Hud, Martin Ritt’s blistering adaptation of McMutry’s
debut novel Horseman Pass By, was a
powerful depiction of generational conflict and father-son feud. In keeping
with the changing sensibilities of American cinema during the 60s, it had a
thoroughly gray lead character and brilliantly mirrored the growing cynicism among
the youth with traditional social structures and idealism. At the heart of the
matter were three finely etched characters – the elderly Texas cattle-rancher
Hommer Bannon (Melvyn Douglas), his embittered and amoral younger son Hud (Paul
Newman), and his naïve teenaged grandson Lonnie (Brandon deWilde) who hero-worships
Hud and becomes the unwitting participant in the simmering collissions between
the two headstrong men. Alma (Patricia Neal), the earthy and sensuous domestic
help who Lonnie is infatuated with and the libidinous Hud leers after, played a
key plot driver, as did the sudden outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease that
might wipe off their herd. The fact that Hud craves for his father’s love and
acceptance and yet ends up continually aggravating their already ice-cold
relationship – Hommer considers Hud to be responsible for his his elder son’s
death, and that was just the tip of the iceberg – made this Shakespearean
tragedy an interesting companion piece to Kazan’s East of Eden, even though, unlike the latter, the resolution never arrived
in the final act here. The film boasted of a string of terrific performances,
including an incredibly charismatic turn by Newman, while the glorious
widescreen B/W photography of the desolate landscapes and the scantly populated
town, along with the evocative but minimalist score, superbly brought forth the
underlying themes of loneliness and death of a way of life, and the poignancy
thereof.
Director: Martin Ritt
Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Modern Western/Americana
Language: English
Country: US
In
the pantheon of horror cinema, Georges Franju’s arthouse classic Eyes without a Face holds an important place for its facile mix of the genre’s sensibilities with disconcerting
psychological overtones. The director brilliantly captured the grotesque
with the melancholic with equal ease, and imbued the movie with moodiness and
poetic realism, thus resulting in a disquieting yet surprisingly tender
examination of society’s obsession with physical beauty and perfection, and the
age-old philosophical debates on the acceptable realms of science. Doctor
Génessier (Pierre Brasseur), a renowned expert on heterograft surgeries for
facial reconstruction, decides to take things a step further when the face
of her beautiful daughter (Edith Scob) gets damaged in an accident. With the
help of his eerily loyal assistant (Alida Valli), he starts kidnapping young attractive
ladies in order to transplant their faces to her daughter. The result was a
grisly depiction of the length to which a man can go to bring her daughter’s
beauty back, and the more he fails, the more he becomes entrapped in an
inescapable vicious cycle. The gothic premise and Franju’s portrayal of the monstrous
underbelly of human psyche was accentuated manifold by the expressionistic
photography and coldly chilling atmospheric. Simultaneously, the fragile girl’s
entrapment in her father’s labyrinthine mansion, and being declared dead to the
world outside despite being alive, added strong poignant touches, as did the beautifully
haunting score. The film, which was released in the US under the
bizarre title of The Horror Chamber of
Dr. Faustus in a ludicrous attempt to draw the B-movie crowd, reminded me a lot of Teshigahara's The Face of Another.
Director: Georges Franju
Genre: Horror/Psychological Horror/Gothic Film
Language: French
Country: France
Bruno
Schleinstein, aka Bruno S., was as deeply troubled a person as were his
indelible characters in the 2 Herzog films he acted in, The Enigma of Kasper Hauser and Stroszek.
His character here was an outsider to the world around him, though not as distinctively
as in the former film, and paid with his life as a result. This devastatingly
bleak and addecting film was the maverick filmmaker’s meditation on the cruel
ironies associated with the enduring myth of ‘American Dream’ and what it
entails to be happy in a world that is trying hard to wear us down. The
cheekily named protagonist Bruno Stroszek (Bruno S.) is a Berliner, an
ex-mental asylum inmate and street musician whose life revolves around his
piano and accordion. His life turns hellish on account of two vicious pimps when
he allows Eva (Eva Mattes), a down on her luck prostitute, to take refuge in
his cramped apartment. So, in the hope for a better life, they move to the US
along with an ageing, diminutive, kindly and eccentric friend (Clemens
Scheitz). They start living the dream when they buy a car and a mobile house
using readily available bank loans, and start working like their blue-collar comrades.
However, their short-lived happiness comes crashing down when they start
defaulting on their loan payments, and soon find themselves on a spectacular
downward spiral leading to a gut-wrenching finale. The wide-angle photography marvelously
captured the impersonal urban landscapes of Berlin as well as the stark and
wintry rural Wisconsin locales, along with the connecting threads of loneliness
and melancholia; the lilting Country tunes and heartfelt performances added to
the film’s tragic beauty.
Director: Werner Herzog
Genre: Drama/Black Comedy/Social Satire
Language: German/English
Country: Germany
Ingrid
Bergman was so impressed with Rossellini’s
Open City and Paisan that she
wrote a letter to the Italian auteur expressing her desire to work with him.
With this began a much recounted but short-lived love story as they didn’t just
collaborate on 5 films, Stromboli was
the first of which, but also got embroiled in controversy on account of the
extra-marital nature of their relationship even though the two eventually got
married. Considered a landmark in Italy’s neo-realist movement, the film
provided a troubling look into the country’s patriarchal society and deep-set
religious orthodoxy with the scars from the just concluded WWII providing a key
backdrop. Karin (Bergman) is a Lithuanian war refugee who agrees to a marriage
of convenience with an Italian POW (Mario Vitale), upon which they relocate to
the titular volcano island where he’s a fisherman. The realization as to what
she has gotten into starts dawning on her thereafter, as the barren, desolate and
suffocating wastelands, with the fear of the dormant volcano turning active
perennially looming on all, aptly juxtaposed with the ultra-conservative nature
of the island’s residents treating her as an outsider – regarding which there’s
never any doubt – when she doesn’t conform to their image of a pious wife. It
further worsens when her husband too turns out to be one of them as she finds
herself alienated and cut-off from the world outside. Though the melodramatic
portrayal of her situation didn’t always mix seamlessly with the harsh realism,
particularly in the tad overdone finale, the fine B/W photography, Bergman’s
immersive turn and the film’s ambivalent nature assisted in providing an
affecting picture of a woman’s existential crisis.
Director: Roberto Rossellini
Genre: Drama/Marriage Drama/Rural Drama
Language: English/Italian
Country: Italy
Japanese iconoclast Imamura’s fascination with
the lower rungs, fringes and losers of the society, particularly in the context
of post-war Japan, and his penchant for riotous and rambunctious proceedings, baser
instincts, and bawdy and ribald comedy were evident in his debut film and first
of three films he made the same year, Stolen
Desire. It also provided immediate evidence of his desire to break free of
Ozu’s influence, under whom he had apprenticed. The story revolved around a penniless
travelling theatre troupe that stages kabuki plays, but, on account of
dwindling audiences, has resorted to opening with striptease shows. The
majority of the film focused on their trip to an earthy village after frustrating
run at Osaka to empty houses, and the ensuing series of raucous misadventures
and peccadilloes by the string of colourful actors and villagers. During their
stay at the village the whole kitchen sink gets thrown in the form of in-group
factions, drunken brawls, crooked landowner, lascivious men spying on the
girls, old cackling ladies with deceptively smart business acumen,
taboo-breaking, and more. And, amidst all the chaotic scheme of things, we have
a love triangle too in the form of Shinichi (Hiroyuki Nagato), the idealistic
college-educated director who is the odd man out in the troupe, Chidori (Yoko
Minamida), the beautiful wife of the leading actor with whom Shinichi is madly
in love, and Chigusa (Michie Kita), Chidori’s jealous younger sister who in
turn is in love with Shinichi. By the end of the year Imamura’s incredible
prowess would become obvious with the darkly funny heist film with the similarly sounding title, Endless Desire.
Director: Shohei Imamura
Genre: Comedy/Social Satire/Ensemble Film/Romantic Comedy
Language: Japanese
Country: Japan
