STEVE VINEBERG

Tiger by the tail

STEVE VINEBERG — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 22:39:02 GMT

The wild and woolly cinema of John Boorman
The wild and woolly cinema of John Boorman

POINT BLANK: This Lee Marvin revenge thriller is so flamboyantly well assembled, you have to marvel at it.

“John Boorman’s Primeval Screen” | Brattle Theatre + Harvard Film Archive: November 20-24

John Boorman's most recent film, The Tiger's Tail, still doesn't have a US distributor, so there's an irony to the impressive four-day festival of Boorman films that the Harvard Film Archive and the Brattle Theatre are hosting this weekend. Everyone knows the Boorman hits — Deliverance, Excalibur, and Hope and Glory — but fine pictures like his neo-Shakespearean comedy Where the Heart Is (1990) and the political adventure Beyond Rangoon (1995) opened and closed without leaving a trace. Boorman has a distinctive visual style — he loves wide, wondrous, prismatic landscapes — and he's drawn to material that interrogates institutions; in his early career he also loved mythology and pop philosophy. But his instinct for subversive visions has made him risky and usually kept him far from the mainstream.

The series includes neither Where the Heart Is nor Beyond Rangoon, and it's also lacking another memorable Boorman, The Tailor of Panama (2001), which improves on the John le Carrû novel from which it's derived. (The one other omission is his 2004 disappointment In My Country.) But it does provide a rare opportunity to see one of his least-known gems, his 1965 debut, CATCH US IF YOU CAN (HFA: November 23 at 9:15 pm), which was released in America as Having a Wild Weekend. This was a fitting introduction to his career: it came out in the wake of the success of the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night, but it wasn't the picture anyone was anticipating from the Dave Clark Five. Instead of showcasing the band, Boorman, working from a melancholy script by Peter Nichols, cast them as stunt men, one of whom (Clark) runs away with a famous model (Barbara Ferris) in the middle of a shoot. They're looking for escape from the sewn-up, commercialized city world, but the farther they venture from the heart of London, the more they discover that everything's been co-opted, and the only alternative appears to be competing forms of desperation. The movie is utterly remarkable — a eulogy for the '60s when they've barely begun that's lyrical and haunting.

Brief fling

STEVE VINEBERG — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 03:28:21 GMT

Carole Lombard’s nine years of stardom
Carole Lombard rose to stardom in 1934 and was dead by 1942, killed in a plane crash on her way back from selling war bonds; her last picture, Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be , was released posthumously.

MY MAN GODFREY: This one’s ’30s-style eccentricity is hugely entertaining.

“Carole Lombard: No Dumb Blonde” | Brattle Theatre: October 18-23

Carole Lombard rose to stardom in 1934 and was dead by 1942, killed in a plane crash on her way back from selling war bonds; her last picture, Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be, was released posthumously. She was one of the great funny girls of the Depression era, as witness the five features in the Brattle’s upcoming series “Carole Lombard: No Dumb Blonde” (October 18-23). Her compact but pointed face, the soft blond crown of hair, the sleek, elegant frame that satin and silk and lamé either clung to or dripped off, all made her a ’30s icon — the billboard for her 1936 film Love Before Breakfast is at the center of one of Walker Evans’s photographs. In straight pictures she was competent and always lovely, but she was at her best in comedies, where she could add a goofy quality to her glamor.

The films in the series include her three finest — TWENTIETH CENTURY (October 19-20), MY MAN GODFREY (October 18 + 23), and NOTHING SACRED (October 21-22) — as well as her two last, MR. & MRS. SMITH (October 21-22) and TO BE OR NOT TO BE (October 19-20). Twentieth Century, superbly directed by Howard Hawks from a breakneck script by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, came out in 1934, the year the Production Code went into effect and filmmakers invented romantic comedy as a way of negotiating the creative restrictions it placed on them. It’s a mixture of romantic (screwball) and backstage comedy. Lombard plays Mildred Plotka, a lingerie-model-turned-actress who lands the lead in a Broadway play because producer Oscar Jaffe (the inimitable John Barrymore) — who promptly renames her Lily Garland — is convinced he can turn her into a sensational actress. He succeeds, and they become partners, on stage and off. But his megalomania and jealousy eventually drive her away — to Hollywood, where she becomes an even bigger star. The movie, most of which takes place three years later on board the Twentieth Century, the cross-country train that was all the rage in the period, is about a pair of battling egomaniacs who can’t distinguish between theater and life; even when Lily bemoans her own penchant for unending melodrama, she’s playing a scene.

Paul Newman (1925-2008)

STEVE VINEBERG — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 01:06:02 GMT

Remembering a movie star who turned himself into a great actor
Paul Newman, who died last weekend at the age of 83, was that rarest of creatures, a movie star who turned himself into a great actor.

Paul Newman, who died last weekend at the age of 83, was that rarest of creatures, a movie star who turned himself into a great actor. He emerged in the early ’50s, a time when young hopefuls were intoxicated by the Method approach to acting and live television had just begun to provide an exciting new venue for performers who were already scurrying between movies and the stage. Newman worked in all three. He played the rich boy who loses the girl in the original Broadway production of Picnic. On TV he was George opposite Eva Marie Saint in a musical adaptation of Our Town and Hemingway’s punch-drunk boxer Ad Francis in “The Battler.” His early performances were undeniably Methody — they were eager, searching, still unformed, and you could see the influence of Brando and James Dean like footprints on wet clay. It’s that youthful tentativeness and self-consciousness that make his Billy the Kid in Arthur Penn’s 1958 The Left Handed Gun so affecting — and so much an artifact of its era.

But it wasn’t Newman’s bid to be a genuine actor that made him a movie star. It was a mix of other qualities: the improbable handsome face and form; the immense, breakaway smile that promised sexual availability and freedom; the insouciance; the always surprising vulnerability — the way his face could melt under the effect of betrayal or heartbreak. Audiences went crazy for him in movies like The Long Hot Summer (where he played sexy-funny love scenes with his real-life wife, Joanne Woodward) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (where it took two hours for Elizabeth Taylor to get him into bed), humid Southern melodramas out of Faulkner and Tennessee Williams. And not because his acting was skillful or profound but because he was an all-American dreamboat who took the camera by force like Clark Gable. Even in the best of the movies he made in his first decade of stardom, The Hustler (for Robert Rossen) and Hud (for The Long Hot Summer’s director, Martin Ritt), both superb early-’60s showcases for his incomparable appeal, his acting takes second place to other elements — freshness and ebullience and sexy humor, and of course those looks. The difference between the two performances, shot merely two years apart, is that by Hud he isn’t working as hard: as the womanizing Texas bad boy in the pink Cadillac whose worshipful nephew (Brandon de Wilde) can grow up only by learning not to follow in his footsteps, Newman never breaks a sweat.

Buffalo’d Bard

STEVE VINEBERG — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 17:06:42 GMT

This West doesn’t win the East
It’s nifty that Boston has snagged the world premiere of Richard Nelson’s new play, How Shakespeare Won the West , which opens the season at the Huntington.

THE PREMISE SEEMS IRRESISTIBLE If only the execution didn’t wander cross-country.

It’s nifty that Boston has snagged the world premiere of Richard Nelson’s new play, How Shakespeare Won the West, which opens the season at the Huntington (and runs through October 5). But this talented, prolific playwright blows hot and cold, and Shakespeare isn’t one of his successes — though the premise seems just about irresistible. Set in the mid-19th century and based on real events, the play is about a New York tavern owner named Thomas Jefferson Calhoun (Will LeBow) who, inspired by a visiting Ohio actor’s tales of prospectors in the California gold rush who revere Shakespeare, assembles a theatrical troupe to trek across country to perform for them.

The company includes Calhoun’s family — his wife, Alice (Mary Beth Fisher), who retired from the stage upon becoming pregnant and has always longed to return, and their daughter, Susan (Sarah Nealis), an eager novice. They’re joined by the Ohio thespian Buck Buchanan (Erik Lochtefeld) and Susan’s childhood friend John Gough (Joe Tapper). They take on a couple who claim to be English (Jeremiah Kissel and Kelly Hutchinson) but are obviously inauthentic both as Brits and as a couple (he’s gay), and an older character man (Jon De Vries). Their star is a handsome drunk and sometime celebrity (Chris Henry Coffey) who just got thrown out of another company; his wife, a gifted actress to whom he has just become reconciled, begs to come along too.

The play, which is performed without an intermission, is episodic; the problem is that it’s also misshapen. It begins as a genial — and not terribly eventful — comedy, but halfway through it makes an abrupt tonal shift, as the troupe is beset by internal and external difficulties. Handling the personal problems of the actors (illness and sexual jealousy), Nelson veers into melodrama. Then, when the actors land in South Dakota and find themselves drawn into the Indian wars, the play becomes didactic and heavy-handed as the playwright feels the need to address the themes of racism and religious intolerance. For a space, the troupe is broken up and Buck winds up being adopted by religious zealots who teach him to shoot at Native Americans and blacks. This dreadful section, which is reminiscent of the worst excesses of Little Big Man, is jarring; I felt as if I’d wandered into some other play. Moreover, the drama keeps getting interrupted by narration shared by the ensemble in the old-fashioned reader’s-theater style, in which each character describes his or her own actions.

When men were men

STEVE VINEBERG — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:02:05 GMT

Sam Peckinpah at the Harvard Film Archive
Since Sam Peckinpah’s untimely death at the age of 59, he has acquired such legendary status that it’s startling to remember that he made only 14 films over a period of 22 years.

THE WILD BUNCH: In contrast with this film’s jackals and vultures, the Bunch act like men and die with honor.

“Sam Peckinpah, Blood Poet” | Harvard Film Archive | September 5-12

In the nearly two and a half decades since Sam Peckinpah’s untimely death at the age of 59, he has acquired such legendary status and his influence has been so pervasive that it’s startling to remember that he made only 14 films over a period of 22 years — and that even now many of them are still obscure. So the long-overdue retrospective that begins this Friday at the Harvard Film Archive, “Sam Peckinpah, Blood Poet,” is most welcome.

There were gaps in Peckinpah’s output owing to his uneasy relationship with the studios: fired off The Cincinnati Kid in 1965, he couldn’t get work again in Hollywood until after he’d returned to television, his original venue, and attracted critical notice with an hour-long adaptation of Katherine Anne Porter’s story “Noon Wine.” Only then did he direct THE WILD BUNCH, his masterpiece — and almost inarguably the greatest Western ever made. (The HFA will conclude the series with a screening of The Wild Bunch on September 12 at 7 pm, pairing it with Paul Seydor’s extraordinary 1996 documentary “THE WILD BUNCH: AN ALBUM IN MONTAGE,” which contains footage of the filming of the Bunch’s last stand that demonstrates how this classic sequence was assembled.) Five years turtled by between the release of Convoy in 1978 and his swan song, The Osterman Weekend. And he spent much of his too-brief career battling studio heads who insisted on dumping his pictures (like the exquisite Ride the High Country, which got relegated to the lower half of double bills) or recutting them. Major Dundee, The Wild Bunch, and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid were all released in versions he did not approve, though the last two can now be seen as he intended them to be.

The awful truth

STEVE VINEBERG — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:46:57 GMT

Leo McCarey was better in the ’30s
Among the signal directors of 1930s comedies — one thinks of Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, Ernst Lubitsch, and George Cukor — Leo McCarey’s name has been largely forgotten.

THE AWFUL TRUTH: A screwball comedy reimagined as a comedy of remarriage.

“Leo McCarey, Screwball and Beyond” | Harvard Film Archive | June 8-16

Among the signal directors of 1930s comedies — one thinks of Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, Ernst Lubitsch, and George Cukor — Leo McCarey’s name has been largely forgotten. Yet he was responsible for three of the greatest comedies of the Depression era: Duck Soup (the most sublime of the Marx Brothers movies), Ruggles of Red Gap, and The Awful Truth. He was an odd duck, though, as fond of melodrama as he was of romantic comedy and farce. The retrospective hosted by the Harvard Film Archive beginning this Sunday, “Leo McCarey, Screwball and Beyond,” is long overdue.

McCarey was brought up in the Hal Roach school of silent comedy, which means that by the time he made his first talkie, INDISCREET (which the HFA will screen a rare print of), he’d learned how to work quickly and economically, he’d perfected a kind of visual shorthand, and he’d developed a light, sure touch with actors. The series begins with a program of his comic shorts — three late silents starring Laurel and Hardy (including one of their most famous two-reelers, “Big Business”) and one with Charley Chase called “Dog Shy.” “Dog Shy,” the earliest of the quartet, was released in 1926, and it was the 40th short McCarey directed, so he was a veteran long before 1929, when he began to make features. His physical work with Chase and with Stan and Ollie bears fruit in sequences like the astonishingly poetic (and uproarious) human-mirror bit in DUCK SOUP, where Groucho encounters Chico and Harpo dressed up to look like him, or the classic scenes in THE AWFUL TRUTH involving Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, and an expressive wire-haired terrier known as Mr. Smith — played by the same canny canine performer who kept showing up as Asta in the Thin Man pictures. (In “Dog Shy,” Chase is continually being bested by a frisky dog; their charming interchanges are a warm-up for the Mr. Smith episodes.)

American original

STEVE VINEBERG — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 18:17:02 GMT

Arthur Penn at the Harvard Film Archive
During the great American renaissance period in movies, Hollywood was in the hands of the counterculture.

BONNIE AND CLYDE: The great American film renaissance began with this one.

During the great American renaissance period in movies, Hollywood was in the hands of the counterculture, and filmmakers, many of them trained in the theater or under the hothouse pressures of live television, and excited by the modern classics that had come out of Europe in the ’60s, experimented with the conventions of movie genres. It all began in the fall of 1967, when Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, the first gangster picture with complex, sympathetic heroes, divided the critics (many found it morally repugnant) but made an immediate and deep connection with young audiences. They were entranced by its interplay of glamor and contemporary put-on humor, its tonal shifts, its take on the topics of celebrity and role playing, its realistic depiction of violence. Bonnie and Clyde opened the fall of my senior year of high school, and the following Monday morning it was the only thing my classmates and I could talk about. Everyone had seen it or had made plans to. My first college girlfriend told me that the weekend it opened in her town she saw it two nights in a row.

Penn flamed into the front ranks of American directors with the film’s release, so it’s easy to forget that at that point he already had a career. The fascinating Harvard Film Archive series “Arthur Penn, American Auteur” pays tribute to his early days as well as to the decade that followed BONNIE AND CLYDE (Sunday at 7 pm); it even includes one of his early television dramas, THE TEARS OF MY SISTER (Friday at 7 pm), from 1953. Penn divided his time between New York’s TV studios and the Broadway stage, and those turned out to be his entrée to Hollywood. In 1962 he brought the William Gibson play THE MIRACLE WORKER (Monday at 7 pm), which he’d directed in New York, to the screen along with its original actresses: Patty Duke as the young Helen Keller and Anne Bancroft as her teacher, Annie Sullivan. His days in TV had taught him how to harness the energy of live performance for the camera: the electric performances of the two stars make Gibson’s stripped-down dramatic text, a triumph-of-the-spirit drama about how a great teacher leads a soul locked away by blindness and deafness into consciousness, into an unforgettable emotional experience. Bancroft and Duke walked away with Oscars, and Penn had a new career.

The Summer with Monika

STEVE VINEBERG — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 20:11:41 GMT

Sensual rebellion
Harriet Andersson is the title character in this 1953 film, a teenager who combines a scruffy working-class sensuality with a slightly preposterous romanticism derived from Hollywood movies.

Wild boys and girls

STEVE VINEBERG — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 16:48:39 GMT

‘Vice vs. Virtue’ at Harvard
The series includes some of the liveliest and most adult entertainment in the history of the movie industry.

HURT ME! Clara Bow is a feisty Western heiress in Call Her Savage.

The fleeting few years between the very early talkies (1927-’29) and the institution of Hollywood’s self-imposed censorship in the form of the Production Code in 1934 produced some of the liveliest and most adult entertainment in the history of the movie industry. Nothing remotely like it would be seen again until the Code finally fell apart in the ’60s, exhausted by repeated challenges from filmmakers. Inspired by Brandeis film-studies professor Thomas Doherty’s new book, Hollywood Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration, “Vice vs. Virtue in Pre-Code Hollywood,” at the Harvard Film Archive this weekend, is the latest entertaining series to pay tribute to this fascinating era. (Doherty will be on hand this Friday evening to introduce the first two pictures.)

All 10 of the pictures in the collection were released between 1932 and 1934, and they address the tension between virtue and vice in strikingly different ways. In the brisk, evocative EMPLOYEES’ ENTRANCE (January 21 at 7 pm), the ruthless manager (Warren William) of a Manhattan department store struggling to stay solvent during the Depression takes pity on a young woman (Loretta Young) he discovers camping out in the model-homes department after closing time. He offers her a job modeling women’s clothes, but his generosity comes at a price: she has to sleep with him. In BLOOD MONEY (January 18 at 7 pm, with Call Her Savage), the hero (George Bancroft) is a bail bondsman named Bill Bailey — he hands out his own special brand of cigars with the imprinted motto “Bailey for Bail” — with a wide popularity in the underworld. But though he has a scandal in his past (he was thrown off the police force for accepting graft), Bailey conducts his affairs according to a strict code of honor. Played by the ebullient Clara Bow in her penultimate film, Nasa “Dynamite” Springer, the heroine of CALL HER SAVAGE, is a feisty Western heiress who resists the efforts of her disdainful, icy father (Willard Robertson) to control her — he wants to marry her off to a man she doesn’t love. But underneath her fiery temper and wild behavior is a woman of sensitive impulses chafing against a world in which she hasn’t yet found her place. Although Nasa’s escapades lead her into some unusual corners — in one scene a high-society escort takes her to a Greenwich Village club where men perform in drag and an anarchist (Mischa Auer) who recognizes her date as a millionaire’s son tosses food at them — the movie is careful never to show her engaged in anything truly illicit. Desperation — a sick baby — almost drives her to the streets, but circumstances conspire to keep her virtue intact.

Wild things

STEVE VINEBERG — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 22:01:59 GMT

Lamorisse’s White Mane and Red Balloon
There is no more-enchanting Thanksgiving outing than the double bill of reissued Albert Lamorisse short films.

THE RED BALLOON: Who’s your friend?

There is no more-enchanting Thanksgiving outing — for children or adults — than the double bill of reissued Albert Lamorisse short films, Crin-blanc|White Mane (1953) and Le ballon rouge|The Red Balloon (1956), that’s getting a run at the Kendall Square starting this Friday. Both focus on unconventional, emblematic childhood friendships. In the first, Folco, a boy from a farming family in Camargue region in the south of France, catches a magnificent white horse, the leader of a pack of wild steeds, and rescues him from hunters who would break and sell him. In the second, a Parisian schoolboy (played by the director’s son, Pascal Lamorisse) climbs up a balcony to release a trapped red balloon, whereupon, self-willed and persistent, it becomes his constant companion.

The Red Balloon is whimsical; White Mane (a small masterpiece) touches, in 31 minutes, all the emotions of a classic coming-of-age picture about a child and a legendary animal, like National Velvet, The Yearling, or The Black Stallion. (It’s clear that Carroll Ballard, who made The Black Stallion, owes a debt to Lamorisse.) In both movies, the object of the boy’s affection is an embodiment of the spirit of childhood that can’t be constrained by the traditions of bourgeois society (in Red Balloon) or repressed by the machinations of the self-interested, mercenary adult world (in White Mane). In Red Balloon, Lamorisse deals with these enemies of the youthful drive toward freedom comically and with tremendous charm. When the boy leaves the balloon outside the schoolroom, it slips in unbidden through an open window, and the principal punishes the boy by locking him in an empty room (solitary) for the day; the balloon follows the principal down the street and butts him on the head. When it finds its way into church, this intrusion of the holiday impulse into a sanctified space causes a scandal, and the boy is thrown out. In both scenes, Lamorisse leaves us outside these solemn institutions, so we see the set-up — the mischievous balloon trailing its pal into places where it hasn’t been invited — and the end of the explosion that results. Both are like perfectly calibrated sequences from silent comedies. (Aside from the musical score, there’s almost no dialogue, and most of it is nonsense, like the argument of the jabbering industrialists in Vittorio De Sica’s Miracolo a Milano, from the same era.)

Teen spirit

STEVE VINEBERG — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 17:57:08 GMT

The Corn Is Green at Williamstown; Romeo and Juliet at the Publick
The Williamstown Theatre Festival revival of Emlyn Williams’s The Corn Is Green marks the first time this play has been trotted out in years.

THE CORN IS GREEN: No Bette Davis, Kate Burton anchors a somewhat indifferent show.

The Williamstown Theatre Festival revival of Emlyn Williams’s THE CORN IS GREEN (through August 12) marks the first time this play has been trotted out in years, though it used to be a warhorse. Ethel Barrymore made it famous on stage in 1940, Bette Davis starred in the movie in 1945, and a 1979 TV movie featured Katharine Hepburn; there was even a (failed) attempt at a musical adaptation. The construction is workmanlike but effective. The protagonist is Miss Moffat, a feisty, feminist English spinster who inherits a house in a Wales mining town in the late 19th century and decides to turn it into a school to educate the local youth, many of whom are illiterate. But to her astonishment, she discovers that one of the boys, Morgan Evans, is prodigiously gifted. So she sets about tutoring him. Her aim is to turn him away from the miner’s life (he lost his father and brothers when one of the mines collapsed during his childhood, yet he has never considered any other future for himself) and possibly secure him a scholarship to Oxford.

The struggle to achieve an education despite debilitating obstacles is a particularly appealing dramatic theme, and the plays and movies that seize on it, like Aparajito and Sounder and My Left Foot, are sometimes moving and memorable. The Corn Is Green shares with Aparajito, the centerpiece of Satyajit Ray’s great Apu Trilogy, the notion that an intellectual spark can show itself in the most unlikely places; its key metaphor, taken from the first essay Morgan writes for Miss Moffat, is a light in a mine. The Corn Is Green is no masterpiece, but emotional conviction can make it memorable; that’s what happened with the Bette Davis film version.

Nicholas Martin’s production at Williamstown isn’t bad; it has lovely designs — sets by James Noone, lighting by Frances Aronson, costumes by Jeff Mahshie — and most of the actors in stock supporting roles perform them with affection and humor. But it’s rather an indifferent show, built around an uninspired Miss Moffat. Kate Burton, a Williamstown stalwart (and a frequent collaborator with Martin), is a fine technician. I had no trouble believing her in the period or believing what the script tells us about her character — her indomitable spirit, her tart wit (often applied witheringly to those she considers to be fools), her devotion to her student. The only one of her scenes I didn’t buy was the one in which Miss Moffat flatters the dull, vain local squire in order to achieve his assistance in putting Morgan forth for the scholarship. (You can see how insincere she is from a mile away.) But there’s no current of genuine feeling underneath her Victorian reserve. I never sensed how much it means to her to lift Evans above his circumstances, or how she shifts from wanting to do it out of pride and personal achievement to wanting to do it out of selfless love for the boy himself.

An Italian feast

STEVE VINEBERG — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 17:50:38 GMT

‘Signore + Signore’ isn’t just about the ladies
A group of performers — especially one unified by gender and culture — is an unconventional focus for a film series.

PANE, AMORE E FANTASIA: Gina Lollobrigida as a poor girl who falls for one of the local carabinieri instead of Vittorio De Sica.

A group of performers — especially one unified by gender and culture — is an unconventional focus for a film series. But it isn’t just the topic that distinguishes the month-long “Signore & Signore: Leading Ladies of Italian Cinema 1941–1977,” which begins this Friday at the MFA. This collection includes only a handful of movies that Boston aficionados are likely to have heard of, let alone seen. Most of the entries are obscure, and these handsome prints are in most cases the first seen publicly in this country in decades. It’s an exciting series — and not just because it showcases a wide variety of acting styles and a breathtaking array of beautiful women who mesmerized the cameras at Cinecittà, Rome’s signature studio: Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, Ornella Muti, Lucia Bosè, Mariangela Melato, Claudia Cardinale, Silvana Mangano. Now any festival that includes Anna Magnani, Alida Valli, Monica Vitti, and Stefania Sandrelli — four movie stars who are also superlative actresses — justifies itself as a tribute to Italian leading ladies. But “Signore & Signore” is finally less about acting than about the lesser-known glories of the Italian cinema in its heyday. None of the Neo-Realist classics is here; there’s no Rossellini, and the contributions by Visconti and Antonioni are atypical of their respective œuvres. Yet the selection is rich and laden with surprises.

Take DRAMMA DELLA GELOSIA|A DRAMA OF JEALOUSY (September 6 at 2:30 pm; September 7 at 8 pm). Ettore Scola’s 1970 tragicomedy, featuring Vitti, Marcello Mastroianni, and Giancarlo Giannini as the shifting points in an amorous triangle, suggests a comic opera by Puccini, presented in a fragmented flashback structure with the uncharacteristically hilarious use of Brechtian devices. Scola never made anything else like it; I’m not sure anyone has. It begins with an act of violence — alluded to obliquely but not actually seen until the very end — and then marches back through the turbulent emotional tangle that led inevitably to it. Scola rarely pins down any scene to a single tone: the clowning of the three actors — especially Mastroianni and Vitti, whose performances ought to be legendary — is heartbreaking. Filmmaking was so experimental in 1970 that the stylistic accomplishments of this picture were overlooked. Now, you watch it and can hardly believe there was a time when a second-tier Italian director would have dared to put together a romantic comedy in so unorthodox a fashion. If there’s such a thing as pointillist narrative filmmaking, Dramma della gelosia is an example.

Ingmar Bergman

STEVE VINEBERG — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 21:43:18 GMT

1918–2007
Ingmar Bergman, who died Sunday, was one of the last of the great world filmmakers who came to fame around the mid century and changed the face of movies.

Ingmar Bergman, who died Sunday, was one of the last of the great world filmmakers who came to fame around the mid century and changed the face of movies. But he ended his career as he had begun it, in the theater rather than on screen. He was trained as a stage director in Stockholm before entering film (initially as a script doctor and a screenwriter), and he never deserted the stage. When he retired from movies in his 60s (twice — first with Fanny and Alexander in 1983, which he declared to be his swan song, and then again unofficially with After the Rehearsal, which was released worldwide after being shown on Swedish TV), he devoted his attention to mounting productions, in Swedish, of Shakespeare and classics of the modern theater.

Of course, he was a consummate moviemaker whose greatest images play on in our memories: the point-of-view shot from the old man’s coffin in Wild Strawberries, the chess game with Death in The Seventh Seal, the merging faces of the two women in Persona, the water choked with bodies in his apocalyptic war film Shame. But unlike the other masters who emerged in the ’40s, like Akira Kurosawa and Orson Welles and John Huston, or in the ’50s, like Satyajit Ray and François Truffaut and Kon Ichikawa — unlike even Robert Altman, who interrupted his film career to direct plays, and some of whose best movies began as plays he himself staged — Bergman really thought in theatrical terms more than cinematic ones. When Altman turned Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean or Secret Honor into a movie, it felt oddly as if it had just been waiting for someone to recognize its essential film essence. But Bergman’s movies often feel like plays on film, though none of them, with the singular exception of his sublime 1975 version of The Magic Flute, actually began as plays. They usually consist of dramatic texts (written by Bergman), significantly dialogue-heavy, delivered by actors in his stock company — Bibi Andersson, Max von Sydow, Harriet Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Gunnar Björnstrand, and others — who have clearly approached them as theatrical ensembles approach new productions, beginning with table talk about the psychology of the characters and then moving into a protracted rehearsal period. Part of what, I think, American audiences responded to when they watched Bergman pictures in the ’50s and ’60s, in the golden age of the foreign-film arthouse, was the thing that made them unique — not the metaphysical, God-is-a-spider stuff (Through a Glass Darkly hasn’t aged well, and Bergman was never much of a philosopher) so much as the theatrical intensity of the interaction among Bergman’s actors.

Counting Sheep

STEVE VINEBERG — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 18:45:34 GMT

Charles Burnett at the MFA
Lyrical, contemplative, with a clear disdain for mainstream Hollywood, the African-American filmmaker Charles Burnett has cobbled out an unorthodox career.

MY BROTHER’S WEDDING: Another story of hope and defeat among the denizens of South Central LA.

Lyrical, contemplative, with a clear disdain for mainstream Hollywood, the African-American filmmaker Charles Burnett — the subject of a 10-day series at the Museum of Fine Arts beginning June 8 — has cobbled out an unorthodox career, mostly on the sidelines of American commercial film. He was trained in the ’70s at UCLA. While Hollywood was churning out blaxploitation features, Burnett was struggling to develop an alternative approach to African-American subjects: a mixture of urban naturalism (most of his movies were filmed in South Central LA) and visual poetry rooted in the images of great Depression-era photographers like Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. His plaintive, haunting, one-of-a-kind feature KILLER OF SHEEP (1977; June 8 at 8:15 pm; June 9 at noon; June 10 at 4 pm; June 14 at 4:20 pm; June 15 at 6:20 pm; June 16 at 12:30 pm; June 17 at 12:15 pm) is often held up as an example of what independent film artists can achieve, but very few people have actually seen it, and in the three decades since he made it, the trajectory of his work has been hard to trace. Occasionally his name pops up on a television drama or a documentary, and he’s made two movies intended for general release: To Sleep with Anger (1990), a family drama starring Danny Glover, and The Glass Shield (1994), which focused on racism in the LAPD. But To Sleep with Anger, an attempt to find a distinctively African-American cinematic narrative form based on fable, is mostly baffling, and the conventional story line of The Glass Shield is such a terrible fit for Burnett’s gifts that you can’t even make sense of the plot.

Québec libre

STEVE VINEBERG — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 16:40:30 GMT

Michel Brault and Claude Jutra at the HFA
The rise of the Quebec movie industry coincided with the awakening of French-Canadian cultural and political consciousness in the late ’60s.

POUR LA SUITE DU MONDE: The crusty, hardy survivors resemble characters out of Renoir’s movies.

The rise of the Quebec movie industry coincided with the awakening of French-Canadian cultural and political consciousness in the late ’60s. Until then, the work of Québecois filmmakers was constrained within the bounds of the National Film Board, which turned out mostly documentaries and short subjects. Claude Jutra and Michel Brault, the twin subjects of the marvelous Harvard Film Archive series “Candid Eyes,” which begins Saturday and runs through April 1, met at the Film Board, became close friends, and collaborated on a number of projects. When Jutra made his breakthrough feature, Mon oncle Antoine, in 1971, Brault lit it, and he was the cinematographer on Jutra’s follow-up movie, Kamouraska, too, though he had already been making his own features for several years. Jutra’s career stalled after Kamouraska, and he died under tragic circumstances in the mid ’80s. (Diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, he threw himself into the St. Lawrence River.) The HFA series covers the golden period of his greatest promise, from the early ’60s through the mid ’70s, providing Boston with the first opportunity to see superb movies like MON ONCLE ANTOINE (March 28-29), KAMOURASKA (March 30-31), and his one-of-a-kind autobiographical picture, À TOUT PRENDRE (March 24-25), since the French Library screened them a decade and a half ago. And it offers us an even rarer chance to see Brault’s films, including the one he’s best known for in his native Quebec, LES ORDRES (April 1), a harrowing depiction of the injustices sown by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s passing of the War Measures Act in 1970, in the aftermath of the terrorist activities of the Quebec nationalist group the FLQ.

The series includes a smattering of the documentaries — some short, some full-length — Brault and Jutra turned out at the Film Board. The best is 1963’s POUR LA SUITE DU MONDE (March 24-25), directed by Brault and Pierre Perrault, which is about how the tradition of whale fishing, abandoned early in the 20th century, was revived on the tiny island of Île-aux-Coudres. The theme is legacy, and the film spends a lot of time with old-timers whose memories and counsel become precious commodities as the new world seeks a way to reconnect with the old. The crusty, astonishingly hardy survivors resemble characters out of Renoir’s movies.

Cross-purposes

STEVE VINEBERG — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 16:36:30 GMT

ART’s Oliver Twist , the New Rep’s Orson’s Shadow
Oliver Twist gets the Brecht treatment in Neil Bartlett’s new adaptation at American Repertory Theatre.

OLIVER TWIST: Is it Brecht or boo-hoo Bartlett is aiming at?

Oliver Twist gets the Brecht treatment in Neil Bartlett’s new adaptation at American Repertory Theatre (at the Loeb Drama Center through March 24). Bartlett, who first directed the show in London, presents it as a literary narrative, with sections of Dickens’s novel read aloud by Carson Elrod to bridge the dramatic scenes. And some of the visual elements — the footlights, Rae Smith's [please see correction below] clever box set — hark back to the conventions of 19th-century melodrama and music hall. But Bartlett’s point isn’t really to evoke the period in which the book was written. The down-front lighting (by Scott Zielinski) [please see correction below] drains the actors’ faces, so that when they huddle together at the play’s opening they look like a band of ghosts. This effect works together with the narrator, the portions of text sung a cappella by the ensemble, and the heavily stylized acting to put quotation marks around the material.

Bartlett’s approach certainly worked on the opening-night audience, which cheered and gave the show a standing ovation. But I have to confess I don’t get the point of applying all these distancing devices to Oliver Twist, unless you find Dickensian sentimentality bourgeois and offensive, as Brecht certainly would have. And Bartlett obviously doesn’t. He wants to underscore Dickens’s message about cruelty to children — which is so obvious in the novel that to point it up seems a prime example of gilding the lily. Moreover, he likes the sentimentality. He interrupts the flow of the story with all these Brechtian techniques, but then he directs Elrod to read the literary sections straight, with extra emphasis on the pathos. It’s as if, at the end of Die Dreigroschenoper, after the company steps forward to sing the moral about poverty and corruption, Brecht and Weill had added a tender description of a child starving to death on the open road and made the audience cry.

The Russians are coming

STEVE VINEBERG — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 22:24:48 GMT

Cold War cinema at the HFA
With one exception, the eight movies in the nifty “Cold War Cinema” series at the Harvard Film Archive are popular entertainments that treat the politics and sociology of the era in a variety of ways.

THE THIRD MAN: A popular entertainment and much more.

With one exception, the eight movies in the nifty “Cold War Cinema” series at the Harvard Film Archive are popular entertainments that treat the politics and sociology of the era in a variety of ways. INVASION U.S.A. (1959), RED MENACE (1949), and PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET (1953) are anti-Communist action pictures. The stupefyingly clunky ROCKETSHIP X-M (1950) is a sci-fi cautionary fable for the atomic age: the first rocket crew bound for the moon falls off course and lands on Mars, where a nuclear holocaust has wiped out an advanced civilization and the planet’s only inhabitants are cavemen. The protagonist of CITY OF FEAR (1959) is a thief who steals an atomic capsule and has to be tracked down before he can contaminate LA; the hero of D.O.A. (1950) has swallowed poison that will off him in 48 hours — giving him just long enough to solve his own murder. PANIC IN THE STREETS (1950) has a classic film noir opening: when a Greek immigrant newly arrived in New Orleans walks away from a poker game with his pockets full, the hood whose money he won and two stooges follow him through the shadowy streets, across the tracks, and onto the pier, where they shoot him down. But the coroner who examines the body finds it riddled with pneumonic plague, and the health authorities and the cops have to find his killers before an epidemic erupts.

Neither the low-rent, engaging D.O.A. nor the gripping Panic in the Streets (superbly staged and shot by Elia Kazan, the year before he turned out A Streetcar Named Desire) is tightly focused on Cold War subjects, and neither can be said to offer a metaphor for Communism or nuclear devastation. But both belong to the Cold War era. The toxin ravaging the body of the hero of D.O.A., Frank Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien), is luminous, a bizarre, exotic detail that links it to a movie like City of Fear. Bigelow can’t harm anyone else, so the ticking-clock element of the picture — unlike that of Panic in the Streets — has to do with justice, not danger. And Panic in the Streets conveys the terror of imminent disaster that is one of the distinguishing features of many thrillers of the period (including sci-fi thrillers like Rocketship X-M), though Kazan and the writers, Richard Murphy and Daniel Fuchs, contain that fear within a small band of investigators — mostly the public-health-service doctor (Richard Widmark, successfully cast against type) and the hard-boiled police captain (Paul Douglas) — rather than moving to the phase where the public finds out what’s going on and mass hysteria ensues.

Major and minor Billy

STEVE VINEBERG — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 14:53:20 GMT

The HFA celebrates Wilder’s centennial
Billy Wilder’s expansive career began in Germany at the end of the ’20s, continued briefly in Paris when he fled Hitler in 1933, and picked up in Hollywood the following year.

Billy Wilder’s expansive career began in Germany at the end of the ’20s, continued briefly in Paris when he fled Hitler in 1933, and picked up in Hollywood the following year. He knew very little English when he moved in with a fellow émigré, actor Peter Lorre, but he learned fast: his partnership with Charles Brackett turned out a couple of the wittiest and most memorable screenplays of the late ’30s, Midnight and Ninotchka. By 1942 he had become a director, and he remained one for four decades, collaborating on all his own scripts, first with Brackett and then with I.A.L. Diamond.

A complete retrospective of Wilder in the year of his centenary would take weeks. The Harvard Film Archive has packed a dozen features and one short into 10 days — but not the obvious choices you might expect to see in a Wilder tribute. You won’t find Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard, or Some Like It Hot here — films that are easily located at video stores and show up regularly on Turner Classic Movies. The series focuses instead — fascinatingly — on the early and later phases of his career. Not all of it is golden. Wilder had a blaring, crass side that became more pronounced in the ’60s and ’70s, like the Cold War farce ONE, TWO, THREE (December 15, 7 pm), with Jimmy Cagney as a Coca-Cola exec trying to break into the East German market, and AVANTI! (December 17, 6:30 pm), with Jack Lemmon as a dyspeptic American who travels to Italy after his father dies on holiday in an automobile crash and discovers that the Englishwoman who perished with him had been his mistress. Lemmon was the favorite leading man of Wilder’s later pictures; his frantic farceur style suited the kind of comedies Wilder was interested in turning out.

Robert Altman

STEVE VINEBERG — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 00:14:46 GMT

1925 – 2006
There’s a scene in Robert Altman’s Vincent & Theo where Sien (Jip Wijngaarden), the prostitute who lives with Van Gogh (Tim Roth) and poses for him, takes a break from an arduous modeling session.

McCABE & MRS. MILLER: McCabe’s ride into scrappy, burgeoning Presbyterian Church is as stoning as Mrs. Miller’s opium.

There’s a scene in Robert Altman’s Vincent & Theo where Sien (Jip Wijngaarden), the prostitute who lives with Van Gogh (Tim Roth) and poses for him, takes a break from an arduous modeling session. But when she squats to relieve herself in a chamber pot, he goes on sketching her, and she’s appalled and affronted. “You can draw me if I model, not if I’m myself,” she protests. But that distinction is meaningless to Van Gogh. And it was to Altman, too, who died on November 20 at age 81, after a career of half a century’s duration that by any standard would have to be called formidable. No director in the history of the medium did as much to break down the boundary between narrative film and reality.

Altman treated screenplays as blueprints, improvising with his actors, taking advantage of their inspirations and of found moments to keep the production vivid and quicksilver — most famously on the set of Nashville (1975), where the actors playing C&W performers wrote their own songs and Ronee Blakley, in the role of a fragile singing star, scripted her character’s breakdown scene. He employed a sophisticated multi-track system to record his trademark overlapping dialogue in an effort to replicate what the rhythms of real-life conversation sound like. He used so many cameras to shoot a scene — especially the bustling, large-cast sequences he was most celebrated for — that his actors never knew what the focus of any moment would end up being after editing. His insistence that they continue to behave in character, their arc unbroken by the usual artificial, fragmented filmmaking process, was one reason actors adored him, many opting to work with him again and again. Like Stanislavsky, he believed fervently in the ensemble ideal and the prevalence of truth over any kind of sham. His best movies — M*A*S*H, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, Thieves like Us, California Split, and Nashville in the ’70s; Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and Secret Honor in the ’80s, Vincent & Theo and Cookie’s Fortune in the ’90s, Gosford Park in 2001 — suggest a vision of life so honeycombed and varied in perspective (true even of Secret Honor, which films a one-man show about Richard Nixon) that they’re best thought of alongside the work not of most other filmmakers but of Virginia Woolf.

Film angel

STEVE VINEBERG — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 15:43:50 GMT

Janet Gaynor at the Harvard Film Archive
Janet Gaynor was the first actress to win the Academy Award, and in her day — the late-silent and early-talkie eras — she was fantastically popular, especially in the 11 movies she made with the likable, curly-haired Charles Farrell.

THE SHAMROCK HANDICAP: Gaynor is very photogenic but doesn’t get much to do here.

Janet Gaynor was the first actress to win the Academy Award, and in her day — the late-silent and early-talkie eras — she was fantastically popular, especially in the 11 movies she made with the likable, curly-haired Charles Farrell. But she bowed out of movies in the late ’30s, nearly half a century before she died, and she’s long been forgotten. In its series “Centennial Starlets: Anna May Wong and Janet Gaynor,” the Harvard Film Archive is providing a rare opportunity to see some of Gaynor’s work — 16 features and the 1926 short, “Pep of the Lazy ‘J,’ ” that prompted Fox to sign her for her first full-length picture. She leaped to stardom: by 1928 she had already won her Oscar, for a trio of films: Seventh Heaven and Street Angel, both directed by Frank Borzage and co-starring Farrell, and Sunrise, directed by F.W. Murnau. This weekend you can see all three, as well as her first two silents, The Johnstown Flood and The Shamrock Handicap, and her last one, Lucky Star, another collaboration with Borzage and Farrell. Movie buffs may want to arrange their Saturday and Sunday schedules accordingly.

Neither The Johnstown Flood, a melodrama so clunky it almost descends into farce, nor The Shamrock Handicap, a slice of horse-race blarney from John Ford, gives much of an indication of what Borzage and Murnau might have seen in Gaynor. Diminutive, with a sweet, compact face, she’s very photogenic but she hasn’t much to do in either picture. Fortunately, Borzage, a Salt Lake native who found in the elaborate, stylized Hollywood of the late ’20s the ideal resources for a distinctively 19th-century vision, and Murnau, a German Expressionist who, emigrating to Hollywood at the peak of his career, decided on American actors for his adaptation of his countryman Hermann Sudermann’s novel A Trip to Tilsit, both fastened on Gaynor as the embodiment of their separate versions of romanticism. They located her poignant, waif-like quality, her depth of feeling (at her best, she can stand proudly alongside Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford), and a quite startling expressive range. In Sunrise, she’s the heartbroken country wife whose husband (George O’Brien, who’d played scenes with her in The Johnstown Flood) is in thrall to a vamp from the city (Margaret Livingston); he plots to drown his wife but comes to his senses and then has to win back her trust. As Angela in Street Angel, she’s a desperately poor Neapolitan girl who descends to thievery and solicitation to cadge money for her dying mother’s medicine; caught and sent to prison, she escapes with a traveling circus, becoming independent and free-spirited. Farrell is Gino, the carefree painter who falls in love with her face and joins the circus so he can paint her. In Lucky Star he’s a soldier crippled in the First World War and she’s a farm girl, brought up by a strict, unhappy mother (Hedwiga Reicher) to be neither honest nor clean, whom he mentors and transforms. (I wasn’t able to see Seventh Heaven.)