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

     Guest      Today, in honor of the 124th anniversary of Russian film director Abram Room's birth, I review his 1927 domestic comedy, Bed and Sofa .  It's the story of a Moscow married couple, Kolia (Nikolai Batalov) and Liuda (Lyudmila Semyonova), living in their one room apartment with a white-footed cat.  They sleep together on a narrow bed.  There's also a sofa, a dining table, cabinets, a kitchen space, and street level windows.  Shadows of passing legs animate the apartment's walls.  Kolia, a construction worker, has a headstrong personality; he's proud of his muscles and grins often.  Liuda, worn out from housework and other dull routines, becomes enlivened by the arrival of Volodia (Vladimir Fogel), a printer and war comrade of Kolia, who invites Volodia to stay in the apartment.  He sleeps on the sofa and immediately finds Liuda nice to look at.      Kolia gets a one month construction assignm...

      Shrooms       Matango , from 1963, was directed by Ishiro Honda, who made many Godzilla films and others in the monster genre.  The American title, Attack of the Mushroom People , gets the climactic events right, but trivializes the overall artistry of a widescreen color film made to frighten and unsettle the viewer.  Dealing with seven people of varying backgrounds on a sailboat caught fatefully in a bad storm, the film shows a group trying to survive on a seemingly deserted island.      They find a wrecked ship washed onto the shore, an oceanographic vessel with missing crew.  The vanished crew were apparently engaged in radiation experiments on indigent organisms.  Opening a big container marked MATANGO, the sailboat group finds a huge mutated mushroom.  Inland, they discover fungi in abundance, but the skipper warns them not to eat it.  They clean up part of the wrecked ship to live there until rescu...

      The Greater Agenda of That Which Creeps      I wasn't high when I watched Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell , but at times I felt like I was.  A Japanese horror film from 1968, the movie seems, at first, like a typical monster movie with no significant depth.  Directed by Hajime Sato, the film finds time for UFOs, alien possession, a passenger liner crash, interpersonal dynamics of the crash survivors, marital woes of an arms dealer's wife, vampirism, the underhandedness of a scummy politician, hypnosis, the Vietnam War, a bomb threat, a political assassin, and apocalypse.      After the crash, the assassin becomes the aliens' first victim, drawing him to their ship, where they split open his forehead to allow the entrance of a metallic blue ooze which proceeds to guide his subsequent actions.  The forehead wound, a gash extending from his hairline to the middle of his nose, resembles a vulva.  The entry of the alie...

      A College Boy's Disgrace      It's been a long while since I viewed a never-before-seen-by-me Alfred Hitchcock film.  I had seen forty-two of his feature films before I watched the forty-third, Downhill , a British silent from 1927.  This was his fifth film.  Due to the title I assumed it had something to do with skiing.  Instead, it's about a young university man named Roddy (Ivor Novello) who's aces in his class, popular and well-liked by his teachers and the Head Master.  He likes a woman who works in a shop.  He brings his best friend to the shop.  They both dance with her, Roddy kisses her, the friend wants her, too.  Later, the friend goes there and scores with her.  She takes her problem, or what she says is her problem (pregnancy, if she's telling the truth, for these students have parents with piles of money) to the Head Master.  She identifies Roddy, who had rebuffed her, as the culprit, w...

      The Last       36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup , Jacques Rivette's final film, from 2009, came out in the U.S. as Around a Small Mountain , which title makes sense only as it pertains to the circus troupe's traveling shows in the vicinity of Pic Saint-Loup (elevation 2,159 feet) in the Massif Central in southern France.      Rivette's geographical title, and the director coming to rest for his last movie on a specific place (except for two scenes taking place in Paris), doesn't reveal anything specific in relation to the movie's story.  It could've taken place anywhere in France, or in many other countries.  Also, there aren't thirty-six locations from which we see Pic Saint-Loup, although, since I've seen the film just once and it didn't occur to me to count the number of times the mountain is shown, it could be that Rivette shows it thirty-six times.      The number thirty-six, like the use of other numbers in ...

      Commercialism          When Steven Soderbergh accepted the Palme d'Or at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival for his brilliant debut, sex, lies, and videotape , he was twenty-six, a year older than Orson Welles when the latter made Citizen Kane .  Soderbergh's youth, combined with the verve and original cinematic technique of his first film, was remarked on obliquely by himself as he stood on the stage at Cannes, saying, "It's all downhill from here."      Having hit a home run as an unknown, expectations for Soderbergh's work have always been high.  I've never failed to be impressed by his technique, while early on, his second and third films, Kafka and King of the Hill , continued the originality and experimentation of his debut.  His fourth film, The   Underneath , a remake of a much better 1940s heist picture with Burt Lancaster and Yvonne de Carlo, has the Soderbergh style, but lacks depth, a problem sh...

      A Powerful First Scene, and Then...      John Reinhardt's For You I Die (1947) starts out strong, ends melodramatically, and in between is a so-so low budget film of the noir variety.      Two escaped convicts, Matt Gruber (Don Harvey) and Johnny Coulter (Paul Langton) rob a gas station.  Gruber had killed a prison guard, forcing Coulter, who happened to be a bystander, to accompany him in his escape.  Coulter had only one year left in prison.  He's embittered by Gruber's recklessness.  The first scene shows them hiding in a storm drain while police search nearby.  Once the heat passes, Gruber's overbearing violent personality comes into focus.  He browbeats Coulter, who wants to give himself up.      The camera's positioned inside the storm drain looking out, the two men silhouetted as they argue.  The circularity of the drain's opening surrounds them with darkness and gloom; a pla...

      Radical Cinema 1967, Part Two      Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise  ( The Chinese ) first came to my eyes in a book, Film: Encounter .  A large format book shaped like a movie screen, the numerous black and white stills from a variety of mostly European films, with spare bits of text throughout, illustrate in frozen form ideas from cinema.  One shot from La Chinoise  I remember from the book, which I checked out from my university library several times, shows Juliet Berto (playing the working class member of the film's small left wing study group) wearing a Vietnamese peasant hat and eating with chopsticks, while two model fighter planes dangle on wires before her.  Like many images in the book, it's an arresting image that suggests many things while also existing out of context from the film itself.      Because I didn't know what the film was about, I imagined mainly that this was an image created by a direct...

      Hanging On      Honoré de Balzac's 1833 novel Eugenie Grandet  was adapted into a pretty good 1921 film, The Conquering Power , directed by Rex Ingram and starring Rudolph Valentino.  I've become fascinated with Valentino's screen presence, which explains why this is the third film I've reviewed starring "the Latin Lover."      Made before The Sheik , the film doesn't feature Valentino as the main character; rather, he's tertiary behind Eugenie Grandet (Alice Terry) and her father, Pere Grandet (Ralph Lewis).  As Pere Grandet's nephew, Charles, Valentino plays the privileged son of a wealthy businessman who loses his fortune "speculating" on the stock market.  The father sends Charles to live with his uncle, a rich man who hoards his wealth in the form of gold coins.  Pere Grandet has a chateau where he could live with his wife and daughter, but he prefers to inhabit a spacious but shabby house, with just ...

      The Hooded One       Cobra from 1925 is Rudolph Valentino's penultimate film.  A melodramatic story of a friendship between two men and the women who keep distracting Count Rodrigo Torriani (Valentino), an Italian nobleman without money who by chance gets to know an American antiques dealer, Jack Dorning (Casson Ferguson).  Dorning, perceiving Rodrigo's knowledge of Italian antiques (which he seems to have been selling off from his ancestral home to make ends meet), invites him to join his prestigious firm in New York.  Rodrigo's chronic woman trouble inspires him to want to make a new start.  He apparently doesn't realize that the New York metropolis is filled with women.      Right away he's trying to score with Dorning's secretary, Mary Drake (Gertrude Olmstead), a young woman attracted to Dorning.  After a long while she turns her sights on Rodrigo; they enjoy a lot of flirtation together, but in the bac...

      Radical Cinema 1967, Part One       In a three part series, I seek to explore the trio of Jean-Luc Godard's feature films released in 1967: 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her , La Chinoise , and Weekend .  I relate them first by the simple fact that they were released the same year, a time prior to the revolutionary events of 1968, when Godard, in May of that year during France's general strike, stepped onto a new path in his films, one stripped down, overtly political to the extreme, burying his identity in a collective filmmaking entity, the Dziga Vertov Group.      Second, the three films of 1967 share the trait of not conforming to accepted norms of cinema from that period, when in America, for example, John Wayne's well-meaning but obtuse  The Green Berets passed as a serious film concerned with the Vietnam War.  Godard's vision of Vietnam, at the same time, represents a realistic presentation through a few still m...

      Valentino Smoking a Cigarette      George Melford's The Sheik , from 1921, is still famous because of its star's breakout eponymous role.  Rudolph Valentino, then twenty-six years old, appeared in twenty-six feature films prior to The Sheik under variations of the name he finally became known by.  His original name, Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Pierre Filbert Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antonguella, suggests the combination of maternal French and paternal Italian parentage hinted at in The Sheik , when it's revealed that his character, Ahmed Ben Hassan, is actually half-English, half-Spanish, raised by an Arab nobleman.      I've known of Valentino most of my life; he's one of those film performers whose fame radiates from his work, to the extent that one can know a story or two about them without ever having seen their movies.  Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Grace Kelly and Elvis Presley fit this tiny category of actors and...