April 19: Rebecca (1940 -- Alfred Hitchcock)

★★★★
What a difference in Hitchcock’s filmmaking two years made.  The Lady Vanishes (1938) has some Hitchcock flourishes but feels conventional; Rebecca (1940) has moved into the suspense, mood and psychology that are familiar to us Hitchcock fans.  It’s not a perfect film, but we certainly get one of the first iconic Hitchcock characters here -- the intense, demented Mrs. Danvers – and a taste of spooky atmosphere.

I’m impressed at how much of a women’s film this is, though I shouldn’t be given Daphne du Maurier's source novel.  Still, credit Hitchcock for creating a film that deals mostly with the heroine’s psychology and for mostly using her point of view to tell the story….and to create much of the suspense in the film.  We don’t know what’s going on in Maxim’s mind because our heroine doesn’t know, and Hitchcock uses this POV limitation to keep us ignorance of an important fact until the big reveal near the end.  Because of the POV, we also share the heroine’s vulnerability as she tries to assume control of Manderley, uncertain of exactly what to do and how to do it.  And we sense her burden of trying to compete with the apparently perfect first Mrs. de Winter.  All of these gender-specific pressures magnify her already-established insecurity and create suspense as we worry whether our fragile point-of-view is going to crack.

Like in The Lady Vanishes, there’s also an interest here in class and in the social differences between the US and Britain.  Rebecca was Hitchcock’s first American film, so you might expect some of that interest to find its way into the film.  The British here are mostly either snooty members of the upper-class or members of the servant class that want their employers to, in fact, be snooty upper-class.  There’s a good case to be made for saying that Mrs. Danvers’ central conflict is that she can’t deal with not having the security of a dominating better to serve; Danvers’ breakdown occurs because the class structure she depends on for her very identity is disrupted when the lower-class American becomes the mistress of Manderley.

The same disruption of class roles leads to the heroine’s near breakdown, too.  When Maxim meets the soon-to-be second Mrs. de Winter, the girl is a companion to a snooty, upper-class American woman, and there’s clearly a parallel between the situations of the heroine and Mrs. Danvers.  Both occupy socially subordinate roles as helpers to other upper-class women.  When the heroine breaks that social hierarchy by marrying Maxim, her former employer says the upstart will never succeed, Mrs. Danvers can’t bring herself to accept the substitute, and the heroine herself comes to believe she can’t function in her new social role.  And all of this turmoil comes about from the sincere, innocent love that the American has for her husband, an introduction of the American/British theme.

It isn’t just love that gets the heroine through her trials, though.  Our lead has a lot of good ole American spunk, and when she gets pushed too far, she shoves her sleeves up and gets to work.  She still makes a couple of stumbles, like the mistake at the costume party, but it’s American sincerity and determination that get her through her social crisis as Rebecca moves beyond her storyline to deal with more British upper-class perfidy. 

I find the film’s change in focus at that point its biggest flaw, though.  Rebecca focusses on the heroine’s struggle for ¾ the length of the film, and when it seems she’s finally dealt with her situation, the movie suddenly veers off into an investigation/courtroom detour before returning to the effects of the heroine’s achievement.  The detour describes both the downside (lover) and the upside (constable) of the British, but it’s a digression from the POV and conflict we’d been following.  Of course, when the film eventually returns to Manderley, it’s hard not to see some symbolism in the destruction of the manor house, which had been governed so much by the British mores.

As much as the plot and characters, George Barnes’ cinematography plays a role in making Rebecca the unique work it is.  Barnes creates the vast, open rooms of Manderley, and he photographs the ample smoke that contributes so much to the space and mystery in the film.  Close-ups evoke intimacy or tension, depending on who is in the frame, and looming shadows with low-angle cameras add an emotional dimension to the dialogue and situation.  Sound and editing often reinforce the visuals, too, as when the Mrs. Danvers tries to get the heroine to jump from a window and the camera suddenly cuts several times from a frame of the two women to the heroine’s subjective POV staring down at the ground from the windown.  Likewise when editing and sound add to the menace in the images of the waves during the storm.

Rebecca is a great advance in Hitchcock’s film language.  The movie has some of the same elements as his earlier work, but it refines these elements, adds to them, and combines them in such a way that we begin to see the emergence here of what we can recognize as the signature of a Hitchcock film.

April 6: The Jungle Book (1942 -- Zoltán Korda)

★★★

I think this is the best type of movie you can find from Zoltan Korda: mildly entertaining with some visual interest and lacking in overt (and, ironically, adopted) xenophobia.  The British colonial burden is happily missing The Jungle Book, and we’re left with a framed story of Mowgli and his dealings with treasure hunters; nice humans; and Shere Khan, the tiger.  It’s a children’s story about growing up, dealing with the enemy and finding your own place in the world.  In Technicolor.

I remain surprised at Korda’s ability to conflate exotica for its visual interest – his vision is almost postmodern.  The pink-tinged jungle here holds tigers, panthers, deer, snakes, wolves and elephants, and villagers prepare a human sacrifice in front of a statue of Buddha before exploring a local ruin replete with faces from Angkor Wat.  The emphasis here is on the curiously exotic, and Korda assembles things that look good on screen in order to engage and entertain, and as long as viewers don’t look too hard for character depth or complex plot, they’ll enjoy the pagent that this film is.

But Korda's is not a contemporary sensibility, and I’ve seen as much of his work as I want to see for now.  The Hitchcock and Powell & Pressberger  of his era were able to provide us with films of insight and longevity, but Korda’s work feels dated, stale and even, at times, racist.  This and two of the other Korda films I watched are the boxed Eclipse set called Sabu!  I think the films in the set are well-chosen for the series as none of them would warrant a separate release and Criterion treatment.  

April 5: The Drum (1938 -- Zoltán Korda)

★★★

The Drum is finally a Korda film that I can enjoy without having to constantly wince at the ideology.  There are still many objectionable ideological elements, for sure: the British offering to “protect” Tokot (history is clear what that meant), the good Indian ruler being an immature juvenile who needs paternalist (British) guidance, and the competent Moslems being sneaky and dangerous. 

All that aside, I was interested in the setting, the Pakistan/Afgan border area that is even today unsettled.  Complete with militants, though in the case of this film, not totally fundamentalists.  And you have to like the Technicolor here, too, with the occasional nice vista and riveting reds.  While The Drum doesn’t have the most original story, the plot is at least moderately engaging, and it leads to an action climax that pays off.  Again, though, I’d have to say that Korda is in the Michael Bay action camp because it’s hard to follow exactly what the characters are doing and where everyone is in relation to each other when the shooting starts. 

I saw this film because it’s in the Sabu Eclipse set, and the young actor had grown by the time he did this role.  In The Drum, he’s playing a character who is outside something the actor would have experienced in daily life, and he acts here rather than doing things for the camera he might have done in his off-camera life.  He’s a little stilted, but he still has clear charisma here that adds a little energy to a movie that can creak in places.

Zoltán Korda isn’t going on my list of directors to seek out, but at least The Drum didn’t leave me aggravated, as some other Korda films have.

April 4: Elephant Boy (1937 -- Robert Flaherty and Zoltán Korda)

★★★

I should concentrate on the child actor Sabu here, but it’s Robert Flaherty’s contribution to this film that I respond to.  I enjoyed the ethnographic elements here far more than the hackneyed dramatic elements and the Kipling storyline.  Many of the images from Elephant Boy are lush, black-and-white picturesques of an India that’s hard to find now: ornate temples framed in vegetation and compressed to fill the frame by a long focal length lens, lines of elephants walking over an old bridge, small towns whose streets teem with life, a beautiful water tank.  These parts of the film look like an artistic anthropology film.  And Elephant Boy pauses for animal shots like those of the baby elephant playing in the river, shots that recall the animals of other Flaherty projects and other non-narrative details like the horn summoning the drivers or nighttime storytelling lit by campfires in this film.  These are the sorts of ethnographic documentation details that give me a frisson--the same little thrill I got many times in Flaherty’s Man of Aran and the more famous Nanook of the North--when I recognize a cultural truth in this fictional work.

In this breakout role, Sabu plays a dynamic child, and there’s clearly a bond between boy and animal as he scampers over his pachyderm, both using the animal and caring for him.  Elephant Boy shows the closeness of that relationship the way we’d be more familiar seeing the relationship of a boy and his dog or his horse.  And I think I read somewhere that Sabu didn’t speak English and was just making the sounds he was taught to make when he spoke.  If that’s so, his performance here is doubly amazing because the bulk of his speaking is quite easy to follow.  As child actors of the era go—and I’m thinking of Shirley Temple here—Sabu manages more authenticity than most.

I enjoyed this film.  Some of the restored b/w images are spellbinding, and the little jewels of ethnographic truth in this Flaherty project give unexpected sparkles when the Kipling story starts to get dull.

March 31: The Four Feathers (1939 -- Zoltán Korda)

★★

I guess it’s obvious that a film's content affects the way we enjoy it, and though I try to look through aspects I find personally objectionable, sometimes I just can’t.  I’ll never like Birth of a Nation, its technical breakthroughs notwithstanding, and I can’t embrace Rome, Open City because of the way Rossellini conflates homosexuality with fascism and sexual perversion.  And I don’t respond to The Four Feathers the way I want to either because I so dislike the imperialist ideology at the center of this 1939 British film.

Some argue that Four Feathers is mostly about honor and duty, but in 19th century England, that was another way of saying imperialism.  Whether fighting the Turks in the Crimea or the Sudanese in Africa, a man of honor would prove himself on the field of conquest somewhere in the Empire and, duty done, he would reap the social rewards in British society.  This is the lesson of the child who likes poetry in Four Feathers as he learns to embrace the Empire and outdo his doubting comrades by braving the natives and their harsh climate.  In fact, everyone is brave, and everyone acts honorably in Four Feathers.  Among the colonialists, at least.  I doubt the dialog given to the targets of British imperialism here would fill two pages of script because we never see them do anything except menace the Brits and serve as the agency for the white man to prove his courage and honor.  The locals, apparently, have nothing that the audience might sympathize with.

The one part of this film I can have affection for, though, is the visuals.  There's more than a little taste of David Roberts' orientalism in the cinematography here, and I also enjoy the path I can imagine between Four Feathers and Lawrence of Arabia.  Less than a quarter of a century after Omdurman, David Lean’s desert adventurer has become complex, conflicted and flawed; the local people have identities and personal concerns; and 1.37:1 has become 2.20:1.  Korda clearly sees the open beauty of the desert, but Lean’s aspect ratio and F.A. Young’s cinematography are able to turn this desert in vast expanses of color and motion that Korda tries to capture but can’t.  Both also use a camera on a truck to track battle lines hurtling toward each other, though Lean’s later film takes advantage of 25 years of developing that technique and has smoother, more successful shots.  Both films have bone breaking treks without water and the hot visuals to intensify the risk.  As an outsized fan of Lawrence of Arabia, I enjoyed seeing a desert epic that predates that film by nearly a quarter century.  Four Feathers is a measure of the refinement of cinematic technique and sensibility that Lawrence represents.

My takeaway from Four Feathers is that content can matter.  This film has beautiful Technicolor and lavish sets, but that feels like attractive make-up on something very ugly.  Powell and Pressberger’s 1943 Life and Death of Colonel Blimp manage to address many of the same issues as Korda does here, but their story manages to avoid the overt, grating imperialist assumptions that inform Four Feathers.

March 23: The Hunger Games (2012 -- Gary Ross)

★★★

I hadn’t read any of the books before I went to see The Hunger Games and, in fact, hardly knew anything about the series.  So I was pleasantly surprised to find myself at a movie that I’d group with Gattaca, Never Let Me Go and Moon as futuristic sci-fi with an intellectual bent.

That said, Another Earth also falls into that category, and it isn’t a good film at all.  And while The Hunger Games isn’t nearly as weak as Another Earth, it’s not as good as my favorites in the category either.  On the positive side, I respond tothe parody of reality TV in Hunger Games--maybe I’m still basking in the aura of Network—and it’s hard not to be drawn by the class/power structure so clearly at the center of the film.  And I like the look of the movie a lot with its costumes, make-up and design that are as over-the-top as that of Fifth Element.  I saw Hunger Games in IMAX, and the colors filled the screen.  The acting wasn’t bad either.  I’d have to say that I wasn’t compelled by the performances, but no one appeared to be merely reciting lines.

My only reservation about the film is that it seems to be too much in thrall to a book rather than being a film.  I don’t, for example, understand why the Woody Harrelson character and the Lenny Kravitz  character couldn’t have been combined; they both advise the Tributes, but neither character has enough time or depth to warrant being singular with the result that neither has much presence beyond being a plot device.  The game itself was a bit over-sized, too, and we didn’t develop much attachment to or understanding of most of the characters.  I recognize this plot as resembling that of films like Murder on the Orient Express (another nod to Sidney Lumet), disaster movies like Towering Inferno or most slasher films: characters get bumped off sequentially.  But the list of victims in Hunger Games is too long and we can lose interest in its unfolding even with the scoreboard in the sky.  …unless , of course, we’re already book fans and want to see how the things we loved in the book develop in the movie.  And I gather that the fans of the book are legion, so it makes some commercial sense to orient the film toward them.

All of that aside, I came out of The Hunger Games curious about the second book, which means I connected with the film in some way.  I plan to pick up that second book and see how things go for Katniss, Peeta and Gale.  Perhaps by the time the sequel comes out, I’ll be joining the segment of the audience wearing a Mocking Jay t-shirt.

March 21: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn: Part 1 (2011 -- Bill Condon)

★
About half way through this film, I hit the timeline button on my PS 3 to see how much longer it was going to be.  Breaking Dawn Pt. 1 is that bad.

At least the first half is.  It’s a long wedding and honeymoon fantasy that was so long and so bad that I was sure throughout that something was about to happen.  But it didn’t, and I was about to quit on the film when a story finally started.  Newlyweds Bella and Edward return from their honeymoon with Bella carrying a miscegenetic, vampire/human child with all the attendant problems that crossing racial boundaries has.  The Werewolves soon head out to fight the Vampires because of the situation.

This part of the film has its heart in the right place, dwelling on the theme of harmony among people, er, beings.  I was struck with how similar this theme is to that in The Host, in which same author, Stephanie Meyers, deals with the same issue through a war between humans and Souls.  And she resolves that war by the merging of the two groups in flesh.  Here in Twilight, the tension is between Vampires and Werewolves, and Jacob’s imprinting on the child points to some reconciliation there.  If I watch Part 2, I’ll be interested to see how that goes.

But I got very tired of another point in this film--its persistent, smack-in-the-face, anti-abortion message.  It reminds me of the abstention message of Eclipse, and it strikes me as a pity that both films make such strident and irresponsible points to the target audience of young girls.

 I hope that Part 2 manages to be more of a film than a wedding fantasy followed by preaching.