11/27: Sawdust and Tinsel

When Ingmar Bergman died earlier this year, there was a certain strain of criticism — most (in)famously presented by Jonathan Rosenbaum in the New York Times — that took the occasion to re-evaluate the famed director's art and importance. At the time, I found the timing unfortunate and the arguments unconvincing; Bergman has always been a director who has meant a great deal to me, and at least several of his films have to be counted among my personal canon. Looking back now, having just watched Sawdust and Tinsel, a key developmental work for Bergman and yet probably the weakest of the many films I've seen by him, I nevertheless remain more convinced than ever that Bergman is a cinematic great.

Let me explain. I have yet to explore much of Bergman's early career, and it's mainly some later milestones that have endeared him to me: Fanny and Alexander, Persona, The Silence, and even a few flawed but powerful works like Shame and Hour of the Wolf. Sawdust, the story of the bitter circus owner Albert (Åke Grönberg) and his unfaithful mistress Anne (Harriet Andersson), shares some similarities with these later works, and it's easy to see how Bergman got from here to the more fully realized films he'd be making just a few years later. The film's story is told in a blend of expressionism and neorealism, with the latter pointing back to Bergman's earliest dramas and the former pointing ahead to the direction his films would take from then on. The expressionistic sequences are often compelling, displaying the kind of visual sense and eye for composition within cinematic space that detractors like Rosenbaum are continually insisting is missing from Bergman's cinema.

In the film's most compelling image, when Anne goes to visit the local theater troupe after a fight with Albert, she's left on the abandoned stage after a rehearsal. As the theater goes dark, she's framed within a circle of light, all alone in a sea of black. Critics often point to Bergman's theatrical fascination as an inherent negative — something you'd never hear about, say, Fassbinder — but this scene makes it clear that even early on Bergman understood the difference between cinematic and theatrical space, and was able to combine them in interesting ways. In this sequence he creates an interplay between the theater and the cinema, framing Andersson first in what might be called theatrical space, with the camera at a distance showing the whole stage with her in its center (though even here he tweaks the theater by placing the camera backstage rather than in an audience's position). Then he cuts to a medium shot, with Andersson approaching the camera, slowly filling the frame, the close-up allowing her cold and determined expression to complicate the scene's emotions, in a sense contradicting the lost, confused sense communicated by the earlier distancing long shot. Both emotional sensations remain in the shot; just as the theatrical space is being contained and reshaped by the cinematic frame, the loneliness and isolation of the long shot is being subsumed by Anne's determination to control her life.

There's also a wonderful scene early on in the film in which one character relates the story of the clown Frost (Anders Ek), whose wife betrayed him by swimming nude with some soldiers from the local garrison. Frost's very public humiliation as he's forced to retrieve his wife in front of a laughing mob and carry her naked body away prefigures the story of Albert's problems with his mistress. Bergman presents the flashback in a washed-out, overexposed white that obliterates detail and gives the scene a haunting, mesmerizing quality. There is quite possibly no greater director of embarrassment than Bergman, and he perfectly captures the humiliation of Frost, cutting between tortured close-ups and wildly exaggerated crowd shots of the observers. The soundtrack is similarly suggestive, veering between an eerie stillness and the roar of cackling laughter. The scene becomes sheer torture as it goes along, as much a purely symbolic representation of primal emasculation as a recounting of a specific incident.

Unfortunately, such scenes are the exception rather than the rule in this film. Bergman's engagement with neorealist aesthetics is much less interesting than his more expressionistic mode of storytelling. And though Bergman is frequently accused of theatricality because of the overwrought performances he wrings out of his actors in his wildest scenes, it's in the more realistic segments of his work that theatricality more often has free rein. For me, Sawdust is dragged down by the prosaic quality of its story and the overly theatrical emphasis on lengthy dialogue scenes with little visual or intellectual interest. Everything that the film might have to say in Grönberg's blustering speeches was already said far better in that self-contained early scene depicting Frost's humiliation, and doing so primarily in visual terms rather than verbally. The narrative never progresses far beyond there, because Bergman has structured things so that Frost's story is meant to foreshadow Albert's. What it actually does is render the rest of the film redundant. There's some pleasure in Harriet Andersson's effortless sensuality, and in Anders Ek's drunken, spiteful performance as the broken clown Frost, but the emphasis on such theatrical, actorly elements is exactly what Bergman's critics latch onto in the first place. In this early film, at least, there's some justice to the complaints.

It may seem odd that I've chosen a Bergman film I don't really like that much to mount a defense of this great director. But what struck me, on watching Sawdust and Tinsel, was not only the number of things that didn't work, but just how much did work in spite of the many weaknesses. Even in this minor transitional film, Bergman was already displaying the foundations of a powerfully expressive visual style and a tendency to intertwine cinema and theater in ways that comment on and develop both. He will certainly be missed.

11/7: The Sacrifice

[This is a contribution to the Film + Faith Blog-a-Thon hosted by Strange Culture.]

Andrei Tarkovsky's final feature, The Sacrifice, completed shortly before his death in 1986, is a fitting end to the career of such an idiosyncratic, deeply spiritual, and yet never dogmatic auteur. It's a strange, unsettling film, flawed but always intriguing. The film is bathed in an aura of poetic spirituality, which Tarkovsky contrasts, in all its absurdity and illogical leaps, against the cruel, coolly rational mechanisms of modern society. Science is present in the film mainly as an agent of evil and nuclear holocaust, a symbol for man's defilement of nature and exploitation of God's creations. In a sense, the film is split roughly into two halves, with the first representing modernity, and the second, with its elliptical montages of dream-like imagery, representing the alternative of spirituality and faith.

Oddly enough, for the first half of the film, the Swedish air (and Swedish cast) seem to have gotten to Tarkovsky: the film strongly resembles a Bergman chamber drama, and not just because Bergman's frequent cinematographer Sven Nykvist is helming the camera. These opening sections concern Alexander (Bergman regular Erland Josephson in a phenomenal performance), a literary critic and former actor who's troubled by vague philosophical quandaries while shuffling through his routine existence. He adores his young son, who's mute and seems to follow his father everywhere, but he's alienated from the rest of his family, especially his cold and discontented wife Adelaide (Susan Fleetwood). The film opens on a lengthy and continuous shot outside Alexander's home, where he's re-planting a dead tree in the middle of the flat, barren landscape. Nykvist's camera hovers far away from Alexander and his son for quite a long time, keeping them isolated on the windswept plain, the camera subtly jiggling from side to side. Alexander recites a story of a monk who planted just such a dead tree on top of a mountain, and ritualistically watered it every day for years until it finally sprouted with life again. Finally, with the entry of Alexander's friend Otto (Allan Edwall, another from the Bergman troupe), the camera begins to move more noticeably, tracking the trio as they move across the grassy landscape, Otto on his bicycle weaving in circles around Alexander and his son.

The openness and solemn beauty of this scene, despite the distance from the characters, is a stark contrast to the constricting interior scenes, in which Alexander's family and friends have gathered for a grim birthday party for the patriarch. At this point, the film becomes a Bergman family chamber drama, even down to the shifting character arrangements in which the film frame is used to create striking compositions simply from the interactions of characters' bodies and movements. This similarity might point to the influence of Nykvist, or else Tarkovsky's conscious choice to employ the aesthetic as a counterpoint to the more characteristic elliptical montage he switches to in the film's second half. Certainly, the quiet, peaceable, intellectual Alexander seems somewhat out of place in this context, especially in comparison to his bitter, histrionic wife. The family's problems are set in sharp relief, finally, when a crackly TV broadcast delivers the news about impending nuclear war. Tarkovsky maintains his cool distance here, objectively presenting the characters' collapse before the enormity of this announcement. Fleetwood's total meltdown is a bit much, and she delivers one of the film's weakest performances in general — a weepy, over-the-top explosion that's more like a parody of Bergman than a tribute.

The rest of the cast quietly contemplates the news and deals with it in a seemingly more composed way. But Alexander wanders off by himself and delivers a heartfelt and remarkable prayer to God, in which he promises to renounce every aspect of his material existence if God will just reverse the impending threat and restore things to order. Tarkovsky films this incredible scene by actually placing the camera at the vantage point of God, looking down on Alexander's pleading, upturned face as he prays. In this subtle way, Tarkovsky retains the objective distance of the film's earlier scenes even during this intense close-up, and yet simultaneously the meaning of this distance is utterly altered. Instead of the authorial distance of an artist observing his characters with a dispassionate eye, the camera's objective gaze becomes the gaze of God himself, looking down on one of his distraught creations. This scene completely opens up the film, pushing the family drama into the background and triggering a dream-like collage of memory, fantasy, and allegorical hallucination as Alexander falls asleep after his prayer.

The film here takes on a dancing, elliptical quality that was entirely lacking from the earlier melodrama — recalling in its structure and elusiveness Tarkovsky's greatest masterpiece, the near-impenetrable Mirror. If the opening scenes often seemed a bit turgid, like warmed-over Bergman, their meaning and purpose becomes clear in contrast to the free associative imagery of the film's second half. Alexander's faith, his blind and pleading faith in the face of annihilation, has released him from the bonds of his material existence, and he wanders now through a dense patchwork of surreal events and images, like a twisted mirror held up to reality. These segments have a lightly absurd quality to them that occasionally even verges on a totally unexpected sense of humor, as in the scene where Otto tries to explain himself to Alexander without actually coming right out and saying what he means. There's also a surprising sensual subtext to these scenes, especially in Alexander's encounter with a religious "witch," ending with the two of them embracing and floating in the air over her bed. For Tarkovsky, clearly, Alexander's sudden burst of religious belief has set him free in many ways — from an unfulfilled life, from his fear of death, even from the physical rules of reality and the scientific laws by which humans explain them.

Finally, though, Alexander wakes up again, and finds that his prayer has been answered, and he recognizes that he now needs to follow through on his own end of the bargain. This is the collision of spirituality with lived reality, which can only result in the absurd, the ridiculous, the insane even. Alexander's actions to fulfill his bargain with God — I won't ruin the stunning ending for those who haven't seen it — can't help but conflict with the world around him. The finale even encompasses a bizarre slapstick comedy routine, so absurd it's sublime: a comedy emphatically underlined by tragedy. Alexander's sacrifice for his religious conviction, ultimately, is his connection to reality and everything he holds dear, but Tarkovsky, perhaps unlike some of the more atheistic audience members (like myself), doesn't judge or question Alexander for this sacrifice. Instead, he sees something admirable, even hopeful, in it. Earlier in the film, he sets up the idea of sacrifice by having Otto say that a gift is meaningless unless it is truly a sacrifice, and this seems to be Tarkovsky's view of man's relationship with God. The film, in spite of its occasional flaws, does such a good job of exploring Alexander's sacrifice and spirituality, that it becomes impossible not to follow along with him to the absurd consequences of his actions. The Sacrifice is one big leap of faith set on celluloid, a bold voyage to the extremes of faith and the very edge of human existence by a director who was himself facing up to his own mortality at the same time.

10/24: I Am Curious — Yellow; Sweet Movie

[This is a Transgressive Sex Double Feature, my second contribution to the Double Bill-a-thon 2007 going on over at Broken Projector.]

Although it's somewhat hard to believe now, Vilgot Sjöman's I Am Curious — Yellow made quite a stir upon its initial 1967 release and subsequent importation into the US in 1969. The film was confiscated before even being shown, and subjected to an intense censorship debate while its release drew massive crowds curious about the scandal. Looking at it now, the film's nude scenes are scarce and relatively tame — though it does say a great deal about American puritanism that, 40 years later, the scene where actress Lena Nyman kisses her lover's penis would still cause an incredible furor if it appeared in a mainstream Hollywood film. Other than that, though, times have changed, and the question becomes: now that the outrage has died down, what else does the film have to offer? The answer, predictably, is not that much.

No doubt, Sjöman was remarkably ambitious, and his film (the first part of a diptych with sister film Blue) ranges far and wide in its combination of political and sexual exploration. The film attempts to blend the personal with the political, documentary with fiction, and locate all this within the metafictional framework of the film crew making the film. It's a true Godardian project, and no doubt if Godard was making it all these disparate elements would hang together a bit better, or at least hint at something deeper beyond the mess. As it is, the film strikes too uneven a division in its balance of politics and sexuality. The first half hour or so engages in some interesting political discourse, questioning both capitalism and hardline Communism. That is, literally questioning them, through a series of probing man-on-the-street interviews that attempt to get at the nature of class distinctions in 1960s Sweden. There are some very interesting parts here, especially the tongue-in-cheek "interview" with Martin Luther King, using stock footage of him intercut with Sjöman (playing the film director within the film) on-screen asking him questions. This leads into a scene of Lena going around asking people if they've heard of non-violence — hilariously, the first people she asks are a trio of cops, who oblige by saying no, never heard of it. She then asks a middle-age woman what she's heard about King, and the answer is "Oh, he won't fight for his beliefs, right?"

This is pretty much indicative of the film's political questioning, which is amusing and frequently at least thought-provoking, but perhaps not as deep or probing as Sjöman would like to think it is. Moreover, after the very beginning, this political material is increasingly backgrounded in favor of the fictional story that's being filmed by the crew within the film, about Lena and her philandering lover, Börje Ahlstedt. This is the part of the film that earned it its notorious reputation, and as an exploration of sexual liberation, feminism, and the "personal as political," it's not without interest. But mostly it's a drab, lifeless, indifferently acted series of scenes with little energy, little intellectual depth, and even little of the crackling wit that was present in so many of the earlier scenes.

The film's hardly a total loss though. Lena's sexual journey remains of interest as an examination of the consequences of total freedom and the individual's responsibility to make his or her own life and ideas. This is an interesting time capsule of an older era, flawed and badly dated, but somewhat redeemed by its sense of humor and seriousness of purpose.

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Dušan Makavejev's Sweet Movie is another film whose primary renown these days is as a source of controversy and shock value. One crucial difference between this and I Am Curious, though, is that Makavejev's film still has the capacity to shock audiences, even jaded modern ones used to seeing just about anything in films. In fact, I only thought I was used to seeing just about anything, until Makavejev reminded just how much potential ground "anything" could cover. The film's steadily escalating assault on the senses starts relatively low-key, with the hilarious introduction set at a kind of gynecological beauty pageant, and culminates in a massive scatological orgy/food fight reminiscent of the Vienna Aktionists (and indeed, Aktionist icon Otto Muehl himself appears among the shitting, vomiting revelers). The last half-hour of the film contains some of the most perpetually shocking and visually extravagant images ever committed to celluloid, and their potential to stun and overwhelm remains undiminished by the 30+ years since their first appearance.

But if that's all Sweet Movie had to offer, it would be little more than a slightly fresher version of I Am Curious, which is certainly not the case. What's interesting is that Sweet Movie appears on its surface to be an infinitely more light-hearted, less serious effort than Sjöman's film, though at its heart it hides a much deeper political core. At times, the film's episodic structure and over-the-top energy make it feel like a particularly demented Monty Python episode or a parody of Aktionist excesses. The film's epic denouement had me alternately gasping in astonishment, laughing with sheer I-can't-believe-they-just-did-that delight, and wincing with disgust, sometimes within seconds of each other. It's such a visceral experience that it's quite easy to miss the film's subtler political subtext amidst all the chocolate sauce and mashed potatoes.

The film is, most obviously, a total celebration of freedom and no-holds-barred living. The loose story follows Miss World 1984 (Carole Laure), who's chosen as the most pure and desirable woman in the world, and given the dubious prize of marrying a Texan milk billionaire. After a disastrous wedding night — instead of making love, he rubs her down with alcohol and then displays his liquid-spurting, gold-plated penis for her — she's tossed aside and spends the rest of the film being limply passed from one ridiculous incident to the next. Carole is in the hands of the capitalist West, a typical feminine image of beauty used as an advertisement — most humorously in the film's infamous chocolate bath — and a status symbol, but never as a living, breathing person of her own. But the film's depiction of Communism is even nastier, with Anna Prucnal playing the symbolic captain of a symbolic ship with Karl Marx as its figurehead and a hold full of sweets and a huge sugar tank. Prucnal seduces a Russian sailor from the battleship Potemkin, copulating fiercely in a sugar bath, and in one memorable and shocking scene, she performs a creepily sexy striptease for a gathered group of seven year-olds. She's a symbol of Soviet Communism, seductive and alluring from the exterior, but with a deadly violent streak underneath, as revealed in the finale when the police unload her boat's cargo of corpses.

But the film's iconic image of Communism is some inserted documentary footage of the bodies found in the mass graves of Russia's Katyn Forest, where Stalin's army had killed and buried over four thousand people. Makavejev uses this footage in an interesting way, inserting it into the narrative twice, once towards the beginning where it is off-putting and seems out of context, and then again at the end, after the orgiastic communal scat party. In this second iteration, the footage's purpose becomes more clear, acting as a recontextualizing reference for the previous 30 minutes. Juxtaposed against the sheer human brutality of the Katyn Forest massacre, the film's over-the-top antics seem as light-hearted as they had previously seemed gratuitous. The film is sometimes hard to take, but despite this it is not the nihilist work that it is often decried as. Its concentration on human bodily processes is couched within a framework of celebration and riotous, hedonistic fun — the commune dwellers who are smearing each other with feces, inducing vomiting, and peeing into their food may be on the absolute fringes of acceptability, but they sure look like they're having a ball. And more importantly, in spite of the strong discomfort factor, it's mostly a ball to watch them.

10/16: Culloden; Day of Wrath; Raw Deal

Culloden was Peter Watkins' breakthrough first film for the BBC after a string of independently produced short films got him noticed as a filmmaker. His very next film, The War Game, with its stark depiction of nuclear terror, would hit way too close to home and get him canned from the BBC, but this film, a popular and critical success, is in many ways just as uncompromising. Watkins developed his trademark pseudo-documentary style early on, and Culloden uses the technique, jarringly, to reconstruct the battle of Culloden Moor, the last land battle in Britain. The film details the defeat of the disorganized, poorly led Scottish highlander rebels by the much larger force of the British army, a bloody rout that turned into a years-long, equally bloody "pacification" operation afterwards. In its criticism of war, exposure of the class divide, and vicious mocking of official hypocrisy and deceit, Culloden is obviously a Watkins film, and it retains the righteous rage that runs through all his work.

Watkins follows the build-up to the battle with a series of close-ups on individual soldiers, as a voiceover describes the preparation, and interviews with soldiers and officers provide further context. As always, Watkins is especially concerned with social and economic injustices, and he details the ways in which soldiers were drafted by force, by economic necessity, by the subtle coercion of the clan system -- all of them fighting for the sake of much richer men who controlled their lives in every way, in battles whose causes and goals were alien to their own poor lives. As affecting as the straightforward voiceover is in getting at the root of their injustices, Watkins' use of stark, head-on close-ups of men on the battle lines is even more affecting. These haunting shots of dirt-smeared, confused and frightened faces, are among the film's most memorable and powerful images. Watkins provides the details of battle strategies, troop counts, and descriptions of period weapons, the meat of a traditional historical documentary. But while the voiceover speaks disinterestedly about such distanced, objective matters, the close-ups draw the attention immediately to the human realities behind such impersonal facts and figures. Watkins is using the form of the historical documentary, but he undercuts and subverts it at every turn, using its conventions against it in order to underscore his points about the brutality of war.

There's no room in Watkins' vision for victors either. Though the battle is a clear one-sided rout, he takes pains to humanize the grunts on the British side as well. Though their losses in physical terms are relatively minor (though, Watkins takes pains to point out, not zero either), they are equally victims of the whims of their social and economic superiors, conscripted and coerced just like their opponents. And they are also pushed into a brutal and dehumanizing campaign after the battle is over, to obliterate the remains of the Scottish rebels in an orgy of slaughter, rape, pillaging, and political sanctions. The film's anti-war outcry thus expands into a more specific protest about the use of violence to wage cultural warfare, exterminating an entire culture. In addition to being a poignant look at the lost heritage of Scotland, the last part of the film's frequent references to "pacification" can't help but point also to the then-ongoing Vietnam War and the always looming troubles in Northern Ireland, which stemmed from the same religious and cultural distinctions that caused the battle of Culloden. As a critique of war and the exploitation and brutality it engenders, Culloden is still, even now, a powerful and unforgettable film, despite its historical setting and early position in Watkins' career. He would go on to make much more incisive and complex critiques in later films, but this film proves that even his very earliest work is worthwhile.

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At the core of Dreyer's unsettling Day of Wrath is a bitter opposition between vibrant sensuality and fierce repression, between the individual's will and desires and the collective morality of the community. In a small Danish village, the old woman Herlofs (Anna Svierkier) is accused of being a witch and burned at the stake, but not before she curses the local priest Absalon (Thorkild Roose) for failing to save her. Herlofs is afraid to die, and begs for a reprieve, but the pious, unquestioning Absalon never doubts that she deserves to die, and can only offer her prayers for the afterlife, a gesture she rejects as meaningless. After her death, the story focuses on Absalon's young second wife, Anne (Lisbeth Movin), who feels trapped and drained by her loveless marriage to the reverend. When the reverend's son from his first marriage, Martin (Preben Lerdorff Rye) returns for a visit, Anne falls in love with him and seduces him.

Anne is a figure of tremendous ambiguity and uncertainty in the film, an indication of the profound open-endedness of Dreyer's vision. Anne is vibrant, fiery, passionate, emotional, everything that the cold and somewhat puritanical Absalon is not. For every moment she is on screen, she is a magnetic, irresistible presence, her eyes burning with desire and frustration at her repressive circumstances. She seems like a figure completely out of place in her time, a modern woman thrust into the 1600s. In one remarkable seduction scene, she glides effortlessly around the room, circling the static Martin, her gleaming eyes always locked on him even as she moves around him. Dreyer's camera moves with her, taking on the sinuous motion of her body, framing the two together briefly, then moving on with her as she cycles around the room, until she arrives back by Martin's side. In another scene, she offers Martin water to drink from her hands. "Want more?" she asks. "Of water? No." "Then, of what?" And she gasps, "Drink!" as though giving an order, compelling him to kiss her.

Her eyes, so remarkably dark and yet shining in the shadowy gloom of Dreyer's film, are the frequent source of comment by the film's characters as well. For Absalon, who looks on her almost paternally, they are innocent, even childlike. For his draconian, righteous mother (Sigrid Neiiendam), they burn with the fire of Satan, a sign that Anne too might be a witch. And for Martin her eyes also seem to burn, but with vitality, love, and life. The difference between the two kinds of fire is, presumably, one purely of perspective, and of attitudes towards sexuality. Anne is a defiantly sexual being, and towards the end of the film she admits to Absalon that she hates him for taking her youth from her without asking, for denying her the chance to find someone to love, to give her sensual pleasures. Earlier on, before taking up with Martin, she was so desperate for affection that she even turns to Absalon himself, telling him, "Hold me, make me feel happy." When he spurns her, coldly going to bed alone to pray and think, she turns to Martin instead, with the exact same words. She is an avatar of youth and open sensuality, desirous of intimacy and contact. For Absalon's mother, to whom sex itself is dirty and her son's marriage to a much younger woman is "scandalous," the lusty, vibrant look in Anne's eyes can only represent evil. Martin, on the other hand, young and full of life himself, is enthralled by that look, while his father, inured to worldly pleasures altogether, simply doesn't see it.

It's to Dreyer's credit that his film never entirely gives modern audiences the easy way out. It's incredibly easy to identify with Anne's repressed youth and sexuality, her longing for love and freedom. But Dreyer makes the character of Absalon a genuinely compelling figure as well, a tragically sad old man who vaguely senses that his life is ending and subtly longs for the youthful vibrancy of his wife and son. His unquestioning religious devotion and fear of sin keep him from ever approaching the sensual world, but he is not an unsympathetic character, and juxtaposed against his hateful mother, it's clear that he genuinely cares for Anne and wants to see her happy. When he hears her laughing from the next room with Martin, his mother reacts with suspicion, but he is glad to hear her enjoying herself, and pines for her exuberance. Ultimately, Dreyer's depiction of the repressor figure is as sensitive and complex as his treatment of the film's "victim," Anne.

The element of the supernatural is treated with just as much ambiguity. Anne's status as a witch is unquestioned by Absalon's mother, and even Anne herself sometimes seems uncertain of whether she really has evil power or not. The film equates, to some degree, sexual seduction with witchcraft. When Anne first seduces Martin, she stands alone, softly calling his name to herself as if in a summons; when he appears behind her, she takes it as a vindication of her charms (whether evil or simply sexual) working. It doesn't really matter, of course, whether she simply seduced Martin or used magic on him; the effect is the same. When a man falls in love, he's said to have fallen under the woman's spell, and whether it's literal or a metaphor, it raises sex to the level of the mystical. The larger point seems to be that, in a society where all sensual experience and human connection is unnaturally repressed and frigid, sex becomes magic, either evil or sublime, but always something distant from everyday experience. Dreyer externalizes this by setting Anne and Martin's affair in a grim, shadowy world, all stark and uninviting interiors. The few outdoor scenes are mostly idyllic, brightly lit interludes between the young lovers, a real contrast to the dark inside of the reverend's house, with its bare white walls and crosses casting geometric shadows everywhere. Dreyer's film is a fascinating study of repression and the struggle between individuality and societal conformity; a struggle that only takes on still greater significance considering the film was made in Nazi-occupied Denmark in 1943.

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Anthony Mann's Raw Deal is a rough, no-budget B-noir of the best kind, raw and uncompromising and minimalist to the extreme. Its characters are stock cliches spitting out edgy dialogue, and its sets look like cheap cardboard, compensated for by the masterful lighting of cinematographer John Alton. Dennis O'Keefe plays Joe Sullivan, who's serving a jail term after taking the rap for his gangster boss Rick (Raymond Burr) after a robbery. His hard-edged girlfriend Pat(Claire Trevor) and Rick engineer a break-out for Joe, but neither of them realizes that Rick is hoping that Joe won't make it, so he won't have to worry about squealing. Instead, he stays on the run successfully, dragging along Pat and his lawyer's aide Ann (Marsha Hunt), who he pulls in unwillingly but soon falls for.

The film's plot combines a love triangle with an on-the-lam thriller, but otherwise it's pretty standard. It's Mann's treatment of the material, the way he burrows into this story with every trick at his disposal, that makes it truly exceptional. The eerie score, heavy on foreboding theremin sweeps, could've come from a low-budget sci-fi flick of the time, and it goes a long way towards creating the film's tense atmosphere. The story is also interesting because Pat provides the hard-boiled voiceover, inverting noir convention by narrating the story from the point of view of the long-suffering girlfriend, rather than the tough antihero. Her voiceover injects a hint of femininity into the traditionally masculine world of the film noir, though her character never really rises above the limited, passive role of women in noirs. She's there to whine at Joe, to worry, to feel jealous when his nascent attraction to Ann becomes obvious. Ann, on the other hand, is more of an active noir heroine, trying to change Joe's mind about his doomed flight from justice, and at the climax taking decisive action to save Joe's life. But even she ultimately becomes just another damsel in distress, with Joe racing to her rescue for the finale. Mann and the script seem to be playing with conventions a bit here, toying with different roles for women within the noir context, but not really venturing very far from familiar territory.

Still, bucking conventions is rarely the appeal of a 40s noir — I go to them for the dark visuals, pulpy dialogue and scenarios, and the exploration of a certain kind of moral tenor. In that sense, Raw Deal definitely doesn't disappoint. Burr gives a frightening turn as the sadistic gangster boss Rick, his eyes rimmed with black, giving him a fierce glare. In one shockingly brutal moment, he casually throws a bowl of flaming oil at a girl who accidentally bumps into him, then orders her taken away, saying "She shoulda been more careful." John Alton's moody visuals are somewhat obscured on the exceptionally dark and poor DVDs that currently exist, but even so his impeccable compositions and the contrast between dark shadows and gleaming areas of light is obvious. Especially great is the fog-shrouded shootout of the ending, with figures melting in and out of the night. This is a classic and well-executed noir from one of the genre's most interesting directors.