Beggars' banquet

Viridiana 1961 Spain (91 minutes) directed by Luis Buñuel and written by Buñuel and Julio Alejandro.

This movie, perhaps one of Buñuel’s most accessible, tells a straight-laced story of the human condition, filled with sexual obsession and repression, religious ardor and its bawdy parody, and Buñuel’s wicked wit.

Viridiana (Silvia Pinal, a Mexican actress something of a composite Kim Novak and Catherine Deneuve) is a pious young woman preparing to take vows to enter a religious order. She is urged against her will by her convent’s Mother Superior to visit Don Jaime (Fernando Rey), a wealthy uncle she has met only once, but who has provided for her maintenance and education. 

 

Don Jaime is a lonely old man who lives with his housekeeper Ramona (Margarita Lozano), her daughter Rita (Teresita Rabal) and his small household staff on a large and long neglected rural estate. Don Jaime leads the life of a male Miss Havisham, haunted by the memory of his bride—Viridiana’s aunt—who died on their wedding night. He keeps her trousseau in a trunk at the foot of their bed, and obsessively tries to slip into articles of her white wedding attire, her veil, corset and silken shoes.

Viridiana’s strong resemblance to her aunt fires Don Jaime’s desire to keep her with him on his estate: if not as his wife, then as the focus of his obsessive veneration, a picture of purity framed between bare breasted caryatids supporting his fireplace mantle. In a sense, the manor house with its barred windows would be a ‘convent’ of his obsession.

It is not difficult to imagine how this intensely self-absorbed, bizarre prospect would horrify anyone. When Viridiana declines to stay, Don Jaime hangs himself with Rita’s jump rope, high from a tree outside the house. 

Guilty, confused and ‘changed’, Viridiana decides to stay at this ‘convent’ rather than return to the one she left, to try to find practical ways to lead a devout life. The household expands when Don Jaime’s bastard son Jorge (Francisco Rabal), who inherits the estate, turns up with a girlfriend Lucía (Victoria Zinny).

Jorge wants to improve the estate’s building and grounds; Viridiana wants to improve herself and others by her example. In trying to secularize her religious practice, Viridiana becomes a ‘limousine liberal’ when she invites a motley crew of beggars and homeless men and women to join her in a community at the estate. 

In the same spirit, Jorge notices a dog tied under a moving carriage and asks its owner why it does not ride in the carriage. ‘It’s a dog,’ the owner replies. Jorge buys the dog to rescue it from callous humanity, and as he walks away self-satisfied by his act, another carriage passes by behind him with a dog trotting tethered beneath it.

Like Viridiana’s notion of secularizing the ideal she envisions in her religious practice, her own project backfires when smudged with greasy human fingerprints.

One day when left at the estate to their own devices, the beggars decide to explore the life of the temporarily absent owners. A scene of beggar women admiring a fine linen tablecloth dissolves to a glass of wine knocked sideways, splashing across that same fine tablecloth spread on an aristocratic table groaning under a true beggars’ banquet.

In a sense, the tableau of this Bruegelian beanfeast mocks the pretention that fostered it when the diners pose to be ‘photographed’ aping Leonardo Da Vinci’s iconic painting The Last Supper. But rather than blaspheme, the scene offers a folk rendering of a well known religious image—as drunken Americans might recreate the iconic images of the Flag-Raising at Iwo Jima or Washington Crossing the Delaware.

This beggar’s banquet and the pose they strike is shockingly funny but, as in the rest of the film no less than its conclusion, Buñuel seems to be saying over and over that he is more interested in observing and celebrating human nature than in making fun of human institutions like the church or the Franco dictatorship, or of humans in themselves.

The film stands out most notably for its independence of thought and spirit.

Buñuel, who had been living in exile from the Franco dictatorship in Mexico and briefly in the United States since the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939, enraged other exiles and anti-fascists when he returned to Franco’s Spain to make this film in 1961.

The film passed Franco’s censors and won acclaim at Cannes. However, its allegedly blasphemous content outraged the Vatican, prompting the Franco government, with its close ties to the church, to withdraw its support and ban its screening in Spain.

Theatrical trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMyyBVX6DAk

Win Win

Win Win 2011 U.S. (106 minutes) written and directed by Tom McCarthy.

For anyone who hopes there is a special corner in hell for those who use the expression ‘win win’, this well-made family drama may be for you.

Though no one in the film actually uses that Dilbertism, Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti), an attorney with a solo elder care practice in New Providence, New Jersey, comes across as a harried family man surrounded by ‘win win’: he has heard it and seen it work so often for others that he decides to give it a whirl.

The story’s central dramatic problem grazes in the hypothetical shady ethical area of ‘whatever the fuck it takes,’ which comes down to taking a flyer on a thing that seems like a great idea at the time and then dealing with the unseen consequences.

Life gets sticky. Director and writer Tom McCarthy thrives in its stickiness in his work here, as he did writing and directing The Visitor (2007) with Richard Jenkins and The Station Agent (2003) with Peter Dinklage, Patricia Clarkson, and Bobby Cannavale. Cannavale plays Mike’s best friend Terry Delfino in Win Win. McCarthy, an 'actors’ director' who can write and act, may be best known to viewers for his own acting work, memorably as Scott Templeton, an unethical newspaper reporter in the fifth and last season of the HBO series The Wire (2008)—a very sticky business.

Win Win begins with Giamatti's Mike jogging on a frosty morning—jogging at a doctor’s suggestion to reduce stress. His daughter Abby (Clare Foley) climbs into bed with her mother Jackie (Amy Ryan) and asks Jackie where daddy is.

‘He’s running,’ Jackie says.

‘From what?’ Abby asks.

Sharp kid: Abby watches her parents as a mirror, listening as though an electronic bug fine-tuned for tone. And she has a knack for finding exactly the right moment to play back the most telling—and least flattering—parts.

Abby plays a small but integral part among a convincing ensemble of actors that also includes Nina Arianda in a small role as Mike’s secretary Shelly. In a recent profile in The New Yorker (Backstage Chronicles: The Natural, Nov. 7, 2011), drama critic John Lahr compared Arianda’s stage presence to that of Meryl Streep. Here, she is more like Streep and Marisa Tomei tossed in a blender—not a bad blend.   

Mike is not a bad guy. He has his law practice and he coaches high school wrestling with his officemate Stephen ‘Vig’ Vigman (Jeffrey Tambor). His problem is that business has been slow and he is strapped for cash.

One of Mike’s clients, Leo Poplar (Burt Young), is a comfortably-retired blue collar white ethnic with dementia and no family besides a daughter from whom he is estranged and has not seen for twenty years. Where’s the downside in taking a $1500-a-month maintenance fee as Leo’s guardian? Win-win, right?

There is a niggling detail in Mike telling the court that he will see to his client’s care in Leo’s own home, when actually he plans to put Leo in a nearby assisted living facility at Leo’s expense. But Oak Lawn is a nice place that will give Leo the round-the-clock care he needs, Leo easily can afford it, and he does not seem much to notice the difference.

Then it turns out that Leo has a grandson. Mike discovers Kyle Timmons (Alex Shaffer) waiting outside Leo’s empty house one morning. Kyle is no more a space alien than most teenage boys, he just grew up with a lot less earthly supervision. He has come from Ohio by himself by bus to visit his grandfather (and to get away from his mother). Mike and Jackie decide he can stay with them until he goes back home.

There’s a deft shot of Mike depositing his first guardianship check at a bank ATM, standing behind glass on which an image of Benjamin Franklin’s portrait on the $100 bill is reflected and superimposed on Mike’s smiling face. Mike calls Jackie to tell her to mail their health insurance premium, presumably held awaiting funds.

Mike’s and Ben’s smiles are win-win writ large.

And it turns out that Kyle can wrestle (Shaffer evidently is a wrestler). He is so good a wrestler, and so content to stay with Mike and Jackie near his grandfather, that Mike and Jackie let him stay and Mike enrolls him in school so he can wrestle on the team. That mantra again…

After wowing his coaches in his first match, Mike asks Kyle in practice to share what he did with his teammates. There’s no specific knowledge it turns out; there’s a philosophy: one must do ‘whatever the fuck it takes’ to stay in control and win.

The table is laid for Kyle’s hypothetical mother, Cindy (Melanie Lynskey), to materialize at Mike’s office in the flesh and represented by counsel (Margo Martindale), scenting her estranged father Leo’s money.

Theatrical trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ci_I6n2j5Uw

Hit and run

Muerte de un ciclista (Death of a Cyclist) 1955 Suevia, Spain (88 minutes) directed by Juan Antonio Bardem.

This is beautifully shot classic Spanish melodrama satirizes the ruling class under Franco in the 1950s, filmed in the black and white of Italian neorealism.

The basis of the story is a love triangle among Spanish society people. Juan Fernandez Soler (Alberto Closas) left Maria José (Lucia Bosé), his first love, to fight in the Spanish Civil War. While Juan was at war, Maria José, a woman of a distinguished family but limited means—and expensive tastes—married the wealthy businessman Miguel Castro (Otello Toso). In the decade after the war, Juan and Maria José de Castro have an affair.

One of the key themes is the ‘egoismo’ of the ruling class—an I’ve-got-mine self-absorption, contrasted with people who work together to serve a common good for the benefit of all.

The story opens when, driving together from an assignation at an inn on a plain outside Madrid, Maria José behind the wheel, the car hits the title cyclist in a desolate stretch of road. Fearing exposure of their affair and looking out for their own interests, the couple leaves the cyclist to die on the shoulder of the highway.

Juan is a geometry professor who owes his academic position to Jorge, his powerful but also rather pompous and ridiculous brother-in-law (Emilio Alonso)—‘un gran muchacho!’ as someone chimes in jovially—a Francoesque ‘good old boy.’ Miguel seems willfully ignorant of his wife’s affair. Curiously, Bardem’s camerawork shows Juan and Miguel gradually appear to lose distinction from Maria José’s perspective.

There also is Rafael “Rafa” Sandoval (Carlos Casaravilla), a social climber with a chip on his shoulder who has insinuated himself into this circle of society people. Rafa cynically games with people’s bad consciences to tease out their peccadilloes, trying to make them think he knows more about them than he actually does.

This tactic works with nearly devastating effect on Juan and Maria José, whose self-absorption leads them to imagine he knows about their affair and the hit-and-run.

Their apprehensions get wing when Rafa makes sure to display himself speaking intimately with Miguel out of their earshot. Later, at an overheated, foot-stomping, hand-clapping, smoke-filled, all-night flamenco session for clueless, rich, visiting Americans, we see Hitchcockian close-up shots of Rafa’s lips moving first near the wife’s, then near the husband’s ear.

The story circles karmically back to where it started, with Juan following his conscience to serve the greater good, inspired by Matilde Luque Carvajal (Bruna Corrà), a geometry student he has wronged, and Maria José in mad pursuit of her self-interest—‘egoismo’.

Director Juan Antonio Bardem is the uncle of actor Javier Bardem.

The Red Balloon

Le ballon rouge (The Red Balloon) 1956 France (34 minutes) written and directed by Albert Lamorisse; cinematography by Edmond Séchan; music by Maurice Le Roux.

This short film for children is a masterpiece of form that can be as light or as deep as a viewer wants to make it—a little boy’s adventure story or an allegory of the soul.

Pascal (Pascal Lamorisse) a small, lonely boy in 1950s Paris, finds and befriends a large bright red helium balloon and has adventures with it in the streets and narrow passages of Ménilmontant, an old Paris neighborhood in the east of the city, northwest of Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Pascal claims the balloon that he finds moored to the top of a light post; but the balloon also claims Pascal, playfully but faithfully following the boy and keeping him company. 

The opening shot sets the mood: Pascal, heading to school slapping his small satchel against his side, pauses at an impasse in Ménilmontant which overlooks the city to pet a cat at the head of a flight of steps leading to a passage below.

The dominant colors are shades of slate grey and burnt umber. The streets of this now long-ago postwar Paris will seem remarkably free of motor vehicles by today’s congested standard. Also, the only residents one sees are white and French.

As the story unfolds, the boy and balloon navigate the wonderland that the urban adult world can be to a child, its familiar and also its threatening aspects. Adult strangers tend to be friendly to Pascal, or easy to get around if not; a loose pack of slightly older and bigger street kids who would take Pascal’s balloon pose a bigger problem.

Director Albert Lamorisse won the 1956 Oscar for best original screenplay, but there is a minimum of dialog. Lamorisse, a documentary filmmaker, tells a satisfying story in pictures; he lets Maurice Le Roux’s score, which has the light, sure touch of a classical pop concert for children, provide a commentary.

Attractive jiggle

Anatomy of a Murder 1959 Columbia (160 minutes) directed and produced by Otto Preminger, written by Wendell Mayes, original soundtrack by Duke Ellington.

‘Attractive jiggle’ is at the center of this authentic mid-century courtroom drama.

Laura Manion (Lee Remick), a provocatively attractive young Army officer’s wife, contacts Paul Biegler (James Stewart), a small town bachelor lawyer, to defend her husband, charged with shooting to death a civilian bar owner whom she claims raped her.

It’s a tough case: there is no question that Lt. Frederick Manion (Ben Gazzara) came into the cocktail lounge and shot Barney Quill five times with a ‘war souvenir’ German Luger pistol in front of witnesses.

It’s also a tough case for the lawyer Biegler to resist: it is a heady professional and intellectual challenge, and it pits Biegler against District Attorney Mitch Lodwick (Brooks West), to whom Biegler lost the county prosecutor’s job in a recent election. His practice could use the potential fee it would bring.

The facts and the law are the easy part. The mystery, and what makes this two-and-a-half hour movie fun to watch, is the people at the center of the case. Lt. Manion comes across at first as arrogant and contemptuous. Biegler senses Manion’s intelligence, but is the lieutenant intensely jealous? Does he have problems controlling his anger? Is he a wife beater? Or is he a calculating killer?

Laura repeatedly is on display from the moment we see her meet Biegler—with a lovely high riff from Johnny Hodges’ trumpet. When Biegler asks her if she is afraid of her husband, she tells him that Manion ‘likes to show me off. He likes me to dress the way I do. But then he gets furious when a man pays attention to me. I tried to leave him but I can’t. He begs and I give in.’

Is Laura’s flirtatiousness quirky, fun and unselfconscious, or is she manipulative? Was the alleged sex a rape or consensual? Was there any sex at all? Is Laura trying to help Biegler get her husband off the hook, or did she set the lieutenant up to get rid of him?

Biegler sums up his problem when trying later to persuade a reluctant witness to testify: ‘As a lawyer, I’ve had to learn that people aren’t just good or bad; but people are many things. And I kind of had a feeling that Barney Quill was many things,’ he said—and not only the victim Barney Quill.

The story comes from a best-selling novel of the same title, written by an upstate Michigan retired judge named John Voelker writing under the name Robert Traver. The trial preparation and legal proceedings, tailored to the drama, move a lot more quickly than in real life.

One of the things that make the movie courtroom work so well is that a real trial lawyer plays presiding Judge Weaver. Joseph N. Welch was a senior Boston lawyer and became a household name as lead counsel for the Army in the nationally televised Army-McCarthy Senate hearings earlier in the decade. (His wife is one of the jurors). Welch’s role undoubtedly is informed from practicing in front of many variations of the figure that find its way into Judge Weaver’s black robe. Welch brings gravitas, a sharp mind and a fine sense of humor to the role.

Joseph N. Welch, James Stewart, Brooks West and George C. Scott in Anatomy of a Murder.

Another interesting detail is that Preminger skips the closing arguments, the summation each side gives at the end of the case, which often provides high dramatic moments both in court and in movies. Trained as a lawyer, perhaps Preminger found the facts more compelling.

There also are strong supporting performances. Arthur O’Connell plays Parnell Emmett McCarthy, Biegler’s senior associate and alcoholic mentor, who talks Biegler into taking the case, then whom Biegler makes swear to lay off alcohol. Comedienne Eve Arden is Maida Rutledge, Biegler’s arch secretary, and George C. Scott is Claude Dancer, a hard-driving assistant Michigan state’s attorney ‘sent up from Lansing’ to help prosecute the case.

Duke Ellington’s score comments on the action like a hip Greek chorus and it has seasoned well with age. Ellington, as pianist-bandleader Pie Eye, and four of his band appear in one scene as the Pie Eye Five in a roadside tourist joint.

The music in the place swings way too well to be just background. The camera finds two pairs of hands at the piano: one pair from ornate sleeves belongs to Pie Eye; the other hands are Biegler’s, sitting in as a jazz fan and musician. But Biegler has to get up when he sees his client’s wife dancing drunkenly with other military officers. 

‘Thanks for letting me sit in, Pie Eye.’

‘You’re not splittin’ the scene, man?’

‘Huh?’

‘You’re not cuttin’ out?’

‘No, I’ll be back.’

But Biegler doesn’t come back. He knows that his job is to keep his—and especially, a jury’s—focus on the case he is trying to win. When he gets Laura outside, he tells her:

‘Look Laura, believe me: I don’t usually complain about attractive jiggle, but… just… you save that jiggle for your husband to look at, if and when I get him out of jail.’

Zaftig bombshell

Quai des Orfèvres 1947 Majestic, France (91 minutes) directed and cowritten by Henri-Georges Clouzot; the DVD set includes a 1971 interview for French television with Clouzot and three of the stars.

The French classic Quai des Orfèvres combines a plain man’s violently obsessive jealousy over his voluptuous music hall singer/actress wife with the murder of a powerful but nasty old hunchback.

Quai des Orfèvres is the location of police headquarters in central Paris. The murder investigation actually functions more as a vehicle for the chief inspector and his associates to crack wise about the victim, suspects and human nature in general, with each other, the suspects and a troupe of minor characters.

A large and lively cast of music hall performers, crew and management, cops, criminal detainees, reporters, performing dogs and a variety of men- and women-in-the-street all get to toss in their sou’s worth of snappy comments and eye rolls as the story develops.

As in Hollywood pictures of the same era, dramatic studio lighting heightens the mystique of this long-ago time and place; the milk bath of light gives the actors’ skin a warm, rosy glow.

The story takes place in December 1946: the coats, scarves and hats worn inside and an unconscionable lack of cars on the streets all speak to the fact that this is Paris in the first year after the war.

The film opens with the zaftig bombshell Jenny Martineau/Lamour (Suzy Delair), a kind of French Mae West, listening to a middle-aged musical talent agent singing a song for her. Her pianist husband, Maurice Martineau (Bernard Blier) seen through a glass door, is playing the piano in the next room. The agent keeps time by patting Jenny jovially on her fluffy fox-furred knee, a liberty which enrages Maurice. Jenny and the agent dismiss his jealous outburst—the silly boy knows she flirts with middle-aged sugar daddies who she thinks can help her career—and she sings what turns out to be her hit song, ‘Avec son tra-la-la,’ pushing the story along from the agency to the Paris music hall where she and her husband perform.

Enter Dora Monnier (Simone Renant), a photographer with a studio and apartment near the Martineaus’ apartment, who is the couple’s best friend. We see Dora taking publicity photos of Jenny in a frilly black bustier and an oversized hat with a large white plume, her shapely legs in black nylons.

Jenny rebuffs Dora’s physical interest in her, and the session is cut short when another client, Georges Brignon (Charles Dullin), the rich hunchback, arrives with a lovely young ‘starlet’ he wants photographed in nothing but her shoes for his ‘personal collection’. As Jenny leaves, the grotesque Brignon proposes meeting her for lunch ‘with his director’ to discuss a film role for her.

Maurice disrupts the subsequent lunch meeting in jealous rage, with a passionate death threat heard by all the restaurant staff; Jenny later manages secretly to meet Brignon in the evening; the housekeeper discovers him dead on his hearth the next morning. Now it is the job of Detective Lieutenant Antoine (Louis Jouvet) to work out whodunit.

Very little surprises the droll Antoine, a gravelly voiced ex-legionnaire who served in the colonies and is raising a mixed race adolescent as a single parent. The pipe-smoking Jouvet, a fixture in French detective movies along the lines of Humphrey Bogart, has a manner that is appealingly direct and I’ll-be-damned! that makes him and his interactions with the other actors fun to watch.

The result is a classic: a sexy and entertaining French detective movie deftly narrated in pictures with an appreciation of human frailty and a wry sense of humor.

This was the first film Clouzot made after serving a two-year professional ban for purportedly having collaborated with the Nazi occupiers during the war. Clouzot made Le Corbeau (The Raven) in 1943 in occupied France for a German production company set up in France under the auspices of Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.

This wartime film examined human nature by showing the residents of a small town reacting to the scurrilous accusations of an anonymous poison pen writer.

The work was taken to have cast the French people in a negative light, in line with the Third Reich’s characterization of the subjected French as a craven and emotional people. It angered the French Left and Right, the Catholic Church—and the Nazis themselves evidently were not all that happy with it either.

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.

Philately as self-abuse

Nueve Reinas (Nine Queens) 2000 Argentina (114 minutes) written and directed by Fabian Bielinsky.

This Mametesque caper set in Buenos Aires involves a pair of con men trying to sell a counterfeit block of nine rare and valuable postage stamps—the ‘Nine Queens’ of the title—to a wealthy but shady Spanish collector.

First we meet Juan (Gastón Pauls), a friendly, nice-looking young guy, trying to pull a bill-change swindle on homely clerks twice in the same convenience store, before and right after they change shifts. 

Marcos (Ricardo Darin), a con man with big ideas and money problems, happens to be in the store and watches this play go down with amusement as he eats a hot dog. Kid’s stuff, but he likes the kid and needs a partner.

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 Oscar-winning best foreign film from Argentina, in which he played a judge’s clerk haunted by the unsolved brutal murder of a young wife and chagrined by his long unrequited love for the judge’s law clerk.

Juan spends the morning with the older and wiser Marcos, telling stories and bonding as they improvise retail scams strolling through downtown Buenos Aires. In a memorable sequence of shots, Marcos points out more than a dozen different street operators.

Marcos is not popular among his associates in the Buenos Aires underworld. He also has difficulties with his sister Valeria (Leticia Brédice), who leads a straight life climbing a chain hotel management ladder. The fire in Valeria’s eyes comes from her conviction that Marcos cheated her and Federico (Tomás Fonzi), their kid brother who idolizes Marcos, out of their shares in their Italian grandparents’ estate. 

‘Technically, one could say I unilaterally readjusted dividends,’ is the way the self-centered Marcos tries to explain what happened.

Marcos gets an angry midday telephone call from Valeria, who complains that one of his ‘associates’ has embarrassed her by turning up at her place of work looking for Marcos and had a medical emergency. 

The associate, Sandler (Oscar Nuñez), apparently on his last legs, is a master counterfeiter. He gasps to Marcos that he has made ‘mi mejor trabajo’—the masterpiece of his career—a block of nine rare and valuable German Weimar era stamps known as ‘The Nine Queens’. Sandler tells Marcos that he made his copy from a set of originals owned by his wealthy sister Berta (Elsa Berenguer) and believes he can sell the stamps to a guest at the hotel, Esteban Vidal Gandolfo (Ignasi Abadal), a wealthy Spanish entrepreneur. But there are some hitches.

Gandolfo appears to be under a kind of house arrest at the hotel awaiting deportation to Venezuela the next day, evidently due to questionable business activities in Argentina. Sandler, a specialist, not a front man, contacts Marcos because he needs a professional he knows to make the sale happen within 24 hours.

Marcos knows that Sandler is asking him only because he is desperate—they have a history—so Marcos makes the ailing old man agree to give him most of the take, and then settles on a fifty-fifty split with Juan. ‘This is something you could wait for your entire life and never happen to you. One in a million,’ he tells Juan more than once.

And then masterpiece gets jacked in broad daylight on the streets.

These are the main moving parts that set in motion this elaborate game of three-card monte. The rest is a wild ride peopled with an entertaining array of character actors: barman Anibal (Jorge Noya), Mrs. Sandler (Celia Juárez), Sandler’s rich sister Berta and her Fabio-like boy toy (Carlos Falcone), Gandolfo and his double dealing ‘stamp expert’ Washington (Alejandro Awada), among others.

 The key to keeping track of which is the red card—or whether there even is one—is not to suspend disbelief for one second from start to finish. For instance, what the devil is a queen doing on Weimar stamps?

It is the kind of story David Mamet might love because it comes down to justice. But Fabian Bielinsky’s screenplay and direction have a Latin lightness, warmth and fun lacking in Mamet’s stylistically muscular forensic architecture.

Justice is served with a garnish au Tarantino (or John Waters) when Juan at last remembers the campy Italian pop tune (Il ballo del mattone/The brick dance) from his childhood that no one he asks throughout the film seems to know.

Classic mayhem and menace

The Narrow Margin 1952, RKO (71 minutes) directed by Richard Fleischer, written by Earl Felton, includes a kibitz version featuring Fleischer and director William Friedkin commenting as the film runs.

Two Los Angeles police detectives are tasked to take a former big-time mobster’s widow by train from Chicago to Los Angeles to sing to a grand jury, the mob hot on their trail to catch the canary.

Detective Sergeants Walter Brown (Charles McGraw) and Gus Forbes (Don Beddoe) first must pick up the widow, Mrs. Frankie Neall (Marie Windsor), at a safe house in Chicago and get her safely on the train, because the mob has an all-points hit out on her.

After a close call at a police safe house, the mob can identify Brown and watch for him at the station. According to the plot line, they cannot identify the widow.

On board the train, Brown realizes that a variety of people is very actively looking for him and his witness. He does not like Neall. Windsor has the classic look for the part: bathed in the milk of studio lighting, she has a sexy, flinty edge and serves up everything that a hard-bitten career ‘good cop’ like Brown would presume a ‘mob wife’ to be.

When Forbes earlier asked him about Neall, Brown, never having met her, called Neall a ‘dish’. ‘What kind of a dish?’ Forbes persisted. ‘A sixty-cent special: cheap, flashy, strictly poison under the gravy.’ It may turn out that he ordered from the wrong menu.

As Forbes, Don Beddoe is the first of a complement of fine character actors that lend a good story body and seasoning, including Paul Maxey as Sam Jennings, a plus size train detective with the tag line ‘Nobody loves a fat man,’ and Peter Virgo is Densel, a bad man in plaid and a snap brim fedora, among others.

Brown also meets and makes an ally of Ann Sinclair (Jacqueline White), a mother travelling with her small boy and the boy’s nanny, though his casual association with Sinclair may mean other things to lurking mobsters.

The film contrasts the day lit, orderly civilian world where people follow laws, work and raise families (and African-American red caps and Pullman porters are smiling and obliging), and the night world of illicit activity—sneaks, corruption, theft, bribery and murder (that black men know to be well shun of). True to the film noir genre, the contrasts blur when the givens turn out to be not as they first appear.

The lighting and back projection are beautifully composed, and there also are several lovely, tidy shots that combine actual interior and exterior spaces, such as inside a train compartment and outside the window when the train is stopped at a station. Light flicking by the windows and reflected along interior surfaces throughout the film, as well as a camera lightly jounced from time to time, remind the viewer that the action is taking place on a moving transcontinental train. A long, dark sedan keeps pace ominously alongside the train at night when the kill is set.

The denouement is set up with a shot of Neall in a lacy black negligee filing her nails with a rhythmic shhh-shhh-shhh sound in a fit of malicious pique after a testy exchange with Brown, which cuts to a shot of churning, harnessed locomotive wheels, as though the inexorable wheels of fate, with their solid, rhythmic chug-chug-chug.

A teletyped wire message to Brown urgently crosses the middle of the screen from left to right, warning him that the suspicious men he reported on the train at an earlier stop are mob-connected and dangerous...

Theatrical trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKQKm-S3cmY

Wrong place, wrong time, wrong victim

Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum oder: Wie Gewalt entstehen und wohin sie führen kann (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, or How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead) 1975 Criterion (106 minutes) directed by Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, based on Heinrich Böll’s 1974 novel of the same title; director of photography, Jost Vacano; original score by Hans Werner Henze.

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum puts viewers in the scuffed shoes of an ordinary person who suddenly finds every detail of her life under the microscope of the full investigative force of the state and a sensation-hungry news media.

The ‘honor’ that the tabloid newspaper-hyped ‘Gangsterbraut’ [gun moll] and ‘Anarchistenbraut’ [anarchist-bride] Katharina Blum (Angela Winkler) loses in this powerful 1975 film is her good name and privacy.

Dr. Steven Hatfill, former FBI ‘person of interest’ in the post 9/11 anthrax scare, could tell a tale or two about that.

The film is based on a 1974 polemic of the same title that Nobel prize winner Heinrich Böll wrote in response similar treatment that he felt he had received from the German government hand-in-glove with the powerful Axel Springer media organization and its flagship tabloid Bild for speaking out on behalf of his young compatriots accused of ‘terrorism’ in 1970s West Germany. 

The novel begins—and the film ends—with the following ‘disclaimer’:

‘The characters and events in this narrative are fictitious. Should the description of certain journalistic practices bear any similarity to the practices of the Bild-Zeitung, such resemblance is neither intentional nor accidental, but unavoidable.’*

The novel’s polemic bite comes from its dispassionate, antiseptic style which mimics an official ‘after-action report’ by being everything but that. The film engages us from the start, taking the extra step of putting us in the target’s place.

The narrative strength of the camera helps to make this film compelling. The viewer’s interest is drawn in because the camera engages it subjects the way one engages another in conversation, by really looking at the other. The camera creates depth both by looking into people’s faces and by looking carefully into frames rather than at them.

Here, the camera works like a pencil in drawing: it shapes the story, conveying the feel of a living thing, taking nothing for granted, always on the move, always watching, but never with that jerky, jarring sensation one gets from handheld shooting. A sequence of 16 mm shots in the beginning even has the feel of a person’s calm, steady, curious gaze, providing information without drawing attention to the means or a ‘style’.

What may be most telling is that as much as the camera shows us ourselves in those it closely observes, good or bad, when police and the media look at the same things they see only an ‘other’.

The film starts with a young man (Jurgen Prochnow) in a white parka with a duffle bag aboard a river ferry. We see the same man in grainy black and white, nicely centered in the viewfinder of a hand-held 16 mm camera, evidently unaware that the middle-aged ‘tourist’ filming the scenery is a member of a team watching him.

The surveillance team follows this man into Köln. He goes to a discotheque where colorfully dressed and costumed revellers dance and carouse, celebrating Weiberfastnacht [women’s carnival night], the first night of the German Karneval party that goes through the weekend to Mardi Gras. (Köln is the German ‘New Orleans’ for Mardi Gras partiers.) The team shadows a group of people the young man accompanies to a party at a private apartment. At the party, the man introduces himself as Ludwig to Katharina, who had avoided thus far going out.

Katharina and Ludwig spend the rest of their time together at the party, and in the spirit of Weiberfastnacht, Katharina takes him back to her apartment. He is gone the next morning when we see Katharina rise—and a police SWAT team close in on her apartment to arrest him.

The violence of this assault is conveyed by the contrast of this ordinary woman taking morning tea at home in a white bathrobe with the masked paramilitary SWAT team that bursts suddenly into her modest, bright, IKEA-furnished apartment, its automatic weapons trained over and under in every direction. 

Call it cultural or cinematic conditioning, but there is something chilling in seeing a large German uniformed police presence at the scene of an arrest of a solitary civilian, with disembodied loudspeakers barking ‘Achtung! Achtung!’, issuing instructions to curious but docile bystanders.

Under the direction of Kriminalkommissar Erwin Beizmenne (Mario Adorf) and Staatsanwalt Dr. Peter Hach (Rolf Becker), the police official and prosecutor heading the investigation of alleged ‘terrorist’ Ludwig Götten (Prochnow), officers comb Blum’s apartment for evidence of her criminal involvement. Authorities haul in the incredulous, naïve woman for questioning.

The upshot is the germanically thorough and excruciating dissection of Blum’s intimate life—a process that it is hard to believe would not be painful and embarrassing to anyone who has lived at least 25 years.

Insult adds to injury when the news media, particularly the tabloid Zeitung [Daily] runs the most embarrassing details and inflammatory allegations in bold headlines—some invented, some leaked by law enforcement to Werner Tötges (Dieter Laser), Zeitung’s intensely arrogant, obnoxious and unrelenting reporter on the story.

At one point, Beizmanne asks Tötges how he got Blum’s terminally ill mother, dying in an intensive care unit, to speak to him so eloquently about her ‘uncaring’ daughter for his story.

‘We must help simple people express themselves,’ Tötges said, with a twinkle in his eye. The operating hypocrisy, in Boll’s view, is that the press asserts that the people’s imputed ‘right to know’ excuses any excess; but those who would challenge excesses such as these would strike at the very heart of democracy and its ‘lifeblood’, a free press.

Blum is truly a naïve nobody, a lonely single woman, housekeeper to a prominent lawyer, Dr. Hubert Blorna (Heinz Bennent) and his wife Trude (Hannelore Hoger). The plot thickens when her personal secrets reveal a liaison higher up the food chain, wholly unrelated to Götten and any criminal activity.

Götten’s criminal activity, such as it is, almost predictably turns out to have a good deal less than any terrorist motivation. The thing that no one can explain in the end is Blum’s willingness to give Tötges an exclusive interview…

A notable feature of this film is its musical score, composed by Hans Werner Henze, which lends the narrative wings, not the usual crutches. Henze’s fine score has classical underpinnings with a 1970s free jazz flavor. 

As an aside, veteran actor Heinz Bennent, who played Dr. Blorna and also appeared in films of Ingmar Bergman and others, died earlier this month at age 90.

*‘Personen und Handlung dieser Erzählung sind frei erfunden. Sollten sich bei der Schilderung gewisser journalistischer Praktiken Ähnlichkeiten mit den Praktiken der »Bild«–Zeitung ergeben haben, so sind diese Ähnlichkeiten weder beabsichtigt noch zufällig, sondern unvermeidlich.ʼ