Double Indemnity (1944)

Second viewing; first viewed on January 23, 1991.

An insurance salesman gets involved with a client's wife, and, abetted by her, devises a plan to murder her husband and collect a large insurance sum.

Very good criminal drama. There is not much I can add to the existing critical output, of which the TV Guide review is a good sample. Christopher Mulrooney, as usual, offers a slightly offbeat angle. I would only like to point out that this, like so many films, and perhaps ultimately all of them, one way or another, is about blindness. In this particular case, it is not so much that the thing is hard to see, as that its possibility is emotionally inadmissible. It concerns two cases of excessive trust, one by a man toward a woman he loves, and the other by a man toward an employee he likes. The point may be that love or friendly affection are mental constructs, built on imaginary foundations. The film refrains from a radical endorsement of that position by having its characters (the woman and the employee) having second thoughts at some point in the development. Subsequent films in the noir school went all the way. A sociological analysis would map this worldview to the atomized condition of people in a capitalist environment and the reification of money as a necessary component of that condition .

Rating: 83 (down from 90)

Monte Carlo (1930)

A woman runs off on her wedding day, heading to Monte Carlo. A nobleman who sees her in that resort is attracted to her, and pretends to be a hairdresser in order to get close to her.

Musical comedy which never gets below amusement level, but doesn't have a decent plot, nor remarkable music. The premise just does not make sense: why would any man conceive of such a lame seduction plan is beyond me. The situations to which this premise gives rise are not always that interesting either, or conducive to psychological clarity. There are some creative touches here and there, the songs are moderately funny, and so are the actors; there is a kind of self-confidence to the proceedings which somehow keeps the film afloat. I am not sure there is any kind of substantial statement on class relations, or anything else for that matter.

Rating: 52

13 Rue Madeleine (1947)

During World War II, the Allies had Intelligence agents working for them. We get to see their training, and then a mission whose goal is to destroy a German missile depot. There is a a complication in the form of a Nazi infiltrator among the spy candidates.

Although the plot is implausible both in the general lines and in some of its particulars, the film is entertaining and has a realistic tone. The most interesting philosophical point is probably the notion that agents must put aside all moral considerations which might pose an obstacle to the accomplishment of their mission. Viewed in times of peace, this is slightly subversive. Especially from the 60s onward, the concept of "peace" became very blurry. If the right's frontline was the military, the left's was the militancy. There was war on both fronts. That Morality as it was known would suffer a blow should surprise no one.

Rating: 51

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967)

Second viewing; first viewed between 1983 and 1986

A white woman introduces her black boyfriend to her parents, saying she intends to marry him.

In my review to The Defiant Ones, I said that this film is that film's logical consequence. It is also a disagreeable film on purely artistic grounds, with a very schematic and artificial plot premise and a resolution crowned by a grand sermon but with not a hint to psychological explanations. In short, it's pure and simple propaganda, albeit well-filmed and with a lovely cinematography.

Rating: 40 (down from 51)

Reds (1981)

Second viewing; first viewed in 1982.

The exploits of John Reed and Louise Bryant, writers and political activists in the first decade of the 20th century, who were eyewitnesses to the Russian Revolution.

Basically a romantic drama about a conventional, conservative relationship between a man and a woman. The comedic ingredient is the discourse surrounding it, full of pretensions to heterodoxy and free-love advocacy. The main couple split and make up repeatedly, much in the same way as in Modern Romance, released that same year, another work which exposes modernity's contradictions. One could consider Reds as a follow-up to Bananas, starring an Allen actress as a sign of acknowledgement. Unlike its predecessor, however, it is not based on a succession of jokes, but rather on a single, very long one in which the punchline is precisely the eventual realization that there isn't going to be one. The revolution itself is filmed in a curiously cursory way, literally as a walk in a square.

Rating: 52 (down from 68)

Behind Enemy Lines (1986)

Alternate titles: P.O.W. the Escape (that's the title of the copy I watched); Attack Force 'Nam

A military detachment is assigned the task of rescuing American prisoners at a Vietnamese camp, just prior to the end of the hostilities. The mission faces a serious setback and its commander is made a prisoner at the same camp he had raided.

Action-packed yet basically absurd (like most of Cannon's films), this film's entertainment value lies precisely in those two qualities.

Rating: 36

Simón del desierto (1965)

Second viewing; first viewed on August 16, 1997

English title: Simon of the Desert

About a man who lives on top of a pillar in the desert. The IMDB trivia section says: "The film's eponymous ascetic is based on the 5th-century Syrian saint Simeon Stylites. While this film takes obvious artistic license with the story, Simeon Stylites also famously perched on a pillar in the desert, reportedly for 37 consecutive years."

Intelligent deconstruction of the Catholic religion, or some parts of it anyway. I am not sure I have much interest in the Catholic religion, especially the aspects the film deals with. The film takes care of demonstrating, by its ending, why those aspects are irrevocably out-of-date. In a way, this is the film's own indictment and perhaps also its redemption.

Rating: 69 (unchanged)