Just my luck

Мое счастье (Moyó schást’ye—My Joy) 2010 Russia (128 minutes) written and directed by Sergei Loznitsa

Imagine a Russo-Ukrainian version of Winter’s Bone—or Deliverance with Soviet-era shansons and folk ballads instead of Eric Weissberg’s dueling banjos.

The narrative of this dystopian odyssey encompasses a variety of oddments that feel filled with references to Russian and Soviet literature, culture and history. The viewer as though takes a long country walk with three people: one relates a story while another interjects comments, observations and non sequiturs along the way; a third, the camera, mutely gapes at its surroundings a beat behind the other two and longer than most people would consider polite.

(This observation refers to the film’s narrative style, not the two muzhiks and a mute the protagonist actually encounters in his ‘travels’.)

The story follows a tradition going back to the writer Nikolai Gogol’s amused and alarmed observations of what he and other Russian writers call poshlost’, a certain pig-eyed, smug provincial small-mindedness.

The new thing that writer and director Sergei Loznitsa has done here is to try to capture its endemic violence. This is compounded by the fact that these ‘provinces’ also witnessed some of the twentieth century’s most savage violence between 1930 and 1950.

In doing this, Loznitsa apparently raised hackles at home. In its political manifestation, the poshlost’ condemned would brush elbows with the kind of chauvinism that fires up the ever-willing audience for right wing demagogues. 

In an opening 'comment' before the film’s title appears, two pairs of tattooed fists drag the body of an unidentified man to a deep ditch and bury him in fresh cement. This would make for a ‘concrete’ commentary on the application of the Soviet past to the free-enterprise Russian present, though poshlost’ long predates the Soviet period.

The main narrative opens on a summer day, with Georgi (Viktor Nemets), a Russian Everyman, setting out in the present from a decrepit, Soviet-era rustbelt factory with a truckload of cement (the plant appears to manufacture cement and seems to be the location of the opening ‘burial’)—though it could be flour. There are neat stacks of heavy brown burlap sacks of a powdered substance.

This delivery appears to be a routine job. Georgi stops at his apartment to pick up coffee and sandwiches for the trip. He looks in on but does not wake his apparently sleeping wife (Alisa Slepyan), and then sets off on his run.

A Sergeant Zhitsov of the traffic police (Pavel Vorozhtsov) signals Georgi over for an ‘inspection’ at a roadside outstation. This feels like a routine shakedown. An amusing pantomime Georgi observes through his windshield shows us that Zhitsov and his captain (Dmitrii Bykovskii) have much more interest in a young blonde (Anna Sheglakova) whose new foreign red convertible they pulled over before him.

While the policemen distract themselves with the blonde, Georgi pockets his identification and travel documents and leaves the outstation. He finds a weathered old man (Vladimir Golovin) in the passenger seat when he gets back to his truck.

Georgi gives the old man a ride. The old man tells Georgi he ‘lost his name’ as the result of a chain of events set in motion by the greed of a corrupt official (Dmitrii Gotsdiner). This happened to him as a demobilized young Red Army lieutenant (Aleksey Vertkov) returning home to his village in rural Russia from postwar Berlin in 1946.

The old man disappears when Georgi stops for fuel. His story would be cautionary, even prophetic, were Georgi more than just an everyday guy delivering a truckload of cement on an ordinary workday—and did this old man not to turn up later in the story.

Soon Georgi finds himself in a long line of cars waiting for police to clear an accident scene. Anxious to be on his way, a pint-sized prostitute (Olga Shuvalova), among several local women working the waiting motorists, shows Georgi a dirt path through the ‘condom-filled’ woods that brings them to the rural town where she lives.

The feral peasant faces and nothing-doing atmosphere of the place could be straight from Gogol or any number of Russian authors writing about rural Russia and Ukraine. Georgi stands in the midst of a burping, belching, and gawking, alcohol-addled, holy-fool manswarm in the town market with a look of stunned disbelief.

The filmmaker’s view of the ‘ugly’ rural peasantry reportedly was criticized as an unpatriotic calumny. These people and the variety of others with whom Georgi is soon to cross paths might be as much—or as little—an exaggeration as the ‘locals’ in John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972) or Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone (2010).

Georgi drives out of the town alone: out of town, and as though into the forever of rural Russia and Ukraine. What had been relatively reliable Soviet-era secondary hardball roads with other vehicle traffic gradually narrows down to single lane rural routes as the sun sets, then dirt roads, then night steppe.

He tries to determine from local muzhiks where he lost his way but, as readers of Russian and Yiddish literature know, they would not be there themselves if they knew the way out.

This is where ‘luck’—the счастье (schást’ye) of the title—enters the picture. Although the English title renders счастье as ‘joy’, the same word also means ‘luck’: the entire narrative is fraught with happenstance and almost hermetically ‘joy’-proof.

In mulling over what to do with the stranger (Georgi) and his loaded truck, a muzhik baking potatoes in an open fire in the middle of a night field points out to an associate, ‘If luck (счастье—schást’ye) comes and you let it pass, you’ll be left to scratch your ass.’ There’s a lot of meditative ass-scratching in this movie.

‘Where’s the road,’ Georgi asks one of these men.

‘It’s not a road. It’s a direction.’

‘Well, where does that direction lead?’

‘Nowhere?’

‘What do you mean, “nowhere”?’

‘It’s a dead end, a cursed dead end.’

Gogol would have loved this. Yet it is only the beginning of this bedeviled, profoundly uncomprehending Everyman’s harrowing odyssey into a parallel dimension of naked unenlightened self-interest—poshlost’.

The ‘journey’ turns out to be centered on a ghost house; ghosts, spirits and eccentric visions abound in the land.

A former occupant of this traditional Russo-Ukrainian country house was a disaffected rural teacher (Konstantin Shelestun) slain by Red Army deserters at the beginning of the Great Fatherland War—World War II. This murder could be poshlost’ killing the potential for enlightened culture; and the ghost house, since peopled with gypsies and derelicts, the empty shell of the vaunted great Russian soul and the life-giving chernozem, or black earth—things that would anger nationalists.

The paradox about the socio-cultural morass into which Georgi descends is that while it seems boundless steppes beyond anything in his experience, he probably strays no more than 100 kilometers from his home.

According to the credits, the film was shot in Ukraine’s Chernihiv [Chernigov] province and the town is Shchors.

Against all odds, the story eventually loops back and resolves at the traffic police outstation in another season.

A dagger of the mind

La doppia ora (The Double Hour) 2009 Italy (95 minutes) directed by Giuseppe Capotondi.

Duplicity is the name of the gioco at the heart of this suspense thriller.

After a bizarre opening sequence involving a suicide that a hotel chambermaid witnesses at work, the story seems pretty straightforward. Until it is not.

Sonia (Ksenia Rappoport), the chambermaid, is a Slovenian-Italian who works at an upscale business hotel. She has been living in Turin only a month when she meets Guido (Filippo Timi), a local ex-cop, at a speed dating event.

Guido, an attractive widower in his thirties, serially speed-dates to ward off boredom and loneliness. Speed dating here is a bit like bingo for adult daters; the ‘prize’ is the prospect of an evening and uncomplicated sex with a like-minded stranger.

Guido’s mildly amused and diffident self confidence in concert with his good looks contrast with his strutting cock ‘competitors’ in a way that one imagines makes him attractive to women. 

Sonia, trying to meet local men, falls under his spell, seeks him out, and draws this cautious widower out of his shell.

They go home separately the first evening they meet when Sonia notices the time on Guido’s digital watch: 23:23. She tells him that she needs to sleep to be ready for an early morning shift at the hotel.

Guido tells her that the time, 23:23 is un gioco—a game, a play, a trick, a trope.

Un gioco? Sonia asks.

La venti-tre, venti-tre: la doppia ora, Guido says, giving us the film title. He explains that when one sees ‘double time’—the same number of hours and minutes on a digital watch or clock—it is the same as seeing a falling star. ‘You have to make a wish.’

‘Does it work?’ she asks.

‘No,’ he says—a throwaway flirt line.

But there is un gioco afoot. Sonia calls the speed dating organizer Marisa (Lucia Poli) as soon as she can to request that Marisa give Guido her number.

Despite the ‘blurbs’, this film does not bear easy comparison with the work of Alfred Hitchcock. Rather than raid a potboiler for telling shots as Hitchcock did time and again to stunning effect, Capotondi has colored a range of moods with details of a complex narrative.

If anything, the ‘references’—fleeting shadows, muted colors, dark figures behind opaque glass, a frightened woman home alone in a bathtub—are closer to the horror than the thriller genre.

To disclose more details would ruin il gioco. That said, Guido’s former police colleague Commissario Dante (Michele di Mauro), Sonia’s hotel coworker Margherita (Antonia Truppo), and Signor Bruno (Fausto Russo Alesi), a regular hotel guest, provide notably full-bodied and entertaining supporting roles among a competent cast.

Commissario Dante (Michele di Mauro)

Sonia’s hotel coworker Margherita (Antonia Truppo)

The effect of the narrative that follows the film’s critical event is similar to that of The Usual Suspects (1995), but rather than an inventive master criminal playing a timorous dupe weaving fact and fiction into a plausible alibi, the dreamweaver here is one character’s guilt running rampant though an active, unconscious mind.

The difference is three days.

Merchants of peace

Good Times, Wonderful Times 1966 England/U.S. (70 minutes) produced, co-written and directed by Lionel Rogosin, with James Vaughan and Tadeusz Makarczynski; restored from original negatives at the British Film Institute by Cineteca del Comune di Bologna.

This classic anti-war documentary gets it punch from slapping up cocktail party banter against archival footage and images of the First and Second World Wars.

Although Michael Moore may have run this technique into the ground for many, it was fresh when Lionel Rogosin and James Vaughan made this film in the early 1960s. Rogosin said that they had had to make the film abroad because their anti-war views were considered ‘anti-American’ at the time. 

The cocktail party is a little like the reception in A Hard Day’s Night released two years earlier—the same kind of attendees, but here without the Beatles. The usual mating rituals and small talk swing to the sound of surfer guitar music, but revolve around young professionals’ views on war, anti-fascism and nuclear disarmament.

Ironic talk about nuclear weapons—Well, what is one going to do if they decide to press the button?—leads to victim footage from post-atomic-strike Japan.

The young men tend to patronize women who are much more passive than they since have become. The Buñuelesque part is that Rogosin’s relentless message builds throughout the film and the archival footage gets starker, while his live subjects become more inebriated as the evening wears on, the men trying harder to impress each other and hit on the women. 

Charming Freddy, much more interested in the girls than people’s political views, probably won’t go home alone.

Another partygoer informs Molly Parkin, whom Rogosin hired to help draw out the others at the party, mostly non-actors, that during the Second World War, ‘the average soldier probably saw six hours of action in the whole of his career… probably for a tiny, an infinitesimal fraction of his time he was actually engaged in the sordid business of killing.’

If that were so, Parkin asks him, how does it explain ‘that during those six hours so many people managed to get killed?’

Rogosin inserts more footage of First World War trench warfare, which leads him to a group of elderly veterans, one of whom gave him the film’s title. 

‘Good times?’ said a robust British Army pensioner in the dining hall at Chelsea Hospital with sergeant’s stripes on his dress blue jacket. ‘Wonderful times! In more ways than one. They didn’t just look after the men; they looked after the horses.’

The dining hall is filled with elderly military pensioners, non-commissioned officers and lower ranks in dress blue military jackets, surrounded by the names inscribed on the walls of the British Army’s campaigns across its vast empire from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.

‘What age would you be when the First World War broke out?’ the sergeant asked his interviewer.

‘I wasn’t even born yet.’

‘Oh, you missed all the glories! I’m only sorry that you missed it,’ the sergeant said, to the nodding approval of his military pensioner table mates. 

The documentary cuts to British and German footage of the casualties of trench warfare in the First World War—‘all the glories’.

‘Now with that boy of yours, the finest thing you could do is put him in the army and make a man of him!’ the sergeant tells the interviewer.

This comment leads to the heart of the film: societies that make wars do so by indoctrinating their youth. Rogosin shows viewers how this happens, from a pint-sized Nazi storm trooper to doughty military Boy Scouts to battle-ready front line troops.  

Two partygoers said that they had served in the military, but that they had been too young for the Second World War. A Brit said that he had served in the United Nations intervention in the Congo (1960-64), and an American had been a junior officer in a parachute infantry unit during the Korean War (1951-53). 

Neither former soldier embraced ‘all the glories’ like the old sergeant in Chelsea Hospital. They justified their service as jobs that their countries needed done.

The Brit admitted to the ‘terrific sense of power’ he had had sighting an enemy with his rifle. And he noted that ‘war is one way of keeping the population down’—both ideas apparent premises to the savagery of Adolf Hitler’s war on the non-German civilian populations unfortunate enough to live in the area that he decided would be Germany’s ‘Lebensraum’ between Germany and the Ural Mountains.

When pressed, the American, who said that he simply had done a job civilians had shown themselves incapable of handling on their own, conceded that he probably had killed people, though by calling in firepower on map locations.

‘You have pride in what you’re doing. You never see it in the context of killing people. This doesn’t come into your calculations at all,’ he said. Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara (1961-68) could not have said it better.

However, there was resistance in the world. In Britain, there was the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (the originators of the iconic chicken-footed ‘peace sign’), and in Japan, demonstrations against U.S. airbases. In the United States, there was the civil rights movement: protests against racism in Birmingham, Alabama, and Dr. Martin Luther King’s March on Washington.

In the end, Rogosin appeals to ‘the people who let these things happen’ by just going along with the majority view to become the resistors ‘who stop these things’ by their active involvement against them.

Included with this DVD set is Man’s Peril (2008), a 24-minute documentary directed by Michael Rogosin and Lloyd Ross on the making of Good Times, Wonderful Times. The filmmakers interview editor Brian Smedley-Aston and actress Molly Parkin, the British woman seen drawing out others at the party. Dr. David Blitz gives context as a talking head, and there also are clips of earlier interviews with Lionel Rogosin and Bertrand Russell.

Un phallo vrai

Gainsbourg: vie héroïque (Gainsbourg—A Heroic Life) 2010 France (120 minutes) written and directed by Joann Sfar, from his own graphic novel.

Americans in high school or college in the 1970s might remember a steamy duet in French sung to a sensual rock beat by a man and a woman who sound as though they are having sex.

Je t’aime… moi non plus [I love you… me neither] (1969) is the song. Serge Gainsbourg, its writer and composer, and his partner, the English actress Jane Birkin, are the performers.

‘You know the song,’ this film’s trailer says. ‘But do you know the man?’

It’s a fair question. The story works along the lines of Todd Haynes’ Bob Dylan bio-pic I’m Not There (2007), in that rather than recount the subject’s life, it tries to convey a sense of the man who lived it through stories about him.

Not well known in the United States, Gainsbourg wrote more than 500 songs and released two dozen albums between 1958 and 1988. He wrote and directed films. He was a celebrity whose serial scandales and love affairs, most notably with Brigitte Bardot, provided regular fodder for the French tabloids.

Gainsbourg, ‘classically trained’ as they say, started out as a pianist working in a style the French call ‘chanson’, which roughly corresponds to what Americans call ‘lounge music’. His early influences were performers such as Fréhel (grittier and less mainstream than Edith Piaf) and Boris Vian. Like Paul Simon, he moved on to and had great success with a variety of other styles.

He relished provocation. It is little surprising that Gainsbourg’s sexually provocative work was not better known in Nixon-era America—or since. (Lord knows, the Nixon Administration had trouble enough on its hands with that drug-using musical English peacenik and his Japanese performance artist wife.)

In the mid-1960s, Gainsbourg wrote several songs for France Gall, a daddy-managed French teen pop idol. One of these songs, Les Sucettes (Lollipops) created a huge—and financially successful—furore because just beneath the song’s bubblegum surface lay a paean to young girls performing oral sex on older men.

In the late 1970s, he did Aux armes et cetera, a reggae version of La Marseillaise, the French national anthem, recorded in Jamaica, which infuriated French right wing nationalists. (He also managed to piss off Bob Marley, for other reasons.)

This is Gainsbourg in a nutshell. These provocations are among many that get play in the movie, but the uproar over La Marseillaise frames Sfar’s telling of the story.

For Serge Gainsbourg begins Sfar’s account as the precocious 12-year-old Lucien Ginsburg (Kacey Mottet Klein), the son of immigrant Russian Jewish parents Joseph and Olga Ginsburg (Razvan Vasilescu and Dinara Droukarova). The family lives in Paris under Nazi occupation. We see Lucien watch drunken French soldiers weave down the street in loose formation, belting out the French national anthem beneath the gaze of a grotesque egg-headed figure on a poster, ‘Le Juif et la France.’

The Ginsburg family hid Lucien in a rural school and all managed to avoid deportation and survive the war in the French countryside.

The Jewish Humpty-Dumpty from the poster follows the boy until Ginsburg’s daimon reveals itself after the war to the young man (Eric Elmosnino) as ‘La Gueule’ [The Mug] (Doug Jones, with Elmosnino’s voice), an elegant, ironical figure with a great beak of a nose and elephant ears.

[‘Mug’ seems a tame stand-in for ‘gueule’. In French, ‘gueule,’ literally an animal’s mouth or beast’s maw, is a long-time ironical/pejorative slang expression for the human face more along the lines ‘ugly mug’ or the 1940s ‘kisser’ or ‘puss’ (e.g., sourpuss), though there really isn’t a better English equivalent.]

Guided by La Gueule, Ginsburg, until then an unsuccessful painter and musical dabbler, takes up performing in earnest and soon the stage name Serge Gainsbourg.

In this story, the protagonist’s Jewish identity is a key to his personality. The film’s adult Ginsburg, like the actual Gainsbourg, is far from handsome. The film shows him taking the ‘ugly Jew’ epithet to heart. In a sense, La Gueule is as much the genius of all the ugly and negative things Ginsburg felt that the world had thrust on him, honed to fine edge and turned right back at it.

At the same time, Ginsburg is grounded comfortably in the culture of his parents. Their lifelong love and support gives him the firm footing, confidence and freedom to become the risk-taking, provocative, though ultimately self-destructive Serge Gainsbourg.

Sfar clearly is a fan of his subject, whom he sees as a ‘transcendent’ figure. His confessed preference for Gainsbourg’s ‘lies’ to his ‘truths’ in a sententious postscript at the film’s end reflects a puppy enthusiasm for his subject.

On the other hand, Sfar’s animated opening credits (even the fish smoke—Gitanes—as do nearly all the actors all the way through the story) and lively visual imagination make this picture fun to watch. 

But what brings the work off is the charisma that Elmosnino lends to these flights of fancy (Klein as the young Ginsburg also is quite good). We first see this in a scene in which the adult Ginsburg brings a guitar to a music room of Holocaust orphans.

A school official asks the hip young Jewish nightclub performer in a gabardine suit if he knows ‘Yiddish folklore’ songs, and warns him not to do anything to disturb the children. La Gueule propels Ginsburg into the classroom where he starts to strum a simple tune, to which one by one they all respond.

The scene, which feels fresh, spontaneous and genuine, establishes who this character is—or, at least, the Chagallesque strummer whom the writer-director wants us to know.

His legendary 30-year career and loves take off once La Gueule persuades him to cut out the ‘nonsense’—an ordinary life—and to get down to the serious work of writing songs.

Gainsbourg appears not to have been particularly pleasant to the lovely array of women in his life, but the delicious cast has fun vamping up the four goddesses: Juliette Gréco (Anna Mouglalis), Brigitte Bardot (Laetitia Casta), Jane Birkin (Lucy Gordon) and Bambou [Caroline von Paulus] (Mylène Jampanoï). The film director Claude Chabrol cameos as Gainsbourg’s cigar-chomping 1960s French music producer.

In the end though, Elmosnino answers the trailer’s question. He convinces us that this odd, funny-looking, possessed man really created and composed this legendary life.

Lucy Gordon as Jane Birkin, Eric Elmosnino as Serge Gainsbourg

Putting words in their mouths

Pat and Mike 1952 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (95 minutes) directed by George Cukor; written by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin.

Romantic comedies starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn still entertain movie watchers more than fifty years after they were made. 

Tracy and Hepburn are Hollywood legends, but what makes their movies sing are the words in their mouths, especially in films such as Adam’s Rib and Pat and Mike, written by the great husband-and-wife team Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin. 

The Pat and Mike story is formulaic.

Mrs. Patricia Pemberton—Pat (Katharine Hepburn)—is a widow (the Mrs.) on the faculty of a small Western college, an accomplished sportswoman who teaches physical education. She is engaged to Collier Weld (William Ching), a college administrative officer.

The good-looking, athletic Weld is not a bad guy. He is in essence the front man for the college’s fund-raising program. Everything about him says he should be an ideal match for Pat, but the audience—as well as the salty Mike Conovan (Spencer Tracy)—can see he is ‘the wrong jockey for this chick.’

What impresses prospective donors about Weld seems to be the same thing that would baffle and intimidate Pat so much that she chokes when she must perform under his gaze—a curious psychological trope that feels right on the money.

But Pat does not ‘blame’ Coll. She recognizes that she is her own worst enemy. Her problem—and the center of our story—is that she must overcome what makes her feel and act this way.

Enter Mike (Tracy), a rough-edged and slightly shady sports agent with a twinkle in his eye. Mike, who admits that he ‘can’t even speak left-handed English,’ is of course just Pat’s ticket. The two do the dance that Tracy and Hepburn fans know so well in bringing each other around. As Mike’s tag line goes, ‘You’re beauty-ful to watch—in action.’

They both are. But what makes this number more than just a duet is Kanin and Gordon’s polyphony. Tracy and Hepburn take the lead, surrounded by studio character actors who roll the story smoothly forward by tossing in well-timed one-liners from a broad range of registers. This includes everyone in the fun.

Courting prospective donors in a ‘friendly’ game of golf, Collier brings Pat along to play a set with Mr. and Mrs. Beminger (Loring Smith and Phyllis Povah), a gruff self-made millionaire and his daffy, opinionated ‘little woman’—whom Pat’s caddy (William Self) gaily mimics behind her back.

The middle-aged, putty-faced Mrs. Beminger instructs Pat nonstop in her golf swing: ‘You’ve got to tense the gluteal muscles, dear! If you don’t tense the gluteal muscles, why, your whole alignment is off.’

The jig is up at the end of the game when an exasperated Pat says: ‘Mrs. Beminger, if you could possibly lift the needle from that long-playing phonograph you keep in your face!’ Pat—with Hepburn’s signature jaw clenched tighter than ever her butt cheeks—then unceremoniously parks Mrs. Beminger in a chair and drives a line of balls serially true and deep into the course driving range.

The time is ripe for Mike to turn up in the story with his likewise shady associate, Barney Grau (Sammy White). Later we meet his ‘ham-‘n-egg’ palooka heavyweight boxer Davie Hucko (Aldo Ray), Hucko’s hapless trainer Gibby (Joseph E. Bernard) and others. 

‘Davie, talking to you is like taking a ride on a merry-go-round,’ Barney says to the unbelievably goofy Hucko at one point.

‘Gee, the last time I was on a merry-go-round, I threw up,’ Hucko says.

Hucko is jealous of the attention Mike has been giving Pat, but one on one, Pat bucks Hucko up with a shot in the arm of her own medicine about standing up for himself and taking on his worst enemy—himself.

Along the way, Pat and Mike engage, among others, a wise-cracking Manhattan waiter (Lou Lubin) at Lindy’s on Broadway, a wry police captain (Chuck Connors, in his first movie role), and a trio of Damon Runyonesque wise-guys-who-can’t-shoot-straight, including Hank Tasling (Charles Buchinski, who later Americanized his name to Charles Bronson), whom Pat gets the drop on—twice.

Police captain: ‘I hope you fellers have been on the ball here. You could learn something’ [i.e., from Pat, who just dropped Hank a second time while she physically demonstrated to the captain the contretemps that had brought them before him].

Deputy: ‘She’s okay.’

Police captain: ‘Where’d you pick up all that anyway?’

Pat: ‘Oh, I’ve been around physical ed for years.’

Mike: ‘Physical Ed? Who’s he?’

Pat: ‘Ed-yoo-cation.’

The lines come so naturally to Hepburn and Tracy that they seem as though written for them—which of course they were. Gordon and Kanin were good friends with Hepburn and Tracy and their work has the feel of good speechwriting, which is to say, dialog crafted to mimic their natural voices.

They wrote Pat and Mike for them (and not for the studio) with a view to showcasing Hepburn’s athletic ability, an accomplished tennis player and golfer.

In doing this, the film also cameos a number of professional women golfers, including three of the thirteen founding members of the then-new Ladies Professional Golf Association: Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Helen Dettweiler and Betty Hicks. These golfers are among many others who gamely let the show play through as they go about their work.

The great writing makes all the fun and high jinx look easy.

Spencer Tracy, Ruth Gordon, Garson Kanin and Katharine Hepburn

Don't tell Mom!

Little Fugitive 1953 U.S. (80 minutes) written and directed by Morris Engel, Ray Ashley and Ruth Orkin; screenplay by Ray Ashley, photography by Morris Engel, edited by Ruth Orkin and Lester Troob, music by Eddy Manson.

Joey Norton, a seven-year-old teased by his older brother Lennie and friends that his rifle shot ‘killed’ Lennie, ‘takes it on the lam’ to Coney Island on a Saturday when their mother left them home alone.

This sets in motion a lyrically shot two-day adventure for each boy: Joey (Richard ‘Richie’ Andrusco), the ‘little fugitive’ of the title, and twelve-year-old Lennie (Richard Brewster) trying to find him before Mother (Winifred Cushing) gets back Sunday evening in Morris Engel’s ground-breaking documentary-style feature classic.

The film, shot with a customized 35 mm handheld camera, celebrates a child’s bygone outdoor life in a Brooklyn neighborhood where the streets, sidewalks, stoops and vacant lots were the playgrounds. It views Coney Island in its post-World War II heyday, but from three feet looking up. And most of this it does to various strains of ‘Home on the Range’ (with the Rheingold Beer jingle—aka Emil Waldteufel’s Estudiantina Valse, op. 191, No. 4—on a merry-go-round). 

It also captures classic Brooklynese in its natural habitat. (The ‘furshlugginer’ faces, body types, images and wisenheimer attitudes match Mad Magazine’s first generation of illustrated stories.)

‘That’s my kid brother Joey,’ Lennie says by way of introduction, watching Joey use chalk to draw a cowboy on a horse on the sidewalk outside their apartment house.

‘Everybody says, couldn’t you kiss him? So go ahead, kiss him’—Joey, now on a low ledge, turns smiling to the camera with a gooey fudgsicle on a stick in one hand and fudgsicle smeared around his mouth.

Lennie explains that he has to look after his brother when his single mother is at work, adding ‘Joey’s smart for his age, especially about horses. He don’t hardly think o’ nothin’ else. In your whole life, you never met a kid what happened to be so crazy about horses.’

Joey tags around with the older boys, listening to them talk about going to Coney Island the next day without him, among other things. As it turns out, Mother gets an emergency call that her mother is very sick. She must leave the boys home alone overnight. This also means that a disappointed Lennie has to stay home Sunday and keep an eye on Joey rather than go to Coney Island with his mates.

Later, Lennie and his friends Harry (Charley Moss) and Charley (Tommy DeCanio), playing with Harry’s father’s bolt action rifle, trick Joey into thinking that he accidentally shot and killed Lennie.

The dialog sounds straight from a Hollywood gangster movie:

‘You better beat it, Joey. We’ll give you an hour’s head start on the cops,’ Harry said.

‘Better hide, Joey,’ said Charley.

‘Take it on the lam, kid,’ said Harry.

‘Yeah, hole up ‘til this blows over,’ said Charley.

Then Harry hands Joey Lennie’s coveted new harmonica as ‘something to remember him by. He don’t need it no more.’

Avoiding policemen as assiduously as Alfred Hitchcock’s characters often do, the little fugitive, wearing a toy cowboy pistol in a holster on his belt, takes the subway to what turns out to be a child’s paradise by the sea—from Jolly Olga to the Wonder Wheel to the Parashoot [sic] Drop. He has six dollars Mother left the boys for groceries.

Joey seems to make good his escape with his first ride on a ‘Catch the Rings’ carousel, whipping his charging steed forward in a lovely and dramatic Eisensteinian medley of shots. He tests himself in games of skill: at ten cents a pop, six bucks makes for a lot of rides, booths, snacks and Pepsis.

And there are crowds of people at Coney Island in midsummer. Among them is Orkin, sitting in as a woman with a baby on the beach. Engel’s eye for people and informal but well-composed shots, and Orkin’s skillful editing heighten one’s sense of Joey’s adventure as much as the pleasure of watching this story unfold.

When Joey discovers a real pony ride, he finds that he is out of money. But his desire and resourcefulness are his guides; there is plenty more adventure to come. Early Sunday morning, Lennie gets a call from a concerned carnival worker. Jay, the pony ride man (Jay Williams), tells Lennie that Joey is at Coney Island. Lennie sets off to find him before Mother gets home.

Lennie’s day at the ‘Island’ produces a memorable sentence, among a variety of verbal and visual treats: ‘Hey mistah, you’re layin’ on my pants.’

The denouement comes in a late afternoon storm at the beach, which Engel shot beautifully high and low in its midst. And there is a happy ending to all this mayhem.

Engel and Orkin, husband and wife, each an accomplished and successful still photographer, later collaborated on their second classic Lovers and Lollipops two years later (1955). Engel released a third film, Weddings and Babies, in 1958.

The DVD set includes Mary Engel’s pair of short documentaries about her parents Morris Engel, The Independent 2008 (28 minutes), and Ruth Orkin, Frames of Life 1995 (18 minutes). 

A tale of two women

Sarah’s Key 2012 France (111 minutes) directed and co-written by Gilles Paquet-Brenner, from the novel in English of the same title by Tatiana de Rosnay.

Sarah’s Key courts the unthinkable—so unthinkable that the bestselling French author of the novel upon which the film is based wrote the original work in English.

This is a Holocaust tale. But the Third Reich sits this one out on the sidelines while the B team—Vichy French authorities and police who zealously carried out Nazi Germany’s racist policies—takes the field.

The film opens with two small children playing happily in bed one morning at home. There is an authoritative rap at the door of the apartment. Paris police order the children’s mother to pack essentials for her family for ‘three days’ and report downstairs.

A quick-thinking little girl tells the plainclothesman that her father and brother are ‘in the country.’ Then she tells her little brother to get in a cupboard, making him promise to stay there and be quiet until she comes back for him. He promises; she locks him in.

In the street, mother and daughter meet father, all of whom police force to go, along with the rest of the neighbors wearing yellow stars, to a former bicycle-racing track on the Seine, not far from the Eiffel Tower. This is the notorious Rafle, or ‘Roundup,’ of French Jews at the Vel’ d’Hiv’ [the former Vélodrome d’Hiver, also known as the Palais des Sports] by Paris police on July 16-17, 1942.

This two day roundup involved about 13,000 Jews—about one sixth of the total of 76,000 deported from France to the Reich’s camps in Germany and Eastern Europe. Roughly 8,000 people were held for several days at the Vel’d’Hiv’ before they were moved to a transit camp south of the city at Beaune-le-Rolande, eventually to Auschwitz. The rest were sent to the Nazi-run holding camp at Drancy, a suburb northeast of Paris.

The quick-thinking little girl is Sarah Starzynski (Mélusine Mayance). The most essential item she has brought from the apartment is the key to the cupboard in which she has stowed her brother Michel—Sarah’s key. So far, she has saved her brother’s life. Now she—or someone—must return to get Michel out of the cupboard.

Fast forward 65 years. Julia Jarmond (Kristin Scott Thomas), an American journalist married to a French architect and living in Paris, is working on a feature story about the ‘Roundup’ for her American magazine. It is territory she knows well.

Her husband, Bertrand Tézac (Frédéric Pierrot), is absorbed in a large project with a Chinese client. He also is renovating his family’s longtime apartment in the newly trendy Marais neighborhood in the heart of Paris, one of the oldest parts of the city, for himself, Julia and their daughter Zoë (Katrina Hin).

In relatively short order, Jarmond realizes that Bertrand’s grandparents first moved into the apartment weeks after the roundup. With her fluent French and a little local legwork, she discovers that the family who lived in the apartment before the Tézacs moved in had been Polish Jews named Starzinski.

She finds out that Riwka (Natasha Mashkevich) and Władysław Starzinski (Arben Bajraktaraj) were arrested during the Rafle, taken to the Vel’ d’Hiv’, then to the transit camp at Beaune-le-Rolande, and afterward to Auschwitz—but not their children.

These are the bare bones of a sweeping, epic narrative which involves the Tézac and Starzinski families, as well as the salt-of-the-earth Dufaures (Jules, Niels Arestrup, and Geneviève, Dominique Frot) and an American family named Rainsferd (Richard, George Birt, and William, Aidan Quinn).

Without revealing any more plot points or story details, it must suffice to say that director Gilles Paquet-Brenner wraps up his story leaving no loose ends. The tale is cast broad but accessible, with a clean finish. The picture is filled with lovely details and many small moments which Paquet-Brenner was lucky to catch and astute to recognize for what they are—and to keep.

One thing that makes the movie hold together well is that it is not yet another pious Holocaust narrative with all the usual suspects. It is a complex tableau comprised of individuals making the variety of idiosyncratic choices real people make, within the context of one of history’s big events.

One is reminded of May Sarton’s ‘one must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.’

Scott Thomas, herself an Englishwoman married to a Frenchman and living in Paris, is acting a life close to the one she leads. But hers is a tough role. Julia Jarmond is that odd breed of American expat, definitely not ‘one of us,’ though perhaps less ‘one of them.’ In order to chase down all the story’s details, she plays an American bull in a boutique of exceptionally brittle old French china. In this, she succeeds well.

The real grace note in this movie is Mélusine Mayance, the ten-year-old girl who plays the child Sarah. This child actress looks younger than ten, but she has the acting chops, the poise, rhythm and timing of actors several times her age. Sarah’s actions are informed by what she observes in the adults around her—surely no less than those of Mayance herself surrounded by adult professionals.

As for the easy outrage that works such as this story can trigger, an old woman Jarmond interviews for her story may say it best.

In the present day, this woman (Jacqueline Noelle) tells Jarmond of the noise and the horrible stench she remembered coming from the Vel d’Hiv’ across the street from her house in the Rue Nélation, with the 8,000 people corralled there. Jarmond asked her if anyone in the neighborhood tried to figure out what was going on there at the time.

The woman replied: ‘To figure it out? That’s easy enough to say now. We were fed so many stories about the Jews. What would one have done anyway? Call the police?’