This year’s inducted films:
Modern Times (1936, Charlie Chaplin) [10 votes]
Johnny Guitar (1954, Nicholas Ray) [10 votes]
Frankenstein (1931, James Whale) [9 votes]
All About Eve (1950, Joseph L. Mankiewicz) [9 votes]
Wild Strawberries (1957, Ingmar Bergman) [9 votes]
It Happened One Night (1934, Frank Capra) [8 votes]
Stagecoach (1939, John Ford) [8 votes]
Late Spring (1949, Yasujiro Ozu) [8 votes]
A Face in the Crowd (1957, Elia Kazan) [8 votes]
L’Avventura (1960, Michelangelo Antonioni) [8 votes]
Woman in the Dunes (1964, Hiroshi Teshigahara) [8 votes]
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965, Russ Meyer) [8 votes]
Bonnie and Clyde (1967, Arthur Penn) [8 votes]
The Graduate (1967, Mike Nichols) [8 votes]
Rosemary’s Baby (1968, Roman Polanski) [8 votes]
The House Is Black (1963, Forough Farrokhzad) [7 votes] {inducted as outstanding short film}
7 votes:
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944, Vincente Minnelli)
Detour (1945, Edgar G. Ulmer)
6 votes:
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920, Robert Wiene)
Pandora’s Box (1929, G.W. Pabst)
The Thin Man (1934, W.S. van Dyke)
Pinocchio (1940, Ben Sharpsteen and Hamilton Luske)
Rebel Without a Cause (1955, Nicholas Ray)
West Side Story (1961, Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962, John Ford)
The Birds (1963, Alfred Hitchcock)
Dragon Inn (1967, King Hu)
5 votes:
Battleship Potemkin (1925, Sergei M. Eisenstein)
Hellzapoppin’ (1941, H.C. Potter)
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, Orson Welles)
To Be or Not to Be (1942, Ernst Lubitsch)
Shadow of a Doubt (1943, Alfred Hitchcock)
The Wages of Fear (1953, Henri-Georges Clouzot)
Rififi (1955, Jules Dassin)
Nights of Cabiria (1957, Federico Fellini)
Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959, Alain Resnais)
Imitation of Life (1959, Douglas Sirk)
Chimes at Midnight (1965, Orson Welles)
Faces (1968, John Cassavetes)
4 votes:
Les Vampires (1918, Louis Feuillade)
Mildred Pierce (1945, Michael Curtiz)
Awaara (1951, Raj Kapoor)
The Killing (1956, Stanley Kubrick)
Contempt (1963, Jean-Luc Godard)
A Hard Day’s Night (1964, Richard Lester)
Seconds (1966, John Frankenheimer)
3 votes:
Napoleon (1927, Abel Gance)
Rebecca (1940, Alfred Hitchcock)
Spring in a Small Town (1948, Fei Mu)
Unfaithfully Yours (1948, Preston Sturges)
Senso (1954, Luchino Visconti)
One Froggy Evening (1955, Charles M. Jones)
Pickpocket (1959, Robert Bresson)
Window Water Baby Moving (1959, Stan Brakhage)
Jules et Jim (1962, François Truffaut)
Gertrud (1964, Carl Theodor Dreyer)
Belle de Jour (1967, Luis Buñuel)
Army of Shadows (1969, Jean-Pierre Melville)
2 votes or fewer:
Broken Blossoms (1919, D.W. Griffith)
The Phantom Carriage (1921, Victor Sjöström)
The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926, Lotte Reiniger)
Ninotchka (1939, Ernst Lubitsch)
The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (1939, Kenji Mizoguchi)
A Matter of Life and Death (1946, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger)
The Cranes Are Flying (1957, Mikhail Kalatozov)
Fires on the Plain (1959, Kon Ichikawa)
Some Like It Hot (1959, Billy Wilder)
The Servant (1963, Joseph Losey)
Onibaba (1964, Kaneto Shindo)
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966, Mike Nichols)
Kes (1969, Ken Loach)
Midnight Cowboy (1969, John Schlesinger)
Z (1969, Costa-Gavras)
See everyone next spring for the 2020 Muriel Awards!
Saturday, July 25, 2020
2020 Muriels Hall of Fame inductees: A Face in the Crowd (1957, Elia Kazan)
“It’s no surprise that Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd has earned a Hall of Fame spot in the era of Donald Trump, American President. More than one writer has called out the similarities between the 1957 film’s influential man of the people, Lonesome Rhoades, and the man now occupying the Oval Office. Each has a persona crafted by and for television and uses it, with the help of enablers, to sell products and amass power. That the film’s story continues to resonate after 60-plus years is a clear sign of its enduring cinematic value. Nonetheless, A Face in the Crowd is a reflection of its time.
“Both director Elia Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg had been caught up in the Hollywood Red scare of the early 1950s. Bullied by the outsized influence of populist demagogue Joseph McCarthy, they went on to name names (Kazan more famously than Schulberg). But they came out the other side with the all-around success of 1954’s On the Waterfront.
“For A Face in the Crowd, their second collaboration, Kazan and Schulberg fixed on an actual enemy of the people. They traveled to locations in Arkansas, the ad agencies of Madison Avenue, and the nation’s capital, where they met with politicians including Lyndon Johnson. The research was knit together to craft this prescient view of how circumstance, media, marketing and politics can turn a fast talker in a drunk tank into a megalomaniacal king of all media.
“It’s Patricia Neal’s Marcia Jeffries, the daughter of an Arkansas radio station owner, who finds Larry Rhoades in that drunk tank and gives him the name ‘Lonesome.’ Andy Griffith, in one of the best-ever film debuts, brays at the nickname before you can see him trying it on in his mind and deciding he likes the fit. Marcia is looking for real-life stories for a new series, and in Lonesome, she finds a born charmer who dishes out common man parables between raw blues strummed out on an old guitar.
“Lonesome’s natural talent leads to his own show and it’s so popular, he’s able to successfully wrangle the locals into trolling the local sheriff who’d arrested him. The incident is Lonesome’s introduction to his new power over everyday people, and he likes the fit of that even better than the name. He dubs Marcia his Gal Friday through Thursday, leaning on her as he gets his own TV show in Memphis, then a network deal in New York, then a lucrative sponsorship deal for a worthless supplement and a consulting gig with a politician unschooled in populist spin.
“Marcia falls for the man and his manipulations, too, until she comes to realize their relationship is less romantic and more like Dr. Frankenstein and his monster (she gets a push from Walter Matthau’s sardonic TV writer and Lonesome’s decision to take up with Lee Remick’s teenage baton twirler). As she raised him up, Marcia ultimately takes Lonesome down in the rightfully famous scene of Lonesome spewing his contempt for his show’s audience into a mic she switches from cold to hot.
“For all the ways in which Lonesome’s story might bring to mind the former star of The Apprentice, there are a couple of essential differences. Lonesome is an American Dream of a corrupted soul, a man able to rise from literally rock bottom to a Manhattan penthouse in no small part through raw intelligence and instinct, which he deploys from the moment he pulls himself off the jailhouse floor and asks Marcia what he gets out of being on her show. The current reality showman followed a more classically aristocratic track, needing only wealth, privilege and the chutzpah that comes with them. And the character of Lonesome existed in a time before the melding of news, entertainment, and media splintered and warped what’s accepted as true, in which saying something heinous into a mic would virtually guarantee a backlash. Our nation has never been perfect, but back then, in this way at least, it was closer to great.” ~ Melissa Starker
2020 Muriels Hall of Fame inductees: Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965, Russ Meyer)
“’Russ Meyer’s ode to the violence in women.’ ’Filmed in Glorious Black and Blue.’ How daunting the task of summing up something so suffused with epic and earthshaking energy that its very taglines are historic? The only film that ever came close to having two different taglines as immediate and immortal as Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is Tom DeSimone’s Reform School Girls (‘So young- so bad- so what!’ and ‘Some fought to keep from being degraded- for about ten seconds,’ but even so, it’s not the same). Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is one of those films like The Rocky Horror Picture Show or The Sorrow and The Pity or The Human Centipede where even if someone has never seen it, they have a stronger than vague idea of what it is.
“This is a film whose idea is so strong that it permeates the culture to an extent that is difficult to define but easy to experience. Wherever a burlesque troupe rules the night, or a group of friends find themselves led into intrigue by the baser instincts, or macho foolishness is hoist on its own petard, there the legacy of this 1965 film is secure.
“Russ Meyer was a kinetic editor, an incisive filmmaker, and a physician for the id prescribing archetypes at war and more sensation than the audience’s reptilian brain could process. But with Faster, Pussycat! he had collaborators who sank their manicures into the very chemicals of the emulsion, and from there into our hearts and minds. Tura Satana, Barbarella ‘Haji’ Catton, and Lori Williams are an iconic trio, and their volatile chemistry gives the tale of three go-go dancers out for kicks who find themselves in the middle of a mystery an impact that delivers gutbucket fun while also adding a touch of the mythic, empowering struggles and defining fetishes with elegant cruelty and boisterous energy. There’s as much Ovid and O. Henry woven into Jack Moran and Meyer’s script as there is jiggle and judo, and our central triad are where audience loyalty and focus remain. Many have tried (Meyer included) to recreate the earthy magic at the center of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, but five and a half decades on, no film has. No film could.” ~ Jason Shawhan
2020 Muriels Hall of Fame inductees: Frankenstein (1931, James Whale)
“It sometimes gets overshadowed by its pop culture footprint, but James Whale’s Frankenstein is a great movie. That pop culture footprint is so vast and so all pervasive that I think the movie is taken for granted most of the time. Certainly, film people take it for granted, often preferring its sequel to the original item (this is a preference I do not share). But behind all the Aurora models and colorful cereals and novelty songs and what have you, there is the film. And that film is great. It’s a film that is a confluence of cultural streams that combine into a mighty river, into a veritable cataract, a Niagara, a Mississippi. The great flowering of horror movies in the 1930s is unimaginable without it. So is the explosion of science fiction films in the 1950s and onward. It is ancestor to much of what makes cinema cinema.
“At the source is Mary Shelly’s novel, which continues to haunt the popular imagination as one of the very first transhumanist narratives in the Western canon. The question of what comes after human beings--of The Singularity--is one of the central concerns of science fiction. It’s a story that finds its way into apocalypses of varying degrees, from 2001 to The Terminator to Ex Machina to Her to Robocop to The Matrix. Prior to James Whale’s film, though, Frankenstein existed in the hinterlands of the pop culture meme pool. There had been a couple of attempts to film the story in the silent era and there was a dreadful stage play, but those productions have left barely a trace on the cultural imagination and those films have mostly vanished. Whale’s film, though…Whale adopts the central idea of Shelly’s novel and discards almost all the rest, welding it to an image born of German Expressionism and the electrical wonders of Metropolis and Karl Freund’s image of The Golem and the lingering trauma of the great World War to create an embodiment of The Creature that has all but eclipsed other interpretations, including Shelly’s. Whale caught lightning in a bottle, if you’ll pardon the image. All those other manifestations of the Frankenstein story flow through Whale’s film to one degree or another. It’s the perfect mating of image and archetype.
“Central to the film and its enduring influence is Boris Karloff, who made the film when he was 44 years old. He had been struggling as a film actor throughout the silent era. He isn’t billed in the film’s opening credits. A question mark has been left in place of his name. Karloff wasn’t even invited to the film’s premier. The film made him a star anyway, because his performance is one of the greatest in film. When you first see him, with his sunken cheeks and dead eyes, he’s an object of horror, a shocking sight even today. When the sun shines down on him, and he grasps at the light, that horror changes to pity. Neither Bela Lugosi, who turned down the role, or Lon Chaney, who would have played it had he lived, could have done any better. It is significant that when the cereal people gave Frankenberry a voice, it was a parody of Karloff’s voice despite the fact that he speaks nary a word in this film (and his voice sounds nothing like its usual sinister half-lisp in Bride). Karloff is inseparable from the monster.
“As a visual object, Frankenstein is unusually sophisticated. The places where Dr. Frankenstein haunts are places of madness. The gravestones in the cemetery at the start of the film are all akimbo, as if their inhabitants are particularly restless. Few horizons in the film are horizontal. None of the walls in Frankenstein’s laboratory rise at right angles. None of the bricks run in straight courses. The film is populated by memento mori even in places where reason holds sway. It’s a ghoulish and oppressive film, an effect amplified by the lack of a score. It has almost none of the humor that Whale imparted on his subsequent horror movies. It means business.
“There’s a sense of transgression in this film that’s absent in the subsequent Frankenstein films too. This was the only Frankenstein film Universal made during the pre-code era and it likely could not have been made after the production code was enforced. The code sent many films into vaults for generations, but Frankenstein was too big for that. They left in the drowning of the little girl because the film makes no sense without it, but cut lines of dialog like ‘Now I know what it means to be a god!’ Its commercial life was by no means finished by 1934, and when it was subsequently released as a double feature with Browning’s Dracula, it was a blockbuster all over again, with lines around the block to see it.
“Some of the ripples sent out by Frankenstein are in the real world. The success of the film rescued the teetering Universal Pictures, which remains in business today. It’s also partly responsible for the unionization of Hollywood. Karloff was one of the founders of the Screen Actor’s Guild. He was motivated by his experiences making Frankenstein, which exacted a physical toll that followed the actor for the rest of his life. Karloff recruited actors on the sets of his subsequent movies and offered his garage to the rest of the organizers as a meeting place.
“I don’t know how many times I’ve seen Frankenstein. I don’t remember when I first saw it, though I’m sure I saw it on a Saturday afternoon before I was seven, back when the Shock Theater package was still offered to television stations around the country. It’s been a constant companion to me through a life with movies, and whenever I see versions of Karloff’s creature show up in The Munsters or in The Far Side or in The Spirit of the Beehive, I smile because I know that I am not alone in my affections for him.” ~ Christianne Benedict
Friday, July 24, 2020
2020 Muriels Hall of Fame inductees: Woman in the Dunes (1964, Hiroshi Teshigahara)
“When it comes to legendary cinematic partnerships, the triple threat of director Hiroshi Teshigahara, screenwriter Kobo Abe, and composer Toru Takemitsu deserve to be considered alongside, say, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, or even, more recently, the Coen Brothers. Throughout the 1960s, Teshigahara, Abe, and Takemitsu collaborated on four feature films that remain fascinating in their consistent thematic, visual, and aural interests. Chief among them is a tilt toward moody existentialism that, in the cases of Pitfall (1962) and The Man Without a Map (1968), liven up what might have been mere genre exercises in lesser hands. That moodiness took a turn toward full-blown science fiction in The Face of Another (1966), which chronicled the psychological and philosophical implications of a disfigured man's desire to put on another face, and thus try on another identity.
“Of all their collaborations, though, their 1964 film Woman in the Dunes remains their peak: the most focused, mysterious, and disturbing of their cinematic explorations of the slippery nature of human identity. The plot, such as it is, is pure allegory: An amateur entomologist and schoolteacher (Eiji Okada, whose most famous previous role had been as Emmanuelle Riva's love interest in Alain Resnais's Hiroshima Mon Amour) vacationing and collecting bugs in a remote village is tricked by locals into becoming the captive of a woman (Kyoko Kishida) living in a sand dune whose existence is defined solely by the sand she shovels and raises up to the surface for the villagers to sell for money.
“But the allegorical implications of this premise and the ensuing relationship between these two characters are startlingly multifaceted. The existential import of a woman who has no conception of an existence beyond ‘shoveling sand to live’ will surely be obvious to those in ostensibly ‘civilized’ society who have little to sustain them spiritually beyond their 9-to-5 jobs. But then, despite the entomologist's evocations to the woman of the potentially enriching joys of living in Tokyo, is his own existence that much better: one in which his only goal in life is to get mentioned in a famous magazine for discovering a new kind of insect? Even the broader village community of which the entomologist, and by extension us in the audience, get only the barest glimpse suggests something real: a patriarchal society in which the literal higher-ups carelessly exploit those down below for the sake of monetary profit (and, in one particular instance, the possibility of some unsavory sexual titillation).
“Teshigahara brings a wealth of visual and aural detail in bringing Abe's richly imagined allegorical universe to the screen. Totesu Hirakawa and Masao Yamazaki's design of the woman's dwelling in the dunes is appropriately earthy, while Hiroshi Segawa's camera doesn't shy away from emphasizing the sweat, dirt, and grit on these characters. But even more so than the occasional insect sounds that punctuate the film's soundtrack, it's Toru Takemitsu's score—with its Penderecki-like dissonances at times evoking the screeching of insects—that helps infuse Woman in the Dunes with the visionary fervor that makes it viscerally unsettling rather than just intellectually stimulating. Rarely has the revelation of a person's name and fate felt so much like a punch to the gut as it does at the very end of Teshigahara's masterpiece.” ~ Kenji Fujishima
2020 Muriels Hall of Fame inductees: The House Is Black (1963, Forough Farrokhzad)
“I am depressed, O so depressed.
I go to the porch and extend my fingers
Over the taut skin of night.
The lamps that link are dark, O so dark.
No one will introduce me to the sunlight
Or escort me
To the sparrows' gathering.
Commit flight to memory,
For the bird is mortal.”
- ‘I’m Depressed’ by Forough Farrokhzad
“Dear stars,
dear paper stars,
how can one take refuge in the verses of defeated prophets
when lies blow through the air like wind?
We will meet like those dead for a thousand and thousand years,
and then the sun shall judge the state of our bodies’ decay.”
“But that contrast in itself couldn’t possibly sustain an entire short film, as that premise becomes obvious as time goes on. There’s also a place for irony, a way in which Forough slides criticism towards the society in which she lived, through the scenes in which men appear praying and singing in the streets, praising God and giving thanks for the life they have, all of this while we see some of them lacking body parts or being blinded by the burden they carry. While this might seem cruel, the overall tone of the film isn’t entirely elegiac when depicting the sick, they have value, their lives have worth, but they don’t have it right now, but it’s not their fault.
“The film quickly establishes at the start that leprosy can be cured, that they can be treated, that there’s no need for them to live a life of endless repetition, where their children and their grand-children also get the sickness (after all, as the film says, it’s not hereditary). The problem is somewhere else, but it’s not taken care of. The fault lies beyond the frame, beyond the narration, beyond the deep eyes of the sick women that look towards the camera, asking not for compassion or understanding, but for something to live for.”
“And here I am
a woman alone
at the threshold of a cold season
at the the dawn of realizing earth’s sullied existence
and the sky’s blue despair
and the impotence of these hands made of cement.”
“I am cold.
I am cold and I think I will never feel warm again.”
Note: *verses in the body of this article are from the posthumous poem ‘Let Us Believe in the Dawn of the Cold Season’.
2020 Muriels Hall of Fame inductees: It Happened One Night (1934, Frank Capra)
“It Happened One Night is, perhaps, a bit the victim of its own success. Watching it now, it may seem too familiar. The down-to-earth (and down-on-his-luck) male lead, the spunky-but-spoiled young woman on the run from her privilege. The lies and deceit and misunderstandings. The gradual bonding between the leads, discovering they can learn from each other. There's even a last-minute change of mind on a wedding day!
“There's a reason, of course, why the basic template of It Happened One Night was repeated so often, more so than that of many other romantic comedies of the 1930s: it works. Clark Gable is irresistible, Claudette Colbert is adorable, and so many of the scenes stay with you. There's the hitch-hiking scene, of course, in which Gable's thumbs turn out to be no match for Colbert's leg; but also the dunking lesson, the bus passengers singing The Dancing Trapeze, and, of course, The Walls of Jericho. My own favorite scene is the one wherein Ellie - Colbert's character - turns out to have unexpected acting skills, versions of which you can find in dozens (if not hundreds) of later movies and television shows. I'm not sure I believe that the sight of Gable's naked chest was really enough to crater sales of undershirts, but there's no denying the film's influence.
“Romantic comedies are a popular genre to mock or denigrate. Fluff for girls; not serious cinema. The fact that It Happened One Night is one of the few movies to have won all "big four" Oscars (Best Picture, Best Director for Frank Capra, and both best Actor awards) shows that the genre was not always so disrespected - and that it does, in fact, include masterpieces.” ~ Hedwig van Driel
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