Screen Screed: Thoughts on Movies From a Lifelong Eater of Cinema

      The Coincidence       The China Syndrome premiered on March 16, 1979.  It deals with a potential nuclear meltdown at a nuclear power plant.  Jane Fonda's in it.  The nuclear power industry got into a tizzy about the film, calling it "sheer fiction."  Fonda was outspoken about her opposition to nuclear power.  Still, her costar, Michael Douglas, had produced the film with his production company, so the oppositional blame should've gone his way, too, but Jane Fonda's a woman; plus she has a reputation, since the Vietnam War years, for being a pain in the establishment's ass, although not so much since the 1970s.      The film, directed by James Bridges ( The Paper Chase , Urban Cowboy ), got boosted twelve days after its release by a real nuclear power plant accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania.  As it's written in Wikipedia:      "The accident began with failures in the non-nucle...

      Skipping Stones Across the Pacific      Documentaries don't always present reality as some stage observed in presumed total objectivity.  The documentarist has a point of view based on personal beliefs, thoughts, opinions held at the time of the film's creation.  Even in Direct Cinema, an objective style that shows its images and records its sounds without any apparent authorial intrusion, is made subjective by what the cameraperson aims the camera at.  Point of view is hard, maybe impossible, to escape.  Even a space probe sent to another planet, a robot explorer that loses operational touch with Earth-based communications and then takes a series of random images, can be regarded as non-objective since it was built by humans and sent into space by them.  Total objectivity implies a vast awareness attributable to God, perhaps, but even God, in the Old Testament for instance, is not objective, interfering in human affairs oft...

      Cell Phones, Western Sahara, a Cow Named GPS      The Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako's 2014 film Timbuktu deals with people of that city and its surroundings adjusting to life under occupation by the al-Qaeda-connected group Ansar Dine, which came into power there for a while in 2012.  As fundamentalist Muslims practicing Sharia law, Ansar Dine (with its black and white flag so similar to that of ISIS) bans music, long trousers, exposed female faces, football.  Their punishment of adultery is to bury the couple to their necks and then throw stones at their exposed heads.      The people of the city and surrounding countryside get on with their lives as best they can.  Some women openly defy the automatic rifle-toting men--a fish seller, told to put on gloves refuses, saying they can cut off her hands if they want to, but she's not going to wear gloves while cleaning fish; it isn't practical.     ...

      Everything's Fine Now      Having been through the turmoil and shocks myself, I can say with authority that John Cassavetes' 1974 film depicting mental illness and its effects on the family of the afflicted one is accurate to the point that in some scenes I felt sick watching it.       A Woman Under the Influence can be interpreted variously, depending on the experience-based viewpoints of viewers.  Because Mabel Longhetti (Gena Rowlands in the finest depiction of a mentally ill person I've ever seen) drinks alcohol frequently, some health professionals who specialize in substance abuse treatment might conclude her problem is based in alcoholism.  Others, like myself, will conclude she's mentally ill, suffering from schizophrenia (possibly) or a borderline personality disorder (more likely, but still, given the clues provided in the film, who knows?).  Early on she exhibits weird physical behaviors symptomatic of anti...

      The Means of Escape       Robert Bresson's 1956 film A Man Escaped ( Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ou Le vent souffle òu il veut ) is a suspense film of the highest order.  Based on a memoir by World War Two French Resistance fighter André Devigny, the film takes place mostly in a prison run by Germans in Lyon, part of Vichy France, but by then, 1943, the Germans had occupied this former section of France that had been run, after the 1940 Nazi conquest, by a puppet regime.      The film details in the minutest focused way, the persistent efforts of the prisoner (his name changed to Fontaine for the film) to escape first his cell, then make it over the inner wall, then the outer wall.  He thinks in terms of one thing at a time, helped here and there by other prisoners in their note-passing system, their possession of forbidden pencils, their brief verbal communications while they communally wash themselves.   ...

      Prelude      I had a bad cold during the week the Persian Gulf War started.  I spent the time reading Robert Fagles' new translation of Homer's The Iliad , a seminal poetic account of a long ago war fought in what is now western Turkey.  I had the thick library book open against my thighs as the skies over Baghdad brightened with anti-aircraft fire.  Air Forces of many nations pulverized Iraq for a month and a half.  The brief ground war to expel the Iraqi occupation forces from Kuwait demonstrated the impracticality of relying on belief in the strength of huge numbers of troops who then get challenged by better equipped, more mobile, and more professionally trained adversaries.  Kuwait's occupation by Iraq lasted half a year, but the aftereffects of those months are with us today in a region still blazing with metaphorical fires set by first world powers and lesser powers inconveniently located above vast amounts of oil. ...

      Hear No Evil      Cornell Woolrich's novel The Black Path of Fear from 1944 was adapted into the 1946 film The Chase , directed by Arthur D. Ripley, starring Robert Cummings, Steve Cochran, Peter Lorre and French actress Michèle Morgan.  The presence in the film of Lorre and Morgan points out the cultural benefit one nation may receive when another nation transforms into a totalitarian society.      Hollywood became the wartime home and workplace of numerous performers and film artists, a holding pool from the brain drain caused by Adolf Hitler's policies toward the arts.  Once war came, French and British film stars, directors, and composers crossed the Atlantic Ocean to work in a warmer (figuratively and literally) environment.  They brought with them original artistic ways of working and crafting a cinema that became, by war's end, a less light-hearted enterprise, generally, than Hollywood's wartime output of musi...

      Barefoot and Pregnant      Beverly and Ferd Sebastian, a wife/husband filmmaking duo of the 1970s and 1980s, made their first fictional feature, The Hitchhikers , in 1971.  The film fits within that era's B-movie supercluster of exploitation films and drive-in theater product.  Still, the movie, in an honest and expressive way, also possesses a poetic beauty, the filmmakers taking time to show landscapes, wildflowers, to depict images of early 1970s America with its truck stops, gas stations, back roads.  In those days, there was still a sense of the possibility of finding remote locations where no one could bother you, unless someone might accidentally arrive, as does Misty Rowe's character Maggie, a pregnant runaway teenager who's been raped by a man who picked her up hitchhiking.      She meets a man named Benson who gives her shelter at his spread, a rundown barn and some other buildings where he lives with four be...

      444 Miles From Madison to Dayton      In 1997 I went to see David Lynch's Lost Highway .  I didn't understand it, but I liked the performances by Robert Loggia and Bill Pullman.  It was also enjoyable watching Patricia Arquette and Natasha Gregson Wagner (Natalie Wood's daughter).  I was most impressed by the cinematography of Peter Deming.  I had never seen darkness used in such an expressive and "lit up" way.  The shot of Pullman walking down a black hallway in his house, away from the camera, looks as if he's walking into a Mark Rothko painting.      That special look of the film, along with Lynch's masterful use of sound, congeal with the strange dual plot dealing with a man, Fred Madison (Pullman in a great performance), sinking into a series of actions, most of them performed in a twilit state of mind, that surround him eventually with violence and the ghastly murder of his wife, Renee (Patricia Arquett...

      A Melodramatic Noir Ghost Story       The Amazing Mr. X , directed by Bernard Vorhaus,   drew my attention before seeing it because of the presence of Lynn Bari in the cast.  A dark-haired beauty with prominent cheekbones and a sultry low- to medium-range voice, I watch her films whenever I get the chance.  She's not famous, like Jennifer Jones (whom she resembles), nor is she a great actress, but in China Girl from 1942 she does a scene with George Montgomery that counts as one of the sexiest performances I've ever seen, the two of them flirting with each other in a hotel bar, then going to his room for an obvious follow-up.  That one scene illustrates my own particular taste for specific moments (sexy or not) in old Hollywood films; how I enjoy certain scenes but find the frequent "happy ending" solutions to be off-putting in terms of realism.      The happy ending following a dramatic premise can be termed "m...

      A Vision Before Death      Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1966 allegorical film, Uccellacci e uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows ), presents the difficulty of interpreting an enormous range of ideas from the mind of a filmmaker who simultaneously displayed in his films a gift for visual poetry and a direct polemical approach, the two methods merging in a dialectical framework both challenging to mind and emotions.  In Hawks and Sparrows , this synthesis produces an overall structure that makes the film both intellectually vibrant but also hard to fathom, at least after one viewing.      Still, even as I didn't understand much of it, I found the situations and performances enjoyable to watch; the director's eye, too, performs with an effort towards making the world look fascinating, as in every other Pasolini film.  Some of his movies depict as backgrounds what could be called the Cinema of Rundown Locations.  Junk heaps, shacks, th...