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50. Le Plaisir (1952, Max Ophuls)
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Another gimmicky Ophuls film watched directly after "La Ronde", this tells three story of debauchery masqueraded as pleasure in the heart of france. The first is about an old, dogged man who still goes to balls wearing a mask and pretending to be the young, virile man that he once was. He does this to seek thrills, base pleasures, and young girls, much to the disdain of his wife. However, she forgives him, because she loves him despite his flaws. Already the themes of the film are becoming clear; that although debauchery and sin are pretty much a constant in the world, there are still those little moments of true love and understanding. The second section, about a group of "working girls" who take a holiday away from the hustle and bustle from the town in a little village with relatives, is substantially the longest and most certainly the best. Here is where that theme really comes to the forefront of the picture. When they leave the city, they have a group of old, dirty men skulking for their loss, already pointing out that a lot of peoples' hearts and souls are in the wrong place. However, it's when we get to the village that we find out what Ophuls is really trying to say. Moments of sin and debauchery are painted out as bad - like a married man actively attempting to seduce one of the prostitutes - whilst the little moments of fun and playfulness are subtely marked out as the true beauty in life. Ophuls is trying to say that, although there is a lot of wrongdoing around, the best moments in life are those that we don't even reflect on much; like the hapiness of a child, the picking of flowers in a meadow, or a brief flicker of true love. The third section sits apart from the film as the only truly tragic one, about a man and a woman who fall out of love and begin to have a volatile and disasterous relationship. It's the only one that the narrator is actually a part of, and the only one he hasn't himself created in his mind. Perhaps Ophuls is trying to say that everything he's said before is wrong, and all that truly exists is pain, suffering and desperation, and true love only forms from guilt or acceptance. The only true story is the tragic one. Although I was about to challenge Ophuls for being overly simple in his themes at the end of the second section, the third one throws up question after question, leading to La Plaisir being a darker and more meaningful film than it ever seems while watching. JB. |
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49. The Killing (1956, Stanley Kubrick)
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When you look at the first two Stanley Kubrick feature length films, there's no doubt they aren't exactly earth-shattering. By his own admission, Fear and Desire (1953) was an amateurish slur on his otherwise unblemished record, and Killer's Kiss (1955) was a step below everything else he's ever done if still perfectly enjoyable. You get the impression that if the great director had done one more average film he perhaps wouldn't have been regarded as one of the greatest nowadays. Of course, he didn't do another average film. Since finishing up on Killer's Kiss, he's had an incredible string of either excellent films or bona fide classic, and that all started here with his noir thriller the Killing, whichsees Sterling Hayden's Johnny Clay and his expertly assembled team of criminals organising a hold-up on a horse racing track. Utilizing a wildly imaginative narrative structure and an incredibly entertaining heist sequence, what followed, as they say, is history. The Killing is undeniably a very clever film. It's not so much in-your-face intelligent as it is subtly so, with little moments make sense after re-watches. It takes a lot of thought to truly understand every scene, and watching it for a second time allows some of the more subtle moments. The initial scene of the film is the most obvious example. When one of our gang-members wanders around the race track, the narrator tells us that this man places a bet on every single horse. It seems like a strange novelty at the time, but we realise after a few re-watches exactly why he's doing this. The man needs a reason to visit the collection point regardless of how much money he loses to do so. Of course, the main contributing factor to this is the imaginative un-chronological timeline. We all know that the Killing wasn't the first to play such a trick, beaten out by Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles) almost fifteen years prior, but there's no doubting that the Killing took it to the next level. Again improved by Pulp Fiction (1994, Quentin Tarrantino) and then once more by Memento (2000, Christopher Nolan), the Killing may initially just seem like another title in the long list who improved on Welles' initial idea, but that's not the case. The Killing was the first movie to do so without the timeline mix-up effect not being done through flashbacks or story re-telling. In the same way that without Citizen Kane there would be no the Killing, without the Killing there would be no Pulp Fiction or Memento. JB. |
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48.Samurai I: Miyamoto Musashi (1954, Hiroshi Inagaki)
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Awaiting review... |
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46. And God Created Woman (1956, Roger Vadim)
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Awaiting review... |
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46. Where the Sidewalk Engs (1950, Otto Preminger)
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It would be wrong and overly bureaucratic of me to count how many film noirs I perfer to “Where the Sidewalk Ends”, but I’d venture a guess that it’s no more than ten. This, coupled with the fact that big hitters from the genre including Howard Hawks’ “the Big Sleep” have already charted below it, is testament to just how underrated I believe it to be. When you consider the greats of the subgenre, and consult lists on the subject, you would very rarely find Preminger’s greatest stab at it, despite the fact that it characterizes everything that is great about noir. There’s the grizzled detective who rarely smiles, turns to violence often, and has a key eye for detail. But that’s taken to a whole new level by Andrews’ Dixon, who manages to shroud the line between hero and villain even further than, say, Orson Welles’ Harry Lime or Robert Mitchum’s Jeff Bailey from the two pinnacles of the genre; “the Third Man” and “Out of the Past”. On the outset, he seems like a good cop who uses whatever it takes to get the job done. Even the accidental murder, where he slugs Paine and accidentally knocks him out for good, is forgivable. It was in self defence and he would never mean to kill anybody. It’s just his reaction to it that shocks. Not only does he do away with the body like a true mobster, he continues to hide his guilt with confidence, and he frames (or at least passes the buck) to several different parties. Even us, as the viewer, begin to ask whether he’s just another hood who fell into the right crowd rather than the young one, or as if he secretly likes the thrills provided by the chase. JB.
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45. The Tales of Hoffman (1951, Powell and Pressburger)
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This is not a film of a staged performance of the famous Offenbach opera, even though it is an adaptation of it. The opera was itself based on the short stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann, the great German fantasist and the film places Hoffmann himself as a lead character. Hoffman is watching his sweetheart, Stella, a ballet dancer perform on stage. During the interval he waits in a bar and tells the stories of three great romances in his life and of the folly of love. The struggle between humanity and art is presented to us, with Hoffmann gaining inspiration each time he fails in love. All three stories have a fantastical element. The first, The Tale of Olympia, sees Hoffmann as a student in love with a star ballerina named Olympia (Shearer) who is actually a marionette/automaton created by a magician puppeteer, Coppelius. The second story, The Tale of Giulietta sees Hoffmann smitten by Giulietta, a vampiric courtesan who works with a devil figure to try and trap the poet's soul in a mirror. The final story, The Tale of Antonia, sees him falls for a singer who is dying of consumption and who will die if she sings again. I'm not an opera fan so I'm the first to admit my actual of knowledge of the art form is rather limited, but I do know that it's not a subject that's easy to transfer to the cinema and that attempt here is brave, brilliant and damn near insane. Powell & Pressburger have created an opulent, elegant and beautiful film that actually carries a somewhat inspirational message of channelling heartbreak and despair into art. Visually it's possibly The Archers most stunning and daring film, perfectly combining movement, colour and music in a way that surpasses even The Red Shoes. For the longest time this was at the top of my 'must see' list and I think it's fair to say that it's the fantastical elements that drew me to it so strongly, but there's so much more to the film. I've seen some critics comment that while they find Hoffmann is a visual masterpiece they find it difficult to connect to any real emotion in the film, for me it's the emotional undercurrents that make the film my favourite P&P. When watching this film, the combination of the incredible visuals and the heartbreaking stories, it's the words of a decidedly non-operatic singer that come to mind "Out of sorrow entire worlds have been built, out of longing great wonders have been willed" Desire, longing and heartache are soaked into every scene of this remarkable film, nobody involved would ever reach these heights again. DW.
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44. Duck Dodgers in the 24th 1/2 Century (1953, Chuck Jones)
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43. Has Anybody Seen My Gal? (1952, Douglas Sirk)
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"Has Anybody Seen My Gal?” is, first and foremost, a comedy film. That's rather odd, because although the films from Sirk that I've seen from Sirk are often comical ("Imitation of Life” has its dark lashes of satire), most of them are mostly dramatic pieces with soap opera sensibilities. Here, Sirk places a lot of the emphasis on the humour, turning the film into a screwball comedy more than anything else. But there's certainly drama here regardless, because Sirk invests enough emotion into the film for the audience to become entranced in the story, and it's certainly a very dramatic story to begin with. It's about love, money, and virtues, and whether wealth is deserved by anyone or a select few who can stay true to themselves in spite of it.
At its core "Has Anybody Seen My Gal?” is a film that should have really been made by Frank Capra, for the reasons outlined above. Capra was legendary for his own new approach to filmmaking, even if it was just an over-exaggeration of everybody else's working at the time. He would tag on a happy ending to everything and it would never feel tagged on, because Capra's films seem to be leading up to these endings and when they happen they feel like a natural conclusion to the story. That's also the case with this film, because Douglas Sirk – a director renowned for creating films with downbeat, rather heartbreaking endings – has crafted a film that is entirely of the Capra mould. The key themes that riddled Capra's work of love and equality being put over money are all here, with people rewarded for their kindness or their integrity and punished for their love for the green stuff. JB.
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42. Sunset Boulevard (1950, Billy Wilder)
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41. Sound of the Mountain (1951, Mikio Naruse) |
Sound of the Mountain is a delicate and thoughtful meditation on marriage, family and the chains that society places on people. Naruse looks at these concerns through focusing on the close relationship between a father and daughter-in-law. Kikuko and Shuuichi's marriage is failing because Shuuichi is both neglectful and unfaithful. They live with Shuichi's parents and she has an especially close relationship with his father, Shingo. As the marriage collapses further, the bond between Kikuko and Shingo becomes closer. Shingo has a closer relationship with her than with his own daughter, Fusako, who has also recently arrived back at the house with her marriage in difficulty. Shingo is aware that Shuuichi has been having an affair but is reluctant to interfere, believing a married couple should take care of their own problems, but when he becomes aware of how badly it's hurting Kikuko he feels obliged to step in. The atmosphere in the house is stifling. No-one is able to express their true emotions and all relationships and feelings become ambiguous as a result of this inability to outwardly express emotions. It's easy to see a father/daughter relationship between Shingo and Kikuko, that she's making up for the disappointment he feels in Fusako. Kikuko is charming. She's sweet, loving, willing to virtually work as a maid for the family, she's the perfect daughter, unlike Fusako. Some might read surpressed romantic feelings between Shingo and Kikuro, I think it's just two souls findings solace together with the only feelings of love being platonic ones. Naruse is fascinated with the daily life of ordinary people. It could be argued that if you break this story down to basics then it's nothing different to what you'd find in any soap opera. Of course the quality of the acting and directing alone would make any comparisons to the likes of Eastenders laughable, but what really sets it apart from soap-opera concerns is the unmelodramatic way in which the problems are approached and the obvious care that Naruse feels for his characters. He's an insightful director, able to evoke complex and subtle emotional depths through simple moments. The film can surprise you as well, especially with Kikuko's character who takes an action that's deeply unexpected and allows you to see a strength to the character previously hidden. To say anymore about Kikuko's actions would be to spoil the film too much, but it's those kind of moments that make the film so rich, so layered and so powerful.DW. |
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