Reviews

This superb film draws on a variety of talented actors and musicians at the top of their form - Levant, Crosby, Martin, Rathbone, Manone are completely at home in the story that apparently was supplied by Billy Wilder. One would love to know more about how much he had to do with it, because it's an exceptionally clever variation on the sterile master/fertile servant tale - nearly an allegory of the entertainment industry, run by dried-up numskulls, but made into a vibrant world of art and play by an exploited underclass of nobodies and non-WASPs. Looking at the last six decades of music, TV, and film in the US, it's hard not to see the underlying insights of this film as prophetic.

I'm not sure a more challenging film has been made. Fekete, director of Bolshe Vita, itself a complex and difficult undertaking, went beyond what we think of as manageable material with Chico. Blurring fact and fiction, uniting a story told through 25 years in 5 nations, or almost-nations, or nations in the process of becoming, unified by the improbable story of an impossible man whose credibility lies in the fact that he is portraying himself, masterfully, honestly, fragmentarily. This is a film of genius by a filmmaker who is not satisfied unless she is on the trail of something very large, very real -- the only other filmmakers I can think of that approach this are the early Rossellini and the early Cassavetes. I would welcome further information on this director and how she managed to make this film.

The film is original on many levels. Released in 1996, based upon the brief window of "openness" in Hungary and other parts of Eastern Europe in 1989, offering contrasting glimpses of the time before and after. Questioning not only the east (Russia), but also the alternative, as proles from Russia, Hungary, and the West mingle in a suspended state, confused about what to do, and how to do it, in a world from which autocracy has suddenly, without preparation, been subtracted. The characters are each sharply drawn, convincingly played, by actors of great talent. In some sense the highly focused lens, following two Russian street musicians (whose musical styles even conflict) through their brief introduction to the middle ground between East and West in Budapest, explodes with the energy of the larger story in which it is enveloped - leaving a strong sense of arbitrary forces leading to resolutions which are anything but "storybook" in tone and sense of closure. Apparently the film grew out of the director's earlier experiences making a documentary about an actual pair of Russian musicians.

This film seems an effort to engage the life and destiny of a city at the level of the political and social, using journalistic techniques but always with an awareness that these are also interpretations - something that most USian journalism tends to overlook. What will mostly bother people is that it lacks the usual human center - the man/woman/family to which the bad things happen which will cause us to care that they are happening. This is hardly an oversight; it is a choice, and one that deserves to be considered openly without the rush to judgment that otherwise occurs when confronted with the unfamiliar. The human center of the film is there, but always at the edges, implied. We barely glimpse the victims of the collapsed building, but their fate informs every frame. And the superb "portrayals" by actual members of the city council (the De Vita character, e.g.) give us not actors, but people enmeshed in the actuality. This film deserves wider awareness.

This is the most clueless, unintelligent treacle I have ever seen. I sat down to watch it 3 hours ago and it is only at the intermission. Before the credits were over, it seemed like it would never end. Consider: The stupifying fact that Colbert is given no job, no tasks, no role or social life - her sole function is to mourn the absence of her unprepossessing hubby, whom we never meet, while worrying about food, money, and the kids. Even Joseph Cotten dropping in does nothing to dispel her melancholia. Take it on the chin for the country, Ma'am! This film reeks of the worst manipulative emotional arm twisting, steeped in middle-American moronism, political witlessness, boosterism, and narcissism. It is possibly the worst film I have ever seen, and it's still...not...over...If there has ever been a sop thrown at the headless USian soul crying in its beer over a world far away that it doesn't understand, this is it. Bush would love this film - it treats us as the stupid morons he thinks we are.

Whatever it was, it's too bad there doesn't seem to be any of it left. Warner Bros. pre-code was like a renaissance atelier - genius in the air, tons of talent on hand, cranking out, if not masterpieces, some unforgettable confections. Tons of bit part players in this one, it's as though they couldn't let anyone just walk on and act, the scene had to be chewed through. This sometimes seems distracting when you're caught up in the story, which, as with "Three on a Match," uses the threatened child to keep you in suspense. But with Lee Tracy and Ann D., plus all these superb faces and shticks, can anyone really complain? Worthwhile to think about why this Warner Bros. vision of life seems to get tremendous lift from exploiting a certain idea of the US press, never better represented than by Tracy - at least until Grant in "His Girl Friday."

This is a thoughtful film, rich in implication. It begins in a bedroom, which is being monitored by some police agency, we don't know who. They have the room bugged, and under camera surveillance, and a hit man still manages to do his job. We learn as the film goes on that this hit man is effective precisely because he studies his subjects, gets to know them so well that he can think like them. Deep sympathetic powers are the source of his deadly capabilities. This element is doubled in the cop assigned to stop him - another student of human nature, who uses observation and intuitive sympathy to predict the hit man's moves. Each of these characters is profoundly able to be intimate with the object of his quest. The development of the bond between the hit man and the woman he loves works out this theme of intimate knowledge and sympathy on a parallel plane. The psychological truth of this keeps us entranced by the film despite some elaborate technological machinations (the hit man's wall of fire, for example) that would normally defy credibility.

What jumps out for me after my first viewing is the extraordinary confidence on display in the two male stars. The women are also strong, but the story belongs to Tracy/Gable and their identical code of honor. Few US films achieve this level of natural aristocracy. If they do, it's often one character who possesses the requisite courage and honor, and it brings out the Iago-esquire in others. This is an unusual document in which love and honor rule, and the matter of winning/losing in terms of material goods is viewed with the hauteur of a view of life that has pretty much been eclipsed. As for the writing, it's not bad - the characters could have been more fully rounded, but there's enough substance to make for a credible world in which these guys make their way. Tracy and Gable brought this quality of strength to a lot of their films, but having both present, without sacrificing part of either, is quite special.

If one doesn't let anticipation over the prospect of Rossellini working with Stendahl's work run too high, this film should not disappoint. It is not Rossellini being "hands on" - it involved many production problems and came at a time when RR was preparing to turn his back on cinema, and still it works as a costume drama with intelligent plotting and setting. Let's put it this way - as an RR film, it's maybe a 5. As a costume drama set next to the nonsense of today, it's a 14. Much of Stendahl seems to have gotten lost, but the film still has a cogency that may be due to RR's increasing interest in making use of history to explore themes that go beyond mere incident and character. He was moving toward Louis xiv, and beyond.

This film has a nervous energy that springs from the opening moment and doesn't stop until somewhere in the last third. Dazzling narrative technique, nearly always confusing you at the start of a scene, but somehow moving the story forward at the same time. The characters in the small village are wonderfully flexible - it's almost as if they change as the film's frenetic comedy and absurd plot demand. There is a sombre undertone as well, and it's that that makes some of the moments of resolution in the film somewhat awkward, as if the seriousness were being shoehorned into a farce. This will either infuriate or drive you into gales of exhausting laughter.

Set in Mexico, "Stronghold" is informed by a sense of history and an original screenplay that manages to combine the best of action movie techniques with a genuine insight into the values and mores of Mexico. Its swashbuckling sense of heroism is never dull, or preachy, yet it contains a wealth of characterization and context that make most Hollywood historical films seem dry and sterile by comparison. Perhaps it escapes cliché in part by putting a USian woman into the lead. It is her gradual education into an understanding of Mexico that is the real story beneath the guns and ambushes.

This film deserves to be much better known.