Showing posts with label The Third Man. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Third Man. Show all posts

Monday 30 September 2019

Musings after re-watching The Third Man (1949)

Musings after re-watching The Third Man (1949)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


29 September

Musings after re-watching The Third Man (1949)








Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Tuesday 25 March 2014

Via Tasso : No torture for you, just execution…

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


25 March

This is a review of Roma, città aperta (Rome, open city) (1945)

This film has several things in common with both The Third Man (1949) and A Canterbury Tale (1944), in being in black and white, made shortly after (even during, in the case of Powell and Pressburger’s feature) the Second World War, and making a feature of the bombed city, as well as the fact that two cities are spiritual homes of Christian leaders. This observation is made not to confine the film to its epoch*, but to recognize that VE Day and The Allied liberation naturally led film-makers to dwell on the preceding five years, what had been lost, and at what cost regained, and to respond in ways that have gained credit for all three productions.



At the start, the title Roma città aperta is rendered in black capitals for ‘Roma’, on which the other two words are overlaid in white lower case, with a panorama behind : quite striking, in the ways that this film – not just visually – is throughout. Compare this with August : Osage County, where the focus on faces seems to be all over the place, and here the effects are subtle, gently putting Francini (Marcello Pagliero) into softer focus as if to give him a mystique, even sanctitude, as a member of the resistance : one almost feels that director of photography Ubaldo Urata would be taking Adriano Goldman, that of Streep’s film, aside, and telling him a few things, explaining how a film should look.

That aside, no wonder that Martin Scorsese recently listed Roma, città aperta as one of his 85 top films, for it is crisp, clear, and certain as to what it achieves, even if, as an audience, we have to work quite hard, at times, to keep up. In honesty, though the restoration looks grand, the lack, particularly towards the beginning, of subtitles for the German speech makes for difficulty.

(For, although one can infer, for example, from the direction in which the SS goons are sent what their orders have been when they are sent to search a building, the information in the other dialogue at that time is only available to those with a grasp of and ear for the language, which does not help. On another level, for anyone with any Italian, the general lack of synchronization between lips and speech is tiresome, because the film looks as if it has been dubbed, and one also does not have the immediate cue of a mouth moving to be sure who is speaking when it could be one of three men in a dark scene.)



We see the occupying German forces determining to divide Rome up into sectors for the purposes of carrying out searches more efficiently, we hear them grandly declare their ‘rights’ as occupiers, and we see them home in on Manfredi. Is this the meaning of città aperta (‘open city’), rather than some positive meaning (although, of course, we hear mention of Cassino, and we know the course of history) ?

Or does the significance lie in the sacrifices that we see made, by those captured, not to betray their comrades in the resistance to the arch Nazi, Major Bergmann (Harry Feist), who seems rabidly adherent to the idea of a master race**, and thereby to fight for the freedom of the city ? For we see a convoy, which is transporting prisoners, attacked and they are freed, and the film places at its centre the values of trust and protecting others, when, doubtless unfairly, Italian combatants have been given a reputation for cowardice, and the resistance in other countries has been given a much higher profile.

Aldo Fabrizi, as Don Pietro, is unassumingly at the centre of the film, but we have no appreciation of his eventual role when Pina (short for Giuseppina, played by Anna Magnani) sends her son Piccolo Marcello (Vito Annichiarico) to fetch him early on. As the Germans were not the ultimate victors in Europe, the film can, of course, make the locals knowing and skilled in their subversion of the activities of the occupiers. It appears (from what
Wikipedia
says) that the reason for the film was, in part, that a wealthy, elderly lady initially wanted to finance documentaries, first about Fabrizi’s character, and then about Roman children who had engaged in combat against the Germans : Rossellini had already wanted Fabrizi to be the priest, and Federico Fellini and Sergio Amidei suggested a feature film to cover the two subjects.

That
Wikipedia item
, however, goes on to quote Rossellini as saying that it is A film about fear, the fear felt by all of us but by me in particular. I too had to go into hiding. I too was on the run. I had friends who were captured and killed. As portrayed, though the struggle is of a deadly nature and we see death, the zeal of Major Bergmann is amusingly undermined by one of his junior officers, Captain Hartmann (Joop von Hulzen), who is (by his own admission) the worse for drink, and who reports experiences with patriots in France that cast doubt on Bergmann’s faith in his powers of extracting information by interrogation and torture.

A sybaritic and, despite her apparent sympathy, even more ruthless figure is that of Ingrid (Giovanna Galletti), who would not be out of place as a Bond henchman (or even villain), in whom and whose environs Amidei (with the collaboration of Rossellini and Fellini) evokes the feeling of The Weimar Republic that we get from Christopher Isherwood via Cabaret (1972). Against such as Bermann and she, Pina and Don Pietro shine, which, despite our knowing that it is an artificial distinction, does not lessen the power of the story.

With a vibrant score by Renzo Rossellini, and its evocative camerawork, the tension that there is in this film is palpable. With the moral argument that the invaders invoke being against history, the resultant way in which courage and resignation can be shown on the part of those fighting back is the stronger : for some reason, between 1951 and 1960, the film was banned in the former West Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland).


End-notes

* Another example is La Bataille du Rail (1946).

** Some critics, though, seem not to have been kind on Feist’s performance, and set it aside from that of the others.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Saturday 7 December 2013

Really shot in Wyoming !

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


7 December


89 = S : 14 / A : 15 / C : 15 / M : 17 / P : 13 / F : 15


A rating and review of Nebraska (2013)



S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

9 = mid-point of scale (all scored out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)



* Contains spoilers *

It may not only be true of lesser films (well, not true of The Third Man (1949)), but Bel Ami (2012) fails at attempting to pass off London as Paris, and On the Road (2012) is a film that, as this one does, features landscape - just nowhere near, reading the credits, where the various journeys were supposed to be happening.

It is an interesting choice to present this film in black and white, because it really adds almost nothing to what we see except the views of the scenery, which are faultless. With Frances Ha (2013), it worked, it did enhance the film's cinematic qualities, but here - apart from the obvious suggestion that much of life in states such as Montana and Nebraska is being presented as lacking a dimension - it was only the fleeting longer shots in transit that benefited, but, then, so much that I would not have had the film any other way.

And this is a film that says something about acceptance, though that does not mean that I have to accept this highly inaccurate account of it from IMDb :

An aging, booze-addled father makes the trip from Montana to Nebraska with his estranged son in order to claim a million dollar Mega Sweepstakes Marketing prize


I see no evidence that David Grant (also unwillingly known as Davie / Davey, and played by Will Forte) is estranged from his father Woody (short for Woodrow, and acted by Bruce Dern), and it is he, rather than his brother Ross (Bob Odenkirk), who comes for him when he has been picked up by the police at the start. The other descriptions beg the question : what life has Woody led that he is as he is, and can his wife Kate (June Squibb) exculpate herself ?

The course of the film takes us to Hawthorne, where Woody grew up, and where there were at least two women in his life. One, sympathetically and with great naturalness brought off by Angela McEwan, is Peg, whose humanity is evident, and says that Woody knew that she 'would not let him touch all the bases' - by implication, the highly judgemental Kate, his wife (Squibb with great ease makes us dislike her), would. (There is a grim scene in the Lutheran graveyard (Kate is nominally a Catholic), where she calls a dead member of Woody's family a whore for having had sex from the age of fifteen.)

It is here that, bit by bit, we can piece together the influences that have worked on Woody, such as the death of a brother with whom he shared a room, being shot down in Korea when being transferred, and the age at which he and two other men from the town were sent to war, and how he returned from it. The laughter at Woody's expense seemed to have died down by this stage (and, in this respect, the film has the pattern of Philomena (2013)), but where it laid things on a little too thickly was with the vacant relatives, who, for example, are querying the journey-time from Billings, Montana, and even infect David with it, who asks Ross how he travelled over.

At Mount Rushmore (another place that Woody did not wish to see), in what he has to say about the monument not looking finished (which. with his critique, it did not), we are given the insight that how he relates to the world does not mean that he is ignorant and foolish, and, in his way, he just as much speaks the truth as he sees it as Kate does. (Indeed, we hear him dub other drivers idiots, and tell a mechanic that he is using the wrong wrench.)

I think that the script suitably covers objections to some of the things that happen for the purposes of the plot and which get us on the road, and that it works well enough as an exploration of the goals that we set, or expectations that we all have, without needing Woody's background and circumstances - the things that we think that we must have, when really something else (or lesser) might do.

In emotional terms, rather than those symbolic of setting out on a quest (and feeling that compulsion), the film resolves itself - and rights some wrongs - right at the end (even if we do not quite know how it can be done, and maybe it is a bit too pat). What is clear is that David has also been in need of healing from the childhood that he had where he is likened to a girl or a prince, and called beautiful - to assert himself, not least as he does, albeit with a fist, with Woody's former business partner Ed Pegram, and to believe in his worth.

The quest itself turned out to have to be completed, even if it was just to be told that it had not garnered anything except an ironic cap, but probably for other reasons by then. As for having to live with the disparaging Kate, nothing had changed that, and her threats of putting Woody in a home, and she had only defended him out of self-interest, both not to have relatives clamour for money, and to have him as her own victim - except that David certainly has more respect for his father, and in that there is hope...


As for the review on IMDb (by Steven Leibson) that calls this a hilarious comedy, well...

However, I quite liked Mark Kermode's review in The Guardian, so here it is (or gu.com/p/3yvcg/tf, if you wish to share).


There is now a little follow-up piece here...




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Thursday 11 October 2012

Kraken crake

This is a Festival response to On the Road (2012)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


12 October


This is a Festival response to On the Road (2012)

* Contains spoilers *

Two admissions, which ruin my credibility forever:

(1) I declined the opportunity to see The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) because I had no wish to follow the journeys of an early Che - he could have been an early Woody Allen and it would have made no difference to the fact that, if I want a travel documentary (in the case of somewhere where I am not going to go), I will watch Michael Palin's antics, and I see the concept of a film rather differently. (As I did not see the film, obviously I do not know for sure what I missed. Accepted.)

(2) I have never read On the Road (let alone any of Kerouac's other writings), though, when I decided to get around reviewing the film, which a friend and I saw, largely through his desire to do so, at Cambridge Film Festival, I looked out my copy of it. Therefore, anything that I find to quote from it will be just that - a phrase or passage that I find when flicking through it.

I also have some insights about Jack K. from my friend, who has read it and more, namely the close identity between the narrators of these works and JK himself.


As the credits for On the Road (2012) tell you, scenery through which we are supposed to be following various travellers on various journeys is nowhere near where it was shot, but in another part of the States (or of Canada). Yes, unconvincingly London passes for Paris in the dire Bel Ami (2012) (quite apart from what we see in The Third Man (1949) or Amadeus (1984)), but that almost makes sense - we can have a sense of the monumentality or grandeur of parts of Paris, even if we are not seeing them.

Certainly, they must have had reason, in this film, not to show the territories surrounding, say, Louisiana (to and from which we journey), but isn't the entreprise a bit hollow if whatever they do show has nothing to do with those places? I start with this point because, if one cannot say Great panoramas - I must go and see them myself some day, we are 'forced back' on the characters, and I honestly do not think that their desires and changes of heart run to a whole two hours 17 minutes worth of interest, but maybe 90 (with less need to show shots that were really somewhere quite different - I do not think that the list bore any relation to what we thought that we were shown).

OK, my thesis is this - it's a nice safe bet to film some version of a well-known, successful book, because people have been satisfied enough with how it is put together working to have read it approvingly. Nothing new there, but, if one's choice lands on something that, to be done justice to, has to sprawl so much and maybe be pretty lacking in any story, is that the ideal project, unless one has a big shake-up with the text and portrays it radically differently? Yes, that might upset an author's estate, or even fans at grass roots, but would it be a better film, maybe even be a film?

Given the acknowledged limitations, but in the light of talking to my friend and others as to whether the way that the text lies lends itself to taking it point for point as the basis for a film, what I have to ask (as I did) is what credibility Sal Paradise has, when we meet him, as a writer, or even simply what there is about him that would make someone, on pretty slight acquaintance, ask him to travel from New York to Denver to see him.

Now we know, after the event, that On the Road the book resulted from this and all the other travels, and, when Sam Riley (as Sal) starts hitching, we see him scribbling is his small but somehow infinite note-book (as if the guys on the back of the truck with him would not have been more than a little interested and been likely to have parted their company).

It may be little more than sexual when he is cotton picking, but there is even a sense that this Sal abandons his exteriority to his own experiences and actually feels them : frustrated though I was that I was being asked to believe in him as a writer when there had not even been so much as something being read aloud with his New York chums, I think that, by now, there might have been voiceover, maybe, of some of his writerly snippets (unless that only occurs later, when he actually starts writing, and he is reliving these moments).

Set against now, where, unless I wanted to be scenic about it, I would take a flight to make this first journey of Sal's, I would still be less than impressed with Dean Moriarity to have had impressed on me that I needed to make a trip whose basis and necessity turn out, in the ever-casual way of intoxication beyond the means of alcohol passing for the common currency of life, to have dissolved, so that, no sooner there and with no thought of where Sal might stay, Dean has to go to Los Angeles (or some such).

Just the first of a series of long, long journeys that seem to have the same capacity for their purpose to disappear more quickly than the destination can be reached. For me, none of it amounts to more than a few very blunt character traits and repressed feelings, which is where I arrive at a run-time around 90 minutes, because they do not merit more :

Sal is flattered by Dean's interest in him, and Dean, for his part, talks up this man who, if he did not resemble (a little) Scottish saxophonist Tommy Smith (whose talent I know and value), actually seems to possess no qualities to justify it. It is all sublimated through Dean arranging girls (including his own partner, at a key point) for Sal to sleep with, and then noisily doing so himself.

That holds true until (for money, and as he says to Sal he has done before) Dean has sex with the man who has been sedately driving them, and Sal witnesses it : not much guessing where his disgust with Dean and walking out on him at breakfast comes from. With a few twists and turns of sub-plots, and of Dean's various and far-flung women, that is pretty much the emotional core of all these lengthy wanderings, except that they always serve as a distraction from him ever knowing what on earth he wants, and all the signs, from how he chatted up Sal on first meeting, are that his own deeper desires from their 'relationship' (I only call it that because they virtually travel across the continent to say hello for ten minutes) are the same.

However, the film decides to swallow its own tail by having Sal write the book that we are viewing, with a roll of paper that he makes and feeds into the typewriter. Apparently such a roll does exist amongst JK's effects, though its status as being how he wrote the book might be suspect, but we get back to the bogus demonstration of creativity, as if there has to be this infinite roll of paper to receive the limitless notes that we saw scribbled before, and the white-hot power of the process is such that nothing, not even puttting in a new sheet of paper and keeping the finished ones in order, must be allowed to interrupt it. Believe that idea of writing if you like!

Clearly, things were taken from this film, but - from my position of majestic ignorance - I believe that a better film could have been made by taking the book as raw material, and not setting out depiction as if sacrosanct. And, blow me, I've still not opened the wretched text!