Out like a lamb (suddenly warm and wet)

...a shorn lamb...

Film review: Black Orpheus (1959)

I would like to think that were this film to be released today it would just be called Orpheus. But other than the title, there is surprisingly (for a 50s film with an almost exclusively black cast) little objectionable about it. As you might guess, this is part of our project of watching every film in our 50-film box set, and this week Jami got to choose the film. Part of her reason for choosing it was a belief that it was one of the few remaining ones that was not horrifically depressing. Well, spoiler alert, if that's your reason for watching it I wouldn't stay for the ending. But at least it's one of the few (so far Summertime and Spirit of the Beehive are the only others) that's in color - and ravishing color it is, too.  In fact, the film is a visual (and auditory, thanks to the bossa nova beat that thrums through the Rio carnival setting) feast.  As you might guess, it's a re-telling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice (right down to the main characters having those names), transposed to (then) modern-day Brazil.  The film manages to be a risky balance between myth and realism (with the first half tending more to the latter and the final act to the former), but in general, the story is just a framing device for sumptuous visuals.  Most beautiful of all is the setting: supposedly a favela, the cluster of shacks that house Orpheus and Eurydice's cousin Serafina is high on one of the breathtakingly steep hills overlooking Rio.  We watch the events of a day as Eurydice arrives from the country, 

arriving on a ferry, then passing through a jam-packed Rio on a streetcar driven by (the unfeasibly good-looking) Orpheus, 

in search of her cousin.  She is fleeing her home because a strange man has started hanging around whom she is convinced wants to kill her (she is unmollified by Serafina's conviction that the man just wants to "get in your pants").  Meanwhile Orpheus, a notorious ladies' man, is being cornered by the predatory Mira, 

who drags him to get a marriage license (and the clerk at the office puts Mira on the alert for anyone called Eurydice by mentioning the legend - pretty meta, huh?).  He draws the line at buying her a ring, though, as he has to get his guitar out of hock, but agrees to pay her back (eventually) if she buys herself a ring, which she duly does. This all happens down in Rio, but the bulk of the film takes place in the favela as everyone prepares to perform in Carnival.  Orpheus charms a couple of young boys (who are very appealing, particularly the one who follows him around like a lapdog for most of the film, and also gives Eurydice a lucky amulet, the eventual loss of which is a precursor to disaster) and convinces them that his playing makes the sun rise in the morning.  (Sidenote: Orpheus is supposed to be a legendary guitar-player, singer and dancer, but we don't actually see him do much of any of those, and I suspect the actor (Breno Mello) can't sing or play the guitar.  He's not even a professional actor - he was a professional footballer who knew Pelé - although he acquits himself well enough.  Of course, up in the favela Orpheus and Eurydice meet again, and this time fall in love.  

Mira cottons on and is not happy, so Serafina (who just wants to hang out with her dopey sailor boyfriend who is visiting on leave) is happy to swap places in their act with Eurydice so she can dance in the Carnival with Orpheus (her costume has a veil that she can hide behind).  However, the mysterious man who stalked her at home shows up in the form of a sinister figure in a skeleton costume and we know all is not going to end well.  He is chased off temporarily, and they all go and perform in carnival, 

but after their performance, first Mira then the mysterious man chase down Eurydice to the station-house at the end of the street-car line. Her death, when it inevitably comes, is in the rather undignified form of electrocution on the cables of the streetcars that Orpheus drives.  Orpheus doesn't actually go down to the underground to get her, he just walks around a Rio that is trying to recover from the bacchanalia of Carnival looking for the morgue that he has been told Eurydice has been taken to.  (The moment when Eurydice tells him not to look back but he does takes place in a voodoo-like ceremony where an old woman channels Eurydice's voice.)  He does finally find her body and carries her all the way back up to the favela, where... well, let's just say Mira hasn't finished her mischief-making.  However, at least the boys discover that they are capable of playing the sun up in the morning.

I don't think one should overthink this film: its (manifest) strengths are all on the (glossy) surface. The main lesson I draw from it is that in the late 50s you could live in a favela whose location alone is probably worth millions now. I want to visit Rio de Janeiro...in the 50s.

Yesterday and today

Film review: Grand Illusion (1937)

Continuing our quest to watch all 50 of the films in our 50 years of Janus Films box set, we have this classic.  If a film is an acknowledged favorite of Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa and Billy Wilder you know it must be on to something, and this is indeed really something.  It's bracingly humanistic, strikingly modern, beautiful, wistful and romantic, all of which is pretty surprising for what is nominally a war film and a prison film.  Of course, the romance part is helped immeasurably by the presence of Jean Gabin, AKA the even hunkier Belmondo before Belmondo (that hair! that nose!)  But really, it is also rather a confounding film.  All but a couple of major events related by the film happen off-screen.  It features daring pilots who are shot down, but we don't even see them near any planes.  It features an accident that disfigures the von Stroheim character, but we just see him before and long after, suddenly wearing that Baron Underbbeit chin attachment and white gloves.  We see plenty of reports of famous battles, but no actual battle scenes. It purports to be a prison-escape film, but not only does a carefully-dug tunnel go unused, we find out halfway through that we haven't been shown at least half-a-dozen (exciting sounding) attempted escapes by our main characters.

The basic outline is of a story of French prisoners-of-war repeatedly plotting escape and eventually succeeding. In the course of it it reveals the various cross-cultural class divisions and class loyalties, a dying system that the war will do much to undermine.  We also see anti-semitism and racism even in supposed protagonists.  But we are left with a hopeful message that love and basic human attachments will win out.  Really the film is a series of loosely-coonected scenes, many of which are just indelible.  These can include comedic scenes of the prisoners of war putting on plays that involve most of them in drag, 

fascinating scenes of the French aristocratic pilot Boëldieu (Pierre Fresnay - who really fought heroically in WWI) chatting with von Stroheim's von Rauffenstein about how they have more in common with each other (they actually know a lot of the same people because they moved in the same pre-war European aristocratic circles) than with their respective comrades in arms, but also how their kind is going to disappear with the war (a fact Rauffenstein regrets apparently more than Boëldieu. 

There are also poignant scenes: Rauffenstein is forced to shoot Boëldieu and he would have been better off shooting himself, and there is a more thrilling, rousing use of La Marseillaise than in the later Casablanca.

The film can essentially be divided into three segments.  The first begins wih Jean Gabin's Maréchal, currently a pilot in the French Air Force, but (as we later learn) in his civilian life a humble mechanic being recruited by Boëldieu to investigate a strange grey patch on a reconnaissance photo, just when he thinks he's about to get some leave.  The very next scene has the Red Baron-esque Rauffenstein reporting that he's shot down a plane and if its survivors are officers, they are to be invited to dinner, and of course they turn out to be Maréchal and Boëldieu.  They are then sent off to their first prisoner of war camp, where life is surprisingly cushy, largely thanks to the luxurious food parcels that a fellow imprisoned officer, the Jewish son of immigrant bankers, Rosenthal, generously shares with his comrades.  This group, which includes the irrepressible forever punning-and-singing Cartier, divide their time between digging a tunnel (their methods of disposing of the dirt were stolen for The Great Escape) and putting on vaudeville shows.A notable sequence in this segment is the back-and-forth over German forces taking over a particular French town.  As they do it at first, the Germans really celebrate, which depresses the allied prisoners.  But then, midway through the slapstick cross-dressing performance mentioned earlier, Maréchal sees a report that the French have won it back and leads everyone in that rousing performance of La Marseillaise.  For this (and various escape attempts we learn about later) he gets solitary confinement - again, shades of The Great Escape - to which he does not take half as well as Steve McQueen. 

Then, just as he comes out and everyone is preparing to make their break for it, they are told they are to be shipped out to a more secure camp. Maréchal tries desperately to tell the new prisoners who are to take over their dorm about the tunnel under the floorboards, but alas, they speak no French and he speaks no English.  And off Maréchal, Boëldieu and one other are whisked to a much more forbidding castle-like prison, which houses two coincidences - their old pal Rosenthal, and the now-disfigured and promoted away from the action Rauffenstein, who is again the picture of old world courtesy.  This time one of their roommates is a black French soldier, to which our heroes are noticeably cold, which cannot be an accident, and presumably is part of Renoir's message that wedges are forever being driven between humans whose interests are identical.  This time the escape has to be by rope, and after a raucous scene where rooms full of prisoners distract (and annoy) the guards by playing first tin whistles, and then when these are confiscated, saucepans and whatever comes to hand, Rosenthal and Maréchal escape, while Boëldieu, to Maréchal's distress, insists on staying behind to act as a decoy.  

It is while so serving that he is shot in the gut, a mortal wound for him, but a far worse spiritual wound for the shooter.

The third section of the film is Maréchal and Rosenthal first on the run, then living on a beautiful mountainside farm with a German widow, whose husband and brothers have been killed in various battles, all - she reports bitterly - Germany's most famous victories.  

Rosenthal, who has injured his ankle, which is why the two men were hiding in her shed when she discovers them, can speak German and translate for her and her adorable young daughter.  Predictably, the initially suspicious Maréchal falls for her, and she for him, another illustration of the pointlessness of this war.  But it can't last - German soldiers keep passing through and our two (remaining) heroes have to make a break for Switzerland.  Can the couple (the second best romance in the film after Boëldieu and Rauffenstein) bear to part?  Will they make it to Switzerland?  Well, you'll have to watch it, won't you. 

Film review: Summertime (1955)

 We've had this box set for well over a decade and had rather stalled out about halfway through (probably because a lot of what counts as "art house" is gritty and/or bleak) but I am now determined to kickstart the process and plow through the remainder.  Jami gets to choose first, and found one of the few at least mildly comedic ones (one that Granny had rather wanted to watch on one of her visits, or at least, wanted to watch more than she wanted to watch what we ended up making her watch). A rather slight number, despite being a heavyweight cooperation between Katherine Hepburn and David Lean.  It's sandwiched between an example of Lean's smaller films (Hobson's Choice) and the first of his huge epics (Bridge on the River Kwai), and has elements of both.  It's small in scope and focus (unsurprising, perhaps, as it was originally a play), but has gorgeous expansive technicolor cinematography, capturing Venice in travel-brochure sumptuousness.  It's one of those films for which the adjective "bittersweet" was invented: Hepburn plays Jane Hudson, a middle-aged spinsterish Ohio secretary who as the film opens is frantically filming out of the window of the train with her hand-held film camera as they pull into Venice.  She is immediately presented as something of a charming chatterbox, revealing to the Englishman in her car that this is more-or-less the trip of a lifetime.  He assures her that most people enjoy Venice, but it is rather noisy.  It certainly seems so as she is jostled from the train to a "bus" that turns out to be water-borne, where she meets a pair of fellow middle-aged Midwesterners, the McIlhennys (small-town Illinois) who are in the middle of a months-long mad dash through Europe (they've done Britain and France already and will end up in Portugal).  It turns out they are also staying in her hotel (the Pensione Fiorina) and are thus able to direct her where to get off.  They are a constant motif throughout the film, she gushingly enthusiastic, attempting Italian phrases and keen to collect souvenirs, he, clearly devoted to her but initially stubbornly inured to the charms of Italy (although by the end of the film he has become a convert to museums of art ("they're all hand-painted!") and even ventures an "Arrivederci!" to his wife's delight), as well as rather boorish (referring to "wop cooking" in front of the refined female owner of the pensione). The latter bonds with Jane, revealing that she turned her house into this hotel after her husband's death.  And it is an idyllic little hotel, with stunning views out on to the water, and a charming singing maid, Giovanna, as well as a street urchin (Mauro) who is on hand for various services whether you want them or not, and who becomes Jane's sidekick in fairly short order.  There are two more guests at the hotel, also American, but younger and more glamorous: a painter and his model wife.  They are responsible for a rather poignant moment about halfway through the film when Jane tries to get herself invited along to a dinner and they make it clear she's not welcome.  And in general, if there's one thing Hepburn conveys painfully well in this film, it's loneliness - made all the more affecting by her cheery, chatty front (she has a habit of calling everyone "cookie").  But, fear not! She cannot mope for long in the beauty of Venice, and soon she (or at least her still-shapely (in her late 40s) gams) is noticed by handsome, only-slightly-greying Antique Shop owner Renato de Rossi.  

She is unnerved by his cool, appraising gaze as they are both having coffee in one of the plazas, and is even more unnerved when she bumps into him in his shop, into which she has been drawn by desire for a red goblet in the window. He insists it is 18th Century, and demands 10,000 lire for it.  She agrees, at which he explains that she is expected to bargain, and he gives it to her for just over 8,000 lire, despite her protestations. Again she flees, but she has a pretext to return because he has said he will try to track down a companion goblet.  Thenceforth the romance is up and running, despite her (somewhat exasperating) resistance. There are some stumbles along the way, most notably when the McIlhennys come back from a glass factory with a dozen identical red goblets, made that very day.  He is offended at her suspicion and insists that his goblet was indeed antique, and, what is more, she got it for cheaper than the McIlhennys got any of theirs.  The second big blow is when the handsome boy who helps out in the antique shop reveals himself not to be a nephew (or even "niece") as Renato has claimed, but a son, and that Renato is still married.  This discovery is paired with the discovery that the painter is having an affair with her landlady, and it offends her rigid American sensibilities no end.  However, he convinces her (a) that his wife and he are separated, and (b) that she's being provincial, and they both love each other, and they manage to have some idyllic days, including a trip to Murano, a little island off Venice where the glass is made, and that is full of multi-colored houses, that filled me (and no doubt countless views over the years) with a yearning to visit.  However, Jane is sensible enough to know that this love cannot last and, as she says she has always been one who stays at parties too long, determines to leave this one before she outstays her welcome, and leaves Venice on the train she came in on, albeit with him chasing after it with a last present of a gardenia (you'll know why when you watch the film).  Is this Brief Encounter II?  Not really: she was looking for romance, and he is not going anywhere.  She could indeed be back next year to renew the affair, and she's perfectly right to realize that his hot Italian love would inevitably cool (probably as soon as he spotted another pair of gams in the piazza).  But she came out of her shell.  She stopped being a passive observer (the film camera is more-or-less abandoned halfway through the film), she got a makeover, she fell in a canal, she developed a more well-rounded, less romanticized view of love.  Better to go out on top.

Last snow for a while?

Where was this in January?