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the film several times from 1953 1978 and he cut scenes but also extended scenes or it may be that i simply missed it it s not much almost a footnote of a joke and nothing is done to call attention to it but it seemed just the perfect touch in the brief introduction to the film terry jones one of the monty python crew compared the comedy here to poetry with little touches adding up to something much greater and building to a laugh and the film style here is quite poetic if quirky tati s walk and stance as hulot has a certain quirky balletic grace about it in this film everyone else walks but no one walks like hulot the film does not have a plot as such but a series of comic episodes which take place over about a week s time at the hotel de la plage by the french coast there is something of a subtle romantic vibe between hulot and martine but it does not build to anything and he does not get to say goodbye to her at the end of the film that doesn t come across as particularly sad he just doesn t get the chance we are trained to want film to lead to some sort of romantic climax between the leading couple but the film is more of an ensemble piece even if tati as hulot is the first among equals and hulot is something of an anarchic character who disrupts the bourgeois week at the beach so it s no surprise that tati confounds our conventional expectations of romance realized in a sense romantic endings often promise a great future ahead for the couple but hulot is very much a figure of the now and not the yet to come so such an ending would ring false for this film and this leading man the criterion s beautifully restored print is quite beautiful and the sound track quirky with all sorts of strange sounds is the crispest i ve ever heard it it made my brief vacation with m hulot all the better this time leave a comment get thee behind me satan posted in uncategorized on 13 july 2016 by bdnm devil s doorway 1950 dir anthony mann w robert taylor broken lance poole louis calhern verne coolan paula raymond orrie masters seen on tcm as part of their westerns celebration there s something great about anthony mann westerns mann directed several westerns in the 1950s and mann s westerns retell the story of the west often valorized in the 1930s and 1940s with a critical eye and this film is no different taylor plays a shoshone indian who had served in the us cavalry during the civil war he returns to his ranch outside of medicine bow wy a decorated veteran and welcomed home by the old timers in the town but in the very first scene there is a hint of shifting winds louis calhern plays a lawyer who is motivated by a racial hatred for the native americans helping sheepherders move their flocks near and even onto poole s land we see the town doctor unwilling to go and tend to taylor s old father and then the film jumps ahead five years taylor by this time has become the richest rancher in the area but wyoming has become incorporated as a us territory and the laws of the land forbid taylor as an indian from owning land so that his land is now fair game for the homesteaders in the history of the us the relations of european americans and native americans is marked by land grabs sometimes by force and sometimes through legal mechanisms with the stroke of a pen rather than at the point of a sword the status of robert taylor s lance changes from honored brave and decorated veteran to ward of the state with no legal rights or recognition of his own there is an arrogance in the government s view that they have the right to so define him what complicates matters in the film is that his attorney is a masters raymond who turns out to be a woman attorney as a woman in a man s world she is quite familiar with prejudice but she is also as a woman in 19th c america ready to yield a course she argues lance follow but there is no way to compromise here calhern is not willing to accept compromise for him compromise is lance s surrender and lance as a brave and a war hero cannot so yield the film comes to an end that could be predicted at the beginning and yet it leaves one with a bad taste in one s mouth and in the course of the film we come to really despise the racism we see in calhern but also watching the film in the 21st century we despise the sexism that largely gets a bye and we really come to despise the legal machinations that allow one group of people to take from another without compensation aside from the story the film s dp was john alton one of the greatest american cinematographers so the film is beautifully shot in black and white leave a comment well more than 21 actually posted in tcm movies on 12 july 2016 by bdnm 21 days 1940 dir basil dean w vivien leigh wanda laurence olivier larry leslie banks keith francis l sullivan mander watched on tcm i found this an interesting movie but a bit puzzling when watching it on tcm i didn t see any sort of date the program guide used to provide the date readily but not so much any more i thought it might be 1938 as there is no reference in the film to wwii which has to have started by the time filming commenced it may be that as the war did not feature in galsworthy s story there was no need to bring it in but i was still amazed at a contemporary film shot during wwii but without any reference to the war or the looming war laurence olivier had not yet made it big as he appears in the titles only after leslie banks who was established as a movie actor and vivien leigh who had only a year previously made such a smash as scarlett o hara in gone with the wind and this film did not do anything to advance his career he does a serviceable job but i can t say that he does much more than that basic plot is as follows larry keith s younger and somewhat ne er do well brother is involved with wanda it turns out that wanda has a husband she thought he was dead who is a rather brutish man when larry and wanda find the husband in wanda s flat and he demands money and then attacks wanda he and larry struggle and the husband falls down dead larry takes the body outside and props it up in a somewhat deserted corner of the deserted street he happens to meet an old bum who had been a clergyman and he begins to chat with him later when the police discover the body they assume that the bum has committed the murder keith is a prominent barrister in london who is likely to be elevated to the judgeship if larry s altercation with the dead man should come out it will derail his plans he tries to get larry to let the trial play out arguing that the evidence is weak and circumstantial against the bum who will likely be let go during this time larry and wanda try to squeeze a lifetime together into 21 days at the end of which the trial should be over and the verdict delivered if the bum is not freed larry will turn himself in as it turns out of course that proves unnecessary in the end the acting in the film is nothing remarkable banks has a stagey quality and olivier was still primarily a stage actor and keeps some of his mannerisms which seem a bit affected on the big screen leigh s acting is less stagy but the most compelling film performance in this production was that of francis l sullivan as the now derelict clergyman i have to say that what i found fascinating though was a scene at keith s club where he and fellow judges and barristers were discussing his promising career at one point each of the judges and barristers tells of one illegal thing they did e g didn t pay fare on a bus or the like and the result a comic comeuppance showing that crime does not pay during this scene as the torch was passed around the table from one judge to another the camera did a pan the way the camera panned though it seemed to me that the camera was atop the table and that it wasn t panning so much as that the table was spinning to the next raconteur it was a bit contrived but it was a nice effect i also liked the final day larry and wanda spent together they go to the sea on a boat and spend a day at the carnival the boat trip and some of the scenes by the seashore were clearly shot on location and not in a studio and i m always happy when we get out of the studio and into the streets in one scene larry and wanda ride the roller coaster together and the camera is affixed to the front of the coaster turned back towards larry and wanda this was before there were steadicams so far as i know but the camera itself doesn t jump but we get the sense of the ups and downs of a coaster again this was filmed on location which means even greater kudos to the dp leave a comment once more into the breach posted in uncategorized with tags 47 ronin action historical drama japanese films on 6 july 2016 by bdnm 47 ronin shijûshichinin no shikaku 1994 dir kon ichikawa w ken takakura oishi kiichi nakai irobe rie miyazawa karu ryudo uzaki yasubei horibe ko nishimura kira jun hashizume asano kon ichikawa broke the international scene in the 1950s with his two anti war films the burmese harp and fires on the plain this soon put him into the upper ranks of japanese directors such as ozu and kurosawa he remained active into the early 2000s when he was in his 90s he is also known for having directed the documentary tokyo olympiad on the olympic games held in tokyo in 1964 this film has an 18 rating the equivalent of an x rating presumably because of the violence but the film doesn t wallow in violence like sam peckinpah s films seem to with one exception the killing of kira at the end of the film seemed intent in visualizing lady macbeth s nightmare yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him other than that there was little direct violence shown the film had some beautiful shots the 47 ronin racing in the snow to attack kira s castle was especially remarkable as was a scene where oishi was carving a bamboo whistle in the middle of a bamboo forest but even the studio shots were very well composed this film begins as the samurai are making plans on how to take kira in his new digs which have much greater defenses and there are flashbacks to the incident where asano attacks kira it is interesting as we get very little information in this version as to why asano attacks kira and kira himself seems quite puzzled by the reaction against him though kira is shown to be a coward this version gives no adequate explanation for asano s attack on him in this film we also get more of kira s defense preparations made by one of his chamberlains irobe for his performance as kiichi nakai won awards in japan as best supporting actor of 1994 irobe seems an honorable man wanting to do right by his lord kira which makes the whole matter of the 47 s attack seem to need more justification than we get when kira is confronted by oishi at the end of the film kira seems still not to know why he is being attacked there is much more a sense of oishi and irobe s cleverness in their preparations like two chess players oishi uses money to pay people to spread rumors about kira in edo we never learn what these rumors are but the rumor campaign does weaken kira s position in the court and he is in effect let go we get the sense that asano was not allowed to offer any defense and that his retainers are returning the favor by spreading rumors about kira as rumors cannot be easily answered and kira s people make use of spies to learn as much as they can about oishi and his plans in other accounts oishi is shown playing the drunk to put kira s people off the scent here we get none of that he remains sober throughout though he does fall for a young woman karu who becomes his love interest apparently genuine after his wife goes away as the cover story that oishi has given in to drunkenness is such a key element in other versions its absence here seems peculiar equally peculiar is oishi s attack on kira in other versions kira is captured and given the choice of committing seppuku but he cannot bring himself to do it here oishi attacks him runs him through and then cuts off his head in fact he attacks him as kira seems on the point of revealing something about the incident though it ultimately doesn t matter why asano attacked kira one would think that oishi who is so careful about the clan s finances would want to know to settle the books the film ends with the death of kira we get no victory parade but a text scroll indicating what will happen from this point on one of the things i thought as i was watching this film was that the portrayal of oishi here had something of clint eastwood s stoic presence and i later learned that takakura has the nickname of the japanese clint eastwood leave a comment silent and short chushingura posted in uncategorized on 6 july 2016 by bdnm chukon giretsu jitsuroku chushingura chushingura truth 1928 dir shozo makino watched on youtube go to https www youtube com watch v dbf3adtavpc to watch the film yourself i noticed that there were some versions of the story on youtube one that intrigued me was a silent version done in 1928 it is one of a few silent version japan was the last country to go to sound film in 1936 because japanese silent film houses employed benshi men who read the titles and provided dialogue and commentary in the image portions of the film these benshi were unionized and were very popular and as the sound quality of early sound films was often terrible japan held back preferring to keep the benshi employed and the audiences happy well i was intrigued by this version because it had no subtitles in other words all i was going to see were kanji titles and nothing to help me figure out the story so first i decided to wait and look at the silent version without help of titles only after i had seen a few versions of the story hoping that my familiarity would help me figure out what was going on and this particular version on youtube had a recorded benshi providing the narration commentary this was in japanese so it didn t help me with the specifics of the story but gave me some sense of what benshi added to the experience and i found i could follow the story which sped right along we have the insults of kira and the attack by asano and asano s seppuku and the reaction back at asano s castle in ako his wife and his brother horrified by what asano has done to the clan it had large assembly of retainers called to decide their next action with much animated back and forth between the two groups fight v surrender and follow the law it had oishi s pretended sink into drunkenness even the game of blind man s bluff he plays with the geisha girls that i had seen in the other films and it had the attack in the snow of kira s castle with the search lights apparently they made lanterns out of something like deep kettle drums coated with highly reflective material to serve as an earlier version of a floodlight to find the hidden kira in the castle i was amazed that i was able to figure out what as what only 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