The Screengrab : anna karina

The Rep Report (January 9 - 15)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 19:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 Made in U.S.A. has long been one of the best-hidden features from the director's '60s golden age. Godard claimed the "Richard Stark" (i.e., Donald Westlake) novel The Jugger as the credited basis for the script, but nobody bothered to get Westlake's permission or cut him a check, with the result that the writer managed to get a proper release of the film in the U.S. squashed. So its appearance at Film Forum for two weeks starting today counts as big news even for the Forum, which has taken to showcasing Godard's color classics from his Pop Art phase at the rate of about one a year. The funny thing is, the movie's connection to Westlake might be just another admiring reference point in a movie that features characters named "Donald Siegel" (for the veteran b-movie director who would ultimately hit paydirt with the original Dirty Harry and "David Goodis" (for the crime novelist whose Down There provided the basis for Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player), as well as villains named "Richard Nixon" and "Robert McNamara", and that Godard claimed was his attempt to remake The Big Sleep with his then-wife and muse Anna Karina in the Bogart role. (Her male co-star is Jean-Pierre Leaud, as Don Siegel.) This splashy affair, described by J. Hoberman as "more devoted to the vulgar modernism of mid-20th-century pop than any movie Godard made before or would make after," also features a cameo by Marianne Faithfull, singing "As Tears Go By" in the first full bloom of her misspent youth. It's being shown in a gleaming new 35-mm. print.

The first half of Film Society of Lincoln's Center' annual "Dance on Camera Festvial" is underway and runs through this weekend, with the usual invaluable collection of performance shorts and features and documentaries, including a tribute to Busby Berkeley that makes room for a screening of his 1943 surreal choreography classic The Gang's All Here. The series concludes next weekend with the Indian musical The Chosen One/Ishanou and an American Masters documentary profile of Jerome Robbins.

Related Stories: Donald Westlake, 1933 - 2008

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 25 Leading Ladies of All Time (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

15. LAUREN BACALL (1924 - )

How cool is Lauren Bacall? Cool enough that she tamed Humphrey Bogart, the greatest leading man of all time. Originally making her name as a teenage fashion model, Bacall’s slender frame and fiery eyes caught the attention of Howard Hawks, who changed her name, fixed her hair, and likely would have driven her career straight into the ground if he hadn’t arranged to cast her in The Big Sleep opposite the man she called “Mr. Bogart”. Bacall wasn’t even the best actress in the movie – according to both Raymond Chandler and William Faulkner, Martha Vickers, cast as her sister, acted rings around her to the degree that her scenes were cut so as not to make Bacall look bad. But she was good enough: her chemistry with Bogey was electrifying, her patented chin-down, eyes-up look was enchanting, and her clever patter, delivered in a sultry, husky voice combining East Coast class with East Side brass, could be felt in the hip pockets of every man in hearing distance. America demanded more of her, and she went on to prove that while she wasn’t the greatest actress of her day, she was at least game for anything, and surprisingly adept with light comedy as well as her trademark dangerous-dame roles. Now a ripe old 84 years old, Bacall is the very image of the classy old Hollywood dame, occasionally taking acting work (with Lars von Trier, even!), but mostly content to be one of Tinseltown’s great raconteurs – a fearless liberal, a hilarious storyteller, and a priceless link to the Golden Era.

14. ANNA KARINA (1940 - )

When she was young, she was the face of the French New Wave. And she was (and is) utterly beautiful, but she has always looked younger than her years. So she has the face of a little girl in those early films, but the words that she speaks -- and the way that she speaks them -- are those of an older, wiser person. Her first film appearance was in a film by the Situationist philosopher Guy Dubord. She has worked with Agnes Varda, Jacques Rivette, Fassbinder, Visconti, and, of course, Godard, to whom she was married during his greatest period of creativity. Wow.

13. MYRNA LOY (1905-1993)

With her pert features and her way with a tart comeback, Loy was peerless in her day at the delicate art of making sanity look sexy, which is always a cause worth fighting for. Much of what needs to be said about her career got said last week in our entry on William Powell in our Leading Men list: they did, after all, co-star in fourteen films. It was the double impact of Manhattan Melodrama, in which she left Clark Gable (with Gable's enthusiastic consent) for Powell, and their first Thin Man movie that, as she was wont to put it, made her an overnight success after more than eighty films. Her earlier jobs had included uncredited bit parts in The Jazz Singer and the 1925 silent Ben-Hur, as well as punching the clock as the sexy-evil-zombie daughter of the Yellow Peril supervillain embodied by Boris Karloff in the camp classic The Mask of Fu Manchu. She also served her country as Fredric March's wife in The Best Years of Our Lives, making a pretty good case for going off to war so long as you had her to come back to. Her last movie roles included 1978's The End (where the director-star, Burt Reynolds, made a bid for being considered a man of taste by casting her as his mother), and the underappreciated Just Tell Me What You Want (1980), as Alan King's unflappable assistant. In 1973, she made her Broadway debut in a production of Clare Booth Luce's The Women, which was reportedly a failure, but which absolutely has to have been better than the recent movie version.

12. GRETA GARBO (1905-1990)

Garbo began her career in silent pictures in her native Sweden and in Germany. It was after seeing one of these, Gosta Berlings Saga, that Louis B. Mayer decreed that she and the film's director be brought to America and installed at MGM. It didn't take him long to decide that the director could go back home after all, but Garbo stuck around, entrancing the crowds who piled into theaters to watch her co-starring roles with her offscreen lover John Gilbert through the clouds of steam that the two of them seemed to give off together. When Garbo made her first sound picture, Anna Christie (1930), MGM famously promoted it with the line, "Garbo Talks!"; years later, when she made the comedy Ninotchka (a calculated, and successful, attempt to lighten what had come to seem an oppressively heavy image), they used the line, "Garbo Laughs!" Pauline Kael once asked why, when she gave what is generally remembered as her finest performance in the 1936 Camille, they didn't think to use the line, "Garbo Acts!" Garbo was a superb actress, but the real historic impact of her career is the degree to which she established that there are some faces so beloved by the camera that their bearers can do no wrong in its all-seeing eye. Although most of her vehicles (Camille included) are kind of stodgy and crude and cheesy at the edges, they hold up to the extent that you cannot take your eyes off that woman. Garbo retired from the screen after 1941, reportedly due to a feeling that her moment had passed and in rebellion against MGM's desire to change her image and maker her seem like more of an accessible, regular gal. (The mind reels, the blood curdles, at the thought of how they might have tried going about this.) The only known time since then that she willingly stepped in front of a camera came in 1949, when she was 43, and agreed to do a screen test for a picture that she was considering coming out of retirement for but that subsequently fell through. To judge from that footage, seen above, whatever her reasons for not returning to movies, it couldn't have been that she'd lost her ability to make the camera go weak in the knees.

11. KATE WINSLET (1975 - )

The story of modern Hollywood is largely one of actresses who start out doing interesting, challenging roles until some big studio takes notice and rewards them for their hard work by putting them in blockbuster movies that make them rich – and utterly boring. Though she’s made some bad choices in her career (let’s not even talk about The Life of David Gale), former sandwich shop employee Kate Winslet, after becoming one of the biggest stars in the world by virtue of appearing as the female lead in Titanic, has steadfastly refused to settle into the role of a reliable, rich and uninteresting box office draw. Her pre-Titanic career was launched with an eerie, unforgettable performance in Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, which she followed up with adventurous roles in classical adaptations like Jude and Hamlet; but shockingly, it was after appearing in the highest-grossing film of all time that her career really got interesting. Since that time, she’s become known for her unconventional beauty (having had many pointed things to say about Hollywood’s insistence that its leading ladies stay rail-thin) and her willingness to portray women who are sexually adventurous, unflatteringly neurotic, and possessed of unexpected and sometimes alarming depths. Outside of a few bill-paying blockbusters – likely the result of knowing she’ll never luck into another Titanic – she’s chosen a rare path, appearing in movies like Hideous Kinky, Quills, Iris, and Finding Neverland. She’s even put an unforgettable twist on romantic comedy with her role as Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. When you’re the star of the biggest movie in history, maybe you can afford to take those kinds of risks; if so, we’re glad it was Kate Winslet who got the chance.

Click Here for Part One, Two, Four, Five, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Leonard Pierce, Hayden Childs, Phil Nugent

Take Five: U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 20:45:00 GMT

Patrick Creadon’s I.O.U.S.A., a documentary about the massive national debt being accrued by the United States, opens in limited release today. Using charts, graphs, and mountains of economics statistics, Creadon – the man who brought us the charming crossword puzzle documentary Wordplay – has essentially created An Inconvenient Truth 2: The Doomsday Debt. In the film, which features guest appearances from a pantheon of econ-nerd luminaries including mega-investor Warren Buffet, Comptroller General David M. Walker, and celebrated presidential candidate/crazy person Ron Paul, we are shown how our unthinkably huge national debt may lead to war, inflation, the collapse of our international alliances, economic catastrophe, dogs and cats living together, and mass hysteria. But hey, every movie with those three wonderful letters ‘U.S.A.’ in the title has to be about how we’re all doomed because of the short-sighted policies of warmongering, tax-cutting, pork-barreling, corporate-welfare-loving presidential administrations! Maybe it’s just some residual patriotism from the Fourth of July, but this movie inspired us to create a Take Five featuring other ‘U.S.A’ movies that aren’t quite so bleak. Or, at least, don’t have so many pie charts.

UNDERWORLD U.S.A. (1961)

A little-seen late-period noir from the underrated Sam Fuller, Underworld U.S.A. is a flawed film, particularly in its underwhelming cast, predictable action, and sometimes hokey dialogue. But Cliff Robertson is dynamite as Tolly Devlin, a man who, after seeing his father murdered by two-bit hoods, decided that revenge is a dish served straight out of the freezer, as he spends the next 20 years infiltrating their organization.

MADE IN U.S.A. (1967)

One of the most impenetrable relics from when Jean-Luc Godard really started to go off the narrative rails and into an experimental/revolutionary world of his own, Made in U.S.A. purports to be – and, to a certain albeit incomprehensible degree, actually is – an adaptation of one of Donald Westlake’s “Richard Stark” novels. Bu really, it’s just a glorious excuse for Anna Karina to lounge around in a (French-speaking) Atlantic City hotel room, talking about socialism.

HARLAN COUNTY U.S.A. (1976)

Barbara Kopple set out to make a documentary about the bitter electoral dispute that was tearing the United Mine Workers union apart in the mid-1970s. Instead, after visiting an unauthorized strike in Harlan County, Kentucky, she found a new subject: the desperation, suffering, and nobility of the miners as they struggled to survive under the weight of bosses who crippled them at every turn. Moving, gripping, suspenseful, infuriating, enraging, affirming and beautiful – everything a good documentary should be.

GRANDVIEW, U.S.A. (1984)

Made during that period of the 1980s where they would apparently greenlight a movie about any old thing, this forgotten relic by Randal “The Blue Lagoon” Kleiser involves a painfully underfed C. Thomas Howell, who is a race car driver and aspiring oceanographer for some reason, falling in love with Jamie Lee Curtis, who owns the local demolition derby in the grand tradition of movie sports bosses who look nothing like Bud Selig.

INVASION U.S.A. (1985)

Now we’re talkin’! After all this 'waah-waah, the economy is failing, the unions are dying, some gangsters killed my dad' nonsense, here comes Chuck Norris, with a sleeveless denim shirt and a big pickup truck, to make everything all right. He does this by single-handedly wiping out a huge invasion force, consisting of a wide variety of swarthy foreign nationals, who have had the unmitigated audacity to take over some of our finest shopping malls. Now that’s the U.S.A. I’m talking about!

Yesterday's Hits: The Bells of St. Mary's (1945, Leo McCarey)

Paul Clark — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

After last week’s review of Robert Bresson’s Les Anges du Péché, I briefly toyed with the idea of writing a nun-themed post every week. I’ve since reconsidered, but the truth is that there are quite a few memorable nun movies. Just think- a When Good Directors Go Bad on Neil Jordan’s We’re No Angels, a Movie Moment column on the rose-scourging scene in the Japanese nunsploitation classic School of the Holy Beast, a comparison piece on the wimple-worthiness of Anna Karina and Audrey Hepburn- the list goes on, even before the nuns go on the run. It’s hard to talk about nun movies without The Bells of St. Mary’s quickly coming up, so with the Easter season upon us I decided to revisit Leo McCarey’s 1945 film.

What made The Bells of St. Mary’s a hit?: 1944 saw the release of Going My Way, which introduced audiences to Bing Crosby’s Father O’Malley character. Audiences quickly fell in love with Father O’Malley, a young priest who kindly ministers to the poor with a smile and a song. Crosby- and O’Malley- won over both audiences and Oscar voters, with Going My Way proving to be both the biggest hit of 1944 and the year’s Academy Award winner for Best Picture, Best Actor (Crosby), and Best Supporting Actor (Barry Fitzgerald), among others. Based on this success, it was almost inevitable that a sequel would be a hit.

But what really put The Bells of St. Mary’s over the top was the presence of Ingrid Bergman. Bergman, who was already a popular and Oscar-winning leading lady, was best known at the time as a serious actress, playing dramatic roles in Casablanca, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Gaslight. The Bells of St. Mary’s gave her the opportunity to play a somewhat more lighthearted role, as the devout Sister Benedict. Even audiences who hadn’t seen Going My Way turned out for the unlikely yet intriguing Crosby-and-Bergman matchup, and The Bells of St. Mary’s is widely believed to be the first sequel ever to outgross the original film.

What happened?: The Bells of St. Mary’s had few pretensions other than to make war-weary audiences feel good for a couple of hours. A movie this featherweight was practically fated to see a fade in its popularity, especially compared to the more lavish color musicals and spectacles of the fifties. In addition, both of the film’s stars saw their box-office heat wane. Bergman’s slide came first, following the controversy over her affair with Roberto Rossellini, hardly the best way to endear yourself to Bells’ core audience. Bing held out longer, drawing in crowds well into the fifties, but his appeal to younger audiences was shrinking as they embraced younger performers like Frank Sinatra. By the time rock’n’roll hit the scene, Bing felt like a relic to them.

Does The Bells of St. Mary’s still work?: Not really. Watching the film again, the two words that kept springing to mind were “quaint” and “cornball.” The Bells of St. Mary’s is so committed to making the audience feel good- whether it’s through gentle laughter or easy tears- that the film never has any edge to it. At the beginning of the film, O’Malley is warned about the strong-willed nuns, but aside from a few heated discussions over how the school is run, little becomes of this. Likewise, the episodic nature of the story isn’t a problem, except that all of the subplots are resolved in the easiest and most predictable way possible.

Consider the story of Horace P. Bogardus (Henry Travers), the rich man and city bigwig who is erecting an office building next to St. Mary’s. Bogardus, like so many other rich men in movies, only seems to think about money, while the nuns pray in the hope that he’ll turn over the building to them to use as their new school. So O’Malley does a little scheming, and after Bogardus falls ill, the nuns’ prayers are answered, with Bogardus requiring surprisingly little convincing to make a gift of his not-inexpensive new property. This wouldn’t be so bad except that every subplot in the film is resolved in much the same way.

In addition, the film’s characterizations are almost distractingly thin. O’Malley doesn’t play any notes that he hadn’t already played in Going My Way, and none of the supporting characters show any real depth. Most disappointing is Sister Benedict- the film sets her up as a formidable rival to O’Malley, but none of this pans out. Instead, she becomes practically saintly, as she sticks to her principles, has Job-like patience with her students, and prays for Mr. Bogardus. Even when she does something questionable, such as teaching a picked-on boy how to box, she does so for all of the right reasons. It’s a shame, since as Bergman plays the character it’s easy to imagine how, with only a few script changes, Sister Benedict might have been interesting and multi-dimensional, rather than the sanctimonious cipher we see in The Bells of St. Mary’s.

But then, when you’ve got a valuable property, why rock the boat? Even the film’s most potentially divisive element- its setting in a Roman Catholic Church and school- is portrayed in the most sanitized way imaginable. This is understandable, as in the year before Vatican II and President Kennedy there was some suspicion among non-Catholics about Catholic tradition. However, aside from a few throwaway lines (like the bit about a kid named Luther- “how’d he get in here?”) and the presence of priests and nuns, there’s little actual Catholicism on display here. Heck, many of the ads for the film didn’t even show its stars in their clerical garb, so clearly the religious issue wasn’t a very big one for the film and its studio.

In many ways, The Bells of St. Mary’s is an ideal example of a movie that is a hit in its day but hasn’t stood the test of time. While there’s nothing edgy or controversial that would have incurred the ire of 1945 audiences, it always offers nothing that’s especially interesting to moviewatchers in 2008. But then, how many of today’s hits will we be able to say the same about sixty years from now?

Screengrab DVD Review: Pierrot le fou

Peter Smith — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:55:00 GMT

Were the world a simpler and gentler place, Pierrot le fou would consist of 110 minutes of Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Marianne (Anna Karina) relaxing on the seaside. Instead, it's the most exhilarating elegy for a failed marriage and betrayal you're ever likely to see. Jean-Luc Godard's tenth film marked a turning point for the director, who divorced Karina around the time he made it. Afterwards, he abandoned its romanticism and upped the political references and Brechtian tactics that lie on the sideline here. It might be a good entry point for Godard neophytes, made at a moment where he could still celebrate American directors like Frank Tashlin, Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller (who makes a cameo) and rage against American foreign policy, maintaining an uneasy balance of experimentation and accessibility.

A married father and aspiring novelist, Ferdinand abandons his family to go on the road with Marianne, the babysitter. After stealing $50,000, the couple is forced to flee a gang of criminals connected with Marianne's brother, who's involved in gun-running. But Godard's disinterest in the film noir-derived narrative (based on Lionel White's novel Obsession) is palpable. He's more excited about the images he's creating — especially when aided by cinematographer Raoul Coutard. Throughout, the colors are dazzling, especially in a sequence where fireworks are reflected in the windshield as Ferdinand and Marianne drive. Frequent outbursts of violence — including an early instance of waterboarding — serve as a reminder of the fragility of love and life, but the film also takes time out for numerous images of art, several musical numbers and a trip to the bowling alley. Like many French New Wave films, Pierrot le fou ends unhappily, but its blissful exploration of emotional highs and lows still thrills. — Steve Erickson

DVD EXTRAS: The second disc includes vintage interviews with Godard, Belmondo and Karina, as well as a recent talk with the latter. It also features two documentaries: A "Pierrot" Primer, which features commentary from frequent Criterion guest and Godard collaborator Jean-Pierre Gorin, and Godard, L'Amour, which concentrates on Godard's relationship with Karina both as a wife and actress.

DVD Digest for February 19, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

New this week: another Jean-Luc Godard film goes Criterion, and plenty of Oscar-bait (successful and not-so-successful) premieres on DVD.

DVD of the Week: The latest Godard classic to get the deluxe Criterion treatment, Pierrot le Fou is quite possibly the lightest and least didactic of the master's Golden Age output. The film lacks the poetry of earlier films like My Life to Live and Band of Outsiders, as well as the revolutionary fervor of Week End and La Chinoise. In many ways, Pierrot feels like the closest Godard came to making a lark, complete with impromptu musical numbers, gorgeous Cinemascope photography, and Anna Karina at her loveliest. But despite the deliberately minor feel of the film, it's a seminal work, both for the filmmaker and for the period. The two-disc Criterion edition of the film also includes: a new interview with Karina; archival interviews with Godard, Karina, and Jean-Paul Belmondo; the video A "Pierrot" Primer, directed by Godard associate Jean-Pierre Gorin; and a documentary about Godard's personal and professional relationship with Karina.

Also on the Criterion front this week is Alex Cox's Walker, a notorious flop in its day that has become a cult favorite in the intervening years. I haven't had the chance to watch the film yet, so I'll direct you to an appreciation of it by former ScreenGrab editor, and unabashed Walker fan, Bilge Ebiri.

Other new releases on DVD:
American Gangster (Universal, also HD-DVD)
In the Valley of Elah (Warner, also Blu-Ray)
Lust, Caution (Universal)
Margot at the Wedding (Paramount)
Michael Clayton (Warner, also Blu-Ray)
Rendition (New Line)

The new Criterions aside, it's looking like a lean week for classics coming to DVD, although I would be remiss if I didn't mention Sony's Blu-Ray-only release of Tom Tykwer's propulsive arthouse hit Run Lola Run. In addition, Sony is releasing a 1992 documentary about old-school criminals like Lucky Luciano and Bugsy Siegel entitled... The American Gangster. I can't imagine why they'd wait until this week to release it.
Finally, new TV on DVD: Universal's Coach: Season 3; Fox's Newhart: The Complete First Season (note: this is the one where he runs the inn, not the one where he's a shrink); and, as promised, the much-anticipated Walker, Texas Ranger: The Complete Fourth Season. I can't imagine there'll be much overlap between people renting this and those renting the Alex Cox Walker, but you never know.