Sang-soo Hong's The Day After (2017)

The Day After is one of three films that Sang-soo Hong made in 2017.  It's in beautiful black-and-white and like most of Sang-soo Hong's films it's about the communication or lack of it between men and women.  Bong-wan (Kwan Hae-kyo) has an early breakfast with his wife Hae-joo (Jo Yoon-he) where she questions him about his fidelity and he responds with passive-aggressiveness.  As Bong-wan walks to work in the quiet early morning there are flashbacks to his affair with Chang-sook (Kim Sae-byuk) and when he arrives at the publishing house he owns he greets the new employee Areum (Kim Min-hee), who has replaced the departed Chang-sook, and starts right in flirting with her.  Then Bong-wan's wife storms in and attacks Areum whom she thinks is Chang-sook.  After Hae-joo departs Chang-sook suddenly returns from abroad and Bong-wan fires Areum on her first day there.  Areum returns months later for a visit and Bong-wan does not even remember her, shades of Max Ophul's Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948).

The film is a series of two or three people in conversation, with Hong either keeping the camera still or moving it from person to person, depending on who is talking or what they are talking about.  Bong-wan, who feels sorry for himself and drinks too much, tries to negotiate with the three women by manipulating them but claims at the end he only cares for his daughter (whom we never see).   

Yasujiro Ozu's Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth 1932

 Japanese filmmakers were slow to switch to sound and Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth is a silent film; Ozu, like the elegant Chaplin, did not make a film with sound until 1936.  Where Now ... was Ozu's twenty-sixth film and something of a transition in both style and content:  he was still moving the camera fairly frequently but also starting to use the low-angle shots that became standard in his later films.  The film started out as a "student comedy," a popular genre in Japan at that time, but also embodied the class-consciousness, melancholy and family drama of later Ozu films.

The story is simple:  Tetsuo (Ureo Egawa) has to leave school  to take over the family business when his father dies; three of his friends eventually join his firm after he helps them cheat at a company test, just as he had helped them cheat in school.  Tetsuo meets his old love Shigeto (Kinuyo Tanaken) when he sees her moving to a cheaper place after the bakery where they met is closed.  They rekindle their romance until Tetsuo discovers that Shigeto has promised to marry Tetsuo's friend Saiki (Tatsuo Seito), who had already given his approval to Tetsuo's affair with Shigeto in gratitude to Tetsuo's hiring him and in obeisance to Tetsuo's authority. Tetsuo slaps Saiki around for so easily giving up Shigeto, another Ozu criticism of the Japanese hierarchical system.

The screenplay for Where Are Now Dreams of Youth is by frequent Ozu collaborator Kogo Noda and the cinematography by Hideo Shigehara, who photographed many of Ozu's silent films. 

For my previous posts about Ozu films see March 31 2015, Nov. 30 2015, May 15 2019.

T.A.M.I. Show, directed by Steve Binder

 The strange T.A.M.I. show (Teenage Awards Music International), filmed in California in 1964, is a snapshot of popular music of the time, going back with Chuck Berry and forward with The Rolling Stones, at the time basically a blues band, just prior to the release of "Satisfaction" and "Get Off of My Cloud."  It was a period when one listened mostly to AM radio (in my case WBZ when I was in prep school in New Hampshire and New York's WABC when I was home in Hudson, N.Y.); I was 17 in 1964 and listened mostly to pop music that, by that time, transcended the issue of race.  Included in T.A.M.I. are rhythm and blues (James Brown), Motown (The Supremes, The Miracles, Marvin Gaye), surf music (The Beach Boys as well as Jan and Dean, who were the hosts). English imports (Jerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, The Rolling Stones), teen-age angst (Leslie Gore) and a garage band (The Barbarians).  Each performed one, two, three or four songs (the movie, filmed on the high definition video of the time, did not necessarily include the complete sets of the performers), usually backed by energetically dancing go-go girls and boys. Leslie Gore, mostly forgotten now and a teenager then, sang "You Don't Own Me," a relatively early anthem of women's freedom.

The performers were raw and emotional, just as the filming was chaotic, with lots of running around to preserve continuous performing.  Before bands began playing Madison Square Garden and baseball stadiums it was common for rock shows to include multiple performers. At the time of the T.A.M.I. show Murray the K was doing regular shows of multiple bands at the Brooklyn Fox Theatre, including The Who.  But soon hit singles and AM radio were replaced by albums and FM rock, the music became more pretentious and we started to get single acts (sometimes with an opening act) in venues where we could hardly see them.  The audience of the T.A.M.I. show, incidentally,  was mostly young women who never stopped screaming and applauding.

Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher by Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz

 Ness's sense of humor didn't always play well in buttoned-down Cleveland, where people might approve of the Safety Director's on-the-job exploits but not his extracurricular activities.  One reporter called him "too handsome and self-centered to be popular with with the great bulk of hard-working conservative Clevelanders."

--Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz, Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher:  Hunting Down America's Deadliest Unidentified Serial Killer at the Dawn of Modern Criminology (William Morrow, 2020)

Do people remember Eliot Ness, played by Robert Stack in the TV series The Untouchables (1959-63) and by Kevin Costner in Brian De Palma's film of the same name in 1987?  Max Allan Collins wrote four novels about him in the 1980's, mostly covering his time in Cleveland, now the subject of a book co-written by Collins and historian A. Brad Schwartz.  After leaving Chicago when Prohibition ended Ness became Cleveland's Safety Director; the book is about his successes and failures in finding a serial killer while modernizing the police force in Cleveland.  He found the serial killer, he thought, but never produced enough evidence to arrest him, but he did succeed in adopting advanced techniques of ballistics and identification, fighting the police union to add African-American officers and requiring cops to be high school graduates. 

Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher is well documented, as it follows Ness from Cleveland to the office of Social Protection (protecting soldiers from venereal disease, mostly) in Washington during WWII.  After the war Ness returned to Cleveland, ran unsuccessfully for mayor and turned to alcohol and a number of dubious business positions, marrying three times and dying of a heart attack in 1957.  There is some obvious tension between novelist Collins wanting to tell a story and historian Schwartz not wanting to deviate from the known facts and details, but the result is fairly seamless in its accuracy about a particular person in a particular place at a particular time.

Robert Parrish's Saddle the Wind 1956

 Saddle the Wind is an okay, fairly routine Western, starring Robert Taylor as the retired gunfighter running his ranch with his trigger-happy younger brother, played by John Cassavetes, with an iconic screenplay by Rod Serling, beautiful widescreen cinematography by veteran George Folsey and music by Elmer Bernstein.  One of the film's themes is similar to King Vidor's Man Without a Star (1955):  barbed wire versus the open range.  Julie London has a relatively insignificant role as Cassavetes's intended wife but she does sing the title song beautifully.  Parrish's direction is passionate but fairly impersonal, though he had originally worked as an editor for John Ford, among other directors. The film is populated by an impressive group of character actors who span the history of Hollywood, from Donald Crisp (who goes back to silent films, appearing in movies by D.W. Griffith) to the more modern Royal Dano and Charles McGraw. The Cassavetes/Taylor struggle of the two brothers is the major theme, but the film also includes references to the Civil War and the benefits and deficits of the beginning of civilizing the West. Stolid Robert Taylor, near the end of his career, represents the past while Cassavetes, near the beginning of his career, represents the rebellious youth of the future.  For those who who enjoy London's singing I recommend her role in Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It (1956), where the distraught and inebriated Tom Ewell puts on a record of "Cry Me a River" and sees the image of London, his former lover, singing it wherever he turns. 

B Movies: Henry Levin's Night Editor (1946), Frank Strayer's Blondie Goes to College (1942), Robert Wise's Mystery in Mexico (1948)

 Night Editor shows some of the strength and weakness of the film noir genre, especially when it's adapted to the B movie.  The screenplay, by Hal Smith, is strong -- at one point married detective William Gargan says to his married lover Janis Carter, "You are pure, no-good, first rate, high grade A number one rotten," expressing his own self-loathing for his infidelity to his loyal wife Jeff Donnell after Gargan and Carter see a murder take place while they are on lovers lane. Cinematographer Burnett Guffey, who worked with directors Phil Karlson and Fritz Lang, captures Gargan's shadowy life as the cop assigned to the murder.  Director Henry Levin (he had a long and generally routine career) did a workmanlike job with the downbeat story, marred only by a "happy" ending, Gargan surviving after he tries to get Carter to confess what they had seen (the wrong person has been arrested for the crime) and she stabs him in the back with an ice pick.

The story is told in flashbacks by a newspaper editor and includes a significant class-conscious element, with Gargan slogging along on a cop's pay while Carter is married to a wealthy businessman.  Carter is neurotically attracted to violence and is excited about seeing the murdered girl in lovers lane, a view that is withheld from her but also from the audience. 

Blondie Goes to College was one of the twelve Blondie films directed by Frank S. Strayer, the earliest ones in the series that ran from 1938 to 1950, a total of 28 films.  Blondie and Dagwood were effectively portrayed by Arthur Lake and Penny Singleton, who became closely identified with comic artist Chic Young's creations.  As usual Dagwood can't stay out of trouble --co-eds find him strangely attractive -- while Blondie is romanced by sports star Larry Parks, as apparently married students were not allowed to matriculate. As usual Dagwood gets in a great deal of trouble and has to be rescued from his arrest for kidnapping his own child, whom Blondie and Dagwood had put in military school so they can go to college; WW II is never mentioned, however.  College is effectively satirised as a place where only parties and sports matter; Blondie and Dagwood are only shown in one classroom scene, where a professor of English makes little sense.  Dagwood goes out for crew and wrecks the championship race, as several jokes are made about "catching a crab." Whether this film represents "the male gaze" or "the castration of the American male" I will leave for others to decide.

Mystery in Mexico is one of those B movies that has something for everyone: a bit of mystery, a bit of noir, some romance and suspense, even an important role for a child.  It is directed by Robert Wise, who started out as an editor for Orson Wells, directed for Val Lewton (The Body Snatcher 1945), made an excellent film noir (Odds Against Tomorrow 1959) and ended up doing bloated musicals (The Sound of Music 1959).  William Lundigan plays an insurance investigator looking for some stolen diamonds in Mexico, where the movie was filmed (cinematography by Jack Draper, an American who worked mostly in the Mexican film industry), chasing Jacqueline White to Mexico, falling for Jacqueline Dalya and being set up by sleazy nightclub owner Ricardo Cortez.

These three movies each run just a little more than an hour, are breezy and intense and were meant to be enjoyed on double bills as an antidote to the more slowly paced, star-heavy main feature.  

Robert Mulligan's The Summer of '42 (1971)

 The Summer of '42 is a film about memory and memories are often different than what actually happened and in the film it is purposely not clear what did, in fact, happen.  Herman Raucher's story is supposedly based on his own experience but who knows if that is true or accurate.  16-year-old Hermie (Gary Grimes) has sex with twenty-something Dorothy (Jennifer O'Neill) after her husband dies in the war, but perhaps this is only a fantasy.  There is some humor about losing one's virginity, buying a rubber, caressing a girl's arm in the movies thinking it's her breast, etc.  Hermie and his friends roam an island during the summer; their parents never appear and the teen-agers appear to have complete freedom to basically horse around.  Robert Surtees's glossy cinematography and Michel Legrand's romantic music add to the adolescent fantasy of the plot.

Mulligan plays down the period stuff in the film (there aren't many cars on the island) and the fumbling teen-agers could be from any period, at least any period before the rise of social media, as Hermie goes to buy his first rubber at a local pharmacy, futilely trying to distract the pharmacist by purchasing a strawberry ice cream cone. Yes, it's a coming-of-age story, directed with the same sensitive feeling director Robert Mulligan has shown for children and teen-agers from his first film, Fear Strikes Out (1957) to his last, The Man in the Moon (1991).

Clean Hands by Patrick Hoffman (2020)

 Elizabeth Carlyle sat at her desk and considered the calls she could make.  For starters she could try Edwin Kerins, the most reasonable of Calcott Corporation's in-house counsel.  She'd explain to him that one of her junior associates had taken a copy of the documents out of the office. He had them on his phone, she'd say.  Yes, the phone was stolen.

--Patrick Hoffman. Clean Hands (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2020)

I do admit to reading a fair amount of genre books, so-called "thrillers" that usually aren't very thrilling (which is okay, since I don't particularly care for cheap thrills) though they might (and sometimes do) shed interesting light on human behavior.  Clean Hands is well-written and very modern in a way, with its Russian mobsters, cell phones, corporate lawyers and shadowy government conspiracies.  The two major characters are lawyer Elizabeth Carlyle and "fixer" Valencia Walker, whose attempts to find missing documents in a very important case take them all over Manhattan and Brooklyn, where surveillance cameras are everywhere and where people can be as carefully traced as the criminals in the tv drama "24."  Things move along so quickly, violently and illegally, that there is little time for Carlyle and Walker to emerge as characters; they are more like chess players with their associates and subordinates as the pieces to be moved around the city and Clean Hands, rather like The Brothers Karamazov, is a series of shaggy dog stories that never ends. 

Chantal Akerman's Je Tu Il Elle (1974)

Thanks to Turner Classic Movies I have begun seeing  Chantal Akerman's work before and beyond Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080, Bruxelles (see my post of July 7 2014), including Je Tu Il Elle, made the year before Jeanne Dielman, when Akerman was 24.  It's a film in three parts:  Akerman alone in her bare apartment eating sugar and writing letters; Akerman hitching a ride with a truck driver and listening to him recount the woes of working-class married life; Akerman with her girlfriend, eating and making love. The first and third parts are shot in high contrast black-and-white; the middle part takes place on the truck and rest -stops and is in grainy black-and-white.

The film is effectively downbeat, with Akerman finding life alone or with another woman or a man to be unsatisfying and at the end just walks out on her girlfriend, presumably to look elsewhere.  There is little dialogue and Akerman's narration in the first part is disorienting, as she describes in the present tense things that have already happened or are yet to happen.  In the second part the truck driver does all the talking while in the third part Akerman only speaks when she wants another sandwich and her lover hardly speaks at all, the implication being that we are all alone in this world, a common theme in Akerman's films, made with static shots and little camera movement. Je seems to mean Akerman, Tu is the viewer, Il is the truck driver and Elle is the girlfriend.

Dorothy Arzner's Merrily We Go to Hell 1932

 Merrily We Go to Hell is a comedy, with March and Sylvia Sidney, in which humor barely conceals the desperation of the brittle rich.

--David Thomson

Is there much that is gay or feminist about Merrily We Go to Hell, directed by lesbian Dorothy Arzner?  Of course one can always find a subtext if one looks hard enough; at one point dipsomaniac Frederic March says, "I prefer the company of men, especially if they are bartenders."  Sylvia Sidney decides to marry journalist and playwright March as a rebellion against her wealthy father, even though March when inebriated thinks she is his previous love, Adrianne Allen, whose picture he keeps on his bureau. March goes on the wagon and finishes his play, with Sidney's help and support, but starts drinking again when the lead in the play is given to Ms. Allen.  March asserts his freedom, causing Sidney to assert hers (this is a pre-code film!) and while March carries on with Allen, Sidney carries on with Cary Grant (in his fourth movie) until she finds she is pregnant and leaves March.  When March reads in his own newspaper that Sidney has given birth he rushes back to her in Chicago, where his father-in-law tells him the baby has died.  March forces his way into Sidney's room --she has been crying for him -- and finally tells her he loves her, though it is clear by now he loves liquor more.

This is a downbeat and depressing film about alcoholism during Prohibition, which did not end until 1933.  Arzner's camera (cinematography by David Abel) focuses on the mostly idle rich and their attempts to drown their sorrows during the Depression. Arzner even uses subjective shots to show how blurry the world looks to those who are drunk. Arzner was the only woman director in Hollywood during the early sound era and made 20 films before retiring, for unexplained reasons that probably had to do with the sexism of the studios.   In 1949 Ida Lupino became a director, the only female director in Hollywood during the fifties.  Gradually things are changing and Merrily We Go to Hell was screened on Turner Classic Movies as part of their tribute to women directors. 

Ken Loach's Sorry We Missed You 2019

 Since he made Kes in 1969 Ken Loach has made more than fifty films, mostly about the working class in England, generally in a neo-realist style influenced by De Sica and Rossellini; he is one of the few directors currently working, now 84, whose movies I look forward to.  Sorry We Missed You is the best film I've seen about workers in the "gig economy," where businesses convince workers they are self-employed before they screw them and their families. 

Ricky (Kris Hitchen) starts to work for a delivery company and has to sell his wife Abbie's  (Debbie Honeywood) car to buy the necessary van (otherwise he would have to "rent" a company one at a high rate).  This means that Abbie now has to take the bus to her elderly clients that she takes care of in her own gig job as a home health aide.  Abbie and Ricky have to work ridiculous hours in order to stay afloat and when they have to take time off to deal with their kids, one a teen-ager in constant trouble, they are docked for the time.  When Ricky is assaulted and robbed on the job he can't even afford to take time off to mend.

Sorry We Missed You was filmed in Newcastle and captures the difficulties and dilemmas of the working class and the gig economy in England.  Loach, as usual, mostly avoids didacticism and lets his observations speak for themselves.

Robert Mulligan's The Stalking Moon 1968

 I doubt that many of those who saw and loved the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) could tell you who directed it, so self-effacing was director Robert Mulligan.  Mulligan was a low-key and humanistic director who, intentionally, had little sense of personal style and was always in service to the story and the screenplay.  I have a certain amount of affection for Mulligan because his first film, Fear Strikes Out (1957), is not only one of the best films about baseball and the people who play it professionally -- in this case Jimmy Piersall, the eccentric outfielder for the Boston Red Sox -- but also a compassionate study of bipolar disorder and a father/son relationship. 

The Stalking Moon is Mulligan's only Western and could be seen as an imagined alternate ending to John Ford's The Searchers (1956).  In Mulligan's film retiring scout Gregory Peck takes home Eva Marie Saint and her son by an Apache (Nathaniel Narcisco) with whom she had been living for ten years after the Apache massacre of her family.  Her son's father pursues them, killing everyone they come in contact with as Peck brings home Saint and her son, leading to a showdown at Peck's ranch, where Peck's friend (Robert Forster) and older employee (Russell Thorson) are killed before the final showdown.

The Stalking Moon is a chaste and fairly routine Western, something I mean as a compliment, considering the conflicts going on in the world when it was made. Peck is stolid throughout, while Saint has little to do or say (she has mostly forgotten the English language) except for cooking and protecting her son. The beautiful widescreen color images are courtesy of cinematographer Charles Lang, a master of black-and- white (Fritz Lang's The Big Heat, 1953) as well as color.  The low-key script is by Alvin Sargent and Wendell Mayes.