Short Take: The Earrings of Madame de...

Max Ophüls’ 1953 film The Earrings of Madame de… is an exquisitely made romantic tragedy. In Belle Époque France, the spendthrift high-society wife (Danielle Darrieux) of an army general (Charles Boyer) finds herself in debt. To pay off her creditors, she sells the diamond earrings he gave her years earlier as a wedding gift. After she covers for their absence by claiming they were lost or stolen, her jeweler, fearful of a scandal for his business, tells the husband of the sale. He is sanguine, and he repurchases the earrings as a going-away present for his mistress, who is leaving Paris for Constantinople. The mistress sells the earrings in Constantinople after losing her money gambling. They are then bought on a whim by an Italian diplomat (Vittorio De Sica). He takes them with him to Paris, where he meets the wife. The two fall in love. He makes a gift of the earrings to her. She accounts for their return by telling her husband she found them in her opera gloves. This first part of the story is a light-on-its-feet farce. Ophüls creates a relaxed atmosphere in the lavish setting with extraordinarily fluid staging and camerawork. The montage of ballroom dances in which the wife and the diplomat fall in love is especially impressive. The dances, which take place over several weeks, are so deftly edited together that it feels they occur in a single take. The movements of the camera, the two dancing, and the dancers around them combine to create a swooning quality. One can’t also help but admire how smoothly Ophüls shifts the tone from farce to tragedy in the film’s second half. His three leads all give fine performances, but the transition seems most enabled by the calm assurance of the filmmaking's flamboyance. The story never gets lost in the style, though. Ophüls builds the drama to a devastating ending, topped off with a moment of redemption from the wife. One may want to go back and savor Ophüls’ filmmaking mastery scene by scene in the way one returns to the better paragraphs of the finest prose writers. But part of the elegance being enjoyed is how effectively the story is told. The screenplay, adapted from a novel by Louise de Vilmorin, is credited to Marcel Achard, Ophüls, and Annette Wadamant. The marvelous sets were designed by Jean d’Eaubonne. The costumers were Georges (Yury) Annenkov and Rosine Delamare. Christian Matras was the cinematographer.

Short Take: The Band Wagon

The Band Wagon, directed by Vincente Minnelli, with song and dance numbers staged by Michael Kidd, is a delightful, grandly produced mix of backstage musical and romantic comedy. Fred Astaire plays a middle-aged former star of Hollywood musicals. He returns to New York, where a pair of playwright friends (Nanette Fabray and Oscar Levant) tell him of their newest effort, a musical-comedy stage play that could be a perfect comeback vehicle. But the director (Jack Buchanan) sees the play as a modernist reworking of Goethe's Faust. He transforms the light musical into a pompous spectacle. He also casts a rising-star ballerina (Cyd Charisse) as the female lead. Screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green set up a hilarious clash between artistic pretension and popular-entertainment values--the latter win out--and the romantic comedy is built around the protagonists' proud devotion to their dance styles: him with tap and other pop hoofing, and her with the tonier ballet. They eventually realize they're not so far apart, and they gloriously rework the show after its doomed premiere. The most ambitious set piece is "Girl Hunt," a send-up of pulp-fiction private-detective stories. It features Astaire as the detective and Charisse as both the blonde and brunette femmes fatales. The narration is a clever parody of pulp prose ("She came at me in sections... more curves than a scenic railway"), and the only aspect that outdoes the terrific dancing of Astaire, Charisse, and the supporting players is the gorgeous color design of the outfits and sets. Even more impressive is "A Shine on Your Shoes," a slapstick-tap number set in an arcade, and featuring Astaire in a partial dance duet with Leroy Daniels as the shoeshine man. But the finest moment is "Dancing in the Dark," with Astaire and Charisse. The characters stroll through Central Park, and as the stroll becomes a dance, the two fall in love. Their blossoming rapport is beautifully rendered by the unisons and counterpoints in their movements. It is one of the most sublime dance numbers in all of film, and easily holds its own with the best of Astaire's celebrated work with Ginger Rogers. The other numbers include "By Myself," the surreal slapstick "Triplets," and two performances of "That's Entertainment!" The cinematography is by Harry Jackson, with contributions by the uncredited George J. Folsey. E. Preston Ames and Cedric Gibbons did the magnificent production design. The songs are by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz.

Short Take: Duck Amuck

The high point of cartoon animation may be the seven-minute Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts produced by Warner Bros. between the late 1940s and the early 1960s. The characters--Bugs Bunny, Road Runner, Daffy Duck, and many others--had strong, sharply etched comic personalities, and the films, directed by Charles M. "Chuck" Jones and others, feature some of the most imaginative slapstick set pieces ever. Choosing the best one is a challenging task, but one of the obvious candidates is Duck Amuck, directed by Jones and featuring the high-strung, quick-tempered Daffy Duck. The story, credited to Michael Maltese, has a simple, straightforward conflict: Daffy versus the animator. All Daffy wants is some semblance of normality, but the animator (silent and unseen until the end) keeps arbitrarily changing things--the sets, the costumes, Daffy's appearance, and even his voice--all to Daffy's ever-mounting rage. The film is a hilarious slapstick dramatization of the formal aspects of picture construction and animated filmmaking. Additionally, it's a testament to the conceptual strength of the Daffy character. No matter how much his appearance and voice are altered, his personality is always unmistakable. And though the subtext is never emphasized, the material also functions as a wry parody of absurdist-existential narratives featuring an individual in conflict with a capricious God. The film is an extraordinarily artful and witty effort. The music is by Carl Stalling. Mel Blanc designed and performed the voice characterizations. Bugs Bunny, the most popular Warner Bros. character, has a cameo.

Short Take: Tokyo Story

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Over the last few decades, the 1953 Japanese film Tokyo Story, directed by Yasujiro Ozu, has become a fixture of consensus best-films-of-all-time lists. A viewer may be initially puzzled as to why. It’s a quiet family drama, and Ozu displays no conspicuous filmmaking dazzle. The story begins with an elderly Japanese couple (Chishu Ryu and Chieko Higashiyama), who live in a small town with their youngest daughter (Kyoko Kagawa), preparing to travel to Tokyo. The couple are going there to visit their eldest son (So Yamamura) and daughter (Haruko Sugimura), who live in the city with their families. But once the couple arrive, they find the son and daughter are so busy with their daily lives that they cannot pay the parents much attention. Resentment of the parents, particularly from the eldest daughter, also rears its head, and it’s not entirely out of place. The only person who goes out of her way to entertain the elderly couple is the widow (Setsuko Hara) of their middle son. The couple eventually returns home before they planned. But tragedy strikes soon afterward, and three of the family members come to terms with the truth of their family’s internal problems. For all their remorse, they realize one can only move forward, and the additional pain of that must be accepted. Ozu concerns himself entirely with serving the story, and he presents it with considerable understatement. The rigor of that understatement is extraordinary, and the thematic core of the film--the tacit conflicts that arise between parents and children over the years, and how the generations invariably drift apart--is so resonant that one cannot get the picture out of one’s head. Ozu’s bravura isn’t in flashy camerawork or epic story construction. It’s in finding drama in the mundane and realizing it with the utmost precision. In many ways, his sophistication is the most impressive kind. Kogo Noda collaborated with Ozu on the screenplay.