More Capsule Reviews? Indeed, Yes.

The Lovers on the Bridge (d. Leos Carax) - When discussing reclusive, meticulous, and relatively unprolific film directors, like Terence Malick (nine, possibly ten features in 44 years) and Stanley Kubrick (13 features in 46 years), one doesn't often find Leos Carax thrown into the mix. He's made five films since 1984, and his name is a pseudonym! What's he trying to hide, and so forth. The fact is, each of Carax's films since Boy Meets Girl, his first, has been in some way more opulent or radical, culminating thus far in 2012's completely bonkers Holy Motors, and his most financially excessive and difficult movie, in practical terms, turned out also to be his most successful. That would be this one, The Lovers on the Bridge, for a long time the most difficult of Carax's films to get ones hands on, until last Tuesday, when Kino Lorber put it out on Blu-ray.

The film, from 1991, stars Juliette Binoche as Michele, a mysterious woman who is discovered sleeping in the spot on Paris's Pont Neuf (a bridge that in the film has been closed to the public for repair and restoration, but during filming had not been, forcing Carax to recreate portions of the Pont Neuf and its surroundings as a set) favored by Alex. Alex is played by Denis Lavant, an actor who was destined to meet Carax, and an actor whom Carax was destined to meet. Anyway, they're homeless, as is Hans (Klaus-Michael Gruber). Michele is an artist who is losing her eyesight, but where exactly she came from, and why she's now homeless is unclear. Alex, falling instantly in love with her, shamelessly paws through her belongings which, however meager, offer several leads (including a loaded gun) that point towards an unhappy romance in her past, and perhaps a quest for revenge.

Which ain't the half of it. There's mystery and betrayal and cruelty and violent death and intense romantic flourishes. In the most famous sequence from Mauvais Sang, his film previous to this, Carax shows us Lavant dancing madly down the street at night, to the tune of David Bowie's "Modern Love". Carax sort of recreates that here, but goes bigger with everything: instead of one piece of music, it's several; instead of one person, it's too; instead of a street at night, it's a bridge at night; instead of nothing in the sky, it's fireworks. The sequence is astonishing, as is much of the rest of the film. The Lovers on the Bridge is gripping, and wild, and completely unpredictable. In the end, though, Carax is romanticizing something that I don't find romantic. To such a degree that I wonder if Carax even meant to romanticize it (all I'll say is, Michele could do better). If he didn't, then he's at odds with the film he made. Then again, if Carax hadn't made it, no one else would have, and that would be too bad.



The V.I.P.s (d. Anthony Asquith) - This is one of those damn movies in which Orson Welles wears one of his stupid discolored fake noses. The other two I know about (and I'm thinking specifically of the color films, so the hue of the nose stands out; Welles wore many fake noses in black and white movies) are Claude Chabrol's Ten Days' Wonder from 1971, and Welles's own The Immortal Story from 1968. This one, The V.I.P.s, which stars Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor as a fiery married couple coming apart in Heathrow airport, hit theaters in 1963, so we're spanning a near decade here. The nose seems somehow most fitting in this picture, since his whole role is a put-on of sorts. He plays Max Buda, a Hungarian film producer who needs to get out of London with a ditzy actress (Gloria Gritti) by midnight to avoid a hit on his taxes. He's a cartoon, and in This is Orson Welles he has little good to say about it, other than to say that Rod Taylor and Maggie Smith are "tremendous" in it, and that director Asquith shouldn't be judged solely on The V.I.P.s as the project, from a director's point of view, was hopeless, it being obviously controlled by the Burton-Taylors from the start.

But the movie ain't that bad! Written by playwright Terence Rattigan (best known through the film adaptations of Asquith's own The Browning Version and David Mamet's badly underrated The Winslow Boy) The V.I.P.s is very much an "it is what it is" kind of movie, in that it probably was never going to be that good, but so what? It follows several stories of various VIPs stranded by fog in Heathrow: the previously described story about Burton and Taylor, which also features Louis Jordan as the man stealing Taylor away; another about a Duchess (Margaret Rutherford) who is in danger of losing her home; the Welles one; and finally, the one with Smith and Taylor. And Welles is right, they're tremendous. Taylor, allowed to speaking with his native Australian accent, plays the young owner of a tractor company, who is about to lose it all in a takeover, and possibly go to prison, because he put his faith in the wrong person. Unless, that is, a very large amount of money can find its way into his bank account by tomorrow morning. The thing is, nobody seemed to actually care all that much about the Rutherford or Welles stories (regarding the latter, least of all Welles himself, I'm assuming), so it's really a movie of two halves (which at a certain point converge). And I liked both. Burton, Taylor, and Jordan, all give exactly the performances they need to give in order to put across their bit -- Burton might be said to be giving more than is necessary, but one also senses that this film might've hit a bit close to home for him in certain ways.

Anyhow, it's Taylor and Smith who are the show. Maggie Smith plays Taylor's personal secretary, who is also in love with him, and it's all one massive Thing Which We've All Seen Before, but the two actors, and Rattigan's very professional script, made me feel quite wrapped up in it all. I started watching the film, thinking I'd probably hate it. The sons of bitches fooled me.

Heard it Before

In 1953, the writer Isak Dinesen (the pen name of Karen Blixen) published a very long story called "The Immortal Story," which five years later would be included in her collection Anecdotes of Destiny, the last collection that would be published in her lifetime. It's quite an unusual story (the first I've read by Dinesen, I have to confess) about a very wealthy European businessman named Mr. Clay who is alone, who is not admired by anyone over whom he holds power, which we're assured is everyone in the Swiss town where he lives, and many more people besides. He appears to be a hateful man who, we're told, once broke off relations with a business partner and then used his wealth and power to hound the man into poverty and eventually suicide. The man's wife and daughter have disbursed, and the man's home is, as "The Immortal Story" begins, the one in which Mr. Clay resides.

So that's Mr. Clay. Eventually, Mr. Clay contracts gout, and suffers terribly from it. Unable to sleep, he summons one of his clerks, Ellis Lewis (actually Elishima Levinsky) to read to him at night. Novels? Stories? No, ledger books, receipts: his, Mr. Clay's, own accounts. Over and over and over, starting back at the beginning when Elishima reaches the end. But Mr. Clay is haunted by the vague knowledge he has that other kinds of reading matter exists. That is, stories. Which Mr. Clay proclaims to hate, if those stories aren't real. Elishima offers to read to him the words of the Prophet Isaiah, but Mr. Clay hates that too -- if it's a prophecy, which is to say if it hasn't happened and isn't currently happened, it is worthless. Mr. Clay recalls a story he once heard on a boat, spoken by a sailor within his hearing, and this seems to be the only story he's ever heard in his life. It's about a rich old man with no heirs who hired the sailor telling the story to impregnate his, the rich man's, wife. Here Elishima says "I know that story and I can finish it for you. Everyone knows that story. Ever sailor tells it. It's not true." Devastated, unable to make this knowledge work with how the story has worked on his own mind over the years, or with, apparently, his very grasp on existence, Mr. Clay hatches a bizarre plan.

In 1968, six years after Dinesen's death, Orson Welles, a huge admirer of Dinesen's, released what would turn out to be his last feature-length (just barely, at 58 minutes) fiction film: an adaptation of "The Immortal Story." Made originally for French television, and for most of its existence available for screenings and home viewings in beat up, washed-out prints, Welles's The Immortal Story has now been released on Criterion Blu-ray, and I'll tell you what: the first time I saw this film, which was only a few months ago, I watched it on Hulu, via their Criterion channel; this Blu-ray looks like a complete different film. I'm not the guy to go to for these kinds of technical details, but this restoration is deeply gorgeous, haunting, and essential.

Be that as it may, what is there to make of this film, or of Dinesen's story, for that matter? Quite a lot, potentially. Welles transplants the action from Switzerland to Macao, though visually this doesn't amount to too much, or at least it doesn't amount to what you might expect, because we still mostly see American and European actors. I'm reminded of Mike Nichols's decision to film Catch-22 with no extras at all, because there aren't many in The Immortal Story either (only Clay's servants are played by Asian actors). And the film does have a drifty, European ethereality. Welles, who plays Mr. Clay, speaks not quite in a monotone, but he's only off of that by a tone or two. Wearing another one of his putty noses (one that in certain shots is discolored in a way that reminded me of the one he would wear three years later in Chabrol's Ten Days' Wonder, in which Welles plays another towering, depraved rich man) he plays Mr. Clay as a man whose misanthropy doesn't come from rage or bitterness or pure meanness, but simply from the fact that this man has never even considered the alternative. He's perpetually haunted, though by what even he couldn't say. At times, the Asian setting of this adaptation, which is otherwise rarely more than ostensible, is justified because with his brightly red-rimmed eyes and heavily ashen make-up, Welles resembles a ghost from a Chinese folk tale.

As Elishama, Robert Corggio adds a further strangeness to the atmosphere, though due to the character's practical nature his strangeness is a tad more sharp. In Dinesen's story, Elishama's family was the victim of anti-Jewish pogroms, and now that he has found a situation that provides him with enough to money to rent a room in which he can close himself off from the world, he means to keep it. He's as seemingly inhuman as Mr. Clay, not morally, but in that he's so apart from everyone who actually understands what it means to live on this planet. This is all neatly contrasted by the relative earthiness of Jeanne Moreau as Virginie, the woman who Mr. Clay will eventually hire, and Norman Eshley as Paul, the sailor, who he will also hire, because he means to turn the story he heard the sailor tell a reality. This way, its status as fiction will be erased.

As I say, it's a bizarre scheme. Surprisingly, Welles doesn't latch onto some of the humor Dinesen added, such as the unavoidable implications and occasional failures that Mr. Clay and Elishama encounter when the two men take the carriage out at night and ask sailors if they'd like to earn five guineas. But that might have been for the best, given the tone of Welles's The Immortal Story. There's something about the small number of people on-screen, and the space in the frame that frees up, that cuts everything down to the bones, to the basics, as complex and off-kilter as those basics are in this case. It makes The Immortal Story seem as narratively pure as the story of the sailor and the rich man and his wife which here and in Dinesen stands in for all stories. In his very good commentary from a 2009 release of the film, brought over to the Criterion disc, Adrian Martin points out one incident that is the core of the film (and Dinesen), and of the story within the story. As Martin says, the incident is as immortal a story you can get. Furthermore, there's the very ending (also from Dinesen), which makes everything we've just seen feel positively ancient. Not even ancient: prehistoric.

This Is Not That Kind of Movie

Listen, I know. The outtakes for that frozen peas commercial Orson Welles did, the one with the copy he said was "unrewarding," and he said that you can't begin a sentence with the word "In" and emphasize it, as I say, that audio is funny. And yes, I realize that by the end of his life he was pretty fat. And I know that he was doing commercials for cheap wine to pay the bills and to fund film projects he never finished. But why does nobody choose to sympathize with Welles in his later years? I mean, sure: that he finished so few movies in those years is a Real Shame. But the way he earned his living, and the life he was leading (which evidence suggests was not uneventful, but never mind), why is it only laughed at? "Because he did it to himself" seems to be the common excuse. Yet that frozen pea thing, isn't part of the reason it's so funny is the belief that, harsh though that "depths of your ignorance" bit might be, Welles is actually right? That his frustration is by no means coming from out of the blue, but is rooted in a justified despair? "Crumb, crisp coating?" In July? I wouldn't direct any living actor in Shakespeare like that either!

Oh, hello. You might be wondering what brought all this on. Well, I'll tell you. I just rewatched F for Fake, the last film that Orson Welles completed and that was released to the public (Filming Othello was finished, but outside of film festivals and special screenings has never been shown publicly or released to video). This was 1973 that F for Fake was released, three years after the frozen peas debacle and five years after his previous film, the 60-minute The Immortal Story, made for French television. His career at this point was not robust. And Orson Welles, one of the great geniuses in the history of movies, had to do a frozen peas commercial. Did he live to see those outtakes enjoy a fuller life than F for Fake did? I don't know the timeline of that, but he certainly lived long enough to see John Candy parody the commercial on SCTV. That sketch is very funny, of course, but at that time, and by the time of Welles's death in 1985, where was F for Fake? Nowhere much. It finally received a home video release ten years after he died, and wasn't reissued again until Criterion put it on DVD in 2005. That's another ten years, and now, nearly another ten years, Criterion has upgraded that release to Blu-ray. Nothing yet on any sort of bump in quality on that frozen peas business.

But how it must have stung, because F for Fake is a work of genius. A sort of mix of documentary, essay film, con job, and ode to the physical attributes of his girlfriend Oja Kodar, F for Fake is the kind of film that begins with a consideration not only of watching beautiful women in the street, but the filming of the men who do it, and even, briefly, a potential criticism of filming those men without their knowing, then moves to Welles doing sleight-of-hand magic for a young boy in a train station, then more magic with Kodar in an airport, a cameo by Laurence Harvey wearing startling sunglasses, then to footage from 1950s science fiction movies, footage of flying saucers, and then, let us not settle down at all, this is that kind of movie, jumps into what this is all sort of in aid of. Which is the art forger Elmyr de Hory, with whom Welles socialized at roughly this time in Ibiza, and the writer Clifford Irving who would initially make his name, after some time of failing to sell his fiction, with a non-fiction book about de Hory and his amazing forgeries of Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, and so on. It's about, F for Fake is, art and expertise -- a big question in the film, a great question, such a great question that everybody has chosen to ignore it, is if de Hory's forgeries could so consistently fool the art world's top experts, what can "expertise" actually mean? What can it provide to the non-experts? Plus, while that was going on, all, again, within Welles's vast social circle, Clifford Irving decided to write a fake autobiography of Howard Hughes that he at first successfully passed off as the real thing before eventually being exposed, in no small part by Hughes himself, who came out of seclusion, or anyway his voice did, just to blow the lid off Irving's hoax.

Along the way, Welles will tell a number of stories, jokes ("First, steal an egg" is pretty solid) and anecdotes, as well as consider his own not inconsiderable experience with perpetrating (sort of) hoaxes, first when he lied on his résumé to begin his theater career (or anyway that's the way he tells it) and later, and famously, with his infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast. All of this stuff, plus more, is put together in a mad jumble of editing that is nevertheless a jumble of precise order. It's a manic film, full of fast cutting and freeze frames, meaningless but perfect digressive shots of Irving's pet monkey. When I say F for Fake is "that kind of film" I of course mean that it is unlike any other film.

If the tail end of Welles's life and career was littered with proof that the man had lost whatever it was he'd once had, as the popular story seems to go, how then did F for Fake happen? What seems to have happened is that the films, mainly the early films, retained the respect they deserved, but the man who'd made them lost it, not through some terrible moral failing but because he was willing to do things he didn't want to do for money. And he was fat, damn him. This is the way of it, though: what's easily mocked is more quickly scooped up and displayed than the things we could not accomplish ourselves. As far as films made by has-beens go, F for Fake is a pretty good one.

Plus that coin and key trick Welles does in the train station. He's wearing thick gloves when he does it, and for the real up-close stuff there are no cuts. I'm not a magician myself, but I would have to guess that doing a trick like that with thick gloves on has to be several times more difficult than doing it bare-handed. So there's that, too. But yeah, the frozen peas thing: pretty funny.

Blu-Ray Round-Up: The Stranger, The Hitch-Hiker, and Night Tide

On Tuesday, Kino Lorber is releasing three films on Blu-ray each of which has to count as kind of a big deal. In fact, two of them are part of Kino's Library of Congress line of films preserved by that august institution, so this isn't chickenfeed, you guys. But let use waste not another second.

The Stranger (d. Orson Welles) - There are films directed by Orson Welles that are actually rather hard to see that get talked up more than this one, Welles's third film (strictly speaking), which has always seemed to be around somewhere.  And it's not that, say, Chimes at Midnight doesn't deserve to dominate the conversation, but it does mean that The Stranger also doesn't deserve to be buried.  I saw this first years ago, when I was even dumber than I am now, and I can't say this post-war thriller about a never-say-die Nazi (Welles) hiding within a normal life as a professor engaged to Loretta Young in the small town of Harper, CT, clicked the way I hoped it would, but this time around?  I'll tell you what, it worked.  Even the ending, which as a pay-off to the suspense is a bit broad -- Welles himself compared it unfavorably to Dick Tracy -- works simply because it's so well done.  It's as well done, in its way, as the should-be classic scene with Edward G. Robinson and Konstantin Shayne in the dark, empty gym, an everyday setting turned sinister by shadows and one man's motivation.

But The Stranger is really strong, top to bottom.  It's a tight and exciting movie, full of good bits and performances.  Welles himself is terrific, if occasionally a little bug-eyed, as the villain, who delivers a great speech at a dinner party that, knowing who he really is as we do, sounds like a threat:  "This is how far you'll be forced to go to beat us."  Edward G. Robinson plays the detective on his scent, bringing his typically winning, quietly smarter than everybody else, kind of way he had with this kind of role.  On the innocent-citizen side of things Billy House is effortlessly wonderful as the owner of the neighborhood drugstore, who has a sideline as a checkers shark.  I also loved Loretta Young here, and the way the character was written. Typically, a character like hers would be easily swayed by Robinson's evidence, but in reality I think most people would find themselves horribly conflicted, as Young is here.  She may do the right thing, but it's no easy choice.  An excellent piece of work, all around.

The Hitch-Hiker (d. Ida Lupino) - This 1953 film has the distinction of being the first film noir directed by a woman, a fact that wouldn't mean a great deal to me if it wasn't any good.  But to paraphrase John Self, the The Hitch-Hiker isn't just any good -- it's many good.  It's a simple story (based on fact) about a psychopath named Emmett Myers, played with a great deal of high-quality vileness by William Talman, tearing through a killing spree near the US/Mexican border.  He hijacks a car carrying two friends played by Edmond O'Brien and Frank Lovejoy, who are trying to get in a secret fishing trip without their wives knowing.  As a result, their seeming disappearance from where they're supposed to be, paired with Myers' crimes, the authorities believe the three are traveling together.  The changing reports of what the authorities believe leaves the innocent men's safety, at the hands of the bloodthirsty Myers, a moment-to-moment question.

At just about 70 minutes, Lupino and uncredited screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring (who also wrote the classic Out of the Past) waste no time in telling their story, though nothing feels sped along due to budget restraints or anything else.  Just over an hour turns out to be plenty, in fact, and there's time even to capture the boredom of Lovejoy and O'Brien's situation, when it's not terrifying.  Curiously, The Hitch-Hiker reminded me of The Prowler, not because, shared genre aside, the two films have much in common in terms of plot, which they don't, but because of the barrenness of the landscape.  The Hitch-Hiker takes place in a near-desert environment, not at all unlike the place where the doom-filled last act of that great Joseph Losey film plays out.  Film noir is known for, among other things, using the jumble and height of cities to beat down its heroes and anti-heroes, but others (see also Jacques Tourneur's Nightfall, one of many) achieve the same effect with almost no people and flat, skyline-free plains.  At least in The Set-Up, even when things are looking pretty bad, in theory Robert Ryan could still pop in somewhere for a beer.  In The Hitch-Hiker, that's not possible.  It's just you, the dirt, the road, and the guy with the gun.

Night Tide (d. Curtis Harrington) - Finally we have this moody horror film starring a young Dennis Hopper as a sailor named Johnny Drake who is on leave in Florida, alone, wandering through an oceanfront carnival town.  There he meets Mora (Linda Lawson), who plays the mermaid in the carnival's midway, under the supervision of barker and her surrogate father Captain Murdock (Gavin Muir).  Drake falls in love with Mora, and apparently she with him, and he holds on to this feeling even in the face of rumors that Mora murdered her last two boyfriends, and that she might actually be a real mermaid.

The film was written and directed by Curtis Harrington, who, despite his early roots in the avant garde, or maybe because of them, had a very interesting career as a genre director, leaving behind a filmography that should be longer.  Night Tide was his first full-length feature, and it actually predates the more famous horror movie it most closely resembles, Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls, which was released a year later.  But both have that wet, washed-out, dishwater black and white look, and each share the same eerie drift in their pacing.  If the composition of Harvey's film could occasionally evoke Ingmar Bergman, Night Tide is a little bit more pulp in its design, but Johnny Drake's dream of making love to a woman who transforms into a mass of tentacles would certainly appeal to the avant gardist in Harrington.  If The Hitch-Hiker is very tightly put together, Night Tide could be accused of slackness if the viewer isn't on its wavelength, but who wouldn't be on this wavelength?  People sometimes say of older films "They sure don't make 'em like this anymore," when, in fact, they do still make 'em like that sometimes -- it's just a thing to say, a way to express their affection for that particular movie.  Night Tide is really and genuinely, no shit, the kind of film they don't make anymore.  Anyway, it's interesting to see how innocent Dennis Hopper, that least innocent of actors, was capable of pretending to be.

Darling, He Said in a Tender Voice

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Anyone who's heard the audiobook version of This Is Orson Welles -- which consists of the actual interviews between Welles and Peter Bogdanovich that make up the print version, with some bonus tracks -- will no doubt remember the moment when either Welles or Bogdanovich, can't remember which, brings up Make Way for Tomorrow (d. Leo McCarey). I have the audiobook on cassette, which means I haven't heard it in a long time, but I remember that when Welles talks about McCarey's film, he sounds as though he's been practically transported, the emotion almost overwhelms him, and he comes close to babbling about Make Way for Tomorrow's melancholy brilliance. Jesus, if that word's even big enough for it. As Welles said, "It would make a stone cry."

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I say the film's melancholy, but it achieves this through a gentle, consistent sense of humor; without that, I wonder if Make Way for Tomorrow might not be unbearable. The story, about an elderly couple who loses their house and is forced to split up, the wife living with the family of one child, the husband with another, the two homes located 300 miles apart, because none of their children can find their way to bring in both parents, is perfectly constructed to support a series of scenes in which the parents find themselves, not ripped, but let's say delicately wrenched, from their happy home together and placed in environments where those who would ostensibly take care of them and work towards joining them back together, subtly and explicitly make them feel unwanted, in the way, a goddamn hassle. But the couple only wants to live together again."Together for always," says the old wife, Lucy Cooper (Beulah Bondi) during a rare and expensive long distance call with her old husband Barkley Cooper (Victor Moore), in one of Make Way for Tomorrow's very best scenes.

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In some ways, Make Way for Tomorrow defeats analysis. I have no doubt that much has been written about its place in the history of the Great Depression (the Coopers lost their home to the bank, and the film was made in 1937), and still more about the film's relevance to today. But I don't care about any of that. Instead, I wonder if there have been two better performances on film than Bondi and Moore's work here. Moore's "Those places must be terrible," in reference to old age homes -- one of which he learns has been scouted out by his daughter-in-law (Fay Bainter), wife to his son George (Thomas Mitchell), with whom Lucy is staying -- is full of quietly, but barely, suppressed pain. And Bondi's whispered "I love you" as the couple takes a cab back from their last grand night out, as her husband sings an old favorite song, is as exquisitely beautiful as any delivery of those three words has ever been. And I wonder if helpless guilt has ever been more fully embodied than it is by Thomas Mitchell's George, during a crucial conversation with his mother, his body stiff and shoulders hunched, as if he's steeling himself just to get through it. Or if, as happens at the film's end, a moment of such perfect joy has ever eased so seamlessly into such crushing, inevitable sadness, in a matter of seconds.

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There's a moral to Make Way for Tomorrow, and it's stated right up front. I urge you to watch this heartbreaking film and see for yourself what it is. And then, if God willing it's not too late, heed it.