Tag: Drama

WAR AND PEACE (Soviet Union, 1965)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Sergey Bondarchuk
CAST: Sergey Bondarchuk, Lyudmila Saveleva, Vyacheslav Tikhonov
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100% Fresh

PLOT: The Russian aristocracy prepares for the French invasion on the eve of 1812 in one of the most ambitious epic films ever made.


The “Why” of Sergey Bondarchuk’s mammoth War and Peace is key to understanding the “What” and “How” of it.

In 1960, the citizens of Soviet Russia fell wildly in love with another version of War and Peace, directed by King Vidor and starring Audrey Hepburn, Henry Fonda, and Mel Ferrer.  It was notable for its extravagant scope, but also for its myriad historical inaccuracies and departures from Tolstoy’s text.  The Soviet government was unhappy with its popularity, so they commissioned their country’s film industry to create their own adaptation, with the full cooperation of the government, the Red Army, and the citizens of Moscow.  Basically, it was a case of, “Anything you can do, I can do better.”  Director Sergey Bondarchuk was tapped to direct.  Five years (and two strokes) later, this gloriously Russian version of War and Peace would go on to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.

The scale of this film is mindboggling.  Clocking in at an intimidating seven hours, War and Peace is divided, like Tolstoy’s novel, into four chapters…basically four movies intended to be viewed one after the other.  That might seem daunting at first, but how many of us have binged a streaming show all at once, or an entire miniseries in one day?  Same difference.  Anyway, three of the chapters focus on one of the principal trio of characters: Pierre Bezukhov, a timid aristocrat; Natasha Rostova, a tempestuous young woman whose emotional output puts modern soap operas to shame; and Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, a sober-minded aristocrat/soldier who woos Natasha despite a substantial age gap.  The remaining film (which is actually third in the chronology) details the French invasion of Moscow in 1812, led by Napoleon Bonaparte, with the spectacular Battle of Borodino as its centerpiece.

I’ll get to that battle in a second, but it must be noted that I went into this film aware of its reputation, but prepared to be absolutely bored out of my skull.  I have not seen very many Russian films, but my favorite by far is Come and See (1985), and I was certain this movie would not be anywhere near as compelling.  However, Bondarchuk’s expressionistic style kept me interested the entire time.  I was never truly bored…well, I tell a lie, the fourth chapter felt a little drawn out to me, but aside from that, the camera tricks on display – as well as the lavish and elaborate costumes and set pieces – were a constant source of surprise.

One highlight of Bondarchuk’s method is his liberal use of what I call a subjective camera.  There may be another word for what I’m describing, but that’s what I’m sticking with.  There is narration throughout the film that clues us in occasionally to what someone is thinking, but sometimes, instead of narration, the camera will give us the character’s POV along with a stylistic embellishment like a swaying motion, or giving everything a kind of blur, or enhanced lighting, or even what appears to be water being poured directly onto the lens to simulate tears or dizziness.  (At one point, during a battle sequence, we even get a CANNONBALL’S-eye view as it crashes to the ground amid friendly troops…kinda neat, especially for the 1960s.)  There are WAY more examples that I could point to, but ain’t nobody got time for that.  Visually, this movie is a feast.

But all of that is nothing – NOTHING compared to the titanic Battle of Borodino featured in film three.  Since Bondarchuk had access to as many troops and extras as he needed, this battle contains camera shots that would have made Kurosawa or Kubrick green with envy.  In any given shot, look at the backgrounds toward the horizon, and you’ll see hundreds, thousands of fully costumed extras marching in formation, stretching literally as far as the eye can see.  No cardboard cutouts, no matte paintings (as far as I could tell), no masses of CGI soldiers.  I can’t imagine what it must have taken to coordinate that many people for any given single shot, let alone a battle that takes up nearly an entire chapter of the movie.

I realize I haven’t said much about the STORY of the film.  (What can I say, the technical achievement really floored me.)  I have never read Tolstoy’s novel, but it’s been said that this is the most faithful adaptation likely to ever be made.  I believe it.  Including the three principals, there are over three hundred speaking roles in the film.  There were times during the first film, and maybe half of the second, when names were being mentioned, and I couldn’t for the life of me remember who they were.  “Wait, who’s Maria again?  Or Ilya?  Or Kuragin?  Is that Pierre or Nikolai?”  But, around the halfway mark of the second film, I got my footing and was able to keep track of all the moving pieces.  This movie does not reward passive viewing, just as the novel is not something you would pick up for some light reading.  But these characters are compelling.

To try to summarize the plot is a fool’s errand.  Love is found, lost, found again; soldiers go off to fight, some return, some don’t; and the aristocratic class of Tsarist Russia gets some jabs for supporting the war effort with “thoughts and prayers” rather than actions.  Lyudmila Saveleva, who plays Natasha Rostova, looks like she was cast after winning an Audrey Hepburn look-alike contest.  Her huge eyes and expressive face get us on her side, even when she makes a truly boneheaded decision in the middle of her chapter.  True, she was misled and emotionally manipulated, but I said I wouldn’t summarize the story, so…

Am I glad I watched War and Peace?  Absolutely.  Will I watch it again?  I think so, yes, although I couldn’t tell you when that will be.  Not next week, not next year, but yes.  I want to admire Bondarchuk’s bold cinematic choices again.  It’s beautiful to look at.  Some of it resembles the old Technicolor films, giving the whole enterprise an air of nostalgia, which is appropriate.  And it’s worth watching again for those epic battle scenes which have to be seen to be believed.  War and Peace lives up to the sobering title of its source material, and then some.

WOMAN IN THE DUNES (Japan, 1964)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Hiroshi Teshigahara
CAST: Eiji Okada, Kyôko Kishida
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100% Fresh

PLOT: An entomologist on vacation is trapped by local villagers into living with a woman at the bottom of a sand pit that threatens to engulf them unless they shovel sand every night without fail.


Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes, which plays like a modern-day existential horror film from A24, is laden with as much symbolism and metaphor as Pilgrim’s Progress or Animal Farm.  It’s remarkable how contemporary it feels, from the editing style to the storytelling to the boldly provocative plot twists involving sensuality and a potential rape-on-demand.  This is a movie designed to be argued about, in all the best ways.

After an unsettling credits sequence featuring music that would be right at home in The Shining or Shutter Island, we meet Niki Jumpei (whose name we don’t discover until the closing minutes of the film), an entomologist who has taken a 3-day leave to search the sand dunes of a local beach for a new variation of beetle in hopes of getting his name in the encyclopedia.  As evening starts to fall, a local man informs Niki he’s missed the last bus home and offers the hospitality of his village for the night.  Niki accepts, but the creepy, discordant music on the soundtrack tips us off that not all is as it seems.  It’s this juxtaposition of normalcy with weirdness that creates such a modern atmosphere of dread.  I was reminded of the great sci-fi puzzler Under the Skin, which features similar “normal” scenes underscored with nerve-jangling music.

The villager leads Niki to the edge of a vast pit dug into the sand.  A ramshackle house sits at the bottom.  The rear of the house is engulfed with sand that is seen in many cutaway shots as it shifts, crumbles, collapses, and threatens to swallow the whole house at any minute.  This is where Niki will spend the night along with the house’s single inhabitant, an unnamed Woman who goes out of her way to be as courteous as possible to her overnight guest, fixing dinner, making tea, but politely telling him it’s impossible to take a shower until the day after tomorrow.

Sand is ever-present in this story.  The Woman has to set up an umbrella over Niki’s head as he dines because sand leaks through the roof.  The teapot has a separate protective lid that goes over the spout.  Parts of the floor of the house are covered with rugs that are clearly covering bare patches of sand rather than any kind of wooden floor.  And that creepy score continues in the background…

It should be mentioned that the only way to GET to the house at the bottom of the pit is via a long rope ladder.  This is important, because the next morning Niki discovers the ladder is gone, and no one at the top of the pit will answer his calls to send it back down.  Then the Woman tells him the truth: he has been “drafted” to assist her with shoveling sand every single night to prevent it from consuming the entire house, because otherwise the sand will advance to the next house in the village, and the next, and the next.  But he can never leave.  This is his new home.

What follows is an expertly told story of a man whose entire self, not just the house, is in danger of being subsumed by the sand and by the Woman who has accepted her fate.  (There’s more to the Woman than that simplistic description, but I don’t want to give away more plot developments.) This is the kind of creepy story that would be right at home in Black Mirror.  It also offers the kind of symbology that lends itself to more interpretations than the Bible.

The one that occurred to me as I watched it was fatalistic, and perhaps the simplest.  The sand is death.  The man and woman toil endlessly to keep the sand at bay, to keep it from ending their lives, while those outside of the pit might be a representation of God or whatever name you want to give to the engine of the universe that brought us into existence.  We are thrown into the pit and condemned to shovel uselessly against the marching sands of time; we can either rage against our lot, as Niki does, or accept it, as the Woman does.

Or, perhaps it’s a screed against religious indoctrination altogether.  The house and the pit might represent religion, and the villagers are the religious leaders who throw us into the pit and encourage us to dig and dig for the rest of our lives, so we always try and try to meet impossible standards while never questioning why we’re doing this in the first place.  Niki asks the Woman a crucial question at one point: “Are you shoveling sand to live?  Or are you living to shovel sand?”  The Woman, who has accepted her role in this folly, smiles, doesn’t answer, and keeps shoveling.

OR…if you really want to go out in left field…the pit is the entertainment industry.  The man and Woman are creators, toiling incessantly at the Sisyphean task of keeping the villagers (the public/audience) satisfied, and they can never stop because the villagers won’t let them.  There is a moment when Niki desperately asks the villagers if they’ll let him out for an hour a day just so he can see the ocean.  They confer and say they’ll grant him his wish…if he and the Woman copulate in front of them.  Is this the audience asking for more and more explicitness and freedom in their movies and TV shows and music, etc.?  Like I said, that interpretation is kind of out there, but I offer it as an example of how many different interpretations are possible in this story.

The ending is another head-scratcher, itself offering as many different interpretations as the rest of the story.  Is it a positive message about people finding happiness by accepting their fate?  Or a negative message about people who only BELIEVE they’ve found happiness when in fact the stress of their lives has driven them slightly around the bend?  I’m inclined towards the latter interpretation, but either variation works.

There’s a lot more to talk about in this film – the black-and-white cinematography, the dreamlike imagery of sand, sand on sand, sand on skin, sand in close-up, etc.  The two main actors whose individual performances are sensational.  I had read about Woman in the Dunes for years and was consumed with curiosity how such a simple plot could support a 2+ hour movie.  Now I know.  I encourage you to find out how they did it for yourself.

[Now available on home video or streaming for free on YouTube TV, the Criterion Channel, or TCM.  You can rent or buy it on Prime Video or Apple TV.]

THE BIG CITY (India, 1963)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Satyajit Ray
CAST: Anil Chatterjee, Madhavi Mukherjee, Jaya Bachchan, Haren Chatterjee
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 93% Fresh

PLOT: The housewife of a lower-middle-class home in Kolkata decides to find a job to supplement her family with much-needed income, battling age-old customs and her own anxieties the whole way.


Stop me if you’ve seen this movie before: a housewife battles deeply held beliefs and outright chauvinism and gets a job to help her family financially, despite resentment from in-laws and her out-of-work husband.  Frankly, if I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were loosely describing the plot of Mr. Mom (1983) or parts of Nine to Five (1980).  But The Big City, directed by the legendary Satyajit Ray (The Apu Trilogy), transcends the sit-com tendencies of the story and presents us with real characters and circumstances that feel as relevant today as they did over sixty years ago.  This is a miracle of a movie.

Meet the Mazumder family: husband Subrata, wife Arati, and young son Pintu.  They live in three or four small rooms in what is described as the lower-middle-class, but to me it looks pretty close to the poverty line.  Living with them are Subrata’s father and mother, Priyogopal and Sarojini, and his younger sister, Bani.  Kinda crowded.  Priyogopal used to be a well-respected professor at a local school, but he was aged out and now must rely on Subrata’s single salary as a banker.

When it becomes clear that Subrata’s salary is no longer enough to support six people by himself, Arati suggests that she look for work herself.  Subrata is by no means a cruel or mean man, but it’s 1953, and his first instinct is to gently remind his wife of the natural order of things: the husband goes to work, and the wife takes care of the family.  “Remember what the English say: a woman’s place is in the home.”  It’s interesting how gentle and straightforward Subrata is.  He doesn’t browbeat his wife, but because this is how things have always been done, he believes they should just accept it.

But when Subrata’s father, the former professor, finds himself begging his former pupils for things like free eyeglasses or some spare cash – “You’re successful because of me, so you owe me,” he essentially says to them – Subrata changes his tune.  So, Arati finds a job as a door-to-door salesgirl for a local company selling household gadgets like the “Autonit”, a device to help with knitting.  (It’s never explained how this machine works, for the record.)  But when she develops an aptitude for it, and she starts bringing home the bacon…what will her husband think?  What about her father-in-law, who is so entrenched in his conservative values that he finds it impossible to speak with Arati directly when she comes home late from work?

We have all the makings of a been-there, done-that domestic melodrama, but The Big City lured me in somehow and made me really care about how these problems would resolve themselves.  There is a moment when Subrata convinces Arati to quit her job because he has a line on a second part-time job himself.  She is all ready to give her boss the letter, but the movie starts cross-cutting to Subrata discovering there has been a run on his bank and he’s suddenly out of a job.  As the movie cut between Subrata desperately trying to reach Arati, and Arati just on the verge of submitting her resignation, I found myself SUPER-involved in the story, muttering to myself and clutching the armrest of my sofa.  Very few movies work on me like that anymore.

How did this movie from India get under my skin so well?  For one thing, the movie never rushes.  Even in the sequence described above, the cutting is moderately paced, not like an action sequence at all.  We get a good long look at the family’s dynamics before Arati finds a job so we have an excellent idea of how everyone will react, and why.  The pacing allowed me fall into the story without boring me in any way.  This surprised me.  I did not expect this foreign film to be as engrossing as anything by Villeneuve or Hitchcock.

For another, even though I disagreed fundamentally with the chauvinistic attitudes from Subrata and his father (and even his mother, too set in her ways to congratulate her daughter-in-law), I didn’t dislike them the same way I disliked the villains in other similar films, because they’re not exactly villains.  They’re not evil, they’re just misguided and, to be honest, a little brainwashed by years of being told the wife stays home and that’s that.  Because there was no one for me to dislike (except maybe Arati’s boss, but that’s another story), I was rooting for the entire family as a whole.

But especially for Arati.  In her society, for a woman of her class to even wear lipstick was considered a disgrace…but it helps with her sales numbers, so she wears it.  On her first payday, she retreats to the ladies’ room with her cash and just holds it in her hands while looking in the mirror.  You can see the pride of accomplishment in her face without a word spoken.  This is mine…I did this.  That’s something everyone can identify with, no matter your race, color, creed, or gender.  During the course of the movie, Arati experiences some ups and downs, as well as telling a crucial lie for the sake of a sale, and I was rooting for her every step of the way.

A quick internet search tells me The Big City is streaming on the Criterion Channel and on HBO Max.  If you’re feeling a little adventurous, give this movie a look.  It’s a wonderful movie…not just a “film.”

AN ACTOR’S REVENGE (Japan, 1963)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Kon Ichikawa
CAST: Kazuo Hasegawa, Fujiko Yamamoto, Ayako Wakao
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 95% Fresh

PLOT: A kabuki actor exacts a bloody revenge after he encounters the wealthy businessman who destroyed his family.


In terms of good old-fashioned melodrama, Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge pulls no punches, utilizing a highly stylized, kabuki-esque visual language to tell a story that was old when it was first made into a movie in 1935, starring the same actor in the same lead/dual roles.  But I am obliged to report that I never quite got a thrill of excitement when it came to the story.  (…well, that’s not exactly true, there was ONE moment that genuinely thrilled me when it occurred.)  I found that mildly disappointing because, as an amateur actor myself, finding a movie that combines two of my favorite plot devices – revenge and theatre – gave me high hopes.  Perhaps I was expecting too much?  But I thoroughly enjoyed the film’s style, celebrating artifice as much as any live stage production.

Kazuo Hasegawa plays two roles that he originated nearly 30 years earlier: a female-impersonating kabuki actor named Yukinojo, and a Robin-Hood-like bandit named Yamitaro.  Director Ichikawa sets the visual tone immediately as we open on a kabuki performance with Yukinojo as the lead.  While in character onstage, he spies three people in the audience, and we not only get his internal monologue about who they are and how urgently he seeks revenge on them, but we also get some cool visual tricks to reinforce his POV.  First, the stagey set – fake snow falling, painted backdrops – is unexpectedly replaced with a “real” set.  That is, it’s still obviously fake (the entire film was shot on studio sets), but it’s more realistic than before.  Then, as Yukinojo looks out to where the audience used to be, we see what he sees with a kind of variation of the iris shot that opens up, almost as if he were looking through a solid wall with X-Ray vision.

For me, this had the effect of creating an almost Shakespearian vibe.  It’s like Ichikawa said, “Okay, you want melodrama?  Let’s go all the way with it.”  This kind of stylistic flair pops up through the entire film; there are too many examples to mention, but you’ll just have to trust me.  It’s really cool to look at.

(Scorsese utilized similar throwback visual devices in films like Hugo and even The Departed.)

Story-wise, after that striking opening sequence, we get some filler about various audience members, some of whom we’ll see again later, before settling into your standard revenge story a la The Count of Monte Cristo or even Ben-Hur, where the wronged party bides their time until the moment is right.  But it’s not enough for Yukinojo to just kill his targets in cold blood.  First, he has to make them suffer.

I should note that this movie’s visual style repeatedly reminded me of another Japanese film, Onibaba, released a year later in 1964.  Also shot in widescreen, Onibaba’s story is even older than An Actor’s Revenge, but it uses arresting widescreen compositions that evoke, not kabuki theatre, but comic books.  I wonder if An Actor’s Revenge influenced that later film to any degree.  Visually, it feels like it, but I’m not a Japanese film scholar, so…there you have it.

There is an interesting gender-bending aspect to the story throughout the film, as well.  The character of Yukinojo is, of course, a man, but he never once breaks character as a woman.  He speaks in a high, falsetto voice and keeps his movements soft and feminine at all times.  There are odd moments when two different women confess their love to him, always referring to him as a man or a husband, while he is in drag the whole time.  There’s a message there somewhere about pronouns and gender fluidity, but I’m not the one to explicate it.

This movie is on the list of 1,001 Movies to See Before You Die, but not for the reasons I was expecting.  I will concede that my expectations were raised due to the subject matter, but while I can’t say my socks were blown off from a story perspective, I did love the visual approach to the storytelling, especially considering the year it was made.

LA DOLCE VITA (Italy, 1960)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Federico Fellini
CAST: Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimée, Yvonne Furneaux
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 95% Certified Fresh

PLOT: In episodic fashion, we follow the life of a philandering tabloid journalist in Rome as he chases stories and skirts with equal enthusiasm.


Fellini’s La dolce vita is easily one of the most critically acclaimed movies ever made.  Roger Ebert counted it as one of his favorite movies of all time, second only to Citizen Kane, perhaps.  In a video introduction to the Blu-ray disc, Martin Scorsese calls it “the movie that changed the world.”  It won the coveted Palme d’Or at Cannes and an Oscar for its costume design.

But I gotta be honest: for most of its nearly 3-hour running time, I found myself wondering what the fuss is all about.  It’s only when a pivotal event occurs around the 2.5-hour mark that I was shocked out of my stupor and began to reflect on everything I had seen before and what came after.  This is a movie that lulls you along and doesn’t reveal what it’s REALLY about until it’s ready to.

In episodic fashion, La dolce vita [rough translation: “The sweet life”] follows the life of Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni), a philandering tabloid journalist who lives in Rome and chases stories and skirts with equal enthusiasm.  He has a fiancé, Emma (Yvonne Furneaux), but that might be too strong a word for it.  She tells everyone they meet that Marcello is her fiancé, and he seems to care for her occasionally, but he seems to fall instantly in love with every beautiful woman who crosses his path.  In the movie’s famous opening, with a statue of Jesus suspended underneath a helicopter flying over the city, Marcello even tries to get the numbers of several bikini-clad rooftop sunbathers, but they can’t hear him over the noisy helicopter.

As a tabloid journalist, Marcello has made friends with some of the city’s famous, or infamous, higher-ups.  Along with his photographer friend, Paparazzo, he contrives situations where a candid photo or two can be snapped of, say, a prince dining with someone he really shouldn’t be dining with.  (Indeed, this movie provides the origin of the word “paparazzi”, so named after the group of rude, pesky, pushy photographers jostling each other for a good celebrity photo, the tawdrier the better.)

In no particular order, Marcello interacts with an old flame, an old madame, a stunning but airheaded Swedish movie star and her jealous actor boyfriend, a mob chasing two children who claim to have seen the Madonna, another old flame, a teenaged waitress, his own father, a rowdy group of actors and dancers, and a group of intellectuals who fill about 20 minutes of screen time with endless philosophizing.  (I’m sure I left something out.)  The only person in that last group with anything interesting to say is a man named Steiner, who worries about his two children growing up in a world that can be obliterated with a phone call.

I’m sure there is a LOT of subtext going on in this first long section, but God forgive me, I was waiting for a story.  There is, of course, the famous sequence where Marcello follows Sylvia, the Swedish actress played by the zaftig Anita Ekberg, into the Trevi Fountain in the middle of the night.  He is bewitched by her, indeed by all women, even by his so-called fiancé, Emma, whom he berates mercilessly one night and throws out of his car…but the next morning he dutifully drives back to the same spot where he left her, where she apparently spent the night, and takes her back home.

I guess the idea we’re supposed to get is that Marcello is the living embodiment of the male gaze.  It doesn’t seem as if he will ever be happy with any woman he meets because there is always another one waiting around the next corner, or in the next bar, or at the scene of the next tabloid story.  I’ve read that the film can be interpreted as an excoriating satire of Rome’s upper class, whom we mostly see as vapid, self-absorbed free spirits with lots of money and nothing of real value to contribute to the human condition.  That’s a good interpretation, but that kind of leaves Marcello out of the equation, unless we’re supposed to believe that he’s also part of the upper class?  I never got that impression.  If he were, what’s he doing chasing rumors and gossip for a living?

This is all well and good, but to beat that dead horse a little more, I was waiting for a story.  We’re getting a fully drawn character in Marcello, but he wasn’t doing much of anything, except watching him listen to the people either clamoring for his attention or warning him to beat it.

But THEN…something utterly unexpected occurs, an event that I can’t even really hint at because it works so well.  When it does, Marcello goes into an existential tailspin, questioning his values, his morals, and his profession.  It’s this event, and Marcello’s reaction to it, that finally gave me some clarity of what this movie was really about.

There’s a sensational closing sequence that takes place an indeterminate amount of time after this unexpected incident.  Marcello leads a rowdy group of actors and dancers to a friend’s empty house.  Nobody home?  No problem – he just shatters a sliding glass door and lets everybody in.  This kind of behavior is interesting because, before “the incident”, you might have noticed Marcello trying to exit a party gracefully, or gracefully decline an invitation to somewhere or other, or politely keeping quiet in his chair or in a corner.  That Marcello is gone.  This NEW Marcello wants to party like there’s no tomorrow.  (This leads to a genuinely ugly moment when he bullies a drunk actress into getting on all fours as he rides her back like a pony and slaps her bottom, then later covers her in feathers ripped out of a sofa pillow…that moment felt to me as raw as watching Nicolas Cage self-destruct in Leaving Las Vegas.)

The film’s coda may also provide a clue to what the movie’s about, or at least partially about.  We opened with Marcello unable to talk to the sunbathers over the noise of the helicopter.  In the final scene, on a beach after the drunken party, Marcello is hailed from afar by this teenaged waitress he encountered earlier in the film.  She motions to him and tries to yell to him, but the crashing surf is too loud for either of them to understand the other.  Rather than walk closer to each other and try to reach some mutual understanding, he ruefully smiles and waves goodbye.  Marcello was never able to truly connect with anyone for the entire film, not even his own father, and despite the changes brought about by external circumstances, he finds himself even more unable to do so than before.

I guess, if there’s a message here somewhere, it’s that we should try to connect, find some kind of common ground with those around us as much as we can.  Life has much to offer, but how sweet can it be when we shut ourselves off from those who just want to love us for who we are?

REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Nicholas Ray
CAST: James Dean, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo, Jim Backus
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 91% Certified Fresh

PLOT: After moving to a new town, a troublemaking teen forms a bond with a troubled classmate and falls for a local girl who is the girlfriend of a neighborhood tough. When the new kid is challenged to a dangerous game of “chicken,” his real troubles begin.


To begin with, yes, Rebel Without a Cause is dated.  It is lurid, obvious, and heavy-handed, leaving very little to the audience’s imagination when it comes to the film’s message.  On the other hand, there are some not-so-subtle references to even deeper issues at play that make this dated, hammy film still relevant today.  I had always thought Rebel was simply about a troubled teenager pleading for compassion from an uncaring society.  Who knew it also dealt with a forbidden homosexual attraction and implied incest?  For a movie made when the Production Code was still being enforced, that is a LOT of subtext to unpack.

Jim Stark (James Dean) opens the film being hustled into a police station for public drunkenness in the wee hours of the morning.  Here, he will cross paths with two other teenagers: Judy (Natalie Wood) and Plato (Sal Mineo).  Over the next 24 hours, Jim will change their lives irrevocably just by trying to stay out of trouble, which has no problem finding him.

It’s here, when Jim’s parents arrive to bail him out, that Dean delivers his immortal line, “You’re tearing me APAAART!!!”  I’m kinda glad we got that out of the way so early so I didn’t have to anticipate it for the rest of the movie.  We also get the first of the film’s heavy-handedness, as Jim converses with a sympathetic cop, Ray (Edward Platt), who asks him the kinds of probing questions that only a psychiatrist would ask.  They become unlikely friends as they bond over the foolishness of Jim’s parents, who are so clearly out of touch with his inner turmoil.

During a field trip to the Griffith Observatory (the movie takes place in Los Angeles), Jim winds up in a knife fight with a local tough guy, Buzz, whom he eventually overpowers.  (The reason: Buzz called him “chicken,” just like Marty McFly…just throwing that in there.)  Buzz wants another chance, so he challenges Jim to a “chickie-run.”  That night, the two of them will drive a couple of stolen cars at high speed towards a high cliff drop; first one to bail out of their car is a chicken.

Before that can happen, we get the first of two surprising plot devices.  Jim runs into Plato at school, and it becomes instantly clear that Plato is attracted to him.  I promise I’m not reading too much into it.  The fact this wasn’t toned down even more in a movie from the mid-‘50s is a little shocking to me.  Plato looks at and hangs around Jim the way a girl with a crush latches on to the object of her desire.  Plato even has a fan-photo of Alan Ladd in Shane hanging in his locker.  It’s so obvious that I found myself wondering whether the movie would go so far as to let Plato try to kiss Jim.  Later, the screenplay makes it clear that Plato was just looking for a father figure, but dude.

Later that night, after the fateful “chickie-run”, Jim tries to explain to his parents what happened, but they’re unable to respond with anything but disbelief, and his mother even threaten to move again.  It’s abundantly clear that Jim’s parents are out of touch, a point that his hammered home again and again.  This approach at first seems overpowering, but director Nicholas Ray apparently was trying to lend the film an emotional, operatic sensibility to give the lead characters more of a mythic stature.

This is also conveyed through the film’s use of color Cinemascope, creating a frame that is just begging to be seen on the big screen where the colors and figures wouldn’t just pop, they’d EXPLODE.  If this was not a popular drive-in movie, it should have been.  That might actually be the best way to watch this movie, if at all possible.

There’s also a curious scene involving Judy’s home life that implies something unsavory is going on.  Judy approaches her father at the dinner table and tries to give him a kiss hello, but he rebuffs her: “Aren’t you getting a little old for that kind of thing?”  She feels hurt and tries again and gets a slap on the face for her trouble.  She runs out of the house and the father says something like, “She used to be so nice, now she’s nothing but trouble!”  A father who can’t accept an innocent kiss from his daughter has more going on underneath than the daughter, I can tell you that.  It’s an eyebrow-raising moment that does more to shed light on Judy’s behavior than anything else in the film.

The message of the film is simple, and it’s directed squarely at the parents: listen to your kids.  The parents in this movie do nothing but express sadness and dismay at their kids’ behavior, and never once do we see any real compassion, except when Jim’s dad (wearing his wife’s apron – more subtle coding?) tries to comfort him before the “chickie-run.”  But his words are hollow and meaningless, because he doesn’t take the time to ask the real questions that need to be asked.  Rebel Without a Cause was released at a time when popular opinion said that juvenile delinquency was largely a product of kids raised in slums or ghettos.  Rebel demonstrated that it didn’t matter where the kids were raised, it’s HOW they were raised that caused their problems.

I give the movie a 7 out of 10 because, while I acknowledge its place in film history, especially with regard to its star, I do feel the dated qualities hard.  But I give it props for delivering an important message, in a film that was powerful enough to lead some communities to ban screenings at local theaters for fear it would give the youth community bad ideas.  Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees…

GILDA (1946)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Charles Vidor
CAST: Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford, George Macready, Joseph Calleia
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 90% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A small-time gambler hired to work in a Buenos Aires casino discovers his employer’s new wife is his former lover.


Admit it: we’ve all known a couple like these two: Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford) and Gilda (Rita Hayworth).  They’re the kind of couple that inspire lifelong celibacy.  You see them together, and you think one of two things: “Why is SHE/HE with HIM/HER?”  Or, “Well, at least they’re saving two other people.”

The irony of Gilda is that they’re not even a legitimate couple, at least not for very long.  The fact that the movie sees fit to give them a semi-happy ending fits more with the period when it was made than with the characters themselves.  Watching them go off together at the end feels…off.  I know there are exceptions to this rule (see Bound [1996], spoiler alert), but this film noir fairly screams for a tragic ending of some kind, appropriate to the genre.  Instead, the two leads get off the hook just a little too easily, for my money.

But I’m jumping ahead.  In case you didn’t know, Gilda is the 1946 seamy/steamy film noir that forever turned Rita Hayworth into a Hollywood sex symbol.  Humphrey Bogart turned down the lead role (that went to Glenn Ford instead) because he figured, with Hayworth on the screen, no one would be looking at anyone or anything else.  He wasn’t kidding.  From the moment of her iconic entrance to the film (hair flip…“Me?”), Hayworth dominates every moment she’s onscreen, as effortlessly as Monroe, Dandridge, or Loren, assisted by those legendary Jean Louis gowns and costumes.  Especially the famous “Put the Blame on Mame” number, with the slinky black strapless “sleeve” dress, and those long black elbow-length gloves that she peels off ever so slowly…

The story!  Right, the story…

Johnny Farrell is a low-rent gambler in Buenos Aires who is hired by casino owner Ballin Mundson – one of the weirdest character names ever – to watch over his operations while he tends to other business in and around post-war Argentina.  One day Mundson returns from a business trip with a new wife: Gilda, whom he married after a whirlwind one-day romance.  Gilda is as tempestuous as they come, brazenly flirting with Johnny in front of her new husband, who can’t help but wonder why Johnny seems so icy towards her…

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out Johnny and Gilda knew each other a lifetime ago.  Their chance meeting in a foreign country ranks right up there with Ilsa wandering into Rick’s Café Américain in North Africa: unlikely, but it makes for a helluva story.

Glenn Ford holds his own in the film as the scruffy, no-nonsense enforcer who can more than hold his own in a fistfight, but whose physical prowess can’t compete with the psychic hold Gilda still has on him.  Of course, the fact that Gilda mercilessly pokes and teases Johnny indicates she’s just as fixated on him.  It’s easy to see how this material could almost become a standard-issue rom-com, but Gilda is made of darker stuff.  Look at it from a certain angle, and there are hints that Johnny and his boss, Mundson, might share a relationship that goes beyond employer/employee, that Gilda knows this, and is using that knowledge to stick the knife even deeper into Johnny’s stomach, just to watch him squirm.

So, Gilda becomes a psychological battle of the sexes, evoking The War of the Roses at times.  Gilda tosses off some zingers that would have made Mae West blush.  (“If I’d been a ranch, they would’ve named me the Bar Nothing.”)  Johnny gets off a couple of his own.  (“Pardon me, but your husband is showing.”  …and, “Statistics show that there are more women in the world than anything else.  Except insects.”)  In between zingers, the plot moves on in the background, but it’s only a clothesline on which to hang the arguments between Gilda and Johnny.  In that respect, it’s like a John Wick film: you’re not there for the plot, you’re there for the action.  It’s entertaining as hell, don’t get me wrong, but they are so good at being despicable to each other that I found myself hoping they DIDN’T wind up together.  Talk about a match made in hell.  Do they deserve each other?  Discuss.

Gilda robustly lives up to the film noir tradition, in style, substance, and story, RIGHT up until the last two or three minutes, when the darkness gives way to the major-chord strings of “happily ever after.”  For that, I personally can’t call it perfect.  But holy black strapless gown, Batman…as they say at Passover, for that alone we should be grateful.

THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL (Mexico, 1962)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Luis Buñuel
CAST: Silvia Pinal, Jacqueline Andere, José Baviera
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 94% Fresh

PLOT: The guests at an upper-class dinner party find themselves unable to leave the drawing room in Buñuel’s famous, none-too-subtle satire.


Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel has many moods.  On the one hand, it’s a dark comedy of manners railing against the entitlements of the upper classes, much like the more recent Triangle of Sadness (2022), which owes much to this film.  On the other, it’s a Serling-esque horror story mining a common occasion for unexpected suspense, like The Ruins (2008) or Open Water (2003).  On a deeper level, perhaps it’s a Lynchian exploration of the human psyche, regardless of class, like Mulholland Drive (2001) or…well, with Lynch, you can probably just take your pick.

I experienced all of those moods while watching The Exterminating Angel.  I haven’t seen such an effective juxtaposition of tone since Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022).

The weirdness starts right away, in scenes that seem to be setting the stage for a Marx Brothers comedy.  Edmundo Nobile (“Nobile”, “noble”, get it, wink, wink?) has invited a large number of his posh friends to his mansion for dinner following an opera.  The moment they arrive, Nobile notes that his servants are not stationed at the door to take the visitors’ coats.  This is because most of the servants felt the sudden need to take the night off and left, being careful to avoid their employer.  He makes a statement about his servants, then everyone troops up the grand staircase to the dining room.

Moments later, this scene literally repeats itself, not by re-using the same footage, but in a separate take.  This kind of repetition occurs multiple times during the actual dinner scene, as well.  If there’s a deeper meaning to this device, I’ll have to leave it to film scholars to analyze.  For myself, it simply added a layer of oddness to the proceedings, but not in a bad way.

The dinner scene contains pratfalls, repeated conversations, and a visit to a side room containing three or four lambs and a bear on a leash.  What the WHAT…?  I remember thinking, okay, so this is going to a broad comedy turning upper-class manners into slapstick.  Seen it before, so I hope this movie executes it well.

The weirdness escalates when everyone retreats to a drawing room just off the dining room, where one of Nobile’s guests entertains everyone with a piano solo.  But when one of them tries to leave, he finds he can’t.  Not physically, like there’s suddenly an invisible wall, but one by one the guests discover they’re simply unable to leave the room.

They slowly realize the logistics of this bizarre situation.  The drawing room has no food.  Water runs low.  The one servant who remained outside manages to bring in a tray of water and coffee, but when he tries to leave to bring food…he can’t.  There’s no phone for them to call anyone about their predicament.

Outside the house, people find themselves unable to enter the grounds, so no one can tell what has happened to the people inside.  Curious crowds gather.  Inside, social structure starts to degenerate.  There are no restrooms, but one quick shot reveals a closet full of nothing but vases, and we see people entering and exiting these rooms repeatedly.  Ick.  Arguments are started with the drop of a hat.  One couple finds a unique, but undesirable, method of escaping their prison.

I responded to this material very unexpectedly, due mostly to its unpredictability.  I wasn’t cheering at the sight of upper-class twits being brought low when faced with bizarre circumstances, but I was more in tune with the horrific aspects of this story.  Buñuel has stated in interviews that he regretted not being able to take the story even further by including cannibalism, which is honestly where I thought things were headed.  It would have made a marvelous satirical statement, hearkening all the way back to Jonathan Swift.

(So, what DO they eat, you may be asking yourself?  Wouldn’t EWE like to know?)

I realize this review of the film hasn’t been much more than just a summary of its events, minus the surprising, “circular” ending.  A more detailed analysis might require listening to the commentary or reading Roger Ebert’s review or something.  But I hope I’ve conveyed how much I enjoyed The Exterminating Angel.  It was weird and surreal and absurd, and comic and horrific, and slapstick and satiric, and totally unpredictable all the way to the final frame.

P.S.  Now that I’ve seen this movie, the Woody Allen film Midnight in Paris (2011) has even deeper resonance when Gil meets Buñuel at a party and gives him the idea for The Exterminating Angel, and even Buñuel can’t understand it: “But I don’t get it. Why don’t they just walk out of the room?”  Funny stuff.

ASHES AND DIAMONDS (Poland, 1958)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Andrzej Wajda
CAST: Zbigniew Cybulski, Ewa Krzyzewska, Waclaw Zastrzezynski
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 96% Fresh

PLOT: Against a backdrop of internal political turmoil at the end of World War II, a Polish resistance fighter faces a crisis of conscience when ordered to assassinate a Soviet official.


The Polish film Ashes and Diamonds is reportedly Francis Ford Coppola’s favorite movie, and Martin Scorsese has stated in interviews that he used it as an answer for one of his finals at film school.  From a technical standpoint, I can see why.  Echoes of this film (and perhaps others from director Andrzej Wajda’s filmography) are overwhelmingly evident in the bodies of work of both directors, from the mobile camera to the shocking moments of violence to the psychological makeup of the characters themselves.  As an emotional experience, I confess I didn’t get “worked up” over it, but it was interesting to see where two of the greatest American film directors got a healthy dose of inspiration.

Ashes and Diamonds opens on May 8, 1945, with an idyllic scene outside a country church that quickly degenerates into a brutal double murder.  The killers are the calm, detached Andrzej and the flighty, charismatic Maciek, who spends most of the movie behind dark sunglasses.  We quickly learn their victims are not who they thought they would be.  Instead of killing two Soviet/Communist officials, they have killed two innocent factory workers.  War is hell.

Later, through circumstances that feel very Hitchcockian, Andrzej and Maciek hole up in a hotel bar, only to discover that one of their real targets, Szczuka, has booked a room in the very same hotel.  Maciek books a room directly below Szczuka’s, and the rest of the film plays out with that element of suspense hanging in the background, leaving us to wonder when and how Maciek will complete his assignment.

Complications arise when Maciek becomes infatuated with the hotel bartender, Krystyna, a blond beauty who rebuffs Maciek’s advances at first.  Later, they connect, but she doesn’t want to get involved with someone when it will eventually have to end: “I don’t want bad memories when memories are all I have left.”  Maciek falls for her so hard that he starts to doubt his resolve to kill his target.  “Will he or won’t he?” becomes the movie’s prime conflict.

Where to begin with the comparisons to Coppola and Scorsese?  The most obvious one is the unblinking attitude towards violence.  The two killings at the beginning of the film are done with very few cutaways as we see the multiple bullet hits on each victim, with one of them getting hit in the eye and another shot in the back at point blank range with such force his shirt catches fire.  (Malfunctioning squib?  Possibly, but it’s still effective.)  It’s interesting that this movie predates Bonnie and Clyde (1967) by almost a decade, but its depiction of onscreen violence feels very modern, even by today’s standards.

Then you’ve got the moral struggle of the main character, a man of action capable of casual murder who is suddenly given a reason to make something different with his life.  This reminded me of Scorsese’s The Departed (2006), with DiCaprio’s character undergoing the same internal conflict.  Maciek has multiple opportunities to kill Szczuka throughout the film, but something always pulls him back from the brink.  His partner, Andrzej, becomes impatient and reminds him what happens when soldiers let personal feelings interfere with their duties.  I had a vivid flashback of Michael Corleone’s credo: “It’s not personal, Sonny.  It’s just business.”

(I also felt that the dynamic between Maciek and his more level-headed partner Andrzej were evoked in Scorsese’s Mean Streets [1973], with De Niro’s Johnny Boy and his more level-headed partner Charlie, played by Harvey Keitel.)

But, cinematic comparisons aside, I didn’t find Ashes and Diamonds to be as gripping as other war or crime dramas of that era, such as Elevator to the Gallows, Touch of Evil (both 1958), or Rififi (1955), to name a few.  It’s a little weird to me, because all the pieces are there for a first-rate thriller.  I’m not asking that every drama pack the exact same kind of emotional gut punch every single time because I know that’s unrealistic.  But the fact remains: Ashes and Diamonds, while clearly very influential on future filmmakers, did not get me as involved as I would like to have been.  I was never bored, but neither was I over the moon.  It was…average.  Perhaps one day I’ll watch it again with a fresh eye to maybe see what I missed the first time around.

FRANKENSTEIN (2025)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Guillermo del Toro
CAST: Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Christoph Waltz, Mia Goth, Charles Dance, David Bradley
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 86% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A brilliant but egotistical scientist brings a creature to life in a monstrous experiment that threatens to undo both the creator and his tragic creation.


Having never read the original novel by Mary Shelley, I have no idea if Guillermo del Toro’s rendition of Frankenstein is any more or less faithful to the source material.  What’s interesting about this version is that it feels like it is.  There are long passages of dialogue and even some monologuing on the nature of life, death, and the creator’s responsibility to their creation.  del Toro is smart enough to balance these cerebral discussions with enough gothic (and gory) horror to satisfy any fan of the genre.  Call it a good example of a thinking man’s horror film.

Oscar Isaac’s performance as Victor Frankenstein puts a new spin on the stereotypical mad scientist.  He’s no less obsessed than previous versions, but del Toro and Isaac went for a slightly different vibe in his personal appearance.  Rather than a cackling lunatic with a god complex, Isaac’s doctor looks and sometimes behaves more like a self-absorbed rock star…with a god complex.  (I learn on IMDb that this was by design; del Toro wanted Victor to evoke David Bowie, Mick Jagger, and Prince…mission accomplished.)

Jacob Elordi as The Creature does an admirable job of generating sympathy and empathy for perhaps the greatest misunderstood monster of all time.  The unique makeup (which took up to 10 hours to apply!) allows Elordi to emote and lend humanity to the Creature in the second half of the film, especially during his encounter with the blind man.  There is a subtle but ingenious effect where one of his eyes will sometimes glow orange with reflected light as a reminder that, when push comes to shove, this Creature is not to be trifled with.

Mia Goth is a welcome presence as Elizabeth, who is not Victor’s love interest this time around, but fiancé to Victor’s younger brother, William.  I supposed I could quibble that the screenplay does not give Elizabeth much to do.  She comes across as the intellectual equal of Victor in a few well-written scenes, but her encounter with the chained Creature felt a little trope-y, and her character’s payoff left me wanting more.

The visual style of the film is crammed with del Toro’s signature fingerprints: huge gothic structures, elaborate costume designs (loved Victor’s mother’s red outfits near the start of the film), startling dream sequences, and lots of practical effects…well, more than there were in Pacific Rim (2013) and Crimson Peak (2015), anyway.  One image that really struck me was the unique design of two coffins seen in the film.  They looked more like futuristic cryogenic chambers than Victorian-era caskets.  Watch the movie and you’ll see what I mean.

Other things I loved:

  1. Victor’s early presentation of his theories to a disciplinary board, in which we get an echo of that creepy dead guy resurrected by Ron Perlman in del Toro’s Hellboy (2004).
  2. The towering set for Frankenstein’s laboratory.  What it lacks in the whirring, crackling machinery we normally associate with his lab, it makes up for in scale, including a yawning pit several feet across that really should have had a guardrail.
  3. Being able to get inside the Creature’s head this time around.  There have no doubt been other variations where the Creature speaks, but I haven’t seen one where he is this eloquent, expressing his pain and anguish over his unwanted existence and apparent immortality (his wounds are self-healing).  This is another factor that makes this movie feel more faithful to Shelley’s novel, even if it isn’t.
  4. The no-holds-barred aspect to the violence and gore, which can be quease-inducing, but which never feels overdone or exploitative.  In fact, the moment that scared me the most in the film had nothing to do with the gore or violence at all, but with one of the doctor’s early experiments that comes to life in a most surprising manner.

Above all, there’s the tragic nature of the poor Creature’s existence, the misunderstood monster that has been so often satirized or spoofed, and the deeper questions the story raises about our own lives.  It might be tempting to listen to the closing passages of the film and dismiss them as trite and sentimental, but Frankenstein earns those moments, in my opinion.  More than any other Frankenstein movie I’ve seen, this one made me think, and jump a little, in equal measures.  Tricky stuff.