Tag: Mig's Reviews

GLADIATOR II (2024)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Ridley Scott
CAST: Paul Mescal, Denzel Washington, Pedro Pascal, Connie Nielsen
MY RATING: 6/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 72% Certified Fresh

PLOT: After his home is conquered by the tyrannical emperors who now lead Rome, a rebel soldier becomes a gladiator and must look to his past to find the strength to return the glory of Rome to its people.


[SPOILER ALERT: There is a key plot point that I must divulge in my review, but it is not something I knew before watching the film, despite the fact it was supposedly spoiled in one of the trailers.  You have been warned.]

While I was being underwhelmed by Ridley Scott’s latest film, Gladiator II, I was reminded of his previous lapses in judgement.  Although he is the deservedly acclaimed director of masterpieces like Alien, Black Hawk Down, Kingdom of Heaven, and Thelma & Louise, he also helmed such misfires as 1492: Conquest of Paradise, House of Gucci, and the regrettable Robin Hood [2010].  My point is that Gladiator II is a reminder that Mr. Scott is human like anyone else and occasionally makes mistakes.

I’m not saying that Gladiator II is a terrible film, though.  It is not aggressively bad like some other films I could mention (*cough, The Counselor, cough*).  It has some amazing sights, like the rhino battle in the Colosseum, and it boasts a triumphantly over-the-top performance from Denzel Washington as Macrinus, a flamboyant trainer of gladiators with designs of his own for the city of Rome.  On those merits alone, Gladiator II is maybe worth a watch.

But…but…

While the story is interesting from a standpoint of pure plotting, and while we get the requisite nostalgia bombs of seeing Connie Nielsen back again along with periodic flashbacks to the first Gladiator [2000], I felt curiously distant from the film itself.  I have theories about this phenomenon, but nothing conclusive.

First, the lead actor, Paul Mescal, as [SPOILER ALERT] Lucius.  He looks the part, I grant you that, at least from a physical standpoint.  He’s built, he appears to do most of the physical stunts himself, and he delivers his lines with the appropriate gravitas.  But I never got behind him as the hero of the piece.  Maybe it’s because he’s a complete unknown to me?  Maybe because we barely got to know him before he was suddenly thrust into the main story arc?  (By contrast, in the first Gladiator, we got to know Maximus inside and out before he became a gladiator.)

My sympathies went entirely towards Pedro Pascal as General Acacius, the military mastermind behind Rome’s greatest victories.  He is the new husband of Lucilla (played by the returning Connie Nielsen), whose son, you’ll remember, was last seen following Maximus’s body out of the Colosseum, sixteen years before Gladiator II begins.  Acacius is dutiful almost to a fault, deferring all glory on the battlefield to the empire of Rome, even if it’s currently being run by a couple of brothers (Emperors Geta and Caracalla) who are entitled, bloodthirsty tyrants.  He is weary of the constant bloodshed and wonders if there isn’t a better way to restore Rome to glory.

And Denzel Washington…well, I’ll get to him in a minute.

So, the story, while it must have been compelling on paper, seems to be a healthy echo of the first film.  Another defeated soldier becomes a gladiator.  Another successful Roman general wants to restore Rome.  More spectacular, bloody battles inside and outside the Colosseum.  More political intrigue regarding power-hungry senators and double-dealing merchants.  Forgive me, but I’ve been there, and I’ve done that.  (And adding massive sharks to a Colosseum battle does not intrinsically make it better than anything from the first film.  However, some basic research does show that the Colosseum WAS occasionally flooded with about 5 feet of water to stage mock naval battles…so there you go.)

The undeniable highlights of the film are any scenes involving Denzel Washington.  Not since Training Day has he chewed the scenery with this much gusto (although his recent turn as Macbeth comes pretty close).  I’m guessing he still has traces of Gladiator II set pieces stuck between his teeth.  He can command a scene by his presence alone, but he adds these marvelous gestures of adjusting his robes and tossing in one of his dazzling smiles when you might least expect it.  He makes one of the greatest uses of a dramatic pause that I’ve ever heard.  (“I own…[beat, beat, beat, beat, beat]…your house.”)  In another scene, he uses an exceedingly gory prop as a punctuation mark during a speech; if he gets nominated for an Oscar for this role, that’s the scene they SHOULD use for a clip, but they probably won’t.  Shame.  The whole performance is a classic example of taking a smaller role, owning it, and turning it into a thing of beauty.  In hindsight, it’s probably a good thing that he doesn’t have much screen time, because he simply outguns his scene partners at every turn.  You can’t take your eyes off this guy.

The drawback to Washington’s masterful performance is that I found myself marking time between his scenes, instead of falling into the world of the story.  I followed along, was able to keep track of which senator was doing what and why Lucilla was so distraught and so on.  But to the degree that I was able to follow along, I just didn’t care.  I was reminded of Troy, another sword-and-sandals epic, also told on a grand scale with innumerable extras and some world-class battle scenes, but which also left me apathetic for much of its running time.

Gladiator II improves on the first film only in terms of the complexity of its visual effects and the addition of Denzel Washington.  Aside from that, I’m afraid it does very little to make me care about its heroes, its plot twists, its unexpected deaths, and the glory of Rome.

(And I had to exercise superhuman restraint, at the final shots of the film, to keep myself from yelling out loud, “Talk to me, Goose!”)

MEPHISTO (Hungary, 1981)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: István Szabó
CAST: Klaus Maria Brandauer, Rolf Hoppe, György Cserhalmi, Karin Boyd
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 80% Fresh

PLOT: In early-1930s Germany, a passionate, prominent stage actor must choose between an alliance with the emerging Nazi party or a life of obscurity in exile.

[Author’s note: this is another in a series of movies I’ve watched lately whose subject matters have intimidated me.  There are topics at play in Mephisto that are beyond my ability to analyze in coherent prose.  I must advise you, this is a BRILLIANT film, even if my review below does not convey that fact…]


Watching Mephisto reminded me of the early days of Covid-19.  As the infection spread and restaurants and other businesses voluntarily closed their doors, I was still naively hopeful that it would all just go away.  A friend asked me, “When will you take this seriously?”  I blithely said, “When all the McDonald’s restaurants close, that’s when I’ll know there’s a problem.”  Not long afterwards, that’s exactly what happened.  Then I was indefinitely “furloughed” from my job, and soon after that, the government shutdown occurred.  In hindsight, I was foolish.  The signs were all there.  Had I paid more attention, I might have been better prepared for the stressful days that followed.

This situation is echoed in director István Szabó’s Mephisto, the first Hungarian film to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.  Mephisto tells the story of a popular actor in 1930s Germany, shortly before and after Hitler rose to power.  Hendrik Höfgen (Klaus Maria Brandauer) is a hot-headed, passionate stage actor who throws himself into his performances with abandon.  We watch him evolve from an actor/director to the leading force behind a “revolutionary” theater company that exhorts its audience to acknowledge the plight of the everyman in their society.  He marries (for money more than anything else), but keeps a mistress on the side, a black German woman named Juliette Martens (Karin Boyd) who doubles as his private dance instructor.  He rails at his wife for riding horses before breakfast – the ultimate in bourgeois behavior – but engages in frantic frolicking with his mistress between dance lessons.

Brandauer plays Hendrik as a man who only feels like himself when he’s pretending to be someone else.  Onstage or when directing his cast, he’s filled with boundless energy, dancing with the chorus line or leaping across the stage with abandon.  Offstage, he is quiet and self-effacing, unless he’s socializing with other cast members.  Mention is made several times of his “limp” handshake, a direct contradiction to the strong characters he portrays, especially his most famous role: Mephistopheles in Faust, a role that brings him even more fame and prominence within the theater community.  The imagery of Hendrik is striking: He covers his face in white makeup like a kabuki player with sharply angled black eyebrows and red lips, the ultimate in being able to disappear inside a character.

But something is happening in the background that Hendrik is reluctant to acknowledge.  A fellow cast member almost gets into a fistfight with him when he criticizes another actress because of her associations with a member of the Nazi party.  His wife warns him about the dangers presented by this man who was just elected Chancellor.  [Interestingly, the name of Adolf Hitler is never once mentioned onscreen.]  She tells Hendrik that many of his friends are leaving Germany, fearing for their livelihoods, if not their lives.  But Hendrik refuses to panic:

“There is still the opposition, no?  They’ll make sure he doesn’t get too big for his boots.  And even if the Nazis stay in power, why should it concern me? … On top of that, I’m an actor, no?  I go to the theater, play my parts, then go back home.  That’s all. … I’m an actor.  You can design sets anywhere or buy antiques.  But I need the German language!  I need the motherland, don’t you see?”

Hendrik is so wrapped up in his profession that he simply cannot accept the fact that his freedoms are about to come crashing down around him.  He would rather formulate a far-fetched scenario based on nothing but hope so he can just stay where he is and keep performing.

(I have to be honest: when we took our first steps out of the Covid lockdown, I felt the same way.  Local theaters announced auditions for shows again, and I assured myself and my girlfriend that I would take the utmost precautions and wear masks at rehearsals and disinfect and wash my hands and I wouldn’t get sick.  And, of course, I eventually got sick.  I recovered, but you can probably imagine my disbelief when I tested positive that first time.  “ME?  But I was so careful!”)

Hendrik stays in Germany.  His wife moves to Paris.  Fellow actors either disappear outright or are arrested by the Gestapo in full view.  Hendrik accepts an offer to direct the official state theater, despite his past affiliations with liberal/Bolshevik causes, because of his prestige in the theater world.  A character known only as the General (probably intended to be Hermann Göring) gives him his marching orders as theater director.  He witnesses several Nazis beating a man on the street and walks in the other direction…best not to get involved.

So, what we have here is an actor willing to trade away his soul and his conscience in exchange for the opportunity to remain in the limelight, performing as Mephisto or Hamlet.  The metaphor is not exactly subtle, but director Szabó manages to land the message in such a way that it never feels like preaching.  It’s a masterpiece of storytelling that lands somewhere between satire and Kafka.

An especially telling scene has Hendrik explaining to an attentive crowd of Nazi journalists that his production of Hamlet will portray the lead character as “a hard man…an energetic, resolute hero”, rather than as a neurotic, “pathetic” revolutionary.  Hendrik tells them exactly what they want to hear so he can stay in the limelight.  He’s made his own deal with the devil.  I will not reveal whether Hendrik’s bill comes due during the film, but I will say the finale evokes the landmark documentaries of Leni Riefenstahl.  I’ll leave it at that.

As I said, watching the film reminded me of the Covid lockdown…but it also made me think about all those many, many times in the past that actors and other celebrities have been criticized for voicing their political opinions in public.  “Shut up and play/act!” is the usual cry.  Many people would prefer their favorite actors to behave more like Hendrik: just keep your head down and let everything blow over, don’t make waves, it’s not your place, etcetera, etcetera.  Mephisto argues that keeping silent in the face of injustice or tyranny is not an option, especially not for people in the spotlight.  Those who do so risk suffering Faust’s fate.  Or Hendrik’s, whose last words in the film are brilliantly contradictory.

INHERIT THE WIND (1960)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Stanley Kramer
CAST: Spencer Tracy, Fredric March, Gene Kelly, Dick York, Harry Morgan
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 93% Fresh

PLOT: In 1925, two great lawyers argue the case for, and against, a Tennessee science teacher accused of the crime of teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution.  (Inspired by the real-life Scopes Monkey Trial.)


I have known about the movie version of Inherit the Wind for many years now, but it has taken me this long to get around to finally watching it.  One of the first shows I ever did in community theater was Inherit the Wind.  I played E.K. Hornbeck, probably one of the best-written characters I’ve ever performed.  I hesitated this long to watch the movie, or any of the other various TV/cable versions, because I feared it could never live up to the power of the stage play.  Boy, was I wrong.  Stanley Kramer’s film of the award-winning play is anchored by two of the greatest performances ever to grace the silver screen, courtesy of Spencer Tracy and Fredric March, both 2-time Oscar winners.

It’s 1925, and in the Bible-belt hamlet of Hillsboro, Tennessee, a young teacher, Bertram Cates, has been imprisoned.  His crime?  Teaching Darwin’s theories in high school.  In Hillsboro, you see, it’s against the law to teach anything but Biblical creationism in the classroom.  The arrest makes national headlines, most of them negative.  Example: “Heavenly Hillsboro: Does It Have a Hole in Its Head, or Its Head in a Hole?”  The despairing town fathers rejoice when they discover that the great Matthew Harrison Brady, lawyer extraordinaire and 3-time Presidential nominee, will volunteer to prosecute the case.  Brady is played by Fredric March with gusto, although I almost wish March had dialed it back JUST a touch every now and then.  He comes VERY close to becoming a parody of a character instead of a real person.

Covering the story in Hillsboro is E.K. Hornbeck (Gene Kelly!), a reporter from Baltimore.  Hornbeck is loosely based on the legendary newspaperman H.L. Mencken.  The screenplay reduces Hornbeck’s presence a tad as opposed to the stage play, but Kelly delivers the goods with all the appropriate flair and panache.

Hornbeck’s Baltimore paper uses its influence and checkbook to lure another skilled, big-city attorney to Hillsboro to defend Cates.  This is Henry Drummond, played by Spencer Tracy in arguably the best performance of his lengthy career.  Drummond is a shambling, good-natured fellow whose twinkling eyes disguise a sharp legal mind and a passion for the truth.  It’s a tribute to Tracy’s abilities that we get to see both sides of Drummond’s persona and there is never a sense of any disconnect between them.

After the first half-hour or so of exposition, the remaining bulk of the film takes place in the sweltering Hillsboro County Courthouse, as a jury is selected, witnesses are questioned, and both sides present their case to the judge (Harry Morgan).  In between court sessions, we get short scenes with Bertram Cates’s fiancé, Rachel, who just happens to be the daughter of the town’s religious leader, Reverend Brown (Claude Akins); a prayer meeting where Reverend Brown essentially damns his own daughter to hell; and pleasant interludes where Drummond and Brady sit on a front porch and reminisce how they used to be great friends, fighting for the same cause once upon a time.  But now Brady has combined his faith with his political ambitions, and Drummond dreams of a day when reason and science are not equated with heresy.

I won’t give you a play-by-play of the courtroom scenes here.  But if I were a film director, and I found myself directing a courtroom thriller, I would sit down and watch Inherit the Wind at least ten times before shooting a foot of film.  The scenes where Drummond and Brady butt heads and cross-examine and make objections are simply spellbinding.  I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the camerawork by the great Ernest Laszlo, moving around the courtroom and around each attorney, pushing in, tracking backwards.  I know great camerawork is supposed to become invisible while watching a film, but this was different.  Laszlo’s camera sometimes calls attention to itself, but it never, ever distracts from the story.

Of course, beautiful camerawork only works when it’s photographing something worthwhile, and Spencer Tracy and Fredric March do not disappoint as Drummond and Brady.  For nearly 90 minutes, they bicker, trade jabs, and put on a double-act of Hollywood professionalism and technique that would not be matched until the films of Newman and Redford.  Tracy is especially fascinating to watch.  It’s impossible to catch him acting.  There’s never a moment when he looks anything but authentic.  His speech patterns give the impression of a man whose mouth is just barely keeping up with his brain.  When he occasionally stumbles over a word, the odds are 50-50 whether it was a real slip up or if he just threw it in as a flourish.

If Tracy’s performance is a triumph of realism, or at least naturalism, Fredric March’s performance is one of the last great displays of old Hollywood, full of facial tics and vocal mannerisms and speechifying that would have made even Charles Foster Kane say, “Dude…dial it down.”  It’s still a powerhouse performance, but it’s a good thing Tracy didn’t try to match March.  Otherwise, the whole movie would have become a cartoon.  Because we have two such contrasting performances, the movie achieves a nice balance that makes time pass much more quickly than it might have with two other actors.

Regarding the TOPIC of the film…well, to be honest, if I started to write about all the things I felt while watching the film, about how so many people today, not just random folks, but people I know personally, would have felt right at home in 1925 Hillsboro, asking God to rain hellfire on the non-believers, chanting about hanging the accused teacher from a “sour apple tree”…I’d still be writing this review three days from now.

Besides, I believe the film makes its point much more eloquently than I ever could (especially when it comes to the discussion of how long that first day of Creation was, exactly).  One of my favorite lines from the movie comes when Brady accuses Drummond of attempting to destroy everyone’s belief in God and the Bible.  Drummond replies:

“That’s not true, and you know it.  The Bible is a book.  It’s a good book.  But it’s not the ONLY book.”

Inherit the Wind is not anti-Christian or anti-God or even anti-religion.  It is a plea for tolerance.  The fact that it was released over sixty years ago does not diminish the power of that message.  And even if it did not have that agenda, it would still be one of the most exciting, crackling courtroom dramas I’ve ever seen.

(Fun fact: A quick internet search reveals that, while all US states currently teach evolution, there are some that voluntarily pair it with creationism.)

THE SORROW AND THE PITY (Switzerland, 1969)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Marcel Ophüls
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100% Fresh

PLOT: An in-depth exploration of the various reactions by the French people to the Vichy government’s acceptance of the German invasion.


When writing this review, I initially tried to provide a background to the film’s topic, attempting to summarize what Vichy France was, who General Petain was, and how bitterly French resistance fighters resented Petain and others who believed that acquiescence to the conquering German army was key to survival and avoiding further destruction.  That attempt at a “brief” summary ran to two full pages.  So, rather than teach a history lesson, I thought it better to just review the film and assume that readers will have an even better grasp of history than I do.  So here goes.

My enthusiasm for The Sorrow and the Pity, another sprawling film from documentarian Marcel Ophüls, is tempered slightly by my tenuous grasp of French history during World War II, and by the fact that, at least at FIRST, I did not feel I could pass judgement on the people involved.  One English interviewee says exactly that, in response to a question about whether he felt Petain’s life sentence after the French Liberation was unfair: “It is not my place to judge whether or not people’s anger was justified.  We haven’t been through it, so we cannot say.”

After watching the complete film, I have changed my tune a bit.  Under Petain’s leadership, Vichy France did indeed escape total destruction, but since they were essentially under German rule, they did end up deporting approximately 76,000 Jews to concentration camps during World War II.  Only a small percentage survived.  French Resistance fighters attacked when and where they could with immense dedication, believing it was better to fight and die than to live under the thumb of Nazi Germany.  Pro-Vichy Frenchmen denounced anyone they believed was a member of the Resistance.  In the documentary, the bitterness felt by surviving Resistance fighters towards surviving collaborators is palpable.

This documentary was (I believe) the first from a French filmmaker to openly discuss, on a world stage, the conflict between the Resistance and the collaborators.  Up to that time, it had been a virtually taboo subject, something swept under the rug or kept in the basement.  The attitude was one of, “Why bring up such a painful subject?  Why go over something so historically embarrassing?  Let’s just move on.”  This attitude reminds me of the thinking behind those who are in favor of redacting your kid’s history textbook or banning certain books from the school library.  The people interviewed in the film – people on both sides of the debate, mind you – demonstrate clearly that a national policy of polite silence on the matter is unacceptable.

In this way, The Sorrow and the Pity functions less as a film, an entertainment, and more like a historical record, the kind of thing you might see at a museum or on a college campus as part of a homework assignment.  I can’t promise watching this film will be as gripping as a typical Hollywood war film, but I can say I was never bored during the film’s running time.  I found myself intrigued by the fact this film was released in 1969, just 25 years after the end of the war in Europe, so the people appearing in the film were not just experts or college professors.  They literally lived through the events they were discussing.

A woman who sided with Petain was tortured by Resistance fighters after the Liberation; she still holds to her belief that Petain was a good man.  A Resistance member who was denounced and sent to prison returns and is told by a friend that he knows who denounced him and he will avenge him with a nod of the head.  The man refuses to allow that to happen, even though he knows who the denouncer was; in fact, he still lives around the corner from him.  “It’s something you can’t forget.  But what can you do?”

A former Nazi soldier is interviewed at his daughter’s wedding reception.  (I would LOVE to hear how Ophüls managed to wrangle this particular interview.)  Ophüls asks why he still wears his military medals when many Germans refuse to wear them because they were awarded by a Nazi state.  The former soldier says the only people made uncomfortable by them are men and women who never fought.

Another former soldier (now apparently a waiter in a pub) makes this startling statement: “We’re not stupider than anyone else, and yet we lost the war.  Nowadays we have to wonder if we’re not better off like this.  After all, if we had won, Hitler may have continued, and where would that leave us today?  Perhaps we’d be occupying some country in Africa…or America.”  It’s hard to tell whether his statement is remorseful, grateful, or wistful.

The Sorrow and the Pity is a remarkable record of a time when a nation had to choose between subservience or resistance.  That some chose resistance is not hard to fathom for Americans, whose existence is founded on resistance to tyranny.  That some chose to collaborate is perhaps unthinkable, but if I look inward, can I say with certainty I would have chosen differently?  I’d like to think so.  I hope so.

Just recently I was looking at a bookstore’s window display with a “banned books” shelf filled with novels that have recently been banned by school libraries in several states.  A woman walked by, noticed the display, and said as she walked away, “This store is degenerate.  I can’t believe they’re glamorizing this shit.”  I found myself wondering how many of those volumes she had read herself.  I wondered which side she would have taken in France when Nazi policies banned certain texts.  It never occurred to me to start an argument with her right there in the street.  Will there come a time in this country when it becomes our duty to openly oppose those who support totalitarian policies?  I don’t know, I’m not a political Nostradamus.  But The Sorrow and the Pity argues that, if that time does come, sitting on the fence should not be an option.  And the world will not soon forget those on the wrong side of history.

ELMER GANTRY (1960)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Richard Brooks
CAST: Burt Lancaster, Jean Simmons, Arthur Kennedy, Shirley Jones
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 94% Fresh

PLOT: A fast-talking traveling salesman convinces a sincere evangelist that he can be an effective preacher for her cause.


Elmer Gantry pulls a double, then a triple-fake.  It’s a good thing they stopped at three because you can only subvert an audience’s expectations so many times before they hold it against you.  It starts as a tired (but well-executed) formula, then it turns that formula on its head, and then, just when you think you’ve gotten a stereotypical Hollywood ending, it pulls one more rabbit out of the hat.  In a way, it reminded of The Blue Angel (1930) in the way it presents a clearly hypocritical man to the audience, warts and all, and gets us to feel a little sympathy for him at the end, despite his wicked ways.

The film is also the most intelligent film I’ve seen about religion and Christianity since Robert Duvall’s The Apostle (1998).  It contains the best scene/exchange on the topic I’ve ever seen, between a fire-and-brimstone preacher and a non-believing newspaper reporter.  Both sides score points, but in the end, neither one wins, which I believe is just as it should be.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

We first meet Elmer Gantry (Burt Lancaster) as he’s telling a dirty joke to some prospective clients in a bar, sometime during the Prohibition era.  The impression he gives right away is that of a huckster, a fast-talking, fast-thinking heel who’ll do whatever it takes to make a sale.  His conversation is interrupted by two nuns soliciting donations.  As a lark, he grabs their collection plate and exhorts the bar patrons to give all they can.  He’s pulling a cynical prank, but his words are surprisingly effective.  And no wonder: we later learn he was expelled from a theological seminary some years ago.  He knows the words, but not the music, but that’s enough for folks to turn out their pockets for him.  No one is more surprised by this outcome than Elmer himself.

Later, after visiting a Negro church service and hoboing around on a train, he visits a traveling revival led by Sister Sharon Falconer (Jean Simmons).  He is immediately smitten by her beauty – because, hello, it’s Jean Simmons – and realizes the only way to get to her is through her vocation.  With some of his trademark fast-talking, he flirts with one of Sister Sharon’s followers and uses what he learns to get closer to Sharon.  He agrees to deliver a mini-sermon at one of her very well-attended revival services to prove his good intentions, but something unexpected happens: the crowd responds to his words as if he were a bona-fide preacher.  Soon he’s touring with Sister Sharon from town to town as crowds get larger and larger.

Meanwhile, we get to see the inner workings of the business side of this religious venture.  We watch as various preachers and pastors debate the merits of inviting Sister Sharon and Gantry to a “big” city, Zenith.  (I learn from Wikipedia this city name is fictional, created by the author of the book on which the film is based…didn’t know that.)  Committee members are uncertain whether Sharon’s and Gantry’s message will increase church rolls in a metropolitan area as opposed to their previous, more rural locales.  I loved this scene because it feels authentic.  Whether it’s realistic or not is not for me to say.  But I can easily imagine well-intentioned religious leaders (and maybe some NOT so well-intentioned) sitting around and discussing, not just the spiritual expectations of such a revival, but also the FINANCIAL expectations, as these men do in the film.

Elmer Gantry is filled with scenes and dialogue that held my attention for the film’s duration.  Growing up as I did in a Christian church environment and graduating from a Christian college, I recognized virtually all of Elmer’s tactics, as well as Sister Sharon’s tactics, in using exactly the right words, gestures, and tone to play a congregation like a fiddle.  The difference is, Sister Sharon genuinely believes she’s been touched or called by God to this vocation, while Gantry is expertly going through the motions as a means to an end.

 (On a personal note, I should mention that Burt Lancaster’s mannerisms and speech patterns as Elmer Gantry strongly reminded me of the pastor of the Southern Baptist church I attended for many years, from his physical appearance to his, pardon the expression, shit-eating grin.  But that’s another story…)

There is one scene that I must specifically mention and dissect.  A Zenith newspaper reporter, Jim Lefferts (Arthur Kennedy), writes an article in which he expresses his skepticism of Gantry’s and Sister Sharon’s motives, as well as of revivals in general.  He writes:

“What qualifies someone to be a revivalist?  Nothing.  Nothing at all.  There is not one law in any state in the Union protecting the public from the hysterical onslaught of revivalists.  But the law does permit them to invest in tax-free property, and collect money, without accounting for how it is used.  What do you get for your money?  Can you get into heaven by contributing one buck or 50?  Can you get life eternal by shaking hands for Jesus with Elmer Gantry?”

(The Lefferts character is asking questions in this article that are as relevant now as they were in 1960, or 1920, or even going back to ancient times when Jesus whipped the moneylenders from the church.  To put it another way, as one dissenting church elder says in the film, “Religion is not a business.  And revivalism is not religion.”)

Sister Sharon and Gantry show up at the newspaper office to officially protest the article to Lefferts and his editor.  Sharon objects to the article’s implications about misusing collection money.  Lefferts calmly asks if Sister Sharon is ordained.  She is not, in fact, sanctioned to preach by any church body.  She points out that neither was Peter or Paul or any of the apostles.  Lefferts retorts:

“Ah, but they said that they lived with the Son of God, were taught by Him, were sanctified by Him.  What gives you the right to speak for God?  …How did you get His approval?  Did God speak to you personally?  Did He send you a letter?  Did you have a visitation from God?  A burning bush, perhaps?  Where in the New Testament does it say that God spoke to anyone except His Son?”

Then Lefferts quotes First Corinthians to show how the Bible says it’s shameful for women to speak aloud in church.  I’m watching that scene, and I’m going, BOOM, game, set, and match to Lefferts.  I remember asking these very same questions when I was younger and having normal doubts about the way church was structured.  Not about women speaking in church, I knew that was archaic and outdated, but I would always hear preachers and evangelists say, “God spoke to me.”  And I wanted to ask, “Well, what did His voice sound like?  Did He have an accent?  Did He speak English?”  But we weren’t SUPPOSED to ask those kinds of questions, we just had to take their word for it because, after all, they’re up there in the pulpit, and I’m down in the pews just listening.

But here’s where Elmer Gantry shows its colors as a film that may SEEM like it’s taking sides, but it really isn’t.  Lefferts finishes his takedown of Sister Sharon, but Elmer has a trick up his sleeve.  He turns Lefferts’s argument against itself by asking why he quoted the Bible if he doesn’t really believe the Bible is factual.  If Lefferts doesn’t believe in the six days of Creation or in the miracle of the loaves and fishes, then how can he use the scripture against Sister Sharon?  It’s a rather brilliant argument that almost feels lifted from Inherit the Wind (released the same year as Elmer Gantry.)

My admiration of this scene stems from the fact that both sides make excellent points, and the scene ends in a kind of stalemate where Lefferts won’t retract the article, but the newspaper offers to run a response to the article.  (Naturally, Gantry wheedles it up to a series of radio broadcasts instead.)  It would be tempting in a movie that is predominantly anti-religion to portray religious proponents as Bible-thumping, spittle-spraying zealots without a brain in their heads.  While Elmer certainly takes cues from that behavioral playbook, he is clearly not a moron, and that is refreshing.

Those who have seen the film before may note that I haven’t even touched on the one Oscar-winning performance from the film.  Shirley Jones plays a prostitute named Lulu Baines, and she has the film’s most unforgettable line as she recounts how a young man once took advantage of her behind a church pulpit one Christmas Eve: “He rammed the fear of God into me so fast I never heard my old man’s footsteps!”  What part she has to play in Elmer’s story, I will not reveal, just in case anyone’s reading this who’s never seen the movie.  She reveals unexpected depths and makes unexpected choices in the last couple of reels that seal both Elmer’s and Sister Sharon’s fates.

Whew!  This was another long one.  Elmer Gantry by its very nature engenders discussion and debate.  There’s even an opening title crawl advising patrons that, while the filmmakers believe that “certain aspects of Revivalism” demand further scrutiny, everyone is free to worship as they please, and patrons should prevent impressionable children from watching the movie.  Perhaps they were afraid children would believe that all religions and evangelists proceed from secular motives, which would lead to all kinds of uncomfortable conversations with their parents, churchgoing or otherwise.  In my opinion, those kinds of conversations can only benefit both the children and the parents.  I believe Elmer Gantry is one of the finest treatments of religious beliefs and activities I’ve ever seen, specifically because, by the time we get to the end credits, I’m still not 100% sure whose side the movie is on.  I think it’s up to us to look at the movie as a whole and make our own decisions.

THE BLUE ANGEL (Germany, 1930)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Josef von Sternberg
CAST: Emil Jannings, Marlene Dietrich, Kurt Gerron, Rosa Valetti
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 96% Certified Fresh

PLOT: An elderly professor’s ordered life spins dangerously out of control when he falls for a nightclub singer.


There are so many things I admire about The Blue Angel that I hardly know where to begin.  The cinematography, the story, the acting, the unbearably tragic arc, the dichotomy of the main character, the debut performance of Marlene Dietrich…just ridiculously top notch all around.  The final 20 minutes or so of the film are so searingly tragic and raw that there were times when I wanted to look away, not out of disgust, but out of social embarrassment.  I’m fully aware of Emil Jannings’s Nazi sympathies, but love him or hate him, this is one of the greatest performances I’ve seen from any film of this period.

[Fair warning, I’m about to really run off at the mouth about this one, so make yourselves comfortable.]

Jannings plays Professor Immanuel Rath, a fussy, stuffy little man who teaches at a local school in Germany somewhere around 1924.  Director von Sternberg directs Rath’s introductory scenes almost as if he were using sound only reluctantly.  With a bare minimum of dialogue, we watch Rath’s morning process as he prepares his clothes just so, eats his breakfast just so, carries his books just so, and arrives at his classroom like Gandalf: never late, never early, but precisely when he means to.  His upper-high school students, all male, respect him just enough to stand at attention upon his arrival, but are rebellious enough to write graffiti on his notebooks, turning his name from “Rath” to the German word for “trash.”

One day, he discovers that several of his male students are in possession of scandalous little postcards picturing a sensuous burlesque performer whose lower regions are covered by a little tuft of actual feathers pasted onto the card.  Blow on the card just right, and her little feather skirt rises to reveal – well, nothing terribly scandalous by today’s standards, but certainly not family friendly in 1924.  Rath is incensed.  How dare these students profane their minds with such affronts to decency?  (We get a brief glimpse of his hypocrisy as he experiments with the feather skirt himself when no one is watching.)

Rath discovers that some of his students have been frequenting a burlesque house called The Blue Angel to see the girl on the postcard.  Her name is Lola Lola, portrayed by Marlene Dietrich in the role that made her a star.  It’s all here: the skimpy outfits, those long legs, the pouty face, sitting backwards on a chair, and the singing voice that eventually led to concert hall appearances in later years when her acting career waned.

Enraged by the thought of his students attending something as inappropriate as a burlesque show, Rath storms to the Blue Angel that very night to try to catch them red-handed.  All his wrath evaporates, though, when he spies Lola in the flesh while she performs.  From that moment, he is doomed.  He winds up in Lola’s dressing room where Lola, seasoned performer that she is, treats him as if he were a rich patron, showering him with compliments and, daringly, gifting him with a pair of her underpants.  Talk about chutzpah.

Predictably, Rath’s students see him at the Blue Angel, and his authority in his classroom starts to wane.  He returns there to give Lola’s underwear back, winds up in a box seat, and watches as she trills the song (in German) “Falling in Love Again.”  She sings directly to him.  He is smitten.  He drunkenly stays the night in her boudoir (nothing happens) and is late to school the next day.  At this point his authority over his students utterly vanishes, he announces his plans to propose to Lola, and his superior essentially fires him from his post.

It’s here where we get one of the first real masterstrokes in von Sternberg’s direction.  Rath carefully empties his desk drawer, fussy as always, picks up a few books, stands, and then slowly looks over the empty classroom.  As he stands, the camera slowly dollies back away from him, increasing our awareness of how large the empty room is, and putting a visual exclamation point on just how momentous his decision is.  He’s throwing away his vocation, everything he’s ever known, and perhaps there’s a moment during this camera move when he is thinking to himself, “What the hell am I doing?”  I’m not doing it justice verbally, but it’s a sensational moment, reminding me of the famous moment in Taxi Driver when Scorsese’s camera tactfully dollies off Travis Bickle during an embarrassing phone call.

The second half of the film involves Rath’s rash proposal to Lola, her improbable acceptance, and his slow inevitable decline.  Up to now, von Sternberg’s direction has been impeccable, using dialogue only when necessary, relying on Emil Jannings’s imposing presence and impressive non-verbal acting, and on Marlene Dietrich’s inimitable beauty and sensuality to underscore their scenes together.  Now, in the tragic second half, von Sternberg REALLY impresses.

Without going into too much detail (you deserve to be as wowed by this movie as I was), let me just list some moments that stood out to me, moments that felt as fresh and moving as any other movie I can think of.

THE WEDDING RECEPTION: At Rath and Lola’s reception, a magician conjures eggs from under Rath’s nose.  The kittenish Lola playfully clucks like a hen.  Rath, besotted beyond reason, smiles and crows like a rooster.  The sight of him making such a ridiculous noise filled me with unease, a reaction I am still unable to completely unpack.  Did I feel sorry for Rath?  Maybe, but why?  He has brought this on himself.  Lola isn’t to blame for his unseemly behavior, though it is all too easy to see how she could be seen as the “villain” of the film.  That is wrongheaded, in my opinion.  If there is a villain in the movie, a person who brings about every bad thing that happens to Rath, it’s Rath himself.

THE EDITING: At one point, Rath discovers that Lola still carries large numbers of those feathery postcards to sell at her performances.  He is adamant: “While I have a penny to my name, you will never sell another one of these postcards!”  Lola’s response is simple, but both wise and somehow chilling: “Well, bring them with us anyway…you never know.”  The camera fades out, and in the very next scene, Rath is sitting at a table, watching Lola perform, and as her song ends, he carefully gathers up the postcards before him and goes table to table, hawking them.  With one single edit, von Sternberg captures not only how wrong Rath was, but also how quickly he has fallen from a place of petty pride to a lowly peddler.  The effect was startling and disheartening at the same time.

THE CALENDAR: Lola is preparing for another performance.  Rath is helping her with a primitive curling iron, but she complains that it’s too hot.  To cool it down, Rath turns to a small day-to-day calendar on the wall, pulls a sheet off, and touches it to the iron to, I guess, burn off some of the heat.  One isn’t enough, so he pulls another sheet off.  We watch as the calendar’s sheets disappear one by one, then in a montage of burning sheets and curling irons as March turns to April turns to November turns to December, and quick as a flash it’s suddenly 1930…four years later.  This astonishing sequence has as much impact as that moment in Cast Away when we fade out on Tom Hanks in the cave and fade back in with the title card FOUR YEARS LATER.

THE FINALE: Wow, I’m really going to have to tread carefully here, but the last 15-20 minutes seal the deal and make The Blue Angel one of the greatest classic films I’ve ever seen.  There is enough heartbreaking pathos and awkwardness and humiliation to satisfy any fan of melodrama.  It’s practically operatic, right down to the image of an anguished clown (long story, watch the movie and see what I mean).  Rath’s rooster crows make an encore appearance, but the circumstances under which he makes those noises are just…I’m having trouble finding the right words.  It’s genuinely hard to watch.  Lola’s portion of responsibility in this sequence is undeniable, but honestly, it’s like that fable about the scorpion and the frog that ends with, “What’d you expect me to do?  I’m a scorpion.”  She is no more evil or immoral than a shark or an earthquake.  In the end, Rath’s hypocrisy and intolerance are rewarded with a comeuppance that is richly deserved, but also pathetic and pitiful, in the most literal sense of those words.

The Blue Angel is one of the most uncompromising depictions of a tragic arc that I’ve ever seen, but it also manages to make the tragic figure inexplicably sympathetic, despite his hypocrisy.  It is achingly, wonderfully sad and melodramatic and heartbreaking, tempered by the occasional song from Marlene Dietrich as well as just being able to gaze upon her from time to time.  Watching it for the first time is an experience I will not soon forget.  I hope I haven’t spoiled too much of it for you if you’ve never seen it, either.  If you haven’t, I urge you to seek it out immediately.  (The German version whenever possible…I’ve seen clips of the English version, and it simply does not carry the same weight as the German version.)

IT’S A GIFT (1934)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Norman Z. McLeod
CAST: W.C. Fields, Kathleen Howard, Jean Rouverol, Tommy Bupp, Baby LeRoy
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 94%

PLOT: A henpecked New Jersey grocer makes plans to move to California to grow oranges, despite the resistance of his overbearing wife.


I have pondered and pondered for almost a week now, and I still have no idea how the title of It’s a Gift relates to its plot, unless it refers to the comic abilities of the film’s star, W.C. Fields.  Perhaps it refers to the bequest of a dead uncle that sets the plot in motion.  Or maybe it’s a situation where the studio heads couldn’t think of a title and just picked one that was languishing on a stack of papers somewhere.

Not that it matters.  It’s a Gift is a tiny gem of a comedy with a plot as inconsequential as its title.  As fate would have it, this is the only W.C. Fields movie I’ve seen, but I’m prepared to bet that this is the best W.C. Fields I’m likely to see.  The only other one on my radar is The Bank Dick (1940), but it’s hard for me to imagine how it could top It’s a Gift for pure slapstick comedy.  Or not slapstick exactly…it’s a weird, wonderful combination of slapstick with theatrical farce, like The Three Stooges or the Marx Brothers but with a shortened leash.  In this movie, Fields is not a wacky character like Groucho or Curly…he’s us, and that makes it more effective.  (That was part of Buster Keaton’s genius, too, but that’s for another review…)

Fields plays Harold Bissonette (pronounced “Bee-so-NAY”), a cosmically patient man living in New Jersey with an overbearing wife, Amelia; a thoughtless teenage daughter, Mildred; and a rambunctious young son, Norman.  How rambunctious?  He wheels around their apartment on roller skates; when Harold tells him to stop, he obliges by removing only one skate.  If I had tried that with my parents, I wouldn’t be alive to talk about it.

Harold’s relationship with his family is defined by their total indifference to what he wants and his desire to avoid conflict at all costs.  Right at the outset, when he tries to shave in the bathroom, his daughter blithely steps between him and the mirror so she can do her hair and brush her teeth.  Rather than raise an objection (which he clearly wants to do), he improvises by hanging a travel mirror from the pull chain on the overhead light bulb.  The mirror spins slightly, leaving him no option but to shave in stages whenever the mirror faces him.  This scene beautifully defines both characters with barely a word spoken.  [Marc, if you’re reading this, this kind of thing is right up your alley.]

The plot involves a dead uncle who has left Harold a decent chunk of change.  Harold’s wife, Amelia, looks forward to moving to a nice house and buying some nice dresses, but Harold has something else in mind.  He wants to move the family to California and raise oranges on an orange grove he’s bought from his daughter’s boyfriend, or the boyfriend’s father, or something, it doesn’t really matter.  What matters is, the boyfriend discovers the orange grove is a wreck, but Harold refuses to listen and moves ahead with his plan.

Before they move to California, though, there are two hysterical sequences to get through.  One takes place at the general store Harold runs in town.  His day at the store plays out as one of the worst (and funniest, for us) days of his life.  It involves an angry customer demanding kumquats, which is funny all by itself because in real life, it’s impossible to demand kumquats and be angry.  Try it sometime.  There’s also a regular customer, Mr. Muckle, an elderly gentleman who is blind and hard of hearing; he carries an ear trumpet and a large cane which he swings indiscriminately in front of him, destroying anything breakable in his way.  There is something Matthau-esque in Harold’s desperate attempts to get those kumquats while also keeping the deaf Mr. Muckle away from his light bulb display.  And then there’s the clueless assistant and the meat locker and the child in the overhead basket and a barrel of molasses and so on and so on.  No WONDER Harold wants to get out of town.  Another day at that store and they’d have to carry his customers out in a hearse.

The second sequence, and by far the funniest in the whole film, involves Henry trying to get some sleep on the front porch because his wife won’t stop nagging him about using all their inheritance to buy an orange grove.  This marvelous set piece involves him trying to sleep on a rickety porch swing while his upstairs neighbor engages in conversation with people below, a baby drops grapes on his noggin through a hole in his ceiling/the baby’s floor, the swing threatens collapse at any moment, a random coconut manages to bounce down three flights of stairs, and he is “accosted” by an insurance salesman.  What makes this scene work so well is not the slapstick nature of the scene, which plays out like a Looney Tunes cartoon, but Harold’s dogged determination to get some damn SLEEP, despite the universe’s intention to make it utterly impossible.  Fields here proves himself a master of understated reactions.  Where the Stooges or perhaps even Groucho would resort to yelling or lobbing insults, Fields projects a world-weariness, as if this kind of thing is always happening to him, HAS always happened to him, and WILL happen to him in the future.  He loses his temper only once, and even then, he doesn’t resort to yelling: he just goes inside and gets his shotgun.

This and the grocery store scene are the highlights of the film.  After they pack everything into their car and hit the road, it becomes a series of episodes before they finally arrive at the orange grove he bought, which is, as promised by his daughter’s boyfriend, a wreck.  What happens next, I wouldn’t dream of revealing, except to say it’s as implausible as it is satisfying.

While It’s a Gift will never be mentioned in the same breath as anything by Capra or Wilder in the screenplay department, it works impeccably as a vehicle for W.C. Fields and his often-imitated/never-quite-duplicated brand of comedy.  (Walter Matthau came close.)  I haven’t seen enough of his films to be scholarly in my approach, but I can report that it made me laugh much more than I thought it would.  That’s all I can really ask for in a comedy, so I’m not going to try to break it down too much.  I’ll just roll with it, like Harold.

MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA (Soviet Union, 1929)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Dziga Vertov
CAST: Mikhael Kaufman, Elizaveta Svilova
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 98% Certified Fresh

PLOT: This highly influential quasi-documentary captures a day in the life of a Russian city, as well as the cameraman doing the filming.


Film scholars more highly educated than I may be able to dispute this, but I think Man with a Movie Camera qualifies as the most “meta” film ever made: a movie about the making of itself.  Filmmaker Dziga Vertov, who cut his teeth on Soviet newsreels, cobbled together three years of footage of everyday life in Moscow and condensed it into a 68-minute quasi-documentary/newsreel that acts as a virtual wormhole into the past, revealing people and activities and life that is not that far removed from our own experiences.  Spliced into this footage are shots of the film’s cinematographer carrying the camera around on a tripod, setting it up, and shooting the footage we’re seeing, sometimes putting himself in mortal danger for the sake of getting the perfect shot.

Vertov used every camera trick available at the time, including [bear with me while I consult IMDb]: double exposure, time lapse/fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, reversed footage, and even stop motion animation.  The resulting film is extremely reminiscent of two of my other favorite films, Koyaanisqatsi (1982) and Baraka (1992), though the reverse is clearly more accurate.  When those two movies were hailed as art house masterpieces, fans of Vertov’s film must have been thinking, “Yawn, been there, done that.”

I’m sure entire books and even college courses have been written and designed around Man with a Movie Camera with its metatextual layers and its impossible-to-overstate influence on filmmakers up to and including the present day.  (There was even a small scene that reminded me of those spinning-atom “flashbacks” in Oppenheimer [2023].)  As a wise man once said, “Better to be remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”  I won’t attempt to approach this beautiful movie from an intellectual standpoint.  Rather, I want to convey the emotional effect Vertov’s techniques succeeded in creating in me as I watched.

Basically, the movie can be broken down into several chapters.  We first see a city asleep: Moscow, mostly, though some sequences were shot in Odessa, Kiev, and Kharkiv.  Early morning streets are deserted except for street sweepers and homeless folks on park benches.  Department store mannequins stare blankly onto empty sidewalks.  A young woman lies in bed asleep.  We see a car pull up to a building and pick up a passenger: a cameraman, who is “played” by the film’s cinematographer, Mikhail Kaufman.

The city awakes.  Store shutters are thrown open.  Electric streetcars and motorbuses pull out of their “stables” and head for the city.  The young woman from earlier gets out of bed and, as the quaint phrase goes, “performs her ablutions.”  In a couple of interesting sequences, homeless men on the street awake to discover a cameraman filming them.  Invasion of privacy?  Exploitation?  Perhaps.  But of the two men I recall seeing filmed this way, one of them simply made no reaction, while the other smiled and laughed, then rolled over to snooze for a few more minutes.  Hey, a cameo’s a cameo.

Then the city gets to work.  People arrive at their factory jobs.  Vast machinery is switched on.  Steel mills rumble to life, and smoke belches from towering smokestacks.  We see the cameraman climbing the crude ladder on the side of one such smokestack with no visible safety equipment.  My palms got a little sweaty just watching it.

The city streets become unbelievably congested with mobs of people, herds of streetcars, and only crude manually operated street signals to maintain order.  Trains pull in and out of train stations right on schedule – presumably.  In one absurdly dangerous shot, we watch as the cameraman places his camera directly on the track in front of an oncoming train and then remains behind the camera for as long as possible, checking focus or whatever, as the train gets closer and closer and CLOSER…then we cut to a shot of the train rolling over us as if the camera was right on the ground underneath the train.

(In the first of several such sequences, we then see a series of shots showing the cameraman has dug a hole in the middle of the tracks large enough to fit him and the camera so he can still crank the film while the train rolls over him.  First the magic, then the explanation.)

Here and there in the middle of all this, we also get shots of the film’s assistant editor, Elizaveta Svilova, laboriously poring through endless feet of film, searching for the perfect shot or the perfect splicing point, cutting and pasting, and sometimes storing small reels on shelves marked with categories like “Factory” or “Street” to be used later.  We’re really getting a look at how the sausage is made here.  But to what purpose?  Perhaps Vertov is going to great pains throughout the movie to demonstrate to the audience that the magic of montage and any emotional reactions they may experience while watching is the result of intensely hard work by manual laborers much like themselves.

Vertov even exhibits a wicked sense of timing and dark humor.  We see a short scene in which a man and woman visit a city office to sign a marriage certificate, all smiles and nerves.  This is followed shortly by another couple, who are NOT smiling, visiting the same office…this time to sign a divorce certificate.  At this point I started to wonder if these scenes were being staged.  But there is a third sequence set in the same office, where a woman hides her face from the camera with her purse.  This time they are signing a DEATH certificate.  We’re then treated to a mixed montage showing a wedding, a live birth, and a funeral: ashes to ashes, dust to dust.  Manipulative?  I guess you could make that case, but that does not diminish its power one little bit.

The raw power of the freeze frame is utilized to great effect in several shots of athletes, horses pulling carriages, and children watching a magician.  Time lapse footage shows clouds scudding past a statue, a technique that would not be widely appreciated until over fifty years later.  Workmen push heavy wheelbarrows and walk directly over the camera, followed immediately by a shot showing the cameraman lying on the ground filming the workmen as they walk over him.  This kind of juxtaposition does not ruin the film’s impact, however.  For me, it emphasized something I tend to forget: this movie – in fact, ALL movies – are created by someone with an idea and a movie camera and the chutzpah to do what it takes to make it happen.

Another idea that deserves mentioning is that Vertov created a compelling and enduring film out of vignettes of everyday life in the city.  No melodramatic scripts, no overacting, no impossible coincidences…just life.  Maybe Vertov was reminding the audiences of his day that their lives, their recreation, their struggles, were no less enthralling or exciting than anything that could be dreamed up by a Hollywood screenwriter.  “You want to see something interesting?” he seems to ask.  “Look no further than yourselves and your family and your neighbors.  You are more interesting and unique than you believe yourselves to be.  Watch…I’ll show you.”

To summarize: Man with a Movie Camera is nearly a century old, but it has lost none of its power over the years because of the director’s utilization of groundbreaking techniques that are still being used – and, in some cases, copied – in today’s film industry.  Even more so than any of the silent films by Chaplin or Keaton, it feels like a time machine, beaming images to us today from a bygone world with none of our modern luxuries but all the emotions and experiences that make us human.  There is a quick sequence showing a hospital nursery, giving us closeups of several newborns.  I found myself wondering…it’s been 95 years since the movie was made and released.  It’s conceivable that one or more of those babies might still be alive today.  I don’t really know what that would mean in the grand scheme of things, but wouldn’t that be something?

THE SWIMMER (1968)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Frank Perry [reshoots directed by an uncredited Sydney Pollack]
CAST: Burt Lancaster, Janet Landgard, Marge Champion, Kim Hunter, Joan Rivers (!)
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100% Fresh

PLOT: A well-off ad man visiting friends in a suburban town impulsively decides to swim home via all his neighbors’ swimming pools.


The decidedly odd The Swimmer starts out like it’s going to be one of those pretentious mid-to-late ‘60s “art films” featuring attention-getting zooms, quick edits, and a kitschy/dreamy score that oozes “soap opera” from every note.  (Incidentally, this was Marvin Hamlisch’s first film score.)  It starts mundanely enough, but then it veers imperceptibly into vaguely Lynchian territory, until by the end we’re no longer sure what’s real.  If the payoff doesn’t quite live up to the build-up, I’m prepared to forgive it because of the film’s daring originality, Burt Lancaster’s nude scene notwithstanding.  Hope I didn’t spoil that for you.

Based on an acclaimed story by John Cheever, The Swimmer opens with those ostentatious zoom shots/quick edits of forests and woodland creatures before we meet Ned Merrill (Lancaster), visiting a friend and swimming in their pool.  The neighborhood is decidedly upper-middle class.  The conversation between Merrill and his friends is banal to the point of tedium.  “You ever see such a glorious day?”  “You old son of a gun!”  “Ned Merrill!  How are you, sport?”  Who talks like this?  The dialogue evokes the kind of vibe you’d get from reading a screenplay written by a moderately talented middle-schooler, or perhaps by an advertising executive with no sense of how people talk in the real world.

After some more boring pleasantries and treacly politeness and observations of how nice the weather is, Ned has a brainwave.  He and his wife and daughters live in a house on a hill a mile away.  Or two.  Or five.  It’s never really made clear.  Anyway, he realizes that his friends and neighbors, all of whom have pools, form a river that he can use to swim all the way home.  He never explains where this decision comes from, but whatever, off he goes, to the consternation of his neighbors.

That’s the plot in a nutshell.  For the rest of the film, Ned will visit his neighbors one by one, popping in unexpectedly, take a lap in their pool, and jog off to the next one.  Along the way, he’ll have encounters with his neighbors that will range from friendly to strained to flirty to outright hostility, and two unsavory encounters that involve borderline sexual harassment.  By the time he reaches his goal, everything we’ve seen before will be redefined in light of new information.  I had an idea of what would happen, but I was wrong.  Sort of.  See for yourself.

The Swimmer is a borderline one-trick-pony movie, like Primal Fear.  As good as that movie is, and as good as Edward Norton’s performance is, after watching it the first time, all the suspense is gone.  But The Swimmer is so much odder than anything I’ve ever seen that it gets some kind of award just because of its oddness.  We’re invited to simply watch a man swim in other peoples’ pools and talk to the owners.  At one such encounter, Ned marvels that their 20-year-old daughter, Julie, has grown up so much.  He mentions his own daughters, Ellen and Aggie, probably playing tennis at home.  Julie suggests driving to Ned’s home to meet them…but Ned changes the subject.  This will occur repeatedly.  Ned will mention his wife or daughters, someone will ask how they are, and Ned will abruptly move to the next topic.  (It’s this behavior that made me think I knew what was going on, but as I said, I was wrong.)

The encounter with Julie takes an odd turn: he invites her to join him on his swim, and she agrees.  After crashing a neighbor’s pool, and Ned hurts his leg jumping over a hurdle meant for horses (long story), Ned and Julie share an odd conversation where she confesses she used to like smelling his shirts when she was much younger.  Ned takes in this information and starts flirting with Julie, who is at least 30 years his junior, to the point where it looks as if something unsavory is about to happen.  Nothing does, but the scene itself is a very strange detour, even in the middle of this strange movie.

While Ned’s encounters with his neighbors are all different in one way or another, the first few all have the same thing in common: they’re all trite, by which I mean their dialogue with Ned is filled with lines and sentences that sound, well…scripted.  Not a word of it sounds or feels genuine.  I suppose one could interpret this triteness as an indictment of modern suburbia, where one house and one pool is so like the next as to be indistinguishable from each other.  The same could be said of the people.  One guy brags about his pool’s water filter: “It filters 99.99.99% of all solid matter out of the water.”  Another house features an enormous sliding roof so people can…go swimming while it rains, I guess?  We are treated to scenes of luxury that border on decadence.  At one party, caviar is served, and the guests scoop it up as if it were onion dip.  I was reminded of a line from The Philadelphia Story about “the privileged class enjoying its privileges.”  Is The Swimmer a clumsily disguised diatribe against consumerism?  Sure, why not.

At the end of the day, while The Swimmer does have a buried subtext that is not fully revealed right away, I’ll admit the subtext is not what compels me to recommend it.  I recommend it because it is a cleverly constructed “head-fake” movie, making me think it was about one thing when it was about something else altogether.  Viewers more astute than I may have guessed what was going on, and more power to them.  For myself, my theory was proven wrong at the finale.  The Swimmer gets points for originality, with deductions for the cheesy score and hammy acting.  The back of the Blu-ray describes the movie perfectly: “…a feature-length ‘Twilight Zone’ by way of The New Yorker.”

(P.S.  If you have “seeing Burt Lancaster’s bare ass” on your Movie-Watching Bingo card, this movie will help you fill it.  You’re welcome.)

THE TWO OF US (France, 1967)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Claude Berri
CAST: Michel Simon, Roger Carel, Paul Préboist, Alain Cohen
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 94% Fresh

PLOT: In German-occupied France during World War II, a Jewish child is sent away from his family and conceals his religious affiliation from the anti-Semitic elderly man that takes care of him.


What are we to make of Pépé Dupont, the grandfatherly old man at the center of Claude Berri’s film The Two of Us?  Here is the kind of craggy, crotchety, yet endearing old man we’d like to turn into when we get to be his age.  He loves his 15-year-old dog almost as much as he loves his wife, if not more.  He’s a vegetarian who doesn’t like it when his wife cooks rabbit for dinner.  “Cannibal!” he exclaims.  He makes friends easily with Claude, the little 9-year-old boy who comes to live with him and his wife in the French countryside in late 1943, sent away by his Jewish parents who feared for his safety during the German occupation of Paris.

But Dupont makes some comments at the dinner table about Jews that makes it very clear: he is anti-Semitic.  He quotes statistics about how the percentage of Jews in political office is vastly higher than the percentage of Jews in France.  The little boy, Claude, is instantly cautious and tentatively asks Dupont, how can you tell if someone is a Jew?  “Why, by their smell, and their large noses, and their flat feet that keeps them out of the army, but look how fast they run to make money!”

These scenes and others like them are intentionally jarring because they emerge from a man who is utterly unaware he’s talking to a Jewish child.  Dupont’s deep-seated bigotry is as much a part of him as his beloved dog, Kinou, but it is so blindingly wrongheaded that he completely overlooks the fact that Claude is Jewish himself.  It’s a situation that is both funny and heartbreaking at the same time: funny because we laugh at the ignorance of someone blinkered by his prejudices, and heartbreaking that such attitudes are harbored by a man who would otherwise be the perfect picture of a loving grandfather.  (Or surrogate grandfather in this case, but you get the idea.)

The Two of Us is based on the actual experiences of director Claude Berri, which makes the film even more poignant.  Over the course of the film, little Claude will cautiously befriend Dupont, but he is careful to never let Dupont’s wife wash him (it wouldn’t do for her to see he has been circumcised).  He memorizes the Lord’s prayer.  He assumes a new last name – Longuet instead of the more Jewish “Langmann.”  Over time, he even becomes bold enough to tweak Dupont’s ignorance.  When Dupont says all Jews have large noses and curly hair, Claude gleefully points out Dupont’s own bulbous nose and frazzled hair and runs away in mock terror: “You’re a Jew!”

Perhaps I’m making this film sound like a dreary exercise in pointing out the obvious – anti-Semitism is wrong, DUH – but it’s far more than that.  Berri’s film is very careful to never, ever include a scene in which Dupont is shown the error of his ways.  The closest we get is when Dupont’s son refuses to enter his house because Dupont supports the Vichy (pro-German) Prime Minister Pétain as opposed to Charles de Gaulle.  Aside from that, we are simply allowed to observe Dupont’s behavior and Claude’s reactions.  Berri is smart enough to realize that people (generally) know right from wrong on an instinctive level and do not need to be preached at.  So few films dare to assume their audiences have a brain that it’s a relief when one is discovered, waiting in some long-forgotten corner of cinema history.

The dichotomy between Dupont’s beliefs and his obvious affection for Claude define the word “provocative.”  It forces us to realize that not all bigots are loud-mouthed blowhards.  They can be just as charming and effusive and loving as your best friend’s favorite uncle or aunt.  Is Dupont evil in The Two of Us?  Some of his core beliefs are rotten, for sure, but I started to take pity on him a little bit.  Like so many other racists, his attitudes were probably taught to him by his own parents, and he simply accepts them as reality without realizing how deeply wrong he is.  The phrase “the banality of evil” has perhaps been overused of late (especially in the wake of Jonathan Glazer’s brilliant film The Zone of Interest), but it occurred to me time and again during scenes showing Dupont playing with Claude, doing chores with Claude, helping Claude with his first crush, and so on.  We get lulled into the idea of a wonderfully jolly fellow…and then he says something anti-Semitic, and it all comes crashing down again.

Not only that, but we get hints and omens of what is occurring on the wider world stage during the war.  At Claude’s new school, children’s heads are checked for lice.  When they are discovered on another boy’s head, the teacher immediately sits him down and shaves his head, right then and there, using a pair of uncomfortable-looking clippers, to the amusement of the other schoolchildren.  As the boy’s hair falls to his feet in clumps, and the other kids are laughing, Berri cuts to Claude, who observes the process without a trace of emotion.  What is he thinking?  Is he aware of the concentration camps?  Or were they still just rumors to everyone else in France in 1943?

The Two of Us feels like a Fellini film (poignant reminiscences of childhood) cross-bred with a Stanley Kramer message picture, minus the sermonizing.  It shifts between delight and solemnity with no warning, making each shift stand out that much more, and enhancing the storytelling by making us passive observers, letting us make our own judgements without guidance from an overanxious screenplay.  This movie was made to be discussed around the water cooler, or on a podcast, or in a movie chat room, just so we can try to wrap our heads around exactly what this film is trying to say by making the kindly old man at the center of the film the source of all of its moral and ethical conflict.