Ivan the Terrible, Part I

Two of the foreign films sitting on my DVR are the two parts of Sergei Eisenstein's proposed three-part film on the first Tsar of All Russia, Ivan the Terrible. Only two parts were completed in part because Eisenstein died and in part because of the political reaction to the second part. Recently, I watched Ivan the Terrible, Part I.

To understand this film requires a bit of an understanding of Russian history. Before about the middle of the 16th century, Russia was rulled by a bunch of local princes along with noblemen called boyars. This internal conflict left Russia weak and subject to predation by various forces on its borders including Poland, Baltic Sea kingdoms, and the Muslim khanate of Kazan in what is now central Russia. In 1547, the teenaged Ivan rises to the throne of the principality of Moscow and pretty much crowns himself Tsar of All Russia, a move that understandably creates a whole bunch of political enemies. Russia was also, at this time, despite being Christian, very much not western compared to the rest of Europe; it wasn't really until Peter the Great went to Holland to study shipbuilding that Russia really began to become more westernized.

To deal with all of this, Ivan needs to do a bunch of things. One is to try to ally himself with the Orthodox Church and the common peasants against the boyars and competing princes. Another is to get himself married and set about creating an heir to the throne. The third is to try to unite Russia, for which a common enemy would do nicely. Thankfully for him, the wedding celebration is interrupted by envoys from Kazan. It seems that Kazan is planning to attack Moscow again, and this is the declaration of war.

Ivan is no dummy, and decides that the best defense is to attack himself, so he besieges Kazan and blows up the fortress from below, earning him a major military and political victory as well as gaining some key allies among the people who served under him. However, there's still quite a bit of opposition from the boyars, as they're going to be throughout Ivan's life. Ivan nearly dies but miraculously recovers, earning himself more allies.

But there's still opposition, including quite close to him in the form of his aunt who is plotting to poison his wife. And she actually succeeds. This emboldens the boyars, and Ivan eventually announces that he's going to go away from Moscow for a while to regroup, gather his strength with the peasants and other people allied to him, and return to Moscow triumphant. Since there's a second movie in the Ivan the Terrible story, the first one ends on a rather uncertain note.

As I watched Ivan the Terrible, Part I, released in early 1945 and filmed in 1943 and 1944, I couldn't help but think of how the movie mirrors the situation Russia was facing against Germany at the height of World War II. Indeed, Eisenstein had to decamp to Central Asia to film much of this. But more relevant here is how Eisenstein was able to make a hagiographic movie about the first Tsar against the repressive dictatorship of Joseph Stalin. Indeed, it's quite easy to look at this and argue that a case is being made for the idea of a present-day leader with an iron fist. The need to unite all the principalities is also a natural parallell to the need to unite the Soviet people against Germany.

Although I have mostly positives for this movie, there are some negatives to note, which is notably in the stilted dialogue. Eisenstein was moving away from the sort of realistic storytelling which was common in Hollywood and commercial films, instead focusing on a style that has a lot of closeups. I wonder whether part of the dialog issue is also because of the backdrop of medieval Russia and also liturgical Russian.

Die Mörder sind unter uns

Every now and then, Eddie Muller dips into foreign films for his Noir Alley segment, leading to films that I'm likely not to have seen as well as a glut of foreign films on my DVR that I have to get through before they expire. One such foreign film was one of the earliest to be made in Germany after the end of World War II, The Murderers Are Among Us.

It's Berlin in 1945, not long after the defeat of the Nazis, with the city largely in ruins and people having to resort to various means, not necessarily ethical, to survive. Among the people returning to Berlin is Dr. Hans Mertens (Ernst Wilhem Borchert), who had worked as a doctor before the war but who was clearly scarred by his war experiences that will be revealed later in the movie. He gets an apartment in a building that was less badly damaged than some others: it seems to have four walls, but a lot of the windows are broken.

What he doesn't know is that the previous occupant of the apartment is still alive. Susanne Wallner (Hildegard Knef) was sent to a concentration camp for reasons not mentioned, although I'd guess it's political rather than being Jewish. She survived the war and expects that she might be able to return to her old apartment, only to find that Mertens has taken the apartment. With the housing crunch, it's not as though there are a lot of apartments out there, so the two agree to live together.

It's not long before Susanne finds a letter addressed to a Mrs. Brückner, which was written by Mr. Brückner and is only to be delivered to her in case of the husband's death. Obviously Mertens had served with Brückner in the war and was supposed to give that letter had Brückner died, only for Mertens never to hear of Brückner's death. With the war over, Susanne figures that Brücker probably died and that perhaps it would be a good idea for her to deliver the letter to Mrs. Brückner by hand.

However, what Susanna finds is that Mr. Brücker survived the war, and is making a reasonably good living in what is effectively the scrap metal industry, taking old military helmets and turning them into cookware. (One would guess that Brückner was of a fairly high social class before the war although this isn't quite mentioned.) Susanne returns home and tells Mertens that Brückner actually survived, something that will probably relieve Mertens.

However, Mertens is decidedly unhappy about this. It turns out that Brückner was involved with whatever it is that gave Mertens that emotional scarring, and in a bad way. Mertens, upon learning that Brücker is actually very much alive and doing quite well for himself, decides that Brückner needs justice, and that the only way for that justice to be meted out is if Mertens does it himself.

The Murderers Are Among Us is an interesting movie, partly on its own merits and partly for the atmosphere in which the movie was made. Germany was of course occupied in early 1946 when the movie was made, and for better or worse the occupying powers influenced how the film was made. This means that the director couldn't get the ending he wanted. However, the movie is filmed on location in Berlin, with all the ruins and deprivation that the city was facing in 1946. That alone is worth the price of admission. Never mind that the movie is pretty good despite the problems the ending has.

The Murderers Are Among Us is absolutely worth a watch.

Trois Couleurs: Rouge

I've mentioned several times that I've got a bunch of foreign films on my DVR, to the point that since YouTube TV "deletes" them after nine months I've had several foreign films I didn't get around to watching. One that was just about to expire and that I finally watched was Three Colors: Red, the final film in director Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colors trilogy following Three Colors: Blue and Three Colors: White.

Irène Jacob plays Valentine, a woman living in Geneva and studying at the university there while paying the bills by doing modeling work. She's got a difficult personal life, revealed in dribs and drabs over the course of the movie, involving a mom who is in England for some reason; a brother who has issues with drugs; and a difficult relationship with her boyfriend Michel. (None of these characters are actually seen, although we hear Michel's voice in phone calls with Valentine.) In a seemingly unrelated incident, law student Auguste drops his law books and meets his girlfriend Karin.

Some time later, Valentine is driving home one evening when a dog runs out in the street and Valentine is unable to avoid hitting the poor dog. Fortunately, the dog has a name tag: Rita, and the address of the dog's owner. So Valentine loads Rita into her car and takes her to Rita's owner, Joseph (Jean-Louis Trintignant). Joseph declares that he doesn't want the dog, so Valentine is welcome to keep Rita. Valentine takes Rita to a vet, who informs her that Rita is also pregnant with puppies and is going to make a full recovery.

The next day, Valentine takes Rita for a walk, but she escapes and goes to Joseph's house, which isn't a bad thing since Joseph had sent Valentine money for the vet bill but much too much money so Valentine wants to return some of it. When she goes to see Joseph this second time, she discovers a shocking secret: he likes to listen in on the phone conversations of his neighbors! This is for all sorts of obvious reasons illegal, and the sort of thing that for similarly obvious reasons disturbs Valentine. She plans on telling the neighbors about it, except that when she visits the neighbors, she finds that the daughter of the man on the phone is also listening in, so knows fully well that her father is not exactly faithful.

Eventually, everything comes together when Joseph hands himself over to the law and wouldn't you know it, but the judge at his trial is Auguste, who has had issues of his own with his girlfriend. Joseph takes Rita back although Valentine wants one of the puppies; Joseph and Valentine continue their platonic relationship as Joseph reveals more of his past and why he never married. Eventually there's a sort of twist ending that I won't give away.

Three Colors: Red received a lot of critical praise upon its release, although it was considered ineligible for a Best Foreign Film Oscar due to the Academy's rules on foreign films having to be credited to one country as opposed to international productions like this that don't quite neatly fit into being a film from a certain country. Having said that, I don't quite get the inordinate praise. It's not so much that Three Colors: Red is a bad movie so much as it's the sort of film that doesn't quite go anywhere. It's unbelievably talky, and leads up to an ending that doesn't satisfy. It's certainly competently made, and I can see why some people are going to love it. I just couldn't get all that invested in the characters.

Berlin: die Sinfonie der Großstadt

Some time back I did a post on the silent film Man With a Movie Camera. Jacqueline Stewart followed it up on Silent Sunday Nights with a movie that has a similar theme, but actually came a few years before: Berlin, Symphony of a Great City. I eventually watched it and left this post in the unscheduled drafts, since at the time I wrote it it was still a bit too close to having watched Man With a Movie Camera and I had not too far in the past done posts on a couple of other German movies.

Berlin, Symphonie of a Great City is similar to Man With a Movie Camera, but not quite as stylized. The movie looks at the city of Berlin as it was during the time of filming in 1927. This is noteworthy because it's smack dab in the middle of Weimar Germany, before the Nazis took over and completely changed German film culture (Karl Freund, who did the cinematography, was one of many people in the German-langauge film industry who fled Nazi Germany). It's obviously also well before World War II, which led to the bombings which destroyed a whole lot of Germany, so the movie can be seen as a bit of a document or time capsule of Berlin as it was in 1927.

There's no real plot to this movie, and also no characters or dialogue. The movie more or less looks at Berlin as it might have been over the course of a day, except that of course the action was not filmed in one day. That is to say, the movie is structured in five acts, with the only title cards announcing the beginning and end of each act, starting in the morning and going through the night. So, the opening act begins with a train coming in to one of Berlin's railroad stations early in the morning, at a time when most of the city is still asleep, although the early birds are just beginning to wake up. The movie then goes on with the start of the workday, lunch, mid-afternoon, and a final act set after dark.

It's a bit tough to say how much of the action is spontaneous and how much of it might have been set up, although I have a feeling at least some of it was not scripted. The homeless people who are depicted in one scene seem fairly real to me. It's also always possible that the cameramen stood in one spot for a while and only filmed when something interesting was happening, or else knew what interesting things were going to happen (eg. the funeral procession) and make a point to film that.

Since the movie was filmed a few years before Man With a Movie Camera, it's unsurprising that it's not quite as technically radical as the Soviet film. That, and the fact that Dziga Vertov was much more open about his desire to be experimental than Walter Ruttmann who directed Berlin, Symphony of a Great City was. As a result, this one can look a bit old-fashioned at times.

However, Berlin, Symphony of a Great City is still quite good technically, while as a piece of cinematic history it's even better.

Die Austernprinzessin

Another of the silent films that's been sitting on my DVR until close to the time that it was going to expire is one that comes from Germany: The Oyster Princess.

Directed by Ernst Lubitsch, an early intertitle (the print TCM ran had intertitles in English only, although a few things like a calling card were still in German with an English subtitle) informs us that this is a grotesque comedy in four acts. The first act is set at the mansion of Mr. Quaker (Victor Janson). He's an American "Oyster King" having made a fortune in oysters, and for whatever reason having brought hs daughter Ossi (Ossi Oswalda) over to Germany, which to me presented a bit of a problem. The movie was released in June 1919, which is only seven months after the end of the Great War, making me wonder about the timeline of everything here. But put that aside. Ossi is a spoiled brat, who is willing to break everything in the mansion she and her father live in if that will help her get her way. She's having another of her tantrums because she just learned that one of her fellow socialites has just gotten married to a count. If a count is good enough for that young lady, then certainly somebody of a similar social standing, or higher, is needed for Ossi. And get her one now! Or even yesterday, if not sooner.

Cut to a matchmaker, the early 20th century equivalent of a dating service, never mind apps like Tindr (somebody should have directed Ossi to Farmers Only). The matchmaker has lots of contacts, but all of them have one flaw or another or else they wouldn't need such a service. An example is Prince Nucki (Harry Liedtke), who is heavily in debt and disinclined to marry. We then see he apartment, where he lives with Josef, whose real relationship to the Prince is never quite explained. In any case, a representative from the matchmaker shows up, and the Prince decides to send Josef over as a sort of go-between. But there's a mix-up when it turns out that the only calling card Josef has is one from Prince Nucki himself, leading Ossi and her dad to think this is the actual prince.

Ossi, being an impetuous young woman, decides to run off and elope with the man she thinks is Prince Nucki, returning home to a huge reception that you wonder how her dad could arrange on such short notice. But since this isn't designed to be a realistic movie, don't worry about things like that. Meanwhile, the real prince is visited by several of his friends, who suggest they the all go out on a "spree", which means painting the town red. As they walk through a park the next morning, one by one the friends pass out on the park benches, leaving only the prince himself, who drunkenly ends up in a carriage and winds up at...

A meeting of the women's temperance association. The association is staffed by all the daughters of the business magnates, with Ossi heading this morning's meeting. They basically sober up the drunks, who look for the most part like you'd expect chronic drunks to look. Until, of course, the much more handsome prince shows up. The two start to fall in love, Ossi not realizing this is Prince Nucki, while the prince, thinking he's supposed to be engaged to somebody, not knowing this is the woman he's engaged to.

Jacqueline Stewart, in her wraparounds, mentioned how The Oyster Princess was one of the earliest movies to display the "Lubitsch touch". Lubitsch at this early date is already in fine form, with the sort of movie that I think would have been easy for audiences around the world to follow, with none of the arthouse stuff that foreign films of a later era would get a reputation for. The comedy works, plot holes aside. It is, however, still a silent film from 1919, so there's going to be a fair bit that might seem a bit old-fashioned to people who aren't that used to watching silent cinema.

Här har du ditt liv

I've mentioned a couple of times how I have a tendency to record enough foreign films that I don't quite get around to watching all of them until they're just about to expire from my YouTube TV cloud DVR. One night of TCM Imports included a pair of Swedish films, and I finally watched one of them: Here Is Your Life, from director Jan Troell.

The movie opens up around 1916. Olof (Eddie Axberg, who would appear in Troell's later films The Emigrants and The New Land) is a boy of around 14 in northern Sweden who has been forced to enter the working world because his father has some sort of terminal illness. Olof gets a job with a bunch of rather older men in forestry, specifically getting logs downstream to the lumber mills. It's difficult work and the sort of thing that led to industrial accidents and workers dying. Olof eventually takes a job in the mill part of forestry, and this time one of the workers is even younger, a boy named Oskar who really shouldn't be doing this work except that a good portion of rural Sweden was still poor enough that families had to send their children into work like this. Poor Oskar gets seriously injured when a pile of logs falls on him, and he later dies in hospital although we don't see the actual death.

In any case, all of this gets Olof to take a new job, especially since he's been doing some reading and shows some aptitude for intelligence even though he obviously hasn't had a lot of traditional schooling. That job is in a small town at a movie theater, although it's not a custom-built theater but the sort of space that would have been converted from something else into showing movies. Olof's job is to put up handbills for the coming attractions, as well as take tickets and sell snacks. If he's good enough, he might even be able to get a promotion to become a projectionist. This is also where Olof meets his first girl, although his love life, such as it is, isn't going to be straightforward. Olof also meets a socialist, although my reading of the timeline of the movie is that the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia had not yet taken place.

Olof's next job is indeed as a projectionist, although it's not with the theater he started at, but with an itinerant theater that sets up shop wherever it can. One stop is with a traveling circus, and it's there that Olof meets the woman who runs the shooting gallery. This too is going to be a complicated relationship. Olof eventually gets another job with Swedish Railways, which is a state-owned enterprise. That's worth mentioning since Olof is getting more heavily into socialism and workers' rights, railing against capitalism. He and his friend at the railway discuss getting the workers to strike as an anti-capitalist move, even though the railway is technically a socialist outfit. Olof goes on like this, until the movie ultimately ends with no clear resolution.

Then again, Here Is Your Life isn't a traditionally-plotted movie, but a coming-of-age story about one character, which is partly why I didn't mention the actors playing the other characters. Max von Sydow does appear, although I didn't recognize him. Axberg does a good job, and the cinematography is also quite good. However, I have to criticize the film for having a very slow pace and a way-too-long running time, at 160-some minutes. Either the movie should have been written to run into something under two hours, or it should have been conceived as something episodic like a TV miniseries. The adventures of Olof might work as a multiple-part miniseries, or what would nowadays be a limited series, but not as quite so well when it's one movie running close to three hours.

I bambini ci guardano

I've mentioned on several occasions over the past few years how I keeping winding up with a ton of foreign films that are just about to expire from the YouTube TV DVR that I need to watch before they expire. The latest example of that was The Children Are Watching Us.

Now, the first interesting thing is that this movie was made in Italy in 1943 which, as you may know, was the height of World War II. But there aren't any references to the war, which may be because it's based on a book that was released in the 1920s, never mind the political situation that might have prevented filmmakers from setting a story like this against the backdrop of the war.

Pricò is a boy of about 5 living in a fashionable part of a fashionable city, with a father rich enough that they have a maid as well as living in a co-op in a building where the big issue is the elevator being too subject to needing repairs. Pricò and his mother go to the park one afternoon and watch a puppet show, although the trip is really an excuse for Mom (Isa Pola) to go see her lover Roberto, not realizing that Pricò sees what's going on. Mom has reached the point where she can't take it any more, so that night she packs her bags to run off with Roberto.

Dad, now a single father, doesn't know what to do, so he sends Pricò off to live with a series of relatives. None of them have much of an idea what to do with such a mischievous little boy, or don't really have the space to put him up for an extended period of time. In any case, Mom returns home after a short period of time claiming that she's gotten Roberto out of her system for good, and would like to return and try to start anew. You wonder how the family is going to be able to put itself back together, but it's not as if there's a whole lot Dad or the boy can do, so Mom gets to live with them again. Besides, it might not be bad to have a boy's mom living with him.

It's the summer, so Dad also decides that a good thing to do would be to get Mom out of the city and to one of those resorts that also populated Hollywood films of the era. The family can spend some quality time together, and Roberto won't be around. And the vacation seems to go well. Except that Dad, being a working man, eventually has to go back to his office job in the city. He tells Mom to stay at the resort for a few more days with Pricò as it will be good for the boy. But wouldn't you know it, Roberto shows up at the resort. Apparently there weren't that many places people in that Italian social class could go back in those days. Sure enough, Mom and Roberto start up their relationship again, although this time the results are much worse.

The Children Are Watching Us was directed by Vittorio De Sica, who would go on after the war to make several famous neo-realist movies. The Children Are Watching Us shows some foreshadowing of that style, but as a whole the movie is much closer to the sort of conventional Hollywood movie you might see from that era. I mean that, however, in a good way, as The Children Are Watching Us is very well made and the sort of foreign film that would be more easily accessible to people who think of foreign films from that era as the sort of arthouse stuff that was disproportionately what wound up in America. It's absolutely worth watching if you get the chance.

Billy Wilder's Bad Seed

Now that we've finished 31 Days of Oscar for another year, it's time for TCM to get back in to its various spotlights. One of them is going to be a prime time night of TCM Imports tonight. One of the movies is one that's already on my DVR and that I hadn't blogged about before is Mauvaise graine, early tomorrow at 2:00 AM (so March 21 in Eastern time, but still March 20 out on the west coast if you don't have the west coast feed). With that in mind, I watched the film in order to be able to put up this post in conjunction with tonight's airing.

Henri Pasquier (Pierre Mignand) is a playboy living in Paris with his doctor father. Dad makes a reasonably good living as a fashionable doctor, but it's not enough to be able to support Henri in the manner to which he has become accustomed. Henri drives a nice car and can't be bothered to work. So one day when Henri gets home, Dad asks if he's got the car keys and registration. That's because Dad decided to sell the car. Henri can join the 7/8 of Parisians who don't have their own car.

Henri is none too pleased about it, and then one day he happens to come across the old car. The people who bought it left it parked with the keys in the ignition, this being the 1930s when people were much more trusting. So Henri decides he's going to "borrow" the car since he was hoping to meet up with a woman in one of Paris' many parks for a date. The two start driving around, until Henri discovers that he's being followed.

The reason the men are following him is that they are part of a ring of car thieves who steal high-value cars and sell them off to people looking to get a good car on the cheap. However, the ring considers Paris their territory, and they don't want anybody horning in on it. Henri's quick thinking convinces the leader of the ring, against his better judgment, to let Henri into the ring. There, Henri meets two of the other members, Jean (Raymond Galle), a kleptomaniac who steals neckties, and Jean's sister Jeannette (Danielle Darrieux). Jeannette is the bait for a lot of the men thanks to her looks. These two become Henri's friends in the ring.

Henri screws up the theft of one of the cars, losing the rear license plate which is picked up by a little kid who rides one of those pedal replica cars. Eventually, the rightful owner of that car spots the kid, which brings the police on to the ring. But before that, the head of the ring has decided to get rid of Henri, sending him to Marseilles where the plan is to have Henri killed along the way by having him drive a car with a busted axle. The two make it to Marseilles where they plan to escape to Casablanca. Except that Henri doesn't want to leave Jean behind, which is why he goes back to Paris and arrives just in time for the police pinch.

Billy Wilder, along with any number of people involved in the German-language cinema, fled Germany and Austria after the Nazis took over. Wilder wound up in Paris briefly becure making his way to Hollywood, and it's in Paris that he directed Mauvaise Graine. Another refugee was Franz Waxman, who provided the score. This was the first time Wilder directed a movie, having done screenwriting up until now, and continuing to write for several years more once he got to Hollywood.

As an early directorial effort, it's obviously not yet to the level that Wilder would reach once he became an established diretor, but Mauvaise Graine is still an interesting movie and one that's definitely worth a watch.

No Kinks music here

Anouk Aimée is another of the people who left us in 2024 and whom TCM included in the late December "parade of the dead" night where they show one movie from each of several people who died in 2024. The movie they showed in her honor was one I have to admit I hadn't heard of before: Lola. But it sounded worth recording, so I did and eventually watched it to do the post on it here.

We don't see Lola for several minutes into the movie. The movie starts with opening credits and a man driving into Nantes, a port city on the Atlantic coast of France, looking like one of those stereotypical Hollywood movie rich guys, with a convertible and a white suit. This is a bit of foreshadowing. Another man, Roland (Marc Michel), is a man who hasn't been able to make much of his life because he's a dreamer. He wakes up late from his lunch break, and when he goes back to work is informed that he's being fired for chronic tardiness.

Meanwhile, there's a US Navy ship docked in Nantes, and the American men on the ship like to go into town to blow off some steam and enjoy themselves. One of the things they do is to go to a bar that looks like it would be a nightclub if only it were nighttime. The sailors dance with the girls working there as if the girls are taxi dancers. One of them is Lola (Anouk Aimée), who is being pursued by Frankie, and American sailor. But we know this isn't going to be a lasting relationship since Frankie's ship is going to be leaving port soon. Besides, we learn that Lola has a young child. It turns out that she was knocked up some years back by Michel, the one true love of her life. But he was too poor to raise a child, so he left town until he could make something of himself, at which point he vowed to come back a rich man.

Roland goes looking for a job and is told there's a hairdresser who has something possibly waiting for an obliging young man. Roland goes, and the manager of the salon tells him something that makes the job offer seem like it's clearly not quite legal. Well much more illegal than that. Roland's job would be to take a boat to Amsterdam, and then go from there to South Africa, where he'll meet somebody in Johannesburg. Roland is being given an attache case which he is expected to give the man in Johannesburg in exchange for another case that's going to look the same and which Roland is to bring back here. Now, it's obvious that Roland is being asked to smuggle something. But he needs the job and this will give him a sense of adventure as well as getting out of Nantes. On the way back to his apartment he bumps into Lola. It turns out that he knew Lola when both were younger, and he's still in love with her. Lola liked Roland as a friend, but her real love was, and still is, Michel.

The movie amiably wanders around Nantes, winding its way toward a resolution of everybody's stories, and does so in a pleasantly brief 90 minutes. Directed by Jacques Demy, Lola is a sort of precursor to Demy's later The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Personally, I prefer the later movie, since the plot feels more cohesive. Lola isn't bad by any means, and it's got lovely black-and-white cinematography of Nantes. Lola is definitely worth one watch if you haven't seen it before.

Olympia

Another of the movies that I had to watch off of my DVR before it expired was Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl's two-part documentary on the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics. Today being the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics, I figured this would be a good time to put up the post on it. Apparently the original plan was to release one movie, but Riefenstahl's edit ran so long that the movie wasn't released until mid-1938, and in two parts as it ran over four hours. Stylistically there's not enough different to justify two full separate posts, so I'm doing a post that covers both Part 1 (Festival of Nations; linked above), and the second part, Festival of Beauty.

The first part starts with a long sequence of Riefenstahl's interpretation of what training for the ancient Greek Olympiad might have been like, with a bunch of nearly naked men wearing nothing more than a codpiece and running or doing throwing events. There are also women who are completely naked, albeit in a form about as artistic as Renaissance art nudes or ancient Greek statuary. We then transition to the Olympic torch relay, starting in Greece and going through southeastern Europe on its way to Germany, leading up to the opening ceremony when the Olympic cauldron is lit after all of the countries (I think 51 of them) march into the Olympic stadium.

The rest of Part 1 deals with most of the track and field events, attempting to document them to show what happened, who won and how, but without running ridiculously long. Berlin is the Olympics where Jesse Owens famously won four gold medals, and these events are shown, with pretty much no more propaganda or racial denigration than one would have gotten from a white American Hollywood production. The recreation of the German radio/public address athletes consistently refers to certain athletes as "the black man [surname]", but that's not much worse than American commentary would have been. But more on the propaganda in the summary later.

Part 2 opens with a shorter sequence of athletes training, which might be a bit controversial in that all the male German athletes retire to the sauna after their run and there's some obvious full frontal nudity. The sports covered here include very brief references to boxing and gymnastics, with more to yachting, and then rowing (showing the American men's win in the eights that became the subject of the book and movie The Boys in the Boat), modern pentathlon, the cycling road race, and the diving, with the diving being the most famous sequence because of Riefenstahl's camera use.

And it's that use of the camera for which Olympia should be rightly remembered. The opening sequences of the two parts are in many ways the most interesting in that Riefenstahl had the most freedom in composing them. When it comes to actual sports, that's a bit harder, since there's only so much you can do to film, say, an actual boxing match. So a lot of the movie has a slightly boring feel to it. To combat this, Riefenstal did as much as she could to put cameras in spots that were unorthodox for 1936, have them moving on rails to track the athletes, or put them under or over the athletes. She also made heavy use of editing, especially in the diving sequence. I think they might have mentioned the winner, but more than any other event that felt beside the point, as she was trying to show the beauty of the human form. Some sequences, however, especially in the cycling and probably in the sailing, look like they have to be recreations.

The beauty of the human body is also where one can start when it comes to discussing the propaganda nature of the movie. Adolf Hitler obviously wanted to show the Germans as a superior people, and all of those nearly-naked bodies are very clearly of a certain narrowly-defined standard of beauty. Riefensthal couldn't show Germans winning events they didn't win -- and she doesn't hide non-Germans winning as with Jesse Owens -- but beauty is clearly a German thing.

There's also the presence of Adolf Hitler. Some of this obviously can't be helped. Berlin had been awarded the right to stage the 1936 Olympics back in 1931, before the Nazis came to power, and it is traditionally the job of the head of state of the host nation to declare the games open. So of course Hitler has to be there. At the same time, one didn't need to show him later on watching the events. There's also a lot of shots of German athletes and spectators giving the Nazi salute to the German flag at various times. During the medal ceremony and anthem playing that's understandable. 90 years on, people are going to be a bit uncomfortable with other shots of it.

All in all, Olympia deserves to be remembered as a movie that introduced a lot of ground-breaking techniques to the coverage of sport, even if it will also always be remembered for director Leni Riefenstahl's involvement with Adolf Hitler.

Chelovek s kinoapparatom

I've got a couple of days coming up where TCM is running a programming salute worth mentioning. Usually, I want to supplement the post simply mentioning TCM's programming with another shortish post on a short film. With two such days in close succession, I decided to do a post on an experimental film instead: Man With a Movie Camera.

There's no plot here, in part because the movie's director, Dziga Vertov, believed that cinema was a medium for something completely new, meaning among other things eschewing movies with traditional narrative plots. The narrative here, if you want to try to call it that, is documenting "a day in the life" of a modern Soviet city as it was in the late 1920s. Except of course that this is not one day, nor is it even one city. Vertov decamped from Moscow to Ukraine which wasn't under quite as tight reins as Moscow was, and filmed in part in Kiev, Odessa, and Kharkov.

Also in terms of "narrative", the movie is divided into six chapters, which look sort of at different times of day as well as different parts of life. The first part, for example, is dedicated mostly to the morning. There's another section that juxtaposes a woman giving birth, another woman mourning her husband at a cemetery, and a man being taken by ambulance to a hospital. A third chapter looks mostly at sport.

But it's the juxtaposition if you will that's worth mentioning, because that's part of the main thrust of Vertov's work. Believing that cinema was a new art that should stand on its own, Vertov used all sorts of film techniques: slow motion, double exposures, time-lapse, running film in reverse, and on and on, to get the style he wanted. There's also a fair bit of breaking of the fourth wall as one of the two recurring characters in the movie is the man with the camera whom we see trying to get the shots while filmed by a second camera. This can include filming from a convertible, filming from the water, being suspended over a watercourse, and so on. This cameraman was in fact played by Vertov's younger brother Mikhail Kaufman, who was a noted cinematographer in his own right.

There are also several shots of the movie's editor, Vertov's real-life wife Elizaveta Svilova, as she engages in the editing process. The other self-referential part includes showing shots of what are various parts of a movie theater, presumably as the film that we are about to see is being premiered.

But do the avant-garde techniques in Man With a Movie Camera work? I can see people not liking it, and certainly critics of the day had issues with it. To be fair, however, Vertov's work was so new that contemporary critics had probably never seen anything like this before and wouldn't know what to make of it. Modern-day critics, on the other hand, go too far in praising Man With a Movie Camera solely (in my opinion) on the grounds that it is so different. Overall, it's mostly interesting although I can't blame anybody who finds Man With a Movie Camera a bit pretentious at times.

Rozmarné léto

I'm still trying to get through the backlog of foreign films I've got on my DVR, although I have a feeling a reasonable number of them are going to expire before I get around to watching them or writing up the reviews. Once again, with that in mind, I watched a Czech film, not having done a review on a Czech film in a while: Capricious Summer.

It's early summer in a small village in southern Moravia. The village had some sort of riverside resort that people used to come to back in the day, before the war and then the Communist takeover. So now there's still a lake, a dock for swimmers to climb into the water, and a changing area, but not all that much else. A group of middle-aged men who are locals spend their days idling their time away there, to the point that you might wonder how any of them live. Except that it turns out that one, Roch, is the local parish priest; Hugo is a retired army major; and the third, Antonín, runs the place if you will with his wife Kateřina. But for the most part all they do is swim and talk.

That is, until the village is shaken up a bit by a traveling circus. Or, more precisely, a one-wagon circus act of Arnoštek (director Jiří Menzel doing some acting here) who is part magician, part tightrope walker and his assistant Anna. Arnoštek does tricks on the high wire in exchange for donations from the people, taken by Anna. I suppose for one night seeing the tightrope walker might be interesting in this sort of small village that doesn't get much of interest coming to it any more, but the wagon stays for more than one night. And in any case, Anna is more interesting than Arnoštek because she's actually good-looking.

Somehow Anna winds up in the river, and Antonín rescues her. He's already been revealed to have a past with women and that he basically drove every other man away from Kateřina, leading to an unhappy marriage. With that in mind, it's unsurprising that Antonín winds up sleeping with Anna, but also getting caught by Kateřina.

The circus act stays in the village a few more days, at least until some old man gets fed up with it and tries to warn Arnoštek about the danger of being up on the high wire. And if Arnoštek won't listen, then the old guy will make him listen by sabotaging the act. In any case, the act being in the village for multiple days gives each of the other two men the chance to spend a little time with Anna, even if this is going to cause problems for each of them too.

Capricious Summer is the movie Jiří Menzel made following Closely Watched Trains, a movie that I think I stated before that I don't find as good as a lot of other people do. I have similar issues with Capricious Summer, although at least in this case it's due in part to the story really being as meandering as the river that brings the men together. The color cinematography of a backwater (and, thanks to Communist misrule, decrepit) Czech village is nice to look at, but it doesn't really save a mediocre story. Still, as always, watch and judge for yourself.

Jigokumon

It's been a little while since I've done a post on a foreign film, and as I've been stating I've got a bit of a backlog of foreign films on my DVR, to the point that I've had any number of them expire before even getting around to watching them. As an example, Un carnet de bal was on overnight and I had the previous recording on my DVR, but when I went to watch it in conjunction with the upcoming showing, it had expired. A film that I watched just before it expired showed up during 31 Days of Oscar: Gate of Hell.

The movie is set in medieval Japan during a short period known as the Heiji Rebellion, in which a couple of competing groups of samurai were battling for control of the government. Endo Morito (Kazuo Hasegawa) is loyal to daimyo Kiyomori, whose family is under threat from another group of samurai. To get the rest of the family to safety, Kiyomore comes up with a ruse: his sister's official carriage will be ridden not by his high-ranking sister, but a lady-in-waitng, Kesa (Machiko Kyo). Morito is to accompany that carriage while the daimyo's family makes it to safety. Morito gets Kesa to safety, although not without some difficulty, and falls in love with her along the way.

After the war is over, Kiyomori wants to reward Morito for his loyalty, willing to grant Morito one favor. Morito's wish is to have a marriage arranged between him and Kesa. Normally, their social classes wouldn't have resulted in them ever meeting each other, but Kiyomori could make it happen with his stature. There's only one catch: in the meantime, Kesa got married to someone who is of her social stature, Imperial Guard member Wataru (Isao Yamagata). Kiyomori could have tried to arrange a marriage between Morito and Kesa had she not been married, but he can't really force Kesa and Wataru to get a divorce.

Morito, for his part, isn't about to take no for an answer. If this were Hollywood, it would be the basis for some sort of noir on the theme of obsession, but this is medieval Japan so the movie takes a completely different tone. There's a slow buildup as first Morito tries to win Kesa's affection by winning the big horse race. When that doesn't work, Morito tries more direct means. But Kesa and Wataru aren't so willing to see Morito, since he's already shown himself to have a violent temper. Kesa's maidservant lies about Kesa's whereabouts, leading Morito to threaten to kill Kesa's aunt if Kesa won't talk to him.

It leads up to a climax in which Morito plans to kill Wataru, which would leave him free to marry Kesa if she's a widow. But the plan doesn't necessarily, well, go according to plan....

Gate of Hell won an honorary Oscar for the Best Foreign Film, having been released before that was an official competitive category. It also won a competitive Oscar, for color costume design. Those costumes, along with the color cinematography and production design, are all quite good. On the negative side, however, Gate of Hell is an extremely slow burn as a movie, being the dramatic equivalent of a one-joke comedy. That slowness doesn't always work in the movie's favor, so some people may find it a bit of a slog even though it clocks in under 90 minutes.

Sylvie et le fantôme

TCM ran a day of Jacques Tati films some time back, and I think that may be where I recorded a movie where he's well down the credits but has an important role. That film is Sylvie and the Ghost.

At a chateau in one of the rural parts of France, Sylvie (Odette Joyeux) is about to turn 16. It's a place with history, as hanging on one of the walls is a portrait of one of Sylvie's ancestors from a couple of generations back, Alain. Well, OK, Alain himself wasn't an ancestor so much as he was in love with Sylvie's grandmother. For this, Grandpa felt his honor besmirched and challened Alain to a duel which was fatal to Alain. Sylvie finds all this romantic, and insists that Alain has to be a ghost haunting the chateau, although nobody has ever seen said ghost.

Meanwhile, the family is falling on hard times. (Although the movie was released in early 1946, there are no references to World War II, so I'd guess the movie is supposed to be set sometime in the 1930s.) In need of money, Dad decides he's going to sell that portrait of Alain to make money. Sylvie is going to be heartbroken, and Frederick, the son of the art dealer who is coming over to help remove the portrait, understands this, and falls in love with Sylvie along the way trying to make her feel better about it. Once the portrait is removed, we learn that there really is a ghost (played by Tati through a reflection trick) who will now be roaming about the chateau since he doesn't have that portrait to stay in any longer.

With a 16th birthday party coming up, Dad gets an idea. Maybe he can put Sylvie's mind at ease by hiring an actor to play a ghost, getting from the employment agency an older man who has a reputation for playing the ghost of the dead king from Hamlet. Howevever, before that man can show up, Frederick returns, hoping to woo Sylvie. And then a thief shows up in the chateau because he's on the run from the police and figured ducking into a building would be a good idea. The servants don't know who is expected to play the part of the ghost, so figure both of these men are the man for the job, with the actual man eventually showing up as well. All three eventually put on the ghostly robes but have different personalities to confuse the rest of the people. The fact that the thief falls in love with Sylvie also complicates matters. And then there's the real ghost who, seeing that these actors have robes on, figures he can take the robes from them and go around the house. But the laws of cartoon physics don't always allow this.

I've said quite often that I don't always care for the foreign films that have big reputations among the movie critic set largely because such films have a tendency to be pretentious. But give me a movie with an interesting or fun premise and I'll give it a chance regardless of whether it's Hollywood or foreign. Sylvie and the Ghost falls into that latter group. It definitely has a different feel from a Hollywood movie, but for the most part it's a delightful little romp. Then again, it's also from the days before the Cahiers du Cinema brought about the French New Wave, which may have something to do with why there's a lot less of the arthouse feel here.

In any case, Sylvie and the Ghost is a fun little movie that definitely deserves to be seen and better known.

Elisa, My Love

I've mentioned several times in the past how I have a backlog of foreign-language movies on my DVR that I need to watch before they expire. With that in mind, I watched one that I hadn't heard of before its last showing on TCM: Elisa, vida mía, and wrote up a quick post to queue for some time in the future. That time is obviously now.

Geraldine Chaplin, who at the time of making this movie was the partner of its director Carlos Saura, plays Elisa Santamaria, one of two daughters of elderly writer Luis (Fernando Rey). As the movie opens, Elisa's sister Isabel and her husband and kids are driving down from Madrid to see Dad for his birthday, with Elisa already being there and a narration from Elisa's point of view being read out in Luis' voice. Apparently Elisa's marriage isn't a happy one, so when she heard that Dad was sick after having had an operation, she figures it's a good time to get away from her husband Antonio for a while.

At this point in the movie, Dad is looking surprisingly well, able to bike into whatever little village he lives closest to in order to pick up bread for dinner. And it's a relatively happy dinner, with the kids being happy to see their grandfather and the adults talking about old times. Isabel's husband is a lawyer working on an important case, so he has to get back to Madrid, leaving Elisa and Luis alone and giving Elisa a chance to talk about things with her father and maybe get some advice.

I say maybe because things start switching back and forth between the present and the past. There's a scene of Dad taking Elisa to be part of a drama class he's teaching to elementary school girls; another scene where Dad admits to not loving Mom and hoping that she had actually died when some assailant stabbed her; and Elisa talking about finding out that her husband Antonio was having an affair with her best friend back in Madrid, which is why she wanted to get away from Antonio for a while.

And then things get really weird. The same narration that we have at the beginning is re-read, only this time the action is set in Madrid in the apartment that Mom kept once she and Dad split. Antonio shows up in the village and tries to get Elisa to come back to him, only to find out that there's no way this is happening. So Antonio suddenly shows up again and, well, what happens in that scene is something I'm not going to mention. And then we get the opening narration read a third time.

Now, I read one review which argues that the scenes in Elisa, vida mía are actually supposed to represent scenes from the book that Luis is working on, which the possible message as well that time is not linear. Maybe that's the case, although if you ask me the movie starts making less and less sense as it goes along. Then again, I've always argued here that I'm not the biggest fan of art-house stuff, and even more so of the idea of how there's a certain type of movie buff that seems to go gaga over foreign films precisely because they're art-house material. (If that weren't the case, why is the vast majority of what Americans get in the way of foreign films, at least before the last few decades, decidedly not the sort of stuff that was made for the domestic market?) Elisa, vida mía is decidedly that way, and worse, it runs a good half-hour too long at close to 130 minutes.

If I wanted to introduce people to foreign films, Elisa, vida mía is decidedly not the one I'd pick. But as always, watch and judge for yourself.

Ta'm-e gilas

I mentioned some time back how I had recorded a double feature of Abbas Kiarostami films from TCM's Imports slot that follows Silent Sunday Nights This time, it the post on the second of the movies, Taste of Cherry.

The movie opens with a man named Badii driving his Range Rover through the outskirts of a city, presumably Tehran, although I don't know if it's explicitly mentioned. Driving along the road, he sees a young conscript who is doing his military service and trying to get back to his barracks after a couple days' leave. Badii offers the young soldier a ride to barracks, although it's quickly revealed that Badii wants to give the soldier a ride for other reasons. As Badii asks the young man about his life, Badii also says that he's willing to offer him a substantial sum of money in exchange for doing a short job. This, combined with Badii's driving past where the soldier would get out to go to the barracks and Badii's questions feeling a bit too personal, understandably makes the young man nervous.

Eventually, Badii stops at a particular location, with an odd request. The parking place is on a hillside overlooking civilization, and somewhere down the hillside there's a hole that Badii has dug. Badii tells the soldier that tonight, he's going to go to sleep at the hole, and would like someone to come the following morning to check up on him to see whether he's alive or dead. If Badii is dead, would the young man cover the hole with dirt and leave this as his grave; if he's alive, could the soldier wake him up? This is all too much for the young soldier, who declines the request and runs off to make it to the barracks on time.

Badii continues to drive along the streets, and winds up at what looks like some sort of roadside rest area. There, he finds another young man who is also an interesting conversation partner: a refugee from the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the Taliban (Taste of Cherry was released in 1997) who is now studying to become an imam. Being rather more devout a Muslim than Badii considering Badii's desire to commit suicide, this seminary student is obviously unwilling to help anybody do anything as part of a suicide plot.

It's on to a third man, who works at a local museum as a taxidermist and gives students there lessons on taxidermy and the local fauna. He's picked up some dead birds for stuffing and for the students to get a lesson on stuffing. But the job doesn't pay enough, and he's got a sick kids who needs money for medical care. He's much closer to Badii in terms of outlook, and indeed he's had experience in his family with attempted suicide. So he starts talking to Badii about that experience, with the obvious intention of trying to talk Badii out of doing the deed. But as he needs that money, he's willing to take Badii's job. What will our taxidermist find in the morning?

Taste of Cherry is one of those movies that gets a whole bunch of praise from the arthouse crowd, although it also drew some surprising criticism for the ending and the seeming lack of characterization. I tend not to be the biggest fan of arthouse stuff, but in this case I'm not with the harsh critics the way I might have been with a movie like Alice in the Cities or Cries and Whispers. I'm a bit more positive than negative, although I think the best way to put it would be the same reaction I had with Au hasard Balthazar: It's a good movie, but I don't understand why so many critics put it so far up the "greast movies of all time" lists.

Tulitikkatehtaan tyttö

Another of the foreign films that I recorded off of TCM some time back and that I had to watch before it expired from the DVR is one from Finland, a country from which I haven't seen very many movies: The Match Factory Girl.

Iris (Kati Outinen) is a twentysomething woman who works at the titular match factory, not that it's particuarly stimulating or remunerative work. (It's also not really the main point of the movie; Iris could work any dead-end job.) She goes home at the end of the day to a crummy apartment here her mom and stepfather live, watching TV all day, taking Iris' pay as rent, and forcing her to do the cooking and cleaning as though she's a Cinderella. Except that this Cinderella most definitely isn't going to find an authentic Prince Charming.

Iris goes out to dance halls at night (think the sort of place where the Ernest Borgnine character in Marty went). However, none of the men select Iris for a dance. So when Iris gets her next pay packet, she takes a bunch of the cash and uses it to buy herself a dress so that she might look a little more presentable. Her parents find the dress, which isn't hard because Iris doesn't have any private space in the apartment, and are pissed. They want that money.

Iris puts on the dress and goes out, picked up by a white-collar man named Aarne. He takes her back to his place, sleeps with her, and leaves her a 1000-markka note (I want to say a bit under $200 in circa-1990 money) as though she's a prostitute. Lovely. Worse for poor Iris is that this one-night stand has left Iris pregnant. When she writes a letter to Aarne about it, he gives her a check for 10,000 markka and tells her to get rid of the brat.

Iris is more or less kicked out of the apartment and moves in with her brother, which gives her an idea for revenge on all of the man who have treated her like crap, which is basically the climax of the film. The Match Factory Girl runs a hair under 70 minutes, and that's with more substantial opening and closing credits than the short Hollywood features of the 1930s had, so the movie is even shorter.

I don't know that The Match Factory Girl is going to appeal to everyone, in part because it's so unrelentingly bleak. It also has a paucity of dialogue, although that's not such a bad thing since I assume most of the people reading this don't speak Finnish. But I found it an interesting movie, and an interesting look at Finland at a time when it was an even more out of the way place than it is even today. And, at 70 minutes, it's not like you've made too much of an investment if it turns out not to be to your liking.

Remind me again why I'm not a fan of Jean-Luc Godard

Another of the foreign films that TCM ran quite some time ago that I finally got around to watching just before it expired from my DVR was Weekend. As has been the case for some time with my being a bit ahead of the game in terms of posting, I wrote up this post not long after watching the film but by the time this post goes live it may already have expired.

The movie opens up at what looks like it may be a vacation resort, with a couple staying in a place with a nice balcony. They get a phone call, and the wife in the couple, Corinne (Mireille Darc), discusses what to do with getting her father from the clinic. Later conversations reveal that she and her husband Roland (Jean Yanne) are waiting for her dad to die, and that hopefully it will be before he can re-write his will: they've been poisoning him slowly. Hence why they want to be the ones to pick him up from the clinic. After the phone call, we see some random violence in the parking lot below, as a fender-bender results in one driver getting shot by another.

But before our couple can head off to get Dad, we get a bizarre scene of Corinne talking to her analyst about some sort of BDSM threesome she's a part of, which doesn't involve her husband. The scene goes on, and on, and is badly underlit. After that the couple finally sets off for Dad's home town of Oinville (Google suggests there are a couple of Oinvilles, all an hour or two from central Paris depending on traffic). But they cause a fender-bender of their own, and the bratty little kid whose parents own the hit car tries to cause a violent scene.

That's about the least violence in the movie. Along the road to Oinville, the couple pass a long, long, long stretch of parked cars as though we're in a traffic jam, although the couple continually passes on the left. Some of the cars are clearly broken down or have been in accidents, but not all of them, which makes one wonder why those other cars decided to stay in this traffic jam. Apparently director Jean-Luc Godard is trying to make some sort of message with this scene. It is, however, about the least blatant of the political/cultural messaging in the movie.

The rest of the movie seems to be the couple trying to get to Oinville and either passing more violent auto wrecks, or getting involved with people who are famous historical political philosopers or revolutionaries trying to impose their own radical political views. The couple eventually does get to Oinville, only to find out that Dad has already died and they're not getting much of an inheritance.

The problem with Weekend isn't what those political philosophers are talking about so much as that these non-narrative scenes are not only in the movie, but drown out the movie as a whole. I got the impression watching Weekend that Godard had this idea of himself being oh-so-clever by trying to make such a film, when in fact it gets tedious quickly. But then again I also get the impression that people like me who find a film like this tedious deserve to have it inflicted on them. Don't they know what's good for them?

I've mentioned quite a few times on this blog my belief that a lot of people over the years have it in for foreign films because of the perception of them being arthouse stuff. Godard might well be the apotheosis of arthouse. So if you like arthouse you may well love Weekend; if you don't you'll probably hate it.

Reikugun

Another of the foreign-language films I had to watch off of my DVR before it expired is a fascinating little Japanese movie called Army.

Intertitles at the beginning of the movie (definitely the English subtitles, although I think the Japanese text says it too) say that the movie was completed in November 1944, and that the movie was sponsored by the Army Ministry of Japan. From the date, this is clearly during World War II, although also a time when the tide of war was turning against Japan. But because it's a country at war, you have to expect there's certain political considerations made. More on that, however, later.

The movie starts off with a brief introductory scene in 1866, which was just before the Meiji era started in Japan, and is in the movie referred to as a time of turmoil. The Takagi family is one is a merchant family of the aspirational class, and their fortunes are at risk because of the warring. But they serve their lord and are rewarded for it.

Fast forward to 1895, which was the time of the first Sino-Japanese War and how the Japanese wound up in control of both Taiwan and the Korean peninsula. Tomohiko Takagi (Chishū Ryū) is a descendant of the family from the first scene, and wants to do his duty for the emperor by serving in the war. He goes off to the military and trains as hard as he can, but unfortunately he's consistently sickly, which means that he can't do any real military duty, which is a matter of great shame. Some time after the war, Tomohiko gets married to Waka (Kinuyo Tanaka), resumes the family business, and eventually has two sons.

The movie goes through this era pretty quickly as well, along with the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 and more action during what would be World War I in the west. By this time, Tomohiko and Waka's first kid, Shintaro, is a young boy who's way too sensitive for his own good, something which bothers Tomohiko since he knows you have to be tough to make a good soldier, and dammit, being a good soldier and serving the Emperor is what matters. Heck, Waka says that parents only have custody of their sons until they can hand the adult sons over to the Emperor.

Eventually we get to the early 1930s, when the Japanese attack on Manchuria begins the Asian theater of what would in the west become World War II. Shintaro is about 20 now, which is old enough to take the draft exam and to try to become an officer. That would be a great point of pride for any Japanese family. But is Shintaro fit for such duty?

The synopsis that I've written above already makes it reasonably obvious how the movie has the sort of propaganda that a movie made smack-dab in the middle of a total war would require. More interesting, however, since the movie never reaches the point where Japan is fighting the west in World War II, is the way Army handles those western powers. Already in the opening 1866 scene, there's mention of how Britain and America are trying to destroy Japan. The US is mentioned at several other places as a country that's going to pose real, existential danger to Japan. Perhaps more interesting is how, in one of the scenes mentioning the wars on the Korean peninsula, it's mentioned that foreigners welcomed the Japanese forces, with specific mention made of an Italian family. Italy, of course, was on the Axis side, so not one of the countries fighting against Japan. The final scene also shows that the director, Keisuke Kinoshita, wasn't exactly on board with the war, but had to be subtle about how he presented anything that might go against the Japanese government line.

All of this makes Army a fascinating little movie, and one that I think is surprisingly well made considering what must have been a difficult time for a filmmaker in a country not only at total war, but losing that war.

Khane-ye dust kojast

I've mentioned a handful of times, albeit no so much recently, that I've got a backlog of foreign films on my DVR that need to be watched and posted about. Indeed, I don't think I got to much of what I recorded during Jean-Paul Belmondo's day in Summer Under the Stars last August before the stuff expired in May. With that in mind, I watched some of the other foreign films that were about to expire from the DVR and so that I could do posts on them and schedule them some time in the future. There were two Iranian films from a TCM Imports block on Abbas Kiarostami, and first up I'll post on Where Is the Friend's House.

Ahmad is a young student at one of those old-fashioned-looking elementary schools where the students sit in a small room on bench type desks. It's a poor part of Iran (at the southwest edge of the Caspian Sea, although this particular village is in a part of the province farthest from the sea), where most people walk to where they're going and there doesn't seem to be running water, and certainly no phones. Ahmad's best friend is the kid who sits next to him, Mohammed Reza Nematzadeh. However, Mohammed is a bit lazy or absent-minded about bringing his composition book for doing homework home, to the extent that he's had several instances of doing homework on loose-leaf paper, which really bothers his teacher. It's so bad that the teacher threatens to expel the kid if he doesn't another time.

So what happens? On that very day, Ahmad walks home only to discover that he's taken both his and Mohammed's notebooks home with him. He feels like he absolutely has to get Mohammed's notebook to Mohammed so that Mohammed can do his homework and not get in trouble. But Ahmad's mother is insistent that he do his homework first before doing anything else, even though she keeps pestering him with things to do around the courtyard and in the few rooms of the house. Ahmad feels like Mom doesn't understand him, so eventually he runs off without telling Mom, in order to take the notebook to Mohammed in the next village over.

However, since Ahmad and Mohammed only know each other from school, they haven't really been to each other's village, and Ahmad certainly doesn't know which part of the village his friend lives in. It's also a good ways away on foot. As Ahmad makes his way to Poshteh, Mohammad's village, he finds that the adults on the way seem to have about as much interest in his plight as his mother did, which is to say none at all. Not even his own grandfather, who lives in Poshteh cares. Grampa, for his part, tells the other men he's talking to that part of this treatment is that a boy like Ahmad needs to learn discipline in order to become a responsible adult.

Darkness falls and so far Ahmad hasn't found his friend's house. Worse, it means he'll be walking home in the dark and his parents would be understandly angry with him for running off like this. At the same time, Mohammad won't have much time to do his own homework since the kids from Poshteh are told by their teacher to go to bed earlier since they have to wake up early to walk to school on time. Will we get a happy ending?

Where Is the Friend's House is a mostly interesting movie, although I had a few problems with it. It's a surprisingly slow movie even though it only runs 85 minutes. At the same problem, I couldn't help but think some of the characters had poor motivations as the adults come across as particularly mean at times. (One thing that I thought would be a plot hole is fixed by Ahmad being told there are a lot of Nematzadehs in this village, which helps explain why nobody can give him a good answer of where the one he wants can be found.) The story mostly works, and it's a visually pretty movie to watch.