Month: June 2021

So, there are some works of art I just don’t get, and never will. Sometimes people discover I’m not a fan of thus-and-such a thing, and will go on an impassioned lecture, trying to Explain Everything – but the issue isn’t that I don’t understand it, the issue is that I don’t get it. Like, I may understand the thought process behind an artwork like that thing Damian Hirst did with the shark in formaldehyde; but I just can’t relate to it as art. To me, it still looks like nothing more than a half-finished natural history museum exhibit. And honestly, this is perfectly fine – I’m just not wired to get those things, that’s all, and I’ll just happily leave them to others and go hang around the things I do get.

This….was one of those things I don’t get.

This is not to say I didn’t see or respect the innovation and the novelty of the approach. Shadows was the directoral debut of John Casavetes, then toiling away as a character actor in formulaic TV and B-movies while desperately seeking something meatier. The problem was that his own taste was rather different from others’ in the industry; he was drawn to the work of the Beats, and wanted to make films about society’s outcasts and outsiders. Since he couldn’t find any such films to be in, he made one – using most of the salary from his own acting gigs to pay for the equipment and hire unknowns as the cast, filming without a permit and using improvisational games to cough up the script.

The script thus produced here, and the outsiders in question, are a family of three siblings – Lelia (Lelia Goldoni), an aspiring writer, Ben (Ben Carruthers), who calls himself a jazz trumpeter but really just hangs around clubs flirting, and responsible Hugh (Hugh Hurd), a singer who understands the need for artists to sometimes “sell out” in order to make money. That’s the biggest reason Hugh is able to find more work than Leila or Ben – like a night-club gig where he’s reduced to singing only a few bars of one of his own works before introducing a bunch of strippers. It’s demeaning work, but Hugh takes it; he’s the breadwinner in the family, and feels especially protective of his siblings, particularly the girlish Lelia.

Except Lelia may not be quite that innocent. She’s got a sort-of boyfriend in David (David Pokitillow), an older self-styled intellectual who spends most of his time trying to lecture to her – but at a party, her head is quickly turned by Tony (Anthony Ray), who’s just as intellectual but is younger and cuter and better at sweet-talking her. Tony talks Lelia into sleeping with him – for her it’s the first time – and seems to genuinely be falling for her after, so much so that he insists on seeing her home. And that’s when he meets her brothers Ben and Hugh. And freaks out a bit – because Ben, Lelia, and Hugh are actually all African-American, but Lelia was light-skinned enough that she appeared Caucasian. The naive Lelia doesn’t get why he’s shocked, but Hugh – recognizing Tony’s conflict for what it is – sends him away. Tony makes one more effort to see Lelia again, but by this time she’s moved on, begrudgingly going on a date with another black man (David Jones) at Hugh’s behest.

To be perfectly honest, I cribbed that plot description above from articles about the film – because the film itself actually gave me vanishingly little to go on. Cassavetes based the script on a series of improvised acting exercises with students in one of his acting classes, and even offers a title card at the end claiming that the whole film was an improv. It wasn’t, but Cassavetes strove to retain the feel of an improv exercise, with actors talking over each other, scenes just sort of randomly starting and stopping, and practically no transition from one scene to the next. There’s ostensibly a subplot about Hugh’s career challenges and Ben’s career aspirations, but what I saw on the screen dealt with that very little; there’s Hugh’s disastrous night club gig, there’s a scene with Ben and his bandmates blowing off a rehearsal to go hang around MoMA’s sculpture garden, but those scenes felt disconnected to any of the other scenes in the film, and didn’t tell me all that much. In fact, the only character who felt like they really had a sustainable through-line throughout the film was Lelia.

Honestly, I feel like a huge Philistine just saying that I didn’t get this. But – I’m sorry, I didn’t. Some of the individual scenes caught my eye – the MoMA sequence is kinda fun – but I was still left cold, wondering why I ultimately was being shown this stuff. I couldn’t quite follow the story through the murk of the “stuff” I was being shown and ended up confused. Intrigued in places – the slice-of-life glimpses I got made Lelia, Hugh, and Ben seem really interesting – but ultimately without as much insight into them as I wished I’d had.

Sometimes the films I see have been the subject of critical deep-dives or scholarly essays, either because of the subject matter or the artistic impact. I tend not to read any of these until after I’ve seen the film – after all, those essays didn’t exist when the film was first released, and it lets me react to a film on its own merits (for good or ill). So it wasn’t until after the fact that I realized that this was perhaps a truly unique film to watch in the days when Critical Race Theory is a going concern.

As the name suggests, this is an adaptation of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Euridyce set in the favelas of 1950s Rio de Janeiro. Orfeo (Breno Mello) is a trolley driver by day and musician by night, while Euridyce (Marpessa Dawn) is a new arrival from the country, come to stay with her cousin Serafina (Léa Garcia) to flee a mysterious stalker (Adhemar da Silva). It’s a couple days before the Brazillian Carnaval, and Orfeo, Serafina and Orfeo’s fiancée Mira (Lourdes de Oliveira) are all representing their local samba school in the parade – Serafina drafts Euridyce into the fray as well, and Orfeo quickly has his head turned by the shy, pretty stranger. This upsets Mira, of course – and it also looks like Euridyce’s stalker has somehow followed her to Rio. So Serafina loans Eurydice her own costume, which conveniently has a heavy veil, so Euridyce can dance in her place and stay under Orfeo’s protection (and so Serafina can stay home and canoodle with her sailor boyfriend Chico [Waldemar De Souza], who’s in town on shore leave for a couple days).

But both Mira and the stalker find her out, and after a desperate chase into the trolley yard, Eurydice is killed. Orfeo doesn’t quite want to believe she’s gone, though, and makes a desperate visit to the local hospitals and the police station, searching for her. A janitor finds him wandering around the abandoned missing-persons section, and says he may know where Orfeo can find Euridyce – and leads him to a Macumba group meeting that night. If Orfeo is lucky, and follows the rules, he may just be able to get Euridyce back from the spirit world…

I mean, it’s Orpheus and Euridyce, you know the story.

When you’re seeing a retelling of such a familiar story, the fun is seeing how the various trappings deal with the different details – it’s a Macumba group instead of the underworld, Orfeo is a guitar player and composer with near-mythic status amongst the kids in the favela, Mira is crazy enough to be one of the Bacchantes towards the end…there are some details that felt a little too on-the-nose (the watchdog outside the Macumba church is literally named “Cerberus“, for instance), but these were few and far between. Director Marcel Camus seems to have leaned most heavily on the color and spectacle of Carnaval itself to carry the day – sometimes even giving the acting itself short shrift. Breno Mello wasn’t even an actor when he was cast as Orfeo – he was a soccer player who Camus felt looked sufficiently attractive. Fortunately his role is simple enough, and the costumes and color and music and action distracting enough. And other actors’ performances also bolster Mello’s work; Marpessa Dawn was an actress herself, and there are some lengthy bits of comic schtick with Serafina and Chico that amuse. But this really isn’t “about” Orfeo and Euridyce so much as it’s “about” seeing the dazzle and flash of Carnaval.

And that’s the bit that bothered many Brazilians at the time of the film’s release, and which has been the focus of many articles since. For many international filmgoers, this was their first real look at Brazil – and it certainly would have captured more attention than did the earlier Limite. But the Brazil it depicts is a fun and colorful and exotic one, with people dancing in the streets and saucy women and jovial merchants and weird spooky rituals. The actual favelas were a good deal dirtier, grittier and more cramped than in the film, which makes them look like a tiny-house development perched on a hillside with killer ocean views.

It was all a sort of fairy tale, in short; which very well have been Camus’ intent, to go a little fantastical with an adaptation of a myth. But many Brazilians, then and since, have bristled that that was what people thought Brazil looked like all the time, and it lead to a sort of exoticism white visitors would come to expect when they came to Brazil. Some non-Brazilians of color even point to Black Orpheus as the root of some fetishizing of non-whites in general; there’s a passage from Barack Obama’s memoir Dreams From My Father where he attends a screening of Black Orpheus with his mother, and realizes that her having seen it as a young woman left her with an exoticized image of non-white men – which in turn lead to her falling in love with his father. Which he admits left him pretty uneasy at the time.

And that’s something I’ve thought about a little since watching the film. I’d noticed that it was kind of flashy and pretty and colorful and fun – the Technicolor in this gets put to excellent use, I tell you what. And this is going to sound defensive – but I don’t believe I ever assumed that this was anything but a fairy tale in the first place, so I seem to have avoided that trap. I mean, all films about a place that depict that place go for the most eye-catching tropes; every film about New York City looks like certain blocks in Manhattan, and not like my own neighborhood at all. Every film about New Orleans focuses on Bourbon Street (especially if the film is set during Mardi Gras, but often even if it isn’t). Every film about Paris is set in a place where you can see the Eiffel Tower out the window, every film about London has Big Ben in it, and on and on. Film has always dealt in the fantastical and polished-up depiction of a place, and this is no different. If any viewers came away from Black Orpheus thinking that Brazilians were all happy residents of charming little houses and regularly danced at the drop of a hat, I would argue that this says more about the viewers themselves than it does about the film.

Fortunately, though, Brazilian irritation at Black Orpheus helped to fuel a new homegrown film scene in Brazil, one which drew inspiration from Italian neo-realism and which dealt with weightier topics. I’ll be seeing more of that work in the months ahead.

First, some apologies for the delay – Roommate Russ and I were contending with a hunt for a new apartment (I realized at one point that the last time I did a proper apartment hunt was back in 1994). But I think things have stabilized enough now to bring you a review. ….My bad luck that it’s a review of a nearly four-hour Bible epic starring Charlton Heston.

But it is a nearly four-hour Bible epic that left me pleasantly surprised. This time around Heston is “Judah Ben-Hur”, a wealthy Jewish merchant living in Judea during the days of Roman occupation. While other Jews are rebelling against the Romans, Ben-Hur is a little more chill – he’d like the Romans gone, sure, but he’s more into the diplomatic approach. In fact, one of his childhood best friends was a Roman – Messala (Stephen Boyd), who’s just been rewarded with a military command of a post in Jerusalem. The friends enjoy a warm reunion, but during their talk Messala tries to talk Ben-Hur into turning informant against his own people, giving Messala the names of any known Jewish Zealots. Ben-Hur is taken aback by the request and turns Messala down, driving a wedge between the friends. In fact, Messala is so hurt by what he feels to be a betrayal that he soon seizes on a flimsy excuse to punish Ben-Hur, when a loose ceiling tile falls off Ben-Hur’s house and nearly hits the Roman governor. It’s an accident, and Messala knows it is, but he still accuses Ben-Hur of deliberately throwing it, and sentences him to hard labor as a galley slave. And for good measure, Messala also sentences Ben-Hur’s mother Miriam (Martha Scott) and sister Tirzah (Cathy O’Donnell) to life in prison.

Ben-Hur spends the next three years nursing one mighty grudge. But then a Roman naval captain, Arrius (Jack Hawkins), cuts Ben-Hur a little slack during a sea battle by not chaining him to his seat like the other slaves. This lets Ben-Hur save some of the other slaves when the boat takes a hit – and then go on to rescue Arrius as well. The grateful Arrius not only frees Ben-Hur, he adopts him, training him as a charioteer. But Ben-Hur has never forgotten his family, and soon returns to Judea, hoping to use his newfound prestige to free his mother and sister, and to get back at Messala. He is quickly enlisted as a charioteer for the wealthy Sheik Ilderim (Hugh Griffith), who suggests showing Messala up in a big chariot race is the best way to embarrass him, or even kill him (chariot races can get awfully dangerous, dont’cha know). But Esther (Haya Harrareet), a former flame of Ben-Hur’s, urges him to stand down; he could get killed, he might get arrested again, or something worse could happen. In fact, there’s a new Prophet she’s been listening to, some Guy out of Nazareth, who suggests that people should love their enemies.

…So, the book upon which this was based bills itself as “A Story Of The Christ”, but director William Wyler leaves Jesus out of most of the story; He appears as an incidental character only, either from a distance or shot from behind. He gives Ben-Hur some water as he is being marched off to the galleys, and Ben-Hur returns the favor when he stumbles upon Jesus’ walk to Golgotha; and except for a prologue showing the Nativity and a scene where Esther tries to drag Ben-Hur to come listen to The Sermon On The Mount, that’s pretty much it. The actor playing Jesus, an opera singer named Claude Heater, wasn’t even credited in the final film. Instead, we get action and spectacle – a big sea battle (even if you can tell they used toy ships in a tank in some places) and a brilliantly epic chariot race, with some surprisingly violent stunts. Far wiser film scholars than I have spoken of the chariot race sequence, and have spoken far better than I have; all I will add, therefore, is the affirmation that it lives up to its hype.

Heston also, thankfully, isn’t gravely intoning things the way he was as Moses; he’s got more of an emotional range (hell, he has an emotional range). Esther – on her way to becoming an early Christian – isn’t a preachy mouthpiece either; she is genuinely into Ben-Hur, and is genuinely concerned about him. And she’s gutsy – thinking nothing of doing charity work amongst the lepers near town. (Well, there’s a bit of a reason for that.) There are a couple moments where Esther speaks of something Jesus said with a bit of a starry-eyed awe, and Ben-Hur goes through a similar conversion towards the end after witnessing the Crucifixion, but in terms of preachiness, it’s pretty low-impact.

So…I liked it more than I thought I would.

This was not a film I could watch lightly. It was meaty and complex, and I had to figure a good deal out; most of the film is nothing but conversations between our leads, a pair of unnamed lovers who’ve met by chance in the city of Hiroshima, and several sequences illustrating some of the woman’s thoughts or memories, and that’s it. I was captivated enough to want to figure things out, however.

And some of the imagery is just plain gorgeous regardless. The opening sequence features shots of our leads embracing (lovemaking is implied, but not graphically depicted) as ash falls on their bodies, interspersed with recreations or still shots of newsreel footage from the aftermath of the U.S. nuclear attack on Hiroshima. All we hear is the couple’s voices – “She” (Emmanuelle Riva) speaks of all the things she saw in the attack on Hiroshima, or in the museum about the attacks, claiming she saw “Iron, burned and twisted…. a bouquet of bottle caps…photographs and reconstructions, for lack of anything else…” But “He” (Eiji Okada) keeps interrupting Her: “you didn’t see that.” “You never saw that.” “You saw nothing, you weren’t there.” And all the while, we flip from clips showing exactly what She is describing, to clips of their bare skin, Her fingers gripping His back and both sparkling with either sweat or radioactive ash.

Things do settle down and get a bit more linear after this, and gradually we learn that they’ve effectively just met for a hookup; She is a French actress in town shooting a film, which She only describes as “an international movie about peace”, while He is an architect who’d met Her in a bar the previous night. He wants to see Her again; but She is flying home to Paris the next day. Still, something about their encounter hit them both hard, so when He surprises Her on set that afternoon, after She’s wrapped, She leaves to spend Her final hours in Hiroshima with Him. And as their conversation grows more intimate, we learn just how impossible any future romance might be between them – both are married to other people, for one thing, but She is also carrying a very heavy burden of memory, the ghost of another romance from even earlier in Her past, during the Second World War. And Her tale, when we finally get the whole story – told painfully and piecemeal in several separate anecdotes throughout – is tragic and heartbreaking, but even more heartbreaking is how She has clearly been ruminating over it for several years, how it has shackled Her and kept Her from another genuine connection before this – and how that is partly Her own fault.

My biggest complaint, however, is that we don’t do as much of a deep dive into His past. He also suffered loss from the war, just as She did (I mean, He’s from Hiroshima, so that doesn’t come as that much of a surprise) – but He has made His peace with that pain. He is strong enough to consider fostering some kind of ongoing connection with Her, but ultimately realizes that She isn’t going to be able to do that. That’s a perfectly valid disconnect – hell, I can probably chalk a couple of my own breakups up to a similar dynamic. But the problem is that as far as the film goes, He is so at peace with His past that it barely comes up. The revelation of His own wartime tragedy is such a fleeting thing that I actually missed it; I even went back and re-watched a couple scenes after I read about that after the fact, in search of the moment where He told Her His story, but couldn’t find it. And I felt cheated, and I felt a bit like He was cheated as well – especially since this then means that this film, which ostensibly uses Hiroshima as a framing device, becomes the tale of a tragic love story from rural France instead.

It’s always possible He may not really be recovered after all. At the time of this film, it would have been about 14 years after the attack – He might very well be deliberately Not Thinking About Things as a coping mechanism because He’s not ready. I was an eyewitness to the 9/11 attacks, and there are some memories from that day which I know that I have deliberately pushed to the back of my mind all “nope, not gonna go there” – and His own losses in the Hiroshima attacks were several orders of magnitude more personal than what I faced that day. However, this is all speculation – there is simply not enough to go on in the film to suggest whether this might be the case, and that in itself is my complaint.

But like Him, I still want to dig down and know more about the both of them, and the strong connection They both enjoyed and the mammoth obstacles which are ultimately tearing them apart again.

This was a little Western that snuck up and surprised me. It’s short, and I hadn’t heard of any of the actors save for James Coburn (making his debut in a smaller supporting role). But it’s a lean story that cuts to the chase, and doesn’t get bogged down in any of the tropes about Westerns I’ve disliked in the past.

Randolph Scott stars as “Ben Brigade”, a bounty hunter we first meet just as he is catching up with his latest quarry, Billy John (James Best), who’s wanted for murder in Santa Cruz. Billy isn’t too keen on turning himself in, but ultimately comes quietly, asking one of his companions to alert his brother Frank before they set off. The pair stop in at a stagecoach station en route and meet outlaw Sam Boone (Pernell Robert) and his partner Whit (James Coburn), both of whom seem friendly enough until a woman bursts out with a gun drawn on them both. This is Carrie Lane (Karen Steele) – the wife of the station master who’s been trying to hold down the station while her husband is away on an errand. And no, she doesn’t know Boone or Whit, they just showed up and she wants them gone. Brigade quickly figures out that Boone and Whit have turned up to try to rob the next coach – just as Boone and Whit are figuring out that Brigade is traveling with Billy John, and they are also interested in the bounty. Good thing, too, since the next coach had been attacked by warriors from the Mescalero tribe and contained only dead passengers when it arrived. Carrie Lane soon learns the Mescaleros have killed her husband as well; so when Brigade sets off with Billy John the next day, she joins in with Boone and Whit and tags along.

As they travel, Boone repeatedly tells Brigade that he’s playing nice for now, since it looks like Brigade can help the party get safely to Santa Cruz – but he also has every intention of fighting Brigade for Billy once they arrive and claiming the bounty himself. Brigade doesn’t seem too bothered by this. ….In fact, Brigade seems to be a little too chill. Almost like he’s taking his time and drawing out the trip. Even when Whit spots that Billy’s brother Frank is on their tale, Brigade doesn’t speed up. Why, it’s almost like Brigade wants Frank to catch up….what’s going on with that?

You do learn what’s going on with that, and it’s best that I not share. You also learn who gets custody of Billy by the end – and it’s a satisfying ending, with everyone getting what they really wanted all along. Well – almost everyone; Carrie is kind of a new widow adrift, but in her (unfortunately brief) role we’ve learned she’s a pretty tough cookie and we’re confident she’ll be okay. Carrie’s characterization is possibly the biggest complaint I had about that – director Budd Boetticher relegates her to eye candy in several shots, showing her in profile so as to emphasize her…physique. Boone and Whit both indulge in long lingering studies of her form. But – they keep their distance and keep their hands to themselves, fortunately, and usually a glare from Carrie is enough to make the boys back off and turn away.

The movie also never really forgets she is a recent widow – there is no scene where she falls into anyone’s arms asking for comfort or breaks down into a crying jag. She’s holding everyone at arms’ length – at one point she learns Brigade is a widower himself, and seems to recognize him as a kindred spirit rather than a potential new husband. She’s also not that interested in Boone or Whit either. And rather than being the helpless damsel in the film’s various chase scenes or shootouts, she’s joining in the fray with her own rifle and manages to take down a couple of the team’s attackers herself. Brigade also comes across as a stereotypical “taciturn lone gunman”, kind of like Shane – but unlike with Shane, you do learn his backstory, and you learn that his silence is strategic (if Boone or Whit don’t know about what his plan is, they can’t try to stop him, after all).

So it’s a Western which avoids a lot of the tropes I didn’t like, the characters all have motivations that make sense, and it’s a neat quick little story. I was pleasantly surprised.