Showing posts with label 1965 Films. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1965 Films. Show all posts
Monday, July 11, 2016
Short Take: Doctor Zhivago (1965)
Tuesday, May 17, 2016
Film Review: Alphaville
This review was originally published at The Hooded Utilitarian on July 18, 2012.
In general, I’m not sympathetic to the auteurist film aesthetic. I think films tend to be better when the director treats the screenplay as a foundation instead of a springboard. But when a director with an auteurist sensibility is in peak form, as Jean-Luc Godard was during much of his nouvelle vague period, the films can be as impressive as they come. Breathless, Vivre sa vie, and Band of Outsiders are great films. Part of that greatness comes from one’s awareness of a richness to the final picture that is far removed from the story Godard started with. Breathless, for example, would seem on paper to be just a banal little tale of a hood on the run from the police. Godard, of course, transformed it into a portrait of contemporary life among young people in early-‘60s Paris. The movie has a freshness that remains striking over 50 years after it was made. Godard’s best nouvelle vague films are the visions of a director, not the visions of a scenarist that the director is helping to realize.
With Alphaville, Godard’s ninth feature, one wishes he had been able to realize a directorial vision to the same degree. If there was ever material that needed transformation by the filmmaking process, the banal science-fiction pulp of Alphaville is it. I don’t mean to suggest that Godard’s handling of the material is at odds with the auteurist aesthetic; there’s considerable directorial imagination in every scene. But it never rises above the decorative. Godard still seems shackled to pulp conventions throughout.
What may have undermined Godard the most was the decision to build the film around the character Lemmy Caution, a secret agent/private detective featured in a series of '50s and '60s French B-movies. The problems were further compounded by the casting of Eddie Constantine, the actor who portrayed Caution in those films.. I haven't seen the other Lemmy Caution pictures, but in Alphaville, Constantine plays the character as the embodiment of the noir tough-guy private-detective cliché. When one watches Jean-Paul Belmondo’s hoodlum in Breathless, or Anna Karina’s femme fatale in Pierrot le fou, one doesn’t identify them with their antecedents in Hollywood films except, perhaps, as a joke. The characters are thoroughly informed by the actors’ personalities, and Godard shapes the scenes to best take advantage of this. But Constantine's Lemmy Caution never comes across as anything but a predetermined stock character. Godard doesn't play this clichéd figure for irony, and the novelty of seeing such a character as the hero in a science-fiction thriller wears off very quickly. He’s still the taciturn man-of-action on a mission into an alien, dehumanized society, where he falls in love with a girl whom he rescues and escapes with after the mission’s completion. In other words, he’s a trite protagonist in a trite story. Godard is so weighed down by him that the film can't rise above its pulp foundation.
Constantine’s age works against the film as well. He was 47 when the film was shot, and the decision to romantically pair him with 24-year-old Anna Karina does not come off. In Breathless and Band of Outsiders, Godard showed a tremendous affinity for romance among younger characters. He’s charmed by it, and he extends his delight in what he’s showing to the audience. When he depicts the relationships of somewhat older people, as in Contempt and Une Femme mariée, he’s cold and judgmental, but he manages to be fairly incisive. With the May-December romance of Alphaville, he’s neither enchanting nor perceptive. The relationship here is a writer’s conceit, and it’s unconvincing onscreen. There is no rapport or tension between Constantine and Karina. Karina tries--she makes a game use of the bashful, looking-for-approval mannerisms that were so effective in Band of Outsiders--but Constantine does nothing to play off her. The scenes between them come across like a stern father lecturing his unsophisticated daughter.
The material that’s center stage in Alphaville is hopelessly inadequate, but one can’t help but admire Godard’s work around the edges. There was no budget for elaborate sets or special effects, so Godard and cinematographer Raoul Coutard had to make locations in contemporary Paris seem futuristic and otherworldly. The camera is frequently angled upward to show the ceilings and emphasize the pervasiveness of fluorescent lights. Reflections in glass and on the walls are common in many of the interior shots. Characters are often shown walking up and down modernist stairwells, and Godard makes effective use of power-plant locations in several key scenes. I was especially struck by his use of a recording studio for the parts in which Constantine’s character is interrogated by the computer that rules Alphaville. Constantine sits in the recording space with suspended microphones moving around him and lights shining and blinking through the control-room glass. The film’s visual schemes are ingeniously eerie.
Godard has some inspired staging ideas as well. After Constantine’s character destroys the city’s ruling computer--I won’t spoil the clever way he does it--the minds of the city residents are short-circuited: they flail around and embrace the walls with their arms. Sex is depersonalized in the film’s world, and thus useless as a trope for love’s consummation, so Godard has the Constantine and Karina characters consummate their feelings poetically. Their love scene is a montage of their faces while Karina reads a passage by poet Paul Éluard in voiceover. Conceptually, Godard's treatment captures the passionate feelings and eternity-in-a-moment quality of such scenes perfectly; one can almost forget that Constantine and Karina aren't believable as a couple. The most brilliant bit is Godard’s depiction of the public executions of those who have violated the city’s ban on emotion. They are made to stand on a diving board at a swimming pool while they are strafed with machine-gun fire. When they fall into the water, a group of women make a choreographed series of dives into the pool. The women then swim over to the condemned person and and drown him. As a piece of absurdist satiric spectacle, this is unsurpassed by anything Godard has done elsewhere. The film is worthwhile on the basis of these scenes alone.
But it’s a shame Godard can’t make Alphaville more than the sum of its better moments. When he has used pulp scenarios in other films, he can usually be relied on to transcend them either in whole or in part. What seems necessary is for him to give the story and characters he discovers while shooting the film precedence over what he’s conceived beforehand. Godard the director should be in charge. Alphaville fails because he didn’t realize the material in that way; the auteur of Alphaville is unfortunately Godard the scenarist. For a filmmaker like him, that's deadly.
Reviews of other films by Jean-Luc Godard:
With Alphaville, Godard’s ninth feature, one wishes he had been able to realize a directorial vision to the same degree. If there was ever material that needed transformation by the filmmaking process, the banal science-fiction pulp of Alphaville is it. I don’t mean to suggest that Godard’s handling of the material is at odds with the auteurist aesthetic; there’s considerable directorial imagination in every scene. But it never rises above the decorative. Godard still seems shackled to pulp conventions throughout.
What may have undermined Godard the most was the decision to build the film around the character Lemmy Caution, a secret agent/private detective featured in a series of '50s and '60s French B-movies. The problems were further compounded by the casting of Eddie Constantine, the actor who portrayed Caution in those films.. I haven't seen the other Lemmy Caution pictures, but in Alphaville, Constantine plays the character as the embodiment of the noir tough-guy private-detective cliché. When one watches Jean-Paul Belmondo’s hoodlum in Breathless, or Anna Karina’s femme fatale in Pierrot le fou, one doesn’t identify them with their antecedents in Hollywood films except, perhaps, as a joke. The characters are thoroughly informed by the actors’ personalities, and Godard shapes the scenes to best take advantage of this. But Constantine's Lemmy Caution never comes across as anything but a predetermined stock character. Godard doesn't play this clichéd figure for irony, and the novelty of seeing such a character as the hero in a science-fiction thriller wears off very quickly. He’s still the taciturn man-of-action on a mission into an alien, dehumanized society, where he falls in love with a girl whom he rescues and escapes with after the mission’s completion. In other words, he’s a trite protagonist in a trite story. Godard is so weighed down by him that the film can't rise above its pulp foundation.
Constantine’s age works against the film as well. He was 47 when the film was shot, and the decision to romantically pair him with 24-year-old Anna Karina does not come off. In Breathless and Band of Outsiders, Godard showed a tremendous affinity for romance among younger characters. He’s charmed by it, and he extends his delight in what he’s showing to the audience. When he depicts the relationships of somewhat older people, as in Contempt and Une Femme mariée, he’s cold and judgmental, but he manages to be fairly incisive. With the May-December romance of Alphaville, he’s neither enchanting nor perceptive. The relationship here is a writer’s conceit, and it’s unconvincing onscreen. There is no rapport or tension between Constantine and Karina. Karina tries--she makes a game use of the bashful, looking-for-approval mannerisms that were so effective in Band of Outsiders--but Constantine does nothing to play off her. The scenes between them come across like a stern father lecturing his unsophisticated daughter.
The material that’s center stage in Alphaville is hopelessly inadequate, but one can’t help but admire Godard’s work around the edges. There was no budget for elaborate sets or special effects, so Godard and cinematographer Raoul Coutard had to make locations in contemporary Paris seem futuristic and otherworldly. The camera is frequently angled upward to show the ceilings and emphasize the pervasiveness of fluorescent lights. Reflections in glass and on the walls are common in many of the interior shots. Characters are often shown walking up and down modernist stairwells, and Godard makes effective use of power-plant locations in several key scenes. I was especially struck by his use of a recording studio for the parts in which Constantine’s character is interrogated by the computer that rules Alphaville. Constantine sits in the recording space with suspended microphones moving around him and lights shining and blinking through the control-room glass. The film’s visual schemes are ingeniously eerie.
Godard has some inspired staging ideas as well. After Constantine’s character destroys the city’s ruling computer--I won’t spoil the clever way he does it--the minds of the city residents are short-circuited: they flail around and embrace the walls with their arms. Sex is depersonalized in the film’s world, and thus useless as a trope for love’s consummation, so Godard has the Constantine and Karina characters consummate their feelings poetically. Their love scene is a montage of their faces while Karina reads a passage by poet Paul Éluard in voiceover. Conceptually, Godard's treatment captures the passionate feelings and eternity-in-a-moment quality of such scenes perfectly; one can almost forget that Constantine and Karina aren't believable as a couple. The most brilliant bit is Godard’s depiction of the public executions of those who have violated the city’s ban on emotion. They are made to stand on a diving board at a swimming pool while they are strafed with machine-gun fire. When they fall into the water, a group of women make a choreographed series of dives into the pool. The women then swim over to the condemned person and and drown him. As a piece of absurdist satiric spectacle, this is unsurpassed by anything Godard has done elsewhere. The film is worthwhile on the basis of these scenes alone.
But it’s a shame Godard can’t make Alphaville more than the sum of its better moments. When he has used pulp scenarios in other films, he can usually be relied on to transcend them either in whole or in part. What seems necessary is for him to give the story and characters he discovers while shooting the film precedence over what he’s conceived beforehand. Godard the director should be in charge. Alphaville fails because he didn’t realize the material in that way; the auteur of Alphaville is unfortunately Godard the scenarist. For a filmmaker like him, that's deadly.
Reviews of other films by Jean-Luc Godard:
- Band of Outsiders
- Breathless
- Les Carabiniers
- Contempt (Le Mépris)
- Une Femme Mariée (A Married Woman)
- First Name: Carmen
- Made in U. S. A.
- Le Petit soldat
- Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live)
- Weekend
- A Woman Is a Woman
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
Short Take: The Avengers, Season 4, Episode 13: "Too Many Christmas Trees"
This review was originally published on Pol Culture.
The Avengers TV series embraced surrealist and absurdist elements, but it was never locked into any one use of them. The show was perfectly comfortable playing them for either humor or suspense. “Too Many Christmas Trees” (Season 4, Episode 13) sticks pretty firmly to the latter, but it doesn’t seem to take itself all that seriously--the episode seems to revel in the artifice those elements require. Tony Williamson’s teleplay begins with the show’s hero John Steed (Patrick Macnee) plagued with nightmares filled with Christmas imagery: multiple decorated trees, wrapped presents, and a particularly ghoulish Santa Claus. Most disturbingly, the dreams also anticipate the future. The décor in the dreams matches that of a weekend-long Christmas retreat Steed and his partner Emma Peel (Diana Rigg) later attend, and Steed also foresees the death of a fellow intelligence agent. His dreams while at the retreat are even more unsettling--one includes his death. Peel suspects something outlandishly sinister is afoot, and she’s of course right. The director, Roy Ward Baker, effectively conveys the unreality of the dream sequences by making them conspicuously theatrical and hyperbolic. The odd rhythm he gives them is heightened by the naturalistic pacing of the other scenes. They are wonderfully bizarre, and they help make the story’s mystery an eerie delight. One is also happy that the show’s trademark humor is very much on display, from the in-joke about Cathy Gale, Peel’s predecessor as Steed’s partner, to the amusing costumes at the Dickens-themed masquerade party at the retreat. (Diana Rigg is the most fetching Oliver Twist one will ever see.) The funniest moment, though, comes at the end, when a secret weapon Steed gives Peel is used in a most anticlimactic way. The episode, which first aired on Christmas Day, 1965, is one of the series’ high points.
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
Short Take: The Avengers, Season 4, Episode 4: "Death at Bargain Prices"
This review was originally published on Pol Culture.
The fourth season of The Avengers TV series saw Diana Rigg's Emma Peel take over the leading lady role from Honor Blackman's Cathy Gale. The series then entered the period it's most famous for. As compelling as Blackman was, she lacked Rigg's talent for wry humor. The flirtatious back-and-forth between Rigg's Peel and John Steed (Patrick Macnee), the series hero, was far wittier, and the lighter tone it brought to the series quickly spread to the stories. Tongue-in-cheek humor became as much a mainstay of the adventure plots as the suspense. "Death at Bargain Prices," Rigg's fourth episode, is a terrific example of how quickly the show was transformed by her arrival. Producer Brian Clemens' teleplay has a standard pulp adventure plot: the heroes must stop a madman scheming to destroy London with a hidden bomb. What makes the episode fun is the department-store setting. Peel goes undercover as a salesgirl to investigate, and her stationing in the lingerie department allows for some hilariously saucy banter with Steed. The setting also provides fresh opportunities for the action. The toy, food, camping, sporting goods, and home appliances departments all have their roles to play before the madman's plot is foiled. My favorite bit is when Steed escapes the villain's henchmen with a toy gun that fires ping-pong balls. Clemens, director Charles Crichton, and the stars all recognize that adventure stories can offer more than just action and suspense--they're at their best when they provide wit, charm, and a sense of fun as well. It's a terrific hour of series TV. The episode first aired in England on October 23, 1965.
Monday, April 22, 2013
Short Take: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (film)
This review was originally published on Pol Culture.
The 1965 film adaptation of John le Carré’s novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, directed and produced by Martin Ritt, is a workmanlike, no-frills, and effective effort. Richard Burton plays Alec Leamas, a British intelligence field officer during the Cold War. As the film begins, he watches as the service’s Berlin operation, which he oversees, collapses. He then returns to civilian life, and appears unable to adjust. The truth is he is marking himself as a target for defection by East German operatives in Britain, His ultimate aim is to manipulate the upper echelon of the Communist country’s intelligence corps. As the scheme progresses, he discovers the full extent of how he and the woman he loves (Claire Bloom) are pawns in the double-dealings of intelligence officials in both countries. The script, credited to Paul Dehn and Guy Trosper, does a capable job of adapting le Carré’s novel. However, one may wish it had followed the book’s lead of letting the audience discover the specifics of Leamas’s mission instead of explaining it up front. But Ritt and the screenwriters maintain the book’s uncompromising view of the dirtiness and amorality of espionage work. One might wish Ritt were a more imaginative filmmaker, but he keeps the story tense and clear. The main reason to see the film is Burton’s fine performance. He foregoes his usual dramatic ostentation, and his restraint makes him all the more forceful. He superbly conveys the character’s misanthropy, and the nuance he shows in the character's more manipulative moments is remarkable. There is also no doubting his cold fury when the caring for others he thought behind him is used as a devious weapon. Burton is ably supported by the warmth and sympathy Bloom brings her role, and Oskar Werner is quite compelling as the protagonist’s principal German interlocutor. Oswald Morris’ gritty black-and-white cinematography serves the material well.
The 1965 film adaptation of John le Carré’s novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, directed and produced by Martin Ritt, is a workmanlike, no-frills, and effective effort. Richard Burton plays Alec Leamas, a British intelligence field officer during the Cold War. As the film begins, he watches as the service’s Berlin operation, which he oversees, collapses. He then returns to civilian life, and appears unable to adjust. The truth is he is marking himself as a target for defection by East German operatives in Britain, His ultimate aim is to manipulate the upper echelon of the Communist country’s intelligence corps. As the scheme progresses, he discovers the full extent of how he and the woman he loves (Claire Bloom) are pawns in the double-dealings of intelligence officials in both countries. The script, credited to Paul Dehn and Guy Trosper, does a capable job of adapting le Carré’s novel. However, one may wish it had followed the book’s lead of letting the audience discover the specifics of Leamas’s mission instead of explaining it up front. But Ritt and the screenwriters maintain the book’s uncompromising view of the dirtiness and amorality of espionage work. One might wish Ritt were a more imaginative filmmaker, but he keeps the story tense and clear. The main reason to see the film is Burton’s fine performance. He foregoes his usual dramatic ostentation, and his restraint makes him all the more forceful. He superbly conveys the character’s misanthropy, and the nuance he shows in the character's more manipulative moments is remarkable. There is also no doubting his cold fury when the caring for others he thought behind him is used as a devious weapon. Burton is ably supported by the warmth and sympathy Bloom brings her role, and Oskar Werner is quite compelling as the protagonist’s principal German interlocutor. Oswald Morris’ gritty black-and-white cinematography serves the material well.
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