Hi, everyone. I hope you had a great holiday and stuffed yourselves silly on all sorts of poultry and side dishes. I’ve taken a bit of time off from the blog due to a bout with the flu and then the aforementioned holiday, but I’m back with a few new films I’ve taken in recently.
Trailerz
Tombstone (1993) – Dir: George P. Cosmatos (and Kurt Russell). Principals: Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer, Michael Biehn, Dana Delany
Tombstone is a perfectly acceptable Hollywood western. It lacks the grit and uncompromising vision of spaghetti Westerns like Leone’s “Dollars trilogy” or Sergio Corbucci’s The Great Silence (1968), substituting much of the violence and bloodshed depicted in those films for a romantic subplot between Kurt Russell’s Wyatt Earp character and Dana Delany’s travelling lounge singer character. What makes a good Western is a strong, charismatic lead, like Eastwood in the “Dollars” films or in Unforgiven. The lead in Western’s isn’t supposed to care about getting the girl. He’s not a romantic; he’s a killer, albeit one that operates with a code of ethics. Russell does well with the Wyatt Earp role in certain respects, but unfortunately the film vacillates between well-done gunfights and romantic mush between Russell and Delany that continually derails the proceedings.
Tombstone does have a strong ensemble cast (Russell, Sam Elliott, Bill Paxton, Powers Boothe, Val Kilmer, even Charlton Heston) and does get the general feel of the old West correct, which is essential for a believable and entertaining Western. Tombstone makes the one-horse town of Tombstone, Arizona accurately feel like the center of its resident’s lives. Everything looks right, as well, with dust and grime covering everything, saloons and brothels on every street corner and ornery characters lurking around every corner.
The acting is serviceable throughout, but Val Kilmer’s performance as Wyatt Earp’s friend Doc Holliday, though a bit hammy and over the top, was at least intriguing and fun to watch. Kilmer provides a spark that the rest of the good guys in the film, including Russell, simply don’t get across. There are scenes of power and some nice gun play in Tombstone, but unfortunately it’s a bit too glossy for this type of material and spends too much time doting on Russell’s love interest and not enough creating an engaging plot. C.
The Third Man (1949) – Dir: Carol Reed. Principals: Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles, Alida Valli, Trevor Howard
The Third Man is a brilliant detective story about an American (Joseph Cotten) trying to uncover the truth about his friend’s death in post WWII-era Vienna. Director Carol Reed captures the look and feel of a glorious city reduced to ruins due to the war and creates a perfect atmosphere for the chaotic story.
Joseph Cotten travels through the city shaking down his friend Harry Lime’s former associates and lovers, trying to get more information to determine the plausibility of the car accident that ended Lime’s life. After talking with Lime’s friends who were at the scene of the accident, Cotten starts to believe that everything about the story does not add up and figures out that Lime is actually alive. Cotten receives intelligence from British authorities (post-war Vienna had been split up into four zones, of which the British controlled one) that Lime is actually a wanted criminal, and his character, played by Orson Welles, steals the movie with a wonderfully cold-hearted exchange with Cotten.
Welles is eventually set up for arrest by Cotten and the British, and the pathetic end to his life, trying to crawl for freedom in the sewers of Vienna, is well done and very powerful. The only thing about the film that didn’t make sense was Cotten’s motivation for uncovering the truth and his devotion to Lime. Cotten’s character comes off as a straight-laced, moral guy, and though he was unaware of Lime’s criminal enterprises, he still seems like the kind of guy that would have sniffed something like that out or realized something was amiss. His detective work shows he is not the kind of guy to be easily duped, and yet he had no idea of his friend’s improprieties. Still, despite its very few flaws, The Third Man is a terrific picture. A-. (The Third Man won the Best Cinematography Academy Award in 1951, and was also nominated for Best Director (Reed) and Best Film Editing).
Feature Presentation
“Dekalog” (or “The Decalogue”), Volumes I-III
Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski
Principal Actors: Episode I: Henryk Baranowski, Episode II: Krystyna Janda, Aleksander Bardini, Episode III: Daniel Olbrychski, Maria Pakulnis
“The Decalogue” is a series of ten one-hour long episodes produced for Polish TV in 1989. Each apparently either corresponds with or contains elements of one or more of the Ten Commandments. Some films are easier to determine which commandment they match up with than others, but it’s truthfully immaterial. Each of the first three “Decalogue” films (in fact, all of them) are brilliant studies in the hardships of Polish society in Warsaw in the late 80s, and each of the films take place in a high-rise apartment complex in that city.
The first “Decalogue” entry depicts a single father, a man of science and numbers, training his young son in the art of the scientific method and using reason to deduce things. He buys the boy a pair of ice skates for Christmas, and he goes out late at night to test the ice on the pond adjacent to the apartments in which they live. The father’s faith in reason and science inadvertently causes the death of his son, who falls through the ice and drowns. The father, played by Henryk Baranowski, perfectly portrays a father in grief when he realizes what happened, and provides what is the saddest and most human scenes I’ve seen in “The Decalogue” thus far.
In the second entry, a young pregnant woman (Krystyna Janda) harasses a doctor about her husband’s medical prognosis. She’s been unable to conceive with her husband, and she’s pregnant by another man. If her husband lives, she’ll have to abort the child, but if he dies, she’ll keep it due to her previous inability to have a baby. The battle of wits between the woman and the doctor (Aleksander Bardini) provide the meat of the film, with the doctor hesitant to make any kind of prediction or prognosis despite the pleas of the woman, and the woman trying to get beyond the doctor’s professional façade and appeal to his humanity to get the information she needs.
Over the first three entries, the setting of the “Decalogue” has been gray, cold, and uniform. The high-rise apartments are drab and their lifts and hallways resemble hospital wards. For the material in question, they’re perfect. Director Krzysztof Kieslowski uses them as a character of sorts, and they work to actually make the character’s problems seem smaller than they really are. Each character’s pains and struggles dominate each of the individual episodes, but we know from previous installments that there are other folks in the same apartment building with comparable problems. This knowledge compounds the difficulties of the characters, and in each film we think back on the protagonists of the previous films and wonder where they are in the complex and how they’re holding up.
The third entry follows a family man who is summoned by a former lover on Christmas Eve to help her find her presumed dead husband. This third film is the most confusing in terms of motivation and isn’t as strong as the other two, but the man and woman’s journey into the middle of the night on Christmas Eve provides some memorable moments. The man, out of a misplaced but noble sense of duty, accompanies the woman to morgues, drunk tanks, and abandoned train stations while the woman alternates between fits of madness and calmness. The people they encounter in these moribund places on a supposed day of joy creates the strongest atmosphere of any of the films thus far.
The first three volumes of “The Decalogue” are a great work of human filmmaking. They don’t presume to be anything more than what they are; simply following a series of characters that live together in an apartment complex and the difficulties and hardships they face. Kieslowski doesn’t tell us how to feel about what happens to them and what they do. He leaves it up to us, perhaps with a little help from the Bible.
A
John Lacey
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