Breakfast at Tiffany's (1960)

Breakfast with Audrey


Early morning. A yellow cab glides along an otherwise empty Fifth Avenue and pulls over outside Number 727—Tiffany’s. A slim, elegant young woman emerges. Wearing a black, off-the-shoulder evening dress, with a diaphanous white scarf, huge sunglasses, and a pearl necklace, she carries a paper bag containing a pastry and coffee: Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Well, breakfast outside Tiffany’s.

Soon after the opening sequence of Breakfast at Tiffany's (1960), the young woman meets a young writer who is moving into the brownstone in which she shares an apartment with her no-name cat. “Tiffany’s,” she tells him, is where she goes whenever she gets “the mean reds.”
“The mean reds?” he says, “You mean the blues?”
“No. The blues are because you’re getting fat or maybe it’s been raining too long. You’re sad, that’s all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you’re afraid and don’t know what you’re afraid of.”

She is Holly Golightly. He is Paul Varjak, although Holly insists on calling him “Fred”—because he looks her brother Fred. But then she has her own way with everything: she wears a dress shirt as a dressing gown, keeps her phone in a suitcase, incorporates fragments of French into her speech (“quel beast”), and sports the longest cigarette holder in history.

Sriptwriter George Axelrod worked hard and long on Truman Capote’s slight but sharply observed novella about a homosexual writer and the sexy girl who lives below him. First, he worked with director Joshua Logan. Then, when Logan dropped out, Axelrod continued developing the script with John Frankenheimer. Axelrod gave Capote’s story a new spine, turning it into a love story. The heroine stayed the same, but the hero became a kept man. Axelrod was then able to retain much of Capote’s material. The part of Holly Golightly was offered to Marilyn Monroe—it would have been her third film with Axelrod; he co-scripted The Seven Year Itch (1950), and wrote the screenplay for Bus Stop (1956). But, Marilyn wouldn’t play Holly—she thought the part was too edgy.

Instead, it was offered to Audrey Hepburn, who was about as different from Marylin as it was possible to be. Already an Oscar winner for Roman Holiday (1953) and double Oscar nominee for Sabrina (1954) and The Nun's Story (1959), Audrey had director approval. She didn’t know Frankenheimer, who at that time had only made the relatively unsuccessful The Young Stranger (1956). So, Frankenheimer left the project—although he soon had another opportunity to work with Axelrod, on The Manchurian Candidate (1962), the film for which Frankenheimer is best remembered.

Audrey accepted Blake Edwards as director. Although Edwards went on to fame and fortune with The Pink Panther (1964) and the rest of the Inspector Clouseau movies, the elegant Breakfast at Tiffany's remains his best movie.

And what happened to the edgy story Marilyn shied away from? Audrey floats above the edginess—playing Holly Golightly as if she has no idea why men pursue her, or why they give her $50 “for the powder room.” The key to her playing comes in an exchange between “Fred” (George Peppard) and Holly’s “agent” O.J. Berman (Martin Balsam). At a party in Holly’s apartment, O.J. asks “Fred,” “Is she or isn’t she?”
“Is she or isn’t she, what?”
“A phony,”
“I don’t know,” says “Fred.” “I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so. Well, you’re wrong. She is. But, on the other hand, you’re right. Because she’s a real phony. You know why? Because she honestly believes all this phony junk she believes. I mean it.”

And, because Audrey makes us believe that she believes, Breakfast at Tiffany's is a delight, a charming New York romance that skates past all the possible traps—even the miscalculated Mickey Rooney sequences—to leave us with the feeling that we just enjoyed the longest drink of champagne we ever had, and that it was exactly enough.

John Bloomfield (2 September, 2002)

On Guard! (1997)

Swashbuckling Filmmaking at Its Best

Paris, France 1699. The flamboyant Duc de Nevers (Vincent Perez) breezes into fencing school seeking competition. He is challenged to a practice bout by the pushy commoner Lagardère (Daniel Auteuil). The two men fence, watched by France’s future Regent, Philippe d’Orléans (Philippe Noiret), and the supremely confident Nevers gets more than he expected from Lagardère.

After the bout, Nevers seems to find Lagardère everywhere he goes in the city. Admiring the commoner’s spirit, Nevers eventually hires him and even teaches him his secret sword stroke—the deadly “botte de Nevers”.

Nevers and Lagardère travel to Caylus castle. There, in the midst of snow-covered mountains, Nevers intends to marry Blanche (Claire Nebout), the mother of his baby daughter Aurore.

Nevers’ cousin, the scheming Compte de Gonzague (Fabrice Luchini), has other plans. Knowing that if he can eliminate Nevers, Blanche, and Aurore, he will become the heir to Nevers’ fortune, Gonzague sends his henchman Peyrolles with a group of soldiers to Caylus castle.

At this point in On Guard! veteran French director Philippe de Broca pulls off a virtually impossible feat: He gives us a totally preposterous scene—two master swordsman doing battle with a gang of assassins on the castle battlements while they juggle a babe-in-arms back and forth between them—and he makes it believable and thrilling.

De Broca’s made his first swashbuckling movie Cartouche in 1962. He also directed the cult hit The King of Hearts (1966). With On Guard! he demonstrates that he is still an audacious, confident filmmaker.

On Guard!was filmed in 1997, but inexplicably its US release was delayed until 2002. Based on Le Bossu, a popular novel by Paul Féval that was serialized in a newspaper when it was first published in 1875, it is one of that wonderful series of French heritage movies made in the mid 1990s.

It is less brutal than Patrice Chéreau’s brilliant Queen Margot (1994), less romantic than Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s The Horseman on the Roof (1995), and less elegant than Patrice Leconte’s assured, astringent Ridicule (1996)—but de Broca’s movie is just as vigorous and way more exuberant. Like Anglo-American Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers (1973), On Guard! is a full-blooded entertainment—the kind of movie that makes you hope was just as enjoyable for the actors and technicians to make as it is for its audience to watch.

The plot is vivid and melodramatic—it involves treachery, disguise, and revenge, an evil count, Italian traveling players, a hunchback, seventeenth century stock manipulations, and deadly demonstrations of the “la botte de Nevers”. The striking, agile wide-screen photography is by Jean-François Robin. The action, thanks to de Broca, editor Henri Lanoë, and stunt co-ordinator and fencing advisor Michel Carliez, is fast and furious. There is much fine acting. The ever-reliable Philippe Noiret is Philippe d’Orléans. Fabrice Luchini is a menacing presence as the ever-gloomy, evil Gonzague. Marie Gillain is the beautiful, sword-wielding, sixteen-year-old Aurore. Vincent Perez is dazzling in an all-too-brief appearance as Nevers. Relishing Lagardère’s cry, “If you don’t come to Lagardère, Lagardère will come to you!” Daniel Auteuil is by turns eager, spirited, resourceful, tender, and vengeful. And, as if that wasn’t enough, de Broca and composer Philippe Sarde use Pietro Mascagne’s beautiful Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana as theme music. This is swashbuckling film making at its best.

John Bloomfield (7 October, 2002)

Mimic (1997)

Approach Cautiously


The eerie credits of the 1997 horror movie Mimic—designed by Kyle Cooper, who also did the credits for Seven (1995)—unfold to the first dissonant cords of composer Marco Beltrami’s brilliant score.

In New York, epidemiologist Dr. Susan Tyler is shown a series of patients—all children struggling for breath—cocooned in a hospital ward. Her guide, Dr. Peter Mann, Deputy Director of the Center for Disease Control, tells her “Strickler’s disease was first diagnosed two years ago. We’re no better off now.” Outside memorial ribbons flutter from the railings of a playground. The CDC has been unable to find a cure or vaccine. Peter wants Susan to find a way to attack the disease’s carrier—the common cockroach.

Susan designs a mutant strain—the Judas breed. Her approach is a success. Cockroaches die. Children are saved.

But, the cockroach is resilient.

Three years pass.

At night, a terrified old man runs across a flat roof and jumps to his death. His pursuer pulls the body through a storm drain. Across the street, an autistic boy sits by a window, swathed in red light. He recognizes people’s shoes by their sound. He calls the pursuer, “Mr. Funny Shoes.”

Two young boys, who regularly capture specimens for Susan, bring a rare find. She identifies it as the Judas breed, although as she tells Peter, “They were designed to die. They are breeding.” Susan goes with the boys to the Delancey Street subway station—looking for roach egg cases.

She discusses her findings with a colleague. “So, you think your little Frankensteins got the better of you,” says Dr. Gates, “Evolution has a way of keeping things alive.”
“But,” she replies, “they all died in the lab.”
“Yes, Susan. But you let them out—into the world. The world is a much bigger lab.”

Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro is in the line of foreign directors—including Roman Polanski (Rosemary’s Baby, 1968), Sergio Leone (Once Upon a Time in America, 1984), and Luc Besson (The Professional, 1994)—who, in New York, have uncovered something different from native-born directors. And, what Del Toro has uncovered in Mimic is very nasty.

This world is brought to shuddering life by Del Toro, camerman (Dan Laustsen), production designer (Carol Spier—David Cronenberg’s regular production designer), and various creature designers, editors, sound engineers, and termite wranglers.

But, for all the movie’s technical bravura, the actors are impressive. Alexander Goodwin is bright and brave as the autistic boy. Giancarlo Giannini is his caring grandfather. F. Murray Abraham has non-judgmental gravity as Dr. Gates. Charles S. Dutton gives a trenchant performance as the transport cop reluctantly pressed into helping in the subterranean search. Jeremy Northam is entirely believable as the CDC scientist. And Mira Sorvino is commanding as the expert who knows more than anyone else about the rapidly mutating adversary.

Del Toro’s New York is a world of glittering nighttime streets, shadowy interiors, and dimly lit passageways. The humans are caught like insects in pools of light, while the nonhumans remain hidden, ominous presences. Del Toro finds striking ways to show this world—when Susan, dressed in protective clothing, first releases the Judas breed into the dark bowels of the subway, he shoots Sorvino from below—as if seen by the roaches—glowing red, like a goddess.

John Bloomfield (28 October, 2002)

Klute (1971)

Elegant Grunge


The two, pre-credit sequences of Alan J. Pakula’s Klute are set in the Gruneman household at a long table, shot head-on. In the first sequence, the table is full of family and friends. To the left, a man sits at its head; at the opposite end of the table, and the frame, is his wife. She catches his attention and holds up her glass in a silent toast. She smiles.
Pakula cuts to the second sequence, to the now empty chair at the head of the table—Tom Gruneman is missing. Mrs. Grumeman is in the same seat. The second head-on shot shows the almost empty table.

“Did you know the subject, Tom Gruneman?” a policeman asks John Klute (Donald Sutherland), who sits near Mrs. Gruneman.

“He was my best friend. We grew up together.”

Another friend, Cable (Charles Cioffi) stands to the left looking out at the night. The policeman asks Mrs. Gruneman about marital problems and produces an obscene letter found in Tom’s office. It is addressed to Bree Daniel, a call girl in New York City.
Then, the credits play over a tape recording of Bree’s voice, as she comes on to a john.

“Has anybody talked to you about the financial arrangements? […] Have you ever been with a woman before…paying her? […] I have a feeling that turns you on very particularly. […] Do you mind if I take my sweater off? Well, I think in the confines of one’s house, one should be free of clothing and inhibitions. Oh, inhibitions are always nice because they’re so nice to overcome. Don’t be afraid. I’m not—as long as you don’t hurt me more than I like to be hurt. I will do anything you ask.”

The credits end. Another head-on shot shows 10 women sitting beneath 3 huge images of woman’s face—a silver and pink positive image framed by a blue negative image to the left and a black-and-white negative image to the right. The women are being considered for a modeling position. Among them is Bree Daniel (Jane Fonda in her first Oscar winning performance).

This is how—with great elegance and economy—director Alan J. Pakula introduces his characters and sets up the poles of his story; the disturbed and bereft Gruneman home; the prostitute trying to change her life; the unseen, obsessive client with the tape recording; and the stoic Klute, about to start searching for the missing husband.
When Bree refuses to help him, Klute rents a basement room in her apartment building, and starts to follow her. But, he is not her only watcher, and she receives anonymous phone calls. Then, when Bree and Klute come to an uneasy truce, the world around them becomes seeder and more threatening.

Pakula made Klute in 1971. His second film, it was shot in the streets of Manhattan and East Harlem, in Central Park, in the Garment District, and at the docks, as well as in a studio on 127th Street and Second Avenue. And never has New York grunginess looked so elegant.

The movie was shot in Panavision—and you should watch the widescreen video or DVD edition, because Klute is one of the great widescreen movies. The framing by Pakula and director of photography Gordon Willis is superb. There are the beautifully tableaux-like opening sequences, the deep-red interiors of the night club where Klute meets the pimp Frank Ligourin (Roy Scheider), the cold blues and blacks of Cable’s office, and the cluttered clothesmaker’s workshop where Bree spins stories for a client. And, there are the often breathtaking shots of Bree’s apartment; for example, the moment when the red-haired Bree lies back on her couch in a vibrant red robe—a deep red pool in the middle of an otherwise completely black frame. This is one of the many beautiful images that grace the powerful and unsettling thriller Klute.


—John Bloomfield (20 May, 2002)

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2001)

Dracula Returns:
The most bizarre and arresting version yet
made of Bram Stoker’s much-filmed novel


Yellow credits appear against a black background. The first names the producers. The second reads, “based on Mark Godden’s “Dracula,” adapted and choreographed for Canada’s Royal Winnipeg Ballet”—so this is to be the record of a ballet.

The credits continue with the cast, the technicians. Then, there is a black-and-white image of a hand wiping a window—the director’s credit appears in yellow, the opening chords of Mahler’s 1st Symphony are heard. Through the window, blurry at first, a crucifix—over which the title appears in blood red, Dracula, the sub-title in yellow, Pages from a Virgin’s Diary.

Then, in black-and-white, characters are introduced in vignettes, as black blood streams down the images. It streams down handwritten pages—a vignette of Mina Murray; it streams onto flowers—Harker, her fiancée; it streams from the ceiling and a chandelier—Lucy Westenra; it streams onto leaves—Lucy’s mother; it streams onto a doctor’s bag—Dr. Van Helsing.

An inter-title quotes Bram Stoker—“There are bad dreams for those that sleep unwisely.” Lucy dreams. Black blood swims across a map of Europe from the East. Sleepwalking, Lucy glides to the window. She wonders, “Why can’t they let a woman marry three men? Or as many as want her?” She pricks her left index finger on a rose—red drops of blood in a black-and-white image. She smears the blood on a door jam. Behind her Dracula appears, twisting a long diaphanous scarf in his hands. Slowly, he approaches Lucy. He places the scarf against the back of her neck. And then. As mist wafts across the screen. He bites into her neck.

This is not your normal record of a ballet.

But, it is a musical—the performers are members of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, and the potent soundtrack is taken from Mahler’s 1st and 2nd Symphonies.

And, it is a silent movie—complete with titles and inter-titles. Shot on black-and-white Super 8 and 16 mm film, it is breathtakingly beautiful.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation commissioned director Guy Maddin to shoot a version of Godden’s ballet. The budget was $1.6 million (Canadian), the largest the cult director—Tales from Gimli Hospital (1988), Archangel (1990), Careful (1992), and Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997)—has worked with, but miniscule by Hollywood standards.

Maddin adds elements from Stoker’s novel—like the character of Renfield—while shortening the ballet from 110 to 73-minutes. He also adds dazzling tinted images, humor (Lucy’s mother lies in a bed with a glass-lid, with piping to a ventilator operated by two maids), and the bone-crunching sound of a head being decapitated with a blood-red spade.

Maddin said (when interviewed by the “Calgary News and Entertainment Weekly,” February 28, 2002), “My goal was to shoot it like a movie, with close-ups, medium shots and wide shots […] stressing the face more.” He convinced the dancers to allow him and associate director and editor, deco dawson, onstage to operate cameras, while moving among them. Deeply immersed in their characters, Zhang Wei-Qiang (Dracula), Tara Birtwhistle (Lucy) and Cindy Marie Small (Mina) give mesmerizing performances.

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary is the most bizarre and most arresting version yet made of Bram Stoker’s much-filmed novel.


—John Bloomfield (12 May, 2003)

Cold Mountain (2003)

A Compelling Drama from Anthony Minghella

Virginia; July, 1864. Attempting to end the siege of Petersburg, Union soldiers lay explosives under Confederate lines. At dawn, the explosives are detonated. Even before the smoke clears, they march towards the Confederate lines—only to find that they have walked into the huge crater produced by the explosion. They are at the mercy of the Confederate soldiers.

In the Hellish battle that ensues, Inman (Jude Law), a Confederate soldier, is wounded trying to save the life of a friend from his hometown, Cold Mountain.

Three years earlier, the Reverend Monroe (Donald Sutherland) brings his daughter Ada (Nicole Kidman) from Charleston to the remote mountain community of Cold Mountain in western North Carolina. There, through the agency of Sally Swanger (Kathy Baker), the elegant, well-educated young woman meets a shy young man—W.P. Inman. “If it were enough just to stand without words,” he says. “It is,” Ada replies.

Ada and Inman have barely any time together before the Civil War erupts. Only at the last moment before he leaves do they kiss.

Director Anthony Minghella’s epic movie Cold Mountain is built on their stories—one ranging over time, the other over space. Ada’s story of changing fortunes covers a 3-year span; while Inman sickened by the killing, becomes a fugitive as he begins the long trek from Virginia back to Cold Mountain.

Minghella, who also wrote the script—based on Charles Frazier’s literary bestseller—is helped by a superb crew that includes Australian cinematographer John Seale, veteran costume designer Ann Roth, the great production designer Dante Ferretti, and master editor Walter Murch.

The movie has a splendid cast. Renée Zellweger vividly plays Ruby, the young woman who has learnt to survive alone who comes to Ada’s aid. Brendan Gleeson is Ruby’s fiddle-playing father, movingly trying to redeem himself. Ray Winstone is compelling as Teague, who was once the main landowner in Cold Mountain, and who manages to gain control of the Home Guard. His militia includes a Bosie, a young man itching to kill, played demonically by Charlie Hunnam.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman captures the torment and weakness of Veasey, a disgraced preacher that Inman meets on his odyssey. Giovanni Ribisi is a mess of jangly nerves as a treacherous young man who lives with a coven of voracious women. Eileen Atkins is full of calm practical wisdom as a healer who lives with a flock of goats, and there is Natalie Portman as Sara, a desperate young woman whose husband has been killed in the war, whose baby is sick, and whose vengeance is pitiless.

At the center of Cold Mountain, is the love between Ada and Inman. Nicole Kidman, who has acted superbly in one movie after another since Moulin Rouge!, subtly reveals how Ada is sustained by her belief in Inman. And Jude Law gives his best performance as a haunted man afraid he may have lost any goodness that was in him, but who, nevertheless, hopes against hope that the kernel of feeling he has for Ada will be his salvation.


—John Bloomfield (22 December, 2003)

The Band Wagon (1953)

Broadway Babies

At a low point in his career, song-and-dance man Tony Hunter (Fred Astaire) returns from California and the movies to Manhattan and Broadway. He plans to appear in a light-hearted musical written by his friends Lily and Lester Marton (Nanette Fabray and Oscar Levant). But, they are also talking to Broadway’s hottest dramatic director, Jeffrey Cordova (Jack Buchanan). Jeffrey is currently starring in and directing his own adaptation of “Oedipus Rex,” as well as directing two other Broadway productions.

Lily and Lester think Jeffrey can direct anything—so does he. Jeffrey re-imagines their musical as a modern “Faust,” decides to direct it, and play the Mephistopheles figure to Tony’s Faust. To give it even more “stature,” he casts hot new ballet star Gabrielle Girard (Cyd Charisse) as the female lead. Tony hears these plans with increasing misgivings.

His first meeting with Gaby is a disaster. He worries about her height and about performing with a ballet dancer. She’s concerned about appearing with a legend and, when she nervously mentions she saw his movies as a girl, he takes it as an insult about his age.

In rehearsal, things begin to fall apart. Tony is at odds with Paul Bird (James Mitchell), Gaby’s choreograher, who has been hired for the show. Lester and Lily bicker—one exchange ends with her yelling, “We’re not arguing. We’re in complete agreement. We hate each other.” Jeffrey’s plans become ever more grandiose—the sets he demands won’t fit in the theater, or even in the alley outside.

The first half of The Band Wagon (1953) is a back stage demonstration of how not to put on a show. The movie’s director, Vincente Minnelli, brilliantly orchestrates the chaos of Jeffrey Cordova’s overweening vision.

After a disastrous out-of-town opening, the cast members hold a wake. They decide to stage the show Lily and Lester originally wrote—and, as Tony says, “It won’t be a modern version of ‘Faust,’ or ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ or ‘The Book of Job’ in swing time.” Jeffery agrees, tells Tony to take over the direction, and asks if he can remain in the show.

The Band Wagon is the most exuberant of Minnelli’s great musicals. Betty Comden and Adolph Green built their witty, literate script around songs by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz. The dynamic choreography is by Michael Kidd.

The movie's series of show stopping numbers, include “A Shine on Your Shoes,” danced on 42nd Street by Astaire and LeRoy Daniels; the beautiful “Dancing in the Dark,” in which at night in Central Park, Astaire and Charisse, both dressed in white, discover they can dance together; and the riotously funny “Triplets,” with Astaire, Fabray, and Buchanan as three angry stunted siblings singing, “We hate each other very much.”

Then there is the dazzling “Girl Hunt Ballet,” with its deadpan sub-Mickey Spillane narration. The Band Wagon is fifty-five years old, but it lives and breathes and gives us the great Fred Astaire with his most technically accomplished dancing partner, the infinitely long-legged Cyd Charisse.

[This review of The Band Wagon is dedicated to Cyd.]


—John Bloomfield (30 June, 2002)

Force of Evil (1948)

The Root of Evil
Corruption and Betrayal in Abraham Polonsky directing debut

To the North-West, Wall Street ends at Broadway where Trinity Church is dwarfed by the surrounding skyscrapers. The camera pans down. A voice announces, “This is Wall Street, and today was important, because tomorrow, July 4th, I intended to make my first million dollars—an exciting day in any man’s life.” The camera stops to present a bird’s-eye-view of the intersection where Broad Street becomes Nassau. The voice continues, “Temporarily the enterprise was slightly illegal. You see I was a lawyer for the numbers racket.”

The voice belongs to Joe Morse (John Garfield). In the lobby of his office building, Joe goes to the news stand, where today’s winning numbers are being discussed. One man comments that every Fourth of July many punters pick 776—“the old Liberty number.”

Joe is legal advisor to numbers racketeer Ben Tucker (Roy Roberts). There are twenty or thirty independent policy banks—they are called policy banks “because people put their nickels on numbers instead of paying their weekly insurance premiums.” Tucker and Joe aim to take over the biggest banks. Their plan is to fix the numbers at 776 on the Fourth of July. If the fix succeeds, there will be so many winners that the policy banks will be unable to pay. Then, Morse and Tucker will bail out the banks they want to take over—the others will go bankrupt.

One piece of the plan is not in place. Joe’s brother, Leo (Thomas Gomez), runs a small policy bank. And Joe owes him—he got Joe out of the slums and put him through law school. Joe wants to bring Leo into Tucker’s organization. But, Leo does not approve of Tucker and refuses.

Joe arranges a tip-off to the police. They raid Leo’s bank and take him and his staff to jail. In this way, Joe hopes he can make Leo close down on the Fourth of July.

Every character in director Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil (1948) is involved in the numbers racket. There are policy bankers, the people that work for them, and the people that bet with them. There are politicians who are being bribed by Tucker. There are the police who bust policy banks. And there are gangsters, like Tucker’s rival Ficco (Paul Fix), who are trying to force their way into the racket.

Polonsky gets fine performances from his cast, which includes Marie Windsor, as Tucker’s wife who is more interested in Joe than her husband, and Howard Chamberlain, as bookkeeper Bauer, who is so scared when Leo’s bank is busted that he wants to quit the business, and becomes an informant.

Gomez is wonderful as the deluded Leo who, in Joe’s words, runs his policy bank “the way another man runs a restaurant or a bar.” And there is a poignant performance by stage actress Beatrice Pearson. She plays Doris Lowry who works for Leo and who, when she hears Joe trying to talk Leo into joining Tucker’s organization, decides she wants to leave the bank. Pearson captures the struggles of a young woman who may look innocent and demure but, after being attracted to Joe, is prepared to walk out on him. Finally, there is Garfield, who has great intensity as the anti-hero who is proud to state, “I didn’t have enough strength to resist corruption, but I was strong enough to fight for a piece of it.”

Force of Evil was Polonsky’s directing debut—he was blacklisted in 1951, and did not direct another movie for twenty years. His rhythmic streetwise dialogue is striking, and his powerful, corrosive view of the numbers racket shows his aborted career was a great loss.


—John Bloomfield (August, 2005)

The Children of the Century (1999)

Literary Lioness

A printer selects letters and adds them to a print block, as the credits for The Children of the Century begin. He spreads rich black ink onto a plate. The presses begin to print “Les Enfants du Siècle.” We see the book’s text and hear its author Alfred de Musset’s voice, “We were born into a world in ruins. The wars were over, leaving no glory or ideals to die for. Despair was our religion and scorn our only passion. Women dressed in white like brides and we, the young men, wore black like orphans and stared empty-hearted at them, blasphemy on our lips. I was living in this wilderness, wrapped up in my selfishness, when suddenly, one day, I met her.” A woman pulls the book over the lower half of her face—she is crying. She is George Sand, and the book is de Musset’s account of their affair, which was the talk of Paris in the early 1830s.

On horseback, George discusses the book with Buloz, its publisher. She is flushed and angry. “It’s only a novel,” says Buloz. “No, a confession,”she replies, “which means telling the truth.” Buloz tells her she should write her own version of the affair.

The film flashes back to June 1832, when Sand was still Baroness Aurore Dudevant. Her husband, the Baron, is a drinker. She leaves him, taking their two young children with her. On arriving in Paris, she meets the editor of “Le Figaro.” He suggests she should write under the name Aurore Sand. “I want a man’s name. No one listen to women,” she replies. “I’m a writer, not a woman who writes.” So, she becomes George Sand.

She causes a stir in Paris’s literary circle—because of her close friendship with actress Marie Dorval, because she wears men’s trousers, because she smokes in public, and most of all because of her views on the position of women. She scandalizes the critics.

Then, she encounters the youthful, unstable poet Alfred de Musset. Soon they are embroiled in a passionate affair, which takes then across Europe to Venice.

With The Children of the Century, French director Diane Kurys turns from contemporary subjects to costume drama. Perpermint Soda (1978) is about two schoolgirl sisters, and Entre Nous (1983) explores the growing friendship of two women going through divorces. The Children of the Century also focuses on a developing relationship—only this time, it is between two of the moist flamboyant personalities of the early 1800s.

Benoît Magimel plays Musset, revealing beneath the poet’s cynical façade, his struggle to express his talent and fulfill his love for George, while threatening both with his insatiable search for sensation in debauchery and opium. Musset dresses like a dandy. His pink frock coat and sky-blue trousers stand out against the autumnal palate used by Kurys and director of photography Vilko Filac. The rich dark reds, browns, yellows and golds that swathe the exteriors and interiors in which the drama unfolds match the colors of Sand’s clothes. And, George Sand is played by the regal Juliette Binoche. She gives a beautiful performance as a woman who has left her husband, who is forceful in the face of hostile critics, who worries about her children, who is swept off her feet by her lover, and who survives.


—John Bloomfield (23 September, 2002)

Insomnia (2002)

To Sleep

A silver seaplane flies low over a spectacular glacier full of serrated icy peaks. On board are two police detectives from Los Angeles. Ostensibly Will Dormer (Al Pacino) and Hap Eckhart (Martin Donovan) have been sent north to help investigate a murder in a small Alaskan community. But their commanding officer also wanted to get them away from L.A. and an Internal Affairs investigation. As the plane flies on, Dormer is all business, studying the case, while Eckhart enjoys the scenery. The plane lands near the docks of the (fictional) town of Nightmute, which, they soon learn, is “the halibut-fishing capital of the world.” Nightmute is in the Far North and, because it is summertime, there is perpetual daylight.

Dormer and Eckhart are met by Ellie Burr (Hilary Swank), a young, smart, but inexperienced member of the Nightmute police force. Ellie studied Dormer’s cases at the police academy and she is anxious to learn from him. But the arrival of the L.A. detectives is resented by some of her colleagues.

The case involves a seventeen-year-old girl, found naked and dead. She was not been raped. But, strangely, her hands were scrubbed, and her finger- and toe-nails were clipped.

Dormer sets a trap for the killer, and with Eckhart and the local police, stakes out a cabin near the sea. The killer is lured into the trap. But, he manages to escape through a tunnel to the rocky, fog-shrouded beach.

Dormer continues the main investigation—but he becomes more and more fatigued, as he cannot sleep in this land of the midnight sun. Meanwhile, Ellie is assigned to investigate the botched trap.

Insomnia is a thriller from English director Christopher Nolan, who burst on the cinematic scene in 2001 with Memento (2000) and Following (1998). Unlike those two fiendishly clever, time-disordered thrillers, the narrative of Insomnia is linear, but the movie is filmed with a similar intensity.

It is based on a 1997 Norwegian movie—also titled Insomnia—directed by Erik Skjoldbjærg. First-time scriptwriter Hillary Seitz closely follows the action of the Norwegian thriller, but the feel of the two movies is very different. And this is largely because of the difference in leading actors.

In Skjoldbjærg’s movie, the visiting detective is Swedan’s Stellan Skarsgård, who appears in Good Will Hunting (1977), Ronin (1998), and The Glass House (2001). Skarsgård has a cooler, less trustworthy, presence than Pacino. Because of this, Skjoldbjærg’s Insomnia becomes an examination of a clearly flawed man. In contrast, Pacino is older, more explosive, more committed and full of regret. His Dormer is a brilliant detective, weighed down by fatigue, and torn by the knowledge that he has compromised his ideals. As a result, Nolan's Insomnia edges nearer to tragedy.

Nolan gets fine performances from the supporting cast. Hilary Swank reveals Ellie’s progression from eager admiration to the skillful use of Dormer’s lessons. Martin Donovan captures Eckhart’s mixture of loyalty to Dormer and self-preservation, as he threatens to make a deal with Internal Affairs back in L.A. Maura Tierney is sympathetic as Rachel Clement, the manager of the lodge where Dormer and Eckhart stay. And Robin Williams is creepily convincing, playing against type, as Walter Finch, the mild-mannered but self-promoting crime fiction writer, who was the confidant of the murdered girl.

Nolan and director of photography Wally Pfister capture the feel of constant daylight. The moody, unnerving music is by David Julyan. The crisp, precise editing is by Dody Dorn. And Nolan brilliantly stage manages the movie’s set pieces, which include a nail-biting chase across water on an endless succession of huge, floating logs.


—John Bloomfield (3 June, 2002)

Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002)

On the Right Track

A car emerges from behind a dusty bush. Maude (Ningali Lawford) yells, “Run,” to her 14-year old daughter Molly, while she grabs two younger girls by the hand. They all run. The car drives through the dust, between the runners and a fence. It cuts them off. The driver, Riggs, is a policeman. He gets out, and grabs one of the girls. Cramming her into the back of the car, he says, “I have the papers Maude. It’s the law. There’s nothing you can do.”

Riggs grabs the second girl and throws her in the car. Now, he comes back for Molly. He tears her away from Maude. As he tries to open the car door, Molly jams her feet against it. But it is useless. Riggs gets her in and drives away: the three girls inside, crying; Maude on her knees in the dust, wailing.

It is 1931, in Jigalong, a remote desert community in Western Australia. And Riggs (Jason Clarke) is right: It is the law.

Mr. Neville (Kevin Branagh) is Chief Protector of Aborigines. He is concerned about half-castes, and he has decided that Molly (Everlyn Sampi), her sister Daisy (Tianna Sansbury), and cousin Gracie (Laura Monaghan), should be sent to Moore River Native Settlement—far, far away from Jigalong. There, “Hundreds of half-caste children have been gathered up,” Neville says, “to be given all the benefits our culture has to offer,” and, incidentally, trained to become domestic servants and farm laborers.

Soon after their arrival at Moore River, the three girls see Moodoo (David Gulpilil), an Aboriginal tracker, bring back a girl who tried to escape. Moodoo brings back all the escapees.

Mr. Neville visits Moore River regularly. He inspects the new children—to determine if they are white enough to go to proper school because, as one of the other girls tells Molly, “they’re more clever.” Neville examines Molly, looking at the skin on her neck, and comes to a decision—“No.”

One Sunday, Molly decides to go home. While the other children go to church, she takes Daisy and Gracie with her—without food, without provisions. The tracker follows them.

Rabbit-Proof Fence is based on the true story of Molly, Gracie, 10, and 8-year-old Daisy, their escape from the Moore River, and their attempt walk home the more than 1,000 miles home, guided by the rabbit-proof fence that runs from the North coast of Western Australia to the South.

Director Phillip Noyce, back in his home country for the first time since Dead Calm (1989), worked from a spare, elegant script by Christine Olson—based on a book by Doris Pilkington Garimara (Molly’s daughter). Director of photography, Christopher Doyle, provides the hallucinatory, shimmering shots of scorched desert lands, that are accompanied by Peter Gabriel’s hypnotic, pulsating score (which was nominated for a Golden Globe).

Branagh reveals the real-life Neville—called “Mr. Debil” by the Aborigines—in all his scary, functionary reasonableness. Gulpilil is eloquent as the seemingly implacable Tracker—when Riggs abandons a three-week vigil, waiting for the girls to arrive, Gulpilil conceals his smile and delivers almost his only lines in the movie. “She’s pretty clever,” he says of Molly, “She wanna get home.” She is clever—and resourceful, cunning, and determined—and Everlyn Sampi gives a radiant, heart braking performance.


—John Bloomfield (27 January, 2003)

The Passenger (1975)

“People Disappear, Every Time They Leave the Room”

Unhappy with both his professional and personal life, television reporter David Locke gets a unique opportunity while on assignment in Chad. After attempting to make contact with rebels fighting in the desert, Locke returns to his hotel to discover that David Robertson, the guest in the next room has died of a heart attack. Locke decides to exchange identities. He drags Robertson into his room, switches the pictures in his and Robertson’s passports, and takes off with Robertson’s tickets and appointment book.

In London, on being informed of Locke’s “death,” his wife Rachel persuades producer Martin Knight to set out to discover what happened to the reporter.

Meantime, Locke keeps Robertson’s appointments. In Munich, he discovers that he has exchanged lives with a gunrunner—Robertson was dealing with the rebels that Locke attempted to contact in Chad. Continuing to follow Robertson’s itinerary, Locke flies to Barcelona—where he takes in Gaudi’s neo-Gothic Palacio Güell, and persuades a French girl to help him. Pursued both by the ghost’s of Locke’s past and by representatives of the government opposing the rebels with whom Robertson was dealing, Locke and the girl drive ever deeper into Southern Spain, until they reach Algeciras.

Michelangelo Antonioni directed The Passenger in 1975. The screenplay, by Mark Peploe, film theorist Peter Wollen, and Antonioni, is based on an Eric Ambler-like story by Peploe. It uses flashbacks to overlap the past and present, providing a meditation on the fragmentation of identity, while following the twists and turns endured by a man plunged into an uncertain, dangerous world.

Antonioni’s earlier work includes glittering genre films (Cronaca di un Amore, 1950: and La Signora senza Camelie, 1953), art films (La Notte, 1961, L’Eclisse, 1962; and Deserto Rosso, 1964), and international films (Blow Up, made in England in 1966, and Zabriske Point, made in the USA in 1970). With The Passenger, he fuses elements of all three types of film. The result rivals Antonioni’s two most impressive works—the two transitional films (Le Amiche, 1955; and L’Avventura, 1960) that he completed between the genre and art films.

Antonioni uses elements of the mystery genre, the beautiful location shooting by director of photography Luciano Tovoli—at one point his elegant roving camera produces an extraordinary virtuoso seven and a half minute shot—the sympathetic performance of French actress Maria Schneider as the girl, and the active presence of Jack Nicholson as Locke, to weave together the strands of the story and resolve the issues of identity in The Passenger.

The Rules of the Game (1939)

Everyone Has His Reasons

The Marquis Robert de La Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio) and his wife Christine (Nora Grégor) have a luxurious home in Paris. They have a château—‘La Colinière’—in the Sologne region, sixty miles south of the city.

And, they have complicated lives

Robert has had a mistress for the last three years—Geneviève de Marras (Mila Parély)—a fact that seems to be a secret to nobody, but Christine.

And Christine has several admirers.

First, there is André Jurieu (Roland Toutain). He is the pilot who has just flown the Atlantic in a record 23 hours. André is disappointed to discover that Christine, who inspired him to make the flight, is not at Le Bourget airfield to greet him when he lands. Second, there is Octave (Jean Renoir). He is André’s friend, he was Christine’s childhood companion, and he, too, is in love with her. And third, there is Saint-Aubin (Pierre Nay)—who just happens to be a friend of Geneviève’s.

A second chain of relationships involves Christine’s maid Lisette (Paulette Dubost), her husband Schumacher (Gaston Modot), who is Robert’s head gamekeeper at ‘La Colinière,’ and Marceau (Julien Carette), an incorrigible poacher. Completing this second chain—and linking it to the first—is Octave, who flirts with Lisette anytime that he finds her alone.

The various relationships evolve. Christine announces that her relationship with André is only one of friendship. Robert decides to leave Geneviève. However, then Christine sees Robert and Geneviève’s farewell kiss…

Meantime, Schumacher has written to Robert. He wants Lisette to live with him at 'La Colinière.' When Robert tells Lisette, her reply is, “Leave Madame’s service? Monsieur le Marquis, I would prefer to get a divorce.” Then later, at ‘La Colinière,’ Lisette meets Marceau and is attracted to him.

The complex relationships of Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939) are explored with clarity and economy. This is in part because of the script, written by Renoir with the collaboration of Carl Koch, which was derived from classical French theater—from the comedies of Marivaux, from de Musset’s ‘Les Caprices de Marianne’ and from Beaumarchais’ ‘Le Marriage de Figaro.’ And, it is in part because of the bravura camerawork.

The movie’s art director, Eugène Lourié, built a huge set exactly matching the exterior dimensions of the château of ‘La Colinière.’ This enabled Renoir to stage scenes simultaneously, in different rooms, and to reveal parallel actions with elaborate tracking shots.

The movie has two splendid set pieces. The first is a hunt, organized by Schumacher, which begins with beaters driving rabbits and pheasants out into the open—so that Robert and Christine’s guests can shoot them. It is a brilliantly edited sequence that is both breathtaking and brutal.

The second is the fête put on to entertain the guests after the exertions of the hunt. It begins with songs and sketches presented on stage in the great hall of ‘La Colinière.’ But then, when Christine leaves the stage with Saint-Aubin and is followed by André, it spreads into the audience. And, when Schumacher begins stalking Lisette and Marceau with his rifle, it spills into the corridors. The guests no longer know what is entertainment and what is real. Renoir’s direction in this sequence is astonishing. The action appears to be chaotic, out of control, but it is revealed with the utmost clarity.

The Rules of the Game switches between farce and tragedy, between servants and masters and, seventy years after it was made, remains a vibrant, exhilarating movie.


—John Bloomfield (September, 2005)

Moulin Rouge! (2001)

Spectacular! Spectacular!

Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! (2001) is an extraordinary object—a special-effects heavy, avant-garde rock operatic mixture of Camille (1937), French Cancan (1955), Les Enfants Du Paradis (1944), and Lola Montès (1955). It is an excessive work that provoked controversy. Some are enamored of its verve, its vibrant carnivalesque sequences, its extraordinary percussive editing, and its score ransacked from years of popular music. For others, the verve and vibrancy do not make up for confusing MTV-style editing, a thin story, and cartoon-like humor.

Moulin Rouge! mixes real people (Toulouse-Lautrec, Erik Satie, Nini-Legs-in-the-Air, and the manager of the Moulin Rouge Charles Ziedler, renamed Harold Zidler), with fictional elements—all borrowed. The hero and heroine’s story comes partly from Orphic myth, partly from Camille. The theme of putting on a show at the Moulin Rouge is from French Cancan. And the subplot involving the admirer of a magnetic actress being prepared to kill his rivals comes from Les Enfants du Paradis.

In 1899, the real-life proprietors of the Moulin Rouge installed the brightest, newest electric lights to reveal a revolutionary, raucous, bawdy nighttime entertainment to an audience in which the upper and lower classes rubbed shoulders. In Moulin Rouge!, Luhrmann and his colleagues do not create an accurate, but inevitably nostalgic, picture of the Moulin Rouge. Instead they attempt to produce the feeling of excitement that the 1899 Moulin Rouge audiences must have felt, when everything was shiny and new—and dangerous. And to do this, they use a throbbing mélange of recent songs, and the most rapid cutting you have ever seen.

The spectacular musical sequences include the first visit of Christian (Ewan McGregor), a young writer, to the Moulin Rouge, where images flash, figures swirl, curtains part, women in vibrant silks and satins, lift their skirts high, and the aural mix includes dancers and singers performing “Lady Marmalade (Voulez-Vous Couchez Avec Moi),” lines of men in tails singing the chorus from Kurt Cobain’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and the Moulin Rouge orchestra playing “Because We Can (Cancan).” The Moulin Rouge is, “a kingdom of nighttime pleasures,” in which, Christian and we, the audience, are massively overloaded. Our sensory experience is of a “big blooming buzzing confusion”—to use William James’ (1892) description of the new born child’s initial experience of the world. After this introduction, a mass of men look up—a sea of white shirts peaking out of formal black coats. White confetti sprinkles down. And above, Satine (Nicole Kidman) the star of the Moulin Rouge appears on a trapeze—her skin luminescent—singing “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend.”

[James, William. Psychology. New York, N.Y.: Collier, 1892]

Three Days of the Condor (1975)

Something Rotten in the Company:
Sydney Pollack's paranoid thriller from the mid-1970s

Joseph Turner is late for work. But, it’s not just Dr. Lappe, his boss at the American Literary Historical Society, who notices. On the South side of East 77th Street, a man waits in a car. He’s watching Number 55, where the Society is located, checking each arrival against a photograph, before crossing out a name.

Turner (Robert Redford) is seventeen minutes late. On arriving, he asks, “Anything in the early pouch for me?” “Nothing in response to your report,” Lappe replies.

The watcher in the car continues to wait. One employee, Heidegger, has not arrived. It begins to rain. At 11:22 am, a man with an umbrella stops by the car. They decide to wait no longer.

Inside the American Literary Historical Society, Turner collects lunch orders, then, to the consternation of the guard, slips out of a back door in the basement.

From the East, on the North side of 77th Street, a mailman walks towards Number 55. A man in a bulky black rain slicker approaches from the West. The mailman rings the bell. He enters Number 55 and guns down the receptionist, Mrs. Russell. The man in the black slicker shoots the guard. The man with the umbrella, Joubert (Max von Sydow), arrives...

Turner returns with lunch to find the front door ajar. He discovers everyone inside has been shot. Mrs. Russell’s cigarette is still burning. Turner puts it out. Then, he takes the handgun from Mrs. Russell’s desk.

Turner calls headquarters. The American Literary Historical Society is a branch of the CIA. Turner is asked for his code name—it’s Condor. He is told to disappear for two hours.

Turner goes to Heidegger’s apartment. He has also been shot.

Next time he contacts the CIA, Turner’s call is rerouted to New York Center—in the World Trade Center. He talks to Higgins (Cliff Robertson) and wonders, “How come I need a code name and you don’t.” Higgins does not reply. Instead, he tells Turner to go to the Ansonia Hotel on Broadway, and enter the alley behind it from 73rd Street. There, the Agency will bring him back in.

But, things do not go as planned.

A paranoid thriller from the mid-1970s—other notable examples were The Parallax View (1974) and All the President’s Men (1976), both directed by Alan J. Pakula—Three Days of the Condor was produced by Robert Redford’s Wildwood Productions and directed by Sydney Pollack. The script, by Lorence Semple, Jr. and David Rayfiel, is based on James Grady’s novel “Six Days of the Condor.

The cast includes Faye Dunaway as a woman from Brooklyn Heights, who is kidnapped by Turner but later assists him, and John Houseman as the CIA’s Mr. Wabash, who wants Higgins to clean things up. Von Sydow makes Joubert both menacing and urbane, while Robertson’s Higgins is never quite as trustworthy as Turner would like him to be.

At first, Redford’s Turner is a man who is not sure he likes being employed by the CIA—he can’t tell his friends about his work. Later, he has even graver doubts. “Do we have plans to invade the Middle East?” he asks Higgins. “No, absolutely not. We have games,” replies Higgins, “We play games. What if? How many men? What would it take? Is there a cheaper way to destabilize a regime?”

When Turner asks, “What is it with you people?” Higgins says, “It’s simple economics. Today it’s oil, right. In ten, fifteen years, food, plutonium.”

Three Days of the Condor was made in
1975—thirty years later, it’s still oil.


—John Bloomfield (22 March, 2004)

A Fond Kiss (2004)

The Trouble with Love:
Ken Loach’s moving interracial love story
set in Scotland

The present: Glasgow, Scotland. Casim Khan (Atta Yaqub), a Glaswegian-born Pakistani, collects his fifteen-year-old sister Tahara (Shabana Bakhsh) from high school. As he starts to drive her home, she is insulted by a group of boys from her class—one of them spits on the windshield.

Enraged, Tahara leaps out of the car and starts after them. Casim follows. The boys run into the school. The chase leads past startled pupils and teachers, through corridors and up stairways, before two of the boys are cornered in a classroom.

Casim tries to drag Tahara away from the boys. The school’s music teacher Roisin Hanlon (Eva Birthistle) restores order. She orders the boys to leave. She is sympathetic to Tahara—understanding that she’s been insulted.

Unfortunately, in the scuffle, a guitar has been broken.

The next day, Casim waits outside the school for Roisin—ready to give her a replacement guitar. When he discovers she doesn’t have a car, he offers to drive her home.

As they cross the city, Casim asks Roisin to duck down. Laughing, she asks why. He explains they’re passing a store that one of his relatives owns, and adds, “If they see me in the car with a strange woman, there’ll be trouble.”

It is clear Roisin and Casim are attracted to each other. He arranges with some friends to deliver a grand piano to her second-floor apartment. After their clumsily attempts to carry it up the stairs, Roisin is relieved to discover the piano still can be played. With one finger, Casim picks out the notes of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star."

He returns to the street but, before he gets into his car, he hears Roisin improvising on the tune. He whistles. When she looks out of a window, he invites her to go to the nightclub at which he is the DJ.

At the nightclub, Casim is annoyed when Tahara arrives with two friends. He makes her leave—but this is only a mild harbinger of the trouble that lies ahead.

Casim is disturbed when he discovers Roisin has already been married. And, his father and mother Tariq and Sadia Khan (Ahmad Riaz and Shamshad Akhatar) have arranged a marriage for him. They are even building an extension to their house in which they believe Casim and his bride—soon arrive from Pakistan—will live.

The Irish-Catholic Roisin, a much more recent immigrant to Glasgow than the Khans, feels betrayed when she discovers Casim is engaged. And then she has difficulties with keeping her job at the Catholic high school—because of her relationship with Casim.

The troubles caused by the couple are explored in A Fond Kiss, the fifth collaboration between veteran director Ken Loach and scriptwriter Paul Laverty. The movie takes its title from Robert Burns’ poem of lost love—

"Ae fond kiss, and then we sever;
Ae farweel, alas, for ever!"

When Loach makes movies, he does not rehearse with his actors and, when he films each scene, he leaves them unsure of exactly how their co-actors will react. With this method, he obtains fresh, often surprising performances.

His actors in A Fond Kiss unerringly reveal the difficulties caused for them by Casim and Roisin’s relationship. They include John Yule, as the headmaster who is pressured to dismiss Roisin; Ghizala Avan, playing Casim’s older sister Rukshana, whose own arranged marriage, with which she is perfectly happy, is threatened when Casim attempts to break off his engagement; and Riaz and Akhatar who show how Casim’s parents feel disgraced by their son’s actions. And Atta Yakub and Eva Birthistle beautifully capture the turmoil of feelings felt by Casim and Rosin, themselves.

A Fond Kiss is a complex, moving love story.


—John Bloomfield (December, 2004)

The Beautiful Country (2004)

Hans Petter Moland’s Modern Odyssey


Hans Petter Moland’s wonderful movie The Beautiful Country tells the compelling story of a young man, Binh (Damien Nguyen in a remarkable debut performance), who endures a tortuous journey, from rural Vietnam to Texas, in search of family.

In 1990, Binh, who is very tall and anxious to please, lives in a Vietnamese village. He is treated as a servant by his foster family. And he is scorned by the villagers, who say he is “bui doi”—“less than dust”—because of his mixed heritage: his mother is Vietnamese, his father an American G.I.

Binh’s odyssey begins when he sets out for Ho Chi Minh City, armed with little more than a photograph of a happy young couple—it shows a beautiful Vietnamese woman holding a baby and a smiling American, standing in front of a storefront.

In Ho Chi Minh City, Binh determinedly seeks information. He meets a young boy, Tam (Dang Quoc Thinh Tran), who has been told that he had a very tall older brother, and through him, Binh finds his mother.

She is overcome at meeting her oldest son. She tells him that she doesn’t know what happened to his father—he simply disappeared one day.

She finds Binh a job in the luxurious home where she is a domestic. But, when an accident occurs in the home, she believes Binh will be blamed. She gives him money and urges him to leave and seek out his father in America—on her marriage licence he has an address in Houston, Texas. She also begs him to take Tam with him.

They survive a voyage in a desperately overcrowded fishing boat. It takes them across the South China Sea. However, on arrival they are immediately interned in Malaysian refuge camp. In the camp, they are helped by Ling (Bai Ling), a young, beautiful, but bitter, Chinese woman. She survives in the camp’s harsh conditions by prostituting herself. Ling gives Binh money, so that he and Tam can escape from the camp—but Binh insists that she should go with them.

They bribe the camp guards and swim out to a rusting freighter, anchored offshore. They are only allowed to stay on board by giving a man named Snakehead (Temura Morrison) all their money and by signing away their future in America, before it can begin. The transactions are watched by the freighter’s Captain (Tim Roth).

The Beautiful Country is an extraordinary movie—a deeply moving story of hope maintained against all odds. It is beautifully photographed, in steely blues and greys on the freighter and lurid reds and yellows in New York, by Stuart Dryburgh, whose began his career as director of photography with three potent features—Angel at My Table, The Piano, and Once Were Warriors). The striking music is by Polish composer Zbignew Preisner.

The movie is full of wonderful performances. Nick Nolte is splendid as an aging Vietnam vet who has managed to come to terms with the troubled life he has led. Roth conveys the world-weariness of the ship’s captain, who has seen it all more than enough times. New Zealand’s Morrison (star of Once Were Warriors) is all business and power as Snakehead.

Bai Ling gives a great performance as a young woman who is all but dead inside, but who is able to find hope in Binh and his young brother. And Nguyen is outstanding as the young man who has every reason to give up his quest, but who persists and endures.

Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland, was hand-picked by the movie’s co-producer Terence Malik (director of Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, and The New World), who began developing the movie with scriptwriter Sabina Murray.

Moland’s work is exemplary. He manages the international cast and crew with great skill. And the scenes in Vietnam, in the Malaysian refugee camp, on board ship, in a hellish New York City, and in Texas are realized with great freshness and extraordinary vividness.


—John Bloomfield (January, 2006)

Heaven's Gate (1980)

The Johnson County War:
Outrageous Acts in the Name of the Law
in Michael Cimino’s Western Epic

Harvard, 1870. James Averill (Kris Kristofferson) runs through the streets to join a group of students. They are following a band playing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." The all-male, all-white students are the graduating class of ’Seventy. They are being watched, from first-floor windows, by elegant young women.

At the graduation ceremony, the class orator is James’ friend Billy Irvine (John Hurt). After the ceremony, the class celebrates in Harvard Yard. As an orchestra plays "The Blue Danube Waltz," the young women join the graduates in a swirling, intoxicating dance. Then, the women watch as the graduates battle for a bouquet of flowers placed high in the tree in the middle of the Yard.

Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate begins, like no other Western, with this extended look at the best and brightest—and most privileged—enjoying their privileges.

Then the movie shifts abruptly—to 1890 and to James, asleep on a train traveling to Casper, Wyoming. He has become Marshall of Wyoming’s Johnson County. He is returning from St. Louis with an elegant horse and buggy, a present for his mistress Ella Watson (Isabelle Huppert).

Further back in the train wagons are overflowing with poor immigrants from Eastern Europe. Before leaving Casper, James visits the Stockgrowers’ Association—a group of wealthy cattle barons, one of whom is the now-alcoholic Billy. The Association, led by Frank Canton (Sam Waterston), is unhappy at the ever-increasing numbers of immigrants who are encroaching on the grazing lands used by the cattlemen. James discovers that the Association is planning to raise a mercenary army and eliminate 125 people in Johnson County.

On returning to Sweetwater, the main town in Johnson County, James warns the community’s leader John Bridges (Jeff Bridges). And when he gives Ella the horse and buggy, he tries to persuade her to leave Johnson County with him. But, she is one of few immigrants who is making money—she runs a frontier brothel—and is reluctant to leave. Ella is also involved with Nate Champion (Christopher Walken), a man of immigrant stock who is working as an enforcer for the Association.

Heaven’s Gate was a commercial disaster on its release in 1980. Its original running time was 205 minutes. It was cut by 56 minutes and re-released, but the second version also failed. Now, the original version has been restored, allowing its rich complexities to emerge.

Cimeno tells the personal story of James, with his wealth, Ella, who is attempting to gain her independence, and Nate, who is caught between his origins and hopes and the escalating violence of his employers.

Cimino contrasts the actions of the privileged—James, who attempts to help, the immigrants, Canton, who tries to eliminate them (demonizing them as “thieves and anarchists” when he issues the list of 125 names), and Billy, whose education has left him unable to deal with the issues that confront him.

Cimino also exposes the social and political implications of the perceived threat the immigrants pose to the wealthy cattle barons. The cattlemen respond by taking the law into their own hands. Then they obtain sanction for their actions from the military (the cavalry) and from politicians (the State Governor and the President).

Heaven’s Gate also has extraordinary set pieces. "The Blue Danube Waltz" dance at Harvard is contrasted with the exuberant roller-skate dance that takes place in “Heaven’s Gate”—Sweetwater’s community hall. And the Harvard mock-battle foreshadows the savage battle between the immigrants and the mercenaries (with cavalry riding to the aid of the wrong side).

[Note: Abyone who doubts the movie’s historical basis should check out The Democratic Experience (Volume Three of Daniel J. Boorstin’s history The Americans, published by Random House).


—John Bloomfield (September, 2004)

Quick Change (1990)

Clowning Around

White-faced clown Grimm (Bill Murray) sits patiently on a subway train, holding some balloons. It is late in the afternoon.

The train stops at 42nd Street. Grimm fights his way onto the platform. He’s in a hurry. He gets to the bank at Park Avenue and 41st as the guard is closing the door. Grimm thrusts a very large red shoe in the door.

The guard says, “We’re closed Bozo.” Grimm produces a gun, and says, “I wouldn’t. And, it’s Mr. Bozo.”

Inside the bank, Grimm announces, “This is a robbery.” He is ignored—until he fires a shot in the air. He takes the customers hostage telling them, “The best way to get out of here is to stay calm. If they want proof that I’m serious, I’ll carve up the troublemakers first.” Then, taking the manager by the hand, he asks, “May I use your phone?”

The manager gives Grimm some advice—“Give up now. That’s the only door. There is no other way out, my friend.”

Grimm hands the manager the phone; “Tell ’em, anybody gets near this place, I’m gonna blow it up. If I don’t hear from the guy in charge in fifteen minutes, I’m gonna send your thumb out through the night depository.” As an afterthought he adds, “And thanks for calling me friend.”

Outside, the police turn out in force, crowds congregate, hot dog vendors rush to the scene. Police Chief Rotzinger (Jason Robards) phones the bank. Grimm tells him there are explosives in the building’s air vents. Rotzinger stops the men rappelling down the outside of the building to get to the vents. When they drop to the ground, the assembled crowd boos. Watching through a window, Grimm says, “God, I hate this town.”

Grimm presents his demands. “I want a city bus with a full tank of gas. I want a Harley Davidson XL 1000. I want a monster truck. And I want two jet ranger helicopters here on the street.” In return, Rotzinger expects hostages to be released—“At least give me the women.” “Get your own women,” is Grimm’s instant reply.

One of the helicopters lands in the street; Grimm releases a hostage—a whining man chosen by the other hostages. When the bus arrives, the hostages select a woman who has insulted the clown’s manhood. The others feel safer without her there to provoke him.

But, when the woman emerges, to the cheers of the watching crowd, she is followed by someone else—a ginger haired man.

In Quick Change, Murray gives one of his best performances as Grimm who, when asked by the guard, “What the hell kind of clown are you?” replies, “The crying on the inside kind, I guess.”

Trying to flee the city, Grimm and his accomplices (Geena Davis and Randy Quaid) encounter all kinds of obstacles. Road signs are missing. They are robbed. Their car is towed when they park illegally. They meet menacing gangsters (Stanley Tucci and Kurtwood Smith), an honorable taxi driver who speaks no English (Tony Shaloub), and an incorruptible bus driver (Philip Bosco).

Quick Change was co-directed by Murray and Howard Franklin in 1990. Murray also co-produced the movie (with Robert Greenhut), and Franklin wrote the script (based on a novel by Jay Cronley). Its fine performances and hilarious plot—in which Grimm’s simmering frustration as he tries to escape is mirrored by Rotzinger’s increasing exasperation as he tries to apprehend the clown—have given it a well-deserved cult following.


—John Bloomfield (5 April, 2004)

Laura (1944)

Deceiving Appearances:
Otto Preminger’s Classic Thriller Still Exerts Its Fascination

“I shall never forget the weekend Laura died,” intones an omniscient, disembodied voice over a dark screen. “A silver sun burned through the sky like a huge magnifying glass. It was the hottest Sunday in my recollection. I felt as if were the only human being left in New York.”

The camera moves across a lavish apartment. The voice continues—“I, Waldo Lydecker, was the only one who really knew her. And I had just begun to write Laura’s story when another of those detectives came to see me.”

The detective, Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews), strolls back across the room as Lydecker says, “I noted that his attention was fixed upon my clock. There was only one other in existence. And that was in Laura’s apartment; in the very room where she was murdered.”

McPherson opens a tall glass case and picks up an ornament. Suddenly, Lydecker’s voice becomes corporeal—“Careful there. That stuff is priceless.”

McPherson closes the glass door and enters the next room. There, in a huge bathroom complete with comfortable chairs and bookcases, he finds Lydecker (Clifton Webb), the noted newspaper columnist himself, seated in his bath, typing—his typewriter suspended across the bath.

McPherson questions Lydecker. Where was he on the evening Laura Hunt was murdered—killed by a shotgun blast to the face as she stood just inside the front door to her apartment? What was his relationship to the dead woman?

Then as McPherson is about to leave, Lyedecker asks if he can go with the detective. When McPherson asks why he wants to observe the investigation Lydecker’s reply is, “Murder is my favorite crime—I write about it regularly.” And when McPherson tells him he is a suspect, Lydecker responds, “Good. To have been overlooked would have been a pointed insult.”

The two men visit Laura’s aunt, Ann Treadwell (Judith Anderson). McPherson questions her about her relationship with Shelby Carpenter to whom she has been giving significant sums of money. Then, Shelby (Vincent Price), who apparently was going to marry Laura, appears from Ann’s bedroom. McPherson exploits the palpable tension between Lydecker, Shelby and Ann. All have there own concerns about Laura.

Otto Preminger directed the classic Laura in 1944, but it still retains all its power and fascination. In glittering flashbacks, the loquacious Lydecker tells McPherson the story of how Laura (Gene Tierney) first approached him, how he rebuffed her, and then later how he how he shaped and molded the glamorous, sophisticated and successful woman that she was to become—only to watch her become prey to the attentions of slick operators like Shelby.

McPherson becomes intoxicated with Lydecker’s vision of Laura. And it is intensified later, when alone he goes to Laura’s apartment, listens to her favorite melody (David Raskin’s haunting theme tune), drinks her liquor, and sits in one of her chairs beneath the huge framed picture of Laura—painted by one of her admirers—that dominates her apartment.

But nothing is quite what it first appears to be in Laura. The self-absorbed Shelby has another, more sympathetic side; the tough, calculating Ann has her vulnerabilities; the calm, methodical McPherson has a sadistic streak; at times, the dapper, cynical Lydecker can barely control his jealousy; and Laura is neither the sophisticate Lydecker describes, nor the simple broad that McPherson begins to suspect she may be.

Based on a novel by Vera Caspary, Laura is beautifully photographed by Joseph LaShelle and impeccably directed by Preminger. It is splendidly acted by Price, Anderson, Andrews, Webb, and Tierney who capture all the slithering ambiguities that lurk beneath the shimmering surface of this sophisticated mystery.



—John Bloomfield (July, 2004)