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My attempt to go through Stanley Kubrick’s filmography continues… well not apace, certainly, but it continues. I was able to watch his fourth film, Paths of Glory, Sunday evening, after a fair amount of postponement and anticipation, and ooooh big surprise: I liked it.

After the critical, if not box office, success of The Killing, Kubrick and producer Jack Harris decided they wanted to do a war movie; Kubrick apparently read the novel by Humphrey Cobb when he was a teenager, and the two men began work. Once again Jim Thompson worked on the screenplay, a chore eventually taken over by another novelist, Calder Willingham (who would later turn in screenplays for The Graduate and Little Big Man). This was while they were under contract to MGM. After a major shake-up in the studio (in which Dory Schary and our boys got the boot), the project seemed to be in limbo, except another star with a reputation for being a maverick was interested in the script: Kirk Douglas. Douglas’ own production company, Bryna (named after his mother) helped ramrod the project through United Artists.

Douglas plays Colonel Dax, a WWI French officer commanded to do the impossible: take his regiment across No Man’s Land and capture The Anthill, a fortified German position that has repelled all comers for months. When the attack inevitably fails, three men from the regiment are picked, supposedly at random, to be tried and executed for cowardice. Dax insists on defending the men himself, only to find himself up against a wall of confustication; the outcome of the trial is never in doubt, and three men are executed by firing squad.

There is no denying that Paths of Glory is an anti-war movie, but there is also little denying it is a pro-soldier movie. The villains in this piece are not the Germans – we never see a German soldier – but the commanding officers, themselves lodged in a magnificent mansion far away from the dismal trenches populated by men they seem to hardly regard as human beings, more as chess pieces. Even then, that road isn’t an easy one to navigate. General Mireau (George MacReady), who will become our major heavy, starts out well enough. When his superior Broulard (Adolphe Menjou) asks him to take The Anthill, Mireau at first demurs, citing the impossibility of the goal, that the toll on his men would be too high. But then Broulard mentions that there may be a promotion for the man who takes The Anthill.

Mireau’s concern for his men evaporates at that point, even ordering his artillery to shell his own trenches when company B fails to leave its protection for the second wave of the assault. The artillery officer refuses, and Mireau immediately orders him to place himself under arrest. Afterwards, still stung at his loss of face and seeking to deflect blame, Mireau wants a hundred of the men executed for cowardice. Broulard manages to talk him down to the three men, later opining that the execution will be “good for morale”.

The unfeeling mechanics of the trial are made even more stark by the assault on the Anthill, lead by Dax himself. Noisy, messy and grueling, it’s well made and shot and seems to go on far longer than it actually does – and in another of those pieces of genius staging, when Dax and his company pauses after this long, tortuous push, for the first time in the sequence, the camera flicks toward their objective, the Anthill… and it still seems impossibly far away. After numerous casualties, they have still only reached the edge of the French wire.

If the court-martial scenes are an exercise in frustrating futility, the mood switches to grim naturalism in the stockade where the condemned men await the sunrise and their death. Ralph Meeker, a couple of years after Kiss Me Deadly, gets to show his range as Paris, a corporal chosen for the trial because he witnessed a drunken superior accidentally kill one of his own men during a night patrol; Timothy Carey brings his usual off-kilter performance to Ferol, picked because he is a “social undesirable”; and as Arnaud, a man chosen by lot for the trial, even though he has two decorations for bravery under fire, is another familiar face I was racking my brain to recognize – it’s Joe Turkel, a quarter-century removed from Blade Runner and The Shining.

The film falls back to seemingly impersonal and mechanical for the firing squad scene, which is another masterpiece of staging and pacing, monstrous in the dissonance between what can only be called the pomp and circumstance of the event versus its actual callousness, most typified by the treatment of Arnaud, who sustained a serious skull fracture when he assaulted a priest in their cell. Unconscious and not expected to live in any case, his stretcher is tied to the stake in the killing field, and the sergeant pinches his cheeks to try to awaken him – General Mireau wants him conscious for his execution.

Mireau will find himself under investigation for ordering the shelling of his own troops, and Boulard will offer Dax Mireau’s post. Upon finding that Boulard thinks Dax has done all this in order to be promoted to Mireau’s position, we get the patented Kirk Douglas tantrum, somewhere between a shout and a sob, as the colonel finally tells the general what he thinks of the whole affair and the general in specific. Boulard realizes that Dax is an idealist and tells the colonel he pities him “like one pities the village idiot.”

According to James Harris on the Criterion Blu-Ray, there was, at one point, a happy ending, doubtless because  it was felt that maybe it would be best for the box office. When it was switched back to the original ending, with the soldiers unsaved from the firing squad, he concealed it from the suits by sending them an entire script, rather than just the changed pages (when the suits saw the completed movie, they apparently didn’t mind). The ending we do get is all the more moving for its bittersweet qualities, even more so because it is an addition by Willingham that Kubrick at first hated, then accepted as he realized how to stage it. The remaining members of the regiment are crowded into a bar, noisy, boisterous. The MC of the club hauls a… prisoner? We’re never quite sure of her status, except she is young, pretty and German, “A pearl cast adrift on the tides of war.” She is, in fact, the only German we see in the picture. Urged on by the host, she sings a song, and the jeers and catcalls of the regiment slowly die down as they listen to her, singing in German. Quietly, the men, sit, rapt. One by one, they begin to hum along with the tune, since they don’t know the words. A few brush tears from their eyes. I do the same.

Outside the club, Dax stands, listening. His sergeant arrives with the news that regiment had been ordered back to the front, at once, an order no doubt prompted by his earlier tantrum. Dax tells the sergeant to let the men have a few more minutes, then walks grimly to his office.

It is quite a remarkable picture, and once again a resounding critical success, if not a financial one. It was banned from several European countries for quite some time, which verified United Artist’s worries about putting up the money for it. But many people point to this as their favorite Kubrick movie, or their favorite anti-war movie. It’s not quite flawless, but it is damned good, and the fact that it still resonates over a half-century later certainly confirms its status as a Great Film.

It also meant that when Kirk Douglas was having problems with Anthony Mann on the set of Spartacus, he would fire the director and ask for Kubrick to replace him. We’ll see how good an idea that was when I somehow manage to carve three hours out of my schedule to watch it next.

March 27, 2012
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 3 Comments

I suppose when you spend a fair amount of time pondering a film’s title rather than addressing any shortcomings, that’s a good sign. That’s where I am with Peter Chan’s 2011 Wu Xia.

In early 20th century provincial China, Liu Jinxe (Donnie Yen) has a simple, but good life: a papermaker in a small village, he has a wife and two sons. The quality of his paper has brought a bit of prosperity in the village. But when two traveling criminals decide to rob the general store, and set to brutalizing the aged owners, Liu desperately steps in, and after a hectic donnybrook, both criminals are dead, seemingly more by accident than anything else.

But there are things that do not sit right with assistant inspector Xu Baiju (Takeshi Kaneshiro).  From an examination of the corpses and the scene of the fight, he begins to suspect that the seemingly peaceful and thoroughly average Liu is not only a martial artist of no small skill, but also a criminal on the run from past crimes. Determined to see justice done, Xu finally bribes a judge for the warrant to arrest Liu, unwittingly alerting the very man from whom Liu is actually hiding – the head of the notorious 72 Demons (Jimmy Wang Yu).

I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say, “Wait a minute. Isn’t that the plot to A History of Violence?” Well, yeah, sorta. The insertion of Kaneshiro’s character adds a different air of uncertainty to the proceedings. The scenes of Xu reconstructing the fight from the smallest of clues is a fascinating bit of special effects wizardry, as the detective walks through slow motion footage of the fight, observing the carnage. Xu Baiju is an expert in physiology and acupuncture, using the needles to stave off the effects of a poison he was given in a case gone wrong many years before. Also, since that case, he has been haunted by his own doppelganger, who urges him on to satisfy justice. It’s that bit of instability that casts doubt on Xu’s actions.

Kaneshiro plays this sort of brainy character with arcane knowledge well; he was superb as the master strategist Zhuge Liang in John Woo’s Red Cliff. He and Yen play well off each other, and it has to be said that Donnie Yen’s gentle everyman portrayal adds another level of uncertainty to the investigation. Tang Wei, last seen in Lust, Caution, is alternately lovely and heartbreaking as Liu’s wife, Ayu, who hasn’t delved too deeply into Liu’s past, fearing that he will vanish from her life, as did her first husband. Seeing her character deal with each new twist in her life is particularly moving.

The movie’s plot is classic slow burn material; the gloves do not truly come off until nearly an hour and fifteen minutes in, when two representatives of the 72 Demons (one of which is the welcome return of another kung fu favorite, Kara Hui) attack the village and Liu must drop his pretense of normalcy and intervene before more people die. It’s a truly electric moment, given that build-up, and the ensuing battle does not disappoint; sadly, I feel the movie never truly reaches that height again, not even in the final fight with Wang Yu, which contains a nicely ironic riff on his earlier career, but also ends with a device so close to an almost-literal deus ex machina that it’s hard not to feel cheated… cool as it admittedly was.

That should not defer you from seeing this – it’s an exceptionally good movie. The cinematography is beautiful, the countryside rendered in lush color, the period design in the village excellent, and the direction, superb. Peter Chan has worked his way up from comedy through horror (Three Extremes II) and into this sort of thoughtful foray into violence – he also directed The Warlords, another excellent movie that I likely would have waxed eloquent over if I hadn’t just seen Red Cliff.

As to my head scratching over the title; wuxia, as you might know, is actually the name of a genre in Chinese culture, the sort of story with righteous martial artists doing righteous things. That’s not, strictly speaking, what this movie’s about. I think the title came more as a result of the success of the previous year’s Jianghu (in the West, Reign of Assassins), which is the term for that “world of martial arts” we keep hearing about, the alternate universe where wuxia stories take place. The agreed-upon international title of Wu Xia is Swordsmen, although, again, not so descriptive of what happens. Dragon is the title given as the “IMDb Display Name”, whatever that means. That title either makes me think of the Bruce Lee bio pic or, God help us, a Clive Cussler novel.

So Wu Xia it remains, Wu Xia I shall call it. A Donnie Yen movie which, like Legend of the Fist, does not give us much in the way of Donnie Yen doing what we love seeing Donnie Yen do, but unlike that Andrew Lau snoozefest, uses that lack of action to good effect.

March 16, 2012
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 3 Comments

Yeah, I swore I’d start taking these movies one at a time, but that didn’t work out so well, did it. The reason why can boiled down to two words: The Godfather.

I didn’t see The Godfather when it was first released, back in ’72. Couldn’t have, even if I’d wanted: it was rated R, and my folks had no desire to see it. It wouldn’t be until I was out on my own, in the 80s, when I was demonstrating to my then-roomate, the late Red Mitchell, what he had been missing in the way of cinema by being a football hero through high school. I brought him into the ways of The Maltese Falcon and The Quiet Man, among others… and then he was shocked that I had never seen The Godfather. One trip to the video rental store later, and we rectified that.

Look, I don’t have to tell you this, but oh my God is that movie ever good.

Like apparently any movie based on a best-selling novel, Godfather had a troubled production (not the least of which was the real-life Mafia trying to shut the movie down), but when it was released, it was a bona fide sensation, a cultural phenomenon. Watching it again after nearly 25 years on Blu-Ray, the “Coppola Restoration”, I see that it is still no wonder. Coppola and Brando both have a very uneven track record; but both men are firing on all cylinders in this, and the rest of the cast is similarly at the peak of their powers. It is one of those three-hour movies that doesn’t feel that long, at all.

Again, I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know; moreover, I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know. When you get right down to it, I’m a guy who likes to watch movies and then write about them a little. Didn’t go to film school, didn’t read any books on critical analysis. There’s nothing new I can bring to this party, except personal observation. And my personal observation is: I wasn’t as blown away as I was the first time I saw it. That is to be expected. My reverence for it, though, did not slip an inch. This is an American classic that deserves to be called an American Classic.

Which would have made for a brief, if honest, post.

Now, on the other end of the spectrum we have the second movie in my Stanley Kubrick Project, Killer’s Kiss.

Um, the gal on the right? I’m afraid I missed that part…

To call the plot of Killer’s Kiss slight is no mean jab, it’s the honest truth; it doesn’t even fill the 67 minute running time – there’s filler in the form of a complete boxing match and a ballet number while Gloria (Irene Kane) tells the tale of her sister and father to the sympathetic Davey (Jamie Smith). The rest of the movie is about Davey, a washed-up boxer, trying to help his neighbor Gloria, a taxi dancer, to get out from under the thumb of her boss, small-time hood Vincent Rapallo (Frank Silvera, the MVP of Kubrick’s first movie, Fear and Desire).

There are, of course, complications. This is noir, after all. Rapallo’s goons, sent to rough up Davey, pick the wrong guy and accidentally kill him, leaving the boxer under suspicion for the murder. They then kidnap Gloria because she can finger them, and Davey tries – not too successfully – to rescue her.

If it’s not too beefy in the plot department, where Killer’s Kiss excels is in the photography. Kubrick had done a number of photo spreads of Chicago for Look magazine, and his vistas of New York in the mid-50s – unglamorous, decaying – distills what noir is frequently about, as he sets his camera far back and low so the city becomes monolithic, perched above and ready to devour the characters. Kubrick’s photojournalist eye captures images without commentary, the seediness of the reality telling far more than any commentary layered upon them possibly could. There’s a reason that the Turner Classic Movies All Night bumper has three shots from the movie: The guy in the ticket booth, the dolly across the Dance Hall, and the blonde taking off her dress – that’s Gloria.

Kubrick’s still trying to work out his storytelling chops (he would, in the future, eschew original screenplays and go strictly for literary adaptations), but in the visual department, he’s already firing on all cylinders. Gone are the coverage errors that required clumsy editing solutions in Fear and Desire. Davey’s pursuit across the rooftop of a massive storehouse is done in long shots, emphasizing his aloneness as Rapallo and his thug close in; this leads to the final fight scene in a mannequin storeroom that trades in the empty space of the roof for an enclosed space that is, at the same time, crowded and yet just as empty. It’s a surreal, exciting climax, that along with the amazing cityscapes, gives the viewer a very nice preview of the director’s capabilities.

So the first two Kubrick movies: definitely tyro efforts, but there is a very clear improvement in his use of the medium; both worthwhile, for entirely different reasons.

March 15, 2012
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

In one of my fits of monthly hubris, I decided that I would watch all of Stanley Kubrick’s movie in chronological order. I do stuff like that all the time, and sometimes I even finish it. Yeah, like that time I decided to read Dave Sim’s Cerebus, all 300 issues of it. I may try to finish that one day, if my bile levels ever descend from the toxic levels those last couple of volumes created. Then, I’m a very happily married man, so as far as Sim is likely concerned, I am irrevocably corrupted.

Cripes, I go off on tangents so quickly, I really should have the ADD demographic sewn up by now. Now, as to where I was going originally: why Kubrick? The only answer I have, I am afraid, is why not? On a purely practical level, I have a box set of his movies that stretches from Spartacus to Eyes Wide Shut, which only left me three movies to chase down, since I already had a copy of Paths of Glory. Over the years, I’ve seen some, but not all, of his movies, and generally enjoyed them. And, in the form of The List, it’s my goal this year to watch more movies which, in the mainstream, are considered “good”, not merely the ones with the best gunfights.

Kubrick’s first movie is called Fear and Desire, and it is an arty, ultra-low-budget war movie. We are not told which war or where; in fact, the opening narration tells us “These soldiers that you see keep our language and our time, but have no other country but the mind.” Got that?

Four soldiers – a looey, a sergeant and two privates – are stuck behind enemy lines after a plane crash, which economically happened before the movie started. They plan to float down a river to friendly territory, but events keep complicating matters. A local girl stumbles upon them, and they have to take her hostage. A nearby farm house is found to be acting as a garrison, with an enemy general on station, and Sarge starts getting obsessed with the idea of killing the general on the way out.

Now that, at face value, could easily be a Roger Corman war picture; a plot that keeps things moving, a pretty girl shoehorned into the proceedings. Kubrick and screenwright Howard Sackler had a different idea, though. In this “any war”, we are privy to the inner monologues of our soldiers, first as they hike through the enemy forest, and we hear them all at once, four men’s thoughts rising to a fearful cacophony. Sgt. “Mac” has several of them, as he floats on the raft toward a suicide mission for which he himself has chosen, argued, even begged. When the unstable Private Sidney (an amazingly young Paul Mazursky) is left to guard the girl, his private monologue becomes public, ludicrous and pathetic.

Probably the cap on the artsy part comes when Lt. Corby (Kenneth Sharp) and Private Fletcher (Stephen Coit) sneak up on the house to kill the general and his aide while Mac draws the sentries to the river to shoot him up; The General and the Aide are played by… Kenneth Sharp and Stephen Coit. The two men are stalking and murdering themselves.

Aaah, I’m being a horse’s ass, but I’m not alone. Kubrick himself eventually disowned the flick, and it’s rumored he tried to have all prints destroyed, but I haven’t found any real evidence of that. There is evidence he seriously downplayed any showing of it in later retrospectives. He was being too tough on himself, but then, there’s no surprise in that from a notorious perfectionist. You do catch glimpses of genius working its way out at various points, but you also see Kubrick the editor cursing Kubrick the cinematographer, as he has to employ rapid, out-of-place close-ups to cover holes in the coverage.

It’s certainly no worse than a lot of zero-budget first films I’ve seen, and better than many. Of the many questions I have to ask, the most significant one is: Every article about Fear and Desire lists the movie’s length at 72 minutes. My copy – the Eastman House print – ran a few seconds over an hour. So the question here is: Huh?

March 13, 2012
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment