Change Your Image
Mozjoukine
Reviews
Le cinéma du diable (1967)
Creaky TV compilation
Creaky L'Herbier TV compilation on French fantasy film offers no suprises.
The blonde interlocutor gets to do unremarkable interviews with Presle and
Marie Déa as a brunette, spacing clips that go back as far as Meliés, VISITEURS DU SOIR and LES JEUX SONT FAITS prominent.
The Kirsanoff RAPT provides the least familiar material. L'Herbier's own title on LA NUIT FANTASTIQUE is held long.
The City (1939)
Landmark Documentary
Curious to find THE CITY evoking such antagonism eighty years after it's production.
After half a Century I had another look at it and was impressed to see the effect it had had on subsequent work including my own. The elements are impressive - the Copland score which I immediately remembered, Morris (THIEVES HIGHWAY, VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE) Carnovsky's reading of Lewis Mumford's commentary and Theodore Lawrence's editing which is a link between the Soviet montage work and Hollywood. The film was cannibalised into a Passing Parade and the Warner HUMORESQUE.
The message about substandard housing ("places where a man sent up for crime can have a better place than we can get for our children") still resonates though their solution sits uneasily with our knowledge of over population and urban planning now but it set up a dialogue with fiction films like SUNRISE, STREET OF WOMEN or LA TERRE QUI MEURT. It's not too far away from the ideal industrial community shown in MAJOR BARBARA.
This one stood out when I started watching non theatrical movies and I still enjoy watching it.
Transmagnifican Dambamuality (1976)
Seventies experimental short
Hectic domestic activity in a black suburban home subsides when the son sits down to play the living room grand piano. Freeze frames, battle sounds - grainy B&W.
Haceldama ou Le prix du sang (1919)
Early Duvivier melo.
First Duvivier movie is a simple minded melodrama which is not without ambition - action scenes staged in rugged terain, name players including Severin Mars, the lead of the Gance LA ROUE and some quite sophisticated camera trickery among which note the sustained take where Jean Lorette moves between the two chairs where he and Mars pop on.
Plot has Didier and gaucho Camille Bert arriving to settle business with local magnate Mars with heavy eye shadow and becoming involved with his ward Pestrat.
Cracker: White Ghost (1996)
Fitz in Hong Kong.
Taking our burly police profiler overseas doesn't really help. On a lecture tour (opening has him singing to his audience) Coltraine is recruited into a murder inquiry which they manage to turn into an anti colonialist exhortation - giving the piece some resonance. The usual darker side plotting.
Conventional TV production values enlivened by glimpses of Hong Kong, the appearance of Ricky Tomlinson and a few familiar faces from the colony's movies.
Dorothée cherche l'amour (1945)
French forties fantasy.
This turns into one of Greville's most chaotic efforts. Star Dauphin doesn't
appear until the film's been running an hour. There are extraordinary lapses like the oil lamp trailing an electric cord while it's carried down three flights of stairs.
Blonde Suzy Carrier / Dorothée is celebrating her engagement to Henri Guisol when she spots her dad paying paying him her dot in cash and, outraged, seeks an escape. Jules Berry returned from purgatory figures this as a chance for the good deed he needs to redeem himself. He takes her to his old home, complete with his portrait. Burglar Claude Dauphin and her share a scene on the bed made an island when a tap is left running. He involves her in a Jewellery store scam but Berry repays his karmic debt.
This incoherent, studiofied forties French movie struggles to be a companion piece to NUIT FANTASTIQUE, VISITEURS DU SOIR and LES JEUX SONT FAITS which it anticipates.
A Political Party (1934)
More history than hysteria.
This one has become, over nearly ninety years, more of a social artefact than an entertainment.
The plot about chimney sweep Leslie Fuller who runs for the spot of local member (cf. the George Formby HE SNOOPS TO CONQUER) is passably lively though the music hall sketches they try to incorporate register as feeble - the baker and the sweep getting covered with one another's products, smashing Blimpish aristocrat Maltby's family china and using items from round the room to make over the singer doing Loch Lomond into a Scotsman. It all plays better than similar material in the CARRY ON films twenty years later.
However it's take on politics, ("Socialism. communism and rheumatism") the woman's place, class ("The working man's wife who is more like a mother to him") and regional divisions will put the teeth on edge of even the casual viewer.
Young John Mills joins in nervously but the only character who qualifies for any sympathy is a blonded Enid Stamp Taylor as the villain's citified daughter.
The Kentucky Derby (1922)
Presentable programmer.
Preceding Denny's career as comic actor, this racing melodrama goes from plantations populated by Kentucky Colonels and compliant darkies through having our hero Shanghaied, sea going adventures and confronting the impersonator who is planning on fixing the big race. It moves along quite well but it's far fetched plot is not helped by imperfections of 1922 film making technique.
The shooting is lengthened by Churchill Downs locations which contribute to the jerky race climax. Denny emerges credibly and it's curious to see Lionel Belmore a decade before he became ubiquitous in horror movies.
Circulating copy appears to be missing small sections.
L'avventuriera del piano di sopra (1941)
Lively war time De Sica comedy.
This Rome filmed comedy tries for a contemporary set Fedeau style farce with De Sica as the lawyer involved in confusions in the marriage of glamorous neighbor Clara Calamai (OSSESSIONE, PROFONDO ROSSO) while his own wife (played by his wife Giuditta Rissone - Mario Soldati's wife plays Calamai's family maid) is at her sister's wedding. Misunderstandings are finally resolved by an inspired legal oration by De Sica.
Film making is smooth and pacing superior though the piece never rises above the level of amusing studio-filmed light entertainment. For the record, the only telephone in sight is not white but black.
There's no hint of the war and the style has no connection to the director's later turgid weepies. This one appears to have had no English language showing.
The Hermit (2015)
Video doc on a modern day recluse
Video doc about 'North Pond Hermit' , a man who walked into the woods and lived for 27 years, stealing from cabins (accumulating a stack of used porta gas tanks in his tent & mattress lair) recounted by his victims, the officer who interrogated him when he was apprehended and local residents. One story has him watching a mushroom grow for two years.
We never see the man who was in the pen when the film finished.
Low key presentation holds attention well enough.
Le homard (1913)
Early French curiosity.
This pre WW1 French one reeler retains some interest as it unrolls the story of duplicitous lover Perret claiming to have braved the waves to get the fresh Dinard lobster object of his desire Grandais craves, when he actually bought them from a fisherman after spending an afternoon at the movies. Split screen and a glimpse of one of the more accomplished film making teams of the day.
The Way We Live Now (1970)
Would be erotic New York Indie.
New York independent movie - over earnest and over wordy but not without it's moments of truth mixed into the exploitation movie texture. Bogus high living background.
Commercials director Nicholas Pryor (later Tom Cruise's dad in Risky Business) leaves home, only seeing his child on weekend zoo visits. The wife says "That lovely child comes first " with him coming back "... and the neighbors second." He cheats on his intense mistress with an old love now in a sexless rich marriage. We get one striking nude scene and the mistress demanding whether his wife ever went in for any of their off screen activities also has a charge.
She gets the most telling scenes with him giving her a hard time for not taking his commercials seriously ("It's my life. It's my work") but he abandons his agency for the married woman who he knows will never join him in his single room.
Seven Days 'Til Sunday (1998)
Festival entry
Blown up from 8mm. B&W experimental shows shots of (dummy) bodies falling -
down a stair well (striking), off a grain storage silo etc. Arresting novelty goes on a bit too long.
The Fledglings (1964)
British sixities indie.
Every know cliché of the B&W sixties art film - speeded sequences, still frames for the photo session with the girl, Bande à part & Halelluya in the Hills horseplay, improvised dialogue including some wildly out post synch. Even with it's recognisable glimpses of the sixties Chelsea scene it's all as convincing as rubber salami.
Three party scenes, including a lesbian event and witchcraft with the girl reading (of course) beat poetry - "the gates of heaven where all comers will not be admitted, even if they bring bottles"
Two young Chelsea types get the girl they share to go with an unlikely American producer who ignores Zanuck calls and wears a suit which needs pressing.
A few nice images and model Julia White appeals. There's some perverse pleasure in finding a film like this, especially an English one. Quarrier was the blond gay vampire in Fearless Vampire Killers.
Atraksion (2001)
Late Raoul Servais
Manipulated sepia live action - men in striped tights each carry two ball & chains. One attempts to scale a column and finds gravity reversed - he's on a giant light flex.
Striking imagery. Recognisably the work of the great animator but not one of his best.
What does it mean beyond a condemnation of conformity - inscrutable.
La cosecha (1970)
Obscure Argentinian feature.
Not without interest though this Argie feature is shot and played in the style of a bucolic comedy even though played with unrelenting seriousness.
Action centers on a farmer prevented from reaping a record harvest by
his family, the corruption and bureaucracy of the administration, and inferior machinery - ending with prison gates closing on him.
There's some atmosphere generated by scenics of wheat fields or carnival crowds thrown into jail, These come with a harvest festival and a surreal dream in which characters taunt the stolid lead.
Uomo d'acqua dolce (1997)
Early and unremarkable Antronio Albanese comedy.
Italian TV comic Antonio Albanese spring boarded into features directing himself in this version of the STREET OF CHANCE plot where he vanishes from the life of his pregnant wife, the appealing red headed Valeria Milillo, only to re-appear holding the jar of mushrooms he went out to find five years ago.
The film is a succession of routines which build to a pay off that never arrives or proves to be feeble. Best segment is a spoof of avant garde music to which Nicola Piovani, the only name in the credits familiar outside Italy, must have contributed.
Polished Milanese production. Albanese would later work with directors like Woody Allen and Gianni Amelio.
So This Is Marriage (1929)
Lumbering Early Sound short
Curious that this draggy two reeler survives having only the incidental interest
of primitive form, the indistinguishable participation of celebrity cameraman Stradling and some proto Radio City Music Hall choreography from a chorus line which shows up at random.
After successive single shots of married couples in double beds we go to some
implausible garden party where the lead arranges for the wives to pretend they have been kidnapped by a prowling criminal called "The Gorilla". This leads him to appreciate his own wife for some inexplicable reason. Dialogue is declaimed and everything is shot square on from a distance.
La galerie des monstres (1924)
Creaky French silent
This is a disappointing silent circus melo from the L'Herbier outfit. Catelain, lead of the drear L'IINHUMAIN is even worse here. Hard to see how his Riquets sub-Harlequin dance act has made him the star of the Buffalo traveling circus - a shadowy anticipation of Freaks.
One of the tribe of gypsies who sleep in the snow outside the Castilian
town, He pairs with local girl Moran (the Al Jolson MAMMY) in her first role. They are turned out
Later (how much later?) they are raising a baby in the Buffalo traveling circus arriving in Toledo. Montage of acts - a tumbler, cowboys, clowns, musicians
and a fakey menagerie with a rigged human torso, a bearded lady who is obviously a bloke & the skinny girl as a mermaid.
The spurned owner lusts after Moran & lets the lion into the cage where she dances (so so montage). Catelain is made to do his act while they are waiting for the doctor.
The circus acts turn on the boss, vaguely anticipating FREAKs. Flossie the spangles girl and the cowboy lion tamer who stole a kiss from from injured Moran are considered to have redeemed themselves and the leads and their baby get to drive their caravan back to her village Can't see that going too well.
This one offers curiosity value in it's excellent Lobster Films restoration in a square format. Serge Bromberg did a pro-piano accompaniment at the Forum des Images screening in Paris.
Die Lawine (1923)
Silent Alpine melo from the director to be of "Casblanca."
Escaping political turbulence in their native Hungary, Michael Curtiz and his star Michel /Victor Varconyi set up in Austria where Curtiz made a number of films with now forgotten leading lady Mary Kidd.
This one is a weepy melodrama with Varconyi reclaiming Kidd and her child who he had abandoned to marry well with Lilly Marischka . The spurned bride has her revenge winning him back in a ski resort and then casting him aside. Rescues in the snow by a wonder dog and a pursuit on skis. This last and the glimpse of Marischka's palatial home liven up an unsurprising weepy.
Director Cirtiz and star Varknonyi had polished their technique since their first efforts.
This one will have to stand in for the Mary Kidd collaboration as it is the one to survive and in a nice tinted copy with a slightly abrupt end.
Talla (2019)
Iranian contemporary drama
Anything from Iran has value as an indicator of what is happening in that country to put against the fake news and propaganda we are stuck with. TALLA / GOLD is pretty good on this level. It shows a group of friends leading unsatisfactory lives in Tehran. Unemployed or tied to unsatisfying jobs which don't allow them to put together savings, they decide to go into business together (think LA BELLE ÉQUIPE) setting up a Soup Restaurant. They hit bureaucratic hurdles and their financing involving ballet with the books runs amok - at which point the piece turns into a people smuggling melodrama.
Things are not helped by the fact that women in head scarves and bearded men tend to look the same (that's the idea) making the piece even harder to follow. This one has moments of conviction but it's mainly a curiosity.
Seven and a Half (2019)
Afghan-Iranian episode message piece.
Haft va nim / Seven and a Half is the new Persian language film from the
Mahmoudi Brothers whose films are regularly put up as the Afghan entry for the Academy Awards. Their subject is the Afghan-Iranian experience with many Afghans moving to Iran, some as a way station to European homes.
Director Navid Mahmoudi's film is made up of seven vignettes each one featuring a distressed young woman battling the demands of Iranian society with an intimidating concept of marriage. Women in head scarfs, rather like men in military uniforms, tend to look the same making things no easier to follow.
Each story is recorded in a single run of Arri 4K digital which provides a muted colour image occasionally undermined by missing a change in exposure, an extra walking through the shot determinedly not looking at the camera or the question of how they are going to continue when someone closes the door on the camera.
Seven and a Half's major asset is it's rendition of a society about which we don't know enough. The film's earnestness and high purpose mark it as a contender for art film distribution which may be undermined by its seventy five minute running time.
Veille d'armes (1935)
Accomplished French naval melodrama
This apparently edition of the much filmed stage piece can more than hold its place in competition with thirties A French feature melodramas like Accusé leve-toi, Esquadrille and Double crime sur le ligne Maginot. It makes an intriguing comparison with The Woman from Monte Carlo, the Warners version of a few years earlier which used Walter Huston and Lil Dagoner in the parts played by Francen and Anabella. Surprisingly the French film is easily the better and more polished production though the American film's down beat ending has more conviction.
Marcel l'Herbier was an uneven director but here, as with l'Argent or Perfum de la dame en noir, he was right on top of his material, with a great cast (Pierre Renoir is particularly excellent) and a script which works on ironing out the piece's implausibilities and delivers it in gleaming Jules Kruger lighting, against an authentic naval background which constantly impresses and may well have been the patriotic motive behind the production.
Francen declaring in court "The dead witnesses are the vindication of my honor as a French Naval Officer" deserves a cheer. He's less plausible claiming to be 46 as the love interest of Anabella, glamorous in her evening gown with the lily bodice and other high fashion outfits. L'Herbier and Spaak needed to put in as much effort on their unlikely union as they did on the ship at sea stuff to make this work.
This one is a fascinating piece of cinema history as well as a fun night at the movies.
I Spy: Trial by Treehouse (1966)
Good series - limp ep.
The second series of I SPY lost the zip of the original. This otherwise mediocre piece has one interesting idea. The kid in Scotty/Cosby's fake family has already seen one father figure vanish when the previous UNCLE agent was killed and takes that to be the pattern for all the men in his life. He has to be re-assured. Otherwise clichés like the cultivated criminal, the undercover agents faking a murder and romance with back room operative Tyson.
THE SUBURBAN AFFAIR ep kicked the idea around with agreeable outrage.
Il grande spirito (2019)
So so Rubini gangster piece.
This one is disappointing coming from the creator of STAZIONE and LA BIONDA. Rubini is a scruffy small time provincial hood involved in a gang war. His associates treat him dismissively after a stuff up bank job where he shot a poodle. He manages to get the loot away from them and plans taking off with his beautician ex. However he finds himself trapped in the apartment block roof top squat of crazy (how crazy?) Papaleo on who he has to depend despite the fact that Papeleo thinks he's a Sioux Indian under the control of the Great Spirit.
The cast work at making their characters vivid and the industrial sky line and small time corruption is nicely caught but it really is too much to try and run this up into a two hour movie.