Sherry Chandler

I have been wanting to see Persepolis since I saw a preview at Lexington’s Kentucky Theater earlier this year. Having finally got it through Netflix, however, I left it sitting on the table for several days, because I thought watching it would take concentration and mental energy. And I was right.

I am not a great appreciator of the graphic novel. I haven’t even read Maus, though it sits on our shelves and I appreciate Spiegelman’s New Yorker covers. I tend to think of graphic novels as sort of a guy thing, though I also know that that is rapidly becoming a dated attitude.

I was very taken by the graphic look and feel of Persepolis, however. The minimalist style, a look that might be characterized as the dark side of South Park (though, okay, South Park is not without its own dark side — maybe the tragic side), the use of silhouettes in black and white, was often very affecting. This is not the computer-animated cutesiness of Disney et al. The film is also a monument to the revolutionary power of pop culture. For one thing, it is the animated film of a graphic novel (comic book) so its very genesis is pop. But, as Frank Zappa was a force in solidarity-era Poland, so our heroine is inspired and consoled by black market tapes of Iron Maiden.

Because the story is a child’s story — I was amazed near the end of the movie when our heroine is about to get married to learn that she is only 21! she had already had experience enough for several lifetimes — the form allows Marjane Satrapi to convey the simplicity of the child’s vision while maximizing the terror that is a child’s experience of war, repression, prejudice.

Like Reading Lolita in Tehran, Persepolis gives one an idea what it’s like for a woman living under a repressive fundamentalist regime and also an idea why leaving the country isn’t all that satisfactory a solution. Nafisi’s vision is more analytical; Satrapi’s gives us raw emotion and some delightfully iconoclastic characters (the grandmother and uncle). There are moments of truly wicked humor in the film.

Satrapi also deals with the clumsiness or just plain evil Middle East involvement of the West, from the installation of the Shah to the arms dealing in the Iran/Iraq War. Her focus is not so strictly domestic. When one of the women says of the religious revolution, “It can’t be any worse than life under the Shah,” I couldn’t help but think of how much worse life is now for women in Iraq since we deposed Saddam Hussein and facilitated a fundamentalist takeover.

I was deeply moved and I think this is a movie that all of us should see, especially now when the Bush administration keeps beating the war drums and painting Iran as the greatest evil in the axis thereof. If you see the human face of your enemy, it is not so easy to hate her.

You will find a number of perceptive reviews and a plot synopsis at Rotten Tomatoes.

Persepolis, by the way, was the Greek name for the ancient capitol of the Persian empire.

What can I say about Black Orpheus, a film that upon its release in 1959 won the Oscar, the Palm D’or, and the Golden Globe and is credited with popularizing the bossa nova in the industrialized world.

Before the world heard Astrud Gilberto’s whispy voice, before they knew of Stan Getz’ velvety sax, they saw Black Orpheus. The film (in Portuguese, Orfeu Negro) put a face on a new style of samba that was fresh, romantic and very accessible to jazz hipsters.

Not much that hasn’t been said better already. Just that the film is eye and ear candy. The shots of the cliffs surrounding Rio, the scenes from Carnival, in spite of the tragic nature of the mythic framework, it all adds up to a celebration of life and sexuality that is especially refreshing after watching the dark melodrama of Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution.

There is little approaching evil in this movie. Mira, Orfeo’s jilted fiancee, tries to murder Eurydice for stealing her man, but her anger is bright and out there and some would say she had cause. Anyway, as Wesley Morris writes in the Boston Globe:

One problem with the romantic tragedy, historically speaking, was that you couldn’t dance to it. In 1959, that changed. Marcel Camus delighted the world with “Black Orpheus,” which relocated the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro just in time for Carnival.

…

Indeed, the Orpheus of Greek myth tamed the masses with his lyre. For Camus’s purposes, he’s Orfeo, a streetcar driver (Breno Mello) who can seduce crowds with his guitar and the gentle rhythms of bossa nova. He’s also a wicked dancer, with moves that wouldn’t be out of place in the center forward position (Mello was a soccer star in his day). Orfeo is also something of a cad. Women swoon wherever he goes. But he’s engaged to Mira (Lourdes De Oliveira), a feisty whirlwind and sexpot who always seems to forget how angry she is when the opportunity to dance presents itself.

It should also be pointed out that Orfeo can play the sun out of bed with his guitar, or so the local children believe. Thus is set up his role as a force of rebirth, as part of the cyclical nature of life and death.

Death lurks around the edges, pursuing Eurydice, but Death is a natural fact not an evil force and this one moves so beautifully that he’s a joy to watch. Spider Man should have such moves.

Lawrence Russell, writing at Culture Court, says that Black Orpheus achieves what Orson Welles rather infamously tried when he went to Rio in 1942 and spent gobs of money trying to document Carnival on film.

It was around 1930 before the Brazilian authorities allowed samba music to be part of the Rio Carnival. Long outlawed as a dangerous expression of black slave culture, it eventually gained legitimacy as a community recreation in the form of Samba Schools, who competed for prizes at festivals.

Our Orfeo is “king” of one of these samba schools, the Babilonia School, and the whole film takes place in the context of preparation for the competition. Continuing with Russell:

The samba gained attention in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere with the highly popular 1934 Hollywood film Flying Down To Rio and later at the 1939 World Fair in New York, where the Brazilian Pavilion featured a samba orchestra and dancers. This in turn created a fad for the exciting 2/4 dance music on Broadway and inspired Orson Welles to visit Rio in 1942 and attempt a movie set in the Carnival. This movie was never completed, in part because Welles ran afoul the local authorities when he went into the surrounding hill communities in order to film a voodoo ceremony as part of the origin of the samba.

Without doubt, Black Orpheus achieves anything Welles was trying for and probably goes well beyond it. For a start, [the French director] Marcel Camus had a script to work from whereas Welles was trying to wing it on the spot. Also, by the late fifties the advances in camera and film technology allowed Camus a far easier mobility. The comparison is merely for historical purposes, however, as Welles was attempting a documentary (with certain fictional aspects) whereas Black Orpheus is pure drama.

So, in the end, the lovers die.

Eurydice is taken by Death. The underworld that Orfeo visits to reclaim her is the voodoo ceremony that Welles wasn’t allowed to film. Again, Lawrence Russell:

Here, under the direction of the witchdoctor (who is smoking a cigar), the samba is in its most elementary form, a raw cacophony of primitive drumming, clapping, chanting… and the droning cries of the dancers who stagger on the edge of the astral plane, seeking possession and reincarnation.

…

The orgiastic aspects of voodoo — sex and the torture of animals — are what relegate “the old religion” to the shadows of the occult. Yet as a source of the samba and the hypnogogic function of dance, the ancient rituals embrace both pagan and Christian cosmogonies and anticipate certain procedures in psychotherapy.

An old woman in the ceremony channels Eurydice but Orfeo fails at or rejects this method of reviving his love. He looks behind him and sees, not his beautiful Eurydice, but a plain old woman in a voodoo trance. He flees this underworld in grief.

The original Orpheus was ripped to death by Maenads for forsaking the love of women after Eurydice’s death. Our Orfeo, returning home carrying the dead Eurydice in his arms, is driven backwards over a cliff by a sort of mob of excited women led by the angry Mira. Life is always lived on the edge if you are poor in Rio. As Lawrence Russell says:

Beautifully photographed and edited, with a lot of the action on the cliffs, Rio is always an ethereal tableaux in the background, its beauty tempered by our visual anxiety of the precipice, the lurking vertigo, as if these frolicking sambistas are always just two or three wrong steps from disaster… like our involuntary falls into the chasms within our dreams.

So Orpheus and Eurydice die and our final view of them is lying in a beautiful sprawl in one another’s arms at the base of the cliff.

But it’s all no matter. There will always be another Orpheus and so another Eurydice. Some one must make the sun come up with their love song, a bossa nova played on the guitar. Here is the final scene of the film:

Roger Ebert says Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution is about “the nature of sex,” which leads me to wonder a little bit about his home life, because the film I saw was more about the erotic nature of violence.

Certainly, the sex scenes dominate the film. So much so that The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane tells you that the sex starts at 95 minutes into this 2 hour 40 minute film, so that you won’t have to waste time watching the rest of it. Or, if you’re mostly interested in the costume drama, so you can leave before the sex starts. Either way, he sees the sex as the (ahem) climax of the film. He summarizes the plot thus:

The costume belongs to Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei), one of a group of student actors who meet in Hong Kong in 1938 and, with the coming of war, hatch a subversive mission against the Japanese occupying powers. Wong is deputed to seduce Mr. Yee (Tony Leung), a senior Chinese official collaborating with the Japanese, the plan being that she will lure him to his death. Wong is a fervid moviegoer (she goes to see “Intermezzo” and “Penny Serenade”), and that seems odd, since anyone schooled in Hollywood melodrama knows that female spies always fall in love with their male targets. And so it proves, the difference in “Lust, Caution” being that Wong and Yee, far from tumbling into a genteel swoon, embark upon a series of difficult grapplings, all harsh breaths and awkwardly locked limbs. Afterward, they lie not in sprawling abandon but in a needy, fetal curl.

“Harsh,” yes, “needy,” maybe, but I wouldn’t call it “love.” Yee begins his love-making with rape, complete with a belt beating, and continues to abuse Wong at every meeting, f*cking her til she bleeds while she has fantasies that the resistance group will burst in and scatter his blood and brains all over her. We know this latter because she tells us so. Yee is a brute who tortures captured resistance fighters and tells Wong that while doing so he pictures the prisoners on top of her.

Intermezzo, this is not. In fact, I think these Hollywood melodramas may be included for contrast. Or to indicate the distance Wong travels from Hong Kong, where she thinks she is playing a game of seduction, to Shanghai, where the full perverted nature of what she is doing is brought home to her. (Hard to write this without making bad puns.)

Everything about sex in this movie is skewed and twisted. To begin with, Wong’s father has escaped to the United States, taking his son with him but leaving Wong behind with promises to send for her later. The promise is never fulfilled.

Wong is sucked into the assassination plot because of her infatuation with the student leader, a beautiful boy named Kuang Yu Min (Lee-Hom Wang). Kuang Yu Min is most passionate about the resistance. He has lost a brother in the fighting and, as the only surviving son, he is not allowed to join the army. So he has something to prove. Though he more or less seduces Wong into the plot, he only approaches her sexually after she confesses to him and a resistance leader the perverse nature of her liaison with Yee (see above). Right after that confession, he follows her down the stairs, grabs her, kisses her. “Why didn’t you do that three years ago?” she asks. An essential question.

Three years ago, Wong had been a virgin who had to be initiated into sexual practices so that she could seduce Yee. It is not Kuang Yu Min who does this deed, but another member of the acting troupe, the only boy with experience — and that with whores. Wong’s sexual initiation is clinical, though we suspect she does it for love.

Admittedly, Wong does seem to have a certain talent for sex but what does her in, contrary to what Rex Reed seems to think, is not the rough play but a few moments of tenderness. It is this sentimental caving in that puts the film back in melodrama mode and that made me just furious that I’d sat through the whole, long, painful thing — especially because this tenderness includes the gift a a diamond the size of a quail’s egg. The film had left it’s melodramatic model way behind to make a cold hard point about the nature of sexuality in times of war and occupation, and it was infuriating to have it come crashing back to (stereo)type in the end.

Says Rex Reed:

It’s not a fresh story, and after all the nudity and brutal sex, there isn’t much of it left to tell. It’s positively amazing how boring so much sex can be when it subs for character development and compelling narrative. Despite Ang Lee’s beautiful images and masterful glimpses into the decadence and glamour of a lost Shanghai, and the limitless physical boundaries the two stars explore and then shatter, Lust, Caution is 157 minutes of tedium. The sex is painful and graphic without revelation (you never actually see anything), and neither of the two stars look like they’re having much fun. The outcome is predictable.

I think he misses the point about the sex; I don’t think the characters are supposed to be having fun. I think each may be punishing the other for what they themselves have done.

There is a passage in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (Viking, 1952) where Adam Trask has been picked up for vagrancy in Florida and sentenced to six months on a road gang. This would have been in the late 19^th century.

Adam thought how a man doing an ugly or a brutal thing has hurt himself and must punish someone for the hurt. To be guarded at work by men with shotguns, to be shackled by the ankle at night to a chain, were simple matters of precaution, but the savage whippings for the least stir of will, for the smallest shred of dignity or resistance, these seemed to indicate that guards were afraid of prisoners, and Adam knew from his years in the army that a man afraid is a dnagerous animal.

In Lust, Caution, Mr. Yee says more than once, with some contempt, that everybody is afraid. When Wong says, “What about you?” he doesn’t answer.

Stephanie Zacharek, writing at Salon, points out that Lust, Caution is based on an elegant short story by Eileen Chang.

The Eileen Chang short story that’s the basis for Ang Lee’s “Lust, Caution” is as economical as a tightly wound ball of silk thread: Chang packs a lot of emotional yardage into a very small space as she examines, without ever conveniently demystifying, the complex relationship between a young spy in Japanese-occupied Shanghai and the dangerous government flunky she has been assigned to seduce.

There’s no doubt Lee admires Chang’s story; he quite possibly even loves it. But instead of doing the filmmakers’ job of taking the source material and modestly adding a bit here and subtracting there, of focusing on certain pertinent details and reluctantly leaving others behind, Lee and screenwriters Wang Hui Ling and James Schamus have instead stretched Chang’s admirably delicate story into a thin, underfed epic.

When the plot fails and the students are picked up by the secret police, Mr. Yee does not allow Wong to be tortured. She saved his life. He will not, or cannot, save hers.
__________
Update: My husband thinks it is the show of tenderness that makes Wong warn Yee. It could be argued that Yee has been softening toward her and goodness knows nobody else had wanted to do anything but use her beauty and intelligence. It might also be argued that Wong is just not capable of doing murder. But I am nevertheless offended that her moment of weakness comes in conjunction with the gift of a huge rare diamond. It’s all like some stupid deBeer’s commercial: “A diamond is forever.” It was a gaudy ugly ring.

Fifty years after the fact, Blackboard Jungle strikes me as a very earnest movie dedicated to the proposition that all America’s troubled youth need is a really dedicated and creative English teacher, the kind who can weed out the bad apples and frog-march them down to the principle’s office.

It’s an attractive idea, I’ll admit.

I was ten years old when this movie was released, not old enough to see such dangerous fare but old enough to be impressed by the rock ‘n roll soundtrack. I had two teen-aged brothers. I knew from Bill Haley & his Comets. Update: According to Destitute Gluch, the film was banned in several cities for fear it would incite violence and Clare Booth Luce kept it from being shown at the Venice Film Festival.

Blackboard Jungle was always part of my cultural texture but somehow I never quite got around to seeing it. I knew it, or thought I knew it, by the rock ‘n roll revolution it helped inspire and by the string of B teen-aged rebel movies that followed it. (It reminds of of Jane Eyre in this way, a serious work that begat a pop genre.) I’m not talking Rebel Without a Cause or The Wild One here (the latter predates Blackboard Jungle and the former was released the same year), but drive-in movies like Teenage Thunder or Dragstrip Girl, even The Blob or I Was a Teenage Werewolf. The kind of thing parodied by John Waters’s Cry Baby, which may be the film that caused me to fall in love with Johnny Depp.

The film was adapted from an Evan Hunter novel of the same title and it rings some Ed McBain emotional clichés that were fifties staples: the vulnerable pregnant wife, the predatory career woman.

I don’t have anything very interesting to add to the reams that have been written about Blackboard Jungle. Just a couple of observations about anatomy as destiny. It struck me watching this movie that there is no way Sidney Poitier would ever be convincing as a punk. Anger, yes. He could play anger and pride as Virgil Tibbs in In the Heat of the Night. or anger and weakness as Walter Lee Younger in A Raisin in the Sun but he can never be surly and weak. He can sneer but he can’t sulk. He has, as Lance Mannion suggests, too much innate authority.

Vic Morrow, on the other hand, has just the right pouty-mouthed sulky look to be the punk gang-leader who will be revealed, at the end of the movie, to be a bully and a coward.

I’ve seen Glenn Ford characterized as a bland actor and he could certainly be accused of playing bland in his role as the English teacher and all-round good man, Richard Dadier. Dadier is that American stock character, the ordinary man pushed to extraordinary actions. In portraying Dadier, bland works to Ford’s advantage. Jimmy Stewart spent a lifetime playing just such characters but nobody who ever spent five minutes watching Stewart on screen ever really believed him to be ordinary. Likewise Gregory Peck, who played his own share of Dadier-like characters.

Glenn Ford, on the other hand, really can look 1950s ordinary.

I won’t say it’s because he’s Canadian.

Oh, I have to mention Jamie Farr, who as Jameel Farah, has a small role as that other stock gang member, the mentally challenged one. He grins a lot.

We’ve had a Japanese twist to our movies lately, having watched Letters From Iwo Jima and Kenneth Branagh’s version of As You Like It in one week.

Branagh’s take on the play — at least he doesn’t call “William Shakespeare’s As You Like It,” a sure indication that much liberty has been taken with the original — sets it in Victorian Japan. Unfortunately for me, about all that offered was a chance to see what a great Darth Vader Brian Blessed would have made. Blessed is cast as both the good duke (Senior) and the bad duke (Frederick). The former he plays with avuncular smarm and the latter with dark gusto. But the Japanese armor has to bring the Star Wars figure to mind. But again, I’m convinced George Lucas stole Darth Vader’s look for Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood.

Though 19th Century Japan may seem counter-intuitive for a Shakespeare play, as hubby points out, none of it matters once Willie has maneuvered his characters into the Forst of Arden, for there is neverland. In neverland, it is fun to watch Blessed, of course, and Kevin Kline, who is probably the United States’s best Shakespearean actor. The NYTimes says

…[Mr. Kiline] seems unable ever to hit a false note. As a thoroughgoing depressive here, he brings some clairvoyance to melancholy, which suits him.

Mr. Kline has, without fanfare, become a kind of elder statesman of American acting, with no taint on him. His face is so kindly and his voice so unforced that viewers can’t help wanting the satisfaction of seeing him cover the big hits…

He is also wonderfully graceful and he gets to use some of his dancer’s moves in this role.

Otherwise, if you want the genius of Branagh’s Shakespeare adaptations, I’d recommend his Hamlet . Here’s Andrea Gronvall in The Chicago Reader:

Although it’s far from the worst thing I’ve ever watched on the small screen, this As You Like It is notable chiefly for Branagh’s puzzling creative decisions. While his fin de siecle Hamlet used the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Europe’s slide into world war as the backdrop for the protagonist’s existential dilemma, As You Like It employs its period and locale only as window dressing. The movie opens with a Kabuki performance (by one of the film’s few Japanese actors, Takuya Shimada) that’s disrupted by Duke Frederick’s takeover of his brother’s estate. Interiors follow the lines of traditional Japanese architecture, but nothing is made of how rooms influence the lives of those within them. (Contrast that with the many mirrored doors and hidden passageways in Hamlet, where the production design fits the court intrigue like an expensive glove.)

Try also Branagh’s Henry V. Even his Much Ado About Nothing, which at least offers Emma Thompson.

Maybe what’s missing in all of this is Branagh himself in a major role?

[This post contains spoilers, I guess. But the end is inevitable.]

This weekend my husband and I watched Letters from Iwo Jima. We have been a long time working up to the experience. After watching Flags of our Fathers, we had some idea of what we were in for, only worse, because there would be no victory at the end of this movie.

And the violence of the real world is such that I am not all that eager to experience vicarious violence whether it is “art” or “entertainment.”

Still, we were definitely not in the mood for yet another superannuated super hero. I mean Indiana Jones was fun, but come on. All good things pass. As for Rambo, never watched his movies in the first place.

And Letters from Iwo Jima really is a must-see movie.

In the end, I was able to pull back from the violence. It seemed so obviously stage blood to me — or computer animated blood — and then our television screen is tiny so the impact of exploding men and burning men is diminished. I was pulled out of the movie, too, by the panoramic shots of the U.S. army storming the beaches. It seemed so obviously computer animated. I do hate computer animation, though this too may have been more compelling on the big screen.

But I could not disassociate myself from the emotional impact of the film nor did I want to. The real power of Eastwood’s movie is not in the fx but in the characters, the human condition of these men — the general Kuribayashi, the grunt Saigo, the Olympic gold medalist Baron Nishi, the failed secret policeman Shimizu — who are being sacrificed by their country for a lost cause. This has to be the focus, because the outcome is known. Suspense, the unfolding story, has to be found in the interaction of the characters.

Chris Vognar of the Dallas Morning News sums it up like this:

If Flags of Our Fathers is about heroism – why we need it, how we create it – then Letters From Iwo Jima is about honor, its importance, and its folly. For the officers who stand in Kuribayashi’s way and sneer at his unconventional methods (including kindness to enlisted men), honor is a code to be followed blindly and by the book. For the core characters, it’s a way of life, of treating other human beings, of facing the impossible with dignity.

I would say also that it’s about the clash of the old rigid code of warrior honor with the mechanized faceless slaughter of modern warfare. My son points out that this has echoes of Europe at the beginnings of World War I, when the French and British sent cavalry charges out against barbed wire and machine guns. The result, of course, was wholesale slaughter.

That echo is made somewhat explicit fairly early in the film, when the two old cavalry men, General Kuribayashi and Baron Nishi, remember the good old days when soldiers could fight heroically and face to face. No more, they say. The machines have changed things.

Modern warfare has rendered the old style of honor impractical and a little ridiculous. When one commander fails to hold his wing, he orders his entire troop to commit suicide because they have been dishonored. They do this by means of hand grenade. Each man in turn pulls the plug and grasps the grenade to his chest and explodes himself. This is probably the most notorious scene in the movie, and while it doesn’t become as silly as it might, it is not death with dignity. What is more, it is a waste of manpower. The more honorable thing would have been for the commander to do as he was ordered, to fall back and add his force to defending the core position.

In the end, the wounded General Kuribayashi, defeated, facing capture and dishonor, orders his aide to be behead him with his sword. This is a scene worthy of high drama, of Shakespeare’s battlefield. But it cannot be in modern warfare. Kuribayashi kneels, neck extended. The aide raises his sword over his head, ready to do the deed. But before the blow can be struck, the aide himself is struck and killed by what seems to be a stray and random bullet. The General is left to shoot himself with the pearl-handled colt he carries as a souvenir of his time in the United States.

In the final scene, both the sword and the Colt are picked up as war souvenirs by anonymous GIs who don’t know the significance of what they’ve found.

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Released in 1949, Akira Kurosawa’s film Stray Dog revolves around two World War II veterans who are mirror images of one another. Both men had seen and done terrible things and, sort of like Viet Nam and Iraq War veterans in the U.S., both as veterans were spurned by their society for the terrible things they had seen and done in its service.

Discharged into a disordered world, each soldier has had his knapsack stolen. The crux of the story is how each man responds to this theft of all their worldly goods, this final betrayal by the society that sent them into futile and bloody war. Murakami (the incomparable Toshiro Mifune) joins the police and works to restore order. Yusa joins the underworld and becomes the stray dog of the title.

The two men are connected by Murakami’s Colt pistol. The pistol is lifted from Murakami’s pocket on a crowded bus. It becomes a commodity on Tokyo’s black market, where Yusa (Isao Kimura) leases it, giving his rice ration card for security, to pull an armed robbery to get money to court his girlfriend. That the black market leases guns instead of selling them indicates how scarce they were in post-war Japan and what a power symbol this small colt is.

Murakami, obsessed by guilt for releasing this instrument of violence upon his city, haunts the black market until he traces it to a girl who says she rented it to Yusi. Because he is a rookie, Murakami arrests the girl and, in doing so, not only misses the more important connection to her gang boss but also keeps Yusi from returning the pistol. And so the cycle of guilt and violence spirals until the film’s climax, the inevitable face off between the two men.

There is another mirrored pair in this story: the rookie cop Murakami and his older mentor Sato (the equally incomparable Takashi Shimura). This mirroring is of course youth, age, innocence, experience — though as a veteran, Muakami is hardly innocent — passion, and wisdom, but perhaps most obviously for this film, the pre-war and the post-war generations. Sato is from a time of high order and his view of criminality is much simpler than Murakami’s. For him, Yusa is not doppelganger but stray dog.

Some elements of this film serve almost as documentary for a generation of Americans who did not live through World War II and whose only knowledge of the U.S. occupation of Japan comes from our own propaganda. One is the 8-minute segment during which Murakami wanders through the Tokyo black markets trying to find a gun-seller. Eight minutes is forever in cinema time, and this sequence is shot in the real black market with a hidden camera by Inoshiro Honda, who will later do the Godzilla films. No dialogue, just mean streets.

There are signs of occupation everywhere. The characters wear western dress. When Murakami identifies the woman who picked his pocket on the bus, his colleague is at first doubtful because this woman always wore a kimono and Murakami said she was wearing a dress. Women only seem to wear kimonos in their homes in this film. This same pickpocket, under questioning, also demands her civil rights, a concept introduced by occupation forces.

The dog shown panting in the opening sequences was also the subject of some controversy. Occupation censors accused Kurosawa of injecting the animal with rabies in order to get a realistic shot and Kurosawa had to go to great lengths to prove that they had simply exercised the dog to make it pant.

I do need to mention the heat, which serves as a major trope in this motion picture. The heat seves as a marker of Murakami’s descent into the underworld and moral relativism. He starts out a young turk, a hero in a shiney white suit and white shoes and ends up, after his battle with his shadow Yusa, wounded and slimed with swamp water. But everybody in this film gets grubbier and grubbier. Sato constantly uses a handkerchief to wipe grime from his brow and arms, Murakami’s white suit becomes sweated through. Showgirls collapse in a limp sweaty pile backstage. Hotel clerk and mobster alike live within the range of the old oscillating electric fans of the day.

In the end, Murakami confronts his shadow self and overcomes him but, as in all quest stories, not without suffering a wound both physical and psychic. The shadow he confronts is not just his own, but that of his society that will not or cannot assimilate and forgive its returned and defeated soldiers.

Tellingly, in the final scenes, a middle-class girl practicing Mozart on the piano overhears the shot that wounds Murakami. She comes to the window, looks out, yawns, and goes back to her piano.

Yusa, capture and handcuffed, wails and wails. It is an eery, epic mourning for all that has been lost.

Stray Dog is a long and visually complex black and white film. I haven’t begun to hit on all the elements of the plot here, let alone the camera work and the performances. An excellent ensemble cast, including the 29-year-old Mifune in pretty much his breakthrough performance. The next year, in 1950, Kurosawa would make Roshomon and stake off in a new direction.
Good review at Bright Lights Film Journal and Images

Cabaret! I have nothing intelligent to say about Cabaret. All I have is gush. It’s as beguiling and dark in 2008 as it was in 1972, and, more’s the pity, still timely. No ingenue is as gamine as Liza Minnelli, no emcee as impish as Joel Grey, no idealistic young Englishman as beautiful as Michael York, no ending as tear-jerking and no daughter as evocative of a fated mother as Liza singing

Female (Warner Brothers, 1933) is a precode film featuring Ruth Chatterton as the owner/operator of a large automobile factory who has claimed for herself all the privileges of a male tycoon, including sexual predation on the help. She uses ‘em and tosses ‘em aside (or at least sends ‘em off to Paris to study art), interestingly enough to the tune of “Shanghai Lil.” A great romp for most of its 60-minute run, Female forces our free spirit to succumb to the quiet masculine integrity of George Brent. Boo hiss! But it was 1933. And I don’t really believe she’s tamed.

Exhausted with serious literary pursuits, last night I indulged in a generous glass of merlot and episode 5 of The Outer Limits. “The Sixth Finger” aired October 1963. It “starred” David McCallum. I had such a crush on him, and he starts out pretty cute here as the Welsh miner whose encounter with the requisite mad scientist turns him into this egghead of the future. Script by Ellis St. Joseph (a pseudonym if ever I saw one) was good for laughs and, while I understand the domed forehead, what is the evolutionary need for Spock ears and a bulbous nose?