Yakuza Graveyard (1976)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Yakuza Graveyard (1976) – K. Fukasaku

Appearing just two years after the conclusion of the five-film Battles without Honour and Humanity yakuza saga, Kinji Fukasaku’s Yakuza Graveyard shows a lot of stylistic similarities.  (His late controversial success with Battle Royale was still decades away).  Tetsuya Watari plays a rogue cop who feels more sympathy (and develops more of an allegiance) with the yakuza involved in a gang war than he does for the corrupt police force to which he belongs.  Again, it’s the yakuaza’s code of honour that appeals to him – although this doesn’t stop him (and them) from gambling, drinking, using drugs, and supporting prostitution.  They do take care of the women who are left alone when their husbands die or are put in prison.  Perhaps these obligations are akin to strictly economic (exchange) relationships rather than love (communal) relationships; the latter are reserved for the male bonds. Once bonded (even between cop and yakuza, as here), the “brothers” will do anything for each other.  Fukasaku’s style is incredible – he makes full use of freeze frames, jump cuts, and even some psychotronic colouring when necessary (Watari is drugged).  It isn’t surprising that boundary-crosser Nagisa Oshima has a cameo.  The film speeds along at a very healthy clip, spiked by violence, and although the plot is occasionally muddled, it isn’t hard to follow the central action.  At times, there is a resemblance to the films of Jean-Pierre Melville (also a master of the “gangster’s honour” genre) and therefore to film noir.  But truly the yakuza film (and specifically those of Fukasaku) are a genre unto themselves and definitely worth checking out.

My Dinner with Hervé (2018)

☆ ☆ ☆

My Dinner with Hervé (2018) – S. Gervasi

A biopic of Hervé Villechaize (played by Peter Dinklage) told on the eve of his death in 1993 by suicide.  The film follows a young reporter (Jamie Dornan) for a British magazine who is given the Villechaize assignment (in conjunction with a more important interview with Gore Vidal) as penance for erratic behaviour due to alcohol and drugs.  When we meet Danny Tate, he’s on the wagon and hoping to reunite with his wife and infant son (who left him after a drunken affair).  The Vidal interview is his chance to redeem himself but after his dinner with Villechaize takes a bit too long, Vidal walks out.  So, Tate returns to Hervé who has promised a great story.  Instead, it’s the promise of a debauched night in a white limousine and strip clubs in L. A. which is not exactly appreciated.  Dinklage plays Villechaize to the hilt but with a great deal of compassion (you can’t help but wonder about his own similar experiences).  Most of the film is told in flashback as Hervé tells his life story – with The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) and Fantasy Island (1977-1983) as obvious highlights.  I suppose I shouldn’t have watched an HBO film on an airplane, given the necessity of sex and nudity (especially in this story).  But I gritted it out.  As he tells his tale and confronts an ever more disbelieving Tate, Villechaize moves from self-aggrandizement and boasting to self-awareness and acceptance of his own role in his career collapse.  This is the same journey that the reporter also needs to take (and as this is based on a real episode in writer/director Sacha Gervasi’s life, one wonders whether he also resonated with Hervé as his character does).  Dinklage is absorbing here but the film still feels slight somehow – it takes place over just a day or so – and too pat.  I wish it didn’t end with Bittersweet Symphony (however apt).  A curiosity although not without real human feeling.

  

The Old Man & The Gun (2018)

☆ ☆ ☆

The Old Man & The Gun (2018) – D. Lowery

Robert Redford’s goodbye film and director David Lowery treats it as such.  One for the geriatric crowd, I guess, although it doesn’t seem too long ago when Danny Glover, Redford, Sissy Spacek, and even Tom Waits were in their prime.  OK, scratch that – it was long ago but we’ve all aged together.  But Redford is really old here, as a bank robber (based on a real story) who can’t give up the life of crime even well into his seventies.  (In fact, Redford is already 80 plus).  I selected this on an international flight, seeking something easy and indeed it was.  Not much of a challenge to any viewer.  We have Casey Affleck mumbling his way through the part of the police detective on the case (the film is set in 1981 which feels very nostalgic).  He’s in an inter-racial marriage which is interesting but not the focus here.  We have Sissy Spacek as the love interest.  We have Waits and Glover as accomplices. Waits gets to deliver a typical monologue but he’s gone before the film reaches the halfway mark. Keith Carradine is credited but missing in action.  Redford is really the focus and there are quite a few sly references to his movies and his younger self. It’s a bit of fun and rather wistful.  But I wouldn’t go out of my way to see it. 

  

Carmen Comes Home (1951)

☆ ☆ ☆

Carmen Comes Home (1951) – K. Kinoshita

It is rather jarring to see Hideko Takamine in her role as a comic floozy after knowing her beloved turns as a caring schoolteacher in Twenty-Four Eyes (1954) and as an often suffering romantic heroine in Mikio Naruse’s many great films of the Fifties and Sixties, especially When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960).  Yet, she pulls it off (including some songs), even if the film itself is something of a trifle (albeit the first colour film in Japan).  The plot sees a rural village (in the shadow of Mt. Asama, Gunma Prefecture) excited to discover that one of its departed residents, a dancer with stage name Lily Carmen, is soon to return from Tokyo in triumph.  Her father is not so sure she is really an artist (as advertised) and indeed it turns out that she is a stripper to the shock of many.  She returns with one of her colleagues and turns the small village upside down with her brazen antics.  It is a bit difficult to determine whether director Keisuke Kinoshita is laughing at these country bumpkins (including Chishû Ryû as an uptight school principal, also very different than in his many pictures for Ozu) or if he is passing judgment on the women’s behaviour.  It is probably the former (Carmen’s behaviour is excused because she had a childhood head injury!?!) and the film ends with a striptease show (with only suggested nudity – this is 1951) that feels a bit prurient. Nevertheless, the money raised is put to a good purpose (contributing to the local school, paying down a blind man’s debt and convincing his greedy landlord to return a harmonium to him), most leering men are ridiculed, and the girls merrily depart.  The film even yielded a sequel, but it isn’t a classic by any means.

  

Torn Curtain (1966)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Torn Curtain (1966) – A. Hitchcock

Better than Topaz!  Actually, the negative reputation for Torn Curtain seems pretty unwarranted to me.  Here we have a textbook Hitchcock film wherein the Master uses all of his favourite techniques to build suspense and generally succeeds.  Paul Newman is an American nuclear scientist who defects to East Germany. The first third of the film explores his relationship with his fiancée/assistant Julie Andrews, who he has neglected to tell his intentions.  Newman does act suspiciously but since he is the hero we soon find out that he is really a double agent, seeking to secure a formula (the MacGuffin) from an East German scientist.  The rest of the film takes place behind the Iron Curtain where Newman (acting very sullenly) and Andrews (basically given nothing to do) must “woo” the scientist, get the formula, and escape back to the West.  Of course, there are many roadblocks along the way (literal and metaphorical).  This is the film where Hitchcock famously wanted to show that (unlike in the James Bond films) it is actually hard to kill a man – resulting in a very protracted fight/death scene which is an incredible setpiece.  Hitch’s dry sense of humour may be subdued but it isn’t absent.  Pictorially, the film often looks great with a sly mix of studio sets, painted backdrops, and location shooting; for example, the museum scenes show the director toying with the audience’s perspective as Newman crosses from room to room.  All told, this isn’t one of Hitch’s best but it has strong family relations to a number of his earlier films (the setpiece scene in the theatre evokes both The 39 Steps and The Man Who Knew Too Much).  Worth a look if you are a fan.

Hollywood Story (1951)

☆ ☆ ☆

Hollywood Story (1951) – W. Castle

William Castle (producer and showman extraordinaire; known for House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler and a lot of B-quickies) made this not-bad noir mystery with reflexive overtones.  Richard Conte plays a New York producer who heads west to Hollywood and decides to make a movie about the unsolved murder of an old silent movie director (only 20 years earlier – so, around 1998 to 1999 for us!).  As soon as the word gets out, old-timers emerge from the woodworks and suspicious events start to happen.  Conte is solid and Castle keeps things moving briskly (the film is only 77 minutes long) so it feels a bit like one of those TV murder mystery shows – palatable but insubstantial.  In a nod (rip-off) to Sunset Blvd (1950), a recent success, Conte encounters a number of actual silent film stars (mostly unknown today but there is Joel McCrea!).  Julie Adams (love interest) and Richard Egan (cop) are good in supporting roles.  The three suspects at least have distinct personalities although the mystery itself isn’t really fleshed out.  Apparently, the studio that Conte takes over is really Chaplin’s old digs.  Have a look at Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon if you want to know about the real unsolved murders of the silent days!

The House on Telegraph Hill (1951)

☆ ☆ ☆

The House on Telegraph Hill (1951) – R. Wise

Valentina Cortese plays a Polish concentration camp survivor who adopts the identity of a friend who died in the camp in order to have a better life in San Francisco (the friend had told of a rich aunt who was caring for her young son sent overseas to avoid the Holocaust).  However, she soon learns that the aunt is dead and her attempts to connect with the orphaned son are spurned by the lawyers for the new guardian; however, when she travels to New York, she meets the guardian, Alan Spender (Richard Baseheart), who soon ends up proposing to her.  As a couple, they return to San Francisco where an unfriendly governess awaits them along with the son who soon warms to his returned “mother” (who he doesn’t remember).  Pretty soon, however, Victoria/Karin (Cortese) starts to suspect that someone is trying to murder her AND the son.  It could be the governess ... or the husband/guardian (who stands to inherit the fortune which was left to the son).  Director Robert Wise manages the production well but the script really lets him down.  Although suspense is generated by the possible threats against Victoria/Karin and ambiguity about whether she is just paranoid IS created, the fact that her identity theft is simply disregarded and has no implications for the plot at all (despite Victoria revealing that she is not really Karin to a US Major from the liberation team) is bizarre.  In other words, the film sets up a premise that is never fulfilled in the action.  All that said, the film isn’t a bad noir melodrama. 

  

Topaz (1969)

☆ ☆ ☆

Topaz (1969) – A. Hitchcock

Is Topaz (1969) Alfred Hitchcock’s worst movie? I suspect there were bad films in his early silent days but this does represent a turn for the worse after so many great films in the previous decades (I’ll have to rewatch Torn Curtain, 1966, soon).  Hitch inexplicably gave the lead, French spy Andre Devereaux, to Frederick Stafford, who comes across rather like a wooden Roger Moore – so all the good acting happens around him (especially in the third act in Paris where Michel Piccoli and Philippe Noiret appear). Leon Uris’s novel may have been foisted upon Hitchcock but Uris himself soon left the project and Hitch and Vertigo writer Samuel Taylor apparently wrote the script on the fly.  Maybe it shows – the film feels very long (with its three acts taking place in America, Cuba, and France) and some of its plot mechanics feel abrupt.  Perhaps that’s because Hitchcock never seems to care much about the MacGuffin (the secrets about the Russian nuclear missiles in Cuba) – as usual, it’s just a device to allow him to build suspense.  However, there isn’t a lot of suspense here.  Perhaps we worry that Devereaux’s contact (and mistress) in Cuba will be caught – but we don’t get much of a chance to know her (and during that time we are dismayed that Devereaux is cheating on his wife, spoiling his good guy image).  Perhaps we are invested in finding out who Columbine is (the French diplomat working for the Russians) but it takes a long time to get to Paris and the possible suspects aren’t introduced until that third act.  Nevertheless, this is still Hitchcock and he is still a masterful director.  Just watching how he sets up his shots, edits efficiently to provide maximum information to the viewer, and, of course, dazzles with some trick shots (Karin Dor collapsing into her purple dress) is worth the price of admission.  Just don’t expect anything on par with Vertigo, Rear Window, Notorious, Psycho, or even Marnie (1964).