Reviews

Le Bel Age which is also referred to in the film as a book title (Translated there as Love Is When You Find It) is a French literary expression for Youth but also connotes the question, what is the appropriate age to still engage in the game of picking up women and when is it the right time to give it up, it also suggests the good old times.

The collaboration between Pierre Kast and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze (the latter co-writing and playing one of the main characters) is of interest as a sophisticated expression of the game of love, told in three flashback episodes from a forest setting where both the men and the women are seen with guns engaging in a different kind of hunt The first episode is set in a classy several levels boutique where women don't seem to have an issue about stepping in to shop for art objects, records or whatever knowing that the men standing around are waiting in competition to flirt with them, it is taken from a Moravia story.

These are upper middle class at least people of leisure who have the wherewithal to jaunt off on excursions to Deauville, Saint-Tropez or a ski resort to continue their amorous attempts It is to the filmmakers' credit that they don't give us just a masculinist (and what might seem today as sexist) perspective but offer their third episode from the point of view of one of the women, where we see the ladies strategizing on their own about how to handle the men An interesting cast has been assembled including New Wave heartthrob Jean-Claude Brialy and novelist Boris Vian and the Italian Marcello Pagliero who worked with Rossellini.

The overall oeuvres of both Kast and Doniol-Valcroze are worth pursuing further. Both made important contributions at Cahiers Du Cinema (the latter actually was one of its founders) and represented with the more well known Rohmer (the witty philosophizing about love in Le Bel Age may remind the viewer somewhat of him) a generation roughly ten years older than that of Chabrol, Godard, Rivette and Truffaut) and they didn't always incline toward the main line of that publication.

If you have access to the Criterion DVD of The Eclipse you might take an hour to watch this supplement which includes numerous clips of Antonioni philosophizing, a few clips with his collaborators, and tidbits from most of his work.

The most interesting bits of footage are the "filming of" clips from several titles and an entire deleted scene from L'Avventura which would have added some humor to that otherwise somber film.

The least interesting parts are the clips of the director philosophizing. It would have been more helpful to have feedback from more of the people who worked with him. Maybe even from a few articulate critics. Scenes of him receiving awards at festivals are, expectedly, as uninspiring as footage from your typical Academy Awards ceremony.

For some reason a number of the films are not represented by actual clips (the best option for giving viewers a taste ) but instead by still footage .

The second installment in Italian director Riccardo Freda's adaptation of the epic Victor Hugo novel mostly sustains the superb mise en scene as described in my user review of the first part.

A couple of questionable decisions though are made in the script, which typical of Italian cinema was collaborated on by a number of writers: the young firebrand revolutionary Marius is no longer the abandoned scion of a reactionary Royalist but is now the missing son of the Paris chief of police. And the subplot in which Marius's ancestor had his life saved at the Battle of Waterloo (which made up a whole chapter in the original) by the sleazy money grabbing inkeeper Thenardier is eliminated, thus depriving us of the more complicated response Marius has to helping the elderly Valjean when he is surrounded by Thenardier's fellow thugs.

Look closely or you may miss several shots of a young Marcello Mastroianni as one of the student radicals, arrested after their failure at the barricades, and shot by a firing squad. This particular part of the story compared to the first film may have involved some writing by the politically oriented Mario Monicelli.

This first installment in the two part 1948 Italian adaptation of Victor Hugo 's epic novel is not the most faithful to its source, of those versions that I have seen so far (only six out of an estimated 8O films) and the performers are merely serviceable rather than offering striking characterizations such as Baur and Vanel did in the 1930s French version. But of those that I have seen it is the most visually stunning.

The underrated genre craftsman Riccardo Freda, a specialist at the time in historical romance and later in horror, summons a variety of resources to bring scene after scene in the episodic story to vivid life: meticulous decor and costuming, moody chiaroscuro lighting, frequent dollying in and out from objects and persons of attention, frequent staging using rich depth of field, exciting cutting, and most interesting of all to me, the decision to set up a number of setups using height and verticality with the camera looking at a higher level above or looking down on things or dramatic use of staircases and street steps.

A flashback told to the hero, Valjean, by the suffering unwed mother Fantine, of her brief period of happiness with other young ladies on a Sunday picnic with who would prove to be frivolous young men, suddenly reminds us in its sweeping liveliness of Kenji Mizoguchi.

Than which there can be no higher praise.

Beauty Spot follows with a few changes the plot of a German film Opernredoute from the year before and benefits from some playful French humor about flirtation and mistaken identity.

The director Pierre Caron uses a few more closely staged scenes than his colleague Leonce Perret, a veteran of silents credited with the French adaptation, might have, as one can see by comparing with the Perret directed Apres L'Amour from the same year also at Pathe where there are more scenes taken at a distance.

The standout moments are the beautifully lit and staged ones in the home of the diplomatic attaché which the attache's friend visits at night in the dark after rather sneakily following home the masked blonde at the black and white party, without knowing that woman is the attaché's wife.

A tip of the hat here to art director Jacques Colombier who worked on a number of these early 30s Pathe productions.

I wasn't familiar with the names of any in the cast except for character actress Jeanne Fusier-Gir who enjoys herself immensely as the wife's cousin, a wild party going type who loves her liquor.

The film didn't get a US distribution though the previous German version of the story did.

Monsieur Fabre is a decent vehicle for the great French actor Pierre Fresnay (who most may know as the aristocratic officer in Grand Illusion) and an educational story about a pioneering entomologist who should be better known .

The treatment combines many remarkable close shots of the insects Fabre studies and tries to teach his male offspring about (sexist to be sure in assuming the women offspring wouldn't be pursuing science, but true to the times) These scenes reminded me of the similarly remarkable nature footage of underwater creatures that documentary director Jean Painleve made his life work.

The other main strand is the familiar biopic arc of the great thinker and inventor who is not sufficiently appreciated by his stodgy and outright reactionary colleagues. They and the people in the small Southern France towns oppose Fabre for talking about how insects have sex and for allowing boys and girls to study together and for fostering humor and play in his classroom rather than strict discipline.

Deprived of a progressive champion in the Imperial court,Fabre withdraws into retirement and Fresnay cakes himself up in old age makeup.

If this kind of story sounds familiar it is because you and the French would have seen it before in the popular Hollywood entries The Story of Louis Pasteur and The Life of Emile Zola with Paul Muni also disguising himself in thick make up and speaking out against the ignorant and the prejudiced. There were also one of two similar biopics later with Edward G Robinson doing the honors.

So a mixed result here. But worth seeing to learn about Fabre and to look at the insects.

Unless you live in Paris or have spent some time there, you are likely unfamiliar with the Buttes Chaumont park in the Northeast 19th arrondissement area, but this little film ,in which that park is basically the main character, will provide an intriguing introduction.

The makers of the featurette (it runs only about an hour) give us lengthy documentary style background on the park's history before we are introduced to two night clubbing youth who land up spending a series of evenings there after the park is closed, and even taking the risk of sleeping there overnight. Later (this is the most interesting stylistic feature of this otherwise conventional work) bits of more documentary footage are interspersed,and the way the story is told is also suddenly changed when halfway through we get narration from the girl (played by the daughter of former Cahiers Du Cinema critic and prolific scenarist Pascal Bonitzer) giving us her point of view on the strange relationship between these two.

The plot ends rather dramatically (a bizarre multilingual traveling writer intrudes on their secret space, along with a night time meditation group) and a bit differently than one might expect. The film does not wear out its welcome though if truth be told it could very well have sufficed as just a 35-45 minute episode in an updated version of that classic New Wave compendium, Paris Vu Par.

I will be checking out another film, 2 Autumns, 3 Winters, by the same director soon for comparison.

"Hercule" is of interest as a French equivalent of the kind of newspaper comedy that was popular at the time in Hollywood, but tailored here as a vehicle for the popular character of Fernandel, who had four other films in release that year of 1938.

He is the country bumpkin (coming from Provence and never having been in Paris) who is taken advantage of by city slickers, in this case Jules Berry as the paper's advertising manager, when you see Berry in a movie from this era you expect something devious is going to happen.

K Fisherman that he is down South, Hercule is out of his depth taking over "L'Incorruptible" which was run by his recently deceased father, but his secretary played by Gaby Morlay, who actually gets first billing, and a faithful journalist played by a young Pierre Brasseur, help to save the day.

This documentary on arguably America's greatest playwright is better than the previous user review indicates.

It is made for Canadians who would not be as familiar with the colors and language of the American South, and Tennessee makes a lively and articulate interview subject, there is no need to fall back on the cliched Ken Burns approach of cutting and pasting together more talking heads and various archival clips What is interspersed instead are restagings of scenes from several of the famous plays by some quality actors, which remind us of the dramatic power and richness of language they contain The treasure is a reenactment by Jessica Tandy of her Blanche Du Bois from "Streetcar" over two decades before, the only recording we have of one of the greatest perfornances in theater history, the monologue is her reminiscing about the young man she married who turned out to be gay. It is devastating.

One of Sweden's finest actors,Per Oscarsson, best known for his performance in the 1966 film Hunger (see my review there) contributes another disturbing creation in this worthy entry from then up and coming director Jan Troell.

His elementary school instructor is a mixture of meanness and incompetence who simply cannot control his class of wild sixth graders even when he tries to clamp down hard. One might think of the harassed Dr Rath played by Emil Jannings in the classic The Blue Angel or for a closer Scandinavian comparison, the authoritarian sadist in Alf Sjoberg's Torment (as written by Ingmar Bergman) though there is more of a late 60s feel to this portrait of young ebellion and frustrated adult driven discipline.

Troell, a former schoolteacher himself, made the film with 16mm equipment, more manageable in the actual Malmo area classrooms it was shot in, and adding a grainy documentary style look to the finished work. He was his own cinematographer on this among others of his oeuvre and has a clever photographer's eye for the vivid stray detail .Adding to the sense of realism, actual elementary students were used in some of the smaller roles.

The premise of the chamber drama that is "Hoysommer" is the changing relationship between a lonely temporary keeper of a remote lighthouse and an attractive but troubled young woman who lands up, unconscious, in a dingy near his buildings.

The landscape of the lighthouse area, the waves and rocks, is ,typical for a Scandinavian film ,also a part of the story but the main interest is in the way the characters interact. The woman at first is wary of the man and wants to leave but is restrained by his concern for her health (she has tried to kill herself) Then when he wants to report her after radio inquiries as to her whereabouts, he is persuaded by her repeated entreaties to let her stay on just another night, until they land up falling in love.

A few minor characters including the woman's elderly husband appear at various points but the drama of what will happen between the man and the woman sustains itself in a satisfying way up until the conclusion.

From the early period when the later renowned Ingmar Bergman would be directing his own screenplays, this melodrama from the veteran Gustav Molander (most famous for discovering the other Bergman, Ingrid) suffers from the unpleasant writing of the main female character (a poisonous "femme fatale" reminiscent of some of the worst of Hollywood film noir) and an unnecessarily complicated story layout tricked out with flashbacks and narration.

It is competently enough made but leaves an unpleasant aftertaste.

This intriguing post WWII character study is a worthy entry from Hasse Ekman, a director well known in Sweden who has been getting a re-evaluation stateside after a 2015 revival of some of his work at New York City's Museum of Modern Art.

The setting is a Stockholm apartment complex where the concierge locks the main entrance at 9 p.m.daily (we later see him reopening the building at 7 a.m.) He and his voyeuristic wife don't get much rest though during these after hours as characters are constantly coming in and out, perking the curiosity of the wife and squabbling by the man.

We get to know a number of characters whose fates will become intertwined that night: A cheerful prostitute soliciting business,a wife receiving divorce papers from her husband, an elderly man out for a stroll who tries to impress people by dressing elegantly and dropping French phrases, a partying baron who specializes in picking up different women, a washed up old actress who tries to cajole her former producer into giving her a part again ,in a Strindberg play.

The night takes a dark turn for several of them. There is a skillful balance in the way their little dramas are presented though arguably too much emphasis on the aged thespian as she hits the bottle and lurches toward suicide.(Though one understands, given director Ekman's family background in the theater, why he places so much weight on this subplot.) One of the better films that has been made about an apartment building.

See also, the Russian silent House On Trubnaya Square by Boris Barnet and of course Hitchcock's Rear Window.

Though Bergman got most of the attention, Alf Sjoberg looms large as arguably the master director of the period in Swedish film between the groundbreaking silents of Sjostrom and Stiller, and the modern achievements of such as Troell, Widerberg and Roy Andersson.

This romantic melodrama, following somewhat in the line of the Hollywood "Waterloo Bridge" it references, deserves to be compared to the more well known entries in that genre by the likes of Ophuls, Borzage, and Stahl. It is a love affair doomed by class difference which is carefully observed.

There is a possibility Sjoberg had seen the work of Welles from a few years earlier, as there is at least one Kane style low angle of characters at a dinner table looking up at the ceiling, and the scenes of family members squabbling on a staircase with the forum y patriarch, in a somewhat theatrical way, are reminiscent of The Magnificent Ambersons.

The two leads are strikingly portrayed by Alf Kjellin and Mai Zetterling.

It is especially striking, for an American viewer, to see a drama made in Denmark in the mid 1940s that discusses abortion so openly as one of the story's main themes, at a time when Hollywood films were not only forbidden by the puritanical Production Code to mention the word abortion but also had to be very careful about how they even suggested it.

In this complicated story in which the lives of various characters intersect (is it by chance, or is it God's hand, the dialogue asks) several points are made about abortion.

The wife of a strict prosecutor, whose trial papers on a group of patients found to have had abortions over the past few years, have been delayed, scolds him for the misery he will unfairly inflict on these women (meanwhile she is having an affair with a rising young lawyer who hypocritically tells women he impregnates to have an abortion even though he is assisting the prosecution) In the main story, a pugnacious soldier learns that the woman he has come to love has had a past which includes being one of these abortion patients,and that she is planning to kill herself.

The dramatization of these themes and characters is well done .

There have been so many films made about World War II that it takes something special to make an example like this one stand out.

In this case, the cooperation in the filming between the Norwegian actors and crew and the actors and crew from socialist Yugoslavia mirrors the theme, which the resulting production makes quite moving, of friendship between local resisters under the German occupation and Serbian prisoners brought into a strange new place.

The two user reviews mention most of the story being set indoors, but that was not the film I saw, which makes vivid use of the northern landscape in the glorious tradition of Scandinavian cinema in general, going back to the 1910s, especially in the magnificent scenes of the young prisoner Janko struggling to make his escape through rocks and rapids and fog and night.

There was also, I would argue with one of these reviewers, nothing routine about Blood Road.

It is a film that deserves to be more well known, and more talked about.

Most American based readers are likely familiar with the classic 1935 Hollywood version of the story, Ruggles of Red Gap, spoofing a culture clash and the social pretensions when a representative of the British class system is brought out as a manservant to a wild and lowbrow Western town in the more open and democratic USA Here we have a clash between a representative of the Scandinavian servant elite, with not so many opportunities anymore in a more modern world to serve aristocrats with civilized tastes and fine manners, taking a job with a grocer's assistant, who lives in an auto junkyard, to maintain his pride in his profession.(The assistant has come into an unexpected inheritance and that's what he wants to spend his money on) At first shocked by the low rent situation he has gotten into, the new butler comes to enjoy serving not only the assistant but his con artist cronies a "bishop" and another character named Igor ,and to find a welcome place for himself in the humble milieu.

This unpretentious little comedy wins a viewer over with its sweet charm.

Most viewers know British director Stephen Frears from his later career as a successful commercial director, including for Hollywood with such accomplished work as The Grifters. Less well known are his skillful earlier Tv adaptations of plays written by the brilliant Alan Bennett. Often these Tv plays carry their main strengths in the dialogue and acting but in the case of One Fine Day, with its long stretches of mostly visual scenes where the protagonist is camped out alone in an empty office high rise, with excerpts (strikingly used) of opera on the track, the role of the director in visualizing Bennett's ideas is the factor that makes the difference.

The play is also memorable for stand up comic Dave Allen's unusual role as a melancholy, timid and frustrated estate agent and for its devastating portrait of a sales culture. (in the field of real estate, it gives the more well known David Mamet "Glengarry Glen Ross" a run for its money.)

If one test of a memorable work of art is whether it creates its own special world which the spectator/reader/ listener becomes fully absorbed in, then this strange Tv drama from the dystopia obsessed 198Os era certainly qualifies.

As with director Clarke's earlier ,equally claustrophobic Psy Warriors, the viewer is never shown any exteriors and now there is only one single (remarkably designed) set where all the action occurs. The young people institutionalized in a Depression style marathon of constant roller skating to wallpaper disco are almost always on the move, but rarely get anywhere. Details build up an Orwellian regime presided over by a Margaret Thatcher style bureaucrat but our main character Carly seems on one level to have become so comfortable with this regime that he really doesn't want to accept opportunities to make an exit.

This heartbreaking and scathing social satire deserves to become more well known.

This striking vehicle for the great rock star David Bowie makes an interesting comparison with the earlier 1970 New German Cinema adaptation in which the Bowie role of the outrageously misbehaving scruffy poet was played by none other than Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

The original production of the 1920s play by Brecht started Oscar Homolka, later to be seen as a sometimes comforting and heartwarming character actor in Hollywood films. The

But the Baal character, based on a part animal legendary figure of the 17th century, is hardly at all comforting and makes the scampish bum in Renoir's Boudu Saved From Drowning look like a paragon of the bourgeois.

I have not seen a more recent German adaptation but contrasting the 1970 and 1982 versions I prefer the way director Alan Clarke in the later one relies on old fashioned tableaux combined with simplified stylized backgrounds and split screens to the way in the earlier one Schlondorff used smeared lenses and hand held camera work.

Plus Bowie's rendition of the song lyrics is spot on.

This harrowing Tv drama by the great Alan Clarke is stark in its depiction of three subjects being tortured by British authorities, a subject that spoke at its time to English viewers aware of the controversial treatment by their government of Irish freedom fighters and that now speaks, since the program has been made available to a wider audience in places like the US, to the later use of torture by the Bush administration in its wars against Afghanistan and Iraq.

Part of the starkness is that we are immediately set in an unnamed interior where the action takes place in a limited number of spaces and we are never given a single establishing exterior shot or any scene outside. Similarly, the American director Samuel Fuller dropped us dramatically into its protagonist's entry into an insane asylum by also never giving us any outdoor footage (except in one of the mental patients' nightmares.)

Bukovsky is a precious document on the history of how psychiatry was misused as a tool of political repression in the USSR of the 1970s and how that abuse was responded to in the West. It is a miracle that the film survives as it was shelved by the BBC and elements were left to neglect.

While the focus is on the prominent dissident of the title, the discussion brings out two strong general points.

First, the shameful way fellow psychiatrists around the world, aware of the abuse of their profession, chose not to speak out so as not to offend their colleagues who they would be meeting at conferences such as one in Mexico City in 1972, where they would schmooze and act polite and say nothing.

Second, the way the British media generally felt the story of Soviet dissidents and psychiatry was "boring" so decided to give it little coverage. But then when Bukovsky became a celebrity the media, as Clarke shows us, would not give the man a moment's peace but hover over him even as he attempts to eat a meal.

It is good that we have a record from this 1956 Tv production, of Garson Kanin's play more or less how he directed it for the stage ten years earlier.,and with the original Harry Brock role as first played by Paul Douglas who is somewhat less boorish and gangster like than the way it was played in the 1950 film by Broderick Crawford, fresh from his depiction of Willie Stark in All The Kings Men.

Another difference is that the film was carefully paced for laughs so there would be more pauses for some of the dialogue to be better heard by an audience, whereas for Tv viewing the delivery of the lines can be speeded up a bit.

Mary Martin is nowhere near as distinctive as Judy Holliday was in the film and uses a Southern accent (she was born in Texas) as part of the Billie Dawn character's shtick.

The reporter character as played by Arthur Hill is rather more of a nerdy type than the more glamorous William Holden was in the film.

These lyrics come from one of the striking Brecht style musical numbers that grace this remarkable mid 6Os British teleplay, one of the more unusual specimens from an especially fruitful period for a younger Ken Loach, at the BBC.

The entire comedy plot (one of the few films from the usually serious and often grim Loach that can be described as funny) fits the mold of what critic Robin Wood described, in his analysis of the screwball romances of Howard Hawks, as "the lure of irresponsibility" A husband prepared to put the down payment of 400 pounds on a home for his wife and daughter is missing several financial documents (no great loss, the house is a disaster) and decides to pamper the little girl he favors by treating her to a spending spree in the posh West End topped off by a tour of a zoo and the purchase of an elephant (the poor animal is later abandoned when as darkness falls father and daughter join a band of groovy disco dancing youth on a river cruise.) The kind of class critique that runs through the entire oeuvre of the director manifests itself in the writing of the shopping scenes, featuring a salesman and a pretentious watch,which spoof the snooty rich the way a film from around the same time, Schlesinger's Darling, memorably did.

Also memorable is the long passage where father and daughter navigate a tedious footpath to the house through an ugly gasworks complex and a desolate abandoned area that could be the setting for a Beckett play.

This little known Tv feature is indeed a rich concoction and it leaves a disturbing aftertaste.

This early Tv film by the great politically conscious British director Ken Loach (arguably no other movie maker has done more with their work to illuminate timely issues of social justice) uses an event that had happened just one year before the telecast to call for industrial democracy. Workers in a company town at a glass factory go out on a wildcat strike for fairer pay when the bureaucratic union structure that is legally supposed to represent them fails to support their issues.

The dramatization, following up on a similar exploration of labor problems in Loach's The Big Flame two years before, raises a larger question of democracy beyond just the workplace. Governments around the world not just in the UK claim to be democracies but in fact leave most of their citizens without any direct say in politics and with a system of representation where the officials claiming to act in their interests have become way too settled and comfortable with the corporate powers and have actually sold out and become corrupt.

Loach's recreation of a specific local action in its historical context is devastating and we are reminded that the British Labor Party hadn't really done much to help the workers since 1926, when there had been a General Strike.