The Lady from Shanghai (1948)

***
Country: US
Director: Orson Welles

What a dilemma The Lady from Shanghai provokes. Orson Welles is in my directors' pantheon, so I want to like the movie more than I do. Individual parts of it contain moments of great brilliance, originality, and imagination—all the things I admire in Welles. But as a whole the film lacks coherence. The result is that it seems better in retrospect than it does during the actual watching of it. I suppose that's because memory can be selective, focusing on the best things in the movie, whereas while watching it I'm constantly aware of its flaws.

The paradox is that this failure to cohere both is and isn't Welles's fault. His original cut was taken out of his hands, tinkered with for nearly two years by Columbia, and reduced by about an hour before being released. Yet if Welles had shown more artistic self-control and greater ability to follow through on the project—problems that seemed to plague his entire career as a director—maybe the studio powers wouldn't have felt compelled to take the movie away from him and reshape it. Some of Welles's movies managed to withstand such tampering. The Magnificent Ambersons was revised by people who were sympathetic to the elegiac mood he had aimed for and able to preserve that mood more or less intact. Touch of Evil was a brilliant movie in its original release version and improved even further in the 1998 version after being re-edited according to Welles's notes. The Lady from Shanghai was not so fortunate as those two films, and the greatness that comes through so clearly in its best parts must forever remain a potentiality, a frustrating tease to admirers of Welles like me.

The plot of the movie is in the classic film noir mold of the late 1940s. A loner, Michael O'Hara (Welles), an Irish seaman who fought in the Spanish Civil War against the fascists, meets a beautiful, mysterious woman by chance one night in New York. The woman, Elsa Bannister (a rather enervated Rita Hayworth, her normal ardor damped down by her cropped, icy blonde hair), is trapped in an unhappy marriage to an older man (Everett Sloane, who's terrific—alternately sinister and funny). Her husband, a rich, brilliant criminal defense lawyer, has some kind of hold over her and has apparently blackmailed her into marriage. She also believes she's in danger and seeks O'Hara's protection while at the same time obviously coming on to him.

At first he resists her advances then finds himself lured into signing on as a seaman on the yacht (tellingly named the Circe) she and her husband are sailing from New York to San Francisco. Soon he is not only her protector but her lover. To get the money to run away with her, he agrees to a very unlikely scheme proposed by the husband's business partner (Glenn Anders, who with his flamboyant performance manages to steal every scene he's in) that involves O'Hara's helping him fake his suicide. Of course, nothing in the situation is what it seems: the true purpose of the shady scheme is entirely different from what O'Hara has been told, Elsa is just as likely a manipulative opportunist as a helpless victim, and O'Hara is soon set up as a fall guy and framed for murder.

The plot is really just a framework for a series of elaborately photographed and edited set pieces. It's questionable whether the rather conventional plot merits such stylistic exuberance, but I for one am willing to accept this as a way to add visual appeal and the veneer of substance to an intriguing but superficial melodrama. The opening sequence in Central Park and the streets of New York, the beach party in Mexico so reminiscent of the picnic in Citizen Kane, the aquarium scenes, the Chinese opera in Chinatown in San Francisco, the finale at the amusement park Fun House culminating in the famous shoot-out in the Hall of Mirrors—these are all justly renowned and leave an indelible impression.

And yet as I watched, I found myself wanting more. While these set pieces can be enjoyed as eye-catching ends in themselves, I kept craving greater narrative coherence. It's clear that the extensive re-editing and reduction of the film's length weakened it. It has a jumpy, decidedly unfluid feel to it, lurching ungracefully from one segment to the next. This air of fragmentation does nothing for the opaque plot. In its final form, the movie is the Last Year at Marienbad of film noir—arty eye candy with a nearly impenetrable plot. In Marienbad that's just fine because it's the whole point of the film. But The Lady from Shanghai is a conventional mystery, the kind of story that doesn't completely satisfy unless it can untangle its snarled plot and offer a lucid explanation of mystifying events. The surviving version of the movie just doesn't adequately do that.

The astounding Hall of Mirrors finale was perhaps intended as an allusion to the convolutions of the film's plot, and the final shattering of the mirrors to signify the return to order from a state of deception and illusion. But the memory of this sequence most viewers retain is of multiple reflections fragmenting into yet more reflections, not the simple reality of the final images. That is in a way appropriate, for even though its many exhilarating moments give tantalizing glimpses of what might have been had Welles been able to see the film through to completion, in the end The Lady from Shanghai delivers not clarity, but confusion—beautiful confusion, but confusion nevertheless.

Jennifer Lopez Pictures

Gorgeous actress Jennifer Lopez pictures

Charulata (1964)

****
Country: India
Director: Satyajit Ray

In colonial Calcutta in 1879 a young married woman named Charulata lives the sheltered, pampered life of the idle rich. She spends her days in an opulent house—a traditional two-story dwelling built around an open courtyard but furnished in the style of Victorian Britain—playing cards, doing embroidery, and reading romantic novels, her needs seen to by servants. Her husband, Bhupati, who is several years older than Charu, is completely occupied with publishing his political newspaper. Charu's boredom and loneliness and the distance between her and her husband are established in the first sequence of the film as she listens attentively to the street noises outside for signs that he is returning home. Each time she hears someone passing, she runs to the window, flicks open the shutters, and peers at the passerby through a pair of opera glasses. Finally Bhupati arrives home—and goes directly to his study with a book in his hand while Charu looks on in silence from down the corridor. Later that evening he tells her that a young cousin who has recently graduated from university, a relative so close that Bhupati calls him "Brother," is coming to stay and asks her, "You feel lonely, don't you, Charu?" "I've got used to it," she answers.

The lonely Charu finds the playful, high-spirited cousin, 23-year old Amal, a poet and musician and student of literature, a fascinating antidote to her sober, unimaginative husband. Basking in the attention Amal shows her—discussing poetry, music, and literature with her, singing to her, sitting with her in the garden while he writes poetry, encouraging her to take up writing—she soon develops a romantic passion for him, which she believes he secretly returns. When he reveals that Bhupati is paying him to "educate" her, she is crushed. Then when his poetry is accepted for publication, she is devastated by the prospect that he might be lured away from the household by literary ambition and in frustration takes up his suggestion that she write about events from her life. So good is her writing that Amal begins to see her in a new light, finding himself attracted to her.

Adapted by Ray from a novel by Rabindranath Tagore, Charulata shows Ray's decidedly literary approach to cinema, with a carefully engineered plot, characters of great complexity, and clearly delineated themes. All three main characters are memorably conceived and interpreted, but this is really Charu's story, a sort of pre-Women's Lib feminist tale of an unfulfilled young woman's initiation into consciousness. By the end of the film, Charu has experienced liberation of her emotions and her creative impulse and has reached a new understanding with her husband, each now more aware, and respectful, of the other's needs. Encircling this story is Ray's perennial fascination with the dialectic of opposing forces in life—politics and art, intellect and emotions, the outside world and the inner lives of individuals. At one point Amal turns philosophical: "Birth and death. Day and night. Joy and sadness. Unification and separation." Each of these things exists, he tells Charu, because of its opposite. That idea seems to sum up Ray's humanistic view of the way the oppositions in life, and the oppositions of human personalities, play against each other but in the end inevitably reach a state of equilibrium, each complementing and sustaining its opposite.

In Charulata Ray takes his style further into experimentation than one might expect from his earlier work. At one point, Charu comes into the room to find Amal sitting at the piano playing and singing a tender love song that begins, "I know you, I know you, O foreigner." Within a few moments the scene has become a dreamy musical interlude, the piano replaced with an offscreen orchestra, and Amal singing directly to Charu, ending the song with a spontaneous alteration of the opening line of the lyric: "I know you, I know you, O sister-in-law." Charu reacts to Amal's performance with the rapture of a woman being serenaded by her beloved. In this stylized sequence, a directorial flight of fancy in an otherwise realistic film, Ray seems to enter into Charu's mind, showing an embellished version of reality colored by her romantic longings.

Ray also experiments with photography and editing. The camera seems to move and track a great deal. Several times Ray discreetly zooms toward or away from an object. When Charu is sitting in a swing in the garden, the camera swings back and forth with her. He also uses the subjective camera at a couple of conspicuous points, one time when the characters are looking through a kaleidoscope and again during that love song when Amal is stepping towards Charu in rhythm to the song and we briefly see her from his point of view, the camera jarring at each step. And when Charu finally sits down to write her autobiographical story, superimposed over her face is a brief montage of scenes from her childhood, scenes that suggest a more rural and less privileged background than that of her husband.

Twenty years later Ray returned to the same themes in The Home and the World (1984), a movie with many similarities to Charulata and also adapted from a novel by Tagore. (Soumitra Chatterjee, who plays Amal in Charulata, would take the role of the neglectful older husband in the later film.) As much as I like The Home and the World, I have to admit that Charulata strikes me as a more passionate, adventurous, and emotionally involving film, one of the best I've ever seen by Ray, very close in quality and appeal to Pather Panchali, one of my favorite movies of all time. (One caveat: although the version I got from Netflix, released by Bollywood Films Ltd., has an adequate film transfer, there are many annoying shortcomings in the subtitles—the most amusing of which is calling the Liberal Party the Libel Party—that you have to be prepared to bear with.)

---

For more about the life and films of Satyajit Ray, see the website Satyajit Ray World.

Eva Mendes in Famous Actors and Actresses

Eva Mendes

Eva Mendes

Actress Mendes

Famous Actress Eva Mendes

Bigger Than Life (1956)

***^½
Country: US
Director: Nicholas Ray

As Bigger Than Life opens, we see the long horizontal façade of a school building stretched across the huge CinemaScope screen. A bell rings, and elementary school students come pouring through the doorway, walk toward the camera, and separate to the left and right as they reach it. Among the last children to leave are three sets of twins—two boys, two girls, and finally a boy and girl—who walk toward the camera without separating. What an appropriate beginning for a movie that is essentially Nicholas Ray's 1950s suburban version of Robert Louis Stevens's classic doppelgänger tale Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, beautifully restored and newly released by Criterion.

The main character is Ed Avery (James Mason), a teacher at the school. With a modern two-story house, attractive wife (Barbara Rush), and son about the same age as his students, he seems to be living the kind of middle-class life found in television sitcoms of the time. But all is not well with the Avery family. Ed is having difficulty making ends meet on his teacher's salary and must supplement his income by working on the sly three afternoons a week as a dispatcher for a local taxi company. More distressingly, he is suffering some kind of major health problem, from time to time clutching his stomach in severe pain, having headaches and dizzy spells, and occasionally even blacking out. When his wife finally persuades him to see a doctor, Ed is diagnosed with Periarteritis nodosa, chronic inflammation of the arteries, a severe condition that if untreated will kill him within a year. Fortunately, a newly released "wonder drug," the steroid cortisone, deals successfully with his symptoms and offers him a hopeful prognosis.

What Ed doesn't realize is that the drug can have severe psychological side effects. He soon begins acting erratically, swinging between euphoria and moodiness. Within weeks he has become a full-blown madman—behaving impulsively, erupting into sudden rages, and exhibiting symptoms of extreme megalomania and paranoia. Subjecting his students and family to tyrannical whims and edicts, he institutes a fanatical reign of terror in his classroom and at home. He pompously tells members of the P.T.A. that their children are spoiled and backward, with the mental development of gorillas. He forces his son to endure a merciless regimen of physical and mental training. He finally announces to his wife that she is his intellectual inferior, that he has "outgrown" her, and that he is leaving her to embark on a lifelong project to write a book that will revolutionize education. The wonder drug has transformed the affable school teacher and loving husband and father into a human monster.

James Mason confronts his monstrous alter ego in the bathroom mirror

Two things lift Bigger Than Life above its occasionally trite plot and its pat conclusion. One is the amazing performance by James Mason, who also produced the film, as Ed Avery, a performance that alone makes the movie well worth seeing. Ed's startling change from a reserved, rather meek man dedicated to his profession and his family into a pill-popping psychotic wracked by delusions of grandeur is unnervingly convincing. As his life spins more and more out of control, he alternates between obliviousness to the behavioral changes taking place in him and, in moments of lucidity, horrified awareness of his rampant mental deterioration. It is a chilling, expertly calibrated performance, one of Mason's very finest and almost certainly the most ambitious of his notable career.

Also impressive is the vision of this suburban horror story created by director Nicholas Ray. Ray studied architecture before turning to a career in films, and strongly evocative interiors are often an important part of his movies. In Bigger Than Life the contrast between the innocuous, rather bland middle-class interior of Ed's house, where much of the film takes place, and his extravagant behavior is a striking one. Yet there are subtle indications of Ed's already existing subconscious dissatisfaction with his conventional life. The distorted shape of the CinemaScope screen, especially noticeable in these interior segments, suggests a personality that already senses the need to expand to fill the empty spaces in its life. The walls of the house, covered in framed maps and travel posters of places like Rome, Paris, and Florence, hint at a desire by Ed to leave behind the ordinariness of his present life for something more fulfilling. The images of doors and doorways that fill the movie echo this same sense of entrapment in present circumstances and the repressed longing to break free. There are literally countless shots of people opening or closing doors, coming through doorways, standing in open doorways or in front of closed doors, or simply photographed from a distance through doorways of all sizes and types. Ray uses all these things to intimate that the changes in Ed's personality are not so much metamorphosis as the unleashing of unconscious urges previously held in check.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the movie is that it is based on an actual case history recounted in the New Yorker by Berton Roueché (1910-1994), a journalist who worked nearly fifty years for the magazine, writing for its "Annals of Medicine" section. The true medical mysteries that form the basis of his articles are fascinating stories of people with mystifying symptoms—many of whom are dismissed as hypochondriacs or told that their problems are psychological and referred to psychiatrists—whose illness is finally diagnosed through the perseverance of an individual doctor or researcher. The several collections of these articles Roueché published are highly recommended, as compellingly readable as the best mystery fiction.

Knife in the Water (1962)

****
Country: Poland
Director: Roman Polanski

In 1961 Roman Polanski made the last of his nine short films, a 10-minute long silent called Mammals. In the film two men in a snowy wilderness compete to see who will ride on, and who will pull, the sled carrying their belongings. Mammals—a slyly ambiguous black comedy that can be interpreted alternatively as a Marxist satire on capitalist exploitation of workers or as an observation that the exploitative impulse is an innate human characteristic which can never be completely subdued—is reduced to its essential elements: two men, one sled, and vast expanses of snow. Knife in the Water, Polanksi's first full-length feature made the next year, is again reduced to essentials: two men and a woman, one sailboat, and vast expanses of water. Again the movie is about competitive conflict between its characters.

The film begins with a thirtyish man and woman driving down a country road bickering. So involved in their argument are the couple that they nearly run over a young hitchhiker who in desperation has resorted to standing in the middle of the road to get someone to stop. The driver's rage at the hitchhiker's brazenness soon turns to apparent friendliness when he invites the hitchhiker to accompany him and his wife on an overnight excursion on a nearby lake in their sailboat. No sooner are they on the boat than Andrzej, the older man, begins ordering the boy around, telling him, "If two men are on board, one's the skipper." "Or the drill sergeant," retorts the boy, who quickly catches on that Andrzej is playing mind games with him but decides to go along for the ride anyway. What follows is an hour and a half of sometimes civil, sometimes hostile antagonism between the two as each tries to outwit and dominate the other—an extended male pissing contest on a sailboat.

There are many areas of conflict between the two. Andrzej is a writer who has enjoyed some material success, as his ownership of a car and boat in 1962 communist Poland attests. The younger man is an impoverished student who criticizes the older man's preoccupation with success and acquisition. The writer's life is one of middle-aged regimentation; he has planned exactly one day and night on the lake before returning to town. The student's life is one of youthful spontaneity; he has simply taken off for the weekend on an unplanned adventure. Most contentious of all is the presence of the wife, Krystyna. Has her husband invited the student to come sailing with them in an exhibitionistic desire for an audience to their rather theatrical bickering, à la Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Has Krystyna gone along with his impulsive gesture because she sees the young man's obvious sexual interest in her as a possible weapon to use against her husband?

Polanski keeps the psychodrama pumping steadily throughout the entire movie, the compact plot constantly taking unexpected turns and frequently veering into dark humor. But equally fascinating is the film's visual virtuosity. From the moment it opens—with the couple photographed through the windshield of the car, the passing trees reflected in the windshield and superimposed on them as they argue—we are aware that this is going to be a film whose images alone will hold our attention. I can't say with certainty that this is the first time this kind of shot was ever used, although it is the earliest example I can think of, but I do know that I've seen it duplicated in countless later movies and even television programs. With much of the first half of the film taking place on the deck of the sailboat, and much of the second half in the even more confined setting below deck, Polanski continually devises imaginative ways to show the spatially limited action, often posing his actors in tableau-like compositions but keeping the film moving with rapid cutting between shots. The film is also filled with less functional compositions of breathtaking abstract beauty. In Knife in the Water Polanski achieves the kind of artful integration of narrative and image that only the most masterful filmmakers are capable of.

One of the film's most striking compositions—a secular icon?

Few film directors have begun their careers as auspiciously as the 29-year old Polanski with Knife in the Water, creating a masterpiece their first time out—Orson Welles, John Huston, Satyajit Ray, and François Truffaut immediately come to mind. Even given Polanski's impressive later career, Knife in the Water is still one of his best movies and one of the key European art films of the 1960s. (The movie received an Oscar nomination as best foreign language film of 1963 but lost to Fellini's 8½.) Visually fascinating and emotionally lacerating, it is the product of a brilliant young filmmaker on the verge of an illustrious career.

Three Comrades (1938)

***^½
Country: US
Director: Frank Borzage

Andrew Sarris has called the director Frank Borzage "an uncompromising romanticist . . . [with] a genuine concern with the wondrous inner life of lovers in the midst of adversity," a description of Borzage's work well illustrated by Three Comrades. Based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front), the movie opens on Armistice Day in 1918. Three war buddies from the German military—Erich (Robert Taylor), Otto (Franchot Tone), and Gottfried (Robert Young)—are celebrating the end of World War I in a tavern and making plans for the future. When a German officer proposes a toast in honor of all those who have died in the war—German, British, French, American, and Italian alike—the three young men are clearly in accord with his feelings. Meanwhile, at a nearby table three stiff-necked officers bristle at these sentiments of reconciliation with former enemies, foreshadowing future confrontations between nationalistic fascists and those who believe in tolerance and peace like the three young comrades.

Two years later the German economy has collapsed and the three young men, their lives permanently marked by their war experiences, are barely eking out a living from the garage and taxi service they run. When they drive to a rural tavern to celebrate Erich's birthday, they encounter a young woman named Patricia (Margaret Sullavan), a "fallen aristocrat" who has lost her money in the postwar financial crash. All three are enchanted by her, but it is Erich with whom she falls in love. Against this background of economic hardship and political unrest, the lovers struggle to maintain their relationship and the three comrades their close friendship. Complicating the situation even further, Patricia is seriously ill with tuberculosis and Gottfried has become involved with a pacifist political group that is the target of the nascent fascist movement. Still, the four are able to maintain a camaraderie that cannot be touched by the problems of the time. "Where you walk," Otto says to Patricia at one point, "we three walk beside you."

Franchot Tone, Robert Taylor, Margaret Sullavan, and Robert Young

Throughout the film Borzage deftly maintains a fine balance between the romantic and the realistic. Always in the background, and at times irrupting into the foreground, is the threat to love and friendship caused by economic difficulties and political discord. But the main emphasis of the film is the romance, and ultimately the marriage, between Patricia and Erich. Although events of the time are never neglected, it is plainly the personal element of the story that most interests Borzage—the emotional effects of outside events on these four people and the way they are unable to avoid the complications to their lives caused by those events. The realistic underpinnings of this deeply romantic film give it a profoundly moving, richly emotional quality that a strictly sentimental love story could never attain.

Borzage's sensitive direction, the elegant cinematography of Joseph Ruttenberg (The Philadelphia Story, Gaslight, Gigi), and the unobtrusively fluid editing all contribute to the strength of the movie. But this is above all else a movie about the emotional lives of its characters, the kind of film dependent on actors to put the story across. Borzage uses Taylor's pretty-boy blandness to good effect, making obvious the appeal of his hopeful, boyish personality to the world-weary Patricia. Young, who has the smallest role, is perhaps a bit mild as the most political of the three comrades, an idealist whose war experiences have transformed him into a committed activist. I kept wondering if a more passionate actor like the young James Stewart might have made a stronger impression in the role. Tone, as the most intelligent of the three, has never been better—by turns relaxed and intense, and although clearly in love with Patricia himself, deferential to her stronger feelings for Erich. Together the three men form a sort of trine of the masculine personality: emotions, action, and intellect.

Regular readers of The Movie Projector will be aware of how much I admire Margaret Sullavan and how strongly I feel that she deserves to be better known. (For more about her life and career, see my post on The Good Fairy.) In Three Comrades she gave probably the best performance of her relatively brief screen career, receiving an Oscar nomination and winning the New York Film Critics Circle award for best actress. (She lost the Oscar to Bette Davis for Jezebel.) Her marvelous Patricia, a woman of outward frailty and inner strength, is the glue that holds the movie together. Having lost her money and her health, she has resigned herself with stoical acceptance to a forlorn future. Yet she hasn't altogether lost her sense of humor—even if it has a touch of the gallows in it—or her capacity to accept and return love when she finds it. She is too much of a realist to nurture the false hope that her happiness with Erich will last; she is enough of a fatalist to know that forces outside their control make that unlikely. But she is completely willing to live for the present in the glow of their feelings for each other while she has the chance. When she recognizes that the time to let go of Erich has come, she does so with selflessness and grace. It is a performance of rare delicacy, nuance, and serenity.

One last thing I should mention is that Three Comrades is the only screenplay officially credited to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was not pleased with what MGM did with his script, though, and understandably so. In 1938 MGM still wanted to protect the distribution of its movies in Germany and actually submitted the script to the German ambassador to the US, who wanted certain changes made. All overt references to anything that might be construed as reflecting badly on contemporary Germany or the Nazi party were modified or removed. Even though in retrospect it's easy to see implicit criticism of Nazi Germany and the post-World War I attitudes which brought the Nazis to power, this criticism is so generic that there is no denying that the movie sidesteps crucial political issues. It wouldn't be until the powerful anti-Nazi film The Mortal Storm (again starring Sullavan) in 1940—with World War II begun in Europe, although the US was not yet involved—that Borzage was able to criticize the Nazis openly.