Born to Kill

Born to Kill, 1947 U.S. RKO (83 minutes) directed by Robert Wise, written by Eve Green and Richard Macaulay; based on the novel Deadlier Than the Male by James Gunn; features a kibitz track with Wise discussing the picture with film historian Eddie Muller.

A coolly attractive woman in Reno for a quickie divorce falls for a striking, intense man, but the character actors are what make this gothic noir marvel sparkle.

Divorcée Helen Brent (Claire Trevor) first meets Sam Wild (Lawrence Tierney) across a craps table. Wild aggressively pursues what he wants. Their paths cross again on a railway siding leaving town.

The former Mrs. Brent is game. True to his moniker, Wild embodies a passionate, unpredictable, aberrant sexuality that attracts the ironic, appraising Brent. She holds the world at bay with sharp tailoring, manicured syntax and a raised eyebrow.

Wild wastes no time shedding his scanty self-control when someone comes between him and a subject of his desire. A housemaid later observing him through the crack of a kitchen door sums up his grim focus: ‘His eyes get me: they run up and down you like a searchlight.’

They really do.                                         

Brent and Wild travel by train together to San Francisco where she has plans to marry steel magnate Fred Grover (Phillip Terry), all dahlings and highballs. Wild, set on making himself ‘a lot more than I am,’ marries Brent’s sweetly clueless sister Georgia (Audrey Long) in his pre-Brent meanwhile. Georgia is heiress to a San Francisco newspaper (Brent was adopted).

But the dark lees of Wild’s sociopathic past shadow him to San Francisco in the person of one Albert Arnett (Walter Slezak), a middle-aged, proverb-quoting and jovially venal private eye with a Central European accent. 

Walter Slezak as private investigator Albert Arnett in Born to Kill (1947). 

‘I am a man of integrity. But I am always ready to listen to an interesting offer,’ Arnett helpfully tells a potential client.

His client is Mrs. Kraft (Esther Howard), the Reno landlady of the murdered Laury Palmer (Isabel Jewell), one of Wild’s former girlfriends. Palmer’s girlish but fatal mistake was to make a psychopath jealous. Mrs. Kraft hires Arnett to investigate the young woman’s killing after Reno police seem to lose interest in the case.

Dramatic studio lighting illuminates Brent as it shrouds the energized Wild. His dark side draws her to him, but also makes the narrative wobble a bit because the psychosexual high jinx had to be muted in the era the film was made.

But any gothic excess is more than offset by an outstanding ensemble of character actors who bring the story off, from Slezak’s Ecclesiastes-quoting detective—‘I find more bitter than death the woman whose heart is snares and nets and he who falls beneath her spell has need of God’s mercy’—to Elisha Cook Jr., film noir’s perennial ‘scared little guy,’ as Mart Waterman, Wild’s best friend and facilitator.

Best of all is Esther Howard’s Mrs. Kraft, the middle-aged landlady to Reno divorcées and friend of the murdered woman. Mrs. Kraft braves middle age drinking beer with her girls and flirting with younger men. After she hires Arnett to find Palmer’s killer, she follows Arnett to San Francisco to make sure that her money is well spent. 

Esther Howard as Mrs. Frank in Born to Kill (1947).

Mrs. Kraft has more lines, fills in more blanks, and moves the plot along as well as a Shakespearean clown. Her scenes are fun to watch, whether boozily flirting and playing hearts with a bellhop, trying to escape a killer in the dunes (and proving handy with a hatpin), or having it out woman-to-woman with Brent.

Back projection, a technique common to films of this time, is notable in this film, with great shots of the neon-lit ‘Biggest Little City in the World’ seen at night from inside the train as Brent and Wild blow town. There also are lovely shots of long gone San Francisco cityscapes and street exteriors seen through the windows of Los Angeles studio set interiors.

The credits appear in the final frame against a fetishistic under-the-table still shot of a woman’s legs in sheer black hose and dark pumps. The woman, seated at an antique side table, wears a dark gown open from mid-thigh, her legs crossed right thigh over left, the lower part of the gown draped on the floor beneath the chair. 

Getting back

Revanche (Getting Back) 2008 Austria Criterion (121 minutes) written and directed by Götz Spielmann.

The fates of two young couples collide in this modern folk tale when a daydreaming Viennese sad sack with a prostitute girlfriend tries to solve their existential problems by robbing a small town bank.

The story about these couples becomes a series of fascinating character studies of the four individual people who comprise these relationships, as well as an aged widower farmer, one of the men’s grandfathers.

This is the first feature film of writer and director Götz Spielmann, an established Austrian playwright and stage director.

Spielmann said in an interview that his title Revanche has a double meaning in German. Like the expression ‘getting back’ in English, ‘revanche’ can convey the sense of ‘revenge’; it also contains the possibility of retrieving something lost or getting a second chance. Characters use the word ‘revenge’ several times during the movie, but in these instances they say the German word ‘rache’ (vengeance) rather than ‘revanche’.

Alex (Johannes Krisch, a veteran Austrian stage actor) is a porter at the Cinderella Club, a Viennese brothel. He and his girlfriend Tamara (Irina Potapenko), one of the club’s top ‘madels,’ are deeply in love.

In love and trouble: Alex (Johannes Krisch) and Tamara (Irina Potapenko) in Revanche (2008).

Alex has a minor criminal record and jail time which seem more a product of bad luck and poor judgment than criminal intent. He is not a ‘bad’ guy. He works hard on the farm of his maternal grandfather, ‘Old Hausner’ (Hannes Thanheiser). Alex’s good intentions and best efforts just never add up to putting him up on the straight-and-narrow.

Tamara, an undocumented Russian sex worker and illegal alien from Ukraine, appears to keep her life together by compartmentalizing its radically different parts and living them one at a time: her relationship with Alex, the daily sexual humiliation she experiences on the job, her religion, and regular telephone calls home to her family.

For Tamara, her job seems to come down to partying with men she does not have to like, mildly anaesthetized with drugs and alcohol. She ‘performs’ and has desultory oral sex, neither of which appear to her really to count; the money is better than she ever made before, and the work is not too demanding. But Alex knows that very shortly the club management will ‘break’ her: the party will end and she won’t be able to leave.

Tamara (Irina Potapenko) 'performing' for a client at the Cinderella Club.

Tamara tells Alex that she needs $30,000 to buy her freedom from Cinderella Club owner Konecny (Hanno Poschl). Alex needs €80,000 to buy a partnership in a bar on Ibiza in Spain’s Balearic Islands to spirit himself and Tamara away from Austria and the Viennese underworld.

During a chance stop at a Volksbank branch in a town near his grandfather’s farm, Alex imagines what little risk it would take to stick-up this folksy-friendly bank hard and fast before they knew what hit them. He would use an unloaded gun to make sure no one could get hurt. He would solve all his and Tamara’s money problems in one morning’s quick work.

‘Nothing can go wrong,’ Alex repeatedly reassures his disbelieving Tamara.

In this town, an intense young policeman sensitive to parental pressure to get on with his life dreams of making a dramatic arrest that will advance his career.

Robert Kargl (Andreas Lust), the fresh-faced, earnest cop, and his wife Susanne (Ursula Strauss), the owner and manager of a grocery store, are an attractive couple with good jobs and a nice new house, but they are frustrated by their inability to conceive a child. Their new nursery was finished before Susanne’s miscarriage, itself a ‘fluke’ because Robert is impotent.

A perfect life: Susanne (Ursula Strauss) and Robert Kargl (Andreas Lust) in Revanche (2008).

Against his better judgment, Alex lets Tamara go with him when he does the bank job. She stays in the car on the getaway route, sitting in the passenger seat, praying in a whisper in Russian with her eyes closed while he disappears up the alley.

At this moment, Officer Kargl, rounding the corner on a routine foot patrol, notices a vehicle illegally parked and taps on the passenger side window to tell the woman in the car that she cannot park there.

Robert walks to the front of the car after the passenger, a Slav speaking broken German, tells him that she does not have identification—and just as Alex nearly bounds back around the corner. 

The events which follow draw the characters together in unexpected ways designed to pinpoint each character’s soft spot.

Robert (Andreas Lust) and Alex (Johannes Krisch) in Revanche (2008)

One could object that it would not take long for the Austrian equivalent of the FBI working the case to solve the bank robbery and its outcome, but this story is not a police procedural. Spielmann said in an interview that the story he had in mind developed from a Jungian idea that one’s challenges in life arise psychically from what one has to learn as a human being.

Thus the story resolves more like a folk tale, in a ‘house at the end of the road,’ and it is in this way that each character ‘gets back.’

One of the most notable effects of this well made film is that the actors carry the drama without a clutter of music, as though on stage. Other than club music in the background in scenes at the Cinderella and actor Hannes Thanheiser’s improvisations on an accordion as the old farmer, Spielmann lets the actors’ Austrian dialect and broken German, the birds, the wind, nature and night speak for themselves.

Hannes Thanheiser as Old Hausner, playing for Ursula Strauss' Susanne in Revanche (2008)

Also, rather than show his audience plain or even telling objects they already have seen, such as photographs, Spielmann shows his actors’ faces responding to these things, letting his actors carry the drama.

The brothel scenes were shot in an actual club using its employees as extras. The women are almost always shot low looking up at their male customers and males who work at the club.

The sets in the country, especially on Old Hausner’s farm, are lit and the frames composed like classic Netherlandish genre paintings.

Included in CD set is Fremdland (Foreign Land), 1984, Spielmann’s first short film. A small boy has been sent to live and work for the summer on his family farm in the Austrian Alps alone with an intense, repressed farmhand. Dry—and spooky—as this may sound, this forty-three minute film draws one in by telling an intense and intimate, pitch perfect story in pictures.

The house at the end of the road in Revanche (2008).

Moon tow

門徒 [Moon tow—Cantonese; Mén Tú—pinyin] (Protégé) 2007 Hong Kong (108 minutes) written and directed by Derek Yee [Yee Tung-Shing]

This is a good local story about heroin trafficking in Hong Kong, in Cantonese but aimed at an international audience.

The movie is something like a Hong Kong version of the 1989 BBC mini-series Traffik (Traffic 2000 U.S.), seen through the eyes of an undercover Hong Kong Narcotics Bureau officer. It looks at the narcotics trafficking ‘industry’ more than the politics, as well as people the industry affects: addicts, police, and various levels of heroin traffickers, from Hong Kong ‘kitchens’ where wholesalers convert pure import for distribution to local dealers, to a warlord opium producer in Asia’s Golden Triangle.

The story reportedly is based on the experiences of Hong Kong Narcotics Bureau officers. The narrative incorporates an engaging variety of authentic details involving the production, transportation, and distribution of heroin. There is no stylized action film ‘action’ such as acrobatic martial arts and ‘endless clip’ automatic weapons fire.

The film opens with a young uniformed policeman’s meditation on drug users. We then watch the same man, ‘Nick’ [Lee Chi-Lik] (Daniel Wu), in business casual attire quarterback a complex drug exchange on the fly and under police surveillance while talking to Narcotics Bureau police on a separate ‘burner’ phone. The quick-paced sequence is well-composed, deftly edited, and realistic.

Nick is an undercover officer in the Narcotics Bureau, a loner whose dangerous work is his life. He apparently has worked undercover his entire police career of seven years. In this time, he has become the right hand man—the ‘moon tow,’ or ‘protégé,’ of the title—to Lin Quin (Andy Lau), who controls half of Hong Kong’s heroin trade and whom Hong Kong law enforcement authorities want to bring down.

Quin’s mantra is ‘Never take risks.’ He is a businessman like Tony Soprano, operating every day in an environment in which the downside of the lucrative financial gain his business realizes is a long prison term if caught and convicted. And like Soprano, Quin has personal and family issues: the gangster is a diabetic in dire need of a kidney transplant, with a demanding wife (Anita Yuen) and a difficult tomboy teenager, among other things.

Nick’s boss, Police Superintendent Miu Chi-Wah (Derek Yee, also the film’s director), and other higher-ups praise Nick’s work. Nick’s dilemma, as a straight cop without any apparent proclivities for acquiring money and power or using drugs, is that his life revolves around ‘industry’ people he has got close to but ultimately is setting up to bust, and addicts in the mean streets where he lives to maintain his cover. 

As the story progresses, Nick gets involved with Fan [Pang Yuk-Fun] (Zhang Jingchu), a neighbor with an adorable toddler, separated from her husband. Fan is a heroin addict. Nick discovers her condition when they first have sex, when his fingertips find lesions which the camera shows us on the back of her legs behind her knees where she has shot up.

Nick is truly a good guy. The story plays out around his young man’s passion and inexperience, large enough to take on the seemingly impossible in shouldering a risky role in Hong Kong’s ‘war on drugs,’ and in trying to help a vampire-like neighbor with a small child ‘kick’ her taste for blood.

Quin’s deteriorating health and his questions about Nick’s loyalty after Hong Kong customs police conduct a ham-handed bust of Quin’s kitchen accelerate his need to designate a successor.

Note to police (and warning to squeamish viewers): do not fire live ammunition at close range at steel doors, especially with colleagues standing nearby; and do not reach through holes on steel doors when you do not know who, and with what implement, is on the other side.

Nick accompanies Quin, his family and amorous single sister-in-law (He Mei-tian) on a trip ‘to pay tribute to Buddha’ in Thailand, where Nick will be either ‘made’ or made simply to disappear.

In the vicinity of Mae Sai, a small town in the heart of the Golden Triangle, near the borders of Thailand, Burma and Laos, Quin and Nick ride elephants to meet the genial drug warlord General Chachai (Nirut Sirijanya). The three discuss the industry Big Picture with the aid of ‘market research’ provided by the good offices of the United Nations in its 2005 World Drug Report.

The general notes that surrounding governments have begun to crack down on the industry. He points out a crater near his compound where rival international drug producers dropped a 2000-pound bomb to ‘make a point’ that the Golden Triangle has seen its day. Fields of American-style corn attest to the fact that foreign do-gooders now overpay farmers in relative terms to grow alternative crops. The general also is aware that the market is trending away from needle-injected heroin, toward psychotropic drugs such as Ecstasy and K (ketamine).

Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, Fan’s estranged, ne’er-do-well junkie husband (Louis Koo playing a Toshiro Mifune-like rogue) tracks Fan down house-sitting for Nick and trying to kick her heroin habit.

Without unnecessarily spoiling plot turns, the significance of Nick eventually sending Fan’s husband to Singapore as a drug courier is that this country executes people caught bringing in even relatively small amounts of illegal narcotics (at that time, 15 grams had been the heroin limit, though the law appears since to have eased). 

The story comes full circle to the young uniformed policeman’s meditations on why people use drugs; though this full circle begins a new cycle.

Free Cinema

Free Cinema 1952-1963 U.K. British Film Institute (475 minutes/three DVDs) Facets Video, 2006.

Nothing could be less ‘typical’ than a Saturday night at Piccadilly Circus or a Sunday morning at the old Covent Garden flower market in the hands of imaginative young filmmakers seeking their subjects in the ordinary.

This three-DVD set reissued by the British Film Institute includes 14 short documentary films, two short ‘art’ pieces, and a recent documentary which looks back at a group of young British filmmakers in the 1950s who called their movement Free Cinema. 

Hand-held cameras catch revelers at an annual bash for miners in Durham, as well as ‘peepers’ with binoculars trying to spot young couples making out in the bushes. American and British servicemen, civilians and prostitutes look each other over in the heart of a Saturday night. A film editor lays bare a campy amusement park exhibitor’s pretense of torture and death by execution as family entertainment.

Nightlife on Piccadilly Circus in Claude Goretta and Alain Tanner's Nice Time (1957).

An old East End Jewish neighborhood of storefronts and apartments appears through the crosshairs of a developer’s transit. A northern mill town closes down for the weekend. A working shed of Lancashire railway engineers regrets the passing of coal-fired steam to diesel locomotives.

A pair of deaf mutes as Beckettsian clowns is pestered by children as they make their way across the working industrial landscapes and German bomb-devastated postwar vacant lots of East End docklands. A Hungarian refugee newly arrived in London speaks little English and seeks a street address without the postal district code.

Eduardo Paolozzi and Michael Andrews in Lorenza Mazzetti's Together (1956).

A long-suffering ‘vegetable of love’ pursues her narcissistic spouse through artsy-surreal Chelsea where self-absorbed young men smooth sugar obsessively in bowls and umbrella-wielding middle-aged men in bowlers and macs are The Enemy.

London schoolchildren play street games with traditional counting songs, and adolescent girls skip rope and chalk squares across Edinburgh. Their older peers jitterbug to live rockabilly music at a London youth club and to r&b and Dixieland jazz in a pub.

Edinburgh schoolgirls with happy feet in N. McIsaac's The Singing Street (1952)

A local group of five family-owned West Riding weekly newspapers (still in operation) is profiled in the context of the communities they serve, from reporters and advertising personnel on the street, to composing and proofing the galleys and making pages from hot lead, to the early morning delivery boys. 

We also see and hear the distinctive individual voices of many faces in the crowd that marched to Aldermaston in Easter 1958 to protest Britain’s nuclear weapons program. The uncredited unseen narrator is the young actor Richard Burton.

'Ordinary people' protesting Britain's nuclear arms program in March to Aldermaston (1959). 

They called themselves Free Cinema. The original ‘they’ were Lorenza Mazzetti, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, and Tony Richardson. It was a start, if not a ‘new wave’; they made their pictures and never looked back.

They called their movement ‘free,’ because their projects, mostly short documentaries, were free from the strictures of studio suits and sponsors. The British Film Institute’s Experimental Film Fund provided them minimal funding to shoot and complete their films as they saw fit. (Reisz worked for Ford’s film unit with the understanding that he could use its facilities for his own work.)

These short films document what had been predominately white urban working- and middle-class Britain in the first era of the Cold War. From today’s perspective, it can be seen as much a look back at a disappearing industrial Britain as a look forward at how these films influenced what followed. The streets feel more open and at the same time more empty with the incredibly few automobiles there used to be on them.

Empty streets on a Friday night in the north in Michael Grigsby's Tomorrow's Saturday (1962).

The young men (and women) who made these films are less notably ‘angry’ than their dramatic contemporaries such as John Osborne; they were more focused on training their limited technology—mostly hand-held, black & white 16mm movie cameras—on their living subjects than training an audience.

The films’ authenticity derives from the cameras’ go-with-the-flow subjectivity. The cinematographers realized that what they were doing was not strictly objective, though some editors had a heavier hand than others (e.g., campy torture and execution = family entertainment). The subjects speak eloquently for themselves, more often than not.

Images that speak for themselves: Lindsay Anderson's O Dreamland (1953).

The sound technology at this time was primitive and rather limited. A viewer gets to know these mostly anonymous ‘ordinary people’ by their faces. They are fascinating to watch as characters, from the neighborhood children and working people who know each other well to strangers on London streets, as they interact with each other within the contexts of their particular settings.

One of the most intriguing features throughout this collection is watching how expressive people’s hands can be, what they do with their hands, where they put them, and how they use them.

Small Is Beautiful—The Story of the Free Cinema Films Told by Their Makers, the 43-minute, 2006 documentary included at the end of the set, gives a good introduction to the movement and its personalities and places them in a broader context.

Walter Lassally, a Free Cinema cinematographer, said he developed his technique for shooting Every Day but Christmas (1957), a typical morning among vendors at the old Covent Garden fruit, vegetable and flower market, and the short art film Together (1956), from closely observing his subjects and getting used to the rhythms in which they moved in their spaces.    

Covent Garden flower market in Lindsay Anderson's Every Day Except Christmas (1957)

‘I studied this rhythm so that when I was ready to shoot,’ Lassally said, ‘I was able to follow that rhythm and to anticipate. It’s like you’re a fly on the wall, but you’re an intelligent fly, and you’re very well trained, you’ve observed the process and you’re ready to film it in the most effective manner without drawing attention to yourself.

‘There again, like with Together, the result was a film which you can look at fifty years later and be perfectly happy with,’ he said.

Lost in the city in Robert Vas' Refuge England (1959).

_______________________________________________________________________

The films are:

DVD #1

O Dreamland 1953 (12 minutes) directed by Lindsay Anderson, filmed by John Fletcher. Middle- and working-class crowds enjoy themselves at an enormous amusement park and pavilion in Margate, England, where campy sexuality and torture and death by execution are part of the entertainment. 16 mm

Momma Don’t Allow 1956 (22 minutes) directed by Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson, filmed by Walter Lassally, edited by John Fletcher; set among young local regulars, including a dental assistant, a butcher, and a train cleaner (and some incidental slumming toffs) who come to dance at Art and Viv Sanders’ Wood Green Jazz Club in the Fishmonger’s Arms (north London), featuring the Chris Barber Jazz Band. 16mm

Together 1956 (49 minutes) directed by Lorenza Mazzetti with the collaboration of Denis Horne and the technical assistance of Lindsay Anderson, John Fletcher and Walter Lassally, among others. Two deaf mutes as Beckettsian clowns (British painter Michael Andrews and the Scottish sculptor and pop art pioneer Eduardo Paolozzi) lyrically navigate the postwar ruins and oversized industrial landscapes of the old East End docklands, pestered by children. 35mm

Wakefield Express 1952 (30 minutes) written and directed by Lindsay Anderson with John Fletcher, filmed by Walter Lassally, commentary by George Potts. A profile of a family-owned local newspaper group told in the context of the communities it serves in the West Riding of Yorkshire (Wakefield, Horbury, Pontefract, Selby and Skyrack, etc.), showing where the news and advertising comes from and how these weekly newspapers are produced and distributed. 16mm

Nice Time 1957 (17 minutes) directed by Claude Goretta and Alain Tanner, filmed by John Fletcher. Throngs of pleasure seekers in Piccadilly Circus on a Saturday night, centered on the statue of Eros. Filmed on 20 consecutive Saturday nights using the natural light, with pieces of movie soundtracks, barkers, a busker, and stray conversations. Shot at night with HPS Ilford 400 ASA 16mm stock.

The Singing Street 1952 (30 minutes) written and directed by N. McIsaac, J.T.R. Ritchie and R. Townsend. Edinburgh schoolgirls singing traditional songs while skipping rope and chalk squares and playing sidewalk games. 16mm

Every Day Except Christmas 1957 Ford of Britain’s Look at Britain!-1 (39 minutes) directed by Lindsay Anderson, filmed by Walter Lassally, edited by John Fletcher, music by Daniele Paris, narration by Alun Owen (who later wrote the screenplay for A Hard Day’s Night). A typical morning among vendors operating stalls at the 300-year-old Covent Garden fruit, vegetable and flower market (closed 1974). Shot inside at night with then-new HPS Ilford 400 ASA 35mm stock.

DVD #2

Refuge England 1959 (27 minutes) directed and cowritten by Robert Vas, filmed by Walter Lassally and Louis Wolfers, with Tibor Molnár as a Hungarian refugee of the failed 1956 uprising against the Soviet Union, new to London, trying to find a London address without a postal district code. 16mm

Enginemen 1959 Unit Five Seven (17 minutes) directed and written by Michael Grigsby and his team, colleagues from his day job at Granada Television, among railroad engineers and rolling stock at a locomotive shed at Newton Heath, near Manchester, England. Unit Five Seven’s first film. 16mm

We Are the Lambeth Boys 1959 Ford of Britain’s Look at Britain!-2 (49 minutes)   directed by Karel Reisz, filmed by Walter Lassally, edited by John Fletcher, music by Johnny Dankworth and the Johnny Dankworth Orchestra and the Mickey Williams Group. A lively profile of activities offered at Alford House, a youth club in Kennington in south London, among a core of its local 350 young men and women members. 35mm  

Food for a Blluuusssshhhhhh! 1959 (30 minutes) directed by Elizabeth Russell, filmed by Alan Forbes, edited by Jack Gold, with Elizabeth Russell, Nicholas Ferguson, Felicity Innes, Brian Innes. A long-suffering ‘vegetable of love’ pursues her narcissistic spouse through artsy-surreal Chelsea where self-absorbed young men smooth sugar in bowls and middle-aged men in bowlers and macs are The Enemy. The story ends on the threshold of The World’s End pub. 16mm

DVD #3 Beyond Free Cinema

One Potato, Two Potato 1957 (21 minutes) directed by Leslie Daiken, filmed by Peter Kennedy, edited by Morag Maclennan. London schoolchildren larking and playing street games among postwar bombed out blocks to a soundtrack of traditional rhymes and counting songs.

March to Aldermaston 1959 (33 minutes) an anonymously-made collaborative effort about the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament-organized, four-day march during Easter weekend 1958 from Trafalgar Square to the hydrogen-bomb producing factory at Aldermaston, about 50 miles west of London, with an uncredited narration by Richard Burton.

The Vanishing Street 1962 (19 minutes) directed, written and filmed by Robert Vas.  The ‘street’ is Hessel Street, high street of a soon-to-be-razed old East End Jewish neighborhood of storefronts and apartments, a synagogue, a Yiddish newspaper and kibitzers, viewed through the crosshairs of a developer’s transit.

Tomorrow’s Saturday 1962 Unit Five Seven (17 minutes) directed and written by Michael Grigsby, filmed by Chris Faulds in the summers of 1959 and 1960 among the working populaces of the industrial mill towns Blackburn and Preston, Lancashire, closing down the mills and mines for the weekend. The broad empty streets without automobiles feel unnaturally eerie.

Gala Day 1963 (25 minutes) directed by John Irvin with several teams of cameramen, shot among revelers and paraders at the Durham Miner’s Gala on July 21, 1962. Irvin got into hot water for including scenes in which men, some with binoculars, appear to be ‘peeping’ at couples making out in the shrubbery.

Small Is Beautiful 2006 (43 minutes) directed by Christophe Dupin. A concise, expository film about Free Cinema, including interviews with cameraman Walter Lassally and directors Michael Grigsby and Alain Tanner. 

Making whoopee in Lindsay Anderson's O Dreamland (1953)

Certified Copy

Copie conforme (Certified Copy) 2010 France/Italy (106 minutes) written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami; adaptation by Massoumeh Lahidji; cinematographer, Luca Bigazzi; montage, Bahman Kiarostami.

What on earth are a famous Iranian film director, a French actress and an English opera baritone doing in one of Tuscany’s picturesque hill towns in verdant midsummer, talking of a leafless garden?

Abbas Kiarostami makes films about the barriers to communication between men and women. Juliette Binoche, contrary to newly-minted Tovarishch Gégé Depardieu’s disparagements, often opts for and masters unfamiliar or challenging emotional territory in the roles she selects. William Shimell is an established English baritone who, apart from operatic performances, has never acted professionally on stage or screen.

We have yet to see a satisfying analysis of this intriguing work. It would hinge on a simple concept that the male lead states clearly at outset; getting this makes the difference between whether Kiarostami is casting after some vague pattern of ‘artistic’ effects, or telling the kind of compelling story for which he is known.

James Miller (Shimell), a distinguished-looking middle-aged British writer with genuine stage presence and a lovely voice, appears to be on a book tour in Tuscany with his Italian translator Marco Lenzi (Angelo Barbagallo—one of the film’s producers). They are promoting the Italian translation of a provocative long essay Miller has written titled Copia conforme in Italian—Certified Copy.   

The main drift of Miller’s essay is his original English title which, but for a marketing-minded publisher, he later says would have been Forget the Original, Just Get a Good Copy. Miller argues in essence that the copy of an original work of art ‘leads to’ and thereby ‘certifies’ the worth of the original.

A woman (Binoche, without makeup—this comes on later), standing in the back of the room with her son (Adrian Moore) has Miller sign a copy of his book as he enters late to give his talk.

Once he begins his presentation, this woman comes center stage, takes a front row seat marked ‘reserved’ next to Miller’s translator, and begins to speak as though familiarly with him in whispers. As she whispers with Lenzi, she makes distracting hand motions to her son who is moving around the front of the room while Miller speaks, using a handheld electronic device. Lenzi writes down something for her and she and her son leave before Miller’s talk is over.

Lenzi has given her Miller’s telephone number. The woman, never named and identified in the credits only as ‘She,’ is the French owner of a local antique shop who has been living in Italy with her son for five years. She arranges to meet Miller at the shop on a Sunday morning; the two spend the day together.

Kiarostami puts this photogenic couple together in Lucignano, a picturesque small town in Tuscany, and gives them dialogue in English and French which sounds at first a little like a middle-aged version of Ernest Hemingway’s short masterpiece Hills Like White Elephants. That is, the couple seems to be talking carefully about everything except the thing they most want to discuss, which appears to be their failed relationship.  

But the key to what actually is going on is something Miller says in his spiel:

‘It’s my intention,’ Miller told his audience, ‘really, just to try and show that the copy itself has worth in that it leads to the original and, in this way, certifies its value. And I believe this approach not only valid in art. I was particularly pleased when a reader recently told me that he found in my work an invitation to self-inquiry, to a better understanding of the self.’

It will not ‘spoil’ a viewer’s experience of this movie know in advance that this couple never before have met. What is going on here is exactly a mutual acceptance of the ‘invitation to self-inquiry’ to which Miller refers, which frames the thesis of this film. 

Miller and She identify in each other a ‘copy’ of a former partner with whom they had failed relationships. In these copies, they seek access to the ‘originals,’ thereby ‘certifying’ the value of those earlier relationships by engaging in role play with each other as a copy, as well as speaking frankly to the copy as the original. In practice, this works like a sophisticated form of ‘couples’ therapy.’

They act and react to each other as to their former partners, though also at times as their past and present selves. In alternating between different roles in English and French, they tell their emotional histories in metaphors as much to themselves—the self-inquiry—as to each other and the audience. Their emotional histories are the heart of this story.

‘You don’t expect a tree to keep its blossom after spring is over because blossom turns to fruit. And then the tree loses its fruit,’ Miller says as they walk.

‘And then?’ She says.

‘And then? The garden is leafless.’

‘The garden is leafless?’                           

‘It’s a Persian poem: The garden is leafless; who dare say that it isn’t beautiful.’*

The role-playing Miller and She do is enhanced richly by poignant incidental encounters they have with a series of strangers as they stroll around this small Tuscan hill town through the day. The town is itself a character.

They meet a café owner (Gianna Giachetti), a young local bride and groom (Manuela Balsimelli and Filippo Troiano), and a pair of older French tourists at a town square (Jean-Claude Carrière and Agathe Natanson). Each of these strangers respond to the couple’s ‘copy’ as an original, yet the simple, authentic things they convey have as much validity for Miller and She as they do for the viewer.

However, Miller draws the line at playing a fake. He refuses to pose with She as ‘a man and wife celebrating their fifteenth anniversary at the place where they were married’ with a young couple actually getting married at there. A copy that intimates an original is one thing; pretending to be something he is or they are not violates the spirit of the exercise.

This varied collection of encounters, exchanges, stories, vignettes and intimacies finishes on the open question of whether this pair of strangers will be satisfied to ‘forget the original, just get a good copy’—and what that means.

In addition to the mysteries the opposite sex holds for—and from—each other, and which draws a viewer into Kiarostami’s narrative, this is a gorgeous movie to look at because of the meticulous attention to detail and extraordinary framing of shots.

The as if inadvertent ease with which the action takes place within the frames, and the simplicity with which the narrative flows, at times dreamlike, at an unhurried, natural pace reflects the director’s careful thought and planning, consummate skill and art, no less than the skill and hard work of his cast and crew.

As Miller said in the drama: ‘There’s nothing very simple about being simple.’

Abbas Kiarostami on the set of Copie conforme.

*Miller quotes the modern Persian poet Mehdi Akhavān-Sāles poem A Leafless Garden:

باغ بی برگی که می گوید که زیبا نیست ؟

‘Who says a leafless garden is not beautiful?’

(Bagh bi-bargi ke miguid ke zibah nist?)

Freewheelin' Motl

Мы едем в Америку [My yédem v Amériku]/We Are Going to America/ אין פארן מיר אמצריקצ [Mir forn in Amerike] 1992 Russia Lenfilm/UniRem (81 minutes) directed by Yefim Gribov, co-written by Gribov and Arkadii Krasilshchikov, cinematography by Pavel Barskii and Denis Shchiglovskii; music by Mikhail Gluz; Tamara Lipartiya, editor.

This remarkable film tells the tale of a provincial Russian Jewish family’s journey ‘to America’ in the second decade of the 20th century through the eyes of an alert and sensitive adolescent boy.

Motl (Dima Davydov), who talks to birds, sees ghosts, and rides trains, brings to mind a young Bob Dylan. It is easy to imagine Motl’s stories as the kind of tableau vivant Dylan might concoct about himself or a forbear.

Inspired by Sholom Aleichem’s fiction and Marc Chagall’s paintings, the movie gives an unsentimental and even corrective view to the cheerful, cherry-cheeked cherubic images in such portrayals as Fiddler on the Roof (1971) based on the same artists’ work. The people portrayed in this film are sympathetic but rough and unsophisticated, highly religious and superstitious rural bumpkins.

The film’s rich sepia tones alternate with muted colors which lend to a sense of one’s clearing the cobwebs of memory. Its kaleidoscopic effects make it feel like the recalling or retelling in an old man’s memory of events in his faraway childhood, or his tales remembered and later retold by a younger relative. The stories are rich in impression, sensation and sharp images, with telling details that make them authentic.

Dima Davydov as Motl in Yefim Gribov's We Are Going to America.

In fact, the most fanciful parts often feel as though to be the truest. They would speak for what a narrator remembers it felt like to experience these things, rather an attempt to make a documentary record. Characters float and fade in and out like vapor; many of the factual details are long gone because they were unimportant to the teller in the first place, even had they been known. Images coined moments that stayed with the teller forever, and captivate the viewer.

Motl, his widowed Mama (Lyubov Rumyantseva), Motl’s much older brother Elya (Semyon Strugachev) and Elya’s wife Brokha (Danuta Slavgorodskaya) sell their home and leave their native Kazeltse to travel by train to an unnamed ‘border town.’ They take with them Pinya (Vadim Danilyevskii), a devout young neighbor. In the border town they expect an ‘emigrant committee’ to clear them for passage to America.

Motl and his family are shadowed by Korotyshka (Ivan Bashev), a malevolent Gentile dwarf with close-cropped hair, a long overcoat and a high-pitched voice, ever in the background when unsavory things invade their world. Korotyshka appears to embody a pervasive Old World evil, particularly the anti-Semitism that preys on them wherever they go.

On the train to the border town the family encounters others headed for America. Motl meets Masha (Olya Maksimova), a Gentile girl his age also travelling with her parents to America. Reb Leizer (Rafail Mishylovich), a rabbi from Tul’chin (a Ukrainian town south of Vinnitsa where the film actually was shot), introduces the family to Taibl (Baiba Kranats) and her brother Meyer (Mikhail Maizel), orphans whose ‘father was killed in a pogrom, and mother died of grief.’ Reb Leizer wants to broker a marriage between Taibl and Pinya, purportedly to insure their success in the New World.

The family is robbed when the train arrives at its destination (Korotyshka hobbles away into the station). After waiting in a long line, they make a rambling, emotional appeal for help to an official (Yurii Reshetnikov). They each suppose and prayerfully repeat throughout the film that a ‘better life’ awaits them in America. Could life be worse than in the backward, pogrom-plagued shtetl? But no one is clear as to exactly what this new life will be.

The official is too patient with these people to be a Russian Gentile. He is presumably a Russia-based representative of the Jewish Colonization Association, an international organization founded in the late nineteenth century by wealthy British and French Jews to facilitate Jewish emigration from Russia. He sends them to a doctor for eye examinations—another long line—on the theory that it is best to know in advance whether anyone has a medical condition that would cause U.S. Immigrations authorities to deny entry and deport them back to Europe.

Meanwhile, Motl meets Kopl (Volodya Belinskii), an older Jewish boy travelling on his own, who teases the adolescent about women. Motl and Kopl tumble into Feigele (Tatyana Bubelnikova), a flaky, sexy young woman ‘mystic’ from Kopl’s shtetl who Kopl says knows about devils, spirits and witches.

Feigele, whose name is from the Yiddish for ‘bird,’ entices Motl to lick sugar from her hand the way Motl feeds his occasional bird companion.

There is a traditional wedding. One of the party fails the eye exam (trachoma, a highly contagious infectious eye disease difficult to cure, was a cause for denying entry to the United States). This means that all either will stay in Russia—or devise an alternative route to cross the border to get to the Promised Land.

The haunting cantor improvisations that comprise much of the soundtrack are sung by Boris Finkelshtein, chief cantor of the Grand Choral Synagogue of St. Petersburg. The English subtitles of the spoken Russian are good; however there are no subtitles for the occasional Yiddish and liturgical Hebrew.

The only blemish noted in this otherwise meticulous work was Kopl’s parting anachronism that he would meet Motl ‘in tails and a top hat, swinging a walking stick,’ in Brighton Beach. It would take about twenty more years before this Brooklyn neighborhood would begin to become a destination for Jewish immigrants.

Oxford opera

Endeavour 2012 U.K. PBS Masterpiece Mystery! (103 minutes) written and devised by Russell Lewis; directed by Colm McCarthy; based on characters created by Colin Dexter.

‘Bad’ makes noise and stinks, but less often than not gives rise to the evil necessary to commit murder most foul.

In this story, sexual jealousy undoes a tidy blackmail set-up involving underage schoolgirls and bent cops, politicians, and government officials in mid-1960s Oxford.

Oxford City police bring in out-of-town help to find a missing teenage girl who turns up naked and dead in the woods. Police set about rounding up the usual clichés: a naïve young ‘redhead well-developed for her age’ fell in with the wrong crowd and got into trouble, and boys will be boys—especially old boys who should know better. It’s a tragedy, but life goes on.

That is, for all but one out-of-town rookie police constable brought to Oxford for his ‘knowledge of the local terrain’ as a former Greats candidate: Detective Constable Endeavour Morse (Shaun Evans).

Young Morse wonders what the devil a schoolgirl was doing with expensive first edition hardback poetry volumes place-marked with a series of Saturday crosswords clipped from a local paper. In each instance, only the first across and the last down of each grid is filled in; the acrosses are place names in Oxford, the downs are numbers.

Detective Constable Endeavour Morse (Shaun Evans) investigates the victim's reading

A loner who carries his resignation letter ready in his breast pocket, Morse has a thing for opera and crosswords and knows English Romantic poetry. His classical training and knowledge, intellectual curiosity, and a single-mindedness that makes him all but impervious to intimidation become crucial to cracking what turns out to have been ‘an almost perfect crime.’

This movie is a prequel to the Inspector Morse series starring John Thaw in the title role that Masterpiece Mystery! ran from 1987-2000. It is rich with references to the long-running series, not to mention Morse’s red Jaguar, Morse creator Colin Dexter behind The Times at an outdoor table at an Oxford pub, and Thaw’s daughter Abigail Thaw in a cameo as an Oxford newspaper editor. Thaw himself momentarily looks back from the rearview mirror at Evans’ Morse behind the wheel of a police car.

But the best thing about this prequel is that it and its star move comfortably in their own clothes in a well-cast, well-made, well-spun whodunit. In this spirit, the film calls itself by Morse’s first name, Endeavour, which fans of the earlier series know that Thaw’s Morse never used (and mentioned once only in an unguarded moment).

Evans might not be the first actor one would have cast for this role. He is ideal in it though, because he clearly understands the character and it is a pleasure to watch this young actor begin to become the man the middle-aged Thaw made flesh. (A series of four more episodes has been made but not yet released.)

'Good cop' Detective Inspector Fred Thursday (Roger Allam), Morse's mentor. 

Evans is supported in this role, and as a rookie cop, by Roger Allam’s excellent Detective Inspector Fred Thursday, a ‘good cop’ who represents everything that Morse likes about police work, and Danny Webb’s equally good Detective Inspector Arthur Lott, a ‘bad cop’ who stands for everything Morse dislikes about the police and which accounts for his letter of resignation.

Subsidiary to these is the cheerfully facetious and pedantic coroner (Is there any other kind?), Dr. Max DeBryn (James Bradshaw), who tells a squeamish Morse at his first crime scene, ‘You won’t make much of a detective if you’re not prepared to look death in the eye.’

Morse is not impressed by academics such as his former fellow student Alexander Reece (Christopher Brandon) nor Dr. Rowan Stromming (Richard Lintern), a Classics tutor. He is impressed the less so when he discovers the two had a £5 bet regarding Stromming’s Pygmalion-like ‘tuition’ of Mary Tremlett (Rachel Heaton), their dear-in-the-headlamps who ends up dead in the woods.

Mary Tremlett (Rachel Heaton), an Oxonian 'dear-in-the-headlamps.'

Shortly thereafter, Miles Percival (Harry Kershaw), Mary Tremlett’s former beau and one of Stromming’s undergraduates, apparently shoots himself on the riverbank—Morse’s first crime scene.

Morse subsequently discovers that Mary and some of her school friends attended ‘parties’ for influential older men, including Sir Richard Lovell (Patrick Malahide), minister for Overseas Affairs and constituency Member of Parliament for Oxford North. One of Mary’s friends is Jenny Crisp (Daisy Head), daughter of Detective Chief Inspector Crisp (Terence Harvey), who commands the city police force.

Teddy Samuels (Charlie Creed-Miles), a spiv Jaguar dealer with an edge, arranges these fêtes. They take place in a mothballed great house formerly owned by the Earls of Oxford, though since under the sketchy supervision of the Treasury Department. The house appears to fall within the purview of a shadowy ‘Special Branch’ chap who owns only to the name ‘Dempsey’ (John Light).

The murdered girl has an adoring older widower father Stan Tremlett (Ian Gelder) and a resentful older sister, Sharon Veelie (Emma Stansfield), married but separated from her husband, who has a connection with Samuels.

And there is the glamorous opera singer Rosalind Calloway (Flora Montgomery), now Stromming, the ‘beautiful woman with diamond earrings,’ who retired as a performing artist when she married Professor Stromming. It turns out that Morse’s love of opera began with first hearing Calloway sing Madame Butterfly; he can’t believe that his work has given him the chance to meet his lifelong ‘heroine.’ 

A star-struck Morse and his heroine, opera singer Rosalind Calloway (Flora Montgomery).

Morse’s challenge is to figure out how all these moving parts make this peculiar town clock tick. Our entertainment is to spend an hour and a half with this engaging fellow as he goes about doing this.

Apart from the recurring aria, Un bel di, from Giacomo Puccini’s Madame Butterfly (sung by Janis Kelly), Barrington Pheloung composed and conducted the theme and incidental music, as he did in the Inspector Morse series.

After we see Thaw’s Morse look back at Evans’ Morse from the car rearview mirror at the end, we hear Pheloung’s well known series motif based on the Morse code for M-O-R-S-E: Endeavour Morse has become Morse.

Shaun Evans, left, and John Thaw, right, as Masterpiece Mystery!'s Morse.