COOL
HAND LUKE (2 hrs & 7 min, color, 1967)
A drunken loser (Paul Newman at his best), finding
himself on the chain gang, exerts a powerful influence over his fellow
prisoners that is measurable only in the most intangible of terms. Faced with the threat of annihilation he
transcends his cosmic despair and finds spiritual resilience he never knew he
had. Under the influence of growing
admiration and respect among his fellows, he becomes an unwitting role model
and leader – “a natural born world shaker”.
His saga is by turns disquietingly funny, heartbreaking, tender,
wistful, fiercely confrontational and oddly inspiring.
DARLING
(2 hrs & 2 min, b&w, 1965)
A London fashion model (Julie Christie) flits
promiscuously from pillar to post, coming off as a kind of bitch goddess whom
Christie makes us care very much about without ever dulling her fangs. The lively narrative of moral descent, under
John Schlesinger’s brilliant direction and Frederic Raphael’s super writing,
unfolds with style-plus, every scene terse and sharp. Dirk Bogarde is the sensitive intellectual
whose life she ruins and Laurence Harvey the decadent advertising tycoon who
does so much to corrupt hers. These
three star players have never been better.
DAVID
AND LISA (1 hr & 34 min, b&w, 1962)
Director Frank Perry and Screenwriter Eleanor Perry
(husband and wife at the time) made motion picture history with this
forty-carat diamond that still casts a resplendent glow into the dark side of
the human mind. David (Keir Dullea) and
Lisa (Janet Margolin) are two deeply troubled souls who meet at a home for
emotionally disturbed youth and find ways, over and beyond the limits of
therapy, to reach and help heal each other.
Almost every scene in the film invades our primal emotions. We are placed at once on the edge of calamity
and left there until the last few minutes.
DAYS
OF HEAVEN (1 hr & 33 min, color, 1978)
Writer/Director Terence Malick emblazons on our
memories the tragic intermingling of four lives. Three migrant laborers in the Texas Panhandle
wheat fields during the Wilsonian era – Richard Gere, Brooke Adams and a child,
Linda Manz (Gere’s sister) – become implicated in the mixed fortune of Sam
Shepherd, the wealthy land baron for whom they go to work. How loneliness, mistrust, alienated affection
and the struggle for survival consume their loves and labors is the essence of
a beautiful narrative, framed by phenomenal photography. A jewel of a film!
DOCTOR,
THE (2 hrs & 8 min, color, 1991)
A distinguished surgeon, who believes a doctor
should be detached emotionally from the patients, has his mindset about his
career reworked, when he contracts throat cancer and has to start taking some
of that detached medicine himself. His
experience also brings to light his deepest human flaws affecting his wife and
a terminally ill young woman he meets.
Based on an autobiography, it is a deeply moving tale of transformation,
under the sensitive supervision of Director Randa Haines and embellished with a
superbly nuanced character portrayal by William Hurt in the title role.
DOUBLE
INDEMNITY (1 hr & 47 min, b&w, 1944)
My favorite film noir, derived from a James M. Cain
novel and put together by the ingenious Director Billy Wilder. Fred MacMurray is an insurance salesman and
Barbara Stanwyck a seductive siren, who plot together to murder her husband and
collect on a fraudulent policy. We are
carried through the process of a man’s beguilement, corruption and ultimate
disintegration as a self-respecting human being. Edward G. Robinson gives one of his crack
performances as MacMurray’s shrewd claims manager, who smells mischief early in
the game. Thoroughly hypnotic!
DR.
STRANGELOVE, or HOW I LEARNED TO STOP
WORRYING
AND LOVE THE BOMB (1 hr & 35 min, b&w, 1964)
Stanley Kubrick’s absurdist portrayal of a nuclear
emergency! Sterling Hayden plays a
berserk Air Force commander who sends warplanes to bomb Russia. George C. Scott is a pushy Pentagon
general. Peter Sellers fills three
roles: a droll U.S. President, a cool, proficient British officer, and Dr.
Strangelove, a paraplegic ex-Nazi adviser to the President, full of spastic
jerks and slurring speech. Slim Pickens
is an outrageous U.S. bomber pilot.
Hyperbole though it be, this remains a living reminder that mad generals
and warlords are among us still.
Brilliant in all departments!
ET:
THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL (2 hrs exactly, color, 1982)
Steven Spielberg struck pure gold with his rapturous
fantasy fable about a twelve-ish boy (Henry Thomas) who becomes the solitary
protector of a dainty but genius-endowed extra-terrestrial separated from his
fellow space travelers on a visit to earth.
There is great dimension in Spielberg’s work. Mellow and reflective moments, visual
wonders, great humor, cliffhanging excitement, a struggle of cosmic
proportions, marvelous animation and special effects – “E.T.” has them all,
plus the score by John Williams, one of the finest ever composed.
ELMER
GANTRY (2 hrs & 27 min, color, 1960)
The sawdust trail is treated with gusto, fervency
and inspired imagination in Director/Writer Richard Brooks’ great award-winning
work, from the novel by Sinclair Lewis.
Burt Lancaster gives the performance of his career as a traveling
salesman, who insinuates himself into the work of a tent revivalist (Jean
Simmons) after whom he lusts and becomes both a boon and a liability to
her. Shirley Jones ratchets up the heat
as an old flame turned prostitute.
Revivalism collides with scandal and controversy, before the film
reaches its blazing climax. All along it
moves fast and probes deep.
ENGLISH
PATIENT, THE (2 hrs & 42 min, color, 1996)
Director Anthony Minghella, working from a novel by
Michael Ondaatje, gives us a cinematic mural full of restless, tormented and
dreamy people whose pathways intersect at tumultuous points. The setting happens to be World War II, but
the human struggles are timeless. Ralph
Finnes, Juliette Binoche, and Kristin Scott Thomas, among others, give us great
portraits of misplaced people, normally decent and harmless, teetering on the
edge in strange places and subject to the lowest common denominators of moral
conflict and blinding passion. A movie
of rare poetic beauty!
FACE
IN THE CROWD, A (2 hrs & 5 min, b&w, 1957)
In the 1950s nobody wanted to be told that the TV
medium was dangerous, hence this brilliant, high voltage film’s box office
flop. Director Elia Kazan is the master
magician who made it happen, along with Screenwriter Budd Schulberg, who first
conceived of it. Andy Griffith is a
dissolute deadbeat, who is discovered by a roving radio journalist, Patricia
Neal. First local then national
audiences get hooked on his sassy, cracker barrel humor, until he becomes over
time a destructive force that politicians as well as TV executives must contend
with. The movie deserves a rebirth!
FIDDLER
ON THE ROOF (2 hrs & 59 min, color, 1971)
Life in a small, poor Jewish settlement in Russia
circa 1905 is the setting for the magnificent musical, based on some Sholom
Aleichem stories, and brought splendidly from stage to screen under the
direction of Norman Jewison. The Israeli
actor Topol gives a commanding performance as the milk vendor torn between his
beloved traditions and the new freedoms toward which his three daughters are
inclined. The film ranges between the
ecstatically happy and the profoundly sad, between the charmingly funny and the
passionately serious. Adorable in every
respect!
FINDING
NEMO (1 hr & 40 min, color, 2003)
Nemo is a baby clownfish, whose father Marlin has to
travel all the way across an ocean to find him, after the son is scooped up by
a fishing boat for display in a fish tank.
This animated feature from Pixar and Disney, the best of the non-musical
ones I ever remember seeing, is swift, beautiful, frisky, exciting, soulful,
ever so funny and utterly charming. The dialogue and the direction are furnished
by Andrew Stanton and a delightful musical soundtrack is turned in by Thomas
Newman. The visuals are out of this
world. They do not make family fare more
pleasing than this!
FROM
HERE TO ETERNITY (1 hr & 58 min, b&w, 1953)
The setting is an army base in Hawaii just prior to
World War II. Burt Lancaster, Montgomery
Clift and Frank Sinatra give us no-nonsense portraits of pathetic low-rank
types with trampled dignity but a puerile sense of gallantry useful to their
country more so than to themselves. Deborah Kerr and Donna Reed also score high as
women who get the worst end of their men’s foolhardiness. Director Fred Zinneman squeezes every ounce
of pathos and poetry possible in movie terms out of the James Jones novel. The film agonizes, throbs and sings like an
extended eulogy.
THE
GODFATHER (2 hrs & 51 min, color, 1972)
Under Francis Ford Coppola’s towering direction
Mario Puzo’s rather pulpy novel becomes a metaphorical nightmare commentary on
the misuse of power. The Mafia-like
Corleones are a darker, more sordid version of an American dynasty. Marlon Brando shines as the aging Don and Al
Pacino is fantastic as the educated (at first independent) son Michael, who
slowly gets pulled into step with his father.
Class A acting is offered up as well by James Caan and Robert Duvall as
the other sons. What a gorgeous tapestry
Coppola weaves! And he misses nary a
stitch.
[To be continued tomorrow]
To
read other entries in my blog, please consult its website: enspiritus.blogspot.com. To learn about me consult on the website the
blog entry for August 9, 2013.
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