The Archers and Their Masterpiece Theat...er, I mean Cinema

The good folks over at The Movie Waffler have posed a question to those of us who care enough to listen.  Which director (or directors in my case) has had the best/most productive run/streak of great films.  Now one could easily make an argument that certain directors have never made a bad film and therefore their entire careers would constitute this run.  But even those directors of whom such a claim could be reasonably made, those with a small enough oeuvre, but a powerful enough one as well, to make such a thing possible, if not probable (Kubrick, Welles, Visconti), have a lesser film or two snuggled away in there to stop any ideas of a perfect game.

Sure, Welles' The Stranger is a very good film, but it is certainly no masterpiece, and therefore would break up any streak that would lead Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons to The Lady From Shanghai and Macbeth.  Now Kubrick, with Lolita, Strangelove, 2001, Clockwork and Barry Lyndon would make a strong case for this theory, but Spartacus at one end and The Shining at the other may say otherwise.  Though, I might be tempted to keep it going through The Shining (unlike many, I quite enjoy that film) as well, but I am here to talk about a different streak, from a different time.  It was the 1940's and the directors were Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, known collectively as The Archers.

English born Michael Powell and Hungarian born Emeric Pressburger first came together during the war.  Already semi-established as a director and writer respectively, these two were brought together to work on propaganda films for the British war effort.  Some of these earlier films (Contraband, The 49th Parallel) were Hitchcockian thrillers, and quite good, but still nothing compared to what was about to come.  In my not-so-humble opinion, The Archers have created seven - and I do not throw such a term around willy-nilly - bonafide masterpieces.  Six of which were made successively between 1943 and 1948, and it is these six films, in these six years that we are here to talk about - so please allow me to praise great movies.

Starring Roger Livesey, Anton Walbrook and, in three roles, the lovely Deborah Kerr (at the time, Michael Powell's lover), and based, at least in name, on a newspaper comic strip, Colonel Blimp, the first of our run, takes place over a fifty year period in the life of a cocksure British officer and the woman/women (all Kerr) who he can never get out of his mind.  Splendid picture indeed.

A Canterbury Tale is probably the least seen and least known of our six film run.  This haunting, otherworldly film tells the story of a group of wayward pilgrims, played by Sheila Sim, Dennis Price and Sgt. John Sweet, an actual U.S. Army soldier in his one and only screen appearance, in the Kent countryside, which incidentally is beautifully filmed by the great cinematographer Erwin Hillier.

Another otherwordly-style film from The Archers, I Know Where I'm Going stars Wendy Hiller and Roger Livesey (and a twelve year old Petula Clark long before she went "Downtown") as a pair of wouldbe lovers trapped by a storm in the highlands of Scotland.  The film's penultimate raging sea scenes and the inevitable finale, make an already great picture into a true blue masterpiece.

Renamed Stairway to Heaven for US release (something that goes against the whole idea of the film never mentioning Heaven or any specific afterlife) A Matter of Life and Death is the magical tale of an RAF pilot and the American woman he falls in love with - after he has supposedly died - is a beautiful film to watch (Earth-bound scenes in Technicolor, After-Life realm in crisp monochrome B&W).   

Black Narcissus, my second favourite Powell/Pressburger, is the haunting story of a group of nuns - headed by the always great Deborah Kerr - temporarily inhabiting a mountaintop nunnery (previously a princely whorehouse) and deals with the ideas of spirituality and the loss of faith.  Archer regular Kathleen Byron, as the bewildered Sister Ruth, is the sexy/creepy highlight of a film already filled to the brim with highlights.

The Red Shoes is not only my favourite Archer's film, but my favourite film of all-time - period.  Starring the beautiful flame-haired ballet star turned actress Moira Shearer as Victoria Page, who lives to dance, and Anton Walbrook and Marius Goring as the men who are splitting her emotions tragically in half.  Shot by Jack Cardiff, one of the finest cinematographers in film history, Martin Scorsese has called this the most beautiful colour film ever made - and who am I to disagree with that.

*************

There you go.  Six films, six years, six masterpieces.  Now one could make an argument that I could go on and add the duo's next film, 1949's The Small Back Room, to this list, but I am going to back off from such a thing since I do not think it quite reaches the heights of these aforementioned six works of art.  As for their next film, The Elusive Pimpernel, I cannot say, as it is a film that, having been in itself rather elusive, I have never seen (believe it or not, there is a Powell/Pressburger that has not been seen by yours truly).  After this, we could add another film to the list (if we were not going for that unbroken thing) in the form of 1950's Gone to Earth, with Jennifer Jones and David Farrar.  This film is that seventh bonafide masterpiece I spoke of in my opening salvo.  But alas, we are going for a streak here, so it will have to just sit and watch its six brethren take their day in the spotlight.  Well, that is it for now folks.  Have a good day.

On Gilda, and How Rita Hayworth Could Redeem My Shawshank Any Time She Wanted (Yeah, I Said it, What's It To Ya?)

Rita Hayworth once famously said, "Every man I have ever known has fallen in love with Gilda and awakened with me."  For the life of me, I cannot figure out what could possibly be wrong about doing either one of those things, at any time.  Yeah, yeah, I get what Hayworth was trying to say - the whole 'nobody is as perfect as the characters on the screen' (she is also quoted as saying, "No one can be Gilda 24 hours a day.") - but even so, falling in love with a movie character, especially that particular movie character, is more than quite understandable, and waking up with Margarita Carmen Cansino, aka Rita Hayworth, aka The Love Goddess, would be a big ole 'must' on the to do list of any healthy patriotic red blooded American boy.

But we are not here to talk about personal cinephiliac fantasies (though I must admit to having one hell of a hard time getting certain images out of my head as I type this), we are here to talk about Charles Vidor's 1946 noir/melodrama hybrid masterpiece Gilda, and how its star, in what has become, and rightfully so, known as her signature role, Rita Hayworth put the ooh into ooh la la.  Sure, Hayworth made films prior to Gilda, and she was already thought of as a sexpot of the silver screen well before 1946 - just take a look at her roles in Blood and Sand, You'll Never Get Rich and Cover Girl - and she was a already a pin-up favourite as well (second only to Betty Grable in the minds of WWII G.I.'s), but there is something about Gilda that just drives a man, not only to the brink of insanity, but right over the veritable edge.  From Hayworth's introduction in the film, about a half hour in, as she tosses her head and mane of red (even in black and white) locks, and looks not into the camera, nor around it, but through the damned thing, to her show-stopping, half-striptease (just barely getting past the censors I am sure) rendition of "Put the Blame on Mame", the copper-topped bombshell is the very epitome of the kind of girl that no matter how hard you try - and co-star Glenn Ford does try his damnedest - you just know she is the one to whom you will eventually and quite inevitably give in and succumb.

As far as the film itself goes, it is quite the unique little nugget.  Playing at several genres at once, Gilda is not quite all the way a film noir, nor is it fully a proper melodrama.  It plays at thriller and musical too, but never fully falls prey to either of those categorizations either.  Mostly, to avoid confusion I suppose, it is labeled as noir, but even though it does have many of the requisite qualities for such a classification, as I said earlier, it never goes all the way into that territory.   Perhaps the most obvious reason for its stopping short is the fact that Hayworth's supposed femme fatale, in many ways the quintessential of the breed, ends up being not all that fatale after all.  Well, at least not in the way many of her ilk end up being.  But this by no means is to infer that Gilda is not the kind of woman some hapless man would not kill, or even die for.  Ford's Johnny Farrell just isn't as stupid as some of his fellow hapless male compatriots.  But why quibble over technicalities?  Let us just enjoy this magnificent film for what it is - a masterpiece.  And this is a word I do not use lightly.  And this is also all in spite of, to call a spade a spade, as it were, Charles Vidor being the kind of man who will never go down in history as a great director.  An auteur for the ages he is not.  The rest of Vidor's oeuvre, though some of it quite enjoyable (Love Me or Leave Me, The Joker is Wild, Cover Girl), leaves quite a bit to be desired.  Gilda is his one and only truly great film, and even though it is filled with stunning cinematography, courtesy of Rudolph Maté (some of the best of the era actually, almost comparable to Orson Welles and Gregg Toland's work), it is great not because of Vidor (at least not fully), but because of...yeah, you guessed it - Miss Rita Hayworth.

I may sound like a broken record here, but there is no denying such obvious facts.  Rita Hayworth not only breathed life into the tragic title character, but she stole that breath not just from all the men in her on-screen life, or even just those men in her off-screen life (which includes both Orson Welles and a real life prince), but also from all of those, myself whole-heartedly included, who have watched her up there on that aforementioned silver screen.  Let's not put the blame on Mame boys, let's put it on Rita. She wasn't nicknamed The Love Goddess for nuthin' after all.  Hell, even one of the many (many and many more) stories on how and when the Margarita was invented, gives credit to Hayworth.  Granted, the story of a bartender naming a drink after a certain young dancing girl down Mexico way, may very well be apocryphal - in fact it most certainly is just legend and nothing more - but that doesn't necessarily stop it from being quite believable.  I mean, what man wouldn't want to name something, anything, after Rita Hayworth?  But I am getting off subject again.  I am supposed be talking about Gilda, and about Rita Hayworth as Gilda, the gold digger with the heart of gold, but those dyed red locks (the genes of her Latin father actually gave her natural black hair) and that come-hither gaze she gives to both Glenn Ford and those of us watching her, tend to distract from whatever we may be discussing.  But since we do not seem to be able to go on in a reasonable, undistracted way, about the film Gilda, I suppose we should just end it all right here and now.  So please let me end on a quote from Rita herself, "All I wanted was just what everyone else wants, you know, to be loved."  You got it baby.

The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and How Preston Sturges Had to Marry Off Betty Hutton, and Quick

Poor Preston Sturges.  All he wanted to do was to make a movie about a girl who gets pregnant and then proceeds to convince the boy next door (not the father!) to marry her before her father finds out.  Simple enough.  Now if this had been done in the precode days before the Production Code was put into effect in 1934, he would have probably been able to do it.  If it were made today, he of course would have had no problem.  But in 1942 Hollywood?  No way José!  When the director handed in his script to the PCA (Production Code Administration), as was the required course of action in these days, the censors, always such progenitors of sensibility and taste, he said tongue firmly in cheek, stopped Sturges short when it came to the possibility of of an unwed mother being shown to all of America up on the silver screen. 

Sturges was told he had to marry the girl off before she could become pregnant.  Because, as everyone knows, a girl cannot get pregnant without the sanctity of marriage in their hearts and a gold ring on their finger.   This quite ridiculous and outdated attitude (at least by today's standards) of course would be countermand to the story Sturges had written, but if he wanted to get his movie made in 1942, he had to go through the PCA to do it.  Even a director like Sturges, who at the time was one of the biggest name filmmakers in Hollywood, was still subject to the puritanical whims of the dreaded Production Code.  But this temporary impediment was nothing for a writer as slick and as sly, and as willfully antagonistic as Mr. Preston Sturges.   

Sure, this age of censorship may have been a bane in writers and directors' existence, but it wasn't all bad.  One thing the Production Code did was make screenwriters more creative.  As opposed to the precode days, when sexuality and criminality could be shown and discussed without ramifications (well, other than the ramifications that would eventually lead to the Hays Office and the Production Code and all that, but that is another story altogether), the Hollywood of the mid 1930's through when the code began to crumble in the late 1950's, was a place where writers and directors had to weave their way around such so-called ethical problems, and in doing so perhaps created more subtly damning works of sedition.  Works of sedition that went right by the rather ignorant blind eyes of the censors and onto the silver screens of the nation's movie palaces.  This is just what Sturges did with The Miracle of Morgan's Creek.

What Sturges did actually, was to create for this oh so important marriage, the most ludicrous of circumstances.  The writer/director/producer gave his main character (the wonderfully named Trudy Kockenlocker, played with great feminine bravura by Betty Hutton) a night of promiscuous partying with a gaggle of departing G.I.'s.  Originally Sturges' intent was to "show what happens to young girls who disregard their parents' advice and who confuse patriotism with promiscuity" but since the censors were wary (and Paramount Studios as well), Sturges had poor simple Trudy getting married while wonky with the most convenient case of amnesia this side of screwball.  Now, with plucky Trudy's purity kept safely intact (though c'mon, a wedding night in a state of relative blackout is not exactly any more pure than Sturges' original idea) the movie could finally go on.  At least that was the plan.

With just ten or so pages of a script that were deemed appropriate, Sturges began filming in 1942.  Barely keeping ahead of the filming schedule, Sturges wrote furiously during the shoot.  Yet, even with winding around the problems brought on by the censors, and creating a screwball comedy that would go down as one of the director's best works, Paramount held the film until 1944.  Sturges would eventually leave the studio over problems such as these.  Upon the film's release though, critics praised the proverbial high heaven's out of the damn thing.  Many of them questioning how such a script got through the censors in the first place.  James Agee wrote of the film "the Hays office must have been raped in its sleep."  In the end, even with the censorship battles and the studio's changes, the film was heralded as a snarky masterpiece of depth and deception.  I will leave you with the words of New York Times über-critic Bosley Crowther: "Sturges has hauled off this time and tossed a satire which is more cheeky than all the rest."

Apparently, I Am Too Racy to Discuss The Archers

As I was perusing the web one day, surfing if you will, I came across a notice for an upcoming movie blogathon.  For those of you who do not know what a blogathon may be, it is where a gaggle of blogospheric writers (aka, we cyberspace nerds) get together and discuss a certain subject, the certain subject of that particular blogathon.  Well the certain subject for this particular blogathon happened to be the certain cinema of a certain Mr. Michael Powell and and a certain Mr. Emeric Pressburger - collectively known amongst we cinephilia-bound folks in the so-called know, as The Archers.  Well hot damn, this was a thing I just had to get in on, so I quickly dashed off an e-mail to the appropriate parties, clamoring to say that I would love love love to write a piece for this exciting sounding blogathon event, and asking if the oft-forgotten masterpiece Gone to Earth was still available as a subject.  The aforementioned appropriate parties said yes to my rather exuberant pleas and everything looked like it was a definite go for lift-off.  Well, this is where everything fell apart and my mission was effectively scrubbed.

You see, a day after receiving an e-mail saying they were happy to have me aboard (my exuberance must have won them over immediately) I received a second e-mail saying, "After checking out your blog, I think it's a little too racy for the blogathon."  Racy?  Me?  Really?  Okay, perhaps I am not a G-rated site, but to say I am too racy to participate in a blogathon is kind of pushing it.  Saying that they are afraid if their regular crowd were to begin to peruse my site (which they did say later in the aforementioned e-mail) that they would take offense to what was written inside, is pretty ridiculous if you ask me.  Now granted, this may all be in the timing as when those appropriate parties from earlier "checked out my blog" the most recent post was that of one of my Retro Reviews.  It was a review of the 2007 film Teeth.  You know, the movie about a girl with vaginal dentata - the girl with the snapping hoo-hoo.  Well, needless to say, my perverse side may have come out a bit in that review (c'mon, how could it not!?) and this same said perversity would have been the first thing these appropriate parties partook of.  In other words - I was too racy for their kinda crowd.

Now normally I am not as perverse or racy (loose terms indeed) as I was in the writing of my Teeth review, but then again I never really think in those kinds of terms.  I just write.  What others glean from my writing is up to them.  I do not bother to tone down my rhetoric for a G-Rated crowd, nor do I try to up such vulgarities as to pander to the NC-17 crowd.  I simply write, without worries of what is proper or what is not.  Looking back, I suppose I am probably best categorized as R-Rated, or even PG-13 in many places, but certainly not too racy for most.  I try to use words as art, for the touchy crowd or the real world crowd.  I never care if I am using what society deems as an ugly, taboo word or not.  I simply write.  I am certainly not overtly racy for fuck's sake!!  Yeah, that was pandering, but I had to throw that word in to prove that no one is going to become a bad person by reading and/or hearing that word.  Fuck, fuck fuckity fuck.  Okay, really, I am not normally like this.  When I was first dismissed, as it were, from the aforementioned blogathon, I replied with a whole "no hard feelings" attitude, but the more I thought about it, the more am getting pissed off.

Now do not get me wrong, I really have no hard feelings (the cocksure attitude here is merely for playful show) and am still an avid supporter of the site that is hosting the blogathon - and all those associated.  I suppose everyone needs their rules, and I suppose that some are inexplicably put off by something as simple as a four letter word, but still, kinda silly if ya ask me.   Extra silly when you consider that this blogathon that all the hullabaloo is about, is a blogathon on, for their time period, a pretty racy filmmaking team.  The lustful nunnery of Black Narcissus, the debauchery hidden away in Colonel Blimp, the seductive factors of The Red Shoes, the naughtiness of Oh...Rosalinda!!, the sexual concoctions of A Canterbury Tale, the giddy sexuality of Gone to Earth.  I will not even bother to go into Powell's solo pet project Peeping Tom.  Perhaps all this carnal knowledge goes over the heads of the kinds of readers who are offended by the word fuck, but nonetheless, it is all there in the fabulous films of Powell/Pressburger.  C'mon people, Kathleen Byron's lusting, desiring, feral, lasciviousness  Sister Ruth cannot be mistaken for anything but a sniffing animal with wanton instincts of a cat in heat.  Racy?  Nah.  Hell, The Red Shoes is one of the most sensual films to have ever been made.  The idea of willing rape in Gone to Earth, or the leering eyes of Mel Ferrer as the playboy ex-pat officer in Oh...Rosalinda!! are enough to make the term racy seem like suddenly not enough.  And I am too racy for them?  Bah!

My 25 (or so) Favourite Classic Films First Seen in 2011

Inspired by the always charming, always enjoyable and always cinematically knowledgeable (and always alliterative, nomenclaturally speaking) Self-Styled Siren, I send forth a list of my 25 favourite classic films seen for the first time in 2011.  Classic, of course, being any movie made prior to 1960.  And in keeping with the Siren's choice of keeping the descriptions to a bare bones minimum (actually inspired in turn by Clara at Via Margutta 51) I will try to hold my typically long-winded ramblings to a relative bare bones minimum as well.  So without further ado, here are my favourite classic films seen for the first time in 2011.

Oh wait!   I do have some further ado to put forth - and possibly some rambling (see, I have already begun breaking promises).  In order to keep this list to a nice and tidy twenty-five (yeah, right) I would like to preface said list with a pair of special mentions.  

Powell/Pressburger: It is a rather sad fact but before this past year I had only seen three films by this brilliant British filmmaking duo known collectively as the Archers (Black Narcissus, Tales of Hoffman & of course The Red Shoes - my all-time favourite film if one wishes to keep track of such things).    In 2011, I almost doubled my Powell/Pressburger film viewing prowess, by seeing five of their films for the very first time.   These five films (in order of preference) are The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Canterbury Tale, Gone to Earth, A Matter of Life and Death & Oh...Rosalinda!!.  Any one of these films could feasibly take the top spot on the below list, so since they are so many and so superior (at least mostly), I have decided to put them in a class all their own.   In actuality this is merely a ploy (a clever ruse if you will) to make more room on the list for even more films since I could not narrow my list down very easily.  The other special mention (just below) is another ploy to do the same damn thing.

Douglas Sirk:  Believe it or not, prior to 2011, I had never seen a film directed by Herr Sirk.  This sad fact was remedied last year by seeing five of his great melodramas (again, in order of preference) - Imitation of Life, Written on the Wind, All That Heaven Allows, Magnificent Obsession & A Time to Live and a Time to Die.  Again, I believe these to be the proverbial head and shoulders above most of the films I saw in 2011, so they too will get a class all their own.  And again, this is merely part of the aforementioned ploy.  But enough of this.  I promised not to ramble on, so now, (really) without further ado, I give you my 25 favourite classic films seen for the first time in 2011.  I have tried to list these films in relative preferential order, but I think we all know how that ends up, so take the numbering order in any manner you see fit.  Now here they are.

1) Leave Her to Heaven (John Stahl, 1945) - Beautiful and sinister as hell, and with the sexiest overbite in the history of Hollywood, this is Gene Tierney at her wicked best - and the glorious Technicolor (wonderfully and appropriately artificial) looks almost as good as she does.  If you do not believe me, just check out that look she is giving you right now.

2) Cairo Station (Youssef Chahine, 1958) - Very possibly the least known film on this list, this Egyptian film noir(ish) masterpiece (yeah!  I called it that!) is like having Hawks, Hitchcock, Welles, Curtiz and Antonioni all rolled into one.

3) Rififi (Jules Dassin, 1955) - Taking its place as my new favourite crime caper movie (my new second favourite of the genre can be seen in the number eight spot below), this French heist film is , to borrow an attitude from Mae West, great when it is loud but even greater when it doesn't say a word.

4) Rancho Notorious (Fritz Lang, 1952) - The best thing to come out of Lang's Hollywood years, and a campy deeelight full of Marlene mayhem (looking a bit older than what she wanted to) and Mel Ferrer and his toothy, snarky grin.  Fun stuff indeed.  My review can be read here.

5) The Last Flight (William Dieterle, 1931) - If the Siren can wax poetic about Edmund Goulding then I can turn critical cartwheels over William Dieterle.  What a great forgotten film (a loving piece in Film Comment made me seek it out), highlighting the equally forgotten (sad as that may be) Richard Barthelmess, David Manners, John Mack Brown and Helen Chandler.  My review can be read here.

6) Partie de campagne (Jean Renoir, 1936) - How could it not be gorgeous - it's Renoir - but even by Renoir standards this forty minute film, based on a short story by Guy de Maupassant, and centered around the drop dead gorgeous Sylvia Bataille as an objet d'art, is a complete stunner.

7) Mädchen in Uniform (Leontine Sagen, 1931) - Even taking the sexy lesbian schoolgirl factor out of the mix (I am a guy after all), this early German sound film is more than well worth a look - a long look indeed.  In fact one could (and should) call this film haunting - a term that could go all cliché if one is not careful, but that is not the case here.  Seriously though, this is a very powerful film indeed.  My review can be read here.

8) The Killing (Stanley Kubrick, 1956) - Kubrick's rather demanding style has always appealed to me, and in this early work (his third) you can see that style hidden inside a more classic style.  A great crime caper movie (my second favourite of the genre - see number 3 above) and easy to see the influence on Tarantino later on.

9) The Shanghai Gesture (Josef von Sternberg, 1941) - Another Gene Tierney vehicle (I suppose I was going through a Tierney phase in 2011), this rather sleazy, giddily B-grade picture was a delight from beginning to end.  And not just Tierney (and that overbite) but also Victor Mature (I did say sleazy) and Ona Munson as Mother Gin Sling.  Great stuff indeed.

10) The Phantom Carriage (Victor Sjöström, 1921) - One of the creepiest and greatest silent films ever made.  Who knew the Swedes could pull of as much silent era intensity and visual bravura as the Germans.

11) 12 Angry Men (Sidney Lumet, 1957) - It is kind of shocking that I went through the first 43 years of my life (the first few understandably so) without ever seeing this film.  Intense and brilliant, this film is the perfect blend of writing, directing and acting.  And the scene where everyone, even the assholes in the group, turn their backs on the racist played by Ed Begley, is simply perfect.

12) The Cobweb (Vincente Minnelli, 1955) - One of the great Minnelli's lesser known works, and a film that is seen as too melodramatic by many, but I was blown away (as they say) by the damned thing.  Granted, I like pretty much anything with Richard Widmark in it, and Gloria Grahame is ooh la la great just about every time out, and I prefer the overly melodramatic, so it was probably a forgone conclusion that I would love this picture.  My review (actually more a list of my 10 favourite things about the film) can be read here.

13) Captain Blood (Michael Curtiz, 1935) - Swashbuckling at its very best.  I think I can call this the greatest pirate movie ever made and I would not get much argument.  Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland (their first of an eventual eight films together) and Basil Rathbone as the villain.  What more need be said.  Ahoy mateys, ahoy.

14) Forbidden Planet (Fred M. Wilcox, 1956) - A cool and pretty keen fifties sci-fi classic (based on The Tempest of all things) that shows a young, pre-parody, Leslie Nielsen as the heroic but somewhat hapless captain of a spacecraft trapped on the titular planet and a very highlighted, and very leggy Anne Francis as the object of the Captain's (and everyone else's) affections.  Oh yeah, and Robby the Robot too.  My review can be read here.

15) The Wild One (László Benedek, 1953) - This is the movie that has Brando in leather, with a revving, hulking machine roaring between his legs.  No, not Last Tango in Paris.  THis is the one with the motorcycles (get your mind out of the gutter).  Cool as can be - and with Lee Marvin to boot.  My review can be read here.

16) The Steel Helmet (Samuel Fuller, 1951) - Just Fuller's third film and already that growling Fullerian intensity is fully intact.  Thanx to Criterion's great Eclipse series for getting this one two me in such pristine form.  I think I would have to include this in any 10 Favourite war movies list I were to make.

17) The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956) - Seen during my summer kick of 1950's sci-fi/fantasy films, this is one of the creepiest movies I saw all year. It just goes and goes and never lets up - not even in the end.

18) Bienvenido Mr. Marshall (Luis Garcia Berlanga, 1953) - I must admit to never having heard of the director before coming across three of his films during My Quest, but I sure am glad I have finally found him.  A screwball kind of film, Berlanga can be called a Spanish Billy Wilder without much fuss.

19) Caged (John Cromwell, 1950) - Subversive and more than bordering on the exploitative, this is a harrowing film and Eleanor Parker hands in a frazzled, frenzied but oh so chilling performance as an innocent turned jaded caged bird.  My review can be read here.

20) The Ballad of Narayama (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1958) - Forget Ozu.  Forget Kurosawa.  Forget Mizoguchi and Naruse.  2011 was the year that turned Keisuke Kinoshita into my favourite classic Japanese director.  This film is just beautiful as Kinoshita does wonders with colour.

21) The Silver Chalice (Victor Saville, 1954) - Mockingly nicknamed Paul Newman and the Holy Grail, and hated by Newman himself (this debut film would be the scorn of the actor's career), I quite enjoyed this rather laughable movie just for the very fact that it is so laughable.  And at the top of this laughability - Jack Palance at his most campiest (no need to shut the closet on this performance).  My review can be read here.

22) The Hurricane (John Ford, 1937) - Aside from the fun I had watching this while an actual hurricane was raging outside (or at least the more inland version of such), this is a very fun film in and of itself.  Plus we get to see Dorothy Lamour tied to a palm tree.  My review (or at least some thoughts on the film) can be read here.

23) Fig Leaves (Howard Hawks, 1925) - Howard Hawks does The Flintstones.  This was a surprisingly fun film to watch.  Granted, it was Hawks and I am certainly what one would call a Hitchcocko-Hawksian, but I still did not expect as much out of this silent film as I got.  Seriously, did Hanna and Barbara see this film before creating The Flintstones?  And if you watch, you will see that Howard Hawks invented the snooze alarm.  My review can be read here.

24) The Outlaw (Howard Hughes, 1943) - I think the fact that Howard Hughes invented the underwire bra specifically for Jane Russell (in her film debut) to wear, makes this a very interesting behind-the-scenes tale.  The movie itself is rather simple (Hughes is not a great director), but Russell makes it her own with her very own pair of great assets.

25) My Favorite Wife (Garson Kanin, 1940) - I think the most fun about watching this screwball comedy is watching how nervous the muscled, mostly naked body of Randolph Scott seems to make Cary Grant - especially considering the real life relationship between the two.  It doesn't hurt that Leo McCarey wrote the thing as well.

I could easily keep this list going with such first time fun as Designing Woman, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, Blessed Event, Criminal Code, So Young So Bad, Detour, The Miracle Woman, Run For Cover, Untamed, Crossfire, The Egyptian, Ceiling Zero, Girls of the Road, The Hitch-Hiker, The Medium, East of Borneo, Land of the Pharaohs, Side Street, Stranger on the Third Floor and both versions of Dawn Patrol. 

Also, I suppose a special mention should be made for a great double feature I saw for the first time in 2011.  The Girl Can't Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, both directed by Frank Tashlin and the first two starring roles for Jayne Mansfield, are a great pair of self-referential comedies - and I do love self-referential comedies.

One last thing before I shuffle off.  As I made mention to above, I spent a lot of film-watching hours this past summer in the genre of 1950's Sci-fi - most of which I had never seen.  Some of these were really good (The Man From Planet X, Invaders From Mars, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers) while some were pretty laughable (The Monolith Monsters, Robot Monster, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman) but they were all pretty darn fun - even if in the cheesiest kind of way.  In fact I liked these films so much that I even did a 10 Best 1950's Sci-Fi list for them over at Anomalous Material.

Once again I would like to thank the Self-Styled Siren for her inspiration in making this list.  I hope to do it again next year, and that may include some of the films I have gleaned off of the Siren's list, and will watch for the first time in 2012.

In Defense of Citizen Kane

The following is my brief contribution to True Classics' The Great Citizen Kane Debate.

In 1952 Sight & Sound polled the world’s leading film critics to compile a list of the best films of all time. The magazine has repeated this poll every ten years, to show which films stand the test of time in the face of shifting critical opinion.  Orson Welles' debut masterpiece did not appear on the initial 1952 list, but Citizen Kane did claim the top spot in 1962, and has held its position every decade ever since.   And of course, this seemingly universal adoration for the film does not stop there.   Topping poll after poll after poll over the past sixty years or so, the formidable Kane (a film as brazen as its director and its subject) is today considered by many to be a film without peers - the greatest film ever made.  A bold statement indeed.  Now the question we must ask ourselves here and now is, "Is Citizen Kane truly the greatest film ever made?"  

I still remember when I first saw the great Kane.   I was a seventeen year old high school senior and I had decided to sign up for a new elective our school was offering.  It was a film class and among the films I got to see for the first time here (Psycho, Bonnie and Clyde, Lifeboat, Wait Until Dark) was Citizen Kane.  The class was a full semester, and half of that time was spent on this one film alone.  I remember when we first watched it - before any discussion on it - and how blown away I was by it.  I was still just a novice, budding cinephile at the time, and had no real idea of film theory or the art of cinematography, so I was no expert, but damn did I love that movie.  Once we began discussing the film, breaking it down scene by scene, going over the films that influenced it and those films influenced by it, it grew even greater in my esteem.

Now many critics and cinephiles over the years have placed Kane at the top of their list out of mere rote.  Everyone says it is the greatest, so it must be.  I have a good friend who says "Citizen Kane is the greatest film ever made - no other answer is allowed."  Of course this is all a bit ridiculous.  First of all, to name the greatest film(s) is just an impossible thing to do.  Everyone has different opinions of greatness.  But at the same time, if you turn it around and name your favourite films, which is more personal and less canonical than naming the greatest, there are still those who would disagree with you.  If we all had the same tastes this would be an awfully boring place to live.  There are also those who, though they make sure to claim respect for the film itself, cannot claim to enjoying Kane at all.  If a favourite film is one that you can watch over and over again, then yes, Citizen Kane is one of this critic's favourite films, even without taking into account its myriad of cinematic flourishes that could very well make the film then greatest ever made.

As far as its greatness goes, perhaps the idea of it being listed pretty much everywhere as the greatest film ever is a bit of an overkill, but there is really no denying its greatness - even for those who claim not to like it.  Yes, the idea of it making groundbreaking strides in cinematography and art direction, his work in deep focus, is a bit of a misnomer.  Welles, along with his DP Gregg Toland, were greatly influenced by the German Expressionism filmmaking going on throughout the 1920's and early 1930's.  In fact Toland had worked on several of these films himself.  But even if Welles was only doing what was already being done in European cinema and early American sound cinema, he was changing it and making it work in his own unique way.  Creating his own Wellesian cinema that would in turn influence so many after him, like Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Joel and Ethan Coen, Paul Thomas Anderson to name just a few.  Welles would go on to make other great films, from The Magnificent Ambersons to The Lady From Shanghai, to Othello and Macbeth, Touch of Evil, The Trial and Chimes at Midnight - all of which also have that Wellesian style that was gleaned from past film history and transformed into his own bravura style.

I suppose what I am trying to say is that Citizen Kane is a great film.  Personally I do not list it as the greatest, instead placing it in the number five spot of my all-time favourite list (behind just The Red Shoes, 2001, The Good the Bad and the Ugly and Psycho).  But considering that among the thousands of different films I have seen, from the nearly 120 year history of cinema, to place at number five is a pretty big deal.  And my love is not just a nostalgic look at the film - seen at the start of my obsession with the art of cinema - but just because it is a great film overall - no other answer is allowed.  It was the first film I ever bought (on VHS - remember those!? and eventually on DVD and now the gorgeous new Bluray boxset) and will always be one that I can and will watch over and over and over again.  For those who do not like the film, one can only blame a lack of taste.  I am half kidding with that last line, for everyone has different tastes (as I state above), but in the case of Citizen Kane, perhaps those different tastes should be reevaluated.  So that is my case.  It is more of a love letter to Kane than an actual appraisal of the technical and artistic brilliance of the film (a gushing school girl love letter, not the critique of the knowledgeable film historian I usually try to portray), but it is my case. and I am sticking to it.  It is my defense of Citizen Kane.  End of story.  Rosebud.

The Great Citizen Kane Debate, Coming Soon to a Blog Near You.

Citizen Kane.  Greatest film ever made or the most overrated?  One can find rabid advocates on both sides of this debate.   Now the fine folks over at True Classics have decided to help bring those rabid advocates out of the cyber-woodwork they have been hiding in (not that any cinephile needs a reason to talk incessantly about film).  How will they do this, you ask?  Well, with The Great Citizen Kane Debate, that's how.  The object is simple as can be.  Somewhere, or somewhen between now and November 13, simply post a piece, either defending the classic film or decrying it, at whichever website/blog you happen to be associated with.  Send a link to said piece/post to those aforementioned fine folks over at True Classics before November 13.  And you can even win a prize!  Each entry will be judged on their individual merits and a winner will be announced at the end of the month.  All the details and various sundry items can be found over at True Classics (in the links above).  Hopefully this event will get some heated debating going on.  As a grand defender of the greatness of this Wellesian Masterpiece (and yes, that did need to be capitalized!) I too plan to toss my hat in the ole ring.  Hope to see you there.

Deborah Kerr: Both the Ideal and the Flesh-and-Blood Woman

The following is my contribution to The Darling Deborah Blogathon at Waitin' On A Sunny Day.

The title of this piece is taken from a quote by film director Michael Powell.  When asked about Miss Kerr, with whom the great auteur was then having an affair with, he said, "I realised that Deborah was both the ideal and the flesh-and-blood woman whom I had been searching for."  And this is exactly the type of woman that the lovely Miss Kerr plays in the Powell/Pressburger classic, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

In this beautifully structured 1943 British-made film (not only one of Powell/Pressburger's best, but in this critic's not-so-humble opinion, one of the greatest films of all-time) Kerr takes on triple duty as three incarnations of the same ideal beauty, taken form of flesh-and-blood.  We first meet Kerr when the film flashes back to 1902.  She is Edith, an English teacher working in Berlin during the Boer War.  Kerr's Edith, ends up getting caught up in a silly international affair, and in doing so becomes close to two men, an English and a German officer.  The English officer, the (somewhat) titular Colonel (his name is actually Clive Candy, later Clive Wynne-Candy), is played by Roger Livesey, and the German by Anton Walbrook, a regular rep player with Powell/Pressburger (henceforth known by their dual nickname, The Archers).  Now even though she is not the title character, it is Kerr who is the heart and soul (if that doesn't sound too cheesy) of the film.  With obvious desire emanating from both of these men, it is she - and later, seeming personifications of she - that will come to enrapture these men, Livesey's Col. Candy especially, throughout the course of their history.  Edith will go on to marry her German suitor while Candy will head back home to fight another day.  

We then jump to the First World War, and to Candy's meeting a young nurse named Barbara Wynne.  This becomes Kerr's second role in the film.  With an obvious striking resemblance to Edith (of course), Candy realizes what he had lost when he let Edith go back in 1902, and he finds himself immediately in love with the young nurse.  This ideal woman made flesh-and-blood once again, she becomes the shining light in this stubborn foolish man's life - a light that this  lonely character so desperately needs.  The two are married and given the home life Candy has been missing all these war torn years and eventually the film jumps ahead to the modern day world of WWII.  We find that Barbara has died of an undisclosed illness sometime before the start of the war, but this by no means ends Kerr's performance in the motion picture.  The actress now takes on the role of Angela "Johnny" Cannon, a young officer who works as Candy's driver.  Of course Johnny's resemblance to both Edith and Barbara is quite stunning (duh) and once more, though now it is more a fatherly love than anything else, this ideal woman has been made flesh-and-blood.  Kerr, with these three roles, is Powell's answer to that ever-so-elusive ideal woman.  The actress becomes the very personification of true love - and it is no wonder considering the auburn-haired beauty, so full of grace and desire and passion, could easily be mistaken for that very same thing offscreen as well.

Kerr would of course go on to play many more great roles (her most famous probably being From Here to Eternity where she famously rolled around in the surf with Burt Lancaster, and The King and I), including another for The Archers as a nun in Black Narcissus, and receive six Academy Award nominations (never winning though!?) but it is her triple play in Colonel Blimp that I believe the Scottish-born actress was at both her sexiest (though she does fill that part quite nicely in many other films, including as a nun of all things) and her most ideal woman state of mind.  With these three roles, Kerr was able to, through no act of her own, other than being that so-often aforementioned ideal woman made flesh-and-blood, control the lives of the film's male leads.  A brilliant movie indeed (as I said, one of the greatest of all-time) but also a bravura turn from Kerr, only 22 at the time, who manages to personify these three different characters, and make each one a different person, while also giving each  one part of the others.  Powell would eventually end the affair when Kerr made it clear she would rather go to Hollywood than stay in the UK, but thankfully he was able to get these roles out of her while he still could. 

Another Contest, Another Good Time

Well, here's how the story goes.  Earlier this Summer I came across a website called FilmClassics, and saw that they hosted a regular series of contests.  So, I went and entered said contest.  My mission (should I decide to accept it - and I did) was to write a review on any classic screwball comedy.  My choice was the little known Barbara Stanwyck vehicle, The Mad Miss Manton.  The piece I wrote really wasn't one of the best things I have ever written, but enter it I did.  To make a long story short, I won said contest and received a snazzy, shiny gold cyber-ribbon which I have placed on the sidebar of this very site.

Cut to earlier today.  My contribution to FilmClassics new review contest, this time on classic film noir (my choice was Detour, and I am much happier with this entry than the last aforementioned screwball entry) was named the winner.  A close race indeed (102 votes to 98 were the top two totals - and let's face it, the voting of course, sadly enough, just comes down to who has the most friends willing to click on the vote button) but squeak it out I did. Of course winning is not the important thing as they say.  Watching and writing about the films is what it is all about.  Winning is just incidental I suppose.  And speaking of writing about films, my entry can be read HERE.  As for my stalwart close competition, it was from a young woman (seventeen I think) named Rianna over at Frankly, My Dear (her piece can be read HERE). From what I read - she does a very nice piece on the genre as a whole - she definitely has a thirst for learning about film history (how many teenagers are into movies from the 1930's and 1940's? Bravo for her!) and will probably grow into quite the film nerd as she ages - and take it from this 44 year old film nerd, there is certainly nothing wrong with that.

Anyway, my new snazzy cyber-ribbon has been placed in the sidebar (a larger version placed at the end of this post) and I await the next review contest at FilmClassics.  For this next contest I will probably write a piece, but enter it "out of competition" (in other words, post it at my site with a mention and link to the contest) in an attempt to give the growing film knowledge of others a chance to bloom.  This may seem a somewhat arrogant and/or egotistical thing to do (and knowing me, it probably is on some level) but is truly meant as a benevolent gesture on my part, as I want those still just getting into cinema (and the love thereof) to be able to compete without some old fuddy-duddy who has spent the majority of his adult life watching and studying film mucking up the works.  Anyway, I wish great luck and good fortune (and all that proverbial jazz) to all those who enter the future contests at FilmClassics.  And to Rianna - keep up the classic film watching no matter how much it perplexes your less enthusiastic peers.  That's it for now.

Looks Like I'm in Another Damn Contest -- How About That?

It would seem the fine folks over at FilmClassics are holding another review writing contest.  FilmClassics held a contest earlier in the Summer, with the subject of classic screwball comedy.  I wrote a piece on the relatively little-known Stanwyck/Fonda film The Mad Miss Manton.  Well guess what?  In a battle to the finish I came up victorious and received a snazzy, shiny banner to post on my blog (it hangs proudly in the sidebar as we speak).  

The subject this time around is classic film noir, so hearing this, loving the noir genre and being a rather competitive person in nature (and wanting another snazzy gold ribbon for my blog), yours truly has decided to enter said contest.  My piece this time around is on that most classic of B-pictures, Detour, directed by the indomitable Edgar G. Ulmer and starring the sultry Ann Savage and her dumb-luck patsy Tom Neal.  I have three competitors this time around and in the fairness of disclosure (or whatever you want to call it) I would like to give the links for these other three.  They are (in no particular order): Anatomy of a Film Noir at Frankly, My Dear; Ministry of Fear at In the Mood; Sunset Blvd. at Forever Classics.  Who says I am not fair?

Anyway, you can read my Review Contest Entry Post and let me know what you think by clicking on the button at the end of said post, which will take you to the contest site where one can then vote.  You can also jump to FilmClassics right now (where you will find links to both mine and my adversary's reviews - and to be fair, please do read all four) and vote as well.  I suppose the main point one should take away from this is to vote vote vote.  Vote early and vote often.  Actually you can only vote once per IP address, but you get the idea. 
 

The Dark and Sinister Goings-on Inside Edgar G. Ulmer's Radically Cheap B-Movie Cult Classic Film Noir Detour

The following is my humble contribution to Film Classics Film Noir Review Contest.  And as fair warning, there may be spoilers ahead, for those who care about such things - ye have been warned.

Made in 1945, on the most extreme of low budgets by B-master Edgar G. Ulmer and released by the Producers Releasing Company (PRC), a member of what in Hollywood was called the "Poverty Row" group of B-studios (these studios were often only in business for a few years and were mainly known for making cheap westerns, gangster films and serials), Detour may have been a tiny tiny film (and short, as was usually the case with "Poverty Row" films, at just 68 minutes) but to this day, 66 years later, it is still considered one of the greatest film noirs ever made.  Roger Ebert has said of the film, "This movie from Hollywood's Poverty Row, shot in six days, filled with technical errors and ham-handed narrative, starring a man who can only pout and a woman who can only sneer, should have faded from sight soon after it was released in 1945. And yet it lives on, haunting and creepy, an embodiment of the guilty soul of film noir. No one who has seen it has easily forgotten it."  The film has truly become one of the most classic of B-pictures.

The film is the story of Al Roberts, a jaded beer hall piano player (he has unfulfilled dreams of being a concert pianist) played by Tom Neal in his only role worthy of remembrance, who decides to hitchhike cross-country to California to be reunited with his semi-estranged girlfriend.  Along the way Al is picked up by a cocksure and obviously wealthy man by the name of Haskell.  A bit later Haskell dies (we never do find out how or why but we do know it was not foul play) and Al, in an act of desperation and knowing he could never explain such a thing to the police, ditches the body, steals Haskell's clothes, money and I.D. and speeds off in the dead man's car.  Now on the run, this will of course lead to Al's downfall, and this inevitable downfall (it is a film noir after all) is helped along when he picks up a disheveled young woman while posing as Haskell.   This disheveled (and obviously bad news) young woman is Vera, played by the sultry and quite psychotic Ann Savage.  Vera knows Haskell and therefore knows that Al is not Haskell and blackmails him into doing what she wants - and of course that can only spell trouble.

Vera tells Al that is to impersonate Haskell in order to get the inheritance the dead man is about to receive from his soon-to-be dead father.  Despite Vera's blackmail attempt Al refuses to along with her plan and the two fight in the Hollywood apartment they are now renting.  In the most infamous scene in the film, Al accidentally strangles Vera with a telephone cord and once again will go on the run.  Since the production code was still fully in force in Hollywood in 1945, Ulmer was not allowed to let his murderer - even an accidental one like Al - get away with his crime, so the film's not-so-intrepid protagonist is arrested in the final scene.  This ending, with its moody atmospheric sense of doom, is one of the things that make an otherwise cheaply made motion picture a classic of film noir cinema.  In their book, "The Devil Thumbs a Ride & Other Unforgettable Films", authors Edward Gorman and Dow Mossman say of the film, "...Detour remains a masterpiece of its kind. There have been hundreds of better movies, but none with the feel for doom portrayed by ... Ulmer. The random universe Stephen Crane warned us about—the berserk cosmic impulse that causes earthquakes and famine and AIDS—is nowhere better depicted than in the scene where Tom Neal stands by the roadside, soaking in the midnight rain, feeling for the first time the noose drawing tighter and tighter around his neck."  And this is what makes the film last.

Now the film does have a certain reputation that perhaps it does not deserve.  The famous, and quite apocryphal story of the film's production (propagated by Ulmer's own late-life assertions) claims that Detour was made with just $20,000 and in a mere six days (even the above Ebert quote says as much on the latter).  Truth be told it was probably closer to $100,000 with a shooting schedule of 28 days, but that would have been the norm for the day on "Poverty Row", so that isn't a very interesting hard luck tale to tell - and if Ulmer was anything it was an eccentric character who would build up his life and career further than it actually ever went.  Born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (in a part that is now the modern day Czech Republic) and making a bit of a splash in 1934 with The Black Cat for Universal (the first of eight films that would team horror icons Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff), Ulmer's career never really took off as many of his fellow European ex-pats careers did when they too fled their warring countries to make it in Hollywood.

Ulmer had previously worked as assistants to many of these same great directors - Murnau, Siodmak, Wilder and Zinnemann among them - before hitting it (temporarily) big in the U.S.  He claims to have worked with Fritz Lang on both Metropolis and M, but this is most likely just more tall-tale telling on an aging Ulmer's behalf.  When the director made The Black Cat for Universal (an actual big-name studio at the time - and that studio's biggest box office hit of the year) and showed the striking visual style he had obviously learned from the German Expressionist cinema of 1920's Germany, he was surely on his way to bigger and better things - much like the aforementioned contemporary ex-pats like Wilder and Siodmak.  Ulmer, however, had begun an affair with the wife of independent producer Max Alexander, nephew of Universal studio head Carl Laemmle. Shirley Alexander's divorce and subsequent marriage to Ulmer led to his being exiled from the major Hollywood studios. Ulmer would spend most of his directorial career making B movies at Poverty Row production houses.  Ulmer's only film of note after this would be of course, Detour. 

As for the stars of Detour, neither Tom Neal nor Ann Savage would ever become big names in the business.  Savage's Vera in the film would be described as "vicious and predatory" and "very sexually aggressive."  Savage herself would be described, by critic Barry Norman, as "sultry and sexy... a feline film noir star at its finest."  Director Wim Wenders called Savage's performance "30 years ahead of it's time."  Savage would play other roles, many of them femme fatales like in Detour, but she would never reach the stars as they say.  Neal's career would be even less than Savage's.  The most interesting anecdote one can muster up about Neal is that he shot his wife in the back of the head and was in jail for six years before being released less than a year before his eventual death in 1972.  Ulmer also died in 1972 and would never see the revival of his film noir that took place in the late 1970's.  Savage would actually tour with the film, helping both the film's reputation and her own.  Savage would later make a guest appearance on the TV show Saved by the Bell, and her final performance would come in 2007, when she was cast in Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg as the director's mother.

Listed among the first group of films to be historically preserved in the National Film Registry (the only B-picture among these first films) Detour may have been a cheaply made toss-off by a fly-by-night studio, and directed by a persona non grata director (though a director with great visual talent who was unfairly blackballed), and the film may be full of flaws (at least flaws from a strictly technical filmmaking standpoint), but that doesn't mean it isn't a great and tragic film noir indeed.  Documentarian Erol Morris claims it as his favourite film and says of it, "It has an unparalleled quality of despair, totally unrelieved by hope."  A hot, lurid, cheap (and I mean that as an attribute not a hindrance) film noir that rises above its supposed Poverty Row station to be (and I said it before and I will say it again) one of the best damn film noirs in the history of cinema.

*********

Voting takes place between 08/26 and 09/10, so if you wish to vote for this post please click on the below banner which will take you to the voting page of FilmClassics, whereupon you can vote for said post. Vote early and vote often.  Actually you can only vote once per server, but you get the picture.

My Quest to See the 1000 Greatest: A Canterbury Tale (1944)

A Canterbury Tale is #581 in  

My Quest to watch the 1000 Greatest Films

Screened 02/09/11 on Criterion DVD at Midtown Cinema

Ranked #381 on TSPDT

*this is one in a series of catch-up reviews in my aforementioned quest (which should explain the rather old screening date above).

There is a certain something about the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.  Of course they are visually stunning.  The look and feel of their films are beyond reproach.  Many filmmakers would give anything to make films like them.  But there is more than just this obvious visual and audible style.  The films this duo made together - especially during that perfect six-movie streak that ran for Colonel Blimp to The Red Shoes - have a certain, for lack of a better term, otherworldly charm about them.  It is as if these films are of a magical time and place all their own.  The windy snow-capped Shangri-la-like terrain of Black Narcissus; the tragic fantasy and that final dance of The Red Shoes; the dreamlike quality of the two lovers in A Matter of Life and Death.  And A Canterbury Tale, though sadly lesser known among the duo's oeuvre, is no different.

Seeming to be out of time and out of place (even though set then-contemporarily in the midst of WWII) A Canterbury Tale (loosely based, of course, upon Chaucer's epic poem) tells the story of three travelers on their way to the titular sacred place, whom all get tangled up in a strange mystery just one town over.   The three aforementioned travelers are Allison, a young "Land Girl" (part of the Women's Land Army - civilian girls who helped out with the war effort - for those non-Anglophiles out there) played by the lovely girl-next-door type Sheila Sim, British Sergeant Peter Gibbs, played by up-and-commer (and later down-and-outer) Dennis Price and American Sergeant Bob Johnson, played by real life Sergeant John Sweet.  These three get entangled in a strange affair wherein a mystery man is running about the village putting glue in young girl's hair.

This odd mystery (which isn't really a mystery since it is pretty obvious who the culprit is from the beginning) is really only a sidebar to the ideas of God and time and space and love and all those other deeply felt philosophical comings-and-goings in life.  It is in these ideas that Powell & Pressburger fashion a movie that is probably even more otherworldly than the afterlife parable A Matter of Life and Death.  As Powell's camera (courtesy of cinematographer Erwin Hillier, most notable for being DP on Fritz Lang's M) moves so effortlessly through the English countryside, we are transported to another world in both mood and feeling.  The Archers' films were (to coin a rather tired, but completely appropriate term) magical, and A Canterbury Tale, though perhaps not as vibrant as Colonel Blimp, nor as seductive as Black Narcissus, nor as downright succulent as The Red Shoes, shows these filmmakers in top magical form.  I personally was transfixed as I watched this film unfold on the big screen in front of me.

The film would go on to have a strange life of its own then.  Not a success at the box office (a first for the Archers) Powell was made to re-edit the film for post-war US release, shortening it by twenty minutes and tacking on bookends which featured Kim Hunter as Sgt. Johnson's girl back home (Hunter would incidentally get the female lead in the next Powell/Pressburger project, A Matter of Life and Death).  The film was eventually restored to its original and proper form (no offense to the lovely and talented Miss Hunter) by the British Film Institute, in the 1970's.  Still often overlooked when considering the entire Powell/Pressburger oeuvre, A Canterbury Tale is considered a classic today.  Personally it is my third favourite film of the Archers - following The Red Shoes and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.