Murnau's FAUST by Goethe

Goethe's last words were "Mir licht!" There is still debate whether he meant it metaphysically or just wanted another candle lit. He could not ask for more light effects and metaphysics than Murnau offers in this, the best silent movie. There is more window play than in Laugh In. Faust forces the maiden's with deadly consequence.

Milton may have shown protagony for the devil but Murnau makes him a smokey star, even while casting him as Figaro comically courting the aunt. It is Mephisto who delivers the death blows to Faust's amorous rival and protective brother. Faust has a small role only in killing his lover's mother, and perhaps, by neglect, killing his baby. Nor does he save Gretchen at the stake.

But one word saves his soul. Doest thou not know that word?

Ivory's QUARTET by Rhys

Creole? "I thought it was a way of cooking chicken." The early autobiography of Jean Rhys reads like an anti-Pygmalion. Her dreams of the stage crashed on the rocks of British prejudice against her Caribbean accent. She slipped into what is quaintly called the demi-monde: posed, danced, aborted, almost died, married again a man who is arrested and exhiled.

To the 'rescue' comes Madox Ford dragging his poor wife along. He comes across as the sort of 'humbug' who feels that hating himself gives him the right to be hateful with everyone. As he is taking advantage of Rhys, her husband is marching in the prison yard wearing his blanket as a hat. Ford's wife turns a blind eye to her own husband but tries to control Rhys by forbidding her to visit the prison.

Artistic patrons behave as badly as USAID it seems. After WTO demanded Europe stop giving guilty preference to Caribbean monocrops, islanders returns fell to pennies on the ton. Screwed by Ford, controlled by charity.

Melville's ENFANTS TERRIBLES by Cocteau

Without Cocteau, the car is just a car, frosted windows just frosted windows, snow just snow. Melville relies too much on the voice over as if in a hurry with the story, not yet master of suspense, without taking the time to show us the contents of the treasure chest one by one, giving us time to ponder the symbols.
"Introscpection demanded a discipline they lacked."

The brother is knocked over by a snowball. Perhaps it contained an agate. The mother is as near death as Apu's garndmother. The sister, all fire and ice, like Athalie courts doom. They live in a temple to Baal. "One cannot help loving them." I can.

Ichikawa's MAKIOKA SISTERS by Tanizaki

The film opens with some of the best use of color in film. Raindrops on cherry blossoms drip. Women in beautiful kimonos eat. "Money," is the first spoken word. Wedding negotiations in pre-war Japan make Victorian prides and prejudices seem positively quaint in comparison. The elder married sisters have control, though the eldest exercises a more negative absentee role. (The problem os letters and legal notices is one of adaptation's challenges.) The sister with the most agency is Taeko the youngest who takes lovers, makes money making dolls, and attempts to elope.

The Japanese title Sasami-yuki (snowflakes) suggests shy Yukiko may be the main character, one based on Junichiro's wife. Both the elders representing tradition and the younger more modern and western Taeko hurt Yukiko's chances to wed, the elders by refusing many wedding offers out of pride, the younger by sullying the Makioka name with her scandalous affairs. Symbolic interpretations might be found for the succession of suiters as well as the sisters; to everything there is a season. With so much color it is hard to conclude that all is vanity.

Inoue's THIRD SHADOW WARRIOR by Nanjo

Prince and Pauper were never like this. A farmboy is glad for the chance to become a samurai, but when he is made shadow of the lord he is also made to hide himself in the dark. When the lord starts shedding body parts, farmboy rebels. Chien Andalou meets Oldboy in the scene of the removal of an eye.

Norio Nanjo might be offering us a leftist cautionary tale against upward mobility. In a dog eat dog world we are bound to be either flea-bitten or fleas ourselves. On, as Saura put it, raise crows and they will peck out your eyes.

Korosawa's IDIOT by Dostoevsky

Kurosawa's Idiot is a holy fool very differnet from the one you would see in Tarkovsky's Andrei Rbublev for instance toying with the Tartar's horses. The kid brute he meets on the train calls him a newborn lamb when the Idiot cries over a sad marwuee picture of the brute's obejct of affection. "The world's full of wolves. Be careful." Kurosawa cuts to the essential so deftly through the infamous baggy blossoming of characters in the Russian novel that even with abridgment time stops liek a broken vase for us to sit spellbound at the salon fire squad drum roll to death. The best eyes are actually the bellamy's little sister's staring down the brute's beloved in defiance of her lacky brother's sham wedding.

So, is this a fairy tale in which the poor pawn lets the money bundle burn and thereby wins a million? Or is this the anti-fairy tale when the idiot's offer to take in the lost woman is rejected through in the process he learns of his inheritance? Or is it fairy tale again when brute wins the beauty? Dostoevsky was spared the firing squad but clearly lived ever after a haunted man.

Bernard's MISERABLES by Hugo

Wooden Crosses director Bernard's film is closer to the Hugo than the musical version Les Mis and perhaps many American tastes - although not near the film equivalent of Hugo's hundred pages are given to the Battle of Waterloo alone. Ponderous pace works better in books than in films. How does on cast for Romanticism? I pity the director this task, but I admit I do nor care for this Jean Valjean the elder's droopy visage. Where is the energy that lifts carts and runs cities; only in his layers of bulk?

Even in the battle scenes the top hats stay on in this film. I will not critique the melodramatic handling of the death of the boy on the barricade, for it is in keeping with Hugo's tone for whatever virtue others imagine there is in that. I will point out its precocity in a willingness to deal, however obliquely, with the long-standing issue of child combatants. Alas, that issue is with us still today.

Orphul's PLAISIR by Maupassant

From the amniotic dark Guy's whisper implores us moderns to hear his old tales. One of Ophul's twirling figurines is more waxen than the others. He wears the mask of a young dandy to the ball in order to turm turn blurring in with the youth until he falls. To the top garotte behind the fish market a curious doctor carries the collapsed viellard, to his poor old wife who tells of spoiled hubby's lost triumphs. It is she who is so sweet you could cry, though I fear some might judge her.

I'll let you guess the good trade hat or dressmakers depicted in the next good Breton 'house' at number three. The tryptich concludes with the story of an artist's model. The getting together scene up and down the museum steps could teach modern rom com montagists a thing or two.

Dieterle's DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER by Benet

Farmer Jebez signs his soul to a devil named Scratch for a bit of Hessian gold. The moneylender recognizes Scratch's gold. Not even Jabez's mother's watchful eye can save him. They may smoke in Massachussets on the sabbath but not in her house! Jabez's provincialism does not help him either. Scratch appeals to his word as a New Hampshire man.

Jabez sees himself suffering like Job: his pig's leg broke, his wife fallen off the literal wagon, his seed soaked. "A man can always change things," ma says, "That's what makes him different from the barnyard critters." Jabez repents, glad of the storm and the rain and the hail. But it avails his neighbors none. Scratch engages them to serve Jabez. So they all dance on Scratch's strings.

Scarrier even than Scratch's carroty cackle is Belle before the stove. She appears, as does Jabez's newborn boy, on the night of the harvest dance. Scratch offers to take the son in lieu on the night he comes to collect Jabez. Daniel Webster intervenes. No foreign prince has the right to take an American. Scratch insists he's part and parcel of America, from the first Indian killed and so on... You're called upon to judge Jabez Stone.

Trotta's LOST HONOR OF KATHARINA BLUM by Boll

"I know so many women who get drunk alone in front of their television. That scares me." The shot on the woman who speaks these lines is unbearably tight, touchingly tight. Imagine being so emotionally naked in front of a room full of suits discovering that if one is determined to think ill of you, you can never reassure enough. Who can give a full account of themselves before edath? Katharina is attempting in this case to account for a few thousand lost miles driven over the past year as calculated by the machinating grinders' inventories of gas receipts. She likes to drive alone in the rain after work. Suspicious?

Everything she will says will also be twisted in the press. The hate mail too is twisted. Whose terrorising whom?Boll twists his readers, naked as worms, projecting implications, and this film twists us just as tightly. Does it matter if she spent the might with a man, if she had sex with him or just slept with him? "A good fuck is half the battle." Does it matter if that man is in fact a 'terrorist', whether or not she knew? This film's subject is regrettably topical today.

Sjoberg's MISS JULIE by Strindberg

Swedish summer seems to spell maddness. But I prefer it to the sad maddness of Strindberg's naturalism. Strinberg's typologies strike us as rotten today as the old sacred trees. Jean is no more "new man" than Julie is 'half-man' despite Strindberg's desires to determine them. He wrote in the play's infamous preface: "I have motivated Miss Julie's tragic fate by a great number of circumstances: her mother's primary instincts, her father raising her incorrectly, her own nature, and the influence of her fiance on her weak and degenerate brain."

One of the problems of Julie is to situate her emotional age. No longer a child, once engaged, yet she seems still at sea with herself. The more autonomy we crave for her, the more critically we must examine her teasing class power play with the servants. Luckily, Sjoberg's film offers bits of relief such as the light on the barn dance. Strindberg's naturalism has been bleakly influential whether I like or no, but he cannot blot the summer. As a revolutionary woman once put it: they can cut the flower, but cannot stop the coming of spring.

Mizoguchi's UGETSU by Ueda

Westerners may not know the works of Ueda but will now the other source Maupassant, though perhaps only for his realist pearls, though he was cousni to Poe in horror. Consider the horla, its aire more terrifying than its manifestation. Now consider Ugetsu one of the most amazing films ever produced. Mizoguchi's Japanese source, Ueda's yomihon (moral history) Tales of Moon and Rain, no doubt lent ideas about witchdom and weather.

Humans are the real terror. Few of us wish to be ghosts but one character wished to join the samurai. The potter's kiln cannot redeem him, for he must make it to market. It is the women who pay, though it is 'nice' to think one can always be bought back. I must admit my powerlessness to describe the visuals. This is so much more than a folktale.

I am not one to fear that folktales will ever die. Long winter nights and starry skies are still our best canvasses. Therefore I can say without fear that this work shows how good it is that there is a new art of the silver screen.

Kurahara's THIRST FOR LOVE and Schrader's MISHIMA

Sartre's biography of Flaubert Family Idiot makes much of his mute spells. But I would not have the quiet I feel before the sohochromatic design of the embedded Mishima stories interpreted as tanbi, the Japanese feeling of awe before beauty. It is in another spirit, the stutterer sets fire to the Golden Temple. The Glass score resonates but does not harmonize with Mishima's
bushido aesthetic. (See him act in Gosha's Hitokiri)

A controvertial scene shows Mishima's ecstasy before a picture of Saint Sebastian martyred. Flashbacks are in black and white while Mishima's last day scenes advance like a runaway horse in pseudo-documentary style. The brightly colored literary scenes must be meant to occlude a strange refusal to adopt an attitude towards Mishima's coup and sippuku. How can we care if we are kept outside the story, no matter the beauty of the strains sifting through the paper walls?

An interesting contract to Schrader's approach to Mishima is Kurahara's Thirst for Love. The private drama is a family without proginy. The overhead view of their meal follows a helicopter tour of their lands for sale. The public problem implied is the future of Japanese society.

Renoir's LOWER DEPTHS by Gorky

"Down here we've no lords or excellencies." Kurosawa's characters survive by playing the fool and stealing, selling flesh or other bits, even of space, and profiting off the lowest, each other, with perhaps a bit of industry (one seems to live by scraping), cleaning up and collecting the trash, begging... Even in JApan the hierarchy gets murky in the depths. We could as well say of the world that it's a bitty piece of turf but everything on it is a pain. At the forty minute mark (third) of Korosawa's adaptation a new pebble rolls in, like a turtle harrowing hell, picks up the dying woman whose been put out of the landlord's kitchen and pronounces "oh my."

The thirty minute mark (third) of Renoir's shorter version offers us the scene of an auction of all the goods of the gambling baron. The baron can thus laugh catching Pepel the thief in his house, offering him even his warm jacket when he goes. Pepel refuses as they would mock him in it at the flophouse. By the hour mark Renoir has the Baron installed in the flophouse where the cirrhosian quotes Hamlet but the landlord still surcharges the cobbler. "Nobility is like the pox always leaving traces." When the old lady lodger dies, Pepel throws off his fence/landlord's wife for her sister.

In Kurosawa's second forty minutes gramps counsels a temple stay to the drunk, chastises the landlord that to fail to do good is to do bad, and eases the old lady's death with visions of the Pure Land. "Lies always beat truth," says Mifune, the thief. This landlord's wife is more scheming than scorned, offering Mifune the girl Okayo if he will kill her husband. "It's not murder to squash ticks and lice." The old lady, marginal but central, dies after this version's break-up, instead of motivating it. "The breeze intoxicates,"slurs the actor, "That's the spirit." In Kurosawa's last forty minutes a tiger means bamboo, bamboo means a sparrow, a peony nods off, vanishing like whitecaps. Look up from the murder scene and see the roots. "Money buys your fate in hell."

Renoir's last half hour will make you forget your own mother's name. The count in rags has the impression that all he ever did was change uniforms - school boy's, groom's suit, functionary's, but not prison stripes. Pepel was born to the trade. In France when the landlord dies, can "I am Spartacus" style solidarity save him? The devil is in the details more than even the structure in differentiating these two filmmakerss versions. Compare Kurosawa's characters' horrible teeth with Gabin's irrepresiblw glamour in Renoir's staging, for with the Count rescuing Pepel from prison Les Mis style, Renoir intends us to see the depth romantically, whereas if there is any hope in Kurosawa's vision it is in the transformation of Gorky's play into a sort of jataka.

Mendes' MAN WHO COULD WORK MIRACLES by Wells

Is it not wonderful to watch the story of a haberdasher? Though they are not so mercurial as hatters, they have a certain flair. This one in particular as he gains omnipotence. What would you do if you had unlimited power. Sartre himself could hardly have devised a worse curse.

All goes wrong, no matter who our anti-hero turns to for advice: clergy, government - one policeman he banishes to that oddest of hades San Francisco. We never needed djinni to lead us astray, it seems. Of course there's a girl in it too. If Candide had to take the inside seam instead of cultivate a garden, could even Pangloss have advised it?

It is hard for any Wells adaptation to top Menzies' Things To Come, but this fantasy is as incomparable.

Pascal's MAJOR BARBARA by Shaw

"It takes the daughter of a multimillionaire to teach economy to a penniless professor." Not since Intolerance have we seen such an attack on reformers. Shaw's excoriation spreads ship-shot blood and fire. My favorite is the naming of the death-merchants the 'Undershafts' whose pater familias is as addled as Reaganomics. His religion is spelled: millionaire. Peter rejoins, "I wouldn't have your income for all your conscience."

Inequality of the sexes meanwhile is revealed as penetrating even to the level of lies women must whisper to the Salvation Army. Men pretend they prefer the peace that passeth all understanding to a piece of bread.

Would that Shaw always remembered that a band beats preaching every time. Is he preaching morality preaching amorality practicing morality, or is irony intended? Glory ever was a hoar. "We are all members one of another."

Wajda's ASHES AND DIAMONDS by Norwid

The freedom fighter reads part of Cyprian Norwid's epic poem from a ruined church:This film manages to be Beat, great war film, New Wave and more. Witness one of the great performances in film history. Feel the sun on the hill. Taste the burning drinks. Smell death in the junkyard.

From you, as from burning chips of resin,
Fiery fragments circle far and near:
Ablaze, you don't know if you are to be free,
Or if all that is yours will disappear.
Will only ashes and confusion remain,
Leading into the abyss? ? or will there be
In the depths of the ash a star-like diamond,
The dawning of eternal victory!

Duvivier's ANNA KARENINA by Tolstoy

There is a Russian folktale about a person who loses their shadow as punishment. I find Vivien Leigh too insubstantial to merit a shadow here. Her detachment is less existential than it is cold. Luckily we have the Korda's sumptuous designs setting mood in the scenes. (Is this another of Vincent Korda's uncredited contributions?) Anyone would feel lost and alone in that massive house. It is the snow that lends the gravitas to the old man glimpsed at the train station. Leigh is just blown over.

Compare the power of Duvivier's salon seance (note the comical pianist in the earlier salon scene) to Leigh's pale salon vision of iron death (no fault of Anouilh's fine dialogue). It would be too cruel to contrast it with the film's hammer ending. Only in Anna's passion at the horserace does Leigh shine. God as my witness, never ask her to perform inside herself again! (Lest I seem unfair I must hastily add how sad a mooning calf I find Vronsky's portrayal, how unlike a predatory Count.)

Alexander Korda was a great adapter of plays: Don Juan, The Ideal Husband; Wedding Rehersal owes much to Wilde. Brother Zoltan also adapted: Kipling's Jungle Book (between propaganda films).

Bernard's ANNE-MARIE by Saint-Exupery

Bernard is best known for the devestating war film Wooden Crosses but also filmed one of the great versions of Hugo's Les Miserables. I will leave it to better gender theorists than me to decide whether women take a step forward or back in Anne Marie. As introduced to us among the engineers, she is just a number. Oh, but what a number! The pilots Thinker, Boxer, Lover, Farmer, and Detective call for the neck of the engineer whose error nearly cost Thinker's life. Anne Marie parlays her error without too much batting of the eyes into a chance to learn to pilot. Are we saying she made a bad engineer?

Will Anne Marie fly through the glass ceiling? Is the sheep in the box alive or dead? To some extent this film is still about which man Anne Marie will end up with. My money is on the Inventor.

Kobayashi's HUMAN CONDITION by Gomikawa

On July 14, 1789 Louis XVI infamously wrote rien in his journal. Kabayashi's relationship to Japan's proud bushido past would seem reinterpretive, to put it delicately, as seen in Samurai Rebellion and the devestating Harakiri. Yet he offers films fulfilling functions of old kibuki theater such as kaidan/ghost stories in summer and at the new year a literary adaptation.

The human in question in Ningen no joken is made supervisor of a Manchurian labor camp. The scene where boxcars of baked POWs charge the food cart is more horrifying than any zombie or goke movie scene. In the end our antihero ends up POW himself to the Soviets.

Huston's UNDER THE VOLCANO by Lowry

"Menudo por el crudo" is a popular saying in Mexico meaning tripe-soup for a hangover. Crudo is the best descriptor I can imagine for our first glimpse of Finney feeding pork head to a stray dog in the market. Finney, in dark glasses reflective of skull sockets and black-tie as incongruous as a wedding dress on a skeleton, meets Lorre's Orlac at the cinema, a new Nazi attache at the Red Cross ball, and the Virgen de la Soledad whose petition he must win. His divorcee appears to him in a cantina, usually not the place for ladies.

So Huston's take on Lowry's iconic depiction of death in Cuernavaca seems to hold out some hope of redemption. Finney as Firmin may not like the Puritans anymore than Blackstone did, whose case of going native he slurs at the Yank neighing against Oedipus in the garden. But consider the hummingbird. There's nothing more real than magic. The horse knows his way home.

Ford's LONG JOURNEY HOME by O'Neill

One might imagine America's most dramatic Nobel laueate in Literature would merit more adaptation. The fact that Ford chose four of O'Neill's little one acts set on the Glencaim to adapt rather than one of O'Neill's record four Pullitzer winning plays (Beyond the Horizon, Anna Christie, Strange Interlude, Long Day's Journey into Night ) seems idiosincratic. Ah, but the sea calls whom she calls. "I suppose there's a woman in it somewhere." Like O'Neill's ships' crews was the Zen monestary where I studied in the Jemez mountains. It soon emerged that every monk was there studying over some story with a woman. Ford/O'Neill's merchant marines dream of land as otiose as heaven, as akward among the civilians as the decommissioned in Best Years of our Lives.

Such plays are necessarily ensemble affairs, but the plotlines never tangle. Admire Ford's police-flashlighting the characters in their bunks by way of introduction. Emotional notes rise and fall quick as waves, from the comedy "he talks English too good" to the pathos of the reading of Smith's letters. The men know they are worth less than the cargo. Who would not act the hairy ape under such conditions? FEMA once called me an 'asset' to be used as they saw fit. Ford advances the action one world war farther along, then adds explosives to ratchet up the wages of fear. Oh, add your stone to the cairn, passer-by. Compared to the Glencairn, Cameron's Titanic is just a prop.

Another compelling O'Neill adaptation stars the imcomparable old man river himself Paul Robeson as Emperor Jones.

Bresson's DAMES DU BOIS DE BOULOGNE by Diderot

Director Bresson is sometimes ecclipsed by Godard and Truffaut (not to mention Balthazar) whereas the author Diderot, whose story Bresson here interprets, was himself often ecclipsed by fellow philosophes terribles Voltaire and Rousseau. Diderot deserves to be better known. He wrote the encyclopedia on, well, encyclopedias, and he deserves more filmic attention as a master of the dialogue form. Bresson meanwhile showed an underappreciated talent for turning those detailed exigences of the everyday so dear to new-wavers to exciting genre use, as for example in the thrill of the minimal in Man Escaped, or Pickpocket. 

Blown smoke and spilled ice render the slap in Dames all the more affective. Through a pane in the door the pearls in a dark hood see only what we want to see of the sad scene. These details are of a completely different transcendent order from Dreyer's world of the Word and Ozu's view from the tatami. The sight or Bresson's bride splayed on the floor has something of the strange sea creature to it, but is as heartbreaking in its way as any dame aux camelias.

This film offers a trifecta, a best of France tout-en-un, with script by Jean Cocteau, whose Orpheus has more of the otherworldy than Camus' in Brazil. Truly they don't make 'em like that anymore. Those aren't ladies in the latter day western woods of Paris!

Ivory's JANE AUSTEN IN MANHATTAN

If Shakespeare Wallah is the keystone to the Ivory opus, then the addition of the Europeans creates the Gothic arch conundrum: the center cannot hold. One attempts to buttress but the puritan severity of Howard James certainly will not serve, nor will Jane Austen in Manhattan counterbalance, for the States is just another colony to James Ivory. What a Hullabaloo! One smells decay on the pictures, and in the fusty little flat to which the Princess is reduced. Savages are in the manor house.

What is the smallest thing you ever thought of? An auction begins: "Fair warning at fifty-five thousand dollars!" If even theater is competition, how much more film? The director tells his company,  "You are going to assume mythological proportions... Don't lose it!" This seems the place for me to admit that Ivory's style of adaptation is one that sometimes leaves me cold. There's something cerebral in amidst his potential lushness. Yet I cannot help suspecting that his oblique and mediated views on empire are as important even as those of Conrad and Malraux.

Wender's HAMMETT, Dashielle

Guiness record-holder for longest palindome Georges Perec who wrote the novel La Disparition without the letter 'e' said that there is not just litterature with a big 'L'. Catalogues are books of dreams, menus texts to which we rarely stand indifferent. For those who were wondering if I intended to exclude genre book films I offer Wim Wender's take on hard-boiled Sam Dashielle, in which Hammett himself plays detective.

Did the historical person Dashielle really quit Pinkerton's becuase they were strike-busting? Does it matter? Do clues keep coming rat-tap-tap after real detectives? What works is the punchy dialogue. The silken tones suit this colorization of a neo-noir set in San Fran Chinatown. No Berkeley PC free speech betrayal drifts across the bay to reinterpret the portrayals here of ku li bitter laborers in this chercher la fille. Police, criminals, big rich... What is evil?

The biggest mystery of this film is what Coppolla made Wenders cut or change, and why. See Wender work detective magicalso in Jusqu'au bout du monde, one of the most important films of my lifetime.