps that, too, is a hallmark of Hindi cinema’s Golden Age.

Dutt (here, as Suresh) and his filmmaking style feels modern - a movie about movies and the movie industry - or at the very least reminded us of timeless American cinema.

Dutt suffered from depression and addiction, as is now well known and was perhaps known then, too. He attempted suicide at least twice before his actual death, in which he may have killed himself (or perhaps accidentally overdosed – it’s not known for sure). This internal melancholy may have led to the abundant and drawn-out final quarter of the film where we watch Suresh’s deep and inexorable decline. This underlying melancholy is a feature of what is considered his preeminent classic, Pyassa (1957) which came out before Kaagaz Ke Phool.

Towards the end of the movie, Suresh, now at true rock bottom – an alcoholic shell of himself – has been cast as an extra in a film where Shanthi is the star. When she realizes who he is, she desperately runs after him but can’t catch him, cut off by adoring fans – an echo of a scene with Suresh from the beginning of the film. The song that plays is “Ud Ja Ud Ja Pyaase Bhaware” and in it, the lyrics say “Fly, fly away thirsty bee. There is no nectar here, where paper flowers bloom in this garden.”

At the beginning of the film, Suresh reminisces about being swarmed by adoring fans

At the end of the film, Shanthi is swarmed by adoring fans and cannot chase down the old, broken down Suresh.

Perhaps Dutt is saying here, as one QFSer pointed out, that there is no glory here in this world where things appear beautiful, like paper flowers, but it’s all an illusion. Paper flowers and fame are not real, will not give you nectar. If you want true meaning, true love, true fulfillment, then you need to seek it somewhere else.

If that’s truly what the filmmaker intended, then this sequence, this final sequence in this master filmmaker’s final film, is a cry for help, placed in a beautifully downcast work of true art. Not all films from the Golden Age of Hindi Film have endured in this way, and perhaps it’s because Dutt placed his finger squarely on something universal, deep, tragic, and true.

Death Race 2000 (1975)

QFS No. 146 - The invitation for June 26, 2024
The late great Roger Corman produced Death Race 2000 set in a dystopic, mayhem-ridden future. And I, for one, have been keen on seeing it for some time. It takes place in the distant future, the year 2000! What will life be like then? Who knows! Well, the late great Roger Corman will tell you!

In Death Race 2000 you’ve got the red-hot stardom of David Carradine to contend with alongside upstart nobody Sylvester Stallone. Made on a Corman-style budget, this feels like an even more appropriate Corman selection than our previous one, X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963, QFS No. 89). Corman directed that masterpiece himself. This one, he produced it on his B-movie assembly line and is one of the films that actually (sorta?) penetrated into the broader mainstream.

And this is our first return to a Corman film since the legend passed away last month. Let’s honor him by easing back on our critical thinking skills a touch and watch one of his classics. Kick back, relax, and watch the soothing tale that I’m sure is at the heart of Death Race 2000. 

Death Race 2000 (1975) Directed by Paul Bartel

Reactions and Analyses:
There was something in the air in the mid-1970s. Part of our QFS discussion about Death Race 2000 (1975) debated what could be the reason for the glut of post-apocalyptic films in the 1970s and into the early 1980s.

The filmmakers of this era grew up as children with memories of the horrors and heroism of World War II and came of age in the Cold War, a time fraught with the very real possibility of global extinction from nuclear weapons. In the 1970s, The studio system no longer had a stranglehold on filmmakers and a parallel film track from auteurs was starting to penetrate the mainstream.

So given some of these conditions, we see films like A Clockwork Orange (1970), Logan’s Run (1976), Soylent Green (1973), Mad Max (1979) and its sequels, Omega Man (1971), Rollerball (1975), Planet of the Apes (though from 1968, the film franchise continues in the ’70s), and perhaps you could argue THX 1138 (1971) and Stalker (1979, QFS No. 25) as well. And of course, Death Race 2000.

The future! New York City in the year 2000 as depicted in Death Race 2000 (1975) in what is in the running for the worst matte painting in history.

Many of those films are attempting to make a commentary about something – overpopulation (Soylent Green), reliance on fossil fuels (Mad Max), nuclear war (Planet of the Apes, presumably and maybe Stalker), totalitarianism (THX 1138).

And then you have commentary on violence in society and our fascination with it (A Clockwork Orange), how we’re inured to it and, in the case of Rollerball and Death Race 2000, how that fascination is literally turned to sport.

How much social commentary Roger Corman and director Paul Bartel are actually interested in is probably very little. The film is perhaps best summarized as one QFS called: the perfect hangover movie to watch after waking up at noon after a night of drinking. This is, of course, high praise.

The premise of the eponymous “death race” is … simple? Simple, but convoluted. Annually, as a way to appease the masses, racers speed across the continent racing from New York to Los Angeles while trying to kill as many people as possible with their vehicles. Killing the elderly or children will give racers the highest number of points. But also – whoever finishes first wins? It’s not entirely clear.

But it really doesn’t have to be. Just take one segment in particular and you can see exactly who this film is intended to reach. After the first day of racing early on in the film, all of the drivers and their navigators (who, we all agreed, are just there to “service” the drivers in all ways practical, emotional, and physical) are naked lying down getting massages. It’s so amazingly gratuitous without really any reason for its inclusion other than attracting the target audience – adolescent males. And given some of the laughable B-movie blood-splattered scenes from the race, it’s almost impossible to refute that the American male ages 16-30 are the ones Corman was after.

Violence and gratuitious nudity. Target audience: American males, 16-30.

Still, the film is engaging even beyond that demographic. The racing sequences, sped up to amply the scenes, are propulsive. Much of the action follows people in motion, the world whipping behind them. The film introduces the drivers in the most efficient manner, almost akin to a video game with each car and its unique killing apparatuses detailed for the viewer. Add to the fact that this was made on a shoestring budget, and it’s quite an achievement in filmmaking.

But with that shoestring budget comes risks. Namely in performances that lack any sort of attachment to reality - what is more simply can be described as “bad acting” – in particular from the supporting cast. But it’s not like David Carradine (as Frankenstein) or Sylvester Stallone (as Machine Gun Joe Viterbo) are lighting up the place with their performances. They don’t have to, of course, but it all contributes to Death Race 2000 feeling more like a product of its time than a trenchant analysis of American society.

Watching Death Race 2000, I was reminded of two movies that are seemingly vastly different from each other. First, The Hunger Games (2012) and its sequels and also Network (1976). The Hunger Games books and film franchise take place in a world in which a deadly game is watched by all in a post-apocalyptic agreement between nations to quell civil war, where teens are sacrificed for the sake of peace and stability. The idea of a violent sport as a way of a nation together after some cataclysm felt very similar to Death Race 2000.

Network explores the line between news and entertainment. There’s an element of watching something horrible on screen – in this case Howard Beale (Peter Finch) having a breakdown on television – and going through with it because the ratings are high and that’s all that matters. There’s something similar in Death Race 2000. Everyone is watching this national event with glee, even actual Nazis cheering an actual Nazi car in front of people in the stands with swastikas on their sleeves.  

Going back to – what are the filmmakers trying to say? At first the film seemed to be a critique against the glorification of violence. Frankenstein wants to abolish the race and return to the rule of law in the country. When he has an opportunity to kill dozens of elderly patients who were about to be euthanized – and thus getting more points – he does not. So this appears to be a point for the idea that violence is not the way or something to that effect.

Frankenstein (David Carradine) and Annie (Simone Griffeth) both want to take down the president and restore order. Or something like that. He also continues to kill people in the car so it’s a muddled message at best.

But what does Frankenstein do instead? Runs over dozens of doctors and nurses! He gets fewer points but he still goes through with killing for the sake of the race. The commentator Grace (Joyce Jameson) defends the action, saying those doctors were smug and they deserved it but the low point total might cost Frankenstein in the long run. Quite the sacrifice!

Obligatory image of the literal hand grenade.

Okay, but then Frankenstein still does intend to change things. How? By using his prosthetic hand grenade (built into his hand!) to kill the president. He ultimately kills him, with the help of Annie (Simone Griffeth). And then, in the coda to the movie, he’s now president (how?) and is about to leave on his honeymoon with Annie. But that annoying announcer Junior (Don Steele) is in the way, so he just runs him over. Presumably, old habits die hard.

So there are logical issues with the underlying desire of the main character. But there are logical issues throughout so this is par for the film. How are they watching all of the races? Why are people taking different routes when they all should take the most direct routes? Why would anyone be out at all on this day knowing they can be killed? Why again do we hate the French? How is Frankenstein president, what kind of succession plan is in the United States of the future?

The answer to all of these questions is – it doesn’t matter. Of course it doesn’t. Or Corman knows that you don’t have to answer every single logic question a movie raises, just as long as you have all the right elements for film. A premise, a world created, and speed to plow through all logic. And, of course, gratuitous nudity and violence. Is Corman criticizing sensationalism by clever use of sensationalism? It’s hard to say and perhaps that’s the lasting genius of Corman’s work in Death Race 2000 and beyond – the ambiguous nature of the theme, but the unambiguous enjoyment of fast cars hurtling across a post-apocalyptic landscape.

A Woman Under the Influence (1974)

QFS No. 145 - The invitation for June 19, 2024
We haven’t yet selected a John Cassavetes film here at Quarantine Film Society and this shortcoming has sent shockwaves throughout the organization.* What’s just as shocking is that I, your humble narrator, have never seen a Cassavetes film. In 2013, The New Yorker, wrote that Cassavetes “may be the most influential American director of the last half century.” The last half century, mind you, included the likes of Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and a lot more! So this is a pretty bold claim. And even more shameful I haven’t seen a Cassavetes film yet.

Oh sure, I’ve seen Mr. Cassavetes as an actor in such films as Rosemary’s Baby (1968). And his auteurist spirit lives on in John Sayles, Jim Jarmusch and especially Scorsese. So I feel as if I have witnessed his influence, if not having seen any of his actual work as a director itself.

I write all this just to make myself feel better because I know, I know, I should’ve been familiar with Cassavetes’ work from the second I stepped foot onto the American Film Institute campus lo those many years ago. His Faces (1968) and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) have been on my list for a while, just as this week’s selection has.

A Woman Under the Influence is considered Cassavetes’ most beloved work and stars his wife Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk (as not Columbo). I’m eager to finally watch one of the true fathers of modern cinema, especially modern cinematic performance and independent filmmaking, to fill in a gaping hole in my film knowledge. 

Join us to discuss A Woman Under the Influence! Feel free to be under the influence of something as well – it’s summer, after all!

* The QFS staffer responsible for this oversight has relinquished their proper name and has been remanded to a farm upstate.

A Woman Under the Influence (1974) Directed by John Cassavetes

Reactions and Analyses:
A Woman Under the Influence (1974) offers no answers. Is it about addition? Is it about toxic relationships? Is it about mental illness? Is it about double standards between how men are treated versus how women are treated? Is it none of these or all of these?

Director John Cassavetes does not seem to be raising awareness about addiction or mental illness or any of the other aspects listed above. If anything, A Woman Under the Influence is a portrait of a relationship between two dysfunctional people. Neither change, neither seem to learn or grow. One doesn’t know how to communicate with the other and one may not be capable of behaving in the world as a functional adult. From a storytelling perspective, the movie fights against all filmmaking convention, where scenes seem to continue on past their natural end, creating a feeling of uneasiness, that we’re watching something we shouldn’t watch but we are not released from having to watch.

This scene halfway through A Woman Under the Influence (1974) continues on for a longer time than it seems like it ought. John Cassavetes gives you no way out, just as the characters are trapped in their circumstances.

In a word, the film is relentless. There’s no escape from these two and their manias. Everyone in the QFS group felt that way – the exhaustion, the cringe-inducing awkwardness, the uneasy witnessing of a dysfunctional marriage. Cassavetes traps you in this film in the way that the characters are trapped. In that way, it’s truly a remarkable achievement of filmmaking.

One of the members of the group brought up the ending, which I agree is pretty perfect and apt for the story. In fact, the entire final sequence contains the rest of the film in a nutshell. Nick (Peter Falk) has slapped Mabel (Gena Rowlands) for standing and singing on the couch, and the children are trying to protect her and refuse to stay in their rooms after he physically carries them upstairs (twice!). He has just shouted at them all, saying he’s going to murder her and their kids. It’s terribly upsetting and wrenching, especially since Mabel may just attempted suicide but instead cut her hand and now lies there bleeding slowly from the wound. Everyone, then, calms and Mabel gathers herself and tenderly puts the kids to bed.

Nick washes Mabel’s hand with equal tenderness – a man who had just hit her moments earlier and threatened mass homicide – and they’re both silent as the water cleans her hand. The Mabel talks in low tones and asks if he loves her. Nick can’t answer. He looks up at her a couple of times and back down at the bandage and the wound. And he seems like he wants to say something, but he can’t - or won’t. This is someone who has professed or at least demonstrated that he does care for her deeply. But he’s also someone who has hit her several times in the film. This moment contains so much without saying anything – which is what he does. He says nothing. It offers no answers.

Nick (Peter Falk) is unable to answer Mabel at the end when she asks him if he loves her.

But perhaps the most brilliant part of this sequence is the next and final one of A Woman Under the Influence. As the music plays, both clean up the living room and put everything back the way it was. Not fixing anything, just rearranging as if it’s all back to normal. This also speaks volumes – nothing has changed. They’re going to continue on in the same manner as when they began the film and presumably the cycle will continue.

The story unspools. We’re dropped into this family and watch what they’re experiencing as if we’re a part of it but we gather information as it goes along that changes our perspective. At first, Nick seems to tell co-workers that his wife is loving and takes care of all the household needs. He tries to get his fellow workers the night off but instead they end up having to fix a water main and he can’t spend the night with Mabel. She, for her part, has given the kids to her mother so Mabel and Nick can have a night together.

So for the first 10 minutes or so of the film, it feels like a happy, healthy family with support and a couple who are hoping to spend more time together. But then Mabel drinks heavily, goes to the bar on her own, picks up a man, brings him home, and (we think) they sleep together. So at first it appears that Mabel has a drinking problem brought on by loneliness because her husband works so much.

A typical setup and familiar story. But then, when Mabel wakes up and the man (Garson Cross played by George Dunn) tries to slink away in the early morning, Mabel calls him by her husband’s name and is confused where the children are. We had seen her just the afternoon before as she put the kids in her mother’s car. Her behavior is jarring, and we start to realize that Mabel’s problems aren’t only substance-related – she has some form of mental illness.

For Nick’s part, at first he seems like a garrulous but likeable middle-class working man, doing his best to live with a woman who suffers from mental illness and doesn’t know what to do. He expresses regret on the phone that he has to stay out late working, and we’re led to believe this is a reasonable caring man – until we seem him shouting at Mabel in front of his co-workers at dinner the next day. (Setting aside for a moment how unusual it is for Nick to have invited a dozen guys from work over to dinner after being gone for probably 40 hours straight and missing a night with his wife...) Throughout that dinner scene, Mabel is so hard to watch – smiling and enjoying, but clearly not all there. So then when she insists on someone dancing with her and Nick shouts in front of everyone, we feel as if we’re in that dinner and can feel that awkwardness the others feel.

Nick seems caring at the beginning, and he mostly is. But also prone to unreasonable overreactions and violence. Or has he been driven to that?

Mable (Gena Rowlands) in the Top 10 most awkward dinner scenes of all time.

Because she starts caressing this pretty face and insists on dancing, leading to Nick;s first outburst.

At this point, it seems as though Mabel has a clear mental problem. But with Nick, we start to get close. Is he abusing her and that’s what’s driven her to this point? Or is it Nick driven to this rage because he’s lived with a person with mental illness and has no tools to address it in a time where these conditions were even more stigmatized than they are now 50 years later? Soon, we do see Nick strike Mabel so we know he’s capable violence as well. This unspooling continues as we learn more and more – the introduction of the doctor who knows her condition, Nick’s mother, Mabel’s mother and later her father. It’s clear this has been going on for some time and we’re just catching up.

One question that came up in the discussion is – does Nick have a mental illness as well? He seems prone to outbursts and violence, mood swings of his own. He wants to control everything, show everyone that everything is normal. Take the scene at the beach with the kids. He insists they go to the beach but then Nick chases down his daughter even though all she was trying to do was going to work on the sand castle. He preferred her be over by him on a beach towel, I guess?

Nick is also prone to extreme overreacting. He comes home when Mabel has been “babysitting” her three kids and two friends. Nick arrives and the kids are all trying on clothes in a costume party and their daughter is running around naked, as kids sometimes do. He flies off the handle, threatens to kill the other kids and their father, Harold (Mario Gallo) in what can only be described as an unnecessary escalation. 

To me, it seems clear that Nick also has a mental condition of some kind. Others weren’t so sure, they felt he was perhaps behaving in a way that someone might behave living with a loved one who has manic mood swings the way Mabel does (not that they condoned the violence of course). Whatever it is – perhaps some combination of both mental illness and driven to the edge (again, Cassavetes provides no answers) – it’s clear that the combination of Mabel and Nick is combustible. They go up in flames.

It says volumes that Nick can get off by behaving the way he does without so much as a mention of him having a problem that needs to be addressed, but it’s Mabel who gets carted off to an institution for six months. She’s subjected to shock therapy and separation from her children, but no one tells Nick that he’s got to seek counseling for rage or domestic abuse as well. He definitely definitely needs it. But it’s 1974, he’s a working class male in America, there is likely no way it’s even on his radar – or on anyone else’s in the family – that he has problems that need to be addressed.

Everything’s fine. We’re all fine here. So she’s got a couple of screws lose and is in the nuthouse, so what? (Paraphrasing Nick

Instead, he’s free to take his young kids out of school, ride in the back of a pickup truck with them, give them Hamm’s beer until they’re drunk enough to sleep as soon as they get home. It’s both a product of the 1970s and also the double standard of how the “hysterical” woman is treated versus how a man is, as reckless as his behavior may be.

Nick tries to get convince everyone, and maybe himself, that you can just force yourself to act normal and things will be normal. He plans a large, ill-conceived party for Mabel’s return from the institution. He invites all of the guys over for dinner after the work shift. He shouts at Mabel to just flip the switch and act normal. But that’s not how it works, and nobody in the film knows how to deal with Mabel’s problems – least of all the family doctor (Eddie Shaw). Dr Zepp communicates with Mabel in a way that we would, in 2024, recognize as profoundly unhelpful. Telling a manic mental health patient to simply “calm down” or the like is definitely not at all useful in any way.

Great sequence that is pure 1970s - a smoking Peter Falk riding in the back of a pickup with children who’ve been taking big swigs of Hamm’s beer.

A Woman Under the Influence is not easy – not to watch and also not easy to discern what meaning to derive from it, if any. And yet, it does feel like essential viewing. There are scenes where the filmmaking is top tier. When Nick’s drinking with the children (that’s so strange to write…), it’s a very tight closeup on Nick as the frame bounces violently, but solidly holding the closeup on Nick. The world speeds past him, out of focus and in a blur behind his head and the red railing of the truck. And he speaks very earnestly with the kids, apologizing for having to send their mother into the institution. The contrast between the dynamic background and what he’s saying is incredibly effective and affecting, giving the feel of that’s what his life feels like.

Mabel returns home after her time at the institution and goes to see their children.

When she sees them, it’s played in tight disorienting closeups, evoking how Mabel feels.

Also, when Mabel comes back home, she finally gets to see the children. She steps into the adjacent room and it cuts to a close up on her face. All of the shots are tight – there is no wide shot that holds the room and the family. It’s tight on her, then tight on the kids, it’s a little disorienting and you can’t quite get your bearings. This is how Mabel feels, and it’s done with the camera, without any gimmicks or special effects. Just simple shot selection, cinematography, choice of camera, and performance. Basically – directing. Cassavetes pushed his performers to the brink to expose their raw insides, photographed that rawness, and made a wrenching, relentless film.

In A Woman Under the Influence, he pushes his audience the same way, giving them no way out. Just as the characters in the film are trapped by their circumstances and each other. Is the moving saying anything about that? Is it saying nothing about that? I still don’t know for sure. So if if for nothing else, the movie is worth enduring exactly because it offers no easy answers in the way that life often does not. 

Superbad (2007)

QFS No. 144 - The invitation for June 12, 2024
Last week we selected a somewhat abstract narrative art film from Southeast Asia. It only stands to reason that our next film should be a raunchy teen comedy, the likes of which are churned out regularly by Hollywood. I give you… Superbad.

I have, oddly, not seen Superbad. There is no reason for this other than perhaps I thought it was too silly to bother back then. But more likely, I was no longer the target audience when it came out seventeen years ago. Still, since it’s endured, I’ve wanted to see it. In part because the cast is superb – Jonah Hill (before he was slim and serious), Bill Hader (before he was a formidable auteur), Emma Stone (before she won two Oscars!) Seth Rogan (basically the same) and Michael Cera (also basically the same somehow).

Superbad feels like it has remained a worthy modern stupid comedy all these years later. Stupid comedies are the lifeblood of the industry – just look at Animal House (1978), to pick one school-related stupid comedy as an example. That has endured and is still referenced by at least a subset of the American public (men 45-75 years old). And with summer now starting, won’t it be something nice just to turn off the old noggin and watch a couple of nerdy teenagers just trying to do (super) bad things? I think so.

Anyway, join us to discuss Superbad!

Superbad (2007) Directed by Greg Mottola

Reactions and Analyses:
Is it possible that a film which includes a very long tangent about a 4th grader with an uncontrollable compulsion to doodle penis drawings can also be a film that has deep meaning about relationships, outward appearances, and observations about American society?

Yes. Somehow Superbad (2007) pulls this off.

Beneath all the vulgarity, the obsession with pornography, the underaged drinking, the cops behaving like children and the chaos throughout, Superbad has heart – just as the main characters Seth (Jonah Hill) and Evan (Michael Sera) do. In another era, Superbad (2007) would simply be a tale of high schoolers who set out to find booze for a party and comedy ensues and nothing more. (I dare you to find broader meaning Animal House, 1978). And on its surface, Superbad is that. But without too much digging, you can readily find some deeper themes and meaning.

Of course, the central love story in the film is between Seth and Evan. And in that story, we see one of the filmmakers’ themes that are a little less overt than the obvious – American males are incapable to expressing true emotion with each other unless their guards are down. The two high school best friends are going to miss each other next year and the film winds its way to show that they are undergoing separation anxiety.

Superbad is, among other things, a love story between Evan (Michael Cera) and Seth (Jonah Hill).

But we were interested as a group about why they are incapable of just coming out and saying that they’re going to miss each other. And I contend that the filmmakers are making a case about masculinity, that American males are unable to be emotionally open with another male. Alcohol, with its ability to release inhibitions, acts as the only facilitator for these kids (and adults) to actually talk to each other about how they’re feeling. The only way American men can be true with each other is with help, and that “help” is usually booze.

Finally, after about two-thirds of the way through the film, Seth and Evan have an extended argument and it comes out that Seth feels betrayed by Evan for enrolling in Dartmouth – even simply applying – because Seth isn’t going there for college and could never have gotten in anyway. It isn’t until a later scene when they’re both exhausted, drunk, and in sleeping bags next to each other that they can finally say that they love each other, and that they’ll miss each other.

So the movie is a breakup film and almost a romantic comedy about a platonic relationship between two young men. And the final way they can actually confess their love is when the illusion they present to the world has dissolved.

Finally, Seth reveals he’s upset with Evan and feels he’s being abandoned.

Later, when they’re both exhausted and have their guards down, they’re able to say they love each other.

And here is the second major theme – public persona and perception versus reality. Both Evan and Seth want to portray themselves as something they’re not. They want to show that they know how to party, that they can provide alcohol for everyone, and are part of the “in” crowd (even though no one can remember having seen them at a party before). They believe that sex is the most important thing in the world, and that having sex and being able to be good as sex is so vital before college. Illusions are a major part of Superbad.

The filmmakers here are also making a comment on American society as well. Seth and Evan are led to believe that the world will not accept them as who they are, therefore they have to pretend they are something else. Evan tries to show off for Becca (Martha MacIssac) by exaggerating their previous night’s adventures – which in reality were watching porn, shot-gunning beer, trying to get into a strip club – and tries to act “cool” but of course he’s incapable of it. Seth brags to Jules (Emma Stone) about being able to get alcohol but he needs Fogell/McLovin’ (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) and his ridiculous fake ID card - of course that fails. This illusion drives the two guys, that their ticket into the elites is providing alcohol and acting more important than you are.

Evan brags to Becca (Martha MacIsaac) about how much the guys party together.

But the night actually entails watching porn.

And drinking beer in a basement, followed by not getting into a strip club.

And here’s where the filmmakers are overt about their solution to this problem: be yourself. Seth eventually “wins over” (unclear, but at least as a friend) Jules and not because he got booze for the party like she asked. She doesn’t even drink alcohol. But she’s charmed by him – she saw his open vulnerable side when she caught him crying the previous night – and will even hang out with him at the mall the day after the party, even though he accidentally headbutted her and gave her a black eye the night before.

In that same scene, Evan reconnects with a hungover Becca. The night before she attempted to have sex with Evan but he objects to doing it while she’s drunk (even though Seth earlier in the film said “we can be that mistake!”) because she’ll regret it and won’t even remember. But it’s this act of earnestness that makes her realize he’s special and they go on an impromptu date at the mall to buy new comforters. He was his true self, not trying to put on a metaphoric mask in order to get laid before college because that’s what they were led to believe they needed to do.

Both of them act like themselves for the first time and are rewarded. Of course, this means that Seth and Evan have to awkwardly say goodbye to each other – still incapable of true emotion in public with each other – and they don’t know either to hug or to handshake. It’s a perfect moment. And here the filmmakers use perhaps the most artistic and cinematic sequence of shots in the film – the escalator, and the teeth on the steps separate the two platonic lovers as they go off their divergent paths , cleaving the two. It’s a perfect scene and ending of the film.

Seth looks back up at Evan from the escalator.

And Evan keeps his gaze on Seth, the two platonic lovers separated.

Further commentary about masculinity? Officer Slater (Bill Hader) and Officer Michales (Seth Rogan) and McLovin’s storyline. The cops are given the authority of a badge, and are given a license to behave like adolescent men. They can drink beers at a bar for free, raid parties, ignore responsibility, trash a police car and fire a gun in public at a stop sign with impunity. They’re living an adolescent dream, two men who were unable to be themselves when younger but now look who’s in charge? The kids you picked on are now the boss. Even all the penis drawings probably speak to this obsession with sex and masculinity that’s more about just a cavalcade of ludicrous penis drawings in what’s an otherwise seemingly superfluous tangent.

Setting aside all the actual commentary embedded in the film, Superbad is still, at its core, a comedy. Humor is subjective, and not everyone in the QFS group was taken by the antics depicted. But for me, the film made me laugh and I cringed whenever I had to witness the protagonists’ public awkwardness. In part because I didn’t want these two to look like idiots because I cared about them. (That cringe-inducing behavior was too much for some in the group.) I wanted Evan and Seth to succeed in bringing booze to minors at a party. Not because I felt like this was a great idea, but because I felt I knew an Evan and a Seth in high school. Cera and Hill’s performances are so excellent and spot on for the characters. The uncomfortable-in-my-own-skin feeling that Cera is able to bring in all of his performances work so excellently here.

Hill’s Seth, however, was more polarizing. While several in the group found him irredeemably off-putting, I had sympathy for him. He’s just a foul-mouthed, witty, overweight, awkward kid. And the reason I rooted for him can be found in an early scene. Seth and Evan walk out of a convenient store near the high school and Seth gets spit on Jesse (Scott Gerbacia), a bully who taunts him for no particular reason. That scene illustrated for me at least that Seth isn’t a kid who is all he claims to be, that he’s actually very low in that society and despises he’s at that level. I most craved for both to just be themselves because they were really funny and had a sweetness to them when they were just with each other and not putting on a social performance.

In Eight Grade (2018, QFS No. 19), Kayla (Elsie Fisher) tries to be something she’s not, as we watch her final week of eighth grade.

And the kids in Superbad all are attempting to be something they’re not, as we watch in their final few weeks of high school. (Obligatory shot of the famous McLovin’ fake ID.)

Several in the group were reminded of Eight Grade (2018, QFS No. 19), and there are a lot of parallels. Both take place at the end of the school year with a seismic life shift – Eight Grade of course is the end of middle school and Superbad is the end of high school into college. And while the humor in Eight Grade is rooted in a realism and Superbad is more on the screwball-comedy end of the spectrum, both feature sets of protagonists that are attempting to be something they are not, to project an image of importance or popularity. And both films root the stories in characters who seem realistic and familiar, because the emotions are true. Both films offer broader commentaries on American society, but in Superbad those commentaries are masked by the raunchy comedy the smothers the film. If you see past that (and past the avalanche of penis drawings), just as if you see past the illusion presented by Seth and Even, you can find that the film and the characters have something to say.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010)

QFS No. 143 - The invitation for June 5, 2024
There are a lot of great things about Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) even if you don’t know about it at all, just as I don’t. First, look at that title! It’s our second longest QFS selection title after Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975, QFS No. 98).

Second, the director’s name – Apichatpong Weerasethakul – is the longest of any directors we’ve previously selected. Between his name and the film’s title we’ve now got the longest filmmaker+title combo yet for a QFS selection. And third, this is our first selection from Thailand. As you can see, the selection process here is rigorous!

I’m very excited by all of these facts. I know almost nothing of the film, other than it has its share of critical accolades and it might be very, very weird. Or it might be just a simple tale of a man who can recall his past lives and that’s that. I’ve come across Weerasethakul’s work on the BFI/Sight & Sound list – this film is No. 196 in the extended Greatest Movies list and Tropical Malady (2004) is tied on the 100 Greatest list with Black Girl (1966, QFS No. 141), Get Out (2017), The General (1926), Once upon a Time in the West (1968), and A Man Escaped (1956, QFS No. 9). Also, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives* won the Palme d’Or at Cannes back then, in case that sways you. And thus concludes all I know about the film and filmmaker.

Anyway, do watch with us and let’s find out about Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives!

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Reactions and Analyses:
The first impression I had of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is that of a fable from India. Though the film is from Thailand, I was reminded of fables I heard from my parents or read from the land of my ancestors. Thailand, of course, is its own country with its own set of traditions and legends and mythologies. But it shares quite a bit with nearby India, from Buddhism to Hindu mythological traditions to its language which has Sanskrit origins just as most of the languages in India do.

So in a film which blends the stark realism of its filmmaking – locked off camera, long takes and very limited first-person perspective of scenes – the interweaving of fantastical elements into that tapestry makes it feel like it’s less a film and more a tale or folklore.

To be more concrete about this, here’s an example: the first fantastical thing we encounter is Huay (Natthakarn Aphaiwonk), Boonmee’s dead wife, materializes out of thin air at the dinner table. It’s mundane, done in a wide shot, as she fades in suddenly during the meal, just sitting at the table. Everyone reacts with surprise, but not supreme shock. Then, they talk to her and are amazed she’s there but it’s all folded into the normalcy of the scene.

And then, to top it off, moments later a demonic creature with red eyes that pierce the darkness appears. He emerges from the darkness into the light and we learn that this is Boonsong (Geerasak Kulhong), Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar) and Huay’s long-lost son who disappeared into the jungle one day ten years ago.

Just your regular dinner but with a ghost in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010).

But then, another mysterious figure appears.

Boonsong (Geerasak Kulhong), the long-lost son, has returned. And there have been changes!

All of these beings are materializing in part because they know that Boonmee is dying of kidney failure – at least, I think that’s why they’re coming. Boonsong disappears in the next scene but Huay hangs around until Boonmee’s final end later in the film.

In our QFS discussion, I found myself trying to grapple with the narrative. Not all films have to have a strong narrative – of course, many great ones rely upon a feel or a mood or emotion above a direct storyline. But Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives doesn’t have a straightforward narrative trajectory, but it also isn’t totally abstract. We know he is dying so are these family members visiting him as he slowly drifts away?

That sort of end-of-life visitation by ghosts is of course known throughout the world (in some ways similar to England’s A Christmas Carol). And though it’s a familiar setup, this is not what the filmmaker attempts. An entire middle section of the film is its own short film – a tale of a princess (Wallapa Mongkolprasert) who is aging and saddened by her appearance, but is lured into the water by a catfish who loves her and finds her beautiful and then makes love to her. Again, I found myself returning to fable-like storytelling. The princess first sees a reflection of herself as young in the water’s reflection, but soon it fades away and she knows the catfish (or lake spirit perhaps) manifested the illusion. There are numerous stories from Indian folklore and Hindu mythology of interactions between a human and an animal or a spirit of the lake or river, and they are not considered unusual but rather from some divine providence or hand of fate. That’s how this scene and sequence felt like to me. But … what is it saying about the rest of the film? It has almost nothing to do with Boonmee’s story.

The princess storyline tangent was fable-like but unclear to a lot of us its narrative purpose.

Unless… the catfish was Boonmee in a previous life! We have no basis for this, but someone in the group thought perhaps that’s the case. The film offers no real clues, so we’re left speculating and reaching for meaning.

Is this a negative? Depends on your perspective. So I asked the group – are we capable of rendering judgment on something like this? Are we tied to Western narrative semi-linear storytelling and incapable of evaluating a slightly opaque artistic film from the East for what it is?

Someone, helpfully, pointed out that we’ve seen The Color of Pomegranates (1969, QFS No. 130) and This is Not a Burial, it’s a Resurrection (2019, QFS No. 124) and were able to evaluate those films as both art and visual storytelling. The Color of Pomegranates is a series of vignettes with meaning that are hard to decipher but they are there, telling the story of Sayat-Nova and his life. Whereas This is Not a Burial, it’s a Resurrection has a central story point – the old lady and everyone have to leave that land before it’s turned into a lake. The narrative is concrete but thin, and the film relies on a feeling, but it’s not totally abstract as there is a premise and a deadline that This is Not a Burial is inching towards.

The structure and story of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is looser than that and falls somewhere in between those two films on the narrative spectrum. There’s the story about Boonmee’s remaining days for sure, but that’s only a small aspect of the story. He tells Jen (Jenjira Pongpas) he regrets all the Communists he’s killed and he’s being receiving karmic retribution now. And there are these encounters and interactions with his family who have passed away or departed, but they don’t seem to offer meaning and the film doesn’t feel like it lives up to a “recalling of past lives” necessarily. Or at least not in a way that’s easy to decipher.  

Some of the really evocative imagery of the film appears in the penultimate chapter, as they trek through the night and ultimately to Boonmee’s end.

The glittering caves give the appearance of the infinite celestial heavens.

The creatures - or ghosts - come to witness Boonmee’s final moments.

And then, in the end, the film tails off with a very long coda after he dies. It’s a bit of a headscratcher. Boonmee died in the cave, and we’re witnessing final rites in the Thai Buddhist tradition at the temple in a city. His sister-in-law Jen and her daughter (who we haven’t met until this point) and Boonmee’s nephew Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee), who is a monk too (that surprised us all), are spending time in a hotel room. Tong and Jen experience a sudden and nonchalant out-of-body experience where they watch the others transfixed to the television while the other Tong and Jen go to a restaurant with karaoke. The film ends this way, in the restaurant, with somehow appropriate abruptness.

Perhaps the most mundane out-of-body experience depicted in cinema.

In which they end up at dinner with karaoke, but don’t do karaoke and we never see karaoke.

As in all films, I try to find something that will stay with me. When I was watching Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives I felt that every time my attention started to drift when the narrative felt like it was losing steam, something unusual or surprising would happen. Huay’s ghost appearing, or the Boonsong creature coming out of the darkness, or the middle interlude with the princess and fish love, or the end night journey where it’s truly unnerving and it’s shot handheld and they’re in the jungle with monkey ghosts and then they’re in the glittering cave – all of it adds up to a haunting series of imagery that will remain in my memory. Perhaps that’s what I will recall when remembering Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives – that movies aren’t always a roadmap from point A to point B and don’t have to be clear to be compelling.

The Philadelphia Story (1940)

QFS No. 142 - The invitation for May 29, 2024
Time to curl up with a classic Hollywood movie. And The Philadelphia Story is about as classic as it comes. Jimmy Stewart? Check. Cary Grant?! Check. Katherine Hepburn?!? Check. The great George Cukor at the helm?!?! Check and mate.

I have never seen this film, which is a strange blind spot. The Philadelphia Story frequently comes up as one of the films of the era that has endured the test of time so I don’t have any explanation as to how I missed this in my viewing history.

George Cukor – you might recall from the QFS email about Gaslight (1944, QFS No. 106) that you likely have printed out and framed like you do with all of these – is one of the great workhorse elite Hollywood filmmakers of the day, eventually winning an Academy Award for 1964’s My Fair Lady. So you know it’s going to be a solid film even if you hadn’t already knew about it.

 So join me in seeing the iconic performers in the classic The Philadelphia Story and then join us in discussing it!

The Philadelphia Story (1940) Directed by George Cukor

Reactions and Analyses:
Do you need much of a plot if you have legendary actors and great dialogue? That question, or some version of that, dominated our discussion about The Philadelphia Story (1940). Comedy sometimes cannot transcend eras, but The Philadelphia Story is one of those films that continues to endure.

And why? This is not a cynical or facetious question – but what is it in a comedy that is funny more than 80 years ago that remains funny today? Physical comedy and slapstick can last beyond the time in which it was created – our December screening of the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera (1935, QFS No. 132) illustrated that for us. But George Cukor’s comedy has really none of that physical comedy. And yet, throughout the film the dialogue and the performances are genuinely funny.

What do we hope happens in this story? That’s one of the main questions we had about The Philadelphia Story (1940).

At the same time, the plot of The Philadelphia Story is an afterthought. That’s not to say it’s devoid of one – it’s nominally about a wealthy bride (Katharine Hepburn as Tracy Samantha Lord) on her wedding weekend with the wedding coming up. So we have a timeframe, a clicking clock. Throw in a plot to infiltrate this high society with a “secret” photographer (Ruth Hussey as Liz Imbrie) and journalist (Jimmy Stewart as Mike Connor) writing a story for a gossip magazine – all facilitated by the woman’s ex-husband C.K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant).

But then, what is still the central tension? Is it this question who will Tracy marry? Or is it will Mike and Liz be found out as spies for Spy magazine? The latter gets dispelled rather quickly, so that’s not it. The former – well, that’s not really posed as a question until far later, when it’s clear that Tracy and Mike have some kind of a connection.

And the resolution – that her fiancé George (John Howard), unsure of Tracy’s moral rectitude, decides to leave her, Katharine returns to Dexter and gets “remarried” to him with the guests who should have been there when she first married him years ago.

Just writing all of that made my head spin. And so - is this why this is the quintessential screwball comedy?

One aspect of the film that people have rightly observed over the decades is class, and that came up in our discussion as well. A QFS member very astutely pointed out that this film is ultimately a very cynical take on class. George, the fiancé, has pulled himself up by his bootstraps from middle class (or poverty) into high society with Tracy and her family. But he is derided throughout the film from the start, with subtle jabs at his upbringing.

Take for example a simple scene early on, as pointed out by one of our members. George is at the stables with Tracy and the rest of her family. He is the only one who has trouble mounting a horse – presumably, he didn’t grow up with them on his estate – and everyone sort of laughs at him, even Uncle Willie (played with unnerving creepiness by Roland Young) rolls his eyes and says, “Hi ho, Silver” derisively.

George has difficulty mounting a horse, presumably because he didn’t spend his youth riding them.

Mike also is an outsider and appears to maybe connect with Tracy but in the end returns to a women more in line with in his class category.

Meanwhile, Dexter is still beloved by everyone except his ex-wife Tracy. Her sister, Dinah (Virginia Weidler) openly wishes he came to the wedding and when he does arrive at the house her mother (Mary Nash) can’t keep her hands off of him. This is a man, mind you, the very first scene of the movie we see of him shoving Tracy down physically with a palm to the face! But he’s forgiven by most and perhaps it’s because of a reason unsaid: he’s a member of the class and belongs with his kind.

Watching Jimmy Stewart (Mike) and Katharine Hepburn (Tracy) stone cold drunk is, if nothing else, reason enough to see The Philadelphia Story (1940).

Then comes Mike, played with Stewart’s uncanny everyman persona. He connects with Tracy and she finds depth in his writing and they are drunk and fall in lust or love or something. But even he – he of the working class – when it’s time at the end of the movie and he hastily proposes to Tracy, she rebuffs him.

The film seems to be saying – it’s all well and good to mingle between classes on some drunken weekend. But that’s all for fun because when it comes down to it you’ll get hitched to the one who is of your own kind.

This is a pretty stark take but it’s all there in the film. There seems no good reason to me, at least (and most of us) for Tracy to end up back with Dexter. Is it that Dexter has sobered up and has changed and she sees that? If that’s the case, it’s barely in the film’s narrative at all. Is it that Dexter now sees Tracy as not a goddess but as a human? That doesn’t come out either. If anything, Mike is closest to saying that Tracy has humanity and depth but even he treats her as if she’s this luminescent creature.

In the end, perhaps all of this ultimately doesn’t matter. Perhaps a loose plot is the maximum you need when you have legendary performers behaving badly. Jimmy Stewart is a downright fantastic alcoholic in this film, and Katharine Hepburn is no slouch either. You could do worse than watching ninety minutes straight of these two getting supremely sloshed and hamming it up on screen.

And perhaps, ultimately, that’s why this film has endured, what so many filmmakers today find this film unassailable as a romantic comedy. Maybe that’s all that matters in making a classic – a fun, slightly superficial, dastardly romp with the wealthy behaving in ways we imagine the wealthy to behave behind closed doors. Which is the exact assignment Mike and Liz were given in the first place. We, the audience, are the ones who actually get to see that story play out on screen in front of us.

Black Girl (1966)

QFS No. 141 - The invitation for May 22, 2024
A lot of "firsts" in these next few sentences. Black Girl will be our first ever selection from Senegal, and our first selection of a film by Ousmane Sembene. Sembene is considered the “dean” or father of African cinema. Did I know this before? No. Am I ashamed of that? Yes.

Sembene’s first film, Black Girl, has been on my radar for the last few years. I first discovered it when it arrived at No. 95 on the esteemed* BFI/Sight and Sound 100 Greatest Films of All Time list. (Tied with QFS No. 9 A Man Escaped, 1956). As you remember, just a few weeks ago we watched No. 48 Wanda (1970, QFS No. 138). Recently, some of the imagery from Black Girl has piqued my interest, including clips I’ve seen in the great montage on the second floor of the Academy Museum that introduces you to the main Stories of Cinema exhibition. And from what I’ve gathered, Ousmane is finally getting some newfound recognition and his due outside of Africa and France.

For those of you keeping score at home, this is our eleventh selection from the BFI top 100 list. We previously selected No. 1 Jeanne Dielman, No. 5 In the Mood for Love (2000, QFS No. 105), No. 11 Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927, QFS No. 104), No. 30 Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019, QFS No. 114), No. 43 Stalker (1979, QFS No. 25), No. 48 Wanda, No. 60 Daughters of the Dust (1991, QFS No. 18), No. 67 The Red Shoes (1948, QFS No. 52), No. 72 L’Avventura (1960, QFS No. 116), and No. 95 A Man Escaped.

Also, at 66 minutes long, this will be the shortest Quarantine Film Society selection since our first Christmas in 2020 when we watched A Christmas Carol (1938) which clocked in at 69 minutes. So watch this week’s film because it’s only barely longer than an episode of Succession. Oh, and for all those other reasons too I guess.

*We’ve discussed at length how I both enjoy and also loathe the BFI list, so “esteemed” is of course sort of facetious. Yet, the list remains an important guidepost if for nothing else but to encounter great works of foreign cinema that I have overlooked.

Black Girl (1966) Directed by Ousmane Semebene

Reactions and Analyses:
Film as symbolism, film as metaphor. These were useful tools for me to finally get my grasp of Black Girl (1966). Recent crtitical revisiting of this early work from the Father of African Cinema Ousmane Semebene has placed this film firmly on the radar of people like us in the QFS viewing group.

But the film is challenging, despite its recent reclamation of glory. Before getting into all the production challenges – of which there were the usual kinds and the uniquely African kinds – we’ll delve into the narrative and the filmmaking craft.

From a purely story standpoint, almost all of us in the group felt the story contained numerous holes and an ending that was shocking, sudden and abrupt. And unearned. Diouana (Mbissine Therese Diop) appears in France, a new maid for a white French couple who also live in Dakar, Senegal – where they encountered and hired Diouana.

But it’s clear there was something missing in the arrangement. Diouana believes she’s arriving in the South of France to take care of children. Madam (Anne-Marie Jelinek) treats her, however, like a maid and not a nanny. Diouana develops a sense that she was duped, is trapped, and has no way out.

Diouana (Mbissine Therese Diop) didn’t sign up to be treated as a maid. But then… what did she expect? Perhaps a well delineated contracted could’ve gotten them all out of trouble in Black Girl (1966).

All of this is a perfectly fine set up. Diouana believed she was going to see France but instead sees darkness out the windows at night and has no encounter with the famous nightlife of the area near Cannes where she lives. France lacks the human vitality of Dakar. In France, it seems, people are stuck in their homes instead of out in the world together.

The strange thing, however, is that Diouana feels shocked that she has to do work at all. And here is where a variety of narrative questions being. Why is she surprised? Was she misled? Is she just young and naïve? Also, when she is actually paid, she says “I didn’t come here for the apron or the money?” But … didn’t she? Surely she didn’t think she was on vacation – she knew she was there for work?

This is not in any way meant to excuse the behavior of her employees. Madam is definitely demanding and it’s not clear why the children are suddenly gone. And for how long? Timelines are unclear in the film throughout – has she been there for a week, a few weeks, months? It matters only because of this – we need to feel as an audience that she is truly trapped, truly abused with no way out. That’s the only way the end is earned and worthwhile.

That’s the face of an irate employer prone to violence.

The end was a major topic of discussion. No one was quite sure what to make of the suddenness of Diouana’s suicide. To me, it’s was, of course, very bleak, but why was this her only answer? The film did not present that she was so trapped and desperate that death was her only way out. She packed up her things and was, seemingly, going to leave. But in the end, she does not and finds that suicide in the tub is her only means of escape.

The narrative is imperfect. But it’s not meant to be airtight as a direct story. It’s film as metaphor, as symbol. When I thought of it that way, and excused the narrative imperfections and some of the inexperienced filmmaker craftwork, the film takes on an importance that is clear in its recent rival.

All of it is symbolism, and what it symbolizes is clear from the start. The power dynamics between the white employers, extracting labor from Africa to do their chores with no cost to themselves. The tantalizing wealth and fun of France, luring poor Senegalese to toil and not experience the joy of the French Riviera in the way the white French are able. The liberal African-loving dinner guests, exoticizing the black girl who serves them food and openly talking about her when she’s mere feet away. Not to mention the extremely creepy guy who wants to kiss a black girl for the first time, treating her as a literal sexual object for his unwanted affection. And the dehumanizing slave market-style scene when Diouana first meets Madam on the street as the group of women are attempting to find work as maids or servants. The refusal of money – a symbolic gesture standing up to the West’s money and holding on to pride, even if it didn’t make sense in the narrative or in reality. 

Dehumanizing dinner featuring a creepiest of the creepy guys who just wants to kiss a black girl.

Dehumanize human marketplace for a maid/nanny.

Even the death – she dies alone, in a tub that, when we next see it, is wiped clean as if she never existed. She’s invisible to the world, and in death forgotten. For a film rooted in a kind of realism or neorealism to some extent, it’s entirely reliant upon symbolism for one to see its value and importance.

Take, for example, the mask. Which many of us felt was the most effective metaphor employed by the filmmaker. Form my perspective, when I first saw the mask on the wall of the French home, I applied meaning to it. I immediately judged the French couple as the type who “love Africa” and culturally appropriate their art in the way that I’m familiar with people who are enchanted by the exoticism of India, but have little care about the actual people and their experience there.

The mask’s origin.

The mask on the wall in France. a gift from Diouana.

The mask “chasing” Monsiur (Robert Fontaine) away in Dakar.

But I was too hasty; the mask evolves in the story, and we discover that it was actually Diouana who gave the mask to them as a gift. It’s genuine and authentic, whether the couple see it as anything other than a fascinating artifact. Then Diouana takes it down when she’s preparing to leave, causing a stir as Madam starts to get very upset with her but Monsieur (Robert Fontaine) says it’s hers after all, she can take it. This, too, is symbolic – is it a hope that Senegal and Africa will reclaim their indigeneity? Perhaps.

Then, the mask returns to Senegal after Monsieur brings it to the mother. A boy takes it and wears it, following Monsieur as he leaves but it has the feeling of dread – almost as if the boy in the mask is chasing the white man out. Out of the village, out of Senegal, out of Africa. This is where the symbolism in Black Girl is most effective – it’s thematic, it has a narrative push, and it’s active. 

It’s amazing this movie was made at all. In Africa, specifically in Senegal but also likely true elsewhere, Africans were banned from making movies due to a Nazi Vichy government law. Illegal! Such work was left to ethnographers, treating Africans as subjects of study instead of creating narrative work about their lived experience. The ban wasn’t lifted until 1960! Only six years before Black Girl is released. One can excuse any inexperience or amateurish filmmaking – by this point the West and Asia had been making films for sixty years. Without any production infrastructure in place, Sembene had to learn on the fly and scrape together the resources to make a movie.

Diouna arriving in France, wide eyed, but it will all go awry.

When you look at it from the production standpoint and look at the film as symbolism and metaphor, Black Girl is a stunning achievement. Sembene practically had to invent African film – hence his well-deserved title of Father of African cinema. Truly an incredible accomplishment, and Black Girl should be seen with all of this context to fully understand it’s value as a film.

Hard Eight (1996)

QFS No. 140 - The invitation for May 15, 2024
This is our first QFS selection of a Paul Thomas Anderson film. You know him from all of his great work over the last 25 years but Hard Eight was his first feature. I’ve seen so many of his films but I’ve never seen the first one so this week’s selection addresses that to remedy that shortcoming.

PT Anderson made Hard Eight when he was about 26 years old. What’s almost as infuriating as that is the next year, in 1997, he makes Boogie Nights and then two years later makes Magnolia (1999). By my count, that’s three major motion pictures before he was 30 – including two of those films, Magnolia and Boogie Nights I’d put up there as downright modern auteurist classics. The amount of stars he directed before 30 years old rivals any of the great filmmakers of all time.

Now, whether you enjoy his films or not is a matter of opinion of course. Although he has been Oscar-nominated eleven (11!) times for screenplay (5), directing (3) and best picture (3), he has never won one. This is probably bad luck and circumstance, but it also could be an indication of how people have mixed opinions on PT Anderson’s work.

For example, if you’re a fan of “The Rewatchables” podcast like I am, you probably know that they consider Boogie Nights one of the greatest films ever made. Personally, I enjoyed Magnolia more than Boogie Nights as a film, but even Magnolia is ripe for criticism – frogs and Aimee Mann and whatnot – and is not universally loved. PT Anderson has the young pre-fame filmmaking pedigree of Steven Spielberg in a way, but Anderson’s films are not mainstream nor are they small artistic and abstract explorations of the soul. He’s Martin Scorsese with less benefit of the doubt from critics. Both of them make movies lauded for artistry even though the narrative may not be so clean, but it feels like Scorsese’s long life as a dedicated artist gives him leeway with the public in ways that Anderson may not.

Of course, there is no perfect film devoid of criticism. For me his greatest achievement is There Will Be Blood (2012) one of three of his films nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture along with Phantom Thread (2018) and Licorice Pizza (2022). There Will Be Blood is a singular accomplishment of filmmaking in terms of its scope and its exploration of power, ambition, religion and will. Not to mention the sheer production feat of making a period film with an oil well explosion.

Apparently, PT Anderson’s next film will be released in 2025. All I know is that it’s his first film with Leonardo DiCaprio, which feels like a good fit when making the comparison with Scorsese. Scorsese is undoubtedly one of the greatest filmmakers of the second-half of the 20th Century, and continued on into this one. When we look back in a couple of decades about the greatest filmmakers at the start of the 21st Century, it’s hard to debate PT Anderson including at or near the top of the list. I’m looking forward to finally seeing his first one.

 Join me in seeing Hard Eight (1996) and discuss with us!

Hard Eight (1996) Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Reactions and Analyses:
When is it too late to reveal a major story point? The end of Planet of the Apes (1968) or Citizen Kane (1941) suggest that it’s never too late. Citizen Kane of course makes sense because that’s the conclusion of the hunt, whereas the why the world exists the way it does isn’t revealed until the last image, but it’s not the central driving why of the film. In Hard Eight (1996), our QFS discussion centered around the revelation of Sydney (Philip Baker Hall) and the central why motivation – why he’s behaving like the guardian angel or savior of man-child John (John C. Reilly).

The movie begins with Sydney taking in what appears to be a perfect stranger and offering him coffee and a smoke. It feels like Sydney knows something about John but it’s very cryptic. And for some reason, John goes on a road trip with Sydney and becomes his Players Card-scheme protégé. John does not ask why Sydney is being so kind to him.

Sydney picks up a “stranger” kicking off the question why in Hard Eight (1996).

And Sydney seems like he knows about John.

This sets off a really strange road trip.

Sydney teaches John how to get a room through Players Card scheme.

And as the film continues – even bridging two years over a first-act title card that advances time – we still don’t know why Sydney keeps being John’s angel. We get some hints about Sydney not having a connection with his own children, so the story evolves to suggest that John and Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow) are becoming surrogate children for him.

About halfway through the film, the question of why is still not resolved. It’s at this point that nearly all of the QFS members (myself included) started to sense that the film is meandering without a real sense of purpose or direction. To me and several of us, Hard Eight suffers from hiding the ball too long. We know so little about the characters except that John’s mother had died and he lost his money trying to win enough to pay for her funeral. The opening Players Card scam is so inspired and memorable, but then the film relies upon more mood and style rather than versus substance.

Even the revelation, finally when it happens, is not done visually or through some action by our main character. A supporting character, Jimmy (Samuel L Jackson), knows the truth – Sydney was a gangster who shot and killed John’s father – and he blackmails Sydney. Now that Syndey has taken John in as a son, there are personal stakes that we as an audience understand now.

Ohhhhh… that’s why. Samuel L Jackson (as “Jimmy”) tell us. But is it too late in the story to reveal that? Several us felt that yes, it’s too late.

This late revelation backloads the action and drama. Suddenly, there is plot and stakes. But since this happens late in the narrative arc, everything is crammed together as the film builds to a somewhat obvious conclusion: when you threaten a former gangster with blackmail, you’re probably going to get yourself killed.

And that’s exactly what happens. Sydney breaks into Jimmy’s home and shoots him as he’s coming home from a date. We get a simple glimpse of what a young Sydney must’ve been once like – cold, professional, efficient, and compassionate (he lets the date go home). There’s something fun about watching an aged gangster, living with regret, coming to terms with his past and trying to make up for something he’s done. But if we don’t know why he’s doing it, does that take away from our feelings about it? Everything does click a little bit better, but there are a lot of aspects of the story unsaid.

You threatened a former gangster with blackmail - what did you expect would happen?

Sydney comes to help out Clementine and John at a hotel room where a semi-conscious man lies handcuffed and beaten up. We are given bits of information as to what happened, but John and Clementine are so unreliable and distraught that it’s still unclear what happened in what is, up to this point, the only dramatic scene more than an hour into the movie. We learn that Clementine and John were married that day … and yet Clementine is still continuing work as a prostitute? Or is John (and maybe Jimmy?) acting as a pimp in an ill-conceived scheme for money?

The first really dramatic thing in Hard Eight happens about an hour into the movie and introduces a lot of questions.

Questions include - how doomed is this marriage?

Also – had Sydney been keeping tabs on John throughout his life, like Obi-wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker? Was John’s father a gangster too, because why else would Sydney feel so distraught? And why is Sydney in Reno or does he live there because he finds John somehow who doesn’t live there but then…

I’m not bringing up these holes specifically to attack the plot or premise. It’s more a reflection of the filmmaking here. The filmmaker is relying on style and not substance for so long, so then when we get some substance but not enough of it, we start reaching for more substance, as opposed to being brought along with the narrative. There is no obligation for a movie to explain everything; obfuscation can be a useful narrative tool especially in a movie. But Hard Eight keeps the audience in the dark in a way that seems to do a disservice to the storytelling.

Speaking of the filmmaker – of course, we selected this film as it’s Paul Thomas Anderson’s first movie. The next two he makes, Boogie Nights (1997) and Magnolia (1999) cement him as the next great director of a generation. Our conversation, however, helped illustrate how that’s a contentious claim on greatness. I pointed out in the QFS discussion that Hard Eight has a tonal issue. Are some of these scenes and situations supposed to be played for laughs? Are Jon and Clementine fun doofuses in the Coen Brothers mold? It’s hard to tell, but that balance comes through a little more in Boogie Nights and Magnolia. Others in the group feel that PT Anderson never ever quite gets tone right in any of his movies, as if the director enjoys turning a “tone dial”from one end to the other without any balance. I can see that – Magnolia swings from poignant moments between Frank Mackey (Tom Cruise) and his catatonic dying father to an infamous breaking-the-fourth-wall singing sequence to Aimee Mann’s “Save Me.” It’s bold, but for me personally, PT Anderson can pull off the tonal shifts with a few missteps here and there (the end of There Will Be Blood, 2009, is an example for me where the ending has a really whimsical tune followed by a goofy final line by Daniel Day-Lewis’ Daniel Planview into the end credits).

In the end, we were interested in discerning what from this movie convinces producers, studios, and star cast to be in his next films? One benefit PT Anderson gets in the 1990s is that Hard Eight was made during the golden age of independent cinema. What probably didn’t hurt is that this is also the golden age of ample funding of music videos – a medium in which PT Anderson truly excelled. As far as films, there are a lot of 1990s studios willing to take risks on a fledgling filmmaker with a voice. For me, just seeing Hard Eight that voice isn’t totally clear – or rather, it isn’t totally clear to me what signaled to producers that this filmmaker has something unique that cannot be suppressed and has the instinct if not skill to tell a story expertly. It’s likely that the very real documented problems PT Anderson had in making Hard Eight – in which the studio attempted to recut it – prevented him from making a film fully of his desire.

Yet, his directing is confident, the command of the camera is elegant but at times more sizzle than steak. Comparing this to, say, Quentin Tarantino four years earlier in Reservoir Dogs (1992) or Wes Anderson three years earlier with Bottle Rocket (1993) with their first films, PT Anderson is harder to get a grasp of in terms of what convinced producers and studios of his greatness. One can easily see Reservoir Dogs showcases a writer-director of the highest order and Bottle Rocket suggests the quirkiness that will characterize all of Wes Anderson’s future work. But Hard Eight is harder to pin down. In three short years after Hard Eight releases, PT Anderson directs Mark Wahlberg, Julianne Moore, Burt Reynolds, Luis Guzman, Don Cheadle, William H Macy, Heather Graham, Jason Robards, and of course Tom Cruise in a role that very nearly won him what would have been his only Oscar, across two landmark films.

Opening image of Hard Eight mirrors one of the final images.

What I’m trying to get at here is – how. Very much in line with the why we tried to address in Hard Eight. Not that it wasn’t ultimately correct to support this filmmaker at this stage of his fledgling career. However it ended up happening, the American film landscape is lucky someone saw whatever greatness lay in store for PT Anderson and gave him a chance to flourish. Without it, we wouldn’t have some of the more iconic films of the last 25 years.

High and Low (1963)

QFS No. 139 - The invitation for May 8, 2024
It’s been entirely too long since we’ve selected an Akira Kurosawa film here at Quarantine Film Society. It was way back in July 2020 when we were young and terrified, but watched the masterpiece Yojimo (1961, QFS No. 13). The offending parties to this nearly four-year gap have been reassigned to new minor roles within The Society.

High and Low has been on my list for a long time and I’m a little upset I haven’t seen it yet. Several months ago, I finally saw Ikiru (1952) in the theater at the New Beverly and though it instantly became one of my favorite films, I was simultaneously upset that it had taken so long before watching such a gem.

And so, lo and behold, the New Beverly just screened High and Low to come to my rescue. I was about to select it anyway (seriously – I have notes to prove it!) and so once again the stars align. I have not seen many of Kurosawa’s non-samurai period films, so it’ll be excellent to finally get a chance to see this one.

But also, excellent to watch at home! Then join the discussion of High and Low below if you can!

High and Low (1963) Directed by Akira Kurosawa.

Reactions and Analyses:
High and Low (1960) has two halves, almost two separate movies. This has long been discussed over the years and by our QFS discussion tackled this as well. But one of our members, a cinematographer, picked up on something I hadn’t noticed – a slight but deliberate change in camera use between the halves.

The first half deals with the kidnapping of Shinichi (Masahiko Shimazu), mistaken for the wealthy child of Kingo Gondo (Toshiro Mifune), and Gondo’s decision whether or not to pay a huge sum to this mysterious kidnapper. Shinichi is Aoki’s son, played with excruciating grief and torment by Yutaka Sada. This half of the film takes place all in Gondo’s home, with everyone awaiting the kidnapper’s next call and us as the audience, trying to determine what Gondo will decide.

The first half of High and Low (1963) showcases director Akira Kurosawa’s mastery of staging - wide frames and compositions with deliberate camera moves when necessary, and takes place entirely in the Gondos’ home. Body language becomes an important aspect of the storytelling when using wide frames.

The camerawork in the first half is composed as if on a stage, with actors blocked in ways where sometimes someone’s back is to us, but their body language speaks volumes. The camera moves, when they happen, are also steady, composed, operated on a gear head for smooth and precise movements. 

The second half – the camera is freed. We’re out in the world, on the case, trying to find the kidnapper and also Gondo’s money. It’s likely Kurosawa had seen many of the films of the burgeoning French New Wave movement where the camera is liberated from the tripod and thrust into the dirty, complex world. Kurosawa’s version is still precise and deliberate, but there’s a greater urgency and rapid movement that evokes a handheld style, if not deliberately handheld.

Kurosawa throws the camera into the world as the hunt for the kidnappers unfolds. The camera, too, is free - some handheld, moving camera that hand off from one detective to another in pursuit.

High and Low becomes an elevated police procedural.

Detectives stuck watching from the car as the suspect encounters Mr. Gondo in person.

Following the suspect through the seedy underbelly of Yokohama. The heroin den sequence evokes the imagery now found in modern post-apocalyptic movies and dramas.

These two styles mimic the change in style, change in movie, change in tone and the change in focus. The drama in the first half of the film is almost entirely internal, just as it is internal in this house. It’s Gondo’s furrowed self-exploration of what to do, whether to give in to the demands and destroy the career and life he’s built for one his personal staff members. It’s the visible anguish on Aoki’s face, at first pleading and then prepared to sacrifice his son in order to save his boss’s livelihood (and, also, his own). There’s his wife Reiko (Kyoko Kagawa) who acts as the moral compass, pleading with Gondo to save the child, that she doesn’t need this home and this wealth.

Reiko pleads with Gondo, and she’s ultimately proved right - even though it costs them both in the end.

But is that true? Gondo reminds her that she was born into wealth and has never had to live as he had to growing up so she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Which then in turn a revelation – that Gondo got a boost early in his career from a dowry from Reiko’s wealthy family.

All of these internal struggles mirror the setting and pace and blocking of the first half perfectly. Kurosawa exhibits his mastery of composition, placing some people in the frame looking towards us and others looking away to enhance their position. Or to have a small sliver of light come through the curtains to bring our focus to a certain place. Kurosawa places Gondo in foreground on the phone, for example, when in the background Aoki anguishes alone and small in the frame. Another moment, when Aoki pleads with Gondo, the two are on opposite sides of the frame – Gondo barely able to look at him.

Gondo, tormented, only his face is in darkness in this shot - a way to use light to tell the story of an internal struggle.

This deliberate staging allows Kurosawa to play with power dynamics – who is big in the frame, who is small? Who is forced at the edge and who is covered in darkness. It’s brilliant and textbook and requires care to execute. (Of course it doesn’t hurt to have the extraordinary Mifune as one of your chess pieces to play on the board.)

Gondo deciding not to pay the ransom. Body language, choice of staging, attention still brought to the center. Mastery in blocking for the camera.

High and Low goes from a story about executive-level business intrigue, to a hostage thriller, to a story exploring social dynamics and issues of wealth, power and poverty before becoming a detective and police procedural with stunning set pieces including the seedy underbelly of 1960s Yokohama.

Kurosawa somehow pulls all of this off without any sense of whiplash or asymmetry. The master clearly at the top of his game is able to balance all of these elements in just about the most seamless way a bifurcated story could be crafted. And he doesn’t abandon elements from first half into the second half – we are reminded of Gondo’s sacrifice when later we see him mowing the lawn. Or when Aoki takes Shinichi back on the path to find the kidnappers’ lair – the detectives catch up with him and Aoki reveals that Gondo told him they won’t need to drive to Gondo’s shoe factory any more, having been forced out as they all knew he would be. We are given glimpses into Gondo’s life changing, even though he barely appears in the second half and we’re more interested in hunt and pursuit of the wrongdoers.

Kurosawa uses this efficiency in his story telling throughout. For example, the bald, sweaty detective Bos’n Taguchi (Kenjiro Ishiyama) – he’s the detective who is rough around the edges but a joking, committed bloodhound. But he’s on the screen so little, how do we know that? Just in a few words, we learn he disdains the wealthy so when Gondo sacrifices we see Bos’n’s admiration. And in behavior – he’s always sweaty and rubbing his head – Kurosawa is a master of tagging a character with a physical tic (see Mifune as “Sanjuro” with the shoulder twitch in Yojimbo, 1961 QFS No. 13). So when this hardened detective breaks down when Aoki and Shinichi reunite, we understand this man and he, in some ways, is a stand in for us as the audience. It’s incredibly moving.

That scene in particular contains another example of Kurosawa’s brilliance. The detectives are in the foreground, their backs to the camera as Aoki runs full speed away from us, towards Shinichi in the distance who runs as well. But the camera stays with the detectives – we see Bos’n holding back tears as he turns towards profile, and Chief Detective Tokura (Tatsuya Nakadai) gives the command that kicks off the second half: “For Mr. Gondo’s sake, be bloodhounds!”

Father and son reunited and moments before Detective Tokura says “For Mr. Gondo’s sake, be bloodhounds!”

And so the second half they’re off, trying to get the kidnapper and recover Gondo’s money.

There are so many points of entry into this film that it’s almost overwhelming to analyze. The bullet train sequence is a masterpiece in suspense. Gondo’s secretary Kwanishi (Tatsuya Mihashi) and his double cross that backfires give us a sense that Gondo is right that his stature is perilous – and Reiko is right ultimately that Gondo’s sacrifice is the correct action ultimately. We also see Kurosawa’s version of a zombie apocalypse film as we explore a heroin den – dreary, seemingly dangerous, the shuffling feet of the addicted clinking on unseen glass vials and bottles. And the plot itself, the suspense and the central question of who is the kidnapper?

He must be the kidnapper! Who else would wear mirrored glasses indoors?!

Several of the QFS discussion members, myself included, were certain that the other board members of the National Shoe Company arranged for this attempted kidnapping of Gondo’s son. The beginning of the film sets up that premise, which is a great narrative device to send us down that path. But ultimately, it’s a psychopath (but is he a psychopath?), a poor medical intern who looks up at Gondos’ castle above his poor slum. The explanation is that it drove him crazy to see that every day, looking down on them, and that he wanted to teach the man a lesson.

This final scene in the prison between Gondo and Takeuchi (Tsutomu Yamazaki in the only scene where he speaks) gives the kidnapper a chance to explain to Gondo and to us the why. I asked our group the question is this scene necessary. Without it, the scene ends with Mr. and Mrs. Gondo in their emptying house, the auctioneers measuring the furniture for their upcoming auction. For me, that felt like the appropriate conclusion to Gondo’s story and several felt similarly.

However, we would be left wondering why and missing out on any sort of explanation. And though Taekuchi’s motives felt thin – how could he be driven so far when there are probably a couple thousand people in the same situation who saw that same house and lived all around him – who didn’t think kidnap and murder were the solutions. So we’re left with psychosis, something that’s born out by the final images of the film as he’s dragged away, the security gate comes down, and Gondo’s image reflected in the mirror of both lives forever torn.

Gondo meets the kidnapper face-to-face a second time.

The final image in the movie in a scene that arguably did not have to be in the film. Up for debate!

While I personally would have preferred a stronger rationale for the film’s antagonist, this is a minor story objection to what is one of the greatest films by one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. Much of Kurosawa’s work should be essential viewing for filmmakers, but High and Low contains it all – blocking, camerawork, pacing, framing, character development, performance, to name a few. It’s clear to me now that the master’s masterclass for all of us is High and Low.

Wanda (1971)

QFS No. 138 - The invitation for May 1, 2024
I’m sure you all have seen this movie because it’s the 48th Greatest Film of All Time™.

Wanda – according to the oft derided/lauded* British Film Institute Sight and Sound Greatest Movies of All Time List released every ten years – is the 48th Greatest Film of All Time. Forty-eighth! Following a two-way tie between North by Northwest (1959) and Barry Lyndon (1975) at No. 45 and tied at 48 with Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet (1955).   

Woah, what’s that you say? You’ve never heard of Wanda? That’s outrageous, well I oughta…

Okay fine. Neither had I.

Wanda falls firmly into the Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975, QFS No. 98) territory here – a film from the 1970s that’s highly acclaimed by critics and filmmakers and one I have never heard of. (Not stylistically, just in terms of obscurity… for me at least.) I do feel some measure of shame for not knowing about both Wanda and of course Jeanne Dielman from before. So here we go again, firming up our film nerd cred by watching and discussing Wanda as a film and of course whether there are only 47 greater films ever made than it. I know very little about this movie but what I do know is that it is significantly shorter than Jeanne Dielman.

For those of you keeping score at home, this happens to be our tenth selection from the BFI top 100 list. We’ve previously selected No. 1 Jeanne Dielman, No. 5 In the Mood for Love (2000, QFS No. 105), No. 11 Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927, QFS No. 104), No. 30 Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019, QFS No. 114), No. 43 Stalker (1979, QFS No. 25), No. 60 Daughters of the Dust (1991, QFS No. 18), No. 67 The Red Shoes (1948, QFS No. 52), No. 72 L’Avventura (1960, QFS No. 116), and No. 95 A Man Escaped (1956, QFS No. 9).

I have seen 60 films in the Top 100 and yes, I just them up counted now. Am I proud of this or a little concerned? I’d say both. Looking forward to knocking No. 48 off the list! Watch Wanda and return here to discuss!

*I both laud and deride the list routinely.

Wanda (1971) Directed by Barbara Loden.

Reactions and Analyses:
It’s hard to watch Wanda and separate the narrative from the craft. The story, though thin on a driving narrative, is still compelling. And the reason to keep watching is Wanda (Barbara Loden), seeing what happens to her as she drifts through her life. The movie is also about how Loden made it and what that evokes in us as a viewer. This is true for many films to some extent – the how did they do that idea ­– but there’s something different about the “how” with Wanda and it in some ways fleshes out the “why.”

Barbara Loden in Wanda (1970) directed by Barbara Loden.

Shot mostly on 16mm reversal stock – which is cheaper but less forgiving than negative film and more in line with budget-strapped documentarians of the day – Wanda, though restored, retains the grainy immediacy of the shooting format. Which makes it feel like a time piece. Stores that no longer exist populate the world (Woolworths and Korvette), the clothes, the rampant smoking, the cars that are easy to break into and hotwire. Although it’s not a documentary and it’s not New Wave, it has a feeling of being a loose and free portrait of a time, place and character where we’re experiencing the world with Wanda because we experience almost the entire film through her perspective.

Our group had a very mixed set of reactions to the film. Wanda gives so little information that the viewer pieces backstory and character motivation together with the clues that are in there throughout. Motivation is a tricky word because … is there motivation? Is Wanda motivated at all? She’s the biggest enigma of the film. Her expression and her emotions are minimal. She’s in court and does the opposite what we’d expect – she doesn’t fight for custody of her children at all. She can’t care for them but also doesn’t seem to even acknowledge them. The children, shockingly, don’t acknowledge her at all.

Wanda in court, not interested in her children and they feel the same - at least in this scene.

This speaks volumes and breaks with audience expectations of how a woman, a mother, would behave when around her children. The children perhaps no longer know Wanda as their mother at all.

When I saw this scene, I felt I knew Wanda or at least understood her backstory. She felt like people I know who I grew up with in the Midwest and so I extrapolated what I felt I knew about her. She is from a place and time where women aren’t getting a great education and are likely expected to marry at a young age. She’s attractive, so I imagined she got by on her looks, married young, had children young, and suffers from depression – or at least this sense that she never had direction in her life.

And true enough, the film starts to bear this out. Wanda does in fact get by on her looks – she’s robbed, has no money, but sleeps with a man who’s paid for her drink and then abandons her at an ice cream stand (who also takes pity on her and gives her an ice cream cone, unbidden). She’s directionless and just pulled along by whatever happens to her, getting swept up with a two-bit crook Mr. Dennis (Michael Higgins) and ends up being his accomplice (but it’s not clear she really wants to?). No one shows her any kindness without it being transactional - for sex, usually - except the guy with the ice cream cone and a brief moment when Mr. Higgins tells her she did good in their taking of hostages. The smallest of smiles crosses Wanda’s face and you get the sense that nobody has given her an earnest compliment in a long time, or maybe ever.

The one earnest compliment and the one actual smile from Wanda in Wanda.

Wanda does push back at one point, vomiting from nerves before the ill-conceived heist and saying she doesn’t want to go through with it. It’s one of two times she takes real action and shows agency. (Of course, she gives in and goes through with the bank robbery anyway.) The second time is near the end of the film when the airborne officer attempts to rape her in his car and she actually fights back and escapes.

The passivity and the narrative ambiguity proved to be too much for several of the QFS members. For me, I was taken along with the filmmaking and the storytelling but I definitely can understand how frustrating Wanda could be as a character. What is motivating her? What is she living for or striving for? Nothing? It must be nothing.

The filmmaking, however, is pretty remarkable. As mentioned earlier, this is one of the cases where I find it’s hard to separate the film from the filmmaking, or the feat of how they made the film. It has that lean, free-camera feeling of an expert filmmaker, not a first-timer with a crew of … four!

For example – the early shot in the film, when Wanda leaves what has to be one of the bleakest houses ever portrayed in cinema as it’s immediately adjacent to a coal strip mine. Wearing light colors, she walks through a black landscape, coal all around, the camera feels like it’s a mile away and she’s very tiny in the frame. The shot continues for a long time. Too long, contemporary audiences complained. To which she explained in an interview (as retold in Current), “I wanted to show that it took a long time to get from there to there.”

One of the early shots of Wanda - very long take of Wanda, in mostly white, against a start black landscape with piles of coal and the bleak world around her.

That’s very telling, and also illustrative of Loden as an artist. She made choices in a film that seems “real” and that we’re watching a real person drift through life. It’s a real tragedy that Loden never made a movie and died a decade later. Her follow up to Wanda would’ve been something very special. The filmmaking of Wanda should be taught to directors just starting out who use their own moxie to pull off something meaningful.

The driving sequences should be necessary film references for any filmmakers shooting from or with a car. Loden has shots looking through the front windshield onto the drivers – which means, given her limited budget, that they had the camera operator strapped to the hood of a moving car. The shots are so lovely for what is probably one of the most awkward road trips ever filmed. During that trip, the camera is in the passenger seat (sometimes the driver’s seat!) looking right at Mr. Higgins or Wanda, and it feels like we’re on the trip with them. But the driving sequence that’s most riveting is the attempted hostage taking and bank heist. The interplay between the two cars, the movement, the camera moves inside the car from Mr. Higgins’ watch to his face for example – these are extraordinary. There is so much dynamism in the sequence, so much tension – especially when Wanda is pulled over for making an illegal U-turn – that it suggests a much more experienced director at the helm than someone making their first film.

Variety of shots while driving, expertly done by Loden and her cinematographer/entire camera crew Nicholas T Proferes.

Wanda evokes Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973) – a film that comes out only three years later. (I made a joke in our discussion that this was a much sadder film given the petty and incompetent thief and should be called Sadlands. It got very few laughs but it’s hard to tell on Zoom sometimes, right? Right?) Similarly in the two films there’s the crime, the listless, emotionally detached lead female protagonists who are carried through the story by awful men, taking place in a part of the country that rarely is portrayed authentically on the screen. I have no way of proving the connection, but I discovered that Loden gave a Harold Lloyd Master Seminar at the American Film Institute in 1971 – a time when Malick would’ve been in the audience. I have a theory that Malick was inspired by Loden and what she was able to accomplish on virtually no money and no crew. (Though Malick had young stars, more money and more crew than Loden - but not a lot more.)

Wanda (1970) on the left and Badlands (1973) on the right. I’m sure Loden’s talk at AFI in 1971 helped inspire Terrence Malick to make his first movie, too. (More like “sadlands,” am I right?) I’m compelled to say that I’m a proud alum of the AFI Conservatory and am trying to will this connection into being if it isn’t totally true.

For a film with an inscrutable lead character – or at least one whose motivation can be debated – the most confounding part is the ending. The film concludes on a grainy freeze frame of Wanda, seeking refuge in a bar after nearly being raped (again). Everyone around her is having a good time and laughing it up while she sits and others buy her drinks and food.

But what will happen to her? Will she continue on as she has been? She’s gone through no personal epiphanies, no great character arc. We have no reason to believe that Wanda is going to change. And perhaps this is the lasting idea that Loden wants to leave us with in this image. The world is all having a good time around her, swirling, living life. But she is stuck – literally, since it’s a still image – in her place, dependent upon the goodwill of others and unable to (incapable of?) change. Perhaps it’s a stretch, but the film does begin the way it started – there is no explanation, there is only interpretation.

The final shot, a still frame, in Wanda.

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

QFS No. 137 - The invitation for April 24, 2024
Happy Fourth Anniversary!

For our four-year anniversary of the Quarantine Film Society, we decided to select an epic by the great David Lean. Yes, it took us four years to get to a David Lean film, and for the most part it’s because I’ve seen most of the epic classic ones. Lawrence of Arabia (1962) remains one of my favorite films of all time and we could easily have selected it to commemorate our four years of watching and talking about movies. 

But instead, I picked what is my second favorite Lean film, The Bridge on the River Kwai. I’ve seen it in the theater once and probably half a dozen times in total. (I have somehow managed to watch Lawrence of Arabia about six times in the theater over the last 20 years in LA, a personal achievement of which I'm quite proud.) 

One of the things I love about David Lean and why I love his filmmaking is that he makes the epic personal. He crafts giant films on huge tapestries during times of war or conflict – but they are, at their core, character dramas. Lawrence of Arabia is, among other things, an exploration of a man’s identity, of living in between two realities, all set against the World War I proxy conflicts between Turkey and the Arabian kingdoms. A Passage to India (1984) examines race, imperialistic hierarchy, and tolerance during the British Raj rule of India. Doctor Zhivago (1965) is set during the Russian Civil War and beyond but concerns itself mainly with the love story between the two protagonists.

Set during World War II in Burma, The Bridge on the River Kwai is a fascinating tale of duty, of an almost sacred commitment to a task. The film questions whether that task is moral or not. We will discuss this further when we chat about the film, but I’ve always be interested in what is known in Hindu philosophy as dharma – one’s sacred duty – and The Bridge on the River Kwai manages the best portrayal of the concept I’ve come across in Western cinema through Alec Guiness’ character. Again, here the film is not about the war. But war surrounds the story. The epic is backdrop for the personal.

Speaking of epic, just a brief reflection on pulling off a four-year run of Quarantine Film Society. Sure, “pulling off” wasn’t really all that much doing. Simply (a) repeated unemployment of yours truly, (b) stubbornness, (c) an eagerness to write mini-film essays nearly weekly and (d) have at hand a bunch of maniacs willing to watch a film and get on an online video phone to talk about it.

These four years I’ve watched more movies than perhaps any other four year stretch of my life except perhaps for college. I’ve greatly expanded my working knowledge of the craft of cinema, American film history of the 20th Century, and have gained a greater appreciation of film as an art form – in that it can be interpreted less like a sentence in a book and more like a painting in a gallery.

For all of this, I thank you. I hope to keep this up for as long as I can. Join me to discuss The Bridge on the River Kwai as kick off our next four years of world cinema domination.

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) Directed by David Lean

Reactions and Analyses:
Who is the antagonist in The Bridge on the River Kwai? For a film that has a lot of traditional action elements, it is not an action film in the classic sense. Or a war film in the classic sense, for that matter.

This question, though, of who is the antagonist or “the bad guy” is an interesting one and was quickly brought up by one member of the group. He argues that it’s actually Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness). He’s a maniacal man hellbent on living up to his own moral code, to the point of collaborating with who is his enemy.

Is Colonel Nicholson (Alex Guinness) the antagonist of The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)?

This is a fascinating take on the film and several QFS members felt similarly. Nicholson, is governed by a code and cannot waver from it. If anything, his counterpart Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa), who runs a prison work camp, is downright reasonable by comparison. Nicholson nearly sacrifices not only himself but his officers on principle. He nearly completely and totally collaborates with the enemy, very nearly (inadvertently) foiling the covert mission by his own government. 

Consequently, several QFS members felt that this makes him a merciless sociopath. Sure, I can see that. But also, I’ve always seen him as totally and completely tied to his duty. As I wrote in the invitation to The Bridge on the River Kwai, for me Nicholson evokes the philosophical concept of dharma – which can be translated to spiritual duty, a duty that’s beyond mere obligation but something that’s deep inside of you that you have no choice but to fulfill. There are characters who appear in Hindu mythology who embody the concept, and at times they are unable to do anything other than their duty. They are, as I’ve heard referenced “bound to their dharma.” Rama from the epic The Ramayana has to obey his elders, his father, even when doing so triggers off a curse that leads to his father’s death. (There’s more to it than that but for simplicity’s sake, I’m boiling it down.)

Also, in the other Hindu epic The Mahabharata, the warrior prince Arjuna is on the eve of battle against his family and is paralyzed by inaction. Krishna, who is Lord Vishnu incarnate on earth, guides Arjuna through this crisis by reminding him that his duty is as a warrior for his people, and a warrior fights. Even when it’s going to be against cousins and uncles who he knows and loves – because he is on the side of righteousness. (Again, this is massively oversimplifying the Bhagavad Gita but go with me here.)

Sacred duty, or dharma, is best understood through Krishna’s explanation of the concept to Prince Arjuna on the eve of battle against his relatives in the Bhagavad Gita - depicted here in this artist’s rendition.

Now, I’ve always felt that Nicholson embodies this concept better than almost any character I’ve seen in a Western film that isn’t inspired by Eastern philosophy directly. And I still feel that way, but I noticed something different this time that should’ve been obvious to me before – this is an antiwar film. Nearly every war film is at its core an antiwar film. But The Bridge on the River Kwai is perhaps even darker. It’s not only addressing the cruelty of war, it criticizes the very necessity of war – and of the British Empire. The bridge is more than a bridge - it’s a symbol of colonialization and empire.

If you’re going to have a metaphor, might as well be a big one.

QFS members pointed out the arrogance of Nicholson, claiming their British engineers are superior intellectually to the Japanese ones, their workmanship and organization the model of the world. Some in our group couldn’t really tolerate that, which is totally valid. But this arrogance is entirely David Lean’s point. It’s this arrogance, this expressed superiority – that it’s all nonsense. And, in the end, futile and destructive. Like the British Empire, they’ve gone in with what they believe to be good intentions, but leave behind destruction, ruin, and death in their wake.

Or “Madness,” as the medic Major Clipton (James Donald) says in the last line of the film. And after the destruction, Lean leaves us with a final shot, an aerial pullback, wide, from the sky, with a jaunty British military tune. This is not accidental, and it’s an acerbic, biting final blow against the British. He could’ve chosen somber or desolate music. But the final tune has the flavor of cynical sarcasm to it.

“Madness!”

And yet, it’s Nicholson, bound by dharma, who must build the bridge and can only do so the best he can. He can’t even comprehend what others are telling him when they say to not build it so well. There are many telling exchanges in the film, but this one to me stands out as emblematic of what I mean:

Major Clipton: The fact is, what we're doing could be construed as - forgive me, sir - collaboration with the enemy. Perhaps even as treasonable activity.

Colonel Nicholson: Are you alright, Clipton? We're prisoners of war, we haven't the right to refuse work.

Major Clipton: I understand that, sir. But... must we work so well? Must we build them a better bridge than they could have built for themselves?

Colonel Nicholson: If you had to operate on Saito, would you do your job or would you let him die? Would you prefer to see this battalion disintegrate in idleness? Would you have it said that our chaps can't do a proper job? Don't you realize how important it is to show these people that they can't break us, in body or in spirit? Take a good look, Clipton. One day the war will be over, and I hope that the people who use this bridge in years to come will remember how it was built, and who built it. Not a gang of slaves, but soldiers! British soldiers, Clipton, even in captivity.

 The incredible build up is all worth it – the long film, the (perhaps) extraneous William Holden (as “Shears”) sequences, the near suicide of Hayakawa – it is all worth it for that moment when Nicholson discovers that it’s his fellow British soldiers who are trying to blow up the bridge. As if awaked from a trans, Nicholson says What have I done? Truly one of the greatest epiphanies ever filmed, both in terms of performance and payoff. Nicholson remembers that the bridge was his duty, but there was a greater one and it was for the British Army.

Colonel Nicholson sees Sears (William Holden), the moment before his realization. “What have I done?”

 A final note – I thought I had this film figured out. It has remained in my memory as one of my formative movies. But rewatching it and discussing with the QFS group has introduced even more complexity into the story and the themes. Once again, the mark of a truly great work of art and craft by one of the masters of the medium.

Ace in the Hole (1951)

QFS No. 136 - The invitation for March 27, 2024
This is our second Quarantine Film Society selection by the great Billy Wilder, after having seen one of his earlier films The Lost Weekend (1947, QFS No. 84) a couple years ago. Ace in the Hole (1951) has been on my to-see list for some time, so I’m very much looking forward to it.

I was tempted to select a Wilder film I’ve already seen because they are so rewatchable. And I’ve managed to see a great deal of Wilder’s films - Some Like it Hot (1959), Sunset Boulevard (1950), The Apartment (1960), Double Indemnity (1944) are such terrific classics - but he made so many that there are a lot left for me to watch. He’s another one, like John Ford, with a very high batting percentage of great hits. I went with Ace in the Hole because, well, don’t we all want to bask in the glow of Kirk Douglas’ chin for nearly two hours?

Ace in the Hole (1951) Directed by Billy Wilder

Reactions and Analyses:
One of the most surprising aspects of Ace in the Hole (1951) is that it’s from 1951 and not 1971. There’s an expectation for many of the post-World War II American films, that they have a Capra-esque quality. A happy ending or at least one that’s, at best, ambiguous or a qualified victory for the protagonist.

A happy ending Ace in the Hole certainly does not have. One of our group members highlighted a shot at the end of the movie, where the crowds have recently left and all that remains is Leo’s father near a sign that reads “Proceeds go to Leo Minosa Rescue Fund.”

The crowds have vanished near the conclusion of Ace in the Hole (1951). Of note - the “re-elect Sheriff Kretzer” sign written directly on the cliffside.

It’s a shot that speaks to the fickle nature of the crowd, the spectacle over, and all that remains is the detritus of the carnival and a family in ruin. Leo (Richard Benedict) has died. His wife Lorraine (Jan Sterling) has departed with the masses, just as she intended to early on before Tatum (Kirk Douglas) convinces her that her fortunes will change soon. And Tatum, having used Leo and keeping him trapped longer than necessary in order for him to reap the benefits of the sensational story going viral before “going viral” was a term, also dies. But not before a final act of almost valor.

The 1970s – coming on the heels of New Wave moments throughout Europe which in turn came on the heels of Post WWII neorealism – featured a generation of filmmakers who were raised by people who had witnessed the horrors of humanity and understood that real life had no clean happy endings. Obviously, this is an overgeneralization but the trends are clear to see from the films that came to life in this era in the second half of the 20th Century.

 With its social commentary on human nature and their attraction to spectacle, the media’s role in fanning the flames of that human nature, and a non-Hollywood ending Ace in the Hole feels like an independent film from the 1970s and not a studio release from twenty years earlier. You can easily see a throughline between this and Network (1976), a film whose very essence is an analysis of media, entertainment and sensationalism. The cynicism in Ace in the Hole feels uncommon for the 1950s, with the Cold War in its infancy and the Allies victory in World War II fresh in people’s minds. The fact that it’s Billy Wilder and that the film is twenty years before its time, in some respect, is perhaps why I’m so drawn to it now and why it has been rediscovered as an overlooked classic of the time.

Tatum says early in the film, “You pick up the paper, you read about 84 men or 284, or a million men, like in a Chinese famine. You read it, but it doesn't say with you. One man's different, you want to know all about him. That's human interest.” Tatum, as an anti-hero, displays a deep understanding of that human nature throughout Ace in the Hole. Sheriff Kretzer (Ray Teal) hates him but Tatum turns him around and knows what the sheriff most wants – to be seen as powerful and important. Tatum tells Sherrif Kretzer how he will promote the sheriff as the man most determined to save Leo and in exchange Tatum gets exclusive access to the mine and the metaphoric gold inside. He convinces Lorraine to stay in town and play the grieving wife because it will make her a star and make all of them money. Tatum is a devious genius and he almost pulls it off.

“Almost” is the operative word. His gamble has proven too costly and Leo dies. And here’s one of our primary debates happened in our QFS discussion group. In the end, does Tatum feel guilty? Is that what drives him at the end? He’s clearly devastated by Leo’s death – but is it because it ruins his own chance at stardom and the heights of journalistic fame? Or is it because he’s come to terms with the fact that he’s Leo’s “murderer,” that he directly caused Leo’s death and consequently has a moment of clarity?

Leo, trying to hang on and trusting Tatum.

Several in the group believed that Tatum has no real remorse. Sure, he didn’t want Leo to die but he also knew that it meant the end of his own life. Others believed that he did in fact feel remorse and you can see it by his solitary act of bringing in the priest to comfort Leo for his final moments. Then, Tatum literally shouts from the mountaintop to tell everyone that Leo is dead and the carnival should go home. If he was truly in for all of this glory himself, he would’ve let Leo die quietly and had the “scoop” on Leo’s final minutes. (“Scoop” in quotes because Leo is the one creating this scoop.)

(Above sequence:) Tatum shouts from hilltop that Leo is dead. Is this the guilt-ridden face of a man full of remorse?

For me, personally, I think he did feel a measure of remorse and guilt but too little too late. And perhaps that’s why he doesn’t seek medical attention after Lorraine stabs him – he knows it’s his penance. He has to now suffer as he’s caused Leo’s suffering for his own gain. Perhaps explains why he accepts this pain without seeking amelioration or offering complaint, but it’s left (deliberately?) ambiguous.

People in our group brought up the cynicism but for me – and I said this early in our discussion – the film didn’t strike me that it was overtly cynical. And that probably says more about me or the time in which I live in now. For the 1950s, sure, the film is more cynical about human nature than popular culture portrayed. But we’ve now lived 75 years or so since then and seen the world revolve around capitalism, social media, hype, and the classically American propensity of squeezing money from every corner of human life. GoFundMe campaigns and “tribute” songs to raise money are the a logical extension of the funds to save Leo in the cave, the altruistic flipside of tragic spectacle. 

And Leo – even the most “sympathetic” character in the film – is a grave robber of Native American artifacts! The person we’re cheering for to survive has, himself, stated that he’s probably cursed by the old spirits for robbing one too many times the burial sites of the indigenous of New Mexico. (Not to mention the studio so disliked the film that after its initial release they pulled it and remaned it “The Big Carnival” because people, you see, like carnivals so they might think it’s a fun movie! Talk about cynicism.) So it’s fair to say Ace in the Hole does have loads of cynicism – on screen and off – even though that’s not what first struck me.

The story is rife with plot holes as pointed out by the group, including the biggest one – why couldn’t Lorraine go down there to talk to Leo? It’s true – once Tatum goes down there frequently and it’s seemingly now safe to talk to Leo, then why can’t people who love him do that, like his parents? Also, is it believable that Tatum would suffer a stomach wound like that for so long? Only if he believes it’s a moral punishment.

And there’s this question – did Tatum ultimately win? He, too, is stuck in a hole – both he and Leo are in a hole together, one actual and one metaphoric. Both are counting on the other to extract them from their personal holes, but both die together. Tatum’s goal was to get back on top, become famous and return to New York. And while he doesn’t make it to New York and out of Albuquerque physically, he has become famous – people are cheering for him, the radio broadcast wants his exclusive thoughts. He is, for a moment, atop the world.

The final confession, near the end for Tatum.

But it’s all fleeting, like the masses who come overnight and leave the next day as the tragedy ends. Ultimately, Tatum will become infamous and perhaps that’s victory enough – especially if you’re a cynic.

20 Days in Mariupol (2023)

QFS No. 135 - The invitation for March 13, 2024
Long time QFS members know that we rarely select documentary films due to a long-standing bias against them within the ranks of our QFS Council of Excellence. This is only our third documentary selection. The other two – Honeyland (2019, QFS No. 5) and Flee (2021, QFS No. 69) were also both nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the Academy Awards, with Honeyland taking the prize in the 2020 Covid year Oscars. Flee did not win, but was the first film ever to be nominated for both Best Documentary Feature and Best Animated Feature – a feat which is still pretty astonishing. It remains one of my personal favorite films of the decade. 

What both those films had in common were that although documentary films, they felt as if they were scripted narrative features. Honeyland followed an old lady  in Macedonia harvesting honey the old-fashioned way as if it was a scripted movie, in a sense. Flee also had a scripted animated feature film feel – both because of the story of the protagonist’s life and the masterful manner in which it was told.

Which brings us to 20 Days in Mariupol (2023) – a documentary which will likely have a similar narrative action film feeling. The story was introduced to me last year by my brother who sent me this link to an Associated Press story by and about AP journalists trapped in Ukraine as the Russians invaded. They had been reporting from the battlefield and soon discovered that they were also being hunted. As most of you know, my brother is a journalist and he first learned of this incredible story while serving on a committee that selected these reporters for an award. Of course upon reading the story myself, I immediately knew this was a movie and started to look into whether the rights were available. Little did I know that the documentary was being finalized with footage from the frontlines by the journalists themselves. A movie, in some fashion, was already in the works. 

The story is incredible and let me give you the lede right here: “The Russians were hunting us down. They had a list of names, including ours, and they were closing in.”

If that’s not the way to begin a great story – on screen or in print or otherwise – then I don’t know what is. The fact that it’s also a true story and one that we can watch, well I think we ought to do that.

20 Days in Mariupol (2023) directed by Mstyslav Chernov

Reactions and Analyses:
What can a documentary do that a scripted feature film cannot? This is one of the questions that went through my mind as I watched 20 Days in Mariupol (2023) and one of the first aspects of the film we discussed. In a narrative film, even a bleak film featuring war, desperation, doom and destruction all around – you would be hard pressed to find a movie that didn’t have some inkling of hope. Some path to escape, at least, if not victory outright for the protagonist.

In a documentary, however, there’s no expectation that you will receive that olive branch or lifeline from the filmmaker. The film can be as relentless as it needs to be because this is real. In a feature film, the filmmakers would (rightly?) be trashed for putting the audience through something relentlessly harrowing. In a documentary, you can turn that feeling into something like a duty to watch it. Because providing witness is what the filmmakers are hoping for in showcasing it for an audience.

One in our group put it that way – it felt like our duty to watch 20 Days in Mariupol. In part because the filmmaker-journalists made it their mission to make sure the world knew what was happening in Mariupol. Going into this film, I had some knowledge of what the filmmakers went through, having read the Associated Press reporting and also the story of the filmmakers being personally targeted by the Russian troops. I expected the filmmakers to include themselves in the storytelling, much in the way The Cove (2009) did – also an Oscar winner for Best Documentary Feature – as someone in the QFS group brought up that parallel.

Refreshingly, the filmmakers of 20 Days in Mariupol did not give in to making the film about themselves beyond what was necessary to tell the story. Although Mstyslav Chernov’s voice guides us in voiceover, the camera is never turned inward. He reflects on occasion about being Ukrainian and there are artistic vignettes of a hand covered in sand and images of his children playing in safety, for example. But they are, thankfully, very few and used at just the right times and just the right ways to break up the constant movement and bloodshed we witness on screen.

To that point, another in our group brought up the moments where the filmmaker sits down, camera still rolling, and we see a hallway sideways or the ground, not focused on anything in particular. The filmmaker catches his breath, taking in the horror and pausing from showing more if it. The moments are needed relief and are a fascinating way of involving the filmmaker in the story in a subtle way. An editor and director could have easily cut those parts out as they don’t advance the “story” or any narrative, but keeping those moments in both help to humanize our filmmaker guides through the film but also to emphasize that we are in this with them – experiencing this with them.

One member of the group mentioned that we never see the filmmaker’s face (until the very end). And yet, we are riveted – we want him to survive. He is us. In that extraordinary action sequence when they have to escape the occupied city with a Ukrainian special strike force, the filmmaking is as good as any you’ll see in a modern war film or a video game. We’re running, we see the soldier in front of us talking when paused around a corner, we dive when an airplane screams overhead. We’re on the edge of our seat, wondering how the filmmaker will survive. And yet – we’ve never seen his face.

That’s a pretty remarkable feat. Perhaps it’s because it is us. We are looking and experiencing the world with this filmmaker and exclusively through his eyes throughout – which is perhaps another thing documentary does that a feature film wouldn’t be able to get away with necessarily. Not seeing the protagonist at all and playing the film entirely through point of view is a hallmark of “documentary style” but often you see clever ways a narrative filmmaker will at least give us a glimpse of the person holding the fictitious camera. But in the documentary, we don’t see the person holding the camera, favoring instead the horror but not in a gratuitous way – it’s real, seen how a person would. At times directly, at times looking away, searching for something else but drawn back to the calamity. The blood, the babies dying or living, the people grieving the death of a child or other family member. We experience it in what feels like real time through the filmmaker’s eyes.

And finally – since this is such a recent war, one still going on, there are so many elements that make it feel truly “modern.” There’s the mission to get internet. Seeing the dozens of power strips so people can charge their phones just to use them as flashlights. The familiar buildings (e.g. Crossfit gym!) being used as shelters or bombed out malls. And then, the entire social media storyline in which the Russians accuse the reporters of faking the bombed out maternity ward and using crisis actors. “Fake news,” if you will. History isn’t just written by the victors, it’s being written in real time – as one of our QFSers put it.

In Chernov’s Academy Award just a few days ago, he said:

“But I can't change history, I can't change the past, but we are all together, you and I, we are among the most talented people in the world. We can make sure that history is corrected, that the truth prevails. And so that the people of Mariupol who died and those who gave their lives will never be forgotten. Because cinema shapes memories, and memories shape history."

Chernov’s use of footage he shot which then later appears as news footage in television programs around the world is incredibly effective in so many ways, but in one way in particular. It reminds us that one of the main driving narrative thrusts of the film is we need to get the story to the world. To prove it happened and so no one forgets. The fact that it was real, that it was a documentary, makes it more urgent for the filmmakers to share it and for the world’s eyes to see it. They got it out to the world and we’ve seen it. We were witness and it was, indeed, a duty to help shape memories and history.

Past Lives (2023)

QFS No. 134 - The invitation for February 28, 2024
What I know about this film approaches zero. I do know it’s (partly) from South Korea and that it’s Celine Song’s first film after being a staff writer on a major Amazon series. So, you know – pretty amazing, that!

But I’ve deliberately kept myself away from knowledge of the plot and was looking forward to seeing the film. This is our second selection from South Korea, the other being Bong-Joon Ho’s Memories of Murder (2003, QFS No. 112), and many more remain on my to-watch list. The South Korean film industry just keeps blasting home runs all over the place.

Join us this week if you can!

Past Lives (2023) Directed by Celine Song

Reactions and Analyses:
There’s a shot in Past Lives (2023) that essentially tells the premise of the film in one frame. It’s early on, Na Young says goodbye to Hae Sung because her family is immigrating from South Korea. The goodbye is curt and without over-wrought emotion because, well, they’re adolescents.

Then they each walk towards their own homes – Na Young upwards on the right of the frame and Hae Sung on the left, more or less straight, away from us. This image defines, in some ways, their trajectories. It’s simple and straightforward but clear. And it definitely sets a course for the split in their lives.

When I first selected Past Lives, knowing very little about the film besides its accolades and that it’s Oscar nominated for Best Picture, I assumed this was a South Korean film. And after having seen it, I can say that it’s very much an American film, an immigrant’s tale. This splitting or fracturing of a life in divergent storylines. It could’ve been told from my parents’ perspective leaving India in the 1970s.

The point from which their lives split in Past Lives (2023).

I brought this up in our QFS discussion and the others pointed out that this is not just an immigrant’s tale – this is the story of anyone who is forced to split from their home at a young age and has that fondness, that nostalgic remembrance, and that powerlessness to stop that fracturing the familiar. The fact that this is also true and valid illustrates how universal and accessible the story is.

Past Lives makes an argument for the simple film told with tenderness but with just the right amount of layering. The Korean concept of “in-yun” – the layers of interaction between throughout past lives – feels deliberate beyond how it’s used to describe the relationship between Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) and Na Young/Nora (Greta Lee). Perhaps in-yun is also meant to convey that the film is not as simple as it seems, that it’s layered in unseen ways (which, I’m sure, is me misinterpreting the definition of in-yun but bear with me). That there’s depth between these two childhood friends (sweethearts?) and when they reconnect later in their lives, that connection has meaning beyond how it’s been set up in the film.

The QFS group was split on the strength of this connection. For some, the childhood connection between Na Young/Nora and Hae Sung didn’t suggest a deeper connection later in life. For example, Nora claims to not exactly remember the boys name while talking on the phone with her mother, but then discovers he’s been asking about her whereabouts for a little while now.

After going on their “date.”

For others in our group, their connection in childhood was enough and felt familiar – this idea of two lives, connected through family, culture, and yes, love – two people diverging but when they reconnect, it’s fated they are to be together. Or, more specifically, in-yun. Case in point: your enjoyment of this film is directly related to whether or not you believe that their relationship at the beginning is strong enough that they could reconnect so quickly over such a long span of time.

Past Lives has the ease of a simple film well told but some of the trappings of a first-time filmmaker, several of us felt (including me). For example, there’s a scene where Nora’s (non-Korean) husband Arthur (John Magaro) talks about how they met and became a couple and moved in together and got married so she could get a green card, etc. What’s missing in his description is “love.” The kind of standard American relationship story devoid of cinematic spark or romance, but realistic and familiar. He continues to then say that in this version of the story, Hae Sun – the childhood lover – returns to her life and she realizes that this is who she should’ve been with her whole life. That he, Arthur, is the villain in this story. Hae Sun is more closely suited to her culturally but also very satisfying narratively. Both Nora and Arthur are writers so this aligns with their story-telling impulses.

Now, that’s all true but … we know that already as an audience. The filmmaker seemingly hasn’t trusted us to put that all together and she has a character explain it to us. This, to me, is a significant misstep in a story otherwise hewing close to cinematic realism. The scene, also, continues and Arthur says he started to learn Korean because Nora was talking in her sleep but in Korean. He says “You dream in a language I can’t understand. It’s like there’s this whole place inside you I can’t go.”

That is beautiful. It’s poetic, it speaks to the character himself, to their relationship, to the thrust and import of that scene. The scene could have very easily started here and it would have spoken volumes. But instead we get the needless explainer. And the ending as well – there’s a version of the film that ends as soon as Hae Sung leaves, wondering if this life is actually a past life and “we are already something else to each other in our next life? Who do you think we are then?”

Again – this is beautiful poetry. One member of the group suggested that ending of the film would be stronger if it ended right here, or right after this and he gets in his airport ride and goes. Instead of the long walk with Nora back to her husband where she cries. (And this is where I offered the additional criticism of staying in a wide shot instead of seeing her face here, for that felt like a payoff to me.) Even the opening shot - there’s an unseen bar patron watching the three in the bar. We push in slowly but instead of trusting the images of these three, with only their expressions and body language to inspire our curiosity, we’re hearing a bar patron who we will never see give us a setup that our eyes would have given us without the help.

Perhaps. These are all counterfactuals and there’s an argument in conducting film criticism that one needs to focus on the film in front of them and not the alternate version in our heads. Yes, valid – but still, the fact that these questions arise are less about how we would’ve done it differently and more about a few small weaknesses in an otherwise solid, simple film. 

Despite some first-time filmmaker criticisms, there are a lot of beautiful uses of visual storytelling throughout - including the use of symmetry across eras between Na Young and Hae Sung.

And in defense of the simple film – I mean “simple” not that it lacks depth or intelligence. Quite the opposite. When the filmmaker has trusted us, we’ve filled in the blanks and walked in the shoes of two people different than ourselves and went on a journey with them. As one person in our group remarked – it’s refreshing to have a film that’s only about 90-minutes, has a simple but tender story, well-acted and executed, that brings up emotions in a natural way. Not overwrought or excessive or gratuitous. (Counterexamples from this award season include Oppenheimer, 2023 and Killer of the Flower Moon, 2023). I believed I added “inoffensive” as a way of describing Past Lives and, once again, I meant it as a compliment. There are no subplots, no side character, no stretching for meaning. It’s all there. Simple.

Whether that simplicity was effective or not, we all were in agreement, however, on this one thing – we are grateful that a movie like this is still being made, is receiving accolades, and that a lot of people have watched and enjoyed it. So consider this an endorsement of the simple film.

Hae Sung and Nora on their non-date date in New York City.

The Holdovers (2023)

QFS No. 133 - The invitation for February 21, 2024
This is our first selection of an Alexander Payne film, one of my favorite contemporary filmmakers. I’ve seen nearly all of his movies, hence its exclusion from the QFS Priority Selection List since I’ve seen nearly all of them. Truly one of the great living screenwriters, a modern auteur.

The first Payne film I saw was Election (1999) at an advance screening in Ann Arbor* while I was in my first screenwriting class. Our professor took us to see it at the State Theater and the film didn’t even have the final credit scroll yet. I saw it a second time at the Michigan Theater during its regular release later that year and it remains one of my favorite viewing experiences – the film brought the house down, especially after one line in particular. Exemplary satire, Election is an underrated modern classic and should have earned Reese Witherspoon at least an Oscar nomination, one of a litany of Oscar Crimes™ over the years (see 2023: Gerwig, Greta).

Payne’s Sideways (2004) not only won him his first Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay but also single-handedly made Santa Barbara Wine Country overcrowded, drove up the demand for pinot noir production and consumption and destroyed the reputation of the perfectly fine merlot grape. His Nebraska (2015) is a beautiful, melancholic road trip film. Throw in About Schmidt (2002), and The Descendants (2011) for which he won another writing Oscar, and you could call that a pretty terrific career.

I’m sure I’m not the first one to suggest this, but from the way I see it Payne is the Preston Sturges of our times. Sturges, as you recall from QFS No. 2 The Miracle at Morgan Creek (1944), wrote and directed films about ordinary misfits caught in a lie or a deception – as a fake husband in The Miracle at Morgan Creek, Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) as a fake war hero or Sullivan’s Travels (1941) as a filmmaker posing as a fake hobo – as a way into the exploration of humanity, relationships and society. Both have a similar way of capturing a character’s story through humor, often bittersweet, but with the slightest of social commentary. With Sturges that commentary was a little more overt and daring, and Payne’s mission is not cultural or social criticism necessarily. But you can find it in his authentic portrayal of an ordinary person, his or her sense of normalcy upended.

Sturges might’ve used more sweet than bitter in his cinematic concoctions, and Payne can be acerbic and creates some truly uncomfortable and squirm-inducing scenes. So it’s not a perfect comparison but I stand by the assertion. Regardless, both carved out a particular niche in their eras – auteurs whose works relied upon well-told stories with grounded characters in exquisitely crafted scripts as opposed to artistic or visual innovation. With health doses of humor.

I’m very much looking forward to finally seeing another Alexander Payne film, his first in six years, and having a chance to discuss it with you. Please watch The Holdovers at home or in the theater – still playing somewhere near you I believe – and we’ll discuss!

*Home of the current National Champions of College Football.

The Holdovers (2023) Directed by Alexander Payne

Reactions and Analyses:
There’s a moment in The Holdovers (2023) that feels like its heading towards familiar territory. A misunderstood curmudgeon teacher and his misfit students all have to somehow survive the winter together at their private boarding school as they’re stuck with each other until school resumes after the break. With this setup, it’s easy to be prepared for a story in which the students come to understand this man more and the teacher softens and becomes a better person and therefore a better teacher by knowing his students more personally – and everyone learns something about themselves or life that prepares them for the world more than their conventional education ever could.

I’m not trying to sound glib; many an excellent film has done this well and movingly – Dead Poets Society (1989) or The Breakfast Club (1985) come to mind. So that’s the direction Alexander Payne is appearing to veer us towards in The Holdovers.

But then, something happens. All the kids, except for one literally fly away in a helicopter to a mountain top.

Paul (Paul Giamatti) and Angus (Dominic Sessa) are stuck with each other from this point forward in The Holdovers (2023).

What Payne really setting up for is this – don’t expect anything because this movie is not going where you think it is going.

As one of our group members put it, you think it’s going to be a movie about class, but it’s not just that; you think it’s going to be a movie a hardened grump falling in love and being transformed by that, but it’s not; you think it’s about the start of a friendship between a teacher and his student – it’s not that exactly either.

All of those themes are in The Holdovers, to be sure, but just when the narrative goes in the direction you think it’s going to go, it goes somewhere else. That this happened in a film that Alexander Payne directed but did not write – to me, that’s incredibly impressive. He took another script and made it a film that feels very much like his voice.

What Payne has always been good at is making characters feel real, even when they’re a little askew. His characters have believable inner lives, are imperfect, and struggle inwardly but not usually outwardly. What I’ve loved and appreciated about Payne’s movies is that they have a very distinct comedic edge but they’re truly dramas. I empathize with the characters in his movies because they seem so much like humans with familiar struggles. 

The Holdovers caused me to experience something new for me in a Payne film – it made me well up with tears several times. Angus (Dominic Sessa) meets his father (Stephen Thorne) in a mental institution, they hug and Angus tells him he misses him. His father, seemingly moved, can actually only reply that he believes the institution’s staff is poisoning his food. And then you realize that Angus is truly alone and in deep need of love and encouragement. When Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) breaks down at the party about the loss of her son, you feel it deeply, as if she’s been holding it at bay for so long and finally lets her grief go.

Topping off all them, however, is the end. The handshake between Angus and Paul (Paul Giamatti). There is perhaps more power, more earned emotion in that handshake than in any number of romance films or romantic comedies’ climactic kisses. And importantly, it’s not a hug – it would’ve been ruined if it was a hug. It would’ve felt fake, like a movie. Because that’s not their relationship. They’re still teacher and student. They went through a journey together, learned each other’s deepest held secrets, have changed and grown to see each other as lonely, suffering, resilient human beings. And that handshake holds it all, with Paul’s cracking voice and Angus hearing from his teacher – a sort of surrogate father role – that the kid is going to be all right. That’s all Angus needed in his journey, was someone to tell him that. And it was earned, narratively, and paid off in the right way.

Perhaps the most meaningful handshake in recent movie history. And then Angus is gone.

In the invitation to this week’s selection, I mentioned Payne as our era’s Preston Struges. And I think this film helps bolster that case. Let’s set aside how both auteurs deftly use comedy to tell a dramatic story in ways both narratively interesting but grounded in truth. There’s also the social criticisms embedded in their films.

Payne addresses class in The Holdovers in several ways but most importantly it’s woven into the DNA of the main character Paul. When we learn about his backstory, Paul reveals he was kicked out of Harvard because of allegations of plagiarism by the son of a famous person at Harvard – when it was actually the opposite, the son copied Paul’s work. But the administration wouldn’t have sided with a kid who left his abusive father and extricated himself from poverty and ended up at Harvard through his own means. The fact that he’s cut down by the wall of privilege is devastating in the retelling and is evident in the unresolved grief that Paul contains within.

Similarly, we hear about Mary’s late son who couldn’t get a scholarship to pay enough for college, went off to the army with the hopes of eventually going to college, only to have him die fighting in Vietnam. Mary’s story touches on race too – it’s never said but you know that he was the only Black kid in his class, whose mother worked there just so he could go to school and have a chance.

Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) in her sister’s simple room. She gives her son’s baby shoes and other baby clothes in a exquisitely moving scene. Even the set dressing and set here is a depiction of class - a Black middle class home set against the wealth privilege of Dalton from the rest of the film.

In all these ways, Payne is making an oblique criticism of the system that rewards the wealthy and well connected, but not through didactic speechifying, but through the story, through the setting, and through the characters. Simply pointing out it exists in the way it exists and portraying it in a way that shows it’s real and not a narrative contrivance is perhaps one of the best ways a filmmaker can illustrate how inequitable things truly are.

Sturges’ social criticisms of a different era centered around poverty and concepts of masculinity/military might. In Sullivan’s Travels (1945), Sullivan (Joel McCrea) a Hollywood director wants to make a movie about hobos. To do so, he goes and lives as one. But it’s skin deep – he can escape this any time so there’s no real lesson learned and he’s only doing this as a temporary means to an end. Through a series of circumstances, he ends up homeless and without memory and actually has to live as a vagrant. In both The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944, QFS No. 2) and Hail the Conquering Hero (1944), the main character has to pose as a military man or a masculine husband figure despite being just an ordinary guy who gets caught up in a… well not quite lies, but untruths let’s say.

(Above) Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels on the left (1944) and Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers on the right. Completely different storylines in these specific films, but both filmmakers auteurs wield comedy to tell dramatic stories with an embedded criticism of class. Auteurs of their times.

Sturges uses more narrative contrivances than Payne does but both point out some of the unfairness or absurdity of life through a lived experience of a character, through the use of humor and poignancy – with near perfect writing and performances. Again, it’s not a perfect comparison but both Payne and Sturges were auteurs who had something to say about our current world and about humanity that is revealing while simultaneously being entertaining.

Another member of the group put it this way – I thank the film gods that a movie like The Holdovers is still being made. Writing, directing, acting, an adult storyline and grown-up themes. This is the film that has become an endangered species in the era of limited series and the mid-budget character driven dramas ending up on screening services instead of movie screens. Thank the film gods indeed for giving us Dominic Sessa and Da’Vine Joy Randolph in these roles, and for seeing Paul Giamatti corner the market on the curmudgeon with the soft center. And thank the film gods for Alexander Payne continuing to use his formidable might to bring these stories to life.