100 Years...100 Movies 46-48: It Happened One Night, A Streetcar Named Desire, Rear Window

Hello all! I'm working my way through AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list, giving thoughts, analyses, and generally scattered musings on each one. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

I said last time that I had to wait for DVDs to trickle in, and trickled they have. Well, one has at least. Still waiting on more for next time, but hey, at least we've got A Streetcar Named Desire!

46. It Happened One Night (1934, Frank Capra)
Now this is a fun one. Watching it today, there's nothing especially groundbreaking about it, and as far as I know, it wasn't all that groundbreaking back in 1934 either. In fact, It Happened One Night is downright conventional. It's plot—entitled lady runs away from her oppressive upper-class lifestyle, along the way meeting a dashing stranger with whom she bickers long enough to fall in love with—is one of the most dogeared sections in the romantic comedy playbook, and the rest of the production follows suit, remaining comfortable within the established rules of the filmmaking game. But innovation be darned! Over and over again, It Happened One Night proves that it doesn't matter how conventional or groundbreaking a movie is so long as it is executed well. The whole film is just such a pleasure to experience. The screenplay is fast and funny, the cinematography is playful, and Gable and Colbert have an infectiously delightful chemistry on screen. They both look like they're having the times of their lives. Also, the film is super sexual, which was a fun surprise for me when I first saw it. Like, sex is everywhere. Given that the film concerns several things that take place over several nights, I'm half convinced that the It in the title must refer to the you-know-what and that One Night is the wedding night at the end. That last shot (i.e. the curtain dropping) is one of the funniest, most sexually forthright (yet somehow understated) moments I've ever seen in a mainstream Hollywood movie from this era. The rest of the film flirts around innuendo admirably, but there's no beating around the bush (so to speak) in that last moment; that falling curtain is as cheekily unsubtle as a movie can get short of a flashing "gratuitous sex scene" marquee a la Wayne's World. Then again, maybe my surprise has more to do with my ignorance of cinematic history than anything. Wikipedia informs me that It Happened One Night was one of the last rom-coms produced in pre-Code Hollywood. So maybe some of you more film-literate readers can tell me if this film is an anomaly or not.

47. *A Streetcar Named Desire (1951, Elia Kazan)
Blanche DuBois is an impressive feat of a character. On the one hand, she's a nearly intolerable tangle of contradictions, someone who's so caught up with appearances and her elitist ideas of what makes human beings worth her attention that it's often a relief when she exits a scene. The fact that she spends at least half the plot lying through her teeth and being just generally phony makes her presence all the more unbearable. There are several characters vying for contempt in A Streetcar Named Desire, but, for all of Stanley's frightening violence, Blanche is by far the most grating. This is true in both the play and movie adaptation (which is impressively faithful to the play while somehow also avoiding feeling like a play itself—lookin' at you, The Philadelphia Story). And yet, on the other hand, the movie somehow avoids viewing Blanche with contempt. Instead, the film (and, by extension, we as an audience) feels compassion for the poor woman. There's no schmaltzy heart-tugging or anything, but just the right amount of humanity in the depiction of her broken neuroses. If I had to pinpoint the source of this humanity, I'd have to split the credit three ways among Tennessee Williams's script, Vivian Leigh's performance, and the cinematography. Lines like "I've always depended on the kindness of strangers" land like bombs, and Leigh's acting is tinged with just enough desperateness to color Blanche with this compellingly primal fear of disappearing into the shadows of society. And speaking of shadows, the cinematography is particularly lush in its representation of Blanche, always cross-cutting her figure with both blinding light and lush darkness, and I'll be darned if you can film someone with such sensitivity without giving rise to at least a little feeling for the person. I've spent this whole post talking about Blanche, which is unfortunate, given the excellence of the rest of the movie, too. I'll close by posing this mostly irrelevant question: do I detect shades of Marlon Brando's Stanley fifty years later in James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano? You Sopranos fans out there let me know!

48. Rear Window (1954, Alfred Hitchcock)
One of the great things about Rear Window (and there are a lot of them) is that it takes a high-concept premise and turns it into something that feels a lot bigger than that premise would seem to allow, something of intellectual and even philosophical depth. This is a particular strength of Alfred Hitchcock, and he does it time and time again, perhaps to the most acclaim in Vertigo but also to lesser degrees in Psycho, Suspicion, Rebecca, and any number of his other films. With Rear Window, we have the mostly pulpy premise of a man who is confined to his room by an injury witnesses his neighbor commit what looks like murder. It's a fun narrative hook, and the plot plays out pretty much in the same fun, pulpy vein. There are great visceral thrills to be had in Rear Window, and if thrilling were all that the film was up to, it would be a resounding success. But, as is the case with Psycho, Vertigo, et al., these thrills are delivered through Hitchcock's direction, and what direction it is! Without Hitchcock, it's a fun movie. With Hitchcock, it's a movie about existentialism, about psychosexual tension and voyeurism, about the unreliability of perspective, about the mysterious ways in which the world develops in leaps and bounds when we aren't there to see it. A lot of those things are hinted at in the screenplay, but it's the direction that really brings the themes to full bloom. I'd also like to note that while Rear Window is definitely about ideas, it never ceases to be great entertainment, either. If you don't care about the ideas, that's totally fine; there's plenty else to enjoy. Hitchcock was a master of this type of two-track cinema, where the film is both accessible and intellectual while being neither dumb nor esoteric (or esoterically dumb, for that matter). The only contemporary director I can think of who consistently manages this balance even close to as well as Hitchcock did is Christopher Nolan, and, c'mon, even he can't hold a candle to ol' Alfred.

As always, it's great to hear what y'all think about the stuff I ramble about here. Until next time!

If you feel so inclined, you can read the previous post in the series, #s 43-45, here.
Update: The next post, #s 49-51, is up right here.

100 Years...100 Movies 43-45: Midnight Cowboy, The Philadelphia Story, Shane

Hello all! I'm working my way through AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list, giving thoughts, analyses, and generally scattered musings on each one. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

We've reached a section of the list where there are quite a few movies I haven't seen yet. This is exciting for me, as it means I'll be getting to experience lots of classics for the first time, but it might be tedious for you readers who want me to hurry up and finish this project already. Expect delays as I wait for Netflix DVDs to trickle in.

43. *Midnight Cowboy (1969, John Schlesinger)
I ended up liking Midnight Cowboy a whole lot more than I thought I would. Maybe because of its legacy as the only X-rated movie to ever win the Academy Award for Best Picture, I had filed Midnight Cowboy in my mind somewhere alongside Natural Born Killers and Fritz the Cat as one of those films whose primary artistic and historic significance was that it broke those taboos. I'm not a big fan of taboo-breaking just for the sake of it, and movies that are interested in doing so generally have a pretty short shelf life. I'm happy to announce that Midnight Cowboy is not one of those movies. Sure, there's maybe some shocks for a 1960s audience (though nothing that would have earned the film anything above an R rating even a few years after its release[1]), but the film has a tender core to it that makes the would-be shocks actually artistically relevant. John Voight's titular cowboy is a sweet but damaged individual, damage that extends to the seedy world around him and makes his relative innocence (and pre-film loss of it) all the more poignant. I was also surprised at how visually engaging the movie is, with the cinematography and editing taking numerous cues from avant-garde and world cinema. The mid-film dream sequence is particularly stunning, mixing fractured editing with both color and black-and-white film in a way that makes for a strikingly efficient method of delivering exposition. Mix the visual inventiveness with that immortal "I'm walkin' here!" improvisation from Dustin Hoffman (who is, by the way, excellent throughout), and you've got yourself a good movie.

44. *The Philadelphia Story (1940, George Cukor)
There's a stretch of The Philadelphia Story where the film actually feels like one of the greatest movies of all time and probably one of the top five best romantic comedies ever. That stretch is the thirty-ish minute sequence that begins with the party on the night before Katharine Hepburn's character's wedding and lasts up to about fifteen minutes before the movie ends. During that sequence, The Philadelphia Story is excruciatingly funny, complex, and thrilling, and the plot is impressively choreographed throughout the relatively confined locations of the party. This sequence confirms what It's a Wonderful Life only hints at, which is that James Stewart (who deservedly won an Oscar for his role in this movie) plays an amazing drunk. Come to think of it, the party and post-party scenes probably work as well as they do because every character is drunk, loosening up the otherwise quite stagey dialogue elsewhere in the film. I can't stress enough just how mesmerizing and hilarious every single cast member is here once their characters get a few drinks in them. When they're sober, though (and, unfortunately, they are sober most of the rest of the movie), The Philadelphia Story doesn't work nearly as well. I dropped the word "stagey" a few sentences back, and I meant that literally; this movie is based on a play, and for much of its runtime, it shows. The shots are lethargic and even static, with characters entering and exiting the frame as they would a live stage. The dialogue, too, simply reeks of the sort of starched intricacy that stage dramas can pull off because it fills out the otherwise stripped-down nature of the medium. Cinema, however, (and particular Hollywood cinema) is rarely stripped down, and consequently, the dialogue often feels overwritten. Also, the character work is troublingly dodgy, as the script doesn't do nearly enough to interrogate the male characters' misogyny (a possibly minor problem if you're one to forgive a movie's dated politics) or, worse, develop Cary Grant's character as a compelling love interest (a huge problem once the film's finale rolls around). All of this makes the non-night-before-the-wedding scenes kind of a drag, although I can't knock Jimmy Stewart in the slightest (he's stupendous throughout). Those night-before-the-wedding scenes, though: golden.

45. Shane (1953, George Stevens)
"Shane, come back! Shaaaane!" Poor little Brandon deWilde is definitely the weak link in the cast. But he tries his best as Joey, and there's no denying that he sells the crap out of that final line delivery. His plaintive cried for his hero to return is one of the saddest, most sincere moments from any movie on this list, and as iconic scenes in Westerns go, this one ranks up there with any put to film by John Ford or Sergio Leone. What makes that ending even more effective is that it's not just a one-sided lament; though he's put a straight face on it, Shane himself is genuinely grieved to leave as well. His is a more existential sadness than the raw abandonment that Joey experiences, as he realizes that the insuppressible violence that defines his character is incompatible with the compassionate, domestic life he tries to adopt for much of the film's duration. He understands that he is doomed to be lonely and unhappy, separated from meaningful human contact by the heroic role he is compelled to adopt. Shane is one of the earliest self-reflective Westerns I can think of (followed a few years later by the granddaddy of all self-reflective Westerns, The Searchers), and that conflict of the irreconcilability of gunslinger violence with happiness is central to its questioning of genre tropes. There's a typical Western romance to Shane's lone gunman heroism, but there's also the decidedly unromantic subtext that Shane yearns to break free of the role the movie forces upon him. But of course, characters can't do that unless their movies allow them to. Tragically, Shane doesn't.

I'll try to post again soon, but as I said earlier, I gotta wait for those darn discs. In the meantime, feel free (as always) to let me know what you think of these or any movies. Until next time!

You can read the previous post, #s 40-42, here.
Update: Read ahead to the next post, #s 46-48, here.

1] 1969 falls within that magical period of maybe five years in which the X rating actually meant what it was supposed to mean, before the R rating got a ridiculously high ceiling to hedge out the increasingly explicit higher rating. Thanks, pornography. Thanks, MPAA.

100 Years...100 Movies 40-42: The Sound of Music, King Kong, Bonnie and Clyde

Hello all! I'm working my way through AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list, giving thoughts, analyses, and generally scattered musings on each one. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

I've already seen all three of these movies, so sorry for the lack of asterisks and still-fresh-out-the-oven insights. Now, without further ado...

40. The Sound of Music (1965, Robert Wise)
It's been a while since I dusted off this critique, so here it goes: The Sound of Music is too dang long. That's honestly my main problem with it. Back when I covered Singin' in the Rain, I discussed a few reasons why I tend to dislike musicals. Well, here's another reason I didn't mention: musicals, especially of this time period, are often draggy, bloated versions of the story they should be telling. Case in point: The Sound of Music. If some studio executive had burst into the cutting room and said, "For goodness sakes, why don't you make this movie about forty minutes shorter?", this movie would have been better by at least a factor of ten, provided that Robert Wise and his editors cut the right forty minutes. And by the right forty minutes, I mean that tedious middle third of the movie with the Maria-Elsa-Capt. Von Trapp love triangle and the happy family hand-holding and the endless, endless dinner parties. Oh, and "The Sound of Music" is a super boring song; just thought I'd throw that in there. It's a pacing issue, really, where most of The Sound of Music's plot happens at the beginning and end of the movie, and for that reason, I almost never watch the movie the whole way through, despite network TV's obvious desire for me to do so every December. The broken pacing is a pity because it mars what is elsewhere a delightful movie. Julie Andrews is, of course, as wonderful and winsome as ever (although if I'm being honest, I would have preferred that Mary Poppins replaced The Sound of Music as her representation on AFI's list, since Mary Poppins is awesome), and the songs not named "The Sound of Music" are all fun, well-choreographed, and super-duper catchy. Then there's the climax, where the film becomes a surprisingly tense action-thriller, and the nuns get to enact a great punchline at the end. All good stuff. But only like 110-130 minutes of good stuff, not 170-ish.

41. King Kong (1933, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack)
In the long run, special effects aren't really about making impossible things look "real." Okay, yeah, I know that isn't entirely true; the landmark effects in films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Forrest Gump are cinematic touchstones to this day pretty much because they make clearly false images (interplanetary space ships, Tom Hanks mooning LBJ) seem as if they actually happened. And most special effects have that purpose at their initial inception, to allow us to see in a somewhat convincing way what we would never see otherwise. That may as well be a thesis statement for the movies: to let us experience something fake under the guise of it actually occurring in front of our eyes. But still, the older I get, the more I think that the ultimate worth of special effects isn't in how convincing they look but in their aesthetic merits as artistic images, in the same way that the worth of a painting isn't necessarily in its photorealism. Effects don't need to look "real," but they do have to look "good," and by that I mean they should be inventive, visually arresting, and make worthwhile contributions to the movie's style. All special effects will eventually look dated and unrealistic; however, if they're creative and interesting, they'll have staying power long past the shelflife of their convincingness. I say all this to point out that if you think special effects need to look "real" (as I did when I first saw King Kong—sorry, Dad, you tried), you're going to think King Kong's suck. Call it a hazard of being an eighty-year-old fantasy film. But if you can get past the obvious fakery of the stop-motion, rear projection, etc., there are bucketfuls of personality and artistry in the film's effects that makes them still pretty great even today. It's not real, especially when the creatures interact with the human characters, but it sure is fun to look at. Think of it like Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but with stop-motion instead of cel animation. I have to admit that I didn't always view it this way. When I was younger, I just couldn't ignore how cheesy everything looked and, unfortunately, the uncanny resemblance between Kong and the Abominable Snow Monster from that old Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Christmas special. But now, I've begun to feel that cheese is pretty nice. Especially when it's this much fun to experience. Realism be darned.

42. Bonnie and Clyde (1967, Arthur Penn)
Before anything else, I just want to call attention to how fantastic that poster is. I love how the bullet holes on the windshield give Bonnie's expression just a twist of ambiguity, that she could either be in the throes of laughter or in the agony of a wound. Anyway, moving on to the actual film, my feeling is that Bonnie and Clyde is another one of those "you just had to be there" movies, though perhaps not quite as dire of an example as The Best Years of Our Lives. I like the movie and all, but I don't think it's great, and I wonder if my lack of strong feelings has to do with how removed the present cultural moment is from that of the late '60s, especially cinematically. I have no doubt that the violence and complicated sexuality were startling and impactful innovations in 1967; in 2014, they are not. Neither is the movie's apparent amorality nor its framing of outlaws as countercultural heroes. In the nearly fifty years since the release of Bonnie and Clyde, punk, hip-hop, Hot Topic, the American indie film movement, and a whole truckload of other cultural factors have thrust the youth-in-revolt movement so firmly into the mainstream American identity that Bonnie and Clyde's '60s-era brand of recklessness and desperation feels very far away indeed. That's not to say that people aren't still reckless and desperate, but the movie's concept of those feelings seems to manifest itself differently than that in our contemporary society [1], in the same way that I imagine that the political and emotional aspirations of something like the reimagined Battlestar Galactica TV series will feel a little incongruous to audiences forty years from now when the W. Bush presidency isn't something everyone experienced firsthand. Maybe I'm wrong about this, though. Maybe it's just me, and everyone else in my generation thinks this movie is the bee's knees. If so, maybe I'm just out of touch. Maybe I'm alienated from my society. Maybe I should start robbing banks.

Or maybe I'll just keep blogging. Until next time!

You can read the previous entry in this series, #s 37-39, here.
Update: The next post, #s 43-45, is up here.

1] That being said, the movie did gain some accidental relevancy a couple years ago when the whole bank robbing thing sort of aligned the film's protagonists with the Occupy movement.

100 Years...100 Movies 37-39: The Best Years of Our Lives, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Dr. Strangelove

Hello all! I'm working my way through AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list, giving thoughts, analyses, and generally scattered musings on each one. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

Judging by the number of pageviews my last post got, it seems that people really like reading about Disney princesses. Regrettably, there's nary a princess in any of these movies, and two of them don't even feature significant female characters at all. Welcome to the AFI, folks.

37. *The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, William Wyler)
This movie bored me. I'm sorry. I hate that word, "boring," because it's a critique that never really goes anywhere productive. But boredom was the overriding feeling I got while watching The Best Years of Our Lives. The cinematography is flat, much of the acting feels phoned-in, and the plot lacks a clear structure and compelling stories. It's not for lack of trying on the plot's part, though, as I gather (from the largely didactic and tiresome score that plays throughout most of the film) that the movie at least intends to make me feel very deep emotions throughout. And it seems to have managed to swell those emotions in other people, given its placement on this list and the fact that it pretty much swept the Academy Awards back in '46. Heck, Roger Ebert even liked it. It just didn't click for me, though. Part of me wonders if this is just one of those "you just had to be there" movies (though, unless he's a time traveler, Roger Ebert wasn't "there" either). There's no question that the concept of soldiers returning home after WWII was a lot more immediate in 1946 than it is today. Its thematic territory might have felt a little fresher back in the '40s, too; by 2014, we've had dozens of movies, documentaries, TV shows, and books, chronicling the challenges soldiers face when trying to reenter domestic life after being in combat, and conditions like PTSD and some of the other emotional and psychological trauma experienced by those men and women have reached a decent level of mainstream awareness. Looking back almost seven decades to The Best Years of Our Lives, I can't help but find the whole thing a little uninspired and uncompelling, not because of the subject matter (that will always be important) but because of the relatively trite way in which it engages that subject matter. This movie seems content to say, "Yeah, it's hard for soldiers to return home after war," and leave it at that, whereas so many other movies since then have dug deeply into the specific whys and hows of the soldiers' difficulties. It isn't all bad; the early sequence depicting the soldiers' first night back with their families is engaging, and there's some spectacular framing of shots in the final wedding scene. But overall, The Best Years of Our Lives was not the best three hours of my life (ha. ha.. ha... *rimshot*).

38. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948, John Huston)
I don't have a whole lot to say about this movie except that it's a ton of fun. It's funny that my write-up of the last John Huston-directed movie on this list (The Maltese Falcon) spent so much time trying to parse out if the movie had a moral or not, because in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, there is most definitely a moral: don't be greedy. And that's a fine moral and all, but it has absolutely no bearing on why I like this movie so much. Whereas The Maltese Falcon sometimes feels like it's trying its hand at profundity (hence making the moral, or lack thereof, kind of important), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is pretty much cool with just being the most entertaining, thrilling picture it can be. Whether or not it has a moral "point" isn't all that important. And as far as entertaining and thrilling pictures go, this one works like gangbusters. It's one of the great adventure movies of all time, and Humphrey Bogart gives a fantastic turn as the film's villain. It also has one of the more useful of famous movie quotes in the "We don't need no stinkin' badges" line. Really, you can use that quote anywhere. Observe: We don't need no stinkin' barges. We don't need no stinkin' vegetables. We don't need no stinkin' bicycles. We don't need no stinkin' Transformers sequels. We don't need no stinkin' long write-ups of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Wish granted.

39. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964, Stanley Kubrick)
I like Dr. Strangelove a whole lot. It's a wonderful mix of the dry and absurd flavors that I usually prefer my comedies to come in, and it's also the rare comedy that is beautifully shot, which should surprise nobody once the Stanley Kubrick name flashes on the screen. The screenplay is tight and fun and greatly accessible for the kind of brainy comedy that this is; even as a kid, I loved the "precious bodily fluids" bits and some of the more slapsticky moments, even though most the sociopolitical satire flew way over my head. It's a movie filled with so many instances of comedic ridiculousness of such a wide range of types that I imagine most people will find at least one joke that lands for them. There are the big "you can't fight in here, it's the war room" moments that are of course huge laughs, but my favorite jokes come at the film's margins, those little details of uncommented-on silliness, like the way the flight commander dons an enormous cowboy hat when he gets word to drop the bomb. Great stuff. And yet... I can't help but wonder if, like The Best Years of Our Lives, I haven't missed the boat on this movie. Don't get me wrong; it's great. But how much greater must it have been back when the Cold War was actually happening? How much more would the fear of a real-life nuclear apocalypse have galvanized the humor? How much sharper must the satire have been when it was picking apart versions of actual possibilities? How much more bite must that final montage of nuclear blasts have had? With the world no longer a sneeze away from H-bomb oblivion, Dr. Strangelove must have lost a little of the terrifying edge that it once had. It's no longer a movie speaking directly to our society. Sure, there are plenty of ways that this movie's themes are still in conversation with contemporary culture (heck, the world is still a violent place rules by raging military powers), but you have to generalize the film a bit to make that work, forming metaphors and fables out of things that were once quite literal. That's the thing about great satire, I guess; there's always the chance that it'll become slightly obsolete.

That's all for now, folks! Thanks so much for reading. It's always great hearing from y'all, so if you have any insights or grievances or humorous anecdotes or whatever, feel free to share. Until next time, be sure to protect your precious fluids from the dirty Reds.

If you feel so moved, you're welcome to go back to the previous post, #s 34-36, here.
Update: Also, you can go on to the next post, #s 40-42, here.

100 Years...100 Movies 34-36: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Annie Hall, The Bridge on the River Kwai

Hello all! I'm working my way through AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list, giving thoughts, analyses, and generally scattered musings on each one. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

A weird bit of list synchronicity: all three of this post's films were released in years that ended in the number 7. Yeah, I got nothing. Read on.

34. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937, David Hand)
I've never understood the "masterpiece" status of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Look, I get that this film is monolithic in terms of its historical and technical significance. Being not only the first feature-length animated film from what would become one of the juggernauts of animation (heck, of entertainment in general) but also one of the first feature-length animated films ever is no small accomplishment. And yeah, I also get that there's an appealing maturity to the animation that hasn't been present in Disney animation since like the forties. I'll give it this much: Snow White looks mighty pretty, and at parts it's legitimately unsettling and even Gothic, two adjectives that describe maybe three percent of the rest of the Disney canon. And yeah, I get that the dwarfs are charming and that "Heigh Ho" is a fun song. But one of the best movies of all time? The only Disney animation represented on this list? Better than Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Pinocchio, Sleeping Beauty, The Emperor's New Groove, and Fantasia [1]? Not in my book, buster. While I acknowledge all the feats mentioned above, I also reserve the right to claim that the film is, as a whole, remarkably slight when considered outside of its historical importance. As a person, Snow White is as dull as a toothbrush and has none of the psychological depth that characterizes even the most basic of dental tools. What's worse is that she's irritating, to boot. I swear, she coos and giggles and yelps more than she actually utters words in this movie. And when she does speak, she's spouting off irritating platitudes about washing hands before dinner or asking for apples from the creepiest, most hello-I-am-dangerous fruit peddler of all time. To put it another way, she's not going to be the valedictorian of the princess class anytime soon. Disney gets a lot of flack (some deserved, some not, I'd argue) for the social backwardness of its "princess" brand, but there's a possibility that the single worst bit of gender regression the company ever did was create this shell of a character. I mean, 1937 was a relatively good time to be a female character in a Hollywood movie; the screwball comedy was at its height, at least, and the first rumblings of film noire were being heard. Surely Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs could have come up a more lively princess, especially if she's the protagonist of the film! Even forgiving the awful sin of Snow White the person, there's still no escaping the fact that I find the songs (save "Heigh Ho," of course) cloying and insufferable, and the general tone muted and lethargic—not in a stately, mesmerizing way like Sleeping Beauty but in an oh-my-gosh-when-is-this-movie-over-show-me-the-wicked-queen-kicking-skeletons-again-already way. I could go on, but I've already had quite the rant. Better move on. Y'all, I do not like this movie.

35. Annie Hall (1977, Woody Allen)
Y'all, I do like this movie, though. I love it, in fact. So much so that it's hard to write about it. Annie Hall is one of those films that just haunts you, even years after you first see it. At least, it haunts me, and I'm a happily married Christian man living in the American South—pretty far out of this film's intended demographic, I'd say [2]. In my mind, it's unquestionably Woody Allen's best film, and I can't count the times that I have been thrown into serious introspection by the sudden memory of a stray line or scene from the film. Even after I'd seen it only once, I felt I had the whole thing committed to memory, since every last corner of the film is brimming with magnetic nuggets of humor and insight, often both contained in the same punchline. That's the real kicker about Annie Hall, too; the funniest bits are also the most bracingly honest. It's an immensely quotable movie, and part of that is the screenplay's remarkable ability to turn a punchline into a gut-punch that eviscerates we audience members along with protagonist Alvy Singer. And about Alvy: of all the Woody Allen movies I've seen (and I haven't seen all of them, unfortunately), Annie Hall is the only one that really nails the Woody Allen character [3]. Alvy Singer has enough of that Woody Allen charm and vulnerability that I sympathize with him and even project my own life experience onto him, and yet, the film also seems perfectly aware of the sleazier aspects of his personality and is often quite critical of his fussiness and arrogance. That character's balance between affable audience surrogate and object of criticism is crucial to the success of this movie, and a failure to pull off that balance has derailed plenty of Allen's other films (including, for me at least, his second most-popular '70s movie, Manhattan). Of course, all the great Alvy Singers in the world wouldn't amount to much if there wasn't someone for him to riff on, and Diane Keaton's Annie is perfect in that regard. Keaton and Allen have terrific chemistry together, which isn't surprising, given that they had been a couple at one time (although the relationship ended before the writing of this movie). One final note: this movie won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1977, beating out none other than Star Wars for the award. There are precious few films that I would be okay with taking the Best Picture from Star Wars, but Annie Hall is one of them. It's just that good.

36. *The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957, David Lean)
About 90 minutes in, I was ready to dismiss The Bridge on the River Kwai as not my cup of tea. I didn't think it was bad, exactly, just kind of dull and lumpy and disappointing after the awesomeness of the last David Lean flick on this list, Lawrence of Arabia. In fact, up to that point, I had just two things to say about the film. First, that hey, it stars Ben Kenobi (or, as people who weren't weaned on George Lucas call him, Alec Guinness) twenty years before A New Hope, and he looks nothing like Ewan McGregor. Strike three for the prequels. Second, that hey, it features that song that the teens whistle in The Breakfast Club, which a mid-film Google search revealed to me as being "Colonel Bogey March." Apparently, the song was written in 1914 and became a big deal for the British in WW II when its tune was used for the novelty song "Hitler Has Only Got One Ball" (move over, Weird Al). You learn something every day. But a funny thing happened around an hour from the film's end: this movie got good fast. Like, really good. The turning point, I think, is the sequence in which the Allied troops, on their way back to the river to blow up the bridge, are ambushed by a few Japanese soldiers and have to chase one through the jungle. The scene is completely devoid of music, dialogue, or anything other than environmental noises, and it plays out with pea-soup-thick tension and brutality (I won't spoil the scene's outcome because if you don't know how it ends, it's a gut-punch). It's here that seems to be the linchpin for the entire film, both ethically and aesthetically; not insignificantly, this scene has the most prominent use of the film's bird motif, and the events of this sequence add layers and layers of meaning to that image. From that scene on, the movie picks up and never lets up, building to a truly tremendous climax. It's not just the plot that makes the end of this movie so engaging; there's also a towering moral complexity to the proceedings that took me completely by surprise, where capricious chance picks at the systems of command and obedience that war fosters and draws them out to their destructive conclusions. It's something to behold, and if I'm speaking in overly vague terms here, it's only because I'm still processing what happened.

Until next time!

If you like, you can visit the previous post in this series, #s 31-33, here.
Update: The next post, #s 37-39, is up here.

1] No secrets about which Disney animated movies I consider to be the best, eh?

2] Although, I am an graduate student in English, so I suppose the Woody-Allenness of that occupation counteracts any other demographic concerns.

3] You know this character if you've seen him: that nervous, stammering man crippled by insecurity and neuroses while somehow still remaining a pompous dick, who delivers most of the funny lines in the movie. Usually played by Woody Allen himself, though in the past couple decades the role has occasionally shifted to people like Owen Wilson.

100 Years...100 Moves 31-33: The Maltese Falcon, The Godfather Part II, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Hello all! I'm working my way through AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list, giving thoughts, analyses, and generally scattered musings on each one. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

Well, folks, I'm on vacation this week, but never let it be said that leisure prevented me from blogging about movies. Plus, these are three movies I've already seen, so it's not like it required all that much effort on my part.

31. The Maltese Falcon (1941, John Huston)
When I first saw The Maltese Falcon (I was maybe eight or nine at the time, and, unless I'm forgetting something, I've only seen it once since then), I thought the ending made the movie a kind of moral fable. Spoilers follow, obviously: that the falcon in question is revealed to be a fake signified to me that the whole movie (and, I guess, the novel it's based on—I haven't read it) was meant to show the futility of greed. That big, fat bow of a twist was telling me, "See how much trouble all those folks went through, and it was just for some fake treasure? [personified plot twist somehow begins to channel J. Walter Weatherman] That's why... ya don't throw your life away for money." But now that I've thought about this movie for a decade and change, I'm not so sure I can get completely behind that reading anymore. That moral is there in some form, but stating it as cleanly as I just did makes it seem just a little off, in the same way that Marge Gunderson's speech ("There's more to life than a little money, ya know") at the end of Fargo feels more like someone reaching toward a meaning rather than firmly grasping one. When I think about that final twist in the movie now, it feels a little bit distressing and existential to me; what these characters have been so focused on this entire film isn't real. Their life's purpose (at least, within the confines of the story told here) is one of futility, a futility not just caused by their lust for wealth but by the essential unpredictability of the universe. And it's a little upsetting. Then again, it also hasn't escaped me that most of the characters in this movie are villains on some level, so aren't they getting what they deserve? I'd have to see the movie again to answer that question. It's been a while. Regardless, existential or moral fable, it's still one heck of an entertaining movie.

32. The Godfather Part II (1974, Francis Ford Coppola)
I prefer the first Godfather. The Godfather Part II is great and all, but it's also a lot more difficult to follow, considerably bleaker, and overall less fun to watch. Basically, I'm just a little too lazy to love Part II as much as I love Part I. There's also the issue that whereas The Godfather feels like a New Hollywood update of a particularly Old Hollywood cinematic and philosophic sensibility, Part II is very much a 1970s movie, with all the brown color palettes, "fucks," grit, and cynicism that come with that decade, and without any of the old-school lushness that graced the first film. But, my series preference notwithstanding, The Godfather Part II is still a great movie and an absolutely ripsnorting sequel. It's got that great quality that only a few sequels (Before Midnight comes to mind as a recent example) manage to have, which is that it's in such deep conversation with the themes and motifs of its predecessor that it practically renders the first movie's insights obsolete, or at least incomplete. The rise of Michael Corleone into a ruthless mob boss is such a vicious takedown of the mafia romanticism of the first film that it's hard to go back and watch the original without at least a little of that griminess coloring the viewing experience. Al Pacino gives one of the all-time great performances as Michael, and the transformation he undergoes from the beginning of Part I to the end of Part II has all the enormity of the very best of tragedies. The flashback immigrant storyline is compelling as well, getting down to the roots of organized crime and turning the whole series (as all mafia-related works of art must be, apparently) into an investigation into the American Dream. Surprise: it's a myth. Welcome to '70s American cinema. 

33. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975, Milos Forman)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a good movie. A very good movie, even. The problem is, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a great book, and great this movie is not. I'm sorry, I'm so very sorry; after my Grapes of Wrath writeup, I promised myself I wasn't going to focus so much on the book end of the book-to-movie adaptation process. But my feelings on this movie are too tied up in my disappointment with it after reading (and loving—like, loving it enough to write multiple papers on it) the Ken Kesey novel. It's an old criticism, but the major misstep the film makes (as far as adapting is concerned) is the perspective switch from the Chief's to McMurphy's, which makes a gigantic difference on the trajectory of the plot in the film, despite following the major events almost to a tee. Randle P. McMurphy is a great character, but he's no protagonist like Chief Bromden is. For one, McMurphy has no arc. He's a rebel and a libertarian and a hero the whole time, and while there are different nuances to those characteristics in different moments, he doesn't exactly grow. At least, not compared to the Chief, whose interior, psychological journey is beautiful and heartbreaking. The weight of McMurphy's actions is directly tied to the effect those actions have on the Chief, and by taking us out of the Chief's POV, the movie only gives the barest hint of that effect, at least until the final moments. For two, McMurphy is an archetype, which makes the film a lot less interesting than it could be. The sidelining of the Chief and the protagonistizing (a term I just now coined) make the film adhere a lot closer to the specifically '60s/'70s counter-culture type than the book does. You don't have to go too far to find cinematic precedents to the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in films like Cool Hand Luke and Bonnie and Clyde, which makes the proceedings feel just a little less special than in the novel (whose publication predates both those films). But enough of that. Credit where credit is due: this movie is undeniably powerful, and there's a cleanliness to the cinematography that's crisp and engaging and that probably wouldn't have been possible if Bromden had been the focus. Also, the acting is phenomenal across the board; I'm hard-pressed to find a cast better suited to their roles than the one in this film. So yeah, it's a good 'un. Just be sure to pick up the book, too.

If you round off the .3 repeating, I'm officially one third of the way through this list. Woot woot!

If you'd like, you can read the previous entry, #s 28-30, here.
Update: The next post, #s 34-36, is up here.