Othello (1952)

Orson Welles' Othello was the director's second adaptation of a Shakespeare play, following up his moody, fog-clouded Macbeth. Whereas he shot his expressionist Macbeth quickly and on a low budget, completing the film in a matter of weeks, his Othello was a deeply troubled project, taking three years to complete, and constantly plagued by budget shortfalls — Welles finally finished it with his own money, earned from acting jobs (like The Third Man) taken specifically to provide money for his own stalling film.

These troubles are readily apparent in the film's rough and rushed sensibility. Welles at times seems to be speeding through the famous play's text, delivering the lines at a hasty clip and liberally cutting from the source so that at times, particularly early on, it feels like a condensation of the story, occasionally assisted by a narrator who fills in the blanks and explains the plot. Coupled with Welles' typical post-dubbed dialogue, which always gives his soundtracks an air of spacey disconnection, this clipped pace gives the film a curious atmosphere, with its grand emotions of jealousy and hatred playing out at something of a remove. Welles seems far less interested in the text and the characters than in the opportunity that this classic source provides for cinematic grandstanding and strikingly crafted images.

This is, of course, a visually stunning film: Welles doesn't locate the emotion and the substance of Othello in Shakespeare's dialogue but in the images that Welles carefully chooses to accompany the words, setting the drama amidst moodily lit, theatrically decorated castles and stark, minimalist natural vistas. Whereas Welles' Macbeth was set in a foggy studio wasteland where the background was often nothing but a wisp of smoke and a dense black night sky, he achieves a similarly haunting effect in Othello with natural landscapes, foreboding swaths of sea and sky that churn with the intensity of the emotions embodied by this tale.


The gorgeous opening sequence sets the tone, foreshadowing the tragic end with a funeral procession shot from skewed low angles, the blank sky towering over the solemn figures of the coffin-bearers. The atmosphere is intense and eerily beautiful, and Welles carries this grand, dramatic aesthetic throughout the film. Othello's arrival in Cyprus is stormy and striking, with soldiers on the battlements framed against the unquiet sea, the waves crashing against the rocks beneath them and a dark, cloudy sky hovering above. The cold wind is practically palpable, and the stark, bleak mood is constantly projecting the air of impending tragedy that hangs over this story.

The film's performances are mostly excellent as well. Micheál MacLiammóir's Iago is perhaps not slimy enough, though he does project a blandly sinister flatness that makes him an effectively unassuming villain. Welles himself plays Othello, his face unfortunately darkened in what was still a Hollywood tradition of having Caucasian actors play darker-skinned men. But if one can get past that, Welles' typical forcefulness is very much to be found here, as he captures the glowering intensity and confused emotions of Othello, led to doubt his beautiful Desdemona (Suzanne Cloutier) by the treacherous plotting of the jealous, ambitious Iago.

Welles makes Desdemona's death scene especially potent, as befits the film's tragically sad climax: Othello wraps a gauzy sheet around his wife's face, her tears streaking the sheet, making wet marks in the cloth as it clings to her features, her mouth gasping against the instrument of her death. Death is at the crux of the film; it starts and ends with the same funeral procession, the same testament to the story's grim destination of murder and loss. Othello's death scene is similarly powerful, the camera reeling and whirling as the Moor, having stabbed himself in his grief and the realization of his mistake, stumbles back to the site of his wife's murder, where she lays sprawled out next to their bed. Welles' Othello is unforgettably potent at moments like this, unfailingly finding the black, shadowy, terrible beauty of the story's tragedy. It is far from a perfect adaptation of its source, and more than Welles' Macbeth it betrays the technical limitations and business woes that followed Welles throughout his career, but for all that it is a compelling, visually inventive work that unmistakeably bears the mark of its director.

The Sniper

The Sniper is an early example of Hollywood taking a stab at the kind of criminal/psychological analysis that is, today, a commonplace element of crime fiction. At the time, though, in 1952, this film's dead-on look at the psychosexual dysfunction of a killer must have seemed bracing and realistic, even if today its psychology seems strained and its examination of the subject superficial. The film focuses on Eddie Miller (Arthur Franz), a man with some serious issues about women. The film's opening text offers up a message about sex criminals, and indeed Miller's sickness is explicitly compared, within the film, to that of rapists and other sexual predators and perverts. With that context established, the opening images of Miller assembling a sniper rifle immediately acquire a sexual subtext, and his use of that weapon to murder women becomes a form of symbolic rape from a distance for a man who's afraid of and disturbed by women, who simultaneously wants them and detests them. During Miller's first murder, director Edward Dmytryk, in one of the film's most shocking shots, zooms in for a closeup on Miller's hands, caressing the barrel of his rifle, wrapping his hands around the gun and running them up and down its smooth metallic length. The sexual subtext of the crimes, the sense that Miller is getting off on these women in the only way he knows how, couldn't be more blatant.

Dmytryk does an excellent job of staging the murders, establishing the creepy sensation that Miller is lurking in the shadows, watching and waiting. His first victim is the pianist Jean (noir stalwart Marie Windsor), a woman Miller knows as one of his customers from his job as a laundry deliveryman. When Miller visits Jean's apartment early in the film to drop off a dress for her, the two flirt innocently — or rather, Jean flirts with him, not suspecting that it's anything more than the casual banter that often passes between acquaintances when conducting this type of routine business. But Miller is a very damaged man, and it's obvious that he's attracted to Jean, and at the same time turned off every time she drops a hint of her lifestyle as a nightclub pianist, every time she hints at the men she knows. Windsor brings just a touch of her usual femme fatale persona to Jean, a few stray touches of regret and world-weariness, a shade of noir toughness in this otherwise normal woman. She has only a few scenes, and Windsor, typically, makes them count, makes this woman memorable so that her sudden death, which sets Miller off on a killing spree all around the city, will be all the more affecting.

The scenes of Miller stalking Jean, following her down shadowy streets to her club and then setting up with his rifle on a roof nearby, are interrupted by a brief scene inside the club, where Jean fends off a drunken admirer and banters with the club owner. The juxtaposition subtly connects the drunk, with his increasingly antagonistic behavior, to the killer waiting outside, who nurses his own even more violent hostility towards women. What's interesting about the film, particularly for its era, is how it pointedly brings the subject of attitudes about women to the surface. It seems like virtually everywhere Miller goes, he encounters someone who has something to say about women, and usually something negative or stereotypical. A doctor tells Miller that he should get married, that cooking is women's work, and Miller's landlady tells him virtually the opposite, that men should learn how to cook just as well as women. In a scene where Miller makes a phone call at a drug store, Dmytryk cleverly stages a miniature drama in the background as the couple running the place bicker over the guy's perceived flirtation with a customer. These kinds of prosaic details subtly comment upon and enhance the central story, and the way this scene places a whole story into the background of the shot is fascinating.


Later, Miller goes to a carnival and unleashes his hostility in a game where the object is to throw a baseball at a target to knock a woman into a tank of water. Miller becomes increasingly enraged and violent, knocking the woman into the water again and again with his perfect aim, but what's notable is that he's really only getting too into the spirit of the game, which seems to be based entirely on this kind of hostility, on the idea that guys will want to step up and knock the woman off her stool if they can. Miller's only more honest about it — and has a better aim than most. The film doesn't exactly explicitly question these kinds of attitudes, but they certainly come bubbling to the surface, often in ugly ways. There's an odd disconnect, for example, between the killer's attitude towards women and the joking tone of a scene where one cop teases his older partner about married life. Similarly, a scene where the police question a lineup of sex criminals, trying to find out if one of them is the sniper, is frankly just bizarre, as the interrogator adopts a blatantly comic tone, turning around to catch the reaction of his fellow cops as he delivers his one-liners about rapists and peeping toms. It's staged like a comedy routine rather than a real interrogation of dangerous sexual criminals.

If the film never quite resolves these tensions, it's at least obvious that the treatment of women, and men's attitudes about women, are at the center of this story. A subtle line is drawn between common ideas about women and Miller's extreme actions. Less interesting is the film's tendency towards blunt, pat psychoanalysis and preachy speeches, which become more common in the film's second half. At its best, particularly for its first half, The Sniper is a taut and tense psychological thriller that places the audience in uncomfortable intimacy with the dysfunctional killer. In the second half of the film, though, the emphasis begins to slide away from Miller and onto the police who are trying to catch him, including Lieutenant Kafka (Adolphe Menjou) and the police psychologist Kent (Richard Kiley). Kent is prone to long speeches about how sexual criminals should be treated and committed to mental institutions, an early expression of the idea, now encoded in our justice system to some degree, that sexual crime should be treated differently from other kinds of crime. The film essentially goes on hold whenever Kent speaks: there might as well be an announcement that the film is being interrupted by a political advertisement or a public service announcement. Similarly, the depiction of Miller as having been damaged by his mother's strict and possibly abusive upbringing is delivered so bluntly and obviously that it takes away from some of the film's more subtle points.

In the end, The Sniper is an interesting if flawed picture that should be credited for attempting to explore sexual crime in a bold and direct way. Its ideas about sexual deviancy and the dynamics of gender relations might seem dated today, but nothing can take away from the creeping terror of its murder sequences. And nothing can dull the power of its haunting final shot, a slow zoom towards the face of Miller as he's caught by the police, hugging his rifle to his chest, a single tear running down his cheek.

The Duel at Silver Creek

Don Siegel's The Duel at Silver Creek is a sturdy Western actioner, a minor but enjoyable B-movie built around rugged location shooting and a good amount of fast-paced action and gunplay. A gang of claim-jumpers led by the slimy Rod Lacy (Gerald Mohr) is tearing through the West, forcing the owners of small mines to sign over their deeds before filling their victims with bullets so they can never be identified. They terrorize the small mines scattered around the area, until they run into some trouble at the mine belonging to Luke Cromwell (Audie Murphy) and his father; the gang kills Luke's dad, but the quick-drawing kid takes down three of them, causing the rest to flee. The film then shifts its focus away from Cromwell, turning instead to "Lightning" Tyrone (Stephen McNally), the Marshal of a nearby town, who goes out with a posse after the claim-jumpers, and while he's gone also loses his own father figure, an older lawman who's shot in the back while the marshal is out of town. When Tyrone returns from his unsuccessful jaunt after the outlaws, sporting an arm wound that has crippled his ordinarily formidable skills with a gun, he finds his friend dead and a new mining operation set up in town. He also has a new love interest, the sexy and deadly Opal Lacy (Faith Domergue), whose "brother" Rod is the secret leader of the claim-jumpers. Opal's introduction is certainly memorable: she appears as a fine lady in an ornate outfit, volunteering to help nurse a man who could potentially be a witness against the claim-jumpers. But when everyone's out of the room, she strangles the man with his own handkerchief, while Siegel holds a tilted Dutch angle closeup looking up at her face, her pretty features expressionless, her placid beauty hiding an inner evil.

Opal is contrasted against small-town beauty Dusty (Susan Cabot), the good girl who's waiting for Tyrone at home — but who he thinks of as just a little sister. Enter Cromwell back into the picture, sporting a new nickname (the Silver Kid) and a hard new attitude. The scheming Opal tries to set the Kid and Tyrone up for a gun battle, hoping to get the marshal out of the way, but instead Tyrone makes the younger man his deputy. At this point, the static melodramatics of the small town threaten to bog the film down, as too much time is spent with Tyrone courting Opal while the Kid makes a play for Dusty — and in the background, Lacy and his gang scheme against them all, employing local hoods like the inventively monikered but kind of lame Johnny Sombrero (Eugene Iglesias) and Tinhorn Burgess (a cigar-chomping bit turn for Lee Marvin). In between the rousing action of the opening and the extended climactic shootout, the film meanders around aimlessly, stretching out its meager plot to fill time between action set pieces.

That said, it's fun to watch the two girls fleshing out their cardboard cutout roles, with Cabot projecting a feisty, frontier gal energy and Domergue opting for sleepy seductiveness. And it's equally fun to watch Marvin make the most of his small role, thrusting his thin face forward with his cigar jutting forward even more, as though trying to imprint his visage in the minds of anyone who watches. This scenery-chewing from the sidelines fortunately helps distract from the boring leads, especially McNally, whose soporific narration certainly doesn't help in dragging the film out of its roughest patches. Murphy, with his usual stoic manner and baby face, has a certain low-key appeal, but he's more of a negative presence than anything else: one feels the absence of emotion in him, the absence of acting, even when he witnesses his father being killed.


If the film falters throughout its mid-section, it picks up again for a viscerally satisfying and intelligently filmed climax, in which Tyrone, the Kid and their posse head out after the claim-jumpers to stop them for good and rescue the kidnapped Dusty in the process. There is much to admire in the economy and elegance of Siegel's action filmmaking, in the exciting chase and gunfight sequences at the beginning and end of the film. His set pieces make excellent use of distance, of the space between combatants. This is true not only of the traditional Western main street shootout — shot from behind the back of one of the fighters, the perspective emphasizing the empty space that simultaneously separates and connects them — but of the much more complex trajectories of the final battle scene. When the Marshal is chasing Lacey during the climactic fight, Siegel's wide shots accentuate the space between the pursuer and his quarry, as well as the line-of-sight threads connecting them, the paths along which bullets can travel back and forth. Their showdown takes place not at close range but across a large distance, the two men laying low and warily maintaining their cover and their separation.

The geography is what really drives the action: Siegel is unusually attentive to how the characters get from point A to point B, how the angles of the gunfire are distinct for a gang member hiding high up on a rocky outcropping or a deputy crouched beneath a wagon. This is what makes Siegel's action sequences so thrilling and potent, the impression that everything is in its right place and that complex trajectories are being plotted out in the air, which is thick with bullets. Siegel's maybe a bit like Budd Boetticher in this respect, though unlike Boetticher the precision of his staging is largely confined here to the fight scenes. The violence in this film is frantic and seemingly chaotic, and yet also carefully balanced, every motion carefully planned — like the way the marshal rides off in pursuit of Lacy, sending a bullet at a diagonal towards a henchman on the way. The impressive staging of the action sequences, along with some eye-catching supporting performances and the natural color beauty of the landscapes where these battles take place, redeem the film from being just another mediocre B-Western.

The Big Sky

The Big Sky was Howard Hawks' second Western after his iconic John Wayne/Montgomery Clift classic Red River, but this second stab at the genre is today largely forgotten, particularly in comparison to Hawks' other Westerns. Considered overlong by the producers and distributors of the time, it was chopped down by 20 minutes after its initial release, and it mostly survives today — on lousy bootlegged prints, when it's seen at all — in this shortened form. Even so, it's apparent that the film is much better than its reputation suggests; it's an ambling, nearly plotless adventure yarn in which a group of frontier men set off down the Missouri River into uncharted territory, aiming to be the first white men to get so far and trade with the notoriously unwelcoming Blackfoot Indians. The cuts made to the film to trim it down to an even two hours apparently haven't done much damage to Hawks' overall aesthetic, eliding some of the subtleties and details from certain scenes and relationships without drastically altering the shape or feel of the film.

From the beginning, Hawks is interested not so much in telling any particular story as evoking a time and a place and a type of man: the film harks back to the frontier spirit of early American history, when large swaths of unexplored land were waiting for intrepid men to penetrate them and discover their mysteries. It's surely no coincidence that one of these men, the aging adventurer and Indian trader Zeb Calloway (Arthur Hunnicutt), calls the beautiful Blackfoot lands "wild and pretty like a virgin woman." Hawks has nothing but admiration for these men who are tied down to nothing and go running off caring only about the taste of adventure. There's a reason that the only period films Hawks was ever comfortable making were Westerns. This frontier spirit — the taming of wild country with sheer ingenuity, toughness and determined group effort — is perfectly suited to Hawks' cinematic sensibility. The film plays out like a blueprint for Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo: a journey up a choppy, hard-to-navigate river in which the men's physical exertions often literally push and pull the boat through the worst rapids. When the going gets too tough, the crew gets out and tugs the boat along the shore with heavy ropes.

Hawks films all of this with a raw physicality and intensity that captures the rigor of the journey in all its detail. He seems to care little for the actual plot, which is really nothing much to speak of anyway, just a loose framework on which to hang all the incidents and scenes that contribute to this vivid portrait of frontier life. Zeb and his French partner Jourdonnais (Steven Geray) have a plan to be the first men able to trade in Blackfoot country. They have a Blackfoot princess, Teal Eye (Elizabeth Threatt), who had been captured by a rival Indian tribe and then escaped, far from home. By returning Teal Eye to her people, the traders know they'll ingratiate themselves to the Blackfeet, thus finally opening up the standoffish tribe to outside trading. The only thing that stands in their way is the local fur company, which certainly doesn't want to see a group of independent operators open up this untouched territory. The narrative is simple: the boat struggles upriver, beset by attacks from the fur company's hired mercenaries and the local Crow Indians who've been stirred up onto the warpath.


In the midst of this adventure, Zeb takes on his young nephew Boone Caudill (Dewey Martin) and Boone's friend Jim Deakins (Kirk Douglas). The two young men are friends in a very Hawksian mold, harking all the way back to his early silent film A Girl in Every Port — Hawks cleverly tips his hat to the earlier film by repeating the bit of business where one of the men, after a fight, pulls the other's finger to pop his joint back into place. Hawks, often predictable in the kinds of stories he's drawn to and the things he finds interesting about them, makes this film about the camaraderie of these men as they head into danger, seemingly for no better reason than having something to do. When the film opens, Boone and Jim meet, fight each other and becomes friends in the process (again, like the heroes of A Girl in Every Port), then immediately set off looking for Boone's Uncle Zeb. When the three men meet up in jail, it's assumed that the two younger men will be coming along on Zeb's latest trip upriver. They all treat the journey like a lark, an excuse to have fun, and Hawks obviously has great fun himself in capturing the campfire bonhomie of the men.

There's an early, very Hawksian scene where Boone and Jim engage in a cheerfully drunken song with a French barmaid squeezed between them, the trio clustered together in the midst of a frame packed with activity and smiling, drunken faces. This cluttered, intimate atmosphere is carried over, once the journey gets under way, into campfire singalongs on the river bank and bull sessions where the men swap stories and pass whiskey jugs back and forth. Hawks even applies this cheery atmosphere to a scene in which Jim, after mangling his finger on a tree branch, has to have it amputated. The men get him good and liquored up, and Boone and Zeb, performing the surgery, get pretty tight themselves, just to be "sociable" with their injured friend. The whole thing becomes suddenly hilarious, the actual surgery performed offhandedly amidst the laughter and drunken camaraderie. Hawks had originally wanted to include a similar scene in Red River, until John Wayne balked at finding humor in something like that. It's obvious that Hawks, more than his actor, understood these kind of men, who wouldn't take a thing like that so seriously that they'd let it get in the way of a good time. The scene ends with an appropriately ridiculous image: most of the camp down on all fours, stumbling around looking for Jim's amputated finger, which somehow got lost in the confusion.


The film is packed with moments like this, and indeed it's structured around such moments. Its narrative simply wanders from scene to scene, taking its time studying the details while the boat meanders upstream towards Blackfoot country. The pacing is slow and deliberate, and the action minimal: there's an Indian skirmish and a pair of tense standoffs with the fur company's men, resolved with lightning-fast economy. Hawks doesn't care about telling a story so much as conveying the texture of the setting, the wild country and wide expanses of open sky that are impressive even in the disappointing prints that are the only way to see the film for now, until a definitive DVD is finally assembled. This disinterest in narrative structure only becomes distracting towards the end of the film, when the love triangle between Boone, Jim and Teal Eye, underplayed subtly throughout the film, abruptly becomes of central importance, with Hawks leaving it to Hunnicutt's folksy narration to fill in the details.

It doesn't help, either, that the central performances of Douglas and Martin are at best likable and slight. Neither actor was Hawks' first choice for this long-delayed project and there's not much energy or passion in their relationships with each other or with Teal Eye. The supporting performances, on the other hand, are uniformly colorful and entertaining, and Hunnicutt is especially great in the Walter Brennan-type old coot role. Zeb's outrageous tall tales and deadpan humor — reminiscent of the Squint character from Frank King's great newspaper comic strip Gasoline Alley — are consistently funny, especially his anecdote about sewing a friend's severed ear on backwards, so that whenever he heard something thereafter, he always turned in the wrong direction. Threatt, too, is compelling, even without a word of English dialogue in the entire film: she acts with her wide, flashing black eyes and the stubborn pride of her posture. The Big Sky is a loose, episodic film, driven by the accumulation of its incidents rather than the meager forward drive of its narrative. It's a true Hawksian Western, a celebration of man's taming of wild nature and the bonds between men that make such grand adventures possible.

O. Henry's Full House

The stories of William Sidney Porter, written under his pen name O. Henry, are almost universally known. Even today, when Henry's penchant for twist endings and cleverly ironic touches has somewhat fallen out of favor, many of his tales endure as part of the pop culture landscape. Five of these stories were adapted by five different directors for the anthology film O. Henry's Full House. Henry Koster, the most obscure filmmaker to contribute to the omnibus, opens the film with The Cop and the Anthem. This is essentially a showcase piece for the actor Charles Laughton, who plays a bum called Soapy, a man who had once been well-to-do and a part of society, and who still retains the vestiges of his sophistication and pride even as he sleeps on park benches with newspapers padded into his coat. As winter approaches, Soapy's thoughts turn to finding a warm, comfortable place to sleep in the cold weather, and he plots — as he apparently has for years — to get himself arrested so that he might spend the next three months in jail, with a nice warm bed.

Laughton is a delight in this film, a perfect choice to play a man who's fallen far but who was obviously once much better off — his rich, dulcet tones and florid manner of speaking are well-suited to Soapy's overblown dialogue. One can't imagine any actor but Laughton pulling off this part without turning him into a pretentious windbag. Instead, Laughton allows us to see the sadness and dignity beneath Soapy's pretensions. He is a proud man, unwilling to accept charity, preferring to do things for himself, even if it means resorting to thievery. One of his schemes for getting arrested is to walk into a fancy restaurant and order an extravagant meal, which works because he projects an aura more suited to a man of great means than a bum. Throughout the meal, the waiters hover obsequiously around his table, eager to do his bidding, silently taking his insults, until at the end he admits, casually, that he has no money, ripping up the check as he does so.

Another of Soapy's attempts involves bothering a young lady (a cameo from Marilyn Monroe) window shopping along the street, hoping that a nearby cop will take notice and break it up. Soapy miscalculates, however, because the lady turns out to be a prostitute, initially mistaking his advance for a come-on, and she's just as eager to avoid the cops. She's just happy to have Soapy call her a "lady." The great thing about the irony of these incidents is that it's often double-edged — the humor emerges not just from Laughton's blustery performance or the irony of wanting to get arrested and being unable to achieve it, but from the subtle reversals in social status that accompany Soapy's dilemma. What's not often acknowledged about O. Henry's stories is that the best of his ironic twists are not simply humorous, but prod at the underlying tensions and emotions laid bare by these ironies. Koster wisely stays out of the way, with a simple style that highlights the great comic performances of Laughton and his fellow bum Horace (David Wayne).

Prolific Fox director Henry Hathaway helms the second segment, The Clarion Call, a much more prosaic O. Henry yarn in which the police detective Barney Woods (Dale Robertson) investigates a murder case. A key piece of evidence tips him off to the fact that the murderer is an old friend of his, the wild Johnny Kernan (Richard Widmark), but he is torn over turning the man in because he owes a debt to Johnny. When they were younger and Barney was struggling with gambling, Johnny helped him out by lending him $1000, a good deed that Barney still hasn't been able to repay. This debt hangs over Barney's head now, as he knows that Johnny committed a murder but feels like he can't do anything about it until he pays off what he owes. It's a contrived moral dilemma that's underscored by the counterfeit bills that Barney is holding onto as evidence; some of the segment's unspoken tension arises from the suspicion that this is leading to Barney compromising himself by paying off the murderer in fake currency.

In addition to the tired premise, Hathaway lazily carries over Widmark's character from the actor's debut role in Kiss of Death, which Hathaway himself had presided over five years earlier. Johnny is a virtual copy of that film's Tommy Udo, the sneering, cartoonish, maniacal killer who catapulted Widmark to attention as a brilliant noir villain. Johnny's petulant, child-like manner and outbursts of uncontrolled violence (and even his black suit/white tie wardrobe) are copied wholesale from the earlier film, which further dilutes this segment's appeal. It's always fun to watch Widmark at his most unhinged, and his pop-eyed performance is in some ways as much nasty fun here as it was in Kiss of Death, but there's still no getting around the feeling of familiarity and repetition in seeing him do the same schtick the second time around. Probably the film's best moment is a little throwaway scene of Johnny's girl (Ava Norring) playing with a kitten before he viciously throws her out. The rest of the segment feels like watered-down noir, and its final twist lacks the emotional and thematic resonances that mark the capper to The Cop and the Anthem.

Jean Negulesco's The Last Leaf opens with a wonderful silent sequence in which the director's deliberately skewed compositions reinforce the emotional turmoil of his protagonist, Joanna (Anne Baxter), after she's rejected by her actor boyfriend for another woman. Throughout these opening scenes, the camera is tilted and cocked at an angle, forcing diagonal lines on the compositions as the distraught young woman stumbles home through the snow, overcome by despair. Negulesco isolates her in the sheets of white, and the cant of his camera suggests the instability of her mental state at this point: it looks as though the entire world is tilted and she might fall off its surface at any point. Her unsteady walk home is marked by a tremendous effort merely to remain on her feet, to keep herself straight against the weight of gravity. It's a great scene, visually representing her crushed dignity; it's implied in later scenes that Joanna is so upset because she slept with the man, who then discarded her once he got what he wanted.

Following this scene, Negulesco's characters begin to speak, and that's unfortunate because the rest of the film is a rather conventional weepy melodrama in which Joanna catches pneumonia and is tended to by her worried sister Susan (Jean Peters) and their upstairs neighbor, a struggling painter named Behrman (Gregory Ratoff). Ratoff's performance echoes that of Laughton in the film's first segment, a man with nothing to his name but with reserves of dignity and pride to spare. He's convinced that he's a great artist, but his abstract compositions won't sell in the time of the story — the script contains a subtle joke on modern art when an art dealer tells Behrman that maybe his paintings will sell in the 1950s, but nobody understands or wants them now. He's an interesting character, but the story isn't centered around him. Most of the segment is dedicated instead to the static melodrama of the ailing sister who has given up on life, who isn't fighting her illness but simply waiting to die, waiting for the last leaf to fall from the vine across the street so that she can go with it. Peters and Baxter are both overacting in the same maudlin register, and Behrman's more subtle evocations of an increasingly drunken and despairing old man are pushed to the fringes. This segment is a relatively minor and forgettable short, notable only for Ratoff's fine turn and its suitably destabilized opening shots.

Howard Hawks' The Ransom of Red Chief is the most often maligned segment of this anthology, seemingly hated by critics and audiences alike. When the film fared badly in previews, this segment was chopped out entirely for most of the original theatrical run. And yet Hawks' ridiculous farce is one of the most delightful parts of Full House, a low-key trifle from the great director and yet nevertheless an entertaining one. A pair of con men, William (Oscar Levant) and Slick (Fred Allen), concoct a plan to kidnap a boy from a small rural town, then extract a ransom for his return. The plan goes awry, however, because nobody's exactly in a rush to get back the little terror they wind up kidnapping, a ten year-old named J.B. (Lee Aaker) who prefers to be known as Red Chief. The film's jokes are aimed at easy targets, namely the slow-witted rural folk and the hapless kidnappers, but its deadpan farce is no less funny for its predictability. Allen and Levant are brilliant, playing their parts with a strangely formal back-and-forth patter, much slower and more deliberate than Hawks' usual fast-paced screwball dialogue, like screwball slowed down to the speed of parlor room chit-chat.

As for Red Chief himself, he's a determined little monster who taunts and assaults his kidnappers right from the start, making it clear that he's the one who's actually in charge; before long, they just want to get rid of him. Most of the sketch's physical gags aren't particularly noteworthy, and the middle stretch of the segment drags a bit. Hawks seems to have more fun with the stylized banter of the two kidnappers, or the way they subtly mock the rural locals while extracting information from them — proving that no matter how dumb you are, there's always someone lower on the totem pole to abuse and make fun of. Later, Red Chief's insistence that the two men play Indians with him provides the silly image of the con men looking forlorn and weary in warpaint and feathers. This echoes the similar images in Hawks' Monkey Business, which he had just finished making, further suggesting that the director's view of childhood and children was far from idyllic. Both films present kids as destructive and malignant little monsters. This segment is ultimately lightweight and inconsequential, buoyed by Hawks' efforts to transform the original story into a mean-spirited, cynical farce. The cynicism and ugliness of this segment is very much at odds with O. Henry's sensibility, but then Hawks is obviously not a director well-suited to adapting this particular writer. Instead, he bends Red Chief to his own preoccupations and delivers a strange but endearingly funny little film.

The anthology's closing segment, The Gift of the Magi, is quite possibly one of O. Henry's most famous stories, though its familiarity does little to dull the impact of Henry King's sentimental but heartfelt adaptation of this classic Christmas story. A pair of young newlyweds, just getting by on the husband's meager salary, make secret plans to treat each other to lavish Christmas presents by selling some of their most prized possessions. The wife (Jeanne Crain) sells her luxurious long hair, which her husband so loves, to a wig maker in order to buy her husband a platinum watch fob. At the same time, her husband (Farley Granger) sells his watch in order to buy some beautiful combs for her hair. The irony is obvious, and not particularly complicated, but this simple reversal is invested with rich emotional depths. The love between the young couple is convincingly portrayed by Granger and Crain, who communicate the affection and tenderness of their relationship, as well as their understated regret that they don't have more to offer one another in material terms.

King's adaptation of the classic story is straightforward, relying on the actors to get across the emotional stakes of such ordinary acts as buying a Christmas present. Along with the first story, this is the anthology's most emotionally satisfying installment, a beautiful ode to love and the spirit of generosity that overcomes any deficiencies in wealth. It ends Full House on a very warm and beautiful note, with one of O. Henry's most genuinely moving messages. As a whole, this anthology is as uneven as most such multi-director films tend to be, with a few forgettable segments and at least a few others that deserve to be remembered. At the very least, O. Henry's Full House is worth a look for Koster and King's heartfelt adaptations of two of Henry's most moving stories, for Hawks' contrarian comic sketch, and for isolated moments at least in Negulesco and Hathaway's segments.

The Cimarron Kid

The Cimarron Kid is a solid, thoroughly enjoyable Western with a gang of surprisingly sympathetic outlaws at its core. It tweaks the usual good-man-gone-bad trope by having the young Bill Doolin (Audie Murphy), after being driven to a life as an outlaw by bullying railroad cop Sam Swanson (David Wolfe), fully embrace his new outlaw status despite some lingering reservations. Dubbing himself "the Cimarron Kid," Bill falls in with the gang of train and bank robbers who he had previously been falsely accused of riding with. Bill is basically a decent guy, and would love nothing better than to settle into a life as a cattle rancher — particularly once he meets the lovely farmer's daughter and tough ranch gal Carrie (Beverly Tyler) and realizes that he might have something to live for. Nevertheless, he feels he has no choice but an outlaw's life, and he surrounds himself with a gang of men who are equally sympathetic. They're all robbers, and killers when they need to be, but there's something familial about their setup; they're bonded together by real affection and tenderness for one another.

Originally a gang of brothers who are mostly killed during a botched bank job, the leftovers of the gang, now led by Bill, retain a close-knit clannish mentality. They live more like a family than a gang of robbers. There's the lanky, taciturn Bitter Creek (James Best) and his Spanish girlfriend Rose (Yvette Duguay), who loves him and is loyal to him even though she wishes they could have a better life. There's also their black stable hand Stacey (Frank Silvera), a family man who is treated as their equal even though he doesn't actually participate in the heists. The only problem of the bunch is Red Buck (Hugh O'Brian), a hothead who's the only one of them who seems content as an outlaw, whose only ambition really is to be the biggest, baddest outlaw of all. All the rest of them want only to be free, to have enough money to be rid of this life on the run. They exist as a family, taking care of each other, everybody chipping in, even the feisty, playful Rose, who gathers information for the jobs.


Director Budd Boetticher, who always seems to inject a morally engaged perspective into his Westerns, is concerned not only with the action of this story — though there are plenty of beautifully executed gunfights — but with the internal battles of his characters, particularly Bill. He stages the scenes between Bill and Carrie in order to emphasize the way she tugs on his conscience, as though her very presence is a gravitational force pulling him away from his outlaw life. In one of the best of these shots, Carrie stands in the foreground, looking at an oblique angle past the camera, while in the background Bill lies injured and out of focus, listening to her. Tyler forcefully overacts these scenes, and she's more appealing to look at than she is as an actress, but Boetticher's blocking and framing conveys the essential point anyway. She represents earnest decency for Bill, so distinct from his outlaw world that even when they're in the same shot together they seem to be in completely different spaces.

The film is undeniably at its best though in its action showcases, which are always inventively staged. Boetticher likes to shoot at slightly slanted angles down long corridor-like spaces, using objects caught in the foreground to emphasize the sense of distance. When the law, led by Swanson and the noble marshal John Sutton (Leif Erickson), ambushes Bill's gang, Boetticher shoots the gang's ride into town by setting up at the end of the street, the signs and front porch for a local inn partially obscuring the view down the street. The scene as a whole pivots around the use of the long street, with lawmen blocking off both ends and the outlaws trapped in the middle. The battle soon moves into a nearby train yard instead, where the central bar of a train turntable becomes the focal point of the action. Boetticher's camera frequently looks over the shoulders of the gunmen, peering through smoke and over the edges of the train as it spins around. The scene is all angles and obstructions, emphasizing the act of aiming a gun and the trajectories of bullets; there is a precise geometry to Boetticher's action here, depending as it does on the tight arc of the train as it spins on the turntable, and the paths of the outlaws and posse as they attempt to outflank one another.

Trains of course play a crucial role in the film in general, and at several points Boetticher's setups are reminiscent of the world's most famous (and most fundamental) train film, the Lumière brothers' L'arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat; again, those slanted angles emphasizing the linearity of the action. Boetticher's geometrical precision also shows through in his use of two virtually identical scenes that take place in a barn, involving gun barrels peeking through the slats of the horse stalls. The first time, Bill and his gang have their guns trained on Marshal Sutton, and the second time it's Bill himself who is in the crosshairs. But there's more than just an ironic reversal to this doubling, and the scene's recurrence at pivotal points in the story serves to make a moral point. This mirroring proves that Bill has been correct in his better instincts, that his refusal to kill without necessity is not only not his undoing, but is in fact the one thing that ultimately saves and redeems him. This is a profoundly moral Western, but also a profoundly entertaining and exciting one, a shoot-em-up with a brain as well as a lot of bullets.

Monkey Business (1952)

Monkey Business is perhaps Howard Hawks' most truly madcap farce, a film that takes an absurd premise — a distracted professor trying to discover a formula for youth — and diligently expands upon each of the scenario's many comic possibilities in turn. There's something simultaneously chaotic and methodical about Hawks' approach to comedy, and it's especially true here. There's a sense in his comedy that, while the action onscreen may be wild and frenzied, there is actually a thoroughly designed structure underpinning everything. The film takes its central idea and then rotates through the possible results: first the professor Barnaby Fulton (Cary Grant) drinks the potion and begins acting like a young man of twenty; then his wife Edwina (Ginger Rogers) takes a drink and becomes a teen; then they both down an even larger dose and regress to childhood; finally everybody in the lab accidentally ingests the formula. The script is schematic in the extreme, formally structured into discrete segments based around the stepped regression of the protagonists, and yet the result never feels mannered. The action is smeared across the frame with such energy and abandon that it's impossible not to giggle and laugh with pleasure.

A large part of the credit must surely go to the fantastic cast. Grant and Rogers have a surprising comic chemistry that's equally apparent in the early scene where the patient, bemused Edwina deals with scatterbrained Barnaby's attempts to get ready for a party, and the later scenes where the duo become childlike, sparring and bickering with petulant stubbornness. Both actors perfectly manage the transformations from adulthood to childhood, acting in multiple different registers to convey the shifts in their personalities. Grant is initially a stiff, somewhat stuffy scientist with a tendency to daydream and forget what he's doing, especially if he's hard at work thinking about a project. The opening credits introduce the actor overlapping with his own character; the credits sequence unfurls over a view of the couple's front door, and Grant keeps opening the door and starting to step out, before an offscreen voice (Hawks himself, actually) tells him, "not yet, Cary." It's a tossed-off metafictional moment intended to remind the audience that, no matter how much of a nerd Barnaby seems to be, it's stylish Cary Grant under that nebbishy exterior. Once he ingests his formula, however, his absent-mindedness gives way to boyish enthusiasm and energy, and quite naturally an interest in the office's leggy, dumb-as-a-brick secretary, Miss Laurel (Marilyn Monroe, in a small but show-stopping role), who he ordinarily barely even notices despite her bombshell beauty.

Grant is an absolute joy when he's playing his younger self. As a young man, he engages in a whirlwind courtship of Laurel, taking her out roller-skating, high-diving into a pool to impress her, racing frantically through the streets in the souped-up sports car he buys. Later, as a younger boy, he's even more fun: dressing himself up in warpaint to become an Indian, and hatching a plan with a bunch of real young boys to "scallop" his wife's former boyfriend Hank (Hugh Marlowe). This scene is perhaps the most distinctively Hawksian in the film. There is almost always, in Hawks' best and most characteristic films, a scene where a group of people gather together, in a tightly clustered frame, in order to perform and listen to music. These scenes are usually joyous and celebratory, representing the peak of Hawks' vision of communal togetherness and cooperation. In this film, the scene that fulfills this function is a truly unusual one, as Barnaby and the other young Indians begin performing a war dance in order to prepare for their ambush of Hank. The boys are gathered in a circle around Grant, whose face is smeared with black paint and a few white lines. He directs his new friends in what to do, giving one a rhythm to play, another a short lyric to shout, another a war cry to holler, and soon the boys and Grant are worked up into a frenzy, howling and singing with the rhythm of the war drums. Hawks' camera maintains its stoic fixed position, capturing the absurd energy of this scene. He follows it up with an equally enjoyable sequence where Hank is captured, tied to a tree, and then "scalloped" until he's left with only a scraggly mohawk on the top of his head. These scenes are truly hilarious, accumulating a ridiculous momentum driven by Grant's over-the-top performance.


Rogers is nearly as good, and her transformations from loving wife to bratty little girl are just as adept at signaling the change in her character (in fact, both actors render completely redundant the silly sound effect that accompanies their changeovers, which makes the whole thing seem more like magic than science). Rogers doesn't get quite as much meat as her co-star, but she does seem to have a real ball shifting from a TV sitcom housewife to a mouthy teen who speaks her mind. There are hints of sexism here — why does the younger Grant become playful and fun-loving while Rogers' youth unleashes a shrewish, whining quality in her personality? — though they are balanced on the whole by the film's overall thrust, and by Barnaby and Edwina's temperate consideration of what the youth formula brings out in each of them. The scene where Edwina, reliving her honeymoon night with her husband, abruptly breaks down crying and lashing out at him over everything, is cruelly stereotyped, depicting every negative feminine caricature rolled up into one character. On the other extreme, the "mature" Edwina dismisses her husband's philandering, his chasing after the luscious Laurel, with nothing more than a bit of affectionate ribbing, as though that's to be expected. Edwina vacillates between a dowdy housewife and a frightful nag, both hoary stereotypes even if Rogers does invest them with a greater than usual depth and complexity.

The film's theme, if such a light-hearted confection can be said to have one without sounding too pretentious, is the importance of retaining a youthful passion in relationships, even as youth itself recedes into the past. Initially, Barnaby and Edwina's marriage is a bit staid, and Edwina seems vaguely discontented even if she's too chipper and understanding to let it show. In one early scene, she casually shrugs it off when Barnaby's absent-minded musings prevent them from going out to a party, shedding her elegant dress for a frumpy housewife's apron and making her husband eggs instead. Despite her laidback attitude, it's hard to believe that she isn't at least subconsciously dissatisfied with this situation. Even the oblivious Barnaby soon realizes it, reminiscing about the much more passionate early years of their marriage.

This narrative of dimmed romance drives the film's narrative, which is otherwise structured only by the (il)logic of its escalating series of gags. There is no real plot here, just the riotous spirit of fun unleashed by the youth formula's effects. The narrative throughline is more subtle, an undercurrent beneath the surface insanity and laughs, a story of lovers reconnecting with their youth and realizing both what they've missed and what they've gained by growing up. The narrative here is thus not a sequence of events so much as a sequence of emotions, and the actors do a fantastic job of maintaining this serious subtext even through the film's most baroque bits of slapstick absurdity.

And there's plenty of absurdity to contend with, in the best sense. The dialogue is quick-witted and clever, packed with sexual double entendres and wordplay. It's not quite as pattering as in some of Hawks' earlier screwball comedies, but there's a real comedic edge to it, a bite to the verbiage that's enhanced by the actors' flowing deliveries. Monroe, though she has a bit part, gets a lot of the choice material, playing even more of an oblivious blonde bimbo than usual, whether she's showing off her "acetates" or explaining why she's at work so early: "Mr. Oxley's been complaining about my punctuation, so I'm careful to get here before nine." Speaking of Oxley, Charles Coburn, as Barnaby's boss, gives another great character actor turn, as a dignified old geezer who's utterly matter-of-fact about his perversions. One of the film's best lines is tossed off by Coburn as he watches Monroe leave the room, having just told her that she shouldn't try typing again after the last disaster. He admires her wiggling walk as she exits, then turns to Grant with a shrug and deadpans, "anyone can type." Hawks also packs a lot of physical humor into the film, whether it's from an impressively trained monkey or from Grant, who's a tightly wound ball of energy and even launches into one of the joyful somersaults he so often performed in his earlier career. The film is nearly a decade late to be a real screwball comedy — and it was certainly too late to be a commercially successful one, as the dismal box office take at the time proved — but it is nevertheless a vibrant, satisfying take on the genre that Hawks and Grant themselves perfected in their own younger days.

The Narrow Margin

The Narrow Margin is a tight, economical thriller which constricts its action almost entirely to a train. The hard-boiled, snub-nosed police detective Brown (Charles McGraw) is enlisted along with his partner to pick up the widow (Marie Windsor) of murdered gangster Frankie Neall, escorting her from Chicago to Los Angeles through a likely hail of bullets in order to testify before a grand jury about her husband's former colleagues. Brown's partner doesn't make it to the train, which leaves the detective cooped up alone in tight spaces with the feisty Mrs. Neall, while the mob's thugs and assassins gather their forces to prevent her from ever making it to L.A. It's a perfect set-up, a recipe for claustrophobic action and teeth-gritting suspense, and even if the plotting sometimes fall short of its promise, director Richard Fleischer rises to the occasion to deliver one of the great B-movies.

The tight setting prevents Fleischer from applying most of the usual noir touches. A few early scenes, when the detectives first pick up Mrs. Neall at her Chicago apartment, take place in dense shadows with expressive lighting, but once the action shifts to the train the sets are brightly lit and confined, with no room for the large areas of light and shadow that form the visual language of so many classic noirs. Fleischer fully exploits the limitations of space inherent in his story, emphasizing the cramped quarters both for suspense and touches of light comedy. The latter is present in the colorful bystanders who provide some momentary distractions from the otherwise relentless plot: the distinctly non-jolly fat man (Paul Maxey) who keeps blocking the passage for both cops and mobsters, and the little boy who mistakes Brown for a train robber. Even these diversions are tied into the central story soon enough, but Fleischer has less interest in comic relief than he does in getting the most, visually, out of his limited sets. He works with the train's tight corridors as much as possible. Characters are constantly having to squeeze past each other or duck into side rooms, which inevitably expand the action into new areas. The film has an exquisite sense of spatial relations. Much of the action takes place along straight lines, with Brown and the trio of mob assassins dodging each other as they weave up and down the train's corridors in repetitive patterns. The action is built on cyclic journeys between the dining car and Brown's quarters, with the detective executing clever ploys to outfox and delay his enemies. It's absolutely crucial, to get the most out of Brown's maneuvering, that the audience get a sense of where the detective is going at all times, and Fleischer is careful to keep the geography precise.

But even as he builds up the claustrophobic intensity of the tight spaces, Fleischer is simultaneously working to expand the spaces available to him. To this end, he makes excellent use of the windows of the train, which at various times and in different lighting function as either actual windows or as mirrors. Much is made of the conceit of spying through windows, as Brown's primary pursuer Kemp (David Clarke) makes it into a semi-open game of wits between cop and mobster. The two are continually glimpsing each other through windows and in reflections. In the dining car, Brown sets himself up so he can see Kemp mirrored in a reflective window pane, while on stops Kemp spies through windows from outside the train, to the point that seeing the mobster framed by a window becomes a marker of trouble and suspense. After Kemp has misidentified the innocent passenger Ann Sinclair (Jacqueline White) as Neall's wife because of her developing friendship with Brown, he stares at her through the dining car window, twisting his face into a sinister leer as he lights a cigarette. At the film's climax, the reflective quality of the train windows plays an important part in the denouement. This is foreshadowed in a scene immediately before the final showdown: a closeup on Ms. Sinclair, her face framed against a dark train window, with a slumping, shadowy Brown reflected in the window, looking like a boxer getting ready for another brawl. Fleischer's use of the train windows continually expands and opens up the areas available to him, and he makes especially ingenious use of them in building suspense in the film's final act. As the train races along and the various pieces of the puzzle begin to fall into place, a mysterious car begins keeping pace with the train, first glimpsed outside the window over Brown's shoulder as he gets up from the dining car, and returning several times in the background. It becomes obvious that the car is following the train and is probably linked to the mobsters, and Fleischer begins both cutting to it directly and allowing it to appear naturally outside the windows; its very presence becomes a foreboding signifier of the approaching end.


If Fleischer's able direction is the film's primary asset, he's definitely assisted by the tough, uncompromising central performance from Charles McGraw. McGraw's square-jawed cop is a well of conflicting emotions, all of them hard and seething. He's principled, but maybe not entirely stolid. When the mobsters offer him large payoffs to look the other way, he rejects their offers, but he obviously at least gives it a thought. He's uncorrupted, but not incorruptible, and he's got a real streak of brutality and anger in addition to his wise-cracking wit and quick-thinking intelligence. When he finally corners Kemp, the fight between the two men is crisp, rough, and physical. Fleischer shoots much of it in closeups and tight two-shots that draw attention to the small space the men are fighting in and the violence of their blows. The effect is heightened even further when Brown conducts a threatening interrogation after the fight, and Fleischer shoots it entirely in extreme closeups, at first keeping the two men separate in shot/counter-shot patterns and then thrusting them together as Brown grabs the other man and pulls him close to make him talk. McGraw's Brown is not a typical movie cop, he's a brawler and a tough guy, and when he says that he'll track down Kemp and kill him if the gangster doesn't come clean, it's a credible threat. Fleischer really knows how to film his star, letting the shadows etch hard lines into McGraw's twisted expression in this scene — in calmer moments, the actor looks the part of the clean-cut good guy, and the tension between the two sides of his character serve the film well.

McGraw's persona also plays off of his villainous foils in interesting ways. Kemp is a memorable and vibrant small-time hood, with his beady-eyed leer, loud suit, and ratty mustache. Even more intriguing is Yost (Peter Brocco, uncredited because of the blacklist), a blandly menacing figure posing as a businessman and offering Brown the temptation of a hefty bribe. Yost's lizard-like charm and nagging insistence, like a dark conscience, form an excellent counterpoint to Kemp's more obvious villainy. It's a shame when the film unceremoniously drops him with some puzzling exposition: someone casually mentions that he got off the train on a stop, and that's it for him. The final villain in the trio is Densel (Peter Virgo), the killer who shot Brown's partner, and who catches up with the train late in the film. The plot calls for his appearance to have some impact that it never does. Throughout the film, he's known as the man with the fur-collared coat, a key detail pointed out in the earlier scene that makes it a sure thing that he'll reappear later. But when he finally shows up, he's only around long enough for a perfunctory scene or two, never developing the personality of the other two hoods, and surprisingly nothing is made of the fact that he killed Brown's friend and partner. The dramatic tension that should have infused his appearance simply fizzles away instead.

Curiously enough, the film also seems to have little narrative interest in developing the character of Mrs. Neall. She and Brown have some stock interplay, exchanging sharp dialogue, but it seems rote — there's so obviously no chemistry between the pair that the noir wisecracking can't amount to much. Marie Windsor does her best anyway, spending most of the film cramped up in one tiny room, lounging around in lacy black lingerie and occasionally poking her head out the door to unleash some fierce femme fatale attitude. For the most part, Fleischer seems more interested in tracking the progress of Brown and the thugs through the halls of the train, than in spending much time with the ostensible target of all this fuss herself. A few final-act twists render her even more irrelevant, and the film finally dispenses with her altogether. Fleischer does give her one of the film's best moments before she goes, but it has little to do with the script or Windsor's performance, and everything to do with the way he highlights the tiny gesture of a hand sweeping across a phonograph to start its record playing.

Despite the slackness and inconsistency of its narrative, The Narrow Margin remains a first-rate thriller for McGraw's brilliant performance and the frequent ingenuity of its direction. Richard Fleischer propels the film well above its origins, ignoring the lame twists of the final act and the many loose threads left hanging in its unsatisfying resolution. Its narrative holes are evidence of the film's B-movie status, but the many flashes of Fleischer's crisp visual storytelling are continual reminders of just how much verve, intelligence, and invention can energize even the most crippled of B-thriller scripts.

11/15: Ikiru

[This is a contribution to the Akira Kurosawa Blog-a-Thon hosted by Film Squish.]

Kurosawa's Ikiru is concerned with a seemingly counterintuitive idea: the poetics of bureaucracy. Its hero is a bureaucrat, and its central premise boils down to this man learning that he is going to die, and in response dedicating his remaining months to becoming a better bureaucrat. Veteran actor Takashi Shimura plays Watanabe, a career bureaucrat in a city Public Affairs department, who abruptly learns that he has stomach cancer and has only a few more months to live. His initial reaction is to sink into depression. He stops attending his job without even calling in, and drinks himself into oblivion in neighborhood bars — he seems intent on either forgetting about his plight or speeding it up to ease the burden on his self-absorbed son. A chance encounter with a writer at one of these bars proves to be the first step towards coming to terms with his illness, and this man takes Watanabe out for a wild night on the town, dancing, singing, gambling, and meeting young girls. This experience awakens Watanabe from his self-pity, making him realize that he should do something with his final months to redeem the wasted, routine life he'd been living since his wife died. However, he rightly rejects the hedonism of that one night as a long-term solution, recognizing it for the momentary pleasure it is.

As he casts around for a direction in his new life, a chance encounter again sets him onto a path, as he runs into his former employee Toyo (Miki Odagiri). Her youth and vitality enlivens her, but their initially carefree friendship quickly sours when Watanabe becomes clingy and desperate. She does, however, indirectly point him back towards yet another path: escape into his work, which is the path he decides on. He recommits himself to his job with a resolution to go above and beyond his duties to truly help people. It's at this point that Kurosawa makes the interesting decision to skip ahead five months, to Watanabe's wake. The remainder of the film is told in flashbacks by Watanabe's fellow employees, underlings, and bosses, revealing the misinterpretations and credit-stealing that go on even the night after his death. The bisected structure of the film allows Kurosawa to essentially create two films, one hopeful and one pessimistic. In the first half, Watanabe's realization of his own mortality initiates his examination of his life and what he's done with it. Even if his ultimate decision to turn back to his career is perhaps questionable as a means of fulfillment, it's still the first time in 30 years that he's made a positive decision for himself rather than just allowing his life to pass by. The first half ends with him actively taking on a new project that everyone else had dismissed, the creation of a children's park in a poor and neglected area of the city where a sewage pond was causing a health hazard.

After the first half of the film, the quiet optimism of Watanabe's mission isn't quite dissipated, but it is seriously dulled by the realization of just how little change Watanabe managed to effect in his surroundings. The second half of the film takes place entirely at Watanabe's wake, with his co-workers not so much mourning him as trying to figure out exactly what made him tick and what prompted the tremendous change in his personality in those final months. The first half of the film is defined by its transcendent quality: the sense, largely communicated by Kurosawa's sumptuous visuals, that we are observing more than just the external realities of a life in flux, but the internal qualities of the man himself. Shimura's amazing, wide-eyed performance goes a long ways towards establishing this spiritual closeness between the audience and Watanabe. His large, watery eyes practically bug out of his head on cue, and Kurosawa frequently allows his facial expressions to say it all in extreme close-ups. He emanates a sublime mix of melancholy, hopefulness, and quiet desperation, and his hunched, shuffling gait and murmured, halting speech only heightens the empathy for him.

In the second half of the film, with Watanabe's disappearance from the narrative except in the form of a photograph hung in the center of the room, this transcendent quality also largely disappears. The employees' squabbles have the quality of the multiple perspectives that Kurosawa had used in Rashomon two years earlier, but in this case they disagree not on facts, but on matters of interpretation. The palpable absence of Watanabe is a black hole in the film, especially since the periodic flashbacks in which he appears briefly restore that feeling of transcendence and emotional connection. The arguing employees are no substitute for Shimura's powerhouse central performance, and it's as though Kurosawa ended a perfectly good narrative film early in order to stage a debate. The employees' arguments spell out all too clearly the ideas that Kurosawa wanted to communicate, a prime example of a great director not trusting his own visual storytelling. This is especially apparent since the second half also contains a handful of the film's best scenes.

In one scene, perhaps the film's most potent, some women from the neighborhood that Watanabe helped show up at his funeral, interrupting at a crucial moment when the ambitious deputy mayor had been busily rationalizing his failure to give Watanabe proper credit. These women kneel in front of the altar and pour out their grief, weeping and crying over the kind, helpful, driven man who helped them so much. Kurosawa barely shows the women, though, instead keeping their cries on the soundtrack while he cuts around the room to close-ups of the politicians and public officials who have gathered for the service. Their uncomfortable expressions when faced with this wordless remorse say it all, and Kurosawa handles this moment with economical grace, indicting every man in the room without a word. The remaining hour of bluster and blather only confirms what's already implicit in this scene: these men don't understand Watanabe, and they don't get that his exceptional commitment to his job in his last months was his way of living his life to its fullest.

The other great scenes in the film's second half are both flashbacks, one in which Watanabe wistfully stares out at the work in progress on "his" park, and another from the night he died, as he sits on a swing in the snow-covered park, singing quietly into the night. These brief scenes — moments, really — are imbued with Watanabe's grace and poignancy, and they are gently affecting, getting at the man's core in ways that no amount of words ever could. Ikiru is the story of this bureaucrat's realization that life should never be accepted passively, but lived with vibrancy and energy. Its other characters never come to this same realization, making this film simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic. But if one broken and mummified man can learn to live his life actively, whatever that means for him, the same option must be open to everyone else too.