The Frame » film-1964

What a Way to Go!

Jandy — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 03:34:29 +0000

Slight but enjoyable Shirley MacLaine vehicle from the ’60s. She’s unlucky in love, in the sense that every time she falls in love and gets married, her husband suddenly makes a fortune, stops paying attention to her, and dies. An astounding array of men play her serial spouses: Dick Van Dyke, Paul Newman, Robert Mitchum, Gene Kelly, and Dean Martin. Nice haul. The most interesting thing about it is that each marriage is introduced with a different filmmaking style. Her life with Dick Van Dyke is done as a silent film; she meets painter Paul Newman in Paris, so they’re a European sex comedy; Mitchum is rich already and their life together is a glamorous Hollywood lifestyle; Gene Kelly, obviously a musical. These vignettes are never taken far enough to be really ground-breaking, though, making them a clever addition to a mildly entertaining film, when they could have marked a highly innovative postmodern experiment if they’d been pushed to the limit. Ah, well. Expecting too much from 1960s Hollywood, I guess.
Average

A Fistful of Dollars

Jandy — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 03:10:57 +0000

I’ve already seen The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, which is the third in the Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood Man With No Name trilogy of spaghetti westerns of which A Fistful of Dollars is the first. I don’t like watching series out of order, but I don’t think it matters much in this case. Eastwood’s nameless character lopes into a small Texas town from nowhere and soon finds himself caught in the middle of an ongoing feud between the two powerful families that run the town. He seems to waver back and forth between amoral mercenary desires and noble actions–he may not be classical Hollywood’s Western hero, but he draws on that mythology, breathing new life into the genre. The film isn’t as good as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (I haven’t seen the middle entry For a Few Dollars More, but supposedly it isn’t either), but it’s a solid film.
Above Average

The Naked Kiss

Jandy — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 05:24:24 +0000

Wow. I don’t even know where to start with this one. Samuel Fuller was a B-grade director well known for his rather off-the-wall, shocking films (his most famous film is probably Shock Corridor); this is the first one of his films that I’ve seen. And it’s so incredibly strange that I loved it! It opens with a woman beating the crap out of the camera–actually, she’s whaling on a former lover, but the first person view is the first of many surprising takes on what might otherwise be an ordinary storyline. The woman is a prostitute trying to get out of the business, so she changes towns and becomes a teacher at a home for crippled children. The only person who knows about her past life is the local cop, who helps protect her from recognition; that is, until she decides to marry another man, the town’s most upstanding citizen (he may be mayor, I forget the details, because I was so focused on its idiosyncratic style that I didn’t pay close attention to the plot). There’s another twist at the end which I won’t reveal. But the thing that sets The Naked Kiss apart is, as I said, its sheer oddness. There’s a scene where the children are all singing a song, which one would expect to be cute and saccharine sweet, but the tune is so bizarre and the children so blank that the scene becomes surreal, even creepy (see below). If you could count “cult film” as a genre, I think you’d have to put this up there with Carnival of Souls as the prime 1960s examples. I’m not sure I’d say it was “good”, but it was far too interesting to pass up, and even several weeks later, it keeps popping up in my head. It won’t be to everyone’s taste, but I couldn’t take my eyes off it.
Well Above Average

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clip mentioned in review:

The Killers (1964)

Jandy — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 16:42:10 +0000

Criterion packages both the 1946 and the 1964 versions of The Killers together, so after I finished watching the earlier one, I popped the later one in to compare. Wow different. You can still see elements of the same story, though the whole diner scene which was taken directly from the short story has been scrapped–even though they still call it “Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers,” there’s really nothing left of Hemingway in it, except the barebones idea of a former criminal’s old gang catching up to him. The Swede character is now a former racecar driver rather than a boxer, and the hitmen are characterized a lot more strongly–really, it’s almost their movie rather than his now. The whole thing doesn’t hold together as well as the earlier film, but it’s flashy and enjoyable like any average 1960s crime caper.
Average

Band of Outsiders

Jandy — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 16:23:10 +0000

Oh, Jean-Luc Godard. You and I have had a rather uneasy cinematic relationship, I know. I’ve considered your colleague François Truffaut to be the essential New Wave director and his masterpiece The 400 Blows to be greater than yours, Breathless. So why, after seeing Breathless multiple times, as well as your other most famous film Contempt, is it this admittedly important but slightly lesser film Band of Outsiders that made me fall voraciously in love with your films? Why should this slight story of three young people and their rather apathetic and doomed robbery attempt have captivated me so much? Is it the joyful spontaneity with which the characters suddenly break into an imitation of an American crime film? Is it your noncommital camera that seems both objective and tragically sympathetic at the same time? Is it the almost wholly foreign (to Americans) tendency to showcase scenes–like the scene where the characters dance in a cafe for several minutes, or the one where they experiment with a minute of complete silence–that seem to do nothing to advance the plot, but rather embrace the lives of the characters? Is it your bittersweet, detached yet complicit voiceover narration? Maybe. I only know that after watching it, I immediately added all of your movies to my Netflix queue.
Superior

Paris When It Sizzles

Jandy — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 16:14:39 +0000

William Holden is a hard-drinking screenwriter who hires Audrey Hepburn as a typist to help him finish his current screenplay in the two days he has left before the deadline. As he writes, he and Hepburn take on the roles of his characters in pseudo-fantasy sequences in which the action frequently changes to reflect the changes Holden makes in his script (told through voice-over narration). It sounds like an interesting take on the writing process, but it ultimately devolves into silliness and can’t sustain the premise. It’s still mildly enjoyable, especially if you like Audrey Hepburn, and you know, who doesn’t?
Average