As the whimsical and wingless angel, second class, Clarence voices the fundamental theme of It’s a Wonderful Life, embodying its spirit of undying hope and resolute buoyancy: “Strange, isn’t it? Each man’s life touches so many other lives. When he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?” In the intimate town of Bedford Falls, New York, George Bailey envisions a future of travel and achievement, hoping to jettison his hometown and experience success…
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In Playtime, Jacques Tati creates a delightful modernity satirizing urbanity, technology, and confusion, delivering a paean to a hapless humanity dwelling in Paris, regimented with absurd furniture, lookalike vehicles, and countless windows of transparent glass. This is the tyranny of a time engulfed by the history to come, sometime between the pager and the internet, when the novelty of towering industry was still a fascination, and an endless, bewitching perplexity. The opening credits appear over…
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In long shot, supine in his apartment at 6:00 p.m., Jef Costello lies in bed with a cigarette whose smoke plumes into the window light. Punctuated by the chirps of a bullfinch in a cage, the portentous quietude of the room prevails until a quote of the samurai’s code appears onscreen, reading as follows: “There is no greater solitude than that of the samurai, unless it is that of the tiger in the jungle…perhaps…” The…
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A lone waif plies the strand and searches for firewood, pottering with a walking stick until a group of children, running wildly to her, calls her back home as one explains that “there’s a man here. He came on a big motorcycle. He says Rosa is dead.” Returning with the waif, the children find their mother in tears bartering with an oafish, swarthy gentleman, who in exchange for 10,000 lire has bought the very waif…
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The superlative film of the neorealist movement, Bicycle Thieves plays as tragedy. Having endured unemployment and penury, Antonio accepts a job for which he needs a bicycle; he procures the bicycle at the cost of bedsheets, which his wife has sacrificed, amplifying the indignity of their living conditions; and he goes about his first day with success, after leaving his son, Bruno, at the pitiable filling station to which he is to return that evening.…
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After falling for the stratagem of his compatriots, the French, who have ousted him as traitorous and cowardly, Parolles in the fourth of act of All’s Well That Ends Well makes a provocative self-assessment: “Who knows himself a braggart, / Let him fear this; for it will come to pass / That every braggart shall be found an ass,” after which he says, betraying a resilience to ignominy, “being fooled, by foolery thrive. / There’s…
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In the antepenultimate stanza of “Lady Clara Vere de Vere”, published with an anthology of his work in 1842, Alfred, Lord Tennyson writes that “Howe’er it be, it seems to me, / ’Tis only noble to be good. / Kind hearts are more than coronets, / And simple faith than Norman blood,” commemorating the humanity of its author as much as the honorable sentiments of civility and altruism. The protagonist of Kind Hearts and Coronets,…
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The Kid is an unerring film of the Chaplin oeuvre from 1921, when the freshness of his appeal was still to meet its apex in masterworks such as City Lights, and his genius as a silent comedian of the cinema, as capable of evoking pathos as hearty laughter, had yet to overtake humankind. Though the runtime of the film barely exceeds sixty minutes, a density of feeling and action in so brief a time is…
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The apex of the Janiculum and the Fontana dell’Acqua Paola constitute the backdrop of the sacred and the profane, which in The Great Beauty concern those inhabitants of the city of Rome. This location of the opening scene has as its precedent the Trevi Fountain, to which the film La Dolce Vita brought not only renown but notoriety. While the latter film brought to the world the vision of Fellini and of Roman squalor, The…
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Under the French administration at Vichy during the Second World War, the French Resistance formed in order to combat a regime collaborating with the Germans. Others resisting collaboration with Vichy, unwilling to become bystanders, also contributed to the Resistance, many being Christian rescuers harboring Jewish civilians or otherwise affording safe passage to the persecuted. Francis J. Murphy writes of these Christian rescuers that they “contributed to the fact that 75 percent of French Jews survived…
