The Cameraman [dirs. Edward Sedgwick & Buster Keaton]

Joseph Frank 'Buster' Keaton was the silent comedy contemporary of Charles Chaplin and a looming influence on cinema's greatest action-comedy stars, like Jackie Chan. Where Chaplin tried to appeal to your sentiment, sometimes quite mawkishly, Buster, popularly called 'The Great Stone Face' for the unruffled expression he maintained throughout his movies, was more about pure comedy and outrageously risky stunts. In 1928, beset by the spiraling cost of making his films and the impending juggernaut of the talkies, he gave up his independent studio and signed on with Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer (MGM). The Cameraman was the first film Buster made for his new employers, and ironically is regarded as his last great film.

Buster enters the picture as a street photographer peddling Tintype portraits. During a street parade he meets and is immediately attracted to Marceline Day, who works for a newsreel studio. To continue the acquaintance, Buster decides to become a news cameraman - he buys a beat-up old hand-crank and looks to freelance at her firm. He is initially quite inept at handling the camera and the boss dismisses his work (this is a bit of an inside joke, since the montages Buster makes are rather interesting surreal trips making use of double exposures, and varying the speed and direction of the action). But with Marceline's sympathetic goading, Buster persists; he also gets to court her in some amusing escapades at the local swimming pool (which the Mr. Bean TV series gleefully ripped off). His big moment comes when she hands him an exclusive tip about a gang war in Chinatown. Buster rushes off and covers the chaos with his customary athletic grace and daredevilry (one shot shows him cranking the camera even as the platform he is standing on comes crashing down). A few misunderstandings get in the way, but Buster finally wins the girl and his place as a bonafide cameraman. The Cameraman is  a notch below his earlier productions like The General and Steamboat Bill Jr in terms of inventiveness and sheer chutzpah, but still a highly watchable and entertaining Buster Keaton picture with several memorable visual jokes and thrills.

Apparently, there was a bound script with contributions from a battery of house writers at MGM, which was against Buster's usual style of having a more diffuse narrative which they would then fill up with on-set improvisation, taking inspiration from the locations and props. But the difficulties of shooting on location in New York gave him the opportunity of convincing young studio head Irving Thalberg that he could make a more efficient picture if he were allowed to throw away the bound script and work with his own team. Sadly, despite the film's success (MGM apparently used it as a training film for their comedy division), this was the last time Buster got such a break, and his growing dissatisfaction coupled with domestic troubles and alcoholism led to his being marginalized as a film-maker. It was only much later that his mastery of visual comedy was rediscovered by film aficionados and he began to get the respect he deserved.

Mr. Holmes [dir. Bill Condon]

Mr. Holmes may not be part of the Arthur Conan Doyle canon, but it is a heartfelt tribute to his famous detective, and a moving meditation on old age and senility.

This film's Sherlock Holmes (Ian McKellen) is a nonagenarian living out his days with his bees in Sussex, cared for by a widowed housekeeper (Laura Linney) and her precocious young son Roger (Milo Parker). Fighting to counter his increasing forgetfulness (he scribbles people's names onto his shirt cuffs to remember them), Holmes is desperately looking at alternative medications to slow down the erosion of his intellectual edifice (the beekeeping originates from his quest for "royal jelly", the foodstuff generated for the queen bee). While otherwise prickly and sardonic, he seems to appreciate the company of the fan-struck and eager-to-learn Roger, developing a strong bond with the boy. Holmes is also trying to write down the 'true' story of his last case before it is forever lost from his mind.

Folks looking to get their fix of the detective from Doyle's stories or from any of the recent spinoffs may be disappointed here. After living through two world wars and the atomic bomb, Sherlock Holmes is an older man, far more fragile and vulnerable, and this is a story of his twilight years. Conan Doyle's sleuth was once famous for saying "Crime is commonplace, logic is rare." In this tale of lambent retrospection, Holmes finds that a heartfelt human connection is rarer still.

It is to the credit of the script (Jeffrey Hatcher, based on the book A Slight Trick of the Mind by Mitch Cullin) and Ian McKellen's performance that this sentiment is conveyed with minimal pandering - the "crisis" towards the end has a slightly manufactured feel, but I'll let that go because it was so good till then. The pastoral setting (interspersed with flashbacks to London with a relatively younger Holmes) and poignant musical score add to the impact. This is a wonderful coda to the celebrated existence one of the most beloved fictional creations of all time.

 

Phase IV [dir. Saul Bass]

 

Visual genius Saul Bass' sole directorial feature film Phase IV (1974) is an interesting low-key science-fiction venture about how after an anomalous event in space, the ants of the world get together and decide to take over. In some ways, it is reminiscent of that amazing HG Wells story 'Empire of the Ants'.

 

 

The main action is focused on a small research station where 2 researchers (including Nigel Davenport as a lower-rent James Mason style cold bastard and Michael Murphy as his more human colleague) study some intimidating ant towers: With the help of some cutting edge 70's tracking equipment and mathematical predictions they try to figure out what's on the collective mind of their invertebrate adversaries. Soon they are joined by a young girl barely escaping death by ants (Lynne Fredrick, who apparently was forced into a painful corset and a strict diet to appear underage). While fending off attacks on their station (the critters take out their generator and their air-conditioning) Murphy is trying to send a message out to the ants to convince them that humans are an intelligent life form to co-exist with, while Davenport has a bee in his bonnet about taking out the all-important Queen.

 

Most of Phase IV is a chamber piece with 3 humans, but it's mixed up with some incredible insect footage. Heck, it's nearly 10 min into the movie before the first human characters appear on screen, and it's a testament to Bass' visual acuity that an engaging narrative emerges with Brian Gascoigne's moody electronic score accompanying shots of ants moving through sinister mud corridors and appearing to be in group conversations about taking over the world. Given that insects cannot directly be trained to follow instructions, they must have employed some ingenious techniques to get them to do stuff that blends with the on-screen narrative. The film ends on the kind of ambitious, ambiguous note 70's Hollywood SF movies specialized in before Star Wars came and fucked everything up.

I recall first watching Phase IV on a ratty looking rip decades ago. Compared to that the blu-ray from 101 films (based on a restoration by the Academy Film Archive) is a revelation. Mind, this is still a low-budget film and a lot of the insect footage shot in dim lighting, but it now has a palpable quality like those vintage BBC documentaries. Looking forward to visiting the Saul Bass short films included on the second disc.

High Plains Drifter [dir. Clint Eastwood]

High Plains Drifter, Clint Eastwood's second feature as a director, is a Gothic revenge drama in the garb of a Western. Seeming to materialize out of the heat haze (marvelously captured by Bruce Surtees' cinematography), a lone stranger (Eastwood) rides into town, and almost immediately, he guns down 3 local toughs and rapes a woman (Marianne Hill) that was trying to play a seduction game. The cowardly townsfolk, including its sheriff and mayor, curry favor with the stranger, looking to him as a savior against the threat of some other toughs that had promised to raze the place in return for their prison sentence. But he has other ideas, and they find that they may have struck a bargain too dear, as he makes use of the town's resources (and that includes its people) as he pleases.

Then there are those dreams or flashbacks the stranger has, where someone at least closely resembling him is being whipped mercilessly to his death while the townsfolk hide behind their doors. Who is this man and who is the stranger? Is it mere coincidence that he happened to ride in or does he have a deeper agenda? The film hints at a possible supernatural tint, but doesn't tip its hand either way.

High Plains Drifter pays homage to Eastwood's work in Sergio Leone westerns, but forges its own path. The movie is especially interesting compared to Eastwood's previous westerns in that here he is not even a man that nurses a decent heart inside a tough exterior. His character's sole motive appears to be wreaking bloody vengeance on the townsfolk, and he has no moral compunctions about how he achieves it. The creepy music (Dee Barton) that greets his arrival at the beginning of the film is indicative of this difference in approach, and later there's a brilliant use of a red motif to depict the town's descent into damnation. Seen in this context, the rape scenes are not exploitative, but make sense as the act of a man who lives in a negative space and refutes any attributes of heroism (unlike James Bond forcing himself on Pussy Galore in Goldfinger).

The Spy Who Came In from the Cold [dir. Martin Ritt]

My first exposure to  John Le Carré's The Spy Who Came In from the Cold was in a BBC audio drama adaptation of the book that runs approximately an hour longer than the film. I have to say, with that additional hour, the drama packed in a greater element of credibility and depth than this nonetheless admirable film.

Le Carré's story deals with Alex Leamas (Richard Burton), an apparently down on his luck former secret service operative, discharged after a disastrous operation in which one of his agents in enemy territory (East Germany) was killed when defecting to the west. While Leamas is reduced to working a barely-paying library job (and accepting the friendly advances of his fellow employee Nancy - Claire Bloom - an ardent believer in communism), he is picked up by a shadowy agency looking to persuade him to part with important covert information for a fee. This is in fact a ruse: Working on the advice of his superiors Control and George Smiley, Leamas is a 'mole' leaking out false information devised to topple Hans-Dieter Mundt (Peter van Eyck), a dangerous agent from the enemy side. It is imperative for the success of the plan that the enemy must believe they are extracting this information from an embittered defector, and so Leamas must live the part of a hard-drinking self-loathing reluctant traitor.

As I recall, in the audio drama, the reveal of Leamas being a 'double agent' comes out gradually in the form of repeated flashbacks to when Smiley is advising him on the strategy to be followed. The film puts it up quite early, and there is no ambiguity about Leamas' position. But till he is actually contacted by the enemy, he must for all intents and purposes be nothing other than a perpetually intoxicated bitter failure. Into this sad lonely existence, the affections of his library colleague come as a warm breeze to the man perpetually "out in the cold" and even as he otherwise faithfully plays his part, he cannot resist getting into a relationship. And it is then that the enemy gets in touch.

The next phase of the drama is when Leamas is passed on from one handler to another, each probing him for information and stringing him along with a bottle, and promises of payment and asylum. He is eventually met by Fiedler (Oskar Werner), a top party member of Jewish origin with a grudge against the former Nazi Mundt. In a careful series of revelations, bolstered by frequent temper tantrums and demands for his payment, Leamas plays Fiedler, always making it look like he is parting with the information against his conscience. In a conventional spy thriller, this deception would have a triumphant climax with Leamas redeemed as a hero. But both Le Carré in his book and director Martin Ritt in his film adaptation looked to present a more murky reality of espionage and without being explicit, one can say that Leamas in turn finds that he may himself be a pawn in a larger game. The ending is a poignant tragedy that makes the story far more memorable.

Although Richard Burton's theatricality still occasionally surfaces in the lead role (apparently he and director Martin Ritt clashed bitterly over the latter's continuous instruction to "keep it down, Rich"), his real life struggles with tax exile and alcohol (and stormy marriage to Elizabeth Taylor) play into his identification with the part. Plus, he is able to convey a certain charisma even in a disheveled state, making Nancy's attraction to a drunk loser more plausible. Martin Ritt helms with knowing understatement - the settings are dreary and the speeches are in low, measured tones (Cyril Cusack's interpretation of Control tutoring Leamas is a masterclass). The most showy scene is a visit to a nightclub with a cabaret performance, and even that is executed with admirable subtlety. Tambi Larsen's evocative set design and Oswald Morris' gritty B&W cinematography effectively capture the murky proceedings. Also worth mentioning is the moody Sol Kaplan score.

Even if it suffers a bit in terms of condensing its source, this film of is by itself an excellent noir-inflected bleak spy drama.

Somewhere in Time [dir. Jeannot Szwarc]

I don't seem to have spoken about it here before, but some years ago I had seen Jeannot Szwarc's 1980 fantasy romance Somewhere in Time (SiT). Last night I revisited it when I felt like indulging in some Christopher Reeve.

SiT is scripted by Richard Matheson, based on his own 1975 novel Bid Time Return. The movie has a 'meh' rep from several critics including Roger Ebert and my favorite fantasy film reviewer Richard Scheib. To be sure, the brickbats are not unfounded. The mechanics of time travel are pure bunkum - no particle physics or quantum mechanics at play here, you just will yourself strongly enough to be in a specific time (right down to the exact date) and pouf, there you are! 

Playwright Reeve is the one that undergoes this bargain-basement DIY form of time travel, in search of an actress (Jane Seymour) he has fallen in love with from a vintage photograph. Well, not just that; it appears that he has previously encountered this woman, albeit a much older avatar in which she pressed a fob watch into his hand with the words, "Come back to me". Although his effort to track the woman in the present reaches a literal dead-end (she having passed away some years ago), Reeve is convinced that they somehow knew each other in 1912. Armed with some decidedly hokey advice from a philosophy lecturer, alongside a vintage-era suit and a few coins of the period, he embarks on the trip through time to meet the love of his dreams at a specific moment in the past.

As previously stated, there is zero science to the process, and even after the time travel has occurred, the expected anachronism plays little part in the events that follow. But to the people that love this film (and there can be no middle road here, either you love it or you think it's tosh), this doesn't matter a whit. The core engine powering SiT is a chaste, delightfully old-fashioned and therefore timeless romance between Reeve and Seymour, that works like poignant wish-fulfillment. Reeve was not the most versatile actor, but when he played a gentleman, be it as a super-powered Kryptonian or this dashing scribe, he conveyed a wonderfully warm chivalrous presence few other actors can hope to match. And Seymour's actress is his equal: she has on her side ethereal beauty, complemented with a rare grace and suggestion of deep inner passions. With chemistry like this, who cares about narrative superficiality and hansom-sized plot holes? Christopher Plummer is the third angle, as Seymour's manager who is obsessed with his protege's career on the stage and sees Reeve only as a danger to his precious find. It is suggested, though never substantiated upon, that Plummer may know more than he lets on about Reeve's sudden entry into her life. All three (along with John Barry's memorable score and Isidore Mankofsky's evocative cinematography) give life to a film that shamelessly, but also gloriously, defines romantic melodrama.

It is also interesting that while a flop in the US, the film was apparently a big hit in Hong Kong. One wonders if it is because Asian audiences are more used to the idea of reincarnation and saw the film more as a (p)reincarnated love story than finding fault with the science of the time travel.

PS: Just so you don't think I am a lonely champion for this film, there is a society called INSITE (International Network of Somewhere In Time Enthusiasts) dedicated to celebrating and keeping alive the memory of this film, who put out a newsletter, arranged reunions of cast and crew and even tours of the major shoot locations.

PS2: People who liked this film (and/or Matheson's novel) should check out Ken Grimwood's 1987 book Replay, which may have been inspired by this, but takes the idea to another place altogether, and was justly included in publisher Gollancz's Fantasy Masterworks series.

Like Someone in Love [dir. Abbas Kiarostami]

A young girl in a slick Tokyo club (Rin Takanashi) is arguing over the phone with her suspicious boyfriend. She is then met by the club owner (Denden), who after doling out some life advice asks her to go for an assignment . We realize she's a part-time prostitute, he's the pimp. She wants to pass on it, as she has exams and also a visiting grandmother that wants to meet her at the railway station before returning back. The owner is polite but firm: the client is someone he respects deeply, and she is the right type for him. While taking a long-distance cab to the client's place, she asks the driver to circle the railway station a couple of times where she observes a woman that may be her grandmother. She lets off some quiet sobs, then falls asleep in the cab while it ferries her to the client. Expecting a high-profile politician or tycoon, she is surprised to find that the client is a comfortable but definitely middle-class retired professor...who also happens to be her grandfather's age.

After having made several notable Iranian films, Abbas Kiarostami went full international to make films in French (Certified Copy) and Japanese (Like Someone in Love - LSIL). I haven't seen the former, but what strikes me best about LSIL is how much it appears like a film made by a modern Yasujiro Ozu - The respect for spaces and silences, the formal conversation, inner thoughts expressed in glances and in tangential remarks. Of course, Kiarostami's previous landmark films are also noted for their circumlocutory approach.

The introduction scene of the girl is important to what happens next. The professor (Tadashi Okuno) has obviously planned a romantic evening with sparkling wine and fine food (perhaps this refined academic wants to soften the idea of a hired tryst), but after some ice-breaking conversation, the emotionally exhausted girl just flops into bed and falls asleep. Sighing resignedly, the old man tucks her in, as a grandparent would. The next day we see him driving her back. We don't know if at any point in the night (or early morning) they do the deed she was called for. Like other Kiarostami films, LSIL features a lot of riding around in cars (not the Fast and Furious kind, mind).

When the girl gets off at the university, she is met by the boyfriend who assumes the old man to be her grandfather; the professor plays along. The young man expresses his views about women in general, and the girl in particular, exposing deep insecurities. But he also warms up to the old man's advice about trust in love, which renews hope for his relationship with the girl, even offers to fix a problem in the car at his garage. At a slightly later point the young man realizes the actual relation between his girlfriend and the professor.

LSIL is a chamber piece, and compared to some of Kiarostami's older work, lightweight. It quietly exposes certain emotional situations. and leaves the consequences for the viewer to imagine; in that modest aim, it does well. The film is anchored mainly around the 3 lead performances (the girl, the professor, the boyfriend) and the actors come across wonderfully. In the little that I saw of the making, Kiarostami talks about how Tadashi Okuno had been previously only an extra, not even having any lines. As the girl's pimp, veteran actor Denden in a single scene makes a big impression.

While not essential viewing, LSIL is a nice example of the director trying out small experiments in new settings.