Movies: The Official "Movie of the Week" Club Thread II

[Jevo]

Some interesting things there. About Kobayashi and The Human Condition. It's kind of a special thing. I think it was nameless1 who suggested it, but Kihei was going on vacation for three weeks. So I decided to watch and review it by myself, and I did it a movie a week, just to not tire myself out in one sitting.

About some of the guys "missing" from the top choices. I think guys like Scorcese, Hitchcocke, Ford and Kurosawa and just too obvious choices, so I often tend to opt for something else. Same reason FF Coppola has been picked I think, the four obvious choices from him are all "too obvious". Godard I've never really gotten into, so I haven't considered him for years now. Malick I think has been there twice, and depending on who you ask, that might be 100% of his good movies. I'm not a huge fan of his newer work either, so there's not that much to choose from. Maybe Badlands, but it doesn't feel that much like a Malick it almost seems like a waste, even if it's quite good.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

Some interesting things there. About Kobayashi and The Human Condition. It's kind of a special thing. I think it was nameless1 who suggested it, but Kihei was going on vacation for three weeks. So I decided to watch and review it by myself, and I did it a movie a week, just to not tire myself out in one sitting.

About some of the guys "missing" from the top choices. I think guys like Scorcese, Hitchcocke, Ford and Kurosawa and just too obvious choices, so I often tend to opt for something else. Same reason FF Coppola has been picked I think, the four obvious choices from him are all "too obvious". Godard I've never really gotten into, so I haven't considered him for years now. Malick I think has been there twice, and depending on who you ask, that might be 100% of his good movies. I'm not a huge fan of his newer work either, so there's not that much to choose from. Maybe Badlands, but it doesn't feel that much like a Malick it almost seems like a waste, even if it's quite good.

Yeah, I have a similar thinking regarding avoiding some of those more obvious picks. Despite that, I was still a little surprised. Further, I think it's interesting that when some of them have been picked, it hasn't exactly been the most obvious choices of movie. I point all this out as a positive. There's certainly plenty of canon here, but I like how the participants often opt for a less heralded or more intriguing choice.

The obviously random, but still curious, tidbit to me is how no movies from 1992 or 2015 have been picked. The other "no movie" years are logical for a few reasons. Those two, just a funny coincidence.

 

[Jevo]

On the beach at night alone (2017) dir. Sang-soo Hong

Young-Hee is a successful young actress who has had a relationship with a married man, one man in a long line of men in her life. But that doesn't mean he doesn't mean anything to her. Perhaps it's her getting older, but the relationship troubles her. What does it mean to her, what does it mean that he's married. Does she want to see him again, should she see him again, does he want to see her again as much as she wants to see him? She travels to Hamburg to get away from it for a while, but she returns to Korea none the wiser about her inner workings.

The movie is a slow burn. Full of long languid conversations, and the camera work is not any more exciting. Early on I wondered if this would be the time for me to start drinking coffee. But like when you are sitting at a café alone, perhaps trying to read a book or a magazine, and then you start overhearing a conversation at a nearby table. At first it's not that exciting. But slowly it starts to become much more engaging than what you were otherwise occupied with. You probably didn't catch everything from the beginning, but you start to be able to piece it all together as the story goes along. That's kinda what this movie was like for me, we kinda dive into a conversation between two women without really having the whole backstory, but we slowly get filled in as we go along. Suddenly I was hooked, and I got into that very zen like feeling that a slow movie like this can give when you give into it. The café analogy isn't random. I feel the film was also filmed from the perspective of the one sitting nearby overhearing it. The camera mainly observes from a distance. I don't think we ever get a close up of a character at all. Only during the climax of the movie do we get closer as the camera slowly zooms in so we only see the faces of the two main characters in the scene side by side. Even though we never get really close, it feels intimate compared to the distance camera work from the rest of the movie.

While I liked the movie, I feel like I'm perhaps at least 10 years too young for this movie. Young-Hee has lived life, but she's at a place now where she starts to move away from that life and she's seeking something else now. Perhaps it's a reverse mid life crisis. But I feel that you get more out of the film if you have lived through that transition period that she seems to be in, and I haven't. So I can't relate to her as much as I want to. But still it was a good movie, and it even had a surprising sense of humour throughout without putting too much emphasis on it.

 

[Ralph Spoilsport]

I've been on board here for just over a year and a half and in all that time, if I'm not mistaken, there hasn't yet been a "repeat" director pick. Been wondering how long we'll keep that streak going, and how far back it extends before my arrival.

(I guess I can check out the coming attractions page for the latter...)

Edit: I am mistaken. There were two by Max Ophuls. But have to go back to "The Fireman's Ball" (Forman, later repeated with "Amadeus") for another example.

This may be in Kal's spreadsheet, I don't know...my WinZip trial has expired apparently. Maybe when I get back to the office I can open it then.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

I've been on board here for just over a year and a half and in all that time, if I'm not mistaken, there hasn't yet been a "repeat" director pick. Been wondering how long we'll keep that streak going, and how far back it extends before my arrival.

(I guess I can check out the coming attractions page for the latter...)

Edit: I am mistaken. There were two by Max Ophuls. But have to go back to "The Fireman's Ball" (Forman, later repeated with "Amadeus") for another example.

This may be in Kal's spreadsheet, I don't know...my WinZip trial has expired apparently. Maybe when I get back to the office I can open it then.

I started at Rules of the Game, though there was a several month break in there for me too.

Kiarostami, Jarmusch and Hawks all have been repeated in my time here. (in addition to Ophuls and Forman).

 

[Ralph Spoilsport]

Someone please help me out with On The Beach At Night Alone. Some scenes may be real, some may be dreams, some may be fantasies or memories, some may be scenes from a movie. It has an elliptical narrative style that reminded me of Police, Adjective--left lots of dots to connect and blank spaces to fill in. And yet I didn't like it anywhere near as much. Maybe I'm just more interested in how moral and ethical standards are determined and applied in society and less interested in some drama queen's love life. Why should I care?

OK, that may be harsh. I do care, somewhat. Young-hee's okay after all, who hasn't said dumb shit when they're drunk? And I cared about her friends, some with relationships of their own, some without. Their situations seemed more interesting to me. My question then I suppose should be…why would I remember? Long after the movie's over I'm not left with anything but a frustrating sense of not seeing what everybody else sees. Not much of a take away. Sorry, kiddo. It's not you, it's me.

 

[kihei]

I'm out of it for at least a couple of weeks with a ruptured elbow tendon. Will continue with short comments and will update the coming attractions on page one. Maybe I'll get the hang of one-handed typing but I seem to actually need two hands to think.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

I'm out of it for at least a couple of weeks with a ruptured elbow tendon. Will continue with short comments and will update the coming attractions on page one. Maybe I'll get the hang of one-handed typing but I seem to actually need two hands to think.

Get well soon.

 

[Jevo]

Las Hurdes (1933) dir. Luis Bunuel

A travelogue style documentary about the remote Spanish region of Las Hurdes. One of the poorest parts of the country. Las Hurdes is situated in a series of valleys in an rough mountain range, which means contact with the outside has often been scarce, and growing food and raising animals have been hard for centuries. Apparently at this point bread is only a recent introduction to the region, exemplifying the hardships of the area, and bread is still a luxury item. A big source of income in the region recently had been the adoption of orphans from other regions of Spain, in exchange of a grant for raising the kids. A scheme that had apparently been put to end because too many kids were being brought to the region.

As anyone experienced with Bunuel might guess, the big question after watching this film is what is real and what isn't? Apart from certain segments being deliberately staged, such as the donkey being stung to death by bees, I suspect most of the images are real. The real grey area comes with the commentary. The movie is styled after travelogues of the time, which often went to africa and other remote areas in search of 'savages', which they could display as backwards and uncultured. Today this kind of movie might have been called "savagery porn", which allows the viewer to sit and be appalled at the unthinkable things they see on screen, cozy and far away from such horrors. I don't believe Bunuel's intent here is to mock, rather it is to get attention to the fact that there are people in his very country, which are in dire need of modernisation and attention from the public authorities to help give them a better and easier life. Poverty that the people of Madrid and Barcelona have never heard of before. The descriptions of life in Las Hurdes by the narrator is often obviously exaggerated, bordering on sarcastic even at times. All presented very matter of factly, which sometimes means you could even describe the movie as fun. But I feel bad about considering laughing at the narration, when the pictures on the screen in front of me are people who live terribly hard lives, and it is often sad to see the hardship they have to go through to get so little quality of life, if you can even use that term to describe what their lives are like.

The subject matter and the context in which this movie was made, are probably quite outdated nowadays. From what I can read Las Hurdes has become modernised, even if it's still poor relative to Spain in general. But I think the way that Bunuel plays with the form of the documentary is still fun to watch, and the movie in itself is sort of time capsule, and in that regard it is also interesting to watch. I also think the underlying message about how the bourgeoisie would rather be appalled at misery far away, than do something about it the misery happening close to them still has relevance today. I mean, we'd risk having to stand face to face with poor people if we got involved in that. Can't have that can we?

 

[Jevo]

Best of luck with elbow to Kihei. I hope whatever caused it was worth it.

My next pick will be Unforgiven. Apparently we've never had a 1992 movie before, so I thought it was about time we had one.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

Best of luck with elbow to Kihei. I hope whatever caused it was worth it.

My next pick will be Unforgiven. Apparently we've never had a 1992 movie before, so I thought it was about time we had one.

Hahahahaha. I was looking at 1992 movies the other day and that was the only one that really jumped out to me so I put in on my list of possible future choices.

 

[Jevo]

Hahahahaha. I was looking at 1992 movies the other day and that was the only one that really jumped out to me so I put in on my list of possible future choices.

I had the same experience. It seems to be bit of a barren year. But maybe I just didn't dig deep enough.

 

[Say Hey Kid]

I'm out of it for at least a couple of weeks with a ruptured elbow tendon. Will continue with short comments and will update the coming attractions on page one. Maybe I'll get the hang of one-handed typing but I seem to actually need two hands to think.

Get well soon. I bet it's tennis elbow.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

Land Without Bread aka Las Hurdes
Bunuel (1933)
“Respect the property of others.”

Luis Bunuel and a camera crew ventured into the hills of northern Spain in 1932 to document a rural region that hadn’t progressed much beyond its earliest days. It’s an unforgiving place of difficult soil and incomparable poverty with about 52 villages and 8,000 inhabitants spread across the remote corner. A filthy stream supplies the water. It’s all a bit all over the place. The crew visits a school. A poor girl on the street dies off screen (so we’re told). Farming is depicted as an arduous process of building walls and relocating topsoil. Fertilizer is created in an unfathomably complicated way. Even the hardest of hard core locavores would be challenged by these methods. We learn about particularly harmful bugs. We meet “cretins” who are the results of generations of inbreeding (so we’re told). There’s a prolonged closing stretching following the mourning and burial of a dead child. The churches do well, of course. There is an actual death herald in the town. It ends with a call to Spain’s authorities to take care of its workers and its vulnerable.

But is that what Bunuel is doing?

From an early point in the film, I was struck with an overwhelming question: Is this a put-on? Is this real? It does indeed seem to be real footage of real people in a real place. Perhaps there is an element of exaggeration? There is something about Bunuel’s tone that constantly had me on guard for a something resembling a punchline. Moments felt ridiculous to me — a donkey swarmed by bees, a goat falling off a cliff, even the school scenes that just have a bizarre air to them. The presence of a school alone makes me think there’s something resembling a more modern society here, but there isn’t much attention paid to that. Did that girl really die offscreen? Was the funeral sequence a recreation? The narrator says he cannot get footage of the “cretins” and yet there is a good five minutes of exactly that. I suppose that is the point and therein maybe lies the power? It is both real and ridiculous.

There are dashes of that classic, playful Bunuel. The scenes of married men competing to pull the head off a liver rooster is rife with the humorous sexual symbolism that marks much of his other works. The narration throughout has a deadpan rhythm that again made me feel like we’re on the verge of a joke, yet none ever came. The violence against animals, some of which was recreated after the fact so I read, was a bit hard for me to stomach. I’m not naive about the world and how many people get the food we eat or how the proverbial circle of life moves, but seeing it in action here was a bit of a punch to my gut. That poor donkey. The scenes are doubly upsetting learning that it was recreated for the film. That isn’t to turn my back on some of the human suffering depicted, but again, I’m not sure how much of what I saw there was real. That donkey definitely was.

 

[Ralph Spoilsport]

In Las Hurdes: Land Without Bread we take a trip into a land that time forgot, a corner of Spain left behind by civilization. There are no ghosts, werewolves or vampires in this land, the monster here is human backwardness. Like many horror films that take the form of a journey--Nosferatu for example--the trip begins with a stop at a safe haven, a last outpost of civilization before heading into the spooky unknown. In Las Hurdes that town is La Alberca, still medieval by modern standards: we arrive just in time for an annual festival in which the recently married men pull the heads of live roosters while on horseback. Sounds barbaric but it could be grand ballet compared to what we'll see in Las Hurdes. I mean, it's at least some kind of culture, and the wine and celebrations flow afterwards. We leave La Alberca and the good life behind and head into the Las Hurdes region where everything in life is hard.


Land without Bread may as well be titled Land Without Breaks, since the Hurdunos can’t seem to catch a single one. Everything goes wrong for them. The men who march off to the nearest city to find work (core skill: begging) come home empty-handed. The land may be Godforsaken, or it may be God’s idea of a cruel joke. Even the honey tastes bitter. The wild cherries that grow there may be sweet but since the threat of starvation forces the locals to eat them before they fully ripen we don't know.

Las Hurdes: Land Without Bread is an early example, maybe the only example, of a horror documentary. It's purpose may well be to inform, to spread awareness of a situation which requires attention, and there's a call to action at the end (which feels tacked on). But it also intends to be creepy and disturbing, even mean.

 

[Jevo]

The ending text is definitely tacked on. I'm not sure exactly when, but sometime after the Spanish civil war.

 

[kihei]

Las Hurdes (Land without Bread) (1932), directed by Luis Bunuel

Under the circumstances, probably the best contribution that I can make to the Las Hurdes discussion is to draw people's attention to this article from The Guardian discussing a different film maker's return to the region in 2000.

Bunuel and the land that never was

The locals are still upset with Bunuel who they think falsified their history. Yet the movie remains an important touchstone for the region anyway. Whatever way one wants to treat this film, it remains a fascinating footnote in the evolution of one of the greatest directors in film history.

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[Jevo]

I think you forgot to link the article. Elbow still playing up?

 

[kihei]

I think you forgot to link the article. Elbow still playing up?

Yup. Article is now included, thanks.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

The Vanishing
Sluzier (1988)
“I need to know.”

Rex and Saskia are a young couple in love. They’re on vacation through Europe. They bicker. They talk of dreams and fears — abandonment, loneliness. They make up. One sunny afternoon after a stop at a busy gas station. We see a man with a broken arm. Saskia disappears. Poof. Rex demands response and answers. The police are reluctant to open a case. Rex wants change from the vending machine dusted for prints. He’s getting no where. Suddenly we’re whisked into the life of Raymond. He’s having dinner with his family where a screaming contest breaks out. That’s a little weird. There is no mystery about the perpetrator of the crime. It’s Raymond. There isn’t even much mystery as to why. The question is how. Time jumps ahead a few years. Rex is in a new relationship in a physical sense only. He remains consumed by Saskia’s disappearance. Now Raymond is sending him taunting letters and even stalking him, lurking in the background. Raymond approaches Rex with an offer — come with me and you will learn all. His obsession outweighs whatever good sense he may have left. They roadtrip and talk. He guzzles down a drugged drink and wakes up ... in a coffin. Buried alive. Up on the surface, Raymond’s idyllic family life goes on.

The Hitchcock comparisons are obvious and fully warranted. Rex is a man so obsessed with a lost (dead) woman he cannot move on in his current life. That’s straight from the Hitch playbook. The entire movie is an exercise in Hitch’s famous adage of surprise vs. suspense. Raymond is that proverbial bomb under the bus seat. We know he’s there the entire time. We see him in the background at the cafe. We see him watching Rex from a distant window. When a TV report dramatically proclaims, “A murderer could be in the crowd,” well, of course, there is Raymond. It’s at times an unbearably tense film — and yet, there is almost no violence. One scene and a quick one at that. Other than that, all the power here is the mere existence of evil and weight of the unknown, which drags you down into The Vanishing’s own distinct claustrophobic hell.

I’ve watched this one a few times now and for all its clockwork precision, all the little details that mean so much, what really drives the dread and sadness home is that Raymond is far from some criminal mastermind. He’s obvious and a bit bumbling. He sneezes into his own ether-laced rag. Several women see right through his ruse and call him on it. Though why they don’t report him to any authority I suppose we’ll chalk up to human beings just not wanting to get involved? It’s only when he resigns himself to giving up that he’s able to lure in Saskia. She’s drawn to the “R” keychain Raymond was given as a present. He spins an improvised lie and lures her to his car. It’s a series of events so mundane as to be heartbreaking. A soda, a lack of change, a keychain, the desire to give a loved one a thoughtful gift ...

And poor, stupid, obsessed Rex. Raymond’s fingerprints would’ve been all over that vending machine change. And it was Raymond in the picture that he was harping about all along.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

I'm still in a Halloween/horror mood so for my next pick, I'll go with The Innocents, a classy classic creeper with Deborah Kerr.

 

[kihei]

The Vanishing (1988) Directed by George Sluizer

I watched The Vanishing again reluctantly. I thought about faking it, writing a review based on my memory of the film. That didn't seem much in the spirit of the thing, though. Don't get me wrong, I think The Vanishing is an excellent film, one that takes a spot in the nether regions of my top hundred films. But I didn't want to watch it again. The experience is discomforting and just weirds me out. It's not like there is a single scene that bothers me; it's not the movie's violence that gets me, because there is virtually none in the movie except for the two acts of murder; and its not even the plot line which I am sure would be less memorable in another director's hands. I think what Sluizer does here is to create a masterpiece of plausibility. I'm not talking documentary realism here or neo-realism. I'm talking about the ability to create a work that convinces me that it could be real in this sense--that a sociopathic killer might function exactly this way. In other words, every scene in the movie quietly convinces me of the film's verisimilitude. Raymond is a perfect creation of horror largely because he seems so convincingly credible. When he takes it upon himself to balance an act of good with an act of evil, he takes on the inevitability of a force of nature. Yet his commitment is almost mundane--this is not a man of exceptional passion or vision or egocentricity, this is an intelligent, remorseless guy on a mission, basically giving his all to the equivalent of what from his point of view is little more than a lab experiment. With his happy family life and comfortable existence, he seems like he could be anybody.

Director George Sluizer in a relatively few strokes creates such an appealing victim, young, lovely, full of life, that the crime has even greater force. Saskia is a great stand in for all our daughters and wives and partners and girlfriends. Partly what is effective here is not just the winsome performance by Johanna ter Steege, though she makes a great contribution to the movie. What makes this character work more than anything else is that there is only one of her, convincingly and sympathetically drawn, so her single death has great impact. If she was just one of seven or eight victims, i.e., the tired genre formula, neither she nor the movie would have anything approaching the same impact. By identifying with one victim, it is much easier to experience the genuine horror of the situation. Part of what gives the movie power is part of what gave the best Hitchcock movies power: the character development afforded both hunter and hunted deepens the audience's commitment to what is going on. The only real difference is that Hitchcock kept reminding you that you were in a movie with all his marvelously entertaining set pieces--Sluizer as a director doesn't have that kind of personality and, as a result, his hand seems far less visible than Hitchcock's--meaning there is one less buffer between the the audience and the events that we see on the screen.

In fact, I'm not sure a great director would have been able to make this movie anywhere near as well as Sluizer does. Sluizer seems to be an odd case. He makes one superb movie, is hired for the terrible Hollywood remake in which he consents to piss all over his own canvas, suggesting that he never had a vision to compromise in the first place. And then nothing--he makes a few meaningless movies and drops from sight. Perhaps, though, it is the absence of a discernible personality in the director's chair, that helps to make the original The Vanishing so effective. While the editing is exceptional in this movie, much of the film's portrayal of Raymond's existence and family life seems like it could come from any one of a hundred European movies. As a result, the very ordinary nature of some scenes contributes to the horror's matter-of-fact plausibility. Resisting the opportunity to jazz it up or impose his personality, Sluizer creates something that is very hard to come by at the movies: genuine dread.

So the end result is the horrific death of two people whom I don't want to see die, but, more importantly, a story that relentlessly shows that there are creatures out there that we can't even see fully capable of such monstrous acts and utterly devoid of remorse. Not a truth that I wish to be reminded about too often.

Later: the thought occurs to me belatedly that maybe my disquiet all boils down to the fact that The Vanishing ends up being such a perfect example of existential randomness. Maybe that is the scariest thing about it.

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[Jevo]

The Vanishing (1988) dir. George Sluizer

Rex and Saskia are a young dutch couple of their summer holiday in southern France. They play car games, joke around, and fight a little bit. The usual stuff you do on a long road trip. They get to a rest area on the motorway and stop to fill up the car and relax for a bit. Saskia goes inside to buy a couple of cold drinks for them, but she never returns to Rex and the car. Rex searches for her frantically all over the rest area, but she has vanished completely. Or at least it seems that way, what we as viewers know is that Saskia was kidnapped and killed by Raymond, a sociopath who had spent a long time preparing for the murder of an unknown woman, just to show to himself that he was capable of doing it. Three years later Rex is still searching for Saskia in the area around the rest area, and even appears of local television. Raymond feels taunted by this and eventually initiates contact with Rex in the Netherlands, and the two start a long road trip back to France, with the promise that Rex will learn what happened to Saskia.

One of my biggest critique points about The Vanishing is the title, or the English title to be exact. The Vanishing sounds too much like a horror movie, like something supernatural is at play. At least it feels that way to me. And the scary thing about The Vanishing is that it's not supernatural at all, it's just a normal human being behind it all. I like the original title a lot more, 'Spoorloos', without a trace, it seems much more ominous to me, very much in line with the movie as a whole.

I really like The Vanishing, it's one of the best thrillers ever made in my opinion. The relationship between Rex and Saskia only has a few minutes to develop, but it is done very effectively, we learn a lot about them as a couple in this short time. The scene in the tunnel also tells a lot about Rex that becomes important later on. The character traits that makes me act like he does there are the same that makes him search for Saskia for three years, and makes him get into the car with her killer. In general I think the tunnel scene is amazing. There's just something about the way the movie is filmed, the sound, etc. that means you know something bad is gonna happen from the first second of the movie, but you don't know what. And then the car runs out of gas in the middle of the tunnel, and they get separated. You just think shit, this is bad, and it's a few really tense few minutes. But nothing happens to them, just like nothing would probably to you and me, apart from being rightly scared and angry of course. I'm not sure if you can call it a subversion, but I really like it as tease.

The movie also spends a lot of time with Raymond, and he's perhaps even the main character of the movie when it comes down to it. But the movie never really makes any attempt to make him attractive in any way. He doesn't have any attractive traits, but he's still really interesting. Personally I can't look away when he's on screen. There's something about his totally cold demeanour that makes him interesting to watch, while also being extremely unsettling. I find Raymond to be a much more scary 'monster' than someone like Freddy Krueger. Raymond seems much more real. And we are allowed to get under the skin of him, and all we learn is that there's nothing redeeming to find. He's just pure evil with no emotions.

 

[Ralph Spoilsport]

Preview

Having seen The Vanishing a few years ago I was a little unsure about revisiting it, figuring the whole movie builds up to a reveal ending which, once known, takes away a lot of the “rewatch” value. In fact I was tempted to watch the Hollywood remake just for laughs instead. But I've been wrong before (I actually have a little streak going), and I was wrong again about The Vanishing; knowing how it ends, I actually enjoyed it a lot more the second time around. Things I didn't pay much attention to the first time around, or scenes that felt like filler, suddenly became deliciously creepy. For example, the scene with Raymond's family sitting around the picnic table screaming: beginning with a false scare (the spiders in the drawer), the rest of the scene just seemed to be playfully mocking death, but now I get it: Raymond is “scream-proofing” his country house, making sure it's isolated enough to bring his victims.

Guess I shoulda known better. When I saw Psycho (with which The Vanishing has a lot in common) for the second time my whole interpretation on the film changed for the same reason. You could probably say this about any movie, but with mystery thrillers it's probably more pertinent. Knowing how the story ends may take away some of the mystery but in a way it enhances the thrills; you can see them coming, savour them. Especially poignant to me was Rex and Saskia's final moments together at the rest stop. Making up with each other after the tunnel incident--Rex isn't in the doghouse for very long--they seem to be deeper in love than before. The parkette, a patch of green with a few trees, becomes like their own garden of Eden, a world of their own. Saskia gets frisky right there on the grass. I understand Europeans have more relaxed attitudes towards these things, but guys--get a room! There are kids around. Frisbees are being tossed around, people are always in the frame going back and forth from their cars, and there is a constant hum of traffic in the background. This very public space is not the place for a private moment, and yet in a few moments a horror will occur in broad daylight in this place teeming with people. Scary.

One thing The Vanishing has in common with Psycho is the bullsh*t psychiatric explanation. Near the end of Psycho a psychiatrist is introduced to explain Norman's condition. He sounds plausible enough, but is he right? Or is Hitchcock pulling the wool over our eyes? I have the same questions about Raymond's motivation. I'm not sure I swallow this explanation that Saskia's killing was somehow related to Raymond's saving of a drowning girl, that Raymond could not be comfortable with being a hero unless he proved he was equally capable of being a villain. This may have been Raymond's story to make Rex think the he was more rational than he was. But the two acts are not comparable at all. Raymond's act of heroism is performed impulsively and without hesitation. He does not stop to measure his heart rate or set his stopwatch, he doesn't need a few test runs. He doesn't need to plan. He acts as though he were predestined--his jump off the bridge mirroring the jump from the balcony where as a boy he asserts the control of his will over destiny--and that's what bothers him most. That's something I'll have to watch for next time I see The Vanishing, I'm looking forward to it already.

 

[Jevo]

Gun Crazy (1950) dir. Joseph H. Lewis

As a teenager Bart Tare gets sent to a juvenile correction facility after he breaks into a store to steal a gun, despite testimony from his sister and friends that he's completely harmless, he just loves guns and is a great shot. Years later he returns to his hometown after a spell in the army where he got marksmans training. There's a carnival in town and Bart goes with his friends for a good time. They see a gun show with the pretty sharpshooter Annie. Bart and Annie gets into a sharpshooting competition, which Bart wins and gets him a job offer from the carnival. Bart and Annie gets romantic, but the owner of the carnival has his eyes set on Annie. When the owner tries to rape Annie, Bart intervenes but gets fired and he runs away together with Annie. The two go on a great honeymoon, but without any income. When their money runs out Annie's evil underbelly starts to show, as she pressures Bart to follow her in a life of crime. The two start to rob stores and gas stations together, at first it's a bloodless affair, but Annie's bloodlust grows stronger and stronger.

Gun Crazy won't make you rethink the meaning of life, but it will entertain mightily for an hour and a half. It takes a couple of minutes to get going, the opening trial is a bit drawn out. But once Annie gets into the film everything is fine. While you can't show anything sexual in an American film from 1950, the sexual tension between Annie and Bart is incredible, the whole film oozes. Their first scene together in the shooting tent is particularly great in this aspect, since they haven't been together yet, so they are like a couple of dogs in heat, and the bizarre shooting competition becomes sexual between them. The movie never really delves much into what emotional or intellectual things bring the couple together, apart from the fact that they are both horny and turned on by guns. As it turns out though, their gun obsession has slightly different end points. I'm not saying the movie is better because they can't be shown engaging physically with each other, so it all has to implied through a lot sexual tension between the two. But it wouldn't necessarily have been better because of it. There's plenty of bad erotic films with sex scenes more boring and life less than a mouldy Sears catalogue. But if it was as well done as the rest of the movie is production wise, I think it could add something good to the film. I actually wouldn't be against the idea of an outright erotic remake of the film. If done by the right people I think it could be a really good movie, and it would be fun to see the contrast between the two versions. But I doubt there's much demand for such a remake at the moment.

Like any good noir Gun Crazy is fast paced with quick editing, snappy dialogue and a great leading couple. It's a fun ride to go along with. I especially think Peggy Cummins as Annie is great. She's a classic noir femme fatale. She's beautiful and you can see why Bart is instantly drawn to her. But there's something about her right from the start where you just sense that she's trouble in some way, but you don't know how. Of course Bart is oblivious to this, as would any man in love be. Another great thing about the movie is Bart's slow realisation what it is he has married. He doesn't really want to admit this to himself either. I think John Dall plays this part of his role really well. Since all of this is happening internally it's something he has to show just with his face and body. At times I thought he had a tendency to be a bit wooden, but here he excelled in my opinion.