Imagine the Sound (1981)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Imagine the Sound (1981) – R. Mann

If you like free jazz, then this one is for you.  It isn’t your typical talking head doco but instead full of complete performances interspersed with brief Q&A sessions with the players (who offer some deep and intriguing bits of wisdom).  Of course, the quality of any investigation such as this depends on the players.  Here, director Ron Mann was able to obtain participation by pianist Cecil Taylor, saxophonist Archie Shepp, pianist Paul Bley, and trumpeter Bill Dixon (sadly they do not play together). They are no slouches for sure but of course we feel the pain of the absence of several major figures of the movement: Coltrane (dead), Ayler (dead), Dolphy (dead), Coleman (alive at the time), Don Cherry (alive at the time), Alice Coltrane (alive at the time) and Sun Ra (alive at the time). The list could go on.  The four featured players skew the film in a certain direction (more abstract and intellectual, less spiritual and emotional perhaps).  Ornette Coleman featured in his own documentary by Shirley Clarke a few years later.  In the end, Taylor offers the most intriguing performances and Shepp and Bley have the sharpest insights.

 

The Shout (1978)

 ☆ ☆ ☆

The Shout (1978) – J. Skolimowski

Cryptic, in the way that most films that seek to portray the more mystical aspects of Aboriginal culture seem to be.  Jerzy Skolimowski’s third British feature (after Deep End, 1970, and a failed Nabokov attempt) starts with a framing device – a cricket match at a mental hospital where Alan Bates recounts a fanciful tale to Tim Curry while they are keeping score.  As it turns out, Bates is a trickster figure in his own story where John Hurt and Susannah York play the protagonists, a couple living in a rural oceanside village who seem to be enjoying an idyllic lifestyle (aside from the fact that Hurt may be cheating).  Bates shows up after a church service (Hurt, an avant-garde composer, is the organist) and engages the unwilling Hurt in meta-physical discussion, subsequently following him home.  It turns out that Bates spent 18 years in an Indigenous community in the Outback (Australia) and has learned some spiritual magic, including how to release a shout that will kill all living things in a several km radius.  He carries a number of bones with him (and may use them to inflict punishment on his enemies) and he possesses the power to usurp another man’s wife (in this case, York).  As with Peter Weir’s films that engage with this culture (Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave), viewers may feel that there are ellipses in the story – something is elusive, a key to the mystery that occurs outside of what we see on the screen.  Here, Hurt does manage to vanquish Bates by smashing a rock – but the return to the framing story leaves things open-ended (Was Bates determined to be mentally ill and is he really? Is the story true? Has Aboriginal magic been used against him in the end? What the hell has happened in the end?). 

  

Mona Lisa (1986)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Mona Lisa (1986) – N. Jordan

Bob Hoskins plays George, just released from prison (and quite a few steps lower on the gang ladder than his Harold Shand from The Long Good Friday, 1980), and in need of work.  His old boss, Michael Caine, arranges for him to drive a high-class call girl, Simone (Cathy Tyson), on her dates in fancy hotels.  He’s too rough and Cockney but she buys him clothes to make him more respectable (basically an impossible goal). Although his wife has basically shut the door in his face, George manages to reconnect with his teenage daughter who he is sad to discover is the same age as some of the streetwalkers he sees on his nightly rounds with Simone. As a result, he wants to help them because he’s a good egg, after all.  But it’s so Eighties, right down to the Genesis/Phil Collins-soundtracked montage (“In Too Deep”) in the middle.  Eventually Simone trusts him enough to ask him to find her missing friend, Cathy, another young prostitute who has been beaten and subjugated by Simone’s old pimp, Anderson.  By this time, George is in love – and the film noir themes come to the forefront and carry us to the film’s violent conclusion.  Director Neil Jordan went on to greater fame with The Crying Game (1992) and Interview with the Vampire (1994).   

 

My Favorite Wife (1940)

 ☆ ☆ ☆

My Favorite Wife (1940) – G. Kanin

Reunion of the leads from Leo McCarey’s wonderful The Awful Truth (1937) although this time directed by Garson Kanin.  In the previous screwball comedy, Cary Grant and Irene Dunne agreed to divorce but gradually realised they still loved each other (after they have other partners in tow, of course). Here, playing different characters, Grant remarries after Dunne is apparently lost at sea – when she returns, on the afternoon of the wedding (to Gail Patrick), Grant finds himself wanting to (having to?) get out of his new marriage. That is, until he discovers that Dunne wasn’t shipwrecked alone for seven years but instead had hunky Randolph Scott for company (in his pre-Western days). Of course, Dunne and Grant are really in love and Scott and Patrick are doomed to lose out.  Thus, it’s a similar funny premise and dynamic – but somehow things don’t catch fire as they did in the first film.  Instead, Grant seems to be underplaying a bit too much in contrast to Dunne’s warmer glow; the pace also feels too slow for screwball (although perhaps the laughs are supposed to creep up on you).  At any rate, it’s a notch below the best of the genre.  If you haven’t seen The Awful Truth, by all means watch that first!

  

Tootsie (1982)

 

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Tootsie (1982) – S. Pollack

Of course, there is an inescapable datedness about Tootsie but this lies more in the fashions, music, cinematography, and art direction than in the gender relations at the heart of its plot.  In fact, the central conceit that Dustin Hoffman becomes a better man as a function of spending time as a woman holds up just as well today as in 1982.  This is precisely because the burdens of being a woman (unwanted sexual attention and patronising treatment by men, additional requirements for make-up and body maintenance, etc.) have not changed.  Hoffman learns about these things when he decides to dress in drag to land the part of a hospital administrator on a soap opera, going from Michael Dorsey to Dorothy Michaels.  Perhaps the only sour note is the implication that Jessica Lange, another actress on the soap who is in a relationship with the director who treats her badly, can learn something from the empowered Dorothy who stands up for women’s rights on the set (the problem is that it seems to take a man in drag to take action whereas the actual women here, including friend Teri Garr, are more submissive).  But aside from this, the movie is surprisingly good natured, even when Jessica Lange thinks that Dorothy is a lesbian or when the various available older men (Charles Durning, George Gables) make their plays for Dorothy and she/he wants to resist. We don’t get slapstick here but something more genuine.  Even Bill Murray, as Hoffman’s roommate, plays things straight with only a handful of witty one-liners (apparently improvised), a sign of things to come. All told, although I hesitated when the film began with nary a laugh in sight, sticking it out proved to be worth it for the wider arc and message of the story.  

 

The Rite (1969)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Rite (1969) – I. Bergman

Bergman teleplay that sees three actors interviewed by a judge in an unnamed country after obscenity charges are brought against them.  After an initial session with all three (Ingrid Thulin, Anders Ek, and Gunnar Björnstrand), we then see the judge (Erik Hell) interrogate each actor separately; in between these scenes we see the actors in pairs discussing their relationships. Although Björnstrand and Thulin are married, she seems to sleep exclusively with Ek who is in turn married to someone else (but separated). The three are suggested to be internationally famous actors yet each has their own neuroses that facilitate the awkward situation.  It is never quite clear until the end exactly what the obscenity involves (and even then, it seems a bit obscure) nor do we fully understand the motives of the actors in that final scene.  Bergman seems to be suggesting (again) that actors are unfairly persecuted in society and should be free to pursue creative expression even if (or especially when) it is threatening to others’ values – but he also portrays those actors as deeply flawed.  Although brief and admittedly stagebound, the film somehow grips you with the puzzle it slowly pieces together (and never really solves). 

 

Three on a Match (1932)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Three on a Match (1932) – M. LeRoy

Pre-code drama that shows us three childhood schoolmates (not necessarily friends), first as “types” at grammar school (the bad girl, the good girl, and the popular girl) and then as young adults who have transformed into Joan Blondell, Bette Davis, and Ann Dvorak.  They still fit the same type:  Blondell has been in the reformatory but is now a showgirl; Davis is a hard-working typist; Dvorak is married to a rich lawyer (Warren William), has a young son, and lives in a mansion. But Dvorak’s character yearns to be free from the shackles of marriage and motherhood (this is pre-code, remember) and soon we see her take up with a bad egg (Lyle Talbot), bringing her 3 or 4 year old son into squalor.  Against type, Blondell saves the child.  Alcoholism and drug abuse soon follow for Dvorak and when Talbot gets on the wrong side of the mob due to a gambling debt (led by Edward Arnold with a young Bogart as his henchman), he kidnaps the young boy to try to elicit ransom money.  It’s all pretty bleak, especially the shock ending.  Still, Blondell is her perky self and Dvorak inhabits the wasted girl well (Davis has nothing to do and Bogart gives only a glimpse of his later tough guy persona).  Worth a look, esp. since it clocks in at just over an hour and offers an eye-opening and lurid look at 1932.  The title refers to the famous superstition, of course.

 

Daughters of Darkness (1971)

 ☆ ☆ ☆

Daughters of Darkness (1971) – H. Kümel

Euro-horror that is less trash and more arthouse than most, with a dream-like visual sense and eerie soundtrack. A recently married couple visits a Belgian resort in the winter, finding themselves the only ones in the hotel until Countess Elizabeth Bathory (Delphine Seyrig) and her lesbian lover/assistant/slave turn up.  Of course, the Countess seems likely to be a vampire and a series of unexplained murders are currently in the news.  But the film is all cat-and-mouse with the Countess stalking the couple and the new wife discovering that her husband may be harbouring secrets (I’m not sure what to make about his strange call to his “mother” who appears to be a man in drag) including violent tendencies of his own. The movie moves slowly to its conclusion which seems inevitable until a sudden twist and epilogue.  Some haunting visuals adorn this finale.