Uncategorized – Page 9 – R. Emmet Sweeney

HYPNO-MURDER: SECRETS OF THE FRENCH POLICE (1932)

February 27, 2020March 17, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

May 17, 2016

Secrets of the French Police is an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink oddity that flings together police procedurals, adventure serials, and a horror villain with hypno-murder powers. Never settling into one genre for more than a few scenes, it’s totally incoherent and bizarrely entertaining, as it absorbs influences from the famous French Inspector Bertillon to Dracula and The Mystery of the Wax Museum. This RKO programmer from 1932 is now on DVD as part of the Warner Archive’s Forbidden Hollywood Volume 10, and is recommended for those with attention deficit disorder.

Alphonse Bertillon was a turn-of-the-century French detective who pioneered modern investigative techniques, including ballistics testing and criminal identification, which he systematized through a series of biometric measurements. RKO was keen to adapt his story to film, and their text was the series of articles written by H. Ashton Wolfe for American Weekly Sunday Magazine, arranged under the title Secrets of the Surete. Wolfe claimed to be a pupil of Bertillon’s, and was promoted as a “famous British investigator,” but his expertise would come under scrutiny. Per the AFI Catalog, RKO discovered that Wolfe was a fraud and “wanted on swindling charges in France and England at the time of this production.”

The timing of all this is unclear, but it is reasonable to assume they discovered Wolfe’s dissembling in pre-production, whereupon they had writer Samuel Ornitz (a devoted leftist and future member of the Hollywood Ten) do surgery on Wolfe’s material. Ornitz took two of Secrets of the Surete stories, involving a mad sculptor who embalms his models in his art and a deformed thief who steals jewels through hypnosis, with chunks of his unpublished novel The Lost Empress, about the Princess Anastasia. These are improbable, impossible elements to combine into one script, but Ornitz plowed forward, and RKO approved. Presumably the timing was tight and they needed something, anything to film, so voila, here we have Secrets of the French Police, directed by Edward Sutherland.

The Wolfe character is turned into St. Cyr (Frank Morgan), a Bertillon-type who uses newfangled technology to track down killers, including a facial recognition technology that provides one of the more striking images of the film. He is investigating the kidnapping of flower girl Eugenie (Gwill Andre), who is being held by the mad Russian-Chinese hypnotist/sculptor Hans Moloff (Gregory Ratoff), who speaks in an unexplained Dracula-accent. Moloff’s plan is to hypnotize Eugenie into thinking she is Princess Anastasia, thereby gaining access to her royal fortune. And yes, he kills and embalms models inside wax sculptures as a hobby. Eugenie’s boyfriend Leon (John Warburton) is an infamous thief, but he teams up with St. Cyr to rescue Eugene and take down Moloff.

Despite writing the above paragraph, I have no idea what happened in this movie. It is all packed into less than an hour of runtime, so when we are ready to settle into a police procedural with Frank Morgan as your amiable Sherlock Holmes knockoff, it turns into a baroque horror movie with secret underground chambers and evil laughing madmen. Time is relative inside Secrets of the French Police, as characters are introduced and then immediately killed off (or just forgotten) — at a certain point inside Moloff’s torture mansion I forgot St. Cyr was still investigating a murder. It’s a pleasurable collision, a Frankenstein’s monster of mismatched movie parts. But what parts!

Frank Morgan does a fine pantomime drunk routine while trolling for information at a rooming house, and then strolls into his super-cool crime lab as his beehive of assistants assemble a gigantic portrait of Eugenie from a hodgepodge of descriptions. It is the most striking image of the film, a romantic portrait conveyed in giant puzzle pieces of cardboard on a police station’s wall. St. Cyr could be a superhero if he only had the powers; he already has the acting chops and the sweet high-tech lair. And Moloff could be a formidable villain with his mesmerizing eyes and murderous sculpting powers. He is no great shakes at long-time planning, however, as there is no plausible endgame to his Anastasia ruse. Why would the Romanov family ever believe that this narcotized Parisian flower girl was their relative? Moloff would have been better off hypnotizing bank prison guards and robbing the vaults. But I digress. What Moloff IS very fine at is murdering models and embalming them in wax casts, a routine suspiciously repeated that same year in Michael Curtiz’ Mystery of the Wax Museum. One suspects that RKO execs or Ornitz read the Wax Museum script and incorporated some elements from it into their already overstuffed feature.

Moloff’s most impressive killing is neither of the hypnotic or sculpting variety though, but an insanely elaborate back projection illusion set-up on a country road. Moloff’s goons set up a back projection rig inside of a billboard on a country road. When a car comes near, the projector is triggered, throwing up a gigantic image of a car bearing down directly toward oncoming traffic. The target, thinking there will be a head-on collision, makes a hard right turn, and crashes off a bridge into a stream. A needlessly elaborate way to kill someone, perhaps, but incredibly impressive all the same. Moloff is the king of all media when it comes to murdering people. Secrets of the French Police is an impossible film and a lovable one, displaying all the ingenuity and limitations of the studio system. Faced with a looming production deadline the RKO writers and technicians had to throw something on-screen, so faced with an impossible task, they made an impossible film.

BLOOD MONEY: TOO LATE FOR TEARS (1949)

February 27, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

May 10, 2016

After viewing Too Late For Tears (1949), I would advise all couples against accepting cash-stuffed valises of mysterious origin. Sure, it would be nice to be raised up out of your dead-end middle-class marriage, but there is the whole issue of the money’s source, and the pile-up of bodies that keeping the cash may entail. Too Late For Tears is a vicious little film noir with a flinty, sociopathic performance by Lizabeth Scott, but it had been in public domain purgatory for decades, circulating in muddy transfers under its re-release title Killer Bait. The Film Noir Foundation has lobbied for its restoration for years, and with the help of a Hollywood Foreign Press grant, the UCLA Film and Television Archive was able to reconstruct the film from a 35mm nitrate French dupe negative, a 35mm acetate re-issue print, and a 16mm acetate. The result can be seen in a superb new Blu-ray from Flicker Alley, complete with Alan K. Rode audio commentary and a highly informative essay by Brian Light. Too Late For Tears originated in a novel by Roy Huggins, which was first serialized in the Saturday Evening Post in April and May of 1947. The rights were snapped up by United States Pictures (who had an output deal with Warner Brothers), but were soon passed on to independent operator Hunt Stromberg, who planned it to be his follow up to his Douglas Sirk thriller Lured, which was opening that September. Stromberg had been one of MGM’s top producers in the 1930s, overseeing The Thin Man series, Best Picture Winner The Great Ziegfeld (1936), and Cukor’s The Women. He started his career in the silents as an independent producer, and he returned to that role in 1943, starting Hunt Stromberg Productions with the Barbara Stanwyck hit Lady in Burlesque. But Lured failed to perform at the box office, and Stromberg struggled to find financing for Too Late For Tears. It took him two years to cobble together an “unusual” deal, per the New York Times, in which Republic Pictures would provide studio facilities and financing for a film that United Artists would distribute. Republic normally distributed their own product, but here would “participate heavily in the profits” instead – though none were in the offing. The desired cast of Joan Crawford and Kirk Douglas failed to materialize, so instead Stromberg brokered yet another deal, borrowing Lizabeth Scott, Don DeFore, and director Byron Haskin from Hal Wallis. Roy Huggins was retained to adapt his book into the screenplay, and according to Brian Light’s essay the film hews closely to the novel. It is about Alan (Arthur Kennedy) and Jane (Lizabeth Scott) Parker, a bickering couple who can’t decide whether to attend a dinner party, so they turn around and go home instead. A blackmail victim mistakenly takes their veering as a signal, and drops a $60,000 payoff bag into their car. Jane is immediately smitten with the valise, her eyes flashing with desire, while buttoned-up Alan wants to turn the cash into the police. With no hesitation Jane starts her manipulations, asking him to keep the money only for a week, just to see if anyone comes looking. Someone does, in the form of Danny Fuller (Dan Duryea), a clumsy, violent chiseler who is determined to shake Jane down for the bag. But Jane plays them both for saps, stringing them along, giving them want they want to hear (and see). She preys on Alan’s insecurities, as in the withering exchange when he says, “I’ve tried to give you everything you wanted, everything I could.” Jane replies, “Yes, you’ve given me a dozen down payments and installments for the rest of our lives.” toolatefortears_1949_mbdtola_ec006_h_11145_ While she plays the dissatisfied wife with Alan, she is going full hardened femme fatale with Danny, a cold, calculating criminal mind. He is instantly attracted to her, and he responds in the only way he knows how, with misogynistic violence, slapping her around. But Jane paws him away like a lion with its prey, and soon he becomes her errand boy, covering up Jane’s increasingly brazen crimes. She pushes him so hard he breaks, ending in a self-pitying puddle of boozy tears. Dan Duryea is the embodiment of hollow machismo, a fast-talker with no backbone to support it. It is a slangy and loose performance – at his most arrogant he pronounces “tedious” as “tee-jus”, bending words to his will. But few can hold up to Jane’s steely-eyed assault. Lizabeth Scott did not think kindly of Too Late For Tears, telling Alan K. Rode that it was her “least favorite film”, but she is truly terrifying in it. It is a cold, unrelenting, and entirely unsympathetic performance. At no point does she beg for the audience’s understanding, you can see the calculation in her eyes from the start. Once she opens that bag, Alan becomes an inconvenience to her, so every smile becomes a sneer the nanosecond he turns his back. The only guy who can take her down is a doughy interloper who claims to be Alan’s old war buddy. Don (Don DeFore) is in fact a figure from Jane’s past who is seeking revenge for one of her previous trespasses upon the male sex. The supposed hero of the story is also the least interesting, a clean-cut Hardy Boy with no interior life who is present merely to nudge the story along. In the fallen world of the movie, it is jarring to see such a square. One wishes Duryea’s character could have been expanded and become Jane’s main foe – a duel to the death of two dead-enders. But the film was already getting harassed by the censors, so, as ever, we should be grateful for the perversities we are left with.

LOST AND FOUND: THE MAN AND THE MOMENT (1929)

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May 3, 2016

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The light comedy The Man and the Moment (1929) was considered lost until a dupe negative was recently discovered at Cineteca Italiana di Milano. This part-talkie from First National Pictures was restored in 2K by Warner Bros. at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in Bologna, and was released on Warner Archive DVD last month. A charming proto-screwball comedy, it’s about a marriage of convenience between a rich playboy and an impetuous adventuress that ends up destroying planes, boats and nightclub aquariums. Made during the transition to sound, it exemplifies the stereotype of that era’s stiff, static line readings. It has snap and vigor in the silent sequences, and grinds to a halt for dialogue. This is not aided by leading man Rod la Rocque, who is a debonair charmer in the silent sequences and a wooden statue during dialogue. His co-star Billie Love is more of a natural, and she waltzes away with the film.

Adapted from an Elinor Glyn best-seller, The Man and the Moment finds Jane (Billie Love) and Michael (La Rocque) at a personal impasse. Jane has a passion for flying, but her strict guardian forbids her to continue her training in the air. Michael, a rich bachelor, is being blackmailed into marriage by the slinky Viola (Gwen Lee). They meet when Jane crash lands her plane into one of Michael’s “Polo Boats” (he plays polo with sea crafts rather than horses – as he is super rich and super bored). They realize that they can solve both of their problems with a quickie marriage. Jane will gain independence from her guardian and Michael can undermine Viola’s scheme. So together they agree to wed, with the understanding it is purely a business arrangement, and that they will divorce soon after. Nothing goes as planned, of course, as Michael instantly falls in love with Jane, and Jane skedaddles, sick of his advances. Jane ends up at Viola’s house, where the various strands of the plot converge and tangle in a wildly convoluted finale.

Variety wrote that director George Fitzmaurice, “has diluted the Glyn molasses so that the screen version avoids most of the love licorice and dwells on the comedy situations.” Agnes Christine Johnston adapted the story into a script, while the spoken dialogue is credited to Paul Perez. The inter-titles set the tone of the decadent milieu, one reads that Michael’s yacht was “lit by electricity – the guests by noon.” Michael is introduced playing “boat polo”, driving a motorboat with a woman on the stern trying to hit a beach ball towards a goal. It looks insanely dangerous, and Fitzmaurice anchors a camera to the back of a speeding polo boat to emphasize the needless danger of the enterprise. The opening inter-title of the film states: “No person ever dashed their brains out playing Polo Boat – because no person with brains every played polo boat.” Michael is thus introduced as a self-destructive decadent frittering away his wealth on near-death experiences.

Jane is something more of a mystery. Johnston’s script cuts out any explanatory backstory, so what we are left with is a stuffy guardian (the status of her parents is unknown) and her love of flight. Despite this lack of characterization Billie Dove invests Jane with a winsome ebullience. She is fearsomely independent and lonesome because of it. Most of her identity is wrapped up in her plane. In one telling sequence she blows off Michael by manipulating elements of her plane, knocking him down with wing flaps and blowing him into the water with the engine. She feels strongest when in control of the machine. She loses control of herself when she is accepted into Viola’s circle, and is invited to an “Under the Sea”-themed party (from “8pm – Blotto”, per the invite), complete with giant human aquarium. There she tests out her flirtation skills against Viola’s (impossible, for Gwen Lee is a superb vamp, a sinuous haughty cigarette smoking machine aimed at rich bachelors), and ends up in the tank with a fellow inebriate. Michael can only get her out by smashing the whole thing to smithereens, depicted through the use of endearingly fake miniatures.

Michael and Jane’s jealousy is now destroying private property, and they need to work things out on their own. Unfortunately this means more dialogue, which Fitzmaurice and his team are ill-equipped to handle. The film’s audio was shot on Vitagraph disc, providing sound effects for the entire feature, and dialogue for a select few. The surviving source was re-cut for silent exhibition, and, as the stated before the feature, “some of the dialogue sequences were truncated. Inter-title cards in place of the missing footage have been inserted into the feature.” This means the inter-titles appear during the dialogue sequences, a disorienting necessity to maintain synchronization. Regardless, La Rocque is audibly uncomfortable with the dialogue, speaking in monotone as if reading the phone book. Fitzmaurice keeps the dialogue scenes almost exclusively in long, static two-shots, with no sound editing to massage the rhythm. I’ve always found the “static” early sound film to be a canard, as there was intense experimentation going on with the new sound technology at the time, audible in how Von Sternberg uses off-screen space in his contemporaneous film Thunderbolt (1929). But The Man and the Moment is just trying to get the sound-on-disc and move on as quickly as possible. Billie Dove comes off the best in the dialogue sequences, as she has an inviting, conversational tone. Though working with flimsy material, Dove conveys an appealingly clumsy flirtatiousness while La Rocque barely sounds present.

But even with the technical drawbacks, The Man in the Moment provides a diverting evening at the movies, mainly due to Billie Dove and some outrageous set-pieces. How much you enjoy it may depend on your enjoyment of late ’20s/early ’30s fantasies of wealth (I have a high tolerance). The New York Times reviewed it and wrote: “The Man and the Moment seems designed for those who do not think Mrs. Glyn’s plots fatuous; who like love in airplanes, in yachts and among the members of high society; who would prefer thinking themselves on the beach at Monte Carlo, and who believe that the Four Hundred go to cocktail parties in silk pajamas.” If you check off all those boxes like I do, do give The Man and the Moment a spin.

A TOAST TO DOLEMITE (1975)

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April 26, 2016

“These rhymes and raps that I have were told 50 years ago by the beer joint and liquor store wise men who used to sit out in front of the store, drinking beer, lying, and talking shit. What I did, I picked them up. I even gave older winos money to tell me those tales. And then I’d take them and freshen them up.” – Rudy Ray Moore

Rudy Ray Moore was an X-rated griot, a traveling storyteller who popularized beer-joint folklore in black communities throughout the 1970s. His routine, in which he told outrageously filthy tales in singsong rhyme, was known as “toasting”, a pivotal influence on hip hop. Like the rappers he influenced (“He’s the greatest rapper of all time” – Snoop Dogg), Moore was intent on channeling the personalities of the neighborhoods he grew up in (he was born and raised in Fort Smith, Arkansas and bounced to Milwaukee and Cleveland as a teen). Wanting to expand his reach after his “toast” albums became underground bestsellers, he started writing a screenplay based on one of his characters – the exaggeratedly macho gangster/pimp/loverman Dolemite. With no one to fund him, he saved money from his non-stop touring and made the feature for around $100,000 of his own money. It is an outrageous, hilarious comedy that never tries to cater to white audiences. Dolemite became famous for the ineptitude of its technical shortcomings – boom mics dipping into frame and the clumsy martial arts choreography – but for black audiences it was a rare depiction of a familiar character, like spending 90 minutes with one of their wisecracking drunk uncles. As writer and performance artist Darius James put it, “Unlike most of the commercial cinema’s Black-market movies, which rely on the story formulas of their honkoid counterparts, the movies of Rudy Ray Moore are rooted in the structure, imagery, and motifs of Black oral narrative.” After decades of circulating in faded dupes, the enterprising exploitation experts at Vinegar Syndrome unearthed a 35mm negative, and scanned and restored Dolemite in 2K. The resulting Blu-ray, out today, is so bright and clean it’s like seeing it for the first time.

Dolemite opens the film in prison, having been framed for possession of drugs and stolen furs by local Los Angeles gangster Willie Green (D’Urville Martin, also the director). The madam of the local brothel, Queen Bee (Lady Reed, Moore’s protege and tour partner), advocates on Dolemite’s behalf, and the warden lets him free if he will help take down the increasingly powerful Green. Dolemite agrees, and he’s loosed back into the world — an improbably pudgy dynamo equally adept with a karate chop as a caress. He immediately sets on bringing down Green – by forcibly taking back his old night club and turning it into a ribald revue of black entertainers (headlined by himself, of course). He is well prepared for an attack by Green’s gang because his loyal army of prostitutes have been taking martial arts lessons (hence the poster calling them “an all girl army of kung fu killers”). There is no way the mythical Dolemite isn’t coming out on top (in more ways than one).

The movie is a showcase for Moore’s unpredictable wordplay (“I don’t wear no cotton drawers” was my senior quote for my high school yearbook), but the directorial duties were handed off to Martin, who had little interest in the production. It was his directorial debut, but as one of the more established actors, he felt the feature was below him, and didn’t put much effort into composing or choreographing images (hence the proliferation of boom mics on-screen in the theatrical release). It was a real amateur, independent production, and it was almost everyone’s first job, all the way from the writer, director and DP (Nicholas von Sternberg, Josef’s son, who was just out of college) to the makeup artist (Marie Carter). The film was a testing ground, and it can lead to scenes of stilted airlessness as well as inspired lunacy, set against fascinating Los Angeles locations (it is all parking lots, funeral homes, dingy apartments).The majority of the cast were non-professionals, many clearly uncomfortable on screen. But Moore was a born entertainer.

Rudy Ray Moore is an ungainly screen presence, his body a soft plush toy. 48-years-old at the time of shooting, he walks tentatively, as if he had knee trouble. His hilariously unconvincing kung-fu battles are as distractingly edited as a late-stage Steven Seagal vehicle. But this isn’t supposed to be a well-oiled narrative machine. It’s a movie “toast”, sending up contemporary action movies (blaxploitation and otherwise) in a series of escalating absurdities that Moore presides over as MC. As unimposing as Moore’s athleticism was, his voice had retained its mischievous power. It was a booming instrument that Moore could slide up and down the scale, speeding up the tempo as he closed in on a punchline. In the final nightclub sequence, there is a taste of his famous “Signifying Monkey” toast, in which a clever simian continually outsmarts the physically superior lion in a competition of deviant one-upsmanship too crass to quote here (the lyrics are over here).

Viewing it for the first time since I was a dumb teen, Dolemite retains its ability to elicit shock-laughs from Moore’s absurdist runs (“When I see a ghost, I cut the MFer”), and the clarity of the Blu-ray brings out heretofore blurry details in the Los Angeles backgrounds, like the odd beauty of a Ralph’s grocery store sign above an empty parking lot. The movie was (and remains) critically derided, but it was a hit among black audiences, making $12 million according to Jet Magazine. In 2000, Moore told Vibe magazine that “Black actors have always had to do roles that were unfavorable to us as a people. So when I came along, I picked a satire that we could enjoy ourselves — not be kicked in the ass. I reversed it. And because Dolemite was so hard-hitting, it worked. People lined the streets to see it.”

SUNSHINE NOIR: CUTTER’S WAY (1981)

February 27, 2020September 12, 2021 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

April 19, 2016

“I have seen people after the war that came from concentration camps, they were violated in their bodies and their minds, and they were contaminated by the violence. They became violent themselves. This is what I wanted to show in Cutter’s Way.” – Ivan Passer

Cutter’s Way is a sickly film, its characters hungover or half in the bag. They have never recovered from the Vietnam War, either from the physical scars from fighting or the guilt from avoiding it. Cutter (John Heard) is the wounded veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress, a ranting paranoiac lost in his own head. His wife Mo (Lisa Eichhorn) nurses the loss of her pre-war husband with drink. Cutter’s best friend is Bone (Jeff Bridges), a lithe golden god who makes a living as a gigolo and occasional boat salesman. The trio’s blurred vision focuses upon the corpse of a young girl, who they suspect was murdered by local tycoon J.J. Cord (Stephen Elliott). Cord begins to exert an outsized role in their personal mythology, a symbol of the system, the American way of life, that has left them on the periphery.

Their amateur investigation is a half-cocked mess, and twists around into a blackmail scheme. Their dream of justice is obscured by the thick haze of the Santa Barbara summer, but whether or not they have found the true killer, they have recovered a modicum of belief, belief which ends in a defining act of violence. United Artists didn’t know what to do with this downbeat drama, and released it with little fanfare in 1981. It has had vocal supporters through the years, foremost among them J. Hoberman, and Twilight Time has released a handsome-looking Blu-ray that should expand its cult.

The film is based on Newton Thornburg’s 1976 novel Cutter and Bone, originally to be adapted by Robert Mulligan, and with Dustin Hoffman as Cutter. After that fell apart it was packaged with Mark Rydell and Richard Dreyfuss, but that too failed to proceed. Eventually United Artists settled on the Czech emigre Ivan Passer to direct – whose most famous film was still his Czech New Wave comedy Intimate Lighting (1965). He had made four films in Hollywood since, including the hilarious and harrowing heroin film Born to Win (1971, with a great George Segal performance), but none had eclipsed the reputation of his debut. Passer was available and interested, and United Artists just wanted to get the project off their slate. They insisted that Jeff Bridges take the second lead, since he was in UA’s upcoming surefire hit of Heaven’s Gate. They preferred Richard Dreyfuss for the role of Cutter, but Passer was adamant on casting John Heard, after seeing him in a performance of Othello opposite Dreyfuss. Not wanting to lose a third director, UA let Heard have the title role (the title was changed from Cutter and Bone to Cutter’s Way after its initial NYC release). The memorable zither-heavy score is by Jack Nitzsche.

Passer’s greatest coup was hiring DP Jordan Cronenweth, who veils Santa Barbara in a jaundiced palette – the city seems to expel Cutter and his cronies as a digestive system expels bile. The look of the film was described pungently by J. Hoberman in his Village Voice review: “Jordan Cronenweth’s accomplished cinematography conveys the essence of rot. Everything is orange-gold and subtly synthetic. The film has the burnished Naugahyde look of a sunset seen through the window of a House of Pancakes.” This “orange-gold” was by Passer’s design. He recalled the working process with Cronenweth to Olivier Père:

The casting director showed me some TV movies and I was impressed by the work of Jordan. I was stunned when I met him because he was around 40 and he behaved like if he was 90 years old! The slowest person in the world! I learned that he was not able to do more than 6 set-ups a day, so I adjusted and did long shoots which I could intercut. It is always very difficult to control the color in a film. We couldn’t paint things like Antonioni. It was too expensive. So we took out one color, blue. There is no blue in the film, which is difficult in California because of the sky. That forced me to put the camera above the eye level, camera is always looking a little down, and you have the sense there is some aesthetic order in the film. Jordan was a real artist, always surprised by everything, like a child. He never made a shot that needed some reshoot or correction.

The color blue is not entirely eliminated — there is some unavoidable sky when Bone takes the murder victim’s sister out for a sail boat ride — but it is conscientiously avoided. Having to point the film slightly downward makes Cutter’s world ever so slightly more enclosed, a path of escape eliminated. Not that he would be capable of going anywhere.

Cutter is missing an arm, a leg, and an eye, literally half a man. John Heard seems to be channeling some of Iago in his performance, a mercurial manipulator who has both Mo and Bone bend to his will. But he can only bend them so far before they snap, and the cooly self-regarding Bone, played with lizard-slick vanity by Bridges, briefly abandons the cause to to seduce Mo. Mo is in a severe depression throughout the film. She is married to a man she no longer recognizes, in a home that is a memorial to the life she thought she once had. Lisa Eichhorn gives a performance of subdued melancholy, her personality muted and masked by vast quantities of whiskey. She is seeking obliteration and finds it.

Passer was not fond of the original ending of Thornburg’s novel, considering death-by-redneck too similar to that of Easy Rider, so with screenwriter Jeffrey Alan Fiskin they created a hallucinatory closer in which Cutter madly crashes Cord’s garden party on horseback, and presumed justice is served. It is almost a burlesque of a happy ending, with its last minute rescue and vanquishing of a sunglasses-clad villain. But by this point “justice” has lost all meaning, what with Cutter’s clumsy blackmail attempts and brutal treatment of Mo, while Bone only shows concern for his moustache. As the final credits roll, Cutter’s violent victory feels very much like a loss.

GROUP THERAPY: ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS (1939)

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April 12, 2016

Only Angels Have Wings keeps growing stranger with age. This studio-era classic is about a group of nihilist flyboys who enact their dreams of self-destruction out of an imaginary South American cabana. Howard Hawks insisted on the film’s realism, as he based it on the stories of some ragged pilots he met in Mexico, but the movie is as realistic as the Star Wars cantina. The invented port town of Barranca is pure Hawks country, an extension of the death-driven pilots he depicted in The Dawn Patrol, Ceiling Zero, and The Road to Glory. Revisiting Only Angels Have Wings in the new DVD and Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection (out today), one is struck by the sheer lunacy of the fliers, ready to sacrifice their lives for the chance to deliver the mail. Only Angels Have Wings pushes Hawks’ love of professionalism to the extreme – death is a natural part of the job, and beyond just accepting it, they seem to embrace it. In Only Angels Have Wings, to work is to die, and these jokey nihilists, including the the female interlopers who are integrated into this group – cheerily embrace the void.

When film critic Robin Wood was diagnosed with a perforated intestine and was told he might not survive the subsequent surgery, “what immediately came into my mind was the work of Howard Hawks and specifically the way his heroes confront death (actually, in Only Angels Have Wings, and potentially in Rio Bravo, where only one minor sympathetic character gets killed). I felt completely calm, and like to think I was smiling (though I probably wasn’t).” Only Angels Have Wings confronts death early on, when the flirtatious pilot Joe Souther (Noah Beery Jr.) crashes on his return from a mail run, rushing to make a date with traveling musician Bonnie Lee (Jean Arthur). Bonnie is shocked to discover that the mail crew boss Geoff Carter (Cary Grant) and his team do not mourn but instead carouse at the bar. When Bonnie asks them how they could be so crass after Souther’s death, Geoff replies, “Who’s Joe?” His job is over so they wipe away his identity. They are not heartless, but the only way they can carry on is to proceed without a heart. They embrace nihilism in order to survive. And they usually don’t – like Kid (Thomas Mitchell), who asks Geoff to leave his deathbed since he’s never died before and doesn’t want to screw it up. It’s like going on your first solo flight, he says, and he didn’t want anyone watching that either.

The film traces Bonnie’s curiosity with and assimilation into Geoff’s odd group, a process of sanding off her emotionality. It is an impossible job because Jean Arthur brings her irrepressible Jean Arthur-ness to the role. Hawks reportedly had trouble working with her, as she refused to do the husky, simmering sensuality thing he preferred, and proceeded to be her perky self. Rita Hayworth, who plays Geoff’s old flame who re-married to a disgraced Richard Barthelmess (whose real plastic surgery scars sell the character’s tragic past), also had a rocky relationship with Hawks, but her slinky role got her noticed by Harry Cohn and set her on the path to stardom.While Bonnie doesn’t bend to the group’s will, she is fascinated by it and tries to understand it – her empathy comes through in a performance of “The Peanut Vendor.” After the “Who’s Joe” line, she comes back, sits down at the rickety piano, and bangs out a perfect, rollicking version of the Cuban tune, joining in on the vast forgetting of Joe’s death.

Geoff and his team were an extension of James Cagney’s character in Ceiling Zero (1936), Dizzy Davis. Davis flew missions in WWI, and has spent the years since as a stunt flier and rabble-rouser. The film begins with him getting hired on by at Newark’s Federal Airlines by his old war buddy. But the flying world has passed him by – it has become professionalized and standardized while Dizzy still flies by the seat of his pants. His free-wheeling ways eventually end in tragedy, and Dizzy chooses suicide over any kind of redemption. Geoff and his crew are a whole group of Dizzys – thrill-seekers too unreliable to get regular jobs in the States, so they ended up at a cheapjack outfit in South America flying impossible missions on ancient equipment.

By the time of Only Angels Have Wings, Hawks had already asserted more control over his work. The film was made for Harry Cohn at Columbia, and Todd McCarthy reports in his biography Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood, that the director had “virtual carte blanche as long as he could deliver a strong story for Cary Grant and one of his top female stars.” So where Ceiling Zero is a compact adaptation of a stage play, Only Angels Have Wings is an extended series of digressions and character moments, so Hawks can build-out this fantasy-world of Barranca. The story outline came from a seven-page synopsis by Anne Wigton entitled “Plan Number Four”, which Hawks then fleshed out with stories of “outcasts” he had met in Mexico. Hawks said that these men were “collectively and individually the finest pilots I’ve ever seen but they had been grounded because of accidents, drinking, stunting, smuggling — each man’s existence almost a story in itself.”

Most of these stories are focused through Geoff, played with inimitable insouciance by Cary Grant. Grant worked well with Hawks’ improvisatory style, and though he doesn’t have the look of a grizzled, disgraced adventurer, he was able to convey all of the arrogance and cynicism. It is an improbable performance, and I can never get Manny Farber out of my head when Grant is on-screen: “The thing you you remember most about Cary Grant’s sexy, short-hop Lindbergh in Only Angels Have Wings, a rather charming, maudlin Camp item, is his costume, which belongs in a Colombian Coffee TV commercial: razor-creased trousers that bulge out with as much yardage as a caliph’s bloomers and are belted just slightly under the armpits.” This is not to mention the wide-brim Panama hat that looks like something my mom would wear to the beach. Yet within the boundaries of Barranca it looks like the most natural thing in the world as the push-pull romance works its magic, with Bonnie forthright and honest in her feelings, and Geoff withholding, cruel, and devilishly handsome. The ending is of joyful sadness. Geoff expresses love through the flipping of a coin, the realization of which spreads across Bonnie’s face like a new dawn. But they will all have to go to work the following day, their jobs guaranteeing no happiness past the present, reckless moment.

WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS: PARIS BELONGS TO US (1962)

February 27, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

April 5, 2016

“The release of Paris Belongs to Us is a score for every member of the [Cahiers du Cinéma] team – or of our Mafia, if you prefer…For Rivette is the source of many things. The example of Le Coup de Berger, his short film of 1956, made me decide to shoot Les Mistons, and Claude Chabrol to be adventuresome enough to make a full-length film from Le Beau Serge; and at the same time it moved the most prestigious short-subject filmmakers, Alain Resnais and Georges Franju, to try their first full-length films. It had begun. And it had begun thanks to Jacques Rivette. Of all of us he was the most fiercely determined to move.” – François Truffaut

Paris Belongs to Us presents the city as a labyrinthine stage which invites its residents/performers to invent and inhabit vast conspiracies. Mysteries lie behind every open door, if only an intrepid investigator would crack it open and peer behind. It is a paranoid Alice in Wonderland in which its Alice, here called Anne, goes down the rabbit hole with a group of poor actor-artists staging Shakespeare’s Pericles. Every door Anne walks through expands her vision of the world as she is drawn into the macabre fantasy life of artists with too much time on their hands. The film lays out ideas that Rivette would explore the rest of his career, from the nature of performance to the city as game board. Jacques Rivette began shooting Paris Belongs to Us in 1958, though it would take two years for it to be completed and released in 1961. The 400 Blows and Breathless both made it to cinemas first, and their phenomenal success relegated Paris to the background. The film, like many of Rivette’s features, would become cult cinephile objects, beloved because of their rarity. But that is slowly being rectified, as the legendary 13-hour Out 1 is now streaming on Netflix, while the Criterion Collection has released Paris Belongs to Us on beautiful DVD and Blu-ray editions.

Anne Goupil (Betty Schneider) is a literature student preparing for her exams whose life is tipped off its axis when she is invited to a party by her brother Pierre (François Maistre). It is a gathering of artists haunted by the death of Juan, a Spanish musician with links to everyone in the Paris avant-garde theater scene. He was preparing the score for a production of Pericles to be directed by Gerard Lenz (Giani Esposito) when he took his own life. The only recording of Juan’s Pericles compositions has gone missing. Juan had been dating Terry Yordan (François Prevost), a secretive American who is now seeing Gerard, and who may have been involved with the conspiratorially minded Philip, an American journalist exiled due to the McCarthyist blacklist. It is Philip who inducts Anne into this strange tribe, by implying that Juan’s death is not what it seemed, connecting it to a grand international conspiracy, like something out of the Illuminati. Anne is skeptical but curious, and is alarmed at Philip’s insistence that Gerard is in danger. She seeks Juan’s recording in the hopes it will contain some secret to it all, but it just leads her in circles, as well as landing her a role in Pericles. She keeps pushing until the whole edifice collapses upon itself.

It was Rivette’s first feature, and though he would later rely on his actors to improvise and create his worlds on the fly, Paris Belongs to Us was a more traditionally constructed feature, hewing closely to Rivette and Jean Gruault’s script. Rivette was dissatisfied with the result:

When I began making films my point of view was that of a cinephile, so my ideas about what I wanted to do were abstract. Then, after the experience of my first two films, I realized I had taken the wrong direction as regards methods of shooting. The cinema of mise en scene, where everything is carefully preplanned and where you try to ensure that what is seen on the screen corresponds as closely as possible to your original plan, was not a method in which I felt at ease or worked well. What bothered me from the outset, after I had finally managed to finish Paris Nous Appartient with all its tribulations, was what the characters said, the words they used. I had written the dialogue beforehand with my co-writer Jean Gruault (though I was ninety per cent responsible) and then it was reworked and pruned during shooting, as the film otherwise would have run four-and-a-half hours. The actors sometimes changed a word here and there, as always happens in films, but basically the dialogue was what I had written — and I found it a source of intense embarrassment.

The performances are without filigree, and there can be a sameness of tone and delivery that makes all the characters blend together. Just compare the rehearsal scenes in Out 1 to those in Paris Belongs to Us to see how the shift in how much he put his faith in his performers. Paris Belongs to Us is more fascinating for its complicated blocking, in which characters re-orient themselves in the frame so the focal point keeps shifting. Shooting all over Paris from grotty apartments to abandoned factories, Rivette gets across the concept of Paris as a stage, and one in which his characters get lost inside. Reality is too banal for them, so they invent believable fictions and turn their lives into movies. It is a void from which they choose not to escape.

LAST CALL: HER MAN (1930)

February 27, 2020September 7, 2023 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

March 29. 2016

Tay Garnett’s Her Man (1930) has had a small but enduring auteurist cult, for those lucky enough to have seen the Cinematheque Francaise print that circulated in the ’50s and ’60s. In his American Cinema, Andrew Sarris wrote of its “extraordinarily fluid camera movements that dispel the myth of static talkies”, while British critic Raymond Durgnat compared it favorably to Howard Hawks’ A Girl in Every Port (1928). Poet John Ashbery saw it in Paris in the late ’50s, and it was an inspiration for his “Pavane pour Helen Twelvetrees”, which you can read here. The film has seemingly disappeared from view since then, with David Thomson erroneously stating that it was a “lost film” in his Biographical Dictionary of Film. It wasn’t lost, but just hiding. The camera negative was discovered in the Columbia Pictures collection at the Library of Congress, and a 4K restoration was performed by Sony Pictures, with funding provided by the Film Foundation. This week the Museum of Modern Art, courtesy of Adjunct Curator Dave Kehr, is screening the restoration of Her Man, alongside some of director Tay Garnett’s other silent and early sound features (including Celebrity, The Spieler, and One Way Passage). Her Man is a redemptive romance that takes place in one of the scummiest bars in Havana: the Thalia. There Garnett wends his camera through a knockabout group of con artists, drunks and killers to get to his dewy-eyed lovers, who strong-arm their way out the door.

Her Man is an extremely loose adaptation of the folk murder ballad “Frankie and Johnnie” (aka “Frankie and Albert”), a turn-of-the-century tune about a young woman (Frankie) who kills her adulterous lover (Johnnie). The song emerged from the black community in St. Louis after the 1899 killing of 17-year-old part time pimp Allen Britt by his lover, and reported prostitute, Frankie Baker (she was acquitted of the crime due to a plea of self defense). The song went through many variations, all of them too risque for Hollywood. But they wanted to capitalize on the song’s continued popularity, the latest iteration of which was a controversial stage play, Frankie and Johnnie, which John M. Kirkland brought to the Republic Theater in September of 1930. It was raided by police during dress rehearsals for “its lines defending prostitution as ‘the only profession for which women are exclusively equipped.” (Body and Soul: Jazz and Blues in American Film, by Peter Stanfield).

The 1930 Pathé Exchange production of Her Man polished off the rough edges, going through several rounds of revisions due to suggestions from Studio Relations Committee readers (or SRC, a Production Code created unit created by Will Hays to enforce the code – before they had any real power to do so). Tay Garnett and Howard Higgin received story credit on the film, with Thomas Buckingham writing the screenplay. It begins with the life of Frankie (Helen Twelvetrees), a lifelong con artist raised in bars who seduces and then steals from local drunks. She feels fated to live her whole life in dives, like the local souse Annie (Marjorie Rambeau), a former beauty gone to seed. Frankie is dating Johnnie (Ricardo Cortez), a violent character with a hand in all variety of vice. Frankie seems resigned to her fate until she sees sailor Dan (Phillips Holmes) hit the Thalia. He is a bright-eyed blonde kid with a sweet voice, an optimistic attitude, and a helluva roundhouse punch. Dan and Frankie dream of life outside the Thalia, but have to devise a way out of Johnnie’s grasp. He is not willing to give up Frankie without a (knife) fight. The film ends in a big barroom brawl whose outcome will seal the young lovers’ fate.

SRC readers were insistent that the film had to erase any insinuation of prostitution from the script, although it is still implicit in the finished film. One note read (as quoted in Body and Soul: Jazz and Blues in American Film):

Johnnie is one of the most despicable types of men. He is nothing less than a worm…. There is as much moral value in this picture as there is in a five week old kippered herring…. There is so much drinking, carousing and scenes of bawdy houses that I do not see how this picture can get by as it is now. You are simply dragged through six or eight reels of filth. You wallow in it neck-high, and scream for the whole business to end. All this babble about reformed prostitutes and the creating of sympathy for harlots in general is a lot of tripe, made worse by the inclusion of songs about a vine-covered cottage.

You can’t sell a film any better than that. Eventually the film passed SRC inspection, but the relationship between Frankie and Johnnie is made intentionally ambiguous, their relationship less romantic than that of a boss and employee. He shakes her down for the night’s take – not from turning tricks, but from robbing drunk customers.

Director Tay Garnett got his start writing gags for Hal Roach and Mack Sennett – he brags in his autobiography that he was fired by Sennett “more often than anyone else who ever worked for him.” One of the great pleasures of Her Man is all of the incidental gags that Garnett packs into the film’s 83 minute runtime. James Gleason and Harry Sweet provide the comic relief as Dan’s soused sailor buddies Steve and Eddie. Steve plays a slot machine over and over again throughout the film, losing every time, only to see Harry pick up beer money with the next pull of the lever. This little gag plays out to perfection at the end of the brawl, with a bash to the skull finally giving Steve that last cash payment. The strangest routine involves familiar pre-code face Franklin Pangborn, who plays a stiff middle class tourist that makes an easy mark for Steve and Eddie. Every time Pangborn appears on-screen, he is getting knocked out – mainly for the expensive fedora that Steve and Eddie nearly fight-to-the-death over.

Her Man has earned whatever notoriety it has because of its elaborate, extended camera movement. Garnett and his DP Edward Snyder have a remarkable freedom of movement in this early sound film, as if they had no restrictions at all using the new technology. Using cranes to dip in and out of packed, clogged barroom dance floors, the film throws you headlong into its world, immersing you in its particular filth and argot. The location is never named, although there is a reference to an island. The whereabouts are kept intentionally vague. In the script the film takes place in Havana, and the Morro castle was included in some of the publicity material. So when the Cuban embassy objected to the film’s depiction of their city, and fearing Latin American markets would refuse to show the film, Pathé made an unconvincing case that the film actually took place in Paris (the Variety review says it takes place in a “Paris dive”).

But regardless of the location, it’s a formidable accomplishment. Phillips Holmes is a perennial discovery for me, as in recent years I have admired his trembling grace in Lubitsch’s Broken Lullaby and Von Sternberg’s An American Tragedy. Here he is a more virile type – in the concluding brawl his shirt is torn to shreds to show off his action movie torso – but he is equally moving as an inadvertent roughneck with a lilting voice. Helen Twelvetrees is appropriately off-kilter throughout, a woman who saw her future at the bottom of a beer glass starting to open up to the world. The film is almost entirely set inside the bar, so any vision of the outside, even just a shot of a carriage rocking back and forth in front of a rear projected city, is blissful artifice. Near the end of their date, when Dan says, his face beaming with sincerity, that ““St. Patrick’s Day, don’t it make you feel great?”, I can’t help but smile along with him.

TAIPEI STORY: A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY (1991)

February 27, 2020February 27, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

March 22, 2016

“This film is dedicated to my father and his generation, who suffered so much for my generation to suffer less. I hope they, the forgotten, can be made unforgettable.” – Edward Yang, director’s note for A Brighter Summer Day

A Brighter Summer Day is an empathic epic of Taipei in the early 1960s. Four hours long, it is a finely detailed portrait of the families who fled China for Taiwan after the Communist Revolution, unsure if they would ever see their homeland again. It is how Edward Yang grew up, and he felt a responsibility to honor the memory of his friends and family who lived and endured this dislocated life, all under the martial law of the Kuomintang government, who stifled dissent in what became known as the “White Terror”. Freedoms were circumscribed and national loyalties scrambled, so in order to establish an identity many children joined street gangs and imbibed Western pop culture, especially Elvis Presley and rock n’ roll. The film is a succession of atmospheric reveries (Proustian sense memories of school uniform fabrics, clunky radio units and stucco dance halls) punctuated by spasmodic violence, boredom and confusion breeding obscure hatreds. The cast of characters is enormous, and Yang is able to build a real sense of a community, conveying the ragged dignity of alcoholic shop owners, philosophical gang leaders, and the apathetic teen who throws his life away with a few thrusts of the knife. It is a towering achievement, though it has been nearly impossible to see in the United States outside of rep screenings and muddy-looking VCDs. But today the Criterion Collection has issued A Brighter Summer Day in a beautiful DVD and Blu-ray from the 4K restoration performed by Criterion in partnership with The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project. It is one of the essential releases of 2016.

One of the major news stories from Edward Yang’s youth in Taipei was the stabbing murder of a high school girl. Yang told Michael Berry that “every single one of my classmates and people my age remember this case very clearly. The murder had a huge impact on all of us of my generation. But no one born a few years later has any recollection of any of this. So I wanted to do something to leave behind a record of what happened.” Yang’s impulse was documentary in nature, but since so many years had passed, he had to reconstruct the period imaginatively, and he took exacting care in evoking the era. He spent nearly a year with the child actors, which numbered over sixty, in order to educate them about the time period and the manner in which they should act. This included the putative star Chang Chen (The Assassin, 2046, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), here making his film debut.

Chang plays Zhang Zhen, nicknamed Xiao Si’r, a middle child of the Zhang family, who immigrated to Taipei from Shanghai following the Communist takeover of the Mainland (Yang was born in Shanghai in 1947, and his family moved to Taipei before the takeover in ’49). The father is a milquetoast government functionary, and his wife is a former schoolteacher who left her accreditation back in China, and can’t get a job. Xiao mostly slides under their radar – his oldest sister (Wang Chuan) is the success story, on an advanced education track with dreams of moving to the United States, while his brother Lao Er (Chang Han) is the black sheep, always drowning in gambling debts. So Xiao skates by, failing out of day school but hanging on in night school, absorbed in movies (including Rio Bravo) and comic books and dabbling with the local gangs. There is also a hopeful romance with Ming (Lisa Yang), a beautiful, impetuous schoolmate who screen tests for a bumbling local film director. Xiao is a bit of a cipher, and Chang plays him with dreamy reserve, his face a mask. He tries on multiple personalities and none seem to fit, drifting through Yang’s tableau compositions without direction. He seems most comfortable, and most childlike, with his stable of school friends, including the tiny Elvis-wannabe Cat (Wong Chi-Zan), who sings rock covers phonetically since he can’t speak English. He has a high lonesome voice that lends even the most rousing tunes a backbeat of melancholy.

It is a film that proceeds at a magisterial tempo, enough to absorb every element of the production design of Yang’s intricate long shots. In Figures Traced in Light David Bordwell calculated that the average shot lasts 26 seconds, where his previous features averaged 11-15. This is a film to absorb as much as to watch, and when Yang does cut in to details, it is jarringly impactful. The family radio is a recurring character, an aging antique that the father brought over from China. On the heavily censored Taipei airwaves, the radio only utters banalities, long lists of names for those who passed exams and little else. During his youth, Yang recalled that, “our favorite broadcasts were those of the basketball games. We knew that everything else was bullshit.” In the movie the radio is a lack, a box that emits meaningless noise. When Cat takes it apart and puts it back together, it starts emitting a buzz, one that is equally entertaining as the usual monotone voice that thrummed out of it.

In interviewing friends and family for the project, Yang was shocked that “out of all the people I interviewed, virtually every single one of them could recall their father being called in for questioning or imprisoned at one time or another during the White Terror.” In the film, Xiao’s father is called out at night for questioning and disappears for days, lost in a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare. He is forced to sit and write the story of his life, and to include every person he has ever met, it seems. The KMT interrogator acts as a sadistic book reviewer, poking holes in his prose and accusing the father of leaving out important relationships. It is all a perverse kind of torture, an attempt to tire him out until he breaks. This sequences includes Yang’s most artificial, dream-like compositions, of a man seated on an ice block, and vast industrial space centered with a single table and chair. The father is eventually released, only to return to a family that is breaking apart at the seams. Xiao gets expelled from school and descends into criminality, Lao Er continues to gamble, and the realization is dawning that the Communists will not fold, and that their hometown may be lost forever. It is a struggle to endure, but Yang patiently charts the family’s resilience, through tragedies large and small. The closing image has the mother staring at Xiao’s now-useless school uniform as if into a void. It is the end of that dream of normality, and the beginning of more brute realities to come.

KID STUFF: MY LITTLE LOVES (1974)

February 27, 2020July 21, 2025 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

Originally published at Movie Morlocks, the official blog of Turner Classic Movies

March 15, 2016

Jean Eustache’s My Little Loves (Mes petites amoureuses, 1974) is about a boy. Twelve-year-old Daniel climbs trees, flirts with girls, and punches classmates in the stomach. He is poised between youth and adolescence, and the film seeks to capture all the moments, and all the silences, of this befuddling transition. After Eustache’s coruscating The Mother and the Whore (1973), a logorrheic portrait of post-May ’68 despair, My Little Loves seems startlingly quiet and gentle. But each are after a kind of completism, of leaving nothing out. Discussing My Little Loves, Eustache told his fellow filmmaker, and Cahiers du Cinema habitue, Luc Moullet, that he wanted “to reconstruct [my] childhood: every wall section, every tree, every light pole.” With the help of cinematographer Nestor Almendros, All My Loves becomes a sensorial memory object. There isn’t much of a narrative – it drifts – but it builds up the fabric and texture of Eustache’s childhood in the small rural town of Pessac (outside of Bordeaux), and the industrial city of Narbonnes, on the Mediterranean coast. My Little Loves is screening on 35mm in the Metrograph’s Jean Eustache series, one of the inaugural programs for this ambitious new theater on NYC’s Lower East Side.

Eustache had long wanted to make My Little Loves, but it was only after the relative success of The Mother and the Whore (which won the Grand Jury prize at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival), that he was able to secure funding. The film follows the loose outline of Eustache’s own youth: Daniel (Martin Loeb) begins the film living with his grandmother (Jacqueline Dufranne) in Pessac. His days unwind over long country roads, where he shoots cap guns at girls who ignore him, and at school, where he punches the tallest, and meekest, kid in class, just because he can. Then Daniel’s mother (Ingrid Caven) floats into town with her sullen new Spanish lover José (Dionys Mascolo). She is going to take him to Narbonnes, a gritty industrial town in which Daniel will be pulled from school and given a job as a handyman’s assistant. The wide open spaces of Pessac become cramped alleyways, and Daniel escapes into cinema and girl chasing with the layabouts at the nearby cafe. Pessac is a promise that is not kept, and My Little Loves is about Daniel adapting to his own solitude.

Moullet wrote in Film Comment that, “Grandparents played an important role in the lives of many French filmmakers during this period. The generation born in the Twenties often sent their children to the countryside to live with their grandparents: this allowed the children to be better fed during the German Occupation, and the parents to enjoy life immediately after the war. The result was a reverence for grandparents and a rejection of the father and mother – a crisis that fertilized a number of artistic careers.” As in the film, Eustache was born in 1938 in Pessac, raised by his grandmother, and moved to Narbonnes with his mother when he was around 12-years-old. The grandmother in the film is presented as a figure of love and light, indulgent and comforting. Sunlight streams through her rural home, one which is kept clean and precise with fastidious care. Daniel, feeling safe in this care, begins to push the boundaries of his childhood. His playfulness is getting ever more violent. Martin Loeb’s performance as Daniel is one of uncanny calm, his wide-set eyes surveying the scene. But even though we are given some of his thoughts in voice-over, they are always ambivalent or self-mortifying. He is as uncertain about his true self as we are – so we just look alongside him at his childhood haunts: there is a the perfect climbing tree in an isolated field, or the bustling market in the square with one precious ice cream vendor.

His mother comes to usher him out of this childhood reverie and into the harsh reality of his situation. As Eustache did, Daniel comes from a working class family, and his mother has hit hard times. His father is missing (or dead), and she is scrounging up money doing odd sewing jobs. José is a manual laborer in seasonal farm work, seeming too tired to speak. Daniel moves into their cramped one bedroom apartment, sleeping on a mat on the floor. He cannot attend school because his mom cannot afford the textbooks. The wallpaper is curled and the smell of mildew emanates off the screen. They are too busy working to take notice of him, so Daniel takes refuge in the streets and in the cinemas – places where you can be alone in groups. He sits in the balcony for the rapturously romantic Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, a makeout spot for idle teens eager to work out their tongues. His other bad influence are the layabouts at his neighborhood cafe, including one slickly rich dick who carries 5,000 francs on him at all times in a leather satchel, enough for two “peppermint jet” drinks a day and for wooing random girls who pass by.

If he’s not at the movies or slouching at the cafe, he’s at work tinkering with motor bikes at a repair shop operated by José’s brother. Daniel is paying some kind of family debt he is never privy to, working as a virtual servant for little to no pay, all for the pleasure of put downs by the owner and his friends, including a cameo by Maurice Pialat (a similarly dyspeptic director – read Nick Pinkerton on “The Second New Wave” at Metrograph’s lovely site for more on their relationship), who weeps for the immature, uneducated youth of the day. For the most part Eustache and Almendros keep the camera unobtrusive, letting the locations and the actors tell their story – but occasionally they are enraptured by faces. There are two bravura sequences that slow down Eustache’s process of remembrance, as if he is stopping and savoring these pockets of time. One is a slow dolly of the cafe, rolling past the bored, antsy, dissolute young men waiting for the day to pass or an event to happen (there is usually a dance, or a party, or a pinball game). The later, more extended one happens at a performance of a girls’ choir, which Daniel happens to stumble into on a lazy afternoon. Eustache pans past the faces of the choir, and their faces encompass the world: there is irony, joy, boredom, studiousness, and passion. Though Eustache obsessively details this moment, Daniel can only see the girl to his right, and the opportunity to briefly caress female flesh. His mind has been taken over with lust, and it is pursued with religious intensity (early in the film, Daniel presses himself up against a girl during his Communion procession). The final sequences find Daniel back home in Pessac, on vacation. His old friends are still kids, while Daniel has aged irrevocably into adolescence. This is a loss that cannot be recovered, and Eustache renders it with eloquent, bone-deep sadness.