The year we wuzzen’t robbed

Damn Yankees! 1958 (111 minutes) produced and directed by George Abbott and Stanley Donen, screenplay by George Abbott, choreography by Bob Fosse, music and lyrics by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, from the novel The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, by John Douglass Wallop.

With Washington’s baseball team in the postseason for the first time in 80 years, this campy classic musical comedy celebrates that city’s long-suffering fans. It will put a smile on the face of every baseball fan who ever yelled at a television or radio over a bad call or bonehead play.

Joe Boyd (Robert Shafer) is a die-hard Washington Senators fan of the late 1950s, during one of the Yankee ‘dynastic’ periods, when the Senators held sway over the American League East cellar without the least glimmer of hope in sight, and fans like Boyd hollered at televisions and radios across the greater District of Columbia broadcast area to no avail—or almost none.

When Boyd moans that he would sell his soul for a pennant, the sympathetic, obliging Mr. Applegate (Ray Walston, better known to 1960s television kids as Uncle Martin of the series My Favorite Martian) materializes mysteriously with a proposition. Yep, that’s right: Old Nick.

Boyd and Applegate strike their bargain. Boyd becomes Joe Hardy (Tab Hunter), a 22-year-old baseball phee-nom from Samuel Clemens’ hometown Hannibal, Missouri, (played on the field in archival footage by 1957 Senators #2 Roy Sievers)—curious shades of today’s Nationals wunderkinder Bryce Harper and Stephen Strasberg.

Applegate’s pad is as purple as his prose, and tellingly has the best view in town of the U.S. Capitol Building. His helper, Broadway star Gwen Verdon’s polymorphously perverse Lola, applies ‘A Little Brains, A Little Talent’ in order to try to get ‘Whatever LolaWants…’ 

But in the end, as Senators manager Benny Van Buren (Russ Brown) tells Hardy, ‘This game of baseball is only one half skill. The other half is something else, something bigger.’ Van Buren and his coaching staff launch into the classic ‘You’ve gotta have heart.’

Fun to imagine current Nationals manager Davey Johnson and his staff breaking into this song-and-dance routine in the club house (maybe this was Bobby Valentine’s problem this year). No doubt they could not agree more with the sentiment.

The movie stars most of the cast of the original Broadway hit. Look for Jean Stapleton in her first film, as one of Boyd’s neighbors. 

Ambulance chasers

Carancho 2010 Argentina (107 minutes) directed, produced and co-written by Pablo Trapero.

Billed as ‘neo-film noir,’ the atmosphere of this story set in the seamy underworld of a thriving Buenos Aires automobile accident claims racket makes tabletop cynicism feel like an empowerment pep talk.

The film opens with the actuarial information that traffic accidents are Argentina’s leading cause of death for people aged 35 years and younger. The large number of serious automobile accidents makes for a brisk trade in generating and pursuing compensation payments.

A ‘carancho,’ or vulture, is the trade’s point man, the one who actually chases the ambulances. Caranchos recruit clients for personal injury attorneys at accident scenes, in medical facilities and funeral homes, even among the homeless or unemployed strapped for cash. They get $200 per tip and an additional $300 if the tip results in a claim. (The Argentine peso trades at about .22 $US.) Caranchos also coordinate staged accidents.

Sounds like agit-prop for tort reform.

In cases mentioned in this movie, victims end up with an average ten to fifteen percent of the total settlement payment. The racket, in this film an organization known as The Foundation, takes the rest.

The story takes place in San Justo, an inland city in the greater Buenos Aires metropolitan area that bears comparison with Raymond Chandler’s derivative, malevolent Bay City, as dirty if not as pretty. Most of the action happens at night.

El Perro (Carlos Weber) is top dog in San Justo, head of The Foundation. This grandfatherly figure purrs power like John Huston’s Noah Cross in Chinatown (1974). One gets the sense that he is meant to be a holdout from Argentina’s bad old days of military dictatorship. El Perro has more authority over local law enforcement than an elected or appointed official, and also is tied in with the city hospital and its proprietary ambulance service.

Counselors Casals (Jose Luis Arias) and Rínaldi (Roberto Maciel), a pair of shyster lawyers, handle compensation claims for The Foundation. El Perro knows that Casals and Rinaldi are scheming ‘behind his back’ to take over the business; he is aware, but more amused than concerned because he knows that they are too greedy to have an original thought. These roles, and the literal heavy, ‘El Gordo’ Muñoz (Gabriel Patricio Almiron), are done to a Sopranosesque turn.

The title ‘Carancho’ is Sosa—Hector Ibáñez Sosa (Ricardo Darin). Sosa is this neo-film noir’s ‘knight,’ a temporarily disbarred lawyer who does not particularly like the system or the people involved. He makes do in the bruised realm of the possible, reassuring himself that his work sometimes helps people and that one day he may get back his license to practice law.

The appealing, sad-faced Darin may be best known to the English-speaking world for his starring role in The Secret in Their Eyes (El secreto de sus ojos), the 2010 Academy Award-winning best foreign film from Argentina. He often plays a sympathetic character that gets a lot more than he bargains for. In this film, Darin comes in for heavy manners from a variety of sources, from disgruntled mourners to dissatisfied bosses.

When Sosa meets a beautiful young doctor one night at an automobile accident scene, he thinks his luck may change.

Luján Olivera (Martina Gusman) works nights for the ambulance company center, hoping to parlay her medical degree into a more regular emergency room or clinical day job. It does not take her long to figure out that getting ahead will involve compromises.

Luján does not get much sleep; her work is stressful. To relax, she injects herself in the top of the foot with a pharmacological substance not identified, that appears to have an effect more physical than narcotic. She later tells Sosa that she acquired this habit from an anesthetist in Buenos Aires.

Sosa’s pursuit of Luján is set back when a staged accident goes horribly wrong. A warning to the squeamish: the preparation for this event involves the consensual fracture of a lightly anesthetized homeless man’s femur with a sledge hammer. This cruel mishap helps to focus Sosa on what he needs to do to win the girl and fly the coop.

A five-victim automobile accident promising a cool half-million-peso payoff may be Sosa and Luján’s ticket out.

The couple is appealing but doomed by the rules of film noir: it is the precise nature of their doom that molds the story.

Like the old saw about pursuing fame, the difficulty with chasing ambulances is that someday the pursuer may succeed in catching one.

The central challenge of the ‘neo-film noir’ school in films like this and writer/director Christian Petzold’s Jerichow (2008), for instance, is the flattening effect that the focus on dead-end protagonists has on the story arc. In contrast, classic film noir put these ephemeral figures—nocturnal moths round the brief, bright flicker of an impossible celluloid chimera—in the dark continuum of human folly and weakness. 

           

Crazy for chess

Joueuse (Queen to Play) 2009 France (97 minutes) written and directed by Caroline Bottaro, who adapted the work from Bertina Henrichs’ novel La joueuse d’échecs. 

This movie is more than a little bit improbable but quite good for all that.

Caroline Bottaro, a first-time French director, made the screenplay from a friend’s unpublished manuscript about a middle-aged hotel maid who masters chess. Bottaro cast a French star, some good character actors, locals, and a couple of American stars—well, okay, game American stars who speak French—and shot her film in Corsica.

Sandrine Bonnaire plays Hélène, a long self-denying, middle-aged French cleaning woman who, inspired by the exotic fantasy she experiences seeing an elegant, independent young American hotel guest (Jennifer Beals) play chess, resolves to learn to play.

Going against class, sex, and age expectations, Hélène masters chess by playing against Kevin Kline’s Docteur Kröger, a retired American academic and gruff reclusive widower living as an expat in Corsica whose house she cleans once a week.

The same imagination that showed Bottaro a film in this story and to cast it the way she has draws Hélène to the possibility of chess and makes her a good player. In essence, Bottaro’s two pointedly mismatched leads give each other second chances by helping each other recover something each thought he had lost.

The result is a nice story with a light touch and a range of good performances, from Kline’s finely understated amused and intrigued melancholic professor to Bonnaire’s method-like absorption in a character who has hid her candle under a bushel until this now-or-never moment broke upon her like a kind of madness—folle des échecs, as her friends and neighbors say.

Also of note are Francis Renaud as Ange, Hélène’s uncomprehending but congenial working class husband, and Alexandra Gentil as their teenage daughter Lisa.

The chess games are authentic: Bottaro used the French Chess Federation as consultants and Léo Battesti, president of the Corsican Chess League, appears as one of the players. 

White slavery

Traffic in Souls, or While New York Sleeps: a Photodrama of Today 1913 U.S. Universal (87 minutes) directed by George Loane Tucker; story by Tucker and Walter MacNamara.

This unusual early silent six-reeler spins a quick-paced yarn about the sex trade in turn-of-the-century New York. It may be the first feature film in which police use wiretap evidence to help nab the bad guys.

The story also is advanced in its portrayal of two staples of what was becoming the American Century: technical wizardry and a quick-witted, resourceful young heroine. 

Tales of ‘white slavers’—operators who enticed and abducted naïve, unsuspecting young white women from the streets and impressed them to work in brothels—made for lurid headlines in early modern New York and other American cities.

This story reveals a complex network of white slavers in action, from spotters and smooth talkers on the street and whip-brandishing madams and enforcers in brothels to management that keeps the books behind legitimate fronts.

The film was shot using a stationary camera with a single lens, thus the action takes place within the context of a series of deftly edited medium-shot frames, without close-ups (which D.W. Griffith recently had invented). The images are surprisingly sharp and the motion fluid. The exposition of the story is conveyed by brief newspaper clips. A tense, climactic tenement gunfight between police and crooks that ends on the roof may be another cinematic first. 

After director/co-writer George Loane Tucker introduces his main characters in their natural settings, the narrative pace moves quickly, the straight life storylines intercut with vignettes from various tentacles of the criminal enterprise.

Mary and Lorna Barton (Jane Gail and Ethel Grandin) live with their widowed father, The Invalid Inventor (William Turner). The sisters work as shopgirls in Smyrner’s Candy Store. Mary, the more responsible elder sister, is engaged to Officer Burke (Matt Moore), a New York City policeman. Pretty, lovable Lorna, always late for work, is everybody’s darling.

A title card identifies William Trubus (William Welsh) as ‘The Man Higher Up.’ Trubus is a middle-aged reformer with a wife and daughter and social aspirations to match his ample muttonchop sideburns. He is head of the International Purity and Reform League, created ‘to clean the city of the infamous traffic in souls.’

In an office downstairs from Trubus’ headquarters, ‘The Go-Between’ (Howard Crampton) collects the sex trade operation’s daily take from a rogues’ gallery of ‘social outlaws.’ Trubus the anti-white slavery champion monitors this activity telephonically from a dictograph downstairs via a secret line to a headset at his rolltop desk.

Lorna is among a variety of women spotted by a ‘cadet’—a white slaver’s talent scout—and targeted for acquisition. It does not take long for Officer Burke to get on the case. The story is off and running.

The great wealth of and attention to detail make this early naturalistic silent film fascinating to watch. Shot on location in Manhattan and at Universal’s studios in Ft. Lee, New Jersey, the stylish and well-to-do characters appear in the fashions of the day. In contrast, cloth-capped, mustachioed lowlifes and nattily-dressed sharpers in bowlers and straw boaters lurk the streets to ‘aid’ lost young women. 

In addition to Lorna, among the ‘victims,’ two immigrant Swedish sisters with long braids arrive literally fresh off the boat dressed as though going to a rural Swedish village festival; an awkward young American ‘Country Girl’ (Laura [Luray] Huntley) comes into the grand new Pennsylvania Station (completed in 1910 and demolished in 1964) overdressed in a corset and bustle and an enormous flowery bonnet. 

Across the trolley tracks on Eighth Avenue from the station stands the new General Post Office Building (completed in 1912; this is now Moynihan Train Station).

The Country Girl takes the Eighth Avenue trolley from the train station to an area with apartment buildings on the west side and trees on the right, most likely upper Central Park West, where she encounters the lurking ‘Respectable’ Smith (W. H. Bainbridge), a ‘grey haired inspirer of confidence.’

Signs where the Swedish sisters arrive indicate Ellis Island, but people get off a vessel at a pier open to the city and the French Line terminal appears in the background, suggesting that the location is among the Manhattan West Side piers on the Hudson.

Officer Burke, independently pursuing another lead, notices a curious new sign on an uptown tenement building: ‘Swedish Employment Agency “Swenska talas her”.’

Mary and Officer Burke close in serendipitously on the unsuspecting, lascivious nefarians. Meanwhile, The Invalid Inventor has developed a device ‘for intensifying sound waves and recording dictograph sounds on a phonograph record,’ the title card says—or recording wiretaps on media which, at that time, were cylindrical tubes of wax or celluloid, about eight inches long and three inches in diameter…

The cast, few of whom continued to work in the sound era, perform their parts in universal gestures unique to the roles they play, mimed to a turn without ham fat. (David Denby provides insight on the lost cinema art of mime in his piece The Artists [Feb. 27, 2012] in The New Yorker, with reference to last year’s ‘silent film.’)

MP suggests watching silent films such as this without the rinky-dinky piano accompaniment, a cutesy distraction that unfairly handcuffs good cinematic storytelling to a reimagined yesteryear. An instrumental hip hop soundtrack works much better.

This movie comes with The Italian (1915) in a two-DVD set rereleased in 2008 by Film Preservation Associates and Flicker Alley, titled Perils of the New Land; Films of the Immigrant Experience (1905-1915). 

Adrift

À deriva (Adrift) 2008 Brasil (102 minutes) written and directed by Heitor Dhalia.

Imagine a Latin version of Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm (1997), set on a summer beach in Brasil: sex is at its core, adults misbehave, it is very intense and sad, but none of the main characters die.

Vincent Cassel plays Mathias, a novelist staying with his wife Clarice (Debora Bloch), two teenage daughters and a son at their beach house in Armação Dos Búzios, an upscale resort 100 miles north of Rio de Janiero, during their summer vacation.

The film’s tag as a ‘thriller’ is overblown, considering Bond and the Bournes; this is a tense domestic drama. The daughters are just discovering boys while the parents’ marriage, long on the rocks, is about to break up. The atmosphere is thick with adult passion. Most of the story comes from the point of view of Mathias’ eldest daughter Felipa (Laura Neiva).

Felipa feels the tension between her parents, sees her mother regularly drink too much and hears her say nasty things to the father. Mathias meanwhile carries on with a wealthy, sexy ‘American’. Felipa digs around in her father’s desk, secretly follows him, figures out ‘everything’ in a 14-year-old-girl way—of course, entirely off the mark—and acts on that basis.

Well cast, nicely observed, beautifully shot, and written by Heitor Dhalia, who also directed The Constant Gardener and co-directed City of God.

Secret Sunshine

밀양 [Miryang] (Secret Sunshine) 2007 South Korea Criterion (142 minutes) written and directed by Lee Chang-dong.

This long, intense film makes for a compelling story because its givens—beautiful surfaces and a cast of characters and situations that mold readily to easy assumptions—bend with human nature and develop in unexpected ways.

In doing this, writer-director and novelist Lee Chang-dong accomplishes what Anton Chekhov wrote successful plays and fiction do: properly frame questions for readers to discover their own solutions, rather than supply answers.

Miryang, the name of the southern South Korean city where the story takes place, is a Chinese place-name (密陽) which means ‘secret sunshine.’

Lee Shin-ae (Jeon Do-yeon), a young widow, moves with her small son, Jun (Seon Jung-yeob), to this provincial city 350 miles from her native Seoul. Her idea is to make a new life for herself. Shin-ae has never been to Miryang, but tells everyone she meets that her deceased husband was a native and always said he wanted to return.

Her motivation is to take control of her life and to make what hurts stop hurting. ‘Secret sunshine’ also could characterize the solace of a revelation or ‘enlightenment’ that she seeks to heal and make herself whole.

Shin-ae’s ‘new beginning’ turns out to have the feel of one of those schemes that sounded great while cooking it up on one’s own late at night staring at a black window in a city apartment. By the end of the story she is fighting just to awaken from the relentless nightmare her life becomes.

How this drama plays out is best seen afresh. Watching the story take shape is like watching someone pulling open a complex origami figure, with an occasional view of where a telling fold had been made. What follows are observations on the characters, acting and direction.

The film opens with a view of a cerulean summer sky through an automobile windshield, possibly from Jun’s point of view in the passenger seat. Shin-ae’s car is broken down on the shoulder of a highway outside Miryang. The first person she meets after waving down help is the tow truck driver, automotive garage owner Kim Jong-chan (Song Kang-ho).

Jong-chan is an overgrown boy. He is unmarried at age 39, oversized and overfriendly, booming with a hale good cheer, curiosity, humor and undiscriminating tastes. Were he Italian-American, he is the kind of man other male Italian-Americans would refer to with humor and affection as ‘that fucking guy.’

Though not a character actor per se, Song Kang-ho evidently is well known to Korean audiences for his ‘good old boy' roles, perhaps a little like a younger Korean Tommy Lee Jones. He plays Jong-chan with relish, and reportedly a good local dialect and mannerisms.

Director Lee said in an interview for Criterion included with this feature that many of the actors are local stage and nonprofessional actors he cast to make the story more authentic to home audiences. His film is filled with a range of beautifully rendered smaller roles and vignettes that provide a rich, universal context for his story.

Jong-chan’s cheerful small-town macho bonhomie only annoys the refined reserve Shin-ae cultivates to hold strangers back. She keeps Jong-chan at arm’s length; his homely presence reminds her that she is a sophisticated Seoul native stuck with this yokel in the sticks. Her frosty hauteur does little to diminish or discourage his good cheer.

Shin-ae does not appear to have financial worries. She finds an apartment, enrolls Jun in a local school, starts a storefront ‘piano school’ for children, and lets it be known that she is interested in buying land on which to build a new house. The attractive, affluent young widow who puts on airs gets everyone in the neighborhood talking.

Jong-chan takes an active interest in her. Park Do-seob (Cho Yeong-jin), her son’s new teacher, himself a family man, seems like a positive role model. Neighborhood pharmacists Kim Chip-sa (Kim Mi-hyang) and her husband are born-again Christians who sense her need and are ready with medicine not made by the hands of men.

But things start not to add up. Once settled in Miryang, Shin-ae does not make any effort to contact her dead husband’s family. When her brother Lee Min-gi (Kim Young-jae) visits her from Seoul, we find out that she left Seoul without telling anyone, even her father. And her husband, killed in a car accident, had been having an affair and considered leaving her.

We learn eventually that she conceives her life stymied by dominating males we never see: a disapproving, demanding father and an unsympathetic husband in her past, which later roll into the inscrutable Christian God.

Shin-ae apparently grew up in constant conflict with her father. She trained as a musician, against her father’s wishes, but gave it up to marry. She had a child, but marriage and motherhood turned out not to be solutions either. After her husband’s death, she moved to his remote hometown to try to get her bearings back—a provincial backwater in this male-dominated culture.

One problem may be that Shin-ae may never have had ‘bearings’ to begin with. Lee said in the Criterion interview that he encouraged Jeon and Song to experience rather than try to express their characters’ emotions in order to get the strong performances he wanted. This is what makes the movie’s givens—the beautiful surfaces and a cast of characters and situations that mold readily to easy assumptions—bend with human nature and develop in unexpected ways.

Shin-ae’s difficulties with male authority inspire her resistance to help offered by Jong-chan, a kind of trickster figure. Curiously enough, Jong-chan has a disapproving, demanding mother in the background whom we only hear nag him on the telephone.

Where our first view was remote blue sky, the final shot is a Chekhovian sunlit patch of muddy earth at the edge of Shin-ae’s small cement-surfaced back yard.

The heart of this film is the interaction of Jeon and Song, virtuoso soloists who find diametrically different but complementary values in Lee’s complex score. Jeon received the best actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007 for her Shin-ae, a role strengthened by its contrast with Song’s indelible Jong-chan.