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…
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Playtime (1967)
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…
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Le Samouraï (1967)
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…
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La Strada (1954)
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…
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Bicycle Thieves (1948)
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…
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Crumb (1994)
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…
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Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
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…
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The Kid (1921)
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…
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The Great Beauty (2013)
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…
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Au Revoir les Enfants (1987)
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…
