The Screengrab : mccabe & mrs. miller

Final Farewells: The Best & Worst Death Scenes In Cinema (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 May 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Bruce Willis in THE SIXTH SENSE (1999)

The big parlor game after The Sixth Sense hit theaters was asking your friends, “Did you guess the ending?” (As opposed to, say, The Village, where pretty much everyone guessed the dopey twist.) Some people claim they caught wise to Shyamalan’s scheme the second Donnie Wahlberg’s buff, naked psychopath shot Bruce Willis’ mumbly psychiatrist in the gut, but I’m not one of them...and as an online screenwriting teacher (at UCLA Extension...summer courses forming now!), I regularly praise the sleight-of-hand brio of the scene above. We see Willis’ character shot dead right in front of our eyes, then in the next scene it’s two years later and he’s sitting on a park bench, seemingly alive. It’s a neat trick, and for the majority of us who didn’t stop and go, “Hey, wait a minute...” it led to a clever, head-slapping reveal that Shyamalan achieved fair and square without cheating (hello, ridiculous Mission Impossible "Jon Voight" mask) or bending the willing suspension of disbelief to the breaking point (so...they set up a fake 19th century society with monsters but without antibiotics? Does anyone ever actually read Shyamalan’s scripts before they go into production?). (AO)

Johnny Depp in A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984)

Johnny Depp may not have been a star yet, but his exit from Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street was instantly memorable thanks to its unholy-torrents-of-blood payoff. Reconfiguring the classic boogeyman-under-the-bed scenario into a boogeyman-inside-the-bed nightmare, Depp’s last scene finds him (and his TV) being pulled into a mattress by the gloved hand of Freddy Krueger. Out of the hole created by this supernatural incident comes a horrific eruption of blood made all the more chilling by its reverse-gravitational movement, the red geyser coating the ceiling without besmirching anything else in the room. It’s one of the finest moments in the Craven canon. (NS)

Leonard Nimoy in STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (1982)

Yes, I’m well aware that The Wrath of Khan was followed by an entire Star Trek movie dedicated to putting Spock together again…and more than 25 years later, he’s still alive and giving advice to his younger self. So what? Leonard Nimoy knew what he was doing when he didn’t come back to give Spock a final sendoff in Star Trek: Generations; he’d already done it to perfection here. Taking the reigns of the Trek franchise, Nicholas Meyer crafted a genuine emotional epiphany from a pop artifact and set the series on a steady course for decades to come. If I can’t ride a nuclear bomb to my death (see below), at least let me be shot out of a spaceship while Scotty plays the bagpipes. (SVD)

Warren Beatty in MCCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971) & Jack Nicholson in THE SHINING (1980)

Beatty and Nicholson have been linked in the public mind for pretty much their entire careers. They’re longtime neighbors on Mulholland Drive, they’ve co-starred in The Fortune and Reds, and throughout the '70s and '80s, they shared a similar rep as Hollywood bad boys and incurable ladies’ men. They also tend to die at the end of their movies, so it’s probably not too surprising that, at some point, they would each find themselves frozen in snow as the final credits roll. As our own Hayden Childs put it last week in our countdown of Best Movies Ever, McCabe’s “final stand, his big gun battle, is as unimportant to the town of Presbyterian Church as Icarus plunging into the sea in Pieter Brueghal's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” In The Shining, Nicholson dies as a howling monster, a wounded minotaur loose in the maze, but whereas McCabe may be instantly forgotten, Jack Torrance has always been and will always be the caretaker. (SVD)

Slim Pickens in DR. STRANGELOVE (1964)

Can you think of a better way to go out? Slim Pickens had more than one great death scene, but whooping it up while riding the nuclear bomb that sets off the end of the world as we know it…there’s a man who knows how to make an exit. (SVD)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Scott Von Doviak

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 May 2009 23:00:00 GMT

Hayden Childs's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1. THE WILD BUNCH (1969)
2. THE SEVEN SAMURAI (1954)

Although I listed The Wild Bunch in the first spot, this one is equally deserving. Perhaps more. The story is simple: poor peasant villagers, beset by marauding bandits, hire a group of down-on-their-luck samurai to defend them. But this is storytelling at its finest: lyrical, universal, and profound. Akira Kurosawa was a great fan of John Ford, and the epic sweep of Ford's Westerns added to the majesty of The Seven Samurai. Look, I can hardly talk about this movie. It's just too much.

3. McCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)

4. BADLANDS (1973) & DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978)

Terrence Malick's first two films are wondrous. I mean this in the sense that they contain wonders to behold and that they are themselves wonders. For one thing, they shouldn't work. Both movies are narrated by girls on the cusp of becoming young women, and both often suppress dialogue to emphasize through voiceover the inner lives of their narrators. Badlands recasts the story of serial killer Charles Starkweather into an insular fairy tale, a Brothers Grimm story about murderous innocence. Days Of Heaven is like an Andrew Wyeth painting given life, and like that other famous artwork that springs to life, Pinnochio, it's a much darker story with breathtaking beauty and sudden horror. (HC)

5. GRAND ILLUSION (1937) & THE RULES OF THE GAME (1939)

6. THE SEARCHERS (1956)

The Searchers is such a strange film, veering wildly between the unholy obsession, the blanket condemnation of racism, the anti-hero who might well be the hero, the cornpone humor, the score that screams of American exceptionalism even as the movie shows itself deeply ambivalent about America's past. This multifaceted approach is offputting at first, but utterly compelling over multiple viewings. John Ford and John Wayne made a hell of a lot of Westerns together, but this is the greatest. (HC)

7. THE GODFATHER PART II (1974)

8. UNFAITHFULLY YOURS (1948) & THE LADY EVE (1941)

9. VERTIGO (1958) & LA JETEE (1962)

Vertigo is Alfred Hitchcock's finest film, an echo chamber of fetishistic obsession with an almost indescribably weird plot. La Jetee is Chris Marker's most accessible movie, a short film captured almost entirely in still shots with a voiceover explaining key plot points. The plot revolves around an obsessive remembrance of an event from the protagonist's youth. One of the major scenes echoes a scene in Vertigo. In his film Sans Soliel, which almost made this list, Marker explains how obsessed he became with Vertigo, wanting to copy it as a means of understanding and possessing it. The embedded video below contains all 26 minutes of La Jetee in its totality. (HC)

10. COCKFIGHTER (1974)

Monte Hellman made some heady no-budget movies in his heyday, but this one, in which Warren Oates plays a cockfighter who has taken a vow of silence, is the headiest (sorry, Two-Lane Blacktop, but you're second in my heart). Let me be clear: cockfighting is one of the ugliest, most vulgar and inhumane sports known to man, and I find it reprehensible. Hellman looks at it without flinching and finds the beauty within. Oates is one of my favorite actors, and never is he better than here, a movie in which he has maybe five lines of dialogue, although he is in every scene. (HC)

11. TOUCH OF EVIL (1958) & YOJIMBO (1961)

Both of these movies make art out of sheer pulp. By almost any standard, Touch Of Evil should be unbelievably bad, but it's astonishingly great, better, I dare say, than Citizen Kane. It's a police procedural where the killing and killer are completely irrelevant to the plot. It's a movie about a corrupt cop who is always right about his suspect even when he plants evidence (and unlike, say, 24, the film doesn't condone police corruption). It's a movie with an unhealthy amount of cheese and ham - Charlton Heston as a Mexican cop!, a biker gang all addled on weed who abduct Janet Leigh!, Marlene Dietrich as a gypsy fortune teller! Orson Welles in a fat suit (or should that be an even fatter suit?)! - that somehow turns it all into the finest cinematic cuisine. Yojimbo also starts with a pulp premise, in this case a samurai version of Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key and Red Harvest, and finds a way to frame it all into a stunning battle royale. (HC)

12. SINGIN' IN THE RAIN (1952)

What the first thing an actor learns? The show must go on!

Here's several other movies that ought to be on this list, and would have been if I'd figured out a way to stretch the idea of Top Ten any further:

Aguirre, Wrath of God (Herzog, 1972)
The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo, 1965)
Chinatown (Polanski, 1974)
Ikiru (Kurosawa, 1952)
Killer of Sheep (Burnett, 1977)
Miller's Crossing (Coen, 1990)
Night of the Hunter (Laughton, 1955)
Playtime (Tati, 1967)
Ride The High Country (Peckinpah, 1962)
Rio Bravo (Hawks, 1959)
Week End (Godard, 1967)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Eight, Nine & Ten

Contributor: Hayden Childs

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 May 2009 22:30:00 GMT

Nick Schager's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1) DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978)
2) THE SHINING (1980)

With all due respect to Stephen King, who famously disliked this adaptation of his novel, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is horror cinema nirvana, an unsettling vision of paternal and spousal madness crafted with the director’s trademark icy precision. Jack Nicholson’s performance is deservedly iconic, yet it’s the disquietingly unnatural atmosphere – generated by, among other things, those little twin ghouls, the nude grandma specter in the bathtub, Looney Tunes cartoons, and subtle allusions to Native American history – that truly turns this haunted hotel tale into a nerve-jangling classic.

3) MCCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)
4) ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968)
5) BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA (1974)
6) LE SAMOURAI (1967)
7) STALKER (1979)
8) AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD (1972)

The production of Aguirre: The Wrath of God was so troubled that, as rumor has it, director Werner Herzog either threatened to shoot star Klaus Kinski, or plotted to have his indigenous cast members do the dirty deed once shooting was completed. Such insanity may be fantasy, but it’s in keeping with the spirit of Herzog’s mesmerizing 1972 feature about the titular Spanish conquistador, whose adventurous exploration of the wild unknown in search of greatness makes him a fitting surrogate for the mad genius director.

9) POINT BLANK (1967)
10) CRISS CROSS (1949)

Robert Siodmak is better remembered for 1946’s The Killers, a superb noir in its own right. Yet it’s this relatively unsung gem that stands as the director’s finest work in the genre, a beautifully constructed, sensual and tense thriller – about Burt Lancaster’s lovesick loner returning home to L.A. and becoming embroiled in a love triangle with his ex, Yvonne De Carlo, and her new gangster beau Dan Duryea – that expertly delivers all those things noir is famous for: love, obsession, betrayal, and a fatalism so potent that it leaves a lasting mark.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Seven, Eight, Nine & Ten

Contributor: Nick Schager

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 May 2009 21:30:00 GMT

Phil Nugent's Top Ten(-ish) Best Movies Ever! (Part One)

1. Double feature: THE RULES OF THE GAME (1939) & GRANDE ILLUSION (1937)

2. THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE...(1953)

The balance of visual beauty, depth of sophistication in terms of character psychology, high wit, and unsentimental yet warm humanity that Jean Renoir achieved in his greatest works would earn him the title of World's Greatest Filmmaker if it could be laid on anyone's shoulders without smirking. Max Ophuls' love tragedy is one of the few movies that can be mentioned in the same breath as Renoir's without embarrassing it. By an odd concidence, all these movies are, in varying degrees, about the death of the aristocratic class; all manage to satirize these people without cheap condescension or programmatic rage, and all manage to partake of the seductiveness of opulence without ever slipping into the Merchant-Ivory vice of seeming to have been made by snobs for tourists. We may never get another movie that looks on such people and their way of life with such clear eyes again; it's hard just to believe that these films were made in the same century that saw the birth of reality TV.

3. McCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)
4. Double feature: THE GODFATHER (1972) & LAST TANGO IN PARIS (1973)

For people who were young when Marlon Brando first burst into movies, it must have really been something getting to watch him grow up. For those of us who were born when Brando was considered washed-up, with his impossible comeback still on the horizon, the older man is the Brando we first got to know--the broken-down, wise old monster of The Godfather and Paul, the middle-aged expatriate loser who might have been a success at something if he hadn't decided to instead be extraordinary. A case can be made that The Godfather, Part II is actually a greater film than its predecessor--I may have been known to make it myself a time or too--but even though Don Vito is present, in the singular and essential form of the young Robert De Niro, Brando is absent, all because he felt the need to throw his weight around (no jokes, please) and demand an exorbitant fee instead of doing a cameo as a favor to the director who'd made him relevant again. It was not entirely uncharacteristic and very petty of him, and they should have paid the son of a bitch whatever he asked for anyway.

5. HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940)

Speed kills.

6. UMBERTO D. (1952)

Some goddamn way, Vittorio De Sica found a way to make direct contact with the human heart without any spillover into bathos, and he did it again and again. Eager to repeat this feat, and figuring that it would help if they could label it, some folks listed some of the methods the director seemed to favor, as if they were ingredients in a recipe, and called it "Neo-realism". Many people since then have since followed the recipe, with varying degrees of success. Some of them made pretty good movies, but nobody else has done quite what De Sica did.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine & Ten

Contributor: Phil Nugent

Bloody Valentines: The Worst Relationships In Cinema History (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:30:00 GMT

RAY & AUDREY, SOMETHING WILD (1986)

“I HATE YOU!” Melanie Griffith’s Audrey (a.k.a. Lulu) screams at her ex-con husband Ray (Ray Liotta) towards the end of Jonathan Demme’s indie cult fave. “I HATE YOU, TOO!” Ray screams back. Ah, romance. Sure, Audrey may toy with an occasional square like Jeff Bridges’ yuppie rebel Charlie Driggs, but only if they’re married (or at least seem to be married) so she won’t be tempted by a genuine connection outside the established dysfunction of her abusive relationship with Ray. A fizzy pop fantasia for every nice guy who ever wished he could steal the girl of his dreams away from the jerk she seems to prefer, as well as a dark reminder of the inexplicable bonds that sometimes bond even the worst couples together like Super Glue.

JOHN McCABE & CONSTANCE MILLER, McCABE AND MRS. MILLER (1971)

He’s got poetry in him. If only she could see it. But, of course, she can’t. Or won’t. Or maybe it’s not there in the first place. I think it is, though. Only a hopeless romantic could look at a town as hardscrabble and bitter as Presbyterian Church and see a promising future. Only a hopeless romantic could entertain thoughts of love with the shrewd and removed (and, yes, beautiful) Constance Miller. She loves only two things: money and opium. And those will have her full attention at his time of greatest need. But there’s moments well before that time where you can see the nascent feelings between them, and you can believe in those feelings. When you see the way the camera captures them, you know that it, at least, believes in their love, even when they can’t even accept the possibility. Unfortunately, the Wild West was no place for love, despite what the movies have told you. Without laws, community, or the sure knowledge that you would live until tomorrow, the frontier was not a place to put your trust or life in the hands of a fellow human being. It was certainly not a place to put stock in the poetry in your soul.

DIX & LAUREL, IN A LONELY PLACE (1950)

He was born when she kissed him. He died when she left him. He lived a few weeks while she loved him. No, let’s go back. Let’s say you’re a washed-up movie writer (are there any cinematic depictions of movie writers who aren’t all washed-up?). This girl you were seen with has turned up dead, see? And you don’t care, because inside you’re all cold and twisted. But you meet a girl. She inspires you to write. But you can’t control your anger. Being accused of murder makes you angry enough to kill! Someone! Anyone! You think a lot about the dead girl -- enough to convincingly describe the murder scene to your agent and his wife. And now you love the girl, see? You want to marry her. But she’s frightened of you, too. Here’s the question: can you stop yourself from killing her? He loves her. He might be an amoral killer. It’s a hardhearted romance. It’s a flowery film noir. They were made for each other. They were completely wrong for each other.

DAVID & AMY, STRAW DOGS (1971)

Several years ago, my friend and colleague Dana Knowles wrote the best damn article on Straw Dogs I’ve ever had the fortune to read. She argues that David is the real monster of Straw Dogs and Amy is the real victim. And she’s right. David treats Amy with little but contempt, and Amy’s only crime is being beautiful and light-hearted. Knowles points out that Sam Peckinpah was not some Neanderthal or fascist or any of those other words that various critics have leveled at him after seeing this movie. He was a man with a keen grasp on the real-world consequences of violence for the sake of violence (see The Wild Bunch) and macho pissing matches (see, heck, pretty much all of his films). Peckinpah made films designed to provoke a response, but he didn’t necessarily condone that response. Here’s Knowles on David and Amy’s marriage:

Theirs is a horrible, hurtful marriage, though it’s not technically “violent” until quite late in the movie. David seems to have married a beautiful, flirtatious, girlish woman only to hate her for being exactly what he thought he wanted. There’s a revealing moment during his contretemps with the pastor that cuts to the heart of his mixed feelings about having a trophy wife. David is attempting further one-upsmanship by describing his academic objective to Rev. Hood, but the holy man is so distracted by the sight of Amy mixing a drink that he’s obviously not even listening. The look on David’s face is priceless, as if Amy is a weapon so thoroughly unsuited to this exchange that she’s morphed into a liability and wrecked his shot at the intellectual knockout punch he was winding up to deliver. Immediately after they say their goodbyes, Peckinpah cuts to the Sumners preparing for bed, and Amy complains about how awful he’d been to the reverend. David responds with, “No … I like him. And his wife is very attractive.” It’s practically a non sequitur, except that it betrays the moment upon which David is still most focused: when Amy’s allure got the attention that he’d wanted for himself. Even when she’s doing nothing but being, she’s a bit of a thorn in his side. Again and again, Peckinpah shows David incapable of being happy with her as is. In fact, the one and only time that David is entirely loose and playful with Amy comes directly after he’s probed her for information about her past relationship with Charlie and she’s claimed that nothing sexual ever happened between them; a revelation that makes him positively giddy. He never comes close to that state again until the final shot of the movie, and Amy’s nowhere in the frame.

Of course, it’s hard to talk about Straw Dogs without mentioning the rape scene, which cuts between David sitting quietly in a field on a snipe hunt while Charlie assaults Amy. No less a critic than Pauline Kael claimed bluntly that Amy enjoyed being raped, and indeed this is one of the received stories about this movie. Knowles punctures that argument by simply describing what Amy is doing on-screen: looking at the fireplace, the only exit in her line of sight, and then trying to remind her rapist that she is a human being that he nominally cares about, trying to regain some control. But it happens, and it’s ugly and horrible, and her husband David doesn’t even notice that she’s different afterwards. And all that the future holds for them is violence and murder, none of it in service of avenging her honor. And at the very end, she doesn’t even rate a lift into town from David. And that’s just plain cold.

HARRY & WILLA HARPER, THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1953)

The clip above is only a snippet, but it captures some of the rotten delusion in Willa Harper’s marriage to Harry Powell. Her prior husband, the father of those adorable/creepy children, killed a couple of men while stealing a bunch of money, and she can’t live with the guilt. Her boss at Spoon’s Ice Cream (the wonderfully named Icey Spoon) is a horrible manipulative wretch of a person who has pushed her into courtship with Powell, a self-styled man of the cloth. There’s a couple of little snags in their marriage. One is that Powell has a thoroughly misogynist view of women, and he will never touch Willa in their union. Well, ok, once, but it’s not for sex. See, the other little problem is that Powell is a serial murderer of widows. When he finally puts his hands on Willa, he’s not so much thinking of le petit mort as the big sleep. Willa’s quivering all right, but for exactly the wrong reason.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four, Five, Six & Seven

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs

The Screengrab Holiday Special: Movies We're Thankful For (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

PHIL NUGENT GIVES THANKS FOR:

BLUE VELVET (1986)

I'm not sure that it's possible to fully appreciate how thankful some of us are for Blue Velvet, the greatest American movie of the 1980s, without having suffered the indignity of being a movie freak in the 1980s, when this picture arrived like cool water to a man stranded in the desert. The biggest surprise may not have been that David Lynch, who by that time had Eraserhead and The Elephant Man to his credit, had this inside him, but that he was allowed to get it out of his system with the financial assistance of Dino De Laurentiis, who bought the property out of development hell and gave Lynch carte blanche to express his vision, asking only that the sucker come in at no longer than two hours. This was apparently De Laurentiis' way of thanking Lynch for all the unhappy work the director had put in cranking out Dune, another De Laurentiis production. Given that Dune failed to result in the intended franchise hit, nobody in Hollywood would have been surprised, let alone appalled, if Dino had told the boy from Missoula to take a hike, and take his leading man (Kyle MacLachlan, who made his film debut in Dune, and who had signed to appear in a string of sequels that were never going to happen) with him. Instead, De Laurentiis succumbed to an unusually well-timed bout of honor, and given the results, only the churlish would whisper that it's too bad that it didn't last long enough for Lynch to cut a deal with him to make Ronnie Rocket. Because of this, anyone who's thinking of talking some shit about Dino De Laurentiis -- the man whose other credits in 1986 alone included Tai-Pan, King Kong Lives, and Maximum Overdrive -- had better check with me first to make sure you've got the right. Unless you've paid for a movie masterpiece and been married to Silvano Magnano, you probably haven't.

MOUSEHOLES (1999)

Helen Hill, who died in 2007, and who earlier this week was awarded a Leo Award by the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, was a friend of mine. Helen was an independent filmmaker, though given the way that term is bandied about these days, it doesn't begin to capture just how independent she was; she never had an agent or a distributor, but finished her short animated films when she could and trucked them around to festivals with a reel tucked under her arm. Her masterpiece, Mouseholes, is a tribute to her dead grandfather that draws on home movies, Helen's own childlike animation, and tape-recorded conversations to make something sublime out of one of the most remarkable things about movies, and one of the key ways in which they have forever changed our world: their ability to enable us to hold onto a few invaluable pieces of the people we've lost, like ghosts trapped in bottles. For Helen, the film was about hanging onto part of her grandfather; now, for those of us left behind, the film has become about holding onto part of the woman who made it.

HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940)

Let's be clear about this: the reason that one of the best, funniest comedies in the history of movies exists is that its producer-director, Howard Hawks, had the balls and the taste to be corrupt in just the right way. A lot of people with as much talent as Hawks would never have thought of taking The Front Page, which then had a pretty good claim to being the greatest American play yet written and is nothing to sneeze at now, and turning it into a romantic comedy by giving the lead role a sex change and turning the other male lead into her ex-husband, who's waiting to make his next move. And while Hollywood was, and always will be, full of crass jackals who'd think nothing of trying something like that, hardly any of them would have been able to pull it off. (A 1988 remake of Hawks' rip-off, set in the world of TV news and starring Burt Reynolds and Kathleen Turner called Switching Channels was apparently made just to demonstrate this very point.) By now, His Girl Friday is so solidly (and deservedly) entrenched in its super-plus classic status that most people are barely aware of what a cold-blooded commercial calculation it's based on, or even that it has a title that ought to make you barf. I bring all this up now not because it takes anything away from the wonderfulness of the movie, because it doesn't: if I'm ever exiled to a desert island, this son of a bitch is coming with me. But it's worth keeping in mind, so that in a movie culture increasingly open to conventional wisdom and partisan warfare, everyone keeps in mind the final word on how greatness is achieved: you just never know.

TOKYO OLYMPIAD (1065)

Kon Ichikawa's 170-minute documentary record of the 1964 Olympic Games was commissioned by the Japanese government as part of their effort to use the games as their announcement that the country had transformed itself since World War II and was eager to be regarded as a smoothly functioning, hospitable member of the world of nations. Originally, the Japanese telegraphed both the ambition of the project, and their willingness to meet the rest of the world halfway, by hiring Akira Kurosawa, who at that time had no serious challengers for the title of the Japanese director who was best-known and most revered outside Japan. Luckily, somebody had a reality check and realized that Ichikawa, who was known for his ability to improvise in the face of changing conditions, was better suited temperamentally to this mission that the proud old samurai and control freak Kurosawa. Besides, the world already had one great Olympics documentary showing what the games looked like through the eyes of a director accustomed to bending reality to her will: Leni Riefenstahl's Olympiad, legendary for the way it transforms the musclular bodies on display into black-and-white film poetry. Ichikawa's brightly colored film captures the atmosphere, the flavor, the summer fun aspect of the whole spectacle, as well as the awesome mixture of the personalities involved. And though it's a measure of Ichikawa's mastery that it all looks effortless -- a few thousand people got together and had some contests, and all he did was point a camera at it and boil the results down to the good stuff -- the sense it gives you of the scale of the enterprise is explanation enough as to why there weren't more Olympics movies like this prior to the mid-1960s. Of course, there'll never be anything like it ever again; none of the people who might put up the money would see the point, because now we get to watch it all while it's happening, on TV. Whoopy-dink.

THE FILMS OF W.C. FIELDS

Pauline Kael: "From their titles, it's hard to tell the W.C. Fields movies apart; as John Mosher observed, 'Fields is Fields, a rose is a rose.' " Wilfrid Sheed:"...we demand more of Fields than even comic genius. We have to believe he meant it. We want certification that such a one existed: a mean, child-hating con man who was so funny about it that he made these things all right." Although there were other great screen comedians who were funnier in a greater number of ways, such as the Marx Brothers, and others who were more gifted visually as moviemakers, such as Buster Keaton, Fields' scraggly, underfunded, rattily uneven body of work retains the special fascination of representing one mean-spirited bastard's judgement on, and self-defense strategy against, the world. Fields has turned out to be one of those movie figures, like Bogart, who never goes out of style or fully loses connection with the modern world, yet it doesn't get any easier, as the years go by, to believe that the movies themselves got made on the level. The Fatal Glass of Beer, Million Dollar Legs, Mississippi, It's a Gift, The Man on the Flying Trapeze, My Little Chickadee, The Bank Dick, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break -- they all look as if they made late at night when the studio bosses had gone home and the security guards had passed out drunk, using money that whimsically crooked bookkeepers had skimmed from the budgets of Rin Tin Tin pictures. Although there are people working today who are probably as talented as Fields, and maybe even as idiosyncratic, there are no parallels for his career; as soon as Bill Murray, probably the closest living point of comparison, showed that he could make people laugh in a thrown-together movie like Stripes, he was thrown into big-budget special effects exravaganzas like Ghostbusters and eventually forced to turn character actor, which might have been his strategy for self-defense. To find anything close to Fields' vehicles today, you'd probably be best off searching the schedule of the Animal Planet channel.

RICHARD PRYOR LIVE IN CONCERT (1979)

Hard to believe now, but there was a time in our culture when stand-up comedians didn't get to leave behind every inflection of their act, cusswords included, perfectly preserved on cable TV specials. Lenny Bruce, who more or less invented the modern conception of the nightclub comic as satirical firebrand and verbal cartoonist, left behind only a posthumously released film record of one of his last performances, caught after his legal and drug problems had snuffed out his energy and wit and reduced him to a wry, paranoid figure snuffling in front of a bare brick wall. (Earlier clips of Bruce doing a TV-friendly version of his act on the Steve Allen show give you some idea of how much of his act was physical, and so is missing from the performances that were released on records.) Bruce's greatest disciple, Richard Pryor, was much luckier: this full-feature performance film caught him in full flight at the height of his powers, at a time when he was using everything he'd learned about working a crowd and applying it to a young lifetime's worth of experiences and observations. The film was released a year before Pryor, in a guilt-stricken, coke-baser's frenzy of despair, lit himself on fire; its sequels, starting with the 1982 Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip, record his partially successful attempt to relaunch himself after that traumatic meltdown, and his subsequent discovery that both his health and his inspiration were all but shot. But at least future generations won't be in any danger of thinking that this man was just the guy in The Toy.

McCABE & MRS. MILLER; THE LONG GOODBYE; THIEVES LIKE US; CALIFORNIA SPLIT; NASHVILLE (1970s)

In 1970, Robert Altman, then 45, directed the first hit film of his career, M*A*S*H. Ten years later, on a wavering leash from producer Robert Evans and a fluctuating budget, he directed Popeye, which was to be his second hit, even though it turned out to be the kind of commercial success whose star, Robin Williams, would still be apologizing for it twenty years later. In between those two hits, Altman would be able to make thirteen feature films, make them his way, for good or ill, and get them distributed by major studios whose bosses were still reeling in confusion from the collapse of the old system and cowed by Altman's many prizes and adulatory reviews. The five listed above are my favorites from that amazing body of work, which is as alive and unconventional as any large-scale attempt to understand America that any artist has ever embarked on. You might prefer five others; I'm generally up to taking another look at any of them, except maybe for Quintet and A Perfect Couple, because I find that revisiting even the ones that I think stink on ice feels less like looking at dead, bad old movies than like revisiting distant, weird members of the family who I haven't seen since the last time they got out of rehab. The fact that any of them exist at all is conclusive proof that desperate bewilderment at the top is not the worst thing you could have in the movie business. You might think that the same guys who were prepared to sponsor Altman to such a degree on the basis of one hit would have handed him the keys to the kingdom after he'd had a second one, but by 1980, the corporate heads had decided they knew what they were doing again, and the next year, Altman gave up on Hollywood and spent the rest of the decade working in theater and cable TV and making filmed plays on shoestring budgets, with only one small return to actual feature filmmaking, the barely released O. C. and Stiggs. He restarted his movie career right on schedule, in 1990, beginning with Vincent and Theo, a Van Gogh biopic that is as great as anything he ever made, and as unprofitable.

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)

The greatest fusion of commercial thriller and political satire ever to come out of Hollywood -- and, as directed by John Frankenheimer, a still-stunning mixture of old-studio technique and new-style TV-age hipness -- is fairly high on the list of movies that nobody should have been able to get made at all. The novel, by Richard Condon, was a great success but also widely taken for being unadaptable. In fact, George Axelrod, who did the masterful screenplay, has said that he was stymied with a concrete case of writer's block until the film's star, Frank Sinatra, cured him by calling up and saying that it had been a while and he would like to see some pages. (Axelrod was the film's co-producer, alongside Frankenheimer, so technically, he was Sinatra's boss, but let's get real: having Frank Sinatra call you up and tell you that he sure would like to see you flap your arms and fly over the Chrysler Building might turn out to be the cure for gravity.) It wouldn't be until the late 1970s that the mercurial Sinatra would gain control of the picture himself and pull it from theatrical distribution or TV broadcast until 1988. The reasons for this, mostly financial in nature, aren't altogether clear, but contrary to popular urban myth, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with guilty feelings related to the possibility that the movie anticipated the Kennedy assasination. (By then, Richard Condon had written a novel, Winter Kills, that was directly based on JFK assassination conspiracy lore, and that book was made into a movie, written and directed by William Richart and starring Jeff Bridges, the blighted production and distribution history of which would spur rumors and allegations related to the organized-crime connections of some of its financiers and the disinclination of Embassy Pictures to alienate its own connections in the defense industry.) But I can say that I remember finally seeing The Manchurian Candidate for the first time -- actually, the first three times -- in the spring of 1988 at the Prytania Theater in New Orleans, and that of all my experiences with movies that have been re-introduced to the public after a spell in the vault, none has been as far from disappointing as my experience with this one.

CHILDREN OF PARADISE (1945)

Marcel Carne's three-hour-plus romantic celebration of the life of the theater, as rich and satisfying as any epic-scale film entertainment in history, was made during the Nazi occupation of France, a time when the Vichy government imposed rationing and other restrictions on materials and did not permit the production of any movie intended to be longer than 90 minutes. (Carne got approval to proceed with his script only by pretending that the finished product would be released in two parts.) The production provided employment, and gave cover, to many Resistance members, who worked as extras alongside Nazi loyalists who had been assigned to the project by Vichy, smiling and nodding in polite conversation with those scumbags while memorizing their faces and imagining how they were going to look with nooses draped around their necks. (Legend has it that Carne dragged out the production towards the end in anticipation of the arrival of the Allies so that the movie could wrap in a free France.) This kind of big moviemaking is commonly associated with decadence now, but Carne's commitment to his elegant conception and vast canvas was strong enough that he plowed ahead, creating the illusion that he had much greater material resources than he had. Some contemporary "independent" filmmakers who think they're demonstrating their own artistic integrity when they can't bother to focus the camera properly ought to be made to sit through this movie and then handed ritual seppeku blades, in trust that they'll do the right thing.

JAWS (1975)

I was eight years old. She was two: this was 1977, the first year she was "officially" re-released after her debut in 1975, to compete with this slutty new number on the block named Star Wars. A lot of the kids I knew were all excited about the new girl, and couldn't understand why I was so excited about the chance that I might get to see some old hag who everybody had been talking about for a couple of years, but I had done some asking around, and everything I discovered seemed to confirm that the new girl didn't have a shark. And I had been fascinated by the thought of Jaws for, it seemed, my whole life; it seemed that, for as long as I could remember, I'd heard people talking about her in vague, soft whispers. I knew that I was supposed to be too young for her, because I'd spent so many hours -- yes, hours -- lying on my belly looking at the newspaper ads, and gazing at that special box that read, "May Be Too Intense for Younger Children." (As the Mad magazine parody pointed out, putting that line in the ads as a means of keeping kids out of the theaters was like trying to keep ants away from a picnic by pouring sugar on the ground.) Ultimately, I got to see it because the Disney cartoon The Rescuers was also playing at McComb, Mississipp's only two-screen theater -- McComb, Mississippi's only movie theater -- and because my mom decided that she'd rather be getting her hair done and shooting shit with the girls for those two hours than sitting next to me watching Bob Newhart and Eva Gabor lend their voices to the characters of a couple of mice. After I got home -- following a very awkward car ride during which I, still in a state of shock, deflected my mom's questions about the movie she thought I'd seen with a series of "Hah?"s -- I would go through many stacks of white typing paper trying to adapt the movie to comic-strip form, in much the way that Hunter Thompson, I would read later, had spent his youth copying pages of Hemingway and Fitzgerald longhand, so that he could feel their prose rhythms coursing through his fingers. It was the closest I had come at that time to writing a movie a love letter. In retrospect, she probably thought I was kind of goofy, if she thought of me at all. I was just one of millions of boys staring at her with my eyes and mouth wide open, I know that. And in the years since -- Christ, in the decades since -- I've known a lot of movies that were smarter, sweeter, more generous, more mature, more beautiful, and had more to teach me about the world. But you never forget the first one. This year she turned thirty-three, and it would be an understatement to say that she still looks good for her age. I expect that, if I'm still around when she's sixty-six, I'll still want to drink her bath water.

Click Here For More Thanks From Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Phil Nugent

Our 11 Favorite Romantic Moments in the Movies, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 21:30:00 GMT

First things first: before you all start sending in your complaints, take a look at the headline there. It's not "The Best Romantic Moments" or "The Most Classic Romantic Moments", and the American Film Institute was not consulted in the making of this list. These are our favorite romantic moments, chosen by us, the good people of the Screengrab. Romance is a very big part of what makes movies so central to our imaginative lives, and what strikes a person as deeply romantic is about as personal as responses get. Here are a few moments that got to us. Happy Valentine's Day.

OUT OF SIGHT (1998)

You have to figure that this movie would have a special place in the heart of any movie geek: the hero and heroine first detect a spark between them while talking about movies. The fact that they're having that conversation while holed up in the trunk of a car after one of them has taken the other hostage in the course of a prison break...well, let's call that the "meet cute", an essential part of any story that you look forward to telling the grandchildren someday. That scene lights the fuse that spreads out into a smooth hot glow in this scene, the one where George Clooney officially became a movie star and the repository of our best fantasy hopes on the big screen. As for Jennifer Lopez, well, let's just say that if she had retired from the screen to enter a nunnery or marry the Prince of Monaco immediately after shooting this movie, we'd still be driving ourselves crazy wondering what we'd all missed out on.

BLUE VELVET (1986)

Some believe that David Lynch's greatest movie is so deeply encased in something called "irony" that it is devoid of true feeling and honest emotion. These worthies must have been on an extended jujubee break in the lobby during the dance scene, with Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern trancing out to the unearthly sound of Julee Cruise performing the Lynch-Angelo Badalamenti song "Mysteries of Love." If anything, Lynch's Pop distancing makes it possible for the viewer to appreciate how ridiculous romantic love can seem to the observer, and also to recognize how little that matters in relation to the way it make you feel. Or as that great romantic poet Jerry Lee Lewis once put it, "I laughed at love 'cause I thought it was funny. You came along and you moved me, honey..."

TRULY, MADLY, DEEPLY (1991)

Juliet Stevenson was happy before the movie started, because she was with Alan Rickman, but then he went and died on her, and she became just miserable. It got so bad that Alan Rickman had to come back to comfort her, and she was happy again for a while, but then she got confused because she met another guy who, though perhaps not measuring up to Alan Rickman in many respects, did have the clear home-field advantage of still being alive, and so Alan Rickman, who is sensitive about these things, finally told her that he thought he'd better leave, because he was prepared to put what was best for her first, and it would probably be better for her to get back to having close relationships with living people. All in all, you should maybe just watch the clip: they explain it a lot better than we do.

MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (1991)

Mike (River Phoenix) is a no-account hustler. He's a narcoleptic, unable even to control whether he stays conscious. He's got nobody, no home, and in all likelihood, not much future beyond the point at which the movie stops. But he is a romantic hero, because he loves unconditionally, asking only that the undeserving object of his love treat him with a little respect when he has to ask him a direct question: "What am I to you?"

McCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)

Love does a job on people. Consider the case of John McCabe (Warren Beatty), frontier enterpeneur in partnership with the whore and brothel keeper Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie), who has the misfortune to be in love with a woman who he brought to the territory in order to profit from her selling herself to any client ambitious enough to get into bed with her. Believing that "If a man is fool enough to get into business with a woman, she ain't going to think much of him" and lamenting that all his association with Mrs. Miller has "cost me so far is money and pain," McCabe retreats to his room and, alone, rages at the woman he feels doesn't see him: “I got poetry in me. I do! I got poetry in me. But I ain’t gonna put it down on paper. I ain’t no educated man. I got sense enough not to try.” Delivered by one of the sexiest male movie stars of his generation, the speech may in fact be one of the most poetic of all depictions in movies of the ability of romantic frustration to make any of us feel pathetically inarticulate.

LA JETÉE (1962)

It is often said of people in love that the world only seems to exist, that things only seem to come to life, when they are with the people they love. In experimental filmmaker Chris Marker’s brilliant, haunting narrative masterpiece La Jetée, that notion is made visually explicit, in one of the most memorable sequences in all of film history. It’s a moment of delicate beauty that manages to be not only an iconic piece of filmmaking but a moment of breathtaking tenderness and romance, as well. The film (upon which Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys was based) is in fact a series of still photographs, telling the story of a world devastated by nuclear warfare, and the attempt of a group of survivors to travel back in time searching for an answer, any answer, to their dire predicament. The man that is chosen as the time traveler, played by Davos Hanich, is haunted by a vague visual memory that will assume grave importance when he arrives in the present day, but through it all, the story is told only through a compelling voice-over narration and Marker’s exquisitely paced still photographs. Except for one moment. In the latter half of the film, Hanich gazes down at the face of the woman he loves (played by the beautiful Hélène Chatelain) and, almost imperceptibly at first, and then clearly like breaking through water, her face begins to move, and she blinks, in the movie’s only filmed sequence. It’s not only a tremendously effective piece of direction, but one of the most moving, romantic moments in cinema.

— Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 2.