(I Never Loved) Eva Braun

Film: Der Untergang (Downfall)
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on middlin’-sized living room television.

Certain stories and certain people are a problem when it comes to film. How does one treat Adolf Hitler in a movie? I’ve been thinking about this since watching Der Untergang (Downfall). Actually, what’s been running through my head is the first line of “How do you solve a problem like Maria,” with the lyrics going “How do you solve a problem like der Fuhrer?”

One answer is comedy. One of the only ways to deal with the enormity (using that word in its original, correct sense) of what happened in the 1930s and ‘40s in Europe is to make it ridiculous. Mel Brooks did that over and over in a number of his films, as if to say that despite the best efforts of the Nazis, the Jews are still around and surviving. To go to that type of extreme makes a certain sense. It also makes sense to paint the Nazis as inhuman, almost supernatural monsters. The evil was so great that it is almost incomprehensible that it could come from human beings.

But how do you deal with the reality of the history if you are a German filmmaker? Der Untergang is the answer. You paint Hitler as a man. A sick, twisted, insane and palsied man, but still a man because that’s what he was. The cruelty, the evil, the destruction, and the insanity all came from a very human mind. This is precisely what Oliver Hirschbiegel has done.

Der Untergang is the story of the last few days of Hitler’s life in the Berlin bunker. The film opens with comments from Traudl Junge, Hitler’s private secretary, and an old woman when this film was made. We see Hitler (Bruno Ganz) hire the young Traudl Junge (Alexandra Maria Lara) in 1942, and then, for the rest of the film, we jump forward to April, 1945, and the end of the war.

This is the story not so much of Hitler himself, but of the death of the Third Reich. Most of the story takes place within the bunker, as surviving members of the Reich hierarchy come and go, are given impossible orders, and seek to either remain loyal to the ideals they hold to, or to save their own skins. Nothing, and this is important here, is glossed over, prettied up, or sugar coated. The characters speak frankly of their planned suicides, and Hitler passes out cyanide capsules to those he favors as a good, painless method of killing oneself. We witness Magda Goebbels (Corinna Harfouch) drug and then poison her six children and then commit suicide herself with her husband.

This is not really a war movie. It is instead a movie about death, blind loyalty, and the destruction of a terrible evil. This doesn’t make the film a happy one by any stretch of the imagination. Normally, I’m someone who will happily cheer when a few Nazis get blown up or gunned down. Here, though, we are witness to senseless slaughter ordered by a man who was determined to destroy the state he had tried to create.

While this is Junge’s story, the focus is naturally on Hitler himself until he exits via cyanide and bullet at the end of the film’s second act. I cannot imagine that this was an easy role for Ganz to play. How does one take on the role of one of the most despised people in history, particularly when that person is from one’s own heritage?

Der Untergang is not an easy or pleasant film to watch. It is, however, an important film to watch. All of the horror, the gruesome deaths, the suicides, the slaughter, and the misery bear with them an important history. No matter how painful it may be, we must be honest with the past. No matter how much we may not want to discuss it or deal with it, everyone’s cultural past is filled with terrible acts that we must understand and learn from. Hirschbiegel has made an important and daring film, and he deserves a lot of credit for not just taking it on, but taking it on in this unflinching and direct manner.

The film ends with another comment from the real Traudl Junge. She claims to have known nothing of the concentration camps until the trials after the war. But, she says, she could have found out. Her age (22 when hired as Hitler’s secretary) was no excuse for not discovering the evil of her countrymen. She’s right. We have the same responsibility.

Why to watch Der Untergang: Germany comes to grips with its terrible past.
Why not to watch: It’s grueling.

Month Eight Status Report

So, eight months in and 203 movies down, including the two I saw in the theater that will almost certainly end up on this list eventually. Those two bring the total list up to 1070, putting me just a hair shy of 20%, which I should reach in the next couple of weeks.

I watched a lot fewer in August--only 16--but I've concentrated on longer, more difficult films at least in some respects. Additionally, I've watched the third or so of one of the longer films, and am waiting for the follow-up DVDs to show up in the mail, so I've actually done a little more than the 16 that show here.

What I have discovered, though, is that there are about two dozen directors with four or more films on the list who I haven't touched yet. I think getting these directors' collections started by the end of the year is an achievable, worthwhile goal. For the record, here are the directors in question:

4 movies
John Cassavetes
Carl Dryer
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Krzystof Krislowski
Ang Lee
Leo McCary
Max Ophuls
Satyajit Ray
Rob Reiner
Roberto Rosselini
Ridley Scott
Ben O. Sharpstein
Paul Verhoeven
Lucino Visconti
Raoul Walsh

5 movies
Bernardo Bertolucci
Robert Bresson

6 movies
Woody Allen
Robert Altman
Jean Renoir
Orson Welles

10 movies
Ingmar Bergman

18(!) movies
Alfred Hitchcock

It may seem like an oversight to have ignored at least Hitchcock to this point, but that at least is by design. My thinking is that if I delay my Hitchcock viewing as long as possible, the more Hitch I get to watch at the same time.

Edit:
Upon further review, these numbers are wrong. There are movies on my list that are not in the index of the fifth edition, either having been removed or added at some point.
Pedro Almodovar, Lawrence Kasdan, and Abbas Kiarostami all have four films and I have (re)viewed none of them. Additionally, Woody Allen has seven on the list instead of six.

Tick Tick Tick Tick Boom!

Film: Le Salaire de la Peur (The Wages of Fear)
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

Real tension is difficult to create in a film, I think. I’m not a filmmaker, so I could well be wrong on that, but based on the number of movies I have seen in which tension is supposed to be ratcheted up and isn’t, I’d guess it’s more difficult than it looks. Hitchcock was a master of creating tension. Evidently, based on the films of his that I’ve seen, Henri-Georges Clouzot was a master of it as well.

La Salaire de la Peur (The Wages of Fear) is perhaps the most intense film I have seen this year. The plot is simple, the characters unexceptional, and yet this film is difficult to watch sitting still. Through the second half of the film, almost every frame holds the potential for destruction completely out of the blue. A single wrong move by the characters, a bad break, or a single tiny misstep holds with it not the threat but the promise of complete devastation. Every scene is a breath holding moment.

We start in a little town somewhere in South America—my guess based on some of the geography mentioned is that it’s in Venezuela. The town is the perfect location for nothing good—it’s inaccessible except by air for the most part. The only thing in the area is oil, and this is controlled by an evil American corporation straight out of central casting.

A number of foreigners have ended up in this dead-end town, and all of them have learned the central problem with their new location. There’s no work. The only possibility of a job is from the Southern Oil Company (SOC), and they aren’t hiring. The only way out of the town is by air, and the tickets are expensive. So, without money and without prospects, these foreigners end up hanging around the local saloon doing nothing but complaining and wishing they could get away.

Prominent among these men is Mario (Yves Montand). He’s a good-looking Frenchman who is having a fling with the pretty but clingy and vacant Linda (Vera Clouzot). Mario lives with Luigi (Folco Lulli). Luigi has a job and is saving up his money to go back to Italy since he, like everyone else, wants nothing more than to get out of this town.

Into this mix walks Jo (Charles Vanel), who walks the walk and talks the talk of a man to be taken seriously. He’s an older man with a history of criminal behavior, particularly bootlegging, but has fallen on harder times. Outrunning the law, he wound up in this nowhere, and now like the other foreigners, he’s stuck. However, because he likes to come off as important, he acts as a bully, setting himself apart from the other men in the area. He bonds quickly with Mario, since both are Frenchmen, and the two immediately make enemies of the other expatriates.

And then there is the possibility of escape, at least for four of the men. One of the SOC oil fields has suffered an accident and is now on fire. The only way to stop the blaze is to coordinate an explosion to cut off the supply of fuel. The only explosive available is a cache of nitroglycerine, which needs to be transported by truck across 300 miles of terribly maintained, bumpy, dangerous roads. The SOC is unable to use its own employees for this task—the union would never allow it. Instead, they offer the job to the foreigners with the chance at $2,000 cash for a successful run. That’s enough money to get out of the town and start a new life somewhere else.

But it’s more fun than that, of course. The trucks that will be carrying the nitro aren’t designed for the purpose. They don’t have special shocks or padding. They’re just standard trucks, and the nitro is in standard jerry cans. What this means is that a single bad bump will cause the nitro, the truck, and the men inside to go up like a Roman candle. Desperate, a number of men apply for the job anyway. While it’s almost certain death, it’s also a way out or a way home.

Four men are selected: Mario, Luigi, an intense Dutchman named Bimba (Peter van Eyck), and an old man named Smerloff (Jo Dest). Jo, upset that he wasn’t chosen, argues his way in by saying that if one of the four doesn’t show up, he’ll take their place. Naturally, this is exactly what happens—Smerloff doesn’t appear the next morning, and the implication is that Jo may have killed him for the chance at the money.

The second half of the film—a bit more than an hour—is the drive. Mario and Jo ride in the big truck and leave half an hour before Luigi and Bimba in the small truck. The gap is for safety. If one truck goes up in a fiery burst, the other should be far enough away to avoid the problem. Of course, the two trucks manage to cross paths frequently as one catches up to the other.

What becomes evident as the film progresses is that Jo, once a daring bootlegger, has lost his nerve completely. He is too cautious, unable to force himself to take a single chance at anything. This becomes very evident when the pair reaches a stretch of road known as “The Washboard” where a speed of at least 40mph is required to avoid significant bouncing. Jo can’t do it, trying instead to convince Mario that they two should drive the 30-mile section at dead slow.

This is all that happens for the rest of the film. The men drive, encounter problems on the road, and reveal their true selves and motivations as death sits literally behind every curve and bump in the road. Every frame of the film from the moment the first truck leaves contains with it the possibility of a massive explosion and instant death for the men inside it. As problems mount up and the trucks encounter danger after danger and close call after close call, the tension becomes a palpable thing, almost a character in and of itself.

I never thought I’d say what I’m about to say. Had you asked me a month ago about Henri-Georges Clouzot, I’d have said that Les Diaboliques was the best thing he ever did. Now, I’m not so sure. I still love that film, and called it Clouzot’s masterpiece less than two weeks ago. Today, I think I spoke too soon. La Salaire de la Peur is not just Clouzot’s arrival on the international film scene, it’s one of the most nerve-wracking, most intense films ever made.

I’ll say only this otherwise—the ending is difficult to stomach. I’m not saying it’s a bad ending or an inappropriate ending, but it does leave the viewer (at least this viewer) with a hollow place in the soul. I won’t spoil it here, not even under a spoiler warning, because this film is far too good and far too memorable to risk spoiling for anyone. But…damn!

Why to watch Le Salaire de la Peur: One of the tensest, most gripping dramas ever.
Why not to watch: A whiskey-tango-foxtrot ending.

Where Your Eyes Don't Go

Film: Chelovek s Kinoapparatom (The Man with the Movie Camera)
Format: NetFlix on middlin’-sized living room television.

Often, when I watch a film, particularly for this blog, I multi-task. I’ve made dinner while watching something on the laptop, for instance. I’ve also used a film to act as an excuse to fold laundry. Last night was a variation on that theme: I watched Chelovek s Kinoapparatom (The Man with the Movie Camera) while ironing. Ironing is new for me, which means it takes me awhile to get it done, and a movie seems like the right thing to do.

This is not a typical film, however. Director/producer/etc. Dziga Vertov (who started life as Dennis Kaufman) wanted to do something entirely new with film. Doing something new was, at least in terms of innovation, easier in 1929 when film was still a new medium. For his innovation, Vertov decided to essentially follow the path of a day in cities like Moscow and Kiev, and that is the extent of his story. There are no characters, no actors, no sets, no story, and no title cards. In fact, the only thing like a title card that appears here is the translation of written items that are filmed.

Vertov does more than just film what he sees, though. This is undoubtedly the most heavily edited and altered silent film ever made. Vertov uses every trick he can muster. Scenes appear in fast and slow motion, there is stop-motion animation, frames slow and speed up as we watch them, freezing for a moment and then running again. Parts of the film run backwards, allowing a pair of men to start with a jumble of chess pieces and end with a perfectly set board. Images are superimposed on each other, showing workers at the center of their machinery. Vertov also frequently uses a horizontal split screen, showing two crowd scenes or street scenes, one on top of the other.

As there is no story or plot here, what the audience is left with is the images, both individually and in series. Many of the images are beautiful while others (a woman giving birth, several women nude from the waist up) are mildly shocking for a 1929 audience. Others are used to extol the glories of the Soviet state. We get, for instance, many shots of workers and machinery, often sped to the extreme, demonstrating the great productivity of the Soviet worker. We also get a number of shots of attractive and fit Soviet youth participating in various track and field events—tossing a javelin, running hurdles, and more.

Or are we? It could possibly be argued that the factory scenes in particular aren’t extolling much virtue, but instead reducing the workers to the level of the machine, where only productivity matters and placing another label on another package is more important than the person him- or herself. In fact, one of the opening scenes shows a city coming to life in the morning. Many of those people coming to life appear to be street vagrants, sleeping on benches or on sidewalks—hardly the sort of image that speaks to a benevolent state.

The most impressive part of this film, at least the version that I watched, is the accompanying score. The version I watched uses a score created and performed by the Alloy Orchestra, in part using the notes and directions of the score Vertov wanted. This is a tremendous effort—the music is appropriate and fascinating, and performed here with such quality that I can’t imagine it being handled by another group. In fact, as I type this, some of that music is running through my head. It is impossible for me now to separate this film from this soundtrack—and I don’t think I’d want to if I could.

The film I am most reminded of here is Koyaanisqatsi. It would not surprise me if I learned that Godfrey Reggio studied Vertov’s work when creating his own film. The juxtaposition of images and ideas leads me to believe that the one is the natural son of the other.

Ultimately, Chelovek s Kinoapparatom is engaging and interesting, but not the sort of film I’d like to have as a steady diet. I’m pleased to have seen it, and would watch it again, but not for a long, long time.

Why to watch Chelovek s Kinoapparatom: Innovation and history
Why not to watch: No plot, no characters, no nothing.

Bogart and Bacall

Film: The Big Sleep
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on middlin’-sized living room television.

There are certain things that, when I see them on the description of a film, give me a very good feeling. Certain elements almost guarantee that I will enjoy a film very much. I tend to like films done in the noir style, for instance. I also tend to really like films that star Humphrey Bogart. This gives The Big Sleep a lot of potential.

Okay, I’m kind of bullshitting here. I’ve seen The Big Sleep before and I know I like it. I’ve even read the book it was based on—in fact, I read the book before I saw the film. Philip Marlowe is in many ways the greatest of the noir detectives, and Bogart is really the best guy to play Marlowe. And here, he gets to play opposite his real-life eventual wife, Lauren Bacall. What could be better?

The Big Sleep starts simply and gets complicated quickly, like many film noirs. Marlowe (Bogart) is called to the house of General Sternwood (Charles Waldron). Sternwood is old, sickly, and near death. Those aren’t the problems on his mind, though. What is on his mind is the actions of his two daughters. The older is Vivian Rutledge (Bacall). She has her vices, which include gambling and booze, and she also married badly, considering her husband is now out of the picture. The younger daughter, Carmen Sternwood (Martha Vickers), is a bigger problem. Carmen has all of Vivian’s problems and more. Her biggest problem is that it appears that she likes men far too much.

In this case, Carmen has incurred a number of promissory notes to a man named Arthur Gwynn Geiger, who runs a rare bookstore. It looks like a simple case of blackmail. General Sternwood wants Marlowe to take care of the problem because his old go-to guy has gone missing for the past year or so. Marlowe goes to investigate and discovers that the woman who works at Geiger’s store appears to know nothing of antique books.

Marlowe tails Geiger to his house and guess who shows up. It’s Carmen. A few gunshots later, and Marlowe rushes in to see what’s happened. He finds Geiger dead on the floor and Carmen dressed up in a slinky outfit in front of a hidden camera and drugged off her ass. It’s never stated outright, but Carmen has descended into the world of pornography, either to pay off those promissory notes or for some other reason.

And this is where things get complicated. Bodies begin to pile up. The Sternwoods’ chauffeur ends up blackjacked and dead in the bay, and bodies seem to tail Marlowe wherever he goes. Much of this is in the pursuit of finding the pictures of Carmen. But in comes many more complications and many more people and more and more shooting. Marlowe and Mrs. Rutledge flirt with each other, and eventually, the bad guys get what they deserve.

The joy of any film noir is in the dialogue between the characters and the twists and turns of the plot and all of the gunplay. The Big Sleep has all of this in spades—and it’s got Bogart and Bacall doing what they do best. This is what a film noir should be. I could say a lot more, but it’s more fun to see this film for the first time and watch where it goes, to see the back and forth between the characters, and enjoy Bogart do what he does.

Why to watch The Big Sleep: It’s noir. What more do you need?
Why not to watch: So many characters, so much shooting.

Big Land, Little Brains

Film: Giant
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on laptop.

Looking at American movies, it would be easy to assume that the basic American assumption is not with violence or sex, but money. Giant is a story of money, but also a story of love, oil, cattle, and racism in Texas in the years between the World Wars and after the second one. It starts simply enough. Jordan “Bick” Benedict, Jr. (Rock Hudson) travels from his massive ranch (595,000 acres), Reata, in Texas to a horse farm in Maryland to buy a stud horse named War Winds.

He does manage to purchase the horse, but returns to Texas with more than he bargained for. He comes back with a wife—Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor). Leslie is a headstrong young woman, and also a Yankee, which makes her something of a rarity in Texas not too far from its rough and tumble past. Leslie immediately butts heads with Bick’s sister Luz (Mercedes McCaimbridge). Luz is not a big fan of Bick’s new wife, but it doesn’t really matter much, or at least for too long. Attempting to prove that she is every bit as tough as Bick’s wife, Luz attempts to ride War Winds, is bucked off, hits her head on a mesquite stump, and dies.

We’re also introduced early on to a young ranch hand who works on the Reata. This is Jett Rink (James Dean). Bick’s not a big fan of Jett, who’s ready to quit the ranch after Luz dies. However, Luz remembers him in her will, giving him the rights to a small, relatively worthless piece of land that’s a part of Reata. Bick, wanting to keep all of his land in one piece, offers instead to give Jett double the price of the land.

Jett, however, enjoys the idea of tweaking Bick Benedict and opts for the land instead. Things don’t go so well for Jett for a few years. The Benedicts have twins (Jordan the third, called Jordy) and Judy, as well as another daughter named Luz. Right away, the kids are not what Bick wants them to be—Jordy, it turns out, is not a big fan of horses.

Jett, though, is a big fan of two things: money and Leslie Benedict. He gets the first one when the little oil well he’s built on his “worthless” scrap of land turns up a gusher. More oil wells follow, and suddenly, Jett Rink is the man of the hour, buying up ranches in the area to build more wells and pump up more and more money.

We flash forward a few years until the kids are of college age. Jordy (Dennis Hopper) shocks his father by saying he won’t run the ranch. Instead, he wants to be a doctor. Judy (Fran Bennett) elopes with a local boy, and they don’t want the ranch either, which causes Bick to wonder what he’s been keeping it together for.

Leslie doesn’t wonder about that, but she does wonder about the treatment of the Mexican workers and residents of the area. The Mexicans, openly called “wetbacks” throughout the film up until the very end, live in appalling conditions. Leslie does what she can to help them, much to Bick’s chagrin. Even more to his chagrin, his doctor son marries a Mexican woman named Juana (Elsa Cardenas) and names their very Mexican-looking son Jordan Benedict IV.

Things come to a head when the now filthy-rich, alcoholic Jett Rink opens a new massive hotel and airport complex. Twenty-five years of bad blood, racism, and oil and cattle money finally come to a head.

Giant, for all of its social conscience, still seems to fall flat in the modern world. Bick Benedict’s great awakening doesn’t seem all that great when he calls his own grandson a “wetback.” This film seems very much like Gone With the Wind with oil and Mexicans instead of the Civil War, slaves, and cotton. While the film appears very much to deplore racism against our neighbors to the south, it makes no comment about the fact that in Maryland, all of the rich people are white and all of the servants are black. It could very well draw a parallel here, but doesn’t.

There are good performances all around, but something just seems to fall flat for me here. James Dean is relatively convincing as a middle-aged Jett Rink, but the iconic look—the cowboy hat, jeans, and boots—vanish earlier in the film than I thought they would and he ends up looking a little bit like the unnatural son of Johnny Depp and Steve Buscemi.

I guess I’m ultimately a little disturbed by a film in which the ultimate decisions of right and wrong, good and bad, are decided with an endless series of fistfights.

Why to watch Giant: It’s James Dean’s last movie!
Why not to watch: Don’t mess with Texas—you might get some on ya.

The Power of Christ Compels You

Film: The Exorcist
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on middlin’-sized living room television.

What is the scariest movie ever made? For my money, films that make the idea of going to sleep dangerous rank up there pretty high—A Nightmare on Elm Street and Invasion of the Body Snatchers thus are scary to my mind. As much as I enjoy zombie films, they also scare me pretty well, and are often nightmare inducing. I have a good (or bad, depending on your point of view) zombie dream at least once a month.

The Exorcist was so scary for its time that it was protested around the world. An uncut version of it was not available in the UK until as recently as a dozen years ago. Billy Graham went so far as to suggest that an actual demon existed in the celluloid of the print. And despite the fact that I love a good (or great) scary movie, up until tonight, I had never watched this film. I was far too young when it first came out, and just never got around to seeing it.

For me, it was more about how much I wanted to take. I like roller coasters, for instance, but there are some that I simply won’t go on. They’re just too much. The Exorcist was like that for me up until today. I’d always been scared not of the film, but of the idea of the film, of how scary other people said it was.

Well, now I’ve seen it.

It’s a pretty straightforward film, for what it’s worth. A young girl is possessed by an evil spirit (Pazuzu according to various materials, although the name is never stated). At first, it is presumed her odd behavior comes from a lesion on her brain, but eventually, it is realized that what is happening is far beyond a human’s ability and in come the priests. All of this takes the bulk of the film—the exorcism itself doesn’t happen until the last quarter or so of the movie.

This film has become enmeshed in the vocabulary of film—the little girl’s head spinning around, swearing, and spitting pea soup, for instance, is a reference anyone can make whether or not he or she has seen the film. The girl is Regan MacNeil, famously played by Linda Blair. Her badly set upon mother, Chris (Ellen Burstyn) is a real force in this film despite all of the crazy antic of Linda, her various puppet doubles, and her voice double. She ages visibly in the film as the weight of what is happening presses down on her.

But aside from Linda Blair, the film really belongs to the priesthood. Father Karras (Jason Miller) is a young priest, doubting his faith. He is the initial priest who sees Regan. As a trained psychiatrist, he first recommends psychiatric treatment until he discovers that Regan is capable of impossible physical feats as well as speaking backwards. Karras acts as the assistant to Father Merrin (Max von Sydow), a priest who has performed exorcisms in the past. There is also a police lieutenant named Kinderman (the great Lee J. Cobb in one of his last roles), who is investigating the death of one of Chris MacNeil’s friends, presumably killed by Regan during one of her possessions.

Viewed in the right mindset, The Exorcist is plenty scary. The effects are still pretty good, even after coming up on 40 years, particularly the makeup effects. But as someone who doesn’t believe in demonic possession, I have to admit that I didn’t really find the film all that scary. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not going to let my kids watch it—but I’ve seen films that have scared me more on almost every level.

What it is, though, is excellently made and well cast throughout. However, I couldn’t help but think constantly throughout the film about what Linda Blair’s parents must have been thinking. My younger daughter acts. In fact, she’s doing a production of Miracle on 34th Street later this year. My older daughter is roughly the age of Linda Blair in this film. I can’t imagine okaying either of my girls to play this role, to say the things Linda Blair at least mouths, or to perform some of the more brutal and horrifying acts she is asked as an actress to perform. More than scaring me, I felt concern for the little girl under the makeup.

So it is a great movie, and for those of a more standard Christian mindset, a potentially terrifying and offensive one. All films, once they have started to age, exist really as two films: one film of the time in which it was made and one film in the present. The Exorcist has perhaps not aged as well as it could have. It still works, but so much has been built upon the ground it broke, that for those new to the film, it may be more of a letdown than the scarefest it was in the early 70s.

Why to watch The Exorcist: For its time, the most terrifying film ever made.
Why not to watch: You have no tolerance for supernatural scary stuff.