Back in 2024, I was contacted by two Romanian film professors, Andrei Rus and Doru Nitescu of the Universitatea Nationala de Arta Teatrala si Cinematografica “I.L.Caragiale.” They had translated David’s and my textbook, Film History: an Introduction, the first of our books to appear in Romanian. As part of the activities around its release, they kindly offered me a Doctor Honoris Causa from their university. Of course I accepted, and my sister Karen and I headed for Bucharest. It was a moving ceremony (me giving my acceptance speech below) and a lovely visit to Bucharest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That visit helped lead to the Criterion Channel’s new March program of Romanian New Wave cinema. The lineup of films which became available on March 1 is:

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005), 12:08 East of Bucharest (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2006), 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Christian Mungui, 2007), Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2009), Aurora (Cristi Puiu, 2010), Tuesday, After Christmas (Radu Muntean, 2010), and Sieranevada (Cristi Puiu, 2016)

Naturally I prepared for the trip by watching as many Romanian films as I could find, in part because it was hinted that I could meet some of the most prominent of the New Wave directors during my visit, which proved to be the case. We had all too short a conversation with Christian Mungiu, who runs a film festival and had to dash off to introduce someone after the starter course. Andrei and I dined with Radu Jude. Doru, Karen (on the right below), and I had a very pleasant and lengthy dinner with Cristi Puiu and Anca Puiu, his wife and producer. She played a considerable role in helping organize the Criterion series.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After I returned to the USA, I contacted my friends at Criterion and asked whether Puiu’s Sieranevada, which I blogged about from the 2016 Vancouver International Film Festival, might be a candidate for release on DVD/Blu-ray. It was unavailable in the US in any format. In my entry I wrote, “Watching the lengthy opening shot, which largely involves the main character’s car being double parked and blocking a DHL truck, I did quickly realize that I was seeing a terrific film.” Finally seeing it again, I could appreciate the elaborate staging as the characters move in and out among the crowded group of vehicles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It turned out that Criterion’s schedule of disc releases was already planned for years ahead. The option of a program of Romanian New Wave cinema, however, was a possibility. Soon it became a reality, and the Head of Programming for the Criterion Channel, Aliza Ma, made it happen. It didn’t quite make into the 2025 schedule, which would have coincided with other celebrations for the twentieth anniversary of The Death of Mister Lazarescu‘s release. It won numerous prizes, most notably the Un Certain Regard Award at Cannes. It is considered to have launched the Romanian New Wave.

Shortly thereafter Christian Mungui’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (2007) won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. It dealt with the harsh punishments for those who had or performed abortions under the Communist Regime, as the woman trying to help her friend end her pregnancy encounters suspicious hotel staff and a very reluctant abortionist (see bottom). It cemented worldwide awareness of important films coming from Romania. These directors and others have continued to make films that show up at international festivals and win or are nominated for awards. I particularly like Police, Adjective (2009), which also won the Un Certain Regard Award, as well as the FIPRESCI prize.

Some of the films are grim, others have a surprising amount of humor mixed in. The most overt comedy in this group is Porumboiu’s 12:03 East of Bucharest. It takes place on the sixteenth anniversary of the rebellion that toppled the Communist reign and Nicolae Ceausescu. Three men in a provincial city form a panel in a rather makeshift television studio to discuss what acts of rebellious heroism they or anyone else in their city accomplished on that fateful day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Channel’s series is an excellent opportunity for people unfamiliar with the movement to get an introduction to some of its most important films. Those who saw some or all of them when they came out can watch those unavailable on home video to see them again.

For anyone who enjoys this series, here are some suggestions for a further exploration of the Romanian New Wave.

You may wonder why there is only one Christian Mungui film in this series, given that he’s one of the most widely known of these filmmakers. It’s probably because Criterion already offers access to two excellent films by him. Beyond the Hills (2013) which David blogged about from the Vancouver Film Festival, will remain available on the Channel and on a Criterion Collection disc DVD or Blu-ray. Mungui’s Graduation (2016), which David blogged about, also from Vancouver, is available on Criterion discs.

I’d like particularly to recommend Mungui’s R.M.N. (2022), an excellent film about immigrants working in a small town and encountering resistance from the locals. It doesn’t seem to have had a release in the USA, but a British Blu-ray by Picture House is available through Amazon America and UK.

Those who enjoy the two films by Corneliu Porumboiu might want to check out his 2019 film The Whistlers (La Gomera, 2019), which David blogged about from the Torino Film Festival. It’s available from a number of streaming services for a fee and free for subscribers to Apple TV+.

I unfortunately did not see all of Radu Muntean’s Tuesday, After Christmas. I could only find it via a used DVD on eBay. It froze halfway through, and nothing could coax it to proceed. So I shall finally find out what happened in the end by watching it on the Channel. I have seen his suspenseful later film Întregalde (2021), available on a Grasshopper DVD.

Recently Radu Jude has become a highly popular and prolific Romanian director. One might ask why he is not represented in this series. Possibly there were rights problem, but one could argue that his distinctive style places him outside or at least on the fringes of the New Wave. I have only seen three of his films, the relatively early and more conventional The Happiest Girl in the World (2009) and somewhat more eccentric Everybody in Our Family (2012), as well as the definitely eccentric Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023) at the Wisconsin Film Festival.

Speaking of which, for those in Madison and surrounding towns who plan to attend this year’s Wisconsin Film Festival, Jude’s KONTINENTAL ’25 will be on the program. Variety‘s review says it retains his “dark absurdist edge.” (The schedule will be available online on March 5.) It’s playing at many other festivals as well.

The Channel’s Romanian program will remain online for a year.

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Thanks to Cristi and Anca Puiu for help with this entry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Youth of Maxim (Grigoriy Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg)

Kristin here:

As usual, this end-of-the-year entry has come out early in the next year. I was out of the country for six weeks recently, returning on December 27. It takes awhile to choose ten films, track down copies, watch them, and format the illustrations. For my 1934 list, I complained because I had trouble finding a tenth film. Looking back now, it was a very good line-up. 1935 turned out to be far more difficult. Only a few really obvious films sprang to mind, and the remaining seven are good but not great films. Fritz Lang didn’t make a film that year. Mizoguchi made two films that year, Oyuki the Virgin and The Downfall of Osen. David discusses them in the Mizoguchi chapter of Figures Traced in Light, but he must have watched them in an archive; I couldn’t find anything but unwatchable prints on YouTube.

One problem this year was a lack of decent DVDs and Blu-rays to watch and the take frames from. I try to avoid YouTube, but two films were only available there. Two were only on the Criterion Channel, with no discs available.

At least I can look forward more confidently to 1936. Renoir’s The Crime of M. Lange, Lang’s Fury, Ozu’s The Only Son, and so on. Most of the films below are pleasant entertainment, but hardly masterpieces. I begin with the three best of the bunch, and the rest are in no particular order.

Previous lists can be found here: 1917, 1918, 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922, 1923, 1924, 1925, 1926, 1927, 1928, 1929, 1930, 1931, 1932, 1933, and 1934.

Toni (Jean Renoir)

Toni is an unusual film for Renoir. His earlier films of the 1930s (his La Chienne was on my 1931 list and Boudu Saved from Drowning made the 1931 one) were studio productions with professional actors. In 1956 he wrote of his approach to Toni:

At the time of Toni, I was against makeup. My ambition was to bring the nonnatural elements of the film, the elements no longer dependent on the coincidence of chance encounters, to a style as close as possible to that of daily encounters.

Same thing for locations in Toni, there are no studios. The landscapes and the houses are as we found them. The human beings, whether they are played by actors or inhabitants of Mariques, try to be like the passersby they are supposed to represent: in fact, aside from a few exceptions, the professional actors themselves belong to the social classes, nations, and races of their roles. 

The opening of the film, set by a rail bridge by the town of Mariques, near Marseilles, shows immigrants coming from various nearby countries, mostly Italy and Spain, arriving looking for work in the nearby quarry and other industries. Initially the film seems almost like a documentary. One of the workers is Toni, an Italian who rents a room in a boarding house run by a French woman, Marie. The plot develops as he becomes Marie’s lover. He is attracted, however, by a woman at a nearby farm, Josepha. She marries a thuggish supervisor at the quarry, and Toni is resigned to marrying Marie. Despite the real locations and the potential for political treatment of the workers’ lives, the rest of the story is a melodrama dealing with the problems Toni encounters as he is torn between the two women.

Despite the rather bland settings (the film was shot in the autumn), Renoir manages some striking shots. He occasionally uses depth shots, as with a dramatic high angle as Tony talks with his friend on a cliff at the quarry (above). Another depth shot involves an interior shot through a window, with Marie in bed, barely visible in a gap which David would call “aperture framing.” (See also the bottom, with a depth shot after Marie’s suicide attempt.)

Toni is available on DVD or Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection and streams on the Criterion Channel.

 

An Inn in Tokyo (Yasujiro Ozu)

Not surprisingly, Ozu has become a regular member of the yearly lists. (That Night’s Wife, 1930; Tokyo Chorus, 1931; I Was Born, But …, 1932; both Dragnet Girl and Passing Fancy, 1933; and Story of Floating Weeds, 1934.) He will no doubt return at intervals at least, as long as this series of entries continues.

Sound came late to Japan, and An Inn in Tokyo is his last surviving silent film. It’s main character is Kihachi, the same name as that of the father in Passing Fancy and played by the same actor, Takeshi Sakamoto. He doesn’t seem to be the same character, however, since in the earlier film he had one son, and here he has two. They doggedly follow him as the three walk from town to town. Kihachi is looking for a job in the Depression, and although he says he’s an expert lathe operator, he is rejected time after time. He and the boys resort to catching dogs and turning them in at police stations, because an anti-rabies campaign is going on, with rewards offered for dogs brought in. The boys continue to encourage their father, but he becomes increasingly discouraged. Ozu conveys the days that pass almost identically by showing a variety of similar industrial landscapes.

Ozu’s style is fully developed here. The opening with a large empty drum and cuts to the same drum with the family trudging along the road, seen in long shot and from a low camera height. Shot/reverse shot is done by systematically crossing the axis of action, with the framing creating graphic matches created by the characters’ positions. Low camera height and other familiar Ozu techniques are consistently used.

 

An Inn in Tokyo streams on the Criterion Channel but for some reason has not been released on disc.

 

The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock)

Around 1970, when I was approaching the end of my undergraduate career, majoring in tech theater, at the University of Iowa. I took a film history course as the only elective I could find that could fit into my schedule. (Film was in the same department as theater and rhetoric.) Other courses followed and lured me into grad school studying cinema.

I had a lot of catching up to do, watching the classics of the canon as it was at the time. No easy task in those days before home video in the form of VHS tapes, which were only beginning to appear on the scene.

I knew I wanted to see Hitchcock’s work, but the number of his films unavailable for viewing in any format, including 16mm (the norm for classroom use) is startling in hindsight. None of the silent films, few of the 1930s ones, and several of the 1950s films, including Rear Window, Vertigo, and the second Man Who Knew too Much,  which were blocked from exhibition by rights problems. I read Hitchcock/Truffaut, which had come out a few years earlier; thus I got a sense of Hitch’s career.

Some readers will remember the impact Charles Champlain’s weekly series Film Odyssey when it was shown on public television in 1972. Twenty-six films, which Champlain discussed afterward with directors and scholars. Fritz Lang appeared to talk about M, Annette Michaelson about Ivan the Terrible Part I and Potemkin, Renoir on Jules and Jim, Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game, and so on. Basically the list was made up with Janus films, the ones we still see on The Criterion Channel and on the Criterion Collection’s discs. I was one of many whose lives were changed by that series, little knowing that in several years I would write my dissertation on Ivan the Terrible and publish it with Princeton University Press (1981). I still treasure the program booklet, provided free on request from Xerox, which sponsored the series.

Among the films was The 39 Steps. The booklet includes excerpts from some of the interviews, but not nearly all. These are the only way one can get information about who the interviewees were. One fan has listed the films and known interviewees on the Criterion Forum.) Eight films, including The 39 Steps don’t have this information. My vague recollection is that it was considered the best of the series of six films Hitchcock made in the mid- to late 1930s. (I don’t include Jamaica Inn, which I find unwatchable.) That series was The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934, see last year’s ten-best entry); The 39 Steps; Secret Agent (1936), probably the dullest of them; Sabotage (1936); Young and Innocent (1937); and The Lady Vanishes (1938).

With most of Hitchcock’s films now available in some form, we can perhaps see that at least The Man Who Knew Too Much, Sabotage, and The Lady Vanishes are equal to The 39 Steps. (I haven’t watched Young and Innocent recently.)

The film has Hitchcock’s usual blend of suspense and humor that characterize many of his films and especially the ones from this period. The Macguffin is a secret that a group of spies are about to smuggle out of the country. Richard Hannay is forced to try and prevent this by a mysterious lady spy on the British side takes refuge in his flat and explains the smuggling plot. We never learn what the secret it, it being a Macguffin, after all. The lady spy is murdered and Hannay is assumed to be the killer and flees from London to Scotland. He continues his attempt to prevent the smuggling, but the real suspense of the film is built around his repeated narrow escapes from the police chasing him. The Scottish landscapes through which he flees are partly short on location, but quite a few shots were done with rather cheap studio sets; Hitchcock managed to give these a strong atmospheric with lighting, as in the frame at the top of this section.

One police encounter ends with Hannay handcuffed to a pretty blonde who has offered to provide evidence against him. This adds the conventional romantic subplot of a couple who hate each other initially and then cooperate to reveal the real murder and spies. It also provides a little mild risqué humor as the two have to pretend to be a honeymooning couple in order to take refuge in an inn (above).

The 39 Steps is available on Blu-ray and DVD from The Criterion Collection and streaming on the Channel.

 

Ruggles of Red Gap (Leo McCarey)

My impression is that Ruggles is not thought of as a significant film within academia, which is a pity, as it is a clever, funny film. It was based on Harry Leon Wilson’s 1915 best-selling novel. (P. G. Wodehouse claimed to have invented his character Jeeves because he felt that Wilson had failed to capture the dignity of English valets.) Ruggles was a considerable box-office success and was nominated for a Oscar as Best Picture. It’s score on Rotten Tomatoes is 100% (among critics, the general populace ranks it at 89%). It played at Il Cinema Ritrovato in a 2015 McCarey retrospective in Bologna.

The plot is based around an English nobleman who through gambling loses his valet, Ruggles, to a nouveau riche couple vacationing in Paris. The wife wants Ruggles to dispose of his new master’s loud clothing (above) and dress him in a more dignified fashion. Doing his duty, Ruggles allows the couple to take him to Red Gap, their small town in Washington. He adheres to his valet’s job, doggedly deferring to his employers by refusing when they tell him to proceed them through doors. Once in Red Gap he gradually grasps the American ideal of all people being equal, becomes a popular citizen of the town, and opens a restaurant.

Ruggles is widely viewed as a screwball comedy, which I think is a fair assessment. It follows the common plot premise of rich people being eccentric, often in regard to working-class people. (A model of such a plot is My Man Godfrey, released in 1936.) It’s very funny, due largely to its excellent cast. Charles Laughton was anxious to show that he had a broader range than the villains and scoundrels whom he had played in his most prominent films.

Ruggles is widely available on a variety of streaming services. The DVD from which I took these illustrations is still available. A British Blu-ray from Eureka! is out of print and seems to be difficult to find and expensive when one does. The frames above demonstrate that in this case a DVD is quite acceptable.

 

A Night at the Opera (Sam Wood and Edmund Goulding)

I thought that Duck Soup (1933) would be the Marx Brothers sole appearance on these lists. The general consensus is that the Marx Brothers’ uncontrolled madness was toned down by Irving Thalberg when they moved to MGM. In a lean year like 1935, however, A Night at the Opera, while not a masterpiece, isn’t out of place in the list.

True, one must sit through two bland musical numbers. Kitty Carlisle at least can act and sing opera, but Allen Jones and his nasal crooning are pretty intolerable and implausible when he impresses a big opera impresario. Moreover, there are the inevitable piano (Chico) and harp (Harpo) solos, this time delivered to cute little children.

Still, setting all this aside, the film has advantages. Zeppo departed the team between Duck Soup and A Night at the Opera. There are two chaotic sequences that live up to the old Marx style: the famous stateroom scene, reaching its most crowded in the frame above. The lengthy interruption and destruction of the opera performance in the climactic scene is hilarious. Groucho is close to his best here, dominating the non-musical-number scenes with constant ad-libs and mugging.

I watched the Warner Bros. Archive Collection’s Blu-ray. (Amazon is even still selling a VHS tape.) The same version streams on Amazon Prime and other services for a small fee.

 

Carnival in Flanders (Jacques Feyder)

How many people these days knows much of Jacques Feyder’s films? Silent film lovers may be familiar with his 1922 show feature Crainquebille, and Garbo fans recognize him as the director of her elegant 1929 film The Kiss. La Kermesse héroïque remains his main classic of the sound era.

Set in 17th Century Flanders during the Spanish occupation, the film deals with the reaction of a town in the path of an approaching Spanish military group. Fearful of a attack of rapine and pillage, the men of the city timidly come up with a feeble plan to pretend that the mayor has recently died. Scornful of the plan, the women, including the mayor’s wife, decide to welcome the Spaniards with entertainment, food, and in some cases sexual favors. The Spaniards are delighted, enjoy an night of carousing, and move on in the morning.

Feyder saw the film as a farce, and much of it is quite amusing. Still, the idea of the women saving their town by consorting with the enemy adds a sour undertone to the film. Nevertheless, if one ignores this and take it as Feyder intended, Carnival is an impressive film. The action takes place within an elaborate city set by the great designer Lazare Meerson (above and below). The comic scenes are played by an excellent cast, particularly the major stars Françoise Rosay as the mayor’s wife and Louis Jouvet as a cynical Spanish priest.

I have been unable to track down a disc release still in print, but the film streams on The Criterion Channel.

 

Wife, Be like a Rose! (Mikio Naruse)

Naruse makes his second appearance on the list, after Street without End in 1934. My impression is that a lot of Japanese cinema aficionados view it as his best film of the 1930s.

The plot is handled in an interesting way, with the action falling into two halves. In the first part we meet Kimiko, a modern young woman who claims her salary is bigger than her boyfriend Seiji’s (below). The two bicker and tease each other but are clearly assuming they will eventually marry. Kimiko’s mother, Etsuko, spends her time writing poetry and lamenting the absence of her husband Shunsaku, who has run off with another woman long ago. Kimiko remarks that her mother never paid much attention to her husband. When she sees her father on the street one day, she expects him to visit her and her mother, but he never shows up. Angry, Kimiko takes a train up to a mountain village where her father lives with the other woman.

So far we have seen the situation entirely from Kimiko’s point of view and occasional remarks from Seiji. Once Kimiko reaches the village, she goes into the countryside to see her father. He spends his time panning for gold, hoping to make a better life for his other family, who life a somewhat spartan life. Once Kimiko meets Oyuki, the woman Shunsaku lives with, she realizes that Oyuki is kind and generous and feels guilty about having broken up Shunsaku’s marriage. Although poor, she has been sending money anonymously to Etsuko, money Kimiko had assumed came from her father. The entire situation that had been set up in the first half is turned upside down, and Kimiko finally is convinced that her mother has given him no reason to return and it is better that her father stay as he is.

As usual, the film has echoes of Ozu’s style. The film starts with a shot through a window in an office building (above), a common way Ozu starts his films dealing with characters who work in bland offices. Naruse also uses shot/reverse shots that cross the 180-degree line and creating graphic matches between the two characters, particularly their faces.

 

He also uses references to American movies, as Ozu does. Here a cover of a fan magazine clearly entitled “Hollywood” (left). Which is not to say that Naruse follows Ozu slavishly. His tracking shots are quite different. In the scene where Kimiko is moved by Oyuki’s description of her happy if spartan home life and her revelation of her sending the money, Naruse uses a tight close-up of the two women, something Ozu would never do.

 

In a short running time (74 minutes), Naruse leads us to radically change our views in the way that Kimiko does and to sympathize with “the other woman,” who had been vilified in the first half.

Being a sound film, Wife Be like a Rose! is not in Criterion’s Eclipse box set of Naruse’s late silent films, which includes Street without End. The only place I could find it is on YouTube in a so-so print with rather obtrusive large subtitles in black boxes. It’s not available on disc as far as I can tell.

I should add that for mediocre prints like this one, I usually photoshop them, typically boosting the contrast a little and getting rid of any bugs that are present. Wife has a NipponKino logo at the bottom right and little white curved corners, which I also eliminate. The idea is to give a better sense of the filmmaker’s style.

 

Steamboat Round the Bend (John Ford)

In her excellent new book, John Ford at Work: Production Histories 1927-1939, Lea Jacobs has this to say about the importance of Ford’s actors were one of two vital influences on him: actors and cinematographers:

Obviously Ford’s career may be charted through the stars he worked with and sometimes helped to create. Henry Fonda and John Wayne are the most famous examples, but Victor McLaglen and Will Rogers are much more important for the first half of the 1930s, and their influence on Ford’s œuvre and career remains to be fully explored. (p. 5) 

She contributes to that exploration with a chapter on Ford’s three Will Rogers films, Doctor Bull, Judge Priest, and Steamboat Round the Bend. The latter is not a masterpiece on the level of most films that make it to my lists, but Lea assures me it’s the best of the three. I hadn’t watched any of them, so I started backwards and watched Steamboat–not just for this list but in preparation of reading that chapter. (I plan to discus the book in a future blog entry.)

Rogers plays Doctor John Pearly, a snake oil salesman who passes his bottles of Pocahontas as medicine, though it is mainly alcohol (above). This is played for comedy, so that the extremely popular Rogers, with his homespun persona, does not come across as a villain. Apart from making money in this fashion, he decides to overhaul his rundown steamboat and enhance his income with it. When the owner of a fancier boat belittles Pearly’s, the two agree to a bet on a steamboat race, with the winner taking ownership of the other’s boat. A major subplot involves Pearly’s newphew Duke, who shows up with Fleety Belle, whom Pearly initially rejects with scorn as a “swamp girl.” A rapid transformation follows, as a bath and a wardrobe of Pearly’s late wife’s clothes turn Fleety into a spunky, smart  young lady whom Pearly admires and even teaches to steer his boat. Duke has been accused of a murder of a man who was trying to force himself on Fleety, and much of the rest of the film involves a search for a witness to the crime who can clear Duke.

The film gives a good demonstration of why Rogers was so very popular. Much of Steamboat has the look of a fairly low-budge film, but Ford pulls out all the stops at the end, with a whole fleet of steamboats participating in the race (more than are visible in the frame below). Naturally Pearly is the one who ends up with two boats, when he runs out of wood and stokes his fire with the remaining stock of Pocahontas–suggesting that he will now give up his old ways and make an honest living.

Steamboat was Rogers’ last film. It was released a month before his death in a plan crash.

Steamboat is available on DVD as part of a set, John Ford at Fox Collection, with all three Rogers films and three other comedies. I haven’t checked the quality of the prints, but it’s a 20th Century-Fox release. Steamboat was earlier also released by itself by Fox. That’s out of print, but there are plenty of copies on eBay. That’s the one I used for the frames above. As far as I can tell, the streaming rights have expired for all the services that used to carry it.

 

The Youth of Maxim (Grigoriy Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg)

1935 was not a good year for most of the major filmmakers in the USSR. Eisenstein was struggling with the ill-fated Bezhin Meadow. Pudovkin was accused of formalism for Deserter (1933), and combined with health problems, his next film was not released until 1938. I haven’t been able to find a watchable version of Dovzhenko’s Aerograd, but friend, colleague, and Dovzhenko expert Vance Kepley assures me that it does not belong on a ten-best list.

Kozintsev and Trauberg have been on the list previously (The Overcoat, 1926; New Babylon, 1929; and Alone, 1931).

The Youth of Maxim is the first of three films, The Youth of Maxim, The Return of Maxim (1937), and New Horizons (1939). These were loosely based on the life of writer Maxim Gorky, presumably derived from his fictional set of memoirs, My Childhood, In the World, and My Universities (1913-1923). The films do not reflect Gorky’s actual life, however. The future author had a miserable early life, orphaned at a young age, wandering across Russia from job to job, and even attempted suicide. (“Gorky,” an assumed name, means “bitter.”)

By contrast, in the first film, Gorky is a carefree young man with a factory job and a girlfriend. We first see him singing a cheerful song with his two friends. The year is 1910, but Gorky has no knowledge of workers’ rights or a coming revolution. The arc of the plot is conventionally Stalinistic. The death of one of the friends in a factory accident begins to alert Gorky to the dangers workers are exposed to and the indifference of the owners to such a minor problems. A second death (above) lingers over the workers grief and anger, and Gorky begins to realize the resistance is necessary. Ultimately at the funeral procession for the dead man, the workers treat the occasion as a protest march, watched by the owners and a military presence (see top). When a riot breaks out, Gorky finally commits to the workers’ cause and joins in the fighting, ending up in prison.

This film and the two that succeeded it were both considered acceptable to the regime, and in 1941 the two directors were awarded the Stalin Prize.

The only place I could watch the film was on the RVISION channel on YouTube, with subtitles. It’s a so-so print, reasonably good in some scenes and poor in the darker ones, including the lively opening that seems to have echoes of New Babylon.

 

Two experimental animated shorts in color:

Composition in Blue (Oskar Fischinger) 

Fischinger began his career making black-and-white abstract animated film synchronized to musical pieces. A group of these Studies were included in a section on experimental cinema in my 1930 list. During the 1930s Fischinger participated in the development of a color system called Gasparcolor, which he first used in one of his ads for Muratti cigarettes, Muratti geift ein (1934) and some animation tests. His first exhibited experimental film using the system was one of his major animated works, Komposition in Blau, at four minutes. It is done in stop-motion rather than with drawings. Most of the little shapes that move about via stop-motion are objects.

The film was shown at a theater in Los Angeles, leading Paramount to hire Fischinger. His move to the US was permanent. His work there culminated in his most ambitious project, Motion Painting No. 1 (1948).

Composition in Blue is available from the Center for Visual Music on one of the two discs of his work: Oskar Fischinger: Visual Music.

 

 A Colour Box (Len Lye)

Coincidentally,  in 1926 New Zealand avant-garde artist Len Lye had moved to London and in the 19302 started work for John Grierson’s Film Unit within the General Post Office. His first two four-minute color shorts, both made in 1935, were Kaleidoscope and A Colour Box. Rather than using stop-motion to manipulate colorful objects, he painted shapes directly onto clear 35mm film. The result was a pair of abstract animated films that ended with a brief passage of words and numbers aimed at promoting the G.P.O.

Both shorts were made using a different early system called Dufaycolor. It seems to have had a narrower range of colors than Gasparcolor, which Lye switched to for his next films, including the marvelous Rainbow Dance (1936)–which might well make it to next year’s list.

A DVD collection of Lye’s shorts called rhythms has been sold in the past by the Center for Visual Music, but the shop lists it as sold out, which seems to be permanent. Canyon Cinema has the same DVD for sale.

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Thanks to Vance Kepley, Lea Jacobs, and Ben Brewster for help with this entry.

The quotation from Renoir is from the notes included in the Criterion disc of Toni, which also contains a useful essay by Ginette Vincendeau

Toni

Story of Floating Weeds (Yasujiro Ozu)

Kristin here:

This surprisingly popular series started with what we assumed to be a one-off entry. In 2007 David and I saluted the birth of the Classical Hollywood Cinema in 1917 as a full-fledged new set of norms that would last until the present day and influence filmmakers around the world. Introducing the list of ten films from ninety years earlier (for the list, click on the 1917 link below), David wrote:

This is the season when everybody makes a list of best pictures. We have stopped playing that game. For one thing, we haven’t seen all the films that deserve to be included. For another, the excellence of a film often dawns gradually, after you’ve had years to reflect on it. And critical tastes are as shifting as the sirocco. Never forget that in 1965 the Cannes palme d’or was won by The Knack . . . and How to Get It.

Still, enough time has elapsed to make us feel confident of this, our list of the best (surviving) films of 1917, both US and “foreign-language.”

 That notion of time elapsing became the somewhat risible rationale for our series: surely ninety years is enough that one can be confident in one’s choices of old films worth watching and rewatching.

David ended that first entry, “Next year, maybe we’ll draw up our list for 1918.” This is our eighteenth such list. I took the initiative to follow up and have written all the entries–consulting with David each time, of course. This is my first time without his advice, though I know there are films on this new list with which he would have heartily agreed, others that he would agree are important enough to include, and one or two that he would be dubious about.

Previous lists can be found here: 1917, 1918, 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922, 1923, 1924, 1925, 1926, 1927, 1928, 1929, 1930, 1931, 1932, and 1933.

As in the past, I begin the process of choosing the ten films to included thinking that this year will be the one where there are ten obvious choices. During the transition to sound, the pickings have sometimes been slim, and in recent years I have filled in with one or two films that don’t quite stand up to the others in the final list. I had high hopes for 1934, but again I have had trouble deciding on a film to fill the final slot. As the 1930s progress, I am confident that it will be considerably easier to think of titles to make the list. Renoir will enter the height of his career, Mizoguchi’s films start surviving, Ozu maintains his high level until the war intervenes, and so on.

L’Atalante (Jean Vigo)

L’Atalante is surely one of the first films one would think of when asked to name great classics from 1934. Vigo made a couple of shorts, but his high reputation is based on only two films, Zéro de conduite and this one. Zéro was on my 1933 list. It’s a strange combination of surrealism, slapstick, magical realism, and bitter satire.

L’Atalante is none of these, really, but instead a poetic romance played out on a canal barge, the name of which gives the film its title. It begins just after the wedding of a young village woman, Juliette, and Jean, the captain of the barge.  As they walk proudly toward the canal, the villagers follow them, muttering their disapproval at Juliette’s decision to marry an outsider with a strange profession. The pair are clearly much in love, but things begin to go wrong as Juliette gets bored with the monotonous routine aboard the barge. Once they arrive in Paris, there are quarrels, especially when Juliette responds naively to a handsome peddler who flirts outrageously with her. Juliette leaves to see the city, but in a fit of unjustified jealousy, Jean casts off, leaving her behind. The pair grow increasingly sad at their parting.

This slim plot is delightfully padded by Michel Simon as the eccentric Père Jules, Jean’s only adult crew member on L’Atalante. He drifts among moods, being funny, poignant and slightly menacing by turns. The antiques and gewgaws that he has collected in his long career of sailing around the world provide the few somewhat surrealistic touches that are more prominent in Zéro de conduite. These range from a sinister mechanical puppet of a music conductor to the rostrum of a large sawfish fastened to the side of a bed.

 

As often has been the case with the films on these lists, in my graduate-student days I saw L’Atalante in a low-contrast 16mm print. The restored version available on The Criterion Channel and in the Criterion Collection’s Blu-ray of Vigo’s complete oeuvre is a huge improvement.

Les Misérables (Raymond Bernard)

By contrast to Vigo, Raymond Bernard is not a name that comes readily to most people’s minds when one thinks of French cinema in the 1930s. He had gained a reputation for making epic historical films in the silent era, most notably The Miracle of the Wolves (1924), an impressive but already old-fashioned, rather stodgy tale of Fifteenth Century France. (Available online in a restored version subtitled in English.) In the early sound era, however, the success of those earlier films allowed him to make two masterpieces.

Wooden Crosses featured on my 1932 list. It was highly successful in France, giving Bernard the chance to immediately launch into an adaptation of Victor Hugo’s popular novel. He proposed making it in three feature films in order to retain as much of the story as possible: “Une tempête sous le crane,” “Les Thénardier,” and “Liberté, liberté chérie.” The tale intertwines two plotlines.  Hardened criminal Jean Valjean escapes and reforms through the love for Cossette, an abused orphan he rescues from harsh innkeepers (the Thénardiers). He becomes respectable and rich under a false identity, though he is in constant danger from Inspector Javert, who implacably seeks for years to track him down. The second plotline deals with young people involved in the French Revolution, one of whom falls in love with the grown-up Cossette.

Harry Baur and Charles Vanel, playing Valjean and Javert respectively, are ideally cast. As in Wooden Crosses, the cinematography by Jules Kruger (who also shot Wooden Crosses and was one of several cinematographers on Napoléon vu par Abel Gance) is superb. Apart from the remarkably precise lighting (see above), it contains many shots using a canted framing, a technique that later drew considerable attention in The Third Man. Here Madame Thénardier scolds Cosette and a group of revolutionaries hold a meeting.

 

The three features made Les Misérables into a serial, much like Alberto Capellani’s 1912 version. Again, it was a considerable success. The film industry in France was in trouble as the Depression dragged on, however, and expensive epics like those of Bernard were no longer feasible. He was assigned to lower budget films, including romantic comedies, while other directors introduced the Poetic Realism that characterized the rest of the decade.

Les Misérables‘ popularity led to its being re-released repeatedly with various re-edited, shorter versions playing for decade, starting in 1935. In May Pathé released a two-and-a-half-hour version, eliminating about half the original film’s length. This and other versions are summarized in Criterion’s notes to the Eclipse set. Late in his life Bernard was able to help assemble footage from several prints, leading to a restoration that still lacks a few scenes.

Les Misérables is available on The Criterion Channel and from The Criterion Collection in the same Eclipse box set that contains Wooden Crosses. Arthur Honegger’s very effective score for the film has been released on CD and is still in print.

Story of Floating Weeds (Yasujiro Ozu)

The last four years’ best lists have included films by Ozu: That Night’s Wife (1930), Tokyo Chorus (1931), I Was Born, But … (1932), and a double-header, Passing Fancy and Dragnet Girl (1933). For 1934, he’s back with Story of Floating Weeds. (His other film of that year, A Mother Should Be Loved, unfortunately is missing the first and last of its nine reels.)

The story revolves around a down-at-heels traveling theatrical troupe which stops to performs in a rural village. They remain there for longer than the dwindling audiences would warrant, and we learn that the group’s leader, Kihachi, is secretly visiting an old flame of his and their son, Shinkichi. She has raised the boy to believe that his father died long ago. He thinks that Kihachi is his genial uncle. The female lead in the company, Otaka, who is also Kihachi’s mistress, learns of this. Out of jealousy she enlists a younger actress, Otoki, to seduce the boy, thus threatening his promising future.

As David points out in his Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, this film departs from Ozu’s earlier work:

The film is played in a remote rural village, a realistic locale for the traveling troupe but an unusual setting for Ozu at this point in his career. The cinéaste of urban Tokyo, of nansensu [nonsense] and moga [modern girl], must now impose his narrational system on a different Japanese iconography: the village street, the landscape, the forlorn café, the decaying theatre. He must film a traditional, if ineptly staged, performance. He must no longer cut away to Lincolns or spinning ventilators or Nipper the RCA dog. Ozu now experiments with treating centuries-old material in his own, recently matured manner. (p. 257)

One example of village iconography that he cites is the “death tree,” a folk tradition where small memorial banners are left for the dead. Otoki sits by the tree as she waits to seduce Shinkichi, and “her casual intrusion into a sacred space underlines the extent to which the actress is an outside to the village” (p. 258). By contrast, the scene in which Kihachi goes fishing with his son uses the countryside to indicate a mood of natural serenity.

  

Story of Floating Weeds is not bereft of the humor present in so many early Ozu films, but he largely confines it to the early scenes, before we learn of Kihachi’s secret life. The inept theatrical performance includes people in obvious animal costumes, as when the young boy of the troupe plays a dog, standing up, taking off its head, and scratching his crotch (top) while Kihachi tries to remain in character. Later, when it starts to rain, water comes through the numerous holes in the roof, and the actors pass through the audience, who are seated on the floor, passing out bowls to catch the drips. Once this early portion of the film is over, the tone turns toward melodrama, and there are only rare moments of humor.

Story of Floating Weeds, along with many of Ozu’s films, is streaming on The Criterion Channel and is available as a DVD or Blu-ray in Criterion’s box set pairing it with Ozu’s 1959 remake, Floating Weeds.

Twentieth Century (Howard Hawks)

Hawks was one of those rare Hollywood directors who could work in virtually any major genre and make outstanding films. He made gangster films, musicals, westerns, murder mysteries, romances, comedies, and military films. He also dabbled in less fruitful genres: science-fiction (assuming he really directed The Thing from Another World) and historical epics (Land of the Pharaohs).

The first film that comes to mind when contemplating Hawks’s comedies is no doubt His Girl Friday. One of David’s and my favorite Hollywood films, it featured in at least two recent film series compiled as tributes to him (the UW Cinematheque last summer and The Music Box in Chicago in September). Next would probably be Bringing Up Baby. Maybe I’m wrong, but I suspect Twentieth Century would come in a somewhat distant third. Yet it is, to put it mildly, hilarious, with a great script and two outstanding central performances backed up by some of the great character actors of the period.

Although John Barrymore started out on the stage with light comedies, he soon was starring in Shakespeare, including his Hamlet, which led to him being dubbed “The greatest living American tragedian.” Once he moved into films in the 1920s, he usually was cast as the lead in prestigious literary adaptations and romances: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Sherlock Holmes, Beau Brummel, Beloved Rogue, Don Juan, and perhaps Lubitsch’s least interesting silent film, Eternal Love. The pattern continued into the early sound period, most notably in Grand Hotel.

Hawks gave him the chance to cut loose his comedic talents, and the resulting performance was flamboyant. To say Barrymore overacted is a mistake, I think, since theatrical impresario Oscar Jaffe is a ludicrously flamboyant character.

The film starts with Jaffe transforming a lingerie model into a theatrical star, Lily Garland (Carol Lombard, who became a major star with this film). They begin a tempestuous affair. Years later, realizing that Jaffe is jealously watching her every move, she flees to Hollywood and becomes a movie star. Without her, Jaffe’s plays fail, and he heads for Los Angeles to beg her to return. Coincidentally they end up on the same train without initially being aware of it, and their battles resume.

The departure of Lily for Hollywood removes Lombard from the action for a lengthy period, giving Barrymore a chance to demonstrate that he can do comedy with the best of them. Upon learning that Lily has left him, Jaffe staggers through the theater, ranting as his mercurial moods swing from despair (“Let life run over me!”) to rage (“Anathema! Child of Satan!”):

 

Once the pair meet on the Twentieth Century, Lily refuses to return to Jaffe, and an shouting match begins. This ends with the two collapsing in utter exhaustion (top of this section). Lombard holds her own through this, but she is the more sensible of the two and generally acts with more restraint in other scenes.

There is a very funny running gag about an innocent-looking elderly man who surreptitiously posts stickers reading “Repent for the time is at hand,” and Walter Connolly and Roscoe Karns, playing Jaffe’s assistant, provide wisecracks as Jaffe repeatedly hires and fires them.

Twentieth Century can be streamed on Amazon Prime and Apple + for $3.99. A fairly decent DVD is available.

The Man Who Knew too Much (Alfred Hitchcock)

Like Twentieth Century in Hawks’s career in the 1930s, The Man Who Knew too Much is one of the underrated films of Hitchcock’s career in this period. David and I both liked it very much. Indeed, when he was starting out teaching Introduction to Film at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he showed it to the class. A brief essay about it featured in the first edition of Film Art: An Introduction in the “sample analyses” section. (This was and still is intended to demonstrate how to analyze form and style across an entire film rather than just learn about individual film techniques.) We replaced it after the second edition with a different analysis, but like all the other sample analyses that have been replaced during revisions, it is available on David’s main blog page. Click here and scroll to the bottom of the list to download a PDF of it.

The brief description there says:

Like His Girl Friday, The Man Who Knew Too Much presents us with a model of narrative construction. Its plot composition and its motivations for action contribute to making the film what a scriptwriter would call “tight.” Moreover, the film also offers an object lesson in the use of cinematic style for narrative purposes. Finally, the film illustrates how narration can manipulate the audience’s knowledge, sometimes making drastic shifts from moment to moment.

We both considered it superior to Hitchcock’s 1956 remake. After all, it is indeed “tight,” telling the entire story in a mere 75 minutes as opposed to two hours. And Hitchcock is increasingly adept at telling his story visually. Take the striking image above. The second scene at a fancy hotel restaurant involves the assassination of Louis Bernard, a friend of the Lawrence family, who are unaware that he is a French spy cooperating with British intelligence. The shot comes from offscreen, and we watch Bernard die in the midst of a crowd. Hitchcock doesn’t have anyone tell us that the bullet came from outside. He cuts to a shot of the star-shaped hole in a window with five people pointing at it, their fingers extending the star-shaped pattern of the cracks. (Never mind that a vertical window could not be pointed at from all sides.)

The casting is also better, in my opinion. (I like Doris Day well enough, but when I watch her, I want it to be as Babe in The Pajama Game.) Lesley Banks makes a good protagonist. His attempts to ingratiate the main villain, Abbott, by acting nonchalant and amused by his banter, even though he knows this man has kidnapped his daughter and is holding her in a room nearby. Abbott is played by Peter Lorre, who is a major asset in the film. (David always claimed that Lorre improved any film he was in, which is quite possible.) On the right below, Abbott calmly has a meal, contrasting with all the other characters, who tensely listen to the radio, waiting for the climactic moment in the orchestral piece when the second assassination is planned to happen.

 

Back when David was teaching the film, prints were gray and fuzzy. Luckily the Criterion Blu-ray features the restored version, and it is playing permanently on the Criterion Channel as well.

The Merry Widow (Ernst Lubitsch)

I am not particularly fond of Lubitsch’s musicals from the 1929-1932 period. Hence I had never made much effort to see the slightly later The Merry Widow, in part because it’s not that easy to see, as I’ll explain below.

The story begins in Marshovia, a tiny imaginary kingdom in eastern Europe. The opening number introduces Captain Danilo (Maurice Chevalier), who has apparently bedded most of the female population of the country. He is intrigued by the mysterious black-garbed widow, Madame Sonia, who is so wealthy that the economy of the country depends largely on her. He invades her home in an attempted seduction, but in a bantering exchange Sonia rejects him. That her mourning is oppressing her is conveyed by pages of her diary turning, with shorter entries culminating with “Nothing to write-” (above) followed by blank pages.

Determining to live an exciting life, she departs to Paris. Danilo is dispatched to woo and marry her so that she will return to Marshovia. Though initially he tries to seduce her, but naturally he falls in love with her. She, aware of his reputation, dismisses his wooing as lies and continues her madcap life.

With such a risqué story to tell, Lubitsch manages to convey it with visuals and innuendos. Sonia’s sudden transition from mourning widow to reckless, fun-seeking widow is handled by a series of dissolves which show her black shoes, dresses, hats, and even corsets turn white (at least in a black-and-white film).

 

When she asks her three maids where Danilo lives, all three cheerily reel off the same address address. Realizing what they have revealed about their relationships with the serial seducer, their smiles disappear as they lower their eyes–the Lubitsch Touch at work.

The use of Franz Lehar’s music (though with some altered lyrics) leads to a better quality of musical numbers than most films of the day had. Lubitsch was also given a considerable budget, and the set design won Oscars for Cedric Gibbons and Frederic Hope.

 

The two leads are inevitably charming, and once again supporting players–Edward Everett Horton, Una Merkel, Donald Meek, and Herman Bing–supply humor throughout.

The Merry Widow is streaming on Amazon Prime and Apple +, with a $3.99 rental charge. It unfortunately is not in the Criterion Collection’s box set of Lubitsch musicals, but is available on a Warner Bros. Archive DVD.

It Happened One Night (Frank Capra)

I doubt I need to say much about this one. Anyone who hasn’t seen it probably is not interested in seeing ninety-year-old films and certainly wouldn’t be reading about them here.

The plot is known to all. Ellie Andrews, the spoiled child of a doting, wealthy father flees to rejoin her new husband, whom she thinks she loves. He wants the marriage annulled, assuming the man is after her money. On a bus from Florida to New York, she meets Peter Warne, a newspaper reporter in trouble with his boss. They take an instant dislike to each other, but Peter offers to take care of Ellie if she will give him an exclusive story about her flight. They encounter numerous problems, from stolen luggage to a steadily dwindling supply of cash.

The casting of Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert is perfect, the script is great, etc.

Again, this is a film I saw back in my graduate-school days. I enjoyed it, but it was the typical soft, low-contrast 16mm print so common in those days. The 4K restoration on the Criterion Blu-ray reveals something that was not evident then: this film was superbly lensed by the great cinematographer Joseph Walker, who shot many of the screwball comedies of the decade but also the brooding Only Angels Have Wings. The scene of the two forced to sleep rough on some improvised hay beds is as good as a three-point lighting in a night-time, studio-shot set can get. There’s also the simpler scene which holds on Ellie in silhouette, having a conversation with Peter across the blanket serving as “the Walls of Jericho.”

 

It Happened One Night is probably not the first screwball comedy, which is considered a sub-genre of the romantic comedy. It may be the first in what I think might be a sub-sub-genre, which revolves around a rich woman who can afford to follow her whims and defy conventions. Ellie starts out rich, though her money is stolen during early on. Carol Lombard’s character in My Man Godfrey is another classic case, with a carefree young woman from a wealthy family finds a homeless man as required for a scavenger hunt, paying $5 for him to appear at a party. His indignation leads her to hire him as a butler. Bringing Up Baby also depends on the Katherine Hepburn character’s wealth that allows her to follow her whims and boss Cary Grant’s paleontologist around. In all cases the man resists being manipulated, but love results eventually.

It Happened One Night is available in an excellent restoration on Blu-ray and DVD from Criterion. It streams on Apple + and some smaller services for $3.99.

Street without End (Mikio Naruse)

Naruse is known to many from his prolific career after World War II. In the 1930s, however, he also made many films, though a considerable number of those are lost. He was one of the four major directors working for Shochiku, the others being Yasujiro Ozu, Hiroshi Shimizu, and Heinosuke Gosho. The head of the studio, however, did not consider him to be on the same level as those three, and Naruse felt that he was being given less creative freedom than the others. Indeed, the other three had passed on the script for Street without End, since it was based on a tabloid serial about a café hostess. Naruse had no choice but to accept the assignment.

Naruse frequently centering his plots around women. In this case, the protagonist is Sugiko, a working-class woman content with her job in a café. She is approached by an film-studio agent who offers her an acting job, but despite her waitress friend Kesako’s excitement at the idea, she turns it down. Kesako takes the job instead and is a success but grows tired of the job. Sugiko is slightly injured struck by a car belonging to a rich man, Hiroshi, a man from the upper-class Yamanouchi family. He falls in love with her and proposes. All her friends urge her to jump at this chance, but her brother warns her that the wealthy family will not accept her. Despite this, Sugiko loves Hiroshi and marries him. As predicted, Hiroshi’s mother and sister snub Sugiko and make her married life miserable.

Naruse’s style in the film somewhat echoes that of Ozu, yet he seems to be trying variants on it. In this early scene, Sugiko’s boyfriend Machio breaks the news that his family has found a bride for him, but he says he’ll marry Sugiko if she agrees. In the course of the scene, Naruse cuts away from the couple to shots of two street lamps, seen from a different angle each time. Ozu typically uses shot of spaces without the characters as a transition device between scenes, but here such shots interrupt the action repeatedly.

1  2  3

4  5  6

7  8  9

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Once Machio has said he will marry Sugiko, there is another shot of the two lamps, closer than before (11). This is followed by a shot/reverse shot pattern between the two. At first Machio is seen looking rightward (12), with the cut to Sugiko showing her also facing rightward (13), a common tactic used by Ozu. Here, however, the cut back to Machio shows him facing leftward (14), as would be conventional following a shot of her looking rightward. Ozu would keep the characters facing the same direction throughout a shot/reverse-shot pattern (shots 9, 10, and 11). In shot 11 Machio turns to exit and shot, and in 15 he is seen from behind walking away from her–perhaps because she does not answer him immediately.

13 14 15

The only reason I can see for this change on the framing of Machio in the second shot of him is an echo of an earlier moment in the scene. In the shot in which Sugiko reacts to his news of his parents plan for him to marry, she turns away and starts out left (frames 6 & 7 above). The next shot shows her from the back, moving away from him. Within this shot, he goes after her and faces her again (frames 7 and 8). A cut-in leads to the inconsistent shot/reverse shots. This time he is the one to move away from her (compare frame 15 with frame 8). He returns to say they will have little money (16). After another cutaway to the two lamps (18), the scene continues with Sugiko saying will marry him anyway. Perhaps this echo hints at their eventual failure to marry.

16 17 18

Through this sad main plotline Naruse weaves some lighter scenes involving Kesako. Her boyfriend is a move comic figure. A running joke compares his rather sloppy “modern” painting with a close view of him carefully setting up an elegant stack of apples and other objects as a model. In later scenes he shows off the painting and has to inform people that the subject is indeed apples.

 

As the title suggests, most of the action takes place in Tokyo and specifically the Ginza district. Sugiko’s romance with the weathy Hiroshi takes place in the countryside, emphasizing that he has an expensive car and can take her on such trips (top of this section). One might assume that this lyrical scene featuring Mount Fuji refers to Shochiku’s famous logo, but that logo was not adopted until 1936.

Street without End was Naruse’s last film for Shochiku. He left for the Photo-Chemical Laboratories studio, late to become Toho. His first film there remains his best-known from the era, Wife, Be like a Rose! (1935).

Street without End is one of five films from the first half of the 1930s in the Eclipse box set, “Silent Naruse.” It also streams on the Criterion Channel.

Dos Monjes (“Two Monks,” Juan Bustillo Oro)

As usual, I like to include an excellent film that deserves to be far better known. I first saw Two Monks at the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in 2017. For me the most unexpected discovery of the festival. The occasion was a restoration of the film by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project. I was impressed and blogged about it at the time. Here is a slightly revised version of what I wrote then.

It is considered the first in the Mexican Gothic genre. It was inspired by the Spanish-language version of Dracula (directed in 1931 by George Melford for Universal), as well as by German Expressionist films. Yet there are no monsters or supernatural villains in the film. Instead, a frame story set in a monastery that looks straight out of Murnau’s Faust (1926) introduces a young monk, Javier, who has gone mad. He attacks another monk, Juan, with an expressionistic crucifix and confesses to the prior that he did so because Juan had committed a terrible crime.

A lengthy flashback lays out the story of Javier’s love for Ana and his eventual rivalry with Juan. In the second half, Juan also confesses, and the story is repeated from his point of view. Scenes we saw earlier are replayed, often starting at an earlier point or ending at a later one, in a way that alters our understanding of the two monks’ past relationship. The result is not a Rashomon-type situation, for the two men agree on the events they describe, disagreeing only on the implications of those events.

It’s a remarkable narrational technique for this early in film history. The atmospheric claustrophobia created by the small cast (no passers-by are seen in the brief street scenes and no servants appear in the houses) and of dread created by the sets and the dissonant music of the climactic scene would bear comparison with the horror films of Universal and Hammer.

Two Monks is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel and some other platforms. It is available as a Blu-ray in the third of the multiple-film releases from the World Cinema Project, along with Héctob Babenco’s Pixote and also in a larger box set with six films.

The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer)

I must admit that I spent quite a bit of time trying to decide on my tenth film, which in part caused this annual post to be a little late. I settled on Edgar G. Ulmer’s only contribution to the considerable number of Universal horror films of the 1930s. I’m not particularly a horror fan, but The Black Cat is my favorite of the Universal series. It has some characteristics that set it apart from the others.

One of these characteristics is that it doesn’t depend on some sort of science-fiction (Frankenstein) or supernatural (The Mummy and Dracula) monster. This makes it similar to James Whale’s The Old Dark House, my other favorite of the series. Instead The Black Cat concerns atrocities committed during World War I in a fictitious fort at Maramureș.

The plot of The Black Cat has one parallel to The Old Dark House. Both begin by introducing a couple who are forced by an accident caused by a storm to seek shelter in an an isolated house. In The Black Cat, newlyweds Peter and Joan Allison meet the kindly Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Bela Legosi), who helps them when the accident occurs and takes them to the house of his old nemesis, Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff). Poelzig traitorously surrendered the fort during the war, causing huge casualties. He now secretly performs Satanic rituals. After fighting in the war, Werdegast has spent fifteen years in a Siberian prison camp and now wants to find out from Poelzig what happened to his wife and daughter. Unbeknownst to him, Poelzig had married his wife and then, after her death, their daughter Karin.

Another thing that sets The Black Cat apart is that its setting is quite the opposite of the conventional old-dark house. Poelzig has designed his own house, a modernist, vaguely art deco mansion located atop the fort, which contains what Werdegast describes as 10,000 corpses of war victims.

 

To be sure, once Poelzig’s full madness is revealed, the action moves to the dark rooms below the house. One corridor contains cases holding corpses of women whom he hass somehow preserved, including Werdegast’s wife. An expressionistic set where he holds the Satanic rituals, including human sacrifices.

   

These settings add to the beauty of the film, a beauty uncommon in the Universal horror films. The other part of that look is accomplished by the cinematographer John J. Mescall. Mescall lensed a huge number of films during his career, most of them minor works. His main other claims to fame were King Vidor’s Wine of Youth (1924); two Lubitsch films, So This Is Paris (1926) and The Student Prince in Old Heidelburg (1927); Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935); and John M. Stahl’s Magnificent Obsession (1935). The first look at Poelzig in the film comes when he wakes up and turns on the bedside light, creating a dramatic and ominous composition (above).

The Black Cat is noted as the first film that Karloff and Legosi starred in together. The contemporary setting and lack of supernatural elements allows both of them to act with less heavy make-up than usual. Legosi plays the rational and kindly (until the end at least) Werdegast impressively, which is a novelty. Similarly, as Poelzig, Karloff hides his villainy with cordial, polite conversation until the climactic ending.

 

After David’s memorial service in May (a video recording of which is permanently on Vimeo with no password necessary), some people on my Facebook page asked if a collection of photographs of David could be made available.

There was a slide show created to run on a loop in the lobby of the funeral home on the day of the service. I just posted it on Vimeo, also on the channel that David set up in order to put some lectures online. Again, there’s no password and it will remain online. This link takes you directly to it.

I thought it would be appropriate to begin and end it with frames from the funeral scene in Ozu’s End of Summer (above). In between are photos provided by many of our friends and colleagues, going back as far as a scan of a college yearbook photo of David as part of a group of projectionists he belonged to in his undergraduate days. The photos range from David alongside celebrities, at festivals and conferences,  and just relaxing at  the badminton parties we used to hold in our back yard.

The slides change automatically about every twelve seconds, but as with any video you can pause them. Many of you will want to do that for group photos; you’ll recognize old friends.

Thanks to our friend Michele Smith, who put together the original slide show. I think the images capture his personality as we all fondly remember him. Thanks also to Erik Gunneson for turning it into a video and for posting it.