High Treason
Maurice Elvey (U.K., 1929)
Videophones, television news, a tunnel under the English Channel; terrorists, arms dealers, and a superpower quick to declare preemptive war based on false intelligence—High Treason's 1929 vision of 1950 looks an awful lot like 2005. A British answer to Fritz Lang's Metropolis, the film boasts futuristic design details that range from surprisingly accurate to charmingly corny (autogyros landing on quaint models of London rooftops, a Rube Goldberg-esque automated orchestra, a high-tech shower). The plot imagines a world divided between Europe and the vaguely defined “Atlantic States”; when acts of terror heighten hostilities between the powers, the (almost all female) World League of Peace must race to prevent global war. If the movie's political ideals are a tad confused—“Our twenty million members are pledged to fight to the death for Universal Peace!”—its fears are only too prescient.
Written by L'Estrange Fawcett, from the play by Noel Pemberton Billing. Photographed by Percy Strong. With Benita Hume, Jameson Thomas, Humberston Wright, Basil Gill. (75 mins @ 24 fps, Silent, B&W, 35mm, Courtesy bfi)

Night Nurse
William A. Wellman (U.S., 1931)
“Rules mean something,” a stern hospital matron admonishes would-be nurse Lora Hart (Barbara Stanwyck) at the outset of her apprenticeship. The distinction between “professional ethics” and real moral values is central to Night Nurse, which delivers a sharp critique of Hippocratic hypocrisy while also providing plenty of occasions for Stanwyck and fellow nurse Joan Blondell to appear in dishy dishabille. The plot swiftly moves from the hospital with its lustful interns and bedpan jokes to a seriously dysfunctional household where Lora is charged with the care of two girls suffering from a mysterious illness, at the mercy of their dipsomaniac mother, a dubious doctor, and a menacing chauffeur (Clark Gable). With the help of the most upstanding guy in the picture—a bootlegger who sees no difference between his racket and the doctors'—the deeply moral but streetwise Lora proves that some rules mean more than others.
Written by Oliver H. P. Garrett, Charles Kenyon, from a story by Dora Macy. Photographed by Barney McGill. With Barbara Stanwyck, Ben Lyon, Joan Blondell, Clark Gable. (73 mins, B&W, 35mm, Courtesy Library of Congress, permission Warner Bros.)

Blessed Event
Roy Del Ruth (U.S., 1932)
The sign on the newsroom wall says SILENCE, but the talk in Blessed Event never stops. Lee Tracy plays a tabloid hack (famously based on Walter Winchell) who rises from ad department clerk to celebrated columnist by dishing dirt about society lights expecting babies before the frosting hardens on the wedding cake and relentlessly trashing schmaltzy crooner/all-American heartthrob Dick Powell. His editor acknowledges that his tactics violate all rules of common decency, and his public taunting of mobsters gets him into dangerous situations, but don't expect Tracy's character to quit while circulation is up. Like all the great newspaper comedies of the thirties, this one crackles with the unbridled energy of American speech. When a high-toned daily runs an editorial denouncing him as “the absolute nadir” of sleazy journalism, our hero claims such phraseology “ain't English,” but he knows how to spell “phfft.”
Written by Howard Green, from the play by Manuel Seff, Forrest Wilson. Photographed by Sol Polito. With Lee Tracy, Mary Brian, Emma Dunn, Dick Powell. (81 mins, B&W, 35mm, From Warner Bros.)

Skyscraper Souls
Edgar Selwyn (U.S., 1932)
Often compared to Grand Hotel, this steely melodrama takes place entirely in the Dwight Building, a fictive hundred-story Deco marvel to rival the Empire State Building (still new in 1932). Naturally, there are stories in those stories, and the movie follows several of them, concentrating on the predations of financier David Dwight (Warren William), whose towering ego is materialized in the building that bears his name. Much of the plot is devoted to Dwight's affairs with a strong-willed yet vulnerable career woman (Verree Teasdale) and her winsome secretary (Maureen O'Sullivan), but the film's most emotionally gripping scenes involve a different kind of romance: Americans' devastating relationship with the financial markets. An urgent montage vividly depicts the hysteria of people following a hot tip to buy shares on margin, then the horror that follows when, pricked by behind-the-scenes businessmen, the bubble bursts.
Written by C. Gardner Sullivan, from a book by Faith Baldwin. Photographed by William Daniels. With Warren William, Maureen O'Sullivan, Gregory Ratoff, Verree Teasdale. (99 mins, B&W, 35mm, From Warner Bros.)

Red Headed Woman
Jack Conway (U.S., 1932)
Ambitious Lil (Jean Harlow) pins a picture of her rich boss Mr. Legendre (Chester Morris, rhymes with “gender”) to her garter and heads for his home, hoping to make hay while his wife's in Cleveland. In comes Lil, out goes wife, and soon, over Mr. Legendre's objections, Lil becomes the new Mrs. Legendre. Like Warner Bros.' later Baby Face, another comic-melodramatic story of a woman seducing her way up the social ladder, Red Headed Woman was a target of censorship even in this relatively forgiving era. Anita Loos's script is blithely cynical about the exchange of sex for privilege, and blunt about the sometimes brutal power of lust (when her lover slaps her, Lil says, “do it again, I like it”—so he does). The film's audacity is still jaw-dropping, from the opening dialogue—“Can you see through this?” “I'm afraid, you can, dear.” “I'll wear it!”—through to the ending, in which crime is not only unpunished, but positively celebrated.
Written by Anita Loos, from a story by Katherine Brush. With Jean Harlow, Chester Morris, Una Merkel, Lewis Stone, Charles Boyer. (79 mins, B&W, 35mm, From Warner Bros.)

Bombshell
Victor Fleming (U.S., 1933)
Platinum blonde superstar Lola Burns (Jean Harlow), touted by her ruthless publicist (Lee Tracy) as “a boon to repopulation in a world thinned out by war and famine,” has had enough of being exploited. In the course of an effort to shift her demographic—less American Sportsman, more Ladies' Home Companion—she discovers the simple, maternal, real Lola...or thinks she does. Harlow brilliantly manages Lola's volatile persona, comically shifting from guttersnipe snarl to haughty mid-Atlantic drawl as befits the occasion, and reveling (as do all the players) in the script's double entendres and relentless verbal sparring. Meanwhile, the film plays with the permeable boundary between fiction and Hollywood “reality” (Lola is called to the set for retakes of the Harlow vehicle Red Dust). This satire will have its cheesecake and eat it too, lampooning the selling of sex appeal while offering up the luscious Harlow in braless satin or a tenuous towel.
Written by Jules Furthman, John Lee Mahin, based on a play by Caroline Francke, Mack Crane. Photographed by Chester Lyons, Harold G. Rosson. With Jean Harlow, Lee Tracy, Franchot Tone, Frank Morgan. (95 mins, B&W, 35mm, From Warner Bros.)

Kiki's Delivery Service
Hayao Miyazaki (Japan, 1998)
(Majo no takkyubin). When a witch turns thirteen, she must leave home for a year of training, so young Kiki takes off with her mother's broom, her father's radio, and her own black cat, the sardonic Jiji. Unskilled in sorcery, she supports herself as best she can, delivering parcels by broom. Kiki's journey takes place in a gorgeously realized alternate Europe where quaint cobbled streets teem with 1930s–style cars and dirigible voyages appear on live television. Beguiling us into this familiar–strange world, Miyazaki intersperses episodes of exhilarating adventure with more contemplative moments than most contemporary kids' films allow. Soaring flight scenes eloquently express the expansive sensations of newfound independence. With help from women of several generations—a kindly baker, a grandmotherly customer, a free–spirited young painter—Kiki grapples with the same insecurities that trouble all adolescents, and learns that even when the magic of childhood fades, there are new enchantments to discover.
Written by Miyazaki, based on a book by Eiko Kadono. (105 mins, In Japanese with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, Courtesy Buena Vista Home Entertainment)

Spirited Away
Hayao Miyazaki (Japan, 2001)
(Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi). Ever the nostalgic fabulist, Miyazaki builds a passage between modern, everyday Japanese life and the half–remembered realms of spirits and folklore in this compelling adventure, winner of numerous international prizes including the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. En route to their new suburban home, ten–year–old Chihiro and her parents stumble upon an abandoned theme park that turns out to be a true magic kingdom. When Mom and Dad undergo a terrible transformation, Chihiro's only chance to save them, and herself, is to become a servant in a bathhouse frequented by millions of gods. Chihiro adapts by trial and error to the rules and culture of a place where little is what it initially seems. As always, Miyazaki makes this fantastic world feel utterly real, populating it with complex, mutable characters, precisely calibrating visual details, and infusing an allegorical yet organic plot with nuanced emotion.
Written by Miyazaki. (125 mins, In Japanese with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, Courtesy Buena Vista Home Entertainment)

Bluebeard
Edgar G. Ulmer (U.S., 1944)
“On the one hand, I was absolutely concerned with box office, and on the other I was trying to create art and decency, with a style.” Ulmer weds exploitation to capital-A Art in this Poverty Row costume drama, set against the blatantly painted backdrop of a romantic, nocturnal nineteenth-century Paris. Stalking down the dim foggy street in his stovepipe hat or peering through a peephole while performing a puppet opera of Faust, John Carradine brings a cadaverous sensitivity to the role of painter-puppeteer Gaston Morel. This worshipper of ideal feminine beauty is driven to serial murder by his disappointment in the real women he paints; in his bizarrely anachronistic canvases, artistic style becomes synonymous with criminal evidence. The film itself has style to burn, evidenced in the delirious camera angles mirroring the state of Morel's mind, or the shadows of puppets haunting his studio like ghosts.
Written by Pierre Gendron, from a story by Arnold Phillips, Werner H. Furst. Photographed by Jockey A. Feindel. With John Carradine, Jean Parker, Nils Asther, Ludwig Stossel. (68 mins, B&W, 35mm, Courtesy Arianné Ulmer Cipes and Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)

Moon over Harlem
Edgar G. Ulmer (U.S., 1939)
The Harlem of this socially conscious melodrama, written by Ulmer's wife Sherle Castle and performed by an all-black cast, is not unlike the Jewish communities of Ulmer's Yiddish films: an insular world torn between familiar ways and the desire for change. On the side of the status quo are long-suffering maid Minnie and her new husband, gangster Dollar Bill (bonus for jazz fans: clarinetist Sidney Bechet plays at their wedding). Bill spends his wife's insurance money on horses and women and lusts after his stepdaughter Sue, declaring, “When I moves in on a deal, I moves in.” Meanwhile, Sue's forward-thinking boyfriend Bob struggles to free the neighborhood from the grip of racketeers like Bill, saying Harlem is “screaming for leadership.” The film was shot in just four days; Ulmer said, “It was one of the most pitiful things I ever did. It was done on nothing....But we made quite a good picture.”
Written by Sherle Castle, from a story by Mathew Mathews. Photographed by J. Burgi Contner, Edward Hyland. With Bud Harris, Nora Green, Izinetta Wilcox, Earl Gough. (68 mins, B&W, 16mm, Courtesy Arianné Ulmer Cipes and Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)

Soldiers of the Rock
Norman Maake (South Africa, 2003)
This ambitious South African allegory of oppression and liberation takes the action genre to a deeper level. During a break in his business studies, Vuyo decides to take a job in a gold mine, to experience the world where his father lived and died for the sake of Vuyo's future. Here he encounters the men he calls “the heart and soul of South Africa,” the black laborers who created the country's wealth. When one miner tries to organize the others to pool their resources and buy their own mine, desire, fear, and rivalry build toward spectacular disaster. Writer-director Norman Maake was twenty-one when the film was made, a student at South African film school AFDA, where (according to a press release) “graduates are trained to...manufacture indigenous cultural products and commodities for the international market.” Maake has clearly learned his lessons well, combining a story of deeply local meaning with Hollywood-worthy stylistics: slow-motion violence, dark, slick surfaces, beads of sweat and humidity glistening like stars.
Written by Maake, Bata Passchier. Photographed by Natalie Haarhof. With Vuyo Dabula, Lebo Mathosa, Glen Gabela, Sibusiso Mhlangu. (96 mins, In English, Tsotsti Taal (township slang), Zulu, and Xhosa with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, From N.Y. African Film Festival)

Agogo Eewo
Tunde Kelani (Nigeria, 2002)
“One cannot be playful in dangerous situations,” warns the hero of this freewheeling political comedy, but the work of director Tunde Kelani, leading auteur of the burgeoning Nigerian video industry, proves otherwise. The sequel to Kelani's successful satire Saworoide opens with the search for a new king of Jogbo after the fall of the old military regime. Corrupt chiefs install retired policeman Bosipo in the top office, expecting him to support their platform of “reform”—that is, more of the same: pillaging natural resources and appropriating public funds for personal gain. But these would-be Machiavellis find that their prince has other ideas; the new king invokes the rituals of the past to point the polity toward a better future. As Variety's Ronnie Scheib wrote, Agogo Eewo “interlaces snatches of popular and traditional culture—intricate dances, children's rhymes, politico-religious incantations, tongue twisters...old songs, and domestic farce—into a plea for political sanity.”
Written by Akinwumi Isola. Photographed by Kelani. With Dejumo Lewis, Deola Faleye, Lere Paimo, Larinde Akinleye. (100 mins, In Yoruba with English subtitles, Color, Video, From N.Y. African Film Festival)

Tender Little Pumpkins
Gilberto Martínez Solares (Mexico, 1948)
(Calabacitas tiernas). A botched suicide attempt leads to a veritable conga line of comic events in this delightful musical starring Tin Tan (Germán Valdés), the only Mexican screen comic to rival Cantinflas in originality and popularity. Sporting a zoot suit and peppering his dialogue with Spanglish slang, Tin Tan was a kind of pachuco predecessor to Jerry Lewis, an impudent cynic with a big mouth, a jazzy, improvisational humor, and a gift for sight gags. His typical character is an ambitious, upwardly mobile huckster, a good guy trying desperately to be bad. He is in fine form here as a would-be cabaret impresario surrounded by talented female performers from Argentina, Cuba, Brazil, and Mexico (including samba artist Rosina Pagán and Cuban rumba dancer Amalia Aguilar)—the “pumpkins” of the title.
Written by Eduardo Ugarte, Juan García, Solares, based on a story by Ugarte. With Germán Valdés (Tin Tan), Rosita Quintana, Amalia Aguilar, Marcelo Chávez. (92 mins, In Spanish with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm)

Iron Fist
Gabriel García Moreno (Mexico, 1927)
(El Puño de hierro). This rare, remarkable silent adventure opens with a young man experiencing his first shot of morphine; to try to describe the rest of the breathless plot would be futile, but suffice to say that it involves hints of bestiality, a mysterious gang, homosexual orgies, a lecture on the horrors of drug addiction punctuated by documentary footage of straitjacketed patients and deformed children, and a pipe-smoking ten-year-old boy detective who helps save the day. With its bizarre criminal intrigues juxtaposed against vividly realistic location shooting, Iron Fist recalls the French serials of Louis Feuillade. It has been cited as a trailblazing example of Surrealism in the country that fostered Kahlo and Buñuel, though it's unlikely either artist ever had a chance to see it—after a few screenings in Orizaba, Veracruz, in 1927, the film disappeared from public view until a restored version premiered in Mexico City in 2001.
Written by García Moreno. Photographed by Manuel Carrillo, Juan D. Vasallo. With Carlos Villatoro, Octavio Valencia, Lupe Bonilla, Rosario Galaviz. (88 mins, Silent with Spanish and English intertitles, B&W, 35mm, Courtesy Filmoteca de la UNAM)

Careful
Guy Maddin (Canada, 1992)
High in some imaginary Alps, swathed in Expressionist shadow, sits the village of Tolzbad, where rosy-cheeked Aryans lead lives of utmost caution. Here, the smallest cry could trigger an avalanche, and the slightest misstep could be fatal; propriety is all, and passion is out of the question—until a young student at the Butler Gymnasium acts upon an incestuous dream. Then a Freudian maelstrom is unleashed, and the papier-mâché peaks shake with Sturm und Drang. A mountain film à la Leni Riefenstahl shot in a tawdry simulation of two-strip Technicolor, with purposely out-of-sync dubbing and drifts of audio snow, Careful represents a pinnacle of Maddin's talent for demented pastiche. But be careful—even while you chuckle at the film's stilted speeches and giddy absurdity, you may find yourself unexpectedly engulfed in an avalanche of emotion.
Written by Maddin, George Toles, based on a story by Toles. Photographed by Maddin. With Kyle McCulloch, Gosia Dobrowolska, Sarah Neville, Brent Neale. (100 mins, Color, 35mm, From Zeitgeist)

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary
Guy Maddin (Canada, 2002
“Immigrants!! Others! From the East!” Characteristically hysterical intertitles herald Maddin's envisioning of Bram Stoker's tale, performed by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. This Dracula is both deliriously silly and earnestly beautiful, highly idiosyncratic yet, with its squeamish sexuality and unsubtle overtones of xenophobia, oddly faithful to the original book. The dance sequences are often tongue-in-cheek (pirouetting maids garlanded in garlic), yet they can be surprisingly effective at conveying narrative and character—the extravagantly stylized gestures of silent melodrama seem to come naturally to the dancers. Mostly black-and-white and silent, with a swelling Mahler score, the film is punctuated with strategic flashes of color and sound effects: red for blood, green for money; the twitter of birds, the juicy thwack of a decapitation by trowel. In Maddin's hands, new technology evokes the old, and digital effects magically suggest the luminous textures of the earliest cinema.
Written by Maddin, Mark Godden. Photographed by Paul Suderman. With Zhang Wei-Qiang, Tara Birtwhistle, David Moroni, Cindy Marie Small. (75 mins, B&W/Color, 35mm, From Zeitgeist)

The Long Goodbye
Robert Altman (U.S., 1973)
With an opening fanfare of "Hooray for Hollywood," Robert Altman's casually ironic, surprisingly apt adaptation casts Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe adrift in seventies Los Angeles, a place both real and unreal, where Reagan is governor and Schwarzenegger is a two-bit hood without a speaking part. Here everybody's playing a role, from the Malibu Colony gatekeeper with his Barbara Stanwyck impressions to Marlowe himself (Elliott Gould), who haplessly rehearses witty comebacks under his breath without noticing whether anyone's listening. Marlowe's contradictory mottoes are "It's OK with me" and "Nobody cares but me." The latter impulse lures him down from his tower apartment and its PanaVision view to help a friend, and entangles him with Hemingwayesque author Sterling Hayden and his wife Nina Van Pallandt, who live in Malibu in the kind of glass house where the windows reflect rather than reveal. Hayden is washed up and eventually out, leaving Marlowe chasing Van Pallandt's gold Mercedes with LOV YOU plates, in search of an elusive Hollywood ending.
Written by Leigh Brackett, based on the novel by Raymond Chandler. Photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond. With Elliott Gould, Nina Van Pallandt, Sterling Hayden, Mark Rydell. (112 mins, Color, 35mm, 'Scope, From MGM)

My Brother's Wedding
Charles Burnett (U.S., 1983)
"Was lost, but now, I'm found": Opening with a man singing "Amazing Grace" at a church service in Watts, My Brother's Wedding sets up an array of ironies. Thirty-year-old Pierce Mundy is emphatically not found, resentful of familiar roles but unable to create new ones, stuck in a love-hate relationship with his family and his community. Pierce rejects the upward mobility represented by buppie brother Wendell and his cartoonish fiancée Sonia--Sonia asks, "Is Pierce retarded?" "No, just ghettoized"--but the alternate path laid out by his best friend Soldier only leads to prison or worse. So here Pierce is, working at the family dry-cleaning business, which Burnett uses as a setting for revealing encounters with a range of wonderful supporting characters. Made with a mostly nonprofessional cast and a tiny budget, this is a moving comedy about getting nowhere, an eloquently ambivalent portrayal of the ties that bind.
Written, Photographed by Burnett. With Everett Silas, Jessie Holmes, Gaye Shannon-Burnett, Ronnie Bell. (115 mins, Color, 35mm, PFA Collection, permission Milestone Film and Video)

To Sleep with Anger
Charles Burnett (U.S., 1990)
To Sleep with Anger is a domestic comedy-drama with the depth and force of myth. At the heart of the story are emigrants from the South to South Central L.A., hardworking Gideon (Paul Butler) and Suzie (Mary Alice), and their two sons: dutiful Junior (Carl Lumbly) and conflicted Babe Brother (Richard Brooks), whose dreams of upward mobility have brought him only bitterness. Into this circle of mundane comforts and frustrations walks Harry (Danny Glover), an old acquaintance from down home, who makes himself a pallet on the floor. Harry's old-fashioned ways are seductive, invoking a nostalgia for times that might better be forgotten, and his strangely transfixing influence leads the family to a dangerous crossroads. Burnett suggests a world where the everyday is infused with mystery, where tradition can be both sustaining and destructive, and where the trickster wields the power of folklore but is finally only a man.
Written by Burnett. Photographed by Walt Lloyd. With Danny Glover, Paul Butler, Mary Alice, Carl Lumbly. (102 mins, Color, 35mm, From MGM Distribution Company)

It's a Gift
Norman Z. McLeod (U.S., 1934)
Harold Bissonette is trying to shave, performing a complicated and dangerous dance around his obliviously preening daughter in front of the bathroom mirror. "You want me to cut my throat?" he mutters. Family life could drive him to it. This New Jersey shopkeeper is the quintessential Fieldsian paterfamilias, on the razor's edge between meek compliance and antisocial behavior. Persecuted by a harridan wife, irascible and incompetent customers, and the ever-terrifying Baby LeRoy, all Mr. Bissonette can do is dream of packing up the flivver and making for California--a dream that eventually comes true, but not exactly as expected, and not before our unfortunate hero has been made to run a gauntlet of hilarious set pieces. Though Fields's famous misanthropy is less vehement here than in some of his other films, his view of human society is reflected in Mr. Bissonette's version of bliss: a tall glass of gin, a little orange, and sweet solitude.
Written by Jack Cunningham, based on a story by J. P. McEvoy, Charles Bogle (W. C. Fields). Photographed by Henry Sharp. With W. C. Fields, Baby LeRoy, Kathleen Howard, Jean Rouverol. (73 mins, B&W, 16mm, From Universal Pictures)

The Man on the Flying Trapeze
Clyde Bruckman (U.S., 1935)
Another of the beleaguered family men that were by this time a Fields trademark, Ambrose Wolfinger lives in quiet misery, oppressed by his second wife and her good-for-nothing relations. Ambrose may be a victim, but he's hardly innocent: apprehending a pair of burglars in his basement, he joins them in a few rounds of homemade applejack and a boozy rendition of "On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away"; using the made-up funeral of his very-much-alive mother-in-law as an excuse to skip work for a wrestling match, he sets off a full-fledged town scandal. Despite the sketchy plot, the New York Times called this "the kind of burlesque which comes dangerously close to realism."
Written by Ray Harris, Sam Hardy, based on a story by Charles Bogle (W. C. Fields), Hardy. Photographed by Alfred Gilks. With W. C. Fields, Mary Brian, Kathleen Howard, Grady Sutton. (66 mins, B&W, 16mm, From Universal Pictures)

Written on the Wind
Douglas Sirk (U.S., 1956)
Sirk called this "my most gutsy picture"; the director's preoccupations with failure and the horrors of family were rarely writ so large. The myriad dysfunctions of the Hadley oil dynasty are blazoned on the screen in screaming colors and skewed angles, nonstop visual hyperbole reinforcing the epic scale of the family's decline. Although the melodrama's ostensible heroes are well-meaning outsiders Lauren Bacall and Rock Hudson, the real stars here are Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone as the doomed heirs to the Hadley legacy: a high-flying playboy falling rapidly into alcoholic regression, and a fervent nymphomaniac nostalgic for some imaginary childhood pastoral. Framed by the doors and windows of the plush, sterile family mansion, Stack and Malone convey the desperate intensity of trapped animals, showing too much of the whites of their eyes. In Sirk's universe, as R.W. Fassbinder pointed out, "the good, the 'normal,' the 'beautiful' are always revolting; the evil, the weak, the dissolute arouse one's compassion."
Written by George Zuckerman, based on the novel by Robert Wilder. Photographed by Russell Metty. With Robert Stack, Dorothy Malone, Rock Hudson, Lauren Bacall. (99 mins, Color, 35mm, From IPMA Inc./Universal)

Tarnished Angels
Douglas Sirk (U.S., 1958)
Featuring the same principals as Written on the Wind, and adapted by the same writer (from William Faulkner's novel Pylon), Tarnished Angels plays out many of the earlier movie's themes--obsession, jealousy, self-destruction, defeat--but in a different key. Hysterical Technicolor affluence is replaced here by marginal Depression-era Americana, shot in lush, melancholy black and white. Rock Hudson gives one of his best performances as a New Orleans newspaperman who develops an unprofessional fascination with carnival flier Robert Stack and his wife Dorothy Malone, a blonde in a pure white dress who's made a profession of falling. Hudson's passivity is an effective counterpoint to Stack's characteristic desperation; although Hudson calls Malone a creature from another planet, the shadows under her eyes mark her as all too human. This film is best experienced on the big screen, where the sweep of CinemaScope gives visceral impact to the film's fatalistic circularity, the camera repeating the fliers' compulsive loop around the pylons, chasing oblivion.
Written by George Zuckerman, based on the novel Pylon by William Faulkner. Photographed by Irving Glassberg. With Rock Hudson, Robert Stack, Dorothy Malone, Jack Carson. (91 mins, B&W, 'Scope, From IPMA Inc./Universal)

All I Desire
Douglas Sirk (U.S., 1953)
A period piece that resolutely refuses nostalgia, All I Desire stars Barbara Stanwyck as a washed-up actress facing one of her most challenging roles: playing the successful lady on a return visit to the husband and children she abandoned years ago, in 1900. Following her back to Riverdale, Wisconsin, we quickly see why she left in the first place; as Sirk put it, "she comes back from an imitated life...with all her dreams--and she finds nothing but this rotten, decrepit middle-class American family." Yet the dream of home and family is as powerful as the dream of escape, and the deeply conflicted Stanwyck finds herself inexorably drawn toward a "happy ending" that, in Sirk's hands, is anything but. As the door swings shut on the family home and the camera pulls back from the bars of the banisters, the chains of the old porch swing, we can only feel relieved to be on the outside looking in.
Written by James Gunn, Robert Blees. Photographed by Carl Guthrie. With Barbara Stanwyck, Richard Carlson, Lyle Bettger, Maureen O'Sullivan. (79 mins, B&W, 35mm, From Universal Pictures)

In a Lonely Place
Nicholas Ray (U.S., 1950)
Ray delivers one of Hollywood's most grown-up views of love--and of Hollywood--in this bitter, tender, and devastating film, presented here in a gorgeous print. Humphrey Bogart stars as Dixon Steele, a less-than-successful screenwriter whose violent contempt has many targets: industry "popcorn salesmen," the moviegoing public, his enemies, his friends, his lovers. ("Do you look down on all women or just the ones you know?" an ex-girlfriend asks.) When a hatcheck girl is murdered, Dix's cynical attitude and penchant for brawling make him a prime suspect; his neighbor Laurel (Gloria Grahame, whose real-life marriage to Ray was falling apart while the film was shot) provides an alibi, an inauspicious beginning to an ill-fated romance. In Dorothy Hughes's novel and the original version of the script, Dix was in fact a murderer; in the final film he is "only" a troubled man. The difference makes the film infinitely more moving, and yet in the end, as Laurel says with knowing sadness, it doesn't matter at all.
Written by Andrew Solt, based on a story by Dorothy B. Hughes, adapted by Edmund H. North. Photographed by Burnett Guffey. With Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy, Art Smith. (94 mins, B&W, 35mm, From Sony Pictures Releasing)

High School
Frederick Wiseman (U.S., 1969)
"Establish that you can be a man and take orders," the dean of discipline at Philadelphia's Northeast High admonishes a student hauled into the office for a minor infraction. At this middle-class, mostly white school, obedience to authority is lesson number one. Taken on its release in 1969 as an anti-Establishment cry against institutional conformity, the film has acquired added resonance with age; more than thirty years later, educational methods may have changed, but the expressions of dreary futility on the students' faces are still uncomfortably familiar. Meanwhile, Wiseman shows a chilling historical reality encroaching on the school's closed system. A collage on a classroom wall is labeled "Our Troubled World"; a teacher reads aloud a letter from a former student who has learned to be a man and take orders in Vietnam: "I am only a body doing a job," he writes. The teacher glows, "To me this means we are very successful."
Photographed by Richard Leiterman. (75 mins, B&W, 16mm)

Welfare
Frederick Wiseman (U.S., 1975)
Wiseman's ongoing study of bureaucracy takes on epic proportions in Welfare, the first of his films to stretch beyond standard feature length. Masterful editing gives subtle structure to the chaos of stories in a New York City welfare center, playing out themes and variations, building tension, then retreating into uneasy calm. Individuals' encounters with the system run the gamut from bemused resignation to delirious antagonism. One client, obviously crazy yet frighteningly insightful, invokes Waiting for Godot; another, enraged, demands to know, "Whose fault is it?" Nobody, including Wiseman, offers an answer. Ultimately the filmmaker's interest in the institution seems less social than metaphysical: hearing endless repetitions of the caseworkers' exhausted explanations, glimpsing the same faces in different waiting rooms, we begin to feel time circle back on itself.
Photographed by William Brayne. (167 mins, B&W, 16mm)

Primate
Frederick Wiseman (U.S., 1974)
"Our artificial insemination will go as planned and we'll let nature take its course," declares a scientist at the Yerkes primate research center in Atlanta, apparently oblivious to the contradiction in his statement. Primate is an alarming, absurdist critique of the notion of scientific observation--the more discomfiting in that we as viewers are implicated, watching the people who watch the primates. Without narration to explain and soothe, we are left to puzzle over the meaning of experiments that involve masturbating orangutans and assessing which electrical frequencies produce the best monkey erections. Responding to the public outrage sparked by the film's harrowing images, the research center's director denounced Primate as "a perversion," a fitting choice of words given the clinical prurience of many of the experiments. Although the film raises serious questions, after you've heard a lab worker address her caged charges as "mama's babies," you might agree with Wiseman that "it's actually a rather bizarre comedy."
Photographed by William Brayne. (105 mins, B&W, 16mm)

Meat
Frederick Wiseman (U.S., 1976)
We open on a classic Western scene, cowboys and cattle roaming the range against a Rocky Mountain backdrop. What comes after is less romantic. Meat tracks the transformation of animals into consumer commodities, from the feedlot where rations are calculated by computer, to the packing plant where specialized assembly-line workers quickly, monotonously kill, skin, and disembowel, to the office where jocular salesmen wheel and deal in parts and poundage and union reps negotiate their contracts. (While workers process six hundred head an hour, management worries that they have "too much free time.") The slaughterhouse images are graphic, but their effect is less shocking than quietly surreal: a merry-go-round of severed, flayed heads; shrouded sides of beef gliding by like ghosts, seemingly under their own power; a Judas goat leading a flock of lambs to their doom. Where viewers might expect an outraged expose, Wiseman offers instead a clear-eyed contemplation of a weirdly efficient business.
Photographed by William Brayne. (113 mins, B&W, 16mm)

In Those Days
Helmut Käutner (Germany, 1947)
(In jenen Tagen). A film about the human spirit whose protagonist is an inanimate object, In Those Days is a contradictory, troubling, and affecting work. Its narrator is an automobile that rolled off the assembly line on January 30, 1933: "When I was young I thought my life would last a thousand years...but a thousand turned to twelve." In a series of flashbacks, the car bears witness to the experiences of its many owners: a composer condemned for his "degenerate" art; a pair of shopkeepers-- one Jewish, one gentile; resistance workers, soldiers, and refugees. These are good Germans in bad times, buffeted by politics like leaves in a storm. "Their humanity was stronger than the times," the narrator intones--a message Germans in these years were desperate to hear. But the background images of devastation speak louder than the hopeful words.
Written by Käutner, Ernst Schnabel. Photographed by Igor Oberberg. With Erich Schellow, Gert Schäfer, Winnie Markus, Werner Hinz. (111 mins, In German with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm)

A Call Girl Named Rosemarie
Rolf Thiele (W. Germany, 1958)
(Das Mädchen Rosemarie). It's based on a true story--the unsolved 1957 murder of class-climbing call girl Rosemarie Nitribitt--but with its sarcastic commentary rendered in Kurt Weill­style song, A Call Girl Named Rosemarie is hardly a typical docudrama. The film's real target is not the ambitious Rosemarie (memorably played by Nadja Tiller) but her clients, the politicians and industrialists who engineered the German economic miracle. Tracking Rosemarie's rise from street to penthouse, the film offers a penetrating view of rampant materialism and corruption at every level of German society. "Rugs in the hall, Picasso on the wall, and there's no past at all," a Brechtian chorus sings while moving TV sets and blenders into Rosemarie's apartment; a factory owner proudly displays a sculpture made from an unexploded American bomb: "and now we export to ninety-two countries!" The blunt bitterness of this postwar tale makes Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun look like nostalgic, candy-coated fantasy.
Written by Jo Herbst, Erich Kuby, Thiele, Rolf Ulrich. Photographed by Rolf von Rautenfeld. With Nadja Tiller, Peter van Eyck, Carl Raddatz, Gert Fröbe. (100 mins, In German with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm)

Policeman
Tomu Uchida (Japan, 1933)
(Keisatsukan). A standout of the 2001 Pordenone silent film festival, Policeman has the energy and grit of a Warner Bros. crime saga--the dogged hero even looks a little like Paul Muni--but its bold stylistic flourishes and ethical perspective are distinctly Japanese. The film is based on a stage play about a cop battling Communist gangsters; the primary theme is not so much political as emotional and moral: the irresolvable conflict between personal and professional loyalty. While the intertitles emphasize an official message of duty and noble self-sacrifice, the images demonstrate a vivid awareness of the painful price that duty can exact. Tracking through mazes of narrow alleys, following nocturnal gun battles and rooftop chases under flashing spotlights, the camera, like the characters, is moody and mobile, shifting without comment between breezy street realism and Expressionist montage.
Written by Eizo Yamauchi. Photographed by Soichi Aisaka. With Isamu Kosugi, Eiji Nakano, Taisuke Matsumoto, Shizuko Mori. (91 mins at 22 fps, Silent with Japanese intertitles and English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, Print through special archival exchange with George Eastman House, Courtesy National Film Center, Tokyo)

Foghorn
Minoru Murata (Japan, 1934)
(Muteki). A brooding tale of power, passion, and violence in 1870s Yokohama, this late silent evokes its setting in darkly atmospheric images. The Yokohama Concession, which was opened to foreign settlement and trade in 1859, is described in an intertitle as a "city of barbarians," less cross-cultural melting pot than seething cauldron of corruption and degradation. Thrown together in the unwholesome stew are Cooper, an unrepentant American colonist, and rebellious youth Chiyokichi, who tries to pick the American's pocket but is caught and enslaved by Cooper. Chiyokichi's only release comes in his violent love for the beautiful Ohana; but even in this, the servant cannot ultimately escape his master's reach. The mood of decadent fatalism is enhanced by the film's twilit photography and its passages of unsettling montage, cutting again and again to the figureheads of ships in the harbor, Western women's faces looming in the mist.
Written by Shuroku Kunihiro, based on a novel by Jiro Osaragi. Photographed by Junichiro Aoshima. With Eiji Nakano, Akiko Shiga, Ichiro Sugai, Nobuo Kosaka. (94 mins, Silent with Japanese intertitles and English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, Print through special archival exchange with George Eastman House, Courtesy National Film Center, Tokyo)

Kiss Me, Stupid
Billy Wilder (U.S., 1964)
Deliriously vulgar sex comedy played as embittered film noir, Kiss Me, Stupid is one of Wilder's most vicious, devastating films. Dean Martin plays a version of himself that we can only hope is exaggerated, a lascivious lounge singer who drifts out of Vegas on a sea of booze and lands in desolate Climax, Nevada. He's taken in by piano teacher and frustrated pop songwriter Ray Walston, who, torn between his desire to butter up the insatiable Dino and his own pathological jealousy, hires "cocktail waitress" Kim Novak as a stand-in for his own dangerously attractive wife. Novak is uncomfortably convincing as the good-natured gal trapped in the body of a Playboy cartoon; Walston's maniacally hypocritical husband is downright horrifying. Referring to the script's outrageously sexual humor, Walston reportedly asked Wilder, "How do you think you're gonna get away with some of this stuff?" The restored uncensored ending of tonight's print gets away with more than anyone could wish for.
Written by I.A.L. Diamond, Wilder. Photographed by Joseph La Shelle. With Dean Martin, Kim Novak, Ray Walston, Felicia Farr. (124 mins, B&W, 'Scope, 35mm, From MGM/UA)

Unfaithfully Yours
Preston Sturges (U.S., 1948)
Unfaithfully Yours is Sturges's most complex and fascinating creation: a unique hybrid of character satire, symphony, and slapstick, with a strong undercurrent of noir desperation. Rex Harrison is frighteningly funny as Sir Alfred de Carter, a British conductor who believes in the elevating, morally "antiseptic" qualities of music and deplores American vulgarity in all its forms, including the movies. His aristocratic self-satisfaction is shaken when, thanks to the interference of an insufferable brother-in-law (Rudy Vallee), he begins to doubt the faithfulness of his wife (Linda Darnell). While he conducts Rossini, Wagner, and Tchaikovsky, Sir Alfred concocts vivid fantasies of revenge and sacrifice, each in keeping with the mood of the music and all highlighting our hero's genius, sophistication, and dignity. But in real life, dignity is hard to come by, as Sturges demonstrates in some of the most effective scenes of physical comedy he ever directed.
Written by Sturges. Photographed by Victor Milner. With Rex Harrison, Linda Darnell, Barbara Lawrence, Rudy Vallee. (105 mins, B&W, 35mm, From Criterion)

You Only Live Once
Fritz Lang (U.S., 1937)
When three-time loser Eddie Taylor (Henry Fonda) is about to be released from prison, his lawyer assures the warden that Eddie will make good. Eddie adds skeptically, "I will--if they let me." Like many of Lang's films, You Only Live Once depicts a struggle between individual will and socially determined destiny; atypically for the director, it's also a moving and sincere love story. This has often been cited as the original lovers-on-the-run movie. But the relationship between edgy, fragile Eddie and sad-eyed Jo (Sylvia Sidney) feels less like amour fou à la Bonnie and Clyde than like a tragic, transcendent partnership borrowed from a Frank Borzage melodrama. Harrowing scenes of prison and pursuit are rendered in a starkly expressive visual style; but the bleak atmosphere ultimately gives way to pastoral lyricism, suggesting a possibility of spiritual if not social redemption. Asked about the ending, Lang said, "You may laugh, but don't forget, I was born a Catholic."
Written by Graham Baker, based on a story by Gene Towne. Photographed by Leon Shamroy. With Henry Fonda, Sylvia Sidney, Barton MacLane, Jean Dixon. (85 mins, B&W, 35mm, From Peter Langs, IPMA Inc.)

You and Me
Fritz Lang (U.S., 1938)
From its dazzling, disorienting opening montage of cash registers and consumer goods, with an offscreen singer-narrator warning in solemn sprechstimme that "you cannot get something for nothing," it's clear that You and Me is not your ordinary romantic fairy tale. Lang said he intended this comedy-melodrama of love, crime, and the retail trade to be "a picture that teaches something in an entertaining way, with songs." That only begins to explain the film's peculiar union of Brechtian socioeconomic critique, Expressionist stylistics, and Hollywood genre conventions--with songs composed by none other than Kurt Weill. The plot centers on tough guy George Raft and his bride Sylvia Sidney, both clerks in a department store, and both ex-cons struggling to make good. Their struggle culminates with Sidney in the store's toy department after hours, delivering a detailed mathematical proof of the theorem Crime Does Not Pay to an audience of thugs--a convergence of fantasy and literalism that's typical of this strangely charming film.
Written by Virginia Van Upp, from a story by Norman Krasna. Photographed by Charles Lang, Jr. Music by Kurt Weill, Boris Morros. With Sylvia Sidney, George Raft, Robert Cummings, Harry Carey, Roscoe Karns. (90 mins, B&W, 35mm, Courtesy Library of Congress, permission Universal)

Hangmen Also Die
Fritz Lang (U.S., 1942)
Lang collaborated with Bertolt Brecht on this fictionalized account of the 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi Reichsprotektor of occupied Czechoslovakia whose brutal rule earned him the nickname "Hitler's Hangman." Brian Donlevy as the fugitive assassin is one of several characters who struggle for survival after Heydrich's death, as the Gestapo mounts an increasingly vicious campaign of terror. Brecht's contribution is apparent in the film's emphasis on the solidarity of the Czech people and in the vehemently antifascist dialogue--although Communist catchwords like "masses" and "comrades" were expunged from the script: after all, this was Hollywood. Yet composer Hanns Eisler managed to smuggle the tune of the 1929 "Comintern Song" into his score, which was nominated for an Oscar by an unsuspecting Academy. Meanwhile, Lang's preoccupations with the psychology of guilt and justice and his aggressive visual style complicate the film's political agenda. The ominous shadows of James Wong Howe's cinematography create a creeping paranoia. And the denouement, in which a betrayer is in turn betrayed, introduces a queasy moral ambiguity to the otherwise ennobling story of loyalty and resistance.
Written by John Wexley, from a story by Bertolt Brecht, Lang. Music by Hanns Eisler. Photographed by James Wong Howe. With Brian Donlevy, Walter Brennan, Anna Lee, Gene Lockhart. (135 mins, B&W, 35mm, From Douris Corporation/Rohauer Collection)

Rancho Notorious
Fritz Lang (U.S., 1952)
"The old story of HATE, MURDER, and REVENGE": the relentless refrain of the theme song summarizes this brilliantly curdled western-psychodrama, a Langian parable of paranoia and futility played out against painted Technicolor skies. Arthur Kennedy plays Vern, a man with only one goal in life: to hunt down the bandit who raped and killed his fiancée. The quest leads him to a remote ranch called Chuck-a-Luck, known as a haven for wanted men; and to its proprietor, Altar Keane--Marlene Dietrich, seen in flashback as a glamorous, daring dance-hall girl, and in the film's present as a mature beauty in faded jeans. Vern's investigative obsession turns everyone he meets into either suspect or informant; his relationship with Altar is an excruciating dance of desire and mistrust. The tale ends with an inevitable outburst of violence, but the climax of Vern's desperate campaign brings no satisfaction, no closure, only a feeling of exhausted disillusionment.
Written by Daniel Taradash, based on the story "Gunsight Whitman" by Sylvia Richards. Photographed by Hal Mohr. With Marlene Dietrich, Arthur Kennedy, Mel Ferrer, Gloria Henry. (89 mins, Color, 35mm, From Warner Bros. Classics)

Lord Love a Duck
George Axelrod (U.S., 1966)
This parable of anarchy and ambition at a Southern California high school is playful, cynical, maddening, and exhilarating: quintessentially Sixties. Perennial teenager Roddy McDowall plays a sweetly diabolical fairy godfather to Tuesday Weld, who brings startling depth to her role as the girl who wants everything, from cashmere sweaters to Hollywood stardom. Harvey Korman and Ruth Gordon highlight a supporting cast of hopeless grown-ups ("Alan, how did we fail you?" one elder queries as McDowall tosses him into the air with a bulldozer). Writer-director George Axelrod wallows in his characters' crassness with a curdled humor; at many moments, including the notoriously lascivious father-daughter sweater-shopping scene (Dad goes wild for Periwinkle Pussycat!), you won't know whether to laugh or cringe. The movie has often been called ahead of its time, and its marriage of satiric and sordid is especially prescient--you might say this ungainly young duckling grew up to be a glossy American Beauty.
Written by Larry H. Johnson, Axelrod, based on the novel by Al Hine. Photographed by Daniel L. Fapp. With Roddy McDowall, Tuesday Weld, Lola Albright, Ruth Gordon, Harvey Korman. (104 mins, B&W, 35mm, From MGM/UA)

99 River Street
Phil Karlson (U.S., 1953)
Phil Karlson directed some of the most compelling crime films of the 1950s, and the rarely seen 99 River Street is Karlson at his hard-hitting, unpretentiously innovative best. Building on typical noir elements--a down-on-his-luck protagonist, an untrustworthy blonde wife, and a grisly gallery of underworld mugs--this film ventures beyond standard crime-gone-wrong themes to explore the overlaps between reality and spectacle. From the brilliant opening sequence, in which a prizefighter turned cab driver watches himself lose on a TV program called "Great Fights of Yesterday," Karlson exploits shifting points of view to disorient both audience and characters. But the film is hardly a dry formal exercise; well-chosen details and vivid performances make the story thoroughly engaging. The working title was "Crosstown," evoking both the characters' mutual betrayals and the cabbie's nocturnal travels across the map of New York, finally leading him down a dark street in Jersey City.
Written by Robert Smith, from a story by George Zuckerman. Photographed by Franz Planer. With John Payne, Evelyn Keyes, Brad Dexter, Frank Faylen. (83 mins, B&W, 35mm, From MGM/UA)

Divorce--Italian Style
Pietro Germi (Italy, 1961)
(Divorzio all'Italiana). Ferdinando Cefalú is a model member of Sicily's good-for-nothing aristocracy: lazy and impossibly vain, he seems to spend most of his time skulking around his ancestors' decrepit villa in pajamas, eyebrows smugly arched, mouth pulled into a perpetual pout under a fussy mustache. ("I really am an intriguing type," he muses before the mirror.) Only an actor of Mastroianni's talents could make such a character simultaneously so reprehensible and so absurdly, irresistibly funny. Cefalú's problem: he's disgusted with his wife's overbearing affections and smitten by a nymphet cousin. Divorce in Sicily is unthinkable, but the law is lenient in matters of honor; if Mrs. Cefalú were to take a lover, who could blame her husband for murder? This gleefully nasty farce skewers every stratum of Sicilian society: busybody matrons; plodding Mafiosi; self-serving clergymen who denounce La Dolce Vita as "lascivious art"; and all the upstanding citizens who sprint straight from church to the movie theater.
Written by Ennio De Concini, Alfredo Giannetti, Germi. Photographed by Leonida Barboni. With Marcello Mastroianni, Daniela Rocca, Stefania Sandrelli, Leopoldo Trieste. (108 mins, In Italian with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm)

White Nights
Luchino Visconti (Italy, 1957)
(Le notte bianche). Mastroianni made his first star appearance in this tale of displaced, disconnected people drifting along crossing, doubling paths. As a quiet man who accidentally befriends a troubled, lonely young woman (Maria Schell) and finds himself playing understudy for the absent object of her affections, Mastroianni mingles subtly passionate yearnings with a characteristic (and entirely appropriate) note of annoyance. His character is both distrustful of and seduced by the romantic dreams that preoccupy the woman he unfortunately loves; he hovers on the boundary between the abstracted heroine's misty twilight world and the harsher light of day. Adapted from the same Dostoyevsky story that was the basis for Bresson's Four Nights of a Dreamer, this film marks Visconti's move away from neorealism toward a more metaphorical, subjective style; its sublimely artificial atmosphere is accented by flashes of odd humor, including Mastroianni's disarmingly stilted dance to the tune of Bill Haley's "13 Women"--a far cry from Ginger and Fred.
Written by Visconti, Suso Cecchi D'Amico, adapted from the story by Fyodor Dostoyevski. Photographed by Giuseppe Rotunno. With Marcello Mastroianni, Maria Schell, Jean Marais, Clara Calamai. (107 mins, In Italian with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm)

Caught
Max Ophuls (U.S., 1949)
It looks like working-class charm-school student Barbara Bel Geddes's ship has come in when she's invited to a millionaire's yachting party. She misses the boat but catches the millionaire, and soon our heroine is successfully ensconced in a grim Long Island Gothic mansion, staving off loneliness with pills, waiting for her husband--bitter, driven Robert Ryan--to come home. One of the morals of this darkly ironic Cinderella story is that marrying money may bring a woman security--but prisons are secure, too. It's no surprise that when Bel Geddes tries to trade in the hollow luxury of her married life for the human chaos of James Mason's Lower East Side doctor's office, she meets with formidable resistance from her husband, who says "women are a dime a dozen" but who monomaniacally insists on protecting his investments. Like the similarly noir-shaded Reckless Moment, Caught shows a European's disturbing insight into the pitfalls of postwar American domesticity. Thanks in part to Lee Garmes's Wellesian cinematography, the dream house has rarely looked so sinister.
Written by Arthur Laurents, based on the novel Wild Calendar by Libbie Block. Photographed by Lee Garmes. With James Mason, Barbara Bel Geddes, Robert Ryan, Ruth Brady. (88 mins, B&W, 35mm, Courtesy UCLA Film & Television Archive, permission Kit Parker Films)

La Signora di Tutti
Max Ophuls (Italy, 1934)
(Everybody's Lady). We first hear actress Gaby Doriot (the lovely Isa Miranda) as a disembodied voice, singing on a record while studio executives negotiate her price; we first see her face on a series of posters churning through a printing press. From the film's opening to its final shot, when the press comes to an abrupt halt, Ophuls underlines the commercial mechanisms that transform an individual woman into that beautiful but brittle construct, Woman--Everybody's Lady. Gaby's melodrama journey from poverty to stardom plays out in fragmented flashbacks while expensive doctors struggle to revive her after a suicide attempt ("after spending so much, we can't afford to panic," say her worried handlers). Each episode demonstrates both the power of Gaby's attractiveness and her powerlessness over its consistently disastrous consequences. As Ophuls's graceful camera follows Gaby's spiraling path, the story's significance passes through satire into tragedy.
Written by Ophuls, Curt Alexander, Hans Wilhelm, based on the novel by Salvator Gotta. Photographed by Ubaldo Arata. With Isa Miranda, Nelly Corradi, Memo Benassi, Tatiana Pavlova. (97 mins, In Italian with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, Courtesy British Film Institute, permission Mediaset)

Une Femme douce
Robert Bresson (France, 1969)
(A Gentle Creature). The suicide of a young wife begins this simple, inscrutable story; afterward, her pawnbroker husband relates the history of their marriage. But his narration necessarily fails to explain the woman whose life we see in flashback, underlining the ultimate privacy of death. The actors deliver their impassioned Dostoyevskian lines with a wonderfully daft (calculated) affectlessness; at moments, the direction reaches a level of sublime absurdity reminiscent of late Buñuel. Yet the dogged peculiarity of Bresson's style and his insistent refusal of psychology seem paradoxically to bolster the story's emotional impact. Mysteriously resonant, too, are the quiet, lucid surfaces that fill the interiors of the director's first color picture--the pawnbroker's dark, burnished table, over which the couple first meet; or Dominique Sanda's pallid face, only slightly more animate in life than in death; and the luminous lid of her coffin, whose closing marks the film's end.
Written by Bresson, from the Dostoyevsky story, "A Gentle Creature." Photographed by Ghislain Cloquet. With Dominique Sanda, Guy Frangin. (87 mins, In French with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, Courtesy M. and Mme. Bresson, permission Paramount

The Devil Probably
Robert Bresson (France, 1977)
(Le Diable probablement). This has been called Bresson's most cynical film. It certainly offers his most fashionably cynical protagonist, Charles, a young Parisian whose suicidal despair is vaguely linked to, but not entirely explained by, all the ecological, political, and social disasters of the modern world circa 1977. This character makes an interestingly unsympathetic addition to Bresson's gallery of self-sacrifices--his behavior toward his multiple lovers is far from saintly, and his aristocratic beauty can't mitigate an infuriating, passive arrogance. But Charles's life, which ends in the middle of an unexpressed thought (less sublime than he'd expected), takes on in retrospect the odd, compromised dignity of a thwarted spiritual search. It's entirely possible to picture an alternate ending in which this dissatisfied youth becomes a Jesuit. The chic psychiatrist who tries to "cure" Charles's indifference asks, "When it's over, do you see yourself as a martyr?" The reply: "Only an amateur."
Written by Bresson. Photographed by Pasqualino de Santis. With Antoine Monnier, Tina Irissari, Henri de Maublanc, Laetitia Carcano. (93 mins, In French with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, From New Yorker)

Funny Face
Stanley Donen (U.S., 1957)
It's a testament to the supreme artifice of both fashion and film that so many aspects of this extravagant musical fairy tale should overlap with the "real world" of 1950s haute couture--the stylish opening credits using photographs by Richard Avedon, the attenuated presence of model-of-the-moment Dovima, and the gowns by Givenchy, who was responsible for Audrey Hepburn's image both on and off screen. The plot revolves around a struggle over Hepburn's identity--between the earnest Greenwich Village intellectual discovered in the Embryo Concepts bookshop wearing dusty tweeds and sensible shoes, and the Parisian couturier's shining embodiment of feminine perfection. Viewers may feel a twinge of discomfort when the black-clad gamine abandons her beatnik philosophy to drift downriver in a gauzy bridal dress with much older lover/mentor/fairy godfather Fred Astaire (shades of Sabrina). Still, Hepburn descending a staircase in a swath of Givenchy red, with the Nike of Samothrace as triumphant backdrop, is exhilarating enough to ease any pangs of regret.
Written by Leonard Gershe. Music arranged by Adolph Deutsch from George and Ira Gershwin, Roger Edens, Leonard Gershe. Choreography by Fred Astaire, Eugene Loring. Photographed by Ray June. Costume design by Edith Head, Hubert de Givenchy. With Fred Astaire, Audrey Hepburn, Kay Thompson, Michel Auclair. (103 mins, Color, 35mm, From Paramount)

Desperately Seeking Susan
Susan Seidelman (U.S., 1985)
Before the Gaultier hardware-bustiers and satiny retro-Marilyn glamour, before the S&M chic of SEX, and long before the tastefully tailored couture of Evita, there was what will go down in history as The Madonna Look. As the elusive Susan, Madonna was a model of thrift-store flash and street-smart seductiveness--a sartorial attitude that would prove highly contagious, infecting both the film's hapless protagonist, Roberta (Rosanna Arquette), and legions of identity-seeking mall girls across 1980s America. Housewife Roberta, vaguely discontented with her pink-tinted New Jersey life, develops a special fascination with free spirit Susan. When Roberta manages to snag Susan's distinctive jacket in a second-hand store, she also finds the keys to Susan's identity, and accidentally lets herself in. The change of costume is a mistake, but it ultimately liberates parts of Roberta's "real" self that might otherwise have stayed forever under wraps--an argument for the life-changing power of costume jewelry, midriff-baring, and the black bustier.
Written by Leora Barish. Photographed by Edward Lachman. Costume design by Loquasto. With Rosanna Arquette, Madonna, Aidan Quinn, Robert Joy. (104 mins, Color, 35mm, PFA Collection, permission MGM/UA)

Hold Your Man
Sam Wood (U.S., 1933)
With this romance between two con artists sharp enough to see through each other's ruses (but not smart enough to stay out of trouble), Anita Loos scripted a graceful and gritty vehicle for her friend Jean Harlow's wisecracking, bluntly voluptuous persona. Fleeing a backfired street-corner scam, Eddie (Clark Gable) barges in on an unclothed and indignant Ruby (Harlow). Herself a seasoned swindler, Ruby instantly observes that even Eddie's smile is crooked--but she willingly helps him out of his jam. A backhandedly passionate courtship ensues, until a collaborative con game goes seriously awry and Ruby trades in her clingy satins for a reformatory uniform. The film's tough, intermittently satiric second half, tuned to the hum of institutional eggbeaters churning out court-ordered angel cake, makes an odd study in female solidarity: the reformatory inmates' longing for romance transcends race, ideology, and jealousy, bringing the women together to engineer what must be the most desperate, breathlessly suspenseful wedding ever filmed.
Written by Anita Loos, Howard Emmett Rogers, from a story by Loos. Photographed by Harold Rossen. With Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Stuart Erwin, Dorothy Burgess. (89 mins, B&W, 35mm, From Warner Bros. Classics)