Due soldi di speranza (Italy 1952)

Due soldi di speranza is an engaging neo-realist tragi-comedy from little-kown writer/director Renato Castellani. A story of young love between a chronically unemployed ex-soldier and a willfull firebrand of a girl in an economically depressed village outside of Naples, employs high farce to telegraph the depth of social disadvantage in the immediate post-war years and the hypocrisy of state, church, and peasant mores. A maelstrom of impulsive actions reach a climactic rebellious act, which while glorious is steeped in tragedy.  A deft work with wonderful cameos and authentic vignettes, framed by a cheeky insouciant score from Alessandro Cicognini. The two leads Maria Fiore and Vincenzo Musolino are a delight.

Received a BAFTA for best film in 1954 and director Castellini was awarded the Grand Prize at Cannes in 1952.

Our Friends In The North (BBC TV - 1995)

The British TV drama series Our Friends In The North is compulsive viewing. At £8m it did not come cheap and the BBC took years to find the courage to give the project the go-ahead.

Writer Peter Flannery worked on the script for six years, and he delivers real lives where the tragedy is slow and cumulative and not on a grand scale but no less human or devastating. Quality English-speaking TV drama with a conviction and veracity only the British can deliver. Indeed, nothing since has come close in quality and historic sweep. There is a seething anger with the failure of the political process and the betrayal of progressive aspirations, which 16 years later, is still manifestly justified.

Contemporary popular music is used sparingly but very effectively in conveying not only the zeitgeist but in establishing a sense of time and place, and a shared history that crosses international borders.

There are no heroes and each character is flawed – as we all are – why blame ourselves when we can blame someone else? Still friends after 30 years, but are we? Nothing left to say, and where were we when we needed each other. We leave family behind and then at the end the truth too late. And working people are still the scapegoat and their desolation aways the solution.

A Separation (2011)

Ironically, A Separation, a film about family conflict and social antagonisms, reminds us of what unites us. That for all the mad accumulation of weapons, and hard political rhetoric on both sides of the East and West divide, there are children, old people, wives, husbands, mothers and fathers, all struggling with life’s vicissitudes.

A young middle-class family in Tehran is torn apart by the ambitions of the wife who in seeking more freedom and better opportunities for herself and her 11-yo daughter wants to emigrate. The husband can’t leave an elderly father burdened by dementia. She unsuccesfully petitions for a divorce and then moves out to her parents as she won’t leave Iran without her daughter, who wants to stay with her father.  He hires a poor working woman from the outer suburbs to care for the grandfather while he is at work.

All too human frailties on both sides of the marriage, between the sexes, and across class divisions lead to tragic consequences.  The husband as well as care for his fractured family, must now navigate the maelstrom of a chaotic but not uncaring judicial system.  There are no villains in this story, only real people with problems we can all relate to.  The film-maker does not take sides and leaves it to us to develop our own responses to what unfolds.  In the end a child is asked to make an impossible decision – and we never know her choice – even though she says she has made it, tears streaming down from her hurt tender eyes.  It is the innocents that suffer most: the daughter, the grandfather, and the young daughter of the carer, all buffeted by the passions raging around them.

The film has a deep humanity and an assured veracity that holds you transfixed.  It has an unwavering cultural integrity and an unflinching commitment to realism. The director takes you into the family home with a disciplined hand-held camera and uses the confined space with imagination and flair. His mis-en-scene is richly redolent, with close-ups used to convey emotions with understated clarity. Outside he uses medium long-shots brilliantly: the harrowed carer desperately trying to find the grandfather on a busy street after he gets out of the apartment, and a wonderful scene of the carer and child from the back on a bench waiting for their bus home, the little girl’s legs dangling.

Yet there is something that disturbed me. The wife in leaving her family is selfish.  In our societies we can say this and it has no consequences beyond the immediate circumstances.  But in a society like Iran’s the actions of the wife and other women in the film can be seen – I believe not unfairly  – as troubling.  The patriarchal argument could easily be made that what unfolds in the film is what happens when women are given more freedom.  As an Iranian film I can’t help but feel that it may have a reactionary consequence. Though this hopefully comes not from an intention of the film-maker, but from the script which leaves the wife’s character not as deeply explored as the husband’s.

Beautifully acted with beguiling performances from the children and grandfather.   The young child of the carer is young enough to wear cute clothes and her angelic bewilderment adds color and true pathos.

An essential film.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was a big disappointment. I have read most of Le Carre’s novels, and while critics find his 70s work superior, I prefer his most recent output as it reveals a weary disillusionment, and a greater concern for the tragic ‘collateral damage’ that is inflicted by so-called democratic regimes.

The film is a flashy anachronism suited more to the cold war years. The world has moved on. This is not to say it could not have been better. Rich period detail and an intelligent script are pluses, but the pace is glacial and there is little if any of the tension you would expect from a spy thriller. There is intrigue but the action is plodding. A big mistake was casting a major star Colin Firth in a minor but pivotal role – anyone with half a brain knows who the mole is at the get go.

The denouement is so flat you wonder what the hell you have been doing for the last two hours. The story should have focused more on the mole, Karla (the Soviet spymaster), and Control, very ably played by John Hurt, who we see much too little of. Some unnecessarily graphic gore is really indulgent. Definitely over-rated, and BAFTA is being patently parochial in naming it one of the best films of 2011.

The Tree of Life (2011)

Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life is short of a masterpiece but certainly great.  A visually stunning and fluidly cinematic film where the images tell the story.  But the editing is sometimes intrusive with some redundant jump cuts at the start.  The mythic elements are largely superfluous and a touch heavy-handed, as is the reliance on the albeit achingly beautiful musical scoring.  I wonder if limiting the scenario to the essential elements of the story would not have produced an elegiac masterpiece.  Somehow, Sean Penn seems miscast - his angst has an arrogance that undermines the modest filaments of a more simple reality found in the childhood years.  The scenes of thrusting towers of glass and steel are breathtaking but rather weak metaphors.

Yesterday before watching Malick's film I was re-reading Saul Bellow's masterful novel 'Herzog' and a particular passage struck me as very telling, and in retrospect particularly relevant to The Tree of Life.  Herzog is being visited by a fellow academic who is waxing lyrical before Herzog's attractive wife:  "Madeleine, "stuck away in the woods," was avid for scholarly conversation. Shapiro knew the literature of every field-he read all the publications; he had accounts with book dealers all over the world. When he found that Madeleine was not only a beauty but was preparing for her doctoral examination in Slavonic languages, he said, "How delightful!" And it was he himself who knew, betraying the knowledge by affectation, that for a Russian Jew from Chicago's West Side that "How delightful!" was inappropriate. A German Jew from Kenwood might have gotten away with it-old money, in the dry-goods business since 1880. But Shapiro's father had had no money, and peddled rotten apples from South Water Street in a wagon. There was more of the truth of life in those spotted, spoiled apples, and in old Shapiro, who smelled of the horse and of produce, than in all of these learned references."

Similarly, there is more truth in that Texas garden with the modest vegetable patch and scruffy lawn than in all those cosmic pyrotechnics.

Melancholia (Germany 2011)

Lars Von Trier's Melancholia is overall a banal bore, which only fires at the end. Without the drama of Wagner the sumptuous visuals framed by the planetary collision are empty of feeling and devoid of real meaning. It is one part too long. Part two can stand alone – it does not need the tedium and bourgeois antics that mark a thoroughly indulgent first half. Von Trier is pretty conceited for a depressive, pronouncing from a golf-cart that angst is truth and that mal-adjustment is a sort of bravery. Witness the contrived cowardice of the brother-in-law John. Depression if we wax poetic is a profound regret born of the unbearable awareness of impermanence, which comes from a deep compassion and paradoxically a dark anger at the pain such awareness brings. But depression is also a chemical imbalance in the brain. Rewire the brain or get zapped by the bio-chemists and it goes away. The ghost is in the machine not on the golf course or in the manicured gardens of the rich. Melancholia is a weakness not strength. Von Trier is a con-man spruiking art in a bottle. Cheers!

The Ides of March (2011)

I found George Clooney’s latest directorial effort, The Ides Of March, only so-so. Clooney should stick to the knitting. The two young leads were good, with Evan Rachel Wood really impressing, and the script would have worked better with her intern being the focus. Even before the dénouement Clooney playing the presidential candidate appears terribly phoney – come to think of it has there ever been one since Nixon who hasn’t been a phoney? Clooney the celebrity is always in the frame for me, and I can’t take him seriously as a liberal/left-winger because of his blatant hypocrisy. His heart must really bleed for the poor and disenfranchised when ensconced in his pallazzo on Lake Como, after laughing all the way to the bank.

Suzaki Paradise (Akashingo - Japan 1956)

Yuzo Kawashima's Suzaki Paradise is an excellent film bordering on greatness. Actress Yukiko Todoroki’s Osami is the moral anchor for the lives that intersect at her tiny bar, and her performance is affecting, but it is Michiyo Aratama as the shiftless Tsutae that is truly compelling in a nuanced and deeply convincing portrayal as the drifter whore burdened by a decency she seeks to escape but always returns to. Her love for a loser is at bottom and all at once a glorious redemption and a prison. She is the new wave – a lost soul of the burgeoning metropolis – a beat. Kawashima uses brothel jazz on the soundtrack to insinuate this, and places his camera at ground level to look up at his protagonists in a disturbing new way. Aratama has the best line in the film: “You have to live until you die.”

Night Nurse (1931)

The pre-coder Night Nurse has quite a cynical subtext that questions not only medical ethics but the 'good-time' moral apathy of big city life.

Medical and other ethics are discussed quite seriously in the first half in the banter between Barbara Stanwyck's Lora and the bootlegger when she patches him up and doesn't report the gun-shot wound.  In the second half Lora is the only one with principles strong enough to fight for the kid's in her care. Even Joan Blondell's nurse Maloney who shares the care of the kids is prepared to let things ride, as is Lora's doctor mentor, until pushed to become involved by Lora's insistence that something must be done. The dipsomaniac mother is not only a lush but morally bankrupt, and has quite a few gowned women and tuxedo-ed men cavorting with her in her nightly bacchanals.

With the bootlegger's help the kid's are saved, but with disturbing irony, Lora is at the end happy to hook up with him despite her earlier insistence that he give up his 'career', and despite having a pretty good idea of the chauffeur's fate.  Indeed, we find out about the meting out of this rough justice in a final comic scene where the bootlegger steers his car one-armed - the other arm is wrapped around Lorna -  while Lorna shifts gear. Twice she jumps the car in reverse and hits the car behind played as slapstick.  But her moral backsliding is not so funny.

Director William Wellman has hoodwinked us into laughing at an irreverent amoral conspiracy.

Great cinema and an unflinching critique of the zeitgeist.

Gold-Diggers of 1933 (1933)

Gone are my blues
and gone are my tears
I’ve got good news
to shout in your ears
The long lost dollar has come
back to the fold
With silver you can turn
your dreams to gold
We’re in the money
We’re in the money
We’ve got a lot of what it takes
to get along!
We’re in the money
The sky is sunny
Old man depression you are through
You done us wrong!

Ginger Rogers cute as a button hits the screen in medium close-up straight after the opening credits. She ain’t glamorous but she overflows with an effervescent charm that has you reeling as she bounces into ‘We’re In the Money’, one of the most ironic and catchy songs ever recorded on celluloid. The girl next door has rhythm!  After the camera moves away to a cheeky cavalcade of chorus girls greeting the audience in close-up, Ginger returns to set-off Busby Berkeley doing his thing abetted by the brilliant music of Al Dubin and Harry Warren. And what a thing! You just want to grab one of those bikini-ed babes and start dancing – big 1993 ‘coins’ simultaneously hide and focus attention on their ‘assets’.  The girls are rehearsing a number for a new Broadway show, but before they finish the Sheriff has raided the theater and confiscated all the girls’ accoutrements.  The producer has run out of dough and the girls are out of a job. Old man depression still has some life in him yet.

- It’s all about the Depression.
- We won’t have to rehearse that.

Ginger on the skids recedes into the background after we are introduced to three out of work chorines sharing an apartment and clothes, and forced to pilfering a neighbor’s milk for breakfast: two forced-by-circumstance gold-diggers and a third cute little damsel with eyes that melt your heart.  The exuberant wise-cracker Aline MacMahon, the hot and soulful Joan Blondell, and the all-singing and all-dancing ingénue Ruby Keeler. A trio of fresh dames that drive the narrative with comic delight and saucy innuendo.  As Maurice Chevalier warbled in another movie – “thank Heaven for little girls”. Ruby’s heart belongs to Dick Powell an aspiring song composer down the hall.  All the story needs now is dough and a producer for another show.  After a few scenes we are there. A show about the depression. Music and mysterious funding by Dick, and production by the irascible Ned Sparks.

The scenario established, we run headlong into a romantic comedy fueled by sex, romance, cute misunderstandings, and gold-digging, peppered with fantastic show numbers courtesy of Berkeley.   As stuffy suitors or marks – depending on who you’re talking to (wink, wink) – we have Warner Bros stalwarts Warren William as Dick’s older disapproving brother and Guy Kibbee as his lawyer, who in one rich scene is caught mugging in a hat-shop mirror with a pooch – mirror, mirror on the wall…

- Isn’t there going to be any comedy in the show?
- Oh, plenty! The gay side, the hard-boiled side, the cynical and funny side of the depression! I’ll make ‘em laugh at you starving to death, honey. It’ll be the funniest thing you ever did.

As scenarios go we have been there before and we will go there again, but the glee is in the dialog, and here Aline MacMahon holds all the cards. Kibbee as her beau whom she dubs “Fanny” holds his end up, but his talent is his silly engaging demeanor. MacMahon is a talker and simply a joy:  wise-cracks delivered with perfect timing have you smiling if not laughing out loud. Her effervescence has you enthralled.  As John Fawell wrote in his 2008 book on the Hollywood studio era: “rapid-fire delivery, a lovely zippy rhythm… a cinema that has a buoyant energy and expresses that energy in a rapid, clever, excited use of language. There is a love of language here that seems to reflect a love of life”.[1] In the middle of her opening number Ginger Rogers sings a whole chorus in pig-Latin, nonsensical celebratory chatter full of mirth.  Apparently this was added to the script after director Mervyn LeRoy and Berkeley heard her fooling around the set aping the latest rage!

Trixie – Excuse me. Come here Fay, I have something I wan-ta show you.
Fay – what do you want?
Trixie – Do you see that?
Fay – See what?
Trixie – Can’t you read? Where it says ‘Exit’?
Fay – Exit?
Trixie – You said it, sister. You start walking and you keep walking, and if you ever come near him again I’ll break BOTH your legs, now scram!
Fay – I could easily resent that!
[As Fay walks away, Trixie kicks her in the bottom, making Fay squeal/shriek]
Fanny – Did little Fay cry out?
Trixie – No, that must have been the cornet you heard.

This is movie-making liberated by the coming of sound: great dialog, wonderful singing, and dance extravaganzas made magic by vibrant music.   A musical!  The irony of course is that the movie was made for depression audiences – the credible rationale being that audiences wanted an escape from the daily realities of unemployment, soup kitchens, deprivation, and austerity.  While no-one would be grateful for the Great Crash, thankfully this movie was made pre-Code.

We just love it
Pettin’ in the park
Bad boy!
Pettin’ in the dark
Bad girl!
Whatcha doin’, honey?
I feel so funny
I’m pettin’ in the park with you
Pettin’ in the park

After enforcement of the Production Code in late-1934 the ‘Pettin’ in the Park’ number would have ended up on the cutting-room floor, and one of the most deliciously outrageous musical numbers to hit the screen would have been lost.  Here we need to thank not only Heaven, but also Warner Bros studio head Jack Warner and production chief Darryl F. Zanuck who had the pluck to give Berkeley’s creative vision free reign.  The number oozes sex and is joyfully erotic, with Ruby Keeler adorably coy when she pouts “Bad boy!” and “I feel so funny”.

Just before the closing ‘Remember My Forgotten Man’ number, Berkeley stages a gorgeous extravaganza of dance and unmatched geometry for a Powell solo– ‘Shadow Waltz’.  The song is nice but it is Berkeley’s exposition of the mood and melody – featuring 60 neon-lit violins! – that has you agape.

You put a rifle in his hand
You sent him far away
You shouted, “Hip, hooray!”
But look at him today!
Remember my forgotten man”

The expectation of a happy-ending is not compromised but a solemn musical coda places the fun and frivolity of the back-story into sombre relief.  The ‘Remember My Forgotten Man’ number is truly subversive.  A dark mood prevails with Joan Blondell as a b-girl forced into prostitution lamenting the fate of her forgotten man – glorified when he returned from war and then discarded by the hard economic times (and by extension by the failure of the incumbent GOP president Hoover to deal with the massive unemployment and social devastation it was wreaking).

Blondell’s rendition is more rap than singing, with the true pathos and bluesy feeling delivered by (shamefully uncredited) black singer Etta Moten in a poignant much too short chorus.  This dark expressionist finale with studio rain must have struck audiences at the time as totally out of left field. But it does redeem the cosmetic resolution of the narrative, which offers up a soppy romantic reconciliation where rich guys can be swell, and conspicuous consumption is just fine.

Delirious fun.

Gold Diggers of 1933 (Warner Bros 1933)
Directors: Mervyn LeRoy and Busby Berkeley (musical)
Writing credits
Erwin S. Gelsey & James Seymour (screenplay)
David Boehm & Ben Markson (dialogue)
Avery Hopwood (based on a play by)
Cinematography: Sol Polito
Film Editor: George Amy
Art Direction: Anton Grot
Costume Design: Orry-Kelly (gowns)
Music
Al Dubin  & Harry Warren (music & lyrics)
Leo F. Forbstein (conductor – Vitaphone Orchestra)
Ray Heindorf (musical arrangements – uncredited)
Etta Moten (singer of Remember My Forgotten Man – uncredited)
Cast
Warren William – Lawrence
Joan Blondell – Carol
Aline MacMahon – Trixie
Ruby Keeler – Polly
Dick Powell – Brad
Guy Kibbee – Peabody
Ned Sparks – Barney
Ginger Rogers – Fay
Awards
Nominated for Best Sound 1934 Academy Awards
Selected for Registry by the National Film Preservation Board (2003)

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[1]  John Fawell, THE HIDDEN ART OF HOLLYWOOD: In Defence of the Studio Era Film (Greenwood Publishing 2008) p. 169