LE NOTTI BIANCHE / WHITE NIGHTS (1957)

We’re nearer Mascagni than Moscow in Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Dostoevsky’s short story; not necessarily a bad thing. The terribly young, terribly handsome Marcello Mastroianni (check out those test shots on the Criterion DVD) is the lonely soul, new in town, who falls for shy, fresh-faced Maria Schell. She’s been faithfully waiting a whole year for Jean Marais, her handsome tenant, to return; perhaps she’ll give up on the cause. The outcome is no more important than the mood & atmosphere as Visconti turns this romantically fatalistic fable into a masterpiece of poetic-realism on an ultra-realistic, yet frankly studio-bound set. You’d need to go back to the glory days of Frank Borzage’s late silents @ Fox to find its rapturous visual equal. Off the main set, watch for two stunning musical episodes as Schell, in a flashback, goes with Marais & Grandmama to the opera; and back in the present at a local boîte where Mastroianni asserts his manhood jiving to Bill Haley & his Comets’ ‘Thirteen Women.’ Schell works her innocent waïf routine pretty hard (so did Janet Gaynor in those Borzage classics), gazing up to catch the light, but you’d put up with far more to reach the film’s snowy apotheosis.

MERRY ANDREW (1958)

This modestly-scaled musical with Danny Kaye as a British prep school teacher, the only film helmed by famed choreographer Michael Kidd, is an unsung charmer. Why it never caught on is a mystery; and a shame since it holds up much better than Kaye’s better known early successes for Sam Goldwyn. The story puts Kaye in England (with a spot on British accent) where an archeological dig for a long sought statue of the God Pan lands Danny face-to-face with a lion. He’s dug himself right into a circus tent! Soon, he’s also fallen for the lovely daughter of the proprietor, winningly played by a game Pier Angeli & the great operatic basso-buffo Salvatore Baccaloni. There are only five or six songs in the film, but each is a delight (check out that counterpoint melody Danny sings against his brothers), with remarkably sophisticated lyrics by the great Johnny Mercer to accompany Saul Chaplin’s catchy tunes. And, yes, the script is by the same I.A.L. Diamond whose next project was SOME LIKE IT HOT/'59. (You thought there were two I.A.L. Diamonds?) You’d never guess this was Kidd’s first pic, even with the dances for BAND WAGON, GUYS AND DOLLS and SEVEN BRIDES under his belt. What a kick to watch him shoot so much stuff in a carefree out-of-doors manner rarely seen at the time. (Did the French New Wave ever see this?) These are some of the most delightfully unstylized musical numbers ever filmed. Yet they never look awkward or out of place. Alas, the days of human-scaled musicals were all but over. And they’ve yet to return.

NOTE: This film has just come out on Warners' VOD service. But this Write-Up is drawn from a theatrical showing during the film’s initial release . . . and not seen since. You do the math.  Addendum - 4/25/24: The VOD (just seen here) pointlessly nips middle section refrains out of half the songs; saving maybe five minutes of total running time and seriously weakening dramatic & musical structure while largely eliminating participation from the kids.

UP (2009)

The good folks @ Pixar Animation, led by helmer/co-writer Pete Docter, built themselves something of a stylistic trap on this one. UP gets off to a lovely start with a prologue detailing the ‘meet-cute,’ courtship, marriage & bittersweet life of the mated-for-life Fredricksons. Then we pick up the main storyline with Fredrickson, now a curmudgeonly widower, living by himself in his old house. Enter Stage Left: A very round, very pesky boy scout who insists on helping the old man . . . whether he wants help or not. It’s a relatively realistic storyline so far, and the animation style lets us ‘buy into’ the characters, settings & events. Then the balloons go up, the house lifts off, and we’re heading toward a wild adventure in South American! But our belief in what we see crumbles. Suddenly, we’re in cartoon-land where dogs talk & fly planes, logic comes & goes as needed to move the plot along, and character motivation gets trumped by the demands of the story arc. This really trips up Charles Muntz, the famous explorer we find in the Pampas. He was Fredrickson’s hero as a lad and now something of a Captain Nemo figure. His actions don’t add up; and neither does his age. He must be 100. UP remains an enjoyable romp, loaded with striking vistas, but even taken on its own terms, it starts to feel like a cheat. And the emotional investment made in the first couple of reels pays little dividend. Pity.

(The DVD comes with two shorts: DUG’S SPECIAL MISSION, a leftover from the main event, and the funny & adorable PARTLY CLOUDY, about a stork who has to deliver all the nasty baby beasts of the world.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Ed Asner does Fredrickson’s voice, but the look is pure Spencer Tracy; circa DESK SET/’57. That’s Christopher Plummer doing the vocals for the villainous Charles Muntz who looks a lot like Kirk Douglas when he did THE VILLAIN/’79., a sort of Live-Action Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote pic. Kirk was also in Disney’s excellent 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA/’54, but it was James Mason who got to play Nemo.

RUBY GENTRY (1952)

Actress Jennifer Jones & helmer King Vidor had been down this road before in DUEL IN THE SUN.’46. Here’s the chamber version, in b&w and running a much shorter 80 minutes. It’s the old story of the sexy girl who loses her man to a safer, saner, better-connected society gal. She marries on the rebound, becomes a rich widow and takes her revenge. Vidor, a brilliant, but uneven director, pushes everything so hard that the film is both compelling and ridiculous. Jones, a decade too old for her role, doesn’t come off as a wild spirit, dying to be tamed by the right man, but as borderline psychotic. A shame, because she’s unusually well matched with a young Charlton Heston whose face hadn’t yet turned to granite. The best scene shows them driving recklessly into the surf, too filled with each other to care. (It’s a steal from Vidor’s little seen masterpiece, THE STRANGER’S RETURN/’33, where Miriam Hopkins & Franchot Tone drive straight into a field of wheat.) But Jones & company soon return to their neurotic ways as the story wends its way toward an unearned tragic finish.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Jennifer Jones is an acquired taste not everyone acquires. But she was far better in her other 1952 film, William Wyler's superb Dreiser adaptation CARRIE with Laurence Olivier in magnificent form, as well as fine tough support from Miriam Hopkins who had starred in THE STRANGER'S RETURN.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-strangers-return-1933.html

THE LAST COMMAND (1928)

Even in an era loaded with classic films, the late-silents of Josef von Sternberg stand out. This famous film, the only survivor of the six films German actor Emil Jannings made in Hollywood*, is a masterpiece of mood, melodrama & masochism. He plays a once great general of the Czar’s Imperial Army, now a shabby movie extra, grateful for a day’s work as a make-believe general in a costume. He doesn’t know that his director (William Powell) knew him from those revolutionary days of 1917, or that he’s out for revenge. In the long flashback that takes up most of the film, we see how they first crossed paths. And we meet the beautiful, morally indifferent woman who was fated never to leave Russia (Evelyn Brent). Sternberg’s distinctive way with studio artifice creates a dreamlike vision of Russia, WWI and the Revolution in Bert Glennon’s ravishing b&w lensing, carefully reproduced on the current Criterion DVD which includes an unusually interesting visual essay in Tag Gallagher’s overview of Sternberg’s silent film career. Of the two musical scores on the disc, the fuller symphonic one arranged by Robert Israel is preferable until the final sequence, back in Hollywood, where the Alloy Orchestra track bests it.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Here are Emil Jannings’ missing Hollywood films:

THE WAY OF ALL FLESH/’27 - directed by Victor Fleming - LOST

STREET OF SIN/’28 - Mauritz Stiller; co-starring Fay Wray - LOST

THE PATRIOT/’28 - Ernst Lubitsch - LOST

SINS OF THE FATHERS/’28 - Ludwig Berger; co-starring Ruth Chatterton & Jean Arthur - LOST

BETRAYAL/’29 - Lewis Milestone; co-starring Gary Cooper - LOST

TORA NO O WO FUMU OTOKOTACHI / THE MEN WHO TREAD ON THE TIGER’S TAIL (1945)

Akira Kurosawa’s first post-war project was a Noh/Kabuki standard that hid a surprisingly topical theme: when is it right to break with tradition in order to save tradition? It’s the underlying point of this period piece about a lord on the run from his powerful brother. Traveling in disguise, along with a few loyal retainers, he needs to cross a border without being discovered. But for his disguise to work, he must lose face, drop centuries of proper protocol, and allow his position (actually his person) to be debased. It’s a situation not so far removed from what the current Emperor, and much of the country, was struggling with. It sounds intriguing, but the film doesn’t come to life. Kurosawa is not yet able to balance the various styles of acting & visual representation. Painted mountains on cycloramas are followed by hikes thru real landscapes; a realistic perf from Susumu Fujita (Kurosawa’s Sanshiro Sugata) plays alongside highly stylized theatrics & off-screen choruses. And a wild comic turn from Kenichi Enomoto, as the porter, doesn’t fit in with anything. (According to Kurosawa, the Japanese film board found the comedy insulting and held back the film’s release for years. They may have been on to something.)

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: While Kurosawa mavens will want to see this, non-completists should check out his first film as director, SANSHIRO SUGATA/’43.

MORITURI (aka THE SABOTEUR: CODE NAME MORITURI) (1965)

This forgotten pic holds considerable interest for Marlon Brando fanciers. Not because it’s an undiscovered gem; it’s not, merely a variable WWII espionage tale that falls apart in the third act. (The big character epiphanies fall flat and director Bernhard Wicki can’t make sense of the action climax.) Yet, it’s fascinating just to watch Brando deliver the sort of generic movie star acting you’d have expected to see from, say, William Holden or Robert Mitchum in some well-paid assignment they’d lost faith in. There’s no challenge to it, even the German accent is a leftover from THE YOUNG LIONS/58, now more refined & relaxed. And he makes it look so ridiculously easy, still solid, handsome & moving like a cat, he swamps everything around him even in neutral . . . no wonder it sickened him. Brando plays a German ex-pat who’s blackmailed by Trevor Howard into posing as an SS officer on Captain Yul Brynner’s Nazi cargo ship. Marlon’s supposed to save its valuable rubber for the Allies. The best gimmick in Daniel Taradash’s script has Brynner loathing the Nazis as much as Brando; the worst gimmick is a subplot with Janet Margolin as a Jewess prisoner who’s really onboard to add sex & unearned moral seriousness. Everyone must have known this was turning into a stinker, note the two titles, but nothing could stop the critical & financial drubbing. (Certainly not Brando’s script rewrites. He added serious issues to the mix.) Now, it’s just a curiosity, but curiously fascinating.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: Peter Manso’s Brando bio covers the disastrous production beautifully. Not a pretty picture.

WATERSHIP DOWN (1978)

The intense identification readers developed with the rabbit characters in Richard Adams’ phenomenally popular book is only fleetingly caught in Martin Rosen’s animated adaptation. But that was enough for a big international audience who had already bought into Adams’ cleverly developed rabbity creation myth, lapin theology & hare-brained exodus story. The look was pleasing & painterly (very watercolor/Lake District) and the abrupt stylistic shift away from Disney’s smooth corporate style (in generic doldrums at the time) read as sincerity. This handmade quality, even the slightly shabby earmarks of a reduced frame rate in individual drawings, worked for the film, especially in the rune-like prologue, wonderfully narrated by Michael Hordern, where Adams’ writing has the cadence of a true myth, "all the world will be your enemy, and when they catch you, they will kill you . . . but first they must catch you.’ Little that follows touches that level of imagination, but the basic Moses allegory plays out in a generally satisfying manner, much helped by a remarkable vocal cast that includes John Hurt, Ralph Richardson, Zero Mostel, Harry Andrews & Denholm Elliott. Would the book still enchant? BTW: Don’t believe what they say about the film being too intense for the kiddies. The wee ones know all about blood, gore, death & violence in the wild and will be caught up in no time.

SANGRE DE MI SANGRE (2007)

This Sundance award-winner, stocked with more coincidences than early Dickens, is something of an embarrassment. Written & megged by Christopher Zalla, it’s as earnest as they come, a tall-tale about two cute young Mexican illegals come to Brooklyn. The naïf (think Oliver Twist @ 17) is looking for the Papa he never met and his brand new friend turns out to be a weasel (think Artful Dodger), a con artist who steals his pal’s satchel & identity, hoping to find & fleece ‘Dad.’ There’s even a drug-addled/tough-love prostie (think Nancy) for them to moon over. Shot & acted in a faceless gonzo style (‘blocked-view’ close ups & dark interiors that don’t make spatial sense), the film seems designed for the captive sensibilities of fest audiences and the wallet of misled distributors. Sure enough, the ski-loving cineasts in Utah honored it and the recently reconstituted Weinstein Bros., temporarily flush with start-up cash, tenderly coaxed a pathetic total U.S. gross of $58,000. And so another fine film from Europe or Asia goes begging for distribution, it’s release slot usurped by a useless mediocrity from the good folks @ Sundance.