The Gospel According to St. Matthew

Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964, Italy (9.0*)
Pasolini's intention was to film the gospel verbatim, without Hollywood scripting, without blue-eyed, blond Jesus actors - his actor was a Spanish student, Enrique Irazoqui, who'd never made a film - this works much better than using an established actor. Compare this to the U.S. films that used Max Von Sydow and Jeffrey Hunter (both blond and blue-eyed!)

The story is totally unembellished, so it appears fragmented and fast-paced. The extras are all Mediterraneans, so they look authenic for once. The settings are very sparse, primitive, and poor. Roger Ebert said "it looks like a documentarian with a low budget followed Jesus around", and gave it 5*'s, his top rating. It's like NO other religious film I've seen: grainy, gritty, realistic, almost manic and fanatical in places.

Make sure you view the subtitled, black and white original version. There's an awful dubbed version, and even a colorized version out there. The disk I rented had the original, and the colorized/dubbed one both - they managed to ruin it both ways in one version.

#103 on our "Top Ranked 1000" films compiled from internet polls

Pasolini was murdered in Italy in 1975 after making a dozen films, most say by the neo-fascist right wing. He had just completed "Salo", based on the Marquis de Sade.

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Mary Poppins

Robert Stevenson, 1964 (8.1*)
This film was a lot of family-oriented fun, with nonsense songs and fantastic happenings, all after a magical nanny shows up in the form of Mary Poppins (who floats in using an umbrella), played with energetic gusto by Julie Andrews in a star-making and Oscar®-winning performance. Dick Van Dyke co-stars as a lower-class chimney sweep, who also has a bit of magic and music in his veins. Don't look to deep into this one, but expect lots of family-style Disney entertainment, with some magical animation overlaid over live action, a la Song of the South.

There was more than a little irony on Oscar® night when Andrews won for actress and Rex Harrison won for actor in My Fair Lady, since the two made the London play a hit yet Andrews was snubbed for the film in lieu of big box office draw Audrey Hepburn, whose vocals were dubbed by off-camera specialist Marnie Nixon, who also dubbed vocals for The King and I and West Side Story. (Nixon finally got in front of the camera in The Sound of Music, singing "A Problem Like Maria".) It's a shame that audiences were robbed of Andrews brilliant interpretation of Eliza Doolittle, as she is British while Hepburn is American, and Andrews made the role famous to begin with; the original cast recording will bear out my argument. In the history of major cinema, this remains one of the major casting gaffs ever committed. One can only assume that the Oscar® for Poppins was the consolation prize for the snub of Andrews for the bigger film, which won best picture and seven Oscars® overall.

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Seven Days in May

John Frankenheimer, 1964, bw (9.2*)
[Posted on Burt Lancaster's birthday, who would have been 97 today]

One of director Frankenheimer's best is also one of the most interesting and rewarding from the long career of impeccable actor Burt Lancaster, Oscar® winner for Elmer Gantry. Here he plays an ultra-patriotic military hero, General Scott, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, a likely future Presidential candidate, and a vocal critic of President Fredric March (who has two well-deserved Oscars® for actor, acting in his last film) and his support of a nuclear disarmament treaty with the USSR.

Leading a surge of anti-presidential sentiment are a phalanx of right-wingers, who use television to stir up the public against the treaty (some things never change). Kirk Douglas plays a staffer of General Scott's who thinks he uncovers some coded messages and a subversive plot within the military. With a countdown style plot, the viewer is in 'edge of the seat' status throughout the entire film. An aging but still classy Ava Gardner adds some romantic interest, which seems a bit superfluous to this plot.

Faithfully adapted from the best-selling novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II (with a screenplay from Rod Serling), Frankenheimer has made one of the best political thrillers of all time, in classic black and white, with almost documentary style cinematography from Ellsworth Fredericks. Frankenheimer said that the scene with Fredric March confronting Burt Lancaster in the White House was the most rewarding he ever shot (after March requested many extra rehearsals) - with three Oscars® between the two actors, it's a rare classic mano a mano between two of the best in front of the camera. A very spooky scenario for those who think "it can't happen here".

Lancaster was Frankenheimer's favorite actor, of whom he said "just watching him walk across the room was art in itself". In Frankenheimer's WW2 classic The Train, Burt did all his own stunts, once leaping on a moving train, and often limping badly from an injury that occurred during the shooting.

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A Hard Day's Night

Richard Lester, 1964, bw (8.6*)
Perhaps dated a bit by time, talented British director Richard Lester attempts to comically show the world the typical day in the life of The Beatles at the height of the mania inspired by their combination of pop music hitmaking and photo-congeniality, which made them the new Elvis in the hearts of teenage girls worldwide. This movie was in such demand that I remember having to buy tickets in advance, like a music concert, that every showing sold out, and we had to try to hear the film over the unending screaming of all the girls in the theater, especially when they showed Paul onscreen.

Lester does a great job combining the wackiness of silent era comedies, particularly Buster Keaton, with the quirky personalities of the individual Beatles, which was more on the side of amiable British eccentricity rather than frightening sociopathic menaces. These were guys that our moms wouldn't mind having over for dinner, even though, of course, they'd like to give them haircuts first.

This film will remain a seminal rock history movie, as the world could barely take another bad Elvis film, and this gave the genre a needed shot in the arm. The film's cinematography and editing are top notch, placing it levels above all rock music films that preceded it. The film ends in a short version of a Beatles concert, so we're given basically a live performance rather than the canned and dubbed fare that Hollywood was dishing out to pop music audiences. Unfortunately, it also spawned the tv pop pablum beginning with the Monkees, which almost made one hate Lester for what he started.

This will remain a must-see for Beatles and 60's music fans, for others it will be a shallow and silly mockumentary style slapstick comedy, with hardly the weight of a guitar pick. There's no real story here (the Ringo attempt at drama is laughable), it's just an excuse for a dozen music videos, and to introduce the world to more Beatles songs and a ready-made multi-million selling soundtrack.

Unfortunately, this refreshing and well shot black and white classic was followed by the atrocious color disaster Help! That had an even worse pseudo-plot about a magic ring of Ringo's, him being chased by primitives, and there the music videos seemed entirely injected and out of place, so neither the story nor the music worked in that one. At least it produced one of John Lennon's best songs, "You've Got To Hide Your Love Away".

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I Am Cuba

a.k.a. Soy Cuba
Mikhail Kalatozov, USSR-Cuba, 1964, bw (8.8*)

This is a remarkable film about fifties Cuba that is only now getting its proper recognition due to western prejudice. It's admittedly socialist propaganda, but is so well photographed and tells such a touching story that one can hardly disagree with its message. The film begins with a quote from Columbus' diary about "the most beautiful paradise on earth", then shows sugar cane farmers at work. Soon, the landowners tell farmers they've sold the land to United Fruit Company, and they all must abandon their homes and crops with no compensation. This leads to demonstrations in cities, and the fascist police kill many, added to the growing resentment of big business and corrupt government. Many of the now jobless farmers join a growing army in the mountains - with machetes as their only weapons until they can capture rifles in battles. When the government starts bombing the mountains and more civilian homes, they add to the ranks of the growing guerrilla movement.

Everyone knows the story, but few have seen this film, which captures the point of view of the innocent victims of capitalists, who were so short-sighted that to save just a few dollars of compensation for those displaced created a nation of communists and lost a valuable market for U.S. trade as a result, costing them billions over time - a just reward for those who think with their wealth first and their hearts last.

This Russian film has narration written by the famous poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and was brilliantly directed by Mikhail Kalatozov. In 1996, it was voted into the archive films by the National Society of Film Critics, and nominated for an Independent Spirit award that year also, only 32 years after its release! Even Martin Scorsese has screened this film to talk about the cinematography and creative direction, which uses a lot of wide-angle, camera motion, and upward perspective to include the mountains and sky. Told in four major vignettes and running 141 minutes, the film does lack a consistent story line and will remain an "art" film, studied by professionals and students of film, but will always have limited appeal in a nation controlled by large corporations, as it exposes their guilt in their disdain for the laborers who do most of the work in every culture.

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Rocco and His Brothers

Luchino Visconti, 1964, Italy, bw (8.2*)
This epic length Italian film seems to have had a major influence on a whole wave of American films, notably Coppola's Godfather films, and especially Scorsese's Raging Bull. It's a complex, three hour film with many stories, my favorite so far by master director Luchino Visconti.

The film is in five sections, one for Rocco and one for each of his four brothers, yet the story is woven throughout each without gaps. The entire family, along with a domineering mama (Katina Paxinou), a fretful widow, move from southern Italy to Milano in the north for one son's marriage, and apparantly that's worse than north vs. south in the U.S.; they face immediate prejudice and scorn from all the locals. After only finding work at first by shoveling snow, we follow two brothers into small-time boxing, Simone (Renato Salvatore) and Rocco (Alain Delon, in his best dramatic performance). These boxing scenes are very prescient of Raging Bull, the actors do their own boxing in a gritty, realistic, documentary style; Scorsese filmed it the same way, albeit more dynamically.

We see these characters change: some grow, some degenerate, but all feel real. This is the #3 film for 1964 in our top ranked survey, and #237 overall. For me personally, it's one of the classic representative films of Italian post-war cinema, and one gets the feeling that several U.S. directors have already paid homage to this within their own art.

Other Italian bw classics: Umberto D and The Bicycle Thief (De Sica), L'avventura / L'eclisse / La Notte (Antonioni's bw trilogy with wife Monica Vitti), The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pasolini). I've yet to see the Rossellini films, as most are not available on dvd. (they certainly didn't come to central Georgia when I was a kid either!) Woody Allen apparently paid his own tribute in his title: Hannah and Her Sisters, also a great film, a complex weaving of the stories of several families into a giant unified quilt of a family story.

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The Avengers

[Our 300th review]
a.k.a. "The Original Avengers", "Emma Peel Megaset"
British TV, 1964-67, 51 episodes, bw & color (8.5*)
This famous tongue-in-cheek British series poked fun at the 007 genre and others, such as cheap SciFi and kung-fu, and did so with a style and panache that's still enjoyable today as long as you don't take it seriously. British super-agent John Steed, played as a charming bowler-wearing sophisticate by Patrick MacNee, starred and was teamed with a series of athletic actresses. The gorgeous Diana Rigg came into the series from the Royal Shakespeare Company about 1964 as Mrs. Emma Peel ('M' appeal, get it?) when it was still black and white, replacing Honor Blackman who ironically left to do the 007 film Goldfinger. In one episode, Steed receives a Christmas card from her character, Cathy Gale, and when Emma asks where it's from Steed comments "Fort Knox.. can't ever figure why she'd be there".

Emma's married, but her pilot-explorer husband has been missing for years after a jungle flight, so she and Steed maintain a platonic but chemistry-charged relationship that often includes ennuendo and roundabout flirtations in typical British style, as the most they ever shared was a bottle of champagne; she is supposedly an amateur sleuth helping Steed for the commonwealth. Rigg's first 2 years in b&w are probably better written, and we see her in black a lot, leather bodysuits and the like, but the color ones from her last year are a little better made and Rigg is even more gorgeous. She eventually left after three seasons and 51 episodes (shown in the U.S. as four, from 64-67; now on 17 dvd's), and her last episode is appropriately called The Forget-Me-Knot, which also introduced her successor, Linda Thorson, as well as a hilarious visual with a Steed double. The Avengers before and after Diana Rigg pale by comparison; she and MacNee brought a cool chemisty never matched by a crime-fighting duo before or since; well, tv anyway - after all, there was the Thin Man film series.

Note: in The Superlative Seven (title spoof of The Magnificent Seven), both Donald Sutherland and Charlotte Rampling were guest stars in a plot borrowed from Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None.
Self-Reference: in the color episode Return of the Cybernauts, Emma is watching tv, which is showing the bw episode The Cybernauts from two seasons earlier.

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Dr. Strangelove

Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Dir: Stanley Kubrick, 1964, bw (10*)

Best Picture (BAA)

AFI Top 100

A perfect black comedy, even in black and white like a documentary, a satire of the cold war and nuclear paranoia.

The story begins when renegade Gen. Jack D. Ripper, Sterling Hayden in his best role, decides to attack the Soviet Union ("they're messing with our precious bodily fluids") with his nuclear bomber group. Peter Sellers (robbed of an Oscar for this!) has a field day playing three parts: Mandrake, the nervous British assistant to Ripper, the baffled President of the U.S. inside the war room, as well as the title character, a Nazi scientist confined to a wheel chair who's an expert on the "doomsday" weapon, and who can't control his hand, which both gives the Nazi salute and attempts to strangle himself!

In fact, Kubrick also wanted Sellers to play the bomber pilot that Slim Pickens made famous, and that character wouldn't be the same without the Texas persona; Sellers said "I can't play everybody". George C. Scott is hilarious as a gung-ho general in the war room, a character seemingly based on Gen. George Patton ("we can catch the Russkies with their pants down!") . A classic in every sense, probably Kubrick's tightest film, beginning to end, terrific pace.

Quote: Gentlemen, there's no fighting in here - this is the war room! (Sellers as President)

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The Train

John Frankenheimer, 1964, bw (8.6*)
For some reason, this is a WW2 action film that you don't hear much about, but one of Frankenheimer's (Seven Days in May, Manchurian Candidate, Ronin) best films. The story involves Frenchman Burt Lancaster trying stop a Nazi officer from moving a trainload of stolen French art (the national culture!) back to Germany before the war can end. The moral dilemna comes from having to decide if this is worthy enough cause to give up your life, for either side.

Lancaster does all his own stunts, mostly involving moving trains, and can often be seen limping from a shooting injury. Terrific cinematography and editing, with a screenplay that garnered an Oscar nomination, the film got a British academy (BAFTA) nomination for best picture, and deserves to be in the conversation of best war films.

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My Fair Lady

Dir: George Cukor, 1964 (9.8*)
Best Picture (AA, BAA, GG)

One of the best Broadway/London musicals, the score by Lerner and Lowe is untopped, with the best lyrics of any musical, all related to the story. The film starts with a bang the whole point: "Why Can’t the English" (teach their children how to speak). The entire story is about linguistics, that the way a person speaks defines him, and that any type of character can be created if given the right instruction.

This was the premise of the original George Bernard Shaw play "Pygmalion", which was transformed into My Fair Lady by Lerner and Lowe. Rex Harrison creates his stage role here, and is impeccable, winning an Oscar. However, Hollywood gave stage actress Julie Andrews the shaft after she created the Eliza Doolittle role, and replaced her with Audrey Hepburn for the movie, thinking Andrews "not a star" (yet she won the Oscar that year for Mary Poppins!) Hepburn’s singing had to be dubbed by Marni Nixon (who did The King and I and West Side Story as well), so this was the only drawback to the film, which is flawless otherwise. Listen to the London Cast recording with Andrews on CD and you’ll see what I mean and what moviegoers missed. The dvd restoration of this classic musical has the most sumptuous color of any film, there’s even a documentary on the disc about it, with the original art director. One of the best 2-3 musicals ever filmed. 8 Oscars

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