Johnny Guitar is a sham Western, a risible and garish melodrama, and a guise for the boiling, salacious sexual tendencies of its characters, who are not what they appear to be. It is the last of these, as the meatiness and sweat hidden by the unserious platitudes of the genre, that makes Johnny Guitar an adroit film to those willing to look beneath its shiny, Saran-wrap surface. The obvious...
“Who among us keeps watch over this strange watchtower to warn the arrival of our new executioners? Are their faces really different from our own?” In the placid, breezy fields of the abandoned camps that once housed millions of those soon to be dispatched to the crematoria, the filmmaker Alain Resnais alighted on a novel technique of documentary cinema serving as a precedent for later cinematic...
Thinking of the staid, halcyon clichés of the American 1950s, I could not help contrasting them with the underbelly of corruption obtaining in the same decade, when illicit activity and human lustfulness were as they have always been, but with more mendacity and concealment papered over by a culture touting its suburban harmony, its kid-friendliness, its tight-knit families and traditionalist...
An eccentric project of a little-known director with a Hollywood credit to his name, Amélie is all lightness and whimsy and enjoys basking in its own playfulness. Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who had long wanted to make the film, made sure the balance between its self-mockery and playfulness were just right, so that it pulls off its silliness without seeming arch or preemptive. It tends to humor us as we...
“I had no father, I am like no father; / I have no brother, I am like no brother; / And this word ‘love,’ which graybeards call divine, / Be resident in men like one another / And not in me—I am myself alone.” –Richard, Duke of Gloucester The Duke of Gloucester, the son of the late Richard, Duke of York, gunning for the English crown with the kind of psychopathic ruthlessness making him a...
One of the common but unspoken phenomena to which humans everywhere are susceptible—especially those that have bottomed out after finding that life has very few stable guideposts for the individual—is that of existential despair, which takes as many forms as there are individuals. But while the forms are many, the phenomenon itself is constant; it underlies its various manifestations. It is not...
This lushly inventive and moving fable, set in Francoist Spain during World War II, tries to pull off the combining of fantasy and harsh, relentless wartime reality, and the result is entirely that of its director, Guillermo del Toro, whose international career has been pockmarked with stories of monsters and crawlers in the darkness. The film is filled with his signature costumes and a sincerity...
I Years before the onslaught of a madness that was to incapacitate him, voiding his intellect like the snapping of a high wire of isolation and brilliance, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a book by the name of The Gay Science featuring the parable of the madman leaping into the marketplace, bearing a lantern in the morning hours. Its echoes, reverberating through the decades to come, would sound across...
“That a man can take pleasure in marching in formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him.” —Albert Einstein Joseph Heller published his epochal novel sixteen years after the end of World War II, having afforded himself a humane interval during which all the horrific bloodshed, nationalism, and bloodthirsty ideologies could fructify in the dust of the...
The director of such films as My Dinner with Andre and Au Revoir les Enfants, Louis Malle coaxes from his provocative film, Lacombe, Lucien, what was absent from the others: an enigma of a primary character that remains inscrutable and hollow until the epilogue of the last scene revealing that this character is to be executed by a tribunal of the French Resistance. This is Lucien Lacombe, who has...