Drive

Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011 (9.0*)

Ryan Gosling plays a man we see in the beginning of the film driving a getaway car for men pulling a heist. The audience is immediately sucked into this film by having it start in the middle of some tense crime action. We later find out that Gosling also works in a garage, and performs driving stunts part-time for films.

Early in the film we learn a little of his personal side as he helps a young mother, Carey Mulligan, who also lives in his apartment building, when she needs a ride after he car breaks down. (Mulligan's character has little acting to do in this compared to her brilliant role in An Education.) We slowly see Gosling as more than a heartless criminal, and realize his character may be more dimensional than most in crime films.

Interspersed with scenes involving Gosling’s character, we also learn a little about some small time organized criminals, a business owner played by Ron Perlman, and Gosling’s garage manager, played by Bryan Cranston (without the same passion and strength as his role on Breaking Bad). Cranston gets a shady mogul, superbly played by Albert Brooks in a rare dramatic part, to invest in a race car to be driven by Gosling. Brooks has won eight awards for supporting actor for his performance, but was skipped over for an Oscar® nomination.

The audience is slowly drawn into Gosling’s world, as he is drawn into that of Mulligan’s, whose husband is said to simply be away – we later find he was in prison after he is released. On top of that, he became connected with some rather despicable men while incarcerated, and to whom he is now in debt.

For me, this film has enough similarities to George Stevens’ western classic Shane to be inspired by it. It has an heroic outsider, Gosling, coming to the aid of a family facing criminals they can’t control, largely due to his attraction to the wife and her young son. His past is murky, like Shane’s, he may be a criminal himself, but not by choice, and at all times he tries to do the right thing, like a samurai warrior. He’s a warrior, but with a code of ethics and personal honor.

The pace is well maintained by Danish director Nicolas Refn. It never seems forced, slow, or too action-packed, there’s just enough of each element to make it a well-crafted film. In fact, I’m a bit surprised (and peeved) that it wasn’t nominated for best picture since they came up with nine, it could have just as easily been ten. I’m willing to bet without having seen but a couple so far that it was better than at least five of those nine. This is going to be considered a quiet, understated classic over time.

It’s currently ranked #237 on the IMDB top 250, and has won 38 awards out of 94 nominations. Only a handful of other films has won this many awards for 2011: The Artist, The Tree of Life, The Descendents, The Help.

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Five Minutes of Heaven

Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2009 (8.4*)
Sundance Awards for directing and screenplay.

Based on a true story of the troubles in Northern Ireland. A Protestant worker is ordered to leave a shipyard in Lurgan by Catholics. In retaliation, a teenage gang of four, members of the UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force) orders a Catholic to leave, a man named Griffin. The youths decide to kill him, even though he’s scheduled to leave the yard anyway in just a week.

When they show up at Griffin’s house, unknown to them, the senior Griffin has left the house, but his eldest son is watching tv in the living room, while his younger brother is kicking a soccer ball on the sidewalk out front. The masked hitman, Alistair Little, approaches, looks at the kid on the street staring at him, an image which will haunt him later, and still shoots his brother through the front window and kills him. Nine year old Joe Griffin not only witnesses the attack from just a few feet away, powerless to do anything, but his own mother blames him for not stopping the killing. Both his parents die soon afterwards, neither recovering from the loss of their oldest son.

Thirty-three years later, after serving a 12-year prison term, Little and Griffin are approached by a documentary television show, who sets up a meeting between the two men. Veteran star Liam Neeson plays Little as an adult, who is now a successful politician in Belfast. Griffin is an embittered man still living in the same town of Lurgan, though now he’s married and has two beautiful girls. Due to losing his entire family over the killing, Griffin has never forgiven Little, and wants, as he puts it, just "five minutes of heaven", when he can confront Little face-to-face and kill him.

James Nesbitt (Bloody Sunday) steals this film as Joe Griffin. Even though he’s now married with two children, years of torment and anguish are etched on his face in nearly every scene. He makes the audience feel his pain on a visceral level, without ever giving a false note – one feels that Nesbitt himself has gone through something similar in his own life. He steals the acting kudos from Oscar®-winner Liam Neeson in this small film produced by the BBC for television. In all honesty, he has the far meatier role, as a contrite Alistair Little seems almost resigned to giving Griffin the chance he needs for vengance. It’s a crime that Nesbitt wasn’t nominated for both a BAFTA and an Oscar® for best actor, it’s one of the best performances of the last decade.

Nesbitt with one of his 7 acting awards –

he won 3 for Cold Feet (1997),

and two for Bloody Sunday (2002)

This film deserves a far better rating than the 6.7 given at IMDB (by only 6,000 viewers). More people should watch this film, and all the other good films on 'the trouble' in Northern Ireland. There are excellent films on this subject, notably Bloody Sunday (2002), the Cannes Palm d’Or winning The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006), and for PBS, both Naming the Names (which remembers the victims of Bloody Sunday) and Frontline: Behind the Mask: The IRA and Sinn Fein. Probably the first great film on this subject is John Ford’s classic, The Informer (1935), for which Victor McLaglen was awarded the Oscar for best actor.

Not being from Great Britain, those of us in the U.S., and probably the rest of the world, need to see the films on this subject so we can better understand the history of violence and repression there.

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The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Trilogy

Noomi Rapace, her biopic, and as Lisbeth

Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Denmark - Sweden - Germany - Norway
Niels Arden Oplev, 2009 (7.8*)
I’m reviewing these together because after you’ve either read the novels or seen the trilogy, you realize it’s just one long story about the heroine, not three distinctly different stories.

Actress Noomi Rapace made a star of herself and created an indelible screen image in punk hacker Lisbeth Salander, the subject of this crime trilogy from the famous novels by Stieg Larsson. I haven’t read the novels, but like most transcriptions to screen, you lose a lot because you’re getting a lot of other artists to interpret a solo work from the mind of one person, and the medium is also being transformed from one of linguistics and the mind’s imagination to a series of images filtered through the minds of others – the screenwriters, the cinematographers, the editors, and the director. All form a collaberative committee on a film, overseen by the director’s vision, which often changes during the process.

Some may find these films a bit too explicit, they show a woman who’s the victim of abuse, and it’s not for the squeamish. Some found this exploitive, others found it a frank depiction of the misygony in society, and how women in general are the victims of sex crimes perpetrated by sadistic men – unfortunately there’s never a shortage of these at any time in history. For me, I found the films to be more about a woman empowering herself by using her brains and street smarts to stand her own ground. In many regards, I found these films similar to the theme of the powerful French film Chaos (2001), from director Coline Serreau, which I’ve called “the ultimate women’s power film”, and one which had me standing and applauding at the end.

The series begins with a man convinced a relative was murdered and he employs a disgraced journalist, expertly played by Michael Nyqvist, and a criminal computer hacker, Lisbeth Salander, to help him unravel the mystery of some grisly murders in the distant past.

The first film won 13 awards (and Rapace won three for actress), including a BAFTA for films not in English (the equivalent of foreign language film at the Oscars). Rated 7.7 at IMDB, and 76 from Metacritics – that’s probably about right, though the cinematography and music are first rate, and actually make each film better. Some think it’s a bit long at 155 minutes, and there’s a longer 180 minute version from Sweden.

The Girl Who Played With Fire
Daniel Aldredsen, 2009 (7.2*)
The second in the series begins to unravel the mystery of Lisbeth Salander’s life. Her father may have been a Soviet agent, that’s part of the mystery. Journalist Blomkvyst of Millenium magazine (Nyqvist), who exposes the corrupton of the establishment, is investigating sex trafficking in Sweden, and the two themselves become the targets of the powerful in return

This film has more action, and is also compelling but is really setting you up for the concluding film, which provides closure to the entire series.

This film is not as compelling as the other two, and was only rated 6.9 at IMDB (fan votes), and 66 at Metacritics. This film and the third didn’t win any awards, and only garnered five nominations between them.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
Daniel Alfredson, 2009 (8.0*)
[Rated 7.0 at IMBD and 60 at Metacritics]

This film was the most riveting of the three for me, perhaps because it was the least violent. Without giving anything away, it becomes a battle of wits between two viewpoints – to put it in normal cinema jargon, the good guys and the bad guys, but using their minds rather than weapons or martial arts.

However, depending on how you feel about certain issues, these sides may appear the opposite to other people. It’s almost like politics - if we agree with a rebel, they’re freedom fighters; if we disagree, they’re terrorists. That's why we have a legal system, at least for civilians.

We see the entire mystery unfold as the journalist uncovers the clues himself. Another long film at 147 minutes, it still didn’t seem overlong; it’s a complex psychological story that demands thorough examination and revelation. The third film brought closure to the story, and in an intelligent, credible manner. Those who stick with the entire trilogy should feel justified in the end.

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Performance

Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell, 1970 (8.5*)
Roeg was also cinematographer

This is #326 on our Top Ranked 1000 Films on the Net, all polls. Former cinematographer Nicolas Roeg shared directing credit on this one, beginning a career that included some visually stunning films.

Performance woke me up when I first saw it. In the beginning, gangster Chas Devlin, played by James Fox, appears to be running from some other criminals, and needs to disappear quickly. He finds an ad for someone wanting to rent a room to a lodger. He literally walks into the mansion and life of a jaded rock star Turner, Mick Jagger – who, by the way, when first seen is listening to late 60’s rap music, in this case “Wake Up, Niggers” by the Last Poets (who were absolutely great, and ground-breaking; I have both their lp's on vinyl), likely the fathers of modern rap, because this sounded just like rap music today, which hasn’t progressed much at all from the late 60’s.

With the help of his two bohemian girlfriends (Anita Pallenberg and Michèle Breton), Turner slowly ensnares Devlin in his hedonistic world.

So a story that begins as a crime thriller, becomes an existential tale of two men beginning to share lives and personalities, each providing something the other needs, an escape from a reality that’s no longer tolerable to either psyche, for different reasons.  For me, this is what elevated this story beyond the mundane, and probably why it’s still ranked as highly in polls today.

James Fox, a criminal on the run

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Adam's Apples

Anders Thomas Jensen, 2005, Denmark (9.1*)

This black comedy has one of the most insane casts since One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975). A paroled felon, Nazi skinhead Ulrich Thomsen, who’s perfectly cast here (he just looks like an angry criminal), shows up at a clergyman’s church that serves as a halfway house for some released felons that really should be behind bars. Here they supposedly do community service, but they never seem to do any.

The new arrival soon meets a semi-terrorist Pakistani who holds up all Statoil gas stations because of some capitalist crime by the company against his father; apparently they stole their land to get their oil for nothing, which has happened since oil was discovered. This guy not only has weapons but knows how to use them, as some local crows find out the hard way.

The preacher himself (another fine acting job by Mads Mikkelsen who was the bad guy in the Casino Royale remake, but who has done many excellent Danish films) is a utopian anti-realist who admittedly sees the silver lining to nearly everything. After being beaten senseless for this optimism by the Nazi, he shows up at the skinhead’s door and calmly says “we’ll continue this discussion in the kitchen”. The kitchen is run by an over-sized and over-sexed man who seems to be stuck in his teenage years; he’s the most innocent of the entire group, yet his dirty mind goes into overdrive when a woman shows up.

The apples in the title pertain to the Nazi’s name, Adam, and an apple tree in the yard. Adam decides he’s like to bake an apple pie when the apples are ready. In the meantime, since this film is about whether it’s god or the devil that gives one misfortunes, the poor apple tree goes through hell on earth, nothing goes right for it, yet it’s fruit is the metaphor for the entire film.

Much of this questions the nature of the metaphysical, but in a humorous way. For awhile, you’re so taken aback by some events that you’re saying “what the heck is this?”, then after it’s all over you say “ok – I get it now”. There's a hilarious interchange about a portrait of Adolph Hitler that I won't spoil here, but this humor knows no bounds.

It has a magical quality that few films manage to pull off, without really being a fantasy so much like Field of Dreams or It’s a Wonderful Life or Heaven Can Wait. It’s magic is in it’s eccentric characters, none of whom are similar yet all of whom share the world of the preacher, and they all live apart from urban or even modern problems. Their problems are even larger really, as some unseen force seems to be attacking them whenever possible, especially the preacher – his personal history brings to mind the story of Job, just less extreme.

This won the best feature film award in Denmark, beating out one of my favorites, Susanne Bier’s After the Wedding. I’m not sure if I’d go that far, Bier’s film is one of the best acted in history (and also features Mads Mikkelson); all four major actors in that won best acting awards somewhere in the world, six total (the two women won two each). This was a great year for Danish films, to say the least.

This won 18 awards out of 30 nominations, including several audience awards (Sao Paolo, Warsaw, Wisconsin). Ironically, at IMDB, the fans rate this 7.8 (almost in the top 250), while the critics at Metacritic (36 in all), rank it just 51 out of 100. So average filmgoers like this bizarre film more critics, you’ll think it would be just the opposite once you see it.

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The Breaking Point

Michael Curtiz, 1950, bw (8.7*)
Well after To Have and Have Not (1944), which was loosely based on the Ernest Hemingway novel and which introduced Bacall to Bogart, this remake from famed director Michael Curtiz (Casablanca) attempted to remain more faithful to the novel, and the author himself thought it was the finest cinema adaptation of any of his works. This was a much more serious and cynical treatment than the Hollywoodish original.

John Garfield is the small boat captain who’s not too particular about who hires out his boat, as he’s seeing some rough economic times, and he needs to make a boat payment pronto or it could e repossessed. He takes on a charter that definitely involves clandestine, illegal activity that may find him in over his head.

Patricia Neal turns in one of her best performances as the woman who drifts into his life from the other side of tracks (or other side of the harbor in this case), and her coy, self-assured demeanor seems more real than Lauren Bacall’s in the original (and I liked Neal even more), as if she’s honed this act on many men before now, and on a classier batch then Garfield. The two had an apathetic, jaded type of chemistry onscreen, which seems more likely given most Hemingway characters; Garfield treated her like a distraction, not an attraction.

The reason the film has been forgotten is that just before it’s release Garfield was called to testify before the HUAC in Congress, and the studio dropped support for the film and the actor like a hot potato, and Garfield’s career never really recovered, ending just two years later. Though Garfield is certainly no Bogart as an actor, in a way he’s even more of an average joe type of guy, so this is the perfect role for him.

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Odd Man Out

Carol Reed, 1947, bw (8.8*)
#634, Top Ranked 1000 Films, 2011 Update, all polls.

Master British director Carol Reed made a perhaps even tighter, white-knuckle crime thriller with this gem. In one of his best roles, James Mason shines as a wounded IRA gunman, who is trying to escape a net of British police, and who is both helped and hindered by those along his route.

We are made to feel his personal terror as the camera stays with him, he’s a man alone in an urban war zone and fighting losing odds. This is easily the most intense role of Mason’s long and distinguished career, as he really is noted for cool, collected characters with an experienced and wise demeanor, and normally projects an aura of calm confidence, such as God in Time Bandits (1981) or as heaven’ representative in Heaven Can Wait (1978).

Carol Reed directed some of the best British postwar films. Mostly noted for the noirish The Third man (1949, bw), I liked Outcast of the Islands, from the Joseph Conrad novel, even more. It has a white man in an isolated tropical paradise who sells his soul for money, and it features some of the most haunting images in cinema, filmed during a torrential tropical rainstorm. Reed also directed the Oscar®-winning best picture Oliver! (1967), the musical based on Charles Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist (filmed seriously first by David Lean and later by Roman Polanski).

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Vanishing Point

Richard Sarafian, 1971 (8.2*)
This homage to anarchy should have better known, it was pure action adrenaline from the start. Barry Newman plays a man named Kowalski who delivers cars and must drive a car from Colorado to the west coast in about 24 hours. Soon after starting, he makes a bet to bring it the car in less than 15 hours.

Having to obviously break the speed limit, he arouses the interest of law enforcement along the way, beginning with some motorcycle cops. Eventually, there’s a multi-state effort coordinated to bring him under arrest for flagrantly flouting the law. He becomes a folk hero along the way, being given help on the radio by a DJ named Supersoul, who is blind but has police scanner. Other than a minor diversion with his family, there’s not much character development or interest here, it’s all about the action.

This entire film has a Thunder Road and NASCAR feel to it, as if you can outdrive the law on open highways, as if they don’t really have radios or telephones and can’t simply deploy other units ahead of you. It’s not like a straight car race across the desert, once you get ahead just stay ahead and you’re clear.

The appeal of this film is that it brings existential statements into a car chase thriller, which is admittedly a bit thin but there nonetheless. This film predated the Australian Mad Max series, but seems to have directly influenced The Road Warrior (1981), easily best of the series - and many more modern copycat films, where speed did make you king of at least one stretch of road, that to the box office.

There’s a mediocre remake of this from 97 with Viggo Mortenson as the driver, who has a diversion in the desert with Pita Wilson of Nikita fame, but it just doesn’t have the anarchistic feel of the original.

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Arsenic and Old Lace

Frank Capra, 1944, bw (8.3*)
Pleasant trifle in which Cary Grant has a field day of double-takes and other physical humor as Mortimer Brewster, the doting nephew of two elderly aunts, the kind with whom you share tea, and discuss family history. Unfortunately, these aunts are not so kindly, as Mortimer begins to discover bodies hidden in furniture around the house, and at the same time there seem to be some missing elderly gents who were former friends.

Priscilla Lane is around for romantic interest and eye candy, or else it would be just Grant and two old ladies, plus you need an outside catalyst to drive the action, someone who could discover the family secret.

Adapted by the Epstein Brothers from a play by Joseph Kesselring. This is one of Capra’s best comedies, as it doesn’t try to do too much but entertain, one that takes homicidal insanity with a nonchalant attitude, as if bodies are empty liquor bottles, something to discard without the neighbors seeing - after all, it’s 1944 and the middle of mass psychosis.

This just recently fell out of the IMDB top 250.

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A Fish Called Wanda

Charles Crichton (and uncredited John Cleese), 1988 (8.5*)
A sparkling comedic cast help push this heist satire over the top into rarified waters. There aren’t many crime comedies worth watching more than once, this is one of them.

John Cleese (of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers fame) plays a judge who falls for the wiles of American con-artist Jamie Lee Curtis, who seduces him to order help pull a con on some British partners in crime (without Cleese’s knowledge). Her supposed brother, but partner in crime, is brilliantly played to mucho laughs by an Oscar®-winning Kevin Kline. He is really her dumb boyfriend, whose recurring line is “Don’t call me stupid!”, because he is the proverbial knot-on-a-log thick.

They enlist the aid of inside man Ken, played by another former Python member Michael Palin, with a wonderful stutter (“Ka-ka-ka-Ken!”), who’s a doting owner of an overloved pet fish named Wanda, hence the title. Yes, there's often offensive humor in this, but it's still sedate compared to Python, no gushing arteries or chunk hurling here.

Some of the best stuff to come from the Python group, likely because the Jones-Gilliam silliness is tempered by the veteran direction of master British director Charles Crichton, who directed the classic The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) bw.

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Inside Man

Spike Lee, 2006 (8.6*)
One of the best films for Spike Lee in years is also one of the best heist films ever made. Just when you think a tired genre has used up all it’s variations comes along a new one for a new generation.

Clive Owen shines here as a mastermind who has plotted the perfect crime. Christopher Plummer owns a major bank more noted for it’s top security vault boxes, where anyone with loot or other valuables to hide can sleep securely at night knowing their goods are safe. He himself has something to hide in his own bank, so he calls in Jodie Foster as a mysterious power broker to help him keep his own secrets. A safe vault, that is, until a screenplay by Russell Gewirtz comes along, or we’d have no film.

A gang enters the bank, takes hostages, waits for the police, then calmly and confidently ask for demands they know won’t be met. After awhile negotiator Denzel Washington, in one of his best roles, begins to get suspicious after awhile that this is not a real robbery, and that something else is going on.

There truly is something else going on, but to say any more would venture into spoiler territory. Suffice to say that Lee has breathed new life into an old genre begun by the French film from director Jules Dassin, Rififi (1955, bw), and that is the re-enactment on film of a well-plotted heist – which usually goes wrong, though not always. A realistic homage to this was the U.S. film Thief, with James Caan, directed by Michael Mann. This stereotypical plot has been well satirized often, most effectively in the Italian film Big Deal on Madonna St (1959, bw) from director Mario Monicelli, which had me in stitches (look for a line in it, “getting something to eat”, and you’ll know what I mean). Also it was parodied by the Jules Dassin comedy Topkapi, in which a partially smart, partially bungling gang steals a valuable dagger from that museum in Istanbul, a parody of his own classic serious film.

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The Player

Robert Altman, 1992 (9.2*)
[This is an updated repost of one of my favorite films about films]

Tim Robbins portrays a film producer looking for that next major hit project, who, through an anonymous blackmailer that sends him threatening postcards, becomes involved in a mystery, and his character degenerates into one who may actually stop at nothing to protect his ego and his wallet, and perhaps find love as well.

With the always delectable Greta Scacchi in his sights, who could blame him? He inadvertantly gets involved with her, with completely unforeseen events, through a screenwriter whose script he rejected. I liked the performance of Cynthia Stevenson as Robbins' low-key girlfriend within the studio, who often travels with him 'on business' - and who seems to be the perfect cynical match for her boss.

The Player is a perfect modern complement to Sunset Boulevard, as each presents the cynical and parasitic side of Hollywood and its shallow, self-centered denizens. Robert Altman's best film (for me) includes dozens of famous cameos (around 75), including 16 Oscar® winners, the most of any feature film (of course not including clip films like That's Entertainment). In fact, the dvd has a special menu of all the cameo scenes so you can quickly jump to the one you're seeking.

As another homage to cinema, the opening tracking shot is one of the longest in cinema history as a couple of film buffs argue in one shot of that about the longest tracking shots in cinema history. That has a pleasing circularity to it that will likely go over the heads of most viewers.

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The Spiral Staircase

Robert Siodmak, 1945, bw (8.8*)
Even though this now looks like a film of scary movie cliches, back in its time, it was one of those few films that made true cinema suspense and made it artfully. You might call this film an archetype of the modern psycho-killer film, and now it's been remastered.

A serial killer is targeting women around town that have various types of afflictions. A very young Dorothy McGuire, in the performance of her lifetime, plays a mute women, who, alone in a large house during a storm, begins to feel a hidden menace, as if she is perhaps the killer’s next target.

This is Siodmak’s best directing job to me, as it’s a beautifully shot early film noir, with lots of darkness and shadows casting eerie shapes across the living, as if the darkness itself is somehow grasping at the innocents. It’s not often that a film can maintain fear and suspense with any veracity, yet this film manages to and to also be re-shown often over 60 years later and after perhaps a hundred-thousand less artistic imitations.

The entire film was shot on a soundstage, which makes it even more amazing. It had the look of a small film, but it wasn’t - this was a David O. Selznick Production (Gone With the Wind), and co-starred George Brent and Ethel Barrymore.

It’s more often what you don’t show that is more menacing, our greatest fear is the unknown. I think Siodmak’s film is a very good example of that for most of these modern ‘horror’ filmmakers.

It's amazing to me that this film didn't make any of the film polls in our compendium, at all. At IMDB, it's average rating is 7.6, about .4 away from the top 250, so it's likely in the top 1000 there, which they don't post. Our compendium came up with almost 2300 films mentioned in all the polls put together and this wasn't listed once.

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High and Low

Akira Kurosawa, Japan, 1963, bw (9.0*)
Excellent crime thriller from the Japanese master director Kurosawa, in the tradition of his excellent police procedural Stray Dog (1949). A millionaire factory manager, played by Tashiro Mifune, has mortgaged everything to buy just enough stock to take control of his shoe company in order to maintain his high quality standards while other greedy board members insist on putting out a flimsy cheap shoe that will not last a year and forcing their customers to rebuy shoes more often.

That very day, the executive's son is playing with his chauffeur's son and they change cowboy and outlaw outfits, and a kidnapper abducts the wrong child by accident, but still demands a hefty ransom or he'll kill the child. So now Mifune must weigh the dilemna of losing his company by paying the money he needs to save the child, or sacrificing a child, who's not his own anyway, to save his career.

This film also becomes a police procedural as they try to narrow down the kidnappers location in a race against time, as they feel the child is likely to be killed in either case. Other than his classic masterpiece Seven Samurai, my favorite films of Kurosawa's are these gorgeous crime films in black and white, which are detective stories filmed like 40's film noir. His film Stray Dog caused a huge wave of popularity for these films in Japan in the 50's.

This is now # 449 on our 2011 Edition of Top Ranked 1000 Films on the Net (all polls)

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Touch of Evil

Orson Welles, 1958, bw (8.3*)

Whether you love Welles or not, you have to admit that this is one unique and bizarre crime film. True to classic noir, this one also has its seminal scenes at night, in fact most of the action is in the dark, like the souls of many in this film. It's a dark and almost dreary film, but that's true of much of classic noir.

Charlton Heston is Mike Vargas, a Mexican narcotics officer, whose honeymoon to Janet Leigh is interrupted by a murder in a border town that happens after someone places a bomb in the trunk of a car on the Mexican side of the border that then drives back across, while on the same street. Vargas is soon dealing with the police chief on the U.S. side, a long-time corrupted Hank Quinlan, to whom his law is 'the law', played with cynical gusto by Orson Welles. Quinlan is all too ready to convict an innocent Mexican-American, but Vargas begins probing into his checkered past.

Meanwhile his wife Susie (Leigh) is not only out of danger at a seedy motel, but right in the middle; this part is inexplicably broken up by a sudden comic appearance by Dennis Weaver as the dumbfounded but pruriently interested hotel clerk, in one of the more bizarre performances in cinema history.

This examines racism along the Mexican border as well as police corruption, and does it in classic film noir dark palette and lighting, with hardly a character you'd want to know personally, even Heston's, for he wouldn't last long in the real world by diving into the fire. More than a clash of individual personalities and ethics, it becomes an inter-racial and cross-cultural statement on mutual cooperation and understanding.

Those interested in Welles should by all means see Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. Touch of Evil is No. 125 on the IMDB 250, and is No. 30 on our compendium of all film polls - so it's obviously ranked much higher by critics than the public.

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M.

Fritz Lang, 1931, bw (9.0*)
No. 11 on our compendium of all polls, No. 55 on the IMDB 250
M. is the classic Fritz Lang suspense thriller in which someone is murdering children in a German city, the police can't catch him, and the manhunt is so intense that it's interrupting all the normal crime, so even criminals enlist in the killer's search.

Peter Lorre is the psychotic serial killer, in a chilling performance, one that put him on the map as a creepy actor that can sell a sociopathic character. Lang did a great job capturing both the uneasiness and the complexity of the characters, as well as creating the atmospheric mood with lighting and cinematography, characteristic trademarks of German expressionism. Lang is more interested in the effects of the killings on the town than the actual crimes.

Like Murnau (Sunrise, The Last Laugh, Nosferatu) and Pabst (Pandora's Box), Lang is a must-see for fans of early cinema, particularly German, and before they came to Hollywood, which makes M. essential viewing as well. His 1926 masterpiece, Metropolis, is the most famous and significant early science fiction film, the same can be said for this film in the genre of crime.

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The Crying Game

Neil Jordan, 1992 (8.7*)
Not your average romance, nor your average crime film, and not an easy film to describe without spoiling it's secret.

The film begins with Miranda Richardson's character seducing a young black British soldier, Forrest Whitaker, and then's he kidnapped by IRA friends of hers. While being held hostage, gunman Stephen Rea takes a daily watch and gets to know the soldier, even though he's supposed to be the enemy, they start to connect while discussing their personal lives.

Suffice to say that not much in this film goes according to the plans of the participants. The hostage section is really just the first half of the story, the second half becomes a unique romance, about which I won't say anything. This is an intesting blend of terrorism, crime, and romance.

The acting, the writing, and Neil Jordan's direction make this film a notch above most others. Nominated for six Oscars®, including film, directing, actor for Rea, supporting actor for Jaye Davidson, supporting actress for Miranda Richardson (she won the NY Film Critics award), editing, and it won an Oscar® for screenplay. It won 19 awards total (out of 37 nominations), including a BAFTA for Best British film. Rea won the National Society of Film Critics best actor award, and on top of the Oscar, Jordan also won the Writer's Guild award for screenplay.

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Basic Instinct

Paul Verhoeven, 1992 (7.6*)
This film won't appeal to everyone, but for those who enjoy a Hitchcockian murder mystery updated with modern sensuality, this will be right up your alley. After the murder of a famous rock star, detective Michael Douglas is making the rounds of those closest to the victim, and he runs across a beautiful and seductive suspect  in Sharon Stone. After a now legendary and infamous interrogation scene, he becomes intrigued by Stone's charms. Even though he has a fiance, he becomes involved with Stone anyway, who, it turns out, may have more than one thing to hide. He may have met his match, I'll let you decide after seeing it.

This film put Sharon Stone on the map, she was certainly more believably seductive in this than any prior roles. Thanks to some better acted screen mayhem than usual, this rises above standard slasher fare and approaches the finest of that genre. This was one film that begged for no sequel, but they made one anyway, which I already know not to watch.

This won 5 awards out of 18 nominations, but nothing big, in fact a couple were MTV awards (both for Stone), so those don't count

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Diabolique

aka Les Diaboliques
Henri-Georges Clouzot, France, 1955, bw (8.7*)
In this classic French suspense film, Michel (Paul Meurisse), the principal of a boarding school for boys has a wife Nicole (Simone Signoret), and a mistress Christina (Vera Clouzot, the Brazilian wife of the director), who are both teachers at the school. Michel is abusive, and his wife convinces the mistress to help her murder him.

Things go well at first, and like most crime films, things start to go wrong. First the husband's body goes missing, and then a retired police inspector shows up who is determined to help Nicole find her missing husband. He seems to be interested in Nicole himself, so he won't leave her alone.

This film is pretty Hitchcockian in its own way, it's just missing his trademark humor and brevity. This film doesn't spend much time developing the plot, it dives right in. It's actually more sophisticated than most murder films; it's more psychological than pathological, and displays more suspense (and no gore) than American murder films. It was actually poorly remade here with Sharon Stone, but I would definitely skip that poor imitation.

Diabolique is No. 182 on the IMDB 250, and won 3 awards. Director Clouzot directed the classic The Wages of Fear, also The Raven, made at the end of World War II, about a poison pen letter writer in a small town. Each of these films is a classic in its own way.

Véra Clouzot and Simone Signoret in Diabolique

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Quiz Show

Robert Redford, 1994 (8.6*)
This, to me, is Robert Redford's best film realization as a director, largely because he presents the story without much judgment or sentimentality, leaving it up to the viewers.

This is a true story about the quiz show scandal of the late 50's, when, at the time, there were 28 quiz shows on network tv in prime time (!) The one offering the most money was "The $64,000 Question", in which guests went into a sound-proof booth and answered a question - if correct they doubled their previous winnings, if incorrect, they went home broke. At any point, they could retire and take their winnings rather than risk any more, up to a grand total of 64,000 dollars.

This particular part of the story involved a nerdy Jewish intellectual, Alfie Stempel, brilliantly played by John Turturro, who has been unchallenged until the show's producers find a wealthy American aristocrat, Charles Van Doren (Ralph Feinnes), from a prominent New England family, and they basically groom him to become an even bigger draw with the tv viewing public. Even back then tv was more about ratings and money for sponsors than about anything ethical, legal, or fair.

The supporting cast here is uniformly excellent. Rob Morrow, who left the successful tv series Northern Exposure to take a chance at a film career, plays a government investigator of tv awards show corruption, in a performance that is undemanding but well done. (His film career subsequently went nowhere).

 Even better is Oscar-winner Paul Schofield as the ultra-successful father of Charles van Doren. David Paymer is a producer of quiz shows, who thinks it nearly unpatriotic not to stack the deck. Johann Carlo is the principled wife of contestant Stempel. Other good actors in the cast include Hank Azaria (The Simpsons), Chris McDonald (Requiem for a Dream, Lawn Dogs), Oscar-winner Mira Sorvino (Mighty Aphrodite, Beautiful Girls).

This is a fascinating subject, and it makes us all wonder if all tv quiz shows are rigged in some way, even today. I once saw a blonde babe lose on Hollywood Squares, then three days later the same woman with a different name lost on Jeopardy as well. She was obviously some actress filling a part they wanted: beautiful babes for the viewers, proving to be intellectual airheads. Note that one of the hosts involved in a rigged show was none other than Bob Barker, who continued in the genre until.. well, did he ever stop?

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