Jean Vigo's Zero de conduite (1933)

 

All of Vigo's own wretched schooling was avenged in Zero de conduite, forty-four minutes of sustained, if roughly shot, anarchist crescendo.  The attempt by society to regiment raw childhood, and the failure of the attempt, are conveyed by the very tender high-angled photography.                                                                  -- David Thomson

Vigo's film brings back memories of one's childhood in school and all its arbitrary authority.  When I was in sixth grade our history teacher said she was going to leave us alone for a few minutes so she could prove to us the importance of authority.  We all erupted into chaos, wildly running around and throwing everything we could get our hands on.  I later regretted that I did not take upon myself the burden of organizing the class to prove the value of anarchy and self-government, as the teacher, Mrs. Shook, returned to point out how she was needed in the classroom to control things.  Vigo's film takes the approach of endorsing the fight against opression by the union of four students to lead the effective rebellion against the teachers who not only give out "zeros for conduct" but steal desserts from the students' lunches while the students are outside being marched around.  

Vigo unfortunately made only four films, including the lovely L'atalante, before dying at the age of 29, but his films were quite influential in Europe, especially on Truffaut and Lindsay Anderson, whose If.... (1968) was strongly influenced by Zero de conduite.

Turner Classic Movies September 2022

 September has a pretty solid line-up of films, but since most of the ones I like have been shown before on TCM you can look them up on this blog and if you don't find them send me an email and I'll tell you what I know and think about them.  The list here is just the major highlights.

Sept. 1:  Blake Edwards's marvelous visual comedy The Party (1968)

Sept. 4: Ernst Lubitsch's brilliant To Be or Not to Be  (1942)

Sept. 5:  G.W. Pabst's Pandora's Box (1929), starring Louise Brooks and Mark Sandrich's Shall We Dance, a wonderful musical comedy starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers

Sept. 12: King Vidor's great silent film The Crowd (1928)

Sept. 13:  Jean Renoir's American film The Woman on the Beach (1947)

Sept. 16:  Raoul Walsh's The Roaring Twenties (1939)

Sept. 18: Walsh's Manpower (1941), with Marlene Dietrich and Edward G. Robinson

Sept. 23: Nicholas Ray's great film noir In a Lonely Place (1950)

Sept. 24:  Budd Boetticher's beautifully austere Western Ride Lonesome (1959)

Sept. 26: Ermanno Olmi's soaring The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978)

Sept. 27: Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street  (1945)

Harold Kress's Apache War Smoke (1952)

 Harold Kress was primarily an editor, Apache War Smoke being one of the only three films he directed, in 1951 and 1952.  Not surprisingly the film is well edited, especially in the more active scenes of Apache attacks on a stagecoach station in the Southwest, with the staff and stagecoach passengers fighting off the attackers.  The enclosed spaces of the station are beautifully photographed in black-and-white by the estimable John Alton, whose brilliant cinematography was most effectively used in the films of Anthony Mann, such as Raw Deal (1948).  The script was written by Jerry Davis, who worked mostly in television, based on a story by Ernest Haycox, who also wrote the story that was the basis for John Ford's Stagecoach (1939).

The cast includes Hank Worden, a member of John Ford's stock company, and stars Gilbert Roland, an outlaw known as Peso, and Robert Horton as Peso's estranged son Tom. who manages the stage station.  Relations between the passengers become complicated and tense, with Apaches attacking the station in search of a murderer; gold from the stagecoach locked in box in a storeroom; a triangle of Tom, Nancy (stagecoach passenger and Tom's former lover, played by Barbara Ruick), and Lorraine (Patricia Tiernan), passing through with her soldier father.  Fanny Wilson (a vibrant Glenda Farrell), another stagecoach passenger, is a former lover of Peso's. Also present is Cyril Snowden (Gene Lockhart), a rather pompous employee of the stagecoach company who turns out to be pretty handy with a rifle. 

The film effectively demonstrates the tensions between the pioneering stagecoach routes and the Native Americans in a part of the country where there is no official law yet, as well as the tensions between those who follow the law and those who choose not to do so.  Kress's biggest achievement is not so much the effective battle scenes as creating individuals beneath the surface of the somewhat stereotyped characters, especially considering that the film is only 67 minutes long. 

Claude Chabrol's La Ceremonie (1995)

 Chabrol was one of the most enigmatic directors.  A fringe instigator of the original New Wave, he managed to create a world for himself -- some private Hollywood -- in which it was possible to produce a stream of subtle studies of human motivation.                                                                            

  -- David Thomson

Claude Chabrol was one of those directors whose films to which I always looked forward: he made more that fifty films between 1958 and his death in 2010.  He didn't always get the scripts or the actors or the money he wanted but he always persevered to make the film, including more that a dozen that I would call masterpieces, among La Ceremonie, from his late period, based on Ruth Rendell's Judgement in Stone and Jean Genet's The Maids.  The title refers to the march to the guillotine, though in this case it is a march to the death for a bourgeois family  (mother, father, two children) who hire a maid, Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire), and treat her condescendingly and patronizingly. Sophie, who manages to hide the fact that she is illiterate, becomes friends with a postal clerk Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert) who encourages Sophie to rebel.

Class distinctions are clear-cut in La Ceremonie, with Jeanne and Sophie watch variety shows on TV while their employer Madame Lelievre (Jacqueline Bisset) and her family watch Mozart operas. One can see this film as Chabrol saw it, as Marxist, but also as a warning about everything from keeping guns in the house to making sure you employees are properly vetted (both Sophie and Jeanne were suspected of murder) and not taking your bourgeois life for granted, though even if you do all these things one can never be certain of anyone's motivations.   The low-key cinematography for La Ceremonie is by Bernard Zitzerman and the effectively sparse score is by Mattieu Chabrol, Claude Chabrol's son. 

The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures: A True Tale of Obsession, Murder and the Movies by Paul Fischer

 Lizzie was certain Thomas Edison had something to do with her husband's disappearance.  Everyone knew he stole credit that wasn't his and Louis had vanished eight months before Edison had suddenly unveiled "his" Kinotoscope, so similar to Louis's invention.  Adolphe, too, was certain his father had been "eliminated."  It was said, after all, that Edison sometimes worked with Allan Pinkerton's National Detective Agency, whose squads infiltrated unions and violently broke up labot movements, whose armed watchmen could be relied on to do whatever it took to protect the financial interests of their clients.                                                                                                                                                                 Paul Fischer, The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures (Simon & Schuster, 2022)

Fischer makes a good case for Louis Le Prince as the inventor of the motion picture; his patents in America and Europe in 1890 were the first from a number of inventors working on this same idea.  But Le Prince disappeared in 1890 and no trace of him was ever found, therefore Louis's wife Lizzie could not invoke the patents until 1897, when Louis was declared officially dead and Thomas Edison had succeeded in manipulating his own patents in order to declare himself the inventor of motion pictures and to sue anyone who exhibited films as infringements on his invention (which was actually developed by Edison's employee William K. Dickson).  Le Prince's first film, Roundhay Garden Scene, was produced in 1888 but shown only to friends and not publicly shown.

Fischer's book is partly a defense of Le Prince as inventor of motion pictures -- including a great deal of technical detail -- but is also a history of others who were working towards the same end, including those we may have heard of, Georges Melies and the Lumiere brothers, as well as those we may not have heard of, William Friese-Greene and Etienne-Jules Marey.  Fischer's research is both deep and wide, from the France of Le Prince's birth to the time he spent in America and, mostly, in England, including the names of all his helpers and assistants.

Budd Boetticher's Westbound (1959)

Westbound is often ignored as a Boetticher Western because it does not have the single-minded and austere quality of the Ranown Westerns that Boetticher made around the same time, including Ride Lonesome, also made in 1959, that were written by Burt Kennedy and produced by Harry Joe Brown.   But Westbound is an excellent Western even if it is outside the cycle of Boetticher's more personal films.

Westbound stars craggy Randolph Scott as a Union officer in 1864 who is assigned to run a stagecoach company in Julesberg, Colorado that will make daily shipments of gold from California to the East to help the Union Army.  Julesberg is run by Southern sympathizers who will do all they can to stop Scott, including destroying stagecoaches full of innocent civilians. Scott also has to deal with his former lover, played by Virginia Mayo, who is now married to the town boss, as well as with Karen Steele, who is married to a disabled Union soldier, played by Michael Dante. The movie is beautifully photographed in Warnercolor, with its emphasis on greens and blues, by veteran cinematographer J. Pervell Marley, whose career began in the twenties and includes Jean Renoir's Swamp Water (1941).

When Scott has to shoot it our with the town boss's hired guns he is surprised to see the town's citizens show up to help (another rebuke of High Noon).  Virginia Mayo decides to head back East while Karen Steele, whose husband has been killed by the hired guns, stays to run the stagecoach station and hopes that Scott will eventually return, as he rides off at the end.

Payment in Blood by Elizabeth George (1989)

 "Dad?"  Barbara repeated.  He gave no answer. She walked into the room, lowered the volume, and turned to him.  He was asleep, his jaw slack, the tubes that fed him oxygen askew in his nostrils.  Racing magazines covered the floor near his chair and a newspaper was open over his knees.  It was too hot in the room, in the entire house for that matter, and the musty smell of her parents' ageing seemed to seep from the walls and the floor and the furniture.  This mixed with a stronger, more recent scent of food overcooked and inedible.                                                                                                                                       -- Elizabeth George, Payment in Blood (Bantam Dell, 1989)

This is the second of George's novels about posh Thomas Lynley and his working class partner at Scotland Yard Barbara Havers, who in this book are assigned to investigate a murder in Scotland among an acting and producing group gathered for rehearsals.  A continuity in the novels involves Lynley's infatuation with Lady Helen Clyde, who turns up in Scotland, sleeping with one of the actors, and not only provokes Lynley's jealousy but his jealousy interferes with the investigation of the murder, as well as a second murder in Scotland.  There are too many suspects and too many red herrings for my taste but George gradually moves to the most likely candidates, with Havers and Lynley both considerably influenced by their respective backgrounds, as everyone in the acting group has a secret in the past or in the present. George's prose is as rich and detailed as in the other two books in this group about which I have posted, and she deftly portrays the complex history and psychology of her characters.