2012 (Roland Emmerich, 2009). Can’t review the movie before it opens, of course; that would be illegal. But I can say that my weakness for the cinema of Roland Emmerich will not be cured here. (Main problem with 10,000 BC, in retrospect: no big buildings to demolish.) Liking this gasser of a movie wasn’t easy at first, because this screening was one of those where (despite the audience consisting of invited press only) everybody gets “wanded” on their way into the theater, as though we were getting on an airplane and rumors of a terrorist had gotten out. Cell phones must be handed over to security guards for the duration, including archaic phones like mine, which don’t actually take pictures or capture video. Usually I lie and say I don’t have a cell phone, but this time it was pretty obvious because the security guards were searching my bag. Next time I’ll lie about it. This would be irritating if it were a fact that press screenings were the source of video pirating; but they are not the source of video pirating. So it’s infuriating.

Catching up on a weekend of movie watching.

The Box (Richard Kelly, 2009). That’s a whole lot of sinister portents for one movie, especially when so many portents aren’t even portending anything – they’re just weird details waiting to be deciphered. (full review here).

A Bucket of Blood (Roger Corman, 1959). Time has not withered the delights of this hep and funny horror-spoof of the beatnik scene. Even if certain moments didn’t bring back the thrill of “Nightmare Theatre,” circa 1970, I would still dig this movie’s vibe.

The Beatniks (Paul Frees, 1960). Lousy juvie delinquent picture, given its title to cash in on the current fad. Peter Breck, pre-Shock Corridor, pre-Big Valley, plays the most energetic of the punks. This is the only movie directed by Frees, the greatest voiceover guy ever.

High School Confidential (Jack Arnold, 1960). Uninterrupted barrage of hepcat slang, with a lot of bold talk about “Mary Jane” and “horse” and the problems facing kids in today’s America. Extremely bizarre cast includes a lot of second-generation Hollywood actors, most prominently John Drew Barrymore.

Towers Open Fire (Antony Balch/William S. Burroughs, 1963) and The Cut Ups (Antony Balch, 1966); Aleph (Wallace Berman, 1959-66). Some experimental numbers to talk about at the Beat event. The first two are assemblage goofs with Burroughs; the latter a hypnotic montage from the same cut-up era.

Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson, 2009). Totally typical Wes Anderson movie. You say it’s animated, too? (full review 11/13)

Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso, 2008). Quiet series of non-events leading up to one of those endings that snaps everything into immediate, pay-attention focus. Alonso is in Seattle this week for a tribute at the Northwest Film Forum. (full review 11/13)

Serre, Werner, Moreau: Jules and Jim

As I write this the Brooklyn Academy of Music is just wrapping up a film series devoted to 1962, a tribute to the New York Film Critics Circle (‘62 being the only year the group did not give out awards in its 75-year history, due to a newspaper strike). The thrust of the series is not only making up for a lost opportunity but also highlighting the riches of that year in movies, which NYFCC chair Armond White argues is at least on a par with the fabled 1939. On the latter point, there can’t be much debate. 1962 was a monster.

My #1 slot was never seriously in doubt, and yesterday I posted a vintage piece on it here. The rest of the field is crowded: one of Godard’s finest films, two classic elegaic Westerns, a David Lean super-production concerned with an enigma, three films directed by John Frankenheimer (including a scathing political satire), and a heady tide of the best of a dizzying era in foreign films. The ten best of 1962 and then, inevitably, more:

1. Jules and Jim (Francois Truffaut)

2. Vivre sa vie (Jean-Luc Godard)

3. Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean)

4. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford)

5. The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer)

6. Ride the High Country (Sam Peckinpah)

7. Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman)

8. Knife in the Water (Roman Polanski)

9. The Exterminating Angel (Bunuel)

10. Freud (John Huston)

The #10 title sneaks above a bunch of very deserving films, mentioned below. Partly this is because Freud is overlooked, partly because I’ve been fascinated by it (and Montgomery Clift’s performance) since childhood, and partly because it’s an ingenious approach to a biographical film that also manages to be very characteristic of its director, who is now in critical eclipse. Polanski’s debut feature definitively serves notice that attention must be paid. Winter Light, a devastating work, has gone up in my estimation in recent years.

I am posting a new piece on The Manchurian Candidate next weekend; I get into Lawrence of Arabia here.

Man, look at the also-rans; these titles make the absurdity of list-compiling crystal clear. Kubrick’s Lolita? How can I leave that off? And To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan)? Then we have great films by Ozu (An Autumn Afternoon),  Antonioni (The Eclipse), Kurosawa (Sanjuro), Varda (Cleo from 5 to 7), plus Chris Marker’s La Jetee. On any given day any of those claims a spot on the Ten; that’s like an entire alternate best list. Toss in Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood, Melville’s Le Doulos, and Pasolini’s Mamma Roma, and you’re getting the depth of the year in film. There are MIA Americans, too: Otto Preminger’s Advise and Consent, Sam Fuller’s Merrill’s Marauders, Arthur Penn’s The Miracle Worker, and Howard Hawks’s traveling party, Hatari! For a gothic touch, include Robert Aldrich’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Orson Welles’ The Trial. And you run out of room.

Except for one more title, arguably the film most remembered from childhood by schoolkids of a certain generation. That would be Robert Enrico’s half-hour classic An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, and I think we can agree that finishes off a head-snapping year.

Jules and Jim

I wrote this piece for a program note at a college film series in 1983 and subsequently published it in The Informer. I am amused now by the worldly opening phrase, since I was a kid at the time and over 25 years have passed since then. Jules and Jim is one of my favorite movies, and this strikes me as a young person’s angle on a complex movie. For me, now, this appreciation is one of those “odd, left-behind artifacts” that the characters discover on their trek. Maybe someday I can write to the movie as a grown-up.–Robert Horton

I’ve known Jules and Jim for a few years now, and whenever anybody mentions the title, the same moment always comes to my mind first. Jules and Jim and Catherine are at their white castle, and they head into the woods—Catherine says, “Let’s find the last signs of civilization!” The three figures, dressed primarily in summery white, pick up odd, left-behind artifacts, and toss them into the air. Catherine finds a chain hanging from a tree, and swings from it. The camera prowls along the ground with them, and discovers a matchbook, a cup, a pottery shard, and, under Jules’ foot, a packet of cigarettes. During the sequence, that incomparable music is swelling on the soundtrack, music full of youth, romance, melancholy. Part of Francois Truffaut’s special gift is in capturing essential moments such as this—those moments when nothing much is happening, and yet everything matters: the quality of the sun on the grass, Catherine’s hair swirling when she shakes her head, Jim’s hand hoisting Jules’ foot. The sequence is lit by the intensity of the friendship of the three people, an intensity that will later darken the film, and their lives.

Let’s follow that sequence a bit: when Jules tells Jim he wants to marry Catherine, Jim tells Jules, “She’s a vision for all men—not just one.” Cut to Catherine, shaking her mane in rapturous close-up. Jules and Jim carry her back to the house. She takes their swimming clothes down from the line, and they ride off on bicycles. Truffaut cuts to a gorgeous long shot of the three figures riding around a curve, then to closer shots as Jim looks at the back of Catherine’s neck as she rides in front of him. At this point in the film, we are aware of the way in which Catherine is both woman and objet d’art to the two men—she is the statue that they traveled to see (and which they first encountered on a movie screen, at the slide show). They will discover that behind the mysterious smile of Catherine is a complex and unpredictable woman—a real woman, not the dry and dusty statue.

Earlier, we have seen Jules sketch a woman’s face on a café table—Jim wanted to buy the table, but the café only sold them by the dozen—and this is symptomatic of the way the two men see women. They are in love with love, and they are in love with the idea of Catherine, but the flesh-and-blood Catherine, very much a woman of her own mind, turns out to be titanically confounding. She is different from anything they know or have experienced, and in some way—the movie does not tell us, this, but we must assume it—the instability she produces makes them feel alive. When the three of them foot-race across the bridge, and Catherine, in her boy’s outfit, jumps to an early start so she can win, it is unfair. But Jules, dazzled, can only turn to Jim and say, “She’s taught me things.”

Jim’s relationship with Catherine is somewhat more complicated, and more darkly shaded; something is stirred in him in that exquisite moment in her apartment when he hooks the clasp on the neck of her dress. Later he will tell her, “I like the nape of your neck—you can’t see me when I look at it,” as though he treasures the safety of that position; he can abstract the object of his love more easily when her flashing eyes aren’t looking him in the face.

Incidentally, the arc of the relationship between Catherine and Jim is marked by a nice directorial device on Truffaut’s part: when Jim enters Catherine’s apartment to help her move her baggage, he tosses his hat on her bed, nonchalantly. She scoops it up and places it somewhere else, muttering, “A hat on the bed,” referring to the classic signifier of bad luck. It’s such a throwaway, this line is not even translated in the subtitles. Much later, when Jim is moving into a room in Catherine and Jules’ house, the action is repeated—Catherine once again sweeps Jim’s hat off a bed, and this time they share a secret smile, remembering the first time it happened. This is both beautiful and eerie—the sweetness of the remembrance coupled with the fact that the act itself portends bad luck.

If Jim’s home is wherever he hangs his hat, perhaps he had some kind of precognition in the earlier scene—that someday he would be making his home in Catherine’s bed; that ultimately, in fact, he was destined to lie beside her forever. That touch is typical of the careful layering that Truffaut has accomplished in Jules and Jim: he establishes motifs, and builds them skillfully, like Catherine’s Napoleonic tendencies (including the small bust of Napoleon on her table), and the references, both verbal and visual, to insects.

Truffaut has his characters return again and again to water, which serves as both a reminder of eternity and a premonition of disaster. The whole movie is in the scene in which the three are walking along the Seine after seeing the new Swedish play; as Jules starts getting heavily into quoting Baudelaire, and what Baudelaire’s idea of women was all about, he and Jim barely notice Catherine walking away from them. As usual, they’re too busy intellectualizing an idea of Woman to pay attention to the woman in front of them. Catherine is going to change all that. She walks to the rail and jumps in the water, and during the ride home, she wears her smile of triumph. Her hat floats away, to the sea.

One of the things Truffaut is getting at here is the extraordinary tension between the seductive lure of Art and the formidable challenge of living in the real world. Jules and Jim have been comfortably lost in that exhilarating galaxy where the discussion of a book, a play, or a painting, when argued about over a small table in an all-night café, can seem the most important thing in the world, as crucial as life and death—or love and death—and just as meaningful. One is tempted to imagine—and it’s not all imagination—that Truffaut himself has lived this lifestyle, particularly during the years when he and the other young film critics (soon to be the French New Wave of young filmmakers) were running around Paris, devouring movies as though life itself depended on it, and then pouring their passionate writings into Cahiers du Cinema.

Truffaut brings that exuberant passion to the filming of Jules and Jim, even while the film is laced with his underlying morbidity. It seems to burst with experimentation and daring: his judicious use of sudden and brief freeze-frames, as though grasping privileged moments out of the winds of memory (or “life’s whirlpool of days,” as Catherine sings it); the poetically apt use of masking to black out parts of the screen at certain moments; the use of natural outdoor light, brilliantly captured by Jean-Luc Godard’s favorite cinematographer, Raoul Coutard; the freewheeling movement of the camera itself, as Truffaut pans, tracks, and spins his Franscope frame with the same excitement Jules and Jim show towards their mysterious statue (note the Hitchcockian zoom-in track-out when they see the stone head on the beach)—but Truffaut also knows when to let his camera just sit there and watch. And then there’s Georges Delerue’s musical score, which incorporates brash jazz, the lush romantic theme, and the song that Albert plays with Catherine, all of which may play over a series of scenes, or just emerge in the middle of a scene for a few seconds.

This litany must not exclude contributions of the actors: Oskar Werner and Henri Serre, the Don Quixote-Sancho Panza/Stan Laurel-Oliver Hardy friends, perfectly capture the romanticism, the rapture, and the vague ordinariness of Jules and Jim. I don’t know what Jules and Jim would be like without Jeanne Moreau as Catherine, but it would be some sort of different movie. An almost mythical figure in French cinema, especially to Truffaut, Moreau manages to be both idol and human being; and although the film is an examination of her dark smile, that smile will remain mysterious and unknowable.

“Let’s find the last signs of civilization!” The cry seems to invite the audience to join the special feeling of this film. Nothing much seems to be real in the world, except the three people and the audience’s involvement with them. There’s the periodic and quietly troubling presence of Gilberte (Vanna Urbino), and la petite Sabine (Sabine), and that strange fellow Albert (Boris Bassiak), of course, but even World War I, existing as it does in old newsreel footage, appears distant and artificial, a disturbing distraction from the true drama of our main characters. Somehow Jules and Jim maintains its embrace of the audience, even when it turns dark—even up through the point of coffins being sent through flames, and bones being ground up (that’s some of the best and most startling footage Truffaut ever shot). We come to know exactly what Jules means when he recites a quote to Jim and Catherine, having just seen them caressing—Jim has impetuously kissed her on the nape of her neck, of course. Jules reels off the quote in German, which Catherine translates back, “The yearnings of two hearts create such heavenly pain.” Jules smiles bittersweetly; “Pretty good,” he says to her, “But you added the heavenly!” Indeed she has, and we can all sense that, and share it.

Clooney and Spacey, still staring

Movies I reviewed for The Herald this week (reviews of The Box and 35 Shots of Rum tomorrow):

A Christmas Carol. “The most prominent special effect is still Jim Carrey.”

The Men Who Stare at Goats. “A groovy approach to waging war.”

An Education. “The blend of a female perspective with Hornby’s boy-centric sensibility is just exactly right.”

The Fourth Kind. “A clever marketing campaign in search of a movie.”

The Horse Boy. “The line between intimacy and ‘too much information.’”

Skin. “The most engaging aspect of the movie is Sophie Okonedo’s performance.”

Plus: from the Movietone News project at Parallax View, a vintage 1980 review of The Wanderers.

Araya (Margot Benacerraf, 1959). A movie that won the International Critics Prize at Cannes (shared with Hiroshima, Mon Amour) and then was barely heard from again, now gorgeously restored by Milestone Films. It’s an eye-filler, with a spellbinding docu-subject: harvesting salt from a briny marsh on the Venezuela coast. (full review 11/13)

The Blind Side (John Lee Hancock, 2009). Well, it’s better than the trailer. (full review 11/20)

Pirate Radio (Richard Curtis, 2009). More Love, Actually than Four Weddings and a Funeral. And that for me is not good news. (full review 11/13)

The Fourth Kind (Olatunde Osunsnmi, 2009). Brush up on your Sumerian, people, ‘cuz the ancient alien visitors are still speaking it. At least when they come to communicate through our puny Earthling bodies. This thing is so full of gimmicks William Castle must be doing slow pirouettes in his coffin. (full review 11/6)

Catching up on a weekend of movies.

The Men Who Stare at Goats (Grant Heslov, 2009). George Clooney in a few hilarious wigs, Jeff Bridges Dude-ing out, the movie not quite hitting its Strangelovian possibilities. (full review 11/6)

The Messenger (Oren Moverman, 2009). Ben Foster, heretofore a somewhat spastically ornate actor, must play it straight as an Iraq War vet now stateside and forced into serving as a deliverer of death notifications to next-of-kin. It generates a hothouse mood; Moverman’s had his name on a bunch of interesting projects. (full review 11/20)

The Children (Max Kalmanowicz, 1980). Godawful thing about a nuclear accident turning kids into glassy-eyed killers. Happily, the audience at the Rotten party last Thursday night was well-lubricated and into the spirit of participation.

We Live in Public (Ondi Timoner, 2009). Thorough enough portrait of super-creepy Internet pioneer Josh Harris, who turned his technical skills on an exhibitionistic wallow in his own life. (full review 11/13)

The Hills Run Red (Dave Parker, 2009). Straight-to-DVD job sent for review by Amazon, about a batch of young cineastes hunting for an elusive lost horror picture. Clever set-up, though it falls into some awfully familiar patterns.

Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968). Brilliant. Ever notice how quickly this thing moves along, even though it doesn’t seem to rush?

Mon Oncle (Jacques Tati, 1958). Tati executing gags mostly in a clean modern house and its front yard; nice flow of jokes from one faulty gizmo to the next.

35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis, 2008). I’m not entirely sure what this movie is about, but it sure shimmies along in memorable fashion – and what a collection of faces. (full review 11/6)

A Christmas Carol (Robert Zemeckis, 2009). Incredible digital dazzle from Zemeckis, and Jim Carrey isn’t about to let the technology get him down – he (or whatever is left of him in the motion-capture process) is terrific. I think Zemeckis likes terror more than redemption. (full review 11/6)

F.W. Murnau scores three films in this year’s list, which says something about A) how many 1922 movies are available to be seen, and B) how deep this filmmaker’s talent was. The Number One is Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, Murnau’s unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Most silent films have vanished because of indifference and the vagaries of film preservation; Nosferatu was supposed to be destroyed because of legal proceedings from the Stoker estate. Fortunately, a few rogue prints survived, and Murnau’s utterly eerie film – indeed a symphony of horrors – still lives.

The other two films display, to a lesser but still evocative degree, the ability of Murnau to deepen the field of the movie frame, to create a world that extends out through the back of the screen. Forget the flat proscenium of the live theater; Murnau blows that out.

The second-best film is also from Germany: Fritz Lang’s crime epic, Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, a stupendously intricate portrait of a society under the spell of a master string-puller. Of all the sinister messages emanating from 1920s Germany, none delivers the dire prognosis quite as completely as this one. Next to these top two titles, the other films look positively relaxed. With the proviso that there are undoubtedly films of this year that deserve to be mentioned that are outside the reach of see-ability right now, here are the best of 1922:

1. Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau)

2. Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (Fritz Lang)

3. Cops (Buster Keaton, Edward F. Cline)

4. Foolish Wives (Erich von Stroheim)

5. Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty)

6. Grandma’s Boy (Fred C. Newmeyer)

7. Phantom (F.W. Murnau)

8. Pay Day (Charlie Chaplin)

9. The Burning Soil (F.W. Murnau)

10. Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (Benjamin Christensen)

The three big comedians are all represented with classic stuff (Grandma’s Boy is a Harold Lloyd picture), to the exclusion of star vehicles for Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford – but sorry, that’s how I roll. Nanook, Flaherty’s famed film of Inuit life, still has shivery moments, and a way of seeing the world that is just as strong as Erich von Stroheim’s orchestrated decadence. Not that there’s anything wrong with orchestrated decadence.

The centenary celebrations for Whit Bissell are winding down by now; you’re probably tired of hearing the endless tributes and thinkpieces paying tribute to the actor, born October 25, 1909. Of course I’m kidding: nobody pays elaborate, passionate tribute to Whit Bissell, and if people know his name it’s because of its humorous quality, an internal rhyme contained within a tiny, meek-sounding series of syllables – a name for a soda jerk or a vacuum cleaner salesman.

Still, a tribute. Whit Bissell might have been the first actor I could recognize as a character actor, a guy who turned up everywhere but rarely played leads. He has almost 300 credits listed on the Internet Movie Database, yet his actual total is surely higher than that when you factor in his ubiquitous TV appearances and uncredited movie work. But character actors are supposed to be colorful in some way: zany or grotesque, not cut out to be heroes but carrying some distinctive quality. Whit Bissell was like his name: he tended to white himself out. Even other people on screen looked bored by him sometimes.

A compact fellow, evidently prematurely white-haired, Bissell had a slightly severe face and a forceful voice, and thus played a lot of doctors and professors and figures of authority. I must have first known him as the military supervisor on The Time Tunnel, where (as he so often did) he fretted and crunched numbers and supplied a drag on the proceedings. He was on all the TV shows in the 1960s and 70s, including the “Trouble with Tribbles” episode of Star Trek, and stayed in movies, too, so often turning up for his one good scene or tiny fragment of story: The Magnificent Seven, The Manchurian Candidate, Hud.

Before he switched to TV-mostly work, Bissell did lots of differents parts, and it would be wrong to suggest that he always played the same drab, officious role, even if a lot of his stuff blends together; especially early on, he got to play neurotics, and his pinched face made his authority figures available to be untrustworthy at times. Good roles in Brute Force, Raw Deal, and He Walked by Night put him in the noir world as a sometimes sweaty, nervous type; he could bring on the badness, as in Riot in Cell Block 11. When it came time to essay a member of the crazed Frankenstein family tree, in I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, he turned in a typically professional, steady performance, perhaps the least histrionic Dr. Frankenstein ever (despite the florid plot turns and dialogue).

He was repeating his duties there, more or less, from I Was a Teenage Werewolf, and he did a lot of genre work during that era, which is another reason I came to know him so well when I was an adolescent: Creature from the Black Lagoon and Monster on the Campus are among the best of those. And when a framing story had to be added to Invasion of the Body Snatchers to re-assure the audience that the alien takeover wasn’t really coming to their town, of course it was Whit Bissell cast as the authority figure calming down Kevin McCarthy. I always enjoyed seeing him during this time, but my affection increased after I realized his name was Whit Bissell, that funny moniker that might have come from Mark Twain. How can you not like a guy named Whit Bissell?

People like him make movies go. You say, “Ah, there’s Whit Bissell,” and then he’s gone, off to pop up in something else in a few minutes on a different channel, then bound for some retro-TV station showing Wagon Train or Perry Mason or Mannix. In a hundred more years, he’ll still be doing that. Even the quietest character actor makes his permanent place.