Tag: Mig's Reviews

THE BAREFOOT CONTESSA (1954)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
CAST: Humphrey Bogart, Ava Gardner, Edmond O’Brien, Marius Goring, Rossano Brazzi
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100% Fresh

PLOT: The life of a Hollywood star whose candle burned briefly and brightly is told (mostly) by the writer/director who helped discover her.


Towards the beginning of The Barefoot Contessa, I let my expectations get the best of me, as I tend to do.  There were scenes between movie producers and directors and conversations about actors and the movie business and dialogue about bad dialogue at the movies, and I settled myself in for another scorching “behind-the-scenes” movie like Sunset Blvd. or The Bad and the Beautiful.  Heck, it was written and directed by All About Eve’s Joseph L. Mankiewicz, so how could I NOT expect something similar?  But I was wrong.  True, the film takes potshots at the industry, but later on it all feels incidental, a necessary sideshow to lead us to the main attraction.

The Barefoot Contessa is a character study about a woman named Maria Vargas (Ava Gardner), who is discovered dancing in a Madrid café by B-movie writer/director Harry Dawes (Humphrey Bogart) and kajillionaire producer Kirk Edwards…whose resemblance to Howard Hughes had to be toned down under threat of legal action from Mr. Hughes himself.  They are scouting for new talent along with Edwards’s gofer, Oscar Muldoon, played by Edward O’Brien, who won an Oscar himself for the role.

Maria is convinced to do a screen test, not by Oscar or Edwards, whose wealth has turned him into a spoiled child, but by the gentle persuasion of Harry Dawes, who quickly sizes Maria up as someone who is not to be bullied or cajoled.  One thing leads to another, and she makes three films in America, all directed by Dawes, and she becomes an enormously popular star, beloved by millions…and three weeks after her fairy-tale wedding to an Italian count, she’s dead.  (That’s not a spoiler; the film opens at her funeral.)

There are so many stories of Hollywood stars who achieve overnight success only to die young for one reason or another.  The Barefoot Contessa tries to get into the mindset of one such actress, but only from the outside, as the public knew her.  Not her friends, because she really only had one: Harry Dawes, the only person who really knew what made her tick, thanks to a heartfelt conversation outside her impoverished Spain apartment.  How much of this conversation reflects what really goes in any actor’s head?  Probably a lot.  She talks about childhood fears, a desire to be loved, her unhappy home life with her parents, insecurities, superstitions (she refuses to wear shoes whenever possible)…there isn’t an actor walking this earth who couldn’t identify with at least two of those issues.

We follow Maria as she moves to Hollywood, changes her last name to D’Amata because it’s more exotic, and becomes a superstar almost against her will.  Ava Gardner plays Maria as someone for whom acting is not a dream job, it’s just a job.  If the by-product is fame and fortune, well, that’s just a lucky break.  Maria is looking for the fairy tale, but it doesn’t involve limos and red carpets, nor does it involve finding a prince who’ll put the slippers back on Cinderella’s feet.

The Barefoot Contessa shifts narrators a couple of times, but it all leads to her fateful meeting with, and eventual wedding to, the dashing Count Vincenzo Torlato-Favrini, an Italian nobleman who “rescues” her from a verbally abusive paramour.  The Count, though, harbors a secret that Dawes, with his “number six sense”, is bothered by, but can’t quite pin down…and since I knew Maria would be dead soon, I thought I knew what that problem was, but boy, was I wrong…

This film may not spark and crackle like All About Eve, but it’s chock full of ideas.  There were times when it felt like it was trying just a little too hard to be a “great” movie, and I know that’s vague, but it’s the best way I can think of to describe it.  I think I need to watch it again, now that I know more or less what’s going to happen, and appreciate what it’s trying to say in the context of stars like Jean Harlow, or Heath Ledger, or Marilyn Monroe, or James Dean.

This movie isn’t so much a “at-what-price-fame” kind of story, though, like Walk the Line or [insert title of musical biopic here].  It’s more like a portrait of someone who beat the system, who was able to reap the benefits of stardom without being consumed by it, much to the consternation of everyone around her.  (But it’s not what killed her; write that up to her desire for the fairy tale.)

THE BIG PARADE (1925)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: King Vidor
CAST: John Gilbert, Renée Adorée, Tom O’Brien, Karl Dane
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100% Fresh

PLOT: Wealthy James Apperson deploys as a soldier in World War I France and grows from a naive kid into a battle-hardened veteran as he and his two buddies are paraded to the front.


Films that incorporate tonal shift had better know what they’re doing, lest they become a thematic mess.  King Vidor’s The Big Parade toes that line by shifting from a nearly Keaton-esque “you’re-in-the-Army-now” military comedy to a terrifying war thriller almost on a dime, anticipating and surely influencing future war films like M*A*S*H, The Boys of Company C, and Three Kings.  I’m compelled to forgive the Hallmark Channel ending because, doggone it, I found myself rooting for it like a 1970’s housewife watching her soaps.

It’s 1917, and James Apperson (John Gilbert) is the layabout son of a wealthy family.  He’s engaged to a lovely girl, Justyn, but we don’t see too much of their relationship before the news breaks: America has officially entered World War I.  Justyn has a revealing line when she tells James how much more she’ll love him when he’s in uniform.

An effective scene shows an impromptu parade going down a city street, with flags flying, bands playing, and people holding banners and signs with things like, “GIVE ‘EM ‘L’ IN BERLIN”.  James starts to get carried away with the patriotic fervor on display and joins a carload of his buddies on their way to enlist.  James’s stern father is delighted that his laid-back son is doing something important, but his mother is naturally dismayed, Jim’s fiancé swears she’ll wait for him, and so on.

In Army basic training, Jim connects with two men whom we saw in an earlier prologue: Bull, a no-nonsense bartender, and Slim, a country-boy construction worker with a long, expressive face and a fondness for chewin’ tobacky.  This trio forms the framework for most of the rest of the film.  In fact, for about the first 90 minutes, even after they get shipped to France, the movie is more or less a military-themed comedy.  Jim’s squad is forced to de-manure a farmhouse before they can sack out, and they do so while singing “You’re in the Army Now.”  Bull, with his two stripes, bosses everyone around and cheerfully leads the singing without doing any of the work himself.  And so on.

There’s even the obligatory encounter with the local women, including a farmgirl named Melisande, with whom James is instantly smitten.  His first clumsy overtures are rebuffed, but she takes a shine to him when he somehow finds himself walking through her farmyard with a barrel over his head and body, looking for all the world like an ultra-primitive droid from Star Wars.  A charming scene where Jim teaches her the fine art of chewing gum was supposedly improvised on the spot by the two actors, and has an incredibly effective payoff much later in the film.

This is all handled nicely and even gently at times.  I could have done with a LITTLE less of the scenes involving Bull and Slim also trying to put the moves on Melisande.  The comic point is made early and then beaten into us a couple of times later, and I just wanted the movie to get on with the rest of the story.

Where The Big Parade really shines is in the next half/phase of the film, when the doughboys finally get their orders to the front.  They’re driven out to a forest somewhere as part of a massive truck convoy…another parade with a vastly different connotation.  The battle scenes that follow are as horrifying as anything from Platoon.  Jim’s squad is ordered into a forest reported to be full of snipers and machine gun nests.  The brilliant tactical strategy is for the men to simply walk slowly into the forest and let the German snipers pick them off until they give their positions away, at which point they can be killed by the Americans.

These scenes had me leaning forward in my seat.  The Americans are marching forward, and every so often one of them simply drops to the ground.  Then another, and another.  And still they march.  The soldiers in front don’t look behind them, and if anyone drops in front of them, they simply step over or around the bodies.

(Wasn’t this the kind of thing the British redcoats did in the Revolutionary War, marching in straight lines while the colonials made mincemeat of them?  I seem to remember reading that somewhere.)

Jim and his two buddies survive this death march (let’s call it what it was) only to arrive in a vast no-man’s land defended by German machine guns and artillery mortars.  I won’t go into great detail about this extended sequence, but it involves two things I didn’t expect from a movie made in 1925.  There’s a censored title card which conveys even more of an impact than if it had been spelled out: “Let’s get those b – – – – – – s!”  And also, in one scene, it’s absolutely clear that one soldier evades gunfire and mouths, “Son of a BITCH!”  We don’t get a title card for that one, but it’s unmistakable.  Such is the intensity of this sequence.  The Big Parade is worth watching for many reasons, but I would recommend that one sequence to any fans of modern war films.  There are some physical effects that are clearly more primitive than what we’re used to, but it captures all the horrors of war just as efficiently.

The last arc of the film involves Jim’s attempts to reconnect with Melisande and his eventual return home.  As I said before, these last scenes are overflowing with melodramatic flourishes – especially concerning Jim’s fiancé – but the movie has earned them, and I was on board with it all the way to the final fadeout.

The Big Parade made stars of its director and its lead actors, and it was the first big hit for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.  Indeed, it was MGM’s highest-grossing film until the colossal success of Gone with the Wind.  I can see why.

CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (1965)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Orson Welles
CAST: Orson Welles, Jeanne Moreau, Margaret Rutherford, John Gielgud, Keith Baxter, Fernando Rey (!), Ralph Richardson
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 96% Certified Fresh

PLOT: King Henry IV’s heir, the Prince of Wales, is befriended by Sir John Falstaff, an old, overweight, fun-loving habitual liar. Through Falstaff’s eyes we see the reign of King Henry IV and eventual ascendancy of Henry V.


[This review contains mild spoilers.]

There are so many layers to Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight that I had trouble figuring out how to start this review.

For starters, putting aside the significance of this film’s subject matter and where it falls in its legendary director’s body of work, it’s Shakespeare, and I have a spotty record when it comes to enjoying films of Shakespeare’s plays.  The only ones I’ve every been truly entertained by were the semi-recent The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021) starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand, and – God help me – Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996).  With the Macbeth film, I was transfixed by the performances from two of the best actors of their generation, and with Luhrmann’s film, what can I say?  The deliriously over-the-top visual style frames the over-the-top performances perfectly.

With every other Shakespeare film I’ve seen, the language has very nearly put me to sleep, not because it was delivered poorly, but because it has always been difficult for me wrap my brain around the Bard’s syntax, occasionally so tortured and roundabout that even Yoda would ask, “Say what did he?”  Such is the case with quite a bit of Chimes at Midnight.  Watching Welles and Gielgud act are the highlights of the film, but after about 15-20 minutes, I had to put on the subtitles so I could pick up on the nuances of the language.

Can you follow the plot of the film without subtitles?  Yes, to a degree, but it was difficult for me to keep track of the numerous side characters: Hotspur, Northumberland, Westmoreland, Worcester, Percy (who is also Hotspur, didn’t put that together until late in the film), etc.  But I concede that, yes, without understanding every single word, it is possible to follow the broad strokes of the story, much like you might be able to follow E.T. with the sound off.  Don’t know why that’s the comparison my mind jumped to, but I’m sticking to it.

So, as pure entertainment, Chimes at Midnight suffers, through no fault of its own, from a lack of comprehension on my part, except for the extensive battle scene at about midpoint and the emotionally shattering finale, which I’ll get to in a minute.

Now.  If we set aside the pure entertainment value and look at Chimes at Midnight a little more analytically, there is a gold mine of information here, especially for dedicated Wellesians like my good friend, Anthony…hope you’re reading, bro.

First, there’s the production itself.  Chimes was the last non-documentary film Welles completed in his lifetime.  On the Blu-ray Criterion disc, Simon Callow, himself a Welles fan and biographer, makes the observation that, prior to Citizen Kane, Welles had nothing but a string of great good luck, and nothing but atrociously bad luck afterwards, almost as if Welles had struck some kind of Faustian bargain to get Kane made.  The lost footage and criminal re-editing of The Magnificent Ambersons, studio interference with Touch of Evil…the list goes on.  To get funding for this film, which had been a passion project of his for years, he had to go to Spain, and even then, he had to pinch pennies.  (The film is officially a Franco-Swiss production and never received a full American release due to the film’s ownership that was bought and sold, or something like that…watch the interviews on the Blu-ray for the whole story.)

But even on such a limited budget, Chimes at Midnight looks like a million bucks.  There’s nothing overly flashy about the camerawork, and there is a low-budget vibe to some of the scenes that reminded me of Kevin Smith’s Clerks, which I mean as a compliment to both films.  I specifically noticed scenes shot with Gielgud as King Henry IV in his castle, with cathedral ceilings and high windows casting shafts of sunlight into the vast space like an Ansel Adams photograph.  The battle at the center of the film looks and feels like something out of Kurosawa, but even more chaotic, which was Welles’s intention.  He specifically wanted a non-glamourous battle to evoke the passing of English history from an age of gentility to one of barbarism.

It’s the towering performance by Welles as Falstaff, though, that elevates this film past my issues with its entertainment value.  I know relatively little of Shakespeare’s plays, but I knew the name of Falstaff before going in.  I knew that he was a larger-than-life figure…I always pictured Brian Blessed or Robbie Coltrane when I pictured him in my head.  After seeing Chimes at Midnight, I will only see Welles’s version.  Wearing a fat suit to give him even more girth, until he looks like a caricature, Welles brings a sense of nobility to Falstaff’s shenanigans.  He is utterly devoted to young Prince Hal (Keith Baxter), whom he knows will one day be king.  He spins tall tales, sometimes it seems just to give Hal pleasure in catching him out in a lie.  There is a charming scene where they do a little playacting: Falstaff pretends to be Hal’s father, sitting on a makeshift throne and using a cooking pot as a crown.  He makes solemn proclamations with a sour face and a twinkling eye, like a soused Santa Claus indulging his elves at the North Pole.

But it’s the film’s climactic scene at Hal’s coronation that really makes my quibbles with the language seem superfluous.  Up till now, Hal has spent virtually all of the preceding film carousing with Falstaff and his cronies, faking robberies, wooing women, thumbing his nose at his father, and so on.  But by this time, Hal has stood at his father’s side as he watched him die, and the awesome responsibilities of the kingdom have settled on his shoulders, willing or not, and he has become a changed man.

So, when aged, corpulent Falstaff more or less crashes the coronation and cries out, “My king!  My Jove!  I speak to thee my heart!”…and Hal, now King Henry V, faces away from his former mentor and says, “I know thee not, old man.” … I mean, I was devastated.  And watch Falstaff’s face, as Welles displays a succession of emotions, each individually definable, each one lasting for just a second or two: surprise, disbelief, shame, puzzlement, and finally realization.  I won’t lay out the rest of Hal’s rebuke to Falstaff here, but it contains some of the most cutting language that Shakespeare ever wrote.

Added to all this is the fact that Welles was in the last phase of his career, that he perhaps realized it, and he was playing a character who, towards the end of his life, was being shut out by a man who once loved him like an uncle, perhaps even a father.  Much like the Hollywood industry, after giving him his big break, had essentially shut Welles out after Kane?  That might be an oversimplification, but it feels accurate.

Welles was always full of ideas, always experimenting.  What if…we made a movie about the life of a media mogul, told backwards, then forwards, then backwards again, with a mysterious code word that the characters never solve?  What if…we open this crime thriller with a long uncut take following a car bomb through a Mexican border town?  What if…we adapted Shakespeare to follow just Falstaff through all the different plays he appears in?

Welles was never content with the conventional.  Chimes at Midnight may feel conventional at first – and if you’re not a fan of Shakespeare to begin with, it might even seem a little boring.  But there is treasure to be found here for those willing to take a chance on it.

THE SHOP ON MAIN STREET (Czechoslovakia, 1965)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTORS: Ján Kadár, Elmar Klos
CAST: Ida Kaminska, Jozek Kroner
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100% Fresh

PLOT: During World War II, a carpenter in the Fascist Slovak State is appointed “Aryan controller” of a Jewish widow’s store.


The first hour or so of the 1983 TV movie The Day After features some of the tensest filmmaking I’ve ever seen.  There is something terrifying about how these people go about their normal lives as their world spirals towards Armageddon.  As the sirens begin, the tension reaches a breaking point when you realize it’s only a matter of a few unstoppable minutes before the literal apocalypse.

Oddly enough, that movie came to mind as I watched the Czech film The Shop on Main Street from 1965.  Set around the year 1942, it takes place in a small town in Fascist-controlled Slovakia.  Tono Brtko is a poor, timid carpenter with a nagging, avaricious wife whose sister is married to a high-ranking official in the local Fascist government.  Tono is not a fan of the Fascists, not for any overtly political reasons, but because he doesn’t like his brother-in-law, who has always treated him as a peasant, even before he was a local bigwig.

One drunken night, the brother-in-law, Markus, gives him some news: as part of a new law, Tono has been appointed as the “Aryan controller” of a small shop owned and operated by an elderly Jewish woman, Rozalia.  It’s now Tono’s job to take over the shop until the government figures out exactly what to do with Rozalia and the other local Jews.

(Interestingly, the Nazi swastika is not seen until the film’s closing sequences, but the Third Reich crouches just out of sight.)

What happens next is a curiously effective combination of suspenseful drama and outright comedy, approaching farce.  In that sense, it’s tempting to compare this movie to Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful, but the tones are very different from each other.  In Benigni’s film, the main character was impish and clownish, an Italian Marx brother.  In The Shop on Main Street, Tono’s dimwittedness leads more organically to scenes of comic misunderstanding between him and the hard-of-hearing Rozalia.  When he tries to explain the situation to her, she believes he’s been hired to be her assistant.  When he arrives to the shop on Saturday morning, he can’t understand why the shutters are still closed well past opening hours.  “It’s the Sabbath,” she says simply as she potters around the back room where she lives.

The comedy of these situations made me laugh, but the underlying seriousness of the plot snuffed it out.  Tono’s wife is constantly nagging him to find out where the old lady has hidden her wealth, since everyone knows Jews are miserly and stingy.  Tono and some of his friends talk about being careful not to be branded as a “Jew lover.”  Tono, to his partial credit, is not as gung-ho as some of his other friends or his wife.  He even mocks Hitler in a strangely tense scene, using a comb as the infamous moustache.  But his conscience only goes so far, and he does his best to just stay under the radar.

Meanwhile, a tower is being built at the center of town to celebrate the Fascist government, and Tono’s Jewish friends can see where this is going and have started packing.  Tono remains certain that, surely, things won’t get TOO bad.  A loudspeaker is installed near the town square.  And then every Jewish citizen receives a notice in the mail…

Beneath the comic personalities and situations, the looming threat of something even worse than run-of-the-mill fascism hovers over the town.  Tono wages a constant war with his conscience.  He’s unable to flout the law by simply refusing to take over Rozalia’s shop because that would mean possible arrest.  But he has no interest in forcing this elderly woman out on the street.  (He’s like me in the early days of Covid: things just can’t POSSIBLY get THAT bad…can they?)

I was riveted by this film.  It felt shorter than its 2-hour-plus running time because of the tension running under everything like a thrumming power line.  In that way, it’s almost Hitchcockian.  And to top it off, this movie had to pass Soviet censors before being released, which absolutely blows my mind for some reason.  The Shop on Main Street plays like a scaled-down version of Schindler’s List, or maybe more like a prologue.  By focusing on a tree instead of the forest, this small-scale movie makes its point just as eloquently and as powerfully as Spielberg’s masterpiece.

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?

DIABOLIQUE (France, 1955)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Henri-Georges Clouzot
CAST: Simone Signoret, Véra Clouzot, Paul Meurisse, Charles Vanel
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 95% Certified Fresh

PLOT: The wife and mistress of a loathsome school principal plan to murder him with what they believe is the perfect alibi.

[NOTE: If you have not yet seen Diabolique, READ NO FURTHER.  I will try not to give spoilers, but discussion of the story may give unwanted hints or clues.  Beware.]


Am I giving Diabolique, Clouzot’s classic of French suspense, a perfect rating because it fooled me?  No.  Is it because of the acting?  Not quite, although Véra Clouzot is an obvious standout.  In my mind, the lion’s share of the credit for my perfect rating goes to the impeccable screenplay and the masterful direction from H.G. Clouzot, director of other French classics like Wages of Fear (1953) and Le corbeau (1943).  The story is so good that Hitchcock famously regretted not grabbing the movie rights from the novel on which the movie is based, so he made sure he purchased the rights to the author’s next novel almost immediately.  [Fun fact: the movie of THAT book yielded Hitchcock’s legendary Vertigo (1958).]

The story of Diabolique will come as no great surprise to any modern moviegoer.  As soon as key facts about the major players were revealed, my mind immediately went to Ira Levin’s Deathtrap (1982), which was CLEARLY inspired by Diabolique, as were many others.  What makes Diabolique such a standout is that it was first.  Before Psycho, before Peeping Tom (both 1960), before Don’t Look Now (1973), Diabolique wowed and shocked audiences in equal measure.

Diabolique’s method is deceptively simple.  With admirably economic storytelling, Clouzot presents us with the three main players: the headstrong mistress, Nicole (Simone Signoret); the timid, sickly wife, Christina (Véra Clouzot, the director’s real-life spouse); and the detestable man they both share, Michel (Paul Meurisse).  The three of them run a boys’ boarding school, with Michel as the headmaster.  Michel is immediately set up as despicable.  The first time we see Nicole, she is sporting a black eye behind some shades, already seeming to plot with Christina.  A little later, Michel forces Christina to choke down some rotten fish served for their meal (he got a bargain at the market for day-old fish…eeyuck).  When she loudly wishes she were dead, Michel evokes Ebenezer Scrooge: “Hurry up, then.  We’ll arrange a nice funeral and be well rid of you.  The school won’t notice, and I’ll feel much better.”  Charming.

So, when the two women hatch a plot to get rid of Michel, we’re on board, because who WOULDN’T want to get rid of this jackass?  But in classic fashion, nothing goes down the way it’s supposed to.  First, there’s a problem with noisy plumbing (I’m being purposefully vague here).  Then there’s the broken handle on the large trunk.  Then there’s the pesky body that simply won’t behave the way a dead body should.  Then there’s the empty hotel room, and the Prince-of-Wales suit, and the schoolchild who claims he saw the headmaster at a time and place where he ABSOLUTELY should not have been…and so on.

Despite the fact that I kind of called what was happening and why, I still thoroughly enjoyed Diabolique, the same way that I enjoy watching some of my favorite films over and over again.  Here’s a plot that we’ve all seen repeatedly, but it’s done so well that you just have to sit back and admire its audacity.  Nothing is overdone, no one strains for any kind of effect, the characters are who they are, simple without being simplistic, if that means anything.  They’re intelligent people, not placeholders, so when they can’t figure out what’s going on, we believe it.

I loved the fact there was no musical score except for the opening and end credits.  That was amazingly effective, especially in scenes toward the end that relied heavily on the kind of shots and editing that reminded me of movies like M and Nosferatu.  And I haven’t seen water used so atmospherically since Brian De Palma’s Femme Fatale (2002).

Depending on how you define “twist”, it could be argued that Diabolique was the first movie to contain a full-on twist ending, one that redefines everything you saw previously and compels you to go back and watch the movie again to pick up on clues you missed the first time around.  (A case might be made for Mildred Pierce [1945] being first, but that film’s ending is not quite as insane as Diabolique’s.)  For that reason alone, and because it accomplishes it so well, this movie is worth seeking out.  Just don’t let anyone spoil it for you.