A Face in the Crowd (1957)

If any two years can be spoken of as the best in movie history, 1957 and 1972 are the ones.  Sure, one can speak of eras, movements, genres, directors, actors, &c...  But as for years, these are the two.  

Amid the swirl of great films in 1957 (for a list, look up "years" on the film 101 website) is Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd, starring Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal, and Walter Matthau.  To be sure, it is a face in the crowd among the 1957 list of greats, but that it goes unnoticed by many makes it all the more rewarding if for no other reason than the feeling of stumbling onto something a bit more rare (snob appeal).  Part of why it is rare may be due to people thinking of it as an Andy Griffith movie, expecting Griffith's television persona.  The assumption of Griffith's easy going Mayberry would be wrong, though.  Here, Griffith is emphatically the character of Lonesome Rhodes.

Lonesome dominates the film right from the start.  At first, he is quite likable, but several hints are given that it will not last.  By the end, Lonesome's laugh goes from fun (while mischievous) to an uncomfortable mania (though it is the same exact laugh).  The reason for the change is simple:  the corrupting influence of power.

Critics of the film, at the time of its release, rightly noted that Lonesome overshadows the rest of the cast.  Where they go wrong is deciding that it is boring in parts because Lonesome is without a rival.  Perhaps there is a lack of tension in the middle for this reason, but it can also be seen as subtle direction.  Kazan may have been drawing attention to the way that television personas do overpower others (albeit telling the story through a film).  But what seems more interesting about the charge of boredom is viewers tend to want somebody to do the opposing for them on the screen.  They do not wish to make opposition themselves nor do they relish the subtleties of overextended power, such as recognizing the man who stands on his toes, does not stand firm.  Unopposed force is not infuriating here, but boring to these critics.

Mel Miller (Walter Matthau) and Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal) are equally valuable supporting actors in the film.  Marcia Jeffries is essential to the birth of the Lonesome Rhodes character, while Mel Miller is the paternalistic figure who puts the nail in his coffin.  With a standout monologue, Miller says, "Suppose I tell you exactly what is going to happen to you. You're gonna be back in television.  Only it won't be quite the same as it was before."  Like many monologues, it earns its right to be preachy after a character like Lonesome has violated everyone.

As much as Miller's lines make for closure, Marcia Jeffries embodies sheer optimism at the beginning when she records her "A Face in the Crowd," radio program in the city jail.  She furthermore gives "Lonesome" his name, and by extension, gives birth to his persona.  Essentially, Jeffries and Miller are archetypal parents of an unruly adolescent son.

The film has a relevance today that can be seen in other movies such as Network and Broadcast News, but it also stands apart.  A Face in the Crowd, unlike the other two, reveals the false confidence that plagues television.  Because Network and Broadcast News admit the world of television is complex, they miss out on how someone like Rush Limbaugh can survive in this day and age.  Kazan does not miss the obvious sham.

IMDb rates this film 8.1 stars out of 10

Film 101 rates this film 5 stars out of 5 (not red stars)

Other Elia Kazan masterpieces include A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, and East of Eden.  

Rififi (1955)

"The cinema competes not only with the tavern but also with the church.  And this rivalry may become fatal for the church if we make up for the separation of the church from the socialist state by the fusion of the socialist state and the cinema."  -Leon Trotsky, from "Vodka, the Church, and the Cinema"

Trotsky's comment is indicative of the Soviet struggle for a common ground, a place where people can meet, and forge a new solidarity.  The sense of exclusion is geopolitical, not personal.  It means the arguments will no longer be made from a preexisting faction's vantage point.  On with the new.  As for the old vantage points, the line is drawn.

Later in the United States, such a battle took place during the McCarthy era when Hollywood was under attack.  Perhaps cinema being embraced by Trotsky was enough to make the film industry deeply suspicious to members of HUAC.  Perhaps the film industry was just another red herring for the right wing after prohibition failed.  Enter Jules Dassin, a Hollywood director who made it on to the blacklist.

Four years out of work, he moved to France to make a film with a low budget and virtually unknown actors.  Up against the strain of unemployment, Dassin reluctantly embraced the truism that some work is better than none, and despite his distaste for the Auguste Le Breton novel, created the noir masterpiece Rififi.  Highlighting the greatness of the film's direction in contrast to the written work scored a point with auteur theorists, but the point remains a distraction to the greater social point scored by Dassin:  the cinema was for the people, not McCarthy.  (Trotsky's line has emerged.)

Rififi happens in three parts.  The first is largely introductory, the second is the heist, and the third is the kidnapping.  Criticism has focused on the latter two for the most part.  The suspense of the heist is regarded for cinematic excellence, while Tony le Stephanois' (Jean Servais) self-sacrificing rescue of his kidnapped godson is taken as a triumph of the human spirit.  Both viewings are reactionary and worse still, mundane for merely meeting the critic's studied expectations.

Today's viewership enjoys film without the critic's nostalgic framework.  The demands of today are that of wanting truth in film.  The peculiar penchant for wonder when someone remarks, "And it's true!" (as if it makes a better story qua story) illustrates the longing for truth from cinema.  And though Rififi is not a true story, Dassin's is.  The viewer wants a film to connect to the real, and in a roundabout way, Rififi does.

The scene where Viviane (Magali Noel) sings about "Rififi" at L' Age d' Or, is worth examination. In the club, a shadow figure represents a character with "lotsa philosophy" and lives for"rififi," which we are told means, "rough n' tumble," both in terms of his street persona and bedroom manners.  The word "rififi," we are also told, is not something the average listener to the song would know.  Meanwhile, Cesar le Milanais (played by Dassin himself) is in the front row fawning over the singer though he cannot even speak the language she sings in.  The hint is toward a world outside of what we see on the screen, a world with struggle.  Dassin is portraying such a longing.

If McCarthy was paranoid over messages in film, Samuel Goldwyn disowned the accusation with, "If you want to send a message, use Western Union." In such a predicament, Rififi is  a circumlocutory film.  Sure, there are both cinematic and humanist triumphs up front, but also a struggle in the background, with a real life Dassin.  The film projects a story complete with characters and the viewer's sympathy towards them, but there is also something distinctly more involved about today's viewership.  There is decidedly less pressure to agree with those who believe that allies must be few in number. There is also the added advantage of knowing that if a truth is not directly there, it is at least casually loitering about the streets of Paris in a shadow figure, the shape of real struggle: it is quite possibly a displaced Dassin himself, forging a Trotsky like common ground fit for a later generation.

Other films by Dassin include The Naked City, Night and the City, Never on Sunday, and Up Tight.

IMDb rates this film 8.2 out of 10
Film 101 rates this film 5 stars out of five (not red stars)
Roger Ebert includes the film in his list of Great Movies

The General (1927)

With all of the buzz around this year's The Artist, perhaps there is renewed interest in silent era film; that is, films that by virtue of being films, were silent.  Of course, even this definition of "silent era" is problematic:  1927 was not only the year of Buster Keaton's The General, but also The Jazz Singer, which was the first "talkie."  

New interest in silent film is a good thing, but the Academy Award imprimatur feels hypocritical.  Though the Oscars started in 1929, silent films were still being made.  Keaton only received an honorary award from the Academy, long after his best and most enduring works.  Likewise, Chaplin only took an honorary award and award for musical score by the time he died.  Maybe it is because the Academy began in an era of talking pictures, silent films felt outdated, and not yet classic.  But a silent film these days can satisfy the Academy's Olympian-like wavering between novelty and nostalgia; a process that tries to pass itself off as being "contemporary."  Thus the award to a silent film this year feels like a rewriting of Academy history; as if to say, we have always appreciated silent film.

What is worth considering about silent film both today and in a bygone era, is how the films are not bound to any particular language.  There are stylistic differences from one country to the next and between one director and the next, but in a way that does not happen today.  Language is hardly a barrier for silent films.  Silent film is also a good reminder of how often language is taken for granted, if not wasted in contemporary film:  e.g."Go ahead, make my day."  Just think how these lines detract from other artistic elements (how any art improves within limitations).  The best scenes with Clint Eastwood can be captured in his complicated glare, not the one liners that diffuse his presence.

In the context of watching a silent film in 2012 where the danger of appreciating it can readily degrade into mere novelty, trendiness, or nostalgia, The General is still worth noting.  The film's formula is simple:  a man with two loves, his train and a woman, and he wants both.  He gets both and more by the end, but what makes the film compelling is how every obstacle is met with what feels like an unstoppable force.  The majority of the movie pushes forward quite literally, whether by foot, bicycle, horse, or train.  (It is additionally worth noting that Keaton is doing all of his own stunts, some of which are really dangerous.)

But why watch such a film in 2012, beside being a reminder of how much is taken for granted in film dialogue, and beside the film's seemingly "universal" and enduring qualities (not exactly universal since there are easily identifiable Americanisms)?  The General is a meditation on living life forward.  It is as if Keaton lives his character, a character who persists through the hang-ups, but is honest enough to acknowledge the role of luck in the end (and not masking the success of his outcome with "God helps those who help themselves"-a subtle way of saying God awards industriousness).  The defaults in cinema are often wish-fulfillment or fate alone.  Even in some of the better films, the choice between will and luck degrades into a tie breaker in double overtime, not a perfect both.  Seldom does a film take desire and luck as equals and make it work.  The distinction is that we do not see greatness and humility enough, or in one word, what can only be termed grace.

IMDb rates this film 8.4 out of 10
Film 101 rates this film 5 stars out of 5 (not red stars)
Roger Ebert includes it in his Great Films list

Pixote (1981)

"Here lies the tragic originality of Cinema Novo for the world cinema:  our originality is our hunger, and our greatest woe is that, because it is felt, this hunger is not understood."

-Glauber Rocha from "Aesthetic of Hunger" (1965)

Pixote is directed by Hector Babenco.  Babenco is not a Cinema Novo director strictly speaking, but with Pixote, he continues the work of Glauber Rocha and Nelson Pereira dos Santos into the naive bliss of the Reagan years.  Thus, the echoes of Rocha's above statement sound prophetically true:  this hunger will be tragically misunderstood.

The film begins with a documentary introduction of Babenco showing us a Brazilian shanty town, the place where the stars of his film actually live (not merely a setting).  Pixote (Fernando Ramos da Silva), for example, lives with his mother and nine siblings.  In the introduction, Babenco furthermore tells us that of Brazil's 120 million population, 50 percent are under the age of twenty-one, and the film that follows will focus on the chaos that these children live in:  as minors, they are not prosecuted for crimes, at most getting a few months in a detention center.  As a result, these children sometimes end up being taken advantage of by adults who use them to commit criminal acts.

The rest of the film follows Pixote, the main character, from a reformatory to his life of getting by on the streets.  Pixote faces horror after horror in both the reformatory and outside world with an almost surreal, unaffected countenance.  Perhaps the most telling scene is a conversation between Pixote and Lilica (Jorge Juliao) who is arguably the most memorable character; a transvestite and the oldest of the children.  Lilica (not in drag for the scene) asks Pixote, "What can a queer expect from life?"  Pixote answers, "Nothing, Lilica."  Lilica understands the import of their circumstances unlike the others, if only because he is nearing eighteen.  Pixote, on the other hand, does not step back to evaluate his hunger, but lives with it.

Seldom does a film confront us with such stark reality.  The film itself ends with Pixote walking down the railroad tracks, but the cinematic closure does not stop at the hunger that Rocha speaks  of as requiring understanding.  The situation is bigger. Fernando Ramos da Silva who played Pixote, returned to a life of crime and was killed in a police shootout in 1987.  Babenco went on to make critically acclaimed Hollywood films such as Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ironweed before returning to Brazil to make his more recent films.  These are also the facts of Babenco's film and the world he captured in it.

IMDb rates this film 7.9 out of 10

Film 101 rates this film 5 stars out of 5 (not red stars)

Roger Ebert includes this film in his selection of Great Films

A helpful introduction to third cinema can be found at thirdcinema.blueskylimit.com