HOPELESS, BUT NOT SERIOUS

A review requested by Rich B, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Who knows how these things happen? To an average viewer, Billy Wilder is one of the most well-known directors in pre-1967 American cinema, and James Cagney is one of the most recognisable (or at least memorably-parodied) actors of his generation. The satiric farce One, Two, Three from 1961 is the solitary collaboration between these two icons, and it showcases some of the absolute best work either man ever put onscreen. And yet it's the next best thing to invisible, barring the odd Turner Classic Movies screening, and a short-lived, out-of-print DVD. You'll forgive me if I have a hard time keeping my Sagelike Critic hat on, when my Passionate Advocate hat is sitting right there, but I'll do my best.

The setting is Berlin, right before the Wall was built, a fact which severely inconvenienced the filmmakers, since the film came out right after the Wall was built. This necessitated the addition of an opening monologue spoken over a montage of life in the divided city by Cagney:

"On Sunday, August 13th, 1961, the eyes of America were on the nation's capital, where Roger Maris was hitting home runs number 44 and 45 against the Senators. On that same day, without any warning, the East German Communists sealed off the border between East and West Berlin. I only mention this to show the kind of people we're dealing with: real shifty!"

Sure, it's a little flop-sweaty, but it ends up benefiting the film anyway: it neatly sets up all the things we're going to be indundated with for the next hour and fifty minutes or so. There's the political angle, of course, contrasting the film's views of Americans and Communists: the former as self-obsessed and convinced of the absolute value of their popular culture, the latter as treacherous but not exactly wicked: more like they're annoying jerks that you can't get away from, so you have to be sure never to show them your backside and count the silver after they've left. There's also the matter of Cagney's delivery of the speech, a spectacularly quick bit of patter laced with put-upon annoyance, and between these two things - a sarcastic, cynical gloss on Cold War political one-upmanship and a take-no-prisoners pace - we've got pretty much everything that One, Two, Three has on its mind in capsule form. And oh, how glorious it is.

It's a fine successor to the genial sharpness of the great 1939 Ernst Lubitsch film Ninotchka, co-written by Wilder - with Charles Brackett, whereas One, Two, Three was co-written by I.A.L. Diamond, and the differences between the movies show a clear difference between the collaborative teams. But the core is the same, approaching the gulf between the central ideologies of the 20th Century with a bitter cynicism about both sides, though not therefore suggesting that they're morally equivalent; thus the conviction that the only way to properly address the cruelty and violence of Soviet totalitarianism is through plummy humor. If it sounds like this means that the film is dated and loses a lot of its punch without the viewer of more than 50 years later putting in the work to contextualise it: well, that's exactly the case. In fact, I can not say anything against the complaint that One, Two, Three is too much a time capsule of long-expired attitudes towards long-dead political concerns, for many of the best jokes are predicated on exactly those things. But damn, what a time capsule! Sarcastic, flippant satire and the Cold War went well together: though they're up to completely different things and have virtually no tonal overlap, I'm still compelled to put One, Two, Three alongside Dr. Strangelove as being not just a great attempt at caustic social commentary through the broadest of comedy, but also one the funniest comedies of the '60s, a decade when American films had a notable and pervasive difficulty with being funny.

Herein, Cagney plays "Mac" MacNamara, a Coca-Cola executive living in West Berlin with his justifiably resentful wife Phyllis (Arlene Francis) and their two children, attempting to break into the Eastern Bloc market; this would be an unprecedented victory for a Western corporation. His days are a constant trial of verbally fencing with a team of obstinate Soviet functionaries while prodding his assistant Schlemmer (Hans Lothar), a former SS officer desperately trying to forward the fiction that he was one of the good Germans, and flirting with his overly receptive secretary Fräulein Ingeborg (Lilo Pulver). Then one day, things explode: he's assigned the joyless job of chaperoning his boss's daughter, Scarlett Hazeltine (Pamela Tiffin), during her short German vacation. This balloons to two months (glossed over in a ballsy cut), by which point the 17-year-old has gone missing and then returned with a horrible secret in the form of a new husband, Otto Ludwig Piffl (Horst Buchholz). Mac is able to use his connections and a good amount of chicanery to get their marriage dropped into the memory hole, but then the second bomb drops: Scarlett is pregnant. And this Mac's mission abruptly changes: now he's got to mold Otto into an idealised old money capitalist, at the risk of being fired with extreme prejudice.

The opening two-thirds of One, Two, Three (as far as I took that little précis) are terrific farce, paced like lightning and embroidered with some of the best dialogue in Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond's collaboration, but it's all a warm-up for the last push. Here, the film turns into the most maniacal, unyielding high-speed comedy since The Lady Eve in 1941, anchored by Cagney's literally indefatigable performance. For all that the film is a triumph of tremendously well-paced directing and editing (by Daniel Mandell, whose abrupt clipping and diving between shots is a perfect example of how much tight cutting can do for comic timing), this is an actor's movie: nothing that goes well could be enough to save the film without a sterling performance in the central role, and nothing could go poorly enough to torpedo it with that performance in place. We can see, in fact, exactly the proof of my second point: the film does suffer from one intolerable misstep in the form of Buchholz, whom Cagney openly detested. Whether it was Buchholz's one-note portrayal of a boorish young ideologue that earned Cagney's ire, or if he retrenched to that portrayal in retaliation against his co-star, I cannot say, but the result is the same: Otto is flattened with the film's most tedious, shrill characterisation.

And it just doesn't matter. Cagney's work is so boisterous that he raises the energy in every scene he's in, which is all but two of them, or maybe three. His rat-a-tat-tat deliveries, escalating in frenzy along with the confusion and thorniness of the plot, are virtuosity and nothing less; his gesticulations are beautifully frantic but perfectly focused within that ("Cagney's finger snapping is tight as hell", I find in my notes, and that's no less than true). The work was intense enough to drive one of Hollywood's all-time greatest troupers into retirement; Cagney wouldn't appear onscreen again until he took a small role in Ragtime, in 1981. It's exactly the performance you'd like to assume would lead to such an action: there's nothing left behind, only furious activity, operatically loud line deliveries, and constant movement. This is not a cast of slouches - Francis and Lothar give particularly excellent performances, I think - but love the film or find it meanspirited and/or tiring in its relentless pace (I could never defend it against either complaint), Cagney is the focal point of everything, and his work is astonishingly committed.

Comedy being the most subjective of all things, I can do no more than posit that One, Two, Three is one of the funniest movies of its generation, and hope that's enough - it's less perfect than Wilder and Diamond's script for Some Like It Hot, but with a much greater pool of quotable lines (one of the reasons I haven't mentioned any is because I couldn't whittle my list of favorites down to less than a top 10); and not so emotionally probing as The Apartment, but it does a better job earning its sourness. And let us not compare it to the films in the director's career following it, for there was an immediate drop-off in quality from which he never fully recovered.

Unquestionably, the film is dated, and some of its finest touches no longer land: one particularly great scene is a delicate parody of the way that the word "pregnant" was once a cinematic taboo, without which it's just a protracted "the German fella can't speak English" bit that's barely even a gag. And for anything made up so completely of white-hot political references, the further we go from those topics, the less it's going to work. I suspect that much of One, Two, Three was already showing its age by the time Lyndon Johnson was inaugurated President. But what works is magnificent: the speed, the ingenious twists in the last act, the great line readings, the total lack of restraint on Cagney's part. This is as precious to me as any other midcentury comedy, and its lack of widespread prominence is a grievous lack.

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AMONG THIEVES

A review requested by Josep, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

There are plenty of things that could be one's immediate response to Big Deal on Madonna Street, a 1958 Italian caper movie that is one of the small handful of films directed by Mario Monicelli to have any meaningful presence on the radar of English-speaking cinephiles, despite his (and the film's) key role in developing an explosion of enormously popular sardonic social comedies in the ensuing decade. Mine was that it's nice to be reminded every now and then that there can be such a thing as comedy that boasts a deft screenplay, performed with brightness by a talented cast, and which is also good as a movie. It being the case that comedy, more than any other genre, has an annoying tendency (and has had it basically since the beginning of sound cinema) to coast on dialogue writing and staging physical gags, and to treat such niceties as well-constructed images and tight dramatic plotting as largely disposable.

Big Deal on Madonna Street - the infinitely less-evocative title of a film whose original Italian name, I soliti ignoti, means something akin to "the usual suspects" - is absolutely not that kind of comedy. As shot by Gianni Di Venanzo and designed by the great Piero Gherardi, it's a rich film of thick, moody atmosphere, low-rent and dangerous, perfectly etching out the grimy urban world its characters operate in and framing it as the site of constant hunted-animal tension. Take out every last joke but leave the rest alone, and you're still left with a crackerjack movie about a gang of frayed, mutually distrustful characters, operating in a mode that takes the spatial texture and busy, deep compositions of neorealism and genrefies them with the visual murkiness of film noir.

It's a splendid peek into a particular corner of the Roman underworld by any means, and that's a huge part of what makes it so much more interesting than a comedy content to keep the actors in frame, in focus, and clearly lit. But it's not only that. In fact, and this seems to have been Monicelli's great genius revelation, it's the very same aesthetic seriousness that makes Big Deal on Madonna Street such a great comedy - which it is to a degree that shocked me, given the difficulties of translating humor across language and culture, and the less than amazing state of film comedy generally around that period. The jokes present in the script written by Monicelli alongside Agenore Incrocci & Furio Scarpelli & Suso Cecchi D'Amico, as well as those inherent to the visualisation of that screenplay, come in a lot of different flavors, but if I had to pick the one thing the film tends to do over and over again, I'd go with its habit of allowing its characters to take themselves very, very seriously, despite their unfailing tendency towards incompetency. It's borderline parody how much the film mocks the figures at its center and the trappings of crime thrillers, and none of that humor would play if it didn't look so very much like an actual caper with its own internal reality. So the film gets it both ways: its style makes it thematically deeper and more sociologically alert than just any old dippy comedy about hapless idiots, and it's also a much funnier dippy comedy for the same reason.

The plot quickly becomes too sprawling to do much with a synopsis, but the basic outline is that minor criminal, Cosimo (Memmo Carotenuto) is in jail for a crime he did commit, but he wants somebody else to take his place regardless. After a great deal of finagling and hunting, his accomplices scrounge up Peppe (Vittorio Gassman), whose spotless record means he'll receive a much shorter sentence, to take the fall, but the unimpressed judge sees through the ruse and sends both men to prison. An irritated Peppe forces Cosimo to share the plans for a perfect heist, and is then immediately released on probation. This leaves him free to take over the heist himself, recruiting several of his and Cosimo's acquaintences for the job: the romantic Mario (Renato Salvatori); the tyrannical Michele (Tiberio Murgia), who keeps his sister (Claudia Cardinale) under lock and key; old Capannelle (Carlo Pisacane), who's munching on something almost every time we see him; and most delightfully of all, sweet Tiberio (an absurdly beguiling, fresh-faced Marcello Mastroianni), whose wife is in prison, leaving him to hall around a baby through all of the gang's planning. After receiving advice from a very dubious career criminal, safecracker Dante (Totò, an icon of Italian screen comedy), the gang is... not so ready to take the job on. They spend at least as much time bumbling around, living their messy lives, as readying to carry off the great heist, and it's not the remotest surprise that the heist itself is one fuck-up after another.

There are subtleties that are invisible to anyone who isn't a fluent speaker of Italian - my understanding is that the characters are all regional caricatures and the dialogue a smorgasbord of slang and casual expression - but even in the form that the rest of us can appreciate it, Big Deal on Madonna Street is delightful, a perfectly-timed comedy that turns the fizzy pleasures of a Rififi (its primary stated influence) into something even more lighthearted, with the moody lighting always making even the most inconsequential gags seem sharper and more unexpected and thus funnier. It helps that, for something that basically pivots on "stupid criminals sure are stupid", Big Deal on Madonna Street is extraordinarily intelligent, both in pacing out its jokes and in the implications of those jokes; it's an overreach and a half to call this a "satire", but like the visually similar, vastly more serious dramas that were still the main force in Italian filmmaking, it's attentive to how people live in the everyday modern world, and its observations about machismo and culture are pointedly mocking, however gently, and however full of love for the characters.

There's a baseline of social realism that the film shares with tonier, graver films of the same period, it's just filtered through good-natured ribbing instead of shell-shocked melodrama. The actors are all having an obvious good time, goofing around, and yet there's enough meat to their performances that it never feels like they're just fooling around - Gassman, in particular, was no kind of comic performer prior to this movie, and while its success altered the face of his career, he didn't at all abandon the basic sincerity of his dramatic work. Peppe, and all the rest, are still recognisable, grounded human beings, even if they're flopping around like clowns and being subjected to the silliest, lightest-touch humiliations available. This essential grounding in real-life, with a sharp eye towards using ridiculous comic excess as a way of calling attention to real-life behavior rather than distracting from it, is one of the cornerstones of the commedia all'italiana movement that largely began here, and while I greatly admire some of its followers - Divorce Italian Style is particularly close to my heart - it's pretty clear that this was one of the cases where the first of its kind got everything just about perfect, right out of the gate.

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: PAIRS OF FUNNY WOMEN

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: the high concept behind Hot Pursuit is counter-programming, of course, but it's also the latest in Hollywood's cynical attempt to figure what these "woman" people might do if we made them the lead of a picture. It is unsuccessful in the extreme, but not all such efforts have been.

There's, like, a whole movie attached to Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, but I would be remiss in not pointing out to start that, good or bad as a complete work of cinema, this 1997 release is one of the most dauntingly '90s-soaked movies I can imagine. The cast, the design, the soundtrack, the explicitly post-Clueless tone: it's possible to exactly date its theatrical release just based on the twin presences of Mira Sorvino and Camryn Manheim. Or the fact that Mira Sorvino is the top-billed cast member, for that matter.

Sorvino is Romy White; Michele is Michele Weinberger, played by Lisa Kudrow in the first important starring role of her career, following the explosion of Friends on TV. They're a pair of absolute airheads living and doing very little in Los Angeles, perfectly content in their little bubble until Romy bumps into their old high school classmate, the spectacularly bitter Heather Mooney (Janeane Garofalo), and is reminded that their ten-year high school reunion is happening soon. Since she bumped into Heather at her boring job at a Jaguar dealership, handing Heather the keys to a brand new sportscar, she's also been reminded that she and Michele have utterly unspectacular lives, the two best friends decide to throw themselves into the task of reinventing their lives. Failing that, they decide to simply lie about themselves when they head back to Tucson and all the shallow pretty people that once made their lives hell.

It's neither the most original nor sophisticated concept out there, and the film much prefers to wade around in the shallow end of stereotypes: besides the protagonists, archetypal dumb Angelino blondes, it has its share of dopey jocks, socially incompetent nerds, sullen goth types, and prim bitchy queen bees. The usual high school movie stock company, presented in a series of flashbacks threaded throughout the unusually long first act. And while the scenes at the actual reunion allow most of those characters to grow (largely into different, semi-related stereotypes), there's not a subversive bone in the film's body. All of which I throw out largely to preemptively defend myself against claiming that, for all its lack of complication or challenge, Romy and Michele has the basic decency to be a genuinely good comedy, using its clichés for the exact purpose that clichés serve best: to quickly let the audience grasp the situations and characters, so that the business of doing interesting and hopefully things with and to those characters can commence. Writer Robin Schiff, adapting her own play, is terrific at permitting her protagonists to drive the film rather than place them into a film she's already worked out; she also understands them so well that even as they are virtually clones, there's not a point in the movie where it feels like Romy and Michele could be swapped out for each other. It's a terrific reminder that even if a storyteller is dealing with the stupidest bullshit possible, it's still their job to treat that bullshit thoughtfully and honestly, to commit to it and its internal logic. It's a freewheeling script, full of plenty of random asides and absurd cutaways, but it's disciplined. I admire that, profoundly.

More to the point, it gives Romy and Michele a sturdy foundation for director David Mirkin, making his first feature after a career television (where he was and is a Simpsons producer, which certainly must have helped with all the non sequitur humor in the script), to create a brightly paced farce, and for the cast to dig into some awfully silly nonsense without having to worry about embarrassing themselves. It is not the case that the cast is uniformly great: long before it was obvious that Kudrow was the most talented member of the Friends ensemble (sorry, Aniston fans; when you can show me Jen's equivalent to The Comeback, we'll talk), she acted rings around Sorvino here, even though playing an only minor variation on Friends' Phoebe (idiot with a sweet heart and a conniving streak) didn't give her much of a shot to show off. And Garofalo, in the era of her peak powers, stomps on them both, though she's playing just as much to type as Kudrow (the only other person in the movie with a big enough part to feel like she's competing for attention is Julia Campbell as the main snobby antagonist; it's the most stock part of all, and she plays it that way, largely because the movie requires it.

Still, there aren't any really bad performances, and even accounting for the mismatch between Kudrow and Sorvino, the actors both contribute an impressive sense of comfort with each other, borrowing each others' mannerisms and ways of speaking in the fashion of people who've spent so much time with each other that they don't even notice that they're doing it. For all its mocking treatment of the characters - it's not really possible to overstate how much Romy and Michele is founded in the idea that Romy and Michele are clueless - the film is at least as good at depicting the snug rhythm of a good friendship with admirable affection and heart (its overall tone is kind of familial - the old "I can make fun of these people but don't you dare" bit).

Mirkin shepherds this onto the screen with a light touch and some small measure of style, even; the frequent transitions in and out of flashbacks involve visual echoes throughout the first half of the movie or so, smart craftsmanship that serves the needs of the comedy without getting in the way. It's not fussy; the film's driven by its sarcastic attitude that flits quickly from moment to moment and line to line, and overburdening that with interesting visuals would be more than the script could bear. But for what needs to happen, it works perfectly. I would try to avoid going too far in my praise for the film: if nothing else, it's so anchored to an era-specific sense of irony and even more era-specific cultural references, and I concede that I happen to have been close to the perfect age in 1997 to encounter the film for the first time in 2015 with the right mixture of detachment and nostalgia to end up right on its wavelength. Even without that, though, the film has enough goodness in it - an enjoyable push-pull relationship to its leads, and swiftness in its pacing that keeps it from ever bogging down - to work as a light comedy that picks at questions of pride and failed life goals without doubling down so hard that it ever becomes particularly weighty.

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HITLER? I HARDLY KNOW 'ER!

A review requested by Jenny B, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

I have been guilty of this sin as recently as in the middle of re-watching the film for this review, but I think I can still say without hesitation: it's much, much too easy to overlook how bold To Be or Not to Be is. The 1942 film, that is, not the 1983 remake that paired married couple Anne Bancroft and Mel Brooks in their only co-starring lead roles, and is in all ways a genial comedy that replicates its source material without any of the same fire. That, of course, is what happens when you treat World War II as a 38-years-gone historical event where the good guys won, instead of the thing happening literally right now to actual living people. To Be or Not to Be went into production before America had entered the conflict - it is vital to remember that about it. While the random American plucked off the street in 1941 surely favored joining the war on the side of the Allies, thanks to a lingering kinship with the United Kingdom, a meaningful segment of U.S. citizens favored siding with the Axis right up until the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Hollywood threw a lot of energy at the pro-Allies side of that argument in the months preceding that (if there's such a thing as a major studio film from '40 and '41 making a pro-fascist declaration, I'm unfamiliar with it, though between 1933 and 1939, there are some here and there that present that belief in quiet and implicit ways), but even in that exciting atmosphere of righteous propaganda, To Be or Not to Be stands out. It is one of the vanishingly small number of movies to look at the pomp and pageantry of Nazism, the passionate furor of Adolf Hitler, and the terrifying ease with which Germany absorbed huge swaths of Western and Central Europe, and conclude that braying, derisive laughter was precisely the right weapon. Offhand, I can only point to the 1940 Charles Chaplin film The Great Dictator as another example of staring straight into Hitler's face and snorting, "That man is a fucking clown".

Divorced from its immediate moment, it's all too easy to find To Be or Not to Be a somewhat weirdly-shaped object, and by no means one of the highlights in the career of director Ernst Lubitsch. That man's stock in trade was, of course, a succession of the most effervescent, elegant sophisticated comedies produced in the '20s and '30s. The famed, seldom-defined "Lubitsch Touch" broadly referred to his ability to express his characters' sexual ardor and inner monologues through clever, witty visual touches and sparkling dialogue that glancingly touched on seriously adult topics, resulting in some of the most disarmingly grown-up movies that have ever been made, and always in a register of deeply intoxicating good humor. To Be or Not to Be doesn't have the luxury of delicacy; there are long stretches that feel more like Lubitsch Thumb pressing down on the scales. Not unfairly: the Berlin-born director, who'd been in Hollywood for almost a decade when the Nazis came to power in 1933 and never returned home, undoubtedly had some very pronounced and very angry thoughts about what was going on back in Europe (he wrote, uncredited, the story for the film; Edwin Justus Mayer wrote the script), ones that he hadn't nearly exorcised in the 1939 romcom Ninotchka, his only other openly political movie during the war years, and that focused more towards the Soviet Union, with only a handful of nods towards Nazi Germany.

Still, this is an odd fit for the agreed-upon definition of a Lubitsch movie, and his immaculately well-honed skills in making sophisticated romantic comedies aren't always what the movie needs. As the title implies, To Be or Not to Be has a little something to do with Shakespeare: its central figures are a troupe of actors working out of Warsaw in August, 1939, led by the vain ham Joseph Tura (Jack Benny), playing Hamlet and present, and his diaphanous, bored wife Maria (Carole Lombard, extraordinary in her last role - she died in a plane crash before the film opened), whose role isn't specified, but as the solitary woman in the company, it makes sense to assume she's playing an experimental hybrid of Gertrude and Ophelia. Something has gone out of the Tura marriage; it seems easy to assume that Joseph's preening and neurotic, needy self-regard are at least part of it, which is why we simply can't feel too bad when Maria agrees to let a handsome young admirer, the pilot Lt. Stanislav Sobinski (Robert Stack), into her dressing room during her husband's angst-filled rendition of the "To be or not to be" monologue one night. And other nights, and some afternoons. This hasn't actually turned into sex yet when a performance of the play is interrupted by the German invasion of Poland on 1 September. And from there, everybody's lives go to hell; the film flashes through then-recent history until winter, when Stanislav has become one of several Polish airmen attached to the RAF, and Warsaw is home to a robust resistance movement trying its best to shake the Nazi grip of its beloved city.

This triggers a chain of farcical events that wouldn't be remotely worth recapping; it's enough to say that the Turas, as well as the other members of their troupe, including the Jewish actor Greenberg (Felix Bessart) and Bronski (Tom Dugan), who has been working on his Hitler impersonation, are obliged to stage a hectic series of cons and tricks to help Stanislav keep the turncoat Professor Siletsky (Stanley Ridges) from meeting with the puffed-up Colonel Ehrhardt (Sig Ruman) and revealing devastating information about the Warsaw underground. That provides a lot of material for the Lubitsch Touch to work on, with the Turas' strained marriage and Maria's eminently sophisticated approach to play-acting at having a lover even without the real intent to have an affair working in exactly the area of intelligently sexual comedy that was home to the director's very best work, and the pile-up of farce showcasing his ability to keep timing and pacing under ruthless control, while letting the audience get out just far enough ahead of the characters that we can be really surprised when they go a direction that we didn't anticipate.

It's not all-time championship Lubitsch: he was a filmmaker uniquely dinged by the coming of the Production Code and its clamping down on even the most erudite, classy lechery. But the film is operating in two totally distinct comic modes and both of them are executed perfectly, with the naughty marital comedy sneaking and slinking along with Lombard's breathy voice and Benny's huffy over-reactions (there's a special kind of genius in dropping an overacting broad comic like Benny into an elegant comedy, and then re-casting his broadness as a failure of the character, not the actor), and the brute-force gags of the more direct screwball comedy blasting forth like cannon fire. For example, the film's gotcha opening, set during rehearsals for a play about Nazi venality that's presented to us as actual Nazi venality at first, is overclocked so slightly and flawlessly that Lubitsch is able to wring genuine laughs out of a series of rapid-fire "Heil Hitler"s. Or there's the way that the line "So, they call me 'Concentration Camp Ehrhardt'" can be repeated numerous times throughout the movie, always in just enough of a different context that it can be funny for a totally different reason. Hell, there's the way that the line "So, they call me 'Concentration Camp Ehrhardt'" can be played for laughs in the first place.

All well and good, and the big hole in the side of To Be or Not to Be is that it's a full-on spy thriller that has been engineered into a comedy about a low-rent acting troupe tricking the Nazis. And this finds Lubitsch... not failing. Like comedies, thrillers are dependent on pitch-perfect timing, so the skill sets involved aren't totally incompatible. Lubitsch's directorial style in particular was always based in large part on the arrangement of people within rooms, so we can see what's going on between them more clearly than they can; this is a skill that's arguably even more important for thrillers than comedies. And yet the thriller elements of the film feel a bit roughly grafted onto the comedy, even though at the level of writing, it's the thriller that drives the plot.

What it is, I think, is the film announcing itself a bit too loudly as wartime morale-boosting: "Yes, it's good and necessary to make fun of these Teutonic blowhards and their idiotic beliefs and merciless dominance of beautiful Europe", it says on the one hand, before flipping abruptly into "and don't forget the incredible bravery of those on the front lines fighting to cut Germany off at the knees, despite horrible danger". That's a rough tonal switch to handle, and with cinematographer Rudolph Maté doing such an outstanding job of making the nighttime Warsaw of spies and counterspies look so moody and grim, the film's reversions to deft comedy feel awfully damn weird.

But that's if we're watching the film solely through the lens of Lubitsch's other films, or as a comedy film divorced from anything but the most generic considerations of comedy form, and that's why I started by pointing out how inseparable the film is from its moment in history. In that light, it's a satiric marvel, mercilessly lampooning the cult of personality that Nazism had burned into its core - I unhesitatingly prefer it to The Great Dictator, which roundly mocked Hitler without seeming to have quite as clear a sense of just how horrible he and his regime were - and then skittering into a gloomy depiction of what those buffoons were capable of. Mockery, bleakness, mockery, bleakness; it's more a rhetorical structure than a cinematic one, but it is outstanding in that regard.

Not that audiences or critics thought it of it as such in 1942, when its message was freshest. Audiences knew damn good and well what kind of wickedness the Germans were up to, and didn't need to be confronted with it in a comedy; the consensus at the time was that the film was making too light of the real situation in Poland, and that presenting a comedy about vain actors alongside a satire of German militarism was in deeply questionable taste. Let me not tell the good people of 1942 what they should think about wartime satire. They were living through wartime, and know more about it than I. But it's tremendously difficult to look at this movie and think it's making light of the occupation of Poland. I find the message of the plot, driven by sexual jealous and the professional frustration of actors with more ambition than talent, to be that people are always going to people, even in the grim mire of occupied Warsaw; and how marvelous that these messy, difficult, tetchy people could still be raised up to do their best when faced with evil; that even in the face of the worst humanity has to offer, life still goes on in whatever ways it possibly can, and that people can be brave and heroic even if they're vainglorious twerps most of the time. It's optimistic and heartfelt without bopping us over the head with it - okay, sometimes it bops us a bit, like the increasingly obvious references to Greenberg's love of the "Hath not a Jew eyes" speech from Merchant of Venice. But having presented us with the cruelty of the Nazis and the ludicrous absurdity of Nazis in a barrage of the most pointed English-language film satire of World War II, I appreciate that the film has that kind of essential belief in humankind, and while it's not close to my favorite Lubitsch film, I am absolutely glad he made it exactly how and exactly when he did.

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1972: In which a cinephile-turned-filmmaker serves up a loving appreciation of Hollywood Past

Cinema history, as an intellectual pursuit, is not nearly as old as cinema itself. In different countries, the rise of a semi-professional class of cineastes emerged through different processes at different time, and in America it began in the 1960s as a response to ideas filtering in from France, and the French critic/directors of the New Wave. Finding a warm home in the criticism being written by the new young intellectuals of the period, the systematic appreciation of film history helped to inform the emerging New Hollywood, which included the first widespread generation of film directors who were also film enthusiasts, people whose knowledge of earlier eras of Hollywood filmmaking came about because of their focused, intentional study of film history. This is the crucible that produced the like of Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg and, most importantly for our current purposes, Peter Bogdanovich, who was a voracious movie watcher and film programmer at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, when he got it into his head to travel to Los Angeles and follow his intellectual mentors at Cahiers du Cinéma by turning his broad theoretical knowledge into practice, by jumping into the world of film directing himself. Like Scorsese, he got his start at the knee of low-budget genius Roger Corman, directing one film and re-editing another, before he emerged as one of the most celebrated young voices with 1971's The Last Picture Show, a celebration of youth and nostalgia built around the fading of a small town as metaphorically represented by its loss of a cinematic heritage.

The film's success with critics and audiences alike gave Bogdanovich free reign to do just about anything that crossed his mind for several years, before he became the first of the New Hollywood kids to strangle on his undisciplined indulgences. And what he wanted to do above everything else was to make '30s films, but with a distinctively '70s aesthetic. Sometimes this did not work, and we get the unloved musical At Long Last Love from 1975 the film that more than any other nuked the director's career on the A-list. Sometimes, this worked extremely well, and we get What's Up, Doc? from 1972, the first project he turned to with all that Last Picture Show clout that he got to spend on whatever he wanted. The film's story is credited to Bogdanovich himself, with a screenplay by Buck Henry and David Newman & Robert Benton, but this isn't the sort of thing that gets "created", so much as compiled from a list of the greatest hits of the screwball comedy era, 1934-1941. Especially Howard Hawks's film of the Dudley Nichols/Hagar Wilde script Bringing Up Baby from 1938 (Bogdanovich had a noted affection for Hawks, later writing a book on the man's cinema), which What's Up, Doc? virtually remakes, with the stuck up paleontologist replaced by a stuck-up musicologist chasing a bag of rocks rather than a brontosaurus bone.

As the title suggests, it also owes quite a debt to the Bugs Bunny cartoons produced by the same studio, Warner Bros., in decades prior, in that the free-spirited crazy girl, Judy Maxwell (Barbra Streisand) gloms on to the painfully square Howard Bannister (Ryan O'Neal) less because she forges an instant erotic connection with him (though there's a bit of that), than because she's in the mood to make mischief and he's the goofily straitlaced Elmer Fudd for her night's entertainment. It's the farthest thing from an accident that one of the first things we see her do, in the midst of a flurry of cons designed to get her a free room and bed in San Francisco's Bristol Hotel, is to grab carrot sticks off of a passing room service tray and take a nice big crunch while looking at Howard with an appraising sideways glance.

The bulk of the film consists of Judy doing everything in her power to destroy Howard's fussy, boring life over the course of two very busy days, but it hardly takes one live-action cartoon character to imbalance the precarious farcical situation that starts up the instant we reach the end of the credits (which are written in a book, the pages turned by hand, as '30s-like as you could hope for), to find that the mechanics of the plot hinge on no fewer than four identical plaid travel cases, one containing Howard's rocks, one containing Judy's clothes, one containing folders marked "Top Secret" and carried by one mysterious trench coat-wearing man (Michael Murphy) being trailed by another (Phil Roth), and one containing an immodest fortune in jewels belonging to the Bristol's guest Mrs. Van Hoskins (Mabel Albertson). They are mixed up, naturally, when the hotel's desk manager Fritz (Stefan Gierasch) and house detective Harry (Sorrell Booke) attempt to steal the jewels and hide them in the same vacant room where Judy has camped out while she's out and about helping with Howard's attempt to win a grant offered by gawky philanthropist Frederick Larrabee (Austin Pendleton), by pretending to be Howard's stuffy fiancée Eunice Burns (Madeline Kahn) and charming the dickens out of Larrabee, while pissy Eastern European musicologist Hugh Simon (Kenneth Mars) spits venom and fumes.

Absolutely none of how this progresses comes as any kind of surprise to anyone with a strong familiarity with the source genres, either '30s screwball or '50s animation. But that's not really the point, of course: it's the creative energy with which the preordained plot complications are executed that matters, and Bogdanovich is clearly a passionate enough student of the form to ensure that the execution is breathlessly paced and openly deranged, playful and fast in all right places. Like many farces, there comes a point where the film begins to rely on its own momentum and starts to get too zany for its own good, culminating in a multi-vehicle chase scene that tries a little too hard and telegraphs its jokes a bit too freely, and a climactic courtroom scene that demands its harried judge (Liam Dunn) to be wackily irritated at the characters in excess of anything the logic of that moment supports. And comedy, even the most freewheeling and nutty of comedy, is only funny as long as it plays fair by its own internal logic.

But the first hour of the movie is so pitch-perfect that even a slightly leaky final half-hour can't do much to knock the film down from its heights. Though Bogdanovich the man was a demanding fussbudget in some ways (his attire and his attitude towards women both suggest links between the director and Howard that I doubt were intentional), he had an uncanny ability to keep his movie moving quickly enough that he can sell us on some very strained contrivances, while getting his cast to contribute some extremely broad performances that stay within the confines of the film's reality. Streisand is the best at this, bringing an insouciant, anarchic energy that feels exactly like a cartoon in human form, but there's barely a weak link in the cast. Kahn, in her feature debut, effortlessly plays the priggish Other Woman without being boringly straight about it (her freak-outs in particular are great), and O'Neal plays a zapped blankness that feels like a comic choice rather than a simple matinee-star emptiness, timing his frequent reaction shots to the camera flawlessly, and bringing in a real prickly despair to his scenes of being distraught that his life is spinning out of control.

The best we can say about it, maybe, is that Bogdanovich does a great job of aping the energy and pacing of a '30s comedy, which is perhaps not a tremendously artistic achievement. What's really exciting about the movie is how the director and his crew (including top notch editor Verna Fields and cinematographer László Kovács) mix that storytelling with the filmmaking techniques common to New Hollywood: location shooting (the hilly San Francisco streets are used to perfect effect), flatly realistic interiors, detailed psychological shading among the character actors in the side characters. The contrasting energies make the film seem a lot fresher and sharper than the simple fact of dragging Bringing Up Baby to the modern day has any right to feel; in fact, the film manages the neat trick of making 35-year-old comedy feel as disorienting in its new context as it did originally. It's a marvelous piece of alchemy that sets hardly a single foot wrong for enough of its running time that it stands out as one of the great, if semi-forgotten comedy masterpieces of the 1970s.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1972
-Porn briefly hits the mainstream on the shoulders of Deep Throat
-Blaxploitation meets horror with the much-greater-than-you-suspect Blacula
-Francis Ford Coppola becomes the first film school brat to spend enormous piles of studio money on an even more enormous Zeitgeist hit: The Godfather

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1972
-Britain's Hammer Films, once the world's foremost creator of sophisticated horror, continues to flail into irrelevancy with Dracula A.D. 1972
-Hong Kong action star Bruce Lee has the biggest year of his short career, starring in both Fist of Fury and Way of the Dragon, the latter of which he also directs
-Bernardo Bertolucci directs Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider in the Franco-Italian erotic psychodrama Last Tango in Paris

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1969: In which the gaseous, bloated corpse of the old system heaves up its last opulent monstrosities

Earlier this year, I reviewed the legendary dismal 1969 musical Paint Your Wagon; and would would like to suppose that it's enough to have hacked through just one of that year's most notorious genre misfires. But if one is looking at the ebb and flow of Hollywood filmmaking over the years, it would be a terrible mistake to try and get away without coming to grips with the other musical from '69, Hello, Dolly! For it is even better as an example of the overwhelming awfulness of the insanely indulgent system of mindless spectacle-mongering that was being replaced by the raw aesthetic of the New Hollywood Cinema. Though both films saw huge box office returns that didn't offset their even huger budgets, it was Hello, Dolly! that somehow managed to scratch its way to three Oscar wins and another four nominations, one of them for Best Picture - the third time in six years that 20th Century Fox had managed to hoist one of its gargantuan, tacky megaproductions into that nominally august company, after 1963's Cleopatra and 1967's Doctor Dolittle (and credit where credit is due: Hello, Dolly! may be a tasteless behemoth, but it's still far better than the enervating Dolittle, surely among the worst movie musicals ever made).

The Oscars are no measure of quality, of course, but they're a good barometer of what the Hollywood establishment thought to be important, socially and cinematically, in any given year. That Hello, Dolly! was taken to belong in the same set of nominees - to say nothing of the same aesthetic universe - as the urban realism of Midnight Cowboy and the politically incendiary foreign import Z is mind-boggling; that it and the shaggy, indulgent radical madness of Easy Rider could occupy consecutive slots on the year's list of Top 10 box office hits feels like a dadaist joke. But it is what it is; and what it is pretty damn ugly, not as hilariously terrible as Paint Your Wagon, but also lacking that film's car-crash novelty. It's a doomed attempt to marry some kind of realistic shooting style with bluntly artificial everything, buoyed up by the comic energy of a nevertheless stunningly miscast lead, hobbled by Jerry Herman's samey, mostly anemic songs. It's sad to think that in 800 years, this will be the last scrap of pop culture left on Earth to teach the robots that follow us about emotions, but there you have it.

Adapted by Ernest Lehman from a record-setting 1964 Broadway musical that was itself based on Thornton Wilder's 1955 play The Matchmaker (which based on Wilder's earlier The Merchant of Yonkers and onward back to the beginning of time), Hello, Dolly! opens in New York City, where the region's most famous and beloved matchmaker/factotum Dolly Levi (Barbra Streisand) is heading off to the suburb of Yonkers, with her own marriage in mind: she's hellbent on snaring wealthy, grumpy hay & feed store owner Horace Vandergelder (Walter Matthew). This requires a great deal of plotting on her part, for Horace is just now heading into New York City to propose to wealthy lady haberdasher Irene Molloy (Marianne McAndrew). The scheme involves encouraging Horace's bored 28-and-three-quarters-year-old chief clerk Cornelius Hackl (Michael Crawford) and his young coworker Barnaby Tucker (Danny Lockin) to head into the city themselves to meet Irene and her clerk Minnie Fay (E.J. Peaker); simultaneously, she encourages Horace's despondent niece Ermengarde (Joyce Ames) to sneak off with her illicit boyfriend Ambrose Kemper (Tommy Tune), to compete in the dance contest being held at the classy restaurant Harmonia Gardens. Farce ensues, by the end of which everybody is paired off with the most ideal person, assuming that there exists a world in which 27-year-old Streisand and 49-year-old Matthau qualify as an ideal pair.

That kind of spirited nonsense requires a very special light hand to carry off, and at no step of the way does Hello, Dolly! evidence any such thing. Not in the directing, not in the choreography, not in the acting, not in the source material. It is a lead-footed beast that has been made in a style that's simultaneously overbearing and emaciated, with hundreds of thousands of dollars obviously plastered everywhere in the fussy period sets and costumes, and yet it feels chintzy as a community theater production made by people who weren't feeling terribly inspired. For any megaproduction to have the enervating overproduced, under-imagined energy of this would offensive: it's a despairing, mortal sin for one directed by Gene Kelly and choreographed by Michael Kidd, both of whom absolutely deserve to be called geniuses for their earlier contributions to the movie musical at MGM under producer Arthur Freed. Every song is exactly fucking the same: a couple of people dancing and then every new cut adds a couple more until the whole of the Todd-AO frame is crammed full of people who have no earthly reason to be there except to add a lot of moving bodies, for the hell of it. And Kidd is addicted to a tiny range of dance movies: oh, how much kicking, taking a half-step back, and leaping there is in Hello, Dolly! Or, in the enormous prologue to the even more enormous title number, there are waiters tossing around trays with plastic food glued to them in gestures that make not the tiniest effort to convince us of the reality of what's going on, and those seem remarkably unimpressive, no matter how much obvious energy the dancers are expending. In all cases, it's a great deal of complicated, busy movement without any emotional connection to any other scene - any other shot - in the movie, a gaudy conviction that "more is more!" that proves deeply incorrect in this instance. Less would be a great deal more than the teeming heaps of dancing bodies Kelly and Kidd puke out all over their musical, all so much desperate, flop-sweaty nonsense filling the frame just for the sake of filling it. Widescreen is only "for snakes, and funerals", Jean-Luc Godard once ventriloquised through Fritz Lang; the dances in Hello, Dolly! are as good a proof of that contention as exists, for they are awfully damn funereal.

I do not mean to pick on the dancing. But for all its failures in other areas - a bloated, heavy farce, or a character comedy full of generally tedious cartoons - its abysmal shortcomings as a musical are the saddest. Compounding things, in a fit of perversity, it's the show's two stand-out numbers in a sea of rather shallow musical noodles - "Put on Your Sunday Clothes" and "Hello, Dolly!" - that have the gaudiest, busiest staging. The whole thing is too depressing for words: hunting for anything that gives a hint of interest to any of these sequences, whether it's an interesting use of color, or an unexpected gesture. Even a playful spin on one of the lines. There's nothing, though - every beat is pre-embalmed, the look of the thing glazed and waxy, the sound mixing alarmingly awfully and erratic.

The film's failures as musical spectacle are so complete that it's missteps as farce are merely annoyances. It's too slow (in part because of how completely it jams on the brakes for those lumbering musical numbers), and the puckish inevitability of Dolly's schemes never feels like it takes on momentum of its own. And the performances are pretty consistently unfortunate: Matthau is so effectively crabby (on top of his singing, which resembles an infant cow keening for its mother) that he's more unpleasant than comic, and his eventual thawing-out comes from nowhere whatsoever. Crawford's rubber-faced exertions are slightly painful to watch; nobody else in the cast emerges as anything other than an object in a dithering narrative.

Except for Streisand, of course. This was just her second film performance, one year after Funny Girl, and it's obvious why that film recommended her for this one: a period comedy (though some 20 years later than Hello, Dolly!), numbers that demand a big voice, jokes that require a certain fearless corniness. The difference is that in Funny Girl, Streisand had a top-notch director of actors in William Wyler; and that she was actually appropriate for a the role of Fanny Brice. Dolly Levi requires a wholly different bearing: Carol Channing was 43 when she created the role onstage, and that's just about the minimum required for a worldly widow who has spent a lifetime tinkering with everybody else's lives, before deciding that dammit, it's her turn now. Streisand simply didn't have the visible miles to sell that aspect of the character. And it shows in her frequently nervous expressions that she knew it, too.

That being said, Streisand is frequently the only thing worth watching onscreen: she's probably playing "Barbra Streisand" more than the role in the screenplay in her best moments, where she launches into vivacious patter or privately amused innuendos, but if that's what it takes to drag some real sparkle and comic energy into the dessicated proceedings, than so be it. She sings the songs in the same way - Channing on the original cast recording is playing a character, where Streisand is performing a pop album - and I'm inclined to be less forgiving of that, but then, it's acknowledged that Streisand had a good voice, and once again, even inappropriate pleasures from Hello, Dolly! are better than no pleasures at all.

There is a shot that, I think, sums up the whole movie, and it comes early on. As Matthau and an inexplicable cast of dozens choke through "It Takes a Woman", Crawford is standing by a horse, that turns and pokes its nose right into his face. The actor steadily retains his composure, bless him, but the moment is so patently a mistake, and either nobody making the film cared enough to do it over, or they gave up trying to keep the horse in check. And all without thinking, gee, maybe we could move the goddamn horse so it's not in the center of frame. But that's the kind of film this is: the kind where having animals on set was more important than doing interesting or coherent things with that animals. It's gigantic, sloppy, unbearably boring, and tackily obsessed with its own sense of scale. As an exemplar of a decadent, soon to be extinct way of filmmaking, it could hardly be topped.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1969
-Gordon Parks's adaptation of his own novel The Learning Tree is the first studio film directed by an African-American
-Sydney Pollack directs the piercing comparison of the Depression and the Vietnam era They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
-The Merrie Melodies/Looney Tunes series ends after nearly 40 years with Bob McKimson's forgettable, racist cartoon Injun Trouble

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1969
-Dariush Mehrjui's The Cow ignites the first Iranian New Wave
-One of the leading lights of the New German Cinema, Rainer Werner Fassbinder makes his feature debut, Love Is Colder Than Death
-Andrei Tarkovsky's final cut of Andrei Rublev premieres at Cannes, three years after its completion in the U.S.S.R., where it remains unreleased until 1971

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1939: In which people who are wittier, prettier, and just better all around than we are fall in love, and it is outrageously delightful

The recent conversation about the state of the romcom in the 2010s - is it dead or dying? is it revivable? why do people hate laughter and love - amuses me to no end, because it misses the most important part of all: the golden age of romantic comedy was over before most of the people involved in the conversation were ever born. The romcom has been dead a looooong time, it's just that the corpse is finally starting to smell.

I mean, there have been some fine and even great romcoms in the years since America entered World War II, but the genre peaked in the 1930s, and if anyone disagrees with me, I will fight you in an alley with a knife. Seriously. Even a desperate, barrel-scraping C-picture in the genre from that period still oozes wit, charismatic actors, a short enough running time that the contrivances don't register until long after the movie is over. And I think most importantly - at any rate, it explains why the genre went off the cliff after 1940, except for Preston Sturges, and he only hung around a short while longer before hitting his desperate years - prior to the war, leading women in American cinema were of an entirely more sturdy, self-reliant stock than the generations that followed. Just a quick tour of names: Hepburn, Davis, Stanwyck, Garbo,Crawford, Lombard, Harlow, Loy, Dunne. They all were best at playing strong people, the kind who would refuse to put up with bumblers or schlubs, unwilling to stand by as the supporting character in somebody else's story. Social considerations aside, it simply makes for better comedy when you put two equally-matched sparring partners against one another, and there simply haven't the leading ladies with the skill or motivation to sell that kind of thing in any kind of mass quantity in later years.

If you'll permit me to stash my soapbox, we can then turn to one of these Golden Age romcoms, and one that is criminally under-recognised in modern days, Paramount's Midnight of 1939, directed by capable journeyman Mitchell Leisen and written by the unbeatable team of Billy Wilder & Charles Brackett, whose work was also on display in another exquisite romantic comedy that same year, Ninotchka. It is not, despite all I just said, the most gender-balanced of '30s comedies, owing mainly to a jaw-dropping final act moment in which Claudette Colbert insistently agrees with a judge that men should spank their wives, in a completely frivolous aside that does nothing else besides suddenly make the film bitterly uncomfortable for moderns. But for the most part, her Eve Peabody is the smartest person in every room, a quick-witted con artist and former golddigger who with a little bit of good luck and a lot fleet improv manages to finagle her way into the lives of several upper-class Parisian socialites. And also into the life of a Hungarian immigrant taxi driver named Tibor Czerny (Don Ameche), and it doesn't take noticing what two names show up on the pre-title credit card to guess who Eve ends up with. Though I am pleased to note that Midnight doesn't have any twinge of "they have to end up together because they shouldn't co-mingle with richer classes" messaging, but the more direct and satisfying "...well, look at them, of course we want them to fall in love".

Apologies for harping on sociology, but it's one of the strengths of comedies that, because they so rarely feel the need to filter and editorialise, they paint a much clearer picture of the cultural norms that produced them. None of this is necessarily the first thing one has in mind while actually watching Midnight; it's much easier to be carried along by its excellent farcical plot, sharp dialogue (though the script, tweaked a bit by Leisen to Wilder's irritation, lacks the punishing wit of the best lines in Ninotchka), and Colbert's splendid performance. Colbert, I might point out, was not an actress who lacked for splendid performances in a career that included plenty of headlining roles but, maybe, fewer long-lived classics than we might prefer (I suspect that to the casual fan of old movies, she's known pretty much exclusively for her Oscar-winning role in 1934's It Happened One Night), and not nearly enough roles with directors or producers who could really exploit her unusual and unique traits as an actress. Above all, her rather direct, deflating way of cutting through bullshit with line readings that are more honest and rueful than just about any other actor in the '30s could reliably produce - in Midnight, that it including the wry, slightly angry delivery of "Well, from here it looks an awful lot like a rainy night in Kokomo, Indiana", as her first words upon entering Paris. Or, at one point, she issues the instruction "Tell him I wouldn't be at all surprised" to a chauffeur with a remarkable mix of confusion, happiness, and nervousness, all communicated through a giggling line delivery she barely completes. And then there's the matter of her one-of-a-kind looks, with wide-set almond eyes exaggerating her face to look squishy and round, and the set of her mouth looks perpetually amused by a joke nobody else heard that even she doesn't genuinely think is funny. Her look is far enough from the standards of beauty active in the '30s (or today, to an even greater degree) that, coupled with her blunt way of speaking, make it feel like someone who wasn't a movie star somehow managed to get all of these leading roles, and that leaves her performances with an eccentric vibe to them, one that's more, I'm almost tempted to call it "modernist" than any of her contemporaries. She's one of the most interesting '30s actresses to watch; I adore her completely, even when her vehicles aren't the greatest.

No such reservations apply to Midnight, one of Colbert's best films and one of the few to understand that her skills are flawlessly suited to the somewhat artificial and brittle world of screwball farce. Eve Peabody has just arrived in Paris from an ill-fated trip to Monaco, with nothing but the evening dress on her back; her first friend in town is Tibor, who takes her from place to place looking for work that's not to be found. At her last stop, she gets accidentally swept in with a group of other people dressed for a night out, and manages to sneak into a society party held by a blowsy sort of woman named Stephanie (gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, the one clunky note in the cast); she is immediately found out by the perceptive eye of one Georges Flammarion (John Barrymore), but he keeps mum for reasons of her own. Those reasons, she finds out after Georges secretly bails her when she loses a small fortune at bridge, are named Helene (Mary Astor) and Jacques (Francis Lederer) - Helene being Georges's wife, and Jacques being Helene's lover. Georges has noticed that Jacques had his eye on Eve all evening, and wishes to put the broke American up in a fine hotel with plenty of clothes and a car, under the name Baronness Czerny - the name she came up with on the spot - in order to keep pushing her towards Jacques, thereby breaking up his wife's affair. Seeing nothing but the dollar signs, Eve accepts his offer. But Tibor, meanwhile, has assembled all the taxi drivers of Paris to hunt for Eve, and when he finds her, he shows his own quick wits by posing as the Baron Czerny. And thus it is that everyone ends up at the Flammarion estate for a weekend, with Eve trying to seduce Jacques as Helene tries to expose Eve as a fraud and Tibor concocts a series of elaborate lies for why his fake marriage is sacrosanct and happy.

At the simplest level, Midnight is a wonderfully pure farce: it starts because people tell lies, and in order to keep those lies from being found out have to tell increasingly madder lies, that run afoul of other lies told by other people for their own benefit. The only sour note in all of it is its drowsy final sequence; by no means the most elegant or high-energy way to end, it moves the action to a courtroom where a fake divorce is held, as the protagonist uncharacteristically defends spousal abuse. But everything till that point is gloriously nutty, as Wilder and Brackett ladle one wrinkle on top of the last, never reaching such a fever pitch as to push the film firmly into screwball territory instead of the more arch sophisticated comedy subgenere, though it is certainl manic enough to never be boring. The cast is top-to-bottom divine: Barrymore, in the final chance he had to do something really special before sputtering out in nothing films made in the last stages of his alcohol-related death, is absolutely brilliant, with innuendo-laden facial expressions and a hilarious willingness to go totally silly during a late-film scene on the phone; Astor's snappish iciness is in excellent form; Ameche oscillates between charming mooniness and comic petulance nicely.

But it is Colbert's film, and she makes the most of it. She's the center of every shot that includes her, kept in focus and weighted by the compositions; the film lingers on her line deliveries, which are absolutely perfect in every instance, with a certain calming, "now, now, let's all be sane" cadence and a clear sense of authority, as though even when her fate hinges entirely on the whim of other people, she knows that she's smarter than they are and needs to keep them on track. She's a superb, grounding center to a frequently giddy film, but without ever playing the straight man to the material; there's too much sardonic wit to her performance for that to be the case.

At any rate, Midnight is a flat-out comedy masterpiece, the best work of Leisen's solid but hardly inspirational career, and enough to make a lifelong Colbert devotee of anybody who somehow remained unaffected in the face of It Happened One Night. There's an old-fashioned elegance and formality to the storytelling that dates it, sure; and it's narrative is based in a social situation that makes no sense on many levels (besides the gender politics, the class-based plot could only take place in pre-war Paris). But the crowd-pleasing instincts and high-speed literacy of the dialogue are fresh as they were 75 years ago; it's among the best, sharpest, fleetest comedies of its era, and worthy of far more of an audience and bigger classic status than it has ever enjoyed.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1939, the Greatest Year in Hollywood History
-Producer David O. Selznick marshals an army of actors and craftsman to make the epic of all epics, Gone with the Wind
-Garbo Laughs in Ninotchka
-MGM vomits out the most glorious expression of Technicolor ever filmed, The Wizard of Oz
-Disney's idiot dog Goofy makes his solo debut in the shockingly tender short Goofy and Wilbur
-George Cukor oversees the cavalcade of actressexual delights, The Women
-John Ford zooms in on John Wayne and a megastar is born in Stagecoach

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1939
-The first edition of the Cannes International Film Festival is called on account of war
-Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game, a timeless and essential masterpiece, is booed and rejected for its mockery of society on the cusp of war; similarly, Marcel Carné's Le jour se lève, though a hit this year, will be banned in 1940 for harming social morale
-Mizoguchi Kenji's Story of the Last Chrysanthemums has nothing to do with war, but it's awfully good anyway

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STANLEY KUBRICK: SOME KIND OF MUTINY OF PREVERTS

The story is well-known, as such things go: how, adapting the serious-as-cancer thriller Red Alert into a screenplay (the book's author, Peter George, and satirist Terry Southern also worked on the script), Stanley Kubrick got to thinking that the fact that all of humanity, in the 1960s, was being held back from nuclear annihilation only by the good judgment of people venal enough to go into politics and the upper-level military was so demented and absurd that you could only possibly laugh at it. Because the opposite to laughing was to take it seriously, and then you might as well give up living altogether, since there was plainly no hope that Those In Power might actually be worthy of the unbelievable authority they had been handed; they were just humans after all, and humans, Kubrick's filmography was quickly making clear, were not people that the filmmaker held in very high esteem. He had already made more than one film on the theme that complex systems are only primarily good at breaking down when the human element gets involved; Dr. Strangelove would be his most damning work yet in that direction, with the breakdown involving the end of all life on Earth.

This line of reasoning led to the blackest black comedy ever made by a major Hollywood studio, and one of the funniest handful of films made in English: Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, a film whose beastly ironies only begin with its most snarling and giddily sarcastic of titles.

In the most literal sense, the film is about the hair-trigger tensions of the Cold War, and thus belongs in the same dustbin with dozens and dozens or even hundreds of other films from a 40-year period of history - some of them truly great works of cinematic construction, some of them forgettable programmers, all of them yoked intractably to geopolitical circumstance so very specific in so many ways that they can only ever function as time capsules, windows into another way of life. This is not, however, how the film plays out in practice. I can only imagine what it felt like when it was brand new in 1964, but 50 years later the film's satire has lost not an ounce of its currency, for what Dr. Strangelove is attacking isn't the Cold War mindset that led to the insanity of Mutually Assured Destruction as a relatively broadly-accepted concept, but the whole notion of military and politics and the kind of deranged people that would want to be part of that system anyway. More specifically, it's about the one thing that will never go away as long as weaponry and power are with us: the male sex drive. It's not exactly hidden that Dr. Strangelove is, basically, 94 straight minutes of viciously mocking the link between political influence, military power, and sex; just a glancing tour of the character names makes that clear, from the outright smuttiness of Buck Turgidson to the slightly obscure slang of Merkin Muffley to the high-minded allusion of Alexi de Sadesky, a huge percentage of the named cast has been given monikers that in some way refer aberrant sexual behavior, or simply to the desire to have as much sex as possible.

Hell, even that's deeper than we need to go. This is a film bookended by erect cocks - in the opening, footage of a mid-air refueling of a long-range bomber scored with lilting, romantic music as a rigid tube juts out of one plane and plunges into waiting hole of another, both vessels rocking up and down from the perspective of a distant camera. And then, when the deed is done, the refueling nozzle pulls out and visibly droops down. It's amazing what you can do with stock footage and the right piece of music. At the end, of course - it is among the most famous images in a film of famous images - a man hoots and hollers as he plunges to earth with an H-bomb between his legs, the biggest piece of manhood ever devised, landing with an orgasm that destroys humanity. Sometimes, it's irresponsible not to see the phallus imagery when it's about to slap you in the face, especially in a film where the very plot springs from feverish sexual psychology. The whole plot, never forget, comes about because one rogue general, Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), finds a way to exploit every loophole in the military rulebook to trigger nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, because of his theory that fluoridation is a Communist plot which explains his post-coital refractory period.

For there to exist a movie that suggests without blanching that all war is just an expression of frustrated men jerking off on a global scale is impressive; for it to have been made in 1964, and to have been cranked out of the Hollywood studio system (though it was shot in England; the first of Kubrick's films to be entirely made out of America, if I am not mistaken) with so much A-list polish, is an outright miracle. And not just because it is so openly, enthusiastically smutty, either: this is a hellaciously bleak comedy, the film that pays off the experiments made two years earlier in Lolita, finding a way to make the most irresponsible, awful behavior seem utterly hilarious, and not even by amping up the outright comedy. It's shocking, in fact, to realise just how much of Dr. Strangelove doesn't appear to be playing as funny at all: the scenes on the bomber, led by Slim Pickens in a role that he wasn't even informed was taking place in a comedy, are amusing almost solely because they are too straitlaced to take seriously, with the urgent, increasingly ridiculous humming and pulsing of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" on the soundtrack and virtually every single action performed, down to the most indistinguishable flipping of switches, punctuated by a frenzied zoom on the camera. Of Peter Sellers's three roles, only one is really openly funny at all: his stuffy RAF Captain Lionel Mandrake (the most obscure sexual reference of any name - mandrake root was once thought to be a fertility aid) is comic for being so blandly British and upper class, and his president Muffley is the film's designated straight man, reacting with seriousness and sternness to the madness around him. Which is almost certainly why he's the source of some of the film's funniest moments: the classic one-liner "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!", and his patient, fatherly telephone conversations with the unheard, unseen, drunk Russian premier. Indeed, the latter of these are the unsung triumph of Dr. Strangelove, the most willfully bizarre and surreal touches in the movie.

That said, the third of Sellers's characters, the titular German scientist (a scathing parody of the Soviet and American attempts to cherry-pick Nazis to help win the space and arms races so pulverising as to be definitive), is an iconic figure and cinema, and rightly so. Maybe the best, and certainly the weirdest of the many live-action cartoon figures in the comedian's career, Dr. Strangelove is a fantastic mix of notions too outrageous to be anything but hilarious, and too indisputably menacing to be anything but terrifying - not for nothing did Kubrick cut away to a shot of the doctor as nothing but a shadowy figure in the gloom right after the words "angel of death" are spoken. It's a freakish balancing act that Sellers carries off flawlessly, and that's even without bringing into it the never-matched physical comic performance of his final scene, when his Nazi subconscious, controlling his ruined right arm, starts to seriously compete for control.

There are other great performances: George C. Scott's work as Turgidson is often unfairly overlooked, simply not showy enough to pull focus from Sellers. But he's very nearly at the same level, and the performance is one of the best examples of Kubrick's manipulation of actors that was ever filmed: Scott didn't want to play the part too big, but the director knew that a certain ebullient messiness was necessary to depict the brash, hyper-masculine warrior psychology that the film planned to skewer, and so filmed what he told the actor would just be warm-up exercises. And even more overlooked, I've always had a soft spot for Peter Bull as the easily horrified, embarrassed, and angered Ambassador de Sadesky (Hayden's gung-ho psycho, I assume, needs no defense from me).

What makes Dr. Strangelove so damn brilliant, though, isn't just the quality of its acting, nor of the acting in concert with the savage script, but that it is, first and above all, a real movie. Too often, dating all the way back to the dawn of the sound era (I find it much less of an issue among silents), the idea seems to be that film comedy just has to be funny, and if the cinematic construct built around that funniness is a bit shabby, it doesn't matter. People still laugh. And this is true even of some of the great comedy masterpieces of all time: the great Marx brothers films at Paramount, all choppy editing and bland lighting, leap to mind. But the secret to Dr. Strangelove is that it acts in every way like a super-serious thriller, with grim chiaroscuro lighting (the credited cinematographer was Gilbert Taylor), and stunning sets designed by Ken Adam, who had by then already begun his career-defining work on the James Bond series. And I'm not just thinking of the legendary War Room set, a vision of terribly stark light against a black background with giant electronic boards dwarfing the humans inside; the heavily detailed and function-driven interior of the bomber is just as impressive, and if the War Room creates a sense of weighty grandeur, the bomber creates an even more important sense of physically tangible authenticity.

It's that utterly straightforward focus and sincerity that allows Dr. Strangelove to be so unendingly funny: nobody onscreen has any idea that the situation containing them is ridiculous and impossibly absurd (and, in '64 more than today, unpleasantly plausible), and since they're not able to laugh at themselves, we have to do it in their place. Too little comedy understands that, but it is vital to humor; even more vital to great satire, of which Dr. Strangelove is an exemplar; almost certainly the best filmed satire in English, maybe in all of cinema. And that is because it is direct, violent and cruel: "look at these utter disasters of humanity we have in power on both sides", the film flatly declares, "look at them and laugh, because that's the only way to strip them of their power". A half-century later, the boobs are still in control, as they probably always will be; that doesn't make it any less important to mock them for it and let them know that we know, and it is the focused intensity with which it disrespects the gravity and dignity of self-appointed authority that makes Dr. Strangelove totally indispensable and timeless.

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DO THE HUSTLE

American Hustle is set in the 1970s, and tells a vigorously fictionalised account of the ABSCAM sting set up by the FBI to target corrupt politicians in 1978, but its heart belongs to the 1960s. For despite its grittastic cinematography and the word "American" there in the title, both of them promising a neo-New Hollywood exercise in studying culture and people through a filter of grubby naturalism, the film's heart belongs to the '60s. In particular, to that decade's widespread subgenre of ensemble caper films, movies about cunning, well-spoken con artists pulling one over on each other and on us, wearing gorgeous clothes and acting generally like they're well aware that they're part of a script, but oh! isn't it such a wonderfully clever and nicely-constructed script at that? There is much of Topkapi in its DNA, I mean to say, far more than there is of The Fighter or Silver Linings Playbook, director David O. Russell's last two low-key genre experiments, from which most of the new film's cast has been culled)

The plot gets mighty convoluted mighty fast, but it opens nice and slow, with a terrific character moment in which the paunchy, balding Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) delicately and with great focus and intent attaches an indescribably complex toupee/combover contraption to the top of his head, in one arch, detached long take. It is the first moment of many in which we'll see a character making deliberate choices about how he or she wants to be perceived by everyone else, for this will end up turning into one of the film's two overriding major themes: creating a facade as a survival strategy. The other theme is of how people can either do things that are safe and reliable, or they can have strong emotions, but not both, and this is introduced only minutes later, in the form of Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), whose entry into Irving's life makes it far more exciting and passionate, and also triggers every subsequent action that shifts dozens of lives, nearly all of them for the worse.

Irving, you see, is a small-scale con artist who has figured out a perpetual scheme that won't ever make him fantastically rich, but keeps him and his dumb harpy of a New Jersey housewife, Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence) stable and safe. Sydney adds a new wrinkle in the form of a fake English noblewoman who adds enough tatty legitimacy to the con that the dollar amounts start to increase, and after the two new colleagues fall in love, Irving finds himself willing to make stupid decisions to keep Sydney happy. One of these involves moving on an unsafe mark, who turns out to be FBI Agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper), looking to make a name for himself in the Bureau. And this is where things start to get terrible: the low-stakes deal he cuts with Irving and Sydney gets him so excited that he almost immediately starts to concoct a new and bigger and much, much dumber plan that won't just take town a few nickel-and-dime con artists from New Jersey's streets, but will snag senators and mayors and mobsters of all sorts.

In essence, American Hustle is about enthusiasts getting in miles over their head and then trying to scramble back to the surface using nothing but ideas they can come up with on the fly. It's all pretty fizzy and even maybe shallow - the only character who's especially well-written is Irving, and the film's exploration of social mores begins and ends at "some people will do desperate things if they think that's the only way to survive". It is, though, massively pleasurable, in the way that watching committed performers throw themselves into the act of telling a snappy story with sparkle and energy. And just because the writing leaves most of the characters with more of the notion of an inner life than an actual personality and psychological core, that's not to say that the actors don't draw out quite a bit that ends up making this much more a story of three very specific figures than the "Irv and his two buddies" situation this could easily have devolved into.

Adams and Cooper give two fantastic performances altogether, in fact. Absolutely the best of Cooper's career, and the best in the film as well, a wide-eyed mixture of utmost childlike joy and a deeply nasty conviction that he's way smarter than everyone around him even when that's demonstrably the opposite of true. It's the best kind of movie star performance: when he's onscreen, there's no point in looking at anyone else. Adams, with a comically ludicrous English accent for most of film, is doing something a little bit simpler but even further outside of her comfort zone and no less arresting. And certainly, given her far greater centrality (she shares voiceover duties with Bale early on, when the film is in a mode of ironic nostalgia - Cooper has a little bit of narration, but not remotely as much), the film's success rests more on her giving it a steady foundation. On the reading that everything Irving or Richie do is ultimately about impressing Sydney (this is not a hard reading to mount), Adams is, in fact, the central focus point of the movie, and she's exactly charming and steely in exactly the right mixture to make that work. That Bale, doing another of his outrageously showy physical transformation deals, recedes so far into the background comparatively is perhaps testament to the character's function in the story as the One Sane Man who can't do a thing to stop the rest of the zanies from going overboard.

And that, right there, is the big surprise about the film, to me at least. American Hustle, a con movie about politics, a grittily-shot movie about American capitalism in its 1970s period of decline, a bitter love story about how people make terrible decisions that hurt everybody when they're too invested in romance, is above all else an outright farce, in a surprisingly classic sense of that word: problems are caused because people lie, they lie even harder to solve those problems, which only exacerbates them, and soon the victory condition is not "we got what we wanted", but "we figured out how to keep things from getting geometrically worse every time somebody breathes".

It's hilarious as all hell, nominally a thriller, but much too much in love with its dialogue and its absurd wrinkles and the gleeful fun of piling on complications to really bother with serious ramifications or anything like that. It is a miraculously well-made truffle, anchored by some of the best performances and most ballsy story writing of 2013. It's not particularly arresting cinema: Russell and DP Linus Sandgren do not a single interesting thing with the camera, and the most present artistic choice consists of a soundtrack so hilariously overreliant on the most obvious possible '70s rock music that I'm half-certain it's a deliberate parody. Also, like basically every movie of the 2010s, it's about 30 minutes too long. But whatever great artistic heights it doesn't reach, it's deliriously entertaining and sexy, two adjectives that describe some of the most outstanding shallow thrills that any human has ever enjoyed.

8/10

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PERSONAL CANON: THE AIR IS CRISP, THE LEAVES ARE CHANGING COLORS, THE BODIES ARE DEAD

Alfred Hitchcock is probably the closest thing to a consensus pick for the greatest film director of all time, between critics, historians, general audience, and hardcore film buffs, but even he was a mortal, and could not do every thing he applied himself to. Notably, and predictably for a man promoted as "the Master of Suspense", he wasn't much of a hand at comedy, at least not at straight-up comedies. Comic relief he could do as well as anybody you've ever heard of, as anybody who's ever seen North by Northwest can attest. But his "pure" comedies are rare, generally underseen, and not generally regarded among his best films by those who've seen them. And while I'll agree that 1941's Mr. & Mrs. Smith is a problematic late screwball put over largely by Carole Lombard's strength of will, and 1976's Family Plot (which I do regard as being particularly under-appreciated) is certainly a perverse enough piss-take on Hitchcock's whole career, particularly as it was his very last movie, the man did direct one comedy that works on just about every level for a movie to work, and which I do think rates somewhere around the very peak of his career: The Trouble with Harry, released in 1955 during Hitchcock's greatest period of influence and popularity. Rear Window was just a year old, To Catch a Thief wasn't even two months old, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents had just begun its indescribably iconic run on TV. It was, in short, during the half-decade period in Hitch's career when he was most able to do absolutely anything he wanted, and what he wanted to do was this.

This is a film set and shot in rural Vermont (as opposed to bustling, hectic, urban Vermont), where two locals, a recent transplant, and a visitor all cross paths with a dead body. For that, you see, is the trouble with Harry Worp (the immaculately still Philip Truex): nobody's quite certain what killed him, and they're damned if they know what to with him now. Old Captain Wiles (Edmund Gwenn), who was hunting illegally the morning of Harry's death, the first to find the corpse, is certain it was one of his errant bullets that felled the man, and he's anxious to hide the body before the law comes snooping. This turns out not to be the case at all, and then it's the turn of Harry's estranged wife, Jennifer Rogers (Shirley MacLaine) to think she done the deed, smacking the abusive bastard on the head with a milk bottle when he tracked her and her son Arnie (Jerry Mathers) to ground. The very charming spinster Miss Gravely (Mildred Natwick) is equally sure that she must have done it, clonking him in the head with the heel of her shoe when he tried to attack her in his bottle-dazed state.

Even just putting that little bit down is arguably spoiling too much for a movie that stubbornly refuses to be watched and appreciated as widely as it should be, but The Trouble with Harry is far more about the tone with which its plot toddles along than the actual details of that plot. The sense I have, every time I've seen it, is that's a quintessentially Vermonter kind of story: it's about four people (the fourth is visiting painter Sam Marlowe, played by John Forsythe) being mightily inconvenienced by a corpse, but not actually finding themselves particularly upset by it. Or made even the littlest bit nervous. It's about likable, friendly, gently quirky people behaving in a briskly pragmatic way about death, without an ounce of gravity or "respect for the dead" involved: Harry is buried and dug up so many times over the course of slightly less than 24 hours that even Jennifer, recapping it all at the end, admits that she can't remember why it happened the third time. And this information plainly causes her no distress at all.

As a result of all this, it ends up being one of the most perverse films in Hitchcock's catalog, and what a terrifically perverse collection that is. Death is traditionally held to be sacrosanct in some way; nice people treat it with a kind of gravity and awe. Well, the people in The Trouble with Harry are unfailingly nice, and they are also quite unimpressed with Harry's corpse as anything but an object. An object that is, incidentally, framed by Hitchcock and cinematographer Robert Burks with an unfailingly puckish sense of humor, such that simply seeing bits of Harry poking into frame results in some of the biggest laughs in the whole movie. Whatever Hitchcock's affinity with comedy, there should be no doubt that the filmmakers behind this image, for example, new exactly what they were doing:

Besides tweaking one of the biggest taboos out there, the film's other chief attempt to thoroughly discombobulate the audience lies in its tone. Basically, this is a weird comedy: structurally, it cannot be regarded as anything but a farce, with repetition and piled-on misunderstandings and a third act struggle to keep things held together in the face of a dubious authority figure. But the momentum is so laconic and slow that it's practically asleep (this is the part that especially feels Vermont-ish), and that is, itself, part of the joke - the film is hilarious, often, because of how coolly everybody is under-reacting, and the deliberate pace of the characters is exactly what makes them such amusing oddballs. It's a dry, subtle form of humor altogether, and Hitchcock was lucky to have performers able to meet him at exactly the right sweet spot: Gwenn is particularly great at playing in this relaxed mode, but MacLaine - making her uncommonly assured feature debut - is right up there with him, and she lands all of the very best line readings, talking about death and abuse with a kind of bored wisdom.

It's too low-key and restrained to ever result in huge, heaving laughs, and maybe that's part of why the film has never found an especially enthusiastic audience, but it's still one of the absolute funniest movies of the 1950s, not least because it is perhaps the most puckish; the best kind of comic film for the trickster Hitchcock to release onto the world. In the meantime, it's also a consummate piece of moviemaking: capturing the Vermont locations (and the locations recreated in a Vermont gym following bad weather) with eye-bleeding beauty, and especially the impossibly painterly feeling of a New England autumn. It is, in fact, one of the best movies about autumn I can name, despite the number of interior sets dressed up with spray-painted leaves.

The best part of all is that even with its frivolous tone and comedy, it's still tangibly a Hitchcock film, with the director demonstrating how thriller principals can be applied to humor, and for the same reasons: the longer a payoff that we're fully expecting is deferred, the bigger the release when it shows up (there's a magnificent scene where we're on pins and needles waiting for Harry's body to fall out, and then just at the last minute, it doesn't fall out, because it turns out not to have been there - fucking glorious filmmaking). It's an unusual application of technique, but it works flawlessly, and the whole movie is both absurd and tense for its entire running time, despite none of the characters ever noting that it's either of those thing.

On top of everything else, the film was the first teaming between Hitchcock and composer Bernard Herrmann, and the bouncy score, with all of its half-formed marches in unusual keys, is one of the very best things that man ever wrote, for Hitch or anybody else. So, you know, it's delightful, offbeat, beautiful, and it's historically important. Pretty fantastic all around, and a movie that continues to surprise and entrance me no matter how often I see it.

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