June 3: Sudden Fear (1952 -- David Miller)

★★★★

June 2: Asphalt Jungle (1950 -- John Huston)

★★★★★

June 1: Woman on the Run (1950 -- Norman Foster)

★★★★

May 31: Out of the Past (1947 -- Jacques Tourneur)

★★★

May 30: Double Indemnity (1944 -- Billy Wilder)

★★★★★

May 22: Alexander the Great (1956 -- Robert Rossen)

★★

Director Robert Rossen never quite pulls together this sprawling bio-epic about Alexander the Great.  Among its many problems is the way Rossen introduces characters and themes that the film drops later.  For example, the long first part of Alexander the Great gives us one of the movie’s more compelling figures in Fredric March’s Philip.  The Macedonian king is a complex figure who is striving with challenges among the Greek city states as well as within his own family.  While attempting to consolidate his rule over Greece, he feels his foreign-born wife is fomenting rebellion in Pella, he doubts the legitimacy of his son Alexander, and he’s working to gain the respect of the cultured elite of Athens.  All the while, he’s fallen in love with a young Greek woman, Euridyce.  These elements make Philip an interesting, well-rounded character, but all this development doesn't contribute to our understanding of Alexander.  In fact, in overdeveloping Philip, the film underdevelops the titular focus of the film.  Similar can be said of Alexander’s mother,  While she isn't as well-developed as Philip and her occasional appearances serve plot functions more than anything, the time we spend with her doesn't give us much insight into Alexander because we see so little of their interaction.  Rossen uses the parents to show us the independence of Alexander, but we're with them for far more time than we need in order to come this conclusion.  And the themes like loyalty and leadership associated with the parents don't become important later in the movie.

Richard Burton doesn’t give us a cohesive Alexander either.  We see Alexander as rash, when he takes the regency of Pellas; stubborn, when he rejects Aristotle’s advice; shrewd, when he decides not to destroy all that he conquers; intelligent, when he expresses openness about non-Hellenistic culture; self-promoting, when he commands that a hill tribe city be named after him; courageous, when he goes into battle; noble, when he executes Darius’ killers; and Oedipal, when told his father would have returned to Greece to repress Athens.  But Burton doesn’t pull all these characteristics together into a unified figure that we in the audience can understand.  His Alexander acts a certain way in a certain set of circumstances, but it’s hard to feel like there’s a single, complex psychology behind his actions.  In voiceover, Aristotle gives us an on-the-nose exposition of Alexander's character as "smart, brave, ..., " but Burton doesn't give us an inner logic to his Alexander.

Rossen’s unsteady direction also undermines our experience.  After lingering on the story of Philip, Rossen speeds up the pace when Alexander arrives in Persia to the point that we are unable to easily follow what’s happening, much less to see how the events there are related to the film's central figure.  We can hardly distinguish the battles of Granicus and Babylon, and it’s hard to know where Alexander is at each point of his Asian campaign.  At one point, he’s massacring Athenians, and at another he’s pardoning them.  The minor roles of women likewise confuse, and it’s hard to know when and why we’re dealing with Barsine or Roxanne.  And Barsine herself swings suddenly from supporting Alexander to opposing him without Rossen providing narrative support to either position.  And the film lurches from one idea to the next with little build up or support for it.  From his time with Aristotle, Alexander proceeds as an unflinching proponent of Hellenism,but we suddenly see him in Persian robes planning to marry Darius' daughter.  The turgid fluctuations of characters, locations and themes in the latter part of the film make watching it an unsatisfying experience.

It's hard to know what happened that makes this film so rambling.  Maybe Rossen tried to remain so true to history that he sacrificed narrative cohesion.  Or perhaps Rossen's cut of the film was indeed cohesive and when the studio cut a third of its running time, that destroyed the unity of the film.  Whatever the case, Rossen's Alexander the Great offers some interesting visuals but little insight into the character or times of the hero.

April 2: The Promise (2016 – Terry George)

★★★

On the surface a historical film about a love triangle set in Ottoman Turkey, The Promise is actually a polemic about the Armenian genocide carried out by the Turks at the turn of the century.  One of the film’s strengths is the way Terry George evokes the era, showing how the Armenians are integrated into Ottoman life.  We see Armenians going to parties, attending schools and doing business shoulder-to-shoulder with Turks.  We observe this life from the point-of-view of the Armenians, mostly from Mikael’s perspective, so we also get to go a little deeper in Armenian life, visiting a church and spending time in a villa owned by an Armenian businessman.  In the beginning of the film, the Ottoman world we experience is vital and cosmopolitan on both Christian and Muslim sides.

As we begin to notice the growing anti-Armenian sentiment, the film makes an important shift.  Soon we no longer see what’s happening in society in general but become locked exclusively into what’s happening to the Armenians.  We experience a series of gripping Armenian persecutions and losses, from discriminatory conscription at Mikael’s medical school to the destruction of his uncle’s business in Istanbul.  Armenians begin to vanish into prisons and become the victims of street violence.  We follow Mikael though brutal experiences and many personal losses, only leaving him so we can join an American reporter Chris Myers as he observes the wholesale evictions of Armenian villages as well as massacres of the people.  The narrow perspective points to George’s limited directorial purpose in the film, to recreate the injustice of the Armenian genocide.

With Promise having such a tight polemical purpose, it’s no surprise that that its love story receives cursory treatment.  Despite convincing acting by Oscar Isaac as Mikael, we feel little real emotion or engagement in the romantic triangle.  Charlotte Le Bon’s Ana often looks like a fashion model and doesn’t sell us on her attraction to either Mikael or Chris.  And for his part, Christian Bale’s Chris doesn’t seem to have feelings for anything.  He shows so little warmth or attraction to Ana that it’s hard to accept they would love each other, and Bale plays Chris as so emotionless that he doesn’t even project feelings about the horrors he’s documenting.  The most that Bale gives us in Chris is a cold, self-righteous anger at the genocide.  And Chris’ posture echoes the larger purpose of Promise, to focus on the horror of the killings rather than on the stresses of the love triangle.

As a gesture of being inclusive, Promise gives us a couple of Turks who resist the growing carnage.  A governor, for example, takes a major risk in warning an orphanage that its Armenian children will be slaughtered. He even allows Chris to leave the area despite an arrest warrant out for the American.  And Marwan Kenzari as Emri conveys an extraordinary vulnerability and decency toward his American and Armenian friends.  It’s unfortunate that George isn’t interested in this side of his story because theirs would certainly have among the most interesting in the film.

While the thrust here is to dramatize the Armenian genocide, it’s hard to watch Promise and not think of our contemporary political situation.  How could a cosmopolitan, tolerant culture suddenly turn on a segment of its population, as happened with the Jews in Germany or the Armenians in Turkey?  Promise doesn’t address the factors that led to the horror in Turkey, but it’s a reminder of how fragile a multicultural environment can be.  It's not much of a love story at all.

Atlanta Film Festival: Sunday April 2, 7 pm at the Plaza Theater.