The Wrestler (2008)

Quentin Tarantino told Elvis Mitchell in an interview that there may be nothing he loves more than when a director takes a genre picture by the horns and doggedly, trenchantly, runs with it. Darren Aronofsky does that, in a way, with The Wrestler, a scabrously gritty cine, which is so powerfully evocative of familiar “indie” touchstones—some of which Aronofsky has arguably had a significant hand in disseminating—that it belongs to a broader grouping of films, defined as much by stylistic technique as by content. And yet The Wrestler is not simply a director's passionate paean to the import of basic, cosmetically unadorned storytelling, but rather as recondite and intensely personal as his earlier works. What is to be found is the melding of sometimes bumptiously unconfined artistic sensibilities, which in previous outings threateningly teeter on the precipice of pretense, with a deceptively straightforward yarn that allows for the filmmaker's obsessions to be visited upon with vastly finer gracefulness. Those creative compulsions, which border on fetishists, include substance abuse, self-destruction, sacrifice, the fragility of life and the inevitability of death and senseless martyrdom. In Pi, Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain, these were what those films boastfully proclaimed to be at the epicenter of their respective squalls. The Wrestler is far more guileful. It represents a major step forward for Aronofsky. He has found a breeding form from which he can essay his interests, rather than allowing his own vaguely haughty wants and desires to be expressly delivered through the granular revulsion and paranoia of Pi, kaleidoscopic operatics of Requiem for a Dream and bewildering phantasmagoria of The Fountain. The Wrestler is unassuming, which makes the film's subtler culling of its director's fixations all the more rewardingly relevant.

The Wrestler's modest trappings are things of vital necessity—not mere accessories and certainly not hindrances—that cumulatively mount an emotionally stirring portrait of one man. Ruminative and stark, with an oppressively dreary and downcast wintry setting in New Jersey, Aronofsky—expertly aided by cinematographer Maryse Alberti—establishes the gauntness of the titular wrestler's surroundings, as though he stands a lone figure amidst the ruins of his past experience atop the mountain of his profession. The first proper shot of the film captures the wrestler, sitting on a chair in an otherwise empty room, holding himself together, his head pointing downward, exhausted, appearing to have torn out the enactment of a bodily taxing professional wrestling contest as though he ripped it from his chest. This simple, compellingly surveyed sacrifice on the wrestler's part is a coursing theme on which Aronofsky brilliantly focuses.

Randy “The Ram” Robinson (Mickey Rourke) is, as he will later say, a “broken-down piece of meat,” a living relic from the 1980s, when he dominated the world of professional wrestling as a top main event draw. He is a systematically physically decimated, financially shaky and perpetually lonely figure, having squandered his days of opulence on deleterious pursuits. An opening credits sequence with wrestling magazines and articles gift the viewer with all of the necessary back-story. What Aronofsky and screenwriter Robert D. Siegel accomplish is to portray “The Ram” as the man time forgot, from his apparent disinterest in cellular phones and other technological devices—he repeatedly finds pay-phones left rotting in decrepit condition with which to call people—to his keeping a Nintendo video game system in his trailer home with a wrestling game featuring no less than “The Ram” himself, to the nostalgic love he has for the rock bands of the time.

One way through which to view the film is the allegory Aronofsky brings to the forefront early in the film. Randy “The Ram” Robinson is compared to Jesus Christ by the person to whom he reluctantly confesses his myriad sins: a beautiful stripper nearer to his age than most at the local club, with the stage name of Cassidy (Marisa Tomei). As he recounts his in-ring war stories, showing off his scars and severe injuries to her, Cassidy attempts to quote The Passion of the Christ's presenting of Isaiah. Maximizing the thematic current of sacrifice and martyrdom, Siegel and Aronofsky point to the little details that possibly affirm this, including ones mentioned by Cassidy—the similarly long hair, and the extraordinarily high threshold for pain “The Ram” and the Son of Man share. Randy keeps an action figure of himself, Randy “The Ram” Robinson, on his truck's dashboard, like a religious symbol. Soon, the camera will spot a tattoo of Jesus' face on Randy's bulky back. “Blading” in a “hardcore” bout, his face becomes crimson, and his body is profusely pierced—by staples, thumbtacks and assorted flesh-tearing pieces of shrapnel.

The one shot utilized perhaps more than any other in The Wrestler is one that captures Randy from only a few feet away, from behind, as he walks to and fro. Aronofsky's film is truly semi-documentarian, and is, literally, interested in following this man on his tumultuous journey. The shot borders on being overused, it is so frequent, but as with so much of the film, it actually becomes endearing in its repetition: Aronofsky's visual consistency is tremendously exacting. Made up of finely framed, long and thoughtful hand-held shots, with close-ups and tracking shots, Aronofsky's unvarnished verite is elongated with a walloping command of mise-en-scene that is more uncompromisingly followed than the showier but less roundly perspicacious efforts of his previous pictures. Perhaps The Wrestler's most memorable sequence details Randy's first day working at a deli, with the camera following him descending through the dark bowels of a building like the backstage environs of an arena. Anyone even remotely familiar with televized pro wrestling will recognize the pre-performance ritual, which is given a wonderful ironic twist by Aronofsky, who, almost needlessly, supplies the ever-louder chant of his name ringing through an arena's audience just before he slips through the curtain. This immediately establishes the showmanship Randy will use to buoy his own experience behind the deli counter, ever in need of an audience.

Employing minimalism at all levels, Siegel and Aronofsky breeze right by the pit of ancient personal history that seems to be lurking behind Randy as persistently as the stalking camera—the viewer is allowed to invent the details of Randy's mightily tragic fall, with the fleeting fortune and gnawing, unspoken void that is his estranged daughter's mother—which centrally presents the congruously credible following of Rourke's Randy wherever he goes. The attention to detail demonstrated by Aronofsky may just be the film's second greatest asset. When Randy and Cassidy engage in an unusually bitter argument at the strip club, a man in camera range is noticeably eavesdropping on their conversation. When Randy walks into an arena, he says hello to a pair of old “midgets,” who had doubtless performed in the ring in their prime like he and other older men shown in the film had. A long, painful and emotionally vulnerable scene that plays out quietly, with Randy and a group of old, beaten-down wrestlers sitting at tables hawking merchandise and selling their autographs, resonates because Aronofsky is sufficiently confident to allow his camera to gradually become Randy's point-of-view. An old wrestler proficient in the violence of “hardcore” exhibitions covers up his lack of athleticism with the gruesome spectacle of bloody mayhem. Eventually, the true names of Randy (Robin) and Cassidy (Pam) are found to be sources of derision and strength for each respectively, as Randy seeks to escape the grind of every facet of his life through the possibility of a comeback in wrestling and Cassidy wishes to become Pam again, free from the slowly ruinous existence she has carved out for herself at the club. As Randy scoffs at the name he has to wear at his day job, Robin, Cassidy declares her independence by setting the record straight, referring to herself as Pam. Their link to one another transcends the obvious point that they are both performers attempting to make their audience forget about their own troubles. Randy gives Cassidy the Randy “The Ram” Robinson action figure, a token miniature of himself frozen in time. In a pivotal scene, Randy buys Cassidy a beer at a bar. Eventually the 1980s band Ratt's greatest hit, “Round and Round,” is played. Randy and Cassidy reminisce about the music of the '80s, noting that it was a tremendous time for music. They both agree about the subsequent decade: “The '90s fucking sucked.” The song allows for Randy's mythic attachment to a certain era to feel more palpable, and his disdain for the ignominious obsolescence that followed, all at once. And yet the song's name describes Randy and Cassidy's melancholic farce of a budding relationship—and the actions of the characters is perfectly matched by the chorus. As Cassidy ducks out of their impromptu date, quickly downing the “one beer” which served as the little date's raison d'être, the chorus chimes in: “I knew right from the beginning, that you would end up winnin', I knew right from the start, you'd put an arrow through my heart.” Indeed, Randy's heart is both literally and figuratively at stake in The Wrestler.

And then there is Mickey Rourke. The film would be effectually rendered by Siegel and Aronofsky with another actor in the part, but the role is demanding that a person at least somewhat familiar with pain, humiliation and personal and professional heartbreak take it as their own. Most men, especially of a certain age, have had to overcome the nocent impact these leave on their lives, and Rourke has been knocked around by mistakes made, befitting a Johnny Cash song (his onscreen alter ego receives one Golden Globe-winner from Bruce Springsteen). Parallel with Randy, Rourke was ascendant in the 1980s, and through unfortunate career choices, unruly temperament and an ostensible lack of respect for his own work—battling with directors, holding the Actors Studio in contempt—found his star precipitously drop. Grappling with and through the character, Rourke seems to find himself, a feat all the more momentous for its being recorded in cinema. Lines of dialogue must be said by someone; it is often how they are said that ultimately matters. Will it surprise anyone when the aforementioned line of self-diagnosis (“...I'm an old, broken-down piece of meat...”), the culmination of which is so moving, it should be reserved to be heard only in its proper context, or the simple, sweet line between store employee and elderly lady customer (“What you havin', spring chicken?”) become immortalized in how many years hence? Tomei is glorious, sexy and intelligent in a role that could easily have become a crushing cliché, and Evan Rachel Wood is mostly effervescently serene in her role as Randy's daughter (succumbing to one excessively “actorly” impulse in her final scene), but the film does truly belong to its leading man. The agony of Rourke's diamantine turn comments on the man's anguish, and his history informs the part, resulting in a performance that bleeds into and overlaps with the actor's true life to such an extent, it is an undeniable marvel that demands to be seen. What Aronofsky's film and professional wrestling share is an inescapable common bond, one that is shaped by their respective goals of showcasing anguish and glory, and all points that mark the way between. There is nothing fake about that.

The Reader (2008)

There are two films out that focus on the uniquely vexing reality and dilemma of German guilt and shame. The first is Valkyrie, which uses wartime conscientiousness as the springboard for its thriller plot. The second is The Reader, which never takes place during World War II, the Holocaust or the Third Reich's reign, but is informed by the reverberations that still pulsate through the people of Germany like so many ripples that disturb a stream. Starring Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes and a young, impressive actor named David Kross, based on a novel written by German author Bernhard Schlink, adapted to the screen by David Hare and directed by Stephen Daldry—the latter two of whom conspired to respectively write and direct the 2002 drama The Hours—the film is brimming with considerable aptitude. The Reader makes its intentions abundantly clear: Schlink and Daldry, as with The Hours, are nothing short of punctilious in their formalism and classicism. The Reader is handsomely produced, exceedingly well-acted, sumptuously photographed by Chris Menges and Roger Deakins and smoothly directed by Daldry.

So why does it never quite break free from itself? Why do its ideas only provoke consideration and never quite move? Some of the fault may rest with the structure—the plot, even when it finally moves into the expected-but-dramatic territory of post-Holocaust German self-examination (several scenes of which are quite cerebrally fecund and engrossingly presented)—never breaks free from the expectations. The film's emotional resonance rests with a decision made by Michael Berg (who is played by Kross when he is in his teens, Fiennes when much older), one that is rightfully portrayed as paralyzing in its self-contradictions—in an effort to not experience crushing shame, he elects to remain silent, doomed to his own shame for the rest of his life—though the film does at least seem to lean in the direction that his choice was one stemming from cowardice, and, indeed, shame.

One issue at hand with The Reader may be that too much of the film plays like an extended performance rather than a completely living motion picture. The Reader is proficiently gripping at times, with its amassing of philosophical quandaries and rigorously applied legalisms, but what lingers, interestingly, is the first act. In this way, perhaps, the film is best when the mystery has yet to be revealed, and yet, it is here that it is also the most predictable, if a film's running time could be divided into “more predictable” or “less predictable” subsets. What may account for this is that Daldry's visual literacy seems most sharply aware and trenchant in the first great stretch of his film. When the “mystery” is finally unlocked, as the film's cryptic poster promises it finally will be, Daldry seems to allow the exposition and drama to largely speak for itself. This is not a necessarily an entirely wrongful decision, but it does lead to a certain feeling of unevenness from which The Reader cannot escape.

The Reader begins in West Germany in the 1950s, with the aforementioned teenager named Michael Berg catching scarlet fever on a cold, rainy day. By sheer chance he finds himself vomiting in the vicinity of a woman's residence. The cinematography exquisitely captures the symbiotic relationship, soon to become an affair, between the two characters, as the mysterious woman's face is obstructed by darkness. (The ethereal camerawork by Menges and Deakins is continually breathtaking.) What the viewer is allowed—and indeed encouraged—to notice is just how readily this woman, Hanna Schmitz (a flawless Winslet), takes up the duty of washing away this youth's vomit, and then taking care of him, and finally bathing him. Why? Who is this woman? Did she become used to such sights, and to such chores as cleaning up after others, bathing them, caring for them? The motifs pique curiosity. Was she a nurse? The answers are revealed much later. What matters in the first act is the physical and spiritual pulchritude and healing that takes place as Hanna bathes Michael, and they finally initiate a sexual affair, which is handled with equal parts deftness and frankness by Hare and Daldry.

Without daring to simply “make excuses” for atrocities committed by Germans, the story posits questions to which there are few comforting answers. Perhaps, the film suggests, if Hitler's Germany had been reading more books rather than burning them, such odious crimes could not have become so commonplace at that specific time in history. As the eponymous reader—Michael—allows an awed Hanna to listen to the words of Tolstoy, Twain, Thackeray and Homer, the story's incisive point that illiteracy and ignorance may have been the greatest aids in constructing the Nazis' genocidal industry, rings true. The Reader brings into view the role of the average, poor German worker, an economically abused class following the Great War, and asks stingingly dolorous questions. For this the film must be commended.

The Reader's fitting literateness may be viewed in variegated manners. Daldry's direction indicates that his continuing interesting in feminine psychology and pride—the latter characteristic of Hanna supplies the bulwark for his drama's very efficacy—may yet find its most captivating expression in the near future. The Reader has many fine touches, polished as it is with a delicate methodicalness that is never less than intriguing. And yet for all of its attributes, something is amiss, and it lessens the film's impact: perhaps the very quality that makes the film accessible also hampers it—it is, somehow, simply too slick for its own good. As the picture arrives at its conclusion, this realization deepens, as the actions of every character seem all too preordained, choked off and statically presented after the particulars of Hanna's grave secret are revealed. So the ideas must suffice, percolating as they do. When the young Michael and a fellow law student quarrel with their professor about the injustices of a Germany they wish to forget (one student cannot bear the discussion and promptly exits the room), the dialogue pierces the viewer's protective separation from the film. For a country, these matters have not easily gone away, quietly in the night. Hanna's statement—the dead are still dead—may be interpreted differently, depending on the viewpoint. What to say? Perhaps only, De mortuis ni nisi bonum. Of the dead, nothing but good.

Niagara (1953)

(The following is another installment of reviews being written to celebrate the darkest month of all in Coleman's Corner with Dark City Dame. The previous reviews of film noirs for this tribute are here and here. The next two films to be reviewed in this series are Henry Hathaway's Kiss of Death and Otto Preminger's Where the Sidewalk Ends.)

Henry Hathaway is a fascinating, intrinsically arresting directors with a keen visual aptitude. His use of frames, arches and other compositionally delineative objects create cleanly-photographed portraits of his characters. These framed portraits usually connote a kind of personal or even metaphysical entrapment, excellently communicated with richly detailed sequences of foreground-background struggles. Those foreground-background struggles usually tell two different character stories in one shot, and Niagara displays this stylistic technique. Hathaway's affinity for water and water-based settings such as this film and 23 Paces to Baker Street, is interesting to consider as well. He often shoots the background water through a frame, a window or some kind of portal—frequently in close approximation to the characters, drawing the connection between character and setting that helps to distinguish his admittedly workmanlike approach to certain parts of filmmaking, such as pacing.

Niagara is a beautiful, Technicolor film from 1953, starring Marilyn Monroe, Joseph Cotten and Jean Peters. Melodramatic, as well as splashy both in its brightly colorful visualizations and in its lurid storyline, the film may in some ways belong as much to the 1950s melodrama as to film noir. However, the opening, with Cotten's acidic, pained and mocking narration is certainly at one with noir: “Why should the Falls drag me down here at five o'clock in the morning? To show me how big they are and how small I am? To remind me they can get along without any help? All right, so they've proved it. But why not? They've had ten thousand years to get independent. What's so wonderful about that? I suppose I could, too, only it might take a little more time.” Cotten's character is the married dupe familiar to film noir—George Loomis, married to Rose Loomis (Monroe)—and his bitterness is to be completely explained to the viewer through the narrative's unfolding.

The picture is paced slightly leisurely, though it never begins to stall. At ninety-two minutes, it is given periodical punctuations of action that make it altogether brisk, and Monroe's almost outre and, in this context, purposefully furbelow sensuality make the film's more underdeveloped portions quite sustainable. Cotten's performance as the man driven to madness and murder by the scheming, adulterous wife is eerily believable, despite some of the melodramatics the screenplays coerces him to indulge in. Whereas certain actors would likely have chewed scenery in the part, Cotten understates his predicament as best he can. Peters plays Polly Curtler—Anne Baxter was the studio's first choice for the part; after she withdrew the entire film was dramatically reworked to emphasize Monroe and her part— who is the loving wife to Ray Curtler (an annoyingly ineffective Max Showalter, made all the worse by a deliberately irritating and under-written character). Peters begins piecing together the pieces of the Loomis puzzle, and is continually rebuffed by her own husband, who insensitively insists that she must simply be seeing things for no good reason. Besides being carried to unrealistic levels by the screenplay, Ray's behavior is repetitive and paradoxically weirder than anyone else's neurosis in its own way, and far less interesting than anyone else's.

The screenplay does indeed suffer at least somewhat from what the old saw describes as too many chefs spoiling the broth, giving the film some unsure beats in its midsection—and the Baxter factor had to have left a considerable impact on the final product. Here the broth is diluted, but adequate. Charles Brackett, Walter Reisch and Richard L. Breen wrote the screenplay, which has a simpler plot than its structure would suggest. Hathaway takes the template of noirish thriller conventions and makes the screenplay's occasional banalities more engrossing by establishing relationships with wordless visual communication. And even scenes that were probably written in the screenplay, relying on silence, are brought to sharper, more penetrative meaningfulness by Hathaway's suasively solid craftsmanship. The first scene between Monroe's Rose and Cotten's George tells the tale of their relationship without needless words: he is knocking on the door and she is resting abed, smoking a cigarette; knowing that her husband has returned, she snuffs the cigarette out and pretends to be sleeping. It is the whitest layer of duplicity that the film will explore.

Where Niagara earns its place in the broader filmic fiefdom of noir is in its psychology, and in its internecine conflicts between Cotten's dupe and Monroe's seductress, and between Peters' intrigued wife and Cotten's seemingly malevolent intentions toward her. Irony is employed, free from cynicism. A sequence in a bell tower is heartbreakingly beautiful, evocatively photographed by Joseph MacDonald (who photographed John Ford's My Darling Clementine, Hathaway's Call Northside 777, and some of Elia Kazan's directorial work). Chemistry is unnecessary between Cotten and Monroe, since their parts call for, if anything, the opposite—and their screentime together is surprisingly sparse—but the effects her Rose's marital malpractice has on his George is profoundly brought to life by Cotten in one of the actor's more offbeat performances. Peters, meanwhile, makes her part register with a performance that balances all of the character's narrative-driven necessities, including her intelligence and naivete, her gentleness and high-spiritedness. Hathaway allows for the screenplay's lack of central focus—is it George's point-of-view from which the film forms itself? Rose's? Polly's?—to become a positive attribute, as it squeezes logically unreasonable tension out of George's whereabouts, motives and location in large swathes of the film, especially when relating from Polly's observant spectator.

Niagara follows the noirish pattern of sending its protagonist into an entrapping web of betrayal and murder, spurred by lust and greed, giving the protagonist an opportunity to right the course, only to see his choices continually backfire and drag him down into the quicksand of anguish all the more forcefully. In the third act, Cotten's George scrambles to escape the trap he has, in a hideously ironic manner, fallen into. It is here that the film tightens its grip, losing in atmosphere while gaining in high drama. It may be said that it is in that harrowing but sumptuous bell tower sequence—understandably considered to have been a possible inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock in making Vertigo—where the oneiric qualities of Niagara unmask themselves to describe not a limpidly pellucid dream but a terrifying nightmare. And in a definitive way, Niagara postulates that the viewer reconsider noir, at least ever so briefly. For in Niagara, perhaps the most literal definition of the struggle that lives and breathes in the very heart of film noir may be conceived: a man on a small boat that has run out of fuel, being drawn inexorably to the mighty Niagara falls he so contemptuously recognized as so much greater than himself, drifting to his doom.

More Thoughts on Gran Torino

One of the perils of reviewing films--especially new films that are still in limited release at the time the review is being written--is being careful to not "spoil" the experience of others.

In my review of Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino, I elected to not cover certain issues that were primarily germane to the film's climax.

Seeing as the film is now in wide release, I have decided to share some thoughts I have had on Gran Torino since seeing it but have stayed quiet about for fear of "spoiling" the film.

So, a full spoiler warning is in effect:

• One of the subtler points about the film is Eastwood's character, Walt Kowalski, using his cigarette lighter, which has the symbol of the First Cavalry Division (the yellow shield with the black diagonal stripe and black horse's head). This establishes three things: firstly, Kowalski takes care of his lighter; he has had the lighter since 1951, when he bought it in Korea, so it symbolizes simple American manufacturing durability which is today lost; and finally, if one is allowed to make such an assumption, Kowalski--who is coughing up blood from his lungs--is a victim of the Korean War. Since soldiers were given cigarettes to smoke, and encouraged to smoke, many became addicted to nicotine. In a certain way, then, Kowalski is one of the more slowly-realized casualties of a war. (Again, this final thought is assumption, but not unreasonable speculation.)
• The Christ imagery, and particularly of the final scene with Kowalski alive, may at first glance appear to be "too much," but there is something to be said for what Eastwood's characters have long represented. Kowalski is ultimately giving up his life for his friends. What makes the imagery work for me is the way Eastwood's hand opens up so the camera can take a good, long look at the aforementioned lighter. The shot looking down on his corpse takes in the stream of blood that is trickling down his wrist--with the militarism represented by the lighter, this crucifix imagery is rendered, in a way, more universal.
• Just as I noted in my review, the film does linger like an older John Ford or Howard Hawks picture. It is essentially fairly complicated, but with a simple coating that makes it quite accessible and a little deceptive in its form.
• Likewise, the film should be--and doubtless is being--compared to The Shootist. John Wayne's final performance, in which he finally lays down his life, in part for the son figure of Ron Howard's, remains poignant today. Eastwood's borrowing of these motifs is worthy homage, and there is no other actor-director who could get away with it--but he can and should be able to. The film is in this way a billet-doux to the American heroes of varying stripes, like Bogart or Wayne, who often acted gruffly or insensitively but, finally, tried to do good.
• Kowalski's repeated comments of slaying a "gook," a "kid," who wished nothing more than to surrender in Korea recalls Eastwood's Iwo Jima films--and especially Letters from Iwo Jima, in which American soldiers are shown mercilessly snuffing out the lives of Japanese soldiers wishing to surrender and survive. Kowalski tells one of the Hmong gangbangers that he could shoot his head off, go back inside and sleep like a baby--obviously thinking of his past in Korea.
• Eastwood's depiction of sybarites again seems to indicate that Eastwood views this kind of person to be rather worthless.
• The phone call of Kowalski's to one of his man-child sons has lingered with other fairly "small" scenes. The look on his son's face after his father hangs up is rather perfect: the quizzical realization that his father would never call--so why did he now?--hits home.
• Gran Torino is an interesting film, and a fine vehicle--pun intended--to be Eastwood's acting swansong. The one thing that hit me just as Kowalski was being shot at the end was that he was entrusting the Hmong community to rat out "their own," despite it being established repeatedly that "the Hmong keep their mouths shut." Similarly, the police and judicial system is suddenly entrusted to save the day, and keep the Hmong gangbangers locked up, as one cop says. This is most ironic coming from Dirty Harry Eastwood--trusting above all else the Hmongs he had seen as alien, and "the system" he had, in earlier incarnations, seen as bankrupt. A strange, fascinating send-off.

The Tall T (1957)

Budd Boetticher's cinema is unlike most other filmmakers' who travailed against the severity of the western genre's singularly stark mien. Boetticher's westerns were different from any other man's. Less sentimental than John Ford's markedly more familial focus, quirkier and a little less obsessed with the nature of man's violence like Anthony Mann, Boetticher looks at the western as the ideal genre in which to comment on the archetypes that populate it, with critical respect. The Man From the Alamo, starring Glenn Ford, was a picture in which a good man is publicly tarred as a coward—the most abominable bete noire of Boetticher's canon, easily surpassing in moral wretchedness the often complexly-rendered “villains”—receiving ample vituperation from almost everyone he encountered. And yet, Ford's “strong, silent” hero found a communal bond of sorts with people already consigned to the unenviable position of being societal outcasts: women, “cripples,” and the elderly and, albeit very fleetingly, the outlaws with whom he finds temporary shelter and sanctuary. In Seven Men From Now, Boetticher's famed revenge saga, the template from which Boetticher and screenwriter partner Burt Kennedy (who wrote Seven Men From Now and adapted Elmore Leonard's story for The Tall T) would draw the four primary characters: The Hero (in each case played to stoic but ardent perfection by Randolph Scott), The Lady (Gail Russel in Seven Men From Now, Maureen O'Sullivan in The Tall T), The Bad Man (a truly vicious Lee Marvin in Seven Men From Now, an empathetically humorous and lonely Richard Boone in The Tall T) and the husband of The Lady, in each case for the story's purposes, The Coward (Walter Reed in Seven Men From Now, John Hubbard in The Tall T).

Seven Men From Now's tone was far more unremittingly dark—with Scott's character personally avenging a horrible wrong—than The Tall T. The latter film is in some ways just as forward-looking as it is inspired by the previous Boetticher-Scott collaboration—The Tall T somewhat looks ahead to Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station, with their more emphatic visualizations of the protagonist making a definite connection to a woman he is charged with protecting. The Tall T's shifting tonality befits the film, which strikes sublimely even-handed treatments of its own themes, settings, characters and conflicts. These attributes enhance The Tall T, and make it the most watchable, easily revisited western Boetticher and Scott made together. The film is simply a seventy-eight-minute epos of prodigious made up of empyreal components, apropros to the cerulean blue sky that often serves as the top framing apparatus for veteran cinematographer Charles Lawton, Jr.'s striking Technicolor compositions.

The first major stretch of the film is leisurely paced and amusingly humorous for the most part, etching a jocular personality in the form of Scott's Pat Brennan. Pat is laconic, but unlike most other Boetticher-Scott heroic characters, he is not haunted by an unspeakable trauma to his very soul. (This is, again, especially true of Seven Men From Now and Ride Lonesome.) In The Tall T, Scott's character, Pat, is a genial man and the film tweaks the image of the western hero as an unexpectedly gelastic personality. Indeed, Pat's very predicament hinges on a comedic premise: he loses his horse in a bet, which hurtles him into the unforeseeable torment that awaits when, after having hitched a ride with a stagecoach carrying newlyweds, Willard and Doretta Mims (The Coward and The Lady played by Hubbard and O'Sullivan respectively), the stagecoach travelers are held up and taken captive by a trio of outlaws. This gives The Tall T a peculiarly puissant portraiture of predetermination that in a thematically scrupulous way gifts this most efficiently crafted western thriller with a protruding tint of elemental doom.

As the narrative significantly expands with the introduction of Boone's complicated outlaw, Frank, and his two simpleminded partners, the icily callous killer Chink (Henry Silva) and dimly foolish perpetual adolescent Billy Jack (Skip Homeier), Boetticher pushes the corresponding tension to increasingly steep heights. Boetticher and Lawton, Jr. make the more easygoing first third of the film pay off handsomely, as it allows them to compellingly augment the story's subsequent tautness without merely resorting to numbing action that would undermine the psychological richness of the scenario and go against Boetticher's more low-key techniques. Rather, Boetticher visually transmits the symbiotic pertinence that defines the characters' relationship with one another by framing them in diametrically opposing configurations. Thus, the valance of Lawton, Jr.'s cinematography comments on the exteriority the outdoor setting and the characters' gulf-like separations from one another. Lawton, Jr.'s fluidity balances Boetticher's painterly shapeliness—the director's seemingly preternatural talent for appropriating the 1950s Technicolor widescreen for immaculately daedal multi-figured compositions is enhanced by the photographer's nimble usage of light, shadow and framing. The picture's cognitively vital mise-en-scene describes the “arc” of the characters: as the small gang of outlaws begin turning on one another, slowly, but surely, Boetticher captures at them in separated, isolated and lonely one-person shots. Lawton, Jr.'s camera is steadied, but ever slightly erratic, as though it has been unnerved by what it has witnessed. The atmosphere conjured is fearlessly independent of any other western, Boetticher-authored or otherwise: in The Tall T, the genre specialist grips the harness and boils the artistic classification to its essence: a solitary figure is held captive by those inferior to he in all of the areas that matter most to Boetticher—morally, mindfully and masculinely—as he confronts the fraudulence at the heart of the relationship between the meek coward and self-deluded woman.

Displaying a nuanced and layered appreciation for the three main characters—Scott's Hero, Boone's Bad Man and O'Sullivan's Lady—Boetticher most assuredly plums the depths of each. Perhaps some can quibble about the unevenly shallow application of Hubbard's Coward, Willard, and Frank's two underlings. Having offered Reed's Coward a chance for redemption in Seven Men From Now, Boetticher is in many ways more merciless here, finding practically nothing worth celebrating in Willard Mims, whose craven deceitfulness actually make him the most protrusive “villain” of the film. And that is because Boone's Frank is rewardingly complicated and challenging. Boetticher and screenwriter Kennedy bathe Boone's Frank in a sensitivity that exceeds the normal-for-late-'50s-westerns trait of endowing the baddie with considerable complexity and charm. Frank is in actuality a sad, lonely figure in his own right—he is neither ruthless nor dumb like his confederates and he longs for meaningful companionship, seeing a possibility of such in the flustered Doretta—and he loathes her newlywed husband, Willard, for his timorousness and greed. As solid and perfectly at ease with himself as Scott is, it is Boone who shines the most brightly, partly due to the marvelous depth of the role.

One scene describes the duel between thespians—which is so friendly in reality that the off-screen relationship beautifully bleeds into the performances, enriching the irony of Frank's better qualities against Scott's more straightforwardly über-noble masculinity—as well as the legerdemain employed by Boetticher to release some of the tension through the tested valve of humor. Scott's Pat hits his head on a stoop at a moment that seemed to be escalating in tension; Scott hits his mark flawlessly, giving the scene the properly defusing impact, but it is Boone the viewer follows most tirelessly, as he laughs in uncontrollable hysteria. Boetticher's musical partner, composer Heinz Roemheld, orchestrally aggrandizes the scene's waxing tension before snappily giving way to Boone's rollicking chortles. This scene serves as a microcosm for the entire film; scenes like this acknowledge the early stretch of the film, which was lightly funny. In Boetticher films, the über-masculine hero, usually played by Scott, is vulnerably kindhearted behind the slightly coarse exterior; here, he is the recurring source of laughter—from the Bad Man and the viewer alike. Just as Boetticher's geographical mastery finds points with which to complement itself and its visually intoxicating and crisply abstract sinew, the film's tonal inconsistencies enable the film's hilly rhythm to completely blossom. This also gives Boetticher enough laxness with which to create an all the more extraordinarily intense, vicious and bluntly graphic denouement. More seriously considered than this welcome comic relief, however, are the intelligently quiet conversational scenes between the two. A fine moment to consider is Frank telling Pat that he wishes he were in better company, and that Chink and Billy Jack are no better than animals—they cannot help who and what they are. Pat's reaction speaks volumes, as he measures up the somewhat serpentine abductor: he listens, but he knows that Frank's words are just so much self-apologia and self-excusing. As Frank says he honestly wishes for a life similar to Pat's, Boetticher's message crystallizes. Frank could have Pat's life, if he shared Pat's ethical code. Without it, he may know exactly how unlawful and base his actions are, but he is in a particular way all the worse for it, continually dogged by a conscience he has mostly disabled, left to lazily leap for what he should be ingenuously striving to achieve. These extraordinarily well-barracked dramatic rudiments make The Tall T more fecund than many movies twice this picture's length.

Psych-Out (1968)

Psych-Out's first shot, after a brief deluge of captivating boxes of stills and videos that lay the crucial cultural backdrop for the film's story, is a wonderful close-up—crafted with a harmonious tranquility by director Richard Rush and cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs— that is pleasingly overwhelmed by Susan Strasberg's sculptured beatific face and flowingly silky raven hair. Strasberg is Jenny, a deaf youth searching for her brother in 1967 “Summer of Love” San Francisco. Before the viewer knows that, however, all that matters is the adorably beautiful face, hair and comportment of Strasberg's Jenny. She is sitting on the seat of a bus, looking in no particular direction. Colorfully splashing against the auburn chevelure she sports—a purple flower, being held by a woman outside the bus, her arm stretched into the mass transportation vehicle. The nearly soundless moment serves as the springboard from which an awesomely mesmerizing credits sequence, which speedily commutes through the Haight District. Enlivened by the catchy and honeyed-sounding “The Pretty Song From Psych-Out” by the Strawberry Alarm Clock, the credits sequence is like a short movie by itself, striking a joviality and wonderment that is impossible to dismiss as anything but terrifically edited manipulation. If Point Blank from the previous year partly chronicled the debilitating rot under the surface of 1960s San Francisco, Psych-Out swims in some of the sweeter waters and walks down the happier trails of the City by the Bay.

Psych-Out was based on a screenplay by Jack Nicholson called The Love Children. American International Pictures studio boss Samuel Z. Arkoff restructured the script significantly, and gave director Rush a mere eighteen days and two hundred thousand dollars with which to make the film. Produced by Dick Clark, Nicholson was able to maintain certain creative control, particularly allowed as he was to star in the role he had written for himself, Stoney. Psych-Out, as it would come to be called, turned out to be a launching pad of sorts for the eventual Oscar-winning star of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, from which Nicholson shot to stardom in the next year's Easy Rider while being lit by Psych-Out cinematographer Kovacs.

Before too long in the film, Jenny finds herself in the company of Stoney and his friends and fellow band members in a Haight District cafe. Laying low, these fellows are concerned about “The Man” without being excessively paranoid about it. The band, called “Mumblin' Jim,” is comprised of actors such as Adam Roarke as Ben and Max Julian as Elwood and (future director) Henry Jaglom as Warren. The banter between these denizens of the Haight District is loose, and realistic, with just the right plausible mixture of agreement, laughter at one another's expense, kindhearted verbal comedowns and jokes. After being lost and almost being run over by a conservative-looking man behind the wheel, wearing a suit-and-tie with glasses (“Dope-fiends!” he bitterly castigates her before learning that her odd behavior comes from her deafness), Jenny finds comfort in the relatively peaceful environs in which her new friends frequently call a haunt.

The first moment in which Stoney is found allows the the viewer to listen in on his conversation. “That's life,” he says with some weariness but mainly confidence. “You spend it.” Lingering on this profound realization, Rush's camera pans and tilts about, finding an intangibly egalitarian form of conversation that continues apace. The humor is witty, and believable. When one friend requests a cup of coffee, the black Elwood remarks, “I'll get it. Serving is part of my racial memory.” Protecting Jenny from “The Man,” Stoney quickly becomes curious about her. That is most understandable. After unleashing the Strawberry Alarm Clock's “Incense and Peppermints,” a conversation between Nicholson’s Stoney and Strasberg's Jenny buoys the filmmakers' handling of their own “exploitation” picture's philosophy. Stoney's curiosity forces him to ask a couple of questions to Jenny about her past, about where she comes from. Jenny becomes immediately upset, however, by the questions. His response: “It's okay. No one has to answer anyone else—that's what it's all about.”

The phantasmagoria in which Psych-Out indulges is almost entirely endearing. One such soothing set-piece involves a web-like structure of bead necklaces, strung about a large room. Young men and women kiss beneath the shining beads; Stoney's valuation of the memorable spectacle memorably draws out critical character information. Stoney may not be the idealized flower child whose primary aim in life is to spread peace and love at no cost—a bandmate accuses him of being a potential sell-out, looking off at the tantalizing bottom line, and his response is to throw the dreaminess of the counterculture in his face—but within his troubled soul he yearns for solitude and comfort.

He may not know that himself, however. Stoney and Jenny predictably fall for one another. A psychedelically wrought sex scene between the two is bewitching; as their bodies tangle with one another, the rug carpet adjacent to them is transformed, through dissolve shots, into a wheat field, and vice versa. The scene is romantic, but is fundamentally interested in the moist, nebulous fog of mind-altering substances. The entire sequence plays out like an effervescent light show. Stoney and Jenny lay abed in this somewhat plotless meditation on the counterculture, not unlike the devastating conversational scene in John Cassavetes' look at the beatniks and blacks in the late 1950s. Jenny asks Stoney what purpose an agent for their band would serve. “To make us famous like the Airplane,” Stoney sighs out. Stoney has his eye on fame, fortune and glory, even if he is halfway still committed to the appealing harmony of remaining among his friends. Rush and Kovacs form a short, pointed analysis of euphoria, and then return to its complications.

And complications arise. Dave (Dean Stockwell) is the seemingly self-appointed “guru” of the group, dispensing little hippie gems of somewhat faux wisdom. The moment he sees Jenny he wants to have her for himself. The hypocritical hippie was something of a trope in counterculture exploitation pictures, and Dave is one of those, but Stockwell's likability cancels out some of the slightly queasier aspects of the character. Elsewhere, Jaglom's Warren suffers from a “bad trip,” and when Jenny asks Warren's friends, “Why does he take that stuff?” she is told, “Don't judge people.” Nietzsche is invoked as a justification for people to not judge one another.

The screenplay and Rush do sometimes lurch toward overly pat, easy iconography, though its harmlessness mitigates most of these errors in judgment. One such amusingly goofy scene has a woman telling what appears to be her husband, outside a Haight church through which the love children wander, “The pastor seemed like such a nice man. How can he tolerate these people and how they dress?” Rush pans his camera, framing (quite exquisitely, as usual) a group of hippies who look startlingly, distractingly like Jesus Christ and the apostles. An arguable misstep here and there may dot the line of the film, but Rush's technique is primarily interested in candor. Some of the more tenuously didactic pieces may not win over people whose knowledge of the era depicted is limited to films such as this made at the time, but they hardly help to confute Rush's sympathetic distillation of the time he, Kovacs and Nicholson were all attempting to capture in a cultural snapshot.

Rush's critical focus shooting technique, an invention for which he himself claims credit, brings many of Psych-Out's most emotionally charged moments to the forefront, and to life. This stylistic flourish, by which Rush briskly alternates between foreground and background figures, is given new, compelling meaning in Psych-Out, especially whenever it involves Nicholson’s Stoney, whose verbal comments to other characters are sometimes belied by his facial reactions. Jenny is appropriately treated as an angel of sorts—which is not to say that Rush places her on a pedestal. The character is in multiple ways the innocent babe in the woods, and the viewer is encouraged to share in her jejune wide-eyed wonderment. Stoney and David both find her brightness of spirit irresistible, and it is against the tender callowness represented by Jenny that the more jadedly aloof philosophizing and bickering between the two is cast. “David, the acid has curdled and turned you sour,” Stoney states in the film's most pointed and meaningful line. Psych-Out comes down on the love children it follows, though appropriately enough, the blow is almost dealt with flower petals, so softly it finally, gently lands.

La Ronde (1950)

“There is no true love without farewells.”

So says one consummate romantic character in Max Ophuls' adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's scandalous play, La Ronde, which synchronously takes on a sincerely melancholic affection for its grandiose cast of longing figures and irreverently jocose mien. Ophuls culls his most exquisite gifts with which to communicate the absurdities and constretemps, the disastrous predicaments and the effervescing mannerisms that stipple the film from its very beginning to ending. More intentionally distant from his subjects than in much of his work here, Ophuls uses an alluring device, framing the multiple, but interlocking plots examining termagent relationships between men and women as tales told by an omniscient and subtly caustic stage manager (Anton Walbrook) who literally oversees “the round,” the carousel that runs on the successfulness of love affairs.

Ophuls' picture is a bedazzling achievement, gliding effortlessly from one pairing to another. Everything about the film seems particularly unique to Ophuls; the substance is attuned to the director's sensibilities (rightly so, as he was one of the several screenwriters who adapted Schnitzler's work), and he is completely attuned to it. The signature opulence of his glittering sets, locales and the impeccable cinematography by Ophuls' colleague Christian Matras could ostensibly not possibly belong to anyone else. Cosmetically a sex farce built with tirelessly painstaking delicacy, La Ronde is frequently quite humorous, wrought out of a visual playfulness that is as adorably winsome as any comic filmmaker's visual literation. Even when a certain naughty symbolic joke teeters on the edge of being overused, its irresistible charm is impossible to ignore. In an early scene, a soldier sits on a bench with the woman he cannot help but try to sexually broach. He clumsily attempts to engulf her on the bench, feebly trying to wrap himself around her. His sword is in the way, however. Later, swords will return to the story, and in one eventful scene, a woman holds a count's sword on her bed, establishing control over him, prodding him to make love to her. The phallic representations punctuate the visually buoyant form Ophuls and his collaborators create. Indeed, La Ronde—most appropriately—goes full circle, rotating back to the soldiers, streetwalkers and swords that are presented in the film's opening stretch.

La Ronde's wit is fantastic, with characters behaving so vainly, possessively, ambitiously and foolishly that a director lacking in Ophuls' deeply ironic humanism would not, could not, have managed to bring the unruly concoction to such nearly miraculous life. In one of the funnier moments, a nervous woman asks her young suitor about what she believes is his home, “Have there been any other women here?” To which he replies, “The building has been here for over fifty years.” The back-and-forth banter is endearing in its farcical harmony.

Yet such obvious humor is utilized sparingly; Ophuls' cerebrally bemused perspective is played out before the viewer with emphatic deliberateness and airy goodwill, with Walbrook's sage raconteur serving as visible, transparent director—a stand-in for Ophuls himself. The humor and pathos the stage manager conveys are both legitimate, seeing the romantic entanglements as almost pitiful flights of fancy that transcend class (which is divided in perspective and personality alike by separate people). The circular movement of the film matches the literal picture Ophuls draws: these twelve characters are chasing one another but they are most indelibly chasing the same desire and destination. Loquaciously representing particular ideas, they are Platonic inventions. Through the specific argot, the characters are eloquent but limited in expressing the truth, free of ornamentation, which guides them.

The film's invocation of the great book of Stendhal's, On Love, and the great author's literature, with its rambunctiously pleasing painting of women—and the men who are so often bewitched by them, bringing about the crystallization of love within their own minds—which makes perfect sense. As Ophuls shapes the picture's constitution, the characters represent the ideas which animate the film's themes. After the host's introduction, a scene in which a lonely soldier is solicited by a prostitute humorously unfolds. The streetwalker's earthy sensuality is specially French in its creation. The soldier's casualness and awkwardness speak to his contrasting inexperience against the streetwalker's weary opportunism. (The streetwalker is played with great frankness by Simone Signoret.) The chambermaid character represents sheerly exuberant passion. Alfred, the two-timing suitor, posing in his dubious but ostentatiously wonderful home, is the “young man” who cannot resist the “chambermaid” and her passion. Temptation is present in other forms as well, with “the Young Lady and Husband,” and the husband and girl in Vienna; the husband is stood up by the girl, while the a poet lands himself in the husband's nest; “the Poet and Actress” examines a girl at the theater, who is stood up by the poet; the actress finds herself a soldier (the count); and finally the count meets the streetwalker as La Ronde almost dizzyingly goes about itself in full circle.

La Ronde looks at the balance of romance requiring the “proper” setting, “appropriate” time and “socially acceptable” conditions against the practicability, reality and, most paramount of all, passion of senses that all too often dictate the choices people make. The film has much to say, but the unmitigatedly light cuteness of the scenarios smooths out any rough edges. Issues as diverse as class divisions, the ideal and reality of noblesse oblige and the jeopardy of lust at the expense of personal happiness, are deftly explored. The film fastidiously follows the trajectory between “love” and “like”—desirability demanding “tests” of masculine manliness. This strain contests the sensuality of feminine charm that is so evident in the numerous portrayals of the fairer sex. Yet the film is never heavier than a perfectly formed soufflé.

The striking set and costume designs by George Annenkov are decorative and almost surreal, particularly as Ophuls shifted from on-location filming to the security and sanctity of sets. Beyond that, however, the set and costume designs assist Ophuls in transcribing the moony mood, ethereal emotion and glowing glamor of every location. This wondrously refined sentiment of Ophuls conclusively enriches Schnitzler's more pronouncedly pessimistic and emotionally brutal tone. The film's lack of severely graphic enactments are part of Ophuls' joke; his Master of Ceremonies is almost drunk on the mere possibilities of the people who populate the interlocking liaisons. And yet he holds a reel of film in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other at one amusingly timed moment. The scene is only slightly coy; the joy and finesse that Walbrook brings to it and all other instances of directly straightforward gamesmanship (several characters speak directly into the camera, though naturally none nearly as much as Walbrook's raconteur) on behalf of Ophuls.

A solid craftsman could perhaps balance the varying components of the plot, but Ophuls brings his breathless visual flair. Sumptuously surpassing the basics of the engrossingly ambitious plot, Ophuls complements the story and its characters with dreamlike tracking shots, mesmerizing camera pans and tilts and thoroughly graceful comprehensiveness of mise-en-scene. One astonishing tracking shot of the chambermaid at the twenty-nine minute mark captures the character's fanciful self-possessiveness. Moments later, as the man she loves is trying to spend an evening with “the Lady,” the woman grows impatient and distrusting of Alfred as he tries to explain away any doubts she has of him. The woman opts to silently leave the home as Alfred struggles, unsuccessfully, to open a bottle of wine. The sad but oddly funny moment is exhilaratingly created by Ophuls out of a sweeping tracking shot, which seems to swim through the walls that divide the rooms he brilliantly captures. The tilts, pans and crane shots repeatedly used by Ophuls allow him to create entirely seamless characterizations without interrupting the ebb and flow of the wholly serene and asomatous tale.

When Ophuls settles down, he does so with a sensitivity unlike anyone. As a man and wife sit in their respective beds, Ophuls shoots much of the scene through a clock that sits near the room's opposite wall. As the husband lectures the wife on the importance of befriending only irreproachable women, Ophuls closes back in on the actor and actress. The cutting between faces at this time is important, as it ably demonstrates the terse confrontational tone between husband and wife, cut apart by shots that capture the reactions each person has to the other's comments. Finally, as the dialogue becomes sweet again, and the tone lightens, and the two find renewed common ground, Ophuls returns to the opening shot of the scene, placing his artfully composed camera behind the clock whose shape allows the two, sitting in their beds, to be captured. The shot through the clock conveys the gulf between the two while establishing that they are still linked to one another. This kind of cinematic genius must be cherished—its reverberating essaying of love is remarkably deep, yet transmits the knotting subject of romance, of desire and of love, with a caress.

Cadillac Records (2008)

"You sing the blues. You don't have to live them." Darnell Martin's Cadillac Records is a gem, not because it tries to say anything new about the cultural and sociopolitical matters that are almost infuriatingly in tumultuous flux throughout the period of time it chronicles through the lifespan of Leonard Chess's Chicago-based Chess Records, which was so instrumental in bringing about the opening of black R&B music in the 1950s and 1960s to the masses, but because it is, fittingly, an exemplary case of a film achieving a rhythmic power. As the film commences, Chess (Adrien Brody giving his most vulnerable performance since The Pianist) wants the American dream—to have a home, a wife and a Cadillac she can drive. The film finds a strangely compelling rhythm itself. Writer-director Martin creates not a standard-issue “biopic” like Ray or Walk the Line, but a film that celebrates the colossal impact black musicians had on American culture in the twentieth century. Not dissimilar from the way in which Charles Foster Kane's newspaper empire functioned as a barometer for the man's personal well-being, sensibility and, in screenwriter terms, “character arc,” in Citizen Kane, Cadillac Records uses the storyline of black blues being born out of the southern cradle of folk music, to the maturation and transformation into R&B and rock 'n' roll, as a transcendental background that informs the emotional waves—both the waxing and waning—of the multiple characters. This does not sound entirely different, and it is not, but it is, in the hands of Martin and her impressively magnetic actors and actresses, executed almost as well as possible.

Playing the legendary Muddy Waters is Jeffrey Wright, whose sotto voce impersonation manages to go to depths not plumbed by the mimicry of Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles or the force-of-will characterization of Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash. (Though both actors were quite good in their respective ways.) Already playing a man whose quietness could be deafening, whose offstage donning of his doo-rag symbolized his intractable personality and sharp individuality, Wright underplays all of the bumps on the road, all of the rich highs and all of the tersely bittering moments in which life seemingly chooses to play a cruel joke for no special reason. As the narrator, songwriter Willie Dixon (Cedric the Entertainer), informs the audience in sadly the only useful bit of narration, Muddy Waters had to be built as a persona (which Dixon says was his primary job), and Muddy grew into becoming that man. Wright's performance is receiving good notices, but its subtlety extinguishes the potential of great acclaim, which is a shame. Wright's performance may be informed strictly by what is known about Muddy Waters, but in any case, his strong, vibrant sense of knowing brings greater, more shaded nuance to the character. Foxx and Phoenix played Charles and Cash almost like leaves blowing in the wind, taken from one place to the next. Muddy has his dalliances with admiring females, buying them jewelry and dinners in exchange for their exuberant lustfulness, but he always knows exactly what he is doing, and why. An important way of seeing this is examining scenes in which Wright, as Muddy, calmly but forthrightly assists his boss, Chess, in sensing when his wife is displeased with him. In Cadillac Records, the leading figure as played to perfection by Wright is not a cypher through which momentous changes occur—he himself is a rueful observer, watching himself as much as he watches others—a point made literal in excellently composed shots of him staring at himself in the mirror.

One standout is Columbus Short as Little Walter: the actor brings a charged volatility to the man that explains, but never excuses, his personal behavior. Even when the character's destination is foreseeable—including to those historically unaware of it—Short's emotively expressed sincerity prevails in winning the viewer over, to simply allow the ride to continue unabated. Mos Def is a surprisingly convincing stand-in for Chess Record's first great crossover, Chuck Berry. Def's humorous quipping and charismatic aplomb—even when Berry is being arrested for transporting white minor girls across state lines in Indiana—inject a warmth and detachment all at once. And then there is Beyonce Knowles, whose performance as vocalist Etta James is one of the best supporting turns of the year. Beyonce took the under-written part of Diana Ross—or whomever she was euphemistically called—in Dreamgirls and made a little something out of it, but in Cadillac Records she almost burns up the screen as a wounded, hungry, unaccommodating rising star. It is difficult to circumvent the woman's distracting beauty, which is probably why too many critics have likely avoided, ignored or dismissed her acting. Beyonce plays Etta as a fully formed being—she is considerably different from the others whose paths she crosses, and simultaneously, her pain, which daunts her almost endlessly, speaks to the people she signs for—whether they be the musical peers depending on her vocal talents or the people who will listen to her singing.

The film is not perfect—not great, not close to being flawless—and there is no purpose in ascribing points of technical or artistic merit to a movie whose subject matter is admittedly deserving of a superlatively sonorous treatment. Martin indulges in at least some movie-land myth-making, instances of which echo back to “biopics” that came before. In one such moment, after the charming but homicidal Little Walter is told by Les Chess that his mother has died, Little Walter tells Muddy that his true mother is his harmonica, with which he brought a wholly unique sound to Chess Records. Muddy holds out a flask of liquor for comfort. Little Walter is quite reluctant, certain that it will disrupt the aureate beauty of his musical art. Finally, however, Little Walter relents and grabs the flask, promising seconds before nearly emptying the contents into his system, “Just a taste.” And so Little Walter's decline begins in earnest, with that one dramatic decision, in the unbearable crucible that one crucial moment. In Walk the Line, Phoenix's Johnny Cash stormed out into the night, irate at the situation in which he found himself, due to June Carter telling the roguish Cash that any nascent love between them had to be excised before it could begin. It just so happened a fellow musician offered Cash some highly addictive pills at that very moment, when he was at his weakest, James Mangold's film posited. The likelihood of such definitive turning points in life is unlikely; the vast majority of “real life” is a languid blur, and starting points for habitual behavior, including addictions, are rarely so ably located with such accuracy and precision. Much of life is so internally dictated, so removed from the dictates of logic through the falsely comforting prism of quantifiable personal reality, that these films, in their formulaic deconstructing of the famous musical artist—which is, naturally, based on the realities of these artists' careers—are probably telling a story at the expense of verite considerations. But that is what movies do. They tell stories, they simplify complexities and they mold a story out of life's myriad realities. They make sense out of the insensible, forming coherent stories out of a confusedly muddled world. That is what movies do.

Judged, therefore, on the sheer emotional thrust of its own worthwhile story, Cadillac Records is a triumph on its own terms. Martin's blending of wildly antithetic characters and the consequent sub-plots that weave throughout is thorough, measuredly following the story of Chess Records. The picture terrifically clamps down on the bitter acrimony in a markedly different kind of workplace that so often characterizes the relationships between people who truly love one another. Martin is still finding herself visually, perhaps, but she has a knack for stitching together potently punctuating dramatic scenes that refuse to go away quietly for fear of embarrassment. This film, too, deals with drug abuse, but the pivotal, highly-charged and emotionally complicated scene that takes on the brunt of the film's time on the indignities of drug abuse is unlike any other in a film remotely like this. Playing out between the strung-out Etta and the sympathizing Chess before a fireplace, the scene establishes a superb contradiction that bedevils the characters: the pit of smothering heartbreak, loss and excruciating memories against the mocking promise of romance.

And Martin maintains that high-wire act of emotionality, which is a truly welcome sight. If she cannot reinvent the wheel, she can make it durable, and she does, with great integrity. Not everything works. The narration is in its own way affable and mildly interesting, but there are several times when its pedantic laying out of the literal, particularly in the ambiguously political relating of the racial discord and angst of the era, seems superfluous, like title cards explaining the cultural meaning of numerous scenes' drama for anyone who did not “get it.” However, when Martin and her cast launch off the ground, they soar. And none fly higher than Beyonce, whose performance must be seen and heard; the immediacy she brings to the role of Etta is something truly inspiring to witness. So much of the character's introduction is seeped in time-worn cliché, with her throwing hissy fits and temperamentally demanding things in the studio. Brody's Chess has to threaten to pull the plug before extracting the kind of singing he needs to hear from her. Beyonce succeeds because she grabs the cliché and breaks down its pulverulent coating until what seems like the real Etta emerges through her. Yes, the musical biopic staples are almost all still here, but they hit harder. The best example? Beyonce's singing of “I'd Rather Go Blind.” As in Ray, a pivotal moment is made out of a singer truly singing a song to someone in their immediate proximity. As Beyonce's Etta ferociously sings the song of embittered, crushed and impossible love to the man she loves, and who loves her, the married Chess, the faithfulness to Etta's vocal work is noteworthy. Viewed from Chess's perspective, Etta is as beautiful as ever. Yet while the camera closes in on Etta, her countenance is dented; a defiant sneer develops. As the scene and song both swell in bombast, with the crying Etta belting out her lyrics directly at Chess, Martin courageously keeps the close-up of Beyonce's Etta running, finally breaking the shot for good when Chess walks out of the room just as the song addresses his action (“Then to see you walk away from me...”). And so Martin completes her cinematically rendered essay on race relations in mid-century America through the power of music. History is simplified, and the delicately recounted black-and-white history of Chess and his musicians is made accessible to follow, from his offering of Cadillacs to his most prized finds to a back-alley assault at the hands of blacks he withstands as "South Chicago... was changing," according to the narration. But movies do that. And good movies do that well. Cadillac Records may not be the most rigorous motion picture out now, but it has one attribute missing in at least some of the supposed titans of this Oscar season: soul.

Laura (1944)

In the debatable contest of discerning the identity of Otto Preminger's greatest film, his Laura must be thoroughly discussed. With a tripartite team of screenwriters—Jay Dratler, Samuel Hoffenstein and Elizabeth Reinhardt (credited as Betty Reinhardt)—working from Vera Caspary's novel and play, Preminger essays everything that makes his cinema unique and almost convulsively, delightfully rewarding. Steeped in the formalism and classicism from which he formed his sensationally arresting art, Preminger's cinema is as sound a definition of mise-en-scene itself as any director's. Utilizing his “objective” camera, Preminger cinematically embroidered seamless, continuous visual constructions. Commonly misunderstood, Preminger's cinema is chiefly birthed out of the director's exceptional surveying of people and places, characters and settings, movement and discontinuation. Preminger's main focus must be read between the filmic lines. Normally casual “establishing” shots are more correctly establishing in the truest sense within Preminger's purview. This particular economy of style is transcendental, for it speaks in the richly fluent and supple language of cinema.

It is that belletristic sensibility that in no small measure comprehensively disguises the frequent subversively risque content of Preminger's films. This enticing thematic blending begins in earnest with the film that catapulted Preminger's reputation in Hollywood, Laura. (Preminger was nominated for Best Director for the film, one of five Academy Award nominations the picture received.) Originally to be directed by Rouben Mamoulian and lit by Mamoulian's master cinematographer Lucien Ballard, the cinematography was provided by Joseph LaShelle, whose gorgeously shadowy black-and-white compositions and beautiful lighting schema provided the film with the aesthetic accentuation that so richly buttressed the action of the plot. (The cinematography of LaShelle's won the film's only Academy Award.) LaShelle's cinematography sweetens the strong brew of Laura, lending a nearly constant luminosity to the characters and places in which they are captured.

Laura, in major, definable ways, marks the most attractive beginning of Preminger's refined technique as authorial voice. If Laura's ensemble cast is made up of possible suspects in a murder case, then the great Austrian director's latter films likewise portray multifarious characters, in plentiful and disparate environments, denominated as much by the director's correlation between persons and the movements by which they traverse as any narrative-determined consequence of their actions. In Preminger's work, characters stand out in overwhelmingly large rooms, walking about and speaking to one another with purpose, forging identities for themselves through their actions as impeccably as his camera gradually posits their true natures. Taken as something as trifling as a simplistic whodunit, Laura in actuality provides the framework for Preminger's later work, including Daisy Kenyon, Whirpool, Where the Sidewalk Ends and Angel Face, as well as the late epics of one manner or another—characterized by speech-making, having to do with the personal, the political, the legal, the dutiful—Exodus, Advise and Consent, Anatomy of a Murder and In Harm's Way, respectively.

It is in the former group of films wherein an observer of Preminger finds the keenness attendant to swiftness and narrative economy. Marked as they are by mutual incisions and tokens—beautiful black-and-white creations out of which despair and humiliation fester, sometimes uncontrollably, these pictures are emphatically accompanied by masculine obsessional behavior, juxtaposed against wantonness and perversity of the feminine. Laura deserves a special place as an unsettlingly gleeful meditation on the kinkiness that resides in the hearts and minds of pundits, of playboys and of policemen. As much of the film takes place in flashback, it is intriguing to linger on the lack of veracity supplied by the narrator, one acidic theatre critic, Waldo Lydecker (the openly homosexual Clifton Webb, in his first “talkie” performance, and first film in nineteen years, the security of his role consequently threatened by studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck, giving a virtuoso performance). This untrustworthiness of the storyteller is an indelible contrast to the objectivity that characterizes Preminger's mise-en-scene. The risque qualities of later Preminger pictures such as The Moon is Blue, which was disallowed the Production Code's seal of approval and withheld due to supposedly provocatively dirty dialogue such as the word “virgin” and The Man With the Golden Arm, about a heroin addict played by Frank Sinatra, find in part their inspiration the director's interest of pushing the proverbial envelope, for the sake of greater, more unvarnished truth.

Laura is a perverse romance of sorts, with three different men loving a woman who is apparently dead. The portrait of Laura, often accompanied by David Raksin's famed “Laura” theme, hangs on the wall like a specter, and magnetic lure for the widely different men who pine for her. This beguilingly melancholic component of Laura speaks to the noirish feature of entrapment, beckoning the three men out of their respective pits of alienation and despondency. For Lydecker (who was evidently based on New Yorker theatre critic and broadcaster Alexander Woolcott, his tale of how he came to know Laura is tinged by his personal stake in the matter of the titular character, and how he attempted to evoke the socialite buried within the woman as he viewed her. The opening of the film revealingly ushers in the exclusivity that is at once outstanding and simply complementary to Preminger's greater style—like characters incongruously captured alone, usually stolidly and quietly, in a more subduedly static framing that richly unravels the layers of protective artifice, in this instance before the figure is able to ever display such self-supported aegis. And yet this character, Lydecker, a preening fop, is matchlessly anomalous, so endowed he is with a shield of support that he carries it with him wherever he goes, including the large, beautiful marble bathtub in which he furiously writes his corrosively astringent editorials. Literally, this is especially rewarding, as Preminger's insistence on portraying Lydecker's nakedness—including the subsequent reaction of another character, in which case the columnist is soon seen by homicide police detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews). The visual scheme is brilliant, as Preminger's objective viewpoint demonstrably articulates with stunning eloquence and economy the literalism that authentically supplements the metaphorical bulwark of Lydecker's. His nudity is blocked by his typewriter—a bit of sly commentary unto itself that hides in plain sight.

Lydecker recounts in the opening scene, “I shall never forget the weekend Laura died. A silver sun burned through the sky like a huge magnifying glass. It was the hottest Sunday in my recollection. I felt as if I were the only human being left in New York. For Laura's horrible death, I was alone. I, Waldo Lydecker, was the only one who really knew her.” Lydecker's pomposity and pretense, coupled with his supercilious haughtiness and sense of self-importance are conveyed with a campy, almost caustic delirium by Webb, who savors every lacerating line of insult and self-deluding romanticism. Viewing himself as Laura's social creator, his unrestrained amour-propre is joyfully brought to animated, cerebral life. Through narration, monologue and dialogue, Webb's vocal delivery is amplified and mellifluously enunciated. Yet the actor places just the necessary amount of dignity to the role, so Lydecker does not descend into mere buffoonish caricature. The almost botanically aggregate creation by Caspary's story, the character is a dense cluster whose divergent parts and carpels only underline the uncondensed quantities to be found in his form. The humor at the character's expense is admittedly significant. In one of the film's most bizarre beats, early in the picture Lydecker stands up in his bathtub, fully nude (off-camera), standing before the questioning McPherson, asking the policeman to hand him his robe. Andrews' McPherson stares at Lydecker, looks down and smirks, reaching for the writer's robe.

McPherson himself is slowly drawn into a pathological, perverse love affair with the murdered Laura. An offbeat, hardboiled cop—with handsome but ambiguously sabulous features and demeanor—McPherson is a steadied, thinking man, who literally enjoys playing puzzles for amusement and satisfaction. Andrews is marvelously understated as the cop whose laconically verbalized comments to other main characters such as Lydecker and the duplicitous, two-timing playboy fiance Shelby Carpenter (an unassailably indecorous Vincent Price), acknowledge a knowingness to the policeman that is nevertheless corrupted by his own budding, quixotically romantic feelings for Laura. As he longs for the woman, gazing through the shadowy haze in which Preminger and LaShelle so persuasively immerse the viewer, the character is further fleshed out. McPherson's blunt language infuriates Lydecker, particularly the cop's use of the term “dame” to describe all women, including Laura. A chain-smoker, known for his heedless dauntlessness, McPherson is etched as something of a self-destructive man, with an unhealthy crasis that stresses the decisions he makes.

Yet a case can be made that it is Gene Tierney who makes the most memorable impression, or at least lends the most vital luminescence to the proceedings. As McPherson works tirelessly to entrap her murderer, the screenplay provides an estimable examination of the woman at the center of the whodunit. As viewed through the male lenses of Lydecker, McPherson and Carpenter, Laura is perhaps an incomplete figure, or at least could easily have become as much without such a bedazzling actress. Equally wispy and strong, Tierney as Laura is a contradiction amidst others. As McPherson and Laura stare at one another—he at her portrait, she back at him while he stews—he is busily chasing any clues or hunches he can uncover, practically living in the woman's apartment. She is projected through long flashback sequences, the details of which are provided by the questionable source of Lydecker. These, among other points, serve to illustrate just how divinely paradoxical and conflicting so many disparate paradigms established by the film. Laura's very identity is most intrinsically related to the viewer through the cockeyed viewpoint of Lydecker's. Preminger's camera brilliantly conveys the smoky murkiness of Laura's personage, and in one instance shoots her through a cloud of cigarette smoke blown by Price's Carpenter at a party. This framing of Tierney's, and Laura's, ethereal beauty through such impediments and accretions further transmits the thematic touchstone of excavating the role the unreliable brume that accompanies the male gaze, and discovery of love, plays in the story.

The contrasting lightness and darkness of the film is intriguing; Laura's sumptuous cinematography often points to film noir, but much of the picture's events take place in fully lit rooms that could have belonged to a 1930s crime picture. The greater the sensuality present, the more seductive the lighting patterns become. Sitting before the haunting portrait of Laura, McPherson, drinking, finally falls asleep. Preminger gently nudges the camera towards the protagonist. A moment transpires in which McPherson is caught as totally still, sleeping away; time has elapsed. The camera reels back from him, and soon a woman enters the apartment. Much later, as this woman is interrogated in a darkly foreboding room by McPherson with strong lights beaming directly into her face, her breathtaking beauty radiates, glowing like light itself. The woman's pulchritudinous countenance shimmers in the shot, exquisitely framed by Preminger's taut control of mise-en-scene.

In many sequences, Preminger opts for the triangular compositional schema that he would perfect in subsequent pictures. (Where the Sidewalk Ends must be noted for this tremendously consistent stylistic. That will be reviewed in this space soon.) In numerous shots, one central figure hosts the primary line of view, forming a the pivoting point that bisects between the two characters on either side. (Again, Where the Sidewalk Ends powerfully brings this directorial signature-branding device to greater fruition and elan, as it conveys the tightening tension that wraps around Andrews' different, more recognizably noirish cop protagonist like a noose.) The first major three-person configuration occurs at the eight-minute mark, as McPherson questions Lydecker and Carpenter in the early afternoon. Another highly engaging composition features this three-person framework at the forty-minute mark. (This is almost immediately followed by a painterly shot of a man walking on a sidewalk on a very rainy evening.) At the fifty-one minute mark, a variation of the three-figure staple is utilized, with McPherson and another individual serving as bookends, separated by a brightly lit lamp. In Laura, Preminger's configurations speak to the disorder of the whodunit plot; the aesthetic brings a semblance of visual order and symmetry to the film's dyspeptically twisty tale.

Laura is an entrancing picture, which at the very least grazes the supernatural and horror film elements that decoratively contribute to the forlorn mood the film conjures. As for the perversion at the center of the plot—driven by deleterious masculine obsession—the film may be able to go only so far in graphic terms. Nevertheless, the screenplay is taken by Preminger fully, and directed with fine perspicacity, melding an austere formalism that does not betray a rigidity with an unpredictable playfulness that does not descend into parody. Gothic, humorous, satirical and cognizant in matters relating to the social strata to which Lydecker belongs, Laura is a kind of cinematic buffet, well worth revisiting.

The Scarface Mob (1959)

The Scarface Mob was the major two-part television event that ushered in the famed crime series, The Untouchables, in 1959. Phil Karlson—who had directed noted film noirs such as Scandal Sheet, Kansas City Confidential and 99 River Street--was the director of the two-part pilot for the Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse production company, which, with Desi Arnaz, produced I Love Lucy. Referred to as The Untouchables: Part 1 and The Untouchables: Part 2, the TV episodes were later shown theatrically as one feature. Narrated by the resolutely earnest Walter Winchell, The Scarface Mob (and later The Untouchables television series) was a crisply black-and-white cops-and-robbers crime analogue with strong noirish stylistic flourishes and undertones. The Scarface Mob promised an entirely tougher, grittier television series for viewers.

Embodying Eliot Ness is the perfectly cast Robert Stack, whose relentless sternness and almost limitless sense of propriety made him seem to be the ideal Ness. Stack possessed the ascetic screen presence with that immediately recognizable voice, which seemed to bring Ness to life, whether or not it was indeed true to the real man. Neville Brand plays his great nemesis, mobster Al Capone, adorned with a scar on his face for the role. Brand lets loose as Capone, and in one of the most memorable scenes, alternately laughs hysterically and glowers menacingly at his gangland associates. Bruce Gordon is Frank Nitti, Capone's chief enforcer. Keenan Wynn shines in the juiciest good guy part as ex-convict-turned-crime-fighter Joe Fuselli, whose knowledge of the Sicilian and Neapolitan dialects, some of the inner-workings of the Chicago gangs and indispensable “street smarts,” as they would be called today, are proven to be invaluable in aiding Ness and his unit of “Untouchables.”

Karlson's mise-en-scene transcends The Scarface Mob's television-production origins. Aided by standout television cinematographer Charles Straumer—who would go on to light seventy-eight episodes of the television crime saga—Karlson creates a Chicago underworld that seems quite unnervingly authentic. A dark room in which Ness and his colleagues begin to ensnare Nitti and his confreres by acting like dirty cops accepting a bribe becomes a habitat that, in its aphotic, dimly lit texture portends the duplicity employed by both lawman and outlaw. Straumer casts face-splitting shadows that indelibly cast the characters in the context of being two-faced. When one hood tries to kill Ness with a knife, and is stopped from doing so (partly thanks to Fuselli knowing what the knife-wielding killer was saying to Nitti in Sicilian), Karlson focuses on the weapon with appropriately penetrative focus. Fuselli angrily stabs a table with the knife, and the light caught on the blade increases the thick tension between Ness, Nitt and their respective forces.

One frame through which to look at The Scarface Mob is the controversial depiction of Italian- and Sicilian-Americans. Drawing the ire of the Knights of Columbus, The Untouchables television series slowly softened the unmistakably strong ethnic tropes that were interwoven in the depiction of the gangster characters. Nearly every conceivable manner in which to highlight the hoodlums' ethnicity is employed, from the raucous yelling matches to the repeated line of “Stupido!” to one another. It is understandable why the Knights of Columbus were concerned with the depictions of Italian- and Sicilian-Americans. Some of the mannerisms and details do call attention to themselves, prodding the viewer to recognize the “hot-blooded”—as it is called in both The Scarface Mob and later Untouchables episodes—emblematic figurative lineaments of the characters' ethnicity. (In one early episode, Stack's Ness says the only member of Capone's gang who doesn't have his brain holstered against his side is Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik, the Polish-born Jew, and Capone's accountant as well as financial and legal adviser, thus establishing dual ethnic typecasting, however based in reality, in one statement.) Occasionally the prominently embossed characterizations are almost oppressive in the borderline outré ethnic stereotypes. Yet the emphasis on a solid verisimilitude makes much of this both forgivable and understandable, given the almost intimate relationship The Scarface Mob establishes between the viewer and all of the characters. The intricacies of the Sicilian gangsters are brought to full, vivid life. One such chilling detail: the process through which a killer is chosen to commit a murder in the “bacio di morte” (“kiss of death”).

Where The Scarface Mob (and later The Untouchables) counters the very valance against which its drama transpires is the depictions of sympathetic characters belonging to the same ethnic background as the villains. Most especially, Wynn as Fuselli is outstanding in subtly creating an entirely fleshed out, endearing character. Fuselli's selflessness is given both quiet and bold expression, and the screenplay by Paul Monash based on the novel “The Untouchables” by Eliot Ness and Oscar Fraley creates a fully rounded, compassionate arc for this most pivotal character. The hairpin twists that dot the crime story's trajectory like speed limit signs next to a road are always plausible, if bedecked. What occurs to Fuselli leaves a last impression, and is forcefully moving. Likewise, Wolfe Barzell as an older man named Picco, a kindhearted but fearful Sicilian father figure to Fuselli, Picco, is palpably effective. In the first hour-long episode, The Empty Chair, a new man joins The Untouchables team—a brave Italian-American, Enrico Rossi, whose moral outrage at the unrelentingly cruel barbarism of criminals who share his ethnic background informs the character as much as his honorable courage. In these characters, considerable balance is provided.

Quasi-documentarian in its form, The Untouchables television series continually provoked intense responses from the viewer. Winchell's narration often criticized a “dangerously indifferent public.” Paradoxically, Al Capone is referred to on at least two occasions as the most infamous result of “America's experiment with Prohibition.” Viewing the issue of the ethnically centroidal matter, the fittingness of the real-life historical drama cannot be dismissed. Prohibition was but one major triumph of the progressive era. The temperance advocates who associated alcoholic consumption with poverty, insanity and criminality from approximately the 1830s onward in America began to target German and Irish immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century as groups that were in need of significant collective reform. Whether evidenced by the powerful and propagandistic Anti-Saloon League of 1893-1933 or the anti-Catholic Immigration Restriction League born in Boston in 1894, which assailed the “undesirable immigrants” of southern and eastern Europe (Italians, Sicilians, Poles, Jew, etceteras), the crusade finally became the national Constitutional law after achieving great success in local jurisdictions and states. That certain criminal elements belonging in no small measure to the immigrant populations against whom many of the progressive era's most vehement constituents and representatives won success after success arose to cash in on the sudden illegality of something so many people wanted is fittingly amusing, and, in a somewhat warped way, perhaps almost a strange, ugly form of cosmic justice.

Valkyrie (2008)

Bryan Singer has proven time and again to be a most artistically barren filmmaker. His films are hollow, grasping at lumpen cliches like so many tasty but unhealthful treats to be consumed at a party when no one else is looking. Unified by the boring caricature cartoon vision of the different oppressed by majority, his movies are so intellectually weak that Singer would be best served to continue plying his trade in a genre that may just suit his ostensibly perpetually arrested juvenilia, such as the colorless X-Men or amaranthine X-Men 2, the only memorable sequence out of which being an early shape-shifting attacker scampering and blasting through the corridors of the White House. Singer's movies tend to dissolve to the point of perhaps one scene within the gantry of the mind, like Kevin Spacey walking out with a smirk on his face in the final moments of The Usual Suspects or Ian McKellan almost hilariously marching around his kitchen in a Nazi suit in Apt Pupil.

It seems quite possible that Singer himself is coming to terms with this reality. Valkyrie, his newest picture, written by Usual Suspects scribe Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander, clocks in at a comparatively brisk 120 minutes. It speaks volumes about the time in which Singer lives and works that a bloated, self-important movie about a stalker son-of-god Superman exceeds 150 minutes with state-of-the-art special effects while an episode out of actual history receives a made-for-TV movie production gloss with Hollywood mega-star Tom Cruise, playing Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, leading a cast of fine (mostly British) actors. It is this discipline, so uncharacteristic for Singer, that enables him to merely tell an intriguing, true story. With stultifying blandness. The film has something of a message, as it should, but McQuarrie and Alexander's screenplay is fast-moving and unconcerned with the humans at the center of their “thriller,” alacritously glancing against historical fact for the sake of cinematic suspense.

There is a reason Cruise has remained a star for as long as he has. He is simply a watchable presence, and despite the level of safety of many of his performances he tends to enliven certain material for which he is suited. Valkyrie, however, represents Cruise almost sedated. Gone is the edge that he uses in his better, more memorable outings. Even Mission: Impossible 3, which was a largely forgettable action movie, featured something that made it worth seeing once: Cruise's zany, vein-popping infusion of the components of his personal life into that character—madly, feverishly in love with a woman who happened to look fairly similar to real-life love Katie Holmes. Valkyrie is lacking in the personal—and personality, not only for Cruise but for almost all of the characters. A better screenplay could have supplied depth to the proceedings by simply fleshing the ensemble cast's characters out. McQuarrie and Alexander are more interested in where to place the time-of-day title cards. It is difficult to calculate how much talent has been wasted. Tom Wilkinson struggles to convey just how duplicitous and untrustworthy he is with his effort as General Friedrich Fromm; Kenneth Branagh is seemingly at a loss as to what to do in the under-written role of Major-General Henning von Tresckow; Billy Nighy actually has about as much fun as he can with his vaguely imperious General Friedrich Olbricht, squinting through his glasses with utmost seriousness and bearing; Terence Stamp gets by with that voice and those eyes as Ludwig Beck; Carice van Houten, who proved she is capable of so much more in Black Book, plays The Wife.

So, if Singer has proven to be incompetent in saying things with his films, here he opts to shut up. The results are equal parts pedestrian and boring, so slickly pieced together that the viewer knows the filmmakers are so safely treading water that there is no way in which the movie can be memorable. Wherever history is uglier and dirtier and messier than Singer and company would like it to be, it is excised. Imagine what a more empathetic screenplay and cerebral director could have pulled off with some of the confrontational moments between conspirators. Absent, for the most part, is anything resembling plausible verisimilitude, but for the bare skeletal framework of the conspiracy itself. Even the death of a major character is far less ugly and painful than it was in reality (hint—suicidal gun blast kills a man instantly, whose real-life death necessitated three bullets to the head, so sloppy he was in executing his self-destruction).

The historical richness of the Valkyrie operation and its origins are all lost on Singer. Named after Wagner's Gotterdammerung—“Handmaidens of the gods choosing who will live and who will die”—the very Germanic consciousness out of which Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg's plot emerged is never noted, nor is von Stauffenberg's Catholicism and noteworthy Teutonic lineage except in the barest and most unremarkable bits and pieces. Context is all but foreign to Singer's film. The furtive resistance group of Germans may as well be the X-Men plotting to block Magneto's latest scheme. How many reviews of the film have referred to von Stauffenberg and the men and women with whom he worked as Nazis? Singer cannot even provide an inconsiderably meager basic history lesson. No wonder the film appears to inspire little else but apathy and tedium in the case of most viewers—McQuarrie and Alexander's screenplay, and Singer's film, are so commiserably amiss in their mere bullet-point historical presentation, that professional film critics cannot be dissuaded of their instinctual revulsion of any German man in a military uniform. (German = Nazi.)

G.W. Pabst celebrated von Stauffenberg as a radical idealist and hero in It Happened on July 20th (1955). The characterization was a lionization, a sanctification. Pabst, however, assiduously emplaced the cultural memory that informed von Stauffenberg's actions. Singer bumps into it in his film's opening scene, in which von Stauffenberg relates in his diary the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis, which have left a hideous “stain on the honor of Germany.” Hitler's public adoration of the Cheruscan leader Arminius, whose defeating of the three Roman legions led by Varus, helped make him an immortal historic figure, finds great irony in von Stauffenberg's plan. Arminius was extolled by der Führer as “the first architect of our liberty.” Perhaps one could perceive von Stauffenberg as the Arminius to Hitler's Augustus. In Singer's film, Hitler states that “...one cannot understand National Socialism without understanding Wagner.” Wagner's diatonic pitches and chords provided great inspiration for der Führer. In these scarce moments, the screenplay touches on something dangerous, something true that burns beyond the obtuse sluggishness of the rest of the film. In the minds of evil lunatics the most beautiful phenomenons can be of great use. It is never helpful when an artist as brilliant as Wagner subscribed to terrible beliefs—which cannot be dismissed, especially when evaluating a man whose very mandate in his Gesamtkunstwerke (Total Works of Art) incorporates analysis of the drama for which his music was so amazingly created. Singer's film pivots around one simple statement by Cruise's von Stauffenberg: in serving his country he had betrayed his conscience. As a conscience-plagued Catholic German, perhaps von Stauffenberg would have been amused, or, rather horrified, to read der Führer's writing on conscience in Mein Kampf:

"It is true we Germans are barbarians; that is an honored title to us. I free humanity from the shackles of the soul; from the degrading suffering caused by the false vision called conscience and ethics. The Jews have inflicted two wounds on mankind: circumcision on its body and conscience on its soul. They are Jewish inventions. The war for the domination of the world is waged only between these two camps alone, the Germans and the Jews. Everything else is but deception."