The Prowler [1951]

 The aspect that one realizes immediately about The Prowler is that three key people associated with it were irreparably affected by McCarthy’s notorious Witch-Hunts. Its screenplay was written by Dalton Trumbo, who’d already been blacklisted, and consequently wrote it using the name of his friend Hugo Butler, who himself got blacklisted soon after; Losey too had to flee the country in the same year, and found himself blacklisted and thereby unemployable upon his return a year later, forcing him into exile thereafter. This bleak and cynical B-noir – with its politically loaded motifs that touched upon class envy, abuse of power by those in uniform, sexual misconduct, and running references to ghost towns and Indian burial grounds – were imbued with darker connotations by the above context. When Susan (Evelyn Keyes), a married woman who stays alone for long stretches as her husband is often away for his work as radio host, calls the police upon sensing being pried upon by a peeping tom, a nastier bad news inadvertently starts unfolding for her in the form of disgruntled beat cop Webb (Van Heflin). His role, ironically, is to provide protection, but soon tries to force himself upon her, and then hatches a dirty ploy to entrap her. While the plot’s progression was considerably dependent on contrivances, one senses bitter and nihilist undercurrents in it, that’re embodied by Heflin’s creepy and sinister turn. The desolate ghost town of Calico that it culminated in – a former mining town that witnessed an economic nosedive – emphasised the underlying themes of human corruption, greed and fatalism. The titular prowler, incidentally, was a classic red herring, with its purpose restricted to putting this sordid tale in motion.

Director: Joseph Losey

Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller/Film Noir

Language: English

Country: US

Senso [1954]

 Luchino Visconti’s celebrated fourth feature Senso served as a pivotal milestone for the “Red Count”, as it marked his decisive turn from a pioneering neorealist filmmaker to a practitioner of grand and ambitious historical melodramas. This visually sumptuous, emotionally feverish, vividly operatic and lavishly mounted epic – that exultantly combined Visconti’s love of cinema, theatre, opera and the fine arts – formed a precursor to and therefore one half of a diptych with his gargantuan masterpiece The Leopard, in that both were extraordinarily lush, formally meticulous, and were set against the turbulent backdrop of the radical social and political transformations that swept through the country during the Risorgimento. At its heart is a torrid, outrageously reckless and thoroughly self-destructive love affair that Livia (Alida Valli), a beautiful countess unhappily married to an older aristocrat with a chameleonic ability to shift his allegiances in sync with changing landscapes, gets embroiled in with a much younger, roguish and self-serving Austrian Lieutenant (Farley Granger), which leads her to betray her patriotic principles – viz. the causes of Italian Nationalists who’re battling for independence from the Austrian Occupation – and takes her to complete moral and existential doom. The resplendently designed and crafted film magnificently evoked the arresting architectural and locational splendour of Venice, Rome, Veneto and Verona – rapturously amplified by luscious art décor, ornate costumes and actual artworks; ravishingly shot in muted, fading colours by three different cinematographers (G.R. Aldo died midway, upon which Robert Krasker came in, but conflicts with Visconti’s vision led to Giuseppe Rotunno being asked to step in); and accompanied by a classical score – comprised of a spectacularly orchestrated and filmed battle scenes at par with what Visconti staged in The Leopard.

Director: Luchino Visconti

Genre: Drama/Historical Drama/Romantic Drama/Epic

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Letter from Siberia [1957]

 Chris Marker’s distinctive voice as a ciné-essayist, visual artist, sociopolitical commentator, globetrotter and ethnographer was already identiable in his first solo feature-length film Letter from Siberia. Therefore, if morning shows the day, then the forecast was bright and clear! In this alternately playful and perceptive epistolary travelogue, he joyously blended multifarious stylistic, formal, thematic and even meta-narrative elements – dry documentation, idiosyncratic musings, zany animations, satirical infusion of advertising elements, deadpan observations, and mock-serious examination of how a documentarian’s subjectivity laces different political colours to their depictions – while capturing the spread, complexities and oddities of Siberia, a place that represents the edge of the world for many. Marker covered it through different angles, and that certainly included its vast expanse, its austere and rugged beauty, its geographic isolation, its prohibitive weather, and interspersed these with glimpses of its working-class people, their habitats, the renowned trans-Siberian railways and massive Soviet infrastructure projects that were underway. But, he counterpointed these conventional elements with quirky facets and interludes – the history of gold rush and how that spirit is still alive among a solitary few; the story of a pet bear; the locale’s unique folk culture; a rather curious animated section on the woolly mammoth that were said to have walked this land in prehistoric times; and, on a hilarious if sardonic note, a faux commercial – aimed at Europeans and Americans – on the consumerist value of a reindeer which form an integral part of life there. And, in its most memorably self-reflexive touch, he showed a couple of scenes thrice – one involving a bus and a car, and another involving construction men – wherein he wryly imbued the same visuals with dramatically different political interpretations.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Chris Marker

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Travelogue

Language: French

Country: France

Night and Fog [1956]

 Numerous films, both fictions and non-fictions, have tried portraying, analyzing and interpreting the grotesque monstrosity and primordial barbarism – borne out of xenophobia, right-wing bigotry, religious hatred, racial supremacism, ultra-nationalism and war hysteria – that Nazism represented and manifested through the Holocaust; unfortunately very few have truly been able to penetrate into its heart of darkness. Resnais’ extraordinarily powerful, haunting and gut-wrenching documentary Night and Fog remains an indelible example of the latter; that he did that through a surprisingly concise 30-minute length – perhaps representing the other side of the spectrum vis-à-vis Claude Lanzmann’s gargantuan Shoah (which, unfortunately, I’m yet to watch) – speaks further volumes about it. And, made a decade after the end of WWII and therefore liberation of German concentration and death camps thet were littered all across Europe, it was also perhaps among the earliest confrontations of this topic. Resnais, interestingly, took an arresting dual narrative approach which made it all the more atmospheric, viz. pairing eerily desolate and tranquil present of now deserted remnants of Auschwitz and Majdanek – which’ve ironically become tourist destinations – shot in Eastman colour; with harrowing war-time B/W footage and newsreels – of the ghastly camps, the watchtowers and barbed wires, the skeletal and dehumanized internees, their transportation in cattle cars, medical experimentation and tortures, executions and massacres, gas chambers and heaped corpses, turning men and women into mattresses and soaps, the remorseless perpetrators supervising the camps and later during war crime trials – from just ten years back. Couple of important footnotes – the script was written by Holocaust survivor Jean Cayrol, and aided by Chris Marker; and French censors forced Resnais to blot out the shot of a French guard which subtly revealed French complicity.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Alain Resnais

Genre: Documentary/Political History/Short Film

Language: French

Country: France

The Asphalt Jungle [1950]

The engrossing world of classic American noirs is replete with tough-guy heist films where things end badly through a mix of bad breaks. The Asphalt Jungle – adapted from W.R. Burnett’s novel, and one of Huston’s greatest works, along with The Maltese Falcon and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre – remains a fabulous, gritty, hardboiled, fatalistic, hugely influential and a definitive depiction of, to borrow from the script, “a left-handed form of human endeavour”. “Doc” Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe) is a recently paroled career-criminal who’s hatched plan for a big caper; the potential payoff interests the wealthy lawyer Emmerich (Louis Calhern) and a crooked bookie (Marc Lawrence) to fund the expenses and hiring of the crew for the job, which includes a disillusioned hooligan (Sterling Hayden), a bartender and a family man. Things, unfortunately, don’t follow the planned route as Emmerich, unbeknownst to the group, has planned a neat double-cross; and that, combined with murders, nasty luck and an overenthusiastic police Commissioner, push Doc and his crew into a corner from which there’re hardly any chances of a clean getaway. Most of the men have their weaknesses – the street-smart professional Doc in his attraction towards nymphets; the seemingly well-placed Emmerich having gone broke through his affair with a teasing seductress (Marilyn Monroe), etc. – which, in the end, take all involved to their doom. The sparkling B/W photography, jazz score and taut script were wonderfully aided by a host of fine performances led from the front by the brilliant Sam Jaffe, and a top-notch Huston who magnificently created a realistic depiction of corrupt cops, societal underbelly and crime as just another occupation, despite the many limitations of the then prudish Production Code.

p.s. This is a revisit. My earlier review of this film can be found here.

Author: John Huston
Genre: Film Noir/Crime Thriller/Heist Film
Language: English
Country: US

A Bucket of Blood [1959]

A Bucket of Blood might not be the most well-known work of schlock trailblazer Roger “The Pope of Pop Cinema” Corman, but it most remains one of his most brilliant. Using his deprecatory ability to traverse across genres, he created – in this low budget B-movie shot in just 5 days – something preposterous, provocative, darkly funny, bitingly satirical, grisly, quirky, ironic and deliciously reflexive in its meta-narrative. Walter Paisley (Dick Miller in his 1^st of 7 renditions of characters with this name) is a geeky, fidgety, neurotic busboy in a Village café populated by Beatniks and bohemians. He’s in thrall of the resident Beat poet (Julian Burton) and his freeform poetry; he’s infatuated with Carla (Barboura Morris) but is always receiving scorns and jibes from his boss (Antony Carbone); he lives alone in a run-down apartment; and he dreams of himself as a great artist despite his singular lack of talent. His fortunes change dramatically, however, when he accidentally kills a cat, and then, in a bizarre display of artistic expression, encases the corpse in clay. His “avant-garde” sculpture attracts immediate attention and admiration, and, with his ambition now stoked, he’s propelled into a ghastly journey of churning out one work of hideous ultra-realism after another, in a hilarious reimagining of the slasher film House of Wax. The fabulous turn by Miller, the striking B/W photography, deadpan humour and the mock-serious bring-down of highbrow pretentiousness, combined with Corman’s love for the macabre, made this a fascinating ‘black-comedy horror’ flick – a genre which he flaunted to have pioneered. Corman and writer Charles B. Griffith would reunite the following year, and would even reuse the same set, with The Little Shop of Horrors.

Director: Roger Corman
Genre: Horror/Black Comedy/Social Satire
Language: English
Country: US

La Pointe Courte [1955]

Agnès Varda’s remarkably assured and exquisitely shot directorial debut La Pointe Courte straddled across two iconoclastic film movements, without consciously aiming for that, though its two loosely connected narratives. The affecting 1^st narrative portrayed, with humour, warmth, exuberance and lyricism, the life of a tightly-knit, impoverished fishing community in the eponymous French coastal village; the authorities are trying to clamp down as they believe the shellfish are contaminated by industrial effluents, which propels the fishermen to find new ways of dodging the city guys who they clearly disdain, while also enjoying their lives despite the meagre means at their disposal. The other narrative covered an unnamed Parisian couple (Philippe Noiret and Silvia Monfort) who’ve come there to spend a few days together; they roam around the fields, river banks and discarded boats discussing about their crumbling marriage, and hoping if there’s a way to save it yet. The only instance where the two narratives coincided was during the end when the couple is finally seen enjoying while attending an annual revelry that the village hosts. The infectious former narrative had all the distinctive elements of Italian Neorealism, including a non-professional cast, on-location shooting and delightful naturalism. The latter narrative, on the other hand, was discursive, self-reflexive and stylized – the arresting close-up shots of the profile of one cutting in half the face of the other, would reappear more famously in Bergman’s Persona. Though I found the latter stilted and artsy, it did bear early signs of the Nouvelle Vague movement, even if it would still be around half a decade before Truffaut would debut with The 400 Blows, Resnais (who edited this film) with Hiroshima Mon Amour, and Godard with Breathless.

Director: Agnes Varda
Genre: Drama/Rural Drama/Marital Drama
Language: French
Country: France