Climbing Mount Criterion XXXI

Some time ago, I whacked myself with a wet noodle for writing a review of Le Cercle Rouge before I saw Rififi (#115)--in fact, without knowing about the connection between the two. (But to engage in this sort of self-flagellation is to fall down a sort of rabbit hole of confessions of ignorance: I didn't know about the existence of the Rififi semi-spoof Big Deal on Madonna Street until very recently, and I'm just assuming at this point that there's a long and fascinating history of European noirs with lengthy heist scenes that I'm destined to discover accidentally.) But without discounting Rififi's dark, patient power, would it be too heretical of me to say that I remember Le Cercle Rouge better, and perhaps even like it more? In my mind Alain Delon cuts a more imposing, intriguing figure than Jean Servais, and I know Jean-Pierre Melville's work better than Jules Dassin's.

The Hidden Fortress (#116) struck me as structurally cleaner than usual for Kurosawa--fewer characters, clearer demarcations of class lines, more emphasis on the gruff wisdom of Toshiro Mifune. But it's also more plodding, and more gimmicky in its pursuit of comic relief, giving an enormous emphasis on the two peasants who follow and shape the proceedings. George Lucas, a director who likes to key in on the gimmicks that make a film work instead of the emotional elements that make it endure, found lots to work with here (he gives a brief commentary on the Criterion disc).

Like lots of Bunuel films, Diary of a Chambermaid (#117) is bent on exposing the foibles of the bourgeoisie. But excepting a brief scene where Jeanne Moreau, as the chambermaid, reads some pro-working class writing from Huysmans for her new master (who busily obsesses over her calf), there's not a lot of pointed ironic comedy that sends up wealthy foolishness. Privilege is contemptable as always with Bunuel, but here he mostly just wants to say it generates weirdness--petty fights between neighbors, blinkered and racist nativism, obsessive concern about primness, foot fetishes. Lest you think this is relatively harmless--the pecadillos of sheltered mansion owners--the death of a young girl midway through raises the stakes. And yet the deliberately muddled resolution of that death, which focuses on the groundskeeper, Joseph (Georges Geret, compellingly inscrutible), is meant to make you wonder how much Moreau's chambermaid has indicted her environment and how much she's embraced it.