Contempt - back on the big screen, in glorious technicolor - glorious indeed. It's an odd film - Godard at his most conventional, I suppose, with the Moravia plot (wife despises husband after he lets her ride in an American's car, I guess), and a fairly realistic and representational style. It looks magnificent of course - beautiful places and things, that Godard exploits, moving his actors around and through like sour tourists (which they all are, in a way). An interesting cast: Bardot pouts, beautifully and effectively; Palance is great - outsized, ridiculous, funny; watching Michel Piccoli and Fritz Lang together is strange - I realized that most of the Piccoli films I have seen are from the 90s and 00s - Rivettes and Oliveiras - and that Lang, in quite a few of the scenes, looks and acts like Piccoli in some of those films. That wry, implacable personality - wise and sly and impossibly cool. Anyway, the film - is, I say, Godard at his most conventional, though it has its moments: the film in a film stuff is definitely something - those inserts aren't treated in a realistic way: they signify the film in a film, they don't show it, I think... But the conventional parts - the breakup scene at the couple's apartment, say - are magnificent. The way Godard develops the situation, while showing the couple in an utterly routine way, going about their mundane business, with all that (unspoken, or half-spoken) emotional business underneath - it is brilliant. Economical while seeming to be digressive...
All for Free - this one has a story. Yesterday, I planned to see Contempt again. I got there late Saturday, and ended up sitting directly behind a tall man with very good posture who did not slouch in any way during the film, so I had to try to guess what was on the right hand side of the screen.... But then, Sunday morning at the grocery store, I bought a pot roast for supper - and when I got home realized that a pot roast would take 2-3 hours to cook: and the Godard film would get me home about 6, making for a very late night. What to do? find another film - nothing else looked worth it, so I picked this, which I knew nothing about. What is it? A Yugoslavian co-production (though set in Bosnia-Herzegovina, I believe), distributed as part of the Global Lens Film Series (at the Coolidge. What else is it? A slow moving comedy, that starts with four friends hanging around a miserable small town, doing nothing, drinking, cuckolding each other, which leads to blood. The survivor, conveniently aged 3, sells all he has and buys a truck/diner and drives through the land giving away drinks. He stays one day in every town - he is greeted with suspicion at first, but eventually, people warm to him (it's all free, after all), but then he meets a cafe owner protecting his turf and a beautiful girl... It's a decent film, over all - often quite funny, sometimes more serious, sometimes maudlin, but generally effective; it makes a few political points, though without pounding them home. It's an interesting twist on the christ archtype, a kind of savior who's mostly saving himself.
And finally - more Douglas Fairbanks! this time, Mark of Zorro and Don Q Son of Zorro (together on one DVD). A neat pair of films - Mark of Zorro was where Douglas Fairbanks became Douglas Fairbanks - and might well be the best of the lot. He gets a lot of comic business, especially as Don Diego Vega, fop, slouching around doing magic tricks and laughing up his sleeve at everyone else - and even more derring do as Zorro, masked avenger. There is achase, worthy of Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd - Fairbanks lets out all the stops: jumping over a mule, running up walls, swinging around, diving through wndows, jumping off roofs, everything. It's good stuff, and clocks in at about 100 minutes, a good sign - as the 20s went on his films tended to get longer and longer, less and less focussed. That's what happens in Don Q - oddly, though, there the second half goes off the rails. The first half shows Cesar, son of Zorro, living it up in Spain - he annoys one Don Sebastian (played by Donald Crisp) and impresses the Archduke Paul of Austria (Charlie Chan - I mean, Warner Oland), so of course the three of them are stuck together. Ah, but there's a girl (Mary Astor), and Cesar wins her out from under the nose of Don Sebastian... And then there's a toady, and a grand ball, and Paul mocks and insults Sebastian while Cesar wins the girl - it's all too much for someone!
Actually, it's a pretty interesting setup. Don Sebastian, though a prig and a snob and willing to screw over his rivals, is not the usual unadulterated cad - the real SOB is Archduke Paul, who mocks him, and blocks his efforts to pitch woo at the girl,and then makes fun of him for being bested in love... it's hard to feel much sympathy for him. Unfortunately, after the terrible event occurs, the film goes flat - Don Q runs for the hills, the villains twirl their mustaches and glower and cast sinister glances around, the girl laments, then everyone - including Zorro - converges on the ancestral pile for a brawl... it's a bit of a let down after the first half... But plenty of fun.
Anyway: here's Doug (or someone) in mid air: probably was Fairbanks - he was the Jackie Chan of his day. (And watching these films it's very clear: Jackie Chan is the Douglas Fairbanks of our day - he stole more of his act from Fairbanks than from Chaplin and Keaton combined...)
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