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CineScene's
Hidden Treasures of Film  |
UNFORGOTTEN
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Out of the Past
(Jacques Tourneur, 1947). |
The President's Analyst |
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Okay, so Hal Hartley's filmmaking career never really took off - but
here is a love story that succeeds magnificently. It's hard to make
romantic comedy work while remaining unique, but Trust is one
of those rare examples where it all comes together. |
Destiny
(Fritz Lang, 1921). One
of the earlier and greater works of the German Expressionist silent cinema,
this film sets the pattern for the fatalism of Fritz Lang's long, distinguished
career. The German title (Der Mude Tod) literally means "Weary
Death." When Death comes to take away a young woman's lover, she pleads
that he be given one more chance. Jaded by his eternal duty, Death agrees
to give her three chances, in three different ages and locations, to save
her lover's life. If less epic in scope than Lang's later German films,
it is distinguished by remarkable special effects and a breathtaking final
image.-- Don Larsson |
The Romantic Englishwoman
(Joseph Losey, 1975).
Michael Caine plays a writer who is trying to write a novel called The
Romantic Englishwoman, about a novelist's wife who goes off and has
an affair because she's discontent. He tells a friend that "he's thinking
of turning it into a thriller." His wife (Glenda Jackson) is in fact having
an affair; at the forty-five minute mark, the film turns into a thriller,
sort of. Literate, deliberately pretentious, beautifully shot. It's a
crock, and I love it. The screenplay is by Tom Stoppard. Best scene: Caine
screaming at Kate Nelligan: "You are the most boring woman in the world!"-- Les Phillips |
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Bachelor Mother The Unknown (Tod
Browning, 1927). |
The Trouble With Harry
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HIDDEN TREASURES |
 Other voices, other films |
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go to
the next part of 
|
 TREASURES COMMENTS |
©2002 CineScene
or, THERE'S THIS 
A
tough ex-private eye (Robert Mitchum) tries to start over and escape
his past mistakes, but someone finds out where's he hiding, and in the
flashback that takes up most of the rest of the movie, he tells about
his fateful encounter with a beautiful, dangerous girl (Jane Greer)
and her gangster boyfriend (Kirk Douglas). With its brilliantly allusive
dialogue and dark visual sheen, this is one of the smartest, saddest,
and most poetic film noirs - impeccable style combined with postwar
American dread. The characters are finely drawn, yet mysterious - their
lives seem to extend beyond the film into places unknown. Tourneur's
technique was never more elaborate - the pace, atmosphere, camera placement
and movement, along with the top-notch acting, pulls you in and never
lets go. Yet the film was considered a B-picture at the time, was dismissed
by most critics, and was generally ignored until its rediscovery by
noir aficionados years later. 
"You think it's fun bein' the silent bleedin' partner in North
America?" 
The funniest political paranoia movie of them all - conspiracies played
with wry wit. Includes a great haystack scene in which agents from branches
of several governments attempt to assassinate the unsuspecting Executive
psychiatrist in the arms of his girl. 
Humans have a place in the natural world. Our attempts at civilizing ourselves
distance us from the knowledge of that place. Such is the theme of this
rigorous, visually stunning film. A teen girl and her younger brother
are abandoned in the outback. They only survive after encountering an
aboriginal youth on his "walkabout." The girl's young brother takes
to natural life quickly, not having been yet inculcated into civilized
habits, assumptions, and thought processes, making the point that the
longer we are surrounded by the antiseptic, the harder it is for us to
relate to nature. Roeg shot this film himself, and masterfully fills the
frame with natural images that take the viewer far away from the civilized
perspective. The return to civilization at the film's end feels nearly
poisonous. The final scene, as the now-grown woman reflects on the "paradise
lost" she left behind, is hauntingly beautiful and bittersweet. 
Trust (Hal Hartley,
1990)
A stranded German housewife (Marianne Sagebrecht) teams up with a tough
black woman (CCH Pounder) to turn a desert diner into an oasis, in this
loving tribute to art in all of its manifestations. With brilliant crispy
colors and oddball visual technique, Adlon portrays the art of making
friends, forming bonds, and seeing things from perspectives you might
not have thought of before. A very funny film with wonderful performances,
including a droll turn by Jack Palance as a desert rat cum artiste,
this film is mainly the story of two women who discover, after a lot
of trepidation, that developing trust is the most rewarding art of all.
It's a visual feast that treats its audience to something new on every
viewing. And it has lederhosen - what more do you want?
In
the desert, these characters feast on the delicacy of friendship and
love. Remarkable. 
An entomologist (Eiji Okada), examining beetles in the desert, misses
his bus back to the city and is given lodging with a woman (Kiyoko Kishida)
who lives alone in a house at the bottom of a huge sandpit, accessible
only by ladder. The next morning he discovers that the ladder has been
removed and he is the woman's prisoner. To keep from being buried, they
must shovel sand each night. At first he tries to escape, but the walls
of sand only crumble beneath him. As the man realizes the extent of
his enslavement, the relationship between the two becomes both bitterly
antagonistic and erotically dependent. Resigned to displacing sand that
will only be redeposited the following morning, the man struggles to
find some meaning in his torturous existence. Aided by Toru Takemitsu's
marvelous score and the stunning cinematography of Hiroshi Segawa, the
film lets us see the sand as both oppressor and liberator. The ending
ponders the true meaning of freedom.
Cary Grant plays Dr. Praetorius, a nontraditional physician who believes
in the power of the mind to help cure illness. When a young colleague
(Jeanne Crain) tries to kill herself, he discovers that she's pregnant
and marries her. While defending himself from charges that he is unfit
to teach at the medical school, he must also persuade his wife that he
really loves her and didn't just marry her out of pity. This is one of
my favorite Cary Grant roles. When Dr. Praetorius finally explains his
relationship with his best friend (Finlay Currie) who has served time
in jail for murder, I am swept away by Grant’s convincing delivery, his
tenderness, affection and compassion. This film was controversial for
its time, dealing as it does with unwed pregnancy, attempted suicide,
injustice of the legal system, the death penalty, and more. But it’s also
warm, funny, romantic, and refreshingly adult.
Widely
regarded as the worst film director ever, Ed Wood is portrayed here
in a fond and sympathetic manner. The failed artist, Burton seems to
be saying, is not just a hack, but a naive person with a vision. Beautifully
shot in black-and-white by Stefan Czapsky, with maginificently realized
performances by Johnny Depp, in the title role, and Martin Landau as
an over-the-hill junkie Bela Lugosi. 
A young French woman (Julie Delpy) and an American (Ethan Hawke) meet
by chance, are attracted to one another, and spend just one day in Vienna
together before parting ways. The two leads have great chemistry, ad-libbing
their way through some monologues believably, and the film expresses
a bittersweet mood through their actions: hugs that threaten to suffocate,
wanting to look back but not giving in, excruciating long walks through
the transit-terminal of choice. Well, a straight description of this
film is unlikely to attract the skeptical. Suffice to say it's one of
the best, most believable, and most unconventional screen romances.
A simple, realistic love story that is unobstructed by stupid
clichés or Hollywood formulas. -- Nikoo Yahyazadeh
If you think horror movies are all about cheap effects, think again.
This is a film that knows how to let the tension build itself into a
good sustained scare. Written by Anthony Shaffer, the story concerns
an investigation by a devoutly religious detective (Edward Woodward)
into the disappearance of a girl that leads him to a strange, apparently
pagan, Scottish community. The music, pace and atmosphere exemplify
the best cinematic aesthetics of the 70s, while the film evokes that
feeling that people were trying to make the most of the recently acquired
sexual freedom - or better yet, trying to discover what to make of it
amidst the liberal excesses and the conservative paranoia. But there's
more than that to this odd flick - it's a beautifully told story of
mystery, violence, and the old conflict between freedom and morality,
sex and religion, paganism and Christianity. No easy interpretations
are drawn, and the ending is totally unexpected and unsettling. A classic.
A frustrated writer who spins a roulette wheel for a living is confronted
with a tricky, dangerous offer from a mysterious woman. Moody, intelligent,
and Clive Owen. Nuff said.
Juliet Stevenson plays Nina, grief stricken over the sudden death of her
lover Jamie (Alan Rickman). She can't bring herself to accept that he's
gone - and then, one day, his spirit comes back to visit her. This film
about love and loss is so real in its emotion, so well acted and fine
tuned to the gut, that each and every time I watch it I cry like a baby.
Herein lies the root of my love for all things Rickman, which has never
relented. And Stevenson is a great talent, so reliable and completely
underrated. I've seen her in a wide variety of films, and she shines in
every sort of role. Nowhere is she more real and sympathetic than here.
With one of the most bittersweet endings ever, this film is a treasure,
hidden or not. 
Even the bit parts are lovingly crafted. Plus a smile-inducing
piano-cello duet of "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore." Plus
ghosts who are movie buffs. Just so many great moments. But sometimes
when I've shown this movie to friends, they've dismissed it as "depressing."
We tend not to be friends after that, but that's another story.
The film that made me fall for Ginger Rogers was 5th Ave Girl,
but this one's even better. She plays a woman who finds a baby on the
steps of an orphanage, and while attempting to bring it inside out of
the winter cold, is accused of being the real mother and then forced
by her employer - David Niven - to bring up the baby as her own. Well
acted and good naturedly risqué, the film remains both comic
and romantic after many viewings. One of the highlights: Rogers goes
to a dinner party with Niven and pretends to be Swedish, totally destroying
the snobbish upper class women who try to make fun of her. 
Lon Chaney as an armless man in a freak show who falls for the circus
owner's daughter and murders a rival. It's a horrific, dark tale of
love directed in great style by a master of the grotesque. 
This
endearing and poignant black comedy - call it light Hitchcock - is full
of wonderfully quirky characters, boasts one of Bernard Herrmann's best
scores, and manages to successfully combine sweet and macabre, in an
amusing look at the dark side of a small Vermont town. 
The trouble with Harry is that he's dead, and the four principal
characters - played by Shirley MacLaine (her debut), John Forsythe,
Edmund Gwenn, and Mildred Natwick - have their own ideas about how he
died, which lead to various attempts to bury the body. In fact, the
body gets buried and disinterred, and reburied and almost buried, quite
a few times. In its blithe disregard for niceties the film ends up being
a rather clever satire on the whole idea of normality. The color photography
(Robert Burks) is simply gorgeous. 
Part journey of phallic redemption, part kinetic portrait of post-WWII
urban Japan, Stray Dog is the gripping noir tale of a policeman
searching for his gun before the killer who stole it uses all six bullets.
At a time of scarcity, the missing gun represents lost honor as much
as a samurai's sword, and a young Toshiro Mifune is in top form as the
desperate detective. The portrayal of decadence in the nighttime search
scenes through the city is at once socially critical and intoxicating.
The climactic hand-to-hand battle in the swamplands by a dusty train
station is textbook catharsis, with no musical underscoring, just the
sounds of the wind whistling through the reeds and two men in pitched,
primal combat. 
"Everyone
likes the film, but I don't...all that technique and not one real thought
in it." Perhaps it is Kurosawa's own opinion of Stray Dog, his
third collaboration with Toshiro Mifune, that has kept it comparatively
hidden. Or perhaps even a great film can get lost amidst the myriad
"classics" that have distinguished Kurosawa's career. Regardless, this
remains an intriguing work, both in terms of Kurosawa's career and as
an allegory of Japan's social and cultural state after the war. What
begins as a quest for a lost firearm becomes a pilgrim's progress of
purification and self-discovery, a thematic search for the humanity
amidst the rubble. 
Every time I watch this film, Hayley Mills convinces me that twins Sharon
and Susan, separated as babies, are really two distinct people up there
on the screen and not one talented young actress playing a dual role.
How these twins, each knowing nothing of the other, meet at camp, discover
their history, change places, and scheme to get their parents together
again is a delightful mix of comedy, romance, and ideal world scenario,
somehow rising above the typical rose-colored Disney product of the
day. The idea that parents could actually be heartless enough to split
up identical twins, each taking one, is a splinter under the skin of
this film, but forgivable in the outcome. Hayley Mills was the most
gifted and natural young actor since Roddy McDowell, and perhaps up
to and including Haley Joel Osment. Although all the cast in The
Parent Trap conduct themselves with honor, it is Mills who carries
this film and makes it worth watching again and again. 
I
grew up a Disney kid, so this stuff was spoon fed to me, but this is
one of the only things that truly stuck. One reason is Ms. Mills and
her ability to make us forget she's got a British accent. It's hilarious,
really, to look back at all her roles and realize that in the vast majority,
we're meant to just sort of forget she's got this accent when no one
else around her does. Anyway, one of the main things that makes this
film work is not the story of the twins separated in childhood and raised
on opposite coasts, but the adult love story between Brian Keith and
Maureen O'Hara, two real looking people of a certain age. O'Hara is
a gorgeously full-figured woman, and Keith is quite the strapping middle-aged
man. Hell, even the "other woman" looks to be over 30. All this, and
"Let's Get Together," too! Yay! Yay! Yay!
The life of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the "little flower"
who practiced acceptance of what life and God gave her. Cavalier tells
the story in a spare, direct style with few sets - a filmic method that
mirrors the simple approach that Thérèse took to her life.
The debut film by documentary master Morris is ostensibly about pet
cemeteries, but I can't think of a film that's more eloquent about the
way people use death as a way to find meaning in life. 
A comedy capturing a lost art form - the French "boulevard" farce. Here's
the set-up: a young man is on the way to his own wedding, but his horse
unfortunately eats the straw hat of a married woman who is in a compromising
position with a cavalry officer, who in turn forces the bridegroom to
go in search of an identical hat so that the lady can return home. It's
from a 19th century play, one of many like it, but the remarkable thing
is that Clair pulls it off without sound - replacing the verbal gags with
visual ones. As the search for the hat proceeds, the situations become
increasingly complicated and ridiculous, while the pacing and visual dexterity
is so elegant and exact that the whole thing feels like a well-oiled comic
machine. The climax (the hero's wedding) pulls all the strands together
masterfully. The film has a satiric tone as well, displaying members of
the middle class in a most unflattering light. The sets and costumes are
splendid. Its flavor of comic struggle against ever-looming disaster is
appealing, and forms an interesting contrast to the more optimistic American
forms of humor.