Bridge on the River Kwai (1957, 162 min, PG) **** - Directed by Sir David Lean, starring Alec Guinness, William Holden, Jack Hawkins, and Sessue Hayakawa. An undoubtedly flawed film, guilty of every criticism leveled against it. Yet there is little question of its status as a masterpiece, one of the greatest films ever made, and possibly the best film to come out of World War II. The closing line sums up all we see before it: “madness!” No one makes epics like David Lean (“Lawrence of Arabia”), a filmmaker whose effortlessness with vast vistas, enormous casts, competing storylines, and Olympian budgets is easy to take for granted. His peers include Kurosawa and Eisenstein, and in English he has no equal. Four decades later, Terence Malick drew on Lean’s jungle imagery with “The Thin Red Line.” Consider how Lean begins and ends “The River Kwai” with the same image of a condor in flight. Consider how Malick’s film is in many ways just an expansion of Lean’s vision of the wise and superior indifference of God’s world in the face of the futile and destructive enterprises of man’s world. Lean turns “The River Kwai” into a great deadpan farce on the “honor” of warfare. The “madness!” is embodied by the bridge of the title, built by British POWs in the service of the Japanese, and targeted for destruction by Allied commandos. It’s a sturdy wooden bridge, beautiful in its straight lines and functionality. How the British colonel (Guinness, in the role that won him his Oscar) comes to see the building of it as a matter of honor is heartbreaking in how much we can identify with it. Our sympathies are always in conflict; we admire and shake our heads not just at the same person but at the same action. The Japanese colonel (Hayakawa, in one of most underrated performances in all the movies) is cruel because he is weak and because his dreams have passed him by. The uncertainty with which he bargains, threatens, and finally, silently folds to Guinness’ will is incomparable. Holden is a little adrift in the first half as the cynical, solitary American in the British POW camp, but he finds his way in the second half as he joins the attack. He is invaluable as the voice of bitterness and personal loyalty over abstract notions of duty and patriotism. He finds a perfect foil in the leader of the commando attack (Hawkins), who is as quietly, stoically, and unknowingly mad as the movie itself. And we love that bridge and want it to last the way Guinness does. We want it to peaceably serve the locals as a reminder that something beautiful can grow from something ugly. But we also want it blown up. See “Bridge on the River Kwai” on the big screen, for the colors, the jungle, the stomach-churning paratrooper sequence, and the wacky justification for Holden not being trained with a parachute. Winner of 7 Oscars, including Picture, Director, Actor, and Adapted Screenplay, #13 on the AFI’s Top 100 American films.
Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982, B&W, PG) **1/2 – Directed by Carl Reiner, starring Steve Martin and Rachel Ward. It makes “The Man Who Wasn’t There”—a movie that was already pretty sophisticated—look even more sophisticated. There’s certainly an allure to making a noir/private eye spoof out of clips of old ‘30s and ‘40s B movies and a lot of the combined images—new black-and-white footage mixed with old—are quite lovely. We get a greatest hits compilation of everything beloved of the genres: private dicks, double crossing dames, gun-wielding crooks, Nazis, and a hero who keeps going despite being drugged, hit over the head, and shot over and over again in the same shoulder. But anything built out of parts so rambling and disconnected seems almost guaranteed not to amount to much. Still, the movie has some good “Airplane!”-style moments, like when Steve Martin’s detective narrates “I hadn’t seen a woman put together that well since the Case of the Murdered Girl with the Big Tits.”
For April 2005
Basic Instinct - Bridge on the River Kwai - Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid - Dial M for Murder - Moolaade - Shoot to Kill
Dial M for Murder (1954, 105 min, PG) **** - Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Ray Milland, Grace Kelly, Robert Cummings, and John Williams. A friend of mine thinks this is Hitchcock’s best film, and there certainly is a mechanical, Agatha Christie perfection to it. Based on a one-set stageplay, it’s all about matching latchkeys, planted evidence, blackmail notes, strangling, and scissors in the back. Of course murder looks like sex, violent death looks like an orgasm, and none of the kisses are this passionate. Taking place almost entirely in a single apartment, it could have been claustrophobic and stilted, but Hitchcock keeps his feet light and his camera in motion. Our sympathy passes from person-to-person, first the tall, debonair, and charmingly ruthless former tennis star (Milland) who wants his cheating wife (blonde ice princess Kelly) dead. (Hitchcock has a love-hate relationship with his villains, admiring their charm while dreading what he sees as upper-class entitlement gone too far.) Next is the luckless schlub and schoolchum (Anthony Dawson) Milland blackmails into the murder, then the veddy-British inspector (Williams) brought in when things go wrong. The only player for whom we don’t feel much of anything is the mystery writer (Cummings) who’s led the wife astray: he’s bland, B-movie handsome, and doesn’t spark much of anything. A “hero” wouldn’t keep us guessing the way this movie does, but the idea of the “other man” being so much less interesting than the husband does. Shot in 3D, although 3D was passé by the time “Dial M” actually hit theaters, so that most theatre goers saw it in 2D because, let’s face it, 3D is just a silly gimmick that “Dial M” doesn’t need.
Moolaade (2004, 124 min, NR) *** - Directe & written by Ousmane Sembene, starring Fatoumata Coulibaly and Maimouna Hélčne Diarra Some movies make you feel like a tourist, while some movies, like “Moolaade,” drop you in the water to fend for yourself. The second kind is better. I’m reminded of 2002’s “The Fast Runner,” based on an Eskimo legend, which gives us only hints and clues as to what’s going on, and gains mysterious power from it. For the most part in “Moolaade,” we are given no guide and have nothing explained to us as we enter a village in modern day Muslim Africa. We watch water jugs being carried, eggs being gathered, and baby livestock scurrying about the courtyard belonging to the three wives of a local farmer. Then, one day, four little girls scheduled to be circumcised seek protection, or Moolaade, from the second of the three wives. Resourceful, fierce, and cunning, she spends days feuding with the male and female religious leaders of the village. The movie obviously has an agendum about ending genital mutilation and empowering women (really, the older I get, the more I like movies with agenda and the more I’m bored by movies that think it’s so great to not mean anything or “not be political”). Empowerment and whole genitals are good causes both, which makes me feel like such an ogre when I have to criticize “Moolaade’s” simplistic feminism: the women are human, the men are arrogant, judgmental, and ritualistic brutes, and the jingoism supporting this view is literally shouted at several instances in the film. Still, it’s nice to even up the score a little bit after centuries of only the men being human while the women are eyecandy. Coulibaly is downright fiery as the second wife, while Diarra is equally engaging as the first wife, whose morality is gradually awakened; the movie keeps a close eye on their dynamics and interactions. While the boys and the girls are separated into bad and good, the two most interesting characters are, not surprisingly, the most conflicted: the son of the local tyrant has just returned from being schooled in France, still in love with his home but now not sure what to make of some of its customs. Then there’s the soldier-turned-peddler, ripping off the locals, carrying secrets, but harboring a deep and instinctive morality. The movie’s most intriguing scene finds them obliquely discussing moral relativism in French. Director Sembene keeps “Moolaade” straightforward and clean, and is, of course, mindful of little details.
Shoot to Kill (1988, 109 min, R) **1/2 – Directed by Roger Spottiswoode, starring Sidney Poitier, Tom Berenger, and Kirstie Alley. An FBI agent (Poitier) and a mountain man (Berenger) join forces to chase a killer through a national park on the America-Canada border. Did I mention one’s black, the other’s white, and they don’t get along well at first? Throw in the mountain man’s kidnapped girlfriend (Alley) and you’ve got a movie. Nothing special, but “Shoot to Kill” gets the job done if it’s what you’re in the mood for, especially the scene where we discover which of Alley’s backpacking tour is the murderer.
Reviews in a Hurry for March 2005.
Index of All Reviews.