Kakogiannis's ELECTRA by Euripides

She cuts her hair in grief and looks like a boy. Her lost twin brother can be recognized by a hunting scar. But this is not Shakespeare yet. Our film can draw from classical sources galore. Early emphasis on Electra's marriage follows Euripides, whereas Sophocles picks up with Orestes return. Aeschylus relies on Orestes footprint on the tomb.

Electra says Orestes will reverse their bad fortune. Aegisthus says he will remove Orestes' head. Kakogiannis portrays these graphically with Electra rolling on the tomb, a point of view shot completing a 360 degree rotation off the axis of the horizon live.

Of course it began farther back. A god makes a command. Agamemmnon killed daughter Iphigenia, whose mom Clytemnestra, his wife, kills him in the bath. So their son Orestes kills her. The furies pursue him. We're back to gods, or Sartre's flies.

Hamilton's EVIL UNDER THE SUN & MIRROR CRACKED by Christie

Agatha Christie is not bigger than Jesus, but close. After Bible sales come Christie mysteries. Guy Hamilton's adaptations do not offer overly much but a chance to contrast Marple and Poirot in films featuring murders around starlets. "There are two things I don't like about you," retorts blue actress to red, "your face." Christie is queen of the catty quip.

Marple slips un unseen. Poirot is all ostentation. Marple is villager, Poirot outsider. Marple is amateur, Poirot professional. This last matters since Poirot can be plausibly called in on cases, whereas Marple must perforce remain an improbable murder magnet, my particular pet peeve.

Poirot's character reveals Brits' love/hate with the continent. Ridiculing him, as when he haggles with the beggar boy, places him on similar footing with Marple, underestimated. Marple meanwhile puts us back in our place, "dear boy." Landsbury looks sunken, but spry. I prefer the still and dowdy Marple, knitting, and listening.

Besides casting problems, Hamilton could lose the porn music over Liz Taylor's close up for one. But he cannot ruin Christie's plotting. Evil Under the Sun contrives to find motive for everyone and opportunity for none. In Mirror it is the motive which must be divined, among other things.

Morrisey's HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES by Doyle

There have been so many fine adaptations of Sherlock (respects, Nige, but Jeremy's my fave) that I thought I would offer a comic alternative.  Caine gave us one of the nose. This one features Peter Cook as Holmes, but he is beside the point.

Dudley Moore imitates Peter Sellers. In fact, does Dr. Watson have an Indian brogue? Moore plays the Doctor, a unidex runner named Spiggot, and a table-tapping trance medium. Is that Moore too, the massage parlor lady with the hairy back? Over the top? How long would you expect a dog peeing on man gag to last?

Cocteau's ORPHEUS by Ovid

Where shall Cocteau set this deathless myth? The left bank vaut bien the forum. It thinks it's the center of the world, but no one passes. The police kill a poet, his patroness bundles Orpheus into the limo with the body and off we go. Charon is a limo driver who, falling for Eureydice, lets slip the details of his suicide by gas. No excess is absurd. The problem with Cocteau's Orpheus is he is bete. The car radio has more poetry: "The bird sings with its fingers: once..." It is a fair questions though - to know how those who live in their imagination will act in a real through-the-looking-glass situation.

The role of the bacchantes is problematic, as is princess death. Her biker handmen may lack the sutlety of Sartre's flies but they get the job done. A girl may be just the thing to turn a man's head, but this tends to trivialize our death-wish, reducing it to mondain love triangle. She stole the wife's soul without permission so no skill is needed to get it back. It's just a technicality, complete with paperwork. The working death is the worst. And Heurtebise was just following orders. Tam tams and echoes give the orders.

How terrible to imagine that signatures will still signify in the beyond. What Cocteau calls poet is to write without being a writer. The existential problem is to write without being written.   

Kurosawa's RASHOMON by Akutagawa

The Chinese equivalent of the detective tale, the gong an, predates Poe/Mauppasant by centuries. In the introducion to Dee Gong An, the translator attempts to explicate some of the story elements that may seem surprising to non-Chinese readers, such as the use of dreams and ghosts in solving the mysteries. We can see this last element in the Japanese mystery tale Rashomon. 

It is true that Kurosawa's film offers three distinct filmic views - the rainy gate, the court/yard with wall at beheading level, and the deadly, dappled woods - but there are four, not three, versions of the rape/murder tale: the 'witness's, the bandit's, the raped woman's, and the murdered samurai's. This last is the key, as channeled through a woman shaman. The samurai in life was calm whereas his ghost's account is emotional; but is this the woman shaman's influence, the ghostly realm's, or the samurai's true nature as undistorted by the others' accounts?

One can see in Kurosawa's samurai films an exploration of the five Buddhist lay ethics the pancasila: against taking life in Yojimbo and against intoxicants in the follow-up Sanjuro, against  sexual immorality in Seven Samurai, against taking what is not given in Hidden Fortress (which influenced Star Wars), and against untruth in Rashomon. 

Kurosawa adapted a story of Uchido in his last film Madadayo, as touching an hommage to age as is his masterpiece Ikiru and a nice counterpoint to that other Japanese master filmmaker Ozu's masterpiece Tokyo Story.  

August's HOUSE OF SPIRITS by Allende

It is a tricky thing to get the mix of magical realism right for a diverse audience. There are those demands perfect verisimiltude in all things save one aspect, or maybe two, as if they were ashamed of the magic. Then again there is a real difference from pure fantasy land here.

On the one hand almost everything is magical already. On the other hand we lose our sense of wonder. It is not a sense of potential that hovers in the thick air of Allende however. It is an air of menace. I am not sure Wynona Rider was the right casting choice for a torture victim.

Barreto's GABRIELA by Amado

I admit I imagined el Turco a bit less glamerous than Marcello Mastroinni. For the rest there is enough naturaleza to ground the heavenly sights, and scents, enough to allow us to believe in terrestrial paradise: from the dust of Bahia to wispy waves, and oh the night.

There are those who will have a hard time getting past all the nudity, and that is a shame. It is they who gets stuck on the breasts. For those who accept them as they come, there is tenderness, the fold of a knee across a sleeper's thigh, and most of all playfulness. Gabriela is a delight!

Perry's NIETZSCHE WEPT by Yalom

"Tell me, is your accent Russian?" This is going to be a painful talking cure. Dr. Breuer as an Austrian does not believe in sorcerers. Nietzsche kills God out of the gate (minute three) and the clergy caricatures gasp. I am not bothered by the historical accident that Freud never happened to have treated Nietsche in fact but rather by the problem that, in my view, Nietzsche would not have suffered Freud patiently.

In the film Friedrich refuses care. "Every time I have tried to build a footbridge to another I have been betrayed." On leaving the office he tilts at horses and falls. Same time next week, doc? On the tightrope between the animal and the ubermensch, Nietzsche seems to cling rather hard to one end. Freud is of little, um, consequence.

Jacob's DISGRACE by Coetzee

Defrocked from professorhood for crossing every powerline, Malkovich gets a job dumping dead dogs. And this is far from the worst part of his life. The book seeps in the feeling so completely there is no way film could do it justice. The sun itself aleviates disgrace, and of course John with his accidental charm comes off less creepy than the written character.

It turns out the opposite of disgrace is not professorhood. It is something some people call god. John leaves the truck at the road to walk in to the farm. Quietly he calls her. Lucy is pregant, planting green shoots.

Markel's LOSS OF A TEARDROP DIAMOND by Williams

This is a flood story, not the end of the world, nor the beginning.

Elements of the old South might heartily approve such an objective correlative as teardrop diamonds as representing what they might perceive as their tragic refinement. But Tennessee knows the full story and there is savagery amid the refinement in the ballroom scene.

As for the love story, it is smoldering.

Blakemore's COUNTRY LIFE by Chekhov

It's an ignoble thing to hear an old man whining, "When's the last time you called me bubu, when?" His young wife recalls the dead of the Somme while watching smoke curl in the woodstove. He asks the doctor for help in the sack but "nothing springs to mind". Apparently the aborigines swear by kangaroo dung?!

Of his memoires, full of purple prose and twinkling toes, brother patron prounounces the words every author must forever fear, "I have wasted my entire life!"  Meanwhile there is a larger context, come of late it seems to our smallest continent:

"What did the landed gentry say to the idea of divesting themselves of their manors?"
"Capital!"

Gabler's LOST MOMENT by James

Years ago I read of a poem square which offered a different poem whether read up, down, left, or right and waited in vain for the work in question to at last produce the poem. It never did. SImilarly this movie disappoints. What are these love letters so powerful that they cause not just one woman to pine her life away over them, but her daughter to do so as well? We never find out. I imagine diappointment as well, iff the poetry with which the hero woos is antything to go on:

"I love you because your name is Juliana and other reasons I cannot say." Uh, I know your name and stuff. The hero is a would be vilain who would not stay against Tina's will. "It's her will that counts." Some works about strange people make one less lonely, if one considers oneself strange in the world. This one does not. As Tina says, "It's only being with people that makes one lonely," or being with certain characters.

Ferlan's AFTER THE STORM by Hemingway

There's a boat called caca de toro. There's dead daddy's watch. There's endless desire and a knife in the water but no comparisons. There's a rubber shark. It gets more character development than the rest.

Eyre's SMOKE SIGNALS by Alexie

How do we forgive our fathers? How do we forgive them for what they did, for what they didn't do? How do we watch the water cascade over, over?

If I were asked to nominate an American for the Nobel Prize in Literature I would without hesitation endorse Sherman Alexie. Smoke Signals is a proudly all-Indian affair and it moves. It also highlights Indian humor. That the sterotype of the sullen Indian persists in the face of FBI: Fry Bread Inspector tees boggles. Here we are treated to John Waynes Teeth he he.

Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven, poetry from the Coeur d'Alene reservation, the main inspiration for this film, remains his masterpiece amid a wealth of poetry and novels such as Reservation Blues and the Newberry winner True Confessions of a Part-time Indian.

Stevenson's JANE EYRE by Bronte

Mist swirls at the gates. His face is half in shadow. This is how Charlotte imagined her work. A complicated love story is elevated by its moody ensnarement in the Gothic. The popularity of the British women authors of period pieces is a double edged sword. Too often the adaptations are rendered mere costume dramas, pale and banal.

In this film the huge old house without electricity is depicted with real darkness. One can almost feel the cold. Orson as Rochester hits the perfect mix of pathos and pathology. This movie is truly creepy, and very moving.

Powell & Pressburger's CANTERBURY TALE by Chaucer

"You've got that in reverse English," says the Yank with his stripes wrong-way-round. "Swell movies," he says of Salsbury. "It's a great thing to sit back in an armchair and watch the world go by in front of you."

"The people may get used to watching the world from the sitting position," warns the Home Guard. "Then when they really do pass through it they don't see anything." They take the blackout seriously in Kent.

The Yank asks after a local newspaper. Replies the Blacksmith, "That's when the pub opens." News: Salesgirl attacked! Luckily the Salvage Boys are on the case. "Did I say glue? I meant clue."

Harvey's DUTCHMAN by Baraka

"I know your type," says the blond to the black on the subway. Her type vacilates: death, Lilith, shadow, anima, serial killer. She talks about his manhood and he about the corporate godhead. They eat apples. Others on the train fail to react, even when she stabs him, until she screams, "Get this man off me!"

At the end of Sartre's play No Exit in which hell is other people, the door to the eternal room is revealed to be open. Still nobody can leave. Baraka shows us that a dyad is as full of Pinteresque menace as Sartre's triad naked as earthworms. We are witnesses to murder and seduction and madness. The train keeps right on in Wright's underground.

Vidor's WAR AND PEACE by Tolstoy

Just as the vastness of the taiga defeated Napoleon, the bagginess of Tolstoy's epic defeats King Vidor to some extent. He must choose, and focuses on a triad: awkward Count Pierre, his ill-fated friend Prince Andrei, and his destined wife Nataha, "not pretty but full of life", a role outshone by actress Audrey Hepburn. I appreciate elision of so many characters and their diminutives and less confusing Countesses Natalya Rostova with Natalia Ilyinichna. 

Pierre is a true seeker. There is not time for his freemasonry (and freeing of his serfs) and reading of Revelation. Only in prison soes he meet a wise man. Natasha smiles at the disguise he adopts in order to assasinate Napoleon. If we are attentive to functions of marriage in European history we will see a link between love and war, land and family.

Howard's PIMPERNEL SMITH by Orczy

They seek him here. They seek him there. Those Nazis seek him everywhere. Is he in heaven? Is he in hell? That damned illusive Pimpernel!

Leslie Howard updates the scarlet rescuer's story from the revolutionary era to world war and comes off kind of creepy. Is it his cover as academic hack that necessitates his mysogenistic rants? This hero should be a suave international sensation of resourcefulness. Leslie is just best boy at the boys school.

Leslie Howard fails to find any evidence of an original Aryan race. That is about all we can conclude with regards to this unfortunate propaganda film. 

Cromwell's OF HUMAN BONDAGE by Maugham

A wise patient tells his doctor to love small pleasures and never marry a lady. Norah as pulp romance author represents the middle ground between art and commerce which Leslie Howard cannot chose. His sees his idealized love in medical texts, on skeletons and bedroom walls. Watch him plod over the help-wanted ads. But some of the cloudy disolves and wipes try too hard at art, like Maugham's character. He has industry and intelligence but no talent. Howard shows great self-respect in giving up greatness and art to be of use in medicine.

Howard lacks self-respect in mooning over an inconstant and cold-hearted waitress. Oedipus lacked insight before he lacked sight. Howard must repair his self-respect before his club foot. The wasted waitress case file ends in pieces, just as the paintings of Paris models. Howard, hounded by taxi noise, realizes he had to be free in order to tear up his travel brochures as a wedding present. Maugham is master of the razor's edge, the art of deferred be/coming, in the modern era where it involves vocation, or human bondage. 

Schiel's TRISTAN ET ISEULT by Bedier

Before Arthur trusted Lancelot, King Mark trusted his nephew Tristan. Were love potions the ancient excuse equivalent of drunk dialing today? Beware long sea journeys. Land, not love, is at stake. Tristan balks at arranged marriage? One might have expected better from the French than this ahistorical fairy tale. And while many modern movies overextend our mythic prince charming ideal of romantic love inappropriately, this is one film that ought not, as it deals with the birth of romance.

This film reduces the romance that invented romance to a Disneyesque chaos of cartoon contraptions and cute little critters and loses sight of the original inspiration, and feeling. "They're looking for a king, a husband, a father. Three people. There's but one of me. Clear case of mistaken identity."

Inagaki's SAMURAI SAGE by Rostand

Sunset's breeze blows the fallen cherry blossoms, so why does Mifune still wear his hat. It is no longer to hide his Bergeracian nose. Mifune can play humor but more the clown than the wit, more sancho than Don. His beastial vitality makes him an awkward Cyrano, especially in the theater scene in which he comes off as more a bully when punishing an actress who dared perform on the aniversary of the death of her old lord, unifier of Japan, Hideyoshi.

The old actress begs protection from the Tokugawa clan. The lovely young lady begs Mifune to protect a young samurai she loves. This will not ultimately be possible as the Tokugawa clan hunts down their enemies over a decade. Inagaki takes too few liberties and the final recognition of Mifune's voice reeks of theatricality. But Mifune offers a lovely 'reading' of the line in his letter about never more tracing his lady's vision. He goes on the die melodramatically on screen. The reading of that line before her recognition scene would have made the stronger ending.

Gordon's CYRANO DE BERGERAC by Rostand

It is no disrespect to Steve Martin to hold up Jose Ferrer's performance for Hal Roach here. "Anyone, anyone at all?" He challenges everyone in the theatre. We have forgotten what a megaman this was. Imagine Stallone spouting poetry. We have lost a lot from the time of refrains "thrust home" to today's "I'll be back."

"I arrived by the last thunderbolt, a trifle singed by the ether." This ought to be the aim of cinema. This film comes close, passes but a moonbeam away perhaps. Bravo. I clap my hands three times, thus.

Billington's GOOD SOLDIER by Madox Ford

Caveat Emptor: "I believe in an omnipotent god."

Does life always go in the order it ought? The film's title was meant to be the Funniest Story.

The style of telling translates well to film. Edward, the soldier, is not good.

Not everybody appreciates the impressionistic style.
Not all narrator's are reliable.

Shuttlecocks. For example, the real first title was Saddest Story.

McGrath's NICHOLAS NICKLEBY by Dickens

Nicholas suffers in situations as bleak as Oliver's various plights. But Dickens's tone is lighter here. The schoolboys' suffering is all the more painful to watch through the eyes of a sympathetic master than even from the point of view of one of the children. Those who find some Dickens villains overblown may be surprised to learn that the one-eyed Yorkshire schoolmaster's sadism was drawn from life.

Dickens abounds in terrifying villains to be sure, but their is also often a benefactor. Here it is good old Noggs who dogs Uncle Ralph's every utterance and bark with comic repetition. Another appears later in the person of a theater impresario. I cannot avoid a spoiler in examining what I find the most interesting fate in this story: evil uncle Ralph's suicide. Is he evil in this last act? The last shot in the film has children twirling round the rosie in the background as the newlyweds stand in the fore over the grave.

Young's AMOROUS ADVENTURES OF MOLL FLANDERS by Defoe

I try not to use quotations not from the film version, and no long citations, but this one says it all, and it is only the real title of the original, one of our first novels:

The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, &c. Who was Born in Newgate, and during a Life of continu'd Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv'd Honest, and died a Penitent. Written from her own Memorandums.

Hurst's HUNGRY HILL by du Marnier

Why would the Irish oppose economic development? The fairness of this film is that it dramatises the capitalist side as well. The tragedy is that it is the son who pays the price for the father's desire. And it was the son who asked why his father wanted to destroy a hill, why he wanted more shiny metal than he already had in abundance, why he was willing to antagonize the locals, import foreigners into hated positions, persist even when violence seems asured.

And what is the father's desire? That is a question that remains. It is not as easy as greed, not ambition at that age, nor desire for power since all local standing will be lost, and in the Old World where capital was grounded local mattered. Is it the pure need to do something, anything? It is mysterious as those feuds that consume all. Suddenly Irish resistance does not seem so silly.

Garland's DOLL'S HOUSE by Ibsen

The good doctor provides his diagnosis: "Miserable as I am, I want the pain to drag on as long as possible. All my patients are the same." This film endures just five minutes over an hour and half. In recompense it offers bits of seasonal color: paper chains, rosy cherubic children's cheeks, and a thin Christmas tree. But each detail makes its price felt: ten, twenty, thirty, forty. It is hard to enjoy one's macaroon while counting each potential cavity.

Any feminist feelings for Nora must contend with her adorable squirrel impression. It may be easy for some to dismiss her casual forgery. But her damning of the useless law that cares nothing for motives must still ring in our ears: "A daughter isn't allowed to spare her dying father? A wife isn't allowed to save her husband?"

Asquith's IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST by Wilde

"I'm very fond of being looked at," she says in answer to her new nearsighted friend's request to look at her through glasses. We could be in the exitless abyss with Sartre's anti-heroine of the mirror. But we are with Wilde. Nearsightedness was part of mama's system of down-bringing. One is not born woman; one becomes second sexed. Meaning brims amidst jokes in almost every scene, of repenant aspect, or most civilized. "We are obviously talking about the same person," matron trills.

"It's perfectly absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't read. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read." Wilde is wild about aphorisms. Glory is a hoar. Don't underestimate the importance however. Earnest may be a double double entendre but is thus just the thing to answer this serious charge of being.

Gold's TENTH MAN by Greene

Is it to see his old house Hopkins returns, or to do penance to the family of the man whose life he bought with the deed? Greene's Catholic guilt would have sufficed to chasten us without the soap operatic score. The tenth man is taken at random off the street. He then anti-romantically perverts the ending of Tale of Two Cities.

Sartre's story "The Wall" impacts total freedom upon us by inprisoning the protagonist and condemning him to die in the morning, then showing all the flights of his conscience. This story shows the choice still left to a man seemingly in thrall to an indiffernent fate, the drawing of the lot with the black x. 

Nair's VANITY FAIR by Thackeray

As her name suggests, Sharp is of a Dickensian type, not naturalistic. Zola dealt with prols, Balzac with petit-bourgies, Dickens with Victorians. Allegory is not au jour. Long past is the time youngsters were instructed reading of Christian's misadventures with the likes of Probity and Patience in a place called Vanity Fair.

Imagine the shock of learning of an ill-bred woman's secret marriage to your son. Now imagine the shame of learnign it because you yourself are persuing the woman! This is a story, as Sharp says, "more ancient stable than ancient fable" and everything depends on the humor. Mira Nair and Reese WItherspoon have caught Humor and nailed it adroitly to the proverbial Procrustian bed.

If I may be allowed a petty peeve it is the lighting. One regrets the loss of the ability under the studio lot system of creating dusky or stormy interior scenes where all the details could still be seen. The naturalism of today is a muddy grey mess.

Scorcese's AGE OF INNOCENCE by Wharton

Narration needs to take the form of spellweaving storytelling or ironizing distance; otherwise it violates filmic logic without purpose, as here. I will not baldly claim storytelling magic for America and leave satirical commentary for the Europeans.
Scorcese is here most effective from the point of view of staring at paintings. An operatic scene so absorbed me I clapped at the end, suprising others in the cinema.

But there is also a certain boredom to Scorcese's long opulance, whether we are watching gang warfare of society posturing. American English sounds nasal and whispy in the mouths of Pfeiffer and Ryder. Day Lewis is as miscast here as he was as the last Mohican.
  

Svankmajer's ALICE by Carroll

As spirit guides go this rabbit is not a good totem animal. It has a watch for a heart and serves a queen worse than Narnia's or the West's. Alice has largely resisted Disnification. Nonetheless we have lost much of its original strangeness, with the possible exception of a psychadelic song. This film is originally strange. No consciousness enhancing substances necessary.

It largely takes place in a real room, in stop time. Small Alice is a creeepy doll. The taxidermic rabbit pulls itself off its stand and stares at you with its big glass eyes and bares its big teeth. Later is pours stuffing out of its chest into a cereal bowl. Are you sure you want to go through the little door? 

Caton Jones' ROB ROY by Scott

I am tempted to blame the American market, apparently uninterested in finer points of tax law (or land reform), for the failures of this film. But Sir Walter fully in his Romantic vein of history must bear some responsibility, as well as Tim Roth, whose wickedly foppish villain steals the show, as opposed to the Brits in Braveheart who are mere strawmen. This later film's success with its even more overblown rape, pillage, and escewing of subtlety I do lay wetly on the door step of the market.

One sympathizes with the dramatic necessity to ground a film in the very personal story of its titular characters. No one is suggesting a filmis dissertation on the Jacobite movement. But to reduce the redress of systematic injustices to mere ad hominum revenge is to make of a hero a mere knee-jerk. And that is the problem: whether Rob Roy, or Robin Hood, or Ned Kelly for that matter are heroes, or mere brigands. I would argue that deciding for either side too clearly distorts not just history, but humanity, and is certainly less dramatic. To paint characters into such tight corners robs them, and us, of more interesting choices. We must still wait for a nuanced treatment of this fascinating, and timely, subject of robber/heroism.

Camerini's ULYSSES by Homer

Has not that cloud on the horizon the shape of a sail? The old songs tell of proud Ulysses offending Neptune, the god associated with earthquakes, the sea, and horses. Recent archeology may have identified the site of a ruined city in Turkey as ancient Troy, its fortifications breached by earthquake. The song of the seige of Troy in the film interweaves with Penelope protecting her land and her son's life from the menace of foreign princes. What keeps Ulysses from his duties?

Cherchez la femme. If one cannot blame god, one blames the witches. Young men like Telemachus, settting aside the father quest motive, may leave home in search of adventure. Ulysses is no longer a youth in search of adventure, but a king in flight from his responsabilites. This is the original midlife crisis, sirens in place of young bimbos, a ship in place of today's red Ferrari.

"Do you not know Ithaka?" the Phoenician princess asks amnesiac Kirk Douglas. She gives him a youth ointment. He needs it. This stranger winning the wrestling match recalls to the mind of an elder the great, mythic Ulysses: "This guy was not bad but he does not compare with real heroes." We may never measure up to our myths, least of all if we shirk, or forget. Rememberance may be the main purpose  of the old songs, and of some films.

Dassin's 10:30 P.M. SUMMER by Duras

I admit I find the nouveau roman as laborious reading as Shaw's stage notes, but it is said the accumulative details are cinematic, all joulousies/Venetian blinds. Dassin almost makes me believe it. But there is still too much dark, too much sad sleepy drunken staring at jugs, sea shell keys.

Two tragedies meet here: old love lost and young love murdered. "After six months married she wants every man in the town so you have to kill her, no?" There is a love triangle in which none are loveable. Luckily there is a little girl with whom we can sympathize. Clair says she will grow up to be like her mother. The wife replies, "Bite your tongue."  

Frears' CHERI by Colette

You may know Colette as the author of Gigi. Collete's scandals include onstage lesbianism and a divorce over an affair with her step son. Like Woody Allen she lays it all bare. Cheri, eyes like sole, is green around the gills. Michelle Pfieffer will serve as his old tutor d'amour, but with none of the debauch of the Dangerous Liasons film alas.

Colette delights in showing the sometimes spiteful resourcefulness of society women. In Fin de Cheri she contrasts Pfieffer's resilience with the fragile spleen of the man-boy Cheri. "Let's just take it one day at a time, shall we?" It is hard to feel for the tiresome Cheri, or even for the old courtisans drinking their solitude away in grand chateaux. "Three hundred and twenty francs for vaseline. What does Ernest do, drink it?"

Dieterle's OMAR KHAYYAM

Without electric light, one spends much time with stars. This can lead to careful observation and measurement, or to flights of fancy. In the case of the Persian Davinci Omar Khayyam it led to both. The Rubayat for which he is known to us is as much the work of his creative western interpreter Fitzgerald. In fact Khayyam ought to be better known as a famous quadratic al-gebrist. Here we find him unbearded.

The biography Spiritual Wayfaring tells as much about Khayyam's piety as does his hajj. It is in the Sufi spirit that we much understand his quatrains about the Beloved. The film skirts the line of making a taudry love story of a spiritual quest.

"Look at your willow tree.
Now what could be more graceful?
Bowing its thanks to the earth which gives it life.
Would you have me bow low before the Shaw?"

It is God, not wine, in the clay jar.

Nichols' CATCH 22 by Heller

Remember in the Little Prince the planet with the drinker who drinks to forget his shame about his drinking? Yossarian's gal in Catch 22 refuses to marry him becuase she says he is crazy for not being married. Every time he meets the number of missions flown to qualify for rotation, the powers that be raise the required number of missions. Asking for a wakevac in such situations is the sanest thing anyone could do. Therfore one is ineligible. Catch 22.

This film is worth it for the bit parts alone, such as Newhart as Major Major who will only let his clerk show people into his office when he is out. Yossarian's end is ironic, stabbed by another's hoar he risked life to comfort. By the end he even lacks Jobian comfortors: one blown to bits, one killed himself, one chopped in two, one disappeared, one a murderer, one a zombie, one at the bottom of the sea.
  

Walsh's BLOOM by Joyce

Joyce's Ulysses attempts to translate the mythic into daily life: tea, toast, toilet. His style is Rabelisian: scatological and linguastic. One wants wit and energy in tone. This film is stuck with a tepid score.

Stephen Rhea as Leopold sparkles in the red light surrealism scenes. Angeline Ball as Molly is delicious. I wish I could say Sean Wlash was self-pleasurnig here but one suspects he dozes.

Huston's BEAT THE DEVIL by Capote

Truman Capote delivers an inveitve satire on Agatha Cristie in this soft boiled film. Bogie is only the foil. The heroine is Jennifer Jones. Capote has made her younger than Mrs. Marple to accomodate the love interest, but the important distinction is that most of what Jones invents is false and fanciful.

Jones spins tales of blackmail, mad doctors, Kurtzian horror, while ignorant of the muder commited by the gang of four very much off camera, the only real crime, besides western speculation at the expense of Africa. Yet it is she who reveals all to Scotland Yard at the end, destoying Bogie's hopes of easy riches in a neat reversal of noir formula as well.

Brechner's MAL DIA PARA PESCAR by Onetti

In Erice's Spirit of the Beehive the 'monster' is a Republican on the run found by a Frankenstein-fascinated  little girl in Franco's labrinth. In Mal Dia the 'monster' is an East German wrestler down-on-his-luck in Uruguay. His promoter is an evil genius but the town they roll into is wise to them and has a fighter of their own.
This unlucky hulk happens to have knocked up a Lady Macbeth type.

"Jacob and the Other" is Onetti's title for the story upon which the film is based. This title foreshadows what we watch unfold in the second half of the film, just as the East German 'monster' is coming to some consiousness. We see the making of another monster; the town's fighter is destroyed and literally rebuilt by the town card-sharp doctor. But he will be his fiancee's bull. Someone must steer.

There is no hint of Nazis hinding out in this film. Jacob is in self-exile, like his Biblican name-sake.
   

Paley's SITA SINGS THE BLUES by Valmiki

With Annette Hanshaw's soulful warbling blues from the 1920s, this film has the requisite musical component we have come to expect from Indian film. But at under an hour-and-a-half it is no epic feat to watch. It manages nonethless to convey both the scope and the jist of the Ramayana, the world's most recounted story. We will each miss our certain pet parts, for me Hanuman's history, but this film stands alone. The second part poses a problem today.

After Ram rescues Sita, should they not live happily ever after? Instead Ram imposes trial by fire and exile on his loyal wife. One of the shadow puppet narrators finds her a push-over. The narrators comment, confuse, forget, invent, update, and wonder throughout the story. This glimpse behind the curtain at the versions and disputes still inspired by the epic proves the genius of both the original epic and the film.

Although the film enhances Sita's perspective, it may rely a bit too much on song to carry the central message of the second half. The first half of the Ramayana is Ram's trumph. The second half is Sita's. If we suspend judgment on a code that demands the highest womanly virtue be purity, we see Sita perfect and resplendant in the flames. It is a whole other kind of hero/ine's journey.

Welles' TRIAL by Kafka

In a world that imagines myth past or untrue, I well understand why Welles said this his favorite film contained no symbols. Can you imagine a better architect to represent alienating structures in society than Welles? My favorite is K standing before the giant door to the court coming up only to the door knob. But there's an existential level too where K roams while under 'arrest' and yet still he goes to work, work in a clerical warehouse.

Patients are oddly reassured when their illness is named. K demands to know with what he is charged. Original sin? The computer reveals his most likely crime as suicide. The American release cut this scene as well as a framing parable. Said the god, "you are insatiable. What is it now?"

Carne's THERESE RAQUIN by Zola

Therese knows shame immediately upon meeting the philosophical trucker carrying her drunk husband in with the argument that people meet as best they can and the important thing is that they meet. The husband weighs little; he will weigh more dead than alive. Mother Raquin took in the niece Therese for her son and for the shop. "Movies are bad for you," she says. "You dream too much. There's nothing romantic in love." L'amour n'a rien de romanesque.

Therese is more novelistic than romantic, sullen as a bovary eschewing equine whinying. Her long marriage is symbolized by the weekly dice game they play on a tiny racetrack with tiny hourse going round and round. The trucker represents escape, risk. Therese compares her composure in selling to people who never know what they want to the blackmailer soldier's sang froid facing forest of death and sunken ship. All he wants is to sell second-hand bicycles. But he has a habit of backing out. "One time in Shanghai..."

Parajanov's COLOR OF POMEGRANATES by Nova

"Without books the world would have witnessed nothing but ignorance." Future great ashik (troubador) of Armenia Sayat Nova is shown as a boy playing on the monestary roof where books have been put out to dry. One can almost smell the dyes on the wet wool in the next tableau vivant. "From the colors and aromas of this world, my childhood made a poet's lyre and offered it to me." This is the spirit in which to offer us biopics of poets. Whereas prosaic historical biopics like Hamsun erase the author and leave only a collaborator.

"How am I to protect my wax-built castles of love from the devouring heat of your fires?... Go then selfless heart and find your place of refuge." In truth the tableaux vivants with which we are presented, sheep-filled sanctuaries, tombs of study, are more akin to icons than to tapestries. "I saw everything clear and strangely blunt and I understood that life had abandonned me."

.. An a crowd of innocent victims we ceom from this world to you of Lord with offerings

Loncraine's RICHARD III by Shakespeare

This is not your father's Shakespeare. Enter Richard, in gas mask, his breathe sounding like Darth Vader's, and executes Ed of Wales. His "winter of our discontent" speech follows a waltzing "and we will all the pleasures prove" and concludes by the urinals. In another powerfully staged scene Richard begins his advance on the widow of Wales Anne in the morgue.

Though many characters are combined, it is still a history lesson difficult to follow for Yanks bereft of mneumonics for remembering who held which titles in which order. The depicted fascism I do find distinctly British, though many have tried to deflect; there's many a slip twixt Adolph's loin and Richard's limp. McKellen's Richard's despised state, speech, and stature shames not the shadow even of Olivier.

Scott's BLADE RUNNER by Dick

"Do androids dream of electric sheep?" Philip L. Dick wondered in the original story. Like sleep researchers today, the film obsesses more with memory, and eyes. The blade runner becomes so reduced to his function, destruction, that there is little difference between him and the skinjobs he hunts, androids. The only problem is Harrison Ford's boyish charm exudes too much humanity in the role.

It matters a lot what version you see, for the ending and noirish voice-over. I will say that if I had to go violently, between Daryl Hannah's theighs would be my choice every time. For a really interesting P.I. film more interested in the dream aspect of how we are androids already, see Wim Wender's Until the End of the World.

Anderson's AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS by Verne

While David Niven lends Phineas Fogg the proper stiffness, the casting of Cantinflas as Passpartout is inspired. While his Spanish humor is very verbal (see him as street-sweeper in D.F.) he is just as funny in this film doing Jackie Chan style acrobatics on penny farthings, hot air balloons, elephants, ostriches, and stage coaches. The treatment of the Sioux may not be strictly p.c. but All America seems savage to the Brits.

Is that old blue eyes on the saloon piano? Yep, and general stone face himself on the train too! Cameos abound in this fun film: besides Sinatra and Buster Keaton look for Noel Coward, Cesar Romero, Peter Lorre, Red Skelton and Marlene Dietrich.

Who cares if the geography is as inacurate as any Bob Hope road flick? Are there really usually dancers at a sutee? The flamenco rivals that in Saura's trilogy. See Cantinflas bullfight! Be sure you do not skip the prologue. In hommage to Jules Verne's moon shot, they show the famous short film Voyage de la lune by Melies. 

Pasolini's TRILOGY OF LIFE by Boccaccio 70

If you like tatooed wrestlers, Pasolini's Canterbury Tales can get your goat. "Between a geste and a joke, many a truth..." It is pleasant indeed to see squire mirrorless, eyebrows akimbo, skip and sing before he is blinded by horns. He thinks himself keeper of the key to a garden so fair the Roman de la Rose must pale.

Less Cervantine tales than these are their kissing kin Arabian Nights, second offering in Pasolini's Trilogy of Life.  "Truth isn't found only in one dream, but in many." Disney lost the exalted and the sex, though Sir Burton touched on the worldly side of the Beloved.

Goods sold in a chest are much valued, unless adulterers. The dead bite in Pasolini's Decameron where Ovid meets Rabelais, and the wit hits the road. Cupid's arrow never looked quite like this! Italy's top cineastes   combine in Boccacio 70 to update the tales. First Baron Calvino offers a potential twist on a couple out of Il Posto.

The second act is all Fellini, beginning at Zazie-pace before settling into a steady story of prudery versus a billboard. The protagonist conjures temptations akin to Bunuel's Simon Stylist's but the cathedral, though Kafkaesque, cannot stop the massive billboardgirl disrobing in the street, inspiring Woody's massive breast run amok and Jeff Daniels off the screen in Purple Rose of Cairo. The knight errant of decency dons his straight-jacket in the end. This is a fun blanket to be tossed in!

To tell you that Fellini is followed by Visconti and de Sica, the whole signed Zavattini is to tell you that you must see this film. And drink more milk.

O'Horgan's RHINOCEROS by Ionesco

If both Becket's waiters were late, they would be Producers' Gene Wilder a little hung over and a light-as-a-feather Zero Mostel in this version of Ionesco's parody of Nazism. Gene drops the alarm clock in the toilet. "I just can't get used to life." Hide-bound Zero finds the sullying of a tie worse than being called a mule. "I never dream." Socrates is proven syllologically a cat.

Rhino had a menacing musk in the artwarehouse presentation I once saw. Ionesco's Lesson also had an air of Pinter at Theatre de la Huchette where the bald soprano has failed to appear since it opened in the 60s. This film, with its peekaboo CPAs as interchangeable as musical office chairs, plays it much more broadly.

Gene can no longer take his humanity for granted. "What's color got to do with it?" Zero transforms, screaming rubbish. "The human individual is all washed up." A newscaster transforms in the middle of the weather report. On TV are: boxing, a Western, war. My favorite detail is the Nixon photo on the wall. Zero is a little hoarse. One bump or two?