Category: 1959

BLACK ORPHEUS (France, 1959)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Marcel Camus
CAST: Breno Mello, Marpessa Dawn, Lourdes de Oliveira
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 88% Certified Fresh

PLOT: The Greek myth of Orpheus and Euridice is translated into a modern-day story (with an all-black cast) set in during Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro.


In the first two-thirds of Black Orpheus, there are scarcely more than 2 minutes strung together at a time without some kind of music or sound effects thumping away in the background.  This gives the film a subtle real-world backdrop, which is good, because Black Orpheus is a fantasy through and through.  Critics, now and at the time of its release, complained that French director Marcel Camus ignored the reality of the Brazilian favelas, or slums, in favor of depicting Rio as a non-stop party.  This is a valid point.  However, I believe that, in this movie, reality has no place.  This is a love story, a myth, a tragedy, and a travelogue all rolled into one.  Reality must take a back seat in movies like this.

(And, heck, somebody must have liked it because it won both the Palme d’Or at Cannes AND the Best Foreign Film Oscar that year, a rare feat.  True, there were extenuating circumstances [numerous French critics had problems with the emerging French New Wave], but let’s not turn this into a classroom, shall we?)

If you’re familiar with Greek mythology, then the plot of Black Orpheus is nothing new.  Orfeu (Breno Mello, a non-professional actor) is a streetcar conductor engaged to the sexy, vivacious Mira, but he is not exactly thrilled about it.  Meanwhile, Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn, who actually hailed from Pittsburgh, not Brazil) gets lost in the city on the way to visit her cousin, Serafina, who lives in a ramshackle favela neighborhood.  She asks Orfeu and his boss, Hermes, for directions, and for Orfeu it’s love at first sight.  The rest of the movie will involve Orfeu wooing Eurydice, who worries about a strange man who might be following her, while trying to ditch Mira, with Serafina’s help.  Also assisting Orfeu, while acting as a Greek chorus in miniature, are two street urchins, Benedito and Zeca, who envy Orfeu’s lovely guitar playing, which Orfeu claims is what makes the sun rise every morning.

Apart from the story itself, the things I noticed at the outset were the presence of riotous colors in the costumes and the Brazilian countryside, and the music.  Lots and LOTS of music, but not a great deal of songs.  Black Orpheus is billed as a musical, but I’d have to say it’s a quasi-musical.  In a standard musical, characters break out into song, and no one notices because otherwise we’d be watching a play.  In Black Orpheus, every song is diegetic…someone asks Orfeu to play a song on his guitar, for example, or the Carnaval participants sing a rousing song while on parade or at a huge dance.  And I want to mention again that, while Orfeu is singing a quiet song to Eurydice, the constant percussion of the Carnaval pulses behind it, completely at odds with his song.  You would think it would become a cacophony, but it doesn’t.  It makes his quiet song much quieter, which may sound counterintuitive, but it works.

The mythic tone of the story keeps the film from flying off into ridiculous territory amid all the revelry.  Without mythology, Black Orpheus would be a soap opera.  A pivotal scene occurs during a massive dance contest, as Eurydice has disguised herself as her cousin, Serafina, so Mira doesn’t recognize her.  But Mira sees through the disguise and threatens to kill Eurydice.  Mira chases her, and unseen by anyone else except Eurydice, a man dressed all in black wearing a skull mask follows them both.  This is Death.  Earlier he had nearly chased Eurydice off a cliff, but Orfeu had saved her.  “I am not in a hurry,” he said, “we shall meet soon.”  With that in mind, his presence during this second chase is tinged with suspense.  It’s a very Hitchcockian element, the threat of danger juxtaposed with a dance or a party.  Good stuff.

So, it’s fair to say I enjoyed this movie a little more than I expected to.  But the bonus features on the Blu-ray brought up an interesting point.  Detractors of the film pointed out that, despite taking place mostly in a slum, the actual reality of those slums (both then and now) is anything but festive, no matter how much bossa nova music you play or how many songs you sing.  It’s highly unlikely these people would have had the wherewithal to create such stylized, colorful costumes while having to deal with the reality of poverty, all while looking down the mountainside at the distant concrete high rises of the higher classes.

Does Black Orpheus ignore reality?  Well…yes, it does.  Myths, by definition, have little to do with reality in the first place.  Would it have been possible to tell this mythical story, retaining its coincidences and absurdities and supernatural elements [especially towards the end], while also keeping its feet firmly on the ground and making a socially conscious statement about the horrible living conditions in Brazil?

I don’t think so.  Or, if you did, it wouldn’t be held together very well.  Black Orpheus is simply re-telling a very, VERY old story and re-imagining it as if the Greek gods had lived atop Sugarloaf Mountain instead of Olympus.  When you start with that kind of premise, reality goes out the window.  You have to focus on the story’s emotional beats, the pleasant assault on the senses and, occasionally, logic.

This opens a whole separate argument: is it a film’s responsibility to BE authentic, or just to FEEL authentic?  For example, Titanic [1997] feels authentic to me, a layman, but I’m sure historians and other experts could point to any number of things that were simply not true in the film.  Fair enough, but that doesn’t affect my enjoyment of the film as it was presented to me.  It FELT authentic, and that’s enough for me.  The only way to make a movie like that 100% authentic would be to turn it into a documentary.

Black Orpheus FEELS emotionally authentic to me, a layman, who is not a social anthropologist.  I look at the colors and vibrancy on display, visually and in the story itself, and while a small part of me acknowledges, “This isn’t real life”, another part of me says, “Well, if I wanted real life, I wouldn’t be watching a movie, would I?”

BEN-HUR (1959)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: William Wyler
Cast: Charlton Heston, Jack Hawkins, Haya Harareet, Stephen Boyd, Hugh Griffith
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 86% Certified Fresh

PLOT: After a Jewish prince is betrayed and sent into slavery by a Roman friend in 1st-century Jerusalem, he regains his freedom and returns for revenge.


For my money, 1959’s record-setting production of Ben-Hur would be a better pick for an annual Easter flick over C.B. de Mille’s overblown The Ten Commandments.  Certainly, Commandments shows the actual story of Passover and might lay claim to more special effects sequences, but Ben-Hur feels grander AND more intimate at the same time.  Plus it actually shows Christ and the crucifixion at the end, and what better symbols could you ask for in an Easter film?

Then, of course, there’s that chariot race.  Game, set, and match.

Ben-Hur was created in an era when Hollywood was watching its profits dwindle because of the advent of television, which was keeping more and more people glued to their sets at home instead of paying for a ticket at the box office.  One way to get people back into theaters was to take the “bigger-is-better” approach: do things that were impossible on a TV budget.

Consider these statistics: Three hundred separate sets were built for Ben-Hur.  The chariot race alone required 15,000 extras on 18 acres of backlot at Cinecitta Studios in Rome and took 10 weeks to shoot.  Over a million props were needed, and it took two years to amass them all before shooting.  Approximately 1.25 million feet of expensive 65mm film was exposed and developed at a cost of roughly a dollar per foot.  The budget for the film ballooned to nearly $15 million, equivalent to over $146 million in today’s dollars, an unthinkable amount in the late 1950s.

But when it was released, Ben-Hur made history by being the first film to win eleven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Supporting Actor.  It remains the only film to date to win Best Picture and Best Visual Effects.  At the box office, it raked in $75 million ($731 million when adjusted for inflation), making it one of the most profitable films in Hollywood history at the time.  It remains popular today, ranked in the IMDb’s top 250 most popular movies and listed as the #2 epic film of all time by the American Film Institute.  (#1 is Lawrence of Arabia, naturally.)

How does a 63-year-old film, with a running time of 3 hours and 42 minutes, with a blatantly religious plotline culminating in the crucifixion of Christ and a shamelessly manipulative miracle, and featuring some of the hammiest acting this side of Bollywood, remain as popular as it is?  Because despite its shortcomings, it does what every film should do, long or short, sacred or secular: it tells a rollicking good story, and it does it extremely well.

After a solemn prologue depicting the first Nativity, we jump forward 26 years and meet Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston), a wealthy Judean prince who enjoys a reunion with his old friend, Messala (Stephen Boyd).  They grew up together but went their separate ways, and now Messala is a Roman tribune assigned to keep the peace in Judea.  Poor Judah realizes just how far they’ve grown apart when an accident leads Messala to arrest Judah and his mother and sister, to demonstrate his power and loyalty to Rome.  Judah vows vengeance and is sentenced to die as a galley slave.  But fate intervenes in the form of Quintus Arrius (Jack Hawkins), a Roman general whose life Judah saves in battle.  Arrius befriends Judah and officially adopts him as his own son, giving Judah the means to return to his homeland, wreak his vengeance upon Messala, and rescue his mother and sister from prison.

…and that’s just Act One.  Act Two focuses heavily on Judah’s revenge in the form of one of the greatest set pieces in Hollywood history: the chariot race.  Or, more properly, The Chariot Race.  If you’ve never seen it, Google/YouTube it.  Even viewed as a stand-alone scene, it is as breathtaking and thrilling as any car chase ever filmed.  It’s so good that George Lucas cribbed many of its beats for the pod-race sequence in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace.  The crashes you see during the race were planned, but they were performed with real stuntmen in real danger.  Note especially one sensational stunt where a 2-wheeled chariot drawn by four horses, at full gallop, approach a crashed chariot in their path.  The horses leap the chariot, then the chariot dangerously rolls over the crash itself, hurling the stuntman so high into the air he nearly topples head over heels over the front of his own chariot.  I am at a loss to imagine how they could possibly accomplish this same scene today without the use of visual effects.

Peppered throughout the story are brief scenes featuring Jesus of Nazareth, although we never hear Him speak, and we never see His face.  In Act One, He offers water to Judah as he is being marched to the galleys, a compassionate act that will resonate through the years.  Later He is glimpsed from a distance delivering the Sermon on the Mount.  And later still, we see His trial, His journey to Golgotha, and His crucifixion.  Everyone involved in those scenes show the appropriate and expected levels of awe and sadness, while the score plays a mournful dirge.  It’s a little ham-handed by today’s standards, especially when compared to modern films like The Passion of the Christ, but it is still effective.

The movie’s highest level of filmmaking, apart from The Chariot Race, is on its best display in the first half of the movie.  Nearly two-and-a-half hours fly by, thanks to superb editing.  It’s never boring or soapy.  (Well…ALMOST never soapy.  The requisite love scenes between Judah and the slave girl Esther, played by the lovely Haya Harareet, are not as easy to watch as the rest of the film, but thankfully there aren’t that many of them.)  Every event and every scene feels crucial to the story.  There’s never a moment that drags.  Like the best epic films, watching Ben-Hur makes me feel like I’m reading a richly detailed novel.

If the film has a major downfall, it’s the story that follows The Chariot Race.  The movie doesn’t exactly grind to a halt, but it doesn’t offer the viewer any kind of climactic punches that can match the visceral effect of Judah’s capture, escape, and victory in the race.  (Sorry if I spoiled that for you, but if you seriously thought he lost that race, seek help.)  Sure, there’s the capture and crucifixion of Jesus and the miraculous aftermath, but while that satisfies the true arc of the story, I still, to this day, feel like the film deflates a little at the end.  There’s simply nothing it can offer that could possibly follow up that damn Chariot Race.  The race is the payoff.  Everything that follows feels anti-climactic.

That quibble aside, Ben-Hur is still as captivating as it ever was, with “old” Hollywood’s full power brought to bear to bring audiences a cinematic experience unlike any other at that time.  No matter where you might stand when it comes to its religious overtones, you can’t deny that the movie is exactly as respectful as it needs to be for this story.  And ultimately, the message of the film isn’t “An eye for an eye.”  It’s “Love thy enemy as thyself.”  It takes Judah Ben-Hur a little while to get there.  But he gets there.

SLEEPING BEAUTY

By Marc S. Sanders

When the Walt Disney Studios released Sleeping Beauty in 1959 it was not received as well as other classics like Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs or Cinderella. Financially it didn’t prove to be as close to a success to Disney’s prior films. I dunno. Maybe moviegoers were tiring of the semi fluid animation where the drawn characters freely move but the backdrops remain in place. The gimmick of animation might have been getting old and stale.

My opinion though is that Sleeping Beauty carries a perfect blend of charm, humor, beautiful colors (whether it’s pink or blue) and most certainly suspense.

Princess Aurora is born, but during her introductory ceremony the evil fairy Maleficent curses her to die on her sixteenth birthday when she pricks her finger on a spinning wheel. The delightful fairies, Flora, Fauna and Merryweather (the original Golden Girls) agree to hide her in the forest, thus avoiding Aurora’s impending doom. This trio is are terrific with their squabbling and intentions to avoid magic use. No magic will ever bode well in dress making or baking.

This is one of the best examples of Walt Disney’s knack for beautiful storytelling in imagination and fantasy. It’s a perfectly innocent film, rated G, but it consists of terrific personality from all of the main characters, even Aurora’s true love to be, Prince Phillip with his trusty steed, Samson, who will carelessly toss Phillip off his back and into a pond.

Moreover, Maleficent is one of the greatest tools of suspense in all of film. A hauntingly well executed scene puts Aurora in a trance forced to follow a floating neon green light. Maleficent’s spell has possessed her and forced her to meet her destiny. Yet as the scene is playing out and Aurora slowly climbs the castle’s stone staircases, you hope to god she doesn’t prick her finger. The scene plays out slowly building on fear and anxiety. A great bedtime story moment.

Another highlight is one the greatest achievements in the studio’s history involving Maleficent transforming into a hideous black dragon breathing bolts of green/yellow fire and smoldering the bridge beneath Phillip as he tries to defeat the beast. Phillip loses his footing, ready to fall into a bottomless void, the three good fairies shake their heads in terror and the music builds. It’s a great scene of bold adventure.

Aurora is adoring as she harmonizes about meeting a handsome prince “once upon a dream.” A beautiful sequence set in the forest where the lovable creatures allow our heroine to play within her fantasies.

Sleeping Beauty has everything. Adventure, romance, music, suspense, and one of the best cast of characters, most especially well delivered from the evil Maleficent. It’s an absolutely perfect accomplishment in storytelling and filmmaking. A film that continues to sustain the Mouse House’s awe inspiring legacy.

Every family and young child especially should watch Sleeping Beauty.

NORTH BY NORTHWEST

By Marc S. Sanders

A story of mistaken identity becomes one of the grandest adventures on film with Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest. The movie plays at such a fast pace, moving from one locale to the next and it all feels convincingly possible.

Before James Bond, there was the dashing Cary Grant in his sharp, fitted light grey suit (the best suit to ever be shown on film) portraying advertising executive Roger Thornhill who simply raises his hand in the air while meeting some colleagues at The Plaza Hotel in New York and is suddenly mistaken for a man named George Kaplan. Soon he’s forced into a car by two men and driven to an estate property belonging to someone named Townsend (James Mason) who implores “Mr. Kaplan” to cooperate or else. Suddenly, Thornhill who continues to insist he’s not Kaplan is on a cross country journey while escaping the authorities who want him for murder while he tries to prove his true identity and exonerate himself.

Cary Grant is dashingly fun with Hitchcock’s camera. It’s refreshing for a change to watch an innocent protagonist not lay on the heavy drama and panic so much. Hitchcock with Grant were going for a sweeping story of cat and mouse play.

What Alfred Hitchcock does best is put the viewer right in position of Thornhill. For the most part (definitely through the first forty minutes) the viewer only knows what Thornhill knows. We know he’s been mistaken for someone else and we are only given the opportunity to put a few names with faces and get a hold of a crumpled photograph. That’s all we and Thornhill have to go on.

Later on, it’s only fortunate that Thornhill comes upon one of Hitchcock’s celebrated blond actresses he was always reputed to cast. This time it is the incredibly striking Eva Marie Saint as Eve Kendall who becomes a willingly helpful train companion for Thornhill. Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint make for a spectacular on screen couple. Their chemistry is so natural together.

Not much else should be said about the story of North By Northwest. The entertainment comes from what each new scene reveals. Hitchcock incorporates all the expected twists and makes sure to use a MacGuffin, of course. This time it involves a statue and microfilm. What’s on it? That does not so much matter really. It’s the need to pursue it that’s important. The pursuit is what drives the picture from New York City to the United Nations, all the way to a curious auction house for fine art and then on to the four famous faces of Mount Rushmore in South Dakota.

Naturally, Hitchcock is the master once again as he points his camera up close on Grant, Mason and Saint and then quickly will cut to one of their points of view to lengthen the suspense. Running after or away from something in the moment is where Hitchcock is very strong as a storyteller. It keeps you alert as a viewer. Very alert!!!

James Mason makes for a terrific villain as Townsend, or could he be someone else? He’s got that sneaky inflection in his voice and short build that makes for a great antagonist against Cary Grant’s tall stature. Mason’s sidekick, Leonard (a mysterious looking Martin Landau) is also a spooky guy to keep your distance from.

The most celebrated scene probably also contains one of the best captions caught in film. I speak of the very surprising crop duster chase. As Roger Thornhill finds himself in a quiet, Midwestern dirt road intersection, an airplane crop duster turns into a frightening menace. The best shot occurs as Grant runs quickly towards Hitchcock’s camera and the plane flies overhead rapidly getting closer in the upper left side of the screen. As Grant runs and runs, he fills more of the screen, but so does the crop duster. The editing alone is spectacular, as an oil rig eventually comes into play with Grant about to get run over. Story wise, I adore this scene as somehow the life of a man who routinely gets in taxicabs and hob nobs through New York City on a daily basis suddenly has found himself in a dusty field running for his life. What was never expected is suddenly all that matters to this ordinary man.

Hitchcock plays with what’s around to play with. Other than a quick gag in Superman II, l don’t recall many films incorporating Mount Rushmore as such an important element to its picture. Every crevice or ledge or finger hold is important to the edits of the climax in North By Northwest. When Eva Marie Saint is holding on for life, I truly believed she could actually fall. [SPOILER ALERT] Actually, Hitchcock wanted you to believe that as the very last scene doesn’t even truly reveal the solution to her predicament. I like his method of editing this way. Hitchcock seemingly offers no option for survival as Grant and Saint’s hands barely hold on to one another. The editing is just so damn good here.

I’d be remiss if I also didn’t recognize one of the greatest orchestral scores in film. Bernard Hermann’s stirring, fast paced rhythms keep the running man theme in play. The movie seems to play by the beats of Hermann’s conduction. Action films of the future seemed to adopt some measures from he did with this film.

North By Northwest will always remain as one Alfred Hitchcock’s best films. There is not one error in the picture. Every shot is done with deliberate intent to sustain the mystery of suspense. Humor is included even at times on a risqué and subtle measure. Alfred Hitchcock again invites the simplicity of storytelling to introduce the complexity of fear and mystery and outstanding suspense. Not many films compare to North By Northwest.