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Altman's take on the children's film, which, not surprisingly, proves to be typically, perversely unintended for its nominal or expected audience. Made during the era of the New Hollywood's fall from grace in the wake of a string of big-budget flops (Heaven's Gate, One from the Heart, 1941), at times Popeye seems to have a Cimino-like disregard for the audience and inward-turning obsession with its own luxurious, strange production, while at other times it suggests another success for Altman, albeit a modest one, of seemingly summoning an actual, wonderful film out of nowhere, or out of chaos. The film is not exactly enjoyable, but it's so weird as to be fascinating to watch. Altman sets about recreating, with methodical literalness, the crowded panels and Dickensian characters of pre-WW II comic strips, on real sets and with flesh-and-blood actors. Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall play, respectively, Popeye and Olive Oyl, and both, like the rest of the cast, have been made up to look uncannily like E.C. Segar's original characters. As always, Altman gives a lot of attention to the setting, in this case the port town of Sweetpea, a ramshackle collection of precipitously leaning houses with a harbor-full of sunken ships. If anything, Altman's take on the comic is closest to McCabe & Mrs. Miller, bringing Popeye to Sweetpea as a mumbling, against-the-grain outsider. Like John McCabe, Popeye remains outside of the community even as he alone takes on the task of defending it.

As with all of Leone's films, America displays a fastidious concern with detail in its sets, costumes, and props. Leone's concern, however, is not with strict historical realism, but rather with creating a sort of heightened reality. Though his movie is a gangster story that takes place in small-scale or squalid places like opium dens, tenement buildings, and crowded delicatessens, production designer Carlo Simi gives everything a touch of opulence, a larger than life quality. And I mean "larger than life" quite literally- as has often been said about Leone's work, America's sets, while often evocative and convincing in their individual details, as a whole are grandiosely overscaled, so that the interior of a kosher delicatessen on the Lower East Side appears as large as a train station, and an opium den supposedly hidden in the back room of a Chinese puppet theater (with, according to Leone biographer Christopher Frayling, Indonesian puppets performing an Indian epic) has people on cots stretching up the ceiling. The epic quality of Leone's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West lay more in their style and physical scale than in the movies' actual stories, which are rather slight. Leone placed his characters against the background of vast historical movements and events, but he didn't focus on the powerful people causing or at least marshaling these events. On the contrary, much of the larger than life quality of his heroes and villains came from how they seemed to exist outside of society and normal human concerns, like, as writer Danny Peary pointed out, a more-than-human race of warriors doomed by the advent of civilization. Gangsters, of course, don't stand outside of society so much as they infiltrate it and corrupt it, and Leone adopts to this difference with a comparatively restrained style, particularly for his actors. Still, little remnants of his spaghetti westerns remain in his interpretation of mobsters. One important difference from The Godfather is that Leone's gangsters are not bosses- they do their own dirty work, whether it be smuggling, union racketeering, or murder. They're still outlaws more than figures of authority, and the main source of contention between Noodles and Max is the latter's decision to hire the gang out to "the Syndicate," as represented by Joe Pesci's mob powerbroker. In interviews on the film Leone spoke of the Prohibition era as the second great era of frontier lawlessness in America, which makes no sense from a historical point of view but works beautifully from a pop culture perspective, which of course is the point. Leone puts an almost touching faith here in the viability of genre as a means through which to filter his epic vision of twentieth century America. The childhood scenes are like a wicked, R-rated version of Our Gang, with the pint-sized crooks exhibiting a strange innocence, displayed most memorably in the famous cream pie scene. But already this innocence has begun to curdle into amorality, into an unthinking amorality and disregard for others. Leone sympathetically and amusedly dwells on their battles with the buffoonish, corrupt neighborhood cop, known as "Fart-face." These scenes have a particularly Our Gang-like quality to them, depicting clever and precocious outwitting stupid and cruel adults. The first of the gang's exploits that we see, however, consists of them burning down them the news-stand of a man who has refused to pay protection money to the local boss. The kids watch excitedly through a grille as flames devour a man's livelihood before his eyes as if they were watching a show put on for their own amusement. All throughout the film, we see people watching other people at a remove, particularly men watching women. Noodle is the ultimate spectator, often silent, constantly watching others, desiring women he can't have, observing events he can't control, seemingly vanishing for extended periods of time (first for eight years, then for thirty-five,) to reappear in an America that has gone on without him, among people who have gone on without him. At least 2/3 of the film, and possibly the whole film, occur in his head, in flashbacks to his past, so Noodles can watch his own life unfolding like strips of film in a projector. Early on, we see patrons watching an Indonesian shadow-play in the theater that fronts for the opium den where Noodles hides from the world. The silent audience outside and the stoned customers within taken together are like a Janus-faced portrait of a movie watcher, subsuming their daily lives in the play of shadow and light on a screen in a state close to dreaming, or drug-induced hallucination, or even death.

Often resembling the pilot of a TV show more than a stand-alone movie, Sword of the Beast is a gritty, cynical samurai film that, like the films of Masaki Kobayashi (with which it was grouped by the Criterion Collection) mounts an attack on Japanese feudal authority, and, by extension, Japanese authority in general. In the film's fast-paced, exploitative opening, the samurai protagonist is on the run from his former clan, who, in a typically shameless male fantasy, send a woman to seduce and distract him (all during the opening credits). As we later learn, the hero's involvement with a group of reform-minded samurai led him to assassinate his conservative clan head, all as part of a plot by the clan's ambitious second-in-command. Only some of this elaborate set-up is actually resolved, since the story comes to revolve around a mountain which other characters have been illegally mining for gold. Despite the very cinematic widescreen style and intensity that director Hideo Gosha brings to the film, the plot's restricted scope and open-ended conclusion give Sword of the Beast more of the feeling of a TV pilot than of a full-fledged samurai epic. The fight scenes are good without having being particularly memorable, but Gosha does bring a nice messy quality to them, so that the participants seem more like fallible human beings than the superhuman warriors who often populate films of this sort. Perhaps the story's biggest weakness is that the story's conflicts : both of the parallel plots involve samurai who are betrayed by superiors in their clans, but in neither case does the betrayal seem to be very deeply felt. It is perhaps in this respect, more so than in the plotting, that the film's TV-like qualities are truly limiting, denying the film the same kind of mythic resonance of the best work of Kurosawa and Kobayashi.

Nicholas Roeg's bizarre 1970s science-fiction film tells the story, after its own fashion, of Thomas Jerome Newton, a humanoid alien who visits Earth in the hopes of finding water for his dying, barren planet. Using his advanced technological knowledge he patents several inventions and establishes his own corporation, only to fall prey to both the treachery of the human race and to his own vices. At least that's what The Man Who Fell to Earth is supposed to be about, but I'm not sure I would have gotten that if I had gone into the movie blind. As with his previous Don't Look Now, Roeg splinters the story into puzzle-piece fragments through elliptical editing and storytelling that can be considered, according to the viewer's taste, either ambiguous or incompetent. We have to wait at least an hour before learning Newton's true nature, and even then the filmmakers don't seem particularly interested in fleshing out the science-fiction aspects of the story. Clearly the aim is more allegorical; if anything, the film is most like an adult take on The Little Prince. Roeg and writer Paul Mayersberg don't mean for Newton to be taken for an actual extraterrestrial than as a representative outsider, a position the filmmakers, as Englishmen in America, probably empathized with. As with Don't Look Now, I came away from The Man Who Fell to Earth feeling that despite a basically straightforward plot I had missed something. Nonetheless, I liked this Roeg film better than his previous effort, if only because it was so beautifully. While Don't Look Now is quite atmospheric, superbly conjuring up a sense of unease through its ominous Venice locations, it was also disappointingly (and surprisingly, considering Roeg's background as a cinematographer) shabby-looking in its photography. This film, on the other hand, is consistently brilliant on the visual level even when it's just baffling in terms of story. As with such other innovative 1970s cinematography showcases as "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" and "The Godfather, Part II," the film's soft, pastel blue-and-green photography takes a little getting used to, but it effectively and beautifully conveys Newton's disorienting and alien experiences of Earth.

Though I've enjoyed reading most of the (regrettably few) Greek tragedies I'm familiar with, until now Aristotle's "pity and fear," his words for what successful tragedies are supposed to provoke in their readers, was only a concept to me. I had never experienced it myself, not from texts and certainly not from the few and universally mediocre productions I've seen of classical Greek tragedy. I didn't expect to experience it during this film adaptation either, which begins as a good-looking but emotionally overwrought melodrama. Somehow, though, by its end the movie has worked up to a level of emotional intensity that does justice to Aristotle's famous phrase. Iphigenia is about the Greeks' determination to reach Troy, and about the terrible decision that their commander, Agamemnon, is presented with by the gods as the price for doing this. After his men inadvertently offend Artemis by killing a sacred deer, the gods withhold favorable winds from the Greek fleet, stranding their ships, halfway to Troy, on the island of Aulis. In this version of the old myth, taking place in a Bronze Age warrior society but produced by a young and troubled democracy, the leaders- Agamemnon, Menelaus, Achilles- enjoy only a partial and shaky control over their men, who, tired of waiting without adequate food or supplies, are on the brink of mutiny as the story begins. Odysseus is portrayed here as less just another tribal chieftain than as a dangerously eloquent demagogue, further stirring up the troops with resentment against their leaders. In this tense situation, the Greek chieftains, particularly Agamemnon and his brother Menelaus, are relieved when the prophet Calchas announces that he has learned of a sacrifice by which they can appease the gods. Agamemnon's relief turns to horror, however, when he learns that the required sacrificial victim is none other than his own daughter, Iphigenia. He keeps this secret from everyone except Menelaus, while at the same time he summons Iphigenia to Aulis. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Agamemnon seems unable to come to a decision, or rather, to be trying to put off a decision until the last possible moment. Agamemnon's mistake is that in trying to keep his options- neither of them good- he ends up backing himself into a corner, where he no longer has any choice. In part Euripides seems to be showing how power can be as imprisoning as powerlessness. Agamemnon, Menelaus suggests at some point, has spent his whole life in pursuit of power, and now his ambitions are rebounding on him. The horrible dilemma with which he is faced drives the story forward. The story's drive is supplied by the horrible nature of Agamemnon's dilemma, and probably as a result, momentum is exactly what is missing from the movie's beginning. The film looks good throughout, and the foreign language helps stave off the overt kitsch which most mythological films fall prey to, but these early scenes are nonetheless pretty tedious. The filmmakers plunge us into the story's strange, alien world without giving us much of an emotional stake in the Greeks' dilemma. These problems seem to stem mostly from the inherent difficulties of adaptation. I've never read Iphigenia at Aulis, but considering the tight restrictions in time and space of the Greek theater, I would assume that much of the script is of the filmmakers' own invention. The director tries to keep things cinematic, but really the film is at its best when it sticks to the text, and to dialogue-heavy exchanges between the characters. The movie only starts to really work when Iphigenia and her mother arrive at the Greek camp. Up until then the scenes, consisting as they do of exchanges between burly, armor-wearing, almost indistinguishable Greek warriors, tend to feel a little flat, so the introduction of the slight, delicate-looking Iphigenia brings a new note of dramatic contrast that grounds Agamemnon's dilemma in reality- it's an obvious but very effective device. As word spreads among the characters of the nature of the planned sacrifice, Agamemnon almost fades into the background of the story, and his dilemma takes on a life of its own. Once the army has learned of the gods' demand, Iphigenia is doomed. Considering that I already knew the outcome, Euripides's play and the filmmakers' adaptation does a remarkably good job of sustaining the tension and suspense to an almost unbearable degree. As Iphigenia comes closer to that inevitable ending, I finally understood what Aristotle meant by "pity and fear." It may not be pleasant, but it is a riveting experience that left me somewhat shaken, and certainly rather subdued, after it was all over.

If David Lean had directed Robert Bresson's austere prison-break film A Man Escaped, the results might have looked something like this. Papillon is made in the old epic mode of film-making that began sometime in the early 50s and was dying off by the seventies, when this film was made. For about its first hour I enjoyed the movie as a throwback to that vanished style, with the beautiful clarity of its widescreen photography and the attention to detail in its sets, costumes, and props. Franklin Schaffner's style, particularly in his meticulous widescreen compositions, is best described as monumental- he even he seems to prefer a monument's somber color range of , with lots of grays, whites and blues. He was heavily criticized at the time for handling what I really a fairly simple prison-break story in such grandiose fashion, but in his defense I think Schaffner is trying to show that one man's determination to reach freedom is an epic theme. As the film begins French prisoners are being taken away from their homeland to French Guiana. Papillon (Steve McQueen), a safecracker convicted of killing a pimp (a crime that he insists he is innocent of), befriends Louis Dega (Dustin Hoffman), who, though a notorious safecracker, has no chance of survival on his own; Papillon provides protection for him, first on the sea journey to the colony, and then in the fetid swamps where they're put to work. The film's meticulous recreations of the story's setting and locations really pay off here in conveying the characters' harsh environment, a nightmare world in which convicts are brutalized for the slightest infraction, are forced by guards to kill crocodiles, and are hunted by professional "manhunters" through the jungles if they attempt to escape. Steve McQueen was not much of an actor in the sense of someone who slips into a character's skin, but in the right role his presence could tell you everything you need to know about a character. One of the basic characteristics of McQueen's characters is that they refuse to be hemmed in by any form of authority, and here he holds the movie together because you know that Papillon will stop at nothing to escape. If the movie had continued in the vein of its first hour it might now be remembered as a great adventure film. It starts to go downhill, however, after Papillon is condemned to solitary confinement. The sequence that follows is like a grim variation on McQueen's similar scenes in The Great Escape, and really it's much too grim for a Steve McQueen movie. There's plenty of brutality in the earlier scenes, but there it's in an adventure movie format that the movie can support, and there's plenty of detail and spectacle to balance out the central story's narrow focus. In the solitary confinement scenes, however, all you have to look at is Steve McQueen locked into a tiny prison cell, and the hollowness of the movie's self-seriousness is exposed. These scenes are also the most similar to A Man Escaped, which only shows up the inherent flaws of Papillon, a film with infinitely more resources than Bresson had and far fewer ideas about what to do with them. Papillon never recovers from what this sequence, even the film returns to familiar escape-movie ground more suited to Schaffner's talents and McQueen's personality. Papillon's escape from the island is well executed technically, but by treating it like the "Greatest Story Ever Told," Schaffner saps these scenes of any sense of exhilaration. Even worse, Papillon's success in escaping depends on way too many contrived details for it ever to be taken as seriously as the director intends. It's almost like a fairytale, with Papillon running into people every step of the way who are improbably willing to help him. Old time epics, for all of their proud claims of accuracy in even the minutest details, sometimes founder on the little details. The American accents of Papillon's cast produces a disassociated feel, as if Americans had replaced all of the French characters and were carrying on in their place. Another lapse is the puzzlingly sloppy makeup job on the leader of a leper colony that Papillon encounters, which in a daytime scene can be seen to only cover part of his face. The screenplay's decision to have Papillon be recaptured after he seems to have been home free for a while is a bold decision, particularly since his betrayer is a nun (!), but it also means that the last half hour is completely perfunctory, since we know that he will escape again, successfully this time, at the end of the movie, leaving us with nothing to watch except Steve McQueen trying to out-act Dustin Hoffman, not exactly his forte as a performer. It's in the last shot, however, where the movie really shoots itself in the foot; as Papillon drifts away from the island on a raft, supposedly alone in the middle of the ocean, I could see, very clearly, a frogman under the raft. At the end of what was obviously a very expensive movie to make, this gaffe isn't just embarrassing, it's mind-boggling that the filmmakers would effectively throw all of their effort in a few seconds. In terms of escape movies, Papillon straddles the line between a serious art-house film like A Man Escaped and a 1960s Hollywood guys-on-a-mission action flick like The Great Escape, but the film is too solemn and narrowly focused to capture the exuberance of the latter, and too much of a movie star-fuelled spectacle to capture the real seriousness of the former. By the movie's end, what began as a compelling adventure movie can be summed up in three words: beautiful but boring.

A very flawed movie, but still one I enjoy, if mainly as a visualization of the Arthurian legends. One problem is that John Boorman, director, co-writer, and overall driving force behind the project, tries to cram the entire legend of King Arthur into 140 minutes, and as a result is unable to sustain much narrative momentum and often seems to be rushing through the story. Excalibur is often cheesy, with bad dialogue ("I, the best knight in the world, bested!"), and overacting, particularly in the opening scenes, where the knights can't seem to utter a word without growling. The production design, while evocative in some scenes, in others reveals Boorman's stretching of a less than generous budget, such as in the cut-rate set of Merlin's "crystal" cave. And despite the scope of the film, the number of participants in a battle rarely suggest more than a small-scale skirmish. For all of these flaws, I don't hate Excalibur. Some of the cheesy acting and dialogue is unintentionally funny, though the rustic accent used by Nigel Terry to play Arthur in his younger years is truly irritating. Luckily, by the end his performance has greatly improved, gradually taking on the kind of quiet, uncomplicated dignity that I always imagine Arthur as possessing. The actor who plays Percival also turns in an effective performance in the potentially embarrassing role of the "holy fool." The best performance by far, however, is by Nicol Williamson as Merlin. He probably overacts more than anyone else in the movie, but in his case it's obviously intentional. Boorman's choices for Guinever and Lancelot are least impressive, with Guinevere coming across as little more than a pretty Irish peasant girl, and Lancelot as a bland hunk. Their affair is one of the film's weakest elements, a casualty of Boorman's determination to fit the entire Arthurian corpus into a single movie. This is how he establishes the beginning of their illicit feelings for each other; Guinevere runs into Lancelot, he gazes soulfully into her eyes, she gazes soulfully back, and the opening theme from Tristan and Isolde blares onto the soundtrack. This problem extends to Boorman's use of musical themes in general; his choices are unoriginal but effective, but they're also too few, and are consequently are used too many times with too little variation. On the plus side, Excalibur is visually spectacular, and Boorman crafts plenty of plenty of memorable scenes, such as Merlin's hilltop, torch-lit exhortation to the knights following a battle (cribbed liberally from Henry V). Boorman also handles Arthur's conception with plenty of audacity and stylistic panache. Arthur's father Uther, transformed by Merlin into the shape of the Duke of Cornwall, has sex with the man's wife while the real Duke lies dying in battle against the King's troops. As if this wasn't weird enough, throughout the entire sex scene Uther wears full armor (or nearly full armor, I guess), and all of this is juxtaposed with Cornwall dying, bloodily impaled on a spear. In contrast to the baroque insanity of the opening scenes, Boorman creates a touching and reverent conclusion for the story, capped off by the indelible image of Arthur, revived from a sort of spiritual coma, riding out to battle with his men through a shower of flower petals.

One could spend a whole day going over the reasons why The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones were such train-wrecks, but one of the most obvious problems was George Lucas's basic reason for making them. Instead of existing in their own right, these movies were made to set up a story that had already been told, filling in the gaps of the complicated back-story. For all of the noisy effort and expense put into them, Episode I and II seemed perfunctory, as if Lucas was making them basically just for the sake of symmetry. Episode III benefits from the start from having a real sense of direction and purpose. The story of how Anakin Skywalker was corrupted and became Darth Vader is much more interesting than wars between obscure alien races with bizarre names. In the weeks before the movie came out, rumors were floating around the Internet that the playwright Tom Stoppard had done an uncredited re-write of the dialogue. If this is true, then I can see why Stoppard wouldn't go out of his way to associate himself with the script. Like Episodes 1 and 2, the acting and dialogue are sometimes atrocious, and rarely less than stiff. Hayden Christansen, who plays Anakin, comes off as particularly inept, but since almost no one manages to give a really decent performance, perhaps most of the blame should be placed on the shoulders of George Lucas, who obviously doesn't really understand how to work with actors. Lucas's attempts at lacing Revenge with political undertones are as muddled as the Jedi philosophy, which is particularly incoherent in this installment. At one point we are told that only Sith think in terms of black and white, which might have been meant as a jab at Bush but comes off as nonsensical in the context of the Manichean system on which all of the films are based. And if the Jedi are supposed to let their emotions guide them, then why is Anakin warned that passion will lead him to the Sith? For anyone who hasn't already caught on, this movie will provide conclusive proof that Lucas, whatever his merits as a filmmaker, should not be taken as a great philosopher. I don't think that should at all be held against him; what bothers me is that he tries to include philosophical points in the Star Wars films anyway. For all these faults, I found Revenge of the Sith, on the whole, to be a satisfactory conclusion to the series. It succeeds where it is supposed to: as a spectacle and an origin story for Darth Vader. Lucas kills off Count Dooku too quickly, considering that Christopher Lee is maybe the only non-digitally generated actor who seems comfortable in this trilogy, but the future Emperor proves to be an effective villain; his methods of seducing Anakin to the dark side of the force are considerably more subtle than those he uses on Luke (which basically consist of saying over and over again, "Embrace your hatred and you will come under my power!") Where the movie really takes off, however, is when Anakin, caught in a confrontation between the Chancellor and the Jedi leaders, finally does turn to the Dark Side, beginning with a Godfather baptism- style massacre of the Jedi across the galaxy. At last Lucas has delivered an action scene where we have a real emotional stake in what happens. He concluded The Phantom Menace with a technically well-filmed light-saber duel that nonetheless fell flat dramatically because the participants had no personal grudge against each other but just happened to be on opposing sides. The moment where Yoda turns the tables on his would-be assassins is almost satisfying enough to make up for this dull climax. By now it's a meaningless cliché to praise something for being "dark," but these scenes have a real dramatic intensity that the new trilogy had been lacking. Lucas, however, goes a little too far in his desire to be "dark" when, in one of the most talked-about moments in this sequence, Anakin decides to kill a whole group of children in a Jedi training school. The scene ends before he actually does anything, but it's still a pretty bold scene for the series that also introduced Jar Jar Binks to the world. Maybe a little too bold; the scene comes early on in Anakin's conversion to evil and too quickly pushes him beyond the pale. Of course I knew, as did almost everyone in the theater that night, that Anakin was going to turn into the incarnation of evil, but Lucas should have made this change from asshole to evil incarnate at least a little more gradual. As it is, the long-awaited confrontation between Anakin and Obi-Wan lacks some the power it should have had, since there's not even the possibility that Obi-Wan can pull his student back from the Dark Side. Lucas does a fair job of setting everything up for the real first movie, even managing to explain the presence of R2-D2 and C3-PO, which in Phantom struck me as a cheap, crowd-pleasing sop to the fans. The series' storyline is still riddled with holes, but that shouldn't bother anyone who has realized by now that Lucas never had a real overarching plan, but has really just been winging it for over a quarter of a century. But for all of my misgivings about the Star Wars series in general and this entry in particular, I couldn't help but be moved at Sith's conclusion as familiar images appeared- of Tatooine's twin suns, of the druids in the gleaming white halls of a spaceship, and of Darth Vader standing menacingly on the command deck of his battleship- bringing the story full circle.

If ever a movie belonged to a single actor, this is it. As a gangster movie The Public Enemy is somewhat creaky, and mainly interesting as a look at the genre's origins, but Jimmy Cagney brings it to electrifying life. Watching his manic performance as the cocky, ambitious thug Tom Powers, I could see the precursor of decades of movie antiheroes, from Richard Widmark to Malcolm McDowell to Al Pacino. Like most gangster films of the time, The Public Enemy tries to wrap itself in the mantle of a moral tract. An opening title card announces that Powers should not be taken as an individual character, but as a type, a characteristic example of an urban criminal. The narrative proceeds to give a standard history of this type is formed, beginning with him getting into petty crime as a kid, and then following him as he proceeds up the ranks of the underworld. Also along the way you see can see the building blocks for basically every subsequent gangster film: the misogyny (most famously illustrated when Cagney, sitting at the breakfast table with his moll, suddenly reaches over and smacks her in the face with a grapefruit; the disapproving family members; the protagonist's more moral sidekick ( a type seen as recently as in the Brazilian crime epic City of God). These ingredients don't jell quite as well as they would in subsequent crime films. I once skimmed through Cagney's memoir, in which he spoke of making these movies, even the famous ones, as being a fairly haphazard process in which memorable scenes came out of last-minute inspiration more often than great writing and far-sighted planning. This might have been partly just humility on Cagney's part, but I can also see it borne in Public Enemy's somewhat half-baked script. Of course any film would probably seem lacking after 70 years of imitators. Aside from Cagney, the performers are definitely a mixed bag. The actor who plays Cagney's law-abiding brother seems to be in a different movie; specifically, a circa-1910 inspirational stage melodrama with a title like "The Road to Ruin, or, the Drunkard's Progress." Conflict between brothers is a great subject for gritty urban melodramas, from "On the Waterfront" to "Raging Bull," but the character's conflict with Cagney doesn't go much farther than, "No, I won't drink your filthy liquor!" (not an actual line from the movie, but it could be). Jean Harlow shows how she came to be regarded as a sex symbol, but her acting is as painful inept as any Bond Girl's. Also, her character doesn't really go anywhere. The film doesn't feature quite as much mob warfare as I expected, probably another sign that the model was still being established. William Wellman's direction generally avoids the static quality often present in films of this era, and he handles the scenes of violence especially well, with terse, confident style. The final shootout occurs completely off-screen, with the audience seeing only the build-up and then the aftermath, and looks ahead to Takeshi Kitano's minimalist mob flick "Sonatine." Gangster movies generally walk a fine line between celebrating and condemning the lifestyles of their characters- think of The Godfather. The moralistic messages of '30s mob movies are often so at odds with the real reason that people watch them that their supposed social responsibility seldom convinces. The Public Enemy certainly did more in the long run to make gangsters look glamorous than to attack them, but it does boast memorable final "warning" against crime. Towards the end Tom Powers is confined to a hospital bed after a shootout, and he seems ready to put his old life behind him. In the final scene, as his mother makes up his old room, preparing for her son's return, someone knocks on the front door. Power's brother opens it, to be confronted with the horror-movie image of his mummified corpse, bandaged up from head to toe. Cagney's body falls across his home's threshold, an obvious but unforgettable ending.

Movies like this raise the question of whether movies are most important as arts of work on their own terms or as social statements made to have an impact on the world. Just by habit, I tend to lean towards the first view, and I would guess that most filmmakers do as well, since directors generally seem wary of discussing their work in terms of messages. But obviously not John Singleton; in the very first shot of Boyz n the Hood, the camera pushes towards a stop sign until it looms over the audience. This image sets the mood for the rest of the film, which has a strong impact that, as contradictory as this might seem, is somewhat blunted by the lack of subtlety. It belongs to that group of movies that probably stem most directly from Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets, a film that showed how talented young directors could make a splash with a debut set on their own home turf, particularly home turf far removed from the mainstream of American society. Not that Boyz n the Hood is anywhere as good as Mean Streets, but then I don't think that Singleton's main goal is to top Scorsese: he has a point to make. It's about the poverty and violence infesting South-Central L.A., with three main characters representing the basic options available to a young black man from that background. Cuba Gooding Jr. plays Tre, whose father, Furious Styles (Laurence Fishburne) is determined to raise him with the self-respect and discipline to avoid a life of crime and violence. His friend Ricky Baker (Morris Chestnut) isn't as smart but hopes to get into college on an athletic scholarship. Doughboy, meanwhile, is already immersed in gang life. The main performances are strong, particularly from Ice Cube, whose character is in man ways the most interesting, possessing the self-awareness his life is headed nowhere but not the will to do anything about it. At his strongest, Singleton creates a powerful, bleak portrait of a community under siege from guns, drugs, poverty, and general hopelessness, and he immerses you in this world as well, so that you share with the characters the same sense that all of the exits have been closed off. Whether or not you agree with all of the specific points that Singleton is trying to make, Boyz is unquestionably strong as a statement and a piece of reporting. It's far from a great piece of film-making; the music is intrusive and poorly done, and the story is overly melodramatic- it's not enough that one character has to be murdered to show the tragedy of gang violence, his friends then have to dump his bloody corpse in his living room so that we can see his mother's and his girlfriend's hysterical grief. But melodrama isn't really the main problem; it's more that Singleton's determination to get his message across frequently overwhelms his determination to tell a good story with believably individual characters. Too often the characters seem to be speaking to the audience instead of each other, sometimes to the extent that I expected them to turn towards the camera and issue a final warning. But for all of my criticisms of the movie, in the end I'm not sure how much they mean, because Singleton's focus, as I've already said, really doesn't seem to be on creating great art. If the success of a film is to be measured by whether it accomplishes what it sets out to do, rather than by one's enjoyment of it, than I think Boyz n the Hood would have to rate as a solid achievement.

When Dino de Laurentiis hired David Lynch in the early 1980s to adapt Frank Herbert's science-fiction opus Dune for the screen, he was no doubt hoping for something along the lines of the Star Wars movies, with great special effects and exciting action scenes. He must have been disappointed, since the final result, about 40$ million later, looks less like Star Wars than Zardoz, the incredibly strange John Boorman science fiction film. Neither movie is very good, but the experience of watching them is simply so utterly strange as to almost make up for their many failings. At least I could understand Dune somewhat better than Zardoz, as I have read the original Frank Herbert novel. Still, I can see how anyone who was not familiar with Lynch's source material would have been completely baffled by his adaptation, which is not very good. The core of Dune is a fairly simple adventure story about a prince whose clan is wiped out by their ancestral enemies, who he flees by going into exile among the Bedouin-like tribes of the desert planet that his father formerly ruled. They receive him as their Messiah, and he builds them up into an army to exact revenge on his enemies and overthrow the Galactic Emperor. But around this core, Herbert constructed an incredibly elaborate, complex portrait of an exotic far-future society closer to the Middle Ages or ancient Egypt than our own time, coated with multiple layers of political, religious, historical and religious allegory. I can understand why Ridley Scott, with his talent for creating almost obsessively detailed worlds, was also approached for Dune. The problem with adapting Dune is that these of the sort of details that work better on the page than the screen, where lengthy exposition is usually deadly and names like "Shadout Mapes" and "Feyd-Rautha" have to get past less than receptive audiences. Lynch's script strives to be as faithful to the book as possible, and the result is a film overstuffed with characters whose significance has vanished in the transition from page to screen, half-explained conspiracies and subplots, and dramatic events that are quickly rushed through. Lynch is obviously a very gifted filmmaker, but I don't think anyone would consider storytelling as one of his gifts- it's no coincidence that this, his most plot-oriented film, is also his biggest failure. Epics need storytellers like David Lean, directors who are willing to put style at the service of content, whereas Lynch's strongest work generally emphasizes the creation of a particular mood over story, which is either slim, as in Blue Velvet, or nonexistent, as in Eraserhead. In Dune Lynch's desperation to hold the monstrously complex plot together is such that he often resorts to explaining the characters' minds through clumsy voice-overs representing their inner thoughts. For De Laurentiis and Herbert, it must have seemed like an intriguing idea at the time to give the maker of Eraserhead a chance to make a film on an epic scale and budget, and at least visually the movie is impressive. There's always something interesting to look at on screen, though the production design is clumsy as often as it's brilliant. Take the execution of the "stillsuits" worn by the inhabitants of Dune, which function as portable plants for collecting bodily moisture and converting it into drinkable water. As shown in Dune, the suits include little nose pieces that give the unintended, unforgettably surreal impression that the characters are all wearing halved, Groucho Marx-like fake mustaches, a detail that might have seemed more at home in Twin Peaks. Lynch's talent for surreal, disturbing imagery really comes into play with the scenes involving the Space Guild Navigator, a huge talking worm floating in a tank, and the villainous Harkonnens, who live in a nightmarish industrial world shrouded in darkness and smoke. In other scenes, however, Lynch's propensity for dark cinematography is out of place, particularly when the action moves onto the deserts of Dune. The biggest problem with Dune is simply that it takes itself much too seriously. Herbert, as I said already, used a pulp science-fiction plot as the vehicle for all sorts of other preoccupations while still creating a fun adventure story, but the movie mostly just reflects Herbert's pretensions. It feels laborious, as if Lynch regarded the project as essentially a gigantic chore, and lacks of any of the book's sense of exhilaration. Lynch's direction only comes alive with the depraved villains on Planet Harkonnen. Earlier this year, I read a biography of Herbert written by his son that included a detailed account of his involvement with making Dune into a movie, and my impression was that he was too involved with trying to safeguard his work. The directors Scott and Alejandro Jodorowsky were dropped after Herbert realized that they would have made substantial changes to the book, and Lynch was brought on board to write an adaptation that would be as faithful as possible, but it's clear that what was needed was a hands-off attitude on the author's part that would have allowed the filmmakers freedom to make the necessary changes.

Until someone releases a letterboxed, uncut version of "A Fistful of Dynamite/ Duck, You Sucker," seeing Tonino Valerii's "My Name is Nobody" is the next best thing to watching another Sergio Leone spaghetti Western. Leone not only served as producer on this late, 1973 (?) addition to the genre he helped create, he also directed several scenes, though which it is not completely clear. According to Christopher Frayling's informative biography Something to Do with Death, he tended to vary what scenes he would take credit for depending on whom he was speaking to. But regardless of what Leone actually directed, his imprint is all over the film. By the time this movie came out, in 1973, even the somewhat tongue-in-cheek tone of such early spaghetti Westerns as "Fistful of Dollars" and "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" had given way in popularity to overt parodies like "They Call Me Trinity." With "My Name is Nobody" Leone seems to be trying to strike a balance between this new trend and the more serious tone of his movies. Henry Fonda, returning to spaghettis with a far more sympathetic role than Frank in "Once Upon a Time in the West," plays Beauregard, a legendary but aging gunfighter looking to leave his old life behind. Terence Hill, a star in Europe for his comic, buffoonish roles in these movies, plays the "title" character, a trickster-type who worships Beauregard and wants to replace him in fame. Nobody spends most of the movie following around the older gunman and trying to convince him to go out in a blaze of glory against the 150-man Wild Bunch. Beauregard and the Bunch are also mixed up somehow in a murky fraud scheme involving a gold mine. The main problem with "My Name Is Nobody," other than that Sergio Leone didn't direct (much of) it, is that it comes off as two separate movies, each starring one of the two stars. Fonda's story is an elegiac farewell to the old West and the old Western that self-consciously comments on the transition from reality to legend. Hill's movie is a "zany" comedy filled with slapstick, sleight-of-hand, and humor based on bodily functions. Nobody never kills his enemies; instead he just plays supposedly amusing tricks on them, usually for the benefit of an audience. But what European audiences apparently found amusing thirty years ago has not fared well in the transition across continents and over three decades. Hill's labored, unfunny brand of humor is almost painful at times to watch. Like the movie as a whole, Ennio Morricone's score is very uneven. Much of the music is wonderful, including a self-parody of his "Frank and Harmonica" theme from "Once Upon a Time in the West," but he also contributes a truly annoying "Europop" tune for Nobody that only adds to the irritating qualities of Hills' scenes. At its best, "My Name is Nobody" can basically be taken as a sort of companion piece to Leone's Westerns, with similar visuals and music, and even one of the same actors. It doesn't really stand on its own as a movie, and I'll be interested to see if I ever find a non-Leone Western that does.

Of all movies by David Cronenberg that I've seen - which, admittedly, is not many- this film is definitely my least favorite, but that's not to say that there's nothing to recommend it. For one thing, since the movie is an adaptation of a William S. Burroughs novel that's famously difficult and obscure, and supposedly almost completely plot less, anyone not familiar with the book- like me- is probably not going to have as much appreciation for Cronenberg's sheer gall in taking on such difficult material. Still, I suspect I would have to be very into Burroughs before I see the film as anything than an interesting failure. Insofar as "Naked Lunch" has a plot, it involves a Burroughs alter ego named Bill Lee who works as an exterminator until he becomes hooked on his own "bug powder." Learning that the cops are after him, Bill becomes paranoid and, in what may or may not be an accident, shoots her in the head after telling her that, "it's time for our William Tell trick." He then escapes to "Interzone," a North African-like city populated mainly by gay American expatriates, which he files reports on under the orders of his typewriter, a giant talking insect. As I said, I haven't read Naked Lunch and can't really say what's from the book, but I do know that large sections of the screenplay are from some of Burrough's other, more coherent books. And maybe most disturbingly, much of the story is actually based on Burrough's own life, including his murder (?) of his wife. In fact, what Cronenberg has done here is closer to Adaptation than to a conventional adaptation, by making a movie about the writing of "Naked Lunch" (which I believe was written in North Africa, though maybe not with the help of any giant insects). Cronenberg's knack for creating unsettling, reality-stretching imagery is fully on display here, and for a while the film is just strange enough to be interesting. Still, Naked Lunch is much more boring than any movie about a man with a talking insect for a typewriter has a right to be, maybe because it's an adaptation of Serious, Important Literature. The film's sluggish quality might be partly due to Cronenberg's direction, which always has a controlled, intensely focused quality similar to Stanley Kubrick's, and while obviously accomplished on its own, might be wrong for the hallucinatory material in "Naked Lunch." Peter Weller, in yet another bizarre role (his others have included Buckaroo Banzai, Robocop, and the yuppie Ahab to an over-sized rat's Moby Dick in that epic masterpiece "Of Unknown Origin"), turns in a typically good, deadpan performance, but his character of Bill Lee/William Burroughs doesn't really develop in any particularly compelling ways, and this inert quality extends to the rest of the movie. For all of the weirdness that Cronenberg's work is known for, at his best he also creates narratives compelling enough to make his reality-bending games more than academic exercises and characters well-rounded enough to involve you emotionally in all of the mutations and distortions that take place. What Cronenberg has ended up with here is the sort of movie that's more interesting in theory than in practice.

I decided to watch this movie after reading and enjoying the Robert Penn Warren novel on which it was based. As a companion piece to the book the film inevitably disappoints, but taken on its own terms it's a fairly good movie. Both book and film tell the story of Willie Stark, a man who begins as an idealistic, rural lawyer crusading against political corruption in his (unspecified) state, but only gains power after he turns into a cynical demagogue, as seen through the eyes of Jack Burden, the black sheep of a wealthy family, a former reporter, and Stark's right-hand man. The difference is in the emphasis; the book's focus is really on Burden, and his moral development as seen in relation to the polar opposition of the pragmatic, Machiavellian Stark and the unbending, idealistic doctor Adam Stanton. Of course, Burden's moral struggles take place largely in his own mind, and as such don't lend themselves easily to filming. Probably sensibly, the movie chooses to focus mainly on Stark's political rise and moral decline, with Burden's role reduced to more of an audience surrogate than a character in his own right. No one in the cast sounds very Southern, giving the movie a somewhat timeless, disassociated feeling. Still, the filmmakers convincingly evoke a world of back –country towns and back room politics, with little of the glamor associated with Hollywood films of this period. The performers are excellent, if also fairly vague in terms of background. Broderick Crawford's Stark is convincing both as a naive country lawyer and a cynical demagogue, and John Ireland effectively portrays the moral struggles of Jack Burden. Mercedes McCambridge, who I'd previously seen in the unlikely role of a lesbian Mexican gang member in Touch of Evil, is more ideally cast here as Stark's tough-minded adviser Sadie Burke. Warren claimed that the book was partly inspired by the similarities he saw between Huey Long and Mussolini. Understandably for a post-WWII movie, Rossen's adaptation pumps up the references to fascism and makes Stark a much more clear-cut villain. He has his own private army of black-shirt style, leather jacket-wearing cops, stages a political rally that looks like a small-scale version of Nuremberg, and by the end is even revealed to have ordered an assassination. Unfortunately, Rossen's changes oversimplify the book and greatly reduce the impact of Stark's climatic assassination by Adam Stanton, which Warren intended as a tragic clash of opposites, but becomes here a simple case of a tyrant getting his just deserts. Though the movie tries to deal with the issues of pragmatism versus idealism, it too easily dismisses the representative of idealism out of hand. The novel's Stark was not an admirable man, but he also could not be completely dismissed- by Burden or by the reader- in the context of a state hopelessly mired in corruption. Still, I don't want to completely dismiss the movie, which on its own terms is an effective political drama that successfully captures the smoky back-room atmosphere of old-time American politics.

Horror movies tend to be the source of the most remakes, as is the case right now, with plans in the works in Hollywood for what must be every low-budget horror film to be "re-imagined." There are good reasons for this; the basic aim of horror is to create visceral reactions in the audience, so premises are usually simple and dramatic. Big stars rarely appear in horror movies, since it's really the content that's the star, and as what content is considered acceptable in movies changes opportunities for updates come up. Philip Kauffmann's Invasion of the Body Snatchers is one of the better remakes that I've seen. Actually, it could be taken as a sequel as much as a remake to the earlier movie, showing the invasion at a later stage. Here, instead of a small town the setting is San Francisco, though the story's structure is fairly close to the original. It's not surprising that this already grim scenario, a product of 1950s paranoia, would become even bleaker in the 70s. The original showed the aliens taking over a small town; here they take over an entire city. The cast is the first of the movie's pluses. It includes Donald Sutherland, as a food inspector, Brooke Adams, who also appeared in Days of Heaven but is given an actual role here, Veronica Cartwright, the other woman aboard the Nostromo, and Jeff Goldblum, playing his usual neurotic. The movie's major strength, though, is its atmosphere. Kaufmann's inventive direction builds a sense of paranoia and unease in each scene through off-kilter camera angles and ominous details. Since a remake by its nature is going to lack the original's element of surprise, Kauffman compensates in the first half by keeping the audience constantly on its toes with the feeling that something may be about to happen. The movie falters a bit when it comes to storytelling. The premise, at least as developed here, is a little too thin for the full running time, and once the characters have recognized the threat, the rest of the movie consists of them running away. In comparison to the lean Don Siegel original, this goes on for too long, particularly when it becomes clear that none of these people are going to get away. It's not too surprising that this already grim scenario, a product of 1950s paranoia, would become even bleaker in the 70s. The original showed the aliens taking over a small town; here they take over an entire city.

George Romero's "Dead" movies, Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, are perhaps best known for their graphic gore, but that the success of those films was due to more than just Romero's willingness to show blood-and-guts is confirmed by this movie, the third installment in his trilogy. Day of the Dead more than outdoes its predecessors when it comes to grossing out the audience, yet I nonetheless found it disappointing. As surprising as this might be for a low-budget horror flick, Day's fatal flaw is in the area of plot and characters. Romero may not have gotten Oscar-caliber performances in Dawn, but the performers were likable, and the story of their travails, though not exactly complex, was an involving adventure story. In the final Dead movie (as of this writing) on the other hand, the story never takes off. The characters spend almost the whole movie locked in an underground complex protected from the hordes of the undead. They are divided between scientists studying the zombies and soldiers assigned to protect them, plus two helicopter pilots. Of course, there is much conflict between the two groups as there is with the zombies. So far, this sounds like a good setup for a horror movie, but Romero botches the execution, probably due to an over ambitious desire to make a serious statement, which should not be a horror filmmaker's first priority. Romero should have gradually increased the tension between the characters, as in The Thing. Instead, they're screaming and pointing guns at each other almost from the very first scene. This dissipates all of the tension, and clearly prefigures the ending. There's very little real conflict, since the soldiers are depicted as complete bumbling fools. Romero lets the actors playing the soldiers overact shamelessly, and the dialog he writes for them is simply terrible. These guys are so annoying that I couldn't for them to get eaten. What's the point that Romero is trying to make here- that soldiers are bad? When, inevitably, the military turns on the scientists, it's for reasons that the scientist could have at least tried to explain. Another problem with the story of Day is the pacing.Dawn of the Dead may have had a relaxed pace, for which it has sometimes been criticized, but it worked because Romero began with the zombies overtaking civilization, relaxed the pace after the heroes barricaded themselves, and then finished off with a spectacular final attack by the zombies. Here, on the other hand, there's barely any action until the very end. That's means that dialog has to carry the weight up until the end, and neither Romero nor his actors are up to snuff.

I decided to see "1900", an Italian historical epic directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, after reading Pauline Kael's review of the movie. Though I don't think I would agree with everything she wrote about it, I think she was right on the mark when she began by talking about it as a "grand folly," one of those movies in which the director aims to transcend movies with a world-changing epic. They rarely succeed, but even just their ambition to make a masterpiece can make the movie worth seeing. There were plenty of sequences in 1900 that felt like they were in a great movie, and throughout almost the entire film I could feel just how high Bertolucci's ambitions were, which made it all the more disappointing when the film, over the course of its more-than-four-hour running time, failed to deliver on all it had promised.

The story revolves two men who were both born on the same day in 1900 on the same rural Italian estate. One is the grandson of the estate's owner, the other of the patriarch of the peasant clan that lives and works on the estate. The movie proceeds to show their ambivalent friendship over the years against the backdrop of the rise of fascism and socialism. The aristocrat is played by Robert De Niro; the peasant is played by the French star Gerard Depardieu. The landowning grandfather is played by Burt Lancaster, the peasant grandfather by Sterling Hayden.

The early scenes showing the main characters' childhoods are the best in the movie. They have a bucolic, lyrical quality, and the beautiful cinematography drenches the screen in golden light. Ennio Morricone's score complements the images beautifully. Maybe the peasants are supposed to be oppressed, but the whole section is filled with nostalgia. Though his accent is jarringly American, Burt Lancaster seemed at home here- maybe because he played an Italian aristocrat in an earlier period epic, The Leopard. However, the depiction of the two boys promises more than the movie is able to fulfill.

In the later adult sections, the De Niro and the Depardieu characters never really seem to take center stage as the childhood scenes seem to promise they will. The movie is somewhat similar to Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America. The difference is that in Leone's film showing the protagonists adult rise in the mob fulfilled the promise of the childhood sequences. Kael suggests- and this seems pretty likely to me- that Bertolucci deliberately goes against the viewer's expectations by deemphasizing the role of the two main characters in order to show that it is "the people" who are the heroes of history. Cute, but if you make a movie that's over four hours long- and in the original version it's closer to six-, the main characters should be as compelling as possible. De Niro is shown throughout as being passive and weak, I guess to show the greater "vitality" of peasants, but Depardieu doesn't seem to do a whole lot either. The supposed friendship between them is never especially convincing, probably because Bertolucci has them representing so much that they never really come alive as characters.

The movie's historical and political content is pretty simplistic. In Bertolucci's defense, he seems to have intended this to a certain degree, as a way of creating a truly "popular" epic in the mold of Gone With the Wind. This can be seen particularly in the depiction of the film's villain, Attila, the estate's sadistic foreman, who is used to represent fascism. As played by Donald Sutherland, Attila is a cartoon-like villain, who, at various points, demonstrates how to deal with Communists by smashing a kitten with his head, murders a little boy, and impales an old lady on spikes. Though this character is one of the movie's most criticized aspect, I don't think the character himself is the problem- Attila certainly makes a memorable villain- so much as the fact that there's simply not much conflict between Sutherland and the two main characters. Of course, it's the movie's point that De Niro, and by extension all "bourgeois", is too weak to act against the vicious Fascists, but Depardieu as the supposedly more robust working class-socialist never does much against Attila either.Therefore, 1900 doesn't fully succeed as a popular historical epic or as an analysis of Italian history. Where Bertolucci went wrong was probably where directors trying to make masterpieces often go wrong- trying to do too many things at once.

For one thing, the socialist message that Bertolucci obviously intended this film to convey seemed strangely half-hearted; he seems more genuinely interested in showing aristocratic decadence. And by the end of the movie, the story had pretty much lost all of its momentum. The scene of the partisans overcoming the Fascists was rushed through, without Depardieu without even being present. And the ending is extremely disappointing; after De Niro's show trial has been put to an end by government troops, he and Depardieu start fighting with each other, and then the movie jumps forward in time to show them as old men, still fighting with each other. Yes, I know it's supposed to be symbolic and all, but it just doesn't work. When a movie's over four hours long, it's more than a little disappointing when it turns into the longest Grumpy Old Men film in history. The dubbing is another major problem. The cast is very international, and the voices coming out of the actors never quite seem to match. This is especially a problem with De Niro; his performance may have originally been quite good, but his dubbed voice sounds hollow and out of place.

Spielberg's famously disastrous comedy is kind of like the Heaven's Gate of comedies. Not because it was one of the expensive debacles that came out at around the same time (which it was), nor because it's as bad as Heaven's Gate (it isn't). The main link between these two otherwise dissimilar films is how they are both overwhelmed by the scale of their productions. Though Michael Cimino and Spielberg both produced films that were undeniably impressive as spectacles, somewhere along the way they forgot to also make films that would be, respectively, exciting or funny. Of course, Cimino had probably decided that it was beneath him to make a movie that would be "merely" exciting. Obviously making a Western was just too lowbrow for the maker of The Deer Hunter. 1941 doesn't possess anything close to the suffocating pretentiousness of Heaven's Gate; in fact the opposite is true. Both movies are equally stupid, but at least 1941 knows that it's stupid. Spielberg does actually try to fulfill the requirements of the genre he is working in, unlike Cimino. The problem with 1941 is how clearly you can see Spielberg trying to be funny. Comedy is like dance; it doesn't work if you can see the effort. The filmmakers' (especially Spielberg's) mistake was in thinking that physical destruction on its own is funny. Because of this approach, we are treated to the sights of: a tank crashing through a paint factory (and then a paint-thinner factory); a Japanese sub shelling an amusement park; a man trying to hit the sub with an anti-aircraft gun blowing apart his own house; the whole house falling into the ocean; and much, much more. What Spielberg and his collaborators seem to have forgotten is that destruction, however absurdly over-scaled, generally only works as the punch line to a gag. In Used Cars, which shares with 1941 the same writing team, Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis, one of the funniest scenes involves one of the used-car salesman wrecking cars on his rival's lot. The scene works because of the salesman's demented spiel, while the destructiveness serves only to cap off the scene. In 1941, however, the human element gets lost amid the epic scale. The cast is impressive, but the actors seem to have been selected on a sort of rabbit's foot-type theory- hey, if we cast famous comedy stars or character actors, their talent will sort of rub off on the movie! John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd appear as, respectively, a crazed pilot and a pompous tank commander. Both of them seem to have been hired on the assumption that anything they did would be funny, without much thought as to how they might fit into the movie. Belushi, who is particularly out of place, does his shtick from Animal House but not nearly as funnily. Tim Matheson is also called on to reprise his role in Animal House, but not to much effect. John Candy plays a racist sergeant, which is apparently supposed to be funny in itself. In addition to then-current comedy stars, Spielberg also enlists a gallery of famous character actors. Warren Oates plays a Dr. Strangelove-type commander, and does not display any previously untapped knack for comedy. Elisha Cook Jr. shows up for about thirty seconds to get shot at by John Belushi. Slim Pickens is put to better use, as a drunken lumberjack who, in the movie's funniest scene, encounters a group of Japanese sailors and tries to chop them down with his ax. (Ironically, and incredibly, this scene was cut from the theatrical version, perhaps on the basis that what audiences really wanted was more scenes with Bobby Di Cicco). Robert Stack and Toshiro Mifune as, respectively, General Stilwell and a Japanese sub commander, are the only actors who emerge with any dignity intact. Stack also gets the movie's second funniest scene, tearfully watching Dumbo as a riot rages outside. The movie's visual scope is undeniably impressive. The sets are huge, while the costumes and props are characteristically impeccable. And I can't deny that part of me thoroughly enjoyed seeing all of this luxurious period detail get systematically trashed and destroyed, not to mention wasted on such a gleefully moronic movie. However, even on the visuals Spielberg and his collaborators shot themselves in the foot. Spielberg and his cinematographer, William Fraker, chose a fuzzy, smoke-filled visual style which generally just makes the movie look out of focus, when 1941 should have looked as bright and sharp as a Looney Tunes cartoon.

This 1914 D.W. Griffith historical epic is a legendary film, both for it's (according to film scholars, at least) pioneering use of narrative techniques and for its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan. It is often credited for defining the "grammar" by which filmmakers tell stories, and for encouraging a resurgence in the KKK. It's often referred to in reviews as a disturbing masterpiece. To me, on the other, the movie seemed more like a disturbing relic of history, impressive at times but generally more interesting as a piece of history than as an actual story. Perhaps the blame lies with the print's inevitably less-than-pristine condition, but I doubt it. Gone With the Wind, which covers similar ground, may not have been as innovative as Birth of a Nation, but it stands up much better now, even leaving aside the question of racism. Birth of a Nation isn't a bad movie, aside from the racism, but it's also not anything special. The movie first runs into problems in its first half when it attempts to integrate history with drama. Actually, there isn't much of an attempt to combine the fictional story with historical reenactments, at least not until the second half. Griffith just cuts from recreations of famous incidents (Sherman's March, the burning of Atlanta, Grant and Lee at Appomattox) to the fictional characters in unidentified battles. The battle scenes seem to have been a big deal at the time, but, for the most part, I didn't find them to be especially impressive, since the sequences consist mostly of long shots of puffs of white smokes. The second half, which is what has gotten the movie into hot water, at least works better as a story and has more of a focus. The chase and rescue at the end doesn't seem that innovative anymore, but it is still exciting- assuming, of course, that you can overlook what's actually going on in the scene.

Most people who have heard of Sam Peckinpah still probably think of him as "Bloody Sam," a gleeful sadist who love of violence inspired his films' slow-motion bloodbaths. This is unfair,because Peckinpah was much more than just an exploitation filmmaker, and it was no doubt in part to avoid being thought of in this way that he decided to film The Ballad of Cable Hogue. Like all filmmakers who create masterpieces, Peckinpah was faced with the question of what could possibly match The Wild Bunch, and so, no doubt wisely, he decided to bypass the question by making that film's complete antithesis. Cable Hogue is also a Western that shows the closing of the frontier, but it does so in a much more gentle fashion (which, granted, isn't saying too much) with barely any violence. Instead of an epic, here Peckinpah is trying to make a surreal allegory. So I can understand why Peckinpah would want to make a movie like Cable Hogue as a follow-up to The Wild Bunch, but I still can't completely understand exactly what he was trying to do in the movie itself. It gets off to a good start but bogs down in a tedious, inexplicable ending. Jason Robards appears in the title role, a man, played by Jason who is left to die in the desert by his partners, played by Strother Martin and L.Q. Jones, essentially reprising gentler versions of their scummy bounty-hunter in The Wild Bunch. Just as he is apparently about to die, Cable discovers water in the ground, and decided to stay there selling water to passing stagecoach passengers. Though Peckinpah's reputation was partly on his image as the anti-John Ford, in Cable Hogue he shows that in one respect he was the perfect artistic heir to Ford: in his handling of humor. Both directors, at ease with majestic landscapes and exciting action scenes, are almost completely lost when it comes to comedy. Peckinpah's attempts at raising laughs reminded me of The Simpsons episode where Homer gives Mel Gibson suggestions on how to "improve" his Mr. Smith Goes to Washington remake, including speeding up the motion in one scene: "Speeded-up motion is funny!" Homer must have also been creative consultant to Peckinpah when he was making this movie, because that's exactly his approach. Peckinpah was often criticized for his attitude towards women, and this flaw comes to the forefront in Cable Hogue with his handling of the character Hildy. Peckinpah tries to have it both ways by treating her as a sex object and a serious character. Because of this, I never believed in the supposedly deep feelings that Cable had for Hildie. The movie's most embarrassing sequence is a montage of Cable and Hildie's time together, supposedly showing us the deep feelings they have for each other, and all to the sound of an unbelievably saccharine song, "Butterfly Mornings (!)." I'd like to think that Peckinpah was forced to add this song by greedy studio execs, but from what I read about the film's production in a biography of the director, he was given complete creative control. Aside from misogyny and unfunny humor, the main reason for Cable Hogue is simply that the end is completely bizarre. Peckinpah was supposed to have been a big admirer of Fellini, and as strange as it sounds, he seems to be attempting his own version of Fellini in the closing scenes. Once again, automobiles are used as a symbol of the passing of the West and the beginning of the modern era. Hildy, who had left Cable to go to San Francisco and make her fortune, returns a wealthy widow driven by a chauffeur. Cable decides to leave his successful business in the desert and leave with Hildy, but before he can, he is unexpectedly run over. This should remind anyone familiar with Peckinpah of Angel being dragged behind a car at the end of The Wild Bunch, but here Peckinpah handles the scene in an offhand fashion, with Robard barely complaining of any pain. His subsequent death is obviously supposed to be more allegorical than realistic, but it just seems off. Instead of subsiding to an elegiac feeling, as was the case with The Wild Bunch, Cable Hogue just seems to sputter out. I'm sure if I would have appreciated the movie more if I had seen it on a restored letter-boxed DVD that I'm sure would have only provided more evidence of Peckinpah and cinematographer Lucien Ballard's flair for using majestic western landscapes. But I don't think that it would have solved this movie's main problems, which have to do with the basic tone and intention behind the story. If anything kept me interested, it wasn't the writing or the direction but Jason Robard's performance in the title role. Cable may be intended by Peckinpah to be a symbol, but Robard makes him into a believable, likable human being. He's the main reason to watch this deeply flawed film.

Though the sort of movies that John Carpenter makes are looked down on by most "reputable" critics- and frankly most of his more recent efforts do look pretty weak- but as a director he has just as strong a personality as any acclaimed critics' darling. In this, his first professional film, most of his characteristics as a filmmaker (though not all of his skill) can already be seen. Like most of his best movies, Assault is basically a movie about a group of people who come under siege from a sinister, apparently unstoppable outside force. Here, in Carpenter's first stab at this scenario, this unstoppable force is an L.A. street gang with. Obviously the last thing Carpenter was interested in was anything resembling accurate sociology; the bad guys are closer to the zombies from George Romero movies than to any real gang- they're completely emotionless, care nothing about their own lives, have an apparently limitless number of members, and have an almost supernatural ability to appear out of nowhere. The movie gets off to a shaky start as cops ambush several gang members (in a very 60s touch that's typical of Carpenter, the police shoot them down in cold blood). This scene is disconcertingly amateurish, and with its shaky camera movements, grainy photography, and unconvincing stunts, looked more like something I might see as a class project than as a John Carpenter-directed action scene. Luckily, the movie improves dramatically on from here, leading me to suspect that the movie was shot at least roughly in sequence and that Carpenter may have been still feeling his strengths. In the scenes that follow, Carpenter shows his usual skill at building up suspense, as the gang prowls the streets looking for a target on which to vent their rage and the usual varied group of characters assemble at a police station that's about to be shut down. As I also found of his later Escape from New York, Carpenter's action scenes are solid but somewhat lacking in punch, though here that's probably due as much to constraints of money and financing as it is of talent. Since none of the gang members seem to have any fear of death, their attacks mainly consist of charging armed defenders and quickly getting shot. The acting is a mixed bag, ranging from poor to solid, but luckily the leading actors generally fall into this category. Like the film school graduate that he is, Carpenter makes plenty of movie references and in-jokes- the basic premise is modeled on Rio Bravo and Night of the Living Dead. One of the two heroes, a black cop, tells a story about his childhood taken right from an anecdote that Hitchcock liked to tell about himself, while the other hero, a white convict, uses lines lifted right from Once Upon a Time in the West. All in all, Assault is a nice reminder of a time when enterprising filmmakers could make low budget genre flicks that were lean and unpretentious, instead of the solemn and bloated big budget efforts that now seem to be coming out very other week (painful memories of Man on Fire spring to mind). As debut films (which I think this could be considered) go, it's no Citizen Kane, but it is an entertaining promise of better things to come.

George Lucas's first movie in some ways seems to be almost the polar opposite of his later work. Unlike such movies as Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, which strive to be as commercial as possible, THX-1138 tries to be as esoteric and avant-garde as possible. That's not to say that I would consider THX-1138 better than those later movies; I frankly think that Star Wars and Raiders do a better job at their chosen task of entertaining the audience than this film does at being profound, which suggests that, despite everything that Lucas has said recently, including on this disc, about wanting to go back to his avant-garde roots, he probably was better off pursuing a commercial path. The story of THX-1138 is a familiar one that comes across as a combination of Brave New World and 1984. Robert Duvall plays the title character, a member of an underground society where all individuality is suppressed. The bureaucracy that runs this society keeps everyone drugged and uses robot policeman against any dissenters. As in 1984, the hero is moved to revolt after he falls in love. After this, the story is pretty basic-Duvall is arrested and put in prison, he escapes, eludes the robot policemen (which isn't too hard) and emerges onto the surface of the planet. Obviously the appeal of THX 1138 doesn't come from any groundbreaking innovations in plot line or theme. Not unlike with many of Lucas's later efforts, the movie is most interesting as a sensory experience. The visuals brilliantly create Lucas's sterile future with, as far as I could see, much in the way of any actual sets, while Walter Murch contributes an eerie soundtrack that looks forward to his work on Coppola's The Conversation. Though on the whole the DVD is as lavish as you would expect for a Lucas film, Lucas has repeated his biggest mistake with the original Star Wars trilogy by adding in computer effects. These digital "improvements" are particularly pointless for THX, which after all is supposed to be showing the remnants of civilization, not a bustling metropolis.

In Hollywood movies L.A. is most commonly used as just a convenient location for stories that could just as easily be set anywhere. Some of the few exceptions can be found in films like Magnolia and Short Cuts, which explore a web of interconnections between people in ways that seem particularly suited to a sprawling city like Los Angeles. Drawing on these earlier movies, the recently released Crash, which I saw last week at the downtown theater with my sister, concentrates on the specific issue of race. Writer-director Paul Haggis structures the story as a series of racially charged connections between both strangers and acquaintances. Over the course of about 24 hours these characters are all forced towards reckonings with how they deal with race. Haggis has certainly delivered a compelling and well-made movie, with beautifully moody, blue-hued cinematography and editing that is refreshingly controlled for a modern Hollywood film. Other than Don Cheadle, I'm not familiar with most of the ensemble cast, but they turn in excellent performances. Haggis has received some criticism for the coincidences that his screenplay is built on, but I can't say I minded; Crash is infused with enough style as to make it clear that it's not intended as documentary-style realism, and so I was able to accept the coincidences as a Dickensian device for juxtaposing different segments of society. Despite all of these virtues, the screenplay has a number of flaws that ultimately diminish the movie's power. Taking place over about the time of one day, the script has the characters go through dramatic transformations, and while some are justified by the story's dramatic intensity, others, particularly those experienced by a rookie cop and a black TV director, are overly schematic and unconvincing, turning flesh-and-blood characters into pawns in the director's grand scheme. The movie contains several scenes of the characters placed in harm's way that some viewers might find manipulative and overwrought but which I found to be legitimately compelling; there is, however, at least one too many of these moments. One of the difficulties in making an ensemble film has to be keeping the different characters' stories in balance; because many of the characters are set up as protagonists, and not as supporting characters who nudge the story along, there's less leeway in the editing room for removing subplots and tangents that don't turn to work. In Nashville and Magnolia, for instance, there were several characters who had obviously fallen prey to the need to keep the movie to a manageable length, rendering their function in the story more or less incomprehensible. Here, the character of the DA's bitchy, racist wife, played by Sandra Bullock, doesn't prove to be very interesting. Moreover, the crisis that befalls her and prompts self-reflection- she breaks her ankle falling down the stairs and is helped by her Hispanic housekeeper- comes right after several more intense scenes, including a car crash and an armed confrontation. At this point I began to get the feeling that Haggis was just piling on one catastrophe after another. The way in which Haggis keeps the issue of race throughout the film is less than subtle- in every single scene he contrives to have the characters discuss racial issues, so that after a while the movie starts coming off as an after-school special with four-letter words.

This is probably not the best movie to start watching after a busy day at 10:30 P.M. Even though I had already heard the Who's original album, I was still completely unprepared for the sensory assault mounted by the film's director, Ken Russell. Every scene is a kaleidoscopic frenzy of garish and bizarre images, most filled with hilariously obvious symbolism (which the college kids watching the film with me seemed to enjoy pointing out), and reinforced by the Who's music, which runs throughout the movie at top volume and with barely any interruption. It's also badly dubbed to the actor's lip movements, which only adds to the overall strangeness. Russell seems particularly fond of having the actors degrade themselves- one long sequence shows Tommy being abused by his sadistic cousin and his perverted uncle. In another scene, involving Ann-Margret as his mother, champagne and baked beans erupt out of a TV and fill an immaculately white room. Following the lead of the original album, Russell seems to be trying to make some kind of satirical statement on organized religion, but the whole thing is so over-the-top and bears such little relationship to any reality that the attempts at commentary wind up as empty as the rest of the film. Russell's dubious accomplishment basically consists of having created the world's longest and noisiest music video.

New York, New York is an ambitious failure. There are a lot of good things in it, but rarely do they ever seem to quite fit together into a consistent whole. You have to give Scorsese credit for trying to do something new, as he has done throughout his career despite the oft-repeated charge that he does the same thing over and over again. In this case, however, his gamble didn't pay off. Some of the tensions inherent in the "New Hollywood's" attitude towards Hollywood's past can be seen in New York, New York. With this movie, Scorsese sought to create a tribute to the big-band musicals of the 40s, while placing at its center a typically hard-to-like protagonist. Robert De Niro plays a talented but abrasive saxophonist who seemingly can't get along with anyone for any length of time, least of all his wife, played by Liza Minnelli. In the extended opening sequence, they meet cute at a V-J celebration, though, in a sign of things to come, the way in which De Niro tries to pick up Minnelli is distinctly creepy in its aggressiveness. She turns out to be a gifted singer, and they become partners, first singing together at a nightclub, then going on the road with a band, before his jealousy of her success finally drives them apart. After the low-budget success of Taxi Driver, Scorsese was riding high, and he was given the chance to mount his follow-up on a big scale. Just as the story and situation mimic those of old musicals, New York, New York's production design aims to recreate those movies' stylized, artificial sets and visuals. The sets are spare and designed in bold colors, while the car scenes utilize obvious rear-projection. At the same time as he is replicating the world of Hollywood musicals, Scorsese is also trying to subvert it's sentimentality by introducing his own brand of gritty emotional realism. Coppola tried to do something similar in One from the Heart; Scorsese's movie is much better, but it still doesn't work. At times, he seems to be doing a run-through for his next and much better movie, Raging Bull. In both films De Niro plays a volatile, jealous character who makes life difficult for everyone around him and never learns from his mistake. Of course, Jimmy Doyle is a little more bearable than Jake La Motta, but the fact remains that the character is just too unpleasant for the context of a musical. As despicable as he was, La Motta seemed to belong in the tough world of tenements, nightclubs, and boxing rings in which we saw him. If his character never really changed, then that was one of the main points of Raging Bull. In New York, New York, though, the characters are similarly unchanging, but they also remain strictly on the surface, as superficial as the studio-built world they inhabit. Scorsese seems to have mistaken unpleasantness for profundity.