French Cinema: Moliere by Laurent Tirard (2007)

Molière was a French playwright and actor who lived in the middle of the 17th century.  At the outset of the film you sense that his life was not an easy one.  We see him tossed in prison for unpaid debts.  This is biographical but what follows is fiction, and a kind of a pastiche of Moliere's comedies, for which he was deservedly famous. 

In this story he is bailed out of this bad situation by a wealthy merchant, M. Jourdain,  who has  desires for a noble woman, Celemine, even though he is already married.  To capture her heart, he hires Molière to instruct him in acting and to consult on the play that he has written to impress her. 

The comedy ensues from these ill-fated efforts and the schemings of his "friend" Dorante who is a member of the French nobility but is financially strained.  Indeed, his chateau is falling to pieces and is needing of much expensive renovation. 

So there you have it, the rich merchant in search of noble connections and a Count in search of a new infusion of money.  His son wants to work, but to the nobility to work is beneath their dignity.    

Everyone in this story has an angle and a secret objective.  While Jourdain is attempting not very successfully to woo Celemine 17th century style, Moliere is having more success with his neglected wife.   And because it is a comedy drawn from Moliere's own famous comedies, all's well that ends well. It is a beautifully photographed and enjoyable period comedy.     

 

Steve McQueen in "Bullitt" (1968)

This is a first rate detective thriller which stacks up quite well compared to Clint Eastwood in "Dirty Harry", which came out three years later.  It is fascinating as a kind of sixties time capsule.  There is for example Robert Duvall in a small part as a taxi driver and Jacqueline Bisset as Bullitt's wife.  There is Robert Vaughn, looking like an earlier day Matthew Broderick, and most famous as TV's  Man from UNCLE who plays an officious asshole politician.  There is of course Steve McQueen who plays the hard-bitten police detective in one of the most beautiful cities on the planet, San Francisco. 

Bullitt's long suffering mustang

And there is the memorable chase scene through the vertical grid of the city, which forces a grid on terrain that should never have had a grid imposed on it.  

Two interesting things about the airport scenes too, there's some guy smoking a cigarette while waiting to  board the aircraft, and when the bad guy is cornered in the back of the aircraft and jumps to the tarmac  he pulls out a gun to fire at Bullitt.   I mean who would smoke anywhere in an airport and most obviously in line to get on a plane, and who would just happen to have his shoulder holstered pistol carried around as nonchalantly as if one were carrying an i-phone on board.  Things have changed certainly.

Vaughn and McQueen

Like most detective stories, the plot is confusing, did not make sense, or maybe I wasn't paying close enough attention.  There were loose threads of narrative that one would hope to tie together but never are.  The whole reason Bullitt was involved in this matter was to help ensure the safety of a government witness against the mob.  Frank Chalmers (Robert Vaughn) wishes to use the man as a surprise witness in the senate hearing in San Francisco the following Monday.  All Bullitt has to do is ensure his safety for the weekend.  Unfortunately somehow the hit men track the witness down and break into the the room, shooting the police detective and the government witness.  

The bad guys

One wonders why if they didn't have time to finish the job there in the seedy hotel, why did they think they would have time to do the job in the hospital later?  Obviously because otherwise there would have been no story.   Bad guys in general are notoriously bad shots, even with a pump action shotgun.  Later they prove they are not very good at safe driving either.  

I won't say anything more about the story other than to say that it it was a great film and held my interest easily throughout.  The fact that Bullitt was a married man with a loving wife (Jacqueline Bisset no less)

and we see a lot of her made me think she was doomed.  In an action film, whenever a man has a happy married relationship with a woman she is doomed.  Well almost always.    Watch the film.

Wolfgang Peterson's "Das Boot" The directors cut (1981)

This is a great film about WWII submarine warfare.  Never mind the fact that they were on the wrong side of the war in service to an evil regime.  Apart from the masters they served, they were merely men who were trying to do their best they could in a system they did not fully understand.  Like the American sailors in "From Here to Eternity", most of the enlisted men were scarcely men at all, but boys.  And their preoccupations were wine, women, and song before and after doing their highly unpleasant jobs is an example of  a universal of human nature at least in Western culture.  .  

Submariners of any nationality have long had to contend with the claustrophobic environment of the interior of their ship, and not much else. 

The sweat and stink of a crew of maybe 20 men who work in shifts cut off from sunlight and any sense of night and day.   And as increasingly becomes the case towards the end of the Second World War, the hunters were also the hunted, as increasingly sophisticated methods of anti-submarine warfare drew the noose tighter on the very ones who were trying to strangle the vital sea links between North America and Great Britain.  The fact is that of the approximately 40,000 sailors in the U-boat service for

Germany, only 10,000 survived the war.  Underwater locating technology and both sides, depth charges, and ASDIC (Sonar) fortunately evened the odds in favor of the Allies before the end of the war.   

There are some memorable scenes in this film, which swings continually from calm to horror/terror and back again.  In one scene they are surveying the burning wreck of an allied tanker, and assuming that the convoy would have picked up the survivors hours ago, they send in a torpedo as a coup de grace. 

It is only then that they discover that the survivors have not been rescued, and that by sending a gratuitous torpedo its way they have ensured that the survivors would not survive. And the scenes where they are desperately trying to fix the engines and the pumps while submerged, even resting on the bottom of the Strait of Gibraltar.   

I have no way of judging the "realism" of this film, other than it seemed plenty "real" to me:  the claustrophobia, the bad air, the

tight spaces, the dim light, the sounds of the metal plates of the ship creaking and snapping as the pressure of the water becomes greater and greater, even in the quieter moments when the captain put on various samples of his record collection for broadcast throughout the submarine.  As I have said, a great film and perhaps the greatest sub warfare film ever made.  Never mind that it was over 3 hours long in the director's cut, it was gripping from beginning to end.

British Film: Stephan Elliott's Easy Virtue (2008)

Another take on the British minor nobility, which are clearly a dying breed.  This one is set in 1920s England in a large country house and a troubled family with two daughters who are destined to become spinsters and a husband who is cold and distant (Colin Firth).  The head of the household is clearly the mother, who is dismayed when her only son comes home from the south of France with a new American wife in tow.  She is a race car driver whom he met and had a whirlwind romance.  However much was not worked out apparently when he tied the knot. 

She had not bargained for his obnoxious family, and he had not bargained for her less than immaculate past.  The women in the house instantly despise her, and this sets up the comedy that follows.  The Whittakers are fox hunters and like to go shooting, and the new wife (Jessica Biel) is dead against blood sports. 

They want the boy to take over the family estate, which is danger of being sold off and subdivided owing to their precarious finances, and she wants the boy to move to London with her and (horrors!) work for a living.  Even the art they like is different.  The family likes the old traditional stuff, and she likes Picasso and even brings one from Paris which she says is a representation of her.

  

A deft combination of comedy and pathos, I will not spoil the ending, except to say that is was a satisfying ending.  I highly recommend the film.  

British Film: The Ruling Class (1972) starring Peter O'Toole

 Of course there is nothing  funny at all about schizophrenia, but the awkwardness of a group of rich people faced with schizophrenia in the main heir to the house of Gurney might be.  And against the backdrop of trying to maintain the proprieties and traditions of British nobility, it can be.  The fact that Jack (Peter O'Toole) suffers the delusion that he is Jesus, the son of God, leads to some amusing dialogue.  He wears his hair long in the fashion of Jesus, he has installed a giant cross platform in the main hall of the house and goes up there to nap. 

His uncle and aunt and his adult son, who also live at the ancestral home, plot more or less openly to have Jack committed once they can get him to produce a male heir. 

The members of the household of the 14th Earl of Gurney are an adulterous bunch, the German psychiatrist, Herder, in the nearby insane asylum/ mental hospital is having an affair with the aunt.  The uncle offers up his mistress, Grace, as Jack's wife.  Jack and Grace are duly married in the Church of England with all the festivity one would expect. 

Meanwhile the manservant Tucker, a closet "Bolshie" who drinks too much,  is making snide remarks about the upper classes and seems to be Jack's only real friend.  

In time a male heir is born, also named Jack.  Now the uncle can spring his trap.  He calls over the psychiatric examiner to determine in his judgment whether Jack is insane or not.   However Jack has suddenly and seemingly "recovered" from his delusions that he is Jesus, owing to a staged confrontation with another mental patient who also thinks of himself as God.  This is effected with the help of the asylum director Herder who brings this lunatic along with two dark suited men to restrain him during a thunderstorm.  It seems to work.

 The next day, Jack is shorn of his Jesus locks, the beard, and is apparently recovered.  He now calls himself "Jack" which is his given name and seems ready and willing to assume his new duties as the 14th Earl of Gurney.   

It gradually becomes clear that Jack is not "recovered" at all.  Unfortunately Jack has merely traded one delusional identity as Jesus for another, that of "Jack the Ripper".

  As the Earl he is accepted along with his now harsh views of criminal justice and the best way to quell civil disorder.  Whereas Jesus was the Prince of Peace and the God of Love,  Jack is none of this.    However as a stodgy conservative in the House of Lords he fits right in.  His young wife is truly in love with him, his aunt is in love with him, and that's too bad, because he's Jack the Ripper and he murders them both.  End of story.

Clearly this is not the kind of film you would take a date to, expecting to score the late innings.  It is funny and even brilliant in parts, but the frequent swings between stark realism and whimsy (and even song and dance) is liable to cause the viewer to suffer from plot whiplash.   Are we watching a story of a madman or are we going mad ourselves?  Meanwhile the fox during the fox hunt pauses to relieve itself against a tree.

Harlaxton Manor, which is now owned by the University of Evansville.

  

The Magic Christian (1969) starring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr

I remember Badfinger's song "Come and Get It" from way back in my misspent youth in the early 1970s, however the film which inspired it was another thing.  I saw it for the first time this week, and it was about what I expected.  The late 1960s and early 1970s were a pretty crazy time, and if you like this sort of surreal humor and practical jokes so much the better.

Basically it is the story of fabulously rich Sir Guy Grand, whose hobby is playing practical jokes, mainly through the application of cash.  It was loosely adapted from the Terry Southern comic novel of the same name.  In the film Grand (Peter Sellers) meets a homeless man, subsequently known as Youngman Grand (Ringo Starr) in a London Park and legally adopts him.

  For example, for a large amount of money he bribes one of the teams competing in a regatta on the Thames to ram the other team's boat.   In another scene he persuades an actor playing Hamlet to do a strip tease while reciting his soliloquy "To be or not to be".   In another one they go grouse hunting with a   stuffy aristocratic set, and when the grouse is flushed, they turn bombs and missiles on the bird, finally flushing and simultaneously cooking the poor things with a flame thrower. 

He lives in a suitably grand country house with two female relations, Dame Agnes and Esther Grand.  They watch scenes of violent civil disorder and mayhem while pleasantly lolling in the parlor, or playing a game of battleships with live ammunition.

Christopher Lee as Ship's Vampire

The jokes are increasingly big ones as the film moves along.   Finally he commissions a luxury ocean liner with room only for the very richest passengers.    Here things reach a climax of silliness with various odd and untoward events ending with a mock abandon ship order where they emerge to discover the same Tower Bridge in London whence they had departed.    Finally Guy and Youngman preside over the ultimate practical joke. 

They fill a small swimming pool sized vat with urine, blood, and animal excrement and tempt the button down London city types to chase free money, which they are, in spite of the smell.  

It is moderately funny, this picture.  I guess the surreal humor takes a little getting used to.  One of the fun things about watching this picture are the numerous cameo performances, including Yul Brynner in drag singing to a passive bar sitter played by Roman Polanski, a traffic warden played by Spike Milligan (one of Sellers'
costars in the old Goon show), 

  Raquel Welch heading a room full of naked female galley slaves,  a salesman at Sotheby's played by John Cleese, the ship's vampire played by Christopher Lee, the Oxford coach of the regatta team (Richard Attenborough) and even Graham Chapman as one of the team members.   

The film can be seen on You Tube here.

Kryzsztof Kieslowski's Camera Buff (Amator, 1979)

This is a fairly simple story.  A man, on the birth of his first child buys a camera and discovers film-making.  He is reasonably well situated with a decent job in a small town in Poland during the communist era.  The local party boss discovers he has a camera and asks him as a consequence to film the local festivities.  From there he branches out into amateur documentary film making.  In short he becomes a camera fanatic who, as he says "shoots anything that moves."

This is where the wheels come off the cart.  His boss warns him of the consequences of some of his filming.  He is criticised for filming the working life of a dwarf and for photographing pigeons.  His wife feels neglected, but his films are gaining him a modicum of fame.  Finally one of his films gets shown on television and the subject matter leads to the firing of another official in his town, who is a friend of his. 

His wife leaves him, and we finally see him sleeping on the sofa of his apartment, and forgetting to put his empty milk bottles out for the milk man.  He is clearly not happy but he continues to film.  

I am not sure what to make of the film, frankly.  It gives one a feel for what life might have been like in 1970s Poland.  In a repressive Communist regime nothing happens without the approval of the apparatchiks.  A man seeks to   express himself in a way that comes from within and finds himself stifled by the confining limits of marriage, job, and the community. 

Stanley Kubrick's "Doctor Strangelove" (1963)

It is hard to imagine anything less funny than nuclear war.  However Stanley Kubrick made a film that was definitely a comedy, a satire, and could be used in the dictionary definition of "black comedy".    This is perhaps the third time I've seen the film and it is quite simply a classic.   The full title of the film is "Doctor Strangelove:  or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb".    The opening credits by themselves give you a sense of what is coming, with a film of a long range bomber being refueled in flight.  One does not need a very active imagination to know what that looks like. 

Of course it is rather dated now, in the sense that we no longer use bombers.   Things have progressed and not in a good way. There are more nations with nuclear weapons (euphemistically referred to as "Weapons of Mass Destruction") and with nuclear proliferation spreading to become within the grasp of states like Islamist Iran and North Korea.    However the early sixties were a very anxious time during the cold war, with the aggressive moves of Khrushchev in Berlin and the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Chinese, who had or would shortly begin slaughtering in a very cold blooded if low tech way millions of their own people and who got their own bomb in 1964. 

General Jack Ripper (Sterling Hayden)

The film opens with an air force general who has lost his mind. General Jack Ripper (Sterling Hayden) decides on his own initiative to launch an all out nuclear strike on the Soviet Union.    He seals off the base and confiscates all radios from base.  Meanwhile Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, an RAF officer (Peter Sellers in the first of 3 roles) discovers too late what is going on. While Ripper goes on and on about the Commies and their weakening of our "precious bodily fluids,"

Captain Mandrake and General Ripper

Captain Mandrake tries desperately to get the recall code from him, as the soldiers in the base fight the ones assaulting the base, and General Ripper gets out a machine gun and fires out the window of his office.  

Cut to the "War Room" somewhere in Washington.  The President and his many advisors, cabinet members,  sit at an enormous round table with a lighted map of the Soviet Union on one wall and North America on the other.  General
"Buck" Turgidson (George C. Scott) explains to the President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers again, this time looking like Adlai Stevenson) about how something so horrible could have happened.  Turgidson is earnest and a bit naive himself, alas. 

President Muffley and General Turgidson

He explains how nuclear war could be won with "acceptable civilian casualties" of about 20 million dead.    He is obviously almost as loony as General Ripper.  They invite the Soviet ambassador into the war room and put him on the phone to the Premier.  Turgidson is scandalized by this, as if at this point it matters whether the ambassador sees the "war room" or not.  

Major "King" Kong (Slim Pickens)

Cut to a nuclear bomber flying somewhere in the Arctic.  Major "King" Kong (Slim Pickens) is reading Playboy in the cockpit when they get a coded message which to their astonishment is the one indicating they should attack their targets in Russia.  After a moment of shock and disbelief, Pickens gets his cowboy hat out of a safe along with the attack instructions and solemnly tells the crew they must do their duty.  

Meanwhile things are going from bad to worse for Captain Mandrake who is trapped in the office with General Ripper while a violent military assault is being made on the base.  Mandrake is doing his best to coax the recall codes from Ripper but has no luck.  Finally Ripper, who is afraid that he might crack under torture, shoots himself, and when shortly afterwards Colonel "Bat" Guano (Keenan Wynn) shows up he is taken prisoner and is only with difficulty persuaded that it is important for Mandrake to put in a call to the President.  In a wonderfully comic exchange, Col. Guano takes him to a pay phone, but Mandrake finds he doesn't have enough change to make the call.  He asks Guano to shoot the coke machine and get some coins for him.  Guano objects "But that's private property!" and when Mandrake prevails on him, Guano

Colonel "Bat" Guano (Keenan Wynn)

says, "Well I hope you realize you will have the Coca Cola Company to answer to."

Returning to the war room, with the help of the President, the planes are recalled and three of the four remaining bombers are shot down.  The ambassador reveals that the Soviets have created what they call "The Doomsday machine" which is triggered automatically if any target in the Soviet Union is attacked.   As a result every living thing on the surface of the Earth will be killed by radiation.   The President asks not unreasonably, "Well, what good is it unless you tell us about it?" And the ambassador replies.  "Oh the Premier was going to announce it at the next party congress.  You know how the Premier likes surprises."

Doctor Strangelove (Sellers)

At this point Doctor Strangelove (Peter Sellers again), who is confined to a wheelchair and has a right arm which he only with difficulty can control.  Strangelove is one of those German scientists which America and the Soviet Union divided up after the Second World War.   As it becomes clear that the doomsday machine might be triggered and make life on the Earth's surface uninhabitable for about 100 years, talk between Turgidson and Strangelove devolve into a discussion of survival of a select population of people deep in mine shafts.  And so it goes, ad absurdum.   Meanwhile the Soviet ambassador sneaks off with a tiny camera taking pictures of the war room.

Slim Pickens drops the big one

The film closes with stock silent footage of nuclear explosions while Vera Ellen sings "We'll meet again."  It is a great, if unsettling film, all the more so in view of the backdrop of real world events in 1962 and 1963.