Of the many characters played by the nonpareil Humphrey Bogart, that of In a Lonely Place, Dixon Steele, most hints at the hard-bitten malevolence underlying his shtick as the “tough guy” of the movies, just as it suggests the nature of the man himself and his own tendencies. Humphrey Bogart plays a burned-out screenwriter manqué, Dixon Steele, who tends toward violent outbursts that are as innate and character-driven as they are products of his screenwriter’s career, which has long been compromised by hackwork (the corrosive agent of many a man’s character). One night, while drinking with his buddies at a Hollywood hangout, his agent importunes him to look at some…
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Taken to the Montluc prison in Lyon, France, a former member of the French Resistance is sentenced to death after a protracted imprisonment. He has hatched plans of escape, and a fellow prisoner by the name of Orsini has tried—and failed—to escape using his own plans. The countdown to his execution, after stalling for many months, makes every succeeding day a trial of uncertainty and fear; in the meantime, this prisoner whittles away at his plans, the wooden door through which he has fashioned a hole, the wires and ropes and hooks essential to his escape. And just before he makes his attempt, at the last moment, another prisoner arrives…
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Inaugurating the late period of his creative production, Late Spring bears those hallmarks that were to acquire worldwide renown, the signature of the Japanese master craftsman, Yasujirô Ozu: waist-high static shots above the tatami mat; long takes lingering on the composed resignation of the characters; “pillow shots” as exterior cutaways to the environs; the glacial, deliberate pacing that sees the ineluctable resignation of those that have to confront their fates. The films of Yasujirô Ozu are so substantial because they make no attempts to be what they are not; the conservative quietism characteristic of his films is that of a humane and patient sensibility, convinced that the lives of human…
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A slow-moving depiction of class decay and the coming of modernity, The Music Room, directed by Satyajit Ray, is as pleasing and substantial a film as those of The Apu Trilogy. It features Chhabi Biswas as an aging nobleman landowner during the last days of a preindustrial culture whose ways have long been decaying. This decay and industrialization, represented by the low-class and boorish Mahim Ganguly (Gangapada Basu), are the final peals of a way of life that Biswambhar Roy (Biswas) cannot abandon. Evoking lush landscapes and an encroaching modernity with slow and steady rhythms, The Music Room uses a poetic realism (like that of The Apu Trilogy), emphasizing minutiae…
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A fond and evocative re-creation of its forebear as directed by F.W. Murnau, Nosferatu the Vampyre still contains all the hallmarks of its director, Werner Herzog. Like Murnau’s film, Herzog’s is a period piece that shifts between the Transylvanian highlands marauded by the sinister, malicious Count Dracula, and the sleepy port city of Wismar (filmed in Delft, Netherlands); like that film, this one contains a deft series of shots featuring Count Dracula—his face in close-up, his spine-tingling appearance in the castle, his mannerisms concealing a bloodlust that brings a more literal meaning to that word; and both films contain the deliberate, fearsome ponderousness of an atmosphere leading to the sucking…
