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)

Viridiana (1961)

Second viewing; first viewed on March 24, 1990.

Loosely based on the novel Halma, by Benito Pérez Galdós, first published in 1895.

Viridiana, a nun, takes a few days off to visit her uncle, a landowner.

This film had a deep impact on me when I first saw it. Now seeing it for the second time, it still impresses me positively for its refined sense of humor and its uncondescending view of social issues. In a way, it is a perfect movie. It is especially topical in these days of Angela Merkel and barbarian invasions (the German Chancellor should be made to see Viridiana in the Clockwork Orange way). All that being said, I am a different person now, and I do not need to be educated on things I already know. That is why these days I prefer films which either teach something I do not already know (if that is possible) or are utterly devoid of a message (supposing there can be one).

Rating: 87 (down from 100)

Il futuro (2013)

English title: The Future

Based on the novel Una novelita lumpen, by Roberto Bolaño, first published in 2002.

Teenage orphaned brother and sister get mixed-up with two slightly older guys who move in with them. The guests have a plan to rob a recluse ex-actor with the help of the orphan girl's sex services to him.

Sordid story from which all disagreeable characteristics of sordidness were carefully removed. This is the rule now. But it is watchable, sort of, and the acting is terrific, even though the actor playing 'Maciste' just does not have the physique du rôle.

Rating: 50

Alice in Wonderland (1951)

Possibly not my first viewing; many of the scenes were familiar to me, but I may have read a comic book version, so I really don't know. Anyway, if I saw it before, it was before 1983.

Based on the books Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), by Lewis Carroll (b. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson).

A dreamy little girl, while being read to by her older sister, sees a white rabbit and follows it to and through an oneiric realm, full of quirky characters.

This refined work of art lovingly blends a very British character with a more flamboyant American spirit. I forward you to a fine review written by Christopher Mulrooney on the Walt Disney entry of his filmmaker encyclopedia.

Rating: 74

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

Second viewing (I think); first viewed in 1978 (I think).

Strange electromagnetic interference affects household appliances. One man and one woman, in different places, are disturbed by weird mental images. They eventually get together for the adventure of their lifetimes. The Earth is being visited!

The subject of extraterrestrial intelligence is a conceptually interesting one. It is too bad that it gets such a poor treatment here. Barely anything insightful is produced, and it sucks as a mere thriller too. Some people have found its underlying worldview disturbing (Dale Thomajan calls it "psychologically unhealthy", two other guys say it is fascistic). I am not sure I agree one hundred per cent with either of those opinions, but I do find somewhat perplexing that the diretor years later directed a remake of War of the Worlds, an exact conceptual opposite to this film. It is a little like Bergoglio inviting Third World masses into Europe and the U.S.A., and when that produces the expected response and then some, expresses fears about anti-Vatican jihadi infiltrators amidst them.

Watched it in pan-and-scan.

Rating: 32 (unchanged)

Racing with the Moon (1984)

Second viewing; first viewed on July 31, 1994.

*mild spoiler ahead*

Two friends living in a small town are soon to be sent overseas to fight in World War II. One of them is rude, the other sensitive. The latter meets a girl whom he mistakenly takes for rich.

Formulaic and artificial drama. It is done with much professional competence, and thus becomes watchable. Not much more I can say, it is a polished product but has no soul.

Rating: 40 (down from 68)

The Sting (1973)

Second viewing; first viewed between 1983 and 1986.

Based on the non-fiction book The Big Con, by David W. Maurer (1st ed. 1940).

A con man whose partner gets killed by their latest victim's gangster boss approaches an experienced con man in the hopes of acquiring expertise in his line of activity. They decide to con the abovementioned gangster in a fake horse betting scam.

The theme is survival as a constant deceit of impending death. Set in the depression era, it only shows explicit poverty in a couple of outdoor scenes. In the rest of the movie we witness the workings of a criminal underworld inhabited by greedy outlaws and callous underlings. The protagonist guides us through the perils of contravention, leading a life of constant persecution where quick wits are essential. There is a certain infantility to the proceedings, perhaps not unlike that of the Italian criminal and Western movies of around that time. The script's construction is a case of form mirroring content the culmination of which is the ending plot twist: the viewer's identification with the deceivers is compounded with the realization he has also been deceived.

Rating: 72 (down from 85)

The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey (1988)

Second viewing; first viewed on September 9, 1990

Alternate spelling: The Navigator: A Mediaeval Odyssey

A group of people from a village in Northern England, during the Middle Ages, is scared of the Plague. Led by a boy, they hope to ward it off by placing a metal cross on the top of a big church. To get there, they follow a subterranean path which they are told will lead them to the far side of the Earth.

I was greatly disappointed at my experience of viewing this film for the second time. Its story runs entirely (as far as I remember) by night, which makes for almost exclusively dark scenes. Furthermore, it is not directed for clarity. All this makes for an often rather enigmatic visual experience. The screenplay is not especially engaging either: the two concepts it plays with (medieval existential drama and time travel) seem arbitrarily pasted together and not given proper individual development. The film has been generally well received, and this must have an explanation; considering that I also gave it a good rating on my first viewing, I probably have this explanation within me somewhere, if only I could remember how I felt and what I thought 25 years ago. Speaking of which, I was quite spooked by the exact coincidence of the dates of my viewings, more so for it happening with a film as charged with mysticism as this.

Rating: 42 (down from 62)

Le choix des armes (1981)

Second viewing; first viewed between 1983 and 1986.

English title: Choice of Arms

Escaped convicts seek shelter in the house of one of the felons' ex-partner, who is now a respectable horse breeder and has a beautiful wife. The couple will have troubles due to this act of hospitality.

Intellectual thriller which explores questions of identity and personal history. World War II's shadow is personified in the former Resistance fighter who became a thief after the war, and later retired a wealthy man. His peaceful life is disturbed by a young criminal who becomes his enemy, yet whom he cannot help but identify with. The film presents a critical view of French society as a mire of police incompetence and class inequality. Dramatically, it fails to produce engaging situations and convincing characters.

Rating: 31 (up from 27)

Rua sem sol (1954)

As the beginning credits are displayed, we see two agents of the law on their way to arrest someone. The suspect is Marta, a young woman accused of having murdered her lover, a drug dealer and nightclub owner. She is taken in custody and tells her entire life to the cops, which is displayed in a flashback. An orphan, she was adopted by a couple who later gave her, by natural means, a sister, who was born blind. Her foster parents died, first her mother, then her father, leaving the two daughters in financial straits. She supported herself and her blind sister by working as a seamstress at home. This soon became insufficient to make ends meet, and she switched to making jewels at a jewelry store. This still didn't bring her enough income, and one day law officers came into her house and assessed her household items, which were later taken as payment to hanging debts. When her sister injured herself during a fall and needed an x-ray, she, in a desperate act, stole a jewel from her place of work in the hopes of selling it. An expert's assessment, however, judged it to be a fake. Upon leaving the expert's office, she was approached by a man who had been watching her and threatened to turn her over to the police. Frightened, she accompanied the man into a restaurant and then into a nightclub, where he blackmailed her into becoming his lover. She seized the opportunity of his momentary absence to flee with the money he left her to pay the bill. Days later, her sister's exam results showed she had a serious injury which needed surgery. She returned to the nightclub of earlier and asked the owner for a job as a taxi dancer. The owner, taking an interest in her, gave her the job. She could thus pay for her sister's surgery. After some time, her boss proposed that they became lovers. She didn't immediately agree. Upon leaving the nightclub, she was seen by a longtime friend of the family, who was the only one who remained a close friend after her father died. He scolded her for her choice of work, making her promise she would quit. Meanwhile, at home, her sister was in a steady relationship with the doctor who helped her when she first became ill. He told Marta that she could see again if she underwent surgery in Europe. The next day Marta, despite her promise, returned to the nightclub and, without being seen, witnessed a quarrel between her boss and another man over money. The man left in a rage. As she was leaving her spot, her boss heard her and called her. He then made advances on her and she resisted. She grabbed his gun, shot, and then lost consciousness. When she came to, her boss was lying dead beside her. The flashback is interrupted at this point. Everything seems to incriminate her, but the police is more interested in arresting the dead man's accomplice than in jailing her. They submit a series of mugshots to her, and she recognizes the man she had seen quarreling with her boss. They arrest that man, and he confesses to not even having left the nightclub after the quarrel and having returned to see the nightclub owner a few moments later, only to find him and Marta lying unconscious. He shot his nemesis on the back of the neck and left (the police knew that he was killed by a shot in the back of the neck, so that exculpates Marta of the murder). Marta was found guilty only of theft. Her sister traveled to Italy where she got married to her fiancé and had an operation which made her able to see. Later they all went to Italy and lived happily ever after.

The plot combines realism and ridiculous tear-jerking melodrama. The execution is unprofessional at times (especially in the scenes not directed by the principal diretor). Some parts of it, on the other hand, are well directed and exude a realistic atmosphere, especially the scenes at the nightclub.

Rating: 32

Hollywood Ending (2002)

A film diretor is hired by indication of his ex-wife, who is now engaged to the studio boss. He develops psychosomatic blindness and his agent convinces him to conceal it from the others and direct the film anyway.

The flow of jokes is steady, and there is no real pain in watching it. For the analytically inclined, there are curious aspects about it, especially as it relates to Allen's filmography. The first really odd thing that came to my attention, and apparently no one else's, is how this relates to Crimes and Misdemeanors. We have here characters or situations that appear to be derived from that movie's. Williams' character closely resembles Alda's character in that movie, Leoni's resembles Farrow's, and Allen's resembles Allen's. Adding to these parallels, both films have characters who go blind (Allen's here and Waterston's there). Both films are about the need to conceal something dangerous -- blindness in one case and graft in the other. Beyond these mysterious analogies, however, there is a more fundamental connection with Allen's entire oeuvre. There are multiple blindnesses on display in Hollywood Ending, besides the central character's. The need to conceal his predicament is itself another inducement of blindness; in other words, this is a ploy to make people blind to his blindness. But there is more. The film is a complicated scheme to divert the viewer's attention from its most glaring aspect: Allen is old and ugly. If you add to that his character's panoply of quirks, you would find it hard to accept that Leoni would ever have been drawn to him in the first place; the ostensive drama around her betrayal of him for a more attractive man only seems to try to conceal that fact. The same goes for his new girlfriend: she is a second impossible event which obfuscates the impossibility of the first one. Thus it seems that a recurrent subtheme of his other films has come to the foreground here: the embarrassment of being of no real attractiveness to the opposite sex. In this sense, what seems to be the film's conspicuous flaw, namely the miscasting of over-aged Allen in the main role, is actually the key to its decipherment. If the film's theme is blindness, how better to convey it than to induce blindness in the audience?

Rating: 55

Unconquered (1947)

Second viewing; first viewed on June 21, 1998.

The film is set in 1763 during the so-called Pontiac's rebellion. An English woman has her death sentence commuted to indentured servitude in America. A weapons trader lusts after her and is opposed by a military who gradually becomes enamored of her.

Not very different in structure from the previous film in this blog. Here, too, we have the implausible notion of a man entangled in a terrible conflict who finds extra time to recurrently save a woman in peril. Again, the plot offers little insight into the mechanics of the conflict, choosing melodrama instead. As a spectacle it is not totally negligible. The film portrays Native Americans as primitive (they almost burn the heroine at a stake on the urging of a jealous woman) and treacherous, well beyond plausibility.

Rating: 38 (up from 30)

Knight without Armour (1937)

Second viewing; first viewed on May 8, 1997.

U.S. title: Knight without Armor

Prior to the Russian Revolution, an English correspondent in Russia becomes a spy for England, and infiltrates a revolutionary group. He goes through several misadventures before and after the revolution and crosses paths with a Russian countess.

Well-made melodrama which does not have a remarkably interesting plot nor offers much insight into the inners of the turbulence in revolutionary Russia. Dietrich has one or two facial expressions which she uses in the course of the film.

Rating: 38 (up from 14)

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939)

Professor Moriarty plans the crime of the century, and has a plan to deceive Sherlock Holmes. His plan involves letters addressed to two different persons, one a certain society woman and the other the guardian of Britain's jewels.

Slightly amusing mystery story, filmed with fitfully dark atmosphere and naïve energy. Good reviews by Robert J. Maxwell and Ted Goranson may be found on IMDB -- browse the User Reviews filtered for 'prolific authors'.

Rating: 52