City Lights

1931 // USA // Charles Chaplin // March 4, 2011 // Theatrical Print (Webster University Moore Auditorium)

[City Lights was screened on March 4, 2011 as a part of the Webster University Film Series' retrospective on the feature films of Charles Chaplin.]

It's challenging to approach a work as enduring and esteemed as City Lights without expectations. This was my first re-visitation of the film since a thinly-recalled childhood viewing, and I was keen to silence the buzzing cogs of cerebral cinephilia in order to simply experience the thing. (Keeping in mind, of course, that this is not the same as "turning your brain off and having a good time," as defenders of awful films would suggest we do.) Fortunately, Chaplin's best films encourage just this sort of rapt emotional engagement, and City Lights is no exception. The film is a triumph of escapism, effortlessly transporting the viewer out of their everyday lives and into the silly, lonely existence of the Little Tramp. His is a straightforward and tattered sort of existence, animated in its particulars but remarkably static in overview. The Tramp has no home and no job, and therefore no need to trace a daily roundabout path between the two. His concerns are pragmatic and short-term: milking every unlikely passing situation for its simple joys, all while evading the authorities and the jibes of disdainful onlookers. (I was reminded, despite myself, of Henry Chianski's cheerful declaration in Barfly: "No money, no job, no rent. Hey, I'm back to normal!")  Suddenly: the monkey wrench. Enraptured by the Blind Girl, the Tramp discovers a pure and selfless love that compels him to seek out--gasp!--employment, putting his dignity and even his pasty little frame on the line for the Object of His Desire. It is that current of earnest longing that makes City Lights a sublime work of art rather than a "mere" sequence of masterful comic set pieces. The almost ecstatic vulnerability of the film's celebrated final scene reveals Chaplin as a profoundly humanist filmmaker. He heightens our awareness of every titter and guffaw we uttered at the Tramp's plight, highlighting that his silly antics are rooted in the most desperate and universal of human impulses: to be accepted, embraced, and loved, just as we are.​

Body Double

1984 // USA // Brian De Palma // February 15, 2011 // Theatrical Print (Webster University Moore Auditorium)

[Body Double was screened on February 15, 2011 as a part of "How (Not) to Mind Your Own Business," the Webster University Film Series' three-feature retrospective on the films of Brian De Palma.]

Permit me the most facile observation about Brian De Palma's perversely mesmerizing thriller, Body Double: In every shot, and every frame, it is a self-consciously Bad Movie, one that teeters on that narrow ledge where all intentionally ridiculous kitsch artifacts attempt to position themselves. It's hard to know what to make of a work of cinema so garish and goofy, and yet capable, in its best moments, of evoking both aching loneliness and white-knuckle tension. Certainly, a film as contradictory and bizarre as Body Double isn't unexpected when the director in question is De Palma, but the film does strike me as his most deliberately trashy work, a precursor to the legion of disposable "erotic thrillers" that would crowd video store shelves and late-night television in the 1980s and 90s, at least in terms of its superficial content. Body Double is, of course, far more visually enthralling than such lesser kin. Its most cinematically conspicuous component is an extended, mostly wordless sequence in which out-of-work actor and amicable everyman Jake Scully (Craig Wasson) shadows his object of desire, Gloria (Deborah Shelton) first through a mall and then at a seaside motel. It's a stock murder mystery setpiece masterfully rendered by De Palma and cinematographer Stephen H. Burum. How, then, are we to react when it concludes with a ludicrous, lustful embrace, complete with the characteristic De Palma 360-degree panning shot and hideously saccharin score? Is this the director simply attempting, as he does much more explicitly elsewhere in the film, to rub our noses in the artificial and manipulative nature of the medium?

Body Double touches on many of the same thematic elements as Blow Out, but the lingering 1970s cynicism of the latter film is here replaced with a Reagan-era middle finger, complete with power-tool-wielding maniacs, vampire "punks" clad in black leather and chrome, and porn stars who specify their "wills" and "won'ts" in terms of orifice, substance, and species. I'm still not sure how I feel about a work perched so restlessly on the border between schlock and art, but Body Double is so obviously striving for the former that its silliest moments don't disrupt as they do in other De Palma ventures. Carlito's Way lulls you into nodding along with its personalized and almost spiritual approach to the gangster film... until Joe Cocker wailing out "You Are So Beautiful" makes you sit up and go, "Whaaaa...?" Body Double, by contrast, is chock-a-block with "Whaaaa...?" moments, and therefore nothing ever really seem out-of-place. Not even, say, a bizarre but admittedly lively music video sequence set to Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Relax," with lip-syncing from a Joel Grey type by way of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Post-Script: Am I the only one who thinks the music used in the U-North advertisements in Tony Gilroy's stupendous white-collar thriller Michael Clayton bears an uncanny resemblance to Pino Donaggio's score for this film, and specifically to Gloria's "striptease theme"?

Blow Out

1981 // USA // Brian De Palma // February 8, 2011 // DVD - MGM (2001)

[Blow Out was screened on February 8, 2011 as a part of "How (Not) to Mind Your Own Business," the Webster University Film Series' three-feature retrospective on the films of Brian De Palma.]

Whether by dint of astute scheduling or pleasing happenstance, the Webster Film Series featured Brian De Palma's bleak, crackling thriller Blow Out one week after it screened Blow-Up, which made for a gratifying and revealing juxtaposition. De Palma's film is unmistakably functioning in the shadow of Antonioni's masterwork, as evidenced not only by its allusive title, but also by its prominent treatment of audio-visual craft, presented with a dazzling balance of admiration and cynicism. There's also, of course, the despairing thematic fixation on veracity in an era of constructed and reconstructed (and re-reconstructed) realities. Yet Blow Out is unmistakably a De Palma film, neither as unruly nor as artistically ambitious as Antonioni's, but dripping with the former director's garish signatures, from the dizzying mood of mortal peril to the goofy, maudlin music cues. Admittedly, even as a thriller, Blow Out doesn't always cohere properly: Far too many scenes rely on characters behaving with breathtaking callowness, particularly Nancy Allen's squeeze-toy / femme fatale, Sally. Yet despite my own ambivalent stance towards De Palma's works, I have to concede that the film stands out as one of his finest, a bold and fascinating amalgamation of diverse influences that still plays in the auteur's distinctive key. Sure, Blow Out exploits the noir tropes that recurrently occupy De Palma, and it brims with the expected Hitchcock nods. Most crucially, however, it represents a synthesis of the director's style with the indelible "paranoia films" of the 1970s (The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor, All the President's Men). And while I've never had much use for John Travolta, here the actor is as enthralling (and gorgeous) as he's ever been, portraying a character that is by turns shrewd, searing, and sweetly dim. Watching his sound engineer Jack stumble along in his attempts to charm Allen's naïve and anxious con-lady is the cherry on top of a striking performance.

Blow-Up

1966 // UK - Italy // Michelangelo Antonioni // February 2, 2011 // DVD - Warner Brothers (2004)​

[Note: This post contains minor spoilers. Blow-Up was screened on February 2, 2011 as a part of Strange Brew, the Webster University Film Series' monthly cult film series at Schlafly Bottleworks.]

There is a crucial moment about two-thirds of the way through Blow-Up, a moment that signals definitively, I think, that Antonioni's weirdly exciting film is evolving into something more profound than "just" a giddy depiction of London in the Swinging Sixties, or "merely" a remorselessly ambiguous thriller. David Hemming's obnoxiously self-assured fashion photographer Thomas, having revisited the public park were he unwittingly documented a murder on film, returns to his studio to pore over the successive enlargements that seem to storyboard the dastardly deed. Unfortunately, the studio has been ransacked by an unknown party; one grainy enlargement remains, wedged between two pieces of furniture. Thomas explains to his neighbor Patricia (Sarah Miles) that the print depicts the murder victim's body lying prone on the grass. However, she sees nothing of the sort, just a collection of dots that resembles one of the abstract expressionist spatter paintings created by her boyfriend. Context is everything, and without the other images, Patricia cannot see what Thomas sees, even when he points out the body in the print. This scene foreshadows the film's most devastating moment, when Thomas, having floundered his way through a nocturnal London landscape of indolent rock concerts and pot-fogged parties, returns to the park in the morning, only to discover that the body has vanished. Has Thomas been conned, or has he conned himself?

Nearly a decade later, Hemmings recalled his role in this film with Deep Red, which also features a protagonist who sees a clue he does not understand. Where Dario Argento is fixated on the inadequacy of memory and the intellect, however, Antonioni's cynicism is directed towards our imperfect organs, both biological and mechanical. The eye and the camera are to be mistrusted. Blow-Up serves as a marvelous time capsule of an unmistakable pop cultural moment, but its obsessions go far beyond the mod bric-a-brac that litters the frame. Just as Michael Haneke would do forty years later in Caché, Antonioni is engaged in a cinematic dissertation on artifice, and on the limitations and vulnerabilities of observation. The world of fashion emerges as a natural backdrop for the film's deeply skeptical stance towards images as a substitute for reality, and towards humankind's ability to discern truth with its own lying eyes. In this, there are echoes of Blow-Up in later works as diverse as JFK (recall that bravura sequence of the Life photo forgery) and the documentary Standard Operating Procedure, but Antonioni's film is novel in the manner in which is at once revels in surface imagery and undermines it at every turn.

Dog Day Afternoon

1975 // USA // Sidney Lumet // January 21, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Webster University Moore Auditorium)​

[Dog Day Afternoon was screened on January 21-23, 2010 as a part of the Webster University Film Series' retrospective on the films of actor John Cazale.]

Perhaps it's a bit discourteous to dwell on Al Pacino's presence in a film that was screened to celebrate the lamentably brief, searingly vital career of John Cazale. To be sure, Cazale's Sal provides a crucial counterpoint to Pacino's Sonny: simmering with limp anxiety, Sal seems to be genuinely tormented by the moral dimensions of their bank heist-turned-fiasco, but he also seems to harbor a deeper, more ominous ugliness in his soul than the hot-blooded Sonny. (Witness Sal's curiously menacing and self-righteous scolding of Penelope Allen's teller when she elects to indulge in a cigarette.) Still, I keep returning to how novel Sonny is as a character in the arc of Pacino's career: He possesses the characteristic brashness that we expect from the actor, but none of the self-possession, none of the bellowing, monarchical vanity that colors even the moments of out-of-control helplessness in his signature roles. Sonny is, in a word, lost, and the wide, darting eyes, twitching mouth, and short-guy strut that are the actor's stock and trade here seem like the reflexes of a man stretched so thin he can no longer tell authenticity from artifice. (Which, of course, is of a piece with the film's fascination with the theater of mass media "news".) Sonny's sole moment of calm certainty comes when he dictates his will, which he does with the kind of fatalism and unassuming emotion that seems pitch-perfect for a Brooklyn Catholic. And yet, his fearful utterance later in the film--"Please don't kill me!"--betrays a man who is not ready to die, who made out his will because, perhaps, that's what he assumed a bank robber in a standoff with police should do.

The Night of the Hunter

1955 // USA // Charles Laughton // October 12, 2010 // DVD - MGM (2000)

[Note: This post contains minor spoilers.]

Screening Charles Laughton's eccentric Southern gothic nightmare—remarkably, the first and only film he directed—has become something of an October tradition for me. I suppose it isn't exactly a horror film, but the struggle of wills between young John Harper and the "Reverend" Harry Powell is one of the great Good-versus-Evil cinematic matches of all time. (As far as I'm concerned, it's up there with Dorothy and the Wicked Witch of the West in terms of its mythic purity.) For that, and its potent aura of physical and spiritual menace, it always seems a good fit for the run-up to Halloween.

The influence of German expressionism on Laughton's style and Robert Mitchum's disturbing portrayal of the Reverend receive the lion's share of critical attention, but what was on my mind on this occasion was how ambiguous the film is in its stance towards children. The way that Laughton presents the story's sentimental moralizing seems authentic, and yet it always has a bit of sadness and uneasiness squirming underneath its phantasmagorical surface. The Reverend seems so ominous partly because the film paints John and Pearl as unblemished souls. John safeguards the secret of the money out of enduring loyalty to his Pa, not because he cares about the cache's value, and Pearl is so untainted by the world's ugliness she makes paper dolls out of the bills. However, Laughton's camera always seems a little apprehensive when it regards the children, as if they are strange and unknowable creatures whose purity intimidates as much as it beguiles. Adding to the dissonance is the fact that Sally Jane Bruce, who plays Pearl, is a damn creepy-looking little girl.

The film is unequivocally a creature of the Hays code era, what with the Reverend's sudden and strangely off-handed downfall, not to mention the entire character of Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish, effortlessly endearing), the sort of saintly caregiver and protector who fits right into the film's fairy tale vision of Depression America. Still, when Rachel muses on the dual character of children—their simultaneous fragility and endurance—it doesn't feel like syrupy sentiment, but a melancholy statement of bewilderment. In fact, an aura of bewilderment characterizes the entire film: at the Reverend's unfathomable malevolence, at others' blindness to his evil designs, at the capricious cruelty of the world, and at the impenetrable nature of God's will.

Incidentally, after ten years on a no-frills MGM disc, the film is finally getting an overdue Criterion Collection treatment on DVD and Blu-ray next month.