Saturday, March 10, 2012

 

“Here’s my hope that we all find our Shangri-La…”


By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.
With the publication of his novel Goodbye, Mr. Chips in 1934, a book penned by author James Hilton a year earlier, Lost Horizon, also began to garner attention from the public and soon would obtain the similar success of Chips. In fact, it became one of the first and best-selling “mass-market” paperbacks as well as one of the 20th century’s most popular and beloved novels. The story concerns a British diplomat who stumbles onto a utopian paradise known as “Shangri-La” — a civilization free from war and want, where its inhabitants are able to live long, peaceful lives well past the usual life expectancy. The title, “Shangri-La,” refers to the lamasery in the novel but soon was adopted as shorthand for any sort of utopian existence; Franklin D. Roosevelt even borrowed it for the nickname of the presidential retreat in Maryland (that we have come to know as Camp David).

Motion picture director Frank Capra read the novel while he was making his Academy Award-winning comedy It Happened One Night (1934), and vowed that Lost Horizon would be his next picture. Capra knew precisely whom he wanted for the protagonist of the novel: actor Ronald Colman. Colman wasn’t available, so Capra made Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) in the interim and when he finally cemented Colman’s participation he convinced Columbia studio head Harry Cohn to pony up a hefty $1.25 million to finance his production — the largest amount ever allocated to any Columbia film at that time. Beginning in 1936, the filming of the movie that was released to theaters 75 years ago on this date would run over that amount by more than three-quarters of a million dollars and though it would be another five years before the film finally recouped its initial cost, it also provided audiences with another outstanding work from one of the greatest of American film directors.

It is 1935, and in the Chinese city of Baskul, diplomat and foreign secretary candidate Robert Conway (Colman) has been assigned the task of rescuing 90 Westerners before civil war breaks out in the region. Conway manages to catch the last plane out along with his brother George (John Howard) and three disparate passengers: tubercular prostitute Gloria Stone (Isabel Jewell), fussy paleontologist Alexander P. Lovett (Edward Everett Horton) and Henry Barnard (Thomas Mitchell) — whom we later learn is the alias of fugitive embezzler Chalmers Bryant. The plane on which these individuals are traveling is hijacked by an Asian pilot and flown toward the Himalayan Mountains, where it runs out of gas and crashes, killing the man at the controls. The group is rescued by a mysterious man (H.B. Warner) who identifies himself as “Chang”; he and his men take the travelers to a lamasery known as “Shangri-La,” an idyllic paradise remotely separated from the outside world.

Perplexed by their surroundings at first, the members of the group gradually are enchanted by Shangri-La and find themselves becoming as content as its inhabitants — particularly Robert, who learns from Chang that the paradise was founded by a priest named Perrault, who accidentally stumbled upon the lamasery in the 1700s. Conway also is introduced to the de facto leader, the High Lama (Sam Jaffe), who is revealed to be Father Perrault himself! The High Lama announces to Conway that despite the longevity bestowed upon Shangri-La’s inhabitants because of its relaxing atmosphere (temperate climate, healthy diet, etc.) he is dying, and on the recommendation of Sondra Bizet (Jane Wyatt), a native resident who has read many of Conway’s writings, has decided that Robert possesses the wisdom and knowledge of the outside world to continue on as his successor. He then expires in a manner later described by Conway as “peacefully as the passing of a cloud’s shadow.”

The offer to remain in Shangri-La is quite tempting to Robert, who also is in love with Sondra, but there is dissension in the ranks in the form of brother George, who has been distrustful of Shangri-La since the moment he arrived — despite having fallen for young Maria (Margo), a resident who was brought to the lamasery as the survivor of an expedition in the late 1800s. George convinces Robert, who is still a bit shell-shocked from the High Lama’s passing (and is loyal to his brother), that the tales told to him by both Chang and the Lama are lies and that they have an opportunity to escape the confines of Shangri-La with the help of a team of porters if they leave in the morning (the remaining members of their party have elected to stay). Both Conway brothers and Maria experience several days of travel in grueling conditions and, succumbing to the elements, Maria falls face down in the snow and expires. George learns to his horror that what Chang had told his brother — that Maria was much older than she appeared and was “preserved” by the magical properties of life in Shangri-La — is indeed true, Maria’s countenance is that of an old woman…which causes George to go mad and leap into a ravine. Robert manages to continue on through the horrific weather to be rescued by villagers from a nearby hamlet.

In an epilogue to the adventures of Robert Conway, an explorer named Lord Gainsford (Hugh Buckler) relates to members of his club in Old Blighty that Conway’s experiences had been wiped from his memory as a result of amnesia but that the recollection of Shangri-La returned while Conway was returning by boat to England. Jumping ship, Conway obsessively made it his mission to return to the tranquil paradise, and Gainsford informs the club members that his ten month attempt to pursue Conway resulted in failure. But in the film’s final scenes, it is apparent that Conway “has found his Shangri-La.”

The characters of Sondra and Lovett are not present in Hilton’s original novel, but were added merely as romantic interest and comic relief, respectively. In the case of Lovett, the addition of the persnickety academic added a touch of humorous whimsy to what would otherwise be a dreary fantasy excursion; Horton — the silver screen’s embodiment of what was then known as the “sissy” — was a perfect choice for the role, and director Capra wisely let the actor improvise much of his onscreen business (including the scene with the lacquer box mirror). Horton’s rapport with Mitchell’s “Barney” Bernard also is priceless; Bernard refers to him as “Sister” and “Toots” before finally deciding to call Lovett “Lovey,” a nickname that soon is adopted by some of the children in Shangri-La as well.

Capra, as a rule, hated screen tests…and made it a point to develop the characters in his films around actors he already had in mind for the roles. But this wasn’t always set in stone; he tested both Louis Hayward and David Niven for the part of George Conway before deciding upon John Howard two days before shooting was to begin, and he cast the part of the High Lama twice before deciding on Sam Jaffe (the other two actors he had in mind, A.E. Anson and Henry B. Walthall, passed away before he could utilize their services). As stated, Colman was his first and only choice for the movie’s protagonist, Robert Conway (changed from Hugh in the novel), and though Colman was hesitant about Capra’s methods of film direction the two men eventually were able to form a rewarding collaboration.

The final cost to make Lost Horizon was $2,626,620. Its production history was a troubled one, which goes a long way in explaining why Capra went over budget and why ultimately his partnership with Columbia studio head Harry Cohn suffered a tremendous strain (Cohn’s insistence on edits to the film resulted in Capra’s filing suit against the studio that same year, charging “contractual disagreements”). Horizon’s snow scenes and aircraft interiors were shot inside the Los Angeles Ice and Cold Storage Warehouse, where the low temperatures wreaked havoc with the camera equipment; cinematographer Joseph Walker would discover to his horror that the extreme cold often damaged the film stock. The Streamline Moderne sets designed by art director Stephen Goosson had been constructed near the busy thoroughfare known as Hollywood Way, with the daytime activity forcing the production to shoot at night and accelerating overtime expenses. Other film locations included the Mojave Desert and the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and the cost of transporting cast, crew and equipment expanded the budget’s waistline as well.

There also were problems related to casting — Cohn hated Sam Jaffe as the High Lama (he thought Jaffe was too young and the makeup used to make him appear older unsuitable) and demanded that Capra replace Sam with Columbia stock thespian Walter Connolly. Capra succumbed to re-shooting all the Lama’s scenes (an additional expense was added in that Cohn also insisted on constructing an expensive new set to accommodate the switch), only to discover that Connolly-as-Lama simply didn’t work (Capra would remark later that Connolly was too hefty to play the part of a 200-year-old character who was supposed to be an ascetic). So Capra had to re-shoot the High Lama scenes upon the return of Jaffe and of the footage he shot, only 12 minutes of the Lama made it into the actual film. Overall, Capra’s insistence on shooting scenes using multiple cameras to cover multiple angles resulted in multiple zeroes being added to the final budget tally.

Capra’s “director’s cut” originally was six hours long, and though the studio toyed with the idea of releasing Lost Horizon in two parts, it was eventually whittled down to 3½ hours (by Capra and editors Gene Havlick and Gene Milford) for a 1936 preview in Santa Barbara, Calif. The audience reaction to that preview was disastrous (though in all fairness, it followed a showing of the comedy Theodora Goes Wild — a film Capra’s crew worked on during the delays in making Horizon) and Capra continued to hack away at his film, becoming more and more distraught in the process. By the time of its official release, Lost Horizon’s official running time was 132 minutes…and in its early engagements was promoted as a “roadshow release,” meaning that tickets had to be purchased in advance and that presentations were limited to two screenings per day. Capra would later argue that Cohn’s continued slashing of Horizon was perpetuated because the studio head wanted to guarantee more daily showings and generate the needed revenue for the expensive production. In its initial theatrical release, the critical response to Horizon was mostly positive despite its poor showing at the box office; the prestige surrounding the picture allowed it to snag seven Academy Award nominations (including best picture), winning for Goosson’s art direction and the best editing trophy for the team of Havlick and Milford.

Horizon only managed to pay for itself upon its re-issue in 1942, when it was re-titled The Lost Horizon of Shangri-La. Since it was being re-shown during wartime, Columbia cut a scene of Colman’s character drunkenly railing against war and diplomacy on the hijacked airplane — something the studio felt wouldn’t go over well with the pro-war sentiment at the time. A further re-trimming saw a slimmed-down version of the film in 1952 at 92 minutes, with the attitudes displayed toward the film’s Chinese characters muted (due to tension between the U.S. and China following World War II) and the “Communist” elements of the utopian society dissipated. The slicing and dicing of Lost Horizon over the years came back to haunt Columbia in 1967, when the original nitrate camera negative of the film has found to have deteriorated and no copies of the full length version of the film were known to survive.

The American Film Institute, beginning in 1973, conducted an exhaustive combing of film archives from around the world in an attempt to locate the missing elements. Their efforts resulted in the finding of a complete soundtrack of the 132 minute film, and all but seven minutes of the visual portion of Horizon. To compensate for the missing video, Columbia and the UCLA Film and Television archive filled in the gaps with freeze-frame images from the movie and surviving production stills, and the resulting product (which was completed in 1986) was made available on DVD in 1999. The disc, in addition to commentary on the preservation of the film, also contained an “alternate ending” which director Capra wisely chose to excise from the finished product (it makes the established ending less ambiguous with regards to Conway’s rediscovery of his paradise, but doesn’t quite “sync” with the rest of the film). Interestingly, in that same year that the AFI's restoration mission began, a musical remake of the movie made the rounds in theaters, produced by Ross Hunter (his final film) and starring Peter Finch, John Gielgud and Liv Ullmann. Despite tuneful songs by Hal David and Burt Bacharach, the production was an unmitigated disaster — its disappointing box-office earned it the nickname “Lost Investment” and film critic John Simon famously suggested that the movie “must have arrived in garbage (cans rather) than in film cans.” Despite its inclusion in Michael Medved’s The 50 Worst Films of All Time, the 1973 Horizon developed a kitschy reputation among moviegoers that a MOD (manufactured on demand) DVD of the film was made available in October 2011.

As for the original, critical acceptance of Lost Horizon is somewhat split in today’s quarters, with classic movie fans on both sides of the fence as to its merits. Speaking only for myself, the realist in me is inclined to dismiss Horizon because I know that the utopian society depicted could never come to pass, owing to man’s innate venality and stupidity. But the idealist in me has an equally powerful opinion, and finds that watching the film is every bit as idyllic as the paradise that is its subject matter; in addition, I love the performances (it’s my favorite Ronald Colman film) and the cinematography, and think screenwriter Robert Riskin is in peak form (Sidney Buchman also worked on Horizon, taking no credit for rewriting much of the High Lama’s dialogue) — it’s a shame that the movie’s problematic history created a rift in the fruitful alliance between he and director Capra. “In these days of wars and rumors of wars — haven’t you ever dreamed of a place where there was peace and security, where living was not a struggle but a lasting delight?” the movie famously posits in an opening title…and each time I visit the cinematic environs of “Shangri-La,” I respond with a most emphatic “yes.”

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# posted by Ivan G Shreve Jr @ 9:00 AM 3 comments

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

 

Just Don't Call Her Twinkle Toes


By Josh R
I have nothing against Darren Aronofsky, but I am sometimes given to wonder if he was held enough as a child. This is not to say that the writer-director of Black Swan, a grisly fairy tale set in the world of professional ballet, is in any way deficient as a filmmaker. On the contrary, he has always displayed an intuitive grasp of the mechanics of storytelling and suspense, a sure hand with actors, and a distinctive flair for the dramatic — his approach to mise-en-scène is visceral, exciting and uniquely his own. He is also (and this is not meant in the spirit of a put-down) a bit of a sadist. Above all, Aronofsky is a keen observer of human suffering, of the graphic physical variety. In Requiem for a Dream — by my estimation, the only film of his in which the bloodletting seemed genuinely gratuitous — there was a certain grim satisfaction in the way the main characters were essentially gutted like fish as a denouement to their battles with addiction. Even in The Wrestler, perhaps his gentlest film, the physically broken-down title character’s tortuous exertions in the ring were rendered with such bare-knuckled clarity that the viewer was left in no doubt as to the intense physical pain which accompanied them. The final scene — basically, a 10-minute coronary in progress — was as tough to watch as anything in Requiem.

There’s a certain kind of ethos at work here, and while the gore quotient can sometimes upset the balance of his films, I think I can see what Aronofsky is getting at. His films deal with the externalization of internal conflict — psychological torment which manifests itself in the form of physical pain. The wounds are a metaphor for something else, but the approach is very literal-minded; when Natalie Portman’s emotionally fragile ballerina is ripping the skin from her bones, she is literally tearing herself apart in order to prepare for the role of a lifetime.

This all goes to say that Black Swan is not recommended fare for the squeamish, or those who prefer fantasy-based drivel such as The Turning Point, which made ballet look very, very pretty, and ballet dancers look like shallow hedonists only capable of experiencing the big emotions — love, pain, loss, betrayal — at the high school cafeteria level. There’s nothing pretty, cute or sweet about Aronofsky’s treatment of his subject; if anything, being a member of the American Ballet Theatre corps de ballet often seems like one step up from life in a Turkish prison. If all the little girls who’d decided to become ballerinas after seeing The Red Shoes watched Black Swan afterward, their parents might have saved a fortune in toe shoes.

Then again, impressionable young women have been known to find a perverse sort of pleasure in pain (it’s the reason that eating disorders and small cutting never fall out of fashion), and Aronofsky knows exactly how to translate the kind of swoony, intoxicating hunger that fuels teenage fantasies of orgiastic self-mutilation into visual form. Portman’s pale, tremulous Nina is a promising young dancer in the corps de ballet. When the tempestuous prima ballerina (Winona Ryder, acting sufficiently crazy) is forced into early retirement, Nina is promoted to principal dancer and secures the coveted dual role in Swan Lake. The director of the company (Vincent Cassel), who is not above mental manipulation in order to bring the most out of his dancers, offers her the role with one proviso; while there is little doubt that she can embody the elegant, delicate White Swan to perfection, she must also find a way to convincingly inhabit the uninhibited, predatory Black Swan in order to keep the part. To pull off this coup de theatre, the repressed, emotionally stunted Nina must channel her darkest inner demons and invite them out to dance — to the point where she can no longer distinguish her own fevered hallucinations from reality. It’s less a question of life imitating art, or vice versa, than one of art and life becoming so inextricably linked that one can no longer exist without the other; she and the Swans have become one and the same. The performance of a lifetime cannot be far at hand, assuming Nina survives long enough to give it, and manages to do so without shedding any blood (hers or others) in the process.

There are intriguing elements to Black Swan, and they almost (if not entirely) coalesce into a very satisfying film. The underlying concept is basically the same as that of Bergman’s Face to Face, in which Liv Ullmann’s buttoned-down psychiatrist is driven to insanity by her own demonic, tormenting visions. Add to that a bit of All About Eve’s backstage skullduggery and the bloodstained shenanigans of De Palma’s Carrie, and you get a rather peculiar hybrid of arty psychodrama and gut-churning pulp shockfest. It’s not an entirely comfortable marriage — imagine if Holly Hunter started stabbing Harvey Keitel with a broken-off piano key as a means of alleviating sexual tension, or if I Know What You Did Last Summer featured a dream sequence inspired by the choreography of Pina Bausch — but it has its own kind of loony fascination, and is brought to life with such flourish that it still sends shivers down the spine at all the right moments. Visually, it’s the most exciting thing Aronofsky’s done to date, and grimly enveloping enough to make you mostly forget how nutty it is.

In case there’s any doubt on the subject, Black Swan exists very much in the vein of a director’s film, as opposed to an actor’s. Most of the characters seem to exist on a purely conceptual level — in other words, as literary constructs that make sense within the context of the film they’re in, but not as part of any larger reality. This doesn’t prevent the principal actors from making an impression; they’re not exactly flesh-and-blood people, but make for compelling figures nonetheless.

I’ve found many of Portman’s performances wanting in the past, but she’s very effectively used here. Her lean, anxious, haunted look, coupled with an air of seeming vapidity, is exactly right for Nina — an unformed person totally unequipped to grapple with the maelstrom of emotions funneling into her consciousness and fueling her metamorphoses from angel to demon. I’m still not sure how deep Portman’s talent runs, but it’s clear that she’s making a connection here — she understands what the role is supposed to be, and she’s up to the demands. Cassel was seemingly put on the earth to play villains, and strikes a perfect balance between smarminess and seductiveness; even while he bullies, berates and abuses his girls, you never doubt why they’d gladly follow him down the garden path to hell. It’s nice to see Barbara Hershey back in action again, even if her role as Nina’s overbearing, slightly unhinged mother is a tad underwritten to allow her to really go to town with it — it’s the one piece of characterization that could benefit from having gone a bit more over-the-top. The best, most interesting performance is given by Mila Kunis, bringing a feral sensuality to her role as the free-spirited rival dancer who may or may not be giving Nina the additional push she needs to send her over the edge. She’s a marvelously enigmatic presence — you’re never quite sure how much of her treachery is real, and how much is a product of Nina’s imagination (credit to the actress that she keeps you guessing right up until the end.)

If you really stop to think about Black Swan, you might conclude that it’s fairly ridiculous — it’s a testament to the element of showmanship Aronofsky brings to the proceedings that you don’t reflect on this until the film is over. He goes for the jugular without going out of bounds, and the film works, even when its disparate elements don’t always fit together the way that they should. It’s a close contest in terms of who’s the bigger head case — the director or his heroine — but as far as blood-splattered trips to Crazy Town go, this one has style.


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Wednesday, October 20, 2010

 

Arthur Penn: Lumiere and Company

By Edward Copeland
Ideally, you would have been reading my final Arthur Penn review, Target, today, but unfortunately the disc from Netflix was defective, so we'll have to wait even longer. However, as I was looking for something else on YouTube I stumbled upon a clip from the group project Lumiere and Company which Penn took part in but is unavailable for rental. Sure enough, his contribution was there. I'm not sure what the complete 1995 film is like (it barely played in the U.S. in 1996) but each filmmaker contributed mostly silent clips of less than a minute long to this documentary celebrating 100 years of film. Here is a list of Penn's co-directors and then his contribution. The others: Theo Angelopoulos, Merzak Allouache,Vicente Aranda, Gabriel Axel, John Boorman, Youssef Chahine, Alain Corneau, Costa-Gavras, Raymond Depardon, Francis Girod, Peter Greenaway, Lasse Hallström, Michael Haneke, Hugh Hudson, James Ivory, Gaston Kaboré, Abbas Kiarostami, Cédric Klapisch, Andrei Konchalovsky, Patrice Leconte, Spike Lee, Claude Lelouch, Bigas Luna, David Lynch, Ismail Merchant, Claude Miller, Sarah Moon, Idrissa Ouedraogo, Lucian Pintilie, Jacques Rivette, Helma Sanders-Brahms, Jerry Schatzberg, Nadine Trintignant, Fernando Trueba, Liv Ullmann, Jaco Van Dormael, Régis Wargnier, Wim Wenders, Zhang Yimou and Kiju Yoshida. Now Penn's clip:




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Wednesday, September 29, 2010

 

Arthur Penn (1922-2010)


Arthur Penn, like many of our greatest directors, accomplished many fine works, in his case on stage, screen and television, but one landmark film proved so extraordinary it will inevitably tower among the rest as those of us who write about film try to pay tribute to the man who died Tuesday night, one day after turning 88. In case any of you might be uncertain what that film might be, it came out in 1967, polarized critics and has sparked countless imitators and influenced many more ever since. Its title was Bonnie and Clyde.

Trying to list all the films — good, bad and mediocre — that came in the wake of Bonnie and Clyde and owe a debt to Penn would take up more space than a large metropolitan city's white pages, so I'll spare you the list. Still, it took a director with Penn's talent to turn Robert Benton and David Newman's screenplay about two famous Depression-era outlaws and transform into a work of art that seemed to play as something new each time you watched it. It was a chase film, a romance, a dark comedy, a slapstick comedy all while offering new statements on movie violence and asking questions we still wrestle with today such as who are bigger thieves: bank robbers or the corporations that own the banks? He gave us what arguably is Warren Beatty's best acting work, ably supported by superb turns by Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons and Michael J. Pollard. He managed to make a movie set in the Depression that plays as fresh today as it would have in 1967 while films made much more recently already seem dated.

Though, as I said in the beginning, one film alone does not tell the Arthur Penn story. He directed frequently on Broadway, most recently a revival of Larry Gelbart's play Sly Fox in 2004 starring Richard Dreyfuss, Eric Stoltz and even Professor Irwin Corey. He first directed on Broadway in 1956. He received three Tony nomination as director of a play for Two for the Seesaw (1958), The Miracle Worker (1960) and All the Way Home (1961), winning for The Miracle Worker. He also directed the original production of Wait Until Dark in 1966. He also directed the Broadway show that really gave life to the comic teaming of Mike Nichols and Elaine May. In connection with his theater roots, he served as president of The Actors Studio from 1995 to 1998.

Even before he began working on Broadway, he got his directing start on television on the many showcases for plays that flourished in the 1950s. He made his feature debut in 1958 with the story of another famous outlaw when Paul Newman portrayed Billy the Kid in The Left Handed Gun.

Four years later, he adapted his Broadway success The Miracle Worker for movies with original cast members Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke. Bancroft, who won the Tony as Annie Sullivan, repeated the win at the Oscars. Duke also won an Oscar and Penn received his first Oscar nomination as director.

Two years later, he was fired from the movie The Train and replaced with John Frankenheimer. The next year, he teamed with Warren Beatty for the first time in Mickey One. The year after that, Lillian Hellman wrote the adaptation of the Horton Foote novel and play The Chase which Penn directed Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda and Robert Redford in, but again had disatisfying results with studio meddling.

He received his second Oscar nomination for directing for Bonnie and Clyde and rounded out the 1960s with a third one for the joyous Alice's Restaurant, a loose and entertaining film based on Arlo Guthrie's epic folk hit that starred Guthrie himself.

The 1970s began with what I think is his second-best film, the great satirical Western Little Big Man starring Dustin Hoffman as a man torn between his lives as a white man and an unofficial Native American. It also reunited him with Faye Dunaway in a hysterical supporting role and featured Richard Mulligan, best known as Burt on Soap, in an awesome turn as Custer. He also directed one of the segments of the legendary documentary about the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Visions of Eight.

He re-teamed with Hackman for the 1975 detective film Night Moves and put Brando and Jack Nicholson together for 1976's The Missouri Breaks. In 1981, he made a favorite of mine, a real sleeper called Four Friends written by Steve Tesich. Hackman joined him again along with Matt Dillon for 1985's Target. He followed that with the 1987 thriller Dead of Winter and 1989's one-of-a-kind Penn and Teller Get Killed.

His final film projects were TV movies, an episode of a short-lived TV series and he was one of a huge list of directors such as Spike Lee, Liv Ullmann, Wim Wenders, Zhang Yimou, Michael Haneke, James Ivory, Ismail Merchant, David Lynch and many more, who contributed segments for a film called Lumiere and Company .

RIP Mr. Penn.


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Monday, July 30, 2007

 

Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007)




What a startling way to wake up in the morning. Just weeks after I wished the great filmmaker good wishes on his 89th birthday, he has lost the figurative chess game with Death. Still, Ingmar Bergman will live on forever with his remarkable body of film work. What worries me is how his stock has fallen over the years and how many younger film buffs have little exposure to his works. Sadly, not one of his many remarkable films made the final 100 on the list put together by The Online Film Community announced yesterday. Hopefully, in my just-waking-up haziness, I can do at least a somewhat reasonable tribute to the Swedish filmmaker.

Even though Bergman began making films as far back as 1944, the first feature that grabbed me and one of my very favorites, even though it's somewhat uncharacteristic of his later works, is 1955's Smiles of a Summer Night. In fact, I already had been planning a tribute to this romantic romp later this year to mark the 50th anniversary of its arrival in the United States. The roundelay of loves both thwarted and consummated bears resemblances to my favorite film of all time, Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game, but Smiles deserves its reputation on its own. In fact, as far as I know, Smiles remains the only Bergman film to inspire a musical, Stephen Sondheim's exquisite A Little Night Music which gave the world the song "Send in the Clowns" (though please ignore that awful, out-of-context Judy Collins version). Smiles though was a brief flight of whimsy as Bergman's filmmography turned more internal, concerned with issues of humanity and the soul in an often dreamlike way.

In 1957, two of these more meditative films (and two of his best) entered the world. First, The Seventh Seal, with its knight heading home from the Crusades (one of his many collaborations with the great Max von Sydow) and literally sitting down to a chess game with Death. On a more earthly playing field, an old professor memorably looked back on his life in Wild Strawberries on his way to a tribute. His film The Virgin Spring, which won the 1960 Oscar for foreign language film, later inspired Wes Craven's suspenseful film debut, 1972's The Last House on the Left, and everyone can see his influence on Woody Allen, for both good and ill. The 1960s also brought us Bergman's great trilogy on faith: Through a Glass Darkly; Winter Light and The Silence. The 1960s also marked a turn toward the more abstract which I'd be dishonest if I didn't acknowledge often failed to work for me. Persona and 1971's Cries and Whispers have many fans, but both left me bored silly.

Still, this period did offer some films that I did enjoy such as Shame and Hour of the Wolf. 1973 brought one of the first examples of Bergman making a phenomenal work for Swedish television and transforming it into a remarkable feature as well with Scenes From a Marriage, which even spawned a pseudo-sequel in Saraband, made for TV in 2003 and released as a feature in the U.S. in 2005. In 1983, Bergman made what he swore was his "last film" and what a great one it was. Fanny and Alexander, a semi-autobiographical film about two children in a large theatrical family under the boot of a minister stepfather. Even though he stopped directing features, he continued to work in TV and theater and wrote more autobiographical screenplays which he turned over to other directors such as Bille August's The Best Intentions and Sunday's Children, helmed by his son Daniel, and Private Confessions, which was directed by his former lover and frequent lead actress Liv Ullmann. He also wrote the script for another film Ullmann directed, Faithless.

Rest in peace, Ingmar.

To read The Washington Post obit, click here.


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Sunday, January 15, 2006

 

Winter Sonata


From Merriam-Webster's online dictionary:
saraband: 1 : a stately court dance of the 17th and 18th centuries resembling the minuet 2 : the music for the saraband in slow triple time with accent on the second beat

Scenes From a Pseudo-Sequel

By Edward Copeland
Ingmar Bergman will turn 88 this year and, despite his retirement from feature film-making, he just keeps going along. While he hasn't made a film for theatrical release since the exquisite Fanny and Alexander in 1983, he's continued to direct countless films for television and contribute scripts for other directors to realize. In 2005, one of those television efforts (alas, which makes it ineligible for Oscar consideration), showed up in American theaters. Saraband revisits the characters of Marianne and Johan (Liv Ullmann, Erland Josephson) from Bergman's great 70s work Scenes From a Marriage.

What's amazing to me is what relatively little notice Saraband received in the American press. It never played where I lived, so I had to wait for its arrival last week on DVD. It was worth the wait, because as Bergman approaches the wrapup of his life's story, he still has the power to captivate a viewer's heart and mind.

In Saraband, Marianne decides that she needs to visit her ex-husband Johan after decades of separation. She finds him living in a cabin in the woods with his son from a first marriage, Henrik (Borje Ahlstedt, living nearby with Johan's granddaughter Karin (Julia Dufvenius).

Marianne arrives to find a tense mess: Johan and Henrik don't hide their contempt for one another and Karin is divided between her loyalty to her father and her desire to pursue a burgeoning musical career.

Aside from a prologue and epilogue that has Marianne alone, Saraband is made up of 10 separate duets between the various combinations of the four characters — and it is riveting.

Ullmann is as luminous as ever and can express more with slight facial movements than most actresses can with full-blown Oscar-baiting speechifying. Josephson, who will turn 83 this year, still maintains his ability to hold the screen with an icy stare, a rare smile or expressions of fear.

The other half of the quartet (Ahlstedt, Dufvenius) are more than able to hold their own with their formidable acting elders, especially Ahlstedt who has a lot of IMDb credits, including Fanny and Alexander, but who has never registered with me before.

It's a shame we won't be seeing Saraband scooping up any Oscar nominations in an otherwise weak year, but don't miss the chance to watch it on DVD. The DVD even includes an interesting 45-minute behind-the-scenes look at the making of Saraband, where you can see the master Bergman at work.


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# posted by Edward Copeland @ 11:39 AM 2 comments

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