#685: Casque d'or

Directed by: JACQUES BECKER
1952, TSPDT Rank #696

I've been chasing this one for awhile, and it was worth the wait. A torrid story of love in a world of criminals set in 19th-century Paris, Jacques Becker's Casque d'or is as romantic as it is brutally direct - much like a slap to the face between two lovers, the likes of which are seen repeatedly throughout this film. It's a potent work of romantic tragedy - the romance is fragile, the people in it are hopelessly flawed, and the world around them is harsh and unforgiving. Simone Signoret's captivating performance as Marie, the woman who inspires the awe and desire of all the low-class hoods she surrounds herself with, is certainly worthy of recognition, but every performance in this film creates an impression. Of particular note is Serge Reggiani, who plays the ex-con carpenter who Marie falls in love with. His performance is much more stoic and less outwardly heated than Signoret's, but he radiates passion and fatalistic cool in his performance as the doomed Manda.



In this world of petty corruption, double crosses, and crimes of passion, where criminals escape from the law with ease in horse-drawn cabs and meet their deaths just as easily, where love is summed up in a brief instant by the river and a night in a rustic cottage far away from the town, love takes on a universal meaning and everything surrounding it takes on a note of tragedy. The tragedy is inescapable, but the romance which fueled it was worth the risk. Clearly, the world which Jacques Becker created in Casque d'or is itself a product of a bygone era. These concepts and visions could not be portrayed so directly and beautifully today.

#684: The Crime of Monsieur Lange

Directed by: JEAN RENOIR
1935, TSPDT Rank #350

Hollywood films of the 1930s are often like sparkling diamonds, while Jean Renoir's early sound films are more like unpolished jewels uncovered from the ash heap of history. But whereas La chienne and La nuit du carrefour could feel somewhat clunky in terms of their storytelling momentum, The Crime of Monsieur Lange is bursting with non-stop energy. Almost all of the action takes place in a cramped cluster of buildings within a single neighborhood - a frenzied beehive of activity where its always hard to get your bearings. There are women, men, and a wicked old publishing magnate who has his way with both of them. The publisher, Batala, is played by Jules Berry in what is much more of a star performance than René Lefèvre's portrayal of the titular everyman. Batala is as smooth and romantic as he is ugly and cruel. Rather than the classic femme fatale character that was seen in many films noir (with Renoir's La chienne as one of the prototypes), Battala is a true homme fatale.




There is also a political dimension to the film, with Battala positioned as the "fascist" in whose absence the former employees of his company are able to fashion a working "cooperative" out of the company that once served only the man in charge. However, this angle isn't explored too deeply. What leaves a deeper impression is the ending. An old man in silhouette against a brightly lit window, a wolf in sheep's clothing, a murder in the shadows, and a couple on the run. As this film hasn't been properly restored for DVD yet, the bootleg copy I watched had awful sound and dull picture quality. Yet even so, the final shot is as beautiful as you will see in any film. We can only hope that this film and Renoir's other early works will get their due someday.

#683: Harlan County, U.S.A.

Directed by: BARBARA KOPPLE
1976, TSPDT Rank #675

There's a tendency to take the term "documentary" at face value and look at documentary films as "documents" or "records". Most documentaries, however, will show that the line between documentaries and narrative films is not so clearly demarcated. In Harlan County, U.S.A. for example, Barbara Kopple shaped over a year's worth of sporadic documentary footage into a narrative about the long labor strike in a Kentucky coal town, a narrative which makes us feel that we are witnessing the core truth at the center of an extended historical moment. This is what the best documentaries do, although maybe the only major difference between the preparation of narrative films and documentaries is that the latter takes more planning after the footage is shot rather than before, while during the shoot, the main objective is to be in the right place at the right time.




For whatever reason, perhaps to allow us to see what effect the passage of time had on the miners' strike efforts, Kopple often left time gaps of multiple months between strike footage, with the biggest focus being given to the final months of the strike, as we start to see the miners' life become more endangered, while at the same time the miners start to see a light at the end of the tunnel. The gaps between footage are occupied by skillfully situated interviews about the history of coal mining labor conditions and past conflicts in Harlan County, along with segments on the corruption within the United Mine Workers of America, whose contract the Harlan County mine workers fought to get their employers to sign. While Kopple put a largely positive spin on the miners' long fight for better pay and more rights, the focus on union corruption suggests that the fight is never over for the American working class.


In any case, this Oscar-winning film is a great study in the methods that documentary filmmakers use to construct a narrative out of their material. There's a marked difference between a film like Harlan County, U.S.A. and a primetime news report. The careful mix of contemporary interviews, cinema verite footage, stock footage and potent folk music written about inhuman mining conditions and the long struggle for mine workers' rights is the mark of a filmmaker who saw a story that needed telling and spent years crafting it in a way that would resonate with audiences both in the moment and for decades to come. With this in mind, the line between a great documentary and a great narrative film is not all that pronounced after almost 50 years of hindsight. Although the fact that in capturing the miners' story, Kopple and her crew also became involved in their struggle, gives the film an added energy and a feeling of unvarnished reality that only a good documentary can provide.

#682: Wanda

Directed by: BARBARA LODEN
1970, TSPDT Rank #375

Towards the beginning of Barbara Loden's sole directorial feature, we see the director, writer, and star of this film as a woman in white, walking down a black coal road lined with lush greenery. After an opening sequence which sets up the film's poor Appalachian setting in a series of brief shots in a cramped working-class home with a screaming baby, this image - a long shot as well as a very long take - is at once profound, beautiful and mysterious. Where is this woman going? Is she running away from the squalid home she's been living at? Is she going to take charge of her life and transcend the harsh working-class life she's been born into?



Wanda initially seems to raise these questions, but its mentality is ultimately not such an obvious feminist rallying cry, as you might expect from an independent film made by a female director in the early 1970s. Instead, it's a very personal meditation on what it means to be a person adrift - with no direction in life and no clear identity. In Wanda, Loden's title character looks for direction and thinks she's found it in a petty criminal whom she refers to as "Mr. Dennis", a cruel, stupid petty criminal who has dreams of robbing a bank but no aptitude for crime whatsoever. Nevertheless, Wanda willingly allows Dennis to control her life - telling her what to do, what to wear, and eventually convincing her to help him in his doomed robbery scheme.



Michael Higgins, the actor who plays Mr. Dennis, was the only professional actor in the film besides Loden. Combined with the film's low-budget, its grainy 16mm look and hard-luck settings, Wanda has all the makings of a political statement. However, while Loden didn't completely turn a blind eye to the societal conditions that shape people like Wanda, the main focus is on the psychology of her main character. With the low-budget production values and questionable results of many of the amateur performances in the film, Wanda isn't a perfect film by any means, but it's a priceless historical snapshot of its era (particularly in coal country) as well as a strong character piece. In its thematic goals and tone, it has in a lot in common with Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces - only with a woman who never had anything rather than a man who had everything and threw it away.



The Criterion Collection has just come to the rescue and restored this rare film for release on DVD and Blu-ray! Find it here: https://www.criterion.com/films/29450-wanda

#681: A Man For All Seasons

Directed by: FRED ZINNEMANN
1966, TSPDT Rank #959

Watching all of the Best Picture Oscar winners was my first goal as a movie fan, even though it's one that I still haven't completed. I only watched about half of the films at that time, and although I have since caught up on most of the ones that I missed since then, there are still a few that have slipped through the cracks. This is partly because I've since become very disillusioned with the Oscars since my early days as a film buff. Their focus on glamour, industry self-congratulation and middle-of-the-road films gets harder to swallow with each passing year. Still, maybe in memory of my old goal, I remain interested in each year's Best Picture winner, although I'm usually disappointed or underwhelmed. This year's winner, Green Book, doesn't seem likely to break that tradition, so I decided to take a look back at a Best Picture winner from over 50 years ago that I still hadn't seen.



The film, although just over 50 years old, is set about 500 years ago, during the time of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and Sir Thomas More. Thomas More will be known to history students as Henry VIII's one-time friend and chancellor, who became accused of treason when he refused to endorse Henry's divorce and subsequent marriage to Anne Boleyn - along with Henry's simultaneous break with the Catholic Church and establishment of himself as the head of the Church of England. And A Man For All Seasons is just right for those of us who can't remember very far beyond that synopsis. It positions Thomas More as a lone hero up against the odds, just like Gary Cooper in director Fred Zinnemann's earlier film High Noon - not to mention exactly the type of character that the Oscars love. Furthermore, in keeping with his recognition as a saint in more recent years, it does so without touching upon any of his flaws, including his reportedly vile treatment of heretics.



But while it might be historically dubious, A Man For All Seasons still paints an entertaining outline of its characters, based on a contemporary play by Robert Bolt (with Paul Scofield reprising his starring role as More from the stage). Zinnemann crafted a riveting story from the play, although not a particularly distinguished one visually, except in its outdoor scenes. In its indoor scenes, the film always seems to evoke a theatrical set more than a historical setting. But above all, A Man For All Seasons is a straightforward film meant to showcase its source material and its performances. Besides Socfield, Robert Shaw shines as a rowdy reimagining of the infamous Henry VIII, Orson Welles looks fittingly near death as the dying Cardinal Woolsey, John Hurt makes one of his first screen appearances as the rat Richard Rich, and Vanessa Redgrave even makes a brief appearance as Anne Boleyn. As for the themes of heresy, dissent, and the tendency of medieval institutions to confuse the two, a later film featuring Vanessa Redgrave, Ken Russell's The Devils provides a much more interesting and uncomfortable take - although you'd never find that film on an Oscar ballet!

2019 Update: The Quest Continues

It's come earlier than usual this year - the annual update to the TSPDT list! This yearly change is inevitable, but it always requires me to recalculate where I'm at in my quest. I guess it's a case where you can never see exactly how far off in the distance the finish line actually is.

However, this year only brought a mere 31 changes to the list, meaning that 31 films have left the list and 31 films have been added, including the following 13 films which I have yet to see:

Amour (Michael Haneke)
Irréversible (Gaspar Noé)
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
Fata Morgana (Werner Herzog)
D'Est (Chantal Akerman)
The Last Bolshevik (Chris Marker)
Cría Cuervos (Carlos Saura)
Stroszek (Werner Herzog)
Strangers When We Meet (Richard Quine)
Le deuxieme souffle (Jean-Pierre Melville)
Caro Diario (Nanni Moretti)
Humanity and Paper Balloons (Sadao Yamanaka)
Diary (David Perlov)

Add these to the films I watched last year, subtract the films (both seen and unseen) that fell off the list this year, and that leaves me with a net gain of exactly 1 film on my previous total. So yes, I am now at 680 films seen of the 1,000. Let the new viewing year begin!

The complete 1,000 Greatest Films list (created by Bill Georgaris at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They) can be viewed at this link: http://theyshootpictures.com/gf1000_all1000films_table.php

A list of all films that have left the list (from last year's edition as well as all previous versions) can be seen at this link: http://theyshootpictures.com/gf1000_all1000films_ex1000.htm

#679: Chimes at Midnight

Directed by: ORSON WELLES
1965, TSPDT Rank #157

Shakespeare has always been a popular wellspring of cinematic source material for film adaptations, but the resulting films have tended to fall into two categories: those that attempt to be faithful to Shakespeare's language and theatrical style (i.e. the films of Lawrence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh), and those that attempt to update their general themes and narrative structure into a contemporary style (i.e. Baz Luhrman's Romeo and Juliet). But Orson Welles' Shakespeare adaptations fall into an entirely different category - and this is especially true when it comes to Chimes at Midnight.

First, it should be noted that, since this is an Orson Welles film, the cinematic technique on display in Chimes at Midnight is breathtaking and full of unpolished mastery. But despite being from an era of social upheaval and the death of the old Hollywood, the film seems to exist in a time and place all its own. The cinematography is in striking black and white, full of depth and beguiling visual patterns. The world of old England is portrayed with more imagination and realistic detail than most of the Shakespeare purists have been able to manage. A dream of Welles' since childhood, this combination of multiple Shakespeare plays (all featuring the rogue drunkard Sir John Falstaff) exists in a world that had lived in his mind for decades - making it feel more vibrant and believable than the most closely studied of traditional adaptations.




Welles' love for Shakespeare's language is plainly evident in Chimes at Midnight as well. Preserving the poetry and rhythm of Shakespeare, along with lifting much of the language verbatim from the original plays, clearly took precedence over any concern about the audience's ability to easily follow the film. Watching Chimes at Midnight requires an attention to the language on multiple levels - which is no mean feat when faced with the overwhelming visual power of Welles' imagery. This makes the Criterion edition of the film a must-have, allowing for multiple viewings to absorb both the rich visuals and the poetic language.



Welles also preserved the narrative structure of a Shakespeare play, despite using pieces of five different plays to construct it. Of particular note is the incredibly visceral battle scene that comes exactly halfway through the film - just as the climax of a Shakespeare play would traditionally come in the third of five acts. Likewise, the film's most potent emotional moment is saved for the final act, leaving the viewer with a profound feeling of melancholy and bittersweet loss. Welles worked on numerous projects after Chimes at Midnight, despite only a few of them being released in his lifetime, but this monumental project feels like the perfect swan song regardless. The technical imperfections that resulted from its low-budget production in Spain might keep it from being Welles' magnum opus (Citizen Kane will always remained the rightful recipient of that title), but it's the defining work of his later years, as well as one which brought his career full circle - back to the Shakespearean aspirations of his youth.

Chimes at Midnight is available here on Criterion Blu-ray and DVD: https://www.criterion.com/films/28756-chimes-at-midnight