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

      Rainwater Falling From a Gutter      Yesterday, inspired by efforts of the two Koreas to find common ground through real diplomacy, in spite of the current erratic policy and traditionally brutal heavy-handedness of the United States toward the peninsula it blasted to smithereens in the 1950s, I watched a South Korean film.       Mandala , directed by Im Kwon-taek, from 1981, is a beautiful widescreen film about two wandering Buddhist monks in modern Korea.  One of them, Pobun, is young and ascetic, tormented by a sad childhood and by a past crime he committed, raping a young woman who happens to also be an occasional love interest of the older monk, Jasin.  The two wander, as Jasin puts it, in "meditation through traveling."        For Jasin, a heavy drinker, the Buddha is in the alcohol bottle, not just in the temple.  His method is to conquer lust, for example, by having sex.  Conquering...

      Whatever Happened To __________?      Ever since the 1980s when I read Enzo Siciliano's Pasolini: A Biography , I've wanted to see the director's films, coming across them haphazardly over the next three decades, with one of them, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom , his final film released soon before his murder (or assassination?), standing out as a work I felt misgivings about watching, based upon what I'd read in Siciliano's book.      Earlier this year, in a used book and other media store, I found a Criterion Collection copy of Salò for $14.95 plus tax, a bargain for a two disc set in perfect condition, with the film, uncut and beautifully restored, and a disc of extra material, plus a thick little book containing six essays, film stills, and excerpts from a contemporary diary kept by a journalist observing the film's production in 1975.  A boxed little treasure containing a movie described by 1970s critics as "monstrous," a...

     Crammed       The Devil Is a Woman (1935, directed by Josef von Sternberg and starring Marlene Dietrich) looks typical of the director's previous Hollywood films, like The Scarlet Empress and Shanghai Express .  Its theme, of a man obsessed with a woman who just uses him, can be seen with greater effect in von Sternberg's German language The Blue Angel , also starring Dietrich.  Still, The Devil Is a Woman has its moments, especially those highlighting Dietrich's beauty.  I've never seen her more luminous or gorgeous than in this film.  Von Sternberg did the cinematography, and also put his own relationship with Dietrich into the story.      They'd had an intimate connection but that was over with by the time of this film.  The first half shows a series of flashbacks, as a Spanish officer (played by Lionel Atwill) relates the story of his painful and chaotic relationship with Concha (Dietrich), a singer. ...

      This Cinema and That Cinema        In 1896, Georges Méliès, a magician, saw a program of the early films of the Lumière brothers.  He asked one of them if he could purchase one of their cameras, a dual use machine featuring a projector.  Lumière declined, even refusing a doubled offer.  He said that cinema had no future (!).  The Lumière brothers photographed reality as it happened, their film titles indicating this style: The Gardener , Fishing for Goldfish , Jumping Onto the Blanket , Horse Trick Riders , among others.  Méliès, undeterred, made his own camera, built his own studio, and began making films, focusing on manufactured, precisely choreographed and stylized fantasies, like, Robbing Cleopatra's Tomb , The Mysterious Knight , The Rajah's Dream , and his most famous film, A Trip to the Moon .  Most of his films are lost because near the end of his life in 1938, forgotten like many early cinema pioneers...

      Something So Easily Burned Can Cause a Lot of Trouble      Cold War espionage cinema amounts to a genre by itself.  All English language films I've seen in this area present the viewpoint of "the West" versus the Soviet Union and/or the People's Republic of China, mostly the former.   The Cape Town Affair (1967), shot on location in Cape Town, South Africa, has one scene featuring an apparent Chinese agent shopping for the film's McGuffin, a three or four inch strip of microfilm with coded language consisting of seemingly random numbers and letters.      This microfilm is being delivered in an envelope inside Jacqueline Bisset's purse as she takes a double decker bus back to her flat where she'll meet with a Communist shit named Joey (John Whiteley).  They're lovers, apparently, at least as a matter of convenience.  James Brolin is a pickpocket who happens to open her purse and snatch the microfilm, not knowing w...

      The Hidden Torpedo       The Lady Has Plans , from 1942, takes place in neutral Portugal.  Sidney Lanfield ( The Hound of the Baskervilles , You'll Never Get Rich ) directed this espionage comedy.  Although there's a murder in the first scene, the film's lightheartedness reflects the American cinematic attitude toward the war in Europe, before Pearl Harbor.  The film's release in January of 1942 indicates it was made prior to Hollywood's commitment to make films in line with War Department thinking.  The bias leans away from Nazi Germany, of course, and towards Britain, as befits contemporary American assistance to the latter nation.      The Germans are depicted as health conscious, running a large spa in Lisbon, the rooms filled with men bathing, walking about in shorts, as if Lanfield and his costume designer, Edith Head, were mimicking Leni Riefenstahl's epic to the Aryan body type, Olympia .   ...