1940s Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Shadow of a Doubt (1943) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

June 6, 2022****/****, 1940s, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, FFC Must-Own, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Teresa Wright, Joseph Cotten, Macdonald Carey, Henry Travers
screenplay by Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, Alma Reville, from an original story by Gordon McDonell
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Just by the fact of her, Charlie (Teresa Wright) is dangerous for her Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten), a violent rebuke of the caustic nihilism of his worldview. She’s too pure, too loving, too good; her existence is proof there’s something wrong with him. Very wrong. She’s so rare a thing, the only way to protect her and, by extension, what he believes about our debased, postlapsarian state is to corrupt her. Really, he’s doing her a favour. I think that Uncle Charlie knows he’s running out of time, that the dragnet around him is tightening at the neck. I think he wants to spend whatever freedom he has left turning his namesake to his way of thinking. Visiting for the first time in too long, he brings gifts for everyone in his sister Emmy’s (Patricia Collinge, her character named after Hitch’s mother) family: his brother-in-law Joe (Henry Travers), his little niece Ann (Edna May Wonacott), his nephew Roger (Charles Bates), and of course Charlie. But she rejects even the notion of receiving a present from her beloved uncle. His presence is good enough, she says.

Saboteur (1942) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

May 22, 20221940s, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Disability, Espionage, Road Movie, Thriller, War

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

*/**** Image A Sound B Extras C
starring Priscilla Lane, Robert Cummings, Norman Lloyd, Otto Kruger
screenplay by Peter Viertel, Joan Harrison, Dorothy Parker
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw When I think of Saboteur, which isn’t often, it’s as the first American project Hitchcock developed largely without his beloved assistant Joan Harrison, who left after co-writing the first draft (seeing in the opportunity to produce The Phantom Lady her chance to wriggle out from under Hitch’s shadow), and, maybe more significantly, without his most essential collaborator, wife Alma Reville, then away in New York with their daughter Pat, who had just won the lead role in a play. They left creative absences Hitch tried to fill–disastrously, I think–with Algonquin Roundtable alumni Peter Viertel and Dorothy Parker. (If there’s a case to be made about the importance of Alma to Hitchcock’s career, it may be useful to examine those films where we know she was absent.) I also think of Saboteur, when I do, as an attempt at an “all-American” film of the kind Hitchcock, fearing he’d left Britain trailing with him too much of the old country, was desperate to make. The desire to embrace his adopted culture is so conspicuous it becomes uncomfortably obvious in multiple instances (stops at the Statue of Liberty, Rockefeller Center, and even the Hoover Dam) that setting has fatally superseded narrative. His follow-up, the Thornton Wilder-penned Shadow of a Doubt, is the all-American Hitchcock that works, locating the country’s heart in the introduction of a human stain into a small town and a wholesome family.

A Matter of Life and Death (1946) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 9, 2020****/****, 1940s, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Fantasy, FFC Must-Own, Romance, The Criterion Collection, UK, War

Stairway to Heaven
****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring David Niven, Roger Livesey, Raymond Massey, Kim Hunter
written and directed by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger

by Walter Chaw Watching 1946’s A Matter of Life and Death while the end of the American experiment is upon us is an amazingly painful thing. The film was conceived in part by hyphenates Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger as a way of cementing the postwar British-American alliance. Accordingly, it ends with a trial in which the United States is celebrated as an inspirational model: a paragon of idealism, humanism, truth. If it ever was those things, it isn’t any of them today. The scales have fallen from my eyes, and the movie now plays as an elegy for everything we’ve lost since 1946–for everything I’ve lost as I bid goodbye to what remains of my innocence and my optimism that there’s anything left in this country that resembles what I had been raised to believe about it. We are divided, hateful, unhealthy, selfish, stupid, and brutal. There’s a line from Graham Baker’s underestimated Alien Nation I think of often nowadays. Alien immigrant Sam Francisco (Mandy Patinkin), drunk one night, tells his human friend:

Detour (1945) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

June 24, 2019****/****, 1940s, 2019, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Road Movie, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Tom Neal, Ann Savage, Claudia Drake, Edmund MacDonald
screenplay by Martin Goldsmith, based on his novel
directed by Edgar G. Ulmer

by Bryant Frazer Among legitimate Hollywood classics, Detour is about as threadbare as they come: a small film, shot on a shoestring over a handful of days (between six and 14, depending on whose accounting you believe) at a Poverty Row film studio. And yet, the finished product is uniquely compelling. As a crime thriller, it’s notable for the absence of gunfights, chase scenes, double-crosses, and back-stabbings. What it’s lacking in film noir‘s usual narrative detail or expressionistic flourishes is compensated for by its overarching preoccupation with determinism and a healthy contempt for fate. Amplifying and accompanying the slow-building sense of despair and helplessness is an internal-monologue-in-voiceover that’s unrelentingly dreary and self-pitying, even for noir. Detour isn’t remotely sexy or exciting, though it is amply dour and uncomfortably personal–disturbing, even, in its spare vision.

Bambi (1942) [The Signature Collection – Anniversary Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD|[Diamond Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

June 5, 20171940s, 2017, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, DVD, Family

***/****
2011 Diamond Edition Blu-ray – Image A- Sound B+ Extras A-
2017 Anniversary Edition Blu-ray – Image A- Sound B+ Extras A-
story direction Perce Pearce and story adaptation Larry Morey, from the story by Felix Salten
supervising director David D. Hand

by Bryant Frazer Bambi is just 70 minutes long, but it’s one of the more versatile features in the Disney canon. It’s a cute circle-of-life story, sure, populated by talking rabbits, nominally sweet-smelling skunks, and wise old owls (not to mention the adorable chipmunks that the owl, for some reason, hasn’t preyed upon). But look what else is going on in this slice-of-wildlife film: an attempt at an animated nature documentary; a tract in opposition to sport hunting; and the impetus for generations of children to weep in terror at the prospect of losing their mothers.

Pinocchio (1940) [The Signature Collection] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

January 23, 2017****/****, 1940s, 2017, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, Disney, DVD, Family, FFC Must-Own

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A
story adaptation Ted Sears, Otto Englander, Webb Smith, William Cottrell, Joseph Sabo, Erdman Penner, Aurelius Battaglia
supervising directors Ben Sharpsteen, Hamilton Luske

by Bill Chambers Bambi was supposed to be Walt Disney’s second feature film, but the phenomenal success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs¹ had thrown his fledgling empire into such chaos–most of it created by Walt’s manic spending and multitasking–that it got swapped out for Pinocchio, ostensibly the easier to animate as well as the more commercial of the two. It’s not that Disney was playing it safe, it’s that he thought he could bank some time and audience good will for experimentation in the years ahead. But before Pinocchio even opened, Disney was apologizing for falling into a sophomore slump, and the film wound up being a box-office disappointment, grossing less than Bambi eventually would.² It’s interesting to try to watch Pinocchio from a contemporary perspective and determine what’s lacking (the crude sentimentality of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, for starters), having grown up with it as a brand classic. Is it possible this idiosyncratic motion picture–more of a dry run for Fantasia than Walt maybe realized or intended–was ahead of its time, and time caught up? It’s possible, though Pinocchio undoubtedly benefited from Disney’s practice of cyclically reissuing their animated features: people started to appreciate that it had in abundance what modern Disney movies lacked, chiefly, personality, inspiration, and ambition.

Bitter Rice (1949) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

April 10, 2016****/****, 1940s, 2016, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Italy, The Criterion Collection

Riso amaro
****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Vittorio Gassmann, Doris Dowling, Silvana Mangano, Raf Vallone
screenplay by Corrado Alvaro, Giuseppe De Santis, Carlo Lizzani,Carlo Musso, Ivo Perilli, Gianni Puccini
directed by Giuseppe De Santis

by Bryant Frazer Bitter Rice is a heck of a film. It’s the story of a couple of refugees from an American film noir who stumble into a grindhouse showing an Italian social-issues drama. The beautiful losers are Walter and Francesca (Vittorio Gassman and Doris Dowling), a pair of small-time crooks on the run following the heist of a lifetime. The social conscience is personified by a class of peasant women who have for hundreds of years travelled from all over the country to work hard days in the rice fields of northern Italy, and also by, to some degree, ethical, committed soldier Marco (Raf Vallone), who lingers in the rice fields after his discharge because he has come to care about the fate of the women there. And the sex appeal is provided, in spades, by Silvana Mangano, a bombshell and a half. When producer Dino de Laurentiis and director Giuseppe De Santis cast the 18-year-old in the role, she had already appeared in a few films and had been the teenaged girlfriend of young Marcello Mastroianni. But her performance in Bitter Rice–a role that had her shaking her tits, swinging her hips, and hiking her skirt up to here–made her an overnight sensation.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 16, 2016****/****, 1940s, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Romance, The Criterion Collection, UK, War

Colonelblimp3

****/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras A
starring Anton Walbrook, Deborah Kerr, Roger Livesey, Roland Culver
written and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

by Walter Chaw The prototype in many ways for Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, Powell and Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, although lighthearted and easily mistaken for a romp, is an existential horror film that, for all the things it’s otherwise about, is most vitally about what it’s like to grow old. There’s a moment early on–when our hero, Clive Candy (Roger Livesey), realizes he’s let the love of his life marry his best friend–that clarifies exactly what the picture has on its mind. For the rest of the film, as the kingdom of his memories grows to a size that dwarfs modernity rushing past, Candy finds shades of the lost Edith (Deborah Kerr), his personal Lenore, resurfacing in the faces of young women the world over. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp understands that as one grows old, an entire village sprouts in the mind, full of beloved businesses and places that have long since disappeared, peopled by old flames and loved ones, dead or just vanished, but in any case never again to resume the form in which memory has frozen them. Though memorable for its technical brilliance, its Technicolor vibrancy, and its courageously sprung narrative structure, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp‘s ability to pinion the sadness, the loneliness, that experience carries with it is what makes the movie what it is. Life as a process of emotional attrition: Last man standing is cold comfort, indeed.

The Palm Beach Story (1942) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 22, 20151940s, 2015, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Romance, The Criterion Collection

Palmbeach1

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Claudette Colbert, Joel McCrea, Mary Astor, Rudy Vallee
written and directed by Preston Sturges

by Jefferson Robbins The Palm Beach Story is lesser candy from a master confectioner–so it’s still worth a taste. Preston Sturges’s screwball portrait of a marriage upending itself braids together multiple comedic forms: road trip, Elizabethan comedy of errors, have-nots infiltrating the haves, and a distinct and strange but intriguing touch of fairytale. For instance, the yacht on which jillionaire J.D. Hackensacker III (Rudy Vallee) absconds with disenchanted young wife Gerry Jeffers (Claudette Colbert) is christened The Erl King. Sure, Hackensacker is an obvious gloss on Rockefeller, and there’s the play on “oil king,” but the Erl King of legend is a kidnapper of innocents. (Goethe’s poem casts him as a child murderer.) Gerry’s scratching a five-year itch, taking flight from glum husband Tom (Joel McCrea), partly on the advice of another “king.” “Cold are the hands of time that creep along relentlessly, destroying slowly but without pity that which yesterday was young,” warns the millionaire Wienie King (Robert Dudley), after moseying into the Park Avenue duplex Gerry and Tom are about to lose. (A Tiresias who’s deaf rather than blind, he can’t hear anything anybody says, so he might as well be talking to himself.) Although “adventuress” Gerry, abandoning her marriage without money or clothing, can still wield youth and beauty as sword and shield, she pays a price for the attempt, first charming and then dodging the heavily armed, dangerously inebriated Ale & Quail Club as it pursues her throughout a southbound train. They’re a Wild Hunt straight out of pagan lore.

Looney Tuesdays – “Dough Ray Me-ow” (1948)

January 27, 20151940s, 2015, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Looney Tunes, Short Films

***/****directed by Arthur Davis by Bill Chambers When Bob Clampett left Termite Terrace in 1946, his unit was assigned to Arthur Davis, who had years of experience behind him as the industry's first in-betweener (the person who draws the steps that get a pose from point A to point B) as well as a director in his own right, having helmed a number of cartoons for Screen Gems, where he worked closely with the great Frank Tashlin. (The two migrated to Warner Bros. together.) But Davis's name never became synonymous with Looney Tunes like so many of his colleagues' did,…

Looney Tuesdays: “The Big Snooze” (1946)

January 6, 2015****/****, 1940s, 2015, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Looney Tunes, Short Films

****/**** by Bill Chambers Given Bob Clampett's less-than-amicable departure from Warner Bros., not only is his final cartoon for the studio, The Big Snooze, a particularly loaded one, it also suggests a key influence on the evolution of Freddy Krueger's mythology. When Elmer Fudd tires of Bugs Bunny repeatedly steering him off the edge of a cliff in a cartoon-within-this-cartoon, he tears up his contract with Jack Warner and dances on the confetti. The delicate ecology of Looney Tunes thus upset (what is the hunted without a hunter?), Bugs disrupts Elmer's life of retirement by coating his pleasant dreams with…

Looney Tuesdays: “Slick Hare” (1947)

December 30, 20141940s, 2014, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Looney Tunes, Short Films

**/****directed by I. Freleng by Bill Chambers Old Hollywood may possess a timeless quality that prevents Slick Hare and others like it (Hollywood Steps Out, Hollywood Daffy, even 8 Ball Bunny) from becoming an instant relic à la the Michael Jordan-fronted Space Jam, but celebrity cameos in animation nonetheless have a habit of accelerating the ripening process. Gags like Ray Milland paying a tab with a typewriter--and getting change in the form of mini-typewriters--straddle the line between obsolescence and posterity, today only earning laughs among the movie-minded while also presenting a valuable snapshot of the pop-cultural consciousness circa 1947. Thing…

Looney Tuesdays: “Little Red Riding Rabbit” (1944)

December 23, 2014****/****, 1940s, 2014, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Looney Tunes, Short Films

****/****directed by I. Freleng by Bill Chambers The Shrek movies dream of being this renegade. Little Red Riding Hood (a brilliant Bea Benaderet, using a halting squeal that suggests the '40s equivalent of uptalk) is on her way to Grandma's house with a picnic lunch: Bugs Bunny. The Big Bad Wolf gets there first, of course, though he has to kick other wolves out of Grandma's bed. (Where's Grandma? "Working [the] swing shift at Lockheed." Wartime audiences must've howled, pardon the pun.) When Red arrives, the Wolf can't hustle her out fast enough in his desire to eat Bugs, and…

Looney Tuesdays: “Gorilla My Dreams” (1948)

December 16, 20141940s, 2014, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Looney Tunes, Short Films

**½/****directed by Robert McKimson by Bill Chambers Bugs Bunny floats in a barrel to the ape colony of Bingzi-Bangzi, where Mrs. Gorilla, in the throes of baby envy, mistakes him for a delivery from the stork. A sympathetic Bugs goes along with it, but her husband Gruesome--an obvious relative of Bunny Hugged's The Crusher--is vexed by the impostor, and opens up a can of whup-ass on "Junior." Although Bugs's pantomime of a gorilla brings down the house (Robert McKimson's paunchier Bugs really lends itself to the gag), ultimately the central conflict is too esoteric to sustain a 7-minute cartoon, as…

To Be or Not to Be (1942) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

October 29, 2013****/****, 1940s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, FFC Must-Own, The Criterion Collection, Thriller, War

Tobeornottobe2

****/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras A
starring Carole Lombard, Jack Benny, Robert Stack, Felix Bressart
screenplay by Edwin Justus Mayer, based on a story by Melchior Lengyel
directed by Ernst Lubitsch

by Walter Chaw Ernst Lubitsch took chances, none greater than To Be or Not to Be. Released in the first months of America’s involvement in WWII, in that initial flurry of propaganda that saw the Nazis as murderous, animalistic, inhuman Hun, Lubitsch chose instead to portray them as ridiculous, as human–to make a comedy, a farce…and a masterpiece, as it happens. It’s a crystallization of his work in that way: He’s always more interested in foible than in oppressive arcs of personal failure–if Nazis can be seen to be possessed of the same faults as the rest of us, the same vanities, the same fears. Make no mistake, To Be or Not to Be is no olive branch. Seventy years on, it remains among the most withering satires of totalitarian governments and the politics of groupthink, but it suggests that Nazism is just one of many insufficient sops to the insecurities hardwired into us–that we’re all just thin projections strutting and fretting our hour on the proverbial stage, each susceptible to things that would give relief from the pain of lack of self-confidence and identity. It’s a film that seeks to explain why people create cults of personality. That it sets itself amongst a theatre troupe performing “Hamlet”, itself a play that houses another play within itself (holding a mirror up to nature, indeed), makes total sense in a picture that, through this absurdity, seeks to highlight greater absurdities. Of all his great films (and when push comes to shove, I’d say Trouble in Paradise is and likely always will be my favourite Lubitsch), To Be or Not to Be is inarguably his greatest.

To Have and Have Not (1944) + The Big Sleep (1945/6) – DVDs

July 8, 2013****/****, 1940s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Romance, Thriller, War

TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT
****/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C
starring Humphrey Bogart, Walter Brennan, Lauren Bacall, Dolores Moran
screenplay by Jules Furthman and William Faulkner, based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway
directed by Howard Hawks

THE BIG SLEEP
****/**** Image B Sound B Extras C+
starring Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Martha Vickers, Dorothy Malone
screenplay by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett & Jules Furthman, based on the novel by Raymond Chandler
directed by Howard Hawks

by Walter Chaw While biographer Todd McCarthy refers to the two versions of Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep as marking the delineation point separating linear (early) Hawks from non-linear (later) Hawks, I feel like you can mark the director’s affection for bonzo non-sequiturs throughout his sultry To Have and Have Not. The picture tells its tale of immigrants marooned off the islets of war and sexual sophistication–an island bell jar and pressure cooker envisioned as a sequel of sorts to Casablanca. But where Casablanca‘s sex was mature and companionate (the sizzle replaced by simmer) and tinged with regret, To Have and Have Not has a slick of bestial sweat to it that promises that the explosion of really naughty stuff is looming rather than in the rear-view. (There’s no sexier film in all the Forties.) The story of the corrupt Vichy government and the brave French underground unfolding behind the red-hot flirtation between diplomatically non-affiliated fishing boat captain Harry “Steve” Morgan (Humphrey Bogart) and lost American teen “Slim” (Lauren Bacall) is punctuated helter-skelter by husky lounge numbers courtesy Slim and Cricket (Hoagy Carmichael) and riff sessions with Steve and Slim that have the cadence and unpredictability of jazz improvisation. It’s not so much a narrative as a medley in a bouncy key, and Hawks is not so much a director as a bandleader. Much has been made of Hawks’s skill in casting (and it’s hard to argue otherwise when he sniffs out the alchemical enchantment between old man Bogie and new thing Bacall (and Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell; and Dean Martin and a bottle)), but looking at To Have and Have Not–the first of Bogie/Bacall’s four collaborations–is to glimpse something more than a good casting eye: it’s to witness the evolution of a true musical genius. The rhythms are subterranean, the verses in between the words; to watch this and The Big Sleep (Hawks’s other collaboration with Bogie/Bacall) back-to-back is as close to rapture as this experience gets.

Monsieur Verdoux (1947) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

May 12, 20131940s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Chaplin, Comedy, Directors: Charles Chaplin, Drama, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

***½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Charles Chaplin, Martha Raye, Marilyn Nash, Isobel Elsom
screenplay by Charles Chaplin, based on an idea by Orson Welles
directed by Charles Chaplin

by Bryant Frazer Charles Chaplin augmented his trademark mix of physical comedy, sweetness, and lefty politics with a dose of suspense (borrowed, probably, from Hitchcock) and a sardonic worldview (informed, maybe, by film noir) in the playful, funny, but ultimately downbeat Monsieur Verdoux. In a scenario that originated with Orson Welles, who receives an “idea” credit, Henri Verdoux is a serial killer based on Henri Landru, a French Bluebeard who seduced, married, and then murdered a string of Parisian women in order to liberate their assets. Chaplin plays Verdoux as a charming fiend whose demeanour incorporates the barest echo of the Little Tramp, but whose murderous M.O. recalled the director’s own reputation as a womanizer.

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) + The Rains of Ranchipur (1955) [The Limited Edition Series] – Blu-ray Discs

February 1, 20131940s, 1950s, 2013, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Romance, Thriller

THE
POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE
***/****
Image B+
Sound A
Extras A
starring Lana Turner, John
Garfield, Cecil Kellaway, Hume Cronyn
screenplay by Harry Ruskin
and Niven Busch, based on the novel by James M. Cain
directed by Tay Garnett

THE
RAINS OF RANCHIPUR
**½/****
Image A
Sound A
Extras B
starring Lana Turner,
Richard Burton, Fred MacMurray, Michael Rennie
screenplay by Merle Miller,
based on the novel by Louis Bromfield
directed by Jean Negulesco

click
any image to enlarge

by
Jefferson Robbins There's a series
of doublings in The
Postman Always Rings Twice, Lana Turner's best-known
vehicle, that
illuminate its obscure title. Disillusioned young wife Cora Smith
(Turner) and
drift-through handyman Frank Chambers (John Garfield) try twice to make
way for
their illicit love by eliminating her diner-impresario husband, Nick
(Cecil
Kellaway). There are two court cases steered by suspicious chief
prosecutor
Sackett (Leon Ames) and defended by wonderfully shifty lawyer Arthur
"I'm
Handling It" Keats (Hume Cronyn). There are two moonlight swims, each a
turning
point in the criminal couple's courtship. Twice the action bends when
ailing
female relatives, never seen, summon a main character to their
sickbeds. There
are even two roadside-diner femmes fatale: Cora,
and her
double Madge (Audrey Totter), who diverts Frank while he's on the outs
with the
woman he killed to obtain. Finally, the murder itself creates a literal
echo.
These aren't anvils falling from the heavens, but instead
the patterns
life presents only in retrospect: This moment, that
day, that was
when God was trying to get my attention. Like Frank, we're too
preoccupied to
ever hear the first ring.

Notorious (1946) – Blu-ray Disc

January 6, 2013****/****, 1940s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Espionage, Romance, Thriller

****/****
Image B Sound B- Extras C+
starring Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Louis Calhern
screenplay by Ben Hecht
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Other than Psycho, the most examined, most carefully raked-through picture in Hitchcock’s filmography might be the cold, meticulous, perfect Notorious. It serves as a model for technique, offered as the pinnacle of Hitchcock’s early American period and used as proof by some that Hitch was a misogynist. The Dark Side of Genius author Donald Spoto wrote a fitfully interesting (if ultimately useless) article about how the first half of the film is a mirror image of the second–rising to a midpoint before diminishing at the end to the same composition as the first shot. (I’d argue that you could say the same for Shadow of a Doubt–particularly during the movie’s character-/setting- establishing sequences.) Stories of how the FBI began a file on Hitch because of his prescient use of uranium as his MacGuffin in Notorious are among the most beloved Hitch arcana, and critics who favour Lacan as the prism through which to analyze the Master of Suspense have found in the picture compelling demonstrations of spectatorship and gender construction. For Freudians, it has its Oedipal elements, its Madonna/Whore complexities–it’s a very fine historical relic, one of maybe only two of the director’s films (the other being Shadow of a Doubt) that’s ever entered into a noir conversation. And at the end–among those in the know, at least–it’s the better version, in every way that matters, of Casablanca. Robin Wood writes a brilliant piece on it in his second Hitchcock book, taking on previous brilliant takes by Laura Mulvey, Raymond Bellour, and Michael Renov. I probably like Raymond Durgnat’s quick-hit the best, however, for his pegging of the picture’s iciness and of Hitch at this moment as midway between idealistic and cynical (though I’d go farther and say he’s pretty much all the way cynical by now). Notorious is possibly, neck-and-neck with Vertigo, the best film Hitchcock ever made, though it’s seldom identified–unless you’re Francois Truffaut–as anyone’s favourite (leave that for the bitterest (North by Northwest), the most nihilistic (Psycho), the least sick (Rear Window)), and when the dust settles, the prospect of writing about it is almost as intimidating as pretending that there’s anything new to say about it. But here goes.

Les visiteurs du soir (1942) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

December 17, 20121940s, 2012, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Fantasy, France, Romance, The Criterion Collection

a.k.a. The Devil’s Envoys
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Alain Cuny, Arletty, Marie Déa, Jules Berry
screenplay by Jacques Prévert and Pierre Laroche
directed by Marcel Carné

by Jefferson Robbins Fairytale is the oldest way we know to exorcise trauma or repurpose it to didactic ends. The moving image, probably the newest. So Marcel Carné’s Les visiteurs du soir (literally, The Night Visitors, though its international title is The Devil’s Envoys), created in France during a period of repression equalled only by the Terror, pulls both tricks. It’s a film, therefore it’s not reality, but it’s also shaped as a magical courtly romance and set in a distant past where romances were both entertainment and cultural transgression. Gilles (Alain Cuny) and Dominique (Arletty) are figures out of a medieval fresco or some monk’s illuminated pages, from Gilles’s suggestively forked mullet to Dominique’s graceful, benedictory poses. The two are minstrels on horseback in 1485–when troubadours carried news, gossip, and forbidden literature from one feudal estate to the next, singing songs of organic, passionate love for nobles trapped in arranged marriages. A long way from Vichy France, under the Nazi occupation, yet either world offered death as punishment for dissent, and both found succour in art that trespassed boundaries.