Onward through the AFI 100! You know what all three of these movies have in common? They are all long, dangit. I'd already seen Vertigo and Schindler's List, though, so I only really had to watch one. And who am I kidding? It's a privilege to watch movies, not a chore; I need to stop complaining so much.
Interested about the details of this series? Check out my commencement post. Otherwise, read on.
Of the three movies on this list so far that I've just now watched for the first time, Lawrence of Arabia is the first one that I've felt is legitimately great. For sure, it's a '60s Epic with a capital E, and thus has all the usual trappings: exotic locales, historical setting, "cast of thousands" battle scenes, excessive runtime. I probably should have mentioned this back in my Gone with the Wind response, but I'm generally not the biggest fan of the old Hollywood epic style; so many of those characteristics I've listed above (especially the exoticism and length) tend to feel excessively cumbersome to me. And yet... Lawrence of Arabia pulls it off magnificently. Seriously, the film almost—almost—earns its nearly four-hour length, which is really something coming from me. The biggest factor in the film's success has to be its cinematography, which is gorgeous—I mean, holy crap is it gorgeous. In a movie full of battles and tense political conversations, it's a testament to the utter beauty of the camerawork and direction on display here that the moments that thrilled me most in the whole picture were the silent ones when the camera lingers on a landscape or a stunningly composed detail. The desert—filmed, Wikipedia informs me, in Morocco, Jordan, and Spain—is practically a character unto itself, such is the vibrancy of the imagery; whenever the camera captures a low sun splaying its light over dunes cut by the long shadows of some desert riders: perfection. Another thing that sets Lawrence of Arabia apart from its epic brethren is the line delivery, which is probably equally indebted to the smart screenplay and sharp acting. Peter O'Toole is no Charlton Heston, and his more naturalist portrayal of the titular Lawrence within already more natural dialogue does a lot to help the film avoid the stagey and portentous aspects of a work like Ben Hur (which we'll get to a little while later in this project, actually). So yeah, great acting, neat script, beautiful cinematography: it's a winner in my book. Man, that cinematography.
There's a certain corner of film criticism out there that will dismiss Schindler's List as emotionally manipulative. And they're right. But you know what else is emotionally manipulative? Every single movie ever made. To paraphrase Picasso, filmmaking is a lie. Every cut, every note of score, every bit of acting is part of an overarching scheme to manipulate an audience into feeling a certain way; the trick is to justify that manipulation with beauty, philosophy, entertainment, sophistication, or some other content that makes the moviegoing experience worth something to the viewer, which is the hard part. So is Schindler's List manipulative? You betcha. Does it justify it? I'd argue that it does in bucketfuls, but that, of course, is a matter of taste. I've heard people argue that touches like the girl in the red coat or Schindler's "one more person" speech at the end are thudding examples of uncalled-for manipulation that compromise the impact of the film, but for me, moments like those are among the movie's most powerful. I think the film is a masterpiece, a powerful statement about the cruelty of humanity against itself and the small pockets of light that try to push back against that cruelty. Stanley Kubrick may be right in noting that Schindler's List is less about the Holocaust's six million deaths than the six hundred survivors in the titular list (though for a movie about the living, Schindler's List spends a whole lot of time showing people die), but I don't think that's a failing on the movie's part. Schindler's List wants to contrast what humanity should do against what it's done, and on that rubric, it's a moving success.
You won't hear me saying that Vertigo isn't a great movie, 'cause it certainly is. It is an exceptionally clever, complex film that straddles an impressive number of genres, from the thriller/mystery of its opening beats to the romance of the middle passages to the arthouse touches of the film's more experimental moments, and it's definitely the most thematically dense of the Hitchcock movies I've seen (which are numerous). The mirroring of those themes in the film's cinematography is fantastic, too. I'll admit that this is one of those movies that I last watched a long time ago, so I can't recall many of the specifics, but I do remember that it's got probably the all-time greatest use of the dolly zoom ever. So there's that. But even considering all those wonderful things, Vertigo is still not my favorite Alfred Hitchcock movie, and I sometimes feel that its recent critical reappraisal as not only Hitchcock's best but one of cinema in general's best is maybe just the tiniest bit inflated. It's too long, for one, and shaggy in ways that Hitchcock movies usually aren't. Also, while I'm not one of those people who considers black and white film to be inherently superior to color, I do think that Hitchcock is a director whose work is much better suited to b&w, especially given the color film tech popular at the time. Something like North by Northwest is fine because it's a fun romp, but the darker tone of Vertigo suffers from the more pastel aspects of the film's coloring. It's a personal thing, I guess, but I much prefer the tighter genre pictures in Hitchcock's filmography, to Vertigo. Don't get me wrong: I really, really like Vertigo; it's just that if given the choice between it and something like, say, Psycho, I know which one I'd choose.
Well, that's it for the first nine. There's a long stretch of movies coming up on the list that I've already seen, so I should fly through those responses pretty quickly. Until next time!
If you want to look back, you can read #4-6 in the series here.
Update: You can read ahead to #10-12 in the series here.
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