I didn’t expect much from a film approaching 70 years old, but I was wrong. So wrong. Deceptively simple, beautiful, and easy, The Bicycle Thief strikes a universal chord that resonates today as much as it must have when it was originally released. Bravo!
The plot is practically nothing: a down-and-out bricklayer (Lamberto Maggiorani) gets lucky and snags a job hanging posters advertising movies (Rita Hayworth, specifically) in Rome. He needs a bicycle to do the job, and his bike is stolen on his first day of work. The impact is devastating: he can’t do the job without a bike, which means his family goes hungry. So, he enlists his son (Enzo Staiola) and neighbors to track it down. His desperation is palpable, and it gets all the more intense with each unsuccessful attempt at finding his bike. A series of events leads him to the thief (Vittorio Antonucci), culminating in a confrontation that does not go as expected. There’s a moral to the story, and it hits hard.
I’m blown away by the psychology here: Vittorio de Sica’s statement on human nature is simple yet eloquent and totally spot on. The Bicycle Thief is a fine example of cinema, Italian or otherwise, at its best.
I’m probably in the minority when I say that I found Vertigo stupid. The story, complicated and intricate as it is, takes a long time to get going; once it does, it’s so fanciful that it’s not believable. The movie is longer than it needs to be. Plus, the ending—I can only assume it’s supposed to be dramatic and impactful—comes off as silly; in fact, Aaron and I turned to each other at the same time and rolled our eyes.
All of this said, it doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the film. I did, actually—very much. There’s a lot to like here.
James Stewart is Scottie Ferguson, a cop forced to sit on the sidelines after a bout with vertigo while chasing a criminal across a bunch of rooftops nearly kills him. A wealthy former classmate, Galvin Elster (Tom Helmore), seeks him out and convinces him to act as a personal investigator; it seems Galvin’s wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak), is possessed by her dead Mexican grandmother. She’s hot (even if she’s not one bit Mexican), and Scottie falls for her. Hard. It’s not long before he’s personally involved, wandering through northern California in her car with her. She opens up to him, he takes the bait, and he loses her. Or so it appears.
Vertigo is certainly a beautiful looking film. The interior sets are gorgeous. The exterior shots of late 1950s San Francisco are stunning, and considering how the city would change a decade later makes them all the more precious. The wardrobe choices are classic yet snappy. The restored version I saw was crisp and vivd. An ominous yet mesmerizing score by Bernard Herrmann takes Vertigo to an even higher place—no pun intended.
Being an Alfred Hitchcock film, there’s more to Vertigo than meets the eye. Symbolism is all over: tunnels, flowers, birds, towers, stairs, heights, the color green. It’s not hard to find articles, scholarly and not, that analyze the many themes here: desire, death, reality, appearances, power, the past, the damsel in distress. All this aside, I can sum up the message I got out of Vertigo in five words: “don’t think with your dick.” The interactions between Scotty and both Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) and Madeleine are sexually charged and tinged with danger. Vertigo is hypnotic, mysterious, psychological, and suspenseful even if it’s not exactly what I would call a thriller.
It takes some work to get through, but Vertigo ultimately proves to be a treat despite its flaws. After almost 60 years, it’s still breathtaking and weird. It’s easy to see why at least one so-called authority named it “the greatest film of all time” (http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-19078948). Hitchcock influenced many, but Vertigo immediately called to my mind David Lynch; I see traces of it throughout his work, and its influence on him specifically is undeniable.
Poor Marthy “Marky” Jane (Shirley Temple)—she’s five years old and has no idea what she’s just gotten into. For what seemed a sure bet on a horse race, her father (Edward Earle) leaves her as collateral—a “marker”—with a group of gangsters. He loses his bet and doesn’t come back, leaving cute little Marky, who has a thing for King Arthur, in the hands of Sorrowful Jones (Adolphe Menjou), a bookie, who plans to drop her off at the nearest police station. When Marky serves as an unwitting vehicle to a scam involving the horse of ringleader Big Steve (Adolphe Menjou), Sorrowful has no choice but to keep her around. He enlists the assistance of fellow hoods Regret (Lynne Overman), Sore Toe (Warren Hymer), Benny (Sam Hardy), Canvas Back (John Kelly), and Big Steve’s girlfirend, sassy jazz singer Bangles Carson (Dorothy Dell), in caring for the girl.
Big shock: Marky grows on all of them, softening their hard, criminal hearts with her sweetness and light. Sorrowful reads Marky bedtime stories, pays for a new wardrobe for her that Bangles picks out, and even teaches her how to pray. Bangles sings a duet with Marky—a great number called “Laugh, You Son of a Gun”— and tucks her in at night. Sadly, their rough edges and shady ways soon rub off on Marky, turning her into a “bad girl.” How can they save her innocence?
Little Miss Marker was Temple’s first starring role in a major motion picture, and it was a hit. Despite its dips into heavy handed morality, it’s a cute story that kept me engaged. It’s gritty, bawdy, and maintains a kind of cynical comedy that ultimately pulls at the heartstrings. Translation: it gets sappy at the end. Little Miss Marker reflects its time: it feels like a Prohibition/Depression Era film, which it is (Prohibition ended the year before). Marky is an orphan in the big city, and she works her cuteness to get her from rags to comfort if not necessarily riches. The accents are affected in that overdone, early “talkies” way. Crime and sex are part of the story, and I had the fortune to see it as part of a lecture series during which it was pointed out that the film is rife with undertones of pedophilia. Um, hello: Temple runs around in tiny shorts that nearly expose her cooter, she climbs all over the men and talks to them in a weird manipulative way, and in one scene she coyly removes her underwear beneath a bathrobe in front of Sorrowful before slipping into his bed, leaving him to sleep alone on a chair—with a bad case of blue balls, no doubt. Creepy!
I never heard of the Dead End Kids until I saw this film. Long before West Side Story and The Outsiders, the Dead End Kids served as a Depression Era vehicle for social commentary on American urban life. Living in tenements along the East River as the moneyed started to convert Manhattan’s slums into upscale properties, the Dead End Kids demonstrated some of the pains of change and the kinds of decisions necessary to avoid going down a road to ruin (i.e., a life of crime). The ensemble held on in different incarnations well past its shelf life until the late 1950s, when the actors were in their mid-30s and had become more of a comedy act.
Adapted from Sidney Kingsley’s successful 1935 play, Dead End is the one that started it all. It goes through a day in the life of a street “gang” led by Tommy Gordon (Billy Halop). The kids are rough around the edges and have names like Dippy (Huntz Hall), Spit (Leo Gorcey), and T.B. (Gabriel Dell). They openly mock their rich neighbors across the street in the co-op that abuts the slum (the windowless door to the co-op clearly states “service entrance”), steal, fight, play cards, shine shoes, and spend a lot of time swiming in the river at the end of the block. A slick neighborhood expat gangster, “Baby Face” Martin (a young Humphrey Bogart), who apparently made it as a hit man elsewhere, returns with his thug, Hunk (Allen Jenkins). No one, not even his low-talking mother (Minor Watson), wants him around. Meanwhile, Tommy’s sister, Drina (Sylvia Sidney), a mother figure who’s off work striking for better wages, is trying her best to keep Tommy on the right path. She mentions a few times that the extra $3.50 a week (!) she’s fighting for would get them to a better place. She’s all into Dave (Joel McCrea), an unemployed architect with his eye on a rich girl (Wendy Barrie) who lives in the co-op.
Loaded with subplots, the story is okay even with its old school melodrama. Some of the performances—specifically Bogart, Sidney, McCrea, and Watson—are decent. The surreptitious way syphilis is slipped into the story is interesting. Otherwise, Dead End has issues. It may have been edgy in the ’30s, but in comtemporary eyes it reads as silly, even campy. The set is too tidy and ordered to be a real street. The kids’ exaggerated fake Archie Bunker accents get annoying after awhile—I expected to hear the word “murdalize” at many points (I didn’t). The story is moralistic in an unsophisticated way that even the ABC Afterschool Special never was. Still, Dead End depicts a world without a middle class and criticizes gentrification, points that ring familiar today. I didn’t hate Dead End, but it’s completely forgettable.
Terrible doesn’t even begin to describe The Mask: the acting, the dialogue, the plot, the sets, the “special” effects—they’re all so wonderfully cheap and dippy in a way that screams “atomic age.” A pervading sense of overblown naive paranoia and a subtext of sexual transgression and drug abuse add to the fun. I loved The Mask for what it is—cinematic junk food.
Mild-mannered Dr. Alan Barnes (Paul Stevens), a psychiatrist, experiments with an ancient tribal mask that a patient (Martin Lavut) warned him about. Barnes quickly falls under the spell of the mask—which looks a lot like a mosaic disco ball version of C-3PO—and morphs into a monster as he sinks into a subconscious world of horror, much to the dismay of his fiancé, Pamela (Claudette Nevins), and his mentor, Professor Quincy (Norman Ettinger). Lieutenant Martin (Bill Walker), hot on the trail of a homicide, has a hunch that the mask is a big clue to the mystery. Can anyone save Barnes before it’s too late?
The mask world, you see, is in 3D. When Barnes submits to his jones for the mask, a commanding offscreen voice bellows, “PUT THE MASK ON NOW!” This little device serves two purposes: it demonstrates the powerlessness of Barnes over the mask, but it also prompts viewers to put on 3D glasses—which were provided:
With the 3D glasses, we get to see what Barnes sees—oooh! The mask world manages to cram every single horror movie dream sequence cliché into each scene—fog, eyeballs, skulls, snakes, fire, spiders, pyres, hands reaching out of the screen, it’s all there. Despite the potential for eyerolling—and there’s a ton—the mask world is trippy and cool even with its pedestrian take on horror. The restored version I saw had a sharp, crisp look. The 3D effect worked surprisingly well. Ed Wood might have envied this one.
If you were to pull out the chapters on modernism from an art history textbook and shuffle them together with Confidential magazine, the result no doubt would look a lot like Lisa Immordino Vreeman’s Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict. Guggenheim led a colorful life—literally and figuratively—filled with art, sex, and a fair amount of darkness.
With audio from a tape recorded interview—Guggenheim’s last—presumed lost until found in a basement during the making of this film, Guggenheim herself in her clipped, matter-of-fact way discusses her childhood, her time in Paris during the 1920s, her abusive marriage to Laurence Vail that ended in divorce after seven years, her relationship with her two children, her sex life, and her entry into the art world. She hung out with the likes of Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, and Gertrude Stein. She tricked with, inter alia, Marcel Duchamp, John Holms (not a porn star), Samuel Beckett, and Max Ernst (to whom she was married for a short time). She was among the first to show many artists, including Vasily Kandinsky, Mark Rothko, Robert de Niro, Sr. (father of the actor), Arshile Gorky, and Jackson Pollock, whose “discovery” she was most proud to claim.
For all her antics, though, Guggenheim’s life was not all fun and games. Her father went down with the Titanic when she was 13 years old. Vail “hit” her. Holms, who she said was the love of her life (despite the fact that he was married), died after a routine hand surgery. She had seven abortions. She wound up estranged from her son, Sinbad, and her daughter, Pagette, died under mysterious circumstances at age 40. To top it all off, she had a nose job that didn’t turn out right; she never fixed it because the experience was too physically painful.
Immordino Vreeman does an excellent job balancing Guggenheim’s considerable achievements with salacious details of her life, giving just enough to keep us tuned in. The gossip doesn’t overshadow the fact that Guggenheim, however flawed, was a fascinating woman way ahead of her time. Illuminating, fun, and never a dull moment, I enjoyed Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict very much.
“Rosenwald school” is a curious name that sounds like the Jewish equivalent of a Catholic Magdalene home, where unmarried pregnant girls of yore were tucked away to do laundry for nuns until they had their babies. It’s not; it was actually a number of schools for black children built in the American South during the early 20th Century. I never heard of these or the man whose name they bear, Julius Rosenwald. Biographer Aviva Kempner tells his story in a decidedly straightforward manner through photos, narration, clips, and interviews with descendants, historians, and Rosenwald school alums like Maya Angelou and Congressman John Lewis. At the end, we even hear from Rosenwald himself.
Born in Springfield, Illinois, where he lived across the street from the Lincoln home, Rosenwald—who considered himself “a member of a despised minority”—first made a name selling men’s clothes with his cousin. A series of fortuitous events resulted in a partnership with Sears Roebuck in Chicago in 1895. He got rich creating the Sears catalog, the Amazon of a hundred years ago, as one interviewee calls it. Motivated by a number of things—his friendship with Booker T. Washington, Chicago Sinai congregation rabbi Emil G. Hirsch, the Jewish concept of tikkun olam (“repair the world”), Washington’s Up From Slavery and William Henry Baldwin, Jr.’s An American Citizen, and a disturbing similarity between the persecution of blacks in the States, particularly the South, and that of Jews in Russia—he started a fund to build schools where the government apparently wouldn’t. He also offered money to build YMCAs in various cities.
Rosenwald’s funding scheme was unique: he paid a third of the cost, with the rest of the funding to be provided (or raised) by the community where the school or YMCA would be built. It worked, and more than 5,000 schools were built. Rosenwald didn’t stop there: he also contributed to housing in Chicago, established the Museum of Science and Industry, and set up a fund for artists and intellectuals. Recipients were in diverse disciplines and included Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Katherine Dunham, Gordon Parks, Jacob Lawrence, Dr. Charles Drew, and even Woody Guthrie. Rosenwald is intriguing not just for its named subject but also for the subjects it gets into on the side: American civil rights, art, and Chicago history.
On paper, The Danish Girl has everything going for it: a sensationalist plot with real-life characters, weighty and timely subject matter, pretty scenery, nifty period clothes, a love story, and a nice dose of tragedy. Visually, it’s a beautiful film: cinematographer Danny Cohen gives it the soft, muted look of an impressionist painting; the interiors are as alluring as the exterior shots. The setting—the early 20th Century art scene in Copenhagen and Paris—evokes a sense of glamor and romance. The acting is okay for the most part, but Alicia Vikander is outstanding. Still, the sum here is no greater than its parts.
Based on David Ebershoff’s novel based on the life of Dutch artist Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne), the first known person to undergo sex reassignment surgery, and his wife, Gerda Gottlieb (Vikander), The Danish Girl is a good story even if it isn’t historically accurate. One day, Gottlieb asks Wegener to stand in for her model so she can finish a painting; she gives him a pair of panty hose, and he is immediately cozy in them. Thus begins Wegener’s road to becoming “Lili,” as christened by the couple’s friend, Ulla (Amber Heard). Lili becomes Gottlieb’s muse, showing up in her paintings. They sell. Lili accompanies Gottlieb to a ball as Wegener’s “cousin,” and everyone is fooled. Wasn’t that easy, isn’t she pretty in pink?
The Danish Girl is fictionalized, and as a result liberties are taken for time constraints, continuity, and drama. I get that. Nonetheless, this film doesn’t come off as genuine because it oversimplifies and sanitizes the issues it seems to want to bring to light and then gives them superficial treatment. Lili’s transition is too quick, and her adjustment—touched on but not explored—is seamless for today let alone 1926. Redmayne’s portrayal of Lili is silly: he bats his eyelashes and caresses his frocks with all the campy drama Johnny Depp mustered up wearing an angora sweater in Ed Wood.Lili looks like Molly Ringwald, right down to her stylish scarves—the real Lili looked like Oscar Wilde in a dress. Wegener and Gottlieb were more complicated and had a more complex and unconventional relationship. The truth here is so condensed and whitewashed that this might as well be a fairy tale.
The Danish Girl might make you cry, but it’s just not convincing even within the confines of a two-hour film. Too bad, because it could’ve been much more.
Barcelona, one of my favorite cities, owes much of its color to Antoni Gaudí, whose personal stamp is all over it. With Antonio Gaudí [アントニー・ガウディー], Hiroshi Teshigahara directs a virtual tour of Gaudí’s major and not so major works, getting close up and even inside a few spots one otherwise might never see.
Antonio Gaudí is pretty, artful, perhaps even poetic; but it’s boring. Teshigahara offers no commentary or background on anything other than—surprise!—La Basílica de la Sagrada Família; even then, the narration is two minutes long, if that. A 72-minute moving postcard, Antonio Gaudí amounts to nothing more than an educational film or a tourism video. I’d rather see Gaudí’s work in person.
Of several celebrity biography documentaries I’ve seen this year, two stand out: Amy (as in Winehouse) and Janis: Little Girl Blue. Interestingly, both performers had similar personalities, made similar music, and traveled similar roads that ended early (at the same age, no less). Both biographies also present their subjects in an imperfect albeit human light.
Narrated by Cat Power, director Amy Berg lets Joplin tell her own story through letters she wrote to her family after leaving Texas for San Francisco in the early Sixties. Interviews with her sister, former band mates, and even Dick Cavett, who famously discussed Joplin’s upcoming ten-year high school reunion on his show less than two months before her death (and who curiously disclosed in his interview for this film that he “may or may not” have been intimate with her), round out her story. What emerges is an ambitious outcast searching for love and acceptance. Two anecdotes are particularly telling and disturbing: a fraternity voted Joplin “ugliest man on campus” during her short tenure at the University of Texas at Austin during the fall of 1962, and footage from her aforementioned ten-year reunion suggests that her old classmates ignored her when she showed up. Weird, considering she was already famous by then. Janis: Little Girl Blue shows a vulnerable side of Joplin that I didn’t know she had.
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