Femmes Fatale

Films: Gun Crazy (Deadly is the Female), The Killers (1946)
Format: DVD from personal collection on big ol’ television (Gun Crazy), DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player (The Killers).

There is a real draw for me to the genre of film noir. Noir is gritty, and while it may not be very realistic in many senses, it always has the feel of reality. This may simply be because it generally avoids the clichéd Hollywood-style happy ending. There aren’t good girls in film noir. Everyone is dangerous and everyone is looking out of him or herself. The central emotional state in film noir isn’t excitement or lust or fear; it’s selfishness. Everyone in a noir acts in his or her own self interests, and if that means killing someone, squealing on someone, or just standing back in the shadows while someone else takes a bullet, well, so be it.


The post-war years of the ‘40s and early ‘50s were the boom time for the genre. Falling right smack in the middle of that time frame is Gun Crazy (originally released under the equally noir-tastic title Deadly is the Female). It hits all of the highlights of the noir genre—criminal enterprise, a dangerous woman, shadows, death, cynicism, anger, lust, helplessness, existentialism, fatalism, and of course, selfishness—but differs in significant ways. Most films noir take place in decidedly urban settings where the shadows of tall buildings and the seamier parts of town can come into play. Gun Crazy takes place in Podunk, and ends in an open marshy area.

We start with Bart Tare (Russ Tamblyn at this point), a gun-obsessed youth. He breaks the front window of a store and steals a couple of pistols from the inside only to be caught by the sheriff. This leads us to Bart’s criminal hearing where we learn more about the troubled youth. We learn that Bart has always been fascinated with the bang-bang. Early in his shooting career he kills a chick, and from that moment refuses to kill any living thing. But he can’t overcome his fascination with weaponry.

Bart is sent to reform school, and when he’s out, he has a career in the military teaching shooting to recruits. A few years of that convince him to move on, and he returns home, now an adult (and played by John Dall). He reunites with his boyhood friends Clyde Boston, (Harry Lewis), now the town sheriff and Dave Allister (Nedrick Young), now the editor of the local paper. The three head off to a carnival that has come to town, and Bart’s life forever changes.

It’s at the carnival where Bart encounters shooting sensation Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) dressed in full cowgirl regalia. She puts on a whale of an act—her shooting at targets is about half shooting skill and half pure sex. It’s one hell of an effective scene with her looking back at the audience in a way that suggests she’s as much a stripper as a gunslinger. Bart challenges her to a shoot-off, and bests her in a scene that is one of the most erotic things ever put on film. Put a gun in the hands of these two, and it’s pure sex.

This pure sexual tension is not missed on the carnival owner Packett (Berry Kroeger). Packett has designs of his own on Laurie, and more than that has something to hold over her—the fact that she was responsible for a death in St. Louis. Despite this, our two ill-fated lovers demand to be together. Both fired at the same time, they run off and get a quickie marriage. They enjoy some happy time together, and then suddenly the money has run out. With only their skill at shooting to fall back on, they quickly fall into a life of crime. We get a montage of robberies, and we also learn that they’re pretty much spending everything they get just to keep going.

One of the truly great shots in this film is the bank heist. Bank heists have been done to death in films like this, of course, but few were done in the way this one was. We don’t actually see the heist itself. Instead, the camera stays in the getaway car while Bart, dressed in his full carnival Wild West regalia, goes into the bank. Laurie stays in the car, then goes up and speaks with a police officer until Bart comes out and she disables the cop. They then flee, desperate to avoid pursuit. The whole scene is done in a single take with mainly improvised dialogue to keep it fresh, and it says more about the genre than any other scene I can think of.

Our anti-heroes are still low on cash, so they plan one last job—a payroll theft at a meat packing plant. Both get jobs there and they work up a way to get the money. But things go sour almost immediately, and their getaway involves gunfire and a couple of deaths. Now desperate and on the run with the whole country after them, they try to make a life for themselves only to find that they are constantly pursued. Eventually, they wind up back in Bart’s home town where they originally met—and now Bart has to deal seriously with his conviction against killing things.

I won’t spoil the ending here, but suffice to say that this is film noir, so you shouldn’t expect sunshine and roses at the close.

What this film is, though, is pure sex and violence without showing us anything. Laurie is perhaps the greatest femme fatale around. She’s sexy, seductive, erotic, and pure menace. She tells Bart over and over that she’s no good, and that when she gets in trouble or nervous, she gets in a mood to kill things. We discover later in the film that the incident in St. Louis wasn’t an accident on stage—it was a hold-up she and Packett were working when she killed the man in question. Bart is a hell of a shot and good-hearted in the sense that he won’t kill anything. But he’s also powerless when it comes to Laurie, weak-willed, and probably a little thick. In short, he’s the perfect patsy for Laurie, the kind of guy who winds up in a film noir because he’s too lovestruck and too dumb to walk away from it.

Perhaps the greatest scene in the film, other than that single take bank heist, is when the two lovers part after the meat packing plant robbery. In separate cars and heading in separate directions, Bart turns around, stops, and rushes to her. They can’t bear to be apart from each other even if it virtually guarantees that they’ll be caught and killed.

I bought this DVD for $4.00. It’s worth a lot more than that. For as short as its running time is, Gun Crazy packs in the action, the sex, and the noir-y goodness like no other film.


Robert Siodmak’s version of The Killers is an interesting noir for anyone with any knowledge of Ernest Hemingway’s short story of the same name. The film takes its cue from the short story, and films virtually the entire contents of what Hemingway wrote in the first 8-10 minutes of the film. That’s where the original source material ends, but it’s where this one begins. The film instead takes the set up of two killers entering a diner and waiting for their target and posits an entire backstory, adds in a number of new characters, and gives us something that explains why these two strangers would show up in a town and bump off a gas station attendant.

That opening scene is almost literally Heminway’s story including actual dialogue. Hired guns named Al (Charles McGraw) and Max (Robert Conrad, still in the early stages of his eventual planetary bulk) arrive in town and head to a diner. The short story’s main character Nick Adams (an uncredited Phil Brown) is tied up with the diner’s cook. The men are looking for a man named Lund, who usually eats there. When he doesn’t show, the killers leave. Nick runs to warn the man, who decides that it’s not worth running—he once did something very bad and there’s no way out. Nick returns to the diner (this is where the short story ends), the bad guys arrive and shoot Lund.

The rest of this is the fancy of the screenwriter. We see the story from the point of view of Jim Reardon (or possibly Riordan, played by Edmond O’Brien), who is investigating the insurance claim of the dead man. He discovers that the beneficiary is a woman who works in a hotel, who remembers the dead man and a night when he trashed is room, screaming about a woman leaving him. This puts Reardon/Riordan (I’m going to pick one now) on the track of what must have happened.

Our dead guy is actually named Ole Andersen (Burt Lancaster), a former boxer-turned-crook and most commonly known as the Swede. Reardon tracks down his boyhood friend, Lt. Sam Lubinsky (Sam Levene), the cop who eventually busted Ole back in the day. Reardon learns about a woman named Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner), once the flame of a big-time crook named Jim Colfax (Albert Dekker) and then the main squeeze of Ole Andersen. He also manages to connect everything he knows about this trio to a few other crooks and the payroll robbery of a hat factory that occurred a number of years before. Coincidentally, his insurance company paid out on the robbery, and it’s Reardon’s job to see if he can get that money back.

Since this is a noir, it all comes down to the love of that dangerous dame, Kitty Collins. Ole Anderson loves her, Big Jim Colfax loves her, and the two of them can never get rid of this thing between them. Reardon starts to hone in on the actual crime and what went on around it. He finds Anderson’s old cellmate, Charleston (Vince Barnett), who starts him off by telling him about the meeting to plan the heist. This leads him to Blinky Franklin (Jeff Corey), seriously wounded and raving about the score. Blinky leads him to Dum-Dum Clarke (Jack Lambert, who is seriously one of the most frightening ugly men ever to hold a gun on someone in a noir), which takes him back to Colfax and the dangerous Kitty.

In all of this, the common thread is the sad life of Ole Anderson and the lengths he went to for his femme fatale and the destruction of his life and many other lives because of it. The performances are great throughout, particularly for the criminal set. Lancaster is great in pretty much everything he touched, and Sam Levene is believable as a cop who wants to do something to set the record straight about his old pal.

Most importantly for me, this is the first Ava Gardner film I’ve seen where I really liked her portrayal of her character. She’s cool and menacing throughout, slinky and deadly and dangerous, the way the main female focus of a noir should be. The fact that she goes as pathetically bibbledy at the end of the film just as Mary Astor does at the end of The Maltese Falcon only adds to her cred here.

Hemingway’s short story gave this film a great set up, and Siodmak had the guts to take that set up with so many unanswered questions and give us a reason for everything to happen. Pure gold.

Why to watch Gun Crazy: It wastes no time getting to the good parts.
Why not to watch: The glorification of crime.

Why to watch The Killers (1946): It answers questions the more literary minded have had for years.
Why not to watch: Sometimes, those literary questions don’t really need answers.

Down and Out in Hong Kong

Film: Chong Qing Sen Len (Chungking Express)
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.


Most of the time when I watch a film on the list, I have a good idea of what I want to say about it, either good or bad. This is not the case with Chong Qing Sen Lin (Chungking Express). Actually two complete stories, the film depicts two sort-of romances, neither of which reach anything like a real conclusion, at least not on screen. Both romances involve cops who have recently been jilted by their long-time girlfriends. But there the similarities end.

The first story concerns a cop with badge number 223. His name is He Qiwu (Takeshi Kaneshiro), and his girlfriend May has left him. However, she left him on April Fool’s day, so he’s not sure if she’s serious or not. He decides to give her a month to come back to him, buying a can of sliced pineapple with a May 1 expiration date every day until then. When she doesn’t return to him on May 1, which is also his birthday, he eats all 30 cans and goes to a bar.

It’s here that he meets the mysterious woman in the blonde wig (Brigitte Lin). He decides that he will fall in love with the next woman who walks into the bar, and it’s her. She’s not really interested in him, or anything, though, because she’s got too much on her mind. What she isn’t telling him (and it’s a good thing, because he’s a cop) is that she is a heroin smuggler, and that her three mules have disappeared with a good chunk of her money, and with the heroin stashed in their clothing, shoes, bodies (a nice scene involving men walking uncomfortably out of the bathroom while she fills condoms with drugs) and expensive electronics. Like Qiwu, she has a May 1 deadline—find the mules or else.

So that’s the set up here—we have a cop obsessed with his ex and willing to do anything to forget her, even to the point of not noticing that the woman he is obsessing over now is a wanted criminal with two murders that we’ve seen on her head. They leave the bar together, go back to his place, and she sleeps. He performs a minor act of kindness for her—he polishes her shoes. She performs one for him—she wishes him a happy birthday. And then they go their own ways. He jogs so that his body doesn’t have enough water for tears, and she…well, she clears up that problem she has with her connection.

We shift stories when Qiwu bumps into Faye (Faye Wong) at a cheap carry out place he frequents. He walks off, and we are introduced to our fourth main character, Cop 633 (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai), whose real name we never learn. He stops by the carry out every evening and orders a chef salad for his girlfriend from the shop’s owner (Chan Kam-Chuen). He’s convinced to bring her something different, and a few days later, she tells him that she’s looking for something different in a man as well.

Faye is intrigued by this attractive cop, and when the ex girlfriend, a stewardess (Valerie Chow) drops off a short Dear John with his apartment key at the take-out. Faye keeps the letter and starts invading his apartment when he isn’t there. While there, she plays with his objects, cleans things up and replaces a few things as well. He, despite his job and the requirement to be observant, doesn’t notice. Instead, he’s lonely enough that he talks to his objects as if they are people—finding it strange that his old skinny bar of soap is now new and fate and that his dish rag is now no longer filled with holes.

Eventually, the two attempt to meet, but before she commits herself to 633, she goes off and sees the world. They connect again at the end of the film, but their future together is unclear.

And that’s really all there is here. There’s not a whole ton of story. Instead, we’ve got characters, at least three of whom are trying to make their way through Hong Kong without being alone. There is a sense of loneliness, a pang and desire of wanting to be together with someone throughout the film, particularly when we spend time with the two cops. What we have is character study, the story of people.

For being mainly plotless and loose at all ends, Chong Qing Sen Lin is surprisingly effective and pretty. This is not a movie to watch because of stunts or plot, but one to watch because it is a film that succeeds in many ways despite its limitations. I don’t want to imply that Wong Kar Wai is somehow limited as a director here—this is actually a great introduction to his major themes and his style. It simply isn’t a traditional movie. It’s a cut out of the lives of four people that bump into each other tangentially. We get no resolution, no feeling that these people will end up happy, or satisfied, or in at least one case, even alive tomorrow. And it works despite this. It needs to be watched more than once—I frequently skipped back and watched scenes a second time, making the experience much longer than its less-than-two-hour running time.

Faye Wong is pretty as a leading woman should be, but she has an annoying habit of looking not at the character she is speaking to, but swinging her head around to focus on that character for a second before looking elsewhere. It’s in character—she doesn’t know what she wants and is terrified of commitment, so this constant looking is a reminder of that. But it drives me to absolute distraction.

When this film was originally released in the states, it came out under Quentin Tarantino’s banner, which may have done it more harm than good. People expect a particular thing out of a film with Tarantino’s stamp on it, and Chong Qing Sen Lin has maybe five minutes of that sort of footage throughout. While that may have initially attracted an audience to the film, I imagine that much of that audience walked away confused rather than intrigued. Oddly, it gives me a whole new level of respect for Tarantino.

Why to watch Chong Qing Sen Len: Less plot, more character, and all character development.
Why not to watch: Halfway through, most of the characters change.

Sucking, but not Blood

Films: Les Vampires (The Vampires)
Format: Internet video on laptop.

The other day, I was lying on my bed watching part #I don’t remember of Les Vampires (The Vampires) when my seven-year-old asked me what I was doing. I told her and she remarked, “Who would ever make a film that long?” For a moment, I tried to explain exactly what a serial was—that it wasn’t intended to be watched straight through, but then I stopped. The kid had a point.

With a film that covers this much time, it’s impossible to really come up with a legitimate synopsis that will do justice to the entire tale. It’s far easier to just hit the high points in terms of the characters and go from there. We have three teams of people: the good guys, the bad guys, and the ones who fall in the middle. You can root for whomever you wish, but the film sure isn’t named after the good guys.

The forces of right and law are personified mainly in the character of Phillipe Guerande (Edouard Mathe), who is a reporter for a Parisian newspaper. Specifically, he is covering the story concerning “The Vampires,” and he seems to be the driving force behind the investigation. His job appears to consist of writing a single sentence every day, at least based on what we’re shown. Working against him at first, then working whole-heartedly for him is Mazamette (Marcel Levesque). More on him later. Aside from the police, rounding out the good squad are Guerand’s mother (Delphine Renot) and, in the last two films, his fiancée, Jane (Louise Legrange) and her mother (Jeanne Marie-Laurent). Mazamette also has a son named Eustache (Bout-de-Zan), who appears in a single episode.

Then there are the bad guys. The bulk of the bad guys are the Vampires themselves, and I probably should have mentioned earlier that they aren’t real vampires, but rather a gang of thieves and killers who tend to dress in black leotards. The Vampire we spend the most time with is Irma Vep (Musidora), whose name is an anagram of “vampire.” Originally, she works for the Grand Vampire (Jean Ayme), who also goes under a bunch of aliases. Eventually, he is replaced by Satanas (Louis Leubas), and Satanas is replaced by Venomous (Moriss). There are tons of other Vampires as well, but they don’t figure into the story as much but cannon fodder. Additionally, there’s another gang of thieves led by a guy named Moreno (Fernand Hermann). He starts out against the Vampires at first, and is then eventually is coerced into joining forces with them.

There are also neutral parties, most of whom only show up for part of one of the 10 episodes of this film. There’s a dancer, an American millionaire, and a few others who essentially play victims, patsies, and people to be rescued.

With something of this length and number of episodes, it’s impossible to give even the most general plot overview. Guerande reports on the doings of the Vampires and does everything he can to help catch them, and the Vampires do everything they can to steal money, kill people, and eliminate Guerande and those he loves. That’s pretty much it. It seems like every room in every house has a secret door or a hidden way in. At a couple of points, Satanas wheels out a friggin’ cannon from a secret compartment and starts blasting away.

More to the point, over and over again, people sneak into somewhere and hide so that they can surprise the people they are waiting for. Over and over again, despite the evident network of tunnels, secret passages, and everything up to and including human-sized air ducts, people simply stand behind curtains. You’d think that people who are up to nefarious criminal activity or who have foiled a couple of dozen assassination attempts would start, y’know, looking behind the curtains every now and then, or maybe just taking them down to reduce the number of possible hiding spaces, but no one ever does.

Guerande, over and over, is saved from death not by his own ingenuity or skill but through pure, blind luck. Frequently this comes in the person of Mazamette, who always happens to be in the right place at the right time. He recognizes the right person, or happens to be walking past when the Vampires do something bad. He begins the film as a comic relief character, and apparently no one bothered to tell the actor that eventually Mazamette changes his allegiance from the Vampires to the good guys, because he’s always played as comic relief. This guy mugs for the camera more than Chris Kattan and Rob Schneider combined. His most common and annoying habit is looking at something, then looking directly at the audience as if to confirm what he is seeing. The fourth wall doesn’t exist for M. Marcel Levesque, evidently. Initially, I thought he was looking at the director to be told what to do next, but it’s soon evident that he’s trying to share a joke with his audience. Didn’t work. He looks like a douche.

If you plan on watching Les Vampires, prepare yourself for a rough ride. The film is interminable. In fact, the only really good thing about it is that it is intended to be watched episodically, which means you have an excuse other than pure frustration to get up and walk away from it and to take a week to get through it. By the last episode, I was watching in five-minute bursts, and rocking in my seat, praying for the end.

Everything is overfilmed. We see someone climb up the side of a building. Great. We’ve learned as movie watchers that if we see someone starting to climb a building, a jump cut of that person on the top of the building lets us all know that the person climbed it. Not so our director here. If someone’s going to climb the side of a building, we’re going to see the whole damn thing. If someone makes a getaway across rooftops, it will not do until we’ve seen them run across at least four roofs.

I took three pages of notes on this to keep it straight over the week I watched it. I don’t know why at this point. Looking back through them, my favorite comments are these: “Guerande—what a dick,” the notation that at their engagement party, Guerande and Jane have a dish on the menu called “Little Bitty Bits,” and that at one point, Irma goes sneaking into a hotel room dressed in a black leotard for silence and shadow and is also wearing humongous chunky shoes that look like they’d make stampede noises on the floor.

Two final things—it’s clear throughout that the bad guys are the real stars here. Irma Vep is the only really compelling character, followed perhaps by Moreno. Second is that by far the most famous still from this film is the woman on the bench being menaced by a leotard-clad woman with bat wings (above). Time and time again, the woman in the leotard is named as Irma Vep. It’s not. The woman in the leotard is a dancer named Marfa in the episode named “The Ring that Kills.” How do we know the ring kills? Because Marfa gets stuck with it, and dies about 30 seconds after that still. It seems that even when trying to justify the value of this lengthy stink bomb, the people on the side of “great film” can’t force themselves to watch it long enough to get their facts straight.

Why to watch Les Vampires: One of the first true serial films.
Why not to watch: A constant desire to check one’s watch.

Strange Romance

Films: The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, The Wedding Banquet
Format: VHS from DeKalb Public Library (Ghost), DVD from NetFlix (Wedding), both on big ol’ television.

First, apologies. The Internet crapped out on us last night, and I was unable to upload this post. Suffice to say that you can expect a second update late tonight. I hope.

What is the appeal of a romance picture? It’s hardly a sexist comment to suggest that romances are, in general, made for women. Yes, that’s a generalization, but I think it’s an accurate one. Many romances, both good and bad, involve presenting women with something completely unachievable in real life. Why else would the damn Twilight books and movies be so popular? Unachievable romance.

Perhaps no film accomplished this sort of romance as fully and completely as The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. We start with a young widow named Lucy Muir (Gene Tierney), who has decided to get on with her life, something that widowed women in 1900 didn’t do. Her mother-in-law (Isobel Elsom) and spinster sister-in-law Eva (Victoria Horne) are desperately against her leaving, of course. The mother-in-law seems to disagree with the notion mostly so she won’t be alone; Eva because it would mean losing control of Lucy. Regardless, using her husband’s willed shares of a gold mine, Lucy and her daughter Anna (Natalie Wood, at least at this point in the film) move to a small seaside community.

Once there, Lucy rents a little cottage off by itself despite the fact that it’s been mainly empty for four years and appears to be haunted by the ghost of the sea captain who lived there until he allegedly killed himself. She rents the house anyway, and the captain, a youngish man named Daniel Gregg (Rex Harrison), manifests himself and tries to scare her off, but fails. She loves the house, and will keep it. They come to an arrangement of sorts—she’ll eventually will the house to become a home for old seamen, and he’ll not manifest to Anna and he’ll stay in his old room.

Almost immediately, Lucy loses her stipend—the gold mine has played out, but even without an income, she refuses to leave the house she has loved so much. As a way out of the financial pickle, Captain Gregg proposes to narrate his life story to her for her to turn into a book. He does, and the book is published and sells, in no small part because of the salty language. So at least the money thing is handled. It’s also at this time that he tells her to call him Daniel, and he decides to call her Lucia. With the book completed, Captain Gregg tells Lucy that she should spend time with living people, particularly with men, even though she doesn’t really want to. It’s evident at this point that the two of them are deeply in love with each other despite the small problem of him being, y’know, dead.

It’s at the publisher’s office that Lucy meets Miles Fairley (George Sanders), an author of children’s books and a man far more forward than most would dare to be. Seriously, when he talks to her, he looms over her. At one point, they share a cab ride, and he just about sits in her lap. Anyway, romance of a sort blossoms, and it’s evident that Captain Gregg disapproves. Despite this, he decides that Lucy must be allowed to attempt to find happiness on her own, and so he tells her in a fairly poignant scene that he will leave her in peace, and that she will remember him only as a dream, and that the dream will eventually fade. This happens, of course, and of course Fairley is a bastard who’s already married and has made a habit of pulling this trick on women in the past. I’ll stop here so as not to spoil the last 20 minutes or so of the film.

The film is, of course, insanely romantic in the truest sense, and not just in the smoochy-kissy way. It’s romantic in the doomed love, Romeo and Juliet, “I want the thing that I just can’t have” sense. That’s really the whole point of the film; she wants the ghost, the ghost wants her, and thus she becomes attracted to another man she can’t have. It’s not the eventual culmination of the relationship that’s important here. It’s not the time when they are together that’s important. The real romance is the ache when they are apart and the longing to be reunited.

That, friends and neighbors, is the romance part, and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir is chock filled to burstin’ with that.

So how is it? As romances go, it’s a shade too predictable, but many romance films are predictable, because the audience for these films wants that ache, that longing, and that desperate reach for a third hanky. The cast is quite good: Gene Tierney is lovely, which is exactly what she is supposed to be, and independent—ditto that. Rex Harrison was generally good in anything he touched, and he’s gruff, and salty, and a shade tender here, which works for the film more than it does for the character. My favorite character, and I suspect the favorite of most people who watch the film, is Martha (Edna Best), Lucy’s maid. She’s no-nonsense, funny, and gruff, and doesn’t hide her emotions or the fact that she spies a bit on her employer.

This is a tenderhearted film, one that’s nice for a snuggle on the couch with someone special. I won’t say that all women will like it, but fans of chick flicks undoubtedly will. As for the guys, sometimes you have to take one for the team. It might as well be one that’s easier going down than the romantic comedy pablum (or, God forbid, Twilight) currently being served up.

The Wedding Banquet (known in Taiwan as Hsi Yen or Xi Yan), rather than being about a love that can’t be, is about a love that isn’t. Actually, there’s a love that is here as well as a non-existent love. The Wedding Banquet is Ang Lee’s second film. In an interview, he described this film as a classic 1940s screwball comedy, except Chinese and gay. It’s a tremendous description. If the “gay” thing bothers you, you should stop reading now, because this film is gayer than Paul Lynde’s underpants.

We are introduced initially to Wai-Tung Gao (Winston Chao) while he is working out. He is listening to a tape of his mother, who evidently sends tapes rather than letters (this was filmed in those dark days before the Internet and email became common) because of her arthritis. She wonders when her son will get married and help carry on the family name. We soon discover the reason why this hope is in vain—Wai-Tung has a lover named Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein), and the two have shared a nice building for a number of years. Wai-Tung is a landlord, running a low-rent building in a much cheaper part of New York. Here we meet one of his tenants—Wei Wei (May Chin), an almost literally starving artist. She lives in a non-residential space in the building because it is all she can afford, and she can’t really afford it.

Wai-Tung goes to collect the rent from her, and we learn that she almost got caught by immigration, and her best friend was deported. Now, she has no work, no visa, no green card, and no way to stay. Wai-Tung is continually signed up for singles’ clubs by his parents, who want him to marry and produce grandchildren to carry on the family name. The solution, thought of by Simon, is obvious. If Wai-Tung and Wei Wei get married, everyone benefits. Wai-Tung gets his parents off his back (and a substantial married tax break) and Wei Wei gets a legitimate reason (kind of) to stay in the country. All seems fine until the announcement of the “wedding” brings Wai-Tung’s parents from Taiwan, for a two-week stay. They want to be there for the wedding ceremony. All of this is compounded by the recent stroke of Wai-Tung’s father and his survival, according to a woman he meets through the singles’ agency, because of his desire to hold a grandchild. And thus, we have the rest of the movie.

And yes, it is a comedy of errors. It’s funny and sweet, and a bit tender. Much of the film, really, isn’t so much about the comedic situation of the plot set up, but the relationship between Wai-Tung and his parents (Ya-lei Kuei as the very sweet Mrs. Gao and Sihung Lung as the traditional and cagey Mr. Gao). Of course, it can’t ever be even this simple, and when Wei Wei manages to seduce a drunken Wai-Tung and becomes pregnant, the situation becomes, well, serious.

I don’t want to be coy here, though. The situation here is very funny and the film moves on the gay/straight/fake marriage story arc completely and there would be no film without it. However, even at this early stage in his career, Lee was smart enough to realize that the movie is much more than the situation. In fact, while it is the situation that makes the plot, the reason the audience watches and the reason the audience cares about anything on the screen is the characters, not the story. There are movies with little plot but interesting characters that are worth watching. There are very few movies (at least in my opinion) with a great plot but lousy characters that are worth much of anything.

And so, the movie really does depend on the quality and depth of the characters, and what we have are real people. More importantly, we have real relationships between them. Wai-Tung has a genuine and believable relationship with his parents, one that many people have with their own. He loves and respects them and wants nothing more than to please them, but he also wants to be free to live his own life. He is desperate not for their love, attention, or affection. He has all three. He wants them to bless his life and his choices and to understand him for who he is. Essentially, he wants acceptance for himself, not for their idea of who they want him to be.

This is what makes the film worth watching, and what makes it accessible to anyone—even those of us in traditional marriages. We relate not to the situation, which is extreme, but to the struggles and the personalities of the people going through it. As with many of the most highly touted directors, Lee started strong, and only got stronger.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that much of the film is really funny, and that just as much is equally serious. The actual marriage ceremony is ridiculously silly, as is much of what follows, and the film is much more watchable because of it. When it does turn into a domestic drama, the change is both sudden and natural, but even here, the film doesn’t completely lose its light touch

Why to watch The Ghost and Mrs. Muir: A sweet romance that happily stretches the boundaries of reality.
Why not to watch: The risk of losing your girlfriend to a ghost.

Why to watch The Wedding Banquet: Real characters and real pathos, even if the situation is extraordinary.
Why not to watch: Homophobia.

What Hays Code?

Films: Little Caesar
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

The stereotypical movie gangster got its start from two films of the same era: Little Caesar and The Public Enemy. The actors in these two films, Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney respectively, were more or less typecast as thugs and hoodlums. Both actors did other things, of course. Cagney worked in musicals, several of which are on this list, and Robinson eventually took smaller roles in great films and acted to great effect. But the short, pugnacious, cigar-chewing, wide-lipped, perpetually frowning thug got its start in the pre-Hays Code days of 1930-1 in the person of Robinson’s portrayal in Little Caesar.

Robinson portrays Cesare Enrico “Rico, Little Caesar” Bandello. We start with a small-time hit in which he and his partner Joe Massara (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) knock over a gas station, and then go sit in a dinner. While there, Rico sees a write-up in the big city newspaper about a party thrown for a local big time crook by his cronies. That’s the life he wants, and he’s taking Joe with him. Joe isn’t really that interested, though. He’d like to go back to his first love: dancing.

They head to the city, and Rico immediately hooks up with Sam Vettori (Stanley Fields) while Joe goes out and gets himself that dancing job, keeping both musical and other time with Olga Stassoff (Glenda Farrell). Rico is given the nickname “Little Caesar” because of his first name. While Joe concentrates on his dancing career, Rico fully accepts the gangland life. Eventually, the gang plans a raid on the club that Joe works at, in no small part because Joe is still a part of the gang and can act as a lookout.

The raid goes off, but not without a hitch. In the course of the robbery, Rico guns down the new crime commissioner, a crime for which he cannot be protected. Joe, of course, witnesses this, but promises not to say anything to anybody. With the loot from the robbery backing him up and his new status as a man not afraid of using the gun, Rico wrests control of the mob from Sam, turning Sam into one of his flunkies almost immediately.

The other hitch from the robbery is the getaway driver, Tony (William Collier Jr.). Already a nervous man, he panics and crashes the car, then goes home to his mother. In talking with her, he realizes that the life of crime is no good for him, and he plans to confess everything to the local priest, a plan he foolishly admits to Otero (George E. Stone), another gang member. Before he can go to confession, though, Rico guns him down on the church steps, then gives him a massive funeral.

Eventually, Rico rises to the top of the crime heap and is given the same sort of testimonial dinner that prompted his move to the big city. This also involves a threat to his life, and he’s wounded in a burst of gunfire from a rival thug. In retribution, Rico doesn’t kill him, but buys him out and forces him out of town. Now Rico is in the big leagues, and is rolling in material wealth. He tries to bring Joe back in on the take, but Joe isn’t buying. He likes his life and loves Olga, but Rico won’t let him go. This conflict sets up the final scene between the two, and begins Rico’s meteoric descent back to the world he started from.

To modern eyes, Little Caesar is all cliché and obvious, which means it really can’t be watched with modern eyes. The reason the film looks so clichéd, of course, is that it began those clichés—this film is the original and the rest are imitators. Much of that is the character of Rico as portrayed by Robinson. What is now a stereotype was, at that time, a completely original performance, and an incredible one. Rico is in most of the scenes of the film, and is also the driving force behind it. He is the one who moves the plot forward. Everything happens because of Rico’s desires, Rico’s needs, or Rico’s quest to become a big man in a big city.

If I have a complaint here, it’s that everything moves too fast. With its under-80-minute running time, everything happens so quickly that it feels as if there is no time for anything to truly build up naturally. Rico’s rise and fall and especially Joe’s relationship with Olga seem so forced because there is no development there—it just happens. That may well simply be a function of the time in which the film was made, but much of the story feels like short shrift.

Still, this is where the true modern gangster movie started. Without Little Caesar leading the way, this list would lose a good number of films, because they wouldn’t have been made.

Why to watch Little Caesar: The real beginning of the gangster film.
Why not to watch: It has become clichéd in spite of itself.

Mosaic

Films: Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

The biopic is not an uncommon form for a film to take, and there are several (or more than several) on the full 1001 Movies list. Most films of this nature take one of two forms. With one type we see a person’s life from childhood to present (or death) with the film concerning itself with the most important and formative events of that life. This tends to be the path of documentary films. Others, generally the more dramatic and dramatized biopics, focus on a single important event or time from the person’s life, making meaning of the whole life from that one event or series of events.

Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould is singular in its depiction of its topic, in this case Canadian concert pianist and radio documentarian Glenn Gould. A dramatized documentary, actor Colm Feore plays the role of Gould in many of the short films. He is never shown playing the piano, although he is frequently shown listening to his own music and reacting to it. All of the music in the film is recordings of Gould, and his work plays over every film even if Gould himself is not present in the film.

While initially difficult to follow, the film does give a grand overview of the man’s life, his eccentricities, his habits, his passions, and his beliefs. One early film, titled CD318 concerns itself with the inner workings of a Steinway piano as it is played. We see the action of the hammers as the music plays, finally ending on the tag designating not the piece played but the actual piano as CD318. We don’t learn until much later that this was evidently Gould’s piano, something we learn from the man who used to tune it for Gould.

The overall effect is less a painting than it is a mosaic. Each piece contains a small part of the ultimate whole, but only by looking at it from a certain distance does the entire portrait become clear.

Taken individually, many of the films are interesting, if a touch bizarre. Taken as a whole, they give a much clearer picture of who Glenn Gould was and what motivated him. Despite being a true virtuoso on the piano, he was not particularly interested in the instrument, claiming instead that it was merely the best way to get the music he heard out. His later work focused more on music-concrete pieces where human voices overlaying and overlapping each other—not singing, but speaking—replaced the instruments. We get descriptions of the many pills he took, a day of his diary that contains innumerable recordings of his blood pressure and pills taken. We hear his philosophy of life and death and the afterlife, and his own fears of being forgotten and considered unimportant.

Even out of context, some of these films are brilliant. A personal favorite is one of the first, called Gould Meets Gould: Text by Glenn Gould in which he interviews himself, stating as subject almost at the top that any subject is on the table except, of course, music. He then proceeds to discuss his philosophy of why he stopped performing in concert halls, instead focusing on his other work and on recorded performance. It’s a fascinating bit of philosophy, and it fades out and cuts off just as it is starting to get really interesting, which is frustrating, but ultimately kind of cool. Another short is a proposed personal ad (appropriately titled Personal Ad) in which Gould looks for a very unique series of soulmates. He reads the ad aloud, picks up the phone to call the ad in, then hangs up and chuckles to himself. There is great wit involved here.

It’s difficult to know what to make of this film. I am not a music fan by nature anymore. There was a time in my life when music was central to my existence—when knowing more than the next person was important, and judging others on their tastes was critical to my self image. That time for me has passed. But even someone like me, who has become so totally ambivalent to music over the last three or four years, can appreciate not only the unique genius of Gould, but also the unique portrait presented here. This is a fascinating portrait of a troubled man who was simultaneously a prodigy. It’s out of my normal wheelhouse, but I’m also extremely happy to have watched it.

Why to watch Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould: A unique portrait of a unique mind.
Why not to watch: It’s too disjointed for all tastes.

Check Out My Shorts

Films: Hold Me While I’m Naked, The War Game, Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (Land Without Bread)
Format: Internet video on laptop (Naked, Las Hurdes), streaming video from NetFlix on laptop (War Game).

It’s been awhile since I’ve done a short film, since I’ve been trying to concentrate on some of the longer film productions. Normally, I look for something more than running time to connect the films of a given day, but today, it’s all about things under an hour long.

Years ago, I worked for a magazine publisher. One of the guys who worked there made amateur films in his spare time, most of which were perverse, scatological, crude, and often really funny. Hold Me While I’m Naked has that same sort of energy to it. It’s camp, both intentionally and unintentionally. Because it is camp, I’m not sure how to react to it.

We start with a woman in green (Donna Kerness) running as if she is being chased. Two things are noteworthy about this woman. First, she’s quite top heavy. Second, she’s wearing someone’s idea of a classy dress. She runs, and we hear a voice over telling her to run, giving her stage direction. We cut to a man with a camera giving an “okay” sign, and then we have titles.

It becomes evident that this is a film about a man making a film, so we start travelling into meta-territory pretty quickly. The film within the film is evidently soft-core smut. The next scene being filmed as well as the scenes planned by the director (George Kuchar, who also directed the film—he’s both the director and the meta-director) are nothing but Donna Kerness getting naked or being naked. She’s tired of having her boobs filmed, so she quits. And the director’s movie falls apart.

I’m not a great fan of camp, which leaves me wondering how to approach this film. Is Kuchar serious, poking fun, or is he demonstrating his seriousness by poking fun? Or is it all of this at once?

The concluding scene shows evidently a scene from the meta-movie, with Kerness in her green dress and with a man in the shower intercut with the director taking a shower. Kerness and the man are obviously enjoying themselves tremendously while the director pounds his head lightly against the wall under the shower spray. Almost as if he’s trying to recreate the shower scene for himself, he’s wearing a pink gown. The film ends with his mother yelling at him to leave the bathroom and eat, and the director comes out wrapped in a bathrobe and towel turban and says to the camera, “There’s a lot of things in life worth living for, isn’t there?” as if he is trying to convince himself.

Is it a statement? I think it is. The director in the film (Kuchar’s character, and possibly Kuchar as well in another meta-moment) is trying to make something greater than his everyday existence, which consists of of a towel turban and a plate of shapeless meat and what looks like sliced beets. And because his starlet has wandered off the set, his dream is gone and only the sad reality remains.

The bigger question, of course, is whether or not it’s worth watching. Hard to say. I can’t say that it’s so bad it’s good, because so much of the camp quality of this film is absolutely intended. It’s a forced glamour that, if it were completely in earnest, would be pathetically sad—but Kuchar is really attempting to make it look like an earnest bad attempt. It’s very much like the songs in This is Spinal Tap that are bad enough to be ridiculously funny, but also just good enough that it’s possible someone wrote them in earnest.

The War Game was initially conceived as a film designed to run on the BBC. Once it was completed, though, the BBC blanched at the graphic nature of the program and declined to run it. Filmed in a pseudo-documentary style, the film depicts the aftermath of a nuclear attack on the British Isles as well as an actual documentary on the typical opinions of the British population regarding readiness and retaliation in case of Soviet attack.

There’s a good deal of controversy regarding this film, actually. The official line on its banning on television (a ban that lasted until the mid-1980s) is that it was far too graphic for the general viewing public, and it is intensely graphic. The burn victims look terribly real despite the old cosmetic technology used in a film in the 1960s. People’s arms look like charred roasts. Don’t watch this when you’re also thinking about eating.

However, there are some who believe (and this also makes a certain level of conspiratorial sense) that the film was pulled from the BBC because it showed that the British population was uninformed, unprepared, and horribly naïve when it came to the realities of full nuclear war. This film is as much frightening possible future as it is an indictment on the British government’s plans for coping with nuclear war and nuclear winter. We’re told mid-way through the film, for instance, that doctors will be instructed to classify the wounded in three categories. Those in the third category are to be placed in holding rooms where they will be left to die in great pain without any medical assistance or painkillers. This is followed by a scene in which the London police “assist” the doctors by delivering euthanizing bullets to those determined to be too far gone to have a chance at survival.

Whatever the reason, suppression or the graphic nature, it’s actually difficult to disagree with the BBC’s decision. Even now, 45 years after the film was made, this is a terrifying piece of footage. It’s gruesome, ghoulish, and completely sobering. Camera pans across rows and rows of mutilated and burned bodies, empty eye sockets staring up, mangled women and children, destroyed buildings, and the haunted, soulless voices of the rescue workers and doctors combine to make this film seem much, much longer than its 48-minute running time.

It’s worth noting that the acting here is quite good overall. The sound often feels dubbed in, but the people being shown—heads bandaged, bodies shaking—are quite convincing. We learn that even in the “lightly hit” counties, death tolls of up to 50,000 can be expected, with the resultant funeral pyres, since that many corpses couldn’t be reasonable dealt with in any other way.

Director Peter Watkins makes his point by comparing the devastation of a potential nuclear war with the realities that occurred in World War II in places like Nagasaki and Hiroshima as well as conventionally bombed cities like Dresden. The commentator remarks that the scenes being shown, while simulated, actually happened in other places, and would be a part of the new reality of a post-nuclear world. This includes the inevitable collapse into martial law, chaos, and a return to essential primitivism. Watkins doesn’t shy away from the psychological aspects of the war, either. A great deal of this film concerns the mental states of the survivors and what they will likely experience in terms of complete mental breakdowns.

Despite its age, this film is still effective and affecting. I don’t know how sound all of Watkins’s science is—he does claim a great deal of vetting at the end of the film—but what he shows is sobering and terrifying.

Luis Bunuel arguably invented the mockumentary with Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (Land Without Bread). This short film (roughly half an hour) tells of the area in northern Spain that is perhaps the most backward region in Europe at the time. The people who live in Las Hurdes, called Hurdanos, are so cut off from the rest of the world that until just before the arrival of the film crew, they were unaware of the existence of bread, hence the name of the film.

Bunuel shows the miserable, terrible lives of the people in the Hurdano villages, wracked by starvation, disease, poverty, and plagued by accidents and the worst of nature. Nothing about the lives of these people is pleasant or comfortable. The richest people in the area slaughter a pig once every year, and thus have meat for three days. The rest of the Hurdanos, says the film, get meat only when one of their mountain goats dies, either through age or through accident.

The people own nothing, are illiterate, and many don’t have shoes. They are crawling with malaria, and in the summer months are so desperate for food that they eat unripe cherries, which gives them dysentery. Misery abounds. Even without the disease and starvation, the people are so isolated that many of them are mentally deficient due to improper medical care and inbreeding. Taking care of the beehives of a nearby region in winter months, the Hurdanos travel to return them to their rightful owners, and several of the men are stung to death. Looking for fertilizer, a man is bitten by an asp. That, combined with the Hurdano cure, kills him.

There is a certain amount of truth to Bunuel’s film, but it is also exaggerated to an extreme degree. The Hurdanos were backward and poor until relatively recently, and have struggled since the release of Bunuel’s film to overcome the stigma of their region. But when Bunuel shows us an ancient woman and claims she is in her early 30s, or any number of the other preposterous and extreme claims he makes, it goes well beyond even willing suspension of disbelief. Bunuel wasn’t above setting up shots to prove his point. At one point a goat falls off a cliff—this was a shot set up by Bunuel, and the goat was sacrificed to take the tumble. In another part, he took a sick donkey and spread it with honey, allowing it to be stung to death by bees, again to increase the evident poverty and pitiable nature of the film’s subjects.

Where the film works, though, is through the combination of image and word. The film is delivered in a straight narration, almost a travelogue as if Las Hurdes were a place high on the list of potential tourist destinations. Interestingly enough, this is now the case—the remote location and beautiful landscape has turned the region into a vacationers’ paradise. For the film, though, the matter-of-fact voiceover reporting on these terrible conditions and tragedies makes an interesting and effective counterpoint to the rest of the film.

What else were you going to do with the next 27 minutes of your life? This film is worth at least that.

Why to watch Hold Me While I’m Naked: A piece of classic camp.
Why not to watch: A piece of classic camp.

Why to watch The War Game: A sobering look at the consequences of nuclear war.
Why not to watch: Lack of appetite afterward.

Why to watch Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan: A surreal documentary that isn’t really a documentary, except that it sort of is.
Why not to watch: The lengths Bunuel went to for certain shots.