Night of the Generals: (1967. dir: Anatole Litvak) It's a failure, this movie, but a wonderful one. Its ambitions exceed its grasp, as it gamely tries to encompass the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler and post-war reconstruction, reaching across a span of some 23 years, all within the framework of an ongoing murder investigation. A prostitute has been viciously murdered, and the field of suspects quickly narrowed to three: all of them generals in the Fuhrer's wehrmacht. In one of Hollywood's unlikelier casting choices, Omar Shariff plays Major Grau, the intelligence officer responsible for bringing the butcher to justice. He is remarkably convincing in the role, avoiding the allurement of settling his character into "the Good Nazi", a snare ready-made for him in the script, in which he is described as a friend to the resistance and a man dogging the generals out of pure love of justice. In fact, largely through nonverbal subtleties, Shariff clearly communicates that Grau is more amorally pragmatic than anything, disregarding right and wrong on the larger scale almost entirely, and that his obsession with the murder has more to do with the gleeful prospect of hanging a general than in justice for the murdered woman. When the Valkyrie plot intrudes on his investigation, he ignores it entirely, not only refusing to choose sides but refusing to address the issue at all until it becomes useful for him in his pursuit.
It becomes apparent early on who the guilty party is, but that's just a piece of the sprawling puzzle, which includes Tom Courtenay as a reluctant soldier in love with a general's daughter and an awkward expository device in which Phillip Noiret's Interpol policeman continues the investigation in post-war years. The most wonderful thing, of course, is Peter O'Toole as General Tanz, a man so ruthless in his warmongering that Grau nearly eliminates him as a suspect, naively reasoning that a "maniac" who daily destroys whole neighborhoods and villages need hardly commit additional murders in his leisure time. O'Toole has always been electrifying in his stillness, and never more than as Tanz. The segment in which he must step maladroitly into civilian clothes and take a few days off is unforgettable: Courtenay's Hartmann drives him around Paris to point out the sights while Tanz sits in the back, pale and rigid in a bowler hat, drinking and chain-smoking. When his face starts twitching, it is truly ominous. His silent communion with a Van Gogh painting is fascinating, both to Hartmann and to us, but it's when the man regains his composure that the real sense of dark menace sets in. And it's not just his face. Even in a long shot O'Toole communicates the grotesque: whether it's a crooked but taut stance by a window after shooting a man, or his Christ-at-the-Last-Supper pose at the table of the Niebelungen, he compels the eye through sheer muscle control.
The movie's biggest flaw, its ungainly length and breadth, is the window which allows its greatness entry: in any reasonable cut of the film, all the great parts would have been pared away and only the more pedestrian skeleton would remain. 1967 was the year of mass onscreen revolution -- Bonnie and Clyde, the Graduate -- and this massive, bloated epic would have looked like a dinosaur at the picnic. Free from its chronological context, it can take its rightful place among the fascinating oddities of cinema.
Odd Man Out: (1947. dir: Carol Reed) In college I was in a production of Pinter's Old Times, a wicked little claustrophobic one-act about three points of a "love" triangle stuck in a room together, in which this movie is repeatedly referenced. At the time there was no way to get ahold of a copy, and it wasn't until years later on AMC that I finally saw it, late at night, which is the best way to watch it, sleep-deprived and half-dreaming. It provides the template for Jarmusch's Dead Man: cast the most darkly beautiful man in the world, give him a slow but fatal wound early on, then follow him through his encounters and hallucinations as he fades. It's an ongoing amazement to me how inventive these old British movies from Gong-and-Certificate days are: not just the Carol Reed pictures, but it never hurts to have a genius at the helm. On the most superficial level, it's an examination of character. We watch as people react to the wounded Johnny McQueen (James Mason), an escaped prisoner and most-wanted in the IRA, some struggling with conscience more than others. Many try and save him for their own selfish purposes, but only the girl who loves him throws her back into it. Even she acts with an obsession that might be construed as selfish, since he's never given her much encouragement and getting him safely on the boat is her only hope of having him to herself. In fact, as Kathleen (played by Kathleen Ryan) moves stoically through the story to its inevitable end, she reminds me of no one so much as Kim Hunter in the Seventh Victim, that strange, proto-Goth Val Lewton tale of (among other things) young girls and fascination with suicide.
Persuasion: (1995. dir: Roger Michell) Every ten years or so, Hollywood remakes Pride and Prejudice, and that's as it should be. Each generation deserves its own. The other Jane Austen books get the treatment now and then, and this is my favorite. It's my favorite of the books to start with, as the heroine is older (27) and sadder than the others, and its concern is whether or not there are second chances in love. Anne Elliot made a mistake the first time round and said no; Frederick Wentworth went to sea, brokenhearted. She's long since seen the error of her ways, and now he's back. Is reconciliation possible? As in life, it's harder than it ought to be to say what is in one's heart, and the story follows the two through a torturous labyrinth of evasion and tentative forays and finally into the marriage that ought to have been, eight years before.
At first I was annoyed with this movie and its lack of glitter. It has a muddy look because it was filmed with true lighting, or near true. Night time scenes glow orange with firelight, and everyone is pale and washed out in the chilly sunlight of Lyme Regis and under the dismal skies of Bath (it always rains in Bath). Nobody wears makeup except as they would in life, and when they dress, the ladies' hair looks like it was done by each other and not by a Hollywood stylist. It's a far cry from the Emma Thompson Sense and Sensibility (which has its own, different yet undeniable charm), for which director Ang Lee had the sheep permed to make them more picturesque.
On top of this feeling of authenticity that I've never seen replicated quite as fully even in BBC productions, there's the script, which is lovely, and the actors, who are great. They OWN these characters; they ought to be granted patents. There will never be another Mary Musgrove; Sophie Thompson has created the epitome, the absolute acme of Mary Musgroves to which all others will owe obeisance for all of time. Simon Russell Beale knows the very soul of her husband Charles, and Fiona Shaw and John Woodvine are the most wonderful Crofts possible, embodying the possibility of true love lasting over long years amidst humor and mutual devotion. Corin Redgrave and Phoebe Nicholls are perfect and awful as Anne's appearance-obsessed father and sister; Susan Fleetwood makes Lady Russell believably sympathetic without sacrificing her character as set forward in the book. As for Anne, Amanda Root will always be Anne Elliot for me. It is true that Rupert Penry-Jones, in last year's BBC remake, is the sexiest Captain Wentworth you'll ever see, but he comes across as romantic fantasy, whereas this version has Ciaran Hinds as the more believable, conflicted lover, vascillating between hope and disenchanted abdication.
The Quick and the Dead: (1995. dir: Sam Raimi) Q is hard. Does one write about Quick Change, the funniest of all clown-heist films? or Quadrophenia, a brilliant movie I watched over and over in youth that was weirdly formative for me? I decided on Raimi's joyfully violent homage to spaghetti westerns because it gets overlooked. It's not perfect. It's glib and overly clever sometimes, many characters are two-dimensional, the violence is absurdist. You might call it the Evil Dead of spaghetti westerns. But big joy it's got. Gene Hackman, as always, is scarily compelling as the bad-ass, and Sharon Stone commits absolutely as a tough she-gunslinger haunted by horrors from a past which she's come to avenge. It took me ten years to forgive her for Allan Quartermain and the Lost City of Gold (don't, for the love of God, see it), but this is the performance that won me. It's the first time I saw Russell Crowe; not only was he gorgeous but he still cared back then, hadn't been poisoned yet by his fast-approaching mondo-fame. The bottom line is that everyone's having so much damn fun making this film, including Raimi and the crew behind the camera, that you can't help but have fun watching it.
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