A PROPOS DE NICE
***½
France
The first of Jean Vigo's four films: an early short satire of the
bourgeoisie, posing as a travelogue and unfolding solely through images - no
dialogue or title cards. Something of a curiosity piece, but
still quite fresh and evocative.
wr/dir: Jean Vigo
L'AGE D'OR
*****
France
Arguably the greatest and second-most influential of the features that came
out of André Breton's official Surrealist Group, this one was made right
after Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali's "Un Chien Andalou" (1929) and it proved even more
scandalous. (Banned in France within a week of its premiere, it
practically disappeared for the next forty years.)
The picture consists of
five barely related segments, the most prominent of which revolves around
a horny young couple fighting against obscure obstacles to consummate
their love. It's a fierce attack on the aristocracy and the Church - Buñuel's
perennial targets for the next 50 years - with a dream-like feel and lots
of abstract symbolism.
As you might suspect, it's not unpretentious and
neither is it flawless, but it's often savagely funny and bizarrely poetic
and just generally unlike anything else you'll ever see. (Dali also played
a major role in its conception, but abandoned the project after the first
day of shooting.)
dir: Luis Buñuel
wr: Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali
cast: Gaston Modot, Lya Lys, Max Ernst, Pierre Prévert,
Jacques Brunius
ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT
****½
ANNA CHRISTIE
***
USA
"Gimme a whiskey, ginger ale on the side. And don't be stingy,
baby." Garbo talks!
Garbo also contorts her face quite brutally, along with a
couple of veterans - they're alcoholics, you see. She looks beautiful and
seems to be carrying the best and most heartfelt intentions in her acting
approach, but she doesn't pull it off half as well as the mannered,
theatrical, incomparable Marie Dressler, who has a ball as a drunken old
tramp near the start, and then practically disappears from the film all
too soon.
dir: Clarence Brown
cast: Greta Garbo, Charles Bickford, George Marion, Marie
Dressler
ANIMAL CRACKERS
****½
THE BLOOD OF A POET
***
THE BLUE ANGEL
****
CITY GIRL
**½
USA
A city waitress marries into the country.
Reportedly this project was taken out of Murnau's hands at
the last minute, and it shows. He goes over much of the ground he covered
in "Sunrise" (1927), but the beauty and
sensitivity of that picture are missing. There's little left.
dir: F. W. Murnau
cast: Charles Farrell, Mary Duncan, David Torrence, Edith
Yorke, Dawn O'Day
EARTH
****½
USSR
A landowner faces antagonism in a Ukrainian village.
An artful, poetic meditation on the natural cycle of birth and death.
Rather than as demonstrations of technical bravado, the elaborate montages
serve as cinematic ceremonies to the beauty and vitality, the joys and
cruelties of nature and humanity as its offspring. Although indulgent in
its earnestness, it carries a strong weapon in the peasants' authentic,
mesmerising faces, with their skin hardened and reddened by decades of battling the
fields. Although financed as a lesson in collectivisation, it differs
distinctly in tone from other Soviet propaganda of the period (which is
why it ran into some trouble with the censors).
wr/dir/ed: Alexander Dovzhenko
ph: Danilo Demutsky
cast: Semyon Svashenko, Stephan Shkurat, Mikola Nademsky,
Yelena Maximova
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LITTLE CAESAR
***½
USA
The story of Rico Bandello was among the first half-dynamic Hollywood
talkies and, although not the first, probably the defining gangster
picture. Though it's more alive and engaging than a lot of things made
around the time, it hasn't dated sensationally well. As directed by the
rarely exciting Mervyn LeRoy, it lacks the zest and tension of the other
genre-defining classics, like Scarface and The Public Enemy.
But in his star-making role, Edward
G. Robinson is still vivid and wonderful to watch. He went on to do much
more nutritious parts but remained closely identified with Rico throughout
his career.
dir: Mervyn LeRoy
cast: Edward G. Robinson, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Glenda
Farrell, William Collier Jr., Ralph Ince, George E. Stone, Thomas Jackson,
Lucille LaVerneMOROCCO
*****
MURDER
**
UK
An actor serving as a juror at a murder trial is
convinced the accused young actress is innocent.
Dated, leaden melodrama from Hitchcock's early years.
dir: Alfred Hitchcock
cast: Herbert Marshall, Norah Baring, Phyllis Konstam, Edward
Chapman, Miles Mander
PEOPLE ON SUNDAY
***½
PRIX DE BEAUTÉ
***
France
A bored typist enters the Miss Europe beauty pageant despite her fiancé's
objections.
One of those movies begun as a silent, with dialogue crudely dubbed in
later. You can tell it's European because it prizes the young woman's
liberty over the righteous path her selfish working-class boyfriend
represents. Sadly, it veers further and further into melodrama as it goes
along, but Brooks remains remarkably naturalistic throughout. Against
odds, she fleshes out a relatable character and grants the picture some
dignity. A strikingly beautiful, clearly intelligent woman, this was her
first French production and last major screen role. Her singing voice is
none other than Edith Piaf's. René Clair is credited with the original
idea and, though it's easy to see why he passed it on to someone else, you wish he'd stuck
around a bit longer.
dir: Augusto Genina
cast: Louise Brooks, Georges Charlia, Augusto Bandini,
André Nicolle
SALT FOR SVANETIA
****½
USSR
A haunting, superbly crafted propagandist docudrama about an isolated,
impoverished Georgian community and its various customs and rituals, which
verge on pagan and self-destructive. Highly reminiscent of
Alexander Dovzhenko's "Earth" - and in many ways its equal - but sadly forgotten.
wr/dir: Mikheil Kalatozishvili
ph: Shalva Gegelashvili, Mikheil Kalatozishvili
THE TALE OF THE FOX
*****
France
The gullible, much-abused animal kingdom turns against the crafty, amoral
Fox.
One of the earliest feature-length animated films, this
dazzling, delightful stop-motion masterpiece has been criminally
neglected. It took
ten years for forgotten genius Starewicz and his team to finish it, and they reportedly
went through great pains to achieve the creatures' realistic look. But
beyond marveling at the technical innovation, the great joy of this - and
Starewicz's other films - is to watch even the technical limitations
overwhelmed by an odd, dark and wonderful imagination, with delightful,
distinctly individual characters and gorgeous, meticulously detailed sets.
dir: Ladislaw Starewicz
voices of: Claude Dauphin, Romain Bouquet, Laine, Sylvain
Itkine, Léon Larive, Robert Seller, Eddy Debray, Nicolas Amato, Pons,
Sylvia Battaile, Suzy Dornac
UNDER THE ROOFS OF PARIS
***½
France
A Parisian street singer falls for a shy Romanian girl involved with a
gangster.
Clair uses mostly music and a minimum of dialogue, opting
instead to
structure this film as a silent one, which detracts from its energy -
particularly in the first half hour. But it offers charming, naturalistic
performances, and a number of wonderfully romantic scenes - as well as a
stunningly staged final showdown - that stack up to leave you feeling good.
wr/dir: René Clair
ph: Georges Périnal
cast: Albert Préjean, Pola Illery, Gaston Modot,
Edmond Gréville
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