Reviews

Utterly brilliant black comedy about an Italian village dominated by selfish and corrupt people. The simple and humble photographer Celestino is unhappy about this until he runs into an old man who is the very image of Saint Andrew, the town's patron. The old man tells him the reason for all the unhappiness is that evil people are allowed to live, thus good people must kill them!

Using magic powers, the old man tells Celestino that his camera now has lethal powers! If he photographs a photograph of someone, that person will die. A perfectly loathsome official pursuing a romantic couple appears on the scene; when Celestino points his camera at a photograph showing the official in a stiff-armed salute, the official freezes dead in this posture.

The greedy councilmen are arguing over a windfall subsidy the government has given the town, and want to use it for everything but the needy. Celestino "photographs" a few of them, but a problem arises: the poor who have benefited by his lethal actions become as greedy and selfish as those who once tormented them. It looks as if our hero will have to kill EVERYBODY in order to purify the world! Celestino is of course too kind a guy to do that, so he then tries to set matters right.

People have certain expectations of Rossellini, but black comedy and slapstick farce are not among them. Give the guy a chance, he made great films in several genres, not just neorealism. Luis Bunuel (whose ironic attitude is similar to what we see here) suffered from the same typecasting: he made some brilliant dramas, but people only want to see his late surrealist works. The neorealists treated the camera as an instrument of social struggle, so it is possible to see this film as an allegory.

This is in the tradition of Commedia dell'Arte, it will help if you have some familiarity with slapstick.

This is a complex movie, and I didn't like it the first time I saw it; I thought it invited us to take pleasure in the degradation of the character Lucia. Later viewings led me to see that this is a sympathetic study of a woman damaged by her youthful experiences.

The story is simple enough: an opera-conductor's work takes him to Vienna, where he and his wife Lucia stay in an elegant but somehow decadent hotel. Here she recognizes the night porter as the concentration camp guard who had abused her when she was a teen-age inmate. The expectation is that she'll call the cops, but no: she abandons her husband, he quits his job, and the two throw themselves into a doomed and passionate amour-fou.

I'll probably be pelted with bricks for suggesting that this is a chick flick, but I notice that female reviewers treat it much more respectfully, and give it a higher rating. Tracy Hodson has written an excellent appraisal at amazon.com which goes into much more detail than I ever could. Anyhow, novelist Barbara Alberti and director Lilliana Cavani put a lot of effort into it, and deserve serious attention.

The film achieved instant notoriety when it came out, but anyone looking for cheap thrills is going to be bored silly. The Nazi background is not essential to the story, it simply sets the scene for an abusive relationship in a way that viewers of 1974 could understand. Lucia does the unthinkable because her soul has been warped by her experiences - alas, this sort of thing is more commonplace than we care to admit, other viewers have had something to say about this.

Charlotte Rampling gives an excellent performance, once you know what she's trying to achieve - you'll notice that she's actually the one who calls the shots in the relationship, contrary to surface appearances. Dirk Bogarde is good at playing the sort of elegantly sinister character that was his specialty. The imagery and pacing owe a lot to Visconti films like The Damned. The pace was actually too slow for my liking - I missed the concentrated fury of Repulsion - but it at least contributed to the atmosphere of elegance combined with decay. I recommend this to people who enjoy intense character studies, but not to those looking for excitement.

... is the first thing you'll see, as this melange of cartoons is framed by a story of an animator kept chained to a dungeon wall except when there's work for him to do.

The "3 Stooges" humour of the live action segments quickly becomes tiresome, as does the film's caprice of being a take-off on Fantasia. The animated segments are ingeniously thought out, but the humour is so vulgar and so Italian that foreigners probably won't relate to it.

Now I am going to turn around and tell you to rush out and watch Allegro non Troppo. There is one truly wonderful sequence - Valse Triste, aka Feline Fantasies, aka The Last Meow. The dreams and longings of this homeless pussycat are among the greatest that animation has produced (you can watch it here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX92pHpPc-k ). Those of you who enjoy the work of Yuri Norstein or Martin Rosen would do well to check this out.

I saw this some years ago, and it didn't really grab me. I dusted it off recently, and it seems so much better when you watch it again... and again.

This is actually a very cerebral film which gives you a lot of information to digest. Gorehounds looking for ultra-violence will be disappointed in this one - it's really a profound meditation on the human condition.

Polanski made an inspired decision to cast sex-goddess Catherine Deneuve in such a difficult role; although she's generally wasted as eye-candy, her acting skills are superb. Here she's absolutely convincing in a performance that must have been very hard to pull off. I have known people like Carol, and she gets everything perfect, she must have done a lot of study.

Viewers have grumbled that this re-hashes Meshes of th Afternoon, but that was an experimental short that was just crying out to be expanded into a feature film - Carnival of Souls also seems to have been inspired by it. You may as well complain that Meshes of the Afternoon is derived from The Yellow Wallpaper - all artists are inspired by others.

Polanski certainly brings a new measure of visual inventiveness to Repulsion, as well as keeping the musical score so minimal. Get yourself into an open mind, and enjoy.

This cartoon is only 149 seconds long, it manages to pack in some of the most powerful images in the medium. The soundtrack consists of the song "Sometimes I feel like a motherless child", accompanied by graphic images of racial prejudice - beatings, lynchings, electric chair, etc. You don't expect this sort of thing from 1932, but a Soviet propaganda cartoon has no need to pull its punches. The only false note is at the end, a statue of Lenin - we are supposed to believe that this white knight has the solution to the problem.

Ivan Ivanov-Vano later became the grand old man of Soviet animation, a big influence on geniuses like Khrzhanovski and Yuri Norstein.

You can see it here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8tQu7ePPpI

This is one of Hitchcock's best pictures, as well as the first talkie to scale he heights of artistic greatness (The Jazz Singer is competent and pleasing, but too sentimental to be a masterpiece).

Hitch really showed his skill in the new medium by using an expressionistic to sound - very famous is the section where the guilt-ridden Alice hears a jumble of incoherent words punctuated by "knife...knife...knife". Hitch had learned visual expressionism in Germany, where he had made his first complete films e.g. The Pleasure Garden; he uses it to good effect here, as we see a neon-sign morph from a cocktail-shaker into a plunging knife.

The characters are complex and well constructed. The detective is something of a lout concerned to impose his will on everybody; this makes him a ruthless detective, but has no qualms about covering up for his girl when he finds out her part in the murder... not so much because loves her, but because it puts her absolutely in his power.

The blackmailer seems to be as slimy as they come, until we realize that he's dirt poor and only wants some breakfast, some pocket-money and the occasional cigar. Despite the title, he's a minor character, but his acting is wonderful.

Anny Ondra as Alice White is the heart and soul of the picture. It's doubtful whether any English actress of that era could have portrayed the range of emotions (and skin) demanded of the character, so Hitch was right in using her - but her Czech accent was so thick they had to use a primitive form of dubbing. She starts out being jolly and slightly mischievous, but events change her into someone overwhelmed by guilt and paranoia. She really just wants to be loved, but the guys available to her range from domineering to disgusting. (The end of the movie suggests that she will live under the total domination of Frank, consumed by fear and guilt.) Some of the technical details are a bit primitive (this is 1929), but the acting and artistry certainly make up for that. My only big objection is to the title - the blackmail is a minor sub-plot, the real theme is the destruction of a woman's personality.

PS Does anybody know of other full-length talkies made between The Jazz Singer and Blackmail? I haven't found any.

Alfonsina Storni was an Argentine poet and journalist who made a successful career in the rough-and-tumble world of reporting, and in a very macho society.

Kurt Land does quite a nice job of bringing her story to the screen. Land was from Vienna, so he has a romantic atmosphere somewhat similar to Ernst Lubitsch. This style of movie-making was dated even in 1957, but Alfonsina does have some nice stylistic touches; they use voice-overs of AS's poetry to accompany some of the elegiac scenes (I figure this was a big influence on I the Worst of All, another great Argentine film).

Spoiler It is well known that Alfonsina ended her life by walking into the sea after discovering that she had cancer; Felix Luna and Ariel Ramirez wrote a famous song about it (Alfonsina y el Mar) that was probably inspired by this movie, and Mercedes Sosa has done a stunningly beautiful rendition of it.

The movie opens with a great shot of waves breaking ominously on the seashore, accompanied by AS's poetry - this scene is better appreciated if you know the story. Another scene has Alfonsina looking into a fish-bowl and saying "I wonder what it would be like to live under the sea".

There's also a startling scene where Alfonsina announces the news of her illness; suffice to say that it's handled in a way very different from Hollywood.

The film is too slow-moving to be considered a masterpiece, but it has a lot entertainment value. I recommend it for those who would like to explore a different culture, or to know about one of the more interesting figures of the XX century.

A family of rich industrialists has one child - a teenage daughter crippled by some disease she caught 11 years before (probably Muscular Dystrophy). She has every luxury imaginable, and her parents are superficially polite to her - but underneath, they despise her. Her mother, especially, hates her enough to kill her; yet she maintains the appearances of a caring parent.

Both parents have adulterous affairs going - ever since the daughter Angela became crippled by her illness, as the girl sweetly informs us. They both go off to their country chateau at different times on various pretexts, and turn a blind eye to what the other spouse is probably doing. Angela is left in a glittering emotional desert, a gilded cage; her only source of companionship is her mute governess/nanny, a pleasant young lady with a mischievous smile.

Angela has grown to be as elegant and cruel as the people around her, although we can sympathies because we see that there was no way she could learn better behaviour - I like to compare her to Catherine Sloper at the end of The Heiress (1949). She arranges matters so that both her parents book the chateau for the same weekend; so one adulterous couple surprises the other "in flagrante delicto". Being civilised people, they laugh it off and sit down to dinner, determined to enjoy the weekend as a party - but then Angela and the governess turn up. Angela is the most perfect portrayal of a "yuppie b*tch", but we can still feel for her. (At one point she asks the caretaker's son, "Would you be able to love a cripple", and his silence tells us all we need to know.

After she has installed herself at the chateau, she drags herself around the hallways opening various bedroom doors and peering maliciously at the adulterous couples inside; they stare back in unhappy resentment. Later the couples propose to relieve their boredom by some game, so the mother comes up with a bright idea: target shooting! She forthwith aims a pistol out at the courtyard where her daughter is hobbling along; it takes the "other woman" to gently restrain her by holding her hand.

Later, at supper, Angela proposes that they should play her favourite game, "Chinese Roulette", in which one group tries to guess the identity of some individual selected by the other group, by means of indirect questions. The questions become increasingly ruthless and cutting; it becomes apparent that this game is as fiendish as Chinese torture and as deadly as Russian roulette, though it uses words instead of bullets. I don't believe in spoilers, so I won't tell you how it ends.

The photography in this movie is absolutely stunning; many of the scenes are shot through (or reflected in) glass, suggesting the glittering falsehood and superficiality of these people's lives. The colour composition is exquisite, words cannot really describe it. The slow movements of the characters are choreographed almost like ballet. The spooky music is just used at intervals making this feel like a horror movie (which it really is). Fans of "evil child" movies should check out this one, which raises everything to the max.

The director, R. W. Fassbinder, said that he wanted to portray what happens when parents fail to love their children. RWF has a reputation for making art movies with obscure meanings, but this isn't one of them - it's a very rewarding experience, I urge everyone to see it. Everyone is entitled to make the odd clunker, and the guy hit the mark more often than not.