Getting the luck out of dodge

Sin nombre 2009 U.S./Mexico (96 minutes) written and directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga.

This ripping yarn brings together a small town south Mexican gangbanger on the run with three Hondurans riding the rails across Mexico to the Promised Land of Big Box Malls.

Willy (Edgar Flores), known as El Casper to his gang brothers in Tapachula near the Mexico-Guatemala border, leads a double life. He has no family, and is a low level soldier for the Tapachula chapter of La Mara Salvatrucha, which calls itself the ‘Confetti clique.’ He runs errands for the clique’s profusely illustrated Lil’ Mago (Tenoch Huerta Mejía) and Lil’ Mago’s deputy, El Sol (Luis Fernando Peña). El Casper also mentors Benito (Kristyan Ferrer), a much younger boy newly initiated into the gang as El Smiley—no connexion with John Le Carré’s venerable spook.

El Casper and El Smiley are supposed to keep an eye on the gang’s turf in a tough part of Tapachula known as La Bombilla, a ramshackle rail yard where many Central Americans await freight trains headed toward El Norte and the Seven Cities of Gold.

When Willy can slip away from gang activities, he visits Martha Marlen (Diana García), a pretty middle class teenage princess with her own pink bedroom far from the ‘hood. Martha Marlen sees only the boy in Willy, apparently unaware that his elaborate body art signifies that he is a member of a notorious international criminal organization and the tattooed tear means that he has killed someone.

Willy is happy to keep things this way. But Martha Marlen is jealous, as pretty middle class teenage princesses can be, curious as the proverbial cat, and after she overhears El Sol tell Willy where the gang is going to meet, she decides to see for herself what Willy is up to with his ‘friends’ when he is not giving his full attention to her…

Meanwhile, Horacio (Gerardo Taracena), a Honduran deported from the United States, is attempting to return illegally to his second wife and three small daughters in northern New Jersey, roughly 3,750 miles overland from his native Tegucigalpa, Honduras. He is travelling with his brother, Orlando (Guillermo Villegas), and his daughter, Sayra (Paulina Gaitán), the only child of his first marriage. Sayra, who lives with her grandmother, is a 16-year-old not particularly happy about being dragged along.

Their more than 500-mile trip from Tegucigalpa to Tapachula ends in a blister-raising overland trek to the Suchiate River where they cross from Guatemala to Mexico, and then make their way to the rail yard in La Bombilla where huddled masses await the next freight train north.

Looking out at the people waiting for the train, the experienced Horacio tells his daughter, ‘Not half of these people are going to make it to the United States. But we will.’

All the pieces are in place.

The story takes off when Fate puts the three Hondurans on a northbound freight train with Lil’ Mago, El Casper, and El Smiley, who plan to rob the yokel immigrants once the train gets moving. Fast-moving events put Willy and Sayra together, pursued in an exciting, countrywide manhunt by tattooed, gun-waving wildmen.

Horacio is right: few will make it to the Rio Grande and Texas.

Writer-director Cary Joji Fukunaga’s close attention to detail makes this movie fascinating to watch, more than just a fast-paced adventure story. It appears to have been shot on location, made with an anthropologist’s eye to detail and a linguist’s ear to the nuances of the richness and diversity of Mexican and Central American Spanish. Adriano Goldman’s excellent cinematography and Marcelo Zarvos’ fine original score support these impressions.     

A viewer can see the terrain change from the roof of the train where the migrants ride as the train carries the story north. Fukunaga evidently consulted people with local gang connections, among others, in order to make his portrayals as authentic as possible. One with a good grasp of Spanish might be surprised at how different it can sound among the people of this relatively small region—as does the music.

Only the meaning of title, Sin nombre, ‘without a name’ or ‘nameless’ is uncertain. Each of the characters has a first name, not a family name, but all except for Willy have a family. The title graphic renders the ‘S’ and ‘M’ in the ornate ‘Old English’ style of the Mara Salvatrucha gang tattoo. Boys initiated into the gang get a new gang name which would enhance their identity, though El Casper seems more comfortable with Willy.   

The film makes clear that the process of illegal entry into the United States overland from anyplace in Latin America weeds out all but the strongest, most determined and resourceful people. Moreover, it belies the fatuous conceit that a mere ‘wall’ will stop people with the pluck to brave the manifold ordeals of getting to it.  

Though the closing shot gives pause as to whether the prospect of a Promised Land of Big Box Malls, of leaf blowers and cooking, cleaning, and caring for effete Americans is really worth risking one’s life and the lives of family and friends.

What a lot of heathen you are!

The Divorcée 1930 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (84 minutes) Directed by Robert Z. Leonard [credited as a producer]; based on the novel Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott.

Norma Shearer lights up the screen in her Oscar-winning starring role in this drama about a free-spirited couple who agree to marry on terms of full equality.

We first meet Shearer’s Jerry Bernard with Theodore ‘Ted’ Martin (Chester Morris), the newspaperman she loves, enjoying themselves apart from a group of their friends, affluent young New Yorkers, at her father’s country lodge outside of the city.

With Jerry in his arms, Ted tells her he likes it that she has ‘a man’s point of view,’ and she says:

‘That’s why we’re going to make a go of it. Everything equal.’

‘You bet!’ says Ted.

‘75-25,’ kids Jerry, but they embrace rather than shake on it.

They announce their decision and soon marry.

Celebrating their third anniversary, Jerry discovers that Ted has had sex with another woman. Ted tries every way he can to reassure an inconsolable Jerry that ‘it doesn’t mean a thing,’ ‘there’s nothing to it,’ and ‘it doesn’t make the slightest difference.’

However, when Ted returns home from a business trip a week later, Jerry tells him, ‘I’ve balanced our accounts.’ This time around, Ted flatly rejects his own reasoning ‘that being unfaithful doesn’t mean anything.’

Jerry and Ted divorce. Their lives continue apart within the context of their network of friends as they make careers and couple, uncouple, and recross paths in their mid-twenties in Manhattan. Their set seems a good deal more sophisticated, hip, and believeable—not to mention a lot more grown up—than the cuddly ‘friends’ of the latter day sit-com.

Jerry’s best friend Helen (Florence Eldridge), a divorcée, remarries Bill Baldwin (Robert Elliott). Ted’s best friend, the debonair and wealthy Don (Robert Montgomery), and Hank (Tyler Brooke), seem to be having too good a time to get married. 

Paul (Conrad Nagel), who had hoped to marry Jerry, instead marries Dot (Helen Johnson/Judith Wood), a woman infatuated with him, whom he does not love but feels responsible for because she was disfigured by a car accident that his drunk driving caused. Dot’s sister Mary (Helene Millard) says she has no interest in marriage.

Jerry and Ted’s story has an ending that is romantic but not forever, and the movie the better for it.

This is a good studio production and the parts are well written and well played. Zelda Sears, the actress who appears as Jerry’s opinionated maid, Hannah, also was a screenwriter who, along with Nick Grindé, got credit for the film treatment.

Some may find it surprising to hear people from long ago do and say things that would not be out of place today on their thoughts and feelings about love, marriage and the opposite sex.

However, frank discussion of these matters all but disappeared from the silver screen when the Hayes Office started enforcing the industry’s self-imposed ‘Production Code’—censorship guidelines on sexual and moral content—in 1934, and continued to do so for nearly three decades.

The Divorcée is among one of several sets of so-called ‘pre-code’ films that Turner Classic Movies has collected and released on DVD, marketed as its ‘Forbidden Hollywood Collection’. Despite the luridly leggy cover art, the sexual, moral, social, and even in some instances political subject matter make for the raciest parts.

Other notable films in these sets include Jean Harlow in Red-Headed Woman (1932), Barbara Stanwyck in The Purchase Price (1932) and BabyFace (1933) and Lionel Barrymore as an alcoholic lawyer (when alcohol consumption was illegal) in A Free Soul (1931), costarring Norma Shearer, Leslie Howard, and Clark Gable.

Murderers among us

Die mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers Are Among Us) 1946 DEFA Filmstudios and Sovexportfilm, East Germany (81 minutes) written and directed by Wolfgang Staudte.

This first feature film produced in postwar Germany has the look and feel of some of its Hollywood-produced contemporaries because it shares the same German expressionist film DNA and sensibilities with what would become known as film noir.

It combines a love story with the actions that one of the lovers, a traumatized Wehrmacht doctor, takes amid the shadows and rubble in ruined Berlin to seek justice for a war crime he witnessed.

Returning combat veterans were a natural protagonist for Hollywood film noir. American servicemen battled their demons and struggled with war memories as they sought justice, often against those who profited from the war in cities the war had not touched.

German veterans had similar experiences on the line. But rather than returning heroes, they came home defeated to a country morally, physically and economically exhausted, the remnants of a once proud and invincible power which had conquered most of Europe, but whose chief ‘victory’ in the end had been its war against the civilians of Central Europe.

Brushed by the wing of a Soviet censor, The Murderers Are among Us dramatizes several Germans contemplating the roles they played during the war and what they must do to resume their lives.

            Susanne Wallner (Hildegard Knef), a former (and briefly in real life, actual) concentration camp inmate, returns to her Berlin flat after the war to find it occupied by Dr. Hans Mertens (W. [Ernst Wilhelm] Borchert), a drunkenly dissolute and deeply traumatized veteran who had been a surgeon before the war.

            Mertens at first appears like the kind of wildly intense character John Carradine played in movies of the time—a prime candidate for war criminal—but Fraulein Wallner seems to recognize this for post-traumatic stress and invites him to share her flat until he can make other arrangements.   

            Circumstances reunite Mertens with Ferdinand Brückner (Arno Paulsen), the former company commander under whose command his traumatizing incident occurred. Mertens had thought Brückner died of his wounds on the Eastern Front.

Brückner is a jolly, mustachioed little middle-aged man with a slight resemblance to Heinrich Himmler and fond memories of ‘freedom in gray kit.’ He owns a factory that employs 120 people who refurbish old army helmets into saucepans. He has an affluent life, especially for Berlin in 1945: his wife and two young sons enjoy a surfeit of food and luxury goods in an apartment restored to prewar standards.

‘Reconstruction: that’s my motto,’ he tells Mertens. ‘My company is marching again.’

But the good doctor, unable to practice medicine because he can no longer abide the sight of blood and screams and moans of patients, is more concerned with Brückner’s earlier company, one that ‘liquidated’ assets in Poland on Christmas Eve 1942.

One can trace the German expressionist DNA in the dramatic studio lighting and use of shadow, as well as motion shot with oblique camera angles that keep the narrative moving with kinetic energy. Distorted shadows pursuing and overtaking the fearful and guilty speak eloquently for victims’ own outsized and often fatal fears.

But even more than an expressionist studio set, Berlin’s actual ruins convey on film an awesome, almost majestic gothic sense in the masses of delicate vertical piers and spires that are the remains of large buildings, buttressed by parts of walls, other collapsed structures and enormous mounds of masonry.

Director Wolfgang Staudt was of the same generation as Robert Siodmak, whose classic The Killers also came out in 1946. Fritz Lang’s Scarlett Street and Edgar Ullmer’s Detour were released the year before. It is interesting also to compare the characters and narrative with William Wyler’s 1946 Oscar-sweeping classic of three returning American servicemen, The Best Years of Our Lives.

As in Hollywood movies of the period, there is a solid troupe of character actors. Old Herr Mondschein (Robert Forsch), an optician who owns the apartment building and has his business on the first floor, lives in the hope that his faith and work will bring his son safely home. Carola Schulz (Ursula Krieg) is the building’s gossip and Bartholomaüs Timm (Albert Johannes) is an eccentric mountebank who claims to tell fortunes ‘with scientific methods.’

But camerawork and lighting aside, one also could think of this as a ‘film blanc.’

Wallner, whose attitude is to put the past behind her by throwing herself into her life and work as a graphic designer, is its femme vitale, nearly to the point of being a propagandist’s model. The doctor sets out to take a life and ends up saving two lives—a young girl’s and his own; the ‘murderer’ does not remain ‘among us.’

Follow the hyperlink to a music video that combines about five minutes of great camerawork from the film with a song written in later years by Hildegard Knef, the film’s lead actress and love interest, titled Rain Red Roses (Für mich soll’s rote Rosen regnen) performed by René Caron.

Life in the land of the Yankees II: Coming of age in the City of Angels

Quinceañera 2006 (90 minutes) written and directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, with indie director Todd Haynes as an executive producer. 

 

This tale may be the better for its improbability.

 

A quinceañera is a Latin American Spanish word for a girl who becomes the marriageable age of fifteen years—quince años. The term also refers to the coming-of-age party that Latin American families have for their daughters (and sometimes for their sons) when they turn fifteen. This is a New World tradition celebrated in various ways in different countries and regions.  

 

In this story, Magdalena (Emily Rios) is the daughter of Mexican-American evangelical preacher Ernesto (Jesus Castaños-Chima) in East Los Angeles. Magdalena is about to turn fifteen in the shadow of her more affluent, popular, and prettier cousin Eileen (Alicia Sixtos).

 

In the midst of the party preparations, Magdalena, a ‘good girl’ who minds her parents, discovers that she is pregnant even though she is technically a virgin—she has a boyfriend with whom she engages in heavy petting, but she has never been penetrated and her hymen is unbroken—an unusual but not impossible gynecological occurrence.

 

The ensuing uproar at home forces her to move in with her Tío Tomas (Chalo Gonzalez), a kindly, eccentric 85-year old great uncle who lives in a small rear house with a large garden in Los Angeles’ Echo Park neighborhood. Another of Magdalena’s cousins, Eileen’s older brother Carlos (Jesse Garcia), a tattooed and gay black sheep also shunned by his parents, already lives with Tío Tomas. 

The narrative gels by contrasting people who seek security by conforming to conventional ideas of conduct and behavior with those who do not fit in and must find guidance, consolation and fulfillment in their own way. The contrast is the more marked in a partially assimilated immigrant community.

 

Eileen and her friends are absorbed by the ritual and forms of the quinceañera, the right dress, the right guests, and whether there will be a Hummer limousine, while Magdalena must deal with the quickening fact of becoming an adult.

 

Carlos’ father, whose intense anger toward his son reflects the shame he feels in his community because his son is gay, bars the young man from the family home and social events where family and friends get together such as his sister’s quinceañera. But Carlos does not fare much better among the affluent and educated gay white neighbors who live around his uncle in Echo Park, whose patronization just makes him aware of his equally low status in the gay community. Carlos comes to realize that he can choose his own community of the people he loves and be the father he wishes he had to someone else who needs a father.

 

Tío Tomas is a quietly tolerant, empathetic, even saintly figure, especially in contrast to Magdalena’s proud and self-righteous preacher father Ernesto, too headstrong and unimaginative to see his daughter in a predicament not unlike the Mary of his scripture.

 

The story wends engagingly through an extended Latino family and a cross-section of people in an old city neighborhood ‘in transition’, that is, affluent white ‘gentry’ displacing lifelong ethnic residents. Though for perspective on this ‘transition’, it is curious to note that Audrey Totter’s evening walk a half century before in The Set-Up goes through the same neighborhood. 

 

Like life, this story takes several twists and turns to get to the point; it does so in a poignant if sentimental way.

One punch away

The Set-Up, RKO 1949 (71 minutes) directed by Robert Wise, includes a kibitz version featuring Wise and Martin Scorsese commenting as the film runs.

A fist with a hammer strikes a ringside bell. Two boxers in black leather hightops dance briefly within the ropes. One kisses canvas.

It is 9:05 p.m. on a clock and all atmosphere and attitude in Paradise City. The town fight club advertises “Boxing Wednesdays. Wrestling  Fridays.” A crowd is milling around the ticket window. Dreamland is a neon chop suey joint next door to the club. Hotel Cozy is across the way. 

A seedy fight manager named Tiny (George Tobias) crosses to the Ring Side Cafe to take $50 from a mob fixer (Edwin Max) to ‘insure’ that Tiny’s fighter, Bill ‘Stoker’ Thompson (Robert Ryan), will take a dive after round two of his four-round bout.

The camera comes through lace curtains blowing in one of Hotel Cozy’s second story windows overlooking the square, into the room Thompson shares with his wife Julie (Audrey Totter). The painter Edward Hopper and his wife could be in the next room. An alarm clock says 9:11 p.m. Thompson is an over-the-hill boxer fighting for his self-respect. He still doggedly chases a title but Julie wants him just to retire. ‘I’m only one punch away,’ he tells her. ‘Don’t you see, Bill? You’ll always be just one punch away,’ Julie says.

Tiny has not told Thompson that the fight is fixed. He is sure that Thompson has no chance of winning and plans to pocket the fighter’s cut of the fix money.

The fight scenes are raw. Ryan boxed for Dartmouth as a student. There is an animal lust and greed on the spectators’ faces. The atmosphere of the Paradise City arena has the feel of the George Bellows painting ‘Both Members of This Club’.

The camera watches a blind man with his ‘eyes,’ a companion who tells him what is going on. A fat man in the front row stuffs his face with fast food each time he appears. A man listens to a Boston Red Sox baseball game with a large radio on his shoulder next to one ear. Well-dressed middle-aged men and women get physically involved in the spectacle from their seats, screaming ‘Kill!’, and there is side-betting and backchat among the guys and dolls in the crowd.

Thompson, unaware of the set-up and hungry to come back, holds his own against ‘Tiger’ Nelson (Hal Baylor). He angrily redoubles his effort when his panicked manager tells him midway through his bout that the mobster Little Boy (career meanie Alan Baxter) has paid him to take a dive.

The rest of this efficient and meticulously shot movie is pure film noir. A beautiful sequence of shots follows Julie, who cannot bear to watch her husband battered in the ring, kill nervous moments during his bout in the streets of Paradise City. Julie gets away from the barkers, sharpers and jitterbuggers, down steps to a place overlooking a tunnel through which streetcars lit with destinations ‘Echo Park’ and ‘Temple Street’ blaze past into the narcotic Los Angeles night. 

And Little Boy does not like losing, especially when he paid to win.

An unusual feature of this film is that it takes place in real time: the time of the narrative corresponds to the film’s 72-minute running time, from right before to right after Thompson’s match, with shots of a variety of clocks at regular intervals between 9:05 p.m. and 10:17 p.m.

The source of the story is a forgotten but worthy long narrative poem of the same title by Joseph Moncure March published in 1928 (though March’s protagonist is an African-American named Pansy Jones). The poem begins, ‘Pansy had the stuff, but his skin was brown/And he never got a chance at the middleweight crown.’

Two asides: the young African-American actor James Edwards cast in a minor role as a trim and winning black fighter named Luther Hawkins, and the famous New York tabloid photographer Arthur ‘Wee Gee’ Fellig is the ‘time caller’ who strikes the ringside bell with a hammer.

World of wonder

Il posto (The position) 1961/2002 Titanus Italy (93 minutes) directed and cowritten by Ermanno Olmi; photographer Lamberto Caimi.

Il posto shows what magic can happen when a good documentary unit with an imaginative director try shooting a feature film using non-actors in their natural settings.

Protagonist Domenico Cantori (Sandro Panseri) is a ringer for Franz Kafka. The large, impersonal interior spaces of the company where he is trying to land his first job, no less its many eccentric employees, are like something from Kafka’s imagination.

However, the camera respects Domenico’s point of view—it is hard to imagine a more alien world to a teenager than that of the middle-aged adult—and takes it all in as the world of wonder it must be to this eighteen year old taking his first tentative steps into what he seems slowly to suspect could become permanent adulthood.

One senses Domenico’s mood as he sits at the window of a commuter trolley car on the way to work, a devil etched in the glass over his left shoulder. Photographer Lamberto Caimi’s camera has the good documentary qualities of being in the right place at the right time, watching steadily, carefully, attentive to detail, and respecting its subjects’ space.

The story line is simple. Domenico is among a group of applicants selected to compete for entry-level positions at a Large Company. It is a chance at secure, lifetime employment that his unsophisticated parents strongly encourage because they never had it. In their view, Domenico would be set for life if the company hired him.

Domenico meets another applicant, a young woman, Antonietta ‘Magalì’ Masetti (Loredana Detto), during the testing process. Both are hired: Domenico starts in the mailroom, Magalì in the secretarial pool. Domenico’s scenes with Magalì intimate an up side for adulthood, but this is no less tentative and uncertain to him than the prospect of spending the rest of his life working at this company.

During the lunch break on testing day, Domenico and Magalì window-shop and slowly get farther away from where they are supposed to return before 3 p.m. When a bystander remarks to another that it is 2:30, Domenico takes Magalì’s hand more as a child than an adult, and they run hand-in-hand all the way back. It is a lovely little scene, fresh and easy to believe—just one of many scenes which show that director Ermanno Olmi knows where to look to find the qualities he wants.

In contrast, Domenico goes to the company’s New Year’s Party—Magalì told him that she was not sure her mother would let her go out and is not there—where he is surrounded by older adults drinking and starting to misbehave. When he is promoted to an office job, he sees people older than his parents behave more childishly than he and his younger brother.

Olmi said that he based the film on his own experience of coming to work for The Edison Company/Edisonvolta S.p.A. at its Milan headquarters at age eighteen in 1949. But rather than the clerical worker Domenico portrays, Olmi was hired as an actor. In the early 1950s, Olmi persuaded management to let him start a film unit to make documentary films about the company and its electricity-generating projects.

Edison provided the space, camera equipment and film stock. Between 1952 and 1964, Olmi made documentaries for the company that featured its activities and projects. He also told the stories of Edison’s people working on its projects.

But he wanted to do more than this. On weekends and evenings, the filmmaker, with the company’s permission, shifted his emphasis from the company to the workers, using company locations as a backdrop to the lives of real people. He shot several feature films out of his shop using his regular film crew and non-actors.

Il posto was released initially in the United States in 1963 as The Sound of Trumpets, referring to a moment in the film when Domenico’s mother tells him to turn out the light and go to sleep because if he stays up too late, ‘not even the trumpets will wake you’—an Italian idiom probably derived from Scripture.

In addition to a high definition digital transfer of the original print, The Criterion Collection DVD set released in 2003 includes Reflecting Reality: Making Il posto, a 2002 interview with Olmi and Tullio Kezich, a friend and occasional collaborator.