The Manhattan Project
Controversy Over Rhee Now to Include Sex, Congress
Morning Roundup: Second Helpings Edition
Increased Urban Walkability For The Win
Cafritz Suffers Second Fire
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
It seems that there have been a lot of film noir picks in this column in recent months, and the AFI's current Robert Mitchum retrospective isn't exactly helping us break the habit. This week, though, features the best of the lot, with Mitchum's chilling turn as a Gospel-spouting murderer who marries a West Virginia widow (the always excellent Shelley Winters), but not out of "love", no matter what his tattooed knuckles might claim. Winters' husband, executed for his role in a robbery gone wrong, hid the money before his incarceration, and hinted to his cellmate (Mitchum) where it might be. Mitchum marries the widow in the hopes of figuring out the location of the stash. Mitchum's coldly calculating killing machine is surely one of the most indelible portraits of undiluted evil; in fact, even if you've never seen or heard of the movie, you're probably familiar with him via those often imitated (and satirized) LOVE and HATE tattoos he sports on his fingers.
The film was a huge failure upon release. On paper, it seemed like a slam-dunk, based on a popular bestseller, and with a cast of stars like Mitchum and Winters, along with the legendary Lillian Gish, and being the directing debut of another acting legend, Charles Laughton. Yet critics panned it, and audiences stayed away. After developing into a cult classic, it's now gained it's rightful reputation as one of the finest films of its decade. Laughton (who never directed another film after Hunter's failure), along with screenwriter James Agee and cinematographer Stanley Cortez, turned the novel into a masterpiece of offbeat, southern gothic-infused film noir, shot like a German expressionist film. The blend must have been pretty jarring for a mid-1950s Hollywood product, but was truly visionary in retrospect.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at the AFI and plays through next week.
---
One dose of inky cinematic blackness not enough for you this week? Then head over to the Smithsonian's American Art Museum next week for Orson Welles' Touch of Evil. The timing is appropriate, since the film features one of the finest performances ever delivered by the recently deceased Charleton Heston — even if he was improbably cast in the role of a Mexican police official. Heston's Mike Vargas spends the film trying to get to the bottom of a U.S. bombing that originated in Mexico, and in the process discovers a hotbed of dirty dealings all leading to the feet of a crooked cop played by the director himself. Welles uses the camera as inventively as always, not least of all in shooting himself: in the height of his excess-induced corpulence, the camera shoots Welles in close, wide angles that actually accentuate how large he'd become. With heavy lidded eyes, stubble, and a sheen of oily perspiration, the viewer can almost smell the stench of sweaty corruption rising off of him. The film is notable on a couple of counts, not least of which the fact that it casts the Mexican cop as the hero, and the U.S. cop as the baddie, not exactly a typical arrangement for 1950s Hollywood. It's also one of the few cases in which studio meddling didn't do much to sully a craftsman's work; while Welles' had the film taken away from him in editing (as tragically happened to so many of his movies), and some scenes were even re-shot by another director, even in its original form its greatness is undeniable. The film has been recut multiple times over the years, and next week's screening is of the 108-minute 1976 version. While not definitively Welles' vision (none of the cuts are), it's still a must-see classic in any case.
View the trailer.
Screens on Wednesday at 6:00 p.m. at the McEvoy Audiotorium of the Smithsonian's American Art Museum. Free.
---
Back to the AFI again, where their schedule of retrospectives is making it difficult to stay away. There's the ongoing Mitchum and Bergman features, and a soon-to-begin Hiroshi Teshigahara series coming up. Along with all that, they just got started last week looking back at the films of Bette Davis (who would have turned 100 last week), and this weekend into early next week, they'll be featuring four early Davis films, presented as a pair of double features. One pair not only is a rare look at some of the actor's earliest work, but also a telling vision of what filmmakers could get away with before the institution of the restrictive Hays Code in the early '30s. In Cabin in the Cotton, Davis plays the prototypical oversexed farmer's daughter, getting a rise out of one particular worker on daddy's plantation. And in the fantastically titled Fog Over Frisco, she plays another bad girl (a socialite this time) who manages to get mixed up with the mob. The second double features Davis with some heavy hitting star power early in her career as she goes toe to toe with James Cagney in the private eye screwball comedy Jimmy the Gent, and as hostage to a young Humphrey Bogart in The Petrified Forest.
At the AFI Sunday-Tuesday.
---
With a new film with sharp criticism of the Iraq War debuting seemingly every week, why should we care about yet another heaped on the pile? What could Body of War have to say that we haven't heard before, and do we really want to hear it from Phil Donahue, whose confrontational stance can elicit eye rolls from even those who agree with him? Against the odds of over-saturation and Donahue-annoyance, reviews for the film have been very positive, and it won the National Board of Reviews best documentary award for 2007. Making the political personal, the filmmakers tell the story of one particular Iraq veteran, Thomas Young, who has been in a wheelchair and unable to regulate his own body temperature following a spinal injury he suffered in battle. Young has become a vocal member of Iraq Veterans Against the War since his injury, and the film follows both Young's personal story as he learns to live with the difficult consequences of his injuries, as well as making poignant use of the political speeches of congressmen and women (on both sides of the aisle) that led to Young and so many others finding themselves with life-altering wounds.
View the trailer.
Now playing at E Street.
---
Jean Eustache's The Mother and the Whore, one of only a handful of films the director ever made, slammed the book shut on the French New Wave with a typically idiosyncratic film that is as offputting in its length and resistance to structure as any of the controlled chaos of Godard could sometimes be. The film is as much endurance test as anything else, clocking in at nearly four hours, and devoid of anything resembling a plot, the movie centers on the triangle formed by three disaffected Parisian youths. The male of the threesome, Truffaut/Godard stand-in Jean-Pierre Leaud, is an amiable, heavy drinking womanizer, and his girlfriend represents the "mother" figure in the title. The whore shows up in the person of Leaud's mistress, a sexually liberated Polish nurse. The film is less a story than simply a period of time carved out of these people's lives; there's very little in the way of structure, and it is utterly devoid of resolution. Considering all that, why are we recommending you take four hours out of your Saturday to watch it? The film's resistance to narrative and excessive length are really a function of its strengths. Rather than contriving situations to make his characters interesting, Eustache simply creates interesting characters, brilliantly illuminating an entirely different way of character-driven filmmaking that has been done well by very few others.
Saturday afternoon at 2:00 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art's East Building Auditorium. Free.
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
Charleton Heston as a Mexican got nothing on Marlene Dietrich as a Mexican. Or even Akim Tamiroff as a Mexican.
The question with Touch of Evil is whether that 1976 version has the single tracking shot at the beginning without the titles over it. That was the biggest affront to Welles' vision. I think it probably doesn't. As I remember there was a release in the early 2000s that was much closer to his original notes and with the proper open sequence. Any other edit would be a poor choice.
The 1976 version has the opening dolly shot with titles over it, unfortunately. The version recut to the Welles 40-page memo to Zugsmith, available on DVD, has the opening in the clear, but lacks the Mancini soundtrack. Both should be seen to appreciate how subtle changes in editing and the use of sound can impact the rhythm of film narrative. Similar situation with the original and re-cut version of The Big Sleep, or even Bladerunner with/without the noir voiceover.
The real question is why haven't they released the little-seen John Ford classic Young Mister Hitler, with a swaggering moustachioed John Wayne as the eponymous hero? Political correctness run amok?
I'm guessing that since the '98 cut was mainly made for DVD, it's difficult to find an actual print of the film to show. There are probably a lot more prints of the '76 cut around and available to rent.
So yeah, the opening has the titles sequence, but other than that, the differences between the two cuts are pretty subtle. The last cut is definitely the better, but Monkey's right, both are well worth watching to see what differences those subtleties make.
Prints of the recut version were struck and circulated when the film did an anniversary run prior to the DVD release, so they do exist. Actually, the ORIGINAL version that was released in the '50s is even shorter, and had much of the comedic Grandi footage cut, as well as bit where Menzies explains how Quinlan took a bullet for him, which made part of the ending senseless ("That's the second bullet I took for you.") Next to Magnificent Ambersons, it's a prime example of how a studio can take a perfectly watchable film and f**k it into the dirt.