IT IS A VERY PLUM PLUM

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

The big problem with The English Patient isn't even its fault: the problem is that Elaine Benes fucking hated it, and nobody who saw that 1997 episode of the sitcom Seinfeld before they caught up with the Oscar-worshiped romantic epic could possibly avoid hearing any echo of Julia Louis-Dreyfus's passionately anguished delivery of her character's rants. "Sex in a tub! That doesn't work!" or the incensed "Quit telling your stupid story about the stupid desert, and just die already! Die!" I will confess that, years and years before I first say the movie in the mid-'00s, I was prepared from that one line to find it unendurably stretched-thin and pokey, on top of already having my knives out from the film that swept the Academy Awards for 1996 when, if the universe were just, Secret & Lies and Fargo would have fought it out for all of the trophies everywhere. Is it any wonder, then, that it met my expectations?

Revisiting the film twice since than has softened me towards it, though I still can't say I love it; of director Anthony Minghella's picture postcard literary adaptations, I would rank it behind The Talented Mr. Ripley in every respect. It is, after all, quite a lot of movie, two hours and 42 minutes' worth, and the more movie you have, the greater the chances that not all of it will work equally well. I've found, generally speaking, that people who like The English Patient but don't adore it tend to cluster into two camps, based around which half of it is better: the "present day" plotline, or the "flashback" plotline, with the tacit implication that it would be better for all concerned if it could have gotten by without necessarily having to spend so much time on both of them. I happen to be a member of the "present day" camp, which is in no small part because I am also a member of the "Juliette Binoche is the best actress of the 1990s, and I really like you, Kristen Scott Thomas, but I'm sorry, just not that much" camp.

As adapted by Minghella from Michael Ondaatje's novel, The English Patient, broadly speaking, tells two love stories that play out during the Second World War, one in the beginning of the war, the other in its waning days. The action radiates backward from an Italian monastery that barely remains standing after years of fighting, currently serving as a field hospital. Here, Québécoise nurse Hana (Binoche) tends to a terribly burned English patient (Ralph Fiennes), who remembers neither his name nor his story. But as he slowly doles out what he does know, to Hana and to David Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), another Canadian recuperating in the area, he learn the full version of his history, the one he either does not or cannot access himself. He is, it turns out, the Hungarian Count Laszlo de Almásy, and at the time war broke out in the late 1930s, he was mapping the Sahara Desert for the British government, alongside an Englishman named Madox (Julian Wadham). Their expedition is joined by the married Cliftons, Katharine (Scott Thomas) and Geoffrey (Colin Firth), and Almásy and Katharine soon strike up a love affair that ebbs and flows during those tense times in North Africa. Back in 1945, while Hana tends to Almásy and hears his story, she meets Kip (Naveen Andrews), a Sikh engineer in the British Army, and has a much less torrid, heaving, and sandy affair of her own.

The English Patient is a film of particular bigness, as Minghella splashes all the grandeur of the Sahara and North Africa across his screen in dauntingly orange landscape shots and more domestic scenes that lovingly foreground Stuart Craig's heavily detailed, lived-in production design. And it is also a film of great and subtle intimacy, relying extensively on close-ups of Fiennes and Scott Thomas. This mix is the film's biggest aesthetic strength, putting it somewhere on the spectrum of great psychological epics on the Lawrence of Arabia model, movies that successfully use an enormous canvas to paint a human-sized portrait (there are few of these that are genuinely good than you might hope for). But if I allow my inner Elaine to pipe up, it's also monotonous: there simply isn't much incident to stretch out to 162 minutes. Individually, many of the component scenes of The English Patient are miracles of mythic filmmaking: the sequence in which Almásy carries Katharine from a plane crash to the safety of some distant caves is Epic Cinema 101. But these great moments are separated by longueurs that do absolutely nothing but restate things we already knew, and though Scott Thomas was never better at inhabiting the space in front of the camera with casual sensual force than she was in this production, any movie that consists for seemingly half of its running time of watching two people smolder at each other is a movie that needs to answer some tough questions about its priorities.

That's part of why I prefer the framework with Hana and Kip and David: it feels more consequential, more rooted in historical context, and more driven. None of this is accidental, mind you. An important part of Minghella's strategy in the film is to contrast the relatively straightforward, plain, and tangible "now" story with the heated, highly subjective and abstracted "then" story, which is meant to work as a hazy dream of physical memory and emotional states - it is an impressionistic approach rather than a narrative one, nimbly aided by cinematographer John Seale and composer Gabriel Yared, the most important members of the filmmaking team for helping to construct that kind of detached High Romantic atmosphere of feeling rather than observing. And I admire this. But I would admire 50 minutes of it every bit as much as I admire two hours of it.

The Italian framework, meanwhile, is much less showy, but for my tastes, much more meaningful. While Scott Thomas and Fiennes are stuck playing concepts of erotic psychology, Binoche simply gets to play a human being, and she's better in her role than either of them (Andrews is the best member of the cast every time he opens his mouth, but in a limited part that has been weirdly slashed down from its importance in the source novel). And instead of the heaving visual overstimulation of the Eternal Desert, it takes place in a perfectly realised, deeply physical space, one in which the use of color and framing and slowness do a superb job of evoking the feel of cool, damp air, and the rough texture of ancient brick and stone. If the romantic flashback segments of film are an evocation of the way we remember places and physical sensation, the framework evoke feeling things and being in places right now. And coupled with the more down-to-earth characterisations and performances, I find all of that to be more satisfying.

That all being said, The English Patient is exactly the kind of movie that feels like it ought to have an enormously passionate fanbase - it is an intense, lush experience that hits right in the gut, while the films I will eternally check it against, Fargo and Secrets & Lies, take dead aim at the brain and allow the libido to shrivel up unattended. The English Patient is utterly gorgeous, and it's lusty and sexy in a very literate, classy way - the R-rated Miramax equivalent to the star-studded, posh European superproductions of the 1960s. There's a lot to be said for that, even when the results are the kind of half-baked and over-baked confection that this particular film turns out to be. I do find it all a bit tiring rather than exhilarating, and I can't imagine that's what the filmmakers had in mind, but I absolutely do respect the top-to-bottom commitment to making this movie the most fleshed-out version of itself possible. It's an enormous, indulgent beast, but it's completely honest about it.

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PEOPLE COME, PEOPLE GO, NOTHING EVER HAPPENS

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

Reducing any film to the sum of its Oscar trivia is a filthy habit, but it's also fun and I'm good at it, and Grand Hotel has a real whopper of a piece of trivia associated with it. It's the second of three films to win the Best Picture Oscar and no other awards, which it did at the fifth Academy Awards, given for the awkwardly-shaped year of 1 August, 1931 through 31 July, 1932 (The Broadway Melody, Best Picture #2, and Mutiny on the Bounty, #8, are the other two). But the real point of distinction is that it's the one and only Best Picture winner to have been nominated for absolutely no other Oscars. There's no wholly positive way to spin that, but it does feel kind of fitting in a way - this was the time when the award was still called "Outstanding Production", with more of a connotation of "this is the most impressive act of studio willpower" than "this is the most aesthetically complete and admirable movie". And Grand Hotel is nothing if not an outstanding production, something in which every facet of it is less important than the massiveness of its existence. Grand Hotel is not about anything but the fact that MGM wanted to show off the full range of its resources, and in that regard, it absolutely can be the year's most Outstanding Production even without having the best direction, writing, or acting.

Though even that's missing the point a little; frankly, Grand Hotel does have the best of some of those things, or at least good enough to muscle into the not very mindblowing competition for the 1931-'32 Oscars. I won't way that director Edmund Goulding deserved a slot above King Vidor and Josef von Sternberg, but surely William Absalom Drake's adaptation of his play of Vicki Baum's novel would have been as worthy a writing nominee as the stuffy Arrowsmith. Cedric Gibbons's luscious Art Deco art direction, an extravagant showpiece for MGM's storied set builders, was outright robbed. And in a notably weak Best Actress year, Joan Crawford's failure to land a nomination instead of a pair of slumming theater goddesses doing nothing in particular (though Lynn Fontanne is leagues better than winner Helen Hayes) and an out-to-sea Marie Dressler is fucking baffling as all hell. Except that it's not, because nominating any one member of the Grand Hotel would have been almost impossible to get away with. That, you see, is exactly the point of the production's one-of-a-kind outstandingness.

Grand Hotel is a genre-starter, you see. This was the very first All-Star Cast Extravaganza, with several of MGM's most luminous names given more-or-less equal focus in a series of intertwining subplots filling up the bustling anthill of the classiest hotel in Berlin (inevitably, the shadow of that upstart politician Adolf Hitler, who came to international attention several months after the film's premiere, adds a sense of morbid gloom to the film's depiction of corruption and depravity in Germany for any viewer coming to the film later than 1933). The movie's very own opening credits stress the divine glamor of those stars more than the characters they play, or the story they play them in. Greta Garbo! Joan Crawford! John Barrymore! Lionel Barrymore! Wallace Beery! Lewis Stone! Jean Hersholt! Only about half of those names have any currency with a modern audience, but for a film lover in '32, seeing those names in one place would be their version of The Avengers (Hersholt is Hawkeye). It's hella easy to live in the 21st Century and airily proclaim that Crawford picks up the movie and runs away with it - which I take to be very much the contemporary conventional wisdom about it - but picking favorites is at a certain level entirely contrary to the spirit of the thing, which doesn't make you need to pick favorites. You just get all of them all at once. This is, never forget, an Outstanding Production.

The really impressive thing about Grand Hotel is that even if its goals are transparently those of unabashed gimmickry, it holds up superlatively well. There's only one of these "superstar ensemble" pictures that even arguably betters it, to my eyes, the following year's glorious Dinner at Eight (also by MGM, and with four of the same superstars), which has the benefit of George Cukor, a sturdier director than Goulding, and a more concrete reason for all the actors to appear in one place, beyond "hey, lotsa folks show up at a hotel". Still, while the first may not be exactly the best, it has pleasures galore in its cross-cutting of dignified melodrama anchored by a whole host of people doing sterling work - beyond Crawford's early career highlight, Lionel Barrymore is at his most sensitive and internally-directed here, with only a minimal amount of cartoonish hamming (I am not tremendously fond of the great bulk of his work prior to the full-on old man stage of his career), and John Barrymore is stone-cold serious. Garbo is... not great. Insofar as everybody who loves '30s Hollywood has that one diva to whom they give all their most serious affection and loyalty, Garbo is mine. I don't feel any need to make excuse for loving her career above Crawford's, 98% of the time. But she's on autopilot in Grand Hotel, more than in any other role I can think of. Within just a couple of years, her line "I want to be alone" had hit a critical mass of parodies to prove that this was seen as an iconic work almost immediately, and far be it from me to deny the pop culture of the 1930s its rightful obsessions. But this is the same hurt, tragic Garbo of at least a half-dozen other performances, all of which involve her being more invested and nuanced in her depiction of that hurt, and none of which so dubiously miscast her (here, she plays a ballet dancer, a profession that requires a totally different body shape and way of movement than anything within a mile of Garbo's physical performance). And certainly, none of which require her to make love to a telephone.

Outside of its misuse of a disinterested top-billed star, though, Grand Hotel is a perfect demonstration of why the Hollywood star system persisted so long, and why it still gives such vast pleasure to those of us in its cheering section. This is really and truly a film that bets the farm on the absolute charm of its actors - the script can barely be bothered, listlessly plugging in sturdy but ancient narrative shapes including the destitute baron (John Barrymore) who falls in love with his rich, suicidal mark (Garbo), the innocent stenographer (Crawford) who starts to receive the nastiest kind of attention from a thuggish captain of industry (Beery), the dying man (Lionel Barrymore) spending his last pennies on one chance to experience luxury he's never known. These were musty old chestnuts by 1932, and the film doesn't waste any time on pretending that we're there to be dazzled by the complexity of the plots and the way they interleave. We're showing up to see famous people perfectly inhabit those roles in enormous, loving close-ups and gorgeous lifestyle-porn gowns by MGM's legendary costume designer Adrian. And this is something Grand Hotel overs up by the shovelful, with that top-shelf cast breathing richness and vitality into their well-worn roles. Crawford, with her strikingly modernist and knowing expressions, is, again, the clear best in show, always marginally more wary and withholding than her scene partners in ways that make us desperately crave more information about her. But there's not a wrong foot in the movie, from the clipped brutishness of John Barrymore in his unguarded moments to Stone's weary sternness. Even Garbo's not in any way an active detriment, all my moaning about her performance notwithstanding.

Marshaling this parade of egos presented as demigods on the big screen, all Goulding really has to do is keep the spigot of close-ups and two-shots wide open, and in that respect he triumphs. But it's not fair to pretend that Grand Hotel was a director-proof movie just because it actually totally was a director-proof movie. There are some fascinating shots he carries off, such as the way the hotel's switchboards, used as a narrative framing device, are turned into geometric traps that sneakily imply a more rigid set of structures (aesthetic and social) than the script is quite willing to explore, or the occasional sudden cuts where the characters are dropped into tiny relief against the sprawling reality of the hotel that simply doesn't care about their individually pitiable tales. Cinematographer William H. Daniels gets to play around with Expressionist lighting, or at least the closest MGM's glossy house style would permit him to get to Expressionist lighting, guiding the mood more than is immediately obvious through canny manipulations of the focus and shadow in the back of shots.

It is, all told, a tremendously sturdy, thoroughly unimaginative, and massively entrancing sample of the early-'30s Hollywood machine doing everything exactly right in the creation of gratifying entertainment. It's too sober-minded to qualify as escapism, and infinitely too proud of its foregrounded desire to seduce the audience to be mistaken for high art. I cannot call it a perfect studio film; a perfect studio film would have a mechanically flawless screenplay, not a tossed-off basketful of scenarios that it cares about even less than we do. But it is the perfect Grand Hotel, one of classic Hollywood's most elegant truffles. Sure, it's still empty calories, but every gram of it reveals great, methodical craftsmanship.

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THE LOVE OF GOD

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

To begin with, it's a biopic - and does any genre so reliably connote "this is a well-polished and achingly handsome lump of Serious Art that's not terribly artistic and even less entertaining" than the biopic? And not just any biopic - it's part of maybe the most diabolically prestigious and inert subgenre, the biopic of an important classical musician, which has produced such ever-forgettable lead weights as The Great Waltz (Johann Strauss) and A Song to Remember (Frédéric Chopin), and has stretched all the way into the 21st Century with the likes of Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky. Besides, it's a powerfully murky biopic: the incredibly famous title character isn't actually the subject or the protagonist, but in deference to his fame, the movie keeps ceding huge chunks of attention to him that leave it damned confusing what the actual story is that the filmmakers aimed to tell.

And yet, Amadeus is one of the best American films of the 1980s. So it just goes to show, never prejudge.

The 1984 film is based on the 1979 play by Peter Shaffer, who did a rather thorough job of re-imagining the material for its journey into cinemas, but either way, the core is the same: the relationship of composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Tom Hulce) and Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham), between Mozart's 1781 arrival in Vienna, where Salieri served as artistic director for the Italian operas of the Hapsburg court, and the former's death in that city in 1791, at the age of 35. It is an enormously fictionalised version of that story, though it should be pointed out that the single biggest lie that Amadeus has popularised - that a jealous Salieri murdered Mozart with poison - is one that the film very specifically and as a key element of its plot doesn't depict (it also doesn't, technically, indicate that Salieri was a mediocre hack, only that he perceived himself as such relative to Mozart. And so these two unfair characterisations of Salieri - the talentless murderer - are the film's great popular legacies through no fault of its own).

So disinterested is Shaffer in actual sober history, in fact, that to call Amadeus a biography, in either medium, is something of an inaccuracy. It's more of a psychological fable told using real historical figures to give it an imposing weight; that, and to celebrate in front of the widest available audience the peerless sophistication and beauty of Mozart's music, lengthy passages of which are played all throughout the rather long movie as Shaffer hands enormous blocks of dialogue to Abraham to elucidate using only somewhat dumbed-down musicology exactly what it is about Mozart that should cause all of us to regard him as one of the half-dozen greatest composers of music in the history of European culture.

And that's a great and worthy goal, one that Amadeus only slightly muffs by handing off all of its music cues to the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, as conducted by Sir Neville Marriner, who generally leans on an annoying tendency to rush through the music like he's terrified of losing his dinner reservation. But ultimately, "provide a showcase for Mozart's Greatest Hits" isn't remotely the reason that Amadeus is great drama and great cinema (many a tepid workaday biopic has also been a splendid Greatest Hits showcase).

For that, we turn instead to the excellent performances and cutting characterisations in the script, as well as the vivid and fleshy production overseen by director Miloš Forman, in what I will happily identify as his best work in English. The film is not the first nor the last, but among the most successful of all attempts to revivify a culture dead for 200 years using sharp contemporary style; the vast majority of costume dramas have a marked tendency to look poised, stuffed, and mounted, but in the hands of Forman, who came of age in the raw, direct naturalism of the Czech New Wave, 18th Century Vienna is full of sarcasm and ass-kissing and bitterness and flustered movement just like the contemporary world. It's a period film that was shot as though it took place in modern-day Los Angeles; Forman and cinematographer Miroslav Ondříček (who'd worked with the director, on and off, from the beginning of both their careers) don't both with painterly lighting or compositions, in some desperate attempt to ape Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (which perfected that style and has never been remotely equaled); they dive right in and capture the color, line, and texture of the dressed-up Prague locations, and of Theodor Pištěk's costumes (rather more fanciful than accurate) with the same intention to find the blunt reality of things that served them as young Czechs attempting to tear holes in the fabric of Communism.

This unsentimental way of film interiors and exteriors alike with a kind of blank-faced present-ness is perfectly matched by the two most important performances, Abraham's and Hulce's - the cast as a whole is wildly inconsistent, ranging from Jeffrey Jones's marvelously and perfectly unfocused Emperor Joseph II, to Elizabeth Berridge's whingey, breathy take on Mozart's wife, but it's essentially a two-hander with a lot of people standing on the sidelines cheering. It's not always subtle acting that's going on: theater actor Hulce's only meaningfully visible film role to that point was in the low-brow comedy Animal House, and he brings a lot of that exact energy to his manic, filthy Mozart, with an unavoidably irritating laugh. Abraham is a bit more nuanced, mostly because the character he's playing is a facile liar, who does his level best to seem pleasant when he is scheming and wrathful. What matters about both of them, mostly, is their resolute modernism: the very conscious layering of psychology and the small physical gestures (Abraham's performance as an old man recounting the story to an increasingly horrified priest is full of some absurdly wonderful facial expressions and gestures - his inward-looking smugness on "Everybody liked me. I liked myself" is my favorite beat in the entire film) that speak to fussy stage-trained acting, and that fills this very old-fashioned mise en scène with very hard contemporary attitude that goes beyond such things as the evocation of punk rockers in Hulce's wigs. It is a study of 20th Century attitudes towards jealousy and faith that places 20th Century men, incongruously but effectively, into 1780s Vienna and does not comment on it.

But in that very lack of commentary, Amadeus comes alive. It's not the kind costume drama that brings a long-dead place back to life; while the film's Vienna is persuasive, and Twyla Tharp's staging of several Mozart operas winningly looks back the poshest stagecraft of a long-dead era, and the film-long obsession with food of the Viennese upper classes (which serves more as a character detail for Salieri than a piece of world-building) is lavish, if not always totally appetizing, it would be difficult to argue for Amadeus the merit of scrupulous historical accuracy. The dialogue doesn't support that; the general indifference to verifiable facts in the matter of its subjects' lives certainly doesn't support that. The film triumphs above all things as a character study, played by two remarkably fine actors in peak form, providing a chance for its very modern audience to reflect on very recognisable feelings of envy towards people we know damn good and well to be more capable than ourselves, "fairness" be damned; the period trappings are, as much as they are anything, a way of heightening those feelings by making them seem weird and fresh.

Or even more simply: the thing Amadeus primarily depicts, biopically-speaking, is the writing of operas - a dramatic form in which strong emotions are presented in a heavily artificial matrix of absurd plot and florid singing. And because of that artifice, the emotions are more immediately accessible. And that's basically the exact same thing Amadeus is doing: the mechanism of the artifice is different, but the intensity, lack of subtlety, and thus the accessibility, they're all the same. It's a prose opera. Form and content meet and seamlessly blend. Terrific stuff.

N.B. I: To prove that I can be at least a little bit critical, take a gander at that tagline. "The man... The music... The madness... The murder... The motion picture". Is that not literally the worst copy in the history of film advertising?

N.B. II: There exists a director's cut; it is far easier to see the film in that format now than its original theatrical version. I prefer the older, shorter cut; the extended version overexplains things that were perfectly clear without being laboriously spelled out, and it badly affects the flow of a 160-minute film that starts to feel puffy at three hours. One might say, of the theatrical cut, "Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall".

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EVE OF DESTRUCTION

Joseph L. Mankiewicz is not a bad director. But he's not a truly great one, either; he's not worthy, anyway, of being the second of only two men to have won a pair of back-to-back Best Director Oscars (John Ford was the first). He didn't, in general, do anything unexpected with his camera; he rarely pushed actors to do work beyond their comfort zone, preferring instead to facilitate them being the very best version of their usual selves. His best directorial instinct, in fact, was to provide the cleanest and most unobtrusive possible frame for Joseph L. Mankiewicz, screenwriter; and that Mankiewicz is the absolute best of the best.

Moreover, that Mankiewicz was never, ever better than when he adapted Mary Orr's 1946 story "The Wisdom of Eve" into 1950's All About Eve, a film in which the art of screen invective finds its absolute all-time pinnacle. Is it a disreputable pleasure, to bask in the bitchy vitriol as talented actors hurl elaborate, poetic insults at each other? Maybe, but the important point is that it's pleasure, and the caustic dialogue in All About Eve is some of the best ever committed to celluloid in Hollywood:

"Bill's thirty-two. He looks thirty-two. He looked it five years ago, he'll look it twenty years from now. I hate men."

"Don't cry. Just score it as an incomplete forward pass."

"To those of you who do not read, attend the theater, listen to unsponsored radio programs or know anything of the world in which you live, it is perhaps necessary to introduce myself."

"The cynicism you refer to, I acquired the day I discovered I was different from little boys!"

"Does Miss Channing know she ordered domestic gin by mistake?"
"The only thing I ordered by mistake is the guests. They're domestic too, and they don't care what they drink, as long as it burns."

"Everybody has a heart. Except some people."

There's a great deal more to All About Eve than zingers, but I don't think it's unfair to suggest that the dialogue is what makes it truly, deeply special. Lots of movies have great acting. Lots movies have pulpy melodramatic hearts beating vigorously under a veneer of studio shine. Very, very few movies have the facility with language of All About Eve. And it's not just simple pleasure that makes me single out the dialogue, either; for all its florid excess, the dialogue is always insistently functional. This movie is about a cluster of people jockeying for dominance amongst each other; it is a drama of how people assert power, and ultimately - crucially - how they elect not to assert power. The way they speak is intimately linked with all that power struggle, so even if it's utterly beguiling to hear a top-shelf cast spit acidic aphorisms, it's also a sneaky way of constantly pounding on the story's themes.

Having entered the cultural lexicon as a kind of shorthand for greedy protégés targeting aging mentors, I do hope that the basic shape of the thing is familiar: Margo Channing (Bette Davis), 40-year-old goddess of the Broadway stage, has attracted a passionate admirer in the form of 24-year-old Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter). Everybody takes to Eve, from the moment Margo's best friend Karen Richards (Celeste Holm) ushers her into the star's dressing room: Margo's favorite director and boyfriend, Bill Simpson (Gary Merrill), Margo's favorite writer and Karen's husband, Lloyd (Hugh Marlowe), Margo's blustery producer Max Fabian (Gregory Ratoff). Only Margo's longtime maid Birdie (Thelma Ritter) takes an instinctive dislike of Eve and her perfectly-formed tale of woe ("What a story. Everything but the bloodhounds snapping at her rear end", she grouses in that immaculately grumpy Ritter way); only after taking Eve on as a personal assistant does Margo start to spot the clues that the guileless young woman is, in fact, rather craftier than she seemed, her eagerness to please slowly adopting a sharklike quality.

The film traces two character arcs more or less in tandem: Margo's confrontation with her feelings of self-loathing over getting older, and her eventual realisation that she needs to re-adjust her priorities and be nicer to the people who put up with her; and Eve's insinuation into the world of prestigious theater, aided and guided by the murderously sarcastic newspaper columnist Addison DeWitt (George Sanders). It's reasonably straightforward, as backstage melodramas go; from the moment the film elects to open near its end, with a ceremony giving Eve a tremendously important award while Margo, Karen, Bill, and Lloyd all conspicuously fail to clap for her in a collection of medium shots that perfectly frame the disgust each of those characters feel for her, it's less a matter of wondering what will happen, more wondering how it will happen, and all in the tightly-compressed nine-month frame the film establishes for itself (the only significant misstep in the whole of the writing - it's simply not plausible that Eve could reach the level of national acclaim we're told she enjoys on the strength of only one solitary play that, if we follow the rest of the in film logic, premiered only two or three months earlier).

And here is where I have perhaps been too mean to Mankiewicz the director, who executes the development of that story with a crispness and sophistication that leaves what amounts to a sudsy story of catfighting feeling like the most brainy of psychological dramas. I'm not quite as fond of his directing here as in the previous year's A Letter to Three Wives (for which he won the first of his two consecutive Oscars; Eve, of course, netted him the other - and both resulted in writing Oscars, for good measure), but the casualness and elegance with which he stages scenes and the energy he draws from his unbelievably good cast certainly help the film to be its very best self. Aided with a terrifically airy Alfred Newman Score and some smart, cunningly character-defining costumes by Edith Head and Charles LeMaire, among other talented contributors (there's not anybody involved in the film's creation who isn't doing top-level work), the film is as glamorous as its characters like to think that they are, making the ugliness and snitty sniping and pathos of those characters feel all the more sharp and tense. That mixture between the surface gloss and the psychological brutishness drives the film like a wild horse, and even though, at 138 minutes, it's maddeningly indulgent for a melodrama with so few clearly-defined plot points, my reaction to All About Eve is always surprise when I realise that it's getting ready to wrap up, even though I just started watching it.

The point I was making, anyway, is that there's beautiful clarity to the filmmaking, even if it's not as complex or surgically precise as Sunset Blvd., the film with which it competed for most of its Oscars (and how marvelous and odd is it to think upon one of the most insoluble Oscar battles ever waged - from Best Actress to Art Direction to Picture itself, most of their head-to-head competitions are incredibly difficult to pick a winner - would center on two melodramatic stories about women?). Mankiewicz's style is to first attend to the characters, and let the rest follow, which leads to some phenomenal pieces of subtle filmmaking. There's an early sequence, for example, that finds Eve meeting the rest of the cast; by staging Davis, Holm, and Marlowe in a three-shot that intercuts with Baxter alone in the frame, and shortly thereafter stages the four of them so that Baxter alone is facing the camera, offering a quiet bit of foreshadowing that Eve is somehow, importantly, different than the others; mere minutes later, she expresses her whole sob story in a curiously flat shot as Newman's score cranks itself up into a relentlessly swoony bit of romanticism that feels gaudy compared to everything else in the score, completing the first impression of this young woman as being distinctly, if indefinably, "off".

The focus on characters also means that the film gives a lot of room to its actors, who pay it back fully. That Davis gives one of the great performances of a generation is simply one of those facts everybody knows, and it's hardly worth going into all the little things she does that make it so (but I am especially fond of how matter-of-fact and unapologetic she plays her big "I've realised I was wrong" speech in the back of a car; even at her humblest, Margo is still proud and tough, and Davis isn't about to deny that reality). The quality of her work has tended to overshadow her co-stars, especially Baxter (a co-nominee in Best Actress, but clearly not in the same race to win as Daivs, Gloria Swanson, and eventual victor Judy Holliday). Which is spectacularly unfair; given a more nuanced role, Baxter is very nearly at the same level as her more famous colleague, especially in the opening scenes when the first-time viewer still hasn't quite discovered what's to dislike in the innocent enthusiast. It's nothing short of a miracle that Baxter can play the role to be totally spotless and pure the first time, while also leaving just enough brittle theatricality that you can pick up on it while re-watching; it's such potent stuff that I'm always a little sorry when the film starts to tip its hand that Eve is a nasty little beast, and Baxter starts to retreat into a much simpler - though no less persuasive, portrayal of a deeply self-satisfied cobra, staring with her hard eyes and setting her face like a marble mask. She's a great villain; one of the best of the 1950s.

But really, the best thing about All About Eve is that it doesn't rely on the kind of straightforward morality where "a great villain" even applies. It presents a ruthless, horrible world, where everybody who survives needs to be at least partially a predator (the small, early performance by Marilyn Monroe nails this perfectly; almost nowhere else in her career do we see the calculating menace behind adopting "I'm a busty dumb blonde!" as a strategic weapon. It is some of the best work she ever did, even if it's entirely limited to two scenes). Eve is a symptom, not a cause; and while Margo and friends clearly hate her at the end, they don't actually seem to blame her for being better at playing the game. That's a hell of a lot of cynicism, especially for a 1950s film; thank God, then, for the endless wit that helps the nastiness to go down, and the robust performances that ground it in something human. Because take them all together, and they mean that All About Eve is one of the greatest films of post-WWII Hollywood.

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YOU MAGNIFICENT BASTARD

With what I can only call the most admirable clarity, the monumental biopic Patton, Best Picture Oscar winner of 1970, opens with a kind of thesis statement that lays out everything the rest of the film is to contain. I don’t refer to the main body of its legendary opening scene, in which famed World War II hero Gen. George S. Patton, Jr. (George C. Scott) stands in front of an enormous U.S. flag to deliver a rousing message to the unseen troops about the inherent nobility and bravery of the American fighting forces. It’s less a patriotic harangue than a revival meeting centered around the religion of blood and killing. That is a great scene, and it does perfectly set the stage for all that comes after, but it’s not what I’m referring to.

I refer to the short beat that precedes his speech. We see Patton emerge in a long shot, a tiny black blip against the field of red and white, followed by a series of cuts that swiftly bring the camera in closer, after which several seconds are spent cutting metronomically from one visual element of this man’s heavily polished exterior to the next: his ivory-handled pistol, his medals, the insignia on his helmet, his rigid salute, his pristine boots. In this moment, director Franklin J. Schaffner and editor Hugh S. Fowler (both Oscar winners for this film) aren’t merely communicating that these are the elements that go into making this man; they’re arguing that these elements are this man, that he is defined entirely as individual components of perfect military bearing. That matters more, to him and to the viewer, than anything to do with his internal humanity. And only once we’ve quickly absorbed all of that does the film move into its legendary opening monologue, where he clarifies that first impression with his impassioned hymn to being the biggest, toughest sonofabitch you can be. Not, in any sense, to being the finest human being.

Scott, according to at least one story, was nervous about this opening, concerned that it was so potent that it would overwhelm the rest of his performance. That at, least, doesn’t happen, but he was almost right; the opening does tend to overwhelm Patton the movie, which has the somewhat unfortunate characteristic of having told us, in its opening and strongest scene, exactly what it’s going to be about for the rest of the film. And at 172 minutes total, the rest of the film is quite long to feel like it’s only ever providing variations on a single theme that’s never clearer than when we start off. There’s a kind of weirdly academic texture to the screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola (who would have much better success directing a three-hour Best Picture winner just two years down the road) and Edmund H. North, which plainly yearns to be a complete and thorough study of an all-time fascinating real-life human, using war less as its plot than as the prism through which its central character is refracted. And it even manages to be that, but Coppola and North are so successful at quickly sketching an outline, and then filling it in with smartly implied and gracefully stated exposition, that we have learned virtually all we will ever learn about Patton before the film is even a third of the way through.

I find much about the film - its expansive length, its focus on psychology during wartime, the central position of a title character who wants above all else to be thought of as a warrior, not a man - to evoke Lawrence of Arabia, then eight years old. That film carefully danced around its protagonist, peeling him like an onion, so that we kept learning new things about him all the way till the end; Patton ends up having to repeat itself, constantly, to hoist itself up to a running time that seems preposterously out-of-place. There is no fact about Patton that we only learn one time. There’s even an entire subthread of scenes taking place in the offices of the Nazi army command dedicated solely to demonstrating that the Germans realise the same things about Patton that the viewers already know. If there had been no other change to Patton but to surgically excise all the scenes involving Germans, it would be infinitely more focused and tight. For not only do the Nazi command scenes serve no meaningful function, they also don’t fit a movie that’s intently concerned on the way that American military men perceive the world.

That all being said, and no matter how reliably Patton leaves me feeling exhausted and, if I must be honest, quite a bit bored, the fact remains that the character it studies is a genuinely fascinating, remarkable figure, one of the most interesting subjects in the history of the biopic. Partially, this is because Patton himself was such a profoundly strange man, colorful and brazen and full of messy self-contradictions. A devout Christian who believed in reincarnation and worshiped the great military minds of the pre-Christian world, a martinet and bully who almost scuttled his entire career for abusing a shell-shocked soldier, an orator who carefully laced blunt profanity into his speeches as a way of making himself seem more erratic and giving his words more memorable tang, and a demented war-hungry genius whose refusal to slow down or play by the rules proved decisive in helping the Allies win the war in Europe. The writers, in pinning this man down on paper, prove to have an immensely ambivalent and confused attitude towards him, which ends up being one of the film’s best strengths - uncertain whether to condemn his bloodlust and my-way-or-the-highway braggadocio, or to cheer for his rebellious instincts, mystified by his adoration of classicism, anxious to praise him as a hero, but alarmed at supporting unchecked American militarism while Vietnam was still burning, Coppola and North never decide on a single approach to the character, which frees Patton from having the simple “you should think this” moralising that tends to make so many biopics so bland and harmless. No doubt, the fact that they were working mostly with the accounts of Gen. Omar Bradley, a bitter rival of Patton’s and eventually his commanding officer, led to this split between hero worship and anti-hero condemnation (it also likely explains why Bradley - played with level warmth by Karl Malden - comes off as so damn humane and reasonable throughout the film, in a way that strikes me as a bit intellectually and ethically questionable).

Its overall ambivalence crops up in many ways: Schaffner’s direction, which keeps the war itself at enough of a remove, and always privileges people talking about strategy rather than executing it, and thus silently reminding us that Patton, great warrior man, was still a general and thus still kept himself back from the heart of fighting; Jerry Goldsmith’s score - one of the few Oscar nominations the film lost, and one of the few it unambiguously deserved to win - which presents rousing military marches that feel like more fully-orchestrated fife and drum tunes from the Revolutionary War, punctuating them with a repeated motif of echoing horn triplets that feel entirely out-of-place and mournful. Though the film was seen as the moderate, middlebrow champion in the year that MASH was a more robustly anti-war Oscar nominee, and Richard Nixon adored it, Patton feels more of a piece with the New Hollywood than its bloat and aesthetic conservatism imply - it has the same lack of clear moral authority and obsession with the ways that men express themselves within a culture where they don’t fit that are typical of more showily radical American films of the same time.

And, like many of those films, it demands a lot of its main actor and relies on him to provide complexity and richness that an only be indicated by the script. So it works out well that George C. Scott came along and gave such an absurdly strong performance. Really, take out the actor, and Patton is much less insightful, and its bloat becomes unforgivable; but put him in, and suddenly even the most logy moments hum with dramatic tension. Scott is a marvel, vanishing completely into the role, and building a rock-solid foundation for Patton’s endless self-confidence and violent certitude that leaves his every action feeling like the inevitable extension of that mind into the wrong time and place, where he is nevertheless able to thrive. Never a small man, Scott towers over everyone and everything in the film, physically and emotionally; he has no little moments, but finds a way to make even quiet reflection the burly explosion of a volatile personality (the famed "2000 years ago... I was here" scene, in particular, is at once spiritual, self-consciously mythic, and presented with an aggressive "fuck you, I dare you to tell me I'm being weird" bullishness). And in his big moments, he exudes crushing, giant emotions with terrifying splendor, as in his wrathful verbal assault against that shell-shocked soldier that Scott turns into Lear-like scream of defiance against a world where things exist that Patton does not approve of.

Scott makes for such an unstoppably watchable Patton that, even though the script offers him little chance in the middle hour to do anything he didn't already do in the first, and only lets him start to project introspection towards the end, he makes every single onscreen moment feels like the most vital thing you have ever seen in a movie. Patton, on the whole is handsome prestige cinema that's executed well enough, looks swell - Fred J. Koenekamp's cinematography, the second and last film shot in the Dimension 150 format, lends a faded beauty that speaks to the subject's mythic stature and his behind-the-times attitudes alike - and has plenty of smart writing (just too damn much of it), but when Scott is added to the equation, it suddenly turns into a genuinely great character study. Not "Best Picture of 1970 or any other year" great, but far better and more involving than it easily might have been.

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THIS FELLOW KEATON SEEMS TO BE THE WHOLE SHOW

It's worth admitting right in front that Birdman is nowhere near the best version of itself. Setting aside every other issue that someone could possibly have with it, it has been kneecapped by a story problem that would have been so easy to keep away from, and in fact the four screenwriters - Nicolás Giacobo, Alexander Dinelaris, Armando Bo, and Alejandro González Iñárritu, the last of whom also directs - pretty much had to go out of their way to specifically introduce that problem. Basically, Birdman is a stream-of-consciousness narrative, put over in the most vividly cinematic language that such a particularly literary genre could possibly hope for, and there are many, many moments in the film that are only sensible if we allow that they don't represent any kind of objective third-person reality, but only the bent perceptions of the protagonist's very fragile mind. The film banks a lot on this intense subjectivity. And then, for absolutely no practical reason other than to spell out some story development that might have been achieved a dozen other ways, there are at least four reasonably lengthy scenes that take place completely outside of the protagonist's vision or knowledge. They're not bad scenes; they're crisply-written, smartly-acted, and handsomely-lit. But they completely violate the aesthetic continuity of the film, and it is a film which privileges that continuity above all else.

And yet, despite that absolute, deadly flaw, Birdman - to just once give its messy, beautiful, strangely-punctuated title in full, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) - is one of the absolute keepers of 2014, for even if its execution ends up betraying its concept, that concept is so terrific that there could have been far more individual mistakes than there are, with the result still turning out to be one of the most audacious and satisfying experiences of the movie year. It's a simple little story: Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton), is a faded movie star whose career hasn't recovered since his decision, 20 years ago, not to play the title character in Birdman 4, feeling that after three-successive go-rounds in the superhero's beak and wings, he was ready to move on to rich pastures. That has, after all this time, brought him to the world of Legitimate Theater, where so many former movie stars before him got to grab hold of a little bit of dignity near the end. He's the writer, director, and star of an adaptation of Raymond Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love", produced by his friend and lawyer Jake (Zach Galifianakis), co-starring his girlfriend Laura (Andrea Riseborough), and taking as his assistant his fresh-from-rehab daughter Sam (Emma Stone). The situation is rife with cause for emotional trauma and self-doubt, and that's before an accident forces him to re-cast the other male role, three days before the premiere, with Mike Shiner (Edward Norton), genius stage actor, arrogant prick, and boyfriend of the other actress, Lesley (Naomi Watts), making her Broadway debut. The pressure of having a superstar performer stealing his oxygen and having to drive himself to the cusp of bankruptcy to get there forces Riggan beyond the breaking point, not that he needed to go very far. The very first image of the movie, and the very first line of dialogue, already do a fine job of dramatising Riggan's present inability to separate reality and fantasy.

So, for that matter, does the movie itself. A stream-of-consciousness narrative I called it, and that's just what it is, in the most appallingly exciting way. González Iñárritu, working with fellow Mexican expatriate and all-around cinematography superstar Emmanuel Lubezki, has fashioned Birdman to look like it takes place mostly in a single shot, seamlessly stitched together (one can notice the joins solely because of spurious camera movements that exist to hide them, not because there's ever a spot where the digital trickery is apparent; editors Douglas Crise and Stephen Mirrione, major names in their own right, have done some exquisite work that goes out of its way not to call attention to itself). Lubezki knowing a thing or two about shooting breathtakingly beautiful, wonderful long takes, it's not surprising that Birdman looks gorgeous and has camera movement that's so organic and three-dimensional that the film ends up being as much of a go-for-broke visual spectacle as anything with elaborate world-building CGI; it's great as well that the artifice of theater frees him up to play with sculpted and colored lighting in ways he hasn't done in years, without giving up the skills he's picked up in using only visible light sources. The result isn't his most groundbreaking work of cinematography, though in individual shots - a cherry red exit sign surrounded by blue, an elevated shot of Broadway at dusk - it ranks with his most purely beautiful.

But anyway, storytelling. Which, in Birdman's case, is indistinguishable from the goings-on of Riggan Thomson's frenzied mind, and that's where the single-take illusion works so well: for of course, the movie taking place over many days, it's not mimicking real time at all, the way long takes do. It is a strictly anti-realist gesture, in fact, suggesting the breakdown going on in the head of the panicky artist for whom there's never enough time, the aging man who has a terrified awareness of how quickly deadlines of every sort are blasting towards him. The visual structure of the film puts us squarely in Riggan's position, as time and space compress and blur together in patently impossible ways (the usual suspects have bitched a little about how the film misrepresents actual Manhattan geography, ignoring that it also inserts continuity errors into its own internally-established geography, and failing to wonder why that might be the case). It is, I honestly think, a way of exploring psychology through visuals that I have never seen done, not in this way; but I have not seen everything.

Anyway, it's all in service to a great, unflagging character study. It can be argued that we need no more movies about aging white guys and their privileged woes; but since we have Birdman anyway, it's great that it treats that subject (the perpetual core of Raymond Carver's writing, making the film's reliance on "What We Talk About..." doubly meaningful) so fucking well. Keaton's performance is absolutely dynamite, for one thing, the best of his career by far, even without so much as nodding in the direction of the meta-casting involved in showcasing him as a guy who hasn't done much of note since appearing in a major franchise at the dawn of the superhero movie epoch. There's unlovely misery and self-loathing plastered across every inch of his performance, in his expressions and his caustic line readings, and the way that he seems to age five years over the course of the movie. The whole cast is good (the men more than the women), but it's Keaton in the hot seat, Keaton who has to create a sufficiently believable well-into-midlife crisis for the rest of the film spinning around him to feel honest and meaningful.

Despite this heavy, pathetic center, the film is giddily watchable, a chain of firecrackers driven by González Iñárritu's surprising and heretofore entirely untapped facility with comedy, and Antonio Sánchez's irreplaceable drum score, adding a relentless tension that does almost as much to suggest the disorienting momentum of these days for Riggan as the sinewy cinematography does. It's a thriller, a sitcom, a merciless drama, and a highly expressionistic depiction of paranoia and panic that is, when it's working, one of the most jaw-dropping, exciting, totally effective films I've seen in ages. Now, again, there are parts where it's not merely failing to work, it's bragging about how much it's not working. But far more often than that, it's one fire: surprising even as it feels inevitable, heartbreaking and sympathetic even as it relishes in showing off its protagonist's most awful characteristics. It's not nearly perfect, but it's as essential as cinema gets.

9/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1965: In which the gargantuan edifice of Hollywood Spectacle in its fading years goes all out and manages to knock one out of the ballpark

The dominant aesthetic of commercial American filmmaking in the 1960s was that of unbridled size. Enormous action films with star-studded casts, like The Great Escape; sprawling ensemble comedies like The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming; grandiose historical epics like Doctor Zhivago. And, of course, the musicals. There's never been anything quite like a '60s musical: it sometimes feels like they were in private competition to see just how much bloat and monstrosity could be crammed into one movie. Especially when that one movie had the running time of two normal movies.

These films are - and I say this as an inveterate lover of musicals, and consider it to be maybe my favorite of all genres - almost all terrible. Saggy and painfully artificial, and the ones adapted from a stage source compound that with tortuously misjudged scene structure There's one exception though, The Sound of Music, an adaptation of the final musical by Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein II, which premiered on stage in 1959. It was the film of 1965: dominating the box office everywhere but Europe (where its depiction of Nazis in the context of a thorough re-writing of actual history kept it out of theaters), winning the Best Picture Oscar and four others, and prior to the end of its release, coming close to setting a record for the most tickets sold for a single movie (it came in second to Gone with the Wind), and saving 20th Century Fox from near-collapse following the disaster of Cleopatra.

And like anything that popular and unavoidable and obligatory to see even if it's the kind of thing you never want to see, it has come under its share of withering criticism through the years, starting with its leading man, Christopher Plummer, who thought it was a saccharine piece of shit. That it is sentimental can hardly be disputed, and the songs are undoubtedly a bit sweet and gooey, but whatever, it works as cinema: much, much better than the stiff and soulless like of My Fair Lady, and considerably better than any of the other films based on Rodgers & Hammerstein's earlier (and mostly superior) shows, ranging from the grimly average (Carousel) to the grotesquely unacceptable (South Pacific) - I understand that there are those who admire the 1956 movie of The King and I, and good for them.

There are reasons for this that become entirely obvious if we compare the movie to the show, but even without cheating like that, it's clear enough that The Sound of Music is much less shackled by its source material than just about any comparable title. Most apparently, it has considerably shorter scenes than most stage-to-film musicals, and it moves between locations with much less forced, self-conscious "opening up" of the material. It's generally said that screenwriter Ernest Lehman did a great deal to fix the show, from the small matter of re-ordering songs (the now-standard "My Favorite Things" was not initially used to cheer up a group of children during a thunderstorm; Lehman smartly used it there to replace the comic yodel song "The Lonely Goatherd", which shows up in a new scene that slightly expands upon a subplot) to the more serious matter of refocusing the middle of the story away from a side character to give the plot a more streamlined flow, all the way to fleshing out the show's rather abrupt climax with more tension, story, and character moments. And in the process of rubbing the kinks out of the story, Lehman also "movified" it, enough to make The Sound of Music arguably the best screen adaptation of a stage musical that has yet been made, and certainly the most improved over its source material.

The story I imagine to be well-known simply though osmosis, even to those who've never seen the movie, or whose hatred for it has overwhelmed its content. In the convent at Salzburg in the 1930s, a postulant named Maria (Julie Andrews) has finally hit the point where the nuns responsible for overseeing her have realized that she's never going to make it in their life, and needs to see something of the world outside to help prod her in that direction. To that end, the Mother Superior (Peggy Wood) arranges for Maria to take a daunting job as governess for a certain Captain Georg von Trapp (Christopher Plummer), a widower with seven children ranging in age from 16 (going on 17) to five. The job of wrangling the children has defeated more sophisticated and experienced women than Maria, but she doesn't have an out. So with patience and steel will, she converts each of the von Trapp children to her lively, humane way of thinking and being and singing, eventually thawing out even the bitter, stern captain himself. In the meanwhile, he's been finishing up a courtship with the wealthy Baroness Elsa Schraeder (Eleanor Parker), and angrily rebuffing those of his countrymen starting to find themselves converting to the cause of Nazism, as it becomes increasingly obvious that Germany will be absorbing Austria, even over the objection of willful men of principle like von Trapp. And this makes life in the von Trapp household far more uncertain than even the love triangle between a stern father, an airily catty baroness, and a singing governess.

There's a lot of ways for this to go wrong, and it wasn't until seeing The Sound of Music onstage for the first time in the spring of 2014 that I realised how many of them it stumbled into, and how much the low-grade resentment of some of the cast and crew for the material did to keep the movie from falling into the tar pits of candy-coated insipidity. Plummer, as has been well-reported, had no respect for the show at all, and regretted the decision he made to appear in the film; onscreen, that translates into a barking sharpness that transforms the early scenes, before von Trapp has warmed up to Maria and the sound of music, from "silly cranky papa is being grumpy" to "oh shit, dad's home". Even afterwards, when Plummer can't be quite so openly contemptuous, he still keeps just enough stiffness and brittleness to his manner of standing and speaking that the film never quite turns into a cozy Christmas card of everybody loving everybody in the most saccharine way possible. And he makes an excellent fencing partner for Andrews throughout, obliging her to respond to his resistance as much as to what's already written into the character, thereby forbidding her from turning out the fluty, frivolous version of Maria that is an inherent danger of the part. Not that I think Andrews needed help: she'd already proven the previous year, with her film debut in Mary Poppins (the dailies of which helped to get her this role - Mary Poppins wouldn't open until The Sound of Music was already in production), that her idling mode was a sort of melancholy-tinged soulfulness, and her singing voice too full and warm to feel as brightly sweet as the worst kind of Maria. There is chipper happiness in her performance, but it's modulated with a quiet way of receding into herself every time she's not being called upon to be "on" for the children. I haven't seen every stage Maria, of course - I haven't even heard Mary Martin in the original cast recording - but it's hard to imagine this character emerging in a more satisfying performance than the one Andrews gives, mixing optimism, nervousness, and wisdom in a blend that perfectly allows her to emerge as a person and not a collection of positive characteristics with a guitar.

Then, of course, we have director Robert Wise, who initially passed on the project due to his disinterest in the story, only to step in after William Wyler, having done most of the heavy lifting of pre-production, lost interest before shooting was to begin. It is immensely clear while watching that Wise wanted to push the show to be more than it was: unlike a lot of musicals from any era, The Sound of Music doesn't feel like tedious book scenes putting a comfortable buffer around songs, but like an actual story about actual people, that at times finds it convenient to indulge in a song rather than speech. The location shooting in Salzburg does a lot for this, giving the film a sense of a physical place found in no other English-language musical of the '60s, and Wise incorporated the locations into the movie with a clarity of purpose that goes far beyond mere realism. Anyone could do spectacle, filming the gorgeous Austrian Alps in the Todd-AO system (Ted McCord handled the cinematography); Wise, uses the setting instead as a way of placing his characters in a particular time and place and context. Admittedly, that context is largely invented (the film's idea of the Anschluß is a bit on the historically outrageous side, and its depiction of the von Trapp's history quite detached from reality), but in all the scenes of characters lounging on the patio with magnificent mountains towering in the distance, or in the decision to set the bouncy "Do-Re-Mi" against a tourist's montage of Salzburg locations, the feeling that this story takes place in a real world, if not necessarily our real world, absolutely overcomes the artifice of the material.

And anyway, Wise never indulges the material; other than the subplot involving teenage Liesl's (Charmian Carr) infatuation with local boy Rolfe (Daniel Truhitte), which visibly fails to engage him, the director kept a slight detachment from the von Trapp children resulting in scenes that play more as "here is a child" than "awww, she's so cute". It helps that nothing in Andrews's or Plummer's performance encourages that kind of impression, and Wise's willingness to cede every frame to the cutting, sardonic Parker everytime she re-enters the script suggests, strongly, that he identified with her. Lo and behold, he manages to pull the film with him, just a little bit.

Now, this is still The Sound of Music. An excessively corny family-friendly sweetness is burned into any property with songs like "Do-Re-Mi" and "So Long, Farewell" and "The Lonely Goatherd" scattered throughout it (I confess this to be, just ahead of The King & I, my least favorite of Rodgers & Hammerstein's major shows, and I find that "Climb Ev'ry Mountain" so commandingly blows everything else out of the water that I'm even harder on the rest of the songs than they deserve), and even in its unexpectedly grounded, realistic, weighty form, the film is absolutely calculated to make any borderline cynic plunge into frothing, rabid fury. Wise & company only succeeded in making it address legitimate humans and legitimate human feelings; they did not find a way to make it sophisticated. But sophistication isn't the end-all and be-all and what The Sound of Music does better than many movie musicals, and all movie musicals adapted from stage, is convincingly suggest the way that the musical, as a form, is about emotions so powerful and rich that they can't be appropriately expressed in speech, only in performance and singing - something Julie Andrews, in particular, was as good at as any other film actor has ever been. Not everybody likes that kind of thing, of course, but for those of us who do, The Sound of Music fully lives up to its reputation as a classic, unabashed corniness and all.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1965
-The Biblical epic exhausts itself and implodes with the lengthy, soporific The Greatest Story Ever Told
-'60s-era teen crap reaches its artistic pinnacle with AIP's Beach Blanket Bingo
-A taste of things to come: Arthur Penn directs Warren Beatty in the French New Wave-tinged gangster film Mickey One

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1965
-Between Miloš Forman's Loves of a Blond, and Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos's The Shop on Main Street, we really cannot ignore the Czech New Wave any longer
-Kurosawa Akira and Mifune Toshiro work together for the last time on the 19th Century character drama Red Beard
-Later butchered for release in the West, The Saragossa Manuscript is one of the major works of '60s Polish cinema

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1947: In which we are Very Serious about Important Topics

"Oh the Protestants hate the Catholics,
And the Catholics hate the Protestants,
And the Hindus hate the Muslims,
And everybody hates the Jews."

-Tom Lehrer, "National Brotherhood Week"

Some years ago, Northwestern film professor and queer studies scholar Nick Davis* wrote an analysis of the 2009 Best Actress Oscar race that included one of those perfectly formed and winningly pithy critical phrases that stuck with me and bubbles up in my mind with rather stunning frequency: "[Sandra] Bullock is often the only thing standing between The Blind Side and complete, vile unwatchability." There are a lot of movies where that sentiment applies, far more than any of us would hope for, really; but since The Blind Side was a Best Picture nominee, and we're here to look at 1947's Best Picture winner, and so the taste and priorities of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are very much on my mind anyway, I think I shall now take the opportunity to steal and gently rework Davis's statement. To wit: Celeste Holme is often the only thing standing between Gentleman's Agreement and complete, vile unwatchability.

Gentleman's Agreement is a message movie, which is like calling ebola a disease: accurate, but not nearly vivid enough to describe the agonising extremes of . I suppose "vile" is overdoing it a little, but "unwatchable" is almost peerlessly appropriate: having now seen the film, for Christ knows what reason, three different times, my response has always been that I'd rather be doing almost anything with that 118 minutes, up to and including watching my television with the power off. More than anything, it's diabolically dull and somber to the point that it's almost worth laughing at it, except that Gregory Peck's incredibly serious expressions have the tendency to make laughter dry out and die. And this, unmistakably, is the kind of film Hollywood thinks it Should make; at least, it's the kind of film that Hollywood promotes in self-congratulatory ways as proof that the motion picture can be a noble way of teaching lessons and imparting morals to everyday folks, thereby taking off just enough pressure from watchdog groups to return to the business of making fast money on trashy potboilers (although Gentleman's Agreement was one of the year's biggest hits, so bang goes that theory).

It's about antisemitism; and in a twist that rather neatly mirrors its content, it exists because the most prominent gentile studio head of the era, Darryl F. Zanuck, was intensely eager to make it and felt that the Laura Z. Hobson's new novel and the period immediately after World War II had ended presented the perfect moment for it, with the recent discovery of the breadth and depravity of the Holocaust making it clear just how toxic antisemitism could become if left unchecked. The story follows a celebrated California journalist with the impeccably posh name of Philip Schuyler Green (Peck) who arrives in New York to take a job at one of the biggest liberal issues magazines going. The publisher, John Minify (Albert Dekker), wants him to write about antisemitism; and what possible angle could we take on such a well-trod subject, Phil wonders, till he chances onto the most obvious possible gimmick hard-hitting journalistic conceit; pose, himself, as a Jew for six months and soak up all the antisemitic abuse that a man named Philip Schuyler Green who looks and sounds like Gregory Peck (incidentally, I would pay solid money to hear Peck try to wrap his baritone around some Hebrew consonants) would never know of naturally. Virtually nobody knows his true identity: his mother (Anne Revere) and son Tommy (Dean Stockwell), of course, and Kathy Lacy (Dorothy Maguire), the Connecticut girl he fell for on his third day in New York. But to all of his co-workers and the world at large, he's just Phil Green, a real haimisher mensch. And Phil makes sure they know it, too, what with his intensely weird tendency of throwing statements like "simply because I'm Jewish myself" into the middle of conversations where very few human beings in the annals of recorded history would use them. And does he encounter antisemitism? Boy, and how!

The only thing that's more intensely irritating than how baldly Gentleman's Agreement vocalises its themes in clumsily anti-natural dialogue is how delightfully it stacks the deck; in this film's universe, virtually every human being other than Phil himself hates Jews, including the Jews themselves. We know from history that even in the depths of Nazi Germany itself, there were goyim willing to risk their lives and their family's to protect fugitive Jews; this small population of genuinely sympathetic, decent people was apparently not to be found in such a metropolis as New York City, where even the most dedicated, socially responsible liberals are prone to spouting off with grossly ill-informed opinions and accidentally track in the odd racial slur. But not Phil! He is a paragon of stability and grim-faced sincerity, as we know when the opening scene that finds him and Tommy admiring a statue of Atlas, the Titan supporting the entire world on his shoulders, which Tommy adroitly notes is just like what Daddy does. Because if Gentleman's Agreement finds an opportunity to put flatly thematic statements of purpose into the mouths of its character, by God it will take all of them. This is a script that sees fit to require one of its chastened characters to passionately rant, about the racism that has crept even into the publishing offices of the liberal magazine, "Well, there just isn't anything bigger than beating down the complacence of essentially decent people about prejudice! Yessir, I'm ashamed of myself." Screenwriter Moss Hart was primarily a comic playwright, collaborating with George S. Kaufman on pieces You Can't Take it With You and The Man Who Came to Dinner, so maybe he thought it was funny. It should be funny, frankly.

There's not a smackeral of non-ironic mirth to be found anywhere, something Kathy tries to point out multiple times in scenes that I believe are meant to showcase that she's shallow and running from the Brutal Truth that Phil so earnestly plumbs, though frankly, for all that Maguire is an impossible wet blanket whose performance is mostly just an exercise in looking befuddled and unhappy with her jaw hanging open in the oddest way, I'm going to have to concede those scenes to her entirely. Peck is stuck in one gear throughout the film, and it's the most fucking tedious thing: granite respectability and bottomless integrity, dimly like his future iconic role as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird with all of the warmth and humility drained out to leave just the statuesque father-knows-best shtick which, in this case, feels downright bullying. He's smug and boringly self-righteous, with absolutely no minute scrap of shading that might make the character even a little complex or interesting. There's no apparent awareness that he could, at any minute, reveal that he's not a Jew, with the tension of how much bigotry Phil can withstand (not much: the six months silently turn into eight weeks) before caving adding some level of tension and awareness that real Jews don't have that out. In fact, his absolute best friend, Dave Goldman (John Garfield) - because there was no way this story was going to avoid giving Phil a Jewish BFF - seems to very invisible kill this possibility when sagely noting that, if anything, Phil is trying to experience too much antisemitism all at once, more than proper Jews do, even. And there's even less of a possibility that Phil perceives, or even suspects, that there's some scrap of bigotry within himself; keeping the story's morality clear, no doubt, while stripping it of a chance for any kind of drama beyond the "Phil angrily declaims sociology at Kathy, scene after scene" structure that the film in its completed form possesses.

It's worth noting that the director, Elia Kazan, would later distance himself from the film, which even he admitted with dry and dull, and he would claim that Peck's performance didn't work; the latter is just kind of a catty thing to say, but he's completely right of course, and while I run more cool than hot on later Kazan, there's complicated, vibrant humanity in most of the performances he directed than anything we ever see here. Even in his later, still more broken fake racism story Pinky (where a white actress plays a black woman pretending to be white), the place has a heaving, visual tactility about it (Gentleman's Agreement is plagued by a cavalcade of nondescript residential interiors that the gifted Arthur C. Miller can make look smoothly attractive, though he is hard-pressed to do anything more; there are a couple of scenes where the staging has some creative depth to it, but these moments are fleeting), and the characters at least seem like they have passions. Not so in Gentleman's Agreement, where everything is at the same stoic, turgid level, where everyone is just as pinioned by one-track characterisations as in that future Oscar-winning tub-thumper about how racism is bad and everyone is racist, Crash.

Except for Celeste Holm! Rightfully winning an Oscar for her efforts, she plays a colleague of Phil's at the magazine, a bubbling life force of sarcasm and barely sublimated sexual energy (let us suffice to say that she obviously loves the though of men in just their pajamas) that covers up for a deeply sublimated sense of romanticism that's beautifully and wrenchingly teased out in her final scene. She's a lifesaver in the midst of yawning averageness and stubborn mediocrity, but she's also giving a real performance too, not just just an act of triage. It's genuinely one of the best turns in Holm's underappreciated career as a top-notch supporting actress, spiky with enough sadness to give it weight, and a skill at delivering lacerating barbs with as much knowing nastiness as anybody. Structurally, she's the film's much-needed comic relief; but functionally, she's the even more necessary human relief, a beating heart in the midst of all the deeply sincere and earnest mannequins populating the movie.

Now, compensating for all the ways in which the film is kind of fucking dreadful, it's incontestably a valuable and important and brave piece of political commentary. 1947 was, after all, the ideal year to start having That Conversation; Zanuck's instincts were dead on. And Gentleman's Agreement certainly got that conversation going; it's confrontational and direct and merciless and gives its audience no way out: do you support this toxicity, or do you abjure it; do you fight for a more just worldm or slink away and give in to the one that exists now? It couldn't do any of those things if it was remotely subtle or artful, and the fact that it's a grueling slog through two hours of condescending lectures shaped into something that pretends to be a story should be tempered by admitting that it wasn't really looking to be entertaining in any quantifiable way in the first place. It's a Moral Lesson; an effective one, given the context.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that, behind Edward Dmytryk's film noir Crossfire, it was the second-best message movie about antisemitism nominated for the 1947 Best Picture Oscar. Can't hardly do better than that!

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1947
-Robert Montgomery directs and stars in Lady in the Lake, an MGM film noir with the odd gimmick of being entirely first-person
-In the midst of his embroilment in accusations of Communist sympathies, Charles Chaplin releases Monsieur Verdoux, his first major flop
-Walt Disney voices Mickey Mouse for the last time in Fun and Fancy Free and the short Mickey's Delayed Date

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1947
-Luis Buñuel directs Gran Casino, his first Mexican production
-Henri-Georges Clouzot is freed from a ban on filmmaking, and makes the crime thriller Quai des Orfèvres in France
-Ivan Ivanov-Vano directs The Humpbacked Horse at Soyuzmultfilm, the first feature-length animated film made in the Soviet Union

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THE LIST IS AN ABSOLUTE GOOD

30 November, 1993, represents the dividing point in the career of director Steven Spielberg. Prior to this, he was primarily a director of ebullient, exhilarating popcorn movies; since then, he has primarily been a director of largely serious dramas, with even his genre films tending to be more about investigating society than providing easy thrills. The divide between these phases of his career is simply identified, for it was on 30 November that his 196-minute Holocaust drama Schindler's List premiered in Washington, D.C.

There's not another film in Spielberg's CV that comes with so much baggage hanging on it: the widespread certainty that it's his best film (an opinion I don't share) on the one side, the way that it has been used as the thickest club with which to beat up the director for his perceived faults as a sentimentalist on the other. There was Stanley Kubrick's famous judgment that "The Holocaust was about 6 million Jews who were killed. Schindler's List is about 600 Jews who weren't killed" (and bless his heart, Stanley was off by almost half - the number was upwards of 1100), and Shoah director Claude Lanzmann was downright apoplectic that something so trivial and saccharine could be summoned into the world eight years after his own self-appointed definitive masterpiece came out. 20 years later, it's still the easiest thing to find people who respond with feverish hostility to Spielberg's attempt to do something accessible and populist about the greatest moral crime of the modern age.

On the flipside, the film has also never shaken its media imposed narrative that it was the absolutely be-all and end-all of movies about the Holocaust, a perception that the director at no point attempted to dispute, and which he very well might have agreed with. Spielberg, of course, might be the worst major filmmaker in the world at understanding what makes his own movies work, and I must strenuously disagree with the idea that Schindler's List is the greatest film about the Holocaust (Shoah is certainly better, and so is Night and Fog), or even the greatest non-documentary (right off the top of my head, The Pianist is clearly more serious about its topic). It is a great film, one of the greatest of the 1990s, even, but not just because it is about the Holocaust, and it does nobody any good to pretend that it is somehow a world-changing exercise in that regard.

So let's play a game. Let's not start by wallowing in two decades of conventional wisdom, of fame and infamy, starting with what we already know Schindler's List to be, and look for proof that we're right; let's start with the movie itself, and try to figure out what it is from there. Because I must say, the first thing that the movie itself suggests to me is neither a pandering wallow in tacky sentiment slathered all over the gravest event known to history, nor the profoundest filmed exploration of the Holocaust yet made: it is a morality play about a craven bureaucrat finding his soul. Bureaucracy, at any rate, is the first thing that Schindler's List presents, long before it gets to to the Holocaust, or even its first named Jewish character: after a brief prologue that simply establishes a tone of reflection and Judaic ritual, the first thing that happens in the legitimate plot is watching the isolated moments of a man whose face we do not see assembling himself for a party, putting on his fine clothes, his costly accessories, and lastly, the punchline of a Nazi Party pin. Taken as a whole, this opening scene very efficiently and cleanly presents to us a man putting on Nazism with the same blitheness as his fancy cufflinks, and for much the same purpose: to impress people. And that is very much who this man, Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), reveals himself to be: a glad-handling entrepreneur who sees the onset of World War II as an irreplaceable business opportunity, and the military officers of the Nazi Party nothing but the objects of his schmoozing, nothing but the cogs he must grease to ensure that his own money-making endeavors will be as untroubled as possible.

The film tracks this charming but merciless war profiteer as he determines how to use the worn-down, ghettoised Jews of Kraków, Poland as a cheap and anxious-to-impress labor force, allowing himself to be slowly, almost accidentally goaded into regarding them with fondness and a protective eye by his Jewish accountant, Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), until he finally reaches the point that he would rather drive his career and fortune into the dust in order to save as many of them as he can, making up a list of all the Jewish workers he can afford to "buy" from the particularly psychopathic SS Untersturmführer, Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), in charge of the concentration camp from which Schindler's workforce had been culled.

Schindler, with his factory just outside Kraków, had a good opportunity to witness much of the persecution of Poland's Jews firsthand, and Schindler's List, over the course of its long running time, alternates between depicting his gradual transition from amoral man to savior, and showcasing several aspects of the Holocaust from the degradation of the Jews in the ghetto (including humiliation and summary execution), to the debased life in a camp, to the horror of the Final Solution, though since this is a story about 1100 Jews who didn't die in the Holocaust, the full depths of evil practice in Auschwitz and elsewhere are left mostly unexplored. As it is, Spielberg and screenwriter Steven Zaillian (this is, by a ridiculously lopsided margin, the best screenplay of his career), already get themselves into trouble by trying to include too much "Encyclopedia of the Holocaust" material in their film: the one completely spurious and ineffective scene in the film follows a group of women mistakenly routed through Auschwitz, sent to the showers, and washed off. It's one thing that this is unnecessary baggage in an already long movie; the real problem here is that, to dramatise a scene in the death chambers in his movie that's very specifically about people not dying, Spielberg is obliged to stage this non-fatal event in the language of a horror-thriller, and while from a purely mechanical standpoint, it's absolutely great filmmaking (the women's arrival in Auschwitz at night, with white "snow" - revealed at the end to be human ashes - falling against a deep black backdrop - is the most recnognisably Spielbergian moment in the entire feature), there's something immeasurably distasteful about something as real, and incomprehensibly inhumane, as the gas chambers at Auschwitz used as the "gotcha!" moment in a thriller sequence. There might be a film that uses horror imagery to depict the death camps and have it not come off as crass exploitation, but Schindler's List isn't built to be that film, and Spielberg wouldn't be the man to direct it, anyway.

One scene in 196 minutes is a pretty great track record, though (and I'm also counting the problematic epilogue as successful, I guess, as I don't really know what else to do with it). For the most part, the transition between "Schindler's character arc" scenes, and "the complete history of the Holocaust" scenes is done cleanly and effectively, and given the shape of his arc, Schindler makes a tremendously effective witness to the events of those years in that place. Allowing the criticism that The Story Of The Holocaust shouldn't be told from the perspective of a Germany, I'd counter that Schindler's List isn't The Story Of The Holocaust in any real way, and thank God for that - it's much better as something more like a fable of human behavior in the face of utter depravity and cruelty, one that is able to explore the Holocaust in a way that had never been done in mainstream pop culture before 1993. So it's the best of both worlds: a fascinating and deeply engaging human story married to a Very Important Lesson that, for once, actually manages to be largely instructive (and this, I think, is what someone like Lanzmann misses: that in order to make this story, Spielberg needed it to have a dramatic spine; Schindler's story is a hell of a good one; mass audiences wouldn't want to go to a unrelievedly death-focused Holocaust movie, but would go to an almost unendingly grim one if it had an uplifting ending; and nobody but film nerds will ever be persuaded to watch a 9-hour documentary, something I know from having attempted and failed to persuade many, many people to have a Shoah marathon with me).

Spielberg is never not a populist, and this ends up being a huge part of the reason that Schindler's List works: he's able to effectively condense things into easily-absorbed emotional beats that build up over the long term to have a profound cumulative effect. For something so damn long - it is, not by a small figure, the director's longest movie - it's epically efficient filmmaking, using emphatic, almost ironic editing (courtesy of Spielberg's ever-reliable collaborator Michael Kahn) to hammer meaning home in swift, sharp blows. It is not, to be certain, a subtle movie: there's almost a certain fatalism to the way that juxtapositions carry home meaning like hammer blows. But the Holocaust was not subtle, and refusing to treat it cinematically like it was is certainly a defensible aesthetic choice. See also the black-and-white cinematography, gorgeously severe and shot by Janusz Kaminski in the first of the many truly essential collaborations between him and Spielberg: the director's state decision for the choice was that, to him, the Holocaust was a deadening event that stripped all the life and "color" from the world, but it could just as easily be noted that the film is a series of visual extremes, contrasty with very little greyscale, and that it is literally in black and white and very little else. It's visually expressing a Manichean idea of morality - here is Good, and here is Evil. There is no mistaking one for the other. And since very little in human history better justifies a Manichean approach than the Holocaust, this works, almost unbearably well.

(At this point, an aside: the Little Girl in the Red Coat (Oliwia Dabrowska). One of the most contentious elements in the film, and one that, regrettably, I have no settled opinion towards. I'll say this much, if there wasn't just that one shot of her inside a building, still in red, I'd feel a whole lot better about her presence, since in every other shot we see her in color, it's from Schindler's POV, and in this regard she is a great element. Her first appearance is the moment where he's struck by the inhumanity, and not just the meanness, of the German's approach towards Jews; her second, as a corpse, is where he is so outraged that he commits himself fully to a path of righteousness. It would be better for the film if she were never otherwise seen, perhaps.)

Does Spielberg manipulate us? Of course he does, it's what he's best at. It is manipulation in the service of great moral truths, though, and I like that Schindler's List doesn't dance around its themes, but blasts them home with intense righteous passion. It's not even that it lacks subtlety as a character drama, for the way it sketches Schindler's growing awareness of his conscience is a tribute to both the director's and the actor's skill (it's Neeson's career-best performance, easily). I am particularly fond of the emphasis placed on the two times that Schindler is called "good", by a Jew: once at 40 minutes into the film, in thanks from a worker, once at 93 minutes, from a woman looking for help. In both cases, Neeson both delicately and broadly demonstrates Schindler's embarrassment and anger at hearing that word: the discomfort of a man who knows he isn't good, and that knowledge is the first step on the path that leads to his climactic, and often-parodied breakdown at the end. There's no moment in the whole film I feel more compelled to defend: it is syrupy and over-the-top, but it is that way only because it is completely unprotected and sincere: a film about a single man abandoning his careerist cynicism is itself the most sentimental and uncynical scene in the movie. It's easy to mock, because all mockery is itself cynical, and broad-strokes, I-will-make-you-cry filmmaking is the diametric opposite to such cynicism. It is the release valve being turned all the way open after hours of misery, and no matter how vividly aware I am that Spielberg, and the shameless, shameless John Williams score are demanding that I feel exactly what they mean me to feel, I also appreciate being given a piece of catharsis. No, the Holocaust was not cathartic, but as established, Schindler's List is not the Holocaust.

Less subtle and more in the realm of moral fable is the sparring between Schindler and Goeth, played by Fiennes in a devastating performance that, love Tommy Lee Jones as much as I do, is probably the single most ridiculous loss of an acting Oscar in the last quarter-century. It's a portrayal of evil that is at one unmodulated (there's nothing decent in the character's entire onscreen appearance), and thoroughly human - Goeth has feelings and sensibility, he recognises suffering, he doubts. His first line includes what I believe to be the first use of the word "fuck" in Spielberg's filmography. There's a scene where the editing nervily implies that the two men are each other's reflection (they're both shaving, and Kahn deliberately confuses eyelines in cutting between them), and this plays out in small ways throughout the film, as Schindler becomes aware of essential morality and thus leaves behind the pragmatic ideology he adopted, while Goeth uses a fierce commitment to ideology to deflect and flickers of morality he feels. A sufficiently eager symbolic reading could even position him as the devil tempting Schindler while Kingsley's Stern (a third truly great performance, but unlike the other two, not a career-best one) is the angel saving him, but I can't quite go there.

Still, I think that's the right register in which to appreciate the film best: with nuance, without subtlety, as a rich depiction of one man's struggle to moral awareness presented in bold, essentialist tones. Schindler's List is a furious movie, in which sharply-defined images batter us constantly, weeping violins lacerate us, and human behavior is presented in emphatic scenes that are so distinct in themselves (the narrative flow of the film is actually quite jumpy, when you stop and think about chronology and the links between consecutive moments) that it almost feels like a pageant. There's nothing about this that's meant to be clever, and like most of Spielberg's work, it is more anxious to engage with the viewer's emotions than thoughts. It does this with an impact rare even among his films, and clarity of purpose, and visual precision, all of which are enough to make it one of the essential films of its decade. Not so important socially as it thinks it is, perhaps, but even more important aesthetically and thematically, and no less necessary now than 20 years ago, 20 years before that, or 20 years in the future.

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