January 14: The Spy who Came in from the Cold (1965 -- Martin Ritt)

★★★★

After Tinker, Tailor, I wanted to watch the 45-year-old Spy Who Came in From the Cold.  And I’m glad I did.  It’s good.

There’s some continuity to these two Le Carre adaptations.  The atmosphere and mood are similar since both have an oppressive darkness to them.  While the desaturation in Tinker, Tailor sets it’s mood, a perpetual, omnipresent rain creates a feeling of bleakness in the black-and-white Spy .  And there’s a tawdriness in both, too, with Alec Leamas being a drunk who makes ethnic slurs, feels sorry for himself, and works in a tedious job reshelving books.  He runs up a tab he never pays at his local grocer and spends his money on alcohol, and we follow him though the unemployment line.  Even his co-worker lives in a tiny apartment devoid of grace or elegance.  Neither the London of the film nor its characters provide much uplift to viewers.

The storytelling here prefigures that in Tinker, Tailor, too.  We don’t get a clear, straightforward story in Spy but rather have to read between the lines until the gaps are filled in.  The most obvious example of this is early in the film when Control tells Alec he wants him to stay in the cold a bit longer, to remain in the Circus, solitary and disconnected from any special relationships.  We soon see Alec drinking too much, looking for work, being bitter and assaulting his grocer.  The film doesn’t tell us how these two situations are related until much later when we hear that Alec is trying to draw the attention of German espionage.  Tinker, Tailor has similar gaps – and many more of them -- but the director of this film feels the need to fill in his 1961 audience with a few more connections.  Despite Ritt’s feeling that he has to complete the story for his audience, he leaves enough jumps in the story to make the audience engage to figure out what’s happening before he ultimately give it to them as exposition.

Among the many good qualities of the film, my favorite is its bravura camera work, cinematography that the later film doesn’t match.  There’s a long crane shot in the opening of Spy that hearkens back to Touch of Evil (released only three years before) as Ritt’s camera follows a car as it exits the border control at the Russian sector of Berlin and comes to the American Checkpoint Charlie.  The Orson Welles reference is so explicit here that I half expected the car to explode.  Another outstanding piece of camera work occurs as Alec is released from jail.  The camera is inside a bus, and we see him with Nan, who the camera follows as she walks in front of the bus and runs up the side to the door and inside.  And while we watch this shot, a face in the crowd stand out that we’ll soon get to know much better.  It’s a camera tour-de-force. 

 It’s probably worth noting, too, that the gay characters come off better in the more recent Tinker, Tailor than in this film.  Here, we get the impression that the man outside the prison might have been cruising to try to pick up recently-released convicts.  Soon, he’s peremptorily dismissed from an important conversation and meekly, effeminately withdraws, being called queer by Alec.  He couldn’t be a bigger contrast to the gay men in Tinker Tailor, who figure in the center of the plot and have well-rounded, sympathetic personalities.  Forty-five years has made a big difference in the portrayal of gay characters in these Le Carre films.

I see many  ways that The Spy who Came in From the Cold prefigures Tinker, Tailor, and the earlier film actually has better camera work than the later.  Both, though, create an effective, dark mood and communicate a pessimism about humanity that impresses.

January 13: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011 -- Tomas Alfredson)

★★★★

In a holiday season that’s seemed full of pretty pedestrian stuff, it was good to come across Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.  There’s real cinema value here.

The big thing I liked was the contrast-y image that was also desaturated.  There aren’t any strong colors here;  blues are flat, reds are flat and yellows are flat.  Skin is ashen throughout, too, and the faces, particularly of the older characters, are heavily creased, in part because of the contrast in the film.  Filmed with this look, offices are full of dirty, old clutter and dusty air, parties have a lifeless formality about them, and even Paris looks plain and drab.  Tinker Tailor has this beautiful, consistent look throughout.

The look is a visual analog to the themes of this dark film, too.  The good ole days of espionage are past at this point, and there is a significant leak in British intelligence.  Like the offices full of faded souvenirs of past glories, the aging characters of the film have to trace back through their pasts for clues to today’s problems.  And as blue isn’t really blue here, so are friends not really friends, patriots not really patriots, love isn’t love and glory isn’t glory.  Tinker Tailor isn’t black and white at all; it’s a lot of empty tones telling the story of empty values.

There’s continuity between the other film I know by director Tomas Alfredson, Let the Right One In and Tinker Tailor. They’re both visually muted, and they’re both about muted characters.  The secondary characters in Let the Right One In remind me of the characters in this film – common, tawdry, mostly-good-intentioned-but-not-really-good people.  Alfredson has done an excellent job of carrying the brown mood from Let the Right One In into Tinker Tailor, and the mood works great here.

And of course, John LeCarre’s book provides the story and characters.  The story is long and somewhat complicated, but I credit Alfredson’s direction in keeping a lot of characters in front of us and still helping us to keep them all straight and follow what they’re doing.   And Tinker Tailor would have clearly lagged did Alfredson not use such deft editing that we always only get the information we need without a lot of backfill.

It’s a bleak story.  Lovers are split up, people who aren’t in love reunite, treason kills and deception reigns.  But Tinker Tailor is as elegant a portrayal of exhaustion and decay as you’re going to see in a while.

January 12: Design for Living (1933 -- Ernst Lubitsch)

★★★★★

This film is a total delight. 

Every adjective I associate with Lubitsch comes to mind to describe Design for Living – witty, urbane, sophisticated, daring, tasteful, clever, sexy, playful, human – and every one is absolutely appropriate.  it's my favorite Lubitsch film.  It has a relationship triangle at its base like I’ve seen in many of his films, and the three sides of it are beautiful, funny and sincere characters.  Miriam Hopkins plays an energetic, grounded Gilda who loves two men and marries a third when relations between her and the other two become too complicated.  Fredric March’s Tom is one of the Americans that Gilda loves; he’s a smart, somewhat sophisticated young playwright.  The third character, George, is played by Gary Cooper as a plainer American – tall, physical, and hugely sexy.  I’d never seen this Gary Cooper and was surprised at his onscreen sensuality.  Gilda balances herself between these two men, guiding the relationship among them with wit, charm and sex.  So centered is Design for Living on this triangle that the credits even use the triangle as a motif.

Yet among all the verbal interplay and wit, there are serious emotions at stake.  Gilda genuinely loves George and eventually breaks their no-sex vow to settle with him.  George, for his part, deeply loves Gilda, too, and comes to count on her as they set up their household and experience George’s painting begin to take off.  Unfortunately, Gilda also has a deep love for Tom, and as soon as he returns from England, she feels her love for him rekindle and decides they have to tell George they plan to move in together.  She loves both, and complicating the love between Gilda and the men is the fact that the men have a deep bond also.  While Tom has been in London, George has kept as a memento the old typewriter that Tom used, a visual symbol of their affection.  The relationship among the three is thus a triangle, and they are bound together with real love, which raises the stakes each time their balance is shaken.

Design for Living also manages some gentle, if pointed, satire directed at capitalism and the moneyed class.  As Gilda manages her two men, she steadily advises them to avoid selling out for money, and George specifically avoids taking a commission from a woman with a double chin.  However, it is the hapless Max who most fully embodies these values as he constantly frets about pleasing potential advertising clients like cement makers.  And not only is his personality profoundly practical if not mercenary, but compared to the young, creative trio, he is sexually impotent.  After Gilda decides she can’t function loving both George and Tom, she finally agrees to Max’s persistent proposals and marries him to get away from the stress of loving the other two.  The wedding flower that the two send, two drooping tulip stems, is unmistakably phallic, and Max’s anger at the flowers after his wedding night certainly suggests frustration at the two tulips.  Design for Living has a good deal of criticism and satire of wealth and commerce.

“…unfortunately, I’m no gentleman.”

The character of Gilda is another interesting aspect of the film.  Women are often strong if not central to Lubitsch films, and that is doubly true here.  Gilda controls and directs the two American boyfriends, determining their actions by hers.  She sets the rules of their relationship (“no sex”) and decides when to break the rules (“…unfortunately, I’m no gentleman.”).  She’s the agent behind the success of both of them.  She holds Max away until she decides to marry him, and when she’s ready to leave him, she does so.  She is comfortably with her own sexuality, choosing her partners at will.  And she’s the one who, at the end, kisses both men on the lips, implying that the earlier “no sex” rule isn’t going to be in effect after the three begin their new, more mature triangular relationship.  Gilda is the powerful female center to this film.

Design for Living is fun, light, witty and uplifting.  Its openness and positive view of human nature is infectious, and it’s a movie that can stand up under multiple viewings.  As I’m sure will be the case for me.

January 11: The Wildcat/Die Bergkatze (1921 -- Ernst Lubitsch)

★★★ 

Wildcat tends more to the broad, slapstick side of comedy than some of Lubitsch’s other works from this time, but there are some sly asides of understated humor and some plot devices that are typical of what I expect from Lubitsch.  It’s got a lot of irony that’s memorable, and you’d have to put the film in the grand old tradition of anti-military films.

You get the broad side of Wildcat’s humor in the opening scenes.  There are some silly idiosyncrasies among the troops who are asleep and obvious stunts when the bugler sounds reveille.  It's all pretty flat.  When the Kommandant comes in, everyone quickly becomes soldierly, but as soon as he leaves, they all jump right back in bed.  This is vaudeville -- not even clever vaudeville -- and it’s off-putting so early in the film.  The large gestures continue throughout, but they get a little funnier.  As lady’s man Leutnant Alexis leaves for his new post, there is a crowd of hundreds  of women to say good-bye at the ceremony, and the crowd cries and blows its nose in sync as part of the departure.  The army can’t control the ensuing women's riot as the hundreds of women overwhelm military security.  And in the vast sections of crowd crying and cheering as the Leutnant passes, there’s a huge section for his offspring.  That little touch is broad but at least witty.  In another scene, Rischka sets out in the snow across the mountains in despair of marrying the Leutnant while the Leutnant himself, in despair over his forced marriage, decides to jump into the snow and slide down the side of the mountain.  They run into each other.  That coincidence is so unlikely that it’s just funny.  Such wit cushions the time we spend on underwear jokes.

All the humor in Wildcat isn’t so clearly in-your-face; there are very funny, ironic touches throughout the film that you have to pay attention to or miss.  I hardly noticed, for example, that when the army detail goes punish the bandits, the military band is at least double the size of the troop of soldiers.  The soldiers fight with snowballs and stumble on ice, but in all that broad comedy, there’s the understate wit of the respective group numbers, too.  The art direction also brings a level of subtle irony to the film.   In the fort, every window has an oversized canon wedged into it (ringed in white trim), and the interiors are heavy, massive curves used as furniture.  A sad Leutnant rocks on one of these while seeking consolation in the bottle, looking for all the world like a kid on a rocking horse.  Even the bandits’ environment has cute décor touches – everything bandit has a childlike skull-and-crossbones on it.  The actors, too, add many small comic asides to their performances.  When Pola Negri’s barbarian leader Rischka is splashing toilet water on herself in the fortress raid, she accidently dumps some down the front of her blouse and goes through a rapid series of facial changes that’s as funny as it can be.  And easy to miss.  The many subtle touches here give Wildcat a nuance that the Three Stooges never get.

One last thing I like in this film is the character of Rischka.  She is the wildcat, and she’s a force of nature.  She runs the bandit band, bossing and terrorizing all its members.  She scares everyone into submission when they start to beat up their chief, who is her father, and she leads the defense against the military incursion, telling her father to fix the coffee while she does so.  And he brings her coffee to her in the field.  She’s the one who dumps her fellow drunk raiders onto a sled when they leave the fortress, too.  She is quite a powerful female figure.

After all this Lubitsch, I’m also noticing that he uses love triangles to propel his plot.  Here, you have Rischka—Leutnant—Kommandant’s daughter as well as Rischka—Leutnant—Bandit.  A lot of the action is centered on these triangles, just as it is in other films like Sumurun, Anna Bolyn and The Oyster Princess.  It’s a structure I’ll have to look for in further Lubitsch.

Wildcat has many interesting sides, and I have to say I enjoyed watching it.  I wish it had had more wit and less vaudeville, but it’s nuances can make it well worth the time.

January 10: Sumurun (1920 -- Ernst Lubitsch)

★★★

I was a little underwhelmed here though you can see Lubitsch trying as many audience appeals as he can.  More than anything, I found that this story didn’t engage me at all.  It’s long, it has interesting turns, and it’s romantic, but I never plugged into it the way I did in, say, I Don’t Want to Be a Man.  The story seemed very conventional to me, though I suspect a contemporary audience might have responded more strongly, knowing the film from the play it’s based on.

That said, two aspects of the film were very worthwhile.  For one, I enjoyed the visuals a lot.  The film is chock full of beautiful sets draped with orientalist fabric in the bold patterns of early 20s cinema.  The sets are immense, too – huge, exotic exteriors of palaces and streetscapes; interior courtyards; plazas teeming with extras.  And everyone dressed in orientalist fantasy costume that blends Northern India, Syria, Ancient Egypt and Morocco.  Whenever my interest in the various love triangles in the film flagged, I could always find something worth my attention in the scene in front of me.

I also liked the comedy in the film.  I kept thinking of Shakespeare while I was watching the life-and-death-and-love drama of the upper-class leads regularly being undercut by the comedy of their servants.  The cloth merchant desperately seeks time with Sumurun, but she is the favorite of the very mean and possessive Sheik.  Meanwhile, the cloth merchant’s two servants, dressed in stripped tights, cavort and roll around the shop poking at each other and satirizing their master; Sumurun’s supporter in the harem jokes around while manipulating and fooling the eunuchs and directing the other women in the harem to help the couple unite; and the Sheik’s guards first toss out the slave trader and then run rapidly after him making goofy faces.  There’s an awful lot of lightness about the humor here, and it’s one of the film’s most endearing aspects.

Otherwise, the two love triangles are simply too diverse to engage much sympathy.  The Sheik is certainly scary, and Yannaia is an original gold-digger. But neither Sumurun nor her cloth merchant love are particularly engaging because you simply don’t see enough of them to care about them, and while we feel some sympathy for the hapless hunchback Yaggar early in the film, he spends much of the last part of the film asleep in a bag.  With the focus so spread out in Sumurun, it’s hard to be very engaged with the film’s characters.

Sumurun is certainly worthwhile for its great visuals, and I got several smiles from comic touches here, too.  And this is my introduction to Pola Negri, a silent star whose name I was very familiar with but whose work I’d never seen.  I can tell she has a real presence on film and will look forward to seeing her more.  Overall, though, I’m not sure I’d recommend this film for the silent movie initiate because of how hard it is to engage.

January 9: Anna Boleyn (1920 -- Ernst Lubitsch)

★★★★

Anna Boleyn was a pleasant surprise to me.  I knew Lubitsch could direct comedy, but I hadn’t expected he’d be so capable at drama.  And historical drama at that. While a lot of this kind of film can drag badly, I was plugged into the characters all the way –especially King Henry, Anna and Henry Norris – and I was invested all the way through.

The most memorable performance here is Emil Jannings as Henry VIII.  Jannings’ is  a tour-de-force silent portrayal of a complex sociopath.  His Henry is impulsive, young, and very hormone-driven.  Obsessed with Anna, he divorces Catherine, but his affections then wander to Jane (and any garden nymph that happens to be around) until some court machinations stimulate his jealousy of Henry Norris.  But Jannings’ Henry is not off-the-rails crazy; Jannings finds a coherence and even a likeability in Henry VIII that you’d think would come from a method actor’s approach to the character rather than from someone so well-versed in classic theater.  With a cut of the eye or shift of posture, Jannings communicates even tiny variations in the King.

The other characters don’t have the complexity of Henry, but they’re still sympathetic throughout.  Anna experiences many conflicts – desire/duty, King Henry/Henry Norris, sacrifice/happiness – and we watch her navigate these contradictions throughout the film with, however, a little more mope than we’d see in her portrayal today. For his part, Henry Norris goes from one bad decision to the next as he inadvertently makes Anna’s life more difficult, and he’s also tripped up by sheer, melodramatic bad luck. But Anna Boleyn is melodramatic, and we’re carried along in Anna’s tribulations and Henry’s inefficacy by the excellent story more than by the range of their respective emotions.  Anna mostly suffers here; Henry gets angry and suffers.  As melodrama is wont to do, the last part of the story moves to elaborate pathos with the baby Elizabeth and the treacherous Duke of Norfolk.

I was impressed by the art direction here, too.  There are great sets with oversized furniture crowding rooms, and there are castle and church exteriors full of extras in period clothes.  In fact, the costumes here are wonderful to look at, an interesting amalgam of 20s style and English Renaissance.  I several times noticed that a woman was wearing a scarf pulled around in flapper style, for example.  But whatever the style, the costumes are wonderfully complex and elegant.

This is a film that’s definitely worth the two-hour run time.  What a pleasure to discover this story-telling side of the great comic director.

January 8: I Don't Want to Be a Man/Ich möchte kein Mann sein (1918 -- Ernst Lubitsch)

★★★★

This movie is charming; Lubitsch’s touch is all over it.

While Princess goes for the big, obvious and ham-handed, I Don’t Want to Be a Man has scene-after-scene of cute subversions or affectionate critiques.  The treatment of the governess comes to mind as a small example of this affection.  After she squashes Ossi’s smoking, the governess picks up the cigarette herself to give it a try, and to her delight, discovers she likes it.  Later, the somewhat unattractive older woman trembles with delight after the dashing, new guardian kisses her hand, and the wiggle in her walk humanizes her with affirmative satire.  This is the mood that infuses the entire movie and makes it so light.

Ossie here reminds me of Ossie in Princess, too.  Early in this film, she pouts; fusses with her father, governess and guardian; and throws things about in her room.  There’s a clear continuity in the two.  But when she dons her male apparel, things change for her.  She’s soon made to give way on the subway and bear up when her toe is stepped on.  She’s then bounced around trying to get to the coat check and falls ill smoking a cigar.  It’s these later experiences that give her a humanity – a sympathy – that the Oyster Princess never has.  It’s funny watching this woman trying to be what she imagines a man to be, but we feel for her unexpected difficulties, too, and sympathize with her in a way we don't for the princess in the other film.

The most fun in this movie is the multiple transgressions that Lubitsch piles up as soon as Ossie begins her cross-dressing odyssey.  She looks like a young, pampered boy, and the image of her in a tux is transgressive on its own.  Many of her actions violate social standards in a comic way, as when the ladies joke about this dandy powdering his nose.  Even scenes when she is dancing with the women are comically breaking barriers as the women take the lead from the “boy” and sling him around.  Some of the best humor in the film comes from scenes like the one with Ossie trying to draw her guardian’s girlfriend away.  When the girlfriend responds to Ossie, it’s an ironic revenge but one we don't typically see on film between two women.  And a transgressive one because we're actually seeing a woman responding to another woman.  Scenes like this one are what Lubitsch’s comedy is about when he’s at his best.

 

Two scenes in this film still made me squirm, over 90 years after it was made.  When the sick Ossie heads to the restroom at the club, I felt the tension increase as I waited for her to choose a restroom.  As she headed toward the women’s, I tensed up in anticipation about  how the women in the restroom would react.  I relaxed as she changed her mind, but I redoubled my anticipation as she headed toward the men’s.  I could hardly imagine how that would go and was honestly relieved when she changed her mind there, too.  Lubitsch led me 100% of the way through that ebb and flow of anticipation.  


The pinnacle of transgression in the film, though, is when the guardian kisses the Ossie/boy, and I’m still not exactly sure what that was about.  I don’t know if such affection was accepted at the time, or if the guardian is simply a profoundly bisexual man. All of those questions wrapped up with the added dimension of the cross-dressing by Ossie.  With all these levels already at play, the urbane Lubitsch ends the film with the guardian referring back to the kiss in as cool and matter-of-fact manner as possible.  That whole episode is masterful, transgressive  comedy.

I thoroughly enjoyed this little film, even with the problems of continuity and film quality.  What an engaging, fun tour.