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: Sisters

Brian De Palma’s 1972 film Sisters, starring Margot Kidder, is no longer a film that can be watched on its own terms. One can’t help but consider it relative to De Palma and Kidder’s other work. The picture is a horror thriller built around the mystery surrounding two separated Siamese twins (both played by Kidder) and the murder one of them commits. For De Palma, the film (like his subsequent Phantom of the Paradise) functions as a bridge between the cultural satire he was initially known for, and the thriller-suspense material that now defines his reputation. He’s at his best here with the cultural satire, specifically the lampoon of the Candid Camera TV show the film opens with. The thriller material is largely reworkings of elements from Alfred Hitchcock films—clever but ultimately empty. De Palma highlights the absurdities, but doesn’t go much beyond that. He has yet to develop the incisiveness with which he would investigate these tropes in his later efforts. He does provide the thrills, but the grisliness aside, it’s in a bare-bones, 1970s action-TV-series manner. Anyone expecting the gorgeous staging and camerawork that are the most admirable hallmarks of his mature style will be sorely disappointed. (He was still learning. Reportedly an extended tracking-shot treatment of a police apartment search was heavily reworked in the editing room because the footage looked too awkward.) Other steps toward the filmmaking style he developed, such as the use of split-screen, aren’t very deft. He was still learning his way with the actors, too. The dialogue scenes have a rather stilted quality. Margot Kidder is impressive, though. As the sister who’s center-stage, she speaks with a Quebecois accent, and is a warm, emotionally fluid presence. It’s a pleasant contrast to the brittle, anxious Lois Lane that defined her career in the Christopher Reeve Superman pictures. The best aspect of her work here is her ability to reconcile this softer manner with the violence a sister commits. The cast also includes Jennifer Salt as a ninny newspaper reporter, Lisle Wilson as the murder victim, and Charles Durning as a comic private detective. (The movie's final shot, featuring Durning, is a piece of surreal-absurdist tableaux that ranks with the best of Luis Buñuel.) The script is credited to De Palma and Louisa Rose. Bernard Herrmann’s musical score is a fine addition to the library of work he put together with Hitchcock and other filmmakers.

Short Take: Into the Night

The 1985 film Into the Night, directed by John Landis from a script credited to Ron Koslow, is ostensibly a romantic comic thriller. But in its odd, rather bumbling way, it’s about as close as Hollywood filmmaking has ever gotten to the poetic, ennui-minded dramas of the great Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni. Jeff Goldblum stars as Ed Okin, a thirtysomething Los Angeles aerospace engineer. He’s at a professional dead end, his wife is cheating on him, and he can’t sleep. The night after discovering his wife’s infidelity, he drives to the airport. Just as he changes his mind about whatever he was planning, Diana (Michelle Pfeiffer) jumps onto the hood of his car, with a quartet of Iranian mercenaries hot on her trail. The two escape the mercenaries, and Ed spends the next 24 hours helping Diana in her efforts to dig herself out of the hole of gem-smuggling intrigues she’s found herself in. Among other things, the picture is a trip through the Hollywood demimonde. It is not much of a thriller, though. Koslow’s plotting isn’t clever or tense, and Landis seems determined, despite the occasional grisliness, to keep the action scenes as mundane as possible. The picture is not especially funny, either; the humor is droll and rarely laugh-out-loud. There’s also not much of a love story. While Ed and Diana find a rapport, their one kiss is platonic, and if the two ever have a romance, it’s only after the end credits roll. The Antonioni comparison may seem a reach, but while Landis is nowhere Antonioni’s equal as a filmmaking stylist, and he’s certainly no poet, the dramatization of Ed’s anomie and the swank L. A.-after-dark settings do capture a good deal of the atmosphere that defines the Italian director’s films. The feel of Edward Hopper paintings such as "Nighthawks" also comes to mind. Overall, the unusual tone and off-kilter rhythms are compelling even when the story isn’t. Landis also has the showman’s instincts to keep the picture hopping. He populates the goings-on with a bevy of Hollywood eccentrics, many of whom are played by famous directors and other show-business notables. The most entertaining: David Bowie as a gangster’s henchman, Paul Mazursky as a sleazeball TV producer, and Bruce McGill, who’s hilarious as a short-tempered Elvis impersonator. Also deserving of mention: Richard Farnsworth, who delivers a lovely sentimental turn as Diana’s one-time sugar daddy, and Irene Papas, as the imperious Iranian exile behind Diana’s predicament. Probably most importantly, Landis has the considerable appeal of his two stars. Jeff Goldblum has a dry comic pathos as Ed, and he makes the character’s befuddlement at the various goings-on quite amusing. Michelle Pfeiffer is charming as Diana, and she plays every scene with a striking degree of nuance. Her talent outsizes the role. One may feel she makes Diana seem too intelligent and level-headed to get into the mess in which the character finds herself, but the fault is more with the script than the performance. There are no scenes that demonstrate Diana’s purported flightiness. Characters may talk about it, but it’s never shown. Robert Paynter provided the film’s cinematography. Ira Newborn is credited with the film’s bluesy score, which he built around guitar improvisations by B. B. King--all recorded while King watched a rough cut of the picture. King also contributed performances of three songs to the soundtrack: “Into the Night” and “My Lucille”--both original to the film--and Wilson Pickett's “In the Midnight Hour.”

Short Take: Charade

The 1963 comedy-thriller Charade, directed by Stanley Donen, recalls the more lighthearted films of master suspense filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock. It’s not as sharp a confection as it could have been, but few films can match it for wit or glamour. An American woman in Paris (Audrey Hepburn) is suddenly widowed. Her husband has been murdered, and she finds herself a target of three of his former partners (Ned Glass, James Coburn, and George Kennedy). The men are after a fortune they and the husband helped steal, and they’re certain she’s the key to finding it. A CIA official (Walter Matthau) claims to want it back for the U. S. government, but he’s perfectly content to leave her unprotected from the trio of thugs. The wild card in the intrigue is a mysterious though charming fellow (Cary Grant), who may be working with the thugs, or a thief out for himself, or the only ally the woman has. The superbly crafted script, by Peter Stone and Marc Behm, is full of ingenious twists, surprising gags, and terrific romantic interplay between the Hepburn and Grant characters. The most refreshing aspect of the love story is that Hepburn’s character is the assertive one. Stanley Donen’s direction is somewhat uneven. The pacing is strong, the Paris locations are used well, and he brings out the glamorous charm of his two stars. But he doesn’t seem to know how to handle violence. The film is grisly when it should be discreet, and the explicitness works against the tongue-in-cheek tone. The picture quickly gets back on track after these lapses, but they may still leave one with a bad taste in one’s mouth. Yet despite the flawed moments, the picture is still one of the most entertaining Hollywood films of the early 1960s. The fine, varied score is by Henry Mancini, and Hepburn’s elegant wardrobe is courtesy of Givenchy. Charles Lang, Jr. provided the cinematography. The script is adapted from Peter Stone’s novel The Unsuspecting Wife, which was based on an earlier screenplay by Stone and Marc Behm.