FILM FILINGS 4-8-23
Sam Stephens: David Lean’s Filmography Part I
Christopher Witty: John Carpenter’s Filmography
Jordan M. Poss: All Quiet On the Western Front (2022) - in-depth review and analysis
Nathan’s Sunday Review: Ugetsu (1953)
1. David Lean’s Filmography
The Man Who Never Made A Bad Movie: The Films of David Lean
I first saw Lawrence of Arabia in a cold, unfurnished sideroom in Mansfield, Louisiana in 1995. The original Toy Story hadn’t come out yet. We had moved in, but the central heating wasn’t on. My dad rented a pile of VHS tapes, and the nearly-four-hour epic unreeled before my eight-year-old self. I can’t pretend to remember much else, except that the combination of grandiloquent musical score and the vast wasteland of desert, projected into that old tube TV-set, not particularly large, made an indelible impression.
Released in 1962, ‘Lawrence’ was directed by David Lean, a British director with an already immortal filmography behind him. His WWI biography-epic, however, was a midpoint in his career, with as many years behind him as there were ahead. I didn’t know any of this in 1995, of course, but all these years later, I made it a goal to finally watch all of Lean’s films. I’ve considered myself a fan for a long time, but had not actually seen anything he’d made before 1957’s The Bridge On the River Kwai.
Part I: The Noel Coward Films
Lean started out by co-directing a movie with that strangest of British cultural phenomena, Noel Coward. The flamboyant Coward was also working for the British government’s war propaganda effort, and the film In Which We Serve (1942) has him both behind and in front of the camera. On camera he is a sea captain who is also a family man. One day a torpedo hits the boat and he and his men are left hanging on various flotilla, and as they linger the film takes us through various episodes of each sailor’s life. What circumstances led each man to this terrible moment? The film is nostalgic, but the survivors are picked up, and life, despite its tragedies, goes on. The result is a feel-good war service drama that hardly gives us enough time to enjoy any particular storyline. You do root for the men’s combined efforts, however, and there is one outstanding scene in which young Richard Attenborough’s character (his debut) fails in his part to load a missile, and the consequences that follow. The editing and transitions are really smart and innovative and keep the film barreling along, whatever the story.
The next film is a family saga taking place between 1919 and 1939, almost entirely in a single household set. There are others like it—Mrs. Miniver, How Green Was My Valley—but I think this one is better. There are splashes, here and there, where the story feels like too much life for one family, but I know that’s not true. Anyways, adapting stage plays is treacherous—the possibility of becoming stultifying is an ever present danger. Sure, the dialogue and characters can be buoyant and colorful onstage, but on film those factors can translate into limitations and can be exasperating. Whether This Happy Breed successfully avoids this is up to the viewer’s taste. It does become an ordinary chamber drama in parts, but Lean’s direction is unfussy and sure-footed, and every time there is a danger of total mush, he brings a breezy British pastoralism to dispel it.
Coward must have approved of Lean’s direction, because the adaptations continued. With Blithe Spirit (1945), Lean turned to comedy—a humorous ghost-fantasy, wherein Rex Harrison’s remarried widower begins seeing the spirit of his dead wife. The humor is situational, and though never laugh-out-loud funny it is endearing and chuckle-worthy. There are a number of (barely) risque one-lines thrown in, which are interesting not for their prurience, but because it gives us a snapshot of what was acceptable at the extreme of popular culture in British cinema at the time.
Though not satisfied with Lean’s direction of Blite Spirit, there was one more Coward play. Brief Encounter (1945) is perhaps Lean’s most famous film after Lawrence and Kwai. It’s also the start of one of Lean’s favorite filmic subjects, the extra-marital affair. The film is entirely theoretical in its telling. A woman recounts to herself in her head, in the manner she might hope to relate to her husband, her brief and unconsummated affair with a handsome stranger she met at the train station. The story unfolds bittersweetly to the strains of Rachmaninov’s romantically enveloping second piano concerto. The film also is brief, and though sympathetic to the affair itself, it resolves with the woman returning affection upon her husband and her son.
It would be easy to say that Lean included this torn feeling about the affair because the times dictated as much. I could easily have believed this movie, like The Night of the Hunter, was censored before actually being viewed. More than Hunter, it would make sense, given the times, if it had been. Contrary to that, the film was an immediate success at the box office and has been consistently hailed as one of the greatest films ever since. But, returning to my point—and pushing aside the fact that it is an adaptation—I don’t think Lean is being inhibited by the times. I’ll speak of this more later in the essay, but, with all his films in view, there is an overarching tenderness and humanity to Lean, one which the book sources he adapts often do not share. The point of Brief Encounter is indeed its briefness, the fleeting desire for another, and the underlying dignity of each human which is either fulfilled by love, or by duty, but always to the tune of “life is complicated.” TO BE CONTINUED.
2. Christopher Witty: John Carpenter’s Filmography
Chris Witty offers a thorough and opinionated survey of John Carpenter’s unique, and often maligned, filmography. From unique comedic sci-fi to a TV Elvis biography, the man who directed Halloween is more than just a horror auteur. Here’s Witty’s review of Carpenter’s first film Dark Star (1974):
“John Carpenter's feature debut as writer-director is a blast: a wry, sci-fi comedy that portrays space travel as a mind-numbing blue-collar job. Beginning life as a 45-minute graduation short by Carpenter and co-writer Dan O'Bannon in 1970, the film was padded out to feature length in 1974 with additional footage; the best being a middle section that sees crew member Pinback (O'Bannon) plagued by his pet alien; O'Bannon would later expand on this segment with his screenplay for Alien in 1979. Initially, the budget was $6,000, expanding to a modest $60,000 during additional filming, and the film's wonkily impressive FX are an early indicator of Carpenter's skill at utilising a meagre budget. With Carpenter scoring and producing in addition to writing and directing, and O'Bannon taking on editing and special effects duties (including a great light speed sequence), this film is a definite collaborative venture, and there's a real camaraderie present that seems to inform the whole thing. Unlike other low-budget sci-fi fodder that get their laughs unintentionally (stand up 1978's impressively bad Starcrash), Dark Star's chilled out humour hits the mark every time. The script is clever, particularly during a scene where crew member Doolittle (Brian Narelle) uses pure logic to dissuade a bomb from exploding inside the ship, and the ending is surprisingly moving in a spaced-out "we're all one with the cosmos" kind of way.”
3. Jordan M. Poss: All Quiet On the Western Front (in-depth review and analysis)
Over at his blog Jordan M. Poss analyzes the good and the faulty of the 2022 adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war novel set in World War I. An excerpt:
Considered purely as a film, this All Quiet on the Western Front is effective and technically impressive. Sunday night it quite rightly won Oscars for production design and cinematography, and I think its makeup and sound, for which it was nominated but didn’t win, and its costume design, for which it wasn’t even nominated, were award-worthy as well. The care taken over its locations, sets, costumes, and how all of these were photographed give the movie a remarkable tactile quality. Not only does the film look and sound great, it also feels real.
But Poss sees fault in the film’s tone:
[T]he film’s tactility and brutality sometimes feel gratuitous, like slasher-movie squick that is only there for shock value.
This last criticism is the hardest for me to formulate, probably because it has to do with the film’s overall tone and approach to the material. It also points toward the film’s most fundamental problem. An analogy from the film itself occurs to me: in one of the film’s final moments, Bäumer, fighting a poilu with his bare hands only minutes before the armistice, has his face shoved into the muck at the bottom of a French trench and he almost smothers. The in-your-face quality of the violence—the grossness, the muck, the squirming, the goopy sound effects—is supremely unsubtle.
4. Nathan’s Sunday Movie Review
Ugetsu (1953), dir. Kenji Mizoguchi. In a time of war, the potter Genjuro sells his wares; he is successful, and makes a profit. Genjuro is a good husband, kind and generous, and the happiness he sees in his wife spurs him to work ever harder. But work consumes him: his wife complains of the change in him. She wants contentment; Genjuro craves wealth. Then, war comes to their village. Even as his hometown is ravaged and his family flees, Genjuro’s greatest concern is for his stock of clay pots. I think of “Bicycle Thieves”, with the selfsame theme of the vitalness of work and the pride it may give a man.
His pots are saved, and we come to the famous lake scene. Genjuro and his family escape across the lake and encounter a man who was attacked by pirates. This is the first notion we have that all is not as it seems. The effect of the lake scene is every bit as dreamlike to the viewer as it is to the characters; I rewound the scene and watched it twice, and I was struck with a feeling of “did that actually happen?” within the context of the film. I read that the scene was shot in a tank, not an actual lake, but the fog, darkness and keening song of Genjuro’s wife give the impression of a larger, wilder space.
That’s how Mizoguchi manipulates his camera. As scenery passes, so too does time, not with a prosaic fade-out, but with a pan. These pans have a slightly dizzying effect, bewildering to the viewer as they are to the character. Characters who aren’t in the shot a second before appear as the camera spins. An omnipresent mist cloaks and reveals characters suddenly. One who appears is the Lady Wakasa, who admires his pottery and delicately seduces Genjuro.
Wakasa’s world is one of pleasure and refinement, rich but fleeting— hardly real. Of course, all is not well at home; Genjuro’s wife and child are attacked and she ends up in a geisha house. When Genjuro returns, his wife bitterly compares their fates: her impassioned monologue on the lot of a woman and the unfaithfulness of men is affecting and strangely modern.
Genjuro returns to the Lady and falls deeper into his entanglement. Will the new viewer realize the Lady’s secret? I certainly didn’t, despite having skimmed a few reviews beforehand, and the effect was dramatic. This is the richness of Ugetsu: a gothic supernatural thriller, a classical tale from Japanese antiquity, and a startlingly modern commentary on ambition versus duty, the goodness of a domestic life pitted against a frightening larger world. It feels both older and newer than its time, taking the form of fable, while speaking to conflicts that arise today: reality vs. perception, love of family vs. personal ambition. All this is conveyed in one of the most visually arresting movies I have ever seen.
