Believe it or not, this year’s class of inductees brings us to a nice round 100 films in the Muriels Hall of Fame. And despite a few blind spots (I’ll get to those in a bit), I think we’ve built ourselves a pretty darn good list of classic films. If someone was trying to learn more about film history, I’d proudly point them to our list as a good starting point.
Before we get to this year’s voting results, here’s something for all you statistics geeks out there:
- All but three of our inducted films appeared in the most recent “They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?” compilation of the greatest films of all time (the holdouts: Duck Amuck, Gojira, and What’s Opera, Doc?). 49 of the inductees are among TSPDT’s top 100. The highest-placing films that we haven’t inducted yet are: Battleship Potemkin (#14), Some Like It Hot (#28), La Dolce Vita (#29), Ordet (#33), and L’Avventura (#37).
- 75% of our inductees ranked in the 2012 Sight and Sound poll’s top 250 films list. Highest-ranked holdouts include: Battleship Potemkin [again] (#11), Late Spring (#15), L’Avventura (#21), Contempt (#21), and Ordet (#24). Hey, what do you folks have against Eisenstein?
- Twelve of our inducted films were nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. Three of them won (Casablanca, The Best Years of Our Lives, and Lawrence of Arabia).
- Only two documentaries have been inducted thusfar. Not awesome, but maybe not surprising either. A lot of eligible documentaries are in a style that’s pretty different from what we generally associate with non-fiction filmmaking today, thus rendering folks like Robert Flaherty out of fashion. Side note: Pretty much every Frederick Wiseman film can be found on Kanopy!
- Muriel’s favorite filmmakers are: Howard Hawks (six inducted films), Alfred Hitchcock and Akira Kurosawa (5 apiece), and Luis Buñuel (3).
- Three of our inducted films were directed or co-directed by women. That doesn’t sound like a lot, except that directing jobs for women weren’t exactly plentiful 50+ years ago. So hey – not too shabby!
- Five directors who’ve been inducted are still alive: Kenneth Anger (Scorpio Rising), John Boorman (Point Blank), Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless and Weekend), Roman Polanski (Repulsion), and Michael Snow (Wavelength). Two more- Stanley Donen and Agnès Varda- were inducted while they were still alive but have since passed away *sniff*.
- 51 of the inducted films contain dialogue that is primarily in English. The next most-spoken languages are: French (16, not counting Battle of Algiers), Japanese (8), and Italian (3). Thirteen of the films are silent.
- 56 out of the 100 inducted films have been released on DVD and Blu-Ray by Criterion Collection or, in the case of Daisies, by Eclipse. This includes, believe it or not, every film with a primary spoken language other than English. I supposed that says something about the “Criterion-ization” of world cinema history, with the good folks at Criterion largely shouldering the burden for bringing classic foreign films to American audiences. However, that would be a job for a better writer than I, and someone with rather more space than I’ve given myself here.
- Finally, here’s the breakdown of the inducted films by decade: 1 from the 1900s (take a bow, Georges Méliès!), 9 from the 1920s, 13 from the 1930s, 20 from the 1940s, 26 from the 1950s, 30 from the 1960s. I could speculate as to why the distribution has been weighted toward more recent work, but one obvious factor is the 50th Anniversary Awards automatically inducting films, and considering we’ve only been voting in this category since 2007 (for 1957 releases), that certainly would skew the results.
Anyway, for those of you who are still with us, here are this year’s voting results. This year, we divided up the final ballot into three categories, as shown below. An asterisk denotes this year’s inductees.
Category A - Directors of Previously Inducted Films
* Bringing Up Baby (1938, Howard Hawks, USA) [8 votes]
* Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953, Howard Hawks, USA) [6 votes]
* Ikiru (1952, Akira Kurosawa, Japan) [6 votes]
* Once Upon a Time in the West (1968, Sergio Leone, USA) [6 votes]
* Week-End (1967, Jean-Luc Godard, France) [6 votes]
5 votes
The Birds (1963, Alfred Hitchcock, USA)
Black Narcissus (1947, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, UK)
Imitation of Life (1959, Douglas Sirk, USA)
Rosemary’s Baby (1968, Roman Polanski, USA)
4 votes
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, Orson Welles, USA)
A Man Escaped (1956, Robert Bresson, France)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962, John Ford, USA)
One Froggy Evening (1955, Charles M. Jones, USA)
Strangers on a Train (1951, Alfred Hitchcock, USA)
To Be or Not to Be (1942, Ernst Lubitsch, USA)
Vampyr (1932, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Germany)
Wild Strawberries (1957, Ingmar Bergman, Sweden)
3 votes
L’Avventura (1960, Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy)
Chimes at Midnight (1965, Orson Welles, Spain)
Day of Wrath (1943, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark)
Gertrud (1964, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark)
The Gold Rush (1925, Charlie Chaplin, USA)
I Was Born, But… (1932, Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968, Alain Resnais, France)
Johnny Guitar (1954, Nicholas Ray, USA)
A Matter of Life and Death (1946, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, UK)
Shadow of a Doubt (1943, Alfred Hitchcock, USA)
Some Like It Hot (1959, Billy Wilder, USA)
2 votes:
Belle de Jour (1967, Luis Buñuel, France)
The Killing (1956, Stanley Kubrick, USA)
Lola Montès (1955, Max Ophüls, France)
Lolita (1962, Stanley Kubrick, UK)
Sullivan’s Travels (1941, Preston Sturges, USA)
Umberto D. (1952, Vittorio de Sica, Italy)
1 vote:
The Apartment (1960, Billy Wilder)
Summertime (1955, David Lean, USA)
Ugetsu (1953, Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
Category B - Directors With No Previously-Inducted Films (English-Language)
* Night of the Living Dead (1968, George A. Romero, USA) [12 votes]
* It’s a Wonderful Life (1946, Frank Capra, USA) [10 votes]
* Greed (1924, Erich von Stroheim, USA) [8 votes]
7 votes
Kiss Me Deadly (1955, Robert Aldrich, USA)
6 votes
All About Eve (1950, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, USA)
5 votes
Bonnie and Clyde (1967, Arthur Penn, USA)
A Hard Day’s Night! (1964, Richard Lester, UK)
The Manchurian Candidate (1962, John Frankenheimer, USA)
4 votes
The Graduate (1967, Mike Nichols, USA)
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944, Vincente Minnelli, USA)
Portrait of Jason (1967, Shirley Clarke, USA)
Window Water Baby Moving (1959, Stan Brakhage, USA)
3 votes
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930, Lewis Milestone, USA)
Broken Blossoms (1919, D.W. Griffith, USA)
Report (1967, Bruce Conner, USA)
Seconds (1966, John Frankenheimer, USA)
The Servant (1963, Joseph Losey, UK)
A Star Is Born (1954, George Cukor, USA)
2 votes
The Haunting (1963, Robert Wise, USA)
Park Row (1952, Samuel Fuller, USA)
Shadows (1959, John Cassavetes, USA)
1 vote
The Hitch-Hiker (1953, Ida Lupino, USA)
Category C - Directors With No Previously-Inducted Films (Non-English-Language)
* Eyes Without a Face (1960, Georges Franju, France) [12 votes]
* La Belle et la Bête (1946, Jean Cocteau, France) [11 votes]
* Children of Paradise (1945, Marcel Carné, France) [11 votes]
* The Leopard (1963, Luchino Visconti, Italy) [10 votes]
8 votes
Black Girl (1966, Ousmane Sembène, Senegal)
Elevator to the Gallows (1958, Louis Malle, France)
Rififi (1955, Jules Dassin, France)
6 votes
Pandora’s Box (1929, G.W. Pabst, Germany)
4 votes
Ménilmontant (1926, Dimitri Kirsanoff, France)
Unsere Afrikareise (1966, Peter Kubelka, Austria)
3 votes
The Cranes Are Flying (1957, Mikhail Kalatozov, USSR)
2 votes
Awaara (1951, Raj Kapoor, India)
Fires on the Plain (1959, Kon Ichikawa, Japan)
The Human Condition, Part I: No Greater Love (1959, Masaki Kobayashi, Japan)
Kanal (1957, Andrzej Wajda, Poland)
Orpheus (1950, Jean Cocteau, France)
Thanks to everybody for follow us for this year’s festivities. The site should be updated within the next week. See you this winter for this year’s Muriels!
Sunday, August 11, 2019
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: Eyes Without a Face (1960, Georges Franju)
“I first saw George Franju’s Eyes Without A Face on a gray market dupe under the title ‘The Horror Chamber of Doctor Faustus.’ It’s a title that, broadly speaking, fits the film even if the name of the doctor isn’t ‘Faustus.’ To describe the plot of the film, in which a mad plastic surgeon murders women in order to graft their faces onto the ruined face of his daughter, is to conjure up a lurid picture of an exploitation film. And the film lives up to that title, too, in a stomach-churning surgical sequence that’s filmed with a dispassionate, clinical clarity. It’s a film that is an affront to an unprepared audience.
“Certainly, continental directors spent a fair amount of time and energy making rip-offs of the film in the 1960s. The Spanish exploitation director, Jess Franco parlayed his own rip-off of Eyes Without a Face into a series of films about ‘The Awful Dr. Orloff.’ It borrows the plot and echoes the alternate title, but misses the poetry. It’s the poetry of Eyes Without a Face that lingers long after the bruise of its initial impact has faded. Its later imitators are more rarified (most famously, Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In and Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky). But even these are grasping after a phantom, an ineffable otherness that haunts the images in Franju’s film that cannot be replicated.
“It’s a film of primal images translated from the darkest European myths into a contemporary (in 1959) post war France. Dr. Genessier would have been a familiar figure to an audience for whom the Nazi doctors were a fresh memory. It’s a film, too, about identity. Genessier himself presents one face to the world while his true self is something else entirely. Like the Nazis, Genessier is an upright pillar of his community when he’s not committing atrocities. His nurse, Louise, presents a different picture: in his home, she’s the loyal servant, perhaps in love with Genessier to the point of madness. Out in the world, she’s something more sinister, dressed in her rain slicker, picking up potential victims. She’s a serial killer who believes in her crimes. Love is prime mover of this film’s plot, and it is well aware of the fact that horrors without number have been committed in the name of love. The film frames its images in a narrative that is by turns dreamlike and crystal clear. It looks backward to the symbolists and to Jean Cocteau and sideways at Alain Resnais, but in a French cinema that never made all that many horror movies, it is sui generis.
“I need to own up to personal elements of my relationship with Eyes Without a Face. When I had the opportunity to choose my own name after my gender transition, I chose to name myself after Edith’s Scob’s character, Christiane Genessier. She’s the masked princess drifting through the gothic castle of her mad sorcerer of a father. Obviously, the film is meaningful to me in a way that might not resonate with all audiences. For me, it strikes a deep chord of melancholy because it’s fundamentally about the imposition of gender norms on subjugated women by a patriarchy that has determined that a woman’s worth is found in what she looks like. It’s a microcosm of the concerns of feminism and humanity itself balled up inside a dark fairy tale, touching on the agency of women, women acting as the kapos of the patriarchy (this is Alida Valli’s sinister nurse), of bodily autonomy, of some women being disposable once men get what they want from them. I feel a deep kinship with Christiane Genessier, who is subject to a society and a father who believe her body has to appear one way even when that one way is impossible. In the end, she can’t live with the monstrosity in either such an oppressive family life or in herself. It’s every bit the same kind of nightmare as The Handmaid’s Tale or ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’ Issues of bodily autonomy are literally the thread of life for me. If I was imprisoned in the body I was issued at birth, I would be dead. Christiane Genessier has no prince charming to save her, but she eventually takes control of her own destiny and saves herself, wandering into the night like a ghost, drifting to an uncertain future.
“This is one of the greatest of all horror movies.” ~ Christianne Benedict
Coming tomorrow: this year's voting results, plus maybe some remarks if I'm feeling chatty. We'll see.
“Certainly, continental directors spent a fair amount of time and energy making rip-offs of the film in the 1960s. The Spanish exploitation director, Jess Franco parlayed his own rip-off of Eyes Without a Face into a series of films about ‘The Awful Dr. Orloff.’ It borrows the plot and echoes the alternate title, but misses the poetry. It’s the poetry of Eyes Without a Face that lingers long after the bruise of its initial impact has faded. Its later imitators are more rarified (most famously, Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In and Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky). But even these are grasping after a phantom, an ineffable otherness that haunts the images in Franju’s film that cannot be replicated.
“It’s a film of primal images translated from the darkest European myths into a contemporary (in 1959) post war France. Dr. Genessier would have been a familiar figure to an audience for whom the Nazi doctors were a fresh memory. It’s a film, too, about identity. Genessier himself presents one face to the world while his true self is something else entirely. Like the Nazis, Genessier is an upright pillar of his community when he’s not committing atrocities. His nurse, Louise, presents a different picture: in his home, she’s the loyal servant, perhaps in love with Genessier to the point of madness. Out in the world, she’s something more sinister, dressed in her rain slicker, picking up potential victims. She’s a serial killer who believes in her crimes. Love is prime mover of this film’s plot, and it is well aware of the fact that horrors without number have been committed in the name of love. The film frames its images in a narrative that is by turns dreamlike and crystal clear. It looks backward to the symbolists and to Jean Cocteau and sideways at Alain Resnais, but in a French cinema that never made all that many horror movies, it is sui generis.
“I need to own up to personal elements of my relationship with Eyes Without a Face. When I had the opportunity to choose my own name after my gender transition, I chose to name myself after Edith’s Scob’s character, Christiane Genessier. She’s the masked princess drifting through the gothic castle of her mad sorcerer of a father. Obviously, the film is meaningful to me in a way that might not resonate with all audiences. For me, it strikes a deep chord of melancholy because it’s fundamentally about the imposition of gender norms on subjugated women by a patriarchy that has determined that a woman’s worth is found in what she looks like. It’s a microcosm of the concerns of feminism and humanity itself balled up inside a dark fairy tale, touching on the agency of women, women acting as the kapos of the patriarchy (this is Alida Valli’s sinister nurse), of bodily autonomy, of some women being disposable once men get what they want from them. I feel a deep kinship with Christiane Genessier, who is subject to a society and a father who believe her body has to appear one way even when that one way is impossible. In the end, she can’t live with the monstrosity in either such an oppressive family life or in herself. It’s every bit the same kind of nightmare as The Handmaid’s Tale or ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’ Issues of bodily autonomy are literally the thread of life for me. If I was imprisoned in the body I was issued at birth, I would be dead. Christiane Genessier has no prince charming to save her, but she eventually takes control of her own destiny and saves herself, wandering into the night like a ghost, drifting to an uncertain future.
“This is one of the greatest of all horror movies.” ~ Christianne Benedict
Coming tomorrow: this year's voting results, plus maybe some remarks if I'm feeling chatty. We'll see.
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: Night of the Living Dead (1968, George A. Romero)
"I know you're afraid. I am too."
“The first time I saw George A. Romero's landmark horror film Night of the Living Dead, I was sixteen. I was staying over at my best friend Jim's place, as I often did in high school. His mother, though usually home, was away for some reason this particular evening, and though we'd often go downtown and hang out at the various coffee shops on Main Street, this night we'd decided to stay in and fart around. Flipping channels, we came across a local station filling time with a cheap horror film - Rospo Pallenberg's Cutting Class. That film, a dumb and clumsy thing that never quite figures out if it's intending or not to be funny, activated our natural teenage tendency towards mockery, and we had a good time riding it as hard as we could. Having built up a good head of steam, we decided to stick around for the next film, fully expecting to continue with our fun. That film turned out to be Dead. Jump to 2 AM, where we have be stunned into silence, our only reaction to be to slowly turn to each other and utter, ‘Whoa.’ I did not sleep well that night.
“Almost a quarter century later, after a dozen viewings, my most recent watch of Dead this past week still left me stunned into silence. I have over the years shown it to other people, people who aren't film buffs, and seen the same reaction happen. I'm not sure what else I can add to the conversation on this one - few films have been as poked, prodded, pulled, dissected, deconstructed and blown apart as this - so all I can do is concentrate on my specific reaction and what that says about the film. And beyond the vituperative social commentary, beyond the groundbreaking casting, beyond the fact that Romero straight-up invented an entire genre, beyond everything that makes this a game-changer... strip all that away, get down to the meat and bone of the thing, and you still have the most terrifying film ever made, a film that retains its cruel and incomparable power to disorient and disturb even after double-digit viewings.
“Therein lies the extraordinary power of Dead - it's a destabilized film for and from a destabilized time, a work of narrative art in which the narrative is a series of shock waves meant to wreck the audience's sense of expectation. And within those shock waves lies its suffocating sense of dread, the mounting panic that stems from its eventual succumbing to the sense that everything is wrong and nothing will be okay. Cutting through the accumulated detritus around the film to find its core, this is the elemental truth to be found there - Night of the Living Dead works at a level most horror cannot hope to touch because, for any number of reasons relating to the time and place it was made, it posits a future where Nothing Will Be Okay. Fear is the only option. There's no road out. These are terrifying times, and this might be The End. I know you're afraid. I am too.” ~ Steve Carlson
“The first time I saw George A. Romero's landmark horror film Night of the Living Dead, I was sixteen. I was staying over at my best friend Jim's place, as I often did in high school. His mother, though usually home, was away for some reason this particular evening, and though we'd often go downtown and hang out at the various coffee shops on Main Street, this night we'd decided to stay in and fart around. Flipping channels, we came across a local station filling time with a cheap horror film - Rospo Pallenberg's Cutting Class. That film, a dumb and clumsy thing that never quite figures out if it's intending or not to be funny, activated our natural teenage tendency towards mockery, and we had a good time riding it as hard as we could. Having built up a good head of steam, we decided to stick around for the next film, fully expecting to continue with our fun. That film turned out to be Dead. Jump to 2 AM, where we have be stunned into silence, our only reaction to be to slowly turn to each other and utter, ‘Whoa.’ I did not sleep well that night.
“Almost a quarter century later, after a dozen viewings, my most recent watch of Dead this past week still left me stunned into silence. I have over the years shown it to other people, people who aren't film buffs, and seen the same reaction happen. I'm not sure what else I can add to the conversation on this one - few films have been as poked, prodded, pulled, dissected, deconstructed and blown apart as this - so all I can do is concentrate on my specific reaction and what that says about the film. And beyond the vituperative social commentary, beyond the groundbreaking casting, beyond the fact that Romero straight-up invented an entire genre, beyond everything that makes this a game-changer... strip all that away, get down to the meat and bone of the thing, and you still have the most terrifying film ever made, a film that retains its cruel and incomparable power to disorient and disturb even after double-digit viewings.
“Therein lies the extraordinary power of Dead - it's a destabilized film for and from a destabilized time, a work of narrative art in which the narrative is a series of shock waves meant to wreck the audience's sense of expectation. And within those shock waves lies its suffocating sense of dread, the mounting panic that stems from its eventual succumbing to the sense that everything is wrong and nothing will be okay. Cutting through the accumulated detritus around the film to find its core, this is the elemental truth to be found there - Night of the Living Dead works at a level most horror cannot hope to touch because, for any number of reasons relating to the time and place it was made, it posits a future where Nothing Will Be Okay. Fear is the only option. There's no road out. These are terrifying times, and this might be The End. I know you're afraid. I am too.” ~ Steve Carlson
Saturday, August 10, 2019
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: La Belle et la Bête (1946, Jean Cocteau)
“Fangs and bristly fur obscure the handsome face of Jean Marais, who plays both blowhard suitor Avenant and the title monster in Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast. He menaces Josette Day, who plays Belle, from either end of its pastoral romance. She's in the thrall of patriarchy within both mortal and mystical realms.
“The Beast wears glittering fineries, shot by Henri Alékan in inky blacks and luminous whites. His castle is a dreamland of surrealist effects work. Disembodied hands grip candles in its hallways; reversed footage and slow motion render bodies uncanny. The decor, like its master, is achingly vulnerable. Little else in film fantasy is as seductive as Cocteau's sui generis fairy tale.” ~ Alice Stoehr
Coming tomorrow: Our final day of inductions is Horror Day! Oooooohhhhh scaaaaaary!!! We spotlight a couple of creepy classics, introduced by two of Muriel’s finest. Come back and see the late two honorees… IF YOU DARE!
(Also, there'll be a little wrap-up piece with voting results and such. Sliiiiiightly lessssssssss scaaaary!)
“The Beast wears glittering fineries, shot by Henri Alékan in inky blacks and luminous whites. His castle is a dreamland of surrealist effects work. Disembodied hands grip candles in its hallways; reversed footage and slow motion render bodies uncanny. The decor, like its master, is achingly vulnerable. Little else in film fantasy is as seductive as Cocteau's sui generis fairy tale.” ~ Alice Stoehr
Coming tomorrow: Our final day of inductions is Horror Day! Oooooohhhhh scaaaaaary!!! We spotlight a couple of creepy classics, introduced by two of Muriel’s finest. Come back and see the late two honorees… IF YOU DARE!
(Also, there'll be a little wrap-up piece with voting results and such. Sliiiiiightly lessssssssss scaaaary!)
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: Ikiru (1952, Akira Kurosawa)
“Even if Ikiru is one of the most beautiful, humanist and transcendent pieces of work ever created (directed by one of cinema’s great humanists), its outlook on life isn’t necessarily as hopeful as it appears at first glance. Sure, the movie’s inedible image is the bureaucrat Kanji Watanabe (character actor Takashi Shimura making his best work here) sitting on a swing, as he knows his own demise is approaching. But one forgets that this is a film that opens with an X-ray image of a cancer-riddled stomach, the stomach of the man that we soon see working at the city hall, filing away complaints, denying funds and moving on with his life. He’s already dead.
“Of course, the film shows us the moment in Watanabe’s life when he decides to make a difference, to make amends with his past as the ‘living dead’ and, instead, to really make the effort ‘to live’ (which is the translation of the title, Ikiru). But just when we’re about to see how he’s trying to create something good for the community, the film jumps forward… to his funeral. The mourners discuss his life, completely unaware of the changes he made in the shadows of government bureaucracy. So, he’s not only dead, he’s deader than death itself, as he won’t be remembered by anyone. Another anonymous death, another body turning to dust in the ground.
“But the way Kurosawa approaches the dead man fills us with hope all the same. Maybe it’s the feeling deep inside all of us that we’ll be forgotten, or that we’re not living the lives we should. It’s nice to think that one last act might redeem us, but is that really the truth? Kurosawa has the perfect answer for that: the kids laughing and playing in the park Watanabe made possible. Their energy escaping into the air, filling the screen – it’s the breath of life itself.
“If you seek Watanabe’s monument, look around you.” ~ Jaime Grijalba
“Of course, the film shows us the moment in Watanabe’s life when he decides to make a difference, to make amends with his past as the ‘living dead’ and, instead, to really make the effort ‘to live’ (which is the translation of the title, Ikiru). But just when we’re about to see how he’s trying to create something good for the community, the film jumps forward… to his funeral. The mourners discuss his life, completely unaware of the changes he made in the shadows of government bureaucracy. So, he’s not only dead, he’s deader than death itself, as he won’t be remembered by anyone. Another anonymous death, another body turning to dust in the ground.
“But the way Kurosawa approaches the dead man fills us with hope all the same. Maybe it’s the feeling deep inside all of us that we’ll be forgotten, or that we’re not living the lives we should. It’s nice to think that one last act might redeem us, but is that really the truth? Kurosawa has the perfect answer for that: the kids laughing and playing in the park Watanabe made possible. Their energy escaping into the air, filling the screen – it’s the breath of life itself.
“If you seek Watanabe’s monument, look around you.” ~ Jaime Grijalba
Friday, August 9, 2019
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: The Leopard (1963, Luchino Visconti)
“Luchino Visconti’s masterpiece The Leopard is one of the most celebrated period dramas in cinematic history, and for good reason – every set, every prop, every stitch of clothing looks and feels impeccable. What distinguishes Visconti’s film, adapted from a novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, from so many other films like it is that the settings and costumes don’t seem glamourous or lush. Indeed, everything feels a little worn, as if one might pick up a random candlestick to find a discolored patch underneath, the tablecloth faded from too much sunlight and dust over the years. This is very much in keeping with the tale the film has to tell, that of an aging Prince in the autumn of his days, on the cusp of outliving the society he’s belonged to since before he was born.
“The Prince, known as Don Fabrizio, is played by Burt Lancaster, who then as now seems an unlikely choice to play an Italian aristocrat. And yet it works (despite the obvious ethnic differences), because Visconti recognized the intangible qualities that Lancaster brought to the part. Lancaster’s athletic background allowed him to inject a masculine virility into his roles, even as age took over, and this helps him cut a slightly larger-than-life figure as the renowned Don. Combining this with the touch of aloofness Lancaster conveyed lets him glide just above the proceedings, seeing the larger context of the story in a way the characters around him can’t.
“And then… he dances.
“When he accepts an offer to dance from Angelica (Claudia Cardinale!), the fiancé of his nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon), the Prince suddenly (if briefly) changes back into the Don Fabrizio that society once knew, and the Burt Lancaster the audience knows from his younger days – dashing and romantic, a beautiful woman in his arms, at the center of the action. But with this comes another change, this one within the Prince himself. As he gets another taste of the life he once enjoyed, it only serves to drive home emotionally what he previously was able to acknowledge intellectually – that his world, such as it is, no longer belongs to him.
“Not long ago, I caught up belatedly with Visconti’s 1954 classic Senso. Watching that film, I was struck by how similar its ending feels to The Leopard’s final scene. In both cases, we see the protagonist (Alida Valli as Countess Livia in the earlier film, Lancaster in this one) walking through the streets alone, trying to deal emotionally with the dramatic changes that have occurred in their respective lives. But unlike Livia, sobbing and wailing into the blackness of night, Don Fabrizio ponders his future silently in the early morning sun. A new day is dawning in Italy, a world for young opportunists like Tancredi, for middle class families like Angelica’s. As for the Prince, all that’s left for him to do in the story is to duck down an alleyway and disappear.” ~ Paul Clark
Click here for more information.
Coming tomorrow: No cool unifying factor between our next two inductees. I mean... they're both more than 50 years old, and... uh... they're awesome. But hey, isn't that enough?
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: Bringing Up Baby (1938, Howard Hawks)
“Bringing Up Baby is the slightly askew story of a boy, a girl and her leopard. The leopard’s name is in the title, but she escaped blame when Howard Hawks’ frenetically paced screwball comedy flopped back in 1938. Audiences didn’t know what to make of this aggressive comedy of aggravation, a film whose main characters were allegedly described by its director as ‘crazy.’ The inspired lunacy of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn cemented the latter’s status as box-office poison, a distinction she shook off two years later when she reteamed with Grant for The Philadelphia Story. That film had a famously drunk Jimmy Stewart; this film has Stewart’s co-star from After the Thin Man, Asta the dog.
“Asta is tasked with burying the film’s MacGuffin, the intercostal clavicle bone that will complete the dinosaur skeleton built by Dr. David Huxley (Grant). The pooch is owned by Susan Vance (Hepburn), whose constant run-ins with Huxley form the basis of every mishap he will suffer. Vance is an intense and destructive force of nature whose Meet Cute with Huxley begins with her playing his golf ball on the course and ends with her inadvertently stealing his car. Things go rapidly downhill from there. Vance keeps misreading Huxley’s antagonistic reactions to her as romantic intent, because her shrink told her that ‘the love impulse in men frequently reveals itself in terms of conflict.’ Vance is further confused by Huxley’s profession—she thinks he’s a zoologist—so she introduces him to Baby, a tame leopard with a narcissistic penchant for songs that include her name. Huxley’s attempt to escape Vance’s clutches is thwarted once that dinosaur bone goes missing. Huxley has to get it back by any means necessary while also avoiding the possibility that he might be eaten by a leopard. Mucho mayhem ensues.
“The comedic impulse in Bringing Up Baby frequently reveals itself in terms of conflict, and Hepburn and Grant practically drown in conflict. Much of the humor stems from Grant’s exasperated response to whatever fresh Hell Hepburn tosses at him. Susan Vance is one of Hepburn’s most daring performances—she’s as exhausting and demanding as the slapstick in a Tex Avery cartoon. If viewers aren’t on the screwball level Hawks’ direction demands, Vance can be extremely off-putting, which might explain the original box office numbers. Yet several decades later, Bringing Up Baby has deservedly earned vindication: it appears on multiple AFI lists and has been designated a classic of its genre. In addition to ‘going gay all of a sudden’ thanks to Hepburn’s lingerie, Grant also engages his acrobatic talent for pratfalls and double-takes. Hepburn proves equally adept and limber with the verbal humor scripted by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde. Both actors alternate as the straight man in their comedic duo, and their flexibility is just one of the numerous, impressive feats performed by this bonkers contraption of a movie.” ~ Odie Henderson
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)