Category: Essays
Posted in: Actors, by Kathleen Murphy, Essays
Sean Connery: The Man Who Would Be King
Written by Kathleen Murphy	 November 3, 2020 November 3, 2020 Leave a Comment on Sean Connery: The Man Who Would Be King
Originally published in Film Comment in 1997
Just back from the Crusades after twenty years, Sean Connery's Robin Hood peers up at an abbey window to espy his onetime Maid Marian (Audrey Hepburn) decked out in nun's habit. "What," demands her scruffy swain, "are you doing in that costume?" "Living it," she retorts. In Robin and Marian, Richard Lester's superb deconstruction of sustaining, fatal legend, Robin is a player past his prime, so taken by his own heroic mask he would choose to die under its weight. In fashioning one of his finest performances, Sean Connery must have called upon something of his own struggle with a devouring fiction, the near-loss of his own face to a single fixed expression of heroism.
In forty years of filmmaking, Sean Connery has climbed into a remarkable variety of cinematic costume: suits from Savile Row, uniforms of every stripe, American West gear, exotic regalia from loincloth to kilt to Spanish grandee's piratical splendor, the robes of a Benedictine monk, the sturdy tweeds of an elderly British archaeologist, and the slightly seedy duds of a boozy publisher. He's been spy, soldier, scientist, submarine captain, cop, poet, miner, thief, messiah, sheikh, fertility god, and dragon. No matter the clothes, period, or genre, Connery displays the sangfroid of an instinctively naturalized citizen, at home from Sekandergul to Oz.
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Posted in: by Robert C. Cumbow, Contributors, Essays, Film music, Westerns
Morricone Encomium
Written by Robert C. Cumbow	 July 6, 2020 July 6, 2020
[Originally published in Movietone News 40, April 1975]
I don't read a note of music, so the language of this article is necessarily interpretive rather than technical. Also, the here-today-gone-tomorrow Duck, You Sucker has thus far eluded my company, so I have recourse only to the first four westerns that Morricone scored for Leone. —RCC
A soundtrack score is rarely significant enough to make or break a film. Generally the least obtrusive music is the most effective in creating mood or building atmosphere—the kind of music the pianists and organists used to improvise to accompany silent movies. If a film score is overly assertive it can do severe damage to a film, as Miklos Rozsa's did to Hitchcock's Spellbound, or as most of Maurice Jarre's post–Lawrence of Arabia scores have done.
With this in mind, it is with the greatest of awe that I express my admiration for the brilliantly assertive yet totally un–self-serving scores that Ennio Morricone has composed for Sergio Leone's "spaghetti westerns." The unique, indefinable atmosphere which Leone's films create is built in large part by the director's tremendously personal style of mise-en-scène, shot composition, and montage, to be sure. But it is often Morricone's music that turns the trick in creating that timeless, haunting aura, and lends an otherworldly, almost religious significance to the action it accompanies.
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Posted in: by Sean Axmaker, Contributors, Essays, Silent Cinema
Japanese Girls at the Harbor
Written by Sean Axmaker	 June 8, 2019
When Hiroshi Shimizu released Japanese Girls at the Harbor in 1933, the veteran filmmaker had already made more than eighty-five films. When he died in 1966, he had at least 160 films to his credit in a thirty-five-year career, most of them made at Shochiku, also the home of his friend and colleague Yasujiro Ozu. In his time Shimizu was both a popular director and a respected filmmaker, but after his death he was practically forgotten, even in his home country. He was born in 1903, the same year as Ozu, yet after the glorious celebration of Ozu's centenary with a near-complete touring retrospective in Japan, Shimizu received a belated "101st Anniversary" celebration at the 2004 Hong Kong International Film Festival, an afterthought, showcasing a mere thirteen films.
Why? Access is certainly a factor. Only a fraction of his films survive, even fewer are available on home video, and his work is rarely revived outside of Japan. Another reason may be a reputation that stuck as a director of light entertainment after his series of children's films that he began making in the late 1930s. "Shimizu's world is a sunny one, where the sadness of things only rarely intrudes," wrote Alan Stanbrook after a 1988 retrospective at London's National Film Theatre, the first to showcase the director in the West. And then there was the reductive public persona that remained long after the films receded from the public.
Continue reading at The San Francisco Silent Festival website
Posted in: by Sean Axmaker, Contributors, Essays, streaming
The Best Current Source For Streaming Classic Movies is … Amazon Prime?
Written by Sean Axmaker	 February 12, 2019
What is the classic movie fan to do in the era of Netflix? For a few glorious years FilmStruck was our salvation, offering a rich, well-curated collection of films from the silent era through the 1970s, something Netflix gave up on years ago.
So with FilmStruck dead, where can the fan of classic movies—let's say, just for the sake of argument, anything older than 40 years—get their fix without resorting to renting each and every title on iTunes or Fandango?
The answer might surprise you. The meatiest streaming source for world cinema classics is Kanopy, a free service offered through most (though not all) public and college library systems. But there's a limit of five streams per month and while they carry hundreds of titles from the Criterion Collection from such directors as Akira Kurosawa and Ingmar Bergman, the collection of classic American cinema is relatively small.
That's where Amazon Prime Video enters the picture.
Continue reading at RogerEbert.com
Posted in: by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Essays, Film Reviews
Chasing the Hat
Written by Richard T. Jameson	 February 9, 2019
[This article first appeared in the September-October 1990 issue of Film Comment. It was reprinted in the National Society of Film Critics anthology They Went Thataway: Redefining Film Genres (1995).]
Ice dropping into a heavy-bottomed glass: cold, hard, sensuous. The first image in Miller's Crossing hits our ears before it hits the screen, but it's nonetheless an image for that. Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne) has traveled the length of a room to build a drink. Not that we saw him in transit, not that we yet know he is Tom Reagan, and not that we see him clearly now as he turns and stalks back up the room, a silent, out-of-focus enigma at the edge of someone else's closeup. Yet he is a story walking, as his deliberate, tangential progress, from background to middle distance and then out the side of the frame, is also a story – draining authority from the close-up Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito) who's come to insist, ironically enough, on the recognition of his territorial rights.
The place is a story, too, which we read as the scene unfolds. A private office; not Caspar's, but not Reagan's either – it's city boss Liam "Leo" O'Bannion (Albert Finney) who sits behind the camera and his big desk, listening. An upstairs office, we know from the muted street traffic (without stopping to think about why we know). Night outside, but sunlight would never be welcome, or relevant, here. A masculine space, green lampshades amid the dark luster of wood, leather, whiskey. A remote train whistle sounds, functional and intrinsically forlorn; the distance from which it reaches us locates the office in space and in history. This room exists in a city big enough to support a multiplicity of criminal fiefdoms and a political machine that rules by maintaining the balance among them, yet it is still a town whose municipal core lies within faint earshot of its outskirts. Urban dreams of empire have not entirely crowded out the memory of wilderness, of implacable places roads and railroads can't reach, even if one of them has been wishfully designated Miller's Crossing. Hence we are not entirely surprised (though the aesthetic shock is deeply satisfying) when the opening master-scene, with its magisterial interior setting and dialogue fragrant with cross purpose, gives way to a silent (save for mournful Irish melody) credit sequence in an empty forest. And then to a title card announcing, almost superfluously, "An Eastern city in the United States, toward the end of the 1920s."
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Posted in: by Sean Axmaker, Contributors, Documentary, Essays
Elvis and the Death of the American Dream, Through Movies
Written by Sean Axmaker	 January 27, 2019
Elvis Presley is ostensibly the subject of The King, Eugene Jarecki's expansive road movie of a documentary. The award-winning director drives Presley's 1963 Rolls-Royce across the US, from Mississippi and Memphis to Nashville, New York, Las Vegas, Hollywood, and elsewhere, talking to historians, musicians, members of Presley's inner circle, and everyday Americans. Elvis centers the film but is also a starting point for a much more wide-ranging discussion of the state of American life, and that discussion takes off in all directions. That Jarecki began his odyssey in the months leading up the 2016 election and ended up on the other side of it only adds fuel to the discussion.
Not of political identity, mind you, but of America itself. Elvis is the touchstone that centers it all, with Jarecki using his life and legacy as both a roadmap for the cultural odyssey and as a metaphor for the state of contemporary America.
And at the heart of the film is the question: Is the American dream dead, a victim of greed, excess, and increasing isolation?
Continue reading at Independent Lens
Posted in: Bernardo Bertolucci, by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Directors, Essays
Bernard Bertolucci's 'Partner'
Written by Richard T. Jameson	 December 4, 2018
[originally written for NoShame Films, August 27, 2005]
Our subject is primarily life, but if you feel that life's missing something, steal a camera and try to give life a style.
Partner, Bernardo Bertolucci's third feature film, has always been one of the most elusive of the director's endeavors: a forthrightly experimental work—"a film that comes from the head," in Bertolucci's own phrase, "a totally deconstructed film"—that willfully declines to satisfy audiences' conventional expectations regarding narrative and emotional identification with characters. Nominally based on the Dostoevsky novella The Double, the movie centers on—and largely transpires in the imagination of—a rather priggish young drama teacher in Rome played by Pierre Clémenti. Clémenti also plays the wilder, looser alter ego who begins to share the teacher's life and, to an extent, identity; both go by the name of Giacobbe (or Jacob, in English-language commentaries).
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Posted in: Bernardo Bertolucci, biography, by Sean Axmaker, Contributors, Directors, Essays
Written by Sean Axmaker	 November 26, 2018
[originally published in a booklet for the DVD release of Partner by NoShame in 2005]
The political and the sensual meet in the cinema of Bernardo Bertolucci. His visually dense and stylistically labyrinthine films are among the most beautiful — and the most provocative (The Last Tango in Paris) — ever made.His career straddles canvases both epic (1900,The Last Emperor) and intimate (Luna, Besieged), from defiantly Italian stories that reverberate with the echoes of Italy's Fascist past to international dramas that explore culture,history, and spirituality around the world. All of them are beautifully crafted works attuned the texture of experience and the magic of the moment.
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Posted in: by Sean Axmaker, Contributors, Essays
Sex, lies and, Soderbergh
Written by Sean Axmaker	 July 19, 2018
[Originally published on IndieWire on January 15, 2014]
sex, lies, and videotape was released this week in a Criterion special edition on Blu-ray and DVD. Parallax View republishes this archival piece to mark the occasion.
"When I was coming up, making an independent film and trying to reach an audience was like, trying to hit a thrown baseball. This is like trying to hit a thrown baseball but with another thrown baseball." – Steven Soderbergh at the San Francisco International Film Festival, 2013
Did the Sundance Film Festival make sex, lies, and videotape or did sex, lies, and videotape put Sundance on the festival map? The debut feature by Steven Soderbergh, modestly budgeted at $1.2 million and starring a cast of recognizable but hardly famous actors on the rise, lost the Grand Jury Prize to Nancy Savoca's True Love but took home the Audience Award and, more importantly, a deal with Miramax, who broke the film out of the limited arthouse circuit and put it into suburban theaters. The confluence of Sundance and "sex" was a seismic shift in American independent film culture: the "big bang of the modern indie film movement," in the words of industry historian Peter Biskind.
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Posted in: by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Essays
Review: The Tree of Wooden Clogs
Written by Richard T. Jameson	 May 8, 2018
[originally presented as a program note for the 1983 University of Washington film series "The Epic Tradition in World Cinema"]
"Those who are wretched are nearer to God." A peasant woman speaks that line early in The Tree of Wooden Clogs, by way of chiding two of her numerous children for giggling at the simpleminded vagrant whose peregrinations intersect the course of the film from time to time. Taken in isolation, the line is open to dispute: are the random peasant types at the beginning of Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff, for instance, imaginably nearer to God than the self-sacrificing governor who places himself (and his family, as it turns out) in jeopardy in their behalf? By reverse token, the line might be invoked as the keynote of any number of kneejerk-liberal tracts, at once patronizing and self-congratulatory, that propose or presume the moral and spiritual superiority of the socioeconomically disadvantaged. Or it might be put in the mouth of a suffering peasant type for the purpose of irony—to nudge us toward an awareness of how religion can serve as "the opiate of the proletariat," a formula of self-consolation that defangs the spirit of revolution and reform, and thus helps sustain corrupt sociopolitical systems.
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