Sunday, February 11, 2024

Review - The Falls

February 12, 2024
 
The Falls – Taiwan, 2021
 

While watching Chung Mong-hung’s 2021 film, The Falls, I was reminded of something one of my child development teachers remarked, that tears and anger are often the result of an accumulation of frustrating experiences – tough mornings, disagreements with friends, difficulty at work or school – not just the result of what has recently happened. However, there are times in history when the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back is so powerful and unexpected that it has the potential to send people spiraling into the abyss. For some people, Covid-19 was such an event, and The Falls is the first film I’ve seen that attempts to show the impact of the pandemic on both people’s personal and psychological states.
 
The Falls begins with a scene of dysfunction, one that I’m sure many people are unfortunately familiar with. It is a school day, and for Lo Pin Wen (Alyssa Chia), just getting her daughter up and out the door is a momentous task. It should be easier, of course. Her daughter, Xiao-Jing (Gingle Wang), is 18 and a senior in high school, yet their morning is filled with a string of unfeeling inquiries and caustic backtalk. And it only gets worse as the day goes on.
 
At work, Pin Wen receives a double whammy. First, there’s a rather heartless email requesting that all staff members decide how much of a “voluntary” pay cut they receive. Then, as if that weren’t enough, she is informed that one of her daughter’s classmates has tested positive for Covid, automatically triggering home quarantine for the entire class. Pin Wen offers to keep working, but her boss tells her to take some time off. It’s an understandable decision, but it deprives Pin Wen of the one thing that she needs to feel in control of the chaos surrounding her, and without it, her descent is rapid and severe.
 
The Falls could easily have focused solely on the ensuing two weeks, detailing what quarantine is like and how these characters deal with their unwanted joint confinement. Instead, it elects to pivot in a way that allows for Pin Wen and Xiao-Jing to switch roles. Covid gives way to mental illness, and Xiao-Jing must now effectively become the head of the household. Unfortunately, the change is too abrupt, and Xiao-Jing’s sudden maturity seems unexplained. This is a character who, while possibly infected, was so spiteful as to take off her mask while standing close to her mother and tell her to keep away, a move that can only be seen as an aggressive attempt to create both emotional and physical distance. To see her acting kind and responsible so quickly was more than a bit jarring.
 
Hurting the film more is its apparent desire for its characters to resolve problems with very little effort. Need your mother’s financial information? Just make an emotional plea to a bank employee. Have money problems? Just sell your house. Never mind that by your own admission the market is bad. Have low savings? Perhaps you too can live off of NT $40,000 (about US $1,300) a month. Writers Chung and Chang Yao-sheng seem to think that there are easy solutions to everything, and that they can be discovered and dealt with in less than ten minutes of screen time. The result is less a journey of discovery than a series of simple steps.
 
Perhaps the most egregious of these “simple steps” is the notion that people with mental illness can, with enough introspection and awareness, eventually diagnose the source of their problems themselves. Twice in the film characters detail sudden flashes of awareness when developments like those are much more likely to be the result of therapy and strenuous reflection. It is as if the spectre of A Beautiful Mind had somehow taken possession of the writers as they looked for another rapid resolution and made them make the following erroneous calculation, Well, if worked in A Beautiful Mind, it will work here. Fortunately, the scenes in which these revelations are divulged are quite moving, and like Nash, one of the characters has developed a somewhat realistic method of coping with something that she knows is not really there.
 
Other aspects of the film also ring true. Many of the companies most directly affected by the pandemic did in fact either reduce their staff or ask them to take pay cuts, despite already having what can only be considered extremely low salaries, and yes, many workers were indeed asked to choose how much of their salaries they would lose. Given that they were told that the alternative was job loss, was it really a choice, though? More importantly, periods of quarantine were not always times when families came together. Those that were already dysfunctional did not magically come together – For many people, there were more arguments, more drinking, more friction, and even suicidal thoughts. Thus, it is not surprising that Pin Wen and her daughter do not come together during their quarantine. Realistically, their journey takes much longer. Also, I admired the way the film slowly puts the pieces of the mother’s condition together. As a result, we get a remarkable understanding of what leads to Pin Wen’s decline.
 
Still, I can’t help thinking of The Falls as a compromised film. The idea behind it is a promising one, and the two lead characters are fascinating to watch. However, the film’s frequent shortcuts undercut the drama, robbing it of much needed momentum. A better film would have left difficulties unresolved for a time, adding them to other conflicts and raising the stakes for its characters. This one does not. A better film would also not have to rely on a shock ending to make its point, for in a family drama, what resonates is the final state of the family, and that point had already been made. In the end, The Falls is a good film, one about sympathetic characters coping with tragic circumstances. It had the potential to be great, though; it just lacked to attention span to pull it off. (on DVD in Region 3; on Netflix)
 
3 stars
 
*The Falls is in Taiwanese and Chinese with English subtitles.
*The Falls won Best Narrative Film at the 58th Golden Horse Awards in 2021.

Saturday, December 2, 2023

Review - Wild and Woolly

December 3, 2023
 
Wild and Woolly – U.S., 1917
 

It seems strange to admit this, but for most of my time spent watching movies, the career of Douglas Fairbanks had been a blind spot. Sure, I had seen The Thief of Bagdad, but that had been as an avid fan of Anna May Wong, not as one eager to discover one of film’s first superstars, and subsequently, I did not pursue Fairbanks’ other films. My curiosity was eventually piqued by a plot summary of his film The Half-Breed and by Bosley Crowther’s inclusion of Fairbanks’ Robin Hood in his 1967 book The Great Films: Fifty Golden Years of Motion Pictures. While neither of those films earned rave reviews from me, his performances in them were enough to rope me in.
 
John Emerson's Wild and Woolly was Fairbanks’ seventeenth film, and while already a star, he had yet to make the swashbuckling, heroic films that would ultimately make him a legend. However, he was well on his way to establishing himself as a romantic superhero. Just a year earlier, in The Matrimaniac, he (and a reluctant priest) had gone through a series of physical challenges just to be able to marry the love of his life over the objection of her traditional father (a common theme in early silents), and his role in Flirting with Fate had audiences awe-struck upon seeing his physically challenging attempts to elude a hit man he’d regrettably hired to whack him. It may not always have made sense that his characters were suddenly able to do such acrobatic moves, but there’s no denying their impressiveness.
 
In Wild and Woolly, he plays Jeff Hillington, the son of Collis J. Hillington, who, in this film at least, was responsible for taming the Wild West with the railroad. In fact, the film begins with a series of comparisons between the West as it was in the olden days – replete with cowboys, shoot-ups, and wagons - and as it is today – “ruined” by technology. Jeff, we soon learn, has a massive obsession with the Wild West and his room is practically a shrine to the days he idolizes. It is here where he practices the “cowboy” skills he has so often seen romanticized in Hollywood movies (using real bullets!). At one point, he lassos the family butler and later offers some modern businessmen some of his tobacco block. He even looks at an actress on a poster for the latest Hollywood western and proclaims her the kind of woman he wants to marry. All of this gets him the reputation of being a nut.
 
Early scenes are fun, even though they make Jeff more akin to the kind of man-child that Harry Langdon played so often in his career than a full-fledged character who just happens to have an unusual interest. The film further stretches believability when it shows Jeff playing in his room alone atop a life-size toy horse with the same amount of energy as a genuine cowboy likely showed during an actual competition or stampede. As for how he acquired the impressive horseback-riding skills he later displays, we can only surmise that it has something to do with the fact that his father is extremely wealthy and that he appears to have a lot of free time on his hands.
 
The film kicks into high gear upon the introduction of two plot threads. The first involves a mine in a small Arizonan town that comes to the attention of Jeff’s father (Walter Bytell) and his decision to send Jeff to investigate it. The second has to do with the greedy schemes of a Caucasian Indian Agent named Steve Shelby (Sam De Grasse), whose nefarious activities have made him rich but wary about hanging around dodge too much longer. When word of Jeff’s impending arrival and his fascination with the West reaches the mining town, the residents decide to recreate those special times in an attempt to win his support for the mine (which, curiously, he never actually visits), while Shelby decides to use Jeff’s visit to pull off a final heist and then skedaddle out of town with a young lady named Nell (well played by Eileen Percy) who couldn’t care less about him, thus setting the stage for an actual western adventure. This part of the film is highly entertaining, as Jeff is an unsuspecting participant in a series of staged events right out of a movie screenplay, including a train robbery and the rescuing of a damsel in distress.
 
The film is of course a product of its time, and some contemporary viewers will likely object to what could be interpreted as stereotypical portrayals of nameless antagonistic Native Americans. However, I chose to see their role as the result of the unique circumstances of this particular tribe. It isn’t a stretch to conceive of their alcoholism and eagerness to attack the town as being the results of Shelby’s efforts to enrich himself at all costs, for what better way to bend people to one’s will than to deprive them of basic necessities and make them dependent on an addictive substance? Seen in this light, the only real villains are Shelby and his partner in crime, Pedro (Charles Stevens). Much less explainable is the exaggerated fractured English in the intertitles, again an unfortunate and distracting product of their time.
 
Still, as with many silent films, Wild and Woolly remains charming and entertaining, despite such elements. Fairbanks plays naiveté and innocence rather well, and his stunt work remains impressive. The cast seems to be having a ball in the scene in which the town stages events from the past, and Fairbanks and Percy are convincing as a pair of young people falling in love steadily. It is said that many silent films had musicians near the set playing music designed to help actors express emotions more clearly. For this film, I’ll bet it was Elger’s “Salut d’Amour.”  (on DVD as part of Flicker Alley’s box set Douglas Fairbanks: A Modern Musketeer)
 
3 and a half stars
 
*Wild and Woolly is a silent film.
*Eileen Percy appeared in 72 films from 1917 – 1943. I look forward to seeing more of her performances.

Monday, October 16, 2023

In Memorium: Dariush Mehrjui

 Gone, but Not Forgotten

Dariush Mehrjui
December 8, 1939 - October 14, 2023

There are days when the world makes little sense. The fourteenth of October was one such day, for that was when someone broke into the home that 83-year old Iranian director Dariush Mehrjui shared with his wife, Vahideh Mohammadifar, and stabbed them both to death. Words seem trivial here, and speaking of movies while their family and friends are grieving feels rather heartless.

However, I will be eternally grateful to Mr. Mehrjui for helping to open my eyes to Iranian Cinema, its history, and Iranian culture. I will remember the humanity he gave to the central character of his 1969 film, The Cow, a man struggling to accept both the loss of his pet cow and the status having the only cow in the village afforded him. And I will always be grateful for the chance to see Leila, his 1997 meditation on tradition and its affects on a young woman whose inability to conceive threatens to make her a second-class citizen in her own home. I was both moved and enlightened by these movies, and I offer my sincere condolences to his family. 

Sunday, October 8, 2023

Review - Robin Hood (1922)

 October 9, 2023
 
Robin Hood – U.S., 1922
 

It is said that the script for Douglas Fairbanks’s 1922 film Robin Hood consisted of just a few sentences scribbled on a piece of scratch paper. While I imagine scenes were more carefully planned out later on, the lack of foreplaning may account for the jarring sudden shift in tone midway through the film. After all, this is a film that for more than an hour seems much more like a drama than a comedy. It’s as if halfway through production someone ran what they had filmed so far and insisted on the insertion of humor and tights. So jarring is the switch that it makes you wonder if the man formerly known as the Earl of Huntingdon had suddenly developed amnesia regarding the degree of suffering being experienced by the residents of Nottingham.
 
Robin Hood begins with a feast celebrating King Richard’s soon-to-be-embarked upon mission into the Holy Land, more commonly known as the beginning of the Crusades. This is presented as a cause for pomp and celebration and as the fulfillment a personal mission. Current students of history may watch this and roll their eyes, especially at the rather positive view of a historical figure who ordered the massacre of 500 unarmed prisoners, yet it’s also easy to believe that at the time many people considered not only the Crusades to be worth fighting but also the men going off to fight it to be heroes. King Richard (played by screen legend Wallace Beery) places Prince John (Sam De Grasse) in charge during his absence, andit is a mistake of astronomical proportions, as the prince quickly raises taxes, seizes household possessions when people cannot pay, reinstates execution, and tortures women who spurn his advances. It’s truly brutal stuff.
 
The first half of the film also contains the first meeting of Huntingdon (Douglas Fairbanks) and Lady Marian (Enid Bennett), and this is portrayed much less romantically as later versions. Instead of linking eyes and feeling the early pitter-patters of love, Huntingdon spies Prince John stalking Marian as she flees upstairs to escape his unwanted and potentially violent advances. After saving her from a potential assault, he is surprised by her humble and soft-spoken manner, and soon the two are gazing into each other’s eyes, theirs faces adorned with the kind of expression that enthusiastically whispers, “Can you believe this is happening to us?” It’s hokey, but it works.
 
Director Allan Dwan does an excellent job of building up the tension, cutting between scenes of Prince John’s increasingly belligerent nature and the men’s blissful ignorance of what is going on in their absence. Dwan plays up Marian’s innocence in a series of close-ups that reflect both the hopefulness of a someone in love for the first time and the naïve practicality of someone who believes that a few sound words of advice are all a tyrant needs to be able to change his ways. Dwan also knows how to film Fairbanks, and his camera is frequently placed at the ideal angle to capture Marian’s and Huntingdon’s torn expressions and looks of concern. I would also be remiss in my duties if I did not mention the impressive sets.
 
By the end of the first half of the film, one character is thought dead, while another is heartbroken and hell-bent of revenge. Perhaps this is why what follows felt so jarring. We suddenly see that Huntingdon has taken on the name of Robin Hood and become known for his habit of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. Now there are a number of ways one could convey the commitment Robin feels both to help the people survive and to get revenge on Prince John. Unfortunately, Fairbanks and Dwan opt to make Robin Hood a character that leaps practically every other moment, stops and laughs mid-escapade, and grins while engaging in pretty deadly swordplay. In other words, he’s now a comic character in a swashbuckling adventure, the kind whose duels inspire both wonder and fun and fill you with amazement at the skills involved in his physical deeds, such as climbing up a long castle drape and fighting off gangs of Prince John’s men the way martial arts heroes do their legions of enemies. It can be argued that, seeing as how this is a Robin Hood film, the shift was necessary. However, the change in tone is too jarring, and it hurts the rest of the film.
 
As the Earl of Huntingdon, Fairbanks is simple amazing; as Robin Hood, while he certainly gives it the old college try, he’s less so. Sure, he does some remarkable stunts and impresses with his physical prowess, yet all of this comes at the expense of the film’s emotional pull. It is hard to remain concerned about the lives of a population living under a brutal regime, while simultaneously being asked to marvel at a character’s acrobatic wonders. Again, this is fault of the script, not the performers. This is not to say that the second act does not contain a certain level of charm, but it makes the film escapist rather than dramatic, something easily forgotten, rather than pondered on and analyzed. In the end, Robin Hood is two films – one cinematic and the other pure Hollywood, and I simply preferred the former. (on DVD and Blu-ray from Cohen Film Collection)
 
3 stars
 
*Robin Hood is a silent film.
*Playing Little John is none other than Alan Hale, better known as the Skipper from Gilligan’s Island.

Sunday, August 6, 2023

Review - Saturday Fiction

August 7, 2023
 
Saturday Fiction – China, 2019
There was a time when a new Gong Li film was cause for playing hooky. One year, I even missed the first day of the fall semester because I simply had to see The Story of Qiu Ju on its opening day, and it was opening in San Francisco at a time when I lived in Sacramento. In other words, in my mind, one of her films was such an important experience that I was willing to pay for two Greyhound bus tickets, transportation in San Francisco, plus a ticket and snacks at the concession stand. That’s how big of a fan I was. This was during the first half of Gong Li’s career, when she worked with Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige in their prime and when her choice of roles seemed daring. In those days, a Gong Li movie was as important as it was entertaining. The same cannot be said of most of her films post-2000.
Lou Ye’s Saturday Fiction is not a return to form necessarily, but it may be the first movie in a long time in which the legendary actress gets to really sink her teeth into a role. In the movie, she plays Jean Yu, a popular actress returning to Shanghai ostensibly to return to the stage after a three-year absence. To say the timing is peculiar would be an understatement. Shanghai in 1941 was under Japanese occupation, home to thousands of Jewish refugees from Germany, and mired in poverty. It had two areas that were considered safe – the French Concession (now, the Luwan and Xuhui Districts) and the English Concession. Upon her arrival, Miss Yu goes from the airport directly to the French Concession, where she checks in at an upscale hotel operated by an eager fan who has bugged her phone and wants to be to be told the moment she makes an international call, actions that make less sense as the film progresses.
The first half of the film is devoted to creating a sense of mystery regarding Yu’s motives for returning. While she says she has returned to do a play, there’s talk of the peril her ex-husband is in and whether Yu has returned to help him flee the country. This is brought up by an obsessed fan who follows Miss Yu’s car and impresses her by demonstrating her knowledge of all of her lines from her current stage production, a la All About Eve, as well as hinting that she knows the whereabouts of her ex. We also learn Yu may be trying to rekindle her romance with Tan Na, the director of the play, with whom she apparently had an affair before she disappeared, and then there’s the attention the film gives to a Japanese official sent to Japan to inform government workers of changes in the country’s secret codes. Could Yu’s return somehow be connected to him?
 
The problem with such a set-up is obvious. Instead of characters talking to each other directly, they have to tiptoe around key topics and words. Say too much and the mystery is revealed. This results in a series of cryptic scenes that don’t ring as truthful as they need to and culminate in an outbreak of gunfire and violence that ends with dead bodies lining a busy street, several people with severe bullet wounds, and a character incredulously declaring that everything has gone as planned.
 
Fortunately, this scene announces the start of the film’s second half, which, now able to dispense with cryptic phrases, kicks into gear and delivers a series of exciting and tense scenes, each with real stakes and a growing sense of hazard. In these scenes, Yu sheds all pretenses and displays a ruthlessness that is both shocking and logical. It makes you wonder why Gong Li has never made a true action film – she clearly has the chops for it. (Full disclosure: I have not seen Operation Cougar, an early Zhang Yimou film about an airplane hijacking in which Gong Li plays a stewardess.)
 
The film is shot in black and white, likely to give it a noir-like feeling, and for the most part, it works. Scenes of rain-soaked sidewalks and Shanghai residents huddled around makeshift fires contrast impressively with the bright and clean atmosphere of the French Concession, establishing the existence of two Shanghais. There are also quieter moments during which the connection between Yu and Na is firmly established. You may wonder whether such strong feelings would still exist after such an extended absence, but the human heart can confound by suppressing feelings and desires for the one that got away and then allowing them to rise to the surface so suddenly that not to act of them seems a sin.
 
Unfortunately, writers Yingli Ma, Hong Ying, and Riichi Yokomitsu have injected the film with a plot device that is all too common in film and which never fails to lessen the amount of suspense a film can truly create. Like James Cagney’s 1945 film Blood on the Sun and Gong Li’s own 2010 thriller Shanghai, the film uses real historical events to build tension, but since audience already know how history unfolded, the outcome is never really in doubt. The question is not Will they succeed? but rather Will they get away?
 
Saturday Fiction is therefore a mixed bag. It is well made, has terrific performances from Gong Li, Mark Chao, and Tom Wlaschiha, and one of the best second halves that I’ve seen recently. However, it’s first half is clunky and hindered by its own plot structure. Among Gong Li films, it sits comfortable in the middle – not as good as some of those masterful early collaborations, yet not nearly as exhausting as some of her latter productions, such as Miami Vice, Hannibal Rising, and the overly long What Women Want. I’m glad I saw it. (on DVD in Region 1)
 
2 and a half stars
 
*Shanghai Fiction is in Chinese, Japanese, English, and French.

Saturday, June 24, 2023

Review - Dinty

June 24, 2023
 
Dinty – U.S., 1920
 

Dinty
is at its heart a love story – several actually. There’s the opening love shared by a young Irish man named Danny O’Sullivan (Tom Gallery) and the love of his life, Doreen (Colleen Moore). Their story resembles that of Romeo and Juliet, for early on we learn that their families are warring. In an early scene, we watch as they elope just one week before Danny sets off to make his fortune in America. This may seem like the set-up for a dramatic story involving separation and longing, of family conflicts brought on by the young woman’s rebellious nature, but alas no. In no time at all, Doreen is on an ocean liner destined for the sunny skies of San Francisco and her disgruntled father is nowhere to be seen.  
 
Okay. So the family drama does not materialize, but now that they’re both destined to be together again, we’ll surely have a serious tale detailing the experiences of Irish immigrants in the United States post-World War I and how love can help people cope with what history tells us were extremely challenging times. Regrettably, upon her arrival, Doreen learns that earlier that day her husband was struck down in an automobile accident.
 
Okay. So that love story was a ruse, but there’s still promise. It seems that Doreen brought with her a young baby named Dinty, and so, Doreen dedicates her heart and soul to providing for him, even taking him to work when he should be at home sleeping seeing as how she works late nights as a cleaning lady. In one scene, we see her scrubbing floors with a rope around her waist, Dinty being on the other end of the rope in a basket. No doubt theirs is a tough existence, and one could reasonable surmise that the film will become about how, for these two characters, life is a daily struggle. Will Doreen find love again? Will they suffer discrimination and hardship? Clearly, the storyline has promise, yet once again, the film can’t be tied down, and in just minutes, twelve years have passed.
 
And here is where audiences may find themselves wondering if they’ve been Rick-rolled, for just as a viewer of Beyonce’s latest video on YouTube may suddenly find themselves watching Astley swing his arms to his massive hit Never Gonna Give You Up, we are suddenly introduced to the drug-smuggling Triad leader Wong Tai (Noah Beery) and his far-too-young wife Half Moon, played by Anna May Wong. Their secret lair is straight out of early Bond film, replete with swinging pendulums, secret rooms, and walls that slide open with the push of a button. In an early scene, we watch as Wong Tai’s henchman evade capture and deliver his addictive product through the use of a sophisticated telegraph machine that can send messages in Chinese.
 
Just what this has to do with little Dinty (now played by Wesley Barry) and his ailing mother is anyone’s guess, but suddenly, Wong Tai vanishes from the film, and once again we are watching the adventure of Dinty, now selling newspapers on the street, and his attempts at dealing with the local newspaper-boy bully, Muggsy.
 
But back to the love angles. Soon we meet Ruth (Marjarie Daw), the young daughter of the powerful, tough as nails Judge Whitely, and her police officer boyfriend, John North (Pat O’Malley). Actually, the film does not play this relationship up until the final scene. What’s important is that it is the judge who has been tasked with bringing down drug smugglers, which puts him on a collision course with Wong Tai. I know what you are thinking: Just how does this involve Dinty?
 
The film was directed by John McDermott and Marshall Neilan, and while credit for the script is given exclusively to Neilan, I can imagine a scenario in which one of them wanted to make a serious movie about Irish immigrants and the other an adventure film with a Fu Manchu-like villain. It’s akin to the mash-up that occurred when Tarentino and Rodriguez decided to combine two disparate scripts - one about killers on the run and the other about vampires - and make From Dusk Till Dawn.  The two plots are incompatible, but at least the latter two directors had the good sense to exhaust one story before introducing the other. Here, a scene involving drug smuggling is followed by a young boy interviewing for a newspaper job by screaming so loud that glass breaks and birds fly off in fear.
 
The film scores some points by making Dinty’s best friends an African-American boy named Alexander Horatius Jones (Aaron Mitchell) and a boy of Chinese descent named Sui Lung (Walter Chung). Alas, while Sui Lung plays a big role in the film’s climax, Jones seems to be there solely for comic relief. Case in point, when Dinty and his friends scrap with Muggsy and his gang, Jones is the only one to hide in a trash can. Perhaps more troublesome is the film’s final shot, in which Jones finally gets something to eat after brooding at the judge’s dinner table. One guess what he is served.
 
At 63 minutes, Dinty does not have much time for character development, and yet it has some rather wonderful moments. In one, Dinty’s friends decide to form a band and play for Dinty’s bedridden mother. The instruments they play represent their culture, with Sui Lung playing a variation of the pipa, yet what makes the scene most memorable is that when a doctor arrives to check on Dinty’s mother, he is so moved by the boys’ actions that he joins them in dance. There are also moments when, seeing all he has done to make his mother comfortable, you marvel at Dinty’s ingenuity. If only the film were not so disjointed.
 
I primarily watched the film for Anna May Wong, having long been curious about her career and whether her films truly deserve their reputation. Here, she is not given much to do, but in a key moment toward the end, she has to register Half Moon’s conflicted feelings about having been betrayed and yet not fully trusting the authority figures standing in front of her. Even at the young age of 15, she was able to act such moments, and I’m convinced that Ms. Wong was a good actress overall, but a truly outstanding silent film actress. I wouldn’t say the movie is worth watching for her performance alone – its script is far too problematic - but if you decide to give it a chance, it would likely be one part you could reflect back fondly upon. The role of Sui Lung would be the other. As for the rest, it’s fun, eye-roll inducing, and memorable for both the right and wrong reasons. (on DVD and Blu-ray from Grapevine Video)
 
3 stars  
 
*Dinty is a silent film.
*Dinty was consider lost until a Dutch print was found. If you pause the film at the right time, you can still see the Dutch intertitles.
*Walter Chung appears to have only appeared in one other film, 1925’s When the Door Opened. He passed away at the age of 70 in 1981.

Wednesday, April 5, 2023

Miscellaneous Musings: On a Right of Every Generation

April 5, 2023
 
On a Right of Every Generation
 

1967 saw the publication of Bosley Crowther’s book The Great Films: Fifty Golden Years of Motion Pictures. At that time, movies were entering into what could be considered their fourth generation, the first three being the Silent Era, the early years of the Sound Era, and the years in which the Hayes Code was enforced. 1967 was also the year Bonnie and Clyde was released, and it is often said that it was Mr. Crowther’s negative review of that film that ultimately cost him his job. The following years would see movies move in two telling directions, becoming both more graphic and more commercial, and that pivot would be rewarded. Gangsters films, as well as an X-Rated film, would go on to win Best Picture, and stories that had been thought of as B-movie material would become the savior of Hollywood studios. In other words, change was afloat, and for a generation of moviegoers and film critics, these would be the movies that shaped their childhood and became a lens through which later movies – and perhaps earlier ones, as well – would be judged. Just look at the AFI’s first list of the Greatest Films of All Time: 40 of them were released post-1966.
 
And that is how it should be.
 
Crowther’s book is a snapshot of one generation’s ideals and preferences, and as such, it is a valuable document, shining a rather humbling spotlight on the impermanence of praise and appreciation. The book is divided up into 39 “chapters,” each one a year in which “great films” were released. It begins in 1915 with The Birth of a Nation, a film that appeared on the first AFI list, but, interestingly, not the updated one released a decade later, and Intolerance, which appeared on the updated list but was omitted from the first. Here are the films Crowther included that are of the most interest to me: The Covered Wagon (1923), The Thief of Bagdad (1924), Greed (1924), The Freshman (1925), The General (1927), The Crowd (1928), The Public Enemy (1931), The Informer (1935), A Night at the Opera (1935), Camille (1936), Ninotchka (1939), In Which We Serve (1942), Henry V (1944), Monsieur Verdoux (1947), Tom Jones (1964), Blow-Up (1966), and Ulysses (1967). What all of these film have in common is that they were excluded from the AFI’s original list.
 
There may be a variety of reasons for this. Movies like Greed and The Crowd were much less available to the public in the years before the advent of home video, and even then, many of these films were hard to find after the arrival of VHS, released by specialty labels and priced anywhere between $75 - $100. It is highly likely that some great films just slipped from public consciousness during this time. It’s also possible that a particular genre, such as comedy, began to be seen as lesser than another. The truly important movies, this thinking goes, are about something and not just entertainment. And then there’s the matter of relatability. I suspect many moviegoers today don’t recognize the kind of college life depicted in Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman or find it hard to completely get into a film about a soldier on the wrong side of the Civil War. Or perhaps a film just hasn’t aged well. Its story simply no longer captivates or reflects values that are a relic of the past.
 
There have been other best of lists, of course. The AFI has put out a number of genre-specific lists, Sight & Sound Magazine continues to publish an annual list of the greatest films of all time, and magazines like Time and Rolling Stone occasionally release their own (the former even included The Lord of the Rings trilogy on theirs). 1988 saw the publication of John Kobal Presents the Top 100 Movies, which, like Crowther’s list, contains both American and International films. Roger Ebert created a ever-expanding list of Great Movies, a technique that saw numbers as pointless and great movies as numerous as the stars. Other writers wrote books claiming to include the 100 or 1,000 movies you simple have to see before you die.
 
The problem is that since so many lists have been created, there has come to exist an expectation of uniformity, that every credible list simply has to include particular films. No 2001: A Space Odyssey? Sorry, not credible. Citizen Kane isn’t number one? The writer does not know what he’s talking about. No Shawshank Redemption? Perish the thought, and cancel the writer. This is definitely not how it should be.
 
It should be remembered that Citizen Kane, Duck Soup, and Monsieur Verdoux were not considered classics until the 1950s, when a new generation, one living through McCarthyism, the Korean War, the early days of the Cold War, and dramatic events of the Civil Rights movement, discovered them and saw in them something their predecessors has either missed or been unmoved by. They now resonated. I imagine they also saw movies that their predecessors had praised and wondered what all the fuss was about.
 
Recently, there have been a number of articles on movies that have been re-evaluated. Most of these have been movies that were panned by critics or ignored by audiences upon their initial release, movies like Event Horizon and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, and a new generation of viewers is giving them a second chance. Rotten Tomatoes routinely asks its readers “Were critics wrong about…” a particular movie, and websites such as Buzzfeed occasionally publish lists of movies that viewers think are undeserving of their stellar reputation.
 
Again, this is the way it should be, a series of evaluations followed by re-assessments and adjustments. The worst thing about lists is that the more of them there are, the more uniform and codified they become, leading to the believe that a certain group is truly the greatest ever made and that anyone who disagrees is either misguided or incapable of judging true quality. This has led to accusations of elitism and snobbery on both sides. Of course, this is not the way it should be.
 
Every generation has the right to look back and decide what speaks to them and what they see value in. Sure, Star Wars was groundbreaking in 1977, but it is perfectly reasonable to ask whether its reputation has been diminished by its multiple prequels and sequels and its seemingly endless stream of television shows, the quality of which has varied immensely? Citizen Kane introduced a new language in filmmaking, but 84 years after its release, it seems natural to wonder whether it still speaks to moviegoers that way it did to viewers living through the Vietnam War and the Nixon Administration. And it seems justified to wonder just how much contemporary reviews of classic films like Midnight Cowboy and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid have been influenced by the previous generation’s insistence that there is greatness in them.
 
We have demoted movies before, relegating them to honorable mention. For his part, Mr. Crowther included a Supplemental List of 100 Distinguished Films. In other words, of films that were great, but not great enough. He could have included thousands more. To the best of my knowledge, no current list of the Top 100 includes The Covered Wagon, Douglas Fairbanks’ Robin Hood, or The Informer, and no one accuses the writers of lists excluding them of being ignorant of film history. Values just changed, and those and many other excellent films found themselves on the outside looking in. Why shouldn’t young critics and moviegoers today be allowed the same freedom?