Climbing Mount Criterion XXIII
Busy summer, but we're still paying attention. Let's do a quick roundup before taking a deep breath and diving into a bunch of Eisenstein.
Variety Lights (#81), Federico Fellini's first director credit (he codirected with Alberto Lattuada), shows a handful of the tics that made Fellini so entertaining (or foolish, depending)--mostly sexual obsession, and a way of simultaneously embracing unusual people and playing them for laughs. But its plot--about an ambitious young vaudeville dancer, nicely played by Carla Del Poggio--is hackneyed, and movie lacks the appealingly surreal touches that defined Fellini's later work.
I'm working off very old memories when it comes to Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (#82)--I caught it in high school with a classroom of AP students who felt the Melacholy Dane was a bit too touchy-feely with Ma in the early scenes. I don't trust my remembrance of the film enough to add anything more insightful than that; my classmates may have been right.
Perry Henzell's The Harder They Come (#83) is a thrill for the first half of its run time--a colorful, gritty vision of a young man, Ivan (Jimmy Cliff), stunned by the Big City but crafty enough to game it to his advantage; the studio-performance scenes are wonderful portraits not just of reggae but of music-making in general. But as it drifts into a crime story and there's less to like about Ivan, the film becomes more rote--and the attempts to edit Ivan into a spaghetti-western oppressed hero feel forced and limp.
Yasujiro Ozu's Good Morning (#84) was the first Ozu I've ever seen, and one of the first films I saw on that old Magnavox. Ozu's wonderful with children, and though I gather he's told the story here many other ways, I haven't had a chance to research the point.
I'll take My Fair Lady over Pygmalion (#85), though not because I find too many flaws in Asquith & Howard's version--Leslie Howard's Henry and Wendy Hiller's Eliza are both beautifully performed. (Is Eliza's first bath overly dramatic? Probably, but I'm also convinced that it'd kind of go that way.) But there's an inherent preposterousness in Shaw's story that the filmmakers seem unwilling to acknowlege (David Lean worked as an editor on the movie), and if you've seen My Fair Lady first, you're probably can't be convinced that the story doesn't need Audrey Hepburn and her missing aitches.
Variety Lights (#81), Federico Fellini's first director credit (he codirected with Alberto Lattuada), shows a handful of the tics that made Fellini so entertaining (or foolish, depending)--mostly sexual obsession, and a way of simultaneously embracing unusual people and playing them for laughs. But its plot--about an ambitious young vaudeville dancer, nicely played by Carla Del Poggio--is hackneyed, and movie lacks the appealingly surreal touches that defined Fellini's later work.
I'm working off very old memories when it comes to Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (#82)--I caught it in high school with a classroom of AP students who felt the Melacholy Dane was a bit too touchy-feely with Ma in the early scenes. I don't trust my remembrance of the film enough to add anything more insightful than that; my classmates may have been right.
Perry Henzell's The Harder They Come (#83) is a thrill for the first half of its run time--a colorful, gritty vision of a young man, Ivan (Jimmy Cliff), stunned by the Big City but crafty enough to game it to his advantage; the studio-performance scenes are wonderful portraits not just of reggae but of music-making in general. But as it drifts into a crime story and there's less to like about Ivan, the film becomes more rote--and the attempts to edit Ivan into a spaghetti-western oppressed hero feel forced and limp.
Yasujiro Ozu's Good Morning (#84) was the first Ozu I've ever seen, and one of the first films I saw on that old Magnavox. Ozu's wonderful with children, and though I gather he's told the story here many other ways, I haven't had a chance to research the point.
I'll take My Fair Lady over Pygmalion (#85), though not because I find too many flaws in Asquith & Howard's version--Leslie Howard's Henry and Wendy Hiller's Eliza are both beautifully performed. (Is Eliza's first bath overly dramatic? Probably, but I'm also convinced that it'd kind of go that way.) But there's an inherent preposterousness in Shaw's story that the filmmakers seem unwilling to acknowlege (David Lean worked as an editor on the movie), and if you've seen My Fair Lady first, you're probably can't be convinced that the story doesn't need Audrey Hepburn and her missing aitches.
5 Comments:
Aw, I think you could do a whole post on "The Harder They Come." It's essential in its own weird way.
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