J. Hoberman

This heady season of bright nights, wild strawberries and pantheistic joy is recalled as a time of intense yearning and elusive happiness, shadowed by an impending autumn, in the early movies of Sweden’s greatest filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman — notably “Summer Interlude” (1951) and “Summer With Monika” (1953).

“Summer Interlude” is a journey into the past. It opens with a montage of the earth in bloom, followed by a shot of windblown leaves. The heart of the movie is a prolonged flashback that begins when a dancer (Maj-Britt Nilsson), feeling old and already mourning her youth at 28, receives a journal written some 15 years earlier by the boy, long dead, who was her first love (Birger Malmsten).

Nilsson gives a terrific performance, both as a high-spirited adolescent and a prematurely world-weary ballerina. Not only lyrical, the movie can be frisky, too, as in the playful interpolation of an animated cartoon. A small film with big ambitions regarding the nature of love and mortality as well as the relationship between life and theater, “Summer Interlude” is alternately melodramatic and expressionistic, occasionally verging on the supernatural. Still, the filmmaking feels fresh and emotionally raw, leaving the odd sense of Bergman already nostalgic for his own innocence.

Apparently the first Bergman film to open in the United States (under the title “Illicit Interlude”), “Summer Interlude” was praised by New York Times critic Bosley Crowther as a “beautifully realized recount of a rhapsodic romance,” and a movie “no more meriting the pornographic word ‘illicit’ than it deserves to be labeled smut.” On the other hand, “Summer With Monika,” released here a few years later as “Monika: The Story of a Bad Girl,” cut and rescored by lounge-music maestro Lex Baxter, was considered an exploitation film and not reviewed in The Times. (Having heard as a teenager about a Swedish movie “in which a young woman swam completely naked,” Woody Allen claimed to have “slept overnight on the curb to be the first on line” when “Monika” opened at a Brooklyn movie house.)

“Summer With Monika” is a more extreme version of “Summer Interlude.” The love story is transposed to a working-class milieu and charged with the spirit of youthful rebellion; the film is even more lyrical, and emotionally harsher. The shop girl Monika (20-year-old Harriet Andersson, in her first movie) picks up a delivery boy (Lars Ekborg) and persuades him to play hooky with her during a summer idyll that ends in an unwanted pregnancy and an unwise marriage.

The story may be familiar. Monika, who lives for the moment and eschews any domestic responsibility, is not. Bergman’s repeated cutaways to sky, water and the summer landscape, establish her as an impulsive child of nature. More than that, Monika is also a foe of stuffy bourgeois morality. Andersson’s challenging, uninhibited performance is comparable to that of her French contemporary Brigitte Bardot — a quality not lost on the young critics, soon to be New Wave directors, Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut.

Writing in 1958, Godard praised “Monika” as “the cinematographic event of the year,” adding that “it is today what ‘Birth of a Nation’ is to the classical cinema,” while Truffaut had the protagonist of his first movie “The 400 Blows” (1959) steal a poster of Andersson’s Monika. The close-up shot of Andersson’s defiant stare into the camera (what Godard called “the saddest shot in the history of cinema”) is thought by some to have inspired Jean Seberg’s similar gaze at the end of “Breathless” (1960).

Two years after “Monika,” “Smiles of a Summer Night” (1955) won a prize at Cannes and confirmed Bergman’s international reputation as well as his artistic maturity. A sophisticated sex farce in the tradition of Jean Renoir and Max Ophuls, set at the dawn of the 20th century, it mixes and matches four couples, giving the most weight to a stuffy middle-aged lawyer (Gunnar Bjornstrand) with a teenage bride (Ulla Jacobsson), and a former mistress ( Eva Dahlbeck). Crowther began his Times review by asking, “Who would have thought that august Sweden would be sending us a film comedy as witty and cheerfully candid about the complexities of love as any recent French essay on l’amour?”

Who indeed? “Smiles” is a movie of elaborate contrivances. The magical wine served during the course of a summer night spent at a country chateau serves to bring the ensemble into correct romantic alignment. The underlying tone is one of labored rue; although the movie does at times come close to farce, only Dahlbeck and Harriet Andersson, playing the requisite saucy maid, appear to be having fun.

Pauline Kael called “Smiles of a Summer Night” a “nearly perfect” film. Perhaps. The gears click smoothly into place, the aphorisms land with a gentle thud, and the actors hit their marks with professional aplomb. But it is certainly possible to prefer the imperfections of Bergman’s wilder, more soulfully self-pitying summer stories.

“Smiles” provided the basis for Stephen Sondheim’s 1973 musical “A Little Night Music,” later filmed in 1977, and inspired Woody Allen in his 1982 feature “A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy” — a respectful spoof that would have benefited from the anarchic insolence of that bad girl, Monika.

“Summer Interlude,” “Summer with Monika” and “Smiles of Summer Night” may all be streamed from the Criterion Channel. “Summer with Monika” is also available on Amazon Prime. “A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy” can be streamed via YouTube, Google Play, Vudu and elsewhere.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/arts/ingmar-bergman-summer-movies.html" id="bd9155a5-02d5-39ec-a5d4-5dad430c1771">The New York Times</a>.

The fleeting Nordic summer, a respite from the darkness of interminable winter, is “the loveliest time of the year,” the Swedish author Selma Lagerlof wrote, with some understatement, in “The Story of Gosta Berling”: “Everything was beautiful. The road, gray and dusty as it was, had its border of flowers.” Even “the smallest child went on the road with a bunch of lilacs in her hand, and every peasant woman had a little bouquet stuck in her neckerchief.”

Bergman's Summer Movies Raise the Temperature

NEW YORK — Putting a sardonic spin on a modern classic of misanthropy, the movie “Hyenas” transposes a dark comedy by Swiss dramatist Friedrich Durrenmatt to rural Senegal. Specifically, it sets the play, known in English as “The Visit,” in the dusty, drought-stricken town called Colobane after the birthplace of the film’s multitalented director, Djibril Diop Mambéty (1945-98).

“Hyenas” — which was made nearly two decades after Mambéty’s first feature, the African new-wave landmark “Touki Bouki” — was greeted with great anticipation when it was shown at the 1992 New York Film Festival. Largely unavailable since, it has been newly restored and is showing at Metrograph.

“The Visit,” described by The New York Times as “a bold, grisly drama of negativism” when it opened on Broadway to great acclaim in 1958, concerned the revenge of a once-despised, now enormously rich woman. Returning to the impoverished town that cast her out some decades before, she offers to reward its inhabitants if they take the life of the man — now a hapless, aging grocer — who long ago seduced and abandoned her. The townspeople are initially indignant, but …

Mambéty sticks close to the original while transforming the drama into a village folk play, interspersed with songs and dances. (The score, which mixes traditional music with Western movie motifs, is by his younger brother, singer-songwriter Wasis Diop.) He cast nonactors in the film’s two lead roles, with the lean and dignified Mansour Diouf as Dramaan Drameh, the chosen victim, and Ami Diakhate, discovered by Mambéty selling soup in a Dakar market, playing Linguère Ramatou, the old woman.

At once symbolic and concrete, the film is further punctuated by images of watchful animals — “frequent shots of fiery-eyed hyenas restlessly stalking the outskirts of the town like evil spirits alert to the scent of decay,” as Stephen Holden wrote in his New York Times review.

Durrenmatt’s play is, among other things, a satire of bourgeois democracy. “Hyenas” evokes a more archaic form of governance. Although the film’s ending, when Dramaan is put on trial, is reminiscent of Greek tragedy, the justice meted out observes local custom. The drama of “Hyenas” is given a specifically developing-world significance. Described as “richer than the World Bank,” Linguère effectively seduces the villagers with consumer goods like air conditioners, refrigerators and TVs.

Not just money but modernization is the bait. (In interviews, Mambéty suggested that Linguère is the grown version of the radical student Anta who leaves Africa for Europe in “Touki Bouki.”) Not above such temptation, Mambéty pointedly casts himself in a small but significant role as a former judge who serves as Linguère’s retainer. The final shot has an earth mover bulldozing a field outside the town.

Mambéty never made another feature, although he did leave a 45-minute short meant to be part of a larger trilogy. A bold and splashy homage to Dakar’s street children, “The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun” (which can be streamed via Kanopy) is as affirmative as “Hyenas” is pessimistic.

Friday through Thursday at Metrograph, Manhattan; 212-660-0312, metrograph.com.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/movies/hyenas-senegal-mambety.html" id="52dcc3cb-7dce-362a-abc3-f42902d3eecd">The New York Times</a>.

(Rewind)

A Dark Swiss Comedy, Transported to Rural Senegal

Every decade or so, Hollywood produces a movie that not only is entertaining but also raises the question of just what is entertainment.

The 1934 musical “Stand Up and Cheer,” in which the president of the United States appoints a secretary of amusement to dispel the Depression, is an example of what could be called meta-entertainment. Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy” (1983) and Ben Stiller’s “Cable Guy” (1996), both self-reflexively predicated on characters who are mass-culture personified, are others. So is Michael Schultz’s 1976 “Car Wash.”

A movie in which mass media, specifically radio, exerts a powerful influence on its characters’ lives, “Car Wash” is an energetic, vulgar, socially conscious farce — scored by the master of psychedelic soul Norman Whitfield and focusing on a single day at the Dee-Luxe Car Wash in downtown Los Angeles. It manages to have its cake and eat it too: The film is simultaneously downbeat and uplifting. New York Times critic Vincent Canby called it “a terrifically shrewd piece of moviemaking,” noting that “if ‘Car Wash’ makes no comment on our pop culture, it’s because it’s a piece of it.”

Yet “Car Wash” does comment on itself: The contradictions between their labor and our leisure are manifest in the irresistible title song. Punctuated by the exhortation “work and work and work,” the song by soul group Rose Royce explains that while the Dee-Luxe is “no place to be if you plan on being a star” (never mind that at least in the final credits just about everyone gets to be one), it’s “better than digging a ditch” (what isn’t?) and “the boss don’t mind if you act the fool” (of course not). Heard over the radio, the tune sets the Dee-Luxe employees bopping while they work in a speeded-up version of the Funky Robot dance. Has a $3-an-hour job ever been more fun?

“Car Wash” evolved out of the 1970s blaxploitation genre: Schultz, the director, had a hit with the coming-of-age drama “Cooley High,” and the screenplay was by Joel Schumacher, who wrote the Motown-influenced showbiz musical “Sparkle.” In other ways, too, “Car Wash” is a quintessential 1970s film. Political exhaustion and economic recession are never far below its candy-colored surface.

Unsympathetic reviewers saw “Car Wash” as a lowbrow imitation of “American Graffiti” (1973) or “Nashville” (1975). “It has no more class than Hostess Twinkie,” Pauline Kael wrote, adding “it, too, may make you gag.” But “Car Wash” is more a critique of those movies. That which was freewheeling and expansive, whether teenage car-culture in “American Graffiti” or boomtown star-making in “Nashville,” is here drastically downsized.

A microcosm of Hollywood, the Dee-Luxe is a stage, and everyone, except perhaps the anxious boss, Mr. B (Sully Boyar), and his gruff ex-con employee, Lonnie (Ivan Dixon), entertains a fantasy or at least wields a shtick. Fittingly, the cast is packed with stand-up comics — Franklyn Ajaye, George Carlin, Irwin Corey and Richard Pryor. The most compelling dreams belong to the playfully romantic T.C. (Ajaye) and the sullen black nationalist Abdullah (Bill Duke), formerly Duane.

T.C.'s childish fantasy of being a black superhero parallels that of the boss’s pot-smoking son (Richard Brestoff), who wears a Mao T-shirt and tells dad’s employees, “Brothers, I’m here to unite with you!” Abdullah’s tortured self-invention is contrasted with that of the self-confident snappy queen Lindy (Antonio Fargas) who, in the movie’s best-known line, tells Abdullah, “I’m more man than you’ll ever be and more woman than you’ll ever get.”

Abdullah also mixes it up with and fails to faze the resplendently smiling Daddy Rich (Pryor), founder of the Church of Divine Economic Spirituality, transported to the Dee-Luxe in a gold limousine accompanied by a glam gospel trio (the Pointer Sisters). Their song is an utterly transparent riff on his con man’s appeal: “You gotta believe in something, why not believe in me?”

The Dee-Luxe crew includes Latinos, a Native American and one hapless white dude, but the perspective is black. Not that the African-American press was universally favorable. The Amsterdam News called “Car Wash” “something Stephen Foster might have written about a day in the life of black folk on an antebellum plantation.” Or a movie lot. That the harried owner, his nitwit son and the brash, insecure cashier played by Melanie Mayron are Jewish suggests that the carwash might be a metaphor for the entertainment industry.

The Jewish characters are well-meaning but clueless, like Carlin’s white liberal cabdriver. The white customers are privileged brats basically making a mess for media-addled minimum-wage workers to clean up. The Guardian, a Marxist weekly — fancifully suggesting an ideological connection to Lenin’s manifesto “What Is To Be Done?” — noted that the movie “poses the day-to-day practical experience of the working class against the ‘abstract’ theory of those who would politicize it.”

“Car Wash” has its flaws. The most obvious is that the female roles are underwritten and cursory, including the glum hooker played by Schultz’s wife, Lauren Jones. But the movie is sensitive to heartache, Abdullah’s not the least. “It’s all falling apart, man,” he admits to Lonnie, whose situation is only marginally less hopeless. However the bright orange uniforms worn by Dee-Luxe employees appeared in 1976, they now seem eerily predictive of prison jumpsuits. The perfunctory happy ending is suffused with melancholy.

Yet to be included in the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, “Car Wash” is a landmark. It provided a showcase for Pryor, the most bankable black star between Sidney Poitier and Eddie Murphy, who was subsequently directed by Schultz in “Greased Lightning” and “Which Way Is Up?” (both 1977). “Car Wash” also features Garrett Morris, an original member of the “Saturday Night Live” cast, and is distinguished by the presence of two notable directors, Ivan Dixon and Duke, as well as multitalented pioneer Clarence Muse.

It was the first movie by an African-American director shown in competition at Cannes; there would not be another until Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing,” a 1989 film for which “Car Wash” furnished a template. Schultz serves as a template himself — he directed more feature-length Hollywood movies than any black director before Lee.

“Car Wash” is available on Amazon Prime, Vudu, YouTube, iTunes, Google Player, and Starz; “Cooley High” is available on Vudu.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/movies/streaming-car-wash.html" id="a7fcf47d-e833-3597-a687-5f3ee68afcf1">The New York Times</a>.

(Streaming)

'Car Wash,' a Raunchy 1970s Comedy Brimming With Meta and Mayhem

One of the best genre films of 1968 was among the very best commercial releases of 2018. Sergio Corbucci’s “The Great Silence” escaped the vault and is available for streaming from Amazon Prime and Vudu.

Corbucci (1927-90) may be Sergio Leone’s only rival as the maestro of Italian Westerns, and “The Great Silence,” which had its belated theatrical opening last spring, is arguably his masterpiece — stylized, subversive and superbly perverse, not least in its casting, mise-en-scène and Ennio Morricone’s typically eccentric score.

Morricone’s occasional passages of raga rock notwithstanding, the world of “The Great Silence” is alpine. The frozen landscape not only recalls 1950s Hollywood “Northwesterns” like “The Far Country” but the German “mountain films” of the 1920s and ‘30s. Everything is blanketed with a deep snow that, among other things, highlights the frequently spilled, bright-red blood. The sensibility is high ‘60s. Ostensibly set in Utah, the movie anticipates Robert Altman’s “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” (1971) both as a snowbound Western and a Western with a strong left-populist view: The law exists to protect the rich.

The white void in which much of the action unfolds can be variously read as a comment on frontier morality or as an existential landscape. There is also an absurdist element. Disenfranchised settlers, driven from their homes into banditry and the mountains, are the good guys; the rapacious bounty hunters sent to kill them on behalf of a malevolent banker are the capitalist villains, depositing their victims’ corpses, for which they receive cash, in the snow — frozen assets for later retrieval.

The movie’s archetypically taciturn hero, played by French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant between roles in “A Man and a Woman” (1966) and “My Night at Maud’s” (1969), is totally silent — rendered mute in childhood when his vocal cords were slashed by mercenary marauders. Silence, as he is called, is a hired gun and potential liberator; the über-villain is a bounty hunter gleefully personified by Klaus Kinski camping it up beneath a priest’s flat-brimmed saturno hat and a blond Beatle wig.

From a distance, the two enemies are indistinguishable, lone horsemen plodding through the snow. A new sheriff (burly Frank Wolff, veteran of late 1950s drive-in cheapsters like “Beast From Haunted Cave”) complicates the conflict, in part through his irrelevance. The bandit families, who sometimes suggest the ravenous extras in the original “Night of the Living Dead,” waylay the sheriff for his horse, which they plan to eat. Early on, there is a terrific scene in which the hired gun, the bounty hunter and the lawman are fellow travelers on the same cramped stagecoach, not fully aware of one another’s identities.

Affirming Trintignant’s status as French cinema’s prince of romance, the cast is rounded out with fiery Vonetta McGee, in one of her first movies four years before “Hammer” and “Blacula,” both 1972, elevated her to blaxploitation stardom. Their impossible love, unusual not as interracial but for its tenderness and sexual heat, sets up for an ending so shockingly pessimistic that it has been said to have precluded the movie’s American distribution and was changed for its second run in France. (The available version has the original ending.)

A vocal spaghetti Western aficionado, Quentin Tarantino paid homage to “The Great Silence” with his snowbound 2015 Western “The Hateful Eight.” Indeed, reviewing “The Great Silence” in The New York Times last spring, A.O. Scott wrote that “in 2018, it’s possible — and perhaps inevitable — to view ‘The Great Silence’ as a footnote to the oeuvre of Quentin Tarantino, whose admiration for Corbucci is well documented.”

Be that as it may, Corbucci was inventing something new. He was a politically committed artist working in a popular form. “The Great Silence,” according to filmmaker Alex Cox, an equally enthusiastic partisan of Italian Westerns, was meant as a statement reflecting the despair Corbucci felt following the death of Che Guevara.

A number of other Corbucci Westerns, some originally released here under his American pseudonym Stanley Corbett, are available for streaming. Best known is his 1966 commercial breakthrough, “Django” (available on Amazon Prime and Vudu). Civilization in this enormously successful and exceedingly violent revenge saga is scarcely more than a muddy hellhole where life is less than cheap.

Played by Franco Nero, Django makes a memorable entrance dragging his coffin behind him. His foes are rabid white nationalists, terrorizing Mexicans and riding around in flaming red Ku Klux Klan hoods; those in Corbucci’s even more violent follow-up, “The Hellbenders,” also from 1966 (Amazon Prime), are a band of unreconstructed Confederates led by Joseph Cotton.

“Django” not only gave its name to Tarantino’s first Western but spawned a score of sequels. None were directed by Corbucci who, in his third 1966 release “Navajo Joe” (Amazon Prime, Vudu) introduced another underdog hero, this one representing an oppressed race. Hair dyed black and slathered in man tan, the movie’s eponymous star, Burt Reynolds, is a one-man gang of destruction, wreaking vengeance on the white scalp hunters who murdered his wife. The score is among Morricone’s best, making use of tom-toms, banshee shrieks and the repeated chanting of the hero’s name.

“The Mercenary” (1968), a bigger budgeted production, replete with battle scenes and religious pageants, can be streamed from Amazon Prime. Set during the Mexican Revolution, it concerns a European mercenary known as “The Pole” (Franco Nero) who pragmatically switches sides, breaking with the corrupt government to work for a rebellious, if self-aggrandizing, peon (Tony Musante) and his ultraleft mistress (Giovanna Ralli). The Pole remains cynically detached from politics throughout; the movie’s real villain is the murderous American dandy played by Jack Palance in a curly black hairpiece.

Made during a period of Italian turmoil and even more overt in its insurrectionary attitude, Corbucci’s 1970 “Compañeros” (Amazon Prime, Vudu, iTunes) brought back Nero as a Swedish arms dealer with Tomas Milian, dressed to resemble Che, taking the part of the seditious peasant. A gaggle of militant left-wing students added to the mix. Here, the villainous gringo (Palance again) has a pet eagle named America who feeds on the flesh of butchered Mexican peasants.

With tropes like that, you might see the Tarantino oeuvre as a footnote to Corbucci’s.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/28/movies/sergio-corbucci-the-great-silence.html" id="546e457f-cfef-3ead-ac38-322b6e27e4ad">The New York Times</a>.

Bright-Red Blood, Spilled Upon Snow

A sable fur coat lands on a young stenographer riding in the upper deck of an open-top Fifth Avenue bus. A turbaned passenger calls it “kismet,” but the Depression-era romantic farce “Easy Living” isn’t so much about fate as the fantasy of getting something for nothing.

Released in 1937, toward the end of the screwball comedy cycle inaugurated three years earlier with “It Happened One Night,” “Easy Living” has risen in critical favor over the decades. Consider it a seasonal gift, revived for a week at Film Forum in an excellent 35 mm print.

Screwball comedies are typically populated by madcap socialites, irate plutocrats, plucky working girls, comic servants, idiotic lounge lizards and English-mangling foreigners. All are present in this film directed by Mitchell Leisen from Preston Sturges’ script. The fur coat (priced at $58,000, approximately a cool million dollars today) that falls from heaven on the head of Mary (Jean Arthur) belongs to the spendthrift wife of a blustering tycoon known as the Bull of Broad Street (Edward Arnold).

While the original story, by the Hollywood leftist Vera Caspary, had Mary steal the coat, Sturges downplays class conflict, delivering something out of the Arabian Nights. The Bull hurled the coat off his terrace in a ludicrous domestic spat. When honest Mary, an employee of a youth magazine called The Boy’s Constant Companion, tries to return it, he makes it a present, along with a matching fur hat. Mary is assumed to be the Bull’s mistress, but romantic interest is supplied by his ne’er-do-well son, Johnny (Ray Milland), a sleek twerp introduced wearing an ascot at breakfast.

Announcing itself with neon Art Deco titles and stocked with mock Erté sculptures, “Easy Living” has some notable sets and set pieces devised by Leisen. A trained architect, he also manages to engineer a way in which Johnny and Mary can spend the night together (lying head to head) without violating the Hollywood Production Code.

Garrulous bit players include Franklin Pangborn as a querulous milliner, William Demarest as a gravel-voiced gossip columnist, and Luis Alberni, who employs a vaudeville Jewish-Italian accent to deliver fanciful colloquialisms like “I don’t beat around the bush to come in the backdoor.” His character is the owner of an upscale Midtown hotel; assuming Mary is being kept by his creditor, the Bull, he offers her the most deluxe suite.

Alberni gets the comic lines, but the movie belongs to Arthur. Remembered for her charmingly cracked voice and the acerbic, girl-next-door career gals she played in Frank Capra’s “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town” (1936) and “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (1939), Arthur imbues Mary with a sly, feisty innocence. The sequence in which her benefactor attempts to mansplain the principle of compound interest is a small gem of verbal fencing. Reveling in her new coat, Mary is oblivious to a mounting hubbub of disapproval as she swans through the Boy’s Constant Companion office as if accepting an Oscar.

The New York Times movie critic Frank S. Nugent wrote that “Easy Living” didn’t “make much sense” and was “incredibly reminiscent of those old custard pie and Keystone chase days.” True. Leisen signals his intentions early with a pratfall that sends the Bull hurtling down a staircase. It is the movie’s interpolated slapstick — along with Arthur and the enormous geranium-shaped bathtub in which she and Milland are planted — that give it distinction.

The classic scene has a penniless Mary wrapped in her fabulous fur scouring a Manhattan automat for cheap eats. Hoping to earn his own way, Johnny is there employed as a busboy. Past the inevitable meet-cute, the scene builds to a sight-gag in which all the dispensing machines open at once precipitating a free food riot worthy of slapstick masters like Mack Sennett or Blake Edwards: Something for nothing!

Along with “Easy Living,” Film Forum is showing a 1938 Paramount animation, “Sally Swing,” in which Betty Boop, in the twilight of her career as a college administrator, introduces a new cartoon character. School janitress Sally Swing trucks and scats her way to campus stardom, but vintage jitterbug moves notwithstanding, the cartoon was most likely chosen for the climactic scene in which a cap and gown descend upon her from on high.

Dec. 28 through Jan. 3 at Film Forum, Manhattan; 212-727-8110, filmforum.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/26/movies/film-forum-easy-living-jean-arthur.html" id="9a00efd9-0c1b-33d5-a3e2-06c097ba11d0">The New York Times</a>.

Gifts Galore: 'Easy Living,' With Jean Arthur and a Coat From the Heavens

The first two, “A New Leaf” (1971) and “The Heartbreak Kid” (1972), were popular and critical hits; the last two, “Mikey and Nicky” (1976) and “Ishtar” (1987), were subversive buddy films that first mired and then ended her directorial career.

While “Ishtar” is now acknowledged as perhaps the slyest political satire of the Reagan era, “Mikey and Nicky,” revived at Film Forum in a new restoration, has yet to be fully appreciated. An exhilarating feel-bad movie about a pair of desperate wiseguys, it was in production at the same time as Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets,” a film with which it has numerous points of contact.

Both concern low-level hoods and draw on the personal history of their directors. (May grew up in Philadelphia, where “Mikey and Nicky” was shot; she has said that members of her family were connected to the mob.) Both are buddy films that deal with betrayal. And both, in their exuberant acting and freewheeling camera work, show the influence of John Cassavetes. Indeed, “Mikey and Nicky” actually features Cassavetes in a role analogous to Robert De Niro’s Johnny Boy in “Mean Streets.”

Giving a supremely volatile performance as the hunted Nicky, Cassavetes plays off the deceptively reasonable demeanor of his childhood friend Mikey (Peter Falk, then enjoying national celebrity as the perennially underestimated police detective Columbo). Seemingly improvised by two method actors, “Mikey and Nicky” was totally scripted. To watch Cassavetes and Falk inhabit their roles is to watch two great jazz musicians riffing on a score. (May brilliantly cast Ned Beatty against type as the harassed, methodical hit man who is given the contract on Nicky.)

“Mikey and Nicky” is often very funny, albeit painfully so. Some reviewers — primed for the broader comedy of May’s first two films — were taken aback by its darkness. (The most farcical scene is set in a graveyard.) The New York Times critic Vincent Canby was particularly harsh, writing that “to watch it is to risk an artificially induced anxiety attack.”

The first print ads used the tag line, “Mikey and Nicky — Don’t expect to like them.” But if May disliked her characters, she also loved them. It’s telling that their names seem to reference her famous partner, Mike Nichols. Released the year “Taxi Driver” capped the Hollywood New Wave and “Rocky” reversed it, “Mikey and Nicky” is as much a virtuoso performance as Scorsese’s film and scarcely less disturbing. May deals head-on with her characters’ racism and, particularly, their misogyny (always from the perspective of their targets).

A lengthy scene in which Nicky alternately abuses and pimps out his vulnerable girlfriend (Carol Grace, then married to Walter Matthau) is excruciating to watch. May’s great theme is the abjectness of women and the idiocy of men. Unique among buddy movies, “Mikey and Nicky” shows bromance from the point of view of its victims.

July 5-11 at Film Forum, 209 W. Houston St., Manhattan; 212-727-8110, filmforum.org

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/02/movies/elaine-may-mikey-and-nicky.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

In 'Mikey and Nicky,' Elaine May nails a pair of desperate characters

(Rewind): Elaine May’s genius goes beyond her Tony-winning performance in “The Waverly Gallery.” The four movies she wrote and directed between 1971 and 1987 are among the strongest Hollywood films of the period.

Dislocation is Wang’s great theme and the subject of “Bitter Money,” his 2016 portrait of young rural migrants who leave their villages for low-paying jobs in the booming garment factories of Huzhou. (The film, along with five of his other documentaries, is available on the new OVID.tv subscription streaming service.)

Wang’s camera wanders among the lives of the men and women who have flocked to the sewing factories. Sensation precedes explanation. Using no narration in his fly-on-the-wall vérité, Wang resembles the American documentarian Frederick Wiseman. But where Wiseman explores institutions, Wang focuses on individuals. He follows them — into their workplaces and homes (often the same), recording their conversations and family relationships.

Wang spent two years filming “Bitter Money,” maintaining that he shot 2,000 hours for this 2 1/2-hour film. Working alone with a small digital video-camera customized with an autofocus lens, he seemingly blends into his subjects’ lives. Because he edits less and holds shots longer than more conventional documentarians, his films are akin to Warhol screen tests — full of revealing behavioral tics and transcendent empty moments. Wang’s presence is not exactly invisible but only occasionally addressed. “Time to sleep — you can film tomorrow,” one man tells him. One wonders if the existence of China’s extensive surveillance network has accustomed his subjects to this sort of attention.

“Bitter Money” begins with a 15-year-old girl and her older cousin leaving Yunnan Province in southwestern China to find work in Huzhou. The quarter-hour or so that Wang devoted to their days-long journey on a crowded train is a film in its own right — a stolid pilgrimage into the future. The passengers seem to be in a state of suspended animation. Once in Huzhou, Wang finds other subjects at a workshop. In one sequence, he cuts from tailor to tailor, showing how the coats are made — but he is mainly observational. Wang does not flinch from recording a domestic quarrel in which the husband has to be restrained from attacking his wife. He devotes considerable camera time to the despair of an older, obviously intoxicated worker fingering a pair of scissors and vaguely harassing a female colleague as he delivers a rambling diatribe against their unseen boss.

Working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, under unpleasant conditions, harsh lighting and intense time pressure, Wang’s subjects are essentially free agents hired by small entrepreneurs to fulfill a particular quota. In his book “Adam Smith in Beijing,” the sociologist Giovanni Arrighi describes these “hyper-exploited” young migrants as the “backbone of China’s export industries.” Given the monotony and deprivation of their lives, their economic uncertainty and the constant talk of money, the movie cannot be anything other than an indictment of China’s so-called socialist market economy.

However local, “Bitter Money” is also universal. The spectacle of these men and women hunched over their sewing machines will not only resonate with those whose family histories include time working in a sweatshop, but anyone who reaps the benefit of inexpensive Chinese-manufactured clothing, which is to say, everyone.

“Bitter Money” ends with a contemplation of the migrants’ alienated labor made material — the workshop’s output, bundled in plastic and forlornly waiting in the rain to be shipped overseas. That these products are intended for export reflects back on the movie. In a recent interview, Wang noted that because he refuses to submit his films for official approval, none have ever been shown commercially in China.

Wang’s desire to wrest a story out of daily existence and to acknowledge the struggle of making a living makes him heir to the Italian neorealist filmmakers of the 1940s and ’50s, including Giuseppe De Santis. His 1949 film “Bitter Rice,” available for streaming on the new subscription Criterion channel, is a fascinating example of neorealist pulp. It also concerns migrant workers.

A story of the women, known as mondine, who harvest Italy’s rice crop, “Bitter Rice” begins like a documentary with a radio reporter outside the Turin train station, urgently describing the mondine’s annual migration to the rice paddies of the Po Valley. Their backbreaking work is amply acknowledged, but “Bitter Rice” is neorealism plus — a crime melodrama encompassing instances of theft, sabotage, rape, childbirth, references to abortion and multiple violent deaths, including one by suicide. It also features abundant pulchritude. When the movie opened in the United States in late 1950, The Los Angeles Times called it “something like a Hollywood women’s prison movie, only more so.”

Following previous Italian hits “Open City” and “The Bicycle Thief” into the World Theater, a Times Square movie house specializing in imported films, “Bitter Rice” ran for months. The main attraction was the movie’s statuesque, sultry star Silvana Mangano as a teenage rice harvester introduced executing a solo boogie-woogie. Impulsive and naive, she comes under the spell of a swaggering thief played by Vittorio Gassman, soon himself to achieve international recognition.

“Bitter Rice” is an early example of globalist cinema. De Santis was a leftist whose sweeping panoramic shots of the hardworking and at times singing masses suggest Soviet celebrations of collective labor. He was also a fan of American movies; the two-fisted fight scenes are pure Hollywood. The movie’s frank sexuality, however, struck Americans as distinctly European. “Passion toils and tumbles through it like the wrestlers in a gas-house free-for-all, and torments of carnal hunger are boldly and rawly exposed,” the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther wrote in his enthusiastic review.

This is undoubtedly why “Bitter Rice” — which, according to Time magazine, would gross nearly $8 million in the United States — was criticized by the American Legion as “a serious threat to Christian morality.” Linked by William Mooring, the film critic for the Catholic journal Tidings, to the international communist conspiracy, it was briefly banned in Albany, but also nominated for an Academy Award.

This article originally appeared in <a id="67509d47-41b4-35f1-a630-b5d75b53a4af" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/movies/bitter-money-migrant-workers-china.html">The New York Times</a>.

No other filmmaker has been more immersed in the social upheavals of contemporary China than Wang Bing. Beginning with “Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks” (2003) a three-part, nine-hour look at the painful decline of a once-thriving industrial zone, the 52-year-old documentarian has consistently portrayed those dispossessed amid the changing landscape of his rapidly developing country.

Migrants facing toil and trouble

One of the first Hollywood productions to be hailed as a cult film, this parodic thriller about a bumbling scheme to loot Africa’s uranium mines was an outlier in the successful Huston-Bogart collaborations. With Huston directing from a script doctored by Truman Capote, the film was initially promoted as a romantic adventure in the tradition of “Casablanca.” On its release in 1954, however, “Beat the Devil” baffled audiences, who didn’t get the in-jokes and plot twists and turns.

Bogart stars as a middle-aged fixer hired by a ragtag group of crooks who become entangled with a seemingly innocent British couple (Jennifer Jones and Edward Underdown). Given the movie’s shaggy-dog quest, Huston evidently imagined “Beat the Devil” as another “Maltese Falcon,” his first film, even casting Peter Lorre, a featured player in “Maltese Falcon,” for good luck, with the portly Robert Morley standing in for Sydney Greenstreet, a seeker of the falcon. Visiting the town of Ravello on Italy’s Amalfi Coast, where “Beat the Devil” was being filmed, a New York Times reporter noted that Huston was harking back to another one of his Bogart triumphs, “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”

The gale of laughter that ends “Beat the Devil” does recall “Sierra Madre,” but this time the joke was on Huston. “A potential treat emerged as a wet firecracker in some 68 neighborhood theaters yesterday where United Artists unveiled its singularly unorthodox ‘Beat the Devil,’” the Times review said, comparing the movie unfavorably to its source, a potboiler of a novel pseudonymously written by left-wing journalist Claud Cockburn.

Huston, a friend of Cockburn’s, prodded Bogart to buy the rights and put money into the film. Vexing the Production Code censors with its relaxed take on criminal behavior and tolerance of spouse-swapping, the movie played down the novel’s anti-imperialist bent but maintained its worldly attitude — something for which Capote took credit.

Jones was cast as Bogart’s dizzy adulterous love interest. Consequently, the actress’s real-life husband, powerful producer David O. Selznick, watched over the film, bringing on Capote, who had recently worked on a Selznick production, to fix the script. Although the late scenes set in North Africa are likely Capote’s doing, his influence has been exaggerated. Many of the movie’s most memorable dialogue involving Bogart’s cutting witticisms and Jones’ contrived innocence can be found in Cockburn’s novel.

“Beat the Devil” is a film whose supposed shortcomings are actually its appealing qualities. Introduced wearing a floridly patterned robe with matching ascot, Bogart is less formidable than the tough guys he played in the 1940s, marginalized by a colorful parade of character actors including the unexpectedly droll Gina Lollobrigida, appearing in her first major English-language film.

Thanks to Bogart’s perplexed underplaying and the anticlimactic ending, “Beat the Devil” was misunderstood in much the way that Elaine May’s not dissimilar anti-thriller “Ishtar” would be in 1987. Overshadowed by its much-mythologized back story — Capote and Huston claimed that the movie was more-or-less made up as they went along — the project lived in infamy. “Bogie sent me a copy of an advertisement an exhibitor had taken out in a newspaper saying this was the worst picture he had ever had in his theater,” Huston would recall. “Beat the Devil” disappeared from view, a notorious flop that rarely, if ever, was shown on television. Then in February 1964, it reopened in a Greenwich Village movie house and proved so successful that it enjoyed an uptown move-over and revival showings in other cities.

“The film that was 10 years ahead of its time is 10 years old … (It’s time!),” a newspaper ad proclaimed. Yet “Beat the Devil” was very much of its time — not just because it was a star vehicle produced by the star rather than by a studio.

For one thing, the movie was released during a thaw in the Cold War, among a flurry of films that made light of international tensions. For another, it rode the wave of a growing popularity of Italian movies. Besides Lollobrigida, who was praised by Bogart as a woman who “makes Marilyn Monroe look like Shirley Temple,” the cast included Italian character actors. (Indeed, the mood anticipated Italian comedies like Mario Monicelli’s “Big Deal on Madonna Street.”) The Times’ on-set report notes the proximity of Roberto Rossellini’s current production, “Voyage to Italy.” In his account of “Beat the Devil,” Huston credits himself with Rossellini’s strategy of giving his actors their lines moments before a scene was shot.

What had changed? The Bogart cult that began in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the late 1950s had gained traction. (Peter Bogdanovich published his report “Bogie in Excelsis” in the September 1964 issue of Esquire.) “Sick comedy” and “black humor” entered the mainstream. James Bond’s gleeful irreverence took hold; “Dr. Strangelove” opened less than a month before “Beat the Devil” was reissued. The ’60s were underway! “Camp” was a buzz word, although Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” which appeared in the fall of 1964, slagged “Beat the Devil” as a movie so desperate to be campy that it was “continually losing the beat.”

In the mid-1970s, around the time the “Rocky Horror Picture Show” cult was attracting attention, Huston gave an interview maintaining that people had seen “Beat the Devil” multiple times, knew the dialogue by heart and would recite the lines along with the actors. I find that hard to imagine — but no more so than that critics and audiences in 1954 failed to appreciate “Beat the Devil” for the charming jape that is.

“Beat the Devil” can be found on YouTube and streamed through Amazon Prime.

This article originally appeared in <a id="c2e61c18-5901-400e-9efd-5192ffc46ecb" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/movies/beat-the-devil-film-humphrey-bogart.html">The New York Times</a>.

'Beat the Devil,' the Bogart flop that spawned a cult

(Streaming): John Huston’s “Beat the Devil,” the Humphrey Bogart vehicle once advertised as a decade ahead of its time, is now an official senior citizen, having opened in New York 65 years ago this month.

<h1>Writer-director Sofia Coppola, fortune’s child, is blessed and cursed for reasons beyond her control. Is it an advantage or disadvantage to have a supportive, larger-than-life father who is a world-famous filmmaker?</h1>

While it’s no stretch to rank Coppola alongside Kathryn Bigelow as the two women with the most longevity on the movie industry’s A-list, it should be noted that on the basis of six features she’s directed since 1999, she’s also the most celebrated American filmmaker under 50. (Paul Thomas Anderson is the only other contender.)

She won an Oscar for writing “Lost in Translation” and a New York Film Critics Circle award for directing it. She received the Gold Lion award at the 2010 Venice Film Festival for “Somewhere” and was named best director at Cannes for her 2017 remake of “The Beguiled,” the dark comedy of manners she fashioned from Don Siegel’s overwrought male gothic.

Coppola is a true auteur — a filmmaker with a distinct worldview and sensibility and a personal set of quasi-autobiographical interests. Where Bigelow works in genres that have up to now been dominated by men, Coppola’s are, to use her own term, “girlie.” Her protagonists are generally strong-willed women, whether as individuals (“Marie Antoinette”) or in groups (“The Virgin Suicides,” “The Bling Ring,” “The Beguiled”) or as part of an older man-younger woman pairing (“Lost in Translation,” “Somewhere”). Drawn to father-daughter situations, she is at work on another — her current project, “On the Rocks,” is about a young mother (Rashida Jones, daughter of Quincy Jones) reconnecting with her playboy father (Bill Murray).

Her characters are typically and blithely privileged, often afflicted with ennui, if not affluenza. Her movies are usually set in protective, even rarefied surroundings: comfortable suburbs in “The Virgin Suicides” and “The Bling Ring,” exclusive hotels in “Lost in Translation” and “Somewhere,” a boarding school for young women in “The Beguiled,” and Versailles in “Marie Antoinette.”

Coppola’s fondness for cosseted milieus is reinforced by a propensity to sanitize the past. “The Beguiled” not only evokes a bubble, it is one — a movie set in Virginia during the Civil War that seems oblivious to the state’s slave-driven economy. Similarly, “Marie Antoinette” shows as little interest in the social forces that ignited the French Revolution as it does in the hygienic practices of the royal court.

Having grown up as Hollywood royalty, Coppola, 47, takes these insular worlds for granted. The prologue to her oeuvre is the script she contributed to a short directed by her father in the 1989 anthology film “New York Stories”; its star, an adorable, doted-upon schoolgirl (Heather McComb), lives with her often-absent parents at the Sherry-Netherland hotel and rewards a homeless man with chocolate kisses. (The prevailing message, Janet Maslin wrote in her New York Times review, is “more or less Marie Antoinette’s.”)

On the other hand, no director has greater access, emotionally or physically, to the rich and famous. It’s hard to say which is more remarkable, Coppola’s ability to do extensive filming at Versailles for “Marie Antoinette” or Paris Hilton’s mad narcissism in letting Coppola use her home as a major location for “The Bling Ring,” a movie about the actual burglarizing of Hilton’s home by a gang of well-off, star-struck teenagers who used online gossip sites to track the whereabouts of celebrities and plot their schemes.

Coppola’s veteran male protagonists, Murray in “Lost in Translation” and Stephen Dorff in “Somewhere,” are sympathetically portrayed celebrities adrift in their own stardom. (Dorff’s character, stricken with toxic superficiality, floats through a nervous breakdown.) But while “Lost in Translation” is Coppola’s sweetest film and “Somewhere” the saddest, her strongest movies are those whose characters have stardom imposed upon them or set out to steal it: “Marie Antoinette,” a costume movie whose worked-out choreography is the equivalent of an action extravaganza, and “The Bling Ring,” a deadpan satire.

Scrumptious colors, magnificent sets and upbeat modern music aside, what’s impressive about “Marie Antoinette” is Coppola’s attitude — a bold refusal to Frenchify or even periodize her knockout cast, which stars Kirsten Dunst in the title role and Jason Schwartzman as her husband, the future Louis XVI. As a parody of monarchist protocol, “Marie Antoinette” anticipates “The Favourite” but loses its edge once Marie and Louis become adults. (The falloff is as drastic as the last 45 minutes of dad’s “Apocalypse Now” — another attempt to make history.)

By contrast, “The Bling Ring,” a deceptively blasé, both-sides-now view of celebrity, never breaks character. More of an exposé than a narrative, Coppola’s account of the so-called Hollywood Hills Burglars is based on a true story (or rather its account in Vanity Fair). With everything refracted through the news media, “The Bling Ring” is both a critique and celebration. Strutting five abreast down Rodeo Drive, as though posing for an album cover, the members of the ring imagine themselves as stars in their own movie (too bad for them that a surveillance camera provided their on-screen debuts). “We don’t know how (or if) they think, and we don’t know quite what to think of them,” A.O. Scott wrote in his Times review.

The two standout performances — Leslie Mann’s new-age airhead and, cast against type, Emma Watson as her bratty, stubbornly self-justifying daughter — are gutsy portrayals of appalling characters one loves to hate (or simply hates). But any moral satisfaction derived when the kids are busted is transitory. On screen and off, most of the real-life kids were rewarded with friend requests and fan pages, as well as with Coppola’s phlegmatic glamorizing film.

Had Andy Warhol lived to see “Marie Antoinette” or “The Bling Ring,” he might have considered Coppola his favorite Hollywood director. (The significance paid to footwear in both films could not have failed to impress an artist who was, in his commercial phase, the acknowledged master of drawing shoes.) Coppola’s blankly comic dialogue — cascades of “Omigod!” punctuated by cries of “That’s so ill!” — are juxtaposed with pop images worthy of painters Ed Ruscha or David Hockney.

“The Bling Ring” is uncompromising in its portrayal of banality and shallowness. In a certain sense there hasn’t been anything quite like it since Warhol filmed Edie Sedgwick in “Poor Little Rich Girl.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="cc478fa8-668a-43d6-ae28-4cf2c9ca0d64" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/movies/sofia-coppola-director-writer.html">The New York Times</a>.

Why hasn't Sofia Coppola gotten the respect an auteur deserves?

She won an Oscar for writing “Lost in Translation” and a New York Film Critics Circle award for directing it.

<h1>NEW YORK — Asian action star Jackie Chan has been often compared to Buster Keaton (no one takes a fall better) and sometimes to Douglas Fairbanks (whose acrobatic grace he equals in vaulting over a wall). But I’m always fascinated by his moves: Chan is the Fred Astaire of outrageous mayhem.</h1>

A child who, starting at age 7, attended an academy for Chinese opera and martial arts in his native Hong Kong, Chan was an international star well before he came to the attention of most American moviegoers. His breakthrough film, “Police Story” (1985), and its inevitable first sequel, “Police Story II” (1988), both digitally restored, are playing together at the Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn.

A small part alongside Burt Reynolds in “The Cannonball Run” (1981) failed to ignite Chan’s career in the United States. Until “Police Story” was included in the 1987 New York Film Festival, his New York fans often went to Chinatown’s movie houses to enjoy his comic windmill kick-box, karate-chop, tumble-out-of-a-third-story-window thing.

The incongruity of screening this violent slapstick at Lincoln Center was not lost on The New York Times critic Vincent Canby, who advised those who missed the festival shows that they could “catch up with more or less the same kind of thing on virtually any day of the week on 42d Street, where comic kung fu movies are treated not as cinematic epiphanies but as unpretentious comedies for people whose minds, like their feet, wander when not nailed to the floor.”

Indeed, “Police Story” — which Chan directed as well as starred in as a diligent but absent-minded cop — would be little more than a bang-bang procedural were it not for a number of impossibly kinetic set pieces. The scene in which Chan, who did all of his own stunts, employs the handle of an umbrella to hang on to a moving bus is easier to describe than the gyrations he uses to confound six bad guys armed with clubs or ride a large shopping mall chandelier down to the ground. The sound of broken glass is Chan’s theme song. His directorial stunts are epitomized by a choreographed sequence that destroys an entire hillside shantytown.

“Police Story” is largely the sum of its action scenes although it’s also enjoyable to watch the villains wield cellphones the size of cinder blocks, or see the very young Maggie Cheung as Chan’s long-suffering girlfriend. (Brigitte Lin, another leading Hong Kong star, is also in the movie as the witness whom Chan’s police officer must protect.)

“Police Story II,” showing as a separate admission, appears never to have been reviewed in The Times. Production values are higher and the havoc quotient is lower, despite several elaborate explosions. The tiresome toilet humor is partly compensated for by some impressively orchestrated gags — involving chain reactions worthy of Rube Goldberg — and a fireworks display that brings down the abandoned factory where the final battle is staged.

The best part of a Chan production can be the humorous montage of outtakes that accompany the closing credits. As if to offset the diminished violence in “Police Story II,” the coda shows real injuries and actual blood.

— Event info: Police Story and Police Story II, Alamo Drafthouse, Downtown Brooklyn, 718-513-2547, drafthouse.com. Also streaming on platforms including YouTube, Vudu and GooglePlay.

This article originally appeared in <a id="20ed5f91-06a2-4c19-84c4-65ff3c909c8d" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/29/movies/jackie-chan-police-story-alamo-drafthouse.html">The New York Times</a>.

'Police Story,' when Jackie Chan swung into action

A child who, starting at age 7, attended an academy for Chinese opera and martial arts in his native Hong Kong, Chan was an international star well before he came to the attention of most American moviegoers.

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