Movies (and DVDs) Seen 11/7-13

Three Outlaw Samurai *** - More samurai cinema, this one directed by Hideo Gosho, starting Tetsuro Tamba. Three peasants have kidnapped the daughter of a corrupt lord - they are hiding in an old mill, and sure enough, who turns up by a hard-bitten ronin, who takes their side. Well - the lord comes for them, using crooks and villains, including another ronin, who soon turns side - and off it goes... It starts comic, but with a gritty edge, and darkens about the middle, into betrayals and reprisals, and an oddly nihilistic happy ending. More than any of these films, this one plays like the Chinese films that followed them - the style, the character types, etc. feel more like Chang Cheh than Kurosawa.

Samurai Rebellion **** - With Mifune as a master swordsman whose lord orders his son to marry one of his (the lord's) discarded concubines - 2 years later, the lord wants her back, but Mifune and his son won't go along with it. Time to use those martial arts!... Kobayashi is a hard case. He is a master, a great director, but I can't warm to him. There is something dishonest about him - his films suggest a kind of politics they don't quite achieve, I think. They concoct elaborate, self-pitying melodramas to justify their characters' killing sprees and manly posturing - they are anti-feudalist and anti-militarist, but those things are opposed by military supermen (this is true in both these samurai films, and in his epic The Human Condition, where liberal anti-militarist Tatsuya Nakadai turns out to be a superhuman soldier.) It's an old problem, of course - the difficulties inherent in making an anti-war war film: he never figures a way around it.

Kurosawa has some of this - but Kurosawa is not sentimental about it. His swordsmen, first, are practical - they fight, they win, they don't pretend to be anything special. (Unless they are, and when they are, they are usually more like monks than samurai - not an accident, necessarily, that Takeshi Shimura first appears in Seven Samurai impersonating a priest.) Second - competence is taken as a value in itself. And third - the political implications of this stuff gets a far more serious turn. Swordsmen in Kurosawa's films, good or bad, are not particularly important, politically - they can come through and disrupt and break things, but it is more the canny types (the honest ugly official in Sanjuro), the professionals (Nakadai's character in High and Low) or the masses (the peasants in Seven Samurai) who make things run or not.

But back to Samurai Rebellion: it has those flaws - it is, after all, really a melodrama, as weepy as any Mizoguchi or Naruse, if you get down to it, but instead of suffering women, it's Mifune murdering extras. It's a rigid and symmetrical films, all blocks and squares, careful compositions - with a few twists - direct overhead shots, freeze frames, flashbacks inside flashbacks.... It's brought alive, however, by the performances, especially Mifune. He is grand - caught between all the forces (his lord, his nagging wife, his sons, his own bitterness and pride), holding himself in, until things reach a point where he can release - once the die is cast, once there's no going back, he comes alive, in a rush of defiance. You see him, Mifune, bringing the character alive, when his son first defies the lord's ruling - you feel him thinking, "I have raised a man! I have raised a son to die for! And he's married a woman to die for!" He - Mifune - expands into this character, a glorious and exhilarating thing to see, like watching Gondo change in High and Low.

Harakiri **** - another melodrama of poverty and doomed love and friendship that ends in a bloodbath - but again - Kobayashi builds the tension higher and higher, waiting for the release, then giving it to us... Here, Tatsuya Nakadai stars as a ronin with a daughter and a son in law, who is the son of his best friend - they suffer in the peace of the early Tokogawa era when no one needs samurai... They suffer too much, and the son-in-law tries to get some cash by threatening in to kill himself in front of the Iya family's gates - well: they decide to make an example of him by forcing him to really kill himself - which he is quite literally not prepared to do. Nakadai finds out - and a few days later shows up himself, repeating the boy's request. But first, a little exchange of stories, theirs, his.... Then - the whirlwind is reaped.... It is a terrible denunciation of the samurai code - not the code as such, but the fact that it is a facade, used only to defend the power of those that have it from those who don't. But as I said - Kobayashi's attacks on feudal, military values always seem to involve a superstar actor with katana in hand knocking over walls and slicing up villains - which tends to undermine the point a bit.

Twentieth Century **** - Carole Lombard and John Barrymore are unleashed on one another in an early (1934) Howard Hawks screwball comedy... he's a Broadway impresario - she's his greatest discovery - both turn up the ham to 11... With Roscoe Karns, Walter Connolly and the like doing their character thing to the very hilt... "What was Oscar doing, rowing?" Great stuff.

The Passenger ***1/2 - This is an odd case. Watching it, I didn't really warm to it - oh, it looks as good as films have a right to look, and I could sort of nod along with it's philosophical pretensions, but it didn't add up to much more than that. It felt like something was about to happen - but never did.. or did it? whatever.... But now, getting ready to write this, reading a couple reviews (Ebert and O'Hehir, in Salon), it seemed to come together. That may be a function of the themes - the emptiness, the kind of meaningless trace of the character - who is not a character... it's a heady brew, probably better suited to words than pictures. Though it loops back - what comes to mind are the pictures, Jack Nicholson's face, the empty landscapes, the crappy hotels, the blowing sand - so maybe what I mean is it's a film better appreciated in memory. I don't know, but I am more impressed than I thought I would be.

Bad News Bears ***1/2 - Baseball misfits win anyway, begetting a million films about bratty unathletic kids winning championships. It's enough to put you off your feed. It's enough, if you aren't careful, to make you forget how good this film really is. (I'm referring to the Matthau film, of course. Haven't seen Billy Bob's take.) We all know the story, I hope - Matthau is a bum who's hired to coach a bunch of loser little leaguers... they start bad, then start to win. He brings in a girl and a hoodlum as ringers. It's about the evils of competition in America, especially among kids. All the cliches are there, but this is where a lot of them came from - and there are a couple things that utterly redeem it. First, the real nastiness under the story - the violent, bitter competition, the sense of desperation and anger, the loss and regret... Second, Michael Ritchie's Altman-light style (the documentary look, the American pageantry, the way he displaces dramatic showdowns) - these elevates it. The harshness is real - Matthau's anger, disappointment, self-hatred - the way none of the cliched resolutions come off - he doesn't get back with Amanda's mother; Amanda and Kelly don't get together; the Bears don't win; he doesn't quite save anyone, though a lot of the kids get a second or two of fairly believable redemption - drawing a walk - laying down a good bunt - catching a ball... It's a great film.

Forty Shades of Blue *** - star turn by Rip Torn as a Memphis music impresario, who looks like Merle Haggard, but plays more like, oh, Jim Dickinson or someone like that. He has a trophy girlfriend, a stunning Russian woman, they have a son - he also has a son from a previous marriage who turns up with his own problems. The three of them - Torn, the Russian woman (Dina Kurzon, who is fantastic), the son - go around each other, all of them a bit too fond of the bottle.... It's a superb film. Directed by Ira Sachs, who made The Delta 9 years ago now - this has more polish, but a similar look - the patient, observant camera, catching people almost unawares it seems...